A/N I clearly got my inspiration from James Buchannan Barnes and wrote some stuff in there. This isn't my best work but it is a working progress. It will only be a one-shot but I may be persuaded into writing more if a positive response has been shown.

Disclaimer: I do not get any profit from this, this is mainly an original work and does not use any borrowed characters, only inspiration from Marvel. So please do not copy any of this without consent.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Breathing in from the antique pipe his father gave him, he drew in the smoke that would one day end his life. Relief: that was the feeling that he had brushing through him, it had been months since the last time he was able to acquire anything substantial to smoke, everything else was pathetic. He could find better at the tobacconist in a small town in France where he had visited every now and then, while spending some one-on-one time with the crumbling trenches there. When being commissioned to Belgium, it was discovered that the bloody place had nothing decent to smoke, it was an absolute disaster. This was the incident that caused him to suffer withdrawal symptoms, he was always anxious and headaches tore through his mind, it began to get better after the first few months but he would never quit.

However bad for his health, it was something important to him, to his father. A connection. His father was never a man he was close to, it wasn't until he was around 18 years old when his father introduced him to a pipe. His pipe. He was now at the grand age of 28 and ever since then, it was one of only two items that he carried with him, articles of sentimental value. The war he was currently fighting was fought for expectation. He never saw the point in war, it was all an argument with rich, high class people who could afford to create destruction in the name of their hubris. Basically it was pointless.

Eventually the smoke from his pipe had begun to cloud his line of sight. It was obscuring his view on what was apparently important: the enemy. While smoking his other task was shooting a gun at the edge of the trenches. As the smoke had started to block his sight, it was being blown to the left of him, where it was also affecting another member of his garrison. He heard a shout from that direction ordering him to stop smoking.

"Barnes! What do you think you're doing? You have a duty! So stop smoking and start shooting!" Corporal Hooper shouted frantically.

Exasperated, he turned his head and yelled back, "Yes, Sir!" Ducking his head, he carefully put his pipe away in his inner pocket, then went back to shooting Germans.

He had just reloaded his gun when he spotted a series of detonations getting closer and closer to him; men in a panic, frantically trying to do what they were supposed to without being blown into smithereens. However everyone was too slow: including him.

For the next three minutes all that he could hear was a sharp ringing in his ears. His vision blurred but was coming back around, he began to realise how grievous the situation had become. Littered all around him were the dismembered limbs of the men he had known for the past 2 years. Body parts currently scattered with shrapnel, swirled and twisted into the arms and legs that were cloaking the rotting ground. Everywhere around was the suffocating stench of nauseating metal, almost covering the odour of decay but not quite. About 4 metres away there was a young man who was clawing and mauling at his own collar, it was clear that there were several fragments of shelling had been lodged deeply in his throat that were never going to come out. The man was choking on his own blood and he wouldn't last long. The general taint of death was at every turn. He himself had gained gashes and some deep cuts, perhaps temporary cognitive damage, albeit rather unlikely. One of the reasons he had not been severed into unrecognisable hunks of flesh was that the private in front of him had. The man had been exposed to the majority of the attack, which meant that he was to continue striking at the enemy: unwillingly.

A/N Thanks for reading and sorry is there are any mistakes.