"I don't want to talk about it."
He's at the pier. His legs are dangling over the edge, and he's slooped over, his elbows digging into the fat of his legs. If he stares hard enough, he can just make out the sea lapping up at his feet, hot and angry as it tries and fails to get at him. It can't get him.
"Okay."
Steve takes a seat beside him. He stares out with Sam, not saying anything. He doesn't have to. In a way, it's kind of worse. Leaving Sam to stew in his turmoil, all the anger, all the fear, all the frustration, all of it bubbling up like a volatile pot of BITTER, it's worse than any speech Steve could give about going back to the apartment, sitting Bucky down at the table, and talking about their feelings like the fucking adults that they are. The silence is a cruel, horrible, horrible thing, and Sam knows without even looking at him that Steve knows exactly what he's doing.
The bastard.
"I know he's not him", Sam says through a hissing breath. He stares down at his feet; his feet, which are starting to hurt because he took off from the house without thinking to put on any shoes. His decision-making at ass o'clock in the morning never fails to surprise him.
"I know."
Damn. He's really gonna talk about this, isn't he?
Sam exhales sharply and closes his eyes. He sucks in his lower lip and sits up, tilts his head back just in time to feel the sea spraying over his face. "He just." He laughs, and his voice cracks, splintering throughout the syllables like a malignant blight. Somehow, he wills himself to continue, tiptoeing along the cracks with little care for falling through. "He pulls the same shitbrained crap like him, and I-I could swear I'm looking at him." There's a hand on his shoulder. It's not so much a grasp or a hold as it is just there. Grounding. Pulling him back into the present and reminding him of who he is and just what he's doing.
What is he doing?
"You've gotta let him go", Steve says, and there's no room for debate. It's not a request; from anyone else, Sam might've gotten defense, might've squared up, whipped his head around, and disowned, denounced, hell, deleted any and all affection he might have felt for whoever had the gall to even materialize the shit that's got him so wound up. But Steve isn't just some mild acquaintance, and Sam can't, won't, pull that shit on. Because he and Steve have been bunkbuddies for years now, and he knows what's in Sam's head. He knows he's spiraling, unraveling, and that the only way he's gonna get past this is if he finally, finally, lets Riley go.
"I thought I did", Sam whispers. It comes out shaky; broken. He's bullshitted his way out of this conversation plenty of times and lied his way through it when he couldn't. But he's tired. He doesn't want to run away, he wants to get this off his chest. And the moment he decides to do so is the moment he realizes he doesn't even know where to start recovering.
He's spent years telling other vets that clinging to the past doesn't make it any more of a reality. He tells them that who they were and the people they lost, they wouldn't want them to be frozen like this, stuck reliving a life that no longer exists. He talks to shrinks, doctors, peer counselors scattered across the country. He's supposed to be an example, but, whole time, he's been drowning in memories of what was and grief for what could have been.
"Talk to him", Steve says; he reaches into his backpack and pulls out Sam's favorite pair of running shoes.
Sam smirks and turns to him, tears threatening to spill over his lashes. "Thanks, man."
Steve smiles. He gives Sam's shoulder a pat, then stands and walks away.
Once he's gone, Sam laces up his sneakers and goes for a run.
. . .
Of all their fights, it has to be both the heaviest and the emptiest.
They're not even in battle yet. They're at Steve's place, their place, discussing their newest mission. It's another HYDRA facility, and they're going over their gameplan. Bucky wants to be sent in through the back, which is just about the dumbest idea ever because that's where the greatest concentration of guards is, and badass sniper or not, they don't have the manpower to take on the entrance.
Sam tells him so. Breaks down the odds of him making it out alive (gawking when Bucky displays little interest in said odds), lays it out that he will, under no circumstances, let Bucky go in there alone. Bucky just says he doesn't need his permission to do shit and tells him to back the fuck off. Steve tries to intervene, to get him to cool down, but this is the third mission Bucky's been on about the self-sacrificing shit, and he's done. Sam storms across the room, grabs Bucky by the shoulder, and makes him turn around to face him.
Immediately, Bucky glowers at him, his shoulders rolled back like a feral cat. It's half a second, like the flicker of a flame, but Sam feels the fight go out of him.
