Unaccounted For
“Well, you see sir, it’s just that I don’t think Colonel Phillips really wants anybody to drop in like this, you know?” Keller trotted nervously a few paces ahead of Steve, moving pretty quickly for someone protesting that they shouldn’t be leading him anywhere.
“It’s official business.”
“That you’ve said, Captain Rogers, but I just don’t know what you wanna try and do here—what you can do!”
“That’s not for you to worry about, Keller.”
“Look, you don’t get it, he really—well, he’s just not that fond of you from what I hear—”
“Keller,” Steve paused to grab the young man’s shoulder, forcing him to come to a halt and stare up at Steve. “Nobody needs to know it was you brought me to him. This is my problem. Now tell me,” Steve gestured to the cluster of unusually large canvas tents, “which one is his?”
The moment Keller pointed a slightly shaking hand to the middle of the group, Steve took off. There was a hint of guilt toying at the back of his mind—the kid wasn’t even a soldier, was just here because the show was, didn’t really deserve to be intimidated by Captain-freaking-America—but the man who could tell him whether there was a chance in the world for Bucky Barnes was somewhere in that tent and no matter how much Steve dreaded seeing Phillips again, he had to.
Steve marched straight into the large tent in the middle of the group, ignoring the soldier posted at the flap who was too confused about whether Captain America was an actual captain to do more than ask why he needed to go inside. The ruckus barely drew the attention of Phillips, who was sitting behind a desk with a stack of reports a mile wide. Eyes never moving from the paper in his hands, Phillips called out, “If you need to talk, I’m busy.”
“You’re an experiment. You’re going to Alamogordo.” Steve took a small measure of pleasure from the way Phillips suddenly tensed, obviously recognizing the patronizing words he had given to a newly-minted super soldier back in New York City.
The man glanced up at Steve and raised one bushy eyebrow before returning his attention to the report in his hands. “Mr. Rogers, I thought you had a show on. Let me guess—they’d rather watch the dancing girls.”
Steve’s blood boiled for the first time in a long time, and he crossed over to the desk to stand directly in front of the man. “Colonel Phillips, we need to talk.”
Phillips set the report down and leaned back in his chair to stare at Steve. “I didn’t realize that playing Captain America gave you the authority to demand my attention. My apologies. What gives you the right to barge in here?”
“I’m not concerned about my right to anything, sir. I’m here for something else entirely.”
“If you’re here because you want to stop playing the soldier and pick up a real gun, I’ve already told you how I feel about that. I asked for an army and all I got was you. You are not enough.”
Yeah, well, didn’t that seemed to be the pattern here. You wanted just a friend till the end of the line, you got temperamental Steve Rogers. You wanted a soldier, you got Steve Rogers. You wanted an army, you got Steven Grant Rogers running around in a damn party suit, a grown man still playing soldiers.
The Colonel waved his hand dismissively and moved to stand. “Bother someone else, Rogers. Pity Erskine isn’t here for you to get cross at—though I’m sure you remember why that is. If you need something for the show, anybody else can handle it.”
Steve slammed his hands down and leaned over the desk, forcing Phillips’s attention back to him. Something good finally came of this extra space he was taking up. “James Buchanan Barnes of the 107th.”
Their gazes warred for a moment before Phillips sighed and ran a face over his hand. “So, you’re here for that shitshow.” Seeing the sudden tension in Steve’s frame, he continued quickly, “Not Barnes, Rogers. The 107th. Four hundred men, just gone, and no one can tell me why it happened or who made the call.”
“Gone.” Steve’s white-knuckled grip on the edge of the desk drew a pitiful creak from the wood. “So they’re dead, then.”
“Dead, captured, MIA. They’re just gone, Rogers.”
“So you’re saying they’re alive?”
Phillips sighed, his stoic soldier’s mask slipping for a moment to reveal the kind of weariness that only comes from years of weighing lives like pawns. “Maybe, maybe not. Some of them.”
Relief, anticipation. If anyone lived, it would have to be Bucky. They weren’t at the end of the line yet. “Who?”
Phillips raised an eyebrow, mask firmly back in place and nonplussed in the face of Steve’s obvious desperation. “You really want me to run through the list of all the men we didn’t find dead in a ditch? I was under the impression you had someone special in mind.”
Steve swallowed the angry retort in favor of grinding out, “Barnes. James Buchanan Barnes.”
“A friend, huh?” Phillips pulled a different stack of reports towards him and began ruffling through, pausing every once in a while without seeming to notice how every furrow of his brow dug Steve’s fingers deeper into the edge of the table.
Finally, Phillips hummed and tugged a sheet out of the stack, flipping and laying it down in between where Steve’s hands were busy fusing with the table. “James Buchanan Barnes, middle of the list. Unaccounted for.”
“Unaccounted for,” Steve would admit that the words felt better on his tongue than ‘Killed in Action,’ but not by much. “What the hell does that mean?”
Phillips whistled. “America’s sweetheart has a mouth. It means we didn’t find a body. Most of the regiment is unaccounted for, at the moment.”
“So you’re saying he might be alive.” Steve received only a nod in response. “Are you planning a rescue mission?”
“Yeah, it’s called winning the war.”
Steve couldn’t help the incredulous, huffing laugh that flew from his throat. “Winning the—but what about these men? Four hundred of them, captured and maybe alive?”
