Chapter 3
A few weeks later, Steve and Sam were slinking through a Scottish city, trailing one of Pierce’s associates. After finding nothing on Bucky in DC or anywhere else in the United States, Steve had felt ready to crumble, when Hill had called. There was a Hydra agent in Europe who was rumored to be building a network again, and Hill couldn’t get in touch with Natasha. For lack of any better options, Steve and Sam agreed to track him down, if only to see what he knew about Bucky.
“He’s coming out of the coffee shop,” Sam said over the phone.
“On it,” Steve said. He was dressed in the most unassuming clothes he could find—a button down and a pair of skinny jeans so uncomfortable Steve was astounded they were “trendy,” as Sam had called them—and he was calmly talking on the phone and leaning against the corner of an apartment building. He kept talking as the Hydra agent, Samuel Davies, walked right past him and sent out a silent thank you to Natasha for teaching him how to blend in in plain sight.
“Where’s he going?” Sam asked.
“Looks like he’s going inside,” Steve said, taking off the cheap, bulky glasses he was wearing and trying to slip them in his pants pockets, before giving up. “How does anyone wear these pants?”
“Shut up, they make your ass look great,” Sam said, appearing beside him.
Steve was sure he was blushing, and turned away from Sam, who was definitely laughing at him. “C’mon.”
They’d been basically living in each other’s pockets for almost a month by that point. First in DC, when Steve had stayed over at Sam’s place, and now traveling through Europe and sharing cheap hotel rooms with one king bed. Sam learned how to push Steve’s buttons very fast and seemed to find great joy in doing so. Steve was embarrassed every time he did, but secretly, he relished it; no one would tease Captain America when he came out of the ice, and Steve had missed the camaraderie he had with the Howlies during the war. Sam filled a gap in his life that Steve hadn’t even realized he was missing.
Steve and Sam crept quietly into the apartment building, following Davies. He was older, almost Pierce’s age, and while he was much lower in Hydra’s hierarchy, Steve still hoped he would have information that could help them figure out how to find Bucky. When they were done intimidating him and getting whatever answers they could, Hill had given them the number of an Interpol agent she trusted to leave an anonymous tip.
Steve saw the man enter his apartment and close the door behind him, and faintly, he heard a lock click into place. Steve and Sam climbed the stairs quickly and paused outside of the right door.
Sam raised his eyebrows: You ready for this?
Steve narrowed his eyes and nodded. This might be their first lead since the bank in DC. He was ready.
He grabbed the doorknob and squeezed hard, feeling the metal crumbling under his grip. The lock splintered and Steve shoved the door open and stormed inside, Sam right behind him.
Davies spun around and blanched. “Captain America?”
“Oh, I’m not here as Captain America,” Steve said, his voice low and cold. “I’m just a concerned American citizen who just uncovered a terrorist group hiding in my government. Now, why don’t we sit down and have a chat?”
Davies left hand was slowly reaching back towards the bag he had thrown onto the couch when he walked in. Sam beat him to it, reaching inside and pulling out a gun. “Were you looking for this?”
“Sit down, Davies,” Steve said. “And let’s talk.”
He didn’t sit, but he did start talking. “Hydra is gone,” he said. “You made sure of that.” He’d gone very quickly from nervous to angry, and maybe… confident? There was something about the way he spoke that reminded Steve of Pierce.
“So what have you been up to?” Sam asked. “Secret contracts with scientists, meetings with members of the local mob… you haven’t been trying to start your own evil empire, have you?”
Davies actually smirked. “Your little play in DC left a power vacuum,” he said. “I’m just doing my part to fill it, before someone worse comes along and picks up the pieces.”
“Worse than you?” Sam said scornfully.
“Oh yes,” Davies said, his voice icy smooth. “You see, Hydra didn’t accept the world as it is. There were some people in Hydra, you might call them mad scientists, who wanted to change the world… and the people in it. And they’re still around.”
Steve felt like his blood was boiling. “What do you know,” he spat out through gritted teeth. He grabbed Davies and shoved him against the wall. “Where’s Bucky. What are they doing to him.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Davies said, his voice still calm despite Steve looming over him. “He disappeared when Insight failed. We’d love to find him and clean out his brain again, though, so if—”
Steve grabbed Davies wrist and squeezed, feeling the bones pop in his grip. Davies screamed.
