Chapter Text
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways
I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall
-Bob Dylan
I
He got off the boat in New York on May 13th, 1945, five days after V-E Day.
He’d stood at the very tip of the bow, hands on the rail, listening to the savage screams of GIs around him, the howling of victorious youth, the jubilant bray of death defied time and time again. People jostled him, accidentally for the most part, glancing his way and saying a quick, “Sorry, Cap’n Rogers” before shrieking again and waving both arms at the thousands of civilians lining the waterfront.
Steve was home in America. It was a day he’d known was coming for months as his role as a walking propaganda poster became less and less important each day as victory in Europe became more and more of a surety. He’d held his breath, waiting for the bullet, the grenade, the mortar, that would take that day away from him, but it never came. There’d been days he thought he could taste his own death on the air, feel it in every footstep on uneven soil, but somehow his heart was still beating, lungs still drawing breath. It seemed so unbelievably implausible, yet here he was.
And now, this was the waterfront in New York City, the same he left from almost a year and a half before. He could hear the brass band playing an upbeat ragtime, the jangle of the chains that held up the gangplank. Civilians screamed up at the boat, girls waving flowers and handkerchiefs at their men, mothers shrieking for their sons, and a few older men were holding a huge home-made sign that read “WELCOME HOME BOYS.”
Steve wanted to vomit as he read it, and he turned his head away.
The deck was deserted by the time he found the willpower to pry his fingers off the railing, one joint at a time. The delighted cacophony below felt strangely muted, wavering in and out of his ears, as men shoved each other in order to get their feet on their home soil.
“Steve?”
He jerked out of his trance, turning around with a sharp inhale.
Peggy was standing a few yards away, a warm smile on her vermillion lips.
“You ready to go home?” She said, her voice raised to be audible above the rabble.
Steve nodded, letting his feet pilot him closer to her, his elbow bending and offering itself to her of its own accord. She grinned up at him as she took it, her brown eyes shining, and carefully straightened his lapel and medals.
“Can’t have you looking all ramshackle for the press, can we?” she said.
Steve shook his head, not trusting his voice. He felt her hand slipped into his, and her eyebrows raised in sudden worry.
“Steve? You’re shaking, are you all right?”
He swallowed hard twice, and nodded sharply.
“I’m okay, Peg. Just nervous is all. It’s great to be home.”
Relief washed over her, her smile just as glowing as ever.
“Great indeed. Shall we disembark, then, soldier?”
The press flocked to the bottom of the gangplank as Steve descended, the sea of men in uniform splitting and turning to look as he came, eyes gleaming with fierce pride.
Pride for what? Steve thought as he stepped onto the concrete dock. Pride for their country? Surely not for him; he wanted none of that pride for himself.
“Captain Rogers!” They were all around, flashbulbs exploding in great flashes like a grenade going off right in his eyes.
He felt Peggy take a step back, and he realized he was surrounded by a ring of cameras, both the massive film type and the handheld, and the megawatt smiles of delighted civilians.
“Captain Rogers! Captain Rogers, you’re home for the first time, what’s the first thing you’re going to do back in America?”
Steve blinked, and he realized his face had been smiling the whole time, completely on its own.
He couldn’t see much, there were so many flashes going off around him; all he could see was black and white shapes smashing into each other in grotesque blobs.
“I… well, catch up on some sleep, I suppose.” the crowd laughed as if it was the funniest thing they’d heard all year, and Steve felt nauseous again. It was the truth.
“Is there anyone special you’ve got waiting for you back home in Brooklyn?” a voice hollered, and someone wolf-whistled nearby.
“I… no, not waiting for me, no.” He wasn’t sure how to respond. Peggy was worth far too much on her own to be dragged into this circus and labelled as ‘his dame.’ It was nobody’s business, anyway.
“Captain Rogers, is there anything you want to say to all those boys who didn’t get the chance to come home?”
Steve inhaled hard, trying to swallow the rising need to vomit again. He couldn’t- not here, not now. He was Captain goddamn America, regardless of how false that felt now.
“Uh, I’m...I’m sorry. I’m...sorry you didn’t get to come home. Didn’t get to see your family, your Ma, your hometown. I’m...yeah, I’m just sorry, I guess.”
He had to stop talking. If he kept going, his voice would break, and they would all be able to see.
“You’re sorry?” someone called, seeming surprised.
“Yeah. Sorry.” Steve said, and he walked ahead into the wall of light, desperate to escape the hundreds of eyes, flesh and glass, cutting into his skin with each gaze.
Sorry, Buck. I’m sorry.
The hotel they put him up at was The Plaza- somewhere that as a child and a young man, he’d been too poor to be allowed to look at, let alone go inside of. But on the government’s dime, here he was.
He was barely in the door of his suite before he was clawing his way out of his coat, dragging off his tie and throwing his hat across the room. The medals and pins jingled merrily like bells as he tossed his coat over the back of a luxuriantly upholstered chair, and the wave of guilt crashed over him so hard, he staggered and caught himself on a piece of furniture to stay upright.
It had been his job to keep them alive.
It had been his job to make sure they did their job, came home, saw their families again, and he’d failed.
God, how he failed.
Bucky, who he’d convinced to follow him even after being tortured for months in captivity, gone, because of him. Gabe and Jim, after following him unflinchingly after Bucky’s death, both dead after an ambush by a Panzer division. Monty, shot in the chest by a sniper and dying slowly, insisting to the last they go on without him and complete the mission.
And so many thousands more, lured overseas by the jaunty Captain America, only to be met with the filthy and merciless truth of war. Names Steve would never hear, never know, but wiped off the possibility of the future nonetheless.
So many civilians, so much hatred, so much death that he hadn’t been able to stop. Hadn’t gotten there in time to change.
He’d been made to change the world, but all he could feel was the gap he hadn’t been able to jump.
Steve sat on the little chaise, its stuffing unforgiving and hard, head in his hands, fingers dug into his hair, fingers stuck in the pomade he’s shakingly combed into it that morning.
He didn’t know how long it was he sat there, but when a polite knock on the door came, he jumped at it.
“...yes?” he called, heart hammering.
“Steve? It’s me. May I come in?”
Just Peggy.
“Yes. Yes, come in, sorry.” he got to his feet on instinct just as she slipped through the door, and sat back down, energy draining just as it had come.
She was smiling, but he saw her take in his coat thrown over a chair, his hat across the room, and his tie dragged loose.
“You’re alright? You look exhausted, darling.” she came up to him, her hands gently cupping his cheeks, eyes warm and kind.
Steve let out a long breath, eyes closing. He turned away from her hold and rubbed his forehead.
“I...I want to sleep, but I just can’t stop thinking.”
Peggy came and sat beside him, taking his hand in hers.
“You can finally stop thinking so much, Steve. I know it’s hard to forget, we’ve been fighting so long. But you deserve to rest. I’m so incredibly proud of you.” her smile was, as ever, a glowing beacon.
“I...so many times, Peggy, I lost. I let men, boys, who I’d convinced somehow that war was an honorable and reasonable thing, let them die because I wasn’t fast enough, or in the right place… I...I failed so many times to keep them safe.” his voice broke.
“Oh, Steve.” Peggy wrapped her arms around him, clutching him to her. He couldn't stop himself collapsing against her if he tried, “You didn’t fail anyone. You did more than anyone ever thought possible, you lived up to everything Dr. Erskine wanted for you and so, so much more. You’re a hero, Steve.”
Steve shuddered and pulled away. He rubbed his eyes roughly with the back of his hand, trying and failing to conceal the angry tears forming there.
“I told them to come across the ocean to help me fight for America, and they died for it, Peggy. By the thousands.”
Peggy was silent for a while, and they listened to the background rabble of the huge city outside the windows. Eventually, she said “I know hearing this won’t help you, but that’s war I’m afraid. It’s always terrible. But think of the horrible things we stopped. Of all the suffering we halted. It was an honorable cause to die for.”
Steve groaned, pain lancing through his chest.
Honorable.
