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domarzioneRecursive (2/5-ish)
PG-13 | Steve Rogers, Avengers, Howling Commandos, Peggy Carter
summary: In the wake of the HYDRA revelations, Steve finds himself both a pawn of the rebuilding SHIELD hierarchy and the leader of a newly-independent Avengers. He's got masters he can't run from, teammates he can't let down, and a best friend who is turning his newly remembered past to ashes. But all of that becomes secondary when a day that begins with dinosaurs ends with a dream that might be real.
tl;dr summary: A Life on Mars homage set post-CA:TWS and during the first film.
"Heard you stirring, sir. Sarge sent me in to make sure you didn't get any ideas."
Steve looked over as much as he could without turning his neck too much -- it still hurt, although the pain was no longer racing down his limbs. He would be able to move if he had to, but he didn't have to just yet and it made everyone else feel better if he didn't.
"Hey, Gabe," he greeted Jones, who was carrying a bundle wrapped in waxed cloth like it was a baby, not bothering to get offended because indignation would be a wasted effort at this point and he needed his energy for other things. The newsreel-watching public and the average GI might think Captain America was invincible and indestructible, but the Howling Commandos knew better, knew that he bled and ached and could wear down, could break. They were not only not expecting him to rise up in fighting form a few hours (days) after waking up from a severe head injury, they would also be pissed if he so much looked like he might be considering it, which was why Dum Dum was rotating babysitters through the day. "You find a new toy?"
It had been easy enough to pass off his confusion and disorientation as concussion-related, to get Dugan to tell him the date (19 November 1944) and where they were (a long-abandoned hunter's lodge in the woods somewhere between Nancy and Verdun). He still had no idea if he was back in time or caught in a dream, but he was willing to buy the former. Not only because of Namor's words and the dinosaurs he'd left behind in 2014, but also because if this were a dream, something to occupy his mind as he healed, why would he have chosen a point in time after Bucky fell and not a happier era? The winter of '44-45 had been terrible, cold and bloody and full of pain as they'd fought the Battle of the Bulge and their own grief and there was no way he would have chosen this as a respite, no matter what the state of his subconscious.
"Not my toy," Gabe scoffed, but he did it fondly. "Morita picked something up when he and Jacques went looking for supplies. Supposed to be getting in contact with base camp -- radio reception is crap here, sir -- and finding something to eat and they came back with this puppy." He unwrapped the package, now sitting on a table, and revealed it to be a German radio set. "It's one of the new models, not even put together yet, and it has the instructions on the back plate. And I'm the team sap, apparently, because nobody else will help him."
Jim Morita could fix anything with wires or tubes or batteries, had a remarkably deft hand for finding radio frequencies, friendly and not, and was the best driver among them on the rare instances when they had a motor vehicle to borrow or steal. But while he'd picked up enough French to get by and was the only one among them who could speak any Spanish, German had remained beyond him except for some choice insults, none of which were likely to be included in the directions for a radio set. Jim's response had always been the same when confronted with written German on anything from cans of ham to unexploded ordnance: if they'd printed them out in Japanese, he'd be fine. Which in a few decades would be exactly what would happen and Jim would, in fact, be more than fine. But right now, it meant him begging -- or usually trading chores with -- another Commando to handle the translations.
"I hope you got something good in the exchange," Steve said, pushing himself a little more into a reclining position -- he'd been flat on his back for most of the two days he'd been awake -- until Gabe gave him a warning look that he shouldn't try for too much more.
Being confronted with all of what he'd once thought lost -- even after Bucky's reappearance in the future -- hurt like salting a fresh wound, far more than the pounding in his head when he tried to sit up or the burn between his shoulder blades where there was apparently still an impressive set of bruises. He hadn't forgotten his Commandos teammates, their smiles or what they liked or disliked or the way they laughed or cried, but he hadn't kept the memories of the little things -- Morita's inability to master even basic German, Monty's habit of intentionally whistling out of tune, the way Jacques always cut apples off the core instead of eating them out of hand -- in any place where they were easily accessible to him. His memories of them were a little idealized, not covered in the grime of living rough and out of each other's pockets where they could piss each other off and make each other laugh a million different ways and would do either just to pass the time. It felt unfaithful, in its way, like he was realizing that he was remembering the heroes on the pedestals at the Smithsonian instead of the actual flesh and blood men he'd known.
"I am now the proud owner of half a bottle of honest-to-goodness cognac," Gabe replied with a smile. He was the team connoisseur, a role Monty would protest but not too much because he might've been born to the best situation of all of them, but Gabe had done the most with what he'd had. "Not brandy, not that weird hooch they make in the Dordogne, but actual cognac."
Steve smiled. "You'll have a few friends tonight."
Gabe looked up from where he was already starting to scribble out the translation. "If you think I am giving Dum Dum Dugan, a man who could not appreciate the difference between cask-aged Bordeaux and rotgut three weeks off the vine and dosed with paint thinner, a taste of something so precious, sir, you got hit harder on the head than we thought."
It was a lie. Gabe would give some to Dugan, but he'd also give him crap about it before, during, and after because Dugan, whose edges were not nearly as rough as he pretended they were, would play his role, too.
"Been hearing that a lot the last couple of days," Steve replied, starting to feel overwhelmed again. He'd kept his distance from the others as best he could since he'd woken up, pretending to sleep or that his head was hurting so that he didn't have to talk so much -- or to listen. It wasn't the same as when he'd woken up in 2011, but it was just as devastating. Maybe even more so because his return was destroying everything he'd come from, everything he'd clung to. By returning to 1944, he'd regained most of what he'd lost when he got thrown into the future, but it wasn't the same because he wasn't the same and it was deeply uncomfortable for that. Like an Oracle of myth, everything was tainted by his knowledge of the future, by his fear of changing it -- and his desperation to do just that.
In November 1944, Bucky had been 'dead' for three months, almost, and it was killing Steve to lie on a rickety cot in France knowing that right now Bucky was alive and being tortured and abused in Poland. Natasha's file, for all of its Soviet provenance, had been very thorough on the Winter Soldier's HYDRA origins. Bucky was in a HYDRA facility outside of Oppeln, in Silesia, and he would be there until the first days of April 1945, when he would be transported, in cryostasis, east to the brutal hands of Department X and the Red Room. Right now, though, he was HYDRA property, being turned and twisted and molded into their image through rough methods -- electroshock, sensory deprivation, physical torture they knew he could withstand because Schmidt's scientists had already completed what Zola had begun in Italy, and psychological torture made more efficient because of Bucky's amnesia. He was in a hell he did not fully understand and Steve was in his own version of it because he had to leave him there, at least for now. The cost was too high otherwise. If this wasn't a dream, if he were really back in time about to relive the Battle of the Bulge, then he could not deviate from that. Historians on all sides were unanimous in the importance of the role that Captain America and the Howling Commandos had played -- would play -- during those months, how they'd saved thousands of lives in a battle where there were more than 90,000 Allied casualties. Steve couldn't abandon those men, couldn't sacrifice them all for just one, even if that one was Bucky. He had to leave him there and hope that Bucky would forgive him when it was over, hope he could forgive himself.
"On the other hand," Steve said, not wanting to dwell any more, "if you give Dugan enough booze, he'll maybe let me get up and walk around when it's not to go piss against a tree."
Gabe snorted without looking up. "I'd have to give everyone a good shot for that, sir, and I don't think half a bottle's enough to make all of us silly enough to let you wander around unattended. You were puking yesterday, sir, and that was just to stand up to water a tree."
The lodge had two rooms, the smaller one Steve had been recuperating in and the large one that was kitchen and bedroom and office for the others. They couldn't keep fires going during the day because the smoke up the chimneys would be a beacon for the enemy, but they were all pretty good at banking embers by now and while the others kept warm by keeping busy and wearing all of their clothes at once and the odd nip of brandy, Steve was simply buried under rough wool blankets that smelled of damp and horses. He shifted those now to free his hands and Gabe did look up then, just in case Steve was considering a jailbreak, and Steve frowned at him.
"Just the once," he said, making a show of re-settling himself. "We should be underway in the next day or two. Not today, but we are going to be late enough back to Paris as it is that they might turn us around at Reims."
Their schedule in the fall of 1944 had been much tighter and more regimented than it had been at any other point during the Commandos' history. Most of it was because they were working off of the intel Zola was providing, the breadcrumbs he'd give them that they'd then mix with what they were getting from other sources and turn into actionable intelligence that would, almost a year later, give them Schmidt. The rest of it was because of the cost paid to get Zola in the first place: Peggy and the others had wanted to keep them busy once they got back to work after Bucky had been killed, giving them specific tasks instead of the more general "go out and wander into HYDRA bases" guidelines they'd been operating under so that there were objectives to meet and deadlines to follow and not much time to dwell, either literally or emotionally.
"Had plans for Thanksgiving in Paris, sir?" Gabe asked, bemused. "I think Eisenhower's gonna have to cancel it this year unless he expects us to eat our shoes and say a blessing for it."
There'd been food and fuel and munitions shortages on the lines since the summer and if the Commandos had eaten better than the average grunt, it was because they had spent those months working with the various Resistance groups instead of Big Army. And, more importantly, because they had Jacques, who gave the Commandos a credibility within France that a half-dozen Americans and a Brit couldn't have managed on their own no matter how renown their deeds -- and who could charm the average farmer's wife out of an extra sausage and bottle of plonk with little more than a smile and a story. Most of which were even true because Jacques Dernier had led quite the life before he'd thrown his lot in with the Free French and then found himself a Commando.
"We weren't getting back to Paris by Thursday anyway," Steve answered. Thanksgiving 1944 the first time had been spent in Suippes, a quiet day they'd mostly ignored the significance of until Jacques and Monty had returned from an errand with a bottle of whiskey and a still-bleeding goose. "But there are advantages to being in the same room when the Powers That Be start deciding where we should be."
It wasn't that Peggy and Phillips and the others intentionally wasted the Commandos' time or that they were sent on pointless errands to keep them from getting into trouble, but... the resulting missions were usually more efficiently plotted and thoughtfully planned if Steve and one of his sergeants were there to more reasonably manage expectations. Neither Bucky nor Dugan were (had been) shy about expressing their dislike of too-ambitious proposals, either by elbowing Steve hard in the ribs to speak up or, if he didn't, fidgeting enough in their seats until someone asked if there was a problem, Sergeant, and they'd begin with an apologetic "With all due respect, sirs and madam..." before cutting whatever was under discussion into tiny ribbons. Which didn't mean that those missions were scrapped -- or sometimes even modified -- but reminding those who sat in bunkers and map rooms about how things were likely to play out in the mud and open air was never a bad idea. Steve had understood it back then, but he'd still been a little eager to please, a little afraid that if he spoke up too much, he'd get taken out of the field or put under a commander who would not put up with such polite insubordination as Phillips, who was always willing to at least listen. Now, however, he would probably have little compunction about speaking his piece without any elbows in his ribs to prompt him.
