A/N: I'm so sorry this chapter is late, see my note below x
November, 1943
When Senator Brandt told Steve that he was going to Europe he'd thought, for a brief moment, that he was finally being given a command. But no, the same old show with the same old film crew were being shipped to a tour of Italy to bolster the troops. Captain America comic sales had apparently been quite popular in the ranks.
So Steve marched around on stage with the dancers in their first ever Italian performance and as it came to a close he stood in front of the rusty microphone, trying and failing to make the speech part of the performance land. But his audience of green-clad soldiers just sat there and stared at him. Steve watched one guy in the front row pick his nose and then inspect his finger.
He'd told Brandt they should change the performance. But according to Brandt it was tried and true.
"Bring back the girls!"
Well. Then they all started shouting at him – and Steve was pretty sure he spotted Gilmore Hodge who he'd gone through Basic with, that asshole – and now they were throwing things at him.
Steve made a strategic retreat.
The clouds broke and the performance area cleared out, leaving Steve alone on the stage steps, sketching.
Agent Carter took him by surprise. She emerged on the steps behind him, perfectly pressed in her uniform as if she'd stepped straight off the streets of Brooklyn, and they started talking about his performance.
"I understand you're America's new hope," she said with an edge in her voice.
"Bond sales take a 10% bump in every state I visit."
"Is that Senator Brandt I hear?"
Steve couldn't look her in the eye. "At least he's got me doing this. Phillips would've had me stuck in a lab."
"And these are your only two options? A lab rat or a dancing monkey?" He felt her gaze drop to the open notebook with its cartoon monkey sketch beside him. He'd thought about covering it up, but why bother? It may as well be a mirror. "You were meant for more than this, you know."
For the first time in a while, Steve remembered Doctor Erskine and his earnest hope in Steve and what Steve could become. He wondered what Erksine would say if he could see him now. He wondered what Bucky would say. His mom. Alice. At least, the Alice that he'd known.
He glanced back at Peggy, words on his lips… but then looked away.
"What?"
He sighed. "Y'know, for the longest time I dreamed about… coming overseas and being on the front lines, serving my country…" all those sketches he'd drawn of himself, Bucky, and Alice as soldiers, all the strategy books he used to read under the table at school. Now isn't the time to be a soldier, Steve. "Finally got everything I wanted." He looked down. "And I'm wearing tights."
A car horn sounded in the distance behind them, and Steve and Peggy glanced back to see a military ambulance jeep pull up at the medical tent. Two medics climbed out into the rain with a stretcher between them. Steve was too far to make out the details of the man on the stretcher, save for the red blur of blood. It wasn't the first ambulance Steve had seen since arriving at the camp.
"They look like they've been through hell."
"These men more than most," Peggy replied. At his questioning look she told him about the recent battle near Azzano and how HYDRA had demolished all resistance. Steve's heart sank. Erskine had been so insistent about the danger Schmidt posed. And here Steve sat, doing nothing about it.
"Your audience contain what was left of the 107th," Peggy told him. "The rest were killed or captured."
Steve's head jerked up. Bucky.
His mind had been made up the moment he heard about the 107th. After that, it didn't take much: Colonel Phillips telling him that Bucky hadn't come back and then dismissing him all in the same breath; Phillips gesturing to the map beside his command desk and saying they're thirty miles behind the lines, through some of the most heavily fortified territory in Europe; Steve's eyes following his gesture to the map with little flag marked H, pinned south of Salzburg.
(He wasn't aware of Peggy standing behind him, following his gaze to the map. He didn't know that Peggy thought of determined green eyes and saying at this point, it would take a miracle to save those men.) When he stormed out of the tent, she followed.
In the costume tent he threw on uniform pants and his own leather jacket over his costume, arguing with Peggy who at first seemed to be trying to convince him to stay, but then looked into his eyes and told him she believed he was meant for more than this.
She pulled him out of the car he'd been intending to steal and brought him to Howard Stark.
When Peggy Carter watched Steve Rogers dive out of the plane against her orders into the night sky erupting with anti-aircraft fire, she thought: that absolute bastard.
Then she thought: well, if wars were won with confidence, we'd be storming Berlin tomorrow.
"Close the damn door, it's freezing!" shouted Howard over his shoulder even as he wheeled the plane out of the range of the anti-aircraft guns. Peggy took once last glance down at Steve's billowing parachute, then slammed the door shut.
Howard glanced back at her. "So, fondue in Lucerne?"
"Mr Stark."
"Back to base it is."'
Everyone had been telling Steve how untested he was, and that may be true, but he didn't run into the base blindly. He'd read countless accounts of infiltration warfare and solo combat, plus he had the serum to make up for what he didn't know. So he knew the best entry point was via the supply trucks (which turned out to have some HYDRA soldiers in them, but again – serum), and then got in close to the factory via the mostly-uninhabited vehicle lots. He couldn't stay in the massive factory itself for too long, as the busy space teemed with people, so he pocketed what looked like a glowing blue battery and crept his way to the prisoner pens.
When Gabe Jones, Dum-Dum Dugan, James Falsworth, Jacques Dernier and Jim Morita first met Captain America, most of them thought he was probably going to die soon.
Oh well. He'd let them out and he was going looking for Barnes. At the very least he'd be a good distraction for their escape.
