The formula died with Dr. Erskine.

You learned that officially two days later, in a briefing room that smelled like burnt coffee and worse news, when a very tired man from Washington explained, in the careful voice of someone delivering a eulogy, that the vial recovered from the Hydra agent's coat had shattered beyond recovery, and that Erskine's real notes — the ones that mattered — had gone into the same fire that took him.

Which meant there were two of you. Just two. The first and the last.

"So we study them," Colonel Phillips said, the way he'd said it once already, except now there was nowhere else for the sentence to go. No formula meant no next batch of soldiers. No next batch meant the two supersoldiers currently sitting on the other side of that door were the only data anyone was ever going to get.

"They're not specimens," Agent Carter said, in the flat, dangerous voice you were coming to recognize as the one she used right before she made someone regret something.

"They're the only two supersoldiers on the planet, Agent Carter. Call it whatever helps you sleep."

You didn't hear the rest, because Steve had his hand on the door, and you both knew exactly what waited on the other side. A locked wing. Blood draws. Reflex tests run by men in white coats who looked at you the way Erskine never had. Like a result, not a person.

Steve, ever your brother, ever incapable of sitting still while someone else made the decision for him, was gone before you'd finished lacing your boots the next morning. You found him in a tent that smelled like typewriter ink and cheap cologne, already deep in conversation with a senator.

--

Senator Brandt had the smile of a man who'd never once lost an argument, mostly because he never had them — he simply waited for you to agree with him and called that a conversation.

"The Army's not letting either of you near a battlefield until they know this serum wasn't a fluke," he said. "Which means you've got two choices. Sit in a room and let men in coats poke you with needles for the rest of the war — or you go where the needles can't reach you. Stages. Radio. Newsreels. You'll sell more war bonds in an afternoon than this whole camp could raise in a year, and nobody in Washington's got the nerve to lock up the man selling them."

It was, you had to admit, a better offer than the one behind door number one. Still.

"And her?" Steve asked, nodding at you, the way he'd been doing since the two of you were children and he'd decided, without ever asking you, that your interests and his were permanently and irrevocably the same thing. Good thing he usually was right.

Brandt's eyes flicked to you then, properly, for the first time. Calculating. "Now that's a picture, isn't it? Your best girl, right up there beside you, both of you strong enough to lift a jeep. Folks'll go wild for it."

You thought about Erskine's chamber, the gold light, the way he'd told you you are not an experiment, you are hope, and about how quickly hope became a poster.

"Fine," you said, before Steve could argue on your behalf again. "I'll do the shows. But I want it in writing that the second the Army needs nurses at the front, I go."

Brandt's smile didn't waver. "Sure thing, Miss Rogers."

He wrote nothing down.

--

By the third city, you had a routine, and the routine went like this: you smiled until your face ached, you kept your knees together the way the wardrobe girl kept reminding you, and you tried very hard not to notice the way certain men in certain rows looked at you like you were part of the merchandise.

You were, technically. That was the whole problem.

The studio had taken one look at supersoldier, five-foot-nothing before the serum, decorated Army nurse, sister of the man they'd already decided to build an empire around and decided, collectively, that what America needed from you wasn't your strength. It needed your legs.

The costume shrank with every city, and it stopped being a nurse's uniform entirely somewhere around the second week. What replaced it was, in the wardrobe department's own words, "Columbia brought to life" — the old poster-goddess made flesh and sent out to sell bonds. A breastplate molded to look like burnished gold, striped in red and white where it dipped low across your ribs. A star pinned at your collarbone the size of a dinner plate. A skirt cut from deep blue and scattered with white stars that ended, scandalously, above the knee, paired with a flowing cape that was more theater than fabric, meant to catch the stage lights and billow dramatically every time you turned. They gave you a laurel-and-liberty circlet for your hair instead of the nurse's cap, and a prop torch to hold aloft in the finale, because apparently the actual Statue of Liberty had not been quite on-the-nose enough for the marketing department. You looked less like a woman and more like a monument that had wandered off its pedestal, which, you supposed, was rather the point. You'd stopped being Miss Rogers, the woman who'd carried grown men off a battlefield. You were "Columbia" now, gleaming and gold and built to be looked at, waving that torch on cue while Steve did the actual demonstrating.

"Sock him, soldier boy!" someone would shout during Steve's number, and Steve would sock a very convincing-looking Hitler, and the crowd would roar.

"Give us a twirl, sweetheart!" someone would shout during yours, and you would twirl, because the choreographer had built the whole number around it, and the choreographer did not care that you could, if you wanted to, put your fist straight through the stage floor.

You brought it up to the director exactly once. "I went through the same procedure he did," you said, keeping your voice level in the way you'd learned worked better than shouting, as a result of your days handling drugged-out soldiers in the hospital. "I can lift a car. I can outrun a train. Why am I singing instead of fighting?"

He looked at you with the patient, faintly pitying expression of a man explaining something obvious to a child. "Sweetheart, folks don't want to watch a girl throw a punch. They want to watch her hand her fella a rifle and wave him off to war. That's the picture that sells bonds."

You hadn't hit him, which you considered, afterward, a heroic act of restraint.

It wasn't only the shows, either. The Army had decided, with the same efficiency it applied to everything it didn't fully understand, that a woman who could lift a jeep was nonetheless best deployed convincing other women to rivet airplane wings. You were sent to factory floors in Pittsburgh and Detroit, posed beside women in coveralls and headscarves, told to smile and say something inspiring about doing your part.

It was on one of those factory floors that the campaign people found their poster.

They'd already picked their girl, as it turned out — a real riveter, a Michigan girl named Rosalind who went by Rosie, who'd been photographed months earlier with her sleeve rolled up and her jaw set, flexing over a rivet gun for a magazine spread nobody outside Detroit had paid much attention to. She was supposed to be the face of the whole "We Can Do It" push. Then someone in Washington saw a newsreel of you lifting an engine block clean off a stalled truck outside the plant gates, one-handed, laughing about it afterward like it hadn't cost you any effort at all, and decided the campaign needed a bigger name than a Michigan girl nobody had heard of.

You met Rosie exactly once, in a hallway outside a studio office, both of you there for what you'd assumed were separate appointments. She was smaller than you expected and steadier than anyone had a right to be, given what you were fairly sure was happening to her in the room she'd just walked out of.

"They're putting your face on it instead," she said. Not a question.

"I didn't ask them to," you said, which was true, and felt useless the second it left your mouth.

She looked at you for a long moment — not unkindly, just measuring — the way you imagined she measured a piece of sheet metal before she put a rivet through it. "Figures," she said. "Real girl works the line for eleven hours a day, and they still want a supersoldier wearing a bandana instead." She didn't say it cruelly. She said it like a fact she'd already made peace with, which somehow made it worse.

You thought about offering to fight it, to tell the campaign people you wouldn't do it unless they used her, and then thought about how little that offer was actually worth coming from someone with no say over her own costume, her own schedule, or her own photographs. "I'm sorry," you said instead, because it was the only honest thing you had.

"Don't be sorry," Rosie said. "Be good at it. At least then it wasn't for nothing."

