The most recent memories came first.

"Bucky! Hang on! Grab my hand!"

The metal rod he'd been holding tight to, been carefully shuffling along to reach his friend, broke free just as he tried to reach out to Steve. He fell, aware of the horror on his friend's face as he was forced to watch him fall. Both of them helpless.

"Nooooo!"

Just minutes before, he was standing on top of a ledge that was just wide enough for the whole team...

"You remember when I made you ride The Cyclone at Coney Island?" he asked as he looked down at the railway below, and the cable that had been stretched across the ravine so they would be able to drop down onto a moving train.

"Yeah, and I threw up?" Steve checked.

"This isn't payback is it?" he asked wryly. He and Steve had a long-held system of looking out for each other, but always making it not be charity. Little pay-backs and pranks had always been part of that. Joking their way of dealing with the difficulties that came with growing up in their part of Brooklyn.

"Now why would I do that?"

It was definitely payback.

Missions, sniping, looking through the scope and seeing his friend, adjusting the scope to get the enemy in sight and not letting them hurt his friend. Charging in, guns blazing, at his friend's side as they committed to a frontal assault. Being recruited by his friend into the special force that was dubbed 'The Howling Commandos', and being summarily dismissed by the beautiful woman in the red dress who, while she responded to what he said, she'd been speaking to his friend, not him.

"I'm invisible. I- I'm turning into you. It's a horrible dream." That... sounded a lot more bitter than it should have. Not as joking as it should have. Had he really said that?

Escaping from that first Hydra facility, the beam he was crossing on slowly giving way beneath him, everything below either exploding or on fire. Just barely making it to the other side as the beam dropped away from underneath him.

"There's gotta be a rope or something!" he called frantically.

"Just go! Get out of here!" Steve called back.

"NO! Not without you!" Even the suggestion that he should save himself at the expense of his friend made him angry. He hadn't abandoned any of the hundred-and-seventh, and they were just people he'd been assigned with. Steve had been his best friend all his life.

Steve who had always been smaller. Had been too small and too sickly to be permitted to join the army, but he'd somehow done it anyway, and in the short re-cap he got from his friend, it seemed that he'd been picked for an experiment. He'd had some serum injected into him that had made him taller, stronger, not sick any more.

"Did it hurt?" They'd injected him with stuff too. It had hurt. God. It had burned through his veins. It felt like it still did.

"A little."

"Is it permanent?" He didn't know if he hoped it was or wasn't, and he didn't know who he was hoping it for.

"So far."

Injections. Needles. Stuff put into him and stuff taken out. Forced into a chair that clamped around his head and scrambled little bits of his brain while Zola talked at him. Insidious little lies that he did not, would not believe. No! No! No! He didn't want to! Make it stop!

Horrors had been planted in his mind as soon as they became aware of the sergeant's surprising ability to adapt and become stronger just a few degrees beyond normal human comprehension, even in the worst of situations. By that, Evangeline meant Barnes' own mental and physical ability was naturally superior to others, not that the Nazis couldn't understand what they'd found in him. He had skills that they determined to augment, to make even better by pumping into him a drug very similar to that which had gone into Schmitt and Rogers.

The words they had planted in his brain in an attempt to claim him as theirs, to claim his skills for their own, are more horrific than the physiological stamp they had left half-carved into him. Angry on his behalf, Evangeline reached out with her magic and seared away the triggers and conditioning that the Nazis had pumped into him. They were burned away until not even ashes (the metaphorical kind, in this case) remained.

Without the complete process – Steve had come before they were finished – it hadn't physically transformed Barnes as it had the other two.

Evangeline kept going, made sure everything was straight. That the memories from before he joined the war weren't tainted, that his childhood was intact and as it was supposed to be. A memory that had been tampered with always felt different. When she was satisfied, Evangeline pulled herself out of his mind and found that Barnes had passed out under the strain.

