Chapter Text
Sam was sitting on an airplane, Bucky was fast asleep on his shoulder, and he was starting to panic.
He and Bucky were on a commercial airline, returning from a mission in Russia. Everything had gone fine - they were tired and sore, but no worse for the wear aside from that, and they had a few more bad guys under their belt than they had before. But the already long mission had somehow gotten longer, and now they'd been away from home for weeks. All Sam wanted to do was crawl into his bed, sling an arm across Bucky's chest, and sleep for the next fifteen hours.
He'd known their plane was going to land in the middle of their very long flight, but it was supposed to land and then some of the people were supposed to get off and some of the people were supposed to stay on (Sam and Bucky included), and then it was supposed to take off again and fly Sam and Bucky home. It was supposed to be a direct flight. Sam had paid extra for a direct flight.
But now, the flight attendants were coming around to tell everyone that they were in Romania (?), and there was a problem with the plane, and everyone would need to disembark to catch their new connecting flights. Sam and Bucky included.
This might have been an inconvenience for a normal person, but it was a big problem for Sam. The reason being that Bucky had taken basically the equivalent of a horse tranquilizer about four hours previously, and Sam wasn't even sure he would be able to get him to wake up, let alone wander around an airport looking for their connecting flight.
When Steve had first come out of the ice, SHIELD had spent some time developing a full panel of medications that would work on his Super Soldier body - antibiotics, painkillers, anesthesia, etc. Thankfully, all these medications worked on Bucky too, who seemed to get injured a lot more than Steve ever had and gotten a lot more use out of them. The sleeping pills, basically a super high-powered version of Ambien, with a hell of a lot more side effects, had probably only ever been used by Bucky.
While Sam and Bucky took military transport instead of commercial flights more often than not, they had flown commercial enough to know that these flights were hard on Bucky. He was good at hiding it, but Sam knew he was still terrified of falling. Heights made him nervous on a good day, and turbulence could make him panic. The Super Soldier serum didn't prevent motion sickness, as it turned out, and the strange smells and loud sounds and close rush of people were a lot for Bucky to handle, especially after an exhausting mission.
Somehow, Bucky also made long flights just as terrible for everyone he was around. The panicking was almost better - it at least got them sympathy. But this was interspersed with bouts of sickness, which quickly outstayed its welcome, and periods of outright hostility. No one wanted Bucky prowling up and down the aisles like a caged animal, recoiling at anyone who got too close and yelling if anyone tried to offer help.
They'd discovered a long time ago, before they were married, that the best thing to do was get a direct flight, no matter how long they had to sit in the same spot or how much it cost, and have Bucky pop one of the super-Ambiens right before the plane took off. He would knock out on Sam's shoulder for the duration of the flight, and awaken a little woozy but docile and calm when they arrived home. It was a system they'd perfected over the years, and they hadn't run into a problem yet. It required a few minor annoyances, but on the whole, it was a huge improvement over the way things had been before. Bucky could deal with shaking off the aftereffects of the sleeping pill while Sam maneuvered him through baggage claim and a taxi ride home, and Sam could deal with going without sleep himself as his deadweight husband drooled on his shoulder for hours on end.
Of course, those problems only appeared minor when they were at the other end of the journey, not stranded halfway in Romania. Sam scrubbed a hand across his exhausted eyes, looking up towards the front of the plane. All around them, people were standing, reaching for bags and beginning to file into the aisles. It wasn't a horrible practical joke then, as Sam had half been hoping. He was really going to have to get Bucky to wake up.
Sam reached across his chest with his right hand. His left arm was pinned beneath Bucky's full weight, and it was essentially useless by this point. Earlier in the flight, Sam had tried to move Bucky against the window, desperate to catch even just twenty or thirty minutes of sleep. Bucky had stayed where he was for almost five whole minutes before the combination of a patch of turbulence and Bucky's natural inclination Samwards had pitched Bucky back to his preferred spot against Sam's shoulder. After that, Sam had given up trying to move him.
"Hey. Hey, Buck, time to wake up," Sam said gently, his voice pitched low. This was partially to avoid startling Bucky, but also to avoid detection as far as they reasonably could. The recent mission hadn't been secret, but S.H.I.E.L.D. didn't want the average Russian citizen knowing that Captain America and the Winter Soldier had been in the country, either. Sam and Bucky weren't exactly undercover, but Sam would sure prefer them not to be recognized.
Unfortunately, Sam's quiet, subtle attempts to wake his husband were proving completely unsuccessful. The best he got was Bucky shifting slightly, letting out a quiet snore.
"Bucky, come on," Sam pleaded, shaking Bucky a bit more aggressively. "You gotta wake up."
Bucky's head flopped back and forth against Sam's shoulder, and he let out a soft, displeased murmur.
