December 2014.

Copenhagen, Denmark.

The city turned to snow as soon as December arrived. It had held off for nearly a month, but then one morning the river was frozen and covered in snow. Our native Danish neighbors had been prepared, but Bucky and I had to borrow a couple coats and an electric kettle. The cold air was more of a challenge than the actual snow, which never got deeper than our ankles. We both went to work; Bucky lifting things and me waiting tables.

He worked more than I did, as if it was his new mission. Restaurants were only open when people wanted to eat, and tourists ate in very predictable patterns. Ports, on the other hand, were open well into the night. It was rare that Bucky made it back to our apartment before I did, but sometimes it happened. I was always surprised when I got the chance to catch him in a domestic state.

Once I had found him washing our collective laundry in the kitchen sink. Another time he had been on his hands and knees with his cheek pressed against the floorboards to look under the bed for a missing sock. There had also been his return from a grocery run, complete with a gallon of milk ("Why are there so many types of milk? It all comes from a cow."), four kinds of cheese ("We ate cheddar. Mozzarella was for the Italians. I don't even know how to pronounce gouda."), and not a single potato ("You can buy all the potatoes you want. I won't.").

Then I got the best surprise, better than anything I had witnessed before. Christmas had infected the city, and it seemed to have infected Bucky as well.

My key was turning in the lock before I realized I had forgotten to use our coded knock. The door opened, and I went inside fully prepared to face an armed and anxious Bucky. Instead, the radio was playing Christmas music. I closed the door softly behind me and found Bucky sitting on the edge of the bed, facing the window, and writing in a notebook. None of that was strange. He wrote a little less frequently now, but he still wrote. The surprise was him singing.

He was barely louder than the radio. His voice, low and timbered, carried across the small room easily.

"I'll be home for Christmas, you can plan on me," he sang. "Please have snow and mistletoe and presents on the tree."

It floored me. I had never heard him sing. Never in the shower. Never while doing some menial. Never anything more than a barely audible hum. And yet, here he was. Singing the saddest Christmas song I could think of.

"Christmas Eve will find me where the lovelight gleams. I'll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams."

I laid my coat over the arm of the couch with as much noise as possible. Bucky didn't startle, but he did look over his shoulder at me and put away his notebook. Our room was small. Less than twenty feet from each wall to its opposite. At the distance from door to bed I could tell his eyes and cheeks were red.

"I'd always get that song stuck in my head," I said quietly. I didn't mean to sound as hoarse as I did. "The radio stations on base would play it three, four times an hour. Like they were rubbing it in that we were still stuck on base."

"I remember when this song came out," Bucky added. I knew from a short-lived stint in a military trivia league when the song came out. 1943. "It was after Steve had gotten us out of the POW factory. I've never seen so many grown men cry as I did the first time we all heard that song."

I crossed the room and sat at the foot of the bed. I could see out the window if I turned my head, and I could see Bucky if I damn near broke my neck.

"Lots of them had wives and kids back home. Or parents. I had my brother and sisters, but Rebecca was married, Helen was in the Army Nurse Corps, And Tommy was trying to enlist," Bucky listed off.

"When did you remember all that?" I asked.

"Just now. That was the first time I had heard that song since I-since I fell off the train. Brought it all back," he answered. "I haven't gotten around to writing it down yet."

"I'll leave you to it then," I announced. I stood up quickly and found some way to busy myself while he went back to writing. Luckily, the radio station began to play something that sounded like Danish "Jingle Bells."

~

A week later he beat me home again. This time I remembered to knock, and he met my gaze guiltily, like a kid with his hand stuck in the cookie jar.

"Buck, what is that?" I asked, cutting my eyes away from him and two feet to the left.

"That's a Christmas tree, Gail," he answered. Sure enough, there was a two-foot tall pine tree sitting on what passed for a coffee table. There was also a string of popcorn woven around the branches and an aluminum foil star perched on top.

"Why do we have a Christmas tree? When did you get this?" I followed up.

"I picked it up on the way home from the docks. People are selling them left and right, and I wanted one," he told me. "Figured we could use a little Christmas cheer."

"So, you bought a Christmas tree, strung up popcorn, and made a star. What? No ornaments?" I teased. As if to prove me wrong, he held up a paper snowflake a few inches in diameter. Upon further inspection, there were paper scraps and a pocket knife on the floor.

I was slack-jawed. I knelt in the floor next to him and picked another piece of paper, not yet folded or cut into snow. The paper was in a variety of colors, mostly pastels.

"Are these fliers?" I asked. Bucky nodded next to me. I sat the paper down and noticed scratch marks in the wooden floor. I continued to watch my sometimes clueless roommate pin a folded piece of paper against the floor and use the point of his pocket knife to cut little bits and pieces out. Once finished he unfolded the snowflake and showed it to me for inspection.

"I'm really glad we didn't have to pay a damage deposit, or else we'd never get it back," I said, rubbing my fingers over the new scratches in the floor. "Besides that, our Christmas tree looks pretty good."

"Our tree?" Bucky challenged. He didn't even look at me. He was too focused on arranging the half a dozen paper snowflakes he'd already made.

"Fine, your tree looks pretty good."