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vostokovasmelina · 4 years ago

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— 𝐀𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝟑𝐂. (𝐬.𝐰.)

𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐢 | 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐢 | 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭

characters: fem!reader; sam wilson; archibald the tabby cat; sarah wilson

word count: 3.1k+

warning: mentions and descriptions of alcohol, death, grief, trauma, therapy, depression – i call this post-snap realism

series summary: after the blip, sam wilson gets home to an unpleasant surprise - his key doesn’t fit the lock anymore and his apartment is now inhabited by a stranger and a grumpy feline. however, the unusual encounter is only the beginning of their post-blip lives and the reader soon learns that what life takes away, it can give back in the most particular ways.

a/n: the ending is a dark unedited mess, so proceed with caution

Taking a cautious sip of your hot beverage, you watched this absolute gatecrasher of a man trying to make up his mind about whatever he was so confused about – Sam kept looking all around your apartment as if searching for something he had left there, his slightly lost and disoriented expression sending a sudden wave of guilt rushing over you. Now that you thought about it, it really must have sucked absolute cheese for him to come home hoping he could finally have that huge cup of strong black coffee he had been anticipating ever since having defeated that enormous purple bastard from Outer Space, only to find that his coffee machine was long gone and now this random lady with a philodendron problem and a judgmental cat were inhabiting the place with absolutely no room left for him whatsoever. It did sound tragic when you put it that way.

However, it really wasn’t your fault that you had needed to find a brand new residence approximately five years before. He really should have checked in with someone to make sure he still had somewhere to go home to. You were quite clearly the real victim here. And Lord only knew how poor Archie was going to process all the excitement of the day.

For a few seconds, you contemplated whether or not to put your thoughts into words, and eventually decided against it for the time being. The man had just helped save the world a few days before, after all, and out of what? Good conscience? Personally not for you, but you could appreciate it in others. And it would have been a real shame to die right when your fan-favourite succulents and killer new posting schedule had been attracting more Instagram followers than ever before. Thanks to the savior complex flaming inside of the gentleman standing before you though, the regular civilian had luckily escaped such terrible hardships. And special thanks to approximately a thousand and one other superheroes. Oh, and to an African country filled with similarly public-spirited people.

For a few awkwardly long seconds neither of you said a word. Sam kept looking around and you watched him look around, slowly lowering your mug onto the table and tilting your head slightly to the left. Weird how Sarah had never mentioned the brother believed to be dead for the last five years was this handsome. It is unfair, really. Some people are just naturally gorgeous no matter the shitty kitchen lighting, that tiny confused frown that had been sitting on their face for the last half hour, or those shiny black bugs for eyes tearing up ever so slightly to snitch on a long repressed yawn.

“Now that the drama is over and the Avengers as such are non-existent – have you considered a career in modeling yet?”

Sam snapped his head towards you with such force and speed that for a moment you were afraid you’d have to spend the rest of the afternoon sewing it back on his neck. You grabbed your mug still pretty much filled to the brim with tea and raised it back up to your mouth to hide your lingering half-smile behind a faded portrait of baby Archie on the ivory porcelain.

“Just saying, I would buy anything for this face on the package alone,” you continued with the confidence of a woman who hasn’t got a single drop of shame left in her body. But it was fine ‘cos you didn’t actually mean it, right? It was all just a joke, an attempt at lightening the mood and snapping him out of his puzzled melancholy. And that tiny flutter of your heart upon hearing Sam’s perfect little chuckle was but a momentary malfunction of the organ. The incident was purely physiological. No contribution from any emotional factors. It was simply an innocent coincidence that these two, completely unrelated things had co-occured.

So when your gazes met, you didn’t tear yours away in embarrassment – you stood your ground, completely unaffected and unbothered, ignoring the increasingly hot sensation in your cheeks when you saw Sam raise a cheeky eyebrow at you. Before even more damage could have been done, however, you decided to cut the party short.

“Oh, no. Don’t get your hopes up, Birdman. I simply couldn’t keep watching you in your deeply disturbed state.”

Very, very smooth. Cleared of all suspicion. Good job.

“Wow. Okay. That was cruel,” Sam scoffed and gave emphasis to his words by bringing up his right palm dramatically to his chest, right above his now most definitely broken heart. The overall effect got ruined by an annoyingly goofy grin in the end and before you even realised, you had already reached out for your massive mug again to drown your own erupting smile in the hot liquid.

In the silence that followed, however, you saw Sam’s smile fall ever so slightly, as if exhaustion or worry were holding onto the corners of his lips, physically tugging them down, and you shifted slightly uncomfortably in your seat. It was time you had stopped messing around with the poor guy.

“Look, I know this is weird but I’m sure we can find a solution. Just call Sarah so she can stop worrying now,” you suggested, finishing your tea and pushing the now empty mug to the middle of the table before leaning back in your seat.

“Ugh, yeah,” Sam started slowly, squatting down to get his mobile and the charger out of his massive sports bag. “Can I plug this in somewhere?”

