Chapter 3: Keep Your Powder Dry

I: Sophie

When they first left Germany to move to New York, in 1934, Sophie was eleven.

They had to leave their pet cat behind, so when they moved into their new home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, her father took her to the animal shelter to pick out a new cat.

The new cat, Gracie, who if she was still alive was living with Sophie's married sister in Greenpoint, was about a year old when they got her, and she had never had a home before.

Gracie was extremely affectionate, for a cat, and she loved her new home and her owners; it was like she was so very grateful to have a warm, safe place to live, but if they didn't let her out at night she crawled the walls.

Sophie asked her father why.

Ben Kauffmann explained to her that Gracie had been wild for so long, even though she was glad to have a home, in a way, she couldn't trust it. With time, she would settle in, and they wouldn't have to let her out.

Ben had been right about Gracie, and Sophie hoped the same thing went for her as for her cat.

The Invaders base camp was the safest place she had been in since 1939.

No one was coming to kill her; death wasn't lurking just around another bush. She didn't have to worry about where she was going to sleep, or what she was going to eat, or who she was going to have to kill to stay alive and keep her meagre belongings.

It was like a little slice of heaven, on one hand, and on the other hand, she just didn't trust it.

Three times while she was walking around the base, she went back to the Comedian's tent to check and see if her knapsack and her gun were still there.

The third time, she ran into Eddie, returning to his barracks-tent.

"Can't get used to it, huh?"

"No."

She closed the door behind her.

"Yeah, I know how youse feel. Me, I never quite settle down. Can't sleep alla way through the night. I know the Old Man's in his grave, because I put him there, and he ain't coming back, but old habits are hard to break, and some shit, it never goes away."

"But does it get a little better, after awhile?"

"Yeah. It will, especially after you get back to New York."

Eddie sat down on his bunk, and Sophie sat down in his chair.

"Hey, Eddie, what you and Logan do, is it kinda like what I did with the Resistance?"

"What did you do with the Resistance?"

"Blew up trucks. Train tracks, sometimes. Killed Nazis in gruesome ways. Left heads on poles. Sniper attacks. Anything and everything to hinder those bastards, and maybe, just maybe, put the fear of God in them."

"That's exactly what me an' Jimmy do. The dirty work. Except we got the military might of the Allied powers behinds us. Trucks. Dynamite. Grenades. Body armor. Machine guns. Bombs. I know how to drive a tank. Whatever we want, whatever we need to make the enemy suffer an' bleed. No questions asked. Why?"

The way he was grinning at her, she knew he knew why.

"Maybe I'm not ready to call the war a day and go back to New York before I've had the pleasure of standing up to my ankles in Nazi blood." Sophie replied.

"Yeah, I kinda figured youse for that. Now I'm a good shot, and so is Logan, but not like you, Soph. We ain't got a sniper like you. An' with you bein' a broad an' all, we could lure some of those Fritzes into a pretty tight spot. Whaddya say?"

"What do you think I say? But, do you have the authority to make me a part of the team?"

"Nope. But Cap does. This is his operation, don't let the name fool youse, he's General Steve Rogers. You wouldn't happen to be a US Citizen, would you, now?"

Sophie rooted in her knapsack for her most precious treasure of all, her United States passport that showed that she was a naturalised American citizen, and handed it to Eddie.

"How do you feel about joining up with good old Uncle Sam, Sophie?"

"Just show me where to sign."

***

Eddie was gone from the tent for awhile; long enough for Sophie to read through several issues of the New York Post he had; it was good to read the news of home.

Make no mistake, New York City was Sophie's home.

He came back with Captain America.

"How are you doing, Miss Kauffmann?"

"Fine, thank you."

"Miss Kaufmann, you do realise that if you enlist in the United States Army, you won't be going back to New York until the end of the war, you'll be going right back out there into battle?"

"If that's where the enemy are, Captain, then that's where I want to be. I've got a few scores to settle with these Nazi sons-of-bitches. I'll go home when the war is over, and Hitler's dead, even if I have to kill him, myself."

