Chapter 14: Artillery Redemption
The silence in the artillery shed was thick, broken only by the distant crunch of gravel under a sentry’s boot fifty yards away. Moonlight cut through a rust hole above, painting a silver stripe across Dante’s knuckles, making the dark rose tattoo look like it was bleeding ink.
Jericho’s words hung between them, too real to ignore.
“Dante, I care about you. I’m not trying to be a dick, dude, you and Tripp was risky. This, this is so much fucking riskier. There’s so many fucking closeted men here, but a fucking colonel and a recruit?”
Dante looked at him, his usual defiant gaze aimed at the dirt floor. “It feels different,” Dante says quietly.
In that moment, Jericho knew. He knew Dante well, he’d never once seen Dante care about anybody. But this, this was it. That tone, that shame in his voice, the way he didn’t hold eye contact. Dante never did any of those things. Jericho knew Dante liked Barnes.
“Dante… do you? Do you like him? Like, like like?”
Dante sighs, a rough, exhausted sound that seemed to come from his boots. He leaned his head back against the cold corrugated tin. “I don’t fucking know, man. I’ve never fucking like liked anyone. I don’t fuckin know why I might all of a sudden now. I can’t fucking do this.” He opened his eyes, the icy blue catching the faint light. “But there’s somethin fuckin pulling me into it.”
Jericho sat next to him on the ammo crate, the wood groaning. He lit two cigarettes, passed one over. Dante took it, inhaled like it was oxygen.
“Look, I know it can be rough. Trust me.” Jericho’s voice dropped, confidential. “But Dante, you have to either stop, or be extremely fucking careful. I don’t want anyone to find out and for either of you to deal with that punishment and humiliation.”
Dante blew smoke out in a harsh stream. “Careful. Right.” He sounded hollow. “You see him after drills yesterday? That stupid laugh he does. Like he means it. All of it.”
“That’s the problem,” Jericho said softly. “It ain’t about seeing him. It’s about not seeing him. You think you can manage that? Walk past his barrack? Sit in the mess hall and hear his voice and just… not?”
The image was a physical ache. Bucky that morning, sprawled and wrecked and beautiful on his thin bunk, the taste of him still on Dante’s tongue. The way Bucky had clung to him, not in fear, but in wonder, like Dante had given him the sky.
“No,” Dante admitted, the word a gravelly surrender. “I can’t.”
“Then you’re screwed, brother. In every way.” Jericho stood, crushing his cigarette under his heel. “Just… for Christ’s sake, don’t get caught. No more quarters. Not ever. This shed? Maybe. Nowhere with walls. And for the love of God, teach the kid to not look at you like you hung the moon in the mess line.”
Dante gave a short, humorless laugh. “He doesn’t look at me like that.”
“He does. To everyone who knows what to look for, he does.” Jericho shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’m going back. You coming?”
“In a minute.”
Jericho nodded, a silhouette in the doorway before melting into the night.
Alone, the silence felt heavier. The pull Jericho mentioned wasn’t a metaphor. It was a low, constant tug behind his sternum, a compass needle swinging relentlessly toward the recruit barracks. It was infuriating. It was undeniable.
He’d spent a decade building a life where want was a simple equation: see, take, forget. This was a siege. It was having his own breath catch because he saw Barnes—Bucky—tie his boots a certain way. It was the terrifying quiet after making him come apart, a quiet that felt like peace instead of emptiness.
Dante stood, his joints stiff from the cold and the tension. He knew what careful looked like. It looked like distance. It looked like never touching him again.
He also knew, with a clarity that was more terrifying than any firefight, that it was already too late for careful. The risk was already taken. The fuse was lit the moment Bucky had shown up at his door, all nervy courage and desperate eyes.
He flicked his cigarette butt into a shadowy corner. It glowed once, then died.
The walk back was automatic, his boots finding the path in the dark. But instead of turning toward the officers’ quarters, his feet carried him on a wide, looping patrol that just happened to pass the back of Barracks C. A light was still on in a window on the east end. Bucky’s bunk.
Dante stood in the deep shadow of a supply truck, just watching. He could see a figure move past the window, a blur of white t-shirt, a hand running through hair.
He shouldn’t be here. This was the opposite of careful. This was stupidity.
