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(Walker! Walker, do not–)
The air is thick with smoke, choking him in heavy waves, and he knows there is something he is supposed to be doing, but everything is going fuzzy around the edges. Someone is shouting for him, in an accented voice that he can’t place, and he– he needs to focus. He can’t– he has to– he’s supposed to be– he’s meant to– he needs to– oh god–
He retches and tries to get his mind in order.
He doesn’t know what–
“John!”
That wipes his thoughts clear.
It’s distant but, “Lemar?”
His breath catches somewhere beneath his ribs.
He turns in a circle, trying to spot the man behind that shout. There is a wall to his left. Concrete. No, packed earth. A building with its side blown open. No, a street in Latvia, gray and cold and wrong, the window shattered above him after he’d jumped through. Afghanistan is burning around him, hot sun on dry sand, heat burning against the back of his neck. Then Riga again. Stone. Blood. That awful sound of—
“Lemar!”
His own voice tears out of him.
There is no answer at first.
John breaks into a run.
He does not know where he is going. He only knows the voice came from somewhere ahead, and that is enough. His feet are already carrying him forward, faster and faster, turning one corner and then another, the walls narrowing around him until the whole place becomes something impossible. A corridor where there should be an alley. A doorway leading into another street that looks exactly like the last one. Concrete walls rise on either side of him, then canvas, then the broken skeleton of a building. He passes a Humvee. He passes a dead storefront. He passes the same overturned piece of rubble twice.
“John!” calls Lemar, more desperate now.
He stumbles. It feels like he’s been struck in the chest.
(Oh shit. Shit. I think Walker was–)
“I’m here!” It hurts. It bleeds. “I’m here! Lemar!”
He pushes past the pain.
“Lemar! Where did you go?”
He still cannot see where his partner is.
That is starting to frighten him, though he does not let himself slow down long enough to understand why. Lemar is in danger. John needs to find him. He must be close. He can feel it. That voice is unmistakable, carved so deeply into John’s life that he could find it through artillery fire, through gunfights, through a screaming crowd. He has to be around here somewhere. He must be. He’s sure of it.
Closer now, “John!”
He must be near now. Just a little further by.
Just past this corridor. Just around this corner. Just beyond—
There.
There.
Lemar is too far away and somehow perfectly clear despite everything else swimming around him. The world blurs and bends at the edges, walls stretching taller than they should, shadows moving where no others exist, but Lemar is there, and John has never been flooded with more relief than in that moment.
He has missed him.
He’s missed him so much.
(Wait, wait! Walker, come back. It is not–)
John reaches him.
There is no thought involved, no hesitation left in him, only the impossible certainty of Lemar standing there and the terror that if John gives himself even one second to question it, the whole thing will disappear. He throws himself forward, arms wrapping around Lemar with enough force that something in his body screams in protest. Pain flashes through his chest, sharp and wet, but John ignores it.
His hands clutch at the back of Lemar’s jacket.
His face presses into his shoulder.
“Lemar,” he gasps, his name spilling past his lips. “Lemar, you’re here—”
He pulls back only enough to look at the man in front of him. His hands come up frantically, almost reverently, and he takes Lemar’s face between them. He has to see him. He stares, and drinks in every detail as though he has been dying of thirst for years and someone has finally put water in front of him. There is so much that he’s forgotten without meaning to, so much his mind has softened around the edges because it hurt so, so bad.
But Lemar is here now, and John has missed him.
“Oh, Johnny,” says Lemar, with terribly soft eyes, and despicably gentle voice, always kinder than John had deserved, “it’s far too late for that.”
His brow draws together in the beginnings of a frown, mouth forming around the words I don’t understand– but then Lemar is kissing him, really kissing him, and John makes a broken sound against his mouth and kisses him back because he has wanted this without knowing it, because he has wanted Lemar back in every possible way and this is impossible and wrong and perfect, and he does not care.
There is a metallic taste on his tongue.
There is blood flooding his mouth.
John pulls back.
“You’re too late,” Lemar says.
He is staring at John with empty eyes.
He tilts his head and flashes a bloody smile.
“Don’t you remember?”
John stumbles back a step. “I don’t—”
“I saved you. I saved you, and you let me die.”
“No. No, I– Lemar, I didn’t–”
“You let me die,” he accuses again. “You killed me.”
His partner steps forward, and John takes another one back, and this is wrong, because Lemar has never been like this, but it is not incorrect because Lemar had died, and John knows this. He’d been there, and he’d held him, and there are nights he wakes with his hands tightly fisted around empty sheets, ready to beat himself up over that unforgivable failure. He can still feel the weight of him slipping away, in the dog tags against his chest, in the careful expressions of people that no longer recognize him beyond that loss.
“I didn’t want to,” he pleads. “I tried. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Don’t go—”
Lemar simply shakes his head, with refusal, with rejection.
John collapses forward, shaking, his hands closing over nothing at all.
