They take their coffees from the counter and sit down at a table near one of the windows. The cafe's entrance is behind Sam and Rogers has the back wall in his blind spot, one of his big shoulders pressed against the glass as he stares down at his cup like it might have dubiously magical properties that allow him to divine the future from it, or something. Sam keeps his tone light as he asks, "So, Rogers. You got a place to stay?"
Rogers shrugs. "Sure I do," he answers, easily enough that it is just as intentionally casual as Sam had been a second ago, and takes a careful sip of his coffee. He drinks it slow, though Sam thinks that has less to do with savoring the quality of the brew and more to do with the price. Rogers had flinched at the register when Sam paid, and Sam recognized that specific kind of phantom pain as meaning someone had a shitty poker face and an empty wallet. They drink in silence for a few beats until it becomes obvious that Sam is waiting for Rogers to elaborate, at which point he turns his head to squint out the window at a young woman with an offensively bright pink dye job. "I'm down on East 30th."
"The men's shelter?" Sam asks, brows going up, more surprised by the fact that he isn't surprised at all. He recognizes the vagueness of the address from some of the guys in his group therapy sessions; there's a temporary housing intake center down there. Rogers is a recently returned Army vet with little to no money, and the abruptness of his discharge doesn't bode well for Honorable service. He probably doesn't have access to most of the VA resources that would have otherwise been available to him. So, really, it doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to put two and two together.
Across the table, Rogers stiffens, shoulders going back and chin coming up defensively, spine straightening from where he was beginning to slouch down and jaw going tight. Sam raises his hands in a placating gesture, and backtracks:
"No, no, I don't mean it like — Look, I get it. I don't think there's any shame in it, okay? The resources are there to be used when you need them. It's touch getting back on your feet after coming home."
"You've got no idea," Rogers snaps. Sam shoots him a dry, unimpressed look that gets Rogers to shift in embarrassment when he realizes that Sam isn't looking for a fight. He coughs, ducking his head and taking a longer drink of his coffee, to cover. And okay, no, Sam doesn't know everything about Rogers. Hell, he doesn't really know him at all, but the sad truth is that it isn't a particularly unique story for guys like them. The only difference Sam can see here is that one of them came home with somewhere to go and the other didn't. Rogers sighs, defenses visible crumbling. He slumps back down, legs sliding under the table until his feet and knees knock into Sam's like he has no idea how big he is when sprawled out like that. "There's no home to go back to. My apartment building doesn't even exist anymore. I-it got torn down while I was. . . Overseas."
Sam whistles. "Ooo, that's rough. Your landlord must've been a crook to do that while you were deployed. Were you still paying rent?"
"Not exactly," Rogers hedges. He gives Sam a grim, tight smile that doesn't reach his eyes. It reminds Sam altogether too much of the way Riley used to look when he was talking about his dad, and he has to blink and turn his attention out the window to wrestle back a sick feeling in his gut. "I was kind of 'killed in action' for awhile, so. Can't say I blame him for giving up my old room."
"Damn." Sam shakes his head. "And you've got no one in the city to stay with, huh?"
"No." Sam looks back just in time to see the smile fall away. Rogers's face goes eerily blank as he shifts in his seat, gaze sliding past Sam to the entrance over his shoulder. It isn't quite a thousand yard stare, not shell shocked enough for Sam to be worried that his companion has wandered off into his memories, but it's damn close. "They're all dead." It's the kind of blunt tactlessness that some people get when they're still getting used to an idea, Sam thinks. Like Rogers has been repeating it to himself in the hopes that it might lose some of its impact but is still waiting for it to really sink in. There's a quiet, understated kind of grief there that Sam knows but can't empathize with. "Everybody's dead," he repeats, softer now.
Sam can't even imagine what he would have done if his parents hadn't been around. If Gideon hadn't shown up outside his apartment to help drag him back into reality. If he couldn't check his phone and see the messages his sister keeps leaving him. "Why don't you stay with me?" he offers, his mouth forming the words before his brain has had a chance to really consider the idea. And why not? Sam has an empty room in his apartment that he might as well put to some kind of use.
