A/N: I updated the Siren playlist on YouTube, added some opera pieces that Alice performs in the story and some modern songs that have served as inspiration for writing. Check it out, let me know what you think!
June 1943
Alice returned to Berlin just as a new rumor about HYDRA began to spread: some said that there were signs the cult-like science division had gone rogue.
Nothing concrete, nothing official. The Nazi leadership kept any information in-house but it was clear they were in a tizzy about something. Alice heard mention of a few missing Nazi officers. There was no word of any planned reprisals, though.
It took her a few days, but Alice eventually got in contact with the newly-widowed wife of a moderately famous painter. The woman was distraught, barely verbal, and her doctors were threatening to institutionalize her. Alice put in a good word to prevent that. The woman eventually opened up: her husband had traveled out of Berlin for a commission, and had returned with talk about an awful place up in bitterly-cold mountains, with a monster who demanded a portrait. He'd spoken of a serum.
Then a few days ago, he just hadn't woken up. His wife hissed the word poison, which made her doctor roll his eyes, but Alice knew of at least three poisons that mimicked the symptoms of a heart attack or a stroke with no lasting trace.
The woman couldn't tell Alice much more than that, but it was certainly interesting. She passed the information onto Otto and they agreed to tell it to their handler on their next visit to Switzerland. Alice made sure the artist's wife had her phone number.
Excerpt from article "The Forgotten Victims of HYDRA: A Study". by Yuri Arynthe, 2000
... also evidence to suggest that the tyrannical Schmidt had a portrait commissioned of himself and later had the painter, Wilhelm Meyer, assassinated (the portrait itself was seized by the SSR following their raid of the main base in 1945, but has not made its way into the public eye since then). It's unclear whether Meyer witnessed anything incriminating, though as we have shown, Schmidt was known to assassinate those who came close to him out of fits of paranoia and power fantasy, as in the case of...
On a train bound south out of New York, Steve set his chin on his hand and gazed out the window.
It had been about two weeks since he had apprehended the HYDRA spy. Two weeks since the SSR left for Europe (without him), two weeks since he'd signed the USO contract Senator Brandt brought to him, two weeks of learning to live in this strange new body and this strange new world. He'd become famous overnight: not as Steve Rogers, but as Captain America. The name had made his nose wrinkle when he first heard it. If only he'd known then all of what Senator Brandt's proposal involved.
It had been a whirlwind since he'd joined the USO. Steve had been whisked off to costume fittings and screen tests, had performance scripts thrust upon him only for the script to be revised hours later, and had met up with the thirty-strong band of chorus girls for rehearsals (they were called the Star Spangled Singers, though they laughed behind their hands at the name).
The women were nice enough. Originally they'd been very touchy – more than Steve had ever been used to, in his old body – but as rehearsals wore on they just got more and more frustrated with his stumbling and forgotten cues.
The first performance in New York had been a disaster. It'd been packed full, thanks to Steve's newfound fame in the papers, but Steve had barely made it through with the help of his lines pasted to the back of his cardboard shield. The show manager was a grease-haired man who dangled the possibility of a military command in front of him. Steve knew the guy was just manipulating him, but it helped to think that this was going somewhere. The lights on stage nearly blinded him, and halfway through he imagined what the people who knew him would think if they saw him doing this (Bucky, his mom, his old schoolmates, Alice) and flushed so brightly it was a good thing he was wearing the blue cowl. He'd topped it all off by almost dropping one of the singers at the end. She was nice about it, but hadn't said more than two words to him since.
Since then he'd improved, if slightly. Early indications were that the show was great for war bonds sales, so Senator Brandt had slapped Steve on the back and said you're going on the road, son.
Steve craned his neck so he could see New York in the distance behind the train.
He thought back to Christmas of 1935, when he'd been small and on the verge of catching the flu (again). Those days already felt so strange and distant. That was the last Christmas Alice had spent in Brooklyn before her parents died, and she'd earned enough money singing that year to buy him a proper Christmas present: a metal compass.
I could tell you something sweet and stupid about how I hope you always end up going in the right direction. Her small, coy smile. But truthfully, I'm worried you'll get yourself lost the minute you leave New York.
He still had the compass, at the bottom of his travel bag. When he packed it he'd tried to tell himself it was practical; every soldier needed a compass, didn't matter where it came from.
That Christmas, Alice had looked into his eyes and said with utter certainty that he would leave New York one day. As a soldier or by some other way, you will. You're not meant to be here forever.
Steve looked out the window and watched the skyscrapers of Manhattan fade into the distance.
He was a soldier – a Captain – but this wasn't exactly how he'd imagined it.
Bucky's regiment shipped straight from England to North Africa the day after Steve's twenty fifth birthday, and a week later joined the landings at Sicily. They knew they'd be pushing north into Italy in a few months.
