Compliance
He reached out for the doctor's hand when he was in the chair, the good one, the one that took the bad things away, just as the doctor was about to give him the injections. The doctor pulled his hand away before he—
bucky
james buchanan barnes
please
please
—could touch him. He understood. You never touched the doctor.
'What is it, soldier?' The doctor's voice was kind.
'Those injections… they make me sleep.'
'That is correct. No need to worry. You won't feel a thing.'
He looked up, at the helmet that he knew was going to be lowered onto his head. It looked like the jaws of some strange animal.
'I—I want to know what happens,' he said. 'In the chair. I want to be awake.'
'Are you sure?' the doctor said.
He closed his eyes. That seemed to be enough of a yes.
(He'd been awake in the chair before. Maybe. He didn't know. The doctor was fixing him, but he was still Crazy and Bad and Wrong. He imagined things. He made things up.)
'Very well.'
There was some commotion at that, but not much. Restraints tightened around his limbs, his torso. The leads were placed on his head. They felt sticky against his skin, but not unpleasant.
He was sure he recognised the guard standing behind two of the white coats, and almost sure the guard was supposed to be dead.
That was all right. He did not mind the dead.
He sensed the doctor draw closer to him. It felt… good. Reassuring.
He deserved everything that happened to him.
'You may experience some… convulsions,' the doctor said. 'You will need to put this in your mouth so you don't injure yourself by accident. You will like it, it is very soft.'
He opened his eyes, then his mouth. The doctor—he had put on a latex glove—carefully slid in a rubber bit. He took it without fuss or complaint.
The doctor was right: it too felt good. He thought he could feel teeth marks in the bit, which meant everything was in the right place. Held tight. Squared away.
He closed his eyes, only a little anxious, as the machine descended and locked around his head. Switches were flipped. His body tensed on pure instinct as the hum of electricity started up, but the restraints held him tightly. They were not very necessary. He wasn't going anywhere.
He thought the sound of his own screams was going to be in his head forever, but then he got to forget.
:=:=:=:
They had him use live ammo on the targets. They had always had him use live ammo on the targets.
He liked the sound the bullets made when they hit home.
:=:=:=:
They had brought him to a room. He wasn't sure what the guard wanted from him, what he was supposed to do. The room was covered in writing, brown with age. In the middle of the room there was a bucket of water, rags, soap, laid out like instruments before a surgery.
Something stirred inside him, very faint. He pushed it down.
He just wanted to know what to do.
The doctor's voice poured out from a wall. 'Clean it.'
He got to work, his body now quiet. The doctor wanted to be pleased, and that, that he could handle. That, he knew how to do.
He—
used to clean
—ran a damp soapy rag over some of the letters, and after a while the brown began to run and lightened to deep red. The writing had been done with blood. It should be too old to smell, but he was special, he was different (rare breed, rare animal) and so he could pick up a trace scent of salt and iron.
The words were all over the walls, straight, crooked, big, small. Whoever had written them had been much crazier than he was: everything was shaky, loopy, jumbled together.
Sister. Street. City street. Commandos. Italy. Lady upstairs Mrs B. Star stars. Strong. Stork. The words didn't make any sense.
He cleaned away a bunch of letters that just said Steve, over and over. It took him some time, but the stains went from words to rivulets of brown, then red, then pink, then just soapy water. The wall was wet but clean.
Who the hell is Steve?
Another spot said I AM ALIVE I AM ALIVE I AM ALIVE. The letters, all scratchy capitals, grew thinner and crooked, like spider legs.
He kept going. He had to wipe it all off.
:=:=:=:
this isn't you, god, this is the first time you've been able to think in how long, who are you, I've got to get out of here remember please remember no stop don't please don't just shut up shut up shut up shut
:=:=:=:
They had him fight people. Live people, the kind that bled and whose bones broke.
He was supposed to learn from them: close-quarters combat, steps, moves, reading an opponent's body and stance, dodging blows, taking them, stealth attack, full-frontal attack, hand-to-hand, improvised weapons.
He couldn't tell time but he was sure it didn't take long for him to have nothing more to learn. For him to take only moments to take them down, any of them.
He liked that.
Sometimes, when they were beaten, they would throw him a look that was hard and full of sharp edges.
He liked that too.
(He wasn't supposed to like or dislike things.)
