Chapter 9
When they arrive at the rendezvous Louis is holding the reins of a horse, dark brown without a speck of white on it, tossing its head impatiently. It’s bigger than Gabe thought horses would be, and Captain America looks about as unsettled as he had when they’d met a bear. There’s a brief scuffle over who has to deal with it, which ends with Jim being nominated for having grown up on a farm, even though he spits at them, “Not all farms come with horses,” as he takes the reins from Louis.
Gabe and Steve climb into the cart with the radio equipment and sit as far away from the horse as possible. There’s only two big damn wheels on the thing, almost as high as Steve himself is, so when the horse starts trotting they’re both pitched backwards by gravity.
Captain America laughs out loud, his teeth white in the gloomy darkness. He and Monty wave to them, as if they’re off on a hay ride. Peggy doesn’t crack a smile, standing grim faced and ready, hands braced on her Tommy gun.
They’ve timed the operation at the apogee of the German patrols, when the units that roam through what used to be villages and farms will be at their furthest points. The wagon creaks louder than the horse’s heavy footfalls on the worn path. Ten minutes behind and half a klick north of their position, Captain America, Peggy and Monty will lead a group of twenty or so Resistance fighters towards the dummy target. No word if the Germans have bitten on the false operation, so Gabe’s job - Jim’s job, if he weren’t driving the horse - is to make sure they do now.
They’ve got short range radios, in case of emergency. Jacques and Dugan are silent, but Bucky’s left the transmitter in his helmet open, ready for instruction. It won’t alert the Germans unless he’s transmitting and in the middle of a fire fight they’ll have other things to be concerned about.
They have a circuitous route to keep the Germans from triangulating their position, winding around the old town and its canal. Steve braves proximity to the horse to hook his elbow on Jim’s bench and navigate, but the last three days have given them a pretty clear map of where the Germans will be at any point in time.
“Bucky doing okay?” Gabe asks him once, laying off the radio as Jim does something up front that makes the horse thunder down the dark roads - according to what the Germans are hearing, Captain America is about five klicks from the target, coming up from the south. If Bucky is where he should be, they’re already huddled up within sight of the bridge into Calais-Nord, in a grand stone building that had only half escaped being bombed.
Steve looks at him, confused. “Sure he is,” he answers. “Why wouldn’t he be?”
Like he knew they were talking about him, the walkie talkie crackles. "Bereit," Bucky says. “Warten auf den Zug.”
“Tell him we need a few more minutes,” Steve says. They’ve overheard a few lazy radio operators in the last few days sending casual messages to their buddies, and are operating under the assumption that German transmissions in an occupied territory will be inherently less suspicious than ones in English.
“Hab Geduld,” Gabe says, but he hears it too: the grinding of tires on the road. Steve lunges up and taps Jim’s shoulder, points off the road. Jim obeys without question. They have just enough time to get themselves hidden in a hole big enough to fit the damn horse into, torn in the side of someone’s house. Then the Nazis come into view.
It sounds for a moment like morning rush hour in the city: the hush of dozens of people not speaking, not thinking, massing as one. They step as one too, or at least it sounds like it: that steady metronome.
“More of ‘em than I’d thought there’d be,” Jim says after a moment, as they watch the parade pass by. Steve’s jaw clenches. He doesn’t say anything, but it’s true: there are a lot more than they were expecting. The Nazis have sent an entire company after Captain America - six trucks, maybe as many as a hundred fifty infantry. Gabe tries to count, but they can’t see how deep the column goes, and after a moment it feels pointless.
“Should we abort?” Gabe asks. It’s barely more than a whisper. “Steve? Should we abort?”
Steve inhales sharply - and then starts coughing, muffling it into his gloved hands. The cold does awful things for his asthma. “No,” he gasps, and fumbles in his pocket for one of his pills. “No, we stick to the plan. If it starts going south, we’ll blow the radio.”
“Kampfgruppe auf dem Weg,” Gabe says, as quiet as he can. “Achtgeben.”
