Doll through War ✷ Bucky Barnes

Chapter Six)

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𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗽𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗦𝗶𝘅
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Bucky's POV,
Six weeks later...

Whenever he was unfrozen from the cryo-freeze chamber by his superiors to go on a mission involving the assassination of an individual or the extraction of valuable goods for HYDRA's cause, James was tossed into a moldy shower stall with a bar of scented soap to clean himself and cold water to rinse his body. They never gave him long, only a few minutes to sufficiently keep up his hygiene, and then they would remove him to dry off and change into his bulletproof black tactical outfit.

Then they would drag him, shivering from the cold, down a wide damp concrete corridor past sentinels and throw him into the worn chair of that torturous memory-suppressing machine. A mouthguard was stuffed in his mouth to prevent him from chewing through his own tongue when the crackling electric shocks fried his brain into forgetting James Barnes.

It was a blurry memory but he remembered the first time they exposed him to the machine and the pain was so horrific that his top teeth began to sink into the muscular flesh of his tongue. They had needed to give him sutures for how deep his teeth sunk in. The mouthguard had come after that occurrence.

The only evidence that he had almost chewed right through his own tongue was a lone faint scar.

How could a soldier be obedient without a tongue? No, HYDRA needed their super soldier assassin to speak when spoken to and give verbal mission reports when commanded to by his cruel superiors.

Then came those ten words in Russian to trigger the impassive and unmerciful Winter Soldier. The soldier the glorious Soviet Union and HYDRA praised and secretly celebrated in their meetings with corrupt politicians and government officials.

Oh, how he wanted to burn that crimson-scratched leather-bound book with the black star on the front cover containing words related to his past and life.

He feared even thinking of those words, scared he would bring out that murderous pitiless monster. It got so bad he began to overthink and lose sleep.

So when Dolly allowed him to stay and basically become her roommate in her apartment, he took his first long shower in years. When he first turned it on, a spray of cold water showered down on him, making him flinch aggressively at the coldness that reminded him of the ice and frost spreading over his body just before freezing in the cryo-freeze chamber. Eventually, the water went pleasantly hot and made his skin go pink from the heat. He stayed in there until the steam flooded the bathroom and fogged up the mirror above the sink like he was in a sauna.

When he tugged the unusually patterned shower curtain aside and stepped out, he gently patted his skin and hair dry with a cotton white towel. James wrapped the towel around his hips, tucking it in securely. He ambled up to the sink and placed his palm on the square mirror, wiping the steam away with a single squeaky swipe of his calloused hand.