Chapter Text
Sam never signed up for this.
He was supposed to be firepower and air support. Those jobs he was good at, those jobs he'd done a thousand times. This, though? Jailbreaking Captain America from a beyond-top-secret bunker underneath Rock Creek Park? Infiltrating a vast Neo-Nazi conspiracy reaching to the highest levels of government? Passing himself off as the asshole who took them all into custody after the freeway shootout, using a fake face Cap's superspy friend got off the not-so-assassinated head honcho of freakin' SHIELD? Sam was a soldier—kind of an unusual soldier, but he'd never been good at all this spook shit. He was going to fuck this up.
On the other hand, he got to rescue Captain America and infiltrate a vast conspiracy wearing a fake face. Spook shit was cool.
Natasha was the one who should've been handling this, but they didn't even know any female SHIELD agents who were unquestionably Hydra, let alone ones they had enough footage of to program the photostatic veil and voice modulator. This Brock Rumlow dude had done enough training videos that the facial recognition software had something to work with. Sam was going to have to go in in full uniform and gloves, but he figured he would've had to do that no matter what if he wanted to stay inconspicuous. Not a lot of black guys signing up for vast Neo-Nazi conspiracies.
What he realized from the moment he entered the bunker, the thing that was maybe going to make this entire crazy rescue possible, was that everyone was scared shitless of Rumlow. The security desk didn't even ask for ID. People walked faster to avoid him. Nobody asked him his business, not even when he rode their coattails through doorways to get around the biometric access controls. All he had to do was stride around looking purposeful and glare at anyone who looked too long. He should've figured it was too easy.
When he saw the first 'Steve Rogers, this way' sign taped to the wall, handwritten on printer paper and complete with an arrow pointing to the right, it crashed down on him that the whole thing was undoubtedly a trap.
He stared at it for so long that someone actually approached him, tentatively, to ask, "Sir, is there a problem?"
Sam made himself breathe. Just because it was a trap didn't mean they knew he was here yet. Least he could do was bluster his way out of this one. "Who the hell put this up here?" he snapped.
"Um, Karsh, sir, he just figured—since anyone can—okay! Okay, we'll take it down."
Sam ripped the sign down, crumpled it in his fist, and handed it to her slowly. He almost felt bad about how terrified she looked before he remembered that everyone in the bunker was Hydra. "No more security breaches," he said, and headed down the hallway to his right, so paranoid he felt like he was going to jump out of his skin at any second. Since anyone can what? he wondered, and chewed on that until he hit the second handwritten sign. This one had an arrow on it, too, and said 'Want a turn with Captain America?' His gut went leaden.
He hadn't even entertained the possibility that it might be worse than a trap.
He was bracing himself for some fucked-up torture shit when he hit the laboratories and heard a muffled cry of pain from beyond one of the open doors. Nothing could have prepared him for what he actually found.
There was just one guy. One guy in there with Steve. One paunchy middle-aged office worker in slacks and a collared shirt, kneeling outside the cell that took up half the room, and... well, it was pretty obvious what he was doing, but something in Sam's brain locked up and refused to accept it until he'd burst in and was standing five feet away from the guy and had the whole atrocity laid out in front of him. Even then, it was really hard to convince himself that was Steve lying there covered in blood and spunk until Steve's voice, cracked and hoarse but familiar, spoke right past the guy fucking raping him oh god like he wasn't even there and addressed Sam, radiating scorn.
"What's the matter, Rumlow? Is it harder when you don't have any friends around to impress?"
Sam narrowly avoided throwing up. He thumbed the switch on the fake face, damn the consequences, damn the spy shit; all he knew was that he couldn't exist for one more second in Brock Rumlow's skin. The miserable sack of shit on his knees in front of the bars looked over and his eyes bulged ludicrously. That was all the reaction he got before Sam, cool and deliberate but somehow almost watching himself from somewhere outside his body, unholstered his sidearm and shot the man between the eyes.
The silence rang louder than the gunshot.
Then Sam rushed over to Steve, ready to shoot the lock out of the cell door, ready to wreak whatever destruction he had to to get him free. But the door swung open under his hand, and there was the key to the restraints, clipped to one of the horizontal bars at head height. Jesus. He started fumbling the padlocks open, hoping to hell he could get Steve free before somebody sounded the alarm.
"Sam...?" said Steve unsteadily. "Oh no. Oh, God, no, Sam, not you too."
Sam wrenched the first ankle cuff open and felt his stomach turn over. "Steve, man, it's okay, I'm not gonna hurt you. I'm here to get you out of here."
A faint laugh from behind him as he kept wrestling with the locks. "...Right. Sam. Oh man. Listen, either things just got really weird, or I'm in some kind of shock. You can give me shit for it later, okay?"
"No, trust me, things are pretty weird." There were the wrists free, and now it was just one ankle holding Steve to the bars. Sam's hand was shaking.
"Sorry to freak you out, I thought..." murmured Steve, mostly to himself. "I don't know what I thought. That they did something to your head. Were going to make you..."
The lock clicked open, and Steve was free. The first thing he did was draw himself up to a sitting position, leaning heavily back on his hands. Sam crouched down beside him. Steve glanced down at his own body, taking in the whole mess, and his lips twisted ruefully before he looked over at Sam. "Hey," he said quietly.
"Hey, man," said Sam, and tried to smile.
"You mentioned a rescue."
"Yeah, let's get you out of here, looks like the hospitality stinks." He slung one of Steve's arms around his shoulders and helped him carefully to his feet. Steve seemed pretty with it, considering... well, everything, but especially the fact that he'd just seen one of the apparent orchestrators of this travesty walk into the room, switch his face off, and turn into Sam. Sam was about to conclude that he was just disoriented, not out of his head with shock, when Steve grabbed him by the collar like he'd just remembered something incredibly important.
"Bucky," he said, and Sam tried not to let his heart sink.
"Sorry. Not Bucky," he said as he helped Steve out of the cell. "21st century, remember? Not the war. You're not in the war anymore. Now come on, let's..."
"No, the assassin. The Winter Soldier. It's Bucky. They've got him, and I have to..."
An alarm went off down the hall, and Sam swore and activated the little transponder that would signal their ride to come get them. "Dude, right now the best thing you can do for him is get the hell out of here and regroup. You know where your clothes are?"
"In pieces on the floor."
Both of them looked at the dead man. Steve looked at Sam, wrinkling his nose. Sam looked at Steve and shrugged helplessly. "Sorry. I didn't bring extras."
