Sam’s alarm is what alerts him to the waking world, but the thing that tethers him there is the feeling of soft fur under his left hand. He frowns, smacking at his alarm clock to get it to shut up and dislodging his companion enough that the cat meows and Sam’s head whips up to look at his chest. Sure enough under his left hand there’s a cat laying there, giving him an unimpressed look as Sam shifts again.
“Uhh,” he says brilliantly, mostly because he doesn’t have a cat. And the cat, which is obviously not a stray since it’s wearing a dark blue collar with a little silver tuna tag attached to it. Sam squints a little at it and in the glint of the morning sun he can make out that it has an engraving on it. Alpine. “Alpine?” he asks more than states and Riley is going to lose his shit at this, waking up and talking to a cat he doesn’t even own.
The cat’s ears perk up and it makes a small ‘murrp’ sound characteristic of a cat acknowledging a human calling to it. He pets the cat slowly and the cat’s eyes slide most of the way closed, squinting the way animals do when they’re contented as it begins to purr. “What the fuck?” he mumbles, wondering how in the hell his life has come to this. He used to be normal and now he’s waking up to whole ass animals with collars and names that he’s never seen before a day in his life.
After a few minutes of petting the cat it becomes clear it has no interest in moving and Sam feels like a real dick, he does, but he has to make a living so he can pay his rent and his Netflix subscription with enough left over to fund his lowkey addiction to chocolate covered almonds that no one knows about. So he sighs, “okay, you gotta move,” he tells the cat, hoping it will get the point and move on its own. The cat yawns, stretching out its front paws toward Sam’s face and he does not appreciate this cat’s nasty little litter paws on his face but its so damn cute that he doesn’t stop the cat either. Settled in its new position of ‘paws on human’s face’ the cat lays down its head, content to go back to sleep.
Yeah, of course it wouldn’t be that easy. “Alpine,” Sam mumbles around cat fur, “you need to move your furry ass,” he tells the cat again, this time moving its little paws off of his face. The cat doesn’t even lift its head to give him a dirty look. “Why the hell are you so comfortable on me? You’ve never even seen me before, I could be a murderer,” he says like the animal is going to respond to reason. Alpine, a champion of debate apparently, sneezes in response- right in Sam’s face.
“You better keep your cat cooties out of my face,” he tells the cat like he isn’t covered in litter paw mess and cat sneeze goo. Alpine shits, getting more comfortable and turning away from Sam slightly into a position that, to Sam, has always resembled a furry comma. “I hate you,” he mumbles, continuing to pet the cat.
*
Riley snorts, shaking his head. “Man, this house is ridiculous- a random cat just showed up on your chest this morning?” he asks like he’s making sure he’s got Sam’s story right.
Sam rolls his eyes, but the action is fond. “I said what I said and this cat was cute as shit too, I felt like a real asshole when I finally had to move him so I could go to work and he followed me everywhere I went, including to the door when I left.” He’s never had an animal before partially because his parents didn’t want a pet and he spent his early adult life in the military so it’s not like having a pet made sense. And since then he’s mostly been more concerned with taking care of himself let alone a pet, so when the cat stood in front of the door and meowed at him like he was about to abandon his furry ass Sam was not prepared to feel like he was out and out abusing this animal by leaving it behind while it yelled after him.
He’s spent the whole day hoping the cat is fine, which is ridiculous because of course the cat is fine. Sam looked it up, cats are fine left on their own for hours while their families are out and in fact some prefer it that way. Not Alpine, he’s pretty sure, but still. “Think it came from The Door To Nowhere?” Riley asks, breaking through Sam’s guilty thoughts.
He lets out a loud snort, “not unless the cat can walk through bricks,” he points out. Creepy ass house, this is what he gets for trusting Riley to pick something out. Sure, it was his dumb ass idea to move across the country, but he figured if he trusted Riley to look at the places he found online he wouldn’t pick the obviously haunted one with a weird neighbor that kind of looks like a hot swamp thing. Frankly he’s pissed Riley’s dumbassery even resulted in that thought crossing his mind. Hot swamp thing, what the fuck does that even mean?
“Maybe it came from the weird attic space,” Riley suggests.
