Chapter Text
Things go right, for a while. US Agent suits him better than Captain America ever could. Val says John didn’t need that kind of baggage, anyway. Let Sam Wilson deal with standing in the shadow of the Star Spangled Man with a Plan, John’s beyond that. He’s forging his own path now, all on his own.
She must know what she’s talking about because John’s sure Lemar would have said the same thing, and somehow he was always right. Always. That beer is shit, John, I wouldn’t do it, he’d say, and three klicks and coming in hot, move it or motherfucking lose it and I think Liv’d get it, man. Why don’t you just ask her out, you'll see and you know what you have to do. You always do.
Lemar had been right about the serum, too. After giving it time to settle in, to let his mind clear… John’s at the top of his game. His reflexes, healing, speed. Everything, it’s all… more. John’s more, now. And if he’s doing it alone, at least he’s getting the job done.
Then comes Belgrade. Belgrade is where some asshole in a hotel lobby won’t stay down and things go very, very wrong.
Val banishes John to the backwoods before the footage can hit the news, corner of no and fucking where, Walker, do you understand me? until she can clean up his mess. Louisiana is his suggestion, but it’s probably her idea. Val is good at that, and he wouldn’t mind seeing the best version of familiar faces he has left. He can’t go home, can’t stay with Liv, and Val pulled strings until the VA coughed back up benefits, complete with backpay. Between that and the allowance Val has him on John has enough money to pay his own way for a while, and Delacroix is as good a place to land as any.
“How long will you be staying?” Bucky slings an arm over the back of Sam’s chair. The metal one, John notes with faint distaste, but Sam doesn’t flinch. “If we’re going to be giving you a couch to crash on, Walker, a timeline’d be nice.”
“What Bucky means to say is,” Sam cuts over him neatly, “we’re happy to provide a spot to land for a couple days, but it’s a shitty couch.” John doesn’t have to see it to know he’s kicking Bucky under the table. “Trust me, you don’t want to sleep on that thing any longer than you have to.”
John pulls his lips up into a smile, lowering his chin to blunt the angle like that media consultant Val hired said would make him look less aggressive. “Shouldn’t take long. Just need to get my head back on somewhere I can’t hurt anybody.”
Sam softens, but Bucky gives him the flat, hateful look of a cat on the wrong end of a garden hose. “I can take care of that.”
John takes a bite of the food Sam cooked for the two of them and keeps smiling. “Glad to hear it.”
He’s not lying.
He’s not telling the truth, either. He’s always been good at that.
Louisiana heat doesn’t stop. Not even late at night and John dreams in the same uncomfortable shades, sticky and twisted up in borrowed sheets. He doesn’t feel temperature the same way he used to, but he sweats through his borrowed shirt and boxers just the same.
It’s always the same dream, even when it’s not. They fight for the shield; Sam kills him. He kills Sam. Sometimes Bucky is there, sometimes he isn’t. Sometimes he helps Sam, sometimes he sits back and watches them take each other on, cool and impassive, but he never helps John.
Sam fucks him. He fucks Sam. That, Bucky always watches. Always, and the shield is below the one of them taking it.
When John comes, Sam makes him lick it clean, cleaning out the fine grooves in the metal with his tongue in widening circles until it shines. When Sam comes, John does the same thing.
John understands Sam deserved the shield. Deserves to be Captain America, and he understands that he didn’t. The right man won. John just wasn’t that man.
He can hold both realities in his head at once. What he doesn’t know is who he hates more for it, Sam or himself.
“Any plans to move on?” Bucky corners him in the kitchen. “It’s been a week, John. Sam’s not going to ask you to leave until he figures out you’re here for the wrong reasons, but it’s my house too.”
“What are the right reasons?” The mug in his hand has a chip on the handle. John rubs his thumb along the jagged edge. “And why do you think I don’t have them?”
“It’s hard, isn’t it?” Bucky’s smile is just as practiced as his own. “The after effects of the serum. All that noise, all the pressure. Everything’s too much.”
“And?” Before Val and her team of media people, he would have said more. He would have thrown the punch he can feel building in his right arm, begging for release. “That sounds like a you-problem, Buck.” The nickname gains a visible flinch. “Should I tell Sam it’s time for me to go?”
“Not if you’re going to tell him why.”
John rides the couch another week, drinks Sam’s coffee, eats Sam’s food. It’s all right, Sam says, he understands. Until John can get back on his feet, he’s welcome to hang around.
Bucky doesn’t like it. Doesn’t like him. Doesn’t want him anywhere near Sam, fouling up their rundown little house and the bedroom they share. He doesn’t say anything much, but it’s not hard to read between the lines to what he’d rather be.
