AN This is following the events of TFATWS taking a stab at what may have happened to Steve after he went back in time. Mostly follows canon and where it doesn't let's just say it's a different part of the multiverse. ;) We only own our original characters. All familiars belong to Marvel.

Chapter 1 - BUCKY
NeverMindDream – 2021

James Bucky Barnes was exhausted. Bone tired. His face and body might only look like they were scratching 40, but he felt every single one of his 106-odd years in every cell of his super-soldier-serumed body.

A body that had had fewer years of rest than it did of fighting. He always seemed to be fighting. Something. Someone. Somewhere.

It exhausted him but, if he were really, truly, brutally honest, he had no idea what else he would do with himself.

He'd tried to die. Even managed to succeed once. It never seemed to stick. And somehow he'd had the fortune (whether it was good or bad, he could never quite tell) of securing friends who inexplicably seemed to want him to stay alive. First Steve, and then Sam. Their loyalty to him was a continual source of bafflement. Given everything he had done in his life - all the evil he'd been made to wreak on the world - he truly believed himself irredeemable. Mostly he kept waiting for his friends to finally wake up and see that.

"Oh, shit. You're right, Buck. You are the worst human being on the planet. See ya."

At least if one of them put a bullet to his head, it would come as a kind of relief. Primarily because he knew neither one of them would miss.

In the meantime, he figured the least he could do was to make sure one of those friends, Sam Wilson, stayed alive as he sought to take down the Power Broker. Sam seemed to believe this was the right thing to do. Unable to trust his own moral compass, Bucky simply agreed and tagged along.

Neither of them knew who the Power Broker actually was. He (or she - or they, Bucky supposed - he was still getting used to all the new language around gender) had originally been based out of Madripoor, but had since moved. Sharon Carter, their erstwhile friend/contact, had been helping them track the Power Broker since the Flag Smashers had been eliminated. Sam still wasn't over that. He had empathized with their cause, and their leader, Karli. Bucky was certain that was somehow going to bite them in the ass at some point, but again - his moral compass was not the one he trusted in this shit.

He missed Steve. A lot. Steve always seemed to know what to do, all of the time. Okay, Bucky knew that wasn't fair and probably wasn't true - it was just Steve had this thing about him that you trusted. Implicitly. Sam had a lot of that too, but the world felt so different now than it did when good and evil appeared more black and white. Nazis? Bad. Thanos? Bad. Easy. Maybe it had been easier for Steve to be so decisive because there had been significantly less grey.

Maybe.

Or maybe Bucky just missed his best friend. They never really even had a chance to catch up. Just when they found each other again, a huge fight broke out with the evil Titan, Thanos, and Bucky ended up dusted. And then, five years later, he came back to another huge fight, after which Steve left. Well, not left entirely, but went back in time so that he could have an actual life with the love of his life, Peggy.

And instead of taking him with him, Steve left Bucky to try to reset his own life in the here and now.

Honestly, if he thought about it too long, bitterness and resentment towards his friend started to eat at his brain and he didn't want that.

So he didn't think about it, as a general rule.

Instead, he assumed the mantle of Sam's bionic bodyguard and stuck to his remaining friend like glue.

Which was apparently a downer on his friend's romantic life.

Bucky wasn't entirely sure how Sharon rebuffing Sam's advances was his fault, but he was happy to assume responsibility for that as part of his Amends. Why not? For Sam, he'd take responsibility for pretty well anything.

Well, that and he did enjoy irritating him when he had the chance.

He, Sam and Sharon were deep in the wilds of Kazakhstan when Bucky found himself in a situation that could, finally, possibly kill him. They'd caught up with one of the Power Broker's inner-circle gangs and were in the fight of their lives. Bucky was separated from his friends trying to fight off what felt like two dozen thugs - some of them semi-super-soldiers (there was a diluted version of the serum the Power Broker was testing going around) - and he was losing. Badly.

Just when he was sure the end was near, eight people having converged on him to beat the shit out of him, suddenly, bodies started flying off of him like someone was yanking them away with a fishing rod.

What the hell?

His eyes were almost swollen shut, but he caught a glimpse of a blur to his right. And then to his left. And then his right again. Within the space of about five minutes, all his attackers were in various states of immobilization.

She wasn't wearing a fancy bodysuit or any kind of 'superhero' outfit. Instead it was army boots, a black t-shirt and camouflage khakis and a hat pulled low over her forehead. Her utility belt was loaded for bear and her shoulder harness was definitely custom made. He'd never seen one that also allowed its wearer to holster a series of small knives across the back in addition to the two guns resting on her chest under her shoulders.