The figure in the window paused, as if feeling the weight of the gaze from the darkness. Dante didn’t move. He let himself look, let the stupid, dangerous pull in his chest have this one thing. For a full minute. Then he turned and walked away, the image of that shadow behind the glass burning itself into his mind.
He had no plan. No safe solution. Just the certain, grim understanding that Jericho was right, and the even more certain, reckless understanding that he was already in too deep to climb out.
He’d go back to his sparse, empty room with its smell of gun oil and memories. He’d lie on his bunk. And he’d think about the risk, the punishment, the humiliation.
But beneath all that, humming like a live wire, would be the memory of a breathless voice in the dark, moaning his name. And he knew, with a soldier’s fatalistic acceptance, that he’d probably choose that sound over his own safety, every single time.
The die was cast. Now he just had to live with where it landed.
Now he just had to live with where it landed.
Sleep never came. The thin mattress felt like concrete, the quiet of his room an oppressive weight. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Bucky’s face, open and trusting, or the grim line of Jericho’s mouth warning him about the mess hall.
He got up before dawn, dressed in the dark, and headed to the officers’ mess just to move.
The coffee was bitter and scorched. He drank it anyway, staring at the grain of the table until the shadows of other early-risers fell around him. No one spoke to him. He preferred it that way.
A runner found him at 0700, breathless. “The General needs you in his office, sir. Immediately. Captains Jericho, Tripp, and Waurez are already en route.”
Dante’s gut tightened, a cold, professional dread momentarily overriding everything else. He nodded, discarded his mug, and fell into step.
The General’s office was thick with the smell of polished wood and anxiety. Jericho caught his eye from where he leaned against a filing cabinet, one brow slightly raised. Tripp and Waurez stood at stiff attention near the desk, their faces carefully blank.
The General himself looked older, the lines around his eyes deeply carved. He didn’t offer seats.
“Listen,” the General began, his voice gravelly with a lack of sleep. “I know this is the last thing you’ll all want to hear. I'm sorry.”
He let that hang, his gaze traveling over each of them. Dante felt his knuckles ache where the rose was inked; he’d been clenching his fist without realizing.
“You’re all being deployed when the recruits graduate. Graduation is next week now.” The General focused on Dante. “Colonel, any men that aren’t fit, now’s the time to kick ‘em out. Anyone staying, you need to inform they have a high chance of being deployed as well.”
Dante gave a single, sharp nod. The motion felt mechanical.
“Colonel Marcus, and Captain Jericho, you’re both going to be on duty together. Captain Tripp and Captain Waurez you’re both going to be on duty together.” The General spread his hands on the desk, as if steadying himself. “Chances are Marcus is getting half and Tripp is getting the other half. I’m sorry for the late notice. This shit kicked off out of nowhere.”
He leaned forward then, his eyes holding a bleak certainty that silenced the room. “And I’m going to be brutally honest. This war will be hell. This will be rougher than any war you’ve ever worked. You will lose men. You need to push through.”
The words landed like physical blows. Dante heard the shift in Jericho’s stance, the subtle creak of leather. Tripp swallowed hard.
“Questions?” the General asked, his tone making it clear he hoped there were none.
“Theater, sir?” Jericho asked quietly.
“Europe. That’s all you get for now. Dismissed.”
They filed out into the sterile hallway, the door clicking shut behind them. The four men stood there for a moment, the reality a cold vapor around them.
Waurez cursed under his breath, running a hand over his shaved head. “Well, fuck.”
“We knew it was coming,” Tripp said, but his voice lacked conviction. He looked pale.
Jericho just lit a cigarette, offering the pack. Dante took one, the tobacco doing nothing to steady him. Europe. Hell. Losing men. The phrases cycled, a grim drumbeat.
His mind, traitorously, instantly spliced the imagery. Not nameless men. One face. One stupid, earnest laugh in the sunlight. A recruit who had no business being anywhere near the kind of hell the General described.
“Half the platoon,” Jericho murmured, exhaling smoke. He was looking at Dante, his meaning clear. You’ll have to choose. You’ll have to put him in your half, or send him away with Tripp.
“We have a week to sort it,” Dante said, his voice rough. It was all he could manage.
He walked away from them, their murmured conversation fading behind him. The hallway seemed to stretch, the linoleum gleaming under harsh lights. The pull in his chest wasn’t a quiet tug anymore. It was a lurch, a nauseating drop.