If Bucky can hear the shake in Gabe’s voice, he gives no sign, no answer. The column passes them, and the sound of Nazi boots fades into quiet, softer than the monotonous drone of those few early, hopeful crickets, singing into the night.
“Tell Dernier to light it up,” Steve says, between his teeth.
Dernier must have been waiting with his thumb on the trigger, because it’s only a few seconds between the radioed order and the flash of his explosives, bright enough to light up the whole sky. Then a crack of sound, following close behind like thunder. Smoke rolls out from beyond the treeline, acrid, thick enough that it blocks out the lights of Calais-Nord and the German garrisons beyond.
But at the edges of the smoke, the air feels abruptly heavier, sweeter - something in it wet and living. The water of the canal, Gabe thinks, thrown into the sky. Pouring thick and clotted across the trainyard, carrying with it thousands of pounds of debris that had been the bridge.
Down the road the Nazis start yelling - and then screaming.
The quickest route between the north bridge and the trainyard is straight through. No roads go between, just muddy, abandoned farmland, and in this they bet their money on human error and come up aces: in the first moment of confusion the Nazi company rushes instinctively towards the explosion, and runs straight into a heavily mined field.
From the other side of the road, Captain America and the Resistance have broken cover, lobbing Stark’s grenades over hedges and against the Nazis’ unprotected flank. Gabe, Steve, and Jim are too far away to see, but they can hear Bucky giving terse commands over the shortwave radio. They’ve got the Germans bottlenecked: forward, onto the bridge they think Captain America is about to blow, or back the way they came.
“Move half your men back onto the road, box them in,” Steve says into the walkie talkie, and a moment later they hear Bucky bark out the order, some combination of French and gestures that must get the point across, because through their binoculars they see muzzles flash, and hear the pop-pop-pop of Peggy’s Tommy gun.
Next to him, Steve’s hand fists around Gabe’s sleeve, hard enough to hurt. When Gabe looks over he’s got his binoculars pointed towards the sky, trying to see through the smoke above their head. “Do you hear that?” he asks, urgently.
Gabe listens with every muscle in his body, staring blank and straining. Jim glances over his shoulder nervously at them, his attention on the road and the battle, in case any Germans come hurtling their way. “What?” he asks. “What is it?”
Gabe breaks away from him, goes running, lurching back towards the radio. He hits the edge of the cart stomach first in his haste and flips forward, almost clipping his chin on the belly of it. The horse startles, dancing in its harness, but Gabe barely notices. He’s jamming the headset over his ears with one hand as his other twists the knob. “The British frequency,” he shouts at Jim, “what is it, what do they use?”
He finds it just in time to hear a plummy, cheerful voice say, “There goes the cookie! Bombs away!”
“Take cover!” Gabe screams.
“What?” he hears Bucky say through the walkie talkie in Steve’s hand, and then, “fuck, the RAF, get everyone -”
There’s a brief moment of echoing silence as their men cease fire and run like their lives depend on it, because they do, and in those few seconds it’s quiet enough that Gabe actually hears the bombs whistle as they fall through the sky.
The impact hits him around the middle, and for a moment he’s not sure if it’s the shockwave or just the shock of noise but he feels it like a physical thing, like a fist against his chest that flings him out of the cart and onto the ground. The horse screams, and Gabe does the only thing he can: he covers his head with his arms and prays.
The first thing he’s aware of is Jim grabbing at him, rolling him over and slapping him roughly. Gabe spits dirt and grit out of his mouth, shoves at Jim’s hands, “I’m alright, I’m alright,” he says, because he is, he is - he’s alright, he’s alive.
“On your feet,” Jim says tightly. “They’ll need our help if they made it through that.”
“Bucky!” Steve’s shouting into the walkie talkie. “Bucky, come in!”
Gabe stumbles as they clear the farmhouse, dizzy: the land around them has been turned into the moon. Cratered and pockmarked, and littered here and there with bodies. Limbs, mostly. A helmet, a boot. One body intact, sprawled at the base of their shelter like he’d been thrown there. He could be sleeping but for the look on his face.
