Chapter Text
1943
Funny story, this. Nico never wanted to go to war. Nico hated fighting, hated violence; there was enough suffering in the world, he reasoned, that he had no business going around making more.
But Jason had been signing up. Jason, who’d never filled out his height, who still took sick every winter like clockwork, who was probably going to die before he was twenty one since his mama never stuck around to drill some sense into his thick head; that fathead was trying to enlist.
And Nico, who had no desire to live in a country where Jason was not, went on and wrote his name down, too. Went through the physicals, went through the psychs. They made sure he wasn’t a weakling or a nutter or apt to desert in the middle of battle for no reason at all, and he passed, flying colors, the only good marks he ever got on a test.
Through the whole process, while they measured his chest and his thighs and his cock, and asked him inane questions like what happened to his mother (he’s still not sure about these head-shrinks, hopes to God their psycho-babble is just another phase and the world will go back to real doctoring soon), he just kept thinking about Jason, how he couldn’t let Jason run off and fight an entire war without him.
Wasn’t just because he was scared of letting the boy out of his sight for fear of what might happen; he just knew that if Jason left, he’d come back some stranger who didn’t give a piss about Nico. Maybe he’d build up some muscles on those skinny arms and flesh out his face, always drawn from his last bought of the sickness, and find real work, and wouldn't need Nico to support him anymore.
Nico thought that might kill him. He’d lost his mother, his sisters, and he’d never had a father; but he’d always, always had Jason. There was something endearing about the boy, who had been left behind by everyone he’d ever loved but still found a heart full of it to spill into the world. Nico had spent ten years trying to deserve that kind of love, and damn if he was going to let a measly war get in his way.
He might’ve skipped out on his duty, taken Jason north to Canada or south to Mexico; but Jason had taken one look at the regulation duds in his hands and said fiercely, “You have to go, Neeks. For both of us. I’ll catch you up later.” And he’d smiled real bright, like he believed that.
Because the CMO had taken one look at Jason, one listen at his weak chest, and shaken his head, oh no, not sending this one over to die--he’s already halfway there. Maybe it was TB, or lung cancer, or just an inflamed case of asthma; Nico wasn’t listening by the time Jason was ready to talk about it. Nico was worrying about being shipped overseas, and dying somewhere cold where no one spoke English, and never seeing Jason again.
“What’s with you?” Jules nudges him, hard, shaking him out of his memories, and Nico scowls at the dark-skinned man, rubbing his hands together against the cold.
“What’s with you?” he shoots back, and his men all ooh like the assholes they are.
“You’re off in dreamland,” Cal says. Cal’s a skinny lad who isn’t really a lad at all, but Nico’s the only one who knows that and he keeps it quiet because she’s the best damn scout they have. She scrapes the bottom of her bean can with a spoon, gathering every last drop of the mushy concoction. “Thinking about your sweetheart?”
Cal’s an asshole, too. She knows full well he was thinking about Jason.
Jules whistles through his teeth. “A poof like you’s got a gal back home?” he crows.
“Shut up,” Nico says to both of them. “I’ll make you run laps around the camp.”
Some of his men snicker; most of them edge away from him, closer to the campfire. They’ve been with him long enough to know that he’ll make good on his word.
It’s been a year and a half, by his count, since the military decided they couldn’t do anything with him and shuffled him off to govern this collection of misfits. When he arrived, they were a lazy stock of good-for-nothings; now they’re a lazy stock of good-for-nothings that are damn near experts on the movements of Hydra.
Most days are like this, sprawled around a fire trying to keep warm while Jules bangs out a tune on a pair of empty cans and Cal sings along in a warbly, fake voice that makes her sound more like a fellow with an unbroken note rather than a girl who can--Nico’s heard her--sing sweet enough to make the birds weep. She croons, let me call you sweetheart, and some of the men boo good-naturedly and others chug down beers they pilfered from nearby towns and pretend the tune isn’t getting to them, and Nico stares into the fire and misses Jason like hell.
The other days, the days in between these peaceful, hellish ones, are what Nico lives for. The days that Cal runs up, flush-faced and out of breath, her caramel hair flying in wisps around her cheeks, and seizes Nico’s arm to hiss in his ear, “I saw it! A kilometer and a half ahead, it was unmistakable.”, and they go off to raid another base, kick some ass, and fail to accomplish anything but confirming what they already know--Hydra is everywhere.
The only time he’s not mooning over Jason is when he’s fighting for his life, and the only time he feels like he’s supposed to be here is when he’s putting the fear of God into some heil-Hydraing creep. It’s grim and it’s miserable and it’s a far cry from how he imagined his life would go, but there you have it. It’s all he’s got.
