Chapter Text
Bucky Barnes was cold.
Huddled in on himself, both arms drawn close to his chest, he tried not to relay just how fucking freezing he was to the other men — all of whom, it seemed, remained comfortably unaffected by the autumn chill.
As he tried not to visibly shiver where he sat, he scanned over the open page of the comic book that had been lobbed over for his consideration.
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me," he said.
Admittedly, when the first batch of comics had been delivered to the camp, Bucky Barnes was among those who were… less than receptive to the character of Captain America, to say the very least.
He flipped through the pages with a pained expression, taking in its too-bright colours and its too-clean language with bitter amusement.
"Schmucks back home really think this is gonna help win us the war?" He held up a page so the rest of the squad could share in his disgust. They all looked faintly amused. "Dunno about you fellas, but my morale's not exactly feelin' particularly boosted right now."
“Eh. No worse than the newsreels back home,” one of the men replied, not unfairly. “Men and women all across America are doing their part’ yadda, yadda, ‘brave American soldiers fighting tyranny on every front!’ yadda, yah,” he continued, in a passable impression of the newsreels’ emphatic voiceovers.
"Bet this shit plays great in Ohio," Dugan said.
“You know they’ve based this ‘Captain America’ off of a real guy? They’ve got some poor bastard parading around the country in tights selling war bonds.”
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Bucky repeated, far less amused this time. Disgusted, he swapped over the comic for an open tin of peaches that Dum Dum held out for him, paired with a slightly bent fork.
Bent forks, Dum Dum had once announced, added 'authenticity' to their time at camp — a declaration to which Bucky had given a quiet suggestion as to where exactly he could stick his authenticity. Obviously, Dum Dum had heard this, because now he took it upon himself to actively search out the most mangled set of eating utensils he could find whenever he retrieved food for them.
“‘Poor bastard’ — more like ‘lucky bastard’. Need I remind you that while he’s prancing around like a show-pony, we’re out here in the mud with holes in our socks. Living off spam. I’ll bet a carton of Luckies that every single pair of socks that that man owns are clean and completely void of holes,” Dugan said, with a bitterness to rival Bucky’s. “Look at him,” he thrust a thick forefinger at the page, “never tasted Spam in his life.”
“Yeah, well, I’d still rather be tangled up in this sweaty fuckin' rat king with the rest of you than where he is.” One of the men, Burke, pointed directly at the large illustrated dick-bulge that they had been laughing at earlier. “At least out here, my dignity’s intact with the rest of me.”
“Yeah, definitely rather him than me,” another laughed.
Bucky didn’t laugh, but agreed regardless. He briefly entertained the idea of what Steve would say seeing an eligible man shirking his role in the war in favour of becoming an on-stage showgirl. One made to pander the war to kids of all people…
“Sergeant,” a voice called from behind. Bucky turned to see his second lieutenant standing with a clipboard in-hand.
Dutifully, Bucky hurried to set down his peaches and dash over to where the other men couldn’t eavesdrop. Righting himself to attention, he saluted. “Sir!”
“At ease,” Lieutenant Harrison said, and Bucky switched to rest position. “We’re prepping the 107th. Have your squad ready to make the trek down to the front at 0600 tomorrow.”
Bucky’s heart sank, hard and fast, and he swallowed down the lump in his throat before saluting once more. “Yes, sir.”
Lieutenant Harrison hesitated, jaw flexed. Anxious. Bucky knew at once that there was something he wasn’t being told. It wasn't his place, however, to question.
When he slouched off back to his men, they were still talking about Captain fucking America.
“He’s scheduled to come here in a few weeks,” one of the men was saying — Bucky didn’t know his name. He had the comic flipped to the back page, where a list of tour dates had been printed alongside a portrait of Captain America, who pointed out to the audience like he was Uncle Sam.
“Can’t fucking wait,” Bucky replied blandly, slumping back down on his place in the dirt and resuming work on his tinned peaches.
As the night grew darker, more men trudged off to their quarters for lights out, intending to squeeze in as much sleep as they could before morning.
For Bucky and several other men, however, they drew it out, wanting to enjoy their last calm night together in peace. Bucky didn’t care that he needed to get up at ass-o’clock to prep his squad — he’d feel shitty regardless of how much sleep he’d had.
Cigarette dangling from one hand and a packet of army-ration sweet biscuits in the other, he stared into the flickering fire pit they’d sparked.