Gabe’s been marinating in that heavy, scorched-metal stink for four days and he’d almost stopped noticing it at all. If the smell of bombing hadn’t faded, the smell of death - of liquified insides, of blood and shit - had.
He turns and vomits into the burnt skeleton of a hedge, and then totters after Jim and Steve.
They find Louis north of the crater that had hit the Germans, or most of him. The woman who had come to the farmhouse, Genevieve, is just beyond. Then nothing for the hundred yards between her and the canal until they look downstream and see shadowed figures pulling themselves out of the water, fetched up against the ruin of the northern bridge.
And there, swimming awkwardly through the water, is Peggy - one arm around the limp, unresisting form of Captain America, Monty trailing close behind them.
Gabe gets there first, plowing into the water. Waist deep before they reach him, and there’s a moment where he can only press his hands to Peggy’s hair, and she to his face, both of them shuddering for breath. She gives over Bucky’s body, and between Gabe and Monty they tow him back to shore, to Steve.
“Medic!” Gabe shouts as they stumble onto the sand, but Jim barely looks up, hunched over Alain’s prone body.
“I need help!” he snaps, and it’s Peggy who goes, dripping and spraying water. In the exchange of their hands - Jim lifting up as Peggy braces her weight against the makeshift bandage of Jim’s own coat - Gabe sees the slippery gray slide of intestines, slithering out of Alain’s body.
“Bucky, Bucky,” Steve’s calling, and it’s the metal click of Bucky’s helmet being undone that hooks Gabe back to attention. Bucky’s still half in the water, and Gabe scoops handfuls of it up to pour over him, to wash away the silt and the blood and find out what’s underneath.
Monty’s sitting with his hands in his lap. He’s staring up into the sky, but it’s too dark to see the contrails of the RAF overhead. “He shielded us,” Monty says. His tone is dull, worn through. There’s a deep cut on the side of his head and his face is a mask of gore. “Carter and me. He took the brunt of the blast as we were knocked into the water.”
“He’s breathing,” Steve says, and Gabe feels cloth, the stiff edges of the plates sewn into the fabric, and then a wide gash. He puts his hands into it - and goes weak all over when there’s only a sluggish flow of blood instead of the hot spray he’d been terrified of finding.
He nods, struck dumb, sagging back against the scrubby sand. He looks up, and over Alain’s body and Jim’s shoulders, he meets Peggy’s eyes. He nods again and sees her mouth go soft and liquid before she turns back to her task.
The bridge is burning. The smell of it is sharp and crackling. It makes the soldiers around him hazy and insubstantial, like shambling ghosts as they collect their dead and wounded. It turns the rippling surface of the canal into a shuddering blaze.
Gabe gets unsteadily to his feet. Captain America’s shield is lapping gently against the shore, gleaming in the firelight. There’s a little pool of water in the bowl of it, and when Gabe picks it up he can see his own face in it, ashen and stunned.
-
In the end, Gabe and a woman named Simone retrace their footsteps back to the tumble-down farmhouse to retrieve the horse and cart. They load Alain and Bucky and Monty and the three wounded French fighters into it, and the rest of them walk alongside. There were six of them killed.
They detour carefully past the crater full of dead Germans, and the cart leaves them briefly behind as they stare down into it.
“A good start,” Jacques says, and shakes a heavy head.
They retreat to a small, walled off town some distance from Calais-Nord. They’d known there were still pockets of civilians, dotted here and there throughout northern France, clinging grimly to life despite the bombings, despite the occupation. The windows are blacked out; the women at the home seem unsurprised by their condition. One woman, gray-haired and weathered, directs the others to help them bring in the wounded while her - daughters? Gabe wonders, stepdaughters? - begin boiling water and laying out bandages they’ve rolled. Gabe recalls the clean neat reams of bandages advertised by the Red Cross back home. These are rough cotton, stained but sanitary.
Steve and Peggy quickly stake out the exits and establish the safety of the house - Peggy communicating with the women and translating the parts Steve doesn’t understand. Gabe helps Jacques unload the wounded, whom they have to set on pallets on the floor of the kitchen. They put Alain on the table, high up near the gas light. Jim barks orders, which is something Gabe has never seen him do before. They have with them dried blood plasma kits, and Gabe and Dugan start following instructions to add water to the kits.