He couldn’t kick him out. The thought was immediately absurd. Barnes was one of the fittest, sharpest recruits in the cohort. Doing it would raise more questions than it avoided.
But taking him? Putting him directly in his own unit, under his direct command, sailing into a hellscape where he’d be responsible for keeping him alive? It was a catastrophic conflict of interest. It was a recipe for getting them both killed, or worse.
Or sending him away with Tripp. To not see him, not know where he was, if he was safe, if he was scared. To have some second-hand report filter back that Barnes was gone, blinked out in some unnamed French field or Italian valley.
His feet carried him outside, into the weak morning sun. The buzz of the camp felt distant, muffled. The General’s warning echoed. You will lose men.
Dante knew that truth in his bones, in the scars on his skin. He’d done it before. He’d written the letters.
This was different. This was a specific, impending loss he could see with terrifying clarity, a chasm opening in front of him. The die hadn’t just landed. It had rolled right to the edge of the table.
He finished the cigarette, grinding it under his heel with more force than necessary. The decision coiled inside him, tight and impossible. A week. He had one week of this fragile, dangerous peace.
He turned his head, his gaze instinctively cutting across the parade ground to where Bravo Company was beginning their morning drills. He found him instantly, a familiar shape falling into formation.
There was no more time for careful. There was only time for what mattered.
Dante moved, his stride long and determined, not toward his office, but toward the barracks. He would find Barnes. He would tell him about the deployment. He would watch his face, and somewhere in the reaction, he would find his answer.
He found him not at the barracks, but at the auxiliary equipment shed, alone and inventorying grenade crates with a focused intensity that made Dante pause in the doorway. The morning light through dusty windows caught the sweat on Bucky’s temples, the deliberate movement of his hands as he checked and recorded.
“Barnes.”
Bucky jumped, almost fumbling a practice shell. “Sir.” He straightened, wiping his palms on his fatigues. A quick, nervous smile flickered and died. “I was just—”
“I need to talk to you.” Dante’s voice was low, flat. He didn’t move further inside. “Now. Somewhere else.”
The smile vanished entirely. Bucky nodded, replacing the shell with care before following him out. They walked in silence toward the perimeter fence, past the motor pool where the growl of engines swallowed sound. Dante led him to the lee of a supply depot, a narrow strip of shade and relative privacy.
He turned, crossing his arms. The words felt like shards in his throat. “Graduation’s next week. Immediate deployment after. Europe.”
Bucky’s face went still, all the youthful animation freezing solid. His eyes widened just a fraction, the only sign of the internal plunge. “Okay,” he breathed, more a reflex than a word.
“The General’s splitting the platoon. Tripp gets half. I get the other half.” Dante leaned in, his height casting Bucky fully in shadow. “You keep your mouth shut about anything that’s happened. You understand? Not a whisper. To anyone.”
“I haven’t,” Bucky said, a flush of defiance coloring his cheeks. “I wouldn’t.”
“Good.” Dante’s gaze was merciless. “Because here’s your choice. You go with Tripp. Or you go with me.”
Bucky blinked, processing. “With you?”
“If you go with Tripp, you’re just another recruit. It’s clean.” Dante’s jaw tightened. “If you come with me, it won’t be like it was here. I won’t be the same man. There’s no room for… for any of this. I will be your colonel. Nothing else. I will be harsh. I will work you until you break, because over there, breaking in training means living in the field. You understand what I’m telling you?”
The air between them crackled with the unsaid. Bucky searched his face, looking for the man from the quarters, finding only the stark, lined visage of an officer delivering a bleak prognosis. He saw the truth of it there, the necessity.
“I want to go with you,” Bucky said, the words leaving him in a rush, no hesitation.
“Why?” Dante snapped, needing to hear the reason, to test it.
“Because I trust you.” Bucky’s voice steadied. “Sir. And because… I’d rather break where you can see it. So you can put me back together right.”
The answer disarmed him. It was not sentimental. It was tactical, and utterly believable. Dante let out a slow breath, the knot in his chest pulling tighter. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“You’re on my list. It’s done.” Dante uncrossed his arms, the decision settling into his shoulders like a physical weight. “Remember what I said. No slip-ups. Not one.”