-
Backup got there just as things were starting to get exciting. There was a gunshot that didn't come from behind them, a scream and a thump as one of their pursuers went down, and then Natasha emerged from around the corner and shouted, "Catch!"
It was a pair of gas masks. Sam tossed one to Steve and awkwardly tried to pull his on as he ran; Steve took his arm off Sam's shoulder so he could get his on quicker, which halved their pace but probably spared them an even more unpleasant ending to the afternoon, because they didn't even have them fully on when the tear gas canisters started whizzing by.
They rounded the corner and ran into Maria Hill, who was pulling more gas canisters off her belt as Natasha provided covering fire. Sam couldn't see their faces under the masks, but he could've sworn that when Natasha glanced over at them her posture shifted slightly at the sight of Steve. He was in more-or-less clean clothes and they'd wiped the worst off him, but Natasha wasn't stupid, and putting herself in the hands of people who wanted to humiliate her was apparently one of her specialties. If she knew enough to manipulate them, she probably knew...
Enough not to comment on Steve's condition or the fact that he was staggering along with his arm around Sam's shoulders again. All she said was, "Here, present for you," and she grabbed Steve's shield where it was leaning against the wall and tossed it to him.
A little bit of the slump went out of Steve's shoulders when he strapped it onto his arm. "That stuff lethal?" he asked Hill as they all started running down the corridor.
"Not unless you use more than we've got."
"Use all of it."
Hill was already turning to fire another canister behind them as they ran. "Steve, what the hell was going on in there?"
"Trust me," Sam broke in during the long awkward pause, figuring Steve could use someone to run interference on this one, "you do not wanna know."
None of them said much else until they were out and safely back in the van, Natasha behind the wheel. As soon as they were seated, Hill stripped off her gas mask and said, "If either of you need to get to medical—oh my God, it smells like a peep show booth in here."
Sam shrugged. "I told you you didn't want to know."
For a second Hill looked sick, but she took a deep breath and snapped into brisk efficiency faster than Sam would've thought possible. "Right. Medical it is. We—"
"Like hell," said Steve. He stripped off his own gas mask. Underneath, he was pale and he looked kind of like he wanted to shudder right out of his own skin, but brisk efficiency was a language he could speak even when the rest of the world was coming apart around his ears. "I don't need it. All the physical damage is stuff that'll heal on its own by tomorrow morning."
"Steve, Insight goes up tomorrow morning."
"I know. Which is why we need to spend our time tonight coming up with a plan. Especially because... look, there's stuff we didn't know that we have to take into account now. Someone we all thought was dead."
"Funny," said Natasha dryly without taking her eyes off the road, "I think Hill was trying to figure out how to tell you the same thing."
-
Steve spent most of the car ride in silence, either trying to wrap his head around what had happened to him or just dragging himself slowly back to the land of the living. Back at Fury's hideaway, the whole group spent a few minutes exchanging just enough information to get everyone on the same page before Steve took off for the showers. "You guys probably don't want to spend an entire meeting having to smell me," he said with a halfhearted parody of a grin. "Won't be long. If I'm not out in fifteen minutes, come haul me out."
"You can take longer if you need to," said Hill. "There's time."
Steve shifted on his feet, visibly tempted and visibly fraying. He scratched a flake of nobody-wanted-to-know-what off the side of his face. "I, uh. No. No, it's all right, we've got business to get down to. Fifteen minutes."
Sam was still only starting to learn Steve's particular dialect of 'feelings, what are feelings?' but he was pretty sure that translated to '...or else I may never want to come out.' Which no one would blame him for doing, but Sam also wasn't hypocrite enough to blame him for finding mission planning a more appealing prospect than standing around wallowing in his own misery indefinitely. "Fifteen minutes," he said, "then I come by to make sure you haven't drowned."
He gave it twenty before he knocked on the bathroom door. "Steve, you alive in there? I borrowed some clean clothes off Fury. Hope you look good in black."
The water turned off inside. "Thanks," Steve said through the door, sounding a lot more flat and subdued than the horrible false animation that had carried him through the first little group chat. "Just a minute. Don't come in, okay? Just hand 'em through the door."
Sam did so, kind of relieved—for the sake of Steve's privacy? for the sake of his own squeamishness?—that he didn't have to look. He'd seen the bloody graffiti on Steve's body when he first rushed into the lab, but Steve had been kind of a mess all over and Sam hadn't stared long enough to make out what it said. He had the feeling he didn't want to know. He had the feeling Steve wouldn't want him to know.
"Sam?" came Steve's voice, quiet, just on the other side of the door.
"Yeah?"
"Thanks for getting me out of there."
Sam's throat constricted. "Good to have you back."
Steve opened the door and stepped out. His skin was pink from hot water and vigorous scrubbing, and if his eyes were a little red-rimmed, it wasn't past the point of plausible deniability. Fury's old t-shirt and black jeans didn't fit him right; they weren't any more constricting than the two-sizes-too-small athletic shirt he'd been wearing when Sam first met him jogging on the Mall, three days and a lifetime ago, but now it felt wrong to look. He was walking funny. Whether it was down to his injuries, or having to move around in jeans that were too small around the hips and thighs, he moved like he was trying to hide an awkward...
...oh, shit, those jeans hid nothing.
"You need another couple minutes?" Sam asked. "We're still waiting on a pot of coffee before we start planning anything. It's going to be a long night." It was the last thing would've expected to see, but dude, if the VA group sessions had taught him anything, it was that one person's counterintuitive was another person's most logical way to deal. If Steve had been in there jerking off to try to get the metaphorical bad taste out of his mouth, that was his goddamn business and the best thing Sam could do was try and give him a gracious way out to finish the job.
But Steve shook his head. "Nah, let's get cracking."
All through the initial stages of the planning, Steve was fidgety and distracted. Too quiet, too, except when he was talking about Bucky Barnes. Even then, he went in stops and starts, letting loose floods of information only to pull back and start dancing around the details of how he knew things. "He was kept in cryo between missions, it's why he hasn't aged. They said he was given some version of the serum. Zola experimented on him during the war, that must've been what he was researching. Must've helped Bucky survive the fall."
"And they just... told you all this?" said Fury dubiously.
"Why would they have been lying? They thought I was about to die. Why bother?"
"Why bother telling you?"
Steve clammed up.
It was Natasha who eventually said, "They were gloating. Weren't they."
"Yeah," Steve muttered.
"Okay. The details you've given us—the cryo, the serum—were they what was supposed to bother you? Could they have been made up to get under your skin?"