It was a whole lot of hurry-up-and-wait. Long, restless days on a ship followed by a mad dash up a beach under gunfire that felt like it took hours but probably only lasted fifteen minutes. Some of the recruits flinched and had to be yelled at before they pressed on, but Bucky had trained well for this. He lead his fire team up the beach and on subsequent patrols, learning just the right balance between barked orders and light humor.
A few days into the Sicilian campaign, he got a letter from Steve. It seemed normal enough: well wishes for his travels, and passing on love from his sisters back home. But Bucky's eyes narrowed as he read it. Steve was up to something. His handwriting had changed.
When the next letter came with a post office return address and some vague explanation about how the post service had mucked up his deliveries and they'd readdress his letter when it arrived, Bucky knew something was up. But he was too far away to do anything about it. Well, he could threaten him extensively via post, but those threats barely worked in person.
So he let Steve keep his secrets, and as he lay in his cot listening to explosions on the front he tried not to feel guilty for being glad that Steve would never make it over here.
In mid July, Alice and Otto traveled to their monthly performance in Zürich, after which they'd meet their SSR handler. They'd done at least a dozen of these now, but they knew better than to let down their guard.
It was past midnight, and all the backup singers had gone back to the hotel. Alice and Otto were alone in the dressing room. Alice sat at the mirror, wiping off her makeup, and Otto gathered the various files and documents they'd stashed in their bags.
"It's a pity we couldn't find out more about what's been going on with HYDRA," Otto muttered, pushing his glasses back up his nose. "We'll have to try for more by next month."
"Whatever's happened is still new, we'll find out more once everyone lets down their guard," Alice said, glancing down at the cloth in her hand to see the red streak of her lipstick. "We-" she cut off as she saw the door handle push down out of the corner of her eye. Otto shoved his documents into a big pile of sheet music.
The dressing room door swung open, and Alice's heart stopped for a beat when she realized it wasn't their usual young, male handler. But then she focused on the newcomer in the mirror and spun around in her chair with wide eyes.
"Peggy?"
Peggy Carter stood in the doorway with her red-painted fingernails on the door handle, wearing a modest brown coat over a knee-length grey dress and stockings. She'd dressed up for a theater performance, with pearl earrings and her hair in careful curls. At Alice's stunned exclamation she lifted her finger to her lips with a small smile, then closed the door behind her.
"Hello, you two," she said softly. Her eyes flicked over them both and her red lips curved into a soft smile.
"Ms Carter," Otto said fondly as he reached out to shake her hand.
"Otto, it's wonderful to see you again."
Alice slowly stood, staring at Peggy. "What on earth are you doing over here?"
Peggy turned amused eyes on her. "It's wonderful to see you too, Alice."
Alice huffed, then strode across the dressing room to pull the dark-haired agent into a hug. Peggy stiffened for a moment before patting her on the back. They hadn't been particularly touchy-feely back in Brooklyn, but the sight of her had startled Alice and she hadn't realized how much she'd missed her friend.
"Are you alright?" Peggy asked softly.
Alice let her go and pulled away. "I'm fine, really." Peggy probably knew most of what Alice had been up to. The assassinations, the false smiles, the nights spent in dark alleys. She didn't know about Steve or Tom, at least she hoped not, but it was enough to have her here. "I mean it though, what are you doing here?"
Peggy glanced between Otto and Alice. "The SSR's been reassigned. I'll be your new handler. We… perhaps you'd better sit down."
Silently, Alice returned to her chair. She still wore her white performance gown, which draped about her ankles as she sat. Otto perched on the dressing table, his face grim.
Peggy smoothed down her civilian clothes and then looked up at them both. "I can't tell you everything, but the SSR has been working towards one of its main goals in New York for some time now. Last month… that hope failed." Her eyes darkened, then flicked to Alice. "Doctor Erskine has been killed."
Distantly, Alice was glad that she'd already sat down because she felt as if her feet had been knocked out from under her. She couldn't even school her expression: her face twisted with shock, then warped into some approximation of the distress she felt. A shuddering breath escaped her lips and she reached up to cover her mouth.
Otto leaned over to place his hand on hers. "I'm so sorry, Alice." She'd never told him about Erskine, but he knew her well enough by now to know that she rarely showed her grief.
Peggy's fierce façade dropped a little, revealing that underbelly of empathy that she concealed.
Alice took a deep breath. "I barely knew him." She knew he'd been so tired, that first time they'd met at Castle Kauffman, when he'd asked to borrow some of her hope. In Brooklyn she'd really gotten to know his kindness, his quick, warm wit, and the grief he hid from so many. Fräulein, you're not a puppet any longer. You have a choice.
She knew he deserved so much more than this war had given him.
Alice lifted her eyes to Peggy. "Who killed him?"
