"It's scary as hell," Steve said. "Fallin', I mean."
James - because he still didn't feel like Bucky, or Barnes, and only sometimes like Sarge - was sceptical as hell of anything Steve said that implied he'd accidentally put himself in harms way. James remembered enough of Steve to know that the punk had the self-preservation instincts of a Nazi in old London town, so he knew that the kid hadn't damn well fallen .
"Try that again, asshole," James said, pleased to draw a smile from Steve. "I've heard the reports, read a few of 'em too, and I know that was no damn fall you suffered."
"Well," Steve said sheepishly, "maybe it was more of a dive than a fall. Still damn scary, though!"
Yeah, Bucky didn't doubt that part - Steve'd taken a plane full of bombs down into the ice in the North Sea, or maybe the Arctic Sea. James wasn't sure on that. Queenie'd given him a rundown of the details, but he was still a little woozy from whatever they were giving him for the pain in what was left of his arm, and details were passing him by just now.
"I dunno," James teased. "I mean, sure, you got a little wet, but you still have both your arms."
Steve rolled his eyes, leaning back in the big chair he'd sweet-talked some of the nurses into rolling in for him, and then smiled, real quiet for a minute.
"I thought you were dead, Buck," he said softly. "Didn't know what to do with myself until I got word Su'd found you. Someone radioed Petey right before we launched the attack, that Su was back, and that she'd gotten you home."
"What'd you do then?"
"Killed some Nazis, of course," Steve said easily. "C'mon, Buck, you know me better than that, as if I'd get so caught up in your thick skull havin' saved you one more time that I wouldn't do my job."
"Wasn't anything to do with my thick skull and you know it," Bucky said firmly. "Now be honest, punk, what'd you really do? Queenie's told me you and Carter and Phillips've been passing it off as goddamn engine failure, but my good friend Mr. Morita told me that you were bringin' that plane down on purpose, and he was handling all your communications - so be honest, this time, or I'll get outta this bed and beat your ass for lyin'."
"I got him! Pegs, Colonel, he's over here!"
Steve's only semi-conscious, but even unconsciousness wouldn't save him from Howard when he's hollering like that. It's so damn cold he doesn't know how he's still alive, and figures, somewhere that isn't shivering and trying to work out how many fingers he's gonna have left after the frostbite gets him, that this is one more thing to thank Doc Erskine for.
"Come on, Steve, wake the hell up before Carter gets here," Howard shouts right in his ear. There're choppers flying overhead, and they seem to be at sea, which makes sense, Steve thinks. Maybe. "She'll have my balls for a necklace if she thinks I've dredged you up dead!"
Steve can imagine that plain as day, and if he were up to it, it'd make him laugh.
Howard's rambling off a whole spiel of scientific stuff, and usually Steve'd be able to keep up with at least some of it - right now, he can just about keep up with the hammer of his heartbeat in his ears, louder even than the choppers above him.
"How in the hell is he still alive?" Colonel Phillips demands, and somewhere beyond the thumping in his ears, Steve can hear Phillips sloshing across the deck. "Get him inside, Stark, under some cover! We don't want him to die of hypothermia just after getting him back alive, goddamn it!"
Peggy is standing over him when he opens his eyes, just a little, and it looks like she might be crying. Doesn't seem like Peg, but maybe he'd cry, if he were in her position. He knows he cried when he heard Buck was back alive, and he likes to think that he means just as much to Peg as Bucky does to him, even if it's kinda in a different way.
There are too many hands all around him, tugging him this way and that, but they're all cold until Howard shoulders his way through the masses, pulls off his gloves, and holds Steve's face tight.
"If I didn't know Carter'd kill me for it, I'd kiss you, Rogers," Howard laughs, and then he rolls Steve smartly onto one side and smacks him hard, right between the shoulder blades.
Steve coughs and vomits up what feels like half an ocean, and suddenly realises that holy shit, he's cold as hell and twice as pissed off, and he doesn't even know if crashing the goddamn plane worked.
"The bombs," he heaves, clutching at Peggy's arm. "The bombs -"
"All gone, my darling," Peggy promises him, pushing his hair back from his face with cold, shivering fingers. "You did so well, you brave, stupid man."
