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domarzioneI'm not not noticing that these keep getting longer.
Antediluvian
Bucky Barnes, Steve Rogers
PG-13-ish; 4200 words
They got on the long line at the recruitment office after work. Every guy in Brooklyn was already on it, it seemed. There were plenty Bucky knew would never get in, the too-old and the too-young and the too-lame, and then the ones the Army might've taken if it really needed bodies. And then there was Steve, who wasn't the only hopeless case lined up with his enlistment papers in hand, but he was the only one Bucky cared about. Steve was no fool and knew he could't sign up to be on the front lines, but maybe he could do other things -- he had drafting and designing experience, he could draw maps, he knew about printing and he could type. Steve was smart and he was too brave for his own good and maybe the Army would see that instead of the scrawny guy who couldn't run down the block without wheezing.
They didn't. Bucky could tell there was a 4F next to his name before Steve said a word, before Steve even realized he was there because he was in such a fog.
"You got in?" Steve asked as they walked down the street past the line that hadn't gotten any shorter for it being almost nine o'clock. They would go to Brown's for dinner; it was Wednesday and there was a beef and beans special.
Bucky nodded, tamping down his satisfaction out of respect for Steve's disappointment. "It probably helped that they could see that I was born on Governor's Island."
Which translated into 'son of a professional soldier,' which Bucky was, granted, but only on paper. His father had died when he was still in diapers and he had been in the children's home not five years later after his mother and then a series of increasingly disinterested relatives had been unable to care for him. Bucky wasn't the Army brat his enlistment papers said he was, but he was an able-bodied young man and that had probably been all they were looking for. But he could say otherwise for Steve's sake.
"You were born on Manhattan Island," Steve corrected, because he always did. Bucky bumped him in the shoulder with his own in response, sending Steve to the curb but not over. "I'm glad you got to do this. It's what you were supposed to do."
Bucky snorted. "I wasn't supposed to do anything."
There had been Barneses in the Army since before the Civil War, or so he had been told as a very young child before he'd finally been packed off to the orphanage. It hadn't been any kind of pronouncement of a destiny or family pride or anything like that, just the calculation of how many years they'd have to feed him before they could ask the Army to do the same.
Despite knowing his family history and having not a few dreams of what his life would have been like without training accidents or cancer or hardship, Bucky hadn't ever thought of the Army as a career option. Not that waitering was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life -- he didn't know what he wanted to do with the rest of his life -- but it paid well and kept him in New York, which was what he wanted. The Army moved you around, put you where they wanted you, which was how Bucky's parents had met, apparently, when his father, who'd never seen an ocean before having to cross one to fight the Boche, had gotten stationed in the middle of one on Governor's Island after the Great War. The war that had not ended all wars, which was why there was now another Barnes in the Army.
"Don't go back here when you try again," Bucky said as they crossed the street. "Go somewhere else, like the Bronx or Staten Island."
Steve didn't bother to pretend that there wasn't going to be another time. "I was thinking of just going down to Midwood."
"The doctors rotate between the centers," Bucky told him. "I heard them talking. The guy who looked me over was saying he'd been down in Brighton Beach yesterday and was going to be at Brooklyn College on Friday. You don't want the same doctor recognizing you."
"They see so many guys every day now, they won't remember me from one day to the next," Steve scoffed, but he didn't quite sound like he believed himself. They both knew that most of the guys who were lining up looked like Bucky and not like him.
A week and a trip on the Staten Island Ferry later, Steve had his second 4F (possibly his third; he had gotten home very late from class one night and mumbled something about finishing a project that didn't sound quite right) and Bucky had official papers that informed him he was to report to Fort Dix six weeks hence for inprocessing and training. The next night, Bucky came back from the restaurant with two butts of a pork loin and the combined remnants of three trays of scalloped potatoes to find Steve poring over the Tribune's classifieds.
"I'm going to need to find a cheaper place with you gone," he explained. "It's either that or get a second job."
Steve's scholarships at Cooper Union paid for his art supplies and the odd textbook with a little left over for living expenses, but his time in classes and completing his assignments -- and traveling to and from Brooklyn -- were hours that he couldn't work to make money for rent or food. He worked weekends, but Bucky, with his sixty-hour weeks and ability to charm leftovers and barely-touched plates from the captain was the real reason he could donate so much time to his studies. And that would have to change once Bucky went off to Jersey.
(They'd fought exactly once about the division of labor and contributions to household accounts. Bucky had won, even if it had been a messy enough victory that it had taken Steve a week to get over it.)
