Chapter Text
Mostly what history can tell you about Bucky Barnes is actually about Steve Rogers.
Bucky Barnes was the oldest of four children. He and his brother were the bookend to a pair of girls, eight years between Bucky and the baby. His family was working class, decently well off for that part of Brooklyn; they didn’t always have much but they never starved, even in the long lean years of the Depression. All the kids worked as early as they were able, which helped. Bucky left school when he was fifteen, and never quite lost his childhood nickname. He was a good student and genuinely bright, a gifted athlete, but none of that mattered much when it had come time to grow up.
Steve was an only child. He and his mother were very poor and did nearly starve, a few times. History is clear on this point.
Bucky Barnes was a good kid who loved Steve Rogers as fiercely as he did his brother and sisters, and grew into a sweet man who loved as easily as he laughed, who believed in the value of hard work and the bonds of family and in Steve Rogers. He wrote to his mother and sisters twice a week before he was captured by HYDRA. He never wrote to Steve but his letters reference him often, and almost always ended asking them to look after him.
Sometimes history will admit that it was Steve Rogers who was the troublemaker, not Bucky Barnes with his bedroom eyes and quick smile. Afterwards this was written as a positive character trait - that Steve Rogers was the same person before and after the serum, that he'd always stood up to bullies and never backed down no matter what the odds - but in Brooklyn it used to scare the shit out of Bucky, who thought sometimes that Steve had decided he wouldn't see thirty anyway so he might as well go out now instead of later, even if it was just against some punk who couldn't keep his yawp shut.
Bucky Barnes loved dancing, loved Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, loved cigarettes and sci fi pulps and Black Mask magazine. He didn’t enlist, but he wasn’t bitter when he was drafted in ‘40 because that’s how the world worked, and he understood why Steve kept at it, just please don’t say you’re from Jersey, for the love of god. He took to the rifle in a way that the Army needed badly, and earned his rank in only two years.
He re-enlisted just before Pearl Harbor because the pay was good and he and Steve had gotten an apartment together that summer, finally moving off the Barnes’ couch where Steve had been sleeping since his mother’s death. He was city born to the core and hated being in the countryside with all the passion of a wet cat. He was a good man. A good soldier. A good friend.
What isn't written down anywhere is this:
Bucky Barnes was never the same after tumbling into HYDRA's hands for the first time. They called it shell shock back then and there was little understanding of what happened to soldiers and why sometimes they came back strange. He was never the same, but no one really expected him to be, not even Steve, who knew him better than anyone and knew Buck would climb his own mountains.
The war turned that sweet kid from Brooklyn into a reserved, efficient killer, who rarely smiled and laughed even less, but it was war and that was what happened sometimes. Steve had never considered sending Bucky back to Brooklyn and Bucky hadn't considered asking. That Bucky might have been changed in a way beyond shell shock never occurred to anybody. On the ground, it was useful - to have someone who could almost keep up with Steve, who could do the things he wouldn’t let them ask Steve to do. Bucky hated Steve being with them more than he hated the war itself, which was saying a lot.
What isn't written down anywhere is this:
Bucky loved Steve and Steve loved him right back and they fooled around with each other sometimes, the way kids do when their bodies start waking up and there isn’t a lot of supervision. They knew that it wasn’t things boys were supposed to do with each other but thin walls and hard living just made it seem more like something people did but didn’t talk about.
In Brooklyn what happened between them was just something that happened, just the nature of their friendship, nothing that would have stopped either of them from having real lives outside of Bucky’s childhood bed. Just something that was. It was unusual for them to have their own place - kids usually lived with their folks until they found someone to marry - but it made enough sense with Bucky’s Army pay and getting Steve off his parents’ couch, and besides they’d stopped all that years ago, mostly.
What isn't written down anywhere is this:
Bucky Barnes wrote Steve Rogers dozens of letters while serving, words that burned the pages they were written on, words that were unforgivable not only because they went so far beyond what happened between them in Brooklyn, but because they didn't stop even after Azzano, even after Steve Rogers became the leader of men, after Peggy Carter staked her claim on the Star Spangled Man and practice time was over. It's not written down anywhere because Bucky destroyed each letter as soon as the words were out of him, and he fell from the train with those words unspoken.