It’s like watching a miracle - a bloody, dirty miracle. There’s copious sprinkling of sulfa into all the wounds, even onto Monty’s flinching face. Jim works first and foremost on Alain, lying on the table. He looks gray, as gray as his guts. His breathing comes shallow and makes a humming sound like a broken accordion. But when they start the plasma it’s amazing how quickly he seems to come alive again, even though they leave the gut wound open. There he is, this whole person, alive, with slimy shininess visible through partly-sutured skin. The powdered sulfa has sunk away into nothing in the wound, like salt on snow.
Steve has bent over to do the same for Bucky’s wound, sprinkling sulfa in it, but that’s about all he can do. Jim’s right to care for Alain first, of course he is. Bucky’s breathing. Gabe and Steve remove his clothes, checking him over for more wounds, but it’s mostly that one gash over his ribs. Jim sutures it only after he’s finished with Alain, then moves on to Monty, who looks better once he’s cleaned up but says he’s having trouble seeing out of his left eye. It’s one of those things that might heal or might not, the soft muscles that control the eye’s focus.
When the initial flurry is over they all sag. The air feels suddenly colder. Gabe becomes aware, with peculiar shame, that they have tracked mud and blood and dirt into these women’s home. They are grim-faced but helpful, matter-of-fact. Still, Gabe falls in next to Dum Dum, who has finished lugging the heavy cauldrons of water in from the pump outside and begun sweeping debris off the floor.
He listens to Peggy lean over and speak to one of the wounded Frenchmen, who stares at her blankly as she asks him the names of his comrades and tells him that they have died. One of the men is crying. One of the women drops to her knees next to him and pulls him up into her lap. His whole body is shaking. He’s making sounds that echo in the quiet kitchen.
Words, condolences in French, pinch themselves off newly budded in Gabe’s throat.
They haven’t given any morphine to Bucky, hoping he’ll wake up without it. The slice on his side was too shallow to stitch. Shrapnel must have slid between two of the plates in the armor. It’s the head wound that worries Jim more, that he pushed Bucky’s hair aside to show them: a swelling over his ear. Getting knocked out isn’t like in comic books, when the hero jumps right back up after a brief nap. The longer he’s out, the worse it could be.
At last Dum Dum sets himself to making them all coffee, even Monty, who finds refuge in murmuring faintly about the poor quality. It doesn’t help Gabe much; he feels itchy and aching all over. His ears are ringing from the bombs and he thinks about telling Jim about it, but there doesn’t seem like much point. They’re all probably feeling the same way.
Dum Dum gives Gabe a cup of coffee, and sets a hand on his shoulder, squeezing fitfully. The mug is thick enough Gabe can barely feel the heat of it, or maybe he’s numb all over as well as half deafened. He smiles at the thought of it, wryly - but when he lifts the coffee up to drink he can see his own face in its oily surface, and flames behind it, and nothing’s that funny anymore.
Steve and Peggy have withdrawn to higher ground upstairs. Gabe joins them, grabbing two extra cups so he’ll have a pretext for interrupting. He’s also got to ask what message he and Jim will send on the radio in an hour when they check in.
“... may not be my fault, but it’s my responsibility,” Steve is saying when Gabe knocks on the thin door.
“Permission to enter?”
“Come in,” Peggy says, dispensing with formalities. Gabe sets the coffees down on the trestle table in one corner and stands back from them.
“What we’ll need to do,” she continues quietly, “is try to find a way to transport them to a surgical facility. Assuming we do, it’s quite likely they'll fall into German hands.”
“We probably all will,” Steve says. He turns to Gabe. His mouth is very tight. “We can’t radio out just yet. We’re pretty sure the Krauts will be listening. And anyhow, they’ll know the mission succeeded.” He gestures at the window, towards the billows of thick black smoke they can’t see through the blackout curtains.
“Right,” Gabe says. “I’ll tell Jim.”
