Chapter 2
“I just don’t think they’re old enough,” Sarah said, her hands neatly at ten and two on the steering wheel. “It's a horror show out there, Sammy."
"What about just, like, Facebook? Nobody on there but their grandparents."
"Why are you making me repeat myself? I don’t want the boys on social media—”
“What, ever?”
She rolled her eyes and said, “Well, obviously at some point they’re going to have to drink that poison, but they’re nine and twelve.”
“They’re gonna have to join the rest of the world at some point,” Sam pointed out. “Maybe this could be the right time to ease them into it, teach ‘em how to be smart and safe online. Start them with something light. Just a simple account with just some family members, maybe some folks from the neighborhood—”
“What, so they can see everyone sharing videos of their uncle getting his ass kicked?” Her tone was sarcastic, playful, but there was a tense undercurrent there, and he knew why.
If he got killed or hurt, if it circulated, if they saw…
God almighty. After losing their dad and seeing half the world vanish into dust, the very last thing Sam wanted was for his baby nephews to see another person they loved die. They were resilient, cheerful kids, sure, but that was because they had had to be. If something unspeakable happened to him, which seemed more likely every day, he didn’t want AJ and Cass to have a front-row seat to yet another family tragedy. He wanted them to have childhoods they didn’t have to recover from.
“Then what about just, like, an Apple Watch or something?” he suggested. “Not a phone, but some kind of tech.”
“Yeah, ‘cause Apple Watches grow on trees.”
“Apple trees,” Sam said, which he thought was funny as hell, but Sarah didn't even snort. He rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on.”
She chewed her lip thoughtfully. “I’ll think about it.”
“Just in case of emergencies.”
“TikTok or whatever is not an emergency.”
“Never said it was.”
“Besides, kids are vicious, and being online just makes it worse. You know about cyberbullying and everything—”
“Yeah, well, kids will be vicious to them if they don’t have any tech, too. AJ’s twelve now, Sarah. You remember what seventh grade’s like.”
Sarah sighed. “Remember when the Garrison twins got a Nintendo and suddenly everyone had to have one?”
“And everyone was picking on poor lame Sam and Sarah whose mean parents wouldn’t let them play video games. Oh, believe me, I remember.”
Somewhere in the backseat, Sarah’s phone began to vibrate. Someday he’ll come along, a woman's throaty voice crooned above a syrupy old-fashioned tune, the man I love, and he’ll be big and strong, the man I love…
“Want me to get that?” Sam offered.
“Oh, sure,” she said. “It’s Bucky.”
Sam made a retching noise as he reached back and fumbled awkwardly behind his seat for her bag, which was trapped under his suitcase on the floor of the backseat. “Oh my God, you two are like teenagers. Gross, nasty-ass teenagers.”
“What?”
“Your ringtone for him is a mushy 1930s love song? For the guy from the 1930s?”
“It is a classic,” Sarah informed him. ”It is a jazz standard. It is Billie Holiday—”
“Uh-huh. Yup. Right.” He finally tugged her bag out from under his luggage and found her phone in the side pocket, but he was too late — it had stopped ringing. Her lock screen informed him that she had four missed calls and three new text messages, all from Bucky.
“And he happens to like Billie Holiday, she doesn’t freak him out like all the modern music you listen to, so—”
“Okay, no, my music does not freak Bucky Barnes out,” Sam said. “He’s a Howling Commando, not a little wilting violet, he can handle a little R&B. What’s your PIN to get into your phone?”
“2013. Don't look at my photos."
"Oh my God, I am not going to look at your photos—"
"And anyway, I’m allowed to be mushy. In fact, I'm gonna be mushy as hell. I was single for years, Sammy! I was a single mom and everyone was dead and it — it sucked! And now you guys saved the world, and I got my brother back, and my boys get to have this amazing guy in their lives, not to mention he’s so freaking sweet to me. You know he always opens the door for me wherever we go? Makes me breakfast in bed? And speaking of bed, well, all I can say is—”
Sam yelped like he'd been burnt. "Holy shit, stop talking," he said over Sarah’s cackling as he opened her text messages. “If you love me you will not say a single word about—hey, didn’t we have a deal? I let you date my friend but you never, never tell me what you get up to with him, because there is nothing I want to think about less than my sister and my—oh shit.”
MOM PLEASE PICK UP
SOS
PLEse
“Hey,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. “Got a weird message from Bucky's phone. From the kids.”
Sarah’s eyes snapped over to him, all humor draining away. “What?”