God, if only she knew. Knew the terrible things he’d seen done by soldiers. To soldiers. Because of soldiers. In spite of soldiers.
And how so many of them died on soil thousands of miles away from home.
“I used to be brave, Peg. I...before I went over there, before Schmidt, before…I know we did good. I know we did what we had to do, and Christ but don’t I know I’d go do it again if I had to. But when I look around me, all I see is what we lost. Not what we won.”
“I know. When I went to London a few months back, all I could see were the scars from the Blitz. It took everything I had to try to see the good bits behind them. But they were there, Steve. You’ll find them too.”
Maybe, Steve thought treacherously, but maybe I don’t want to look.
He knew what he’d see. Or rather, what he wouldn’t.
Who he wouldn’t.
They’d been sitting around a fire, a few miles from the front, waiting for orders for the next push into France. All around them in the fading blue light of dusk were spots of light from other fires in a long string along the treeline, other members of the same company temporarily banded together to take a small group of villages with the help of the now infamous Captain America and his Howling Commandos.
It was a warm day, early August, with a field of lush grass on one side and a dense tree line on the other, and the sound of the occasional laugh or shout could be heard across the field. Men in a tank crew were sitting on their vehicle, drinking wine and smoking.
Falsworth was likewise smoking, muttering under his breath as he attempted to heat his rations in a tin saucepan. Morita was reading and Dum Dum was cleaning guns while Gabe and Dernier played rummy on an overturned crate.
Steve was sitting near the fire, boots off, drying his feet and socks simultaneously by stretching his legs straight out from where he sat on the grass, leaning against a broken stump. It felt so nice not to be wearing shoes, he considered even possibly going barefoot into the next battle, uniform violation or no.
“You’re gonna burn your feet.” Dum Dum said around his cigar, polishing the barrel of a rifle he’d taken off a Gestapo officer.
Steve ignored him in favor of continuing to draw with his tiny nub of a pencil, which had been broken in half somehow, carefully outlining the leftover shards of a bombed church he’d seen the day before.
There was a rustle in the trees and everyone looked up simultaneously to see Bucky brushing off a few loose leaves, sleeking a hand over his windblown hair and holding a piece of paper.
“Orders for tomorrow, Sarge?” Morita asked, watching as Bucky came and plopped himself unceremoniously down on the grass beside Steve. Their shoulders bump and carouse, just like they always have.
“Nope. Not yet. Got something even better.” he held up an envelope triumphantly, “Mail from home.”
Steve smirked as everyone went back to their jobs, uninterested by Bucky’s mail.
“Who from, Buck?”
“Becks! And I gotta write her back this time; I’m months behind.”
“What a shit brother you are, Sarge.” Falsworth said, frowning woefully down at his sad dinner.
Bucky shuffled around beside Steve and leaned back against the same stump, head tucked down as his eyes roved hungrily over the page in front of him. Steve glanced at him before returning to his sketching, eyes flicking over several of his favorite parts of Bucky’s familiar, ridiculously handsome profile; the poker straight nose that melted gently from brow to bridge, currently furrowed between the brows with concentration. The enormous eyes, bright and full of life, framed in dark eyelashes, the lovely idiosyncratic chin with its little cleft, the sharp swoop of the cupid’s bow.
It was Steve’s favorite face, both to draw and to look at. A decades-old secret desire he tamed and indulged in only rarely; a hunger kept lean and weak by infrequent feedings. It had followed him since they were young children, and had only grown as they became men, a stubborn dandelion breaking through every layer of concrete poured over it.
But he’d accepted long ago that he’d just have to keep pouring.
Bucky burst out laughing, glancing up at Steve to check his attention.
“Here, listen to this: ‘I know Steve is with you, I’d known that stupid face anywhere, so you tell him you two best be keeping each other safe much as you can. If one of you dares come back without the other, there’ll be hell to pay.’ Hah! She’s got your number, Stevie. Can’t pull one over on a Barnes, eh?”
Steve grinned, shaking his head. “Tell her yeah, yeah, I'm watchin' you. I ain’t letting you die without walking her down the aisle; I know that’s what she wants to hear.”
Bucky chuckled and adjusted against the stump, carefully folding the letter away into his coat.
“Can I borrow a sheet of your sketching paper? I think I got a bit of pencil here somewhere.”
Steve carefully turned the page in his booklet to a fresh one, and then delicately tore it out, handing it over for Bucky to write his response. Bucky lifted his knees up and set the paper against it, and Steve rolled his eyes.
“Just use this. Getting too dark to draw properly anyway. You’ll probably hurt your eyes as it is.” he tucked his sketchbook in behind the sheet against Bucky’s knees.
“Thanks,” Bucky said, setting pencil to paper. Steve watched him write for a minute, listening to the scratch of the pen, the occasional break as Bucky thought about his next sentence.
He watched riveted as his top teeth would occasionally peek out and rake sideways across the lush pink flesh of his lower lip. Then he looked guiltily away, as always.
The sunset was a glorious haze of magenta and orange, made more dramatic from the constant smoke hanging in the air, darkening slowly over the distant hills beyond the front. It seemed likely that the German soldiers hiding there and awaiting their own next orders would similarly be watching the colours slowly fade from the sky.
Steve looked back when Bucky rustled a few pages on his sketchbook, flipping idly through.
“Got anything good in here we can send home? Becks and Ma will love it.”
Steve tried to school his reaction and resist snatching the book back like a guilty child.
It was too late anyhow; Bucky was already looking at one of the (many) portraits Steve had done of him, face contemplative but not overly perturbed.
“How ‘bout this one? Prove I’m still alive, still got my nose attached, and two eyes.” he held up the sketchbook, grinning.
Steve yanked back the book, smiling to hide his panic.
“Good idea, Buck.”
Carefully, Steve separated the page from the spine of the booklet, pointedly not looking at the intensely detailed portrait on the page. It had been entirely from memory, precise and loving in each stroke of the pencil. A love letter without words, decipherable only to one who knew to look.
Bucky took it without pause, gave it an appraising look, and then held it back out to Steve.
Steve swallowed, watching Bucky’s face as Bucky watched him, waiting for the moment of realization to dawn, or the shock to occur. Neither happened; Bucky just looked at him, mouth a vague twisted smile, eyes unreadable and flat in the low light.
“Gotta sign it, pal. Otherwise they won’t know for sure it’s you.”
Steve took it back dumbly, carefully and diligently writing his name on the bottom right corner
It seemed idiotic, to be putting his name on something so incriminatingly obvious in its desire.
But Bucky asked, and so he did it.
Steve handed it back, and to his horror Bucky held it up for inspection by Falsworth, who took it eagerly.
“Phwoar, Cap, if you aren’t half brilliant. As I live and breath, he looks as if he’s about to open his smarmy little mouth and call me bastard.”
Bucky snickered and took it back, folding it into his letter and letting Steve relax.
“Wouldn’t have to call you one if you wasn’t one, Monty.”
“And same to you with change, Sargent.” Falsworth fixed Steve with a considering look, “Would you mind terribly doing my likeness too, Rogers? Be a hell of a thing to send home to Mother; a portrait of her own son, done by the one and only Captain America.”
Steve nodded, all while carefully and discreetly tucking his sketchbook into his coat.
“Any time we’ve got a free moment, I’d be happy to.”
Before then, Steve would have to remember to curate his sketchbook. Fortunately, it hadn’t seemed as if Bucky had seen the few scattered images of just the shape of his lips, just his hooded and elegantly lashed eyes, just the back of his neck as it gracefully curved into his spine, or the soft, secret crease of where his armpit connected to his chest and shoulder when he slept with his head pillowed on his arms.
Or if he had seen, he hadn’t said anything.
Ⅱ
Rebecca Barnes found him the next morning, before he’d even had a chance to eat breakfast.
“I asked some MPs where to find Captain America and they said he was at the Plaza.” she was wearing her mother’s coat over a clean blue dress, her dark hair twisted into a tidy bun, her giant blue eyes, so much like her brother, hard and unfriendly. While no one could ever call her shabbily dressed, she certainly didn’t fit in in the dining room of the Plaza Hotel, and was getting looks from the other diners eating their Eggs Benedict and drinking French champagne.
