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No more talking was an order that he was comfortable following. Even when he had served as Stark's bodyguard, and what little language he did use was Russian, he had been mostly a silent companion. But a constant one, one always on Tony's side, always with him and never hating him for his genius or his need to cling.

Even when-- even when--

"You had a fever," the words came out quietly and stilted. "I looked after you."

It was a strange, half there sort of memory. The boy, ten at the time, had managed to catch a chill that had turned into pneumonia. The doctor had given antibiotics, pneumonia wasn't dangerous these days with the advances in medicine, and he had been put to bed alone. Something in the Soldier's memory had buzzed, though, countless hours of warming and caring for a different skinny body wracked with coughing had come to the forefront and it had morphed into his orders to protect Tony. He had nursed him, broth and cool washcloths, and fresh sheets for five days. That was when the boy had started to cling to him more, see him as more friend than guard.

"You didn't know Howard was HYDRA?"

Really and truly?

Tony hadn’t been a sick kid. Sometimes he did stupid things that opened him up to malady, mostly in the form of broken bones brought on by lack of desire to safely manufacture his inventions in lame attempts to garner attention from a man who never seemed to like him, but like every child, Tony did find himself sick from time to time. Genuinely. Not just faking it to get out of a math class that was far beneath his genius or a stint in detention that he absolutely deserved a hundred times over. And while he had not had many illnesses, he was old enough then to remember that pneumonia, caught from being stuck in a tree for three hours while his Nanny was off doing something for his dad and Jarvis was at home with his own wife, an off day for the semi-butler.

The sickness had kept him in bed and delirious for days, had let the voices creep in and play around with his memories, and left him feeling miserable on top of achy and feverish. A flash of golden-amber eyes might have looked familiar then, part of the recall of Bucky’s long repressed memories, but Tony was quick to cover them up once more with lashes as he looked immediately away from the dimple chinned man he’d last seen the day before he turned fifteen.

“So you do remember.” He needed to look through his belongings. There were almost no photographs of him as a child, and only a few videos from the archive. In the seventies, no one walked around with a means to record every second of every day, after all. It bothered him, for the first time ever. It bothered him because his nanny had been cut out, fittingly, and he’d hated even the thought of him for years.

Tony wiped his hands on a rag. Red and black mixed maliciously and he threw it aside where DUM-E could clean it up later. Or burn down the lab. He seemed to get those two tasks mixed up and Tony never had the heart to fix his whipping boy.

“The only thing I know about my dad is that he was a douche bag. So hey, maybe deep down I always knew. But HYDRA stopped being a thing after the war. It’s only just come back into style. Like the 80s. Your thumb should work now.”

The Soldier had been taken because those were his orders, and by the time he had been sent to kill Howard and Maria, thanks to the inventor trying to double cross HYDRA by stealing the bastardised serum that they had been working on, he had already been wiped again. He had never even thought of the boy who had wondered about his bodyguard, dismissed so suddenly and never returning.

"You don't know who I am?"

He wasn't sure whether he meant the Soldier or James Buchanan Barnes, only that he meant something. That it must mean something if the boy he had cared for hadn't been in on it all, if he had somehow remained ignorant even while his bodyguard spoke in such stilted and dehumanising ways.

As far as Tony was concerned, everyone and their mother spoke the way his nanny had, or should have at least. He’d been too wrapped up in himself to see anyone outside of himself and thought Jarvis had tried hard, very hard, to reach Tony in his youth and teach him about how to recognize that every human being had the right to be treated as such, this man was mostly out of his life by then. It was why Tony had cared so much for him. He never judged. He protected Tony without lecturing him. He was there for the nightmares, let the kid hold onto him when he needed to, and never mentioned it again, not to anyone, no matter what.

His Nanny was more like the St. Bernard that the Darling children kept and was treated as his namesake was.

“I know who you are,” Tony said, switching tools and removing his gloves once he had wiped down the metal with rubbing alcohol. He needed to do some more precision work and he slipped some magnifying headgear over his forehead and right eye. “You worked for me for awhile and then you disappeared.” He didn’t like to repeat himself but this was a special circumstance. “You only remember a case of pneumonia. You know I’m on TV like... all the time? I’m an Avenger? Ever heard of us? Oh. Guess so. Since you don’t want me tattling to Captain Starspangled Boxer Briefs. Why is—“

The tool slipped on the ridges if the arm. No harm done, but Tony was silent for a long time as his thoughts caught up with him. He never knew if his insights were all his own or if they were the others that he used to talk to Bucky about when he was a kid before his mother found out and sobbing my out him into therapy where he learned never to mention it again.

