#its SO humid outside my stupid little body cannOT do that shit anymore

[thepixiepaige]

Was nOT expecting there to already be like... 20 people queued up for sleep token tonight when I went on my little around the blocksie at SIX THIRTY THIS MORNING

How long have yall been there!!?!?! It's been POURING and it's so W E T and H O T?????? Jeeeeeeeesus

[heirloommtomatoes]

Together (Sam Drake x Reader)

This was a requested fic for “Don’t you dare ever do that again!” & “Who gave you that black eye?” from...four years ago? I posted it a while ago, deleted it, updated it coincidentally a few weeks ago, and @seizethesam​ was looking for it so here we are! Enjoy this throwback!

Word Count: 5,621

Warnings: Violence against a minor depicted. Might be disturbing to some. Strong language, depictions of PTSD. Mentions of suicide (implied).

————

“The truth is, unless you let go, unless you forgive yourself, unless you forgive the situation, unless you realize that the situation is over, you cannot move forward.”

―Steve Maraboli

The day Sam Drake died, he broke his wrist. He suspects now that it was likely more of a hairpin fracture, and wonders why it is this he remembers with such clarity. Not the gunshot, not slipping from his brother’s hand, not the sickening lurch in his gut as he fell, nor the stench of sweat and blood and metal and the red-hot wet of the pool of blood he lay in. Instead, he remembers trying to break his fall and failing, remembers the crunch of his wrist against the cement and the darkness that followed.

Fifteen years later, and all he has to show for it are bullet scars and a brother who learned to live without him.

“Sam, it’s four in the damn morning,” Nathan whispers into the phone as he swings his legs over the side of the bed, sensing Elena shift beside him at his movement. The feel of his brother’s name on his lips is still odd after having not spoken it for so many years.

Even just hearing Sam breathing on the other end still hits him with a surreality that nearly takes his own breath away. When you lose someone you respect, they become God. Nate had never been one for the pious doggerel of the nuns at St. Mary’s Boys’ Home where they had grown up. He had never prayed, had never presumed to try and speak to God. But over the last decade, he did speak to Sam. His grave had become his temple.

Nate remembers the shouting, the gunfire, the stench of humidity and smoke and sweat. He remembers his hand in Sam’s as he held onto his brother with everything he had over that ledge. But Sam had dropped anyway, and a part of Nate’s heart had gone with him, and he wasn’t sure if it had ever come back up.

“I know,” comes Sam’s reply, but his voice sounds broken, cracked, “I…uh,” he drags a hand down his face as he stands from where he was sat on the edge of the bed, offering a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure he doesn’t disturb your sleep. He stands slowly, walks heel-to-hoe to the door, twisting the handle slowly.

“I need to talk but I—I don’t wanna wake Y/N,” he whispers, and it’s silence from the other end as Sam makes his way to the kitchen to take a seat on a stool next to the island.

“Ah,” Nate finally says, “So you wake me,” he tries to joke, but it falls flat and hits the silence that follows like a wall.

“I keep having these dreams, Nathan—” he takes a shaky breath and lowers his head; half in sorrow and half because he’s too tired to keep it up, “I keep remembering him.”

Sam presses his hand against his younger brother’s chest, pushing him back. A group of guards, three or four strong, train their guns on the pair of men.

“Hey, you keep your gun on me!”

Careful what you wish for. Sam doesn’t remember feeling the bullets hit, but he remembers the force of it pushing him back and his heel slipping on edge of the roof. It seems now like something that happened to someone else — and Sam supposes that if he were inclined to such thoughts of spirituality and philosophy, he would think that in a way it was. He doesn’t recognize himself in that man anymore.

His heel goes over the edge, but with a sharp pain in his arm he realizes he’s not falling. Nathan lunges for him, grabbing his wrist before gravity could complete its job. He hauls on his arm so hard Sam is afraid his shoulder will pop right out of the socket. He lets out a manic laugh at that when he remembers he was just shot, and thinks to himself that might be the wound more worth worrying about. Blood sputters from his mouth with it, splattering onto Nate’s face.

“Sam, don’t you let go!” Nathan shouts at him, face grimaced with the effort of carrying his brother’s weight. He thrusts his other arm down and reaches for Sam, “Grab my other hand!”

Sam looks up at Nathan. His face is covered in dirt and sweat and blood, his head haloed by the flat white light of a cloudy mid-afternoon sun. His breath comes hard, fast, and it takes a moment for Sam to register the tears making tracks down his brother’s face. Is he dead already? It seems fitting they would die together.