“Maybe. The key word there is maybe, Rogers.”
“No, Phillips. No. The key word is alive. Your soldiers alive and being held in God knows what hellhole—”
“The key word, Steven, is maybe. We can’t go in for maybe.”
“Soldiers—American soldiers, sir!”
“Rogers, look.” Phillips seemed to crumble in his chair, even though his ramrod posture never wavered for a second. “I wish I could get them back, I do. Four hundred men lost, all at once, out of thin air. Believe me when I say that it doesn’t please me. But,” Phillips looked imploring at Steve, “I can’t risk anymore good lives on a maybe. I’m sorry, for you and for everyone else who’s going to have to leave it alone. But you have to, because I’m not going to do a goddamned thing.”
Steve struggled to keep his voice level as he posed his next question. “Do you even know where they are?”
Phillips shrugged. “We have a general idea, but nothing concrete.”
“Some men are saying Austria. Is that it?”
Phillips’s face shut down, and he finally stood, immediately beginning to make his way towards the second set of flaps in the tent. “What it is is classified.”
The brief gleam of triumph in Steve’s eyes was gone by the time Phillips reached the flap and turned to speak to Steve over his shoulder. “Look, I’m sorry about your friend. But, this is what happens in war. They’re gone, Rogers, and you should get that in your head.”
Steve held Phillips’s gaze until the Colonel was forced to turn his back and let the flap close behind him. Steve waited tensely for a few moments, listening intently to the squish of boots through mud. When he was certain that the sounds were only getting further away, Steve rounded the desk and reached for the same stack of papers out of which Phillips had found Buck’s name, hoping for some indication of where they believed the men were taken. All he found were names, hundreds of them, all paired with a number and some variation of ‘not found,’ ‘MIA,’ ‘unaccounted for.’
He swore under his breath and set the stack down, looking around the room for where the actual report might be hiding. His eyes alighted on a set of filing cabinets in the corner, and he opened them to find out that they were—thank God for the orderliness of the military—blessedly organized by date. He removed the file for the last week and began flipping through looking for any indication of what had occurred, before he finally found mention of the 107th regiment.
He skimmed the seemingly endless list of reports from officers and soldiers who were there—outmanned, overpowered, trapped—until he got to a page where Phillips had obviously typed up his own assessment of the situation. Steve read over his reasoning for abandoning the men quick enough that he didn’t have the chance to get angry before his eyes settled on a name:
“Kreischberg.”
After a quick glance to the two openings in the tent to confirm that no one was around, Steve folded the paper and hid it in his fist, wishing for the first time since his initial run in the suit that he had pockets, or any room to spare at all. His walk across camp was uneventful, despite the detour he took to retrieve one of his prop shields from his own accommodations. Judging by the cheers and whistles coming from the vague direction of the stage, the producer had made the wise decision to bring back the dancing girls. Steve’s pride didn’t have a chance to sting because he was too focused on getting to the outer edge of the camp before anyone thought to come looking for him.
Days, weeks, years later, Steve wouldn’t be able to explain what he was thinking as he swung himself into the driver’s seat of the first unattended jeep he found. All he would ever be able to recall was a series of disjointed images, sensations, and sounds, all strung together into some semblance of sequence.
It wasn’t disorganized, or hazy—far from it. Steve would remember clearly the weight of the shield on his arm as he strode through the camp, the slight sunctiony pull of the mud on his boots with every new step, as if the earth itself was trying to hold him back from the one thing that mattered over anything. He would remember the beat of his heart behind his ribcage, and how it slowly extended itself outward to sit in his throat, press at his teeth, ring behind his eyes, until finally it seemed as if the entire camp was quaking. He would remember suddenly staring down at where his hands gripped the leather steering wheel, the unusual roughness of the seat—he had hardly ridden in a car, let alone driven one, and wouldn’t Buck laugh at the thought of Steve Rogers going near ‘one of those metal death traps’—and thinking how. He would remember the way the sunlight glinted off of the key that had been kindly left on the dash, and the unsettling roar of the vehicle rumbling to life.
He would remember hearing the distant mutters of confusion from a couple of someones, and how they grew louder when he shifted the gears and pressed one of the pedals like he had seen Buck do a handful of times, making the jeep jump forward a few jerky feet.
And then, he was on the road. A road—a road to somewhere. There was a map in the glove compartment, he hoped, that would tell him to where, but that was for later, a few hours later, when his terror at the speed with which he was careening and bouncing down this road (barely a road really, a path) had abated enough for him to find the brake pedal so he could give himself two minutes on the side of the road to bring his breathing away from its current dizzying pace.
And then, when he was ready to put away his fears in favor of moving forward and finding that map, he realized that when he grabbed his shield he must have also dug through his bags for his own winter jacket, which he slid on gratefully, and Bucky’s, which had been his constant companion since the tour moved overseas. Bucky’s jacket he folded and laid in the passenger seat, just far enough forward that he could see it out of the corner of his eye when he was staring down the road, daring it to hold him back.
But before even that, he attempted to flatten the folded paper that held his salvation in the words ‘James Buchanan Barnes—Unaccounted for,’ and he tucked it into the inner breast pocket of his own jacket. Secured, calmed, focused, with the sharp instrument of absolution pricking at his heart, the last thing Steve would remember would be the way the grey winter sky turned to rust, and with it the pale moon to blood.