He liked to think that this was all him, but as with his uncanny knowledge of how to fix this piece of equipment he had never seen in his life, he didn’t think so.

“Barnes. Winter Soldier. Shit. Do you remember blowing up a building, by chance, or is it just sickness based memories?”

A shudder went through the man in the chair as he was called Barnes and his muscles tensed up, even the damaged plates of his metal arm clicking and sliding into a more attack ready state.

"I've blown up a lot of buildings, but I didn't touch the one at the UN."

It was unfortunate for Tony that he was still so blank and so emotionless that he didn't even consider how dreadful this must be for Tony. To suddenly be confronted by the truth that his old bodyguard hadn't had a choice, that he'd been a slave to HYDRA and brainwashed into obeying no matter what, that his father had been an instrumental part of stripping down someone into less than a person.

"Don't call me either of those things. I'm not the Soldier any more, I don't do that, and I went to the museum-- that man in the pictures with my face, that's not me. I don't remember him."

It's why he needed to stay away from Captain America, the man did ridiculous things to him and made him malfunction in ways that he couldn't figure out how to stop. He looked at him with love and desperation and called him Buck as if he could actually be human.

Hate filled Tony, an analogue to the emotion that Bucky must be feeling now. He was impossible to read, this situation was nothing like s board room drama and the personalities he was dealing with here were nonexistent. He set the tool aside with trembling fingers, he stood, and he walked across the room to grab the bottle he knew was poorly hidden behind just-for-show flasks. He didn’t bother with a glass this time, drawing his comfort directly from the mouth of the only constant in his life.

After that, the edge gone, his feelings dulled, he turned but did not immediately slip back into Barnes’ company. The bottle was still in his hand but he had twisted the pressed metal cap back on, a flimsy defense.

Should he blame himself for not knowing st five years old that his Nanny had even less autonomy than the Darling children’s pet? What about ten year old Tony, who asked questions about why the man never slept and if he didn’t have the muscles in his jaw to smile. What about when he was fourteen, finally self-aware, in the throes of puberty, constantly masturbating, and becoming a little too much like a singular version of the Hardy Boys attempting to get his Nanny to open up a little to him.

But there was nothing to open up to him about because his father was a monster and wiped his memories and forced him to protect and follow around a lonely child who had no mind to notice that his Nanny wasn’t just super cool and stoic and took his job seriously.

“How about you tell me the things you do remember? Got this feeling that the list is short.”

Even though his thumb now moved, he knew that the repairs were not complete. He could still feel pain in his shoulder that would restrict his level of movement and keep him from being effective in a fight. So he remained where he was in the chair, the only part of him that moved was his eyes as he tracked Stark across the lab and watched him drink with an air of desperation.

"Is it relevant?"

That wasn't exactly a refusal, but he didn't understand why it would matter. His memories were disjointed and confused, precious pieces of himself that he was loathe to give away to other people.

"You can repair the malfunction without needing my memories, and then I can leave."

If words could sober a man right up, Bucky had found them, plucked them out of the nether, glued nails on them and threw them so hard they might as well act like bullets. Tony knew the thought was hyperbole. He knew he was being dramatic. He’d been without Bucky longer than he had been with him, but he couldn’t shake off the sting of his self imposed lonesomeness once more being reinforced.

“How about you humor me?” His Nanny hadn’t ever spoken to him this way. Tony would chat incessantly and Bucky would just follow orders when they were given or stare over his head to keep an eye on the situation as Tony used him for holding spare parts or carrying heavy objects away from the school or the house. Bucky has a voice now, though, one that wasn’t a growl or an occasional seeking of clarification in Russian.

He set the bottle down with reluctance, ignored the desire to call up Pepper at her mother’s and tell her his dad had been HYDRA because he needed to tell someone, and pushed the stool that had traveled away from Bucky back to the workbench.

“Because right now, the only thing you’re doing is demanding work from me and paying me in backhands. Gotta tell you that there’s a time and a place for that and it’s not here.” That Tony was a masochist would surprise no one.

