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“And how does that make you feel? When you picture yourself in that situation?”
It was a trick question. It was a stupid fucking question. Because obviously the answer was “bad,” but there was so much more to it than that.
Bad, but he doesn’t deserve to be allowed to feel that way.
Bad, but it wasn’t really, was it?
Bad, but at this point he really just needs to get over it and move on.
Bad, but if he admits that then they’ll punish him.
He doesn’t say any of this. He settles on, “I mean, bad. Obviously.”
“Very descriptive of you. Could you give me a little bit more to work with?” She said, looking at him like she could read the internal storm going on in his mind. She couldn’t, he knew she couldn’t. Nobody knew what to do with him, nobody knew how to help; there weren’t a lot of doctors who were trained in undoing the lasting side effects of brainwashing. But he didn’t know how to fix himself, so here he was.
Plus he didn’t want to get arrested. So there was that too.
“I mean, I recognize it as a bad thing that happened, it’s a bad memory. The things that the Winter Soldier — that I — did, were really bad.”
“Yes, but I don’t want to talk about the things that you did. I want to talk about the things that were done to you.”
He did not want to talk about that.
“I don’t know if I want to talk about that.”
“Well, tough shit Bucky, you’re here for an hour.”
“Have I told you yet that you’re a terrible therapist?”
“Many times. Anyway, let’s get a bit more specific: how does it feel to picture yourself in the chair? The one that Hydra used to wipe your memories?”
He found it funny that she felt the need to clarify. As if there would be any other chair in his life that would be significant enough that he’d need to talk about it in therapy.
Oh god no, not an armchair! His greatest fear! He was basically cowering in the corner. He would be —
“Bucky? Are you listening to me?” She asked again, and he rolled his eyes.
“Yes. I’m thinking.”
“Hopefully all of that thinking is being used to find me an honest answer and not another way to very conspicuously dodge my questions. You’re not going to work towards any lasting healing by lying to me and avoiding ever thinking about it.”
“It’s really optimistic that you think that I never think about it.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I think about it all the time. Every day. Even when I’m actively trying not to, it still sits in the back of my mind, there’s literally no way to avoid it.”
“Which I think is completely understandable, given the scale of what they did to you.”
“And what I did.”
“Sure, yes, what you did. But you need to remember that you didn’t have a choice. It’s less something that you did and more something that you were forced to do.”
“Just because I was brainwashed doesn’t mean that I didn’t do it. Just because I wasn’t in control of myself doesn’t mean that it wasn’t my hands that killed all of those people.”
Fuck, this was making him emotional now. He hated when these appointments made him emotional. He never knew what to do with that; he wasn’t great at having emotions, as a rule. Outside of Wakanda, of course. Something about Wakanda just made everything feel safer. He had half a mind to move there permanently, if he didn’t have other shit he needed to resolve in the rest of the world.
“Can you at least let yourself acknowledge that it wasn’t your fault? That you didn’t have a choice?”
“That feels unfair. That feels like I’m letting myself off too easy.”
“Is there a threshold of suffering you need to reach to feel like you’re worthy of grace, Bucky?”
It honestly would’ve been less of a shock if she’d just punched him in the face.
“Is there a threshold of suffering you need to reach to feel like you’re worthy of grace?”
The question bounced around in his mind, and he wanted to scream that yes, obviously yes there was. The threshold was the amount of suffering that he had inflicted, the threshold was the amount of suffering that he had been expected to endure.
Of course, that was never going to be reached. The bar was always being raised. He would complete a mission successfully, he’d be a perfect soldier, and he would be rewarded with more pain. More missions and more pain. There was never going to be a time when he had suffered enough, because they had made it so he could never view himself as anything more than the pawn they made him into. A puppet with nobody pulling the strings.
“I… I mean…” He started to answer, but he was floundering. He didn’t know what the hell he was supposed to say in response to a question like that. “Obviously I inflicted a lot of suffering, so I feel like —”
“No. I’m sorry to cut you off, but I can’t sit here and allow you to continue with this rhetoric. I need you to acknowledge that you didn’t have a choice in the matter.”
“Obviously I didn’t have a choice. I know that.”
“But do you? Have you really metabolized the emotional implications of that?”
