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i.
It wasn't like Sam meant to intrude or anything. Honestly he hadn't even been thinking of Bucky at all when he'd wandered in to the suite shared between him and Steve while they all hid under the protection of the Wakandan royal family - something he was still kind of mind blown about. What he'd really been doing was looking for the sweater he left behind when he was in here earlier listening to Steve's latest rant about how he just knew Tony Stark was still a good man even if his methods obviously left quite a lot to be desired. Sam hadn't listened all that hard. He'd made his own opinions and he was sticking to them, thanks.
Letting himself in to the common space of the suite was as easy as slapping his hand against the biometric security pad and watching the door hiss open, eyes heavy with sleep and feet shuffling in the very comfortable house slippers they all wore everywhere. Nothing but the sweater he wanted to fall asleep in occupied his mind until he passed by one of the bedroom doors and heard the very distinct sound of a person trying not to cry.
Which one of these was Steve's room, that was his first thought. Once again Bucky didn't even cross his mind as an option. He'd only met the dude a few times and none of those had been great experiences, really, so it was only natural for his worrier instincts to go straight for the man he'd already helped through several nightmares over the past few years.
"Steve?" He called gently, tapping his knuckles to the door. "You good? I got two shoulders if you need 'em. Only mildly bruised." A beat passed in which he could hear nothing at all.
"Next door," a voice answered that was definitely not Steve's but was also definitely trying and failing to cover the fact that they were in distress.
Sam opened his mouth only to pause. It didn't take a genius to guess who was behind that door. If not one super soldier it could only be the other considering there were just the two bedrooms. Despite the lack of any great connection between them, Sam was hardly the type of guy to leave someone to suffer in their own misery; he just wasn't sure if this particular man would appreciate the offer. Only one way to find out though.
"I'm sure my shoulders would work just as well for you if you wanted to lean on one," he said.
"Why, cause I'm down an arm again?" Bucky growled back just as defensively as Sam could have guessed. Rather than take the easy bait he shrugged unseen and softened his voice.
"Nah. Everyone needs to lean on a friend sometimes. Can I come in?"
He waited patiently through the lengthy silence that followed. This was a dude who'd spent decades being given no choice in literally anything so it wouldn't be any sort of surprise if he was struggling to make one now or even just trying to work through the shock of being allowed to.
Eventually Sam heard a hesitant, “I guess you can.” Which would have been great from almost anyone else but he’d worked with enough trauma vets to know better than taking things at face value.
“Well how about this,” he tried again without moving to open the door. “Do you want some company in there? Cause if you don’t I’m game to fuck off if that’s what you need.” The wait was a little shorter to get his answer this time, though not by a whole lot.
“Yeah. Company’d be nice.”
Sam worked his face in to the expression somewhere between warm and neutral that he’d perfected while working at the VA, free of any expectations or judgment while also projecting just that little bit of friendliness needed to invite people in, to see him as someone they could open up to. He was glad he'd had so much practice when he stepped in to the room and found Bucky huddled on the floor in the farthest corner, eyes wild, face tracked with tears he clearly had tried and failed to wipe away. Hard to hide the evidence with more tears streaming helplessly out one after another. Sam closed the door behind himself and walked exactly halfway across the room. Again he was glad he'd trusted his instincts; Bucky shot him a surprised but grateful look when he didn't try to come any closer, just folded himself down on to the floor as well where he rested back against the plush, unused bed.
"Do you want to talk about it?" He asked.
Bucky stared. The stump of his left arm jittered before his right came up to wipe ineffectually at the tears again. "Not really."
"Okay." Sam almost recoiled as soon as the word was out of his mouth because damn this guy was going to break his heart if he kept reacting like that to having his wishes respected. "Do you want me to talk to you about something else? A distraction can be helpful sometimes."
"Uh, sure. That- yeah. Sounds alright."
Nodding, although he wasn't sure if he was agreeing or just shaking his own thoughts in to place, Sam wracked his brain for something innocuous to talk about. It had to be something that had so little to do with all this shit that had gone on over the past few years that it couldn't trigger any memories. Nothing from his own time as a soldier and definitely no anecdotes about Steve; there was no telling what memories he might rattle loose with that kind of thing.
After a few seconds his lips twitched up in to a little smile. Before he’d had anything else Sam’d had the bayou and a family with more love than money, love enough to make some pretty easy memories.
"Don't know if you knew this but I grew up in Louisiana, a little podunk town called Delacroix, and we had this old fishing boat. That boat practically raised me as much as my mama and daddy did. So this one time when I was about ten years old I took it in to my head that I was probably big enough to take the boat out on my own. I'd been steering from daddy's lap since my arms were long enough to reach the wheel and I knew how to work the throttle well enough."
Sam paused to let the sense memory of being out on the water gently wash over him, the smell as real as if he were there right now. A peek from the corner of one eye showed that Bucky was hanging on his every word and that made him smile a little more. Good. Just as he'd thought. Stories of the bayou were enough to take anyone out of their head in his humble opinion.
