This AU exists in a world where gender (and racial) equality came a bit sooner than in the real world. Obviously when your integration happens in the midst of a war, the atmosphere is going to be different than during peacetime.
In the past couple months I've fallen in love with female!Bucky Barnes, so this is the first of two (unrelated) fics starring her.
The story will be published every Monday night, and then I'm back to my big fic.
Warnings for: torture, graphic death and mental health issues.
(Depictions of graphic death.)
They approached the base under the cover of a waxing half-moon. The clouds threatened rain and Dernier swore she'd seen red in the sunset, some old omen of blood spilled.
Steve told her to shut up before his words spread to the other GIs, but it wasn't like any of them would've cared. The only pens left serving hadn't had the chance to see action before Germany's surrender, or else lost everything back home and didn't care if they died in Europe.
The base was more of a fortress, really, or a castle updated for the 20th century. Peggy had called it a bunker but that wasn't right either – bunkers were built into the ground; this followed the mountain slope upwards, never more than a few levels high but damn near impregnable and easily hidden by the forest around them. Only the winding road and the guard stations along it hinted to its importance.
So this was where Zola had been hiding out since Schmidt's fall.
Steve motioned for his team – supplemented with a small company from the 3rd Infantry – they weren't letting Zola slip away to rebuild Hydra yet again – to approach and spread out. This was the size force he should've had command of during the war, given his rank of captain, but he was glad Colonel Phillips saw the wisdom in a large team instead of sixty pens.
Bucky had groused about that; captains and their sergeants should've gotten more than a measly five soldiers to command. No one would respect any of them. Steve asked, in private, if that meant they should ditch the Commandoes and move back into the army from the SSR. " 'Course not," Bucky answered, and that was that.
No one brought up those old complaints when Phillips, itching to catch Zola as much as any of them, gave Steve the company; doubly no one had pointed out that Dugan was also a sergeant.
The infantry pens spread out, surrounding the base under the tree cover. The Commandoes held back for the final check-in: confirming which platoons they'd take half the pens from – Dugan one, Dernier the second and Sawyer third – who'd watch Cap's six – "Monty," laughed Sawyer, "good luck keeping up." – and rendezvous points with the backup platoons in case things got ugly.
"They better not," Dugan grumbled. "We've been lookin' for this asshole for almost the whole damn year. Ever since Bucky –"
Dernier hacked a cough and Dugan fell silent.
Ever since Bucky died you've obsessed over Zola.
Steve resisted the urge to sigh, instead replying, "So we're not gonna screw it up this time around. Take position."
"Screw" and "up" were the magic words nowadays, reminders that they hadn't had one mission they felt good about since the one when Bucky died and Zola hadn't even been on the train to begin with.
In the aftermath of that disaster Peggy had plowed through their intelligence sources, triple-checking every informant the SSR used and every pen in their department until she found the mole. He'd confessed in an interrogation so beautiful Steve had to remind himself that Peggy was on their side, not Hydra's; ever since then Phillips handed more and more of the SSR's administration over to her.
She'd done such a thorough job cleansing their intelligence network, she confessed to Steve later, to distract herself while teams were out looking for the Valkyrie.
He returned to active duty within a week of thawing out; Peggy pursed her lips but didn't say anything, only handed him a folder with the next mission. It left the taste of ash in his mouth, retrieving documents from an abandoned safehouse. The one after that did too, until he started hating missions and active duty and being away from home, even though he couldn't remember how civilian life felt like.
The day he realized he needed to be discharged was the day Peggy slipped him a ring, an unspoken question, and he gave it back to her that night.
The one piece of foresight Steve had ever had, really, was asking her out on VE Day.
"Platoon one-A, report."
"In position," said Dugan.
"Platoon one-B, report."
"In position."
"Platoon two-A."
Dernier: "In position."
"Two-B."
"In position."
"Three-A."
"We found a guard post," Sawyer told him. "Empty."
"Platoon two-B reporting, just found one too. No hostiles spotted."
"Three-B?"
"In position. No activity."
"Hold positions."
Steve muted the walkie-talkie, took the earpiece out, sighed and rubbed his forehead. This was going the way every other mission the past few months had gone, except there were now sixty pens making the whole time awkward instead of only part of the time that the Commandoes on their own felt off-kilter.
He needed this to be over. He should've requested a discharge months ago, if he was being honest. He should've gone home and faced his best friend's family. But no, he was still in Europe, going over maps and schematics and invitation templates because dammit, if there was one thing he wasn't going to do it was half-ass his wedding.
The wedding was half-assed. He knew it, Peggy knew it, everyone on the damn base knew it. Her parents wouldn't be there, his parents were dead so it didn't matter, and he didn't know or like anyone back home who would come for Steve Rogers, only Captain America.
They hadn't even sent out the invitations yet.