"See Cap? I toleja."

"What rank did you hold with the Resistance, Miss Kauffmann?"

"I was a Sergeant in charge of a small brigade, from 1942 until about six months ago. The Nazis wiped out all my men, and I escaped. I'm a wanted enemy of the Reich, so I had to resort to hiding in basements, until I could find a contact with the movement. That's where your men found me."

"And what was it that your squad did?"

"What you would call guerrilla or commando work. Dirty work. Real dirty. Massacres. Explosions. Bridges, trucks, trains, anything. Some espionage. I'm also a sharpshooter, and I know a lot more about explosives than the average nice Jewish girl."

Cap laughed.

He was very German-looking, but Rogers was an English name, then again, all these Americans were mutts.

Still, it was nice to see a German face, smiling at her in approval and welcome.

"Well, then, I am prepared, after I see your passport, to induct you into the United States Army, Women's Army Corps as a Sergeant, under my command, and assign you to special duty, effective immediately with the commando squad of the Invaders. We'll need a few days to get you outfitted, and to put the paperwork through, and I think you and Eddie and Lucky Jim need a little time for recovery, but we should have you in uniform and back on duty in about a week, soldier. How does that suit you?"

Sophie realised she had tears in her eyes, and she didn't want them to be heard in her voice, so she stood up and saluted, smartly.

"Eddie, hold this flag up for me. Miss Kauffmann, I don't have a copy of a Jewish holy book around here anywhere, but I did manage to find a Bible that just has the Old Testament. Will that be alright?"

A German face that respected her religion, and her culture.

I am going to cry.

"Yes, sir." She said.

"Good. Place one hand on the holy book, and, wait, I've got no pockets in this suit, here it is, please raise you right hand, and repeat after me. I, Sophie Kauffmann, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God."

It was a good thing for Sophie that she had a very good memory.

She repeated the Oath, perfectly.

"Welcome to the US Army, Sergeant Kauffmann."

"Thank you very much, Captain America."

II: Logan

"Lucky Jim" didn't understand why he and Eddie got a hero's welcome.

It was their duty to get back to base camp, to make things hard for the Fritzes, and to look after Bucky.

Rescuing sympathetic refugees was also within the scope of their duty; nothing they had done was anything more than it was their duty as soldiers and members of the Invaders to do.

They had been hired onto the team to do a job, and that job was to terrorise the Nazis, to bring to them a little of the Hell on Earth they had brought to most of Europe.

That was their job and they did it well, and after a few days of R&R, they'd be doing it again.

Maybe it was just because Logan didn't like being fussed over, and he didn't like being called Jim, or Jimmy, or Lucky Jim.

If Cap or Eddie did it, well that was okay, but otherwise?

No.

Maybe it was because he didn't feel like Sophie Kauffmann needed saving.

Some people don't need saving; they can save themselves.

She would have crawled out of that basement on her own after they left and shot her way across the last stretch to an Allied camp, which was the Invaders base camp they were in right .

Sophie walked through the gates under her own steam a few days after they got there, regardless, and it wouldn't have taken long for her to find Eddie and Eddie to find her.

Sophie was a survivor. And a fighter. She wasn't cowering in that basement , she was writing with a machine gun. Had they made any moves against her, she would have blown them to hell. She had only been on the base for an hour before she had her American passport in her hand, looking to enlist, so she could ship out ASAP with him and Eddie, and do some serious Nazi-killing.

Sophie had a thirst for Nazi blood that she wouldn't be able to slake in the States, and Logan couldn't say he blamed her.

As for himself, Logan would rather that he could have saved Bucky.

Then he would have felt like he deserved a hero's welcome.

Sure, they brought him back alive, but Logan had lived long enough to know when a man was broken and Bucky was shattered like a water glass that fell onto a brick fireplace.

And all the king's horses and all the king's men weren't going to be able to put Bucky Barnes back together, again.

