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It had been a trap.
In retrospect, of course it had been a trap.
Sam blinked and saw only darkness. That was good for a moment of panic before the memories rushed back, and with them, a climbing awareness that something was seriously wrong.
The old abandoned mine shaft had collapsed on top of them just after the EMP blast had taken out Sam’s wings and tech and Bucky’s arm. He remembered the instant of understanding—they’d been set up—and then the blast of the explosive and the deafening roar of earth and rock and splintering wood all around as the ceiling came down and the walls closed in, and then, he’d opened his eyes to darkness. He was on his stomach with his cheek pressed against rough dirt, half-covered in rubble. His legs were trapped.
Bucky. He had to make sure Bucky was okay. That thought pushed to the forefront, even ahead of How long had he been out and How bad was the damage.
Bucky had been behind him in the tunnel, and the collapse would have been right over his head. Might’ve survived. Might not have. Sam remembered the last time he’d seen Riley, a small figure bent and broken on the hot sand far below, not sure if he was alive or dead, and it wasn’t the same but it was and Sam pressed his face into his arm and forced himself to breathe. Come to the rescue, like he always did.
First things first. The numbness of shock was starting to wear off and pain crept into his awareness in a dozen places, but he couldn’t afford to lie still and wait for help. Gritting his teeth, Sam positioned his arms under his chest and started pushing himself up and out from the rubble. The shield and useless jetpack on his back felt like they weighed a thousand pounds.
His left leg met resistance and something went wrong wrong wrong and the distant awareness of pain exploded into razor-sharp agony radiating from his knee to his ankle. He collapsed back down, burying his face in his arm to stifle a scream.
That was when he heard movement, rubble shifting around several feet away in the darkness. Relief flooded through him and he picked up his head, trying to twist toward the noise, but of course he couldn’t see anything.
“Bucky,” he rasped, then coughed up a lungful of dust and tried again. “Hey. Buck. I’m here. I’m stuck. You okay?”
“I’m on my way,” Bucky said, and the shifting of debris resumed.
Sam fished in a belt pocket on the suit until his fingers closed around the emergency supply kit. He worked it free, and with shaking fingers pulled out a small matchbook and lit a match. Light flared.
The tunnel they’d been in stretched out into darkness, but the end they’d come through before the EMP blast had collapsed entirely into an impenetrable wall of rubble. Bucky was waist-deep and still digging himself out. He was moving strangely, and it took a beat for Sam to realize his left arm was missing. In the flickering light, half of Bucky’s face was glistening dark with blood.
Bucky pulled one leg from the rubble, then another, and half climbed half slid down the pile toward Sam. Sam craned to see that what trapped his legs was a large beam that had fallen at an angle in the rubble. His left leg was caught where one end of the beam met the ground. The sharp edge of the beam had forced a new joint in his left leg between his knee and his ankle.
He gritted his teeth against the climbing pain and tried to hold onto the relief he’d felt at seeing Bucky alive.
Three days earlier, Bucky had been waiting for him at Sarah’s when Sam had pulled in from his latest mission. For months, he’d been trying to stay a step ahead of the GRC in tracking down Karli’s loyalists in the hopes of bringing them to the table before the GRC could start shooting at them. Yet he was still little but a thorn in the GRC’s side and what remained of the Flag Smashers’ following blamed him for allying with the GRC during Karli’s assault on the conference and had made themselves scarce. He’d been all around the world, chasing whatever intel Torres could provide him, and he was exhausted and frustrated and tired of being alone.
He and Bucky had sat down at the picnic table by the dock and Sam had pushed the file across the table to him, explaining that intel from an anonymous government source suggested there were loyalists hiding out in an old mine deep in the Tennessee mountains. Possibly willing to talk. Close enough to home Bucky could join him and be back in time for dinner with Sarah.
He remembered how Bucky had smiled easily at him in the Louisiana sunshine and how his fingers had grazed Sam’s arm gently as he’d said of course, he didn’t mind, as long as Sarah could spare him for a few hours. Even then, Bucky’s smile had warmed something in Sam, but he’d pushed it aside unexamined. He liked having Bucky as a partner. That was all.
Only now they were trapped in a dark, dank tunnel with no way out except going deeper into the crumbling mine, without even a working flashlight between them, let alone Redwing’s navigation systems. As the match sputtered out, burning his fingers, it was hard not to feel some of his hope go with it.
