Don't You Worry Child

Safe and Sound

Chapter Summary: Samantha tries to recreate her first 'date'  with Steve but a trip to the grocery store makes things more difficult than they should be.

Soundtrack: Safe and Sound by Taylor Swift Featuring The Civil Wars

Eventually, Samantha returned to Steve's room, Natasha trailing in her wake. She was being protective for some reason, Samantha supposed it was because she'd caught her crying in the hallway. "Sorry about that, what would you like to know?" she asked, all manner of professionalism. She was going to take all of this with a grain of salt.

"Uhh, tell me about S.H.I.E.L.D," he said and she smiled. She figured he was trying to avoid anything overtly personal with Natasha in the room.

"S.H.I.E.L.D. Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division. You name it, we deal in it. Kind of at a plateau for the moment since we realised HYDRA had infiltrated us so we're kind of down to half our force. Founded by Peggy Carter and Howard Stark, he was my grandfather – unfortunately, I never got to meet him because he died before I was born. Umm it was a kind of offshoot of SSR. Peggy was kind of sick of being treated like a weak little girl so she and my Granddad set up S.H.I.E.L.D" Samantha explained with a kind smile as she sat down beside him "You're an Avenger, a part of an elite task force designed to take down those normal people can't. You're actually kind of the leader. Natasha is our kick-ass assassin, Clint – who you met earlier – is our awesome marksman. Bruce is well he's a hulk. Then you've got Thor, he's the Norse God of Thunder. Dad is our tech guy slash human robot and then there's well there's me,"

"And what do you do?"

"A bit of everything, investigation, I've hacked into a government agency, S.H.I.E.L.D. actually. I have the ability to kick ass. Oh and I've been known to fake cry on occasion," she answered with a hint of humour.

He laughed in reply and she smirked. They were doing fine.

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It had been a week and Samantha was pondering how on earth she hadn't realised that her mother wasn't really dead. She thought back to the day, the day her mother 'died'. They'd been talking one minute, about what Samantha was going to do now that she'd finished college one minute and then the next her mother went into cardiac arrest. Samantha pressed the call button, hoping that one of the nurses could get there in time. She remembered being rushed out of the room and then being told that there had been nothing they could do, Audrey Lucille Montgomery was dead.

Or so she had thought anyway. She looked back on it, Audrey there were ways of making it look like you were going into cardiac arrest without actually doing it. Natasha had since told her about them, they couldn't have been that difficult. HYDRA could have had at least one doctor within the hospital, it wouldn't be hard. The funeral had been a closed casket one.

So, convinced that she had been ridiculously stupid about it all, she went to one of the two people she could trust: Steve. "How could I not realise that she was alive? I mean, I'm many things but stupid is not one of them. I graduated top of my class from UCLA with a law degree, I am trained to notice these things and yet I couldn't figure out that my mother wasn't dead! What does that say about me?" she asked him as she paced the room.

"It says that you were grieving which I would guess that you're doing now," he answered, that sweet smile on his face. She smiled back, it was only on very rare occasions that Steve didn't know the right thing to say or didn't say it.

"Yeah but I mean there are things, things I should have noticed. Even if I was grieving. Nine times out of ten, if you think that someone's watching you then there probably is somebody watching you, that's an idea most psychologists support. I've had that feeling since the day my mom died, or the day I thought she died anyway. So why wouldn't I have bothered to look into it?" she questioned.