She didn’t seem to notice.
“Becca! I...hello. Sit down?” Steve tried to smile warmly, but his chest was constricting underneath his dress uniform. He already knew what was about to happen.
Becca eyed him warily, glancing around, before pulling out a chair and sitting in it heavily, as if defying him to make some mention of her manners.
“This place is ridiculous. They almost didn’t let me in until I told them I knew you. Even then, I’m sure they’re just itching to throw me out. I hate places like these. Although I’d imagine you’re used to this now, all big and famous as you are.”
He hadn’t seen her in almost three years. But the contempt in her gaze, the grief riddled anger, it left no room at all for an emotional reunion.
“It’s not my cup of tea either, Becks, you know that.” he said placatingly.
Becca just turned her head away, looking at the laden table in front of him. She chewed her lip angrily, and then after a moment, reached into the pocket of her coat and pulled out a small bunch of papers, all folded into one another. She carefully extricated one page, stared at it with the blankness of someone who’d seen it a hundred times, before shoving it at him. Her stare was boring into him, sharp and demanding with judgement.
Steve took it gingerly, and as soon as his eyes landed on the official letterhead, he knew what he was looking at.
An official condolence letter, sent by the army, to the family of one James Buchanan Barnes, killed in the line of duty on this, the tenth of November, 1944. It didn’t even specify where he’d been killed; all their ops had been highly classified, and so it just read “on operations in and around Northern Italy.”
He stared at the paper in his hands, unmoving. He didn’t want to be looking at it, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the words on the page.
“You don’t believe it when it comes.” Becca said, still watching his face, “You assume it must have been a mistake, and someone got messed up somewhere, or a wrong name was written down. We’d only got a letter from him two days before. The one with your drawing in it. We couldn’t believe it, even though he’d sent it months and months before. We’d just read his words, in his handwriting, how could he be dead? But… but later. Later, I knew.”
Steve blinked hard, trying to stop the tears building and falling down his face. He handed the paper back roughly, swallowing hard.
“I’m sorry. I...I really… I wanted to… I couldn’t write. I didn’t even…” Steve rubbed his face hard. His throat ached like he was choking, his jaw and chest tight.
“What happened? I have to know. I need to know, Steve.” her voice was forceful.
Steve took a huge breath before finally looking at her.
She was glaring at him, trying to be strong despite the tiny wobble in her lower lip.
Steve looked away again, unable to hold her gaze. He looked down at his empty plate, at his half drank coffee, at the dirty spoon perched on the saucer, and the revulsion for it all hit him like a wave.
“He fell. He tried to help me, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he fell. I couldn’t save him. Or…” Steve swallowed the rising lump in his throat, “Or maybe I could have but didn’t try hard enough, I don’t know. I...I don’t know.”
Becca took a deep breath, her whole frame shaking. Her shoulders seemed so little under her old jacket.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I don’t know...if I could have saved him. I...every day I remember it, Becks. I remember it and I try to think of ways I could have saved him. But I...I don’t know if I could have. But I…I wish I could go back more than anything. And try again.”
Rebecca finally looked away, sniffing hard, glancing down at the other papers in her lap. She shuffled them until she was holding the sketch of Bucky, the one Steve had signed, so many months ago.
She stared down at it, tears trickling down her cheeks.
She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand, roughly and punishingly swift, before holding out the portrait.
“You should have this back. I...I don’t feel right having it.”
Steve swallowed hard. He was terrified to look at it again, to see the face that had followed him every day, every hour, since the last time he’d seen it in the flesh.
He hadn’t drawn a single line since then, hadn’t even opened his sketchbook. It would be like opening the door of a mausoleum.
“He wanted you to have it. For you and your Ma to… to know he was…” Steve let out a shaky breath, “...know he was okay.”
Rebecca laughed harshly and without humor, wiping her eyes again.
“That’s why I don’t want it. Or Ma. It just hurts too much for us to look at.”
Steve took the picture, folding it along it’s old crease as he did so, ensuring he couldn’t accidentally see it.
He tucked it into his pocket, and then sat there in stunned silence, listening to the quiet clink of cutlery and muted morning conversation.
He reached across and took Becca’s hand without looking.
“I’m sorry, Becks. I’m sorry I couldn’t bring him back home. More sorry than I’ve ever been.”
She took a deep, shuddering breath and nodded sharply.
“Me too.” she whispered, her voice just barely audible. “What...what are you going to do now?”
Steve looked over at her; at her hand in his, small and fragile in his now big and fleshy one, at the small pile of papers on her lap, at the tear tracks running down her cheeks.
“I think...I’m going to try to keep people safe. If I can.”
Becca sniffed hard and looked up at him, wiping her face.
“You’ll go to the Pacific?”
Inside Steve’s head, a plan was galvanizing. An idea; not a good idea, but a justified one.
“If they’ll let me. It’s just that...they made me for war, Becks. And I want to fight for what’s right. But I think what’s really right...what I need to do… is make sure as few people get letters like that one as possible.” he nodded at the condolence letter on her lap. “If I can’t save him… I can try to save someone else. As many as possible. And maybe… maybe that’ll be enough.”
Rebecca sighed, a deep, miserable thing.
“I hope you’re right, Steve.”
“Me too.”
Becca was silent for a few moments, the clinking of cutlery and the muttering of breakfast conversation a dull blanket around them.
“It was the broken pencils, that made me really realize it was you.” she said quietly, not looking at Steve but looking out the big picture window at the busy street beyond.
“Broken pencils?”
“I mean, I had a pretty good idea. I saw the newsreels and things and, you know, the face and the hair was the same. But then when you sent that letter to me, and you said you were going away for a few months and if I could keep an eye on your place… there were spots on the page where I could see you’d pressed too hard and the pencil nub broke and you had to resharpen it. And I realized it was because you were so strong you didn’t realize how to be gentle with a pencil and I knew. I knew it was really you.”
Steve didn’t know what to say.
Can’t pull one over on a Barnes, eh?
Steve just kept holding her little hand and hoped he’d learned how to be gentle.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
That evening, Steve sat in the bath, the hot water failing to suck any of the tension from his muscles. With his huge new body, even the grandiose bathtub in the Plaza was almost too small for him.
He sat with one hand gripping his chin, stare focused on the middle distance.
God, what he wouldn’t give for a moment of reprieve from his own thoughts. Then he could maybe, for a second, break from the horrible cloud of melancholy that had been dogging his heels for months.
Steve heaved a huge sigh and rubbed at his eyes, then slowly sank in the tub until his head ducked under, resurfacing and slicking his hair back from his face, wiping water and bubbles from his eyes and cheeks. He hesitated for a moment, then reached for a towel to dry his hands thoroughly, and then with one ridiculous long arm, grabbed his coat from where he’d dropped it on the tile floor in a heap.
When he’d undressed, he left his clothes where they fell around him.
Carefully, he reached into the interior pocket of the coat and with a hand that shook, withdrew the folded piece of linen drawing paper, with it’s one ragged edge and its tri-fold crease from where Bucky had shaped it into the envelope, and then been refolded by Becca.
He sat back against the porcelain, looking at the folded paper in his fingers.
Part of him wanted to dunk it under the water, have it disappear under the sudsy surface. He could burn it, but the Plaza had all electric of course, so there were no candles in sight.
Steve rotated the page in his fingers, and it dangled precariously over the water.
Then, he took a sharp breath and slipped his thumb into the crease, folding the page open.
He looked at the picture, his eyes stinging, and Bucky looked back.
The drawing was just as damning as it had been before, still too intimate and too detailed and too… much. Steve’s examination flicked over the careful shape of Bucky’s luminous eyes, which Steve had always thought were the most unearthly and sublime shade of blue; where his own were just regular boring robin’s egg blue, Bucky’s were one of a kind, gleaming a bright and rich lapis lazuli, like the blue at the base of a flame.
