Chapter Text
Of all the wires
It was the wires
That were the wires for empathy
That we guard
Beyond all the others
Of all the wires
It was the wires
That were the wires for empathy that
We loved beyond all the others
The sound of
that
much
life.-from "Fear of the unknown and the blazing sun" by Colin Stetson, feat. Laurie Anderson and Shara Nova
One thing Sam quickly realized after officially taking on the Captain America mantle was that being an official superhero involved a truly soul-crushing number of meetings. At least, it did if you didn’t have a secret identity.
Sam was currently deeply regretting not having a secret identity. That Daredevil dude in Hell’s Kitchen probably never had meetings, thought Sam during a meeting with the NYPD commissioner a couple days after the Flag Smasher business. Sure, that made Daredevil a vigilante on the wrong side of the law and frequently the press too, but maybe he’d weighed those cons against the undeniable pro that was avoiding meetings like this.
The commissioner, apparently, expected a much higher level of cooperation between superheroes and the NYPD than had been present during the assault on the GRC. The commissioner had a lot to say about chains of command, while not-so-subtly implying that superheroes in general, and Sam in particular, should be reporting to the NYPD. Sam said the appropriate, diplomatic things about respecting the boys in blue and how of course he would try to keep the NYPD better apprised of any threats.
“Maybe we can set up a monthly meeting. Some training exercises,” suggested the commissioner.
The Avengers had never had training exercises with the NYPD, Sam did not point out. The Avengers sure as hell had never been part of the NYPD’s chain of command either. Given what police departments did with all their ridiculous amounts of paramilitary gear—Sam didn’t care how weird shit got, no city’s police department needed goddamn tanks—Sam hated to think of what they’d expect superheroes working with them to do.
What Sam wanted to say was, Bucky and I are not going to be your superhero SWAT team. Instead, he smiled politely and said, “I’m not sure I’m going to be based out of New York. But I’ll get back to you.”
That Spiderkid swinging around Queens probably didn’t have meetings either, and also, he never had to deal with press conferences, thought Sam with gritted teeth as he told yet another reporter the version of the story of Steve passing the shield on to Sam that was carefully crafted to avoid any mentions of time travel. The Spiderkid just shot off cheesy quips that got recorded on people’s cellphones and posted all across social media before he swung up onto a rooftop and fled. Fleeing sounded good right about now. Sam had wings. He could literally fly away from this bullshit.
“Mr. Wilson, is Captain America on the moon?” asked a reporter.
Sam gripped the lectern hard enough to make his fingers hurt. His palms throbbed and ached, as they usually did nowadays. Not even vibranium-woven gloves could fully absorb the force of catching the shield on the rebound.
“I am Captain America, and I am standing right here. Not on the moon.”
He followed the words up with a smile that he hoped like hell came across as charming.
The reporter at least had the grace to look somewhat abashed. “I meant Captain Rogers, obviously.”
Obviously, thought Sam, and tried very hard to release his grip on the lectern. Of course.
“I’m not at liberty to say,” he said. “Next question.”
The other thing no one told you about being a superhero was that it didn’t actually come with a salary. Not anymore, at least. Plenty of people were lining up to put the new Captain America on payroll though: the Air Force, the FBI, the CIA—which, was that even legal? Sam thought they couldn’t operate domestically, so what exactly did they think Cap should be doing?—the GRC, SWORD…
“I mean, you do need to get paid,” Sarah pointed out. She refilled Sam’s coffee mug, then joined him at the kitchen table. “Or is this like unpaid internships where only rich people can afford to do ‘em?”
Sam snorted. “More like you need a superhero sugar daddy or sugar mommy,” he said.
With all the most important—or if not important, then insistent and urgent—meetings out of the way, Sam had finally been able to come back home, though email and voicemail inboxes full of enthusiastic and occasionally mildly threatening volunteers for the position of being Captain America’s superhero sugar daddy had followed him here, to say nothing of the media inquiries. His contact info was, clearly, too damn easy to find now that he wasn’t a fugitive on the run.
“So? Who’re you gonna pick? Air Force? I’m sure Colonel Rhodes would support you.”
That would make sense, given the contract work he’d already been doing with them, and Sarah was right, Rhodey would have his back. But it was one thing to pick up the odd job as a contractor when he was the Falcon. The Falcon was, after all, just a guy with a particular set of skills and some kickass wings. It wasn’t that Sam didn’t stand for anything as the Falcon, because he did; he held true to the Pararescue motto of so that others may live. He’d clung to it even as he’d grown increasingly disillusioned with the war during his time in the Air Force. As Cap though? That was a whole different ball game.