Payment. He hadn't even considered payment, he had gone so long without that being an issue for him at all. He was provided with everything he needed, both to survive and to keep functioning at peak condition, and that was simply the way it should be. Since he had fled after the battle of the Potomac, he had ended up stealing or ghosting through places in order to get what he needed.

Now Stark wanted payment? Did this include not telling Captain America that he had harboured the man he was tearing the world apart to find? Or would that information be forfeit as soon as he left?

"I remember committing sixty seven separate counts of murder, arson, and assault. Do you want the details on those for payment?"

“This isn’t a Bad Things We’re Done measuring contest. And if it was, I’d win,” Tony said, though he wasn’t boasting. Sometimes he couldn’t look in the mirror at himself. The Accords were supposed to stop people like him from screwing everything up all the time. He needed checks and balances. Tony traipsed through life being a carefree asshole and as such, countless people’s lives were changed…and never for the good. He’d killed a lot of people with his armament contracts, not directly, but his name was stamped on every weapon used for hate. Innocent people were collateral damage…look at the sheer mess the country was in thanks to one, several-hour fight with aliens. The black markets were flooded with Chitauri lefthovers. No one even attempted to deny that anymore.

People lived because of them. But people also died because of them. And it was the death toll that he’d racked up that kept him awake at night. Dreaming focused only on the wormhole, only on the faceless masses he’d help usher to their deaths. He wasn’t even being dramatic about that. It was all true. The news, people he thought loved him, and the every day folks he saw scurrying to Starbucks thought so.

“You know what? Never mind.” He tugged down the lens over his eye and went to work again. He was sure that he was the only one who felt the tension and it rose into his throat like bile. It took forty-three seconds before he dropped his tool again and flipped his glass up to look up at Bucky’s face. “How can you not remember anything about me? FRIDAY, I need you to find any archived photos or movies…anything of me, from when I was a kid.”

“Parameters, Boss?”

“Let’s do three to fifteen.”

Tony turned on his stool as FRIDAY queued up a an unsurprisingly low amount of footage. Most of the pictures were of Tony and his mother but, as he flicked through the images that hovered over his desk, there was Bucky in profile, carrying Tony, about six or so, piggyback style behind a group of men in uniform walking with his father. He couldn’t help the feeling of dread that washed over him and he grabbed the tool as if for protection.

“FRIDAY, when was this?”

The AI paused. “I can’t find any information about it, Boss.”

The man without a name, he really should choose one for himself just to get used to thinking of himself with an identity that was human, watched Stark and his obvious unease with confusion. Why should it matter so much that he had forgotten yet another person, when he had forgotten so many? It hadn't been a choice, all of those memories had been ripped out of his head time and again in order to create a blank slate for missions.

Was he personally offended? Hurt? As if he somehow should have resisted the effects of the wipe when nobody else had, not even his supposed best friend. It was extremely confusing and led to him frowning over at the adult Stark working on him, rather than the photographs flickering in front of them.

"I don't understand."

His words were soft and genuinely lost.

"Why do you want to be remembered? Why does it matter when I carried you or why? That was the mission, that mission is complete, I have been wiped since then."

"Yeah, cool, stop saying that. It's gross," Tony said, a very, very weak stretch of his ability for annoyingly effective quips. His mind was unfocused, and as much as he would like to blame that on the alcohol, it usually had a different, calming sort of way with him. Scotch, his best friend, had failed him, no matter how much he offered it worship and constant companionship. Rhodey would not approve, but he wasn't around enough to decide if his approval was something he really wanted to start earning or to put off again for next quarter's conscience earned value meeting.

He moved his hands apart to blow up the image and poked the men in suits. There had never been in a time in all of Tony's sometimes faulty memory where his father had anything to do with him. So why was the Winter Soldier carrying him along like that, towards a distant helicopter?

Tony recognized the lawn, recognized the carriage house in the distance and the back of a fence where his mother's gardeners grew her roses. This was the house in Long Island. The one he said he grew up in but had very few memories of until he left school and started crashing on the living room couch of.

There were other questions now, like who would take a photo of this anyway, and who were these men? Why would his dad want him along for any of his shady dealings?

A white flash behind his eyes left him momentarily out of breath. He knew at once what it was, the first caresses of a panic attack, and so Tony waved his hand over the image until it faded into light and distant memories.

