Chapter Text
At first, all he would talk about was Barnes.
Whether he had a dry place to sleep. How he’d always hated the cold. If he was injured or in pain. What if Hydra found him again. Did he have anyone to comfort him if he was having nightmares. The frantic urge to run off into the night and track down the dead man seemed to have become less immediate, but Steve’s thoughts were still preoccupied.
After the episode, Sam had convinced Steve to stay with him at his cousin’s lake house back in Georgia. It was far from secluded, the mucky shores lined with cabins in the shade of a few pine trees, retirees always milling about on the lake in their pontoon boats. But it was quieter, and Natasha had stopped by to secure the place with some fancy security tech that would shield them from being tracked.
The compromise was uneasy. SHIELD’s grip lay over Steve like a skeleton hand, and though the fingers had opened, he was still situated in the palm, poised to be pulled back into what remained of the leviathan after Hydra’s uprooting had stripped it of flesh. They’d wanted him involuntarily committed; Sam even had to fight Natasha on it, and once he convinced her, he had dragged them both into lying to SHIELD about Steve’s mental state, something that was going to blow up in their faces any day now.
Sam was firmly against involuntary psychiatric commitment as a principle he followed in his practice. Locking somebody up against their will wasn't going to help anybody. He’d seen too many cases where that only compounded existing trauma and set the patient on a worse trajectory.
But Steve was still in the midst of a psychotic episode, and he needed help.
“I’m not even sure he recognized me at all,” Steve said. “Who knows what they must have done to him?”
Your friend is resting, Sam wanted to say. Your friend is not hurting anymore. It pained him how strongly the delusion held on when it seemed to distress Steve so much. Steve had a serene friendship with death as it pertained to himself—bordering occasionally on latent suicidality, though he didn’t seem to be at immediate risk—but he couldn’t find any comfort in the thought of Bucky in the arms of the Lord, finally relieved of his suffering.
“Natasha should be able to give us more information when she comes back,” Sam said. “We can’t do anything until we’ve gathered more intelligence. Files remaining in some of the abandoned Hydra bases should tell us where the Soldier’s retrieval point was supposed to be, and where he might have gone otherwise. Failing that, they might be able to provide a means of tracking him.”
This was not a lie. Sam had drawn a hard boundary against lying to Steve. Natasha was tracking the Soldier, hoping to prevent his recapture by either SHIELD or Hydra, and to gather evidence related to Hydra’s infiltration of various governments and organizations—or so she said; Sam sensed that there were other motives at play, but he did not question them.
Of course, some part of him hoped for solid evidence that the Soldier was a normal man with a normal date of birth, some undeniable proof that he couldn’t be Steve’s undead best friend. That part of him hoped that the evidence would convince Steve, and that Steve would be able to finally grieve his loss. Maybe Natasha was seeking that proof too. It was unlikely that Steve would be snapped out of his delusion just like that, but wouldn’t it be nice if things were easy.
“It’s just so hard to wait,” Steve said. “Here in this comfortable little cabin, when Bucky is out there and I don’t even know if he has a bed or a roof over his head.”
“He’s smart and he’s capable. I’m sure he’s found a place,” Sam said.
He coaxed Steve into talking about Bucky, the real Bucky he remembered, the one he’d lost. It reminded Sam of talking to an elder with dementia. But Steve hadn’t forgotten the last several decades. He simply hadn’t lived them at all.
* * *
“What was he to you?” Sam asked, on the third day, when they were sitting on the couch together, with the TV muted.
He didn’t answer for a long, long time. Just looked out into space, and swallowed, and swallowed again, and: “He was my friend.”
“He was drafted?”
“Yeah.” He looked down at his hands now. “I–I wish…”
When the silence lasted ten, fifteen seconds, Sam offered, “I bet there’s a lot of things you wish you were able to tell him.”
His eyes were desperate and glittering. He was starting to cry, painful huffs in his big body that looked like the gulps of a man drowning.
“I need to find him,” Steve said, “I need to—”
“Hush. Maybe if you tell me about him, I’ll be able to help you better when the time comes,” The impending explosive action that had bunched up in Steve’s frame calmed a little. Sam placated further, “And it’s important to have your head on straight. It sounds like your friend went through a lot, and…” He wasn’t going to encourage the belief that Bucky was still alive. It wouldn’t be right to do that. “You need to process through some of your emotions.”
“I keep thinking—” He sniffed. “I keep thinking, since waking up. Maybe I’m dead, and this is my Hell. And I don’t—I don’t want Bucky to be down here in Hell with me.”
Sam was quiet; he didn’t know what to say to it. Some stupid insurance commercial was playing on the TV. Sam picked up the remote and turned it off.