"Say, Queenie," James asked. "Does everyone call me Bucky, or is that just Steve?"
"Well," she said, not looking up from the stack of reports balanced on her legs - she's all stretched out, slumped in a chair with her feet resting on his blanketed thigh, and with her army-issue shirt unbuttoned just so, James couldn't imagine anything more beautiful. "Most of the men call you Sarge, dear, except for Peter, who tries to avoid calling you anything at all."
"Listen, kid," Bucky says, when it's just him and Big Petey awake on a flight from an undisclosed location near Toulouse to another undisclosed location outside Naples. It's not a long flight, especially not in one of Stark's fancy planes, but the other guys are still taking the chance to catch a little shut-eye before they're thrown back into combat.
Petey never seems to sleep all that much. He's a weird kid, with the same sort of quiet strength as Steve but a lot more out-and-out charm. Queenie's strong, too, and charming as hell, but not like Petey. Petey's…
Bucky remembers meeting Cardinal Hayes, just once, when he was with Steve and his ma at mass after Steve got through a bout of pleurisy by some miracle. Mrs. Rogers had dragged them all the way into St. Patrick's, for mass at midday on a Sunday, had insisted on Bucky coming too so she could thank God for him and his help as well as Steve and Steve's health. Then, while he and Steve had been sitting in the very back seat of the cathedral, waiting for Mrs. Rogers to finish up her prayers after mass, the Cardinal had come out.
Bucky hadn't really known what to say - Steve'd recognised the crimson robes and the buretta, and had stammered out something about an Eminence, but Bucky was Jewish, is Jewish, and he hadn't really known what was appropriate for him to do.
Cardinal Hayes had had this sorta quiet, commanding air, like he knew just what he was doing, and that everyone should just believe him, and honestly, Bucky thinks Big Petey has just the same air. The kid is always calm and collected, and totally ready to do what needs doing.
"I don't like that you're seeing my sister," Petey says, in just the same fancy kinda voice as Queenie's, "but she seems to think you're an appropriate suitor, so I suppose it isn't my place to complain too loudly."
"I dunno about that," Bucky says, unable to hold back a smile. "I know if my sister was steppin' out with some punk I didn't like I wouldn't be long sayin' something about it."
Petey's smile holds a hundred secrets, looks a thousand years old, and he shakes his head.
"I do like you, Sarge," he says. "Someday, I may even trust you with my sister - but for now, a healthy suspicion is normal, I think."
"You ain't ever called me that before," Bucky says, delighted. "I think you're warming up to me, Petey, I really do."
"You've always been a good buddy to me, Buck," Steve said firmly. "This is just me paying back the favour, is all."
Steve had kept James company even more than Queenie, and while James appreciated it, he did wonder how it was that Steve had the time to sit by his bedside. He'd asked, of course, and had gotten a half answer about overdue time off in return, but now he was really beginning to wonder just what was wrong.
"Bullshit," he said. "Tell me the truth, Steve - how come there ain't nobody else has the time to sit around shootin' the breeze with me? We have a whole unit, I remember 'em, more or less. Where're-"
"I'm on leave," Steve cut in. "Kinda enforced leave. The higher ups don't know what to do with me, Bucky, not now that the Japs've surrendered. I'm a soldier without a war to fight - and they can't even send me to Berlin, because everyone knows my face too well because of those fuckin' movies."
James had watched a couple of Steve's propaganda movies with Queenie and Carter and Stark one night, when Steve was off talking to some of the higher ups he hated so much, and he'd laughed so hard he'd split some of the stitches on his stump.
"So you ain't a spy," James said. "What the fuck about it? Find something else to do. Train kids to survive a war. You managed it pretty well, until you tried to commit fucking suicide."
Steve's self-sacrifice was still a little raw with James, and he had no intention of working on it, even if Queenie kept insisting that he was being unfair by holding a grudge. James knew Queenie held some sort of grudge against her sister, for some fight they'd had before she signed up, though, so he didn't pay her too much mind.
"Listen," Steve said. "All I ever wanted to do was fight in this war. You know that-"
"Nah," James said, waving a hand to shut Steve the hell up. "You wanted to draw a comic book. I know that, even if you maybe wish I forgot it, huh?"