He falls.

Sam is vaguely aware of the stinging pain in his abdomen, and more aware of the cold that spreads through each and every limb like a wildfire. The dampness around his abdomen seems to weigh on him as if someone has decided to stuff a molten bowling ball into a gaping hole in his body.

“Cuidadoso! Él todavía está viva!”

When darkness swallows him, there’s are only two names that stay gasping at the surface:

Nathan.

Y/N.

He wakes, hours or days later, to a light that sears straight through him and aches in the backs of his eyes. He doesn’t remember dying. With some hazy sense of dread, he wonders if the voices that sound as though people are shouting at him from behind glass are some sort of chorus of angels, or more likely, demons. He hadn’t believed in any of what they’d taught in the Boys’ Home, but old habits persist. A breath enters his lungs, one that feels as though he’s stepping out into a winter’s day from a cabin on fire, his chest burning with the effort. All this pain and numbness fighting for dominance in his stomach, in his legs, in his head. Tingling, stinging, aching, all so persistent. Darkness swallows him, and it’s weeks before he wakes again.

Nathan.

Y/N.

Two years later, and he’s been in the same cell as some child for the better half of it. Sam thinks he must be a teenager still, and something in his chest aches at that that he can’t quite place.

Panama is nothing like he thought it was going to be. Maybe it’s just that he’s alone now. That’s probably it. He thought he’d get used to it more quickly, but falling asleep in the same bed that always pokes at his lower back no matter which way he turns and spending his days brawling and trading cigarettes has yet to become monotonous. He’s not sure if this is a blessing or a curse. He’s not sure what that says about him. He’s not sure if he wants to know.

With a gnawing guilt, Sam has come to find that prison is one of the only places he’s felt free. No responsibility weighing over him, no little brother to parent and worry over, no need to be constantly searching for work. It’s a loveless existence, but no one he cares about on the outside know where he is or what he’s doing. It’s his own kind of hell and kind of heaven, and somewhere in the back of his mind he wonders if he did die that day, and every day after.

The humidity and heat takes some getting used to, though. The stench it brings, both from the men and from the miles of green around them was fierce and unrelenting and ever-present. And despite the wet season that comes and goes through March to December, dust clings to the walls year round, smelling of tobacco and sweat and blood.

Not long after waking and Sam has plucked out a book from underneath his mattress. It’s some shitty millionth-edition copy of a book on Henry Avery, but he figures it’s better than nothing and probably the best he’s going to get in this shithole. The boy sits silently on his own bed, and for a fleeting moment Sam wonders what goes on in that small head of his. As if on cue the boy opens his mouth to speak.

“What’re you gonna do when you get out?” he asks, accent thick. Sam looks over.

He can barely see him sitting on his bed in the shadows, knees drawn up to his chest, arms resting lazily over the tops of them.

“How old are you?” Sam counters, ignoring the question. They weren’t going to let him out of here. It was a stupid question.

“Dieceséis,” comes the reply, “My name’s Roberto, by the way.”

Sam sits up suddenly, setting the book down by his side, “Sixteen? Fucking sixteen? Jesus, you’re a kid. I didn’t know they even let people that young in here.”

Roberto shrugs, “Ran out of space everywhere else, I guess.”

A silence settles over them and Sam lays back down, hands clasped over his stomach, thumb rubbing over one of the small dips in his skin where his scars are.

“You got a lady out there? Waiting for you?”

Sam snorts, “I don’t know so much about the waiting part, but yeah.”

He tries to not think of you. This place would spoil your memory, like a song you listened to over and over during a breakup and can’t listen to anymore without thinking of it. When — if — he sees you again, he doesn’t want that. He knows you don’t deserve it.

But as if he can help it. Memories of you are among the only things keeping him sane. He remembers waking next to you, the soft golden glow of dawn washing through the nearly-transparent curtains of a hotel room. The hum of the fan wasn’t enough to drown out the songbirds that had decided your window was most appealing that day and had rudely awoken him at such a small hour. He remembers flopping over to face you, watching your breath rise and fall, reaching out to trace the gentle curve of your spine—

“You gonna marry her when you get out?”

Sam takes a breath in. As he lets it out he tightens his jaw. He knows the kid is an ignorant shit. He doesn’t know better. “I’m not getting out,” he replies, “So stop acting like that’s ever gonna fuckin’ happen.” The response comes out as more of a snap than Sam had intended, but he pushes away the feelings of guilt, forces himself to keep his gaze away from his cellmate.

“Oh.”

