We Were Soldiers
70. America's New Hope
"Are you sure you oughta be up and about so soon?" Steve asked as he followed Bucky through the camp. His friend had been released from the hospital and now wobbled his way towards the 107th's barracks with his box of personal belongings in his arms. Steve had offered to carry them, because even after a night of food and broken sleep, Bucky still looked pale as a corpse and unsteady on his legs, but Bucky had merely said, "They're mine," before setting off into the crowd. The words had hurt; Steve couldn't remember Bucky being possessive before. He'd always been a sharing kinda guy.
"Doc Peacock said I just need some rest," Bucky called over his shoulder. The crowd parted, men nodding and smiling at him, clapping him on the shoulder, telling him how good it was to see him again. Bucky thanked them, but kept his gaze fixed firmly ahead. "And Audrey's got better things to do than run around fetching cookies for me all day. Besides, if you stay in the hospital too long, they make you give blood. We—I mean, I, learnt that the hard way."
Steve didn't bother arguing. The camp's senior doctor had seemed more concerned with freeing up beds for emergencies than making sure Bucky was fit and healthy. The guy had given Bucky only a cursory examination before diagnosing exhaustion and malnutrition. Soon after, the rest of the injured POWs from the HYDRA factory had been brought in, and Bucky actually seemed glad that the doctor wasn't taking care of him anymore.
Beds were not easily come by. Steve had spent the night in a bedroll in the hospital, sleeping on the ground beside Bucky's bed. Thanks to the serum in his blood, he didn't need as much sleep these days, so he'd lain awake well past midnight listening to Bucky's fitful mumbles. Every so often, Steve's friend would jolt upright, eyes wide and panicked, skin slicked with sweat, as if torn from some terrible nightmare.
The first time Steve had offered him comforting words, Bucky had scowled at him, snapped, "I'm fine," and rolled over onto his other side, turning his back to Steve and tugging the woollen blanket roughly over his shoulders. For a split second, the look in Bucky's eyes had reminded him of that moment in the Krausberg factory when he'd shot a German colonel without warning or call for surrender. Steve was slowly coming to realise that the friend he'd freed from the cold metal table was a harder man than the one who'd offered him a heartfelt farewell and a jaunty salute at the Stark Expo five months ago. In all the ways that counted, he was Bucky. But he was also different.
"Will you at least let me give you a hand carrying that stuff?" Steve asked, decreasing his stride so that he didn't get ahead of his tottering friend. All of Bucky's personal effects were in that box—save for his book, which was peeping out from his jacket pocket.
"No need, it's not heavy. Mostly just letters and stuff." Bucky attempted a smile, but it didn't come easy. "Gusty said he's evicting the guy who took over my bed. Hope nobody's sore about me coming back."
Steve's response died on his lips as he stepped around the corner of a tent and walked straight into a very familiar figure. Gilmore Hodge was shorter than Steve remembered him, and the man's lips twisted up into a sneer as soon he recognised Steve. Then, Bucky turned the corner, and the sneer faded to a more general frown.
"Sarge, it's good to have you back," said Hodge. And Steve was gobsmacked, because it sounded like Hodge actually meant the words coming out of his mouth.
Bucky shifted uncomfortably, then deflected the topic elsewhere. He'd done that a few times, since getting back to camp. "Thanks. Steve here tells me you and he go way back."
"Oh. Err. Yeah. That. The Project. Way back." Hodge glanced at his boots, his hands, the sky, even the faces of other soldiers around him. Anything, it seemed, to avoid the topic of Steve. Made sense. By now, there probably wasn't a single person in the whole camp who didn't know who Steve was, or what he'd done. People hailed him as a hero, even though he'd only wanted to do the right thing. Hodge had spent a whole week telling everyone in the Project that Steve would never amount to anything. Now, he was being forced to eat his own words.
Steve felt something stir within his chest. It felt suspiciously—and oddly—like pity. Five months ago, he would've given anything to see Hodge brought down a peg or two, especially if it was of his own doing. Now, he was the bigger guy. The stronger guy. The fitter guy. Gloating over Hodge's discomfort made him feel a whole lot smaller. He opened his mouth to offer an olive branch, but for the second time that day, Hodge surprised him.
"So. Rogers. Guess I owe you an apology. I was kind of a jerk to you, during the testing. Didn't think you'd make it this far, but you've done okay." Bucky aimed a not-so-subtle glare at Hodge, prompting the man to offer his hand. "I still think I would'a been the better choice, but you're not the failure I thought you'd be. Glad you're on our side."
