We Were Soldiers

165. Mission Reports

BANG BANG BANG.

Bucky's eyes flickered open at the banging on his door. He knew that bang like the back of his hand. It was Steve's urgent knock. The knock he used when he had no time for standing on politeness. His polite knock was much quieter, much more reminiscent of the old Steve. This loud knock was all Captain America.

Daylight streaming in through the window told him not too much time had passed since he'd fallen asleep, but the coals in the fire had died down now, and the temperature in the room was a little cooler. Beside him, Wells slept curled up on his side like a newborn babe, the blanket wrapped around him and his head supported by his own hands. He didn't even twitch at the loud door knock, but then, he'd always been a deep sleeper.

Bucky slid out of bed and took the briefest of glimpses of himself in the wardrobe mirror. He looked like he'd fallen into the linen closet and been attacked by everything fluffy, and his hair was trying to do its own thing as well by defying gravity. But his skin was back to its usual colour, he could both stand and walk without wobbling, and if his eyes had been bloodshot earlier, they weren't anymore. He might not be a pretty sight, but he was good enough to see Steve.

When he opened the door to peer out, the relief in Steve's eyes was palpable. "I'm glad to see you awake, Buck. How are you feeling?"

"Shh!" Bucky held his finger to his lips and made a speak more quietly motion with his other hand as he slipped out the door and prevented it from latching behind him. The air in the corridor was cold on his feet, but it was more a refreshing cold, less the violent shaking type of cold that had wracked him earlier. "You'll wake Wells."

"He hasn't left yet?"

"No, he fell asleep on account of he was up all night making sure I was okay. Thanks for not punching him, by the way. He has a bad habit of engaging his mouth before his brain sometimes. And I'm sorry I missed the run; I didn't mean to, but I don't think I would've managed even if I was awake."

"Don't worry about it, there'll be other days for running." Steve ran his gaze over him, as if looking for any lingering signs of malady. Hopefully there would be nothing left for him to see. "How are you doing? Danny said you'd had food poisoning."

He nodded. "I think so. Definitely felt like the last time I had it. But it wasn't quite as bad this time. I almost feel back to my usual self, in fact."

"I see. And I see you took a bath."

"Yeah, last night. I didn't wanna put real clothes on until I knew I wasn't gonna be sick on them." It didn't feel right lying to Steve, but he needed the food poisoning line to fly a little longer. Telling Steve what had really happened, how the horrors of Krausberg had come back again just like they had during the mission to Norway, was not an option. Not right now. First he needed to make Schmidt and Zola pay for what they'd done to him.

It didn't fly any better than one of Captain Stone's planes with a belly full of flack. "I want you to see a doctor."

"Again? I saw a doctor three weeks ago, after getting back from Czechoslovakia. And again last week, after getting off the U-boat. And Howard checked me over and gave me a clean bill of health. I'm all for second opinions, but who do you want me to get a third opinion from?"

The question seemed to flummox his best friend, so Steve changed topic without skipping a beat. "Buck, I just want you to know that despite everything that's changed, I'm still me. You can come to me if you have any problems, and if you're feeling unwell, you can call on me for whatever you need."

"I know, I know. But you weren't here last night; you were out at the theatre with Carter. And that's the way it should be," he said quickly, before Steve could object with something stupid like you should have sent someone to come get me. "Things have changed. Who you are, who I am, where we are, what we're doing… I'll always have your back, and I know you'll always have mine, but we have our own lives too. You've got something good with Carter, something good that will get even better. I'm not gonna interfere with that for every upset stomach or case of the sniffles I come down with. Honestly, there's nothing to worry about. Wells got me home. Mr Chipperton sorted me out with the fluffy stuff. I'm good now. I promise."

Steve grudgingly accepted his word on the matter. "You're not going out playing darts again tonight, are you?"

Bucky treated him to the ol' are-you-mad look. "Hell no. Tonight I'll be sleeping. And eating. Not necessarily in that order. How about you? Another date with Carter? Maybe even dancing?"

"No date. I need to go to HQ for a couple of hours to take a look at some stuff, and then I've got another dancing lesson with Amelia."

He gave his best friend a good-luck clap on the shoulder. "I'm proud of you for sticking with it. Hopefully you'll be able to exchange Amelia for Carter soon enough."

"I hope so too." He smiled, half hope, half worry, and Bucky didn't think he was dwelling on dancing right now. "I've gotta head off, but I'll see you for breakfast in the morning, okay?"

"Sure."