"Everyone wants to be remembered. Even you. Maybe. Probably. Jesus, this is a mess. But whatever. Same shit, different day. I can't fix the nerve connection, but I have something that can. Fair warning, I made a murderbot baby with a deadbeat co-parent who never pays childsupport with it so... Mileage may vary."

"I don't want to be remembered."

He would like to remember, he would like to remember everything that he had ever done or said, he would like to know who he was as a person and move on with his damn life. He would like to know if he could ever be an actual person again, or if he had been hollowed out so completely that there was nothing left.

"When people remember me, they remember a lie and they expect me to be that lie. You're doing it now. You're hurt that I'm not the same silent Soldier you remember, and it bothers you that I don't remember whatever relationship you had with something that was just a hollow machine following orders. Ste-- Captain America does it, he calls me Bucky and looks at me like I'm all of his hopes at once. You all remember me as something that I'm not."

It was the longest speech that he had made in about seventy years and his voice was raspy by the time he was done, but it had come with surprising passion. He didn't want people that told him that he was a bodyguard or a best friend, he wanted space and someone who would let him figure out who the hell he was supposed to be now. Someone who might get to know that person and not expect someone else.

"Forget it, I can live with the damage."

All of a sudden he was on his feet and heading back for the door of the lab.

It took a long moment between sitting back down and watching Bucky stalk towards the glass doors that would take him up the stairs and back towards the elevator our of the building for Tony to open his mouth. "You were just there." His Nanny had never been much of anything. He wasn't a conversationalist. He wasn't a companion in the true meaning of the word. He wasn't the first mate to Tony's pirate captain or a joint explorer on a mission to Mars.

Bucky had been a blank doll, a projector screen, and nothing else. Well, no that wasn't always true, was it?

"Mostly, you were as good as furniture." He let the tool go and spun it around on his desk. It was a complicated game of spin the bottle, without anyone around him to land on for a kiss. When it stopped spinning, it landed on empty air and Tony thought that was fitting. "But sometimes you were more than that. You had... I don't know. Moments. Like when you trashed all of my Captain America stuff. Understandable, now, he's an asshole. Or when you snatched me out of bed and carried me to Brooklyn in my pajamas-- Makes sense now, I guess. You had clarity and dad decided to wipe you. So thanks for the attempt to save me a few times. RIP Captain America action figures. Good luck with....whatever."

He stood to fetch the bottle, neatly twisting open the cap with just the edge of his thumb, and wondering what silence about this would do to those insistent, buzzing voices in his head, the ones that reminded him that there was as many moments in his life that he didn't remember as the ones he did.

Edited 2017-10-25 14:20 (UTC)

He doesn't know if it's a comfort that he had experienced moments of almost clarity before he saw Steve on the bridge, or if it just makes it worse that he kept coming close to freedom before he was dragged right back under. Did that mean that the other Bucky was so strong that he couldn't be fully wiped away? If so, where was he now? What stopped him coming back now?

He didn't even pause before he got back on the elevator and then disappeared.

It would be another three months before he showed up again, though he had been monitoring the situation to see if Stark would tell Steve that he had found the man he was tearing the whole goddamn world apart trying to find. When he did show up it would be when Stark was in his lab again, and all of a sudden there would be a man behind him.

"Intruder detected," FRIDAY said helpfully, about ten seconds too late.

"Is she pretty? Or at least an eight?" Tony didn't look up. If there was an intruder alert without a flickering of a screen showing exactly where the intruder supposedly was, that meant that there was someone much too close for comfort. He'd been prepared for that, and was wearing the watch now that could be used as a way to grip a gun and stop it from killing him. "And does Happy know? Because the last time I checked, he's fine and well and sitting downstairs eating Cheetos out of the Family Size bag. What do I pay people for?"

He had been thinking about Bucky, though not exactly Bucky and more about that particular time in his life. He'd uncovered far too much lately, had more or less withdrawn from the Avenging he kept saying he was retired from despite his frequent dabbling, and had several generals and senators on constant hold these days until he needed them to shed some light on the information he was siphoning from their databases.

Sure, SHIELD (what was left of it), was likely monitoring him. Natasha had been by a few times to ask him to stop. And he assumed it was she who was in the room right now.

FRIDAY was up on her game to detect her, though.

