Archive of Our Own

Androids, aliens, wizards.

Sam really does hate all three. No offense to Thor or Wanda, who can’t help what they are or where they’re from — but full offense to this Ultron knock off currently trying to sink New York City to the bottom of the Atlantic. That hunk of junk can go fuck itself.

Sam swoops between skyscrapers, weaving through pillars of smoke and daylight glaring off the polish and glass. It’s too nice a day to be hunting for rogue artificial intelligences and too bright for a decent visual at this vantage. They lost sight of the target when it took a brief respite from exploding things back towards Midtown — or at least what Bucky called Midtown. Sam’s uncertain of the landmarks in this city. But he does know there are less of them now then there were when the sun came up.

So far the shiny tin can of an automaton responsible for all the chaos and sirens has leveled a dozen buildings, three parking garages, and an entire hospital since it activated kill mode down at the convention center. Apparently the damn thing had been on show at a Manhattan tech symposium. Details on the jailbreak are fuzzy. Reports from survivors it was wheeled out onto the stage before it started flashing, beeping, and maiming. Then it shattered the all-glass roof and jettisoned itself into the sky.

Because of course it did.

“Why did it need to fly?” Sam groans into his earpiece. Wind rushes by like static over his vibranium wingspan, but he’s certain Bucky will hear him and grumble nonetheless. “What possible reason does anyone have for building a flying deathbot? It’s already a deathbot. Jet propulsion is just overkill.”

“National guard interrogated the student who built it,” Bucky’s voice chips back over the line. He’s somewhere below coordinating the local evacuation, or holding up steel beams or something equally superhuman. “Said it was some punk kid from Jersey .”

Sam rolls his eyes behind his visor. 

“We get it, Buck, you’re a New Yorker.” It is the last thing Sam would have suspected to transcend both time and brainwashing, but Bucky’s Brooklyn born and bred hatred of the Garden State was alive and well. “Does it really matter what side of the turnpike the flying murder drone was built on?”

“Sam, you ever been to Jersey?” he continues, pausing seemingly only to fire his gun. He’s not waiting for an answer. It’s a purely rhetorical exercise in spite. “The place is better off a landfill.”

Sam’s helmet readout beeps, detecting motion under the barricade of cars smashed to pieces three streets southbound. Angling his thrust he rounds over the deserted road to get a closer look before giving the signal. The machine jolts out of hiding in jarring, whirring movements. It’s got the look of a bad Iron Man cosplay with too many pincer-like arms tacked on to avoid copyright infringement. The extra churning limbs hurdle shrapnel through the air with impressive accuracy. 

Sam dives to dodge the arc of car parts and slabs of concrete, sacrificing altitude for the evasive maneuver. He folds his wings over his face and torso. Enemy impact does little more damage than cause a ringing reverb inside his metal cocoon. Even his comms are still crystal clear. “Wait, are you talking about Jersey now or Jersey seventy years ago?”

“Same difference.” Then there’s gunfire again. Bucky’s, no doubt. Sam takes advantage of the cover to unfurl his wings and soar to a higher perch. He unlatches the shield and sends it spinning, gaining impossible momentum the way only vibriaum can. It slices through the joint of one of the upper robotic extremities, then rebounds from the rear to take out the lower left arm as well.

Finally; a weak spot.

“Go for the joints — and don’t start bitching about Jersey again — I’m from the south, Buck. You gotta know by now you’re all yankees to me.”

Sam sees Bucky give lopsided salute, but mostly he hears him chuckling over the line. 

Sam won’t ever admit it, not out loud, not to himself, and never, ever to another living breathing person, that the way Bucky laughs is distracting. It’s full-throated, earnest, genuine, because it takes something real to squeeze a laugh out of that headcase. Sam likes the sound of it more than he can ever let on. Likes that it makes him a little more brave. More audacious, and a hell of a lot more daring. Usually for the better. This time, though, it means he presses his luck too soon and hurls the shield at the exact wrong moment. Aiming for the second set of arms, the robot’s thorax grinds a full three hundred and sixty degrees  turning and evading the shot. In one fluid motion it slingshots the shield right back, slugging Sam in the chest.

The laughter stops and the wind picks up. 

His lungs are stunned and his flight systems flickering. His controls are offline. He can’t steer up. He can’t navigate or pull his chute, not at this height, not in time to avoid the crash. The street below springs up at him, looming bigger and bigger. He can’t stop. He can’t catch his breath.

He closes his eyes and— 

*

Riley had been laughing at something Sam said all of two-point-five seconds before he died. Something about watching his ass so Sam didn’t always have to do it for him. Riley would have had a real smart mouthed retort. He always did but his mouth was all cinders and char by the time Sam reached him. It’s what happens in the crossover from combatant to casualty. The body spirals, and the mind follows.

Outside, he knows he’s nose diving.

He knows there’s nothing he can do.

All he can do is think about things he shouldn’t, things that won’t save him. Think about the earth spinning the wrong way, a boat cracked in half from bow to stern. Think he is taking on water, taking on air. Thinks about that lopsided grin and sandy brown hair. Shy hands, quiet reserve. A full body blush down the neck. That uneven gait — Sam never let Riley live it down, how he couldn’t walk a straight line, how it was a wonder how he ever got past boot camp, let alone into the air force.

Thinks about the way Riley made up for all his gravity-bound fumbling the second he stepped into the air; wings spread, shining and weightless and beautiful. 

Thinks about how it was Riley who made him fall in love with flying. Not with the idea of it or the mechanics or the utility in combat, but the defiance in it. The shivers up his spine, his spinning equilibrium. Sunlight encasing him. Wind at his fingertips.

He thinks Riley probably never even felt fall.

And if Sam is grateful for nothing else, it’s that.

*

Something catches him.

It’s clumsy and painful and Bucky makes a better concrete wall than a landing pad, but he catches him all the same. He leaps out of nowhere, diverting Sam’s impact with his entire body. It shouldn’t work aside from the combination of armor design and the fact that reality always seems to be bending around supersoldiers. But they survive the impact in a single piece, one half Sam, one half Bucky. 

“Can you walk?” Bucky asks. He doesn’t wait for an answer. They are still taking heat from the android and they need to keep moving. Bucky is dragging Sam to cover by his shoulders while he’s still trying to get air into his chest. He can’t really protest when Bucky lays him down to crouch over his body like a human shield. No bleeding. No breaks. No trauma. Or so Bucky mutters to himself during his overly vigorous pat down of Sam’s body.

One more gasp and Sam can speak. “What the hell just happened?”

“Right…” Bucky starts, looking guilty as hell while examining Sam’s extremities. “So the National Guard did mention that the Jersey kid programmed it to be self teaching. Said it might learn to anticipate your movements.”

Sam grits his teeth. He tastes blood. “Thanks for the speedy intel, Buck.”

“You’re welcome.”

Bucky can’t play it off, but Sam might appreciate him for trying. Leaning forwards, pain radiates from his solar plexus outwards. 

He winces. 

He fumes.

This shit was not on their itinerary. His long weekend in the city was supposed to be a leisure visit. Sam had wanted to see the Hughes House and eat Nathan’s hotdogs. Not suit up for the nearest crisis because he was the closest thing to an Avenger within a hundred miles.

Staggering to his feet, Bucky stabilizes him at the elbow. He’s looking at Sam in some kind of way again. The way that goes beyond jokes and self reproach and Sam has to pretend he doesn’t see. They don’t have the time to dissect that, not even when their lives aren’t being threatened. But especially not when he’s this pissed. That goddamn thing hit him hard enough that he saw Riley . 

Several yards away the deathbot is destroying a transformer circuit dangling precariously from a post. All of the nearby highrises and signage goes dark. Sam can’t be sure what it means to achieve. Havoc might be its only goal. But they need to put a stop to it. 

Unscrewing every knut and bolt and setting it on fire might be a good start. 

“Alright. The bot learns fast so we gotta get creative. Any big ideas, Buck?”

“Honestly?” Bucky gives a half thoughtful look, one barely masking his apprehension. Maybe Sam’s not the only one taking this personally. “I was just gonna keep shooting at it.”

Sam blinks at him, unimpressed. “Simple. Straightforward. Some might even say stupid.”

“So you’re in?”

Sam ejects both his wrist pistols. 

“Yeah. Let’s go.”

Shooting the android in the face is more satisfying then Sam anticipates. Although with low chances of the machine realizing it even has a face beyond the rickety headpiece with flashing sensors in the place of eyes. At least it has no mouth to speak of. Since donning the shield, Sam’s been on the receiving end of more manifesto monologues than he can count. 

As if working with Bucky didn’t mean he already put up with enough people giving him lip.

The barrage of bullets buys enough time for the cavalry to phone in their arrival. A legion of heavy metal tanks rolls in through the ruined streets emblazoned with bright NYPD lettering and flanked by military. Figures the city would have tanks of all things stashed in a SWAT lock-up. More and more cities are armed to the teeth since Loki and the Chitauri Invasion. “Stand down, Cap,” comes a gung-ho order from a helmeted officer. “We’ll take it from here.”

Bad idea , something says in Sam. He can’t pinpoint why, let alone voice it. But Bucky does.

“You don’t want to do this,” he protests, watching the creaking and churning tank turrets line up. Sam grabs his shoulder, knowing it’s not a fight Bucky is going to win. Even if he weren’t credibly known to the public as a Cold War era assassin. It’s simply never been in the nature of the US military to change course mid-engagement.

