Lovers in Arms | Bucky Barnes

Part 18

After everyone has returned to their seat, the judge calls everyone to order and asks Moore to start with her questions.

Moore nods and stands up, walking slowly towards Bucky with a friendly demeanour. It makes Bucky relax slightly after Anderson's interrogation. "Sergeant Barnes. Can you tell something about yourself?"

"My name is James Buchanan Barnes. Friends call me Bucky. I was born on March 10, 1917 in Brooklyn, and I am... was the eldest child of four."

"And early in life you became best friends with Steve Rogers." Moore continues. "According to your records you were an excellent athlete who also excelled inside the classroom." She pauses.

"In our conversations you told me about the time you and captain Rogers had no choice to get a ride back towards Brooklyn on the back of a freezer truck as you had used all your train money to buy hot dogs."

Bucky nods his head and chuckles. "That's correct." Some members of the jury also laugh. "Are we here to catch up on memories?" he asks.

Making some members of the jury laugh was her intention all along. "Let me continue." Moore picks up the remote control from the desk. With a press of a button a picture appears on the screen. A picture of 1943's Bucky in his uniform, alongside tiny Steve, just before he was send out for training.

"Where was this picture taken?"

"I believe at, or just before the Stark Expo in 1943. The last time I saw Steve like that."

"You look happy and handsome if I may say. And I believe this was just before you received your orders and would be going into war the next morning."

"Yes, I was drafted." He replies.

Moore looks him straight into his eyes. Raising her eyebrows and giving him a questioning look. Bucky knows she wants to discuss serious topics now and slowly nods back to her, answering her unspoken question.

She presses the button to go to the next picture. "And when was this picture taken, and what is happening?"

A picture appears, it's an image of a video he watched weeks ago. The one where HYDRA just dragged him out of the gorge. Wearing his original dark blue Howling Commando's outfit, all wet and bleeding on a slab. The atmosphere in the courtroom shifts. Some of the jury gasp at the sudden brutality of the image.

"It was..." It's like he can't speak anymore so Bucky clears his throat. "...it was after I fell down a 400-feet gorge during my last mission with the Howling Commando's in 1945. I was just able to survive the fall from the train, though my left arm was ripped from my body upon impact. I was discovered by a Soviet soldier, who dragged me back to a Soviet POW camp where they kept me until Zola was released from the SSR's custody. They started removing the remnants of my severed arm, the doctors replaced the missing limb with a prosthetic one."

Moore nods. "Thank you. And this image?" The next picture appears. This time a less disturbing scene.

"This is one of the pods they kept me in. When I was in cryo-freeze."

"And what did that process look like?"

Bucky looks around the courtroom. Everyone listens carefully to what he has to say, they hang on his lips. The judge, jury, and audience. "I would be taken out of cryo-freeze and wiped the second I regained consciousness. A guard would say the activation words and the Winter Soldier would be activated, and was send on the mission. When the Winter Soldier was retrieved after a mission... most of the time they had to wipe my mind because the mind control would ware off after a period of time. Sometimes I would see flashes of my prior life, not understanding them and become, like HYDRA would say; 'unstable'."