It was the most backhanded compliment Steve had ever received, but he accepted it and shook Hodge's hand. Squeezed maybe just a little tight. Enjoyed the man's pained wince just a tiny bit. "No hard feelings."
"Right. Well. I gotta go to the pit. Catch you later, Rogers. Sarge."
Hodge brushed past, and just when Steve was about to say to Bucky, 'Was that really Hodge?', the guy turned around and called, "Hey, Rogers?"
"Yeah?"
One corner of Hodge's mouth pulled up into a grin. "Your boots are still stupid." And with that he turned and disappeared into the crowd.
"Ignore him," Bucky said. "Your boots show off your shapely calves."
That did it. He was definitely getting some different boots.
The inside of the 107th's tent was rather dark when Steve followed Bucky inside. Their arrival heralded a cheer, but it was all for Bucky. Dozens of men flocked 'round to clap him on the shoulder and offer him heartfelt greetings. Bucky endured it with a wan smile fixed on his face. He didn't seem glad of the attention, which was another thing that had changed in the last five months. Bucky had always enjoyed being the centre of it.
Sergeant Ferguson appeared to bring a little order to the milling crowd. He cleared a path for Bucky to a bed near the centre of the tent, and Steve followed them. The few glances he drew were guarded, as if the soldiers here didn't quite know how to respond to having Captain America in their midst. Or perhaps they simply saw him as a stranger, a man who didn't belong because they'd all worked hard and sacrificed to get where they were. Did they see him as a charlatan because his own progress had been handed to him in a vial?
"Biggs and Mex are out on a recon," Ferguson was saying. "They should be back for dinner. Here we are; we even brought you some fresh bedding. The guy living here for the past month had really bad B.O. Can't tell you how glad we are to see the back of him."
"Where is he now?" Bucky asked.
"We sent him to bunk with the 9th."
Steve watched on as Bucky unpacked the contents of his box, transferring them to the footlocker. When he was finished, he sat down on his newly made bed and brought the book from his pocket, toying with it. Other soldiers in the tent were similarly ensconced in books and letters home and small poker games.
"So, what now?" Steve asked.
A puzzled frown crept over Bucky's face. "Whaddya mean?"
"What do we do now? What happens next?"
"Now I write a letter to my folks and tell them I'm not MIA or KIA after all. Hope that my letter has even a small chance of beating the official letter of condolence."
"That's a shame, Sarge," said Ferguson, a few beds over. "I wrote some real nice things about you that I'm sure your family will appreciate. Err, well, maybe not as much as they'd appreciate you not being dead, of course."
Bucky winced. "Thanks, Gusty."
"But what happens in terms of… you know… the war?" Steve pressed. After all, the war hadn't ended just because he'd done what he'd set out to do. Bucky was back, but the Nazis, and HYDRA, had not gone anywhere. "There must be missions for us to go on. Battles for us to…"
Bucky and Sergeant Ferguson were sharing a very bemused glance. Steve felt his cheeks flush with heat. He probably sounded like a fool to the men who'd spent the past five months fighting on the front lines.
"Now," said Ferguson, "we wait."
"For how long?"
Bucky shrugged. "Hours? Days? Weeks? This is war, pal."
Steve sank down onto the bed beside Bucky—it groaned beneath their combined weight—and ran his hands through his hair. He'd thought that sit and wait was something limited entirely to the USO, but if the whole army followed the same M.O., how could they ever expect to win the war?
: - - - — — — - - - : - - - — — — - - - : - - - — — — - - - :
As promised, the doctor came to Rosa's house to check up on Danny's shoulder. Danny had no memory of the wrinkled old Italian man, but the doc seemed to know what he was doing despite the fact he didn't speak a word of English. He arrived just before lunch time, and Rosa immediately chivvied Danny up to the bedroom so the physician could get to work.
Although he was used to moving his arm by small increments to put on his shirt, the doctor moved it into whole new positions as he unwound the bandage around the gauze. It wasn't long before a sheen of sweat slicked Danny's skin, and he was glad Rosa had insisted he sit on the bed for this. Pain lanced through him, arcing across his shoulder and up his neck. If he'd been standing, he thought his legs might've given way.
The gauze was pulled away, and when Danny saw how much blood had crusted on it, he almost fainted. Seeing some other guy's blood was one thing; seeing your own was so much worse. It wasn't right. Nobody should have to see their own blood.