"Only thing was," he went on, "there were a bunch of things I didn't know I was supposed to do before leaving on account of my daddy was always the one doing last checks and shit so I forgot something real important. I never checked how much gas was left in the engine. Got about four mile away from home before suddenly the whole boat goes quiet under me and then there I was, stranded in the middle of open water with no phone, no help, and no one knowing where the hell I was. Safe to say ten year old me had a good panic about that real fast."
When he looked this time Bucky's eyes were drooping and his jaw was split on the sort of yawn that always looked more like screaming for sleep. For a man as deadly as him it was an oddly adorable look. Sam cast his eyes forward at nothing and kept talking.
"It felt silly later but at the time I was convinced I would now have to live out there on that boat forever. Even made some terrible plans for how to survive. Pretty sure that's the day I really fell in love with fishing; I had some very serious intentions to live off of whatever I could catch out of those waters. Of course, I was still happy as hell to see Old Man Walter's boat coming up fast an hour or so after I'd broken down and I might have cried all over again when my daddy came aboard with a few jerry cans of gas to get us back home. Fishing is nice and all but the bed in that boat was old before I ever got born so- ah." Sam cocked his head to the side. "Look at you, snoozing away. You're gonna have a helluva crick in your neck tomorrow but. Well. I guess any sleep is good sleep if the nightmares are this bad for you."
Considering how rich everything here in the palace was, it was no surprise that the bed yielded a blanket so soft he almost wanted to run away with it. Damn, he'd have to ask for one of these in his own room. For now he kept his footsteps soft and his breathing even as he wandered just close enough to drape the cloth over Bucky’s form where his chin had fallen entirely down on to his chest. Without the lines of stress that constantly pulled his features taut Bucky finally didn’t look all that much older than Steve. They were technically only a year apart, Sam remembered suddenly, but Steve had been frozen straight through from putting the plane down to waking up in the twenty-first century whereas Bucky had been thawed out and tossed back in the freezer an unknowable amount of times. It was weird to think about how their bodies had aged differently. Weirder still now looking down at a man who appeared barely in his early thirties for all that he was closing in on centenarian territory.
Sam’s back made a very worrisome popping sound when he realized he was just standing there watching someone sleep and jerked himself upright a little too fast. After taking a pause to groan and reach back, soothing his own muscles as best he could, he turned and wandered out of the room to look for that sweater he’d originally come for. It turned up shoved halfway under the cushions of a very squishy armchair. Sam yanked it out, resettled the cushion, then set off back to his own opulent suite.
The next morning Bucky said nothing about their little nighttime meet up and Sam wasn’t surprised in the least, was fine with that, in fact. If the guy wanted to pretend nothing happened then he wouldn’t be the first dude coming out of the early nineteen hundreds with whole truckloads of toxic masculinity shoveled down his throat from birth. One little nightmare moment of need was hardly going to change that. Besides, it wasn’t like they were actually friends or anything. Sam didn’t need to spend any of his days worrying over someone he wasn’t going to have the time to get to know anyway so it wasn’t like he was heartbroken at the loss of opportunity or anything. By the time he and the rest of their ragtag bunch were on their way out of Wakanda he didn’t really feel any kind of way about Bucky going back in to cryo beyond the knowledge that he would probably have to help Steve deal with it.
ii.
Long months of life as a fugitive had gone by before Sam heard from Bucky again. Of course, it hadn’t been even close to that long since he’d heard about Bucky but he’d sort of signed on for that life way back when he first agreed to help Steve look for his long lost back-from-the-dead best friend. After everything that happened between the two of them it was understandable that Steve would have Bucky on his mind a lot so for the most part Sam just tried to let everything wash over him without saying too much one way or another. It generally worked pretty well.
Were it not for the bad luck of poor memory things might have gone on that way and never changed. Having only been in the twenty-first century for a handful of years, it was still hard sometimes for Steve to remember that he had a phone he should be carrying with him at all times. The number of U-turns Sam had made so they could backtrack to random motels and safehouses just to retrieve Steve’s phone was phenomenal and he honestly would have refused after the first couple of times if that particular phone weren’t so goddamn special. That phone - and only that phone - was programmed with the number that would connect Steve to one James Buchanan Barnes, fresh out of cryo and working his way through some very intense therapy somewhere in the middle of the Wakandan countryside. Sam knew that if he had anything that might connect him to the memory of Riley in such a way he would have torn the very earth apart to keep it with him and so around and around he turned the car almost every time they left for a new safe haven.
