#i shall upload the others tomorrow. so as to not. spam. lol

[astxrwar]

blunt force trauma [2/x]

SYNOPSIS: traumatized!Bucky x Brainwashed!supersoldier!reader.

Rating: M

Word Count: 5k

Content Warnings: Canon-typical violence. Check out the tag "fic; blunt force trauma" for Content + ao3 chapter notes for extras if you're interested. <3

Read on AO3

[1] [ 2 ] [3]

It’s the first thing he realizes when he wakes up the next morning; he’s going to have to fix that giant fuck-off hole in the wall.

Bucky only remembers after he’d gone through the convoluted and absolutely unnecessary process of the Home Depot self-checkout— gloves don’t work on the stupid fucking touchscreens they have now, and neither do half of his fingers, which is just such bullshit, god, everything was easier when you could just hand some guy actual money and be done with it— that the government tracks his purchases. The military, technically. Parole condition, again, since they’re paying his rent and also all of his bills, and because, he suspects, him having an actual job would limit the amount of time he’s available as a state-sponsored superweapon of last resort. 

“What’d you get at the hardware store?”

Doc’s tone is light, nonchalant, and painfully fucking contrived. A nail gun, he thinks about saying, and some rope, and duct tape, and, oh— a band saw. Whatever he can think of that sounds the most like he might be planning to commit murder; just to be an asshole. But she already knows exactly what he bought, courtesy of the modern-day surveillance state dystopia that already pretty much existed even with that HYDRA mission falling flat. 

What he bought was a seven-foot oak two-by-four, a C-clamp, wood glue, and twelve 3” galvanized screws.

Nothing villainous, nothing remotely illegal , or whatever the hell these people think. That support in the wall is fucked, but he’d done some amount of woodworking, just as an odd summer job way back when he was fifteen or so, and he knows enough, he thinks, to be able to fix it on his own. Even if he doesn’t, tough shit, he can figure it out— he’s not going to explain to his fucking super why there’s a massive hole in the drywall and the beam’s been split nearly in half. No bullshit excuse he could come up with for any of that even came close to sounding like it’d be believable, and, besides, he kind of likes having something to do. Progress that’s visible. A goal that’s concrete. 

“The TV stand,” he lies. “It— broke.” He’d worked out the details while he was on the subway headed here, decided on exactly when to pause and hesitate like he’s admitting to something, the points where he’d inject some moments of performative vulnerability into it, not too much, just enough, he hopes, to get everyone off his fucking back. 

Doc’s eyebrows raise briefly. She taps her pen against the pad. “Broke how, James,” she prods, on fucking cue.

He hesitates, on purpose, and looks away from her, also on purpose, and then says, pointedly monotone, “I had a nightmare.” 

She leans forwards, just a little bit— she’s probably not even aware of the fact that she had, the way most people tend to be oblivious to their tells— and he knows she’s interested. Thinks this is something. “Walk me through how those are connected.”

The implication is pretty fucking clear, because she already knows he sleeps on the floor in the living room more often than in his own bed, and she knows that he has a temper, a violent one, one that he controls with precision except in circumstances where he doesn’t have to. Like when he’s alone. But she wants to hear him say it; so many appointments end up like this, the both of them already knowing whatever unspoken thing that’s been brought up, and her just— obsessed with the actual speaking. It’s annoying, but at least it’s fucking predictable. “I had a nightmare,” he repeats, not even having to fake the irritation, “And I was in the living room, and I woke up, and I was— in a bad mood. So I broke it.”

She writes something down on the notepad and he has to restrain the urge to roll his eyes. This is not the first time he’s talked about breaking shit when he’s angry. There is fucking– nothing new here. 

“So you’re planning on fixing it, then?” She says when she’s done, studying him. 

He grits his teeth. Again with the fucking obsession with stating the obvious. “It’s new. I don’t want to just— throw it out.”

