Man Out of Time - A Captain America / Avengers Fanfiction

Chapter 37

Reader wish list: One banged-up Steve. Tended to by Bernice. Check...

(With a tiny bit of intrigue added to advance the plot)

Thanks for reading!

X

Chapter 37

Smoke filled the air, the frames of shattered farmhouses little more than skeletons clawing out of the earth. Two tanks clattered behind them as they got their first glimpse of the village they'd spent the last four days shelling. They'd liberated many villages, the cure for Nazi occupation often being nearly as bad as the disease, but usually the locals had enough common sense to flee the advancing Allied forces, understanding their houses could be rebuilt, but to stay while armies clashed was suicide. This village, however, had not cleared out. The scent of cooked meat drew their eyes to the bodies piled high in the village square, a half-hearted bonfire lit to erase the evidence. A warning. A warning that Herr Kleiser had a policy of total surrender. Or annihilation.

"What happened here?" Dum Dum Dugan asked, his green bowler hat perched precariously on top of his flack helmet, nearly matching the coloring of his face. He pointed to the pile of bodies. "Did –we- cause all these deaths?"

"I don't think so, Sir," Gabriel Jones said, the unit's only African American member. "That doesn't look like no damage from bullets."

A brigade of soldiers lined up and drew buckets from the well, passing it in a line until the half-hearted funeral pyre had been extinguished. Steve went down on one knee to lead a moment of silence as he said a prayer for those they'd been too late to save. Some of the murdered were children, although if rumors of atrocities against the gypsies and the Jews filtering out of Germany were true, this should be no surprise. He pulled out his handkerchief and held it over his mouth to filter out the stench. Some had bullet wounds, but most bore no sign of injury except looks of pure horror, as though whatever they had seen was far more horrible than being on the wrong end of a stray Allied mortar.

"What's wrong with their faces?" Bucky asked. "They've got ... some kind of holes drilled into their skulls?"

The looked which passed between them was haunted. Bucky ... had come close. A nervous laugh rippled through the Allied troops even though none of them found this funny. Memory of the –last- village they'd taken back from Herr Kleiser, and the terrified villagers who'd rushed out to greet them, tugged at Steve's memory. Their stories had been so bizarre the brass had labeled the entire village shell-shocked and stuffed their witness reports into some top-secret file, never to be seen again.

"Shape shifters," Steve said. "They said they were shape shifters."

A cool cloth touched his forehead, wiping clean his injuries. He recognized her scent. The scent of Lux soap, a soap he had thought they no longer manufactured. He fought his way through the fog that made him too weak to even lift his own head.

"Bernice," he whispered.

"Shhhh..." she shushed. "Just go back to sleep. I need to tend these wounds so they don't become infected."

At some point she must have removed his armor, because cool air touched his chest where only a sheet covered him now.

"I had to come..."

"I know," Bernice said. Soft lips brushed his. "I love you too."

Too weak to give her anything but a smile, he drifted back to sleep.

X

"Bucky," Steve cried out. "What have they done to you?" He felt his pulse, afraid for a moment he was too late. It was erratic, but Bucky was alive.