~oOo~

Transfiguration was more permanent than conjuration. That is to say, when something conjured reverted to what it had been made from, it turned into air. When something transfigured returned to what it had been made from... And if the transfiguration was purely aesthetic, rather than on an atomic level then the transfiguration would hold longer. Beetles to buttons were beetles again by the end of the week. A bolt of fabric could be transfigured into a dress and only more magic would change it again after that, though conjured buttons would vanish like nobody's business. Beetles resisted the change, fabric existed for exactly that purpose.

A wooden match into a silver needle would also revert, because there was nothing in wood that made it anything like silver. It might hold the needle shape, because it was so similar, but it would eventually revert to a wooden needle, rather than remain a silver one.

With these sorts of transfiguration principles (and a good many more) in mind, and a hearty soup simmering gently on the hob, Evangeline set herself to studying. To puzzling and planning and figuring out how to give Barnes a new arm that would work like the old one. A flesh arm couldn't be created. Anything that was 'living flesh' reverted from its transfiguration fairly quickly, depending on what it was and so on. Dudley's pig's tail had lasted all of August, but it was really just a bit of skin pulled out and made twirly. No bone or flesh or cartilage or anything, maybe a few nerves. It could have been easily removed with a sharp knife – and had been, by the doctors who had sterile instruments and a local anaesthetic so that Dudley wouldn't scream from having the hole in the skin of his backside stitched back together again. Then again, that had been a hex, rather than a transfiguration, so the rules were ever-so-slightly different.

"What's holding your attention so tight, Doll?" a tired, weak, but still rich and deep voice asked softly from the bed.

Evangeline jumped in her chair and twisted sharply.

"You're awake!" she exclaimed with a relieved smile. "I have some soup on the hob, if you're hungry, and I gave you the stuff for the leg while you were out. It will be stiff for a while longer still, but you should be able to walk short distances on it right now. For example, from the bed to the table."
"I think I could eat," Barnes agreed as he pushed himself up into a sitting position with his one remaining arm.

The blanket that Evangeline had tucked around him when he'd passed out after the Legillimency slid down his body and exposed his naked torso to the slightly cooler air. Yes, she had a fire going, but there's always going to be a feeling of being cooler suddenly when the blankets fall away.

There's also the sensation of the blanket falling to take into account, and Barnes' eyes grew wide as he realised that he just felt it slide down his skin, not drag over his shirt. He looked down and, sure enough, his naked chest is on display to a member of the opposite sex, while he's sitting on a bed no less, and without a chaperone.

Normally, he didn't worry about chaperones too much, but normally, he just went dancing with the girls, maybe stole a kiss or two. This was so far beyond that. He spotted his boots on the floor by the bed, and the rest of his uniform – every single item of clothing he'd been wearing, bar one – missing.

"Nothing I haven't seen before," Evangeline assured him with an amused, gentle smile. "Medical school had practical lessons, so I've seen the full physiques of a good number of people, most of them not even half as handsome as you are, and I left your modesty intact."

"Thank you," Barnes said softly as he fought back the blush that was creeping up the back of his neck, towards his ears, and aiming to take over his cheeks. "But, uh..."

She giggled. She couldn't remember the last time she'd giggled. She knew she'd been given cause to laugh by various friends over the years, all of them determined to drive away the shadows of the war from each other's eyes. Giggling though... No. Actually, if she thought about it, Evangeline realised that she had never giggled before. Laughed, guffawed, snorted, huffed, chuckled, but giggling, that stereotypical girly thing to do over a cute boy... no. She hadn't ever.

But this man, who had lost his arm in a fall, in the middle of World War Two, deep in a mountain range somewhere in Europe, naked except for his under-shorts, had just made her giggle as he fumbled a little over a request for clothing.

"Your uniform is soaking," she explained gently. "Lots of blood and dirt, and when I've finished cleaning it, I dare say it's going to need to be mended."

"I can't go about in nothing in the presence of a lady though!" Barnes objected faintly. "It's not right!"

