Archive of Our Own

PART ONE: THE BOY 

“Wake up,” Sam hisses, chubby fingers tightening on his parents’ bedroom door frame. His hands are clenched so tightly that his knuckles are standing out through his skin. 

“Mama, Daddy. There’s a ghost in my room!”

It’s a humid July evening in 1984. By the thin, warm sliver of light leaking in through the open door, Sam watches his parents shift gently in their bed; neither of them wake fully, and the only sounds he can hear in the bedroom are of their soft, even breaths, the belching frogs in the wet air outside the cracked-open window, and his own rabbiting heart, loud as a drum in his ears. 

“Wake up, wake up,” he whispers again. His heels bounce anxiously against the floor. “I’m scared!” 

Not even a stir. Around them, the house creaks as it settles into the foundations. 

Now fully caught in the hysterical clutches of his fear, Sam opts for a more intrusive tactic and sprints across the room to squirm himself in between the two slumbering bodies. “Wake up!” he howls, amidst surprised splutters and flailing limbs, “Wake up! Mama, Daddy! There’s a ghost!” 

“Wh—” Darlene Wilson coughs as she catches a bony six-year-old elbow to the solar plexus. She extends a restraining hand. “Calm down, baby! What’s all this noise in the middle of the night?”

“I already said!” Sam wails into the blankets. “A—a—”

“Ghost,” finishes Paul Wilson, dropping his head back into his pillow. “Are you sure it wasn’t just the wind, Sammy? Or a frog, maybe. Remember the frog from last week? The big green one.”

“That was last week! I’m sure this time! There was—there was a—”

But Sam is a bit too young to verbalize the air in the room shifted and the hairs on my arms and neck stood up on their ends and though nothing had happened I suddenly knew that I was not alone anymore, so he settles for crying out, lip wobbling all the while, “I’m not lying! I yelled when I saw it and nobody heard me—and you didn’t even come to help—” 

 “Alright,” sighs Darlene. “Calm down. How about I come to your room and check it out for you? And then we can all sleep peacefully.”

Sam twists his little fingers together. 

“But, but,” he quakes, “what if it’s still in there?”

Darlene makes a valiant effort at not looking completely fed up. “Then I’ll scare it away for you. Come on, baby.”

Sam hesitates. 

“Okay. But Daddy has to come, too. ‘Cause he’s strong.”

The three of them make the slow march down the hall to Sam’s little bedroom in the dark, looking a bit like a shambling, six legged beast—Paul leading the way, Darlene rounding out the back, and Sam in the middle, each little hand fisted in the hems of his parents’ pajamas (“For safety,” he insists, to their groggy acceptance). 

They pass by the silent, sealed doorway of his baby sister’s room, and Sam thinks about cracking it open to take a peek, just to make sure she’s sleeping sound and untouched—she’s soft and whiny and the size of a small loaf of bread, is even less capable of defending herself than he is—but he thinks better of it. She’s safer from the ghost behind a closed door, and besides, she gets cranky when she’s woken up in the night. 

When they round the corner to Sam’s room, everything appears to be in its proper place. Paul rubs a hand across his face. “There’s no one here, Sammy.”

Sam rushes to defend himself, only barely holding back from stomping his bare feet on the carpet. “No! I wasn’t lying, the ghost is invisible, so it could still be here! It could be hiding somewhere!”

“Invisible, you say.” 

Sam nods rapidly. 

“Okay,” says Paul. “Well, then.”

Sam’s parents make a quick tour around the room, checking under the bed and in the closet, and still they find nothing. His unease mounts.

Darlene, seeing the look on her son’s face, elbows her husband in the ribs.

“What?”

“Paul,” she says quietly.

“Ah.” Paul puffs up his chest and clears his throat. “Attention! Mister Ghost, who may or may not be here! You are a visitor in our home. Poor behavior shall not be tolerated, and if any harm comes to my son—”

He pauses, brow furrowed. Sam stares up at his father, twisting his fingers anxiously. 

“You will be punished,” Darlene suggests after a beat. “Severely.”

“Yes.” Paul nods in relief, exhaustion slipping through his expression. The shadows under his eyes look especially purple in the warm light of Sam’s bedside lamp. “You will be punished severely. Okay.”

Sam frowns, not quite reassured, but before he can speak up—

“Now back to bed with you, young man. You’ve still got school in the morning.”

In the span of a minute, Sam finds himself cajoled into bed, kissed on the head, then tucked back against his pillows despite his ongoing protests; and when the bedroom door clicks closed behind his parents, he is once again alone in the blue-black quiet of his unlit bedroom, peering out at the silhouette of branches shivering over the glass of his window. 

He knots his hands into his sheets. At the far end of the house, he can hear the low rumble of his parents’ whispers, and then the muffled creak of their bodies settling back down to sleep. 

The bedside clock ticks loudly. Sam holds his breath. 

As he bunches his blankets closer beneath his chin, he finally musters up the courage to steer his gaze in the direction of the wall opposite his bed. He sees these things, in this order: 

1. The soft shadow of his robin plushie, perched on the sharp, lined up ridges of the picture books at the top of his bookshelf. 
2. Captain America’s tiny figurine body, flexing heroically out toward the kingdom of Sam’s train-patterned carpet.
3. The faintest outline of something that looks barely like a man, standing silently and inhumanly still in the farthest corner of Sam’s room, almost certainly staring directly at him. 

 Sam only notices the ghost if he squints very hard, which is why he forgives his parents for how they walked past the terrifying shadow watching them from the corner of the room without even trying to fight it off for him. It shimmers slickly at the edges, violet and green and black sliding together in a translucent storm that he makes out through the slivers of his eyes. He can hardly bear to look at it. 

“I can see you now,” he breathes, watching the spilled-oil mess pulse darkly. He thinks he might pass out with how hard his heart is trying to squirm its way up his throat. “I know you’re still here.”

The ghost hadn’t been moving in the first place, but Sam swears that now even its warping colors fall still. Goosebumps crawl over his arms. 

“You heard my Daddy,” he continues, terrified. His mouth is dry, but he’s frozen stiff, can’t even reach for the glass on his bedside to wet his lips. Perhaps, if he holds as still as his unwelcome visitor, everything will go away. 

Sam doesn’t like this at all. 

“You have to be nice to me, okay. This is my room, so you have to follow my rules. Or else.”

More stillness. Sam wants very badly for his Mama and Daddy to come back, but then he remembers the way their eyes had slid blankly over the occupied patch of his room. 

He’s on his own. 

“Do something, ghost,” he demands shakily. His voice, thin and high and dry-cracked as it is, pitches up one more octave. “Do something—”

The ghost shuffles forward, strangely ungainly. 

Sam shrinks back. “No!” he hisses from where he’s re-tensed every single muscle in his body and attempted to lodge his entire being into the depths of his mattress. “Stay there, don’t come here!”

The ghost freezes in place. 

Sam relaxes minutely, mollified, and stares intently at the far patch of shadow. He finds himself gaining a little bit of his confidence back; if it listens to him, perhaps this ghost isn’t so scary, after all. 

Sam clears his throat and puts on his best interrogation voice, like the ones used by detectives he sees on TV: “Um. Um. Now you need to answer my questions. Where are you from?”

Somehow, the ghost manages to convey a shrug through the shimmering of its outline.

“Okay,” Sam breathes, “so you don’t know. Why are you here?”

This time, the ghost hesitates.

Sam stares, waiting for an answer, but none come.   

It occurs to him then that perhaps this foreign thing, strange and terrifying as it seems, is just as bewildered as he is. Perhaps it simply woke up here, not knowing its home. Not knowing how to speak. How awful—how lonely. Perhaps that’s why it’s in Sam’s room, in the end. It has nowhere else to go. 

He’d ran from a stray cat, a few weeks ago, when he’d accidentally kicked over the cardboard box it had been hiding in. It hissed at him, and he’d gone all the way home without stopping and told his mother all about the frightening encounter.

“I don’t think it meant to be mean,” Mama had said to him. “You just startled it. It was probably just as scared as you were.”

Sam contemplates the ghost. 

“If you want, Mr. Ghost,” he ventures, “you can stay here for tonight. As long as you’re nice to me, we can be friends, even. Just don’t stare at me when I sleep, ‘cause that’s scary.”

He shuffles himself a bit more securely into his blankets and peeks out again. 

The ghost doesn’t do anything, per se, but Sam thinks the air around it softens. The churning mass appears to turn just a bit, like it’s averting its gaze. It nods once.

That’s a good start in Sam’s book.

“Okay,” he whispers. “Good night.”

With nothing else to say, he rolls over on his side and tries to go to sleep, and his dreams find him more quickly than expected.

In the morning, Sam is awoken, bleary and crusty-eyed, by the early sun streaming through his blinds. He sits up in bed, rubbing the gunk out of his eye corners. His bedspread is half-pooled on the floor after being kicked off during the night, as usual. Everything is lit up with bright daylight. He sweeps his eyes across the room, once, twice, three times, then stares intently at the farthest corner of his room. 

His midnight visitor is nowhere to be seen, vanished into the daylight like a thought.  

***

For weeks, Sam jerks his head around at every creak and groan of his family’s home, expecting to catch the glossy shimmer of his supernatural visitor out of the corner of his eyes.

Unfairly, he is disappointed every time.

Even more unfairly, his mother chalks his high-strung behavior up to sugar-induced hyperactivity and tells him he can no longer have candy in the evening. Sam suffers several blows in the form of purged bedroom chocolate bar stashes; he gets by with what his friends are willing to spare him, performing sly exchanges when he visits their houses to play, but it’s a hard life indeed. 

Despite all of the setbacks, he persists—and when, on a slow September afternoon, the ghost comes into quiet, oil-slick existence in the sunny patch next to his window, he is ready.

(Not ready enough to stop from being startled, of course, but Sam is six. He can forgive himself for knocking over a glass of grape juice when there are ghosts involved.)

“Hi!” he says, waving and putting on his best, bravest face—and when the ghost waves back a little, it even feels natural. 

So begins their co-existence. 

Following encounters quickly establish the fact that Sam’s ghost is not the most regular of visitors. Sometimes, just days go by between re-appearances. Sometimes, months. The lengths of its stays vary, too—sometimes it can keep Sam company for as long as several hours, drifting along silently behind him like a second shadow, and sometimes he’s halfway through saying his greeting when it flickers out of sight again. 

Slowly but surely, Sam becomes used to turning around and catching that dark silhouette out of the corner of his eye. 

For all he tries, he can never quite catch the exact moment that it appears, can’t figure out if it melts out of the walls or just simply becomes in an instant, popping into existence within the split second that it takes for him to blink, or if, maybe, it was just always there. 

***

When Sam is eight, he visits a nearby island with his father for the very first time and gets lost. Just as he’s about to panic, the ghost appears and shows him the way back to the boat, moving slowly and patiently over the dusty paths beaten in by frequent use. 

When Sam is thirteen, he stays up until 2 AM for the very first time in a desperate attempt to finish his geometry homework—something that he should’ve had enough time to finish that afternoon, but whatever, not everything in life is about homework. His ghost stays up with him, too, even if it doesn’t do much to help besides stare. 

When Sam is twenty-two, he pulls on his new uniform to check its fit in the mirror, turns to ask his ghost for its silent opinion, and comes face-to-face with its blurry almost-head. 

“Hey,” he says, smiling. “I didn’t notice. We’re finally the same height.”

***

Sam doesn’t live under a rock, of course. 

He’s seen as many horror movies as a questionably adrenaline-seeking young person could possibly see. Used to marathon them one after another in the living room while sandwiched between middle school friends, one eye peeking through his splayed fingers and the other watching the door for his parents’ return. 

It had been fun watching the first few ones about hauntings, for a while. The campy effects, the typical slamming doors and mysterious breezes and pale faces hidden in shadow. Fun to see his friends quail against the seat cushions when, unbeknownst to them, Sam’s very own personal specter was perched right behind their shoulders. 

Then he watched a few more movies. Noticed some patterns.

Vampires: Weird Europeans.

Zombies: Plague, or whatever.

Ghosts—

He tries not to think about it too much.

***

Sam flies out to Afghanistan, and he leaves his family behind at the airport. His second shadow, he brings along with him to the other side of the world. 

For the first time in his life, he’s much too busy to pay any mind to his spectral companion. He’s got more than enough occupying his attention; his newfound friendship with Riley, their recruitment into the EXO-7 program, the swoop in his stomach as he’s strapping on his wings. Him and Riley, they’re the only ones who make it all the way through the grueling program. The third remaining candidate drops out in the last leg of the program, and when he packs up his things and leaves that night, he spares a moment to tell them that he thinks they’re both crazy.

Sam can deal with that. He’s had a ghost hanging over his shoulder for about the last two decades of his life, and he’s never really questioned it; crazy probably isn’t all that far off from the truth. 

They come back from their first mission shaking with adrenaline, hair wind-blown, cheeks flushed from exertion and triumph and Oh-my-god-I’m-still-alive, and in that moment, Sam is riding so high on the rush of pride that he turns to Riley’s beaming face and says, “I’ll always have your back, man,” and both of them are young and dumb enough to believe it. 

And for a while, his words are true. 

For every mission that Sam flies, he feels himself stretch up into something larger than he is. Here, he isn’t plain old Sammy from Louisiana, puttering along in his calm, gentle life. Here, he has a greater purpose, greater duty. He’s saving lives. Here is Sam-and-Riley, an unbreakable team, two parts of an amazing whole. The world is in the palms of their hands, and they are unstoppable.

In Afghanistan, Sam flies mission after mission after mission and soars through the sky on metal wings, the hot sand rising and dipping beneath him.

In Afghanistan, Sam captures Khalid Khandil with his partner at his side and the sun at his back, and Riley’s whoop of joy is high and loud enough to hear even over the wind. 

In Afghanistan, Sam watches as—

Well.

***

When Sam leaves the Air Force, his life settles into something best described as peaceful monotony. 

Sam relearns the world. Relearns his place. He tries to put himself back together, piece by piece like a puzzle set, though sometimes the pieces slide apart from each other faster than he can match them up. He finds a home for himself up in Washington D.C., a simple little place wedged into a row of other simple little places, and he starts working at the VA, helping people like him. He has people who know his name, and a favorite local grocery store, and a regular schedule for his morning runs. 

And when his ghost shows up in the corners of his kitchen and bedroom and bathroom, he smiles and greets it like usual and pretends that looking at it doesn’t make his skin crawl now. 

(He doesn’t think about what he’d seen in Afghanistan. He doesn’t think about what he’d left behind in the desert.)

Everything is nice and quiet, just the way Sam wants it.

But apparently, he doesn't want it enough—because one day Captain America shows up at his front door, and within hours Sam finds himself looped up into the most batshit insane mess that he's experienced in years. 

It’s quite possible that he jumps in a bit too eagerly, considering the alarmingly large ratio of certain death to potential victory, but that's beside the point. 

One thing leads to another. Sam jumps out the 41st story of a building—as one does; Sam uproots his life to hunt down an assassin—as one does; Sam becomes a national fugitive and goes on the run—as one does. 

Or maybe only as Sam does. But again. That’s beside the point. 

For more than a year, he spends his days in and out of shitty motel rooms and cramped little cars, bumping elbows with two super soldiers—and because this is just Sam’s luck, both of these super soldiers happen to think that putting on baseball caps will magically shrink them down from beefy manspreaders into scrawny average Joes that are able to blend into crowds like normal human beings. It’s a miracle they aren’t caught within a week.

On one especially muggy afternoon, Steve slips inside a diner to go pick up a quick to-go lunch, his favorite disguise jammed firmly over his head, and Sam pushes his way out of the car because he can’t stand sitting with his legs folded up in the footwell anymore.

The air is hot and wet on his skin, and he’s sweating in seconds. He's in the middle of doing a little stretch against the trunk of their third Volkswagen beetle when he hears the rusty squeak and slam of the opening car door, and then the heavy crunch of gravel under approaching super-soldier boots.

“I suppose it was too much to expect more than ten minutes of peace and quiet,” he says as he straightens up.

“I saw you talking to yourself last night,” says Barnes, apropos of nothing.

That gets Sam’s attention. Damn it. 

He’s always been careful about keeping up appearances, ever since his failed childhood attempt at getting his parents to see what he saw; the idea of being hauled off for talking to the air makes something like nausea twist in his stomach. Sam’s not crazy, he knows that what he’s seeing with his own eyes is real, that his brain couldn’t possibly be creating such a complex delusion for so many years, but he also knows that other people wouldn’t understand. 

So when that familiar shadow coalesced into the air in the middle of their run-down motel room the past evening, with Bucky sitting right in the corner and Steve just out of sight in the bathroom, voice low as he spoke on the phone, Sam should’ve done the smart thing and just have pretended that nothing was there. Should’ve just waited until his ghost got the message and wandered off somewhere else to find its amusement.

But the thing is, he’s been lonely. 

And Sam’s not crazy, he’s pretty sure. But as the days run slow and the nights drag on in what seems to be a never-ending loop of motel room after motel room, as he spends his days exhausted and hunted and wondering if he’ll ever see home again, he’s started wondering if perhaps there’s something else wrong with him. If it’s strange that he’d so willingly throw away his civilian life just to return to spending his days at the edge of danger, flirting with death. 

That topic was not something that he’d want or even be able to bring up to his current company, and there was his ghost, a perfect neutral party, and Sam had so desperately wanted to talk to anyone—so sue him, he’d taken his chance. Walked out the door with a lame excuse and basked in the minute joy of talking about how his day was with someone who hadn’t been breathing the same air as him for three weeks straight, even if that someone couldn’t talk back. 

It occurs to him now that it had not been a good idea. 

It also occurs to him that Barnes is currently watching his face like a hawk, waiting for a response. 

“Damn,” he scoffs, mind working quickly as he unfreezes. “So you’re following me now? Can’t a guy get his privacy sometimes?”

“You get your privacy when you take your morning shit in the bathroom,” Barnes says, unphased, “not when you’re loitering around in the motel parking lot next to a broken vending machine. You do realize that we’re trying to stay under the radar, right?”

“Yeah, and you do realize that you’re a nosy shithead, right?” Sam shoots back. “I went outside to get some fresh air, not to have you peeking around the wall at me. Mind your own business. I was just bored.”

Barnes glares harder, crossing his arms across his chest.  “It’s my business when your dumbassery could get us all caught.”

“Yeah? You’re gonna pull that card?”

Barnes frowns harder.

A mild relief wells in Sam’s gut, mixing with the vicious glee that he always feels when he can make Barnes’ expression tip into that constipated scowl; he just needs to push a bit harder to derail the conversation and bring it back to safe waters. He’s spent enough time ruffling Barnes’ feathers that he has it down to a science. “That’s real rich coming from you, greasy Jesus.”

“What’d you call me?”

“I’ll say it again: Greasy Jesus. Nazareth’s oiliest.”

“Shut up. Why don’t you start a diary or something, if you’re so bored. Don’t attract attention by jabbering into thin air—”

Sam steps forward, eyebrow raised, and Barnes matches him. At this distance, he can even feel Barnes’ angry huffing breaths on his face. “Can’t blame a man for taking his chances with the second best conversational partner available. Not my fault that talking to you is worse than talking to a brick fucking wall—”

“Then maybe you should just suffer in silence!”

“Oh yeah, and maybe I’ll take up your perfect idea? Writing everything down on physical paper that anyone could pick up, that’ll be great for being stealthy. Real genius move from an expert fugitive, Barnes.” 

“Shut up, Wilson. And what top secret stories would you be scribbling down? ‘Dear Diary, today I moved my car seat all the way back to stretch my itty bitty legs again, oh, I need so much space for my tiny little wingspan—”

Sam has never thought of himself as being a particularly childish person, but—“You shut the hell up. If you want more leg room you can get out of the car and walk! Plenty of space on the side of the road.”

 “I’ll show you plenty of space, you complete—”

“Burgers!” Steve announces as he approaches hastily from the direction of the diner. 

He’s got two hands loaded with greasy paper bags and an increasingly pinched look on his face, the same one that he always gets when Barnes starts kicking the back of Sam’s seat. “Sorry it took so long, guys,” he says breathlessly, peeling his lips back into a vaguely forced looking smile, “I couldn’t figure out where the ketchup packets were. They’re right next to the pop dispensers, isn’t that a weird place to put them, huh?”

“Yeah, that’s weird,” says Barnes, eyes still fixed firmly on Sam’s. 

“Yeah,” echoes Sam. He refuses to be the first one to look away. “Thanks for grabbing food, Steve.”

Steve lets out a sigh gusty enough to level a mountain. 

“C’mon,” he says, dropping a heavy hand on both their shoulders. “Buck, Sam, not now. Everyone back in the car, let’s get some food in our stomachs and head back on the road! Daylight is wasting, don’t you guys wanna get a move on?” 

His tone slides into the cajoling lilt of a suburban mother attempting to take her rowdy children on a road trip. Sam resents it very much. 

However, it doesn’t stop him from making a face at Barnes. 

“Yeah, Buck,” he mocks, as Steve steps away and moves toward the car. “Stop wasting time.” 

Barnes’ jaw ticks as he clenches his teeth. “I’m going to—”

Sam cuts him off, speaking through his best shit-eating grin. “You heard Steve. Into the backseat with you.” With that, he turns away, and takes a step towards the car. 

He makes it three steps before Barnes stops him, hand closing around Sam’s elbow like a steel trap.

Sam stumbles backwards. “What’s your problem—”

“You’re suspicious,” Barnes mutters under his breath, leaning in close so Sam can hear him. His breath gusts across Sam’s neck. “Steve can’t tell, because he thinks you’re great and that the sun shines out your ass, but I know. There’s something you’re not telling us.”

The hand around Sam’s elbow tightens minutely, and he swallows hard, a step too late to school his expression. 

Barnes is too close for the movement to pass unnoticed. His eyes flick down as he tracks the bob of Sam’s throat.

Over Sam’s shoulder, a crunch of gravel and then a rusty creak—Steve is getting into the car. 

“Mind your own business,” Sam spits again, and breaks his gaze. 

“I’ll be watching,” Barnes says, almost hastily, and he lets go with as much speed as he had grabbed on. In three long strides he’s made it to the passenger’s side, and Sam’s left standing there with several hours in the cramped backseat in his immediate future.

Goddamn it. 

***

Barnes spends the next few days making good on his threat to keep an eye on Sam. Maybe even a little too good. 

“This is ridiculous,” Sam snaps when he pushes open the bathroom door and, through the billowing of hot steam, sees Barnes leaning right against the door frame. “What the hell are you trying to do? Catch me jerking off?”

“There are lots of things someone can do in a bathroom,” says Barnes, undeterred. He scans Sam’s shower damp body slowly, no doubt checking for stupid hidden codes or weapons or something of the sort. “Very private space. Lots of little nooks and crannies.”

Sam rolls his eyes. “Well, great. I can assure you right now that there isn’t anything tucked into these nooks and crannies.” 

“Hm,” says Barnes, and flicks his gaze down again. 

Sam tips tries not to clutch his towel tighter around his hips too obviously. “You gonna let me put my clothes on?”

Barnes squints and leans in. His face is a little red, probably in frustration. “Depends,” he hisses, voice low, “on whether you’re hiding something else in—”

“Wow, it sure is steamy over there!” says Steve, loudly.

Barnes pushes off the door frame. Sam turns around to stare at Steve. Steve crosses his legs, uncrosses them again, and fiddles with the sheets of the bed he’s sitting on with an awkward, restless energy. He’s not looking anywhere in their direction.

“The shower,” he adds, after an unnaturally long pause. “It made lots of steam.”

Sam hikes his towel up again. “Uh. Yeah.”

“Good water pressure?” 

“Nope.”

“Oh. Thought so,” Steve replies, voice sounding strained. His ears are flushing. “Since the last one was bad, too. Uh. I just wanted to check.”

“Okay. Energy in here’s real weird right now. I’m just gonna…” Sam attempts to slide through the miniscule space between Barnes and the wall, but the space is so cramped that doing so just brings them chest to chest. He huffs. “Would it kill you to move?”

Barnes tips his chin up. A challenge.

“Well fuck you, too,” Sam mutters, and pushes his way through. 

He ignores the rough sensation of Barnes’ canvas coat on his bare skin as he pushes past, and the tingling that goes up his spine as he pulls on his clothes with Barnes’ eyes still burning against his back, and the outline of his ghost standing in the corner of the room, shoulders shaking, almost definitely laughing at him.

***

The days pass. Barnes refuses to ease up; Sam finds his rare moments of solitude growing fewer and farther between. 

He also finds, with growing horror, that he’s starting to grow kinda used to the itch of Barnes’ creepy-ass eyes glued to his back and the warmth of Barnes breathing weirdly down his neck. Exposure therapy of the worst kind. 

Steve, for his part, starts giving them both meaningful looks. Sam doesn’t even want to start decoding that.

***

One night, Sam snaps awake to a solid hand on his shoulder. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, still half-asleep, trying to scramble back from the shadowy silhouette looming over him. One arm flails out wildly. “Please—I’m sorry—”

“Wilson. It’s me.”

Sam blinks, breath coming fast. “Who? What?” 

A sigh. “You woke me up.”

Sam props his sweaty back up onto the headboard. The light is on in the bathroom, with the door cracked open just wide enough for the ugly yellow light to sketch out the features of Barnes’ impassive face; Steve lies in shadow on the moth-eaten couch, breathing slow and even. 

As expected, the ghost is there as well, standing quietly in the corner. Sam very deliberately does not look in its direction, and focuses instead on slowing his breathing.

“Are you watching me sleep now?” Sam asks. Embarrassingly enough, his voice breaks mid-sentence and falls pathetically short of the cutting tone he’d been aiming for. He closes his eyes so he won’t have to see the judgment on Barnes’ face. “Leave me alone and go back to your own bed if you need your precious eight hours so badly.”

No answer. Sam feels Barnes’ beady eyes burning a hole into his face. 

After a minute, the room is quiet enough that Sam is half-convinced that Barnes must’ve silently returned to his own blanket nest, but when he cracks one lid open, there he is—a hunched-shoulder lump, still perched on the very edge of Sam’s bed. 

He sighs. 

“What,” he says tiredly. He stretches out a leg and aims his knee at the Barnes-lump. “If you have something to say, spit it out.” 

“You were loud,” Barnes mutters.

Sam shifts defensively. “You snore, too.”

“I don’t.”

He doesn’t, but Sam’s not about to tell him that. “Sure you don’t. Your breathing just naturally sounds like a foghorn, then. Dunno if that’s just an old guy thing, but you should get it checked out.”

“It doesn’t. I’ve been trained out of making unnecessary noises in my sleep.”

“Tell that to my ears.”

A beat passes. 

“You’re full of shit,” says Barnes, and then: “I said that you were loud, not that you were snoring,” and then: “Do you want to talk about it.”

Sam almost laughs, at first, because the delivery is just so incredibly stiff and emotionless, and the idea of Barnes saying something like that is ridiculous enough that it seems like a joke. I thought we were already talking, he almost says, but then he sees the look on Barnes’ face.