"No." Steve took a deep breath and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "One of the... stories could have been a lie. I hope it was. But those things were just incidental details. Rumlow would have no reason to make them up."
Natasha glanced sidelong at Fury. "If it were my interrogation, I'd take it."
Not long after, they took a break for more coffee, since Steve was knocking it back at such an inhuman rate that there wasn't much left for anyone else. He looked like he could use a break and some fresh air, anyway. Sam didn't think it was particularly stifling inside, not enough for him to be sweating and tugging at his shirt collar like Steve was, but he'd already noticed that the safe house's resemblance to a bunker was putting him on edge. And he'd only spent half an hour, tops, getting in and out of that Hydra hellhole. He and Steve fell into step side by side and by unspoken agreement headed out to the concrete bridge behind the plant.
"You want me to see if Fury's got any camomile tea stashed away somewhere? Maybe some hot chocolate?" said Sam once they were out in the breeze. He nodded to the mug in Steve's hand, half-full of the burnt dregs from the bottom of the last pot of coffee. "You look pretty wired. I'm pretty wired, and I haven't even been trying to keep up with you."
One of the corners of Steve's mouth quirked up in a half-smile. "This stuff's better comfort food than hot chocolate. It's almost as bad as Army coffee." They both laughed at that, and Steve added, "Anyway, that's one of the side effects of the serum. Can't get drunk, can't get wired."
"You are drugged, though, aren't you?" said a voice behind them. They turned around and saw Natasha leaning back against the closed door, her arms crossed.
Steve said nothing, so Natasha continued, "I don't know any interrogation drugs offhand that would get around the serum protection, but you've been showing symptoms ever since we got you out. Sweating, flushing, restlessness. Dilated pupils. And I've seen you run five miles without getting that out of breath. What did they give you, some kind of hallucinogen?"
"Why would they give me interrogation drugs?" Steve said, glaring at the ground. "It wasn't an interrogation." He stretched his cramped posture out a little and leaned back against the railing.
Sam didn't realize that was supposed to be an answer until he looked at him, really looked, and saw his silhouette from the side. With his legs uncrossed it was painfully obvious that he was still erect.
"Aphrodisiac," Natasha said grimly, and Steve nodded.
Okay, that was a few new layers of horror on top of everything Sam had surmised about what had gone on in that cell. Bad enough to imagine all the nasty shit Steve had gone through, worse when you realized the sick fucks had gone out of their way to make him get off on it. But more than that, it painted a really ugly picture of the how and the why. This wasn't a beating gone out of control or derailed by some pervert's bright idea, it was premeditated. It had never been intended to be anything other than what it was. And if Steve was still fighting off the drug, the ordeal hadn't ended when Sam broke him out of there. It was still going on. It had been going on the whole time. Steve was probably still running in crisis mode.
"Look," said Sam, because it was the very least he could say, "if you need to take ten and go deal with the effects..."
"I can't," Steve said, looking like he would rather be anywhere else than here having this conversation. "It scrambled something. You know how no matter how ticklish you are, it doesn't work if you try to tickle yourself?"
Oh, shit.
Steve looked so miserably reluctant to share any of this that Sam was trying not to think too hard about the implications, but it didn't exactly take a rocket scientist. Whatever evil shit they'd drugged him with hadn't just made him get off, it was engineered to make him dependent on outside help for any relief from...
Oh, shit.
Sam looked at Natasha and she raised her eyebrows a fraction. One of them had to say it. It would be the most awkward offer in history, but they had to at least offer. Ten-to-one odds that Steve was too stiff-necked or too traumatized to accept, but if he did end up toughing this out alone, it should be because that was an option, not because it was the only option.
"Steve," he said finally, "there is no graceful way to put this, but..."
"If you need a hand, the offer's open," said Natasha, blunt and businesslike. "Just to relieve the symptoms."
"We're here for you, man. Not something I ever thought I'd say about awkward handjobs, but we are."
Steve stared at them like a deer in headlights. "I can't ask you guys to do that."
"You're not asking," Natasha said. "We're offering."
"No, you don't get it, I can't." Steve was breathing even harder now, and in spite of himself he had started to look them up and down with poorly-concealed hunger in his eyes. But the rest of his expression was reproachful, even a little horrified. "I just... can't. Not if it would mean getting one of you involved in sex you wouldn't otherwise want to have. I've just been on one end of that, you think I want to go anywhere near the other?"
Sam took a deep breath and tried to choose his words carefully, because he was venturing into even more dangerous territory here. "Okay, look. I don't want to sound like I'm trying to get in your pants or anything, because that's not what this is about and now is really not the time. But... let's just say it wouldn't exactly be a hardship. Now, if you'd rather wait it out on your own than have anyone touching you right now, we can back the hell off, no problem. But if you're objecting on our behalf, I just want you to know, I'm not putting anything on the table that I'm uncomfortable with."
Steve looked a little taken aback and Sam got ready to start kicking himself. But then Natasha shot Steve a meaningful look. "Yeah," she said, "uncomfortable isn't the word I'd use."
Somehow, those six words got across what Sam hadn't managed to impart with all his babbling and disclaimers. Steve relaxed a fraction. "It won't be pretty," he warned them.
Both of them shrugged.
"Who do you want to do the honors?" Sam asked.
Steve stared at his feet. He squeezed his eyes shut, and for a second it looked like he wanted to cry, but it passed so quickly that it could just have been him agonizing over the choice. Finally, still unable to look at them, he let out a sheepish little laugh and said, "I... lost a lot of different kinds of virginity today. If there's a choice, I'd kind of like to hang on to what I've still got. And that's mostly with women."
Natasha nodded, looking neither hurt nor relieved, and opened the door to go back in. "I'll make your excuses to the others," she said. "Good luck. And Steve?"
"Yeah."
"It's a wound." She was looking back at them from the shadows of the doorway, her posture straight and her face stony, but Sam had the suspicion she was baring herself all the same. "It will hurt. It might slow you down in ways you weren't expecting. It will take longer than you want it to. But it will heal."
Steve nodded.
Then Natasha was gone, and he and Sam were alone on the bridge.
Now that it was just the two of them and the crickets, Sam had a grand total of zero bright ideas for how to bridge the embarrassing gap between Point A and Point B. He felt kind of absurdly grateful when Steve set his empty mug down on top of the concrete wall and came over to stand side-by-side with him.
"Just out of curiosity," said Steve, who was flushing and fidgeting more than ever but gamely keeping up a casual front. "Did you want to get in my pants before all this happened? It's okay, you can be honest. I... well. I'm not exactly in great shape right now. Sore in places I don't want to think about, definitely off the market for the near future. But I can still tell plain old interest apart from what happened today. I'm not going to run screaming."
