Chapter 20: Frontline Reunion
The cold morning air bit into Dante’s lungs as he pushed through the tent flap, the ghost of Bucky’s warmth still clinging to his skin like a confession. He’d taken two steps toward the murmur of the waking camp when the sharp, insistent jangle of the field phone ripped through the quiet from the communications post nearby.
He altered course, striding to the makeshift booth of sandbags and canvas. He snatched the receiver. “Marcus.”
The voice on the other end was Captain Waurez, a good officer stationed ten clicks west, but it was shredded by static and something else—raw panic. “Colonel, our base got hit, they know where yours is, they’re probably fucking on the way so be fucking ready, we lost—”
An explosion detonated on Waurez’s end. The sound wasn’t just through the receiver. It was a distant, deep-throated crump that vibrated the ground under Dante’s boots, followed half a heartbeat later by a much closer, shattering roar from the eastern tree line.
The phone line went dead.
Dante didn’t hear the rest of Waurez’s sentence. He was already moving, dropping the receiver, his body shifting from man to weapon in the space of a heartbeat. He ran toward the new explosion, the world narrowing to a tunnel of smoke, sound, and instinct.
Chaos had bloomed at the perimeter. Muzzle flashes sparked like angry fireflies in the predawn gloom. The crump of mortars, the staccato bark of German machine pistols, the sharper crack of M1s answering. His men were already fighting, spilled from the barn and foxholes, taking cover behind logs and the rusted skeletons of farm equipment.
Dante slid into position beside Cartwright behind a water trough. “Status!”
“Maybe a platoon, sir!” Cartwright yelled, not taking his eye from his rifle scope. “Came in quiet from the east tree line. Mortar team set up somewhere in there.” He fired. A distant scream cut short. “Bastards.”
The next hour was a hellish blur of noise and movement. Dante became a vortex of cold command, shouting orders that were immediately carried out. He directed Rogers and Barnes to flank right, their movements synchronized and lethal. He called for grenade volleys into the machine gun nests. He shot a German officer square in the throat as the man tried to rally his troops.
He fought with a terrifying, focused efficiency, but a new thread of awareness ran beneath it—a constant, scanning pressure. Jericho. He’d seen him at the start, firing from behind the low stone wall near the barn. Now he was nowhere.
An explosion from the tree line took out the enemy mortar. The hostile fire dwindled, then ceased. The sudden silence was louder than the battle, ringing with adrenaline and the moans of the wounded.
They’d won. Three of his men were down—Simmons with a leg wound, O’Malley grazed across the temple, Peters clutching a bleeding arm. All breathing. All cursing. Not serious.
Dante stood amidst the acrid smoke, his chest heaving. His eyes swept the torn-up earth, the bodies in field gray, his own men moving to secure the area. No Jericho.
“Jericho!” The name tore from him, louder than he intended. It didn’t sound like an order. It sounded like a plea.
He started walking, then jogging, his boots crunching on splintered wood and spent brass. “Jericho!”
Nothing.
A cold, sick feeling, entirely foreign, began to pool in his gut. The recruits—Reddit, Barnes, Rogers—they watched him. They saw the relentless scan of his eyes, the tight line of his mouth, the way his hands, usually so still, flexed at his sides. They had never seen genuine worry on Colonel Marcus’s face. This was panic, stripped bare.
“Fuck,” he said under his breath, the word swallowed by the smoke.
“Colonel! Over here!”
Reddit’s voice. It came from behind the collapsed remains of the stone wall, near the barn’s foundation. The tone was all wrong—high, strained.
Dante registered the panic in it and was beyond anxious. He was there in seconds, vaulting over the rubble.
Reddit was on his knees, his face pale. Beside him, lying in a hollow of churned earth and blood-blackened stones, was Jericho.
An explosion had hit him, bad. His uniform was charred and tattered on one side. Shrapnel had done its cruel work. He was barely clinging to life, his breath a wet, shallow rasp.
Dante dropped to his knees, the impact jarring up his spine. The world narrowed further, until it was only this patch of ruined earth and his friend’s broken body.
Jericho’s eyes fluttered open. They found Dante, focused with an immense effort. A faint, familiar smirk touched his torn lips. “Hey Dante,” he said softly, the words bubbling slightly.
