Warnings:
1) This story is a tag-fic to the Captain America: The Winter Soldier movie, and thus contains spoilers, so if you haven't watched the movie, then you may want to bookmark this first and come back later.
2) This story is a continuation of The Avengers movie AU fic called Time-Traveler, which centers on Anna Stark, an original character, and contains elements of time-travel and 'future'-knowledge use. You may want to read Time-Traveler first, but there's enough cues in here that you don't really need to (though I do hope you'd want to afterwards ;P).
Anna Nicholson loves to travel. She's been all over Europe, the northern parts of Africa, the Middle East, Asia and, of course, America. Despite her love for travel, she only gets to visit her hometown of Malibu twice a year, at most, because she travels for work and work takes her places. Specifically, Times Square Tower, New York, has become her primary address.
Anna Stark, on the other hand, hates traveling—always has, and always will—and she hates it even more now, because she's here for one ultimate purpose: to protect her family. Which she can't do when she's constantly trotting about the globe for errands set by the man known as her boss.
It's not that she's not grateful that he took her in with no questions asked and gave her a legitimate identity that keeps S.H.I.E.L.D. from snatching her off the streets, it's just that she's worried. She has seen the effects brought about by her absence from this timeline, and she knows that that's only the beginning. She just wants to be ready for whatever's coming next.
Which is why when news of Nick Fury's death reached her ears, something inside her clenches and knots up with guilt, because unlike Tony Stark, Nick Fury dies on the day he's supposed to die in the place he's supposed to die the way he was supposed to die, and Anna doesn't even remember Nick Fury and his fate until she hears he's already dead.
She feels guilt well up in her, because just because she never knew him didn't mean she shouldn't have saved him. She should've remembered. At the very least, she should've tried to save him.
It would've been the right thing to do.
And then, she remembers who else was based in Washington.
She was attending a shareholders meeting in Norway when she hears of Fury's death. She arrives in Washington just in time to see the waters at the base of the Triskelion open up for three Helicarriers. She's driving through slow-moving traffic when all three start firing at each other.
And that whole time, one thought keeps coming back to her.
It's not his time to die.
There's only one person in her family that she has always loved and favored best, even before she learned the full details of the events surrounding her birth. He was the one who first held her, even before her mother could (or would, for that matter); he was the one who named her, who signed her birth certificate alongside Uncle Rhodey (and god was her mother pissed at them both for it); he was the one who took her home, fed, cleaned and cared for her (for two months, before her mother was even willing to be in the same room as her). She was ten when she found all that out, and knowing had only deepened her love and loyalty to him.
Anna sees him fall and doesn't see him come back up and dives into the river for him without a second thought.
She searches for him in the water for what seems like an eternity before she surfaces for air for who-knows-how-many-times-already and sees a long-haired brunet dragging a blue-with-a-white-star-clad blond up to the riverbank.
By the time she gets there, the brunet is gone and only an unmasked Captain America is left. He is bleeding profusely (something she has seen many times in her life) and unconscious (which is a rarer sight if she's honest) and Anna falls to her knees beside him and cries when she finds his pulse strong despite the amount of blood staining his uniform. She looks him over and, to her relief, finds only one other bullet wound, which is easier to care for compared to the perforations in his belly.
She can do nothing for his other wounds—she knows well the risk of putting unsterilized materials over open injuries—so she focuses on what she can treat and whips her belt from her hips, turning it into a tourniquet for his bleeding limb, double-wrapping it tightly around his thigh and locking the clasp in place. She then loosens his belt and moves it up his waist, pushing against the ground to get the momentum she needs to tug it tighter. He groans as his ribs pinch together, but she knows he can take it, and the need to minimize the blood loss he's experiencing outweighs the urge and desire to make him feel more comfortable in his time of pain. That done, she rests his head on her shoulder, hooks her arms under his, and drags him carefully up the slope and by the roadside so that he's easier for S.H.I.E.L.D. to find.