Steve took in the delicate swoop of his eyelashes, the little parting of his lips, smiling ever so slightly. There was nothing inherently erotic about it, but it still oozed of eyes that lingered too long on things they rightly shouldn’t.
And dear God, he’d signed it.
There was a clatter from inside the hotel room beyond the door, and Steve quickly shoved the paper back in his coat, guilt and shame rising.
“Steve? Are you here?” it was Peggy again.
“In here.” Steve called, rubbing his forehead. The suds of his bath were still thick and concealing, and it wasn’t like she hadn’t seen it all before.
After Bucky died, he’d leaned on Peggy with all his grief and misery, letting her steadfast and unbending support gently coax him back into some semblance of a functioning soldier. Some time later, she’d come to him late one night in his officer’s tent and shown him how she liked to be touched, and had in turn touched him. They had sex often for a few weeks after that, but as the ring around the Reich closed, Steve was sent away more and more to help the Allies push into Germany. When news came of the Red army taking Berlin, Peggy had brought a bottle of champagne to his little temporary base in Alsace and insisted they drink it, before falling into bed together once more.
Since then, and the boat ride back to America, they’d been in separate hotel rooms, and neither had initiated anything more than chaste kiss good-night after dinner.
The door creaked open and Peggy slipped in, wearing a stunning black sheath dress.
“We missed you at dinner, darling. I assumed you were perhaps sitting up here enjoying your own company. You rather deserve it, I’d say.”
“Sorry. I lost track of time.” Steve replied, watching her as she perched on the lip of the bath beside him.
Peggy’s sharp gaze roamed his face, her lips curving slowly into a concerned frown.
“You look terrible. Have you been able to sleep at all?”
Steve sighed.
“A blink or two last night. Haven’t tried all that hard, really.”
“It would do you good, a full night’s rest. A bath is a good way to start, so well done-”
“I’m going on the train to San Francisco tomorrow. I’m going to fight in the Pacific.”
Silence fell, Peggy’s eyes widening.
“You’re...what? Steve, that’s ridiculous; you just got home!”
“You said it yourself, Peg. This isn’t home anymore. I can’t just look past what’s missing, I have to do something.”
“You have done something! You’re a hero to everyone here, not to mention every civilian in Europe owes you a debt they could never repay. They don’t need you to beat the Japanese; they can do it on their own.”
Steve just rubbed his jaw with a wet hand, shaking his head slightly.
“I was made for war, Peggy. You know that better than anyone. And there’s still a war to be fought; I’m not done until it is.”
Peggy just stared at him, jaw set, eyes searching him again but this time suspicious.
She glanced down at the floor, and Steve saw her see both his dropped clothes and the poorly hidden portrait.
He swallowed hard but didn’t watch as she bent to pick up the drawing, and he listened as she inhaled sharply when she opened it up.
It was quiet in the bathroom, with no noise beyond the background roar of the city and the distant bumps and bangs of the hotel.
It was almost a full minute before Steve looked up at her.
She was staring at the picture, a tiny crease between her eyebrows, which disappeared when she glanced at him watching her, and then back to the photo, several emotions flitting across her face.
Her eyes started to shine, and she gasped a quick breath, her chin trembling.
“Oh, you...Steve, you…” her voice broke and she closed her eyes tightly, turning her face away as tears clung to her lashes.
Steve just watched her, his heart hammering.
Peggy took another galvanizing breath, dragging in a great lungful of air.
“Steve, you...you loved him, didn’t you?”
Steve felt his chest burst open with panic, his throat close.
“I should have known, I… god, what a fool I am. You… you were so sad, I thought perhaps...well, I guess it doesn’t matter what I thought.” she carefully wiped away tears with her thumb, looking down at the picture in her hand.
Steve’s hands were gripping the walls of the tub, and he felt the porcelain crack under tension.
“Peggy, I-”
She looked up at him when he spoke, and seemed to immediately gauge his obvious panic.
“Oh, no, no, my dear, it’s alright. I would never, could never.” she put her hand on his shoulder kindly. “I won’t tell a soul, I swear to you. You’re far too wonderful a man to have your name dragged into the mud.”
Steve sagged back into the tub, relief slackening his limbs.
“I...I’m sorry, Peggy. I...it’s not that I don’t...I love you, Peg, I do, but…” his voice died, but when he saw her watching him, waiting, with a kind and patient look on her face, he swallowed and continued, “He was all I had in all the years when I had nothing. He was my only family, my only friend, my everything. As long as I can remember, I...I felt…” he closed his eyes against the grief that crashed over him in a colossal wave.
“You don’t have to explain anything to me, Steve. I...I understand. He was… he was more to you than I could ever be. And that’s no one’s fault.”
Steve leaned forward and carefully, slowly, rested his head on her thigh, tears of his own rising. Her hand came up and rested on the back of his neck, warm and dry on his damp skin.
They sat that way for a while, motionless, the new realizations crystallizing around them in the spectacular bathroom, all the gilded fixtures gleaming and leering with a dark menace.
“I have to go, Peg.” Steve whispered, “I have to make sure as many of them get home as possible. That’s what my fight is. To stop this.” he vaguely lifted a hand, gesturing generally to the misery surrounding him in an almost visible cloud, before letting it drop with a splash back into the bubbles.
She stroked his neck, her thumb gentle on the outside of his ear.
“It won’t bring him back.” her tone was not unkind, and gentle.
Steve let out a long shaking breath.
“I know. But it’s all I can do now.”
Ⅲ
1969, near Quang Tri, Binh Dinh Province, Vietnam
The Soldier waits by the main Huey helicopter landing area outside of base camp, a safe distance from the hustle and bustle and shouting and smoke. Like the several men that wait with him, he stands in the shade of a bunch of palm trees, taking solace there.
Even out of the direct sun, the 100 percent humidity and 105 degree heat is oppressive.
He doesn’t notice it, or at least register it as discomfort on a conscious level, and it certainly doesn’t sap him as much as it does the other men waiting for the chopper, their M-16s hanging loosely off their sagging shoulders like wilted leaves, skin glistening with sweat.
Unlike them, who have all cut the sleeves off their shirts months ago, or are just in vests, he’s in full length sleeves, buttoned at the wrist, and dark leather gloves. In deference to the heat however, his shirt is unbuttoned just enough to expose his throat and a slim strip of the black sleeveless shirt down the front.
His hair, entirely non-regulation, is invisible tucked away under his helmet.
Nearby, a beaten up little radio plays Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, ‘Nowhere to Run.’
His brain processes the lyrics as he hears them, considering them, turning them over like stones- ‘Nowhere to run to, baby; nowhere to hide.”
He knows this as a profound truth; he’s had nowhere to run or hide in twenty years. There’s no point in trying.
With a thopthopthopthop that only gets louder and more aggressive, the Huey chopper comes roaring over the treeline, flattening the long grass into an undulating pea-green sea and making the fronds on the palms and banana trees wave and flap loud. The hard wind feels wonderful against the wet skin on his throat. For someone who’s been in-country as long as he has, the back of his neck and collarbones are neither tanned nor burned. Of course, his skin can’t do either of those things. The only burns that last on his are ones put there intentionally, usually by acetylene torches or something similarly hot. He knows; it’s been done to him before.
He climbs into the Huey, sitting in the back facing forward. He shuffles along as other men sit beside him, one smoking, the other eating what looks like jerky, one taking up position as the door gunner. One of them, who glances at him and his eyes linger briefly, has FUCK YOU written on the fabric of his helmet in black marker.
The chopper takes off, swinging wildly up over the treeline, and he has to hold on to one of the aluminum handholds as it lifts. He uses his left hand, and has to remind himself not to grip too hard- his fingers can carve into aluminum like it were butter on a warm day. His shoulder makes a noise as it adjusts to the strain, but only he can hear it over the engine noise.
The men around him start having a loud and bawdy conversation, but he ignores it. It doesn’t concern him, and they aren’t assigned as his handlers. They’re talking about sex, he vaguely registers, or women; two topics most often discussed amongst the GIs. Neither topics he has any time for.