“Don’t ‘hey Dante’ me right now,” Dante croaked, his own voice barely recognizable. He placed a hand on Jericho’s less-injured shoulder, a useless anchor. “Just focus on pulling through, you stubborn asshole.”
Jericho coughed, a soft, painful sound. He smiled again, a real one this time, though it was tired. “C’mon, brother. You’re the smartest man I’ve met. You know I’m not walking away from this.”
Dante knew he wasn’t. The knowledge was a physical blow, a hollowing out of his core. He could see the life leaking away, the immense damage no field medic could patch. His eyes burned. He didn’t blink. A single tear traced a clean path through the grime on his cheek, following the scar.
“Dante,” Jericho breathed, his gaze intense, urgent. “You make sure my family is good. Vanessa and the kids love you. You take care of them, please.”
Dante nodded, a sharp, jerky motion. The tear dripped from his jaw onto the back of his own hand. “I will, Jer. You know I will.”
“Good.” Jericho’s eyes drifted, finding Bucky, who had approached and now stood a few feet back, frozen, his face a mask of horror. Jericho looked back at him, a ghost of his old mischief in his gaze. “You keep this stubborn prick out of trouble. Or I’m haunting your ass.”
Dante couldn’t help it. A wet, choked chuckle escaped him, a broken sound. Jericho looked back to him, his expression softening into something profound and simple.
“Thank you,” Jericho whispered.
Dante looked lost, empty. “For what?”
Jericho smiled. “Being my best friend for my entire life. Since we were kids.” He took a shuddering, deeper breath, as if gathering strength for the final mile. “I love you, brother.”
Before Dante could respond—before he could force the words “I love you” past the vice in his own throat—Jericho took his last breath. A final, quiet exhalation. The familiar light in his eyes, the one that had seen every stupid, reckless, glorious thing Dante had ever done, winked out.
Dante just stared for a moment. The sounds of the camp returned in a rush—the murmurs of the men, a distant engine, the cry of a bird. They were meaningless.
He slowly removed his hand from Jericho’s shoulder. He reached out with his other hand and gently, with a tenderness none of them had ever witnessed, closed his friend’s eyes.
He bowed his head. His broad shoulders slumped, just for a second. The weight of it—the decades of shared history, the jokes, the fights, the quiet understanding—settled on him, final and absolute.
“Goddamnit,” he said under his breath. Not a shout. A quiet, devastating acknowledgement.
He stayed there, kneeling in the dirt, for a long minute. No one moved. No one spoke.
Then Dante Marcus stood up. He turned away from Jericho’s body. His face was stone again, but it was a stone that had been split by a seismic fault. The icy blue of his eyes, when they found Reddit, was glazed, remote.
“Get a poncho. Cover him,” Dante said, his voice flat, toneless, authoritative. “We’ll move him when the area is secure.”
He walked past Bucky without a glance, his stride even, direct. He began issuing orders for perimeter reinforcement, for casualty reports, for contacting command about Waurez’s overrun base. The machine was back in motion.
But Barnes had seen it. He’d seen the tear. He’d heard the chuckle. He’d witnessed the awful, quiet moment of fracture.
As Dante walked away, Bucky looked from the Colonel’s retreating, rigid back to the still form under the now-spread poncho. The promise from the tent—I’ll try—echoed in the new, hollow space left by Jericho’s last breath. It felt infinitely heavier, and more fragile, than it had just an hour before.
It felt infinitely heavier, and more fragile, than it had just an hour before.
Dante walked until the barn blocked him from view. He turned a corner, the adrenaline sieve finally empty, and his knees simply gave out. He sagged against the cold, rough bricks of the farmhouse’s surviving wall, sliding down into a squat. The numbness that held him together crumbled into dust.
His breathing hitched, a sharp, ugly sound in the quiet. Then it came faster, shallow and useless, as if his lungs had forgotten their purpose. He pressed the heel of his tattooed hand hard against his sternum, trying to physically push the ache back inside.
It didn’t work. Jericho was the last person Dante truly had. He partially had Captain Tripp too, a complicated tangle of respect and occasional, convenient heat, but they were nowhere near as close. Not like this. Not a lifetime.
