Your Hands Have Made Some Good Mistakes

Solstice

A sickly feeling grew in his gut while he worked through the basics. After the fall, he was captured again, he told her. His left arm was mostly gone, probably caught on the rocky cliffs he tumbled down, and he expected to bleed out there in the snow. He welcomed it. But he was found and brought to another bunker, this time in Siberia. He couldn't tell her how long he was kept there, because he didn't know himself.

Bucky didn't speak any Russian at the time, but, unfortunately, he was a fast learner. The names of their tools came first; he quickly learned what they called the scalpel and bone saw and soldering iron, though he wished he hadn't. It was better, easier for him when he didn't know what they were going to do to him, when he didn't understand their plans days in advance. When he still thought they might help him, might give what was left of his arm cleaner cut and then let him heal. When he didn't hear them muttering about bolts and drills, discussing experimental techniques and the odds of the prosthetic limb taking. He wished he was ignorant, so he would only have to suffer through the pain once, in real-time, instead of over and over in his head between each procedure.

That time in his life was fuzzy enough— Hydra offered no sedation, no painkillers, and when he wasn't being actively operated on, the deep-set agony in his chest and arm was bad enough to make him wish that he was. At least when the pain was that fresh and sharp, he was sometimes lucky enough to fall unconscious. The delirium that set in during that period was a refuge, but it made it impossible for him to track the hours and days he lost strapped down on the operating table.

When his new arm was firmly attached, rooted deeply under his skin and bolted into his bones, haphazardly wired straight to his brain, his indoctrination began.

"That's kind of where I... lose it." Bucky glanced down at the table; his notebook sat unopened in front of him. "The memories." He had spent years trying to dig through his convoluted consciousness— especially after DC, when he found his way to Bucharest without knowing who he was— but all he could recall were the vaguest fragments of sensations. The smell of blood and gunpowder, the texture of crunching sinew and cartilage. None of it made sense. None of it connected.

But all of that wasn't important; how he got there didn't matter.

"I only know what I did after that because I read about it," he continued. He couldn't trust his own mind, but he could trust history, trust the records and files. The reports didn't mention him by name, of course; the Winter Soldier was a ghost story. But there were characteristics he could look for: missing persons with ties to political figures who disappeared without a trace, assassinations made to look like accidents.

Explaining it to Karen there in the conference room, he tried to keep it linear. Tried to make as much sense of it as he could. He flipped through his notebook with his right hand as he spoke, reading the details of his transgressions from the pages. He hadn't been able to use the dates he found to calculate how old he was, but they still served as a kind of road map, a guide to how he had spent his years.

Karen had a pained expression on her face while he spoke— of course she did. Anyone in their right mind would be uncomfortable sitting across from him while he recounted his crimes. But she let Bucky speak, and finally, when he was done, she took a deep breath.

"Serg... Bucky," she said carefully. "You got all of that information from news reports and the trial, right?" He nodded, and she gave him an apologetic wince. "That's... that's all public information. I did my research before meeting with you, of course, and none of that is new to me."

He didn't understand.

"What you said about your arm, that was good," she said encouragingly. "But I can't just report what was already reported." Bucky looked at her blankly. "That won't... it won't help anything," she explained. "It won't change anything. We need to tell them something they don't know."