Work Text:
After the war, Jim gets used to people spitting at him in the street; it's not like it hasn't happened before. If that had bothered him, he'd never have signed up to fight for a country that treated him and his fellow countrymen like criminals. That was something Gabe understood as well as he did - being betrayed by your own skin - but at least Gabe wasn't considered fucking responsible for every tragedy of that damn war.
The worst irony is he doesn't even speak Japanese; his parents raised him to be a proud American patriot - some good that did him.
Jim never forgets the moment he intercepted that call from Steve and was ushered out, his boots echoing on the corridor floor while he pretended not to hear Peggy Carter's sobs in the distance. That night, he thought to himself, you son of a bitch, Rogers, you've gone and found a way to kill yourself without him, while looking like a hero.
The next night, all the Howling Commandos got stinking drunk and told falsely cheerful stories about the two crazy kids from Brooklyn they had always expected would outlive them all. Jim sat quietly, nursing his whiskey, trying not to remember the way their fearless leader had looked at Sergeant Barnes, like he was his whole world spinning on its axis.
No wonder he hadn't wanted to live without him.
After the raid on Reinhardt's base in 1945, Jim never expects to see his former compatriots again: they were brothers, and they all belonged to each other, but it is too painful for him to think that they all get to fit back into their lives, and there's nothing for him.
When he gets off a rickety bus to see his parents' old hardware store in Fresno is long gone, boarded-up and the land sold off, he wonders why he came back at all: there's nothing left that resembles home for him.
In the chaos of the mass exodus from the Manzanar internment camp, it takes time to find those he left behind. Eventually, he locates his family - his parents and sixteen-year-old Will - eking out a life for themselves in the San Fernando valley, growing fruit. It's less than half the life they deserve, but they get by with Jim's war pension, and at least it's better than living out their lives as hibakusha on the scorched earth of their homeland.
There are hard edges to the brother he left behind. Will was just a kid when Jim shipped out, and now he is a man with anger deep in his bones; it takes him a long time to forgive Jim for not being there.
Jim Morita spends the rest of his life campaigning - writing letter after letter until his hands are covered in ink splotches, speaking in front of Congress committees and exploiting his membership of the Commandos at every turn, because it's what Steve would have done. Steve, that stupid, brave idiot who never knew better than to throw himself headlong into danger.
When he hears that Steve is alive, all he can think of is Bucky, who lost his chance of growing old like the rest of them. Every time he picks up the phone and tries to dial the number, his shaking hands won't let him. The cancer's about to get him, and he won't put that man through any more loss than he's already experienced.
* * *
“Monty! Let's have another,” Winnie says, leaning on his arm with a half-smile.
Montgomery Falsworth laughs. His older sister could always drink him under the table, even back when they were children and raiding their father's drinks cabinet.
“Chin chin.” He pours them both another shot of whiskey - hard to come by, courtesy of Colonel Phillips and his worrying connections - and grins. “To absent friends.”
His sister's eyes soften, and he knows she's thinking of Jamie, their younger brother, the name they've barely been able to speak since 1944. The Commandos were in Paris between missions when Monty got the news. It had been a barrage balloon that got Jamie, on a night recon mission with poor visibility - a garden variety RAF death, nothing unusual but for the fact it ripped Monty's guts out from the inside.
The night he got the letter, he sat there numb, white noise filling his ears while the others ran up a bar tab and teased Cap about his most recent visit from the beautiful Agent Carter. Eventually, Monty couldn't stand it any longer. He'd stumbled away from the others, and Bucky had followed him, the stubborn bastard that he was, right into the alley behind the pub that smelled of piss. While he screamed and kicked the wall, Bucky said nothing, just stood there beside him with his hands in his pockets, but it helped, just the same.
When they went back inside, Bucky didn't breathe a word of it: he knew what it was to have demons, after all. There'd been nights when the two of them had shared a tent and he'd pretended not to hear the way Bucky shook and cried in his sleep with nightmares of Zola.
After it was all over, Monty got home to find his childhood home turned into an orphanage, to staircases rattling with cheerful Cockney evacuees who called him professor and toff . He'd rather missed the little ruffians after they returned to their parents, and he knew Winnie did; living in this empty house, Mum and Dad long dead while the skies rained with bombs couldn't have been easy for her.
