Work Text:
for Richard Aoki
He was fourteen when he got sprung.
"Junichi Kurazumi, alias James Buchanan Kurazumi, alias 'Bucky', you are hereby discharged with probation officer approval from the Preston School of Industry, this fourteenth day of June, 1942." The officer reading the notice did not look up. Bucky shouldered his duffel bag and pushed open the doors as the officer moved on to the next name. "Waylon Lincoln, alias Easy Street, is --"
He liked the idea of having an alias, like a gangster, like a big man who took no guff. His names weren't fake, though. His mother had given them to him: one Japanese, two white.
If he were going to choose an alias, it wouldn't be Bucky.
*
He waited twenty hours for a bus from Preston Castle back to Oakland, then spent another fifteen hours on board as it meandered around the mining towns and farms of Amador and San Joaquin Counties. Once back in the city, he snuck on the Tenth Street car without paying, until an old lady set to shrieking about Japs. He jumped free and took the laneways on foot.
He'd left in November, when the needles on the trees were starting to crisp and his father rose in the dark to go open the bakery. Now it was June and the trees on their street were brilliant green, the sky even brighter. As Bucky neared their apartment building, something moved near the top of the eucalyptus tree out front. He stopped and looked up, craning his neck as far back as it would go.
A length of red fabric, tattered at the edges and drained of color, waved like a pennant from the topmost branches.
"Go 'way," a kid said from the steps to his building. "You can't be here, go 'way."
He looked away from the tree to the kid. Showed his teeth and raised a fist until it cried for Momma.
Momma didn't come, but an older brother and then an adult man did appear, rubbing sleep from their eyes and pulling on overshirts, to yell at him. This neighborhood was whites-only, none of your kind, go back to the track. When he pushed past them, decked the littler one, then slid inside and ran up the stairs, his key didn't work in the lock. He kicked open the door to the little apartment he shared with his father, woke another baby and lady with peroxide curls.
The bigger man caught up with him, grabbed him by the collar and heaved him down three flights of stairs, out of the front doors. Bucky flew. The sky and leaves streaked, then he landed on ripped-open palms and knees.
They kicked him down, in the ribs, and kept kicking.
It was like a dream: leave the castle, come home to a different world. A different world with no home at all. He was free. He was finally free.
He laughed until a kick landed on his jaw, rattled his teeth. He rolled over, saw the red snarled in the tree branches and flapping against a sudden raincloud.
He ran, huddled over, arms wrapped around his bag and his chest to hold in his ribs, and ran. He made it for three days skulking around Oakland. He scrounged scraps from the back of gin mills and sucked unripe apricots from background trees, slept under trees or down by the tracks.
Then one night he slept too close to the Kaiser shipyards.
He got picked up for vagrancy and suspicion of espionage, double-booked for being yellow, and matched up, finally, with the War Relocation Authority.
He had never been to Tanforan race track, but the older white boys he'd been running with before juvie had. They spoke highly of handjobs in the washroom stalls, unattended drinks in the cocktail lounge, the stink of horse-sweat on a sunny afternoon in the grandstand.
Now the track was full to bursting with Japanese, housed in the horse stalls, one family per, and more in shacks on the infield. He saw people he knew from around the neighborhood, but most of them were strangers.
Honestly, they were all strangers. Even the faces he knew were closed to him, had been since he was small and already running wild.
His father had passed two weeks after relocation; Bucky supposed that was the telegram that had come to Preston Castle that he'd never bothered to open. Hell if he knew where it'd gotten to, now.
One lady who didn't know any better tried to adopt him. Bucky gave her his rations, stole scrap lumber for her, found her a better pot to cook rice in. Mrs. Ikeda knit him a sweater from unraveled wool and served him dinner behind her family's stall when they had finished eating.
When she invited him to sleep in their stall, when she started wanting to trim his hair and see him in neater clothes, he started staying away.
By October, he had escaped three times from Tanforan, once for nearly three weeks. He got a switchblade and used it well, slashing the cop who brought him in to ribbons.
Then the residents were moved to Utah in the space of a week.
*
Men from the Army came, high-ranking enough that they didn't wear khaki. Three of them talked to him and a few other kids, gave him tests, poked him like doctors and listened like cops.
We've heard about you, they said.
Bucky shrugged and scratched his arm. He'd learned early on to avoid eye contact and bite his tongue. It worked for his father out in the world; it worked even better for Bucky at home *and* the world.
Here's a chance to make something of yourself, they said. Do some good for once. Serve your country.
This was not his country; this never was his country.
