Chapter 27: Protective System

"Thanks, Clint." Steve opened the door to the bedroom. Bucky was draped between him and Clint, still happy-groggy from the drug cocktail.

"No problem, Cap. You want me to hang out with you?"

"Yeah, sure, hang out," Bucky mumbled, grinning sloppily at Clint. "Grab a beer."

Steve smiled. There was so much to discuss about the scan results and the effects of the drug cocktail, but for now, he was happy that the chemicals coursing through Bucky were activating parts of his brain that had been suppressed for too long. At least, that was Bruce's theory. It remained to be seen what version of Bucky would wake up in the morning, but at least there was hope now.

Real hope.

"Not necessary, thanks," Steve answered as he paused in the doorway, surprised to see the comforter and pillows piled on the floor between the wall and the bed. "He's been sleeping on the floor?" He understood how hard it could be adjusting to a soft bed after not having one for so long, but still, the floor couldn't be comfortable.

"Just takes time to acclimate." Clint adjusted the arm draped around his shoulder. "Bed or floor?"

"Floor, I guess."

"Grab the couch cushions, Steve." Bucky lolled his head toward Steve and scrunched his nose affectionately.

Seeing that little Bucky-ism evoked a beautiful pain in Steve's core. "Already there, buddy."

Together, they eased Bucky onto the floor. Steve took off his shoes and covered him with the blanket. Bucky immediately rolled to his side and curled against the wall. The only light in the room came from the doorway and a narrow candy-bar style window near the ceiling. It overlooked a hallway, allowing for only artificial illumination.

"Thanks again." Steve said as he and Clint headed out of the room. He kept the door halfway open. "Jarvis, Tony says you can monitor Bucky's breathing?"

"Indeed, Captain Rogers. I will commence monitoring and inform you if there is cause for concern."

"Thanks." He wasn't sure if it was silly to thank a computer, but it never hurt to err on the side of being polite.

"He'll be fine," Clint reassured. "Hydra experimented on him with stuff at even higher doses than Bruce gave him, and he's still alive."

"I know." Steve couldn't help but glance into the dark room and try not to think about those experiments. He took a breath and dropped into an armchair. "This is the best news I could have hoped for." He tried not to get his hopes up too high. He'd had the rug pulled out from under him too many times, but still, the warm feeling in his chest continued to rise until he was grinning.

Bucky's brain was healing.

"It's incredible, that's for damn sure," Clint said, opening the fridge and grabbing a couple of beers. When Steve shook his head, Clint put one back and took a sip of his.

"Erskine said the serum creates a protective system of regeneration and healing. We don't know what version of the serum Bucky got, but it has the same regenerative qualities." In the two weeks since the last scan, there was a noticeable reduction in what looked like scar tissue.

Except that Banner now thought it wasn't scar tissue.

"Even if scar tissue was removed, there wouldn't be undamaged neurons in its place," Bruce had said. "I don't know what this is exactly. It could be that his neurons are regenerating, but if that were the case, the memories lost would be gone forever. New pathways would improve cognitive function but the old pathways would be gone for good. Since his memories are returning, that's not what's happening. My best guess is that what I thought was scar tissue is actually a protective system."

"What does that mean?"

"Think of it like a callous for neurons—a layer of protection that developed as a result of repeated electro-stimulation. Instead of destroying these neural pathways, the electrical stimulation caused the serum-enhanced neural tissue to form a protective layer. It explains why Hydra had to keep wiping his memories. With time, the protective layer recedes and those neural pathways re-activate."

"Is that why it seems to hurt when he remembers?"

"What?" Bruce asked. "I wasn't aware of that."

"He winces or holds his head when he remembers something. Is there anything we can do for him?"

"I'm not sure given his resistance to painkillers, and we can't keep him on heavy drugs."

"With time he could make a full recovery?"

Bruce grinned. "Yes, I think so. Exposing him to things that help jog his memory could facilitate the re-activation of those neural pathways. We'll have to take follow up scans, of course, to measure the restoration rate."

