The next morning Margery explained to Bucky what was entailed in this "hard work." She would do brain mapping; show him pictures and capture what each one showed in his brain. She would ask him questions about his time as the Winter Soldier. She would ask him questions, as would a psychologist. These types of activities would be phase one of treatment. The second was correcting the damaged or altered pathways of the brain and mind that she found in the first.

That first day saw them sitting together in front of a monitor with her swiping her hand to display new pictures. He was wearing an absurd amount of electrodes stuck to his head in addition to a heart rate monitor clipped to a finger. They sat for hours like this. Broke for lunch. Sat for a few more.

When she finally pronounced that they were done for the day he was obviously confused.

"That was it?" he asked.

"Yes. I know, very boring. It will be several days of this. And then I will take several days to review what your brain was telling me. And then we will do some more boring stuff." She laughed. Her patients often told her that they expected something more eventful, and she agreed that though it would be more dramatic, the results would speak for themselves.

And that was how their days progressed. During the day they would do the boring stuff. In the evenings though, they were more relaxed with one another. They would often watch a movie or television together. She would make popcorn or something to eat and he would provide "old-man commentary" at appropriate intervals.

"What is this? This isn't reality!" he would exclaim when they would come across a mind-numbing reality program.

Or, when watching an action movie he would comment on how such-and-such was unrealistic or clearly a prop. On one memorable night he declared that the movie that they had watched was terrible and most likely rotted the brain, ending with, "And I should know."

Or on the rare times they found a news program that was not in Wakandan, he would exclaim at the type of stories they covered. "That's news?! That was about a cat being made mayor for a day!"

Such commentary made Margery laugh and Bucky would too, once his minor outrage at the contemporary world was over.

"Didn't you watch television at all when you were out in the world?" she asked him one night.

"Never when I was on an assignment. It wasn't important." He replied quietly. Then brightened when he continued, "And when I was on the run? I couldn't afford cable."

They had laughed together at that.

Sometimes they would play games. For the most part this consisted of Scrabble or cards, since it was hard to find many two-person games. Margery soon found that Bucky was fiercely intelligent and managed to beat her at almost everything. She was fairly certain that the times that she did manage to win, he had let her.

They were both finding that they enjoyed spending time with one another in the evenings.

XXXXX

The scans from Bucky's mapping came back and she would spend hours pouring over the data and images. She felt confident in how she wanted to proceed. She began to question him.

"Once you were activated, were you aware of your actions and surroundings? Or were you in fugue state?" She began one morning.

He was standing and looking out a window. "I knew." He responded quietly.

"And you retained memory of the actions, despite not being in control of them?"

"Yes."

"Do you feel remorse, or anger, or sadness when you remember?"

"Why would that matter?" he responded, irritated. "I remember each thing I did, and I feel ashamed of it all."

"It matters because if you felt nothing at all, the work would be infinitely more difficult. But that you feel, have true emotions attached to the memories, means that your mind, the one that they tried desperately to erase, is closer to the surface than you might think."

For two days she carried on like this. She poked at the trigger areas that the brain mapping had revealed. He was guarded and prickly during this time. His responses short and pained. He didn't come out and socialize with her those evenings.

On the third day she asked him about Steve. That did not go well. She was asking him painful questions, ones that led him to painful answers. He eventually burst.

"What do you want me to say?! That I am angry with Steve? He's my best friend!" he yelled at her.

"And best friends are supposed to stick together." Was her calm response.

"We have!"

"Eventually, yes. But before that? Before he took you here?"

"We were enemies, because of what I was."

"And before that, in the War?" she continued.

"What do you mean? Steve and I always had each other's back. He saved me when I, and the other men, would have been written off by our superiors."

**Margery looked at him knowingly. "And experimented on?"

"Yes! He…he saved" he faltered. He had come upon what she was leading him towards. "He didn't save me every time. Steve didn't save me. He left me to die! He left me to become this- thing!" he was angry now. Angry at Steve. Angry at himself. "But he couldn't have known!"

"No, he couldn't have known. But he left you all the same. And it is important to know that this, despite what you rationally know to be true, is a source of anger to you." She explained.

"This doesn't matter. None of this matters. It's not helping, I'm not any different. You should have just left me frozen." And with that declaration he stormed out and overturned a chair and small equipment table from the lab. The guards standing on the other side of the door made as if to stop him but Margery signaled for them to leave him. He would cool off.**

That night, when she couldn't sleep, she left her room to get a glass of water. Walking down the hall, she saw that the light was on in his room. She stood outside of it, listening. She heard the sounds of soft, restrained weeping.

She knocked. When there was no answer or move to open or quiet the sounds within, she entered on her own.

There Bucky sat on the floor, his back to the side of the unmade bed. Margery knelt down in front of him.

"This is ridiculous. I shouldn't be doing this." He mumbled halfheartedly.

She wasn't sure if he meant that he shouldn't be sitting on the ground crying in the middle of the night, or unfrozen and attempting to fix his mind.

"Bucky? Do you know why every time they woke you up for an assignment they had to use a machine to apply electrical currents into you brain? Why the programming and trigger words were not enough to get you to comply with their wishes? Why they had to torture you into a compliant state?" he looked up at her at this but she didn't wait for an answer. "It's because every time that you were asleep, your brain set about healing itself. Even if you were awake for too long, it healed itself and you would be subjected to that device. Even now, if I look at a scan of your brain from right before you put yourself into cryo-sleep and now, there are vast differences."

"What?"

"Probably because of the serum that enhanced the rest of your body, but the human mind is a mysterious thing. Both more fragile and stronger that we can imagine." She took his one hand. "So, when I say that you are making improvements, believe me that you are." She squeezed his hand. "Now- it's time we both got to sleep."

She stood up and he followed suit. She gestured to the bed and he had to smile in spite of himself at how he was being put to bed at his age. He climbed in and she turned off the lamp.

On a spur of the moment impulse, Bucky asked quietly, "Stay?"

And despite her better professional judgment, Margery replied, "OK."

He scooted over and she climbed in after him. They lay there awkwardly in the dark for a moment before Bucky reached out with his hand and held hers again. Then, they both slept.