A lot could change in five years, even if you remained stagnant. Sam had learned that when he came back, after that big battle was said and done and Stark was in the ground. It took a long time for that adrenaline to die down, a long time for the dust to settle, a long time for Sam to let himself breathe long enough to take a look around and take stock of what was different.
The most jarring, of course, were the people who weren’t around.
There was a part of Sam who’d seen those missing people and wanted to feel optimistic about where they might be. When Steve approached him after the battle, he’d grinned wide and cocky and exhausted and greeted him with, what, did Sharon have someplace better to be? He remembered the way Steve’s face fell, remembered how his whole world changed from one heartbeat to the next.
There was a moment, he’d told Riley once, that existed between a tragedy’s occurrence and its realization. It was the moment after the gun fired, just before his father fell. It was the split second between his mother’s scream of pain and the sound of her body hitting the concrete. It was the heartbeat after Riley started his descent and the one before he landed in the sand.
It was the moment after he made his joke, before Steve spoke. He wished, sometimes, that he could live in that moment. He wished he could curl up in that ticking clock just before the world fell apart.
But he couldn’t. That hand moved from one second to the next. His father fell. His mother’s body hit the ground. Riley landed in the sand and didn’t get back up.
And Steve opened his mouth, and Sharon was dead.
It was a hard hit. It always was. Sam had lost so many people, and there was no getting used to it. Every loss felt like the first one, sharp and brittle.
Maybe that was why he’d been standing in front of her door a good ten minutes now, trying to bring himself to knock.
Not many people got second chances like this. Not many people found themselves plopped down in the middle of an alternate universe where their dead friends were alive and thriving and happy. (Some of their dead friends, at least --- Pararescueman Riley Clark was still shot down by enemy forces in Afghanistan, body never recovered. Sam had checked.) Second chances were rare and precious things, and Sam was trying to get his to convince him to wrap his knuckles against the door, to call out, to do anything to make his presence known, but it was hard.
He was pacing when the floorboards made his decision for him, creaking under his feet. The sound wasn’t loud, but it was enough. The door swung open, and Sam whirled towards it... but there was no one standing at eye level. He lowered his eyes until he found a little girl staring up at him, eyes narrowed. “Uh,” he said, blinking. There were footsteps behind her, and this time, the person approaching was tall enough for him to look in the eye without kneeling.
The person in question was also achingly familiar.
“Sharon,” he said, a quiet breath. “God. I’m --- Hey.”
(He was usually good with people. This, he supposed, was what he got for having most of his conversations with a cat in the last few months.)