Considerations
Sam, as he waits for Steve to come around, tries to put his life in order. It’s not easy. It’s not easy because he was dealing with his shit. He was helping people deal with their shit. And then this fucking know-it-all asshole running man came into his life. He’d tried to help him too, because fuck if Sam doesn’t know what it’s like to come back from a war without your best friend. He knows now that Riley is to him as Bucky is to Steve. Fuckin’ SAT analogies. But who fucking knew that if you try to help Captain Fucking America himself, Steve Motherfucking Rogers will show up on your doorstep - with a friend he might add - and ask if Sam’s willing to commit an entire fucking felony. He is. But that’s not the point. Sure, Sam took one look at Steve, one look at the mystery woman, and just stepped right aside, but hindsight is 20 fucking 20 and he’s allowed to be a little overwhelmed once the whole shitstorm is over. He is. He’s going to process this like a big boy, because he knows how to help himself and how to help other people too. So he plays music. It’s calming to him, and it’s all part of Steve’s attempts to acclimate with the century or whatever the fuck. Sam knows exactly what it is, because Steve showed him the list once. And he gets it. Catching up on things is important, but it seems almost like a chore to Steve. And that’s the bad part. He thinks that maybe Rogers hasn’t made as many choices about his life as he should be able to.
But this silent time is about Sam, too. He’ll lose himself if he only thinks about Steve, and he can’t do that. Because a lot’s happened to Just Sam. He got his wings torn off. Didn’t die, but the loss still hurts (they link him to Riley and what if that’s the last thing he’ll ever share with his best friend). And he’s got some cracked ribs. Those hurt too, more palpably. He lived and he’s absolutely going to have to call his mom, because holy shit, she’s going to be worried. She doesn’t know - and isn’t ever if he has anything to say about it - that he was on the front lines of it, but a hurricane comes within a hundred miles and she’s expecting him to call. She’ll find out the story from him, as much of it as he can tell her, because she just knows these things. It’s some sort of wild intuition and a very complete understanding of her own child. He should probably visit. It’ll do him some good. Maybe he’ll bring Steve home, too. God knows he needs some mothering and some food that’s not from a mess hall.
His sisters - and his mother too, if he’s being honest - would tease him that he’s got a fucking thing for boneheaded white boys. Riley was blond too, and that makes it so much worse. Because one boneheaded, blond haired shithead that runs into danger at any cost because he thinks (knows) it needs to happen is one thing. Two like that, is another. And yeah, Sam was pararescue too, which means that he’s just as crazy (see the whole commiting a felony thing), but he thinks that when he’s picked as wingman twice, it’s less of a coincidence and more of a very long, strange cosmic joke that Sam’s not in on.
Steve, the shithead, takes this opportunity to wake up. “Hey man,” Sam tells him, slapping on a soft smile, because he’s not about to start lecturing when Steve was just put through a meat grinder and almost drowned. That’s only like the last two bad things that happened to him, too. Everyone deserves to wake up just a little bit peacefully. That’s shattered, though, because Steve blinks, looks confused, blinks again, and then he’s looking sad and -
“Bucky - did he -?”
Steve must be able to read Sam’s face, because his expression that had something that might have been hope in it fades away to nothing.
“Sorry, nothing on him.” No news might be good news, Sam thinks. But then he frowns, a sudden thought. “Hey, how’d you pull yourself outta that river?”
Steve frowns right back. He’s quiet for a moment. “I didn’t.” Maybe some of that hope comes back into his face and Sam hopes that it’s not all fucked up. “We gotta find him. He recognized me - at the end. He was there, Sam. We gotta find him.”
Well there goes Sam’s quiet retirement that he’d been set on for all of two seconds. Sam would like to put himself up for the Best Friend Ever award for this. “Okay. We’ll find him. You need to rest, though, buddy. Super healing or not, you have to get some rest.”
Steve looks like he’d like to fight him on that.
“I’ll call that scary-ass spy - Natasha, right?” If that is her real name. “I bet she’d know how to make you stay in that bed. Do you want me to call her? We exchanged numbers, don’t doubt we did. Takes a lot of people to keep you from an international incident.”
Steve still looks put out, but he doesn’t look like he’s about to jump out of bed anymore.
“I’ll stay, Sam. But we gotta get moving.”
Sam sighs. “I get that, I really do. But look at it like it’s a battle plan. You need to be mobile and you’re not. You’re probably gonna want to talk to Natasha about things, too, even if it’s over the phone, and I have no fuckin’ clue where she’s at right now. Something this big? There’s gonna be huge consequences. There’s been a dump of information - pretty much all of HYDRA’s files got set loose on the Internet. And if we don’t start to even flip through those dossiers, we’re gonna miss something big. Because your friend there? Bucky? He’s gonna be in them. No way he’s not.” Sam’s not sure if that’s really Bucky anymore, but he’s thought about how he’d feel if Riley showed up again and decided that he can’t stop Steve, just do damage control. “He’s in the wind, man, and a guy like that’s not gonna get found unless he wants to be. So we need to use all our resources.” Yeah, he’s committed to this, isn’t he.
“I guess,” is the underwhelming reply to all that. “What if he’s hurt, bad? I tried not to fight him, but not until the end. I got some hits in.”
Sam is going to kill Steve himself. ‘Here lies Steve Rogers, a big fuckin’ dumbass’.
“You idiot. Steve - what the fuck? What the fuck, Steve?”
Steve just looks at him.
“Usually it doesn’t take that long for people to start yelling,” he says, and Sam is going to slap him, he swears to god.
“I was trying to be nice to the patient, but fuck that. Steve, he looks like your friend and maybe he recognized you, but you could have gotten killed.”
“He could have killed me so many times, Sam. But he didn’t. It’s Bucky in there. He was there, in the end. And he had to have been the one to pull me out of the river.”
It’s like talking to a brick wall. Sam decides to answer the original question.
“He was all armored up, remember? And from what you told me, he seems like a pretty smart guy. Maybe he’s not thriving, but I think he’s smart enough to survive out there. You need to focus on you, and then we’ll focus on him. Just stay here overnight, okay?”
“Fine.”
Overnight was a compromise, but Steve doesn’t have to know that.
“Hey, call Natasha and see what she’s doing. I wanna talk. You were right. Don’t look at me like that, Sam.” Steve must have seen the mad glee in Sam’s eyes at being told he was right. Not that he was doing much to hide it.