He doesn't want to argue. He doesn't want to yell. He just wants to sit Bucky down and tell him that when he says shit like this, that it doesn't matter if he dies, that Sam needs to stop pretending to care about him, that his "shitty opinions and statistics" have no bearing on his choices, it cuts him to his core and makes him worry that he's gonna get himself blown up without them having made up. Sam doesn't want want him to get hurt, doesn't want him to die. He wants to see him smile again, he wants to hug him, not because one of them almost died but because he's one of the closest friends he's ever had.
He can't watch him die, too.
Sam doesn't want to fight. But Bucky's still glaring at him. He's not listening, and Sam needs him to hear this.
"Sam", Steve says, but Sam's not listening either.
"You cannot", Sam says, not caring that his voice is rising. "You cannot just say and do shit like this."
Bucky shakes his head. "I can do whatever the hell I want. I don't take orders, not from you or anybody else." His face has gone red, bright red like he wants to punch something. Sam knows the feeling.
"They're not orders." His hands clench at his sides, and he grits his teeth. He can see Steve out of the corner of his eye, watching the two as he often does when they get like this. He looks worried. "They are the words of a friend who doesn't want to see you hurt!"
"That's not up to you." Bucky throws his arm out, the metal one, and slams it into the wall. It leaves a crater, pieces of wood and brick crumbling out and over the table beneath it like the minerals of a collapsing sand castle. "This is my life, you son of a bitch, and you're not just gonna walk in it and act like you have any say over it." He stalks into Sam's face and flares his nostrils, meeting his glare, heat for heat, unrelenting. "If I die, then y'all can just find someone else to replace me. My death'll be on me. Not you."
"It will if I couldn't save you", Sam shouts, and the room goes quiet. Bucky keeps scowling at him, but the taut muscles in his face go lax. Sam pants, and he giggles, bringing up a clenched fist to press it against his eyebrow. "You go out, signing up for battle after battle after battle, not giving a damn about the people who would hurt so fucking much if something bad were to happen to you."
"Sam." Steve, again. And Bucky, too, who's lost the scowl all together but still hasn't moved out of his space.
"So no." Sam shakes his head. "I'm not just gonna-just gonna sit here and let you run into shit that could get you killed without thinking it through. I care about you, and I know you care about me, and if we could just drop the fucking act, maybe we wouldn't keep ending up here!"
"Sam." Steve's in his space, too, grabbing him and pulling him away from Bucky. But Sam's stubborn. He grinds his feet into the ground and remains planted, his stare withering as he continues to glare at him. He's crying.
"How am I supposed to live if you die and there was something I could have done to stop it?" His eyes slam shut, he digs his fingernails into the skin of his palms, and he shouts, "What am I supposed to do with that, Riley!?"
Quiet, again. Just like that. His eyes fly open, wide and conflicted as he runs back the conversation in his head because, shit, it's been years since he said that, and yet, here he is again. Staring down at some heated dumbass, shaking and crying underneath the weight of death on the horizon. He'd thought he'd gotten over that, or, at the very least, buried it underneath far more recent traumas. But it happened. Just like how he sees it happen with his patients at the VA and his buddies from his old unit, it bubbled and bubbled and bubbled until an explosion of angst far too nasty for a guy that claims to be a peer counselor just erupted and started spewing fireballs of crippling anguish and misery.
It's out there. And he can't take it back.
Bucky's staring, and Steve's staring, and why, for once, couldn't he just keep his mouth shut?
Sam takes a step back. "I…" He blinks, shakes his head, and stares at Bucky like he's been caught in headlights.
"Sam", Bucky says, but he's already turning around and taking off out the door.
. . .
He doesn't go home. Not at first. He needs a minute to gather his thoughts before he can head back.
It's late. Three, four in the morning. He didn't check the time when he left, and he can't even consider his phone, not with Bucky blowing up his inbox.
God, how did this get so messy?
He didn't even like Bucky. Steve's best friend or not, tortured soul or not, the guy was a brooding, prickly little thing, and Sam was in no hurry to befriend him. Those first few months, the only time they spent together was when Steve was in town or they were on missions. They weren't friends.
And, one day, Sam looked up, and they were.