"It's nice to see a glimpse of the guy you used to know, I bet?" Clint said, jarring Steve out of his introspection.

"Yeah." He grinned again, feeling some of the weight of the past couple of weeks lift. "It sure as hell is." He didn't know which version of Bucky would wake up, but at least he knew for sure now that his friend was still there.

-0- -0- -0-

Darkness. Silence. Where was he? A hard floor beneath him. He reached out to feel a surface in front of him. He blinked. The darkness remained impenetrable.

How long had it been? His tongue felt like cotton and his head like an overinflated balloon, but his stomach wasn't aching, and the voice that blared from the speakers was silent. They'd taken him, hadn't they? Drugged him? Put him in a machine?

He pressed his palm to the wall. It was textured, not smooth like metal or cement. He drew patterns on it with his finger. A flower. A knife. A star surrounded by concentric circles.

Heavy footsteps outside the cell turned his heart into a panicked creature. He rolled, sitting up, his back slamming into something hard that jostled. The door eased open. A towering shadow of a man stood in the doorway.

"Bucky?"

Bucky?

Light flooded the room, harsh against his retinas. He blinked and squinted up at the man.

Steve?

It was Steve.

He scanned the room, and the light cleared the last wisps of fog from his brain. He was in Stark Tower.

"I didn't mean to startle you. I was coming back from the bathroom when I heard the thud." Steve leaned against the frame. "How are you feeling?"

Steve was eyeing him curiously, his gaze a little too intense, and Bucky was sure there was a question behind them. He probed his memory. The last thing he remembered after dinner was being in Dr. Banner's lab, on the table….

Dinner.

That came back to him, too. He brought his knees up and rested his forehead on them. "How's your throat?"

Stark was right. He could never be set free.

"Hey, we covered that already." The mattress squeaked. "I"m fine. How are…you?"

He thought about it. His head felt lighter, almost floaty, and there was a weird sickly-sweet taste on his tongue. "I feel strange."

"Banner had to drug you to do the scan after you panicked. Do you remember that?"

He sighed and looked up. "Yeah, some of it."

Steve's smile eased his lingering anxiety. The results must be good…as good as anything having to do with brain damage could be.

"What Dr. Banner thought was scar tissue isn't," Steve said. "It's going away. His theory is it's a protective layer, and as that layer recedes, your memories return. He suggested we try to expose you to familiar things to jog your memory and facilitate the process."

"What?" His brain wasn't irreparably damaged? All of his memories could return?

Steve leaned forward, his face broken by a grin. "The serum protects your nervous system like it protects the rest of you. The…" the grin faded, replaced by something dark and pained, "...electrical memory wipes didn't destroy brain cells. It led to a protective response. Banner likened it to a callous, sort of. Anyway, we don't know exactly what it is, just that it's not permanent. It's going away, and since your memories are coming back, Banner thinks the two are related."

"Hydra didn't destroy parts of my brain?" In the span of a few moments, he went from a lifetime of being broken beyond repair to the possibility that his fractured mind could be put back together again.

He might remember his life, his family…everything that was now gone. His mother, father, and sisters could become more than mere concepts and fragmented images. Now that the possibility was there, he wasn't sure he wanted to remember the things he lost if he could never have them again.

"There's hope, Bucky. Dr. Banner wants to go over this with you tomorrow. It'll take work, and regular scans—I know that'll be difficult—but he's optimistic." Steve paused, leaning forward to brace his elbows on his knees. "Do you remember after the scan? You said something."

He didn't remember much after the procedure until waking up in darkness. He recalled feeling cold. Then warm. Voices.

"No, I don't."

"You asked me to turn up the radiator, like we were back in our apartment."

The image came to his mind, bright and clear. A small living room with a couch and a chair. A radiator beneath the front window. An even tinier kitchen off to the side. A radio against the far wall. A short hallway with a bathroom between two bedrooms.

"I remember it. We lived together?"