Today they weren’t leaving anywhere. He had, in point of fact, flat out refused to exit the little ramshackle cabin he and Steve were occupying for the day, declaring himself too tired to go off in search of food. Steve might be more recognizable in a lot of places but there were others where any black man at all would get more stares than if Captain America went strolling down the Main in full regalia. When Steve left to make the hour drive in to town in search of food Sam was actually more grateful than anything else for a chance to be well and truly alone for even just a small chunk of time. The two of them had been living in each others’ back pockets ever since they left Wakanda and while it was fun every time Nat had a few days to fly out and join them it didn’t help the feeling of social claustrophobia.
Sam had already located the only cold drink left in their dingy fridge - a nearly expired bottle of off brand soda - and kicked back on a lumpy moth-eaten couch, ready to enjoy a few hours without hearing anyone else breathe, when he heard it. That special ringtone. For a second he actually thought Steve had quietly come back for something until he realized the guy had just forgotten to bring his phone along.
Fucking again.
That left good old Sam to haul himself up off the couch and wander in to the kitchen where a heavy vibration pattern had the phone dancing across chipped granite counter tops. He picked it up and swiped ‘accept’ on a video call with no small amount of surprise. When did either one of these dinosaur men even figure out what a video call was?
“Steve’s phone, not Steve here. Oh. Hey, man, you good?”
Bucky stared back at him from behind the pillow clutched tightly between chest and drawn up knees. He was sitting just far enough away from the camera for Sam to guess that he’d used a laptop or something to make the call.
“You- where’s- I-...” Pausing to draw in a deep breath, Bucky looked away. It turned his face towards the light in what must be his bedroom and lit up the shine of his cheeks. “No. I’m not good.”
“Well shit. Uh, Steve’s gone out to get us some grub, sorry. He forgot his phone here.”
“Right. Okay.”
Still not looking at the camera, Bucky took a deep breath that visibly shuddered his frame even though the speaker wasn’t good enough to catch the sound of it. Just looking at him caught Sam’s heart in his throat and his mouth was open before his mind could catch up with it.
“Do you want a distraction?” he said as casually as he could muster. “I’m no Steve but I spin a pretty good yarn, so the word goes.”
Bucky looked about ready to melt in to his own bed with relief as he nodded, also trying for casual and failing in a sadly hilarious way. “Sure, I guess. I...well...you know, Steve was never really good at, um, distractions. Too earnest. I just…”
Didn’t have anyone else to call; he didn’t need to finish the sentence for Sam to hear it. Without further ado he nodded and began rooting around in his head for the most innocuous bit of trivia he could remember from his childhood. Boat stories had worked really well last time but he wasn’t sure if that was because it had been the middle of the night already or if his storytelling had really been that soothing. Only one way to find out.
“Alright, okay, I got you a good story. I went through college on the army’s dime - get everything you can out of the man, you know? But that meant I couldn’t afford the really good private dorms. Got stuck living in a shared space with three other dudes going through three other courses and we shared a floor with about twelve more dudes. Never seen that much uninhibited testosterone in my life. Awful shit. My mama raised me real neat and tidy but these guys were like living in the same space as a bunch of filthy animals.”
Sam paused to twist his lips in disgust just at the memory, shaking his head. On the screen in front of him Bucky peered over the top of his pillow with the lines between his brows slowly transitioning from panic to amusement.
“When I wasn’t losing my nut over how gross they all were, though, we had some really good times in those dorms. There was this one tradition- I don’t even know how the game started, to be honest. It was kind of stupid, looking back. But there was this troll doll that one of the guys had accidentally packed. So he said. Always claimed it belonged to his sister and I never figured out if that was a lie or not.”
Carefully Sam lowered himself on to one of the kitchen stools and set his phone on the table to lean up against a stack of raggedy old newspapers. Bucky continued to watch him with heavy eyelids. The windows behind him were dark.
“That dumbass doll, man, I wish I could remember who started it but I guess it doesn’t matter. We had this game where one of us would hide the thing somewhere and whoever found it got to hide it next. You never knew where it was gonna turn up. Carlos found it inside the shower head once. Another time Kato had set it in to a big thing of gelatin and left it in the back of his fridge, that shit took weeks to find because they never cleaned their fridge out and they were always shoving more leftovers inside. Ugh. I always cleaned out my fridge.”
Already partially hidden by his throw pillow, the rest of Bucky’s face disappeared entirely when he began to yawn and buried himself in the silky looking material. He took several long seconds to resurface but there was just enough curiosity in his gaze for Sam to be reassured that the distraction was working. It wasn’t a very important story, it was nothing informative or good for anything really, but it was just the sort of normal person bullshit that he figured Bucky had been sorely missing ever since his mind got knocked back in to his own control.
“Did you ever find the doll?” Bucky’s voice was a little bit far away when he spoke, thin like he was headed for sleep and trying hard to stay awake.
“Oh a bunch of times,” Sam told him. “This one time, though, oh my god. Berat had found it like a day before so I figured we wouldn’t see the damn thing for weeks but then I’m getting dressed the next morning, right? And there it fucking is. In my goddamned underwear drawer! Like, some things need to be sacred! Does a man not have a right to keep his underwear inviolate?”