"Yeah, that's good, but you gotta open your eyes, too," Sam told him, shaking him again.
"Excuse me? Sir?"
Sam turned to see one of the flight attendants, the one who'd brought him a cup of tea midway through the flight and seemed to speak near perfect English. She'd asked if Bucky wanted anything, and Sam had kept it simple and told her he didn't love flying, and he'd taken an Ambien. She'd been sympathetic, and Sam was now very glad that at least one of the staff on the flight knew that Bucky wasn't drunk, or sick, or anything concerning, but that he still might be about to cause a few problems.
"I'm so sorry," Sam said quickly, before she could say anything. Desperately, he gave Bucky another futile shake. "We really didn't expect to need to get off, I've been trying to wake him up-"
"I was just going to say, if you wanted to get off the plane last and give him more time to wake up, we can tell the passengers seated behind you to go on ahead."
Sam blinked. "Oh. That...that would be great, actually. Thank you. Really, thanks so much."
"Of course," she said warmly, waving some kind of go-ahead to her coworker in the next section of the plane. "I hope he feels better."
She left, and Sam turned his attention back to Bucky. He was grateful to have a little extra time on the plane, because it was clear that Bucky was going absolutely nowhere fast. Sam jostled Bucky's shoulder again, and there was a dull but embarrassing thud as his opposite arm, the metal one, hit the armrest on the other side.
"I'm not letting you go back to sleep," Sam informed him. "Not until we're on the next flight."
Bucky muttered something that sounded angry. Sam was starting to feel a little desperate. He had learned the hard way that he couldn't demand that Bucky do anything, ever. It came out too close to an order, which was too close to HYDRA. It was just as likely to trigger Bucky as not. But it meant that, especially in situations like now, when Bucky was out of it and didn't have the mental reserves he normally did, Sam had to be careful to phrase things as requests and suggestions, so he didn't throw Bucky back into a place he was unable to pull out of.
"Come on," Sam pleaded. "Just open your eyes. Please."
Finally, finally, Bucky's eyes slid open. They were glassy and reddish, pupils blown wide, but he managed to focus on Sam.
"We home?" he whispered.
"Not quite," Sam said. "We need to get off the plane. Change gates. There's some sort of...problem with this one."
Bucky's eyes started to drift closed, and his head tilted forward.
"Hey, hey," Sam said, grabbing his shoulder again. "Stay with me. We're gonna have to move, remember? I know you're tired, but we need to get to our new gate, and I can't carry you."
Bucky got his eyes open. Sam couldn't tell if he was tracking. Sam had never actually seen Bucky like this - the super strength sleeping pills were something he only took if he knew he could get eight to ten hours of uninterrupted sleep. Sam had never tried to wake him up and get him to respond through the drugs before. Did he just need a few minutes to get his bearings? Was he going to pass out as soon as he tried to stand?
Most of the drugs they'd developed for Steve came loaded with more side effects, a byproduct of the fact that they were effective even with a Super Soldier's metabolism. Sam wasn't completely sure what the side effects of this particular sleeping pill were, since Bucky obviously usually slept through them, but he knew from a few nasty experiences with Bucky on painkillers that nausea and hallucinations were definitely on the table. Sam grimaced.
Sam looked around the plane. Pretty much everyone was gone. Sam stood, and tugged gently on Bucky's wrist. "Come on, time to get up," he said.
Bucky's eyes slid up to Sam's face. "We goin' somewhere?"
Sam closed his eyes softly. "Yeah, Buck. We're going to our new gate, remember? There's something wrong with the plane."
Bucky sighed softly, and started slowly and laboriously trying to push himself to his feet. Sam abruptly realized that, secrecy of the mission aside, this would not be a very good look for Captain America and his husband if the press got ahold of it. He dug through Bucky's bag with one hand, while still holding onto Bucky with the other, and came up with a baseball cap. It would hide Bucky's face, at least. He plunked it on Bucky's head, and Bucky didn't seem to notice. Then he pulled out a pair of glasses for himself.
As soon as Bucky was on his feet, he pitched to the side. "Whoa," he said softly, eyes sliding shut as his hand reached out for nothing.
"Oh, man." Sam steadied him gently, keeping a hand on the small of Bucky's back as he struggled to find his balance. "You good?"
It was then that he realized Bucky had gone pale, and was swallowing convulsively.
"Shit, shit, shit," Sam whispered. "Bucky, are you gonna puke?"
"Mmm," Bucky hummed, which wasn't really an answer. But after a few seconds, he seemed to have sorted himself out, at least for the time being. Sam watched carefully as a bit of color found its way back into his face, and Bucky stopped swallowing so heavily.