It's not like Riley's going to care, not like he has a lot in that room right now anyway. The only reason Sam has anything of Riley's was because they'd lived together in secret and Riley had put all his girly clothes and makeup and shit he hadn't wanted his mama to pack in Sam's storage unit just in case he came home in a box. All the rest of his belongings had gone back to Louisiana, because as far as the Air Force was concerned, Sam had just been Riley's team leader. Riley had just been his wingman, and Sam didn't have any right to him after he was gone.
"For a little while, I mean," Sam clarifies. "It's not much, but there's a bed, and you won't have to share the bathroom with a company's worth of strangers."
"I appreciate it. Really, I do," Rogers says, shaking his head. His mouth quirks up on one side. "But I don't need your charity. I can get by on my own."
"I'm sure you can," Sam agrees, and he knows he's parroting his therapist from the WTU a little when he goes on to say, "but you don't have to. I don't think you're a charity case; you're a soldier, like me, and sometimes we need help, you know? Accepting help when it's offered. . . That's not weakness. It takes a certain kind of strength to be able to do that, too."
Rogers chuckles a little, a sad sound as his smile tilts into resignation. "You sound like my friend," he says, and Sam knows right away that the man is dead. That Rogers lost him the way he lost Riley; like it's an ache in his chest that never quite goes away. Like he's putting up a united front when all he wants to do is scream.
"Well, he must've been a great guy, then," Sam jokes, because how else is he supposed to respond to that? Rogers reminds him of someone he lost, too, and the only way they're going to make it through this godawful part of the conversation where they pretend that they're not drowning under the pressure of recovery, of pretending that they don't regret surviving when better men didn't, is with a little gallows humor. "Smart and handsome like me, too, I'll bet."
"Oh yeah," Rogers assures him, all wide-eyed and faux-earnest, which is an unsurprisingly good look for him. "And real modest to boot."
"Only the good die young," Sam says, his playful tone faltering. Rogers looks back out the window.
". . . No wonder we're still here." Sam lifts the last of his overpriced coffee in a toast to that. They tap their paper cups together, and that's the end of that.
Sam brings Rogers back to his apartment, and spends altogether too long standing in front of Riley's door with his hand on the knob. He has to open the door to show Rogers the inside but he. . . He can't. He hasn't opened this door yet. Sam tries telling himself for the hundredth time that it isn't really Riley's door, isn't Riley's room at all because Riley is gone. Rile is dead, and they never lived together in New York. His hand is clammy on the metal of the knob, and he can't get his wrist to turn.
"You can stay here," he says, swallowing hard. It feels like he's going to throw up and his eyes are scratchy when he blinks, like there's sand caught beneath his flight goggles. Rogers is standing behind him, a little off to one side, watching. "I have this extra room." He doesn't open the door.
This is not a betrayal. Sam isn't doing anything wrong. He's offering a guy who is down on his luck a place to stay, that's all. It shouldn't matter that Rogers is blond and beautiful, like Riley was, but not at all like Riley past those shallow surface details. But there's still shame and guilt making his stomach roil at the thought of giving that room to anybody else.
Rogers looks between Sam and the closed door for another moment, then puts a hand on Sam's shoulder. Sam doesn't know how he knows, but it seems like he gets it. Why it's so hard and why Sam doesn't want him in there. He says, "How about I stay on the couch instead?"
Relief floods through him. There's a knot in Sam's throat that makes it tough to talk, so he just nods and releases the door knob. Keeps the door closed for another day. He's not ready to go in there just yet.
"Can I use your shower?" Rogers asks. His voice is soft, apologetic. Like he thinks his being there is an imposition, even though he has an invitation. Sam coughs, shakes his head, and wipes a sweaty hand down his face.
"Y-yeah. Yeah, it's down the hall. I'll lend you something to wear." Sam doesn't wait for Rogers to nod. He heads into his own room and roots around in his drawers for a pair of gym shorts and a shirt he won't mind getting stretched out. The shower starts down the hall, and he remembers that he hasn't put away his laundry yet. Rogers probably wouldn't mind using the same towel that Sam had used that morning, but Sam's mother would have thrown a fit if she knew he was even considering being a bad host.
It only takes a moment to dig through the clean laundry bag to find his other towels; Sam always waits to wash them all at the same time to cut down on the number of trips to the laundromat. He grabs one, and with it and the clothes, goes to tap on the bathroom door.
