𝐁𝐄𝐓𝐓𝐘'𝐒 𝐁𝐀𝐁𝐘 𝐁𝐋𝐔𝐄𝐒

༻ ❁ ༺
 

  
February 13th, 1943

          RETURNING TO CAMP was always its own controlled kind of chaos, one that Bucky was surprised to find himself becoming accustomed to. 

It wasn't something he expected to happen when he left New York, but it appeared to be occurring nonetheless. He wasn't sure how he felt about that as he walked through the trampled grass towards the field hospital.

This was a more sophisticated setup than he expected them to create in the middle of nowhere, Italy, but he figured they'd learned a thing or two since the war twenty-five years ago.

Unfortunately, it was not enough to prevent history repeating itself.

The Great War. The War to End All Wars.

If only.

Perhaps it was mainly because the British with whom they shared the camp had been here for years before his country decided they couldn't bear it any longer. They'd left an indelible mark on the design.

They'd taken over most of the best flat terrain for their barracks, and the British Nursing Sisters dominated the infirmary with an iron fist, and he thought their baby blue dresses and wimples were quite lovely. The American nurses, with their small caps and plain white uniforms, lacked the same allure.

Bucky fully credited the charm of the British nurses for the affection his company had for 'Betty's Baby Blues', as the soldiers had nicknamed it. 

He strolled by the pharmacy tent and the operating theatre, pausing briefly to take in the aromas drifting from the kitchen tent (he'd be stopping there later), and then continuing on to the receiving tent. He wasn't seriously hurt — at least not in his opinion — but they needed a record of his location in case someone came seeking for him.

Nothing was broken, and he wasn't missing any body parts, so he was taken to the Minor Injuries ward, as he had expected.

And walked into the tent just in time to see one of the nurses nearly walk into one of the tent poles.

Bucky bit his lip, fighting back a laugh. And lost the battle entirely as another of the ward nurses made their way towards him, shaking her head.

"This kind of thing happen a lot?" He asked, nodding towards the young woman who'd almost clocked herself on the post. 

She was short, certainly smaller than the lean ward nurse in front of him, and decked out in one of the blue uniforms of the English nursing sisters. Her hair was brown from what he could see, tucked up under a crisp white wimple.

The ward matron glanced back, then shook her head again with a small smile. "Alice is a sweet one. Eager beaver, good with patients, but well... bit of a clodhopper at times." She turned back to him. "You been seen to, shug?"

"No, ma'am."

"Then why don't you head on over, take bed twelve." The matron pointed to the little numbers on the foot of each cot. "We'll get you seen to in a jiff."

Bucky smiled to himself and followed the instructions. As it turned out, bed twelve was exactly behind where Alice was working. She must have been preoccupied because she didn't appear to notice him approaching.

He took a step behind her, fighting a faint chuckle as he followed her gaze. It was aimed at a lovely blonde nurse he remembered from a prior visit to the unit. "Was it Martha bending over?"

The young woman jumped, nearly stumbling over her armload of sheets. "What?" As she whirled on him, holding the covers to her chest, her voice came out in a terrified squeal. "What? No. No, why would I be staring at Martha?"

Cute, blonde, looked great in her uniform. Who wouldn't want to look at Martha? Although Miss Looky-loo wasn't too bad herself. Plus, she obviously had excellent taste. "I like you," Bucky decided. "You're my favourite nurse now."

If possible, her already flaming face burned even darker. "Um... thank you?" She cleared her throat, brushed an errant lock of light brown hair behind one ear. "So, um... do you need something or were you just here to see if you could make a poor innocent girl -- who was totally not watching any pretty blonde nurses bend over, by the way -- drop things?"

He smiled at her, looking a little sheepish himself.

As he spoke, he tugged his shirt from his trousers' belt, exposing flawless abs and blood-smeared skin. "More like grazed? I'll be fine if you could just lend me some gauze or something."

"What -- oh my god!" The colour that had risen in her face drained immediately. "Oh my god."