She stares at him for a moment longer, her expression too relaxed to be vetting the merit of what he’s said; more like she’s contemplating it. Eventually she blinks and shifts in her chair, crossing one leg over another and sets the pad and the pen on the edge of her desk, seemingly satisfied. “That sounds like quite the project,” she remarks, in that tone he can never quite place, whether it’s approving or patronizing or something else altogether. “I think this has the real potential to be a valuable lesson for you, James. Fixing something you've broken instead of discarding it– it can be a therapeutic experience. It might help you work through some of the guilt you’re feeling.”

He doesn’t bother to stop himself from gritting his teeth at that; it would have annoyed him even if he hadn’t been lying.

~

Bucky fixes the beam, hammers the splintered wood back into a vaguely-straight line and seals the cracks with wood glue and attaches the new two-by-four to it with the galvanized screws; it’s called sistering, what he does, and the last time he’d done this shit was something like 1934. It’s what you do when the alternative would be jacking up the wall and tearing down the entire thing, which would be a massive fucking pain and require more tools and more expertise than he has.

He doesn’t see her again between then and his next appointment.

Doc grills him about his ‘project’ the next time he sees her and he says some stupid shit like yeah, it’s going fine, I feel better, I guess, about not throwing it out. And I was thinking I kinda don’t want to break it again, ‘cause I put a lot of work into fixing it. 

Doc looks satisfied with that. It’s not entirely a lie; he knows, now, what this kid is capable of. Next time he really will be more careful.

He makes sure, when he gets around to buying the spackle and the mesh and the paint to patch the drywall, that he pays in cash.

~

The second time she’s a whole lot more sneaky about the breaking-and-entering. 

Bucky wonders, briefly, if this is how it felt for his targets to come home and see him there, straight-backed and still like a statue, just– waiting. Not blinking, hardly even breathing, motionless and so utterly detached that it was hard to tell if he’d been there for hours, or if it had only been minutes. 

This time, he knows better than to try to get close. 

He’d been at the package store, picked up a case of beer, but she’s in the kitchen again and between him and the fridge, so he decides to just set it down by the door. He makes his way into the living room empty-handed, arms raised like last time. He doesn’t go further than the single armchair about halfway, just kind of rotates it around so it’s facing the kitchen, and sits in it. Focuses real hard on looking– safe. Nonthreatening. Whatever the fuck that even means.

“Sorry,” she says, after a while, the word kind of– slurred, like her tongue isn’t moving right in her mouth, thick and clumsy and unused to the dexterity speaking requires. “About your– wall. I didn’t– I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” he says, after a while. “I fixed it.”

She stares at him, for a long time, not even blinking. He stares back, unfazed.

All of this feels like the weirdest kind of deja vu– like how sometimes in his nightmares he watches himself, in the third person, like he’s an observer in his own memories, or sometimes even from the eyes of victims or bystanders, even though that’s impossible and doesn’t really make sense. That’s what it feels like, now, kind of, except where the nightmares feel visceral and frightening and have him jolting awake drenched in sweat and violently sick, right now he’s– fine.

It’s one of those nightmares, except all of the pieces are cut up and rearranged and the details are all disorganized, like somebody’s telling a story all out of order. Like the cinema, back when he was a kid; he had had this friend before he’d dropped out of high school who worked in the back room at the theater, and he’d gotten to watch, one time, and see how the movies that look like they play out as one cohesive and unbroken event when you’re sitting in the audience are really just a whole bunch of smaller reels, switched out between two different projectors to give the illusion of continuity. Right now, if this were a movie, all of those reels would be all jumbled up, and whoever’s running the show keeps forgetting how to time the switch between the projectors right; things keep overlapping, getting lost. Remixed.

“You want to maybe tell me what’s going on?” he says eventually.

“I–” She finally blinks, then, and tears her eyes away, looks somewhere over his shoulder, glassy and sightless. “I don’t– I don’t know.”

“Okay,” Bucky shifts on the chair as he watches her, leaning back, resting his elbows on the arms, trying to appear casual, relaxed, which is– not how he feels. He’s not stressed out, really, but that same thing is going on with his awareness, like the last time; everything is sharp and bright and detailed, and he’s here, he’s present, he’s not caught up in his own thoughts or in his memories or in the past, separated from everything else in his head like he’s cordoned off from it all by this thick pane of glass. “Okay, well, what do you know?”

