[JK by "6b and 6c" I also mean "6d" because I've realized there's no chance in hell Sam Wilson doesn't confront Rumlow]
Sam got Steve back when they put him in his own body again.
Sam wasn’t there for it. He understood it was quite a light show. Natasha and Barnes took that bullet—after they took whatever bullets they’d needed to in order to come back smelling like smoke and chemicals, dragging a HYDRA scientist and a load of paperwork behind them. No one suggested that Sam go with them, or that he be there for the attempt to switch Steve and Rumlow back. Sam didn’t suggest it. He felt worse than useless but he kept his mouth shut.
“I don’t think we should try too many times,” Steve had said earlier, while Barnes and Natasha were gone. “You know what I mean? I don’t think we should give him too many chances to pull a fast one.”
Sam shivered. It really was cold in this cell. “Yeah, that did it,” he said. “I wasn’t feeling dire enough about this whole situation, but you got me there. Thanks.”
“Sam. I’m serious.”
Sam bent forward on the bench they’d hauled down for him. It had been a week since they got back from Mexico, and he didn’t really hurt anymore. The ache had eased, anyway. He didn’t constantly feel like he might have to throw up, just because that was the only thing he could think to do with the pain in his guts. Now he just felt… hollow. Scooped out. “Have you talked to anybody else about this?”
Steve shrugged and then froze up, shoulders locked, and they both had to wait out the rush of pain, wait for him to be able to talk.
This was what had Sam wanting to run away and throw up, now. That he was better, and Steve was trapped with this, with agony that barely let up. My sloppy seconds, he kept hearing.
“Not yet,” Steve said, breathless, but pretending he hadn’t just lost thirty seconds to burns that weren’t even his. “I wanted to tell you first. Then I’ll talk to Fury. I don’t think… I don’t think I’ll tell Nat or Bucky.”
“Good call,” Sam muttered, because they wouldn’t let it happen. Fury could order in a whole squadron of S.H.I.EL.D.’s finest to execute Steve Rogers’s body, and even if Fury did convince Natasha, Barnes alone could knock them down as they came. While Sam… “I get a vote here?”
“Come on, Sam… you don’t want him getting loose like this any more than I do. You know I can’t risk it.”
Sam shrugged. He could do that, repercussion-free. He got up and knocked on the door of the cell, one-two, one-two-three, which was the code that shot the extra dead bolts and locked him in here too, which in turn meant he could open the bars keeping Steve on his side of the cell. It had taken him a while to ask for this, and another while for Fury to agree. But everything else aside, Sam was a medic, and as much as he knew Steve needed advanced care way beyond his emergency field training, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he could fix things if he tried hard enough.
“If that happened,” he said, gesturing for Steve to get his shirt off. He aimed for casual, like he wasn’t picturing Steve—Steve’s actual body—with a bullet through the side of his head. “If you were stuck like this. Then what?”
Steve struggled with the range of motion required to get the collar over his head, but the shirt was loose and Sam knew better than to help. “That’s what I’m asking,” he said. “I guess the—worst case scenario, that part I’m telling. If he hurt you again, or somebody else… We can’t let that happen.”
Sam sucked a breath down, another coil of the haze around his brain shredding. Somebody else. If Natasha had walked into the house that day, before Sam got home—if it had been Wanda—Natasha wouldn’t have fallen for it, he thought. He could remember so many things he should’ve realized were wrong. This all would have been over in twenty-four hours if it had been Natasha. Hell, Wanda probably would have sensed it or some shit like that.
All of that was unhelpful and none of it changed the first second of his reaction; the image of Steve hurting them was already there, vivid in his head.
Steve fumbled his shirt and dropped it, but left it on the floor. He turned away from it like he didn’t care, like he could’ve picked it up if he wanted. “Right?”
Sam nodded and grabbed the sanitizer and jar of ointment off Steve’s bed.
“So what I’m asking is, then what?”