What happened after that goes like this:
First, they broke him. Then they made him into the Winter Soldier.
No. That's not how it goes.
-
First, they put him in a white room for three days and wait to see if he dies. He has no way real way of telling how long he’s left alone, but it’s three days. There are no windows and they never turn the lights off. One of the lights is about to burn out and it lets out snapping, popping hisses every once in a while. He'd fallen badly on his left arm and in his first brief period of consciousness, he sees a white stick of bone jutting out just above what used to be the bend of his elbow. The two smallest fingers of the hand below it are mottled black and look worse every time he surfaces. His legs aren't broken, but that was about all you could say about them. He doesn’t remember falling.
When he doesn’t die, they bring him out of the white room and into the lab. He’s feverish by then - not really healing, just not dying enough that they think surgery might not be a waste of time. He smells how you'd expect a man to smell, after lying in his own piss for three days, his arm red and swollen with infection, the smallest two fingers starting to rot. He weeps as they strap him to the table. He's insensate with fever and sickness. He doesn't understand where he is or what's happening to him. He begs for Steve as they start cutting through his arm, a few inches above that jut of bone, and keeps begging until the shock knocks him under again. When he wakes up there is a blank space where the bottom half of his arm used to be.
Then a long, hazy period of recovery. They give him injections that make him feel like he’s burning up, like he’s going to die. Slowly, he gets better. He knows that it’s HYDRA who has him and that this time Steve has no reason to think he’s still alive. He plots escapes anyway. Force of habit, or hours where the boredom is almost as bad as the pain. No one speaks to him or uses his name. If they think of him as more than a body (an American, a source of intelligence, a Howling Commando, Captain America's best friend), they don’t say anything about it to him.
-
One day he hides the tin cup they bring with his evening meal. The next morning he hits a guard with it so hard that it shears clean in half. He puts the jagged shard through the other guard’s cheek, takes both their guns, and gets halfway down the hall before he’s shot with a weapon he's never seen before, that arcs toward him like lightning and puts him on the ground as hard as if he'd just been shot with a bullet.
He goes down on his left side, the one where his arm isn’t anymore, and the pain is breathtaking. He lies on the ground, flinching, limbs jerking helplessly, and watches jackboots slip through the blood dripping from where his arm used to be. Watches a pair of soft soled shoes push through, sees the hem of a lab coat brush against the tile and the blood as the man kneels. "Gut," the man said softly. “Dies ist gut.” More in German that he doesn’t understand. The soldiers pick him up and carry him back into the room, and there they beat him badly enough to fracture a rib and break two fingers. They put a bag over his head and cuff his ankles together. His right arm is yanked up over his head and attached to something.
When they’re gone he fumbles the bag off his head with the stump of his left arm. The wrist he has left is handcuffed to a grate. He can kneel and he can stand, awkwardly, but he can’t lay down. They leave him like this for four days without food or water. This will be one of the only times during his captivity with HYDRA, with the Soviets, with HYDRA again, that there is a clear line between cause and effect - between behavior and punishment.
After, he has to be carried to the lab. The doctor there is the one from the hallway, who knelt in Bucky’s blood, but his hands are gentle during the examination and he explains what he’s doing in soft tones. “Antibiotikum,” he says, holding up a syringe and waiting for Bucky to nod. “Narkose,” he says, holding up another. He makes a face like he’s hurt and then changes it to a smile, gesturing again at the syringe.
After the doctor stitches his arm up, he gives Bucky a cigarette and helps to light it for him. Bucky tries to put it out in the man's eye, but he's too weak and he misses. The doctor only smiles and jabs him with another dose of morphine. When Bucky comes out of it, he notices his broken fingers have healed.
-
His world narrows. The room (his room), the lab where they treat his wounds. An interrogation room, although they have never asked him anything; they just beat him until he can’t get up. A different lab, where they inject him with things he doesn’t want to think about. He is moved between these places without a schedule, without any rhythm he can discern. He is drugged, often. Sometimes they turn on the speakers in his room and play music at deafening volume for days at a time.