He didn’t wait for confirmation. He turned and walked away, the gravel crunching loudly under his boots. He didn’t look back. He couldn’t.
He found Jericho back in the artillery shed, recalibrating the sight on a rifle. The familiar scent of gun oil and damp earth was a welcome anchor.
“Barnes is coming with us,” Dante said, leaning against the workbench.
Jericho didn’t look up from his tool. “Figured he might.” He gave a fine adjustment. “You tell him how it’s gotta be?”
“I told him. He knows it can’t be how it was here. He knows I’ll be different.” Dante watched Jericho’s hands, the precise, sure movements. “I have to be.”
Finally, Jericho set the tool down and looked at him. His expression was unreadable, then it softened by a degree. “I trust you, Dante. To lead. To do what’s right by the unit.” He picked up a rag, wiping grease from his fingers. “And for what it’s worth… I know Barnes is a good soldier. A damn good one. He’ll keep up.”
It was the closest thing to approval he’d get. Dante gave a curt nod. The formal burden was shared now, and somehow that made it both heavier and more bearable.
“A week,” Jericho said, echoing Dante’s earlier thought. “Then it all changes.”
Outside, the sound of drilling recruits was a distant, rhythmic chant. Dante listened to it, already translating it in his mind to the different, terrible rhythms to come. He had his answer. It offered no relief, only a clear and dangerous path forward. He had one week of this fragile peace. He intended to remember every second of it.
He intended to remember every second of it.
He failed.
The three days that followed bled into a grim montage of logistics and last-minute assessments, the hours dissolving into rosters, manifests, and the hollow-eyed look of men being told they’re shipping into hell. Dante moved through it like an automaton, his voice a constant, clipped instrument of command. He saw Barnes in drills, in the mess hall, in passing. He allowed himself nothing, not a held glance, not a flicker of recognition beyond what was due a promising recruit. The ache behind his sternum became a familiar stone.
Three days later, with four left until graduation and deployment, he found himself walking toward the old artillery shed long after dusk had purpled the sky. He told himself he was checking the lock. He knew it was a lie.
The door was already slightly ajar. Inside, the darkness was softened by a single lantern resting on an upturned crate, its light painting the dust motes gold. Bucky was there, sitting on a stack of empty ammunition boxes, still in his fatigues. He looked up, his face all shadows and sharp angles.
“Figured you might come here,” Bucky said, his voice quiet in the cavernous space.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Dante said, but he stepped inside and let the door sigh shut behind him.
“I know.”
They looked at each other across ten feet of dusty concrete. The air was cool, smelling of earth and rust. The careful distance of the past three days now felt absurd, a fragile dam threatening to burst under the simple weight of proximity.
Dante walked over, the sound of his boots echoing. He didn’t sit. He just stood in front of Bucky, looking down. Bucky’s gaze didn’t waver. There was a question in it, and a quiet defiance.
“We can’t do this over there,” Dante said, the words feeling rehearsed and inadequate.
“I know what you said,” Bucky replied. He shifted, making space on the ammo crate. It wasn’t an invitation. It was a statement. We’re here now.
Dante sat. The wood groaned under their combined weight. For a long minute, they just existed in the silent, lantern-lit gloom, shoulders almost touching. The tension wasn’t about want, not right then. It was about the yawning chasm of the week to come.
Then, Bucky shifted, leaning his weight. He eased himself down, lying back on the rough wooden planks, and pulled Dante with him. It wasn’t graceful. Dante stiffened, instinct screaming about exposure, about the door, about the sheer recklessness. But Bucky’s hand was fisted in the fabric of his shirt, a gentle, insistent pull.
Dante relented. He stretched out beside him, on his back. Bucky turned, curling into him, his head coming to rest on Dante’s chest, just above his heart. Dante’s arm lifted, hesitated, then settled around Bucky’s shoulders, his hand resting against the tense muscle of his upper arm. They lay there in the dust, under the skeletal roof and its view of a few cold stars.
The lantern light flickered, dancing across the far wall. Dante could feel the solid, warm weight of him, the rhythmic expansion of Bucky’s ribs against his side. He could smell his soap, faint beneath the scent of starched cotton and clean sweat. This was worse than the quarters. This was quieter. This felt like a promise he had no right to make.
“I’m kind of scared,” Bucky said into the silence, his voice muffled against Dante’s shirt.
