The best friend who was already a soldier when Steve Rogers was still being turned away at recruiting offices, and who spent seventy years being used as a weapon by the people who caught him.
Bucky Barnes is the only person in this story whose entire arc is about not being responsible for what he did. Everything Hydra used him for happened; the question the films keep circling is whether any of it was him.
He starts as the confident one. In 1943 he is a sergeant with a unit and a future, and Steve Rogers is a small man being told no by every recruiter in New York. Their positions reverse, and then keep reversing. The fall from the train should have killed him. The serum he was given without asking is why it did not.
What follows is seventy years as an instrument: tortured, wiped, kept frozen between assignments, brought out when Hydra needed somebody dead. When the films finally give him his memory back, they do not give him relief with it. They give him the list.
Show detailsThe trigger words
The programming is not portrayed as a mood or a corruption. It is a phrase, and anybody holding the book it is written in can read it aloud and take the man out of his own body.
Helmut Zemo does exactly that in Captain America: Civil War, in a room, with a piece of paper, and it is the most frightening thing anyone does in that film precisely because it takes no power at all.