They were pulling all-nighters, munching on Captain Crunch and binge-watching Netflix. They were going on runs together, going shopping together, cooking together. They were joking, teasing, reminiscing. They didn't need Steve around to talk anymore, they just needed each other. And one night, after awakening from a nightmare, Bucky rushed to Sam's room, found him awake at his desk. They exchanged one look, and, suddenly, there was no other side of the bed because they were sharing one. They weren't together, but there was this understanding that they still weren't friends because they were something more.
It's why it hurts so much when Bucky says that Sam doesn't care, that he shouldn't be get so bent out of shape about the decisions he makes. And Sam knows it's no excuse. He knows he isn't the only one struggling here. Bucky's afraid of someone taking his free will again, and he knows just how he comes across when they get heated like this. He tries not to, he tries like hell, but Bucky just fucking pushes, pushes until Sam's wound up and has to push back and they're both left a raw, bleeding mess, not literally, of course, but for all the pain they're sharing, it sure does feel like it.
Sam pauses, leaning against a lamp post, and stares down at the yellow light bouncing across the pavement. He wipes the sweat from his face and shivers. It's too cold out for a run. He's gonna get sick, and if he's sick, then that's just fucking fantastic because then Buck and Steve'll be down a man, and they'll definitely be in trouble.
He doesn't want to fight. He just wants Bucky to be safe.
Sam stands and casts a glance at the moon. On nights like these, when the air's too cold to go out, they sit in the living room and just stare out the window, watching as clouds pass over the moon like a wispy, half sky. Sam always sits one end, Steve on the other, and Bucky in the middle. Steve never says so, but Sam thinks he knows he likes being that close to him; he likes watching Bucky watch as the moon fades in and out of sight before the sky gives birth to clear, bright blues and gets upstaged by the sun.
Sam sighs. He pushes himself off the lamp post and jogs down the path until the moon, the sea, and Riley and all the rest of the static all trickle away to nothing beyond right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot.
. . .
Bucky's sitting on the couch when he gets back. He looks up and immediately is at the doorway, standing several feet before Sam, his arms hanging awkwardly at his sides like he's uncertain of what to do with them.
"Hey", Sam says, brushing past him. He walks into the kitchen and pulls open the fridge, snaking out a bowl of purple grapes before slamming the door shut.
"'Hey'?" Bucky pauses on the other side of the island and stares at him incredulously. "You drop a bombshell like that, take off in the middle of the night, without telling anyone where you're going...and all you can say is 'hey'?"
Sam leans over the island. He plops three grapes in mouth, then wipes a hand over his face and looks up at him. "Buck", he begins tiredly. "Look, I-I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said all that. You're just trying to do your own thing, and I unloaded all my baggage on you." He wraps his arms around himself and shyly holds his eye for a moment longer before dropping his gaze to the marble counter. "I'm sorry."
He's gone quiet again. For a moment, Sam's worried that he's truly ruined it all. Bucky's doing better, better than Sam's ever seen him, but he's still in recovery. It doesn't help to have all this unnecessary stress on him. And with Sam's blowup and the prospect that he may be getting committed to a guy who looks at him and can't help but see his dead friend? Sam wouldn't blame him for wanting to cut all ties. It's the responsible, mature thing to do.
"I'm sorry", Sam says again. He's ready to take his bowl, slither off into his room, and hole himself up in his closet for a couple of days. But before he can, Bucky sighs, reaches across the table, and pulls the bowl of grapes to himself.
"I know you wasn't trying to control me", he murmurs, chewing on a grape. "I know you're not like that, not like them. You just worry, and I know...I know what that means. I just." He huffs and presses his fingers against the knots that are not doubt forming in his delts. "I just get mixed up sometimes."
Sam gives a brief lift of his eyebrows. "I get it."
Bucky's gotten up. He's gotten up and walked to the other side of the island to pull up a chair and sit beside Sam. He pushes the bowl between them, and, soon enough, they're just munching on grapes, staring out the window, watching the sun come up, like it's just another Tuesday.
"I don't know who Riley was", Bucky murmurs hours later, his head resting against Sam's shoulder. "And I won't pretend that I do. But I'm not him."
Sam closes his eyes. "I know." He wraps an arm around Bucky's waist and pulls him close. "I know."
. . .
When the sun comes up, Sam and Bucky are on the couch, wrapped around one another; there's a blanket on them that neither remembers getting, but it's just as well. There's a chill in the apartment, and, if they're gonna spend the day on the couch, they're gonna need a little warmth.