Author's Note: The Russian translations in this chapter were kindly provided by boot_from_cd and alley_skywalker, with additional comments and suggestions by irien24, liilliil, migmit, and sandwichwarrior. Thank you all for your help!
This chapter has an amazing illustration by dark_roast, you can find her art post here: archiveofourown dotorg / works / 2515286
5. Reflexive
It was soft. At first, he wondered if it was just the buzzing of a fly, the sound of pipes settling down. After a short while, though, it was clear it was a person, maybe a child. It was coming from the other wall. He got up—stronger, he was getting stronger—and moved towards it.
The crying wafted up from a vent. He knew he shouldn't go near it. The knot of ice in his stomach told him something very bad would happen if he went near it.
He couldn't help himself. He had to do something. If he didn't, the crying would rattle inside his eggshell skull until his head broke open. He kneeled on the floor by the vent. Blood dripped from his hand and splashed on the floor in a strange pattern.
Nothing bad happened. His heart quietened, just a little. The crying grew louder, bounced off the vent's sides. It was a child for sure. Bucky edged as close to the vent as he could. 'Hello?'
The weeping stopped for a few seconds, then started up again, lower than before.
'Can you hear me?'
The voice from the wall didn't answer, but he was sure now that it was a child, probably a little girl. Children didn't belong here. He wasn't sure what here was—it was some kind of hospital, and it was familiar—but he knew there shouldn't be any children here.
'Peux-tu m'entendre?' he said. 'Kannst du mich hören?' He knew left from right, he knew the sun rose in the East, he knew how to say those things and what they meant.
The girl in the vent whispered. He swallowed and put his ear as close to the cover as he dared.
'Help me.' The words were punctuated by an echoing rattle, as though something was moving about far below. 'Help me.'
'I'll help you, OK?' he said into the vent, hoping it was loud enough and his voice wasn't shaking too hard for her to hear. 'Don't be scared. Just stay put and I'll find you.'
The weeping started again, more desperate this time. Maybe the Bad Thing the vent did was happening, but it was happening to her instead of him. 'You can't—you can't do that,' he cried out at the ceiling. 'You can't keep children in here, just…'
… people like me.
He had to go to the door. He had to go to the door and open it and step out. He had to find the little girl. He stood up, wobbly, took one, two, three steps towards the door. Ice coiled in the small of his back. Open the door. It's no big deal. Open the door. Try the lock. He reached out towards it. His hand shook so bad it sprayed dollops of blood. Open the door. His heart raced. Open—
When he touched it, the door swung open with a little squeak of metal. He staggered out. He couldn't feel his body again, which was good, but he had to hold on to the walls for balance, which was bad. His hand left a streak of blood behind it.
The corridor outside branched into three other corridors. He peered into one. More corridors, all the same beige walls and linoleum floor.
His palm itched. When he glanced at it he saw a big strip of skin hanging down to his wrist, pink-streaked with blood, exposing a patch of flesh. A swell of nausea rose into his throat.
The metal arm was still useless, a load pulling him out of balance, but with some effort he managed to catch the end of the skin flap with the fingers of his right hand. He tugged, and winced at the sting as the skin began to rip free. It sloughed off, nearly translucent. He looked down as the skin dropped to the floor. More patches had begun to peel off; he could feel them itch, see the spots where they'd stained his hospital clothes. He took off his pyjama top, very carefully, then began working on the loose skin on his stomach and his right shoulder.
There were barbs under the exposed flesh. He tugged on one and felt the joint in his shoulder grind and shift. The barb began to slide out. He could feel it tear through his muscles. It felt like a bone splinter but it was black, and sharp. It twitched against his fingers as he tried to dig it out…
:=:=:=:
'… clean it up.'
He blinked. He was in the room. The door was closed.
It was the doctor who'd spoken, from a screen in the wall. The picture was fuzzy.
He—
How did he—
James. Something. The thought floated up through fog, then burst. Buck.
'Clean it up.'
Somewhere else. He had been—
His neck bent down, slow with rust. There was a bucket of water, a sponge. Under the light the film of soap on the water shimmered like dragonfly wings.
He turned back to the doctor on the screen, uncomprehending. The doctor told him things, at least. He was sure the doctor told him things.