“Whatever they’re planning can’t be worse than what we’ve tried.”

“No, this is definitely worse. This is what it wants us to do.” Bucky draws them back, taking it upon himself to wedge his body between Sam and the action. Across the field of smoke and rubble the machine stands, waiting.

“We can’t be sure of that. We have no idea what kinda protocol it’s acting on.”

“Except it’s targeting population centers and infrastructure. It’s not defensive or retreating. All of this is intentional. It wants total annihilation.”

Planes circle overhead, dangerously low and hardpoints primed for launch. For all Sam’s skepticism one way or another Bucky may end up being right.

“Some college kid designed it, right? It can’t be that adept in combat—”

Bucky shoots him an incredulous look. “Well, if I was gonna unleash hell on Jersey, I know I’d want to finish the job.”

“Goddammit,” Sam swears but it’s drowned out by booming concussive rounds. The tanks lurch back on their treads, muzzles flash first and then blasting one after the other. The missiles catapult towards the mark standing eerily still until the very last second. It evades everything. The munitions swarm past, sinking into the base of a highrise. A mushroom cloud of dirt and glass splinters balloons up into the sky. 

Units begin falling back. Other tanks hold the line, gearing up for the next shot. In the distance the impacted building sags, rumbling and collapse imminent.

Gaze flicking upwards to the formation of jets, Sam sees rigid lines piercing the sky. Eventually some bigwig will give the pilots the order to carpet-bomb Manhattan Island back to the stone age.

Total annihilation, indeed.

The fallout is thick with soot and noxious smells. There are new craters in the street where asphalt used to be, gaping openings leading into the subway system. The machine flies straight into the depths as soldiers on the ground sputter and gag for air, shouting “move, move, move,” in their hasty retreat.

“Don’t say it, Buck,” Sam warns as the pair of them advance. They take position at the entrance, Sam in the lead and Bucky following after. There’s only one way down so they take the leap, landing in a flooded tunnel.

“Don’t say what?” Bucky asks with false humility.

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“Actually I don’t. Maybe refresh my memory? Was it the part when I told you exactly what would happen… and then it happened? Is that it?”

A rat as big as a badger swims past. The stretch of wet garbage is everywhere. Sam’s suit is beginning to chafe. “I shoulda let Walker be Captain America. Should have left that crazy white man be. It should be him here who has to deal with you.”

Bucky snorts, laughing once again, harder than he has any right to. It makes Sam seethe that its effect on him remains despite the pain and waist high water and how much he wants to strangle him.

The trail leads to a padlocked gate. The top half is mangled and melted into a hole cartoonishly shaped like the android. Bucky climbs through it without hesitation. Sam tries to follow. His rotator cuff has other ideas.

“Maybe you should stay here,” Bucky suggests from the other side, overly cautious yet giving every indication he did not plan on doing the same.

“Hanging back isn’t really my style,” Sam decides, squaring up with the shield in his good arm. It breaks the chain and lock after the second blow.

“You’re injured—”

“Not the time to argue.” He brushes past his partner, fully aware it’s an utterly pointless thing to say. There’s never not room for an argument in this so-called partnership. Bucky’s already puffed up the way he does anytime he disagrees with any of Sam’s calls. 

“You’re being an idiot,” he says while they’re hiking over debris and “You should have told me it was this bad” when he stops to lift a column off a trapped maintenance worker. “Can you even throw the shield?” he demands   looking over his shoulder at every opportunity, keeping track of Sam like he thinks he might swan dive into the polluted water and backstroke away from him.

Which Sam might’ve considered under less dire circumstances. Operative word being might .

Ahead of them is the cavernous echo of metal scraping on metal. They inch around a corner where the water recedes and find a derailed subway train. Its front end is a crushed aluminum can and the rear snakes onto the tiled platform, cracking the foundation. The android is tearing into the siding of the subway tube, smashing glass and ripping open grating.

“Hang back while I distract it,” Bucky commands, balling his metal arm into a fist. Sam is doing the exact opposite of that, instead flanking to the side.

“I’m going left. You take the right.”

Bucky hisses, “Sam, no—” and the two of them end up going left because Bucky is apparently feeling clingy. Which Sam doesn’t get at all because he’s fine. Rattled, injured, maybe limping, but most importantly fine. He didn’t hit the ground. 

The rogue science experiment has already bored through the base of the train and is digging into the concrete and dirt below the tracks, lifting away gravel and debris at a furious rate. Sam can’t imagine why or what logistical or combative end it’s aiming for. He’s starting to suspect that as autonomous as the machine may be, even its own workings may be a mystery to itself.

“If it takes the offensive again, get behind me.”

Sam is ready to protest, but then he sees it. The glitch in it’s movements, the stray sparks emanating from the crack at the top of its chassis. “Get me in closer.”

Bucky grudgingly obeys, but not without a caveat. “I swear if you get yourself killed, I’m gonna be pissed.”

Sam lets his backhanded concern roll off his shoulders. “Don’t worry. If it happens, you get to keep the shield.”

Bucky halts in his tracks, actually growling, “Who said I wanted it?”

A moment later the android jolts up, aware and as murderous as they;ve come to expect. It flies out of the train, a bullet fired through the metal shell. Sam dodges and Bucky leaps, heading in opposite directions and flanking the target. Bucky pins down a pair of arms while Sam initiates his plan, raising the shield above his head with both arms. Everything in him hurts when he drives sheild it into the chink in the reinforced titanium. Wires sever and split and fuel lines spit greasy oil but the machine doesn’t stop swinging. It heaves back before tilting forward, effectively throwing Bucky several feet to the wayside and at the same time trapping Sam in a cage of metal apprengades. Whatever mechanism controls its aim is malfunctioning. It has Sam cornered and still it slams its arms into the ground again and again, narrowly missing his head and neck.

That luck won’t last. Eventually it will find its mark. The shield can’t protect him forever.

Bucky roars, scaling up the backside of the android, prosthetic and flesh and blood arm desperately pulling at the mechanized flailing. It barely budges. It won’t even slow down. It’s still not enough. Which is insane, Sam thinks — because thinking too hard about the wrong things at the wrong time is apparently what he does now this close to death’s door. Sam has seen Bucky tear through steel girders and catch bullets and rip engine blocks — as well as steering wheels— out of moving cars. This should be nothing in comparison. 

Nothing aside from the fact that Bucky wasn’t Bucky back then.

“Where’s the Winter Soldier when you need him?” Sam rasps, hoarse and ragged  Nowhere near loud enough for Bucky to hear him over the clangor.

But he does.

The noise stops. All of a sudden, no more grinding, no more banging. Just the low stormy inhalation Bucky takes as he lifts the entire android up, up, up. The overhead carry leaves the android straining, wriggling like a toppled insect. Sam is out from under the shield, up on his elbows in an instant. It dawns on him that he still has no real idea of how strong a supersoldier actually is. He watches in near awe as Bucky piledrives the thing once, then twice into the ground. The arms make a last ditch play for Bucky’s center mass but his vibranium arm shatters the joints, bending it back the wrong way. A shiny endoskeleton pops out, grotesque and sharp. Bucky tears the entire thing off from the hinge and it becomes a perfect javelin to pierce the chassis. The android is offline by the time Bucky stabs it for the third time. The eighth, ninth, tenth times are a little unnecessary. 

Sam scrambles to stand, bent at the middle and hands on his knees. “Where the hell was that can-do attitude all day? You’ve been pulling punches, Bucky?”

Bucky doesn’t hear him. He’s still stabbing the android.

“It’s down, Buck. You’re good.” 

Bucky drops his makeshift weapon, but only because sheer force has bent it out of shape. From there he tenses his fists and brings his knuckles down again and again, metal and flesh on metal.

“Bucky,” Sam wheezes louder this time. “I said you can stop. Hey! Are you even listening to me?”

Bucky snarls. He’s clenched tight, feet planted apart, barrelling down on the scrapheap. He shows no sign of relenting. No sign that he wants to stop, or even that he could if he wanted to. There is nothing left for him to break. Nothing left for this well of violence to achieve. Sam keeps saying his name; calling him Buck and James and Sergeant and whatever else he can think of. It’s no use.

There’s no safe opening when he inches closer. Safety would be backing the hell away slowly. Safety would be leaving Bucky all alone, hoping he makes it out of his tunnel before bringing it down on himself. But Sam can’t do that. Can’t take the easy way out. No. He has to make it hard on himself. He has to drop the shield and kneel as close as he can, unarmed and open palmed. 

It’s more prayer than forethought to the touch he places on Bucky’s shoulder. It’s the only thing that makes sense even if Sam can’t explain why. But his partner goes rigid, rearing back in a predatory glide. Locks eyes on him, the stare attached is dilated and blank and colder than Sam has ever seen.

The Winter Soldier swings. A roundhouse to take Sam’s head off.

“You said not to get myself killed…” Sam breathes, holding out for a spark of recognition. “So how about you don’t finish the job, Buck?”

The blow never lands. It wavers just shy of Sam’s nose, red dripping from the knuckle into the puddle of grease the machine bled out. Face dark and judgement clouded, Bucky flinches.

His hand falls but the damage is done.