Mrs. Conlon's place wasn't the Ritz, but it cost money and she'd raised the rates last year and this and it would probably go up again now that the Navy Yard was going to be on a real war footing and not just the pretend peace that was Lend-Lease.
"I'll chip in a little if you bring my stuff with you and you let me crash when I'm on leave," Bucky said, pulling the plates out of the cupboard. "You should look in Manhattan so you'll be closer to school."
Steve spluttered about the first, agreed with the second, and they still hadn't come to an agreement on exactly what Bucky would be contributing when it came time to move their entire collection of worldly goods from Red Hook to Stanton Street. Steve's new home -- and Bucky's temporary one, for the dime-a-day rental of a cot -- was small but clean and the landlady was used to students, although possibly not American ones because there was a lot more Yiddish than English spoken in the hallway. Bucky finished his last week at the restaurant, where he was treated to a glorious meal after service on his last night. He took the leftovers home to Steve and, when Steve was down the hall in the bathroom, tucked five dollars into the milk jar bank. Francois had given it to him to go buy a girl for his last night of freedom, but Bucky didn't need to buy girls and Steve was still looking for a job in Manhattan so he wouldn't have to travel back to Red Hook on the weekends.
Basic training was just that, a haircut and a lot of yelling and ugly threats and running around and learning how to survive in an environment where you had no friends. It was a lot, too much for many, but Bucky got through it without any tears because, really, what had his childhood been but this? Being ordered around by people paid to make sure you lived but not to care about you, learning how to defend himself and protect those who couldn't, eating not enough crappy food prepared with indifference to how it tasted, wearing clothes that had been issued to him and worn before by someone else in the same situation... all that had been missing was the room bedwetter and he had had his suspicions about Fonseca.
"It was exactly like St. Agnes's except the nuns wear black hats instead of habits," newly-minted Private Barnes told Steve at lunch at a Horn & Hardart automat during his first leave. He had been released from Fort Dix with orders for Fort Benning for more training, with the understanding that he might not get to finish it before getting put on a boat for Europe. He had four days in New York before he boarded a train for Georgia. "Seriously, they even spout the same stuff about God and duty, except your duty is to Uncle Sam instead of Jesus. They punish you when you don't make your bed right, when you don't stand up straight, when your hair's not combed right. Sister Margaret didn't scream at us when our rifles weren't as clean as she wanted them to be, but she would have if we'd had them back then."
Steve, laughed, but it wasn't a laugh that made it up to his eyes. He'd shrugged and deflected the question when Bucky had asked him how many more enlistment attempts he'd made.
"I'll keep it in mind," Steve said, sipping on his Coke. "But it sounds like I was right -- this is what you were supposed to be doing all along. That's why they're sending you to Georgia."
Bucky had a mouth full of hamburger, so he could only shake his head until he swallowed. "They're sending me to Georgia because I can't read a damned map to save my life."
Which wasn't precisely true, but it wasn't untrue, either. His drill sergeants had seen something in him that made them think that he could be more than standard cannon fodder, but he'd been warned plenty that this wasn't a reward and he'd be just as dead if a German shot him no matter how much extra training he got.
Nonetheless, Bucky understood that he'd taken to soldiering in ways that most of his recruit platoon had not. The physical endurance and skills were easily enough acquired. He was a crack shot with both pistol and rifle, which had come as a bit of a surprise, and could run forever with his pack banging into his kidneys and no food, which hadn't been a shocker. He had done okay when it had been his turn to plan an assault on the neighboring training platoon, but he was shit at land navigation, although so was everyone else in the platoon from the city. Samuelson and Forster and Plowman, the farmer kids from Jersey, were the only ones who could identify a constellation, let alone figure out which direction to go from them.
The rest, the mental part of it that had drawn the cadre's attention, well, that was just what he'd told Steve: a lifetime of being unloved and unwanted and seen only for what use could be made of you was the perfect preparation for Army life. The guys who'd grown up in their own families, whose mothers had cried when they'd enlisted, who'd never had to choose between work and school or rent and food, those were the guys who'd had the hardest time of it no matter how fine their bodies were or how good a shot they were. Fonseca ran like a tiny Sicilian Jesse Owens and could slip free of any grapple, but he was a momma's boy and he'd gone from being doted on to being in the Army and the enthusiasm of payback against the Japs hadn't been enough after the first week.
