Temperamental
Back when they were kids, they’d play soldiers. They might not have had the hats or wooden pop guns that other kids did, but they did just fine with Steve’s imagination and Bucky’s willingness to follow along. He’s been humoring Steve since day one, letting himself be dragged all over God’s green earth so that Steve could fight imaginary monsters, so that his coughing, huffing, and puffing little friend would smile. It was exciting, and it felt like adventure and glory and everything that Steve wanted, and Bucky right beside him to boot. His second-in-command, marching into battle over and over despite his insistence that he didn’t want to play. All it ever took was one look from Steve, even at that age, and Buck was toast. Steve knew it too, as much as he pretended to come by all his wins honestly.
He never should’ve made Bucky play. Looking at the greyed and haunted faces of these soldiers—some of them younger than Steve himself—he couldn’t help but flip through his childhood searching for just how many times he had wheedled and whined for Bucky to be a soldier with him, for Bucky to “get shot” so that Steve could avenge him. And now Bucky was a soldier, a real soldier, and Steve might have had some bells and whistles but he was still just playing. It was obvious from the painfully spick and span lines of Steve’s clean reds, whites, and blues against the rusty, irregular splashes that many of the soldiers wore. He tried to stick to those who were associated with the show and told himself it was so that he could prepare for the night’s performance, and not because he couldn’t bring himself to look anymore soldiers in the eye knowing that resentment and scorn would be written all over their face, and that any face might be the one he wanted to see the most.
He was still hoping to see Bucky here, of course he was, but he couldn’t help the fear and more than a twinge of anger when he thought about how his last letter had been answered. After weeks of waiting on the edge of his seat for some sort of response, that hurried little paragraph had been damn near crushing. Steve had spent the weeks since trying to reason with his mounting fear that maybe Bucky saw something in his letters that he didn’t want to see, no matter how probable it was that he was just in a tough spot and hadn’t gotten any of the desperate, vaguely apologetic letters Steve sent before leaving for Europe with the tour.
Maybe if he hadn’t gone to the Grand Canyon, and just after Buck seemed to be warming up to the idea of Steve doing some big new job, too. It had seemed alright there for a month or two, as good as it could be writing Bucky from another continent and unable to really see what was happening. Steve had thought that something was starting to happen, something he wasn’t sure how to deal with but that seemed to hide in the lines of every new word, the shapes of every familiar memory. He had almost thought that Bucky felt it too, but after all, that could’ve been the problem.
If he were being honest, then Steve would have to admit that he was avoiding looking the soldiers in the face because he didn’t want to know what he would find in Bucky’s eyes, in the slant of his mouth, in the crinkle of his brow. He didn’t want to see the resentment. Resentment that Steve was only playing the soldier, and that he had lied, and that one of the only true things he said was almost as painful as the lies, all that Steve thought he could handle, but if Bucky knew, if he had seen the shift in Steve’s heart and been disgusted at what he found, then the end of the line might be much closer than either of them had thought before.
It was perfectly possible that what Buck had said had in fact come to pass—that his regiment was in a bad place and the letters had stopped coming and going, that he had to write that damned letter as fast as he could and didn’t think a thing of it—but was that really any better? Bucky’s hatred would be better than his absence, in the long run.
“Captain!” A harried voice called out from somewhere behind Steve. “Captain Rogers!”
Steve ignored the snickers of few passing soldiers in favor of turning to face the approaching young man with a smile. “What can I help you with, son?”
“Producer asked me to find you, said you don’t need to help unload anymore and he’d rather have you backstage prepping for the show.”
The kid looked nervous, as if he didn’t know whether he was really supposed to be telling Captain America what to do. Steve smiled as winningly as he could—though it still felt like pulling on a pair of gloves that just didn’t fit quite right—and nodded. “Lead the way.”
The pair walked swiftly in the direction of the stage, Steve striding with painfully measured confidence while the young man plodded along in an attempt to match his pace. He still looked a little bit like a spooked horse, and Steve couldn’t attribute it wholly to his being asked to fetch the star of his show because at that moment Steve realized he already knew him. Not explicitly, they had never actually exchanged words, but the more Steve side-eyed the kid the more he remembered seeing him around, standing tall, not curling and scampering like he was now.
“Son,” Steve asked, startling the young man out of his determined reverie, “what did you say your name was?”
“Oh, I didn’t, actually. Sorry, sir. Keller, Grant Keller.”
“Well Keller, what’s got you so nervous?”
“Nervous, sir?”
Steve slowed his pace to something more comfortable, more suited to a conversation between two young men, and shrugged in the offhanded way he had seen Bucky use so often to get what he wanted. “You’re shaking like a leaf, Keller. Something’s got you spooked, was just wondering if I should be worried.”
“You? Oh, no sir,” Keller laughed. “I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about. I don’t think any of us do, really, it’s just this business with all the captured soldiers. Really makes you think. They’re all supposedly far away by now, though, so like I said, nothing to get too twisted about.”
Steve hadn’t felt this cold since before he got the serum, and for a second, he had to glance down to remind himself that he wasn’t sick and alone in the apartment back in Brooklyn. “Captured soldiers? I haven’t heard anything about that.”
“Well, it’s the rest of the guys, sir,” Keller looked sheepish now, as if he knew why Steve had avoided the soldiers’ company or else he saw something sharp in Steve’s expression that urged him to caution. “They’ve been a’talkin about it something fierce. Saying they saw crazy things, and 400 soldiers gone!”
It didn’t mean anything, necessarily. There were lots of soldiers, and when the world was at war, there were lots of tough spots. Lots of people who couldn’t get around to sending letters, or just didn’t want to, for one reason or another. “Four hundred,” Steve whistled. “No wonder they’ve been talking.”