Sam shakes his head, “nah, I’ve got live traps up there for the squirrels and raccoons that keep getting in.” Those people who release wild animals are getting real familiar with him showing up with raccoons and he would have liked to not have had to look up where the hell to even take a raccoon he caught in his attic but Riley makes bad life choices. And he likes the advocacy group he found anyway, they’re always nice to the raccoons even when they’re feral and growl a lot. At least the squirrels are cute even if Sam has found no less than three in his kitchen after escaping from the attic space. Neither he nor the squirrels knew what to do with that situation so he decided on live traps and figuring out where the fuck to take the animals after he caught them.
“What about that weird room we found in the other bedroom’s closet?” Riley asks.
“The fact that you didn’t, at any point notice that a serial killer obvious lived here before I did and stashed victims all over the damn house is embarrassing, just so you know,” he tells Riley. “And no, there’s no way it came from there because I cleaned everything out and blocked that space off. No way am I about to get murdered by some freak who lives in my walls.” Next time he moves he’s sending his sister out to look at places because she would have found Jigsaw’s torture rooms right away.
“Is stuff still going missing from your fridge?” Riley asks and Sam gives him a look.
“The other day I made a ham, it a nice ass ham too, with pineapple and all that. I woke up and did I have my beautiful ham in my fridge? No.” Is there any evidence someone broke in? Also, no, nothing is out of place except for extra dishes in his sink in the morning and less food in his fridge.
“I’ve told you like ten times to get a camera,” Riley tells him, and he looks worried, but Sam has a method to his madness.
“And find out that some serial killer is living in my walls? No fucking way, I’m happy to live in blissful ignorance if all that’s gunna happen to me is a higher grocery bill than normal,” he says. No way is he going to put up a camera, alert the killer to the fact that he knows his fridge is being raided, and then get murdered about it. No thanks, he’s fine with just letting some weirdo eat his food if it means he doesn’t get snuffed in the middle of the night. “But I do have no idea how the cat got past the locked door, though,” he adds out loud, only realizing that he locks his bedroom door now despite unlocking it this morning.
This is what he gets for not being a morning person, not noticing real obvious shit until after work. Riley looks more concerned and Sam gives him a look, “I didn’t know any of this was going to happen!” he says like that’s any kind of defense.
“if you used your fucking eyeballs I wouldn’t be in this mess,” Sam points out. “Living in some fucking horror movie ass,” he mumbles under his breath, shaking his head as he trails off.
“Name one thing I would have noticed immediately,” Riley says and Sam cannot believe the audacity.
“The door to nowhere, Riley. If you used your damn eyeballs to spy a door in the middle of a kitchen wall with nothing else but that door on it you might have opened it and knew it led to nothing but a brick wall. Then you would have thought ‘hmm, maybe this house was owned by Hannibal Lecter’ and told me not to move there. Now I’m rooming with the guy, and I guess he has a cat named Alpine.”
In Riley’s defense he has the good sense to look guilty about accidentally leaving him in a roommate situation with Freddy Kruger.
*
Alpine is sitting in his lap and Sam has no idea where this furry little bastard is coming from, but he seems content to come back. At least his food isn’t going missing as often so the serial killer that lives in his walls is obviously deciding to be nice this week. He decides not to think too hard about it while some nature documentary plays on the tv even if his attention is mostly taken up by apartment hunting since Riley obviously can’t be trusted. The cat purrs and Sam is wondering how the hell he’s going to swing breaking his lease when someone smacks on his living room window, causing him to jump high enough to filly dislodge Alpine from his lap.
He whips his head over to find his neighbor staring in at… well, Alpine. “That’s my cat!” he says loudly, words still muffled somewhat by the thin window, “how the hell is my cat not in my house?”
Sam stares at him for a long moment, then turns to look at a guilty looking Alpine half crouched on the ground like he’s prepared to run, tail still puffed up from his rude awakening of being tossed off Sam’s lap. “That’s a good fuckingquestion,” Sam tells his neighbor, walking over to his front door, Alpine on his heels. He opens it and sticks his head out of the door, Alpine choosing to run out and to his owner, rubbing himself along the guy’s ankles like he does with Sam when he comes home. “Do you have all kinds of weird shit happen to you too?” he asks, squinting.
His neighbour looks up and shrugs, “I mean, yeah, but I’m not normal so I’m not a good judge. Weird stuff happens to me all the time,” he says.
Yeah, well he’s definitely proved the first half of that statement. “Okay, cool, cool, cool. Well I’m pretty sure I have a serial killer living in my walls, but I’m pretty relieved to learn the cat belongs to you and not whoever keeps eating my stuff.” The neighbour’s cat somehow sneaking into his house? Reasonable, if a little odd, but this whole damn house is odd so at least there’s a logical explanation for that.