When Bucky first met Captain America, he thought ow and then he thought: Steve?
A few seconds later as Captain America hauled him off Doctor Zola's table, Bucky thought: what in the hell has this idiot done now?
When Johann Schmidt first met Captain America he thought: so, the film starlet hasn't proved completely hopeless after all.
Then Steve Rogers punched him in the face.
When Steve and Bucky caught up with the rest of the HYDRA prisoners on the road leading through the mountain ranges, they seemed pleasantly surprised.
"Thought you probably died back in that fireball," said a mustached man Steve would later come to know as Dum-Dum. The man turned to Bucky. "Good to see you in one piece, Barnes. You alright?"
Bucky nodded sharply. "Good to be in one piece. Everyone, this is my friend Steve."
'Everyone' turned to stare at Steve. "You know Captain America, Barnes?" questioned one of the soldiers from the 107th.
Bucky turned to look up at Steve – never had to do that before – and then let out a breath of a laugh. "Yeah. Yeah, I guess I do."
His tone was light, but Steve sensed a hidden note in it.
Oh boy, I'm going to have to do a lot of explaining.
Steve clapped Bucky on the shoulder – gently, he could tell his friend needed a medic – and then looked up at the gathered soldiers. "Alright, we're about thirty miles from the front. With the help of those tanks and troop transports" – he nodded to the stolen vehicles – "we should be back in no time."
In Milan after a whole day of performing, Alice got a phone call at her hotel from one of her friends in Salzburg, the one watching the HYDRA supply center.
"Alice, I've got no idea what's happening but something big must have happened at that… that place you were having me keep an eye on. There's been no trucks at the warehouse in two days, they've never gone that long without a delivery, and the local prison's suddenly full to bursting with HYDRA soldiers that the Wehrmacht found trying to hide in the mountains."
"That's… strange," Alice murmured. She scratched her cheek. Maybe they had an uprising within their ranks? Maybe a mechanical error that led to the base being shut down? Maybe the Germans have been better able to fight them than I thought. She said none of this, however. "Thank you, Lille, let me know if you spot anything else out of the ordinary."
"This whole place is out of the ordinary," came Lille's dry voice.
"Now isn't that the truth," Alice sighed. She farewelled her friend then hung up the phone, and thought about the quickest way she could get this news back to the SSR.
Excerpt from Oral History Interview with Veteran Sergeant John Jackson of the 107th Infantry Regiment, interviewed 10 April 1980:
"... I was at that camp when they returned back from behind the front lines, you know. Sitting there, feeling sorry for myself because I was pretty sure what was left of the regiment was going to be split up into different divisions since there was so few of us. Then they arrived like... like a mirage. The whole lot of 'em, with Captain Rogers and his team with him.
They looked like the perfect team. When I found out a few days later that they'd all only just met each other I didn't believe it at first. They looked rough, sure - Sergeant Barnes especially, I knew him before we lost him at Azzano and I was used to him being the jokester of the lot, but he'd clearly been through hell. Had bruises under his eyes and he'd lost weight. The others were pretty beat up too. But we'd never expected to see them alive ever again, and there they all were. With Captain Rogers looking like he'd just gone for a walk in the woods."
By the time Alice and Otto figured out a courier to Azzano, they got word that the SSR had up and left Italy. Agent Homer and Agent Badger were to continue on as planned, and meet their handler in Switzerland later on in the month. It was all very vague, but Alice got the sense that something momentous had happened.
Excerpt from Debriefing Notes November 4 1943: Sgt. James Buchanan Barnes. (Transcribed by Private Lorraine Williams] Documented at SSR Italian Encampment, Colonel's Office Quarters. [NOTE: CLASSIFIED]. Archived by Catherine Laurey, SHIELD Archivist
Sgt. JBB: Eleven days after we arrived at the facility, I was picked out by Doctor Zola and taken to the isolation area of the facility. He performed various experiments on me-
Col. CP: What kind of experiments?
Sgt. JBB: I'm afraid I couldn't say, sir. I was sick, see, and... don't know much about that sort of thing.
Agt. MEC: Could you describe-
Sgt. JBB: My memory's not too hot.
Col. CP: Besides, Carter, Zola obviously hasn't recreated Rebirth, look at the kid-
Agt. MEC: Colonel, that's classified information-
Col. CP: He's best friends with Rogers, so I imagine he probably already knows all about Rebirth by now. Isn't that right, son?
Sgt. JBB: [pause] Yes sir.
Col. CP: And?
Sgt. JBB: And what?
Col. CP: Never mind. Tell us more about the machines you were working on while you were in the factory itself.
Steve was supposed to report straight to the Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall the moment he arrived in London, but instead he and Bucky stole away to a coffee shop near the Thames to come clean.
Steve finally admitted to his friend all that he'd been up to since Bucky last saw him, and Bucky told him about his time with HYDRA. Steve noticed that Bucky skimmed over his description of what he'd gone through in the isolation area of the factory. Bucky didn't get as angry as Steve thought he would about the whole Project Rebirth thing, though he did clench his jaw and stare at him.
Steve managed to make Bucky laugh with his stories about his time on tour, though, and the lightness after the past few days made them both sag with relief. Steve leaned back in his precariously fragile wicker seat and allowed his gaze to drift. London was colder than Italy, with a chill bite wafting off the Thames. Everything around them was damp. Peggy had warned them about that.
