Chapter 12

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Peggy woke with a crick in her neck from sleeping upright against her husband's shoulder. The sun was not yet up, pale pre-dawn light filtering in through the windows. Outside the birds were singing as though fit to burst.

"Morning," Steve whispered.

She turned her head to see him looking at her. The circles under his eyes were as deep as bruises—she raised her hands to cup his face and traced them with her thumbs.

"Did you sleep at all?" she whispered back. His stubbled jaw rasped lightly against her palms as he shook his head.

"Not much," he confessed, and craned his neck for a good-morning kiss, keeping the rest of his body as still as possible to avoid disturbing Bucky, still fast asleep with his head on Steve's knee.

The kiss satisfactorily concluded, Peggy leaned back and took stock of her husband. Steve had tucked the beads and their little black case out of sight sometime during the night. She thought about asking him about them, but decided against it. That was a conversation which could wait for another day. Instead she dropped her hand to his hip, pressing lightly against the healing bullet wound. "Does it still hurt?"

"Not much," Steve said again, but the corners of his eyes tightened and she knew it hurt worse than he let on.

"You need to sleep, Steve," she persisted, running both hands lightly through his hair. "Give your body a chance to heal."

He closed his eyes and leaned into her touch, smiling. When he looked at her again, it was with naked adoration. "Have I told you yet today that I love you?"

This man. How could he be so exasperating and so endearing all at once? "Don't think you can distract me, Rogers."

His eyes danced and he grinned. "Why, Mrs. Rogers, I would never."

In retrospect, it was rather a good thing she hadn't any lipstick on this morning, because otherwise Steve would certainly be wearing it all by now.

At last she pulled herself entirely away and got to her feet. "Speaking of healing, I must check in on Jim and Gabe, see that they're all right."

Her husband nodded, the boyish joy she'd put in his face receding as the careworn mantle of the captain dropped back onto his shoulders. "Find out if we can move on or if Morita needs another day."

Gabe was tucked snugly into bed, still fast asleep when she tiptoed into the little living quarters upstairs. His splinted arm stretched out on top of the covers. Falsworth had bunked down on the floor beside him, and opened sleepy eyes as Peggy slipped in. She held a finger to her lips and bent to collect her pack and Steve's from where they leaned against the wall. Apparently Falsworth had repacked Steve's things from where he had scattered them the night before as he'd retrieved the little black case of beads.

"How is he?" she mouthed soundlessly, gesturing to the sleeping figure in the bed.

"Clean break," Falsworth whispered, indicating a place on his own forearm with a finger to show where Gabe's arm had been broken. "Should heal all right."

She nodded and slipped out again, swinging the door shut behind her in order to dress quickly in the semidarkness of the little landing.

The rest of the men were still asleep when she returned to the main floor; she blew a kiss off her fingers to her husband and eased the door open to step out into the early morning.

It was chilly. Beautiful, but chilly. Smoke rose from the chimney of the little house, and she knew the elderly couple was already awake. Hugging herself tightly against the cold, Peggy hurried from the barn to the house and rapped on the door.

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The sun was decidedly up by the time she returned, and so was the rest of the team, all but Bucky. To all appearances, he was deeply, soundly asleep, his head still pillowed on the captain's knee. The rest of the team packed their belongings quietly, trying not to make any noise. Gabe, his arm in a makeshift sling, worked with Dum Dum to get something for the others to eat.

"How's Morita?" Steve asked around a mouthful of oatmeal as Peggy reached his side. He kept his voice low.

"Better," she responded, and accepted a plate from Dum Dum. "Still very weak. He wants to talk with you."

Steve nodded, then set aside his plate and looked down at the man asleep in his lap. "Guess it's time to get Buck up, then." He took a deep breath. Peggy inched back to give them room. Everyone else paused what they were doing, watching with bated breath.

"Buck?" Steve asked softly, gently jostling his friend's shoulder. "Bucky? Time to get up."

Bucky screwed up his face. "Five more minutes," he slurred, and curled in on himself.

Falsworth dropped the tin plate he'd been in the act of putting away. Everyone else simply stared. It was the most they'd heard coming out of Bucky Barnes's mouth in three years.

Steve blinked blurring eyes hard. Something tight and grateful welled up in his throat, but he swallowed it firmly down. His voice only barely wavered as he responded, "We don't have five minutes. Up and at 'em."

Bucky groaned, opened his eyes, and then groaned again and shut them, clapping his good hand over his face against the light. Slowly, he sat upright before lowering his hand and looking around, squinting.

Then he saw the people in the room and stopped short, eyes widening.