"A HYDRA assassin. He's dead now." Peggy's eyes were hard. "Erskine's work… it succeeded, but just once, and Phillips doesn't think that's enough for what we had hoped. So we've been reassigned to Europe now, we're back on the ground. We'll fight HYDRA from here with what troops we have."
Alice frowned. "And what do you think?"
Peggy sighed. "I think that what Erskine achieved was enough. But we didn't put our faith in h- it." She shrugged. "I suppose we'll never know."
Otto pulled his hand away from Alice's and crossed his arms. "So how will this change our assignment?"
Peggy's chin lifted and Alice saw Agent Carter slide back over her face. "It shouldn't, really. We'll still need all the intelligence you can acquire, though we may give you more targeted assignments. We're going to have you do some work in Italy since that's the new focus of the campaign."
Alice nodded. The Allies had bombed Rome just two days ago.
"So," Peggy said, taking a seat on one of the backup singer's chairs. "What have you learned about HYDRA?"
Otto and Alice exchanged a glance, and then began to tell their new handler everything that they knew.
A few days after Switzerland Alice performed at a concert hall in Hamburg, Otto's home city. It was a truly beautiful place, with a river that flowed in from the west and split into dozens of offshoots as it spread across the city. This of course meant that the river teemed with U-boats.
Alice's last performance went off without a hitch, and she went out for a couple of hours afterward to coordinate with local resistance. No sooner had she fallen into her hotel bed, exhausted, than she heard an ear-splitting boom that shook the walls of her hotel. She jerked up and looked out the window to see a fireball erupting a few miles away across the city, close to the shipyards. Suddenly five more fireballs erupted, closer this time, and the concussive booms shook the hotel three seconds later.
Sirens began to wail.
The adrenaline turned Alice's focus sharp and clear after that. She sprang out of bed and into the hallway, finding Otto there with his hair sticking up. They joined the flood of terrified hotel guests downstairs, out across the street and down into the bomb shelter. Alice heard the whir of plane engines overhead as she descended into the shelter.
They sat underground for over an hour, a couple hundred terrified civilians and a handful of soldiers, all in their night things. The shelter's roof was shaped like a cathedral, making the whispered voices and occasional sobs echo strangely.
They felt the earth shake above them and heard the distant explosions. Otto's face was grim. They might be the only people in this bomb shelter who were somewhat glad for the bombings (it meant the Allied forces were pressing closer in to Germany) but Hamburg was still his home. He'd met his partner here. Yesterday he'd taken Alice to the river and pointed out the buildings near the shipyards that he used to play at when he was a boy. Alice doubted those buildings had survived the night.
An hour later the explosions subsided, and half an hour after that the whistle for all clear sounded. Alice and Otto emerged out onto the street and looked around to see fires burning across the city. Alice reached down to take Otto's hand.
"I'm sorry," she murmured.
"It's just a place," he sighed.
But Alice knew a place could be more than that, even if you'd grown to resent it for what it symbolized. She couldn't imagine the pain she'd feel if she saw bombs being dropped on Brooklyn. Or Vienna.
"Let's go pack our bags."
The bombing of Hamburg continued for another eight days, a coordinated back-and-forth between the British air force at night and the US air force during the day. When they weren't bombing, the city was burning. By the end of it tens of thousands of people had died and the city was mostly destroyed.
Despite herself, Alice's heart ached. Those were civilians that had died. Yes, the shipyards and the U-boat docks were gone, but so was Otto's childhood home. And she hadn't signed up to protect those people. Quite the opposite.
She and Otto shouldered their guilt and their grief, and kept working.
Excerpt from article 'Fifty Years On: Gomorrah' by Hugo Strausse, 24 July 1993
Codenamed Operation Gomorrah, the campaign of bombing on the city of Hamburgh in July of 1943 was at the time the largest series of air raids in history, and the most devastating civilian loss Germany had faced. Over the course of 8 days and 7 nights the RAF and the USAAF jettisoned tonnes of incendiaries over the city of Hamburg, causing massive casualties, destruction of infrastructure and warehouses vital for the war, and on the 27th, a firestorm that culminated in a fire tornado that stretched 1000 feet into the sky. Over 40,000 civilians were killed and a vast number of them fled, effectively leaving Hamburg a crippled and deserted city. While undoubtedly a major victory for the Allies, who were yet to make significant inroads against Germany, Hamburg still bears the scars of those 7 nights.
A week or so later, Alice caught a passing mention of unrest in the United States from a French newspaper: there'd been race riots in Harlem after an African American soldier was shot by police. The paper was vague about the damage and if anyone had died. Alice's heart sank to her feet as she read it.
She wanted desperately to find out if Tom was okay. He lived in Harlem, he would have been at the heart of all this. But she had no way of knowing.
She wondered if this was how he felt, every time he learned something new about the war.