Sam raised his eyebrows and smiled despite himself. "I wasn't going to say anything unless you were interested."
"But you were looking."
"I'm not made of stone, man. And you were trying awfully hard to pick me up."
Steve leaned against him, just a little, his arm and knee touching Sam's, and even that scrap of physical contact was enough to make him let out a ragged sigh and shift his hips uncomfortably. He still managed to smile. "It's called making friends," he said, digging an elbow into Sam's ribs. "But okay, yeah, that possibility was open too."
"Past tense."
"For now."
"Then hey, it's a good thing you set up a fallback position in the friend zone." Sam slung an arm around Steve's shoulders, loosely enough to let him shake it off without any trouble if he decided this whole touching thing was a terrible idea after all. But Steve closed his eyes and tipped his head back and slumped into the embrace, so that his back was half-pressed to Sam's front. "Because right now I think you definitely count as a friend in need. We gonna do this?"
Steve's hand drifted to the fly of his jeans. "If you're up for it. But hands only."
"Dude, hands were the only thing on offer. I might have been looking at your ass the other day, but right now it is like six counseling certifications above my pay grade."
"It's not you I'm worried about." Steve squirmed, looking more acutely embarrassed than Sam had seen him throughout this whole ordeal. He was sweating so hard his hair had gone dark at the roots. "This drug. It doesn't just kick your libido into high gear, it makes you really, really want to get fucked. I've been resisting it. Really hard, for a really long time. I don't know what kind of stupid crap will come out of my mouth once I let loose, but I can guess, and I want you to promise not to listen to me. Hands only. No matter what I ask you to do."
Sam swallowed. Okay, it was officially time to start filing everything Steve told him under 'deal now, freak out later,' because if he thought too hard about any of this he was going to start puking or turn into a giant green rage monster, and neither would be any use to Steve right now. The giant green rage monster slot on Steve's team was already full anyway. "Well, I guess you did tell me it wasn't going to be pretty," he said. "Hands only. I promise. And whatever stupid crap you need to get out of your system, go ahead, I promise I won't pretend it's anything but the drugs talking." Whether he was going to be okay listening to Captain America recite all the humiliating bullshit he'd refused to say to the two-faced rapist psychopaths who'd drugged him was a different story, but that was what 'deal first, freak out later' was for. Captain America was Steve, and right now Steve needed his help.
Steve looked down at the ground, squaring his shoulders and straightening his posture in one last moment of self-possession. "Never thought you'd do otherwise." He took a deep breath. "Okay, let's go."
Sam tugged him backwards into the shadows where the bridge met the building. It was late evening, dusk drawing on to night, and no one in the woods would be able to see what they were up to back there even if they hadn't been in the middle of nowhere. Steve shot a questioning glance towards the door, but Sam shook his head. He didn't know if he could do this in the dank concrete claustrophobia of the building; better to stay out in the breeze, with the sky still faintly purple behind the silhouettes of the trees and the smell of earth and greenery in the air, than in anything that remniscient of a bunker.
It was a relief when Steve grabbed Sam's hand from where it was resting uncertainly on his hip and guided it forward to cup his straining erection through his jeans. Sam curled his fingers around it, and Steve threw his head back and moaned aloud. "Sorry," he said raggedly, "it's gonna be embarrassing noises from here on out. And the first round will be fast. It'll take at least two or three to ease it at all."
"How fast is fast?" said Sam, popping the button on Steve's jeans and unzipping his fly. With his other hand he started digging around in his pockets for that half-full travel pack of Kleenex that always seemed to be lurking at the bottom among the loose change and wadded-up receipts. He reached into Steve's pants to pull his cock out and Steve tensed all over. For a second Sam thought oh, shit, that's set something off, why the fuck did I ever think this was a good idea, and then—
"Really fast," Steve choked out, and came all over Sam's hand.
Sam couldn't help noticing that while he was extracting the tissues from his pocket and wiping his hand off, Steve didn't start going soft or even flag the slightest bit. "Potent stuff, huh?"
"Oh yeah." Steve was slumped back against him, pinning him to the wall with his weight, but he didn't look sated at all. His mouth was hanging open and he was breathing harder than ever, and his hips kept twitching, eager little jerks upward into the empty air. "And they kept giving me more of it. They thought that since I kept telling them to go to hell instead of begging to be fucked, I couldn't possibly be as desperate for it as I was supposed to be."
"Were you?"
Steve grabbed Sam's hand impatiently and guided it back to his still-hard cock. "I was pretty desperate," he said, and ground his hips backward against Sam. "Still am." Sam started jerking him off, loose and easy, and Steve continued, "I know we said hands only, but even with everything that's happened, if you did me up the ass right now I'd enjoy it. How sick is that? I'm so sore it hurts to sit down, but the pain doesn't stop me from getting off on it. Sure didn't stop me at the time. And some of them were definitely out to make it hurt."
"I'm sorry." Sam pressed his face into the back of Steve's shoulder and tried to keep the rhythm of his hand steady. "You know you got nothing to be ashamed of, right? Sounds like you fought as hard as you could."
Steve's Adam's apple worked up and down a few times, whether in pleasure or around a lump in his throat Sam wasn't sure. "I know. They wanted me to be. Been fighting that, too, trying to keep it straight in my head. Ashamed is only when you've got something to feel guilty about, but then there's that feeling when someone walks in on you naked. Sees something private, something that wasn't for them to see." He bit his lip, breathing hard in time with the motion of Sam's hand, and Sam was pretty sure he could fill in the blanks: touches something that wasn't for them to touch, takes something that wasn't for them to take... "I'm not gonna be ashamed of what someone else did to me—not even the sick crap they put in my head, not when I fought it and kept control of myself. They could make me like it, but they couldn't make me like it, you know? But it's still a hell of an embarrassing impulse to have to fight."
"I know. I know. You do what you want with it, okay? You want to run off your mouth now that we're alone, you do that, I'm not gonna judge you for what they put in your head. But you don't have to. If that's not for me to see."
"Some of it's... pretty disturbing." Which apparently also meant 'arousing,' because Steve arched up into Sam's hand and had to stifle a groan. "You might not want to hear it."
"Try me."