“Sam… I—”

He chalks it up to his time as the Falcon, not Cap, that he’s able to roll with the would-be punches. He claps his partner heartily on the shoulder again and pretends to be none the wiser. “That’ll do, Buck… that’ll do.”

Blinking down at his hands, Bucky’s brow knits together and he fumbles over his words. “Is that… is that a reference… to something?”

“Yeah, Bucky. I’ll explain it later.”

*

Topside, Bucky’s even more of a mess. 

He staggers, shoulders sagging, eyes unfocused. His hand finally stops bleeding but there is a hitch in his every other breath that won’t quit. He looks ready to crumble where he stands and melt into the backdrop of rubble. He doesn’t even complain when Sam slings one of Bucky’s arms over his shoulders. 

The real Bucky would be embarrassed. Annoyed. Probably mouth off, asking if Sam wanted to offer him a bridal carry next.

Instead he stares off like he’s got tunnel vision.

“Hey, man, you okay?” Sam asks.

Bucky nods back numbly. “Just tell me what to do.”

Sam pauses. He’s about to ask what Bucky means, but they’re interrupted. In a moment of supremely poor timing that Sam blames on crimes he must have committed in another life, Spider-Man swings out of nowhere. Because, oh right, he thinks, the kid’s from around here, too. Somersaulting his landing in front of them, the red-and-blue menace bounds up to them.

“Don’t tell me I missed it!” he exclaims.

“Yeah, kid. You missed it.” Sam waves him off. He’s got bigger concerns right now, like whatever the hell is going on with Bucky. “Show’s over. You can go home.”

“Okay, rude,” he sulks, the kid starts in, petulant and pacing in a way that shows his age. “Because first of all, I am home . Queens is right across the river. I could see you guys blowing stuff up from the 59th street bridge. How was I supposed to ignore that?”

Sam is aware that he’s the adult here. Holding anything that happened in that German airport against the kid is pointless. Still his temper flares. “We didn’t blow up anything. The android did all that. Also, didn't you have something to do with a drone attack in London?”

“Hey! I was cleared of charges.” Through his mask he looks skeptical. “So where’s the droid then?”

“Out of commission, underground.”

“And where’d it come from? Outer space? HYDRA lab? OsCorp? Tell me if it was OsCorp. Because if it was Norman again I swear I’m gonna—”

Sam is going to snap, but Bucky lifts his head. “Jersey,” he mutters half heartedly, because hatred dies hard. “It came from Jersey.”

Peter scoffs, disgusted.

“Figures.”

* * *

Saving the day means the rest of the afternoon is shot.

Debrief was anything but brief. They’re greeted by the long arm of the military industrial complex as soon as the all clear is given. Spider-Man sling shots off, attesting that Sam and Bucky can definitely take it from here but most likely not wanting to be arrested by General Ross.

Some suit and ties and uniformed generals emblazoned with pins and ribbons queue up to interrogate and congratulate. Sam explains at least three times where the clean up crew can find the remnants of the android. In fact Sam has to do all the talking. Bucky can barely string three words together. 

The brass carts them off to an old bomb shelter, deciding unanimously to forgo medical attention since neither Sam nor Bucky were actively bleeding out. They spend hours in separate rooms, stuck behind concrete walls getting shaken down for information. Sam gets questioned as to why they were in New York and before he can point out “it’s a free country” someone mentions oversight last had them pinged in New Orleans. He’s about sick of hearing how closely the government tracks his movements but it’s a moot point. His partner is the Winter Soldier. Acquittals and pardons can only get them so far down the watchlists. They would always be waiting for Bucky to slip up. Waiting to see something exactly like what happened back in the subway terminal.

Shit.

The exchanges drone on and Sam is handed a script to practice when faced with the eventual spectre of media and microphones. Apparently they are to report that the student who built the droid is in custody, but Sam is sure there’s more to it than that. By the time the handshaking and deal making is over and they let Sam out of the room, he’s ready to collapse. He nearly fell to his death hours ago. Not to mention almost getting his head caved in.

But Bucky looks worse. He’s a shadow stuck to the wall, worn thin to the bone. Sam’s afraid of what he might’ve said or confessed to considering the state he is in. But they wouldn’t be walking out of there shoulder to shoulder if he’d raised any alarms.

He takes the win. He takes his partner. It’s time they got the hell out of Manhattan.

* * *

They’re headed to Brooklyn because Ross told them not to leave town and that’s where Bucky’s place is at. It’s a ritzy paid off condo in his name. Sam’s never got the full story behind how it came into his possession or how he maintains it or knew anything about New York real estate in the first place. Nevertheless, the place was always waiting for them whenever they stop over in the city.

The streets are chaotic despite the crisis never having reached the other boroughs. The buildings are still standing, but not much else. Prospect Park is a wasteland covered in abandoned trash and toppled bicycles and dumped backpacks. The narrow streets are blocked end to end with rear ended vehicles. Sam figures it’ll be cleared out by the morning, like it never even happened. New York is New York. If the city could bounce back from the Chitauri invasion, it could bounce back from anything.

What does worry Sam is how much longer he’ll also be waiting for the first son of Brooklyn to snap into place.

At the stoop of the brownstone, Buck shuffles up the stairs. He numbly feels around his pockets, checking the same pouch twice before he finds the keys. Sam has to get the door for them.

Inside everything is old wood and gleaming fixtures in the city sunset. If the subtle air of pretensions polish is anything to go by, the space definitely came pre-furnished. Sam has seen the way Bucky lives when left to his own devices. He’s the sort to camp out on a floor bedspread in front of a TV. He certainly could not be trusted to pick out tasteful leather couches or nail art to the walls. Though there’s a framed yellowing newspaper clipping on the mantle; a beaming shot of Steve in his original gear from 1942. It’s the only real touch that feels like him.

Bucky must feel as out of place as Sam does. He’s standing in the middle of the living room, eyes scanning his surroundings like he’s never seen it before. “Our stuff is still here… right?”

“Yeah, Buck,” Sam tells him, unsure if he needs to be oriented. “Our clothes are packed up, and we left breakfast in the fridge, too, remember?”

“The food we got in Bed-Stuy.” Bucky nods, sluggish, making the fact sound more like a question.

Sam is used to seeing soldiers slipping away with their eyes open. He’s seen it first hand in one-on-one counselling and in group work. It’s always a swinging between extremes; from heightened agitation to dimmed lethargy. He knows how to help walk it back for the average soldier.

How different could a burned-out supersoldier be?

“Do you remember why we’re in New York?”

Bucky shakes his head, but still says, “I think so. Baseball.”

“That’s right. The Dodgers playing the Mets. You wanted to see who would lose.” The corner of his mouth curls into a grin. “Then you wanted to go to Coney Island and see where that field used to be. What was it called?”

“…Ebbets Field.”

“Right. But I wanted to see Harlem instead, so I twisted your arm until I got my way. That’s why we were in Manhattan in the first place.” Sam rubs the back of his neck. “So all this was kind of my fault.”

If any of it rings a bell, it doesn’t show on Bucky’s face. “Then what happened?”

“Sirens started going off, remember? People started evacuating, and you said you had our suits in the rental car trunk. I didn’t know you stashed my wings and the shield in there. But you said you always do it.”

The fog parts a little. Bucky nods. “Just in case.”

“Yeah, just in case. It’s good that you did. We couldn’t help anyone without it.”

“Not true. You could.” Bucky lumbers past to slump onto a couch without elaborating.

Sam doesn’t know what to say to that kinda blind faith after the day he’s had. Its pretty high on the list of things Sam doesn’t know how to deal with on his best of days. 

He sits down next to Bucky.

“Look… Our tangle with the android… it might not have been our best performance. But in our defense, we were on vacation. But we still won, though. So if everything feels cloudy right now, remember that part. You and me, we kicked ass.”

Bleary and exhausted, there’s the slightest nod. “Yeah… You and me…”

His stomach turns over, recalling what he said. Where’s the Winter Soldier when you need him? But its Bucky he needs and he’s miles away. Sam can’t help but feel he sent him there. Whatever he said or however he meant it, he triggered something. He’s not sure where to start to repair it.

“Let’s just get cleaned up, alright? Can you do that, or do you need me to help you?”

“No. No, I got it.”

Sam pinches the bridge of his nose. “Do you, though?” 

Bucky sighs, relenting.

“Probably not.”

In the bathroom, Sam leaves the wings by the door, the shield beside the clawfoot tub, and Bucky sitting on the toilet seat cover. Sam’s guiding touch finds none of the expected resistance. His stubborn, cranky partner is pliable as he is listless. “You could at least try an’ fight me on this,” Sam says. He  fills the sink with water while watching Bucky in the mirror. “You just sitting there, it’s unnatural.”

“If you want…” Bucky smiles faintly, “I can up and dance. Sing you a show tune.”

It’s quite the mental image. Bucky in full-gear, every inch of it designed to intimidate, belting out Broadway. “Appreciate the effort, but pass.”

Sam unbuckles and unlatches the belts and straps and zippers holding up his body armor. All kevlar is specialty made and the ceramic composites are way too heavy for the average soldier. It hits the tile floor with a clunk. The leather is more elegant. It molds to Bucky’s shape, moving with him, tight to every muscle. Not that Sam’s ever noticed. Underneath there are no bruises. His chest is unblemished. Sam wishes he could say the same as he scrubs at Bucky’s face and abdomen and arms, rinsing off the dirt and grime. Errantly, it occurs to him that he has never seen this much of Bucky’s skin before. Not this far up close. Not this personally. Not even during their one night in Johannesburg. They had barely gotten undressed before they—

Don’t go there, he chides himself. He turns and wrings out the cloth as hard as he can into the sink to keep busy with his hands. That’s the last thing he needs to be thinking about.