They put you on the poster three weeks later — sleeve rolled up, fist raised, the same slogan stitched above your head that had been meant for her. You kept a folded copy of the original magazine spread, the one with Rosie's actual face on it, tucked into your trunk for the rest of the tour. You never told anyone why.

It was, you had to admit, the only part of the tour that didn't make you want to scream entirely — there was something almost bearable about standing shoulder to shoulder with women who were actually building something, even if the country had decided, in the end, that it would rather look at you doing it.

"They don't know what to do with you," Steve said one night, on the train between cities, watching dark countryside slide past the window. "You're not a soldier on paper. You're not really a nurse right now either. You're just-"

"A picture," you finished. "I know."

He was quiet a moment. "For what it's worth, I think you'd be better in the field than half the men Phillips has actually got there."

"Tell that to Phillips."

"I have," Steve said grimly. "Repeatedly. He has a lot of very creative ways of telling me no."

You couldn't go home anymore, not really. Your old Brooklyn apartment, the one with the too-low doorframe you'd both learned to duck for, the desk you no longer fit at, was quietly shut up not long after the tour began, once someone in Washington decided the sister and brother currently plastered across every newsreel in the country probably shouldn't be living somewhere any reporter with a phone book could find. You moved with the tour instead, city to city, hotel to hotel, your whole life packed into two trunks. It should have felt glamorous. It just felt like you were stripped of your past life: watching Steve pace around the tiny home after being rejected from the army once again, and Bucky dropping you off after your date, standing on the porch with you and doing everything but saying goodbye, long enough that Steve would open the door to say it to him. That wasn't going to happen anymore. Now you were ushered into a hotel room across the hallway from your brother's, shut in until your wake-up call the next day.

--

The photographs were, in a way, worse than the shows, because at least onstage there was a script, blocking, a director calling out when to stop. The photographs were just you, standing still, while strangers decided how close was close enough.

You learned to read the shift in a man's posture before he made his move — a kind of animal awareness the serum had sharpened along with everything else. The too-long look. The hand that found the small of your back or your waist for a photograph that didn't require it. The reporter in Ohio who'd leaned in to "get a better angle" and gotten close enough that you could smell the whiskey on him at two in the afternoon.

Steve had a way of appearing in those moments that you were fairly sure wasn't accidental. He'd drift over mid-photograph, all easy smile and effortless height, and simply put himself where a shoulder or an arm had been a second before, so smoothly that most men never quite registered they'd been moved. "Careful," he'd say pleasantly, to nobody in particular, "she's stronger than she looks," and somehow that was always enough to send the offending hand somewhere else.

"You don't have to do that every time," you told him once, after a rally in Albany where he'd wedged himself between you and a state senator's son for the third photograph in a row.

"I know I don't have to," Steve said. "I want to."

"I could break his hand before he finished the thought."

"I know that too. Doesn't mean you should have to."

You didn't have an answer for that, so you let him keep doing it.

--

You wrote to Bucky between shows, on hotel stationery, on the backs of programs, on anything you could find. Your handwriting was still new to you — bigger, bolder, more sure of itself than the careful, painstaking letters you'd sent in the first weeks after the serum — but it was yours now, every word of it, and that alone made every letter feel worth sending.

They've got me in a skirt that would make Ma faint, you wrote him in July. Steve says I look ridiculous. Steve is right.

They put my face on a comic book, you wrote in August. I have abs now, apparently, in the drawing. I do not have abs like that in real life. I checked.

In September, you sent him a photograph — the only formal one that existed of the two of you in costume, taken by an Army photographer in Philadelphia and paid for out of some publicity fund, since your own salary didn't stretch to portraits. In it you were mid-laugh, caught off guard by something Steve had said just before the shutter clicked, one gloved hand on your hip, the ridiculous little cap pinned at its ridiculous angle. You almost didn't send it. It felt strange, mailing him proof of the version of you that existed in magazines instead of the version that had grown up beside him.

His reply came to the hotel you'd been staying at in Cleveland, courtesy of the schedule you sent him so he'd know where to send his letters to.

Doll, he wrote, I have shown this photograph to every man in this unit whether they asked to see it or not, and I would like it on record that Dum Dum Dugan actually said the word "wowza" out loud, in front of witnesses, and then had to sit down. I have never been prouder or more furious in my entire life, sometimes within the same sentence. You look like trouble. You have always looked like trouble.

Also — and I say this with love — whoever decided you should be twirling around in that costume instead of doing whatever terrifying nurse things you're actually capable of has clearly never seen you set a bone. Their loss. My gain, I suppose, since I get to be the only one who knows what you're really capable of.

Keep the photographs coming. I'll take whatever pieces of you I can get out here.

You read it standing in a hotel hallway in Cleveland and laughed out loud, alone, for the first time in weeks.

--

His next letter came in October, thicker than usual, and you knew before you'd even broken the seal that something in it was different.

--

My Dearest Y/N,

I've started this letter more times than I can count, which you'll know is unusual for me, seeing as I've never had trouble telling you exactly what's on my mind. But this one's different. This one I want to get right.

Dum Dum's been ribbing me for a week straight because he caught me practicing what I'm about to write, out loud, to absolutely no one, in a tent full of men who now think I've lost it entirely. Maybe I have. It happens, apparently, when you love somebody the way I love you.

I keep coming back to that photograph. There you are, up there four thousand miles from where I'm standing, being brave and stubborn and impossible in exactly the way you've always been. Serum or no serum. I'd have loved you exactly the same if you'd stayed five-foot-nothing for the rest of your life. None of what happened to you changed a single thing about what I feel. It just meant the whole world finally got to see what I already knew.

So here's the part I keep practicing and keep getting wrong, so I'm just going to say it plain, the way you'd want me to.

I don't want to wait until the war's over to ask you properly. I know it's not the way it's supposed to be done — I don't have a ring, I can't get down on one knee where you can see me, I can't take you to that little Italian place on the corner where the owner used to slip us extra bread when we were too broke to order dessert. I've got a muddy field and a stub of pencil and about four minutes before I'm needed on watch. It's not romantic. It's not what you deserve.

But I'm not waiting anymore, Y/N. I've watched too many good men run out of time to say the things they meant to say.

Marry me. When I get home — and I am getting home, I've decided, so don't you dare argue with me about it from all the way over there — marry me. Let me build you that too-small house with the porch you keep drawing in the margins of your letters. Let me be boring with you. Let me spend the next sixty years finding out what colour your eyes really are in every different kind of light, because I have a feeling I could look for sixty years and never get tired of it.

I already know what you're going to say. I just need to see it in your handwriting. The real one. Yours.

Yours, completely and always,

Bucky

(Tell Steve I said hello, and that if he lets one more reporter call you "the Star-Spangled Man's kid sister" instead of using your actual name, I will personally deal with it when I'm home.)

--

You read it three times standing in the wings of a theatre in Cleveland while the stagehands called ten minutes, and by the third read you weren't crying so much as simply leaking, quietly and without any particular decorum, while a very confused wardrobe girl tried to hand you your boots.

You wrote back that same night, still in the ridiculous cap, ink smudging under your palm because you couldn't make your hand slow down enough to be neat about it.

--

My James,

Yes.