Bucky woke up to the sound of Sam’s ragged cry and found himself under a literal ton of rubble, his vibranium arm pinned by a boulder the size of a car. It took longer than he liked to work himself free, but aside from a blinding headache and insistent waves of dizziness and nausea to go along with it, he seemed to be okay. That was good, because Sam wasn’t.
“Think you can lift it?” Sam asked, as Bucky crouched beside him and examined the place where Sam’s leg was caught under the half-buried beam.
“I think so,” Bucky said.
His enhanced vision let him make out the outline of Sam’s handsome face, apprehensive and determined.
“Then get it over with,” Sam said.
Bucky nodded, felt the movement like a spike through his skull, then planted his feet and hooked his hand under the beam, and heaved. At first the beam shifted a little, debris raining down from somewhere high above. He heaved again, straining through clenched teeth, loose rocks shifting under his boots until something jerked free and the beam came up in his hand. An inch. Two. More. Enough.
Sam gasped and said, “Let it go, let it go!”
The beam came down with a massive whump that shook the tunnel and sent more debris raining down around them. Bucky dropped to his knees, gasping, and pressed his head into his hand like he could keep it from splitting in two that way.
“Bucky. Bucky. Hey.”
Bucky straightened. The pain was unimportant. Irrelevant to to the objective. He swallowed it back.
”Sam,” he said. “Are you alright?”
“I was about to ask you that,” Sam said. He was sitting up against a large chunk of rock now, his bad leg stretched out before him. He was gripping his thigh with one hand and staring off into the darkness somewhere behind Bucky’s shoulder.
“We need to get out of here,” Bucky said.
“Oh, you think?” Sam said.
“Explosion like that,” Bucky said, “probably destabilized the whole network of tunnels. We need to get out of here before it all comes down.”
“Oh,” Sam said again, and this time, Bucky could hear the trepidation in his voice. “I hate to break it to you, Buck, but there’s only one other entrance and a whole lot of tunnels between us and it.”
“I can get us there,” Bucky said, and Sam’s head turned toward him.
“You can?”
Bucky pictured the map of the tunnel system Sam had shown him back in Delacroix. With it came a flash of Sam’s smile, and a peaceful afternoon, Sam sitting so close at the picnic table his knee brushed against Bucky’s. Bucky felt at home with Sam’s family, and liked flirting with Sarah and learning to play the fun uncle to Cass and AJ and getting to know Carlos and Tommy and everyone else. But none of it ever compared to the way he felt when Sam was there. It wasn’t something Bucky wanted to think too hard about. They were friends. Partners. So what if being invited along a mission had made his heart leap like a kid being asked to a dance.
“Yeah,” he said. “I memorized the map. You know kids today, they rely way too much on GPS to get around.”
That got a strained laugh from Sam, who said, “Okay. So. How far are we from the other entrance?”
“About ten miles,” Bucky said.
“Ten miles,” Sam said, and tipped his head against the wall again. “Great. That’s just great.”
A few minutes after Bucky had helped him escape the rubble, Sam found himself leaning against the mineshaft, balancing on one leg like a stork. In hand was a makeshift torch, a rag torn off one of Bucky’s layered shirts soaked in fuel from Sam’s jet pack and wrapped around a piece of metal piping he’d pulled from the rubble. His leg was splinted tightly with a few pieces of wood and rope. It hurt like hell to put his foot down, but the splint held his weight. He’d shucked off his heavy wings and the shield with a little silent promise that he’d be back.
As they got ready to move on, Bucky wrapped his arm around Sam’s waist and Sam put his arm over Bucky’s shoulder. Sam could feel the lean muscles in Bucky’s arm and shoulder move as he shifted to support Sam’s weight and Bucky’s scent was musky under the dust and the metallic tang of blood. He couldn’t recall the last time anyone had held him so tenderly for any reason and that thing--that thing he couldn’t let be a thing--rose up in him suddenly. He wanted to make a joke, to deflect, but there wasn't a single thing he could say to make himself feel better that wouldn’t make it weirder than it already was.
“So are we gonna do this, or what?” Sam said.
“I’ve got you,” Bucky said.
They started down the tunnel, Sam leaning heavily on Bucky and trying not to drop the torch or stumble on the uneven ground or overbalance Bucky. The splint held, but suppressing the pain was exhausting and before long Sam was clenching his teeth and feeling a cold sweat trickle down his back. They were moving slowly, too slowly, to cover ten miles in any reasonable amount of time.