“What.” Sam falters, uncomfortable. “Since when do you care?”

Barnes shrugs. “Dunno. Maybe I’m bored. So…?”

“Seriously?” Sam sits up from the headboard to cross his arms in front of his chest, feeling searing indignation rise in his gut. “Are you for real? It’s, what,”—he spares a quick look at the clunky little bedside clock, and it blinks out 3:52AM at him— “almost four o’clock in the morning, my eyebags have eyebags, and now you decide to play chatty Cathy and keep me from going back to sleep—”

With a creak, Steve turns over on the couch. Sam snaps his mouth shut, holding his breath—one, two, three seconds pass, and then Steve smacks his lips and continues snoring softly. 

“I’m tired, man,” Sam says finally, voice quiet. “Do I look like I want to talk?”

Barnes sits up, too, mouth inching down into a frown. His eyes are much too sharp for the lateness of the hour.

“Yeah,” he replies. “You do.”

Sam digs his fingers into his biceps. 

“If it’s bothering you, don’t keep it inside. Tell me about it.” He sounds like a robot. And yet—perhaps it’s something about the tilt of his head. Something sympathetic about the set of his face. 

Sam lets his arms drop down, slowly. He rubs a thumb against the bedsheets—the fabric is strange and rough, almost definitely not washed enough. His sweat is cooling quickly from the aggressive air conditioning unit that’s been installed on the wall next to his bed. 

Dark sky. Moon-bleached sand. A presence at his back.

Sam shivers.

“Just dreamed about, y’know,” he manages to get out. “Old stuff. It’s been a while since I’ve had that one.” He pauses and clears his throat. 

And then, because he feels like he needs to get the upper hand, he adds, “Also, don’t think I don’t realize that you’re copying my techniques word for word. Surprised you were awake to hear that one.”

A week ago, Sam had woken Steve up from a nightmare and talked him through the shaking, voice low and calming in the way he had learned from his days at the VA. Don’t keep it in, he’d said. Barnes had remained silent and motionless for the entire half hour of that, and Sam had thought he’d been sleeping. 

“I’m a light sleeper,” Barnes says tonelessly. “You changed the subject. What old stuff?” 

“Just old stuff,” Sam repeats, helpless. His shoulders rise up like mountains, book-end his head to protect his neck—no matter how good he is at listening to other people’s problems, talking about his own makes his skin crawl. Makes him feel like a dog with its tender pink belly exposed, trust without guarantee of reciprocation. 

(Yeah, yeah. He can’t take his own medicine, or something like that.) 

“Bad shit follows you around,” he says, keeping as vague as possible. Redirect, c’mon, redirect, can’t show too much of that soft belly—“You should know how it is, Barnes, what with all—uh.”

And now Sam’s gone and stuck his foot in his mouth. 

Normally, he’s not too shy at taking shots at Barnes. He doesn’t dance around the whole one-arm, brainwashing, decades-of-torture-and-loss-of-agency thing the way Steve does—but in the enclosure of their dark room, bringing up the Winter Soldier’s past suddenly seems like a low blow. 

Barnes, not privy to Sam’s innermost thoughts, is unphased. “Sure, I know how it is,” he says plainly, and shifts his metal arm just enough for the bathroom light to throw off a blinking starburst. “Got a whole conga line following behind me.” 

His delivery is more suited to small-talk about the weather. Like a quick little sentence made to pass the time, bridge the gap from one topic to another. An observation of a fact of life. The sky is blue. The grass is green. James Buchanan Barnes has killed more people than he can even remember. 

It makes Sam feel worse. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, chagrined, before Barnes can add anything else. “That was unfair of me, using your past. It’s shitty of me to be bringing up stuff that wasn’t even your fault.” 

No reply. 

“Barnes? Um. You good?”

Barnes’ eyes widen, just slightly—he’s been staring at Sam this whole time. “Um, yeah.” There’s something surprised in his tone; his face softens from his seemingly built-in scowl, just a bit. Just enough so that his eyebrows lift up from their perpetual furrow, tilt up into something that resembles cautious amazement. Through it all, he looks like he’s holding his breath. 

Then he breathes out. 

“Don’t see what you’re apologizing for,” he adds, his voice a little rough. “Wasn’t a big deal.” 

Sam eyes him warily. “It’s a pretty big deal. I was out of line. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

“Your reaction was pretty weird for something that was ‘fine’.”

Sam thinks that he won’t answer, but after maybe a second, Barnes says, candidly, “It’s just. I think that was the first time someone’s said that to me in a while.”  

“Said what?” Sam tilts his head to the side, thinks for a moment. “What, sorry?”

“That. And the other stuff.”

“Oh.” Sam swallows. 

“Yeah.” 

For a long moment, they sit there in the half-dark, watching each other’s faces. 

Barnes’ gaze is intense. It makes Sam uncomfortable. He can’t explain it—it’s a little bit like the feeling he’d get in high school, when he’d lean his chair back on two legs, and it’d teeter there—the sensation of being about to fall. 

It makes something tug in his belly.

Outside, someone clears their throat of phlegm, a car door slams shut, an engine rumbles to life—the earliest of the early travelers, headed out onto the road and back into the unknown at the most godless hour in the morning. 

The tension breaks. 

Sam looks away. His eyes land on the ghost still standing in the corner—abruptly, he feels self-conscious. “Okay,” he says, glad for the darkness and for the additional presence of Steve, who is still knocked out on the couch, arm flung above his head. “That’s enough chatting for tonight. I need to get at least two more hours if I’m going to be functional today.”

“Hm,” Barnes says, and doesn’t get up. 

“You gonna move or not?” Sam asks.

None too subtly, Barnes tilts his head down and gestures down. Sam follows Barnes’ gaze to his own hands; he hadn’t noticed that they were still trembling. 

He clenches them into fists and tucks them under the sheets.

“Are you sure you’re good?” There is something soft in his voice that could pass for concern. 

Half of Sam still thinks that this is some sort of long-con joke. This is not how their exchanges go. He waits for the regular Barnes to come back; not the one that sits at his bedside and asks him about his bad dreams, but the one who studies him with suspicious eyes and makes petty comments and accuses Sam of keeping secrets that will endanger their little rag-tag band of fugitives. 

But nothing happens. The only Barnes is the one sitting on the edge of Sam’s motel bed, the one asking about how he’s feeling.

“Yeah,” he says. “All good.”

Barnes studies him for a long time, looking unconvinced, but he nods. 

“‘Kay,” is all he says.

And then he gets up and goes back to his own bed, leaving Sam to slump back under the sheets again in an exhausted mix of confusion and reluctant gratefulness.  

***

In the morning, Barnes comes back from the lobby of the motel with an extra cup of coffee in his hand and sets it down on the table without a word.

“You’re driving today, Wilson,” he says, when Sam looks up at him. “Don’t fall asleep at the wheel.” Then he slips out of the room again, ostensibly to go lurk around the parking lot or something weird like that. 

Sam looks at the cup. It’s probably not poisoned, he reasons.

When he takes a sip, he doesn’t gag as he expects to. The brew is burned and acidic, as most motel coffees are, and the creamer is the shitty, cloying vanilla type—but still, the actual components themselves are what he always gets for himself. Two sugars, one cream.

Barnes remembered how he takes his coffee. 

Sam, personally, doesn’t know Barnes’ coffee preferences—the guy is weirdly cagey about his drinks—beyond the complaints that he sometimes makes about the watery motel brews that they get every now and then (This looks like it was scooped up from the Hudson River is a common complaint)—but he thinks that if he were to learn them, it would only be so he could deliberately get it wrong to piss Barnes off. Really. 

Something strange creeps up into his chest. He spends a minute or two more than he’s comfortable admitting to convince himself that Barnes’ gesture doesn’t mean anything.

Still, days later, when he realizes that Barnes has stopped eyeing him like he’s some sort of double agent and that their banter has slipped into something with a little less animosity and a little more camaraderie, he feels that strange, begrudging warmth flow through him again—and for the longest time, he doesn’t know what to make of it. 

***

That newborn warmth—which grows arms and legs and a big fat body, goes through toddlerhood and puberty and then suddenly it’s a full-fledged fucking adult—persists stubbornly even through his continued days on the run, as Barnes orbits closer and closer over car seats and diner booths and musty motel couches.

And then it persists through his imprisonment in the Raft, which is a big fluorescent buzz in Sam’s memories, and better not spoken of—

And then through his second time as a fugitive, god, how long is Sam going to run, and how far, and will he ever, ever get to see home one day—

Anyway.

That warmth is why Sam feels the dread in his throat ease, just a little, when he first sees Bucky after they land in Wakanda. Even despite the awful circumstances à la Purple Buttchin Apocalypse. 

And, yes, just Bucky. Not Barnes. Somewhere along the line, without his notice, he’d switched out Barnes for his weird old-timey-sounding nickname, because it just rubbed off on him, and—well, what does that make them? Friends? Teammates? What do you call a guy who you’ve tried to kill and who’s also tried to kill you; whose air you practically breathed out of his mouth because you were living so damn close together; who’s woken you up from nightmares and who might still remember your coffee order, but you aren’t sure, because you haven’t seen him in two years? What do you call him? 

“How about a hundred year old man?” Bucky says, as he strides out past the Dora Milaje. 

The asshole can’t even let Sam have dramatic inner monologues in peace. 

Bucky goes in for a firm hug with Steve, but he throws a sidelong glance to Sam as he does it, even offers a little quirk of the lips over Steve’s shoulder, which is, just. Something. Whatever. Sam doesn’t know what it is.

Bucky’s stupid face is just infuriating, that’s all. Sam looks away before he can smile back.

The buzz of anxiety settling over Birnin Zana catches them up in a flurry, and then there’s no time to think about smiles, or Bucky, or how the two are related.

Later, Sam’s watching alien ships shatter into debris against the force field protecting Wakanda when Bucky finally leans over, nudges at his left shoulder, and addresses him directly for the first time since he arrived. 

“So,” he says. His eyes are also trained on the bright blue veins of energy threading through the sky, and his tone is casual enough that one might think he was passing the time while waiting in line at a cafe. “What’ve you been up to? You and Steve kick some asses?”

Sam turns and gives him the most unimpressed stare he can manage. Something explodes in the distance. “Does this seem like the time?”

Bucky gives him an innocent look. “No time like the present.”

Sam snorts, tilts his head back up at the sky. He considers telling Bucky that he actually—kinda missed your stupid ass. Steve’s not as fun to mess with. He still thinks I take my coffee with five sugars, and he’s so sincere about it that I can’t make myself correct him. It’s so sweet it hurts my teeth, and I haven’t seen a dentist in two years. Also, he never wakes up when I do.

He decides against it. Some things should remain unsaid. 

“Yeah, sure,” he agrees. “We kicked a lot of asses. Got our asses kicked, too. Same old, day in, day out.”

“Sounds fun,” says Bucky. Another alien ship crashes down outside the borders—the city shudders with the impact, and Sam feels it tremble all the way up to his teeth. Bucky doesn’t even blink.  “Guess I missed out.”

“Yeah, big time. I’ll catch you up later.”

Bucky huffs out a tiny little laugh. “I’ll take you up on that.”

When he smiles, it crinkles his eyes in a way it didn’t before he came to Wakanda. Sam thinks, with an alarming desire: I want to see what made him smile like that for the first time. 

There’s that strange sensation again. That falling feeling. It occurs to him—in that moment, with the Wakandan sun burning hotly at his scalp, and Bucky fucking Barnes smiling at him like that, and the very edges of normality shattering to pieces around him, as they always have—that he is on the edge of something momentous. That he is teetering on the precipice of a very tall mountain, head tipped all the way back, unaware of the chasm waiting for him at his back.

Or maybe the prospect of the world ending is just getting to him. Fucking Thanos. Sam needs to get his head in the game. 

A crackle, then; Steve’s voice comes on through the comms. “Buck, I’m gonna need you over here. Sam, you too.” 

The ground shakes again. Sam and Bucky exchange a glance.

“You know,” Sam says, clearing his throat. “Just so you know. You’re not so bad.”

Bucky slaps a hand on Sam’s shoulder. Grips it firmly, and Sam swears he feels the heat of it sear itself into his bones. “Thanks, Sam. You’re not so bad yourself.” A wry little smile. “We’ll finish this later.”

Famous last words. 

***

Sam dies in a battle and wakes up to another one, and only when the worst has passed, when his heartbeat has quieted in his ears and his hands have stopped shaking with adrenaline, does he realize what has happened to him. 

He finds a quiet place, then. An empty rooftop. He sits there and listens to the wind whistle through a sky that has grown five years older without him, and he laughs until his belly aches—until his laughter turns to gasping—until his eyes begin to water.

***

After the press has settled down into something slightly quieter than a roar, after the bodies have been gathered and the wounds stitched up, after Steve leaves and comes back and pushes the shield into Sam’s hands—after everything—Sam returns home. 

But before all of that, he calls his sister. 

“Sam,” Sarah sobs down the line. She picked up her phone before the second ring. “Samuel Thomas Wilson, when I see you again, I’m gonna strangle you with my bare hands.”

Sam finds his throat closing up. He lowers himself slowly into a chair, and feels the movement ache in every muscle of his body. “I’m sorry, Sarah,” he says. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Sam thinks that that phone conversation is the best and worst thing he’s experienced in months—in years, actually, if the time he missed counts for anything. (He doesn’t know. It had felt like nothing to him.) Sarah scolds him, weeps some more, marvels at his miraculous return, circles back around to scolding. Sam clings onto his phone for dear life and soaks in the sound of his sister’s voice down the line, and his hands tremble through it all.

When Sam tells her about Steve and the lake and the shield, she’s silent for a long moment. After what seems like five whole minutes, she lets out a crackling sigh and says, “You’re coming home, aren’t you?”

Home. Sam’s chest tightens. 

“Yeah,” he whispers hoarsely. Then louder. “Yeah, you think I’m giving up my chance at a free meal? I haven’t had a good dinner in five years, I’m starving.”

“You think you’re funny?”

“I’m always funny,” Sam says, and Sarah laughs, even if it is a wet, weak thing, and that’s all that matters.

She texts him a picture a few minutes after they hang up. It’s a cute snap of her and Cass and AJ at a park, one that he doesn’t remember, or maybe doesn’t recognize—probably the latter. They’re all smiling at the camera, the boys with ice cream in hand, Sarah with her hands on their shoulders. 

She looks both the same and not at all. Her eyes are more tired, worn down. As for his nephews, he barely recognizes them. They’d been babies when he’d last seen them.  

He saves the photo to his camera roll. Straightens out his clothes. Heads back into the fray. 

***

For two long weeks in Delacroix, Sam refuses to check his phone for anything less than a national emergency. He’s just fought the battle of a lifetime, he has a family to catch up with; as far as he’s concerned, the suits on the other end of the phone can screw themselves. At least for just two weeks. 

He hugs Sarah, plays with his nephews, spends more than one quiet afternoon sitting on the porch, watching the long grass swaying on the bank and the silver water sliding past beyond it. He asks after the neighbors. Figures out who’s still here, who’s—gone. 

He doesn’t see his ghost once, which he is absurdly grateful for, even though he can’t quite put his finger on why he feels that way. 

And, every few days, he sends Bucky a text message.

He doesn’t receive a single response. 

After his little vacation is finally over, he heads back to DC, and his phone burns a hole in his pocket for the entire flight. When he lands, despite every nerve in his body telling him that he’s pathetic for doing so, he opens up his text thread with Bucky and checks for new messages.

At the top are the ones he sent that morning. 

Sam

I’m headed back to DC today. 

You’re probably settled in New York, right? 

Maybe I can swing by sometime.

There are no replies from Bucky, as usual. And Sam expected this, but. But. 

Bucky had been by his side when he received the shield. He’d said Sam’s name and smiled, and his eyes had been warm. And Sam had teetered on that precipice, blindly—and he’d hoped—he’d thought that maybe—after—

He guesses that it doesn’t really matter, now, what he had been hoping for. 

***

Sam rose from the dead after five years to return to an apartment that’s been gathering dust for ten, and when he cracks open the door and steps across the threshold into his dark, stale apartment, the only thing he can think is: I don’t remember what it looked like when I left. 

He opens up all the windows to air out the smell of stagnancy; breaks out an expired pack of clorox wipes to clean off the counters; opens up the fridge to a bare shelf containing only one long-expired bottle of tomato juice and two dessicated tangerines; decides to go on a grocery run. 

Technically speaking, a trip to the store isn’t so urgent. There are plenty of good restaurants in the area, he could definitely survive on takeout for a few meals, take the night to wash off the exhaustion of traveling before really settling back in and putting in the energy to restock his pathetic food stores. 

Still, he can’t bear standing around in this place that doesn’t feel like his. So he goes. 

Back when he was still a civilian living in DC, Sam went to the same locally-owned grocery store every two weeks, sure as clockwork. There were stores with better selection, maybe with fresher produce, but that store was Sam’s. He knew its layout by heart. Half the employees knew his name. To him, there were no better reasons for returning than those, and so he had, week by week.

When he reaches the storefront and pushes the door open, the tinkle of the bell is just as high and annoying as it had been before, and that’s about where all the similarities end.

“Welcome,” says the young woman restocking the plastic-packaged cherries on the stand by the entrance. She doesn’t turn around.

Sam sweeps his eyes across the store—and—it’s—it’s— 

The fruit isn’t supposed to be by the entrance, he thinks. It was supposed to be the baked goods section right at the front. When he walked through the door, he’d been expecting the smell of freshly-made bread, just as always, and instead he’d gotten a whiff of—whatever that was. Recycled produce mist, or something. 

Sam swallows. “Thanks,” he says, quieter than usual, and then grabs a shopping basket and strides into the depths of the aisles.

Five minutes in, he’s still feeling a little stuck on the fact that what he originally recognized as the pasta aisle has now been renovated into a color-blocked treasure trove of children’s cereals. As he contemplates his surroundings, a little boy shoulders his way into Sam’s knees with all the strength of a college quarterback. 

Sam inches aside. “Hey, little man. Was I blocking you?”

A round face turns up in snotty solemnity. “Yup.”

Sam nods briskly. “My bad.” The kid does not move away. “Can I help you with something…?”

A chubby finger points up into the air with imperious intensity. “I can’t reach.”

“Oh. Yeah, lemme just—” Sam pulls a box off the shelf and examines the neon orange slug plastered over the front of the box, oozing in a slow trail over a bowl of sugary-looking flakes. Not Sam’s first choice of a cereal mascot, but maybe kids like different things these days. “Tony the Tiger is out, huh?”

“Whozzat?”

“He’s—never mind. Here you go.” The cereal box is delivered safely to its target, and Sam steps back with a perfunctory nod, and the kid does not go away. 

“Anything else?” Sam asks after another second of mutual staring. “Cinnamon Toast Crunch? Froot Loops? Cheerios, but maybe you don’t like those, huh—”

“Are you lost?”

“...No?” 

“I got lost yesterday,” the kid volunteers. “At the mall. I waited on a bench, and then I saw Tommy, and he called my mom for me. And then I went home, and after dinner, my mom went out and brung back pretzels, ‘cause of how good I was for waiting. You should wait on a bench, maybe.”

“Oh,” says Sam, because he doesn’t know who Tommy is, and he has no clue what mall Cereal Kid is talking about. “There aren’t any benches here, though. And I’m not lost. I’m just looking for the pasta.”

“You looked lost.”

“I didn’t,” Sam says, knee-jerk. 

“I watched. You were standing for really long.”

Sam goes to pinch at his temples, aborts halfway through. “It’s rude to spy on people, you know.”

“I wasn’t spying. I was just looking.” The boy shuffles his slug flakes, or whatever it is, around in his arms and frees a hand to rub at his nose in a sticky sort of way. He’s in desperate need of a tissue. “I know where the pasta is,” he says, and then fails to elaborate.

Sam gives him another few seconds before responding. “...Mind telling me where?”

“Oh. On the other side of the store.”

“Ah.” For the entire time that Sam’s been coming to this store, the dried pasta and canned goods aisle has been on the right side of the store. That’s how it’s always been, and he’s known by heart which side to start on, where everything is. Right to left—produce, pasta and canned goods, coffee, spices, frozen items. Like walking a well-worn path. “Thanks for the tip, little man.”

“Mm.” And then: “You were on TV.”

“Hmm—” Sam, halfway into turning around, pivots back on his heel and forces a smile. He just wants his pasta. “Yeah, sure was. You watch the news, huh? That’s pretty mature of you.”

“Do you know Captain America?”

Sam blinks.

Does he know Captain America. He knows things about the man who was Captain America, sure. He knows that he slept curled up, snored a little, too, that he knew how to swear, that he thought that the weird powdered eggs served at free motel breakfasts were actually kind of good, that he was stubborn, that the only thing that he left behind was a round case that is currently propped up against the edge of Sam’s dining table at home, the worn brown leather of it creased with age and repeated use. That he left Sam behind, too, and didn’t let him know about it until it was too late. That he was Sam’s best friend, once.

Does Sam know Captain America. That’s a great question.

“That’s a secret,” Sam says, and the boy’s mother calls him from the end of the aisle, and Sam turns around and walks away before he can be interrogated further.

He ends up finding only half of what was on his list. But it’s just groceries. It’s not important.

At the register, the teenager ringing him up has to ask him twice if he wants paper or plastic bags before he looks up from his distracted stare into the stinging red light of the barcode scanner. “Paper, please,” Sam says, clenching his empty hands at his side. He usually brings his own bags, but he’d forgotten.

“That’ll be an extra 85 cents,” says the boy, and unfolds the brown paper with a sharp snap. 

Sam walks home with his head filled with white noise. 

He fumbles with his keys at the door, catches his foot on the edge of the door frame as he crosses the threshold, barely remembers to tuck his shoes away onto his empty little shoe rack. 

Somehow, in the time that he went away to the grocery store, the distance between his front door and the fridge has grown from a few meters to the span of a football field. Sam takes what must be a hundred years to cross his living room, and then he’s standing in front of his dinky little fridge, staring at the little faded blemishes of carelessly placed magnets and poorly removed tape on the white plastic coating. 

The handles of his grocery bags are hurting his palms; they’re getting heavy. He should set them down. 

He says this to the vets at the V.A. a lot: if it’s hurting you, set it down. 

The relocated pasta section at the grocery store, the wet, leafy smell of the produce at the entrance. The fresh coats of paint on the walls, covering the watermarks that had been there for years. The newly replaced neon sign in the window. That grocery store and all the others like it lining the streets on the walk home, all of them repainted and renewed and reborn, and Sam, stumbling over the unfamiliar cracks in the sidewalk, outgrown by his own neighborhood.

His hands tremble. The bag handles dig deeply into his flesh.  

His nephews, taller. His own little sister, older than him. Bucky, radio silent. Neighbors gone. Natasha gone. Steve gone. One after another after another after another—

And—

Dark sky. Moon-bleached sand. A presence at his back.

Sam bites his tongue so hard he nearly draws blood. 

I want to go back, he thinks. The bags slide out of his numb fingers, dropping to the kitchen tile with a heavy thunk; something gives way inside one of them, and a dark patch of sliminess begins to seep through the thin brown paper. He’s broken his carton of eggs. He doesn’t care; he just bows over, presses the heels of his hands against his face, hard, until his vision sparks and bursts like the desert sun, until it feels like the white light might wash him out into something softer, something brighter, something that doesn’t feel so lost.

I don’t want this. I want to go back. 

But when he peels back his hands and opens his burning eyes again, nothing has changed. 

The world turns on, unforgiving. 

***

The broken eggs can be replaced. The floor can be cleaned up. Sam does all this and then moves on with his life, because that is his only option. 

There’s the shield to deal with, and the world falling to pieces, and then Sarah’s trying to sell the boat, and then, miracle of miracles, Bucky Barnes finally deigns to give Sam a sign that he’s alive—that sign being an incredibly unsolicited delivery of His Opinion on Sam’s ownership of the shield or lack thereof—

The point is, Sam is busy. 

After one exhausting, disaster filled week, and by the grace of whatever merciful being is out there, Sam’s overflowing plate of mind-occupying items is relieved of approximately two things: 

1. The potential sale of his parents’ boat.

2. The tenuous ownership of the shield. 

Unfortunately, a third remaining item on the plate grows in such massive amounts that it is more than enough to fill the empty space left by the departure of the previous two. This untactful item is:

3. Bucky Barnes.

And even more unfortunately, the expansion of occupied space is meant in both the metaphorical and the literal sense. Which brings him to the current moment.

“Stop manspreading,” Sam gripes. “This is my couch, why are you crowding me out?”

In response, Bucky sinks deeper back into the soft chenille and gives him a petulant middle finger. His thighs are spread wide enough to take up one and a half seat cushions. “If you’re gonna hog the remote for the whole day, then I’ll take up as much space as I want. Put up or shut up.” 

It’s a warm August afternoon, and by now this type of squabbling is as good as their daily routine. 

(There had been a short stretch, just after the whole Flag Smashers situation, when Bucky had been hesitant, almost soft-spoken around Sam. Afraid to cross the line, maybe, which was strange considering all that had already happened between them, and especially weird considering that their main mode of communication was through banter. A week in, and it had already driven Sam insane. The docile silence. The apologetic hunching and staring and tiptoeing. He didn’t need another shadow, he needed a partner. Stop that shit, he’d finally said, at about the tenth time Bucky had visibly held himself back from making a joke at Sam’s expense. You look constipated. Just say it out loud.

So, hesitantly, Bucky had made the joke. And Sam had laughed, unoffended, and punched his shoulder until Bucky cracked a smile. And here they are now, with Bucky over at Sam’s so often that he’s starting to expect ridiculous things, like remote privileges.)

Sam frowns and tries to shove Bucky’s thigh back with his knee. “My couch, my TV.”

Bucky grinds his teeth. “But you’re not even paying attention to the episode. Do you even know what you’re watching? Tell me who that guy is.”

Sam flicks his aching eyes back to the TV. There’s a man onscreen with incredibly straight teeth, wearing a crisp plaid button-up. Sam flounders for a name. 

“That’s, uh, Ben…drew. He’s a professional dentist.”

“His name is Bendrew,” Bucky repeats flatly. 

“Yeah.”

“And he’s a professional dentist. As opposed to an amateur dentist.”

“That’s what I said.”

Bucky’s face is turning slightly purple. It’s hilarious to look at. “You—you really can’t lie for shit! This is Smiling Tiger levels of bad, Sam, c’mon!” 

Sam blinks slowly. Bucky’s outrage is always funny, but it’s so hard to keep his eyes open. “And what about it? Let me watch the damn show.”

“You’re very obviously not watching, and you haven’t let me change the channel for the last hour. Just hand it over!” 

Bucky makes a desperate grab, and Sam shoves at him with one hand while trying to maintain his grip on the remote with the other. His arms feel like they’re made out of sticky, slow-moving syrup. 

“What the—hands off!” he gets out. “This is my TV time!”

“It’s always your TV time! Christ, let me choose for once, you know I don’t have a TV in my place!”

“And how is that my fault?”  

“You—”

Bucky lurches forward in a burst of energy and snatches the remote from his hand, and normally Sam would be able to hold up under the strain, but. 