Sam closes his eyes, tries to think of something else other than the way Roberto’s tone reminded him so much of Nathan when they were kids, but it’s like someone telling you not to think of the phantom pain after losing a limb. And what do you think of?

He hears shuffling from the other side of the cell. The lifting of a mattress, a grunt of effort, the crinkling of paper and the heavy thud of setting it all back down again.

“Here,” Roberto says, and Sam feels his weight at the end of the bed. The older man groans and runs his hands down his face as he sits up, shirt sticking to his back that’s wet with sweat from the midday heat.

Roberto lifts a small square piece of paper in his hands, “Mira,” he says, gesturing to the photo.

It’s a black and white photograph of a woman, heavy-set with kind eyes and a massive grin plastered to her face, the several missing teeth only adding to her obvious charm. Her hands are clasped over her stomach, an apron bound as tightly around her as the head wrap she wears to stave off the heat of the day.

“Who’s this?” Sam asks, not bothering to wonder how he managed to get it in the first place.

“Mi madre,” Roberto responds, “When I get out, I’m gonna find her. Maybe you can come visit us,” he adds with a childlike enthusiasm that’s like an arrow to Sam’s heart. God, this kid deserves so much more than this.

“Do you have any pictures of your girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Aren’t you scared you’ll forget what she looks like?”

Another year passes, and eventually Sam gets used to the torrential rain November brings. Or more importantly, he gets used to what it means; the cigarette trading turns into more frequent brawling in the laundry rooms or courtyard and the withdrawal symptoms make the fighting take on an animalistic turn as the men become restless. He leans against the railing that overlooks one of the courtyards, clasped hands fidgeting as he watches the men below, screaming and grunting and splashing in the mud as punch after punch lands.

He can sense Roberto’s presence beside him before the kid announces himself.

“The guards are looking for me,” he says, voice small, “I took a piece of bread from the kitchen.”

“You’re not doing a very good job of hiding yourself,” Sam responds without turning his gaze to look at him.

“They’re distracted by the brawling anyway,” Roberto says, shuffling closer as if Sam’s shadow could hide him. Hell, Sam thinks it probably could. The kid must weigh barely a hundred pounds.

“I fuckin’ hate this rain,” Sam says, picking a cigarette out from his pocket and fiddling with it in his hand, “Can’t even light a goddamn smoke.”

Roberto’s shoulder is almost touching Sam’s side. He looks down at him and frowns. The kid looks like a wet rat in his white t-shirt, black hair matted to his forehead. Sam shrugs off the navy prison jacket and drapes it over the kid’s shoulders, “You’ll catch a cold,” he says when Roberto looks up at him in surprise and grabs the lapels to tug it closer to himself as Sam sticks the cigarette in his mouth. He wasn’t about to try and light it in the downpour, but it felt good to hold there.

Sam meets the boy’s gaze, and its only then he notices the dark bruising around his eye, “Who gave you that black eye?” he demands, the intensity in his own voice surprising himself as he leans forward to tilt Roberto’s head in the light.

The teen swats him away and grumbles something under his breath, turning his gaze back to the courtyard.

“What?”

“I got in a fight,” he says, “It won’t happen again.”

“Good,” Sam tells him, “Those guys down there could snap you like a twig, you know that? Don’t you dare ever do that again,” he says, taking the cigarette from his mouth and irritably throwing it over the edge as he leans over.

Roberto shrugs his shoulders and hugs the jacket close, “Let’s go back to our cell. I got a deck of cards.”

Sam looks back down at him at the suggestion and slings an arm over his shoulders, steering him back down the stairs and under cover.

“It’s called crazy eights,” Sam tells him later as they sit opposite each other on Roberto’s bed, raising his voice to be heard above the rain that had worsened on their way back. Thunder cracks and Roberto jumps slightly, looking over his shoulder toward the cell bars.

The air is thick with the humidity of it, as if the rain is pushing all the heaviness that had been hanging above them back down. It brings about new smells too; smells of faeces and urine and vomit that Sam knows are a result of the practically non-existent plumbing of the place. He turns his gaze back to Sam, scrunching his nose as he sniffs. Nervous habit.

“My little brother and I used to play it,” he continues as he shuffles the deck he imagines Roberto traded for a pack of cigarettes back in March when it was still possible to smoke them outside. It feels almost natural to talk about Nathan again, but god help him if he was going to speak his name aloud.

“Our parents would fight sometimes,” he says, “He’d get scared, so he and I would hole up in his room, play cards. Talk about history, practice our latin.”