That earns him a confused look, “maybe I should install cameras…” the guy murmurs and it occurs to Sam that he’s never actually met his landlord.
“You’re the one who owns this place?” he asks. Next time he does this he is so not doing everything online because clearly that is not to be trusted. Or he has exceptionally bad luck- probably both, but still.
The guy wrinkles his nose for a moment before he sighs. “I mean, kind of yeah. Its complicated. Well, not really, I work in a nursing home and this old man that hated everyone took a weird liking to me and left me his entire estate in his will, which included the house. And I mean, I’m only living in half, figured someone else might as well use the other half,” he says, shrugging.
Okay, yeah, this guy is definitely not normal and a piss poor judge of what is but Sam still has some questions. “Does someone eat all your stuff in the middle of the night? And do you have like, weird doors to nowhere and secret rooms in closets?”
It’s weird that the guy looks relieved because Sam absolutely would have had a fucking priest exorcise this shit long before he moved someone else into it, but he reminds himself that this guy isn’t normal per his own admission. “Yes! I’ll be honest, your side creeps me out so I’ve never really looked around in there too much, but I have the fucking weirdestlayout on my side. And like three like… crawl space things in really dumb places and one was filled with dolls so that was uh… horrible.”
Uh huh, Sam found a blanket nest in one of his so he gets it even if he definitely got the nightmare side. “Awesome, so the old man was some type of freak, that explains the horror movie ass layout. Alpine, have you been eating my food?” he asks the cat despite knowing it’s not the cat, obviously, because cats don’t use utensils. The cat makes a happy chirping sound and trots back over to him, rubbing up against his ankles.
“Cheater,” his neighbour mumbles, giving the cat a dirty look.
Sam snickers and scoops the cat up, pleased when the cat starts to purr loudly. “Friendly cat. Any idea how he got into my apartment?”
“Nope. Probably some a vent neither of us have noticed that connects our halves of the house or something. I’m Bucky, by the way. Sorry for scaring the hell out of you, it’s just that Alpine here has been mysteriously going missing for long amounts of time and every time he does it I panic that he’s dead so I was um, surprised to find out he’d just scammed my neighbor for attention,” he says, sounding apologetic.
“Little bastard scammed me for a hell of a lot more than that- he spends enough time in there that I wasn’t about to go without a litter box hanging around, and it’s not like I can just keep feeding him human food when he gets hungry, and bored cats are assholes, alright, he needed toys. And this whole time your furry ass had an owner,” he says to Alpine, giving the cat a betrayed look.
Bucky looks a little surprised, “you did all that for a cat you don’t even own?” he asks.
Like Sam knew Alpine didn’t have an owner- sure he has a collar that looks fancy and all that, but the cat spends a weird amount in his house. “Would you want a cat hanging around your house for seven hours with no litter box, nothing to do but knock your shit over, and no food just to piss it off? No, because that’s stupid and I like my wallpaper where it is.” Alpine doesn’t seem to mind any seems how he sneaks his furry booty into his half of the split level on a regular basis.
Bucky just snorts, “no wonder he keeps sneaking in, you might love him more than I do,” he says, giving the cat a rueful look. Sam’s real pissed that up close Bucky isn’t a hot swamp thing, he’s a sexy swamp thing and that is so much worse and better at the same time.
Alpine purrs, unaware of Sam’s internal struggle or maybe he just doesn’t give a shit since he’s a cat and why would he care anyway? “Yeah, well, he’s real cute when he chases his little felt mice around so,” he shrugs because he gets something out of it too. He didn’t think he’d enjoy having a pet that wasn’t a bird, he’s always wanted one but never had the time or space to take proper care of one, but having a cat part time isn’t half bad. Sure he could do without Alpine deciding the most interesting thing in the world is his butthole as he swings his entire ass into Sam’s face, and he has a bad habit of licking his ear when he’s asleep because it’s a sure fire way to wake him up and convince him to pet the cat, but sometimes he runs so fast he smacks straight into a wall and its hilarious. Sam feels like they balance each other out, the pros and cons, especially when the cons are ‘the cat really likes to be pet.’
“Oh, yeah, I use a laser pointer sometimes and he’s pretty accurate, he can turn the lights on and off now,” Bucky says fondly, like it’s totally normal to train your cat to use the light switches.