(It was true that he hadn’t really been watching. More than for entertainment, he’s been keeping the TV on to help himself stay awake. Less chances of nodding off when there’s noise and color and—anything, really. But he’s just so, so tired.)

Bucky’s weight presses down on him, and Sam’s arm gives way like the rotten beams of an old house, and he falls backward onto the couch. Bucky falls with him. 

“Oof,” wheezes Sam.

“Ow,” says Bucky, voice muffled by the henley over Sam’s shoulder. “My nose.”

“Serves you right,” says Sam. 

He’s holding as still as possible, breath held like a prey animal. He hasn’t been this close to Bucky since their embarrassing roll in that field in Munich, and this time, there isn’t much in the way of protective leather to buffer the feeling of Bucky’s body over his—just an old cotton t-shirt, some worn-down sweatpants, thin enough that they might as well not be there. 

Bucky runs hot. Sam’s more aware of it than ever.

“Move,” he grunts, turning his face away. “You’re heavy. Getting sweat on me.”

Bucky raises his head a centimeter, expression considering, and then drops it back down. “No. If I let you up you’ll steal the remote back.”

“Steal?” With each breath, Sam’s chest rises and presses into Bucky’s own. He shoves the observation aside as quickly as he can and tries to sit up. “It’s mine!”

“Don’t bother.” Bucky grins, eyes gleaming—and there’s a light behind them that Sam knows well, almost sharp, coiled like a predator—and he pushes Sam back down again, easy, like he’s moving a feather. 

Sam’s breath rushes out between his teeth in an audible gasp, and the cheery music from the commercial break is nowhere near loud enough to drown it out. 

That’s—well. Sam’s stomach flips, and he blames it on exhaustion-induced nausea.  

Above Sam, Bucky has already turned his cheek away. Either he wasn’t paying close enough attention to hear the gasp, or he just didn’t care to dwell on it; he is now preoccupied with flipping gleefully through the channels, one hand on the remote, the other still pressing down on Sam’s chest.

“You can stay there,” Bucky says smugly. “I’m comfortable enough like this.”

He’s not using full strength in his arm, and Sam knows this because he knows what Bucky at 100% feels like. He could probably squirm out of it, if he tried his best. He doesn’t need to remain here, pinned like a butterfly onto his own couch.

But.

Again. He’s just so tired.

Bucky still isn’t looking. In those few, private seconds, Sam breathes in, slowly, and then out. Closes his eyes to center himself. 

Bucky’s hand on his chest, the vibranium just cool enough to be comfortable. 

Bucky’s body, heavy and warm on his own.

The low drone of the TV, badly-written dialogue smearing into a blur of noise. 

Sam’s closed eyes, dry from strain. His tense shoulders. The ache of exhaustion that has grown its roots into his core. 

If he let himself, he could just drift off. Just let the slow heat of Bucky’s body press him down, like he’s a walking weighted blanket. It would be easy. Sam could forget everything else, and melt into the cushions, and maybe try to get the first good sleep he’s had in days—but—

“—ello. Hello? Earth to Sam.”

Sam squints his eyes open. “What.”

“So you’re alive. Thought maybe I crushed you to death, but I didn’t hear you squeak.”

“Shut the hell up, man,” Sam says wearily, and when he pushes at his shoulder, Bucky finally slides to the side to let him sit up. 

Sam’s skin feels startlingly cold when Bucky moves away, even in the muggy summer air. “I was just closing my eyes,” he says.  

“Naptime?”

“Shut up. I wasn’t asleep.”

Bucky smirks, clearly not convinced. “Sure.” 

“Wipe that smirk off, asshole.”

“I dunno, sleepyhead. You sure you’re still up for that morning mission tomorrow? Wheels up at oh-six-hundred, y’know.”

(It’s a new offshoot of Hydra. Some underground seed that has been germinating for a few years, finally bursting to the surface. Rumor was that they had been experimenting with magic. 

Joaquin had given Sam and Bucky a missing persons file. Adrian Lewis, missing for three months. Recently returned after the Blip. The last time his wife had seen him, he’d been driving away from their home of ten years. The next time he’d been spotted, he was riding out to the middle of nowhere in Nevada in a car packed with suspected neo-HYDRA members. The agent tailing them had reported back that he’d seen suspicious flashes of green light—something like magic.

He’s hurting, was what the wife said in her testimonial. He’s not himself.

Suspected human experimentation was scribbled in the margins of the file, and then Possible replication of time stone, and Sam could see Bucky’s jaw jump when he read it over.)

“If I’m ready—let’s see if you even wake up on time, how about that!” 

And then Sam shoves Bucky into the couch cushions, and Bucky whaps him over the head with one of the throw pillows, and Sam watches Bucky’s mouth curve in laughter and soaks up the happiness in his face like a sponge, all the way until he’s too-full with it.

***

That night, the terror in Sam brings his limbs alive before he’s fully awake. 

“I’m sorry—” he gasps, flailing blindly. “Please—”

When his head clears, he’s alone in his bedroom, shrinking back against the sweat-damp pillows. He pushes himself up into a half-sit against his headboard, and as he does, the bony knob at the base of his neck grinds into the wood, painful and unpleasant. 

It’s dark outside. The moon is just a thin, pale slice in the darkness framed by his curtains. Waning crescent. Sam stares at it until his eyes hurt. Breathes in and out, in and out. 

When he blinks again, the room is already washed light gray with overcast morning light. 

The knob on the nape of his neck, when pressed, aches like a bruise. 

***

When Sam strides out onto the slow bustle of the dark tarmac at 5:30AM sharp, Bucky’s already waiting for him, fingers fiddling idly with the sleeve-cuff of his usual leather jacket. The first thing he does is give Sam a thorough up-and-down, and his gaze lingers longer than usual on Sam’s face.

“Jeez,” he says. The corner of his mouth quirks up. “You look rough.”

On any other day, this would be Sam’s cue to launch off an insult of his own and push them into their usual banter, but he’s feeling too achy and raw to come up with a proper response. His spine bows under the weight of the gas-laced air blowing in through the gaping entrance of the aircraft hanger. It’s an awfully beautiful morning. 

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, brushing past; their shoulders knock, and it irks him more than it should. His duffle bag feels even heavier than normal. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

After a pause, he hears Bucky fall into step behind him. 

Further behind Bucky, he’s aware of his usual second shadow, following silently in their wake. It had appeared at Sam’s tableside that morning and stared at him, silent and accusatory, as he went through the motions of his daily routine and didn’t even pretend that he had slept. 

When they arrive in Nevada, the mission goes—to put it lightly—messily. 

Sam’s not doing his best work, and he’s very aware of that. He’s putting in all that he can, of course, but it’s one thing to stand in his doorway in the morning, feeling the bone-deep exhaustion, and tell himself: You can do this, Sam. It doesn’t matter how tired you are, it doesn’t matter how much your head aches or your eyes burn or your chest hurts—you are a professional, and you will get through this if it’s the last thing you do. 

It’s another thing to actually be mid-air, with bullets whizzing past his head as his vision blurs, and to realize: Hm. Maybe today is the day I get my head blown off, too, just because I didn’t get enough sleep. 

And through it all, the horrible familiarity—of the hot sand and the hotter sun, the forever-curve of the horizon, the wind whistling past his ears—

Sam can usually handle it, really. He’s just tired right now. That’s all.

When they arrive at that secluded desert bunker, the place is completely cleared out. No signs of HYDRA activity beyond the defense that they’d pushed through, and no sign of Adrian Lewis. By the time the whole ordeal is wrapped up, Sam is even more exhausted than he was already, and the constipated look on Bucky’s face has reached critical levels.

“Looking hot out there, Sam.” Bucky’s using his what-the-fuck-was-that voice, the one reserved especially for half-botched jobs like this, and it makes Sam want to throw his hands up into the air. So far, in his tenure as Captain America, he’s had a pretty good track record with his missions, but he’s fully aware when he messes up. There’s no need to lecture.

“I already know,” he tosses over his shoulder, speeding up. Their boots are loud against the bottom of the plane, each step ringing hollowly in the metal belly; it does nothing to ease the throbbing in Sam’s temples. “You don’t need to rub it in.”

Bucky huffs. “Do you know? ‘Cause if you did, you wouldn’t have let yourself get to this point in the first place. Really, what was that? I had to cover your ass five times—”

“That last time didn’t count, I had that one fine, you just had to butt in ‘cause you’re nosy.” 

“Four times, then. That’s still too many.”

By now, Sam’s resigned himself to the fact that there really is no way to avoid someone when they’re on the same plane in mid-air, short of jumping out. He throws himself down on the bench built against the wall, ignores the way that his ghost stations itself beside the bench.

“You’re my partner,” he argues. “Aren’t you supposed to cover me? And how many times have I covered you, remember that time in New York—”

Bucky drops down right beside him, because he has no sense of personal space, and also because he is refusing to read the fucking room. “My arm was malfunctioning—"

“You’re not standing here in front of me claiming that Wakandan tech malfunctions so easily. Just admit you were distracted.”

“Okay, we’re way off topic. You’re trying to distract me now, right, that’s what you’re trying to do. You looked like a drunk driver, you were practically swerving through the air. That’s not fine. Whatever happened out there—”

“I know. Christ. We have no leads on the HYDRA branch now.” The ghost next to the bench is staring at him, unmoving, and it’s starting to piss him off. Sam takes a fortifying breath. “That’s on me, okay, I’ll make sure to write it up in the report that it was my fault, if you’re so damn worried about that—”

“What—Sam. Listen to me.” Bucky drags a hand down his cheek, scrubbing it through his stubble. Fuck, he’s got his Serious Business face on. “Fuck the neo-nazis. Fuck the mission. I’m talking about you, okay?”

Sam bristles. “What about me?”

Bucky pauses, tilts his head like Sam should know better.

“Spit it out,” Sam says, when Bucky stays silent. 

“You feelin’ tired?” 

An echo of the day before, except Bucky isn’t exactly laughing this time. His expression is unreadable. 

Sam rolls his eyes.

“Not gonna answer that. I’m not giving you more ammo, y’think I’m dumb?” He leans his head back against the humming metal of the cargo hold; he rattles with it. He’s too tired to be shooting the shit right now. “I don’t need your old geezer ass asking me if my mind is fading for the next three weeks.”

That, of all things, summons the tiniest of smirks. “So your mind is fading?”

Sam sighs more than says, “Whatever.”

The engine sings into the bone of his skull. It’s not too rough; he could probably pass out like this. It’s like a long ride back home on the bus. 

To his side, Bucky drums his fingers in a steady rhythm against the meat of his thigh. Then he uncoils, wets his lips. 

“What’s going on with you, Sam?”

Sam passes a hand over the bruise on the nape of his neck, presses a finger in where it’s most tender, and the ache diffuses out from the dune-ridge line of his vertebrae, thin and slow like sand. He can feel their eyes on his face—Bucky’s and the ghost’s. He wants both of them to leave him alone.

He considers Bucky’s question. What’s going on with him? 

1. Sam has a very important errand that he keeps putting off. AJ’s birthday is coming up soon, and when he had his regular call with Sarah last week, she had asked him what he was planning to get (just to avoid accidentally getting the same thing), and he had realized that he had no answer.

It’s the first of either of his nephews’ birthdays since Sam’s come back, and does that mean he should get five more gifts for all the birthdays that he missed? Or should this gift be extra special, extra expensive, like making up for his absence could ever be solved as simply as a little more cash spent? And does Sam even know what AJ likes anymore, what he would want as a birthday gift? After all this time?

2. There was a childhood picture of one of the Flag Smashers posted online a few days ago, the one called Nico. God knows how the poster had gotten their hands on it. It was a side-by-side photo comparison, like one of those before and after kiddie photos. The first picture was of Nico as a child, dressed in an ill-fitting Captain America halloween costume; it was too big in the shoulders, and the sleeves fell short of his bird-thin wrists; he was beaming at the camera, or whoever it is who was holding the camera; he had a little gap in between his two front teeth.

The second picture was pulled from some news article or another—Nico again, this time with his chest smashed in by Captain America’s shield.

Someone else had sent a print-out of it in an envelope, mixed in with the fan mail that he gets sometimes. That was how Sam found it. Not while scrolling online, not from someone tagging him in the article—just the printout, folded into crisp fourths, printed in color so that the blood was perfectly red and vivid. 

It’s still sitting on the desk in his home office, tucked back carefully into its envelope. 

3. Sam is haunted by a—

“Ghost,” he mumbles as he looks at it, absent-minded, and only when he catches Bucky’s head tilt in his peripherals does he realize his mistake.

“What was that?”

“Nothing,” Sam says quickly. Damn it. His mouth had been moving faster than his brain. 

“I definitely heard something.”

“You need to get your ears checked.”

“Maybe you should get your brain checked, if you’re gonna be whispering to yourself like that all the time.”

“Forget it.”

Bucky sighs at that, lips twitching a little. “Aw, c’mon,” he says. “Hit me with it. I won’t laugh unless it’s stupid.”

Sam glares at him out of the corners of his eyes.

“I won’t laugh.” Bucky straightens out both his back and his expression and scoots closer, knee colliding with Sam’s own. He keeps it there; it feels hot and solid, even through the kevlar. “C’mon, I promise. Just tell me.”

Sam turns it over in his head for a long moment. Swallows hard. Rubs his palms across his thighs. 

“Okay,” he says, looking away. “Do you believe in ghosts, man?”

Bucky laughs, the asshole. 

Sam swallows.

“You said you wouldn’t laugh.”

“Yeah, ‘cause I thought it was serious, Sam. Is it ‘cause I made you watch that creepy haunted house movie last week?” Bucky’s doubled over a bit, now. “You need me to call the Ghostbusters to your apartment?”

“The Ghostbusters.”

“Yeah, to exorcise the ghosties in your closet. Or suck ‘em away in their big goo tanks, or something like that. So then they’ll stop terrorizing your dreams!”

Sam watches Bucky’s mouth stretch wide in amusement. The back of his neck aches.

He bows his head, stares down at his hands, still tracing restless patterns over the kevlar. They move aimlessly, separate from him. He watches them until the tracing starts looking more like clawing, and then he balls them up into fists. 

“That’s a good one, Buck,” he hears himself say, and then the autopilot ha-ha-ha of his laugh. “Who you gonna call, right?”

Another bark of laughter.

“Okay,” wheezes Bucky, finally taking a calming breath. “Okay, for real, I’m—ha, I’m serious now. What’s up?”

“Well,” replies Sam, not looking.

The thing is: he already knew that this would happen. He’s run this scenario over in his head time and time again, every time he’s even considered telling anyone. He knows he sounds ridiculous. 

Sam closes his eyes, disappears into the darkness behind his eyelids. He imagines it all again. He imagines saying: I’m trying to tell you. He imagines saying: I need you to listen to me. He imagines saying: Please believe me. Please believe me. Please believe me. 

Sam opens his eyes. 

“Nah, it was a bad joke,” he says. “Guess I just need some more sleep.”

***

In Afghanistan, Sam watched as Riley dropped out of the sky in a bloody rain, and then he landed at their temporary camp and stood under the hot sun and stared out into the unbroken, sandy horizon, waiting. 

Someone had tapped his elbow, maybe, had told him none-too-gently that he was no use to anyone as a mute, burnt rotisserie chicken. That he should go into the shade of the tents and sit patiently until the humvees returned, if he wasn’t gonna offer any more information. 

“God knows it isn’t helping Riley, that poor bastard,” they’d said. 

But Sam stayed. He would have stayed there until his skin peeled and his eyes boiled in his head. Probably even if it were worse than that. 

See, he had been entertaining a wild notion— something from somewhere in the deepest, most childish recesses of his mind—that if he stood there and burned and and made up for his lapse in attention, everything would be forgiven. God, or the universe, or whatever almighty figure that stared down at the anthills of human society, whoever it was, they would see that he was suffering for his mistake, that he was sweating and swaying and buckling slightly at the knees, and the scales would tip. They would step in. They would say, Maybe it wasn’t that bad, actually, maybe the RPG missed just by a few crucial inches, and Sam wasn’t paying attention, sure, he was lagging behind and was too far away to save his stupid best friend’s skin from being scorched like a steak, but Riley’s dumb heart was still beating and medical technology really is such a wonder and Sam would just have to wait for him to wake up to curse him out for being such a blockhead, and then things would be made right.

That was how Sam wanted the world to work. 

Three hours later, Riley came back in pieces. 

“I’m sorry,” said the first soldier who had hopped out of the vehicle, and Sam hadn’t heard him, at first. Hadn’t wanted to hear him, despite everything laid out before him—the dust-tracked humvee, the nauseous, gray pallor of the man’s face, the tremor in his hands as he reached for the door handle for the backseat.

“What?” Sam said. Still hoping. Still not hearing. And then he leaned forward and saw what was waiting for him in the backseat, what had been collected out there on the sand, scattered under the sun, stray grains still clinging to loose skin. 

He had turned away and lost the contents of his stomach all over his dirty boots, right there under the blazing sun.

The world had never been forgiving. That was what Sam learned that day. 

Sam doesn’t know how he found his way to his tent that night, but he did. He turned in early, and no one stopped him. He didn’t sleep, though. Just laid there in the half-darkness, numb, like something in a monster’s belly, being slowly eaten away by the acid. Too weak to scrabble at the walls, too weak to crawl up its throat, yet too desperate to give up. Hoping—hoping—

But there was no one coming to slash open the belly and fish him out. No fated magic sword lodged in the beast’s cavernous bones, for him to find and free himself. 

Sam stayed there and waited to be digested. 

Eventually, the rest of the compound fell asleep around him. And it could have been anything, it could have been a change in air pressure or the shifting of the tent in the wind or maybe just the way Sam had been lying, motionless, for hours on end—he grew restless, and flipped over onto his other side, and was forced to face the evidence that had been standing, accusatory and silent, behind him. 

Riley’s cot was cruel in its emptiness, and in the way it sagged in the middle even when unencumbered.

The wind picked up outside. It howled, mournful, like a thousand voices. 

Of all things, this is what finally made the tent unbearable. Sam found his legs and rolled to his feet; he stumbled blindly to the dagger of light eking through the crack between the entrance flaps; the tent vomited him up into the night, newborn. Desert dunes shifted in the wind, moon-bleached, and Sam looked up from their stirrings to the curve in the sky. 

Waning crescent. 

Something tugged in his gut. 

He followed his feet, and they led him away from the little military compound, away from the lights and tents and empty or not-empty cots, and toward the gray mountains in the distance, now black in the night. One foot in front of another, repeat, repeat; Sam turned his face from the sand stinging against his cheeks, felt it slip into his unlaced boots and squirm in between his toes, heard it crunch and slide underneath his heels, and kept walking, and the compound shrank away from his back, and still he continued, wading out into the land-sea, until, finally, he reached an eye of calm: a place where the only thing he could hear of the desert was the wind, and the only thing that the desert could hear of him was his clenched throat, gagging on a scream. 

When he opened his mouth, he ripped the night in two. 

He dropped to his knees. He screamed until his throat went raw. He accused, and cried, and pleaded, and then everything all at once, knowing that it would still not be enough. He bent his head and dragged his nails through the sand and then sat back on his heels and pressed his palms to his eyes and felt the wetness seep through his dusty fingers. 

And then—

(This is the part that Sam still has trouble with. 

Here’s the thing about ghosts: once you’ve seen one, you start seeing them everywhere. 

Of course. He knows that. He knows that. The ways that even mere shadows can twist and morph in the corners of your eyes, the ways a coat piled on a chair can turn into the silhouette of a person—he’s gotten used to these things, ever since that one summer night in his childhood.

And yet.)

—Sam sat on his heels, and wept into his palms, and just as he felt that he might sink into the sand and drown under its weight, something behind him reached out and put its hand on his shoulder. 

His shirt was thin, a pathetic cotton barrier against the night breeze, and that grip burned right through it. It was realer than anything, that hand. It was solid enough to make his body seize in terror.

“Who,” he croaked out. The air returned to his lungs slowly, one horrified shudder at a time. “Who—who is that?”  

He didn’t turn around. Just knelt there, frozen. 

See, Sam had been entertaining a wild notion. One about ghosts and the reasons they stayed.

And this—this hand on his shoulder, on the worst night of his life—

It made him feel sick to his stomach. 

The pressure on his shoulder disappeared. The night air sapped the warmth it left on his skin. It happened quickly enough that, if it had been anyone else, it could have been passed off as a wild flight of imagination.

But when Sam finally unfroze his terror-locked joints and turned his tearstained face around to look, the desert wind had not yet finished blowing away the faint lines of two footprints, pressed into the sand behind him. 

***

Here’s another thing about ghosts—and this lesson is one he’s already learned, sitting in front of that TV in his living room so long ago, technicolor horror lighting up the walls—the reasons they stay are simple: 

Anger. Resentment. Unfinished business.

Sam has had years to take his pick, but he still doesn’t know which one would be worse. 

PART TWO: THE SKEPTIC 

“Sam—don’t be stubborn. C’mon, it’s on your back, how are you gonna treat that yourself?”

“I’m flexible enough. I’ll manage,” Sam shoots back, fumbling with his keys. 

It’s almost midnight, and he’s shuffling through his front door with Bucky hot on his heels, both of them aching and stale with post-mission sweat. Three weeks have passed, they’ve had twice the number of missions in that time, and—to be honest—the both of them are being stretched thin.

(Or, Sam feels stretched thin. He doesn’t know how Bucky’s feeling—his healing factor takes care of all the shallower cuts and bruises, the lucky bastard.)

Tonight has been difficult. Another false alarm for Lewis, who they haven’t been able to track down since Nevada, but instead they found several members of an underground, even more extreme version of the Flag Smashers. This time, Sam didn’t come away unscathed: it was a lucky shot, right below the relatively solid protection of his wing-pack and shield. 

“I’m sure you’re flexible enough.” Bucky, uncharacteristically, stumbles over that sentence, and then powers through. “Just let me help you, okay? I’m already here anyway.”

Sam crosses his arms, feeling the skin around his wound twinge painfully. As much as he doesn’t want to admit it, Bucky makes a good point, and he doesn’t really want to risk making anything worse by trying to pretzel himself to reach the gash over his lower back. 

“Fine. You know where the first aid kit is.”

Bucky quiets, mollified, and shuffles off to the other side of the kitchen to pull down the kit from its high shelf.

“You really should put this in a lower cabinet, you know,” he calls out as he does. “Easier access.”

“We’re the same height, asshole. Stop saying you’re taller, your hair just sticks up more at the top.” Sam begins to peel himself out of the suit, hissing quietly between his teeth as the hasty patch-job on his back pulls against the friction of his suit. The emergency bandage he slapped on earlier was sufficient enough to stop the bleeding, but it only went so far. 

Bucky meanders his way back along the counter, kit tucked under one hand. He stops just shy of Sam’s breathing space. “You’re just jealous of my extra inch. And I’m just saying you could make things easier for yourself. It’s not a crime to make your first aid kit easier to reach.”

Sam frowns at him. He thinks of three possible comebacks, decides it’s not worth it, and turns around with a sigh to give Bucky access to his back, skin chilling in the still air of the kitchen. 

An antiseptic-soaked q tip dips into the ragged edges of the cut and he grits his teeth against the sensation. When it worms deeper into the cut, he can’t help letting out a hiss.

“Sorry,” Bucky says, even as he prods the q-tip around. His hand lands on Sam’s side, gentle.

Suddenly, Sam is hyper aware of the way Bucky’s hand is rubbing up and down, just slightly, slipping against the bare, sensitive skin under the cage of his ribs as if in comfort. He can barely focus on the pain of the gash anymore; even the skin of Bucky’s hand runs warm, and with every swipe, Sam feels the catch of every one of the rough calluses on his palm. 

He holds his breath and feels a shiver jitter up his spine. Bucky is silent at his back, still a steady line of heat.

Finally, the abrupt crinkle of a sterile bandage being peeled out of its paper-and-plastic wrapper. That stray hand leaves Sam’s skin and in its wake, goosebumps rise along his side.

“Speaking of making things easier for yourself,” Bucky says, shattering the silence with his clumsy overture. “How many breaks have you taken in the last few months?”

Sam blinks, still dazed by the sudden chill off his skin, and only a few seconds later does Bucky’s prodding tone register in his ears. His fingers curl up into his palm, and he shrugs one shoulder up and down. 

“No, don’t move yet, you’re gonna ruin my hard work.” This time, Bucky’s voice is accompanied by the sticky krrrr of unrolling medical tape. “Just—Sam, I’m not gonna lie to you. You need a fuckin’ vacation.”

Sam shakes his head, opens his mouth against the tenseness of a jaw he hadn’t realized he was clenching. “I didn’t realize paid leave was part of the Captain America deal.”

“I mean it. You’re exhausted—ah, don’t even try to argue. I saw you in transit last week, you were passed the hell out. Your cheek was pressed against the window. I think I even saw drool.”

Sam sputters, pushes away from the counter as soon as he feels Bucky finish taping up the bandage. “Hey, fuck you—”

“Sam.”

That tone makes his shoulders slump. He sees the exasperation through the lines creasing Bucky’s brow, the way his eyes soften around the corners. Bucky’s easy to read when he’s worried.

“I’ll think about it,” he sighs, and it’s enough to lift the corner of Bucky’s mouth, just a tick. 

***

The next week, Sam buys AJ a remote-controlled plane for his birthday and flies down to Louisiana to personally hand-deliver it. 

AJ loves it. He and Cass spend the rest of the afternoon sending it zipping through the sky above the roof, and to Sam that’s worth the slog of the red-eye flight that he takes back to catch his next mission.

You looked like shit, by the way, Sarah texts him when he touches down in DC. Get some more rest, okay?  

I will, replies Sam, and doesn’t. 

***

Sam dozes off for ten minutes in the back of a military van. He wakes back up to his head on Bucky’s shoulder, and his ghost staring facelessly back at them between the bars of the passenger seat’s headrest.

“Christ—” Sam gasps twice: first as he jerks his head off of Bucky’s shoulder and feels the stiff knot forming at the base of his skull, second as he notices their unwelcome voyeur and slams his head back against the headrest in surprise. 

“What?” Bucky’s face is closer than expected; it shouldn’t be that shocking, considering they’re sitting shoulder to shoulder on the bench-style back seat. Which—hm. That’s funny. He could’ve sworn they’d been sitting on opposite sides of the car when he was still awake—he recalls the distinct relief that there had been no one else to sit in the back with them, and therefore no need to squabble over who would have to sit on the uncomfortable hump in the middle. 

Bucky’s sitting on that uncomfortable hump now, legs sprawled out casually as if he’d always been there, and close enough that all Sam would have to do is let his head drop down to the side again, fit it into the curve between Bucky’s neck and shoulder. He’d probably be able to smell his shampoo, even. 

That’s a weird thought to have. Sam needs more sleep. 

“Sam?”

“It’s nothing.” Sam turns around to stare at the lush thickets rolling past the window and ignores the heat creeping up the back of his neck. Excellent shade of green, those trees. “Just got that freaky sensation, you know the one when you’re falling asleep sometimes. What’s it called again? Um, hypnic jerks.” 