“So,” he said, because talking was a distraction and the only one he had. “Sarah’s gonna be real upset if we don’t get you back. She might actually miss you more than me. Says you’re the best thing to happen to the business in years.”
He could feel Bucky frowning beside him. Bucky said slowly, “She wouldn’t miss me more than you.”
“I know,” Sam said. “But you’re really a part of life down there now, man, and Wilson Seafood is having its best quarter in a long time. It’s cool. You like the work?”
“I like to help,” Bucky said. He still sounded confused, but was humoring Sam, which was all that mattered. “I like Sarah. Anyway, it’s the least I can do, considering she’s been putting me up in her spare bedroom for the last three months.”
“She wants you there,” Sam said. “She wouldn’t put you up if she didn’t. She likes you.”
“I hope so,” Bucky said, and his tone was light and wistful in a way that made something in Sam’s chest clench. But that was ridiculous, because there was nothing between him and Bucky and there never had been and there never would be. He should be happy that Bucky had found a place he belonged, and happy that Sarah was coming out of her shell too. It was good for the both of them.
“You know,” Sam said. “I was only teasing you about the flirting and having Carlos feed you to the fish. If you two can make each other happy, I’m not going to get in your way. You’re a good person and I know you’d be good to her too.”
Bucky didn’t say anything for several long seconds. Then he said, “What?”
“Come on,” Sam said. “You know what.”
He’d thought that putting it into words, the way he was supposed to feel, would have made things right. It hadn’t. At all. His chest clenched tighter.
Bucky’s grip around Sam’s waist shifted slightly, almost a caress. “Sam. Look. Uh. Sarah’s great, and I mean, she’s gorgeous, obviously, and I love the kids, and maybe if things were different…” he broke off, “but, uh, we’re just friends. I don’t need your... blessing.”
“If things were different?” Sam said.
“You know,” Bucky said, and glanced down at Sam, an odd look glinting in his eyes in the flickering torchlight. “Things.”
“Alright,” Sam said, and found that all of a sudden he could breathe again. “Things.”
They continued on. Sam kept a desultory conversation going for a while, asking Bucky about his thoughts on Delacroix and various people Sam had known growing up, and then moved onto interrogating the extent to which Bucky had expanded his musical horizons and whether he’d finally watched Lord of the Rings and whether he planned to get back into superhero-ing as a more regular thing, and then anything else he could think of, until his voice was ragged. Bucky, plodding along stoically, did little to hold up his end of the conversation, but for a while it was better than nothing. Eventually, Sam fell silent too.
He started to lose track of time, as Bucky led him through one tunnel after another, until his entire world narrowed to the relentless stabbing pain in his leg and the torch in his hand and the shadowy, rubble-strewn path in front of him and Bucky’s arm around his waist. The dancing of the torchlight cast everything in an unnatural dreamlike glow. Bucky’s solid, steady presence beside him felt like the only thing in the world that was real.
The rumbling started like distant thunder. It took a moment for it to register, but by then, Bucky had already pulled up short. The sharp movement made Sam stumble and the fresh agony that shot through his shin made him lean into Bucky hard, hissing through his teeth.
“Sam,” Bucky said urgently.
“What is it?” Sam said.
“Backtrack. Now.”
There was another rumble and this time Sam felt the tremor beneath their feet, and little pieces of rock and dust started to fall from the tunnel ceiling. Bucky tugged him back the way they’d come, first in a brisk walk, then in a sprint. Sam tried to keep up but his bad leg buckled and the torch went skittering across the floor and disappeared as huge chunks of rock fell around them in a deafening, horrible roar. Sam’s world tilted suddenly and he was slung over Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky sprinted and dove for cover against the wall as a massive boulder crashed down right where they’d been, then shoved Sam down and covered Sam’s body with his own. Small pieces of rock and dust and rubble rained over them until silence fell again.
Sam breathed harshly in the darkness, his leg a throbbing mess of pain, the break a hazy epicenter.
Bucky’s body was flush against his, one of his knees slotted between Sam’s, his bloodied face pressed into Sam’s shoulder.
“Hey, you okay?” Sam said, when the pain had calmed down enough he could think and Bucky still hadn’t moved.
“‘M okay,” Bucky mumbled, then groaned and rolled off, thudding to the ground beside Sam. “You?”
“I’m okay,” Sam said.
“Do you still have those matches?” Bucky asked.
