Chapter 15
In the end it takes Jim, Dernier, Monty and Dugan to carefully load Bucky onto the floor of the German truck. The trick will be to get him to the camp and its medical facilities without jogging the shrapnel: a quick death from blood loss instead of a lengthy one from sepsis. Peggy holds his head still as the truck bumps and rattles along the road. Gabe sits on the floor with them, one hand shading his face from the other soldiers, gulping down quiet sobs. There are sixteen survivors from their platoon escort, and nine casualties. No one speaks for twenty miles, except once.
“Don’t worry,” one of the soldiers says to another. It’s the man who had Bucky autograph his rifle, who hasn’t looked away from Peggy’s blood smeared hands. “Cap always gets up.”
But he doesn’t. He wakes just for a moment as they arrive at the German camp. Dugan parks the truck as close as possible to what they think is the hospital, and they pile out to look for a stretcher. Steve stays, and when everyone is out of the truck he puts a hand over Bucky’s cheek.
For a moment Bucky’s eyes open. They’re vivid, empty blue in the cold light of the truck. He looks right at Steve and then through him, as if he doesn’t recognize Steve at all.
-
“Steve?”
Peggy’s shadow stretches across the floor. She picks her way carefully through the shamble of smashed tables and charred filing cabinets, her hands folded in front of her.
“There’s a chair over there, if you’d like one,” Steve tells her.
“Oh,” she says, as she settles on the floor next to him, “I’ll be alright.”
She digs into her jacket pocket and produces a pale pink handkerchief, edged with lace. The last time Steve saw it was at Pine Camp in upstate New York, the edge of it sticking out of Gabe’s duffle bag like a naughty secret. “I never keep these clean,” Steve mutters, but wipes his face regardless, the fabric cool against his skin.
Peggy inspects her nails, and then the papers spread out along the floor. She leans over to pick one up: blueprints for a tank of preposterous size, bulky as a dinosaur. “Ambitious,” she says, and lets it fall fluttering back down to their feet.
“There’s a plane over there you’d never believe,” Steve says, gesturing with his chin at another pile of crumpled blueprints. He wraps his arms back around his knees, his bandaged hand dangling.
They sit together in silence until finally, gently, Peggy says, “Jim’s going to start the surgery soon. Will you come?”
Steve shakes his head. “I can’t.”
“Mabel needs you there,” she says. “And - I don’t want you to be alone.”
His throat is too clogged to speak. His chest feels like it’s wet through, his limbs numb. It’s cold in the room, which must have been somebody’s office: the windows are cracked, and a little bit of snow has drifted through. He hasn’t been able to stop shivering. It’s funny, how the body forgets grief. The specific weight of it, the taste of this particular pain. “I never should’ve pulled the trigger,” he says, when he’s able.
Peggy sighs. “You didn’t know he’d been hit.”
Steve rests his cheek along his folded arms. The possibilities stretch out in his mind, roads not taken. If Gabe and Monty had provided covering fire for a force moving up inside the train. If Steve had thrown the bombs out into the waiting Germans instead. If Morita and Peggy had been able to break down the door to get to Bucky. If Phillips thought the Germans would never fall for a fake super soldier. If Steve had just let Bucky go back home where he belonged. If, if, if.
He squeezes his eyes shut, and sees once again Bucky’s naked body, cut out of his Captain America uniform. How much blood there’d been. How dark the wounds had been on his shoulder, his stomach. Steve had kissed that stretch of skin only a few days ago. Had woken up with his nose pressed against the familiar landscape of Bucky’s chest. Had run his hands across the plane of Bucky’s stomach for longer than he knew what touching meant, what it could mean, how it could reshape a person’s world.
He opens his eyes. Blows his nose on Gabe’s handkerchief. Tucks it carefully away into his coat pocket to be washed later. And smiles at Peggy, even though the edges of it tremble.
“I’ll come in a moment,” he says.