Twice they put him in a metal box and put him to sleep. When he wakes up he has days worth of hair on his face and he can’t get warm for hours. Once they attach electrodes to his head and he nearly bites his tongue off screaming. When he wakes up he has burns all over his head and he can’t remember why. Violence comes at unpredictable intervals and narrows his world even further, to places on his body that do or do not hurt.
Somewhere in all of this, the war ends. Bucky is on the winning side. The facility that he is being held in is so deeply buried that none of the scientists there hear about it for nearly six months.
No one speaks to him except for the doctor - at least in any way that matters. He hasn’t heard English since the train and when he dreams the words sound unfamiliar. His German is improving, slowly. Some of the guards speak to each other in what he thinks is Russian. Sometimes he’s sure he’s still in Italy, with Zola and Schmidt - that they’ve simply moved him to another part of the factory for the other doctors to have a turn with.
His world has been shades of unreality since Azzano, Steve’s big hand on his shoulder, shaking him out of a living hell and standing him effortlessly on his own feet - so it makes sense, that the nightmare never really ended. It makes sense, why they’ve never asked him anything about the Allies’ strategies or troop movement or the Howling Commandos, because none of that ever happened. It would be a relief, that he made it all up - because it meant that at least Steve would be okay, without Bucky there to look after him.
He tells himself stories, when he is alone and not in too much pain and can believe that he’s ever been somewhere in his life other than these little concrete rooms, stories about Brooklyn and Steve and his sisters and his mother. He traces over the scar on his left ankle, where he took a spill down the steps behind his building when he was twelve. The freckles on his shoulders that he got from his mother, who was covered in them. He tells himself about the taste of funnel cake and warm sand and hot dogs in Coney Island with Steve. About the smell of hot garbage in the alleyway underneath Bucky's fire escape, their legs dangling down and his fingertips brushing against Steve's as they handed a bottle back and forth. These times - when he is alone and not in much pain and more or less lucid - are harder and harder to come by.
He still fights, sometimes. But not often.
-
And eventually, of course, he breaks. They wake him up in a black, sluggish hour that feels like a while before dawn (he hasn't seen the sun for months) and they put a bag over his head and bind his arms to a board behind him, wrenching the left one up to be able to tie it securely. One of the guards puts a gloved hand over the end of his stump and squeezes viciously, for no reason at all; he was half asleep and not resisting. He howls and falls to his knees. And then just waits, for someone to hurt him again or to decide that the pain is over for now. His breath is very loud in his own ears. The fabric of the bag flutters in and out of his open mouth. All he wants is for them to pick him up, set him back on his feet, and not hurt him anymore. To do whatever they're going to do, and then leave him alone.
A boot scrapes down what’s still there of his left arm, stopping just long enough on his shoulder that it feels like touch, like someone’s hand. He’s been in pain - sometimes more, sometimes less, but always, always - for longer than he comprehends, anymore. He realizes - flashing bright across the back of his eyes like a heartbeat, like the slap of his fingertips across the bars of the fire escape - that he can’t remember the last time he heard his own name, even in his own head.
The boot knocks him sideways almost casually, flat onto the cold floor, and without thinking he kicks out hard. That’s the last thing he knows, for a while.
When he wakes up, it’s quiet. He’s in the lab. He’s strapped to the table and the doctor is hunched over the end of his arm. He’s doing something that Bucky can’t see very well, the angle awkward; there’s a whirring sound and a few sparks. It doesn’t hurt, and the relief of it hits him hard just a second before the shame does.
Without pausing in his work, the doctor reaches up and pats Bucky on the shoulder. Bucky curls towards the touch, helplessly. His throat feels gummy and raw. Even odds whether he was kicked in the throat or whether he was sobbing while unconscious.
He remembers being beaten so badly in Italy that he pissed blood for a week. He remembers waiting his turn to shit in the single bucket allotted to each cage of captured soldiers, of lying awake at night and feeling fluid fill up his lungs, listening to muffled sobs in the darkness around him. He remembers being taken away to Zola's lab and understanding clearly that this was it, that he'd never see his family again. He'd never go home. He'd thought of home every day, and now he'd never see it again.
This was it.