“Steve!” Sam yelled, but Steve’s entire focus was on Davies.
“What did you do to him!”
“I didn’t do anything,” Davies said, his voice only shaking slightly. “I just watched.”
Steve pushed him against the wall with his arm at his throat, lifting him slightly off the ground. Davies struggled weakly with his good hand but couldn’t fight him off.
“You won’t kill me, will you Captain?” Davies gasped, his face turning red under the pressure of Steve’s arm.
“You don’t know what I would do for him,” Steve whispered.
Then Steve felt a sharp pain behind his knee and he buckled, dropping Davies. He staggered backwards, ready to fight, but it was only Sam. “Steve,” Sam hissed. “Take a walk. I got this.”
“But—”
“Go.”
Steaming, Steve stormed out of the small apartment and down the stairs. He flung open the doors on the ground floor and staggered outside, breathing heavily with adrenaline and fear. He leaned against the side of the building, gulping in deep breaths of fresh air.
He’d lost control. He wanted to hurt that man, he might’ve even killed him, if Sam hadn’t stopped him.
He had killed a lot of men—he was a soldier, after all—but he’d only lost control like that once before. The Howlies had stormed a Hydra base, a big one, in occupied France. Peggy had asked them to secure Hydra’s intel before Dernier blew it up, and Bucky had volunteered to get to the command center to grab it. It was a dangerous job, but Bucky argued that if the rest of them came from one side and caused enough problems on one end of the base, he could slip in unnoticed and get to the command center from the other. Steve and the others had mostly cleaned out the base and Dernier had rigged it to blow when Steve nearly ran into a Hydra agent fleeing the base. The agent had blood sprayed on his face and he only got one shot off—it pinged off Steve’s shield and into the wall—before Steve disarmed him. Steve remembered calling for Bucky’s locations in his comms unit, with no answer. Then the Hydra agent started laughing, and he said that Bucky was already dead—he’d killed him in the command center and ran. He told Steve to go get his friend’s body back, and that was all he could say: Steve was on top of him, punching his face until his jaw cracked, his nose split open, and finally his skull dented. Steve barely had any memory of doing it, and would’ve kept punching if Jim and Dum Dum hadn’t found him and physically pulled him off of the guy. Bucky, it turned out, had been fine; his comm had been knocked out of his ear during a fight, but he got the intel they needed and made it out of the base before the rest of them. He looked concerned when Steve came out of the base with his hands covered in blood, supported by Jim and Dum Dum, but he’d accepted Steve’s hug and then punched him playfully on the shoulder. I’m fine, punk, Bucky had said. Don’t believe anything those Germans say, they’re all rotten liars.
Out in the Scottish fresh air, a hint of rain falling, that felt so far away. Like it happened to another person, not just in another lifetime. Steve focused on what Davies had said when Steve asked about Bucky: that he disappeared, and they’d love to find him. That meant they didn’t have him. That meant he was still out there. Safe, hopefully. It might be painful to Steve that he and Sam couldn’t find Bucky, but at least that meant no one else could, either.
It didn’t take very long until Sam came out of the apartment building, his hands casually in his pockets. He turned left and Steve fell into step with him.
“Sam, I’m sorry—”
“Interpol is on their way,” Sam said. “We need to get out of here.”
“Right.” Steve swallowed. “If you—if you want to go back home, to DC, I wouldn’t blame you…”
Sam gave him a sideways look. His expression was hard to decipher, but it didn’t look like he was angry. “I’m not leaving,” Sam said. “We’re going to hotwire a car and drive across the English border. And then we’re going to buy way too much alcohol and we’re going to have a talk.”
“I can’t get drunk, Sam.”
“I know. The alcohol is for me.”
Well. Steve did not know what was going on, but it didn’t seem like Sam was abandoning him, and he was endlessly grateful for that.
. . .
After about four mostly quiet hours in the car, in which Sam fiddled with the radio stations and Steve thought of and then discarded approximately sixty ways to start a conversation, they arrived in a mid-sized English town that Sam deemed sufficient for their needs. Sam sent Steve to get a hotel room while he went to get food and “all the alcohol they have.”
