Too Little Too Late

James Barnes

War was easy. Compared to now it was. The good guys were fighting the bad guys. Black and white. Nothing more nothing else. It was easy to know what to do, where to point the barrel of your gun. Every shoot that hit the target was a small victory, a small step toward the end of that mess. The soldiers didn't want to be there but it was ok since they were doing the right thing for the world at large. They didn't think about the guy on the other side of the line because they didn't have to. They didn't want to. If the enemy didn't have a face, a family, and a life it was easier for them to shoot. It didn't occur to them that the enemy was there maybe, just because he was someone who was between a rock and a hard place. His choice for fighting on the front line might have been not a choice at all. Disagreeing meant the concentration camp for you and your family. The military perhaps supposed dying but also meant protecting, for a little bit longer at least, the ones they loved. Front lines it had been then. Did the Germans think the same way too about them?

War wasn't easy. Never. The enemies were never all monsters they were made out to be. Some were no doubt. Like Hitler. Like Red Skull. But even them had a family. Just like the heroes were not how history would remember them. The propaganda worked both ways. Steve certainly was not the man the books choose to remember. He wasn't the man from the Smithsonian exhibit. The man with a plan. "A" as in one plan. One and only. The howling commandos were made of very experienced war heroes in their own right. They knew what to do and when to do it. Quite often, Steve would make out a plan. Not a bad one but always very forward. Too forward sometimes. To punch your way in and out wasn't always the best of strategy.

Steve wasn't one for patience and stealth but James was a sniper, a marksman. Patience and stealth were all he was about. Maybe they worked well together because they were so different, bringing to the other what they lacked. They always had been at the opposite of the spectrum. Like the yin and the yang, they completed each other. When the plan fell through, the Howlers knew what to do in order to survive and, most often than not in order, to get the mission done. They saved a lot of people no doubt. When things went wrong, no one said anything. They weren't really part of the army, not directly under the SSR either. Desperate times called for desperate measures.

Steve had always been a little shit. Always being right whatever the circumstances. Even when so blatantly wrong. James remembered the last fight before he was sent out in Europe. Steve had gone to the cinema when some guy had shouted against the war news. Of course, the shrimp had to say something, his opinion the right one in all circumstances. He was beaten in a back alley and proud of it. Standing up against the bullies, real or not, was all he was about. Steve had always resented his health. Being so sickly wasn't a good thing back the days. People were looking at him with pity, worse, like he was a burden to his family. Steve wanted to prove them that he could be of some help, that he could be someone. He just went the wrong way about it. Like that guy in the cinema who had been drafted a couple of days before and was about to depart for the training camp and then Europe. He had wanted his last hours free from anything war related. So yes, that guy shouldn't have hurt Steve, but just maybe Stevie wasn't always right in his opinion. Especially when he didn't have the whole picture. And he never had the whole picture. James had met that guy briefly. He had died killed by a German grenade. A forgotten hero really.

When James woke up in his own mind again, after seventy years, everything was so mixed up. Steve was there, the same as ever. That felt wrong because himself had changed so much. The world around them felt brand new. So many possibilities. James had always liked the technology like during the Howard Stark exposition. Everything was high tech now compared to the forties. Cars weren't flying around though. Too bad. The soldier wanted nothing but to be left alone. Sometimes he had flashbacks from another life. The one with little Stevie. The one as the Winter Soldier as well. Nightmares. He was both and neither. He wasn't sure who he wanted to be now. Everything was so hazy. So, he just spent his days alone in Bucharest. He was filling his days going to the market, being a good neighbour, being as normal as he could be. That felt so good, normality.