100 Marvel One Shots✔️

Books Over Brawn >> Steve Rogers (Captain America) X Reader

Title: Books Over Brawn

Paring: Steve Rogers (Captain America) X Reader

Warnings: social anxiety, fears and phobias, dancing and parties, libraries etc

Spoilers: no! I avidly avoid canon deaths and ignore them at all costs!

Author's note: This fic just hit me on the back of the head, thrust me forward and into a puddle in front of my laptop because I live for people with quiet/unassuming jobs going with people who have great jobs and a great story (aka myself and every fiction character maybe ever).

I actually pre-wrote this because I have to get my wisdom teeth out today (all four out in the dentist's chair) and well, apart from being super uber nervous, I didn't want to deprive my readers and fellow fic lovers of some prime fanfic I concocted for you. Please wish me luck!

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Dating was a terrible, most honestly horrible thing for you to do. It involved leaving your apartment, dressing up to impress someone you were most likely never to see again, and going out into the loud, foul-smelling world to have a night doing what others called 'socialising'. You had never enjoyed it. Not even as a teen, or a child, not since your mother not-so-quietly confessed over coffee to her friend that you were adopted. The same situation happened three years later when in the middle of the city your father had been attacked by a man with a strange mask, leaving your mother and yourself to go on without him.

It had been exactly three months since you had politely declined your last date (a school-teacher who taught shop in a rough neighbourhood) and to be quite frank, you had to admit that you preferred being alone in your home on a Friday evening with a cup of tea, a good book and a new season of your show waiting for you on Netflix. It meant no awful people trying their best to feel you up under the table like it was the fourth date or acceptable, it meant no date whinging and making you pay in full for the check.

You were happy. And that's exactly how you liked being.

It wasn't too hard to maintain being a librarian. All it meant was rejecting flirtations and keeping your nose away from the daylight because anything could happen out in the streets. People who came into the James Buchanan Barnes Memorial Library weren't there to make trouble, oh no. Granted, you offered free WiFi, but your library was the proud owner of the largest collection of archived files for both the first and second world war in the country, but your library had a good reputation and was well loved. Many a day your library would be teeming with ancestry-seekers and teen romance novels alike, and it brought a flutter to your heart.

It was in libraries where people could come together and be calm. Be kind. Nobody started a fight in the library, not like the people who tore up the city and called themselves heroes. It wasn't that you didn't like the Avengers, no, you looked up to them like any person. They were spotlight people, and that was the one place you couldn't help but feel most vulnerable in.

There was one noticeable face who would come in and read during opening hours. She always wore shades, though inside and a hoodie to shield her face even more. Maybe it was because of the catastrophe which happened overseas, or her own sensitivity to the public eye, you had no idea. All you knew was that Wanda Maximoff was an exceptional patron. Never harmed a book. Always had manners for you and those around her. The ideal library-goer.

But it was on one day, early on a Thursday morning during your emptying of the after-hour returns chute that altered your life. The usual DVDs scanned back into circulation without a hitch, the same with a handful of returned CDs. But it was when you picked up a heavy tome that you caught sight of a small piece of paper slipping loose from the pages.