He takes a sip, savouring the burn and looks away. At least he came back to Winnie; that's something in all this unending darkness. There's sharpness at the back of his throat that has nothing to do with the whiskey when he thinks of Bucky's three sisters back in New York, who had to settle for nothing but an empty grave and an obituary that talked more about Captain America than their brother.
“Sad about your Captain, isn't it?” Winnie puts a sympathetic hand on his - they were never the most demonstrative of families, and he can't help but think of mother telling him that a gentleman always keeps his feelings under wraps - and Monty finds himself almost weeping at the touch. He blinks back the tears, manages to get a handle on himself and knock back the rest of his drink.
“His best friend, too,” Monty says, slowly - and at that, he has to try not to sob again. “Bloody idiot got shot out of a moving train in the Alps. Neither one had a bit of sense in them.”
Winnie reaches for the decanter - the last of their heirloom crystal she hadn't donated to the war effort - and sloshes some more alcohol into their glasses. “Hope they're together now.”
Years later, Monty makes it to the states and spends a few nostalgic, alcohol-soaked days with Dum Dum at the bar he'd bought and filled with Howling Commados memorabilia from top to bottom, reminiscing about old times. He seems happy, back with the wife and son he talked of all the time when they were raiding HYDRA bases back in the forties.
Monty had never meant to lose touch with the boys, and he's reminded of how much he misses them all - especially Morita and Barnes, the men he'd shared a first name with and too many filthy limericks to count. He never quite gets around to seeing the others.
After his third divorce, he decides happiness is overrated. For the first time in years, he finds himself thinking of Barnes and Rogers and the soft glances they'd exchange when they thought no-one was looking. Those two seemed to have it all worked out.
Yes, he'd always pretended not to see.
The day Bucky died, Monty had heard Steve through the thin wall at headquarters, sobbing his heart out like a man who'd lost the other half of himself.
But a gentleman should always keep secrets that aren't his to tell. He takes their secret to his grave, ignoring all crude speculation from biographers and the press as to the true relationship between Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes.
* * *
It strikes Jacques Dernier more than once or twice that maybe trying to run a farm after the war wasn't the best idea. He never had much of a talent for anything apart from explosives, living on a knife edge and handling wires that could blow everyone to pieces in half a second. But the alternative is going back to Marseille and living out each day amongst the ruins of his old life, and no - this is better.
The other Commandos used to laugh sometimes when he talked about his dreams of tilled soil and a few animals. He never minded that -perhaps they were simple fantasies, but they were his - and all those men were his, too. He might not have shared their language, but they all shared everything else, his brothers of blood and fire and mud.
When Steve's plane went down into the Arctic, Jacques felt a piece of him go down with it; they all did.
Dugan swings by on one of his missions into France, and teases him about how his English was always a lot better than he let on (it was).
Most of the time, Jacques tries not to remember the old days; it's easier that way. He marries a local girl, Adeline, and they have two sons. Many of his Resistance friends never made it out of the war, and of course, neither did two of his own unit. At least he gets the life so many of his fallen comrades never got to have, and he is grateful for it.
Over the years, he stays closest to Gabe - though an ocean separates them, they meet up when they can. One visit, they're in the cellar of the old Provence farmhouse, drinking some of the decent 1954 vintage, when Gabe says, “Do you remember that old bombed-out farm we found in Austria?”
Jacques smiles. “What a night that was.”
They'd been on a high after a mission involving covert infiltration of a HYDRA base (Falsworth and his impeccable German accent helped with that one) and a series of superbly tricky sniper shots from Barnes. The base had been burned to the ground by the evening, and they'd all taken shelter in an abandoned farmhouse for the night.
Morita found a couple of jugs of wine in the cellar, and the Howling Commandos settled down in the barn on scratchy hay bales and drank to their own success.
Here in his own cellar, Jacques looks back at Gabe, and he isn't smiling anymore.
“You remember what happened later, though?” Gabe says.
Jacques narrows his gaze. “I thought we agreed we'd never talk about later.”