But he doesn’t. He sits still and unmoving while the room grows dark around him, Bucky’s coat wrapped around his shoulders - which still smells like Bucky, under everything else. His mother would want it. There are books in Bucky’s pack too, that Steve could send to her. Letters tucked in between the pages, from her and from Becca and Esther. Two letters from Bucky that he hadn’t sent yet, on which Steve had doodled Swiss clocks and Swiss milkmaids.
They shouldn’t have to hear about it from the Western Union man. They shouldn’t -
Steve’s eyes are open and empty.
He’s still sitting there hours later when the door opens again, and Jim’s boots shuffle in the room. Steve can smell him approach: the copper smell of blood, laid over with vinegary rubbing alcohol. When Jim stops in front of him Steve is too afraid to look up. His whole body aches, knowing what comes next.
Jim kneels down on the cold floor. His boots smudge the blueprints, tear one wing off the ludicrous Nazi plane. When he doesn’t say anything Steve clears his throat, and unlocks a hand to place on Jim’s shoulder. It’s impossible to speak. He looks at Jim’s chest instead of his face. He says, “Thank you. I know you did everything you could.”
“Steve,” Jim says, and there’s something strange in voice. “Steve, there’s something you gotta see.”
-
The room Jim takes him to is an operating theater, with rows of wooden pews for spectators. The building is old enough that the room has a fireplace, and a skylight overhead when candles wouldn’t have been sufficient for surgery. Someone has hacked apart a few of the pews to build a fire, and the room is incongruously warm and cozy.
Bucky is lying on the operating table, a nearly empty plasma bag still connected to his arm. For a moment Steve feels a cruel twist in his heart. There’s ruddiness in Bucky’s cheeks. Color in his naked limbs, which are slack and still. The heat of the fire, warming a corpse.
Then Steve sees Bucky’s chest rise and fall, very shallowly.
“He’s still alive,” Steve says, and feels hope surge in his chest like a physical thing. “He made it through surgery. Jim, he’s -”
“He’s -” Jim says, and then can’t seem to find the words for it. He takes Steve’s elbow and pulls him forward until they’re standing directly over Bucky. “He’s,” Jim says again, and then swallows. Shakes his head. “Look.”
He peels back the bandage on Bucky’s left shoulder. For a moment Steve is sick at the sight of the ragged edges of the wound. But he can feel Jim watching him, waiting for him to see something. He looks again, letting his eyes blur until the dark clotted hole is no more than an impressionistic stain. When he sees what Jim is trying to tell him, it doesn’t make sense. The idea trickles up his spine and curls around his bum heart, gripping tighter the more he tries to push it away.
Steve had stood back at a distance as Monty and Jim had unbuckled Captain America’s armor and laid him bare, but memories have always been like photographs for Steve. Easy enough to lay one over the other and see where they don’t line up.
He frowns. “Wasn’t that - ?”
Jim’s whole body tenses up and he rises up onto his toes. He’s practically vibrating. “When I finished the surgery I sat with him for a while,” he says, his words clipped and deliberate. “But it was a long time, just waiting. Long enough I started to think, maybe he’ll make it through the night. Maybe I should patch him up for travel, just in case. I went to clean out his shoulder, and that’s what I found.”
“It’s smaller,” Steve says slowly, almost asking a question.
“Almost half an inch smaller,” Jim says. His fingernails dig into the operating table, which is still crusted with blood.
“That’s not poss -” Steve says, and then stops. His hand is on Bucky’s chest above the wound. He can feel Bucky’s heartbeat in his fingertips, weak and thready but there, alive. Alive. The skin beneath his hand is warm.
“Oh,” Steve whispers. He spreads his fingers and presses down lightly, carefully. “Oh, you fucking punk. You rotten, lying son of a bitch.”
Bucky’s brows knit together, just a little. The table he’s lying on is broad and cold. The lamps Zola had been using to light his experiments have been smashed and overturned. One of them has fallen crossways along the pews, where maybe Schmidt had sat while Zola worked. Waiting to see if this version of the serum had been successful where so many others had failed.
How had they known all along? Had there been others who survived the process? Had Hydra possessed the real formula all along?