“He sounds nice,” Roberto says, and is aware of how bland his response is. He’s worried anything else will make Sam shut up, and that’s the last thing he wants.

“Too nice for his own good, I’d say,” Sam says as he nods and deals out the cards, “Last person I taught this game to was my girlfriend,” he continues, and wonders why he’s only telling him this now. God, it feels good to talk about the two of you, “She was awful at it,” he laughs, and Roberto decides then and there that if he had an older brother, he would have a laugh like that.

“Do you love her?”

“Yes,” Sam says with no hesitation, the answer coming like a reflex. Of course he loves you. Kid has a habit of asking stupid questions, “What about your family?” he asks as he finishes dealing the cards and picks up his hand.

Roberto seems to have nothing to say for the first time since Sam befriended him two years ago as he reaches for his cards and shrugs, “They’re nice. I have a younger sister. My parents have work in town, but they come home in the afternoon and make the best dinners for us,” he says, setting his hand back down in front of him and sitting cross-legged, hands gripping at his ankles. Sam thinks he looks younger than he is sitting like this.

Heavy footsteps sound down the hallway and Roberto tenses, looks over his shoulder.

“I told you the guards were after me,” he says in a quiet voice, but Sam’s brow furrows. He’d stolen from the kitchens before. Everyone had. The punishment for it was far from severe, but of course as everything in the prison it depended what kind of mood the guards were in. The worst he’d seen was someone thrown in solitary for a day or two.

Five guards approach the door, hands set to their guns as a man clad in brown opens the door. Sam looks at Roberto with wide eyes and gets to his feet, “Hey, hey, hey,” he says quickly, holding his hands out in front of him as if that might stop them, “What the hell—”

“Cállate, gringo,” a guard yells at him, shoving his shoulder against his chest hard enough to knock him against the back wall. Sam lets out a grunt as he slides down, the force nearly knocking the breath out of him as he turns his gaze to Roberto.

“¿Dónde es?” the guards yells at him, lifting his gun to line up with his head. Roberto crawls back on his bed until he hits the wall, sending cards flying to the ground in his struggle.

“No—no sé lo que estás hablando,” Roberto stutters, and Sam wonders if it’s the fear or dampness making him shiver.

Sam scrambles to his feet and grabs Roberto’s wrist, shoves him behind himself, “Hey, you keep your gun on me,” he says, the words tasting familiar to him. He holds out an arm protectively and can feel Roberto gripping his shirt and peeking out from behind him.

“¿Qué carajo crees que estás haciendo?” the guard spits out, “This doesn’t concern you.”

The guard raises his arm and slams his elbow against the side of Sam’s head, knocking him to the concrete floor.

As one of them keeps a gun on Roberto, the other four lift the mattresses and throw them to the floor, one of them trapping Sam’s arm. When he goes to reach for one of the guard’s legs to trip him, another sends his boot into his ribcage. Pain explodes across his abdomen and when he opens his mouth he finds he has no breath to gasp at the agony of it.

“What do we have here?” a guard says, holding out the small slip of paper Roberto had kept under his mattress, “Where did you get this?” one of the guards spits at Roberto, holding up the photograph, “Who gave all this shit to you?” he repeats, gesturing at the cards.

“No va a halbar,” another guard says, snatching the photo out of his hands and shoving it in front of Roberto’s face, “Keeping a photo of your dead madre around? You want to be a traitor like the rest of your family?”

Roberto stares, frozen where he sits, back still against the wall, eyes wide.

“Alright, hijo de puta,” the guard says with a sigh, “Grab him,” he gestures to Sam and two others tug him from the ground, holding each of his arms back. Sam hangs his head, legs limp as he spits out a mix of phlegm and blood onto the ground.

“Don’t—don’t fucking touch him,” he croaks, feeling as though he’d been cut in two, his breath still returning to him.

The guard who has established himself as the leader of the group throws the first punch. Then another. Sam roars. He lurches forward, and his shoulders hurt when the guards pull him back. When Roberto starts to hit back, a renewed fire in Sam’s belly causes him to throw himself back in hopes of catching the guards by surprise. It earns him a mouthful of fist, and darkness swallows him.

When he comes to, hours or days later, the rain has stopped.

He’s laying on the ground at the foot of his bed, the mattress sprawled next to him. Slowly, he pushes himself onto his hands, wincing at the aching in his abdomen. He turns his gaze to the bed at the other side of the cell to where Roberto is curled up, breath coming fast, hands clutching at his middle.

And suddenly his pain is just pain and he stands, scrambling to the other bed.