Drooping gently on to the pillow, Bucky let out the smallest of sounds that only with a leap of intuition could Sam recognize as a laugh. He’d made the man laugh. Something about that sent triumph jittering down the length of his nervous system but Sam only allowed himself a hint of a smile.
He went on for a little while longer and kept his voice soft. In the middle of describing the fourth time he’d found that dumb troll doll he paused to let the silence stretch until it was pretty clear that if Bucky had still been awake he would have definitely said something by now. He’d fallen asleep. The heavy darkness of night behind him made it very clear why he’d called and Sam took a minute just to look at him, breathing in the fact that this was probably the first time he’d ever called Steve looking for help after a nightmare. Captain America had many talents. Keeping his mouth shut was not one of them.
Sam murmured a very gentle goodnight just in case before ending the call. He didn’t let himself think too hard about it when he clicked in to the contact information and pulled open his own phone to copy over Bucky’s number. Didn’t think about it when he opened the history log on Steve’s phone to erase any trace of this call. Still didn’t think about much of anything as he put it back and wandered off through the safehouse, typing out a few slow messages from his own phone.
[7:12PM]
It’s Sam, this is my number.
[7:12PM]
Wasn’t sure if you’d want Steve up in your business so I won’t say nothing if you don’t.
[7:13PM]
Just wanted you to know you can call me if you ever need to.
[7:13PM]
I’ve got lots of stories.
Throwing himself down on the bed he’d claimed as his own, Sam drummed the fingers of both hands on the back of his phone in thought for a little while before eventually he caved. One more message sent and then he let the phone drop down beside him and closed his eyes for a pre-dinner nap.
[7:19PM]
Sleep well.
iii.
[3:23AM]
I did.
[3:23AM]
Thank you.
[3:52AM]
For not saying anything, thank you for that too.
[4:41AM]
And for your number. I might use it. Thank you.
[6:01AM]
You sure are a grateful man.
[6:05AM]
I have a lot of things to be grateful for.
[6:07AM]
And a lot of things to be sorry for.
[6:14AM]
You really don’t.
[6:14AM]
To the second one, I mean.
[6:39AM]
Thank you.
iv.
Patterns, once they were established, were fairly easy to follow. As a former military man, Sam was very used to patterns. As the son of a preacher, he found patterns to be both very comforting and, inversely, very stifling. It was really a case by case basis. The patterns he developed around Bucky Barnes were among the more pleasant ones he was able to keep in the wild ride that was his life these days.
“I’m beat,” Steve was saying. He’d been saying it for at least the past hour but hadn’t yet made any move to get himself up and head to bed. That was all part of the pattern.
“Why don’t you do something about that?” Sam asked for the third time without bothering to lift his nose out of his phone.
“Could. I could. Or I could sit here and wonder what the hell the draw is in those stupid little phone games you keep playing.”
Sam blinked but his thumbs kept flying and he deliberately couched his reply in that distracted tone that all teenagers inherently used to piss off any adult in a five mile radius. “I am this fucking close to beating level eighty-six. This close. I can feel it.”
He heard Steve draw in a breath and he was already stifling a smile by the time he heard his friend blow it all back out in exasperation.
“You kids and your technology,” Steve drawled.
“Old man.”
“Young whippersnapper.”
“Confused crotchety fart.”
“Flippant bird-loving punk.”
Sam couldn’t hold it in anymore. He dropped his head back laughing, almost choking on his own breath. “Go to bed, man, and dream up some better insults. Anything bird related is getting old - almost as old as you!”
Amidst a lengthy grumble about how his material wasn’t any fresher, Steve followed his advice, heaving himself up off the couch at last and shuffling down the hall. The hostel they were staying at was among the fancier Sam had seen but he and Steve were just as invisible here as everyone else. No one paid much attention to two more guys rolling in with raggedy backpacks and raggedy beards. With a cap pulled down low over his eyes Sam could have been literally any other man in the world sitting here in the common room playing games on his phone.
Or he could have been if he were actually playing games on his phone. He waited to make sure Steve had really gone to bed down for good before sending another text and then he stood to let himself out the front door of the building. A quaint little cafe next door provided somewhere to sit and the late hour meant no customers around to listen in when his phone rang, Bucky's contact number coming up with a video call.
“How you doing so far?” were the first words out of his mouth, no greeting. He didn’t really need one when they’d already been chatting for the past ten minutes.
“A little calmer,” Bucky admitted.
“You’re still looking pretty wild around the eyes. I take it this was a bad one.”
“Pretty bad, yeah. I...yeah.”
Sam nodded but didn’t press it. He never did. They had established very early on in this pattern that Bucky would prefer not to talk about his nightmares, though he had admitted they mostly consisted of very vivid memories, and Sam respected that. If Bucky was healthy enough to set his own boundaries then Sam could allow him the dignity of obeying them. He wasn’t the guy’s therapist, regular night time conversations notwithstanding.