“If I pick the Air Force, then Cap is—I’m—just military propaganda.”
Sam respected Rhodey, and he appreciated the work Rhodey had sent his way, or recommended him for. But Rhodey was just one guy, and he couldn’t hold off the brass’s inevitable plans for Captain America on his own.
Sarah raised an eyebrow. “As opposed to what Cap was before…?”
“You know I’m not down with that,” he said, exasperated. “That’s not what I took up the shield for.”
It had, in fact, been part of what had been keeping him from picking up the shield in the first place. Steve had accepted the necessity of propaganda when he’d taken on the shield, and hell, back then, the propaganda had even done some good. But the inescapable truth was that Cap propaganda meant something entirely different in the here and now, it meant holding up the unjust status quo rather than fighting against bullies, and Sam couldn’t in good conscience stand for that.
“So what did you take it up for? And who’s gonna let you do that?”
Sarah always did get straight to the heart of things, no bullshit and no coddling. She took after their nana that way. Sam sighed and turned back to his inbox. Just then, a new email arrived: another job offer, this time from, Christ, DHS. No way. He deleted that one without even reading it.
“I just want to help people,” he said. “I want to use this shield to do good.”
It sounded naive and simplistic, when he put it like that. Plenty of the agencies and organizations filling up his inbox did important work. Plenty of them would know what to do with Sam’s skills. But as he looked through the offers, they were all for combat or law enforcement positions. Which made sense, obviously, but—
He thought of Karli, dying in his arms. The desperate fire in her wide eyes, the fervent fury in her voice. She’d been too willing to hurt people, too ready to turn to violence as her only language, but she hadn’t been wrong about the injustices of a post-Blip world. What kind of Cap could have helped her, and everyone else like her?
Sam wondered that, and then he deleted all the emails.
Sam called Bucky, not particularly expecting him to pick up. They’d parted on good terms and all, promising to keep in touch, but those months of radio silence left Sam worried he was going to get ghosted again. To Sam’s surprise, Bucky answered after only a couple of rings.
“Hey, what’s up?”
“Hey,” said Sam, startled.
“Yeah, hi,” said Bucky, wariness edging into his tone.
“Sorry, I just didn’t think you’d actually pick up. Uh, you got a few minutes to talk?”
“Sure,” said Bucky, still wary.
“So, uh, we’re gonna have a cookout down here in Delacroix next week, you’re invited. Come down whenever, you’re welcome to stay.”
There was a long pause, and Sam got ready to give Bucky the hard sell on this because come on, who said no to a cookout of delicious home cooking in beautiful Delacroix? But then Bucky said, soft-spoken and sincere, “Okay, thanks. I’ll be there.”
“Good,” said Sam, and didn’t bother to hide the way his smile shaped the word into something that resonated with quiet satisfaction. “How’re you doing, Buck? You talk to Yori yet?”
“Yeah. I’m okay.”
“How’d it go?”
“About as well as could be expected,” he said, his voice gone low and very faintly tremulous. Sam waited, until Bucky cleared his throat and continued, “He, uh, wants to talk to me again later this week.”
“I hope it goes well, man.”
“Yeah. Me too,” said Bucky, and then there was another long pause.
“Wow, you are not good at this,” Sam marveled, and Bucky huffed.
“I’m not used to talking on the phone,” he said.
“Right, right, because back in your day, the phone hadn’t been invented yet—”
“We had phones! But it’s not like I got much of a chance to use ‘em all that often. It—it’s just easier, if I can see you.”
“Oh, you wanna subject me to your staring problem over Facetime too?” Sam teased, but shit, Bucky wasn’t wrong.
Sam didn’t know what about seeing Sam made it easier for Bucky, but for Sam, Bucky’s face was an open book compared to his usually low voice. Sometimes it seemed like a solid two-thirds of what Bucky was saying wasn’t in words at all, but in body language and his too-eloquent face and those big blue eyes of his.
“Whatever, just Facetime me next time,” said Bucky. “I’ll answer, as long as I’m somewhere I can talk. So have you got any Cap business you wanted to talk about, or…?”
“No missions, if that’s what you mean. I’d need to accept one of these many job offers for that.”
“Oh yeah? From who?”
“A whole lot of agencies and branches of the government that should not have Captain America on payroll have been blowing up my inbox.” Sam heard Bucky let out a long exhale, and wished he could see Bucky’s face to know what he was thinking. “You get any offers?”
“I make sure my email address is not easy to find, and I haven’t set up my ‘official’ phone’s voicemail inbox. New-fangled technology and all, just can’t seem to figure it out.”