That doesn’t matter. Sam says he can stay, so he’s staying.
Look at you, Sam tells him, rocking his hips down and hauling John’s right knee up until it’s by his ear so he can fuck him deeper, harder, until he bleeds. Just a whore. Fucking filthy whore, taking my cock like that. A slut for it, aren’t you baby? Piece of shit, worthless, just a fucking hole for me.
Beautiful, Sam calls him some nights. So good. You’re doing so good, John, everything I need. Baby, he calls him, and sweetheart and perfect and forgiven.
He doesn’t fuck Sam anymore, but he still licks the shield clean.
“I’ve been thinking about getting a place of my own.”
“Oh?” Sam looks up. “Thinking about moving on, finding someplace built for a guy like you to sleep?”
John sits up a little taller in his chair, shoulders inching towards parade rest straight. “Yeah. Liv’s with her parents, we’re taking some time. A change of scenery might be just what the doctor ordered.”
“Shame. We’ll miss you.” Bucky raises his beer in a salute. “Where you headed off to?”
Sam doesn’t say anything, and John smiles.
“Got a place just down the street, actually. Signed the papers last week.”
He gets a dog.
He doesn’t like the damn thing, but people like dogs, and people like people who have dogs. Val’s newest media person is in charge of all the social media accounts Val had him create, and she says get a dog.
So. He gets a fucking dog.
You call that attention, soldier? The fuck kind of sloppyass, dicksucking bullshit are you trying to pass off as getting it right? You don’t fucking know how to stand like I fucking tell you to stand? Sam’s fist is so tight around his dick John feels the ache all the way up into his fucking guts. He strains and tightens and pulls himself rigid, perfect, all spine and no horizon.
When he comes, Sam cups it in his hand and watches John lick it spotless again with critical, unyielding eyes.
Good, he says finally. Now you’re showing a little goddamned promise.
The house is a piece of shit—a fixer upper, Lemar would have said, putting an elbow in his side and leaning on it until John stumbled and laughed.
Nobody’s there to say it. Bucky isn’t any happier now that John’s surfing his own couch, four properties down the way, and he’s keeping Sam away.
John breaks the sink, trying to turn the goddamn faucet off while he’s half asleep. It starts to spurt water, hitting him in the face, and it’s hot and it’s not water. He smashes in half the wall trying to make it fucking stop.
The next morning he wakes up on the jagged, broken tile that used to be his bathroom floor. He studies his hands: not a mark on them. He studies the mess around him.
The house is a piece of shit.
“Rough night?” Sam’s knees are bare, track shorts hitching up as he sits to expose those vulnerable knobs. Little shadows and dips and hollows, bone and cartilage. John could crush them all. Take the warm skin, hold it in his hands, measure the space and then squeeze until there’s nothing left but pulp.
“Nightmares,” John nods, like they’d been why he caved in the wall. “You know how it is.”
“I do.” Sam’s good at silence. John’s noticed that, too.
Bucky’s banging in the bathroom takes on a new level of violence. John smiles; it sounds like he’s given up on fixing the pipes and started using the wrench to beat the shit out of them and see if that helps.
“Thanks for the help,” he says, swallowing back another acrid mouthful of the instant he keeps in the kitchen. “And the coffee.”
“Yeah. Nah, of course. Don’t mention it.” They sit in the kitchen, companionable and quiet, and John drinks the coffee Sam made for them both.
“Don’t come at me with that Roll Tide, Bama shit. You pricks won’t even say we’re your fucking rivals. Fuckers. Your team ain’t shit and neither are you.” Sam’s jostling play fight with one of the dockhands catches John’s attention.
He’s strong, even without the serum. If there had been two vials, he would have saved the second for Lemar—maybe Sam would have taken it. There could be two of them, then, and he’d have to know how much more effective that would be.
“They let Bama fans past the state line?” John asks Bucky, who only shrugs and refuses to look up from the railing he’s painting.
“No idea what any of it means. I know it’s college ball, all right?” he adds, finally raising his eyes to glare like he can hear John’s thoughts. “I’ve watched with Sam, I know that much. I don’t need you to explain it, thanks.”
“Wasn’t gonna try.” John turns back to watch Sam, now busy trying to grind his fist into the top of his target’s head. “You a Yankees fan or something like that?”
Bucky’s can of paint hits the ground with a thud. “I gotta go check on the boys.”
Look at me, John. Sam’s face is backlit by the window, throwing a halo around him. I have a job for you. A mission. Only you can do it, John, there’s no one else. It’s dangerous, but I need it to be you. You’re the only one I can trust.