“Thank you,” Steve says, and hesitates. “How are the men downstairs?”
“The same,” Gabe says. “Nicolas - he probably won’t lose his foot, Jim says. But he says he can’t treat Alain any more than he has.”
They both nod; they know this.
“Right,” Peggy says at last, touching Steve on the back of his hand. He stiffens a little, his natural instinct being to withdraw from concern rather than lean toward it. Then he sighs, tucks chin to chest, and reaches over for his coffee.
He cradles it in two hands, like it’s soup. It’s how he drank coffee at their favorite cafe, a Turkish joint in the West Village near the automat that Mabel May had once gone to spend late Sunday afternoons. This was of course before the Mayor came down on places like that. Gabe had begun to meet up with Steve once Bucky had been sent to learn how to be a soldier, and they’d sit and drink coffee that was textured like molasses and very bitter.
He and Steve both drank it out of pride, maybe, or to feel sophisticated. Neither of them really liked it, he figured; as for Bucky, he had used to add as much sugar to his coffee as he could pour, though that came to seem in bad taste after America joined the war. The owners were Jews and didn’t mind serving Gabe, and it was dark and small and dusty and served pastries that all tasted the same, with a texture like wet newspaper.
Now he lifts his cup to his mouth and sees Steve do the same, and it’s weak Army powdered stuff, no better than the coffee his mama drank back home made of grain; and they look at each other silently. Gabe knows they’re both thinking about the Turkish place and the Turkish coffee and how it wouldn’t taste so bad right about now.
Gabe fills them in on what the French think he didn’t hear them saying, which is mostly that they’re running low on food and can’t think of what to give these Americans.
“They were talking about going back to try and find their friends.” He hesitates. “But then they said no. The Germans, they… they said they’re… well-organized about the dead.” He had asked Monty what this meant, in an undertone, and Monty had told him that they stacked up their dead in neat rows. He said they even did it in Africa when they were retreating, which on account of the heat caused some problems.
Peggy nods. Steve rubs a hand over his mouth and then lets it drop.
“Hard feelings?” Steve says. “Because I wouldn’t blame ‘em.”
Gabe pauses again. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. No one’s said anything about giving us over to the Germans.”
There’s a stretch of silence that follows that. Through the crack in the door he can hear the murmur of conversation, too soft for him to make out the words or language. But maybe it’s just his ears.
“Well,” Peggy says. She runs a hand over the front of her trousers, which are in shreds, stuck to her legs by blood. “I had better clean myself up.”
“I have an extra pair,” Gabe offers. “And Dum Dum can sew this one up.”
“I know how to sew, Jones,” she informs him, and since it’s just the three of them she can smile when she says it. It looks painful on her face, which is still smudged with silt from the river water, but it’s enough that he tries to smile back.
“Sure you do,” Gabe says, “but let the poor guy feel useful.”
Steve snorts, but he doesn’t try and defend Dum Dum. Doesn’t seem too much in the mood for talking anymore. He sets his cup of coffee down, hardly drunk, and peers out through the blackout curtains. There’s blood smeared on his sleeve, on the front of his shirt where Bucky’s head had rested.
“Now, then,” Peggy says. “Where can I get cleaned up?”
“There’s a pump outside,” Gabe says.
Steve has turned away and is pacing the room, hands stuffed in his pockets, head down in thought.
-
Outside the air is still gray. The pump is set just inside a little dim shed dedicated to stacked firewood. It’s rusty and surrounded by a circle of water that still hasn’t run off through the straw. It squeaks when Peggy cranks it to life, then gurgles as water begins to flow. Gabe stands at the door, keeping guard for her. Over the burble of water, he hears her sigh. When he looks inside through the striping light that falls through cracks in the roof, he can see that she’s carefully peeling shreds of fabric out of deep scratches in her legs, like crosshatch marks. He cranes his neck outside and sees nothing and no one nearby. Even the wildlife he’s starting to get used to seems scared silent by the bombs: only the crickets keep ticking.
