Chapter Text
“Where are we?”
The asian man by the door turns his body Klaus’ way, giving him a considering look.
And look, Klaus knows he looks like shit. He’s still bloodied from his tango with the Masked Terrors, bruises on his bare torso from many-a gutshot, rope burns on his wrists and neck. Of course, to make everything blessedly worse, he’s wearing nothing but a stained towel, and it certainly doesn’t help matters.
Although it’s better than sitting barenaked on the stone floor.
“Austria, kid. We’re in a nazi base in Austria.”
Stranger things have happened, Klaus reasons. Sure, he has a time-traveling briefcase, but his brothers Luther, Diego, and Ben were a chimpanzee, fish, and an eldritch monster respectively, and because of this, few things surprise him anymore. Growing up, he’d learned how to effectively kill a man before breakfast, so nazis? Doesn’t scare him.
“Hey, uh, here.”
Klaus jumps at the greeting and turns to see one of the soldiers near him shrugging off his jacket. “It’s not much but it’s something,” the man mutters seemingly to himself as he extends it.
Klaus wants to argue, wants to deny the offering, but he’s cold as hell and this soldier is extremely attractive. “Thank you.”
The soldier stares with wide eyes as Klaus puts the jacket on.
“Klaus. My name is Klaus,” Klaus stammers, overwhelmed by the attention as he pulls the thick bomber jacket tighter around himself.
It’s ridiculous. He’s a grown-ass adult, but he’s still blushing like a schoolgirl because a pretty boy lent him his jacket.
“I’m Dave.” Dave looks him up and down slower than the previous guy did, this time lingering on the knife marks Klaus is attempting to hide. “They really got you good.”
Good, as if anything about this situation is good.
“Yeah,” Klaus confirms anyway.
The rope burns on his wrists hurt like hell, but it’s nothing compared to the neck wound. His interrogators had used a wire, and as much as Klaus had tried to imagine a jaunt in the sheets, there was nothing safe, sane, or consensual about that session. Now that he thinks about it, he could teach Cha Cha a thing or two about rope etiquette.
He could’ve taught Cha Cha a lot .
Hazel, though, Klaus saw potential in. Soft looking, a hidden soft spot, big enough to throw his weight around.
“You okay, Klaus?” Dave asks, bringing Klaus back to reality. Klaus had been scratching at the angry red lines under his chin, mindlessly ripping away what unblemished skin he’d had left. “Klaus!” Dave insists, but this time, he grabs Klaus’ hand.
When he pulls it away, Klaus’ fingertips are covered in blood. “I’m okay, sweetheart,” he says anyway, “just peachy keen. You wouldn’t happen to have the date, now would you?”
The casual response must’ve caught Dave off guard because he lets go of Klaus’ hand and stutters out the date.
“1943?” Klaus mutters to himself. The month and date are relatively normal, but the year? What the hell did he get into? At least the nazi comment makes more sense now.
Thankfully, Dave brushes Klaus’ confusion aside, because if he asks, Klaus would definitely tell the truth. “What troop are you with?”
“Troop? I’m not a part of any unit.”
“Oh, is it secret? Sorry.” Dave’s embarrassed face is incredibly cute.
Amused, Klaus shakes his head. “No, I’m not a soldier, spy, or anything.”
The embarrassment turns into shock quickly. “What do-”
“Look alive, boys, the Doc’s back,” the asian man interrupts in a harsh whisper as he makes his way to Klaus’ side to sit down.
Someone repeats the message to a man in a beret, who translates it into French and continues the chain. Klaus watches the message ripple through the holding cell, and the soldiers collectively sit a little straighter. The older soldiers seemed to move in front of the fresh-faced kids, British blue and French red and greys and greens filling the spaces. There is barely enough room to breathe, and yet, Klaus feels like everyone there wishes for more people to hide behind.
Someone dangerous is coming.
“Who--?” he starts to ask, but the asian man sends him a quieting glare, and although Klaus would never give any authority the same consideration, he shuts up quickly.
“You don’t wanna draw attention to yourself, Klaus,” Dave clarifies in a small whisper, “whoever’s gotten dragged away by the doctor doesn’t come back. They’re doing some crazy experiment or something, and they don’t care ‘bout the death toll.”
The doctor turns out to be a five-foot-something man with a deep scowl on his rat-like face. He’s wearing a blood-stained lab coat rolled up at the sleeves, the rest of his clothes hidden by the material that seems to dwarf him. As he walks down the hall of cages, voices die down until there’s a fragile silence.
The crowd simultaneously holds its breath.
Klaus doesn’t see anything particularly frightening about the doctor, although there’s a passing resemblance to Reginald Hargreeves in how the man holds himself.
Which is probably why--along with Klaus’ incredible stupidity--when the doctor points at Dave, Klaus stands up.
“Take me.”
~
The man tied up on the gurney beside Klaus won’t stop yelling.
“Sergeant James Barnes, serial number 3255-”
“-57038!” Klaus cuts him with a frustration that surprises even himself. “Yeah, yeah, we got it the first ten times!”
The other man stops, seemingly calming down at Klaus’ yell. “Sorry, you okay, kid?”
Klaus huffs. Damn, he is so far from okay that it isn’t even funny. He’d gone from an underwhelming torture session with two masked idiots that wanted to kill his twelve-year-old brother, to a nazi base in the mid-forties. He hadn’t gotten a second to recover, or even think about what to do next. And he thinks he just fell in love with a soldier fated to die before he’s even born.
Worse, though, even though he’d volunteered to save Dave, the doctor took both of them. Separated them immediately, throwing Dave into the lab and Klaus into what looked to be a holding room. If Dave died, Klaus doesn’t know what he would do.
