Jacques Dernier of Marseilles was not a proper prisoner of war. He couldn't be, because he was a civilian. Jacques had no proper military training, and he had never been registered as a member of any French armed forces. There was nobody that had to deliver a letter detailing his disappearance to his home (supposing it still existed). There was no senior officer to write that letter to his next-of-kin in the first place. Which was just as well, because Jacques no longer had any kin to inform.

Jacques was among the older prisoners here. He'd been born into uncertainty and chaos. Was old enough to appreciate the difference that the Armistice in Compiègne made in his life. Jacques was a man of subtleties. As an expert in things that went boom, he was aware that explosions were not subtle. However, the things that caused them often were. And Jacques knew how to recognise those things. Abandoned artillery and ruined weapons were the backdrop of Jacques's childhood – you had to know the signs if you didn't want to step on something disastrous out in the fields. He understood the difference between life with active hostilities and post-war recovery. He'd been wise enough to feel the tension rising for several years before the invasion came for him and his people.

While Jacques did not believe in destiny per se, he did know there were certain inevitabilities. He was a man of science, after all. Reactions and chemistry, certain statistics, simple universal life experiences…these were all quite simple for him to understand and accept. Occupation was not supposed to be one of those things people were meant to accept. Jacques's resistance to said occupation: Inevitable. His capture? Perhaps that was also inevitable.

Inevitable did not necessarily mean impossible though.

One of the benefits of not having formal military training was a certain flexibility. Jacques was never taught to do something any one way. When presented with a problem or situation, all of these soldiers seemed to attack it the same way. Alternatives never occurred to them. They looked for grenades to blow something up instead of simple heat, oxygen, and fuel. And those three things were all around them just waiting to be sparked.

Literally and figuratively.

Corporal Dugan spat through the bars of their cage. He was a powder keg himself, already set to burning the night the guards took Sergeant Barnes from him. Jacques wondered how much longer Dugan's fuse was. The man was due to burst any day. He was not coping well at all. Poor man refused to accept the likely reality of the sergeant's death.

"He needs closure," Gabriel said to Jacques in French one night.

"He's unlikely to get it," Jacques replied. "No one has ever come back from the isolation ward since they moved the medics' quarters back there. The people on janitorial duty said they never handled any of the doctor's victims' bodies."

Gabriel shrugged. "I think he knows that, but it doesn't help him accept it at all."

Jacques hummed and observed their cellmates. He was quite fond of Gabriel. Not only because of the shared language, of course. He was a pleasant man. Kind and honest. Jacques couldn't say the same for the other two in the cell. The Englishman was rather cold and distant. Part of that was just his culture, the nature of the English, Jacques knew. But there was an edge to Falsworth's distance. A purposefulness. Jacques chalked it up to a defence mechanism. The man had the rank of a commanding officer. Surely he carried the weight of every man he'd lost in the field and knew better than to become close to others who might be lost to him.

Dugan was alright when they'd first been confined together. He'd only grown more and more gruff and surly since Barnes was removed. The man was combative and snapped at people frequently. It was harsh, but it was still quite plain to see that Dugan did it with good intentions. He snapped at the others that made mistakes because he did not want them to have to suffer for it. It was similar to Falsworth's situation, Jacques decided, where he did not want to lose any more people. Only Dugan chose not to distance himself, wash his hands of others' fates. Instead he inserted himself into the lives of others with benign belligerence, if such a thing made sense.

"He has a strange attachment," Jacques finally said.

Gabriel laughed quietly. "I thought the same thing when I was assigned to the same foxhole as them. He looked up to him in a way, which would make sense. He was his sergeant. But he was protective of him, too. Like an elder brother."

Jacques smiled.

Gabriel continued, "Yeah. A guard dog almost. I sort of started to understand it. Sarge was a really good NCO. Good person. Textbook personality that you want at that rank. I never heard anyone say a bad word about him when three different units got surrounded together. Even the officers with huge egos got along with him. Not very often that you get the brass and the enlisted men to like you at the same time."