"We already know what they want us to do, sir," Gabe pointed out, crossing something out thoroughly and then rewriting it. "Find HYDRA, kill HYDRA, and try not to blow ourselves up in the process... I am going to know more than I need to about crystal oscillators by the time I am done with this."
Armed with knowledge of the future, Steve knew it was both more and less important that they get back to Paris promptly. The Germans would be breaking through the Allied lines in the Ardennes in a month's time and the Commandos would be sent out as part of the response, so being at Reims would be closer as they'd been in Paris last time. But if there were any way he could slip in a little warning, a little bit of pretend-to-have-overheard details that would allow the Allied forces to shore up the initial attack points even a little to reduce casualties, Steve owed it to the men who would die defending Elsenborn Ridge to do so. But that was a month from now and probably more than time enough to get back to Paris no matter how slowly Dugan made them go in deference to Steve's injuries; in the meanwhile, they had to complete the current mission, which had mostly been a headcount of the various Resistance forces and a watch for the vanguards of the anticipated German forces, especially the SS and HYDRA elements that were not bogged down by micromanagement from Berlin and had been slipping units into Allied-held territory from pretty much the moment the Allies had first held it.
"It wouldn't hurt to have two of us who know how to work that thing if we're going to carry it around," he pointed out, since Gabe was waiting for a comment. "Or are we trading this for Thanksgiving dinner?"
They were not above donating or bartering away found tools or tech or materiel to useful parties -- for food, often, for intel or assistance, frequently, to curry favor or build up an ally worth cultivating, on occasion. Which might have been why nobody had wanted to help Morita before now -- it was something he was going to get to play with for a few hours before it was handed off to someone else.
"We might be trading it for what we've got now," Gabe admitted and Steve frowned, since what they had now was entirely because of him and his injuries. "But Jim wants to test it out, get a sense of its value so we aren't handing over a diamond for a couple of stew rabbits and some sawdust saucissons."
It was not, it turned out, a diamond. Steve was in the main room when Jim finished putting it together and deemed it interesting, but exactly the kind of work that had the Germans losing the war. "You could drop it from a plane and it would work fine," he sniffed. "But Veronica could run rings around it with two of her crystals missing."
Veronica, named after Miss Lake, was Jim's baby, a Frankenstein's monster of a machine that seemed to have components from every radio in US Armed Forces use and defied any kind of description save to say that she was petite and homely and Jim loved her more than any real woman, named Veronica or not. (He'd certainly had his hands on her more, as the others were quick to point out.)
"I am shocked at your assessment," Monty said dryly as he dished out 'stone soup,' their most frequent meal and the reason Steve had been allowed out of his quarantine to sit with the others by the fire. It was a collection of whatever they could get out of the locals -- a turnip here, a carrot there, a potato here, a bit of ham bone there -- and whatever herbs and bits they could find or had brought with them. Occasionally, it meant that everything tasted like rosemary because that's all they had, but tonight, at least, it was more than palatable and not just because there was a bottle of red to share. (Steve used to think that he was imagining it, that the wine he'd drunk in France during the war had affected him more than what he would drink in the future, but it really was more potent stuff, although not enough to fell any of them with a single bottle between six.) The three days in Nancy had been bountiful for more than intelligence and if Jacques had traded away the marjoram in return for something more useful to them, they still had juniper berries and whatever else was rattling around in Monty's blue snuff tin.
After dinner, Steve put off his return to exile by asking for detailed reports on what Morita and Dernier had seen when they'd gone for supplies to help him and what the SSR base camp, currently still in Paris although considering moving closer to the lines, had actually said, instead of what he'd been told they'd said when he'd asked yesterday. Dugan wasn't above such selective editing and sat tonight at Steve's right with not an ounce of repentance to him as the others revealed what they'd hidden. Which wasn't dramatic or shocking or even vaguely urgent once it had become clear that Steve wasn't about to die of a brain hemorrhage. Steve was going to have to check in himself via radio tomorrow during one of the windows, but the plan of action was going to be essentially unchanged: up to Reims, more surveillance and conclaves with the local fighters and then coordinating with the Allied field commanders before returning to Paris. The bulk of the forces were moving south from Normandy and Calais and, soon, from Antwerp, but there were still Allied units coming up from the south and Steve had standing orders to help them out if needed and get out of their way if necessary and he wouldn't know which was the case until he met them.
He was eventually chivvied back to his cot, but Dugan stayed behind and the two of them looked at the maps for an hour or so, figuring out where they should go and how they should get there.
"I do want to get going soon," Steve reiterated, since he was sure Gabe had not passed on that desire. "My head's clear and if we wait until I stop hurting, there'll be a peace treaty first.... unless someone else is hurt, too?"
As team sergeant, Dugan was a little more willing to rat out a fellow Commando than Bucky had been when someone was feeling ill or was banged up or otherwise in less than fighting form, although neither of them ever divulged details if they were at all embarrassing or would risk censure. Even if that censure amounted to Steve giving the guy in question a pained look and a plea for the hangover or the sprain or whatever it had been to be all that had brought back from the brothel. (None of the guys had ever gotten the clap, thankfully, although there had perhaps been a few scares that Steve had suspected but would never have gotten confirmed.)
"Everyone's fine," Dugan assured, meaning it. "I don't think the couple of days' downtime waiting for you has hurt any, mind. Being indoors in this weather's no hardship. A little extra sleep, dry clothes and not having to worry about frostbite, a little less worrying about getting their throats slit in the night... We didn't need the break, but it did us some good anyway."
Steve nodded. "Good. We'll check in tomorrow morning with the bunker and then head out after a big lunch. Let the boys get a belly full of something warm before we go back to humping it through the snow."
"Soldier, put your head down if you don't want to lose it," Steve called over to the private who was prairie-dogging a little too much for his own safety considering that their enemies were so close and so numerous. The Allies were gaining ground everywhere except in Alsace, where they were still fighting to keep from getting cut off and surrounded by the Germans storming out of the Colmar Pocket with impunity. Steve was moving among the infantry now, but he had arrived in the region with the 12th Armored Division, which had taken some heavy losses in battles the previous month, and elements of which currently had neither the trust of their superiors nor any faith in themselves because of poor command decisions. He had understood why he'd been informally attached to them -- to cure the morale problem and give everyone the sense that someone was around to issue orders that would make sense -- but he wasn't really in the mood to play the rah-rah Captain America higher command had prescribed and so there was a bit more tough love and a lot more sharper commands than the boys might've expected from the newsreels. But after the last few months of heavy fighting in the snow, nobody expected any less and Steve could not give any more. He had already given everything he could and was, he suspected, working off of reserves that were closer to exhausted than he might like.
The winter of '44-45 had been no less terrible the second time around, even knowing what was coming and doing what he could to minimize the damage, which hadn't been much because Captain America's capacity to effect change in '44-45 was very different than it was in 2014. Steve laughed at himself, often bitterly and always in private, when his requests to see generals were denied or his orders to officers in the field were ignored -- it wasn't that he believed his own press releases, but he had simply gotten used to having the kind of power and respect that seventy years of history and legend had inspired, far more so than he'd ever realized. In 2014, Steve could argue freely with the Secretary of Defense and have the Joint Chiefs of Staff hanging on every word; in 1945, his reputation did not outstrip his rank or his relatively late date of commission or the untraditional origins of Captain America. He was respected by many as a small unit commander and covert combat tactician, but he was still hobbled by his USO past and Hollywood taint, his laboratory transformation, and the disdain many of the old guard had for covert operations. It was extremely easy to dismiss the showgirl, the experiment, or the guy who spent his time sneaking around in the dark slitting throats instead of engaging in proper and honorable soldiering. Special Operations might be the sexiest of the military specialties in the future he'd left behind, but in the present he'd returned to, it was considered ungentlemanly at best and either savage or cowardly at worst, the last resort of men who'd lost all else -- including their dignity -- and was capable of no more. Captain America might be good for the public back home, but 'real' soldiers knew better, which was not true within the ranks, but it wasn't the ranks that he had to convince to change their position because history said that the 106th Panzer Brigade was showing up in nine days.
"Sergeant, I want you to move your men ahead two hundred yards and set up prepared to fire south," he told Ginsburg, the NCOIC of the unit. By the time Steve had come across them, they'd already lost their lieutenant, platoon sergeant, and half their number in a skirmish earlier that morning, soaking the knee-deep snow with blood. And so while Steve wanted to move toward the enemy -- a company from the 708th Volksgrenadier Division had set themselves up comfortably half a mile away -- he had to get these boys home instead. They were exhausted, frostbitten, grief-stricken, and running low on ammo and they'd be no help in his fight. "We should be clear, but just in case."
It took an hour to get the fellows attached to another retreating unit and, once they were settled, Steve accepted a tin cup of hot coffee, but refused the hot chow on offer in favor of a K-ration and a couple of Logan bars because it was running short and others needed it more, although he said it was because he could take those on the road and nobody else would eat them if they didn't have to. Which was true enough -- D rations weren't called "Hitler's secret weapon" for nothing -- but he really didn't want to stick around. He was feeling soul-weary and sorry for himself and angry for the latter, so he just wanted to go out and hit things for a while. It wasn't blood thirst, rather its opposite -- he was exhausted by the killing and if he could make it stop, make it happen less, then he would. He was exhausted by everything for more reasons than that he was barely sleeping; he was now closing in on his sixth year of warfighting.
Fighting the Germans again, fighting HYDRA again, was disturbing for more reasons than just than having to relive the unspeakable horrors of war. It was his growing sense of the uselessness of it; he had driven Schmidt's plane into the ice at ease with his fate because it had ensured the failure of HYDRA's great plan and it had come after the death of their leader and his mission, in many ways, had been completed with that act. But it hadn't been. HYDRA had survived and thrived because of the peace he'd helped bring about, and he couldn't escape the feeling that all of this blood -- and he had seen so much blood in the three months he'd been back in this time -- was being spilled in vain. His sacrifice, which hadn't been negated by being defrosted, had been in vain because no matter how many lives were spent here and now, no matter how many were saved, in seventy years and three months, Alexander Pierce would come a heartbeat away from giving Schmidt his victory. And the worst part, if there could be a worst part when every part was so awful, was he wasn't able to do more to change it. He didn't know what he could do or change without adversely affecting the future; was he killing a German soldier whose never-to-be-born child would create a cure for some dread disease, was he saving a man who would go home and commit murder, would keeping Pierce's father from meeting his mother make things better or worse when Pierce had done many objectively good things in the twentieth century? He didn't know the answer and there was no one he could ask.
Keeping everything to himself meant walking a lonely road, one he made even more so by intentionally separating himself from the people who knew him best because there was, he had realized, no way to hide all of the changes three years in the future had wrought on him. Everything about him was different and he couldn't brush it off as just others' perceptions or even provide plausible explanations for most of it.