Bucky spent his four days in New York enjoying himself. He swung around to the old neighborhood and 'accidentally' ran into Anna Senckiewitz, who was still more than willing to put out in exchange for dinner and a movie. He went down to Coney Island with Steve and made him go on both the parachute jump and the Cyclone, knowing he hated both, and then they both got nearly sick with too many fried oysters on the boardwalk. He slept in on the dime-a-day cot, had lunch at a place that didn't have specials on tough-as-hide beefsteaks, and, when Steve got back from classes, he dragged him to one of the girlie shows over on Tenth because Steve was still too shy to go on his own. It wasn't one last gasp at the good things because he thought he was going off to his death or anything, which was a possibility -- his father had died in a training accident, after all, and after training would be what he was going to be training for. At least he didn't think he was. But he was leaving New York for a long time -- he was going to Europe after Fort Benning, whether or not he finished his training first -- and even if (when) he did return, he was aware enough to understand that he wouldn't be the same person, even if he wasn't sure who that new person would be. He'd felt the changes start at Fort Dix, the way he had to think differently when pretending to be in combat and keeping his unit safe, the way it was nothing like the skirmishes from his childhood -- the way those skirmishes felt like childhood and further away in time than they actually were. This week, he just wanted to enjoy his hometown one last time as the person he still was. He wasn't sure how much of this Steve understood and it wasn't like he was going to try to explain it, but Steve was a sharp guy and seemed to understand something and didn't make a fuss about how much money Bucky was spending on him or on himself.
Fort Benning was miserable and that was before he actually did anything. New York this time of year was unpredictable, some days screaming of spring and other days clawing desperately to winter, but Georgia was just hot and getting hotter. "Just wait until summer," he was promised. "You'll wish for these days."
He didn't get to see summer at Benning, at least not the legal definition of it, but it had been plenty miserable for weeks when they'd been ordered to form up in the blazing sun and then told to pack their gear because they were going north so that they could go across the Atlantic.
They would be going back to Dix, although whether they were sailing out of Newark or Brooklyn was going to be decided after they got there. Bucky hoped for Brooklyn, obviously, and so did his unit because they were already asking him for places to eat and get girls and booze, but all that probably meant was that they were going to get stuck in Jersey. He wanted to tell Steve to clear out an afternoon in case he got leave before they were marched on board a ship, but it would have to wait until Dix because the line for the phones was just too long. Besides, Steve would still be at his studio at school and trying to leave messages with his landlady had historically not gone well. (Mrs. Zilansky was a very nice woman, but her command of English was spotty and her hearing worse and Steve had had to wait for the letter to realize that Bucky had gotten a promotion to Private First Class and was not marrying a girl named Piefsky.)
They were indeed leaving from Jersey, but there were day passes and Bucky took the train up to New York. He met Steve at school, getting to see his studio space and what he was working on. Steve had been doodling for as long as Bucky had known him, but it wasn't anything either of them had considered as a way to earn a living until late in the game, when Steve had been encouraged by teachers to apply for a spot at Cooper Union and extra scholarships to make even a free school affordable. Steve's plan had been to go work in an ad agency -- there was no romance in being a starving artist when he'd been one all along -- at least before Pearl Harbor. Steve was still trying to get in to the Army or the Navy (the latter because he figured you had to run less on a boat), but he seemed to be a little less frustrated that he couldn't yet. "It's getting bigger and bigger," he'd told Bucky in a letter to Georgia. "They'll get around to me eventually."
But right now, Steve was still an art student during the week and a printer's assistant on the weekends and Bucky, in his uniform because the Army thought it would make him less likely to go AWOL if he had to do so in his skivvies, was happy to see what he was turning out these days. Their room in Red Hook had stopped being quite so cluttered with sketchbooks and pencil shavings once Steve had started at the school and while it had made the place easier to clean, Bucky had missed it in a way. Steve lived in his head a lot, too much usually, and looking at the last pages in his sketchbook was sometimes the best way to understand him. Steve realized this too, eventually, which was why he'd stopped detailing his daily indignities in picture form after the first time Bucky had taken a look at a sketch and beaten Bobby Mauer to a pulp the next day. But Bucky could still read Steve's drawings like the thought balloons in the comic books and time and distance hadn't changed that.
"You need to get yourself a girl, Stevie," Bucky said as he finished his tour of the tiny space. "One you are allowed to touch and not just ask to move her arm so you can get a better look."
What he really wanted to say was 'I wish you had less to worry about' because horniness wasn't the dominant theme of the collection. (Point of fact, Steve's nudes were always somehow tasteful and respectful, even when he had a better angle than you could get sitting in the front row of the Laughing Tigress.) Steve was afraid, afraid for Bucky, afraid to be left behind and alone, afraid he'd never be able to do anything for the war effort or in life, and Bucky hated it. Steve probably wasn't wrong to worry about him, but for the rest... for a guy whose courage had outstripped his common sense for so long, Steve still found a way to see the everyday hazards all too clearly and to recognize them as dangers. And the time had passed from when Bucky could minimize those hazards -- or Steve's reactions to them -- in any real way.
