Chapter Notes: Be advised that I am very serious about my PTSD tag, and this chapter deals with both Sam's war memories and his father's from Vietnam. Also a racial slur (the N word) is used in this chapter. No fancast for this chapter, as the description of Sam's father comes from a cross between the older comics and some Vietnam vets that I know.

Sam's father shows up later that week to sit with Sam in his living room, wanting to talk about Sam's service, about his tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, about war in general and how it changes people. His father is a preacher now, but he wasn't always and he tells Sam as much.

Sam knows that his father was drafted for Vietnam, served overseas and saw a lot of awful shit over there before coming home to angry shouts and civilian protesters. He doesn't know what that's like. The War on Terror isn't popular but it wasn't like Vietnam in the '70s. Sam's never been spit on or called a baby killer.

An instructor called him a nigger once in 2008, back when he and Riley were still testing the EXO-7s for the field. They were just about to go into lockdown at the installation hospital for their medical screening and immunizations, and Sam had been sitting on his A-bag next to the smoking area outside their barracks, talking with one of the program's wash-outs who would be shipping back to his old unit in the morning. Riley was cleaning his garrison boots next to him, trying to brush the synthetic suede back down now that he'd finally gotten the dirt scrubbed out.

"Airman Wilson, come here," the instructor had called from the steps of the barracks, and Sam had looked up but hadn't gotten to his feet fast enough and then the instructor was shouting, "Nigger, I said get your ass over here!"

Sam's blood had gone cold and his face had felt hot as he paused, mid-rise, hands clenched convulsively at his sides. He was almost thirty and no one had ever called him that before; it felt humiliating and demeaning, and he knew that there wasn't anything he could do about it. They'd started out with twenty candidates in the program and that number had already dwindled to twelve. Sam was one of only four black men who had made it to the medical phase, and goddamn it, he wanted to be a Falcon and had been through too much to fuck it up getting hot-headed. He had let the Air Force drown him and starve him in training already, had collapsed his parachute on order and then trekked eight miles on a sprained ankle back to the rally point. If he had to let an instructor call him a nigger to graduate then that was just what he had to do.

For a moment, everything felt impossibly still, the slur hanging heavy in the sudden quiet. Then Riley dropped his boots and lurched to his feet, crossed that fifteen meter gap like lightning to slam the instructor into the concrete. By the time Sam and the other airman pulled Riley off, the instructor had a black eye, a broken nose, and a dislocated jaw.

The MPs had shown up and taken Riley back to the station to spend the evening in their detainment cell, but the Brass in charge of the EXO-7 project must have thought it would cost too much to replace him because Riley didn't get pulled from the program right then and there. He got released in the morning to go through the medical screening and get all those weird shots, and a week after the lockdown was over, Sam and Riley were the only PJs left standing.

Riley got his first Article 15, but it could have gone a lot worse if they hadn't been the only Falcons in the Air Force. Sam had known a guy at Lackland who got dishonorably discharged following an Article 91, and by all rights, they could have court-martialed Riley. Instead, Riley just got knocked back down to Airman 1st Class, got his post privileges revoked and was slapped with some extra duty and a General Letter of Reprimand in his permanent file. The instructor got transferred to another post out of state and Sam never saw him again. In seven years of service that was the only time something like that had ever happened.

He doesn't know how to tell his father any of that, though, so he doesn't say anything. There isn't a gentle way to point out that the Air Force Sam served in is so vastly removed from his father's Army experiences that the things his father shares are just stories now. That Sam listens with a vague, unconnected feeling because they all sound like they're set in that hazy time period that swirls around legends and folktales, lost and unreal.

"You dream about bein' back there, Sammy?" his father asks, hands folded in his lap and his eyes a little distant. He looks old, Sam realizes with a start. His father is all narrow chest and tall leanness, skin darker than his own and starting to sag, deep lines carved into his face from time and laughter and too much frowning. His hair is greyer than it was last time Sam saw him, he thinks, more salt than pepper at this point, and his hairline is receding sharply. "That's normal, you know. You'll probably always dream about it and the things you seen out there."

Sam doesn't answer, and his father keeps talking, keeping his voice low because it's still hard for him to talk about it, even after all this time. His father talks about dreaming of the jungle and rice paddies, about long recon patrols on old dirt roads in a country with nothing but heat and sweat and fear for miles and miles until mortars start dropping and bullets start flying.

He talks about loss and the way death smells, about struggling to be a good man in an evil place. About how the mind tries to find ways around all the bad things, tries to bury it or cover it up, twist or change the grisly truth into something more manageable. His father's RTO had taken a bullet through the back during one patrol, ripped right through the platoon's big ol' Harris radio. The passage of the metal had sucked all the wires out of the box and through the soldier's chest, poking through the skin and his uniform like something out of a science fiction film. All the blood he saw that day was so dark and thick that it seemed like oil, and his father said that for a long time after that nothing in Vietnam looked human to him. He'd dreamt of robots and androids on the battlefield for the whole rest of the tour, and while maybe that had made it easier to deal with then it certainly didn't help him sleep at night now.