When he glanced down at his shoulder, the feeling of nausea and dizziness intensified.
"Do not look," Rosa said, though she was managing it just fine.
Danny ignored her. His shoulder was a mess. Raw tissue scabbing over. What looked like a flap of skin hanging loose. Where it wasn't torn, the skin was shrivelled, as if drying out and slowly dying.
I'm lucky. It's a mess, but at least my bone stopped the bullet. If it'd gone through me, my shoulder would've been twice as bad at the back.
The doctor said something, and Rosa quickly translated. "He wants you to try lifting your arm."
So he tried. Shirtless, sweaty, hurting, he managed to move it all of half an inch.
Pathetic.
"Do you think I'll ever be able to use my arm again?" he asked Rosa, who asked the doc.
"Maybe, if the bone knits well where it was cleanly broken, and if the muscles are given a chance to heal before they are put to heavy use. You should do nothing more than small movements for another month. After that, I will come back, and we will see."
A month?! That would take him into December. The snow was already starting to pile up against the side of the house; in another month, it would be too deep to wade through without snow-shoes. He couldn't wait that long! He had to get back, to fight the… war. Only, he couldn't fight. Not with his arm like this. Shoot a pistol, maybe, but he wasn't left handed, and even if he was, no CO in his right mind would send a man so injured out on a mission. Not even on a recon.
His heart shuddered, gripped by an unseen icy hand. If he went back now, with a million-dollar wound like this, he'd be discharged. Sent back to the States. Away from the front lines. Away from Barnes. Injured as he was, he'd need help. Couldn't even tie his own shoelaces. But he had nobody to help him, not like Rosa did. Nobody to feed him and help him dress and mother him in that awkward, bossy way. Danny would be forced to go home. To the house he'd grown up in. To the parents he hated and feared.
No. He couldn't do it. He would have to stay here until he got well enough to fight again. And if that meant putting up with Matteo's glares, so be it. At least he could handle being glared at by a stranger. It was better than being tormented by people who were supposed to care about him. Spring. He would give himself until the snows of winter melted. By then, he'd have full use of his arm again. He could go back to the fight. Back to camp. Besides, he had a promise to keep. Barnes had said his birthday was in March. Danny didn't know when in March it was, but they had an agreement. They would celebrate his birthday in March, then they would celebrate Danny's birthday on 4th July. Didn't matter how they celebrated. Cake in a foxhole or a night out in Milan, all that mattered was having fun in some way. Any way.
He gritted his teeth as the doctor poked and prodded around the entry wound in his flesh. Bit back his whimpers when lightning bolts of pain flared within him. Finally the doctor seemed satisfied. He redressed Danny's shoulder and gestured towards the over-large shirt on the bed.
Danny picked up the shirt and gingerly redressed himself as Rosa and the doctor went downstairs to have a light lunch. The sight of his shoulder, looking for all the world like a piece of butchered flesh, had put him right off the idea of food.
He tried not to imagine the worst as he buttoned up the shirt, but he'd spent his whole life mastering the art of thinking in grim, fatalistic and dark thoughts, imagining the worst outcomes, readying himself for the fall so that it wasn't so much of a shock when it came. In his mind, he was already accounting for the loss of all use of his right arm. He'd be scarred, badly so. Three months ago, that would've been okay, because scars were a dame-magnet. He could've used a gripping tale about his war injury to his advantage.
Now, he didn't want to be scarred and broken. He had enough of that going on on the inside; he didn't need it on the outside, too. He didn't want people looking at him as a cripple. Pitying him. Seeing him as something less than. Less than whole. Less than perfect. Less than a man.
Rosa found him an hour later still toying with his buttons, his mind swimming in a fog of depression. He'd looked ahead and seen how his life would be. People offering to carry his bags because he couldn't carry them himself. Friends making jokes, not realising how deeply they cut. Turned down for work back in civvy life, because who wanted somebody flawed when they could have somebody perfect?
"You are fortunate to have your arm," Rosa said. Her words cut through the fog, pulling his gaze to her face. She did not look particularly sympathetic. "At one point, whilst he was removing the bullet, the doctor feared he might have to amputate."
A violent shudder racked his body. He hadn't realised his situation had been that bad. Remove his arm? Then he truly would be a cripple.
"I don't know how to function as less than whole," he said.
"Is that how you see yourself?" When he didn't respond, she stepped forward and sat down beside him, the mattress dipping with the added weight. "These friends you have mentioned in your stories. Davies, and Gusty, and Carrot. If it was one of them in your place, believing that he was less than whole, would you just accept that?"
