Chapter 1
“Shut the hell up,” is what Sam says when, on Sunday morning when they’ve barely had a cup of coffee each and he’s frying up their eggs, Bucky tells him he’s pregnant. He follows with, “Do you want toast or not?”
Bucky’s whole face shifts downward, all frowns and creased brows. Sam ignores him and flips their eggs over.
“I’m pregnant,” Bucky repeats with more insistence. Sam eyes him. He doesn’t understand the joke, but he also doesn’t understand Bucky pretty often. So, this is probably just another outdated reference to a movie he’ll have to look up later or some bit that Bucky’s playing out for too long. He rolls his eyes and brings his coffee mug up to his lips. Bucky huffs from the dining table.
“When … when HYDRA had me, they would use me for biological experiments, and-and they modified my … reproductive stuff. I didn’t tell you because I thought it didn’t work, but it … it-this one does. I’m pregnant.”
Sam halts. He turns off the heat under their eggs, puts his mug down with a slam onto the counter, and full on freezes. The explanation is way too detailed and hard for Bucky to get out to be made up. Sam’s heart goes all the way to the soles of his shoes and he thinks that his lungs may not be working, but his head is running too loud for him to really tell. He’s fought purple dudes from outer space and a spider-child, he really needs to start taking the crazy shit at face value.
“Okay, so you’re-okay, how do we-” he jitters out, “fuck, I don’t know what I’m trying to say, but you-let me just check again- you, as in the person who is sitting in my kitchen, is pregnant?”
“Y-yeah. I’m gonna figure out how to get it dealt with, but my therapist wants me to be more open with people, so I thought it’d be good to tell you first.”
Sam abandons any attention he had left for breakfast and falls into a seat across from Bucky, his forehead and palm meeting each other with a thud. As usual, Bucky stares.
The first feeling he can really name is intense overwhelm, at the situation they are currently in and the ever-growing mountain of trauma and awful secrets that surround his boyfriend. Guilt for feeling that overwhelm and blaming Bucky even a bit and even for a second coats him right after. He rubs his thumb and his index finger hard into either temple, frowning at himself. It takes what has to be over a minute for him to get to processing what Bucky last said.
‘Dealing’ with it, Sam assumes, means that Bucky’s already made the decision to terminate. His head’s spinning to find out about the pregnancy and the choice on what they’ll do about it in basically the same breath, but it makes obvious sense. The scientific fact of being what Sam’s nearly sure is the first person to ever do this is enough to lead to the abortion conclusion by itself, but, also, they are not in a place where either of them can make room to be parents. Sam understands it, of course. It’s a lot of information for him to take in at once, is all.
“You’re freaking out. Which is fine. I did, too. Or, I mean, I am. I can get out of here for a while, if you want. Take a walk,” Bucky rushes. Sam hears the scrape of his chair against the floor and feels the gust of him standing up quickly, “Yeah, I’ll go take a walk. I, uh, I could stay in a hotel tonight, too, so you can have the night to-”
Sam’s arm goes shooting out and his hand finds its way into the cool, solid, almost reassuring metal of Bucky’s. He yanks him back down into his seat.
“Nah. No running away. Nope,” he sighs as he settles Bucky’s hand down onto the table and lays his own over it.
“Okay,” Bucky mumbles. Sam takes a grounding deep breath and tells himself, as much as he is, as Bucky said, freaking out, this needs to be about Bucky’s stability right now and not his. He looks up from his hand to find Bucky’s blue eyes half-lidded and scanning him.
“So, you doing alright?” Sam asks. Slowly, a small, less than stellar smirk grows on Bucky’s lips.
“No, Sam. I’m pregnant,” he states, monotone. Sam nods.
“Fair enough.”
Neither of them have much want to eat the eggs anymore so Sam slides them into the trash before he ushers them both back to bed. It’s only been a little over two hours since they woke up in the first place and Sam’s not tired in the slightest, but he also knows that he wants to hold Bucky up against his chest under the covers, give Bucky something solid and warm to tether against so he doesn’t start spinning out of his grasp. It’d been a lazy Sunday with no Cap duties for Sam, so they are at least still in their pajamas.
Bucky is stiff but also trembling under Sam’s arm. He sounds so ridiculously small and weak when he manages to speak.