"Who'd have figured we'd both end up here?" Bucky said, sounding far away. He spun his coffee mug in his hands.
"Especially looking like this."
"Don't look at me, pal, you're the one sitting there the size of Charles Atlas."
Steve snorted. Bucky kept shooting him funny looks out of the corner of his eye, as if constantly surprised by his appearance. Bucky had known him the longest as his short, skinny self, so he supposed it would be an adjustment. Hell, Steve still sometimes jumped when he saw himself in the mirror.
Bucky's gaze drifted away again, dark. His bruises had already faded and he looked almost back to his old self physically, but… his eyes were different. Steve had never seen Bucky look so haunted before.
"Have you heard anything more about… Alice?" Bucky eventually grit out.
Steve's eyebrows rose even as his stomach fell. "No, I… they don't report much on the Siren in the States."
"I heard her."
"What?"
"On the radio in Italy. She was there. On the other side, singin' for the troops." The resentment in his voice made the words painfully sour.
Steve's gaze dropped. The thought of him and Alice standing on stages on either side of the battlefront made his heart clench painfully in his chest. He just wanted to look her in the eyes and ask why.
"Do the SSR know about her?" Bucky asked.
Steve glanced up. "What? No."
"You should ask 'em to look into her. They're good with finding things out, they might… they might help us understand."
He shook his head. "What would I say? 'Hey, my best friend's a Nazi and I want you to find out why?'" The words spilling from his mouth physically jarred him and he almost snapped his teeth down on his tongue. He'd never said that out loud before.
Bucky's hard gaze softened. "Best friend?" he murmured. And it wasn't jealousy or admonishment. It was a tone that said we both know she was more than that.
A long silence passed. A troop of soldiers marched past, and the girls at the other table outside the coffee shop laughed under their breath.
"You're right," Bucky eventually said as he crossed his arms. "No point bringing all that lot into it. We… maybe one day we'll be able to ask her ourselves."
The thought of seeing her again felt far too painful. Steve had to squeeze his eyes shut. When he opened them again, it was because Bucky had stood up and set his hand on his shoulder.
"C'mon, punk. There's a whole office full of people waiting to talk to you. Turns out you're kind of an important guy now."
Steve heaved to his feet, taller than Bucky now – still weird – and dropped his arm around his friend's shoulders. "Jerk."
After meeting with Peggy and Phillips in the underground Cabinet War Rooms (he'd recreated the HYDRA map he'd seen at the base, they'd greenlit his tactical team idea, and in the meantime were reaching out to their intelligence network for more information about HYDRA's bases), Steve made his way to the Whip & Fiddle pub.
He hoped that Bucky'd been able to track down each of the men Steve had asked him to – he didn't think it would be difficult, half the rescued POWs were probably in this pub of their own free will.
On the march away from the HYDRA base, five men had come to Steve's attention. Four of them he'd spoken with in the base, the same who'd been locked up with Bucky for most of the time, and the fifth, Jim Morita, had only met them all that night. These men had proved the most useful on the slog out of Austria and back to Italy – they weren't all necessarily highly ranked in their respective armies, but when push had come to shove they were the ones throwing themselves into danger and leading the tired, injured POWs back to safety.
Steve had chatted with each of them individually and as a group, and he had to say he liked them. One on one he noticed all their skills.
The most senior of all of them (Steve included), Major Falsworth, hid the mind of an expert tactician under a generally affable demeanor – he'd seen them through the worst of the Austrian wilds.
Private Gabe Jones and Jacques Dernier had formed a fast friendship (mostly since Gabe was the only one who could speak fluent French and didn't crack jokes about French people all the time). Gabe was one of the smartest of the lot, spoke English, French and German pretty fluently as far as Steve could tell, and was quick as a whip when it came to hardware. Dernier wasn't Army at all, he'd been in the French Resistance since 1940 and had a frightening knowledge of explosives.
Jim Morita was quietest, but Steve didn't let volume distract him: Morita was a crack shot and didn't blink in the face of danger. They'd come up against some resistance on their way back through Italy, and Morita had been the first to react. He also spoke English and Japanese, and if Steve was being honest, they'd need his level-headedness.
Dum-Dum Dugan was the loudest and the craziest of the lot of them, and he didn't necessarily bring any skills that the rest of them didn't have (they were all incredible marksmen), but for some reason Steve just didn't see it working without him.
Each man rightfully held his own, each a highly trained survivor who knew his way around a gun and didn't need a leader's orders to get things done. But when they were all together it just worked. Steve had noticed as much on the march back to camp.
None of them were bullies, either. Dugan talked a lot of shit but he never kicked someone when they were down.
Thankfully, blowing up a whole HYDRA base went a long way when it came to pulling strings with troop reassignment. And so Steve found himself the brand new leader of a brand new unit, the 107th Tactical Team.
Steve pushed open to the pub and sure enough, all five men sat around a table in the busy, smokey space, raising pints with a cheer as Bucky laughed at them.
Steve squared his shoulders.
Now, to convince these guys to do something completely crazy.
He had a good feeling about it.
Steve had been so busy trying to get the guys all in one place that he realized he'd completely forgotten to ask Bucky if he was coming along too. So he asked.