"It's called 'compartmentalization' these days," his father says after a pause. "Your mind does what it has to to get you through it, and then you deal with it in your own time, God willing."

Sam nods and looks down at the carpet beneath his feet. It's like his group sessions: everybody he knows who deployed and came back is reliving all these horrors. But Sam doesn't have nightmares about the war and the shit they saw or the awful things they had to do to get the mission accomplished. Sam pulled men out of their beds in the middle of the night, zip-tied and concussed for the flight back, while Riley pointed his rifle at their wives and kids and parents where they trembled and cried on dirt floors. Sometimes they were told who they were extracting and what they'd allegedly done during the mission brief. Sometimes they just got a picture and an eight-digit grid coordinate.

He thinks there must be something wrong with him, that he's not dealing with this the normal way like everybody else. Sam wonders what it means that he doesn't have nightmares about the kids wearing bomb vests who got sent up to the checkpoints to get shot by Americans or blown up by the trigger men, isn't haunted by the people Riley slammed in the face with the butt of his rifle when they tried to pull Sam away from their adult sons, all of them shouting in languages the other couldn't understand.

No, Sam doesn't dream about any of that.

He dreams about Riley, and the pissed off look he got when Sam told him they'd come down on orders for that first tour in Iraq.

"That's not a funny joke," Riley had said. "Do they know how low we fly?"

"You mean," Sam sighed, crossing his arms over his chest. "Does the Brass in charge of the top secret Falcon project know the range and limitations of our incredibly expensive wingpacks that they've had to approve? Yeah, Riley, I think they've been briefed at some point."

"Well, we fly below fifteen thousand feet, and you want to know what else has a range that low, Wilson?" Riley snapped. "Anti-fucking-aircraft, that's what. Jesus Christ."

"You knew we would deploy at some point when you volunteered –" Sam began but Riley groaned over his words and covered his face with his hands.

"I thought someone would realize that flyin' around with no oxygen and minimal body armor in a goddamn warzone is a stupid idea!" he cried. "Like, sure it looks cool on a training slide and it'll be a great recruiting gimmick, but if we get hit with a surface-to-air missile from one of those Talibani manpads we're just gonna be a fuckin' crimson smear, just red mist an' itty bitty pieces a' burnin' metal rainin' down, man, shit!"

Sam always wakes up in a sweat afterwards, never quite staying asleep long enough to hear himself reassure Riley that he'd take care of him, the way he always had in training, and promise that they'd both come home at the end of the tour.

Or he'll dream about Riley pressing up against him in the shadows of a HESCO barrier on the perimeter of a British combat outpost they'd stopped at to resupply last April. They were both tired and jittery from their previous mission, out too late and without enough time to even make it back to Bagram before the Brass was redirecting them, sending them back out into harm's way. It was night and Riley's mouth was hard, insistent, desperate like he'd known he was going to d–

Sam's heart stutters, pulse tripping. His breath catches and his skin prickles with sweat. He wipes his palms off on his pants and can't meet his father's eyes.

"Come on," Riley had muttered, voice low and more breath than substance. He used to get grabby when the missions took too long, and Sam always had the feeling that there was something more to it than just adrenaline. Riley tugged at Sam's belt until it loosened, slipped a hand down the back of Sam's fatigues and squeezed his ass. Sam groaned into Riley's mouth, half-pleasure and half-exasperation. His wingpack was digging into the skin between his shoulder blades and his spine fucking ached from their last flight and he knew he was going to have to fight the unit here to get more ammo before they went back up and, goddamn it, they didn't have time for this shit right now. "C'mon."

"Riley," he complained, smearing the whine across his wingman's lips. "Riley, quit it; I haven't seen running water in a damn week, I can fucking smell myself, I am disgusting right now –"

"So? So, you think I care?" Riley growled back, biting at Sam's lower lip and then sucking on it for a moment. "You think I only want you when you're clean? I don't care. I don't – I like you anyway. Clean, dirty, it don't matter; I want you, I want you all the time, I just need –"

"We gotta go," Sam reminded him. "Takeoff's in an hour."

Riley shook his head and buried his face against Sam's neck. Sam grimaced. It felt like there was five days of sweat and dust on every visible inch of him, and it must have tasted nasty. That dust was gonna turn into mud in Riley's mouth. "I won't take an hour."

"Riley."

"I don't even wanna go up there," Riley had whispered into his skin, and Sam had just sighed like an asshole and rolled his eyes because how could he have known? "Fuck this, Wilson. Fuck this mission."

"Come on, it's a perfectly normal grab an' –"

"No, no, no," Riley insisted, and kissed him again, rolling his hips against Sam's and tightening the grip he had on Sam's ass. "I don't give a single shit how important Khalid Khandil might be; they can send some other fuckers out to get him."

