Perilous Pancakes
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Whoever said the French could cook had evidently never met Dernier. Steve froze, and then carefully took the first bite back out of his mouth. Bucky was less discreet.
"Ugh, what'd you do to the pancakes, man - put sand in them or something? How do you mess up a pancake, anyway?"
Dernier shrugged and said something in French, but Jones was too busy gagging to translate. He was an early riser and had already eaten three of the pancakes in question. Now he was looking visibly ghastly. Peggy stepped forward and squatted next to him, offering a helpful thump on the back before turning a suspicious eye on the bag of flour in Dernier's pack.
Steve took a second look at his plate, and carefully pulled the beautiful, tenderly browned pancake apart. There was an odd, gritty texture to it that had initially arrested his attention, and he could faintly detect something off about the flavor, though it looked and smelled wonderful.
Peggy asked Dernier something in French and he shrugged eloquently, answering her in the same language. Steve was beginning to pick up a little, but not enough to completely figure out what they were saying. Still, he was pretty sure the word "Stark" was in there somewhere.
Rising to her feet, Peggy crossed the camp and sat next to Steve, studying his plate thoughtfully.
"Maybe don't eat those," she carefully suggested after a moment.
He threw her a questioning glance, but her poker face was good enough that he couldn't always read it.
Hungry as they were, nobody ended up eating more than a few bites. Dernier didn't seem to be hurt by it, merrily wrapping the leftovers in a piece of oilcloth and stowing them in his pack before they moved out. Jones was still wobbly-kneed, and they had to pause several times for him to throw up.
"I don't think I'll ever eat Jacques' cooking again," Bucky admitted, looking a little queasy himself.
Steve thought about Howard Stark and the bag of suspicious flour, and shrugged a little. "Maybe something was spoiled," he suggested, and left it at that.
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The compound was heavily built and well-guarded. They'd taken out the first layer of guards under cover of darkness, but time was moving quickly and the silver rim along the edge of the skyline was growing fast. Soon the moon would rise, and the element of surprise would be lost.
Stripping off his gauntlets with his teeth, Steve knelt against the wall, feeling along the ground for the edge of the door. Dernier was right beside him, yanking explosives and fuses out of his pack.
"Found it," Steve breathed, barely making a sound in the stillness of the night. He kept one hand on the nearly invisible line that marked the door's position, holding out the other for some kind of explosive. Instead, his fingers curled around something flat and vaguely spongy.
Confused, Steve lifted it closer to his face and then shook his head, trying to hand it back. Dernier wouldn't take it, already busily working on his side of the door, whispering something back in vehemently hushed French.
Steve didn't catch a word of it.
"You gave me a pancake," he tried to explain, and then squinted through the dark to discover that the presumed explosives that Dernier was setting were also pancakes from the doomed batch. Caught severely off guard at the unexpected proceedings, Steve blinked hard - but when he looked again, the pancakes were still there. Perhaps he was seeing things.
"What's the holdup?" Bucky demanded, coming up behind them and then stopping short. Steve twisted, and couldn't help grinning a little at the stunned expression on his friend's face at the sight of light, fluffy pancakes fitted with fuses and set as if they were explosives.
Then again, maybe it wasn't good that they were both seeing the same thing. Sure, it was nice to know he wasn't going out of his mind, but it also meant that their volatile explosives expert had just gone nuts and was about to attempt blowing a hole in a Hydra stronghold with breakfast food.
"We're trying to blow the door up, not give it a sick stomach," Bucky hissed, shooting Steve a look of sheer incredulity as if this madness was all his idea. The captain spread his hands helplessly. Why on earth did Bucky always think the craziest things were his fault?
Dernier shook his head with frustration, muttering something under his breath that sounded like "un imbécile stupide" as he snatched the last pancake out of Steve's hand and fixed it with a fuse. Then he got to his feet, stooping and scuttling backwards toward cover as he shook a fine trail of white powder out of the flour bag.
"Allez! dépêchez-vous!" he whispered urgently, waving an arm. Neither of the Brooklyn boys needed to know French to understand his meaning; when Dernier acted like that, it meant something was going to explode in short order.
Even if he expected to work a miracle with pancakes and fuses and flour.
"Wait, this is really some kind of joke, right?" Bucky demanded as they reached the shelter of the trees, throwing himself to the ground more out of habit than actual caution. Dum Dum immediately perked up, always interested in a good joke - and then he caught sight of Dernier who had shaken the last of the flour out of the bag and was fumbling for a match.