“What about you?” he asks Cal, in revenge. “Got a girl back home?”
Jules whoops. “That one? He ain’t even got chin-hair yet!”
Cal blushes, and glares furiously at Nico, who sticks his tongue out before he can catch himself.
Sometimes, he finds himself acting the way he did when he was with Jason, and he hates it. The more he reveals to these people, the less he’ll have to give back to Jason when he returns. And it’s not like he has much to begin with; just a few memories, some feelings he promised Bianca he’d try to suppress, maybe his smiles. He saves them, nevertheless, like the pennies he used to clink into a Mason jar back home for rainy days, never mind that it was always pouring for the two kids in Brooklyn.
“You know what I heard?” Cal asks, after they’ve moved past the part of the night where they tease each other about gals they know they’ll probably never live to get rationed with.
“What’ve you heard?” Nico replies dutifully, expecting another yarn about clawed beasts or Hitler being from outer space. Those kinds of tales usually come from Hank, who’s obsessed with that sort of thing, but sometimes Cal’ll repeat one or two as well.
“This was from one of the boys in the 45th, that we passed by two days ago,” she says. “Latest news from the homefront.”
Everyone in earshot stills, the men who pulled away from Nico now drawing closer, in order to hear Cal. There isn’t a soul out here who doesn’t crave news from home; who wouldn’t?
Cal leans towards them, face alight with the joy of being the one to deliver this treat. “They’re saying,” she says, pausing dramatically in a way that makes Nico want to slap her, if he wasn’t opposed to hitting girls in general, “that the U.S.A. has come up with a secret weapon--a formula that turns little weaklings into strong, burly men.”
There’s a beat. Then everyone--Jules, and even Nico included--bursts out laughing.
“What the hell?” Jules adds, shaking his head. “Lad, you finally gone crazy.”
“It’s true!” Cal declares adamantly, and scrabbles around in the pockets of her dingy coat, pulling out a newspaper article. It’s recent, only three or four months old, and she passes it around as proof. “Look!”
Nico scans the clipping when it reaches him. It isn’t much; just a grainy photo of a man in a mask, a star on his broad chest, waving and standing next to the President. The article beneath is barely a paragraph long, but he reads it three times to make sure he isn’t mistaking this.
(Carr, 1943)--The future of America is now! Chants of “Long Live Captain America!” and “Hooray for the USA!” could be heard throughout Washington, D.C. today as the purported Star-Spangled Man took to the stage, shaking hands with the President and charming everyone with his bright smile. “I was a scrawny kid from nowhere,” the man, now known as Captain America, said in his following speech. “But due to the miracle of modern science, I’m now a powerhouse--ready to beat back those Nazis and win the war!” And, indeed, this man proceeded to shock and awe the crowd with his demonstration of strength. He bent steel bars, lifted the President’s automobile, and knocked out ladies in the crowd with his stunning looks. Who was this man previously? “Like I said, just some kid,” the man himself said as this paper questioned him. “I had TB, I was dying in an apartment alone. When someone approached me, asked me if I wanted to be better, of course I said yes. I left my old life behind in Brooklyn, and I’m not going back.”
Nico hands the article back to Cal. “That doesn’t say anything about a secret formula.”
“Well, it’s secret, innit?” she responds. “Anyway, the lad I got this off of swore up and down that he heard it was true--some sort of serum that turns men into gods. And you read the article--no normal man can bend steel bars, let alone one who had TB.”
“Sensationalism,” Nico dismisses it, but some of the details stick in his mind long after Cal put the article away. A sick boy from Brooklyn? A boy with a hero complex?
He’s gone crazy out here, seeing Jason where Jason isn’t. This clown in a star-spangled suit is probably a hired circus performer, someone to boost public morale. No man in a mask is coming to fight Hydra; that battle is for Nico, and his men, and none of them have gotten to meet the President or had ladies swoon over them in a crowd. They’re unshaven and smelly and hungry more often than not, swear like sailors and fuck anything that moves, and they’re the real heroes of America.
Only, they’re too busy being out here heroing to parade around being exalted back home.
“I wouldn’t do it,” Jules is saying, when Nico tunes back into the conversation. “You couldn’t pay me to be in one’a those government thingies. Who knows what they’re putting inside you? Ain’t natural.”
“I heard, there’s a special ops group that has one of ‘em in it,” Hank says eagerly, leaning in close. “They have a man who has claws. Real ones, like in the Wolfman.”
The other three groan.
“Hank, you need to stop reading those dime-store novels,” Cal scolds, even though it isn’t like there’s much else to do out here. “You’re gonna ruin your head, and it ain’t too good to begin with.”