Days later, a resistance fighter named Maria Terwiel was executed. Alice had followed her arrest and trial in the papers: the woman had helped to hide Jews and joined the anti-fascist group Die Rote Kapelle [Red Orchestra], whom Otto had some connections with.
She'd been guillotined.
Another reminder of what Alice could expect if she got caught.
The Americans increased their bombings on German soil.
Georgia in August was a sweltering, humid place, so hot even in the performance venues that a few of the chorus girls nearly fainted on stage. Steve usually had to peel off his uniform afterwards, coated in sweat.
He'd gotten more or less used to the performances (the serum, he'd found, made his muscle memory a lot better), but now they'd decided to film a short movie when they reached California next month. So now as well as the performance, the meet-and-greets afterwards and the radio talk shows, he had a script to memorize.
To everyone he was Captain America, who'd sprung into the war fully-formed and ready to be the beacon of patriotism. But Steve was still adjusting to the new body and his new abilities. The serum had changed almost everything. He slept differently, he realized, and he noticed so much more around him. He'd picked up the habit of quiet observation from Alice, but now everything seemed so much sharper. It helped with reading the chorus girls, who'd been bewilderingly hard to understand at first. They'd more or less warmed to him by now.
He'd had to re-learn how to draw with his different hands, because not drawing was making him go insane. It was an outlet, a way to take his observations about himself and the new places he'd been visiting and get them out of his head.
He kept up writing to Bucky. Bucky didn't tell him much about the action he was seeing overseas, and Steve didn't tell him anything about Project Rebirth or his tour across the country, and they both knew they were keeping things back. Steve wondered, as he crafted his letters, how did we all get so good at keeping secrets from each other?
Poster titled 'TWO NIGHTS ONLY: SEE CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE STAR SPANGLED SINGERS INSPIRE AND AMAZE AT THE CULLEN PERFORMANCE HALL', Houston, Texas. Poster bears an illustration of CAPTAIN AMERICA pointing at the viewer, with sketches of Star Spangled Singers gracing the edges of the page. Sponsor: USO (August 27 and 28, 1943).
Otto and Alice had a two week scheduled stay in Austria, but Alice didn't use the time to relax in her uncle's house. She had work to do. She started by reconnecting with her network in Vienna, which Hugo and Vano ran with a steady hand. They still had about fifty Jewish people under protection in the city, under the cover of secrecy or hiding in plain sight with false papers.
Their network had switched more towards intelligence gathering and resistance. They had a few connections in the Catholic church now, which was trying to spread an anti-fascist message with limited success.
Alice had a different goal in mind, though. For a few years she'd been hearing of construction somewhere in the mountains near Salzburg. Once the construction had been completed the rumors had shifted to stories of men in strange uniforms frequenting Salzburg, truck convoys roaring through the countryside, the occasional missing local.
Alice reconnected with some old friends in Salzburg and set up a few performances there. In the heart of Salzburg, she followed the rumors. A day's work brought her to a supply warehouse in the city. It was definitely HYDRA, if the uniforms of the drivers who pulled in and out of the warehouse were any indication. Alice couldn't see inside, but if, as she suspected, she was on the trail of a HYDRA base, they would need a steady supply of food, arms, and parts. Otto sat with her in a salon across the road for the better part of a day, as they noted each arriving and departing truck.
"That's the same truck that left before noon," Otto noted as he sipped his coffee, not looking too obviously out the window.
Alice checked her watch and scribbled down the return time beside the truck's number plate. "So that's… just about two hours. That matches the other trucks. Leaving time for offloading, we must be looking at somewhere less than an hour's drive from here."
Otto rubbed his chin. "We're right on the border to Germany, that still leaves a lot of place."
Alice finished her tea. "Those trucks are driving south, and the initial construction workers said the site was up in the mountains. I need a map."
They returned to the hotel and Alice spread a map of the area around Salzburg on her bed. Otto stood over her with his arms crossed. She traced routes in pencil, calculating vehicle speeds and military check points in her head, until she eventually landed on a mountain range 40 miles south of the city: the Salzburger Schieferalpen [Salzburg Slate Alps].
"You're sure?" Otto asked.
Alice cocked her head at the map. The mountains were in a good place, convenient for access to Germany, Austria, Slovenia and Italy, with a small enough local population that rumors wouldn't travel far. Alice was just good at listening.
She nodded. "One way to find out."
The next day, she and Otto took one of her uncle's old cars up into the mountains. At all the checkpoints they explained they were on a leisure tour, and no one found that strange. The Slate Alps were beautiful, with thick forests hugging the hillsides and the occasional small village tucked into the folds of a mountain. There was a lovely flat lake at the bottom of the main valley. It was a quiet area. Save for the convoys of trucks rolling through.