“Just drive. I’m just gonna call and check on things.” He dialed Bucky’s number, and listened as it rang and rang and rang and no one picked up.
Leave a message, Bucky's recorded voice growled, like he was hoping that if he just sounded bitchy enough it might scare off all the hungry journalists who kept calling him for interviews.
Sam hung up before it started recording. Dialled again. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Leave a message, Bucky growled.
He hung up. His heart was beating so hard he thought he might be sick.
Something was wrong.
The boys—if anything happened to the boys…
“Sam,” Sarah said through gritted teeth, eyes fixed on the road, “you tell me what’s going on right fucking now.”
Sarah never swore.
“I can’t get an answer, no one’s picking up,” he told her. “But the boys are with Bucky, okay? You know he won't let anything happen to them.”
“Did they text you too?”
“I don’t think so—wait.” Sam dug through the side pocket of his carry-on bag and fumbled for his phone. There were no notifications on his lock screen, just his favorite background photo of Cass and AJ and Sarah and Bucky on the dock, pulling funny faces and falling over each other laughing, the afternoon sun turning them all golden.
“No, no messages for me,” he said, and then his heart stopped, because there was a tiny airplane icon in the top right corner of the screen.
His phone was still on fucking airplane mode.
“Sam?”
“One sec,” he mumbled, opening his settings and flicking airplane mode off.
His phone downloaded eight text messages he had missed, popping up from the bottom of his screen in rapid succession:
UNCLE SAM PLS PICK UP
SOS
UNCLE SAM ITS AN EMERGENCY
Someone is here and Bucky is fighting her
This is AJ pls call back mom isn’t answering her phone
Are u okay
Please
PLEASE PICK UP SHES HURTING HIM
He had nineteen missed calls.
“Sarah,” he said, in a low voice, and she didn't need another word — she just clenched her jaw and hit the gas.
They sped down the road, flying past cars left and right. It was almost dinnertime on Christmas Eve and most people were settled into their homes, but there were still a few travellers on the road, and Sarah swerved around them like she was driving a Ferrari instead of a fifteen-year-old Jeep.
Once every minute or so, Sam hit redial.
No one picked up.
At top speed, they roared past the weathered wooden sign on the edge of town that had been there for fifty years:
Welcome home to sunny
DELACROIX, LOUISIANA
Then they were zooming straight through the four-way stop on Main Street and someone on the sidewalk was shouting at them to slow down but Sarah didn't even wave an apology. Just kept howling past the shops, the closed-up restaurants, the rows of little old stucco houses all lit up with strings of Christmas lights and inflatable waving Santa Clauses. And then they were heading toward the southern outskirts of town, toward the edge of the bayou that the Wilson family had called home for sixty years. Sam clutched the holy-shit handle above his door and leaned into the centrifugal motion as his sister flung the car around the curves of the long forest road.
He kept dialing Bucky’s phone.
It kept going to voicemail.
At last, up ahead in the darkness was the long driveway up to the house; the headlights glinted off the red mailbox with WILSON painted on the side. Sarah barely slowed down as she turned into the driveway, and the rear end of the Jeep drifted and squealed as she cranked the steering wheel.
They were on the home stretch now, heading down the long winding driveway toward the house. He could already see the red and green Christmas lights twinkling above the porch in the distance. Gravel crunched under their tires as they barrelled ahead, and… was there something up ahead on the lawn?
Yeah, some human-sized dark shapes crouching down in the darkness—what the hell, was that the boys out there? What were they doing outside in the dark?
“What’s that?” he said, squinting, at the same moment that Sarah breathed, “Oh, no.”
She slammed on the brakes, spraying wet gravel, and cranked the gearshift into park, and she was out of the car and running without even turning the engine off. The driver’s side door swung heavily back and forth with the force of her exit, thumping on its hinges. Sam’s fucking seatbelt was stuck, of course it was, goddamn it — he hammered and jimmied the button with his fingers until it finally unlatched, and then he leapt out and dashed after Sarah.
The Jeep’s headlights lit up the wet grass in two long beams, and fog swirled upward through the yellow light. Up ahead, two small dark lumps were crouched on the wet grass beside a much larger dark lump, sprawled out on its back. But Sam knew what all three of them were. Who.
“What the fuck,” he breathed.
