Author's Note: Minor changes have been made to this chapter since its original posting.
They take the subway to Union Square, and Rogers keeps mostly to himself the whole way, despite Sarah's attempts to pull him into conversation. Rogers had been out of the States for a long time, apparently, and hadn't bothered to keep up with the news or pop culture. He doesn't seem to know any of the recent issues, bands, or television shows she mentions. Sam doesn't even think to start running interference until she tries to engage him in a sports debate that he knows for a fact will just be a flimsy pretense for her to wax poetic about Alex Rodriguez's butt.
"You don't care about the Yankees," he teases, interrupting before his sister gets on a roll. "You just want to talk about your boy. Isn't he on the disabled list again?" Sarah bristles.
"Oh my God, A-Rod has been back since August," she snaps. Rogers mouths the nickname at Sam over her head, exaggerated like he isn't sure if it's a name or just a word, and well. It's a shame that Rogers isn't into sports, either. Or maybe he's a football fan; he's got the build for it, and Sam knows better than to get his hopes up about the likelihood of Rogers following college basketball. Instead of answering, Sam shrugs and waves the unspoken question off as Sarah goes on to say, "And he's gonna pass Lou Gehrig for career grand slams this year, just you wait and see!"
"Gehrig still has the most?" Rogers asks, perking up noticeably and confusing Sam's earlier assumption.
"Not for long!" Sarah preens proudly, as though she has anything to do with a professional player's ranking and the MLB hall of fame. Sam catches Gideon rolling his eyes as the train car slides to a stop at their station.
Exiting the subway terminal brings them up on the southern end of Union Square, with the Greenmarket stretching out up the street one way and the barricades keeping traffic out of the street fair sprawling down the other side. A group of dancers are performing to the east of the chess boards where the steps are, and Rogers stares at them a little as they backflip and spin on their heads like he's never seen a b-boy before. Sam squints against the sudden brightness and frowns at the good weather overhead.
Except for work and his run route, Sam hasn't left Harlem in over a month. Even then, he makes a pointed effort not to look up when he's driving around in the ambulance. Union Square might still be Manhattan, and not even that far away as the crow flies, but the air feels different and the sky seems too big, too wide, too blue out here. Looking up feels like falling, spiraling through the atmosphere on one wing with his engine shot out and smoke trailing behind him. Like any second now he'll feel the ground rush up to meet him.
It doesn't make him flashback to Bakhmala, but his hands are shaking as he stuffs them deep into the pockets of his jacket so his siblings don't see. His eyes are starting to smart and his throat hurts. His chest is on fire and his spine aches with the phantom weight of his wingpack. He feels so fucking stupid. Sam didn't crash in Bakhmala; he wasn't the one who got shot out of the sky and have what was left of his body abandoned in the dirt. He landed just fine, grabbed Khalid Khandil and brought him back to the combat outpost where it had turned out that he wasn't an insurgent at all but a British intelligence officer in deep cover. He hates himself a little for the way he's getting worked up for no reason. Riley died at night over the outskirts of an Afghani village that had never seen a paved road, not during a bright, clear spring day in New York City.
Sarah snags Sam's arm and tugs him toward Broadway with Gideon and Rogers bringing up the rear. "Come on!"
He keeps his head down as his sister drags him through the street fair and focuses on the present. On the people milling around the booths. He listens to their footsteps on the cracked pavement and the cooing pigeons nearby, snippets of conversation and the subtle sounds of music drifting up from a stranger's headphones. They pass vendor stalls and tables with shirts and soaps and reclaimed scrap metal twisted into art. He breathes in the different food smells wafting up from the carts that make his mouth water and remind him he hasn't eaten breakfast yet. There are fried breads and kebabs and gyros and corn-on-the-cob. Sam spots a place selling giant turkey legs that he thinks ought to be considered out of season by now. Sarah pauses in front of a display of purses and jewelry, surveying quickly before deciding that nothing is stylish enough for her discerning palette, and Sam falls into step behind her next to Rogers, who looks as overwhelmed as Sam feels.
"Been awhile, huh?" he asks, instead of suggesting they grab a bite. It's nice, he thinks, not to be the only one struggling. Rogers huffs a dry laugh.
"Yeah, it's not the crowds. It's just. . . different, you know, than I remember."