“This is . . . it’s really fucked up. Like, I know fucked up better than anyone else and this is the height of it. I’m sorry I’ve made you a part of it.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” Sam whispers back and Bucky shifts down roughly.
“I didn’t think it would . . . they did so many experiments and most never panned out. All the shit they put in me and took out, you can’t imagine, and I almost forgot that they had-”
Bucky has locked up the way he does when he tries to rehash any of what happened to him as the winter soldier; shoulders pulling in towards his chest and neck rigid in a way that looks painful. Sam leans his head against that tight neck and feels the muscles soften to it.
“You don’t have to tell me. I don’t need the details. It happened, let’s just deal with that.”
Bucky doesn’t fight him on this, even if he does disagree. He yanks the comforter up to his chin and shuts his eyes. Sam tries to follow, kissing the top of Bucky’s head and relaxing down into the bed.
Sam can’t fall into a nap, retracting his arms from around Bucky when he’s sure he’s fully out, but Bucky gets a good two hours in. Sam is happy to let him have it and does some silent work on his laptop while Bucky lays in bed. After Bucky wakes up, when he stays in the bedroom, utterly silent, Sam keeps doing that work and doesn’t bother him.
They make contact again around six.
“Dinner?” Bucky asks, lingering in the doorway like he can’t make up his mind about entering or staying hid away for another few hours. Sam gives him a welcoming smile and sighs warmly when Bucky takes another step forward.
“I’ll order us something. Thai?” Sam asks. Bucky shakes his head with a wince. Sam notes as a food to avoid for as long as they’re dealing with this situation.
“You just want pizza?” he offers. Bucky nods with a barely there smile and takes a few more steps.
Sam calls in an order at a place he knows has the aggressively melty cheese and thin crust Bucky likes and puts on some trash reality show for background noise while they eat, Sam leaning back against the couch and Bucky choosing the floor with the coffee table as a headrest because he’s actually insane.
“So, you’ve been to the doctor, right?” Sam asks once Bucky’s had one full slice and might actually participate in this conversation. Bucky sets down his plate with his second helping slowly and glares at Sam.
“Yeah, I went to the doctor. Obviously. What? You think I’m taking pregnancy tests every now and then just for the fun of it?”
Sam frowns and feels as idiotic as Bucky wants him to. It was a pretty stupid question, he knows, but his brain is scattered and regrouping, prone to mess ups.
“Sorry, okay? I shouldn't have-that was dumb,” he apologizes. Bucky grumbles and turns back to his food. Sam can’t help but watch him for a second after he does; he’s still tense as all hell and looking one push away from disaster, even if he’s calmed down a bit. Sam hesitates before he keeps talking, “Did they tell you how far along you are?”
Buck sets his slice down on his plate again, quiet for a long moment and keeping his focus on the two women getting into a bar fight on the screen.
“Why the hell does that matter?” he spits. Sam huffs and shrugs.
“I don’t know. Sometimes it can affect when and how you can terminate. I was just asking. I don’t know.”
“Nine weeks,” Bucky issues in a growl, “and they don’t know how to get rid of it yet. They don’t think the normal medications will work on me, so they have to think of something else. Maybe surgery. I’m not sure. The doctor’s office said they’d call me when they had more information.”
The potential of a surgery elevates the seriousness of this all for Sam, and the level of seriousness it was at was already pretty major. His heart does a few hard bangs against his ribs before he shuts his eyes and levels himself off with deep breaths. He reassures himself that this is manageable and that the doctors know how surgeries and abortions and uteruses (if that’s what Bucky has, he doesn’t know) work. It’s fine. Or, well, it’s not, but it will be once Bucky can talk to the doctors and he can get Bucky to talk to him. That won’t be tonight. Sam’s sure of that. But, that will be fine, too. They’ve made it through worse nights.
They go to bed at nine-thirty, hours earlier than they usually do, and once more that day Sam is laying under the sheets and the comforter feeling nowhere near sleep. But, Bucky had said he wanted to go to bed and Sam didn’t like the idea of letting Bucky sleep alone if he could help it.
There’s a large gap between them, Bucky having pulled his pillow as far as he could to the left side of the bed and curled around it. Sam is staring up at the ceiling and watching the way cars going past on the street change the light filtering in from the window. Also, he is thinking. A lot.