'You have spoiled your room, like a little child, or an animal,' the doctor said. He (another balloon-thought: Bucky. Zola. Pop.) looked around.
A wall was spattered with red paint. Only it wasn't paint, it was blood. His blood. He had put the words on the wall because they had stolen them out of his head.
He got to his feet, still swaying but suddenly strong with rage. 'What did you do to me? Where's the girl?'
The doctor—Zola, he's Zola—frowned. 'What girl?'
'Don't lie! I know who you are, Zola. You—' That tug at the edge of a black hole again. God, why couldn't he remember? 'You've done things to me. You're keeping me here and…'
The vent. The vent where he'd heard the girl. It was gone.
He looked around the room frantically, as though that would make the vent show up, but of course it didn't. There was no vent. No girl. No corridors. There was only the room.
No. No. His head hurt. He reached up to touch the bandage but there was no bandage. His fingers probed around his scalp, looking for a wound, a scar, but there wasn't any. 'You… operated on me. Did some kind of surgery.'
God, he had to think.
'Do not be absurd, Sergeant. You invented it all,' Zola—but is his name really Zola?—said. 'Not on purpose, of course. It is what we call a delusion. Your mind is sick and therefore invented this surgery and this… girl. It is the same, ah—problem that led you to deface the wall. Rest assured that it is for your own good that you should clean it up.' The doctor leaned forward and his black and white face almost filled the screen. 'Come, now. I am asking you to do something very easy. Simply pick up the—'
He didn't hear the rest of the doctor's sentence. Pain shot up his left shoulder, dull at first, then sharpening to razor edges. He was on fire. He couldn't breathe. He dropped to the floor, air escaping his throat.
'What's wrong?' Zola said.
The pain snaked around his throat. He squirmed on the floor. The room was spinning, his vision turning black. He tried to get the metal arm off, before it burned a hole through his flesh, but his hand right hand just clenched uselessly, the skin stained red. 'I can't—' he spluttered. He was going to pass out.
'Breathe, Sergeant,' the doctor said. 'Relax.'
He gasped, helpless. 'I—I can—'
'You can if you simply calm yourself.'
A big gulp of air rushed into his lungs. The pain still crushed him like a vice but it receded a little, gave him room to breathe. Air wheezed in. He gulped it so fast he felt even more light-headed than before.
'Please calm down, Sergeant.' Zola sounded very calm himself. 'Count to three before you release each breath. One, two, three, very simple. One, two, three. Yes, that is it. Just one, two, three.'
He couldn't help but follow the doctor's instructions. It was easy. Air filled his lungs again. The pain began to fade, until it was only a grind in his left shoulder, under the metal. 'What did you do to me?'
'Me? Come, Sergeant, clearly I have done nothing. You could see me all along. In fact, I have almost never touched you since the day you volunteered.'
'You used some switch or…' He trailed off, swallowed. His lungs still ached. He hadn't seen Zola press any buttons, but that didn't mean anything—did it? He looked at the metal arm, as though the answer would inscribe itself there in fire letters, but of course there was nothing. Only mute steel.
His head. Something had happened to his head.
'Sergeant, you are sick. You know that it is healthy to listen to me but all the—problems in your mind will not allow you to do so. The conflict creates the nervous reaction. It is called a psychosomatic phenomenon. It means your mind creates the physical effect. But it is all imaginary, Sergeant.' He stopped to light a cigarette. 'Now. I am telling you this as a scientist and as someone who very much wants you to become healthy. For your sake, Sergeant, clean it up.'
He shook his head.
The doctor took a puff of his cigarette, unhurried. 'We can be here all day, Sergeant.'
It didn't take all day. He wasn't sure how long it took. His eyes stung. His head was hollow. Holey. His body ached, but not so much that he couldn't bear it, not so much that he couldn't have held on not to so much that he shouldn't have shut up shut up just shut up. His hand shook and the letters swam in and out of sight as he ran the wet sponge over them. Pink rivulets dripped to the floor.
He was sick. Not sick to his stomach (although he was). Not feverish (although he was). Just sick.
'You see how reasonable you can be, Sergeant?' the doctor said.