Of course, Bucky said yes. He looked tired and he wasn't charming the room like he used to in Brooklyn, but he said yes. For a moment Steve considered protesting – Bucky'd been through hell under HYDRA, he had more than earned a trip back home to his sisters. But under the teasing glint in Bucky's eyes as he ribbed him about the uniform, Steve saw determination.
Of course he'd said yes. Bucky wanted to tear these guys to the ground just as much as Steve did.
When Peggy walked into the bar she wasn't quiet, and she didn't blend in. She marched right through those doors in a vivid red dress that silenced everyone who saw her.
Bucky turned on the charm, and she didn't even look at him. There was only one other person who'd – no.
"Well what are we waiting for?"
"The right partner."
Steve barely spoke, stunned into silence by the sight of her while simultaneously trying to swallow his nerves.
Wasn't this what Bucky had been trying so hard to push him into looking for, for months? He ignored the stab of pain at the thought. Shouldn't he at least try to open up some kind of a future with someone he could be happy with?
Maybe.
"Yes ma'am," Steve replied once she gave him his reporting hours for tomorrow. "I'll be there."
Peggy strode right back out of the bar with a smile on her face.
She thought back to a dimly lit safehouse, and cloth stained with blood.
How do you keep up close relationships, with all your secrets?
At the time Peggy hardly had an answer for Alice. I don't, really. I haven't a lot of time for family or friends – what with my work. And I often struggle to find an equal. But. The war will end one way or another and then life shall go on.
Peggy still remembered the almost ancient look in Alice's eyes. I hope you're right.
One day this would be all over. And one of Peggy's first orders of business would be to make life as normal as possible for her, and for Alice. Both of them deserved it.
She rolled this thought over in her mind like a marble as she strode the quiet London streets. But then she returned to the underground SSR offices and found it in uproar because Howard Stark had managed to blow up his lab, and all thoughts of life after the war dissolved like mist in sunlight.
Steve didn't get much sleep, too busy thinking about the changes he'd been through, the war ahead of him and that painful realization he'd made at the pub: that for the first time truly since he was sixteen, he was unattached.
The next day he reported to the SSR offices, tried out a flicker of flirtation with Phillips's secretary and got kissed behind the file boxes for his efforts. Peggy snapped at him and shot him the dirtiest glare he'd seen in a long while. It didn't help with the deep upwelling of guilt that roiled in his gut since he'd first even begun flirting with the woman. It shouldn't matter, he told himself. You haven't betrayed anyone.
Well, he supposed he ought to feel guilty about Peggy. But she needled him about being a soldier just like all the rest of them until he finally pushed back and asked about her and Stark, and she rolled her eyes at him.
"You still don't know a bloody thing about women."
Well. Steve supposed she wasn't wrong.
Then Stark showed him around the labs and Steve got a shield made of something called Vibranium. It was a gorgeous piece of metal, a silvery grey disc which he itched to draw.
Then Peggy shot him.
It had been a big day, and it was only nine in the morning.
Excerpt from Oral History Interview with former SSR Agent and Sergeant William Gladwell, interviewed February 8 1975:
[laughs] "I knew you'd ask something like that, that's what it always seems to come down to, doesn't it? Who was the man behind the mask? Well I'm afraid I can't tell you much, like I said, I never worked directly with the Captain. But I always suspected he had a sweetheart, y'know. Who do I think it was? Oh, I'd always thought it might've been Agent Carter. Just had a feeling."
Alice returned to Berlin to find the mood had soured after more fallbacks in Italy and the East – the Russians had recaptured Kiev and the Wehrmacht had been forced to pull back the defensive line in Italy. Alice performed a few Lieder-Abende [song evenings] to morose audiences of German leaders.
And in the meantime, she and Otto tried to figure out who might have information about HYDRA. They still weren't sure what had happened to the base in Austria, but Peggy's last orders were to find out more about HYDRA's weaponry, so they intended to carry out orders. They had a meeting with her in Switzerland later in the month.
It was one of their informants who told them that there might be HYDRA manufacturing documents somewhere in Berlin. Apparently, back when HYDRA had still been collaborating with the Nazis, the Nazis had got their hands on some information about HYDRA's work (partly from a voluntary exchange of documents, and partly from Nazi spies). For four days, Alice, Otto and their allies followed hundreds of paperwork leads: the whole Nazi government was a massive bureaucratic machine, one just had to follow the threads.
During an air raid one night, Alice spent a few hours in the bomb shelter with a Reich Main Security Office accessions list, a headache blooming behind her eyes as she cross-referenced item lists while the distant booms made the ceiling quiver. The raid that night ended up killing a hundred Berliners, but did not do much damage to buildings or military infrastructure.
Otto figured it out in the end. It turned out that the HYDRA documents may have mistakenly ended up at the Patent Office in Berlin. They shouldn't be there at all, they were far too confidential, but the convoluted paper trail seemed to end there. And it seemed that no one else apart from Otto and Alice had realized it. The Patent Office had been a mess since before the war, after all, since the Nazis stripped patents from all non-Aryans. It stood to reason that they'd let a few documents slip here and there.