From the too-hard, too-long hug they exchanged before Bucky got back on the train to Trenton after their dinner out, maybe Steve understood what he'd said anyway.
Bucky had always understood that he was signing himself up to probably die, although his willingness to accept that on the bone-deep level came and went depending on where he was and what he was doing, but there came a point when it came and struck true and, he understood in that moment, it would never leave him until he did die or until he took the uniform off one last time. It wasn't the first time he stood underneath German bombers dropping payloads (in Suffolk, too far away from anything worth running to use as a bomb shelter to do anything but look up and watch) and it wasn't the first time he was shot at (still on the beach west of Oran, water up to his ankles already turning red with blood). It was the third time he was shot at, outside of Oran, when his unit came across some Vichy bastards who'd sniped off five guys before their position had been identified and Bucky was one of the three who was sent to take them out. This was the first time he'd been shot at as an individual, not as part of a group where any hit was a good one, and it was the precision of it, the lack of chaos and randomness, that got through to him in a way the whizzing bullets and pink seafoam hadn't. He killed his first man that day, not with his pistol but with his combat knife, and, once the skirmish was over and he'd thrown up and then emptied his canteen, he came away from the experience with a new and terrible understanding. And a sniper's rifle. And, soon, a battlefield promotion to corporal.
He was a sergeant by the time he got back to the States, at least on paper because he still hadn't been issued the extra chevrons to sew onto his gear so they hadn't bothered with a promotion ceremony. He'd been gone more than a year, although it felt like five most times. He'd spent it almost entirely in North Africa before a hellish return trip back to England and he hadn't thought he'd be going home at all -- he'd been sent north to join V Corps, which was apparently bitterly short of NCOs with any more experience than the privates they led. But the battalion he was supposed to be joining had found someone else, so he was instead being given orders that amounted to 'go back to Fort Benning and wait until we figure out where to put you,' a block leave before that, and a ticket back to New York.
"Don't get too comfy back home," the major who signed his orders in London warned. "You'll be back here before Christmas."
Which turned out to not be true, but only because he didn't go back to London before invading Italy. His orders to join the 107th came while he was still on leave, but those lasted until exactly four days after he reported because the 107th was getting reorganized and turned into a coastal triple-A defender and the S1 thought he could trade a combat-tested infantry NCO to a front-line unit and get back someone who knew anything about anti-aircraft artillery, which Bucky did not.
"How do you feel about Jump School?" Captain Yount asked him.
"Sir?" Bucky had been in the Army too long to believe that his opinion mattered for shit.
"If you were parachute-qualified, then I could trade you to the 82nd Airborne for someone who knows how to load an artillery piece and lot more besides, Sergeant," Captain Yount explained meaningfully. "Unless you have your heart set on doing paperwork for the rest of the war. How's your typing?"
After more than a year of intense desert fighting, doing paperwork for a while didn't really sound like such a bad idea -- he'd have been happy to learn how to use coastal artillery pieces, too. But he understood that neither of those were actual options on offer. He'd proven himself too good at the ugliest parts of war to be allowed to rest in the rear echelon, not anymore.
"I feel very good about Jump School, sir," Bucky replied, since it was the only acceptable answer. In truth, he'd met some of the guys from the 82nd in Tunisia and there were worse units to end up with.
He wrote Steve about the change while on the train back down to Georgia (he wouldn't find out for another year that Steve never got the letter because he'd already been sent to Camp Lehigh). Jump School was both very easy and incredibly hard -- learning how to fall and land was straightforward, but he really hated being treated like a recruit again, yelled at by the instructors like he'd never put on combat boots before. Also, he really wasn't wild about flying at all, let alone jumping out of perfectly good aircraft, but he could grin and bear it and qualified for his Airborne patch and his jump wings with nothing more than a slightly turned right ankle.
Which was how he found himself jumping out of a plane over Salerno, wondering out loud at the top of his lungs how anyone, even an officer, could believe that floating down to Earth while every soldier and airplane and AAA battery could take pot-shots at him and his parachute was the future of modern warfare.
Three weeks later, he found out the hard way that the Germans had other ideas about the future of modern warfare and, strapped to a table in a mad scientist's laboratory, he was about to become a part of it.