In the field, he fought differently -- he'd been a puncher and a gymnast the first time, but now he knew capoeira and krav maga and muy thai and jiu jitsu and used them instinctively. He threw the shield differently and with far greater effect. His tactical and strategic skills were far better, as was his ability to command larger units -- he'd already incorporated the lessons learned from his first time through the Battle of the Bulge, plus the Battle of New York and everything that had come after that. It wasn't all improvements, though: he'd used terminology nobody understood and requested tools that hadn't been invented yet and he'd gotten men into trouble more than once for plotting out moves that would have worked easily with twenty-first century technology and tactics but were dismal failures with what the average soldier was carrying and wearing in 1945. But overall, his combat skills had grown immeasurably and the contrast was stark with what he'd been showing before he'd landed on his head outside of Nancy in November. Away from the Commandos, it was easier to pass off as simply him being Captain America, but he wasn't going to forget the not-entirely-pleasantly surprised looks Dugan and Morita had given him the first time he'd dropped a trio of SS brutes with silat moves.
Off the field, which he rarely had been since Christmas, he was different in more ways than he could probably recognize in himself. He knew that the last two months of constant fighting had taken their toll, that eighteen months at war would change anyone and that was to be expected, but there was also the time in the future, three-plus years during which he did not rest and, as Sam had gently guided him to recognize, he had not healed. He was numb almost all of the time, which was a comfort mostly because it kept him from feeling some of the pain he was surrounded by, but it also kept him from relishing the moments of bliss that surprised them all. He could laugh at jokes, had enjoyed himself well enough the one time he'd allowed himself to be taken to bed, and had even cameoed as himself during a USO show in Paris, but it was all still muted and muffled and he was starting to forget what it was like when it hadn't been. The Commandos, none of them unaffected by what they'd seen and done, either, had let this pass largely unremarked because to them, it was a natural continuation of what had been. Steve hadn't realized to what degree he'd been affected by Bucky's death the first time, but it had apparently been more than he'd thought.
He reunited with the Commandos two days later. They had largely stopped operating as one unit after the new year; they had gone ahead early to scout positions and take out vanguards where they could, but once it had become army-against-army, small unit covert actions were less useful and so they'd been moved around to where they could be more efficient. Steve, of course, went everywhere and did everything and could probably have objected more than he did, but he hadn't the first time because he'd been respectful of the senior officers' experience and didn't this time because he was hiding from his teammates and their looks of surprised concern. However, he did make sure, to the best of his ability, that they weren't being ill-used or feeling abandoned by him. Morita and Gabe especially, since their membership in the Commandos had provided them with a layer of protection against the prejudices against a Nisei and a black man in a still-segregated Army; Morita's reputation as an RTO whiz had him roving the front lines keeping everyone's comms up and steady while Gabe had gotten himself attached to the camp of a battalion in the 3rd ID after finding an old high school classmate as the operations officer there. Dernier and Falsworth were attached to French and British units respectively and could not have been happier, to the point that they were apologizing to him for their deep satisfaction at fighting alongside their countrymen once again. (He'd told them to stop being idiots.) Dugan was back to what he'd been doing before he'd been captured in Italy, playing up his legend as a soldier who'd never fit in and never let anyone down -- that bowler hat had been far more than whimsy, a distinctive mark that the rank and file took to mean that he was on their side and the smart officers took to mean he was too valuable to break to the bit.
When the Commandos reunited, it was half by accident and mostly by intent -- they had all gotten orders to hitch up to Antwerp, but doing so together was happenstance. The SSR was still based in Paris, but they were supposed to be meeting agents in Antwerp to get new assignments. The Battle of the Bulge was essentially over, the Colmar Pocket clear, and the Allied armies were on the move into Germany, and that left plenty for those agencies that did their work away from the front lines. They rode up in the back of a covered transport truck, exhausted but content -- with the successes on the battlefield, with seeing each other again, with the promise of resuming doing what they were best at doing. Even Dernier and Monty weren't overly disappointed; the freedom within the Commandos was something not enjoyed anywhere else in any uniform -- Steve held loose reins, something that would serve as good practice in the future when it came to leading the Avengers -- and being back under the structure of a formal fighting force, even one that spoke their own language, had had its downsides. They'd run into each other in various combinations over the last six weeks, but this was the first time it had been all of them together. To celebrate, they all passed out and were snoring before they even crossed the border into Belgium.
Antwerp was somewhere between US Army company town and an old city stretching itself after having been squashed under the Nazis' boots, festive and industrious in a kind of manic way. They were met at US Forces command by an SSR agent they didn't recognize and escorted to a hotel that had enough black market connections to offer real steaks in the restaurant alongside the usual fries and beer. They were elbow deep in all of the above when Peggy showed up with a smirk on her face and a tiredness in her eyes that she couldn't quite hide. They all stood up and Dugan shifted everyone over around the big table so that there was space between Steve and Monty for one more chair. Peggy accepted the seat with grace, the half-pint glass from the publican with somewhat less grace (and a bit of snickering from the table because everyone knew that while Peggy was a perfect lady, she was also a perfect lady who could put away a proper pint of bitters with ease), and took fries off Steve's plate like they were a right as she updated them on where things were within the SSR and its search for Schmidt and the rest of the HYDRA infrastructure.
This wasn't the first time Steve had seen Peggy since he'd been back, nor the third, but their meetings had been thus far brief and distracted by the business of war and espionage. She'd worried over him when he'd first returned to Paris after his fall through time, but they hadn't really had any time to exchange more than assurances that no, really, he had a very hard head in the literal sense, too. She'd put her hand on his hair as if to judge the integrity of his skull herself, even though the bruises were long gone, and he'd closed his eyes at the nearness of her, at what he knew he still wanted so very much now that it was in front of him again. He'd thought about making a move, knowing that it would not be cruelly rejected. Peggy had mourned him as a lost love when he'd died; making what they'd separately wished for real, even for a little while, would not change that. But there hadn't been time or place and then the war, always the war, had taken precedence.
Here and now, two months later, it was almost overwhelming to have her at his side, picking off his plate and pouring beer from his glass to hers because the bartender was going to enforce her ladylike decorum if she wouldn't do it herself. After going so long not feeling anything, not allowing himself to feel anything, it was almost too much and he had to force himself to listen to what she was saying and not bask in her being close enough to smell her perfume.
Peggy left them after she'd said her piece and made them all swear to show up at the formal briefing not too hung over to listen, wishing them goodnight and expressing gladness that they'd all survived and returned safely. Steve stayed a while longer, finally decompressed enough to appreciate his teammates' tipsy antics, before getting up to settle the bill and leave the boys free of officer supervision. He exchanged a look with Dugan, who nodded that yes, he'd keep everyone from overdoing it too much, and then told the table that he was paying for the beer tonight but would not be paying for bail tomorrow.
They had been given four rooms upstairs, the Commandos splitting three between the five however Dugan wanted to do it and one for Steve. He'd bought a bottle of bootleg Irish whiskey when he'd settled the tab and poured some of it now into the tumbler they'd given him. He couldn't get properly drunk, not like he used to and not like the boys were getting downstairs, and beer never did anything for him, but enough hard liquor could take the edges off, soften the world enough to make the points of contact not hurt as much for a little while. And he desperately wanted that respite tonight.
For all of his bone-deep exhaustion and the first hot, substantial meal he'd had in months, he wasn't sleepy and so he sat at the desk by the window, glass of whiskey at his elbow, and sketched in the pad he carried with him everywhere but hadn't opened in months. He was most of the way through a study of soldiers making camp in the snow in Alsace when there was a quiet knock on the door. Not expecting anyone -- the knock had been far too polite and discreet to be a drunken Commando checking in -- he put down his pencil and picked up his pistol before going to the door.
"Well, that's one way to greet a lady," Peggy said dryly, eyebrow arched as she took in the pistol in his free hand. "Although I suppose it will serve as evidence in the matter I wanted to discuss with you."
He stood aside as she entered, looking out into the hallway for witnesses before shutting the door behind her. He knew that it was widely assumed that he and Peggy were lovers, had known it the first time even as he'd vehemently protested the impugning of Peggy's virtue and honor, but there was no reason to give those rumors fuel because they did not make her life easy even as they added to the legend of Captain America.
The two of them had been ridiculous, Peggy would tell him in the future, each sure of their own feelings and completely misreading the other's until it was too late, and nobody else had quite believed that they had been so blind. He'd been an innocent despite an abundance of physical experiences that should have stripped his naivete from him and she hadn't understood that until the end, instead assuming that he was disinterested in anything more than a casual fuck because that's all he'd ever had. (That Peggy knew his sexual history in almost complete detail, from the actresses on the USO tours to the occasional dalliances with Resistance fighters and war widows, had embarrassed him acutely in the future and she'd laughed at him for that.) Catching him in a clinch with Private Lorraine had been proof for her that he really had changed from the man she’d met at Camp Lehigh, that he was now like every other fellow on the inside as well as out, and that he’d meant to continue as he’d begun with his casual encounters with women who once upon a time would never have looked twice at him.
Here and now, however, he wondered if history would be different this time around. Peggy had never come to his quarters alone the first time, at least not without knowing that there was someone else there to bear witness to its professional necessity.
Peggy looked around the room now, eyes falling on the desk with the half-empty whiskey bottle and the open sketchpad. "I'm going to tell Colonel Phillips that none of you are going anywhere for a week at least," she began as she crossed over to the desk, her heels clicking quietly on the bare floor. Her fingertip traced over the lines on the page. "You're all at your limits, if not beyond. You shouldn't have been out so long as it was, but there was no way to get you all back once you'd been dispatched. And, I think, if we'd tried, I don't know that you'd have come."
He'd followed her back toward the desk but stopped halfway, keeping space between them. "Jacques and Monty were pretty happy among their countrymen."
Peggy turned to him and frowned. "I wasn't referring to the boys, Steven. That last 'you' was not the plural."
"I was needed," he said simply, since explaining everything else would have been impossible. Even if he could allow himself to reach for Peggy now, to turn rumor into fact, he couldn't allow himself to unburden all that he was carrying upon her. Couldn't let himself speak a word because he knew that Peggy would triumph over the rumors and the skeptics and the institutional misogyny and she would become a Director of SHIELD and he could not risk her so greatly changing the future. It was the reason he hesitated now, kept an invisible barrier between them, because it would be unfair to take comfort in her while still keeping his secrets to himself. It would be lying and he respected her too much, loved her too much, to do that to her.
"You are always going to be needed," she told him, turning back to the sketchpad. "But you are so far past the point where you have what to give that you can barely stand. You've been running on fumes since Bucky Barnes died and you haven't stopped running, not for six months. The others have noticed and you can be damned sure Colonel Phillips is going to notice."
He stood where he was, unsure of what to do or say. "Are you here to warn me?"
Peggy chuffed out a laugh that was almost ugly in its ruefulness. "I thought I might have to," she answered, tapping the page with her finger. "But you are very clearly aware of it. I am here, then, I suppose, to ask you what you are going to do about it."
She looked up at him, almost over her shoulder, and he was startled by the fear in her eyes. He had never done anything to make Peggy afraid of him... but, perhaps, he had made her afraid for him.
