Chapter 12: The Handler's Gambit
The silence after Marc left was a physical thing. It pressed against Sage’s eardrums, a low hum that wasn’t sound but absence. She focused on her breathing, in through the nose, out through the mouth, just like Wanda had shown her. The wall in her mind felt solid, a smooth featureless slab holding back the psychic murmur of the sleeping compound.
She counted the faint, rhythmic pulses of light from her monitoring pod on the nightstand. One. Two. Three. A lullaby of her own stable vitals.
On the seventh pulse, the light stuttered. It flickered from soft green to a brief, urgent yellow before settling back. Sage’s breath hitched. A glitch. Just a glitch in the Compound’s system. It meant nothing.
But the air changed. It thickened, tasting of copper and static, the scent of an oncoming subway train deep underground. The wall in her mind didn’t crack. It melted. One moment it was there, and the next it was simply gone, dissolved by a silent, internal command she never gave.
The noise didn’t flood in. It detonated.
It wasn’t the muddled river of conscious thoughts from before. This was raw, unfiltered sensation—the collective subconscious of the entire facility vomiting into her skull. Stark’s chronic, grinding anxiety about legacy and failure. Banner’s deep-sea terror of the other guy, a monster sleeping beneath his ribs. Steve Rogers’s profound, century-old loneliness, a cold so permanent it felt like bone.
And the pain. God, the pain. Every old injury, every psychic scar, every remembered blow from a hundred enhanced beings resonated through her neural pathways as if they were her own. A phantom symbiote ripped from her spine. The searing brand of a laser whip. The brittle snap of a femur.
She couldn’t scream. Her diaphragm was locked. She curled inward on the bed, muscles rigid, fingers clawing at the sheets. Her monitor was shrieking now, a continuous, shrill alarm painting the room in red pulses.
“—just can’t get the fluid dynamics to— what is that?”
“Sage?”
Voices from the hallway, muffled and warped as if heard from underwater. The door hissed open. Peter stood there, a holotool in his hand, his face a mask of young alarm. Bucky was right behind him, his eyes scanning the room for a threat the sensors couldn’t see.
“Sage, hey, look at me,” Peter said, stepping in but keeping his distance, hands up. “Jarvis says you’re having a neural event. You’re safe. You’re in the Compound.”
His thoughts were a frantic, buzzing swarm. Oh man oh man what do I do is this a seizure did I break something is it the screen I knew the screen was a bad idea—
Each frantic word was a needle in her cortex. She squeezed her eyes shut. “Stop… thinking,” she gasped, the words a ragged scrape.
Bucky moved Peter gently to the side with a vibranium hand. He understood noise. He understood overload. He didn’t try to touch her. He sat on the floor beside the bed, his back against the mattress, putting himself in her space without being a threat.
“Alright,” he said, his voice low and utterly flat, a dial turning all the way down. “Floor’s cold. Can you feel it? The grout line under my boot is cracked. I can feel the edge.”
He was feeding her simple, concrete data. Anchors. He was imagining the crack in the grout, focusing on it with a sniper’s intensity, and that single, mundane image cut through the static haze like a beacon.
“My left shoulder aches when it rains,” he continued, the monotone almost hypnotic. “Not the metal one. The real one. Dumb football injury from 1934. Jenkins snapped a tendon. Feels like a dull screwdriver twisting.”
She latched onto the description. The specific, ordinary pain. She matched her breathing to the slow cadence of his words.
“Breathe with it,” he instructed. “In for the ache, out with the screwdriver.”
Peter, catching on, crouched down. He didn’t speak. He just started sketching rapidly in the air with his finger, leaving faint tracers of light from a projected interface. A simple, looping shape. A lopsided star. Then a circle. Then another star. A silent, repetitive pattern for her to follow with her eyes.
The storm in her head began to recede from its peak, the waves of alien sensation pulling back, leaving her own scorched shores behind. She was shaking, a fine, uncontrollable tremor that made her teeth chatter. The alarm from her monitor cut off abruptly, replaced by Jarvis’s calm, omnipresent tone.
“Neural风暴 has subsided. Vital signs stabilizing. The episode appears self-contained.”
“Self-contained?” Peter whispered, looking at Bucky. “What does that mean?”
Bucky didn’t answer. He finally turned his head to look up at Sage. Her face was slick with sweat, her eyes wide and hollow. “Back with us?” he asked.
She managed a weak nod. The hollow ache for Jake was gone, burned away by the neuro-fire. In its place was a new, chilling clarity. It hadn’t been an attack from outside. The wall hadn’t been breached.