Rogers hasn't closed it all the way, and it swings inward at Sam's touch.
Riley hadn't been a natural blond. He had brown hair that he used to carefully dye in bathroom sinks during overnight layovers whenever they traveled for training. He liked the way it looked and, as long as it was a dark blond and he touched up the roots between courses, most of the instructors couldn't tell and wouldn't give him shit over it.
Sam used to give him shit, though. It was practically his job to give Riley extra shit about it because no one else did.
"You spend more time on your hair than any woman I've ever been with," Sam had informed from his spot on one of the hotel beds where he was flipping through a magazine. Riley had his shirt off and Sam wasn't looking because this was his friend and he thought Riley was straight at that point. Sam was in a long distance relationship with a cute fuel systems specialist he'd met at Fort Bragg, anyway. They were in Denver, flying from Key West to Seattle after Combat Divers' School back in 2005. He remembers the smell of the bleach in the room, and the dark tan lines on the back of Riley's neck and around his arms.
"You been with some low-maintenance girls, then," Riley shot back.
"You gonna do your eyebrows, too, while you're over there, princess?" Sam asked. He glanced up in time to see Riley make a face in the mirror. He had a little beauty mark on his lower back, to the right of his spine, just above the waistband of his loose sweats. "Make sure you look all pretty before we —"
"Shut up, man," Riley grumbled, clearly embarrassed and annoyed but fighting a laugh all the same.
"Aw, don't be like that, Riley," Sam teased. He put on the most sincere expression he could muster, but the effect was marred by his own grin. "You know I think you're prettiest PJ in the whole Air Force."
Riley ducked his chin and there was that smile and that blush and all Sam had wanted to do in that moment was kiss him, girls and careers be damned. "Yeah?" Riley asked, a little bit too quiet, too shy. Then he jerked his head up and smirked at Sam's reflection in the mirror, quick like he hadn't meant that first bit to come out like that and now he had to cover it up. He said, all bluster and bravado this time, "Yeah, you're damn fuckin' right I am."
In the present, Rogers turns away from the mirror, his shirt wet and soapy in his hands where he was washing it in the sink, to meet Sam's open-mouthed stare. And Sam is staring, he knows he is but he can't help it, because Rogers. . . Rogers is. . .
He doesn't look a damn thing like Riley. He's about four inches too tall and fifty pounds of muscle too big, but the thing is is that people don't actually look like this, not in real life. His skin is too smooth, too perfect; looks warm and soft and all his muscles too hard beneath it. The sharp lines of his hips and lower abdominals can't be maintained on a deployment diet. There are no scars or beauty marks or tan lines from wearing the same uniform out on patrol for days on end. Sam's eyes catch on the slope of his sculpted torso and broad chest, his wide shoulders and tense biceps, the tendons in his forearms that stand out as his strong hands tighten on his shirt. . . Sam has seen a lot of bodies in his time in the Air Force and now as a paramedic, and no body has that kind of careful definition or symmetry naturally. People don't. . . They don't. . .
They don't look like this.
Rogers looks like a statue brought to life. He looks like something carved and shaped in an art studio, or a laboratory, like some kind of male power fantasy dreamed up by a sexually confused fourteen year old boy. It's strange. It's foreign and unnatural and exotic in a way Sam didn't think he'd ever use that word to describe someone physically. His dick gives a twitch of interest in his running shorts.
"You need something?" Rogers asks, and Sam finally brings his eyes up from the dusty pink of the man's nipples to the tense line of his jaw, resolutely set. Rogers puts the shirt down on the corner of the sink and reaches for his belt to undo it with sudsy fingers. The buckle clanks loudly in the silence between them. They hold eye contact while Rogers pulls it slowly from his belt loops and drops it to the floor like a gauntlet. Like a challenge, defiant and combative. Like what he's really saying is, 'whatever you want from me, you'll have to take it.'
The implication makes any feelings of desire or arousal wither. Sam's pretty sure he's going to throw the fuck up in his kitchen sink in a minute.
"No, I do not," Sam replies, a little too loud, too hard, and he tosses the clothes and towel at Rogers and slams the door shut.