Notes:

This is my first foray into fanfic in this fandom, and my first fic in about a year (2?) but wow did I fall hard for Bucky Barnes... and so does my protagonist. This story does go to Bucky's POV also, once he's awake. ;) Not sure how long this one will go, but I always, always finish writing my stories, and I always have regular updates. Promise.

Chapter 1

She didn't know what she'd been expecting, but this wasn't it. White walls, glass, computers, and industrious scientific types tapping away at computers, here in the middle of a jungle in eastern Africa. She'd expected something a little less… modern, maybe? When Steve (and how weird was it to call him that, but he'd insisted) showed up in her Psyche 101 classroom with a ridiculous story, she'd pretty much decided nothing else could be stranger, but this was a close second.

It was surreal. All of it. The Captain, sidling into the back of her lecture, in her little college, asking for her help. The fact that she'd been made a laughingstock in the psychiatric community didn't faze him one bit, nor did her insistence that she was no longer practicing. He'd fixed her with an impossibly sincere gaze and stated he needed her help. Considering she'd just finished out the semester and she'd not been invited back to teach again, she'd figured it couldn't hurt to at least humor him. She had to eat, right? A job was a job, these days. But Wakanda? Crazy, but what the hell. Captain America needed her help. Why not?

Layers of security, five different searches, an extraordinarily high-tech x-ray machine, the likes of which she'd never seen, and a pat down so familiar she felt the need to invite the lady to Thanksgiving dinner later, and she and Steve were finally ushered into a quiet lab and asked to wait for the head of the facility who would be briefing them on the "situation."

Steve chose to stand rather than take a seat next to her. Chalk up another surprise in her day, he looked awfully nervous. If he was nervous, she wondered if she was missing something critical and maybe she should be nervous too. She knew she'd have free room and board, and a hefty paycheck, all to act as a consultant. It sounded like a lifesaver, a miracle considering her financial situation, and she'd taken the bait, hook line and sinker, but maybe she should have asked more questions before she got on the plane. Steve said he'd explain later, but the flight over hadn't been later, nor had the car ride. Later was now, damn it.

She turned to Steve, "We're here. Care to fill in some of the finer points? Maybe start with what, who, and why," she suggested.

"Dr. Zilberschlag-"

"Hilly," she interrupted. "Just Hilly, please."

"Hilly, then. I think it'll be easier if I can just show you."

She opened her mouth to argue, but the door swung open and their welcoming committee strode in.

"Welcome to Wakanda. I'm Dr. Berhanu Jakande, the head of our research station, my specialty is neurosurgery, and with me is Dr. Eshe Yeboah, our top neurophysicist and my assistant, Mwanajuma Orji. We'll be working with you while you're here."

Hilly's forehead creased as she studied him, the humor and curiosity in his face strangely familiar beneath the thick beard.

"Columbia," Dr. Jakande stated. "That's where you recognize me."

Her eyes opened wide. It had been years, but yes, she knew him. They'd been colleagues… no, that wasn't fair. They'd been friends. "Jak? What on earth are you doing here?"

He grinned, "Wakandans often send their youth abroad to university, but we usually come home." He sobered, "And you are very far from home. It's good to see you again Hilly. I hope you will consider the good Captain's offer. This is not my expertise, but I know it is yours."

"What is? All Steve will tell me is he needs an expert in surviving psychological trauma."

Jak nodded, "PTSD, torture, and deprogramming. You know why I thought of you."

Hilly swallowed hard, "The Program."

"You've seen this before. The real thing. There aren't many people that have," Steve said.

A bitter laugh escaped her, "Yeah, well I wish I hadn't. The Program was shut down for a reason."

"Dr. Jakande insisted we needed you. It had to be you."

Hilly glared at him, "It should be anyone but me. We failed. I failed."

"No. You didn't," Jak argued, "You were told it failed, but they lied to you. You did your job too well, and that wasn't what they wanted. It wasn't your fault."

Hilly's gut churned. She gripped the chair next to her as her knees began to buckle. Steve was there in a heartbeat, guiding her to the seat. "No." She felt the truth of it in her bones. All those unanswered questions, all the bits that didn't make sense. She'd suspected, but she'd let it go, because if what she suspected had been true… we had been trying to create our own form of mind control. It had all been a lie. Ten years of her life she'd given to The Program. Those men and women… veterans, had relied on her to help them. They died because she couldn't. They told her it was because the program failed. Because she couldn't break their programming and they were deemed too dangerous. They'd destroyed their lives and her life for what? Why?

"I know," Steve said softly. "I used to trust the government, too. Agencies have agendas. I put my trust in people, and the Doc says the person to help us, to help my friend, is you."

She shook her head, "I can't."

"Please. Please try."

Once again she found herself on the receiving end of that sincere blue gaze and once again she somehow found herself nodding yes. She suddenly saw why people followed him into impossible situations. No wonder he was able to turn the tide in World War II. He would have just had to say please. She hoped she wasn't going to regret this. She was almost certain she would.