"I'm sure my father and godfather would agree with you," Evangeline allowed as she stood from her chair, "but they'd probably object to the fact that a man I'm not married to is practically naked in my bed in the first place."

"This is your bed?" Barnes asked, no less panicked, but now also stunned and shamed. "Where have you been sleeping? I'm pretty sure I've slept a lot since you saved my life. You can't have been awake the whole time."

"Actually, I have," she answered as she pulled a trunk of clothes out of the linen closet. Witch's tent and magic. Practically set up a whole house in fifteen minutes. Love it. "It's only been eighteen hours or so. Now, let's see. I think Sirius' old things might fit you."

She quickly passed him singlet and socks, which he just as quickly put on. Next, she pulled out a paisley purple shirt with lots of ruffles.

She pulled a face.

"If it wasn't one of the few things I have left of the old dog, I'd burn it as a monstrosity," she said firmly. "Sirius was my godfather. He died saving my life when I was fifteen," she added softly in explanation.

"Not to speak ill of the dead, but... did he understand about style?" Barnes asked carefully.

Evangeline snorted as she dropped the horrific shirt back into the trunk.

"He did," she answered. "But he also deliberately went out of his way to make his mother furious with him in revenge for her making his life a very painful, miserable hell. Anything cheerful, she hated. Anything bright, she hated. Anything that was an expression of her eldest son's independent identity -"

"She hated?" Barnes suggested with a wry smile.

"With every fibre of her evil, twisted being," Evangeline confirmed solemnly. She pulled out a different shirt, this one a simple, bold, red in wool-blended cotton. Not a frill or a ruffle or a bit of lace anywhere to be seen. "Much better," she approved. "Hope you don't mind red."

"I think I can live with this," Barnes answered as he took the offered shirt. "Better than the first one."

"I'll see if I can find you some trousers. Sirius had the broad shoulders, but he was skinnier than a rake towards the end. Didn't keep the trousers that fit him when he'd had a healthy weight. Shirts had to be the same size though, to fit the bone-structure, even if he didn't have much meat over those bones any more," she rattled off absently as she dug back into the trunk that held the clothes of the man who had been all the father she'd ever known.

She didn't have any of her real dad's clothes. Just about anything that could burn had gone up in smoke that Halloween night when Voldemort had attacked Godric's Hollow.

Barnes did his best to pull the shirt on with only one hand, and struggled – but did eventually succeed – to fumble the buttons through the holes. He'd just got the last one done up when he heard a soft laugh that would have drawn his attention even if he hadn't been about to direct it to the owner of that laugh.

She was holding up...

"I honestly had no idea that Sirius owned a kilt," Evangeline said, biting back laughter with every syllable. "I'll bet Dad had one just the same. This is McGonagall tartan. They'd have got them while they were in school, to tweak Professor McGonagall's nose."

Barnes was silently relieved that she set the tartan back down and picked up a pair of plain brown slacks. He didn't think his masculinity could take the hit of wearing a skirt, even if it was a skirt that was meant for men to wear. Bad enough he'd been invisible to that pretty Agent Carter when he stood next to Steve.

"She probably loved it though," Evangeline murmured to herself wistfully. "Here, these should fit you."

"Thank you," Barnes said softly. "I... I'm sorry for your loss."

Evangeline shrugged.

"It gets easier," she admitted as she wrapped her arms around herself, "and it's hardly your fault that I'm without them. Besides," she added, more determinedly cheerful as she handed over the trousers. "It means that I have clothes to give to handsome young soldiers who fall into my care."

"Do you say that to all the men who end up in your bed?" Barnes asked, a little bit of the old charm coming back to him as he sat there, blanket over his lap as he accepted the piece of clothing.

Evangeline laughed.

"Yes," she admitted with a bright, happy, teasing smile. "But then, you're the only man who's ever been in my bed for me to say it to. You put those on, I'll serve up that soup for us."