When he noticed her swaying on her feet, his amusement quickly turned to concern. "Woah, easy there, doll. Let's sit you down for a second."

Alice took a step back and shook her head to clear her thoughts. You'd think that after two years on the front lines, she'd be used to seeing these kinds of injuries. Her terrible luck was that she had never grown accustomed to seeing blood and pain.

"You've been shot. Sit here, I'm going to clean you up. I can have a seat when I'm finished." She set him on the cot before stepping briskly away from the sheets she was carrying and gathering the materials she required.

She reappeared a few moments later, carrying a tray full of gauze, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and other essentials. She placed the tray on the small bedside table before moving her gaze to him. "Okay, soldier. Off with the shirt. Let's get you patched up."

He complied, not exactly opposed to the way her beautifully unique eyes flicked over his chest with each undone button. He seemed almost captivated by the unusual hue of the outer blue rim bending into the hazel centre.

Alice told him to sit back so she could have a closer look at the wound, forcing her thoughts back to work. His original judgment seems to be basically accurate. It had been a graze. It was, however, a bad one.

"Looks like you got lucky," she commented. "Few more millimetres and you'd be needing more than just a couple stitches."

"James."

"Pardon?"

"My name. It's James. Friends call me Bucky."

She gave him a quick glance as she gathered a cloth to wipe his wound. "You move fast. We've only known each other about five minutes."

"And in that time, you've managed to get me out of my shirt. I think that makes us friends."

Alice chuckled. "Charmer. See if you're feeling so friendly after I clean this out." She passed him a worn strap of leather. "Just in case. This is going to hurt."

"Not my first time, doll," he assured her. "I can take it."

"If you say so, hun." She was not surprised at the curse he bit out as she laid the peroxide-soaked cloth over the bullet graze. "Deep breaths."

"You know -- I think the cleaning hurts worse than actually being shot," he commented through gritted teeth.

"I'll take your word for it. But better than losing a nice boy like you to a nasty infection." Alice set down the cloth and picked up the needle and thread, satisfied that the wound was as clean as she could make it. "This part's not going to be any more fun."

"Wouldn't mind a distraction, if you're offering."

"Now that depends on what kind of distraction you're looking for," she replied. "You mentioned Martha earlier. If you're here fishing, you're not the first to try for her."

"Martha's sweet," Bucky agreed. "We've shared a drink a time or two. But if I was fishing, I don't think I'm using the right bait."

Unsure of how to respond to that, Alice elected to stay silent as she prepared the needle. "Ready?"

He nodded. "About that distraction -- how'd someone like you end up in a place like this?"

"Well, you see, these terrible group of people known as Nazis seized power in Germany and began murdering civilians and invading other nations —"

"No shit, doll. I hadn't noticed."

"Need I remind you that there are ladies present, Sergeant? You might scare them away if you don't mind your language."

He burst out laughing at that. "I'm guessing you're a newbie. The girls here have taught me more about cussing than the boys back in camp."

That didn't come as a surprise to her. She'd had a thorough education in the various inventive ways in which curse words could be put together during her time in Italy.

"And I think my language is perfectly acceptable for when someone is stabbing me repeatedly." Bucky said, glaring at the waiting needle.

Alice scoffed and smiled, and relaxed a little more."I haven't even started the stabbing yet. And I brought the strap if you needed something to bite down on."

"For a little scratch like this?" Bucky flexed, immediately regretting the decision, as it sent a shooting pain up his side.

Alice rolled her eyes. Fragile masculine pride would be the death of one of them. "Open your mouth, Sergeant."

Bucky plucked the strap from her fingers and waved it at her, amusingly. He wasn't about to squander a good flirting session for a minor annoyance like crippling pain. "At least buy me dinner first, doll."

Her cheeks heated again, but she met his gaze evenly this time. "I'm sure we can get some good recommendations for Italian somewhere near here."

He laughed again. "That was terrible. I love it. Maybe afterwards we'll go out dancing."

"If you can keep up," She teased. There wouldn't be dancing. There was never actually dancing.