"That's not how it works, you dumbass," Sam snapped, pushing back until he could get Riley slammed up against the tan barriers. Both of Riley's hands came up to Sam's chest as Sam shook him by his EXO-7 harness. "We go where we're told, okay? We don't get to fuckin' pick and choose, jesus, Riley, what the fuck? Get ahold of yourself, airman."

"I know, I know, I – shit, I know, okay?" Riley had babbled, had leaned in to try to kiss Sam again and Sam just shoved him back against the barrier. His wingpack was probably leaving bruises between his shoulders, and Sam hadn't cared because he was tired and frustrated and they had to go soon and he hadn't known, okay, how the hell was he supposed to have known? "Promise me you'll be careful."

"We have done this a hundred fucking times, Riley."

"Promise me you're gonna make it back!" Riley begged, voice cracking and eyes wet. He had looked so scared and Sam hadn't understood at all.

"You are the stupidest man alive, Riley, I swear to God," Sam had said, glaring. "Everything is going to be fine, now calm the fuck down."

"I love you," Riley had said, choked up with emotion. "I can't go back without you, Wilson, I'm serious right now, if I lost you –"

"Shut up," Sam hissed, shaking Riley by the straps again, bouncing the EXO-7 off the barrier before pinning him there with his weight. "You shut the hell up, Riley. No one is losing anyone, it is a routine extraction."

Riley squirmed and tried to kiss him again, but Sam put his forearm against Riley's collarbone to keep him from getting close enough. "Okay," Riley had said, finally, breathing hard and still struggling to push down that earlier hysteria. "Okay, okay, I'm calm."

"Are you?" Sam asked, bitter and pissed. "Because I can't take you up there if you're like this, baby. I can do it alone –"

"No!" Riley screamed, and the panic was back and he was crying for real now, tears spilling down his cheeks. "No, don't you dare, don't you fuckin' leave me here, you bastard, don't you leave me behind!"

Riley's voice from last year is still ringing in his ears when Sam asks, "Do you think I'm compartmentalizing?"

"I think when you bury something," his father says, slow and careful and controlled. "You keep coming back to it until you put it to rest."

He doesn't ever dream about Bakhmala.

"Move right," Riley had said into the comm roughly, and Sam had barely heard him over the static crackle and the sound of the rushing wind. Riley was edging in too close, not keeping the appropriate spacing for their flight formation, and he'd been doing it the whole damn way.

The EXO-7s were great for getting them in and out of an area quick, but there wasn't much they could carry given the careful calibrations for the wingpacks. They got three liters of water and a couple field-stripped MREs, but the majority of their weight limits were used up on their medical equipment and their weapons, on what felt like never enough ammo. Riley used to joke that they flew with quarterback pads instead of real body armor, and the missions that lasted more than a few days made them both woozy and strained more than just muscles and joints.

Sam shifted right and told Riley, "You're drifting."

"I got a bad feeling," Riley said, and Sam had just about had it with this bullshit today. Riley got bad feelings all the time when they did back-to-back missions, when they missed the stabilizer and altitude meds they'd been taking ever since the medical phase of training. "Like, buzzing around my skull and tinglin' all up and down my arms. I can feel it behind my eyes, man. It's bad."

Sam turned his head to tell Riley that it was just withdrawal, just nerves, nothing to be worried about. He got weird stuff, too, when they missed their meds; Sam got auditory hallucinations and mild delusions, thought he could talk to birds and all their chirping sounded like snippets of overheard conversations. Last time, he'd spent twenty minutes trading fly-over reports of an enemy encampment with a mountain finch. It was trippy as shit.

He turned his head look at Riley, and with the flight goggles down, it was hard to tell if they had made eye contact in the dark before they started their descent into the city. But Sam knew Riley's face, knew that familiar, tight line of his mouth and that particular grim furrow of his brows. He was looking right at Riley when the sky lit up with fire and smoke clawed down his throat, burning into his lungs.

It hits Sam then, sitting on the couch in his apartment with his father next to him, that he hasn't kissed Riley since that night, and that Riley's never going to kiss him again because Riley –

Sam lurches forward, sucking in a gasping breath and his father catches him before he falls to the floor. He's crying now and shaking and his father just pulls Sam into his arms, holds him like he used to when Sam was just a little boy.

"Shh, shh, Sammy, it's okay," his father says, but it's not okay, it's not okay because Riley is –

Riley is –

Oh god, Riley is –

"No," he says, to his father and the memory and the heat of the explosion ghosting over his exposed skin. To the sting of burning ash and shrapnel and the awful reflex that pulled him up and out of the kill zone. To the dark form that he was powerless to keep from tumbling toward the ground. His throat closes around the words and he chokes out, "No, no, no. There's nothing left to bury."