lednikovyy | app for el nysa

OOC

Handle: Lauren
Contact: blauren on plurk or PM
Over 18? yes
Characters Played: n/a

THE CHARACTER

Character Name: Bucky Barnes
Series: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Canon Point: The end of CW, right before he and Steve fight Tony
Character Age: ~100
Background: wiki

Personality: (TW: brainwashing, dehumanization)
After his apparent death during World War 2, Bucky spends decades brainwashed and being used as a tool by HYDRA who wiped his memories on a regular basis. As a result, a lot of his memories from both before and during his time with them are missing or incomplete and his personality is informed both by the person he once was and what he's been through at the hands of the people who did that to him.

Loyalty is a big factor for Bucky, especially with his best friend, Steve. As a kid, he'd been best friends with the scrawny kid who couldn't keep his mouth shut and Bucky had followed Steve into fights of his own creation without a second thought. That loyalty follows them into adulthood, through back alley fights and even to war. When Bucky is captured and experimented on while serving in the US Army in World War 2, he agrees to follow Steve back into the war instead of going home after he's rescued. Even during the rescue, he has an opportunity to get out alone, but refuses to leave without Steve, knowing that his refusal to leave Steve behind could lead to his own recapture or death. He shows this loyalty to Steve again and again, following him into dangerous situations until it leads to his apparent death during a mission. Even his "death" is a direct result of Bucky picking up Steve's shield and trying to defend Steve from gunfire that knocks Bucky back and leads to him falling from a train.

Bucky is a huge flirt. He loves women. Dating is a priority for him. It's less of a priority for Steve, but Bucky still works to find him a date so they can spent his last night in Brooklyn together before Bucky ships out. After Steve leaves them, Bucky goes dancing with both women by himself. His flirting and how attractive he is to women is a huge point of pride for him to the extent that when he hits on Peggy, her rejection hits his ego enough for him to comment on it. He take it as a given that she'll be just as attracted to him as the other women he's known and the refusal surprises him, though it doesn't stung so much that he can't make a joke about it.

There is a sense of honor, duty and selflessness that resonates with Bucky before and during the war. Steve is louder about it, speaking about the importance of joining the war effort, but Bucky believes in it, too. He enlists, even when Steve is denied, and he fights hard once he gets overseas, because he sees stopping the Nazis as a fight worth fighting. Even when he's captured and experimented on, he repeats his identification numbers rather than allow himself to give away information to the enemy. He doesn't even known if anyone will come for him and if Steve hadn't disobeyed orders, no one would have. Decades later, when he's free of his brainwashing and on the run as a fugitive, he fights with Steve again and risks himself and his freedom to take care of a serious risk to world security rather than trying to go back into hiding, showing that that sense of duty is still there in him.

Under the grip of HYDRA, Bucky becomes the Winter Soldier. He's a killing machine, clean and efficient and brutal in ways that no fully human person can be. He has goals and missions and shows no emotion for his work. When he would question orders or start to remember things, he would be wiped again. Bucky has to live with the cold and brutal nature of these memories as they return, including the fact that he killed Howard Stark, an old friend, in cold blood. The guilt weighs on him. Many of the things he did are things he can't forgive himself for, not just the killing but the fact that his actions helped HYDRA grow and thrive. He's credited for shaping much of the latter half of the 20th century through his brutal work and he knows that firsthand just as well as any file can. He voices his apprehension to Steve about whether or not he's really worth helping, because he knows that he was brainwashed, but the memories are still there and the Winter Soldier is still a part of who he is now. His loyalty and idealism had been replaced with something cold and deadly for a long time and he has to reconcile these two incongruous lives he's lived.

With the fall of HYDRA, he has his freedom and no memories beyond Steve insisting that they'd been friends. With no reason to trust Steve, he goes to ground to figure out who he was before. He has no problem taking care of himself with all the skills he's got under his belt. That level of independence, even when he's utterly lost, shows just how capable the Winter Soldier had been and in turn how capable Bucky is now. He manages to spend about two years living off the grid and undetected, even as Steve and likely several governments and other organizations are looking for him, as well.

When Steve finds him, his first instinct is to lie about having his memories back in hopes that it will get Steve to stop chasing after him. It's not that he doesn't want Steve there, but that he's worried about all the building anxieties he's had as he's remembered who he'd been before and who Steve had been to him. He worries about how he will derail Steve's life or drag him down, but selfishly he also wants to keep Steve from seeing what he's become. It's bad enough that he'd fought Steve nearly to the death, but Steve knowing about all the terrible things he's done for HYDRA would honestly hurt him more than anything. His loyalty to Steve and the need to protect Steve is alive and well in him, even through all the things he's struggled with. When it's revealed that he killed Howard Stark, Steve admits that he'd known, but it's Bucky who's surprised that he'd known all along. He hadn't realized that Steve had known and he's surprised that Steve had fought so hard for him even with the knowledge that Bucky had murdered their friend.

His will to fight is very low. Even when defending himself, he takes great effort to use nonlethal force against people who are sent to arrest or kill him. He could easily hit people and kill them with his metal arm, but avoids using it in many of his fights, including the one against T'Challa, who is clearly also enhanced. He will defend himself and he will fight if he's given something he thinks is worth fighting for, but he's seen too much violence in his life and even with all of his skills, it's not a choice he makes lightly. His skills are still there, though. He can and will defend himself and others and he will fight for causes he believes in.

