A/N: So apparently Google has lied to me and sugar water actually does have medicinal use. The more you know.

When he wakes up the world is white.

The Soldier's mind goes to snow and ice and the only thing that keeps him from screaming is the onset of shrill bursts of sound to his left. He tilts his head and the white becomes a ceiling rather than a snow storm. Eyes reaching the point where the ceiling meets the wall, his gaze carries on downward and lands on the machine producing the noise. It's a heart rate monitor, though he can't say why he knows the name. The sounds slow as he stares at it, leveling out as he realizes the beat is his own.

It takes a moment to grasp he is lying on a bed, because he has no memory of ever being in one before. The mattress below him is so soft it feels as if it could give way at any time. The clothes on his body are not the ones he was wearing when he fell asleep; they are dark and very, very soft, and the sleeves are short. There is an IV port in his right arm connected to two lines that lead up to bags of clear fluid hanging from a stand beside the bed. A wire snakes from between the buttons on the shirt that is not his, leading to the heart rate monitor. He raises his right hand, brushes it against his face, and the hair that had been growing there is gone.

HYDRA never put him in a bed that he can remember, never gave him clothing that wasn't tactical gear, but beyond that the set-up is identical to the moments of respite between missions or the time between the tank and being sent out.

So the man who had wings lied and he is to be a weapon again. The Soldier cannot lie, but he finds no surprise in the thought that others mislead him. That he will be made back into an asset seems more of a foregone conclusion than a trick. It almost doesn't hurt to realize it.

The door opens and the man who had wings is there. "Hey, Bucky. How're you feeling?"

"Functional." Any answer beyond that is irrelevant. He doubts a verbal response is necessary at all—the man must have hooked him up to these things, surely he knows how the Soldier feels—but they'll punish if he doesn't acknowledge them. He remembers that. Sitting up, he gathers the resolve to question at least where they are, but the look on the man's face delays him.

"Thought your arm wasn't working?"

Both hands are braced against the mattress, arms supporting him as he fully sits. The Soldier lifts the metal hand with a curious stare, flexes the fingers. The wrist and elbow bend and the shoulder rotates. When he brushes the metal fingers against his face, they are cold. "It wasn't." Something in the tubes powers it, then. He wants to ask what is in them, but why would he be allowed to know how to sustain himself?

Instead, he asks, "Where am I?"

"New York." He must see something in the Soldier's face, because he adds, "Not Brooklyn, okay? This is Manhattan. And it was either this or take you to a hospital, and hospitals are a little less forgiving about the whole "fugitive from justice" thing."

The Soldier hadn't realized he was a fugitive from justice. He supposes that's to be expected when one opens fire on a populated bridge, but it isn't something he's ever had to worry about. "Why Manhattan?"

The door is opening as he speaks and an almost familiar man with dark hair is entering, pulling a utility cart behind him. There are tools and tablets and things the Soldier does not recognize on its surface. "Because I don't make house calls, and we're all better off if I perform repairs instead of creepy government suits. Plus, how many other recovery rooms are you gonna find with Cerruti sheets?"

"Bucky, this is Tony Stark," the man who had wings says, and while the name sparks something, the Soldier can't place it.

Tony Stark comes to a stop by the side of the bed, watching as the metal limb lowers until the hand is resting in the Soldier's lap. "Sam said your arm wasn't working." He sounds disappointed, as if a weapon with a broken arm is somehow favorable.

"It wasn't," the man who had wings—Sam—says. "What, does it charge when you sleep?"

"I can still look at it, right?" Tony Stark asks. "Figure out how it functions? You know, so we can keep it from failing again and make sure there's no tracking chips and I get to check out the cool shiny cybernetic? I mean, I've turned this tower into a bed and breakfast for wayward geriatric super soldiers, free of charge, so really it's—"

"Bucky, is it all right if Tony takes a look at your arm?"

He cannot grasp why they wouldn't have examined it while he was still unconscious. HYDRA always recalibrated it while he was right out of cryo and barely functioning. But HYDRA designed it. Perhaps his new handlers require his feedback to properly maintain it.

"Yes," he says, because Tony Stark said super soldiers, plural, which means Steve is somewhere in this building. And he doesn't want to hurt people Steve might care about, no matter what they plan to do with him.

Tony Stark taps his hand against the tablet before lifting it back up and the screen seems to rise as well, hovering in the air. The Soldier thinks it is called a hologram. Tony Stark places his hand at one corner of the hologram and draws it away slowly, extending the size of the screen. "All right, Anastasia, here's the deal. I can't imagine you're too fond of people poking at you like a big metallic lab rat, and I've definitely not fond being strangled, outside of a very specific set of circumstances and safe words. So. You need a minute at any time, tell me. And if you can't speak, just flip me the bird, okay?"

"What bird?"

Tony Stark proceeds to teach him a hand gesture that makes Sam laugh and shake his head at the same time. He then offers something that looks similar to the security wands in airports, only much smaller.

The Soldier hadn't realized up until that thought that he had ever been in an airport.

"This is what I'm gonna use to take a look in your hardware," he explains. "And probably the rest of you, just to make sure there aren't any sub-dermal microchips or anything. That button on the side there activates it. You just wave it over anything you want to creep on—slowly—and it'll show up onscreen."