Here is what he knows: when he’d gone back through the memory, some of the patterns she’d used when they’d fought were HYDRA, but a lot of them weren’t. He thinks she’s probably been brainwashed, but it’s hard to tell to what extent, and even harder to tell why. She knows him, and he’d bet that’s why she keeps coming back here.

She doesn’t answer the question. She still hasn’t moved, not even to shift her weight, like she can’t feel the way her body must be getting sore from standing in the same place for a while. Normal people, they fidget a fucking lot. Bucky’s not as bad as he used to be, so he moves, now, occasionally, aware of his muscles complaining if he’s stayed still for too long, but it’s infrequent enough to make people uncomfortable. 

He figures it probably doesn’t make her uncomfortable. He figures even if it did, deep down– she probably wouldn’t even know.

“You know me,” he presses, after the silence has drawn out for a long time. “You knew my name.”

She looks back at him again. Even the way her eyes move is strange, unnatural, too sharp and too sudden and too intent. People don’t realize this, either, but when they look at stuff, they never really look at it; the eyes move, back and forth, just a little bit. Compensating for the fact that the human field of vision is actually pretty narrow, filling in the bits in the periphery. When she looks at things, there’s no movement. Just this unwavering precision. That happens to him sometimes, still. 

“Do you know your name?” he asks her, and she flinches. 

That thing that he’d seen the last time, like a spark, or a glint, or something, when she’d been about to do some serious damage to herself in order to escape and he’d let her go, when she’d recognized that– it’s back. 

Absently, Bucky thinks about Romania. This apartment is way fucking nicer than the one he’d had then; a one-bedroom, new, light fixtures that all work and really great water pressure and a kitchen that’d been remodeled just last year. In Bucharest, he’d lived in a studio, with windows that didn’t latch and leaked when it rained and hot water only sometimes. 

“How about you just tell me your name,” he says, more firmly than the first time. “You know it, it’s always the first thing to come back.”

That’s not really true. The first things are feelings, but they’re fleeting and sometimes wrong. A name is a concrete thing. It’s a fact. You can write it down and you can say it aloud and you can hold onto it.

She jerks back like he’d slapped her. “How do you know that,” she replies, still flat, but wavering a little; so little that if he didn’t know , he probably wouldn’t notice.

James Buchanan Barnes. He’d carved it with a pocket-knife into the floorboards of that studio apartment, above where he’d hidden his go-bag underneath, in the spots where water damage had rotted it, made the wood soft, like carving into skin. It was insurance. To make sure he couldn’t forget. He’d stare at it, when his nightmares would keep him awake, and the letters would float out of focus and distort and stop making sense, like when you say the same word over and over, until it means nothing.

Eventually, there were other things, too. 

Your mother’s name was Sarah. You used to wear newspapers in your shoes. 

“Don’t ask stupid questions,” Bucky says. “Tell me your name.”

That spark in her eyes is bigger, flickering, like watching a candle in a windowsill. “I– I don’t–”

“You can tell me,” he repeats, louder, “You know it. You’ve said it, haven’t you? Out loud, to yourself, and I bet you’ve written it down somewhere, you know it, I know you do–”

His voice rises in volume and lowers in pitch without him meaning for it to, and something inside of her flips like a switch, that candle stops being a candle and it flashes bright and wild like a molotov cocktail or a fucking car bomb, like flames licking up the side of a building, the veneer of neutrality cracked open and something vicious and violent and vulnerable underneath and whatever of that is still left inside of him rears up to press at the surface of his skin and he thinks yes, come on, just fucking say it–

Her eyes flash and harden and her mouth presses into this trembling line and she turns and disappears down the hallway.

“Oh– god damn it,” Bucky says, the tension he hadn’t even registered collecting in his body giving out, his back slumping into the chair cushions. 