"When all this is done," Steve says one night in the mess, sleeves rolled up past his elbows and the sides of his hands covered in charcoal - where the hell he's getting it, Bucky doesn't know, but he'd bet his coffee rations that Carter's involved somehow - instead of shit, for once. "When all this is done, I'm gonna make a comic book about it."
"Making light of war, Captain?" Queenie says, her voice cooler than usual - Bucky's got an arm over her shoulders and can feel how tense she is, because Queenie takes war seriously, and doesn't approve of the movies that make it look like some big game, he knows because he's asked her what movie she's gonna let him bring her to see when they get to New York - and her eyes dark and angry. "Surely that's a little tasteless."
"Not makin' light of it," Steve assures her, looking thoughtful as he scritches something out on his little notebook. "Just… Recording it. Beyond all those lists of names and numbers. Makin' the names on the pages more real, y'know?"
"Letting the whole world see how handsome we are, he means," Morita whispers to Queenie, which gets a smile out of her - Bucky's glad, because she doesn't smile enough, and that's a damn shame. "What'll ya call it, Cap?"
"Dunno," Steve says, and Bucky could almost take him for genuinely thoughtful if it wasn't for that dirty little smile hanging on the corner of his mouth like a smoke. "Steve and the Stupids, maybe."
Queenie is genuinely thoughtful, tapping one long finger to her chin as the guys throw whatever shit they can lay their hands on at Steve, who's laughing and hiding behind a pretty pissed Carter.
"The Howling Commandos," she says, silencing all the shit the others are shouting, "already sound like comic book heroes. Why not stick with that, Captain?"
"Yourself and Steve," Queenie said, looking a little uneasy, "make certain high-ranking officials… Uncomfortable."
"It would have suited the higher ups better if the two of you had died," Carter said, blunt as a fist, just like always. "That way you could have been made the perfect, voiceless poster boys for noble death in war - noble sacrifice, I suppose. Nonsense, of course, but there you are. No one ever said those with power are also endowed with sense, I suppose."
"So now that we're alive and I'm too banged up to be put back in active combat," James hazarded, "they're afraid of what we might say, since we know the media want to hear from Steve?"
"Oh, the camera loves Steve," Carter said, rolling her eyes but somehow failing to actually look pissed. "Which means television people will come looking for him, of course, never mind the newspapers - those are already hammering down the door to get at him, and at you. Your story was leaked, and you're seen as a miracle of some sort."
"I kinda feel it," he admitted. "Nobody'll tell me anything about how I got home except that Queenie brought me - feel like fillin' me in, Carter?"
"Susan is perfectly capable of telling her own stories, Barnes," Carter said, all snotty like she got when she was teasing. "I shan't be the one to spoil her fun, I promise you."
Susan goes on these secret missions, sometimes.
Bucky doesn't like to pry too much, because she gets cagey for a day or two when she comes home from them, but he knows they're some kinda special ops, and that she brings that fancy lookin' bow of hers, with those feathered arrows. He's asked around, and Monty and some of the other English boys are into archery, and they say that mostly, people do it for fun, and that they've started moving to metal arrows with synthetic flights.
Su's are wood, whittled with a neat little knife she keeps tucked into her neat lace-up boots, and the feathers for the fletching comes from a neat little tin box she keeps tucked into her pack, right at the bottom. Bucky ain't ever seen feathers like 'em before, so he assumes they're from some bird specific to England, and he doesn't like to ask.
Su gets a bit weird about her bow. She's damn good with it - can split an arrow without breaking a sweat, like one of those trickshot guys at a fair but much better looking - but doesn't like to talk about it, just like she doesn't like talking about the time she spent living in the countryside when the war started. Petey talks about that, sometimes, and talks about fencing - he and Monty found a pair of foils somewhere, when they were in London, and they've been poking holes in one another every spare minute since - but Su's quieter about it.
The secret missions, though… Bucky's been approached, very carefully and with a sort of "not yet" attached, about secret missions. He's a crack shot, he knows it, and while it's never actually said, he reckons he can make a good guess of just what they want him to do, someday in the future. He doesn't think he has the temperament for assassination - he does his duty when they're on assignment, and he's good at it, he knows he is, but he doesn't think he could kill for the sake of killing. When they're on assignment, he's killing to keep his boys safe, but outside of that…
Queenie's ice cold, sometimes, and she sees politics that Bucky can't even imagine. He loves her - there, he's said it now - but sometimes, it's like she's this whole other person, someone Bucky can never know, and it scares him a little.