Wet hay crackles underfoot as he approaches. She doesn’t look up. Peggy, Gabe realized long ago, spends much of her time lifting her chin and squaring her shoulders, and there are times she doesn’t want to.
She’s left the pump cranked open, water flowing and pooling at her feet. Her socks are neatly in her boots, at some remove from the water. She’s stripped down below the waist to just her undergarments, which are a pair of men’s shorts. He crouches in the wet straw and cups his hands under the pump, drips water over her skin. It smears blood that just wells up again, fresher and brighter; and she tips her head back, her mouth open as she breathes out.
He passes his hand over a wound, testing, and she lets out a sigh, a sigh as if what has to be cold stinging pain is in fact relief. As if she’s earned the hurt.
“Did you know them well?” he asks.
“No,” Peggy says, and opens her eyes to look down at him. “No, I never know any of them very well.”
He’s never asked - can never ask - how many times she’s done this. How long she’s been doing this. She’s let details slip: purposefully, because she only ever does things purposefully. She’d never have survived this long if she couldn’t keep secrets. Among the Germans, with the Maquis. Their own people, too - as much as anyone else.
She fumbles beside her to shut off the flow of the pump. It creaks to a slow drip. Gabe pulls cotton bandages out of his pockets, starts wrapping them around the worst of the cuts on her leg. One of them won’t stop bleeding now that it’s been opened. He presses on it with the heel of his hand and feels her pulse pounding through her, faster than he would have thought.
She touches his face. Her fingers are chilled through with cold, and trembling faintly. He looks up and meets her eyes. “Are you alright?” she asks, hushed.
He turns his cheek into her palm and closes his eyes. “You haven’t seen anything like that before, have you,” she says. He shakes his head. Because it hadn’t been like that in Italy, besides those few heartstopping minutes where they’d been pinned on the hillside, bullets hammering into the earth beside him, half convinced Steve would have them in a ditch before they could get to the crater to lay the tank trap, smearing mud all over Steve’s face to hide them while they waited for Captain America to catch shells. In Italy, the bombs had fallen far away.
“Just been lucky,” he says, and kisses her thigh.
She takes a breath and covers his hand with hers on her leg. His eyes fly open, and dart towards the half-open door. He stays still while she trails that hand up his arm and shoulder, cupping the back of his skull. Her hands are callused. The rasp over the sensitive skin on the back of his neck makes him shiver, and once he starts he’s shivering all over.
Peggy strokes her thumb over his cheekbone, her mouth twisting. “Don’t say it,” he warns, and kisses her again.
“I would never,” she says, and gasps as he licks drops of water off her skin. It’s the faintest, barest sound. Under his fingers, restlessly stroking over her bandages, he can feel her heartbeat.
“It’s what I wanted,” he says, and lets her reel him closer, guide him: pressing a kiss where the fabric of her shorts come together. Stays there for a moment, open mouthed, breathing her in. River water and silt, oily smoke, and under that the faint salty smell of her. Her hips tilt forward, toward the heated air of his mouth, and when he looks up her jaw is clenched. Pained looking.
“It’s only going to get worse,” she manages, when she can - she’s shivering now too, even though her hands on his head are steady, controlled.
“I know,” he answers, and puts his tongue out, licks along the seam of her shorts, rubs against the little nub of her he can barely feel through the cloth. “But I had a lot of doors slammed in my face just to get here.”
“I know the feeling,” she gasps, and finds the edges of his smile with her thumbs.
There’s no answer to that, not in words. Gabe could give her aphorisms in four languages, if he chose, about valor and amour de patrie. He could quote Cyrano de Bergerac’s speech to his Gascognes, but he doesn’t. These are things he’s read in water-stained books from the Howard College library, and the words were easily absorbed. Life doesn’t move in the same way, with the flick of pages turning over. It’s wood that shifts on a heavy, precariously stacked pile. Old bark that cracks and flakes.
“Keep going,” she says, and her voice is steady, so he does. They peel her shorts off together, down past her knees. Just far enough to let him in. She puts her hands on his shoulders, and he takes the weight easily, which feels strange to him even now - like he’s wearing armor over the body he used to have, layered with muscle and hard use instead of dancing and drink. He licks her slowly, like they have all the time in the world, letting themselves pretend for just a moment that they do. Keeping his tongue flat and soft, drawing her up onto her toes at the heat of it.