He tries to imagine what they’d be doing if this was a normal situation. As in one where their shared history isn’t a storybook full of burned pages, he’s not Captain America, Bucky isn’t the world’s most traumatized 106 year-old, and Bucky has a body they knew could make children. Sam would have worn condoms is one change he can note right off the bat. He would have had a remote sense of caution in the relationship instead of barrelling headfirst into it. They’ve been moving so fast, from friends to dating to living together in Sam’s apartment in the span of six months. Had it been anyone else, this is the point Sam thinks he would probably be starting to consider saying ‘I love you’ for the first time. He wouldn’t be getting them knocked up.
But, the fact is Sam did knock Bucky up. He fucked him without condoms and without a thought to what he was doing and its repercussions. If he’s going back to his hypothetical reality for them, Sam would be doing the right thing and telling Bucky he’d support him no matter what, that he would stand by him through all of this and he loves him so much. He would be taking responsibility for the baby he put in Bucky’s body.
He put a baby in Bucky. Jesus. They made a baby.
“I love you,” Sam says into the dark because he hasn’t said it since Bucky told him he was pregnant and he really, really should have. Bucky rolls onto his right side and their eyes hold onto each other.
“I love you, too,” Bucky says. It feels like the first time they’ve said it, even if it’s past the hundredth. It’s a reaffirmation. Sam grabs onto Bucky’s hip and pulls himself across the gap to kiss him. Bucky melts into it.
“I’m with you through this. You let me know what you need me to do and I’ll do it, okay? You’re not alone and I’m not leaving,” Sam tells him as they break away. Bucky sighs shakily, nodding, and Sam feels like an ass for not realizing Bucky would need to hear that. They’ve never talked about it directly, but Sam has counseled enough people like him to tell that abandonment is a fair part of Bucky’s PTSD. It’s only gotten worse since Steve left, something Sam will never forgive, as much as he loves Steve. Sam’s arms hold Bucky to him and he closes his eyes as he listens to the calming beat of his heart.
Bucky pulls away a while later after a yawn and a stretch and resettles onto his pillow. Sam lays in the spot he was for a second, considering and backtracking before he speaks.
“Bucky?”
“Hm?”
“I wanted to say that . . . that if you wanted to keep it, I’d support you. I-I mean we could . . . if that’s what you want, we could figure it out,” Sam says. He’s not sure if it’s what he wants. There’s no way he could be sure of something that life-changing after one day. But, he does know that he wants Bucky to have his options open and available. If on the off chance Bucky’s waiting for Sam to give him the permission to want one of those options, he’s going to give it.
Bucky’s quiet after Sam speaks, for long enough that Sam thinks he was asleep enough to not be listening. But, eventually, he feels Bucky toss himself over to face away from Sam and punch into his pillow.
“Don’t be stupid,” he mutters.
“What’s stupid about that?” Sam asks, aggravated and honestly confused, as he often is by how the hell Bucky’s emotional state works.
“The way you’re acting like you could actually have a kid with me. Like you could even leave someone like me alone with a baby. C’mon,” Bucky says in a gruff hush. Sam studies the ceiling again. He is too tired to deal with the endless pools of self-hate Bucky has. Not tonight.
“We could do it.”
Sam leaves it at that. They sleep.
Bucky startles up with a gasp at somewhere around four in the morning and Sam goes into their routine.
He’ll take Bucky’s hand in his and pull him onto his chest. They’ll take their deep breaths together and go through what they can see in the room, every little detail of the space that Bucky can use to come back to himself.
But, Bucky breaks the routine. He yanks away the hand Sam reaches for and tucks it under the pillow he holds in his lap.
“I’m okay,” Bucky fires automatically, but Sam can hear how fast he’s breathing. He’s not.
“Baby, lemme help you. C’mere . . .”
“I’m gonna sleep on the couch,” he says and is gone before Sam can stop him.
Sam doesn’t see Bucky in the morning before he has to leave for a meeting at Bolling Base. He only gets to hear him throwing up through the locked door of their bathroom. Sam doesn't speak to Bucky at lunch when he tries to call him and gets sent to voicemail twice. Sam doesn’t even get to talk to him at night, when he comes home past ten and finds all the lights off in their place. Bucky’s on the couch again, which is going to be a thing now, he guesses, with a blanket over his bare chest and his body turned away from the room. He kisses Bucky’s temple with a sigh and sleeps alone in their bed.