He used to believe that it was. Or, maybe more correctly, he'd never given the matter that much thought. But this had been home. Whatever that meant, this had been home, even when his father waited twice as long as any American for service at the butcher's, the garage, or the jeweler. Even when he repeated second grade twice because his teacher claimed she couldn't understand his accent when he'd never spoken Japanese in his life. Even when he got sent to juvie -- the first time -- for a month over a Tom Mix Ralston Straight Shooter badge he'd been dared to steal, because, like the judge said, his kind -- slant-eyed Nip chinks -- were sneaky as all get out and impossible to read.
Get out of here, they did not need to say.
He looked around -- up at the empty, huge desert sky, down at frost-hardened mud -- all around at the flimsy shacks with tar-paper peeling off the roof.
What's in it for me? he never asked. He didn't need to ask.
The answer was clear: Get out of here. Escape this nowhere place. Flee from nice ladies in threadbare dresses who speak as high as birdsong, from sad men with sloping shoulders who never speak at all. From rations that taste like stagnant water and cold that creeps into your marrow.
Escape, sure. Into battle, toward death.
He trained as an assassin. He was, they said, a natural.
They gave him a knife, a pistol, and a mask as well as a dumb yellow-haired pretty boy partner.
They didn't need to say, Kill. Kill 'em all. Be sneaky, and mean, and inscrutable. Kill 'em.
That much was understood.
*
In the midst of everything, he made friends .
The Young Allies began as a propaganda project -- a colored boy, a fat Jew, and Tomás Ramón, a Filipino circus kid who could turn into fire, all of whom were his age -- but became a team. They ran codebreaking missions and passed messages behind the lines, then drank until they were sick while on leave. Bucky and Toro claimed to be rajahs and Wash Jones was an African king. The khaki-wacky girls ate it up. Bucky and Toro covered the infantry with gun fire and fire-fire when necessary, slept in the same bedroll, shared secrets without speaking.
Bucky even, eventually, came to appreciate his matinee idol blond boss. Steve wasn't nearly so dumb as he seemed. As bosses went, he was okay.
Not a single one of them, kid or captain, American or freak, expected to survive the war.
Theirs was a nation of killers, filled with ghosts. Soon enough they'd be home among the dead.
They fought in Europe where fog chilled them to the bone and snow fell for days, in Africa where the sand burned and never shook out, in the New Guinea where the jungle grew like a fever-dream.
Bucky infiltrated camps of twenty men and headquarters with hundreds. He tugged his knife across throats before they could scream; he lay prone for hours on end for the chance to take one shot. Jugular blood pumped out in arcs; heads exploded just after pince-nez shattered.
His heart beat fast, constantly anxious, and his breath came shallowly. He never slept but he tossed and turned; he ate little but grew taller.
"Like a weed," Steve said as they prepared to join the Air Transport Group in Assam, India. He reached over to muss up Bucky's hair, jerking back just in time when Bucky moved to grab his wrist. Steve crossed his arms over his chest and stood a safe distance away. "I mean it. Like a *weed*."
"Watch out, old man. Coming for you." Bucky cinched his belt and shrugged on his heavy wool coat. He'd never be as big as Steve; he barely reached Steve's upper arm now.
Steve laughed, bright teeth and blushing face. "Looking forward to it, lad."
*
"You'll be back, right?" Toro asked the night before Bucky left for China. They were tucked up together in the London HQ, legs interlaced, Toro's hands on Bucky's shoulder. In his anxiety, flames licked off his cheeks and hair.
The glow off Toro cast everything in a pink glare, pale as blood washed over a porcelain basin. Bucky studied his hands; in this light, his skin looked almost white. Nearly American.
He curled his fingers into fists and tucked them back inside his coat. He found his knife on the strap across his chest and stroked it.
"Sure," Bucky said. "Sure I will."
*
From India, they flew over The Hump into China. Steve wished aloud, several times, that there was a window so he could see the Himalayas below them.
Knowing him, he probably wanted to liberate Shangri-La.
After landing, they hiked for over a week, working with the nationalists and communists, then moving forward on their own. They made it to Shanghai and spent another week in the safehouse. "Safehouse" was a grandiose term for a frigid basement in an outbuilding of an old Methodist mission. No word came from any local contacts; their rations were long gone and Bucky took to scouring the dumps and alleys for food while Steve stayed inside.
Shanghai was a cold, restless city. People in the streets moved as slowly as the slush at their feet; the bombed-out buildings were black as coal, rotten against the sleeting clouds.