:=:=:=:
They kept taking things from him. He would wake up with new holes inside his head, as though his memories were a moth-eaten fabric. He dragged himself to the wall, filled it with his blood again. Each word a fragment, and the words didn't connect because the fragments didn't connect. City streets. New York? Girl. Sister? Steve, he remembered Steve, only sometimes he was a little boy lying on a hospital bed, face flushed, hands pale as the sheets, and sometimes he was a grown man and he—
barnes bucky barnes james buchanan barnes come on remember hold on to that
—was the one lying down and burning up. Black and white. Real? Brushing someone's hair, brown and long. Real, maybe? Going over a ball game play by play, even all the stuff the Lip (who?) had said. Why? He couldn't come. Where? Who? He switched on the radio, but it wasn't a radio, it was a Victrola, and it was in London. London? Real?
He put it all on the walls with the ink he got from his flesh. Sometimes he couldn't turn the little pieces into words and sometimes the words didn't link up together, like pieces from ten different puzzles, but he had to do it. If he did it, he could stitch it all up together later. If he did it, every time he woke up with another hole inside his head maybe he could look at the wall and find something to fill it up.
He had come from somewhere. He hadn't been in this room forever.
Real?
Sometimes he woke up with straps holding him in place. Gloved fingers pushed pills into his mouth.
They were for his own good. He would feel better after taking them.
They left a bitter taste in his tongue and after he swallowed them the things on the wall floated away like balloons.
:=:=:=:
He could think clearly. For once he could think clearly.
'Come on.'
He could hear someone crying, in another cell. He would get them out and then they would get away from here.
He used his hand, the metal one, the strong one, to break the lock on the door, then stepped into the corridor outside. He was weak—something he didn't remember had been done to him and his muscles felt like jelly—but if he just kept staggering forward, he would make it. He knew he would make it.
'Hang on,' he muttered. 'I'll come get you. Just hang on.'
The corridors looped in on each other, led only to dead ends. He tried to guide himself by the crying, but it had turned into whimpering now, barely audible, and he was no longer standing but crawling, and after a while he was still.
Come on. Think. You can still think.
There was a wetness in his ear. He touched it and his fingers came down smeared with red.
'Can you hear me?' his voice was hoarse, as though he hadn't used it in a very long time. 'If you can hear me, please answer me!' he shouted. Might as well shout.
A crackle started up in the floor in front of him.
He jerked backwards, struck the wall, then crawled away as fast as he could. He could barely use his limbs and didn't know where he was in the maze, but he had left a trail of bloodspots on the floor. He scrambled to follow those, his flesh turned to jelly. The hum in the floor and walls crept just behind him. Darts of pain hit his feet and hand. He tried to go faster, faster, fast, so hard he has scraping his skin on the floor, but it wasn't fast enough.
The door. The room. He dragged himself forward, bruised his elbow, gouged his flesh when his arm hit a corner. The crackle was coming, right behind him. He could feel the fire licking his skin.
He rolled inside the room and waited on the floor for it to start, for his flesh to burn, for him to smell hot metal and singed hair.
There was nothing. It was safe in here. It was safe.
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.'
:=:=:=:
'Clean it up.'
This time his metal arm started to thrum, then nausea and a burning sensation shot through his body.
Good. He liked it better like this. It didn't take him long to beg the doctor to stop—'Only two minutes of you being stubborn, Sergeant. This is good. You are improving.'—but at least when he ran the wet sponge across the wall, hand still trembling, and the words started to drip into nothing, at least he knew he hadn't done it just because the doctor had asked him to.
:=:=:=:
He came to on an examination table. People in masks and gloves started to cut his clothes away. He tried to cover himself up, but his hands barely obeyed him. His right hand must be drugged. His metal one, rusty.
'Please,' the doctor said, out of sight, his voice pursed with disapproval. 'What a perversion, to think we would be in any way interested in looking at you during a medical procedure. You are very sick, Sergeant.'
He was given no space to feel shame, if he even could. Electrode leads were being stuck to his skin, clamps and probes fixed to his body, everywhere. He was sure he could even feel them inside, digging in cold and painful.
Screens fenced him in. He could only move his head a little, but his eyes rolled frantically from side to side. There were screens showing a grey maze inside a whitish oval, screens with block patterns, screens with moving squiggly green lines.
