Sharing Pain《sambucky》

《here》

TW: Talks about suicide.

The stench of hospital makes Sam scrunch his nose up and his eyes water, but he marches on to the direction he knows, thanks to the nurses, will lead to his soulmate.

He hates hospitals with a passion, ever since he was nine.

It still pains his heart to think about what kind of racism he had to face back then, as he sat there on a chair watching his dad's bruised chest rise and fall as he slept. Paul Wilson went grocery shopping, but didn't return that day.

Sam still remembers his mother gasping for air as the police stood on their doorstep, an eleven year old Sarah shielding Sam from view and the news of his father being beaten down by a group of white students, he is in the hospital, but it's risk-

Sam swallows it down and thinks about his parent, which are both very much alive and still madly in love.

He's gotta make them meet Bucky though.

Apropos, Bucky...

Bucky did follow his orders and got himself checked out, so Sam is here to confront to the doctors about how to treat some of the wounds.
But when he finally arrives, he finds a calm, but tense Bucky Barnes, in his clothes, tying his shoes neatly.

Their eyes meet and Sam's brows furrow together.

Sam approaches a doctor standing nearby and fires questions at him. "What's going on? Why is he dressed?" Sam fucking knows Bucky's ribs still hurt and his nose is far from healed, but the doctor sadly shakes his head.

"Mr. Barnes metabolism will heal him in less than two days fully and he refuses treatment. Besides, the only thing we could help with is the tooth stuffed with poison, but Mr. Barnes denied that, too."

"Tooth stuffed with poi-!?" Sam sputters out, his eyes widening comically, but his world has minimised already only on Bucky.

Bucky, who has a tooth stuffed with poison in his mouth. Stuck there probably decades ago.

Pictures of HYDRA Agents with foam around their mouth, withering on the floor enters Sam's mind like a bullet and he takes five big, coordinated angry steps towards his idiot of a soulmate and grabs both sides of Bucky's face with his hands. Sam pushes him backwards and his head collides with a wall so hard, Bucky flinches.

The latter makes a surprised noise, which gets interrupted by Sam's thumbs slipping between the white rows of teeth to hold them apart and pinch his mouth open and his eyes fly over them to find what he's looking for and-

No shit.

There, at the end of the bottom row on the left sits one that looks differently and Sam pulls away as if he's been hit.

"Why do you still have that!?!" He screams, outraged, and Bucky's face fills with guilt and shame.

"It doesn't bother me, really..."

On the contrary, Sam tries to remain calm.

He doesn't succeed.

After he forces Bucky to get it erased, Sam stays there, in the hospital, thinking where it all went wrong.

Why didn't he get rid of it already?

"Because I wanted to die, Sam." Is apparently the right answer, but not the one Sam wants to hear.

A sob breaks out of Sam's throat as they sit there on a bench, a few meters away from the hospital. It's a cold season, but Bucky seems unbothered by that.

Sam, meanwhile, never felt colder.
But for that, he can't blame the weather.

"So you wanted to bite on it and end it all." Sam elaborates, and Bucky stoically nods.

"Look, Sam, it's just-, I just, yes, I wanted to end it multiple times already. I wanted to take the coward way out of everything.

HYDRA, they used to..." and wow, if this isn't the worst way to start a sentence, and Sam selfishly wants Bucky to shut up.

"They inserted it back in eighty-six, but at the same time beat it into their asset that it is only allowed to use it when the enemy has captured it and threatens the asset to get information. They-"

"Please, oh, god, don't- don't refer to yourself as 'it'!" Sam cries now, but tears running down his cheeks, but Bucky just shrugs his shoulders.

"That is also beaten into me."

Deathening silence follows, and Bucky's face is void of anything right now, those stone cold icy blues focused on the lake a few meters away. They stare onto the water as if they could find something important there. But those plump lips are drawn into a sharp line. His spine is too straight and his shoulders too tense to be relaxed and Sam wants to curl around him and forcefully make him calm.

Although Sam is almost sure 'calm' is something relative for Bucky.

Years later, and HYDRA is still robbing this pure hearted man of everything.

"After I escaped, I hid all over the world. The first time I wanted to bite on it was in 2015, in Tokyo. I was sitting there, on top of the roof, starring down on people that would never know me for me, but the crimes I've committed.

Then I thought of all the things they did to me. Taking my mind apart, hurting my body in colourful ways, did you know those aren't my own teeth?" Blue eyes flicker to watery brown, only to snap back to the lake in front of them.

Sam, in fact, did not know that.

"I shattered mine back in the forties, when they used the chair for the first time. They put those in with me being fully conscious."

He takes a deep breath and a voice in Sam's head is telling him this is the longest he's heard Bucky talk. Ironic, how he'd love to beg Bucky to shut him up.

"So there I am, sitting in Tokyo, begging to end it all. That's, when for the first time, I was fully aware of pain that wasn't my own."

He smiles, and Sam's tears run down his face like a faucet.

"I know you don't believe me, but I'm not going to kill myself. I don't wanna meet 'em, but I also don't wanna make 'em fell my absence, and be alone." He says and stands up, pats Sam's shoulder and walks away from him.

But I am alone. You left me alone. Sam thinks bitterly and curls up more on that bench, his forearm keeping the cold around him and in his heart only a little bit.

His forearms can't stop his heart from breaking though.