"I'm not trying to get myself killed, Peggy," he said quietly.
"You're not," she agreed, a brittleness to her tone. "But you've become completely indifferent to it happening by accident."
He shook his head to disagree, but without vehemence. This wasn't the first time he'd had the accusation leveled at him by someone who was in a position to know. He knew himself that there had been points where it had probably been true, but it wasn't right now. "I still have things I need to do," he said, aware that it was hardly a denial.
"And when they're done?" Peggy asked, right hand moving from the sketchpad to the half-full tumbler, fingertip circling the rim. "What then?"
He shrugged helplessly, unable to lie to her about this. "I don't know."
She nodded, like this was an important confession he'd made and maybe it was. She stook looking at the sketch for a long moment and he watched and waited as the minutes ticked by. Then she looked up at him and smiled tightly and a little ruefully. “You’ve been honest with me and that should be rewarded with honesty in return,” she said, eyes on the tumbler under her fingertips. “I have taken advantage of your... exhaustion, or, rather, I did not protect you from it as well as I should have. Instead of politely turning away, I saw something I am quite sure you meant to keep hidden.”
He froze. There was no way to hide all of the changes the future had wrought upon him, which was why he’d exiled himself from those who knew him best, including Peggy. But there were also the times when he’d been genuinely careless, such as when he’d found himself sketching Avengers Tower on his notes during a meeting and had had to doodle over it to turn it into something less dangerous.
Peggy laughed, this time with amusement. “Oh, Steve,” she sighed fondly. “You look like I said that I'd caught you looking at dirty pictures.”
He blushed a little, although not nearly as much as he once might have. “I’ll confess to that, if I must.”
Dugan had curated quite the collection, which all of them had borrowed at one point or another for personal recreation. They had also traded the pictures as needed for more prosaic needs like gun oil or an extra can of C-rations or eggs from a farmer’s hens.
“You needn’t,” Peggy assured lightly. “But for the record, I would have assumed it to be true.”
He smiled hesitantly at that, unsure of where she was going with this. A direction that became no less clear – or maybe too clear – when Peggy picked up the tumbler and downed the contents in one gulp, coughing a little. She squared her shoulders and turned on her heel and started walking toward him with a purpose. She didn’t look like she was bracing for impact, but something in her posture softened a little when he didn’t back away as she passed through the invisible barrier between them.
“Peggy,” he warned softly as she drew close enough for him to smell the whiskey on her breath. “You—“
She silenced him with a finger to his lips. “I don’t,” she agreed easily. “Nor do you. But I would finish my confession, if you’ll let me.”
He nodded once slightly, not enough to dislodge her finger but she moved it anyway, replacing it with her thumb rubbing softly against his lower lip and her hand cradling his face.
“Once upon a time, I made a judgment about you,” she began, meeting his eyes and holding them. “And you tried to tell me that I was wrong and I chose not to listen, chose instead to see your gestures of protest and your attempts to prove your innocence as their opposite, as evidence of your guilt. And, somewhere along the line, you chose to stop fighting, to protect that truth and hide it away. And I, in my foolishness, took that as a victory. But now you are so worn down, so exhausted, that you can’t keep that truth hidden anymore and I can’t help but see it. See that I was wrong and my victory was a defeat of us both.”
The movement of her thumb against his lip ceased and he waited for her to speak again. The next move was going to be his, he understood that. To accept her apology or not and decide what happened next. She wasn’t offering herself to him. Or, rather she was, but not the way women did in this time and in the future, as something temporary and ephemeral and meaningless. This was her offering up her heart and hoping it wasn’t too late because it had taken her so long to see that she'd always had his.
When she said nothing more, before the silence started to mean something other than what he wanted, he kissed the thumb against his lips. She choked out a laugh and used the hand cradling his face to pull him in and close the distance. He went, mirroring the gesture and smiling as they kissed, months ahead of schedule and far less hurriedly. He tried to keep himself a little bit grounded because this was overwhelming, to finally allow himself to have something he’d wanted for so long, to feel something instead of the numbness. And then he realized what he was doing and let go because why couldn’t he be overwhelmed if it was by happiness?
Peggy left in the middle of the night, her shoes in her hand and a bemused smile on her face as she slipped back to her own room down the hall. They didn’t see each other until the meeting with Phillips and the other SSR decision-makers in town, when she walked in with a stack of files in her arms and archly asked how the Commandos were that morning and Dugan, whom Steve knew to be nursing an impressive hangover, cheerfully assured her that everyone was accounted for and nobody was in jail.
The discussion about what they’d seen and done and what needed to be done next was lengthy but straightforward because Phillips had no tolerance for politicking and would always favor the field operator over the analyst working safely in the bunker. Which might have been why he'd come to Antwerp in the first place. He knew what Eisenhower wanted out of the SSR, which was not necessarily what he was prepared to give the General, but the two weren’t so far apart that it would cause lasting friction. The Commandos were going back to hunting for HYDRA, which Steve was more than fine with. He knew where the bases were and which ones were the dry holes and had enough mission autonomy to favor the former and choose the safest of the latter because those would be the softball missions. Hunting HYDRA would also give him cover for what was his own real next mission: to find and rescue Bucky.
Bucky would be in Poland for another five-six weeks, but getting to him sooner than later was better not only to end his suffering more quickly, but also because Steve only knew when the Soviets moved him, not when he had been found. Steve didn’t want to have to fight off the Russians, putative allies, to get to Bucky because they considered him a spoil of war.
He had already started planning the mission in his head, which was becoming an unintentional mirror of the first time he’d had to spring Bucky from HYDRA captivity, not in the least because he was planning on doing it alone. He knew the Commandos would want in, but he also knew how dangerous it was going to be and how weary they were. This wasn’t going to be one of their usual jaunts behind enemy lines and he didn’t want to risk their lives, even to save Bucky’s. They had wives to meet and children to sire, full lives to enjoy, and he was not going to chance any of that not happening, of changing time so drastically by getting a Commando killed on a longshot mission. And it was a longshot, even knowing where Bucky was.
(He'd justified rescuing Bucky to himself by pointing out that HYDRA would have no shortage of assets to complete their murderous missions and could do what they wanted without the Winter Soldier's help. How much of that was logic and how much of it was selfishness he couldn't say, but he had to believe it. Had to do this. He had sacrificed them both for no good reason -- HYDRA thrived in the future -- and no matter what happened with him, Bucky would not have to bear the brunt of his folly again.)
Getting to Poland was going to require a plane and a parachute; Oppeln was too far inland to go by sea and too far from Allied borders to drive or walk without running into someone with either the authority to ask him where he was going or standing orders to shoot him on sight. Getting a plane might actually be easier than getting a truck, especially with transport (and gas) shortages. He could hit up the Army Air Corps or the RAF for a lift – they’d trust him even if he didn’t have written orders, especially written orders to a region being assaulted by the Russians. After that, it was going to have to be a bit of improvisation to get to the base and find Bucky, but he was going to need a bit more planning than just winging it to get the two of them back to friendly territory. Especially if Bucky was not himself. Steve knew that he had to brace himself for going in to rescue his friend and finding the Winter Soldier instead, but chose to consider that a worst-case scenario for now.
In the meanwhile, it was off to follow the French II Corps into Germany.
“This is a lot more fun than the last time we were here,” Jacques announced cheerfully as he rigged the explosives to blow. They were at a HYDRA facility east of Bonn, a small but useful one they’d gone ahead to find while the French were still bogged down by Cologne. It was their third stop and, judging by the haul and the number of prisoners, their last before they would have to return to base. This place, an old estate that was less castle than manor, had been a low-security base, mostly research and documents, no weapons storage or anything too heavily defended, and they’d gotten in before the occupants had realized they were under assault and thus before they had had a chance to fulfill their orders to burn everything before the Allies could get their hands on them.
“Don’t have so much fun that you set the forest on fire,” Steve warned, but he did so with a smile. He had just finished a last walk-through and was carrying a box of papers to be brought back to Belgium for the analysts to read. The others were supervising the prisoners ferrying the rest of the boxes into the rear of the HYDRA truck that had been parked innocently in the estate's garage, leaving Jacques to do what he did best. “Save some for next time.”
“Ouais, Papa,” Jacques replied, all insouciant obedience. Steve made a note to himself to make sure the truck was some distance away before Jacques set off his latest creation.
The boys were upbeat on the drive back north, not the least because of their successes, although that hadn’t hurt. Nor had watching Jacques’s fireball turn two different colors before settling into a more traditional red-orange flame as it burned. Instead, Steve suspected it was the return to normal operations, at least by Howling Commando standards, for the first time in months. They were on their own, doing what they did best, and it felt good. It did feel good, he could readily admit, and he’d felt more comfortable in his skin than he had at any point since his return, more present and more alive. He knew some of it was Peggy and having a real human connection again and having that connection be her, but the rest of it was simply getting away from the front. It was doing all of them more good than the week off in Antwerp could explain.
All of which made the scene that occurred back in Belgium that much more of a shock, at least to him.
They’d been back for a day, a triumphant return akin to Santa Claus on Christmas with their truckloads of documents and munitions to be examined and prisoners to be questioned, and there’d been a celebratory dinner that even Phillips had stopped by for and donated a bottle to. Steve had stayed longer than usual before retreating to officer country, which in this case had been a table at the other end of the room with Phillips and Stark, who was in town to play with some of their haul, and Peggy and the liaisons with SHAEF and the others who got their oar in when the SSR came up winners. After that had been a more private reunion with Peggy, who’d remarked on how much less weight he seemed to be carrying on his shoulders. “I’m not trying to carry everything on my own,” he’d replied. “I’m happy for the first time that I can remember.”
The next morning, what had originally been a day off became a day with a meeting at noon in Phillips’s office. Steve had shown up expecting news about Schmidt – it was almost at the point where what Zola had been telling them was going to start paying off there – but instead of Phillips and maybe Peggy, he walked in to see them plus Stark plus all of the Howling Commandos.
His first thought was that this was where they asked him who he really was and what he’d done with Steve Rogers. Especially as he saw the look of hurt and betrayal on Peggy’s face that she was doing a poor job of hiding from the others – if they’d been looking. But everyone’s eyes were on him alone.
“Sir,” he prompted. “Reporting as ordered.”
Phillips turned to Stark, who stepped aside and Steve exhaled with what might have been relief or might have been disappointment when he saw what was on the corkboard on the wall: it was the map of Poland he had been working on, the facility outside Oppeln marked in ink and possible ingress and egress routes done in pencil. It had been in his pack, at least it should have been. He hadn’t looked at it since they’d gotten back and while Peggy might have found it in his room last night, the odds were more likely that one of the boys had seen it while they’d been campaigning, going in to his ruck for matches or money or whatever else.
“What’s in Poland, Captain,” Phillips asked, more resigned than angry, although he was definitely both. “And why haven’t you been sharing with the class?”
He’d debated lying if he’d been discovered, but had chosen not to. Better to let them think him desperate than to lose their respect. So he looked Phillips straight in the eyes and answered.