“Uh, I guess I’ll try to figure out where the cat is getting in,” Sam says somewhat awkwardly. He’ll miss the little guy but maybe he’ll get his own cat or something.
A light in Bucky’s head seems to go off and he nods, “right, yeah. I’ll try and figure it out too since I don’t like him disappearing all the damn time. And I’ll install cameras because I always hear weird shit out back too- do you hear like howling noises out there?” Bucky asks, squinting a little.
Sam shivers, “and that tree that looks like it’s got a thousand little fucking hands on it trying to reach in and snatch your soul right out of your skin? And that creepy laughing? Yeah, I’ve noticed that my life is an eighties movie and I’m pissed about the genre,” he says, annoyed.
“My life has always been like this honestly, so I mostly don’t know the difference. The good news is that the tree is definitely harmless, it’s a long story but its only creepy looking,” Bucky says definitively, like he’s put it to the test and gotten a result that led him to this conclusion. Sam should have stayed in New York but no, Riley decided his home state was the one to hang out in and Sam is seriously regretting it.
“I don’t care, fuck that tree,” Sam says meaningfully, unintentionally making Bucky laugh. He’s damn mad that Bucky has a nice laugh and an even nicer smile because this is not a situation that should elicit this response.
*
Sam is attempting to clean out his closet not out of desire, but out of need. He’s been trying to find one specific shirt for a half an hour now and it should not be this hard to locate his clothing. Unfortunately for him past him didn’t think the same way and destroyed his closet, so now he’s stuck cleaning up his own mess. And yeah, yeah, consequences of his own actions but he still wants to go back and smack him for deciding to just toss stuff around was a good idea.
It takes another ten minutes to finally find his shirt and he sighs a breath of relief, sticking it back on a hanger and putting it back on the bar, finding a shirt he hasn’t seen since he moved in underneath it. He sighs because sometimes, despite being a mental health professional, he looks around at his life and thinks ‘damn, I live like this?’ This is one of those times and the only thing he can do about it is get the shirt off the ground, sniff it, and shrug because it smells like laundry detergent and he’s not about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
He puts the shirt on a hanger and hangs it before stepping back and sighing when he notices the horribly messy shelf above. Past him is a real asshole. What catches his attention, though, is a box pushed slightly out from the rest on that end of the closet and he frowns, going to the kitchen to grab his stool and returning to check it out. When he moves the box he’s greeted by an uncomfortable amount of cat hair- obviously Alpine’s- and a weird little crack in the back of his closet.
“Oh hell no,” he says, pulling out his phone to send a text to Riley. He takes a picture and sends it, adding what the fuckass kind of slasher shit did you get me into?
He jimmies what looks like a thin panel open and its obviously been built to slide so Sam thinks that’s some nightmare fuel for tonight. Luckily for him it’s obvious that the only thing that’s been in the freaky little crawl space tunnel thing is Alpine given the sheer amount of cat hair. “Bucky!” he yells through the tunnel out of curiosity.
He hears, if he strains, distant shuffling before a slightly louder, “what the fuck?”
“I found where Aline got in,” he yells through the tunnel. The shuffling gets closer to him but the sound of a small rattle before a cat plops down into the tunnel catches his attention first. Alpine trots over to him unconcerned, rubbing his body along Sam’s face in place of a greeting. He leans back and shakes his head, wiping stray cat hairs away from his nose before he accidentally sucks one in before reaching out to pet the cat. Alpine is fine with this development but Bucky still seems to be lost.
“Where the hell did he get in?” Bucky asks, significantly closer this time and Sam frowns.
“Are you above me?” he asks because Bucky should be on the first floor of the other side of the house, but it sounds like he’s above Sam’s head.
“Yeah, I’m in that elevated part in the back of the house why are you confused and where are you?” Bucky asks.
Sam squints, “elevated part of the what- what? Do you have a blueprint for this Winchester ass house or what because I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about. I’m in my bedroom closet,” Sam tells him.
“Your side doesn’t have a weird like elevated half a level in the back?” Bucky asks and Sam can hear him moving things around.
“No, which is creepy as all hell by the way,” he says, unimpressed. Alpine pays no mind, purring away as Sam pets him. “Did you seriously just not look around an entire half of your bizzaro house that you inherited from a cantankerous old man?” Sam asks because that sounds unbelievable to him. He’s not even sure if he believes in God or any other religious figure but he’d get everyone to bless the hell out of this mess if he owned it.
