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

9. Always On The Front Lines

Chapter 9
Always On The Front Lines

    Putting on the uniform for the first time, was amazing. It was comfortable – which is a big thing to have when you're going to be wearing it for a long time – and it was actually practical to wear. None of this 'ladies have to wear skirts or dresses' bullshit that seemed to be thrown around by society.

    My uniform consisted of a dark blue pea coat that was a bit longer than Bucky's – it kept me warm, and I could wear a normal, baggy shirt under it – a pair of black trousers with lots of pockets for extra ammunition, and other tools I may need, and some army issue combat boots. I even had two gun holsters strapped to my thighs, and they were hidden by the length of my coat.

    "This is better than I imagined, Howard. Thank you." Pulling him in for a long hug, and giving him a kiss on the cheek.

    And then it was time to leave for our first official mission as The Howling Commandos. All the training and weapons testing we'd been doing for the past month came down to this. And I knew that we were more than ready to go storming all the HYDRA bases we could find. The only question was, were they ready for us?

    There was something inside me that wanted this to be easy, where we could just kick their asses and move on to the next base. But then there was part of me that wanted this to be hard. For it to be a challenge, where it would get a bit rough and tumble, and I could make them pay for what they did to us. I didn't want them to have a quick death... I wanted them to suffer.

    But I did have to admit, kicking down the door and going in all guns blazing, was a fun way to make the point that we were after every last one of them and that we weren't going to stop until either us, or them, were dead.

    We'd chosen the first base at random, and we weren't going to stick to any sort of pattern either. We didn't want them to figure out which base we were going to hit next – which would give them time to escape. We wanted them to know we were coming for them, and being scared of whether they were going to live to see the next day.

    Now, while this may seem like I'm taking this personally, I had just over eight months of pent up anger and hate towards anybody, and anything, who worked for HYDRA, and I had to let it out somehow. And what better people to take it out on?

    Blowing up the factories was satisfying as well. Knowing that there were still HYDRA agents alive inside when the building went up in smoke, was a small comfort that they knew they were going to die as soon as the timer ticked down to zero.

    I also found that Schmidt's possible rage at finding the destruction we left, brought a smile to my face. Just imagining him arriving to the fires, and dead bodies, and another one of his factories gone, and the anger radiating off of him... It was enough to help me sleep through the night with no images of the mutilated bodies of the prisoners who never made it out of HYDRA's Austrian Munitions factory alive.

~oOo~

    The HYDRA bases that we'd mapped in the bunker, had pieces coming off it every couple of weeks. The fewer we had, the safer we were making the people and soldiers who were in the area.

    A light dusting of snow had fallen before we made it to the second base, and we had been forced to bring reinforcements with us. I thought us eight Howling Commandos were fine for the jobs, but it was safer to have more people when it was foggy and had the possibility of being ambushed without anybody noticing that they were there. But it also made us a bigger target, and it was harder to hide our movements.

    It was while we were creeping through the trees, that I spotted somebody up in one of the branches - almost concealed by the leaves - but it was the slight rustling that alerted his presence to me. Steve spotted him as well, and just as I was about to take the shot, he threw his shield towards the guy, and he fell out of the tree.