Chapter 4
For two days after the miscarriage, neither of them leave the apartment at all. Sam makes some calls to the right people and creates an email thread for all his contacts marking him as unavailable until the end of the week. He orders food for delivery, whatever Bucky will agree to eating, which is unfortunately never much. They hole up, with movies with only happy endings and junk food neither of them usually eat, and be with their feelings and each other. Bucky still won’t cry in front of him, but he lets Sam hold him during the long hours they spend in bed, exchanging soft ‘I love you’s and nothing else.
On the third day, Bucky has a session with Dr. Raynor. Sam drives him up to her DC office because Bucky asks and both of them go a little short of breath once they have their seatbelts on and the engine is whirring to life. The outside feels unsafe for their fragile wellbeing after hiding away with each other for days. But, Bucky needs to speak to someone and, for once, Sam thinks he actually realizes this.
“M’ going to the bathroom,” Bucky shoots when they arrive and Dr. Raynor is already coming down the hall from her office to the waiting room. He darts basically right in front of her, leaving the doctor and Sam staring at each other once Bucky’s gone.
Dr. Raynor quirks a brow up high on her face and sighs at Sam. Sam takes small, anxious steps to her.
“Well, he certainly seems-”
“He had a miscarriage,” Sam interjects before Dr. Raynor goes in on Bucky. It’s both relieving and gut wrenching voicing the pain that has remained so private to them. Right after, though, when Dr. Raynor looks at him with a mix of surprise and worry, Sam balks, “I wanted to tell you because I didn’t know if he would. I mean, he probably would, but I don’t-I know he doesn't tell you things, sometimes, so …”
“I understand,” Dr. Raynor says, reserved. She pauses and studies him. She’s always studying everyone, but this is especially focused. It makes him break eye contact with an abrupt glance to his shoes, “and I’m so sorry to hear that. I’d be perfectly fine to have both of you in with me today, if you have some things you’d like to work through as a couple.”
Sam does consider it. He considers sitting on that grey couch next to Bucky, hand clutched in hand, and letting the intense flood of pain within him flow forth to someone who's trained to handle it, someone removed from it all. He wants to purge it from himself. Putting Bucky through his purging, though, seems unfair. He shakes his head.
“That’s alright, thanks. I’ll let him have his time.” Sam wants to allow Bucky the space he needs on his own to process. In the two days of them bunkering down with only each other and a hoard of delivery fast food, Bucky did not speak a single word actually about the miscarriage. And, with a lack of many other factors, Sam sort of thinks it’s because of him. Dr. Raynor smiles sadly and tips her chin, studying some more, before she takes her hand up to rest on Sam's shoulder.
“Again, I’m sorry for your loss.”
Sam doesn’t say anything to that, simply irons his lips into something close to a grateful smile and dips away. Hearing those words confuses him the same as it did when Sarah said them. Losing the baby feels like a death and doesn’t. It’s odd to grieve so deeply for someone he never got to meet.
Sam drives around while he waits for Bucky’s session to end. He’s been in DC for so long that he can turn down any street and know which restaurants are good to eat at, the neighborhood demographics, and at least a few people. And, because apparently everything makes him sad now, seeing it all is making his throat go dry and tight as he thinks of the kid he won’t be able to show around his city. It’s stupid, really, to have his heart squezze up so fervently over not getting to take his hypothetical child to a chili place on U Street. But it does, and the picture of his little family in one of the place’s booths as he drives past is unshakeable. The vision of what he thought fatherhood would be like hasn’t fully stopped being real in Sam’s head, which is probably why it’s so hard to let go. And, it’s not like him and Bucky being dads has been permanently erased from their picture, or not from Sam’s at least. Though, right now, thinking of having any child other than the one they lost feels impossible, disrespectful, and hopeless.
Bucky meets Sam an hour and a half later with harrowed eyes and a morose, overworked expression on his face.
“Hey,” Sam whispers as they slip out of the waiting room and he runs gentle fingers down Bucky’s neck, “you okay? Did things go bad in there?”
Bucky shakes his head roughly and shrugs his loose jacket up on his shoulders.
“No. It was . . . it helped, I think. Sort of intense, is all,” he mumbles. Sam pulls a small smile, slips his hand into Bucky’s, and lets out a breath when Bucky takes hold.