Tony glanced up from the file he was flicking through, basically Winter Soldier 101, all in Russian and culled from some abandoned Siberian base no one really remembered existed from the Cold War, to his glass to catch the redhead's reflection in the curved scotch--

Not seeing her caused him to stand and turn abruptly, eyes wide, until he recognized the dull eyes staring at him.

"Jesus Christ. Are you trying to kill me? Actual question, not hyperbole."

If Tony had been delving into HYDRA files about the Winter Soldier, he would find that they were unpleasant reading. They were put together like a manual for how to take care of and maintain a machine, there was nothing in the language that even indicated this was a living and breathing person. It was full of phrases like 'disciplinary maintenance' and 'Asset familiarity'.

FRIDAY, in an effort to keep him from completely shutting himself off, had made sure to give updates on all the other Avengers at regular intervals. Well-- except for Bruce who seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth, and Thor who had gone back to Asgard after his disturbing visions when fighting Wanda. Steve was looking for Bucky, Sam was helping, the others were training and kept wanting him back.

Bucky had got past them all to get in.

"No," he answered, voice low, not offended by the question. "I came to see you, I'm malfunctioning and you're the only technician I have left."

Not his arm, but his head. Fractures of time and memory that were giving him fierce headaches from the scarring on his brain, just another one of HYDRA's legacies for him.

It was Rhodey that managed to keep Tony from sinking into a fog of his own genius, War Machine's objectives and loyalty to the new Avenger team did not keep him from his friend's side. He'd been here more often than not, asking for upgrades, and Tony had obliged. He had no intention of having one of his fugues this time around (they were always so messy and Pepper wasn't around to snap him out of it). He was just busy. Mysteries did not solve themselves.

Though he had no reason to believe a damned thing Bucky said, Tony lowered his defensively postured arms from in front of his face and sat back on the desk.

"You're not a machine," he said immediately. His schematics for DUM-E were far more humanizing than the manuals he'd been reading. He never even called DUM-E an it, the way that these assholes did. He crossed his arms and looked up at Bucky as he stood there, perpetual frown on a face that didn't really suit it. "And I told you. I'm a doctor. But I can fix that seam without the use of good Doctor Cho's device. I figured out a biological polymer. I dabble in biology now, thanks to you."

Bruce would be so pleased. Or afraid. Everytime Tony picked up a new hobby, it meant people died.

"I'm not here about my arm."

His advanced healing had taken care of that. He had wrenched the panels out of the flesh of his shoulder far enough to let the bone and skin heal by themselves. It was still painful and he didn't have full range of motion, but it was good enough to live by. He had an extremely high pain tolerance, after all.

"The malfunction is in my head," he continued, not really knowing what other term to use. He had found himself more human, but he was still struggling with it. Was that so surprising, though, for a man who had been nothing but a machine for literal decades? "Debilitating pain and occasional loss of vision."

It was a good thing that Tony was currently seated because he was fairly certain that he would have needed to otherwise. His face morphed from annoyed to curious to blank. How do you deal with a guy who is so unaware of himself that memory makes him think he's malfunctioning?

Tony wasn't a psychiatrist. He did the talking. The world revolved around him and when it decided not to, he tried to force it back on track. Helping other people was typically conducted through several channels such as Throw Money At It to Throw The Legion At It to Throw Iron Man At It. None of Tony's methods could be of any help in this situation and he wasn't a calm, empathic, emotional creature that could heal through love and understanding either.

Wariness filled his dark eyes as he lightly scratched the underside of his chin.

"So your malfunction? That's not physical." He reached beside him for the tablet computer he had been reading up classified information on, flicking his index finger over the screen. His Russian had improved remarkably since he'd last seen Bucky and he addressed him in Russian now, reading from the source material. "If there is deviation from standard programming or a degradation in the adherence to protocol, wipe the Asset immediately." Tony tossed the computer back onto the desk. "I don't think that's a good idea. But I'll tell you what? I also suffer from debilitating pain and occasional loss of vision from time to time. It's called high anxiety disorder. You're having panic attacks."

And he knew all about what fractured bits of repressed memory (or in his case, hearing voices telling him things he either shouldn't know or hadn't happened) did to a person revolved around his frequent abuse of alcohol. Too bad Bucky couldn't get drunk.

"Let me guess...your memories are popping back up?"