“Turn around, man.” Sam cleaned his hands off and dunked into the ointment, which smelled like the chemical-candy equivalent of mint and was S.H.I.E.L.D.’s in-house solution for burns that should have been life-ending and appeared not to have received any real medical attention since Rumlow had been broken out of the hospital. He smoothed it across the backs of Steve’s shoulders, where he couldn’t reach himself. The scars didn’t bother Sam in and of themselves—they were grisly, still red edged in white; they were thinner than they should be by now and sometimes they split; but he was used to worse and fresher than that. What bothered him was when he remembered they were Steve’s, for now; that Steve had to feel them. “Then,” Sam said, “you’re legally Brock Rumlow. Your face has been on TV as a ringleader in HYDRA, so that’s gonna put a crimp in our big date night when you get released.”
“Well.” Steve gasped when Sam touched something wrong, then went loose when he got it right. “Yeah. That’s a problem.”
“And this…” Sam dug his thumb into a knot. He was getting good at hitting the place between too hard for the burns, and too soft to do anything for the tension. “…is permanent. It’d cut into your avenging even if you were allowed within five hundred yards of a firearm.”
“Tony could make me a suit.” Steve turned to face him.
This was harder. He knew it was Steve. But this close, Steve the same height as him, brown-eyed and heavy-browed—Sam leaned back, hard as he tried not to.
Steve smiled a little, the worst kind. “Yeah, that,” he said. “It’s S.H.I.E.L.D., they’ll figure something out. Legally or otherwise. I know it’d be hard, I’m just saying I could handle it. I’m asking, could you?”
Sam was easily frustrated with Steve’s inability to let anything resembling a challenge go, irritation and concern always just below the surface waiting for that particular trait. It occurred to him why that might be when he found himself halfway through the only possible response, which was to kiss Steve.
It was weird. Steve was the wrong height. His mouth was shaped wrong. He kissed… right, clumsy and hungry and gentle where Rumlow had been desperate or overcautious. I should’ve noticed, Sam thought again. He worried for a second he’d freak out, given he was kissing Rumlow’s body. But it was fine. It was Steve.
And if it weren’t. If they switched back all of a sudden, right now. Rumlow couldn’t hurt anybody like this.
It felt like a betrayal, but something heavy moved in Sam’s chest, threatening to dislodge. “I’m game if you are,” he said.
Only that wasn’t what happened. Sam got Steve back. In his own body, hale and whole, no more pain, and Sam was glad—glad for Steve, and for the first few minutes, for them both. Barnes and Natasha swore it was him, and when Steve saw Sam he lit up the way only Steve could. He wrapped his arms around Sam and swung him up, and even that was fine, at first; it was Steve, Steve could do that, that was just how things were. For those first few seconds, Sam thought things were just going to click back to normal.
He got Steve back and they left together. They were boyfriends. They’d been living together. It was Steve, he’d been cleared, so they left together.
Before they left, Natasha pulled him aside. “We couldn’t gag him,” she said. “Rumlow. We needed them both talking, so we could be sure. We needed them in the same room for our shoestring version of this to work. Rumlow… talked.”
Sam stuck his tongue between his teeth and bit down, a little harder and a little harder again. He stopped. “I can guess what he said.”
“You can guess,” she agreed. “It was pretty predictable.”
To her. To Barnes, maybe. To Sam, now. It would have been fresh for Steve. Original material.
And then they left together, but they couldn’t go home, and neither of them wanted go through the rolodex of superheroes, so they went to a hotel.
Sam was still glad for Steve. He did click back to normal, as natural in his body as he’d been the whole time Sam had known him. After a few hours of rolling his shoulders a lot and taking deep breaths, it was like nothing had happened. Steve wasn’t the problem; Sam was. And the hotel.
It was a suite in a D.C. chain, not a tiny room in Mexico. But something about the smell of cleaner, the shiny comforter and the feel of industrial carpet underfoot… Either room was bigger than his bedroom at home, but they both felt small, like Sam was overheated and couldn’t get space to breathe.
He tried going in the bedroom and closing the door, with the excuse that he had to call the V.A. and figure some things out about his schedule. That was fine for as long as it lasted. Then he was done, and Steve knew he was done, because Steve could hear through that shitty excuse for a door; and Steve had been through some shit too, and Sam was going to get out there and be with his boyfriend.
He stared at the door instead, throat squeezing shut.
What was supposed to stop HYDRA from doing the same thing again? They’d had Rumlow before, but had they needed him with them physically in order to pull it off?
