Welcome to Febuwhump 2021! I will be filling the prompts in four fandoms—Supergirl, Timeless, MCU/Avengers and Stranger Things—and will be posting one work for each fandom filled with only the chapters that belong to that fandom. Almost all of these prompts stand on their own, but a few that have more than one part are notated as such, and will have their second part within the same fandom.

A full list of prompts is available on febuwhump's Tumblr, or on my own (usaOneTwoThree) under the #febuwhump tag. On my Tumblr, there's also my finalized plan for the month if you want to look ahead.

Hope you enjoy!

Day 2: "I Can't Take This Anymore" (Time Loop Part 1 of 2). Bucky gets stuck in a time loop, each day unable to prevent Steve's death.

It never happened the same way, but it always happened.

At the end of the day, by midnight, Steve was dead, Bucky having failed to save him.

He'd lost count of how many days this had gone on for. At least fifty.

In those days, Steve had been electrocuted, shot, drowned, bit by the rarest and deadliest animal in the world, had his throat slit, a piano fall on him, a fatal allergic reaction, went septic after a paper cut, slipped in the shower, and was poisoned (at least three different ways). He'd also fallen out of the Avenjet, had his skull caved in by a tree branch, was blown up, killed instantly in a car crash, crushed under the weight of a bank, burned alive, and strangled. His heart had given out, he'd had an aneurysm, and at least four times, he'd just died with no explanation.

Nothing Bucky did helped. He kept Steve in the Tower all day (heart gave out), took him out and about (piano), went out on a mission (tortured, electrocuted, waterboarded, then shot), got him on a plane (which he'd been sucked out of when the tail sheared off), drove across town (car crash), went boating (drowned).

Early on, he'd gone to Tony, who had believed him, and helped him look for a solution. Very quickly, Bucky had gotten the explanation down to a science: the exact number of words he needed to say to get Tony to believe him measured and perfected.

And still, Steve died. Again and again and again.

Tony had consulted Bruce, Reed Richards, Helen Cho, with no viable solution for saving Steve's life.

This wasn't like Groundhog's Day, where there was something Bucky had done wrong and needed to fix. The day before, the team had gone on a mission that had been successful and wrapped up almost without any injuries (Clint had whacked his shin against a small stool before Tony had found a light switch). The target was, for once, a genuinely bad guy with no redeeming qualities, and to top it all off, he had been saved: arrested alive and uninjured to stand trial for his crimes.

The rest of the day had just been hanging out in the Tower, enjoying a scant bit of peace before the next mission.

Each new day was wearing on Bucky, worse than the nightmares he'd had while breaking free of his Soldier conditioning. Those had been planted in his brain to keep him compliant. These iterations of Steve's death were real, for whatever real was anymore.

Today, when he woke up to find himself staring at the same white ceiling, in the same room, with the same book on his bedside, bookmark inserted at page seventy-two, he couldn't do it.

"Buck?" Steve asked a few hours later, poking his head into the room after knocking. "Everything okay?"

No, it most certainly was not, but Bucky couldn't find it within him to explain everything to Steve again.

"I'm not having a good day."

Steve nodded, and took a cautious step into the room. "Do you want to talk about it, or be distracted by it?"

"Distracted." It wasn't even a question.

Too late, he saw the dot of red between Steve's eyes, and when his friend fell, he screamed until his voice gave out.

The subject is almost ready.

I will alert management.

Bucky jolted back into awareness, to the same view he'd seen for the last… however many days. Steve's impending death weighed on him like a physical force.

"Buck," Steve asked, with the same amount of concern as he had every other day Bucky had stayed in bed, no matter if Bucky texted him or not. "Everything okay?"

"No." The wet sob that escaped after that surprised even Bucky, who tried to stifle it under a cough. But Steve had already heard it, and was quickly walking into the room.

"What's wrong?"

"I can't take it anymore," Bucky mumbled, swiping viciously at his eyes.

"Take what?" There was concern in Steve's voice, which was directed at the wrong person.

Again Bucky explained it, feeling as helpless as he had the first day he realized he'd inevitably be unable to save his friend.

"I'm sorry," Steve breathed, his expression matching what Bucky was feeling. "Have you—"

"Talked to Tony? Bruce? Literally everyone with any footnote on Google with knowledge of time loops? Yup. If we ever get out of this, I would write a whole freaking dissertation about everything I've learned."