Antediluvian
Bucky Barnes, Steve Rogers
PG-13-ish; 4200 words
They got on the long line at the recruitment office after work. Every guy in Brooklyn was already on it, it seemed. There were plenty Bucky knew would never get in, the too-old and the too-young and the too-lame, and then the ones the Army might've taken if it really needed bodies. And then there was Steve, who wasn't the only hopeless case lined up with his enlistment papers in hand, but he was the only one Bucky cared about. Steve was no fool and knew he could't sign up to be on the front lines, but maybe he could do other things -- he had drafting and designing experience, he could draw maps, he knew about printing and he could type. Steve was smart and he was too brave for his own good and maybe the Army would see that instead of the scrawny guy who couldn't run down the block without wheezing.
They didn't. Bucky could tell there was a 4F next to his name before Steve said a word, before Steve even realized he was there because he was in such a fog.
"You got in?" Steve asked as they walked down the street past the line that hadn't gotten any shorter for it being almost nine o'clock. They would go to Brown's for dinner; it was Wednesday and there was a beef and beans special.
Bucky nodded, tamping down his satisfaction out of respect for Steve's disappointment. "It probably helped that they could see that I was born on Governor's Island."
Which translated into 'son of a professional soldier,' which Bucky was, granted, but only on paper. His father had died when he was still in diapers and he had been in the children's home not five years later after his mother and then a series of increasingly disinterested relatives had been unable to care for him. Bucky wasn't the Army brat his enlistment papers said he was, but he was an able-bodied young man and that had probably been all they were looking for. But he could say otherwise for Steve's sake.
"You were born on Manhattan Island," Steve corrected, because he always did. Bucky bumped him in the shoulder with his own in response, sending Steve to the curb but not over. "I'm glad you got to do this. It's what you were supposed to do."
Bucky snorted. "I wasn't supposed to do anything."
There had been Barneses in the Army since before the Civil War, or so he had been told as a very young child before he'd finally been packed off to the orphanage. It hadn't been any kind of pronouncement of a destiny or family pride or anything like that, just the calculation of how many years they'd have to feed him before they could ask the Army to do the same.
Despite knowing his family history and having not a few dreams of what his life would have been like without training accidents or cancer or hardship, Bucky hadn't ever thought of the Army as a career option. Not that waitering was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life -- he didn't know what he wanted to do with the rest of his life -- but it paid well and kept him in New York, which was what he wanted. The Army moved you around, put you where they wanted you, which was how Bucky's parents had met, apparently, when his father, who'd never seen an ocean before having to cross one to fight the Boche, had gotten stationed in the middle of one on Governor's Island after the Great War. The war that had not ended all wars, which was why there was now another Barnes in the Army.
"Don't go back here when you try again," Bucky said as they crossed the street. "Go somewhere else, like the Bronx or Staten Island."
Steve didn't bother to pretend that there wasn't going to be another time. "I was thinking of just going down to Midwood."
"The doctors rotate between the centers," Bucky told him. "I heard them talking. The guy who looked me over was saying he'd been down in Brighton Beach yesterday and was going to be at Brooklyn College on Friday. You don't want the same doctor recognizing you."
"They see so many guys every day now, they won't remember me from one day to the next," Steve scoffed, but he didn't quite sound like he believed himself. They both knew that most of the guys who were lining up looked like Bucky and not like him.
A week and a trip on the Staten Island Ferry later, Steve had his second 4F (possibly his third; he had gotten home very late from class one night and mumbled something about finishing a project that didn't sound quite right) and Bucky had official papers that informed him he was to report to Fort Dix six weeks hence for inprocessing and training. The next night, Bucky came back from the restaurant with two butts of a pork loin and the combined remnants of three trays of scalloped potatoes to find Steve poring over the Tribune's classifieds.
"I'm going to need to find a cheaper place with you gone," he explained. "It's either that or get a second job."
Steve's scholarships at Cooper Union paid for his art supplies and the odd textbook with a little left over for living expenses, but his time in classes and completing his assignments -- and traveling to and from Brooklyn -- were hours that he couldn't work to make money for rent or food. He worked weekends, but Bucky, with his sixty-hour weeks and ability to charm leftovers and barely-touched plates from the captain was the real reason he could donate so much time to his studies. And that would have to change once Bucky went off to Jersey.
(They'd fought exactly once about the division of labor and contributions to household accounts. Bucky had won, even if it had been a messy enough victory that it had taken Steve a week to get over it.)