She was winding what looked like a coil of wire back into place on her hip. Her head was tilted to the side and she looked at him like she was assessing the damage.

"Can you stand?" she asked. Her voice was deeper than he'd expected. Not masculine, but rich and sonorous. He found himself thinking that he liked the way it felt when she talked.

What a weird thing to think.

"I think so," he grunted, righting himself. "Who are you?"

She clipped the wire whip to her belt and that's when he noticed the sharp, barbed end on it. Is that what she'd used to yank people away from him? She was maybe five foot seven, and that was generous given the heel on the boot she was wearing. Maybe five six barefoot. She was densely muscled, but that did not in any way take away from her obviously feminie curves. There was no way she should have been able to move the guys who were twice her size off of him with the ease they seemed to be ripped away. The physics didn't work.

Unless.

"Who are you?" he asked again, taking a step closer to her. "Or better yet, what are you?"

She didn't back away. Didn't break eye contact with him. For the first time, he took a good look into her blue eyes. They struck him as familiar, but he couldn't place why.

A small smile lifted the corners of her lips. "You can call me Junior," she said. "And you're welcome for saving your ass. I'm about to go help your friends. You think you're up to join me?"

"You didn't answer my question," he persisted as she started walking away from him.

"I answered the one you didn't have the answer for," was all she said. "I told you who I was."

Bucky wanted to be mad, but damn if she didn't cut a striking figure from behind. Her auburn hair was pulled up off her neck in a tight bun at her nape and he saw something - a tattoo, maybe? - just visible under the collar of her shirt near her right shoulder.

"I asked you what you were, too," he tried, not quite catching up to her so he could continue to enjoy the view. It was a tattoo. He could just see two points of a star.

"Mmmhmm. Like I said, you already know the answer to that."

He didn't want to say it out loud. It was difficult, when you hated yourself so much, not to dislike others that might also be like you. He found himself, strangely, not wanting to dislike her.

"You're a super soldier," he said at last.

She gave him a half-smile. "Told you."

"Whose? How?" he tried.

"My own. And none of your business," was all she gave him.

"You're a free agent?" he pressed.

"I saved your life. Does it matter?"

"Yeah, it does. I need to know if I can trust you."

She chuckled wryly at that. "Assume you can't. In your position, you shouldn't trust anyone, should you?"

"Why did you save my life then?" he asked.

She shrugged. "I dunno. You're kinda cute?"

"What?"

He didn't get a chance to ask her anything else. They'd found Sam and Sharon and both hurried to relieve them of the thugs currently trying to kill them.

Bucky did his best to track Junior (what kind of a name was that, anyway?), but she was fast. And there were enough people to deal with that he couldn't afford to divert his attention.

He did manage to see how she utilized that wire whip on her belt, though. She would fling the thing over the branch of a tree, snag folks with the barb (usually by the belt), and, with a sharp tug on her end, backward they'd go. Super strength and a pulley system. Maybe the physics did work after all.

Bucky had to return his attention to the people attacking him after that. When the last person was finally immobilized, he looked up to see that it was just him and Sharon left on the battlefield. Panic took a roar through him.

"Sam!" he yelled.

Sharon, dazed and bruised, stumbled towards him. He caught her and she leaned heavily against him, trying to get her breath back.

"Sam!" Bucky yelled again.

He heard a kind of roar of a small engine and looked up in the direction it came from. Sam, winged, burst through the trees, his backpack smoking but functional. His landing was less than elegant, but he was alive. Thank god.

Bucky flung Sharon's arm over his shoulder and helped her hobble over to where Sam had gone to ground. His friend was bloody and breathing hard, but he didn't appear to have any fatal wounds.

"Are you okay?" Bucky asked him. "What happened?"

Sam shook his head, apparently the answer was too long to give just then. "Later," he managed. "Let's get to safety and lick our wounds first."

Bucky nodded. "Do you need help?" he asked his friend.

Sam waved him off. "Take care of Sharon. I'll manage."

Bucky did as he was told, scooping Sharon up in his arms as she appeared to be losing consciousness on them.

He looked around the space, trying to see what had happened to Junior. She was nowhere to be found. Maybe he'd imagined her. It was entirely possible. His nightmares had started to knock him sideways even during the day lately. Who was to say that he hadn't invented this mystery woman, too?