Alice and Otto kept mainly off the main roads as they didn't want the trucks to notice them, but soon enough they had followed the sound of rumbling engines to… well, it looked more like a factory than a military base. They hadn't gotten very close, just a mountain road slightly above the base, so Alice could glimpse smokestacks and a large warehouse-like building through the thick pines. Tall, barbed-wire-topped fences wrapped around the base.
"Drive on," Otto said, carefully marking out the location on their map. Alice stepped on the gas. "That's a bigger base than I expected," he muttered. "We've been getting rumors of increased HYDRA activity, something about those new weapons. They must be increasing output here."
"Output of what," Alice muttered grimly.
When they took the base location to their next meet with Peggy, Peggy noted down the location with raised eyebrows. "Thank you. We won't be able to move on it for a long time, but it's good to know where it is."
Alice shrugged. She knew Austria wouldn't be on the table for infiltration for a while. "They've got other bases. I'm doing my best to pin them down, but HYDRA stopped sharing with the rest of the Nazis a while ago. I think they may be preparing to move against them, but I don't know how crazy they've gotten."
Peggy's eyes darkened. "Crazy enough for anything, at this point. Don't underestimate them."
On Alice's birthday at the start of September, Bucky slogged his way north through Italy with his regiment, chasing the front. He'd been training to kill for so many months that when it came down to it, it wasn't very hard at all.
In Vienna, Alice threw herself another massive birthday party. This year the tone wasn't quite as raucous and celebratory – the war had gotten a lot harder, and even the socialites had learned to be cautious. The Nazis had lost North Africa and the Eastern Front, and were losing ground in Italy. They were still firmly entrenched in the heartlands of Europe, but everyone had begun to feel the stretch. They'd been at total war for seven months now.
Alice matched the mood: this was her twenty fifth birthday, the first one since she was twelve that she hadn't celebrated in some way with Steve and Bucky.
The blonde Propaganda Department secretary was there again, scowling at Alice, and Alice resisted scowling back.
"You're a true comfort to us, Fräulein Siren," said one Luftwaffe commander, a few drinks in. He'd sat at the table next to Alice and held court, smoking a cigar. "Your song is a balm to the spirit and you are an inspiration to the Aryan youth of the Reich."
Alice smiled though her guts twisted.
A general at the other side of the table let out a huff of agreement. "You're a true symbol, Siren, unlike the Americans with their gaudy, commercialized Captain America."
Alice joined the round of laughter that rippled around the table. She'd heard about the Captain America war bond show, mostly through sneering German propaganda with cartoonish depictions of the man. She did agree that the idea was awfully… well, American, the kind of thing Matthias used to call 'idealism wrapped up with a price tag'. But she wasn't going to snub anything which helped the Allied war effort. All sides needed their propaganda.
And if the Germans reacted by leaning more heavily on their prized Siren, that only helped her do her job.
A flicker of her unease must have crossed her face, because the Luftwaffe commander leaned over and patted her arm with a heavy hand. "The Americans' icon may earn them some trifling money, Siren, but you inspire the soul. You give our men the strength to fight. It is more than money that wins a war."
Alice smiled, and suppressed the shiver that threatened to wrack her. Could it be that she'd done too much?
Steve didn't realize what day it was. He'd been on the road over two months now, done over 100 shows, signed thousands of photographs and comics, had bumbled his way through one film and they had already planned a second one, and he wasn't even 100% sure which state he was currently in.
But then one of the chorus girls capped her lipstick and said "Let's do the USO extra proud today, girls, it's the third anniversary of the war." The girls agreed enthusiastically, but Steve's stomach dropped.
September 2nd.
Alice's birthday.
He dropped his head into his hands where he sat at the edge of the dressing room.
"Steve, sweetie?" said Agnes, one of the girls he usually lifted on the motorcycle at the end of the performance. Her hand landed on his shoulder. "You're on in three, you feeling okay?"
He drew in a deep breath and lifted his head. "I'm fine."
Her brows drew together. "Anniversary hit you hard, huh? It shocked me too, time flies by so quickly. But don't worry, we're going to win." She shot him a reassuring smile, then jammed her blue helmet on her head and whirled toward the stage entrance.
Half a minute later, Steve followed her. When he marched out onto stage with the girls striding behind him, he looked up into the bright lights and felt so, so tired.
After her birthday, Alice and Otto traveled to Italy for a performance tour. The Italian Fascist government had fallen apart and Mussolini had been arrested, but while Alice was there he was rescued by the Germans and set up a new regime. Italy was practically a German territory at this point, though it continued to be snatched up by the Allies from the south, so there were plenty of weary troops for Alice to perform to. And plenty of weary generals with loose lips.