When Steve heard a knock on the hotel room door—he had texted Sam the room number—he jumped up off of the bed to open the door.
Sam was holding three large paper bags and Steve took them off of his hands. Two of them had food—three burgers and two large bags of fries—and the third had a six pack of beers and a bottle of vodka.
“Thanks, Sam,” Steve said gratefully. He had been so wound up all day, that he hadn’t realized how hungry he was until he smelled the food.
“The beer is for you,” Sam said, “I wasn’t sure if you would want anything, but I figured it would be a little less depressing to get drunk in a crappy hotel room if I wasn’t drinking alone.”
Steve laughed. “Happy to help.” He laid out the food on a towel in the middle of the bed and started in on one of the burgers. He shot a nervous look at Sam, who sat down on the other side of the bed and was eating two fries at the same time. “I should apologize, for earlier.”
Sam nodded. “Does that happen often?”
“What do you mean?” Steve asked.
“You lost control, you saw red,” Sam said. “Did you flash back to the war?”
Steve shook his head. “No, nothing like that. I just—what he said about watching, when Bucky…” He couldn’t finish. He took another bite of his burger, but suddenly it tasted like sawdust. He chewed and swallowed, and Sam sat silently eating, waiting for him to continue. “It’s happened, uh, once before,” Steve said. “During the war. A Hydra agent said he’d killed Bucky… I couldn’t reach Buck on comms, I believed him. Turned out, he was lying,” Steve said, with a hollow laugh. “I killed him. The Hydra agent. I don’t really—it wasn’t, um, a conscious choice.”
Sam nodded. “I’ve seen it before,” he said. He handed Steve one of the beers and cracked open the vodka, taking a swig straight from the bottle.
“I’m glad you were there to stop me,” Steve whispered. “I shouldn’t’ve—we’re not at war, I know that, but sometimes it feels like… it feels like I never left the battlefield.”
“Wars have changed,” Sam said. “Battlefields don’t always exist like they used to. I mean, look at Natasha, look at Stark. Neither of them has spent a day on a battlefield, but they’re fighting some kind of war.”
“I don’t know,” Steve said. “The world has changed so much, but this? This feels like my fight.”
“Barnes being involved made it personal?”
“Hydra made it personal,” Steve said. “Bucky being alive… I don’t know, that’s something else.”
Sam nodded. “I’m going to tell you a story,” he said. He put down his burger and picked up the bottle of vodka again. “It might make you uncomfortable.” He lifted the vodka and gulped down—one, two, three, four large swallows of alcohol, and then wiped his hand over his mouth. “I don’t talk about this sober. I know I’m a counselor and all that, but everyone has their unhealthy coping mechanisms, and this is mine.”
“Ok,” Steve said. Sam joked about his time in the army, and sometimes told funny stories, but he never really talked seriously about his deployment. Steve braced himself to hear about people dying in battle.
“When I was a boy, I always thought I would join the military. A lot of Black boys think they will as a way out of their neighborhood, but it wasn’t like that for me—I lived in a nice, mostly white neighborhood, and my parents made decent money. I would’ve had to take out loans to go to college, but a lot of people do; I didn’t need to join up to afford school.
“I had little GI figurine toys, and at one point, I put an army poster up on my wall. I thought I liked military men because they were so brave and honorable and all that shit they try to sell you in the recruitment office.” Sam smiled wide. “It wasn’t until I was in college that I figured it out: it wasn’t because they were brave. It was because they were hot.”
“Oh.” The noise escaped Steve’s mouth before he could hold it in.
Sam laughed.
“Sam, you don’t have to—”
“Steve, eat your burger, shut up, and listen,” Sam said.
“Yes, sir,” Steve said, and shoved the last of the first burger in his mouth.
“Good. So. I dated in college, some girls, some boys. Figured out I was definitely gay. I had to stay in the closet in the ROTC program, of course, but it was a big school, and I had plenty of freedom.
“I was still committed to joining the military, but for real reasons this time. I thought I could help people, which is why I became pararescue. But I also thought I’d do my tour and get out, you know, try to find a nice guy or something.” He laughed and took another sip of vodka. “I had always been an adrenaline junky—I once broke my leg jumping off our front porch as a kid because my sister bet that I wouldn’t do it—so I guess I was kidding myself that I’d serve my one tour and leave.