"Hey, Frenchie," Dugan reached out, dabbing a finger into the flour on the ground. "You're wasting the grub."
Dernier smiled - an eerie flash of white teeth. "Attends, tu vas voir," he grinned, and struck a match with a flourish. For just one moment they could see his face in the warm glow, intent, eager, body shielding the light from enemy eyes. Then he touched the flame to the flour.
The flour burned.
It didn't burn like any flour Steve had ever seen before. The flame nipped across the ground, following the trail Dernier had laid, sparking brightly through the stones until it vanished in the darkness, out of sight.
Then there was a long stretch of dark silence, broken only by their collective heartbeats.
Nobody breathed. Dernier was so confident that somehow Steve almost caught himself believing that the weird pancake setup might actually work - which was patently ridiculous.
Bucky shifted impatiently and started to say something.
The next instant, a blast of light and heat and sound hit them, expanding outward in an explosion that sent the heavy doors flying. Dernier was up on his heels, clapping his hands and shouting in delight, but Steve could barely hear him through the ringing in his ears.
Bucky's mouth hung open - and not just as a precaution to keep his eardrums from bursting. "Son of a gun," he gasped, and Steve found himself nodding in stunned disbelief. Then gunfire split the air from the alerted guards, and it was time to move.
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"What was in those pancakes?"
It was hours later. The stronghold had been defeated, prisoners taken, and the sun was finally beginning to come up. Bucky picked his way through the rubble of the door towards Steve, eyebrows furrowed.
"I dunno," Steve answered, turning over a chunk of masonry with his toe. "Pretty sure it wasn't regular flour, though." He'd need to talk to Stark later about this, make sure the man hadn't enthusiastically sabotaged any of their other supplies.
"Exploding pancakes." Bucky shook his head in amazement. "And here I thought I'd seen everything." Then he sobered. "We probably shouldn't let him cook any more. I'd hate to see what he could do with some beans or a couple of potatoes."
Steve nodded - he had been thinking the same thing, at least until he could get his hands on Stark and ask Peggy to interpret Dernier's side of the story. "You know none of the rest of us are any great shakes at cooking," he pointed out, just for the sake of an argument. "If nothing else, at least Dernier's grub looked good."
Bucky snorted. "Your food might not be real pretty, but I usually don't worry I'll blow up after eating it."
Feigning indignation at the slight to his cooking artistry, Steve swung an arm at his friend. Bucky ducked without even looking, and then whirled to catch him in a headlock. By the time Peggy found them, they were both red-faced and laughing boyishly, each trying to trip the other up onto the stony ground.
It took three solid weeks of burned beans, cold K-rations, and loud Gallic protests before any of them let Dernier near their food supplies again.
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And this is where you say, "...what?"
Hee hee. Ahem. :)
Okay, let's be clear. I actually did not make this up, though I did fudge a little with the technicalities of laying explosives.
The direct precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). During WWII, the OSS was ordered to come up with unexpected ways to trick or attack the enemy. One of the unusual weapons the OSS made was an explosive made to look like flour that could be baked into beautiful, if slightly gritty, baked goods. The only drawback - it made people very sick if they ate it. The flour, dough, and baked product were all equally explosive. Easy to transport and hide in plain sight, it was used primarily on the Pacific war front. Doubt me? Go to the CIA official webpage and search for "Aunt Jemima" - the explosive's code name. It's there, along with a bunch of other interesting gadgets.
You cannot convince me that Howard Stark and Dernier did not immediately bond over their love of blowing things up, and that Stark did not give a bag of their new explosive to the unconventional French expert for testing.
That is all.
Allez! dépêchez-vous! = Come on, hurry up!
Attends, tu vas voir = Wait and see
Tu es un imbécile stupide = You are a stupid imbecile
Thanks a million to blobfish3690 and KoolKat189 for their help with French translation! They are amazing!
Shoutout - If you like the idea of Howard Stark in conjunction with baking, look up "The Mother of Invention" by Sholio on AO3. It is probably my single most favorite Howard fanfic. :)
ChildofGod: Yes, Steve isn't the only one in his group who had to fight just to get in the army. I'd imagine each man on his team had their own story that got them that far.
LaughyTaffy: Oh my - ice cream! You've found my Achilles heel. (Collapses dramatically with joy)