daphneblithe

This entry is a summary for people who are reading Love Among the Ruins and wished to skip Chapter 11 and 12.

While Bucky is at the weird ruined hospital, he keeps undergoing insulin injection. The doctor Leander speaks to Bucky about two projects, one run by the scientist Guseinova and focused on genetic experimentation, and one seemingly led by Leander and focused on ‘sleep and remembering’. Bucky is taken to a different room, one he recognizes from years before, and Leander confirms that Bucky was in this very hospital decades earlier. They are trying to make Bucky remember something from long ago, but they don't tell him what.

In line with accurate psychiatric practice from the 1930s to mid 1950s, Bucky is treated daily with insulin and other soporifics to force sleep and sometimes seizure. Leander is clearly very informed on research of the period, and the ways insulin coma was used also in theaters of war.

After weeks of the treatment, Leander tells Bucky more about his sleep project. It is called Project Rusalka, and has two dimensions: using sleep therapy to try and help Bucky remember material from his past that Hydra need (what??) and ultimately, a plan to develop ‘sleep clinics’ again in some way, as part of Hydra’s ongoing covert brainwashing goals. Leander even mentions how in the 1930s a hospital in Brooklyn was used in a pilot attempt; Bucky doesn’t know that Sarah Rogers saw exactly that, but the reader may remember it.

Gradually it emerges that Leander and Hydra want Bucky to remember an old location where Zola worked on him. Bucky is given a new arm, and is electrocuted into Winter Soldier amnesia and compliance, combined with sleep therapy and hypnotic suggestion. Under this influence, he leads the Hydra team to a ruin from his past. Yet before Bucky can complete the mission and find whatever-it-is that Hydra want, the trance cracks and Bucky remembers Steve – before remembering his own name – and the search attempt fails.

Leander is enraged, and later Bucky experiences unwanted sexual contact. Afterwards, a nurse seems to inject Bucky with his usual dose of insulin, but in a strange way – she seems sad, and bids him goodbye, in English. About an hour later Bucky has a terrifying seizure and falls into oblivion.