Or had someone brought a film to Zola of a man bending steel and throwing barbells around like Charles Atlas? Had Schmidt heard rumors that the Russians would pay anything to create super soldiers of their own? Did he know that the Americans believed they could end wars with one man?
He looks up at Jim. “Who else knows about this?”
Jim shakes his head. “I came straight to you.”
Steve nods. “Go get them,” he says. “Don’t tell them anything yet, just bring ‘em back here. Peggy too.”
“She’s with the SSR,” Jim says. “She’ll tell them.”
“That’s a risk we’ll have to take,” Steve says. “We’re gonna need her help.”
“With what?”
He wants to let out a laugh. It curls and bubbles in his throat and then settles into quiet calm. This is what they were trained for, after all. To raise a great multitude where none could exist; to erase tracks and plant false flags. To tell the biggest stories ever told, big enough that their enemies never question their reality. The plan unfurls in his mind like a map, each twist and turn clear. A solution worthy of a Hollywood epic. Three acts in technicolor. Duty and country, country and duty. And lots of human interest.
Steve looks at Jim and says, “We have to kill Captain America.”
-
Combat deception takes planning. Every detail must be carefully outlined in advance, the territory thoroughly scouted. Their unit had operated differently than the rest of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops; they’d brought with them no sound trucks or magnetic reels and had swiftly abandoned their bulky inflatables. But their days in the bocage had still been monotonous with surveillance, monitoring, and scouting. Recording shift changes, counting heads. The endless courtship of delivery men and cleaning women, wringing out details of each fuel depot and water plant, sketching layouts and escape plans. By the time Captain America showed his face, they knew each target inside and out.
Careful forethought is the only way to make the illusion real.
Jim reveals each bullet hole like a magic trick and shows them the reddened healing edges, the faded pink lines that hours ago were deep scratches from being bounced around in the armor. He leaves Bucky’s middle covered, but hovers one hand over where he’d pulled eight inches of jagged steel from Bucky’s gut. “He’d have already gone septic, with how big this hole is,” he says. “You’d be able to smell it.”
Bucky groans tightly through his teeth. His fingers twitch and shake around Steve’s, who stands on one side of the table with Jim. The rest of them are on the other side, Bucky in between. For a long time the only sound is the crackle of the fire and the creak of leather as Dernier shifts his feet. The look on Gabe’s face is unreadable until he turns away, wiping tears from his eyes.
“My trust did beget of him a falsehood,” Monty says finally, “in its contrary as great as my trust was. Which indeed had no limit.”
“Is now really the time for that, Limey?” Dugan asks.
“Did he tell you?” Gabe says very quietly, and Steve has to shake his head no.
Peggy’s hanging back, still and silent by the fire. Jim looks at her, his eyes dark. “What would the government do if they got their hands on Barnes?”
“Life in a laboratory,” Monty says, “would be a best case scenario.”
“That’s not an option,” Steve says immediately.
Peggy’s lips thin. “I’m not any more pleased than you are,” she says. “But what of the good that could be done, even with half a serum? Barnes may not be able to throw tanks around, but if he can survive these kind of grievous wounds what else could be learned? How many lives could we save, knowing this is possible?”
“I think the Army’s a lot more interested in people who can throw around tanks,” Gabe says. “Maybe they do things a little more nicely in England, but our government has a track record for experimenting on poor folk in the name of ‘improving the human race’.”
“They can’t be trusted with this,” Jim says.
“We have to tell them something,” Peggy says, frustrated.
“If we tell them Bucky was KIA, they’ll want the body,” Monty says. “If we tell them the Skull is dead, they’ll want the body.”
“We tell them nothing,” Dernier suggests. “We say nothing happened. We found nothing.”
“Sixteen guys saw Cap get gunned down,” Dugan says. “If he gets up and walks out of here - sorry, Rogers - I’m guessing the SSR’s gonna have some questions about that.”
“They will,” Steve says, “unless we give them something else to believe.”
“I thought you were being a little quiet,” Gabe says, and Steve smiles grimly.