“Don’t condescend to me, obviously I know that I didn’t have a choice. I understand the emotional implications, I’ve been living with them since I escaped Hydra.”
“I know that you understand them. But understanding something and actually letting yourself feel the weight of it are two completely different things.” She leaned a bit farther forward, and he felt like she was about to say something that he was not going to want to hear. “They took the choice from you, Bucky.”
He was right. He did not want to hear that.
He was shocked to feel tears stinging his nose, and it took his brain a second to catch up to his nervous system well enough to process why he was on the verge of crying. Because if they took the choice from him…
“I should’ve had a choice.”
The words tumbled out of his mouth before he could even fully process them, and his therapist sat back in her chair again in approval. But he barely even noticed. Suddenly, the only thing he could picture was his body on the operating table.
“I should’ve had a choice.”
He all but whispered it to himself the second time, and he felt like his heart was going to beat out of his chest.
Obviously he understood that the things that he’d done had been against his will. And he knew that what had happened to him was bad, objectively. But he’d never really considered before the angle that he should have been given an alternative at all. They took that from him, the ability to decide if he wanted to. Instead, he was just expected to follow orders and be okay with it. Even if those orders meant the end of his own life.
“What do you feel, when you picture yourself in that chair, Bucky?” She asked again, voice softer this time. He just shook his head.
“I don’t think…” He trailed off before looking back up at her, eyes glassy. “I need a minute to process, please.”
“That’s fine. Do you want me to step out for a second?”
“No, it’s okay. I’m fine. I just…” God, he really had never been good at having emotions. Especially after seventy years of not being allowed to. He looked at the ground again, taking a few steadying breaths before looking back to her. “I should’ve had a choice, right?”
“Of course you should’ve had a choice. You are a human being, you deserve to have the freedom to make your own decisions, and it’s awful that they took that from you.”
“I… for some reason, I never thought about the fact that they did. I conceptually understood that what I did was against my will, but I never… there was never any other option. I always just agonized over the things I should’ve done differently while I was in there, not…”
“The fact that you never should’ve been put in that situation in the first place?”
“Yeah. That.”
“... Do you want to tell me what you’re feeling right now? Can you put a name to it?”
He hated when she phrased things like that. It made him feel like he was a child. Still, he replied, “I feel like I should be more angry. But… I really just feel sad. I feel really sad for him.”
“For who?”
“For younger me. The version of me that they found out in the snow and chopped up. I just wish —”
“Hold on, pause. You do understand that that was you, right?”
“Obviously. I just… I feel like I have a hard time acknowledging that, you know? Bridging the gap between me during and me now. I can feel unabashedly bad for me when I was young, because I hadn’t actually caused anybody any harm yet, but whenever I think about the things that happened to me, I have a hard time being able to emotionally acknowledge that they happened to me. They make me sad, obviously, but it’s sad in an abstract way.”
“Which is absolutely a coping mechanism; our brains do that when we’re dealing with traumatic events. Distancing yourself from the emotional weight of the experience can be a helpful way to survive something, at the time. But at some point, you have to bring it all back together.”
“And I can’t really figure out how to do that last part.”
“It seemed like you were sufficiently emotional a couple of minutes ago.”
“Yeah, that… that’s the first time that’s happened to me. In a while.”
“Can I just say something honest real quick?”
“As if you ever do anything else.”
“The things that were done to you were bad. I know that in all of the conversations surrounding your time as the Winter Soldier, everybody just wants to talk about the things that you did — and that everybody includes yourself, by the way — but I feel like you need to allow yourself to feel the weight of the fact that the things that happened to you were objectively horrible. And it’s okay to be upset about that. It doesn’t invalidate anybody else’s experiences or emotions for you to allow yourself to be upset about what was done to you.”
He had honestly no idea what to say to that. There were really only a handful of people in his life that made him feel like the things that he’d gone through were actually things that he’d gone through, and over half of them were dead now. So to have somebody say it so plainly…
He really didn’t expect it, this time. He thought he had things under control. He was a man, he was a soldier, he was —
He was sobbing on the couch.
The tears hit him completely out of nowhere, to the point where even his therapist looked a bit taken aback. It was the first time he’d cried in front of her ever. Honestly, probably the first time he’d shown genuine emotion in front of her ever. And it made him feel awful, it made him feel horribly exposed and cold and —
“What are you feeling right now, Bucky?” She asked, and for possibly the first time, he actually knew the answer.