Another thing that weighs heavily on him is the fact that the HYDRA programming is still there. There are keywords that can activate it and it turns him back into that cold and malleable tool of death and destruction. Until that programming is removed, he regards himself as a risk and a liability to others. Once he and Steve accomplish what they need to in Siberia, he agrees to go back into cryosleep until they can figure out how to deprogram him so that he can't be used as a weapon again. This is a conscious decision he makes, as even Steve is apprehensive. For a man who spent years being robbed of his agency, he still chooses this over his freedom when it risks so many lives and so many threats to the things that he and his friend have always believed in and stood for and that is one of the greatest signs that he's once again at least in part the Bucky Barnes of his youth, even if he carries the Winter Soldier with him now, too. Where he'd first chosen his freedom and walked away from Steve at the side of the river, he now feels a greater sense of personal responsibility and that is the biggest contrast between the newly freed Winter Soldier and the Bucky Barnes of two years later. Being on the run had left him vulnerable to being used as a weapon again, even if he's free of it in the moment. He can't live like that at the risk of other people.

Powers/Abilities:
HYDRA Conditioning - Bucky spent years under HYDRA's control. During that time, he wasn't only trained, but also brainwashed and conditioned. He has a series of trigger words that work like a factory reset on him, turning him into the Winter Soldier again. In that state, he is an empty vessel waiting for orders, brutal and efficient in his approach to attaining the goals he's give. Bucky himself shows extreme hesitance to use lethal force, but the Winter Soldier has no problem ending lives that get in his way or being given a mission to kill. He's shown to ignore physical pain entirely and to have no ability to empathize with anyone in this state. We have seen him break out of it in two ways: the first when he was fighting Steve and started to remember him and have emotional reactions to him and the second when he was rendered unconscious after a later trigger. It is likely that without the constant memory wipes that HYDRA also forced on him under their care, he has an easier time remembering himself after he loses consciousness or takes a harsh blow to the head, though canon is not entirely explicit on the exact science of it.

Firearms - Bucky excelled as a sniper in World War 2. He also would have been trained with other firearms at the time, but a sniper rifle was the weapon with which he excelled. As the Winter Soldier, we see him use everything from a SIG-Sauer P220 hand gun to a Milkor Multiple Grenade Launcher with ease and precision. He's clearly been trained with a huge variety of firearms, both large and small. Once he's got his freedom back from HYDRA, the main firearm he handles is an M249 SAW, which is the same rifle he has later in Infinity War, but he also handles a Glock with comfort and it's clear that he's retained his varied firearms training.

Hand-to-Hand Combat - Bucky's comfort with hand-to-hand combat is comparable to that of his firearms training when he's the Winter Soldier. He handles knives like an extension of himself, reversing his grips and throwing knives as if they're nothing and attacking with brutal precision. Whatever training he'd had in the Army was vastly expanded on under HYDRA. He can punch, hit, block, stab and bludgeon with fluid motions. His hesitation when not under the Winter Soldier conditioning knocks these skills down a peg. The muscle memory is there, but Bucky's hesitance to seriously injure or kill others slows him a little in a fight and removes some moves from his vocabulary of motions. His fighting tends to be much more defensive than offensive when he can't justify seriously hurting or killing the people he's fighting.

Super Soldier Serum - Bucky was experimented on when he was a prisoner of war at Azzano during World War 2. It's later revealed that he was injected with an attempt to replicate the serum that had turned Steve into Captain America and though it's unclear if it's a perfect match or not, it's clearly very close. This serum is how he was able to survive that fatal fall from the train on his last mission in World War 2. He heals faster than a normal human, though not instantaneously, and he has a higher endurance for taking damage before it becomes fatal. His body is also more resistant to the damage it takes. The serum works his body and metabolism to its extreme peak, allowing him to maintain a lot of muscle mass. This also allows for him to be extremely fast and agile along with the extreme strength. None of these abilities are at a cosmic far-beyond-human level, but they are extremely impressive for a human range of ability, seemingly beyond the range of normal human capability, but only by a little bit. He is still very much human in the way his body functions and his bodily needs, even if many of those needs are slightly lessened. There is simply an extra level to his physical abilities such that he is at an 11/10 on human physical capability. It is likely that he is immune to most lesser diseases the same way Steve is, though we have not seen proof of this. Likely due to the enhanced metabolism, it would be very difficult for him to be drunk or drugged by a normal dose that would affect humans.

Metal Arm - His left arm, including his entire shoulder, is gone. He lost it when he felt from the train and it was replaced with a cybernetic metal arm, which he has had for decades. As the Winter Soldier, he takes hits with it and deflects bullets without blinking, however after the conditioning is gone, we see him feel pain through it and that it is so touch-sensitive that he can feel the ripeness of fruit with it through a thick glove. It is very likely that there is more metal inside of his body that we can't see to support the weight of the arm and connect it to his nervous system. It is unclear what type of metal it is, but it is very strong and it is not vibranium. The lack of vibranium is proven when it's destroyed by Tony Stark later by a beam that cannot penetrate Steve's vibranium shield. The arm is incredibly articulated along with its sensitivity and behaves almost exactly as a human arm, save for the fact that it's much harder to break, even when he can feel pain through it.

Power Nerfs (if applicable): n/a (but I have no problem nerfing healing and disease/drug immunity if need be.)

Inventory:
This outfit and gun (M249 SAW)

Incentives:
Removing the HYDRA programming from his mind is his main incentive. At the end of Civil War, he voluntarily goes into cryo stasis until it can be removed because he feels that it makes him too dangerous to be awake. The promise of its removal would get him to cooperate easily as long as what's requested of him doesn't violate his own morals.

SAMPLES

TDM thread 1 TDM thread 2 and the toplevel in case you want more