The absolute last.

*

If Sam were thinking about it, he’d be remembering how Jo’burg had been sweltering for days. The streets were steaming and the air was soup. A record heat wave, off the charts for anywhere in South Africa, or so the locals kept saying. Sam thought he was prepared for it. Ready to hunker down and wait out the target, primed for a stakeout. No heat like a Louisiana heat, he told himself. No heat like Kandahar. But then the real peak hit and the city was melting and Sam was trapped in the same twenty by ten meter to sweat out his hubris with Bucky, a man who took to heat the way a housecat took to water. 

They took turns standing guard and didn’t breathe in each other’s direction. There was little else to do for relief. No plumbing, no refrigeration, no respite in the radio silence, just one open window letting in stale air day and night. Because despite how many five star accommodations there were in South Africa, criminals never picked high-end hidey holes to crash in. That left them stuck until someone made a break for it. In theory Sam was pretty sure he’d die of heatstroke before the scowling supersoldier in the corner. But he couldn’t be sure if all the muttering in foregin Slavic sounding languages meant Bucky intended to defect back to the Soviets and soon. He had to be missing those Russian winters. By the sixth day in the pressure cooker, they were more likely to kill each other than track or capture the fugitive. One degree hotter was all it would have taken. That or Bucky so much as looking in Sam’s general vicinity again, so help him god. 

But then the sky cracked like an egg and a storm hatched, washing the city clean, bringing gusting wind and plummeting temperatures. A silent armistice declared between them kept the two of them holed up against that windowsill together, sucking in the cool air. Sam half meant to apologize. To just say it and get it over with. Confess that the other man was tolerable under most sane conditions. Chalk it up to how there was just something combustive between them always threatening to drag them under. Something that grated against his better instincts. It’s what Sam meant to say when he turned to Bucky and opened his mouth, but it was lost to the inarticulate sound of lips meeting.

A different tension broke wide open and didn’t close until the rain ceased. In the morning they nabbed Graeme Cormack and brought him into custody, first flight to The Hague. They never spoke a word of what else happened in the meantime. And Bucky never did get that apology.

*

Sam shoves Bucky in the shower and leaves him there long enough to get out of his own armor. Down to his boxers, he’s sticky with sweat, covered in dust, up to his elbows in oil. In the mirror over the sink he can see contusions forming on his pectorals. That and he needs a haircut. He sponges off with a washcloth under the running faucet.

Of course he picks now to dwell on it; the worst twenty-four hours of his life and he’s stuck on Bakmala, stuck on Johannesburg. Stuck on things he can’t change and pain he can’t take back. Won’t be long before New York is on the list of places he carries under his skin, his personal atlas of war wounds.

He hasn’t heard a peep from Bucky through the shower curtain.

trying to get out in front of this disaster while he might have a chance left.

“You know, Bucky…” he hedges, “I know with how things went off the rails today… that it’s been… Look, if you have something to say, you should… say it, I mean.”

No response.

“Or yell it, or scream it, I don’t care. Tell me to go to hell. Tell me to never say it again. Tell me something, Buck.”

Tell me you’re good. Tell me you’re safe. Tell me everyone is gonna be safe.

Still nothing. Just running water and heavy breathing.

“And… as for me… look, what I said back there about the Winter Soldier… I shouldn’t have said it. I wasn’t thinking and I never… I never thought that it would… I’m trying to say, I’m sorry.”

He leaves before Bucky can hit him with yet more silence. There’s folded towels on the counter with fresh clothes and so long as he doesn’t figure out a way to drown standing up, Sam can leave him be in good conscience. He’s about ready to hit the sack in the spare room and sleep for a week when the bathroom door eases open.

His hair is a sopping mess and he still looks jittery, but the man he knows is closer to the surface now. 

“You didn’t have to say that.”

Sam cocks his head. He feels like they are having two different conversations.

“You know what. Don’t feel sorry about it. I… I’m fine,” he adds quietly. 

“Of course you are,” Sam nods, tone dull and disbelieving. “You’re so fine that you’re obviously not having an acute stress reaction right now.”

He grunts. “Wouldn’t matter if I was. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I clearly did. For fuck’s sake, Buck. I was Counsellor Wilson longer than I was Falcon, way longer than I’ve been Cap. I know the signs when I see them.”

None of what he is saying appears to register. He squints at Sam, like he’s only just seeing him after a long time apart. Then Bucky, dripping all over the floor, his bare feet leaving a wet trail behind him, wanders closer. Without a word his hand is hovering over the spreading blemish at Sam’s clavicle, tracing out the half healing scabs etched in his skin.

“You’re hurt.”

“That’s… that’s really not our biggest concern right now.” Sam’s aches and pains are surface level. He knows the root cause and he knows the cure. The first being that fighting death bots is a terrible work out and an even worse way to spend the morning. The latter is solved with time and bedrest. “I’m not worried about me. I’m gonna be fine. Gonna live to fight another day, or long enough to nearly get killed by another android or alien or whatever comes next. You, though… I’m less sure about you, Buck.”

Bucky ignores him, sweeping past straight into the hallway. There he is yanking open draws and cabinets, rummaging around for something. He seems to find what he’s looking for. A small black jar he tosses to Sam. 

Sam looks over the container. There is a wall of script on one side in short clipped lines in an alphabet Sam doesn’t recognize, entirely unreliable. “What’s this for?”

“It’s an ointment. Wakandan.”

“And?”

“Put it on your bruises. You heal faster.” Humoring Bucky, Sam twists off the lid to inspect the contents. It’s clay-like and red, smelling herbal and earthy. Sam’s never one to doubt Wakanda, but it seems like too tall an order for such a small jar. 

“This is real nice of you, Buck. But we were in the middle of something.”

Bucky is not listening. Instead he takes hold of Sam’s arm, steering them through the threshold of his bedroom door. Sam lets himself be manhandled, half out of guilt and half not wanting to remind Bucky that this isn’t Sam’s bed he’s plunking him down to sit on. Sam’s been sleeping in the spare room across the hall.

Bucky unscrews the jar and hands it to Sam. “Put it on. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

Reluctant, Sam acquiesces. He starts applying the medication, scooping a clumsy amount into his palm. But Bucky, being finicky in the way only he can be, kneels down to take the jar back from Sam again. He dips two fingers in and applies a more even, generous strokes to Sam’s wounds. Warmth blooms instantly. The clay texture changing on contact, mingling with body heat until it goes slippery and silky. Everywhere the material covers tension releases soft and slow. Pain seeps out of his muscles little by little following Bucky’s careful minisations. 

And in the blink of an eye, nothing hurts anymore.

“Better?” Bucky asks meekly, face downturned.

Sam swallows. He can breathe easier now, deeper. His head is comfortably foggy, his eyes feeling heavy, like he might finally be able to rest. He glances back at Bucky, still waiting for an answer.

“Why do you have this?”

Bucky’s head turns, puzzled and confused. 

“Not that I’m complaining… just wondering. Since you’re a supersoldier, you  won’t ever need something like this to heal. So why hang onto it?”

Bucky pulls back. His arms are crossed and he looks exhausted. Frustrated. “You really don’t get it.”

“Don’t get what?”

Apparently it’s possible for a vibranium prosthesis to register a tremor. It shakes steadily at Bucky’s chest. He snatches the metal wrist with his right hand trying to steady it to no avail. “You’re not Counselor Wilson. You’re not Falcon. You’re Captain America.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Everything!” His shouting bounces off the bedroom walls, his voice louder than Sam’s heard since the battle. “It has everything to do with it. Because I’m the guy… I’m the guy who looks out for Captain America!”

Oh.

“I’m the guy who watches your back! I’m the guy who keeps you safe! I’m the guy who keeps the Winter Solider locked up tight in a fucking vise,” he jabs a finger to his temple, “I hold him back every minute of every damn day… until you need him!”

A rush overtakes him, pushing to Bucky’s side. He tries to guard himself, hide his face from Sam, but Sam won’t accept it. “Bucky, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have… Look at me, hey! I shouldn’t have asked. I shoulda just known. Should have just said, thank you.”

It wasn’t a secret how Bucky prides himself on his willingness to follow Captain America anywhere. He did it for Steve. He’s more than proved it to Sam, even when others had doubted him. Some days it was more loyalty than Sam knew what how to be worthy of.

“I know you look out for me. More than anyone’s ever done for me. But that’s gotta go both ways. You have to let me help you. And if I can’t… We can find you someone who can. A doctor, maybe. There are specialists that Steve used to see. I could take you to them.”

Bucky retracts, bent close to himself to take up less space. “You know what they’ll do if they see me like this. You want them to put me behind bars?”

“No. You know I don’t.” Sam pulls him closer by the shoulders. Isaiah Bradley’s weathered face looms in the back of his mind. The years stolen from him because of fear and hatred. “That won’t happen to you.”

“They only let me go in the first place because they know no one can control me. But if you tell them I can’t control myself, then whats the difference?”

“I’m not saying that! I would never say that!”