"I can imagine that," Jacques said. "He had a way with all the other prisoners while he was with us."

Gabriel smiled. "Yeah, he was absolutely a brooding hen."

"Would you two keep it down?" Dugan complained. His arms tightly crossed themselves over his chest. "I know you're fucking talking about me."

Gabriel laughed and said in English, "Nothing gets by you, does it?"

"You two only talk like that when you're talking shit about me and Monty. If you're gonna shit talk, do it to our faces in a language we understand."

Falsworth said, "Who said I don't understand French?"

Dugan sat up and waved his arms. "Are you joking? Is it really only me? I feel like a moron!"

Gabriel looked from Dugan to Jacques and said in French, "I think he liked being the guy who took care of the guy who took care of everyone else."

Falsworth said in English, "Rather like a secretary."

They had a laugh at Dugan's expense. While that was going on, Jacques noticed the Japanese-American man in the cage across the aisle watching them again. He'd been doing that for several days now. He watched the Americans in particular. Jacques knew that look on the young private's face. That was the look of someone who dearly wanted to say something but couldn't, didn't know how to start. Didn't know if they wanted to deal with the consequences of what they wanted to say. It was the look of a person who just needed a little encouragement.

Jacques watched the man watching his cellmates. Maybe he was good at recognising heat, oxygen, and fuel where others didn't see it. And maybe he was growing quite bored with the monotony of daily labour. Jacques wasn't a proper soldier, so he could be flexible.

A little bit of heat, oxygen, and fuel in the welding cell the next day caused a lovely little explosion. Nothing huge. Nothing that would compromise the integrity of the project. (Maybe it was close enough to compromise the tanks of compressed gases that were nearby. Maybe enough to make them dangerous, should someone knock them over one day.) Jacques endured a tirade and a few minor blows for his incompetence with the welding equipment. A cleaning crew was summoned to clean the area.

How convenient that the man who watched Jacques and his cellmates was among the pair that was sent to clean up the mess. Biding his time, Jacques stood nearby and waited for the man's companion to give them space.

When he did wander off for something or another, Jacques sidled up to the man and said in English, "Hello."

The man gave him a sidelong glance but then kept to his task.

"Strange how these accidents keep happening," Jacques continued, undeterred.

This time the man gave him a look with much more personality.

"Someone might get hurt again if the guards don't tighten up on the safety procedures, eh?"

The man muttered, "Yeah, because that's the problem here."

They weren't quite there then, huh? Jacques thought for a moment. "Are the safety procedures better in other parts of the plant?"

The man stopped what he was doing and faced Jacques head-on. "No. They're not." He went back to scrubbing ashes off the wall. "But it's not like anyone will believe me anyway."

Jacques clicked his tongue. "Why not?"

The man rolled his eyes. "You playing stupid? I'm one of the top suspects. I'm the guy who squealed about the map."

Was that all that was stopping him?

"Pfft." Jacques waved a dismissive hand. "I don't think anyone believes that for a moment. For one thing, you have made no effort to get in with any group since the map was found. You would be a terrible mole for doing that."

The man was beginning to soften despite himself. Perhaps a relief to be told that it's ludicrous to think he was the mole, even if it was a stranger saying it. It was true though: Jacques did not think this man was the mole.

"Maybe I gotta lay low for a while," the man said. "So I don't blow my cover."

"What cover? You sit around at night looking more miserable than anyone else here. No, a mole would not look so morose."

"Maybe I'm just a bad actor. I spend all day in the guards' breakroom drinking coffee and tea, having a good ol' time. I tell everyone I'm cleaning, but I'm really just spending the day being complicit with all the bullshit."

Was that an admission? Guilt in the man's voice?

"Complicit," Jacques echoed.