The admission, so plain and unadorned, shattered something inside Dante’s carefully constructed detachment. He stared up at the corroded tin above them.
“That’s fair,” Dante said, the words rough. “It’s genuinely terrifying.”
His hand moved, almost of its own accord, stroking down Bucky’s arm. A pointless gesture of comfort.
“But I will do everything in my power to bring every single man home.” He heard the stress in his own voice, the strain of a vow he knew was impossible. “I won’t be able to, but I’ll try.”
Bucky was silent for a beat. “How bad is it?”
Dante looked down at the crown of his head, the dark hair, then back up at the roof. His jaw worked. He’d briefed soldiers before. He’d given the sterile, prepared speeches. This was different.
“It’s rough.” He let out a long, controlled breath. “You won’t come back the same man. Especially with the way Princeton was talking.”
He felt Bucky’s muscles tighten under his hand.
“He said it’ll be worse than any war we’ve been in.” Dante’s voice dropped, becoming flat, factual. It was the only way he could say it. “And I’ve been in some fucking horrific wars. So that’s concerning.”
The word ‘concerning’ hung in the air, a pathetic, bureaucratic understatement for the abyss they were about to enter. Bucky’s fist tightened on his shirt.
“You’ve seen it,” Bucky said, not a question.
“Pieces of it. Enough.” Dante remembered the smell of rain on mud and cordite, the specific sound of certain artillery rounds. The way silence could be louder than the blast. “It chews men up. Spits out parts.”
“But you came back.”
“I came back,” Dante agreed. He didn’t say what he came back as. The sleepless nights, the sudden rages, the way his hand still sometimes twitched for a sidearm when a car backfired in the city. The framed photo on his desk of a man whose face was beginning to blur in his memory. That was the man lying here now.
Bucky shifted, tilting his head back to look up at him. The lantern light caught the worry in his eyes, the vulnerability he wasn’t hiding anymore. “The guys… they think you’re invincible. A hardass, but invincible.”
Dante’s mouth twisted, something too bitter to be a smile. “They’re wrong. I’m just better at hiding the cracks.”
He moved then, rolling slightly onto his side so he could face him. He cupped Bucky’s jaw, his thumb brushing over the stubble on his cheek. The contact was electric and devastatingly soft. “Listen to me. Over there, when I’m harsh, it’s not… it won’t be personal. It’s the job. It’s keeping you alive long enough to hate me for it.”
Bucky searched his face, his eyes tracing the lines Dante knew were etched deeper now than they were a month ago. “I could never hate you.”
“You might,” Dante said, and he believed it. War had a way of twisting things, of making saviors look like tormentors. “Just… do what I say. Exactly what I say. Even when it sounds stupid. Even when you’re tired, or angry, or scared. Your brain will tell you it’s wrong. Ignore it. Trust my voice.”
Bucky nodded, a slow, grave movement. “I trust your voice.”
The simple conviction of it was a gift and a burden more profound than any command. Dante leaned in and kissed him. It wasn’t like before. There was no hunger, no frantic heat. It was slow, and deep, and tasted like shared fear and a desperate, unspoken agreement to carve this moment out of time. A memory to hold onto when everything else turned to mud and noise.
When they parted, Bucky’s eyes were closed. He rested his forehead against Dante’s. “Four days.”
“Four days,” Dante echoed. He pressed another kiss to his temple, then carefully disentangled himself. The cold air rushed in where their bodies had been joined. “You need to go back. Now.”
Bucky sat up, running a hand through his hair. He looked young again, tousled and real. “Yeah.”
He stood, and Dante rose with him. For a second, they just faced each other in the lantern’s pool of light.
“See you at dawn, soldier,” Dante said, the colonel’s mask slipping back into place, but his eyes stayed soft.
Bucky gave him a faint, genuine smile. “Yes, sir.”
He turned and slipped out the door, disappearing into the night. Dante stood there until the sound of his footsteps faded completely. He looked around the shed, at the lantern, at the impression their bodies had left in the dust on the crates.
He extinguished the light, plunging the space into a darkness that felt total. The memory was secured, vivid and aching. But as he walked back to his quarters, the stone in his chest hadn’t lightened. It had grown. It was now the precise weight of a specific promise, and the terrifying knowledge of just how easily war could make a liar out of the most determined man.