I want that to be the very first word you see, before you have to wade through anything else, because I know you, and I know you'll read the whole thing twice looking for it if I bury it in the middle.

Yes. A thousand times yes. I would have said it when I was seven years old and you shook my hand like I was somebody worth knowing, if anyone had thought to ask a seven-year-old her opinion on the matter.

You don't need a ring, and you don't need the Italian place on the corner, though I fully expect you to take me there the second you're home, extra bread and all. I've had the only thing that ever mattered since we were children. Everything else is just details.

I keep thinking about that too-small house. I want the porch. I want the boring Sundays. I want to watch you get old and cranky and still somehow more handsome every single year, which is deeply unfair to the rest of us, and I have decided to forgive you for it in advance.

They've got me doing another show tomorrow, another twirl, another crowd that cheers for a version of the war that doesn't look anything like the one you're actually fighting. I hate it more than I've let myself say out loud. I miss having a real bandage in my hands instead of a paper flag. But I keep thinking about you reading this, wherever you are, and it makes the whole ridiculous costume worth it.

I don't have a diamond to send you either, so here's my promise instead, the realest thing I own: wherever you are, whatever's happened, I am coming to find you. I mean that plainly, not romantically. If this war doesn't bring you home to me, I will come to wherever you are and drag you back myself. I have the arms for it now. Ask Steve.

Come home, James Buchanan Barnes. Come home and marry me and let me spend the rest of my life proving that everything you just wrote about me is true.

I love you. I have loved you since before I understood what the word meant, and I will love you long after either of us has any business still being alive to say so.

Yours. Completely and always yours,

Y/N

(P.S. Steve says hello back, and also that he will absolutely still be calling me his kid sister when we're both ninety, so you'll have to take that up with him in person.)

--

You sealed it, addressed it, and walked it to the mail drop yourself before you could talk yourself out of any of it, humming something you didn't have a name for, lighter than you'd felt in months.

It made it as far as a mail depot outside London before the news came through that made every letter addressed to the 107th Infantry Regiment redundant.

--

The show that changed everything happened five miles from the front, in Italy, in a tent that smelled like mud and antiseptic and wet canvas instead of the perfume and hairspray of every venue before it.

You should have known the moment you walked out from behind the curtain. The audiences back home were a blur of clean uniforms and eager faces, boys who hadn't shipped out yet, wives and mothers who wanted something to believe in. This crowd was different in a way you felt before you understood it — too many arms in slings, too many faces gone the particular grey color you recognized from every cot you'd ever knelt beside. Bandages that hadn't been changed recently enough. A man near the front with his eyes fixed somewhere past the stage entirely, somewhere you couldn't follow him to.

You performed anyway. That was the job.

They didn't want it. Not the twirl, not the song, not Steve's rubber-jawed Hitler taking his nightly beating.

"Where's the real war, sweetheart?" someone called out, halfway through your number, and it wasn't friendly.

"Bring back the girls with the good song!" another shouted over Steve's opening lines, and someone else laughed, too loud, at something you couldn't hear, and you caught the shape of the word chorus girl thrown at Steve's back like a weapon, which, considering what he'd actually wanted to be doing with his life since he was seventeen, it was.

You saw it land. You saw the exact second something in Steve's face went hollow, watched him keep smiling through the last verse anyway because the show didn't stop just because the star had stopped believing in it, and underneath the noise you found yourself doing what you always did now without meaning to — cataloguing the crowd the way a nurse catalogues a ward. Fresh dressings. A man favouring his left side. Another with two fingers missing and a stare that didn't track you across the stage. Whatever these men had come from, they'd come from it recently, and they'd come from it badly.

Backstage, in the mud behind the tent, Steve sat on an overturned crate, a piece of paper forgotten in his hands, not saying anything at all. You'd have gone to sit beside him if a familiar figure hadn't come around the tent flap first.

"Agent Carter," you said, surprised. She looked entirely out of place among the mud and canvas in her sharp coat, and entirely unbothered by that fact.

"Officially," she said, "I'm not here." Her eyes found Steve. "That was quite a performance."

"You should see the version with the twelve-year-olds," Steve said, not looking up. "Better audience."

"I don't imagine either of you noticed who you were playing to tonight," she said, and something in her voice made you go still. Not cruelty. Care, badly disguised as procedure. "I'd rather you hear the rest of it from me than piece it together from a casualty list."

Steve set the paper down.

"Schmidt sent a strike force against a Hydra weapons position near Azzano three weeks ago," Carter said. "Two hundred men went in. Fewer than fifty came back." She let that sit, watching both of you, and you understood, with the particular clarity your new eyes gave you for everything except this, that she was choosing her next words very carefully. "The men you performed for tonight — the ones in that tent, the ones who booed you off a stage they'd earned the right to boo you off of — that was what was left of it. The 107th Infantry."

The number hit you like something physical, a full second before your mind caught up to why.

You knew that number. You had known it long before it belonged to a war Bucky was fighting in, long before it belonged to Bucky at all.

--

You were seven years old the last time that regiment took someone from you.

Your father had come home from the first war with a cough that never fully left him — a wet, rattling thing that lived in his chest year-round, that got worse in winter and worse again every winter after that, until it stopped sounding like a cough at all and started sounding like something scraping its way out of him. He'd been gassed crossing the Hindenburg Line in the autumn of 1918, one week before the armistice, one week before it would have stopped mattering. Mustard gas, the doctors said, when your mother could get one of them to say anything plainly at all. It didn't kill him outright. It just started killing him slowly, and kept at it for eight patient years, while he worked the docks with lungs that had been turned to lace and told you and Steve, every single night, that he was feeling stronger.

You didn't understand, at seven, what any of that meant. You understood that your father smelled like the eucalyptus rub your mother mixed at the stove every evening, that his hands shook when he thought no one was watching, that some mornings he couldn't get out of bed and other mornings he insisted on walking you to school anyway, slower than the other fathers, stopping twice to catch a breath that never seemed to quite replenish him. You understood the sound he made in the night, through the thin apartment wall, better than you understood your own multiplication tables, which — given the way letters and numbers had always swum and traded places for you — was not saying very much.

You remembered the last night with a clarity that had nothing to do with the serum, because some memories didn't need enhancing to stay sharp. Steve, eight years old and already too stubborn to cry where anyone could see him, sitting on the floor outside your parents' room with his knees pulled to his chest. Your mother's voice, low and steady, reading something aloud to your father in the dark — a psalm, maybe, or just something to fill the space where his breathing used to be easier. You, too small to be any real use, standing in the doorway with a cup of water no one had asked you to bring, because it was the only thing you'd been able to think to do.

He'd asked for you specifically, near the end. You remembered that. You remembered climbing onto the bed beside him, careful of the tubes and the smell of camphor, and him smiling at you like you were the only bright thing left in the room.

"There's my girl," he'd said, which was the same thing Bucky would say to you, years later, in a hospital bed of his own when you'd reunited a few years ago, and you had never once let yourself notice the echo until this exact moment, standing in a mud-floored tent in Italy with Agent Carter's careful voice still hanging in the air.