"What, they don't have street fairs in Europe?" Sam asks. Rogers chuckles, like Sam's missing out on the big joke.
"Not when I was there."
"Were you in Europe a long time with the Army?" Gideon asks, his voice weirdly neutral, and just like that, Sam knows that he's about to start some shit. Rogers must hear something in Gideon's tone, too, because he also tenses up; his shoulders go back and his grip on the handle of the black wheel case he brought with him goes white-knuckled.
"You could say that," Rogers answers cautiously, side-eyeing Gideon.
"You know, not a whole lot going on in Europe right now," Gideon points out, not bothering to obscure his disdain despite literally no one asking for his opinion. Sam knows exactly where this is headed because they've had similar fights many times over the years since Sam left New York for Basic back in 2004. Sam hadn't enlisted in the first wave of patriotism that swept through the city in the aftermath of 9/11, choosing instead to finish his Bachelor's degree, but this had always been a point of contention between the two of them. Gideon never understood Sam's desire to serve, and he had a whole list of reasons for disapproving of the so-called 'military industrial complex.' Sam groans, loudly, to signal that he doesn't want to hear the next bit of self-righteous bullshit his brother is about to start peddling, but Gideon ignores the unsubtle hint to add, "And even if there was, it's not our business."
Rogers's eyes narrow and he sets his jaw. Sam might not know him very well yet, but he's already starting to recognize what Rogers looks like when he's gearing up for a brawl. Gideon meets his gaze and they stare each other down like they're waiting for the other to start a scene in the middle of the street. Sam shoves his hands deeper into his pockets and ducks his head to glare at the asphalt.
He'd thought they were doing better. Gideon was always going to be Gideon; he was far too old and set in his ways to go about changing his most deeply held political beliefs, but they'd been working hard on setting their differences aside since that visit back in February. Hell, maybe that's part of the problem. Maybe Gideon is picking this fight with Rogers because he can't keep picking it with Sam when it's so obvious that Sam came home fucked up.
"It's the business of good men anywhere when innocent people are dying," Rogers replies, drawing the proverbial line in the sand. "Or is there an embargo on human decency now, too?"
Gideon scoffs. "Being an attack dog for the Ellis administration has nothing to do with 'human decency.' Every time we go to war, some tyrant trots out this tired 'just cause' nonsense when it was never about protecting people in the first place! It's just another rich, white man's war fought by the poor to exploit —"
"Come on, lay off," Sarah interrupts as she returns from the latest booth, taking his hand to pull him away toward the next one. Sam's grateful to have her there to redirect, because he doesn't want to get involved. They all know how this will play out if he does, and Sam doesn't want to end up screaming at his brother again. Especially not today, not after this morning. Not with Riley's fall on his mind and the heavy taste of sand still in his mouth.
Rogers doesn't seem to get the memo, though. His mouth twists into a bitter smile like he never quite learned when to keep his damn mouth shut, and the next thing he says is, "You act like just because we're poor and from a bad side of town we're too stupid to make our own decisions or tell right from wrong. But, hey, I guess it must be real easy to be a good man from the safety of your pulpit, huh, Father?"
"I'm a preacher, not a priest, you ignorant warhawk," Gideon snaps back over his shoulder as Sarah keeps him firmly facing forward and wandering down Broadway. "And Europe can take care of itself. We got plenty of problems of our own, and you sure as Hell don't have any damn right to use them as a stepping stone to send American soldiers off to play world police in the Middle East."
"I didn't have anything to do with that campaign," Rogers says, an angry flush spreading down his neck to disappear under shirt collar. "And I never said that I wanted to go to war —"
"You volunteered, didn't you?" Gideon spits, breaking free of Sarah's hold and whirling around as they all come to a stop in front of one of the traffic barricades at the blocked off end of the fair space. "Nobody drafted your ass into the Army."
"Oh my God, shut up, 'Deon!" Sarah half-shouts at him. She makes an apologetic face at Sam, scrambling to find a way out of this train wreck of a conversation, but it's too late. He can feel their history bubbling up between them, all those years of backhanded comments and disapproval and disappointment coming to an awful head with Rogers caught in the middle as the unfortunate catalyst. The three of them — Sam, Gideon, Rogers — are rooted in place, watching each other like circling sharks, waiting to see who will spill first blood.