John’s mouth closes around Sam’s cock, pushing down until the sides of his mouth threaten to split. You might die, Sam tells him between each descent, lips painted in John’s precome and spit leaking down his neck in steady pulses like he’s the one on his knees. You probably will. But it has to be you. You’re the only one who can do this for me.
His come paints the top of Sam’s boots in thick splatters of white. Clean it up, Sam urges him, pulling John off his cock with a loud pop and string of spit that stretches and stretches and then snaps, hitting John’s chest with a thud like a payload landing. Don’t get all fucking ate up on me now.
John’s mouth tastes like leather for a week.
It’s the best he’s felt since Lemar’s head hit that pillar, opened up and bled him out.
“Pipes working okay?” Bucky sounds like the question is yanked from his mouth with pliers.
“More or less.” They’re in better shape than they were the day John broke them. He shrugs, ducking his head. Aw shucks, ma'am the new body language expert Val’s into this week called it, and said he should think about slouching more often. “Gets the job done, so I really can’t complain. Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” Bucky’s mouth twists, says he would rather John not thank him at all. For anything. “How long you renting this place for, anyway?”
“Sam didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“It’s all bought and paid for, Buck.” By Val, but he hadn’t told Sam that. She owns the house, the uniform, the media team and the army of PR people. He’s still the one living in it, and the idea that Sam knew something about John and didn’t tell Bucky is too good to not to take the shot. “I’m thinking I might stay for a while, yet. I’m getting a feel for the area, and I think it’s going to be good for me.”
“How fucking great for you,” Bucky mutters, and doesn’t bother making a good excuse to get up and leave before he does it.
I want you so fucking bad, Sam grunts into his ear when John throws back a couple fingers just for the hell of it and strips bare to take a nap, bearing John down and crushing his cock between unyielding metal and flesh, painting the shield and John’s abs in come with long, painful brushstrokes.
In the corner, Bucky is a silent witness.
Just you, hear me? Sam says, not even looking at Bucky to see how it lands. This perfect fucking hole, baby, that sweet mouth. And you’d die for me, wouldn’t you? I can find anybody who will kill for me, but you? You’d die for me.
John babbles an agreement, sincere as he’s ever been in his life, watching the man in the corner watch them. Bucky’s eyes are wide and focused, but he’s not cold now. He’s the lost one, he’s the one who’s grieving.
Sam’s mouth is hot when he kisses John, tongue fucking in surely and swallowing the rest of his promises down before he can make them.
John grills a couple steaks for dinner that night, chars the meat and cuts into it before it’s had time to rest. He eats outside too, planting his ass on the scraggly piece of shit back lawn Val bought him and trying to imagine he can see through the space between houses, hear pieces of the argument coming from four doors down until it works, and he can.
Sam’s sister doesn’t like him. She might want him around even less than Bucky does. John’s tried everything to change it, and nothing works. Apologizing, throwing a hand in around the new business, getting the boys autographs from a Saints player Lemar introduced John to when he was still in OCS.
She watches him. Eyes always on him, even when his back’s turned, like if she doesn’t keep track of his movements he’ll hurt somebody. She doesn’t like him near the kids, doesn’t want him on her boat, wants him out of her life. Sam’s life. She’d march him past the state line and leave him there if she could. He could save the whole goddamned world and she’d spit in his face for it.
She doesn’t say it, but John knows.
He’d like to say he doesn’t hate her back, doesn’t hate any of them, but he’s never been that guy. Love’s not his problem, never has been, but hate isn’t either.
“Saw you on CNN today with your dog. I didn’t even know you had a dog, John.” Bucky nearly gets the drop on him at the corner store. John hears him coming in time to prepare for the sound of his voice, just barely, but in a fight he would have paid for it.
“She’s a rescue,” he replies woodenly, like he’s been explaining on all the morning shows. “Sometimes it feels a little like she rescued me.”
“Jesus.” Bucky’s whistle hurts his ears. “Who wrote that line for you? If they told you you can sell it, John, they lied. I didn’t take you for a purse dog kind of guy, anyway.” Bucky’s eyes are hidden behind his sunglasses, but the implication John knows he’s making hits him in the gut.
You lied, he’s saying, you’re lying now, you were lying then, and you’ll always be lying.
John smiles so wide it hurts and imagines the pink mist, letting it consume his entire field of vision. “You have a nice day too, Buck. Always good to have a chat with a neighbor.”
I think about you all the time. John tightens around Sam’s cock, moaning brokenly. Want you here, in my bed. Want to do this for fucking real, split you open on my cock, right up into your guts, fill you until you can fucking taste me.
He’s never been invited in the bedroom that Sam calls his but has an indent in both pillows, every single night. He knows what it looks like, anyway.