This avoidance tactic goes on for days where Sam and Bucky only speak to have the same conversation.
“Have you heard from your doctor’s office?” Sam asks.
“Nope,” Bucky replies every time.
Sam comes home earlier than expected from a mission in New York after two days away and five days of virtually no interaction between him and his supposed boyfriend with aching bones, a bruise on his jawline, and the gumption to call Bucky on his shit.
The state of the apartment is not the best when he swings open the door. The blinds are pulled over the windows and all the lights are turned off, so the only source of light left is the glow of the TV playing a 40’s movie. Bucky sits in front of the couch in a t-shirt and boxers, shoveling spoonfuls of cereal into his mouth.
“Jesus Christ, Nosferatu, it’s three pm. Turn on a light,” Sam snaps, and does it for him, flicking on all the overheads. Bucky squints angrily at them.
“I like to watch movies in the dark,” he says, “How are you home already?”
“The whole thing was a lot less complicated than it seemed,” Sam tells him as he makes his way to the kitchen. He stops short of the fridge when he sees the mess of the sink. There’s a high stack of bowls with bits of cereal stuck to their sides and an emptied out Lucky Charms box on the counter next to them. Sam shakes his head and grabs the box.
“This all you've been eating for two days? We got food here. I left you with stuff to make-” Sam rants, shaking the box in the direction of Bucky, whose glare could be slicing if Sam hadn’t gotten used to it by now.
“I didn’t feel like cooking!” he yells back. Sam clutches his throbbing temple, snaps his tight jaw, and sucks in a puff of air up through his nose.
“You’re so goddamn wack, man. You can’t be eating this way when you’re-” Sam stops himself before Bucky has to. He has to catch himself from going there and worrying about the baby like it’s going to be a real part of their lives. Bucky’s told him what he’s decided and, in the end, it’s Bucky’s body and not Sam’s.
“When I’m what?” Bucky presses, teeth gritted. Sam’s eyes flick away.
“Nothing,” he mumbles, “You hear from the doctor’s?”
Bucky groans so low and rough in response it scares Sam. His hands go tight around his bowl.
“Nope! They’re still trying to figure out what exactly to do with my unknowable body. Guess it’s a pretty tough nut to crack, huh? Just too ruined to fix, right? So, yeah, Sam, no word from them. Still fucking pregnant!” Bucky’s grip, which had been clenching harder and harder with each sentence, goes vice like on the last word. The side of the bowl in his metal hand shatters across the floor and milk comes spilling out, pooling in Bucky’s lap. He stares at it, “fucking shit.”
Sam goes into damage control immediately, grabbing a trash bag, handing Bucky a few sheets of paper towels to clean himself up, and gathering up all the pieces of ceramic he can see caught in the carpet. Bucky dabs at the milk on his shirt and boxers with a red face and looks anywhere but at Sam.
“I’m a fucking uncontrolable animal,” Bucky grits.
“Stop,” Sam presses as he takes the trash bag and ties it up. He’s gotten most of the broken bits but he’ll still have to vacuum, which he’s sure Bucky will use as a chance to lock himself up in the bedroom, or the bathroom, or the patio. Bucky hasn’t even been letting Sam help him when he gets sick, won’t even take a glass of water from him. Sam has had about enough.
“This is why we can’t keep it. I don’t get how you can’t see that I . . . I’m not fit to be around normal people,” Bucky hisses, his arms wrapped around himself and the metal hand squeezed tightly to his body and hidden. Sam’s brows fold into each other and he can’t, he can’t take seeing Bucky hate himself so viscerally and squash down even the thought of having this kid because of it. Sam wants this baby, he realizes, and he wants that to be what Bucky wants, too, but that’s not even what he’s upset about, not really. It’s not that Bucky doesn’t want to have a kid, because that’s understandable given the circumstances; it’s that the choice is making Bucky dive back into a level of self-hatred Sam had thought he had moved past. And, seeing Bucky back in this state of violent loathing is breaking Sam’s heart.
“Bucky,” he says, and runs his hand down Bucky’s cheek, keeps it there even when Bucky tries to flinch away, “you know that isn’t true, right? That’s not how I see you, how anyone sees you anymore, or not anyone who counts. That’s not how you really see yourself. I know that. Why are you getting like this again?”
