What Is Bucky's Post-Recovery Nature?

["winter soldier!!"

by yuspart]

[the following text and art

are by t00thpasteface,

excerpted from a larger post]

when it comes to bucky specifically… idk. i have a hard time buying that he could come out of 70 years of being the perfect assassin and then never hurt a fly once he’s been liberated. i want him angry, i want him aggressively maladjusted. i want him struggling with violent tendencies because of how tightly those synapses got wired together. he was a very driven, confident, and brave person before all that happened— in multiple iterations of the character— and i want that solid core of bullheaded determination (no doubt the reasons steve likes him so much) to persist through and beyond his time in hydra.

and speaking of steve, i have trouble believing that steve “i won’t stop until everyone in hydra is dead or captured” rogers would encourage bucky to deal with the anger and shame by just sitting around drinking tea and watching cartoons all day. steve’s entire raison d'etre is to make heartless motherfuckers pay for what they did, and i really can’t see him telling bucky to wait in the car. bucky doesn’t chicken out, period. that’s the whole reason he got in this mess. if bucky was the type of person to say “this is a little too intense for me, i think i need to sit this one out,” he wouldn’t have any kind of dramatic presumed-death scene like he did. he’d have been back at base camp drinking martinis instead of going out in a blaze of glory.

i want bucky to really, really struggle with those urges and habits that were seared into his brain by hydra. i want him to be channeling it into quests of vengeance because the only other option is to take it out on the people he cares about, because there’s just no other catharsis for him but violence. he’s deeply angry at what was done to him, and he doesn’t know what else to do but find someone to punish in turn. i want there to be parts of his brain that just don’t light up anymore unless he’s hurting somebody. and i don’t want it to be easy for steve to still love him. i want it to be a difficult and potentially lifethreatening decision that steve chooses to make, over and over again, because that’s his best friend no matter what.

if bucky has his moments of peace and calm, i want them tainted with the tension and dread that it could be ruined at any time because of who he is as a person.