You blinked at him a couple of times while he waited patiently for your answer. You could only imagine the number of missed calls and unread texts waiting for Sam on his phone, but you decided you didn’t know him enough to give him a lecture on behalf of his sister. So you just gave him a tired nod and gestured lazily towards your battered kitchen counter, Sam following your direction with his gaze.

“Above the microwave. Oh, and the socket farthest to the left–”

“–doesn’t work. I remember.” Sam flashed another exhausted but friendly smirk at you above his shoulder, and you allowed yourself to return the gesture to his back once he wasn’t watching.

“Right, sorry. Forgot I was the intruder here,” you joked, delighted to earn another one of those irritatingly lively chuckles of this man’s.

You seriously needed to get your shit together.

“Okay, while your phone is doing its thing, let’s call Sarah from mine, I guess” you continued, jumping up from your chair the moment Sam returned to the table and you headed towards your worn little couch where you scratched Archie gently behind his right ear. “Where have you put my phone, you dirty old man?” You cooed, smiling softly while sliding your hands under the cheap cushions and booping your irritated cat’s tiny nose when your fingers finally touched the cold metal you had been looking for.

Once seated again, you caught Sam staring at Archie, his eyes slightly narrowed in what appeared to be deep concentration. You furrowed your eyebrows and tilted your head, waiting for your uninvited guest to notice you.

“I don’t think your cat likes me too much,” he finally said, slowly tearing his gaze away from the pet feline’s and looking into your slightly more welcoming human eyes instead.

You chuckled dryly, turning around to see Archie in all his glory on the couch. He simply gave you an unbothered look before completely losing interest in the two of you, and he hopped of the couch, slowly making his way towards your bedroom where you knew he would bundle up under your bed on the cosy carpet. He had apparently decided it was time for his beauty sleep.

“Yeah, he’s like that with everyone. Nothing personal,” you assured Sam, who offered a tired half-smile in return. You cleared your throat gently, eyes fixed on your phone’s screen and fingers already searching for Sarah’s number. Once you had found it, you handed it to Sam whose only job left was to press the call button. You raised your eyebrows at him expectantly and he let out a sigh while reaching out for your mobile.

* * *

It wasn’t like he didn’t want to talk to Sarah. Quite the opposite, actually. But he was embarrassed. Sam knew full well how furious his sister was going to be. And honestly, rightfully so. He couldn’t argue with that. After all, she did say there had been something she wanted to talk to him about. And Sam did hang up on her without a passable excuse. And he did let his phone die on his way back home to Louisiana.

Yeah, he most probably wasn't going to be nominated for this year's Brother of the Year award.

Their last call had happened two days before. Two days is a long time without any news from a brother who had just returned after having been believed to be dead for the past five years. And if you had been to ask him, Sam wouldn’t have been able to tell you what had gotten into him either but ever since the Blip, something had not been exactly right. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what was going on, so he hadn’t brought it up to anyone, but his brain felt slow and foggy as if it hadn't had time to catch up yet.

Sometimes, Sam worried that the molecules in his brain had been mixed up and hadn't been put back into their original places in the process of the whole turning-into-dust-and-back-into-human-form-again thing.

It was a silly thought, yes, but with everything going on in the world, would it really be that hard to believe?

"Hey hon! What's up?" Sam's thought process was cut off by the endearing voice of his sister, and though he was aware all this affection was not directed towards him – given that he had called Sarah on your phone – his heart did swell upon hearing her again.

And then he said hi and it all went south from there.

Sarah was obviously pissed.

She asked Sam if he had any idea how many texts and missed calls she had left him, and no, he had no clue but if he had to guess, the number would have been way high up in the double digits.

Then she started going off on Sam, using different kinds of actually very creative euphemisms – which was a problem because Sam got so distracted by his sister's choice of words that her short, well-thought out rant had very little effect on him, but at least he had enough self-respect left to get his sister off speaker at this point.

"Look, Sarah, I know I messed up but I'm fine! I swear," he started, cutting his sister short while subconsciously picking at the skin around the nail on his index finger with his thumb. "What if I stop by Andy's and tell him to give me their best apple pie?" Sam added, hoping this promise would serve as an ice-breaker. Sarah did love her desserts. A lot. And Andy always gave a discount to the Wilson family, too.

When he heard his sister's tired sigh, Sam's heart gave a hopeful flutter, but he was rudely dragged back onto the ground on his way to cloud nine the very next second.

"I'm doing the shopping at the moment. Just got here and it's gonna take long," Sarah replied, annoyance poking through all her words. Then, the tension that had been dominating the pair's call suddenly seemed to evaporate as Sam sensed a weak shadow of a smile in her following sentence. "But that apple pie does sound good."

Sam couldn't help the grin that creeped its way onto his face and he didn't even care about Sarah's semi-serious threat, saying how they were nowhere near finished yet. He muttered out a quick sorry again, promised Sarah to give her regards to you and finished the call with a charming 'I love you' to which his sister replied with a snarky 'I bet' before hanging up with a promise that she would call again when she got home.