"You…"

He spun around, nearly overbalancing, to look at Steve. Steve had no idea what his face looked like, but he tried to smile. "Morning, Buck."

Bucky's mouth opened, but no words came out. He shut it, and then pinched himself as hard as he could. Furrows deepened in his forehead. "You. Steve. You—came?"

The words were nearly whispers, the last shreds of forlorn hopes still clung to. Steve nodded and swallowed hard again. "Yeah. We came to get you."

It was too much. Bucky shook his head, mouth working again. He carded his good hand roughly through what remained of his hair, apparently not noticing either the pain in his head or the three fingernails he'd ripped off in trying to claw off his metal arm. Steve noticed he didn't even attempt to move or look at the metal arm, tied closely in a sling across his chest. It was as if it weren't there.

"You came," Bucky whispered hoarsely, gaze turning inward, as though he were seeking to understand the meaning of the words he was saying. "You… all… came…"

Steve blinked hard and smiled mistily, settling his hand on his brother's shoulder. "Of course we did, Buck," he said, his voice uneven. "Of course we did."

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Morita had indeed benefitted from sleeping on a real bed throughout the night. The medicine had helped keep his fever down, and for the first time the elderly woman caring for him didn't look tense and worried.

"How long before we can move him?" Steve asked. Peggy passed the question on to their hosts.

"I can move," Morita insisted, though his voice was thin and weary. The extra pounds he'd gained since the war seemed to have dropped off of him. He smiled at Bucky, who hovered uncertainly in the doorway clutching a tin plate of breakfast—the house was too small for the sergeant to fit comfortably inside, but he had flatly refused to stay behind at the barn and let Steve out of his sight.

Bucky didn't smile back. The vacant confusion of the last few days was beginning to cloud his face again. Sure, the kimoyo beads had done wonders, but he had a long way left to go.

"They can put us up for a few days," Peggy translated as the elderly woman spoke. "They're concerned if he moves too soon his fever will come back and the wound will reopen. But Steve," she broke the translation to interject, "we can't risk staying still."

Steve gritted his teeth. True, they had seen no signs of pursuit since rescuing Bucky, but something in the back of his mind was desperately insisting they move on. Fast and light—that was the way to stay ahead of any enemies.

And yet this was Morita, with a wife and unborn child back home and untold miles between them and the next medical aid.

"We'll stay," he decided.

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Steve was halfway back to the barn before Peggy caught up with him.

"Stop a moment," she ordered, catching at his arm. She already knew the stubborn expression she would see when he turned to face her, and wasn't disappointed. "Steve, this is the wrong decision."

His mouth was tight, face set. "We can risk a day or two."

"Yes, 'risk' is the word." Peggy heard her own voice rise and tried to moderate it. "Darling, it's nothing short of a miracle that we've pulled this off so far. We need to keep moving until we're safely off the continent."

Steve shook his head and looked away. "I refuse to risk one man's life for a wider margin of safety."

And there it was.

If Steve Rogers had one tactical weakness, it was in seeing his men as individuals, unable to order one loss for another gain. And Peggy loved him for it. She herself had learned to think of lives in tactical terms during the war, pieces in a chess game. But Steve—he had never been able to do that.

The only life he'd ever chosen to sacrifice was his own.

"I know," she said softly, stepping closer. "I know you don't trade lives, and I love that about you. But I'm thinking about the team. If we delay, it will put all of us in danger, not just Jim. And we're not in a position to fight back right now. Gabe's hurt, Jim can't fight, and Barnes…"

She trailed off, not sure what words to apply to Bucky's situation. Instead she simply gestured to where Bucky stood a few yards away, vacant eyes restlessly scanning the treeline. The plate of food Falsworth had given him back at the barn hung forgotten in his hand.

"Staying isn't the right choice," she finally finished. She laid her fingers gently on her husband's forearm, felt his muscles tense and jumping. "You know I'm right."

The eyes he finally raised to her face were haunted with memories of tragedies she would only know from his brief stories. "And what about his wife? His kid? I can't make a call that could leave them without their husband and father. I can't do it, Peggy."

His anguish stopped Peggy short. There was more to this than just Morita, she realized. She slipped her hand down his arm until it caught and entwined with his.

"You don't have to make the call," she said quietly. "I can."

He held her gaze for a moment, and then closed his eyes, folding her hand more tightly in his. "Okay," he said at last. "Okay."

She stepped close, raising her free hand to cup his cheek, running her thumb along his cheekbone until he opened his eyes to look at her. "And darling," she murmured encouragingly, "Morita is tough and stubborn as a mule. He'll pull through."

An awkwardly cleared throat broke the moment. It was Dugan, shifting from foot to foot from where he had joined Bucky a few yards away. Steve noticed he had gently taken the forgotten plate from Bucky's hand. "So, Cap? What's the call?"