“You know some of the story. I got into the Falcon program, got my wings, met Riley.”
Steve nodded.
“I didn’t tell you how I met Riley,” Sam said. “It was the first day of the Falcon program. We’d all been out there before, seen some shit, and now we were back in training all over again. Some of the guys were pretty frustrated about that at first, but not Riley. That dumbass stood right up in the middle of the bunks and said he loved basic, ‘cause he got to kick the shit out of the American military and not be brought up for treason.” Sam laughed, a loud and free laugh, and took another big swig from the bottle.
“We got pretty close pretty fast. I mean, all the guys in our program did, when you fall out of the air as much as we did it’s a bonding experience. But Riley and I… I don’t know how to describe it. We just clicked. It started with sideways looks, you know, that sort of thing. And then, about a month in, we’re practicing swerving around flying objects and Riley dares me to a game of chicken, basically. So we start flying at each other, two hundred yards apart, one fifty, one hundred yards apart, and I think we both knew that the other one wouldn’t flinch. We’re fifty yards apart, twenty, and I can see him clearly, see that big smile on his face, and I don’t think I could’ve stopped even if I wanted to.” Sam’s not looking at Steve anymore. In fact, it looks like he forgot Steve was in the room entirely; he’s staring off into space, as if he could still see Riley flying out there.
“So… what happened?” Steve prodded, in what he hoped was a gentle tone.
“We crashed,” Sam said, laughing, looking at Steve again. “We ran into each other and grabbed each other, and basically fell to the ground holding each other. The minute I touched him, it was like lightning or something, I never wanted to let go. If we had been in private, not in the middle of a military base, we’d probably have taken off each other’s clothes right then and there.”
“Did anyone see?” Steve whispered.
“See us crash into each other in mid-air?” Sam asked, laughing again. “Yeah, they noticed. We got yelled at for a good ten minutes about ‘proper use of military resources,’ and it was all Riley and I could do to keep a straight face.”
“But…”
“Nah, man,” Sam said, as if he knew what Steve wanted to ask. “There was nothing to see, and besides, everyone knew to not look too hard. There were so many not straight guys in the military, if they dismissed us all, there’d probably be no army left. They got away with their bigotry in public but never did anything to enforce it.”
Steve wondered if that was true of his time in the military; if there were a bunch of queers in fatigues during World War II and he just didn’t know.
“The first leave we got, we didn’t even tell our families,” Sam continued. “Just drove to the closest population center, got a cheap hotel room, and didn’t leave for about 48 hours.” Sam grinned at the look on Steve’s face. “Oh, relax, old man.”
Steve cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Sam, not that I’m complaining, but why are you telling me this?”
Sam took another drink of vodka, and then capped it and put it aside. “Riley was the love of my life. He’s the only one… I mean, I wanted to marry that man. I would’ve done anything to be with him, I would do anything to have more time with him.” There were tears spilling out of Sam’s eyes, dripping down his face. “I’m telling you this, because I want you to know—if it were Riley, if Riley were still alive and some old white Nazi dude was between me and seeing him again, I probably would’ve broken every bone in that guy’s body to get to Riley, too.”
Steve looked down at his lap, his face hot in embarrassment.
“Steve?” Sam’s voice was gentle, kind. “You don’t have to share anything you don’t want to share. But, if you want to talk about Barnes, about anything, you can talk to me.”
Steve looked up at him. He felt like he was in a bombed-out bar in London again, accepting kindness he didn’t deserve. He took a deep breath. “Me and Bucky, it wasn’t anything like that.” He looked down at his hands again. “Bucky was my best friend. We grew up together. He picked me outta more alleys than I could count. He would sit with me, all day, when I was too sick to get out of bed. When my ma died… I don’t know what I wouldda done without Bucky. I might’a died, honestly. I might not have made it.”
