Okay so it's always been a while lol. This time I had good reasons? I mentioned that last chapter things had been really, really shitty…well literally like a week later I landed an art test for my DREAM JOB and by the end of November I had started working there. Y'all. Like. I don't want to mention the company name because I don't need my co-workers finding my fanfiction, but I'm working on a videogame. As a part of a big name studio. We had our private beta this weekend if that helps ;P

Anyways, I still have lots written and have been writing to connect it all. Let me know what you think!

Chapter 36

She was glad the young hostess had seated them at an empty booth in the dining room that was nearly full as opposed to the much emptier section Clara had seen through the windows on their way in.

He'd be less likely to make a scene with a crowd.

Clara was determined to do this. She was going to do this. She'd spent more time than she'd ever admit in the bathroom that morning breathing deeply and whispering to herself in the mirror. It was definitely more challenging to be the one that needed help as opposed to the one dishing out advice.

She waited until he was halfway through his pancakes, his mouth full before she dropped her bomb.

"So, one thing that was talked about at my session was that I should tell you that they experimented on me." Her hand beneath the table gripped the cloth napkin into a wad, her other sliding the remains of her omelet around the syrup on her plate.

Bucky choked and she calmly nudged his glass of water towards him, careful to keep her eyes on what she was doing.

"What?" His voice was a low rumble and she felt instant regret. She knew she should have kept it to herself.

"Please don't...freak out," she muttered. She noticed his hands clenched tightly around his silverware in the same moment he did. His fingers sprung open and the bent metal fell to the table.

Clara carefully set her fork down and rubbed her forehead with her palm. "Bucky—"

"Clara."

"—I didn't want you to get mad—"

"You didn't want me to be mad?" He hissed lowly. She heard him take a slow breath, and his voice as calmer when he spoke again. "Clara. Look at me."

His voice was gentle, but his request was not easy. She could feel the emotions radiating off him in waves. But she looked anyways.

"Are you okay?" He demanded slowly and gently, the effort to remain calm clear on his face.

Clara took a breath and sat back against the plastic cushion of the booth. "I have scheduled an appointment for a physical in which I will request blood work—" She stopped when Bucky's eyebrows lowered fractionally. "I'm fine."

"What did they do?"

"They unfroze me once, took some blood, injected me with something…"

"Did they hurt you?" he asked when she didn't continue.

Clara met his eyes sadly. "Don't do this to yourself."

"Did they hit you?"

"Bucky," she sighed.

"The bruise on your back."

Clara leaned her elbows on the table and dropped her face into her hands. "Stop."

"I need to hear you say it," he whispered.

"No. You need me to give you the justification you need to run off after Hydra."

"I hardly need you to give me a reason," Bucky scoffed. He reached out and gently tugged her wrists away from her face. "Clara…" Whatever he had been about to say died in his throat at the sight of her pink cheeks, eyes glistening and red. "I'm sorry."

She pulled away and wiped at her eyes with her fingertips. "It's okay."

He sighed and sat back. "I'm sorry." He felt the resolve settle in his chest.

"Let's just finish breakfast, yeah?"

He found he had no appetite and watched her eat the rest of her meal in silence. Instead, he planned.

-x-

He didn't tell Steve what had happened when he walked back into their apartment. Bucky wasn't ready for whatever Steve would say. Whether that was a lecture or an I told you so for the way the night before had ended or if he knew Steve would stop him after what he'd learned that morning, he wasn't quite sure. This Steve was still different from the Steve he remembered.

And he always flourished the things he told that Steve anyways. Except about Connie…

Bucky just knew he needed to keep up the routine he'd built until he could figure out his next move. He didn't have Hydra's networks to help him start off on the right trail.

"Didn't drag Clara back with you?" Steve asked from the kitchen as he tugged off his boots at the front door.

"She wanted a day alone," he mumbled. "Mundane tasks, she said. Laundry I think."