God, he wouldn't forget that in a hurry. Morita was outside the house on watch, Dugan and Falworth were snoring, and he and Gabe were left singing French drinking songs. Barnes had gone out for some air a while back - though why was unclear, he could take his drink better than any of them except perhaps Rogers - and Rogers had followed him, as he often did. Nothing unusual about that.
Gabe had stumbled to his feet and said he was going to take a leak, but as he reached the barn door, he froze, stock still.
Before Jacques knew what he was doing, he'd followed him on swift and silent feet and pressed his ear to the wood.
It was Barnes and Rogers on the other side, and they were moaning.
“Mmm, always want you like this,” they heard Rogers say.
Jacques and Gabe exchanged a look of shock. Never had they heard their grim, determined leader sound so tender, not even with Peggy Carter.
“Want you every fuckin' day,” Barnes replied, his voice low and soft with lust. “Wanted you all night. Seeing you watching me across the circle, Steve - couldn't wait to do this.”
There was a throaty laugh - Rogers - then the wall creaked, like someone was sliding down it, and he gasped. There were wet sounds. Was Barnes? - oh God, he was - and Jacques had to fight back an exclamation of his own.
Jacques turned to Gabe and shook his head. This was private, too private for anyone to be listening in on. Gabe put a finger to his lips, and it took them all of half a second to creep away and agree in hushed whispers that they were never going to talk about it again.
It had been more than just a drunken tryst they'd heard, more than a fast fuck, a desperate search for comfort in the hell of war. Rogers and Barnes loved each other, and if they did a good enough job of hiding it in the light of day then, well - could they begrudge them that? Two men together like that wasn't right, wasn't natural, but they respected them both, they were good men, and maybe that was enough. They had a right to their small piece of happiness, at least.
“So you do remember, right?” Gabe presses on, leaning forward in his chair.
“Of course.”
“The day of the train - I'd never seen Rogers like that," Gabe says, looking down at the wine in his glass. "He was dead already on the inside. He would have killed Zola with his bare hands if I hadn't been there to see it, I'm sure of it.”
“No doubt.” They both need a deep drink after that; there is silence for a moment.
Gabe's eyes are haunted when he asks, “Think any of the other guys knew?”
Jacques laughs at that, takes a gulp of wine. “Not Dugan. Definitely not him. Falsworth was a slippery bastard, so maybe. Morita? Never knew what that man was thinking.”
“If I'd lost Alice like that, I wouldn't have wanted to live, either,” Gabe says quietly.
It's a small mercy that Jacques never lives to see their former leader wake to a world without Bucky Barnes in it.
* * *
Dugan stares at the epitaph on the empty grave in a Brooklyn cemetery:
Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there, I do not sleep.
Some damn maudlin poem - that was fitting for Bucky, the dramatic bastard.
Becca had chosen it, he was sure of it - that serious, quiet girl of eighteen who now bore such loss inside her - and he'd never even met her. But he'd heard Bucky talk of her enough, and the younger ones, Dottie and Evie, to know what his sisters had meant to him. He'd been fighting for them the whole time, but he'd never come home to them.
Shit.
Nothing different to what families up and down the country were facing, what his Mary might well have faced had one of those godforsaken blue HYDRA weapons got him. For a while he'd thought about tracking down the Barnes family, telling Bucky's mother and sisters stories of his courage, as if it would help. But he didn't; Dugan knew he was more of a coward than a crack soldier like him had any right to be.
After all the missions and chases across Europe, he was finally home on the promise that he'd lend himself to some SHIELD intelligence work every once in a while. Back to Mary and Joe - already fourteen and it had been three years since he'd last seen him. He had to come here first, though, to pay his respects to his friend.
The first time Tim Dugan met their new sergeant, he hadn't liked him much. He'd had James 'just call me Bucky' Barnes pegged for the usual greenhorn officer out of basic who thought he knew something about war. When push came to shove, a lot of those boys ended up screaming, out of their minds with fear and incapable of giving an order if their life depended on it. He'd figured Barnes for the same, until Italy, when the 107 th went up against a HYDRA blockade. That day, he'd watched that kid - not a day over twenty-four and baby-faced, to boot - step up to the plate. Sergeant Barnes gave his orders with a cool head and no small amount of confidence, and though Dugan could smell the terror on him, he never showed it, not once. It was in no small part due to him that they'd held out so long before the tanks came.