“Hypnic jerks,” Bucky repeats.

“Yup.”

To his side, Bucky is now staring straight ahead through the windshield, eyes deliberately averted in a way that means he is most definitely monitoring Sam’s every twitch and breath. 

That’s how Sam has been feeling these past couple weeks: monitored. Bucky’s always watching, now. For what, Sam doesn’t know, but he hates the feeling of it on his skin—or, not exactly hatred. But it makes him squirm. Makes him uncomfortable.

Several beats pass uninterrupted, and Sam thinks that Bucky will actually let it go without saying anything—

“We’re partners, aren’t we?” 

Sam doesn’t turn to address Bucky, either, and instead looks up at the passenger seat again, where his ghost is twisting silently in place, watching Sam and Bucky determinedly not watch each other. 

“Yeah, we are.”

“So you can tell me stuff. If you want.”

“Mmhm.”

A pause.

“Still not sleeping?”

Sam sighs. 

“It’s fine.”

The van hits another rough patch, jarring them. Sam stifles a yawn. 

When Bucky speaks again, there’s a smile in his voice. “Well, if you need another nap, my shoulder’s free.”

Sam rolls his eyes and leans the other way, even though his cheeks flush. Even though his heart is beating strangely, a swollen thump, th-thump that rushes up into his throat.

“Haha,” he says, enunciating tonelessly, and feels the burn of Bucky’s eyes on his face for the rest of the ride.

***

It’s nothing. It’s nothing.

Still—Sam remembers that edge-of-the-cliff feeling, the unknown waiting for him at his back. 

***

Two days later, he receives a text.

Bucky

You’re not the only superhero in New York City; someone else can hold off all the worldly evils for a few days. I cleared your schedule for the week. 

But leave your plans open for tomorrow. 

We’re gonna go play tourists.

***

“That,” says Bucky, tipping down his sunglasses, “is probably the tackiest thing I’ve ever seen in this lifetime.”

Across the rancid Upper New York Bay, the Statue of Liberty rises regally into the skyline, hoisting a massive, half-formed replica of the vibranium shield above the skeleton of structural support beams. 

“Hmmm.” Sam puts a hand over his eyes, shielding against the glint of the morning sun off the water, and squints at the island. It’s been cordoned off for construction, and seems all the more bare without the usual ant-crawly coating of tourists that Sam sees on TV. He’s only come here as a tourist once before; freshman year of high school, early summer, air thick with humidity and sticky ice cream dripping down his fingers. The statue had appeared bigger, back then. 

“Yeah,” he decides. “It looks even worse than it did on TV.”

“So tacky,” Bucky repeats. “What was wrong with the torch?”

“Too small?”

“And, uh—uh, not shiny enough.”

Sam brings a hand to his chin in faux-thoughtfulness and thinks back to the sketch he saw when he was first informed of its construction—not that he was given any say over whether or not the damn thing was made, anyway. “Right. No big glowing star, which is obviously a must-have.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, snorting. “How’re we supposed to know where we are if the Statue of Liberty isn’t shooting beams of patriotism and American justice?”

“Exactly. Totally worth the hour-long flight to see that eyesore, right?”

So far, this tourist thing isn’t too bad. This is the first stop, and it’s fun for Sam to take the piss out of overrated American monuments, and even more fun when he and Bucky can shoot off little judgmental bits in between them, rapid-fire—ah. 

He’s spoken too soon. 

The couple next to them must’ve overheard their conversation, because both their heads turn slightly in Sam’s direction—whether in amusement or offense, he doesn’t know—and then turn away again.

A beat. One head whips back around in recognition.

“Target acquired,” Bucky murmurs under his breath, amused, and Sam groans. 

In the short time that he’s been Cap, he’s already been asked countless times for photos and signatures and the sort. Sam loves the people who support him, and he feels blessed every day to be where he is, but some of the encounters—to put it lightly—have been weird. Like, borderline not-okay, weird. He’s starting to understand Steve’s more put-out comments on his past showbiz days.

Now, the idea of being asked to take a photo, as Captain America, right in front of the tacky propaganda piece that the government has so lovingly built in honor of his title? It’s unbearable. It’s cringeworthy. It’s a part of his life. Already, he can see one of the girls stepping forward, possibly to ask for an autograph, a photo, a shout-out on social media, and Sam can see his pride flashing before his eyes, he’s very possibly gonna be asked to pose in one of those stupid optical illusion ways so it’ll look like he’s the one holding the shield instead of the statue—

Amazingly, Bucky picks up on Sam’s discomfort and is, for once, a pal about it.

“Well!” Bucky says loudly. Both his hands emerge from his coat pockets to plant themselves on his hips, and he straightens up from his don’t-look-at-me slouch to his fullest height. “Time’s wasting, Sam. Don’t tell me you forgot we have that important meeting in ten minutes?” 

Sam furrows his brow. He’s confused, at first; there is no meeting today. They’re here for leisure. 

“What?”

“The meeting,” Bucky says again, between his bared teeth, persevering through an attempt at his cheesy public smile, the one that somehow ends up making him look particularly menacing and stiff. “The one that we have to leave for right now, with no delays or pictures or autographs, because it’s very important.”

“Oh—yeah,” says Sam, catching on at last. “Uh, that very important meeting, with a very important person. Can’t be missing that! We better get going!”

“Exactly,” says Bucky. He pats on Sam’s back, starts to usher him in the vague direction of the street and away from the—Sam glances back for a moment—visibly disappointed couple. After a second of stalling, his arm slips easily around Sam’s shoulders, and he presses closer, like his body is enough to block Sam from the curious gazes of any potential interlopers. “Get a move on, bud.” 

And then, added under his breath: “Further away from that eyesore, the better.”

“That’s a mean thing to say.”

“I was talking about the statue—hey, fuck you.”

They’ve shot their way down two blocks, speed-walking aimlessly, before Bucky slows down and says, “Okay, where are we going.”

Sam’s shoes make an audible, cartoonish screech on the concrete. He wheels around. “I was following your lead.”

“I was following you.”

“What the—this was your idea! You were the one steering!”

“That doesn’t mean I knew where I was going! I was just walking.”

Sam sucks his teeth. “Wow. So are you gonna be the type of asshole friend who drags someone out to a different city and then makes them plan the rest of their own surprise vacation?”

“Oh!” Bucky’s smirk is insufferable. “So you do want to make this a vacation.”

“Look, I’m just saying. Since we’re here.” Despite his best efforts, Sam finds himself starting to grin, too. “Time for you to step up, Buckaroo. I want to live out my shitty tourist dreams.”

Bucky’s walking style rarely deviates from what Sam likes to call The Terminator, but suddenly his steps do seem a hair lighter. A hair bouncier, even. “Okay,” he says, rubbing his hands together, “I’ll accept that challenge, young Samuel. First order of business, we’ve gotta get you a disguise. Uh…”

Bucky’s eyes stray across the street to where a merchandise shop is spilling its guts out onto the sidewalk. Right at the front: a spinning display rack of baseball caps. 

A shiver of foreboding passes over Sam’s body. 

“No,” he warns, one finger already raising, “don’t you dare—”

Three minutes later, a freshly-bought cap is being crammed into his hands. On the front, embroidered in a shameless red: FUHGET ABOUT IT!  

“Put it on,” Bucky says. The smugness oozing off him is practically gummy enough to stick Sam’s shoes to the ground. “My treat.”

Sam barely manages to avoid crushing the cardboard brim in his grip. As an uncle, he likes to think that he’s a connoisseur of embarrassing travel merchandise, but it feels awfully different when he’s on the receiving end. “It isn’t particularly subtle. This is the best you could do?”

“You’re very welcome.”

An eye-twitch is oncoming. “Seriously, what is it with you old dudes and hats? Is this just your go-to accessory?”

“Oh?” Bucky waves broadly at the price tag plastered storefront. “You wanna buy your own disguise, then? Go ahead. You can pay thirty dollars for another tacky t-shirt and pull the collar over your head to cover your face. It’ll look great, totally natural.”

Sam puts the cap on. 

Bucky laughs. Sam crosses his arms. Bucky laughs some more. 

“There we go, Cap’s signature cheekbones tucked away. No one will recognize you now.”

“What about you?”

“I don’t need one. People aren’t gonna be mobbing us to ask for my photograph.” 

“Why’s that?”

Bucky blinks, shrugs. “When you come to big cities to go celebrity-hunting, who are you gonna look for? Captain America? Or the nation’s least favorite mass-murderer assassin?” 

Sam pushes up on the wide brim of his cap, unshading his eyes so he can pin Bucky with an appropriately stern look. “Hey.” 

Bucky looks away and slumps down immediately. He sighs. “I know, I know. My past does not define me, I was being brainwashed, and all that.” He drags his shoe along the gum-sticky sidewalk, looking grim. 

Sam allows himself to lay a hand on Bucky’s shoulder for five seconds of silence. 

“Actually,” he adds after a beat, “I was just gonna say that there are plenty of freaky people out there who would be into murderers, too.” 

The snort he gets in response is gratifying.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Sam still ends up buying a cap for Bucky, who wears his New York Shitty hat with pride. 

The city has evolved, and even with his limited experience here, it’s obvious enough that Sam notices it. New buildings, more construction sites. A changing landscape. And all the while, Bucky still insists on walking a little too close, inserting his body between Sam and the crowd and not-quite-shielding him with his shoulders. 

“In case some super-fan pounces for a picture,” he says.

“You mean, ‘cause crowds make you nervous,” Sam returns.

They fall into a pattern of on-and-off—a classic modern tourist attraction, then a lesser-known restaurant of Bucky’s own choosing. They find their way to a little hole-in-the-wall pizzeria that’s somehow stayed open since the 1940s, where they share a piping hot pie and Sam burns his tongue on the cheese; then a taxi to Rockefeller Center, to wander vaguely up and down the sidewalks; then a quick dinner at a place serving oxtail stew, where the little old lady who comes bustling in and out of the kitchen’s dividing curtain seems to recognize Bucky enough to remember his usual order. 

When they pass the memorial for the Battle of New York, Sam really does mean to walk past without looking. He’s not a tourist, not a super-fan either, really, and it—it shouldn’t matter. He’s fought alongside those people, seen them bloody and dirty and exhaustion-drunk, made breakfast for them, even. The plaque is just a plaque.

But just as he’s about to breeze by the patch of sidewalk where it stands, he sees that flicker in his eye.

It’s the ghost. Standing there, staring up at the gold lettering like it means something to it. 

Sam feels—

“Hey,” Bucky says in his ear. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“You were looking over there,” says Bucky. 

“It was—” Sam hesitates again. Decides to tell the truth, because why the hell not, because it’s actually become a little inside joke with them, and Sam can even bring himself to laugh at it, most days, and Bucky won’t believe him anyway. “Was a ghost, actually. Creepy.”

Bucky cocks his head to the side, assessing. Follows his eyeline to the plaque. Says nothing for a long, long moment. 

“Yeah,” he says finally. “Creepy.” And then he nudges Sam along the sidewalk, sets the ball of his life rolling down the street once more. 

Sam looks back, just once, before they round the corner. The ghost has disappeared. 

As the sunset vista of paint-splash colors fades away and the evening pulls its heavy curtains over the sky, Sam and Bucky find themselves on the very periphery of the crowd in Times Square, doused in LED light. The biggest screen is playing the trailer for the fourth installment to a movie franchise that, last Sam knew, didn’t even have a sequel yet. Flashing across the screen: starring four-time Oscar winner—and then a name he doesn’t recognize. 

“This place sucks,” Bucky says, after a moment of grave contemplation. 

“Hm,” says Sam. 

Sam’s never come to Times Square before. Or, at least he’s never been here as himself, as just another person in the crowd jostling for an Instagram photo op—but he’s heard stories. That old, worn one from Steve, told on the slowest and loneliest of their nights on the road: There I was, not even half-awake, stumbling around looking for anything familiar, and it was like I ran into an illustration from one of those futuristic magazines—the fast cars and the bright lights and all those people—and I couldn’t believe it, that all of this new world had sprouted up while I was asleep. Surely the construction would have been loud enough to wake me up, right? And then that memory of his voice in the darkness, exhausted and aching and just a bit raw, just a bit regretful. Rip Van Winkle in the modern age. 

Maybe that’s why, when Bucky says to him, “It used to be a bad part of town, y’know, before everything got updated,” Sam replies, without thinking, “How did you get used to it?” 

And when Bucky just smiles, doesn’t look at him, and says, “Well, I lived in Brooklyn and didn’t come up here often, so the crime was never much of a problem anyway,” Sam lets out a breath, curls his fingers around empty air.

Nods to himself, one sharp jerk of the head, like that’s all he meant to ask about, anyhow. 

“Let’s walk in a little further,” he decides, turning on his heel, ready to plunge forward into the crowd. “We look so suspicious just hovering here staring at everyone—”

Bucky snags his wrist. 

“Sam.” He says it whisper-soft, hesitant, but even in the swelling noise of the heart of the city, Sam can hear him. Can make out the words perfectly, as though his ears are tuned to the frequency of his voice. “Hold on.”

Sam stops.

“I don’t—sorry. I’m not good with words like you. I just needed a second to think about it.”

Bucky’s hand is gentle around his wrist, and their connected arms stretch tight between their bodies like a bowstring. Sam lets himself sway back, just enough to put in some slack. But he doesn’t turn around—both to give Bucky the privacy to gather his thoughts, and because he doesn’t know what his own face looks like, right now. Doesn’t want Bucky to know, either. 

Bucky’s voice comes from behind, slow this time, like he’s really thinking over every word. “It’s not something you get used to, just like that. Not something you’d ever completely get over, really.”

Sam swallows. Looks out at the swirling light-sea in front of him.

“You saw how everything was when I first got my head back. It was a mess. It’s like—like they’d already dug my grave, that day when I fell, and they buried me in it. And even when I woke up again, I was still trapped in that hole. Living in it, stuck in it, ‘cause I thought that was where I belonged. ‘Cause they’d dug it out in the shape that I used to be, and that was the only place that I thought I would fit anymore.” 

Bucky’s fingers squeeze down, gentle. 

“But sometimes there are people standing aboveground, and they’re willing to reach out and pull you up. Let you see all the other spaces for you in this world. Let you feel the sun on your face again.”

Sam turns arounds, then, and finds Bucky already looking back at him. His eyes are bright and searching, crinkled at the edges. 

“It took time,” says Bucky. “But I had the right people.”

They stand there, cutting the flow of Times Square, letting its cacophonous, bustling tides pass them by—and when Sam can finally open his mouth again, to rasp out a hoarse, “Thanks, man,” the weight in his chest feels a just a little bit lighter. 

***

That night, Bucky follows him home, and Sam doesn’t complain about it. 

“It’s late,” he says when they pass through the front door, “just sleep here tonight,” and shakes his head again when Bucky makes for the couch. He tells himself that it’s only because the couch springs poke uncomfortably into one’s back after an hour or so.

“Bed’s big enough for two,” is the excuse he gives. 

They’ve shared before, back when they were still on the run with Steve. Sometimes the ratty little motels they came across at night just didn’t have enough beds, and they were exhausted and stressed besides, unwilling to waste a few precious hours of sleep on bickering over a shared mattress. It was no big deal then, Sam insists to himself, and it’s no big deal now. Just two friends crashing for the night.

Still, when Bucky curls up next to him under the sheets, warm like a space heater—when he shifts in the night and feels the brush of Bucky’s hand against his—when he finds himself having to untangle their limbs before he slips out for his morning run the next day—it doesn’t feel like ‘no big deal’ at all. 

Sam returns after an hour, sweat-drenched and head slightly cleared from his run, and Bucky is still there. 

“Hey,” he says, feet perched up on another chair as he lounges at the kitchen table. “I put on a pot of coffee, so. If you want some.” He has pillow creases pressed into his cheek. He’s loose, slouched, sinking back into his chair like he belongs there, wrapped in the comforts of Sam’s home. 

“I need a shower,” is what Sam says, instead of screaming out everything that’s rattling around in his chest.

Bucky nods at him. Sam nods back, goes to take his shower. And when he finally comes out, a damp towel draped over his neck, he finds a cup waiting for him on the empty kitchen table, a gentle reverse-waterfall of steam still seeping off the rim. 

He takes a sip.

Two sugars, one cream. Just the way he likes it.

***

On Monday, Bucky’s back in Sam’s apartment.

“Whoop,” he says, as he barges loudly through the foyer, “there it is. Thought I left that here.”

He beelines for the leather jacket draped over the arm of the couch, and Sam, legs propped up on the coffee table, gives him the most unimpressed look that he can manage. 

“Do locks just not exist as a concept to you?” he asks. “Like, the thing that most people put on their doors to discourage others from coming into their homes? The thing that I definitely have on my door, and was definitely turned all the way to the right?”

Bucky hums, doesn’t actually pick up his jacket, and plops down on the next cushion. “If you wanted to keep me out, you would have gotten better locks.” 

“Then you’d just go through the window.”

Bucky shrugs, not even bothering to deny it. “Yeah. Your windows are abnormally easy to climb through.”

Sam doesn’t even want to get into that argument. He tosses the remote over to Bucky instead, very generously offers to let him choose the channel, and by the time he realizes that he should’ve asked hey, you’ve found your jacket, mind telling me if there’s any other reason you’re bumming it on my couch? it’s already evening, and his mama raised him to be a gentleman. 

That, and the fact that he really doesn’t mind Bucky being there. Not at all. 

So he makes corn chowder and lets Bucky slice up the ingredients. 

(“I have tons of daggers that are better than this,” Bucky says, examining the sharp edge of Sam’s kitchen knife with one careful finger. “If you want, I could give you—”

“I will not be accepting any knives that have been inside a human body.”

“What about a non-human body?”

“Depends. Was it an edible body?”

“Uhhh. Dunno. Never had alien before.”

“...So, that’s definitely a no.”

“‘Kay. Your loss.”)

“Coming through,” Bucky says whenever he passes behind him with the knife. Every time he does it, he pats Sam with his non-knife-wielding hand to notify him of his presence, sliding his palm across his lower back. 

Every time, Sam has to actively stop himself from leaning into it. 

When the chowder is finally finished, Sam ladles it out into matching bowls, brings it out to the table. They sit facing each other, laughing between bites.

And when Sam finishes up the washing and heads to the bedroom, Bucky follows without a word.

***

Quietly, as Sam turns over under the covers: “Don’t you have your own bed?”

Bucky’s voice is low and heavy with sleep. “Yeah. But yours is more comfortable.”

“Sure.”

“Yup. Shut up now, birdy. A man’s gotta sleep.”

***

On Tuesday, Bucky wanders off at noon, ostensibly to return to his own apartment, and returns an hour later with three paper bags looped over each arm. 

“I bought too many groceries,” he says, balancing on one leg and kicking his boots to the side with the other. “Take some.”

Sam doesn’t even question him, just glares at him until he puts his boots on the shoe rack, and then waves him deeper inside so he can put everything away in the fridge.

“I want pasta,” Sam says casually, propping his elbows on the kitchen counter as Bucky bustles around him.

“You don’t have pasta sauce,” Bucky says, still consumed with his task of shelving the cans in his arms. He doesn’t even double-check the sauce cabinet, but Sam doesn’t doubt him.

“Could just make it.” Sam reaches down, pulls out the round, ripe tomatoes from the bag on the floor, all of them dangling on the wiry green vine. One of them drops off, too-ripe; he catches it easily. “It’d taste better that way. Canned sauce, psh.”

“It’d take time.”

Sam raises his eyebrows. “I’ve got nothing but time right now.”

(Sue him for being restless. He’s never lounged around for this long in a while, now; it feels both amazing and horrible. Amazing, because he no longer feels like he’s constantly walking around in a half-awake haze. Horrible, because he feels useless like this, somehow.)

Bucky gives him a long look through narrowed eyes. 

“Fine,” he sighs, when he’s found whatever he was looking for in Sam’s face, and turns wordlessly to the pantry to hunt for the dried spaghetti. 

That night during dinner, he interrupts Sam mid-sentence, leans over, and rubs a thumb across his cheek.

“Sauce,” he explains, when he settles back into his seat, and Sam pretends that the heat in his face is just from the embarrassment of looking like a messy eater. 

***

That night, as they turn in again:

“Did Sarah put you up to this? Is she trying to make sure I’m actually resting, or something?”

Bucky side-eyes him. “You think Sarah’s texting me about your sleep patterns?”

“…Not really.”

“Then there’s your answer. Scoot over a little, blanket hog. I was cold last night.”

***

On Thursday, after an hour of flipping lazily through the channels in solitude, the door flies open again. 

“So, funny story, the electricity at my place just went out—”

“Just get over here and watch this dumb show with me.”

The speed at which Bucky scrambles onto the couch is just a bit too fast to be dignified. He sits close, no courtesy cushion left in between them, and Sam studies his expressions for the rest of the afternoon, the animated movement of his brows, the curve of his laughing mouth, the shine of his eyes lit up in technicolor. 

***

By Friday, they no longer bother settling down on the opposite sides of the bed. At night, before either of them drop off into sleep, they curl up in the center. Warm, safe. Close enough to touch. 

***

On Sunday—the last night of Sam’s break—he waits until Bucky’s breath evens out into a gentle rhythm before he flips over to watch him across the pillows.

Bucky’s hair is getting longer, and it flops across his forehead, catches on his lashes. It’s incredibly messy, and it makes him look stupid, and Sam’s chest has never ached more. 

He could easily reach out and brush the softness of Bucky’s cheek where it squishes up against the pillowcase. It would wake him up, light sleeper that he is, but Sam thinks it would be okay. It would be okay to lean in just this once.

He inches closer, just a bit. Just enough to feel the warmth of Bucky’s body radiate all the way down his front, just close enough to see the little freckles on the bridge of his nose. He holds himself still. Doesn’t touch.

“Hmm,” says Bucky without opening his eyes. “We should get you some locks for your windows.”

“Ah.” The noise comes out involuntarily; Sam hadn’t realized Bucky was still awake. He draws back, heart beating wildly in his chest, and tries to sound normal. “Okay? I already have locks on my windows.”

“Those piddly things? Don’t count. Need better home security.”

“You’re the home security,” Sam says, half-joking, and smushes his face into his pillow so Bucky can’t see his expression. Had he been awake the entire time, feeling Sam’s eyes on his face?  “What’s with all this, randomly?”

One blue eye cracks open.

“I was thinking. If it somehow helps you sleep better at night, knowing everything is secured? Even those big-ass windows? I’ll install it for you.”

“I’m Captain America. I can protect myself.”

“Well, something’s keeping you up at night.”

“If this is a roundabout way of telling me that I’m keeping you up with snoring, or something like that—”

Warm fingers find Sam’s hand under the blanket. 

“Not snoring.” And then, softly: “Sam.”

For a moment, Sam is back in a cramped little motel room. The corner of the bed drenched in ugly yellow light. Steve, sprawled across the couch across the room, chest rising with gentle breaths. Still here. 

He blinks. 

This is his bedroom, not a transient fugitive-space. The light coming across the sheets is pale and clear, not an ugly yellow; his bedroom window opens straight to the open patch of sky right outside, and the moon is high in its arc, just a knife-slice of silver, always watching. Steve is gone. Always will be.

When Sam turns over in bed, he lets Bucky’s hand slip off of his, even though part of him wants to keep holding on.

“Everyone has trouble sleeping at one time or another,” he says to the wall. “It’ll pass. Let’s go to sleep.”

Breath held, Sam feels the Bucky-lump next to him go unnaturally still. He closes his eyes, waiting, and eventually is pulled down into a place so soft and dark that he forgets what he had ever been waiting for.

***

In the morning, Sam opens his eyes to cold sheets, not knowing exactly what woke him. 

The bed is empty beside him. This would not be strange except for the fact that in the past week, he has never woken up alone before. It’s amazing how fast he's gotten used to the feeling of someone breathing on his neck in the morning. 

Sam rises, doesn’t bother to pull on a pair of socks or change out of his sleepwear. He wanders out into the lying room, scans the area, and finds Bucky’s big boots still lying next to the shoe rack in the foyer. Next to the rack, not on the rack, goddamn it. He’s told him at least five times to store them properly, and when he finds him, he’s gonna give him an earful, because bad habits are best broken early, and Sam’s not going to put up with street dirt and clutter around his front door for the foreseeable future.

He slips back the hallway, bare feet sliding quietly over the hardwood, and now he sees what he didn’t the first time: the door to his office is slightly ajar. He keeps it closed at all times. 

He doesn’t bother knocking as he enters; it’s his apartment, after all. The door hinges squeak loudly as he pushes through the gap, and he makes a vague promise to himself to get some WD-40 the next time he runs errands—the same promise he’s made to himself the last hundred times he’s pushed open the office door, because he rarely has time to run errands anymore, and when he does, squeaky office doors are hardly the first thing on his mind. It’s grating, though, and loud enough to make him wince. He knows, then, that this must be the thing that woke him—and that someone’s been snooping.

Bucky’s standing by the desk, dressed, his back to the door. Only his feet are still bare, and the sight of them, pale and veiny against the carpet, pulls at something tender in Sam’s chest.

“Hey,” says Sam, voice still sleep-rough. “You’re up early.”

Bucky says nothing.

Sam scratches a little at his nose, unbothered, because he knows Bucky’s not a morning person. “You’re quiet. Need some coffee? Since we’re both up now.”

Nothing.

Sam pitches his voice down. “‘Gee, Sam, that’d be swell. Thanks so much for being a great host even after finding me snooping around in your office!’ Wow, you’re welcome, Buck. Hey, remember what I said about closed doors before—”

“Sam.” 

Finally, Bucky turns around. He’s clutching a partially-folded paper in his hands. “What is this,” he says flatly.

“What is what?” Sam steps forward, squinting, and then he notices the empty envelope on the desk, and Bucky flips the paper just enough for Sam to catch the photo printed on the inside, splashed with all that vivid red. 

Sam’s stomach lurches.

“It’s a letter,” he says, a beat too late. His feet are frozen in the doorway. “Last I checked, it was addressed to me, not you, so stop going through my stuff. You know it’s a federal crime to open other people’s mail, right?”

“I came in to get a pen and paper—and then I saw—”

“What?”

“I was—I was going to leave you a note saying I went out to get coffee, okay? Forget it. And the letter was already open.” Bucky brandishes the printout again, and now he’s clenching down hard enough that the paper crinkles. “You opened this, and you saw what was inside, and you kept it right on your desk instead of putting it in the trash where it belongs. Why?” 

“It’s nothing,” Sam retorts. “We recycle here, old man. Gimme that,” and he reaches out swiftly to snatch the paper back, to fold it into its crisp quarters, tuck it back into the envelope and away from prying eyes—but Bucky tugs it out of reach. 

“Nothing,” he repeats. “Nothing? Bullshit, this is nothing, Sam. If it were, you would’ve tossed this out without blinking. Why did you keep it?”

Sam, hand left dangling in the air, draws his arms in close across his chest. “Why—Bucky, c’mon. Leave it. Coffee’s waiting.”