That is, until someone kicks him in the shin.
“Oy, Coles. I asked, what kinda nipples you like? Small and pink? Or them big brown ones?”
He blinks. He is Coles. PFC Robert Coles is his current name. It says so on his jacket.
And he hasn’t ever been asked this kind of question before.
“What?” he asks, likewise shouting a bit to be heard over the sound of the Huey.
At the sound of his voice, the pilot glances quickly over his shoulder, momentarily preoccupied, before looking back at his job. His hands grip tighter on the steering column. It’s not time yet.
The guy who kicked his shin is grinning and he closes his eyes, leaning back against the centre bulkhead.
“I like em little and pink. All perky like that? Aw man. The perfect mouthful. I had a girl back home, man. The best tits you ever saw. Fill up your hand, with the cutest little nipples.” he opens his eyes again and fixes them on him. “Which you like, Coles?”
He thinks for a moment. His programming knows how to deflect direct questions while on a covert op.
“Same as you. Little and pink.”
The guy grins in delight. He has a big gap between his front teeth, and he can see his tongue through it.
“Atta boy! Coles knows the good shit when he sees it!” he gives him another kick, this one gentler and teasing. It’s non aggressive, and doesn’t hurt at all anyway, so he feels no need to retaliate.
Besides, he isn’t at his dropzone yet.
The jungle rolls up and down below them, mountains of thick, ridiculous green rising and falling. The steam coming off it smells intensely of life and decay, dampness and thick air. There’s columns of smoke rising in the distance from multiple places all around them, hit with carpet bombs or napalm or possibly both. For almost an hour they cruise above the jungle, keeping low enough so as not to be seen from a distance, but high enough to avoid rocketfire from below.
His day’s worth of sweat is just beginning to properly dry in his hair and on his clothes when he sees the specific mountain formation hove into view- one sharp peak, another dull, bisected by a rise of slightly taller trees and a small river, visible from the air.
The pilot turns to him, and his eyes are bright with fear but also grim determination.
“Drop Zone Tango Delta Tango Bravo” the pilot says, and his voice shakes. Here’s the place.
He nods sharply, mind and body shifting easily into mission ready mode.
Sounds and sights not pertinent to him drop away like fall leaves off a tree, so precise and calculated is his focus. If it doesn’t matter to his mission, it doesn’t exist at all.
He gets to his feet, letting the M-16 fall to the floor of the Huey. His fellow soldiers jump in surprise, and one grabs his gun for him on reflex. The pilot points him under the seat, so he stoops and pulls out a big rucksack duffle, heavy with gear.
He reaches up, undoes his helmet and then pulls it off, his hair falling around his face in a dark curtain. He tosses the helmet out the open side of the chopper, followed by his gloves, which he pulls off, finger by finger, and tosses out. As his metal hand is revealed, the eyes of the soldiers around him get wider.
Then, because nothing can be allowed to restrict his movement, he grabs the front of his shirt in both hands and pops the buttons apart, baring the faded black tank underneath. He pulls the shirt off his arms, right and then left, revealing the gleaming jointed metal underneath, reflecting orange in the hazy late afternoon light, the star on the makeshift deltoid flashing red. He throws the shirt from the helicopter too.
The soldiers around him all stare in shock, recoiling.
“What the fuck?”
“Jesus Christ!”
He picks up the duffle in his right hand, flexes the metal fingers of his left, and then makes a fist.
He then punches the fist straight up through the roof, into the hub of the rotors.
Immediately the helicopter jerks violently and starts to fall, smoke spewing from the mechanism. The whirl of the engine turns into a grinding shriek and then a squeal rising in pitch and volume.
The men around him are screaming in panic, flailing and grabbing on to anything they can hold on to, and he ignores them as he withdraws his hand, and takes a large step off into thin air as the helicopter starts to spin out of control.
He falls.
The air hisses past him, the green mass of the jungle rushing up to meet him. He can hear the screams behind him as the Huey careens away, twisting and plummeting. Men fall out of it, clutching each other, as it lists on its side.
He waits for the canopy to come, extending his left arm, hand open. He hits the treetops precisely, hand grabbing the first solid thing it comes in contact with. The branch immediately slows his fall, bending with his weight, and he lets go and grabs onto the rib of a massive banana leaf, which bows to lower him, slowing him again on the way to the ground. Leaves and branches slap at him like a thousand hands.
He lands, half kneeling, on the wet forest floor with a thump, the duffel still in hand, breathing hard. He straightens slowly, rolling his shoulders, one with a faint pop and the other with a series of mechanical whirs.
All around him, the jungle is alive.
Birds shriek and cackle, bugs scream and squeak. It smells of rotting leaves and old rain, ozone and trapped humidity. The trees are all tall and lush and covered in vines; no Agent Orange or napalm has been used here yet. It’s incredibly hot on the forest floor, well over 90, and he is immediately sweating once again.
He scans his surroundings, getting his bearings and cardinal orientation from the location of the sun. He organizes the next sequence of events in his head, and then sets to work.
First, he opens the duffle and withdraws his gear, quickly changing into his familiar shadowy black tac gear. What weapons he hadn’t already had hidden on himself he equips quickly and deftly.
Then, he listens carefully and takes note of his direction of travel, before heading off into the jungle, leaving PFC Robert Coles’ clothing and identity behind.
Now, he is just the Winter Soldier.
He finds the crashed Huey easily enough- it’s on fire, but due to the damp jungle, is barely catching on any of the surrounding vegetation. It’s spewing thick, oily black smoke into the air, fast and churning and high into the sky. He gives it a wide berth, staying well inside the trees, gauging sight lines and potential hides on pure instinct. He relies on sniper’s abilities he has honed for what feels like a thousand years, though he can’t remember how or why he gained these skills. It feels as if it’s knowledge he’s always had.
He finds a direction he likes, with optimal visibility and long sight lines. He scales an enormous tree, higher and higher until he’s well hidden in the canopy, sitting near the large trunk and settling in.
And he waits.
He can wait for days at a time, motionless and endlessly patient. Hunger, thirst, heat or cold, exposure or muscle fatigue, all are part of him. Things that should kill him are immaterial. His training is faultless, and his mission parameters clear. He can, and he will, wait forever if need be.
Even as evening comes, the heat is a physical presence, heavy and lethargic. His skin is slick, sweat dripping off his nose and down his chest and back. Moths come once the sun sets and uncurl their long tongues to drink the salt and water from him. A normal soldier would likely be incapacitated from dehydration. But he is no normal soldier.
The half-and-a-bit moon bathes the jungle in a bizarre irregular smear of dark impenetrable blues and silvery greys, leached of the daytime vibrance. The orange of the fire from the Huey has died to a glow, smoke rising slower and clearer, the superheated metal pinging and popping still.
He waits in the tree, and he listens, eyes constantly moving, body motionless.
He hears them about two and a half hours after sunset, in the pitch blackness of the night.
It’s barely any noise at all, just the snap of a twig, the crunch of the old leaf litter in a regular pattern of footsteps. A normal human without his enhanced senses would never hear it, and even then, he’s been trained to be perfect at picking up sounds that don’t belong. No one can listen for Charlie like he can listen for Charlie.
Other sounds, like the bugs and birds and his own breathing, are swallowed into what his brain associates as ‘Mission Silence’; the all consuming focus trained into his bones eclipsing all extra sound.
This is why he can hear them.
They come quietly, whispering occasionally, but otherwise mute. They are carrying Russian-made guns, far superior to the M-16s the American GIs carry.
He watches as they pick their way through the undergrowth towards the Huey, stopping and surrounding it before closing in. There’s not much left to salvage, but they poke through the wreckage nonetheless, every so often speaking to one another in Vietnamese.
He understands Vietnamese. He has no idea why this is.
After going through the rubble, they find a few charred bodies, one of whom is the pilot who’d been in league with him. Hydra had demanded this task of him, and so he had complied. There is no reasoning required beyond that.
The Viet-Cong soldiers below apparently don’t find anything in the rubble, and quickly retreat the same direction they’d come.