"Yes." Hope saturated Steve's face. "After my mother died, you moved in with me. Do you remember that?"

"Not that, but I know what the apartment looked like." His memories were returning. He hadn't remembered that before. "I remembered something else, too, before you walked in." The shadow of dread and loneliness lingered from his disoriented awaking, when his mind went to another time, another place. It was an in-between of sorts, from the sense he'd gotten, a time before he became the Winter Soldier but after Hydra captured him.

Steve gave a sanguine nod, encouraging in his silence.

"They kept me in a dark room for a long time. There was nothing except a voice from the ceiling that never let me sleep. I drew on the walls with my fingers. Before you turned on the light, I thought I was there."

Shadows seemed to coalesce in the angles of Steve's face. "If anything about this room reminds you of where Hydra kept you, we'll change it." He looked up at the candybar window near the ceiling and released a slow breath. "There's not much outside light. I can talk to Stark about that. If you wake up and think you're back there again, what would let you know that you're not?"

Bucky didn't expect the question. His environment had always been provided as is, and he had no choice but to accept it and adapt. Perhaps in the time before Hydra had found him, he'd had such choices.

His gaze swept the room. It was simple and efficient. The elevated bed was overly large and too soft. He felt as though it would swallow him. The walls were some indefinable shade of gray. With no exterior windows, the room and living area beyond were dark when the lights were off, but keeping lights on would interfere with sleep.

"I don't know. A dim light source could help."

"Would this be acceptable?" the computer in the ceiling asked, and instantly the lights dimmed until the room was a mere collection of shapes without color.

"It might help." Bucky conceded. It was worth a try, but if Steve and Dr. Banner were right, no environmental modifications would stop his memories from returning, especially in his dreams. He never dreamt when frozen. Cryo was a type of death—a flash of pain, then nothing, until they pulled him out. It was always easier being frozen than unfrozen. Death was gentler than resurrection.

"We can paint the place, too, if you want," Steve offered.

"Yellow," the word fluttered from his throat like a moth searching for light. That was a color of warmth; it was a dress with little white flowers and the smell of vanilla and cinnamon.

"Yellow it is. The computer can help you pick out a shade."

"My mother wore a yellow dress?"

"Yes."

"That shade."

Steve smiled, but there was sadness in his eyes. "Okay, Buck."

After Steve left, Bucky opened the drawer of the nightstand and pulled out the spiral notebook and pen Bruce had given him, rifling through the scribbled texts and images until he found the first blank page to capture what he remembered from the waking disorientation moments before.

-0- -0- -0-

Bruce fidgeted in his chair as he adjusted his glasses. Barnes was being a model patient, sitting quietly on the exam table, his eyes impassive as they studied the CT images on the screen.

"So, uh, you can see the degree of remission here." Bruce pointed to the area near the left temporal lobe that was normal in comparison to the white-laced image of the prior scan. "Also, here and here." He indicated a couple more areas near the frontal lobe that showed improvement."

He paused before continuing, giving Barnes a chance to ask questions, but the man remained silent.

"These lines here," Bruce pointed to the hair-like structures, "are the implants. I'm not a brain surgeon, so if you want them removed, we'll have to bring in a specialist. That's entirely your decision, but you don't have to make it now." He glanced again at Barnes, but the man's expression gave no clue as to his thoughts on the matter. Bruce switched to the body images. "You can see the implants in your chest and left leg. Again, I'm not a surgeon, so….someone else will have to take them out. These should come out, but again, it's your decision."

Bucky blinked at him.

Bruce sighed. "Do you have an opinion on their removal?"

"Out."

"Okay. All the implants – brain and body?"

Barnes nodded.

"I'll talk to Tony, start getting specialists vetted."

"No."

"No? You just said…."

"You."

"I'm not that kind of a doctor."

Barnes' jaw clenched.

Bruce decided not to push the issue. Barnes needed time to trust that not everyone outside of the Avengers was a secret Hydra agent. Tony was working through the data from the Bunker and SHIELD computers, and maybe they could convince Barnes that they did their homework in vetting people—homework that was probably beyond legal.