It had been dismantled from within. By her.
“It was a key,” she whispered, her voice raw. “They didn’t build a lock. They built a lockpick. And it’s in me.”
Bucky’s face went very still. He understood programming. He understood sleeper protocols. “What activated it?”
She looked at the monitor, its light now a steady, reassuring green. “A signal. A silent one. In the compound’s systems. It pulsed, and I…” She trailed off, the truth too horrifying to say. And I opened the door.
Peter’s eyes widened in tech-horror. “Jarvis? Run a full spectral diagnostic on all internal networks for the last ten minutes. Look for any non-standard carrier waves, any encrypted pings, anything that could be a neural trigger.”
“Running,” Jarvis confirmed. A moment passed. “Scan complete. No anomalous signals detected within the designated parameters.”
“Which means they’re using something we’re not scanning for,” Peter said, standing up, his fear shifting into furious problem-solving. “Or it’s baked into a frequency we consider background. Like… like a heartbeat.”
Marc was suddenly in the doorway, having moved there without a sound. His face was granite. He’d heard everything. “A heartbeat you can’t shut off,” he said. His gaze settled on Sage, not with Jake’s possession or Steven’s clinical care, but with the grim assessment of a soldier recognizing a minefield. “The trigger isn’t external. It’s her own biology. Her own brainwaves. They taught her system to respond to a pattern, and the Compound’s tech just… plays the pattern.”
Sage felt the truth of it settle into her bones, colder than any fear. Her sanctuary was the vector. Her safe room was the trigger. Every hum of the lights, every pulse of the servers, was a potential symphony, and her mind had been taught the conductor’s rhythm.
“We have to get you out of here,” Bucky said, rising to his feet in one fluid motion.
“No.” Marc’s voice cut the air. “Running is what they’ll expect. It’s what he would do.” He didn’t need to say Jake’s name. “They’re watching. They just tested their connection. They know it works.”
He stepped into the room, his eyes never leaving Sage. “So we use it. We feed them exactly what they want to see.”
Sage looked from Marc’s calculated resolve to Bucky’s protective readiness, and finally to Peter’s tech-fueled determination. The hollow ache was gone, replaced by a sharp, frigid focus. She was the engineered lock. The conditioned asset. The trap.
And for the first time, she saw the outlines of the trappers.
“What’s the play?” she asked, her voice steadier than she felt.
Marc allowed the faintest shadow of a smile. It held no warmth. “We give you a new handler. One they’ll believe. We let the signal in, and we control what walks back out.” He glanced at Bucky. “You up for being a villain again?”
Bucky’s metal hand flexed. “Just point me at the right target.”
“She’s the target,” Marc says grimly. “Either she answers to them, or she answers to someone here. Until we can deprogram her, she’s wired to answer to someone. You think Jake makes a poor handler. Maybe you’re right. But it’s got to be someone.”
Bucky’s expression didn’t change, but the air around him did. It went very still. “You want me to give her orders.” It wasn’t a question.
“I want you to be the voice,” Marc corrected, his words precise and cold. “The one her conditioning recognizes as authority. If the signal comes again and opens that door in her head, we make sure your voice is the first thing waiting on the other side. Not theirs.”
Sage felt a cold drip of understanding slide down her spine. They were talking about hacking her own mind. Using the very pathways her captors had carved. The clinical horror of it made her skin feel too tight.
“That’s a hell of a gamble,” Bucky said, his eyes never leaving Marc’s. “You’re asking me to step into the same role I spent decades trying to burn out of my own skull.”
“You know the architecture.” Marc’s gaze was unflinching. “You can speak the language.”
Peter looked between them, his young face pale. “Whoa, time out. We’re talking about imprinting a new… a new command protocol? That’s not therapy. That’s just swapping out the puppeteer.”
“It’s a placeholder,” Marc shot back, a rare flicker of impatience in his tone. “A firewall. Until we find the root code and scrub it clean, we contain the vulnerability. Would you rather she open that door and find nothing standing there but static and a polite invitation from the Pharmacist?”
The name hung in the room, a phantom made real. Sage saw the mountain complex from Tony’s file in her mind, carved and cold. Her hands had stopped shaking. A strange, detached calm was settling over her.
“He’s right,” she heard herself say. Her voice sounded distant. “It’s not about obedience. It’s about receptivity. That’s what the file said. They made the socket. Something’s meant to plug in.” She looked at Bucky, assessing him not as a person but as a tool. It was a grim, pragmatic shift she felt happening behind her own eyes. “You fit the profile. You have the… vocabulary.”
