Remnants of Time

Chapter 2

Song Choice: Sorrow by Sleeping At Last; Run Boy Run by Woodkid

When everything had stayed calm around them and the second hour of the flight had passed, Sam nudged Steve' side.
"You really are as reckless as Bucky said. Man." Steve shot him a confused glance from the side. He actually looked a little tired right now, although he shouldn't be.
"Y'know, training for hours and not even taking water along. Gotta stay hydrated, man."
Sam grinned a wonderful white grin and Steve knew that this guy had way too much fun right now, when a water bottle flew right at him from the back. Grateful, Steve took a few gulps.
"Bucky didn't say I was reckless", he replied.
"Yeah he did, but I won't turn around so you can ask him."

You can't ask him. Steve remembered the moment that became reality. When ice was poured over the man he wanted to see alive and breathing. These days Bucky just stood there, in the tube with only one arm and pretended he was dead. How many times Steve had stood in the same room, looking at Bucky, silence between two men who'd never been silent when together.
A sigh escaped him.
"I hope everything will go as planned."

Sam couldn't turn around to his friend, couldn't look him in the eyes just then, maybe for the first time ever, because all the pain on Steve's face was too much to take. Also, it caused him to feel like he was intruding, like this was a part of Steve too personal to be shared with anyone. Sam concentrated on the night beyond the windows of the cockpit, hands calm on the control board.
"You saw Wanda's face", he started slowly, willing to encourage the man next to him, who just wasn't supposed to be this breakable, this fragile. How could fate be so cruel? To someone who didn't deserve it in the slightest?
"She almost glowed when you told her to watch Bucky. She won't let anything happen."
Sam didn't know what to say when Steve stayed silent. This man inspired people by just being around, but right now, he didn't do anything, let alone inspire Sam.
"Sleep a little, I mean it."
Back came a grunt. But the blonde giant did stand up, obliging a piece of advice by a true friend very much crucial to the success of this mission. Nat would scold him for not listening to Sam, he could feel it.
So Steve strapped himself onto one of those wide benches in the back of their stolen Quinjet, praying for peaceful rest. Sam did too, pray for him to have peace when his eyes closed. He knew he couldn't handle nightmare-Steve if his life depended on it.

Because Sam, not just a therapist to war veterans with PTSD, but also a human being with a healthy sense of empathy and reason, had discovered what a proficient liar Steve actually was. All these evenings where they had been joking around, when Nat had proclaimed Steve the worst liar she'd ever met, they had completely forgotten - or maybe chosen to ignore - the depth of Captain Steve Roger's sense of responsibility and selflessness.
He'd lied to them all along, undetected and repeatedly and even soldiers and spies were blind, or longed too much for a lie that they'd decided to trust his every word.

The best liars are never those who make you believe the lie.
The best liars are those who make you want to believe the lie.
Sam inhaled sharply when these thoughts took him captive. Never before did he accept them, as though he could be punished for this knowledge, but he realized that Steve just didn't let anyone see him. Oh, and how he had learned to defend himself with a shield.
Only the people closest to him ever caught a glimpse of the horrors beneath the perfect, peak-of-human-performance-façade.
And these nights in Wakanda, Sam had met the real Steve and realized that it scared him more than anything. After a few long time, however, he noticed a distinct pattern in Steve's nightmares.

At first, the raw screams from behind walls sounded disassembled, cracking with every new intake of breath, pained by fear. Then names followed, some loud and urgent, some a mumbled bunch of syllables. Sam had heard Peggy before, he knew Bucky, he knew his own name and he knew Natasha. It hurt to hear those names in the middle of the night, sounding so broken and panicky. Sam's heart shuddered.
Was it more terrifying, in the wild minutes Steve didn't stop screaming and thrashing his room, when Sam couldn't move, fear nagging on his soul like he was a child again and the monster was just next door? Or was it in the eerie silence that followed right after, or maybe even the mornings afterward, when he caught a glimpse of Steve's room, the room of a disciplined military operative, with neatly folded blankets, clothes and no traces of the forces unleashed by the super soldier in his midnightly wrath?
Or probably when Steve smiled kindly at Wanda, encouraging her before school started, when he high-fived Scott after a good joke, when his blue eyes rested on Sam so peacefully, hiding all the pain that he endured as his own burden, that no one was ever to carry other than himself.
Maybe Bucky would carry them, Sam thought, hoping for scenarios unlikely to happen during his lifetime, given how slowly the doctors progressed on his case. No matter how frozen he was right now, he was crucial to Steve's sanity. These boys knew each other to a degree that he'd seldom witnessed before, they trusted each other too deeply to ever forget the other, brainwashing or no.
Sam cursed silently. They couldn't make any mistakes. Too much depended on this mission and they hadn't even prepared for it.
His mind wandered back to his first mission with them, back in DC. He hadn't been prepared back then. Steve and Natasha had needed his help and hadn't bothered to ask for it.
Now, that fight was over and in the past and Steve still needed help.