Day: November 2, 2016

prompt #5 (x) – “A stranger in the house.”

(MCU – Captain America, WWII, Finland, Gen)

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“Liebchen, good evening,” the officer says with a show at jovality. “I am so sorry to disturb you this late.”

The little girl draws further back behind her mother’s legs as he crouches to her level, taking his hat in his hands and smiling broadly.  In the loft above, Bucky silently slides his rifle onto Steve’s shoulder.

“I have an important question, Liebchen. Very important. Have you seen any strangers around your village tonight? Any men you don’t know? Anyone new?”

“She doesn’t understand,” her mother says with a heavy accent, hand on the girl’s head. “She does not speak— the Germany. We haven’t seen these men.”

Bucky exhales slowly, elbow digging into Steve’s chest, Steve’s thigh going numb under his knee. They’re awkwardly wedged under the sloping roof, Steve taking most of Bucky’s weight and braced against a ceiling beam to keep them in place. It’s only by the grace of God they haven’t been seen yet, nothing between them and the Mannerheim soldier but height and darkness.

“Are you quite sure?” the soldier says, straightening. His eyes rove over the wooden walls and simple furnishings, lingering on the door to the stable. “There would have been six or seven of them. Hard to miss, I think.”

The girl’s mother holds the only source of light in the small wooden house, a fat tallow candle that waivers as the wind slots itself through the cracked door. Steve feels like he hasn’t seen the sun since they snuck ashore in Turku two weeks ago. There’s snow in the creases of Bucky’s jacket and inside Steve’s boots, up his cuffs, down his collar.

“You’re welcome to see,” the girl’s mother says, gesturing towards the stable. “There is nothing there.”

They’d taken the horses months ago, she’d told the Commandos. Then the sheep. All the way down to the chickens.  Aaretti— that’s her name— has a small, underfed hen under her bed that gives them about one egg a week.

“I will, thank you,” the officer says, and walks right under Steve and Bucky where they’re tucked against the roof’s thick supports.

“Now?” Bucky breathes against Steve’s cheek.

“… now,” Steve says, the moment the soldier is through the other door, and swings down as quietly as he can.

“As you see,” the girl’s mother says, standing in the doorway and blocking the fall of light from the candle. “Empty.”

“Are these tire tracks?” the officer asks, staring at the dirt floor.

Bucky starts to ease over the edge on his belly, boots kicking three feet above the ground.

“Old ones.”

“I see.”

Steve grips him around the waist and pulls him into his chest, then down. Bucky’s hiss of surprise is hopefully lost to the sound of the wind outside.

“Well. Frau, I suppose I’ve intruded enough tonight—”

The wind has already nudged the door open several inches, and Steve and Bucky slip into the silver-blue night on the tail end of the officer’s platitudes and around the side of the house, past the snowed-in garden and the pasture that once held a cow, and into the pitch-black pines.

“You fuckin’ punk,” Bucky huffs beside him, “try picking me up one more time. One more time, I’ll fucking—”

An engine revs behind them. Steve grabs Bucky where he’s wallowing through a four-foot drift, puts him over his shoulder and runs like hell.

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ONSEN SAUNA BONUS

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Basecamp is around the other side of a frozen lake, in a long and mostly windowless hut.  Bucky and Steve meet Aaretti’s husband outside on the porch, trees crowded up to the log walls and a skinny dock stretching out onto the ice. They pass him a thick pat of butter and a note that makes him blink rapidly before he slips it in his coat.

“Your friends,” the man says, slapping Steve’s shoulder. “They have proper sauna now. Tomorrow, we move— tonight, sauna.”

Steve has some idea what a sauna is, but he’s unprepared to open the door and have steam and heat hit him like a ton of bricks.

“You made it!” Dum Dum says, naked as a jay and scalded pink from head to toe.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Bucky says, shielding his eyes.

“Stay out or come in, just close the damn door!” Gabe yells.

Which is how Steve finds himself stripped equally naked and occupying a corner of the rough wood bench, skin red from scrubbing and a little dizzy from breathing more heat than air. At their host’s insistence, he’s sipping something strongly anise-flavored and so potent it makes even his eyes water. He’s not sure he likes it; he’s much less ambivalent about the sausages that appear and get roasted over the coals in the center of the room.

“You come near me with those birch branches, you better be ready to lose that hand,” Bucky says to Jacques, sprawled next to Steve with one knee bent and no hint of shame.

“Suit yourself,” Jacques says with a sniff. “Philistine.”

“Thanks, I will.” Bucky knocks his knee against Steve’s and steals the tin cup of booze from his loose fingers. Steve, warm and relatively clean for the first time in weeks, lets him take it without complaint and leans further back against the wall, feeling his eyes start to close.

Aaretti’s husband abruptly stands up in the middle of the small hut and exclaims, “Now snow!”

“Snow?” Dum Dum asks.

“Snow!” he confirms, and flings the door open.

Later, they have to fish Jim and Monty out of the lake itself, but in the meantime there’s Dugan and Gabe rolling in the snow like a couple of deranged dogs and Jacques fending them off with the birch branches when they comes to drag him out. Bucky puts his boots on and gets up on the roof when no one’s watching, and Steve says a lot of things he’s not proud of when a sheet of snow and ice is dumped on his head from above.

“Bucky, goddamn it!”

“I told you,” Bucky says, smug and shivering. “Don’t c-cross me, Rogers.”