The screen right in front of his eyes flickered once and showed a picture of a dark-haired woman. Maybe a good-looking woman, but the thought was laughable down here.
I know… But the thought sank. He didn't think he knew who she was.
'Do you recognise this woman?' the doctor asked.
'No,' he said.
The picture on the screen changed. 'Do you recognise this man?'
'No.'
The pictures kept changing. A dog. A sheep carcass. A girl at the beach. 'Have you ever been here?' 'Do you like this picture?' 'Do you know what this is?' 'Does this picture scare you?'
The dark-haired woman again.
'Have you seen this woman before?'
'No.'
'Lie,' the doctor said.
Stinging pain ripped through his body. He jerked against the restraints. Cries clotted in his throat, but only a whimper squeezed out. The green lines in one of the screens turned to panicked spikes.
The pain receded. He could breathe again, see again.
But I didn't know her.
Have you seen her. In the picture before. Have you seen her.
'Do you recognise this picture?'
Steve?
'Yes!'
'Lie.'
Pain again. Longer this time, he was sure. By the time it was over his breath came in little ragged gasps.
'Do you like this picture?'
It was a picture of a room. Just an ordinary room.
'Sergeant, please answer. Do you like this picture?'
'I don't know,' he whispered.
The picture on the screen changed. Tears prickled his eyes.
The pain came again a few pictures later, when he said that a picture of an eye being sliced by a razor blade disturbed him. He was sure he had told the truth, but he must not have. The doctor could see his thoughts, spilled out on the screens.
'There is a number and a letter in the screen in front of you,' the doctor said.
The screen was blank.
Oh god. Where is it? 'Where.' He hadn't meant for the word to drop out of his mouth.
'Right in front of you, Sergeant.' The doctor sounded a little testy. 'Please read the number.'
He tried to move his head but it was stuck to the table, a useless lump like the rest of his body. He tried looking sideways, up and down, as far as he could, but he could only see the edge of a screen placed above and behind him, and the very bottom of white shapes on the black background. 'I can't. I can't see.' Even his tongue wouldn't obey him.
Cross-talk.
'It is perfectly visible, Sergeant,' the doctor said. He didn't sound pleased, and bad things happened when the doctor wasn't pleased. 'We can all see it quite clearly. Please don't be stubborn.'
No, he didn't want to be stubborn. He didn't he didn't he didn't. 'Three,' he said, finally. His vision was hazy. The number might as well be floating in front of him.
'Lie.'
:=:=:=:
His face was slippery with cold sweat. He wanted to wipe it away, but he couldn't do that and clean the wall at the same time. His arm and hand, the flesh ones (the weak ones) shook so bad he kept spilling water on the floor.
'You are going to be very good for us, aren't you?' the doctor asked. 'We won't need to correct you again. You want to get better.'
He didn't care about getting better. He just didn't want to go in the dark room again.
The room had made him beg even if he couldn't even hear his own voice in there.
:=:=:=:
The screen showed him films of someone who looked like him. The man who looked like him was wearing thin cotton pyjamas and he looked like a ghost.
It mustn't be him because nothing ever happened to the man on the screen. He just sat on a bed in a room. Sometimes he stood in the middle of the room.
The man on the screen would stare and stare and stare, blinking once in a while, while the clock hands spun.
:=:=:=:
Pictures flickered in front of him. He was on a table (again?). The doctor asked him questions, on and on and on. 'How many people are in this picture?' 'Read the second letter on the screen.' 'Does the woman in this picture remind you of anyone?' 'Does this picture make you feel disgust?' 'Is the boy in this picture wearing a white shirt?' 'Is the boy in this picture frightened?' 'Are you frightened right now?'
The pain would come and go. It was becoming familiar.
'In this picture, do you— Ach je.' The doctor sounded disgusted. 'Sergeant, we do not need to know how much you are enjoying this. Try to control yourself.'
Enjoying—?
There was chatter from the doctor's table. '—did consider sexual pathology.' The doctor spoke to him again, the disgust only slightly muted. 'We will correct it along with your other abnormal responses, Sergeant.'
God, what does he see—
Everything. The doctor saw everything. Every thought, spread and splayed out on the screens.
Enjoying?