"And don't let Mr Chipperton know you've got a new roommate, or he might start charging you extra for him."

"Wells will be gone by the time you get back," he assured his friend.

"Alright. Rest well, pal."

He watched until Steve disappeared down the staircase and then slipped back into the relative warmth of his room. The slowly dissipating heat enveloped him from head to toe despite the fact the fire was out. It did feel good to be warm again, after all that bone-wrenching cold.

Inside, Wells was already awake and in a state of almost-dress. He'd buttoned up the top of his shirt, donned his jacket, and had a seat in the chair so he could work on his boot laces. He still looked tired, but a couple of stolen hours couldn't make up for an entire missed night.

"I didn't realise you were awake," Bucky said.

"Maybe Steve should change his name to Captain Loud," Wells quipped. "He was right, though. I managed to sneak past the concierge at breakfast time, but he seems like the kinda guy who spots things easily, and I am a bit hard to miss at times. I'm envious, though; you have a big cushy bed in a nice cushy room all to yourself, and a little private bathroom to boot. At my place we have communal bathing facilities, shared toilets, and my roommate is a germophobic nymphomaniac."

There was probably an interesting story behind that. "If you're tired, you can sleep a few hours longer," he offered. It was the least he could do after Wells had taken care of him all night.

"Nah." He stood and stretched. "You know how too much candy makes you sick? And too much alcohol makes you sick? Well, I have a theory that too much me has the same effect, and it's not a theory I want to test out by being the one who has to clean up the results of that experiment."

The self-effacing attitude didn't suit his friend, but at least it was a step up from macabre bullshit. He didn't think Wells would believe him if he tried to convince him that his presence wasn't nausea-inducing, though. He'd probably accuse Bucky of trying on his 'older brother routine', or whatever the hell he called it. "Okay. In that case, can we have our rescheduled darts practice after you finish your next batch of shifts? Assuming we're not on a mission by then."

"Course."

Wells' agreement brought some relief. He'd been partially worried that the past few hours might've been too much for his friend. Talking about deep stuff like that, it was never easy for Wells. In the past he managed it by making everyone around him feel more uncomfortable than he was, but he was clearly trying hard to change that behavior now. Very likely he was close to the limit of his tolerance for what he once would've called 'touchey-feeley crap.'

Once his friend had gone, Bucky locked the door behind him, pulled the curtains over the window and freed himself from the bath robe and towels before climbing back into bed. It was deliciously warm still, and he quickly pulled the duvet and all three itchy woolen blankets over himself to keep that warmth in. His stomach growled a little as a reminder that he'd only had one plate's worth of breakfast this morning, but he could wait a little longer before eating. Right now he wanted to burrow down into his blanket cocoon of warmness and enjoy the feeling of not being cold. By the time he realised the blanket closest to him still smelled faintly of camphor, he was already halfway to sleep.

: - - - — — — - - - : - - - — — — - - - : - - - — — — - - - :

Friday afternoons in Whitehall were always a little quieter than the rest of the week. Most workers finished early in preparation for the weekend, and even armed forces personnel had a little more freedom providing there was no emergency to be dealt with. Today, the area languished in lazy August heat, as if in ignorance of the war happening just a few miles across the Channel. Steve made it to the front of the SSR's headquarters without seeing anyone he knew. He absently greeted Tommy at the door, then made his way into the rickety old elevator that was definitely going to snap and kill someone in the near future.

The Big Room was devoid of most of its staff. A few administrators were working hard, or at least keeping up appearances, but Lorraine's desk was tidy and her seat empty. That might mean she'd been given the afternoon off, or it might mean the Colonel wasn't in. Only one way to find out.

He knocked on the door that held a plaque which read Colonel Chester Phillips, and immediately received a "Come in, Rogers."

Colonel Phillips was behind his desk, poring over a pile of paperwork, a hot mug of coffee beside it. He glanced up for long enough to see Steve's salute, then asked, "What can I do for you today? If this is about intel from those trains, MI6 are still working on it, so tell the team to cool their breeches for a while longer."

"It's not about that, sir." He took a deep breath. During the walk over, he'd mentally tackled the best way to broach the subject, and decided straightforward would be the best. He would request. Not ask, not demand, but somewhere in between the two. "I need to see some of the mission reports from SSR activities last year. And I need to look at some of the personnel files."

That seemed to get the colonel's attention. He put down his pen and steepled his hands together over his paperwork pile. "Which missions, and which personnel files?"