Bucky breaks away, slapping Sam’s hand down and clutching hard at the back of his neck.
“Why? Really, you’re gonna ask me why? I . . . I’m still HYDRA’s beast. Inside. I am,” Bucky says. His chest lurches with his rapid breath and Sam can tell this is the start of a panic attack.
“Hey, Buck, baby, listen to me, let’s breathe-”
“No! No! Y-you don’t understand. Ev-everytime I-I think I’ve got them flushed out, everytime I think that-that I’m clear, they’re still there! They put this thing in me and made me unnatural and-and, I can’t, I can’t . . . the doctor’s haven’t called me, Sam, and it’s been almost a week, I don’t know what I’m supposed to . . .” he pauses, gulps up air, and pulls too hard with the fingers that have laced into his hair, “I’ve got HYDRA in me and they don’t know how to get it out. It . . . it’s a nightmare, but I can’t-Sam, I can’t wake up, why can’t I wake up, why . . .”
Sam presses Bucky so snug to him it probably hurts. Bucky’s whole body shakes, from shoulders to ankles, and Sam has been trained to deal with anxiety as bad as this, but not when he’s this close to the situation, not when he feels like he could fall, too.
“Hey, shh, breathe, okay? HYDRA’s . . . they’re gone. They left this in you, but it’s not . . . it’s not theirs, what’s in you. It’s not going to be like them. This baby’s ours. It’s you and me,” Sam reassures. Something like a whimper shakes out of Bucky and Sam wants so badly to hold him tighter and longer and convince him in every way he knows how that Bucky’s life is his own now. But, Bucky is tearing Sam’s arms off him and shaking his head forcefully.
“I can’t. I can’t-why would you say that when I told you . . . It’s not-I’m not . . . no, no,” he rushes. He runs past Sam, ramming his shoulder so hard against Sam’s that he stumbles backward, and slams the door behind himself once he reaches the bathroom. The lock clicks after. Sam wipes a hand down over his face, sweaty and weakened.
Sam sits on the couch, his laptop open to a debrief of the recent New York mission, and listens to the slap of water on tile from Bucky’s never ending shower. He’s been scanning over the debrief for a while now and has not retained anything. He’s stuck replaying his and Bucky’s conversation and finding flaws in everything he said. It was stupidly selfish and completely misguided to try to convince Bucky of something he can’t let go of, especially in a moment when he should have been doing all he could do to keep Bucky level. It’s almost cruel, he thinks, and doesn’t know how to fix this.
Sam doesn’t understand himself. He’s never done anything like this before. He’s been aggressively pro-choice his whole life. He drove one of his high school girlfriends to Planned Parenthood after they had been reckless and less than safe and paid for her procedure himself. He remembers; it was most of the money he had from cleaning up hair at his dad’s best friends’ barbershop that summer. She had told him that she didn’t want the baby and he had done his part without question, with care and love. He wants to give the same support to Bucky; to make him soup after and put on cheesy movies like he did for her when he was seventeen. He doesn’t know what is making it so hard, really. All he knows is that every time he lets himself actually think about having a kid, his heart starts pounding and every thought in his head turns to how much he wants to be a dad.
Bucky comes out from his shower after a long two hours that will up their water bill a good amount and Sam follows him into the bedroom. His hair is soaked and hangs limp across his forehead as he holds a towel taut around his waist. His face has been set into a stiff, unreadable mask.
“I’m really sorry. I know I was out of line,” Sam says as Bucky crosses in front of him to the dresser. Bucky sighs, a heavy sound from deep within him, and slips on his clothes before he responds.
“Don’t read into this too much,” he prefaces. Sam nods.
“I’m not mad at you, I just want to know if you want to keep it.”
Sam purses his lips and holds down the emotions from showing on his face. He is, of course, mentally yelling a resounding ‘yes’, but telling Bucky that is risky and has the potential to tilt them back over to chaos. On the other hand, Sam doesn’t lie to Bucky.
“Yeah, I do.”
Bucky places himself on the edge of the bed and rubs the knuckles of his right hand across his chin. Sam can see his gears running fast in his brain.
“How do you know you want that?”
Sam shrugs and takes the other edge of the bed. Bucky’s fingers wander over to meet Sam’s and Sam hums as they make contact.