“Roberto, hey, can you hear me?” he says, grabbing the boy by his shoulders and turning him onto his back. Blood stained his shirt where it had dripped from his nose, his face a sickly pale, stomach bloated and purple.

“Oh, fuck. Oh, shit, shit shit—” Sam feels his throat tighten, the pain in his abdomen fading almost entirely in the face of this new crisis. An anger replaces it, bubbling in his belly, tingling in each of his limbs, spinning the world around him until his eyes can’t focus on a single thing anymore.

The only thing he can think of is that he can’t lose him—not again. He’d failed him before, failed him so many times back in Cartegena, back at the Boys’ Home, back when he couldn’t make their parents stop arguing, back when he didn’t just give him his other damn hand when he was shot and dangling from that roof, back when he didn’t get out of bed when he heard his mother close the door to the house at three in the damn morning he could’ve gotten up he could’ve told her not to leave he could’ve stopped her and all this never would have happened—

“Sam?”

“Roberto, hey,” Sam says, breathing a sigh of relief, “Don’t move, okay? I’ll—I’ll get you some water, alright? By the end of the week we’ll be laughing about all this, yeah? How does that sound?”

“I’m—I’m sorry I lied, Sam,” he continues, voice cracking, “About my family.”

“Just rest, Roberto, c’mon—”

“No,” he says firmly, and Sam can tell he has to strain to raise his voice, “I wanna tell you now.”

Sam opens his mouth to protest, then shuts it. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knows the boy is going to die. Sam knows what he is about to hear will give him the reason no one will be willing to help the kid the way they helped him with his bullet wounds. He knows these four walls will be the last thing Roberto sees, and he feels like throwing up; feels as though he’s on a boat lost at sea in the middle of a storm and the compass is spinning.

“My parents, they—” he coughs; a dry sound, closer to hacking than anything and blood sprays onto his white shirt, “They were involved with the wrong sort. I—I don’t know, but the others, they visited our house in the middle of the night and they—” he coughs again, “They burned it down. I tried to escape with my sister, but the police arrived and—” he takes a gasping breath, “My father escaped. He has one of the guards working for him and he promised he was gonna get me out and I wanted you to come with me so we could still be together and I could meet your little brother and—” he takes another breath, tears swelling in his eyes that spill over the sides of his cheeks, “Some of the others, they found out about me and that’s—that’s the fight I told you about,” he finishes, daring to turn his head to look Sam in the eye. The moment they lock gazes, Sam can feel the tightening in his throat loosen like a dam.

Born into something so much bigger than himself, all choice ripped from him before he even had the chance to know what any kind of self-agency felt like. That was something Sam could relate to.

Roberto dies three days later.

The rain had left for the dry season, making way for the sun and birds and scent of earth to return to the otherwise concrete establishment. Sam had watched as they carried his body away on the stretcher, eyes wide and unseeing, stomach turned a disgusting mix of blacks and blues and purples. A fucking kid.

Roberto had had the photo of his mother in one hand and Sam’s in the other, gripping it like a vice as he died.

“I’ll make sure this gets back to your father, make sure he knows—”

“No, mantener la fotografía—keep it. It’s yours.”

Sam had learned after that to keep to himself. He kept conversation limited, never spoke of you or Nathan or Roberto. Never told anyone what happened, or why the kid was no longer attached to his hip.

There is nothing more irritating than the constant chatter of a child, and nothing more somber than the silence they leave after they are gone.

So Sam compartmentalizes. He moves on. He is a different man now, tempered with bitterness and disappointment and distain, wearing different clothes but marred with the same scars. In his youth, he had thought himself strong, had thought himself to be made of iron and wit. The truth is that he is - and he suspects most people are - a shattered, graceless mosaic of experience compacted to display something resembling an assertable face to the world. Inside he makes himself of awkward, delicate things; of memories of dead goddamn children and mothers, of a little brother left alone. When he looks in the mirror, he barely recognises the person staring back. Sam knew a man like him once, but he isn’t him.

And what makes him human was that sometimes the façade splinters. And in that moment he was closer to something tangible, something recognisable, than he might ever know.

“At the time, losing him felt like losing you,” Sam says finally, fiddling with the napkin holder on the kitchen island, “I’m sorry.”

“I know.” His voice comes out in a strained whisper, squeezing itself uncomfortably around all the other words he does not say.

“I love you, little brother.”

“I know.”

Sam stays silent after that. His shoulders feel lighter but his chest feels as though someone has filled it with bricks.