Bucky flinched, almost imperceptibly. The word vocabulary struck a nerve only he could feel. The Winter Soldier’s lexicon of pain and control.
“This isn’t a committee,” Marc stated, finality in his tone. “It’s triage. Barnes? In or out?”
The silence stretched. Sage could hear the faint buzz of the dead holographic displays on her wall. She watched Bucky’s internal war play out in the tight line of his jaw, the minute tremor in his right thumb where it rested against his thigh. He was weighing the ghost of the Asset against the living woman in front of him.
“What’s the first order?” Bucky asked, the question directed at Marc, but his eyes finally swung to Sage. It was a soldier’s eyes, preparing for a dirty, necessary job.
Marc didn’t hesitate. “Simple. Clear. Something her conscious mind would also agree to. We start small. We build the association.”
He turned to Sage. “You need to sleep. Real sleep. Your brain needs to reset from the episode.” He looked back at Bucky. “So you tell her to sleep.”
“That’s it?” Peter whispered, unnerved by the stark simplicity.
“That’s the hook,” Marc said. “We bait it with a basic, benevolent instruction. We see if the conditioned part of her mind latches onto his voice as the source of permitted action. If it does, we own the channel.”
Bucky took a slow breath, then let it out. He moved, not toward Sage, but to the chair by the window where Marc had sat earlier. He lowered himself into it, the weight of history bending his posture. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked at the floor for a long moment, assembling himself.
When he looked up, his face was different. Not cruel. Not angry. It was empty of everything but a frightening, focused certainty. His voice, when it came, was stripped of all inflection, a flat, neutral tone that carried an unbearable weight of authority.
“Sage.”
Her name wasn’t a question. It was a designator. Her spine straightened without her permission, a galvanic response to the sound. The calm she’d felt curdled into a sharp, attentive stillness.
“You will sleep now.”
The words were quiet. They weren’t shouted. They didn’t need to be. They landed in the center of her skull with the physical force of a key turning in a lock. Her racing thoughts, the fear, the residue of the panic—they simply switched off. A profound, immediate lethargy slammed into her, as chemical and undeniable as a sedative injection.
Her eyes drifted shut. Her body went limp against the pillows, muscles releasing all at once. It was a surrender so total and so peaceful it was more terrifying than any pain.
The last thing she heard was Peter’s horrified intake of breath, and Marc’s grim, satisfied whisper.
“Channel open.”
The silence in the room was absolute. It was the quiet of a vacuum, of a switch being thrown on a living thing.
Peter stared at Sage’s slack form, then at Bucky, his face a open wound of horror. “What did you do?” The words were a breath.
“What you asked,” Bucky said. His voice was his own again, rough with a disgust that coated his tongue. He looked at his right hand. It was steady. He willed it to tremble, to show some physical echo of the violation, but it refused.
Marc moved to the bedside, checking Sage’s pulse at her throat. His touch was professional, detached. “Neurological activity has dropped to baseline sleep patterns. No distress. It was… efficient.” He said the last word like a pathologist noting a cause of death.
“Efficient? She just obeyed.” Peter’s hands were fists at his sides. “You turned her off like a light. That’s not a firewall, that’s a remote control.”
“It’s a proof of concept,” Marc corrected, his eyes never leaving Sage’s peaceful face. A muscle in his jaw jumped. “The architecture accepts input. Now we control the input. Until we don’t.”
Bucky pushed himself out of the chair. The joints in his knees ached. It felt like a century of kneeling on concrete. He needed air that didn’t smell of sterilization and fear. “We’re done here.”
“We’re just starting,” Marc said, finally turning his predator’s gaze on him. “The connection is live. We need to reinforce it, establish a reliable link before their signal pings her again. That means repetition. Consistent stimulus and response.”
A cold knot tightened in Bucky’s stomach. “You want me to do it again.”
“I want you to be on duty. The next time her monitors blip, or her eyes go distant, you bring her back. You give the anchor command. We re-route the pathway through you until it’s a dirt road in her head, not a highway.”
Peter threw his hands up. “And what happens to his head, Marc? You’re asking him to play Winter Soldier. You think that just… washes off?”
For the first time, Marc’s certainty faltered. He looked at Bucky, really looked, seeing past the soldier to the man beneath. The cost registered. He gave a single, tight nod. “It wears. I know.”