So they'd figured out where the files might be. They even knew the very file cabinet. But that file cabinet still happened to be locked up in a very populous government building in the middle of Berlin, and it wasn't like the Siren was being regularly asked to perform at the Patent Office. The SSR had never bothered to place any agents there and they didn't have time to wait.
But then, as if by fate, an invitation arrived: not to the Patent Office, but to an evening function at a restaurant on the canal just ten minute's walk away from the building. Otto didn't like the plan Alice came up with. But he ended up giving into it anyway – he didn't have any better ideas.
The night came: a warm restaurant with wide windows overlooking the river which gleamed gold with reflected lights, the hot press of handshakes and bumping elbows at the table, speeches and laughter. A production company had booked out the restaurant for a fundraising dinner with about eighty patrons who took advantage of the free alcohol. Rationing had made it a valuable commodity.
Alice had declined to perform before accepting the invitation – terrible head cold, so sorry – but in reality just didn't want to draw too much attention to herself. As the dinner plates were cleared away and everyone stood up to mingle she shared a glance with Otto and then just… slipped away.
It was easy enough to pull on her winter coat and warm hat over her evening gown in the bathroom, then slip out the staff exit while everyone was busy toasting the production company's CEO. No one saw her leave.
Outside, she blended in with the evening foot traffic along the canal. As she crossed the bridge, shivering at the chill breeze, she walked past a paperstand closing up shop for the night and the vendor offered her a free paper. One of the headlines read: CAPTAIN AMERICA MACHT MIT NIEDERLANDS RAID EINEN NUISANCE [CAPTAIN AMERICA CREATES NUISANCE IN NETHERLANDS RAID]. Alice frowned for a moment (she'd thought Captain America was a USO performance in the States) but then waved off the man politely.
Her patent leather shoes clipped on the cobblestones as she walked along the canal and then crossed the main road to look up at the German Patent and Trade Mark Office. For all that it was a fairly dry government department, it lived in a grand old building made of sandstone bricks and wide glass windows, taking up a whole city block. Thankfully, that meant it had lots of entrances.
Under the dim glow of the streetlights Alice circled around to the back of the building, her hands in her pockets and her chin ducked into her coat. Finally she found the shadowiest, quietest door and waited until she couldn't see anyone else on the street. The door was locked, and for a few moments she struggled against it with a hairpin. But the lock was made of strong stuff, and eventually she conceded defeat. She'd already been gone about ten minutes and she needed to hurry.
She turned to the nearest ground-level window, slid her longest hairpin into where the edge met the frame, and levered and pushed until the hinge snapped. No one thinks to reinforce the hinge as well as the lock, she recalled Peggy telling her. She carefully lowered the windowframe into the bushes below the window, and then with one last glance over her shoulder she pulled herself up onto the ledge and plunged into the building beyond.
She fell in an ungainly pile on the other side, tangled in her coat and gown for a moment before she struggled to her feet and peered into the darkness. The Patent Office had closed hours ago. After a moment to recall Otto's diagrams, she oriented herself. She reached into her purse for her flashlight and set off into the dark warren of the building.
The Patent Office was a big place, pretty much four massive floors full of nothing but paperwork. Searching for a single file should have been like finding a needle in a haystack. More like finding a piece of paper in a paperstack, Alice reflected as she winced at the creaking hinge of an office door. But she wasn't worried. Otto was good with bureaucracy and paper trails, and soon enough she'd found the right room and the right cabinet.
From what she'd seen in the gloom the Patent Office building was tidy and well kept, each room an identical layout of cabinets and desks. But she could tell that this room was more disused: a faint layer of dust clung to the cabinets, and the workspaces were tidy in a way which meant that no one used them regularly. No one bothered with this room very often, clearly. The windows had drapes over them, but Alice still kept her flashlight pointed down to avoid being spotted from outside. The room had absorbed the chill from the night air and stored the cold in the stone walls.
The cabinet wasn't even locked. She slid open two drawers before she found the right one, and fished out a file: XF-H14563. She kept her ears trained for any sounds in the abandoned building as she laid the file on the nearest workspace and flipped it open.
Her heart skipped. There, in thick black ink, lay the HYDRA skull-and-tentacles logo. Well done Otto.
She reached into her purse and pulled out her Rolleiflex TLR camera; a tall, double-lensed metal and glass device covered in a hardy leather skin, remarkably small at six inches tall and just under two pounds. It had cost her, but the Gestapo wouldn't bat an eye at a young starlet obsessed with her own image owning a camera. To make sure of it she carried a small folio of developed photos to prove her love of photography: landscape shots from her travels and portraits of backup singers and actors.
Of course, if someone caught her with a camera inside the Patent Office at night, she'd have a trickier time explaining that.
Alice removed the lens cap and after carefully positioning her flashlight snapped a photo of the first page. She turned the page, then turned the lever on the side of the camera to roll the film. She only had twelve photos per roll of film, but she had extra rolls in her purse disguised in lipstick cartridges.
She went through a few rolls as she photographed the HYDRA file, skimming through as she read. Her lips pursed. She didn't know a lot about engineering beyond what the inside of a radio looked like, but she understood enough from these blueprints and reports to know that this was bad. And if HYDRA had gone rogue… no wonder the SSR were so worried.