As soon as Stark addressed him in Russian and read words clearly from the manual on his own care, he stiffened up and very nearly went for him. He had said that he wasn't HYDRA, but that didn't mean that he had been telling the truth. People rarely told truths when they belonged to an organisation like that, and why else would he have that particular document to hand?

"I'm not the Asset, and if you try and wipe me then I'll kill you." The threat was probably more effective because he didn't give it in a snap or aggressive tone of voice, just a casual neutral tone like he was just giving his opinion on the weather. It's sunny today and I might kill you.

It wasn't panic.

He was relatively sure that it wasn't panic. He would know, he would be able to recognise that sort of intense fear, he had felt it at other points. He had woken up terrified and drenched in sweat and panting, but this was different. This was the white hot pain of a migraine and blacked out vision. This was the blood vessels in his brain under pressure, the scarification that HYDRA had etched in there no longer properly maintained. He had pieces of metal in his brain to work with the reprogramming machine, he should be dead but skilled doctors and engineers working together had maintained him.

Now he was a dead man walking.

"Did you miss the part where I said that wasn't a good idea?" Tony grunted. "You need to stop threatening me. I had to do all sorts of things to explain away those bruises you left the last time." He hadn't, actually, no one wanted to know about them. No one ever looked at him that closely anymore. And Rhodey knew better than to question him about anything personal. He never liked the answers. "And I don't appreciate it."

He doubted that his bodyguard with this new, unstable personality actually cared, though. He also doubted that these were posturing words to leverage help. He would kill him. It was written all over his face.

"Aside from an inability to understand when I'm reading and when I'm actually addressing you, you're going to have to be about ten times more specific about what your problem is. Don't just make impressively aggressive faces at me. You came to me. Again, I might add."

He gestured absently to the furniture for Bucky to have a seat before he used the heel of his boot to situate his stool back under himself and transferred his now distracted rear from the desk to it. He leaned his elbow on the table and spent another minute or two flicking through digital files before the slow process annoyed him enough.

"FRIDAY, full scan. Let's see what we've got to work with here."

"I don't know why I've come to you."

It was a quiet admission and sounded much more human than anything else he had said. He didn't know why, much like the Soldier hadn't known why he had destroyed Tony's Captain America model collection. It was instinct, something deeper than memory that recalled that Tony hadn't treated him unkindly and could be trusted. But if he had to give voice to that, then he had no idea.

It only took a fraction of a second for FRIDAY to finish the full body scan and put it up on the screen. Aside from the the damage to Bucky's shoulder that was already known about, he had a fractured left leg and two broken ribs. But it was the scan of his brain that would be the most worrying, there were so many dead sections and scars that it should be a literal impossibility that Bucky were even alive at all. Bits of metal showed up white on the scan, and no less than four blood clots were already forming where maintenance hadn't been performed in too long.

Bucky sat still while this was going on, though he watched Stark the whole time out of intensely focused eyes.

Watching the failures with Bucky's body was like watching a diagnostic of a crashing system. Parts were highlighted in brilliant scarlet, words of warning flashed. FRIDAY suggested calling the hospital for emergency transport, and one of the smaller voices that often plagued him whispered that fixing him would be a piece of cake.

Piece of cake?! He wasn't quite panicked, mostly incredulous, but there went his heart rate again, pulsing and pounding in his ears. It didn't drown out the sound or the surety he felt, despite having just broken one of his cardinal rules about never, ever, acknowledging those voices.

He pressed a hand to his forehead and shook his head.

"You're getting in Cho's machine. I'm not a brain surgeon. I don't want to learn to become one either and I don't think you have a whole lot of time. I can fix you, and that bed is going to keep you alive while I do it."

What was the worst thing that could happen?

Bucky could die? He certainly wasn't living right now, that was for sure.

He could see the scan results as well and hear what FRIDAY said about emergency hospital relocation, but it was what Stark said that scared him the most. For the first time since he had shown up months ago, his expression changed from the stoic and neutral mask that the Soldier had been trained into, and became genuine fear.

"I'm not-- no."

He wasn't going to go into any sort of machine. Especially not one that would mess around with his brain, he couldn't do that again, he couldn't lose what precious tiny sense of self he had managed to get back.

"It's not that bad, I can handle it."

Fine. If it was a choice between the malfunctions and submitting to a machine again, he would take the headaches and the loss of vision. He had handled worse.

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