He kept zoning in and out of the conversation, mind wandering from one awful hypothetical to another against his will. He looked up at the faces of the men he was sitting around with. Dum Dum (loyal Dum Dum, with his patched bowler hat; his white-toothed, wrinkly-eyed grin. His hearty laugh. His enormous hands, always caked in dirt with the fingernails gnawed short. Hands which had jubilantly slapped Bucky on the back so, so many times). Gabe (genius Gabriel Jones, who spoke in such low, soothing tones, he could probably pacify Hitler himself. Talented musician Gabe, who had a girl back home, Alice, who he intended to marry). Smithy (barely of age to join — his young, round face constantly beaming; able to force his sunny disposition down anybody’s throat. Sheer anybody up. Make anybody laugh). And Burke, (quiet Burke, who had probably read every book ever published; who spouted more useless-as-crap facts than anyone Bucky knew. Whose demure nature contrasted forcefully against his thickset frame; faded tattoos stretched over too much muscle and buried under thick dark hair on his forearms…)
Would they all come back from battle tomorrow? The next time Bucky saw any of them, would they still be alive? Intact? Would deep, twisted scars soon mar Smithy’s perpetual smile? Would Burke’s tattooed forearms be blasted away? Would he ever hear Dum Dum’s booming laugh again after tonight?
Bucky shook himself out of his reverie and forced himself to re-join the conversation.
Gabriel was chuckling wistfully. “My dad died in the first Great War," he said. "Mom couldn’t afford to send me to college and keep the house I’d grown up in, so, in the end, she decided to sell the house so I could go to school, and we moved to Washington with my grandmother. First day there, I decided to take a break from hauling furniture into the house, and so I walked down to this little joint on the end of our street. Alice was working as a waitress there, and she comes to the front to offer me a table, and I swear, I’d never seen anyone as beautiful as her. When she asks me if I wanted to sit in a booth or at the counter, you know what I say? Like a big idiot, I just blurt out, ‘I go to college!’, and man alive if that isn’t the single stupidest thing I’ve ever said. She never let me live it down."
The men all laughed.
“My Jenny was a waitress too,” Dum Dum shared affectionately. “I was working as a lumberjack up in Montana, and I’d just worked a double shift that day to cover a buddy of mine. The usual place I went to was closed by the time I’d finished, so I found this shitty all-night diner instead. Completely dead — only people there was the cook, some skinny fella drinkin’ coffee in the corner, and her. Lips red as cherries with shoes to match, her hair all curled...” Dum Dum giggled. “You know the first thing she says to me after giving me my order? She snatches the napkin outta my hand and says, ‘what, were you raised in a barn? Eat with your mouth closed; I’ll thank you to be showin’ some manners when you eat in my restaurant, sir.’ And then she tucked my napkin into my shirt for me like I was her toddler.”
“Did your mama like her?” Smithy asked.
Dum Dum gave another one of his hearty laughs. “First thing she says to my mama when she met her? ‘You know, your son here is probably the biggest oaf I’ve ever met’. And so my mama says back, ‘don’t I know it — he gets it all from his father.’ Mama loved her; said she had spunk.”
The men tittered again, and there was a brief moment of comfortable silence among the group.
“What about you, Barnes?" Burke asked. "Tell us about your family — you got a girl back home?”
“Naw, no girl. Just me and my best pal, Steve.” Bucky smiled at the thought.
“Well, what’s his story then? How’d you two meet?” Dum Dum extracted another sweet biscuit from his packet.
Bucky thought for a moment, trying to parse through the haze of time. “Mm,” he began unsurely, “I think I might’ve been... maybe nine? Ten? I was in this crappy orphanage back then, and so long as we weren't caught makin' trouble, the nuns would just let us wander the streets. Could be gone for hours without anybody asking where I’d been.
"Anyway, so one day I found a quarter in the street — which is a fortune to a kid who owned nothing but a few lousy shirts, pants, and a couple'a socks. So I ran straight down to the nearest candy store. Three cents a bag. I just started loading my pockets with as many as I could carry — made the phrase ‘kid in a candy store’. Afterwards, I started to head back, but then I hear this scuffle in the alleyway beside the store. I think there were about four boys in there, about twelve or thirteen, and they were shoving around this... absolutely tiny kid. Telling him that he had to pay a two-cent toll to walk from eighth avenue to tenth.
“Course, this kid ain’t having a single bar of it. ‘Not givin’ you a red cent!’ he tells ‘em, and so they punched him,” Bucky smacked one fist into his other palm, “square in the face. I clock the biggest one — caught him off guard, and he ended up crashing face-first into the brick wall. Another kid tried to come at me with a brick, but then out of nowhere, that kid they were beating suddenly gets up and slams him with the lid of a garbage can, right on the back of his head. The bullies ran off, and then I finally get a good look at this kid. Tiny little runt of a thing — Steve's only a year younger than me, but at the time he only looked about six or seven. I remember his suspenders were tightened the whole way, but they still fell off of his shoulders — might’ve been his dad’s, I guess. Anyway, he turns to me, with a black eye, and he gives me the sourest look I’ve ever seen. ‘I woulda worn ‘em down eventually y’know’ he tells me, and I laughed and said, ‘yeah, when they died of old age’. He didn’t like that. Brought his fists right back up to fight me." He laughed. "I told him to holster the guns, and offered him a sweet out of my pocket — we’ve been best friends since.”