Mrs. Conlon's place wasn't the Ritz, but it cost money and she'd raised the rates last year and this and it would probably go up again now that the Navy Yard was going to be on a real war footing and not just the pretend peace that was Lend-Lease.
"I'll chip in a little if you bring my stuff with you and you let me crash when I'm on leave," Bucky said, pulling the plates out of the cupboard. "You should look in Manhattan so you'll be closer to school."
Steve spluttered about the first, agreed with the second, and they still hadn't come to an agreement on exactly what Bucky would be contributing when it came time to move their entire collection of worldly goods from Red Hook to Stanton Street. Steve's new home -- and Bucky's temporary one, for the dime-a-day rental of a cot -- was small but clean and the landlady was used to students, although possibly not American ones because there was a lot more Yiddish than English spoken in the hallway. Bucky finished his last week at the restaurant, where he was treated to a glorious meal after service on his last night. He took the leftovers home to Steve and, when Steve was down the hall in the bathroom, tucked five dollars into the milk jar bank. Francois had given it to him to go buy a girl for his last night of freedom, but Bucky didn't need to buy girls and Steve was still looking for a job in Manhattan so he wouldn't have to travel back to Red Hook on the weekends.
Basic training was just that, a haircut and a lot of yelling and ugly threats and running around and learning how to survive in an environment where you had no friends. It was a lot, too much for many, but Bucky got through it without any tears because, really, what had his childhood been but this? Being ordered around by people paid to make sure you lived but not to care about you, learning how to defend himself and protect those who couldn't, eating not enough crappy food prepared with indifference to how it tasted, wearing clothes that had been issued to him and worn before by someone else in the same situation... all that had been missing was the room bedwetter and he had had his suspicions about Fonseca.
"It was exactly like St. Agnes's except the nuns wear black hats instead of habits," newly-minted Private Barnes told Steve at lunch at a Horn & Hardart automat during his first leave. He had been released from Fort Dix with orders for Fort Benning for more training, with the understanding that he might not get to finish it before getting put on a boat for Europe. He had four days in New York before he boarded a train for Georgia. "Seriously, they even spout the same stuff about God and duty, except your duty is to Uncle Sam instead of Jesus. They punish you when you don't make your bed right, when you don't stand up straight, when your hair's not combed right. Sister Margaret didn't scream at us when our rifles weren't as clean as she wanted them to be, but she would have if we'd had them back then."
Steve, laughed, but it wasn't a laugh that made it up to his eyes. He'd shrugged and deflected the question when Bucky had asked him how many more enlistment attempts he'd made.
"I'll keep it in mind," Steve said, sipping on his Coke. "But it sounds like I was right -- this is what you were supposed to be doing all along. That's why they're sending you to Georgia."
Bucky had a mouth full of hamburger, so he could only shake his head until he swallowed. "They're sending me to Georgia because I can't read a damned map to save my life."
Which wasn't precisely true, but it wasn't untrue, either. His drill sergeants had seen something in him that made them think that he could be more than standard cannon fodder, but he'd been warned plenty that this wasn't a reward and he'd be just as dead if a German shot him no matter how much extra training he got.
Nonetheless, Bucky understood that he'd taken to soldiering in ways that most of his recruit platoon had not. The physical endurance and skills were easily enough acquired. He was a crack shot with both pistol and rifle, which had come as a bit of a surprise, and could run forever with his pack banging into his kidneys and no food, which hadn't been a shocker. He had done okay when it had been his turn to plan an assault on the neighboring training platoon, but he was shit at land navigation, although so was everyone else in the platoon from the city. Samuelson and Forster and Plowman, the farmer kids from Jersey, were the only ones who could identify a constellation, let alone figure out which direction to go from them.
The rest, the mental part of it that had drawn the cadre's attention, well, that was just what he'd told Steve: a lifetime of being unloved and unwanted and seen only for what use could be made of you was the perfect preparation for Army life. The guys who'd grown up in their own families, whose mothers had cried when they'd enlisted, who'd never had to choose between work and school or rent and food, those were the guys who'd had the hardest time of it no matter how fine their bodies were or how good a shot they were. Fonseca ran like a tiny Sicilian Jesse Owens and could slip free of any grapple, but he was a momma's boy and he'd gone from being doted on to being in the Army and the enthusiasm of payback against the Japs hadn't been enough after the first week.