She skimmed past dozens of designs: weapons, vehicles, tanks, armor. At the bottom of one of the blueprints she saw a handwritten note in German: Research Facility #7 may have resources necessary for these parts. This note was followed by a list of what looked like place names and possibly manufacturing companies, but not in German. She recognized French, but also… Dutch?
Her brow furrowed and she continued leafing through the file. Her heart pounded. The Nazis didn't even know they had this.
Once she'd photographed each page she returned the file exactly to where she'd found it, careful not to disturb the dust on the cabinet. She slid the film rolls back into her lipstick cartridges, returned the camera to her bag, and then slipped out of the room. Her mind was already on her route back to the restaurant, and trying to calculate how long she'd been gone. She took one step into the stairwell when an ear-piercing siren split the air.
Alice nearly jumped out of her skin. Instantly she thought of escape routes, hiding places, combat. She probably couldn't make it back to the restaurant if they were looking for her-
But half a second later she realized that it wasn't just one siren she could hear, but many. And it wasn't a Gestapo or a burglar siren. Her ears rang with the sound of a high, insistent blare that wound up and down in volume. In the distance, she heard bells start to toll.
The air raid sirens.
They'd been going off more often since the first raid on the city three years ago, but they were still infrequent. There'd only been nine alerts the whole of last year, and there'd been a raid only four days ago, surely the planes weren't back already?
But then, as she hesitated at the top of the stairs, Alice heard a bone-rattling boom.
Her heart dropped. They're back.
She ran down the stairs and along the darkened main corridor of the Patent Office, back to the room she'd broken into. She still made sure to close all the doors behind her. Once she burst into the room she hoisted herself onto the window ledge and scrambled outside into pandemonium.
As she jogged back onto the street her eyes first caught on the lights: two massive searchlights strafing across the sky from the Flak tower, which she knew had been built over at Berlin zoo. She followed one of the piercing beams as it caught the flat green darkness of a trio of planes flashing overhead. The anti-aircraft guns started up, a shockingly loud rattle in the night. The projectiles looked like flashing white streaks arcing up into the sky.
Alice tore her eyes away from the searchlights and looked directly up. A black silhouette whisked over the stars above her. Her skin prickled. Then she saw similar flashes of blackness cutting overhead. Dozens. Hundreds. Seconds later she heard the high drone of plane engines. Two more booms went off in close succession, and the ground beneath her feet shuddered. I need to move.
She started jogging back the way she'd come, feeling strangely disconnected from the rattle of anti-aircraft fire and the whining plane engines. Just a moment ago she'd been creeping through a darkened building, snapping photographs of HYDRA files. That had been her plan for the evening. This felt… it felt like it was happening to someone else.
A third boom landed, much louder, and her head snapped around to see a fireball erupt a few blocks away. Screams echoed, and Alice's eyes widened as she saw flames lick up into the night sky. She increased her speed, but then flinched at a high whistle and a blast, much closer now, and started sprinting.
Alice knew there was an air raid shelter at the U-Bahn station by the canal. She clearly wasn't alone in the thought – when she ran out on to the main road she found the street full of running, screaming people, dashing for the canal. Alice got a general impression of terrified eyes and upturned faces before the streetlights went out.
Another boom and a shudder erupted, and Alice heard the hiss of water flung up from the canal. In the distance ahead she could see the searchlights beaming out of the zoo Flak tower, and the steady stream of anti-aircraft fire. She knew that the tower was probably entirely manned by teenagers from the Hitler Youth, trying to bring down the bombers. She wondered, bizarrely, what their parents must be thinking right now.
Her breath rasped in her throat.
The ground shuddered again. There was a blast every second now, and the darkness imposed by the dead streetlights started to recede as flames hungrily claimed the night air. One of the search lights flashed overhead as Alice ran down the road, illuminating a dozen dark shapes plummeting through the sky.
Her fine shoes slapped on the pavement as she ran, and the cold air sliced into her lungs. She heard an engine growl overhead so close that it sounded like it was about to clip her head off, so she instinctively threw her hands over her head and ducked.
She kept her gaze up, though, which is how she saw the metal silhouette of a warhead flash down through the dark air five hundred yards ahead. She blinked, and did not see the bomb impact with the road.
She did feel the blast of scalding air and shattered concrete fragments that roared outward, searing her retinas with its bright starburst of flame and flinging her backwards.
Alice tumbled, disoriented, numb from the sensory overload of bright, loud, sensation.
Alice opened her eyes to see her own pale ash-streaked hand spread on the dark pavement. Liquid ran into her left eye, and she wondered if it had started raining. But she blinked, tasted iron on her lips, and realized she must be bleeding. She wasn't sure if her ears were ringing or if that was the sound of plane engines. The road pressed hard against her body.
She rolled onto her back and sat up with a groan. Her system buzzed with adrenaline, so she didn't feel any pain. Just disorientation.
Her tumble through the air had turned her around, so it took her a moment to figure out where she was. She looked back over her shoulder, in the direction she'd been running, to see a crater in the road. The side of the street had crumbled and spilled sideways into the river, and as she watched, a cascade of bricks splashed into the water. She could see a leg protruding from between two slabs of cracked concrete. On the right, one of the residential buildings had caught on fire.
I'm not going to make it to the air raid shelter.
