"What's eating you, Potter?" Colonel Philips demanded softly. "And don't deny that something is, or you wouldn't be scaring all the troops with the way you're attacking that innocent wooden post with that machete."

"You're not going to ask where I got a machete from?" Potter asked mildly. She made no comment on the fact that the 'innocent wooden post' had been a very tall tree when she started, that it still had roots in the ground, and she'd only attacked it with the machete. No magic at all.

"I saw you make a chair appear out of thin air," he reminded her. "As uncomfortable as that thought makes me sometimes, I figure I'm better off not asking where you get things unless I happen to have need of 'em too."

Potter nodded her understanding of the Colonel's perspective, and didn't say a word about where she had gotten the blade from. Because it wasn't conjured.

"Now answer my question," the colonel ordered.

"I don't think Parker is stable," Potter admitted.

"... And what the hell does that mean?" Philips asked lowly.

"In the pod, when he was being saturated with the vita-rays, he couldn't take it. I mean, he did, but Bucky and Rogers toughed it out. Parker begged it over-with faster, and he wasn't subjected to one-hundred percent saturation for as long as the other two," Potter explained.

"It worked though, didn't it?" Philips questioned. "Kid turned into a Super Soldier, same as Rogers and Barnes."

"Yes," Potter agreed darkly. "And right now, he's fine. I don't know that he still will be in five year's time. In fact, I'm fairly sure he's going to start regressing back to his pre-serum state, slowly and painfully, around that time. I've told him that, by the way."

Not that it would matter quite so much to the army by then, as the war should be over by the end of next year if general history moved to the same time-scale as it had in her dimension of origin. This was mostly professional concern on her part.

"And maybe he'll make the mistake of stepping on a landmine next week and the whole expensive process he got put through will have been wasted," Colonel Philips countered as reasonably as he could, though frustration shone through. "Don't you have something else to do besides wave a damn machete around and making my men nervous? What about that project for the fancy new limbs for our amputees?"

"Howard had a look over the plans last week," Potter said as she shook her head. "Double-checked my calculations. He's sourcing materials right now so that he can start building the prototype."

"You don't need to have an amputee to build it for, specifically?" Philips asked.

"Once a prosthetic is built, it needs to be fitted and calibrated, and ideally it would be made to the measurements of the person who is going to wear it," Potter supplied. "But Howard can build one without needing an amputee to fit it to immediately, and it's just the prototype stage. The maths is good, but what's theoretically possible and what's actually possible don't always match up."

Philips wasn't quite sure what to say to that. On one hand, he was glad that progress was being made with the prosthetics, because there were a lot of people being left a limb short from this war that didn't deserve it. On the other, because the project was at the point where Doctor Potter had handed it over the the engineers, she didn't have it to keep her busy – and it turned out that a distracted-and-aimless Doctor Potter was very good at frightening the men.

"Some other project then," Philips tried. "Because frankly it isn't good for morale to have the little lady doctor swingin' a machete around like she knows how to eviscerate someone with it."

"I do know how to eviscerate someone with it," Potter pointed out calmly. "I can also perform crude amputations and effective executions, as well as cleave skulls in half."

"I thought doctors of medicine took oaths against causing harm that wasn't medically required," Philips quipped.

"Most do. I didn't," Potter stated flatly, then sighed. "I'm sorry, Colonel. You don't deserve the attitude from me. I guess even eight years of medical school isn't enough for me to get used to being a non-combatant, especially in a war-zone."

"If you want me to send you out on a mission, you're crazy," Colonel Philips informed her plainly and unsympathetically. "You're too important to risk. Hell, I've half a mind to send you State-side just to make sure you stay properly safe. You could probably find men to put through the Super Soldier process a lot easier over there too."

Potter shook her head.

"I don't want to go on a mission," she denied. "I got into medicine because I was sick of fighting and risking my life. I'm just paranoid and worried. And itching," she admitted. "Like I said, I'm not used to not fighting. Even if fighting isn't something that I want to do, it's still something I'm used to doing, particularly in settings like this."

"That, I can understand," the Colonel allowed with a nod. "But you can't go on scaring the men like this."

"It's not like I'm blowing up the camp," Potter muttered. "I think I'm being very contained, really."

"That's as may be, but watching a delicate-looking thing like you swinging around a pig-sticker like that shatters a lot of illusions and makes all the men you've threatened bodily harm to – and apart from myself, there isn't one currently in this camp that you haven't – very twitchy. Twitchy is a bad thing to have in men who are handling munitions."

"Sorry, Colonel," Potter apologised, and slipped the large blade through a modified gun-holster that hung by her left thigh. "I guess I'm just worried about..."

"Lieutenant Barnes survived five months as a regular soldier, another month under Zola, and eight months with the Howling Commandos before sheer bad luck sent him over the side of a cliff and you met him," Colonel Philips rattled off, well aware of just what exactly was distracting the lady doctor. He wasn't sympathetic, but he was aware. "He'd been keeping up with Rogers for eight months, every trick, every mission, shoulder to shoulder with a Super Soldier through nothing more than sheer grit, skill and determination. Then he lost his arm, met you, and luckily didn't die. Now he's a Super Soldier, has been for the better part of six months. Doctor Potter, you don't have a damn thing to worry about when it comes to Barnes."

"Yes Sir," she said softly.

"Find something to play with that the men will find less disturbing," Colonel Philips ordered.

"I suppose I do have a couple of pints of blood I could be running tests on," Doctor Potter agreed.

~oOo~

Evangeline had only very, very recently graduated from medical school when the accident that brought her into an alternate version of World War Two happened. She had been planning to open her own private practice – one open to both the magical and non-magical populations – since the day after her first practical class in a hospital.