Bucky’s flushes, hot and hurt. “Once they decide I’m too dangerous to be free, I’m stuck in a hole for the next hundred years. And if… if it was just about my life, I could live with that. I’d deserve it and more for all the things I did. But it’s not just my life. It’s yours too, Sam. Because I can’t protect you from inside a cage!”

Sam stumbles a step back. “This isn’t about me, Buck.”

Bucky stares hard at him. Bitter. Betrayed. 

“It is for me.”

There is no discerning why it hurts to hear. Why his resolute tone sends an aching pang tearing through Sam. He hangs his head, feels his stomach hardening. His thoughts are spinning. Time feels like it’s crawling on its hands and knees, begging to stop. Begging Sam to say it, just this once. He could unearth every bit of history between them, turn over every stone and rethink every choice and action and know how they got here. He should be able to admit it to himself.

He can’t.

Blinking hard, Sam does what he’s grown the most accustomed to. He pushes it aside. He focuses on anything else. “It’s been hours and you’re still shaking, Bucky. You’re breathing hard. And I bet you’ve got heart palpitations. Or chest pain, nausea?”

Bucky glowers.

“I can’t help you if you won’t let me.”

Shrugging, Bucky doesn’t deny it. He leans away, defeated. His back faces Sam and for the longest time he doesn’t speak. A rolling police siren filters in through the windows. If he listens closer, he hears footsteps shuffling, neighbors arguing, warped doors scraping open and shut. The city outside is alive and kicking, despite the hour.

“There’s one thing we could try…” he suggests, resigned, a little desperate. The last of his fight draining out. “Something you could do.”

Sam doesn’t like the sound of this, wherever it might be going. But he’s willing to meet his partner halfway. “Spit it out. I’ll do it. Anything.”

Bucky hasn’t turned around. He’s talking to the door. “Are you sure about that?”

“No. But I said anything, didn’t I?”

“Then I need you… I need you to tell me what to do. Give me a command.”

“What?” Sam freezes. He has to have heard Bucky wrong. It can’t be that simple. It can’t be that insidious. “What do you mean, give you a command?”

“Exactly what it sounds like.”

Sam squeezes his eyes shut. In his head, they’re still trapped in that terminal, stuck underground, watching that machine pummeling and shoveling into the dirt with zero explanation, malicious programming to blame. It’s too similar to the way it ended with Bucky pounding it into scrap far longer than necessary, longer than humanly tolerable. No explanation there either, only the looming threat of haywire circuitry and all that might entail.

Opening his eyes, he sees the tremor in Bucky’s left hand has worsened.

Reeling, his mind lands on the oddest of answers. Sam clears his throat. “We left dishes in the sink.”

Bucky breathes out, hard and apprehensive. Anticipating. It’s the only sound or movement either of them make.

“I said, we left dishes in the sink. You should go wash them. Right now.”

Bucky turns at last. His eyes are dark, but clear. He says something in Russian under his breath, then turns heel and marches out of the room. Sam hears his trail stop at the other end of the brownstone. Running water, the scrape of plates and silverware. He scrounges up the courage to peek past the door. Bucky’s standing there, scrubbing away. Completely unbothered.

It’s an innocent command. Small, stupid, meaningless. It shouldn’t bother Sam. He shouldn’t feel this sting of fear that a line has been crossed.

What he does feel is utter exhaustion. Between his depleted energy and the cumulative sedative effect of the Wakandan medicine, Sam is swaying on his feet. He drudges back to bed and listens to Bucky puttering around the kitchen for as long as he can stay awake.

He only remembers it was Bucky’s bed the moment before he drifts off.

* * *

Steve’s there. 

There, being somewhere Sam’s never been before. A cathedral in Flatbush, all black and white and brown around the middle, exactly like the photograph Bucky showed him of what Ebbets Field used to be. The stadium that belonged to the Dodgers back when the Dodgers belonged to Brooklyn. Sweeping arches and planes of glass and open sky. A hazy roar rises from the field, the fans going wild.

Sam sighs, turning to Steve. All this whitewashed nostalgia is dizzying. He can’t make heads or tails of any of this pre-war pastiche. “If it matters to either of you yankees, I’m actually a Saints fan. Y’know the, the football team? The real American pastime.”

Steve grins, holding a bag of peanuts. He looks younger than the last time they saw each other but older than the version of him that still lives in Sam’s memories. “So you and Bucky, huh? Called it.”

Sam opens his mouth to argue but the city is fading, color and sounds slipping down a drain. In a flash Steve is gone, too. Which is typical. He always had to have the last word.

* * * 

Someone is raising their voice. “You’re not going in there.”

Sam jolts up. Bucky’s arguing with someone. 

“Oh, c’mon! Please? You could just wake him up for a minute, and I could ask him myself—”

“I already told you. Go back to Queens, kid.”

Sam wipes sleep from the corner of his eyes, dragging his feet over the edge of the bed. It takes a moment for everything to catch up. He’s in New York. Brooklyn. Bucky’s bedroom. And apparently Bucky’s in the other room arguing with Spider-Man of all people.

“Kid, don’t make me throw you outta here.”

Sounds of a ruckus follow. Something topples over with a thud and a box of something spills, rolls across the rugs. Sam figures he should probably stop them. There’s more tumbling and bumping as Sam puts on one of Bucky’s shirts. It doesn’t hurt to pull over his head. His rotator cuff feels completely fine. Points for Wakanan medical intervention. He doesn’t even need painkillers.

The living room is mess and furniture is upended when Sam walks in to find Bucky brandishing a broom handle in one arm — he’s not wearing his prosthesis — swatting at the ceiling where an unmasked Spider-Man is currently hanging from.

“Hi, Mister Wilson! Sorry to wake you—” Bucky swings and gets the kid in the back of the head with the broom, which he then snatches at until he and Bucky end up in a game of tug-o-war, “You were sleeping a really long time and I was wondering if I could- Ow!”

“Bucky, let him down.”

His partner obliges, looking petulant and ridiculous while he does it. The kid is at least grateful to be rightside up again. “Thanks, Mister Wilson.”

“How did you find this place?” Sam asks straight to the point. In the corner of his eye he sees clean dishes stacked neat and orderly on the counter. There’s a rung out sponge drying on the window sill above the sink.

“Missus Potts helped me. When I wanted to find you, she pointed out that Stark Industries owns the whole building. Wish I’d’ve known that while I was apartment hunting for college. I put money down to rent way too far from campus.”

Sam glances at Bucky. “Stark money bought you this place?”

“What?” Bucky scoffs. “He’s dead. Not like he’s using it anymore.”

“Missus Potts said it was a gift ,” the kid cuts in. He was always sensitive about Tony.

“But why are you here, Peter? What do you want?”

“Right. Right! I have a pitch. A proposition. An offer you cannot refuse .” He getsitulates with his hands, deepening his voice.

Bucky wrinkles his nose. “Why is it talking like that?”

“It’s a bad Marlon Brando impression. The Godfather. I’ll explain it later.”

“I was really, really, really hoping that if you had the time, you would let me introduce you to the world’s next greatest, most hard-hitting-est investigative reporter who would love to interview you, the one and only Captain America.”

Call him sleep-logged, but Sam took in none of that. “What?”

Peter sucked in a breath. “After we graduate my girlfriend is planning to majoring in journalism and she has her heart set on this university that’s really competitive and it’s all about who you know and who you rub shoulders with but if she submitted a real interview with a real superhero, it’d be a cinch for her to get in!”

“Kid, breathe.” Peter does as he’s told. “Now if you stop to think about it, you’d remember that you’re Spider-Man. Why doesn’t she just interview you?”

He folds in at the shoulders. “So I offered but her focuses are on racial justice and social equity. She did her senior year seminar on white how privilege and red-lining affected public opinion and funding towards which neighborhoods got rebuilt after Loki.”

Sam nods, knowingly. “Your girlfriend is black, isn’t she?”

“Yes!” he says, brightly, sensing his opening, “yes, she is. Does that mean you’ll do it?”

“No,” Bucky answers, pouring himself some coffee. “We’re busy.”

Peter shushes him. “Please, please, please, Mister Wilson? I understand, it’s not the best time, everything’s crazy, and General Ross won’t leave the city and keeps threatening to arrest me, and I just dropped in on you and your boyfriend while you’re at home but—”

Bucky’s coffee cup shatters in his hands.

“What did you just say?”

Peter looks from Sam to Bucky and back to Sam. “I’ve said something wrong.”

“You think Bucky and I are— what ?”

Peter is backing away slowly, red-faced, smiling hard and unnatural. “Okay. Okay. Okay. So maybe I wasn’t right about that last part. And I’ll just get out of your hair, go out the way I came.” He backs into the far wall, feeling around for the window latch. “Sorry about all the confusion, if you two aren’t really… I mean, its okay to not be gay, I think? And if you, um change your mind — about the interview, not about not being gay! - then my number is on the post-it on the dining table. My girlfriend would really love to interview black Captain America. Or just regular Captain America, no modifier needed! Bye!” 

Peter is halfway out the window. He leans back in.

“Are you two sure that you’re not like, together-together ?”

Bucky pushes the kid out and slams the window shut.

Sam forces air in through his nose and out of his mouth. “Seriously, Buck? You could’ve hurt him.”

“He’s fine.” Bucky doesn’t actually check, but Peter is a blur swinging from rooftops down the street. “How are you feeling?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing.”

