Chapter Text
There are certain indisputable truths in the universe: the sky is blue, snow is cold, and, if you throw a rock in the air, it'll come back down.
And those are beliefs that can't be shaken, those are things that Bucky - that everyone - knows for a fact.
Then there are things central to Bucky's universe, core truths that make up the foundation of who he is and while they aren't believed in by everyone else, they feel like they should be: the Yankees are the best baseball team; he's in love with Buck, probably, and thinks he has been since the day he met him; and, humans are really good at starting wars.
The thing is, though, that all beliefs get challenged sooner or later.
No matter how much you believe something - how much you want to believe something - sometimes you have no choice but to change your view on it. You can be as stubborn as you want but sometimes alternate facts - the true truth - just smack you in the face and there's nothing you can do about it.
That's what happens with another one of Bucky's beliefs: the one that says monsters aren't real.
He's never had proof of one, always known that night-time noises or other weird happenings could be explained logically. In fact, he's always assumed the word "monster" was used as another term for fairy-tale characters or human beings.
He's never been one to like admitting when he's wrong. Most people don't. But he can, if even the words scrape his throat raw on the way out. And this is just one more thing he's wrong about, in a long fucking list.
He first hears about it in the summer of '43.
The rumours start in France, from what he understands, but by the time the war is over, every soldier's heard them. The rumours spread to Austria, Belgium, and England, to the US and Russia and Germany. They even spread to Japan, to Australia, to the rest of the Pacific Theatre.
They're carried home by returning soldiers, squirrelled away under bandages and scrawled on the backs of letters. They lurk in barracks and under hospital beds, are discussed by commanding officers and nurses and support staff. They're found at army bases and air fields, in trucks and planes and submarines.
Inescapable, once you know they exist.
Somewhere along the way, the rumours get twisted into warnings. They become hushed stories, tales of sharp teeth and danger and eyes that shine in the dark. They tell of men who got sick, who are different now, of people who went missing during the war and came back wrong.
Bucky hears the rumours, of course. Everyone does. But he never particularly believes them. He even goes so far as to laugh when he's first told about it. He's been around soldiers from the First War and he's never heard anyone talk about them.
But maybe that's the point.
Men like to talk and he's never come across those sorts of stories, never heard any of those whispers in dark bar corners or under the guise of smoking a cigarette.
He probably would have dismissed it out of hand if he had, would have written them off as shell shock or small-town folklore.
There are some men who come back wrong.
Fucking understatement, isn't it?
Of course there are people who come back wrong from a war. Try and find someone who's come back right. He's never met anyone who has. Isn't sure they exist, even.
But then he starts listening.
It's hard to escape rumours in the army and it's even harder in the Stalag.
There are soldiers who like to tell stories, soldiers who don't, and soldiers who will only talk when the lights are on.
That last set is where Bucky gets his most valuable information, actually. It requires careful questions, knowledge of when to push and when to sit and wait, to allow them to tell their stories in their own time.
And the stories they tell send ice through his veins.
They talk about men who never left the battlefield. Not ghosts, but something other, caught between man and monster, turned into things that never left, that still live in the empty trenches.
One of those stories is told when Bucky strikes up a conversation with an old soldier named Joseph. He describes an encounter in a snowy forest and his fingers tremble as he talks.
"I was runnin' for my life," he says with a faraway look in his eyes. "Bullets whizzin' by my ears - and somethin' scared them all away. Don't know what it was. Don't want to, either."
"You sure it wasn't human?"
Does he want it to be?
Isn't it better, sometimes, to have it be something else?
Joseph shakes his head. "No man could scare anyone off like that. Scared me off, too. And it - somethin' was watchin' me, all the way out of the woods. Makin' sure I left. Never felt anythin' like it before."
"Since?"
"Once. In Delaware. Folks say those woods have been empty since the mine shut down but that can't be true. There's somethin' in there. People're just too scared to go lookin' for it."
Bucky asks careful questions and listens and collects the stories and somewhere along the way, doubt starts to creep in. He starts to look twice at guys who pass him, just in case. He keeps his eyes on the deep shadows and never turns his back to the woods and wonders if maybe they're right. If there really might be something out there.
Because maybe it is true.
Word of it must get around the Stalag, that an American is asking questions about the stuff no one else believes - or even wants to know. Some guys wait until they're asked. Some guys find him and volunteer their stories.
Bucky thinks some of them are just relieved to have someone listen.
After all, nightmares are diminished when you share them with a friend.
A British airman tells him about letters his brother wrote home, how there were references to things seen in the woods, things not seen in the woods, and the feeling of being watched.
Another soldier, younger, pulls him aside and whispers about things his uncle saw in the first war. "He said there were things living in No Man's Land. That they'd come out at night and crawl through the barbed wire."
The description of four-legged humanoid creatures with sharp teeth and a taste for flesh has Bucky looking over his shoulder for a good three days.
He's never believed in monsters. As much as he wants to dismiss it, laugh it off, he can't. Something about these stories sticks in the back of his mind, has latched on with sharp teeth and refuses to let go.
Something about them feels different.
He doesn't believe in monsters but maybe he believes in these ones.
And it gets worse. It gets real.
They hear when the tide starts to turn. The Allies start gaining ground. And if the crystal radio didn't tell them that, being forced out of the Stalag and marched across Germany pretty much confirms it. But back roads are an easy place to let your imagination run wild. A bad one, too. It's not hard to imagine shadows moving in the tree line, creatures watching from tall clumps of grass.