"Steve's going to need you to be brave for him," your father had told you, his hand — thinner than you remembered hands being allowed to get — finding yours on the blanket. "He doesn't know how to be small yet. You do. Teach him."

You hadn't understood that either, not then. You understood it a great deal better now, having spent the last decade of your life doing exactly that.

He died before morning. The paper the doctor left behind — the death certificate, the one with complications of gas exposure sustained in service, 107th Infantry Regiment, A.E.F. typed across it in careful black letters, because even eight years later the war still got the credit for finishing what it started — sat on the kitchen table for two days before your mother finally asked Steve to read it aloud, because you couldn't, because the words had scrambled themselves into nonsense the way they always did, and you remembered sitting at that table with your hands over your ears, not because you didn't want to know, but because some small, seven-year-old part of you had already understood that once Steve said the words out loud, they would be permanently, unchangeably true.

When you became a nurse, you told people it was because you were good with your hands, good under pressure, unafraid of blood. All of that was true. None of it was the whole truth. The whole truth was that you had knelt beside your father's bed at seven years old with a cup of water you didn't know what to do with, and had promised yourself, in the specific, absolute way only children can promise things, that you would never again be the useless one in the room while someone you loved disappeared in front of you. Turns out, you started losing them when you were far too distant to help them. First, your mother. Now...

--

The world narrowed down to that number. Fewer than fifty came back.

You thought of the man near the front with his eyes fixed on nothing. You thought of every bandage you'd catalogued without letting yourself understand why you were doing it.

"The 107th," you said, and your voice came out steadier than you felt, because saying it plainly was the only way you knew how to keep standing. "That's Bucky's unit."

You didn't remember deciding to move. One moment you were standing in the mud with Steve's hand finding your elbow; the next you were both walking, fast, toward the command tent, toward Phillips, toward anyone who might have a casualty list with a name on it that wasn't the one you were already bracing for.

Phillips was hunched over a field table covered in paperwork when you pushed through the flap, and he didn't look up right away. "If it isn't the Star-Spangled Man and his best girl," he said, tired rather than sharp. "Little late for a show, isn't it."

"The list from Azzano," Steve said. "We need to see it."

"That list isn't for civilians, son, no matter what you're wearing on that shield."

"Please." You hadn't meant to say it that quietly. "Sergeant James Barnes. 107th. I just need to know if his name's on it."

That got Phillips to look up.

Something moved behind his eyes — not surprise, you realized. Recognition. The specific, weary recognition of a man who'd already had this exact conversation in his head and had been hoping he wouldn't have to have it out loud. He set down his pen. He was quiet long enough that you could hear your own pulse, too fast, too loud, the way it hadn't been since before the serum, since before your body had learned not to be afraid of anything.

"I've signed more letters like that one than I'd care to count today," he said finally, and for the first time since you'd met him, there was nothing gruff in it at all. "Barnes. Sergeant. Yeah." A pause that lasted a lifetime. "Name's on the list. I'm sorry."

The tent didn't tilt. The ground didn't give way. Some small, distant part of you had almost expected it to, had braced for it the way you'd braced for the letter about your mother — and instead the world simply kept being exactly as solid and exactly as unbearable as it had been one second before.

The laboratory was a marvel of 1940s technology. Howard Stark stood beside banks of machinery that hummed with barely contained energy. Agent Carter observed from behind thick glass, her expression unreadable. Colonel Phillips paced like a caged animal.

Two capsules stood side by side—vertical chambers lined with tubes and wires. They looked more like coffins than anything that should house the living.

"Ladies first," Stark said with his characteristic grin, gesturing to the left capsule.

Your legs felt unsteady as you climbed the platform. The metal was cold against your bare feet. You'd never been more aware of how small you were—barely five feet, all sharp angles and nervous energy.

"Comfortable?" Erskine asked as the technicians began attaching monitors to your arms and chest.

You managed a laugh. "As comfortable as someone can be before becoming a science experiment."

He smiled. "You are not an experiment. You are hope."

--

The injection came first. The needles were larger than any you'd used as a nurse, filled with a luminescent blue liquid that seemed to pulse with its own light.

"This will feel like the worst fever you've ever had," Erskine warned. "But it will pass."

The serum hit your bloodstream like liquid fire. Every cell in your body seemed to wake up screaming. You gripped the sides of the capsule, knuckles white, as heat raced through your veins.

Then came the lights.

The chamber door sealed shut, and suddenly you were bathed in a golden glow that intensified by degrees. Through the small window, you could see Steve in his own chamber, his face contorted in pain that mirrored your own.

"Initiating sequence," Stark's voice crackled through the intercom. "Increasing to twenty percent... thirty percent..."

Your vision started to blur. The familiar greyish tint that had colored your world for twenty-three years began to shift and waver. Something was happening behind your eyes—not pain, exactly, but a strange pressure, like your brain was rewiring itself.

"Seventy percent... eighty percent..."

The world exploded into color.

Red.

The first thing you saw when the chamber door opened was Agent Carter's lipstick. Not the dark grey you'd always perceived, but a brilliant, shocking crimson that seemed to burn against her pale skin. You gasped, stumbling out of the capsule on legs that were suddenly longer, stronger.

"Easy," Dr. Erskine caught your arm. His lab coat wasn't the yellow-tinged white you remembered—it was pure, blinding white that almost hurt to look at.

But it was Steve who made you stop breathing entirely.

Your brother—your scrawny, sickly brother—stood nearly six inches taller, his shoulders broad. But more than that, you could see him clearly for the first time. His eyes weren't just light-colored—they were blue. Bright, vivid blue like the serum that had just coursed through your veins.

"Steve?" Your voice came out different too—stronger, clearer.

He stared back at you with equal wonder. "You're... you're..." he stammered.

Because you could see everything.

The world had become a symphony of color that your brain struggled to process. Agent Carter's hair wasn't just dark—it was a rich, deep brown with hints of mahogany that caught the laboratory lights. Howard Stark's suit was navy blue, not the black you'd always thought. The American flag hanging on the wall blazed with red, white, and blue so vibrant it was almost aggressive.

But it wasn't just color. The fluorescent lights that had always seemed dim now illuminated every detail with crystal clarity. You could see the individual threads in people's clothing, the precise curve of their eyelashes, the subtle movements of their facial muscles that betrayed their emotions.

"How do you feel?" Erskine asked, studying you with fascination.

"Overwhelmed," you whispered, because it was true. Your enhanced eyesight picked up dust motes dancing in the air, the slight tremor in Phillips' hands that suggested he was nervous despite his gruff exterior, the way Agent Carter's pupils dilated slightly when she looked at Steve.

"Taller," Steve replied, and you almost laughed because that was exactly it. Not just taller, but more. More substantial, more present, more real somehow.

You tried taking a few steps and nearly stumbled. Your centre of gravity had completely shifted. Where you'd once been five-foot and slight, you now felt like you were inhabiting someone else's body entirely.

Colonel Phillips was saying something about Berlin and nervous folks, but you were distracted by the way you could hear his heartbeat from across the room. Was that normal? Could everyone hear that, or just you?

Dr. Erskine approached with that gentle smile of his. "And you, Miss Rogers? How do you feel?"

You opened your mouth to answer when the world exploded.