"The SSR's mission to the south of France," he said, meeting the colonel's eyes calmly. Not a demand. Not asking. A request. An official request. "And the files of Sergeant Barnes, and Sergeant Wells."

"Hmph. So, Sergeant Wells has finally put in an appearance, has he?"

"Sir? You knew he was alive?"

"Of course I knew. I like to keep tabs on potential security threats." Security threats..? "Colonel Hawkswell sent me a message a couple of months ago, when Sergeant Wells seemingly returned from the dead. Last I heard he was with the Third Infantry in Italy, and I was content for him to stay there, out of the way."

"Does this complicate things, sir?"

"Complicate things?" The colonel scoffed. "Of course not. It just means I can deal with him myself if he decides to get chatty. Thanks for bringing this to my attention, Rogers. I'll be sure to keep an eye on him."

That sounded ominous. Maybe he'd been too hard on his friend. Bucky's reticence to talk about the time he spent with the SSR last year, Danny's guarded behaviour this morning… maybe they had good reason to be paranoid, and maybe that good reason was sitting in front of Steve right now dunking a Rich Tea biscuit into his coffee.

"So you want to see the files," Phillips continued after polishing off his biscuit. "I suppose it's a reasonable request. As the SSR's greatest asset, leader of the team that's hunting down Schmidt, and the only person in the world currently strong enough to stop him, I suppose you do have a right to mission-relevant information."

And now the colonel was sounding entirely too reasonable. It wasn't like him, and it filled Steve with a sort of cold dread. Before coming, he'd toyed with the idea of going to Peggy for answers, but in the end decided it wasn't fair to her. It was a conflict of interest. He was a conflict of interest. She was a soldier whether other men saw her as one or not. Her loyalties had to lie first and foremost to her country, and then to the SSR. If Steve approached her and asked her to compromise that loyalty for him, it would put her in a position she did not deserve. To refuse the man who loved her, or to betray whatever oaths of loyalty she'd taken. Forcing her to make that choice was not something he could do.

Phillips pulled a little key from his desk drawer and used it to open one of the taller filing cabinets behind him. Danny had been wrong; the drawer wasn't labelled 'dirty little secrets' - it had only an alphanumeric ID string. He shuffled through the various files contained within, and then pulled several of them out, cradling them in his arm until he'd accrued a sizable pile. When he turned back to his desk, the first two he dropped on the desk in front of Steve were personnel dossiers. "Go ahead. The files don't leave my office, so you'll have to look at them here."

Pulling up a seat, Steve settled himself in for reading and picked up his friend's file first. When he opened the dossier, most of the first page was entirely black. He turned it, and found the second page the same. A quick flick through the rest of the pages showed that the whole file was redacted. He picked up Danny's file next, and found the exact same thing.

"These are redacted," he pointed out.

"I know. Took me damn near a week to do it. Do you want to see these?" he asked, hefting the pile of mission reports cradled in his arm like a baby, "or have you had enough black marker for today?"

"Where are the unredacted files?"

"Don't exist." Phillips dropped the mission reports onto his desk and sank back down into his chair. "That's all there is."

Stave stared at him for a moment. "But why?"

"Why? Do you remember the day you were born, Rogers? And I'm not talking about you as a snot-nosed brat, I'm talking about the you as you are now. Captain America."

"Of course." That day was seared painfully into his memory. It would always be there, a reminder of the loss he and the entire program had endured.

"You recall we had a bit of a Hydra spy problem, yes? A friend of mine died because a man in a suit brought a spy into my top secret base. I don't trust men in suits, Rogers. They run the country and I follow their orders because I have to, but I don't trust them. So the thought of sending back similarly classified information, only to be left out in the open by some suit with half a brain, right there for any passing spy to read… it doesn't sit well with me. So I redact it. All of it."

"Then… all those mission reports you have me type up..?"

"They get the black marker treatment."

"So why have me waste time typing them in the first place?" He spent hours writing up his mission reports. Pored over detail. Agonised over terminology. And in the end it didn't matter, because nobody could read it.

"Because I read them. And because it's the rules. There have to be reports. We have to be accountable, otherwise we're just a rogue agency bowing to no man's authority. We're no better than Hydra."

He stared down at the black pages. This whole trip had been a waste of time. The answers he sought about Bucky's past, about the SSR's missions, about everything that nobody would speak to him of… it was all right in front of him, but still out of reach.

"I don't suppose you'd just tell me what you were doing in France last year?"

Phillips shrugged. "Sure."