“Aww. You're giving me cavities, Barnes,” Dum Dum teased good-naturedly.
“You grew up in an orphanage? Pretty sure I’ve heard you talk about your ma before,” Burke said.
“Adopted,” Bucky replied. “When I was thirteen — me and my little sister Becca. I’ve known Steve longer than I’ve known my own parents.”
The man all aww'ed again, but Bucky couldn't even pretended to be annoyed.
He allowed himself to subtly fade back out of the conversation after that. He didn’t say much of anything for the rest of the night, in fact. And when the men had finally felt their eyelids begin to droop and could no longer fight the irresistible pull of sleep, he’d followed wordlessly, taking it in turn to give each of them a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder before they separated, tiptoeing to their allocated cots.
At dawn, he rose with them again.
The march to the front was silent but for the rhythmic sounds of stomping military boots. The battlefield was vast, smoggy, and for a while, completely devoid of any enemy threat.
But when the Germans came, they did so with an almighty force Bucky could never have imagined.
Taking up the space where eight normal tanks could have comfortably fit, the Germans had brought along with them three specialized battle-tanks unlike anything Bucky had ever seen. Instead of firing explosive rounds, they launched great, luminous orbs of electric-blue light that struck with terrifying precision. On impact, the soldiers they hit didn’t fall. They vanished. Disintegrated. No blood, no bodies. Not even a shadow left behind on the grassy hillside.
There was no choice left. Radio contact was down, they were losing men fast, and nobody was coming to rescue them.
They issued surrender.
Bucky Barnes was cold.
He was unsure if it was that the winters in Austria were simply colder than the winters in Brooklyn, or if it was purely because the metal chamber they’d been isolated in was so poorly insulated.
The survivors were marched away single-file with their hands on their heads, their weapons stripped. Like animals, they were crammed into small cages; around five or so men to each. There appeared to be no real organization as to which men were stored with where. Bucky’s heart had sank when he saw that it wasn’t only most of the 107th who were captured, but also what looked like two or three other complete companies from different divisions — mostly European.
Bucky’s container was shared with the comforting faces of Dum Dum and Gabe, as well as with two other European men whom Bucky hadn’t met before.
James Montgomery Falsworth was a lieutenant with the 3rd independent English parachute brigade. He was a tall, slender man who spoke with a refined dignity that was often a cause for good-hearted jibes from Dum Dum. While at first largely unamused by Dum Dum’s… particularly American sense of humor, he eventually thawed the longer they were kept in proximity to one another, and turned out to be capable of giving as much as he got in the way of good-natured digs.
Jacques Dernier was a short man, with coarse dark hair reminiscent of Burke. Although he apparently understood English fluently, he chose to only speak in French — a trait that was a source of endless amusement to Gabe, and irritation to the others. Gabe, being the only other man to understand French beyond the basics, and whose peaceful demeanor and soothing voice provided a source of great calm, was the only person Dernier seemed to really trust out of the lot.
During the first morning after their capture, On the first morning after their capture, Bucky hadn’t understood why Dernier and Falsworth had recoiled when a masked German guard came early to the POW cells. They had shrunk back into the shadows, pressing themselves flat against the rear bars, as if trying to disappear.
At first, he extrapolated that it was because of the gun — that sleek, elongated gun, which glowed with the same kind of strange blue-light ammunition that had so thoroughly obliterated his unit the previous night.
What they actually feared, however, turned out to be much, much worse.
Wordlessly, the guard had raised one thick, gloved finger to one of the cells, pointing directly at Chester Burke.
Out of nowhere, it seemed, two more guards appeared out of that heavy metallic door. In seconds, they had unlocked Burke’s cell, grabbed hold of each of his arms, and began to drag him out.
As soon as they had grabbed a hold, the men in each surrounding cell had began shouting, screaming their pleas to leave him be — to choose someone else. To show him mercy. Their begging fell on deaf ears, and Burke was hauled out of the room, bellowing and pleading, until the heavy metal doors shut, and he was heard no more.
“Where the hell are they taking him?” Bucky whirled to face Falsworth and Dernier, both of whom kept their eyes trained on the floor. “Hey! Don’t ignore me. Tell me where they’re taking Burke.”
Falsworth finally lifted his head, though he still didn’t meet Bucky’s eyes. “Every few mornings or so, the guards will come and pick out a soldier. They’re taken into an isolation ward on a higher floor.”
“Aucun d'entre eux n'est revenu,” Dernier murmured quietly.
Gabriel stiffened, horrified. “They don’t? They don’t come back at all?”
