Holly briskly strode down the sidewalk, leaving her car in the lot behind her. Jogging, she cut across the grass towards the nondescript apartment building. She felt like she was going to be late, even though it hardly mattered if she arrived on time at this place. What mattered was that she came. And after the long day she'd had at work, she was more than glad to arrive at any point here. Stealing swiftly through the side door, she jogged down the hall and halted before the door marked #7. Pounding lightly, she heard the stirring within and stepped back a little as the door was thrown open.

"Hey!"

A petite blonde whirlwind seemed to come at her, and all she could do was open her arms and allow herself to be hugged tightly. Sarah Collins was her best friend, after all, and could hardly be denied the gesture.

Sarah was one of the few people Holly had met when she first moved out to the East Coast, a tiny girl who had wandered into the bookstore to escape a deluge of rain. She could not be ignored, with her graceful bearing and her bright, happy vocals as she practically trilled away about this, that, and the other thing. Instead of feeling annoyed, the lonely girl at the till was grateful to have someone to talk to her like she wasn't an idiot just there to ring up the books. Soon enough, the two became fast and close friends.

"Feels like I haven't seen you in forever, girl. How are you?" she asked, her voice cheerful and her green eyes wide as she led the way into her apartment. Holly stepped after her, careful to keep her longer stride short so she didn't overtake her friend. Seating herself on the couch, she tucked a leg under her knee, while Sarah was seated cross-legged down the way. A wine bottle and two glasses waited on the coffee table, and both young women indulged in a glass. Glancing around, the familiar sights of old trophies and the pictures of little girls in sequined outfits filtering amongst the other bookshelf knick-knacks met Holly's gaze. Sarah, having danced from a young age, had taken up the mantle of instructor several years ago, and her devotion to her pupils—her girls, she called them—showed in every corner of the living room.

"I'm good," she answered, giving her friend a saucy grin over the rim of her glass. "It's been two weeks since your birthday. You getting so old you forgot that already?"

"Yes, I'm so ancient now," snorted Sarah, waving away the jab with a flick of her fingers. Given that she was only twenty-four, two years younger than Holly herself, she didn't take it at all to heart. "Point being, I haven't seen you a lot lately."

Holly sighed, resting her head against her hand and taking another sip of wine. "I know, I've...I've been busy."

"Writing?"

It was a fair assumption; though it hadn't happened in awhile, Holly had several works of fiction waiting on her laptop that she plunked away at every now and again. The big story, however, had not been touched in some time; a novel, spanning across two years and still not near completion. Ostensibly, Holly had gone to school to become a writer, but aside from a couple of poems and a short story, she hadn't published much. Real life, and writer's block, definitely took up a major portion of her time. Still, there was a chance she may have been bitten by the writing bug.

"No. Well, yes and no. I've chiseled away at the manuscript a little. I think I've figured out how to get my character out of the prison," she confessed excitedly. Her character was a young girl with special capabilities, attempting to find their mother after she was abducted by a special agency. She'd been locked up the last time Holly had worked with her; knowing where to go with a story, but not how to get there, was a cruel feeling. She was glad to be able to banish it.

Sarah snorted, rather indelicately, as she drank. "Only took you six months."

Holly rolled her eyes and chuckled, "Shut up."

Next came the inevitable questions: how was her brother doing? Keeping to the garage with the cars, as usual? Was her sister still enjoying married life and her new infant son? Were her parents okay?

"Everyone's fine, really. Not much has changed back home. Still weird to think of Hank and Heather as adults, with businesses and babies, but Mom and Dad are handling better than me," Holly said, laughing a little to herself. Asking after Sarah's girls, she discovered that they were well on their way to working out going to competition at the end of the month. The pride in her voice was evident, and she was so happy to have the girls get as far as they had.

They both topped off their glasses, savoring a bit more wine. Sarah, toying with the stem of the glass, looked at her friend with hooded eyes. "So...still hanging out with that Steve guy?"

