I Never Told You What I Do For A Living | Bucky Barnes

7. The Birth of the Howling Commandos

Chapter 7
The Birth of the Howling Commandos

For one awful moment, I actually believed that Steve wasn't going to make it. He'd risked his life to come save us, and if he didn't survive, then I was going to feel even worse than I did now but he did make it; grabbing the railing, and pulling himself over to the safety of the gangway.

But this wasn't the time or the place to celebrate that victory. There would be time to do that when we got out of here, but right now, we had to leave as fast as we could. So Steve opened the door he'd spotted before, and we ran down the stairs, and out into the open air; just before the whole building went up in flames.

The feeling of being outside after being held for so long was amazing – even if I looked like I'd been dragged through a bush backwards. But that didn't matter to me. Just feeling the dirt under my feet was enough to bring a smile to my face. The cold was something that I could've lived without, but we can't always get everything we want in life.

"How does it feel being free, Beth?" Monty yelled from his position on the tank, as we ran over to the freed prisoners. Once he'd learned my real name, he'd started using my nickname.

"Would've been better had we caught Schmidt and Zola, but being outside again is refreshing." I replied, coming to a stop, "But I'm not letting my guard down until we're back over our lines. So, what's your plan, Captain?" I turned around, to see Steve staring at - what looked to be - one of Howard's transponders, "Well, there goes the quick rescue I was hoping for. We better start walking."

And so we started making our trek through Austria – Steve leading the way, with Bucky and I by his side. The two of them were joking about their childhood, and it was pretty funny what they got up to. It reminded me a little of what I used to get up to with my brothers.

When I asked what Abe had thought of the serum being a success, Steve had to break the news about how he'd been shot almost immediately after the experiment had been completed, by a HYDRA assassin by the name of Heinz Kruger. He also said the assassin was dead after biting his cyanide pill.

After hours of walking, Steve decided that it was a good time to take a break, so that we could have some food that we found in the back of the trucks we'd taken, have a couple hours kip, and figure out a plan of action for the rest of the walk back to camp.

I knew that at some point, I'd be asked about why I'd been taken prisoner for all these months, and I was hoping to skirt around answering them, but when Steve gave me some pretty impressive puppy dog eyes – prompting Bucky to do the same thing – I knew I couldn't tell them 'no' or avoid the questions.

"In August nineteen forty-one, I was tasked with the extraction of a German scientist, who'd made contact with the allies, and escort him to the States where he would work with the S.S.R. His name was Doctor Abraham Erskine. He gave us information on Johann Schmidt, and HYDRA, and the serum he'd been working on. Abe told me he'd only gone along with Schmidt because his family had been threatened.

"It's how I met Howard. He was the one who picked us up, and I ended up spending a month in New York. MI6 thought I needed some time away from the job, given that Edward was shot down just three months prior, and then just after I got back, William had died as well, so I ended up going back to work with Howard on some of his projects.

"But then came the news of something called the Tesseract. A small town called Tønsberg, in German-occupied Norway, was attacked in March of forty-two, and the Tesseract was stolen, and everybody in the village was killed by Schmidt." I told the people who were listening, "So that's when the research started, and I ended up going to the village. Found out that the Tesseract was being kept in a secret wood carved wall of Yggdrasil – tree of the world and Guardian of wisdom and fate – but a lot of people thought it had been buried with the remains of a Viking. We didn't have much on it, apart from the fact that it was supposedly the jewel of Odin's treasure room.