Sam snorted. “You are calling me from a smartphone right now, old man.”
“Yeah, well, don’t tell the government. But yeah, I’ve gotten offers. I’ve been getting offers since I got my pardon.”
“Wait, seriously?”
“The Winter Soldier is a valuable asset,” said Bucky in a voice so absolutely devoid of emotion that it could only mean Bucky was genuinely fucked up about this. “Do a bunch of assassinating people for HYDRA while brainwashed, and it’s a crime I oughta be locked up for. Do wet work for the CIA, and I’m a patriot and a hero. Kinda funny, right?”
“Bucky, you absolutely do not have to do that. Not ever, not if you don’t want to.“
The silence that followed was so long that Sam checked his phone to see if Bucky had hung up on him.
“Yes, I do,” said Bucky eventually, sounding puzzled. “Not the wet work, I mean, but—it’s a condition of my pardon, Sam. I have to work with the government. I picked helping the feds out with their anti-HYDRA task force, but some alphabet agency’s always trying to—“ Bucky cut himself off. “I thought you knew.”
“Well I didn’t! Why would you think I knew that!”
“Because you told me you were helping with my pardon,” said Bucky, sounding peeved now.
It was one of the last times Bucky had bothered to answer Sam, before the Flag Smashers business had kicked off: Sam had been busy dealing with the mess of coming back to life after a five-year absence, but he’d checked in with Bucky a couple times about the pardon stuff, and to make sure Bucky was doing okay and had somewhere to go. When the pardon and everything had all been finalized, Sam had sent Bucky a congrats text and Bucky had texted back a thanks, and then it had been almost complete radio silence after that, until the Flag Smashers.
“I—yeah, but I meant that I submitted, like, a character reference!” said Sam. “A statement that you were un-brainwashed and a hero and shit, not that—Bucky, if you’re being forced to do anything, or coerced—“
“I’m not. I mean, I thought maybe they’d—but the feds are alright. I go into the office once or twice a week or so and help them analyze intel, tell them anything I remember that could help. It’s fine. Colonel Rhodes vouched for them, he checks in with me sometimes.”
Sam sighed in relief. If Rhodey had vouched for this, if he was keeping an eye on things, then it was fine. “Okay, good. Just—Buck, if anyone tries to coerce you into working for them, please tell me. Or Rhodey. You don’t—you don’t have to be the Winter Soldier, you don’t have to fight, not if you don’t want to.”
Bucky went silent again, and again Sam wished he could see Bucky’s face, because he had the awful feeling that Bucky wasn’t at all comforted by this assurance. Then, sounding utterly exhausted, Bucky said, “I wish I could believe that.” Before Sam could follow up on that, Bucky asked, “What offers have you gotten? Why don’t you trust them?”
“Oh, you know, the usual. Air Force and the Pentagon, the GRC, your fed friends…even the damn NYPD. I’m not even a New Yorker!”
“So what’s wrong with all the offers?”
“You saw how shit went down with Walker,” Sam said. “It’d only be more of the same, except with a whole lotta buzzwords about diversity. They want a convenient propaganda mouthpiece who’ll fly into whatever fights they point him at.”
“And you wanna pick your own fights,” said Bucky, somehow sounding both incredibly tired and incredibly fond, a combination that made Sam’s heart do a confused clench and flutter.
“I mean, if it comes down to it, yeah. But what good did a fight do Karli, huh? What good did we even do in that whole mess?”
“We saved lives, Sam,” said Bucky, almost gently. “We kept the serum out of dangerous hands.”
Sam rubbed at his eyes, frustrated. “Yeah, no, of course, I know that. I just mean—the bigger picture. I look at everything the guys at the top want me to do as Cap, and it’s all being a soldier, or being a cop. Haven’t we already got enough of those?” Sam sighed. “But shit, I can’t do this gig as a volunteer. I need to actually get paid.”
Bucky at least didn’t have to worry about that, he had backpay and his pension. Sam didn’t begrudge him for it, that was Bucky’s due and more besides, but the fact remained that Sam didn’t have that kind of financial security.
“It’s not right,” said Bucky quietly. “That you gotta worry about that.”
“And it’s not right what they’re trying to pull with you either,” Sam said. He tapped at his laptop keyboard to wake it again. More emails, of course. Endorsement deal offers this time, and a recruitment pitch from the Coasties of all things. “Maybe we can go freelance. I think some of those New York vigilantes are pretty much doing that.”