"Please," he whispers to the doctor, who quirks an uncomprehending gaze up at him. “Bitte," he says, trying again. "Ich heiße Bucky. Hilf mir. Bitte. Hilf mir, bitte."
The doctor smiles at him, warm. He pats Bucky's shoulder again, his fingers gentle on Bucky's bare skin. "Bitte," Bucky whispers to him, "mich töten, bitte."
"Okay," the doctor says. The word sounds awkward in the man's mouth, but he smiles at Bucky, proud of his English, and Bucky almost cries with relief. "Okay."
But they don't kill him.
They give him a new arm. They put him back into the box. Zola returns, and they start the conditioning.
-
Zola is impatient, demanding. He never seems satisfied with the process of building the perfect soldier. He sits with the other doctors sometimes watching Bucky's physical training, sniffing and pouting and generally making himself a nuisance. Bucky's doctor complains about it sometimes, the way you'd complain to a dog: not expecting any answer but dutiful, full attention. The doctor is proud of the experiment; the others wanted to just kill Bucky or sell him off to the Russians, but he knew the potential was there for something greater. Bucky listens with dutiful attention. Hearing that everyone wanted to kill him doesn't bother him. It's been nearly two years and not a lot bothers him, these days.
Once, his doctor calls him over after his training is finished for the day. He had sparred against six soldiers in various combinations and weapons. Two of them clapped him on the back when the trainer finally called an end. The doctors are sitting at a table at the other end of the room and he sits down at his doctor's feet. He's sweaty and his body feels good except for the arm, which is heavy and always cold and makes strange, unnerving sounds when he moves it.
His doctor is bragging about him. About the arm and Bucky's progress and how quickly he heals from the damage done to him. They spent most of last year refining him - tracking the recovery time of burns, electric shock, oxygen deprivation, broken bones, minor gunshot wounds, stab wounds at different depths and in different limbs. They tell him how many cells he regenerates per hour, as if he'll be impressed.
"Irrelevant," Zola declares. "And what have you done with this perfect soldier of yours? What does it matter if he can sneak into American bases? You want him to train our people to be better Americans? We could have kept any of these prisoners, not poured money into this one - if all you can produce is an English teacher."
Bucky has snuck into American bases, twice, alone. He spent weeks preparing with the doctor and his team, relearning the social cues he would need to pass unnoticed, to get what he wanted. Before the American bases, they took him to a local town three times and on the third time he charmed a smile out of a girl. When they returned, the doctor lavished attention on him - cigarettes, a hot shower, long hours where he talked at Bucky in his quiet voice.
“You are angry that you cannot reproduce him,” Bucky’s doctor says, loftily.
Zola sniffs. “I am angry that he still has that accent.”
This is true. One of the soldiers on the American base had spoken to him only because he'd heard something in Bucky's voice that stood him out of the crowd. He'd asked Bucky where he was from and Bucky had answered, had said Brooklyn because they hadn't told him somewhere else and the man had beamed and said Queens! like that meant something. The soldier bought Bucky a drink and talked endlessly about Queens! and the city! until Bucky had managed to get away, help me still clenched between his teeth. Brooklyn is meaningless, just a word that fell out of his mouth when he needed an answer, but something in the soldier’s voice had felt like home too, like the smell of sidewalks and hot garbage and Steve -
He knows the words, the memories - Brooklyn - they just don’t seem to matter much. Like they happened to someone else.
He’d sat there, awkwardly, hunched over the barstool listening to the kid talk about New York, and hated himself with a clarity he hasn’t felt about anything for what feels like a long time. He’d sat and actually thought about leaning over and whispering to the guy that Bucky was being watched, that he was being held against his will by people who were hurting him, that his left hand only looked alright in the weak light of the bar, only sounded alright when the whirring motion of lift, sip were covered by the honkey tonk piano from the corner. And said nothing. Smiled and nodded in the right places and after the second beer slipped out the side door and went back to the truck waiting for him.
Told them about Brooklyn and Queens! They’ve been working on his speech since, rounding out his Th’s and R’s - quarter, water, this, that, the other one. The doctor’s English is poor so other people are teaching him, other people speak at him with soft voices and sometimes touch him - to get his attention or tell him he’s doing well. Sometimes it’s very hard for him to pay attention, but sometimes he plays it up so that someone will lay a hand on his arm.