They should've just eloped. Peggy had said it would be better but noooo, Steve had to –
– footsteps behind him, crunching in the snow because it was fucking January and it was always cold in –
He spun, knife at the ready, and found Sawyer with the radio. "There's a message from Carter – Cap, you gotta take this."
Of course Sawyer knew he'd muted his comm even though he shouldn't have.
Steve radioed in his identification, got the right counter phrase from Carter and confirmed. Then,
"We recovered Morita."
They stared at each other, the three men crouched down in this godforsaken forest in The Middle of Nowhere, East Germany. "Repeat that?"
"We recovered Morita. Hydra captured him last month when he was on patrol. He's weak but alive. They were going to kill him yesterday but the executioner let him go."
"Why would they do that?"
"He doesn't know. The others with him were killed."
"What's his condition?"
"He'll live. I've sent one of my half-platoons to the coordinates he gave us."
"...How did he get coordinates?"
"The executioner gave him a compass. It's all rather confusing, he's not made much sense."
"Is the mission compromised?"
"No. Continue with caution."
Steve ended the transmission, handed the radio back and put his comm earpiece back in place. "Ready on my command."
He was ready for this night, ready for the war to finally be over. He was ready to go home and face the Barnes family. He needed to invite them to his wedding knowing full well they probably wouldn't show up because why would you when no one gave you answers for ten months?
He needed to take Zola down; it was the only sort of closure he would get from the fucking war. He was ready to marry Peggy – they'd danced around each other for far too long, and since they'd got together they couldn't have rushed through each of Stark's "mile markers" any faster.
His team all tiptoed around him in those weeks after Stark's people recovered him from the ice. He wrote and threw away dozens of letters to the Barnes family, beat fifteen heavy bags into oblivion and binged on mess food so that he could throw up in the bushes afterwards. Even in the field he took stupid risks just to hear his dead best friend's voice in his head, telling him so.
Peggy and Gabby finally broke the code of silence after a month. They knocked him unconscious in the middle of a Commandoes meeting and he came to tied by one hand to a hospital bed. Gabby told him to cry it out while Peggy negotiated with Doc X to keep the room available overnight.
It took him seventeen hours total, crying the whole time, and he walked out of the room clear-headed and starving.
If someone's seen you at your worst and stuck by you, that's love, his mom had told him once, and you can be sure they'll stick around.
Bucky's whispers of you're a fucking idiot, you're gonna get yourself killed shifted to ask the woman out already! and he decided he didn't want that in his head anymore. Bury your dead, that kind of thing. And then VE Day came with the bouquet of flowers and went, along with his virginity, with Peggy sprawled out on top of him – and the blanket – on the roof of the Grosvenor House Hotel. Steve tried to move on.
This ended tonight. He would move on tonight, with this.
"Cap," said Sawyer over the comms. "We found a body. A guard."
"Same here," Dugan reported.
Platoon 3's lieutenant: "As with us."
The other platoon leaders called in their own dead Hydra pens and Falsworth found theirs soon after, her neck cut clean and deep.
In Kreischberg, the dead bodies of Zola's prisoner-experiments had been piled in a corner of the room where he'd found Bucky. Steve ignored those best he could, focusing instead on getting his best friend out of the restraints, but the deep red lines on their throats had seared into his memory in a way that the map of Hydra's bases never did.
Two weeks later Peggy taught everyone in his new team the best ways to silence enemy sentries with their necks: slashing carotid to carotid, or breaking it by twisting at an extreme angle.
Steve stuck to the neck-breaking; Peggy and Bucky both favored knives.
"Consolidate positions," he ordered. "No one on their own. Dernier, to me."
Dernier showed up shortly with a pen beside her. "Que se passe-t-il?"
She didn't sound any more excited than Steve did to be there.
With Jones gone home Dernier was the only woman left in the Commandoes. She'd consolidated tents with Steve and Morita, a cramped atmosphere that only remedied itself when Jim disappeared doing recon on a base a month back. Now Steve wished he could size the tent down to make it feel less empty.
Two Commandoes MIA, presumed dead – well, only one anymore – and one more discharged. If the SSR wanted to keep Steve's team going after he shipped home then they'd need to recruit some more pens than just the one – not that Sawyer was any less of a soldier than his predecessors.
"The posts were empty. Someone killed every guard out there," he told her and Falsworth; they were the oldest on the team, veterans who'd served twice as long as Steve had, and he liked to get their assessments when the situation sent him mixed signals. "The backup teams recovered Morita. He said Hydra had him as a POW and gave him to someone to kill, but they let him go."
Dernier wrinkled her nose. "Do you think this person killed the guards? It sounds unlikely."
"Stranger things have happened," supplied Falsworth. "And we have no reason to believe our intel was unreliable."
Their intel had come from an "estranged associate" of Zola's, name of Jacobus. He'd been in the same science program with Erskine and was persecuted by the Nazis for supposed Jewish ancestry; unlike his colleague he had solidly Protestant stock, and somehow his experience going through the wringer made him more anti-Semitic. But Zola had screwed him over one too many times to get to the top of Hydra and they'd found Jacobus drinking his shitty life away in a Vienna pub. It took ten minutes to flip him.