"You alright?" Steve's tone had Bucky freezing and looking up at him as he hung his jacket on the hook and headed for the kitchen table where the morning paper sat.

"Yeah, I'm fine, why?"

"C'mon, Buck," Steve sighed.

"I just don't wanna go see this moron tomorrow," Bucky lied, unfolding the paper and propping his feet up on the chair in front of him. Steve may know all his tells, whether he wanted him to or not, but Bucky had learned a thing of two over the years. He wasn't about to let the more useful parts of his training go to waste. Easiest tactic? Distraction. "He's not going to tell me anything about myself that I don't already know."

"That's not the point of him," Steve said, clearly amused. He turned back to the dishwasher and continued unloading. "He's just there to help you work through some stuff."

"You say that like I just have some minor mental issues," Bucky said blandly. "Like depression. Or schizophrenia."

"Neither of those is minor."

"To a normal person, maybe." He flipped to the second page, skimming the headlines looking for anything he could use to find these guys. None of what happened that day at the café was even in the paper anymore. "I have a few more…challenging issues. One problem I could solve if you'd let me go look for the book."

Steve audibly sighed and closed the dishwasher. "I've asked Tony and Banner to try and track down a friend of mine, but so far they haven't found a trace."

Bucky's irritation grew as he scanned the paper and found nothing useful. He wondered briefly if Steve kept older papers, ones closer to the dates of the incidents that would be more likely to have something he could use.

"Your appointment is tomorrow morning at nine," Steve murmured, wiping his hands on a rag.

"Yeah, yeah…" He definitely wasn't looking forward to it, but the voice in his head kept chanting This is for Clara, and he couldn't find it anywhere in him to argue with that.

"Oh yeah," Steve started, voice changing tone. "How did last night go?"

"Her couch is the hardest thing I've slept on in seventy years," Bucky said flatly, tossing the paper across the table. "And I spent most of that time in a metal pod." He looked up when Steve didn't respond, to see him looking at him through slightly narrowed eyes. The suspicious look was new, he realized. It was a look he never really wore while they were growing up.

"What?"

"This is new," Steve commented as he walked towards the living room. "Usually hen you would lie to me about your girls, it's the other direction."

"Woah, those weren't lies," he deflected.

"Embellishments, then." Bucky didn't respond immediately, he only stood and went around to the fridge for water.

"She slept through most of the night, happy?" he said when Steve kept his eyes on him.

"How about you, Pal?" But his tone was different. It was accusatory, he wasn't insinuating anything. It was genuine concern.

"I had a memory," he mumbled around his glass of water. "But I got a few hours. Five or six."

Steve nodded once and leaned back on the couch. "That's good," he replied, and neither knew what else to say.

-x-

Bucky sat slumped in the chair in front of the man, his legs stretched out in the space between them. The only thing keeping him in that chair and not walking out the door was Clara's voice echoing in his head, do this for me, please?

The bald man push his glasses up his nose with one hand while scanning a file folder in his lap. He crossed his legs and sat back in his chair, looking up at Bucky. "Well, let's start off with what would you like to be called?" He glanced back down at the file. "You've got quite an impressive list of names, nicknames, codenames…what is your name?"

"Depends on who you ask," Bucky muttered, glancing at the clock on the wall and trying to make the minute hand move faster.

Dr. Lindley frowned. "I'm asking you."

Bucky cocked his head at the doctor, wondering just how much actual information was in the file Steve and Clara had prepared for him.

"Well, to Steve and Clara, I'm Bucky. To Hydra I'm the asset, to the rest of the world…I'm the Winter Soldier. Why does it matter?"

"Do you think it matters?"

"No."

Dr. Lindley's eyebrows raised at that. "You say it doesn't matter, but when I asked you what your name is, I didn't get a straightforward answer. I am asking what you want to be called."

This was so much more frustrating than when Clara coaxed him into telling her what he wanted to be called, he realized, clenching his fist on the armrest. "Bucky," he said. "My name is Bucky."