“Do you want to hear about the time I got in to a fight with a thirteen year old girl over a bag of chips?”
“I absolutely do,” Bucky said and the very light tilt of a smile in one corner of his mouth was just what Sam was hoping to see. “But first: what level of game am I now?”
“Oh that, ha! I told Steve I’m up to level eighty-something. I think I’m gonna have to ‘find a new game’ to start playing soon or he won’t believe me when the number keeps going up.” Sam grinned, patting himself on the back when Bucky’s shoulders visibly loosened just that little bit more. Already the nightmare was beginning to fade from his eyes. It was good to see.
Unfortunately it took more to fight off the bad nights than a simple joke or two. Bucky’s smile slipped just a little as he nodded. “That’s smart, planning ahead. I- thanks. You know? For not telling him about all this. It’s just that he's too…”
“Steve.”
“Exactly. Too Steve . He’d want me to talk about it, he’d want me to share everything, and I can’t. Sometimes I can’t. The guy means everything to me but sometimes…”
Again Sam finished the sentence for him. “Sometimes he’s just not what you need. And that’s okay.”
“Yeah. I guess.” Bucky chewed on his bottom lip and leaned back in to his pillows. “Can you, uh, you can tell that story now. If you want.”
That was another part of the pattern, one that Sam found endlessly endearing. Bucky had a way of trying to ask for help without making it sound like he was asking for what he wanted except he was kind of terrible at it. For a man with so many years of training in the art of subtlety he was very good at tossing it all out the window when it came to himself. Of all the things Sam was angry at HYDRA for burning out of this man, the acceptance of his own existence was the one that most enraged him. He sort of wanted to kill every HYDRA agent that might still be alive but he knew that wouldn’t make the difference he really wanted it to.
More death would do very little to remind Bucky that he deserved the space to exist and emote just the same as every other human being on this planet. If anything it would probably heap a new burden of guilt on to shoulders that were already carrying far too much and so Sam curbed his killer instincts. He made his face smile instead.
“Okay so I was, like, all of twenty years old and if you think I’m a cocky bastard now then you need to be glad you never met me at that age. I was damned sure my footsteps shook the whole world when I walked. My mama used to say every time I walked out the door she wasn't sure I was gonna be able to fit coming back in on account of my head was just getting way too big.”
Bucky rolled his eyes but didn’t interrupt. A gentle smile was already creeping its way back on to his face.
“I was also young and stupid enough to believe my parents had no idea what I got up to with my friends even though they’d known those same friends since we were all rocking in the cradle. They knew exactly what kind of crowd I’d fallen in to. Apparently my daddy used to pray for my sins and whatnot. Good man. He absolutely did not deserve all the trouble I gave him when I was all young and full of spit and fire. Lord, if I could go back and smack myself in the head-”
He paused to tut quietly, knowing very well that playing up a bit of self-recrimination over such mundane things helped to soothe Bucky’s mind and pull him away from his own more serious bouts. Then he went on with the story. Over time he’d found that the trick of Bucky was to help without drawing any attention to what he was helping; case in point, the entire reason they’d started calling each other so often.
“Where was I going with this? Right. Yes. Okay, so, this was right after I’d just broken up with this guy I’d only been dating for a few weeks but I’d really liked him right up until he told me he just wasn’t feeling it. Not really his fault we weren’t clicking but I was pretty sore about it anyway. My friends took me out drinking that night and I don’t remember how we ended up on the opposite side of town but we did and we were- shit, we were desperate for salt and vinegar chips. Life or death kind of desperate. We needed those damn chips or we were all gonna expire. You know how an idea gets in to your head when you’ve had a few, yeah?”
Through the screen Bucky’s eyes were starting to droop but he had enough fire left in him to lift one eyebrow judgingly. Sam ignored him.
“Since we didn’t really know the area we just wandered around until we found a convenience store and wouldn’t you know, there was only one bag of salt and vinegar chips left. And it was in the middle of being paid for by this little wisp of a thing. Young, drunk, and stupid Sam took a very big exception to that.”
Describing the attitude he’d given that poor girl was mortifying now as an adult but with every word Sam could see the nightmare growing fainter and fainter in Bucky’s eyes until the story wound down and he caught his friend yawning widely.
“You look pretty tired,” he said with as little inflection as possible. Do not address the elephant, that was the rule. Never address the elephant keeping time in the corner.
“I think I might try to get some more sleep,” Bucky admitted. “Maybe tomorrow I’ll head in to the marketplace and talk to that painter who keeps wanting to decorate my arm. Do you think she’d call me crazy if I commissioned a painting of some salt and vinegar chips?”
“Fuck you, man!” Sam laughed because it was so easy to let the lightness fill him up once Bucky started telling jokes.