"I wonder if I'll be able to shoot again," he said quietly, when it was just him and Queenie and the light from outside cutting in through the blinds. "You know, when they give me this new arm they keep talkin' about."
"Howard has offered to make you one specially," Queenie pointed out, settling sleepily under his arm and sliding one hand over his chest. "I'm sure he'd make it so you can shoot as much as you like, if you ask him."
"Nah," James said, shaking his head. "I'm gonna do this normal, at least at first. Maybe if I can't get the hang of it I'll ask Howard to make me somethin' special."
"He could make it to match Steve's shield," Queenie said, hooking her foot over his knee. "Captain America and his plucky sidekick, Bucky Boy."
"Hey now," James said softly, leaning his cheek against her shiny hair. "I ain't nobody's sidekick, 'cept maybe yours."
"Oh?"
"I asked you something along those lines, if I'm rememberin' right," he said, suddenly nervous. What if he was remembering wrong?
"So you did," Queenie said, lifting her head to smile at him. "Do you remember how you asked, Sergeant Barnes?"
So he took a bullet. It happens.
It's only in his hip - didn't even hit the bone, never mind anything major - and yeah, sure, it's bleeding like hell, but so is the slice Gabe took from a flying piece of shrapnel from an exploding tank, so Bucky doesn't see what the fuss is.
"I shall tie you down and keep you here if you're going to insist on getting yourself injured every time you're let out," Queenie says, hands on her hips and hair coming loose from that neat twist that Bucky finds so damn appealing. "Every bloody time, Barnes!"
"Aw, c'mon, Agent P," he wheedles. "It ain't every time."
"This is the fourth time you've been shot!" she fumes. "You are a sharpsooter, James! You aren't even supposed to be in a position to get shot!"
"I gotta get stuck in sometimes, Queenie," he points out, wincing as the nurse begins to stitch him up, now that the slug is out. "Can't let my boys do all the hard work, can I?"
She makes the funniest noise he's ever heard, one which makes the nurse frown up at him, which is mesmerising and typical of women, and then storms away.
"Hey, Queenie!" he calls after her, stunned, because while she often gets mad at him she's never yet walked away from him, not since they kinda officially became an item.
It's hard to be official, in an active war zone, but Bucky's doing his best. Susan's worth it, he's pretty sure.
"Queenie! Hey! Susan!"
She turns then, and she's goddamn crying and he feels like a complete asshole.
"C'mere, Queenie," he says, holding out a hand. "I ain't gonna die, I promise - I'm always gonna come home to you, I promise."
"I'll come and fetch you if you don't," she warns him, but she's smiling a little now. "I swear to God, James-"
"What if home was the same place for us both?" he asks, startling them both. Him more than her, probably, since Bucky's never given much thought to this kinda thing before, but now that he has thought about it - for a minute, tops - it makes perfect sense. "You and me, some little place back home, or in London, whichever you want-"
"I am not going to live with you," she says, gone all pink, "unless you make it worth my while, James."
"Well," he says, "I gotta have a ring to propose, but I ain't got one here, so I'm not gonna do it now. This is just a heads up that I'm gonna do it."
"Hey, Carter, you got a number for Stark?"
Carter and Queenie shared a grin as Steve fiddled at the useless fingers of James' new arm, and it took all his willpower to keep from cursing up a storm at the pair of them.
"Just because I'm marryin' you doesn't mean I'm afraid to tell you to shut up," he warned Queenie, which just made her laugh. "I said I'd try this thing and if I hated it, I'd call Stark. Well, I've had it an hour, and I hate it, so I'm callin' Stark."
"So impatient," Steve said out the corner of his mouth. "Worse'n a kid, I swear to God."
"I won't disagree," Queenie whispered, plenty loud for him to hear, and James wondered when they'd decided to become a comedy act. "If we didn't love him, how would we ever put up with him?"
"Listen to me," Susan says, with that red silk scarf tied around her neck again. "This is a dangerous mission, even by your standards. Please, James - please be careful. For me."
