Chapter 28: Domestic Bliss
The coffee tasted like heaven. Bucky leaned against the kitchen doorway, steam curling from his mug, and watched Dante move through the morning sun in their living room. Their living room. He still got a kick out of thinking it.
Two and a half years.
The Greenwich Village apartment was a far cry from Dante’s old cavern of grief. War maps were pinned to corkboards alongside a cheap print of a Van Gogh sunflower Bucky had bought at a street fair. Dante’s dog-eared copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls lay spine-up on the sofa arm. Two coffee mugs, not one, sat in the sink. The air smelled of Bucky’s slightly-too-strong brew and the faint, clean scent of Dante’s shaving soap. It smelled like them.
Dante stood at the window, shirtless, the early December light gilding the intricate tattoos on his left arm and the newer, softer scars on his back. He was watching a sparrow hop along the fire escape. His posture was easy, relaxed in a way that had taken months to become habitual. The permanent knot of tension between his shoulder blades had softened. He had moments, still. Dark afternoons where he’d stare at the wall, or nights where he’d wake gasping. But they were moments, not eternities. Bucky knew how to navigate them now. A hand on his back. A fresh cup of coffee. The simple, solid fact of his presence.
“You’re gonna catch a chill,” Bucky said, taking a loud sip.
Dante didn’t turn. “I’m from Chicago. This is balmy.”
“You’re from a drafty apartment in Chicago. This is our drafty apartment in New York. Put a shirt on, old man.”
A ghost of a smile touched Dante’s lips. He turned, his icy blue eyes finding Bucky with a warmth that still made Bucky’s stomach flip. He crossed the room, the floorboards giving their familiar, forgiving groan under his weight. He plucked the mug from Bucky’s hand, took a sip, and made a face.
“Christ, Barnes. You could tar a roof with this.”
“Give it back, then,” Bucky laughed, reaching for it.
Dante held it out of reach, his other hand coming to rest on Bucky’s hip, thumb slipping under the hem of his t-shirt to brush skin. It was a casual, proprietary touch that spoke of years of quiet understanding. “I like it,” Dante said, his voice a low rumble. “It’s grown on me. Like a stubborn fungus.”
The phone rang.
It was a shrill, jangling interruption in the warm silence. They both looked at the black Bakelite monstrosity on the wall by the kitchen door. It wasn’t unusual for it to ring. Bucky’s mom. Dante’s sister. A buddy from the old unit.
But something in the air shifted. Dante’s hand slipped from Bucky’s hip. The easy light in his eyes banked, replaced by the focused neutrality of a soldier assessing a potential threat. He set the mug down on the counter and walked to the phone, moving with that renewed, unconscious authority.
“Marcus,” he answered, his voice flat and clear.
Bucky watched him. He saw Dante’s spine straighten, just a fraction. He saw the fingers of his free hand curl slightly against his thigh.
“General Princeton,” Dante said. A pause. “Good morning, Sir.”
Bucky stopped breathing. General Princeton was Pentagon. High-up. Not a social call.
“I know you have six months left on your contract,” Dante repeated, listening. His gaze drifted to the window, to the sparrow now flown away. “Typically we don’t call people in for service, but I’d appreciate if you’d come out and help.”
Another, longer pause. Dante’s jaw tightened. “How long?”
Whatever was said on the other end caused the tension in his shoulders to loosen, just a hair. “Only a month or two, Sir.” He let out a slow, controlled breath. “Understood. Yes, Sir. I’ll await the orders.” He listened for another few seconds. “Thank you, General. Goodbye.”
He hung up the receiver. The plastic click was deafening. He didn’t turn around immediately. He stood there, one hand braced against the wall, looking at the floor.
“Dante?” Bucky’s voice sounded small.
“They need me for a consultation,” Dante said, turning. His face was a careful mask, but Bucky could see the conflict swirling in his eyes. “A logistics pinch in the European theater. Princeton says it’s clean. In and out. Two months, max.”
“You agreed.”
“I’m a Colonel with six months left. It wasn’t a request.” He ran a hand through his hair, disrupting the slicked-back style. It fell across his forehead, making him look younger. “It’s fine. It’s nothing. A month of staff meetings and looking at maps. It’s not… it’s not the field.”
He said it to convince himself. Bucky heard the old shadows in his voice, the fear of being pulled back into the machinery that had nearly ground him to dust.
“Hey,” Bucky said, crossing to him. He took Dante’s face in his hands, forcing him to meet his eyes. “It’s two months. We’ve survived worse in this very apartment.”
A real smile, thin but genuine, broke through Dante’s facade. “The great flour incident of ‘43.”
“Exactly. A wartime tragedy.” Bucky kissed him, a firm, reassuring press. “You go. You be brilliant. You come home. I’ll be right here, tarring the roof with my coffee.”