"Okay," Sam said, propping Bucky against the seat and reaching up for their shared duffle bag with a grimace as his aching back and shoulders protested. "Ready to go?"
Bucky watched hazily as Sam struggled to pull down the bags out of the overhead compartment. He blinked, fairly sure that he should be doing something, but it was awfully hard just to remain upright with his eyes open. He felt groggy and confused, and everything felt slowed down. Both moving and thinking was harder, like both he and his thoughts were wading through syrup.
He didn't think this was normal. He'd taken sleeping pills before, and they'd never made him feel like this. At least, he didn't think they had. This didn't seem like a feeling he'd want to have again.
"Bucky. Buck?"
Bucky blinked a few times, and Sam was in front of him, peering into his eyes. Bucky got the feeling that Sam had been saying his name for a while, and he just hadn't realized.
"Yep," Bucky mumbled. Talking was hard too, his tongue felt thick and heavy, stumbling around the few words Bucky could force through his sludgy brain.
"-leave the plane now. Hey, can you hear me?" Sam sounded worried, at least the tail end of the sentence that Bucky had heard sounded worried.
"Leavin' the plane," Bucky parroted obediently. Leaving the plane, that...that sounded hard. He blinked towards the far end of the plane, staring until the dizzy swirls resolved themselves into an image that made sense.
Sam's hand closed around his, and then they were walking. That was the hardest yet, and Bucky couldn't stop his boots from catching on the plane carpet, lightly tripping him up and causing him to bounce against opposite sides of the aisle like a pinball in the arcades Sam liked.
"Oh, no, I'm good, really. Please, I couldn't ask you to-"
Even drugged half out of his mind, Bucky recognized Sam's "I'm mortified for causing a public nuisance" voice. It was easy enough for him to pick out, probably because Bucky was frequently the public nuisance in question.
Blearily, he looked up to find Sam fighting to extricate the duffle bag from where it was stuck against a row of seats, blocking the aisle. Sam's shoulders were slumped, a sure signal of embarrassment. A flight attendant hovered in front of him, trying to take the bag out of his hands. Sam let her, his still-tense shoulders slumping a bit further.
Finally, Bucky's overtaxed, exhausted brain reminded him that Sam wasn't a Super Soldier, and he spent every mission flying. Even the least taxing missions left his arms and shoulders brutally stiff and sore, and usually (even around the leftover wooziness), Bucky would at least carry his own bag in an effort to spare Sam the extra weight.
Bucky stared at his hands, one of which was being held tightly by Sam and one of which was empty. Both of them seemed oddly detached from him. He watched his vibranium hand open and close with vague fascination, coming to the slow conclusion that he wasn't going to be helping Sam with the luggage anytime soon.
"-so sorry," Sam was saying, ahead of him. "Thanks for all of your help, again. Umm, sorry for all the trouble."
"It's no trouble sir, really, we just want to help if there's anything we can do-"
Bucky took a few more steps forward. He realized he had stopped walking when he felt Sam tugging on his arm. "Come on," he said, sounding desperate. "We're not even off the plane yet, you gotta keep walking, Buck-"
And then some time went by, and Bucky was off the plane. He was standing in the airport, and the lights and colors and sounds and smells were enough to make him feel like he was going insane. He was decidedly queasy, but he decided not to mention that. It would go away, just like this weird dizziness, as his body continued to metabolize the pill.
"Just stand here for a second," Sam said. "I need to figure out our next gate."
That turned out to be a taller ask than Bucky thought Sam had expected. As soon as he started concentrating too much, his legs threatened to spill him. He swayed alarmingly, or maybe it was the ground that was swaying underneath him, and Sam caught him around the waist to hold him up.
Bucky forced his eyes to focus on the board of flights in front of him. Some of the words didn't look like English words, and Bucky had a second of panic that maybe he was so high he couldn't read anymore. Then, those words slowly rearranged themselves into Romanian words, and he realized he did know their meanings. But why was there Romanian in an American airport?
And then, a few things that Sam had said slowly filtered through his brain. Sam had said "I need to figure out our next gate," not "we're going to leave now and go home." And that, coupled with the Romanian...it honestly seemed like a pretty bad sign.
It took Bucky a long time to get the words to go from inside his brain to out of his mouth. But finally he managed, "Are we home?"
Sam turned to him, and he looked very sad - another bad sign. "We're in Romania. We had to get off the plane, and now we have to find our new gate."
"Oh," Bucky said sadly. He really didn't feel so good, and trying to find a new gate sounded much less enjoyable than being in his bed.
Sam might have said some more things to him - it was hard to tell. Eventually, he told them they were going to start walking towards their gate, and then they started walking. Sam held one of Bucky's hands again, which Bucky was grateful for. He was seeing double, and he thought if he had to navigate by simply following Sam, he may end up following the wrong one.