"We can discuss that later," Bruce said. "Back to your CT cranial scans, I know you're remembering more about the time before the last…uh…" It was awkward to talk casually about a man's torture, especially when the subject was sitting four feet away, "...the last time they wiped your memories."

The impervious expression on Barnes' face wavered, and his eyes flicked away. "Yes."

Bruce really wished they had another doctor here to have this conversation. He wasn't that kind of doctor, and Barnes needed someone highly proficient in treating Post-Traumatic Stress, and who knows what else.

"My brain will heal, and the rest of my memories will return?" Barnes asked.

"Yes, probably. There's a good chance you'll recover most of them, maybe even all," Bruce said. It was nice to be able to give good news.

"Is there any way to stop them from returning?"

"What?" Had he heard correctly? "You don't want to remember?"

Barnes stared at a point just to the left of Bruce's head. "What benefit is there in remembering?"

According to the notes kept by Hydra scientists, the Winter Soldier had a specific protocol. He was placed into cryo after each mission, when he was no longer needed. As soon as he was removed from cryo, before he recovered enough to put up a fight, they stuck him in the chair, wiped his memories, and spoke a string of code words that placed his brain in an altered, compliant state.

Putting that information together with the condition Barnes had been in when they found him, it was a reasonable assumption that Barnes hadn't had his memories wiped after sustaining his injuries. He probably remembered what happened just before he was put into cryo.

Damn.

They still hadn't talked about it. If Tony found anything in the tapes confiscated from the Bunker, he hadn't shared. The only thing they knew for sure is that Barnes had been…abused. Horribly.

It was not the only time. The old photographs memorializing Hydra's brutality made that clear. So, maybe Barnes had good reasons for not wanting to remember more, but there was no way for him to remember the good stuff without also regaining memories of the bad stuff.

"It's not possible to stop your brain from healing without repeatedly wiping your memory like Hydra did, and that's not something any of us will do, even if you wanted us to," Bruce said. "I'm sorry. I wish there was more I could do to help." He took a deep breath. "I know you were…injured…when we found you. Do you remember what happened?"

The rhythm of Barnes' chest picked up pace, and his muscles coiled within the stillness of his limbs. "Punishment," he said.

Torture, is what it was, and Bruce's stomach was becoming decidedly unhappy about digesting the breakfast he'd eaten an hour earlier. "That shouldn't have happened to you, and nothing like that will ever happen to you here. It shouldn't happen to anyone. Remembering won't be easy. I wish I knew a way to make it easier, but that's not my area–"

"I don't want to talk about it," Barnes said, the plates of his metal arm clanking.

Thank God. Bruce didn't want to talk about that, either. "We don't have to. No one here will force you to talk about what happened to you, but your memories are going to return whether you want them to or not. Horrible memories—some good ones, too—but a lot of bad ones. There are people who have expertise in this area, maybe not exactly this area, but close enough. They can help you work through the trauma." He hoped.

Barnes had been dealt an abysmally lousy hand. From what he knew of the guy, Barnes had a bright future ahead of him before the war. The history books spoke of a charming, outgoing man who was a star student and athlete. By all accounts, he would have had a decent life, maybe even more than decent, had he made it back home.

What he got instead was 70 years of being a science experiment at the hands of real life evil mad scientists. So, yeah, if anyone deserved a shot at having a life, Barnes did.

-0- -0- -0-

All the furniture was pushed to one side of the room near the bed, and the protective plastic was spread on the floor. Now, they could paint.

This was new, this feeling of influence over his environment. Choice. Decision. Why did color matter? Bucky wondered. As he stared at the streak of yellow paint against the light gray wall, he realized it just did, for some indefinable reason.

"Do you remember this?" Steve dragged the paint brush over the rim of the can to remove the excess paint, then spread the lemony color over a section of gray wall. "I helped you paint your room one year." He grimaced at the memory. "Until the fumes gave me an asthma attack, anyway."