Dante’s hands came up to grip Bucky’s wrists, holding him there. “I love you,” he said, the words still spoken like a sacred, secret thing after all this time.
“I love you, too.”
The phone rang again twenty minutes later.
This time, Bucky answered. “Barnes residence.”
“Private James Barnes?” a clipped, unfamiliar voice asked.
“This is he.”
“Standby for Lieutenant Colonel Simmons.”
Bucky’s blood went cold. He looked over at Dante, who was now shoving socks into a duffel bag. Dante paused, reading the pallor on Bucky’s face.
The line clicked. “Barnes? Simmons here. Your leave is revoked. Report to Fort Hamilton for processing and transport. You’re to be embedded with a strategic reconnaissance unit. Short-term assignment. One to two months duration. Orders are being wired.”
Bucky’s mouth was dry. “Sir… may I ask the nature of the assignment?”
“You may not. Your service record and unique experience with behind-lines operations have been noted. You ship out in 48 hours. Any questions?”
A thousand. All of them screams. “No, Sir.”
“Good. Welcome back, Sergeant.”
The line went dead.
Bucky slowly hung up the phone. The room seemed to tilt. Dante was in front of him now, his hands on Bucky’s shoulders.
“Bucky? Talk to me.”
“They’re calling me back in,” Bucky whispered. “One to two months. Recon.”
Dante’s expression tightened, a storm cloud passing over his features. “They can’t. You’re… you’re not on active status.”
“They just did.” Bucky let out a shaky breath, a hysterical laugh bubbling up. “Strategic reconnaissance. My ‘unique experience’. Jesus.”
Understanding dawned in Dante’s eyes, cold and grim. “They’re pulling the whole team. They’re pulling the old unit back together for something specific.” He muttered a curse under his breath. “Princeton didn’t mention other personnel. He just needed me to agree first.”
The reality settled over them, heavy and cold. Their fragile, hard-won peace was being dismantled with two phone calls.
Forty-eight hours later, they stood on a rain-slicked tarmac at a private airfield in New Jersey. A military transport plane, its engines whining, loomed in the grey drizzle. Dante was in full uniform, his Colonel’s rank stark on his shoulders, his duffel at his feet. He looked like a statue of command again, impenetrable.
Bucky, in his own kit, felt like a kid playing dress-up. He shifted his weight, the strap of his gear digging into his shoulder.
Two other figures emerged from the mist, hauling their own bags. Steve Rogers, taller and broader than Bucky remembered, his jaw set in a familiar line of stubborn determination. And next to him, Reddit—Theodore “Red” Reddington—a lanky, sharp-eyed man with a perpetual smirk that didn’t quite reach his eyes. They were the core of the old unit. The ones who’d survived the desert.
“Well, ain’t this a reunion,” Reddit drawled, dropping his bag. “They digging up all the old fossils for one last hurrah?”
Steve nodded at Dante. “Colonel.” His gaze shifted to Bucky, and a flicker of surprise, then concern, passed over his face. “Bucky. Didn’t know you’d be here.”
“Last-minute addition,” Bucky said, his voice tighter than he intended.
Dante ignored the protocol, stepping closer to Bucky. The others tactfully looked away, studying the plane or the grey sky. Under the cover of his body, Dante’s hand found Bucky’s. He gave it one fierce, crushing squeeze. His eyes held Bucky’s, saying everything they couldn’t voice here.
You come back. You come back to me. I’ll find you. I promise.
Bucky squeezed back, just as hard.
A sergeant appeared at the ramp. “All aboard, gentlemen! Let’s move!”
The moment broke. Dante released his hand, the warmth replaced by the chill damp air. He turned, becoming Colonel Marcus once more. “Move out,” he said, his voice carrying easily over the engine noise.
They filed up the ramp into the dim, cavernous belly of the plane. The scent of fuel, cold metal, and canvas assaulted Bucky’s senses. It was the smell of the past. Of a life he’d thought he’d left behind.
He took a seat on the hard bench alongside Steve. Reddit sat across from them, already tilting his hat over his eyes. Dante sat up front, near the cockpit, separate. In charge.
The engines roared to a deafening pitch. The plane began to vibrate, then lurch forward. Bucky clutched the edge of the bench as they accelerated, the force pressing him back. Through a small, grimy window, he saw the rainy tarmac fall away, then the messy grid of New York City, then the endless, choppy grey of the Atlantic.
He looked away from the window. He looked forward, at the back of Dante’s head, at the familiar set of his shoulders beneath the uniform wool. The man he loved. The Colonel he had to follow.
The plane climbed into the heavy cloud cover, and their old life disappeared below them.
The plane climbed into the heavy cloud cover, and their old life disappeared below them.