-
It takes most of the night to thrash out the details of the op. The office where Steve had waited for Bucky to die yields a treasure trove of information. Layouts of camp extensions, inventories of supplies. Memoranda of a half-dug base in a nearby mountain, as unfinished as the enormous plane whose blueprints are scattered about the room. Logs of experiments, prisoner names, extensive notes in what they can only assume is Arnim Zola’s hand. “You think you can counterfeit this?” Steve asks, and Gabe huffs.
“Give me an hour to practice,” he says .
Zola’s office also yields an ULTRA machine, which Jim attaches himself to with relish. Dernier spends his hours sifting through the wreckage for anything that can be repurposed for his uses, which are many; the months spent in covert operations has given him a keen eye for improvising explosive devices.
When dawn breaks they sleep in shifts. Dugan is dispatched to give orders to their surviving escort: cleaning up the barracks, consolidating supplies. On returning, he reports they’re all very anxious about Cap. “I told them we got new orders,” he says. “That Cap’s hard at work on a plan to defeat Hydra.”
“So he is,” Steve mutters, rubbing sleep out of his eyes.
“If Hydra still exists, now that we’ve cut off their head,” Gabe says. He and Steve had slept head to toe in front of the fire, or rather they’d laid head to toe and talked for hours about home, feeding most of Zola’s documents to the flames.
The Captain America costume is still damp when Dugan hands it over, scrubbed clean and bleached. He’d patched the holes as best as he was able, using Dernier’s favorite blue shirt and the tail end of a scarf he’d been working on, which he reassures Steve is nearly the same color red. The stitches are neat and even around the wide holes, and when Monty stands at a few yards distance, the effect is passable.
“Feels strange to be wearing this,” Monty says, looking down at himself. He’s shaved off his mustache.
“Sounds even stranger,” Jim says, wincing at his cool English tones.
Monty clears his throat and says, “Whaddayou, a wise guy? I’m a New Yorka. I wuz born on Toity Toid Street.”
“I’m ashamed to hear you talk like that,” Gabe tells him. “Who are you trying to be, Rocky Sullivan?”
“It sounded like Barnes to me,” Dernier says.
“At least they’re the same height,” Steve says.
Bucky sleeps an artificial sleep the whole day through. Jim’s kept him under while his body does the hard labor of knitting itself back together. It’s slow going and makes for anxious hours. Twice Steve has to stop what he’s doing and make sure that it’s not all some cruel dream, that they’re not planning what could arguably be treason for a corpse. Once he surprises Dernier keeping the same watch.
For dinner they supplement their rations with hard cheeses and the best brandy any of them have ever tasted, unearthed from a storeroom full of dusty corners. Afterwards, Peggy takes Steve aside and says, “I’m not sure all of this will be enough.”
Steve rakes both hands through his hair. His hands are still smudged with oil and ash; they smell of smoke. There’s dried blood in the beds of his fingernails. “Not even the rest of the Nazis know what Hydra’s been up to,” he says. “Schmidt kept Zola from them, and all his weapon development. He could have built this thing.”
“That’s not what concerns me,” she says. “I’ve seen the sort of thing Howard builds in his spare time. This - this Valkyrie, these specially powered bombs - a man like Schmidt could achieve these things.”
Steve shakes his head. “So what am I missing?”
“You want to kill a man,” Peggy says. “But he’s meant to be so much more than that, isn’t he?”
“Gods and legends live on,” Steve says.
“Schmidt was right about that, at least,” Peggy says, and shakes her head. “He was never intended to be only a man, not by any of you - Erskine, Schmidt, Zola. Even you, Steve.”
Steve looks back towards the others. They’re subdued, sitting close together. Monty has his pen and paper out, but he sits watching the fire instead of writing. “I wanted him to be a hero,” he admits. “I knew I’d never be one.”