The Soldier runs the wand across Tony Stark's chest, because it is the nearest thing that is not a pillow or a blanket. When the image appears on the hologram, Stark taps it and things go translucent, displaying fabric layered over skin over insides. He presses his fingers to the screen and spreads them apart, and the hologram splits into screens of each component: fabric, skin, musculature, bones, organs and blood vessels. There is much scar tissue, the Soldier notes, at the center of the man's chest.

"See? Completely painless. Wanna give it a go?"

When Stark scans his arm, he stops the wand at the point where skin meets metal. The Soldier gently lifts his right hand and pushes the scanner higher up. The metal continues under his skin, to the point where the collarbone reaches the sternum. It replaces muscle tissue from the point of the scarring and into his torso and neck. When the scan divides into its components, rather than muscle and bone, one screen displays the plating, and another the hydraulics in the wrist and elbow. There is circuitry beneath the plating, most of it incased in gel that Stark theorizes aloud is meant to absorb shock. The joints of the arm itself contain pockets of the gel, while the fingers are cable-jointed. The frame beneath everything else is not unlike the bones of his opposite arm. On the screen, his glove lights up with all the synthetic nerve endings implanted inside the leather.

Stark is most interested in the point beneath the metal musculature of his shoulder, where the arm connects into nerves and body tissue. He is constantly enlarging and rotating the hologram, muttering under his breath. The Soldier isn't sure what he finds so interesting, but he thinks the man looks happy.

"If I touch it, you won't kill me, right?" Stark asks, and it takes the Soldier a moment to realize he's being addressed. No one ever asks permission to touch his body. When he nods, Stark's fingers skitter over the surface of it, gently lifting the plates and setting them back down. "How much can you feel without the glove?"

"Pressure and temperature. Not much texture." His fingers barely feel at all. The Soldier is not sure if that is intentional or if they are too small for the circuitry.

"Does it have a set temperature range?" Stark's hand runs over the glove, the only part of the arm that is nearly warm.

A shrug. No one had ever given him measurements. "It doesn't reach the rest of the body's temperature. It cannot…" The Soldier pauses, searching for a word. "It cannot…burn the skin with cold?" He is not used to someone touching the glove so lightly—generally it is not touched outside of combat or maintenance—and he feels itching even though that sensation should not be possible. The arm tenses, plates sliding together.

Stark's face lights up at the action and he walks his fingers to the forearm, occasionally asking the Soldier to flex or bend as he examines the technology. "This is beautiful," he says, running his hand over the plating a final time before he steps back. "You know that? No one else's got anything like this."

To be called beautiful, if only in part, twists in the Soldier's stomach and pulls foreign emotions just below the surface of his memories. But it seems sincere. He stares at the arm, the smooth silver metal and the red star. He's never thought of it as beautiful. It's never been anything but his arm.

"So how does it run?" Sam asks.

"Ah, now there's the question." Stark is scrutinizing the screens again. "Well, a question. Other questions include "why paint a star on it" and "can he operate a touch screen?" But it's a good question."

"You don't know?"

"I have theories, Top Gun. And much as I hate would-be genocidal totalitarian regimes, HYDRA's got some impressive engineering prowess, I'll give them that. The takeaway here is, it's not going to blow up and it's not going to lead a ninja clan to our doors, so everyone wins." He waves a hand across the screens and they clear. "Especially me. Because I get to poke at the fun new tech more. But first, let's make sure they didn't tag any of the rest of you, okay, Tin Man?"

He doesn't move as the wand runs over him, transfixed by the sight forming on the holographic screens. It isn't that the Soldier hadn't realized what the interior of a body looks like. He has it memorized, knowing just where to shoot and slice to do the most damage in the least amount of time. But to see it in him, to look into his own body and have it match that of a person, is something else entirely.

Stark pauses the wand over his sternum, examining the screen with the bones and mumbling about metal coatings. The Soldier's eyes remained glued to the center screen. The circulatory system. His heart is beating and he can watch as it happens.

Mouth forming a smile, the Soldier leans slightly forward. His arm is just a limb and not especially interesting. This, though, is beautiful.

A/N: Pretty much everything in this chapter regarding the Soldier's arm and what is inside it, especially the idea that the glove improves the sensation of texture, comes from the brilliant therealdeepsix on Tumblr, who has a very long and intelligent post on what likely makes up the tech of the arm (I can't link it directly here, but I will link it in the notes for this chapter on my Archive of Our Own account, which is linked in my profile page). She also shared my thoughts on the arm running off of calories, which is super cool.

Cerruti sheets – I don't even think they make these anymore. They are the very, very expensive bed sheets best known for being stained with "cranberry juice" in American Psycho.

Once upon a time I had surgery in a university hospital, and the process was explained to me by two very enthusiastic med students who obviously loved their job and wanted me to love it too. It was very "high fives all around! This is going to rock! See this skull? Let's just demonstrate what we're going to do with it! You want to hold the skull? Yeah, just like that! This is gonna be the greatest surgery ever!" Their enthusiasm was pretty contagious, and ever since then I am convinced that is the best possible way to perform medical (or mechanical) attention. It also just struck me as the Tony way of doing things.

According to the concept artists of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Bucky's arm is supposed to be slightly more advanced than Tony's technology. Which is both amazing and terrifying.