He was tired, he'd been awake for two weeks straight, almost, and even he had to sleep, but when he lay down in his bed in his tent, sleep didn't come.

All he could think of was that terrible night when Bucky had asked him and Eddie to do the right thing, the decent thing, a thing they would have done for a dog, and they couldn't do it.

He went out and started walking around the base, and, seeing the light on in Cap's tent, he knocked on the door.

"Come in."

"Hiya, Steve. So, how's Bucky?"

"I'm not sure, Jimmy. Is that what's keeping you awake, too?"

"Yeah. Everybody's celebrated us comin' in today, with no casualties. Bullshit. We had a casualty. Bucky. He's done, Steve. Fuckin' finished. Beyond help. Oh sure, as long as he's with you, as long as the war's on, he'll have a reason to keep up the good fight. But, when the war's over and he's back in New York…I've seen it happen to a whole lotta guys. He'll start drinkin' heavy, real heavy. He won't sleep at night for the bad dreams, and only the booze will keep his memories at bay. I know you'll try to help him, but you're gonna have bigger things to worry about than Bucky's mental health. Who knows, maybe Bucky'll find some nice girl who wants to save him, but she won't be able to. The woman will have to leave, get a divorce, take the kids, and that'll only kill poor Bucky a little more. He'll end up a broken-down, balding, red-nosed wreck with shaking hands and a beer gut by the time he's 35, sitting at the end of a bar in Brooklyn with pieces of his old uniform on, raving about the war to whoever will stop to listen. All day from opening to closing, shuffling back to a flophouse or whatever he can afford on the check he gets from the War Office that he drinks most of. I Me and Eddie, we shoulda killed him when we had the chance. It would have been a helluva lot better than dragging the shell of the poor kid back here."

"What do you mean, killed him when you had the chance?"

"It happened a few nights before we met up with Sophie, I mean, Sergeant Kauffmann, don't I? Anyway, I was on watch, and Bucky and Eddie were sleeping in the back of the truck. Bucky woke Eddie up screaming like it was the end of the world and I ran into the back of the truck. You shoulda seen him. He woke up in a cold sweat with tears coming out of his eyes screamin' amd screamin. Eddie had to put his hand over the kid's mouth to keep him from givin' our position away. And them, once he calmed down, Bucky he begged us both to shoot him. And he meant it. He said he didn't wanna live anymore and he couldn't imagine living with this till he was old and grey. He said if we had any regard for him as men and soldiers, we'd kill him."

"What did you do?"

"What we felt it was our duty to do. As men. And soldiers. We left the truck and took him out behind it. Eddie told him to turn around, and he put his sidearm to the back of Bucky's head, and I did the same thing. Neither of us wanted to be the only one responsible. But, we couldn't do it. Neither of us. He was cryin', and sobbin', an shakin' like a leaf. So we tried to give him a runnin' start, but we still couldn't do it. I chased after him and I caught up to him and he grabbed my hand, an' put it up against his throat and begged me to pop just one claw. I couldn't do it. I'm no hero, Steve. I'm the dirty coward who doomed Bucky Barnes to a lifetime of Hell."

"Logan, a man of honour, a soldier, hell, a decent human being doesn't shoot a disturbed comrade in the head like a mad dog out in the back of a hijacked truck. And that goes for you and Eddie. He may not be a good man, but he's a good soldier and he has a good side. This is 1944, Logan, not 1884. There are doctors and hospitals and medicines to treat Bucky's problems, all of which will be more effective than a bullet in the back of the head. Or a claw to the throat. And you don't have to worry about what happens to him after the war. I took responsibility for him when he was 14 years old, and if that means he'll be my responsibility for the rest of my life, then, that's the way it's going to be."

"That's a pretty big burden to carry, Cap."

"That's alright with me, Logan. You think you'll be getting any sleep tonight?"

"No."

"Me neither. How about we play some cards?"

"For cigarettes?"

"Suits me. You think Eddie wants in?"