Small on the screen of his phone, Bucky’s wide and droopy smile was still a thing of beauty. “I’ll have it shipped to wherever you are and make you carry it around between safehouses.”
“Yeah? How the hell am I supposed to explain that to Steve?”
“Tell him you won it in a contest.”
Sam rolled his eyes but didn’t bother holding back a round of chuckles. “Alright, Sleeping Barnesy, get some goddamn rest. Your best friend forever’s been getting antsy so I’d say expect a call from him in the next day or so.”
“Oh. Yeah. Thanks for the heads up. He never messages me to make sure I’m not busy or anything. One time he called and I was right in the middle of- uh. Hm. You know.”
“You didn’t have to pick up!”
“Would you let him go to voicemail?”
“Good point.” Sam cringed just at the thought of it. Ignoring a call from Steve was just asking for the man to board the next flight or train or whichever mode of transportation could get him to you faster so he could spend the next several hours checking you end to end and making sure you were, indeed, as perfectly okay as you’d probably been insisting the whole time. He couldn’t imagine how Bucky had gotten through that conversation without dying of either embarrassment or frustration.
Bucky was already making himself cozy under the covers as he blinked slowly through the call and smiled, a soft kind of gratitude that conveyed more than he’d ever managed to find words for. “Goodnight Sam.”
“Night, Buck. Sleep well.”
After pressing the little red button at the bottom of his screen Sam continued to gaze at Bucky’s contact card for several long moments. This being a burner phone - and theirs being a well protected secret - there was no photo attached. He didn’t even have the number saved under a proper name, just the letter B and a snowflake emoji that he’d made himself laugh with when he put it in there. It took almost a full minute before he realized he was doing nothing at all but stare at his phone in an empty cafe when he could be doing as Bucky was doing; he could be sleeping.
It was nice, he mused as he rose to let himself back in to the hostel, being in a time zone that worked so well with the difference between here and Wakanda. Finding somewhere quiet where he could take a call without being interrupted was so much easier when it wasn’t the middle of the day with Steve and often Natasha as well hanging over his shoulder. Sam wondered sometimes if his friend was really as oblivious to what was happening as he seemed to be.
Then Steve would go off on another rant about how lonely Bucky must be all on his own in another country with no friends and no one to talk to whenever he himself wasn’t reaching out and Sam would have to hide a smile. Yeah. Their secret was definitely safe for now.
v.
It was safe right up until Bucky’s fingers got clumsy in the turmoil of a particularly bad nightmare and called the wrong number. Sam felt a little bad later for how little care he’d put in to that call. Honestly, he’d been mostly asleep himself and all the usual cues that he needed to be alert and empathetic were mentally connected to the buzzing of his own phone, not to having Steve gently shake him and hold one out in front of his face. The whole event was pretty vague in Sam’s mind when he woke up the next morning with a tenuous recollection of telling that really great prom story he’d been saving for a bad night but the sequence of events didn’t seem to match up. Steve was never around for his calls with Bucky, they both made sure of that. He thought, then, that it must have been a dream.
“Good morning.” Somehow, with just two words, Steve managed to get his voice to come out both flat and utterly delighted. Lingering sleep was still doing its best to drag Sam back under when he blinked his eyes open and rolled his neck - only to stop and gasp. God, what the fuck? Why had he slept in such a crap position? Now his neck was killing him.
“Maybe once I get some coffee in me,” he grumbled back. It was never a good morning until he had coffee. All these late nights were really doing a number on his self image as a morning person.
White styrofoam dangled tauntingly in front of him and Sam mumbled praises that could have been for god or for Steve, he wasn’t too picky. All he cared about was the sweet rush of caffeine with two sugar and no cream. Not even burning the roof of his mouth stopped him from sucking in another long draught before very carefully slumping his body over sideways and attempting to stretch. He really was getting too old to be sleeping on the floor like this.
“So. How are you, Sam? Did you sleep well? Have a good rest?”
Cracking one eye back open, Sam gave his best friend a suspicious look. “What?”
“I sure hope so. You’ve got a big day ahead of you!” Steve, he noticed, looked just a little too happy for literally any time of the day.
“You mean we?”
“No. I just mean you.”
Well that didn’t exactly clear the sinking feeling in his gut. Sam watched Natasha slide in to the room from the corner of one eye, traced the shape of her knowing smirk, and decided that he must have done something. He wasn’t sure what but it had to have been something big for the two of them to be ganging up on him all weird and shit.
“Mkay,” he drawled slowly. “So what’s on the agenda?”
“Tell me everything ,” Steve demanded with a sudden intensity that bordered on fanatical. “How long? What the hell is going on? Why didn’t you tell me? I can’t believe you!”