“I’m not ready to talk to you about it,” Bucky tells Sam, eyes forward as he messes with his hands, halfway back to the apartment, “and I’m sorry, cause I know that’s not fair. I know you like . . . talking about shit. But I can’t do that yet. I’m working on it, but I’m not there.”
Sam holds his breath full and heavy in his chest. It’s a relief, mostly, that Bucky’s addressed that unspoken ‘it’ at all, and Sam is more than understanding. A big rule he’d learned at the VA; don’t force healing, because then you’re just hurting. A small part of Sam, however, is pulsing with hurt that Bucky is once again locking up his feelings from him, specifically.
He rubs a palm across Bucky’s thigh and tells him it’s okay, putting on a smile when Bucky gives him one.
Whatever Sam is feeling about it, he does give Bucky his time to work it out on his own. He makes dinners full of good, healthy foods that Bucky eats meager bites of, invites Bucky on his morning runs that he never comes on, sets up date nights that Bucky wriggles out of, and does everything he can without pushing Bucky to talk about it. He searches ‘how to support a partner who has miscarried’ about a million times, always exiting out of the tab because there is no way any online guide could manage to understand the complexities of their situation. Sam lays back, even though it kills him, even though Bucky is a mess.
Bucky stops cutting his hair. He gives up on shaving. He leaves the apartment less than he used to, which means as close to never as he can manage. He does shower, nearly hour long stretches of taking up the bathroom that he leaves with red, swollen eyes and a tremor to his step. The cracks grow every day. Sam watches each time that Bucky avoids him how the fault lines across his psyche deepen. A break is coming, and Sam feels like all he can do is hope it won’t be cataclysmic.
It’s affecting Sam’s work, which, considering his line of work, is dangerous as all hell. It catches up with him as he and Torres are in the middle of a takedown of a weapons smuggling ring. He’s out of it and, next thing he knows, an aggressively burly man is ramming his feet to the center of his chest, another guy is shooting Torres out of the sky, and two trucks are speeding away containing multitudes of firearms and explosives going to illicit buyers.
“Uh, what-what the hell, Sam?” Torres yelps at him. They’re in their transport van as a medic attends to the nasty wound on Torres’s shin from where a bullet clipped him. Sam holds his aching head in his hands and is more angry at himself than Torres or anyone else could manage. He’s thinking about who will feel his consequences for him, whose blood will fall on his suit in the coming weeks. Of course, though, simmering under all those thoughts, remains his worry for Bucky. So, he says without thinking,
“It’s Bucky.”
Torres eyes Sam as the medic wraps layers of gauze around his leg.
“Huh? What does Bucky have to do with-wait, did . . . did you guys break up or something?”
“Yeah,” Sam tells him, because it’s easier than explaining the reality of it. An awkward flush swarms over Torres’s face and he licks his tongue fast and anxious across his bottom lip, keeping his eyes on his injury rather than Sam.
“Oh. I’m really sorry about that,” he mumbles. Sam shrugs off his imaginary breakup; there’s more important things for them to focus on than Torres’s uncomfortable sympathy.
“Thanks. Now, c’mon, let’s figure out how we're gonna fix this,” Sam says as he stands, swoops up the case file, and takes a seat next to Torres. And he will fix it, by the end of this week. No, by tomorrow. Tonight, if he can. Torres nods, his chin bobbing up and down speedily.
“Yeah, of course. And, look, if you wanna talk about it or something-”
“Nope, we good,” Sam shoots and opens the packet between them. Torres mutters a few ‘yep’s and ‘uhuh’s and Sam huffs, diving into their plan over the sounds. His hurt is so personal, so intimately intense and unexplainable, that speaking it to outsiders feels insurmountable.
Sam doesn’t sleep well. He keeps waking up from vividly real dreams.
They’re not nightmares, he doesn’t think. They may leave him at a loss and wanting, with sweat on his brow and a whimper caught in his chest, but there’s nothing nightmarish about what his brain is creating for him.
He sees Bucky reaching full term. In Sam’s dreams, Bucky’s stomach has grown full enough that they can touch their palms to it and feel the stirrings of life underneath. Bucky glows with a light so glorious it makes Sam want to cry. In his dreams, they are going to have their little girl, any day now. In his dreams, they are righteously happy.
It’s consistently jarring to wake up wrapped in hot sheets that stick to Sam’s sweaty chest and next to Bucky, who is neither happy nor pregnant. Sam lets his fingers ghost across Bucky’s flesh arm and takes solace in the fact that he does remain to be there.