“Yeah.” Sam fumbled the matchbook out of his belt pocket, sat up laboriously, and struck a match. The flame flared bright in the darkness. Bucky sat up beside him, catching himself with his arm as he half collapsed back to the tunnel floor again. Worry shot through Sam’s gut, but it was superseded by the sight in the tunnel ahead.
Where there had been a tunnel moments before, there was a massive pile of rock and debris where the ceiling had collapsed in.
“Look,” Bucky breathed.
“I know,” Sam said, unable to keep the horror and fear and grief from his voice. He’d joked about not getting home, when the only thing he’d been fending off was the grind of a long trek on an injured leg. Once they’d started toward the second entrance, he hadn’t really believed there was a chance they wouldn’t make it. But now, they were trapped between two cave-ins, and there was no way out.
Before the cave in, they’d been close to the second mine entrance. By Bucky's estimate, the end of the tunnel should have been no more than a mile away.
He squinted into the darkness beside Sam, his enhanced vision picking up every detail of the collapse in the flickering light of the match. The pulsating pain in his head distracted him. He could feel something warm trickling from one ear. He ignored it. Sam needed him.
When Sam said, “I know,” Bucky heard the defeat in his voice.
Sam hadn’t seen what he’d seen.
“Look,” Bucky said again. “There’s a gap between the rubble and the ceiling on one side. I think there’s a way through.”
The little shocked Oh that Sam let out might’ve been endearing under other circumstances.
“I’m going to check it out,” Bucky said.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “You do that.”
Bucky picked himself up and turned to the pile of rubble. Aside from stray chunks of rock that had fallen from the ceiling or bounced out into the tunnel, the cave-in was mostly a steep pile that formed a wall where one side of the tunnel had collapsed. Bucky picked through the debris on the floor, then climbed up to where the top of the pile met the tunnel ceiling. It was awkward with one arm, and he stumbled and slid a few times on the loose rocks, but what he saw confirmed what he had hoped. The tunnel on the other side was intact. The gap itself was several feet deep and only a few inches across, but the way the debris had fallen, it could be widened.
Bucky half climbed, half slid back to where Sam was waiting with another match held tight between his fingers.
“I’m going to dig us out,” Bucky said.
“I can’t help you,” Sam said. It sounded like a confession.
Bucky sighed, and said, “You don’t have to.”
Clearing the debris around the gap was slow, unpleasant work. Before long Bucky’s arm and shoulder were aching and his palm and fingers were raw and scraped. The continuous effort set his headache reverberating with an intensity he hadn’t believed possible and he had to pause every so often to ride out surges of dizziness or breathe past the nausea as his stomach churned and churned.
Some of the rocks and other pieces of rubble were small and came apart easily, but others had to be dug out and moved aside. A particularly stubborn boulder he broke with a punch that left his knuckles screaming. It all would have been a thousand times easier with his metal arm, but he didn’t allow himself to dwell on that. He needed to work with what he had. That was all he could do.
Time went by. He didn’t know how much. There was only the next rock, and the next, and the next. Finally, finally, Bucky shoved a boulder out of the way with a grunt and it rolled down the other side of the tunnel, leaving behind a gap where the rubble pile met the ceiling that was large enough a grown man could pass through.
Bucky slid back down to Sam, staggering to his knees on the ground before righting himself. He found Sam sitting against the wall with his leg stretched out in front of him and his head tipped back and his eyes closed. He lifted his head as Bucky approached. A match flared to life between Sam’s fingers.
“It’s clear,” Bucky said.
“You did it,” Sam said. He sounded relieved and incredulous, and some of the tension in his face and his shoulders relaxed, though it returned almost immediately as he caught Bucky’s profile in the flickering light. “Whoa. Buck. You good?”
“Fine,” Bucky lied. “Come on.”
“Okay,” Sam said. “Right. Let’s go.”
Bucky pulled Sam to his feet. As soon as Sam was vertical, he made a muffled sound of pain, hopping slightly and swearing under his breath as he tried to put his foot down. Bucky slipped his arm around Sam’s broad waist again to steady him. Sam’s body pressed into his and his fingers dug into Bucky’s shoulder like Bucky was an anchor.
“What’s wrong?” Bucky said.
“I don’t know,” Sam panted, “Just stiff. I think. Shit. Can’t put any weight on it.”
“Can you still make it over?”
