idk if this is suitable for the 'fanfic director's cut' ask meme, but i read Many chapters of the buckyfic over the weekend and I keep thinking about how you wrote post-hydra!Bucky's concept of his relationship to pre-hydra!bucky - that the old Bucky died and he 'inherited' the body. I'm highkey chewing drywall about this, it makes so much sense for him emotionally and it's so narratively juicy, do you wanna talk some more about your thought process behind that? :-)
Yeah so this is something I can't fully take credit for because it is a common theme to explore in Bucky fic, the concept that Bucky died and was replaced by the Soldier or whoever Bucky is now.
There are several Bucky fics that explore him as having DID, but even fics that don't explicitly name dissociative identity disorder tend to portray Bucky as at least a little bit plural.
Some Bucky fics use the idea that the Winter Soldier is a new and completely different person than Bucky was. It is very common for him to go by a new name. It is interesting because a lot of these fics were written in the time of 2014-2016 and fic writers were digging very deeply and thinking very hard about how 70 years of torture and brainwashing would affect a person, and essentially a lot of them concluded that Bucky was not going to be Bucky in the way Steve knew him ever again and that a major source of conflict would be Steve's difficulty accepting that.
Meanwhile, the MCU didn't seem to think it was important to deal with it at all. :|
Fanfic writers have been cooking with the themes of Bucky's personhood and identity for over a decade. I owe a lot of my portrayal to what's already been explored.
I knew that in i am an exit, I wanted to portray this devastating severing and fragmentation of identity-- I had read multiple fics where Bucky got his memories back and was basically the same guy, and some of them were good but I didn't really care for it personally.
What really compelled me was stories where Bucky had all these impulses and fragments of memory but he didn't know where they came from or what they meant, where there was a real sense that he wasn't ever going to be Bucky again, where the Soldier felt like he was piloting around Bucky's undead corpse or even felt like he was Bucky's murderer. I love characters who are undead in a literal or metaphorical sense. I love it when characters die and Come Back Wrong. And I loved Bucky's undeadness, and his plurality, and the ways he felt like he was no longer human, in these stories: the ways he was a machine, a creature, a corpse, a weapon, a thing.
I'm going to share some passages from i am an exit that portray what i wanted to do with him.
This is from chapter 14, part of a scene where Bucky/the Soldier is bathing himself:
It was another man’s body, the body of a man who had died many years ago, who had lived a very different life, and yet the other man’s body was also his own. A strange echo drifted through his head, something he had heard before: This is my body. This is my blood.
He lowered himself into the bath, feeling pleasure at the warmth enveloping him, and sudsed up a washcloth. He was thoughtfully aware this time of how it felt to wash himself. He was more careful, more thorough, and more capable of contemplating the touch, perhaps because he knew now that he was caring for another man’s body. He cleansed the body of James Buchanan Barnes, as though preparing him for burial.
As he scrubbed his thighs, the backs of his knees, his calves, and the arches of his feet, he thought of how they had carried Bucky through his short, young life. Had his feet often been sore? Had his toes been warmed by a crackling fire, or numbed by bitter cold? Had he felt the dull, bruising pain of kneeling on a hard floor? Had his palm slapped against his thigh as he laughed at a joke?
As he washed his belly, soft and reactive to touch, the tender valley of his pelvic area between the still-prominent hipbones, his chest fortified by the ribcage, he thought of who Bucky had embraced. Had he held other bodies? Had he pressed against someone else as he slowly swayed in a dance? He felt a pang of something sharp and salty, and stirred the images into dissolution.
I. I still remember getting mule-kicked by the line "He cleansed the body of James Buchanan Barnes, as though preparing him for burial."
I love this scene because he's been so dissociated because of his abuse that this is the first time he can carefully explore awareness of his body, by thinking of it as belonging to someone else. And he's trying to understand this body's past and the things it felt and experienced. The present Bucky, the Asset, has felt so much pain. Yet he tries to imagine if the old Bucky might have felt warmth, mirth, closeness to other people. There is tenderness there, and mourning.
This is a longer section from Chapter 17, where Bucky/The Asset is reflecting on his experiences with touch:
For the other Bucky, touch had been abundant, relatively. His body had protected the smaller Steve, wrapped generously around him to warm his fragile frame. Men had pounded him on the back and pulled him into embraces. He remembered these things, but he could not feel them embedded, the way he could the things that came later.
Later, the hands that touched him were gloved, guiding sharp metal points and cold probes against him and inside him. Each of his owners had delved into his biology, seeking to understand the source of his strength and implacable survival. The evaporative cooling of skin swabbed with alcohol. The searing puncture of biopsy needles. Restraints clamping down on his limbs. On the medical examination table, he was an assemblage of parts that functioned together. Immobilized by his heavy restraints and by paralytic drugs, he had no possibility of reacting to or influencing what would be done to his body.
Each procedure was a new horror that he could not have imagined prior. Each new horror had a single narrow white hallway through it, the unstoppable necessity of experiencing it. The gloved hands and sharp instruments found secret places inside him that he didn’t know could feel until they were invaded. Their pressing and probing showed him every gland, vessel, membrane, and tissue, left him remembering their unfamiliar names.
It had been systematic and utterly unmerciful: his body was examined, touched, and known in its totality.
