"Miss Harris' progress over the past few weeks has been nothing but phenomenal," Howard began his presentation with the energy of a five year old on Christmas morning. With an armful of documents practically spilling out of his hands, he didn't waste time passing them around to the people present: Colonel Phillips, Agent Carter, Sergeant Barnes and the rest of his and Captain Rogers' men. The group sat around a big table made of two examination platforms pushed together courtesy of the medical tent a few yards away. "Sensational, unbelievable, indescribable-"

"Skip the vocab lesson, please, we don't have all day," Phillips sighed. "I have a meal break in four hours and I'm not missing red-mush Monday again for a session of praises." A split second of laughter from the men passed, though Bucky hadn't thought much of this to be too amusing. As he looked over the charts and notes, skimmed through the scientific terms full of words he didn't know but got the general gist of, Buck couldn't help but take this meeting a little more seriously than the rest of the people present.

After all, they were talking about his future wife.

"Right," Howard continued, a little more contained than he'd been before. "Anyways, we've been studying samples of her blood over certain periods of time within the past for teen days: when she got up in the mornings, before eating breakfast, after eating breakfast, before exercising, after exercising-"

"Wait, how many samples did you take?" Buck couldn't help but speak up at the sound of Howard's thorough procedure. One of the first things Bucky could remember learning about Angie as they were growing up was her phobia of needles and anything even near in resemblance to the thin, poky devices of torture. She'd gotten enough of that in their time locked up; the idea of her going through more pain than necessary made his teeth grind and his jaw tighten. "You said having any more than a pinprick's worth would be too risky to handle." He tried to cover his tracks and hide the truth from his tone, but no one was buying it. Not that he really cared about their opinions on his emotions.

"With the technology I have in my care, my fellow scientists and I were better suited for the task than I had been here in the trenches," Howard slid his hand into his coat pocket and revealed a small black vial the size of his pinky. From the way the metal shone in the light of day, it was apparent that the apparatus was made of steel or titanium. The millionaire extended it to the nearest soldier. "Pass this around so everyone can get a good look."

"In the vial you all hold is enough power to completely incinerate a human being."

At first, their demeanor with the cylindrical tube was nonchalant. They acted as if it were nothing more than a regular test tube, even going so far as to toss it across the table to one another instead of just handing it off. It wasn't going to hurt them; it wasn't like it was a loaded gun. But at the mention of incineration, the soldiers noticeably handled the small test tube with much more care. 

"She proved that much within our first few hours back on American soil-"

"What?" Bucky's eyes became wide as dinner plates and he nearly leaped from his seat. In the first few hours? Angie had been threatened to the point of blowing someone up within the first few hours of her setting foot on their home turf? Why hadn't she mentioned that to him when she got back? "Why was that necessary?"

Buck hated it when she kept information like this away from him; she'd been doing that ever since they were kids and it still pissed him off. Both she and Steve were guilty of hiding their fights from him, mainly because he almost always wanted to get involved in some way, shape or form, but that was beside the point. The point was his girl had been in trouble and he was just now hearing about it from the guy who seemed to view her as nothing more than a science experiment.

If he and Angie were going to be married, their communication skills would be their first obstacle they'd have to hurtle.

"Hydra interfered with our journey to the laboratories upon arrival," Howard stated simply. From the corner of Bucky's eye, he could see Colonel Phillips and felt the old man's glare burrowing into the side of his skull, but Bucky couldn't have cared less. "It was then that we also found out about her being immune to bullet wounds."

"Figured that much," Henry could be heard off to the sergeant's opposite side. "No one can take almost a whole round of bullets to the back and walk away like nothing happened."

"You're right, kid. Which is why I've assembled you all here today," Mr.Stark fished out another container from within his coat, only this time it was a tin box, sort of like the ones Buck had seen smokers keep their chewing tobacco in. The man carefully removed the metal lid and placed the box on the center of the table. Inside was a dark powder; they almost assumed it was plain old gun powder. But the group knew better than that by that point. "When Evangeline absorbs bullets, blades, or whatever made of metal that enters her body through her skin, that material melts and enters her bloodstream, mixing in with the explosive chemicals she naturally produces now. In less than a second, the material absorbed runs through her body and gathers at her palms and knuckles. In an instant, her hands become as deadly as active land mines."

"The reason I've brought this to your attention is that you people are going to be the closest to her on the battlefield. You need to know that as soon as you see this dark matter forming on her hands, you turn the hell around and run as fast as your legs can carry you," Stark continued.

"Why don't we just put her out on the front lines?" One of the men questioned. "If she soaks up everything the Nazis can throw at her, then why not pull our guys out and let her handle the big guns?"

"Because as much as we want to believe she's indestructible, the truth is that she isn't," The scientist pointed out. "She has her limits just as the rest of you do and can still die in a multitude of ways- dehydration, malnutrition, a lack of oxygen-" Howard's sentence stopped abruptly when Sergeant Barnes proceeded to push his chair out from beneath the makeshift table and get to his feet. "Sergeant Barnes, I can promise you we didn't go to extremes to calculate her weaknesses-"

"I need a minute," With his hands balled up in fists at his sides and the sound of his pulse thumping in his ears, Bucky decided that this would be the best time for him to step away from the conversation and take a deep breath or two. "By all means, continue without me. I've heard enough." There was no stopping him after that. Glancing around the camp real quick before finding an unused vehicle he could barrow for a bit, the soldier started it up and began to head for Steve's special hiding place.

As the man drove down the dusty dirt road, he could practically hear Phillips in the back of his mind, lecturing him about how he was letting his emotions get in the way of the fight. But the longer he drove, the more Buck was able to let go of the old man's opinions and focus on one thing and one thing only- his girl.

Screw Phillips if he thought they were acting like a bunch of hormonal teenagers, that asshole had no idea of what they'd gone through as POWs to Hydra. He had no idea how much Angie meant to Buck, how she and Steve were pretty much the only family he'd ever known and that going through three whole days of hearing nothing but the screams of the woman he loved did more damage than any bullet wound or broken bone ever could. The colonel could go to hell for all Buck cared. Because it didn't matter how pissed Bucky was that she'd been experimented on back on American soil, that she'd been shot and would've died if her body hadn't been altered in a twisted way by the Germans, that Steve had been acting weird ever since Buck and Angie's engagement, and that Colonel Phillips was a dick-

All that mattered to Bucky was the girl who had his heart. The girl who was too stubborn to move out of her apartment just because the neighborhood she lived in was a little shady. The girl who could read her Tom Sawyer book over and over again without ever getting tired of the story. The girl who could fall asleep on a roof top in the middle of loud New York city as long as she was with her friends. The only girl in the world he could see a future with, getting married and having kids with, spending the rest of their days growing old together and watching their kids have families of their own.

Evangeline Harris was his past, his present, and his future. His entire world.

Little did Buck know it would all crumble away sooner than he'd ever thought possible.