Two more explosions lit up to her left, across the canal. The air was deafening with engines, explosions, and anti-aircraft fire. As she got shakily to her feet she saw an orange blossom in the sky, followed a few seconds later by a boom that sounded different.
Alice's eyes followed the orange blossom as it pinwheeled down to crash a few miles away, right in the heart of the city. She let out a shuddering breath. The sky was alive with light: explosions, flares, gunfire, flames and sweeping searchlights. She'd never seen a night sky so bright.
Another bomb went off, closer, and she took off running again after a shaky start as her ankle threatened to wobble out from under her. She didn't go far this time. She ran down the main road until she found a bombed-out house, its guts spilling onto the road. She could see scorch marks, but the fire had already gone out. Must've been made mostly of concrete or stone. She darted into the ruin, climbing over concrete and cutting her hands on shards of glass.
She forged through until she found a storm door for a basement and twisted it open, revealing a yawning black hole in the ground. The basement below was probably too shallow to be much protection against falling bombs, but anything was better than out here on the street.
Alice clattered down the ladder, catching a glimpse of the empty, damp space before she slammed the door behind her.
Her breath came out as a frightened hiss in the sudden blackness.
~ You don't have to be alone in the dark ~
Alice sat in the darkness for an eternity. Early on she reached for her flashlight with shaking hands, only to find that she must have broken it when she fell. A layer of shattered glass lay at the bottom of her purse. She realized a minute later that she must have smashed her camera as well. She checked the lipstick cartridges with fumbling fingers, panicked, but they seemed to be in one shape.
Then there was nothing left to do but sit, wide-eyed and sightless, and wait. The world shuddered and screamed over her head and she gripped her hair in her hands. She began to feel pain: a sharp throbbing just beside her left eye, which was wet and painful when she touched it. Her jaw ached from where it had hit the road, as well as her shoulder and hip. She felt the sting of dozens of small cuts on the front of her body, where she'd been facing the bomb.
Slowly, the silences between the concussive booms grew longer. It didn't sound like the earth was going to tear asunder any more. When she managed to count to three hundred after hearing one lonesome blast, she held her breath, climbed up the basement ladder and twisted open the storm door again.
She'd thought it would be dark, but she climbed out to a strange hellscape: the entire sky glowed a deep, dark red, undulating above her. For a moment she just stared. Then she realized a thick layer of smoke now hung over the city, reflecting the flames below. It looked like the sky was on fire.
Alice climbed out of the bombed-out building and picked her way in the direction of the air raid shelter closest to the restaurant. Bodies lay on the side of the road. Alice watched their chests but saw no sign of movement. She walked past other wanderers like her, pacing wide-eyed and sooty-faced. She wondered if she had tear-streaks running through the ash on her cheeks as well.
She approached the river and found the burning, tangled wreck of a fighter plane hanging off the lip of the bridge. She could still see the RAF logo on the tail. The cockpit was blinding with flame.
Sirens had become the loudest cry across the night air – the air raid sirens were still going, but now the more urgent wail of fire engines rose over them. Alice had to jump out of the way of one racing fire engine, which made a beeline for the blazing church a few blocks away.
She didn't realize she'd made it to the U-Bahn air raid shelter until she spotted a man in a Gestapo uniform standing guard over the stairwell. Just an hour ago she'd have been terrified to see a uniform, but now she ran across the road and threw herself into the man's arms.
Please, officer, I've lost my friends.
She was a frightened, injured socialite. The officer rushed her down the stairwell and toward the waiting medics and the frantic, wild-eyed Otto.
No one thought to check her bag.
The next day, no one batted an eye at the broken window at the Patent Office; just another item for the damage report.
Excerpt from 'War on Germany: Life Behind the Lines' by Helga Simmons (1982), p. 62
The Battle of Berlin, which stretched from November of 1943 to March of the next year, has come in later years to be seen as an operational failure by historians: the RAF, who led the series of raids, suffered greater losses of planes than the Luftwaffe and failed to gain any major German concessions. That being said, the battle itself was devastating for Berlin. The first raid was relatively minor due to unfavorable weather, but the second raid on the night of the 22nd of November utterly destroyed a great swathe of Berlin and caused several firestorms, killed over 2000 people and left 175,000 more homeless. The opera house and zoo were destroyed.
... among prominent individuals affected by the RAF campaign were... the Siren, who some primary sources indicate was at a social function that even and suffered minor injuries. This is interesting, because...
A week later Alice sat in the dressing room of her regular performance hall in Zürich, wiping away her stage makeup as Otto leaned against the far wall and watched her through the mirror.
The monthly performance had gone off as well as ever. They usually brought their backup singers but it was getting harder to convince the neutral Swiss to let the Siren into the country to perform, let alone a whole pro-Nazi retinue, so Alice had sung alone tonight. Thankfully Otto continued to work his magic and their performance slot was safe.
So it was just the two of them in the dressing room, hanging back late as they usually did. The room was warm and brightly lit, but the mood was somber. Otto watched Alice run a damp cloth over her face, revealing her still-fresh cuts and bruises, and his brow furrowed. Neither of them spoke.
The Propaganda Department had, surprisingly, offered Alice some time off after the RAF bombing to heal, but she had refused them. Our soldiers are out there working tirelessly to win this war, she told them. I've got no right to do any differently.
