ei-dolon:

*sciency ramblings about bucky’s arm with a bit of angst*

I made a gifset yesterday that highlighted Bucky’s nervous habit of clenching and unclenching his metal fist, right after Steve says “I need you to do better than ‘I don’t know’”. Later on in that scene, there’s a brief shot of him sitting, hunched over, and wringing both of his hands together.

Both of these instances say a lot about how much sensitivity the limb has, specifically in the fingertips; the technology is so advanced that it’s a part of him in the most literal sense, and he unconsciously treats it as such. 

The arm also has a clear sense of pressure and touch, as demonstrated in CA:TWS (that one scene with the tiny, round explosive device that everyone is fond of making gifsets of for really weird reasons) and CA:CW (he tests plums for ripeness by gently squeezing them). 

I’m guessing there are a ton of electrodes embedded in the internal mechanism, all of which allow him to control and manipulate the arm, recieve sensations of pressure, heat, cold, texture, etc. Whether he can feel ‘pain’ is debatable, considering he was able to use his metal arm as a brake along several feet of roadway, but there’s definitely got to be some sort of equivalent in order to warn him if he’s going to damage it–and it would take significant trauma in order for that to happen. In general though, his brain treats the prothesis like a real arm.

All this to say: getting the whole shebang ripped off at the shoulder joint by an arc reactor beam probably felt like he was losing his flesh arm all over again. Because it’s the same concept–all the signals that his brain was recieving from the prothesis are suddenly gone. Right after losing his arm, he passed out for several several minutes, and when he came to, he could hardly move, and if that doesn’t indicate severe pain, I don’t know what does.

I mean, think about it.  Bucky is one of those people who doesn’t go down easily. He spent 90% of his screentime in CA:TWS getting the crap kicked out of him, and hardly made a sound. As the Winter Soldier, he was taught to disregard physical damage to his body in order to complete the mission. That suicidal endurance isn’t going to go away. It’s as much a part of him as his arm was, and will permanently affect his combat behaviors. 

So when Bucky is physically unable to give any contribution to a fight beyond grabbing his opponent’s ankle, it’s a pretty good indicator that he’s Suffering™.