He sits there for a long time before he finally gets up and goes down the hall to his bedroom, where he stares at the open window, and then pulls it shut.

~

Bucky sleeps in his bed, that night, and not in the living room. He doesn’t have nightmares, and he doesn’t even really wake up on the hour like he’d expected to. Instead, he dreams. In his dream, he comes home to a darkened apartment, case of beer in hand, and he walks the length of the living room and he opens the fridge and sets it inside. When he closes the door, she’s standing behind it, and dream-him jerks like he’s been startled, though he doesn’t feel any actual fear.

She has a gun to his head. She’d been in civilian clothes both times he’d seen her, but in his dream she’s wearing black. Body armor.

“Sorry,” she tells him. Like she’s talking about the hole in the wall.

Her finger tightens around the trigger.

He closes his eyes.

Bucky wakes up before it goes off. His bedroom is flooded with morning light and his heart is beating slow and steady and he feels, strangely, fine. 

~

Doc stops halfway through a back-and-forth about whether or not he’d consider actually picking up woodworking as a hobby– you need hobbies, James, it’s part of being a well-adjusted human being, to which he’d flashed a not-smile and said back, I thought the reason I come here twice a month is because I’m not one, Doc.

She’d looked at him like a parent looks at a child who’s being snarky on purpose, which– fuck that, honestly. He’d been alive probably before her parents were even born.

And then she’d just leaned towards him and tapped her pen against her notebook and stared, the way normal people stare, her eyes fidgeting back and forth, not staying anywhere for long, flicking over his expression and his posture and the way that he’s holding himself in the too-small annoyingly-uncomfortable chair–

“You’re in a good mood,” she says, and then, as an afterthought. “Relatively speaking.”

Bucky scowls at her. “I'm not in a– good mood,” he says. 

She raises an eyebrow at him like she thinks he’s full of shit. “I’d like to discuss it. Your mood. Good or otherwise.”

The scowl deepens. It’s real fucking aggravating, the way that she always prefaces shit with I’d like to and let’s try and if you would as if he has any choice in the matter. As if this isn’t a session he’s forced into attending because the alternative is– many years in prison. Many. So many.

He closes his eyes for a second. He has a headache starting; he always gets fucking headaches, here. “It’s nothing, I don’t know,” he says. She stares some more, the way she does when she’s not going to say shit, the threat of talk or I’m court-ordering you back to sessions more frequently than either of us want to be seeing each other lingering unspoken in the deeply annoying silence.

Bucky makes some vague frustrated noise and then does what he usually does when she gets like this; racks his brain and makes something up. 

“I met someone,” he says finally, which is true. “They’re a veteran,” which is also true. Kind of. “I’ve seen them a lot,” not really, three times isn’t that much, but the context kind of makes it feel like it is. “And I guess I’ve just been thinking about them. We’ve started– talking. Kind of. Not really friends, but– acquaintances. We have–” he shifts on his chair, crosses an ankle over his knee, thinks, again, about how the government could buy furniture that doesn’t suck. “We have a lot in common.”

Doc blinks at him; she’d sat forwards, the way she does when she’s pressing him, and she leans back, now, which he’s sure makes him palpably relax. “A veteran,” she repeats, pensive, “World War 2?”

He scoffs. “No.” 

“Korea?”

“No.” 

She gives him this look, which he figures is something along the lines of would it kill you to just answer the obvious question here?

Bucky sighs, long-suffering. “Recent. I don’t– it hasn’t come up, but they’re pretty young, so.”

Doc makes some approving sound and nods and writes something in her notebook. He hates that fucking notebook. Sometimes he thinks about breaking into the office and setting it on fire, but the risk-to-reward ratio, he figures, just isn’t worth it. He’d probably go to prison. Or worse, he’d be sent all the way back to visits twice a week. 

“If they’re around your age–” he opens his mouth to say something technically probably obnoxious, but she shoots him a sharp look and says, “Your physical age, James,” before he can– “--it’s likely to have been Iraq or Afghanistan.”

