"No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories." - Haruki Murakami

Chapter 10: Machinery

The Soldier felt off-balance and vulnerable with his metal arm deactivated. He'd almost never had to do things without it fully operational; now it was a dead weight making his gait graceless and clumsy. He got through lunch as best as he could, trying to function as normal.

That was what he was trained to do, after all. Function as normal even with a bullet wound in his thigh or a knife in his stomach or missing limbs or no clothes or frostbite or whatever may occur in the course of his missions. The metal arm, though… It almost never stopped working, and when it did it rebooted itself within a few minutes. He was aware that right now it wasn't supposed to work, which probably meant that this was training, but that didn't make it any easier to deal with.

He scooped himself a plate of macaroni and cheese, then sat down to eat it, reciting protocols under his breath and trying desperately to ignore the worrying heaviness of his metal arm tugging painfully at the nerves and skin of his shoulder. He already hated having his arm deactivated and he would make sure it never happened on mission… trying to fight like this would be a nightmare.

After they finished eating, the scientist and the technician informed him that they would be taking his metal arm off to replace it with a new and better one. The Soldier almost shuddered but stopped himself in time. Tech upgrades to the arm hurt, hurt like hell, but he knew better than to flinch. Once the procedure started, it would probably be impossible not to react, but he never got terribly severe punishments for his screams.

His handler had him lie down on a hospital-type bed, white and a bit too soft. Several times they warned him that they were going to do something like put a needle in his vein or check his blood pressure, but for the most part it was quiet.

The Soldier was fairly relaxed, even with the technician and the scientist fussing around his shoulder. He was just managing to zone out and let his mind go blank (Hydra called it his mission mindset) when, without any warning, something sharp was pressed into his shoulder.

Bucky was lying on cold unyielding metal, pure agony burning in his shoulder as flesh and metal melted and wire and nerves sparked. The whole time his new arm was being grafted onto him, skin and bone cut and shaped, Zola stared at him with cold, snakelike eyes and smiled smugly. Bucky's chest, waist, right arm, and legs were strapped to the table with thick black leather, but he was trying to struggle all the same, screaming incoherent curses until he finally blacked out from the agony.

They had to literally drag him to the chair after that, beating him, shocking him, and digging cruel fingers into his burning shoulder. They forced him to sit, and the clamps sealed around his arms and he screamed hoarsely as the electricity burned him away.

"Bucky, come on, buddy, you're at Avengers Tower and you're safe now. Come on, Buck, look at me."

Bucky blinked and watched the past recede, to be replaced by the Captain's worried eyes. He had somehow tumbled off the hospital bed onto the floor and curled up in the fetal position. He felt tentatively along his shoulder and arm. It was still there. He was alright… sort of. The Soldier swallowed uncomfortably and climbed back into the hospital bed without a word.

Stark looked horrified. "I'm sorry, Barnes. I'm such a screw-up. Damn. I meant to tell you before I injected you but it felt so normal I..."

The Assert shrugged with one shoulder. The people here were so strange. Always apologizing, always making sure he wasn't in pain, acting like normal procedures were awful or odd. It wasn't a bad kind of strange, but it put him on edge and gave him ideas that terrified him. Ideas full of blood and the downfall of Hydra and freedom – what exactly was freedom? Anyway, he almost missed Russia. The Russians had always been better handlers and agents and slower to get angry, although the Americans didn't hurt him as much.

These people were definitely American, except for Natalia, but they didn't get angry often. They didn't punish him with anything more than words. They fed him real food that was good, not scraps or protein drinks. They were…

Not Hydra.

His handler kept saying this wasn't Hydra.

Was that even possible?

He hazarded a question. "Captain?" he asked tentatively.

"Yes?" His handler sounded exhausted. That was the Asset's fault.

"Where are we?"

"Avengers Tower, in downtown Manhattan."

"Oh." The Soldier paused. "But… are we Hydra? KGB? The Red Room? Who are we affiliated with?"

His handler smiled a little. "We're the Avengers, Buck. We save the world from people like Pierce. We want to take Hydra down."

The Soldier frowned, confused. ""But… Hydra has to give the world the freedom it deserves," he parroted. To his surprise, the Captain's eyes hardened angrily and he shook his head.

"No, Bucky. Hydra doesn't want to give anyone freedom. They want to take it away and hurt people. The Avengers fight people like them."

The Soviet assassin thought for a long moment about that. He really wasn't with Hydra, then. As a matter of fact, his new handler hated Hydra. He thought maybe he should be relieved by that, but all he felt was a wrongness in his stomach. His handler shouldn't hate Hydra. Hydra gave him a purpose and a new arm and pain and they were right about everything. He shook his head slowly.

"Hail Hydra," he said.

"No, Bucky, not hail Hydra," the Captain said firmly. "Hydra's full of bullshit and they need to be stopped."

Bucky's mind started whirling with familiar phrases that his handlers always fed him about Hydra, about how he belonged to Hydra and how Hydra gave him everything he had.

"Hey Bucky, you're zoning out on us again," his handler called gently. The Soldier blinked and nodded to show that he'd heard.

"What are you thinking?" Natalia asked.

"I am... I don't understand. Hydra is… I'm Hydra's."

"No, Kiryanov, you don't belong to anyone. You're your own person."

"But I… I'm not… What is my mission?" He felt himself start to panic, unsure of himself. All his instincts were telling him to kill, to get out and find Hydra, but a new side of himself was arguing very strongly against that idea. He could choose to leave and find the cruel, cold and familiar, or he could stay with the uncertainty, not punished and fed well. Natalia Romanova was here, and he still didn't know why he remembered his old handler. He didn't like this. He had a choice and he didn't know what to do. It made his head hurt. He rocked silently back and forth, trying to control his breathing.

"You don't have a mission just yet," Natalia said reassuringly, touching his right shoulder. "Maybe once you're better."

He latched onto that idea with relief. "I can be better! I can do what you want and I won't have a flashback again; please give me a mission! I'm operational." He needed a mission. He needed to stop having flashbacks and questions and just do something.

Captain Rogers and Natalia glanced at each other, then the Captain sighed and sank down to sit on a chair. Stark and the scientist went back to dismantling his metal arm and muttering quietly back and forth to each other. He couldn't feel his shoulder anymore, which was strange.

No one said anything about a mission. No one even spoke, except for when Stark told him they were going to start trying to take the arm off now. There was a tugging sensation in his shoulder, but otherwise he felt nothing. Once again he wondered what he'd done wrong.

Finally the mild-mannered scientist spoke up, much to his surprise. "I think you're doing fine, Barnes," he said kindly. "But we do a different kind of mission than you're used to, and until you remember you won't be able to help us with them."

Remember? The Soldier thought about that. He was trying to remember… sometimes he thought about things and it made his head hurt because he didn't know something he should. "Remember what?" he asked.

The scientist shrugged. "Start by trying to remember how you know Steve over there. Does that sound good?"

The Asset glanced over at his handler, who was leaning forward, looking almost nervous. "Yes. Is that a mission?"

Natalia answered him. "I suppose it is."

The Soldier had a mission, then. He had to remember Captain Rogers.

A/N: This is, obviously, a shorter chapter. It was gonna be longer, but I felt like that line ^ was a natural ending point, so... Yeah. Sorry about stuff. Sorry about the flashback and... yeah. I'm just sorry. This chapter got out of hand.

The longer Bucky is out of cryo, the faster he will remember. In theory, anyway.