“It’ll work or it won’t,” Bucky said, cutting off the debate. His tone brooked no argument. He couldn’t afford to think about the cost, not if he was going to step back into that hollow, command voice. He just had to do the job. Like always.
The wear began almost immediately.
It was in the watchfulness. Every ping from the compound’s PA system made his shoulders tense. Every flicker of the lights in Sage’s room had his eyes darting to her face, searching for that blank, receptive emptiness. He stopped sleeping in his quarters. He dragged a cot into an empty equipment alcove down the hall, a habit from a war ninety years gone. Sleep was a liability. The dreams were worse.
He dreamt of a different chair, a different woman with vacant eyes. The words were Russian, but the effect was the same. A profound and terrible stillness.
He’d wake with his metal hand embedded in the composite wall, fingers clenched in a crushing fist. The vibrations would trip a proximity sensor, and Jarvis would politely inquire if Sergeant Barnes required medical assistance.
He always said no.
The first test came thirty-six hours later. Sage was eating soup, her movements careful and deliberate. She’d been quiet since the episode, a watchful quiet that mirrored his own.
A maintenance drone passed in the hallway, its repulsors emitting a specific frequency harmonic as it corrected its hover alignment.
Sage’s spoon froze halfway to her lips. Her eyes lost focus, fixed on a point in the middle distance. The spoon trembled, spilling broth onto the tray.
Bucky was already moving from his post by the door. He didn’t touch her. He positioned himself in her line of sight, a solid, deliberate obstacle.
“Sage.”
Her gaze didn’t waver. Her breathing shallowed.
He summoned the voice. It came easier this time, a familiar, hated glove sliding on. “Look at me.”
Her eyes snapped to his. They were aware, but glazed, as if she were looking out from behind thick glass.
“You are here. In the Compound. The soup is from the kitchen. It’s tomato. You hate tomato.” He fed her simple, verifiable facts, battling the pull of the signal. “You will finish the sentence: The sky is…”
He left it hanging. A command to engage her own mind.
Her lips parted. A silent struggle played out across her features. “…blue,” she finally whispered, the word dragging itself out of a deep well.
The glassiness shattered. She blinked, looked down at the spilled soup, and a flush of shame colored her cheeks. “It happened again.”
“You stopped it,” Bucky said, letting his own voice return. It felt gritty. “You finished the sentence.”
“After you gave the order.” She pushed the tray away, her appetite gone. “It’s like… trying to swim against a riptide. I can fight it, but only after someone throws me a rope.”
He just nodded. The adrenaline was still buzzing in his veins, a corrosive hum. He’d won. He’d pulled her back. The victory tasted like ash and old copper.
The second test was at 03:17. Jarvis alerted him to a spike in her cortical activity. She was dreaming. Or something was dreaming her.
He found her sitting bolt upright in bed, drenched in sweat, her eyes wide open and unseeing. She was whispering, a low, phonetic stream that wasn't any language he recognized. It was code. It was a handshake protocol.
“Sage.” He didn't shout. The flat authority cut through the chanting.
It didn't stop.
He moved closer, kneeling before her so she had to look down at him. He forced his breathing to be even, a metronome for her to follow. “The dreaming is not permitted. You will cease vocalization.”
The whispering stopped mid-syllable. Her mouth clicked shut. A line of spittle traced from her lip to her chin. She stared through him, a puppet with cut strings.
“You will lie down.”
She did, stiff as a cadaver.
“Sleep will now resume.”
Her eyes closed. The rigidity left her body. The compliance was absolute, and it made his skin crawl. He stayed there on his knees for a long time, listening to her breathe, waiting for the shake in his own hands to subside. It didn't.
The wear was becoming a fracture. He was spending hours every day inside the mind of the Asset to keep her out of it. The edges were blurring. He caught himself thinking in mission parameters, in threat assessments that viewed her as both objective and liability. He’d snap out of it, gripped by a nausea so profound he’d have to brace himself against a wall.
Peter noticed. “You look worse than she does, man,” he said one afternoon in the commissary, pushing a cup of coffee toward Bucky. “You can’t do this 24/7. Let someone else take a shift. Let me try.”
“It has to be me,” Bucky said, his voice flat. “The association is building. Changing the variable now resets the progress.” He was parroting Marc’s tactical analysis. It sounded hollow, even to him.
“What about him?” Peter asked, lowering his voice. “Jake. He’s… still in there, right?”