Sam’s most realistic dream comes a month after the miscarriage. In it, Bucky is giving birth. The basic conceit lacks logic, because Bucky was never going to do that. His doctors had scheduled a C-section a week before his due date; labor with his anatomical set-up was a risky situation they had wanted to avoid at all costs. But, those facts hold no ground in Sam’s dream, where he and Bucky exist in some indistinct medical setting, Bucky on his back with his legs up in the air and Sam clutching his hand firmly in his own. Sam is muttering words of encouragement he can’t make out as Bucky breathes rhythmically the way Sam has seen this happen on TV. They’re so close to meeting their daughter, Sam knows, because the doctor is telling them he can see the head. One more push, he tells them, she will be here to meet you in just one push. And, oh my God, Sam will meet her. He’s going to hold this girl to his chest and she will shine like the sun. Bucky’s bearing down so hard. She’s coming, she’s coming right now, doctor cradling a head and lifting, and then they can be-
Sam wakes up. He jolts out of the foggy hospital room and lands back down heavy onto the bed. He’s shaking with how close he was to seeing her and sizzling with anger at his body for leaving too soon. He slams his eyes shut in an attempt to get back there. He wants to be in that reality for as long as he can manage, but it’s hopeless, his mind is awake and here, where he is. And, for some reason, he has the feeling that even if he could fall back asleep, he still wouldn’t be able to see her. Something would block her from his view, he’s sure, and she would stay just out of reach. He knows this deep in his gut. It hurts, it hurts, God, it hurts.
Sam rolls himself to Bucky, who occupies the far left edge of the bed, and goes to cling tight to him. When Bucky grunts and pushes him away, a dagger dives through the heart of Sam.
“Bucky,” he demands, raw voiced. Isolation consumes him, passes like a wave over his whole body and sucks him away with the tide. He’s been patient and understanding and given his love to Bucky in the ways he is allowed, but this is the final push, metaphorically and literally, to Sam’s restraint falling apart, “Do you still love me?”
“It’s the middle of the night, what’s-”
“I asked you a question. Do you still love me?” Sam commands. His breath sits thickly in his chest and doesn’t move. He needs this answer. He needs it and if he doesn’t get it, he’ll explode. He is certain of that.
Bucky turns, sits up firmly straight, and stares at Sam with severe, darkly focused eyes.
“Of course I fucking love you. You-” he stops, swallowing hard and clenching fists into the sheets, “you are the best person. You are too good for me to love you as much as I do.”
“Bucky …” Sam whispers into the tense dark. Guilt and fear and sadness lay thick over him. Bucky’s face, as it pinches up in shame, is honestly physically hurting him. Sam can feel the deep torment in Bucky’s frown burrowing down in his soul and ripping him apart from inside out.
“I don’t want to treat you like this. You’re so good to me, you don’t deserve all my … my … I’m sorry, I’m trying to be okay, but it’s really, really hard for me to be touched right now,” Bucky winces. His hands come up to cover his eyes, pushing up his face and scraping through his hair soon after. The cracks deepen and Sam blames himself.
“Jesus, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have . . . I had an intense dream and it set me off. I shouldn’t have taken that out on you,” Sam apologizes. Bucky shakes his head against his hands as he tosses himself back to the bed. Slowly, cautiously slow, his hand stretches over to Sam’s and grabs on.
“Do you wanna talk about your dream?” Bucky asks. Sam’s eyes remain on Bucky, on the arm he uses to hide his face and the shallow, distressing rise and fall of his stomach with his breath. He can’t tell him about his dream. He pulls up Bucky’s hand and presses it with a small kiss.
“It’s okay. Just hold my hand. That’s all you need to do.”
Bucky sighs, a weighty sound, and fastens his grip onto Sam. His thumb rubs against one of Sam’s knuckles, digging in. It says enough.
“Can do.”
Sam wakes up before Bucky, as he usually does, and pulls out everything he needs for french toast from the fridge. It’s Bucky’s favorite. On Sunday mornings, before everything in their life was touched by what happened to them, when Sam allowed himself to sleep in, Bucky would make a mess of the kitchen whipping it up for them. It’s not a Sunday, but Sam’s left the morning free so he can drive Bucky to a therapy appointment and he thinks they’re both in need of some french toast.
“Hey, I’m cookin’ you some spectacular french toast out here! You better get ready,” Sam hollers out from the kitchen when he hears the rustling of Bucky rising and swinging open the bathroom door.