That meant making a few purchases. Most of which, honestly, she hadn't got to. She'd made a list, things to buy, but apart from a couple of things that she could start using while still studying, she'd deliberately put off buying equipment until after her graduation. After all, technology was starting to really advance quite quickly in the new millennium, a new amazing advance coming out every other year. Evangeline had decided that she'd get on to buying the building she'd set up her practice in before she started buying things to fill it.

Which meant that she was completely without all of the very clever machines that she could have just dropped a sample of blood into and gotten a read-out from. Machines which, admittedly, would have had to have been kept in a room separate from any magic, because as with a CD player, magic would have really messed them up – and these machines were a bit too expensive to be replacing every week because of magical interference.

So she had a pile of scalpels and clamps, a selection of syringes, and a truly massive collection of beakers, vials and sample cups. She had a handful of pipettes, a nifty little box for sterilising things, and the most powerful microscope she could find that was completely analogue. She had her stethoscope, the little reflex hammer, a pen-light, and the instrument that was used for checking ears. That's not including the cupboard that was bigger on the inside and stocked completely full of a thousand bottles of hundreds of different potions.

This was the equipment she'd had to work with when she was putting Doctor Erskine's formula together – which was, admittedly, part of the reason it had taken so long, even with comprehensive notes from the man's ghost to work from.

An attempt to isolate specific features in a genetic chain in blood samples, well... no one with any sense would call that easy. Not even when Evangeline could use the engorgement charm on the individual cells under the microscope so that she was not totally inhibited by the limits of the apparatus she had access to.

Genetics hadn't really been her main area of study anyway. Sure, there had been mandatory classes, but Evangeline had specialised in Trauma and General Practice. Provided the heart was still beating, the brain was still working, the patient had a will to live, she could put a person back together like a jigsaw. Of course, much like a jigsaw, she couldn't do anything about where there were pieces missing. The chief reason she'd bought the microscope at all (when she could have just used a school one and then, when she had her practice, shipped samples off to one of the many hospitals that would run such samples and mail back results), was because it was quicker and easier if she could take a sample from a wound, stick it under glass, and check to make sure there wasn't any infection herself.

In short, analysing the blood she'd collected from the Howlett brothers and put under stasis charms was neither something she was equipped or really trained for. She was the best doctor of this era, but she hadn't been top of her class when she'd graduated. She'd only got an average of eighty-four percent on the classes that involved cellular analysis. She'd done so well because she was extremely observant (how else could she spot a snitch from the far end of a quidditch pitch with bludgers flying at her?) and had learned from Hermione about researching, comparing, and referencing external sources of information.

She had no idea how anybody had ever grown a human ear on the back of a bald mouse. Not her area. War had taught her how to destroy, her focus in medical school had been to heal in reaction to destruction, and also to move towards having a normal life. Being a GP was just about as normal as a person of her wealth and station could get.

For all the frustration she was feeling at the moment – impotence, helplessness, uselessness – Evangeline knew she wouldn't trade her current situation for her old life and the plans she had initially made for it. So what if she was forcing herself to learn more about a medical field she didn't even have all the books on, out in the middle of Europe during the War? It was better than having to listen to Kingsley's constant begging to join the Auror force.

(She could still remember the last time. He'd shown up in person rather than sending an owl. "You're the best there is at taking down Dark Wizards, and you're going to throw it all away? Please, Potter, please reconsider!" She'd kicked him out of her house, slammed the door behind him, and posted a letter of complaint against him to the Daily Prophet. She didn't know if he would have finally stopped after that, because she'd wound up here two days after.)

All of that did not, however, mean that she wasn't getting bloody-minded over the matter of how to figure out the mystery of the Howlett's healing factor. Especially since there wasn't exactly a plethora of white mice available to experimenting with (and no, conjured mice wouldn't work). She also wasn't going to use the men for her experiments, whatever her threats to the contrary.

There was also the fact that the Howling Commandos were roughly four months late returning from the mission they were on, and still hadn't come back. Colonel Philips knew where they were, knew what they were doing. He was getting reports in every two weeks.

That didn't keep Evangeline from wanting to pull her hair out. Or alternately, her wand. She could very easily charge herself off into the wilds and send tripping jinxes at whoever tried to stop her, blasting hexes at the enemy, and just plain keep on going until she felt better about herself. Damn, but she thought she'd left that part of herself behind. No, she definitely had. The problem was, she'd left it with the war, and here she was, in another one.

At least Colonel Philips had been sensible enough to not demand any more Super Soldiers from her after the last one. Then again, that might have had something to do with not being able to get any more generators from allies or the enemy, and the ones they'd used to put Parker through had burnt out completely. They'd been able to fix them once, after Bucky went through, but now? The things were unrecoverable, having melted themselves down into so much slag. Howard had turned them over to the factories to turn into bullets.

Evangeline pushed her work away from herself, got up from her desk, and left her library behind completely, and headed for the kitchen. She might have been forced to cook for the Dursleys when she was a child, might have been starved by them while she did it, but since she'd left them behind when she was sixteen, since she'd started cooking for herself, she'd found it a good deal more enjoyable.

Baking, in particular, was good for de-stressing.

Evangeline paused when she set the bag of flour on the kitchen bench.

Baking was even more relaxing when done to music.

She fetched her record-player and a selection of records, set them on the breakfast table, and set the first record she picked up to playing. While the record that had Lena Horne cooing out Stormy Weather (possibly not the best choice, all things considered) started playing, Evangeline returned to the pantry for more necessary ingredients.