Bucky barely glanced away from his work, transfixed by the brush he held in his hand and the motion of the bristles over the wall. If he'd done this before, he couldn't remember, but it was…calming. "I don't."

"I painted a spaceship over your bed for your birthday a few months later, since you were into sci-fi." There was a sudden shift in Steve's tone, almost sad.

That caught Bucky's attention. Perhaps Steve had bad memories, too, and painting reminded him of them.

"I can finish the wall," Bucky said, dipping the brush in the paint and swirling it around. He enjoyed the feeling of the gentle resistance and studying the undulations in the surface of the yellow paint.

"Why?" Steve stopped painting to look at him. "Do you want me to leave?"

"No. Your voice changed. Does this activity disturb you?"

"No." Steve sighed. "I'm just going down memory lane, and sometimes that reminds me of what I've lost…what we've lost. I get homesick sometimes."

"Because you remember things you will never have again?"

"Yes," Steve stroked more paint over the wall, his arm pushing the brush gently upward. "That's life, though. Things change. We lose some things and gain others."

"What did you lose?"

"My mother. Your family. They were like my second family. The guys in my barbershop quartet…and a woman I loved."

Bucky took a deep breath and stared at the drying yellow paint. "Is it painful when you remember?"

Steve stopped painting, the brush lingering still on the wall. "Yes, sometimes." He straightened suddenly with a cock of his head. "Not physically, though. I'm not sure if that's what you meant. When you remember things, it hurts, doesn't it?

"Yes."

"Bad?"

"Manageable."

Steve's mouth pressed into a hard line that made Bucky wonder whether he answered the question wrong.

"Hey," there was a sudden shift in Steve's demeanor—a relaxing of his shoulders and a smile on his face, "How about some music? It'll make the painting more fun."

'Fun' was another word that felt strange to him. He knew its definition but could not conceptualize its meaning.

"Jarvis, play us some music from the 30s and 40s."

"Of course, Captain," the AI responded.

"Dr. Banner recommends trying to jog your memory," Steve said. "Maybe the music will help."

A melody with horns filled the room.

"Ray Noble," Steve said. "You had this record."

Bucky listened to the music. It didn't sound familiar, but for some reason an image of a dog looking into a horn—a phonograph, his brain supplied—sprang to his mind.

"Did I have a dog?"

Steve's brows knitted together. "No, why?"

"Oh." He resumed painting. "I thought I remembered something, a white dog with black ears staring into a horn."

For some bewildering reason, Steve chuckled as he worked near the baseboard. "The RCA dog. It was the logo on the record, and in ads."

Words sprang to mind that settled cold and heavy at the base of his skull. "His master's voice?"

"Yeah, the slogan."

"Did they make him attack?"

"Who?" Steve asked, focusing on streaking paint along the topline of the baseboard.

"The dog? When his master spoke the words, did he attack?"

The brush's wood handle snapped in Steve's hand, launching the detached brush onto the white baseboard and splattering it with yellow paint before dropping onto the plastic sheeting. "Damn." Steve grabbed a clean rag from the pile next to the fresh brushes, picked up the pieces of the broken brush, and shot to his feet. "I'll be back. Gonna wet this to clean the baseboard before the paint dries." His voice was clipped, hard.

Steve was angry. Even though Steve and Banner said there was no punishment in this place, and no one had harmed him even when he attacked Steve, Bucky's heart still fluttered anxiously.

Steve returned a moment later, jaw tight, fist clenched around the rag, and dropped to his knees. He scrubbed vigorously at the soiled baseboard, folding the rag several times to work off all the paint. Bucky observed, becoming quiet and still, a thing in the background that did not draw attention to itself.

Grabbing a new brush, Steve resumed work on his section, smearing paint on the wall with broad, aggressive strokes. "No, to answer your question," he began, "they didn't use the dog to attack people. The ad slogan was about him hearing his master's voice from the phonograph, playing up sound quality."