“Yeah, Jessica’s got a PI license,” Bucky said absently, and wait, what? Since when was Bucky on first name terms with— “And I’ve gotten some freelance offers too,” he added, now sounding actually amused. “Did you know there was some kinda heist on the nation’s cheese stockpile and the mob’s been fighting over it? Because there was, and they are, and they wanted to hire me to take out their competition.”
“Wait, what?”
“Come to think of it, maybe that’s the kinda thing we oughta look into,” mused Bucky.
“I don’t even know where to start with that.”
“Not that we should let the mob hire us, I mean,” continued Bucky. “They offered to pay in cheese, that’s not gonna help your cashflow problems.”
“Please tell me you’re fucking with me,” Sam pleaded.
His email pinged with a new message from [email protected], containing a series of links. The first one led to a Washington Post article from a few months back: NATION’S STRATEGIC CHEESE RESERVE STRUCK BY THIEVES.
Huh. Maybe Bucky was not, in fact, fucking with him.
“What the fuck is the government doing with over a billion pounds of cheese?” Sam demanded. “And why the fuck am I running around an underground warehouse trying to stop people from stealing some of it? No one’s gonna notice a couple hundred thousand pounds going missing!”
Sam brought up his shield to block both bullets and flying chunks of cheese.
“Exactly!” said one of the mob guys. “So what’s with the shootout!”
“You’re the ones having a gang war over cheese!” shouted Bucky from behind a pile of cheese wheels. He heaved one off the pile, and it rolled with impressive velocity to bowl over a couple of gunmen.
Gang war was maybe overstating what was going on here: mostly it was organized crime attempting a heist, with warehouse security trying to stop them, and, most bizarrely of all, an assortment of locals who’d formed some kind of cheese-based cult? But they did all have guns, because America, and that meant even something as ridiculous as a cheese heist could turn into a bloodbath, and that was why Sam was here.
(He was also here because, honestly, it had seemed kind of fun as missions went, not that he’d admit that to anybody. So sue him, he was hoping for an easy win after the whole GRC and Flag Smashers thing.)
“Hey, we tried to do this clean!” retorted the head mob guy. “What do you think we wanted to hire you for! Take out a couple people, quick and quiet, and none of this would be happening!”
“First of all, I don’t fuckin’ do that anymore, and second of all, you coulda mentioned that this was your competition!” said Bucky, gesturing towards the cheese cult people, who’d set up a makeshift barricade of barrels and pallets guarding most of the cheese.
“EAT CHEESE LIVE FOREVER, EAT CHEESE NEVER DIE!” shrieked one of them before shooting willy-nilly into the warehouse.
There were a dozen or so of them, and they called themselves cheese protectors, which if you asked Sam was frankly disrespectful of the work water protectors had done and were still doing to prevent greedy corporations’ pipelines from doing more damage to the environment. But whatever else they were, they were sincere enough to be willing to die, or maybe even kill, for all this cheese, and Sam figured it was better for him and Bucky to deal with them than for the SWAT team waiting outside to come in guns blazing.
“I really think the Blip did some profound psychological damage to folks,” Sam said with some consternation, before lobbing his shield at one of the cheese protectors to knock a rifle out of his hands before he could fire it.
“You think?” called out Bucky. He caught the shield on the ricochet and threw it back to Sam, knocking another weapon out of a mob guy’s hands along the way. “The fact that people are calling it the Blip didn’t already clue you in?”
“Yeah, that’s messed up,” said one of the warehouse security guys. “Like, no judgment, I wasn’t here and all, but you can’t call five years a blip. You can’t repress five whole years, you know?”
“Okay, gonna have to call bullshit on that, because I am doing a great job at repressing the shit out of approximately seventy-five years of trauma,” said Bucky, and chucked another cheese wheel with unerring aim at a mob guy.
“Yeah, no you’re not, that’s really not a good example, man,” Sam said.
“Hey, I’m not curled up in a corner shaking and crying, and I haven’t joined a cheese cult, so I think I’m doing great!” retorted Bucky, which yeah, okay, fair enough.
“THE CHEESE COULD HEAL YOU!!” shrieked one of the cheese people, a wild-eyed lady who was hugging a smaller cheese wheel to her chest with one arm, and, Christ, a goddamn assault rifle in the other. “ACCEPT CHEESE INTO YOUR LIFE!”
And then she chucked the cheese wheel at Bucky’s head, only for Bucky to catch it, and hold onto it. “Okay,” he said, and raised his eyebrows. “Sure, why not.”
Sam only barely managed to hold back his laugh. The cheese lady was baffled and distracted enough by Bucky’s apparent cheese conversion that Sam could swoop in and grab her gun. A few strategic shield and cheese wheel tosses later, everyone was unarmed, and mostly uninjured. No one had actually been shot, at any rate.