Looking at him now, nothing about Bucky looks any different from normal. Same scowl lines on his forehead and perpetual five-o’clock shadow. He looks even-keeled, steady. No tremor. No sweat. Like the night before never even happened.

Neither of them mention the bomb the Spider-Kid dropped in his wake.

“I see the dishes are done.”

“They are.” Bucky fetches another mug. He pours more coffee and adds two rounded scoops of sugar while stirring, skipping the cream before he hands it to Sam. Their fingertips touch and Sam feels wide awake before his first sip. 

He draws back to the kitchen table, keeping a safe distance. 

“You know, when I said you could give me a command, I kinda meant any command.”

“Duly noted.” Sam pretends not to notice Bucky’s low grade disappointment, or the fact that he knows exactly how Sam takes in his coffee. “Next time, I’ll make you take the trash out.”

He watches Sam drinking intently, gathering his composure. “And this is the part where I have to explain myself, right?”

“No.” Sam leans back in his chair. “This isn’t an interrogation.”

He gives Sam a doubtful look. “But?”

“But… yeah, I’ve got questions.”

“Such as…?”

Sam eyes him over the rim of his mug. 

“Why were you suddenly ten times stronger than I’ve ever seen you for a whole minutes and a zombie for hours after? Has it happened before? For how long? Will it happen again? What triggers it? How does obeying commands stop it? And most importantly, what the hell did you mean when you said you were keeping the Winter Solider locked up?”

Bucky startles.

“I said that?”

“Yup.”

“Fuck.”

Bucky turns to the window. He looks ready to throw himself out.

“I didn’t mean… It’s not the way it sounds. It’s not that bad. He’s not, he’s not real. He’s not alive in my head or anything.”

“Good.” Sam finishes his coffee. He didn’t need the nightmare of a Russian spewing Terminator Bucky ripping his wings off. “One of your personalities is already enough.”

“You don’t sound like you believe me.”

Sam scratches his beard. “You told me that all that time in Wakanda fixed you. That the Dora Milaje broke your conditioning. But last night, you weren’t you. You were… you were distant. Vulnerable. Slipping in and out of a fugue. And what you needed, what you asked me to do? Anyone else could have taken advantage of that.”

Bucky shakes his head. “But it wasn’t anyone else. It was you.”

“What if it wasn’t?”

“That’s not the way it works. No one controls me. Not unless I let them. Not if I don’t want them to.”

And I want you to , goes unspoken.

To Sam’s left is the post-it Spider-Man left. It’s got a ten digit number and a squiggly smiley face at the end. The pipsqueak had called them boyfriends. He always talked a mile a minute, never once thinking about what he was saying. It must have felt like an innocuous observation. A harmless guess.

But the air-dried plates and upside down cups in the kitchen do not feel harmless. They feel daunting. Frightening.

Tell me what to do , Bucky had said.

Sam wishes someone would tell him the same.

Bucky edges out of Sam’s line of sight long enough to reattach his prosthesis. He returns carrying Sam’s coat.

“Let’s get out of here. We still haven’t been to Coney Island.”

Sam raises an eyebrow, aware they are not remotely finished with this conversation. “Won’t it be closed? The city was on fire just yesterday.”

“Manhattan was on fire,” Bucky corrects. “This is Brooklyn. Boardwalk’s always open.”

*

The beach is open, but barely. The tourists have either fled the city or are hiding in their hotel rooms, leaving the Brooklyn natives free and clear to reclaim their territory. They’ve camped out in clumps on the beach, skate by in waves over the boardwalk, throwing up graffiti on walls and scaling  the gated fences of the shuttered amusement park. Unlike the tourist traps, the food stalls haven’t been abandoned. There is no shortage of grilled burgers, gyros, tacos, popcorn, bar clams, and of course, hot dogs. Bucky orders for them, griping about a time when hotdogs cost a dime and not letting Sam put ketchup on his food. Some weird New Yorker faux pas that he simply can’t abide. “You eat Nathan’s with mustard, onion sauce, sauerkraut, and that’s it.”

“I don’t remember being this controlling when we were eating in the French Quarter.”

“Funny, because I recall you snatching a pepper shaker out of my hand.”

“That’s not the same. You tried to salt and pepper a black woman’s roast before you even tasted it. Sarah would have been within her rights to toss us both out from the sheer disrespect.”

The boardwalk creaks and chirps a little tune as they carry on, eating and bickering. Bucky’s got it in his head that Sam’s sister would never kick him out of a meal, seeing as she’s so sweet on him. Sam threatens to toss him in the ocean out of obligation to his sister’s honor. 

Sam wouldn’t admit, but ketchup-less hotdogs aside, he’s enjoying himself. This is more of what he had in mind when they arrived in the city. Sightseeing and tipping buskers. Expensive food and people watching. More leisure all around and a lot less life-or-death scenarios. It’d be almost perfect if their every move weren’t being followed at every turn.

“They’re just seagulls , Sam,” Bucky keeps insisting. “Pigeons that live by the water.”

“I know what seagulls are. Those are not seagulls.” The flock flying overhead glides eerily close, Sam feeling the weight of their beady black eyes. Bucky is quickly realizing that Sam’s apprehension is real.

“You have got to be joking. They’re scavengers; we have food.” Bucky chucks the last bite of his hotdog to prove his point. The winged stalkers descend in a squawking feeding frenzy. “Didn’t you grow up on a fishing boat?”

“Louisiana seagulls mind their own business.” Which, okay, is not true. If those birds back home caught someone slipping with their back to their picnic table, all bets were off.

“There’s slim pickings for litter without all the tourists,” Bucky explains. “Besides, you were the Falcon . Shouldn’t you at least like birds?”

“I like birds. Cardinals, eagles, red-tailed hawks. Doesn’t mean I underestimate them.” Sam finishes off his last mouthful so he doesn't get dive bombed. “Look at them. They know what they’re doing. I can already see my obituary. ‘AMERICA MOURNS: FORMERLY BIRD THEMED HERO PECKED TO DEATH BY GANG OF GULLS.’”

Bucky kicks up sand stopping in his tracks. “You have a headline picked out?”

“It’s the obvious choice.”

Bucky stares at him for the longest, an unbidden smile eeking out of him. “And everyone thinks I’m the weird one.”

They steer further on towards a bench where Sam rattles off avian facts and why wildlife deserving a healthy level of respect is smart, not weird. Birds are practically kissing cousins to dinosaurs, one ones that survived the KT extinction when a nine mile wide asteroid obliterated the macrobiome of the earth’s surface. What about that didn’t deserve respect?

He’s lost in thought on the more deadlier details of birds or prey flight speed and talon strength when apropos of nothing, Bucky shifts and turns him and says, “HYDRA removed one of my kidneys once.”

“Uhh.” Sam’s mouth falls open. “Um, I’m sorry?”

“No, it’s fine. It grew back.” 

Sam thinks for a second. “Pretty sure kidneys aren’t supposed to do that.”

“Yeah, well, they aren’t supposed to churn out eleven-point-six times as much adrenaline as a normal human’s, but ever since the serum that’s what they do.”

“That’s a suspiciously specific number. How exactly do you know that?”

Bucky hesitates. He folds his hands. “The HYDRA papers.”

“Wait, you actually read those?” Sam tried once. After the Heli-carriers went down and Natasha uploaded nearly a half million classified pages of espionage, black ops, manufactured coups, offshore accounts, and shadow state-backed assassinations, anyone with an internet connection could comb through the wreckage. But the HYDRA papers were as odious as they were lengthy. Staring at a screen full of bluelight and war crimes in his downtime had been more than he could endure. Buried in all those atrocities had to be information pertinent to the creation of the Winter Soldier. 

It’s astounding to Sam that he’s never put it together before.

“They kept records on you. On the conditioning and the torture?”

“Well they didn’t call it as much.” Bucky leans back in his seat. “But yeah. Most of it is there. All the times they strapped me down for tests and injections and dissections. I never understood why it was happening, not at the time. I did find out what happened to my kidney though,” he adds lightly, trying in vain to lift the mood. “Turns out they tried to transplant it into some other guy. Wanted to see if it could make him stronger, like it did to me. It killed him the first time his blood pressure went up. Straight into heart failure. Overdosed on adrenaline.”

“That scans. Afterall, the Nazis are known for their sound, wholesome, scientific inquiry.”

Bucky cackles. He fidgets with his hands, and stares out at the water. “HYDRA never perfectly recreated Erksine’s serum. But the found ways to tweak it. To tweak me. Because my baseline is strong, you’ve seen it. But what makes me stronger…”

“The same thing that makes everyone else stroger. Adrenaline. Stress. Fear.”

“Things the conditioning stopped me from feeling. So HYDRA found a work around.”

“Let me guess, it was both unconscionable and fucking evil?”

“Something like that. A drug cocktail that kept the Winter Soldier in a heightened state. Always firing on every cylinder. Mission ready. Full primed. Every chemical in the bloodstream pushing to be stronger, faster, more alert.”

“Meaning there wasn’t any part of you they didn’t calibrate to be a weapon.”

Bucky looks apologetic for a second. “I’m not telling you this to make you angry, Sam.”

“I know you’re not.” Sam hadn’t noticed he was grinding his teeth. His fists are balled tight. He used to be better at hiding his emotions. Back when he had a clipboard and a name tag and a desk at the VA office. There had been a divide between other people’s nightmares and his own. That didn’t exist with Bucky.