This is what he’s been waiting for.
He descends quickly and silently to the ground, his enhanced strength making tree climbing a breeze.
He flits after the retreating figures in the dark, keeping to the dense cover just off the indistinct trail they follow back up the mountain. Their awareness of their exact location in the unbelievably dense jungle, even at night, is genuinely impressive, and his respect for them grows.
The tactical parts of his brain, capable of quick combat decisions and immediate evaluation of long term strategic ability, know the VC have the capability to vastly outperform the Americans at every aspect of warcraft. From what he’s seen while in country, he also knows this assessment is coming to be correct.
It’s quite some time into the trek back up the mountain, over an hour, that he registers the other VC soldiers standing guard off the path, watching for the return of the scouting party. He quickly dispatches the one most likely to interfere with him, twisting his head around and silently lowering his body to the forest floor, before continuing on behind the line of soldiers. There are no lights, of course, but he can see the entrance into an underground tunnel, considerably larger than just a foxhole, and other VC soldiers standing around it.
He waits as they enter the compound, disappearing into the blackness of the tunnel entrance, leaving behind only two guards by the door.
He crouches in a wet pocket of darkness, watching the breathing jungle around him for hints of other hidden watchers, while deftly screwing a silencer onto the muzzle of his sidearm, a custom made 9 mm Baikal Makarov pistol. Sure enough, after about fifteen minutes of endless patience, he catches a glimpse of someone shifting their weight about a hundred yards or so away from him, barely visible behind a clump of bamboo.
He is close to his objective, and he is able to retreat into the Mission Silence, take comfort in it’s muffling blanket, to keep his heart slow and even, his every sense precise.
He disposes of the hidden person first, carefully skirting the bamboo and killing him silently with his left hand, saving bullets. Next, he slinks up the mountain and circles back, footfalls utterly silent as he nears the outcropping over the door. He crawls, poised above the forest floor like a jungle cat, slow and patient, until he can see the men below him.
He inhales once, deep and focusing, and springs into action.
He swings over the edge, landing on top of one man with his legs around his neck, twisting violently to take him to the ground, all while reaching with his left hand and yanking the gun from the other’s surprised hands, his own gun coming up and shooting him up through the chin with the suppressed phew of a silenced gunshot. The man under him has barely a second to struggle before the pistol is on his head, and is dead a second after that.
He rolls lightly to his feet, quickly grabbing both men and tossing them one handed into the bush nearby, away from the entrance and the trail leading to it. He glances around, skimming the darkness for movement, and seeing none, quickly wipes sweat from his brow with the back of his right hand, still holding his sidearm. He slips into the profound darkness of the tunnel.
This new darkness is impenetrable, inky and almost touchable in its density. Even his enhanced vision can barely track in this pitch blackness. The Mission Silence is still there, focusing him on every possible noise that could indicate the presence of another human.
He reaches into a side pocket and withdraws his goggles, slipping them on.
Immediately, the darkness is rendered in bright green and dark green, the ambient light spectrum magnified into something visible. This technology, better than the devices used by the military which rely on moonlight, is only just newly developed, enormously less bulky, and only he has ever used it in the field.
He moves forward down a long dirt hallway, around roots that hang from the ceiling and protrude from the ground. It smells of old damp and enclosed underground space, but also of gasoline and diesel fuel, gunpowder and human sweat.
He continues until he reaches a T-intersection, listening carefully before turning left; he can hear indistinct voices that way.
As he goes, his goggles detect more and more light, so he tugs them down his face to around his neck. There’s a faint glow ahead, from a gas lamp on a table, surrounded by several hands of face- down playing cards. There are chairs too, pulled out but empty, and tin cups with dregs of coffee He doesn’t hesitate, just passes it quickly, and down the next tunnel.
More gas lamps hang from little metal claws here and there, and as he goes he notices a man sleeping, leaning back against the wall. It’s the work of a second to dispatch him, and he immediately moves on, a one man invading army into the heart of darkness.
The dirt walls, rather than turn to stone, become concrete, old and cracked but relatively sturdy. His intel was correct, then; an old French installment, long since abandoned and then retaken, likely before even the Japanese had taken and then lost Vietnam in the Second World War.
There is a long hall, with rooms branching off, and said rooms are large, mostly storerooms of ammunition, fuel and explosives, and some have people in them, sitting around, eating, playing cards, cleaning weapons, mending clothes. Many soldiers are sleeping on woven palm mats, tucked together like sardines. It is cooler down here, much more comfortable than the jungle above.
He slinks on through the damp and the dark, water dripping in along cracks in the walls, trickling in red smears of rust and rainwater. Roots hang thick like cables from the ceiling, or creep lazily along the floor like great snakes, and in places are entirely eating away at the concrete walls. It smells of mildew down here, still air and recycled breath, and fermenting jungle soil.
He reaches his goal at the very end of the hall, just before the tunnel has collapsed under what appears to be a huge weight of dirt and enormous boulders. There’s an office with a closed door on one side of the tunnel, and he slips through it as soon as he reaches it.
Inside, there is old furniture, boxes of ammunition, and an old rusted metal desk piled with papers.
At the desk, sits a man. The man he’s been looking for… or rather, has been told to look for.
The man looks up as he enters the room, and dies before the yell in his mouth can emerge.
He lowers the Makarov and proceeds to the desk, pulling the man off of it before blood can get on too many of the papers in front of him.
He flips through several of the files on the desktop, none of which have the title he has memorized.
He turns pages, opens drawers, flips paper after paper, eyes scanning each.
Finally, in the bottom drawer, under a bottle of cheap whiskey, is an old, tattered dark green file with German, and then more recent Russian words stamped on it, followed by a handwritten English translation: “Operation July Sundown".
He withdraws the file and unzips the front of his coat, carefully stashing the file inside, before rezipping.
Part one of his mission is accomplished. He commences with part two.
He reaches into the pockets of the dead man slouched in his chair, withdrawing his book of matches.
He lights one, and throws it onto the desk. It catches on a stack of paper. He waits for the flames to spread and grow, then grabs a handful of burning papers and carries it to the nearest wooden box of ammunition, gently placing them inside, then grabs a few more files and adds them to the box.
It’ll take a while for the fire to get hot enough to set off the ammunition.
He retrieves the whiskey from the bottom drawer and rips a strip of sleeve off the dead man, shoving it into the neck of the bottle. As he waits and lets the liquor wick up the fabric, he lights a few more stacks of paper on fire. The smoke accumulates at the ceiling and builds quickly, just as the flames do on the desk.
He slips out the door into the hallway, Molotov cocktail in metal hand, silenced sidearm in the other. He can feel the impending chaos he is about to cause, hear it resonate through time and into his bones. He is an agent, an entity of this chaos, but also of calculated and merciless precision.
He goes to the first room in the hall, one with barrels of diesel and munitions, and quickly kills the man sitting eating a bowl of rice by an oil lamp. He knocks over barrels, spilling fuel onto the floor, before carefully lifting the oil lamp and throwing it onto the now slick floor. Hungry fire immediately jumps up, popping and snapping, and he steps out the door as the flames start to engulf the boxes of rockets and grenades.
He lights the strip of fabric in the whiskey, now soaked in alcohol, and steps into the next nearest doorway. It is the room full of slumbering men, but most importantly, several barrels of fuel. He throws the bottle. It explodes into flames and screams, immediate anarchy and confusion following right after.
He steps back out of the room, continuing backwards until he is past the first room that is now just a wall of raging flame, and as men flood out of the door towards him and the exit in a panic, he sets to work.
His arm is as much of a weapon as the gun in his other hand is, and the rest of his body is equal again to a third share. He is deadly and unwavering when the panic sets in to all others, ignoring the bullets shot blindly into the smoke and darkness of the hall.
He dispatches all who try to escape the burning room, running into him in their confusion and terror. He can smell that the palm mats have ignited, and in the chaos one of the gasoline barrels has been knocked over, immediately causing huge greasy flames to burst from the floor of that room as well.