"I guess not." It was a reluctant admission. Such self-pity would've required a serious ass-kicking. Thinking of it that way didn't help, though. There was only one person who'd ever tried, and succeeded, at pulling Danny out of the dark places he made for himself, and that person might as well be all the way across the other side of the world.
"Good." Rosa stood, and pulled him to his feet with his left arm. "Now, I have vegetables that need chopping for dinner. You can still chop, can't you?"
He sighed. It seemed Rosa, like Barnes, wasn't gonna write him off so easily. "Yeah. I can chop."
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Peggy wiped the smile from her lower face as she stepped into the command tent. Colonel Phillips looked up at her approach, and she suspected he saw the smile despite its absence.
"You sent for me, Colonel?"
"I sent for you half an hour ago, Agent Carter," he said, drawing glances from some of the other staff who'd taken up residence in the command tent.
"I'm sorry, sir, but Howard was at a critical stage of construction and required an additional pair of hands."
"Doesn't he have assistants for that? I'm fairly sure he has assistants. I have two men on the SSR's payroll whose sole purpose is to provide assistance to Stark in whatever form required."
Peggy straightened up, trying to aim for an additional inch of height. "He claims they're incompetent and… well, I shan't repeat his language; it was rather foul."
"Hmph. Well, maybe we can do something about that."
"Sir?"
"Take a walk with me, Agent Carter."
Recognising Phillips' desire to speak without having a half-dozen other colonels eavesdrop on his conversation, she fell in beside him as he led the way out of the tent and along a muddy thoroughfare towards the motor pool. For a long moment they walked in silence, and a tide of soldiers on their way to the mess tent for dinner parted around them. Peggy glanced over their faces, just in case Steve was in the crowd. He was still a little uncomfortable around the troops, still a little wide-eyed and unsure. It was, she had to admit, just a little bit endearing.
"We've been recalled to England," Phillips said, snapping her out of her guilty thoughts. "We leave in two days, and we'll be taking the men rescued from Krausberg with us… along with the USO show folk."
Peggy's heart skipped a beat, and she mentally cursed it. Whenever Steve Rogers was around, she felt like a schoolgirl in the flurry of her first crush. It was ridiculous, really. She was a grown woman. Had once been engaged to be married. And yet, Steve's smile quickened her pulse in a way that Fred's never had. She very much feared that she might be falling for Steve Rogers, which was… well, it was poor timing, for a start. This was war; she couldn't allow herself to be distracted by affairs of the heart, no matter how much the heart wanted it.
"We're being pulled off HYDRA's trail?" she asked, clearing the mental image of Steve's smile from her mind.
Phillips' face twisted into a grimace. "Not exactly. Seems top brass want to speak to Mr. Rogers—" the smile immediately came back "—about that factory. Intel he gained. Maps he saw. Technology he stole."
"Surely they don't need him to do that in person?"
"It's not just that." Phillips glanced around, then lowered his voice. "Kauffman thinks he's close. He wants to consult with Stark."
"Ah." A wry smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. "So, that's the real reason we're heading back to England. Steve's intel is just a cover."
"Steve?" One of Phillips' eyebrows lifted in question. "We're on first-name terms, now?"
"I call Howard by his first name. Sir."
He gave a grunt of reluctant defeat. "I'll leave you to organise the men who'll be coming back to England with us."
"Of course." Just before the motor pool, they stopped. Peggy decided it was the right time to bring up the other thing on her mind. "I'm worried about Sergeant Barnes. Mr. Rogers says they were experimenting on him." And he looked like hell. Somehow, he managed to look even worse than he had that time Nazi spies poisoned him.
In truth, he'd been off even before Steve brought him back from Krausberg. In the days before Azzano, it seemed as if he was merely going through the motions of being a soldier. For the first time since the start of the war, his stare had reached a thousand yards. Now, though, his stare was so close that it was actually turned inward, as if everything he saw was in his own mind, rather than the world around him. Peggy had seen the horror in Steve's eyes, as he'd told her about pulling Barnes off the lab table… and now she worried that he might finally have broken.
"We'll get him, and the others from Krausberg, checked out when we reach England," Phillips agreed. "We'll probably send them all home, Barnes included. They've been through a lot."
Peggy merely nodded. Sending Sergeant Barnes home might not be as easy as the Colonel made it sound. For one, she was fairly sure that Steve Rogers wasn't ready to say goodbye to his friend again so soon.