"Bravery is the capacity to perform properly
even when scared half to death."
Gen. Omar Bradley
Elsenborn, Belgium; December 17, 1944
The SS man's jacket snapped in the chilling breeze. His teeth were chattering between lips spread wide in a blissful smile, shoulders sagging as if he were releasing a pent-up breath. His clothes were in tatters, body smeared with mud and traces of red, but behind the mask of exhaustion and terror stood Tony Stark.
Steve was almost too shocked to see Clint's body tense, arms raising as they focused his rifle with deadly precision over Tony's heart. Brilliant grin falling limp, Tony raised his hands higher in the air, shaking slightly beneath his gloves.
"What are you doing in a Kraut uniform, you damn traitor?" Clint seethed. He was shaking too, but not from fear or cold. His body stood taut with rage, eyes narrowed with a chilling glare as cold as the crackling ice beneath Steve's boots. A wild, feral energy snapped around him, and Steve stepped forward, extending a steadying hand in the sailor's direction.
"Funny story, actually, I landed in the middle of nowhere without another soldier in sight, so I had to improvise my way out of getting bayoneted!" A tense laugh escaped Tony's lips. Steve fought to remember where Tony had been blown off to in the jump into Normandy. That day seemed like eons ago, crowded out of his memory by endless days of fighting. "I borrowed this from a corpse and no one gave me any trouble behind enemy lines."
The barrel of Clint's rifle swung from Tony's chest to that of one of the German escapees, who forced his hands higher. "Yeah? And you buddied up with these little angels on the way, huh?"
Tony's eyes widened and he reached out as if to stop Clint from atop his tank. "No, don't! That's Luck, he's one of my friends –"
"Your friend?" Clint hissed, his finger flexing on the trigger of his gun. Alarm sparked through Steve and he snatched for Clint's gun, clenching the freezing metal of the barrel. Steel crunched beneath his grip, and when he released his hand the cylinder of the barrel had crumpled inward. Clint glowered at Steve for a moment, his fury still red and raw, but he stepped back as Steve gestured for Tony to rejoin the men on the bank.
Swimming in the frigid water with the enormous SS cloak surely wasn't an easy feat, but Tony clambered onto the ground dripping wet but alive. Steve grasped his hand and pulled him up beside the rest of the men. The eyes of the German soldiers flickered from Steve to Clint to Tony, confused and terrified in the face of a foreign tongue.
Steve nodded back to the soldiers, speaking over the conspicuous click of Clint loading his pistol. "You got in with a tank crew?"
"I figured it was safer than rouging it on foot. Luck came with me. We've been together since Falaise." Recognizing his name, a fair-haired and hard-faced soldier looked up and made eye contact with Tony. The latter smiled back at him, his apparent confidence betrayed by his rigid shoulders and darting glances around.
"Look, Cap, what's going on here? You know this guy?" Richardson called from his rear position.
"He's a friend from the States. He's no Nazi." Steve called back. Clint disguised his snort of disbelief as a cough.
"Are you imprisoning us now?" Tony's eyes shone, and he looked almost hopeful at the prospect of his capture. "Take us back to your HQ. They'll cooperate, I promise."
"We don't have an HQ," Steve admitted. "I think we're behind enemy lines right now. Rich, retreat to the rear. Let's try to get back to friendly territory."
Tony blinked slowly, as if he couldn't believe what Steve was saying. "You mean... You're on your own?"
"Not for long if you get yourself moving." Fishing a pistol from his pocket, Clint jabbed the barrel into Tony's back. "Step on it."
-o0o-
The trek through the forest was almost beautiful. Steve allowed himself to glance away from his path for a moment, seconds of respite from the constant vigilance demanded when wandering through enemy territory. Ice fractals encrusted rows and rows of deep green boughs, scattering the fading sunlight across the soft, white canvas of recent snowfall. Every tree seemed dressed for Christmas, the twinkling ice dripping down the short needles in perfect diamonds. The silence save the sound of birdsong gave the forest a tone of the ethereal, as if Steve and his companions had stepped into some fantasy picture book. In a world like this, one could almost forget the war.
Clint and Tony stood behind him, stooped at the waist to avoid knocking any snow off of the branches and giving away their position. They were far more focused on attacking each other with snippy comments than any possible enemy encampments on the left flank, which Clint was supposed to be watching.
"Comfy in that suit of yours?" Clint muttered, and Tony scowled. They were both buried knee-deep in snow, forcing them to flail their limbs about to make any progress in the dense snowbanks. Clint's face spelled murder, but Tony merely looked exasperated.
"Seeing as I am soaked with water and freezing cold, I'd say no." Steve felt bad for him, smothered in his dripping garments that were gathering frost. The winter was cold enough with reasonably dry gear, and Tony had just swum through a frozen river. How he could still speak was a miracle. Then again, Tony would rather leap from the Empire State Building than be bested in a battle of words.
"You know what they do with deserters back at CP? It ain't pretty."
"Please, spare me your childish attempts at intimidation. I understand you're angry, but this is ridiculous. Steve, don't you agree?"
Sighing to himself, Steve kept his eyes firmly fixed on the horizon. It was hard to make out the gleam of binoculars amid the glittering wonderland of snow and frost, but he feigned his best attempt. "Don't drag me into this, Tony."