A sliver of light dropping down into the tunnel alerts him to Bucky finding Alpine’s escape tunnel, and a moment after that Bucky’s head appears, upside down. “What the fuck? You’re in my sunroom closet,” he says.
“Was the old man you got this shit from H. H. Holmes?” Sam asks.
“Honestly he was really messed up in the end, but he had a whole bag of health problems and a badly deteriorating mind so mostly we didn’t pay attention but now I wonder,” Bucky says.
“A serial killer gifted you his murder house,” Sam says, “and I, for one, am mad that living here is so cheap, what the fuck?” He’d assume this was some type of trap to kill him except its only his food that goes missing, nothing else, and it doesn’t happen all the time either.
“I’m not comfortable charging someone a lot of money for something that they need and rent around here is expensive, I mostly only wanted to cover the bills of two people living here,” Bucky says.
It’s cheap because the guy is conscientious, go fucking figure. He’d assume he was wrong about that except he’s really good at reading people, has to be to be good at his job, and Bucky is a strange bastard, but he doesn’t strike Sam has harmful. “Okay, well you should probably call the cops and religious leaders of every religion and denomination you can find to get rid of the bad juju and probable dead bodies in the walls,” Sam tells him.
He’s gifted with another laugh from Bucky, “wanna get coffee?” he asks.
“Anything to get out of Amityville,” Sam says, wrinkling his nose.
*
Riley is staring at him like he’s nuts, “you went on a date with your neighbor who owns a house with a serial killer in the walls? Sam, he probably is the serial killer in the walls.”
As if Sam is incapable of research, “no I found the obituary of the old man that died, everyone in the town thought it was weird he left it to some rando working in a nursing home, but no one seemed to find anything weird on Bucky. That old man, on the other hand, was definitely Ted Bundy’s more fucked up cousin.”
“What’d you find on him?” Riley asks but Sam shakes his head.
“Nothing interesting aside from the evidence of the fact that he was some kind of freak and built his house for freak activities, but that’s evidence enough for me.” Weird rooms, doors to nowhere, tunnels that go to spaces that are built in ways that make no sense looking at the house on the outside- the old man was clearly into some wacky hobbies and they were probably violent crime hobbies.
“I guess you’ve got a point the-” Riley’s words cut out as the Door To Nowhere opens and Bucky walks in, frowning immediately. Alpine, pleased with this development, runs into the room and immediately jumps into Sam’s lap. He pets the cat, somewhat confused because they’d blocked off his path in and out of Sam’s closet and what the fuck that door used to have bricks behind it. And, in Bucky’s defense, he looks as confused as Sam and Riley.
“When I took down those bricks, I didn’t think I’d find your kitchen…” he says eventually, sounding even more confused than he looks.
Riley squints at Bucky like he’s trying to determine if he’s a serial killer or something, but Sam has other questions. “What was behind the bricks?” he asks because he’s heard noises from behind there. It’s not often, but every once and awhile and especially lately he’s heard a strange amount of scuffling around behind that door.
Bucky looks relieved to have a different topic of conversation handed to him, “oh, one of those freaky little crawl spaces. Alpine likes it in there so I thought I’d make it a fun little cat room, but also there was a doorway bricked off in the middle of the wall and that was weird, so I took down the bricks and uh. Sorry for accidentally breaking into your apartment,” Bucky says, wincing.
Doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that can be done purposefully but Sam leans over so he can see into the room and sure enough it’s a small sliver of space maybe six feet wide and just as long with a couple steps leading up to another room Sam can’t see into. “What the hell is the layout of that side of the house?” he asks because it makes significantly less sense than his portion of the split level.
“You know what, yeah, I’m curious too,” Riley says, leaping on the opportunity to investigate Sam assumes.
Bucky gestures to the room he just walked out of, “take a look at that shit- whoever designed it wanted zero drunk people to come home because the whole layout is a big ‘fuck you’ to anyone who is even slightly confused,” he says, shaking his head.
*
Bucky looks into that creepy ass room he’d blocked off that are similar to the hidden rooms on Bucky’s side even if he wasn’t kidding about having the stupidest layout known to man. The first thing in Bucky’s house walking through the front door is a short hallway, then his room because apparently he wants to sleep closest to the spot a likely killer would get in, before proceeding to the shittiest housing design Sam has ever witnessed. The thing about it is that it had to have been designed that way because Sam has seen zero houses that stick the kitchen and bathroom back to back with each other with the pantry on the other side of the bathroom, Bucky’s bedroom is attached to his living room and the kitchen is through that, and that doesn’t even get to the mess that was the upstairs or the weird ass sun room.