“I’ll let you get back to sleep.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?” Nate says, a tinge of guilt and stubbornness in his voice that only Sam could pick out.

“Yeah.”

Sam takes the phone away from his ear. Then, faintly —

“Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

Sam’s breath hitches. He shakes his head, though Nathan can’t see. Guilt, rage, sorrow, and an inescapable and indefatigable longing for something he can’t quite place skips through him, fizzy like soda pop.

He nods, small but staccatoed movement, “Yeah,” he tries to say, but the pain weighs down the word and it gets caught in his throat. He wants to say thank you, he wants to say, I love you, thank you, thank you, thank you for everything, but he’s not ready. He’s not ready, but for the first time in a long time he feels that maybe one day he will be.

“Goodnight, Sam. Talk soon,” Nate says, voice almost a whisper.

“Yeah,” Sam says again, but he’s not sure if Nathan hears it as he pulls the phone from his ear and presses the red button to end the call.

Sam flips the phone over and sets in down on the counter. He lifts his hands to run them down his face with a small fatigued groan before resting his elbows on the island, shoving both hands in his hair with his head bowed.

“Sam.”

He almost jumps at the sound of your voice behind him, piercing through the quiet like a bullet through flesh. Hesitantly, you set a hand against his shoulder, rubbing it softly.

“Did I wake you?”

You don’t respond. You’d tried to not eavesdrop, but when Sam had started going on about how he had heard his mother leave the house morning of her death, your feet had planted in the hallway and you couldn’t help the hand that flew to your mouth. Did he really blame himself for that? How many mistakes that weren’t his crowded the empty shadowed corners of his life?

He lifts a hand to cover yours on his shoulder, rubs his thumb over the ring on your finger.

“Let’s go back to bed,” he whispers, lowering his voice to hide the hoarseness in it. You nod and he laces his fingers through yours as he stands and starts back toward the bedroom.

“Sam, wait.”

Sam slows gradually before coming to a stop, his feet scuffing against the wood of the apartment floor.

“Come here.”

He turns wordlessly into your outstretched arms, wraps his arms tightly around your middle, buries his head in the crook of your neck.

“I’m so sorry, Sam,” you whisper against his hair, one hand rubbing his back and the other threaded in his hair, “I’m so sorry.”

Sam’s grip loosens as you feel him shudder as he breaths out, dropping one arm entirely to have the other wrapped loosely around you. He sobs quietly into your shoulder and crumples against you, bringing you both to your knees on the floor.

The two of you stay like that for as long as it takes for Sam’s tears to slow.

“Let’s go to bed, yeah?” you whisper once he has this breath back, “Get some rest,” you tell him, not being able to help the tears that have formed in your own eyes at the sight of him so distraught. When he lifts his head, his face is red and his eyes are puffy and tired, hair disheveled from having his face buried in your shoulder.

He nods as the two of you stand and crawl back into bed.

Sam lays on his side. He has his back to you.

Tentatively, you shuffle yourself closer to him and press yourself against his back, draping an arm over his middle. He lets out a sigh and his shoulders fall as he lets out a tension he hadn’t known was there.

Sam doesn’t sleep that night, but his mind doesn’t wander much either which he counts as a blessing. He tries to breathe deep, focus on the warmth of you behind him, on the uncomfortable stiffness in his fingers laced in yours.

In the morning he turns to face you and can feel the awe in his expression, can feel how stupid he must look as he stares.

In all his thirteen years in prison he’d only cried once. It was during his twelfth year, when he had begun to think he wasn’t capable of it. He would dream nearly every night, and each time it would be of Nathan, of you. When the people he loved most in this world became no more than figures with no voices or faces even in his dreams, he knew he was lost. Aren’t you scared you’ll forget what she looks like?

The twitch of a smile graces your lips, but you keep your eyes closed, “You know if I didn’t know better that’d be a little creepy,” you whisper, voice scratchy.

“Sorry,” he murmurs in return, the word meaningless and flat. You open you eyes to find you’ve moved a good half foot down the bed and were staring straight at his chest.

“I don’t mind,” you say with a sigh that creeps its way into a smile, and he lets out a small laugh. When you turn your gaze to his, he can’t help but think you have the eyes of everyone who has ever cared.

And this, Sam thinks, is the way it will go. He will trace his fingers over remembered lines, recalling until he catches upon a changed border. He will not run at the sight. He will adapt. And you...his lips curve into a smile and his heart catches in his throat. You and him will grow together around the differences like vines wrapping around tree branches, healing the way bones do.