He’s cold wherever she’s not touching him; his knees sunk into the muddy straw, sweat cooling on the back of his neck. But with his eyes closed, his throat tilted up and open, buried between her legs, the whole world has fallen away: quiet, at last.
She pulls him up onto his feet, and they rearrange, her shoulders pressed up against the wall. He still has the condoms they all were issued, but they’re inside with the rest of his gear, so instead what they do is this: she stands with her thighs squeezed together and he slips between them, sliding the full length of his cock against her wet cunt. She gasps, and shudders hard, her fingers digging into his arms, so he does it again and again, her hips angled down so he’s rubbing up against her clit. They’re pressed against each other everywhere they can now, his face buried in her hair, her mouth against his neck, hips moving together, her breasts soft and heavy against his chest. When she comes she’s silent, as she has to be, as both of them have to be: her whole body seizes up tight and shakes, and shakes, and shakes. He’d slowed down to give her a moment, but then her hips shift just so and it feels like he’s been kissed by the wet lips of her cunt and then he’s gone over too, startled by it.
They kiss for a while afterwards, breathing hard into the air that’s humid between them and chill everywhere else. They wash themselves with the dribble of water still coming from the pump, and he gives her the spare pair of pants that he’d thought to grab even if he hadn’t thought of condoms.
Peggy puts a hand on his wrist, as he turns to look through the crack in the door, make sure they’re still alone. “I would never say it,” she says, very seriously, and he has to cast back for what she’s talking about.
There’s a flush creeping up her neck, or lingering. He traces it with a thumb, and says, “This is what I signed up for.”
She bites her lip. “My mother tried to teach me to be soft - weak, you know,” she says. “I suppose in some aspects she succeeded.”
“It’s not weak to care about people, Peg,” he says, even though in her line of work it is, and by the look on her face when she meets his eyes she knows it, better than he ever could.
“I suppose some people can’t keep from caring,” she says thoughtfully. “You and Steve, both of you.”
“You said yes,” Gabe says, “when he decided we had to go after Bucky.”
“I wouldn’t have done so on my own,” she says softly.
He glances down at her legs, the damage bandaged and hidden away. “Let’s go inside,” he says, because he lets her keep her secrets, even the lies she only tells herself. She keeps all of his, after all.
Back in London, Peggy had arranged for a room one evening, cautious, as always, but he doesn’t remember the caution. He remembers the color of her lipstick and he remembers the control in the way she smiled at first. How that wore away while they talked. And then the tremble of her open mouth. And afterwards, lying in bed, he had told her about Mabel May and she had leaned over very carefully and painted his lips the same red as hers.
So he thinks about that color against the skin of her legs: how his lips had moved over them. How they’d been warm. He thinks of marble statues, the statues the English stole from Rome, the Elgin Marbles. Chisel scratches, and things removed from home.
-
Bucky wakes up just before dawn. Gabe is awake only by chance, drowsing on one of the hard wooden benches next to Steve, who hadn’t slept at all. He’s almost gray in the candlelight, the last little bit of the wick flickering, sputtering. They’ve burned all the candles through, and Gabe is thinking about what they can leave for the women to make up for everything they’ve done, what won’t be too incriminating to make it worth it. Alain is in the other room, and though he groaned fitfully through the night he’s quiet now, which grates on Gabe’s nerves more than his moaning had.
Bucky doesn’t make any sound; Gabe just glances down and sees that Bucky’s eyes are open and staring up at the ceiling, the thick bunches of dried herbs above his head. For a moment Gabe thinks he’s died - but then Bucky blinks.
Steve exhales, like he’d thought the same thing. “Bucky?” he asks, and since there’s no one around but them he reaches down and squeezes Bucky’s hand.
Who squeezes back weakly, and smiles so broad his whole face wrinkles up with it, and whispers, “We gotta quit meeting like this.”