Cass and AJ were on their knees in the muddy grass and gravel, bent over the third shape. Cass was crying loudly, an awful sound like the sobs were being torn right out of his chest. AJ was silent and leaning forward, his hands pressing down on that third dark figure, and Sam couldn’t make out the figure’s face or a telltale metal arm in the darkness, but he knew the shape of that chest and the length of those legs, he knew who it was, he knew—
“Mommy,” Cass sobbed as Sarah ran to him, which he hadn't called her in at least two years. He raised up his arms like a baby and she fell onto her knees and wrapped herself around him, cradling her youngest son. “She killed him, she killed him—”
“Oh, baby, no, no, no—”
Sam skidded to a stop beside them and dropped to his knees. The ground was wet and the cold seeped through his jeans.
“Oh my God. Bucky? Buck, are you okay? Buck!”
“She killed him—”
“Cass is being stupid, he’s not dead,” said AJ through gritted teeth. He was kneeling beside Bucky with his hands pressing down on his left shoulder, bearing down with all his weight. He looked up at Sam, a grown man’s eyes in a child’s face. “I’m trying to stop the bleeding.”
“What bleeding? What happened?”
“She took his arm,” wailed Cass.
“What?”
In the darkness, at this angle, Bucky’s left side was obscured. But then AJ lifted his bloody hands and pushed aside the torn shoulder seam of Bucky’s t-shirt, and Sam saw.
The arm was gone.
The remains of the shoulder port were mangled. That was the only word for it. A ridge of black metal erupted from the skin at an unnatural angle, sticking out like a broken bone. The stump of the shoulder around it was a mess of bleeding raw flesh. The empty port was damaged too, crackling with sparks that shot off and danced into the darkness; a trio of loose wires was hanging out and sparking, singeing a little blackened patch into the grass.
It took Sam a moment before he realized what he was looking at: the black vibranium sticking out of Bucky's shoulder had been torn upwards right out of the flesh. It had been stronger than the bone it was anchored to. Which meant—
Oh, God.
Something had ripped Bucky’s arm off.
"Sam?"
Sam’s Red Cross training was past its expiry date, but he’d once done this for a living and his hands remembered the old routine. He grabbed Bucky’s stubbly chin and tilted it up, looking for breath, and yes—oh thank god, yes, he was breathing, though it was wheezy and thin and labored. When Sam pressed his fingers against his artery, there was a light fluttery heartbeat there too. Bucky’s resting heart rate was always slow, like Steve’s, like an athlete’s—not this fast, not this weak—
He pushed Bucky's black t-shirt up, looking for stab wounds or gunshots. None of those, thank God, but he was covered in weird… burn marks? Jesus, yeah, that’s what they were. Spots of flesh were all blistered and charred, red and black. The fibers of his t-shirt were stuck deep into the burned flesh and the sticky raw skin peeled up with the shirt as Sam pulled.
The burn marks sure didn’t look like they tickled, and there was a field of rising bruises, including one blackened patch over ribs that were almost certainly broken. But the breathing — the wheezing gasp of his breathing, that was the part that actually scared him. He tapped at Bucky’s chest with two fingers, listening for the hollow echo of a pneumothorax, but it was hard to hear anything over Cass’ wailing.
“Keep the pressure on, just like you're doing,” he instructed AJ. “Sarah, call an ambulance—”
"I already did," said AJ. "I got Bucky's phone from the kitchen and I called them. I called you first but no one picked up. I called and called you both and I texted but neither of you would just pick up!"
"I'm so sorry, baby," said Sarah. Her voice was thick. "I was driving and your Uncle Sam was—"
"I don't care!" AJ shouted. He wasn't sobbing like Cass but his eyes were suddenly wild and spilling over with furious tears, enough of them to run rapidly down and drip off his chin onto Bucky's still, pale face. "I don't care if you were driving! He's going to die and you didn't answer your fucking phone and it's my f—and he's my—” And now he did sob, just one big hard ragged sob, and turned his face away.
Sam met Sarah’s eyes, because yeah, they were definitely going to have a conversation with AJ about appropriate ways of expressing your anger later, but holy shit was this not the time.
Sam reached out and gripped AJ's shoulder, trying to comfort him, but the kid wrenched away with a hard sniff.
"We tried to stop her," he said thickly. "But she, she was going to…" His chin wobbled.
"Who was she?" Sam asked.
"She looked weird," Cass whispered from his mother's lap. “Her skin was blue.”
Blue skin. So some enhanced, freak-of-nature asshole had shown up and attacked Sam’s family. At Christmas. Not for the first time, he cursed every single life choice he’d ever made that had led to this moment, starting with going for a morning jog at the same time as Steve goddamn Rogers.