“Not as spectacular as mine!” Bucky calls back, a small glint of his old energy and snark touching the edges of his words. Sam’s grin stretches up into his cheeks as he presses the bread flat against the pan. He finishes up frying his toasts and plates them with a sprinkling of powdered sugar, the fruit they have on hand, and artistic drizzles of syrup, because he doesn’t back down from a challenge, joking or not. He settles his masterpieces of breakfast on either side of their kitchen table and waits.
Sam waits and waits and waits. It’s been ten minutes; the syrup and the powdered sugar congeal nastily as the fruit goes too soft and they’ll barely have time to eat before they leave for Bucky’s appointment.
“Buck?” Sam asks into the silence. White hot dread pinpricks across him when he gets no response. He doesn’t like this place to be silent. He doesn’t like to not be able to actively see that Bucky is okay, or closed off bathrooms, or the anticipation of finding out what lies behind shut doors. It’s instinctual now, to encounter all of that with involuntary fear. He stands from the table and treks down the hall with creeping anxiety working up his spine, and has his breath knocked out of him when Bucky almost crashes into him, barreling down the hall in basketball shorts, a loose pullover, and one headphone shoved in his right ear.
“What the hell are you doing?” Sam questions, scanning the outfit. Bucky slides around him and out of the hallway, a tension in his muscles Sam can’t help but notice.
“Going for a run,” Bucky mutters. He steps over to the plates Sam had set out, shovels down bites of french toast so quickly Sam knows he isn’t tasting any of it, and offers Sam a thumbs up, “It’s really good. I’m going to head out.”
“Excuse me?” Sam sputters. Bucky looks up from tucking his phone against his body and sighs at Sam like he’s the one acting out of his mind.
“I’m fat. Looked in the mirror today and finally realized it. I’m still fat. I need to get back in shape.”
Sam looks up and down Bucky’s body and tries to find where the supposed ‘fat’ is. Most of the pregnancy weight has fallen away from him with his continually abysmal eating, leaving him not skin and bones, per se, because the serum prevents that from happening, but gritty and stripped again. The only fat left lies around Bucky’s hips, the smallest of softnesses that Sam secretly hopes never leave.
“You’re not,” Sam says. Bucky laughs, gruff and mean, ready to rebuff, so Sam speaks over him, “and you’re not going running, either. I’m taking you to therapy in less than an hour.”
“No. I think I’m good. Think I might skip out on that one. I’m feeling fine today,” Bucky zooms with another step to the door. Sam huffs hotly out his nose and pushes himself up to standing, which gets Bucky to halt, even for just a moment. Sam tries not to yell. He really does. Because, Bucky is unstable and Sam vowed last night he wouldn’t. He shouldn’t yell. He should take a deep breath and calmly ask Bucky to attend his mandated therapy that he is required to go to for another year, but Bucky and calm have not been mixing well lately, or ever.
“Okay, I get it. You wanna get arrested. You wanna screw over your whole pardon. That’s great. You’re trying to fuck everything up. Good for you!” Sam roars. Bucky tosses his arms up and lets them fall against his thighs with a loud slap.
“Fuck it, maybe I do! Why not? Maybe I will go to prison. I should probably be there, with all the shit I’ve done.” The tremble under Bucky’s yelled words shakes through Sam, tossing around his ribcage. It’s raw and sore, the pain that screeches out of Bucky’s snarled lips. He looks at Sam fleetingly, burnt and dejected behind his eyes, before his hand shoves back the too long hair that hangs over his face and he whips his head away. Speech fails Sam, starts of sentences dying in his open mouth before he says them. He’s not used to being at a loss for words. He doesn’t like it.
“You need to go to this appointment,” he settles on. Bucky shakes his head, leaning back onto the wall with something close to utter exhaustion. His eyes close as a quivering exhale comes up out of him.
“Okay,” he whispers.
Sam drives Bucky, still in his running clothes, to Dr. Raynor’s office. He walks him up the stairs and into the waiting room, checking Bucky in with the receptionist. And, when they are called back, Sam walks him all the way to that gray couch and forest mural.
“You can go now,” Bucky frowns at him as he throws himself down onto the couch. Sam huffs at him.
“Nah. I’m gonna stay,” He tosses his stare over to Dr. Raynor, who watches the exchange intently, “That good with you, Dr. Raynor? It’s just, Bucky tried to skip this session and break the terms of his pardon-”
“Oh, Jesus, fuck-” Bucky cuts in, but Sam rolls right over his words.