"Arnim, my old friend," the doctor says, "Why be so petty? My soldier, he is wonderful. He will do anything I tell him to."
"And what do the rest of us get, hm?" Zola asks. "Without me, they would have discovered your little experiment years ago. How wonderful would your soldier be without their money, without this little paradise you have?"
"If you're jealous," the doctor says, "try him out."
There's a moment of suspicious silence. Bucky looks up at the doctor over his shoulder, aware of the vulnerable stretch of his own neck. The doctor makes a careless gesture, and Zola bends closer to where Bucky sits waiting.
"Go kill that man," Zola tells him, pointing at random to one of the soldiers on the other side of the room, who is drinking water with the other men, relaxing - not paying attention to the doctors or to Bucky. He's one of the men who clapped Bucky on the shoulder and gave him a smile. Bucky gets to his feet.
He knocks the soldier down with the metal arm and stomps on the man's throat. The trachea is crushed under his heavy boot and blood spurts up out of the man's mouth and onto Bucky's trousers. He has just a second where the soldier looks up at him - confused, more than anything else - then his eyes roll back in his head. The other soldiers have drawn their weapons but no one does anything. They stand and stare at him like he's a hurricane. Like he's a family pet that decided to bite. The fear in their faces feels good. He feints at one and is delighted when the man falls backwards instead of hurting Bucky. The soldier on the ground is still choking to death and the sound is very loud. Across the room, he can hear Zola's pleased laughter.
-
They teach him German, Russian, French. Later on, Mandarin, Cantonese, Polish, Romanian. It happens subliminally, while he's in the box. They supplement with a few weeks of conversational training with native speakers. He comes out of the box stumbling, shivering, the new words awkward in his mouth. The box speeds his healing, his learning, his tactical training. He is trained, physically, until the muscles remember everything, even when he doesn't.
They take him out. They don't always say why, beyond "kill this person" or "kill that person." Sometimes he is out in the world for weeks at a time. He charms strangers. He plans ops. He kills many, many people, up close and from far away. He is Russian, Romanian, American, Ukrainian. He is a soldier.
They put him back in the box. They take him out. They attach the electrodes to his head and measure the damage to his brain. This happens many times. He watches the doctor's hair grow whiter without understanding that it's 1949, that it's 1952, that it's 1957.
Zola is away often and when he returns he moves slowly and painfully, which is satisfying to the soldier. The doctor still complains about Zola - his restrictions, his evangelism, his missions that send the soldier back damaged. He was caught in his own explosion on the last one and to replace the arm they had to take the six inches that was left of the one he was born with, and parts of the shoulder itself. It was necessary, the doctor reassures him as he comes out of the surgical haze. To counteract the weight and force of the new arm, they've bolted the hardware directly onto his spine. It would help with dexterity and motor control, and really there have been so many improvements. Morphine doesn't work on him long but there's a steady drip and right now he is flying, he is falling. He smiles up at his doctor.
"I thought we would lose you," his doctor says, and smiles back unsteadily. "But you're all right now."
The doctor turns away abruptly to fuss with the arm. He's been out long enough that the burns have sloughed away, leaving new pink skin all over him in patches. His leg isn't broken anymore, only a little tender when he rotates his ankle. He can feel the edges of real pain around the haze of the morphine, where they cut away at him, but right now he is alright, like the doctor says. "Yes," the doctor says, as if he'd spoken aloud. "And you'll be fine once you rest. I told them they had you in the field too often, that eventually you would tire, and look what happens! You can't imagine what Arnim has been saying, but - I am talking too much." The doctor turns around. His face is pale but his smile is stronger now. "You are all right now and that is what is important. We can prevent these little mishaps by being more careful, yes? And after all, even Captain America wasn't invulnerable."
The soldier breathes. The lab is quiet, just the two of them, and his voice is scraped raw when he asks, "wasn't?"
The doctor looks surprised, which is expected. The soldier rarely speaks. Not unless he is out in the world and orders need to be given. Here he only takes them. Here he speaks when spoken to, and never with a question. The doctor is at a loss for a long moment.