“Okay, let me take over, AJ,” Sam said. “You boys did real good, but now y’all need to go inside. Go get warm. You can’t help him like—”
“No!” Cass threw himself to the ground and clung to Bucky’s remaining arm, keening like a wounded puppy. Sarah petted at his back and murmured, trying to coax him away, but her eyes were fixed on Bucky's slack face too, anguished, and her hands shook and clenched as though she wanted to reach out but knew better.
“What happened, baby?” she asked her son softly. “Did you see?”
Cass was incoherent, but Sam made out something about a blue lady again.
“It was an alien,” said AJ, over his brother’s crying. His eyes were dry now and steady and full of rage. "She was an alien. Her face was all messed up and she had black eyes like a monster. Cass said he thought maybe they knew each other—"
“Sam,” said Sarah sharply, her eyes fixed on Bucky.
A sliver of one silver eye was staring up at Sam from Bucky’s swollen, bloodied face.
“Oh, hey,” Sam breathed, patting at Bucky’s cold cheek. “Hey, Buck. You with us?”
His lips moved. There was blood on his teeth. No sound came out, but Sam knew what that word was: Sam.
“Yeah, man, it’s me. The whole family's here. We’re gonna get you help. Hey! Hey, hey, no, you gotta stay down.”
Bucky was trying to haul himself up—he made an agonized noise and fell back to the grass, his eyes glassy.
“Easy! Easy, easy.” Sam gently pushed him back down against the ground, though he felt Bucky’s chest straining under his palm. “Nah-uh, dumbass, we are not playing the macho bullshit game tonight. You stay down until the professionals get here.”
“You’re a professional,” Sarah pointed out.
“Not these days, I’m not.” And even if I were, I don’t have anything better than band-aids, and that sounds a lot like a collapsed lung which needs serious attention PD-fucking-Q, he didn’t add.
Bucky squirmed under his hand and rolled his head to the side as though restless. There was something wild in his eyes.
Was that a siren in the distance?
“Please,” Bucky gasped. His eyes were darting around in the middle distance, like he was seeing something Sam couldn’t. “Please.”
That was definitely a siren. Oh, thank God.
And then Sam put two and two together, because oh, that was why Bucky was freaking out—he could hear the ambulance before Sam could.
“Sam,” Bucky gasped, as though saying the word took all his strength, and when he met his gaze it was pleading.
Well. Shit.
Sam didn’t begrudge Bucky the way he vanished like a spooked cat at the first sight of someone wearing a lab coat or carrying a stethoscope; he had seen the files. He and Steve had both read them enough times to have whole horrific passages memorized, back in the days when they were chasing Bucky-shaped shadows down every dark alley in Korea and South Africa and Greece. He knew exactly what kind of sick, horrifying shit had been done to Bucky Barnes by people wearing lab coats and scrubs in cold fluorescent-lit rooms. Knew what HYDRA’s idea of “medical attention” had looked like.
On the rare occasions when he did get injured badly enough to need help, he’d usually let Sam clean him up, both of them bitching heartily at each other the whole time. So who the hell knew how he’d react when faced with a medical emergency that truly needed professional help? One he couldn’t run from?
Guess tonight Sam was going to find out. Merry Goddamn Christmas.
“Just—you,” Bucky gasped. His one unswollen eye was fixed on Sam, and for a moment his gaze was shockingly clear and lucid. “Please.”
“No one’s gonna hurt you. Bucky, I promise, I swear to you, I won’t let them hurt you, okay?”
That clarity in his gaze was clouding over again. Getting hazy.
“Please,” he panted again, unfocused, and there was terror in his eyes—like maybe he was afraid of something that wasn’t there, something far away in the past, some old horror shifting out of the darkness from eighty years ago to haunt him even now. “Please.”
“I'll go with you,” Sam said. He reached down and took Bucky’s hand in his. It was cold. “I promise, no one's gonna hurt you. But Buck, this is bad. You need help.”
“Please,” Bucky panted again, so soft Sam saw his lips moving but wasn’t sure if he’d actually made the sound. His face crumpled in abject misery, and his eyes slipped shut.
The ambulance was pulling down the driveway, its red and white lights strobing across the bare branches of the trees.
“Stay here, stay with him,” Sam told Sarah, and stood up. “Keep him calm so they can help him.”
“Where are you going?”
"It's morning in Wakanda," Sam said, and left Sarah staring at him as he jogged across the yard to the Jeep.
He took a moment to turn the idling engine off and pull Sarah’s keys out of the ignition—but that wasn’t what he was after. In the back seat, under his luggage, was the metal box where his vibranium suit was stored. Yet another beautiful gift from the generous Wakandans to someone they owed nothing to. And now he was going to ask them for yet more.
