2

"I won't tell her you called her a hard-ass."

"She already knows. Are you nervous?"

"Well you've painted her in such a lovely way. I can't wait to meet her," Carina said during their commute to Dr. Raynor's office.

The doctor was waiting for them in the reception area when they arrived. "Ah, James."

"Doc."

"I'm guessing this is your wife."

"Yes, Carina. Nice to meet you Dr. Raynor. Thank you so much for everything you're doing."

"That's what I'm here for, that's my job. Now, I think I'll speak with you first," she told Carina.

"Sounds good."

"James, you can wait out here."

Bucky nodded and took a seat in one of the many awaiting chairs while Dr. Raynor led Carina into her office and closed the door.

"Please, have a seat." The doctor nodded to the empty chair, she taking a seat in the chair opposite.

"Firstly I just want to say again thank you for what you're doing for Bucky. We really appreciate it. Both of us, so much."

The therapist gave a nod. "The reason I've called you in today is because I want to hear your side of the story."

"Oh." Carina was sure her surprise showed.

"So I'll open it up to you." Dr. Raynor gestured for her to begin whenever she was ready.

"Okay, well, we met way back in 1941 and instantly clicked. My family is Latino, but my parents were very focused on fitting in as 'Americans'. They were very paranoid, my grandparents had really struggled as immigrants. I went by 'Karen' whenever away from home, but with Bucky I instantly felt safe and accepted, didn't want to hide my true self from him, and he didn't want me to either. It was a very good feeling. We started going out and then he joined up and got deployed a year later and we always had plans to pick up right where we left off once the war was over and he returned home. I got a job with Stark Industries and their war effort. I only saw him once more in England before he allegedly died..." Even though it was so long ago, those emotions suddenly came rushing back and settling within her like they had all those years, all those decades, ago.

"I was devastated, we both were, Steve and I. He lost his best friend and I lost the man I loved. I was hoping to marry him after the war..." She tried to push those emotions away - Bucky was alive, she reminded herself, he was safe and they were married now. He was waiting right outside the door. But she had been trapped in the belief that he was gone for so long that it was easy to get wrapped up in it again, even though it was all over now.

Well, maybe not all over.

"I kept working closely with Howard after the war, with the SSR, the early S.H.I.E.L.D., and I had my good friend Peggy Carter there with me, which was such a blessing. We bonded over both losing the men we loved and being the only women in our workplace. Bless Peggy. I miss her so much. I'm sorry, I'm just rambling - is this what you're looking for?" she broke off suddenly.

The doctor nodded. "Yes, no need to apologize."

"Okay, thanks. Um, then there was S.H.I.E.L.D. I always wanted to be a scientist working in a lab but the education for that let alone job opportunities for women in that field at the time were few and far between, if any at all, especially a woman of my background."

"Did you date anyone else after losing James?"

The question struck her. "Um, not really. He was my one, I was so sure of that. He is. I did go out with an SSR colleague, Jack, a few times, but it didn't stick. No one could replace Bucky and honestly I wasn't all that keen on moving forward with anyone else. I had my work, a job few like me had, and I was proud to hold such a position, so that took most of my focus. It was around then that I began noticing my lack of ageing..." Again, she paused, unsure of how much detail to go into, but Dr. Raynor simply nodded, urging her to continue. "I wasn't ageing, not like the people around me were, and I had no explanation for it, and it was being noticed by most of the people around me. Then, in the early '70s, when I had barely aged a day since thirty years previous, I asked Peg to help me go dark, disappear, go off the grid."

"That must have been very difficult," the doc sympathized.

"Yes, it was. I had to adapt to a situation thrown upon me that I didn't understand, and wouldn't understand for decades, and still find hard to wrap my head around. I'm a woman of science, so I like explanations for things, but this was beyond anything I could explain, way out of my element. The years passed, and soon we were into the twenty-first century and still there was no change, I still looked the same as I had before and still had no explanation for it. I dyed my hair, took on an alias, that of my own granddaughter by the name of Liv Sword, and reentered society, 'joining' S.H.I.E.L.D., the agency I'd helped found. Then I started working alongside Cap and Nat as a 'new' agent, Spark, and-" She took a deep breath before continuing. "And that's when we met up with Sam and encountered the Winter Soldier, and the impossible happened."

"You discovered James was alive."

"Yes, after all that time. Though he was hardly living." Again, those emotions were rushing back. "He almost killed me, that day in D.C. He looked right at me but had no idea who I was. And reading that file, learning what happened to him, what HYDRA did to him, I-" She was becoming choked up. "I saw red. I've always hated HYDRA, and I thought I couldn't hate them any more, but I could, oh I could. So much. We spent the next few years trying to track him down, trying to find him. But I was still Liv to everyone, so I still had to play the part. Couldn't be too eager to find Bucky. And, oh boy, then there was the whole Sokovia Accords issue and the team breaking up. And not only that, but something else weird was happening where there kept being other women who looked like me appearing in my life and no one had an explanation for that either. So there was always a lot going on at once. And Tony almost killed Bucky, right after I got him back, but then Wakanda, they were kind enough to help him, and I will be forever grateful to them. That was when I revealed myself as myself."

"Did you ever visit him in Wakanda?"

"Not in the beginning, they didn't want to overwhelm him as he recovered, which I completely understood. I was really eager to see him, of course, but there was also this lingering worry that he wouldn't want to be together anymore, which, I mean, it had been decades, we should have both been long dead. But it sort of seemed like life was giving us another chance. I visited him a few times towards the end of his recovery, and he was back."

"James was still alive because of his serum, but you still didn't know how you were still alive?"

"That's right. That was still a mystery, but I took it." She sighed, realizing there was still a lot more to divulge. "We were on the run as fugitives at that time, and there was some alien threat coming, because of the Infinity Stones - but that's a whole other story. That was when Buck and I reunited and I was so relieved when he said he wanted to continue where we left off all those years ago. I was overjoyed. But I only got him back for less than a day before he was gone again - for five years. Five more years." Those bitter feelings were settling back in again. "It was strange, while it seemed like life was giving us another chance, it kept taking him away."

"Remember, he lost you for those five years too. He had just been reunited with you. You lost each other."

"That's true. And finally, after five years we had a way to fix it, and we did, at great cost, but we did. And I finally figured out why I was so old and yet so young at the same time, cause of my connection with the Time Stone-" Again, she paused.

"It's all confidential here," the doc reminded her.

"Right, thanks. And my look-alikes' connection to the other Infinity Stones. That's why I wasn't being affected by the flow of time like others."

"And now? For you and James?"

"Now we've got a chance at the life we always wanted to have." This made her smile. "Is that everything? I think that's everything."

"How do you feel? Any less stressed because of it?"

"Honestly, no, I don't," she realized. "I mean, part of me does, but there's always a lingering fear that something's going to happen to separate us again. And we're walking on eggshells here with his pardon, he has to be so careful. I'm deeply terrified of losing him again. I've felt that grief so many times now it's familiar, and I'm just waiting for it. It's awful."

"That's understandable. Well, it sounds to me like James has a great support system at home."

Carina smiled and they shook hands. "I hope that was helpful."

"It was, thank you."

"Thank you."

"You can send your husband in. And Carina - I think you need to spend some time away from worrying about James, and focusing on you."

Whew, that chapter just flowed, I wrote the vast majority in one sitting! :D

Thank you so much for reading and I hope you enjoyed! :)