“How about we try talking this out, huh?” asked Sam.
One of the mob guys groaned. “Oh yeah? The cops gonna be cool with that? Man, no one even owns this cheese!”
“Wait, what?”
“The cheese in this part of the warehouse, the company that owned it went under during the Blip! 1,472,000 pounds of cheese, just sitting here waiting to go moldy! And the only reason there’s even an enormous fuckin’ cheese stockpile is to keep prices high for dairy farmers! It’s a fuckin’ racket! The market needs disrupting!”
“This cheese is a gift from the Lord! It’s meant to feed the people!” said one of the cheese cult people, which was honestly the most sensible thing any of them had said so far, divine attribution aside.
Sam turned to one of the security guys. “Is that true?” he asked, and the security guy got up to his feet, groaning. “About the company, I mean, not the theology of free cheese.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean the cheese is free for the taking!” he said.
“Okay, but why not?” asked Sam, and shook his head. “C’mon, we are handling this like goddamn adults, no guns, and no cheese wheel tossing! We are sitting down and talking this out.”
Bucky was already going around and collecting all the weapons, and Sam radioed the cops outside, telling them to stand down. They protested, but too bad: Sam was multitasking and he was already emailing media outlets too. This ridiculous situation was not turning into a needless tragedy on Sam’s watch. Bucky caught his eye, and Sam raised his eyebrows a bit as a silent check-in. Bucky nodded before going over to the head mob guy.
Though maybe mob guy was an overstatement too, this didn’t seem like the usual sort of organized crime outfit. The guy looked like nothing so much as a construction foreman, the kind of sturdy and stolid white guy who might yell a lot, but who’d look after his crew and get the job done.
“Seems like you recognized a real solid business opportunity here, Patrick,” said Bucky, taking the guy aside. “And hey, cheese? That’s gotta be a much safer and more stable market than drugs. I mean, you seen the kinda shit they’re cutting drugs with now? Fentanyl in goddamn everything.”
“Exactly! What the fuck! You think I wanna be selling shit that kills folks? They’re even putting that shit in weed now! It ain’t right! I don’t want no part of that! I figured, folks don’t need the damn drugs, what they need is some food, but me and my boys, we gotta make a living, right?”
Bucky seemed to have that well in hand, so Sam headed for the cheese protectors.
“Hey, let’s talk, tell me about yourselves, tell me why all this cheese is so important to y’all,” he said.
“My name’s Cherie,” said the lady who’d been distracted by Bucky earlier. Without an assault rifle in her hands, she looked like any other middle-aged woman, someone Sam might see at the grocery store checkout or in the school pickup line. She had tired eyes, but she was neatly dressed and seemed much more calm now.
“Nice to meet you, Cherie. I’m Sam.”
“This cheese, it’s a gift, you have to understand that! You were one of the Blipped right?” Sam nodded. “That makes you one of the lucky ones, you know. Those first couple of years after…things were bad. Even with half as many people, there wasn’t enough food to go around, not with how everything broke down: crops rotting in the fields, infrastructure and supply lines a mess…it was bad. Our church tried to help as many folks as we could, but there just wasn’t enough. Then my cousin Rob, he remembered having made deliveries to these warehouses. He remembered they were full of food.”
“And it wasn’t doing anyone any good just sitting here.”
“Exactly!” said Cherie, aglow with fervor now. “But we didn’t—we know stealing is wrong, okay? But all this cheese, it doesn’t even belong to anyone anymore, the company that owned it went under. Taking it wouldn’t hurt anyone. And we thought, what a miracle, what a gift, to find all this food when we needed it the most.”
“So you’ve been using it,” he said, and Cherie nodded.
“These last five years, this cheese has kept us alive! It’s been like Jesus with the loaves and the fishes, you know? A bounty of food, more than enough for all of us. There’s so much of it, we’ve barely made a dent, even after passing it around the community for years and expanding out to the rest of the state. There’s always more. It’s like a miracle, our own miracle,” she said, tearing up.
And yeah, okay, Sam got it now, why these folks thought a warehouse full of cheese was worth protecting and dying for. He could understand them getting weird about it too, given the apocalypse they’d lived through and all. At least they hadn’t become like the groups convinced they’d been left behind in the Rapture, or worse still, the ones who’d started worshiping Thanos. Believing in an infinite supply of cheese was practically harmless, in comparison.
“I hear you,” he said with a smile. “And you’ve been doing a good thing, keeping folks fed. So let’s figure something out, okay?”