He couldn't see his own body. Was he… flushing? God, was it worse than flushing, was he—
He was enjoying it, wasn't he? A little bit. When the pain went out and then when it came back again. He must be.
The shame stung harder than the shocks.
The pictures blurred together. Mouths melted into dark holes, bones turned black with mould. His body rocked once in a while, but he wasn't on the table anymore. He lay on his stomach, and a hand was rubbing gentle circles between his shoulder blades. It's all right, Bucky. It's all right.
He remembered now. He had forgotten, because he was bad, but he remembered now. This used to happen, when he'd been small and upset, or ill, or had a bad day, or she (who?) had had a bad day. It was safe. Everything would be fine.
Dad?
He sat up. 'You really let me down,' his father said, voice still a little tender, as he turned away. He (Bucky, he had to hold on to the name) had to stop him from going. He had to tell his father that something terrible would happen if he went. Dad. Don't go. I'm sorry. I'll do better. Don't go. He had to save—
His father turned around.
Instead of a face there was only smooth, featureless skin, two ragged holes where the eyes should be.
He wasn't screaming any more. He was in a maze, in the middle of a snare of windowless corridors.
'Do it, Sergeant,' the doctor's voice said, but he couldn't tell where it was coming from. A growl rang out, only a thin wall away. He started to run.
The growl gave chase, faster and faster, closer and closer.
The screens flickered in front of him. Water dripped down the glass.
The growl caught up with him. It was a dog, big as a horse, fangs wet with spittle. It jumped on him, dragged him to the floor. The metal hand fastened around the dog's neck. 'Do it.' There was a whimper and a snap of bone. The sound made him sick.
He was on the chair again, the one where they stilled his eyes and his mind and put things in his head, things that made him throw up. There were no needles this time, no pictures. The doctor stood in front of him, at the head of a row of white coats who looked on, the bottom halves of their faces hidden by masks.
'Do you finally understand how simple it is, Sergeant?' the doctor said, and wheeled a tray closer to him. On the tray there was a silver dome, a small porcelain jug with a spoon. 'Things that don't work get broken. However, when things work well, it is time for a reward.' He reached down to lift the dome.
He (bucky bucky bucky) expected organs, a severed head. Instead there was a fat slice of chocolate cake, the kind with frosting and a cherry on top. He felt hunger; it rattled somewhere in his belly, unfamiliar. The doctor spooned out a generous dollop of whipped cream from the jar, and set the plate on his knees.
There was a metal fork. He reached out for it, his hand shaking. He was going to stab the doctor with it.
Instead he used it to slice through the cake.
Something scuttled inside the chocolate sponge. Seconds later an insect crawled out, then another. Spiders spilled onto the china plate.
The doctor smiled.
:=:=:=:
'It's not real.'
He was in the room, lying on the bed and staring at the door.
He was holding something in his metal hand. He could feel a slight pressure in the palm. He opened his fist. A cherry rolled out, glossy red, fell off the mattress, and landed on the floor with a soft little plop.
'It's not real.'
The girl in the walls was crying again. No, not crying, making soft sobbing sounds, like an animal that knew no one was coming to release it from its trap.
'It's not real.'
He rolled onto his side. There was a loose thread on the edge of the mattress. He picked at it until he'd pulled a hole in the fabric.
'It's not real.'
:=:=:=:
He ran and ran and ran, in the dark. There were obstacles he had to avoid and he could mostly feel them before they struck him. When he reached the end—a wall; there was no way around the wall—the doctor's voice poured down from the ceiling.
'You did very well, Sergeant. Six kilometres in a little over eight minutes. We will improve on that, of course, and you still don't know how to balance your artificial arm, but for now it is excellent.'
Six kilometres? Not a straight line. Circles. I've been running in—
Fog. He was taken to the doctor. The fog was still dispelling as the doctor talked to him. He had trouble keeping the room from spinning.
'You see how much better you feel like when we all work together?' the doctor said, and injected something into his thigh.
He did feel better. Good, almost.
:=:=:=:
Sometimes it was the bad needle.
:=:=:=:
The pills, one round, one oblong, were in front on him, sitting in a little paper cup. He opened his mouth for them.
You won't give us any trouble, will you?