If they’d done it again, Rumlow would have had time to compose himself. By now, he’d be oriented, ready. He could pretend.
It was like being six years old and convinced there was a wolf at the head of the stairs, just where the light cut out, on the way up to bed. Sam did the same thing now he’d done then; open his eyes so wide it hurt and walk faster. He barreled into the couch-and-a-TV imitation living room.
Steve wiped his face clear, though not fast enough. He hadn’t been crying—Steve didn’t, really, only once in the time Sam had known him—but he was drawn and blotchy; it had been close. Sam washed over with relief, and then felt selfish, but it was so much easier to deal with Steve’s problems than with his.
And Rumlow wouldn’t have been crying, not even almost.
Sam sat down next to Steve on the couch and reached over to card his fingers through Steve’s hair. He still smelled funny, antiseptic from being kept locked up. “How’s it going?”
Steve’s face twisted up, smoothed out. He looked at the coffee table, so shiny it reflected them back. “He used to, um… Rumlow. Some of the jokes he made, when we worked together…” He smiled, a self-mocking grimace that reminded Sam of Barnes. “I really thought he didn’t like guys. I, uh. I don’t know. It didn’t occur to me that he’d—want—I was afraid he’d say awful stuff to you, or…” He pressed his palm over the fading bruise on Sam’s wrist without closing his fingers. “Bucky knew better, he tried to warn me. I didn’t get it.”
“Forget it,” Sam said. The rage started low in his gut, that he’d been this close to Steve not even hearing about it; if they’d just gagged Rumlow, Sam could have pretended it never happened. “I should have known, but I didn’t, so it wasn’t awful.”
He remembered, way too clearly, the way Rumlow had jerked away from him that first day. Startled, like waking up in Sam’s house hadn’t clued him in. If he hadn’t kissed Rumlow first, if he hadn’t fucking started it—
“Of course you didn’t know,” Steve said. “Why would you—who the hell thinks that?”
Sam kissed him, hard and sudden. He kept his eyes open. The kiss felt right, like Steve, but he looked… wrong, now. Fake. Steve’s eyes closed, eyelashes dark against his skin, like a picture. If Sam closed his eyes too it’d be fine.
He kept them open. He fumbled the button of Steve’s jeans.
“Um,” Steve pulled back to say. “Sam?”
“It’s over,” Sam said. “It could’ve been worse. Dude, think about it, if he’d actually done whatever HYDRA wanted instead of trying to elope. We were lucky. It wasn’t that bad, it was short, and it’s—it’s over.” He levered his hand into Steve’s pants, and Steve was hard in about the time it took Sam to get him in hand. Normally he’d stand up, because he hated losing an argument to his super-libido, but—weird day.
He leaned back. “Are you sure, is all,” he said.
Sam slid over him, into his lap, bracing himself with a hand on the back of the couch over Steve’s shoulder. It was green, an ugly bright shade with olive stripes. They should just go home, he thought, even though he knew they couldn’t. He bent forward, to lean into Steve, because that was what came naturally; and then he sat back so he could see Steve’s face.
Steve looked different. Not really, Sam knew, not actually. He just looked… newer. It had been years since Sam looked at him and saw Captain America, physical perfection, too good to be true. He saw Steve, his boyfriend, gentle hands and worst morning breath in the country, freckles and a lazy eyelid. Sam blinked hard, trying to banish the veneer of strangeness, dislocation. Like there was a robot there, something fake, not Rumlow but not… Steve, either.
Each time he blinked there was a second where everything was fine. When his eyes were closed he knew who it was. But that wasn’t good enough, that wasn’t going to get them anywhere.
Steve gasped, one of those hitching little ones that sounded like he might cry. He did that almost every time. Rumlow never had. He locked a hand on Sam’s hip.
Sam bit his tongue again, hard and harder. It wasn’t anything like before. Steve wasn’t holding him still. He worked his hand faster; he was getting hard too, thought he’d even like Steve to fuck him, maybe, except he didn’t think he could do this all the way through, keep it together.
When Steve came all over Sam’s hand and his jeans and the ugly couch Sam let himself close his eyes and lean into Steve’s shoulder, where he couldn’t see. Steve put an arm over his back, just one, and didn’t try to return the favor.