Poster titled 'SIRENENLIED' [SIREN SONG]. Text [translated]: 'You've seen her on the stages of opera houses and performance halls in Berlin. This Saturday, see her at your mess hall! For one night only the Reich's own Siren will bring her enchanting voice to entertain our division. Don't miss it!' Image: a black-and-white photograph of the Siren in Wehrmacht uniform, beaming at the camera. Sponsor: Propaganda Department (September 15, 1943)
The 107th took a small Italian city towards the end of September, overseen by a division called the SSR. They spent the following days establishing camp in the city and getting some rest.
Bucky liked his four-strong fire team, they were good soldiers and they trusted him. They might not have been friends had they all met under different circumstances, but they got along alright. Currently he was soaking up some sun outside his tent, his cap over his eyes and his fingers laced over his stomach, as his fire team sat in a ring of chairs and played cards.
Three of them were teasing the fourth, O'Malley, about the Captain America comic he'd bought from a private in another regiment the other day.
"What are you, six? You chose to spend your money on that rag instead of Sawyer's pin-ups?"
Bucky chuckled under his breath.
O'Malley made a noise of protest. "Sawyer draws those himself, that last one you bought he'd forgotten to draw her whole left arm-"
"I'm not lookin' at them for their left arms!"
"Christ," said Connors, and leaned over to switch on the radio. Staticky crackle turned into piano notes. "Jesus, there's still only that German station available. Those bastards are having a goddamn concert over there, did you hear?"
"This ain't too bad," said O'Malley. Bucky heard the rustle of cards. "Bet."
One of them must've turned up the radio volume, because the German song suddenly rang out clear between the tents. Bucky froze.
That's Alice.
Slowly, he unlaced his fingers and pulled his cap off his face to stare at the radio. The German lyrics crooned soft and lilting through the speakers, slightly echoey as if it were being recorded live at a concert.
He didn't understand the words, but he knew that voice. He'd heard Alice sing countless times before, and had had to suffer through Steve playing her records non stop when she'd first gotten big. He didn't know this song, but he knew her. That was Alice's voice, making German words beautiful, on the other side of the war. In Italy.
A few moments later, Connors looked up. "Wait, where'd Sarge go?"
"Stormed off that way," said O'Malley, vaguely flapping his hand in the direction Bucky had left. "Guess he ain't a fan of music."
Alice's performances got pushed further north as the front encroached. The Italian campaign seemed pretty even between the Germans and the Allies as far as she could tell. She got used to picking out the difference between Luftwaffe, RAF and USAAF just from their engines rumbling overhead, and even spotted a couple of dogfights as they traveled the Italian countryside. Each time she spotted the American and British planes she felt a strange mix of pride and fear.
Alice performed exclusively for the German troops, but when she did interact with the Italian civilians she sensed their resentment toward the Germans. Support for Mussolini had collapsed as the war stretched on, and support for the Germans had been practically non-existent to begin with. The people here were tired. They wanted an end to the bombs and the troops tramping through their homes.
Alice's Italian was rusty, so she spoke English with a British accent when she snuck out at night as Al, which more or less got people on her side. The British were better than the Germans, at any rate.
She connected with an Italian resistance group hiding in the countryside north of Milan, and after some back and forth with Otto agreed to supply them with weapons. It took about a week for a few members of her network in Austria to drive down with a truck full of weapons (disguised under raw sewage – the soldiers at checkpoints only let them stop long enough to check their plumbers permits before insisting that they move on) and stash them in the foliage at the base of a mountain. The weapons might smell a bit, but they'd give the group a significant advantage in their operations.
HYDRA was elusive in Italy. They'd drawn into themselves over the past few months since their hushed-up break with the mainstream Nazi leadership, but Alice didn't think they were gone for good. It felt like they were building up to something.
She sensed hints of their influence in Italy: mentions of strange uniforms in the north, even one wild rumor from a farmer about a tank the size of a house. Otto went to the field the farmer said he'd seen the tank roll through, but a recent rainstorm had washed away any possible tracks.
Alice was pretty sure HYDRA had a base in Italy, since they seemed to have a foothold in all major Axis countries (she was still trying to pin down one in France, and she had suspicions about another in Belgium), but she didn't think she'd gotten anywhere near it yet. So far the best way to find them was to follow rumors of strange weapons and uniforms, and disappearances of civilians and soldiers alike.
October, 1943
"Oh yeah? What d'you know, you limey bastard?"
"Oh that's very original, really-"
"Cut it out," Bucky interjected from where he sat on the floor of the metal cage the five men had been shoved into. He dropped his head back against the bars. "Us fighting is what these guys want."
As one, all five men in the cage looked across at the black-armored guards at either end of the darkened room, and up at the guards striding on the platform above. Sensing their gaze, one of the guards looked over. He twitched the electric baton at his hip.
Bucky and the others looked away.
The room they found themselves in was long, concrete and cold, with about thirty cages packed with soldiers from all different armies, the only light being the residual electric glow of the factory filtering in through grates over the cages. Bucky'd been thrown in with two other Americans from different regiments, a British Major, and a fellow from the French Resistance, who as far as he'd worked out had been sent to Italy on an intelligence mission. The guy didn't speak any English.