“I don’t give a shit about the coffee, Sam. Answer my question.”

“Nah. I don’t feel like it.”

“Sam—”

“It’s too early for this.”

“You wake up at this time every day!”

“Well it’s still too early.”

“Like hell. How long have you—”

“Leave it,” Sam says firmly. He doesn’t raise his voice. “Whether I keep it or not, what I do with it or not, that’s none of your business. I’ll put it on my desk, or pin it on my fridge, or keep it framed in the hallway. It was sent to me, so it’s my responsibility. Now I’m gonna go to the kitchen and you’re gonna stop poking around. End of discussion.”

He turns away from Bucky’s stony face, moves to the doorway. One step, two steps. He’ll start the coffee machine, stand quietly in the light leaking through the blinds as the humming starts. He’ll let the white noise rattle everything out of his head.

Three steps. 

“Sam,” Bucky says behind him, very quietly. “When are you gonna start fucking talking to me?”

Sam stops. 

“I talk to you almost every day,” he says. He doesn’t turn around. 

“Stop. Just stop with the deflections, stop dancing around and just—god.” 

When Sam whips around, hackles rising, Bucky’s dragging a hand across his face. The printout is creasing in his hand. “Sure, sure you talk to me. You tell me what you think is funny, what you think is stupid. You tell me where the groceries go in your kitchen. You tell me how I can make my life better. But for all the yapping you do, you sure as hell don’t say much about yourself, you know that?”

Sam pulls in a sharp breath through his teeth. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Look at us.” Bucky flings an arm out. “Look at this fucking paper in my hand. This is what I meant, Sam. You talk a big game about emotions and vulnerability and guilt, and then you turn around and let stuff eat you from the inside out.”

“You don’t know that,” Sam says. “What do you know about—”

“Don’t bullshit, Sam. Just—I’m asking you to be straight with me. I want to help, Sam. I want you to open up—”

Sam feels his hand spasm. His heartbeat throbs in his ears, the wet rush of it loud and angry and red. His whole body seizes in tune with its unbearable thunder. “I am open.”

“About what?” Bucky is pacing now, carving a dent into the thinning carpet. “About the movies you like! About the food you want to eat! About the jokes you come up with in your head! But when it comes from here,”—and Bucky thumps a hand over his chest, hard, like he thinks that it’ll knock something loose in Sam, too—“it’s like pulling teeth. Do you think I’m blind? You carry around all these burdens and you don’t tell a single soul about them! If something is bothering you, tell me—"

“Why?” Sam says, before he can stop himself. 

Bucky stops. “Why?” His face twists. “Are you really asking me why? Because we’re—we’re work partners. Okay? This stuff matters if we’ve gotta have each other’s backs in the field. And because I—”

Bucky’s throat bobs, and too late, Sam identifies the expression on his face as hurt. 

“Sam,” he says finally, half-pleading, “why can’t you just trust me?”

Bucky dips his chin down then, eyes big, something desperate in them. And waits. 

The thing is: Sam does. Trust him, that is. Fuck, he does trust Bucky—has for a long time now, he thinks. Ever since he forced Sam to go on vacation for his own sake, since he fixed up Sam’s family boat without even being asked, since he woke Sam up in the middle of the night because he was gasping in his sleep. He trusts Bucky so much that he’s trying to pull out the thing that’s grown its roots into his chest, that his very being has calcified around—all because Bucky asked. He tried to, once, and Bucky didn’t listen. He’s trying again now. 

But trusting takes practice, and Sam is too slow, too wary of the pain. 

“There’s a ghost,” he says, stumbling over his own tongue, and watches as Bucky’s expression shutters closed.

“Okay,” Bucky replies, jaw clenching. “Fine.”

“No—” Sam says, feeling the moment fall away from his hands. “No, listen—”

But Bucky turns away. His voice is cold and deadly quiet, and the sound of it makes the pit in Sam’s stomach grow larger. “If this is a joke to you, fine. Joke away. But don’t drag me into it.”

And then he turns around and walks out, through the horrible creaking door that Sam should have oiled and never did. 

Sam listens, frozen to the spot, as the front door opens and closes with a slam.

***

The world has always been unforgiving. Sam doesn’t know how he had forgotten that.

***

They’re back at work, and they aren’t speaking to each other.

“Well,” Sam says, to absolutely no one in particular, “I thought that Sergeant Barnes would’ve learned how to fly a plane properly by now, but maybe I was wrong. Or maybe it’s normal for all passengers to be tossed around in their seats like apples in a barrel, huh?”

“Oh, yeah?” Bucky storms out of the briefing room and shoves past Sam in the hallway, glaring into thin air. “Well maybe if Captain America was gonna be so picky about my skills, he should’ve been more efficient about finishing his own tasks and taken over piloting instead!”

“Guys,” says Joaquin, trailing five feet behind them and sounding a bit helpless.

Correction: they aren’t speaking to each other, but they are speaking at each other, and it’s worse than if it had been a complete freeze-out instead.

After Bucky left that morning, Sam spent three days fleeing his empty apartment.

Or, maybe fleeing wasn’t the right word, because it wasn’t like anything was chasing him. He ventured—that’s right. Every morning he would venture out through the front door, and he wouldn’t trip over the dusty, wayward boots that were no longer there. And he would follow his usual jogging route—past the changing storefronts, past the grocery store where he still hadn’t memorized the shelving organization, into the park where he would follow the loop trail and run and run and run until his breath caught painfully in his chest and he’d have to lean against a tree and put his hands on his legs until everything hurt less.  

So, no, it was not fleeing. But during the times that he returned home to freshen up and realized that the rest of his listless day was unrolling before him, free of distractions, with nothing but the suggestion of a ghost prowling his empty hallways and standing above his cold bed for company, and that he had all the time in the world to contemplate Bucky’s used cup in the sink, which still needed to be washed, and the wounded determination that had been in his voice when he had said Just fucking talk to me, and the way he asked Sam to tell him the truth but didn’t bother staying long enough to listen.

Try as he did, Sam hadn’t found much reason to stay at home.

On the third day, he received a ping with new orders, and he was so consumed by the prospect of something to do, something to take him out from his own miserable head, that the entirety of his situation completely slipped his mind.

That is, until he’d stepped into the briefing room and came face to face with Bucky’s impassive stare.

Right. Partners. 

Weeks have passed like this.

 Professional interactions—and they are capable of being professional when it comes to life-threatening situations, believe it or not—are limited only to sparse grunts about mission details and the occasional passive aggressive sniping. 

Personal interactions—well, there are none.

Sam can work with that. It’s fine.

Joaquin, when he had asked about the abruptly chilly working conditions, had suggested that it was not really fine, Sam, it’s tense as hell, I feel like I’m getting stuck in the middle of my parents’ divorce or something. 

A difference of opinion, then. But both of them are still stuck here watching Bucky try to lose them in his dust.

“Any improvements?” 

Joaquin has taken to asking this, voice hushed, at every chance he gets. The first time, Sam almost bit his head off. Now, Joaquin’s learned to take on a very plaintive, sympathetic look while asking, and Sam hates it and gives into it in equal measure; hates it, because it has that kids-gloves gentleness about it, the type that implies comfort, and Sam resents the idea that he needs comforting; gives into it, because it is easier than thinking about all the reasons Joaquin thinks he might need comfort at all.

Sam turns his head to the side. Has to pause for a second to adjust his eyeline, tilt his head down, because he’s used to looking up higher, because Joaquin is three inches shorter than—

Pauses again. Tugs at the kevlar of his collar, because the suit’s been perfectly tailored to his proportions, sure, but lately Sam always feels like he’s choking.

“Nada,” he responds flatly.

“Sam,” Joaquin says now, and it’s a little hushed—pointless, because they both know that at this range, Bucky can probably still hear him. “So, I know maybe it’s not my place—”

“Yeah, you’re probably right about that, bud.”

“—but shouldn’t you guys, y’know? Kiss and make up?”

Sam nearly bites open the inside of his cheek with the speed at which he turns around. “What,” he says, a little too quickly.

Up ahead, Bucky stumbles a little in his purposeful stride. Sam does not let his heart wrench with it. Joaquin continues on, oblivious. 

“You know that saying, Sam. Look, I know you guys have had your disagreements before. But you’ve always been able to talk it out before, right? You guys like each other too much to fight for this long.”

“So you’re the Sam and Bucky expert now, huh,” Sam observes flatly.

“I mean, I’m the one who has to put up with you guys all the time,” Joaquin jokes. His expression falters a little when Sam doesn’t laugh. “Look, I’m sure you guys had another misunderstanding. For the sake of our missions, can’t you..? Since you’re partners and all..?”

Sure, okay. For their missions. Sam can do that. Nervousness does not a good team make, or however it goes, and he prides himself on his communications skills. He’ll just—pull Bucky aside—hash things out—and then everything will be better—

“Partners?” Bucky says loudly. He’s a good fifteen feet away, and at any other time Sam would have found the way he’s still pretending very hard that he wasn’t eavesdropping to be hilarious.

“Um,” says Joaquin, eyes darting from Bucky to Sam. “Yeah?”

Bucky makes a loud harrumphing sound in the back of his throat. Still facing away, shoulders squared firmly. “That’s fucking rich.”

Sam has several hundred smartass ways he could respond to that. Out loud, he sighs. Says, tone pale of emotion, “Just spit it out, man.”

There’s a split second—something about the way his head tilts a bit, maybe, or the way his shoulders slump down just a centimeter—where Sam thinks Bucky is going to turn around. 

He knows Bucky’s habits like a second language, after all. It’s all tucked away in his head in some dark and soft place, bruised deeply into the tissue, a little catalog of Bucky’s twitches and tenses and tells; this is the way his mouth purses when he thinks Joaquin’s said something particularly witty but doesn’t want to admit to liking it; that is the way he drums his fingers in impatience when he’s waiting for the briefing to hurry the fuck up, please, because he’s hungry and wants to go get dinner already; here is the way he leans forward, almost unconsciously, and then falls back again, when he is reminded of something from a very long time ago; there is the way he tilts his head forward and to the side, chin dipping, eyes searching, when he really, really wants Sam to listen, to pay attention, to look back at him.

But they haven’t looked each other in the eyes for weeks.

Bucky’s arms drop straight by his sides into something Sam recognizes as dismissal. He does not turn around. 

“It’s rich,” he says, “because partners tell each other shit. But we don’t do that, right, Sam?”

Then the screech of his heel against the floor. The dull thuds as he strides away. In this little tunnel of a hallway, everything is magnified, funneled straight through by the low ceiling. Sam thinks he gets the full experience like that: head bowed, kevlar collar pinching at his neck, Bucky’s words loud in his ears. 

“Wait, c’mon,” Joaquin gets out, shaking off his stunned silence. The dismay is clear in his voice. “That’s not—”

“Hey.” Sam holds a hand out, stops him from following after Bucky. Studies the tacky linoleum under his boots.

Still, at the very back of his mind, he thinks of that early morning in his cramped little office, and of bare, veiny feet, soft against the carpet, and of the way every wall closed in on him like a great mouth. Him, trying to outline the edges of his pain, fighting desperately against a full sketch, and Bucky, following the lines blindly and without understanding. The sick, whirling pit in Sam’s stomach, all the while. 

He listens silently as Bucky retreats down the hall, every step scratching out his bristling frustration, growing fainter as he goes.

“Forget it, Joaquin,” Sam says finally. 

He pats the kid on the back, unballs his tightly-fisted hands. Turns away to save his own heart. 

***

Sarah

How’re you doing? Haven’t heard from you in a while. Work keeping you busy?

Sam

Sorry, Sarah. I’m fine. Work is the usual, you know how it is. Everything alright with you?

Sarah

Yup. Business has been booming! Seems like everyone wants to try a Wilson Family recipe, these days. Got a lot of your groupies here.

Sam

Can’t help that everyone wants a piece of me. 

Sarah

Har har. Mr. Big Time Captain America, I get it. 

Whenever I see Ms. Patty, she asks about how you’re doing. Next time you have a break, get yourself down here and tell her yourself!

Sam

Of course I will. Can’t have the people of Delacroix forgetting what this handsome face looks like!

Sarah

You’re full of it. I changed my mind. Invitation rescinded. 

Sam

Awww.

Sarah

Can’t have you bringing that attitude into my house.

But for real, the boys miss you. And I think it’d be good to have all of us together as a family soon. I know the anniversary is coming up soon.

I know you don’t like talking about it. But just consider it, okay? 

And bring Bucky with you.

Sam?

Did your cell service cut out or something?

Sam

Sorry. 

I’ll visit soon, I promise.

Anyway, something came up, I gotta go. Give Cass and AJ my love.

***

There is a break room on the second floor of the base. Break closet would be more of an appropriate term, considering it’s closest in size to the one in Sam’s bedroom, and contains little more than one crowded countertop laden with pre-packaged caffeinated beverages of all sorts and a precariously installed little shelf with several stacks of chipped mugs that, despite frequent mug displacement onto the counters and into the sink, never seems to be empty. Sam imagines that someone must clean the used cups and then restack them, with great care, into their teetering piles; someone must refill the little cardboard box that spills tubes of instant coffee mix at the brim. It’s a comforting thought; of all of the stern-faced men and women in the building, at least one person has dedicated themselves to maintaining the quiet little constancies of the claustrophobic pit stop for all weary soldiers. 

All this to say: the break room is well-used, but tiny enough that if you aren’t specifically looking for it, it might completely pass under your notice. 

Sam’s stirring his spoon through a particularly acidic mug of instant coffee when he hears the voices from outside.

“So have you noticed the weird vibes between Captain Wilson and Sergeant Barnes lately? Or am I the only one?”

“Only one—dude, the whole fuckin’ base has noticed.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I was just checking to make sure, ‘cause damn. Were you there when they got back in from Mexico yesterday?”

“You know I wasn’t. Get to the point!”

“Okay, well you could’ve cut that tension with a knife. Remember how they used to banter or—”

“More like flirt.”

Sam stops stirring his coffee. 

“Yeah, flirt, yeah, whatever. They had that whole back-and-forth before, right? Yesterday? Nada. They stepped off the plane—and they weren’t even looking at each other, man, it was so awkward—and boom! Speed-walking off in opposite directions. Not a single word exchanged. It was like when you do that thing with magnets, you know, when you put the wrong sides together and they push off of each other.”

“Jesus. Guess the rumors are true, then.”

“What rumors?”

“That they were—together, like that. Kept it on the down low, ‘cause that’s what you do when you’re a superhero, right?” 

Sam’s stomach drops like a rock.

“For real?! Where’d you hear that?”

“Pipe down, stupid. I heard from Shin, who heard from Molina, who heard from Smith—actually, it doesn’t matter. All you need is eyes to tell.”

“Ahh, true. Now that I’m thinking about it, that makes a scary amount of sense. What d’ya think did it? I’m thinking they got into a huge fight or something last month—that’s when the bad vibes started, right—“

The other person hums in agreement.

“—and there was a really bad breakup, but now they still have to work with each other. Jesus. Still gotta see each other every other day. No wonder they’re acting like they’ve got sticks up their asses.”

“Mmhm. That’s workplace dating, man, I guess even the best of us aren’t safe—”

“So the government is paying you gentlemen to stand around and gossip. That’s a new one.”

A choked gasp of alarm. The snap of boot heel against boot heel as the two soldiers audibly gather themselves together. 

Then, meekly: “Sergeant Barnes. We weren’t…it’s not…sorry. Didn’t know you were there.”

The sound that Bucky’s leather jacket makes when he pulls his shoulders back; Sam knows this by heart. 

“Makes it awkward to talk about someone behind their back when it’s not actually behind their back, doesn’t it?”

“Sir, we—”

“Don’t ‘sir’ me. I don’t think I even outrank you. Just go and do something productive instead of making up rumors about stuff that wasn’t and will never be true.”

Sam sets his spoon against the side of his cup very, very quietly. His hands lower themselves to the counter, rest in fists on the surface. He swallows silently. 

“Yes, sir—”

“Sorry, sir—”

“Go.”

Two sets of footsteps, as the soldiers hustle off toward Bucky-less safety. Sam stands at the counter, holding himself perfectly still, the edge of the countertop digging uncomfortably against his hip bone. He doesn’t know when he started leaning against it. At this angle, he cannot see into the hall; whoever’s in the hall cannot see into the break room. But he knows that Bucky has enhanced hearing. 

No sound from Bucky. 

Sam had never realized that absence had such a distinctive presence, not until now. Like this: Sam, sharp-tongued, Bucky, sharper, but never looking each other straight in the eye. How they do not talk to each other. How they do not touch each other. How they dodge brushed shoulders and shared elevators and hallway run-ins with careful expertise, which makes Sam want to laugh, because they could only learn how to be so perfectly out of alignment because they already knew, in painstaking detail, the exact puzzle-piece shapes of each other’s lives—and that’s funny, right, and Sam has to find it funny or he’ll start finding it something else, and he really doesn’t know what he’ll do then. 

The door between them is open. Neither of them step through it. 

After what feels like the world’s most generous minute, he hears the stifled remnants of what must be a sigh, and then the sound of a third set of footsteps, departing once again. 

He remains where he is, still as a statue, for a long time. Barks out a laugh to himself, two short bursts, ha ha. Finally steps back out into the hall, every inch of him already gone cold. 

***

In an altercation in California, Joaquin’s leg is sliced open by a jagged metal pipe, tossed like a javelin by a neo-Hydra member who was succinctly immobilized and hustled off in handcuffs. 

It’s nothing major. The pipe misses the femoral artery by a mile. But Sam can see the blood, the way it soaks darkly into the rough fabric, almost black; he can see the bloody smile of the torn flesh through the new slit in Joaquin’s pant leg. 

“Don’t worry about it, Sam,” Joaquin chirps, bright as ever, when he catches Sam looking. He covers it again with the clean towel that medical gave him. “I heal up fast, anyway. Well, not as fast as—you know. I’ll be fresh in no time!”

Sam had been mere feet away. If he’d turned his head even a second faster, he could’ve knocked the pipe off its course with a toss of the shield or even a well-timed kick. But he’d been distracted by his fuzzy thoughts, by the ache of exhaustion in his bones, by the sheer amount of caffeine in his blood making him shake apart; he hadn’t been watching. He hadn’t been careful. 

 “I’m sure you will, man,” Sam says, trying for a laugh, and it comes out tight and forced, and momentarily, he can feel the burn of eyes on his back—but it must be his imagination, because when he looks back, Bucky’s busy wiping down his arm.

When he gets home at night, he doesn’t shower right away. Just heads to his office, dumps his duffel bag on the floor. Drops himself down in the chair in front of the crumpled, folded paper on the desk.

He doesn’t pick it up. He just sits there, and the stifling air in the room crushes him down into his seat, and he watches the dying stripes of light slide slowly across the surface of his desk until everything turns gray and colorless, and only then does he get up slowly, everything aching, to step back out into the hall, closing the still-unoiled door behind him. 

***

These days, Sam finds himself in great need of quiet spaces. He stares at those stacked-up mugs more often than he should; he’s taken to gulping down three or more cups of bitter brew every day to keep his eyes open. He takes it straight now, no cream or sugar. 

All these things: the black coffee every morning, the undisturbed sheets of his bed, the deep ache that has taken root in the softest parts of his body.

All these things: quiet little constancies. 

***

Sam flew back home to the States on an airplane that smelled like stale air and tired human bodies. The only upside to the entire ordeal was that he got an entire row of seats to himself. 

“Thank you for your service,” the flight attendant had said when she handed over his cup of ginger ale. Her hair was slicked into an updo as shiny as her smile, and Sam had tried to smile, managed only a grimace, and then clinked his teeth into the ice cubes in his drink when he took a sip to cover his expression.

He was only able to tell that his window blind was cracked open when the thin sliver of amber moved on the back of the seat in front of him moved after takeoff, and he realized it was the light leaking under the space left under the blind. A wiggle of his finger slid it all the way up. 

The glow was orange and blinding—they were moving past the sunset. 

The sun caught softly against the gentle swell of clouds beneath the plane, and they came alive in gold and red. Sam sat forward in his seat for a better look, wondering at the stir in his gut at the sight; he pressed his hand against the window, leaving a smudgy set of fingerprints. The glass was only just barely cold. He couldn’t even hear anything behind the double layers.  

When he flew his missions for the military, the whistle of the wind was a constant whisper in his ear; on the fastest maneuvers, it was a roar of a thousand voices. Sam was the adaptive type, got used to it after the first few times, but Riley hated it. Said he had sensitive ears.

Had hated. Had said. 

Sam felt sick. 

When he slammed the window cover shut, it was loud enough to turn several heads in his direction. He ignored them, pushed the blind down all the way to the bottom, but it had been set crooked into the frame and wouldn’t block all of the light completely, so he leaned his head against the window cover to let the buzzing vibrations rattle his skull into numbness. 

Half an hour into the flight—and half an hour into his silent contemplation of the unpleasant felty material of the seat under his fingers—the overhead lights went out with a gentle whisper. The cabin fell into silence; Sam watched, silent, as his fellow passengers settled in for a long nap, heads tipping over onto stiff headrests and propped hands as they dozed off to the low rumble of the plane engine. Across the aisle, a middle-aged woman settled her head down on her husband’s shoulder, and he slid the armrest up so that she could squeeze closer; the teenager next to them propped his arms up on the tray table to pillow his cheek in the crook of his own elbow.

Sam didn’t sleep. He stared at the dim glow of the NO SMOKING sign until his eyes ached. Until the air shifted. Until he realized, suddenly, that he was not the only one in his row anymore.

He managed to maintain twenty seconds of silence before he couldn't stand it anymore. 

“I saw something,” he whispered quietly to the shadow sitting in the aisle seat. “I saw something in the desert. That night. It wasn’t—it touched me—” 

Stopped, again, jaw snapping shut. He couldn’t bring himself to say the words. 

What Sam wanted: to destroy something. To rip the uncomfortable headrest from his seat and hurl it into the aisle. To crack a hole into the window at his side and let the wind suck everything away, to take his head in his hands and wail, to grab that intangible burden at his side and scream into its featureless face. To beg it for answers that he knew it could not give, to make it feel all the horrible things that he felt, to tell it, over and over, I want to go back I want to go back I want to go back. 

What Sam could do: nothing, because he was sitting on a commercial airliner with a hundred other people, and because he was stuck talking to a ghost that could not speak, and because there was no way to turn back time. 

He settled for turning his face away, grinding the heels of his palms into his face, and biting down on his lip until he tasted blood, still feeling those eyes on him. 

Sam ignored it. He could only focus on the hiss of the recycled air that was pumping back into the cabin, the ambient noises of the other passengers being lulled to sleep around him. Somewhere, deep in the bowels of economy seating, a baby began to fuss, and an airline attendant glided down the aisle to retrieve an extra blanket for an old man, and still the sliver of light danced across the back of the seat in front of Sam, seeping through as the one reminder of the unforgiving earth that turned below them all. 

By the time the seatbelt sign lit back up with a soft chime, the aisle seat in Sam’s row was empty once more. 

***

When Sam wakes up in his empty bed, he is not alone. 

His curtains are drawn today, and without the guiding light of the moon and city lights, it’s hard to make anything out, but he does not need to look to know it; his neck, still awash with cold sweat, prickles in awareness, skin rising in bumps with the sensation of being watched by something draped in the shadows that populate the still corners of his room.

“What.”

The ghost looms silently and invisibly.

“Great.” Sam pushes himself up with a groan; he can’t go back to sleep like this. “Stare at a man all night, you could at least make yourself useful and get him a glass of water. No? Just gonna stand there? Thought so. Don’t bother following me.”

He’s squinting through the harsh wash of fridge light, staring blankly at the limp lettuce in the crisper, when he feels that prickle on his skin again. 

“I told you not to follow me,” Sam says tonelessly. He does not turn to the blur at the edge of his vision.

Very predictably, no reply. 

Sam doesn’t know what he expected. He’s tired, down to the bone; the tile under his feet is a little too cold, a little too hard, as always; the light from the fridge burns at his dry eyes, as always. Little constancies, he reminds himself as he steps away, but when he slams the fridge door shut, it’s hard enough that he hears something fall over inside. 

He turns, beelines for the cabinet where he keeps his cups. Pulls out a glass, runs the tap, fills it. Clutches it between his hands, hard, as he watches the surface of the water tremble up against the sides, still feeling those eyes on his face. 

His mouth is so, so dry. He doesn’t drink. In his mind, still, that long flight home from Afghanistan, so many years ago, the sunset creeping in under the closed window no matter how much he tried to stop it and that dark cabin of sleeping bodies and the pounding in his head like a drumbeat, like bloody rain against the earth. 

From the day since it first appeared in front of him, this ghost has been a held breath. Sam has been choking himself blue, waiting for the exhale. 

“Fuck off,” he whispers.

The ghost does not go.

Sam grits his teeth, turns sharply, and throws his cup through its head. 

“What do you want from me?” The cup shatters in a silver crash against the kitchen tile. “What do you want? Why can’t you leave me alone?”  

The face in front of him does not flinch. He can see the mess he’s made through the heat-blur of its head—the splatter of water against his wood cabinets, the winking glass sea on his kitchen floor—and this just makes him even angrier.

“Whatever it is—please, please—hasn’t this been enough for you, hasn’t this—” and here Sam gestures at himself, his empty home, his empty life, and his breath hitches and skips in his chest, stuttering, dry—“been enough to absolve me? What else do you want me to give up?”

The ghost shifts slightly, as if to move, and Sam flinches back.

“Don’t. Don’t come near me. I’m tired, I’m so tired, do you know that? You have to know that. Whatever it is, I know it’s my fault. I know. You’ve never let me forget it. Just—just watching, and waiting, and never saying a damn thing—why can’t you tell me who you are? Why can’t you tell me what I did wrong?”

Sam lifts his hand again, thinking of swinging it, thinking of trying to reach out and shake that faceless shadow until the answers he’s been looking for fall out of its intangible, unreachable mouth—

 The ghost disappears. 

Sam’s hands fall to his sides, useless, and the rage and pain swell in his throat with nowhere to go. 

“Fuck. Fuck!”

He squats down, alone in a kitchen filled with broken glass, and puts his head in his hands. He stays there for a long, long time. 

***

He shouldn’t, but he sweeps up all the broken glass while he’s still barefoot.

There’s a moment there where he’s tempted to say, fuck it. Screw the broken glass. Screw this life. Maybe he should just give into that awful part of his mind that wants to break the rest of his glasses, throw the plates against the wall, slam his hands against the counter and roar at how unfair everything is.

But Sam is a grown man. So he sweeps the glass up, and is maybe a little less careful than he should be about stepping on the shards. It doesn’t matter, anyway. Nothing happens. 

By the time everything is cleaned up, it’s two hours past midnight, and he’s just collapsed in a chair by his kitchen table when his comm goes off.

Sam’s head jerks up so sharply it aches. He looks to where his communicator lies abandoned on the kitchen counter, lights blinking in a red frenzy and the body rattling noisily with vibrations. They’ve started keeping communicators on them specifically for work, ever since that disastrous call from Sarah in Madripoor—his personal phone is still in his bedroom, lying silent on his bedside table.