"I think Eddie's getting into something a little sweeter than a card game, right now, Cap."

Cap laughed, in spite of himself.

Sometimes you have to laugh, because of you cry, you won't stop anytime soon.

"How does he do it?"

"It's the crazy ones. They all love him."

II: Eddie

Back at the camp, in his own tent, the Comedian waited for Sergeant Sophie Kauffmann to return from the showers.

She had on a big oversized bathrobe, but you could still tell she was no ordinary dogface.

"Boy, I must clean up well. On the way here, I saw lights going on in tents so these guys could get a better look at me."

"Look is all they better do."

"Why, Eddie? Do I belong to you, like the new pair of boots Logan found in the Schrafft's house belong to him?"

"You wanna take your chances out there, go ahead. You can have yourself a gang bang and you won't have it like you got it with me."

"You're a real cocky sunnuvabitch, aren't you, Eddie? I hope whatever uniform I get comes with fatigue pants. Some of those enlisted men look pretty hungry, and not every man I killed for trying to make me submit to him was a German."

"As long as I'm around, doll, you won't have to kill anybody. Any of these dogfaces try to touch you, I'll rip their lungs out." Eddie laughed.

He pulled something out from under his pillow and held them up for her.

"Remember what you were sayin' about a dress an' some nylons? Before you put on your new fatigues, maybe you could try these on for size. For after the war, when you an' me go dancin'."

"I don't understand you, Eddie. You roll in here, you're the big hero. Everybody wants to shake your hand. Even Captain America, himself. You saved that idiot mascot boy who thinks this is a movie about a war, and you brought back a truck stuffed with German weapons and provisions. And the only thing you want is for me to take a bath and put on a dress and some nylons so you can look at me in them, and then take them off again."

"Hell, I'm just a man, doll. All we ever think about is pussy, beer and food. Didn't anybody ever tell you that?"

"Sure. And the only kind of men I like are the ones that's true about. Now, turn around ad I'll put these on for you. No peeking. It'll ruin the effect."

It was a cheap dress, and they were low quality nylons, but to Sophie they might as well have come from Saks Fifth Avenue.

The last time she wore a dress and nylons was the day the Nazis came to the barn where her family was hiding, to take them all away.

It was nice, nice to just be a woman again, alone with a man who bought you a dress and nylons just so he could look at you in them, and take them off, again.

"Okay, Eddie, turn around. So, do you like what you see?"

"Yeah. I do. I didn't get to see it before. Too dark. And you was wearing too many clothes. You Jewish girls sure are stacked, I gotta say. I'm no bigot, Soph. I been beaten with brooms and knocked outa windows, an' had my life threatened by almost as many irate Jewish fathers as I have Micks and Polacks and Wops. That's what we had in my neighbourhood, and that's what I like. High-class WASP broads, you can have 'em. They all got big problems and small tits." The Comedian mused.

"That's what I miss about New York, Eddie. Guys like you. Jesus, I miss the city."

"I miss it too, doll. But we'll be home soon enough."

"You think we'll make it?"

"Think? Fuck, I know I will. An' now you're with me and Jimmy, you got a helluva lot better chance than youse did before."

"I like the sound of that. So, how much do you like what you see, Eddie?"

He smiled at her.

"Enough I'd like to see it better."

"Well you just wait a minute, mister. I'm a nice girl. I don't go with just anybody. When we get back to New York, are you gonna call me? You gonna take me to the pictures? Buy me dinner? Take me dancin'?"

"Sure I will."

"You lyin' to me, Eddie?"

"Would I lie to a woman who can shoot like you can?"

"I sure hope not."

Eddie walked over to Sophie, and she found herself glad to be in his arms, again.

"Hey, doll, you know I can tell if a woman ain't putting it on for me?"

He slid his hand under her dress, and along the slippery fabric of her nylons.

His hand stopped in the middle of her thigh, right where the nylon and the garter stopped, and her leg began.

There was something about the way he stroked her thigh, right there at the juncture of stocking and skin than made Sophie feel dizzy in the head and weak in the knees.