Her eyes soften but hold no pity. “The SSR never wanted a hero,” she says. "They wanted a weapon. If we want Captain America’s death to mean something, the right something - the kind that will make sure no one’s still thinking about how they can get their hands on that super soldier - we can’t just kill a weapon. We need the man, a real and human man, to die a hero. To show it isn’t just what we’ve been fighting for - but how we’ve been fighting for it.”
“What are you suggesting?” Steve asks.
“Wishfulness is a great flaw in intelligence - but it can bring meaning and comfort in a world that makes no sense. It may be the thing that wins wars. It matters, I think, what we’re wishing for.” She bites her lip, and laughs ruefully. “Which is to say, we need to give Captain America something more than love of country to die for.”
-
They send the first message to London at 0740. Arnim Zola has been captured. Given the valuable information he has provided, and in exchange for his full cooperation, Doctor Zola is being remanded to Switzerland. Please prepare suitable transportation. At this distance it’s almost inevitable that the message will be intercepted, but for added ease Morita uses the codes they were given back in Normandy, almost certainly broken by now.
“But we got no idea where this Zola character is,” Dugan had said, when they were talking it over. “Won’t he have something to say about it?”
“Who cares?” Peggy says, sounding for a moment just like Bucky. “Zola has very little chance of seeing the end of the war with Schmidt taken out of play. But he’s still a target of the SSR, one that I’d like to see brought to justice. Either we’ve just signed his death warrant, or he’ll defect and stand trial for his crimes.”
The second message is sent an hour later, for relay from Zurich to Liechtenstein. Request approved, reinforcements en route to your position. A reply to a message lost, perhaps - enough to throw some confusion about who is communicating to whom. The Italian campaign had been gutted for Operation Overlord, and reinforcements for the invasion of northern Italy had been trickling in for months from three separate divisions. Coupled with Allied bombardment over Austria and the advancement of the Russians from the east, even a short message would muddy the waters about who was asking for troops in the Alps, and what troops could be sent at such short notice.
Their transport is loaded and ready to go. Captain America comes to bid farewell to their platoon escort, who are being left behind to guard the Hydra camp. He shakes their hands and nods gravely as they tell him it was an honor. No one seems to notice that he doesn’t speak or that his upper lip looks a little pink.
The fork in their roads is a bumpy hour through windy mountains. They cut Bucky’s morphine and without it he’s stumbling fitfully towards consciousness. “He’s gonna be in a lot of pain when he wakes up,” Jim tells Steve. “It’s not gonna be pretty. But try and keep him clear if you can. Wash out the wounds and rebandage them when you find somewhere to stop, at least by tonight. Sterilize the water first.”
They’ll turn north towards Salzburg. The unfinished Hydra base lies somewhere in between, below the tree line. Jim will use ULTRA to send the remaining signals from there, panicked messages notifying of an approaching Allied force. Updates of a battle that isn’t happening as they lay Dernier’s explosives throughout the base to conceal a force that never existed.
“Save some for your team, in case there are any Germans nearby,” Steve tells him.
“Penicillin injections every six hours until you run out, not before,” Jim says doggedly, as if Steve hadn’t spoke. “Not even if he’s up and complaining he doesn’t need ‘em anymore.”
He keeps up the running commentary as they load Bucky carefully into the back seat of the second vehicle and helps pile blankets on top of him. Their escape will be in a nondescript German staff car that’s seen better days and is barely big enough to fit Bucky’s long legs. Like Monty’s accent, it won’t hold up under scrutiny, but it should be enough to get them off the mountains and close to the Swiss border - if they aren’t found by the Germans first, if they can’t find safe passage across the border, if the SSR doesn’t believe Peggy’s story, if, if, if.
For a long time the seven of them stand in a circle without speaking. The storm has cleared, and sunlight sparkles off the mountains. It feels as if they’re standing on the top of the world, or at the very least a high precipice, looking over the edge.
“If Cap were here,” Steve says finally, “he’d have a pretty good speech for you. All I can say is thank you.”
“Yeah yeah,” Dugan says. “We already saw how the movie ends. Freedom and sacrifice, yadda yadda. You too, Rogers.”