The blast threw you sideways, enhanced reflexes the only reason you managed to land on your feet instead of crashing into the observation booth. Glass shattered around you in slow motion—or maybe that was just how your brain was processing it now, everything crystal clear and impossibly fast.

A man in a suit was grabbing something from the serum storage, a vial of the blue liquid that had just transformed you and Steve. He had a gun.

"Stop him!" Dr. Erskine shouted.

The crack of gunfire split the air. You watched in horror as Dr. Erskine crumpled to the ground, blood spreading across his white coat in a pattern your enhanced vision could trace with terrible clarity.

The shooter was running now, pushing through the crowd of screaming civilians. Agent Carter was pursuing, her own weapon drawn, but he had too much of a head start. Steve was bent over Dr. Erskine and frantically trying to keep him conscious.

You looked at Steve. He looked at you.

Without words, you both moved.

The chase spilled out onto the Brooklyn streets, and you realized immediately that your body could do things that defied everything you'd known about human limitations. You kept pace with Steve easily, both of you gaining on the sedan the Hydra agent had commandeered.

"I had him!" Carter shouted as Steve tackled her out of the way of the car.

"Sorry!" Steve called back, already running again.

You veered left as the car took a sharp turn, using your new strength to vault over a parked vehicle in a way that would have been impossible an hour ago. Your enhanced vision tracked the sedan's movement, calculating trajectory and speed with mathematical precision you'd never possessed.

The car was heading for the docks.

Steve caught up to it first, leaping onto the roof with superhuman agility. You heard gunshots, saw muzzle flashes through the windows. Then Steve was rolling off the car as it crashed through the dock barriers.

You reached the waterfront just as the Hydra agent grabbed a small boy who'd been playing near the pier.

"No! No! Not my son!" the woman screamed. "Stop it! Don't hurt him!"

"Get back!" the agent shouted, backing toward the water with the child.

"Wait, don't! Don't!" Steve advanced with his hands raised. "Don't hurt him!"

You circled around, trying to get a better angle, but the agent spotted your movement. With a cruel laugh, he hurled the boy into the water and dove in after him.

"No! Don't!" Steve yelled, already diving.

You didn't hesitate. You hit the water a split second after your brother.

The cold should have been shocking, but your enhanced body seemed to regulate temperature differently now. You could see clearly underwater, could hold your breath longer than should have been possible.

The boy was sinking fast, his small body weighted down by his clothes. You reached him first, wrapping an arm around his waist and kicking toward the surface.

"Go get him!" the boy gasped as you broke the surface. "I can swim!"

You made sure he was safely swimming toward shore before diving back down. Steve was nowhere to be seen, but your enhanced hearing caught the sound of mechanical movement underwater. A submarine—small, sleek, definitely not American.

You followed the sound, lungs burning despite your new capabilities. The water was murky, but your enhanced vision picked up shapes moving in the depths. There—Steve was grappling with the Hydra agent near what looked like a torpedo tube.

You swam deeper, fighting against pressure that would have crushed your old body. The agent had a knife, was slashing at Steve while trying to reach some kind of control panel. Without thinking, you grabbed a piece of metal debris from the harbor floor and used your new strength to hurl it at the agent's hand.

The knife went spinning away into the dark water.

Steve managed to pin the man against the hull of the submarine. Even underwater, you could see his lips moving, forming words. Then they were both swimming upward, Steve dragging the agent with him.

You all broke the surface together, Steve having thrown the man back onto the dock, and both of you climbed up with newfound strength.

"Who the hell are you?" Steve demanded, keeping a grip on the man's collar.

The agent's face was pale, but his eyes held a fanatic's gleam. When he spoke, his accent was thick, Germanic. "The first of many. Cut off one head, two more shall take its place."

The words sent a chill through you that had nothing to do with the harbour water clinging to your clothes. This wasn't some desperate spy or isolated saboteur. This was part of something bigger, something organised.

"Hail Hydra," the agent said, and bit down hard on something in his mouth.

The foam that bubbled from his lips was tinged with blue. Cyanide, you realized with your enhanced senses picking up the bitter almond scent. He was dead within seconds.

You and Steve breathed hard in stunned silence, staring at the body on the ground between you.

"What the hell was that about?" you whispered.

Steve's expression was grim. "I think we just found out there's a lot more to this war than we thought."

--

Hours later, after debriefings and medical examinations, one long blood donation and more questions than you could count, you and Steve finally made it back to your tiny apartment in Brooklyn.

You'd forgotten about the doorframe.

CRACK.

"Ow!" You rubbed your forehead, blinking in confusion at the door that had somehow gotten shorter.

Steve, coming in behind you, had to duck significantly to avoid the same fate. "I think we might have a problem," he said, looking around the apartment that suddenly seemed built for dolls.

Your bed, which had always been perfectly sized for you, now looked like something made for a child. The kitchen counters hit you at hip level instead of waist level. Even the bathroom mirror was positioned wrong now.

Steve tried to pull on one of his old shirts and the seams immediately strained across his now-broad shoulders. "Well, this is going to be expensive," he muttered, examining the stretched fabric.

You attempted to sit at your small desk and found your knees hitting the underside. Everything in your life, every space you'd carefully arranged for your old body, was now completely wrong.

Getting up, you wandered into the living room and sat on the floor beside Steve because both of you were afraid you would destroy your couch just by sitting on it. For a moment, you just sat there in silence. It didn't feel right. You felt like a child, about to play cards with your mother. Of course, you'd never read the numbers right, and you'd lose constantly, but hearing your mother, brother, and sometimes Bucky laugh while relishing a sweet escape from the mundane middle-class life (at least for your family) in the 1920s.

You wondered what Bucky was doing right then. Was he asleep? It was about 12am in London, but maybe he'd been awake, thinking. Thinking about you. Unbeknownst to you, that was exactly what he'd been doing. He read your letter (or rather, Steve's). You would never be able to get him to admit this out loud, but he'd yearned for the day that you could read his letters yourself and write back to him without Steve being your middleman. He knew that you'd have to hold back on your true feelings just to make sure Steve didn't get uncomfortable because he was the one writing the letters, and you had to keep some secrets from your brother, too, like the time you and Bucky fell asleep on the roof of some building in the city when you'd told Steve you just spent the night at the Barnes' place. In your last letter, you'd told him about this new experimental serum you'd be taking.

Your eyes caught on the letter sitting on the small table by the window. The cursive handwriting was unmistakable—bold, confident strokes that you'd memorized the shape of even if you couldn't always decipher the words.

Bucky.

Steve noticed your gaze. "That came three days ago," he said quietly. "I didn't open it. Figured you'd want to..."

He trailed off, understanding the impossible situation. You couldn't read it. Not the way you used to, where the letters would scramble and you'd have to ask him to read aloud. And now, even though you could see every individual letter with perfect clarity, you still needed to focus to make the cursive handwriting sharp enough to process.

"Help me?" you asked, already reaching for the envelope.

Steve moved to sit beside you on the floor, both of you careful not to put weight on the furniture. He took the letter and unfolded it gently.

"My Dearest," he began, and you held up a hand.

"No," you said. "I want to try."