"Nobody drafted my ass, either," Sam points out when his well of patience runs dry, each subsequent element in his argument barked with the staccato rage of machine gun fire. "I volunteered. Hell, I re-upped when my initial contract was over and went back for a second tour. That shitshow was my campaign. I was in Afghanistan and Iraq. What, you think I carried a rifle for show? 'Cause it looked good with my fatigues? I was pararescue, not the Red fuckin' Cross, so come on, asshole." He feels guilty and ashamed at his own outburst, and mad as hell at Gideon for getting to him like this. For dragging him into this mess yet again when he'd just wanted to come out and pretend to be normal for a bit. Sam puts his hands on Gideon's broad chest and shoves his brother back a step. "You want to spit shit and talk tough? Let's hear it! Call me a murderer, and tell me how I let myself be used and we were all just pawns in some rich fuck's war game for oil. Say it! I know that's what you think."
"We did go over there under false pretenses!" Gideon pushes back, and he has enough extra weight on his side that it makes Sam stumble back two steps to his one. "You can't pretend that we didn't. You were there! You know there were no WMDs —"
It would have been bad enough for Gideon to have insinuated that Riley might have died for nothing. Sometimes, in Sam's darker moments, he can't help but think that, too. He was never under the impression that they would bring peace to the Middle East, that they would win over the hearts and minds of the people there, but he'd always believed that they were truly trying to do the right thing. It wasn't always clear what that meant and it was almost never easy, but damnit, they tried.
But this, the idea that they brought it on themselves for being somewhere they had no business being, was more than Sam could bear.
Sam grabs Gideon's lapels and drags him in close, nose to nose to snarl, "Just come out and say it, you coward. Say you think our troops who died over there deserved it."
Gideon scowls, but it's Rogers who speaks up next, making an attempt to diffuse the situation now that Sam is escalating it. He puts a hand on Sam's shoulder and eases him off his brother. "Look, I get that you don't think we should have been there, but someone had to do something and that 'someone' was us. The men we fought put on enemy uniforms and didn't use any of the opportunities we gave them to surrender. They knew the consequences and they made their choice."
"You can't tell me that you honestly think they always get a choice," Gideon says as he straightens his jacket out, livid in his disbelief at Rogers's stance. Sam's hands are shaking, and ache with the desire to lash out.
"Choosing between working with the devil and dying up against the wall is still a choice," Rogers replies.
"What the fuck," Sarah whispers, wide-eyed, at the same time that Gideon shouts back at Rogers, "No it's not!"
"You're a man of the cloth. Don't tell me you wouldn't die for your principles, that you wouldn't rather save your soul than your skin —"
"You can't ask people to choose between survival and —"
"The world asks you to make that choice every day!" Rogers interrupts. "There's always a crueler option, Gideon, and we choose not to use it because how we live matters. We could steal what we need, but instead we work for it. Even when it would be so much easier to just take what we wanted, we don't. We earn it. And it's easy to sit back and say that you can't ask people to choose, but you make those same choices every time you get up and choose to take the harder right over the easy wrong. 'Surviving' isn't the same thing as 'living,' and sometimes living means choosing the final ground you'll die on."
"Did a lot of people choose to die for you?" Gideon asks, biting and scathing in his assessment of Rogers's character. Rogers recoils like Gideon shot him in the gut, and Sam thinks about Rogers's sergeant from this morning. Sam grabs Rogers by the wrist of his free hand before he takes a swing and knocks Gideon's head clean off his shoulders. His other arm comes up, the wheel case laying across his forearm like he plans to snap it forward to smash into Gideon's face. It looks like that would be easy for Rogers, like the motions are practiced and familiar. "Were you good at getting people to make that choice, before the Army let you go?"
"The Army didn't let me go," Rogers practically growls through clenched teeth. "I was KIA in a plane crash."
"Oh." A beat, and Gideon's conscientious anger falters for a moment in the aftermath of that admission and they all go quiet. Sam blinks in surprise. Rogers hadn't mentioned anything about a plane crash yesterday, but Sam hadn't really asked. He had just assumed it was some kind of dishonorable action that got him discharged; Rogers's timeline doesn't make sense with any kind of medical care or review that Sam's ever heard of in any branch of service. Gideon's next question is automatic, clearly out of his mouth without much thought to the callousness of the inquiry, "Mechanical malfunction or pilot error?"