John soaks their sheets down through to the mattress, spit and sweat and come saturating each fiber until he’s just another piece of the fabric.
I’m never gonna get you out now, Sam tells him, sliding down so he can seal his mouth over the bruised, puffy mess he’s made of John’s hole and suck, spearing his tongue and using it to clean him in rough jabs, drawing himself back out so John can’t say the same. Might have to keep you chained to the headboard, so I can have some of this whenever I want. That what you’re doing, John? Trying to make me keep you around, baby? You think I want somebody like you?
Yes, John says, forever, and Sam agrees.
“It seems like you’re making some real progress.” The therapist Val got him is a fucking idiot. She’s young, and pretty, and she mentioned an uncle who served in ‘nam. “How are things going with the dog?”
“Great,” he says, glancing away from the computer screen and back at the sliding door and out to the dog house some consultant picked out. It’s delicate, all swirls and curlicues like it’s an expensive cake. John hates it almost as much as he hates the dog. “She’s great. We’re really bonding.”
“I’m so glad! You see, I told you…”
John tunes her out. It’s not like she’s any help. She’s a box to check to prove he’s not a danger, that it’s like Val said: executing one of the men who helped get Lemar killed was nothing more than an error in timing and location.
Sam would understand. Sam might actually be able to help, but they won’t let him.
“Yeah,” he answers a question he didn’t really hear, but it’s not going to matter. She only asks him questions when she wants a positive answer: are the nightmares better? Are Sam and Bucky lending a hand? Are you feeling steadier? Do you think you’ll be ready to head back out into the field? Will it be soon?
Who knows if Val is paying her to make things this easy. She’s a civilian with student loans and she wants this to work out. For the money Val’s spent on rolling her out as part of the package, she knows if it doesn’t John’s not the one people will blame.
“Yes,” John says again, staring down at Lemar’s tags, bunched up in his fist. He’d only wanted to keep the toe tag, just half the set, but his mother had insisted. Lemar didn’t need them anymore, she said. He’d want John to have them. All he would want now is for his best friend to keep going, to be happy and do honor to his sacrifice. He’d died for John, and John had to live for him. “No, everything’s all right.” Blood rolls down to encircle his wrist as he tightens his grip and feels the metal cut deep, tattooing its neat block type on his palm. “I’m feeling good. Great, really.”
Two weeks later, John leaves the front door open a little too long. It’s sweltering. He wants a cross breeze, that’s all, but next time he looks up the goddamned dog is gone.
He looks for the stupid fucking thing for hours. The intern running the accounts that need pictures gets on uploading them, and the Harvard grad they hired to tweet for him puts the word out there.
GMA does a quick piece on it in the morning; engagement’s through the roof, whatever the hell that means. People like the dog, is the point, and John understands that well enough. Val puts up the money for a reward but the goddamn thing stays gone, so if somebody really did take it they didn’t do it because they need the money. The interns keep posting for a couple weeks, but once twitter forgets John’s allowed to do the same.
It’d be better if it’s not dead, he doesn’t need Val to tell him that. And he doesn’t hope it died, it was just a stupid dog. It didn’t do anything to anybody, didn’t hurt him.
John just hated the ugly little thing, couldn’t stand to look at its trembling limbs and big sad eyes. Not having it around all the time, pressing its nose to the glass, begging and whining to come in… he’s happier with it off his plate. That’s all.
Maybe some kid has it, now. Maybe that stupid fucking dog is tucked snug in bed having the time of its anxious life, and that’s why nobody brought it back. When he thinks about it that way, dropping the issue is what Lemar would tell him to do.
“No.” He shakes his head, slow enough not to look jerky on low-res screens and sighs, looking down at his lap and closing his eyes for exactly three seconds before looking up again like they’d practiced when Anderson Cooper asks him if he’s thinking about getting another dog. Val flashes him a thumbs up from off-camera and turns back to her phone, fingernails tapping on the screen loud for him to catch it. “I know how this sounds, but I just don’t think I’m ready. She was… she was a special dog, you know? And all I can hope is that whoever has her now loves her as much as I did.”
Crack. Sam’s hand catches his bottom lip just right and splits it in a sharp line of pain. John runs his tongue over the gash and tastes electricity, crisp and centering.
You like that, baby? Need somebody to keep you in line the only way you understand? Sam strokes his cheek with gentle fingers, hooks two fingers into John’s mouth and yanks until blood drips freely down his chest. Yeah, I know you do. No good alone, are you? No fucking good at all.
John sobs and thanks him, begs him, barely even aware of Bucky’s jealous eyes anymore.
Shhh, Sam comforts him, and winds up again. I’m gonna take care of everything. You just keep doing the work, John, let me handle the rest.