She's got one hand over her chest, and he knows her fingers are resting on the little hoop of metal he beat into a ring and hung on a scrap of chain, as a placeholder for the engagement ring he's going to buy her when this is all over.
What can he say? There's romance in every soul, even his.
"I'm always careful, Queenie," he promises, smiling so much that he almost misses it when she stretches up on her toes, which leaves him surprised - he's not going to turn down a kiss from his best girl, but hell, she's usually the one making him promise to be discreet, the one complaining about how obvious Steve and Carter are, and kissing him here in full view of the entire damn camp ain't exactly discreet.
He's glad, kinda. He's seen the way some of those punks've been eyeing Queenie up, and he's not the sharing kind.
"I'll come back," he promises again. "Su, Susan, you know I will. I've sworn, right? So I'm gonna. It'll be fine."
"Now you've gone and done it," she sighs, letting her hands slide down his chest from where she'd looped them behind his neck. "Just be ready when I come to fetch you, James - I'll likely be a grumpy old witch from all this snow, and I shan't be in any mood to hang about."
He loses his grip on the train almost exactly a day later. Not that he ever tells her that.
"I don't remember my sister's name," he admitted to Steve - because he could admit it to Steve, when he couldn't even to Queenie, who always talked about her sister and brothers, even though her and Petey always seemed to be bickering and she had told him that she didn't talk to her sister, sometimes.
But Steve just took the holes in his memory in stride, like it was no big deal that James couldn't remember why people called him Bucky or what the big ride that made Steve sick in Coney Island was called or how long his old man had been dead or what his little sister's goddamn name was.
"She looks like me," he said, angry with himself for remembering everything but her name. "She's steppin' out with that kid whose parents have the deli across from the school, and she likes to wear blue ribbons in her hair. But I can't remember her goddamn name."
"It's Rebecca," Steve said, passing over his sketchbook with a smile - the girl in the sketch looks a lot like the memories James is forcing up of his sister, only a little older. "Everyone calls her Becky - Becky and Bucky. She's three years younger than you, and Isaac proposed to her just before you shipped out. We had a party."
"There was a cake," James remembered suddenly. "It was… White and blue. Her favourite colours. Ma never let her get a white and blue dress because it wasn't practical."
"Your ma was always practical like that," Steve agreed. "Can't fault her on it, really - Becky's always getting stuck in something that means she's gonna be a mess by the end of the day."
"Like you," James said. "Always gettin' into trouble, right?"
"Listen," Bucky says, "I'm not even surprised. I'm just pissed the hell off."
Steve heals so fast it kinda scares the nurses, who are the only ones who seem to do any goddamn work in the medical tent. He's big and he's bulky and he heals so fast no one knows what to do with him, but he's not invincible.
Try telling Steve that.
"It's just a little burn," he says easily, shrugging as if half his damn uniform wasn't burned off his back by a flamethrower, as if Carter hasn't been stuck in Phillips' command tent for the last three hours, convincing the colonel that no, Steve isn't a crazy person, and that yes, Steve is competent and should be allowed to participate in further operations.
Bucky isn't sure he agrees with Carter, but he's not going to say so. Not to her face, anyways.
"It's a whole lot of burn," he corrects Steve instead, because Steve's been living with Bucky's fussing his whole life, more or less, so he's used to it. "Fuck sake, Rogers, if I hadn't taken the sonofabitch out he would've fried you alive-"
"Buck," Steve says, firm and deep like when he's talking to a big group of troops. "I'm-"
"Using that fuckin' Captain America voice on me," Bucky snaps, deeply insulted. "As if that shit is going to work on me, asshole - ain't a thing in this whole world that's gonna keep me from shoutin' at you enough to make my ma proud, because I've never met anyone so fuckin' stupid as you were today in my entire goddamn life."
"I've figured out a way to get the army off your back," Howard said, bursting into James' room as if it wasn't half past ass in the morning. "You should stage a big, showbizzy wedding. I'll pay for everything."
"Say, Stark," James managed, fumbling with the covers and trying not to show off too much scarring - he still wasn't comfortable with just anyone seeing it, and even though Stark had seen it when he was measuring James up for a new arm, well, this wasn't business. It wasn't pleasure, either, though, he knew that for sure. "Go fuck yourself."