"Sergeant Barnes, sir."
PG-13 | Steve Rogers, Avengers, Howling Commandos, Peggy Carter
summary: In the wake of the HYDRA revelations, Steve finds himself both a pawn of the rebuilding SHIELD hierarchy and the leader of a newly-independent Avengers. He's got masters he can't run from, teammates he can't let down, and a best friend who is turning his newly remembered past to ashes. But all of that becomes secondary when a day that begins with dinosaurs ends with a dream that might be real.
tl;dr summary: A Life on Mars homage set post-CA:TWS and during the first film.
"Heard you stirring, sir. Sarge sent me in to make sure you didn't get any ideas."
Steve looked over as much as he could without turning his neck too much -- it still hurt, although the pain was no longer racing down his limbs. He would be able to move if he had to, but he didn't have to just yet and it made everyone else feel better if he didn't.
"Hey, Gabe," he greeted Jones, who was carrying a bundle wrapped in waxed cloth like it was a baby, not bothering to get offended because indignation would be a wasted effort at this point and he needed his energy for other things. The newsreel-watching public and the average GI might think Captain America was invincible and indestructible, but the Howling Commandos knew better, knew that he bled and ached and could wear down, could break. They were not only not expecting him to rise up in fighting form a few hours (days) after waking up from a severe head injury, they would also be pissed if he so much looked like he might be considering it, which was why Dum Dum was rotating babysitters through the day. "You find a new toy?"
It had been easy enough to pass off his confusion and disorientation as concussion-related, to get Dugan to tell him the date (19 November 1944) and where they were (a long-abandoned hunter's lodge in the woods somewhere between Nancy and Verdun). He still had no idea if he was back in time or caught in a dream, but he was willing to buy the former. Not only because of Namor's words and the dinosaurs he'd left behind in 2014, but also because if this were a dream, something to occupy his mind as he healed, why would he have chosen a point in time after Bucky fell and not a happier era? The winter of '44-45 had been terrible, cold and bloody and full of pain as they'd fought the Battle of the Bulge and their own grief and there was no way he would have chosen this as a respite, no matter what the state of his subconscious.
"Not my toy," Gabe scoffed, but he did it fondly. "Morita picked something up when he and Jacques went looking for supplies. Supposed to be getting in contact with base camp -- radio reception is crap here, sir -- and finding something to eat and they came back with this puppy." He unwrapped the package, now sitting on a table, and revealed it to be a German radio set. "It's one of the new models, not even put together yet, and it has the instructions on the back plate. And I'm the team sap, apparently, because nobody else will help him."
Jim Morita could fix anything with wires or tubes or batteries, had a remarkably deft hand for finding radio frequencies, friendly and not, and was the best driver among them on the rare instances when they had a motor vehicle to borrow or steal. But while he'd picked up enough French to get by and was the only one among them who could speak any Spanish, German had remained beyond him except for some choice insults, none of which were likely to be included in the directions for a radio set. Jim's response had always been the same when confronted with written German on anything from cans of ham to unexploded ordnance: if they'd printed them out in Japanese, he'd be fine. Which in a few decades would be exactly what would happen and Jim would, in fact, be more than fine. But right now, it meant him begging -- or usually trading chores with -- another Commando to handle the translations.
"I hope you got something good in the exchange," Steve said, pushing himself a little more into a reclining position -- he'd been flat on his back for most of the two days he'd been awake -- until Gabe gave him a warning look that he shouldn't try for too much more.
Being confronted with all of what he'd once thought lost -- even after Bucky's reappearance in the future -- hurt like salting a fresh wound, far more than the pounding in his head when he tried to sit up or the burn between his shoulder blades where there was apparently still an impressive set of bruises. He hadn't forgotten his Commandos teammates, their smiles or what they liked or disliked or the way they laughed or cried, but he hadn't kept the memories of the little things -- Morita's inability to master even basic German, Monty's habit of intentionally whistling out of tune, the way Jacques always cut apples off the core instead of eating them out of hand -- in any place where they were easily accessible to him. His memories of them were a little idealized, not covered in the grime of living rough and out of each other's pockets where they could piss each other off and make each other laugh a million different ways and would do either just to pass the time. It felt unfaithful, in its way, like he was realizing that he was remembering the heroes on the pedestals at the Smithsonian instead of the actual flesh and blood men he'd known.
"I am now the proud owner of half a bottle of honest-to-goodness cognac," Gabe replied with a smile. He was the team connoisseur, a role Monty would protest but not too much because he might've been born to the best situation of all of them, but Gabe had done the most with what he'd had. "Not brandy, not that weird hooch they make in the Dordogne, but actual cognac."
Steve smiled. "You'll have a few friends tonight."
Gabe looked up from where he was already starting to scribble out the translation. "If you think I am giving Dum Dum Dugan, a man who could not appreciate the difference between cask-aged Bordeaux and rotgut three weeks off the vine and dosed with paint thinner, a taste of something so precious, sir, you got hit harder on the head than we thought."
It was a lie. Gabe would give some to Dugan, but he'd also give him crap about it before, during, and after because Dugan, whose edges were not nearly as rough as he pretended they were, would play his role, too.
"Been hearing that a lot the last couple of days," Steve replied, starting to feel overwhelmed again. He'd kept his distance from the others as best he could since he'd woken up, pretending to sleep or that his head was hurting so that he didn't have to talk so much -- or to listen. It wasn't the same as when he'd woken up in 2011, but it was just as devastating. Maybe even more so because his return was destroying everything he'd come from, everything he'd clung to. By returning to 1944, he'd regained most of what he'd lost when he got thrown into the future, but it wasn't the same because he wasn't the same and it was deeply uncomfortable for that. Like an Oracle of myth, everything was tainted by his knowledge of the future, by his fear of changing it -- and his desperation to do just that.
In November 1944, Bucky had been 'dead' for three months, almost, and it was killing Steve to lie on a rickety cot in France knowing that right now Bucky was alive and being tortured and abused in Poland. Natasha's file, for all of its Soviet provenance, had been very thorough on the Winter Soldier's HYDRA origins. Bucky was in a HYDRA facility outside of Oppeln, in Silesia, and he would be there until the first days of April 1945, when he would be transported, in cryostasis, east to the brutal hands of Department X and the Red Room. Right now, though, he was HYDRA property, being turned and twisted and molded into their image through rough methods -- electroshock, sensory deprivation, physical torture they knew he could withstand because Schmidt's scientists had already completed what Zola had begun in Italy, and psychological torture made more efficient because of Bucky's amnesia. He was in a hell he did not fully understand and Steve was in his own version of it because he had to leave him there, at least for now. The cost was too high otherwise. If this wasn't a dream, if he were really back in time about to relive the Battle of the Bulge, then he could not deviate from that. Historians on all sides were unanimous in the importance of the role that Captain America and the Howling Commandos had played -- would play -- during those months, how they'd saved thousands of lives in a battle where there were more than 90,000 Allied casualties. Steve couldn't abandon those men, couldn't sacrifice them all for just one, even if that one was Bucky. He had to leave him there and hope that Bucky would forgive him when it was over, hope he could forgive himself.
"On the other hand," Steve said, not wanting to dwell any more, "if you give Dugan enough booze, he'll maybe let me get up and walk around when it's not to go piss against a tree."
Gabe snorted without looking up. "I'd have to give everyone a good shot for that, sir, and I don't think half a bottle's enough to make all of us silly enough to let you wander around unattended. You were puking yesterday, sir, and that was just to stand up to water a tree."
The lodge had two rooms, the smaller one Steve had been recuperating in and the large one that was kitchen and bedroom and office for the others. They couldn't keep fires going during the day because the smoke up the chimneys would be a beacon for the enemy, but they were all pretty good at banking embers by now and while the others kept warm by keeping busy and wearing all of their clothes at once and the odd nip of brandy, Steve was simply buried under rough wool blankets that smelled of damp and horses. He shifted those now to free his hands and Gabe did look up then, just in case Steve was considering a jailbreak, and Steve frowned at him.
"Just the once," he said, making a show of re-settling himself. "We should be underway in the next day or two. Not today, but we are going to be late enough back to Paris as it is that they might turn us around at Reims."
Their schedule in the fall of 1944 had been much tighter and more regimented than it had been at any other point during the Commandos' history. Most of it was because they were working off of the intel Zola was providing, the breadcrumbs he'd give them that they'd then mix with what they were getting from other sources and turn into actionable intelligence that would, almost a year later, give them Schmidt. The rest of it was because of the cost paid to get Zola in the first place: Peggy and the others had wanted to keep them busy once they got back to work after Bucky had been killed, giving them specific tasks instead of the more general "go out and wander into HYDRA bases" guidelines they'd been operating under so that there were objectives to meet and deadlines to follow and not much time to dwell, either literally or emotionally.
"Had plans for Thanksgiving in Paris, sir?" Gabe asked, bemused. "I think Eisenhower's gonna have to cancel it this year unless he expects us to eat our shoes and say a blessing for it."
There'd been food and fuel and munitions shortages on the lines since the summer and if the Commandos had eaten better than the average grunt, it was because they had spent those months working with the various Resistance groups instead of Big Army. And, more importantly, because they had Jacques, who gave the Commandos a credibility within France that a half-dozen Americans and a Brit couldn't have managed on their own no matter how renown their deeds -- and who could charm the average farmer's wife out of an extra sausage and bottle of plonk with little more than a smile and a story. Most of which were even true because Jacques Dernier had led quite the life before he'd thrown his lot in with the Free French and then found himself a Commando.
"We weren't getting back to Paris by Thursday anyway," Steve answered. Thanksgiving 1944 the first time had been spent in Suippes, a quiet day they'd mostly ignored the significance of until Jacques and Monty had returned from an errand with a bottle of whiskey and a still-bleeding goose. "But there are advantages to being in the same room when the Powers That Be start deciding where we should be."
It wasn't that Peggy and Phillips and the others intentionally wasted the Commandos' time or that they were sent on pointless errands to keep them from getting into trouble, but... the resulting missions were usually more efficiently plotted and thoughtfully planned if Steve and one of his sergeants were there to more reasonably manage expectations. Neither Bucky nor Dugan were (had been) shy about expressing their dislike of too-ambitious proposals, either by elbowing Steve hard in the ribs to speak up or, if he didn't, fidgeting enough in their seats until someone asked if there was a problem, Sergeant, and they'd begin with an apologetic "With all due respect, sirs and madam..." before cutting whatever was under discussion into tiny ribbons. Which didn't mean that those missions were scrapped -- or sometimes even modified -- but reminding those who sat in bunkers and map rooms about how things were likely to play out in the mud and open air was never a bad idea. Steve had understood it back then, but he'd still been a little eager to please, a little afraid that if he spoke up too much, he'd get taken out of the field or put under a commander who would not put up with such polite insubordination as Phillips, who was always willing to at least listen. Now, however, he would probably have little compunction about speaking his piece without any elbows in his ribs to prompt him.