And then she waits with him, putting pressure on the holes in his belly to lessen the blood leaking from his body, and doesn't comprehend until later the irony of the only two chronologically-displaced people in the world—a man from the past and a girl from the future—waiting on the roadside for help to come.
Instead, she cries and keeps her bloodied hands on his wounds and begs him not to leave her again.
"Anna," he slurs suddenly, glazed blue eyes peer up at her blearily.
"Uncle Steve," she sniffles miserably, her tears still coming. "Don't die."
He is strong—always has been, always will be—so she's not surprised that he has the energy to touch a gloved-hand to her cheek. His reply is simple and reassuring. "Okay," he says, and Anna believes him.
She always does.
It's true that she wants a relationship with her father—what child wouldn't want to know for themselves just the kind of person their mother loved and pined for, the man who helped give life to them? But even though she'll never admit to it, Anna knows she wants to get to know her father only because he was supposed to be her dad, and not because she wants him to be her dad.
Because, as much as he hurt her later on in life, she'd already had a dad.
It's only slightly difficult for her to find a surveillance footage that depicts the face of the man who saved Steve, if only because he was masked for the most part and out of sight for others. But there is one instance in which his face is clearly visible—the moment Steve Rogers unmasks the metal-armed man and freezes, shock on his face.
She points to the next face and asks, "Who dis, Unca Steef?"
His fingers join her tiny ones, tracing the image on the paper. "That," he says quietly, "is Sergeant James Barnes. He's my best friend." He grins suddenly, and she giggles when he adds, "His middle name was Buchanan, so I called him Bucky."
Anna is equally shocked the first time she sees the man's face, because how many times has she leafed through her Uncle Steve's sketchbooks and begged him to tell the stories behind each one? How many times had she accessed S.H.I.E.L.D.'s files to read those very stories after Steve left New York? And the stories of Bucky Barnes, the man whom Steve himself looked up to and loved as brother, were her favorites, so of course she knew who this man resembled.
Who this man was.
Is.
But how? Anna wonders. How did he survive the fall from the train? How did he still look the same after nearly 70 years—?
The serum, of course, her brain supplies immediately. Or at least a variation of it, she realizes, because the exact formula that created Captain America had been a secret its maker took to his grave. And didn't Steve say that he had found Bucky in a lab when he rescued him in Austria? If so, if Bucky had been experimented on before his rescue, then he might have some version of the Super Soldier Serum in his system that let him survive his fall. This was also perhaps why he looks the way he had in 1944.
But, and this was the important part, why was he fighting Steve? Did his fall from the train make him bitter or resentful because Steve hadn't managed to save him? Did he get amnesia, from his fall or from a later injury? No, no, it must've been from the fall, otherwise he'd have made contact with S.H.I.E.L.D.—or the S.S.R., as it used to be called—to let them know he was alive.
She paused at that thought, because what if he had called for help? In her time, S.H.I.E.L.D. hadn't been very open with the Avengers most of the time, which had resulted in many of the Avengers' mishaps. What if Bucky had radioed in, and the S.S.R. had kept the news from Steve. Perhaps they planned to tell him that his best friend survived after he returned from his offense against HYDRA, except that he died during that mission and their intentions never came to fruition. After all, she'd seen Bucky Barnes's S.H.I.E.L.D. file, and he'd been listed as 'MISSING', not 'KILLED'.
What if, what if, what if. There were too many uncertain variables for her to make an accurate estimation of the situation. She needed proof, needed the source.
But HYDRA was in control of S.H.I.E.L.D. now, and S.H.I.E.L.D.'s database was out there for anyone to peruse anyway, with just enough encryption left to keep the general public from editing any of the information there. Hackers though, hackers could make the data unreliable.
Shit. She didn't know. She couldn't know. Not unless...
Yes. Yes, that was an idea, wasn't it?
For him—for Steve—she would help find Bucky Barnes, and bring him home.
Tony Stark was her biological father, Thor Odinson was her adopted father, and Steve Rogers was her dad.
And, as she's already proven for Tony and Thor, she would do anything for her fathers.