Holly half smiled at that. Given how much she had spent time with him over the last two months, it didn't make sense to hide what she was doing from Sarah. She told her his first name, and that he was a little old-fashioned, but still a sweet person. However, she kept his identity as Captain America a secret; it felt too much like gossiping, or even a little like betrayal, to even consider doing so. If she were him, she wouldn't want her friends always gushing about how she was this famous hero and inviting everyone in the nearby radius to give their exact opinions on what she had done. So he was just Steve, the guy without a Facebook account (Sarah had tried to find him there, only to be met Holly's explanation of, "He's never had one and he doesn't want one," as an excuse).

"Yeah. Ever since he was, you know, let go, his has been an easy schedule to plan around."

That certainly was true; with SHIELD no longer existing, he technically did not have a job any longer. It definitely gave him more time in the real world.

"Not trying to replace me, are you?" Sarah joked in a false suspicious tone.

Tapping a finger against her chin, Holly pretended to give the notion thought before snickering, "Naw, I've put too much work into this friendship already to give it up now."

"Good to hear."

"Yeah."

"You should bring him by sometime, maybe the next time I have people over," Sarah suggested, thinking this was a grand idea. She wanted to meet the guy her best friend couldn't help but mention every time she spoke to her. She wanted to put a face to the name, to essentially examine this new person who'd gotten under her friend's skin. "The more, the merrier, and all that."

Holly hesitated before shaking her head. "I don't know if he could. He's working on a new project, and it could keep him busy for awhile. I haven't heard from him in a few days."

"Hopefully not for too long."

"I don't know," Holly answered honestly, furrowing her brow. Though she had no details, she knew Steve would be well engaged with his "other plans." The importance he'd laid upon them was very apparent to her back when he first mentioned the pursuit, and given that he'd established "radio silence" with her at the moment, she knew he was jumping head first into them. The duration of the endeavor was not hers to speculate on.

"What's wrong, hun?" Sarah inquired, noting her friend's troubled expression. She laid a hand on her shoulder, patting her gently. Holly just shot her another glance, one loaded with words she couldn't articulate, with thoughts she couldn't express.

"I just...I hope that everything goes well for him, that's all," she commented quietly, a finger sliding around the rim of her glass. "He hasn't had the best of luck lately."

'And that's putting it mildly,' her brain supplied as her mouth was occupied with another sip.

Silence engulfed Sarah momentarily, as she could not comment on someone she hadn't even properly met before, or his luck. Instead, she just looked over her friend, watching her gnaw her lip and stare into the middle distance. She could see the worry in Holly's eyes, and knew that she would be turning over the idea over and over in her mind for some time. That did not stop her from speaking her mind on her behavior, at least.

"Don't borrow trouble, Holl. Especially if it's not yours to begin with," she murmured, patting her shoulder once more. Her companion scoffed under her breath, having heard the admonition several times in the past. She held her tongue, keeping her comments locked away.

'Tell me not to breathe while you're at it,' sat at the forefront of her mind, but she said nothing.

The worst part of the entire situation, for her at least, was the fact that she knew nothing about what was going on. Oh sure, she had a vague understanding, but she had no honest idea. And the unknown made her a little afraid. She was afraid for all of them; whatever Steve, and most likely Sam as well, was dealing with, it wasn't anything pleasant. He hinted at that himself. And it had the potential to have dire consequences. Or she thought it might; without anything to back up her theory, either good or bad, she was left to imagine worst possible scenarios.

She had joked with Steve, telling him to warn her in case the "other things" would affect her and possibly cause her harm. Now, she wondered if that would actually happen.

It was a scary thought. One that, for once, she could not readily confide to her friend. Sarah didn't need to be brought into her quagmire of fear and frustration. Dwelling on it would not do, either. Downing the rest of her wine in one big gulp, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and gestured towards the television.

"Alright, no more borrowing trouble. Let's watch a movie or something," she said, with Sarah agreeing easily. It had already been a long day, with difficult customers and a cranky distributor yanking her and Carl's chains up until the afternoon. It was ideal, coming to Sarah's and watching some terrible guilty pleasure films to take her mind off things. However brief that interlude might be.

xXxXxXx

Steve tapped at his computer, his chin in his hand that was propped beside it. He was in the process of converting all the paperwork and notes in the file to a word document, to be saved and pulled up at his convenience later if he needed to do so. He wasn't all too familiar with the feeling of his brain frying on the inside, but after the last couple of hours, he imagined he was beginning to smell smoke as he kept typing, and thinking.