Finally, their orders came. Bucky was to make contact with a midranking official of Tewu, the internal security force under the Nanjing regime, pose as a Kuomintang defector, and obtain documents concerning defense of the Chinese coast.
When Steve read him the orders, Bucky started to laugh and could not stop. Steve looked first puzzled, then hurt, and finally annoyed.
"What's the joke?"
Bucky tipped back from his crouch until he was sitting on the floor, legs splayed open. He rubbed his face and swallowed another laugh. "Why don't they just send you?"
Steve narrowed his eyes. He seemed about three seconds away from reminding Bucky about rank, respect, and insubordination, so Bucky waved his hand. "Forget it. Sorry."
They ate stale rice in silence. When they were finished, Bucky lit a small fire in the grate and burned their trash with the transcript of the orders. He crouched before the fire, back to Steve, poking the papers with his knife. "I don't speak Chinese."
"Eh?" Steve moved behind him, checking the lock on the door and the narrow windows along the top of the wall. "What was that?"
Bucky looked back, planting his chin on his shoulder. "Don't speak Chink, anymore'n you do."
Steve stopped short. "So talk Japanese."
Bucky let his eyes close. The pressure in his head was huge, smooth, like a granite tombstone. Unmovable, and he could barely speak around it. "Sure, that would work. I'll make it work somehow."
He did, as it turned out, leaving a trail of bodies behind him. Since he couldn't read Chinese (or Japanese, come to that), the documents he stole proved to concern agricultural policy in the north.
He and Steve were back in Europe by then, running a mission with the Howlers outside Rouen. He never thought he'd be so happy to see white faces again as he was there. He might not speak Frog, but no one thought he did, either.
*
In the winter of '44, Bucky got sent alone to work undercover at one of the camps. Tule Lake was where the no-no's got shipped, people who answered the loyalty oaths wrong and become potential subversives. They were a riotous bunch, according to his briefing; martial law had been in effect for half a year, but the work stoppages, demonstrations and robberies of food continued unabated.
"That won't do," his liaison observed when Bucky appeared dressed as a camp inmate, old sweater and patched-up trousers and all. "Look like you just stepped out of the Sears, Roebuck compared to these sad fucks."
He scrounged up an older sweater, more holes than wool, and had Bucky roll the trousers around in frozen horse turds before pronouncing him passable and letting him through the barbed wire that separated camp staff from the inmates.
Bucky did not enjoy much of an introspective cast, but he did pause to marvel (briefly) at the fact that he was going in disguise as himself. As the person he otherwise would be.
He slipped into a union meeting, held in one family's barracks room, overflowing with angry men.
"They don't want us in their country," Aoki, the leader, said. "Never did. Let's return the compliment, shall we?"
Bucky was intimately familiar with silent resentment. After all, he excelled at it. He also knew anger, its bark and snarl, quite well. But Aoki and the other men's frigid disdain for white Americans, their cutting bitterness, was something new to him. It slapped him in the face, again and again, and something shook loose inside his mind.
It was a good thing he was not supposed to act as agent provocateur
The camp itself was little more than the set in an elementary school play. Every building was rickety, thrown together out of cheap pine and bent nails. Your boots clacked and boomed on hollow floors; the barracks shook in the cold night wind, threatened to lift wholly away and spin off into the sky.
In the dark behind the barracks, a week later, Bucky stood well after curfew, smoking one cigarette after another. The sparks lifted in the wind, then winked out.
"What will you tell them about us?"
He looked over and saw Aoki standing at the corner of the building.
His cover had been blown plenty of times before. Usually Bucky retreated, or killed. This time he offered Aoki a cigarette. He lit it off his own and Aoki joined him, accepting the smoke.
"How'd you know?" Bucky asked.
Aoki shrugged. "Your hands. Much too nice."
Bucky looked down. Aoki's hands, like everyone else's, were chapped and cracked, the skin weathered like a great-grandfather's. His own looked plump by comparison, fat and smooth.
"What will you tell them?" Aoki asked again when he had thrown away the stub of his Lucky.
Bucky let smoke curl out of his mouth. "Depends on what they ask me."
"That so?" Aoki's profile brightened when Bucky lit another cigarette.
"How it usually goes," Bucky said and dug his chin into his jacket collar. "They rarely ask the right questions."
Aoki chuckled hoarsely.
*
Captain America and Bucky were there to liberate the German camps. Bucky saw starved people and stacks of corpses behind barbed wire.
*
With Hitler gone, the war was almost over. So they were told, so LIFE magazine claimed. Cap and Bucky's teams shifted operations to the Pacific.