The smoke obscures him, as well as his opponents, the flames occasionally offering an outline but little else. His enhanced senses and decades of ruthless training give him every advantage imaginable. He throws oil lamps mounted on the wall into the smoke ahead of him as he walks backwards slowly towards the exit of the tunnel. Someone tries to throw a grenade in their panic, but he catches it and throws it back into the depths of the hall, where it explodes and makes his hearing dip away briefly before hissing back with the shrieks of burning, dying men.
In the far end of the tunnel, he hears ammunition start to go off in rapid bunches, the fire finally reaching a level hot enough to set off the boxes in the back office. It’s only a matter of time before the grenades and rockets start to do the same.
He walks back out of the tunnel, the glow of the fire behind him lighting his way. There’s three men running into the tunnel ahead of him, dressed in full jungle camouflage. One is slightly faster on the uptake than the others and gets off a spray of bullets in his direction before he can kill him with his Makarov.
Being shot is nothing new- he’s been shot over a hundred times in his unreliable memory. He feels it as impact, not pain- one grazes his calf in a deep furrow, the other two follow in a spray line; one goes through his right bicep, but misses the bone, and the other into the file on his chest, which feels like a solid punch but not the burning shock of a deep puncture.
He leaves the tunnel, not bothering to limp. Behind him, he hears something large explode, and with reflexes tuned to exactly this scenario, leaps forwards out of the tunnel into a somersault and springs back up onto his feet some fifteen feet away as flames belch out of the tunnel mouth.
He stands in the darkness of the nighttime jungle again, the glow from the fire now illuminating him and the maze of tree trunks and undergrowth around and behind him. The world is bathed in orange and black; a tiger striped night. He pants slightly, adrenaline pouring through his veins, the heat still cloying and heavy. Sweat and blood, both his and not, is pouring down his arms and is sticky under his clothes. His hair is stuck to his face, coming loose only when he wipes it away.
Part two of his mission is complete. Proceed to extraction.
Actually, not quite.
He looks down at his chest, and carefully undoes the off-centre zipper of his tac coat. He withdraws the file, which has a hole in it where the bullet punctured, mushroomed and went into the meat of his chest, blood already leaking onto the old worn paper.
The file isn’t thick enough to stop the bullet itself, but the heavy weave in the front centre panel of his jacket is designed to resist light weapons fire. It is the combination of the two that saved his ribcage today.
He carefully lets the file fall open, and looks upon the first page.
And then…
And then…
And then something happens in his brain.
Something misfires, lurches from dormant to alert, and something that had been hiding comes screaming back into his head. A switch he hadn’t known was there is flipped, and a fuse explodes in a shower of sparks.
Pinned to the interior of the file is a photo of a man. The man is very handsome, with a square cut jaw, serious eyebrows, intense eyes. The photo is in black and white, but for some reason, he knows that this man’s hair is dark blonde, combed meticulously back from his forehead and parted on the right. His shoulders are enormously wide, what’s visible of his arms are likewise large, and his chest is broad and thick.
He is wearing a dark uniform with a white star in the centre of that powerful chest.
And the Winter Soldier’s brain, as he stares at the photo, is in overload.
The special infil ops agents find him an hour after sunrise, staring at the file in his hands, sitting on the leaf littered jungle floor near the smoldering remains of the hidden base.
The extraction point they were supposed to pick him up at was one click North of the smoke, but when he hadn’t arrived, they’d been sent into the jungle to find their formidable lost lamb.
There are three of them, each in heavy duty jungle tac gear not affiliated with any of the units American soldiers, marines or navy already in Vietnam, their weapons far beyond anything else available in-country.
They approach him with practiced wariness, standing a safe distance away, guns at the ready.
Always, always at the ready.
“You awake, asshole?” one says, stepping sideways to enter his field of vision, but remaining around ten feet away.
He is staring down at the file, at the photo he now is holding in his shaking hands, has been holding, cradling, for several hours.
“I said, are you AWAKE. ASSHOLE.” the soldier says again only louder, kicking leaves and a loose stick at him but coming no closer.
“Why do I know him?” he says quietly. His voice is crumbling, his breathing is fast and bordering on panic.
“What?”
“Why do I know him?” he says again, slightly more forceful. His eyes have drifted out of focus, strange images flashing into his memory like lightning across the sky. Dead things in his mind are coming to life, moving beneath the earth under graves that have long gone cold.
The Mission Silence he can always rely on to calm him, is obliterated by the photo in his hands. Every sound around him unbearably loud and intrusive, overwhelming and sharp. He can’t cut out any of it.
“Oh, get the fuck up already. You missed your extraction. We’re behind schedule by hours. We have to be back on base by oh-seven hundred.” The soldier points his weapon with more malice but again, comes no closer.
He stares back down at the picture, he feels his lip tremble with an emotion he hasn’t felt in… in how long? How long ago did he feel this? Has he ever felt this?
“WHY DO I KNOW HIM?!” he says again, this time looking up at the soldier in front of him. His chest is rapidly rising and falling, and his throat is under intense pressure by some unknown force. He feels like he is choking on the air, on all the things he can’t see in his own mind.
“The fuck is wrong with him? What do we do?” asks one of the soldiers behind him, addressing the one in front.
“Jesus Christ.” the first soldier keeps his SMG pointed at him, but speaks into a radio mounted on his shoulder, “Yeah, this is Echo Team, we’ve got him, but send down the Colonel. Tell him his toy is broken, over.”
“Roger, Echo Team, standby, over.” the radio is a synthetic fizzle in the highly organic jungle air.
“Why do I know him?” he says again, and this time it’s a pleading whimper.
His name was Steve. His name was Captain. He was small. He was big. He was in Europe. He was in New York. He was short he was tall he was he was he was he was…
“Who is he talking about? What’s he looking at?” asks the soldier behind again.
“Well I ain’t getting close enough to look,” says the one beside him, who’d remained silent until then.
“He’s got a file. On his lap. He’s holding a picture.” says the soldier in front.
“Tell me! Who he is!” his shout travels into the canopy, frightening a flock of colourful birds.
Silence falls around him, the soldiers all looking at each other and at him. They don’t know what to do. Their uncertainty is palpable even to him in his scattered state.
“Please tell me.” he begs, and holds his hand up holding the photo, in the direction of the man in front of him.
The soldier doesn’t move. He looks quickly from the men behind and then to him again, processing, calculating.
He inhales, holds it.
Takes a step forward.
“Reenders!” says one of the other soldiers, their voice a shocked warning.
“Yeah, yeah, keep your fucking shirt on.”
The soldier takes another step, gun still on him as he advances.
“He’s gonna rip your fucking head off, Reenders.” says the other soldier, his voice betraying his apprehension.
“Can I see the picture?” the soldier holds out his hand, palm up. His voice is gentle.
He hesitates, looks at the photo in his flesh fingers, and then at the open palm in front of him.
He looks at the picture again.
Those eyes. The shape of them feels like something so incredibly, terribly important, but he’s forgotten, he’s forgotten, how could he forget??
He looks slowly back up at the nameless soldier in front of him, with his hand and his gun.
His metal arm comes up and into the gun, smashing it into the man’s face before he’s even had a chance to blink in surprise. The other soldiers don’t shoot immediately; they’re better trained than that. They do, however, start shouting, when he launches up into the man, sending them over and onto the jungle floor. His hands are pummeling, throttling, breaking everything he can reach.
“SHOOT HIM!”
“WE CAN’T!”
“JUST FUCKING SHOOT HIM!”
“DON’T shoot him.” It’s a new voice, clear and cutting through all sound.
He freezes, metal fist raised mid-descent into the soldier’s face. His body is rigid, motionless.
“He’s worth millions and millions of dollars, you’re worth next to nothing. I don’t care what he does; you don’t shoot him.” the voice comes closer from behind, the jungle crunching underfoot.
He doesn’t turn or move, doesn’t even breath. He listens to the footsteps.
“On your feet.” comes the command.
He springs up, off the man on the ground, hands falling by his sides. He is breathing erratically, his heart is sprinting in his chest.