“I don’t know how it is for Catholics,” Sam said, “but growing up, my dad always talked about God’s mercy. He would say, no matter how swallowed up you feel in your own sins, that hopelessness you feel is only a tiny drop, and God’s mercy is like the ocean.”
Steve nodded.
“I just. I can’t stop thinking about. What must have happened to him, in all this time—and I abandoned him. I abandoned him.”
Sam watched him curl in on himself, his shoulders shaking, but he was still tight all over, not able to let himself cry with the bigness his body demands. Sam reconsidered some of his previous thoughts. He had felt before that Steve had become convinced that the Soldier was his dead friend out of a wishful longing for the past, an inability to cope with having the entire context of his existence ripped violently away. Now he was seeing more layers in it. Steve’s delusion of seeing his friend in the Soldier’s face was a manifestation of his guilt, a haunting that punished him.
“Hush,” Sam said. “I don’t think you abandoned him, and I think he would understand that. Tell me what you loved about him.”
He wiped his eyes. “He was so…blunt. Always saw right through my bullshit. Never hesitated to tell me when I was being an idiot.”
Sam smiled. “Everybody needs a friend like that.”
“He loved to laugh.”
“Yeah?”
“He was…he was everything. Everything I wanted to come home to. Everything I wanted to have, someday, when it was all over…when the war was…”
He was cut off by long, wet sniffles, and Sam was extra gentle with the next part: “Was he more than a friend to you?”
Steve, in the midst of his crying, coughed out a monosyllable of laughter. “What?”
“When you say you wanted to come home to him. Someday, when the war was over,” Sam said, carefully. “It sounds like he was more than just a friend, but a sort of—life partner, for you.”
“What are you talking about?”
Sam knew the streak of guilty anger that quickly blazed in his eyes, the gnawing, hollowing fear that lay behind it, and it hurt. It hurt to recognize it, to see that in someone else. “I’m not accusing you of anything. There is absolutely nothing bad or wrong about anything you shared or wanted to share with Bucky, and I know this for a fact. Gimme that Bible over there, I’ll lay my hand on it and swear it.”
Steve stared at him, and then at the Bible on the TV stand, as though considering whether to actually do it.
“Steve, I’m bisexual. Do you know what that means?”
Steve shook his head.
“I’ve loved both men and women. I might find a wife someday, or I might find a husband. Society is a lot more accepting of men loving other men in that way nowadays. I’m not saying that’s how I think you loved Bucky. I’m just saying that I see you’re in a lot of pain right now, and I know firsthand how painful it is to feel like you have to hide the love you have for another person, something so sacred and so important, because of what everybody else thinks.”
Steve stopped crying. Maybe was too shocked.
“Bucky wasn’t…like that,” Steve said.
“I’m not saying either of you were a certain way,” Sam said. “But I know that if you were. You must have lived in a lot of fear. And I’m saying it ain’t right.”
Steve crumpled. He let his face fall into his hands and his shoulders slump in defeat.
Thoughtfully, Sam went over to his desk to pull out his laptop, and typed in a search. He pulled up a website and tilted the screen towards Steve. “Look. Is any of this stuff familiar to you?”
Steve stared at it. For a little bit Sam wasn’t sure he was reading, but then he pressed the down arrow key to scroll further down.
“I mean. Yeah. I’ve heard gay. I’ve heard kids calling each other that, anyway.”
Sam winced. “But nobody ever sat you down and explained.”
“This one,” Steve said, tapping his finger on the screen where the word transgender appeared, and Sam raised his eyebrows. “That’s, that’s really great that people have that now. When I was…you know, back then, being a man was something you just kinda had to do,” He smiled, though it was sharp and thorny. “I knew some guys who…it would have been better just to have that. If they didn’t feel like they had to.”
“You don’t have to put a label on anything right now,” Sam said, as Steve scrolled. “Or ever. I’m just letting you know it’s okay.”
After some time had passed, Steve shut the laptop and began once again to cry.
“I wish—I just wish—”
“Yeah. It isn’t fair, is it? You lost so much.”
“War does nothing but take,” Steve said.
“Yeah.”
“And it just keeps going. They’re always looking for a new war.”
“Yeah. Never ends, does it?”
“Never ends,” he said, and sniffed. “I should never have thought I could end it.” He sniffed, longer and wetter. He was capable of producing an ungodly amount of snot. “I should never have thought I had anything to contribute to it at all.”
“You did what you could with the information you had,” Sam said. He’d hated being told that. But somehow he didn’t have anything better.
“They didn’t tell me about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
“You mean, when you woke up?”
The tears were streaming down his face, but they looked like angry tears now. He looked like a man on the brink of tearing his hair out, flipping tables, throwing chairs. “They didn’t tell me. They made sure to tell me about 9/11, you bet your ass they did, but they didn’t tell me the truth about how we ended the war that I gave my fucking life in.”