"We already know what they want us to do, sir," Gabe pointed out, crossing something out thoroughly and then rewriting it. "Find HYDRA, kill HYDRA, and try not to blow ourselves up in the process... I am going to know more than I need to about crystal oscillators by the time I am done with this."
Armed with knowledge of the future, Steve knew it was both more and less important that they get back to Paris promptly. The Germans would be breaking through the Allied lines in the Ardennes in a month's time and the Commandos would be sent out as part of the response, so being at Reims would be closer as they'd been in Paris last time. But if there were any way he could slip in a little warning, a little bit of pretend-to-have-overheard details that would allow the Allied forces to shore up the initial attack points even a little to reduce casualties, Steve owed it to the men who would die defending Elsenborn Ridge to do so. But that was a month from now and probably more than time enough to get back to Paris no matter how slowly Dugan made them go in deference to Steve's injuries; in the meanwhile, they had to complete the current mission, which had mostly been a headcount of the various Resistance forces and a watch for the vanguards of the anticipated German forces, especially the SS and HYDRA elements that were not bogged down by micromanagement from Berlin and had been slipping units into Allied-held territory from pretty much the moment the Allies had first held it.
"It wouldn't hurt to have two of us who know how to work that thing if we're going to carry it around," he pointed out, since Gabe was waiting for a comment. "Or are we trading this for Thanksgiving dinner?"
They were not above donating or bartering away found tools or tech or materiel to useful parties -- for food, often, for intel or assistance, frequently, to curry favor or build up an ally worth cultivating, on occasion. Which might have been why nobody had wanted to help Morita before now -- it was something he was going to get to play with for a few hours before it was handed off to someone else.
"We might be trading it for what we've got now," Gabe admitted and Steve frowned, since what they had now was entirely because of him and his injuries. "But Jim wants to test it out, get a sense of its value so we aren't handing over a diamond for a couple of stew rabbits and some sawdust saucissons."
It was not, it turned out, a diamond. Steve was in the main room when Jim finished putting it together and deemed it interesting, but exactly the kind of work that had the Germans losing the war. "You could drop it from a plane and it would work fine," he sniffed. "But Veronica could run rings around it with two of her crystals missing."
Veronica, named after Miss Lake, was Jim's baby, a Frankenstein's monster of a machine that seemed to have components from every radio in US Armed Forces use and defied any kind of description save to say that she was petite and homely and Jim loved her more than any real woman, named Veronica or not. (He'd certainly had his hands on her more, as the others were quick to point out.)
"I am shocked at your assessment," Monty said dryly as he dished out 'stone soup,' their most frequent meal and the reason Steve had been allowed out of his quarantine to sit with the others by the fire. It was a collection of whatever they could get out of the locals -- a turnip here, a carrot there, a potato here, a bit of ham bone there -- and whatever herbs and bits they could find or had brought with them. Occasionally, it meant that everything tasted like rosemary because that's all they had, but tonight, at least, it was more than palatable and not just because there was a bottle of red to share. (Steve used to think that he was imagining it, that the wine he'd drunk in France during the war had affected him more than what he would drink in the future, but it really was more potent stuff, although not enough to fell any of them with a single bottle between six.) The three days in Nancy had been bountiful for more than intelligence and if Jacques had traded away the marjoram in return for something more useful to them, they still had juniper berries and whatever else was rattling around in Monty's blue snuff tin.
After dinner, Steve put off his return to exile by asking for detailed reports on what Morita and Dernier had seen when they'd gone for supplies to help him and what the SSR base camp, currently still in Paris although considering moving closer to the lines, had actually said, instead of what he'd been told they'd said when he'd asked yesterday. Dugan wasn't above such selective editing and sat tonight at Steve's right with not an ounce of repentance to him as the others revealed what they'd hidden. Which wasn't dramatic or shocking or even vaguely urgent once it had become clear that Steve wasn't about to die of a brain hemorrhage. Steve was going to have to check in himself via radio tomorrow during one of the windows, but the plan of action was going to be essentially unchanged: up to Reims, more surveillance and conclaves with the local fighters and then coordinating with the Allied field commanders before returning to Paris. The bulk of the forces were moving south from Normandy and Calais and, soon, from Antwerp, but there were still Allied units coming up from the south and Steve had standing orders to help them out if needed and get out of their way if necessary and he wouldn't know which was the case until he met them.
He was eventually chivvied back to his cot, but Dugan stayed behind and the two of them looked at the maps for an hour or so, figuring out where they should go and how they should get there.
"I do want to get going soon," Steve reiterated, since he was sure Gabe had not passed on that desire. "My head's clear and if we wait until I stop hurting, there'll be a peace treaty first.... unless someone else is hurt, too?"
As team sergeant, Dugan was a little more willing to rat out a fellow Commando than Bucky had been when someone was feeling ill or was banged up or otherwise in less than fighting form, although neither of them ever divulged details if they were at all embarrassing or would risk censure. Even if that censure amounted to Steve giving the guy in question a pained look and a plea for the hangover or the sprain or whatever it had been to be all that had brought back from the brothel. (None of the guys had ever gotten the clap, thankfully, although there had perhaps been a few scares that Steve had suspected but would never have gotten confirmed.)
"Everyone's fine," Dugan assured, meaning it. "I don't think the couple of days' downtime waiting for you has hurt any, mind. Being indoors in this weather's no hardship. A little extra sleep, dry clothes and not having to worry about frostbite, a little less worrying about getting their throats slit in the night... We didn't need the break, but it did us some good anyway."
Steve nodded. "Good. We'll check in tomorrow morning with the bunker and then head out after a big lunch. Let the boys get a belly full of something warm before we go back to humping it through the snow."
"Soldier, put your head down if you don't want to lose it," Steve called over to the private who was prairie-dogging a little too much for his own safety considering that their enemies were so close and so numerous. The Allies were gaining ground everywhere except in Alsace, where they were still fighting to keep from getting cut off and surrounded by the Germans storming out of the Colmar Pocket with impunity. Steve was moving among the infantry now, but he had arrived in the region with the 12th Armored Division, which had taken some heavy losses in battles the previous month, and elements of which currently had neither the trust of their superiors nor any faith in themselves because of poor command decisions. He had understood why he'd been informally attached to them -- to cure the morale problem and give everyone the sense that someone was around to issue orders that would make sense -- but he wasn't really in the mood to play the rah-rah Captain America higher command had prescribed and so there was a bit more tough love and a lot more sharper commands than the boys might've expected from the newsreels. But after the last few months of heavy fighting in the snow, nobody expected any less and Steve could not give any more. He had already given everything he could and was, he suspected, working off of reserves that were closer to exhausted than he might like.
The winter of '44-45 had been no less terrible the second time around, even knowing what was coming and doing what he could to minimize the damage, which hadn't been much because Captain America's capacity to effect change in '44-45 was very different than it was in 2014. Steve laughed at himself, often bitterly and always in private, when his requests to see generals were denied or his orders to officers in the field were ignored -- it wasn't that he believed his own press releases, but he had simply gotten used to having the kind of power and respect that seventy years of history and legend had inspired, far more so than he'd ever realized. In 2014, Steve could argue freely with the Secretary of Defense and have the Joint Chiefs of Staff hanging on every word; in 1945, his reputation did not outstrip his rank or his relatively late date of commission or the untraditional origins of Captain America. He was respected by many as a small unit commander and covert combat tactician, but he was still hobbled by his USO past and Hollywood taint, his laboratory transformation, and the disdain many of the old guard had for covert operations. It was extremely easy to dismiss the showgirl, the experiment, or the guy who spent his time sneaking around in the dark slitting throats instead of engaging in proper and honorable soldiering. Special Operations might be the sexiest of the military specialties in the future he'd left behind, but in the present he'd returned to, it was considered ungentlemanly at best and either savage or cowardly at worst, the last resort of men who'd lost all else -- including their dignity -- and was capable of no more. Captain America might be good for the public back home, but 'real' soldiers knew better, which was not true within the ranks, but it wasn't the ranks that he had to convince to change their position because history said that the 106th Panzer Brigade was showing up in nine days.
"Sergeant, I want you to move your men ahead two hundred yards and set up prepared to fire south," he told Ginsburg, the NCOIC of the unit. By the time Steve had come across them, they'd already lost their lieutenant, platoon sergeant, and half their number in a skirmish earlier that morning, soaking the knee-deep snow with blood. And so while Steve wanted to move toward the enemy -- a company from the 708th Volksgrenadier Division had set themselves up comfortably half a mile away -- he had to get these boys home instead. They were exhausted, frostbitten, grief-stricken, and running low on ammo and they'd be no help in his fight. "We should be clear, but just in case."
It took an hour to get the fellows attached to another retreating unit and, once they were settled, Steve accepted a tin cup of hot coffee, but refused the hot chow on offer in favor of a K-ration and a couple of Logan bars because it was running short and others needed it more, although he said it was because he could take those on the road and nobody else would eat them if they didn't have to. Which was true enough -- D rations weren't called "Hitler's secret weapon" for nothing -- but he really didn't want to stick around. He was feeling soul-weary and sorry for himself and angry for the latter, so he just wanted to go out and hit things for a while. It wasn't blood thirst, rather its opposite -- he was exhausted by the killing and if he could make it stop, make it happen less, then he would. He was exhausted by everything for more reasons than that he was barely sleeping; he was now closing in on his sixth year of warfighting.
Fighting the Germans again, fighting HYDRA again, was disturbing for more reasons than just than having to relive the unspeakable horrors of war. It was his growing sense of the uselessness of it; he had driven Schmidt's plane into the ice at ease with his fate because it had ensured the failure of HYDRA's great plan and it had come after the death of their leader and his mission, in many ways, had been completed with that act. But it hadn't been. HYDRA had survived and thrived because of the peace he'd helped bring about, and he couldn't escape the feeling that all of this blood -- and he had seen so much blood in the three months he'd been back in this time -- was being spilled in vain. His sacrifice, which hadn't been negated by being defrosted, had been in vain because no matter how many lives were spent here and now, no matter how many were saved, in seventy years and three months, Alexander Pierce would come a heartbeat away from giving Schmidt his victory. And the worst part, if there could be a worst part when every part was so awful, was he wasn't able to do more to change it. He didn't know what he could do or change without adversely affecting the future; was he killing a German soldier whose never-to-be-born child would create a cure for some dread disease, was he saving a man who would go home and commit murder, would keeping Pierce's father from meeting his mother make things better or worse when Pierce had done many objectively good things in the twentieth century? He didn't know the answer and there was no one he could ask.
Keeping everything to himself meant walking a lonely road, one he made even more so by intentionally separating himself from the people who knew him best because there was, he had realized, no way to hide all of the changes three years in the future had wrought on him. Everything about him was different and he couldn't brush it off as just others' perceptions or even provide plausible explanations for most of it.