The doctor told him not to kill them.
:=:=:=:
He didn't think he went into the bad chair, the one that put things in his head, very often.
He couldn't know, but he didn't think it was very often.
The pictures were already in his head. Clouds of fire. Bodies swollen with flies. Ropes tightening around the necks of hooded heads.
Once he tried to claw the pictures out of his head and the doctor had to punish him.
As soon as he could use his flesh hand again, he wanted to tell the doctor that he was fixed. He understood now. He was strong. People were weak and they bled and their bones broke.
Not like him.
:=:=:=:
He remembered the doctor, all his faces. He remembered the guns and the knives and the moves. He remembered running the maze.
He remembered being Bad, and his Wrongness, his Sickness, and having all that cut away from him.
He wanted to be good.
He wanted to put a bullet in the fabric head of a practice target, slice through its rubber guts. He wanted to see it kicked down, sawdust spilling, and know that the thing on the ground wasn't him.
He was very good at shooting things, cutting things, fighting things. That was all he knew how to do, all he was able to do. Put something in his hands and sooner or later its guts would spill out. The doctor said he shouldn't be ashamed of it. He should be proud. There was nothing like doing what you had been bred to do. What you were naturally good at.
All things were happiest when put to their right use.
He couldn't remember if he'd ever been happy. He was sure he wasn't supposed to be.
There had been a Before. He was almost certain there had been a Before. It was drab, the colour of fog, a big black hole with only dust at the bottom.
He didn't like thinking about the Before.
He didn't like thinking at all, not very much. Everything rattled inside his head. All loose pieces that didn't fit. Grab hold of one and it was like sticking a hand in a hornets' nest.
The doctor helped him not think.
He wanted—
He didn't want. That was Bad.
He wanted to do what the doctor told him to do.
The doctor made him sleep in a place where he didn't have to know he was in the dark.
He didn't like the dark but he didn't mind that kind.
It was friendly.
:=:=:=:
The wall whispered to him. He went to it, placed his hand on the plaster. The good hand, the cold hand. Veins of black ice spread out across the wall until the room looked like a forest of thorns.
You could come across all kinds of things in the woods. And sometimes you escaped, and ran and ran and ran until you were about to drop to the ground. But in the dark, it was easy to lose your way, and sometimes you ended up just running in a great big circle, back to the needles and the fangs.
That was good. He could stop running, let them into his flesh, under the skin.
He was finally in the place where he belonged, where he'd been headed to all along.
TBC…
Author's note: The strong/stork thing is Bucky very vaguely remembering Howard Stark ("stark" means "strong" in German). I AM ALIVE written over and over on a wall is once again a reference to the Cold Case episode The Road—it's what one of John Smith's victims wrote on her cell's walls during her captivity. The dark being described as friendly comes from the Jacques Tourneur film Cat People (1942). The bits in the last section about escaping a monster in the woods, running in a circle, and feeling relieved at ending up in the place where you'd been headed to all along come from the Joe Hill short story Best New Horror.
Also, tl;dr (and probably boring and self-involved tbh ;)) meta, feel free to skip: I feel like I should mention that I am hopefully getting across here the fact that Bucky being made to kill people as the Winter Soldier is not a consequence of the abuse he experiences. Having his sense of self and his agency obliterated so he can go and do things he'd abhor at the whims of people who are his sworn enemies is itself part of the abuse. This is not to say he doesn't have a responsibility, once he regains his grip on himself, to help others and choose to be a force for good instead of being used to do harm, because he absolutely does (which is of course exactly what he does in the comics—well, the ones that are actually halfway decent, at least ;)—and hopefully in the movies too, assuming they don't screw it up). But I just felt the need to point out that the whole "character does bad things out of their own volition, oh well, give them an abusive backstory, that explains it all" trope doesn't just imply that abuse victims/survivors are basically irrevocably broken vampires, thanks a lot but also… this is actually a favourite tactic of abusers. Abusers are fantastically duplicitous and they often strategically deploy sob stories and redemption narratives to keep their targets under their control/justify their behaviour. In contrast, Bucky doesn't have access to such a narrative, obviously, since he's an actual abuse victim. (Plus, there's plenty of complexity that can be explored in abuse stories! This was actually one my goals when writing this fic! But the whole Freudian Excuse trope… is not it :(( …)