Bucky never had much sense in his head, though. During the months they were caged animals in that factory, he couldn't keep his damn mouth shut for a second, standing up for the sick, cussing out the guards and doing extra for those who fell behind on their quotas. It was like he made it his personal mission to save everyone, and one day it was going to bite him in the ass - Dugan just knew it, and it terrified him.
And then they came for Dugan, to take him to that place nobody came back from, and Bucky, the stupid fucker - half-dead from pneumonia, with kicked-in ribs - had pushed in front of him and said to the guard: “Take me. This man's got a family.”
Dugan could have killed him then and there, but then, he hadn't counted on there being a man in this world even crazier than Bucky Barnes. No wonder Steve and Bucky had been thick as thieves since they were kids. Dugan could see where Barnes had got his disturbing martyr complex from, but in turn, he learned to respect the Captain, and in the end, he'd followed him, hadn't he?
Truth be told, those times with the Commandos were the best of his life. Bucky, the little shit, had given him the name Dum Dum, and it had stuck. Dugan had hated the nickname at first, but he'd take it if it meant he was fighting beside his friends.
Except for the part he tries not to think about - the fact that Barnes had loved Steve Rogers.
Bucky could tell dirty jokes and stories about dames with the best of them, but sometimes, his eyes would fasten on Steve's, so full of naked emotion that Dugan had to look away. He'd never figured Barnes for a queer - Rogers, yeah, with that way he could barely talk to girls - but then he saw maybe it wasn't men he liked, just their Captain. It made Dugan's skin crawl, but they all had a job to do, and it wasn't done yet. No use upsetting the apple-cart.
The thing was, the Bucky Barnes that had left that factory was damaged as all hell - he thought he could hide it with his laughter and charm and rakish smiles, but Dugan knew it, maybe better than Steve Rogers did. In the end, he couldn't begrudge a man who'd been through so much the smallest piece of light in the darkness. Even if it made him sick to his stomach, he'd look the other way. And he did.
In the present, Dugan sighs, wondering if he was wrong after all to think that about two people who cared so much for one another. He scoops a handful of cold earth from the ground with his hand and drops it at the foot of the grave.
“Sleep well, Buck, though you ain't here, anyway.” He wipes a hand over his eyes (it's not like Dum Dum Dugan ever cries, but even he isn't made of granite, and if anyone's deserving of his tears, it's Bucky).
By all rights, it should be his old ass six feet under, not that fierce kid with a boyish grin. The worst thing is that Bucky and Steve aren't next to each other; Steve's headstone is at Arlington. One day Dugan might make it there, but the grave's just as empty as this one and there doesn't seem much point.
Dugan goes home to Chicago and impulsively buys a bar. Maybe he's not the best husband and father, too lost in his own memories, but he isn't the worst, either. He plasters pictures of Dernier, Morita, Falsworth, Jones and those laughing Brooklyn boys all over the walls of his bar, and it becomes something of a tourist attraction. For him, it's a memorial to the two kids who never came home, who were too young for the rotten luck that life dealt them.
* * *
Gabe never imagined he'd end up a mechanic, but being a communications specialist who knows French and German doesn't get you very far in the real world. Out here, no-one gives a shit that you've fought for your country if the colour of your skin isn't the right one.
When he was little, he'd helped his grandpa fix up cars at their old Macon garage, every Saturday. He'd preferred spending time with him more than any of the work they ever did, but it had come in handy in the war when he had to hotwire vehicles and fix broken-down engines at a moment's notice. Dum Dum used to say he treated an engine like a beautiful woman, and if that was true, Gabe certainly made them purr.
The Commandos used to rib him about never showing more than a passing interest in the girls they encountered on their travels, about the time he spent writing letters to his Alice. He didn't let it bother him; Gabe knew what it was to have someone to come home to, and he wasn't going to mess that up for a second.
Sometimes Barnes would look at him, and they'd trade this little smile, like he understood what it was to have eyes only for one person.