“I just want you to understand. What I mean when I say, when I wasn’t me… when it was HYDRA and Pierce controlling me, it never turned off. I didn’t stop, I didn’t rest, I couldn’t think. My body always felt like it was on fire. And only one thing put that fire out was when I completed a mission, whenever I made a kill… it felt good…”

Bucky’s voice breaks.

“That wasn’t you.”

Bucky huffs. “That’s the rub, isn’t it? How much of me felt good doing what I was told, versus how much of me—”

“It wasn’t you. Full stop.”

They sit quietly. The world passes them by, anesthetized to all the ways it could end. Families throw frisbees and dogs scamper off their leases and kids pose for selfies while the crater in the lower East side of Manhattan still smokes in the distance.

“I remember when it finally stopped. When I fished Steve out of the Potomac. Everything in me rebounded. I was sick for days, vomiting in some alley. Chills. Shakes. Sweating.”

“Prolonged stress reaction,” Sam guessed. “The body isn’t built to deal with weaponized hormones on a non-stop basis. Not even a super soldier’s body.”

Bucky shrugs. “I just thought I was dying… thought it was because I didn’t complete my mission.” The waves come in and out. Kids are chasing after it, splashing and laughing. Bucky can’t take his eyes off them. “I found you and Steve, a while after. I thought if I tried again, if I completed my mission then the pain would stop. It would feel better, like it used to. But watching you both. I didn’t want to. You and him looked so…”

Bucky doesn’t finish the thought. Sam doesn’t press. He’s already confessed more than Sam ever thought he would. 

“After what you said, when we were taking down the android…” Sam fights the urge to interrupt, to say sorry again a thousand more times. “It’s not that I’m pulling my punches. Not intentionally. I’m just trying not to feel like that again. Like him. Because when I’m me, when I’m calm, I’m usually strong enough. Usually.”

One of the smaller children runs and trips, face planting in the sand. He wails and pounds his little fists into the sand until an older child comes scurrying along to scoop him up. He wipes his knee and kisses his head and the world is safe and right and good again.

“I won’t ask you to do it again,” Sam promises. “Not ever.”

“It means a lot that you’d say that but… eventually, there’s gonna be no choice. Just like there wasn’t against the android. And I accept that. But when it’s done, when I’m crashing… the only thing that makes me level is feeling like I’ve done what I’ve been told to do. And I don’t trust anyone with that. No one but you.”

Sam takes his hand. “If you knew all this, then why did you wait so long to ask me?”

Bucky glances at him sideways. “No one likes hearing that you’ve still got leftover HYDRA programming. It makes people nervous. And I don’t want you to be… uneasy, around me. You’re the only person who isn’t. And…”

“And what?”

Bucky clambers off the bench, awkward and shy. 

“And I’m in love with you. Which I wasn’t going to say but if Spider-brat knows about it, then so does everyone else. That kid couldn’t keep his own name a secret.”

Sam blanches. He can’t remember how his mouth works. “I—”

Bucky waits. And he waits. And he waits.

And Sam says nothing. 

Bucky stuffs his hands in his pockets. There is an unhidden hurt there. “It’s alright if you don’t… You don’t have to say anything back. I just wanted to be honest. C’mon. I know a bar in Red Hook where you’ll get recognized. Patriots drink free.”

* * *

It’s the absolute worst forty-eight hours of Sam’s life and counting. Androids. Spider-people. Stolen organs. All the money he lost on the rental car deposit. Getting his ass knocked out of the sky. Bucky having the audacity, the sheer audacity—

“Another drink, Cap?” ask the bartender.

“Yep.”

O’Halligan pours him a few more fingers of the good stuff. The same he has been pouring for Sam for what felt like hours. It goes down smooth but it doesn’t reach the hurt any better than the last three shots. Fucking Nazis. Every time he thought he had a handle on what Bucky’s been through, some long dead fascist prick managed to throw him a curveball. Seventy years, on and off the ice, with not even a moment of calm. Not a moment of peace. Just a body hardwired like a bomb.

O’Halligan, a man who by his own declaration was the last true Shanty Irish Prick in all of New York, keeps the liquor coming. He’d been more than excited to play patron to Captain America. And prick or not, Sam thinks, the man is a saint. He didn’t stop mixing Sam’s drinks even after Bucky had stopped finding the situation humorous. He probably did not expect Sam to take such enthusiastic over the arrangement.

“You planning on slowing down any time soon?” Bucky asks when he drifts back into view. He’d been sulking by the pool tables. Probably jealous that Sam’s liver was capable of alcohol poisoning and his was not. And speaking of visceral organs… 

Sam knocks back the drink. “You’ve got the wrong idea about your kidneys, y’know. They don’t produce adrenaline. The gland on top of the kidney does.”

Bucky slouches, groaning. “You’re impossible.”

“No.” Sam hiccups. “I’m accurate .”

“You’re drunk. And before you were drunk you were trying to convince me that seagulls had ulterior motives.”

“And now I’m schooling you in physiology. Because the adrenal cortex it makes… stuff . Makes more than just adrenaline. There’s your norepinephrine, your, your cortisol, and of course you gotta have your aldosterone.”

Bucky nods with his hand on his chin. “Right, right. Can’t forget aldosterone.”

“That’s your parasympathetic nervous system, baby. Your brain senses danger, then your adrenal hormones flood everything and it all kicks your system into fight or flight.” Sam peaks from over his sunglasses just to be obnoxious. “From there on out it’s matter over mind.”

“Thanks for the lesson, Counselor Wilson . You use that line a lot in group therapy?”

“Sometimes. If it helped people. The mechanics of stress. Made some folks feel less crazy. And that’s what’s happening to you too, Buck. Stress.”

Bucky shoots the bartender a death glare as he hands Sam another drink. “What are you talking about, Sam?”

Sam’s beginning to feel dizzy. The neon buzz and chatter and food smells stick together like tar. “The other stuff you said. It’s stress. Trauma. Latching onto something that feels good, even if it’s not real.”

“Is that so?”

Sam nods, head heavy. “Yeah, Buck. It is. Trust me.”

“Trust you?” Bucky is stoned-faced. “Trust you that what I said, wasn’t real?” O’Halligan comes dangerously close, looking to refresh Sam’s glass. Bucky grabs the neck of the bottle with his left hand.

His grip tightens.

“Pour him one more goddamn drink. I dare you.”

The rest is a whirlwind. The tab never gets paid, no matter how much money Sam pulls out of his pocket. “Heroes drink free, remember?” Which sounds familiar. That’s why Bucky brought him here. But now Bucky is angry, teeming mad. He shoves Sam into a ride-share and rattles off directions.

Sam is pretty sure underneath the floating haze, he’s miserable. That he doesn’t like the way Bucky drags him up the stairs to the brownstone. The brownstone that Tony’s money bought, which is funny in a way Sam still can’t explain.

“Drink this.” Bucky leaves a dark, fizzy beverage on the table. Sam downs it, thinking of the old adage. Liquor before beer, you’re in the clear.

Sam wavers, decides the couch looks comfortable enough. A warm shadow slips over him and everything goes hazy black.

*

Riley’s there.

In a canteen that belonged to another time, another place, another war. His wings are clipped but his face clean. Same sand brown hair. Same careful, guarded hands. Same everything, because the dead don’t change. There’s less to decipher here. It’s a dream that knows its a dream. It’s a pain that knows its own name.

It’s Riley, because it has to be Riley, shaking his head, an echo of the day he taught Sam to fly. “It’s not the lift or the thrust that gets you off the ground. It’s not the engine or the machinery. It’s just you, looking, but still taking that leap.”

*

His mouth is dry and tastes of cinnamon. Which doesn’t make sense. Sam hates flavored whiskey. More to the point, his head is clear. There’s no pounding pain, no migraine. “Where is my hangover?”

“You sound disappointed.”

Sam cranes his neck, following the sound. He steps out of his room, still dressed in the same clothes are before. Not too much time could have passed.

“Not disappointed. Just surprised. Let me guess, more Wakandan cure-alls?”

Bucky hikes a thumb back over at the suspect glass on the counter. There’s a gritty film stick to the sides

“You really have Wakandan medicine that cures hangovers just laying around?”

“Some kind of tree root grounds. Cures most any poisoning. Alcohol included.” There is an air of judgement in his words. Stiffness in his movements. “Something tells me you would have preferred the hangover. It’d be a convenient excuse to get out of talking about what I told you at the beach.”

Sam presses his lips into a line. “We can talk about HYDRA.”

Sighing, Bucky walks away from him. “You know, for a guy that keeps reminding me I got seventy years worth of trauma, as far as the whole repression thing goes, pretty sure you’ve got me beat.”

Sam’s rebuttal falls out of his mouth on reflex. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“But you always know when it’s somebody else. But never when it’s you, Sam. You’re always just… hiding. Pretending you’re not stuck. Stuck thinking about Riley, or Steve, the snap, or what happened in Johannesburg. And that’s fine. I can’t make you… I don’t want to make you do anything. But you can give up the act. Do us both some good and move on.”

Bucky doesn’t sound so sure about that last part. Sam sees his left arm shivers and shakes.

Shit.

“Bucky. Your hand.”

He doesn’t bother looking. “Stop deflecting.”