“So, you know, I figured I should make sure he doesn’t bolt or anything.”
“That’s alright with me,” Dr. Raynor says, gesturing for Sam to sit.
“It’s not alright with-” Bucky groans as Sam does sit, adamantly, “well, nevermind, then. Just invade my government-sponsored psychoanalysis, I guess.”
“Okay,” Dr. Raynor says with a click of her tongue and swings open her notebook, “who wants to start?”
Sam’s eyes flick over to Bucky, who persistently won’t make eye contact with him. He waits and hopes that maybe, this will be the moment. He gives Bucky his time to talk first and prepares for whatever will be said, as long as he will say something. But, he doesn’t. Sam sighs and rubs a hand across his pursed lips.
“I don’t know how to help him,” Sam mutters. Bucky readjusts next to him, sucking up a breath. Dr. Raynor stares at him for a long moment as her pen taps a small beat on the notepad.
“Do you want to speak to that, James?”
Bucky shrugs and leaves his shoulders up there, locked around his neck. His breath is coming out rattling and restricted. The weight of all that he has caged inside himself is so immense Sam can feel it on him, too. After a minute, Bucky’s eyes roll up to the ceiling and he responds.
“I don’t know, either. I don’t know how to . . . to be in my . . . body, anymore.”
“What do you mean by that?” Dr. Raynor asks, cool, level, but insistent. Bucky’s jaw is tight, painfully so, and Sam has the overwhelming urge to lean over and cover it with soft kisses until Bucky melts to him. But, it doesn’t work like that, now. Sam can’t kiss Bucky into his arms, into smiles and rough, energetic sex that erases all his tension; Sam can’t even touch Bucky without upseting him.
“There’s-it’s like . . . it’s like I-I . . . ugh, God, I don’t know how to say this,” Bucky stumbles out. Sam’s heart squeezes to hear him struggle and he wanders a hand over to Bucky in an effort to alleviate an ounce of what presses down on either of them. Bucky tucks a hand under his thigh and balls his other into a fist pushed up against his chin. His eyes graze over Sam and then dart away, “Sorry. Shit, sorry, I can’t . . .”
“What can’t you do, exactly?” Dr. Raynor questions. She’s resolute and steady with her handling of Bucky, in a way that Sam is glad for at the same time he hates it. It’s too harsh and removed, her questioning, but it’s necessary, too. Bucky won’t answer to less.
“Be touched,” Bucky mumbles, looking at neither of them. Dr. Raynor leans forward, elbows firm on her knees and eyes narrowed, and examines Bucky like he's a particularly challenging puzzle. Sam would say that the metaphor stands to be true pretty regularly.
“Do you know why that is?”
“No,” Bucky spits automatically. Dr. Raynor tilts her chin down and furrows her brow, which, shockingly to Sam, is enough to get Bucky to face her with a huff and give an answer, “It feels like my body is too dangerous to be touched.”
Sam sits up, alert, and shakes his head automatically. He’s dedicated much of the past year to showing Bucky that he’s not dangerous to him. In quiet nights and hushed, vulnerable conversations on the fire escape of Bucky’s old Brooklyn apartment, in inviting Bucky into the Wilson family in nearly every way possible, in searing touches and scarily intimate moments in Sam’s bed, Sam has done the work to make Bucky feel trusted.
“No, Bucky, you-no. You’re not dangerous. You know that. You would never hurt me now. You wouldn’t hurt anyone who didn’t deserve-”
“But I did!” Bucky jolts outs, rising from the couch a little. He gnaws down on his lip and falls back, “My body did. It’s weaponized. Always will be. It-Sam, fuck-it killed our b-baby.”
Sam’s skin goes prickly and cold. He thinks he could cry. But, he doesn’t, because this is not about him. He stops the tears, resteadies, and centers back on Bucky.
“That wasn’t your fault. You didn’t kill . . . I don’t know why it happened. I wish it didn’t. God, I wish it didn’t, but you have to realize that you didn’t do anything wrong.”
Sam’s composure teters on the edge, on the brink of a nosedive into failing if he doesn’t devote most of his attention to keeping it together. The sting of salt sits on the waterline of his eyes and if he loses focus for even half a second, he will spill open with everything that rests just behind his surface. He needs that not to happen. Or, at least, not until Bucky is okay.