Plus there’s the hidden rooms, at least one tunnel that Alpine has found that was purposefully built in, and from the layout of Bucky’s side and Sam’s there’s still hidden spaces they haven’t found, namely the space under Bucky’s sun room. “Maybe there are dead bodies in the house,” he says, frowning.
“I’ve never smelled anything,” Sam says.
Bucky shrugs, “guy was old and in the nursing home for five years before he died, if he killed a bunch of people in here, they were probably all bones when I got here.”
“I still think they’d smell like swamp ass,” Sam says and Bucky snickers.
“Yeah, maybe. Does this half of the house wig you out any?” Bucky asks.
Sam squints at him, “more than the side with a torture chamber under the sunroom? Hell no.”
“Really? This side of the house creeps me out and your missing food stories have convinced me its haunted,” he says like that’s the most reasonable explanation.
“Haunted? Absolutely not, ghosts aren’t real. Didn’t your cameras catch anything?”
“Other than coyotes shitting in the garden I work hard to make look like that? No,” Bucky says, irritated. In his defense those gardens out back are nice despite the squirrels and apparently coyotes digging around in there.
“Disappointing and disturbing,” Sam mumbles not that he thought he’d be lucky enough to figure out it was raccoons stealing is ham or something.
Bucky leans against the wall next to the small crawl space entrance to the hidden room. “To be honest I’m more freaked out by the fact that we have the exact same living room,” he says.
Sam shakes his head because he’d forgot about that in the mix of Bucky’s stupid house followed by Riley telling him he was in a Jordan Peele movie and he needed to get out. “To be fair I didn’t choose that nasty ass wallpaper,” he says in his defense, “the rest of the design choices are my fault and yeah, it’s weird as hell that we have the same everything.” Couch, T.V, the T.V stand- all of it was identical and even weirder was that it was set up exactly the same as Sam’s living room. Bucky was so freaked out after Sam pointed out they had the exact layout of living room that he wrote it off as the most fucked up coincidence he’s ever had the misfortune of dealing with. And, as Bucky said, apparently this kind of thing happens to him all the time. Sam thinks that sounds exhausting but what the hell does he know?
“You know, maybe if you like… put something in here it’d be less freaky,” Bucky says, gesturing to the drab grey concrete walls of the hidden room.
Sam raises an eyebrow, “is that what you’re doing on your side? Slapping some paint on your mystery rooms and pretending no one died in there?” he asks.
Bucky shrugs, “minus that time I accidentally broke into your kitchen it seems to be working fine,” he says in his own defense.
“You know we’re probably being hunted for sport, right?” he asks and Bucky laughs, bright smile kind of infectious despite Sam being somewhat seriously worried he’s about to be a true crime story.
*
Sam waves a hand around his face, making solid contact with something furry and he frowns as Alpine licks his fingers and rubs his face along his hand. “What the fuck are you doing in here?” Sam asks, scratching the cat’s head much to the cat’s delight. He sighs, shaking his head because he’s thirsty anyway and he might as well enjoy the cat while it lasts because he misses having a furry companion at night. “Come on,” he tells the cat, gently nudging Alpine off his chest and he sits up, grabbing the cat and carrying him out of the room. Might as well have some company while he gets a drink and the cat doesn’t mind, content to lay half over Sam’s shoulder purring loudly.
When he gets to the kitchen, though, he finds someone else in his fridge. “Uh,” he says intelligently, alerting the intruder to his presence and when he whips around Sam is shocked to find Bucky standing there looking as confused as Sam feels.
“What are you doing in my kitchen?” they ask each other in sync, immediately reacting in confusion at each other’s words.
Bucky looks around like he’s lost and frowns, “this… this can’t be your kitchen…” he says softly.
Sam squints, “I’ve seen your recycling bin, there is no way you cook yourself up some nice pasta salad so there is no wayyou thought this was your kitchen,” Sam points out, gesturing to the container of his pasta salad in Bucky’s hand.
He stares down at it for a long moment and he looks so fucking confused Sam is at a loss, “I thought I was dreaming about the other kitchen with the food that was so much better than mine…” he says softly, looking off into nothing like he can’t quite figure out how he got here.