Natasha was rolling her eyes with that expression she always made when someone went off script. Clearly the two of them had planned out this little ambush. And just as clearly Steve was not sticking to the plan. Sam cast his mind back to yesterday, trying to figure out what he’d done that he might deserve to be ambushed over. They’d all been very pleased to see each other for the first time in almost a month, more than happy to slide Natasha in to their plans for infiltrating an abandoned facility rumored to function as a HYDRA safe house. For once things had even gone off without a hitch even if they had all come back bone tired and disgustingly dirty. The last thing Sam remembered was slumping down against the wall and declaring his intentions to sleep forever.
Until Steve had shaken him half back to consciousness and-
Oh.
Ah crap.
Sam really hoped his expression was playing it cool because the shiver that rippled through him was not one of embarrassment. More than anything else, he couldn’t help but be deeply annoyed.
“If you think I’ve done something wrong, man, go right ahead and say it.” He lifted one eyebrow in question and was satisfied both by Steve’s flabbergasted expression as well as Natasha’s mildly impressed one. It took a lot to impress Nat. That felt good.
“You’ve been talking to Bucky without telling me!”
Unimpressed, Sam lifted the other eyebrow to drawl, “And?”
“It- you- and you didn’t tell me ! He’s-”
“A grown ass man who can talk to whoever he wants whenever he wants and he doesn’t need to ask your permission.” Sam rolled up in to a sitting position, cracked his neck to both sides, then rolled a little more until he could get his feet underneath him. “Look, the dude deserves some privacy and if he wants to have conversations that don’t involve you then I’m not gonna be the one to get you involved either without his express permission. Capiche?”
Steve made a noise that was somewhere between a splutter and a growl, probably the funniest noise Sam had ever heard anyone make, and it was three times funnier coming from the mouth of America’s golden boy. He was visibly gearing up to say something more, most of which Sam was entirely prepared to not listen to. The unmistakable sound of that one special ringtone cut through his words and froze him in place instead. It was like a switch being flipped. All the indignation filling him up drained out to be replaced with instant worry as Steve dug through his pockets to pull his phone out and accept the incoming video call.
“Bucky!” His eyes widened impossibly. “Are you alright?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Stop making that face.”
“I’m not making a face!”
“Uh huh.” The tone in Bucky’s voice was a very skeptical one that Sam had heard enough times to bring a smile to his own face in automatic response.
Thankfully Steve wasn’t looking at him. His eyes were bright and shining, staring almost manically at the man in his phone. “What a coincidence to hear from you this morning, we were just-”
“Don’t care. Listen. Are you idiots ever dragging your asses back to Wakanda? The sooner the better.”
“Aw, Buck, I miss you t-”
“Shuri’s been working on designs for a new arm for me and it would be great to have opinions from some people who don’t have their heads in the clouds !” By the end of his sentence Bucky was leaning to one side, shouting his words at someone across the room with a very pointed expression. Feminine laughter mocked him from somewhere too far away for the speaker to pick up words. He huffed, shaking his head, then flicked his eyes back towards their call. “Seriously. Get down here before she straps a rocket launcher to my side with a goddamn whisk attachment.”
He ended the call there without waiting for a response, leaving an even more flabbergasted Steve with his jaw working but no words coming out.
Natasha stepped out of the room with fingers already flying across the screen of her own phone and Sam bit the inside of his cheek. He knew exactly what she was doing. For someone who claimed not to have any attachments, Natasha sure did pull up for her teammates pretty damn quick even when the situation wasn’t life or death. It was nice to have friends.
“I uh…” Steve looked up with shiny eyes. “I guess we can take a little time for a visit, right?” He said it as if this wasn’t exactly what he’d been wanting since they left Wakanda in the first place.
“Vacation time, nice.” Sam grinned, loose and easy.
With a slightly lost cast to his face, Steve nodded. “We’ll need to figure out some way to get there under the radar.”
“Clint’s in the area,” Natasha called from the other room. “He’s loaning us his quinjet.” So that took care of that. Neither one of them was stupid enough to ask why Clint might be in the area, how she knew that, or where he might have acquired an aerial craft developed and owned by the currently-in-shambles SHIELD. Less questions always meant more plausible deniability.
Sam and Steve traded smiles filled with delight.
“That’s that then,” Steve said.
“Yup.”
“I’d still like to ask you some-”
“Nope.”
If only Sam could go back in time just to tell his eight year old self that someday he would get to stand there and watch Captain America himself sulk like a child denied his favorite toy. Life certainly had its ups and downs these days but right now? Right at that moment? Life was great.
+ i.
The ride from Bumfuck Nowhere over the ocean to Wakanda took almost a full twenty four hours and none of them found it in them to complain. As long and grueling of a journey as it was, Sam was just thanking his lucky stars that they didn’t have to fly economy. Not only would that have made the journey twice as long but he’d have been forced to share his armrest with either some exhausted parent or a sweaty dude who fell asleep on his shoulder. Those were really the only two options he ever seemed to get seated next to.