“I always figured I’d have kids one day, always knew it was something I wanted to be a part of my life. In Delacroix, half the town stayed there their whole lives and had a million babies. It was part of my blood, settling down and having a few little ones. And, I mean, with Cass and AJ, when they were born and I held each of them for the first time, I knew some more. Now, we’re here and it’s unexpected and not something I had even considered for us, but, I love you pretty damn much and I feel like I know even more,” Sam explains. He catches Bucky smile at his feet, sad and soft but there, and goes on, “You’ve never even thought about it?”
“No. Or, I don’t know. Maybe I did? I think, maybe, when I enlisted, I thought I’d meet a girl when I came home and start a family. It’s all foggy, that time. I know I didn’t think it would happen like this. I didn’t think it’d be me who . . . I didn’t think I’d be doing it with a guy, either, but, you know, along came you. You kind of have a way of changing things up for me,” Bucky says and Sam can’t help the proud grin that sprouts on his face. Bucky huffs at him and rolls his eyes, “Hey, I said not to read into it. Don’t smile like that.”
“Like what?” Sam teases.
“Like you think you can have your way with me,” Bucky indulges, shoving at Sam’s arm. Sam pushes back against it and moves into Bucky’s space. Bucky lets him, which is a pretty great sign things are okay in Sam’s book.
“Oh, baby, I know. I know it,” Sam eases. He kisses Bucky slow and hot, pressing his tongue to the roof of Bucky’s mouth and getting his hands all up in his hair. Bucky moans into Sam’s mouth when Sam’s hand dives under his shirt and brushes across a nipple. By the time the ring of Bucky’s cellphone, the most obnoxious of the prepackaged Apple defaults, interrupts them, Sam almost has the entire shirt off. Sam groans when Bucky tugs the clothing back down and picks up the call.
“Hello?” Bucky answers. The person on the other line says something that makes his face go all stony and tense again and, after a few muttered ‘yes’ and ‘uhuh’s, he darts out of the room and closes the door behind him. Sam forces himself not to listen to whatever is happening on that phone that Bucky doesn’t want him to know about. Five minutes later, Bucky opens the door back up, clutching hard onto his phone.
“It was my doctor’s office. They’re going with surgery. They want me in for a pre-op meeting tomorrow,” he issues to the floor. Sam inhales sharply and straightens his back out.
“Okay. Do you want to-”
“I’m taking a walk,” Bucky announces, and does one of his quick heel turns out of the room that leave Sam no time to refute him.
“Fuckin’ crazy,” Sam growls at the now empty door.
A final attempt is made by Sam to read the debrief, which proves to be impossible today, so he turns on a movie he liked when he was a kid that requires no brain power. His body is prickling with nerves. He usually doesn’t mind Bucky’s long, head clearing walks, because Bucky is a man with super strength and a vibranium arm, what is there to worry about? But, now, Bucky is too vulnerable, too close to breaking and snapping off in a way that gets him arrested or killed. And he’s not answering his cellphone.
Sam decides that if Bucky is not home by eight, he’s putting on his suit and flying around DC until he finds him.
Bucky comes through the door at 7:45.
“Nice to see you again,” Sam rumbles at him, arms crossed, “Thanks for being so good about keeping in contact with me.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that,” Bucky mutters. He’s playing with his jacket and keeps pushing his hands through his hair, fussing up the strands. So, Sam gathers, he’s freaking out over something, “Anyways, I was thinking, we should do it.”
“Excuse me?” Sam fires back and Bucky starts to pace, tugging down at his jacket with so much force that it strains at its seams.
“I-I don’t know if I gonna be any good at this. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to even handle all this. But, you want it and you believe I can and I love you and I think we should try,” he speeds. Sam tense and untenses a few times over and dares to hope.
“Hold up, I’m gonna need you to be direct with me here. What are you offering?”
“I’m telling you we can keep it,” Bucky says, jittery and nervous but clear. Sam’s heart leaps up into his throat and somersaults happily back down into his chest. He thinks he might be crying, a little bit, feels the heat behind his eyes, when he moves over to slam Bucky with a hug.
“I love you, you incredible masterpiece of science,” he whispers and Bucky laughs horsley, “also, I hope you know we’re not naming it Steve.”
“Damn you,” Bucky snorts and shoves out of the hug.
Sam doesn’t think he’s ever smiled this big.