Author's Note: Title is from a line in Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird." Also, I don't actually know anything about the Air Force, I just pretend that my Army experiences work in all branches of the service, so please feel free to correct me, airmen. This story contains all seven prompts from Samtember 2015, and has been rewritten from its original posting, as I decided to use it for my 2015 NaNoWriMo novel. If you think any other tags should be added, please let me know. This fic is an AU (of the canon divergence variety), a crossover fusion with Spider-Man, and takes place Pre-Avengers. Big thanks to radbirbRaa over on AO3 for correcting me on how the Air Force promotion system works!

Relevant Tags include: Graphic Depictions of Violence, Slash (Sam/Riley & Sam/Steve), Explicit Language, Military Jargon, PTSD, Unethical Experimentation, and some incidents of Racism.

The door to Riley's room stays closed most days.

It's tough to get used to. They'd spent the better part of the last seven years together, posted to the same bases and attending the PJ Candidate Course at the same time before getting picked up for the EXO-7 project. Sam had been promoted to Staff Sergeant back in 2008 just before they transferred from the Specialized Contracting Squadron at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base because it was time and they'd needed an NCO for the new Falcon team anyway, and everyone knew he'd be better at it than Riley would.

That had pissed Riley off when they got the announcement and his own score was below the cutoff, had him swinging between hot-tempered gripes and moody pouts for a full hour before he complained about the performance reports being inflated and the whole promotion system being biased.

"Against what?" Sam had asked, fists clenched and jaw tight. He'd heard the bullshit about bias in the system ever since they got a black Senior Master Sergeant in their squadron, some nonsense about the leadership being pressured to give higher EPR scores to black airmen so they'd receive more points. Riley hadn't ever given him grief about race before, but people often let their prejudices show when it came down to matters of rank and money.

"Folks from Polk," Riley had snapped, dead serious. The tension eased out of Sam's shoulders and he just laughed, which only made Riley glare more. "I ain't kiddin'! It's 'cause my ol' man was Army. This is some inter-service discriminatory garbage!"

"Right, right," Sam agreed, shaking his head. "Y'know, I don't think there's anything biased about picking the Senior Airman without an Article 15 on his record."

"Aw, hell, Wilson," Riley had said, finally smiling. He put an arm around Sam's shoulders and gave him a good-natured shake. "You put that sense makin' away before they rip those stripes right off your arm."

Sam stares at the closed door for a minute. They haven't joked like that since coming back, and he misses it more than anything. He misses Riley's teasing and bad jokes. Riley didn't care for dirty jokes, which in the service made him the comedic equivalent of a goddamn unicorn, and so had made it his personal mission to learn every terrible clean joke known to man. Blond jokes were his favorite, but he had a soft spot for funny similes and made-up words.

"Hey, Wilson, you wanna hear a joke?" he would ask when they were cleaning their gear after training.

"Yeah, hit me with a good one, man."

"Okay, so these two goldfish are in a tank, and one looks over to the other one and says, 'you know how to drive this thing?!'" Sam chuckled appropriately. "Yeah? I got another one you'll like. Two soldiers, sittin' in a tank, one of 'em looks at the other and says, 'blub blub blub.'"

Sam snorted. "That was awful."

"This one's better," Riley promised. "Hey, Wilson; why aren't koalas actual bears?"

"I don't know, man. Why?"

"Because they don't meet the koala-fications."

He misses Riley and how damn loud he used to be. It's so quiet in the apartment that Sam sometimes thinks he'll lose his mind. He tries not to notice, tries not to spend too much time standing in front of that closed door with one hand on the wood and his heart in his throat like he is now. Sam doesn't push, or pull, or try to drag Riley back out into the world with him. He needs time, and space, and Sam tries to respect Riley's privacy but all he wants to do is see him again.

God, he misses everything about Riley. It feels like he never sees Riley anymore, like he's been wandering through thick fog since the end of that last tour. He can't remember the last time Riley sat down with him at the kitchen table for dinner. Sam misses his Southern cooking. Riley had a grease-stained cookbook full of old Cajun recipes and his mama's comfort food that he loved and cracked open at least once a week no matter where they were stationed. He had thought it was hysterical that Sam hadn't known what grits were before they'd bunked together that first time out in Panama City in 2005, that he'd never had catfish or okra or collard greens.