Sam knew better, he’d learned better, but right then, he thought, There. This isn’t going to be so tough.
bodyswap trash fill 6b/6
Sam got Steve back when they put him in his own body again.
Sam wasn’t there for it. He understood it was quite a light show. Natasha and Barnes took that bullet—after they took whatever bullets they’d needed to in order to come back smelling like smoke and chemicals, dragging a HYDRA scientist and a load of paperwork behind them. No one suggested that Sam go with them, or that he be there for the attempt to switch Steve and Rumlow back. Sam didn’t suggest it. He felt worse than useless but he kept his mouth shut.
“I don’t think we should try too many times,” Steve had said earlier, while Barnes and Natasha were gone. “You know what I mean? I don’t think we should give him too many chances to pull a fast one.”
Sam shivered. It really was cold in this cell. “Yeah, that did it,” he said. “I wasn’t feeling dire enough about this whole situation, but you got me there. Thanks.”
“Sam. I’m serious.”
Sam bent forward on the bench they’d hauled down for him. It had been a week since they got back from Mexico, and he didn’t really hurt anymore. The ache had eased, anyway. He didn’t constantly feel like he might have to throw up, just because that was the only thing he could think to do with the pain in his guts. Now he just felt… hollow. Scooped out. “Have you talked to anybody else about this?”
Steve shrugged and then froze up, shoulders locked, and they both had to wait out the rush of pain, wait for him to be able to talk.
This was what had Sam wanting to run away and throw up, now. That he was better, and Steve was trapped with this, with agony that barely let up. My sloppy seconds, he kept hearing.
“Not yet,” Steve said, breathless, but pretending he hadn’t just lost thirty seconds to burns that weren’t even his. “I wanted to tell you first. Then I’ll talk to Fury. I don’t think… I don’t think I’ll tell Nat or Bucky.”
“Good call,” Sam muttered, because they wouldn’t let it happen. Fury could order in a whole squadron of S.H.I.EL.D.’s finest to execute Steve Rogers’s body, and even if Fury did convince Natasha, Barnes alone could knock them down as they came. While Sam… “I get a vote here?”
“Come on, Sam… you don’t want him getting loose like this any more than I do. You know I can’t risk it.”
Sam shrugged. He could do that, repercussion-free. He got up and knocked on the door of the cell, one-two, one-two-three, which was the code that shot the extra dead bolts and locked him in here too, which in turn meant he could open the bars keeping Steve on his side of the cell. It had taken him a while to ask for this, and another while for Fury to agree. But everything else aside, Sam was a medic, and as much as he knew Steve needed advanced care way beyond his emergency field training, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he could fix things if he tried hard enough.
“If that happened,” he said, gesturing for Steve to get his shirt off. He aimed for casual, like he wasn’t picturing Steve—Steve’s actual body—with a bullet through the side of his head. “If you were stuck like this. Then what?”
Steve struggled with the range of motion required to get the collar over his head, but the shirt was loose and Sam knew better than to help. “That’s what I’m asking,” he said. “I guess the—worst case scenario, that part I’m telling. If he hurt you again, or somebody else… We can’t let that happen.”
Sam sucked a breath down, another coil of the haze around his brain shredding. Somebody else. If Natasha had walked into the house that day, before Sam got home—if it had been Wanda—Natasha wouldn’t have fallen for it, he thought. He could remember so many things he should’ve realized were wrong. This all would have been over in twenty-four hours if it had been Natasha. Hell, Wanda probably would have sensed it or some shit like that.
All of that was unhelpful and none of it changed the first second of his reaction; the image of Steve hurting them was already there, vivid in his head.
Steve fumbled his shirt and dropped it, but left it on the floor. He turned away from it like he didn’t care, like he could’ve picked it up if he wanted. “Right?”
Sam nodded and grabbed the sanitizer and jar of ointment off Steve’s bed.
“So what I’m asking is, then what?”
