It took a few days for anyone, well, Steve at least, to really realise how big a mountain they had to climb. Tony was taking his sweet time in getting Bucky's arm back, the injuries to the rest of Bucky weren't healing as fast as O'Malley had hoped and they were having trouble getting Bucky to keep food down. Anything thicker than soup reappeared pretty quickly, and O'Malley didn't want to get close enough to find out why. Every time she came near Bucky, he 'blacked out' or whatever he did and needed Romanoff (he wouldn't listen to anyone else in that state) to tell him to stand still. They hadn't found a way to get Bucky out of that state other than Romanoff ordering him to sleep. And he wasn't sleeping well, rarely more than an hour or so before he shouted himself awake. Or worse. Sometimes he spent ten minutes stuck in nightmares like a little kid, shouting and thrashing about, but completely unaware of where he was. When he finally came to, he didn't remember what he'd dreamed, or at least he said he didn't. When he wasn't blacked out, Bucky knew Steve, but there was a lot of memory missing and he sure as hell wasn't right. As Bucky, he'd learned who Sam was and seemed to be wary of Romanoff, who intentionally came in when they weren't expecting O'Malley to stop Bucky forming an association. She won every hand of every card game they played, except Go Fish, which Bucky occasionally edged her on. Barton occasionally came and joined in with them, and dared to call Romanoff's bluff.

It was six days, in which time Steve had barely slept, before he called the Avengers to Assemble. Thor was absent, but Sam was there, like he'd always belonged.

"This can't go on indefinitely." Stark said, without any preamble at all.

"No." Rogers agreed. "He'll go nuts sitting in that room."

"Cap, he's already nuts. You said it yourself, there are huge sections of his life he can't remember and he flips out at first sight of a white coat."

Rogers opened his mouth to interject, but Romanoff cut across him. "I disagree. Not the way you mean it anyway. I don't think he's dangerous."

Barton snorted. "Tasha, every single one of us is dangerous."

"He took out a dozen HYDRA bases single handed." Stark threw back. "And god knows who or what he destroyed for them before."

"I didn't say he wasn't powerful." Romanoff said. She had a remarkable ability to make everyone shut up, even if they were being much louder than she was. "Powerful means able to do things, dangerous means likely to harm us. All of us are powerful, none of us is dangerous." Banner shifted. Romanoff ignored him. "Barnes lives between two states, the state in which he treats The Captain like his best friend and the submissive state, The Winter Soldier."

"So which one of those took three of us to bring down the other night?"

"The Soldier, but deranged. We pulled a few HYDRA files on him-"

"So that's what you've been reading." Banner said.

Romanoff nodded once. "There are… procedures used to maintain The Soldier. The files suggest The Soldier went AWOL on two separate occasions and got caught again in between, that's why he went quiet for months. Both times he went AWOL, it followed incomplete or absent procedures and a kill order on Rogers." There was a long silence.

"What…" Stark started. "What the hell do you do to someone to make them...?"

"I don't think you want to know." Barton said quietly. Romanoff shook her head. Stark didn't pursue it.

"So what?" Banner asked. "So long as nobody tries to get him to kill Rogers he's relatively safe?"

"Yeah." Romanoff said shortly.

"How can you know that?" Stark shot back.

"I don't know it definitely, but given what I've observed and what HYDRA wrote about him, it makes sense. They didn't change his ideology, they made him submissive."

"Is that like the sceptre thing?" Wilson asked.

Romanoff shook her head. "I don't think so"

"It's not." Barton said quietly, looking at the floor between his feet.

"Whatever it is," Wilson said. "right before he flips, he looks scared, every time."

"It looks like behavioural training," Romanoff added. "maybe a deranged fear response."

Wilson shook his head. "I don't want to think what they did to him to…" He tailed off.

"Hang on." Stark said after a moment. "If fear makes him flip, is he like Bruce?"

Bruce shook his head. "We can't assume that. All that reliably triggers him so far is sight of a medic. That's not the same thing as fear."

"Might be." Romanoff said. "He's been with HYDRA seventy years. I don't think the medics and technicians there are known for bedside manner. The way we're going to figure this out is by exposing him to stuff."

"Nobody would suggest that with the Hulk." Stark stood up. Banner looked down and shifted uncomfortably, so did Barton. They all remembered the last time that had happened. "This is insane. Can nobody else see that?"

"Trying to trigger the Hulk would be insane." Romanoff said, perfectly calmly. "An uncontrolled Hulk is just about the most dangerous thing we know of, but if he's a nuke, the Soldier is an attack dog, the most perfect attack dog there ever was."

"He turned on his handlers."

"They set him on his handler, his first handler. Something under the obedience chose. Something older than the Winter Soldier is in there, interfering. We have the perfect handler for the Soldier," Romanoff looked at Steve.

Steve looked away. "I'm not his handler."

Romanoff sighed. "Yet. I think we can make him accept another handler. There's a method written out."

"Romanoff, that's not what I meant."

"Rogers, HYDRA lost control because they asked something of the Soldier that James Barnes couldn't do. You know James Barnes's limits. If it took him seventy years to break what HYDRA did to him enough to disobey them, I don't think he'll ever disobey you."

"Romanoff, I was never his handler."

"You were his CO." Wilson said.

"Not really. He always said he wouldn't follow Captain America, but he'd follow…" Steve tailed off, remembering what Bucky had actually said – "the little guy from Brooklyn who was too dumb to run away from a fight"

"Fury would say this," Romanoff said. "So I'm going to. Get over yourself Rogers. When he's cogent, sure, he's your friend. When he's the Soldier, he's just about the most feared assassin alive. You have what's probably a unique ability to keep him under control. You damn well use it."

Steve didn't look back at her. Part of him knew she was right; if Bucky hadn't killed him when he'd been ordered to (given how obedient he was when he was… whatever that was), he could probably keep Bucky from hurting anyone, but something in Steve rebelled against the idea of Buck looking at him the way he looked at Romanoff when she was commanding him. He was Bucky's friend. He wasn't his master.

"OK." He said. Protecting people had to come first. Protecting people always had to come first.

"Stark, how close are you to being ready to give his arm back?" Romanoff asked. It took Stark a long time to answer, and when he did, he sounded like he didn't want to answer at all.

"We're actually kind of at the stage now where we nearly need to study it sort of on him." He'd been holding it back. Stark had been keeping Bucky's arm away from him.


I feel that I ought to point out that I have no mental health qualifications at all.

This is based on my interactions with those who do, a little bit of reading, and, honestly, what a panic attack feels like