"What even are grits?" Sam had asked. Riley, straight-faced little bastard that he was back then, looked him right in the eye and replied with undue seriousness:

"Bark, from hominy trees. Ground down on big ol' stone mills. Native Americans ate it for, like, a thousand years before the white man came. Southern kids learn all about it in school."

It would take Sam four months to figure out that Riley was lying. They'd been in North Carolina for freefall parachutist training at Fort Bragg that following year when Sam had asked, off-hand to their waitress as they were getting breakfast one weekend, what a hominy tree looked like. Riley choked on his coffee and she looked at Sam with such profound pity, like he was the stupidest man she'd ever met.

"Oh honey, hominy is jus' corn," she said, and Sam had smiled at her in embarrassment and waited until she left their table before turning to glare at Riley, who had still been coughing and struggling to breathe.

"I can't believe you," he had growled through clenched teeth.

"I can't believe you believed me," Riley wheezed, red-faced and gasping.

Sam had protested that he was from New York and shouldn't be expected to know that Dixie shit, which only made Riley laugh. He must've been dragged out to every produce stand and farmers' market in the state before they'd gotten sent to Kirkland, New Mexico for the next forty-two weeks of their pararescue training and certification. Riley kept saying that everything was better in Louisiana, but since PJs didn't get stationed out there they might as well put in for Florida or Georgia when they got through the pipeline.

They'd ended up at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio instead, the only two pararescuemen from their class to be selected as candidates for the EXO-7 'Falcon' project. Then it was a year and a half of training and additional testing before they deployed to Iraq with the 24th Special Tactics Squadron out of Fort Bragg in 2009. Ten months after returning stateside they were back downrange again, this time in Afghanistan attached to the 58th Rescue Squadron from Nellis Air Force Base, for a shorter tour that ended early in 2011.

"Hey, Wilson, are you. . ." Riley had started to ask, but then paused and seemed to reconsider. Sam propped himself up on one elbow where he was lying on the ground, his wingpack and harness unhooked beside him, close at hand in case they needed to leave in a hurry. It was dark and a little overcast that night, so Sam didn't even have the benefit of moonlight to help him read the complex emotions flickering over Riley's face as his wingman stared up at the sky. He tucked his arm under his head and sighed.

"What?"

"Are you gonna – " Riley stopped again, tensed his jaw for a moment and then swallowed hard and nodded to himself, like he was pushing down an internal debate about whether or not he should even be asking. "Are you gonna stay in the Air Force forever?"

"Forever's a long time," Sam said instead of answering. Riley wouldn't look at him.

"I don't know I wanna stay in, you know? But I don't think I could live with knowing that you were gonna go somewhere without me, 'cause. . . 'cause what if you needed me, man? What if you needed me and I wasn't there?"

Sam squeezes his eyes shut, takes a deep breath, and tries to calm his racing heart. Sometimes it does that, now. Runs ragged in his chest for no good reason, pounding behind his ribs until everything feels tight with anxiety. His skin will feel cold and all his insides too hot.

In the end, Riley's question hadn't mattered because Sam had been offered a medical discharge when they returned from their last tour. He jumped at the chance to get back to New York and the apartment he'd been illegally subletting in Harlem for years, and he couldn't just up and leave Riley, so here they were now.

"Hey, man," he says, resting his forehead on the door, hand on the door jamb. "You gonna come out tonight?"

Riley doesn't say anything. Sam sighs. He was expecting as much.

"All right. Well, you just. . . Whenever you're ready," Sam says, and the next words catch in his throat. He can feel his eyes start to water, his voice wavering when he does finally manage to speak. "I'm here, okay? I'm right here, Riley, whatever you need."

They do this a lot, these days. Have this same exchange through the closed door, with Sam trying and trying and trying not to let it get to him. He misses Riley so much. It feels like he's dying some days, like he's bleeding out slow and in too much shock to tie off his own tourniquet. Like he's coming in too hard, too fast, about to botch the landing and all he can do is watch the ground rush up to meet him.

Like he's already fallen and he's just waiting for someone to scrape him off the dropzone.

He wishes Riley would just talk to him again. The therapist he'd seen while he was at the WTU last year used to talk about the importance of communication, about allowing himself to grieve and about accepting that sometimes he just needs to take a knee.

"You don't have to always be the strong one, Sam," the therapist had said. That line was used a lot in therapy. So was, "It's okay to ask for help when you need it."

Sam doesn't need help.

He just. . .

He needs –

"Riley?"