Passing through the barrier over the capital city was as terrifying this time as it had been the first time but at least none of them screamed the way Scott had, entirely convinced they were about to crash headlong in to a mountain. One second their vision was filled with nothing but very solid trees and then the next they were all staring wide eyed at the marvels of Birnin Zana. With all the incredibly advanced technology here it almost felt expected that the quinjet should respond to some kind of signal from the city, landing itself without any human input and allowing three very tired travellers to lean up against each other near the back of the craft.
When the hatch opened they all smiled to see King T’Challa himself waiting, hands folded primly behind his back, honor guard stiff and beautiful in a half ring of protection around him. It really said something about the bonds of friendship that a sight like that couldn’t hold their attention in the slightest when another lone figure came in to view a dozen or so feet to the left.
“Buck!” Steve’s voice didn’t exactly ring throughout the courtyard, he didn’t yell or anything, but the relief in his voice to see his best friend again was enough to turn heads anyway. It would have been enough to turn Sam’s head too if he weren’t paying his friend just as little attention as he was the quickly forgotten king.
Sam instead had eyes only for the slow joy spreading across Bucky’s face, their eyes locked, the distance between them growing smaller and smaller until he found himself with an armful of super soldier muscles and not much recollection of actually stepping forward in to the hug. Off to the side somewhere he vaguely noticed someone drawing out a long, “Oh! Oooohhh!” as if in discovery of something but he was busy sinking in to the warmth surrounding him and the solid chest pressing up against his own.
“Hey,” Bucky murmured against the side of his head.
“Yeah, hey.” Words - his entire vocabulary of them - felt very far away for some reason. Sam reluctantly settled for burying his nose in Bucky’s shoulder with a faint, “It’s good to see you.”
“For real this time.”
And wasn’t that the damn truth. The last time they had stood within even a fifty mile radius of each other they were barely on speaking terms. Now it was over three quarters of a year later and Sam couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone a full week without a video chat. Hell, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone more than two or three days without at least a short conversation over text, quick messages fired off in the few moments he had to himself during bathroom breaks or ducked in to shadowy corners. To actually stand next to each other was a change of pace, to say the least.
It was a goddamn thrill is what it was.
Sam pulled away with a reluctance that bordered on physical, letting his fingers drag slowly down the outside of Bucky’s arm only because he could feel one very large hand doing the same on his left side. When he smiled the expression was echoed back with a lightness he wished he saw more often during their calls.
“Lookin’ good, popsicle, you’ve gained back some of the weight.” His eyes couldn’t help but fall to admire the solid body still standing pretty close to his own. “None of this been showing up on camera.”
“They’ve been feeding me pretty good,” Bucky admitted in a quiet voice.
Sam grinned. “Well you better start saving a place at the table for me, I remember what the eats are like around here. Cannot wait to get me some more of that!”
“You planning on sticking around for a while then?” Bucky, bless his frigid little heart, was downright awful at pretending to be casual.
“For as long as we can,” Sam agreed. “I dunno, really, you’d have to ask-”
“Steve...”
It was probably comical, at least from an outside perspective, the way both of them froze at the same time. Sam knew he would have been laughing if it weren’t him suddenly remembering that not only did Steve Rogers exist, he was undoubtedly watching this very revealing conversation unfold. He and Bucuky held each other’s gazes for a moment longer until the air around them grew so heavy with expectant silence he could feel it like a physical weight. Only then did they both turn to face the music.
After nearly three years of such close friendship Sam really should have known by now how much of a bastard Steve was. He was painfully reminded just then. Of all the reactions he might have expected - shock, bafflement, even anger or jealousy - the one emotion he was not prepared to find was sheer unbridled glee.
“Well...crap,” Sam mumbled under his breath. This promised to be thoroughly humiliating. No one had even said a word yet and he could already hear the wave of teasing about to crash down over him. The questions were going to be even worse now. He’d only gotten away with avoiding them so far with claims of protecting Bucky’s privacy and autonomy but now that they were all here together in the same place that was going to be a lot harder. Judging by the light in Steve’s eye the man had every intention of being relentless until he got the answers he was looking for and who the hell knew what he was specifically looking for.
Sam had worked himself halfway in to a pretty decent panic spiral before he met Bucky’s gaze again and felt it all evaporate as easily as that. If he’d thought he would find panic here too he was mistaken. Bucky was looking back at him with the soft, wry sort of amusement that said ‘ah, we’ve been caught, well this should be fun’. Obviously he understood the conclusions Steve had leapt to but just as obviously he wasn’t bothered. So why should Sam be?
In fact…
“Oh fuck it.” Sam had gambled his life on super soldiers before. One more time wouldn’t kill him. Hopefully. “Here’s hoping you’re worth it, Barnes.”
“I plan to be,” was all Bucky had time to say, his voice as breathy as the little noise he made when Sam pressed their lips together.
The inevitable questions began immediately, of course, most of them at volumes that only came from the shock of seeing something unexpected. Sam heard none of it. He was far too busy living a new story with the man he’d already shared so many with.