"You seem reluctant to be here," Dr. Lindley noted, bouncing his leg.

What and understatement.

"I don't want to be here," he admitted, studying the man's face for any crack in his pokerface.

"Yet you're here," he said, adding fire to Bucky's anger. "You want to get help?"

"I'm here because the person I was seeing can't help me right now," Bucky said through clenched teeth, not liking where this was going.

"Why is that?"

"Because she needs help," Bucky spat. "Because of me."

"Okay," Dr. Lindley nodded, writing something down in a little notebook on his lap. "We'll come back to that later, since you don't seem to want to talk about that right now." He looked back up a Bucky, adjusting his glasses. "Tell me about your sleep patterns."

"My sleep patterns?" Bucky repeated, a little surprised he'd dropped the previous subject without being asked. There was a little trickle of relief filling him, but he still wasn't entirely at ease.

"Yes. How many hours of sleep do you usually get a night?"

Bucky looked at his lap, genuinely trying to think about it. He'd gotten a solid six hours of dreamless sleep the night he brought Clara back from Russia. But other than that… "On average, four."

Dr. Lindley pursed his lips, making another note. "Why so little? Do you nap during the day?"

Bucky shook his head. "I just…don't want to see them."

"See who? You have nightmares?" he asked for clarity.

Bucky shifted, uncomfortable with the turn this talk was taking again. "The people I've—the people I've killed. I see them. Over and over."

Lindley made another note, and Bucky noticed the page was quickly filling up with the doctor's illegible shorthand. "Do you wake up in a panic? Disoriented?"

Bucky pressed his lips together. "I live with Steve. Sometimes he wakes me up, says I was screaming. I haven't gone after him before, but I was reading online…"

Dr. Lindley let out a chuckle and nodded. "A big issue us doctors have these days are people searching up things about their health and coming to the wrong conclusions. Everyone's PTSD is different, and while you haven't had any violent outbursts, they aren't necessarily impossible, especially with what you in particular are dealing with."

Bucky nodded slowly.

"But, it does concern me that you are getting so little sleep," he admitted. "I can prescribe you something—"

"Nope," Bucky said flippantly. "No drugs."

"Medications can—"

"Control me, keep me in line, inhibit my thinking, modify my judgment—no drugs."

Dr. Lindley held up a hand calmly. "Alright, no prescriptions. There are plenty of over the counter sleep aids you can buy though—at your own volition, of course. A few more hours a night can help you a lot, I think."

Bucky tucked that bit of information away as a slight possibility. He could decide on his own if those would help, but he didn't want some doctor forcing pills down his throat because they thought they knew what was best for him.

Lindley flipped through some pages in the file. "So, Dr. Maitland made some extensive notes on your memory here. Why don't you tell me a bit about that."

"I don't want to talk about that."

"You seemed to have had no trouble discussing it with Dr. Maitland, why not me?"

Bucky bristled at that. "Because I don't trust you. And I don't want to talk about it," he explained through clenched teeth.

"We don't have to talk about the bad things," Dr. Lindley tried, prying a little. "We can just talk today about what you remember of the 40s."

Bucky rubbed his temple with his flesh hand. "I don't want to talk about any of it."

"Why?"

Bucky couldn't help the expression that took over his face, looking at the doctor like he was an idiot. "Have you not read that entire file?" he snapped, gesturing to the manila folder opened on his lap. "If not, I'm sure you can google me and find out everything you need to know about what I've done."

"Are you ashamed of it?"

"Yes!" Bucky all but shouted. "I'm ashamed, I regret it happened—I wish none of it had happened."

"But it did."

Bucky took a breath, his arm whirring as he clenched his fist tight, the metal creaking. He reminded himself in his head, once again, that Clara asked him to do this, and that punching him in the face would disappoint her a bit.

"But that doesn't mean I want to talk about it."

"You can't pretend it didn't happen," Dr. Lindley frowned.

"I can try," Bucky challenged with a single humorless laugh.