As if summoned, Marc walked in. Or rather, Steven did. The carriage of the body was different, lighter, the perpetual storm-cloud expression replaced by one of polite concern. He collected a tea bag and hot water.
“James,” Steven said, with a curt nod. He didn’t sit. “Her lucid periods are increasing in duration. Your work is having an effect. However, the suppressant regimen I’ve implemented to keep our more… reactive aspect subdued is causing synaptic friction. It’s a balancing act.”
Bucky just stared into his coffee. “How’s he taking it?”
Steven’s smile was thin and humorless. “He is, as you might imagine, enraged. He perceives your continued presence as a usurpation. He is… vocal. Internally. It’s rather like sharing a flat with a wolverine.” He stirred his tea, the spoon clicking a precise rhythm against the ceramic. “He believes you’ll break. He’s betting on it.”
Bucky finally looked up. “What’s your bet?”
Steven met his gaze. The urbane facade flickered, and for a second, Bucky saw the raw, shared exhaustion of a man holding a beast on a choke-chain. “I bet we’re all running out of time.”
The breaking point wasn't dramatic. It was a slow leak that finally emptied him.
It was the fifth time. A malfunction in the climate control system caused a sub-audible whine in Sage’s room. Her pupils dilated. She turned her head toward the vent with the mechanical precision of a radar dish.
Bucky was so tired. The command felt like lifting a boulder. “Disregard. Focus on my hand.”
He held up two fingers.
“Count them.”
She stared. “Two,” she whispered, but it was just an echo. The pull of the signal was stronger this time.
“You will count them again.”
“Two.” A tear tracked down her cheek. She was fighting it, from somewhere deep inside. He could see the war, and he was just another officer on the battlefield shouting orders.
The voice that came out of him next wasn’t the Asset’s flat calm. It was ragged. It was desperate. It was his. “Sage, damn it, look at me! Just look at me!”
She flinched. The raw emotion in his voice, the break in protocol, was a shock to her system. Her focus shattered back to the present. She saw him then, really saw him—the sweat on his temple, the haunted hollows under his eyes, the barely-contained tremor in the hand he still held up.
“Bucky?” Her own voice was small, a child’s.
The weight of it all crashed down. The watching, the commanding, the careful manipulation of a broken mind with his own broken tools. The constant, grinding fear that he wasn’t building a firewall, but just becoming a more palatable warden.
He lowered his hand. It felt like it weighed a thousand pounds.
“I can’t,” he said, the words a dry scrape. He wasn’t talking to her. He was admitting it to the room, to the unseen watchers, to the ghost of the Soldier in his head. “I can’t do this anymore.”
He turned and walked out, leaving her sitting there, alone. The alcove with his cot felt like a cage. He needed the sky. He needed distance. He headed for the compound’s rear landing pad, the cool night air hitting him like a physical blow.
He didn’t hear Marc follow him out. He just felt the presence, a different kind of tension than Steven’s.
“Barnes.”
Bucky didn’t turn. He stared at the dark tree line. “It’s your turn. You do it. You be the voice.”
“I can’t,” Marc said, the admission stark. “It has to be a voice she doesn’t associate with safety. With friendship. It has to be a voice of pure, reliable authority. Mine is… conflicted. Hers is the only face I see when I close my eyes.”
Bucky finally looked at him. In the low security lights, Marc looked ancient, carved from the same stone as the god that haunted him. “Then we’re out of options. Your plan is failing.”
“No,” Marc said, his gaze shifting to a point over Bucky’s shoulder, back toward the compound. “The plan just changed. She fought the signal tonight because she heard you break. Not the Soldier. You.” He let that hang. “The connection isn’t just about obedience anymore. It’s about who she’s choosing to listen to.”
From inside the compound, faint but clear through the reinforced glass, an alarm began to blare. Not a medical alert. A security breach. A perimeter sensor on the western fence had been tripped.
Then a second one, closer.
Jarvis’s voice flooded the outdoor speakers, calm but urgent. “Unauthorized incursion detected. Energy signatures match known hostile prototypes. All personnel to defensive positions.”
Marc’s body stiffened, his head tilting as if listening to a distant voice. His eyes rolled back for a second, and when they focused, the quiet fury in them was volcanic, familiar, and raw.
Jake slammed back into control, surging forward on a wave of Khonshu’s screaming glee. He grinned, a savage, teeth-baring thing.
“They’re here for their asset,” Jake snarled, cracking his neck. “Guess the silent treatment’s over. Let’s go remind them why they should’ve left her buried.”