He can’t do this again. He does not want to do this again. His heart is tearing itself apart, and he’s pressing his hands over his bleeding chest, gasping for air, gasping over sobs, pleading for another moment to see his partner again. He doesn’t want to go on without him. Please, please, come back, take me with you– it hurts, and there’s blood. His mind is muddled, and there is blood on his fingers, and he is on the ground.
A smudge of dark fabric and blonde hair hovers over him.
(Stop moving. О Боже, you are going to–)
John blinks a few times, trying to make sense of the sight.
“–bleed out like this. Hey! Walker, stay awake.”
Yelena, he recognizes.
There is something in her voice John has never heard before.
It sounds dangerously close to fear. He tries to answer her, tries to offer some assurance not to worry, but a pained cough tears through him. His body convulses around it, and suddenly Yelena is grabbing him, hands under his shoulders as she rolls him onto his back. He groans. His chest is on fire. Yelena presses both hands over it, trying to staunch the open wound that’s soaking into his uniform.
Don’t you remember? Lemar asks.
Yes, I do, John answers. Of course I do.
He remembers that final crack that had stolen his love.
He remembers–
The mission. He was on a mission.
The building was gassed.
He was shot.
And oh, oh–
“Walker,” comes that same urgent insistence. “Eyes open.”
He’s trying, but he’s so tired–
Yelena presses harder against his wound.
John cries out as darkness swallows him whole.
***
He comes back badly.
Consciousness does not return so much as slam into him all at once, dragging him up through thick, suffocating darkness and depositing him somewhere painfully bright. He groans before his eyes are even open, every part of his body feeling wrong in a way he cannot immediately account for. His chest aches. His throat is raw. There is something tight around his middle, something pulling when he tries to move, and his head feels as though someone has packed it full of cotton and then started hitting it with a hammer.
“Fuck,” he rasps, trying to push himself up.
“Lay down,” Yelena orders.
“The mission–?” asks John, as he keeps at his attempt.
Pain lances through his chest.
His body folds around it.
There’s a hand on his shoulder firmly pushing him back against the bed.
“It does not matter right now.”
“But–”
“John,” she interjects, and he goes silent.
It’s the first time she’s not used his surname.
“You got hit with a hallucinogen,” she continues, gentler. “You were injured.”
“I fucked up the mission,” he summarizes.
It hadn’t been real.
Lemar hadn’t really been there.
Of course he hadn’t, John chides himself, as the realization cuts past his ribs, right into the ache in his heart that had never quite stopped. He had known that already, on some level, even in the midst of what had gassed him. Hadn’t he? Lemar could not have been there. Lemar was dead. Lemar had been dead for years, and John had still run toward him anyway, because apparently some part of him was pathetic enough, desperate enough, to see the shape of his partner in the dark and follow without asking a single question.
“Forget the mission,” she snaps. “You nearly died.”
He tilts his head up to look her in the face. “But I didn’t!”
“Walker– John, were screaming at us. You were shouting a name, and you–” Her expression pinches as she hesitates around her next words. “You were begging us to kill you.”
It’s the most devastated he’s ever seen her.
John immediately feels guilty for it.
Good job, asshole, you’ve made her worry.
She shouldn’t be so broken up over someone like him.
She’s told him herself: he’s trash. He’s not worth it.
But, moreover, “I don’t remember saying that.”
He does not remember begging them to kill him. He does not remember the exact words leaving his mouth. But he does know the feeling, the impulse, the thought that has come to him more than once since Lemar died: If I die, maybe I will see him again. It’s a tempting one, especially on the nights replaying his partner’s final moments until the nightmare becomes more real than the present, especially on the mornings he forces himself up, furious that the sun has risen without him. He’s worked hard to shove it down, to focus instead on the utility he brings to the team he is now part of, until that hallucinogen had gone and laid him bare.
“You did,” Ava says. “We all heard you.”
John startles, realizing they’re not alone, realizing that the entire team is in the medical bay with them, and that they’d witnessed it all. His heart is beating too fast. He feels so sickeningly exposed. The prickling discomfort spikes, and with it, he’s able to push through the pain, sitting up despite Yelena’s protest, to address them all. He needs to do something, anything, to abate the pity that they must have for him now.
Denial comes so easily.
“I’m fine. The gas just had me talking nonsense, alright?”
“John…” Bucky says, and god, even Bucky is staring at him like that?
His discomfort curdles into something defensive, and John almost laughs, except he thinks it’d hold more hurt than humor. Bucky had hated him from the start, and John had come to terms with that. He’d made up his mind about John the moment they’d met, and it’s throwing him off to see that sort of gentle concern on his face now. It’s been a long time since anyone has looked at him like that, back before he’d wrecked his life, back when he’d been a better person, one that deserved that kind of care.
“I’m fine,” John insists again, and tries for a smile.
The looks he gets in return tell him he does not succeed.