Toro and his boss were there, running bombing operations on Japan every night while Namor the fish-man aided the blockade and sinking of Imperial ships.
It didn't look like Toro was going to make it much longer.
"You gotta do something," Toro said. His eyes were bright like knife oil, his lip quivering. "I can't do this any more, Buck. I just *can't*."
He had been bombing Jap cities at night for nearly three months. He looked closer to dead than Bucky could ever have imagined, hollow eyes and dull hair, drooping shoulders and a toneless voice.
"What'm I supposed to do?" Bucky said.
Toro slumped back. "Just -- do something. I can't, I --"
"Ssh." Bucky tried to sound gentle, but all he felt was angry. Baffled, even, and jumpy. "Sssh. There, there."
"They look like you," Toro said. "Like you and me and they *scream*, Buck. They scream and then there's nothing and it's dark again."
He wasn't any good for this. He was good at sneaking, stealing, killing. He could get anything done. But he couldn't soothe Toro and he certainly couldn't stop the bombing.
*
His mother crossed the sea to San Francisco carrying a single valise. It contained two snapshots of his father, a burgundy wedding kimono and crimson obi, a change of Western clothes, and twenty dollars in gold. She taught herself English from history textbooks and pamphlets like Uncle Sam Needs A Wife.
He didn't remember her. Her obi hung over his bed until he'd gone to juvie.
The last time he saw her obi, it waved at him from the top of the tree. He still didn't know what that meant, just that the message was urgent.
*
At the end of July, those on their team who could fly were removed to the Marianas to join the 509th CG of the Army Air Force. Something was in the air; Bucky certainly could not put his finger on it, but the usual wartime nerves seemed to have given way to a kind of arrogant anxiety, a preening peacock looking back over his shoulder.
He forged papers to get himself and Captain America transferred to Tinian in the Marianas. The place might as well have been purpose-built as an airfield; there was nothing but asphalt, perfectly flat, runways and outbuildings as far as you could see. B-29s loomed like native birds, glinting in the relentless sun. Dwarfed by them, by the sea all around, the personnel spoke louder, faster, than usual. Everyone talked in code there, about silverplate and cosmic bombs. Blow them right off the map, one NCO bragged to Steve before he saw Bucky, send 'em back to fishing boats and spearhunting.
Toro flew recon over Hiroshima one brilliant morning. Unlike the rest of the small detail, he did not return.
Killed in action, was the consensus, lost in the cloud of dust the bomb kicked up.
Bucky knew otherwise.
Two days later, the 393rd Squadron went into high gear again. Word was that the target this time was Kokura.
"What, you got a sweetheart there?" One of the AF jocks hip-checked Bucky in the canteen. His shock must have shown on his face. "Some sweet little Tokyo Rose?"
Bucky had no idea where the city was. He'd never heard of it before. He stepped back, refused to reach for his knife, and plastered on a goofy smile. "Haha, I like Yvonne DeCarlo better."
"Good thing," the jock said. "Come tomorrow, they'll all be crispy dumplings."
He moved away, back outside, to smoke and plan and watch the stars. The enormity and the impossibility of what he had to do struck him like a blow to the head. To the gut, then the head again. The horizon tilted, the black sea flashed white, then flipped again.
*
The next morning, well before reveille, Steve blocked the exit with one tree-thick arm.
"Don't stop me." Bucky turned his knife and let it catch the light. He didn't wonder how Steve knew; they were close like that. He didn't have to like that fact. He just had to accept it. "You don't have to help me, but you have to get out of my way."
"You're out of your head. You're --" Steve swallowed. "I should arrest you, right here. For treason."
Bucky possessed no superpowers, but he was light and quick and he wasn't afraid. He'd never been afraid, and maybe that had gotten him into more trouble than anything else, but that was the truth.
He got in a good blow on Steve's jaw and pressed the knife against his heart. "Let me go. I'll make it look like you put up a fight."
Steve blinked. His undershirt puckered, then ripped, under Bucky's knife. "Don't do this. You don't have to do this."
"I don't *have* to do anything," Bucky said. "But I need to do this."
He didn't care who won the war. He couldn't remember if he'd ever cared.
As he stepped outside, the morning was pale like the side of a pearl. The planes shone, the crews swarmed below them like insects.
"When this is over," Toro had said the night before Hiroshima, "we'll stay here, right? Maybe go to the Solomons."
"Right," Bucky agreed. He shifted onto his side and angled his arm across Toro's chest. "Get us some grass skirts and coconut rum and a nice hut, live the good life."
His first mistake was looking past the war. The next was seeing himself there.
He wouldn't be making any more mistakes.