The flight was a sixteen-hour purgatory of roaring engines and frigid, metallic air. Bucky dozed fitfully, his head jerking upright whenever the plane hit turbulence, his dreams a muddle of Greenwich Village sunlight and desert sand. Steve read a battered paperback with intense concentration, while Red seemed to genuinely sleep, a minor miracle given the noise.
Dante never once left his seat near the front. He stared at a fixed point on the wall, his profile sharp and unreadable. Bucky knew that look. It was the look of a man assembling a complex machine in his mind, testing each part, anticipating every failure. He was already planning, already leaving.
They landed on a gray airstrip carved into endless, rainy pine forest. The air was colder here, smelling of damp earth and diesel. A jeep waited, its driver silent. They rode in silence too, the weight of the unknown pressing down on them as the vehicle bounced along muddy ruts deeper into the woods.
The base was a cluster of unmarked, low-slung concrete buildings nearly swallowed by the trees. It had a temporary, desperate feel. Inside, the walls were bare except for a large, detailed map of the Alsace region, peppered with pins and notations. General Princeton was there, along with a grim-faced British intelligence officer named Seward.
“Gentlemen,” Princeton began, without preamble. “We have a lock. A hydrogenation plant, here.” He tapped a spot on the map with a pointer. “It’s nestled in a narrow valley, heavily fortified. Conventional bombing can’t touch it. Your reconnaissance photos last year, Colonel, gave us the lay of the land. But intelligence confirms they’ve expanded the underground facilities. We need to know exactly what’s down there.”
Dante stepped closer to the map, his eyes tracing the contour lines. “You don’t just need reconnaissance. You need a disruption.”
Seward nodded curtly. “Quite. We need the layout of the sub-levels. And, if possible, a catalyst introduced into their primary cooling system. It would set them back nine months, minimum.”
“A surgical strike,” Dante murmured, his finger hovering over the valley’s sole access road. “Not a bombardment.”
“Precisely,” Princeton said. “In and out. Silent. No traces. The four of you have a… particular history of solving unconventional problems. We need that ingenuity now. Get the schematics. If the opportunity presents itself, plant the charge. Then you vanish. Mission success means immediate rotation home, discharges processed. Your six months, Colonel? Consider it done.”
Home. The word hung in the stale air. Bucky watched Dante’s shoulders tighten. It was the right bait. A clean end. But the hook was buried deep in something terribly dangerous.
Dante turned from the map, looking at each of them: Steve, solid and reliable; Red, cunning and observant; Bucky, whose face he could read like his own. “We’ll need everything. Aerials, soil samples, local resistance reports, weather patterns for the last five years. We need to know the guard shift change down to the minute. We need to know what they had for breakfast.”
He was in his element. The quiet intelligence, usually masked by stoicism, was now their primary weapon. “This isn’t a frontal assault. It’s a ghost story. We’re the ghosts.”
The next month and a half became a fever dream of preparation.
Their world shrank to the map room, the training yard, and the cramped bunkhouse they shared. Dante consumed information, cross-referencing patrol logs with moonlight phases, studying the architectural principles of German industrial engineers. He paced, he muttered, he drew intricate diagrams on tracing paper that he would later burn.
Steve and Red ran the physical drills. They practiced moving over uneven, silent terrain in the dark, communicating with hand signals they refined until they were instinct. They rehearsed extracting a wounded man, with each of them taking a turn playing the casualty.
Bucky was the nexus. He translated Dante’s complex strategies into actionable steps for Steve and Red. He calibrated the delicate timers for the catalytic charges. He was also the one who could pull Dante out of the planning abyss, handing him a cup of terrible coffee and steering him toward a cot for three hours of sleep.
“The drainage culvert here,” Dante said one night, his voice hoarse from hours of talking. He pointed to a blurry aerial photo. “It’s their vulnerability. Big enough for a man. It empties into the coolant run-off pond.”
Red peered at it, scratching his stubble. “Also big enough to be a perfect machine gun nest. Or to flood on a timer.”
“It is,” Dante conceded. “Which is why we check it for tampering here, here, and here.” He indicated specific joints on the diagram he’d drawn. “Barnes, you’re the smallest. You do the initial entry and the wiring. Rogers, you’re his shadow. Reddington, you’re our eyes on the ridge. I’ll handle the diversion at the main gate.”
“A diversion?” Steve asked, frowning.
“A noisy one,” Dante said, a thin, sharp smile touching his lips. “They’ll look at the shouting man at the front door. They won’t hear the mice in the cellar.”
The camaraderie of the old unit solidified again, but it was different now. Bucky and Dante shared loaded glances, a brush of hands when passing a tool, a silent conversation held across the room. It was a secret within the secret. Steve watched them sometimes, a quiet understanding dawning in his eyes, but he said nothing. Red just smirked, as if he’d known all along.
Six weeks in, the plan was a living thing—tested, adapted, honed. They could execute it in their sleep. The tension shifted from how to when.