“I’m not.” He lunges for Bucky’s metal wrist. He’d told Sam that he did all he could to keep the stress underwraps. To keep himself from feeling the way HYDRA made him. And here Sam was undoing all of it.

“Except you are,” Bucky bites out, bitterly. “You always are. Running and hiding, with me, with yourself, with everything. Even with the shield in your hand.”

Sam snaps back, burned. “What the hell does that mean?”

Bucky is steely, utterly resolute. He looks like a man with nothing left to lose. “You’re Captain America.”

“Yeah, last I checked.”

“So act like it.”

As if met with the sharp end of a pin, the bubble of fear and concern Sam’s been floating in deflates.

“You want to watch what you say to me next.” Out of everyone, Bucky knew what it meant for him to carry the stars and stripes. 

Bucky doesn’t back off. “When we fought the android, when the army rolled out the tanks and the missiles, you knew it was a bad idea. You knew you should stop them and you didn’t. You let it happen.”

Sam’s eyes widen.

“How long have you been sitting on that one?” Sam stalks away, forcing air in slow and measured. “You want to know why I didn’t bother throwing my weight around, trying to talk the jarheads out of a plan they were already dead set on? Because I knew I’d lose. Because I know that to them, I’m just the guy with the shield. The same way you’re just the guy with the arm. And no matter how much you wish it meant more, it doesn’t mean any of them are ready or willing to take my orders. It doesn’t mean I get final say. It doesn’t mean I get to win. It never worked that way for Steve, and you’re dreaming if you think it will be different for me!”

Bucky hasn’t moved an inch. His gaze rakes over Sam, knowing. “So you don’t even try?”

“Of course I fucking try, Buck! But I can do the one thing Steve never could. I can pick and choose my battles.”

He’s in Bucky’s face, breathing down his neck, ready to throttle him. No one else made him this damn angry. No one else made him feel a tenth of this much, ever.

A feather light slips around the back of his neck. Bucky pulls him in closer.

“So then pick this one.” It’s a whisper, but Sam can’t miss it. “Pick this fight, Sam. Please?”

Sam’s eyes are squeezed shut. He knows Bucky’s face is soft, earnest, and that it would break him. He is so close, he presses their forehead together. “Tell me how you feel, or what you don’t feel. But be honest with me. And maybe you’ll find it isn’t that bad. Can’t be worse than flying androids, or aliens, or sorcerers, right? And I know you don't believe me, even though I definitely wouldn't lie about loving someone who doesn't understand baseball. But who knows, maybe after this, there'll be no more battles. Maybe after this fight, you can’t lose. I will make sure you never do. I swear it, Sam, give me the chance—”

Shutting Bucky up with his mouth is so ingenious, Sam really should have thought of it ages ago.

*

This time Sam’s mind does not wander.

This time, it is safe to stay right where he is.

*

Sam’s fingers card through Bucky’s hair, pulling, growling, curling his body flush to his. He kisses Sam breathless in return and crowds him against the bed. Bucky nearly took the door off its hinges getting them into the room. There was no getting Sam into the bed fast enough. He nuzzles Sam’s neck, mouthing his way along his jaw, slips a hand under his knee.

“Off. All of it. Off.”

Sam’s too busy licking his way into Bucky’s mouth to realize what he means before he rips his buttoned shirt. “Easy on the tailoring. Don’t rip it.”

“Then take it off so I don’t have to.”

They’re a desperate mess. Sam breathes out unsteadily, dragging Bucky back to him for kiss after kiss no matter how hard he tried to sink down the bed to yank off their pants. He’s greedy to get to the good part, but Sam is not ready to let go of this yet. The feel of him, the weight of his anticipation. How badly and how thoroughly sure he is when he clutches against Sam. Holding him like he’s waited a century and more just for this.

“You have to make everything difficult.” Bucky arches against him, grinding and goading him on. The palm of his hand cups the fly of Sam’s pants, kneading the bulge there tentatively. Sam gasps, bites his lip. “Too stubborn,” he repeats over and over, working Sam through the fabric. He’s harder now than he was five seconds ago. “You couldn’t just let me—”

Sam rolls them over. It’s the perfect vantage for Bucky to shove his hand down Sam’s pants. He pulls out his cock, running his grip root to tip. It aches so good Sam can’t think. He moves his hips in time to Bucky’s movements, chasing the brunt of the pleasure.

“Couldn’t make it too easy on you. Sam shrugs out of his shirt. His boxers are left around his ankles. Skin to skin, Sam hisses. Stroking, pulling, heaving tension. Bucky groans, fingers stuttering slightly. He takes ahold of Sam again, ready to stroke him off. 

But Sam remembers the tight clench of that hand. Can feel the shudder against his skin that Bucky can’t stop, can’t control. But Sam can

“Hands on the headboard.” It’s automatic. The words haven’t left Sam’s lips for more than a second and Bucky’s hands are already  over his head, scrabbling for the wood. Sam grins. Bucky looks good like this. Long and solid and pliant. “Keep them there. I want to try something.”

He leans up to catch Bucky’s mouth again. Another burning sweet kiss. A half dozen more kisses on his collar bone, worrying the skin there with his lips. Lower, he nips at Bucky’s chest until he makes a pleading, animal sound. Begging, Sam realizes. He’s begging for it. Sam mouths a tight, hot circle on Bucky’s nipple, comes close to breaking him. His fingertips leave the headboard for a second before they snatch back tight. Obedient afterall.

Sam’s hand stroked down, down, down. Past Bucky’s navel. His searching touch finds heat and hardness and huff of Bucky pleading. 

Bucky mewls, lifting his ass.

“What was that, Buck? Didn’t quite catch that.”

Bucky nods at nothing, face tossing and turning, burying in the pillows. Still hanging onto the headboard, there’s scratch marks, indents where Bucky grip slipped. Sam sinks down. Presses the length of their cocks together, heady and perfect and leaving spots behind his eyes. Bucky is either about to sob or scream when the friction starts. Sam rocks them hard and heavy and it tears the sound of Bucky. He takes it, muscles taut, toes curled, head thrown back.

It’s not like Johannesburg. This doesn’t compare to the quick and dirty handjobs that came before. This is naked and raw. It’s beyond desperation or lack of better judgement. This taste is utter devotion. Bucky could reduce that headboard to mere splinters, yet he holds on, supplicating, waiting for Sam to let him move.

Sam’s close to the edge when he thinks, fuck it. Bucky’s waiting this long. He’s pushed this far. Farther than Sam’s hang ups would have ever gotten them. And he did it on sheer faith alone. He’s earned it.

“Let go, Buck,” Sam says between strokes. “Touch me. Show me what you want.”

Bucky’s eyes snap open. Dark and clear, full of intent. The room spins and Sam’s not sure if he’s on his back, on the bed or the floor or the ceiling for all he knows. Bucky settles between his thighs, breath tickling skin. Bucky pulls Sam’s fingertips and leads them back into his hair. “Like this.” He’s hoarse, blissed out. “I want you like this.”

The fit of his mouth is tight. He breathes in through his nose and he swallows, sucking Sam hard. He doesn’t bother to find a rhythm. He keeps his lips sealed and his nose pressed against Sam’s curls until Sam’s hold gives and he drags back up the length, following his touch eagerly. It doesn’t seem to matter to him deep Sam pushes into his throat, how long Sam pins him in place, tipping his hips into the wet heat.

He should really have a better reason for running from this. A better reason for every wasted second he slept in any bed but Bucky’s. A reason better than fear for the sake of fear. Fear of losing anything that felt this right. Though nothing else comes to mind when Bucky works his throat on him that last time, drawing Sam deeper and deeper until he arches back, white hot and inevitable.

Bucky swallows him the whole way through, reverent and beautiful and entirely, completely Sam’s.

* 

Hours pass. They don’t move. Bucky won’t let Sam go. Or Sam won’t let him go. It’s more or less the same difference in the end. Bucky keeps Sam curled close to him, can’t keep his hands from touching him. He is sure it all stems from the years worth of emotional distress and romantic belligerence that apparently Sam now has to answer for.

“If I’d’ve known that it was that easy to get into your pants, I would’ve changed tactics months ago.”

Sam grumbles, his head tucked under Bucky’s forearm. “This is never happening again.”

“I promised to fight your battles, Sam. And you caved . Practically swooned into my arms.”

“I’m gonna swoon right outta this bed.” But arms lock around Sam’s chest, pinning him closer. It’s dizzying and exhilarating, even still so long into the afterglow. Sam feels his fingertips up and down the length of Bucky’s spine. He presses a kiss to his ear. “Don’t go anywhere.”

Bucky’s brow screws up. “Like where?”

“I don’t know… Just don’t.”

And Bucky nods. “You lead, I follow, remember?”

It could be the blindingly great sex or the cluster fuck the past seventy-two hours have been, but for the first time he believes it. Gives himself permission to feel it as wholly and assuredly as Bucky always had. It leaves him lightheaded, his chest full of wind, familiar in all the best ways. The way it felt the first time his feet left the ground in controlled flight. The way it felt to turn the shield over in his hands and know without doubt it belonged to him and no one else.

Sam melts into one more kiss, and draws back. One last nagging doubt dawning. “You sure you’d follow me anywhere? Even to New Jersey?”

Cursing, Bucky covers his face with his hands. “Absolutely not… but we can start smaller. If you feel like taking a day trip to hell, there’s always the ferryboat to Staten Island.”