In the field, he fought differently -- he'd been a puncher and a gymnast the first time, but now he knew capoeira and krav maga and muy thai and jiu jitsu and used them instinctively. He threw the shield differently and with far greater effect. His tactical and strategic skills were far better, as was his ability to command larger units -- he'd already incorporated the lessons learned from his first time through the Battle of the Bulge, plus the Battle of New York and everything that had come after that. It wasn't all improvements, though: he'd used terminology nobody understood and requested tools that hadn't been invented yet and he'd gotten men into trouble more than once for plotting out moves that would have worked easily with twenty-first century technology and tactics but were dismal failures with what the average soldier was carrying and wearing in 1945. But overall, his combat skills had grown immeasurably and the contrast was stark with what he'd been showing before he'd landed on his head outside of Nancy in November. Away from the Commandos, it was easier to pass off as simply him being Captain America, but he wasn't going to forget the not-entirely-pleasantly surprised looks Dugan and Morita had given him the first time he'd dropped a trio of SS brutes with silat moves.
Off the field, which he rarely had been since Christmas, he was different in more ways than he could probably recognize in himself. He knew that the last two months of constant fighting had taken their toll, that eighteen months at war would change anyone and that was to be expected, but there was also the time in the future, three-plus years during which he did not rest and, as Sam had gently guided him to recognize, he had not healed. He was numb almost all of the time, which was a comfort mostly because it kept him from feeling some of the pain he was surrounded by, but it also kept him from relishing the moments of bliss that surprised them all. He could laugh at jokes, had enjoyed himself well enough the one time he'd allowed himself to be taken to bed, and had even cameoed as himself during a USO show in Paris, but it was all still muted and muffled and he was starting to forget what it was like when it hadn't been. The Commandos, none of them unaffected by what they'd seen and done, either, had let this pass largely unremarked because to them, it was a natural continuation of what had been. Steve hadn't realized to what degree he'd been affected by Bucky's death the first time, but it had apparently been more than he'd thought.
He reunited with the Commandos two days later. They had largely stopped operating as one unit after the new year; they had gone ahead early to scout positions and take out vanguards where they could, but once it had become army-against-army, small unit covert actions were less useful and so they'd been moved around to where they could be more efficient. Steve, of course, went everywhere and did everything and could probably have objected more than he did, but he hadn't the first time because he'd been respectful of the senior officers' experience and didn't this time because he was hiding from his teammates and their looks of surprised concern. However, he did make sure, to the best of his ability, that they weren't being ill-used or feeling abandoned by him. Morita and Gabe especially, since their membership in the Commandos had provided them with a layer of protection against the prejudices against a Nisei and a black man in a still-segregated Army; Morita's reputation as an RTO whiz had him roving the front lines keeping everyone's comms up and steady while Gabe had gotten himself attached to the camp of a battalion in the 3rd ID after finding an old high school classmate as the operations officer there. Dernier and Falsworth were attached to French and British units respectively and could not have been happier, to the point that they were apologizing to him for their deep satisfaction at fighting alongside their countrymen once again. (He'd told them to stop being idiots.) Dugan was back to what he'd been doing before he'd been captured in Italy, playing up his legend as a soldier who'd never fit in and never let anyone down -- that bowler hat had been far more than whimsy, a distinctive mark that the rank and file took to mean that he was on their side and the smart officers took to mean he was too valuable to break to the bit.
When the Commandos reunited, it was half by accident and mostly by intent -- they had all gotten orders to hitch up to Antwerp, but doing so together was happenstance. The SSR was still based in Paris, but they were supposed to be meeting agents in Antwerp to get new assignments. The Battle of the Bulge was essentially over, the Colmar Pocket clear, and the Allied armies were on the move into Germany, and that left plenty for those agencies that did their work away from the front lines. They rode up in the back of a covered transport truck, exhausted but content -- with the successes on the battlefield, with seeing each other again, with the promise of resuming doing what they were best at doing. Even Dernier and Monty weren't overly disappointed; the freedom within the Commandos was something not enjoyed anywhere else in any uniform -- Steve held loose reins, something that would serve as good practice in the future when it came to leading the Avengers -- and being back under the structure of a formal fighting force, even one that spoke their own language, had had its downsides. They'd run into each other in various combinations over the last six weeks, but this was the first time it had been all of them together. To celebrate, they all passed out and were snoring before they even crossed the border into Belgium.
Antwerp was somewhere between US Army company town and an old city stretching itself after having been squashed under the Nazis' boots, festive and industrious in a kind of manic way. They were met at US Forces command by an SSR agent they didn't recognize and escorted to a hotel that had enough black market connections to offer real steaks in the restaurant alongside the usual fries and beer. They were elbow deep in all of the above when Peggy showed up with a smirk on her face and a tiredness in her eyes that she couldn't quite hide. They all stood up and Dugan shifted everyone over around the big table so that there was space between Steve and Monty for one more chair. Peggy accepted the seat with grace, the half-pint glass from the publican with somewhat less grace (and a bit of snickering from the table because everyone knew that while Peggy was a perfect lady, she was also a perfect lady who could put away a proper pint of bitters with ease), and took fries off Steve's plate like they were a right as she updated them on where things were within the SSR and its search for Schmidt and the rest of the HYDRA infrastructure.
This wasn't the first time Steve had seen Peggy since he'd been back, nor the third, but their meetings had been thus far brief and distracted by the business of war and espionage. She'd worried over him when he'd first returned to Paris after his fall through time, but they hadn't really had any time to exchange more than assurances that no, really, he had a very hard head in the literal sense, too. She'd put her hand on his hair as if to judge the integrity of his skull herself, even though the bruises were long gone, and he'd closed his eyes at the nearness of her, at what he knew he still wanted so very much now that it was in front of him again. He'd thought about making a move, knowing that it would not be cruelly rejected. Peggy had mourned him as a lost love when he'd died; making what they'd separately wished for real, even for a little while, would not change that. But there hadn't been time or place and then the war, always the war, had taken precedence.
Here and now, two months later, it was almost overwhelming to have her at his side, picking off his plate and pouring beer from his glass to hers because the bartender was going to enforce her ladylike decorum if she wouldn't do it herself. After going so long not feeling anything, not allowing himself to feel anything, it was almost too much and he had to force himself to listen to what she was saying and not bask in her being close enough to smell her perfume.
Peggy left them after she'd said her piece and made them all swear to show up at the formal briefing not too hung over to listen, wishing them goodnight and expressing gladness that they'd all survived and returned safely. Steve stayed a while longer, finally decompressed enough to appreciate his teammates' tipsy antics, before getting up to settle the bill and leave the boys free of officer supervision. He exchanged a look with Dugan, who nodded that yes, he'd keep everyone from overdoing it too much, and then told the table that he was paying for the beer tonight but would not be paying for bail tomorrow.
They had been given four rooms upstairs, the Commandos splitting three between the five however Dugan wanted to do it and one for Steve. He'd bought a bottle of bootleg Irish whiskey when he'd settled the tab and poured some of it now into the tumbler they'd given him. He couldn't get properly drunk, not like he used to and not like the boys were getting downstairs, and beer never did anything for him, but enough hard liquor could take the edges off, soften the world enough to make the points of contact not hurt as much for a little while. And he desperately wanted that respite tonight.
For all of his bone-deep exhaustion and the first hot, substantial meal he'd had in months, he wasn't sleepy and so he sat at the desk by the window, glass of whiskey at his elbow, and sketched in the pad he carried with him everywhere but hadn't opened in months. He was most of the way through a study of soldiers making camp in the snow in Alsace when there was a quiet knock on the door. Not expecting anyone -- the knock had been far too polite and discreet to be a drunken Commando checking in -- he put down his pencil and picked up his pistol before going to the door.
"Well, that's one way to greet a lady," Peggy said dryly, eyebrow arched as she took in the pistol in his free hand. "Although I suppose it will serve as evidence in the matter I wanted to discuss with you."
He stood aside as she entered, looking out into the hallway for witnesses before shutting the door behind her. He knew that it was widely assumed that he and Peggy were lovers, had known it the first time even as he'd vehemently protested the impugning of Peggy's virtue and honor, but there was no reason to give those rumors fuel because they did not make her life easy even as they added to the legend of Captain America.
The two of them had been ridiculous, Peggy would tell him in the future, each sure of their own feelings and completely misreading the other's until it was too late, and nobody else had quite believed that they had been so blind. He'd been an innocent despite an abundance of physical experiences that should have stripped his naivete from him and she hadn't understood that until the end, instead assuming that he was disinterested in anything more than a casual fuck because that's all he'd ever had. (That Peggy knew his sexual history in almost complete detail, from the actresses on the USO tours to the occasional dalliances with Resistance fighters and war widows, had embarrassed him acutely in the future and she'd laughed at him for that.) Catching him in a clinch with Private Lorraine had been proof for her that he really had changed from the man she’d met at Camp Lehigh, that he was now like every other fellow on the inside as well as out, and that he’d meant to continue as he’d begun with his casual encounters with women who once upon a time would never have looked twice at him.
Here and now, however, he wondered if history would be different this time around. Peggy had never come to his quarters alone the first time, at least not without knowing that there was someone else there to bear witness to its professional necessity.
Peggy looked around the room now, eyes falling on the desk with the half-empty whiskey bottle and the open sketchpad. "I'm going to tell Colonel Phillips that none of you are going anywhere for a week at least," she began as she crossed over to the desk, her heels clicking quietly on the bare floor. Her fingertip traced over the lines on the page. "You're all at your limits, if not beyond. You shouldn't have been out so long as it was, but there was no way to get you all back once you'd been dispatched. And, I think, if we'd tried, I don't know that you'd have come."
He'd followed her back toward the desk but stopped halfway, keeping space between them. "Jacques and Monty were pretty happy among their countrymen."
Peggy turned to him and frowned. "I wasn't referring to the boys, Steven. That last 'you' was not the plural."
"I was needed," he said simply, since explaining everything else would have been impossible. Even if he could allow himself to reach for Peggy now, to turn rumor into fact, he couldn't allow himself to unburden all that he was carrying upon her. Couldn't let himself speak a word because he knew that Peggy would triumph over the rumors and the skeptics and the institutional misogyny and she would become a Director of SHIELD and he could not risk her so greatly changing the future. It was the reason he hesitated now, kept an invisible barrier between them, because it would be unfair to take comfort in her while still keeping his secrets to himself. It would be lying and he respected her too much, loved her too much, to do that to her.
"You are always going to be needed," she told him, turning back to the sketchpad. "But you are so far past the point where you have what to give that you can barely stand. You've been running on fumes since Bucky Barnes died and you haven't stopped running, not for six months. The others have noticed and you can be damned sure Colonel Phillips is going to notice."
He stood where he was, unsure of what to do or say. "Are you here to warn me?"
Peggy chuffed out a laugh that was almost ugly in its ruefulness. "I thought I might have to," she answered, tapping the page with her finger. "But you are very clearly aware of it. I am here, then, I suppose, to ask you what you are going to do about it."
She looked up at him, almost over her shoulder, and he was startled by the fear in her eyes. He had never done anything to make Peggy afraid of him... but, perhaps, he had made her afraid for him.
"I'm not trying to get myself killed, Peggy," he said quietly.