Sam keyed in the code and flipped the metal lid up, and dug around in the bottom of the box under the neatly folded suit. There it was—the kimoyo bead Shuri had sent along for him in case of emergencies, tucked in a bright red silk pouch. He picked it up and rolled it gently in his palm. It was heavy and cold and made him think of playing with marbles when he was a kid, and he turned it around and around in his hand while tapping at it, trying to remember how these things worked, and—oh, hey, it lit up and projected a little hologram of a grumpy, familiar face.
"Ayo," Sam said, "oh, thank God.”
“Captain Wilson,” she said, with the brick-wall evenness that he’d come to learn meant warmth.
“Is Shuri… available?” He paused, because damn, that was probably not how one requested an audience with royalty. “I’m sorry, I just—”
Ayo’s eyes narrowed. “The Princess is occupied. Why do you call?”
“Bucky’s hurt. Bad. It’s the arm—someone took the arm.”
Ayo spat something in Wakandan that sounded unmistakably like a long string of curse words. “They took the arm?”
“Tore it off.”
Ayo went very still, and he’d come to know her face well enough to glimpse her fear, even as a tiny hologram in his hand. “He lives?”
“So far.”
“Who did this?”
“We’re working on that.”
She nodded brusquely. “Keep the White Wolf alive, Captain Wilson. Help will come to you.”
The little hologram flickered out.
It was a different kind of privilege, being an Avenger. It might not get you far at the bank, but it did get you into a private hospital room ahead of everyone else, surrounded by a bustling crowd of nurses that Sam jogged alongside as they rolled Bucky down the corridor. He felt a little guilty about it—he was being sped to the front of the line ahead of all the folks in the waiting room, their sick children, their bleeding injuries and hot fevers.
Then Bucky's eyes opened slightly, glazed, and Sam felt much less guilty about being rushed to the front of the line for treatment when he saw the depths of hopeless terror in them—as Bucky took in his surroundings, white lights and white coats and beeping machinery—
Oh, god, those were tears in his eyes.
Sam slammed to a stop in the corridor, causing a pile-up of nurses behind him.
"Take off your lab coats," Sam ordered. “Please.”
"Okay, sir, we're going to need you to—"
"That is my partner, that is Sergeant Bucky goddamn Barnes, don't you watch the news? Listen to me and take off your damn coats. Now!"
The group went very quiet. The two women wearing lab coats both shrugged them off, glancing awkwardly at each other.
“And you guys—” Sam turned to the other nurses, or aides, or whatever they were. "If you've got a shirt or a cardigan or something, put it on over your scrubs. Okay? This guy's a vet, he's a survivor, he’s got PTSD in every flavor you can imagine. He was tortured in places that looked a lot like this, by people who looked a lot like doctors.”
Everyone scurried back into motion, but one of the nurses moved forward.
"Captain—Mister…?"
"Sam," he said shortly.
"Sam," said the nurse, her voice kind but tight, "we are doing the best we can for him, I promise you, but…"
"But what?"
"He's special, right? Like Captain Rogers?"
"Yeah. Enhanced."
"Sam, I will be honest with you—no one at this facility is trained to treat an enhanced person, and we don’t have any medical history on file for him. Do you know anything about his care needs? Drug interactions with his metabolism? Can we even give him painkillers?"
Sam grimaced. "It won't hurt him, but it probably won't do much either."
“Does he have a family doctor?”
Bucky? Have a doctor? Ha.
“He has a psychiatrist, she’s probably the closest thing,” Sam offered.
“Is she also his GP?”
“I don’t think so.”
"Then I don’t think that will be any help. But any information you may have on his medical records—"
“His medical records aren't available.”
"Oo-kay," said the nurse, both eyebrows climbing up, "but we do need some intake info for him. Can you help me with that while the doctors get him stabilized? Who’s his next of kin?”
“That would be me. Sam Wilson. I have power of attorney too.”
“And his blood type? Any allergies?"
"I don't know, check his dog tags. No allergies." He wondered for a second if Bucky had had allergies before the war and the serum. Steve had never said.
A funny little part of his brain, the oddly calm part that wasn't screaming in panic and wondering how much it was gonna cost to put his poor nephews through therapy, thought: I hope if he had an allergy, it was to peanuts. Dude loves peanut butter so damn much. I hope he was allergic before, just so the serum gave him one nice thing out of all the other miserable bullshit.
It was always weird, how there was always one calm little corner of his mind that was dealing with the smallest mundane thoughts when the flaming wreck of reality was a much bigger concern. Shock was weird like that.