“So, did that go how you thought it’d go?” Sam asked Bucky on their way back to Delacroix. “Because it did not go how I thought it’d go.”
With the cookout coming up, Bucky had agreed to tag along to Delacroix with Sam rather than returning to Brooklyn, and Sam was grateful if only because it meant he didn’t have to make the long drive on his own.
“Well, Patrick did say he’d pay me in cheese if I handled his little problem for him, and now we do have a trunk full of cheese,” said Bucky thoughtfully.
“I have no idea what the hell we’re gonna do with all that cheese.”
“Hand it out at the cookout. Make fondue. Take up cheese sculpting.”
Sam scoffed. “That’s not a thing.”
“They make butter sculptures, why not cheese sculptures?” When Sam glared over at Bucky, Bucky grinned, the bright flash of his smile a rare and welcome surprise. Bucky was in a whimsical mood, it seemed. “And no, it didn’t go how I thought it’d go, but it was good. It was good, right? No casualties, and everything worked out okay.”
Sam risked taking his eyes from the road to glance at Bucky. There was a new lightness about him, his expression open and hopeful in a wary kind of way, like he wasn’t sure it was allowed.
“Yeah,” Sam agreed, his lips tugging up into a smile. “Patrick and his crew are even on the straight and narrow, more or less.”
They’d agreed to be brokers for the massive quantities of unclaimed and unsold cheese, and to set half of it aside for Cherie and her people to continue to work what they were convinced were cheese miracles with it. The cops and officials weren’t entirely thrilled with this turn of events, but the media attention and Sam’s involvement got them on board.
“Your speech helped,” said Bucky. “You coulda eased up on the cheese jokes though.”
Sam had made sure the cameras were watching when they’d come out of the warehouse, and he’d done his best to make sure no one involved would be painted as a villain. So long as being Cap came with a bully pulpit, Sam intended to use it. It was just as much a weapon and a tool as the shield and the wings were.
“Your little chat with Patrick helped just as much,” Sam countered. He stared out at the road and gripped the steering wheel tightly. “Wish things could’ve gone so well with Karli and the Flag Smashers. I wish I could’ve talked her out of it.”
Every night when he was trying to fall asleep, Sam played out a different scenario, a way he could’ve done things right. He tried to come up with the right words for Karli: words that would’ve convinced her that violence wasn’t the answer to her problems, words that could’ve redirected her anger into something more productive. Maybe words wouldn’t have worked, but if he’d saved her, if he’d stopped her, there would have been enough time to get through to her—
“Me too,” said Bucky, and when Sam glanced over at him, Bucky offered Sam a sad, sincere little smile. “I just keep thinking—I know she made her choices, I know no one really forced her into any of it, but she was just a kid, and the way she must’ve grown up, during the Blip…she deserved a chance to grow past that, you know?”
Sam blinked to clear his suddenly blurring vision, and wasn’t sure if the knot in his throat was more grief for Karli or relief that Bucky understood. He hadn’t said much about Karli during the mission, laser-focused as he was on tracking down the serum, so Sam had wondered if she weighed as heavily on him as she did on Sam. Until now, the only hint about Bucky’s feelings about her had been in how he’d quietly seen to her funeral arrangements, though Sam supposed that in itself said plenty. Neither of them had attended, mindful of how it could have been taken as a threat, but Bucky had somehow made sure the people who mourned her could be there.
“Yeah. Yeah, exactly,” Sam said.
They were silent for a few miles, until Bucky said, “You think it would’ve helped, if I’d told her she was a lot like Steve at that age?”
“Was she really?”
“Yeah. Angry at the world, always ready to throw himself into a fight, to do anything to fight bullies. Only Steve actually kinda mellowed out a bit after the serum, once he found the biggest fight he could throw himself into.”
As always, it was hard to read Bucky’s most low, soft-spoken timbre, but a quick look over at him showed the bittersweet grief clear as day on his face, the sorrow in his eyes and the affection in the curve of his lips. He was so easy to read, Sam was coming to learn. It was as if Sam had been handed a dictionary of Bucky Barnes, and sometime in between getting tossed around an airport by the Spiderkid and now, he’d become fluent.
“I don’t know if it would’ve helped,” said Sam slowly, because he hadn’t gotten the impression Karli had thought much of superheroes. “But…all those things we wish we would’ve said—maybe we should just say them, next time. We should try. We did today, and it worked out.”
“It’s not always going to be mobsters whose hearts aren’t in it and church folks who think cheese is a miracle,” Bucky said. “Sometimes, it’s going to be people who know how to use their guns, or their superpowers, or it’ll be one of the big three.”