“Turn around, man.” Sam cleaned his hands off and dunked into the ointment, which smelled like the chemical-candy equivalent of mint and was S.H.I.E.L.D.’s in-house solution for burns that should have been life-ending and appeared not to have received any real medical attention since Rumlow had been broken out of the hospital. He smoothed it across the backs of Steve’s shoulders, where he couldn’t reach himself. The scars didn’t bother Sam in and of themselves—they were grisly, still red edged in white; they were thinner than they should be by now and sometimes they split; but he was used to worse and fresher than that. What bothered him was when he remembered they were Steve’s, for now; that Steve had to feel them. “Then,” Sam said, “you’re legally Brock Rumlow. Your face has been on TV as a ringleader in HYDRA, so that’s gonna put a crimp in our big date night when you get released.”
“Well.” Steve gasped when Sam touched something wrong, then went loose when he got it right. “Yeah. That’s a problem.”
“And this…” Sam dug his thumb into a knot. He was getting good at hitting the place between too hard for the burns, and too soft to do anything for the tension. “…is permanent. It’d cut into your avenging even if you were allowed within five hundred yards of a firearm.”
“Tony could make me a suit.” Steve turned to face him.
This was harder. He knew it was Steve. But this close, Steve the same height as him, brown-eyed and heavy-browed—Sam leaned back, hard as he tried not to.
Steve smiled a little, the worst kind. “Yeah, that,” he said. “It’s S.H.I.E.L.D., they’ll figure something out. Legally or otherwise. I know it’d be hard, I’m just saying I could handle it. I’m asking, could you?”
Sam was easily frustrated with Steve’s inability to let anything resembling a challenge go, irritation and concern always just below the surface waiting for that particular trait. It occurred to him why that might be when he found himself halfway through the only possible response, which was to kiss Steve.
It was weird. Steve was the wrong height. His mouth was shaped wrong. He kissed… right, clumsy and hungry and gentle where Rumlow had been desperate or overcautious. I should’ve noticed, Sam thought again. He worried for a second he’d freak out, given he was kissing Rumlow’s body. But it was fine. It was Steve.
And if it weren’t. If they switched back all of a sudden, right now. Rumlow couldn’t hurt anybody like this.
It felt like a betrayal, but something heavy moved in Sam’s chest, threatening to dislodge. “I’m game if you are,” he said.
Only that wasn’t what happened. Sam got Steve back. In his own body, hale and whole, no more pain, and Sam was glad—glad for Steve, and for the first few minutes, for them both. Barnes and Natasha swore it was him, and when Steve saw Sam he lit up the way only Steve could. He wrapped his arms around Sam and swung him up, and even that was fine, at first; it was Steve, Steve could do that, that was just how things were. For those first few seconds, Sam thought things were just going to click back to normal.
He got Steve back and they left together. They were boyfriends. They’d been living together. It was Steve, he’d been cleared, so they left together.
Before they left, Natasha pulled him aside. “We couldn’t gag him,” she said. “Rumlow. We needed them both talking, so we could be sure. We needed them in the same room for our shoestring version of this to work. Rumlow… talked.”
Sam stuck his tongue between his teeth and bit down, a little harder and a little harder again. He stopped. “I can guess what he said.”
“You can guess,” she agreed. “It was pretty predictable.”
To her. To Barnes, maybe. To Sam, now. It would have been fresh for Steve. Original material.
And then they left together, but they couldn’t go home, and neither of them wanted go through the rolodex of superheroes, so they went to a hotel.
Sam was still glad for Steve. He did click back to normal, as natural in his body as he’d been the whole time Sam had known him. After a few hours of rolling his shoulders a lot and taking deep breaths, it was like nothing had happened. Steve wasn’t the problem; Sam was. And the hotel.
It was a suite in a D.C. chain, not a tiny room in Mexico. But something about the smell of cleaner, the shiny comforter and the feel of industrial carpet underfoot… Either room was bigger than his bedroom at home, but they both felt small, like Sam was overheated and couldn’t get space to breathe.
He tried going in the bedroom and closing the door, with the excuse that he had to call the V.A. and figure some things out about his schedule. That was fine for as long as it lasted. Then he was done, and Steve knew he was done, because Steve could hear through that shitty excuse for a door; and Steve had been through some shit too, and Sam was going to get out there and be with his boyfriend.
He stared at the door instead, throat squeezing shut.
What was supposed to stop HYDRA from doing the same thing again? They’d had Rumlow before, but had they needed him with them physically in order to pull it off?
If they’d done it again, Rumlow would have had time to compose himself. By now, he’d be oriented, ready. He could pretend.