They'd been here a week. Just a week, Bucky'd kept careful track of the days.
A week since two hundred of his fellow soldiers from the 107th had gone up against the Wehrmacht forces outside Azzano. It had been a hard-fought battle, Bucky's men hunkered down in a crater in the grassy hills under the cover of darkness as they tried to get an angle on the Germans. The night air tore apart with the rattle of machine guns. One of his fire-team, Connors, had been clipped in the shoulder by a rifle round.
Bucky had sighted a German division pouring over the lip of the closest hill and centered a soldier in his crosshairs, only for the man to just… disintegrate in a flash of blue light. He'd blinked, and then suddenly the night was illuminated with vivid blue arcs of light pouring down the hillside. Before Bucky's eyes, the light hit a contingent of German soldiers and they dissolved.
He'd tracked the rounds of light back up the hill to spot the most enormous tank he'd ever seen: it was the size of a two story house, rolling across the field toward them. A cannon the size of a tree trunk, treads that would mow down three men standing abreast and crush them to pieces. That massive cannon had swiveled with a whine of hydraulics and Bucky'd found himself staring down its hollow center.
In the German cage, Bucky flinched at the memory of the bright blue light tearing across the night sky toward him.
He'd lost every man of his fire team. Their families wouldn't ever be able to bury their bodies.
And Bucky and the rest of the survivors had been corralled and marched for days across the harsh terrain, tramping on tired feet and injuries and getting burned in the harsh sun during the day. Once they'd arrived at this facility they'd been put to work straight away in… well, he supposed it was a factory. He knew they were manufacturing weapons of some kind, powered by the same blue light he'd seen spitting out of that massive tank, but their overseers were careful to only keep them working on one small element of the whole, so they never got a glimpse of the bigger picture.
Workers dropped like flies all around him. Illness, succumbing to their injuries from battle, or just plain exhaustion. The guards didn't care, they just dragged them out and tossed their bodies into a furnace.
If they were still alive, they disappeared to the isolation ward.
At first Bucky had thought he'd been captured by the Germans, but these guys had fired on the Germans. He'd since heard the word HYDRA bandied about – the guards certainly said Hail HYDRA enough – but he didn't know shit about what HYDRA actually was.
Bucky'd heard enough horror stories about POWs taken by the Nazis. He had a feeling these guys were another breed entirely.
He wondered how long it would take the commanders of the 107th to get a letter to his family. He wondered how long it would take for Steve to find out. Their letters had been growing further and further apart. Steve probably wouldn't notice that Bucky had stopped sending letters for another month.
The thought made him feel incredibly lonely.
Though he was never alone, not with the other four men in his cage (who doubled as his work team). They'd gotten in an all-out brawl their first night, but since then they'd grown closer. Save for Dugan sniping at the others from time to time. Bucky liked them well enough – Falsworth, the Brit, was a welcome source of calm against Dum-Dum Dugan's bluster and fighting spirit, and the Frenchie Dernier's effervescence. Gabe Jones, a Private from Georgia, was a good-humored kid who hid a sharp intellect.
Didn't matter, he supposed. Bucky was getting sick. He could feel it in his lungs, in the weakness seeping into his limbs and the fogginess in his mind. He'd seen Steve through enough illnesses in the past to know the signs.
But here, those who got sick disappeared.
"Where the hell are we, anyway?" he said thickly, partly to break the tension after Dugan and Falsworth's squabble. After losing most of his regiment in the battle and the violent slog into captivity, he hadn't thought to ask.
"From how long we walked, and the signs I spotted on the way in?" Gabe scratched his chin. "Austria, I think."
Bucky's head jerked up. "What?"
"Austria," Gabe said, like Bucky was stupid. "We crossed the border."
"Goddamn Nazis," said Dugan resentfully.
Dernier rolled his eyes. "Combien de fois devons-nous vous dire que ce ne sont pas des Nazis?"
"Right," Gabe agreed. "These guys fought against the Nazis."
Bucky's head dropped back again and clunked against the metal bar. "This ain't how I imagined visiting Austria," he muttered.
He'd thought about it now and then, imagining the scenes from Alice's first letters in which she'd described Vienna's beautiful streets and the breathtaking mountains of the countryside.
"What?" asked Falsworth.
Bucky shook his head, wincing as his vision spun. "Nothing. Doesn't matter."
Excerpt from Doctor Arnim Zola's Notes, October 1943 [Translated]
... many of the prisoners are weak and failing. The trouble is finding a subject fit enough to withstand the testing, but not so fit that we cannot spare them from the factory. The wardens have also requested that I take subjects who have caused them trouble on the factory floor (some have displayed resistant behavior) so I will factor that request into my next subject selection. I have observed some soldiers exhibiting symptoms of illness while still maintaining their work, and I believe I will take my next subject from that category, to ensure best results for the experimentation. After all, Doctor Erskine's serum success occurred with a sub-standard physical model. Tomorrow I will make a selection.