Bucky spent his four days in New York enjoying himself. He swung around to the old neighborhood and 'accidentally' ran into Anna Senckiewitz, who was still more than willing to put out in exchange for dinner and a movie. He went down to Coney Island with Steve and made him go on both the parachute jump and the Cyclone, knowing he hated both, and then they both got nearly sick with too many fried oysters on the boardwalk. He slept in on the dime-a-day cot, had lunch at a place that didn't have specials on tough-as-hide beefsteaks, and, when Steve got back from classes, he dragged him to one of the girlie shows over on Tenth because Steve was still too shy to go on his own. It wasn't one last gasp at the good things because he thought he was going off to his death or anything, which was a possibility -- his father had died in a training accident, after all, and after training would be what he was going to be training for. At least he didn't think he was. But he was leaving New York for a long time -- he was going to Europe after Fort Benning, whether or not he finished his training first -- and even if (when) he did return, he was aware enough to understand that he wouldn't be the same person, even if he wasn't sure who that new person would be. He'd felt the changes start at Fort Dix, the way he had to think differently when pretending to be in combat and keeping his unit safe, the way it was nothing like the skirmishes from his childhood -- the way those skirmishes felt like childhood and further away in time than they actually were. This week, he just wanted to enjoy his hometown one last time as the person he still was. He wasn't sure how much of this Steve understood and it wasn't like he was going to try to explain it, but Steve was a sharp guy and seemed to understand something and didn't make a fuss about how much money Bucky was spending on him or on himself.
Fort Benning was miserable and that was before he actually did anything. New York this time of year was unpredictable, some days screaming of spring and other days clawing desperately to winter, but Georgia was just hot and getting hotter. "Just wait until summer," he was promised. "You'll wish for these days."
He didn't get to see summer at Benning, at least not the legal definition of it, but it had been plenty miserable for weeks when they'd been ordered to form up in the blazing sun and then told to pack their gear because they were going north so that they could go across the Atlantic.
They would be going back to Dix, although whether they were sailing out of Newark or Brooklyn was going to be decided after they got there. Bucky hoped for Brooklyn, obviously, and so did his unit because they were already asking him for places to eat and get girls and booze, but all that probably meant was that they were going to get stuck in Jersey. He wanted to tell Steve to clear out an afternoon in case he got leave before they were marched on board a ship, but it would have to wait until Dix because the line for the phones was just too long. Besides, Steve would still be at his studio at school and trying to leave messages with his landlady had historically not gone well. (Mrs. Zilansky was a very nice woman, but her command of English was spotty and her hearing worse and Steve had had to wait for the letter to realize that Bucky had gotten a promotion to Private First Class and was not marrying a girl named Piefsky.)
They were indeed leaving from Jersey, but there were day passes and Bucky took the train up to New York. He met Steve at school, getting to see his studio space and what he was working on. Steve had been doodling for as long as Bucky had known him, but it wasn't anything either of them had considered as a way to earn a living until late in the game, when Steve had been encouraged by teachers to apply for a spot at Cooper Union and extra scholarships to make even a free school affordable. Steve's plan had been to go work in an ad agency -- there was no romance in being a starving artist when he'd been one all along -- at least before Pearl Harbor. Steve was still trying to get in to the Army or the Navy (the latter because he figured you had to run less on a boat), but he seemed to be a little less frustrated that he couldn't yet. "It's getting bigger and bigger," he'd told Bucky in a letter to Georgia. "They'll get around to me eventually."
But right now, Steve was still an art student during the week and a printer's assistant on the weekends and Bucky, in his uniform because the Army thought it would make him less likely to go AWOL if he had to do so in his skivvies, was happy to see what he was turning out these days. Their room in Red Hook had stopped being quite so cluttered with sketchbooks and pencil shavings once Steve had started at the school and while it had made the place easier to clean, Bucky had missed it in a way. Steve lived in his head a lot, too much usually, and looking at the last pages in his sketchbook was sometimes the best way to understand him. Steve realized this too, eventually, which was why he'd stopped detailing his daily indignities in picture form after the first time Bucky had taken a look at a sketch and beaten Bobby Mauer to a pulp the next day. But Bucky could still read Steve's drawings like the thought balloons in the comic books and time and distance hadn't changed that.
"You need to get yourself a girl, Stevie," Bucky said as he finished his tour of the tiny space. "One you are allowed to touch and not just ask to move her arm so you can get a better look."
What he really wanted to say was 'I wish you had less to worry about' because horniness wasn't the dominant theme of the collection. (Point of fact, Steve's nudes were always somehow tasteful and respectful, even when he had a better angle than you could get sitting in the front row of the Laughing Tigress.) Steve was afraid, afraid for Bucky, afraid to be left behind and alone, afraid he'd never be able to do anything for the war effort or in life, and Bucky hated it. Steve probably wasn't wrong to worry about him, but for the rest... for a guy whose courage had outstripped his common sense for so long, Steve still found a way to see the everyday hazards all too clearly and to recognize them as dangers. And the time had passed from when Bucky could minimize those hazards -- or Steve's reactions to them -- in any real way.