It was like being six years old and convinced there was a wolf at the head of the stairs, just where the light cut out, on the way up to bed. Sam did the same thing now he’d done then; open his eyes so wide it hurt and walk faster. He barreled into the couch-and-a-TV imitation living room.
Steve wiped his face clear, though not fast enough. He hadn’t been crying—Steve didn’t, really, only once in the time Sam had known him—but he was drawn and blotchy; it had been close. Sam washed over with relief, and then felt selfish, but it was so much easier to deal with Steve’s problems than with his.
And Rumlow wouldn’t have been crying, not even almost.
Sam sat down next to Steve on the couch and reached over to card his fingers through Steve’s hair. He still smelled funny, antiseptic from being kept locked up. “How’s it going?”
Steve’s face twisted up, smoothed out. He looked at the coffee table, so shiny it reflected them back. “He used to, um… Rumlow. Some of the jokes he made, when we worked together…” He smiled, a self-mocking grimace that reminded Sam of Barnes. “I really thought he didn’t like guys. I, uh. I don’t know. It didn’t occur to me that he’d—want—I was afraid he’d say awful stuff to you, or…” He pressed his palm over the fading bruise on Sam’s wrist without closing his fingers. “Bucky knew better, he tried to warn me. I didn’t get it.”
“Forget it,” Sam said. The rage started low in his gut, that he’d been this close to Steve not even hearing about it; if they’d just gagged Rumlow, Sam could have pretended it never happened. “I should have known, but I didn’t, so it wasn’t awful.”
He remembered, way too clearly, the way Rumlow had jerked away from him that first day. Startled, like waking up in Sam’s house hadn’t clued him in. If he hadn’t kissed Rumlow first, if he hadn’t fucking started it—
“Of course you didn’t know,” Steve said. “Why would you—who the hell thinks that?”
Sam kissed him, hard and sudden. He kept his eyes open. The kiss felt right, like Steve, but he looked… wrong, now. Fake. Steve’s eyes closed, eyelashes dark against his skin, like a picture. If Sam closed his eyes too it’d be fine.
He kept them open. He fumbled the button of Steve’s jeans.
“Um,” Steve pulled back to say. “Sam?”
“It’s over,” Sam said. “It could’ve been worse. Dude, think about it, if he’d actually done whatever HYDRA wanted instead of trying to elope. We were lucky. It wasn’t that bad, it was short, and it’s—it’s over.” He levered his hand into Steve’s pants, and Steve was hard in about the time it took Sam to get him in hand. Normally he’d stand up, because he hated losing an argument to his super-libido, but—weird day.
He leaned back. “Are you sure, is all,” he said.
Sam slid over him, into his lap, bracing himself with a hand on the back of the couch over Steve’s shoulder. It was green, an ugly bright shade with olive stripes. They should just go home, he thought, even though he knew they couldn’t. He bent forward, to lean into Steve, because that was what came naturally; and then he sat back so he could see Steve’s face.
Steve looked different. Not really, Sam knew, not actually. He just looked… newer. It had been years since Sam looked at him and saw Captain America, physical perfection, too good to be true. He saw Steve, his boyfriend, gentle hands and worst morning breath in the country, freckles and a lazy eyelid. Sam blinked hard, trying to banish the veneer of strangeness, dislocation. Like there was a robot there, something fake, not Rumlow but not… Steve, either.
Each time he blinked there was a second where everything was fine. When his eyes were closed he knew who it was. But that wasn’t good enough, that wasn’t going to get them anywhere.
Steve gasped, one of those hitching little ones that sounded like he might cry. He did that almost every time. Rumlow never had. He locked a hand on Sam’s hip.
Sam bit his tongue again, hard and harder. It wasn’t anything like before. Steve wasn’t holding him still. He worked his hand faster; he was getting hard too, thought he’d even like Steve to fuck him, maybe, except he didn’t think he could do this all the way through, keep it together.
When Steve came all over Sam’s hand and his jeans and the ugly couch Sam let himself close his eyes and lean into Steve’s shoulder, where he couldn’t see. Steve put an arm over his back, just one, and didn’t try to return the favor.
Sam knew better, he’d learned better, but right then, he thought, There. This isn’t going to be so tough.