Oh, hey, he was in shock. Huh. He should probably pay attention to that. He felt like he was rising toward something, crescendoing. Maybe he was tilting up toward a panic attack. Sam hadn’t had one of those in years, not since those long bad months right after Riley, when even looking up at a blue summer sky had flung his mind back to the desert and the splatter of his best friend’s gore on the sand—
"—shoulder is full of metal, which is going to prevent us from doing an MRI,” the nurse was telling him, and his mind clicked back to reality with a jolt, like changing the channel. “We’re looking at removing it but it seems to be deeply embedded in his—"
"What? No, no no no, that’s the base for his arm, you can’t just take it out!"
“Sam, we realize that the metal implants are required to mount his prosthesis, but there are multiple broken bones surrounding the metal that are going to need to be reset. And the whole… shoulder implant, the mount for the prosthesis, is severely damaged. Do you understand? It would no longer be usable even if we left it in.”
Well, shit, thought Sam, numb. That was that. Buck was going to live as an amputee from now on. Because there was no way in hell he would ever allow another prosthetic arm to be installed. Not again. Surgery was simply not an option.
But still.
“Doesn't matter if it's usable,” he said, “you can’t just start taking him apart without his consent. They did that to him. You get that?”
“Yes, I get that, and we understand that he has a complex medical history, but one of the problems we’re running into is that the wiring in his shoulder port is directly wired into his nervous system. And we can’t seem to identify a power source for the arm, so we can’t turn it off to prevent it from—”
“Body heat,” said Sam. “It runs on his body heat.”
“Okay, that is very helpful, thank you,” she said. Sam knew the careful, friendly tone of someone who was managing him. He did not care to be managed.
“The Wakandans are on their way,” he said. “Just keep him alive until they get here. Don’t worry about the arm, don’t touch the arm, all right?”
“Unfortunately we don’t have much of a choice, okay? The prosthesis mount is currently lodged in his muscle in a very precarious way. It is very close to his heart, and if we don’t remove it, we are leaving him at serious risk of internal damage that could be fatal if he moves around too much. Okay?”
Sam closed his eyes. “It wouldn’t be fatal. Not to him.”
“We can’t take that risk.”
"Let me help,” he said. “I used to be pararescue. I have a master’s degree in electrical engineering, and I know something about Wakandan technology—"
"Oh, are you Wakandan?"
He resisted the urge to roll his eyes—seriously, just because he was Black? "I can help," he informed her flatly. "Where can I scrub in?"
Ayo had told him to keep Bucky alive. He was damn well going to.
Once upon a time, nine years ago, Sam showed up on Sarah’s doorstep with Steve fucking Rogers of all people, and asked all casually if they could stay the night.
Both men were exhausted and hungry. They’d just flown in from Portugal, but it hadn’t been any kind of vacation. They were worn thin from tirelessly searching for someone Sarah had only heard about, a mentally unstable assassin who’d tried to kill them both but was now, by all accounts, more of a danger to himself than anyone else. It all sounded highly insane but Sam and Steve were clearly both fraying at the edges, so she let them in and fed them bouillabaisse and let Steve hold little Cass until the baby fell asleep in his arms. Then her husband Alex made up the couch for Steve and everyone said goodnight, all cool and normal like they weren’t having a sleepover with Captain goddamn America.
But when Sarah crept downstairs for a glass of water somewhere in the wee hours, Steve Rogers was sleepless in her kitchen, his big impossible shoulders hunched over the old dining table. His hair was white gold under the halo of the hanging lamp, and it cast hard shadows under his brow and cheekbones that were almost black. He was sorting through a folder full of photographs and papers, so deeply immersed in their contents that he hadn’t noticed her. He’d raised a big hand and wiped at his face roughly. Tears were dripping off his chin and leaving round wet stains on the papers he was so focused on.
She’d tiptoed back up the stairs without her water.
She hadn’t thought much about the man they were looking for, other than to worry about her brother’s safety and sanity. Sam loved big. Sam didn’t do anything halfway. Sam was going to get his fool ass killed one of these days. Especially if he was chasing down a crazy person who was great with knives.
Never in a million years would she have dreamed that one day, the broken assassin she’d worried was going to murder her brother would show up in tow behind Sam and start scrubbing her family’s old boat. Never had she imagined he’d have big soulful blue eyes and an Old Hollywood grin, or that he’d start bringing her flowers when Sam wasn’t looking. Or that he’d turn out to love the same old blues music she did, and laugh at the same jokes. Or that she could fall into a bright, spirited, thoughtful conversation with him about anything and everything, and look up to find that three hours had gone by like five minutes. Or that she would learn to trust this man with her children, utterly—to trust that he loved her boys as much as he loved her, to know that he would lie down and die for them. Better yet, that he would live for them.
