Cruel Summer

Chapter 21

A/N: Fine, I arrive to take pity on you but only because I'm about to head to class and I've got FINALS to work on kiddos. So here, I'm in a merciful mood and you can have a slight filler chapter with some interesting thoughts, Bucky perspective, and Sandra being an icon. Sandra and Meg? One of my favorite duos ever. As always, let me know what you think!

Chapter Text

October of 1943 should have been the happiest time of Meg's life. Should have been the time in which she was celebrating a marriage, that she got an actual marriage license, had a surrogate honeymoon, should have been basking in the presence of John Clarence Egan in every way, shape, and form.

This was not that.

When Robert Rosenthal came skidding back to Thorpe Abbotts, a singular plane all that was left of the Hundredth, Meg had felt sick. Felt sick because she didn't know what had become of Bucky, wouldn't know for at least several weeks. She had full faith that he had made it to the ground, but once he was on the ground—all bets were off. Because Meg had been in deep, she had seen the Nazi ideology and culture up close and personal.

And she knew the kind of scars that it could leave on people. Knew that by placing himself in the outfield, by going into the heart of Germany, she could lose him. She could lose him and it could entirely be her fault—because of who she was and the things that she had done.

Meg couldn't take the silence of the Hundredth. Couldn't begin to tell people that they couldn't just ship Bucky Egan's things home—because she was his wife and those things were all that she had of him. Couldn't even say that she was married to him. So she had told them to leave the locker there because as surely as Buck Cleven was coming home, so too was Bucky Egan. She was dead-set on the fact.

Maybe it was the fact that Meg was an international spy and some of these men had watched her decimate enemies. Maybe it was the fact that her father was the leading Colonel at the moment. Either way, no one wanted to argue with Meg about a single damn thing. So the locker stayed there, with all of the other lockers.

There was a feeling in her chest that was screaming at her. For opening her heart again, for allowing herself to be happy for such a short time and then to have it ripped away. But she just soldiered on. It was what she had to do. She didn't have a choice.

After all, Meg was a spy. She had work to do and subordinates to train. She had intelligence to collect and spies to implant all across Europe. She had to stay busy— it was the key to dealing with heartbreak. She had known that for years now. It had worked before and it would continue to work for her now.

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When Bucky had first landed in Westphalia Germany, absolutely clueless as to where he was, there had been a cruel part of his mind that thought this was God's punishment for leaving Meg. That because he had just given her up in order to save his best friend, to go after his men, surely this was a punishment.

The logical side of his brain told him that was stupid and this was just how his luck was going. He could no more control the outcome of what was to happen to him than he could control the weather. And so that first day, sitting in bushes and eating lettuce, he had felt sick to his stomach.

Meg's words sounded in his ears like some sort of rallying mantra. "You're going to need to be careful as hell over there. And if you get caught by the Gestapo, you don't give them shit. You get transferred to a camp and you keep your head down and you stay alive. And even if you're going to be a leader there, you keep yourself alive first. I've been to enough of them to know that mentality makes all of the difference. So you are coming back to me,"