A couple hours before sundown, a single crow takes off and circles above them, calling out what feels like a warning. A German officer takes a shot at it and the crow wheels off and disappears. The silence that falls makes his ears ring.
They keep walking.
The chill that goes down his back isn't just from the rain.
The whole country feels dangerous.
There's a discontent lingering in the fog, a deep-rooted darkness that stalks them on the road. It has him fixating on details and looking back and the lack of safety that's been there ever since his plane when down is suddenly a lot more prominent.
They stop in a half-bombed town, huddling together for warmth in their tattered scarves and threadbare coats. No one has dared to attempt an escape. They've talked but talk is cheap. The Germans are armed to the teeth and Bucky's not eager to test how accurate their shooting is. And no one else will either, because they're all still clinging to the faint hope of getting home.
Except...there's an opening.
Just for a moment, one of the guards walks away.
They might never get another chance.
He elbows Buck and says quietly, "Do you wanna make a run for it?"
Even saying it, he knows it's a bad idea. They shouldn't even be thinking of it. It's stupid and suicidal and they'd be leaving their boys here alone, but the lure of over-the-wall is so strong that Bucky feels physically pulled in.
Buck glances back - at the Germans, at the other prisoners, at their friends - but he agrees.
He agrees.
It would be almost stunning, if not for the fact that he knows Buck has the same itch under his skin, the same hook deep in his stomach pulling him toward home.
"You first. I'll be right behind you."
Buck hesitates, just for a moment. "Are you sure you wanna do this?"
Abso-fucking-lutely not.
"Yeah, it'll be fine. I'll be right behind you."
A lie, though.
He doesn't mean for it to be a lie, at the time.
For as big a deal as escape is, it happens surprisingly fast. They edge away from the group and once they have a clear line, Buck takes off, vaulting over the wall and disappearing into Germany.
And Bucky doesn't follow.
Can't follow, once they grab him.
Even before they do, though, his feet refuse to move. It feels wrong to call it fear, exactly, and he doesn't know if it's cowardice or the fact they'll be hunted all the way to England for it or just that once they try to escape, it's impossible to undo it, but he doesn't even try to run.
Is this what it feels like, to betray someone else?
Two pairs of rough hands drag him back to the other prisoners and throw him to the ground. The echoing gunshots make him sick to his stomach. It wasn't supposed to go like this. It should be relief. It should be a good thing that Buck is gone. That one of them, at least, has managed to escape. But instead, fear rises in the back of his throat, so strong he nearly chokes on it. It's too easy to imagine Buck dead on the other side of the wall. Or not dead, broken, bleeding out from bullet holes in his back.
The thought haunts him all night.
He's had a lot of bad nights - a combination of his own stupidity and things outside his control - but this one tops them all. He curls next to Brady and it's worse, almost, that nobody seems angry that he was going to leave.
It clouds over sometime during the night. It's cold. It's so fucking cold. The only warmth comes from the blood running down his face.
And he doesn't know if Buck made it.
He can't sleep. Fear sits heavy on his shoulders. The shadows are thick like oil, scraping and sliding over the rubble and against his skin. Restless wind whistles through heaps of loose bricks and a branch snaps from somewhere out in the dark. It's too easy to imagine ghosts - to imagine Buck as a ghost.
A dead tree's branches twitch and creak above his head.
What if Buck never made it?
As much as Bucky hopes, he doesn't know. It drives him mad, fuels a run of bad decisions. He mouths off to a guard to try and ease the burning itch of not knowing and a crunch reverberates through his skull as the man breaks his nose.
It distracts him for a moment, at least. So that's something.
A thin, pitiful, scratched-up silver lining.
The guard shoves him away and sends him stumbling into Brady. Brady spits at the guard and earns himself a smack across the face before he thrusts a strip of someone's scarf into Bucky's hands. It's not much; it soaks through with blood before they get a chance to do anything else. The blood stains his hands, drips onto the dirt.
He hopes Buck is still alive enough to bleed.
Once they stop, Brady sits him down and resets his nose. White-hot pain flares outwards, turning his vision into static and he hates the noise that's pulled out of his throat. For all of his scolding - there was an angry "What the fuck were you thinking, pulling shit like that?" when it first happened - Brady's hands are gentle as he wipes the blood off Bucky's face and runs a hand through Bucky's hair.
Bucky just shrugs and mumbles an answer into Brady's shoulder.
How is he supposed to tell them that he's afraid Buck is dead and that it was his fault? It was his idea to escape but when it was his turn, he didn't even have the guts to try. How can he try to defend himself when he and Buck were planning on leaving Brady and the others behind, when he was set on abandoning his friends and the sole reason he didn't was because his legs wouldn't move?
But Brady doesn't demand an answer, doesn't do anything more than keep an arm around Bucky and let him lean on his shoulder.
The war is ending and they're still trapped in a German prison camp. There's nothing they can do beyond making plans that might never be acted on.
But, again, they get an opportunity. Not a big one, maybe not a smart one.
But a chance.
And, when the time comes, Bucky makes another bad decision and ducks through dozens of bullets to scale a building, cut down the Nazi flag, and put the American one up instead. And maybe that isn't the best thing he could have done. Maybe it was a pointless action, maybe it doesn't really meaning anything.
But he thinks it means something.
He looks down on the camp and sees the bodies of men who were so close to going home.
It can't have been for nothing. Even if it's a hollow victory, even if shouts and gunfire are carried off on the wind, it has to mean something.
Doesn't it mean something?