Work Text:
Bucky has nightmares, sometimes.
He doesn’t say anything, but Sam knows it’s been a bad night when Bucky stumbles downstairs in the morning, red circles ringing his eyes and hair mussed up like he’s spent all night tossing and turning.
Sam will hand him a coffee, a strong one, and Bucky will take it wordlessly and drink it while looking out the window.
They don’t really talk about it.
It’s one in the morning, and Sam can hear Bucky thrashing around in his bed. He stares up at the ceiling, watching the lights of the nearby cars reflect, listening to the wind howl outside.
He shifts to one side, puts a pillow over his uncovered ear, and closes his eyes tightly. Maybe then, he can go to sleep.
In all honesty, he’s trying his hardest not to get up and go to Bucky. He’s not exactly sure what he’d do once he got there—give him a bro hug? Stuff a pillow in his face so they’d both finally get some sleep?
He pauses as he hears the door creak open. A part of his heart that still belongs to the war skips a beat and he has to remind himself that it’s just Bucky.
There’s footsteps, coming to his bed. Sam’s not sure whether he should get up (what would he say?) or pretend he’s still asleep.
Before he can decide, he feels the bed dip and creak as Bucky climbs in, muttering a soft swear as he collapses to his left, behind his back.
There’s a stillness, a tension.
And maybe if it wasn’t one am, maybe if Sam didn’t know what it was like to have nightmares, maybe if he wasn’t secretly fighting down a feeling he couldn’t quite explain, he would have left the tension for the morning, let Bucky shoulder whatever weirdness he’s introduced into their (still tentative, still cautious) friendship.
But Sam is tired, Sam is a soldier, Sam feels something growing in his chest.
He shifts over. He didn’t think it was possible for Bucky to be any stiller, but he can almost feel him tense up beside him. Feel him waiting for the witty joke or the concerned question or some sort of acknowledgement.
Sam lets Bucky know that he is there, he is with him, but he doesn’t push it. Doesn’t glance in Bucky’s direction. Just keeps his eyes shut and lets himself slip into sleep.
Bucky is gone the next morning. When he comes down for breakfast, Sam offers him a coffee, and Bucky takes it warily. And Sam thinks that was that.
And then the next night, Bucky comes again. Apparently he’s interpreted Sam’s reaction as an invitation. Not that Sam’s protesting—but when he and Bucky became roommates, he was expecting to share a coffee over the news, maybe visit some national monuments together. He wasn’t really expecting to be sleeping next to a super soldier.
During the night, Bucky begins to cry. Sam wakes up to his muffled sobs, and he sees that Bucky is somewhere between awake and asleep, wholly unguarded.
Maybe the thing that confuses him most about the… situation isn’t the fact that Bucky is voluntarily sleeping in his bed at night. It’s that Bucky trusts him enough to show weakness around him. Bucky likes thousand-yard stares, grimaces, frowns. Sam’s never seen him cry.
Sam, very slowly, slides his hand towards Bucky’s. His sobs stifle as Sam’s pinky brushes Bucky’s, gently. Sam isn’t sure if he’s crossed a line. He feels like maybe these past two nights have decimated the line.
And then Bucky curls his pinky around Sam’s, so carefully, like it’s a trigger.
The next morning, they still don’t talk about it.
And that night, Bucky doesn’t even go to his room first. He goes to Sam’s.
They lie next to each other, and somewhere in the night their fingers tangle together. Bucky doesn’t have nightmares that night.
(And this feels like the start of something new, of something complicated, but not necessarily something Sam’s afraid of.)