“I know. But we can still try.”
The road stretched empty and long ahead of him, so Sam looked at Bucky again, and for a moment he thought the angry jaw clench was back, but no, Bucky’s eyes were too sad for that. Sad, and something else Sam’s quick stolen glance couldn’t decipher.
“Yeah, alright,” said Bucky. “Let’s try.”
They didn’t have the opportunity to put their mutual resolution into effect for a few weeks. There was the cookout, and Bucky’s talks with Yori, and more emails and meetings and conference calls, to say nothing of the daily work of making a living and training. Bucky came and went with all the regularity of a stray cat, though he did text and call regularly, and he joined Sam on the few self-selected missions Sam went on, even when they were just building new houses for the folks displaced by the Blip.
“You don’t have to tag along for this kinda thing,” Sam told him, only for Bucky to scowl at him and toss his duffel bag into Sam’s truck. It made an alarming metallic thunking noise. Sam decided to assume it was full of tools and not weapons.
“Someone needs to watch your back,” said Bucky.
“Oh yeah? And who appointed you as my bodyguard?”
Bucky’s scowl lightened then, shifting into a too-smug smirk. “You didn’t hear? I got a new job offer.”
“From who?”
“Sarah, of course. The couch and all the home-cooked meals I could ever want are mine so long as I keep an eye on your bird-brained ass.”
“That’s a shitty job offer, you shoulda held out for at least one pie a week too. Or, you know, actual cash money.”
Not that the Wilsons had that in abundance. Sam really needed to figure out what he was going to do about that. They’d be alright for a few more months—the Air Force had coughed up a nice bonus for Batroc’s capture—but being a volunteer Cap wasn’t sustainable. Maybe he’d just start a Gofundme, be a crowdsourced superhero. Or no, that was for people with medical bills and shit, maybe what Sam needed was a Patreon. A…Twitch stream? Youtube channel? He should’ve paid more attention to Cass when he was talking about all the new social media shit that had popped up since Sam had stopped paying attention to that kind of thing.
Bucky shrugged. “I’m good. Want me to drive?”
Sam tossed him the keys. “Driver and bodyguard? Sarah’s definitely not paying you enough,” he said, and laughed when Bucky narrowed his eyes and moved as if to toss the keys back to him. “Kidding, kidding, I’ll get you some coffee, how about that?”
He regretted the offer when Bucky ordered some mocha frappucino monstrosity that cost damn near ten dollars.
“Really thought you were more of a black coffee kind of guy.”
“Coffee milkshakes, Sam. The future is amazing.”
Sam wasn’t exactly a carpenter, but he knew enough to not embarrass himself, and Bucky had worked construction during his time on the run, so between the two of them, they put in more than enough work to prove they were here for more than just a photo op. Though they were also here for a photo op, if not for their own benefit.
Once word got around that Captain America was helping a local non-profit build houses, a handful of reporters showed up, eager to spin a feel-good story. It wasn’t ideal, feel-good puff pieces never dug deep enough to reach the bitter roots of the entrenched problems they represented—like, why did the kid whose sister had cancer need to start a whole damn small business to pay for her treatment? why did that nice old lady need to cook enough to feed her whole neighborhood?—but it was better than nothing.
After offering some supportive soundbites along with pointed comments on just why this housing was so necessary, Sam directed the reporters to the folks actually in charge of this particular non-profit. He tried to, at any rate.
“Is this really the kind of thing that requires Captain America’s attention?” asked one of the reporters, a youngish looking Black guy whose sharply pressed business casual clothes belied the puffy bags under his eyes. Maybe not all the reporters were here for a puff piece. “Aren’t there bad guys to fight?”
“This community doesn’t need me to fight bad guys right now,” Sam said. “This community needs secure, affordable housing, and that’s something my partner and I can help with today. That’s something we can all help with today.”
“Is this the kind of thing you’re planning to spend most of your time as Captain America doing? Public service rather than protecting the public?” asked the reporter, imbuing the question with a palpably and wearily dubious tone.
“I don’t think those two things are mutually exclusive. My partner and I will be there next time aliens invade, or there’s a situation that needs some superhero intervention,” said Sam, putting as much steady certainty into his tone as he could. “But there’s plenty of important work to do in the meantime.”
After that, Sam’s voicemail and email inboxes filled with a steady stream of requests and pleas: to help with other housing projects, to support various community initiatives, to visit schools and hospitals and food banks and shelters…it was a torrent of need, and Sam had no idea where to start, much less what to do.
