“Why didn’t you let me know you were okay?” @flylikefalcon
The immediate, true response was bitten back and swallowed back down to his stomach before it could slip out. Because I wasn’t.
He was luckier than some that came back, he knew. Two of the other men in his truck had required amputations after the IED. He’d seen plenty of injuries over his years in the service, men who were blown halfway to hell and left damn near unrecognizable. He’d seen even more men who didn’t make it home at all.
He knew all this. But it hadn’t made him feel any better when the world was silent as a grave around him, and his leg fucking hurt, and more than anything he wanted to be back on the battlefield and not in a teal-toned hospital room day in and day out for almost a year. It hadn’t made him feel any better knowing that things could’ve been worse when he’d been thrown back into civilian life with a monthly check from the government and discharge papers that declared that his skills were useless without the hearing he’d lost in the blast. A great many days in that two years between the accident and Ra’s, he’d almost wished that he’d been left there in the sand rather than left in his island of an apartment with nothing but a check every month and ‘best wishes.’
But he hadn’t been left. A man with mechanical wings had scooped him up and carried him to the medical facility a mile and half away, and in the delirium of blood loss and brain damage, Tarik had almost been convinced the man was an angel.
Sam Wilson, they’d told him later. They’d given him an address, too, for the man’s deployment at the time, but at first he couldn’t think of what to say, and by the time Wilson’s deployment was supposed to be coming to a close, Tarik hadn’t felt grateful anymore. He’d felt angry.
With the benefit of nearly a decade put between then and now, his perspective had warmed considerably. So instead of telling the truth, Tarik offered the lie the man deserved to hear. “I sent a letter on my last day of PT. They told me you’d already shipped back by then. You’d be surprised how many Sam Wilsons there are in the United States, flyboy.”
Tarik Mansour was a time machine. Sam saw him and found himself transported back into a warzone, bullets whizzing by his ear. He remembered Riley’s voice, sharp and panicked. Wilson, we gotta go! We gotta get out of here! He remembered the taste of sweat as it rolled down his face, the stench of blood in the air, the dry and grainy sensation of sand in his shoes, in his eyes, on his tongue. We can save them, he’d insisted, shrugging Riley’s grip off his shoulder, refusing to let himself be pulled away from the fight. We can still save them.
And they had. Not all of them, of course --- some men were so far gone that even Sam recognized that there was nothing more to be done for them, so badly damaged that even Sam understood that the only move left to make was to take their hands and let them pass from one world to the next with someone at their side. But they’d saved some of them. They’d saved Tarik.
Rescue came with a cost, of course. Sam understood that, too, had figured it out long before he returned home himself with an extra set of dog tags around his neck and a ring in his pocket that no one was ever going to wear. You could save a man from a warzone, but you could never remove him from it entirely. Sam still flinched at fireworks, even years after his ears stopped ringing with the echoing of explosions in a desert. Tarik still had scars under his clothes that Sam couldn’t see but knew were there all the same. And they still existed, as old ‘war buddies’ always did, as time machines into a windstorm that neither of them ever got away from.
Sam didn’t always get to know the people he’d saved. There were some who kept in touch, others who didn’t. A time or two, he’d been the call men made when they needed to be talked down. A few others, he’d been the address on the letter they put in the mailbox when ‘talking down’ was no longer an option they wanted to entertain. And sometimes, he was an afterthought that people further up in line called when it was all over. He was a person who only heard updates at funerals, who learned about graves he’d yet to visit while standing in front of ones freshly dug. He’d always dreaded that for Tarik. He’d seen the way the man looked when the warzone was behind him, recognized the look in his eye, and seeing him now... Sam was desperate for an answer to his question, eager to know why the man in front of him had never thought to tell him there was no grave bearing his name, no obituary to search for.
“Oh,” he said flatly, feeling a little empty at the revelation. He’d missed a letter by a few weeks at the most, he suspected. “Yeah. They ended my last tour early.” Riley fell from the sky and Sam nearly killed himself trying to save him, nearly died in his efforts to bring home a corpse that never made it out of the sand. He wondered if he’d been out of the hospital yet when Tarik finished his PT, wondered how close their paths had come to crossing again under different circumstances, as different men. “Well, there’s only one who matters, isn’t there?” Sam plastered a grin onto his face, raised his brows with an eager arrogance that he didn’t feel no matter how badly he wanted to.
There was a pause, a quiet moment where Sam was somewhere else and he suspected Tarik was, too. He cleared his throat in an attempt to be rid of it, in an effort to chase himself back into the present. “How’s civilian life treating you, then?”