Fuck. Sam can’t even catch a break, even now. 

The chair screeches back with a furious noise. Sam storms across the kitchen, snatches up the communicator—nearly dropping it in the process—and flips it open with a quick snap of his wrist. 

“Took you long enough to pick up,” says a familiar voice.

It’s Bucky. 

Double fuck.

“What do you want,” he says shortly, leaning his weight onto the edge of the counter. He feels even more exhausted than when he woke up. “It’s late.”

A long crackle of static on the other end of the line—Bucky blowing a frustrated breath into the receiver. “Do you think I’d call you on this line just ‘cause I felt like it?”

His tone grates. Sam feels his already fragile temper flaring. “I don’t know, maybe you would.”

“So that’s what great old Captain America thinks of—”

“Well if you would just get to the point—”

Someone clears their throat loudly. “Hey guys. Uh, I’m on this line too.” 

Sam closes his eyes. The pounding in his head intensifies. “Hey, Joaquin.”

“Torres,” Bucky says shortly. “Why don’t you get Cap up to speed.”

Joaquin may still be sitting on a fresh injury, but he’s been as diligent as ever; his voice is a smooth stream through Sam’s comm speakers, cutting cleanly through the tension. He launches into a quick explanation as Sam makes a quick beeline to his bedroom.

“It’s another lead,” Joaquin says; the rapid click of a keyboard drowns out the last word momentarily. “Lewis. Big green flashes of light, just like what was reported in Nevada. I’ve been monitoring surveillance footage since the last ping, and the latest sighting pinpoints this incident at…” and there he pauses, typing away. 

Sam frowns a little to himself as Joaquin reads out coordinates through the communicator—it’s very close to central DC. A bit close for comfort. 

“Sorry about the timing, but—”

“S’okay, Joaquin,” Sam interrupts. “Wasn’t sleeping anyway. And this takes priority.”

Bucky makes a quiet noise, barely picked up by the receiver. 

He’s a little tempted to goad him into saying whatever it is he’s holding back, but Sam can keep it professional, even when he feels half out of his mind with exhaustion and the last vestiges of adrenaline.

“Yeah,” Joaquin replies, sounding a little relieved, “right, gotcha.”

Sam keeps busy as Joaquin gives them a quick briefing; he brings the communicator into his room and tosses it on the bed, listening to the voice streaming out as he pulls out the case for his suit and unlatches it in quick, efficient movements. The familiar movement of it steadies him a little; as he peels off his sleep shirt and pulls on the undersuit, then the stiff material of his uniform and boots, he feels the rest of himself fall away. It’s enough to soothe the uneasy churn of his stomach and the now constant burn of exhaustion behind his eyes. By the time he emerges from his room, he’s not Sam, who mere moments ago was screaming down a ghost that only he could see—he is just Captain America. 

“—So be careful out there, guys,” Joaquin is saying. “I wish I could be with you on this one, but—”

“Bed rest, doctor’s orders,” Sam reminds him. “Don’t sweat it. We’ll be fine.”

There’s a long moment as Joaquin silently and very obviously thinks about the current state of Sam and Bucky’s partnership. “Right,” he says slowly. “Well, I’ll be in contact.” 

A click, as Joaquin drops off the line.

Then it’s just Sam and Bucky.

“Well,” Sam says shortly, “I’ll see you—”

“Hold on, Wilson.”

“What.”

There’s the sound of Bucky’s motorcycle roaring to life, then the purring as it idles.

“What are you doing, man,” Sam says flatly, when Bucky doesn’t say anything. “This isn’t the time to chitchat. You’re ready to go, I’m ready to go, let’s just get this over with—”

“Are you sure you’re good for this mission.”

Sam breathes in deeply through his nose. He’s trying very hard not to feel insulted, and his temper feels like it’s on a hair-trigger. “I’m perfectly fine.”

“You sound off.”

“If your word was law, then I’d always sound off. Come on, we don’t have time to waste—”

“I’m not wasting time,” Bucky says, and this time his tone is sharp enough that it gives Sam pause. “Look, if you’re not on your game, you could slip up. Just look at what happened last time—”

Sam can still remember the fleshy smile carved into Joaquin’s leg. His mouth tastes sharp and bitter, like blood. “Do you think you need to remind me? I don’t want other people to get hurt because of me, either!”

“Oh my god. Why is it always ‘other people’ with you? I mean you, okay? You! I don’t want to see you get hurt! I don’t want to watch you get shot out of the sky, or get your head blown off, or whatever! So be up front for once and just tell me if you’re okay!”

Sam swallows, hard. 

“Fucking—earth to Wilson. Did you even get any of that?” Bucky mutters a little under his breath, indecipherable over the sound of his motorcycle.

Sam’s fingernails dig into his palm.

“And what would it matter,” he says, strained, “if I said I was okay? Would you believe me?”

“What does that mean.”

Sam thinks of his office in the morning light. Bucky’s pale, bare feet against the carpet. That red-splashed printout. His heartbeat roars in his ears. 

“You told me to tell you the truth, back then,” he says. “I tried to tell you. I was trying—and you didn’t even fucking believe me.”

“What—that’s not the issue here.”

“No. It is. Do you know how hard it is—you can’t expect me to just spill my heart to you on command if you’re just going to ignore it. To even begin telling someone something like—this isn’t something I can just whip out like some sort of hat-trick.”

“Sam.” Bucky sounds just as frustrated as him, now. A small part of Sam feels vindicated. “I’m not expecting you to. I just want you to help me understand—”

 Sam’s eyes feel hot. “But you didn’t even listen to me. You left. And—”

“Oh,” says a voice over his shoulder. “It’s just as I thought. We do have a lot in common.”

Sam’s body reacts without him even thinking. In a flash, the communicator drops to the floor and skitters across the hardwood—his right hand now free, it rises up to grab his shield.

As his fingers close around air, he remembers, too late, that the shield is still in its case in his office. 

“Whoa, Cap. Easy.”

He recognizes the man standing in his hallway in an instant. His face matches the headshot he’d seen in the file given to him before Nevada.

“Wilson. Sam! What’s going on?” Bucky’s tinny voice belts out from the communicator’s speakers.

“How did you get into my apartment?” 

“Your windows are really easy to break into,” Adrian Lewis says conversationally. He walks forward until one of his boots is nudging up against the communicator. “You should get that checked out, I think.”

“Thanks for letting me know, man,” Sam replies tensely. “I’ll make a note of it.”

“Sam,” comes Bucky’s voice again, “Who is that—”

“We don’t need an audience,” says Lewis, and crushes it under one of his heavy boots. Sparks fly. When he lifts his foot, the communicator has been completely destroyed. “Don’t look so worried, Cap. I split you two up for a reason. I don’t wanna fight.”

Sam thinks fast. Normally, he would have no problem taking out a guy this size, but things get tricky when magic is introduced, and Sam wants this to be as clean as possible. Bucky will have known that something is off—most likely, he’s already en route to Sam’s apartment. The drive is ten minutes, tops, and he’s seen Bucky on that bike of his. He could halve it with no problem. More importantly, Sam would prefer to take his usual approach, which is to save the use of force until absolutely necessary. 

What he needs to do right now is what he does best: talk.

“Okay.” Sam lowers his hands, telegraphing every movement. “Okay. Anything in particular I can help you with?”

Lewis breathes in deeply through his nose, contemplating the slightly-scratched wood of Sam’s cabinets, the mess of magnets on his fridge, the used dishes in his sink. He rubs a hand across a countertop and rubs at the imaginary dust between his bony fingertips. 

“Do you know what I did when I came back after the Blip?” he asks.

“I don’t,” Sam says calmly. “Why don’t you tell me.”

Lewis cocks his head to the side. His eyes are pale gray and watery. 

“I was in the middle of getting radiation therapy when I was snapped away, you know. Went poof in my hospital gown, ass hanging out and everything. I think that was actually an easier way to go than what was waiting for me, you know—every day I was puking my guts into the toilet, my hair was falling out, I felt so fucking tired every day I could’ve just keeled over and died and I wouldn’t have cared. But I was stuck there, getting every cell on my body blasted so much that I couldn’t hug my wife. I couldn’t even hold my baby. I was hanging on for their sakes only. Every day I was in there was another day my wife was trying to take care of our newborn by herself, trying to pay all my medical bills at the same time.”

“I’m sorry,” Sam says, hands up, body language calm and open like he’s comforting one of his veterans. “It’s never easy to—”

“So, the Blip,” Lewis says, cutting Sam off. “That was it. Then five years later, I come back in the middle of a crowded waiting room and flash half the patients there. They’d remodeled.”

Lewis has begun to circle around the kitchen counter. Sam moves with him, one step at a time. He keeps his front facing him, his shoulders squared. 

“I hadn’t finished treatment, you know. Going by my own timeline. But I got out, fuck all those doctors who tried to get me to stay, and got to my house as soon as I could, and I knocked on the door, and my wife comes out and her face goes white. There was another guy there, you know? Holding my own daughter. Five years. Fuck. Fuck. She’d found someone else.”

Lewis trembles a little. Takes a steadying breath.

“My wife told me—she told me it was too much. She told me to come back later, like it was some sort of—corner shop. Not just the house I’d bought with her, that we moved into together. That house was mine, too. It was ours.”

Lewis pauses, puts his hands on the counter and leans forward, and it almost looks like he’s clawing at the marble. Sam, very deliberately, does not lean back.

“You know what, I think half of her was relieved when I disappeared five years ago—then she could move on with her life, didn’t have to hang around and watch me lose a little more of myself each day.” He rubs his hands over his face, tugging down at the dark skin under his eyes. “You know what people keep telling me? That it’s a miracle of life, that I’ve been brought back like this. That I’ve been given a gift. Fuck that shit. How is this a gift? What kinda gift makes your wife not want to see you? What kinda gift makes it so you can’t even meet your own daughter? Now I’m dying and alone. Fucking hell, it would’ve been better to let the cancer take me back then.”

Sam remembers Lewis’ wife’s testimonial, now, in that folder from months ago: He’s hurting, was what she said. He’s not himself. And I couldn’t blame him for that. I swear, I only meant to take a day to think everything over. I swear.

“There are better options than working with HYDRA,” he tries. “I can g—”

“You weren’t there, Captain America,” Lewis spits. “But they were. It’s like they knew I needed them—I meet a guy, and he says to me he knows I’m miserable, and he can make that change. I was out on my own, no wife, no kid, and I kept thinking about it. Back then. I kept thinking to myself: what would I give to go back, to have my family like that again? I’ll tell you the answer. I’d give my whole fucking life. If I could, I’d turn it all down. The treatment, everything. I’d live out my days with dignity, and I’d do it with them. Not in a fucking hospital room.”

“Adrian—”

“They gave me a way out.” The light in his eyes is too-bright, manic. “Everything’s changed now. I have a way out.”

“Whatever they’ve done to you, I can guarantee that it’s not the solution that you think it is. I know HYDRA. I’ve seen what they do to people. And if they’re trying to recreate dangerous magic—”

“That’s okay, Cap. I wasn’t asking for your permission.”

By Sam’s estimate, Bucky should almost be here, and he also would have called for backup. He inches over, trying to cut off the paths of escape; no easy routes, even if Lewis did manage to come in through the window. “Come on, Adrian, you don’t want to do anything rash.”

“Don’t worry. At first I thought, I’d just solve my own problems and be done with it, right? But I’m a selfless type of guy, y’know. That’s why my wife stuck around so long, even when I was shriveling away into a bag of bones. So I told myself—I can help other people who feel just like me. People like you.”

Sam feels himself go tense at the strange, knowing look on his face.

“What do you mean?”

“I knew it the second I saw you on TV. It was on the news. Coverage for a funeral—Rogers, I think.” Lewis smiles, lips pale and chapped, at the expression he sees on Sam’s face. “Yup, there it is. That look on your face that says you know you’ve been left behind, and it hurts. Fuck, it hurts, doesn’t it?”

Sam recoils. 

“All due respect, you don’t know me, man,” he shoots back, but Lewis pushes on.

“I know you and I both got zapped out of existence for five years and when we came back, everyone expected us to just go about our days like normal. That shit changes a guy, doesn’t it, Cap? Waking up in a different world. It makes you examine yourself in ways you probably wouldn’t like.”

There’s the sound of a motorcycle roaring down the block; Lewis cocks his head to the side. “That’s your friend on the phone. James Buchanan Barnes. The Winter Soldier. He’s one of us too, y’know? The eyes never lie.”

“Please,” Sam says, last-ditch, tracking Lewis’ gaze as it wanders to the front door behind him. “We can help you.”

The sound of boots on the pavement. Bucky’s right outside.

Lewis smiles.

“Just as well; this is my first time trying this out on my own. He can be the test run, Cap. I’ll save the best turn for you.”

“Adrian, don’t—”

The next few seconds seem to happen in slow motion:

Lewis’ hands come alive with green light. It’s a lurid shade, a sickly, poisonous green, bright enough that he has to squint his eyes against it; the whole room lights up like some sort of corrupted time-stone lantern, almost certainly visible to anyone standing outside on the street.

Bucky, hearing Sam’s raised voice and seeing the green light beaming out the thin glass of his windows, lifts his leg up and kicks the door in; the wood splits and collapses with the force of it, leaving him directly in Lewis’ line of sight.

Lewis, grinning with all his teeth now, lets loose a long beam of light.

Sam takes note of several things at once. He’s too far away from Lewis to tackle him—the kitchen counter is between them, and he’d have to hurdle it to get to him, and by the time he reached Lewis it would be too late. He can’t use his shield to deflect the light because it’s still sitting in his office, and he has nothing else within arm’s reach to replace it with. He’s too far away to push Bucky back through the doorway, either, and the mess of broken door on the ground might trip him up if he tries.

So he does the only thing he can do.

Sam steps in the way.

***

The green light hits him square in the chest. It burns hot, like molten lava. He can hear himself yell—

—can hear Bucky call his name behind him—

—and then everything is whisked away.

***

The light spits him up somewhere dark and quiet and warm, and Sam staggers backward, head spinning, until his back slams into a wall.

“God,” he gasps to himself, trying to catch his breath. He pats at his chest blindly—nothing seems to be wrong, no gaping hole in his flesh. Just the solid material of his uniform. “What…?”

It takes a few moments for his eyes to adjust to his new surroundings; he breathes in deeply through his nose, bracing himself through the nausea, until the vague, night-purple shapes around him resolve into discernable objects. 

The closest things make themselves known first. Sam narrows his eyes through the darkness. 

Just to his side, the flat, wooden slats of a bookshelf. It’s built low, lower than he’s used to. He can make out the ridges of hardcover spines; books, lined up neatly at the top.

Sam leans forward.

On top of those ridges, a soft, plush shadow. A stuffed animal.

Sam tilts his head to the side, worries absentmindedly at the skin of his hands with a single, blunt nail. Something seems familiar. 

Past the soft curves of the plushie, something a little more identifiable. The silhouette, in miniature, of Captain America—

Sam’s heart stops in his chest. The nausea surges back to life.

He knows this room. 

He knows these books. He knows these toys. He knows this train-patterned carpet under his feet, and it is gray and colorless in the dark but he knows that it comes alive in the sun in blues and reds and greens, and that, not now, but soon enough, there will be a dark purplish stain at its edge from an accidentally overturned glass of juice, because the one who knocked the glass over was—

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees something move on the other side of the room. A body, rising jerkily from under the covers of a bed. 

Sam catches, just at the threshold of silence, a thin, reedy gasp, and feels the bile rise in his throat. Oh, god. 

He does not want to look.

He has no choice but to look.

Sam turns, every inch of his body ice cold. Watches as that young face splits in terror.

“Oh!” cries his six-year-old self, staring right back at him. “A ghost!”

PART THREE: THE GHOST

Nine months after Sam returned from Afghanistan, Sarah dragged him out the house, packed him up into the truck, and drove him all the way up to the graveyard where Riley had been laid to rest. 

Sam picked out the bouquet himself, right before they started off in the early morning: white lilies, forget-me-nots, a frothy spray of yellow rue. The florist on shift told him Sorry, such bad timing, we had a big order last night and haven’t stocked back up yet! He told her it was fine. The bouquet was wrapped in brown kraft paper with twine instead of the white ribbon that he’d imagined, and on the way out the door he convinced himself that Riley wouldn’t have cared much either way. 

It was summer. Even in the truck, the moisture in the air descended to pool in every crevice. They kept the air conditioning on blast, but it could only go so far, and there were the inevitable bathroom breaks and moments when they needed to stretch their legs, when they couldn't keep the engine running. 

The heat crept in, slow and sure. 

After they arrived, Sarah kept a respectful distance as Sam put down his bouquet. As he crouched down in front of the headstone in a crackle of joints, as he passed his hand over the granite and dragged his fingers through the thin layer of grime that had formed over the name etched into the surface. Sam got through about thirty seconds of forced-cheer mumbling before his knees gave in and he half-sat, half-fell into the grass.

Sarah moved forward then, quiet as a whisper, and put an arm around his shoulders. 

“Hey,” she said softly. 

“Hey,” he echoed back, softer. “Look.” He pointed a finger, traced in the air over the wrinkles in the kraft paper where he’d laid the bouquet on the car seat, the drooping lines of the rue at the edge. 

“What is it?”

“It’s wilted,” he said. 

“It looks fine,” she replied.

“No.” Sam shook his head; the movement was so small it could have been mistaken for a tremor. “Should’ve put it in water, or something. It was too hot.” 

“Sam.”

He ignored her. Put a hand up to that name again, like his doing so meant something, like he would somehow reach through the six feet of dirt at his feet to tap at Riley’s shoulder, casual, like old times. 

“Sorry, man,” he said. “I messed up your bouquet.” The wetness in his eyes spilled over.

Without another word, Sarah shifted forward to take more of his weight. She squeezed him, hard, like she was afraid he would fall apart into pieces if she didn't. And then they sat there on the ground, the tops of their knees spotting with drops even under the clear, blue sky.

When he finally took away the muffling hand over his mouth, Sam felt Sarah squeeze him again.

“It’s not your fault,” she said. It was the same thing she would tell him with her eyes when he came down the stairs after a restless night. 

Sam bit down on the inside of his cheek, hard. Looked up from the grave to catch the faintest shimmer of air out of the corner of his eyes; there, a few rows down, his second shadow. Silent and faceless as ever.

His stomach lurched. 

"Yeah," Sam lied. "I know."

***

Sam stands with his back to the sun, watching his younger self swallow back tears at his dead best friend’s grave. There’s a fine bead of sweat going down the smooth curve of that familiar face—it gathers at his chin, hangs there for a trembling moment before dropping down into the grass.

Sam, for his part, doesn’t feel the heat. He just—is. The sun does not warm his skin. The grass does not tickle at his ankles. When he looks down at his feet, he can see the green blades poking through his feet instead of being crushed flat under the heavy soles of his boots. 

Movement again. He looks up. The Sam at Riley’s gravestone is getting to his feet.

“C’mon,” Sarah is saying. “I saw a diner a few blocks back, why don’t we get some food in you?”—and then she’s hustling them down the winding, shoe-worn path that snakes its way between the rows of graves and back toward the parking lot. 

As they approach, they’re close enough to touch. Past-Sam keeps his head down as he passes, but it’s not enough to hide anything—Sam can still see how tired his eyes are, how the skin underneath is bruised dark with exhaustion. He can see how Past-Sam darts a quick look at him through the red corners, the wary and rattled twitch of his face. More than that, he can remember the feeling of walking away from his best friend’s grave and straight past a ghost—how it sickened him, how it made his stomach heavy with dark anger and guilt and indignation at the injustice of it all. 

Sam considers, for a moment, reaching out to himself. Reconsiders. He already knows from experience that it won’t work.

(After Sam had first landed in his own childhood bedroom—after he had narrowly avoided vomiting on his own train-patterned carpet, weak-kneed with nausea and exertion and a steadily building terror—after his child self had finally fallen asleep—he had begun to investigate. 

He could walk through surfaces, but only if he tried really, really hard (this, he thinks, is a bit of a blessing— it would get annoying to fall through every floor he tried to walk across). He could not make himself seen by anyone other than himself, and he could not make himself heard by anyone. He could not pick up or touch most objects, and the reason he knows this is because when his child-self had finally fallen asleep, Sam had walked down the hall and into his parents’ room—parents who, to him, had been dead for half a lifetime—and his first reaction was to reach for them. His hands went straight through their faces.)

“I’ll drive,” he hears Sarah say as her eyes slide past him. “You rest in the car, okay?”

Past-Sam and Sarah cross the parking lot. Sam stays where he is as they pile in and the engine rumbles to life. It’s the old gray one—the one their dad used to drive. The engine failed a few years later, and they had no choice but to retire it and shell out for a replacement. 

The truck reverses and pulls away. As it does, there comes a now-familiar sensation in Sam’s chest—a pinch, like a string pulling taut.

Still, Sam does not follow. He knows what happens next. As the truck shrinks down the road, the string pulls tighter—and tighter—and tighter—

And with a snap, Sam is thrown back into a flash of green light. 

***

His time-jumps, as far as he can tell, are at random. Figures that HYDRA’s stupid knockoff time stone experiment isn’t even good enough to send him through time in a linear order. 

The timestream spits Sam up into place after place, time after time. In this order: the lush stretch of grass of the National Mall, his late-twenties a speck in the distance as he jogs down the curve of the concrete path; a pre-teen infested middle school hallway, his prepubescent self attempting to jam one more textbook into a locker already packed with half-opened snack bags and other little knick knacks; a cavernous hanger on his first day in the Air Force, his inexperienced self scrambling along with anxiety tightening the skin around his eyes. There is no rhyme or reason to it, he is simply thrown around like a leaf in the wind.

One of the worst parts of it, he’s decided, is that he can’t even sleep.

Before his little jaunt into the past, plagued with nightmares as he was, he would have found this a mercy; now, with nothing to bookend his days, moments start to slide together into a senseless stream. He’s tried so, so many times to lie down, to close his eyes, to not have to be for a while—to stave off the pit of horror that swells out further every time he jumps, every time he thinks to himself oh god, oh god, I might be here forever—but it never works.

He doesn’t seem to need rest anymore, but he’s never been so exhausted.

Place after place after place. Time after time after time. After what must be about his twentieth time-jump, the twentieth time he feels that string pulling tight as he’s ripped away and flung across the neat line of his own life, Sam stops keeping track of how long it’s been. It all just starts blurring together.

***

Which is why it feels like a physical blow to his chest, the first time he stumbles out of the light and comes face to face with Bucky. 

“Hey,” Bucky shouts above the music, squinting into the flashing neon spotlights that beam across the writhing crowd over on the dancefloor. He’s not looking directly at Sam, almost—through him. “So what’s Google say about that one?”

They’re in—Sam tries to look around, to take in his surroundings, but he needs a moment to gather himself, because it’s been so, so long since he’s seen Bucky’s stupid, familiar face, and the wrench in his gut at this realization borders on pain. He has to take a deep breath and hold it until it subsides.

They’re in Sharon’s stolen art gallery, he thinks. He can recognize the paintings set in their LED-lined display cases and the throb of the music in his ears. 

“That joke’s not as funny the second time.” That’s his own voice.

Sam turns around to see himself standing there, expression unamused. One hand is sliding to his pocket, tucking his phone away. There’s a split second where he and Past-Sam lock eyes; and then—he recognizes that look, because he’s seen it now at least twenty times, and performed it himself a hundred more. The refusal to acknowledge what was in front of him. Past-Sam’s eyes slide right through him, and Sam takes it as his cue to step out of the way. 

Bucky smirks. His head bobs a little to the beat of the music, and he steps a little closer, probably to make his words easier to hear. “Really? I think it was a good one, actually.”

Past-Sam rolls his eyes. “Where’s Zemo?”

Bucky gestures vaguely in the direction of the dance floor. “Saw him a minute ago. Pumping his fist like a loser.”

“Ugh.”

“Yeah.”

“Can’t believe he’s in the mood to dance.”

“Knowing him, he’s doing it to piss us off.”

There is a pregnant pause in the conversation as the crowd parts slightly and Zemo’s sleazy dance moves are further unveiled. Both Sams—past and present—wince in disgust. 

Bucky just looks thoughtful. “I used to be pretty into dancing, myself.”

“In illegal art galleries?”

“Yeah, in illegal art galleries—obviously not. No, I meant before. I would—Steve didn’t like dancing, but sometimes I would drag him out for double dates, and we’d go out on the town.” Bucky crosses his arms across his chest as he says it, and doesn’t make eye contact.

Sam remembers this moment a little better now. He remembers thinking that the music was too loud, that it was too hot, that the brown leather jacket he’d borrowed was just a bit too tight in the shoulders. Bucky’s mention of Steve had grated on him, too, and then the hot wrong feeling in his stomach he’d been suppressing for weeks had bubbled up and he’d had to swallow his tongue and look away. Sam remembers all of this. 

On cue, Past-Sam looks away too, and Sam watches as Bucky darts a look at him out of the corner of his eye, quick enough to be passed off nothing.

“I liked dancing,” Bucky adds a little belatedly. 

“Oh,” Past-Sam says, a strange expression flashing across his face. Sam remembers this, too. He’d gotten a sudden image of Bucky, face carefree and young, spinning a girl round and round on a dancefloor filled with color and light. It had shocked him, the intensity of that image. He’d had no explanation for why it made the hot wrongness in his stomach turn into something else. “Guess you don’t feel too far from home, then.”

Bucky gives him another look again, this time with a smile tugging up at the corner of his lips, like he’s laughing at a private joke by himself. “In a place like this? Sure.”

Past Sam casts a look out at the crowd, half of whom are jumping up and down in what must be drug-induced excitement, and the other half of whom are grinding on one another. “Yeah, they must have nothing on the jitterbug.”

“Oh, absolutely. They don’t know what they’re missing.”

“Yeah? You want people to lindy hop in the club? To this awful EDM?”

Barnes smiles, this time with teeth. “You’d be surprised. I’ll show you, one day, and then we could—um. Well. You know, you’ll see.”

“Hmm. Whatever you say.”

There’s more to this conversation—Past-Sam and Bucky move onto another topic of conversation, something about the art—but Sam can’t pay attention anymore. He just stands there, taking in the sight of Bucky’s face. Basking in it. 

It’s not like every time-jump in this god forsaken mess that Sam’s found himself in has been bad. In fact, in the one just before this, Sam had preoccupied himself with bending over his own thirteen-year-old shoulder and watching him speed through his geometry homework, late on a school night. He’d watched him doodle (in pen, he’d regret that later) on the margins of his notebook paper, brush invisible eraser shavings off his desk and onto his lap, fiddle with the silver spiral ring that shot through the spine of his notebook. Every so often, he’d flip to the back of the textbook to check if his proofs were written correctly, and before he did, Sam would try to guess the answer, too. Most of the time, they were both wrong. Geometry was never his strongest subject. 