Dernier steps forward and takes Steve’s hand in a tight grip. “C’était une grande plaisir, servir avec vous.”
He turns to Monty, who smiles, gentle and raw looking without the cover of his mustache. He’s left the shield in their truck, his face naked of Cap’s mask. “I’ve been racking my brains for the perfect quote,” he says, and shakes Steve’s hand. “But it seems that words have deserted me also. Godspeed, Rogers.”
“Godspeed,” Jim grumbles, and sticks his own hand out. He jerks a chin towards the mess of blankets concealing his friend. “You tell him - aw, hell. You tell him I’ll be on the radio, okay? You tell him to get a message to me.”
“I will,” Steve promises.
He turns to Peggy, who is looking at him with large, sad eyes. Her spine is as straight as ever. He takes both her hands within his own regardless, and says, “I’m sorry for what’s waiting for you on the other side of this.”
“It won’t be all bad,” she says, and she and Gabe share a smile. “You two will spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulders.”
“What life?” Steve asks. “I’m already dead.” And so he is; dead for days, according to the reports the Commandos will make to the SSR. Killed during the train attack that wounded Captain America and lead to the capture of Doctor Arnim Zola. Zola, who may or may not turn up in Switzerland, but whose notes will - stating that he was unable to duplicate Erskine’s serum.
“Don’t be an ass, you know what she means,” Gabe sighs, and draws Steve into a tight embrace. “You sure you can drive that thing?”
“We’re about to find out,” Steve murmurs into Gabe’s coat. “You got the letters for his family?”
“I got ‘em,” Gabe says. There’s nothing incriminating in the pages. No mention of Captain America, no heroics. Nothing but I love you’s, I miss you’s, the margins full of little drawings to make Bucky’s sisters smile. “You be safe, y’hear? Take care of each other.”
“You too,” Steve whispers, and takes one last breath of home.
He doesn’t look back as he points their car west, and if the road blurs with tears every once in awhile that’ll be between him and God. The air warms up as they pass down through the tree line, but it doesn’t really get any easier to breathe. On the bench next to him, the radio chirps - picking up the first of Jim’s messages. They’re staging the opening attack, then.
Captain America’s motorcycle roars through the woods, easily outpacing the six Hydra soldiers hot on his tail. Little did they know that the motorcycle had been built by Howard Stark himself! He triggers a tripwire, yanking two Hydra goons off their motorcycles. A belch of fire from his exhaust pipe takes care of two more.
He approaches the wide concrete gates of the base, and is confronted by the squat silhouette of a tank. But it’s no trouble for Cap’s shield - or for the powerful rockets designed by American ingenuity! The tank is destroyed in one powerful blast, and Cap aims his motorcycle up the steep ramp, flipping up and over Hydra’s measly defenses.
Over the gates, he smashes his way through Hydra soldiers - wham! Blam! His superhuman strength makes quick work of the evil foot soldiers. But as he knew he would be, he’s quickly surrounded. All is going to plan. His trusted Howling Commandos await his signal.
He can picture it in his mind’s eye, clear as if he were watching it up on a screen. As if he were lying in the narrow cot he’d shared with his mother as a child, a toy soldier in each hand, telling himself stories.
It had been how he’d learned to draw, in fact. He’d always wanted to save the best scenes for Bucky.
The Red Skull’s base has been overrun with soldiers, but the villain himself eludes Captain America. It’s not until he hears the whir of great propellers that he realizes Schmidt is about to carry of his most dastardly plan - the devastation of America with his mighty Valkyrie, an experimental Nazi plane designed to resist radar and all known forms of tracking.
“We have to get to that plane,” Cap says grimly. “Our American way of life depends on it. The war itself depends on his madness not reaching our shores.”
But brave Agent Carter is already ahead of him, and she roars into view in the passenger seat of Schmidt’s own car. “Get in!” she shouts, and they begin a desperate chase. Ahead they can see daylight through the open hangar doors. Cap ducks underneath the propellers, which bounce harmlessly - KLANG! - off his shield. He readies himself to leap -
The car skids on the icy road, and Steve yanks irritatedly on the wheel. His stomach is a mass of knots. They pass an elderly civilian truck trundling its way up the mountain. The driver spares a curious glance towards Steve.