You took the letter back, studying the first words. The cursive was flowing and ornate, the way Bucky always wrote—like every word was important. You squinted slightly, adjusting the focus in your eyes the way you'd learned to do in the past few hours.

The letters snapped into sharp relief.

"M-y... D-e-a-r-e-s-t," you sounded out slowly, then looked up at Steve. "My Dearest?"

He smiled. "Yeah. Keep going."

You squinted at the next line, your enhanced brain processing the familiar curves of his handwriting. The rest of the letter unfolded slowly as you squinted through passages, your eyes adjusting to bring each section into focus, similar to how you used to try to read. It was easier than you expected—a simple matter of concentration, of telling your enhanced vision to really look at what was in front of you. It helped that the letters weren't jumping around anymore.

By the time you reached the body of the letter, you were moving faster, squinting less frequently as your brain adapted to the task.

"My Dearest, I don't even know how to start this letter. I've written it a hundred times and thrown it away because nothing feels like enough to say. I miss you so much it physically hurts. That's not poetic or dramatic—it's just true. There's an ache in my chest that doesn't go away, even when I'm surrounded by the guys, even when I'm busy. It's the specific shape of missing you. I keep your last letter in my pocket. I've read it so many times I've nearly worn through the paper. I know Steve wrote it for you, but I can still hear your voice in every word. I can still picture your face when you were thinking hard about what to say. The serum. God, Y/N. I won't lie—I'm terrified. Not of you becoming stronger. I've always known you were stronger than anyone gave you credit for. Stronger than you gave yourself credit for. I'm terrified because I'm stuck here and you're there becoming something incredible without me there to see it happen. But if anyone can survive this, it's you. You've been fighting your whole life. Fighting against the world, against yourself, against everyone who said you couldn't do something. This serum won't change that. It'll just make you officially as powerful on the outside as you've always been on the inside. I think about you constantly. I think about your smile. The way you scrunch your nose when you're concentrating. The way you fit perfectly against my side. The way you say my name when you're trying not to cry. I think about coming home and seeing you. I think about it obsessively. I love you. I love you so much it scares me. I love you in a way that makes me understand why soldiers write letters they might never send. I love you in a way that makes every day without you feel like wasted time. Stay safe. Be strong. Keep being the most incredible person I've ever met. Wait for me. I'm counting down every single day until I can come home to you. Yours. Always and completely yours, Bucky"

You sat in absolute silence when you finished, the letter trembling in your hands. Your eyes had gone blurry—not from focus issues, but from tears.

"Oh my God," you whispered.

"You did it..." Steve said quietly, his voice thick with emotion.

"He... he wrote about..." you couldn't even finish the sentence. The intimacy of it, the rawness. The way he'd written about specific things—your smile, the way you fit against him, a piece of his soul.

"He's been waiting for you to be able to write back yourself," Steve said. "You know that, right?"

You nodded, unable to speak. Of course he'd wanted his girl to write to him.

You waited until Steve had gone to bed before you sat down at the small desk that now felt comically tiny. Your knees hit the underside even as you pulled your chair as far back as it would go. You'd need a new desk. You'd need new everything.

But first, you needed to write to Bucky.

You pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and an ink pen, staring at the blank whiteness. This was different from sounding out words someone else had written. This was creating them from scratch, pulling sounds from your mind and translating them into letters that would have to mean something to someone else.

What if you misspelled something? What if he couldn't understand what you'd written?

You took a breath and put pen to paper.

My Dearest Bucky, Your hand shook slightly as you formed each letter. The pen felt different in your stronger grip—you had to consciously control the pressure or you'd tear right through the paper. I read your letter. I read it myself. Every word. I had to squint a little but I did it.

You paused, reading back what you'd written. There was no punctuation between your sentences. The spacing was uneven. But the words were there, in your handwriting, saying what you needed to say.

Something happened today. Something big. Me and Steve both. Were changing. Were not the people you left behind. My eyes see colors now Bucky. Real colors. Remember that bear you won for me at Coney Island? Steve told me it's pink. Not grey like everything was before. But you knew that. I can hear heartbeats. I can see in complete darkness like its daylight. I'm taller now. My body doesnt fit in our apartment anymore. I hit the doorframe walking through the kitchen. But the worst part is how much I miss you. Because now I can see and hear everything so clearly and all I want is to see you. To hear your heartbeat next to mine. To feel your hand in my hand. I'm terrified that when you come home you wont recognize me. That Ill be too different. That the girl you love wont exist anymore. But then I read your letter. The real one, from you, not from Steve. And you said you love me. You said you love me in a way that scares you. And Bucky I love you like that too. I love you so much it hurts. The serum didnt change that. It made it stronger somehow. Made me understand that I was always supposed to be strong enough to stand next to you. Not behind you. Next to you. I don't know how to write properly yet. My brain works different now and I have to think about every letter. But every single one is for you. Every word is yours. Come home to me. Please come home. I love you.

You read it over, noting all the misspellings and missing punctuation. Missing capitals. Run-on sentences. It was messy and imperfect and probably difficult to read.

It was also the most honest thing you'd ever written.

You folded the letter carefully and addressed the envelope with painstaking attention to detail. Your handwriting was different now—stronger, more confident, the letters larger than they used to be because your enhanced motor control meant you could make precise, deliberate strokes.

Steve would send it through military channels. It would take weeks to reach Bucky.

But when it did, he would open it and see your handwriting—really your handwriting—for perhaps the first time. He would see your mistakes and your passion and your inability to hide how much you loved him.

And you had a feeling he would treasure it more than any perfectly written letter could ever be.

-

"Recruits, attention!" The soldiers in training straightened their backs at the command barked at them. Helping a young man who'd twisted his leg a few minutes ago, your back involuntarily straightened as well. Came with the territory of being a dyslexic nurse, constantly shouted at by the head nurses for rearranging the medicines by height and shape, since you couldn't read the labels.

"Gentlemen, I am Agent Carter," you looked up from the young man's leg you were assessing, and squinted when the white sunlight directly hit your eyes. A woman — no, an Agent — was sizing up a line of men, all but one of whom were already beginning to shake in their army-issued boots. Standing amongst them was your brother, looking more like a child trying on his father's uniform than a soldier in his own right. Your eyes softened with pity — the wind could knock him over. You turned back to the gentleman who's foot you had been unceremoniously tugging, noticing he was fighting back tears. With a quick apology, you told him to keep off of it for at least a day to prevent any further injury. He wouldn't be doing that, of course, the soldiers here couldn't afford to spend a single day off of the training ground. You were busying yourself with arranging the tools in the first aid kit — the rest of the nurses never bothered to — when you heard a loud punch. You whipped your head around so hard you could've given yourself whiplash. Did Steve say something stupid again? To your surprise, Steve wasn't the one who'd gotten punched. It was a smug looking guy (not so smug anymore) who'd clearly irritated the Agent.

The smug soldier was on the ground now, clutching his jaw like he’d just been personally betrayed by gravity.

You blinked at the scene, momentarily forgetting the bandage in your hand. Agent Carter stood over him, calm as a winter morning. The line of recruits had gone very, very still.

You heard someone, probably the soldier beside you, whisper, “Jesus.”