"You're not," she agreed, a brittleness to her tone. "But you've become completely indifferent to it happening by accident."
He shook his head to disagree, but without vehemence. This wasn't the first time he'd had the accusation leveled at him by someone who was in a position to know. He knew himself that there had been points where it had probably been true, but it wasn't right now. "I still have things I need to do," he said, aware that it was hardly a denial.
"And when they're done?" Peggy asked, right hand moving from the sketchpad to the half-full tumbler, fingertip circling the rim. "What then?"
He shrugged helplessly, unable to lie to her about this. "I don't know."
She nodded, like this was an important confession he'd made and maybe it was. She stook looking at the sketch for a long moment and he watched and waited as the minutes ticked by. Then she looked up at him and smiled tightly and a little ruefully. “You’ve been honest with me and that should be rewarded with honesty in return,” she said, eyes on the tumbler under her fingertips. “I have taken advantage of your... exhaustion, or, rather, I did not protect you from it as well as I should have. Instead of politely turning away, I saw something I am quite sure you meant to keep hidden.”
He froze. There was no way to hide all of the changes the future had wrought upon him, which was why he’d exiled himself from those who knew him best, including Peggy. But there were also the times when he’d been genuinely careless, such as when he’d found himself sketching Avengers Tower on his notes during a meeting and had had to doodle over it to turn it into something less dangerous.
Peggy laughed, this time with amusement. “Oh, Steve,” she sighed fondly. “You look like I said that I'd caught you looking at dirty pictures.”
He blushed a little, although not nearly as much as he once might have. “I’ll confess to that, if I must.”
Dugan had curated quite the collection, which all of them had borrowed at one point or another for personal recreation. They had also traded the pictures as needed for more prosaic needs like gun oil or an extra can of C-rations or eggs from a farmer’s hens.
“You needn’t,” Peggy assured lightly. “But for the record, I would have assumed it to be true.”
He smiled hesitantly at that, unsure of where she was going with this. A direction that became no less clear – or maybe too clear – when Peggy picked up the tumbler and downed the contents in one gulp, coughing a little. She squared her shoulders and turned on her heel and started walking toward him with a purpose. She didn’t look like she was bracing for impact, but something in her posture softened a little when he didn’t back away as she passed through the invisible barrier between them.
“Peggy,” he warned softly as she drew close enough for him to smell the whiskey on her breath. “You—“
She silenced him with a finger to his lips. “I don’t,” she agreed easily. “Nor do you. But I would finish my confession, if you’ll let me.”
He nodded once slightly, not enough to dislodge her finger but she moved it anyway, replacing it with her thumb rubbing softly against his lower lip and her hand cradling his face.
“Once upon a time, I made a judgment about you,” she began, meeting his eyes and holding them. “And you tried to tell me that I was wrong and I chose not to listen, chose instead to see your gestures of protest and your attempts to prove your innocence as their opposite, as evidence of your guilt. And, somewhere along the line, you chose to stop fighting, to protect that truth and hide it away. And I, in my foolishness, took that as a victory. But now you are so worn down, so exhausted, that you can’t keep that truth hidden anymore and I can’t help but see it. See that I was wrong and my victory was a defeat of us both.”
The movement of her thumb against his lip ceased and he waited for her to speak again. The next move was going to be his, he understood that. To accept her apology or not and decide what happened next. She wasn’t offering herself to him. Or, rather she was, but not the way women did in this time and in the future, as something temporary and ephemeral and meaningless. This was her offering up her heart and hoping it wasn’t too late because it had taken her so long to see that she'd always had his.
When she said nothing more, before the silence started to mean something other than what he wanted, he kissed the thumb against his lips. She choked out a laugh and used the hand cradling his face to pull him in and close the distance. He went, mirroring the gesture and smiling as they kissed, months ahead of schedule and far less hurriedly. He tried to keep himself a little bit grounded because this was overwhelming, to finally allow himself to have something he’d wanted for so long, to feel something instead of the numbness. And then he realized what he was doing and let go because why couldn’t he be overwhelmed if it was by happiness?
Peggy left in the middle of the night, her shoes in her hand and a bemused smile on her face as she slipped back to her own room down the hall. They didn’t see each other until the meeting with Phillips and the other SSR decision-makers in town, when she walked in with a stack of files in her arms and archly asked how the Commandos were that morning and Dugan, whom Steve knew to be nursing an impressive hangover, cheerfully assured her that everyone was accounted for and nobody was in jail.
The discussion about what they’d seen and done and what needed to be done next was lengthy but straightforward because Phillips had no tolerance for politicking and would always favor the field operator over the analyst working safely in the bunker. Which might have been why he'd come to Antwerp in the first place. He knew what Eisenhower wanted out of the SSR, which was not necessarily what he was prepared to give the General, but the two weren’t so far apart that it would cause lasting friction. The Commandos were going back to hunting for HYDRA, which Steve was more than fine with. He knew where the bases were and which ones were the dry holes and had enough mission autonomy to favor the former and choose the safest of the latter because those would be the softball missions. Hunting HYDRA would also give him cover for what was his own real next mission: to find and rescue Bucky.
Bucky would be in Poland for another five-six weeks, but getting to him sooner than later was better not only to end his suffering more quickly, but also because Steve only knew when the Soviets moved him, not when he had been found. Steve didn’t want to have to fight off the Russians, putative allies, to get to Bucky because they considered him a spoil of war.
He had already started planning the mission in his head, which was becoming an unintentional mirror of the first time he’d had to spring Bucky from HYDRA captivity, not in the least because he was planning on doing it alone. He knew the Commandos would want in, but he also knew how dangerous it was going to be and how weary they were. This wasn’t going to be one of their usual jaunts behind enemy lines and he didn’t want to risk their lives, even to save Bucky’s. They had wives to meet and children to sire, full lives to enjoy, and he was not going to chance any of that not happening, of changing time so drastically by getting a Commando killed on a longshot mission. And it was a longshot, even knowing where Bucky was.
(He'd justified rescuing Bucky to himself by pointing out that HYDRA would have no shortage of assets to complete their murderous missions and could do what they wanted without the Winter Soldier's help. How much of that was logic and how much of it was selfishness he couldn't say, but he had to believe it. Had to do this. He had sacrificed them both for no good reason -- HYDRA thrived in the future -- and no matter what happened with him, Bucky would not have to bear the brunt of his folly again.)
Getting to Poland was going to require a plane and a parachute; Oppeln was too far inland to go by sea and too far from Allied borders to drive or walk without running into someone with either the authority to ask him where he was going or standing orders to shoot him on sight. Getting a plane might actually be easier than getting a truck, especially with transport (and gas) shortages. He could hit up the Army Air Corps or the RAF for a lift – they’d trust him even if he didn’t have written orders, especially written orders to a region being assaulted by the Russians. After that, it was going to have to be a bit of improvisation to get to the base and find Bucky, but he was going to need a bit more planning than just winging it to get the two of them back to friendly territory. Especially if Bucky was not himself. Steve knew that he had to brace himself for going in to rescue his friend and finding the Winter Soldier instead, but chose to consider that a worst-case scenario for now.
In the meanwhile, it was off to follow the French II Corps into Germany.
“This is a lot more fun than the last time we were here,” Jacques announced cheerfully as he rigged the explosives to blow. They were at a HYDRA facility east of Bonn, a small but useful one they’d gone ahead to find while the French were still bogged down by Cologne. It was their third stop and, judging by the haul and the number of prisoners, their last before they would have to return to base. This place, an old estate that was less castle than manor, had been a low-security base, mostly research and documents, no weapons storage or anything too heavily defended, and they’d gotten in before the occupants had realized they were under assault and thus before they had had a chance to fulfill their orders to burn everything before the Allies could get their hands on them.
“Don’t have so much fun that you set the forest on fire,” Steve warned, but he did so with a smile. He had just finished a last walk-through and was carrying a box of papers to be brought back to Belgium for the analysts to read. The others were supervising the prisoners ferrying the rest of the boxes into the rear of the HYDRA truck that had been parked innocently in the estate's garage, leaving Jacques to do what he did best. “Save some for next time.”
“Ouais, Papa,” Jacques replied, all insouciant obedience. Steve made a note to himself to make sure the truck was some distance away before Jacques set off his latest creation.
The boys were upbeat on the drive back north, not the least because of their successes, although that hadn’t hurt. Nor had watching Jacques’s fireball turn two different colors before settling into a more traditional red-orange flame as it burned. Instead, Steve suspected it was the return to normal operations, at least by Howling Commando standards, for the first time in months. They were on their own, doing what they did best, and it felt good. It did feel good, he could readily admit, and he’d felt more comfortable in his skin than he had at any point since his return, more present and more alive. He knew some of it was Peggy and having a real human connection again and having that connection be her, but the rest of it was simply getting away from the front. It was doing all of them more good than the week off in Antwerp could explain.
All of which made the scene that occurred back in Belgium that much more of a shock, at least to him.
They’d been back for a day, a triumphant return akin to Santa Claus on Christmas with their truckloads of documents and munitions to be examined and prisoners to be questioned, and there’d been a celebratory dinner that even Phillips had stopped by for and donated a bottle to. Steve had stayed longer than usual before retreating to officer country, which in this case had been a table at the other end of the room with Phillips and Stark, who was in town to play with some of their haul, and Peggy and the liaisons with SHAEF and the others who got their oar in when the SSR came up winners. After that had been a more private reunion with Peggy, who’d remarked on how much less weight he seemed to be carrying on his shoulders. “I’m not trying to carry everything on my own,” he’d replied. “I’m happy for the first time that I can remember.”
The next morning, what had originally been a day off became a day with a meeting at noon in Phillips’s office. Steve had shown up expecting news about Schmidt – it was almost at the point where what Zola had been telling them was going to start paying off there – but instead of Phillips and maybe Peggy, he walked in to see them plus Stark plus all of the Howling Commandos.
His first thought was that this was where they asked him who he really was and what he’d done with Steve Rogers. Especially as he saw the look of hurt and betrayal on Peggy’s face that she was doing a poor job of hiding from the others – if they’d been looking. But everyone’s eyes were on him alone.
“Sir,” he prompted. “Reporting as ordered.”
Phillips turned to Stark, who stepped aside and Steve exhaled with what might have been relief or might have been disappointment when he saw what was on the corkboard on the wall: it was the map of Poland he had been working on, the facility outside Oppeln marked in ink and possible ingress and egress routes done in pencil. It had been in his pack, at least it should have been. He hadn’t looked at it since they’d gotten back and while Peggy might have found it in his room last night, the odds were more likely that one of the boys had seen it while they’d been campaigning, going in to his ruck for matches or money or whatever else.
“What’s in Poland, Captain,” Phillips asked, more resigned than angry, although he was definitely both. “And why haven’t you been sharing with the class?”
He’d debated lying if he’d been discovered, but had chosen not to. Better to let them think him desperate than to lose their respect. So he looked Phillips straight in the eyes and answered.
"Sergeant Barnes, sir."