They sat around the table on the final night before gear check. The maps were rolled up. The charges were built. Dante finally looked at them, not as their colonel, but as the man who had brought them there.
“We go in tomorrow night,” he said, his voice low. “Moonless. Forecast calls for low cloud cover. It’s the best window we’ll get.” He paused, his icy gaze sweeping over them. “Anybody wants to back out, now’s the time. No shame. No record. Just walk.”
The silence was complete. No one moved.
Steve nodded once. Red gave a lazy salute. Bucky just held Dante’s stare, a current of perfect understanding flowing between them. Where you go, I go.
“Alright then,” Dante said, the word a final seal on their fate. “Let’s go home.”
The night before insertion was a silent, ticking thing. They checked and re-checked gear under the harsh fluorescent lights of the bunkhouse, the ritual of preparation a substitute for conversation. Dante inspected each pack himself, his large, tattooed hands moving with a surgeon’s precision over buckles, wires, and the waxed paper of ration packs. His focus was absolute, a wall against the fear they all felt.
Bucky watched him, memorizing the line of his shoulders, the way his brow furrowed in concentration. He thought of the bathroom floor years ago, the shattered man he’d found there. This was the same man, rebuilt and hardened for a single purpose. It was beautiful and terrible.
“Get some sleep,” Dante finally said, his voice cutting the silence like glass. “If you can.”
No one slept. Bucky lay on his cot, listening to Steve’s steady breathing and Red’s occasional turn. He stared at the springs of Dante’s empty cot above him. After an hour, he slipped outside into the biting cold.
The pine forest was a black wall around the compound. His breath plumed in the air. He heard the crunch of gravel and turned. Dante stood there, a darker shadow against the dark, a cigarette tip glowing like a tiny, angry star.
“Couldn’t sleep either?” Bucky’s voice was soft.
Dante took a long drag, the ember flaring. “Sleep is a luxury for men with clean consciences.” He exhaled a stream of smoke. “Or men who haven’t read the meteorological report for the Alsatian valley.”
“That bad?”
“Winds shifting east. Could bring in a fog bank. Could just as easily clear the sky and leave us naked under a searchlight.” He flicked the cigarette away, a tiny meteor extinguished in the mud. “It’s a variable. I hate variables.”
Bucky stepped closer, the cold seeping through his boots. “We’ll adapt. We always do.”
Dante turned to him. In the weak light from a distant barracks window, his face was all angles and deep shadows. The unnerving intensity of his blue eyes was softened by something else, a raw vulnerability he showed to no one else. “I need you sharp tomorrow. Not thinking about me.”
“You’re always in my head, Dante. That’s what keeps me sharp.” Bucky reached out, his gloved hand finding Dante’s. He squeezed. “You come back to me. That’s an order.”
A ghost of a smile touched Dante’s lips. He leaned in, his forehead resting against Bucky’s for a brief, stolen second. “Yes, Sergeant.”
Morning was a grey, nervous thing. They geared up in the predawn chill, the weight of weapons and explosives a familiar, hated burden. The mood was taut, a wire stretched to its limit. After a final, grim briefing from General Princeton, they were dismissed until evening transport.
Steve, Red, and Bucky stepped outside into the weak, late morning sun. The cold air was a shock after the stuffy map room. They stood on the gravel, a temporary island of quiet before the storm.
“You been okay, Buck?” Steve asked, his voice low. He nudged a pebble with his boot. “You and Dante doing good?”
Steve and Red knew. They were the only two men Bucky trusted with it, and neither had ever offered anything but a shrug of acceptance. It was a quiet understanding, a bond forged in the desert and tempered in this new, secret war.
“Yeah,” Bucky said, the word feeling both true and fragile. “Things have been really good. How have you guys been?”
“Good,” Steve said, a genuine smile breaking through his serious demeanor. “Peggy and I finally tied the knot. Small ceremony. You’d have hated it, Red. No fireworks.”
“Sounds dreadful,” Reddit drawled, lighting a cigarette of his own. He took a drag and exhaled slowly. “My wife just had our little girl. Felt kind of bad leaving, but didn’t have much of a choice, y’know?” He said it casually, but his eyes were far away, fixed on some point in the pine trees where a future waited.
“Congratulations,” Bucky said, and he meant it. The normalcy of it, babies and weddings, felt like a story from another planet. “What’s her name?”
“Eloise,” Red said, the name sounding strange and tender in his rough voice. He cleared his throat. “She’s got her mother’s lungs. I could hear her yelling from the taxi.”
They shared a quiet laugh, the sound swallowed by the vast, silent woods. They talked a little more, about nothing and everything—a Dodgers game Steve was missing, the terrible coffee, a joke Red had heard. It was easy. Normal. A ten-minute slice of a life they were all desperately clinging to.
They had no way of knowing that tomorrow would change the course of their lives forever.