"Okay." Steve turned his head away, hiding his face, but even in the dark Sam thought he could see the flush creeping down his neck. "I told you I'd enjoy it if you did me up the ass right now, but even without the agreement, you probably wouldn't want to. I did my best to clean off after we got back here, but I... had a lot of guys shoot off inside me. I'm still kind of messy with it. It's disgusting, and it's driving me crazy, because I can feel it and how slick it is and I can't stop thinking about how easy it would be for someone to slide something up there. How I wouldn't be able to stop it no matter how hard I clenched up." A drop of precome beaded on the tip of his cock, and he moaned softly when Sam rubbed it around with his thumb.
"That's fucked-up."
"Told you you didn't want to hear it." Steve was outright grinding against Sam's crotch now, which at any other time would've given him an instantaneous awkward boner, but even if that was what Steve wanted there was no risk whatsoever of it happening now. Because that was fucked-up.
Sam tightened his grip a little and sped up to keep time with the rocking of Steve's hips. "I said it was fucked-up, I never said I didn't want to hear it. I'll tell you one thing, it's making me really look forward to kicking some Hydra ass tomorrow morning. I want to find all these sons of bitches and personally kick them in the balls."
Steve laughed. It was a humorless, extremely unpleasant laugh, and he wasn't smiling. "Get in line."
"I'll hand them over to you while they're still clutching their nuts and squealing, how about that?"
"Sounds great. But let's take care of those helicarriers before we go hunt down twenty different guys, okay?"
"Hang on, twenty?"
Steve's lip twisted. "Yeah. Give or take. Six in the mouth—they had a gag with some kind of metal ring to hold my jaw open. Would've bitten down otherwise." He took in a few harsh breaths, lips parted, and grabbed Sam's hand to guide him into a firmer hold on his dick. "Up the ass... I lost track. A dozen tally marks on my leg when I washed off, but they might've undercounted. Five from the STRIKE team, three lab techs—there were half a dozen, I think, but one chickened out and a couple more just jerked off on my face—plus a handful of guys who just wandered by."
"Tally marks."
"Yeah." Steve's breath hitched. "Thought you saw. Fuck—" He thrust into Sam's fist, eyes closed.
"I was trying really hard not to look."
"Here." He seized Sam's other hand and pushed it up under his shirt, skimming over his stomach and chest, to land just under his collarbone. Sam could feel a set of scabby cuts under his fingers. "Two sets," he panted. "One here, one on the back of my leg. They took the gag off midway through, that's why there aren't as many up here. They tried to make a game out of it. Said they'd take the gag off once they'd—" He stiffened and gasped, and Sam didn't even realize it was because he'd brushed his pinky over Steve's nipple until Steve grabbed his hand and made him do it again. He let Sam play with his nipples for a minute, getting so worked up his chest heaved with every breath, but eventually he grimaced and steeled himself to finish the sentence, in phrases punctuated by shuddering gasps: "Once they'd fucked me... so open... I had their come... dripping out my ass. Figured I'd be... hah... ready to beg by then." He smiled in grim triumph. "Stupid of them, really."
Sam pressed his hand flat to Steve's chest, unable to say anything to that. There were more scabbed-over cuts there. He started tracing them with his finger, spelling out the letters. It said 'Hydra fuck toy.' Fucking hell.
"I mean, they got there. Didn't get me to beg... but they got there. Took 'em a while. And a guy with a dick like a... goddamn baseball bat. First few could barely get it in me. Like being ripped open, every... goddamn... time. Started out a virgin. Rumlow, he went first... well, second... first on the STRIKE team... what were his exact words? Oh yeah..." Steve's face screwed up in something that wanted to be a grin but came out looking like he was about to be sick, and he exhaled slowly as he came all over Sam's hand. When he caught his breath again, his voice was low and hoarse but even. "'Son of a bitch could squeeze blood from a stone,'" he said bitterly. He was still hard.
Sam focused on taking deep breaths as he wiped his hand off. He was going to kill someone. A lot of someones. The knowledge was clear and cold in his head. He was going to punch, stab, maim, shoot, he was going to squeeze blood from them all. But he had to put his rage away for tomorrow morning, because right now there was no one there but Steve. "I'm sorry, man, I know it's not fair to you," he said, "but if I run into any of these assholes I don't know if I'll be able to keep them alive long enough to hand them over to you."
Steve slumped back heavily into his arms. "I'd be the last to blame you."
"Can I ask you something? Just so I know who to hit hardest?"
"Sure."
"Who did go first?"
Steve's entire body went rigid.
"Uh-oh. Does that mean I should skip the hitting and just shoot the bastard to make sure he's really dead?"
Steve shoved away from him and strode off to stand at the railing by his empty mug. The last ghosts of the evening light picked out his expression in faint, sparse lines: the jut of his jaw, the slash of a cheekbone, the angry slant of his brow. There was a faint tinkling noise, which Sam couldn't place until he padded up behind Steve and saw that Steve's hand was shaking around the mug handle, jittering it against the concrete.
Sam almost put a hand on Steve's shoulder and then thought better of it. Instead he stepped forward to stand next to him, giving him at least a foot of space between their bodies. "Never mind," he said. "Forget I—"
"They made Bucky do it," said Steve in a monotone.
Sam froze.
"Pierce made him do it. Twice. I didn't know who he was the first time. I hated him; I could've killed him. The second time, with the mask off..." Steve broke off, shuddering violently, his voice choked. Almost inaudibly, he said, "It was sick. And I couldn't even say his name."
Sam edged closer and carefully slid an arm around Steve's waist. Steve barely reacted, lost in his own personal horror. "Did he resist?" asked Sam.
Steve closed his eyes and shook his head, then shrugged helplessly. "They brainwashed him. You should've seen the way Pierce talked to him, like a hypnotist. He didn't remember who he was, but he kept looking at me, like there was something on the tip of his tongue. He asked them who I was. Said there was something he was supposed to know that he'd forgotten."
"I'm sorry." Sam squeezed him gently around the waist, and Steve folded like a deck of cards and buried his face in Sam's neck. Sam brought his other arm up and wrapped Steve in a tight hug.
"He's still in there," Steve said, muffled in Sam's shirt.
"If they got him to do that to you?" said Sam, hating himself for having to say it, knowing that if it were him in those shoes—if it were Riley come back from the dead—he wouldn't be able to hear it either. "I'm sorry, Steve, there might not be anything left to save."
"No, I meant... okay, I meant that, too. He was trying to remember. If we could get him away from them... but what I meant was, they've still got him. He's still in there with those sick bastards. If they did all that to me, what have they been doing to him all this time?"
It was a rhetorical question that Sam knew better than to answer.