Steve's head snapped up. Phillips wasn't a kidder, but was he being serious right now? He'd just tell Steve everything that was in the files he redacted?

The colonel seemed to understand his confusion. "I didn't redact them to keep the information from you, Rogers. I did it to keep the information from falling into the wrong hands through the incompetence of men who can't tell their asses from their elbows. This is, of course, sensitive information that is not to leave these walls."

"Of course." He would've agreed to almost anything right then.

"Last year, we received word that Schmidt had set up a series of communication bunkers in southern France, bunkers that fell outside the standard Nazi comms chain. It was our mission to meet up with the stranded 9th Infantry and verify these claims."

"To destroy them?"

"No. Infiltrate them."

Pieces of the puzzle suddenly fell into place. Everything his team had done over the past ten months. The missions they were given. It fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, and Steve had just been given a glimpse of the picture on the front of the box. "The intel you get… the missions you send us on… that info comes from these bunkers. You've compromised Schmidt's comms network."

"That's right. Part of the network, anyway. Not the whole of it, unfortunately." He took a sip of his coffee and pulled his face. "I needed someone obedient and marginally competent to capture the first bunker so we could put one of our own men at the wheel. So I sent a lieutenant named Danzig to capture it for me. I got obedient, but not competent. Sergeants Barnes and Wells managed to achieve their mission objective and bring the rest of the team back alive, so then I had competent, but not obedient. They managed to replicate their feat several times, but started poking around a little too much. Asking questions. Trying to learn more than they ought to know."

Steve smiled. That sounded just like Bucky. His friend didn't like to be kept in the dark. In hindsight, that probably made him a less than ideal soldier. He enjoyed a good mystery too much.

"After their poking started to cause ripples, I brought them in on the secret. Told them about Hydra, Schmidt, our mission—"

"You didn't tell them about me," Steve pointed out, and Phillips hand-waved that away.

"You were a non-factor. Far as I was concerned, you were nothing but another show-girl dancing on that stage. I didn't expect you to show up on the front lines, not even on a USO tour. But once I told the sergeants about our true purpose, their efficiency went up and we were able to infiltrate all the bunkers, one way or another. We've been using that network ever since to keep our ears open for whispers of any targets you and your team might hit."

So. The big secret. The source of Phillips' intel. The reason—or at least one of the reasons—why Bucky always clammed up when Steve brought up his past missions. "Is this why intel from the mission to the train yard is taking so long? You're running it past everything you've got from the comms network?"

"One of the reasons. MI6 are having a field day with it too. There's no sense in us sending you out to somewhere that they may already have an agent working covertly. It would blow cover."

"I see." It certainly answered some questions, but not others. He gestured at the files on the desk. "How did the SSR end up in Italy?"

"The war caught up with us. Our mission was technically over, and were instructed to assist other forces in the area. I was hoping we could lay low while we received intel from those bunkers, and be already behind the lines if any opportunity for action arose. But there was no laying low after you single-handedly stormed Krausberg to bring back your friend and drew Schmidt's eye right to us."

"I won't say that I'm sorry." He would never say sorry for doing the right thing. Never.

"I never expected you to. Anything else, Rogers?"

"No sir." He stood and saluted. "Thank you for sharing the information with me. And I promise the SSR's secrets will be safe with me."

"Of that I have no doubt. Now you're dismissed, Captain. For God's sake, take a few days to think about something other than the war for a change. I know where to find you when a mission comes up."

As he left HQ, he felt a small weight light off his shoulders, allowing him to stand a little straighter. He'd been in the dark for so long that he'd forgotten what it felt like to walk in the light of knowledge. Now he knew as much as Peggy. As much as Stark. As much as Bucky and Danny. All he had to do now was try to make sure Phillips didn't get the opportunity to keep him in the dark again.

Author's note: I shall now take a few days' break from publishing chapters to get some writing done. Thanks for reading so far! Glad to hear everyone is enjoying a little more hurt/comfort than you would normally find in one of my stories. But you can't keep breaking characters without giving them a bit of comfort too, amirite?

For those who think Steve is boring, I do think he's not as interesting as some to write, but for a guy who supposedly doesn't lie, he kept some awful big secrets when he learned that Bucky was the Winter Soldier and killed Tony's folks. If you think that the entire Civil War plot line could've been avoided if Steve just told the truth in the beginning, instead of keeping it quiet and then attempting to lie about it straight to Tony's face... well, it makes for some interesting what-ifs. :3