"When."

"What?"

"You said 'if'. You meant 'when'."

"Doesn't feel much like a 'when' at this point, Steve."

"We'll figure it out together."

As if Bucky hadn't heard that before…

"What haven't you tried?" Steve asked, to which Bucky went through every maneuver he could remember.

Somewhere in the middle of it, Steve pulled out his phone and began typing.

"Are you listening to me?" Bucky snapped, interrupting the list of ways Steve had previously died.

"Yeah." Steve flipped his phone around. "Have you seen this result? Strange, on the Upper West Side."

"And that's special because?"

"Strange is a man," Steve enunciated slowly. "Expert in something time-related."

Bucky sat upright. Steve had searched many times for a solution, but this had never come up.

"How many pages did you go back?"

"It was the first result."

Bucky narrowed his eyes at Steve, who shrugged. "Has this never happened before?"

"No," Bucky said cautiously. "Never."

He dove at Steve, rucking up his shirt to reveal a fading scar over his hip, when he'd been shot on a mission with the Commandos. Nutrition had been so poor that month that the thing had never quite healed properly.

"Tell me something only you would know," he then demanded.

Almost instantly, Steve ran off a list of facts Bucky had never seen or heard of being published, online or otherwise.

"I'm me, Buck," he finished.

Bucky wanted to believe him, but something about this wasn't sitting right. Still, maybe it was his subconscious trying to tell him something. Something that would be useful.

"Well, let's go visit this Strange character."

It was on the way there that the subway crashed.

We're losing him.

3 mg of epinephrine. He's in v-fib.

The next morning, Bucky was out of the Tower within five minutes of waking, and heading to the address Steve had found yesterday to meet Steven Strange, a former surgeon, who lived on the fourth floor of a luxury apartment complex.

The instant Bucky walked in, he knew something was wrong. For one, the building was one-level, with no staircase or elevator in sight. Two, the seemingly endless room was dark, with no windows, when Bucky had seen many floor-to-ceiling ones on the exterior. Three, a man was standing in front of him, a man who didn't look anything like Steven Strange's picture online.

This man was average-height, dark-haired, rugged in a way that came with real-life experience. One side of his face was deeply scarred.

Bucky knew that face, but couldn't place a name.

"What was it that gave it away?" the man asked.

"The search results." Bucky reached for his lower back, but his weapon was gone—as was the knife strapped to his thigh, the holster around his ankle, and the two handguns in his shoulder holster.

"You weren't supposed to be able to remember that far back."

"I remember all of them," Bucky snapped. "Who are you? And why are you doing this to me?"

"We're prepping you," the man said. He was wearing what looked like twin holsters, which crossed over his chest. "You were disobedient on a mission. Rebellious. Non-compliant. You didn't respond to our usual techniques."

The man tilted his head at Bucky, and laughed cruelly, the sound bouncing around the empty floor. "You don't remember any of this, do you?"

Above the man, a spotlight appeared, lighting up a red cephalopod which was crudely spray-painted on the grey wall.

"You thought you left us?" the man spat. "You've been here the whole time, living out this alternate reality, so we could remind you where you belong."

"No," Bucky gasped out, barely audible. That was wrong. He'd gotten free. Steve had broken through the programming. He was getting better. He lived at the Tower. He had a list of likes and dislikes. He went by "Bucky". He'd reclaimed his identity, and was working on accepting what he'd done.

Bucky lunged forward, coming up behind the man, but his holsters were empty. A split second later, faster than Bucky could fathom, a .45 was pointing between his eyes.

"I think we're ready to proceed to Phase Two," the man said, before pulling the trigger.

This time, when the asset awoke, it didn't see a warm white ceiling, or a nightstand with a book turned to page seventy-two. It saw a dark grey bunk, in a miniscule room, and someone standing above it, asking it, in Russian, if it was ready to comply.

Fear not! This prompt will be continued on Day 26: Recovery.

Up next, we switch fandoms again to Supergirl for Day 3: Imprisonment, which we're loosely interpreting as quarantine and forced isolation, when Winn comes into contact with an alien toxin.

Thanks for reading! See you tomorrow!