“You’re telling me, sir.” Keller was animated now, his previous hesitation thawed by Steve’s mild reaction. “They’re saying they were just overrun, sir, but I think they’re wrong. From what they say, it sounds like the Devil himself is what they—”
“And who,” Steve interrupted, “who exactly are they? The ones who are talking.”
“The boys from the 107th. Well, the ones that’re left, anyways.”
Keller plodded ahead for a few paces, unaware that his escortee was frozen in place, heart pumping harder than it ever had even before the serum. “The 107th.” It wasn’t a question. The words were less words and more a breath, a single fragile exhale into the chasm that had opened suddenly at Steve’s feet.
The words sat there, hovering, as Keller turned and took in Steve’s carefully neutral expression. “...Sir, is something wrong?”
“Who.”
“I—” Keller glanced around with obvious unease, before turning back to Steve. “I don’t understand. Who?”
“Who’s missing? Do they have names? A place? Anything?”
“No, sir. At least, nothing solid to—”
“Dead? Are they dead?”
“Alive, they think. Somewhere in Austria by now. But sir, I really don’t understand, did you know someone who—”
“Captain Rogers!” The booming voice of the show’s producer broke through the growing fog of Steve’s panic, and made him take a few steps back from where he had—apparently—been getting progressively closer to Keller. “Just the Star-Spangled Man with a Plan I wanted to see.”
The producer glanced between Steve and Keller, possibly reading some of the tension in the air before electing to ignore it in favor of clapping a hand on Steve’s shoulder and steering him in the direction of the stage. “Not like you to be lollygagging around when there’s work to be done, Rogers.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Steve twisted to gesture back to where Keller stood, “but I—”
“Never you mind, son. Just put on a good show—lord knows these guys need it.” The producer’s grip brooked no argument, and Steve followed along silently, the surety of his stride in stark contrast to the snatches of half-formed thoughts swimming through his head.
Steve tried desperately to hold on to just one, to pluck one of the frantic cries out of the whirlpool so that he could examine and address it, but the only thing cutting clearly through the litany of panicked questions buzzing behind his teeth and the monotonous clop of left, right, left, right, left was a single word: Bucky.
As the producer tugged Steve by the arm up the steps to backstage and directed him to get into costume, Steve knew again that Bucky alive and hating him was infinitely better than Bucky captured or dead or worse. And he was captured, Steve reminded himself—Keller had said they were alive. Hesitantly, but it meant there was a chance. And if Buck was here now and just didn’t want nothing to do with Steve anymore, well. Alive and hating him. It would have to be enough.
Steve dressed in a daze, stretching the suit over his steady arms and legs, and vaguely he noted that before the serum his heart had only beat this quickly right when he realized he couldn’t breathe. It had always slowed down then, the longer the condition persisted, and brought with it the hazy comfort of something sweet and calm and beyond his reach. Now there was no relief from the mounting fear. He would have called it paralyzing, except his body had thankfully kept moving without his conscious input. He only realized when he was staring out the holes in his mask at the gathered soldiers, hidden behind a wing of the stage, that he was waiting for something.
His cue—there it was. The dancers parted, and Steve noted vaguely that they were getting closer, or he was. He was walking onto the stage, body propelling his unwilling mind back into the present. His face split into a ragged smile, the corners of his mouth tugging his dry lips as taut across his face as they could go, and he stared out into the faces of hundreds of soldiers who may or may not have been James Buchanan Barnes, but who were for some reason here in front of him anyways. The lights from the stage suddenly felt blinding, and as he tripped through his lines Steve felt himself begin to sweat more than he had during the first show when he had been nervous as all hell. Not that anyone could tell with the rubber suit.
Rubber suit, wooden shield—someone shouted out something about Captain America and paper bullets; he couldn’t make it out but the laughter was clear. Captain America. There. Steve looked out at the blurred faces of the audience while he started bitching about war bonds and suddenly felt sick to his stomach. That at least was a familiar feeling.
Bucky Barnes was gone. There was no way in hell—Steve had been around for days and nothing from him. Not that Buck would know Steve was there if he hadn’t been getting his letters, but Captain America was there, and as far as Buck knew that meant Steve, too. Could he really believe that Bucky wouldn’t be tripping over himself trying to get someone to take him to Steve? To get someone to direct him to the skinny little punk that was risking a flareup of his chronic something-or-another by gallivanting off to Europe in the middle of a war when he was specifically told not to, and risking more besides by increasing the edge of something in their letters that Steve still wasn’t sure Buck noticed or appreciated. As much as there was a part of him clutching the Good Book and hissing that Buck wouldn’t want anything to do with such a...temperamental character as Steve, he just couldn’t get over the part of him that stubbornly insisted that Bucky wouldn’t care. Or if he did, that the worst he’d do would be to tell Steve to leave off, or maybe knock out a few teeth, before he tried to wrap him up in a blanket and send him back stateside.
The sick feeling in the pit of his stomach wasn’t going away, and as he tried his best to remember from what side Hitler was supposed to make his stealthy approach and to figure out how he could get off the damned stage right now, someone took to shining down on him.
“Hey!” Steve was jarred into focus by a muddy boot soaring through the air and connecting with his stomach. “Bring back the dancing girls!”
In a moment, he had decided. “You got it,” Steve muttered under his breath while he strode off the stage, into the wing, directly passed the frantic show producer who was hissing at him to get back out there and finish the damn job, sir. Steve kept walking, only pausing once he had cleared the stairs leading up backstage and could wrench the nearest soldier from their purposeful marching.
“Where’s Grant Keller.”