Chapter Notes: Again, no fancast, as I based Sam's mom off the old comics and some badass mamas I know (she plays the same card game my mama plays, haha). The gangs are all from the Falcon/Captain America and Luke Cage comics.

Sam goes to the church and stops by his parents' house after the service on the following Sunday. His mom is thrilled to see him and makes him sit at the table, brings out more food than he can possibly be expected to eat and frets over his health. She hasn't changed much since the last time that he saw her, still short enough that he can tuck her under his chin and she smells like lavender and olive oil when they embrace. Her black hair is still shoulder length where she straightens it so that the tips curl under, her bangs still side-swept like they've always been. It's a kind of timelessness that his father doesn't have, despite the fact that she's going grey too, that she's got crows feet crinkling the corners of her dark eyes and age spots freckling her cheeks and temples, contrasted sharply against her tawny complexion. They play cards and talk about her students for a bit; Sam learns who is promising and who is struggling, who is a shoe-in for second place at the science fair and who she thinks should try out for the spring musical.

There's a charter middle school opening over in Queens that she wants to get some of the kids into. She's hoping it'll give her brightest a chance to dodge the prison pipeline, because more and more often they're getting picked up by gangs who need planners and brains instead of muscle to pull off big hits.

Sam tries to stay in Manhattan because he knows the area, the crime spots and alleys to look out for, knows which streets are gang turf and which get patrolled regularly. His parents have been in Sugar Hill all his life, and Sam's mom knows three of the officers at the local precinct and all the gangbangers who tuck in their chains and remove their hats and bandannas before coming into his father's church on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights.

"That the ABCs?" Sam asks, drawing two cards from the deck and looking over his hand. His mom likes to play Shit On Your Neighbor, and she never lets him win. He's got a Jack turned over on top of his stack, and three rows of discards beside it. There are two Aces between them, and a stack of cards ending with a Five of Hearts. He plays a six and a seven, and discards a nine. His mom draws to start her turn and shakes her head.

"Oh no, those boys know better," she says, playing three cards from her hand and one off her own stack. The card she turns over is wild, a King of Spades. "We haven't had trouble with them for years, not since Lucas came back. You know that."

Sam nods. Manhattan's crime rates have been down since the end of 2004. They've got the Bloods and the Diablos and the Ghetto Guns and the ABCs, and they're all practically sitting on top of each other these days. They throw up tags on buildings and smash in car windows when members park on the wrong streets. Sam's treated stab wounds on young men wearing the opposing gang's colors whenever one of them wanders into the other's territory. But there are surprisingly few collateral injuries when a scuffle breaks out, and they don't recruit out of schools anymore.

Because ever since Lucas Cage got out of prison, he's owned the island of Manhattan from Battery Park to the Broadway Bridge, and nobody's stupid enough to start a fight that Cage will come out to finish.

Sam hadn't been in New York to see the streets get cleaned up; he'd been at Basic when Cage was released. But it felt like everyone had heard the stories. Stories about how Cage was more monster than man after he got out of Seagate, that bullets bounced off his skin and he could lift a car clear over his head. The gangs were terrified of him. The newspapers swung between calling him a superhero like Spider-Man, who'd showed up in Queens and the Bronx two years earlier but hasn't been on the crime-fighting scene in New York since last April, and screaming that he was a dangerous thug who needed to be permanently locked up in Attica or Dannemora.

"I can't believe you're on a first name basis with a crime boss," Sam remarks. His mom laughs.

"Crime boss? Lucas?" she scoffed. "Oh, please. I went to school with that boy! Your father blessed his bar when he opened it. It's not like he's Sonny Caputo."

"I heard he worked for Sonny Caputo, at one point, though."

"Well," his mom sighs, playing her King as an eight and finishing that stack with the cards in her discard rows. She tidies it up and moves it out of the way. "Well, we all make mistakes, don't we? He's a good man, now, you know. Anyway, enough about him. Tell me about how this new job's treating you."

Sam had taken Gideon's advice and started working out of a hospital on the southern edge of East Harlem, down on 1st Avenue near the river and Yorkville. Sam had a degree in Social Work, but had been certified as a paramedic during PJ training out at Kirkland and hadn't let his credentials expire in the years since. He had already been re-certified through the NREMT as part of his transition process with the WTU, and he'd challenged the regular state refresher course when he first moved back to New York. That had let him skip over the classes he'd missed that fall and he'd just gone straight to the exam back in December.

Sam breezed through the written portion right up until the OB/GYN section, because he didn't have a goddamn clue what the difference was between placenta previa and abruptio placenta. He knew all the different kinds of shock and how to treat them, how to tell what stage a person was in, how to calculate med dosages based on patient size and weight. There were some iffy numbers he wasn't so sure on when it came to pediatric vitals on the test, but for the life of him, Sam couldn't remember a damn thing about women's health and pregnancies when he'd studied for the exam.

"What the fuck am I even reading?" Riley had complained, laying his paramedic review manual over his face. He liked to study on the floor, laid out on his back so he could hold the material above him. Sam was stretched out on the bed; they were in his barracks room because his roommate was never home and the airman Riley got stuck with this time was a loud-mouthed tool. He looked down over the edge at his wingman. "Nobody even has a placenta!"

"I'm pretty sure about half the population has a placenta, actually," Sam replied, and went back to where he had been reading over his notes on field sterilization and debridement.

Riley threw his pencil at Sam's head and missed. "Only pregnant people have placentas, man. And why do I need to know this? How many pregnant people are we going to be pulling out of combat zones?"

The answer, as it would turn out, was zero, but Riley had ended up delivering a baby at a rest stop in Alabama along I-10 once because the ambulance didn't get there in time. He'd been pissed that Sam hadn't helped, but Sam had had his hands full with the husband, who had promptly passed out and given himself a major concussion on the asphalt when he figured out that his wife had gone into labor a week early.

Sam smiles at the memory, and puts his cards down.

"It's fine, Mom. Really," he answers, and meets her concerned gaze. "Work treats me fine. The EMTs and other paramedics are all really nice guys and gals. I'm okay. You know, a lot of vets have it worse when they come back. And they don't have anybody. But I've got you and Dad and Gideon and Sarah, and all my friends, and. . . and just because Riley is –"

Sam struggles with the words for a moment, his throat constricting around a knot of emotions. His mom reaches out to put her hand over his on the table; familiar and comforting, a quiet offer of support that he's had his whole life when things have gotten rough. He hasn't had to say it out loud yet, but he knows that he needs to. That at some point he has to, and he might as well do it in the safety of his parents' home with his mother beside him. "Is. . . is gone. He's gone."

There's a hollow, aching feeling in his chest and a ringing in his ears, a strange kind of displacement like he's just getting back to his feet after a long fall and his vestibular system is still playing catch up. His mother squeezes his hand and Sam blows out a long, shaky breath.

"I'm. . . I'm sorry, Mom. I-I know I should be better by now, and I'm trying. I really am, and I'm. . . I'm sorry I haven't visited more."

"Oh, Sammy," his mom says, in a soft voice. "You visit as much or as little as you need, and you can take all the time in the world, all right? I am so proud of you for everything you've been through and everything you've done. You've been through fire, Sammy, and you've come out so much stronger than you were when you first started. You are exactly where you need to be right now, do you understand?"

He nods, swallowing hard as he wipes at his eyes with his other hand before drawing back up to five cards to start his turn.