Steve looked down into his wife's eyes; she squeezed his hand in silent support. He nodded, sucked in a breath. "Do as Peggy says."

Exactly a half hour later, they bundled Morita carefully into the back of their truck, said goodbye to their hosts, and continued on their trek toward Western Europe and freedom.

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Whether they were being followed or not, it felt good to be on the move. They didn't waste time, racing across Eastern Europe as though the whole of Hydra was on their heels.

Thankfully, Morita's wound didn't reopen, though his fever did return.

"I'm fine," he promised despite the lines of pain in his face. "I'm fine."

And whether it was because he was a stubborn son of a gun, or because of the treatment he'd received, he did indeed seem to be holding his own.

Bucky had a few more violent episodes, though none as bad as the one in the barn. His burns and the self-inflicted wounds steadily healed, but he still barely spoke, struggled with waves of confusion and panic, and woke screaming in the night.

He never acknowledged the damaged metal arm strapped across his chest. It was as if it weren't there.

Steve continued the kimoyo bead treatments every night. The results were rarely as dramatic as they had been that first time, but little by little he felt that Bucky was definitely improving. None of the team ever asked where the beads came from, though they eyed them with barely-concealed curiosity. And Steve didn't volunteer the information.

They took a brief rest when they reached Calais. Dernier contacted some of his old French Resistance friends who were more than happy to hide them, and a doctor came to inspect Morita and put a proper plaster cast on Gabe's splinted arm.

They ran into a little trouble there, because Bucky took one look at the white-coated doctor and turned absolutely grey. Then in a single move he inserted himself between Morita and the doctor, nostrils flared, pure murder mingled with terror in his eyes.

Dernier instantly grabbed the doctor by the collar, whisked him out of the room, and then went to find the captain.

It took almost an hour for Steve to talk Bucky down enough to let the doctor get close enough to Morita to examine him. Clearly he had associated the doctor's white coat with the white-coated men in the laboratory who had hurt him so badly. Even with Steve's steadying hand on his shoulder, Bucky refused to leave the room, hovering menacingly as the doctor did his examination.

"Would you like me to look at his arm next?" the doctor asked in French, gesturing at the sling that still held Bucky's metal arm across his chest.

Bucky shivered and snarled. Steve hurriedly stepped between. "Non, non," he said, and the doctor had shrugged eloquently and backed off.

Steve's French was better than his Polish, but even so it was helpful to hear Gabe's translation of the doctor's parting message. "He says I need six weeks in the cast, and Morita needs a month of rest before he even thinks about going anywhere."

A month of rest. Steve shot a worried look at Morita. The Californian grinned weakly. "It's okay, Cap. We make it on the boat home from Liverpool, and I'll get all the rest I want."

They didn't see much in Calais while they waited for their passage across the Channel. Nobody wanted to risk it, not now that they were so close to getting out of Europe. The building they stayed in had once been a hotel, bombed during the war. It still had gaping holes in the roof and sides, but it was more than sufficient for them.

"We even get our own rooms!" Dugan had announced a little more loudly than necessary, winking largely at Peggy.

She had rolled her eyes and thrown a wet stocking at his head (they were doing laundry at the time)—but nobody missed the fact that she and Steve disappeared rather early that night.

And this time, at least, Bucky slept the night through.

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From Calais they slipped across the Channel in a boat Dernier had arranged. The water was rough, the air full of spray and rain, and the boat was tiny and smelt oppressively of fish. Even Peggy looked faintly green. Bucky threw up over and over, clinging to the railing with his good hand, while Steve hung onto his collar in case a sudden dip sent his friend overboard.

"It's okay," he promised again and again, and if he felt the urge to make some Coney Island joke, he kept it to himself. Now was not the time.

They were a sorry, bedraggled bunch by the time the boat docked. Everyone was queasy and shivering. Morita had to be carried off the boat.

It was a relief to come ashore, and not just because of seasickness. England felt different, a world away from the hole they'd found Bucky in. It was only a stone's throw across the pond from America. Steve could practically see the stress roll off his team's shoulders.

They spent an agonizingly long week laying low in Liverpool, waiting for their ship home. "We could have Howard fly us," Peggy had suggested, but Steve grimaced, shaking his head. He was pretty much past the days when flying left him white-knuckled and panicking—his hesitation to fly now was more tactical than anything else.

"If people are looking for Bucky," he pointed out, "Howard's plane will be a big sign pointing right to us. It's less obvious to go by sea."

He didn't add that he was counting on the voyage to give him more time to work on Bucky's rehab before they hit the crowds and insanity of New York.