“Mission report.” the order is direct and crisp.
He takes a few gasping breaths but he can’t make himself speak. His mind is filled with the image in the photograph, which is crumpled in his fist, and it eclipses even the Handler.
“Mission. Report.” it comes again, this time even more firm.
He’s shivering. He isn’t the least bit cold, but he’s shivering like he does when they thaw him too quickly.
It feels like his brain is trying to thaw for the first time in decades.
“C-c-c-c….” he says, and swallows hard, “c-complete, sir.”
The Colonel walks around him and stoops, picking up the cast aside folder. He straightens, looking down at it, eyes flicking over the pages as he carefully aligns the edges.
He is terribly handsome, much like the man in the photo clutched desperately in his flesh hand. The Colonel’s hair is also blonde, his eyes also blue, shoulders also broad, though not quite as dramatically so as the man with the star on his chest.
The stark difference, though, is the Winter Soldier has no strange, murky memories of this man. All memories of him are immediate and as unforgivingly real as they are terrifying.
There is no kindness to be found when he looks at his face, and no fondness glowing in his chest when he hears his voice.
This man is not a friend. He is the one with the power.
“Good work, soldier. You completed your task with efficiency and accuracy.” the Colonel says, smiling warmly at him. He knows that this is not a real smile.
“He...he killed Reenders, sir!” one of the soldiers says, waving at the man on the ground.
As if on cue, the aforementioned Reenders lets out a reedy wheeze.
“Not quite, it would seem. And he knew the risk he took. He won’t make that mistake again.” the Colonel glances up from the file in his hands at the two soldiers, who stand in nervous, tense readiness, “Take Reenders back to the chopper and wait there. Now.”
They immediately comply without further comment, pick the bloody pulp of a man up off the forest floor, and disappear in the direction they came.
The Colonel closes the folder and tucks it under his arm.
“So. You want to tell me why you weren’t at the extraction point?”
He glances up into the Colonel’s face, then back down at the ashen dead leaves on the ground. He licks his lips, his shoulders still rising and falling quickly in his distress.
All he can see in his mind’s eye is the face in the photo, see it smiling a crooked smile at him, see him lifting a hand and placing it on his shoulder in easy comradery. He can almost feel the weight of the hand, feel its warmth on his collarbone.
“Speak.” The Colonel snaps his fingers twice directly in front of his face, and he flinches.
“Mission details unclear.” he says, his voice wavering and quiet.
“Unclear? Which part?” The Colonel’s face is always unflinching, it never shows any emotion or gives a sense of what’s going on behind his bright blue eyes. He stares at him, unblinking, expectant.
“Who...who is the man in the file?” he stares back, and his voice is pleading now.
The Colonel just watches him, face blank if not slightly amused. His eyes trace over him, one feature at a time, as if adding each up in turn, to see if his question merits a response.
He very, very rarely asks questions.
The Colonel takes a deep breath, as if resigned to his answer.
“That man is Captain America. Information about his physiology and vulnerabilities was traded to Hanoi by the Soviets, but then they refused to honor the info sharing deal with me and the forces I represent. You retrieved that valuable information, and yet again, your actions have shaped this world for the better.”
“But why do I know him?” he asks, and there is fear in his voice now. He is afraid, but he doesn’t know why.
He is afraid for all the things he doesn’t know.
“You don’t know him.” the Colonel says sharply, firmly, unarguably. “You don’t know anyone. That is why you are so special, and why you are so valuable.”
He can feel the lie. The Colonel’s face betrays nothing whatsoever, and it never does, but he can feel the untruth of what he says. His bones, his flesh, his blood are all telling him that these words are false, and it is terrifying.
He shakes his head, a little at first, and then more. Despite his fear of this man, and of the uncertainty washing over him in colossal waves, he knows he must insist.
“No. I...I do know him. I know him.”
This is the first time ever he can remember directly contradicting a handler.
The Colonel watches him for a moment, before slowly raising one hand and placing it gently on the side of his neck.
It would be a comforting gesture, but he knows it for what it really is. It’s a threat, a proprietary one, particularly when the Colonel’s thumb slides over his larynx, just hard enough..
“No. You don’t know him. You have never known him, and you will never know him.” The Colonel dips his chin slightly and his stare is unwavering and steadfast. He drops his hand and reaches to his belt, off which he pulls a specialized handheld taser.
The Winter Soldier is very familiar with this device. His eyes focus on it immediately.
“We will not be discussing this again, or mentioning this to anyone. You will go to the chopper and you will ride back to base for debriefing. We won’t be repeating this incident, and you will not skip another extraction point, or you will be sent to Vladivostok to be wiped and reprogrammed, which I do not have the time to waste doing. Am I fully understood?”
He nods jerkily, not taking his gaze away from the taser.
“Yes? Yes, what?”
“Yes, Colonel Pierce.”
“Good. Then let’s go.” he steps aside and motions with an open arm in the direction of the helicopter.
The walk to the chopper is quiet, except for the ambient shrill scream of the jungle. They reach the small clearing by the stream, where four soldiers in the Huey are leaning over Reenders on a stretcher, attempting to stabilize him for transport to the nearest field hospital.
He recognizes two of the other agents as well, who are standing outside, keeping a lazy watch. They’ve been in Vietnam with him for four years, and unlike Reenders and his team, they too carry handheld tasers. They are familiar with how to control him, and are unafraid.
Pierce stalks past them, ignoring their salutes.
“Let’s get this bird in the air, I have to be on the phone with Washington at eleven hundred hours.”
He goes to follow, but the two agents step in front of him. One holds up his taser and waggles it.
“See this? Try any of that shit with me and I’ll lay you out.”
He doesn’t move, just waits and doesn’t make eye contact.
They let him pass.
He climbs into the Huey and sits quietly as the men climb in after him. He watches the flapping green curtain of the jungle whip and froth in the propwash of the chopper, ignoring the other people around him as they take off up into the thick, soupy air.
Across from him and on the opposite side of the chopper, Pierce is reading the file, brow furrowed, hands tightly holding all the papers together in the wind.
The pain from his gunshot wounds is a resonant but ignored sensation, present but useless. He knows his body will heal. The bleeding has already stopped.
He looks down into his hand, at the crumpled photo he’d been keeping in the tight ball of his fist.
He feels a sense of both profound calmness and impending doom and panic when he sees the face in the photo. He is small, he is tall, he is thin, he is broad, he is light, he is heavy, he is, he is heisheisheisheis
“ ‘Chu got there?” a muzzle of a rifle shoves his hand roughly.
He closes his fist immediately, looking up at the agent across from him from under the sweaty curtain of his hair.
The agent seems to think this act of defiance is funny. He grins and shoves again, the metal sharp against his knuckles.
“Show me.” the agent says.
He just glares. This agent isn’t exactly his handler, especially not when Pierce is right there. But Pierce is occupied by his intel, and the agent has all the authority he needs in his handheld bull-zapper.
The agent pulls said taser out again and holds it up. He’s smirking still.
“Come on. Hand it over, or I’ll zap your dick off and toss it in a bonfire.”
With a shaking hand, he slowly extends the photo. It’s snatched roughly from him, and he’s irrationally angry about this even though he himself had crumpled it first.
The agent looks at it and laughs out loud, a belligerent hoot.
“Hah! Look what he had!” he shows it to the other agent beside him, who laughs too.
“What, you keeping this for your spank bank? Always figured you was a queer.” the agent tosses the photo out the side of the Huey with a flick of his wrist.
With preternatural speed, his hand darts out and snatches the photo out of thin air.
His hand is shaking as he puts the picture into the front of his jacket, the old blood from his chest wound sticky and cold.
The agent is still laughing, shaking his head, delighted by this reaction.
“So what, you fucked him? Or other way around? Bet you liked sucking America’s big red, white and blue dick, eh?”
He leaps at him, direct and precise like a jaguar, and lands on top of him, flesh hand strangling at his throat, metal one making a fist with which to cave his impudent skull in.
The taser hits him in the kidney first.