Summary: After an unimaginable loss, you discover your powers and become even more cemented in your faith. Sam experiences a similar loss and struggles with it. When you meet, how will your lives change?
Pairing: Sam Wilson x Indian!Superhero!Reader
Words: 904
A/N: This is for @bucky-smiles 2K Bollywood Writing Challenge! My prompt was Jab Tak Hai Jaan. The thing that stood out most to me was both of the protagonists’ struggles and/or commitments to faith, so that’s what I drew on for this fic. Although I know that Sam is an orphan in the comics, having lost both his parents to violence, I had him be raised by his mother, so she’s still alive here.
Beta’d by: The lovely @bucky-smiles herself. I wanted to make sure I did the culture and religion justice, so thank you! Also beta’d by another Indian lovely @emilyshurley, who also made the above aesthetic for me. Thank you both for working with me. It meant a lot for me to get the culture and religion right because representation fucking matters, so your help was invaluable to me. <3
To say that your life took a different turn than you expected was an understatement to say the very least. As a child, watching your mother and father, you’d fully intended to become a surgeon, a brain surgeon specifically, but after that day in the alleyway, you knew you’d been chosen for a different purpose.
Even your father knew it. At first, he’d been frightened by your newfound abilities, denying their existence, but when you exploded at him, begging him to believe, and he saw the fire in your eyes, he knew you’d been telling the truth. “This is why you were saved, beta. I know it.”
From that day on, you trained. You trained in every martial art you could think of, your father even seeking out the best trainers to help you under the guise of ‘keeping my daughter safe in an unsafe world.’ Every day you honed your fire abilities, ensuring that even under the most crazed of circumstances, you could control them.
You became a doctor anyway, fostering your mind as well as your body, hoping to help others in any and every way. Instead of going into neurosurgery, you pursued orthopedics, serving people from all walks of life all around the world – from New York City to Afghanistan to India and back.
Fire and strength lingered in your very being, but you only utilized your abilities when trouble found you; you didn’t go looking for it. Stopping gangbangers, frightening a rapist here and there, even pushing back against a few dates who got a little too handsy and didn’t want to take the hint. But that was it.
Until New York 2012.
Watching aliens pop out of a wormhole in the sky put your seemingly ‘weird’ powers into perspective. Apparently, it was just the tip of the iceberg. Others like yourself - a man who could summon lightning, a giant green dude, Tony Stark – they all flew around the city, saving citizens one by one, and you’d jumped right in at their sides, helping to extract patients from the hospital to hand off to one of the masked superheroes.
It was shortly after that you heard that the Avengers, as they became known, were looking for new recruits, people similar to yourself with gifts others could only dream of. Offering puja to your Krishna murti that night, you asked for his guidance. Was this your path? Was this what you’d been saved for all those years ago?
With deep breaths, you lifted your hands, palm-to-palm, against your chest, listening for an answer. As you waited intently, a peace washed over you unlike anything you’d felt before, warmth blanketing you like the sun on your skin. The fire you’d grown accustomed to licked at your fingers, wisps of smoke following in their wake.
This is what you were meant to do.
----
Apparently, most of the people that had come to test their abilities alongside the Avengers were new to the whole thing to say the least. They were untrained, unfocused, undisciplined. And while even the Avengers as a team still had some tweaking to do within their ranks - settle petty squabbles, learn to work together seamlessly – they didn’t have the time to hone someone’s skill.
When you walked through the doors of Stark Tower that day, you knew who you were, what you could do, and how to control it. They put you through rigorous obstacles, watched you fight, talked with you one-on-one. They’d all asked you why you wanted to be on the team. And you told them – you wanted to help. After all that you’d lost, you had to believe that Bhagwan had saved you for a reason. You had to believe there was a point to the pain you’d endured.
As you showed them the true extent of your abilities, Steve looked on in awe at the flames that licked at your skin. Bruce studied you. Thor nodded in appreciation. Coming from Asgard, your abilities were probably nothing to him, but he smiled nonetheless. Natasha looked unimpressed; however, the slightest twitch in her smile and a shrug of her shoulders told you all you needed to know. Clint’s mouth dropped open in amazement, saying something about being armed with a bow and arrow while you had flames coming from your arms. And Tony, well Tony just raised an eyebrow before glancing toward the rest of the team, a silent agreement forming between them.
“Welcome to the team, Y/N,” he said, walking up behind you and clapping you on the back. “We’re going to have to come up with a cool superhero name.” He clapped his hands together and smiled. “Anyone have any ideas?”
----
In the ensuing year or so, you became known as Agni, after accompanying Tony on a mission to the Middle East. To right some wrongs. Surrounded by enemy combatants, you tapped into your power with a ferocity even you hadn’t experienced yet, flames coating your entire body as you channeled it toward each and every one of them, frying them in place while Tony focused on the civilians.
With each mission, you became more and more sure in your purpose, continuing to devote yourself to Krishna and thank him for showing you the way. You knew where your life was headed. Until it threw an unexpected, yet welcomed wrench in your plans.