Jak led them both through another corridor and into a sterile blindingly white lab. In the center of the room stood a frost rimed capsule, and inside a human form. Next to the capsule was a graphic display of vitals, monitoring the man within. She stumbled as her mind made sense of what she was seeing. Cryogenics. The impossible. She glanced over at Steve. Well, improbable, she amended. He'd defrosted okay, but he was more than human.

She moved closer to the glass. "Who is he?"

"James Buchanan Barnes," Steve answered. "My friend."

"Oh." Brilliant conversation, yeah, but what could she say to that? "He's not dead." Yeah, that was so much better.

She moved closer, rested her hand on the glass and peered at the man inside. Long dark hair, what a jawline, one arm… and a genuine legendary war hero. She'd always thought he was so handsome in the old pictures in her history books. He looked different behind the glass. Torture, programming, and PTSD, they said.

"Hydra," Steve answered. "They took him after he fell. Wiped his memory over and over again, programmed him to be their assassin. He was in their control for seventy years. A couple of years ago, I saw him... he was trying to kill a friend of mine. He had no idea who he was, who I was. We fought… I didn't have a choice. He was killing people. End the end though, he remembered. He remembered and saved my life. When the helicarriers went down, I went down with them. Bucky pulled me out of the Potomac."

She nodded; she remembered. She watched it live. Hilly studied the play of emotion on his face. Pain, and love, and fear. This man was important to him.

"I woke up on the bank and he was gone. We looked for him for two years. Found him after the UN bombing."

She shuddered, and something in her expression must have bothered Steve because his expression turned ugly.

"It wasn't him. It was a trap to catch him."

She raised her hands, "I believe you!"

"Sorry." He sighed, "He's better now. He remembers me, can control himself, but the triggers are all still there. There was a man, Zemo, he took control of his mind. Bucky couldn't stop it. It scared him."

She swallowed down the lump in her throat at the thought of what had been done to him. She knew her Howling Commandos history, especially that of Bucky Barnes, and yet here he was. How long had they had him under their thumb? Oh damn, she was in it now, wasn't she?

"I'd just got him back," Steve implored.

"Okay. Fill me in on all of it. I'm ready to listen and I'll do my best to help him."

######

Steve and Jak filled her in on how Bucky Barnes had gone from dead war hero to cryogenic brain-wiped super assassin, the recovery of his free will (mostly) and his memories, and his reunion with his childhood best friend. James Barnes had been through hell, had a massive guilt complex, and had chosen to go back into the freezer rather than be a danger to others. She requested his files, everything they had on him, and said she'd tell them when she felt ready to begin. She needed to know what she was getting into, as best she could. More important, she needed to know Bucky.

She would be staying on-site at the lab, which suited her just fine. The implications of helping Bucky coupled with her knowledge of the Project and why it had really ended weren't lost on her. If she hadn't managed to make herself a laughingstock in the psychiatric community and become universally pitied as an example of a brilliant mind gone awry, she might be dead. Jak told her that they were the only people still living out of all those that worked on the Project. Jak left early enough that they probably figured he didn't know enough to bother killing him, plus he was T'Challa's cousin, but she'd worked there for ten years. If anyone learned she was back into this sort of work, it could be bad for her. Well, with Steve sleeping just down the hall from her, and the security involved with getting inside the facility, she felt well-protected at least.

Jak escorted her to her room and left her instructions on how to contact him and directions to the kitchen housed on the floor below. She didn't think she'd be hungry for the next week from the looks of what was in Bucky's files. Jak said the rest was on the laptop in her room, complete with information on his ops, interviews, pretty much anything and everything they had on Bucky before and after his transformation. Hydra and the Russians had kept copious notes and recorded much of their sessions with Bucky. It was a lot of data. Steve had spent months finding as much as he could, raiding old facilities, calling in favors.

She had a truly daunting task ahead of her, but she felt better than she had in years. When the Program failed, she'd been lost. Lost her sense of purpose, her confidence, her life. This was a chance for Bucky to get his life back, and just maybe, she could get hers back too. She was sick to death of the empty shell she'd let herself become. If Bucky could fight after all that was done to him, how could she fail to do the same?

Her heart ached for him. Loyal, brave, and a true friend to Steve Rogers, James Barnes had been a good man. From the looks of his file, he'd been stubborn to a fault, even after Hydra got their hooks into him. He'd carried out orders exactly to the letter, never killing a soul on a mission he wasn't implicitly directed to kill, never giving one iota more than he had to. She read it as a rebellion of sorts. He'd been stored in cryo in between ops due to his instability. Instability meaning he'd been throwing off the mind control faster than they liked. Bucky Barnes was one strong-minded stubborn bastard. The same serum that helped him survive was likely at work in his brain, repairing damage. If they left him out too long or let him go too long without a wipe, his brain healed at least some the damage done. That may make her job easier, or perhaps so much harder. Either way, after reading his file, she was half in love with the man. Not good.