“What the fuck?” Sam asks because what kind of explanation is that?
Bucky blinks back into existence, like his software just rebooted and reminded him that human interaction requires interaction and he frowns. “Sorry, I’ve had some really weird sleep habits since some fucked up shit over seas, which is kind of why I banished myself here to my confusing ass house, but I’ve… I’ve somehow broken into your kitchen… again… repeatedly?” he asks more than states, eyebrows drawing together like he has no idea how this happened.
There’s no fucking way so Sam squints, “how’d you even get in here?” he asks.
“Oh!” Bucky says, excited like he’ll figure this out too and Sam has never met a guy who is so damn weird and so… well, he’s not lacking in sketchy qualities, it’s just that they all seem to be some kind of fucked up coincidence. Bucky shuts the fridge door, leaving them both in darkness as he makes his way back to the living room off the kitchen and to Sam’s intense surprise there is an entire chunk of his living room wall standing open. He quickly catches up with Bucky and grabs him before he can walk back into his room, which Sam can see clearly now that he’s closer to the doorway.
“Hold up a minute and look at this creepy shit,” he says, pulling Bucky back before walking over to the door and swinging it shut. Bucky frowns, blinking rapidly as he looks at the wall in confusion because there’s no fucking door there, and Sam suspects if he were to inspect the wallpaper it matches up exactly with the door with no handle on his side.
“What the actual fuck?” Bucky asks.
*
In Bucky’s defense, and Sam can’t even believe he’s thinking this, the view from Bucky’s room through his living room and the view through Bucky’s living room is pretty much identical even without being half asleep or sleepwalking or whatever. “It never occurred to you to check what was behind Door Number Two?” Sam asks because he’d noticed the second door in Bucky’s bedroom, but he’d written it off as Bucky’s Door To Nowhere.
“I did,” Bucky says in his defense, “but the knob never worked and I might not have spent oodles of time in your half of the house but I damn well knew, so I thought, that there was no doorway in your living room that connected to my bedroom. Your identical down to the furniture living room,” he says, eyes wide with distress.
This is the most fucked up thing he’s ever had to write off as an accident. “You ate my ham,” Sam says, for some reason choosing that to be offended about.
To his credit Bucky looks guilty about that, “man, I thought those dreams were the best and now I have block this door off,” he says sadly. “And I guess I should make up eating your food by accident to you,” he adds.
Sam crosses his arms over his chest, “you are damn right you are making up eating all my hard work in the kitchen,” he says.
“Well, I guess I could take you to dinner,” Bucky offers and that’s the fucking smoothest thing Sam has ever witnessed in his life and its out of a man who has just discovered he’s been accidentally busting into his neighbor’s house and eating his food. People exist in multitudes, but as someone who has an interest in mental health Bucky is just too damn weird not to take an interest in.
He ignores what kind of psychological strangeness he must have going on when he agrees.
*
Riley loves Sam, he’s always loved Sam, it’s just in their nature to love each other but this is worse than the time he made friends with that red head who kept black widows as pets and was vaguely terrifying and probably a Russian spy. For a guy who likes to think of himself as normal Riley isn’t sure Sam has known a normal day in his life and whenever he’s with Sam strange stuff follows.
Like this insanity that his best friend has gotten himself involved in now. “Sam, you found out the serial killer in your walls was your neighbor and you decided the appropriate action was to date him?” he asks, baffled.
Sam doesn’t even look like he feels bad about his stupid life choices that he spent the last several months blaming himfor. “I get it, I do, but there are reasonable explanations for everything,” he says.
Riley stares at him like he’s grown another head, “of course he’s got reasonable explanations, that’s how they get you, Sam!” He shakes his head, “don’t you look at me like that, if this was me, you’d tell me I was acting like a dumb white person in a horror movie,” he says.
At least Sam has enough self awareness to visibly agree with Riley even if he shakes his head, “it’s fine.”
He senses another motivation and squints, “why are you acting like an idiot?” he asks point blank.
For a minute it looks like Sam isn’t going to answer but after a few moments he lets out a long sigh and looks away like he knows Riley is going to tell him he’s being extra stupid. “Look, have you seen Bucky’s ass? Scrumptious, I’m gunna sleep with him at least once after all of this,” he says, waving a hand around.
Riley sits back in his seat, shaking his head in judgement. “You’re the dumbest bitch I’ve ever met,” he tells Sam.