Heads shot up all around the camp at the sound of a roaring motorcycle engine coming down the road. It wasn't an unfamiliar sound, so it wasn't surprise had had heads popping up all over. Rather, it was eagerness. Mail frequently came in the side-car of a motorcycle. Intel was often carried by a messenger riding a motorcycle.

"I've got a special delivery for Captain America!" a female voice called out.

Which really surprised everybody. Agent Carter was the only woman in the outfit. Then again, that was the same accent. Maybe it was a British thing, to send women onto the battlefields?

A tall man in a uniform of red-white-and-blue, a silver star in the middle of his chest, strode across the camp towards the voice that had called for him. When he rounded a tent and caught sight of the motorcycle, he could only wonder what the 'special delivery' was.

Then the person in the side-car took off their helmet, and Captain America damn-near stumbled.

"Bucky," he breathed, eyes wide.

He ran for his friend then, and barely caught himself from crashing into the big black motorcycle – which was, he realised now, definitely not army regulation. Not for either side.

"You can't keep doing this to me Buck," Steve informed his best friend a little desperately as he very carefully didn't dent anything. "It was bad enough the first time. Watching you fall like that... I can't take the thought of you dying a third time, Bucky."

"Payback," Bucky declared with a tired smile on his face. "For all those times you waded into fights you weren't strong enough for, or worked yourself up to an asthma attack trying to prove something, and I worried about you but you just stubbornly kept on doing it."

"Bruises and wheezing aren't the same as dying, Bucky," Steve insisted firmly.

"Don't I know it," Bucky grumbled. "I'm still not sure I'm not actually dead and dreaming all of this."

A hand, delicate and pale with perfectly shaped but unpolished nails, appeared between the two friends and took hold of Bucky's chin. It turned his head towards the owner, and Steve looked as well. A pretty face with bright green eyes was framed by a few loose, wispy curls of dark red hair that was a bit longer than strictly fashionable, most of it pulled back in a practical (but again, not strictly fashionable, in fact, not fashionable at all) tie at the base of her skull.

"You couldn't dream me up if you tried, Sergeant Barnes," a sweet contralto informed him as mischief danced in those amazingly green eyes, a coyly knowing smile on her lips. "And I'm going to make sure you don't forget me either. You're the first man who has been in my bed who wasn't trying to get there because of my inheritance."

Steve blushed.

"Thought you said earlier I was the first man to ever be in your bed," Bucky countered.

"Completely true," the unknown woman agreed as she released her hold on his chin. "Doesn't mean others didn't try very, very hard, before you fell at my feet, hypothermic, half-drowned, with a bullet-hole in your side, a broken leg, a concussion, and missing an arm. I guess I'm just a sucker for a doll-faced bloke in distress," she teased.

While Bucky's neck grew warm at the description of himself as 'a doll-faced bloke', Steve's blush drained from his face at the litany of injuries his best friend had apparently sustained, and it took the rest of his colour with it.

"Missing an arm?" he asked weakly.

Bucky grimaced.

"Put it this way, Punk," he said, forcing out a joke despite how bad he knew it to be. Bad enough that he'd wished for death instead when he'd first found out. "It's a good thing I'm right handed." It was probably the weakest, most limp – no, lame, that was the word – joke that he'd ever made in his life.

"With a list of injuries like that, I'm surprised that you're conscious, let alone making jokes about it," a new voice intruded. Colonel Philips had arrived on the scene, Agent Carter a half-step behind and to the right of him. "Glad you're not dead Barnes. Rogers was getting all mopey without you, and went through a whole lot of booze before he realised he couldn't get drunk. Kept on drinking anyway."

"Can't get drunk?" Bucky questioned, thrown.

"Apparently it's a side-effect," Steve admitted. "My metabolism is four times faster, so I just burn through it before it can affect me."

"Drink something stronger," the mysterious woman who had brought Bucky back suggested, and threw her leg over the motorcycle to dismount. "Are you the commanding officer of this... amalgam of personnel?" she asked Colonel Philips.

"I am indeed," he answered, and offered his hand to shake. "Colonel Chester Philips, and who might you be, young missy?"