Sam looked over at the pile of rubble, and at the tunnel Bucky had painstakingly burrowed thought it. He exhaled through his nose. “I’ll make it. You go first and help me down the other side.”
Bucky helped Sam hobble over to where the cave-in began, then left him standing on one leg while Bucky clambered up, pulled himself to the other side with one arm, then turned around carefully and skidded down the other side.
“You’re up,” he called, and lit another one of Sam’s matches and held it up to light the way.
In answer he heard rock shifting, and Sam muttering curses under his breath. He saw Sam’s hands first, gripping the rock as he heaved himself up, and then Sam’s head and shoulders appeared. In the flickering light Sam’s face was tense with concentration.
Then Sam was through, and carefully turning around to come feet first down the other side. He grunted as his broken leg slapped against the jumbled rocks, but caught himself in an upright position.
Then a loose rock shifted under Sam’s hand and he was sliding and the toes of his good foot scrabbled against nothing and he crumpled to the debris-cluttered tunnel floor below with a ragged cry of pain. Bucky jerked to help him, too slow. Too late. Fuck.
Bucky dropped to his knees beside Sam. He was curled around his leg, his eyes were squeezed shut, and he was panting raggedly. Bucky put his hand on Sam’s shoulder, gripping it in what he hoped was reassurance, then rubbed a gentle, comforting circle along Sam’s back.
Slowly, Sam’s breathing evened out, and he leaned his head into Bucky’s thigh where Bucky was kneeling beside him. Instinctively, Bucky moved his hand to cup Sam’s cheek, running the pad of his thumb gently along Sam’s cheekbone.
He’d been afraid to name it before, the way he felt about Sam. Now, in the dark, in the thick silence with Sam’s head in his lap, it seemed silly to pretend he didn’t know what it was.
“Buck?” Sam breathed.
“I’m here,” Bucky said. “How bad?”
“Bad,” Sam choked out, and moved his hands away from his leg. Bucky struck the last match and leaned over, pressing his lips together.
Sam’s foot pointed away at an unnatural angle from his knee, the splint knocked loose. Blood was soaking the leg of his suit where the broken end of the bone protruded. Sam was shaking.
“Can’t believe,” Sam grunted, “a six foot drop is what’s gonna do me in.”
“Try not to move,” Bucky said.
“No choice,” Sam gritted. “Help me up.”
Reluctantly, Bucky braced Sam’s back as Sam pushed himself upright with shaking arms, then leaned against a boulder. Bucky could just make out the outline of his face, pulled into a tight grimace.
“You have to leave me,” Sam said abruptly.
“What?” Bucky said.
“Go. Get help. Come back for me.” The words came out labored, and Sam took a shaky breath, one hand tightening around his thigh.
“No,” Bucky said.
“No?”
“I’m not leaving you. It’s too dangerous. The rest of the tunnel could collapse any minute.”
“Well, I can’t do this,” Sam said. “Do you hear me? I can’t do it, and you do not look like you’re in any shape to carry me out of here. So go, get out, before it’s too late.”
“No,” Bucky said again.
“Bucky--” Sam began.
Bucky cut him off, the words coming out before he’d given any thought as to what he should say. “I’m not leaving you here to die. I love you.”
The silence that settled between them was thick. A pebble rolling down the rubble pile was as loud as a thunderclap. Bucky breathed in and out and his head seemed to be cleaving in two and he severely regretted everything.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was out of line. But I’m getting you out of here, Sam. I can carry you the rest of the way. I can do it.”
“Buck,” Sam started again, and his voice was softer this time. His hand groped in the dark, and then found Bucky’s arm and ran the length of it until his fingers wrapped around Bucky’s. It was Bucky’s turn to exhale shakily, afraid of what the gesture meant and what it didn’t mean. His heart pounded in his chest. “Bucky,” Sam said. “I-- I don’t know how to say this.”
“You don’t have to say anything,” Bucky said gruffly, because of course, of course, Sam didn’t feel the same way, and now he felt like he had to let Bucky down easily. Hadn’t been fair to put that on him.
Sam’s fingers tightened around Bucky’s, his thumb moving over Bucky’s battered knuckles. Then suddenly he pulled Bucky toward him, and Bucky hardly dared to believe what was happening until Sam’s chin tilted up and his soft, warm lips met Bucky’s.