"And you said I move fast. I like a woman who knows what she wants." He winked. Girls always liked it when he winked.

"And I like a man who knows how to follow orders. Now stay still." She said firmly, hand steady as she set to work stitching the wound.

"Shit," Bucky snarled, clenching his teeth and aiming his attention to the tent's peak. After all, he could have used the strap. "A girl after my own heart,"

As long as he didn't find out she was all talk. He wasn't the first GI to respond to pain with flirtation. It never meant anything, and she didn't mind playing the game if it distracted them from their wounds. However, she would have loved it more if she had been in a different situation.

"Really, though." Bucky was talking to keep himself distracted now, it was only kind of working. "You're more...sensitive, than most of the other girls here."

"Sensitive," she chuckled. "Yeah, you could say that. I'll tell you, being on the front was not my first choice. War broke out. Dad enlisted." He would have been forced to, she thought, if he hadn't chosen himself. And, for the millionth time, she wondered how much of his choice to leave had been influenced by his wife's urging.

"Mama and Susan, my sister, stayed back home, teaching. I applied to work in one of France's rehab centers. The next thing I know, I'm on a plane to Italy, and all the French I'd been learning isn't proving to be as useful as I had hoped."

At the very least, he knew what to say, and eliciting the appropriate sentence from his thoughts took enough focus to get him through another two stitches.

"L'italiano non è poi così diverso." (Italian is not all that different)

Alice looked up at him in surprise. "You speak Italian?"

He shrugged, another bad idea according to his side. "Enough to order dinner and talk my way out of a fight. Brooklyn's like that."

She returned her focus to her task, steadfastly avoiding those glittering eyes. "Then I'll let you order dinner, since the amount of Italian I've picked up here could get us kicked out of every nice restaurant in the country."

"I don't know if that's a comment on your accent or the quality of your teachers."

"I'll let you draw your own conclusions given that most of the Italian I learnt here was while folks were getting stitches or having bullets taken out of them."

"And how many of them have talked you into dinner?" Bucky wasn't opposed to a little friendly rivalry, but he wanted to know who he was up against. For a woman like her, there was bound to be a long line of suitors.

"That have actually followed through? Well there's one that's making some decent progress. Long as he's not a dead hooper, he may be a keeper."

So, she liked to dance. He could work with that.

"Pretty blonde? You feel like the type that would go for pretty blondes. If it's Hodge, you should drop him. Guys a tool. You can do better."

Alice's brow furrowed in distaste. "Ugh. That pig. Certainly not. I'd rather have a partner with more than two brain cells to rub together, who doesn't make me want to deck him at every turn. No. I do like pretty blondes, but right now I'm drawn to handsome brunettes with eyes as blue as the summer sky."

She finished stitching and tied and clipped the thread before returning the needle and scissors to their tray.

"Damn, she's a poet too. Someone get me out of here before I embarrass myself even more." Bucky smiled and leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. Just for this chat, the agony in his side was worth it.

Alice burst out laughing. "You haven't walked into a tent pole yet, so I'd say you're safe for the time being." She wiped the wound down again before reaching for the roll of new bandages to cover it.

As she applied the dressing, Bucky was quite sure she spent more time staring at his muscles than she needed to. He didn't mind at all. Especially since she reddened so attractively when he caught her.

Finally, she slipped the bandage's end under her arm and took a step back to assess her job. And perhaps a better view of the rest of him. She was only human after all.

Bucky smirked. She was definitely getting an eyeful. "Can I put my shirt back on now?"

Alice cleared her throat. He'd caught her. "For purely professional reasons, I'm going to say 'no'."

"Purely professional, huh?" Bucky cocked his brow.

"Go grab a clean shirt so your bandages don't get contaminated."

Damn. Bucky thought. That smile is more lethal than any weapon on the battlefield.

Alice wasn't the kind to seek out trouble, but Bucky was the kind of trouble she wouldn't mind getting herself into.

Gwen was not going to approve.