Sam let out a relieved chuckle before handing you back your phone and taking the final sip of his slightly lukewarm coffee, watching your bright red-nailed fingers tap away on the device, and he swallowed harder and probably louder than he had meant to. You just happened to put your phone down the very next second, so he tried to cover up the gulp by clearing his throat and shifting his gaze from your nails to your eyes.

Beautiful eyes.

Well shit.

"So, I guess you're staying," you started hesitantly, raising your eyebrows at Sam in a slightly impatient manner, which snapped him out of his blissful thoughts and thrust him back into reality.

Was he staying? He certainly had nowhere to go now that he was practically homeless and his sister was unable to welcome him in her own home for the next two hours, at least. But then again, you were a complete stranger whose afternoon he had just disrupted, and it didn't matter how weird it felt seeing you be so at home in his apartment because it wasn't his anymore. It was yours and you had all the right to kick Sam out and he had absolutely zero right to argue.

But, thankfully, he didn't have to.

"Which is fine, by the way. I did promise you an explanation, after all." Sam couldn't quite ignore the hint of dread behind your words and he was ready to object, to leave you alone and spend the rest of his afternoon doing God-knows-what, but then you offered him another cup of coffee followed by a tiny but honest smile, and Sam just couldn't bring himself to say no.

* * *

Sam Wilson was ridiculously easy to open up to.

It made you want to commit a crime.

His gaze was so intensely warm that after a while, you were looking at everything in your apartment but him just to avoid accidentally trauma dumping on him, especially when you got to the part about group therapy.

Because you had met Sarah at a group therapy session approximately four and a half years before.

It had been clear from the very first minute that neither of you had actually wanted to be there and that both of you had been forced into this situation. Sarah had been dragged to group by an overly enthusiastic co-worker of hers whose crush on the counselor had been probably more intense than the trauma she had suffered – she had lost a dog and her neighbor to the right whom she had always talked shit about behind his back. She was a nice enough woman, but considering that people had lost actual family in the Snap, her presence had always been mostly aggravating, to say the least.

In your case, it had been your grandmother who had bullied you into going to one of the sessions because 'she had the same rotten mentality when Miss Taylor told her to go but then she found it life-changing'. At this point, you had become so indifferent to everything in the world that you hadn't needed much convincing to go. You had told yourself it would be one session anyway after which you would have told Grandma Ethel that 'therapy was simply not for you' and could have been back to your usual Thursday evening routine consisting of a cheap bottle of red wine and depressing reruns of trashy British reality shows from the late 2000s.

The actual sessions had never worked for you. They might have if you had actually spoken up at any of them but you had never become quite ready to talk about your loss in front of a dozen other people, most of whom you had already known. But then you had met Sarah and something about her had made you feel secure, secure enough to talk about them for the first time, so you had started hanging out at a café not too far from the community center and it had become the best thing in your life.

"And the rest is history," you finished, getting up from your chair to put both yours and Sam's mug in the sink and watered your nearby plants while at it.

"I'm really glad Sarah had someone by her side," Sam commented and you could hear a hint of guilt in his words but you decided to ignore it. You simply nodded and muttered out a weak 'yeah', saying you were just as happy to have found a friend like Sarah.

Then Sam said something that made all the muscles in your body tense up and you froze completely for the next couple of seconds.

"And have you seen your family yet? Now that they've come back?"

It was an innocent question. He doesn't know the whole story. So calm down.

You slowly put down the glass you had used earlier to water your plants and tried with every particle in your body to put on the best toothpaste commercial-worthy smile you could force out of yourself before turning back towards Sam and answering his absolutely understandable question.

"Yeah!" No. "They're doing well, actually!" They're fucking dead.

Sam's genuinely happy smile was way too much to handle and if it hadn't been for a call from Sarah, you would have broken down in tears right in front of him the very next moment.

So instead of all that, you decided to turn right back around, pour yourself a huge glass of cold tapwater and down it in one breath while Sam finished his brief conversation with his sister. The stinging pain in your chest that followed was enough to distract your thoughts until he was finally at the door, saying goodbye and thanking your for the coffee and saying sorry for intruding and taking absolutely way too fucking long to finally leave.

"Hey, um... I could give you my number? If you ever need anything or..."

He can't be serious.

"Sure! You can, ugh, put it in my phone," you replied, your hands shaking dangerously as you reached into your back pocket for your mobile and handed it to Sam, who knew better than to comment on it.

Once finished, he returned your phone with one of those irritatingly joyful smiles of his and with a final 'see you around' Sam Wilson was off and you proudly patted yourself on the back for successfully holding it together until you finally reached your couch.

* * *

mini-series taglist – let me know if you want to be added

@softieyn

@mahvericks

@amirahiddleston

@fireghost-x

@samuelthomaswillson

@itsnottilly

@loveyhoneydovey

@songofcosplay

@titaniumstark

@falcons-wings