She'd suffered through an endless influx of visitors, flowers, and cards, even one from Adolf Hitler's office. The sympathy was almost worse than her actual injuries. Almost worse than the way she still flinched at loud noises. Almost worse than the fact that she couldn't sleep without the light on any more because in the darkness she would wake up terrified that she was back in that storm cellar.
Peggy Carter slipped into the dressing room so easily that it took Alice a second glance to fully register that she was there.
"Peggy," Alice smiled as she turned on her chair, feeling tension release from her spine.
"Hello my dears," Peggy said, her eyes glinting from Alice to Otto. She wore a concierge uniform this time. "Wonderful to see you. I have good news, so-" she paused abruptly.
Alice tensed. "What?" Peggy's eyes were fixed, suddenly hard, so Alice glanced to Otto. He looked first confused, then resigned. Alice looked back to Peggy to find her staring unwaveringly at Alice's face. Oh.
She'd removed most of her makeup, so her injuries were plain. The worst was the nasty gash right beside her eye. Shrapnel of some kind had sliced into the corner of her eyelid and curved up over the ridge of bone beside her eye. If it had hit just slightly to the right she'd have lost her eye. A purple bruise peeked up over the tip of her jaw, and even in her performance getup there were cuts from shrapnel visible on her arms and chest. Her left hand was still bandaged – it had taken a medic pointing it out for Alice to notice, but at some point that frightening night Alice had ended up with a shard of glass lodged in her palm.
Peggy's voice came low and hard. "What happened." But she didn't allow time for Alice to answer before she turned on Otto. "What happened, and why didn't you report this to me?"
Otto still leaned against the wall, but his face turned hard to match Peggy's. He didn't look afraid. Not like he'd been afraid when he saw Alice brought down to the air raid shelter covered in blood and ash. Alice didn't think she'd forget how he looked that night.
"It happened recently," Otto said in a low voice. "We wanted to be safe and wait until today to let you know-"
"Agent Badger," Peggy replied crisply, "if any SSR operatives are in danger I want to hear about it-"
"I was in Berlin," Alice cut in. Peggy turned to her. "On Monday."
After a beat of silence, Peggy's eyes widened. Horror bled into her rigid anger. "Alice." She paced across the room and unconsciously reached out before pulling her hand back. Her fingers curled. "I'm so sorry. If I could have warned you-"
"No," Alice said, shaking her head. "That's the last thing I want to know. I'm meant to be getting intelligence for you, not from you. I know where the air raid shelters are. I'll be fine."
At the far wall, Otto let out a slow breath through his nose.
Alice kept her expression calm.
Two thousand people dead. Tens of thousands of others without homes. Alice had returned to her apartment the next morning to find the windows had imploded inward, but otherwise the building had suffered no structural damage.
Alice knew that she'd been close (a few hundred yards, in fact) to losing her life.
She knew that this happened in war, she'd even seen some of it in Hamburg, but it never failed to surprise her. What this war made people do was awful. And those men, women and children who had died that night – she was actively working against them.
Peggy saw the angry, distraught thoughts swirling in Alice's mind and reached out to touch Alice's hand on the dresser. "I know," she murmured. She didn't say anything to try to make it better, or to justify the bombing. She just repeated: "I know."
Alice nodded, her head bowed and wanting to weep at the exhaustion in her limbs. They stayed like that until Alice summoned the strength to lift her head again.
"So," she murmured, swallowing past the lump in her throat. "You… you seemed to be in a good mood when you walked in. What's new?"
For a moment, Peggy hesitated. Alice could feel her dark eyes flicking over her, sizing her up and deciding what she was ready for. But eventually she took a step back so she could address both of them.
"Do you remember that hope I thought the SSR had lost?" Her eyes gleamed. "It turns out I was wrong. The SSR has a whole new focus now, and we're going to hit HYDRA where it hurts. We're going on the offensive."
Alice's eyebrows rose. "Oh?"
Otto pushed off the wall. "This has something to do with that Austrian base, doesn't it?"
Peggy nodded. "I can't tell you most of it, to keep you safe, but we've got a heavy hitter now."
"So how do you want us to help?" Alice asked.
Peggy smiled: a red-lipped, dangerous smile. "I want you to point the way."
Alice felt her own lips curve to match Peggy's smile. "You got it."
Peggy's smile warmed. "So do you two have anything for me?"
Otto and Alice exchanged a glance and then both looked toward the small satchel bag on the edge of the dressing room table, which contained not only the intact lipstick cartridges packed with film roll, but everything else they'd been able to steal and learn over the past month.
"Yes," Alice replied evenly. "We might have one or two things."
Hello my lovelies, I hope you're all safe and healthy. Quick update: as some of you know, I'm Australian but currently living in Japan. Well, very unfortunately and upsettingly I have had to pack up my house and things, sell it all and my car, in the hopes of getting back to Australia before there are no more flights. I'm okay (if a little heartsore at having to so suddenly leave the place and people I love), currently sitting in the airport in Tokyo before my flight back to Australia. Editing this chapter has been a wonderful distraction, and I'm sorry it was late - this past week I've barely had time to eat, let alone write! Sending lots of love x
Reviews
Guest: I'm glad you're excited, because I am too! We'll have to see about Bucky and Steve finding out about Alice ;)