“It’s true! He’s immortal, too,” Hank says, and Nico shakes his head at Jules, who grins.
“Well, I’ve heard there’s a gent who can fly,” Jules says. “Wanna know how he does it?”
“How?” Hank asks.
“Gets in an airplane,” Cal butts in, and she and Jules laugh.
Hank shakes his fork at both of them. “You just wait ‘til Uncle Sam gets to us. They’ll be doing it soon--every single soldier’s gonna be enhanced. We’ll be an army of supermen.”
Even Cal scoffs at that, and they let the fire die down a little. Nico orders everyone to sleep and takes the night watch, as usual. He’s still not used to sleeping out here--there’s too much space, too much air. He misses the cramped bedroom in New York, where he was lulled to sleep by Jason’s wheezing breath. Cloistered in there, even in the heat of summer, he felt hidden and safe. Here, he’s just exposed.
He wonders if it’s possible that this Captain America really went through such a transformation. He can bet that, back home, Jason’s eating up the story like fresh biscuits; of course Jason will love the idea that a scrap of a thing can become a hero. God knows he draws enough champions of justice on every piece of paper he can find.
Jason will probably get some crazy idea that he can change, too, and he’ll be back to stalking the Recruitment Office in hopes that some scientists happens along and decides to mutate him as well. There isn’t a Nico around to drag him off and talk some sense into him, either. But there isn’t much Nico can do about that now, so far away with letters crawling so slow. For all he knows, Jason’s already gotten himself in deep.
All of that only makes Nico more determined to survive, to get home before Jason drowns in his own fatheadedness. It’s all that keeps him going, these days, the idea that he’s fighting in Jason’s stead, fighting for that chance to go home and wake up in a world that isn’t ruled by fascists. He didn’t want this war and he didn’t want this violence, this love of darkness that grows in him every day, but--as always--he’ll succumb to it if it’ll save Jason.
Cal rolls over, bringing her bedroll closer to where he’s sitting at the edge of the camp. Her eyes are wide open, some light from the fire or the stars or the moon or, damn, heaven itself making them glint. “I’m sorry,” she says softly, for his ears only. “About earlier, when I teased you.”
He nods jerkily. “Me, too.” They don’t hold little things against each other--nobody does, out here. It’s too stupid to fight over hurt feelings or stolen beef jerky when they might be blown to bits or, worse, captured by Hydra at any second. “I know you’ve got reasons for what you do,” he goes on.
“And you,” she says. “You could say the same.”
Instead of answering that, since they both know it’s true and verifying it for the hundredth time would be a waste of breath, he says, “You think it’s real? Captain America?”
Cal shrugs. It looks funny, as she’s lying on her side and all. “Does it have to be?” she asks. “All people need is a little hope, and they become their own heroes.”
He bites back a disbelieving snort. “You sound like Jason.”
“Don’t knock it ‘till you’ve tried it,” she advises. “I’ve seen wars won over less, and besides, when was the last time you hoped for anything?”
“The night before I shipped out,” he tells her, the words spilling too easily from him. These are the sorts of things Bianca wanted him to keep secret, the sorts of things that could get him dishonorably discharged. But he trusts Cal; she’s taking a few risks, herself. And it feels good to not hide. “I wished for two things. One, that Jason would roll over and fuck me hard enough that I forgot anything else existed. And the second, that the world would end the exact second that I came, so I wouldn’t have to know what it felt like to leave him.” And so that he wouldn’t have to face the consequences.
He should be ashamed of himself, speaking of vulgar things to a girl, but Cal doesn’t even redden. She just purses her lips and nods, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world for him to want that. Moments like this, she isn’t anything like the cocky little kid who begged him to keep her gender a secret. Moments like this, she isn’t like anything he’s ever seen before.
“You’ll get home,” she says, not in the hopeful way that most of them reassure each other, but calmly, as if it’s a fact. “You’re going to go home, Nico. You’ll survive this--you’ll survive worse than this. And at the end of it all, Jason will fuck you blind.”
A shiver runs down his spine. It’s different, hearing someone else say it. It’s scary, how certain she sounds. And he’s absolutely terrified that some of the men are awake, that Hank or Jules or Mattie or Steve might still be nabbing at zzzs and overhear what Cal just said.
But when a second goes by and nobody springs up, crying, “Get out of here, you fucking fairy!”, and the world fails to end and Cal rolls back onto her other side and it stays quiet, quiet enough to hear the crickets and the thump of his heart, he relaxes.
He feels downright peaceful on watch that night. He’s going to make it, he determines. He’s going to make it home.