“I can’t do this,” Bucky whispers as he clutches his hand over his eyes and fights his own battle against emotion.
“James, I think you should listen to what Sam is telling you. He doesn’t blame you. No one blames you,” Dr. Raynor states. Bucky gnashes the heels of his palms under his eyes and gives a violent shake of his head.
“I need him to go,” he grunts, and Sam doesn’t realize at first that Bucky means him, “Sam, you-you have to leave. Right now. You have to go. Please, I-I can’t.”
“Don’t. C’mon, Buck, don’t-” Sam’s voice is clawing out of him, sounding exactly as desperate as he feels.
“Please,” Bucky grits.
Sam stares. Bucky doesn’t stare back.
Sam feels so goddamn alone.
He leaves.
The forty or so minutes Sam waits for Bucky in the lobby is consumed by the unending sensation of falling. Sam is used to falling. Every time he puts on his suit to jump out of the next plane or zoom over the next car chase, he falls through the sky. Though, in those cases, falling is always followed by the relief and elation that is flying. The falling he is stuck in right now comes with no euphoric lift. It is plummeting with no wings and knowing that there is nothing and no one below to catch him.
Bucky refuses to look at Sam when he enters the waiting room. He walks straight ahead out the glass doors and doesn’t turn back to see if Sam is following. They have another noiseless car ride, the second of the day and the seemingly hundredth in the past month. Sam is plunging through it all.
When they get to their apartment, Bucky goes without words to the bedroom and starts searching through Sam’s drawers.
“What the fuck?” Sam asks, more resigned than angry. Bucky grumbles non-words and moves onto a new drawer. Sam crosses his arms and watches it happen, “No, actually, what the hell are you-”
Sam’s words halt and his arms fall. From under all of his thick winter sweaters that he hasn’t touched in months, Bucky pulls the Captain America onesie. Sky blue-no, baby blue, plastered with the shield proudly in the middle and the words ‘Cap’s Sidekick’ under it, Bucky holds it in front of his chest.
Sam should have thrown it away. As Bucky had slept the morning after the miscarriage, Sam had fished the tiny piece of clothing from a bag in Bucky’s closet and tried his best to walk it over to the trash can and drop it in. He had hesitated, though, to toss out this part of a life that never came to fruition. He had kept it for the same reason he can’t delete his album of bump photos or he’s got the ultrasound scan tucked in between other papers in his desk; these things are all he has to hold. Sam swallows down hard and watches Bucky.
“How’d you know-”
“I wasn’t that asleep that day.”
Bucky lets out a hulking breath and grips hard into the fabric. Slowly, he brings the onesie up to his face and presses into it. Covering himself from nose to chin, he dives deep in and inhales. It doesn’t really make sense, because it’s not like the baby ever had the chance to wear it; if it smells like anything, it’s Sam’s musky old shirts. It has been utterly untouched by its presumed wearer. As Bucky screws his eyes shut and continues to take deep breaths against the item, that stupid little sentence that circulates in English classes and literary circles alike, ‘For sale, baby shoes, never worn’, gusts into Sam’s head. He’d never really understood its significance before, less than impressed by the famous, scant story, but, seeing how desperately Bucky clings to the onesie, he understands it on a fundamental level.
Bucky’s shattering cry erupts out of him and slashes through Sam. It’s a slight release at first for Bucky to finally cry in front of Sam, but when his knees buckle and he crashes to the ground, any relief dissipates.
“Bucky,” Sam trembles as he zooms over and lays his hands on either side of Bucky’s chest.
“Don’t touch me!”
Sam rears back, stung. He had forgotten, in the echoing sound of Bucky’s wails, that he’s not allowed to touch him anymore. He’s not allowed to hold Bucky to him as he weeps or wrap both of them in his wings, pressed together and sheltered, like he wants to. Sam clenches hand into his shirt above his heart and slides down to lean against the bed like he’s been shot. Anger surges, the one that he’s been keeping at bay for over a month.
He hurts, too, every day. He replays finding Bucky in the bathtub constantly, as much as he replays every doctor’s appointment and discussion of baby names and night holding on to Bucky’s bump, especially now, as all he can hear is Bucky’s shrieking sobs. He breaks his heart as he walks through every mistake from that day. He should have stayed, he knows, but, secretly, deep in himself, he knows Bucky should have called, too. Bucky should have fucking called Sam when he got worse or called his doctors or done anything but lay in that awful water while the baby died. And Sam doesn’t-will never, ever-blame Bucky, but his grief and sorrow and anger is leaking out at every seam and latching onto anything it can. He can’t hold onto this any longer. He can’t keep keeping it together for Bucky’s sake. Gulping, Sam gathers his courage amongst Bucky’s dying whimpers.