The inhabitant had been James Buchanan Barnes back then. So young, his body so sensitive and naïve to desecration, still clothed in pretensions of dignity. He had been embarrassed by the thin gown, cracking unsteady jokes; he had squeaked in indignation when they’d lifted the hem to catheterize him; he’d cringed at the prick of the needle that delivered intravenous medication; he’d stared in incomprehension when informed that a drug would be administered via rectal suppository (“up my ass?” he’d bleated), as though unable to believe that such an awkward and humiliating thing could happen to him.
And, oh, how he’d wept over the amputation of the useless, necrotizing limb, hiccupping and hoarse, almost unbelieving, like a beaten child who had never been struck hard enough before to hurt—completely new to the experience of losing a part of himself.
The asset felt a vague sense of pity toward that person, that Bucky Barnes, that fiction of a border drawn around a man that separated him from what he was unwilling to endure and become.
Much more, the asset wanted to kill that person, as painfully as he could, hold him underwater until he drowned.
Here, Bucky feels intense hatred and contempt for the the humanity and vulnerability of his past self. He remembers the old Bucky's reactions of indignation and humiliation at the dehumanizing, clinical way his body was treated, how he felt back when these experiences were new, and he remembers his intense grief over losing his arm.
Present day Bucky thinks of his old self as childlike and naive as he tried to hold onto his humanity. He is looking back bitterly on a time when he behaved as though he could stop his body and mind from being completely taken from him.
The fact that he wants to kill his old self, implies that his old self isn't dead. Bucky's violent feelings come from the fact that part of him still feels the pain that his old self felt.
Here's a passage from chapter 23 where Bucky is grappling with his "selves."
The other Bucky was a charmer, a gentleman, a pretty boy that the ladies all fawned and fought over. He was brave, spirited, laughing in the face of danger, a skilled and honorable warrior who didn’t hesitate to answer the call to fight and die for his country. He warmed Steve’s frail body, massaged his aching limbs, cleaned up his vomit, earned enough money for the two of them to survive. Everything was easy on the other Bucky’s back, like the falling of dappled light; the gold of his heart had the weight of a dandelion’s down.
He imagined a second ghost in the room with them, the other one. The one with the empty eyes, the body clad in black leather and tough nylon and kevlar, the long and wild hair. The mechanical fist that tore apart bodies like they were cobwebs coated in dust, the black mask that sealed over the face. The Asset stood, motionless, placid, mute.
The Asset was a void, an extinction, an antithesis, an exit, an amputation: a door that was entered in only one direction, an irreversible thing. It was capable of feeling, but its pain and its fear were like light that entered a black hole. It was Death, the Fist of Hydra, their Grim Reaper, and it was a bottomless pit that accepted the offal of its owners’ lust, anger, and boredom; a thing that could be filled up by the most repulsive of human urges and would swallow it all silently, never spitting it back out, never making a sound. The Asset’s strength, its ability to endure, its ability to suffer, were infinite.
And the other ghost, the boy, his eyes sparkling with laughter? What was inside him? Joy suited his features just like the golden hour of evening and the color navy blue, but inside the body, how did the joy feel?
One of the commonalities between these three passages is the relationship the "selves" have to bodily experience. Current!Bucky can't remember how it felt to be pre-war Bucky.
Whereas Asset!Bucky's experiences are viscerally embedded into the body.
He assumes that pre-war Bucky experienced joy, tenderness, camaraderie, but he doesn't remember that the way he remembers torture. He struggles to imagine what must have gone on inside the Other Bucky, the one that seemed so brave and full of laughter and strength.
this passage is alllll the way back in chapter 5:
The stomach hurt, but it needed to think. There was something very important. It had been allied with the Captain for some time, so the Captain must, at some time, have been part of Hydra.
But that wasn’t right.
It dug into the deepest shafts of the memory, breathed the dust, immersed in the suffocating blackdamp of the wrinkles of the brain. There was a memory of being born, being forged, the nerves clean with lightning. Pain was its first memory, the first star to light its world.
Below, it felt an intimation of something, geological in its massiveness, something the body knew. Deeper strata, silent and without light.
the it/its pronouns are for Bucky--when Bucky was the Asset, he ws referred to exclusively as "it" and Bucky reverts to thinking of himself as "it" when he is dissociating.
I can't take credit for using it/its pronouns for the Winter Soldier because that is basically standard for Bucky fic, but mine is the only fic I know of where Bucky spends a lot of the story switching back and forth between pronouns depending on his level of dissociation.
furthermore, at this point Bucky doesn't use possessive pronouns referring to his body because he has been conditioned to believe that it is not "his" body--that his body does not belong to him. So it is always THE body (THE brain, THE stomach) rather than "his" or "its" body. ( I credit @possumwoodpie's fantastic fic "As Sharp as Satin" for this linguistic trick.)
Pronouns are incredibly meaningful throughout this entire fic. There are many later scenes where Bucky switches back and forth between saying "I/me" and "he/him" referring to himself at different points in the past.
Lots of Bucky fics do crazy things with pronouns to explore different aspects of Bucky's mental state, I'm just building upon what others have built.
Anyway, pronouns tangent aside: at this point Bucky doesn't really have memories of his past, but he has this unplaceable sense that he HAS a past. the geology metaphors are because this passage is discussing the Appalachian landscape in relation with Bucky's memory-- the mine shafts and geologic strata as things that contain memory and conceal it, secrets and silenced violence.
the line "pain was its first memory, the first star to light its world" is devastating because he doesn't remember anything outside of being hurt. but as you can probably guess "being forged, the nerves clean with lightning" is a reference to the Chair which erased his memory
I could go on and on with Bucky's relationship to his body and personhood and how he puts the pieces together. It's endlessly fascinating to me.