Most of all, never, ever had she imagined that she could love someone like that again. Not after losing Alex.
And then she did. And it was him—the recovering prisoner enslaved and mutilated for the better part of a century, the charming Brooklyn boy from the ‘40s, the man who was neither and both. Equal parts modern and antique, sunshiny and haunted, suave and fumblingly awkward; someone deeply wounded and still gentle and decent and good, maybe more so because of it. Her Bucky. Their Bucky.
Now she understood why Steve Rogers had been crying at her kitchen table in the middle of the night.
It was a weird feeling, Sarah thought, spending Christmas morning sitting alone with her sons at the table under the cheerful light of the golden string lights that Bucky had strung up around the kitchen doorway.
It didn't feel like Christmas. It was quiet, cheerless. She should have put some music on. The boys pushed their waffles around and around on their plates. It felt like the broken, empty Christmases during the Blip, when it was just her and the babies and all the world’s ragged sadness—a young widow with a whole fifty bucks in her bank account and not a single family member left to celebrate the holiday with. But now… God, now it was almost worse, because this sweet little life she’d scrabbled together with her bare fingernails had been so good, and it was so close to falling away.
She couldn’t take another loved one dying. She couldn’t even entertain the thought. It was too much to consider, the enormity of her terror so great that her heart throbbed painfully and she was simply lost under the crush of fear like a swimmer under a heavy blue wave—
“It doesn’t feel like Christmas,” said Cass, blunt as ever.
"We'll have a real Christmas morning later," she said quietly. "When Bucky comes home."
“Is Uncle Sam gonna bring him home today?” AJ asked, staring down at his plate.
“Probably not,” she said, as gently as she could. “Probably he’s gonna need to spend some more time there.”
“Is he sleeping?”
“I think so.”
“Then tell the doctors they have to make sure he’s not cold,” said Cass. “He doesn't like being cold.”
“He tell you that?”
“No. But he doesn't like it.”
“When are they going to tell us if he’s going to die?” AJ asked. A question like a gunshot.
Christ, she wished she had some coffee. But the coffeemaker was still broken, with the screwdriver and all the little plastic pieces still sitting out on the table where Bucky had left them.
“They already said he’s gonna be okay,” she said. “That’s not gonna change. Okay? You did a real good job looking after him, AJ. You too, Cass.”
“Cass didn’t do anything,” said AJ, cold and quiet, still staring at his uneaten soggy waffle. “He just cried.”
Cass shriveled in on himself.
“Hey,” said Sarah, deploying Mom Voice, “we’re all going through a lot right now, okay? It’s okay to be sad or scared, Cass, and it’s okay to cry. Especially when you’re—”
AJ’s fork clattered loudly on his plate. He shoved his chair back, scraping it against the floor, and stomped away and up the stairs.
“AJ,” she called after him half-heartedly, but he didn’t stop.
Cass quietly put his head down on his folded arms and sniffled. Sarah kind of wished she could do the same.
“It’s okay,” she said, wishing she was as confident as she sounded. She squeezed her baby’s trembling shoulder. “It’s gonna be okay.”
She was drying the breakfast dishes when Bucky’s kimoyo bead chirped and lit up on the countertop, where he’d left it in the bowl with his house keys. She’d never seen it activate before.
“We are about to arrive, Sarah Wilson,” said the flickering image of a strange Wakandan woman, who somehow knew her name, what the hell. “Prepare yourself.”
The woman wasn’t joking; it was less than ten seconds later that some kind of small jet set down outside the house as easily as a bird landing on a tree branch.
Sarah ran out to the patio, tea towel still in hand, just in time to see the craft’s hatch door hiss open. Four Dora Milaje descended down the ramp, all dressed in majestic red and gold, and holy hell, she suddenly got it—she got the way Sam and Bucky spoke of them with such reverence and respect. With perfectly practiced military precision, the four warriors gathered in perfect formation on the muddy lawn and stamped their spears in unison, a kind of salute. Each was decked in bangles and bones that clinked and jingled, their faces fierce and proud as all four turned to Sarah as one, and the only word she could think of was glorious—glory the way her father had meant it when he spoke of God’s glory, great power turned to righteousness.