“Vulnerable.”
Every part of him was raw nerve, and he wanted nothing more than to crawl beneath something and hide. To not have to face this in the cold light of day, under the cruel glare of grey and fluorescent lights. To not have to face the fact that he was broken, that maybe it really was that bad and this wasn’t just going to go away if he ignored it for long enough. It was a serious issue that he had no clue how to fix, how to help himself recover from, how to move on without damaging himself even further. This was never supposed to have gotten this complicated, he was never supposed to have made it this far away. They would’ve wiped him by this point, he would never have been able to dwell on feelings like this before. Hell, he would’ve never even been able to have feelings like this before.
“You asked what I feel when I picture myself in their chair?” He asked, shocked that he was even able to talk through his tears.
“Yes, I did.”
“Grief. That’s what I fucking feel. It’s grief,” He spit the words out before he could convince himself to take them back, to remind himself that he had no right to feel like that when he’d caused hundreds of people infinitely worse of the same emotion. For the first time in his life, he felt completely unmoored from the present, but not in a way that dragged him back down into guilt. The scenes playing in his mind weren’t scenes of his victims. They were scenes of himself.
The operating table, the experiments, the cryochamber, the chair. Fear and electricity and pain and cold and pain, over and over and over until he was needed again.
“But I knew him.”
It was the first time in decades that he’d tried to talk back again. That he’d tried to make sense of the fact that he was still a person, still somebody who had feelings and memories and thoughts and dreams and fears. And they’d hurt him for it.
They had always hurt him for it.
“And what are you grieving, when you picture what happened to you?”
“I… there’s nothing I can do. There’s nothing I can do to go back and stop them. There’s nothing I can do to stop this from having happened. There’s nothing…”
This was who he was now. Yes, he could heal, and the emotional impacts could be lessened, but he could never rewrite history. He could never truly erase the past. The Winter Soldier would live in his bones forever, even if it wasn’t actually in his head anymore.
There was nothing that he could do to save himself.
“I wish…”
What did he wish? That none of it had ever happened? Obviously, he’d been wishing that for years. What was different about today?
“There’s a version of myself that was better. There’s a version of myself that none of this ever happened to. I wish I could see what his life is like.”
“That is not uncommon, amongst people who have experienced life-altering traumas like this. But fixating on who you could’ve been if it hadn’t happened isn’t a productive avenue of healing. Like you said, you can’t change the past.”
There was something else nagging at him, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. A weird anxiety coursed through his body the longer that he talked about it, an anxiety different from the kind that typically came with any of his previous attempts to be emotionally vulnerable. An anxiety that only cropped up when he tried to touch on details, when he tried to actually paint a picture of the things that they had done to him.
The anxiety that came with being punished.
There was nobody left to punish him, though, he had to remind himself. He was not there anymore, he did not have to spend every waking day waiting for the other shoe to drop. For either the world to end or his life to end, whichever happened first. He told himself this over and over, and still he couldn’t really make himself believe it. Believe that he wasn’t going to be dragged back to that chair tomorrow, that this temporary reprieve wasn’t all some beautiful and horribly strange dream. Because they would find him eventually. His work was never done, they would find him again and he would have to go right back to the way things were before. In twenty years this would all seem like something he imagined in a fit of desperation, just like that night in Austria when Steve rescued him. He was only allowed happiness for so long.
“Is it over?” He asked her, not recognizing his voice when it left his mouth. His tone was desperate in a way he’d never heard it before. “It’s over, isn’t it? It’s really over? I’m actually free?”
Her expression softened, and she nodded. “Yes. It’s over. You’re free.”
“I don’t have to go back. Right? They can’t make me, not again. I don’t have to go back.”
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, anymore.”
The words hit his ears, but he found himself unable to believe them. Memories of the first time he was promised freedom raced through his mind, and he longed for the certainty in Okoye’s voice. But he knew that no matter how many times somebody told him, this was something he was going to have to internalize for himself. He wasn't sure if he'd ever truly be able to believe that the life he'd built for himself was something he was allowed to have.
It was really over.
He was free.
And he never had to go back.