Steve pulled away with a sigh and tried to compose himself, tucking his dick—now drooping at half mast for probably the first time in hours—back into his jeans and shoving his hands into his pockets. He angled himself away from Sam, not quite looking at him, as though embarrassed to have cried, even figuratively, on Sam's shoulder. "It's funny," he said in a voice like bile. "He was in there for half an hour at most. And I'd trade that half hour for the rest of the afternoon all over again. Walk right back into that cell if it let me erase everything but the knowledge that he's alive. A couple of beatings, six forced blowjobs, a dozen rapes, two guys' fists and an electro-stun baton up my ass, it'd be a bargain. I'd do it all week if it would get him out of their clutches."
"An electro... the more details you let slip, the more I wonder how you're even alive."
"I heal fast," Steve shrugged, staring fixedly at nothing.
"Yeah, I figured. At least now I know what my nightmares will be doing for the next year."
Steve glanced over, and Sam must've looked rattled enough to snap him out of his private dead-best-friend hell. "You okay?"
Sam snorted. "You're asking if I'm okay."
"There might as well be one of us." One corner of Steve's mouth quirked up in a half-smile. "Seriously, you've already done a lot. If hearing about this is messing you up, take a break. I'll go trade horror stories with Natasha if I still feel like running my mouth."
"I owe it to you to at least listen."
"Sam. You don't owe me squat. And I owe you a whole lot. Don't do this to yourself."
Sam shrugged. Maybe the crickets and the smell of the air were reminding him of that night in the church parking lot, which was one of those scenes that he could call up just as vividly twenty years later. Like his mom's hospital room, or Riley falling in flames from the sky, or—he suspected—finding Steve in that cell. "Maybe I owe it to someone else to get my dumb ass in line and listen when somebody needs me to."
Steve laid a hand on his shoulder. "You have. You've gone above and beyond." Then he raised an eyebrow. "Something you need to get off your chest?"
Sam shook his head. As masochistically tempting as it was to come clean with that bit of lingering guilt, he couldn't, any more than Steve could bring himself to share the gruesome details of what Bucky Barnes had been made to do to him."Not my story to tell. Not the specifics, at least." He fidgeted and looked down, trying to figure out how much he could own up to without getting murdered next Thanksgiving dinner. "She's okay now. Successful, happily married, probably still hasn't forgiven me. Brave kid. Tough, brave kid. Raised the rest of us while Mom was sick. That's the thing about people who don't like to dump on anyone else. I should've realized that if she was asking for help, things were a whole lot worse than any of us thought. But I was immature and wrapped up in my own problems and I didn't want to think about the gory details, and I blew her off."
The hand on Sam's shoulder gave a gentle squeeze, and when Sam finally dared look up at Steve, he didn't look angry or disappointed at all. In fact, he looked sympathetic, which only made Sam's gut squirm harder. "You ever try to make it up to her?" Steve asked.
"It's not the kind of thing you can ever make up for. All you can do is pay it forward."
Steve nodded. "You have, you know." His fingers had started to knead absently at Sam's shoulder, which he didn't even seem to realize until his thumb hooked under Sam's shirt collar and met bare skin. He jolted like he'd had an electric shock and yanked his hand back, then tried to disguise the gesture by running his fingers through his hair. "We should get back," he said, glancing at the door. "We've still got the Insight helicarriers to take down and a lot of Nazi butt to kick."
Sam was inclined to agree, but even though he couldn't make out much detail on Steve's black clothes in the dark, he was willing to bet that his not-so-little problem was back in full force. "You want one more for the road before we go?" he asked. And, since Steve was already shuffling and waving a dismissive hand and opening his mouth to insist he didn't need any more help, he added, "Because if you've got any more frustration we can burn off right now, I'd rather deal with it while we're out here than find an excuse for one of us to drag you back out later."
It took a few seconds of squirming, but Steve relented. "I'll try to get it over with quickly," he said with a pained smile. "And not talk too much."
There was no need to find a shadowy corner now that there was only the half moon and the faint yellow haze of light pollution from the direction of DC. Steve unzipped his jeans right there on the bridge, and they both turned sideways and rested their left arms on the railing as Sam stepped up behind him and took him in hand.
For the first few minutes it was silent except for Steve breathing a little harder than normal. Then Sam brushed his thumb just so under the head of Steve's cock, and Steve choked back a moan. "Sorry," he whispered.
"I don't mind you making noise," said Sam, and did it again. Steve cursed under his breath and bucked forward into Sam's hand, just once, but it broke the spell of stillness and silence and after that he loosened up, shifting his hips around fractionally and keeping up a steady stream of soft noises and hitched breaths.
And now the awkward boner risk was becoming a real problem. Not because Sam had forgotten any of the horrors Steve had recounted to him, but because Steve's face betrayed no revulsion, no indication that those horrors were what was playing behind his eyes when he moaned and arched into Sam's touch—nothing, in fact, but pleasure and fierce determination. It was entirely possible that he was hiding his disgust for Sam's sake, but tell that to Sam's hindbrain. Still, he had the situation pretty well under control until Steve followed one particularly breathy moan with a murmured "Sam—yeah, like that." At that point Sam had to take a half-step back and pray that Steve hadn't noticed his cock springing to full attention.
No such luck. Steve followed him backwards, seeking out Sam's body with his hips. Sam's hand faltered. And then—"Oh," Steve said, and wriggled his ass against Sam's erection as though to make sure of what he'd felt. He reached down to curl his hand around Sam's, encouraging him to stroke faster. Sam bit his lip and braced himself to be carried along for the ride.
Soon Steve was outright grinding back onto Sam's cock, and Sam was letting slip a few embarrassing noises of his own. This was wrong. This was so, so wrong. He was supposed to be lending a hand to deal with a drug-induced medical condition. He definitely wasn't supposed to be getting off himself at a time like this. And to make matters worse, then Steve blurted out, "Sam, please," and immediately stuffed his fist in his mouth in shame.
Sam took a deep breath and let it out. That, at least, was a bucket of ice water over the head about the kind of state Steve was in and what Sam's job was in dealing with it. "It's okay," he said, low and steady. "I remember. Hands only."
Steve melted back against him, shuddering all the while. "Sorry," he said, "thought I could hold on, but... you feel so good."
"It's okay," Sam repeated softly. "Do what you have to."
Steve reached back, and for a second Sam froze, thinking Steve was trying to get his pants open, but instead he was fumbling with Sam's hard-on through his jeans, nudging it until it was facing straight up towards his belly button. Sam wasn't sure why until Steve started grinding on him again, serious, dirty, fucking-through-clothes grinding with Sam's cock wedged into the cleft of his ass. "Oh God," Steve groaned, "Sam—want you inside me so bad, but at least fuck me like this."