Steve didn’t move. Of course he didn’t. Your brother had the unfortunate habit of freezing whenever someone got hit. He looked more shocked than the man who’d actually been punched.

You exhaled quietly and finished tying off the bandage on the recruit in front of you.

“Try not to step on it too hard,” you murmured.

He nodded weakly, though you both knew he’d be sprinting again in ten minutes.

When you looked up again, the recruits were being marched toward the obstacle course. Carter walked beside them with the air of someone who could snap every single one of them like dry twigs if she felt like it. And you didn't doubt that she would not so much as hesitate before doing it.

You packed the gauze back into the kit, arranging everything by size and shape the way that made sense to you. Small scissors. Long scissors. Thick bandage rolls. Thin ones. Reading the labels had never worked for you. The letters crawled and swapped places like mischievous insects. But height and shape never lied.

You shut the box with a click.

-

Across the training field, chaos was unfolding in the orderly fashion the army seemed to specialize in. Boots pounded against the packed dirt. The obstacle course rattled and creaked under the weight of recruits hauling themselves up ropes and tumbling over wooden walls.

Colonel Phillips watched it all with the long-suffering expression of a man who had been promised a miracle and instead received a shipment of problems.

Dr. Abraham Erskine stood beside him, his posture loose but attentive, as though the whole camp were some complicated apparatus he was studying piece by piece.

Phillips pointed with two fingers toward a large recruit vaulting the wall with impressive speed.

“Hodge,” he said. “Six foot two. Strong as an ox. Passed every physical test we’ve thrown at him.”

Erskine followed the movement with quiet interest.

The man landed cleanly, chest puffed out as if already expecting applause.

Phillips grunted.

“Now that,” he said, “is a soldier.”

His gaze drifted across the field again until it landed on a much smaller figure crawling under the barbed wire.

Steve Rogers. Flat on his stomach in the mud. Moving slowly. Determinedly.

Phillips exhaled like a man whose patience had been personally offended.

“You’re not seriously thinking about picking Rogers.”

Erskine did not answer immediately. His eyes remained on Steve as the young man struggled forward another inch.

“I am looking,” Erskine said eventually, “for qualities beyond the physical.”

Phillips turned toward him fully now. “Doc, I didn’t drag a hundred men out here so you could start judging their personalities”. He gestured toward the field. “You see what we’re dealing with?”

A recruit slipped from the rope and landed in the dirt with a dull thud.

Phillips spread his hands.

“This program took months to get approved. Committees, hearings, senators who couldn’t tell a rifle from a broom handle.” His voice lowered into a mutter. “You know how much grovelling that took?”

“I am aware,” Erskine said gently.

Phillips continued like he hadn’t heard him. “And now we’re supposed to create the most important soldier this war has ever seen.” He looked back toward the recruits. “One man.”

Erskine’s expression remained thoughtful.

“One man,” he repeated softly.

Phillips shook his head.

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?”

He folded his arms.

“You’re putting everything into one body. One soldier. One shot.”

Erskine considered that. His gaze moved again across the field—over dozens of men attempting, failing, trying again.

Quietly, he said, almost to himself, “Perhaps not only one.”

Phillips gave him a skeptical look. “You planning to bottle twice as much miracle serum, Doc?”

Erskine did not answer.

But the thought had already begun to take shape.

If the process worked…

Why stop at one?

Phillips rubbed his jaw. “Well, even if we did try,” he said gruffly, “we’d still have the same problem.”

He pointed again toward the recruits.

“Which one?”

Erskine followed the line of his finger.

There were many possibilities.

Hodge. A few others. Strong men. Capable men. Soldiers who understood orders.

Two of them might serve the purpose well.

Phillips sighed.

“You don’t win wars with niceness, Doctor.”

He reached down to his belt.

Erskine noticed the motion immediately.

Phillips pulled free a grenade.

Cold metal glinted in the afternoon sun.

With a practiced movement, he yanked the pin free.

“You win wars with guts.”

And before anyone could react, he hurled the grenade directly toward the recruits.

“GRENADE!”

-

The word carried across the field like a crack of thunder. You looked up instantly. Your brain needed a moment to make sense of the movement in front of you.

Men scattering.

Boots slamming into dirt.

Shouts erupting everywhere at once.

Then something small bounced across the ground.

Your eyes struggled to lock onto it. The dull metal blurred against the dust and sunlight, edges blending together in that frustrating way small objects sometimes did.

But you recognized the shape. Your stomach dropped. And then you saw Steve. Running toward it.

Of course he was.

You didn’t even remember deciding to move.

One moment you were beside the medical table.

The next you were running.

Across the field, Steve reached the grenade first.

He threw himself over it without hesitation, curling his body around the metal cylinder.

“GET BACK!” he shouted. “GET BACK!”

The other recruits were already scrambling away.

You reached him seconds later.

For half a heartbeat you stared.

Your brother had pressed himself flat against the dirt, arms wrapped tight around the grenade like he intended to absorb the blast through sheer stubbornness.

You felt something sharp flare in your chest.

“Steve, you absolute—”

You grabbed the back of his jacket and shoved him sideways.

He yelped as he rolled off the grenade.

Your hand closed around the cylinder.

It was heavier than you expected.

Without thinking, you stood and hurled it away from the group as hard as you could.

The grenade struck the dirt several yards away.

And lay there.

Still.

Silent.

Nothing happened.

The trainer’s voice cut through the stunned quiet.

“Dummy grenade!”

A long breath seemed to release from the entire field at once.

“Back in formation!”

Steve pushed himself upright slowly.

“…Was that a test?” he asked hoarsely, looking towards the Agent, holding his arm where you'd unceremoniously pushed him.

-

Near the edge of the field, Colonel Phillips stared.

For several long seconds, he didn’t speak.

He had expected one outcome.

Maybe two.

Men scattering the moment the word grenade hit the air. Instinct taking over, survival louder than courage. Perhaps—perhaps—one of them proving brave enough to dive onto the thing. One man willing to die so the others wouldn’t have to.

That was the sort of instinct Phillips had been looking for. That was the sort of instinct wars were built on. What he had not expected was the rest of it.

The small recruit had done exactly what Phillips predicted. Thrown himself flat over the grenade without hesitation, skinny arms wrapped around it like he could smother the blast with sheer stubbornness.

And then—

A blur of movement.

A nurse, for God’s sake.

Running across the field.

Phillips had seen soldiers hesitate before. Even the good ones paused for half a second while their brains caught up with the danger.

She hadn’t. She’d crossed half the field like someone chasing a dropped tray. Grabbed Rogers by the collar. Shoved him aside. Picked up the grenade.

And thrown it away.

Phillips lowered his hand slowly, the one that had thrown the grenade in the first place.

“Well,” he muttered under his breath.

The training field was already settling again. The trainer was barking orders, recruits scrambling back into formation with that stiff, embarrassed energy men had when they realized they’d just panicked in front of their commanding officer.

But Phillips wasn’t looking at them.

Beside him, Dr. Erskine had gone very still.

The doctor’s gaze was fixed on the far end of the field.

Not on Rogers.

On you.