It had been amusing in a calm, absent sort of way. There had been nothing inherently distressing about it, and Sam was past trying to batter against the boundaries of a magical curse that he couldn’t even begin trying to untangle. He’d tried running as far as he could, he’d tried screaming at the top of his lungs, he’d tried—everything. And then he had just given himself up to coping. 

The ghostly undercurrent of wrongness that had coursed through it all has only become apparent here, with Bucky standing right in front of him. Emerging from an endless, blurring stream of time-jumps, Sam’s mind is suddenly very clear. 

Huh, Sam thinks to himself. I missed you.  

The sight of Bucky’s smile, directed toward him—even if it is a past version of him—makes his stomach lurch. He thinks of the excruciating silences between him and the Bucky of his own timeline, and bites the inside of his cheek until it stings, until he thinks he might draw blood. 

He stands there, silent and unmoving, until he sees Sharon emerge from the crowd. 

“Hey, guys,” she says. “I found him.”

“Here we go,” Past-Sam says, a thread of relief in his voice, and makes a beeline for the exit. 

Sam should go with him. It’s not like he benefits from staying any longer in this drunk-people-filled nightclub of an art gallery, surrounded by people who can neither hear nor see him. 

Still, he stays, and watches Bucky hesitate for a second, watching Past-Sam cut his way between sweaty bodies. His expression is unidentifiable. 

Sharon lags behind, too. She glances over her shoulder at Bucky. “Coming?” 

Bucky doesn’t move, distracted. The neon lights shift across his face, the effect blurring and floating into something sea-like. 

Sharon takes two steps forward, pauses, turns back to do a double-take, and her eyes grow sharp in that cunning way that Sam has seen a little too much in his own timeline. 

“Oh,” she says. “Oh. ”

“What,” says Bucky, monotone. The whatever-it-was in his face has faded away, replaced now by a vague look of defensive annoyance.

“Nothing.” A pause, in which Sharon conveys with the upper half of her face that what she means by ‘nothing’ is definitely something, and in which Bucky’s shoulders hunch up around his head as he bristles like a porcupine. “Wow. You really know how to make things hard for yourself, don’t you, Barnes?” 

Which—Sam doesn’t even know what that means. He thinks he’s missing something in this conversation. 

But Bucky must understand, because all he does is sigh, grunt out, “Mind your own business,” and shove—gently, because Bucky had been learning to do that, and he had been getting better at it, too—past her to follow Past-Sam out toward the light of day.

Sam’s still confused. “What,” he mutters to himself. And maybe to Sharon, who’s watching Bucky go with a look of delighted amusement on her face, even though she most definitely cannot hear him.

“Men,” she chuckles to herself, and makes to go, and Sam has no choice but to follow. 

***

After his first time encountering Bucky in his timestream, it seems almost inevitable that Sam starts hoping to see him every time he gets dumped out somewhere new. 

He doesn’t have a reason for it, really. Just—it’s nice to see a familiar face. It just happens that Bucky was the last person he really spoke to, before everything, that’s all.

If he starts looking for Bucky in the faces of each crowd he ever finds himself in, that’s his own business.

***

As Past-Sam and his recently incarcerated comrades hustle their way up the ramp into the belly of Steve’s definitely stolen aircraft, Sam takes a moment to catalog the people around him. There’s Lang, his usually cheery expression looking somewhat chipped away. There’s Barton, eyes searching about for Natasha—and Sam feels a pang in his chest when he determines that she isn’t here, even though he knows that already. He’s already lived through this once. 

There’s Wanda, pale and silent, her eyes hollow. Steve is settling her down now, guiding her to a bench built into the sidewall. 

Steve—

Sam’s fists clench a little, looking at him like this. He’s young, still, spry and tall and sturdy. His hands are firm but gentle as he tugs at Wanda’s restraints until they come free, as he looks into her face, intent, making sure to telegraph all his movements to avoid startling her. Sam can see all the places where his face will fold in with age, where he will develop sprinklings of liver spots at his temples and hands. Sam knows very well how this beloved, familiar face will turn into a stranger’s. 

Past-Sam is there in the corner, too, watching Sam hover around Steve. For once, the wariness in his eyes is gone. He just looks tired. 

Steve stands up straight, surveys the group of prison blues around him, and heads toward the cockpit. Sam follows him. 

Bucky is sitting at the controls, back straight. 

“Hey.” He doesn’t look up at the sound of Steve’s approach, hands flipping away at the switches with ease; the floors of the aircraft rumble heavily beneath their feet as Sam feels them lift away from the Raft and into the air, and he pictures the dark, churning water just underfoot, the shrinking dot of the island-prison shrinking away into nothing as they jet off over the Atlantic. 

“Hey.” Steve punctuates this with a heavy sigh. He wavers a little, looking like he’s contemplating sitting down into the co-pilot’s seat, but remains standing. “We got them all, Buck. No one left behind.”

“Good.” There’s a pause as Bucky focuses intently on the glass in front of him, eyes darting across the gray haze settling over the ocean. There’s a sound from the back of the aircraft—Sam focuses, thinks it must be Lang, probably trying to break the tension with a joke. 

“Scott’s fine,” Steve provides, following Bucky’s gaze. “Still smiling, even.”

“Nothing can get that guy down, huh. A little annoying if you ask me.”

“Bucky,” Steve says, slightly admonishing. He sighs again. “Everyone else is fine, too, as far as I can tell. Physically. Clint asked me about Natasha, I told him she’d join us later. And Wanda is—it wasn’t great, how they had her in there. Buck, they tied her up like an animal. She’s just a kid.” 

“Fucking Ross,” Bucky mutters under his breath. Both of them contemplate the gray horizon once more. 

This time, when the silence is broken, it’s because of Bucky.

“What about Sam?”

Steve starts a little. Sam does, too, not expecting to hear his own name called. He has to remind himself that Bucky isn’t talking about him right now, not really.

“He’s—” Steve doesn’t smile, but the wrinkle in his forehead smooths out like he wants to. He’d been like that, back then, when Sam and Bucky had started moving into a first name basis and getting along more often. Always smiling, and watching them, and acting like he knew something they didn’t. It’s like my best friends are best friends too, he’d said before, ignoring the way Sam and Bucky had side-eyed him for that. “Sam’s fine, too. Don’t worry.”

“I wasn’t worrying,” Bucky grunts, but his eyes are darting around like he wants to twist in his seat to peek at the back. “I’ve never worried about that asshole.”

“Sure,” says Steve, not sounding convinced. It’s the same way Sharon had said nothing in her illegal art gallery in Madripoor, and Sam’s starting to see a weird pattern here, something about people saying one thing and meaning another. 

He tries not to think about it too hard.

Bucky’s leg is shifting up and down a little, just barely noticeable. It would hardly qualify as leg-jiggling on anyone else, but Steve’s got eagle eyes, and he notices.

“You can go see for yourself, if you want,” Steve says, gesturing over his shoulder. “I can take over here for a while. You’re not the only guy here who knows how to fly a plane.”

Bucky turns, gives him a scathing look. “I’d reconsider that, given your track record with flying planes,” he says. Still, his head twitches, like he stopped himself from peeking at the last minute. Steve watches him, visibly waiting, and finally Bucky shifts an inch off-center in his seat and cranes his neck back to look.

Sam leans over, follows Bucky’s gaze through the open entrance to the cockpit and down the length of the plane. He can see his past self, just at the edge of the group of blue prison uniforms—he’s standing, arms folded over his chest, a few paces from Wanda. His eyes jump from face to face—he’s scanning everyone’s expressions. His face looks drawn. The bags under his eyes are dark and deep.

When Sam had been trapped on the Raft, darkness was an unattainable mercy. The guards kept the lights on twenty-four seven. The high whine of the fluorescents had filled his ears for the entire duration of their imprisonment—it must have been a week, at least—and every time he tried to lie down, fall asleep for a few minutes, he’d hear that insistent buzzing, see the red glow on the other side of his eyelids. Unconsciousness evaded him. By the end, his vision had started smearing, tossing like a wave-battered boat. 

It had been lonely, too. The cells had been positioned so that they couldn’t see one another. The relief he’d felt when Steve had emerged from the shadows in front of his cell—and then the relief at the relatively unbruised faces of his comrades, and even the sight of his ghost, standing on the gangway leading up to their escape vehicle—it had nearly been enough to bowl him over.

Bucky, watching Past-Sam, frowns to himself. His brows furrow above his eyes. 

“I’ll…” he says, and then stops.

“Yeah?” says Steve.

Bucky turns back around. “Sam’s a big boy,” he says, finally. “He doesn’t need someone hovering over his shoulder. I’ll handle it here.”

For the rest of his time in this particular timeline-jump, Sam stands silently over Bucky’s shoulder, watching him navigate the rough skies over the sea. It’s quiet, boring even—but every so often, Bucky leans back in his seat, looks back at the younger Sam in the back of the plane.

Sam hadn’t known, back then, that Bucky had been looking out for him like that.

It’s—

It’s something.

***

In the first month after his return from Afghanistan, Sam had spent many days in bed, silent and still. It’s not pleasant to witness that from another perspective, but instead of phasing through the bedroom walls and going off to wander around the house, Sam watches over himself. Out of what, he doesn’t know. Maybe some sort of obligation, or some sort of guilt. 

Past-Sam is a lump under the blankets. His room is dark as a cave. He must feel the gaze prickling at the back of his neck, but he doesn’t move, not for a long time. 

Just after midnight, Past-Sam releases a long, loud breath. 

“Hey,” he says softly. He doesn’t turn over. “Do you think he’s out there?”

The sound of the covers rustling against skin. Sam says nothing, does nothing. He’s never opened his mouth to talk to one of his past selves. It’s always felt meaningless.

“Did you think it was him, that night? Do you think he hates me for not saving him?”

The moon has broken through the clouds, is high in the sky, just a pale curve of silver. 

The figure on the bed makes a quiet, choked noise. Sam turns away; even if Past-Sam can’t see his face, he’d never liked having other people watch him cry. 

He does the only thing he can. He stays. 

***

Watching yourself nod off is just as embarrassing as it sounds. 

Sam just barely holds back the urge to cover his face with his hands, watching as his past self’s eyes slip closed for a second and his head lists slightly to the side. It’s almost cartoonish, the way his lashes flutter each time—any minute now, there’ll be a ridiculous honk-shoo-mimimi sound effect coming out from his mouth, complete with a bubble coming out his nose. 

(Sam’s found, by now, that it’s easier to treat the act of watching his own life like a casual viewing at a movie. He gets more entertainment out of that way, and also he doesn’t risk losing his mind by agonizing over the implications of it all.)

The military van they’re in hits a bump on the road—Past-Sam’s head jerks up again, and he looks around, expression a little wild—and then within a minute, he’s back to lolling his neck all around like the little possessed girl in the Exorcist. 

Bucky’s sitting on the other side of the bench-style seat from him, watching. That’s what makes it doubly embarrassing.

Sam looks out at the lush greenery rolling past the windows so he doesn’t have to live through the second-hand humiliation. He remembers this mission, now—this was one among many in that long, exhausting string of missions, just before Bucky had buckled down on him getting a vacation. Right before New York, and then everything that came after New York. The warmth and closeness. Then the silence.

Sam doesn’t like agonizing over that, either.

When he hears Bucky clear his throat a little, Sam twists in the passenger seat that he’s occupied to look back again.

“Okay,” he hears Bucky murmur to himself. “Alright.”

Across the seat, Past-Sam’s head is dipping toward the window next to his seat—Sam cringes, thinking of the feeling of his skull bouncing off of bulletproof glass—before the van jerks again, saving Past-Sam from giving himself a concussion, but also sending his head swinging around in the opposite direction and toward a direct collision path with the bench.

It doesn’t happen. 

Instead, Bucky slides quickly along the bench, all the way until he’s situated in the middle seat, and catches Past-Sam’s head with a gentle hand. As Sam watches, flabbergasted, Bucky inches closer, still holding Past-Sam’s head up with one hand as he maneuvers his shoulder under it, and then lowers it until Past-Sam’s cheek is pressed up against the kevlar. 

“Well, that’s just…” Sam says, mostly to himself, and stops. If he had the words for this, he wouldn’t say them out loud.

Next to Sam, the man in the driver’s seat coughs a little. Sam looks to the side—he remembers this guy. Last name Smith. Pretty cool guy, by all accounts, but he looks a little taken aback as he glances in the rearview mirror and catches the sight of his commanding officer snoozing on his partner’s shoulder. 

In the backseat, Bucky glares back until Smith averts his gaze. His ears are turning red. 

Past-Sam sleeps on soundly, unaware of how awkward the vibe has gotten in the inside of the van. His brows furrow a little before he sighs quietly and relaxes his entire body, melting into Bucky’s side. 

Bucky’s ears go redder. 

For the next ten or so minutes, Sam watches in silence as Bucky holds himself very, very still and lets Past-Sam press his head up against his neck. The flush over Bucky’s ears creeps slowly across over his face, and then down his neck and into the collar of his uniform. It’s so weirdly endearing that part of Sam wants to scream, while the other part of Sam wants to curl up and die of embarrassment. Why didn’t Bucky just wake him up? Just let Sam hold his own dumb head up instead of letting him drool on his uniform?

At one particularly rough bump in the ride, Past-Sam’s head is nearly jolted off of Bucky’s shoulder.

“Hey,” Bucky hisses, one cautious hand resting over Past-Sam’s exposed ear, as if trying to avoid waking him up with the sound of his voice. “Can’t you drive a little more smoothly up there?”

“Sorry, sir,” Smith says meekly. “The road is uneven. I’m trying my best.”

Christ. Sam sits back in his seat, watching through the rearview mirror as Bucky carefully rearranges Past-Sam’s head to rest more comfortably over his shoulder. Story of my life.

***

Once, he lands in the back pews of a church, a sea of black before him. It’s pretty easy to figure out where he is—mostly because of the massive black and white portrait of his father propped up on a stand at the front of the congregation. He can see his own shoulders hunched over in the first row. He’s leaning into his mother. 

He remembers the funeral. Open casket. He almost couldn’t bring himself to go up and look.

One of the gripes he always had with the movies he watched growing up was that the makeup was never right. In movie funeral scenes, the deceased always looked picture perfect. The color was still in their lips, their hair fell in perfect waves across their foreheads. They looked like they were airbrushed and warm and sleeping. Sam thought that it was all bullshit. There was no dressing up something like that. Dead people looked like dead people. 

He’d looked into the casket, in the end. His father’s face was stiff and cold and wrong under the waxy makeup they’d caked onto his face. Whoever his mortician was, they’d used a heavy hand, and the artificial rosiness of the blush just served to make his cheeks look even more bloodless underneath. That image had stayed with him for a long time after the funeral: the clumsy attempt to tether his father to the world, and how it had failed in the end. He had remembered it at his mother’s funeral a few years later—she had never been the same after his father’s death—and then again at Steve’s. Sam had been a pallbearer for all these funerals. Those caskets were still the heaviest things he’d ever carried. It had felt like he had the world on his shoulders. 

From the back row of the church, everything looks different. His father’s casket, which a younger Sam had thought of as a massive wooden mountain that towered in front of him, does not seem so large. The sweeping, dark-wood rafters above his head, not so high. The darkly-clad crowd of mourners in the pews, not so cold and silent. 

At the front, Past-Sam rises from his seat, notecards clutched in blanching knuckles. He’s going to say a few words. As he passes by the casket, he glances down into it, quick, like a reflex, and his face goes ashen. 

Dead people looked like dead people. Like Sam’s father, in his awful mortuary makeup; like his mother just a few years later, her eye sockets dark and sunken; like Riley, and the insides of his head spilled out onto the sand. All their worldly ties to the world turned into cut strings, fluttering in the wind. 

And here’s Sam, sitting in the back of a church where no one can hear him or see him, where he might as well not exist at all. Untethered.

He puts his head down for the rest of the service. He can’t bear to watch.

***

Outside Grand Central Terminal, he turns away from the memorial to the Battle of New York and locks eyes with Past-Sam through the busy foot-traffic across the street. Bucky’s standing next to him, one hand raised away from his body, like he’s thinking about reaching for him. Now that Sam’s thinking about it, it always seems like Bucky is reaching for him. 

Sam doesn’t budge, just stands there, the names of his fallen friends at his back, and studies himself. 

The guilt he finds there is crushing. He doesn’t think he’s seen a face that sad in a very long time. 

It’s all in the eyes, indeed. 

***

There is a certain peace to Delacroix that, in Sam’s opinion, can’t be found anywhere else in the world. The long green grass, the endless water. The familiarity of it all.

Past-Sam runs laps through the trails as he trains, and while the scenery is beautiful, Sam’s seen it all a million times, and grass and water are not what he’s been longing to see. He turns away from the training grounds and wanders up the steps to the porch toward Sarah and Bucky, who’ve perched themselves on the wicker chairs there. 

This was one of the times he’d brought Bucky down to visit his family. He’d seen them chatting, every now and then, and chosen not to butt in. Some conversations were meant to be private.

But—now—

Well, sue him if he’s feeling a little nosy. One of the side effects of the looming feeling that you’ll spend the rest of your artificial eternity, or whatever, alone and away from anything you know, is that you start wanting to know everything. 

It must be muggy. Sam remembers sweating a lot, and even though he can’t feel anything now, he can see the condensation beading on the sides of Sarah and Bucky’s glasses of lemonade. There’s cloud cover, too, keeping in the heat. Not to mention the flush of red he can see on Bucky’s face as he watches Past-Sam jog in and out of view.

“It’s good for him,” he hears Sarah say as he approaches. “Having you around.”

Hearing her voice makes him want to cry. He wonders if Bucky has let her know what’s happened yet, in his own time.

The Bucky in front of him pulls absentmindedly at a stray bit of rattan poking out from the edge of an armrest. The little fidgeting is a world of improvement over the nervousness he’d exhibited when he stayed at Sam’s home for the first time; Sam thought Bucky would’ve fallen over with how eager-to-please he’d been. “You think so?”

Sarah scoffs loudly and crosses her legs, turning around to face him. “I know so, Mr. Barnes. Do you need me to list out all the reasons why?”

“I dunno. Seems like I piss him off half the time,” Bucky replies, but there’s a little smile tugging at his lips. “Why don’t you tell me, just in case.”

Sarah sighs, but she looks fond, too. They got along quickly, Bucky and Sarah, like a house on fire. Sam had been glad to see it. He hadn’t known why at the time, but he’d really wanted them to like each other. 

“If you insist.” Sarah sticks her hand out, starts ticking off on her fingers. “He’s always been cheery, but lately—I’ve been worried about him. He’s always so tired. So it’s good to know that there’s someone around him who can get his spirits up. His face always lights up around you.”

Sam touches his face self-consciously. He hadn’t noticed that.

“Another thing, you keep him humble. Gosh, I love my brother, but he can be such a reckless jackass sometimes. He’s always worked better with a partner.”

“He is a hard-head, sometimes,” Bucky says, amused.

“Oh, and he tells me things about his life now. Do you know how hard it was to get a word out of that boy before? The first time he got swept away by Captain America, all I got was a ‘Sorry, Sarah, something’s come up.’ Then he starts running around playing superhero himself, and all I got was ‘It’s important work, and someone’s gotta do it.’ I swear, it was like talking to a brick wall. If he thought it might even stand a chance of making me worry, I wasn’t hearing about it.” She pauses, gives Bucky a long look. “Now it’s ‘Bucky this’ and ‘Bucky that’. You know, you’re the first coworker of his that I’ve met, but with the number of times you’ve come up in conversations, you’d think you two were roommates.”

Bucky huffs out a laugh, looks down at his hands. A quietly pleased smile slips across his face, and Sam feels the same expression cross his own. “Can’t say we’re roommates. Yet.”

“Hmm?” Sarah says, in a way that means she wants him to go on.

“It’s not—” Bucky stumbles over his words a little, here. “We haven’t talked about it at all. Or, like. I haven’t brought it up to him. But my lease is only for a year, and well, after that—who knows. We’ll see.”

“Hmm,” says Sarah, now in a completely different way, and Bucky gives her a nervous look.

“Yeah. It’s just—well, you know I’ve brought this up before, he’s—”

“He’s not good at sharing anything,” Sarah finishes. She sighs heavily. “Yes. In more ways than one. It’s funny how he can moonlight as a counselor when sometimes it seems like he’d rather die than talk about his own emotions.”

Abruptly, Sam no longer feels like smiling.

Bucky’s still playing with that piece of rattan. He’s nearly pulled it free by now. “Yeah. I noticed that. Is that—” he stops, visibly trying to figure out how to phrase his thoughts. “Sometimes, I can tell when something’s bothering him. But he doesn’t tell me about it.”

“That’s Sam.” Sarah looks out across the grass, watches as Past-Sam rounds the curve of the bank and pauses to take a breather, resting his hands on his knees. He looks small next to the wide expanse of the river, the mirror-bright shine of it. 

When she finally speaks again, she sounds tired. “My brother’s always felt like he needed to be responsible for everything. When my father died, it was like he changed overnight.”

Next to the water, Past-Sam unbends, shakes out his legs, and starts running again. 

“Afghanistan was worse. He came back and couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. Only told me the barest details of what happened, and when I tried pushing, he would shut down more. I’ve learned now that the only thing you can do is wait. If he really doesn’t want to talk about it, all you can do is wait for him to come to you. And when he does—just be ready to listen.”

She reaches out, takes her glass of lemonade. Doesn’t drink it, just traces her fingers through the condensation, leaving little squiggles on the frosty-fog surface. 

“He’ll agonize over everything,” she says plainly, and Sam swallows down the lump rising in his throat. “He’ll torture himself with every possible outcome, and when things do go wrong he’ll tell himself that it’s his fault. Sometimes, I wanna grab him and shake him and ask him what else he could have done. He doesn’t need the weight of the world on his shoulders. He’s just a man.”

Bucky watches her, silent.

“He’s just a man,” Sarah says again, and her mouth trembles. 

Sam feels the breath hitch in his throat. Stares at the solemn faces of two of the most important people in his life. Stands there by their sides, still unseen. 

Overhead, the sun breaks through the clouds. 

***

Sam has known, all along, that there’s a good chance that he might die here.

He’s done the math. There can only be so many times he can time-jump before he is left with nowhere—no when —to go. What happens then? Will he loop over, start back at the beginning? Will he be stuck in limbo for the rest of eternity? Will he just disappear?

He can’t stop remembering what Lewis had said. Back then. I keep thinking to myself: what would I give to go back, to have my family like that again? I’ll tell you the answer. I’d give my whole fucking life. If I could, I’d turn it all down. The treatment, everything. I’d live out my days with dignity, and I’d do it with them. Not in a fucking hospital room.

Sam knows what he would do if he ever got the chance to go back. 

He would say—

***

The motel room is even smaller and shittier than he remembered.

The yellow light from the bathroom flickers on and off intermittently; the moth-eaten couch that Steve is sleeping on is so small that it appears to be half-collapsing under the weight of his body; the aggressive air conditioning unit next to the bed makes noises like it’s got a loose part rattling around somewhere inside. The entire place smells of exhaustion and impermanence and mothballs. 

Sam settles down in the corner and waits. It doesn’t take much time for his past self to begin to plead. 

Even now, after hearing himself sleep-talk for more times than he can count, Sam still can’t get used to it. There is a thready, hurting quality to his voice that just puts his teeth on edge—in unconsciousness, he has no inhibitions about expressing exactly how he feels, and the desperation that comes through makes his skin crawl.

At this time, Sam had a whole rotating selection of recurring nightmares. This one, he remembers particularly well. 

(He’s sitting in the window seat on the plane back from Afghanistan. His neck is bent at an uncomfortable angle, and the back of his head is resting on the humming plastic of the closed window cover, face turned outward. His eyelids are frozen open. 

In the seat next to him, Riley slumps back into the ugly felt cushions. 

The pieces of him slide against each other unnaturally, slow and wet like elmer’s glue oozing out from between the broken joints of a doll. He stares back at Sam, the whites of his eyes wide and bloodshot. The grit caked on his flesh falls off in chunks as he shifts. 

Sam can’t move. Can’t breathe. His eyes burn.

Riley’s body sags over, slowly, torturously, until he’s nearly on his side. The armrest goes straight into his blown-open chest. He keeps dragging himself forward. One hand reaches out and lands, heavy and cold, on Sam’s stiff shoulder—)

Small mercies—tonight, Past-Sam does not start screaming. The only words that come out are ragged and muffled:

“Please. I’m sorry.” 

Bucky creeps over in increments. A raised and turned head, first, as he registers the noise coming from Past-Sam’s bed, then his eyes narrowing in curiosity as he processes the words. A tentative foot off of his own bed, where he had been either sleeping very lightly or just feigning sleep entirely. Both feet down then, and soft, sock-muffled steps to the other side of the motel room. A quiet moment as he peers down at the shaking figure on the bed, visibly contemplating how to wake him up. 

A hand rising up to that sweating cheek, absentminded, and then pulling away just as quickly. 

“Hey. Wilson.” Bucky puts his hand to Past-Sam’s shoulder instead. “Wilson. It’s me.”

Once he’s woken up, the embarrassment in Past-Sam’s voice is excruciatingly obvious. So are his attempts at misdirection: for every time he tries to change the topic, Bucky is still hot on heels, chasing after his answer like a dog with a bone. 

“Do I look like I want to talk,” Past-Sam says, and Bucky replies—“You do.”

“You copied my technique,” Past-Sam says, and Bucky replies—“You’re changing the subject.”

“That’s enough chatting,” Past-Sam says, and Bucky replies— “Are you sure you’re good?”

Even from the beginning, Bucky had known how to look through him. 

And Sam—

(He knows Bucky’s habits like a second language. 

It’s all tucked away in his head in some dark and soft place, bruised deeply into the tissue, a little catalog of Bucky’s twitches and tenses and tells. 

Here is the way he leans forward, almost unconsciously, and then falls back again, when he is reminded of something from a very long time ago; there is the way he tilts his head forward and to the side, chin dipping, eyes searching, when he really, really wants Sam to listen, to pay attention, to look back at him.)

Eventually, they both return to bed; Past-Sam settles back down into his starchy motel sheets, and Bucky traces his path back to his own sleep-dented covers, and the both of them turn to face opposite walls and close their eyes—

—And Sam can’t stop thinking about it. About everything.

About how Bucky had reached for his face, first, when he was about to wake him. About the small motel rooms and cramped little cars and cups of shitty coffee with two sugars and one cream. About their tacky tourist hats and their joined hands, lit by the bright lights of Times Square, and the warm line of Bucky’s body against his own, that night. About how Bucky followed behind him in Sharon’s art gallery, how Bucky leaned back to watch him as they escaped the Raft, how Bucky let him sleep on his shoulder, how Bucky sat on the front porch of his childhood home and watched Sam stand at the edge of the river with something soft in his eyes.

About how Bucky always seems to be reaching for him, and how Sam—despite everything—always seems to be reaching back. 

Are you sure you’re good, Bucky had asked. Over and over, in a hundred different ways.

Sam wants to say: Ask me again.  

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. Ask me again, and if you’ll listen, I’ll tell you.

I’m sorry.

I love you. I’m sorry. I should have told you.