The cracks in this young man were clear as day. He closed his eyes for a long second and sighed. Seemed to come to a resolution within himself. "Listen, I haven't seen your buddy in a while. Last time I did…it didn't look good. We cleared out a medic's body almost a week ago. Guys in the isolation ward are usually dead or on borrowed time by the time we bury the medics."

That was not what Jacques had been expecting to hear. He was expecting intelligence about the building. Perhaps an upcoming chance at a breakout or the opportunity to really hurt HYDRA. He hadn't been expecting to hear that Sergeant Barnes had still been alive up to a week ago – and that there was a possibility that he still was now.

"He was still alive?" Jacques asked just to be sure that's what this man was trying to say.

"A week ago, he was. Maybe." The man shrugged. "I don't about now."

"How?"

"The shit that doctor does is fucked up," he said.

"It's been—"

"Almost a month."

Mouth surely hanging agape, Jacques stared at this man.

The man looked uncomfortable. He said, "Would you tell the guy with the bowler hat that? Look, I don't know if it'll help, but if it'll get him to…I don't know what it'll do."

Jacques was nodding his head before the man stopped speaking. "Yes. I will tell him. Thank you. Thank you for telling me."

The man shifted uncomfortably. "Yeah, well. You didn't hear it from me."

"No, of course not."

The news was heavy on Jacques's mind the rest of the day. The man with the news evaded Jacques for the rest of the day, so he wasn't able to ask any of the hundred follow up questions that were occurring to him. So jumbled up were his thoughts that he couldn't think of a good way to wander away from his station to tell the others. Jacques's body worked automatically until the end of his shift (he was quite sorry to realise he had done very good work on all of his welds).

It was quite difficult to contain his excitement as the lot of them were shepherded back to their cages that evening. Jacques was nearly bursting with the news. He hardly had patience for the cocky exchange between Dugan and the guard about who would have a big stick one day.

"I have news," Jacques said once the guards had slouched out of the sea of cages and gone off to start their rounds. And then he told them.

The immediate reaction from Dugan: "Ha! I knew it! Fucking told you he wasn't dead!"

"Keep it down, Dum Dum," Gabriel said in a hushed tone.

"We gotta do something. Gotta get him outta there," Dugan said.

"Weren't you listening?" said Falsworth. "We've no proof that he's still alive. Just some stranger's word that he was alive a week ago."

"It's something," said Dugan. "Gabe, back me up."

Gabriel looked torn. "I mean, don't get me wrong. I want Sarge to be alive. But it just seems so unlikely. If he is alive, what sort of shape is he in?"

"Does it matter?" Dugan was getting loud again.

Falsworth made a severe motion with his hand to silence the group as a guard patrolled overhead. They waited for him to move on a few cages over.

"I was not trying to start a rescue operation when I told you all this," said Jacques. Though he couldn't think of a different reason why he'd been eager to spread the word.

"What'd you think would happen?" asked Falsworth.

Dugan threw his hands up. "Look, it doesn't matter to me what any of you are saying. If there's a shot Jimmy's still kickin' in there, I'm gonna do something about it."

Falsworth: "Alone?"

"Yeah. If I have to. I can't just sit here on my ass when I know he's in there."

Gabriel said, "Let's be smart about this."

"It won't be so simple as arranging an accident for Lohmer," Jacques said carefully. "But I think maybe we could arrange something so that one of us could get into the ward to confirm he's alive."

"Now we're talking!" said Dugan.

At the same time, Falsworth said, "Please, Dernier, do not encourage this delusion."

Their whispered argument was interrupted by the most curious thing: a guard collapsed directly above them. All of their heads whipped upward to see a man standing over the fallen guard, and he was wearing the most bizarre uniform.

It was Gabriel that was the bravest among them to ask, "Who are you supposed to be?"

The man looked down upon them with more than a few shades of uncertainty on his face. "Um. Captain America."

This captain pulled the ring of keys from the fallen guard's belt.

Falsworth said the polite version of what was on all of their minds: "I beg your pardon?"