A raw, broken noise escaped him, followed by another. He couldn’t hold it in and he let it out. He’d started crying, silent and violent, his shoulders shaking. His chest hurt, a sharp, constricting pain as his heart hammered against a wall of pure grief. He lowered his forehead to his knees, hiding his face in the dark cage of his arms, trying to stifle the sounds.
The field phone in his pocket, scavenged from the comms post, shrilled against his thigh.
The mechanical sound was a lifeline to the present. He dragged in a shuddering, wet breath, another, forcing air past the tightness. He fumbled the phone out, his knuckles streaked with dirt and Jericho’s blood. He thumbed the button. “Marcus.”
“Dante?” It was Waurez, his voice exhausted but clear. The background was silent. “Christ, man. You there? Are you guys okay?”
Dante wiped his face savagely with his sleeve. He cleared his throat, but his voice still came out graveled and thin. “For the most part. We held. Three injured, one…” He paused, the word lodging like glass. “One deceased.”
A sigh gusted through the receiver. “Copy that. We’ve got three casualties here, and three more needing medevac. It was a fucking mess.” There was a beat of hesitation. “Who did you lose?”
Dante opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He swallowed hard, hearing the crack in his own breath, the wet choke he couldn’t fully suppress.
Waurez heard it. His voice softened, worried. “Dante? Who was it?”
He tried to speak. He struggled, clamping his jaw tight, then forcing it. “Jericho.”
The silence on the line was profound. Waurez took a deep, audible breath. He knew. Everyone who knew Dante at all knew about Jericho. “Jesus Christ,” he finally breathed, the words heavy with genuine pain. “I’m sorry, Dante. I’m so damn sorry.”
Dante shook his head, a pointless gesture to an empty alley. He focused on the protocol, the next necessary thing. “What men did you lose?” he asked softly.
Even Waurez, who’d only served with him sporadically, hadn’t ever heard Dante speak that way. The quiet wasn’t calm. It was devastation held by a thread. He knew Dante was hurting. “Two recruits… fresh faces,” Waurez said, his own voice tightening. “And… Tripp.”
He hesitated. Because he knew about Dante and Tripp. They were friends, sure, but they’d had a little thing going on and off for years, a sporadic understanding between soldiers that flared when they were near.
Dante didn’t respond. His mind felt blank, wiped clean by a second, unexpected wave. His chest felt even heavier, leaden, as if his ribs were slowly collapsing inwards.
“Tripp?” he asked, the name a choked back sob he couldn’t fully smother.
“Yeah.” Waurez’s voice was rough with shared loss. “He was at the comms tent when the first mortar hit. I’m truly sorry, brother.”
Dante just listened to the static for a full minute, his thoughts a formless grey roar. The bricks were cold against his back.
“I think we need to merge the camps,” Waurez said finally, practicality returning. “Being split up isn’t going to help us right now, especially after the losses. We can consolidate fuel, ammo, watch rotations. I could help you guys out.”
The offer was sound. Tactically, it was the only move. Dante closed his eyes. He saw Jericho’s smirk. He felt the memory of Tripp’s solid shoulder bumping his in a crowded bar in London, a silent toast to surviving another week.
“Okay,” Dante said quietly, the word barely a whisper.
“Okay,” Dante said quietly, the word barely a whisper.
Waurez sighed on the phone, the sound heavy with a shared, weary understanding. “I know this is rough for you, Dante. Anything you need, don’t hesitate to ask.”
Dante just said, “Okay,” again, the syllable empty of everything.
They got off the phone.
The silence that followed was absolute. Dante let the hand holding the field phone drop into the dirt. He didn’t stand up. He simply folded, his back scraping down the rough brick until he was fully sitting on the cold, damp ground. He drew his knees up, resting his arms on them, and stared at the churned earth between his boots.
His anxiety was acting up bad.
It wasn’t the quick, sharp fear of combat. This was slower, colder, a deep tectonic shifting in the dark places he never let anyone see. His breath started coming in short, ineffective pulls that didn’t reach his lungs. A sharp, precise pain anchored itself under his ribcage. He pressed the heel of his hand there again, grinding it into the spot, as if he could physically reshape the hollow ache.
He lost Jericho.