“What?” Bucky whirled around and clutched at the bars with both hands, rattling their cage. “Hey!” he bellowed at the steel doors they’d dragged Burke through. "Lousy fuckin' Krauts — bring him back!"
Hands grabbed the back of his sweatshirt and yanked him away. His ass hit the floor hard, the impact jarring, and he blinked up in bewilderment at the four other men who surrounded him.
“Êtes-vous fou?” Dernier spat harshly.
“You want to be next?” Falsworth hissed. “There’s nothing you can do, Sergeant. I’m afraid there’s no hope here for your friend.”
Bucky slumped, bringing his knees to his chest and burying his face in both hands.
After weeks of assembling weapons in Schmitt’s factory, Bucky had fallen ill.
It had started as tightness in his chest, which then evolved into serious back pain. And then a raw cough that left his throat inflamed and tender following a fit. He’d suffered alongside Steve enough times to be able to recognize the symptoms of pneumonia when he saw them.
His endless coughing and bleary clumsiness had finally enraged one of the German guards during his last shift on the main floor. After accidentally running over the man’s foot with a transport cart, Bucky had been struck with an empty bomb cartridge — the guard beating him repeatedly across the head and ribs in bursts of brutal fury. It only stopped when the man was shoved away by one of his more sympathetic associates.
Clear that he was no longer going to be of much use, Bucky had been dragged back to his cell, bloodied and half-conscious — to the horror of the other men inside.
“This is no good,” Gabe fretted, one broad hand massaging Bucky’s back gently. “He needs a doctor, and soon.”
“Oh yes, I’m sure our German imprisoners will gladly supply us with supplies and medicine if we ask them really nicely for it,” Falsworth said sarcastically. “They love handing out favors, those Nazis.”
“Be serious Monty,” Dum Dum snapped. He had been smoothing his great mustache over and over again for the last hour, staring at Bucky with wild concern as he winced and wheezed his way through one coughing fit after another.
“No, he’s right,” Bucky rasped softly, “I just gotta tough it out — Steve’s been through this plenty'a times since I met him. If he can do it, I can.”
“Your Steve also had medicine, Sergeant Barnes,” Falsworth said softly.
“He didn’t always,” Bucky said softly.
“You need warmth and bed rest — neither of which you are going to find in a German prison. You're unlikely to survive another shift, Sergeant.” Falsworth was clearly far more worried than he was letting on, and it upset Bucky that he was causing so much distress.
“Don’t be dramatic,” he said — a suggestion that lost most of its impact after he was wracked with yet another coughing fit. “I just need to sleep!” he insisted forcefully, glaring at each of the other men’s anxious faces in turn.
“Well then,” Dum Dum scooped up both his and Bucky’s blankets from where they’d been piled in a corner of the cage. “If you’re gonna sleep, you’re gonna stay warm.”
Falsworth nodded, following suit, handing out Bucky his blanket as well. Dernier did the same.
Bucky shook his head. “I’m not going to take your covers, you’ll all be freezing. I’m just one man — I can’t look after all four of you when your own stupid nobility gets you all sick,” he coughed loudly again.
Dum Dum took the blanket out of Falsworth’s hands and pushed two of them into Bucky’s hands forcefully.
“Me and Frenchie will share his, and Monty will share with Gabe,” he insisted. “Besides,” he patted his belly with both hands, “built-in insulation!”
Bucky laughed weakly, but didn’t argue.
They’d come early. He hadn’t heard the lock rattling.
He had no warning that they were there at all, until suddenly he was being hauled upright — yanked out of his slumber by two sets of gloved hands, which fastened tight around his upper arms. Before the others could register what was happening, the cage locked behind him, leaving them all scrabbling against the bars, roaring and pleading — rousing men from other chambers out of their sleep.
“Let me go!” Bucky shouted. “Get your hands off of me, you lousy fuckin'—!”
Dum Dum had both arms between the bars, clawing desperately, trying to reach any part of Bucky that he could to reel him back in. He bellowed fiercely at the guards, yelling and swearing as Bucky’s feet were dragged along the concrete floor.
Another guard appeared, training the barrel of his weapon in direct line with at Bucky’s heart. Bucky only glowered, and continued to fight to pull free as best he could with broken ribs and an injured head.
“You want to go free? Back into confinement?” the guard with the gun demanded, thickly accented. His other hand rounded to point at Dum Dum and the others. “You choose who takes your place. You go back if you choose.”
Bucky froze. His eyes locked with Dum Dum’s, mouth working wordlessly for a moment before he slumped in their grip, defeated.
Without further struggle, he allowed himself to be dragged from the room.
Before the door swung shut, he caught eyes with the men again. Dum Dum, Gabriel, Falsworth, and Dernier all wore matching expressions of devastation and horror.
Bucky gave a sad wave goodbye, and the door closed behind him.