"Doctor Evangeline Potter," she answered as she grasped the offered hand and pumped it firmly, but not too hard, just the way Bill had taught her. "Pleasure to meet you, Colonel."

"Doctor Potter, if it's not too much trouble, I would very much like to know how you came across our lost boy," Colonel Philips requested.

"An accident while travelling caused me to be severely geographically displaced. I've been wandering those mountains for the better part of two months with no idea which direction I should go to find the good guys. It was just as fortunate for me as for Sergeant Barnes that we met. If we hadn't, he'd probably be dead, and I would definitely still be lost in the mountains," she explained succinctly. "With permission, I'd like to set up my tent with your camp and maybe join your medical team."

"Haven't got one," the Colonel admitted. "We've got some pretty good first-aid supplies and a medic on hand, but we've been sending the injured to the nearest mash unit."

"Then with permission, I'll set up my tent and a triage tent," Doctor Potter said, altering her offer slightly, but it was clear that she intended to attach herself to the unit. "I'm not letting Sergeant Barnes out of my sight. You probably won't find a better medical professional than me anywhere on this continent or the next, and I intend to see Sergeant Barnes' recovery through to the point where he has a working prosthetic that he's going to be able to live with."

She'd almost be the best by default simply because she had internalised so many medical and scientific advances that hadn't happened yet.

"Ma'am, it is standard procedure to send the wounded back home," Colonel Philips pointed out frankly. "You couldn't do your medical bit over there just as easily?"

"I suppose I could," Doctor Potter agreed mildly. "But I get the feeling my expertise will be needed here sooner than later."

"The only place civilians have in a war is the USO, entertaining the troops and moving on."

"Civilians don't have any place in any war, Colonel. They just get caught in it by accident and suffer for it," the lady doctor countered sharply. "It won't be the first war I've seen, Colonel Philips, I can promise you that. It's just that the last war I was in, I was a front-line fighter. I didn't become a doctor until after that was over."

"A woman on the front line?" It surprised just about everybody that it was Agent Carter, of all people, asking that question.

"Not a place any teenager plans to be," Potter answered, subtly emphasising that it was actually a lot worse than a woman on the front line; it was a girl. "But once I was there, I couldn't leave until it was over."

Colonel Philips was silent for a moment as he considered the unknown woman before him.

She'd brought back a man they had all thought dead. She had brought him back alive against the odds, considering the injuries she'd listed. She'd brought him back through enemy lines on a motorcycle. A motorcycle that didn't have so much as a scratch on it that he could see.

If nothing else, she could handle herself, and she could handle injures.

Still.

"What do you know about Hydra?" he demanded.

"Greek monster, generally depicted as having a lizard-like appearance," she answered. "Chop off a head, another three grow back. Smarter heroes who fought the thing learned quickly that there was no point slicing the heads off, and went for other methods of killing instead."

Colonel Philips narrowed his eyes at that. It felt like he was being mocked, but at the same time...

"What kind of methods?" Agent Carter questioned.

"As someone who only vaguely remembers that lesson, I think dropping a mountain on it, crushing it to death, was the method used. I could be wrong. As a doctor, however, I am supposed to favour quick and merciful deaths, and death by crushing isn't either. Therefore... cut out the heart. I don't believe any text ever talks about Hydra's heart re-growing, just the head," Doctor Potter supplied thoughtfully. "On the other hand, my more practical, paranoid, and vindictive side is quite fond of putting a pike up through the enemy's soft palate, up into their brain, then having fun with lots and lots of highly flammable fluids and a lit match... and that wouldn't be cutting off heads either, technically."

"No offence Ma'am, but your last suggestion there was mildly terrifying," Steve said, filling in the stunned silence that had followed the pretty doctor's suggestions.

"I had to kill the same man seven times in the last war I was involved in," Potter stated solemnly, seriously, though she off-set that with an almost-careless shrug. "You learn to make sure they're properly dead when you're dealing with that sort of thing. Colonel, where can I pitch my tent?"

"... Next to Agent Carter's."