Not Okay, Dude
It had been a long day already, and Sam knew trouble when he saw it.
“Hey, man, group is over – but you’re welcome to some of the coffee and donuts.” He gestured behind him and kept stacking chairs. This guy didn’t look like he wanted to talk. Truth be told, he didn’t look like he wanted to even be in the building. But the VA had a way of drawing people in. That was what it was for, after all. This guy screamed vet. He just needed a minute to get his bearings and hopefully not to decide that he was a racist asshole about to make Sam’s life a living hell.
Not that Sam had any experience with racist assholes or anything.
Sam snuck glances at the man out of the corner of his eye while he tidied the room. He was roughly his age, with scraggly brown hair in desperate need of a wash covered by the world’s most pathetic baseball hat. The guy had to be wearing like eight layers, which was a lot for Washington DC, even in the winter. He was clearly cataloguing the exits and checking the windows, signs of PTSD but fairly standard ones as far as everything went. The weirdest thing about him was definitely that he was still wearing gloves indoors, but that wasn’t serial killer weird. Sam relaxed minutely. This was probably fine. His instincts were probably wrong and this guy was probably not a massive threat.
“Samuel Isaiah Wilson, pararescue. Currently a counselor at the Veteran’s Affairs building. Current address 54 Poplar Street. Only surviving parent is father, Franklin Wilson, residing at 90 Livingston Avenue, Apt. 1A, in Harlem, New York. Sister…”
“Man what the hell?”
Sam was never ignoring his instincts again. He whipped around as the man began talking, stunned to hear his life details mechanically and rustily recited as if by rote. The man didn’t make eye contact while he delivered his report, just kept going until Sam, having heard enough, interjected. Then he stopped, without looking up, and went still, as if waiting for orders.
“Not okay, dude. That is what we call an invasion of privacy.”
The man didn’t move. Sam felt himself wanting to reach for a gun that wasn’t there, to draw on the threat that he now felt more clearly than he had before. What the hell? Who the hell was this guy?
“Everything okay in here?” June stuck her head in from the hallway, a look of concern etched on her face.
“It’s fine,” he said, without really working to make his tone match the words. “I’ll be out in a minute to close up.”
She nodded, still slightly suspicious, and went back out. Sam took a calculated risk and stepped closer to the man, noting how his eyes tracked Sam’s feet.
“Man, you can’t just go looking up people’s families online,” he hissed. “Some people might view that as a threat.”
Nothing.
“Look, if you came here for group, come again next week, and please leave the creepy googling at home.”
Still nothing.
“Did you do this research on anyone else who works here?”
The man was completely still and silent. He decided to try something.
“Soldier.”
The man’s eyes shot up and it was as if with relief he met Sam’s gaze. “Reporting.”
“Where did you get your information, Soldier?”
The man settled into parade rest position and spat out, as if comfortably reporting to a superior officer, “Used advanced information gathering tactics, Sir, as trained. Followed standard procedure for ascertaining loyalties of assigned handler.”
“Handler?”
The man didn’t reply, but continued looking at Sam. Sam was starting to get the feeling that his training, extensive though it had been, wasn’t going to cover this.
“Am I your handler, Soldier?”
“Sir.”
His training definitely didn’t cover this. It covered how to deal with emotional attachments, how to deal with dissociations, how to deal with soldiers who still lived in the emotional reality of their service, but not what to do when a soldier who didn’t seem particularly stable decided you were his handler. That was new.
It also raised an important question. Handlers weren’t a thing in most branches of the military. This guy was obviously a vet, but a handler suggested wetworks. So did the information gathering. Was he –
“Soldier, what is your name and rank?”
The man looked at him confused.
“Soldier, what is your name and rank?”
The man just continued to stare, unblinking, with his head cocked slightly to the side. It was as if Sam had asked a question that just wasn’t computing.
“What do I call you?”
The man relaxed a fraction. “Asset.”
Well fuck, this was even worse than he thought. He had a mentally damaged, traumatized man here who clearly worked for covert ops and couldn’t even remember his name and rank. Sam was going to have to pull out all the stops on this one. He might even have to bring in external help.
“Okay, Asset, thank you for coming to me. I’m glad we’re going to be able to work together to get you back to fighting shape.” The man nodded, though he didn’t seem particularly happy about this. He didn’t seem particularly anything about it. “But it’s getting late, and I got to get home. You should probably get going too. Why don’t we meet back here tomorrow?”
The man, or Asset, or whatever, cocked his head again and looked at Sam.
“Do you have someplace to sleep?”
Nothing.
Sam was about done. He needed to go home and read about a dozen books on trauma counseling before he felt ready to deal with this in the morning. So he repeated himself and walked to the corner of the room, turning the lights off.
“Come on, Soldier. We’ll come back tomorrow morning. How does 8am work for you?”
When Sam didn’t get a response, he rephrased. “Report back here at 8am, Asset. We’ll start work then.”
He could feel a presence at his back as the man followed him out of the room. He nodded to June as they stepped into the hallway. “All set back there.”
“You have a good night now,” she said, nodding to both of them. Sam smiled back at her and led his shadow out of the building.
It was cold, the winter wind whipping through the trees they’d planted just after he got back stateside. The trees were almost tall enough to provide real shade now, and definitely tall enough for the wind to get at them. The man stepped to Sam’s side, where he could see him.
Sam had a hunch the guy was living rough, but he knew it was a slippery slope. He worked at the VA, and he needed to be able to leave his work behind him. If he opened his home to every hard case that turned up at their doors, he’d been running his very own shelter in a week, and Sam needed a haven too. So he said his goodbyes and turned for his car, taking care not to look behind him to see the man left standing on the steps of the VA in the cold.
It was fine.
It was a lot less fine when he got to his house and the man was already there, standing at his doorstep, looking pleased with himself.
“Dude.”
Sam was tired. He was freaked out. He was this close to calling the cops on a possibly dangerous, probably armed veteran who he should be ready to counsel instead. So he did the last thing he wanted to do. He didn’t enforce his boundaries. He didn’t think about the consequences. He didn’t leave a man to freeze to death on his literal doorstep. Instead, he opened his door and said two words, “Come in.”
And so he saved the life of Bucky Barnes again.