The tall, elegant warrior whose face had been displayed in the kimoyo bead’s little hologram now stood before Sarah in real life, standing at the forefront of the small troop. She gazed sharply around, assessing their surroundings, and then she called out sharply, some kind of command, like she had determined the coast was clear.
A stringy teenage girl strode out from the craft, most of her tall skinny frame hidden in a heavy purple parka and thick leggings and winter boots. She looked as though she was set to hike up Mount Everest. To be fair, Sarah considered, even a Louisiana winter would probably be a shock for someone coming from the peak of an African summer.
The teenager moved past the assembled Dora Milaje and barely slowed down as she came to Sarah on the patio.
“Where is he?” the girl asked, by way of greeting.
“Uh,” said Sarah, blinking.
“Where is Bucky?”
“He’s — hospital,” said Sarah, still tongue-tied at the sight of the Dora Milaje. “In the hospital, Sam’s with him.”
The girl clicked her tongue. “I don’t understand why he could not just simply tell us where he is—neither of them ever do anything the easy way—”
“I can take you, let me get my shoes—”
“No need,” sighed the girl, tapping at her kimoyo beads in a pissy teenage way. She glanced up and added, all in a rush, “I am Princess Shuri of Wakanda by the way and it is very nice to meet you at last, Bucky is half-crazed about you and it is extremely funny,” and then she was bounding back up the ramp into the aircraft. Her red-clad warriors followed, their leader giving Sarah a slight nod over her shoulder.
Then they were gone, and the aircraft was vanishing into the high grey sky. Its engines were almost silent.
Sarah wondered briefly about whether it was really legal to fly that kind of thing in American airspace. But hey, it was Wakandan royalty, apparently. Who the hell knew.
“Boys,” she called. Both of the boys’ heads popped up from the kitchen window, where she knew perfectly well they’d been watching. “Get your shoes on. We’re going to the hospital.”
He woke up and it was dark and something was beeping.
He woke up and someone was gently squeezing his hand: one-two-three, one-two-three. The secret code. I love you. He squeezed back, even though he couldn't see them, because he loved everyone who knew that code. Someone gasped and said He’s awake! but he couldn't quite open his eyes, so he slid back down into the soft deep darkness and stayed there for a while.
He woke up and the light struck the thick lenses of Dr. Zola’s glasses in two perfect white circles. The Soldier was trained not to scream no matter what, so he must have been malfunctioning very badly because suddenly he was screaming like a frightened child and begging no no no please no oh god nooooo noooo no no no and then there were a lot of people bustling around him and above him and a needle in his arm was burning cold and a man was calling Bucky, hey, Buck, no, it’s okay, it’s okay, and then it all vanished into the distance and he went under and far away into the dark.
He woke up and Sam was in the metal chair next to his bed, tired but focused, thumbing intently through something on his phone.
He woke up with lips so dry they hurt, and someone made soft noises and slid an ice chip onto his tongue. Spasibo, he mumbled, and someone sighed sadly.
He woke up and Sam was arguing with a nurse at the foot of his bed. He thought Ayo was there too in her red Dora Milaje finery, but that’s how he knew he wasn’t really awake, so he closed his eyes and tried to straighten out his brain and went back to sleep.
He woke up and Shuri was — no, that wasn’t right. Shuri hated him. She wouldn’t be wearing a big yellow sweater and poking a little metal instrument into the broken hollow of his shoulder port.
“Ow,” he said, because it kinda hurt, the way she was tapping around in there. He could feel everything, all the individual little thready wires getting jostled.
“Shut up and go back to sleep, idiot wolf,” said the vision of Shuri, and he coughed a laugh, but that hurt too, and he closed his eyes.
He woke up and there was Sarah, his girl, his Sarah, and she was holding his hand, and wasn't that something? She was asleep in a chair with her head resting on the side of his bed; her thick dark beaded braids spilled over his arm, all the way down to where her knuckles were tightly intertwined with his. Her mascara was smudged under her eyes like she'd been crying, but Sarah never cried, never, like she had something to prove. He thought maybe it would make her feel better if she did cry once a while — maybe he should tell her she could cry around him if she wanted to. That it would be okay. That she could be herself with him, the same way she let him be him, panic attacks and messy brain and all.
"Hey, sweetheart," he whispered, dry-mouthed, and squeezed her knuckles. Three quick squeezes, the Wilson code. I. Love. You.
She was snoring softly, her mouth slack and squished wetly against his arm. Gazing at her, something within his heart moved deeply and he understood with sudden warm clarity what people meant when they said that when you love someone, they are always beautiful to you.
He slept.