Dear Sam (1)
[Sam Wilson x Reader]
Word Count: 1259
Summary: Two years after the snap, you’re still struggling with the loss of Sam Wilson.
Warnings: Grief, loss, anxiety, a brief therapy session
A/N: Not what I intended to write today, but it’s what was coming to me. This takes place between Infinity War and Endgame. So it’s sad, but… stick with me. This will just be a mini series, so it’ll get better soon.
It had been two years, seven months, and twenty-three days since you’d last seen Sam Wilson. Two years, to the day, since anyone had seen him. Two years since every last person on Earth had lost someone they loved in one single, shattering instant. For everyone else, this day, this anniversary, was particularly painful. There were small, commemorative events taking place all over the world. Memorials and monuments were unveiled. Speeches were given. Support groups hastily expanded their hours, bolstered their supplies of chairs and bad coffee to accommodate influxes of people seeking comfort, reassurance, answers any way they could get them.
Part of you wished you could join them, share the weight of grief, draw some catharsis from the morbid and distinct camaraderie of public mourning. But you didn’t. It didn’t feel right. Honest. Fair. Because sometimes…
Sometimes you forgot Sam was even gone.
He’d been lost to you long before he had disappeared for good. On the run, an international fugitive who could only show his love by staying as far away from you as possible, by refusing to implicate you in the mess he’d found himself embroiled in.
And so most days you woke up unbothered by the coolness of the sheets and the smooth surface of the unused pillow beside you. On autopilot, you pulled only one plate from the cabinet, prepared single-serving meals, or stowed leftovers without a second thought. When you went to work, you left behind an empty apartment. You ate lunch alone. Fielded phone calls and texts from your mother, your neighbor, the new girl in HR. Your eyes didn’t linger of the thread long unused but never erased, the contact that used to fill your lock screen with silly nonsense and flirtation every afternoon.
You’d lived so long without him that fighting through loneliness became second nature. In the back of your mind, you were still just waiting for the dust to settle, keeping everything in order until Sam could come back home to you.
But then the truth would sink in.
Inevitable, but gut-wrenching all the same.
Thanks, Sarah . . .
(I have full faith in you but also, your writing is absolutely amazing so I know I’m gonna get the feels the ENTIRE ride so.)