“I keep getting asked that, Barnes. Is it my outfit or my demeanor?” Klaus quips in an attempt to fall back into his devil-may-care attitude. It isn’t easy.
Barnes is pretty smart, as he seems to catch on almost immediately. That, or Barnes has got the kinda joking suavity that Klaus prides himself on. “Oh, sweetheart, I’d never judge a man by his appearance. It’s your bracelets,” he responds, shaking his own cuffs.
“Fashionable, I guess, but I prefer this kinda thing in the privacy of my bedroom.”
Barnes gives a hearty, surprised laugh. “You’re a funny guy…”
“Klaus,” he fills in.
“Do you have a last name? Title?”
Klaus shakes his head, although he knows that Barnes can’t see him. “Ain’t a soldier, Sergeant Barnes, and I’m not a fan of my last name.”
Although Klaus is pretty sure Barnes is army, the man curses like a sailor. “A civilian? Goddamn Krauts! What the fuck is a civie doing this far behind enemy lines? And you’re American, right? Like the goddamn Geneva Convention is just a piece of paper!”
Somehow, a stranger getting angry over you is a happy feeling, Klaus discovers. No one cared when he was eight, strapping on a suit and jaunting off to the nearest bank robbery to watch Ben rip men apart, but someone cares now. Well, not about the bank robbery-filled childhood, but about Klaus’ wellbeing. “I’m actually Canadian, Barnesy-bear. The family’s in Ontario.”
“Canada, America, citizens are goddamn citizens!”
“Careful, there, Sergeant Barnes, or I might think you care.”
There’s silence for a moment before Barnes speaks again. “I do. This war, it’s bad enough that soldiers have to go through this kinda thing, but civilians are a whole ‘nother thing. You haven’t been trained for any of this.”
That gets a laugh out of Klaus. “You’d be surprised. My dear old dad was pretty much a drill sergeant himself, so I learned a thing or two.”
“There’s a difference between learning how to defend yourself and having to actually use it, especially when your life is at stake.”
Klaus considers telling this man that every moment learning how to defend himself, his life actually was at stake, that if he even breathed wrong, he would get a broken rib or bruised eye. He learned anti-torture techniques—the kind you learn through being tortured —before he was old enough to tie his own shoe. He was made to sleep in a coliseum, unfed for days on end, more than he’d ever slept in his own bed. Dear old dad didn’t do anything by half measures, and their father was preparing them for war.
“I guess,” Klaus says instead, because Umbrella Academy doesn’t exist yet, and child soldiers generally aren’t allowed to grow up.
“And for god’s sake, call me Bucky. You ain’t a Private or one of my men.”
“Bucky?” Now, that gets the amusement back in Klaus’ voice. “A nickname, I hope.”
Barnes—or Bucky, as he’s now—snorts. “My middle name’s Buchanan. My punk of a best friend couldn’t say ‘James’ when we were younger, so Bucky it was.”
“Aww,” Klaus draws, although he keeps the teasing short. There is real fondness (the kind that usually translates to unrequited love) in Bucky’s voice, and that kind of thing Klaus doesn’t mess with. “You must really like the guy if you put up with ‘Bucky’ all these years.”
“He’s my best friend,” Bucky says carefully, and Klaus suddenly remembers that gay is not okay in 1943. Not that it stops Klaus Hargreeves.
And he is really hoping to get to know that Dave guy after they escape the nazi base.
But Klaus gets that not wanting to be beaten to death for your sexuality is fair, so he changes the subject. “How long have you been here?”
“Two weeks or so, maybe. My troop got captured behind enemy lines, and this place seems to be where they throw POWs. How long have you been here?”
“A day, ish? I don’t know. It’s not my first stop, though.”
“Caught somewhere else and then transferred?” Bucky asks. “I wonder why they’d go through the effort, usually they either ransom civilian prisoners out or just ki-“ he cuts himself off abruptly, but Klaus could see where he was going with it. They kill civilians.
He’d like to explain that his ‘first stop’ wasn’t a nazi holding cell, only the hotel room of two time-traveling wackjobs, but he gets the feeling that it wouldn’t go over well with Bucky. “Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t want to let go of me and my devilish good looks.”
As if constantly surprised by Klaus’ sense of humor, Bucky snorts a laugh again. He tilts his head Klaus’ way, giving Klaus a good view of his profile. “I can’t exactly see you, but you sound a swell enough fella. So maybe.”
“You’re definitely missing out, Bucky-poo, because I am an incredible sight.”
Their laughter echoes through the holding room for a solid minute, the brief joy lifting a weight off his chest.
Just for that weight to come slamming back down at the opening of the door. “Sergeant Barnes,” a sharp German voice calls as a couple of guards enter the room.
“Sergeant James Barnes, serial number 32557038,” Bucky picks up again, “and that’s all you or your mad scientists are going to get from me.”
The response is immediate and jolly. “We’ll see, Sergeant Barnes!”
A guard on each side of Bucky’s gurney, and they start to wheel him away.
“Well, it was lovely to meet you, Barnes. See you later at tea time?” Klaus calls because, obviously.
“‘Course, Klaus,” Bucky calls back, “save me a scone!”
~
Klaus has never been more thankful for a fight in his life than in this moment.
The explosions had worried him, worried him as much as the screams and gunshots had five seconds earlier. But it had all been one-way, so when a group of soldiers burst into the room and cut him out of his restraints, he was relieved to not be hearing a massacre.
Someone tosses him a pistol and a pair of pants, and it’s on.