"See? He agrees with me! Why do you hate me so much?" Tony threw his hands in the air, sending a rush of powdered snow down on the shoulders of the men. Everyone froze, and Steve lowered himself into the bank of snow until it was chest-level. The telltale sound of rifles cocking or artillery grinding seemed to pound in Steve's ears, but he dispelled these fears and hunted for the sounds of German defenses in the twinkling silence. None came.
"Oh, let me think. You send my friends to a watery grave, you collaborate with the Ruskies and the Germans with weapons that are sending American boys to their graves, and you're an insufferable asshat. Need I go on?"
"Language," Steve called back, but his interjection was drowned out by Tony's exasperated reply.
"When will you get your thick skull around the fact that I didn't order the hit on the Reuben James? And I've cut ties with both of those countries now! I'm a changed man!"
Clint snorted with disbelief. "The day Tony Stark becomes a changed man is the day the Germans win this damned war. I don't believe it for a second."
"Fellas, I hate to break this up, but I think we have a more important matter at hand." Steve looked back over his shoulder to see the two with crossed arms, chins lifted and refusing to look at each other. Just the attitude he wanted from the men who would be watching his back. To his right, Richardson and Laurey snickered behind their gloves.
-o0o-
It was cruel and unusual torture on Steve's part to put Clint and Tony in the same foxhole. As much as Clint respected Rogers as a solid strategist and a good man, this was overstepping his boundaries. The past four hours had been dedicated to entrenching tools and axes and bloody, split fingers while Tony sat on the side in a grand impression of work.
"The Tigers are just marvelous, aren't they? The addition of the legs is an ingenious modification, I can't believe I didn't think of it myself!"
"Yes, I'm positively shocked," Clint raised the pitch of his voice in an impression of Tony's snobbish attitude.
Whether he was oblivious or simply ignoring him, most likely the latter, Tony gestured vaguely with his entrenching tool toward the sky. "And have you seen the wings Rogers is working on?"
"The wings? What about them?" Clint brought the blade of his ax down in the split of the tree, scattering shards of wood around his feet. His arms throbbed with the steady burn of work and purpose, and his throat tightened with anger. He attacked the tree again with a vigorous furor, imagining the splintering wood was Tony's neck.
"I can tell he's trying to improve a model of mine the Germans used on him. He does have a sharp thought or two every once and a while, I'll admit it. Don't know where he put them, though, since all he carries around is that damn satchel. Captain America..."
With a deep groan of age-old agony, the tree bowed at its split and began to tumble to the side. It wasn't a particularly large one, so Clint braced its fall with his shoulders and rested it gently on the ground. The crash of falling trees would surely attract an artillery barrage from the Krauts. Starting on the loose branches, Clint's arm rose and fell with robotic precision.
Tony dragged his toe through the icy veneer of snow and pine needles glazing the frozen ground, the image of nonchalance. His hands were tucked under his arms and his cheeks were flushed flaming red with cold, but otherwise he could have been his normal self. Except for his eyes, Clint supposed. They had the look of fleeing prey in them, a skittishness and crystallized fear hidden not quite out of sight. They were the eyes of a hunted man.
"Why don't you take a stab at the hole, will you?" Clint growled, and Tony simply shrugged.
"There's nothing left to do except that last log of yours. It's got to be at least four feet deep, wouldn't you reckon? Anyways, back to what I was saying."
"Damn what you were saying! I can't build this whole foxhole by myself!" Damn that Rogers, damn this winter, damn it all! Clint wheeled on Tony, whose eyes fell to the ax in his hand with a flicker of fear darting across his features.
"Tell you what, Barton – I've got a bottle of whiskey stored in the hole. Why don't we break it open and relax for a minute?"
Clint's grip tightened on the ax, tugging on the split skin of his hand. His own blood felt frigid against his palm. Warmth was a distant memory. Every part of his body was numb and bitten by the fangs of burrowing frost. Avoiding trench foot was quite the chore since Clint's boots were constantly waterlogged. He was more than miserable, and Tony was only irritating him more.
"You're going to drink on the front lines? Are you –"
An explosion drew his attention elsewhere. The ground trembled beneath his feet like a rolling wave, and Clint dove headfirst into the foxhole as a whistling, screaming whir split through the calm of the air. The wooden logs only covered half of the hole, so Clint and Tony had to huddle shoulder-to-shoulder to hide under its menial protection. As he brought his hands around his neck and ducked down into a ball, Clint's fingers brushed a glass half-hidden beneath the pine needles. Tony hadn't been lying about that whiskey after all.
During the many shellings he had endured in the war, Clint found it best to distract himself with other thoughts. While the very air seemed to scream and bleed and the earth itself seemed more like water than solid ground, he forced himself to think about the Reuben James. Only the good things, of course, like his excursions through the towns with Farley and Owen and Sabin. All dead now – no, don't think that. Dinner with the British soldiers in London, playing cards on the North Carolina, the eyes of the Japanese pilot boring through him with his death-mask of a face...
"Enough!" Clint shouted into the mud, his own voice drowned out in the deafening explosions, shell after shell burrowing into the earth, each with its own radius of destruction and disaster. Clint was blinded in the mud, deafened from the sounds, numbed to the sensation of the whole horrid war.
A rabid anger filled him, and his fingers itched for anything to fire back with. The thrill of the violence called to him, and he yearned for the challenge with every fiber of being. He was a soldier, and he would be damned if he didn't do his job.
((Hey everyone! I wanted to post on my birthday yesterday but didn't get around to it, so here's a regular Friday update! Thanks for reading!))