“Bucky, I need-”
“I want to break something,” Bucky says over him.
Sam swallows up his pain once again, even if it can barely fit inside him now, and nods. Bucky can break down whole walls for all he cares.
They decide their patio chairs are the most expendable, in terms of destruction. Sam sits in one as he watches Bucky heft the other up. He lifts it over his head, takes in a puff of air, and tosses it down onto the cement below. It shatters instantly.
It’s satisfying to see; the solid chair turning into wood shards strewn around them so easily in Bucky’s hold. Seeing Bucky have strength in any way is gratifying and reassuring. Though, this show of it is too wild and feral to inspire any relief in Sam.
“I can’t feel like this anymore,” Bucky whispers at the desecrated chair. Sam sighs brokenly.
“It won’t be like this forever,” he assures, though, it’s hard to see the truth. It’s hard to see anything that exists outside of this.
The chair bits are left untidyed on the patio. Sam orders in Chinese and they eat out of the boxes without tasting the food, sitting on opposite sides of the living room. They go to bed early.
“Sam?” Bucky whimpers out a few minutes after the lights have been shut off and they have slid under the sheets. Sam turns onto his side.
“Yeah?”
Bucky leans in and shocks him by sliding his lips in between Sam’s, gentle and unsure. It’s been so long since they’ve kissed, just kissed, and Sam thinks he could weep as he tastes the salt and sweetness of Bucky.
“I’m sorry,” Bucky sighs as he pulls away. He remains close, his breath tingling across Sam’s lips.
“It’s okay,” Sam tells him. He’s said those words so many times as of late that they have lost all meaning and turned into word mush. But, maybe, if he keeps saying them, he can will them into reality. Bucky scrunches his face into something sad and crushed and gasps in a breath.
“Hey, what’s-” Sam starts up, a cloud of worry covering him. Bucky shakes his head quickly and pulls further away.
“Sorry, it’s . . . it’ll be okay. Go to sleep. I love you,” he rushes. Sam stares at him and doesn’t move. His creeping sense of wrong crawls up his neck, clammy and jittering, but it’s rare it’s ever gone, lately. Bucky brushes his knuckles across Sam’s cheek, “I love you more than anyone I’ve ever known, I think. I just realized that.”
Sam’s mouth falls open. They’ve told each other they love each other so much, he says it without thinking about it, but this is different than that. This is profoundly more than any other ‘I love you’. Now, it’s Sam’s turn to lean over and kiss Bucky. He kisses him in a way he hopes conveys that he loves him with every atom in his body, and will forever more.
Bucky sighs away when Sam’s hands dive up under his shirt. Embarrassment ghosts over Sam at his aggressive forwardness at the worst time and he starts to form a muttered apology. Bucky shushes him.
“Don’t worry about it. Just go to sleep,” he says and, for the third time, adds, “I love you.”
“Love you, too,” Sam says with a small smile. He is reassured by Bucky returning it the best he can. He sucks in his lips and runs his tongue along them as he nestles his head into his pillow, the lingering taste of Bucky so wonderful. It guides him into sleep, stupidly heavy, too heavy sleep.
Bucky’s not in the bed when Sam wakes up. As he runs his hand down the stretch where Bucky was, it’s cold enough to assume he hasn’t been there for a while. Trepidation runs along Sam’s skin and goosebumps his arms. It feels the same. He feels the same as last time. He wants to vomit because it feels the same. Standing on unsturdy legs, he wanders into the hall.
The fucking bathroom light is on.
“No,” Sam chokes out. He doesn’t know what he’s saying no to. His thoughts are not rational enough to know that. All he knows is that he’s sure something terrible exists in that cursed bathroom and he wants it to stop.
Sam wishes he could not open the door. What he wants more than anything is to count this as a weird dream, crawl into bed, and wake back up with Bucky next to him, never having to open that door. Sam doesn’t think that’s an option.
His sweaty palm seals around the gold door knob and he turns it open.
Bucky is on the ground. He’s spread across the floor and is not moving.
With how his hair falls over his face, Sam can’t tell if he’s alive.