***

The green light, again.

And again.

And again.

***

Afghanistan is beautiful. The sand under his boots. The clear, open sky. The craggy peaks of the gray mountains that rise up in the horizon. He doesn’t remember it being this picturesque, but life has always had a way of proving him wrong. 

Five paces away, his past self hunches over his knees and weeps like he’s trying to tear the grief out from his chest.

Sand scatters against him, blown up by the wind, and catches in his closely-shorn hair. Under his downturned face, the earth is spotted with dark, wet drops. His boots are unlaced; Sam remembers the walk from camp, the sand gathering under the soles of his feet, how his feet ached from the loose chafing of his boot around his heels and toes. The desert seemed to go on forever, and he’d wished for it to be bigger, still. Big enough that its enormity would have swallowed him and everything else. 

Sam stays where he is, watching his own body shake. He remembers that hand—realer than anything—coming down on his shoulder, and the fear that paralyzed him after. 

He waits. 

He used to picture coming back here in his dreams, his nightmares, his every waking hour. 

He would do it all over again, that's what he thought. It wouldn’t be nighttime like it was now. It’d be the middle of the day. Hot, dry, what Riley used to call Egg-frying days, you know, when you can fry an egg on the sidewalk, to which Sam would reply, C’mon, that’s been every day since we got here. The sun high in the sky, a lifetime above the sandy horizon, and the sky clear and blue as anything he’d ever seen. He would do it all over. 

Sam, he’d say; he’d say this to himself before they went up into the air. Sam, you stupid, young idiot. You arrogant, air-filled idiot. This is the most important day for the rest of your life. Keep him alive. That’s your partner. Keep his heart beating.

They’d go up. Sam wouldn’t make a single mistake. He would do everything right. He would pay attention. He wouldn’t lag behind. He’d see the RPG, the tell-tale burst of amber on the ground and the smoke trail that followed it, and he’d yell through the comms loud enough that everyone would hear him, that everyone would have no choice but to hear him; he would know what was coming. It would miss by those few crucial inches. And at the end of it, there would be Riley, still alive, still so perfectly fucking alive. Not the bloody debris that he’d become.

Of course. Sam had always known what he would do if he were to come back. Or at least, he used to think he knew. 

He takes a step forward. The sand stays smooth and untouched under his feet.

“When you leave this place,” he says, quiet, “the memory of it will eat you alive.”

His past self is still on the ground, head bowed. Sam moves closer again. 

“You’ll carry it around with you for the next five, ten, fifteen years. Every little thing will remind you of it—the light coming through an airplane window, the feeling of sand in your shoe, the sound of someone with the same laugh as him on the street outside your window. Some days—beautiful, bright, happy days—you’ll forget it ever happened, and when it comes back to you, it’ll feel like you’re carrying around a dead body on your shoulders. It’ll make you sick. You’ll hate yourself more than anyone, in those moments. How could you ever forget what happened? How could you forget him like that?” 

The desert stretches out around them, wide and pale in every direction.

“You’ll spend whole days lying in bed wondering what if, what if, what if. That weight will sit over you and crush you, it’ll crush the air out of you, and you’ll think that this is forever. You’ll think that this will be the rest of your life: you, spending the rest of your years always looking behind you, always looking over your shoulder, always thinking about this night. And it’ll trip you up. You’ll spend so much time walking backwards that you won’t even see where you’re going.”

Sam’s eyes begin to burn. He doesn’t raise a hand to wipe at them, just keeps staring down at his own young head, keeps talking, feeling the grief that never left him rise high in his throat.

“You’ll miss out on so much, man,” he says. “All ‘cause you think that this is where you belong—stuck here in the dark, carrying that dead weight on your shoulders. You’ll miss the people reaching out for you, the ones who want to pull you up and show you all the other spaces for you in this world. The ones who’ll let you feel that warm fucking sun on your face again.” 

His past self sits up and presses his hands against his face. Sam watches him do it. Recalls the way his despair burned away at him, the way he’d looked up at the sky and begged the world for a different answer. He hadn’t gotten one. The world was unforgiving. 

But it had never been about all that.

“I wish you would’ve known this,” Sam chokes out, and his voice comes out raw and broken and wretched. “You’ll realize what you passed up, one day, and it’s gonna hurt so bad your chest feels like it’s gonna explode.”

Wetness trickles down the bridge of his nose. He tastes salt in his mouth.

“You’ll realize that it doesn’t matter that you weren’t paying attention that day. It doesn’t matter that you were lagging behind. It doesn’t matter what you thought you saw that night. It doesn’t matter. It never mattered. Because—”

Sam stops. His throat clicks. He makes that final, weightless step forward. 

The desert around them is empty. It had always been empty. It had only ever been him out here, alone in the sand. 

Sam knows now, what he would do if he were to come back. 

He knows what he’d say.

“It was never your fault,” he whispers, and then he brings his hand down to rest on his own shoulder. 

All at once, the air twists around him. Sam’s stomach churns; suddenly, the night is cool on the back of his neck, and he can feel the sand give slightly under the weight of his body. The wind bites softly at his face. He’s feeling. He’s actually feeling.

And the shoulder under his hand, his own shoulder, warm and solid under the thin layer of his cotton t-shirt—

It’s as real as anything. 

Sam feels that tug in his gut, sees the green light eat away at his vision, and the last thing he sees before he’s whisked away into oblivion is this: 

In profile, smooth skin lit up with moonlight and tears still wet on his cheeks—his own hopeless, hopeful face, halfway through turning. 

***

“Oof!”

Sam’s first word after returning to a corporeal body is not the most eloquent thing in the world, but he’s too busy marveling at the sharp ache—actual sensation!—of his knees against hardwood floor to worry too much about it.

Legs, check. Arms, check. Hands with the lines of his floorboards pressed into the palms, check. The wood is cool to the touch. Sam grabs at anything he can reach—his own face, the far edge of the kitchen counter—and when he sweeps his hand out again and feels a sharp prick against his finger, lifts it up and sees the bead of blood welling against his skin, he laughs out loud in honest, breathless, near-hysterical relief. There’s sharp glass still on the floor. He must not have swept up properly.

“Okay,” he says to himself, as his eyes sting anew. “Damn.”

The light coming through his kitchen window is bright and sweet and illuminates every corner. He can see subtle changes, now—the distinct, dusty boot prints of what seems to be several men, all stamped onto his previously clean floors, and the conspicuous lack of a front door sitting in his doorway. 

“Damn,” he says again, this time remembering the flash of green light and the sound of Bucky kicking down his door.

He’s off his knees in a flash, scrambling for the bedroom. His communicator was crushed—nope, can’t use that—and he snatches his personal cell off his nightstand, fumbles his password three times before unlocking it on the fourth. “Pick up, pick up, pick up,” he chants, fingers tapping against his thigh as he brings the phone up to his ear.

He doesn’t need to wait long. Bucky picks up on the first ring. 

“Sam?”  Bucky sounds like shit, but shit is one hundred times better than being zapped away to a time-bending compilation of The Winter Soldier’s Top Ten Missions. His voice is the best thing Sam’s ever heard in his life.

“Oh, thank fuck.” All of Sam’s anxiety rushes out of him in one breath. “Are you okay?”

 “...Sam.” Bucky’s voice cracks halfway through the word. 

“Yeah. It’s me. You’re fine? What happened to Lewis?”

“Where are you?” Bucky is breathing very loudly now. Sam can hear a commotion in the background—there’s the sound of voices, and someone who he thinks is Joaquin shouts, Is that Cap?!

“I’m—where are you? What day is it? And you didn’t answer my first question—”

“Sam. Where. Are. You.”

Sam swallows. “...I’m at my apartment.”

“Don’t fucking move.”

Click. 

Sam stares at his phone. Abruptly, his knees go weak, and he has to sit down on his bed or risk bruising his knees on the floor again. The mattress is soft underneath him.

“I’m back,” he says to himself, half in shock, half in reassurance. “I’m back.”

He stares at the softness of his covers, and the way the cloth gives under his weight. He feels the itch of the tears drying on his face. He listens to the buzz of mid-day traffic outside his window, and the fluting song of the little round birds that roost in the trees that line the sidewalk, and the soft hiss-click of his neighbor’s lawn sprinklers turning on. 

Ten minutes later, he catches the sound of what appears to be Godzilla crashing through the hole in the front of his house.

“Sam!” When Sam doesn’t respond immediately, too stunned, Bucky’s voice comes again. “SAM! I SWEAR TO GOD, IF YOU’RE NOT HERE—”

“Hey!” From somewhere in him, Sam finds the wherewithal to get to his feet and move. “I’m in here—”

He rushes through the doorway. Rounds the corner, hands shaking.

And there, at the end of the hallway, stands Bucky.

The sight of him is nearly enough to knock Sam on his ass. There’s that perpetually-frowning mouth, now open halfway through another shout. There are those piercing eyes, the thick brows above them dropping low. There’s that expression—the one that looks half-constipated to almost anyone who sees it, but which Sam knows means that every inch of Bucky has gone weak with surprise and relief. There’s Bucky, finally looking at him, and not through him.

“Hey,” he says again, trying for a smile and falling short. “Hope I wasn’t gone too long.”

“I hate you,” Bucky says, face crumpling, and then they’re colliding. 

Bucky’s arms are tight enough around him to squeeze the breath from his lungs, and his hands are everywhere—he clutches at Sam’s arms and back, desperate, like he’s afraid Sam will disappear the minute he lets go. “You idiot,” he chokes out, his voice rough with emotion and warm on the shell of Sam’s ear, “you idiot, why did you do that? You disappeared right in front of me and I couldn’t do anything— ”

“Sorry,” Sam says, clutching back. His legs feel weak again, but Bucky is sturdy and steadfast, and he keeps Sam up. Sam laughs shakily. “What was I supposed to do, let you get magic-zapped before I even got the chance to try it out first? Dream on.”

“Don’t joke,” Bucky says a little heatedly, but the hand he puts on the back of Sam’s neck is gentle, and his tone is too relieved to be truly angry. 

Sam jolts a little and pulls back, suddenly remembering the context of his current predicament; “Lewis! Where is he? Did he escape again? His powers are unstable, we can’t let him—”

“We took him in,” Bucky says firmly. His tone has gone dark. “I had backup, and whatever magical shit HYDRA did to him, he didn’t have too much control over it. He’s locked up right now, full guard.”

Sam relaxes a little. “He’s got full Gandalf guard on him?”

He’d said it to make Bucky smile, maybe even chuckle a little, but that grim look stays stuck on his face. “Yeah. For his sake. They didn’t let me back in to interrogate him after the first time.”

Sam frowns. “First time?”

Bucky pauses for a long moment. When he speaks again, his voice is strained. “You were gone for three days, do you know that?”

Sam pulls back even further at that. “Three days?”

It had been much, much longer than three days for Sam. But he looks at Bucky, really looks at him, and now he notices the purple-green bruises of exhaustion under his eyes, how the stubble on his jaw has grown out longer than usual. He looks tense, and exhausted, and heartbroken.

“You took that hit for me,” Bucky says, face twisting, “and if you had died, it would’ve been my fault.”

Sam feels the bottom of his stomach drop away. “No—”

“That was such an unbelievably stupid move, you know that? We didn’t even know what his powers were yet! You had no idea what he was gonna do!”

“And I was supposed to let him do that to you, instead?” Sam barks out a sharp laugh. “Fat chance. Sorry, Buck.”

Bucky’s fingers tighten over the fabric of Sam’s uniform. “Don’t joke! I spent the last three days not knowing where you were, how you were, if you were even still breathing—and if anything bad had happened—I would—fuck, I would have wasted the last few weeks not fucking talking to you, all because I was mad—”

“Bucky.” Sam wriggles his arms free, feeling weirdly faint—god, he doesn’t want to imagine that worst-case scenario either—and clamps his hands down on Bucky’s cheeks. “Stop! I’m here. I’m back.”

Bucky stares back at him, eyes wide. The rims of them are red. 

“Sam,” he says quietly, “I—”

There are more footsteps at the end of the hallway. 

“Cap!”

“Captain Wilson!”

“Sam!”

Bucky’s expression sours.

Suddenly, Sam’s house has filled up with what seems like a whole army of military personnel, all of them wielding what appears to be different medical apparatus; Joaquin, face pinched in worry, is at the head. Sam watches the endless stream of dusty uniform boots tromp over his hardwood floors and thinks to himself, resigned, I’m gonna need to mop this place down later.

“Joaquin,” Sam greets him as he approaches. “Good to see you.”

“Hey, Sam,” Joaquin says, visibly relieved. “Are you—” for a split second, his eyes dart to Bucky, who has made no move to step away from Sam or even let him go from the cage of his arms. If he looked upset earlier, it’s faded into a kind of resting grouch face. “Um, are you alright?”

“Fine,” Sam says, even though the dizziness from earlier isn’t fading away as quickly as he would like.

Bucky jolts at his side, apparently realizing the possibility of injuries for the first time as well, and begins to pat him down roughly. “You’re not bleeding anywhere, are you? Any bruises, or—do you feel weird at all? Any—”

“Stop,” Sam says, pushing away his hands as the nausea peaks. The crowd of faces pitches and blurs in front of him. “I’m—fine—”

His knees buckle. 

“Fuck.” Strong arms wrap around his waist; Bucky catches him before he hits the ground and lowers him down gently, folding down with him as he goes. “Fuck, Sam, what’s wrong?”

Sam feels woozy. “I don’t—”

“Medic!”

Approximately four medics pop into existence at Sam’s side, eager to help.

“It’s not a big deal,” Sam says, trying to wave them away as he simultaneously fights down the urge to puke up nothing from his empty stomach. 

“Absolutely not.” Bucky pins the medics with a stern glare. “Don’t listen to him. Whatever’s happening to him, you better—”

“They can’t do anything if you don’t let them near him, Bucky,” Joaquin points out, and Bucky looks down as if he’s only just realized that he’s been angling his body so that he’s crouched in between Sam and the other people in the hall like some sort of protective shield.

“Hm,” he says, taciturn, and moves just enough for one of the medics to scooch past him.

“It’s probably just magic-sickness or something, like motion sickness, it’ll go away,” Sam says, still trying futilely to talk the situation down, even as the medics converge around him. Everything is a bit too close and a bit too loud. “Come on, it’s not that bad—”

Unfortunately, he feels awful enough that he doesn’t think carefully enough about his next words. “It’s—well, there wasn’t exactly food and water there, but I didn’t need it so it wasn’t like I was starving—and it was only for a couple months, maybe—”

“What?” Joaquin says, at the same time Bucky roars, “Months?!”

Fuck. 

Sam spends his next few hours being examined in a military clinic.

His doctors put him on a drip, draw blood, run tests, ostensibly do some sort of check to see if the magic has given him any physical changes or side effects. (When he asks, a bit nervously, about the results, they assure him that his body is fine. Exactly in those words. Cool. Sam knows his body is fine without having to check with anyone.) They make him choke down a tray of bland hospital-cafeteria fare. They also ask him all sorts of questions, taking notes as they do. 

Sam, knowing how important the data they gather is, tries to give as many details as is necessary without telling them everything. He keeps things vague—yeah, I was basically bouncing around from time to time in my life like a pinball. Yeah, no one could hear me or see me. Except my past self. What times in my life? Oh, don’t think too hard about that. Why don’t we move onto the next question.

The whole time, he’s very aware of Bucky, who’s sitting on a bench just outside the entrance and keeping a close eye on everything.

The first time Bucky is asked, subtly, if he’d like to leave, he answers with a short, curt, “Nope.” The second time, he simply stares the medic down until the poor man shrinks back and backs away.

When Sam is finally released into the privacy of his own hospital bed, feeling intensely poked and prodded, Bucky follows him there.

“All good?” The rickety hospital chair at his bedside doesn’t look any more comfortable than its predecessor, the rickety hospital bench, but Bucky doesn’t look like he wants to complain. He drags the chair close—maybe closer than normal—sits down, and searches Sam’s face.

Sam eyes him. He might scream if Bucky gives him the medic-question treatment, too. “I’m fine now.”

Bucky doesn't respond. Just stares harder.

“Really.”

More staring.

Sam folds. “Okay, fine—I’m cold! They always have the air conditioning on way too high here, and I don’t like it. I think hospital beds suck, and it smells like rubbing alcohol in here, and the beeping of all the machinery is gonna give me a headache. This hospital gown itches. I’m tired as fuck and I haven’t slept in—” technically, months, but Sam doesn’t want to remind Bucky of that, “—ages, and if I stay here I’m going to have the worst night of sleep ever. So that’s it.”

“Hm,” says Bucky, and he stands up and leaves.

Sam stares at the empty room. His heart rate monitor beeps coldly in the background.

“Okay,” he says to no one. 

Fifteen seconds later, Bucky walks back in, shoulders set, and tosses a bundle of cloth on the bed. “Your clothes,” he says, folding his arms across his chest. His foot taps at the linoleum floor. “No one’s in the area. Get changed and we’ll go.”

Sam laughs, and then he looks at Bucky’s face again. “Oh, you’re serious?”

Bucky lifts an eyebrow.

Sam looks at the bundle of cloth. Looks back at Bucky. “We can’t just—I’m supposed to be in overnight observation.”

A pause. 

“And when do you ever listen to authority?”

Sam stops. Thinks about it.

“Okay, point taken,” he admits, and turns to pick up the clothes. 

The only way back is to take Bucky’s motorcycle, and Sam is, frankly, too tired to care. He climbs on behind him, takes the helmet— “For your delicate birdy head,” Bucky says, grinning a little—and leans into the solidity of Bucky’s body for the entire ride back. It makes him drowsy, and he doesn’t even realize where they are until he’s dismounted the bike.

“This isn’t my apartment,” he says, staring up at Bucky’s apartment building.

“You’re so observant,” Bucky comments dryly, taking the helmet from him. “Guess that’s why they used to call you Falcon, huh?”

“Bucky.”

“Look, I figured you wouldn’t wanna sleep in a place without a front door right now. You can make do.” Bucky’s voice is nonchalant, but the look he gives Sam is a little nervous.

Sam is too exhausted to pretend that he doesn’t find that endearing. “Go ahead, then,” he says. “Let’s see it.”

The only time he’s ever been over at Bucky’s place was when he first helped him move in. Bucky only had the bare essentials, back then—table, chairs, bed. They’d looked bare and pale against the white-walled expanse of Bucky’s studio, and Sam had made a few off-hand comments about interior decoration and left it at that. Even if he thought privately that Bucky would have benefitted from a more colorful space, it wasn’t exactly his place to tell him what to do with it.

Bucky’s clearly added some decoration since then.

“Wow,” Sam whistles, peering about at the art hanging on the walls, the throw draped over one arm of the couch. He even has a few tasteful lighting fixtures added into the mix. “Guess you took my advice about IKEA, huh?”

Bucky’s smile is answer enough.

The bed is tucked in the corner. Queen size mattress, not a mess of blankets on a hardwood floor like it used to be. Bucky pulls out an extra set of sweatpants, a spare t-shirt, and Sam takes them gratefully. He likes the feeling of the soft cotton on his skin. He likes that they smell like Bucky.

“I can take the couch,” Bucky says when he emerges from the bathroom, at the same time Sam says, “We can share.”

There is a beat of silence.

“Oh. I didn’t know if—after—” Sam says, dropping his eyes, thinking of the silence that had hung between them after that fight in his office. Every night after that, he’d felt a little too cold. 

“It’s your bed, man. I don’t wanna kick you out of it.”

I don’t want to be alone right now, he doesn’t say. 

But Bucky’s face softens. “Yeah,” he says, moving closer. “Sure.”

They crawl in on opposite sides and settle in the middle, faces turned towards one another on the pillows. With a click, the room drops into shadow. 

They lie there in the dark, silent, and Sam traces the barely-there lines of Bucky’s face with his eyes. Everything is just visible by the light coming through the window. He can tell by the cadence of Bucky’s even breathing that he hasn’t knocked off yet.

“Hey,” he whispers, even though he can feel his eyelids drooping. The events of the day—of the last many days, in fact—are starting to weigh on him. Part of him is afraid that if he closes his eyes, he won’t open them again.

“Hey.”

“These are some soft ass sheets. What’s the thread count? I feel like a Roman emperor.”

“S’nothing special. Just IKEA, you know.”

“Damn. Nothing special, okay.” Sam pauses, feels himself melt a little further into the mattress. “The way you were always over at my place, I thought you made yours into a dump again. But this is nice.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Figured you were mooching, but you had this snazzy bachelor pad all to yourself the whole time. If I had a bed this comfy, I’d always wanna go home.” Sam’s slurring his words. He’s so tired.

“Mm-hm,” Bucky says, and Sam can hear him smile through the dark. “I didn’t visit because I thought your apartment was more comfortable than mine, Sam.”

“Hmmm?” Sam’s voice is half-sigh, now.

“It’s—” Bucky stops, and Sam can hear him move with a rustle of sheets—he can feel it, too, in the dip of the mattress as Bucky shuffles forward a bit. “Go to sleep, Sam. You’re about to pass out. I’ll tell you in the morning.”

Sam tries to blink his eyes open again, with monumental effort. He hadn’t realized they’d closed. “No, I—”

“Sam.” Bucky’s hand meets his under the blanket—his fingers are warm where they wrap around Sam’s. All of him is warm, in fact, putting off heat like a furnace. Sam can feel it all along his front. “Go to sleep. I’ll be here in the morning.”

Bucky’s words loosen a knot in Sam’s chest that he hadn’t been aware of. 

“‘Kay,” he mumbles, eyelids drifting closed again—and as the waves of sleep pull him under, he can feel Bucky’s hand rest once, gently, on his face.

“G’night, birdy.”

***

Sam wakes with a jolt, feeling that something is terribly wrong.

There’s light shining across his face. The room he’s in is unrecognizable to his sleep-blurred eyes; for one moment of pure, utter panic, he can’t feel anything around him at all, and his stomach drops.

He can’t be back. He just got out, he can’t be back there, not when he’s already spent day after endless day as an invisible specter, watching his life bleed out around him without the power to do anything—

There is a loud clatter of noise to the side, and as he flinches back, something constricts tightly around his limbs, trapping him—

“Sam, hey, hey, look at me.”

That’s Bucky’s face, right in front of him. Bucky’s warm hands, cupping the sides of his neck.

“What,” Sam gasps. “How are you—”

“We’re in my apartment. I snuck you out of the clinic last night, you fell asleep here. Remember?”

Sam’s heart rate is slowing back down. He can see it all now; Bucky’s surprisingly not-awful IKEA decorations, the sheet of undetermined thread count twisting around his legs, the shine of the kitchen appliances along the side of Bucky’s studio and the steam percolating out the top of the coffee maker at the end of the counter. 

“Yeah,” he says, still a little breathless. “Yeah, I remember.”

“I got up to make coffee,” Bucky says, chin dipping, eyes searching. One of his thumbs strokes at the tender skin under Sam’s ear, soft and absentminded. “I’m sorry if I woke you up.” 

Then he adds, a little apologetically: “I don’t have any cream. You’ll have to tough it out for today.”

Sam stares back at him. Quiet, steadfast Bucky, who remembered how Sam liked his coffee all those years ago and never once forgot. Who has been here at Sam’s side, all this time. His heart squeezes in his chest, like it’s about to explode, like he’s falling into open air. 

He can’t keep it in anymore. 

“I love you,” he blurts out. 

The thumb under his ear goes still.

Bucky’s eyes are wide, his mouth slightly open. He looks like someone’s just slapped him across the face. “Sam,” he says, the word barely audible.

“I love you,” Sam says again, just to hear the words in his own voice. God, he’s finally saying it out loud. “I’m sorry I never told you. I didn’t realize how much until I thought I would never have the chance to see you again, and then I—I just needed to tell you that.”

Bucky’s hands fall away. His throat bobs silently. “Say it again,” he whispers.

Sam swallows too, studying Bucky’s expression. “I love you.”

Bucky inhales deeply, closes his eyes for a long moment. Nods to himself like he’s confirming something.

When he opens his eyes again, his face is set in concentration.

“I’ve spent the last seventy years of my life feeling lost,” Bucky says, voice shaking. He’s speaking quickly, almost stumbling over his words, like he needs to get everything out before it chokes him. “If I wasn’t the Winter Soldier, then I was a fugitive—if I wasn’t a fugitive, then I was a traumatized victim of brainwashing. Nobody ever treated me like a person except Steve, and that was because he had known who I was before all of that. And then you came along—”

“Hey,” Sam manages, heart beating quickly, “don’t give me too much credit—”

“—and you were such a smartass.”

“Hey now.”

Bucky snorts a little. “Just listen. You were such a smartass and you annoyed me so much, and I loved it. You weren’t my best friend like Steve was, but you didn’t act scared of me, and you didn’t treat me with kid gloves—you made me feel like a regular human being. And I hadn’t had that in so long. And you had the audacity to be compassionate, and funny, and so full of life on top of that. I didn’t stand a fucking chance. When I’m with you, I don’t feel lost anymore, Sam. You were wondering last night why I always used to be over at your place instead of going home—that’s why. That’s what you are to me. Home.”

Sam makes a small noise at that, and Bucky reaches for his hand.

“The last three days felt like the worst in my life,” he says. “And that’s saying something. I kept turning over in my head how, if you never came back, our last real interaction would’ve been about how I was too fucking stubborn to hear you out when you were trying to open up to me. Because my pride was too hurt, and I—”

Bucky stops, bites his lip. His hands tighten over Sam’s.

“I’m sorry for everything I said before,” he says, after a pause. “You were right. You were trying to confide in me, and I wasn’t listening.”

Sam squeezes back.

“I was at fault, too,” he says, something tender blooming out from under his ribs. “I’m sorry if I ever made you feel like I didn’t trust you.”

“I was trying to push you to talk about something you weren’t ready to talk about,” Bucky counters, and his mouth twitches a little. “I should’ve known. I should have waited until you came to me, and I should have paid attention when you did. Sarah had this talk with me, and—look, my point is that even thinking about what could have gone wrong makes me feel like I’m going to pass out. So if you ever make me think that you got zapped to kingdom come again, I’m going to follow you there and drag you back out myself. I love you too much to lose you. Do you understand?”

He leans in, still holding Sam’s face, watching him until Sam blinks in stunned acquiescence.

“Good,” Bucky says quietly.

“Cool,” Sam breathes. “Nice to know we’re on the same page.”

“Yup.” Bucky blinks, too quick, and flushes. He sways forward. His breath brushes across Sam’s cheek. “And now that that’s been said, I really want to kiss you right now. If that’s okay.” 

The feeling in Sam’s chest travels up into his neck, high into his face. He feels light, and warm, and free. 

“More than okay,” he replies, and leans in.

***

Much later, when the mid-morning sun is spreading over the soft, pale sheets of Bucky’s bed, Sam turns over in Bucky’s arms, every word half-muffled into the skin of his neck, and says, “I want to tell you a story.”

To which Bucky responds: “I’m listening.”

Sam smiles. 

“When I was six years old,” he begins, “I saw a ghost for the very first time…”

THE END.