"You encountered the Winter Soldier again, during the break."
"Yes, sir."
"How was he?"
Steve looked at the Professor's feet. "They wiped him again."
"This makes four times then."
"Yes, sir. Eleven visits, four wipes."
The Professor made a note of that in the log. "I find it very curious," he said, "that they keep erasing his memory, and yet he keeps coming back to you. To the apartment you shared. Whether it is muscle memory or instinct or something else, there is a part of him that knows you, a part so integral to his being that they cannot root it out without making him useless to them."
"I thought so, too, but it's nice to hear it from someone else. You think there's hope?"
"There might be. He would never again be the man you knew, but he might recover enough to call himself 'Bucky Barnes' and have it be truth." The telepath wrote a bit more. "Physically, how was he?"
"He had a gunshot wound on his right side, through and through, no organ damage but he'd been bleeding for a while. And his brain – no worse, but no better, either. I did what I could for him. Dr Grey's lessons have helped a lot." It was slow going, very slow going, but he had learned to heal bruises and small cuts without transferring them to himself, and was starting to inch his way up to more severe injuries.
"No worse but no better," the Professor repeated, briefly tapping his pen on the log. His gaze was distant, probably conferring with someone.
The bell rang, and the man dismissed him to his classes. Even though the first week back was always an easy one, he still couldn't afford to miss a single class. He might have been living in the "modern era" for almost fourteen years, but he was still learning new things every day and unlearning old ones, still adapting to new discoveries, new science, new technology.
"Steve!"
Marie and Kitty waived him over; they had saved him a seat next to them. He smiled and darted over to sit next to them, waving to a few others who called out greetings. "How was you break?" he asked as he sat down.
"Good. I called my parents." Marie's southern drawl lengthened her vowels and reminded Steve of one of the few lazy Sundays he had with Bucky.
"And?"
She smiled shyly. "They came up to see me last week. We had to be careful, but I got hugs from everyone anyway."
Both Steve and Kitty beamed. Marie's relationship with everyone was complicated by her mutation, but they were happy to see that her parents wanted to reconnect. Not everyone was so lucky.