When they had leave, Bucky would dance with girls and kiss them and maybe do a little more, but it was all show - Gabe had suspected even before the night he and Dernier had overheard them outside the barn.
What he'd never told anyone was that it had never bothered him particularly: really, it was kind of sweet, to know that their tough captain and sergeant had each other. That was love, he figured; something beautiful among the horrors of this world, and who was he to deny them that? Steve and Bucky were different, was all, the way Gabe had been made to feel different all his life.
After a few more missions with Dum Dum and Morita, Gabe finally comes home to the peach trees in his mother's yard and an older, sadder Alice who has lost none of her compassion. He has nightmares for the longest time about Bucky falling, wonders whether he should have been inside the train to stop it somehow. With Alice's love and acceptance, he makes it to the other side, sets up his own auto shop business and starts to build himself a life. They have four children, and he watches them break barriers that he never could have, back in the day.
The day his daughter Sandra becomes the first female African-American professor of physics - at Howard, his alma mater - he couldn't be prouder. Wish you were here to see this, Steve, he thinks. His grandson Antoine joins SHIELD, and Gabe is glad that there are still some crazy kids out there to keep the world safe, just like his Commandos back in the day (and they were all his, each and every one of them).
He never loses touch with Jacques and Dum Dum - he always means to catch up with the others, but Falsworth drinks and gambles his way into an early grave and Morita is too busy fighting his own battles.
Though Gabe makes peace with the memories, the untimely deaths of his friends haunt him for the rest of his life. Steve and Bucky were the best of them, and he knows they deserved better than their icy graves. They deserved each other, for the rest of their lives.
* * *
Moscow, 1948
Somewhere in between sleep and waking, Bucky tries to open his eyes, but they feel stuck together.
“Steve?” he murmurs, wondering if he's slept in and the others are already getting ready. He's half-expecting Dum Dum to throw a pillow at his head, the way he normally does when Bucky won't get up. He coughs and it hurts, but he can't move to even sit up. Must have been Dernier's schnapps last night that did for him.
It's the train today. It's important. They need to get Zola.
There's cold metal under his back; it's bare, like the rest of him, except for the sheet he can feel covering his lower body - and this isn't right, it's too cold for Bucky to ever sleep without wearing anything. He can open his eyes, feel that something cold is trickling down his face. His lashes appear to have been frosted shut. That's strange, but the pounding in his head is preventing any further analysis of the situation.
“Sergeant Barnes,” says a heavily-accented voice - Russian, maybe; he isn't sure. He blinks away the water clouding his eyes to see a man looking down on him, wearing a black uniform with a familiar red symbol on it.
No. It's the train today. He's going to wake up any minute.
Bucky closes his eyes, and at once finds his lids wrenched open by two leather-gloved hands. It hurts.
“Calling for your Captain, were you?” There is a sharp laugh, and the hands leave his eyelids. “You're not dreaming, Sergeant. And he's gone. Won't be coming for you.”
Bucky goes cold inside.
A newspaper is held in his face, dated March 5th , 1945. It looks old and dusty, which makes no sense - hasn't he only been asleep a few hours? - but all he sees is the headline: Captain America Missing In The Arctic. There is a subsection with Bucky's army photograph and his status: killed in action.
“No,” he says, his throat scratchy from disuse, and coughs again; that coldness is in his lungs, too. “You're lying.”
Then he looks down, sees the stump where his left arm used to be, and he is screaming. He only stops when the man in the black uniform slaps him across the face.
Steve. Steve. Gone.
The trolley he is on is moving, through a set of double doors into a room where everything is metal and glass and gleaming knives and machines. A familiar face is looming over him: the face that's haunted his every nightmare since Krausberg.
“Ah, Sergeant Barnes,” says Zola, beaming, a clipboard in his hands. “A pleasure to see you again, it's been too long. I apologise for putting you on ice for a few years”- at that, Bucky nearly starts screaming all over again, because this isn't real, it has to be a dream, like one of his pulp sci-fi stories, and he's going to wake up any second, he has to -“but I have needed the time to acquire the necessary resources. The procedure has already started.”