Bucky focused on his brush strokes, watching the bristles press against the wall, bleeding bright yellow in their wake. Another song began, a soft melody with a woman's voice.

"We'll meet again. Don't know where. Don't know when…."

The headache began behind his eyes and the base of his skull. He was in a room with people wearing clean, pressed clothes—women in dresses, men in suits. He was dancing to this song with a woman. She had brown hair parted on the side and a gentle smile. Another woman, blonde, sat alone at a table with her drink.

He danced with her, too. He danced with them both. He remembered thinking about Steve, that he was supposed to be there, but he wasn't.

"I've never been to England. Are you scared?" the brunette had asked him.

England? Steve might be able to put a date to that memory. He didn't feel as though the woman was important to him, but he couldn't be sure. The images came without warning, and he had no control over them. Sometimes they brought emotions without context, emotions he hadn't felt in a long time. Some emotions he couldn't quite decipher and could only catalog by the sensations they left—an ache in his chest, but also a warmth in his face. Sometimes his eyes grew wet, but he couldn't always tell if it was because what he remembered made him sad or happy.

Steve could tell him, but Steve was angry now. Anger made the hairs on Bucky's arm go straight and the gears in his metal arm shift.

He should catalog the memories. Even though he wasn't sure he wanted to remember, Banner said his memories would come back unless he was wiped again, and he didn't want that, either. Thinking about the pain it brought stole his breath for a moment, and he focused on the firm brush strokes to pull himself away from that memory.

The chair took more from him than just his past. It left him confused, breathless, terrified…until the words took over. The pain always yielded to the words, words that brought relief but also a sense of terrible dread somewhere deep in his brain where the mutilated thing lived.

Now he felt the mutilated thing closer than ever, and he was beginning to understand it. It was no longer buried in the deep. It writhed and twisted inside him. It was calmest in Steve's presence. It feared the dark and being placed in confined spaces. It didn't like needles. It panicked when the body was restrained.

Mostly, it wept and sometimes, at night, it took over, and he would wake from a dream with wet cheeks and a hitch in his breath.

He heard that same hitch in Steve's breath, and he turned his gaze to the sound. Steve's cheeks were dry, but his eyes were wet as they tracked his painting strokes.

Steve was no longer angry. He was…sad? Why? Bucky had said nothing else that could have upset him further.

Something familiar stirred inside him—another emotion he couldn't quite identify. He placed a hand on the crook of Steve's neck. This, too, felt familiar.

Steve wiped quickly at his face. "Sorry, it's the song." He smiled, but it didn't look happy. "During the war, this song was everyone's anthem for soldiers they missed. It always made me think of you whenever I heard it. After I woke up from the ice, it only reminded me of people I'd never see again—and then I found out that you were alive, and, well…the song reminds me of what a miracle that is. Sorry for being a sap." He smiled. "I'll blame the fumes." Steve cleared his throat and patted Bucky's arm. "I'm getting hungry. How about some lunch?"

Bucky nodded, even though he no longer had the constant hunger pangs he remembered from before, with Hydra. There was always food in this place, as much as he wanted to consume.

"Okay," Steve rose. "I can order pizza."

"Pizza?" He probed at his memory but no images came forward. "What is that?"

"What's pizza?" Steve's jaw dropped open. "You don't remember…? I mean, I guess I'm not surprised you don't remember. It wasn't as common in our time, but pizzerias in New York really took off after the war. I was surprised seeing how many of them there are here…frankly, how much of everything there is now."

Steve said a lot of words, but Bucky still didn't know what pizza was.

Bucky got to his feet. "So what is it?"

"Hmmm." Steve pursed his lips and eyed the ceiling. "Well, I guess I'd call it a tomato pie with any topping you can imagine."

Bucky knew what pie was, but it was sweet and came with fruit. Tomato was a fruit, but it was not particularly sweet and didn't seem to be something that should be made into pie. The concept sounded unappealing.