Bucky closed his eyes, and for an interminable moment everything else fell away. There was only him and Sam and the warm pleasure of the kiss pooling low in his belly and Sam’s tongue moving along his bottom lip and the soft brush of Sam’s goatee against his cheek and the scent of his skin. Bucky could’ve lingered there forever.
When Sam pulled away, Bucky was breathless. He looked at their hands entwined and said the first thing that came into his mind.
“Are you sure?”
Sam actually laughed and for an instant Bucky saw the flash of his smile in the darkness.
“Yeah, Buck,” Sam said. “I’m sure.”
A different sort of silence descended, relief and anticipation and fear of disturbing the fragile new development between them. But soon, Sam’s face pinched into another grimace, and Bucky’s world lurched and faded in and out in a way that told him he didn’t have much time.
“Come on,” Bucky said. “I’ve got you.”
Sam nodded, and said in a clipped voice, “Okay.” He didn’t let go of Bucky’s hand immediately, though.
Bucky pulled Sam over his shoulder in a one-armed fireman’s carry. Sam groaned sharply as Bucky lifted him but didn’t complain.
His head throbbed and his arm and shoulder protested and the world spun, but none of that mattered. There was barely a mile between them and the free, open air. Bucky staggered down the tunnel until he saw light at the other end.
Something was beeping. Sam blinked. It was bright. There had been hours in the dark, and pain, and Bucky, and finally everything had faded out as his boot filled with blood and the jostling ride on Bucky’s shoulders took its toll. Now he was somewhere bright and warm and smelling of antiseptic and the pain was mostly gone, or at least distant in the way that the good drugs made it distant, and something was beeping. He was on his back in a bed with his leg suspended in a complicated-looking cast. Hospital. That was what it was called.
Beside him, in a too-small plastic chair with his forearm braced on one knee, Bucky stared at him. A bandage was wrapped around his temple and dark puffy bruising smudged the skin under both eyes like a raccoon’s mask. Where the skin of his face wasn’t bruised or scraped, it was gray. The knuckles of his right hand were split and bruised and he’d folded the sleeve of his shirt over where his metal arm would have been.
“Wow,” Sam said. “You look awful.”
“How do you feel?” Bucky said.
“Alright,” Sam said honestly. “Think they’ve got me on the good stuff.”
“You were in surgery for six hours while they fixed your leg,” Bucky said. He handed Sam a cup of water and helped him drink, then said, “The doctor says you’ll be fine, though. Back to your morning jog in no time.”
Sam nodded, and said, “You alright?”
Bucky shrugged. “Skull fracture.”
“Bucky,” Sam breathed, as the jumbled memories cohered. Bucky lifting the beam to free him from the rubble. Supporting him and guiding him through the long trek through the tunnels. Protecting him from the cave-in with his own body. Digging them out. Carrying him that final stretch. “You had a broken skull that whole time?”
“What difference does it make?”
Sam took a deep breath, and maybe it was the meds talking, but he said, “I should have seen it was a trap. I shouldn’t have brought you in. You shouldn’t have had to do all that for me when I didn’t know how bad it was for you. It’s not right.”
Bucky’s brow furrowed. He reached across to the bed and cupped Sam’s cheek, like he had in the tunnel. Sam resisted the urge to close his eyes and lean into the touch. It was wrong to want Bucky’s comfort now.
“Sam,” Bucky said slowly. “I know…you like to be the one who carries everyone. But sometimes, you have to let someone carry you.”
Sam stared at him, taking in the sincerity in his wide blue eyes and the determined cast to his jaw and something else, an indefinable want or hunger that might have been desire but might have been something else, too.
I like to help, he’d said.
“Well,” Sam said quietly, bringing his hand up to catch Bucky’s where it still rested against his skin. “In that case. Thank you.”
Bucky squeezed his hand.
“So we’re good?” Sam said.
“Yeah. We’re good.”
“Good.”
They stared at each other again, and this time, it was Bucky who broke the silence by leaning in for a kiss. Sam closed his eyes and returned it, basking in the way Bucky’s teeth caught at his lip and the softness of his lips and the scratch of the stubble against his cheek.
His work wasn’t done. That he’d been set up by someone feeding intel to Torres meant he had enemies in high places. Dealing with a broken leg on top of that was going to be an exercise in frustration. Even collecting their equipment from the collapsed mine entrance would be a pain in the ass. But, at the very least, he knew he wasn’t going into it alone. He watched as Bucky settled back in the chair, a small smile lingering on his face, and couldn’t help but feel that things were going to work out fine.