Molten.

"It works every time." The Comedian chuckled.

III: Steve

Before he was injected with the Super Soldier serum and became Captain America, Steve Rogers was just a struggling college student from Red Hook, in Brooklyn.

He grew up in a pretty traditional family, under rather conventional circumstances. They didn't have a lot of money, growing up during the Depression, but they made do, and his childhood and youth were unmarred by major tragedy.

Young Steve Rogers had been taught to be hard-working and fair, kind and generous, to be loyal to friends and family and tolerant of people of other nationalities and religions. After all, America was the great melting pot. He was brought up to love God, freedom, democracy, his neighbourhood and his fellow man. It was the duty of the strong, of a man, to protect the weak, like women, children and old people. It was also the duty of a man to be brave, honest, and decent, in the face of all adversity. He was taught to love his country and trust the wise men who the people had elected to run it, as well as public servants like policemen and fireman. He believed that most people were honest, decent folks and that they wanted the best for themselves, their families, and the world, and that bad people, that evil itself, was some kind of easily discovered aberration.

This terrible war had shown him all the ways that human beings could violate those simple truths he had held dear, and showed him all the shades of grey in his black and white views and perceptions.

The Invaders, of course were meant to be, no, were a force for good, for the greater good, for the winning of the war.

He constructed the team in accordance with his morals and his values.

And then he recruited two men, two men he found it impossible not to like, good soldiers, in their own ways, good men, to systematically act in a way that was repugnant to everything he held dear.

Logan he met in Madripoor in 1941; they rescued a young Russian girl from the clutches of the Hand, there.

He was a complicated man, decades older than Steve, a veteran of many wars and many lives. He lived by a strict code of honour. Steve suspected he was some kind of oriental knight, but he wasn't sure. All he would really say about his background was that he was Canadian, and that his name was James Howlett, and he came from British Columbia.

He had stories about the Gold Rush and WWI, and the Mexican revolution, tales of living with the Indians in the Great White North but neither Steve nor anyine else really knew too mucg about Logan.

What they did know was that he was the kind of man who did what he had to do when he had to do it, and he didn't mind unleashing the beast in him when it was necessary.

Eddie Blake, the Comedian, in some ways, was his polar opposite.

He had packed so much into his twenty years of life it was hard to believe he was just a young pup, but that's what he was.

The only honor he had was the honor he learned in the street; don't ever rat, don't leave a buddy in the lurch, take care of your own, and meet blood with blood and violence with violence.

The man was fuelled almost completely by rage, a rage he came by honestly, through surviving the most nightmarish possible upbringing that Steve Rogers could imagine.

The Comedian was a murderer at 13, of his own father, a brutal criminal who escaped Death Row, where he sat waiting for the chair, officially for the murder of a policeman, but also for many unconfirmed murders to his name, including the suspicious deaths of two of his own children.

He was a superhero at 16, going into the mask game to see to it that men like his father were wiped from the Earth, and to feed his family; after the death of his mother he became responsible for six siblings, three of whom were under the age of 10.

He was a soldier at 18, a black-ops commando soldier, with whom Cap became acquainted with Eddie in Italy in 1943, where the young superhero had been transferred after his great success in the war in the Pacific.

Sitting in a trench eating Corn Flakes and beer out of his helmet, with a jaunty grin on his stubbled face, shovelling the food into his mouth on the edge of a hunting knife clasped in his fist whose knuckles were permanently bluish from frequent breaking, his uniform spattered with blood that wasn't his, dirt, gun oil, and soot.

And now they were to be joined by a third black-hearted killer, a deadly sniper and explosives expert who had lived on the run like a hunted wild animal since 1939. A hard-eyed, single-minded fighting machine with a heart full of rage and an unquenchable thirst for revenge for a slaughtered family that could be slaked only by Nazi blood.

Logan would go out and commit, well, they were atrocities, no matter how you dressed them up because that was what needed to be done and he was capable of doing it.