It was the doctor's voice, but no one was speaking. He looked up at the person feeding him the pills. He wore glasses, a surgical mask covering his face. Between the cap and the mask, behind the lenses, there were the doctor's eyes (maybe), but that didn't mean anything. The doctor saw everything, was everywhere.
He didn't swallow the pills. He chewed them, and they left a sticky trail of powder on his tongue.
'Can you make her be quiet?'
The two guards looked at him. 'что?' one said.
'Ты можешь приказать ей замолчать?' he repeated. He didn't remember learning how to understand the words or how to say them, but he remembered so little now.
The girl was crying again. It made his bones hurt.
He just wanted her to be quiet.
As the guards walked away, his mind was glass-sharp, glass-bright, just for a moment. He saw the mazes, the rooms with the chairs, the table, the screens, the white coats, the guards, all of it. All of it for the purpose of keeping him in, like the stopper in a bottle. He spoke to the ceiling and the walls, where the doctor lived. 'You think I'm your prisoner,' he said. 'But you're my prisoner too.'
The doctor didn't answer.
After a while the girl went quiet and so did his mind.
:=:=:=:
He didn't have much time. All the bits that hadn't been cut out from inside his head were drifting about, within reach. If he was quick he'd be able to catch them. He ripped his flesh open and began to write, to put it on the wall where he could see, where he would be able to read it when he no longer remembered.
An address that might have been his own. Names. Making jokes for a boy (Steve?) so he'd drink a bottle full of purplish-red. Rows of little lead letters. A tank. Bottles covered in plaster dust. Washing hanging on a line. Things people had said, maybe, headless and tailless.
He filled the cell with words, top to bottom. Halfway through he wondered if he was going to run out of blood, empty himself on the walls. That would be good, wouldn't it? But he didn't. He didn't run out of blood. He didn't even run out of words. The only thing he ran out of was wall.
And time.
He blacked out again.
Always.
When he came to, the walls were sickly-white and empty again. The skin on his hand felt damp. He brought it to his face so he could sniff it. The faintest trace of soap still clung to it.
He hadn't been forced. He didn't remember it, but he knew he hadn't been forced. He didn't have that to cling to. He wasn't nauseous, either, his head didn't ache. The fog had ebbed away, just a little bit. He could hook thoughts together and have them go somewhere for once, but it didn't matter.
Nothing he did mattered. He would wash it away like a tide on sand. Nobody had to make him do it.
He had to wipe it off.
He didn't know how long it took for him to feel the presence in the room. He didn't move. Instead, after a while, he looked at the chair by his bed, the man sitting on it.
'Hi, Bucky,' Steve said.
TBC…
Author's notes: Another Emergency Puppies/Kittens chapter, I'm afraid. :( Though hopefully (she said) I managed to keep the focus on where I wanted to keep it, i.e., on the psychological effects all this has on Bucky, rather than on horrible things happening for the sake of horrible things happening. The bit with Bucky's father is lifted straight from the comics, specifically Captain America and Bucky #620 (Sep 2011). (You can find the relevant scans here: ic . pics . livejournaldotcom / overlithe / 15266763 / 256675 / 256675 _ original . png and here: ic . pics . livejournaldotcom / overlithe / 15266763 / 257014 / 257014 _ original . png) In this fic's backstory, as well as in my MCU head-canon in general, Bucky's understanding, loving, etc father died in an accident during his son's childhood after telling Bucky he was disappointed over the fact that Bucky got in trouble after promising he wouldn't do it anymore. Basically the main difference from the comics—in terms of the characters' interactions and relationships, that is, obviously there are many other differences in details—is that Bucky's mother is still alive throughout all this and Bucky got into trouble due to not knowing how to stick up for Steve/deal with something else that will come up later in appropriate ways, rather than getting into trouble due to not knowing how to deal with his mother's death in appropriate ways. The line you're my prisoner too is taken from a similar (not identical) line in one of Ruth Rendell's books. I think it was Make Death Love Me, but unfortunately while the line has stuck with me the title of the book hasn't! The bottle of purplish-red would have been a bottle of raw liver juice, which was used in the 20s as a treatment for pernicious anaemia (one of pre-serum!Steve's many health problems) until a concentrate was developed in 1928.