They had been walking for at least ten minutes when Bucky realized that they were still definitively not home. In fact, they weren't even in a cab. They didn't even seem to have called a cab - they were still in the airport.
"We goin' home?" Bucky asked, tugging on Sam's hand.
Sam sighed. "No, B, we're going to a new gate. We're in Romania still."
B was what Sam called him when they were trying not to draw attention to themselves. "Bucky" drew attention to them, apparently. If Sam was calling him B, it meant they were trying to be undercover. Bucky could remember that, he thought. He could follow Sam, and he could be undercover, and Sam would sort out all the rest.
Sam blinked desperately at the arrivals and departures board, which was written almost exclusively in Romanian. He'd managed to find their new gate through a combination of locating their flight number and a little guesswork. They were in the section of C gates, and of course, their new gate was in the A section. Sam sighed, tugging on Bucky's hand again.
"Let's go, B."
Thankfully, Bucky seemed to respond to the pet name/secret code of 'B.' Sam had initially suggested it back before they'd gone public, when they were still trying to stay under the radar and not be instantly recognized in public settings. Bucky was, after all, not a very common name. Bucky had never really seemed to understand the purpose behind the nickname B, and Sam didn't know if he truly didn't believe that modern men didn't want to go by Bucky, or if he was just being a bit of an ass. Either way, Sam was semi-relieved that even in his sleep-addled state, Bucky seemed to understand there was some call for secrecy.
"Home?" Bucky asked quietly, following Sam. His eyes were closed, stumbling along in Sam's wake without bothering to watch where he was going.
Sam bit his lip, wishing that he could cry, or punch something, or sit down in the middle of the airport and just let Bucky sleep right there on the floor. It just wasn't fair. Bucky already had such a hard time with air travel and they'd finally figured out a system that worked for him and now Bucky was drugged up to his eyeballs, lost in a foreign airport and unable even to remember that they couldn't go home yet. All Sam wanted to do was to get his husband home, and if he was being completely honest with himself, the lack of sleep was starting to catch up with him as well. He wanted to be home nearly as much as Bucky, and it was killing him to have to tell Bucky again and again that they weren't anywhere close.
"Not yet," Sam said miserably, stroking Bucky's hand with his thumb as they walked - or as Sam walked and Bucky stumbled. He hoped it was soothing. Hell, he hoped Bucky was awake enough to process the touch - he might not even notice at this point.
Sam followed the signs for the A gates down an inordinate amount of hallways, passages, and corners until they made it through one excessively lengthy corridor and were greeted by the sight of wide, sliding glass doors opening onto the side of an elevated track.
"Shit," Sam said despondently, looking at the side of Bucky's face beneath the ball cap. His eyes were closed - again - and he'd sagged heavily against Sam as soon as they stopped walking. His face was paler than it had been before, even on the plane, and his breathing was shallow. He did not look like a man who was prepared for an airport tram ride.
It wasn't that Bucky had a problem with closed spaces, it's just that they could be hit or miss. Nine out of ten times, Bucky was completely fine on airplanes, on public transportation, on something like this. But very occasionally, he started to feel trapped. It could come out as panic, or it could come out as hostility - it really just depended on the day. Sam wasn't sure if the absolutely absurd amount of drugs he was currently on would help or hurt.
"This is gonna be fine," Sam whispered to Bucky, hoping he sounded reassuring. "You're going to be fine."
Thankfully, a train arrived in less than five minutes, and it was very nearly empty. Sam realized abruptly that he had absolutely no idea what time it was here. The airport wasn't full, but it wasn't dead either. And airports sort of always felt like a place out of time. He couldn't see any windows.
The doors to the train slid open with a soft rushing sound. Sam realized they weren't wide enough for him to hold both Bucky and their bags. Sam decided once he was back he was going to write a strongly worded letter to whoever designed airports - they clearly weren't made for someone who had to both carry suitcases and tow their drugged out husband around, and Sam thought that was ridiculous.
Sam let go of Bucky's hand, ducked inside the train, and dumped the bags on an empty seat. By the time he got back to the doors, Bucky was already stumbling towards the train. Not moving very fast, granted, but he was moving under his own power and that was more than Sam had expected.
Sam put his arm over the door sensor, so it wouldn't close while Bucky was still maneuvering himself. He watched as Bucky laboriously made it to the doors. And then he watched as Bucky's foot caught in the gap between the platform and the train. He didn't even make an attempt to catch himself, just fell heavily forward into the aisle.
Sam probably should have sprung into action as soon as he watched his husband start to fall. He definitely should have raced to him while he was lying facedown on the ground. But Sam was just so shocked by this whole situation that all he could do was stand and watch in frozen horror.
Bucky slowly turned his head to the side. "Ow," he muttered.