Chapter Text
The sun beat down upon an already red neck, and sweat poured continuously down the back of a brown shirt beneath the fluorescent yellow and orange vest. It wasn’t like the oppressive desert heat, which made him struggle to breathe through his nose to fight dehydration instead of panting by mouth. This was humid, demoralizing, aching heat. The only thing the two places had in common was thirst. Each Hell was lethal and each was crushing. But one resembled the other only in the desperation for water.
Sam had leapt from the fires of the Registan and the Kandahar war zones, into the frying pan of Louisiana’s sweltering Jefferson Parish. He was unlikely to endure a sandstorm here, but the mosquitoes were thick as one sometimes.
The work on the Pontchartrain crossway had brought him here, and now, months later, the seemingly endless maintenance on the world’s longest bridge over water was coming to an end within the next few weeks. Sam tried not to think about that. Not yet. Not when thinking of it made a dark part of his brain bubble with panic. Not when he didn’t have any true plan for what came next.
But here he was, thinking about it.
The man beside him wouldn’t stop talking. He was completely oblivious to the anxiety attack going on behind the walls of Sam’s emotionless eyes. It was his fault Sam was thinking of this at all.
“I ain’t saying it’s a bad job. Just don’t know if I want it. They offered it to you too, right? What’d you say?”
Sam swallowed. “Don’t know yet. I can’t-I can’t worry about it till this job’s done.”
Mackey called over to them to pick up the pace. He spared an extra second to stare at Sam with an intelligent glint, but Sam kept his own eyes lowered. If Mackey could see properly anymore, he might have figured Sam out by now. He stared often enough, like he was trying to dissect him. But the guy was mostly blind in one eye, and he had no reason to strain the other one just because Sam was a curiosity.
Just because Sam didn’t belong there.
Caleb wiped his hands on his towel, and then used the same to wipe the sweat from his face. “You’ll starve like that, man,” he was saying as he continued his work. “Gotta worry about the next job before this one runs out or you’ll end up weeks without a check. Me, I got two offers, one in Missouri and one up the east coast. I’m just trying to decide my best move from here. You’re counting on the freaking Pontchartrain breaking up into gravel so’s you don’t gotta move on?”
“I don’t have anywhere to go.”
“Hell you don’t. We was just talking about how you got the same damn offers I got, that the other hard-workers got. Come on. Thing in St. Louis could be good. Or the other thing. You ever been to Baltimore? Working a tunnel’s got to be better than working under the sun like this!”
Sam was trembling very slightly now. He gripped his tools tighter to keep himself steady.
There was no way Sam was going to work in a tunnel. No matter how big it was. That wasn’t going to happen.
“I don’t get you, man! You got offered foreman when you first got here, without a damn minute of experience managing guys like me, and you turned it down to work in the dirt next to me. Gave up the extra money and the clean shirts, for what?”
“You said it yourself. I don’t have the experience to be a foreman.”
Caleb snorted. He paused long enough to yank at a stubborn slab of metal, then gestured to Sam with a sigh.
Sam set his things aside to grab hold and pull the slab from the side of the rail with a grunt.
His buddy laughed, and drew a sleeve across his forehead beneath his helmet brim. “I ain’t complaining, you understand. It’s better for me to have your freakish brute strength down here in the trenches with me.”
He smiled softly. “You’re welcome.”
Caleb shrugged, and continued replacing the ancient slab with a new one. “Just saying everybody knows you’re smart enough, got enough school, to be running the place. Not even a douche, so we wouldn’t mind working for you. Guy like Mackey can work that foreman job, why can’t you do it? He’s a good enough guy, smart enough, I guess. But you-“
“I don’t want it. I don’t like managing people.”
Caleb’s gaze slid toward him before returning to his work. “Yeah. Except I hear you was an officer or some shit in the army.”
Sam’s chest tightened abruptly. “What? Who-who knows that? Who knows what my rank-Why is anybody even talking about me? Why are we even talking about me? We got work to do!”
The man shrugged again. “Okay. Okay. Calm down. You got secrets? We all got secrets. Think I couldn’t have Mackey’s job? I got a record, man. Told you all about it over drinks a long while back. I screwed up bad, and now I got a lot fewer options. I did okay in school, like you two. But I’ll be using my hands my whole life because I used them once to do some shit I shouldn’t have done. Some guys, even me, we’re okay with that. I’m good with it. It ain’t what any of us planned to do, kid. But it’s got a peace and a poetry to it that some people never get. You, though? Why the hell are you even here, Sam? And even more than that...why don’t you seem to have anywhere else to go?”
***
“Think we’ll be home this time next year?”
Sam looked up from his paperwork. He sighed. “Adam-“
The young man dropped into the chair across from him. “I’m not complaining. Just wondering. And I don’t really mean us. You and me. I mean all of us. Think we will have finished up by then?”