He wonders what they’ll tell Bucky’s family. Both of them lost at once, with no bodies to bury. Would the SSR tell Mrs Barnes that her son had died a hero, wearing a flag across his chest? Or would he and Steve be disavowed, hushed up, classified?
Erased from history. You will cease to exist, Phillips had said.
- “Wait!” Carter says, and her slim hand finds a way to Cap’s chest. He leans down to her, and she up to him, and her kiss is a promise he hopes desperately to keep. There’s no time for words, for vows - he must turn away from her, for all of their futures depend on him catching this plane, and stopping the Red Skull’s evil plan.
The road bends and turns and suddenly clears, dropping off into a great wide valley flush with sunlight. He can see little towns in the distance, smoke from chimneys. They aren’t nearly to the border yet, and from so high above the world the distance seems impossible.
Steve pulls the truck carefully to the side of the road. There’s sunlight streaming through the windows of the car. The engine ticks as it cools down. The radio antenna clicks as he pulls it to its full length. He listens to the sound of Bucky breathing until he can’t anymore, until he has to bury his face in his hands.
A cold wind whistles through the broken windows of the Valkyrie. Below is an endless expanse of sky, clouds, snow, nothing. The instruments laid out in front of the Captain read, in lights bright enough to be on Broadway: NEW YORK. His hands fly over the panels, but they tell him nothing.
The Red Skull is dead, but his evil plans may yet come to pass.
If Howard Stark were there - if Peggy Carter were there - if his trusted Howling Commandos were there - but there’s no time to spend on ifs. The plane is moving fast, and every moment he wastes could mean the deaths of thousands in the city where he was born.
Cap looks up. The sun is streaming through the windows. The cold wind pricks his eyes with tears. There’s only one choice to be made, but he can’t make it without hearing the voice of his best girl … one last time.
There’s a rustle from the back seat, the sound of shifting blankets and the creak of the leather seat. “Steve?”
It’s hoarse, barely above a whisper. Steve twists around in his seat. “I’m here! Bucky, Bucky. I’m right here.”
“We really gotta quit meeting like this,” Bucky grits out. He takes a deep breath, his face contorted with pain. “What the hell happened? I thought I was a goner.” His words are slurred together. His eyes are heavy-lidded. His hands find the bandages on his belly, and he hisses between his teeth.
“It’s a long story,” Steve says. He wipes his eyes, his chest heaving. His face aches already from smiling. “I’ll tell you about it when we drive.”
Bucky cranes his head, and Steve watches him take in his surroundings. His eyes flicker, watching the dust float golden through the morning air. They’re the most beautiful color blue Steve has ever seen. “Where’re we going?” he asks.
“Anywhere you want,” Steve says. “How about the Grand Canyon?”
Bucky’s eyebrows knit together, confused. “That in California?” he asks. Steve rests his forehead against the seat between them, grinning helplessly.
“Yeah Buck,” he says, “the one in California.”
“Oh,” Bucky breathes, and grins bright and beautiful up at Steve. “You’re coming too?”
The radio beeps: two long, two short, one long. “You’re stuck with me, pal,” Steve tells him. “There’s just one last thing we gotta do.”
He picks up the headset. His heart is squeezing at him; it’s not hard to sound frantic as the call is answered. “Come in,” he says, “this is Captain America, do you read me?”
Bucky makes a curious sound from the back seat. “Captain,” Jim says, and then there’s a commotion on the other side. Peggy, pushing him away from the radio so she can talk to her love. All according to script: “Darling, is that you? Are you alright?”
“Steve?” Bucky says from the back seat, and then groans sharply as he tries to sit up.
“Peggy, Schmidt’s dead,” Steve says into the radio, squeezing his eyes shut. He reaches his free hand over the back of the seat. After a moment he feels Bucky’s fingers wrap around his own and hold on tight.