He felt like his throat was closing, like his old asthma had come back just thinking about it, and changed the subject. “People made assumptions about me. Back when I was small and fragile, and doing art, people talked about me. Well, I would try to beat ‘em up if I heard about it, but it didn’t stop them. Being queer… it was something bad. I mean, everyone talked about it like—like it was a disease when I was growing up. So I never thought… I figured if I was a queer, I would know. Like the way I knew when I felt an asthma attack coming or when I got scarlet fever—I knew when there was something bad, something wrong inside of me. I thought it would be the same.”
Sam smiled sadly. He looked like he might want to reach out to Steve, but Steve pushed on.
“I loved Peggy. Nothing ever happened between us—there was a war, there wasn’t time—but I fell in love with her from the day I met her. That’s when I learned what love is. Whenever she was in the room, I couldn’t stop staring at her. I felt like she made me a better person just being around her. She was so beautiful, and not just how she looked; her mind was beautiful too, ya know? We just understood each other.
“But when Bucky fell off the train—” Steve had to stop and swallow hard. He could see it happening in front of him all over again, he feel the wind whipping at his face, he could hear Bucky screaming his name—
“Steve!” Sam was right in front of his face. “Steve, you with me?”
Steve was panting, his chest heaving. His face felt wet. “Yeah. Sorry.”
“Steve, tell me where you are.”
“I’m in a shitty hotel room in England.”
Sam laughed. “Ok. Take a few deep breaths with me.”
“I’m fine,” Steve protested.
“Steve. Just do it.” Sam took a big deep breath and held it in, and then slowly released it. Steve mimicked him, and slowly, he felt his heartrate stabilize.
“Thanks,” he said. “How’d you know—”
Sam shrugged. “Been through it,” he said. “Most of us have.”
Steve nodded. “Anyway—”
“Steve,” Sam interrupted. “You don’t have to—”
“I want to,” Steve said. And, surprisingly, he did. Maybe it was the fact that Sam had told him something so personal and he wanted to reciprocate, or maybe he just hadn’t realized he needed to talk about this. But he suddenly felt like he had to keep going, like he had to finish the story. “I knew death,” he said.
Sam frowned.
“I mean, I was basically on death’s door half my childhood, but that’s not what I—I just meant that death was never far away, in those days. Everyone knew someone who had died. We lived in a poor area in Brooklyn—not the poorest, but it was the Depression, no one really had enough food to go around, let alone medicine. I was lucky, lots’a people weren’t.
“When my ma died, I felt like—like a part of me died too, ya know? Like she took a piece of me with her. It was hard. I wasn’t supposed’ta outlive anyone, and then I had to bury my ma. If you don’t count the Barneses, she was the only family I had.
“But when Bucky died—when I thought he died, when he fell from the train right in front of me—that was… that was something else. Like I didn’t know how the world kept turning, how people could continue working or eating or, or anything. There was still a war, but it all felt meaningless. What was I fighting for, if Bucky was gone?”
Steve looked up at Sam’s face and saw what he felt reflected in his eyes. Sam knew. It’s like I was up there just to watch. Sam knew exactly what Steve had felt. “Sam, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to—to bring up, to make you feel…”
Sam gave a shaky smile. “Nah, it’s ok. It’s good.”
“There was nothing between us,” Steve said. “Nothing—nothing like that. But, I don’t know, Bucky was like a part of me. I didn’t really know who I was without him.”
Sam nodded and reached for the bottle of vodka again, now half empty, but then stopped, as if something had just occurred to him. His head tilted to the side. “Steve…”
“What?”
“How long was that? Before—before the plane.”
“Oh, a couple of weeks, I think,” Steve said. 46 days, Steve thought.
“Steve, I’m sorry, but I have to ask,” Sam said.
Steve started to get nervous. Sam looked serious, like he hadn’t drunk all that vodka earlier. “Ask what?”
“You put the plane in the ocean a few weeks after Barnes died. And I heard you on comms, you told Hill to activate the helicarriers before you were clear. Steve.”
Steve felt his face grow hot. He knew what was coming and he didn’t want Sam to say it.
“Steve, are you suicidal?”
Sam’s voice was so calm, and Steve felt like the lowest piece of dirt. “No.”
“Steve, look at me, please.”