From the too-hard, too-long hug they exchanged before Bucky got back on the train to Trenton after their dinner out, maybe Steve understood what he'd said anyway.
Bucky had always understood that he was signing himself up to probably die, although his willingness to accept that on the bone-deep level came and went depending on where he was and what he was doing, but there came a point when it came and struck true and, he understood in that moment, it would never leave him until he did die or until he took the uniform off one last time. It wasn't the first time he stood underneath German bombers dropping payloads (in Suffolk, too far away from anything worth running to use as a bomb shelter to do anything but look up and watch) and it wasn't the first time he was shot at (still on the beach west of Oran, water up to his ankles already turning red with blood). It was the third time he was shot at, outside of Oran, when his unit came across some Vichy bastards who'd sniped off five guys before their position had been identified and Bucky was one of the three who was sent to take them out. This was the first time he'd been shot at as an individual, not as part of a group where any hit was a good one, and it was the precision of it, the lack of chaos and randomness, that got through to him in a way the whizzing bullets and pink seafoam hadn't. He killed his first man that day, not with his pistol but with his combat knife, and, once the skirmish was over and he'd thrown up and then emptied his canteen, he came away from the experience with a new and terrible understanding. And a sniper's rifle. And, soon, a battlefield promotion to corporal.
He was a sergeant by the time he got back to the States, at least on paper because he still hadn't been issued the extra chevrons to sew onto his gear so they hadn't bothered with a promotion ceremony. He'd been gone more than a year, although it felt like five most times. He'd spent it almost entirely in North Africa before a hellish return trip back to England and he hadn't thought he'd be going home at all -- he'd been sent north to join V Corps, which was apparently bitterly short of NCOs with any more experience than the privates they led. But the battalion he was supposed to be joining had found someone else, so he was instead being given orders that amounted to 'go back to Fort Benning and wait until we figure out where to put you,' a block leave before that, and a ticket back to New York.
"Don't get too comfy back home," the major who signed his orders in London warned. "You'll be back here before Christmas."
Which turned out to not be true, but only because he didn't go back to London before invading Italy. His orders to join the 107th came while he was still on leave, but those lasted until exactly four days after he reported because the 107th was getting reorganized and turned into a coastal triple-A defender and the S1 thought he could trade a combat-tested infantry NCO to a front-line unit and get back someone who knew anything about anti-aircraft artillery, which Bucky did not.
"How do you feel about Jump School?" Captain Yount asked him.
"Sir?" Bucky had been in the Army too long to believe that his opinion mattered for shit.
"If you were parachute-qualified, then I could trade you to the 82nd Airborne for someone who knows how to load an artillery piece and lot more besides, Sergeant," Captain Yount explained meaningfully. "Unless you have your heart set on doing paperwork for the rest of the war. How's your typing?"
After more than a year of intense desert fighting, doing paperwork for a while didn't really sound like such a bad idea -- he'd have been happy to learn how to use coastal artillery pieces, too. But he understood that neither of those were actual options on offer. He'd proven himself too good at the ugliest parts of war to be allowed to rest in the rear echelon, not anymore.
"I feel very good about Jump School, sir," Bucky replied, since it was the only acceptable answer. In truth, he'd met some of the guys from the 82nd in Tunisia and there were worse units to end up with.
He wrote Steve about the change while on the train back down to Georgia (he wouldn't find out for another year that Steve never got the letter because he'd already been sent to Camp Lehigh). Jump School was both very easy and incredibly hard -- learning how to fall and land was straightforward, but he really hated being treated like a recruit again, yelled at by the instructors like he'd never put on combat boots before. Also, he really wasn't wild about flying at all, let alone jumping out of perfectly good aircraft, but he could grin and bear it and qualified for his Airborne patch and his jump wings with nothing more than a slightly turned right ankle.
Which was how he found himself jumping out of a plane over Salerno, wondering out loud at the top of his lungs how anyone, even an officer, could believe that floating down to Earth while every soldier and airplane and AAA battery could take pot-shots at him and his parachute was the future of modern warfare.
Three weeks later, he found out the hard way that the Germans had other ideas about the future of modern warfare and, strapped to a table in a mad scientist's laboratory, he was about to become a part of it.
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Date: 2013-09-06 14:05 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-06 14:25 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-06 14:38 (UTC)