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The night before the ship was to leave, Peggy and Dugan slipped out and came back with supplies for a small celebration. This would be farewell to two of the members of their band—Dernier and Falsworth would not be sailing back across the ocean.

They sat crowded shoulder to shoulder around the one small table their hideout afforded. There weren't enough seats; Peggy ended up halfway in her husband's lap and Steve wrapped an arm around her waist to tug her close. Bucky was at his elbow, looking with concentrated focus at each member of their little band.

"Cheers," said Falsworth, lifting his glass. They clinked glasses and tipped back their drinks, thumping them back down against the wooden tabletop.

"I can't thank you all enough," Steve said simply. "I owe you. All of you."

Dernier said something in French; Jones nodded and smiled. "When the Captain calls, the Commandos answer. It was our pleasure, Captain."

Bucky took a sudden breath, as though he was about to speak, but let it out wordlessly. Unshed tears shone in his eyes, and he nodded his unspoken thanks, twisting his mouth into the first pale imitation of a smile they'd seen from him.

Dugan, seated on his other side, slung an arm around Bucky's shoulders with unexpected gentleness.

"Of course we came," he said, even though Bucky hadn't been able to get the words out. "We couldn't leave our sergeant in that hole."

It felt so right, all of them there together. They drank and shared stories and jokes and long moments of weighty silence, smooth glass between their fingers, shoulder to shoulder, family forged in the crucible of war.

They sat up together until well past midnight. Nobody had wanted to break up the party, but Morita was beginning to lean heavily on the edge of the table and Bucky had lost track of his surroundings twice already.

Dugan gave the last toast of the night. The gravity in his bearing and that of the rest of the Commandos told Steve that this was not a new toast. It had been given many, many times before.

"The Captain," Dugan said soberly. "And the Sergeant."

"The Captain and the Sergeant," everyone chorused, and Steve's eyes weren't the only ones wet as he raised his glass.

He had lost so much by coming here, lost teammates and friends, lost a life he'd spent years rebuilding—but here, side by side with the first men he'd ever found fellowship with, with the love of his life, and the friend of his youth—he couldn't regret the decision.

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The fog was thick the next morning when they set out for their ship. They slipped into the darkened streets, the dim gloom offering anonymity. Falsworth tugged Morita's arm over his shoulder; Steve found Peggy's hand with his own.

"Penny for your thoughts?" he whispered into her hair.

She laughed softly, tipping her head back. He admired the line of her throat, the curve of her cheek outlined by a single light burning somewhere ahead of them. "I'm looking forward to going home," she admitted.

Oh how he loved her.

"Thank you," he breathed. The words were too simple to hold all he meant: thanks for loving him, for coming with him, for supporting him on this insane quest, for standing by his side. He stooped to press a kiss to her temple—and caught a flicker of motion out of the corner of his eye.

He looked up just in time to see a hand reach out of a darkened doorway, level the barrel of a gun between Bucky's eyes, and pull the trigger.

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I knew it had been a bit since I'd updated, but I hadn't realized it was four whole months. *faints* Y'all are the most patient, wonderful, loyal, kind, supportive readers ever. I don't deserve you. (And I will NOT leave you on this cliffhanger for another four months, I promise.)

Special thanks to DigitalDreamn, Doc Mui, and steverogersandpeggycarter. You know what you did. This chapter is my way of saying thanks. *hugs you all*

Guest Reviews:

Ryn: Thank you! You could pay me no higher compliment than what you just said about my research. :) And yes, I am a firm believer that the Commandos are a bunch of incurably romantic Steggy shippers who squirm and howl with protest like 11-year-old-boys at any sign of "mushiness," but are nonetheless incredibly pleased to see two people they care about finding happiness.

Guest (May 29): I'm so glad the beads didn't come across as "hand-wavy" as I feared. And that was an excellent point about the 21st century meds. I did not know that fascinating comics detail about WWII Captain America and Black Panther-thank you so much for telling me! Yes, Shuri certainly built the arm super quickly-it makes sense they would have thought about it before.

my-secret-garden: Thank you! And of course, of course I will reply to you! You take the time and trouble to read my stories and say kind things about them, so I am absolutely going to thank you. :)

Guest (Jul 24): Thank you, thank you for your reassurances about the kimoyo beads. And it makes so much sense what you said about all the other procedures Steve might have read about (I agree that the man reads voraciously, and while perhaps reluctant to share his feelings openly I'm sure he's read up on self-help and healing techniques for both himself and Bucky). And that's so cool about Captain America and T'Chaka during WWII-I have like zero knowledge of the comics so it's absolutely fascinating to me.