Killing Nazis was nothing personal to him; they were the enemy; they were threatening the stability of the world he lived in; they needed to die.

Eddie welcomed any channel for his rage. To him, the authoritarian, ruthless, amoral Nazis, systematic killers of women, children and old folks were in the same category of despicable scum as his hated father. Death was too good for them, but if it was all he could give them, he'd settle for it.

Killing Nazis was intensely personal to Eddie; he couldn't kill in cold blood, but he was so full of rage that it didn't take much to make his blood boil.

And the Jewish sniper, who lost her whole family to the Nazis deranged vendetta against the Jews, well, the sniper's reasons for wanting oceans of Nazi blood didn't have to be elaborated on.

Why did he think of Sergeant Kauffmann in those terms?

Sophie.

Sophie Kauffmann, yes, Steve, Sophie, yes, a woman.

She didn't want to go back to New York and safety to buy dresses and nylons and war bonds and a pair of coveralls so she could work for the war effort, she wanted to join the army so she could be assigned to the commando unit and go out there into the field armed to the teeth and fight, fight, fight and kill, kill, kill.

What's more, she had the skills to do it, and the guts, as well.

She understood what had to be done, no matter how dirty of a job it was, it had to be done, these Nazis like criminal rats of humanity and their evil had to be wiped from the face of the Earth.

She understood it, Lucky Jim understood it, Eddie understood it, and Steve didn't like some of the methods he had to use, but he understood it, too.

Bucky was a brave, strong young man.

He was only two years younger than Eddie.

Why couldn't he understand?

Sometimes Steve thought about what would happen after the war.

But when he did, he often wondered what he would tell his family when he got home.

His mother and father were honest, decent, hard-working Irish immigrants, and although they were both gone, he came from a big family, a family of proud relatives, brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces who would want to hear all about what he'd done during the war.

What was he supposed to tell them?

That there was good in bad men, and bad in good men, that human beings were capable of evils that it seemed Satan himself could scarcely imagine, that sometimes a woman could be stronger, tougher and more courageous than a man, that the strong oppressed and destroyed the week with depressing regularity and that he would be fighting an uphill battle against that kind of evil for the rest of his life?

And how would he introduce his comrades at arms, his army buddies, a brutal and amoral young man struggling to channel his homicidal fury into his mission as a superhero and a mutant in his nineties with bone claws that sprung from his hands, the consummate soldier and the consummate loner, grappling eternally with the man and the animal that were constantly duking it out within him?

Well, he could just explain they were fellow Irishmen, couldn't he, and Eddie was from East New York, and now he lived in Bensonhurst.

That would do.

What about Bucky?

This is the boy I brought into Hell when he was only 14, it destroyed him by the time he was 18, I tried to protect him and failed and now I have to live with that failure for the rest of his life, he's my responsibility.

I'm sure they'd understand.

It's been a week since they returned.

They're all fine.

Hale and hearty and ready to go.

We've got Sergeant Kauffmann all outfitted, as soon as her uniform and her dog tags arrive, all I have to do is give the word and off they'll go.

And she and Eddie will sleep in the truck, drink together, sleep together, while Logan stands watch, outside.

And Bucky puts up a good front, but he's not the young man he was.

In a week or two he'll seem like he's back to normal, he'll have constructed sufficient defences to go on by then, but he won't be the same.

Never the same.

Like Logan said, he's done.

Finished.

"Steve?"

Bucky was sticking his head through the door; he looked worried.

"Jeez, Steve, I kept knocking, but you didn't say anything. Are you alright?"

"I was just thinking about some things."

"Well, Miss, er, Sergeant Kaufmann's uniform and her dog tags got here, and she and Eddie and Lucky Jim are itching to get back out there. They're waiting for your orders."

"Well, I can't let them down, can I? They've got places to go, and Nazis to shoot."

Bucky laughed a little.

"I'm OK, Steve. Really, I am."

"You're a good man, Bucky. Well, time to go do my job."