The thought was not a memory, but a present, active devastation. He saw the smirk, heard the wet rasp, felt the exact moment the life left his oldest friend’s eyes. The phantom weight of Jericho’s shoulder under his hand lingered, a cruel imprint.
He lost Tripp.
A different kind of loss, less seismic but deeper, more complicated. Tripp was a familiar heat in the cold, a sporadic anchor in the chaos. A person who knew a version of Dante that didn't have to be the Colonel. Gone. Blown apart in a comms tent.
Then his mind kept going.
It vaulted back over the years, ruthless, connecting losses like points on a map of ruin. He lost his mother to his psychotic step father’s drunken rage. He lost his brother, Mikey, 4 years later in a combat because of a mistake Dante had made. He lost 8 friends in war.
He lost everyone and everything.
The list unspooled in his head, a silent roll call of the departed. Each name was a stone. He was buried under them now, the pressure immense, crushing the air from his chest. He was thirty-four years old and completely alone in a way that had nothing to do with physical solitude.
The closest thing he had to anyone or anything right now, was Bucky.
The realization was a shock, a sudden, glaring light in the dark cellar of his thoughts. A kid from Brooklyn. A recruit with too much heart and a confusing, persistent draw that had already broken every one of Dante’s rules. That was it. That was the only thread left.
A violent tremor ran through him. The careful, rigid control he’d maintained since kneeling beside Jericho’s body shattered.
Then Dante fully let the tears come out.
They weren’t quiet. They were wrenching, silent sobs that convulsed his entire frame, bending him forward over his knees. His face contorted, ugly and open, hidden only by the alley’s shadow. He cried for Jericho, for Tripp, for his mother and his brother. He cried for the sheer, exhausting weight of being the last man standing. Hot tears and slick streaked through the grime and dried blood on his face, dripping onto the worn leather of his boots. He made no sound, but his shoulders shook with a force that threatened to unmake him.
He didn’t hear the careful footsteps on the gravel.
He didn’t know he was no longer alone until a shadow fell across the ground in front of him, and a body slowly, deliberately, lowered itself to sit beside him against the wall. Not touching. Just there.
Dante froze. The sobs choked off into a ragged, wet inhale. He didn’t lift his head.
Bucky stared straight ahead at the opposite wall, his own hands loose in his lap. He’d seen Dante walk this way. He’d given him five minutes, wrestling with the need to respect the man’s space and the louder, screaming need to go to him. The latter had won.
He said nothing. He just sat. The space between them was charged, fragile.
After a long minute, Dante roughly swiped at his face with his sleeve, the material abrasive against his raw skin. His voice, when it came, was shattered glass. “What.”
“Nothing,” Bucky said, his own voice low. He picked up a small stone, rolled it between his fingers. “Just sitting.”
“I don’t need a babysitter.”
“I know.”
“Then go.”
Bucky didn’t move. He tossed the stone aside. “I’m good here.”
Dante finally lifted his head. His eyes were ravaged, red-rimmed, the blue almost swallowed by the dark dilation of his pupils. The tracks of his tears gleamed in the faint light. He looked at Bucky, really looked at him, and there was no authority left, no Colonel. Just a man, gutted.
“He’s gone,” Dante said, the statement simple and utterly final.
“I know,” Bucky whispered.
“Tripp’s gone too. Waurez just told me.”
Bucky closed his eyes for a second, absorbing the second blow. “Shit.”
They sat in the silence. The distant sounds of the camp securing itself were muffled, worlds away. Here, it was just the two of them and the colossal, silent thing between them.
“You said you’d try,” Bucky said finally, not looking at him. “To give a fuck. Remember?”
Dante let out a breath that was almost a laugh, but it was too broken to qualify. “Feels pretty fucking pointless right now.”
“I know that, too.” Bucky finally turned his head. His gaze was steady, unwavering, holding Dante’s shattered one. “But you’re not done.”
The words hung there. A statement. Not a plea.
Dante looked away, back toward the torn-up field where they’d already moved Jericho’s body. The hollow in his chest yawned wide, an abyss. But Bucky’s presence beside him was a solid, warm line against the cold brick. A thread.
He didn’t answer. He just rested his head back against the wall, exhausted beyond measure, and let the silence, now shared, hold them both.