Dust clung to the hem of your skirt where you’d skidded to your knees. Your hair—once neatly pinned up for the day—had come loose in several places, strands sticking to your temples in the heat. You were standing now, brushing dirt off your brother’s shoulders with the sharp, efficient movements of someone who had already decided he’d done something incredibly stupid.

From this distance, Phillips couldn’t hear what you were saying.

But he could see the way Rogers winced slightly under the quiet scolding.

Erskine spoke first.

“Colonel.”

Phillips grunted.

“Yeah.”

Erskine folded his hands behind his back, his posture thoughtful in that absent-minded way of his.

“A moment ago,” the doctor said, “we were discussing the possibility of selecting two candidates.”

Phillips gave a short, humorless laugh.

“Yeah.”

His eyes were still on the field.

“Two men.”

That had been the entire conversation.

If the serum worked—and Phillips had his doubts—then perhaps they might eventually repeat the procedure. Build a small unit. A handful of enhanced soldiers instead of just one.

But first they needed to prove it could work at all.

And to do that they needed the right man.

Erskine did not respond immediately.

His gaze remained fixed on the scene unfolding below.

You were still fussing over Rogers like he’d just tripped down the stairs instead of nearly sacrificing himself for a dummy grenade.

Phillips watched the exchange for another moment.

Then he realized something.

Erskine hadn’t looked away once.

“Yes,” the doctor said quietly.

“We were.”

Phillips followed the line of his gaze.

At first he saw nothing remarkable.

Just a nurse.

Slight build. Uniform dusty. Hair a little crooked now.

Hardly the image of a soldier.

“…She’s not even in the program,” Phillips said after a moment.

His voice held the flat certainty of a man pointing out an obvious fact.

Nurses weren’t recruits.

They weren’t candidates.

Hell, they weren’t even on the list.

Erskine’s expression didn’t change.

“No,” he agreed calmly.

He continued watching as you finished brushing the dirt from Steve’s sleeve, then gave him a small shove toward the formation like you were sending a child back to class.

Phillips scratched slowly at the side of his jaw.

His eyes moved between you and Rogers.

Rogers had thrown himself on the grenade.

That had been courage.

But you—

You hadn’t just been brave.

You had been fast.

Decisive.

You’d assessed the situation, removed the obstacle, and neutralized the threat in one fluid motion.

Phillips exhaled slowly.

“Well,” he muttered.

He shifted his weight, still watching as you turned back toward the medical station like nothing particularly interesting had just happened.

Then, after a beat—

“Well I’ll be damned.”

-

Phillips watched you walk back toward the medical table, your movements almost casual, as though nothing extraordinary had just happened. Dust clung stubbornly to your skirt, and your hair, which had escaped its neat twist, fell across your face in soft strands. You brushed it back with one hand, tightening the knot as if the interruption of a grenade landing at your feet had been merely inconvenient, a slight annoyance in the middle of your day. The recruits were reforming their line now, awkward and embarrassed, with Rogers returning as well, dusting dirt from his sleeves and ears red from the spectacle. The field, once tense with anticipation, settled again into the steady rhythm of training, and yet Phillips could not take his eyes off you.

He crossed his arms, squinting slightly against the late afternoon sun, and spoke to Erskine with a slow, deliberate tone. “Doc, that girl is a nurse.” The words hung in the air. Erskine nodded without comment, letting the silence stretch. “She isn’t enlisted,” Phillips continued, raising an eyebrow. Erskine simply allowed the faintest nod in acknowledgment. “She wasn’t even part of the test.” Again, the doctor did not respond immediately, his gaze never leaving the small medical station where you crouched beside the supply crate, rearranging its contents with calm precision as though the entire field, the grenade, and the chaos it had created were irrelevant. Phillips followed his gaze, squinting slightly, realizing that for the first time he was seeing something he hadn’t expected.

Erskine’s voice was soft, measured, and precise. “When the grenade landed, most of the men ran.” Phillips made a grunt of agreement, acknowledging the obvious. “That’s called survival,” Erskine continued, his tone quiet but firm. “One man jumped on the grenade.” Phillips nodded, a small, incredulous laugh escaping him. “Rogers,” he said. Erskine tilted his head thoughtfully, his eyes never leaving you. “But she did something different.” The words were calm, almost understated, yet they carried weight. You had not simply thrown yourself into danger like the boy beside you; you had acted. You had assessed, calculated, and moved. You had protected, without hesitation, without fear, and without a thought for yourself.

Phillips scratched at his jaw, his mind wrestling with the impossibility of the situation. “Yeah, well,” he muttered, his voice rough, “she also threw army property across my training field.” Erskine allowed himself the faintest smile, one that suggested not amusement, but approval. Phillips continued to watch you, crouched beside the crate, tying bandages around the injured recruit’s ankle with quick, practiced hands. Every movement was precise, calm, deliberate. The recruits had no idea who you were or what had just occurred, and yet, with every flick of your wrist, every adjustment of the bandage, you made it clear that you belonged here, even if no one had expected it.

“She’s still not a soldier,” Phillips said finally, his tone less a statement than an observation, almost as if he were testing his own disbelief. “No,” Erskine replied evenly. “This project is about creating a soldier.” Phillips glanced back at Rogers, then at the field, his expression tight. “Rogers is not much of a soldier either,” Erskine added quietly. “That kid is barely a strong breeze away from snapping in half,” Phillips muttered, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “And yet,” Erskine said softly, “he jumped on the grenade. But she—she solved the problem.” The weight of the words settled between them. You had not panicked, had not frozen, had not thought of yourself. You had acted with courage, ingenuity, and a clarity that few men possessed.

Phillips let out a long breath, running a hand over his face. He looked back toward the medical station, toward you, still kneeling beside the recruit as if nothing had happened. “You’re telling me,” he said slowly, his voice almost incredulous, “the two best candidates in this entire camp are a ninety-pound asthmatic and a nurse who can’t even pass the enlistment exam.” Erskine’s eyes glinted with quiet certainty, calm and unwavering. “Yes,” he said simply. The colonel exhaled, muttering under his breath, “God help me,” before turning sharply toward the trainer standing nearby. “Barnes!” The man snapped to attention, his posture rigid. “Sir!” Phillips barked, jerking his head toward the medical station. “Bring that nurse over here.” The trainer hesitated for a brief, stunned moment before hurrying off. Phillips crossed his arms again, eyes still locked on you, and muttered quietly, almost to himself, “You realize this is going to look completely insane on paper.” Erskine allowed himself the faintest smile, one that suggested he already knew it would be. Most good ideas did. And some, he thought quietly, only reveal their brilliance in moments like this.

You moved toward them with the same calm precision that had marked your every action since arriving at Camp Lehigh, dusting off your skirt and tightening the knot of your hair once more, unaware—or perhaps entirely indifferent—to the magnitude of what you had just accomplished. And for the first time that afternoon, Phillips understood that what he was seeing was not simply a nurse acting beyond her duty. He was witnessing the emergence of something entirely new, something that could not have been predicted, calculated, or trained, but only recognized when it happened. He muttered again, almost to himself, “God help me,” and this time, it was not doubt he felt, but the stirrings of reluctant approval.

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