That gave Sam pause. It wasn't that much heavier than anything they'd been doing before, but now that Steve put it like that Sam had to wonder if it was really in the spirit of their agreement. They were both still fully clothed, and Steve was still aware enough to preserve the technicality instead of trying to get Sam's pants off. And yet. "You think dry humping really counts as hands only?" asked Sam.
Steve made a strangled, impatient noise, but he slowed down. "We've been doing it since before I got this worked up," he pointed out. "It's fine. No clothes off, no penetration."
It still made Sam's conscience prickle. He could bring the whole thing screeching to a halt, drag Steve back towards full lucidity long enough to get a trustworthy response out of him, and then try to build back to where they were now despite the added load of self-conscious mortification. Or he could switch to doing it face-to-face to eliminate the temptation, and probably draw it out longer he had to. Or he could shut the fuck up, trust Steve to still be able to distinguish between what he wanted and what he wanted, and honor Steve's express wish to get this over with as quickly as possible. "Six counseling certifications above my pay grade," he muttered, and thrust up to meet the backward jerk of Steve's ass.
"Oh," Steve moaned, and "oh, yeah," and "know it would be a terrible idea, still wish you could put it in me." He rubbed himself up and down along the length of Sam's dick, trying to give them both the best approximation of the real thing he could manage through four layers of clothing. Sam swore and sped up his hand, wondering if he would have to resort to reciting baseball stats in his head to hold on until Steve was done.
"Want you to do it," said Steve breathlessly. "Want to do everything, fuck you, blow you, get you to blow me, but oh God I want you to fuck me so bad and don't you ever tell another living soul I said any of this crap or I swear I'll hunt you down myself."
"You're good," Sam assured him, "you're good. Secret's safe with me."
Steve bit his lip, rutting frantically back against him, and held out for a few long moments of silence before the words tore themselves out of his throat: "God, do it, fuck me, please, Sam, I want you to be the last one to have been inside me, please, please, fuck—" He choked on the last word, shuddered, and came.
Sam was all ready to give him a second and keep holding him steady while he recovered, but almost as soon as he finished, Steve jerked away from him. His mouth was clamped tightly shut. Sam handed him a tissue, and he wiped his softening dick off and made himself presentable in record time, not quite looking at Sam while he worked. When he was done, he stood up unnaturally straight, squared his shoulders, and pointed a mock-threatening finger at Sam. "You didn't hear any of that."
Sam spread his hands in an 'I got nothing' gesture. "Any of what?" he said, one eyebrow raised.
Steve let out a long, slow breath. "Okay, good."
A little bit of the creeping dread that had been coiling in Sam's stomach eased. "We good here?" he asked. He wasn't about to bring up his own failure to keep things from getting more intimate than they'd planned on, not with Steve's pride so clearly smarting, but he figured he might as well give Steve an opening if he wanted to take him to task.
"Better. Thanks. Sorry you had to see that." Steve shifted awkwardly from foot to foot, looking not at the doorway but at Sam. "How about you? You want a hand? Don't want to leave you hanging."
Sam didn't let his jaw drop open, but it was a close thing. "Steve. Come on. You do not have to offer that. I feel bad enough for letting myself get this worked up."
"What if I want to?"
"Of course you want to! You're drugged off your head."
"Not like that. Just... it's sex," said Steve, and even if the light wasn't good enough to make out the subtleties of his expression, Sam was going to take a wild guess for 'stupidly earnest.' "Maybe not under ideal circumstances, but I'd rather it be sex than, I don't know, you lancing a boil or something. If it were that impersonal, there's a doctor on site. There's a reason I trusted you with this. And I'm getting kind of tired of people asking me to pretend it's not personal."
The words That's the problem, I'm not about to ask you for sex after what just happened to you almost made it to Sam's lips before he heard the bite in not personal and shut the hell up. Come to mention it, he'd never thought that hard about why Steve had trusted him with this. Any of this, right down to showing up on Sam's doorstep in the first place, except that Sam was the least likely person in Steve's universe to be Hydra. He'd jumped right back in without examining it, because fighting for what was right was all well and good, but what mattered was that Captain America was asking him to be the guy next to him in the foxhole and that was something neither Sam Wilson nor Steve Rogers had had in way too long. Except that wasn't true for Steve, was it? The bastards they were going to hunt down tomorrow, they'd been his team. They'd had his back. And they'd turned on a dime and done this to him because, what, they were on opposite sides of an ideological divide?
He hadn't thought about how much it meant that he was the one Steve was willing to trust after that.
And the rape, was that not personal? Like hell, but like hell was it about sex. And if Steve was sick to the teeth of convincing himself it didn't mean anything and done dealing with sex that wasn't really about sex, Sam wasn't enough of an asshole to argue with him.
He made himself smile. "So what you're saying is, you did have ulterior motives for asking whether I wanted to get in your pants."
"They weren't that ulterior," Steve said dryly, "considering that's exactly what you were about to do." He swallowed hard, ducking his head and pressing his lips together in a thin half-smile. It had been a cute bashful gesture when he'd done it in Sam's kitchen that morning, but now, under his paper-thin layer of friendly sarcasm, he looked exhausted. Ragged around the edges, losing a knock-down drag-out fight with his own shame, running on fumes and battery acid because it was better than what would happen if he stood still. "Now, do I get to return the favor? Or is the thought of who else has been in my pants enough to kill your enthusiasm?"
Sam wasn't going to let him lose that fight alone. "Get your stupid ass in here," he said, grabbing Steve by his shirt collar and tugging him in close. "If it's not enough to kill yours, then I'm game."
Steve gave him a tight-lipped nod. He didn't go directly for Sam's fly. Instead, he closed his eyes and pressed their foreheads together, close enough to share breath but not close enough to kiss. His breath didn't smell like anything unsavory, just coffee—and about half a tube's worth of toothpaste, which, since he'd showered off and all the bruises on his face and arms had faded by the time they got outside, was the only outward sign of anything he'd gone through that day. He squeezed Sam's shoulders briefly, and then his hands slid down Sam's chest, warm and sure, feeling him up through the thin fabric of his t-shirt. They left tingling trails in their wake. If Sam's arousal had been flagging before, it sure as hell wasn't now. Steve ragged and exhausted was still hotter than he had any right to be, but more than that, he was brave to the point of crazy, and damn if that wasn't a turn-on.