The last couple of days had been spent cracking away at the file, the first step in Steve's plan to locate Bucky...hopefully without much conflict. That was wishful thinking, of course, but although he planned for the worst, he could hope for the best. Between him and Sam, they were determined to split the file in half and work on their separate parts in an effort to speed along the process. So they'd worked, on and off, over several days, trying to make some headway.

He glanced down at the sheet, sitting beside the laptop on the desk. Contemplating it, he pondered the rest of the contents. What he'd read, what he surmised thus far...it was worse than he'd imagined. The first day, when he and Sam had arrived home from the cemetery, he could only get through a few pages before he had to turn away in disgust, leaving it for the next day. Bucky's fortitude, which he knew firsthand to be great, had to have been sorely tried when he was taken by HYDRA.

Torture. Experimentation. That was what he'd gleaned so far, having to walk through the notes in his imperfect understanding of German, and even having to use an online translator for some of them. Some were in English, but far too much of it remained obscure. He reckoned those he could read were not meant to be secret, unlike the others. The Russian notes were something he might try to run by Natasha sometime; his fluency ended at German and French.

A list poked out beneath it, a list of names. His assassinations list, Steve concluded, when he noticed the fresh addition of "Nick Fury" and "Captain America" at the bottom. It was a long one, with names from over the last fifty years, all (except for the last two) truly dead and suspected to be his handiwork. It twisted his stomach, and his heart, to think about how his friend was commanded to carry out those duties, without knowing exactly who he was going after.

"Oh, Buck," he whispered to himself, scanning the page once more and wincing. It was a surgery report, describing the procedure of taking off the remaining, hanging bones and muscle of his arm before his metal arm was attached. "Damn."

Yes, Steve was a soldier. Yes, he'd seen atrocities and death, things an average citizen could never want to see. He'd escorted escaped prisoners of some concentration camps to safety, to freedom, and witnessed the cruelty of man. It didn't make reading what had happened to his best friend any easier to swallow. His past experiences couldn't change the fact that he felt terrible for what had occurred.

Not for the first time, he hated himself for being on ice for seventy years. If he hadn't gone down with the plane, he could have found Bucky, reversed the damage done to him...

None of that was your fault, Steve, Natasha's words floated back to him. He sighed; they didn't make him feel any better, no matter if they had the ring of truth. Maybe it wasn't his fault, but it still should not have happened.

His phone lit up then, catching his eye. A new text message came in, penetrating the cocoon of study and preparation he'd built around himself. Despite his want to get as much put into the document as he could that night, he broke off long enough to pick up the device and read the message.

Hey, haven't heard from you in awhile. Just checking to make sure you're still alive. :)

In his morbid mood, he shouldn't have found the words even remotely funny. A corner of his mouth lifted slightly, even so. Of course, he mused silently, of course Holly would say something like that. Leaning back in his chair, he drew in a long, deep breath, calming his agitation somewhat.

It should not have happened to Bucky. It should not have happened to anyone. But, God willing, he could stop something like that from happening again.

He would stop any evil force, as best he could, from claiming another of his friends, from taking advantage of someone he cared about.

Hey. Still alive, Holly, still alive.


A/N: This chapter could be alternately titled as, "Yes, Holly DOES Have Friends Beside Steve." Or "A Semi-Girly Interlude." Or, "Holly Knows A Lot of People With S-Names." Hahaha...good thing I'm not titling the chapters in that case.

In my mind, Natasha did pull some strings and got that file for him, but I highly doubt it would all be in English, so the first few days have to be dedicated to translating the damn thing before he could begin to even actually comprehend the text.

Soon enough, though, the boys will be shipping out in pursuit of Bucky, and where will that leave Holly? Oh, you'll find out soon enough. I jotted out this chapter fairly quickly, as I'm not sure exactly how this weekend is going to shape out, so here ya go: a chapter a little earlier than normal.

Anyway, thanks for reading, PLEASE REVIEW (I don't mean to beg, but it would be a nice gesture on your part), and I'll see you next time!