“These people need grants and social services, not superheroes,” said Sam, sitting at the kitchen table with Bucky while Sarah made dinner.
“But they’re asking for you,” Sarah pointed out.
“Most of them have problems I can barely make a dent in.”
God, what Sam wouldn’t give right now for a simple extraction or hostage rescue or alien invasion. It was one thing to say that he’d help out in whatever way his community needed, that there was a lot of important work to do, and another thing entirely to be faced with the sheer magnitude of that work. He was just a guy with wings and a shield. He didn’t have some vast philanthropic apparatus backing him, he didn’t have a ton of connections and influence.
Bucky put down the book he was reading, and grabbed Sam’s laptop instead to begin scrolling through his inbox. Sam sighed and let him.
“Just because you can’t do everything, doesn’t mean nothing’s worth doing.” Bucky stopped scrolling, and did some typing and clicking around. “Here. This one. Rural county in New Mexico who emailed about their food bank, they’re regularly having their GRC aid shipments stolen, the authorities aren’t doing shit. And here, this housing project in California doesn’t just need more funding, it needs someone to go put the fear of god and embezzlement charges into the contractors and city planners.”
“What?” Sam took his laptop back. “I didn’t see those.”
Bucky raised his eyebrows. “You gotta read between the lines a bit. And do some supplemental research.”
Sarah came over to the kitchen table and gently closed Sam’s laptop, ignoring Sam’s protests as she sat down and took his hands.
“You just have to do what you can. I can’t make Bennett’s mama get sober, or pay Mr. Johnson’s medical bills, or stop the storms from hitting us. But I can make sure Bennett’s always got good healthy food to eat, and I can take some fresh fish over to Mr. Johnson, and I can stormproof our house, and our neighbors’ houses.” She sat back in her chair and smiled at him even as she arched an annoyed eyebrow. “I feel like literally, actually saving the world has given you unrealistic expectations. Most folks don’t need you to save the entire world on the regular, Sam.”
“I hear you,” said Sam, rueful. He sighed and tipped his head back, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes. “But I still kind of feel like I have to save the entire world, if I’m carrying this shield.”
“Sam,” said Bucky, and Sam lowered his hands and opened his eyes to look at him, only to find himself the subject of Bucky’s staring problem yet again.
It was a gentle sort of stare, open and searching. Sam often found himself the subject of stares like that from Bucky, and those stares always rested on Sam with an almost palpable weight. It should have been uncomfortable—from anyone else, it would have been—but it never was with Bucky. This was just what being the focus of Bucky’s attention was like, and Sam was finding that he liked it. He liked knowing that Bucky would always take the time and effort to look, to really see Sam, even if he didn’t always understand Sam, even if Bucky’s stares sometimes made Sam’s stomach flutter and swoop. Maybe especially because they did. After all, Sam had spent a not insignificant part of his life chasing after that flutter and swoop in the sky, leaning and diving into it.
“Let’s just go out there,” said Bucky. “See who we can help, how.”
“What, without a plan? Thought you didn’t like that, that Steve always had a plan.”
Bucky’s stare shifted to a glare, and Sam grinned. He couldn’t help it, Bucky always looked like an adorably disgruntled cat when he glared like that.
“Steve had a plan for missions, yeah, but he never had a single damn plan for Captain America. His only real plan was to stand up against bullies. Don’t see why you need more of one.”
“It just doesn’t seem like enough. Nothing I do seems like it could be enough.”
“Because you’re overthinking it. You were overthinking it back when you didn’t want to take up the shield—” Sam narrowed his eyes at Bucky, and Bucky continued, “Yeah, you had some good reasons. You’re right about how it’s different for you to have that shield, and I get that it comes with a lot of baggage for you, that it’s not just Steve’s legacy, it’s the country’s. I’m sorry I didn’t get where you were coming from before. But you were still overthinking it.”
“‘I’m sorry, but,’ is never a good phrase,” said Sam.
“That’s not what I—” Bucky huffed out a frustrated sigh, and leaned in, holding Sam’s gaze. “I mean, you’re getting caught up in what everyone else wants and expects. You told me what you want, Sam. You want to help, and you want to try to do it without always turning it into a fight. So let’s go. Let’s try.”
“Where’d all this wisdom come from?” asked Sam.
“I’m very old, remember?” said Bucky, and then he softened and said, “From you, Sam. It came from you. You said it: don’t let other people tell you who you are, be of service.”
“So what, we just hit the road? Be traveling superheroes?”
“For now, sure.”
“I’m still gonna need an actual job that pays actual money, at some point,” Sam warned. “But alright. Might as well.”