She glances up and to the left of him– the clock. Great; they have to be almost done. “Both of those wars were– complex. Most of my clients served in one or the other,” she says. “Quite a large number of soldiers who were simply following orders found themselves responsible for the deaths of innocents; I’m not surprised you have things in common. I think it would be beneficial for you to make friends you can relate to.”

What he thinks: 

I don’t have anything in common with people who chose to follow orders. People who chose to do-- anything.

What he says, instead; “What, you want me to make friends with them?”

She sets the pad and the pen down on the table beside her chair. “This is one of those things that’s more about what you want, James,” she says eventually.

“I don’t know what I want,” he replies.

~

It’s been a week, since he saw her; she’s not there, when Bucky steps into his apartment after taking the subway back from therapy. He wonders for a second if he’d fucked up the last time, scared her off, but he knows, objectively, it’s too early to consider the possibility. Not like he could do anything about it, anyway; he doesn’t have the connections to be able to figure out who she is without a name.

That night he has the dream again. The apartment, darkened and silent. The bright, washed-out white of the open fridge, setting the case of beer on the second shelf, the inside otherwise empty. Spotless. Like a prop. Dreams are weird.

He knows what’s going to happen when he closes the door, this time. For a second it looks like there’s something red on her arm, at the shoulder, but when he looks harder for it there’s nothing, just unbroken black.

“Sorry,” she tells him, again, only this time she keeps going. “I have to. I don’t have a choice.”

“It’s okay,” he says; this is new, too. “I know. It’s going to be okay.”

Her finger tightens around the trigger in slow-motion, and he doesn't close his eyes, this time.

Bucky still wakes up before the gun actually goes off, and he still wakes up feeling weirdly calm. He prefers this, he decides, over the dreams about killing people. Dreaming of being killed– that’s fine. Better, actually.

He sits up and he swings his legs over the side of the bed– he’d been taking advantage of the lack of nightmares and the suspicious ease with which he’s been sleeping, lately, because he’s kind of getting old and his body has started to hate him whenever he doesn’t sleep on an actual mattress– and when he stretches his back doesn’t ache or twinge or crack the way it does when he sleeps on the floor.

He yawns. He rubs at his eyes until splotches of color burst behind his eyelids, and then he opens them, and he waits for his vision to unblur, and–

He zeroes in on something moving on the windowsill with an instinctive and familiar efficiency.

It’s a slip of paper, folded up and trapped between the glass and the mesh screen, fluttering gently with the breeze. It’s from a notebook, ripped out, the kind that comes from one of those slender, flimsy little pocket-sized spiral ones you can get at the dollar store, the pages inside so thin they might as well be tissue paper.

On it, scrawled in shaky, uneven handwriting, is a name.

~

He has the dream a bunch more times after that, and it's mostly the same, and then it isn't.

Stepping through the door to his apartment, stepping into an open mouth; the lights are on, this time, but somehow the room is still dark, just these glittering shards of white on the ceiling that look like sharp, gleaming teeth. He can’t see her as he rounds the counter to the fridge, and though he tries to turn his head and look, the dream body won’t obey. Just opens the door, puts the beer inside– there’s stuff in the fridge, just splotches of color that could be anything– and then closes it again.

Gun to his head. The muzzle is touching his skin, this time, which is weird, and also stupid. You don’t touch people with the gun you’re pointing at them; that’s a really good way to get it taken from you. But it’s a dream, and even though he tries to turn and disarm her, his body stays still.

“Sorry,” she says, “I have to. I don’t have a choice.”

It’s okay. I know. It’s going to be okay. He’s had this dream a lot of times, now, and so he expects–

He says the name from the notebook paper. Her name. She’d given it to him, she’d wanted him to have it. 

Her finger tightens around the trigger all at once, and he doesn't wake up, this time, but the gun doesn’t go off, either. 

It clicks. Jammed. She opens her hand, and it drops, and then it disappears instead of hitting the floor, because– dreams.

“What do I do now,” she says. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

"It's okay,” he hears himself reply. "Just-- let me help you."