"All I'm saying," Stark said, collapsing into the chair by James' bed, "is that nobody's going to look too hard at what you and the big guy are doing if they think you're just a pair of newlyweds, happy to be home safe from the war with your English roses."
He was probably right, was the worst part - Steve had a lot of ideas about ways they could do good, ways that the army wouldn't like, ways that sometimes veered into outright vigilantism in a way that left James feeling kinda wrong-footed, because they didn't seem to fit with what he remembered of Steve.
Then again, sometimes Steve looked at him as if he didn't fit the Bucky Steve knew, so maybe what Susan was always saying about war changing people was true.
"How're you so wise, Queenie?"
They're sitting on an overturned tyre, belonging to something big, and it's quiet. The Howlies don't get put on watch, when they're back at base, but Bucky likes to take a stroll in the moonlight, especially when he can coax Su into joining him.
"I don't know what you mean, James," she says, shifting closer under his arm - it's cold enough that Bucky reckons it might even snow, and Queenie's wrapped up in a coat that has the right name stitched on the chest but is so big it has to be Petey's, it just has to be. "Sensible, certainly, but wise? That's more my little brother's arena, I'm afraid."
He's heard plenty about Su's little brother and sister, serious Edmund and happy little Lucy, and he wishes he knew what to say when Su cuts herself off from talking about her sister. He can't imagine not talking about Becky, which he does whenever he's given an opening.
"Nah, Su," he says, nudging her face up, a brush of his temple against hers - he kinda wants to draw her, and sure, he's never been as good with a pencil as Steve, but he's better'n most, and he thinks that he could trap some of what's so beautiful about Su by starlight on a page - and making her meet his eye. "You're so calm about all this mess, you know? It's like you've seen it all before."
Sometimes, when he says things like that, she gets this hard, scared look in her eye, and even if it's gone as soon as it appears, it still stuns him, every time he sees it.
"We were at war for some time before your president decided to jump in, James," she points out evenly. "And I did grow up in London, where the bombs hit so hard-"
"I know, I know," he says, shrugging it off, because things like that make her sad, and he hates her being anything but happy. "My ma'd call you an old soul, Susan Pevensie."
"Maybe she'd be right," Susan says, tipping her head back. "Maybe there's part of me that's lived another life, under different stars."
Bucky looks up with her, watching the stars twinkle in the frost-sharpened air, and smiles.
"From where I'm sitting," he says, leaning his head against hers, "these stars right here are the best there are."
The first arm Stark presented to James was plated all in chrome, overlapping rings of steel overlaid with shiny, shiny chrome, looking like a fancy car part and not at all what James wanted.
The second arm was better - it was still metal, because James wasn't sure Howard was aware that other materials existed, except maybe plastic - but still a little heavier than he'd like.
"I'm gonna be takin' it off and on for everything," he pointed out, shrugging his shoulder to get a feel for the new limb. "I dunno, Howard, it's great and all, but-"
"I've got another design," Stark blurted out, rocking on the balls of his feet and looking fit to burst. "It's more permanent, but it's better. Full range of movement. Maybe some sensation, if I can work the upgrades into the schematics."
The silence that greeted this announcement filled the whole room, and James broke it by laughing.
"You fuckin' asshole," he choked out, "makin' me think these hunks of crap were your best work - c'mon, then, show me the schematics, let me see what you're gonna be sticking in my shoulder."
"All I'm sayin'," Bucky says, and it's maybe the tenth time he's said that today, "is that you don't know what they're puttin' in ya - oh, wait, that's never fuckin' stopped you before, has it?"
"I'm still here, ain't I?" Steve says, shrugging it off like it's nothing. "It's not like this is a big deal, Buck-"
"Sure it is!" Bucky shouts, waving his arms, and he knows that he looks just like his ma used before she went for the wooden spoon. "Steve, c'mon, this is just plain stupid."
"I'm doing it, Bucky," Steve says, pulling his shirt over his head and holding his arm out to the greasy-haired guy on the little stool beside him. "It's not your choice to make."
"James," Queenie says, appearing beside him and rubbing gingerly at the bandages wrapped around her right forearm, just under the elbow, the same as where they're wrapped on him and Carter and the guys. "It's just a tattoo, darling. I'm sure no one is going to pump Steve full of cyanide through this needle."