Steve looked up from his lap and made eye contact with Sam. Sam’s face was so open, so kind. He wasn't judging him or pointing out his failures. He was caring. “No, I’m not. I’m sorry, Sam. I’m not suicidal, it’s not that I want to die, ok? I don’t, I swear.”
“It’s not a weakness,” Sam said gently.
Steve shook his head. “It’s not that simple,” he said. “I don’t want to die. I didn’t want to die on the plane, or on the helicarrier. It was just…” he sighed. “It was just easier.”
“What do you mean?” Sam asked.
“During the war, the plane had to go down. The amount of firepower that was on it, I couldn’t land it anywhere, it would’ve caused too much damage. The only way to make sure to protect civilians was to put it in the water. And it was just… easier to go with it. It would’ve been risky to try to rig the plane to go down and then jump ship. Too many ways it could go wrong. So, I decided to make sure—I went down with it.”
“It wasn’t about Barnes?” Sam said softly.
Steve shrugged. “I thought about him, on the way down,” he said. “When my lungs started filling with water, I was thinking about him. But I didn’t choose to go down with the plane because of him, it just made the right choice easier to make.”
Sam exhaled sharply. “And the helicarriers?”
“You were still in danger. Hill, Natasha, even Sharon… until those helicarriers came down, you were all still in danger. I wasn’t going to leave without Bucky, and the more time we wasted, the bigger chance there was of Hydra gaining back the upper hand. Yes, I stayed on the helicarrier for Bucky, of course I did. But I told Hill to take them down because of everyone else.”
“You’re a self-righteous son of a bitch,” Sam said. “You know that?”
Steve laughed. “I’ve heard it before.”
“I’m serious, Steve. You know we took a risk that day—we all took a risk, we all decided it was worth it. We decided, Steve. You weren’t responsible for our safety more than your own. We knew what we were going up against and we chose to fight.”
“Ok, but what about the millions of people who would have been targets of Insight? They didn’t choose to take a risk, they didn’t even know what was going on.”
“You should’ve—”
“Stop,” Steve said. “Whatever you say, it’s not going to convince me. If I had to make the decision over again, I’d do the same thing. I’d choose to protect civilians, and protect my friends, over protecting myself. That is part of the job, it is not the same as choosing to die,” Steve said, forcefully.
“And Barnes?” Sam asked.
“I’m never going to stop choosing him over me. I can’t, Sam. I lost him once before because I was too slow—he fell from that train with his arm out, reaching for me, and I couldn’t grab him. He fell two hundred feet screaming my name. It was the worst day of my life. I can’t make that mistake again, I can’t.”
“Ok. I hear you, Steve. I understand, at least a little. But there’s more to life than this one guy, ok? No matter what he means to you. It’s hard, it—it fucking hurts, to lose someone like that. I know. But there’s other people who care about you. If you ever feel like it’s easier to just, just go down with the ship again, talk to me first, ok? Steve, I mean it.”
“Yeah, Sam. Ok.”
Sam heaved a long sigh. It was a sigh Steve recognized well—it was the same one his mother would make when Steve and Bucky arrived after dark, Steve’s nose bloody and Bucky’s knuckles bruised. Steve started laughing, and once he started it was hard to stop.
Sam gave him a strange look, but before long he was laughing too. They were cracking up—all the stress of the last couple days, or maybe the last couple years, was pouring out of Steve in waves and he fell over sideways on the bed with laughter.
“You’re crazy,” Sam wheezed through his laugher. “You’re even crazier than I am.”
Steve wiped tears from the corner of his eyes. “I guess it takes one to know one.”
When the laughter had subsided, Steve sat up and looked at Sam. “You don’t have to keep doing this.”
Sam shot him a withering look. “You’re an idiot, Steve. We’re friends now, ok? We just bared our hearts to each other over some half-decent vodka. You don’t get to push me away now.”
“I didn’t—I don’t want to push you away, Sam. I just want to give you an out, I know this is not what you signed up for.”
“You clearly don’t understand what I signed up for, man,” Sam said. “I’m here to help you reunite with your long-lost best friend, and maybe kill a couple Nazis along the way.”
Steve smiled. How did he get so lucky? “Thank you, Sam.”
“Starting tomorrow,” Sam said. “Preferably tomorrow afternoon, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be very hungover tomorrow morning.”