"Neither," Rogers corrects him flatly and without relish. A couple of people are staring at them. Someone has their phone out and turned in their direction like they're waiting for either Sam or Rogers to finally lose their last bit of chill and throw Gideon over the barricade. "They had a bomb on board and were headed for Times Square. I wasn't about to let New York become the next Pearl Harbor, so I chose to crash the plane and kill everyone on board." Gideon looks away sharply. "Oh, I'm sorry," Rogers says, sounding anything but. "Am I making you uncomfortable?"
Gideon lets out an uncommitted grunt but doesn't turn back to look, awkward and still fuming, as Rogers fixes Sam with a half-contained smirk and a raised brow. It's hard to argue with a sacrifice play like that, after all.
Sarah elbows Sam hard in the side as she breaks up their circle and forcibly marches Gideon back up the street under the guise of wanting to explore the other side's wares. She tries valiantly to keep Gideon's attention off the others by pointing out a rack of scarves she likes and scolds Sam and Rogers for not seeming interested in getting any knick-knacks. The distraction doesn't work, but it does succeed in moving them so close to the crowds that none of them want to risk endangering bystanders.
"What do you think?" Sarah asks, talking too loud in a blatant and unrefined attempt to derail the conversation. She drapes her old blue scarf around Sam's neck as she tries on a shimmering beige one.
"It really brings out your eyes," Sam informs her in his most deadpan and uninterested tone.
"Very snazzy," Rogers agrees with the same undue seriousness.
"God, you're the worst," Sarah announces, tossing her hair back with a pout and regale shake of her head. "No wonder I never invite you guys anywhere." It earns a tight laugh from the men, and Gideon and Rogers, in silent mutual understanding, give each other a nod and agree to shelve their differences for the time being.
Sam can't shake the feeling that something about Rogers's story doesn't sound right. It's not impossible, of course. Sam's pretty well-versed in the kinds of crucial defense operations that don't get news stories, so he's not surprised that none of them had heard about the thwarting of an attempted terrorist attack. But the wording is a little off, like how Rogers mentioned the Eastern Front when talking about being stationed in Italy, and the more he turns it over in his head the less it makes sense:
Why bring up Pearl Harbor when there's a much more recent and direct attack on New York City involving a plane he could have used as an analogy?
They continue back toward Union Square, and Sam manages to convince Rogers to try a sopapilla when they all realize that he has no idea what they are. As he finishes, Sam nudges Rogers with his shoulder and offers him a quiet apology on all their behalfs before asking, "You're not still hurt, are you?" in a soft voice. Rogers just shakes his head and deposits his trash in one of the nearby bins before they follow the other Wilsons through the sparse greenery of the little park.
"No, it. . . it wasn't recent, or anything," he assures Sam. "I was. . . I was kind of in a coma for awhile, I guess."
"You guess?" Sam frowns, brows knit with concern and no lack of confusion.
"It's complicated," Rogers hedges, not looking Sam in the face. Sam sighs and lets the subject drop, much to Rogers's obvious relief.
Gideon is much more interested in the Greenmarket than he was in the street fair booths. They hover around honey vendors and someone selling more kinds of beets than Sam even knew existed. Sarah gets a carton of early spring strawberries. Gideon argues over the price of jam with an old woman that Sam's pretty sure is about to beat his ass if he doesn't buy something soon. There are booths brimming with flowers that Rogers pauses in front of, admiring the displays for a moment before rejoining Sam as they begin the return trek toward the entrance to the subway.
"Aren't you cold?" Sam asks, glancing over Rogers's thin jacket. He had redressed in the clothes he brought with him, having washed them in the sink and hung them up to dry after his shower the night before. Sam was impressed that they weren't still damp. Rogers shrugs.
"Not really? I've been colder," he answers, which earns him a snort and a pointed look from Sam. He adds hesitantly, "I. . . I crashed the plane in the ice. And, uh, I haven't really felt warm since I got back, so it's hard for me to tell."
Sam unwraps his sister's scarf from around his neck and holds it out to Rogers in offering. Rogers accepts it with another small smile, head tilted down as he wraps it around his neck. He looks back up at Sam through his long lashes and Sam is struck again by how handsome he is. By how much he doesn't look or sound like Riley. He quickly turns away, clearing his throat.
They're just standing there, Sam trying to think of what to say next, when the explosion goes off on the southern end of Union Square.