"It came from a Nazi. Of course it was unreliable."
Dernier was a French Jew; she'd deposited her husband and children under aliases in Switzerland before joining the Resistance. Obviously she took a dim view of using "reformed" Nazis for intelligence but the SSR wasn't above moral compromises.
"We have seventy pens," she continued. "Even if we assume the source lied about the size of the base, we will have the – quelle est l'expression?"
"The element of surprise. Yes. I would advocate continuing the mission as well."
Someone screamed.
Not the childish sounds of terror that damsels in distress had used in the few years before talkies were affected by the Women's Revolution; this was a warning shout, short and loud, and came from inside the building.
Falsworth swore in English, Dernier French and Steve Irish Gaelic, and they clutched their guns. "Back to your platoon!"
Dernier and her pen ran off; the two men left behind ran forward. "Advance with caution," Steve ordered through the comms.
The hardest part would be when they crossed the open area, not quite big enough to be a field, between the woods and the base. The roof had crenellations, perfect points for snipers, though no one in their right mind would sit up there for days on end on the off chance that a crazy fake army captain would –
Steve shook Bucky's words from his brain, held his shield up and sprinted across the clearing.
Nothing.
Well, something: more shouts. Yelling – panic even, too muffled for him to make out words. It rose and fell, individual voices cutting off only for others to take their places.
Steve used a tree stump as a jump-off to the roof, tucked into a roll and jumped up levels to get to a door he'd seen from the ground. He passed more dead guards, three snipers and two guns. Finally the door, and he slammed against it at full speed with his shield.
It held.
"Captain!" shouted the second platoon's lieutenant, name of Kotani. "In position. Orders!"
"Move in!" he told her and ran himself against the door again. Again, it held.
Damn, they must've reinforced it from the inside.
Steve tried again, and again, until the thuds turned into bangs and –
No, that was a gun.
Someone was shooting.
"One-A, report."
"Shots fired from inside the building. I got not idea for entry unless we shoot up the whole door."
"One-B."
"Same."
"Two-A?"
All the same: shots, one every couple seconds, and no one could find a way into the fucking building.
Not an automatic, those were individual shots – all the same sound, same weapon and location, not a bullet wasted – who was shooting?
"Never waste bullets," Phillips told Dugan when he handed him the gun. "No crazy wahooing like you Texans love to do. You're a GI, not a cowboy."
Still, Dugan shot a bit too often at the sky after successful missions. He planned to be an explosives expert when he went home; he complained that they'd discontinued fireworks displays once the Depression hit, and then the war was on and he'd never got a chance to see those beautiful explosions.
Somehow he'd still stepped up to lead the Commandoes, sentencing himself to at least another year on the front once Peggy and Steve discharged.
"Never waste bullets," Phillips told Morita, and the private smirked and said, "If I'm shooting I'll be close enough to see the whites in their eyes."
Jim was alive and safe. The medics were probably force-feeding him ration bars and water. He would go back home, hug his mom and his three younger sisters and finally see his father's grave, in Fresno instead of that God-forsaken place in Idaho that Congress almost convinced Roosevelt to "ship all the Japs off to". He'd find a lady – or a fella, to be honest Steve suspected he'd be fine with either – and live his life.
Medical discharge. He could be home in two weeks.
Steve backed up and contemplated the door. He'd felt it give from the center, the weakest point instead of the top and bottom that he'd've expected for a locked door.
Someone had bolted the door twice-over – overkill for a regular night. Probably overkill for whatever was going on inside as well.
The shots sped up, almost as fast as a machine gun now but Steve knew the difference.
"Never waste bullets," Phillips told Jones, handing her two lightweight pistols not because she was a woman but so no Hydra pen would spot them where she'd hide them. "You're the team medic. If the situation needs you to shoot, you won't get a second shot."
Gabby always talked about her husband, how he was big and strong and liked his factory job so much he let her go to war instead. "Damn good thing he did, too," she'd say. "Back home I spent months trying to get into nursing school. Sign up with the army, hell they'll make me a doctor."
She'd taken the GI bill and was planning to go to medical school. Something about emergency rooms, she told them all in a letter, reminded her of the war in a good way. The adrenaline rush, probably. Steve heard her laughing through the pages as Monty had read the words aloud.
The resistance to Steve's next kick felt weird, as if the reinforcements inside had moved. On a hunch he slammed against the door at full-speed again and heard the wood whine against concrete.
Wedges.
"Shoot at the top and bottoms of the doors," he said into the talkie microphone, heading back down to the ground and Falsworth. "Stand by when you've cleared your entrance."
Six voices chorused "Yes, sir!"
Steve made short work of the door his partner had positioned himself next to and listened to the platoons report their own successes. At last 3A reported, "Entrance clear, Cap!"
"Move in!"