"I'm a fan," the tattooist assures Bucky, pushing up his own sleeve to the shoulder, to show off a pretty decent inking of Steve's shield. "I wouldn't hurt the Captain if you paid me, Sarge. I got this."
"I wanna get outta this bed before they put me under again," he'd insisted, and somehow, it had worked. Queenie and Carter had mountains of paperwork to get caught up on, and that meant James had been able to talk Steve into finding him some clothes so he could go into town without his ass hanging out.
He had some cash, and one hell of an IOU from the army, and with those tucked into the inner pocket of the jacket he'd borrowed from Farnsworth (a little narrow in the shoulder, and a little long, but it'd do for now), James felt perfectly confident walking into the jewellers Steve knew a little too well for his interest to be casual.
"I need a ring," James said to the pretty girl behind the counter. "Somethin' with a sapphire, and maybe a little diamond - nothin' too showy, or too big. She ain't that kinda girl."
The girl behind the counter smiled, and twenty minutes later James walked out, without any cash and with a slightly smaller IOU, a little box weighing down his pants pocket.
"You picked Carter's ring yet?" he asked, feeling like whistling up into the damp grey London skies. "I figure her for an emeralds kinda dame."
"Amethyst," Steve said absently, and hell, he looked like he was about to burst into song. "Square, not round."
James took out the little box to look at the ring again, pleased as punch by the round-cut sapphire, with a little diamond on either side, and tucked it away in safety.
"Queenie ain't that kinda girl," he said decisively, and led the way back to the hospital.
If Susan guessed that he'd gone out, she didn't say anything - she just sat on the edge of his bed and read aloud from the newspapers until the nurses came to fetch him down to theater, and then she stood back with Carter and Steve, and smiled even though James knew she was scared silly by all that could go wrong while he was on the table.
But Queenie wasn't the kinda girl who let a little thing like terror stop her smiling when she knew he needed it.
"I'm perfectly fine, James," Susan says, patting his hand as if she doesn't have a big old hole in her gut. "It's only a scratch, darling. I've had worse."
Bucky can't imagine her ever having had worse than a goddamn hunting knife an inch and a half deep in her belly, but now isn't the time to say that - now's the time to hold on tight to her hand, so she can squeeze like hell when the doc pours surgical spirits over the wound to clean it, and begins to stitch it up.
It's one of those secret missions, that's what it is, she's still got her armguard strapped on and her hair scraped back practically from her face. She looks like a warrior princess, the way Steve drew her in that dumb comic he made of them all as superheroes when it was raining so hard they couldn't see a foot in front of their faces last week, and Bucky's sick with worry.
Just how dangerous are these secret missions of hers, and why is she the only one who can do them?
"James," she says, quiet and white-knuckled. "Stop it. I'm perfectly fine, darling."
But she isn't - she's gonna have one helluva scar from that damn knife, and Bucky knows he's right to worry when Petey appears in the mouth of the tent, all frowns and disapproval.
"You're getting reckless, Susan," he says, shaking his head. "You were always better from a distance."
Bucky wants to agree - if she's shooting assholes from a distance, they can't stick goddamn knives in her belly - but there's something in the way Petey says that that he doesn't get, that he doesn't want to get stuck in the middle of, so he sits there, and holds Su's hand, and smiles back when she smiles at him, all while the doc's needle is slipping into her skin and back out, over and over, forming twelve neat stitches that are scary black against her pale skin.
"Hey, Queenie," he says, pulling her arm over his shoulders so he can get her back to the tent she shares with Carter. "Do me a favour."
"Of course, darling," she says, lolling all over him so much he figures the nurses must've slipped her something for the pain. "What is it?"
"Maybe don't stand in front of any more knives," he says, "because I don't think my nerves can take it."
She laughs right up until Bucky pulls back the tent flap to reveal Steve's bare ass and Carter's stockings, and starts up again when Bucky lifts her clean off her feet and runs back to the tent that's serving as the Howlies' barracks for now, spluttering about how damn irresponsible Steve is.