"I suppose I shouldn't have said that," he says, eventually. "I forget, sometimes, that ..."
The soldier shifts. He's belly down and completely naked on an operating table, his left arm supported away from his body on an extension of the table. Both arms are restrained, in fact - but the doctor flinches back anyway. As if he is a family pet who is about to bite. The soldier spreads the fingers of the hand the doctor can see, turning his palm up.
"Please," he says, and realizes that he is crying. It's been so long since he'd felt anything in particular that it astonishes him. His breath is short and his heart feels like it will beat right out of him. He doesn't know why he needs this so badly, this story above any others he could have asked for. The doctor traces the tips of two fingers over the soldier's cheek, just for a moment, and the soldier shudders. The doctor isn't smiling anymore.
"No," the doctor says. "I'm sorry I mentioned him, my child. It's nothing important. Just forget about it."
He doesn’t, though. Not for a long time. He whispers to himself on nights they let him sleep and lets himself feel sadness. Steve is only a word to him now and he doesn’t really know that it’s a name, but it he says it over and over and over, and sometimes it actually helps.
But eventually he lets go of that too.
-
He rests. He recovers. The new arm is a big improvement. He crushes a man's skull without meaning to, the first time he is taken downstairs to spar. Zola is thrilled. His doctor is quieter these days - something strange and unfamiliar on his face. He teaches the soldier to roll cigarettes, to improve his fine motor skills, but sits mostly silent, his thoughts unshared as they haven't been for many years.
Once when they bring him back in they take him to a room before cleaning him up and seeing to any minor repairs. The soldier is covered in mud and blood and his arm is making a strange sound when he moves the wrist joint. There is a group of five soldiers and three prisoners waiting for him. The prisoners are kneeling on the cold, damp concrete. There are bags over their heads and two of them are wearing lab coats.
"Traitors," one of the soldiers tells him, unnecessarily. He takes the gun he’s given and shoots all three of them in the back of the head, one after another. One attempts to speak, but it's over very quickly.
-
The doctor is no longer there. One day Zola isn't either. The faces change around him. The flags and languages do too. He stops keeping track. He goes into the box and they bring him out of it. They wipe him and send him stumbling out into the world for a few days at a time. He sees summer, autumn, winter, spring. Not always in the same order, but it doesn't matter very much.
They let his hair grow long. He is no longer a soldier to them. They don't let him plan ops. They don't let him charm strangers. There's not much in him anymore that wants to; he is docile on good days and erratic on bad. Once they pull him out before an op is even complete. Once he doesn't return to his extraction point and they don't catch him for two weeks. They beat him and ask him, after, why he ran and he finds he has no answer. There wasn't a reason, or if there was it's gone, the way most things seem to be gone these days. They hurt him when he isn't compliant, or when he doesn't respond quickly enough. Sometimes he remembers this in time to stop it from happening, but not always.
They shave his face. They trim his nails. They wash him, sometimes. He's not always sure. He thinks he’s been watching the world happen from outside himself for a long, long time.
There was a reason that he ran, but he doesn’t remember anymore. He was on his way to the extraction - waiting for night to fall so that he could travel inconspicuously - crouched in a hollow on the roof of an old brick building - a warehouse, maybe - and the fading light - the light caught - on a blond head down below on the street. Laughter, and a cadence to the man’s speech that sounded familiar, misplaced R’s and blurry Th’s, quarter, water, this, that, the other one.
He watched, fascinated, as the man turned the corner, and then he followed.
It was hours before he came back to himself, and then he simply kept going. He stole clothing to make himself invisible. He ditched the weapons and the gear from the mission. He didn’t particularly feel hunted; if he’d thought about it, he would have assumed they would find him. He went willingly enough when they did, and by that time he’d forgotten the man entirely.
He hates the wipes, more than anything else. They hurt, like everything else, but after they untangle him from the machine and take the guard out of his mouth, he’s weak and shaky and so detached. Nothing is real. Nothing hurts. This is when it’s easiest for them to move him physically - to push his limbs into place, to twist his arms into the jacket and roll socks onto his feet and shove them into the boots. He is entirely without control, and he hates that more than anything.