He snorted softly. “This is a war, Milligan. We don’t just put out twenty episodes and wrap it up neatly for the next season’s writers. I’d love to say we’ll be out by then. But I don’t believe it. I don’t believe we’ve got a plan here at all. I think we just react to whatever is blowing up each day, and save those we can save just to lose them the next day to something else.”
Adam was watching him. “You used to believe it. What we’re here for. You used to believe in it.”
He lowered his pen to the shoddy desk. There was sand in his teeth, even after brushing and hydrating. He hated that feeling. More than anything in the world, Sam hated the feeling of sand in his teeth. They had been caught outside when the storm had advanced on them. They had seen it coming. Plenty of warning. But they couldn’t move out of its path, because it would have meant giving up their gains of the day. Gains they would lose to the Taliban by the end of the week. Gains the so-called Islamic State was just waiting to snatch into their own hands.
Some days, Sam couldn’t keep track of who the enemy was. Snippets of Orwell ran through his mind, and he found himself thinking of Eurasia and East Asia, and the way Oceania of the imagined 1984 was always at war with one or the other territory. When at war with Eurasia, Oceania claimed an alliance with East Asia. Then a memo would circulate from Big Brother’s inner party, declaring the opposite to be true, and the fighting would continue without a breath of hesitation, but against a new enemy.
It was all madness, and so was this.
“I believe in protecting those who cannot and would not protect themselves. That won’t change. As for the rest of it...I’m doing what they tell me to do, and you do what I’m told to tell you to do.”
“And how’s that working out for you?”
Sam smirked at him and shook his head. “Not good. But it’s all we got right now. Get to sleep, Milligan. Either Eurasia or East Asia will attack something tomorrow, and we need to be rested up to deal with it.”
Adam frowned at him. “We’re in southwest Asia, Sam. That’s where Afghanistan is. Or don’t they teach geography in officer school?”
He had snickered then. “Yeah. Okay, kiddo. Maybe I need some sleep too.” He stood and tossed a careless arm around his half-brother’s shoulders as they walked out of the tiny office space. “Heard anything from Dean or Dad?”
“No. You know that. And, dude, you gotta stop calling me kiddo in front of the guys and my CO. It’s embarrassing.”
“Zachariah giving you a hard time? Because I will kick his petty ass all the way back to basic.”
“Stop. Don’t touch him. He’s already looking for an excuse to toss me in a pit someplace and leave me there. Don’t piss him off. He hates you.”
Sam shrugged. “Feeling’s mutual. I ever find a pit, I’ll toss his ass in, and let him scheme and whine his way out.”
“He’s my CO, Sam, and he loathes me because of you. Don’t make this worse for me. And anyway, he’s buddies with General Michael. So don’t get yourself in any trouble either.”
“They can both bite me. And don’t tell a soul I told you this, but Michael once told Lou while I was standing right there that there’s a reason Zach’s battalion is perpetually on the front. Apparently ‘commander I trust the most’ translates into ‘commander I’d mourn the least’ in high-brass-speak.”
Adam’s mouth fell open. Even after all this time in a war zone, the guy could still be naïve, which was probably why Sam kept slipping and calling him kiddo.
“Yeah. So don’t put too much stock in his supposed friendship with the general. They’re all fakes, Adam. All of them. You and me? We’re family. That’s something these guys will never understand.”
Adam stopped walking and turned to him suddenly. “Sam? Did you...I mean, I kind of felt like...Before we deployed, I mean. I kind of never felt…”
Sam took a breath. “Adam? Whatever happens between me and Dad, I never blamed you for any of it. You’re family. My family. Maybe we weren’t quite there yet when we first left the States. But out here? We’re finally really brothers. If you didn’t feel that before, it’s only because-because I didn’t know what to think of you before. Dean and me...We didn’t know you were out there, man. If we had known...Anyway, out here, it’s just you and me. We look out for each other, the way we never had to before. There’s nothing that’s going to bring brothers together like protecting people on the same watch. Guys like Zach only see the mission, and what it means for them. You and me...It’s different. Even if we weren’t brothers before, we would be now.”
The kid stared up at him with that hero worship that Sam was too familiar with, the kind that never really went away when he thought of Dean. “I hope I can make you proud of that.”
His large hand patted Adam’s shoulder. “Already am. Go on. Get back and get some sleep. Tell your CO to call me if he’s got questions about where you’ve been. I’ll be happy to tell him where to shove them.”
Adam’s grin made him laugh at the time.
It made him weep now.
***
Sam forced a smile onto his face for Caleb’s sake. “I’m here because I gotta be somewhere,” he choked out. “And I haven’t got anywhere to go because I’ve got no family. So if the company is going to St. Louis or Baltimore, I guess that’s where I’m going too. It doesn’t really matter anymore. I gotta be somewhere.”