There were so many bandages wrapped around his shoulder and chest that he couldn't see shit when he finally woke up, but everyone assured him that it had been a complete success - Doctor Vasquez kept promising him that everything had gone perfectly, and Howard was following her around like a lovesick puppy, saying Maria, Maria I'll give you anything you want, please come work for me, Maria, please .
Steve and Carter kept on smiling fit to burst, but Queenie just say very quietly beside him, her hand sitting right over his heart on his chest.
"Hey," he said, putting his own hand over hers. "I'm good, Su. Promise."
"You died on that operating table," she said, her voice small and wobbly. "Your heart stopped beating, James - it was worse than when I found you in that blasted laboratory."
"Yeah," he said, "but you kissed me back to life, right, Queenie?"
Her eyes narrowed dangerously, and she smacked him firmly in his good shoulder.
"Not this time," she said, "and I'll think twice about it next time, if you make a habit of this."
It's bitterly cold, but that's never worried Susan.
Cold has been something of an amusement to her, since Narnia - nothing can ever hope to compare to Jadis' winter, not even this bitter Alpine freeze, seeping through her fur-lined gloves, likely dampening her bowstring, ruining her good, sturdy socks, knitted with an appalling lack of skill and an endearing wealth of determination by Peggy during those dark knights before they became SSR liaisons to the Howling Commandos - so Susan marches on, her snowshoes shuffing and squelching on the unevenly frozen surface of the snow beneath her.
Colonel Phillips did everything in his considerable, fierce power to stop Susan from attempting this - he thinks it's impossible that James might have survived the fall from the train, and if Susan were any other woman, any other person, she might agree. Susan is not any other woman, however, and knows that a great deal of impossible things are not only possible but in fact likely, and she has decided to include James' survival among those things.
Force of will cannot change the world, she knows, but it's a damned good place to start.
She has a fair idea of where James might have been taken - the little village half a mile from the rail line, tucked into a bend in the river, is unlikely, but there is a suspected HYDRA based a further mile and a quarter east from there, and so it is that Susan is just less than a mile and a half from where James fell, peering at the world through green-tinted glass goggles and wishing to Aslan that the bloody snow would clear just a little, so she might see.
Which is how she nearly gets shot, the first time. The squids have a guard, miracle of miracles, and she was so caught up in the lack of visibility that she forgot to think of such a thing.
She kills him with a little Stark Industries special, a neat little handgun that Howard played with just for her and Peggy, and tucks the gun back into the pocket in the leg of her trousers. She prefers her bow, likes that it fits her now as it hadn't when she came home from Narnia, but it just isn't practical in this weather - oh, she could make the shot, of course she could, there aren't circumstances in which Susan Pevensie, once a queen and now an assassin, could not make a shot, but even still, she has to think practically.
James needs her to think practically.
The base itself has only a skeleton guard - she dispatches the first four she meets easily enough, a carefully placed elbow here, a deftly thrown sliver of steel there, two neat shots from Howard's special toy to finish it off - and she slips through the shadows as easily as if she's playing hide-and-go-seek with the dryads in the orchards at Cair Paravel, or in Diggory's house with Ed and Lu and Pete.
"Come now, darling," she murmurs, choking a young man in an elegantly cut but wholly evil uniform until he stops struggling. "Let me find you - make it easy for me."
She hears the screaming, and she hopes she's wrong but is relieved to be right all the same, when it leads her to James. He's strapped to a steel table in a white room, surrounded by doctors with the squid on their shoulders, and he's so still, now that the screaming has stopped.
For this, she knocks an arrow to her bow - let them know that Hawkeye is claiming this kill, that Hawkeye will avenge any slights against her and hers.
Five arrows later, she is bent over James' table, unhooking him from all the monitors he's attached to and wishing she didn't have to do this, but she does-
He goes still again, once the screaming has stopped and the reek of seared flesh means the cauterising is done, and she brushes her lips against his as an apology.
"Queenie," he whispers, pale eyes bleary with pain and confusion and blood loss. "Wha-"
"Up you get, darling," she says cheerfully, smiling despite her tears. "We've got a long walk ahead of us, and I fear I have only one pair of snowshoes."
She takes a bullet in the side from a foolish soldier she thought she'd killed on the way out, while she has James balanced over her shoulders, but she steps on the fool's throat and ensures he shan't shoot anyone else, and she considers it a small price to pay for James' return.