“Now, how did they get around that one?”
“They told me about the atom bomb. Told me we bombed Japan, it was the best way to minimize loss of life—bullshit. Bullshit. I read about it, on my own. It was civilians. Tens of thousands of civilians.”
“And it just gets worse from there,” Sam said.
“I was proud of my country. I knew we had done awful things. But I thought we just needed time—to grow into what we were supposed to be all along,” He hid his face in his hands. “And I was so wrong.”
Sam didn’t know what to say to that.
* * *
That evening, after they’d eaten dinner (box mac and cheese, which Sam’s mama would have considered utterly traitorous), something occurred to Sam that troubled him. “How long has it been since someone gave you a hug?”
Steve stood in the middle of the hallway, silhouetted by the light above the sink. “I…I don’t know.”
“Would it be okay if I gave you a hug?”
Steve closed his eyes and nodded, and Sam approached a few steps, opening his arms, allowing Steve to close the gap. He enclosed Sam in his huge arms, crushing him tightly against his chest, and Sam held on tight to him, flattening his palms against Steve’s back to hold him close. It was like hugging a tree trunk; Steve was tense and his muscles had barely any give to them, and he was completely steady and still. Sam tried to turn his head so he could breathe better and Steve seemed to take this as an indicator that the hug was over. He broke away, looking lost and sheepish and fragile, unable to face his need, but pinned and made helpless by it.
“It can be hard,” Sam said. “Being a man in this world. After I got a certain age, nobody touched me very much, except my mama, when I saw her.”
“It was hard to get used to,” Steve said. His voice was husky, choked. “One of the hardest things, really. There is so much…space. Between men.” He sniffed loudly and said, “I’m sorry. I’m crying, I’m sorry. I haven’t had someone just…hold me like that since Bucky…”
“It’s okay. It’s okay,” Sam said. “It’s healthy to cry.”
Steve wandered back into the kitchen, and stared out the window above the sink, though there was nothing to see but a rectangle of black. “Before the serum,” he said, “I was small.”
“Yeah?”
“I was a lot smaller than Bucky. In the winter, when we lived together, we would sleep in the same bed, we only had the one quilt, and I could curl up and he would just…surround me. I was very privileged to have someone to take care of me like that.”
“You lived together?”
“Yeah. I wasn’t really able…” He trailed off. “I couldn’t work most jobs,” He didn’t meet Sam’s eyes. It seemed like that fact was a source of shame to him. “Bucky supported me when I needed it. I’ll always be indebted to him.”
“Steve,” Sam said, “You want me to hold you again?”
“Is that…okay?” He wiped his eyes hastily before looking at Sam straight-on. “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”
Sam let himself laugh, hoping to reassure. “Not at all. I’m a hugger. I hardly get to show affection with people that way. People assume…” Well. They would be there all night if he got into all the things people assumed. “C’mere. We can just sit on the couch and you can lean on me if you want. If that would be less intimidating.”
Steve nodded, seemingly not trusting his voice to speak.
So he sat on the couch, and Steve leaned his head over on Sam’s shoulder, and Sam put an arm around him, and he was so hungry for the touch, so eager to give himself away to it even as his body wouldn’t quite let him do it, that it broke Sam’s heart.
“Sleepy?” Sam asked, after he’d had Steve enclosed in an awkward halfway hug for a while, and Steve nodded.
“Don’t wanna get up, though,” Steve said. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”
“Not a bit. Here, lemme just—I’m going to turn toward you and swing my legs up on the couch so you can lay on me. Cuddle up a little bit. You’re a cuddler, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Steve said, “maybe.”
“C’mere, you big ol’ cuddle bug,” He slapped his chest, indicating where he wanted Steve to lay his head. “Yeah, there you go,” He wrapped his arms around Steve’s broad back, rubbed his cheek into Steve’s fluffy blond hair. “There you go. Comfy?”
“Mmhm,” He sounded already half asleep. “Better than the bed.”
Sam laughed. “Those beds aren’t the best, are they?”
“Mmm,”
Down here in Georgia, there was no pretense possible of huddling for warmth, but the air conditioning had been blasting all day so the cabin was cool, and the heat of Steve’s body was deeply comfortable. There in the dark, Sam’s heart felt warm, glowing around the twist of sorrow at the center of that warmth. Steve was safe in the arms of someone who cared about him. At least he could give Steve that.
Steve was soon snoring, and the predicament was quickly apparent: Sam had approximately zero chance of moving this massive boulder of a man without some super soldier serum for himself.
But, he considered, feeling his own sleepiness, he didn’t really mind too much.
He didn’t really mind at all…
…