Instead of travelling to Switzerland that October, Alice met Peggy in Italy, in a bombed out town behind Axis lines in the dead of night. Alice was nervous about Peggy making the journey, but as Peggy told her when she arrived, disguised in a brown shawl and a silver wig, the Germans have bigger things to worry about than a lone woman talking a walk in the woods.
Peggy seemed more solemn than usual as they took a seat in the pews of an abandoned church with half the roof caved in.
"Are you alright?" Alice asked softly. The sound carried through the dark, crumbling space.
Peggy gave her a half-smile. "We lost most of one of our main regiments at Azzano week ago. The 107th."
Alice's brow furrowed. Steve's father's regiment. She hoped no one she knew from Brooklyn had joined, then felt guilty for the hope. Whoever they were, those men had families waiting for them to come home.
She swallowed. "HYDRA, right?" The German commanders had been furious to hear of HYDRA's betrayal, and the battle marked the beginning of true hostilities between the Nazis and HYDRA. "I heard there were survivors on both sides, they've likely been taken to the Austrian base. If you like I could go back, see about infiltrating it or attempting to communicate with the POWs inside-"
"No," Peggy said with a firm shake of her head. "From what you observed, that base is heavily guarded, and we don't know what Schmidt has up his sleeve. We'd only be risking your position."
Alice furrowed her brow. "I've also heard that Doctor Zola is currently at that base. They had a new load of scientific equipment go through." Alice had a friend in Salzburg keeping an eye on the base for her.
"That does not bode well," Peggy murmured.
"I'll have my friends keep an eye on it, see what else I can get you."
"Thank you. Though… at this point, it will take a miracle to rescue those men." Alice felt a heavy dread settle in her gut. Peggy adjusted her wig and then turned to face Alice fully. "HYDRA fought with weapons that no one has seen before. Anything you can find out about these would be vital, Alice."
Alice nodded. "Of course. Now that they're at outright war with the Nazis, my connections in the Nazi party have been furiously digging up information about them. That should make my job easier."
Peggy's eyes flicked over Alice. "And you're alright?"
Alice shrugged. "I'm a Nazi."
To Alice's surprise, that made Peggy smile. "Oh, Alice. If you're a Nazi, then I'm a cocker spaniel." Alice's lips quirked. Peggy leaned across the pew and took her hand. "I know you don't need me to tell you this, but you can do this. You may make play as one of them, but you are not, nor have you ever been, a Nazi. Nazis are afraid of difference and anything they don't understand, and hate what they are afraid of. That has never been you."
Alice gripped Peggy's warm hand and clenched her jaw to keep from crying. "I know I should… I know this work is the most important thing I've done. But I've… lost…" she blew out a breath. "I've lost people I care about."
Peggy's dark eyes glistened. "Alice. I'm so sorry." She could see all the grief Alice kept at bay. "One day they'll see, I promise. We'll make them all see."
Alice nodded in the darkness for a moment, staring up at the smashed church altar. It was littered with fragments of stained glass that gleamed in the moonlight.
After half a minute, she let go of Peggy's hand to reach up and brush away the few tears that had escaped. "Thank you," she said roughly. She cleared her throat. "Now, Otto had a few other things he wanted me to pass along…"
I'm doing my best with historical accuracy, but the MCU version of the Italian campaign is just... a total mess, so please excuse any inaccuracies/anachronisms you spot if you're a history nerd.
Also I know in the movie there's a deleted scene which implies Bucky, Dugan, and Jones knew each other before they were captured by HYDRA, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense and HYDRA would probably have separated them. MCU wiki seems to think they were in different divisions. Anyway, that's just me being picky, carry on!
Reviews
Guest: Ah, the sweet sounds of button mashing – my favorite!
Guest: Sorry to make you sad! I can't say that this one would have made you feel better, but it's good to hear you're enjoying all the same :)
thaliahuntress9: I really appreciate you taking the time to review, it means a lot! Thank you so much for your lovely words, your review made me smile. Hopefully this update notification made you excited as well!
Guest: Excellent to hear that you enjoyed the last chapter! As for Alice's reaction to Steve becoming Captain America, we'll have to wait and see… ;)
jul: we are indeed in the movie now! Sorry for breaking your heart, but I'm glad you're enjoying :) No worries about being slow to read! I know there's a lot going on right now for everyone. Let me know what you thought of this chapter!
spanieluver1973 (from Chapter 1): I'm so sorry to hear that, if this story has helped in any way at all then I'm beyond glad to hear that. My PMs are open if you need x