Steve slipped his hands up under Sam's shirt, feeling his way over his stomach and sides, and then his thumbs met in the middle right under Sam's belly button and slid down. Sam held his breath as Steve got his jeans open. He didn't even realize he was doing it until Steve pulled his cock out and wrapped a hand around it and Sam emptied his lungs in a sudden, explosive sigh.
The angle should've been awkward, standing face-to-face like this. When Sam had been standing behind Steve he'd been able to jerk him off as though he'd been doing it on himself. But having to switch his grip didn't seem to faze Steve at all, and it definitely didn't hamper his effectiveness. "You done this before?" Sam asked, already more breathless than he wanted to be.
There was a long moment of silence before the answer came, and then, "Yeah," said Steve in a voice like broken glass. "Bucky and I tried it a few times when we were teenagers. Just for fun. I kissed him once, after, and it scared the hell out of us both. We stopped after that."
"I'm sorry." Sam slid an arm around Steve's shoulders, resting his hand on the nape of his neck. Steve tilted his face back a little farther, as though afraid Sam would be dumb enough to plant one on his lips, and then when Sam had the good sense not to go there he sped up his hand and wrapped his free arm around Sam's waist.
"It was a long time ago," he said quietly.
"And they didn't make you..." Sam started, and immediately wished he hadn't, because for fuck's sake, there was a time and a place.
Steve let out a bark of laughter. "Do this?" he said, and twisted his wrist so the angle was just a little bit off and squeezed. It wasn't enough to hurt, but it was an alarming enough warning shot to drive home exactly how difficult and dangerous it was to get Steve to do anything he didn't want to do. "Even if they'd had the imagination, they would never have had the guts."
"Jesus," Sam breathed, his adrenaline spiking. Steve went back to stroking him, faster and rougher than before, and it wasn't long before Sam was groaning and coming into the strong, hot grip of Steve's fist. He didn't even want to think about what that said about what got him going. But when he opened his eyes Steve was smiling at him, a fond, lopsided smile that actually reached his eyes.
"We good?" Steve asked.
Sam handed over the last of the tissues so Steve could get himself cleaned up. "I don't know," he said, "you mentioned something about a lot of Nazi butt to kick. But otherwise, yeah, we're good."
-
Fury and Hill had used the extra time to finish programming the server blades and set everything up, so the planning meeting was mercifully short. Afterwards, they all tried to get a few hours of sleep. The safe house was short on amenities aside from Fury's hospital bed, so instead of tossing and turning on too-soft mattresses they all settled down on the floor in opposite corners of the same room.
Sam woke up twice in the night to find Steve in the throes of a nightmare. The first time, he was moaning and lying perfectly still as though paralyzed. When Sam grabbed him by the shoulders to shake him awake, he gasped and convulsed and went limp, then mumbled something unintelligible, rolled onto his side, and settled into what appeared to be peaceful sleep. Sam wasn't about to look under the blanket and check, but he was all too familiar by now with the effects of whatever Steve had been dosed with. He could guess.
The second time, Steve was thrashing and yelling, and Sam was about to go to him again when he heard Maria Hill's voice saying, "Steve—Steve, wake up." There was a sudden smack of flesh on flesh, and Sam sat up in alarm, but when he looked over Hill was holding Steve's wrist firmly away from her and saying, "It's okay. No harm no foul. Just a nightmare." The thrashing and yelling was probably a good sign anyway, or at least a sign that the drugs were wearing off. Sam curled up and tried to go back to sleep.
The next time he woke up, it was from a dream of his own. The details faded as he drifted back to the real world, but the dread stayed in the pit of his stomach—he had a vague memory that he'd been chasing the Winter Soldier, tracking him through endless tunnels with impossible geometry, but the closer he got the more he started to wonder whether it would be Riley's face under the mask or Steve's. There was faint pre-dawn light filtering through the grimy windows when he opened his eyes. Gradually he realized it was the sound of Natasha talking that had pulled him back to the surface.
"...think it's impressive. But the truth is, the last time I planned around an extraction team to get me out of a situation I couldn't handle myself, they never showed." Her voice was quiet, matter-of-fact, and coming from Steve's corner of the room. "Barton found me, but not before I'd spent two days in a military prison in Sarajevo being—"
Sam felt a sudden need to yawn really loudly and stretch himself awake.
"—interrogated. Creatively." Natasha didn't even glance over her shoulder. "Morning."
"I didn't know there were situations you couldn't handle yourself," came Steve's voice.
"After that, I narrowed the field as drastically as I could. Now up you get, it's time. If we survive, I'll be sure to teach you a few party tricks for restraints."
There was a rustle and a slight groan as Steve dragged himself to his feet. "Looking forward to it," he said, so dry Sam couldn't actually tell whether he was being sarcastic.
He looked worse than he had the previous night: drawn, haggard, pale except for the dark circles under his eyes, mouth fixed in a grim line. He barely spoke all through their quick breakfast and the initial preparations. Like the screaming nightmares, Sam was inclined to take it as a sign that at least the drugs had worn off and he wasn't being forced to enjoy a damn thing. He moved differently, too, although Sam hadn't noticed it at first. It wasn't until Natasha drew Steve aside for a ten-minute warm-up spar and he came striding back with some semblance of his usual grace, carrying his body like the well-honed weapon it was, that Sam realized he'd spent the rest of the morning lugging it stiffly around like a burden.
Natasha was right behind him, mopping up a split lip and already sporting a handful of nascent bruises on her arms and shoulders. Sam caught the tail end of their conversation as they returned to the main room: "...can't guarantee that the SHIELD-issue phones won't have automatically backed up to the central servers by now."
"It's okay," Steve said quietly, a muscle in his jaw twitching. "Dump all the data anyway."
Sam didn't get a chance to talk to him one-on-one until just before they left, when Fury and Natasha were getting the last of their spook shit in order. He found Steve out on the bridge again, staring off into the distance.
He didn't want to think about what Steve was seeing. Rape, torture, betrayal. Last night's humiliation. The devastation they were fighting to avert today. The devastation he'd already seen back in the war. A million reasons to burn Hydra to the ground. "Hey," said Sam, coming up beside him. "Payback time."
Steve shrugged.
"If that's how you want to put it," he said unhappily, his eyes still somewhere else. There was a jagged catch to his voice that it took Sam a second to recognize, but then it all fell into place.
"You're going to try and save him, aren't you," said Sam. Steve nodded. "You know you're going to have to stop him first, right?"
"I'll do both," Steve said, a fierce, simple declaration of fact.
He didn't add or die trying. Sam heard it anyway.
"Now gear up. It's time."