Tumblr so your thing. I once read a pirate AU with either Peter Parker or Andrew Garfield, either way it was Andrew Garfield of some sort. Reader was a mermaid, and he ended up betraying the reader. I read it once years ago and I've yearned for it ever since.
CW: Deteriorating mental health, paranoia, cursing, mentions of guns and sex, allusions to danger and violence
Word count: 2.2k
A/N: I had so much fun writing this?? I really wanted to explore how Sam might interact with a female character who had an actual name (!!), overlapping interests, and wasn’t just a sexualized object. Even if you haven’t seen Under the Silver Lake (and it is super weird, as reflected below), I think you might still enjoy the fluffy comfort aspects, humor, and ‘90s references. 🩷
Emily, a neighbor in the apartment complex, tries to connect with Sam as he becomes increasingly paranoid. Takes place during the events of UTSL.
I was standing on the balcony when I saw Sam go running through the courtyard in that gawky way he had. I still wasn’t sure what to make of him. My one friend in the complex had described him as a “harmless stoner weirdo,” but aside from some mix-ups with the mail, I hadn’t interacted with him much. He was cute, I guess, but definitely weird—and kind of jittery, especially lately. And watching him now, he looked terrified. I didn’t know why I was drawn to him—bird with a broken wing syndrome? That was usually what got me into trouble.
Since I had some of his mail anyway, I decided to just drop by and see what his deal was. I mean, it’s not like I had anything better to do. I didn’t have any “friends” yet in LA.
When I knocked on Sam’s apartment door, the response was a high-pitched yelp. Shit, was he hurt or something?
“Sam?” I called tentatively through the door. I knocked again. “Sam, it’s Emily, the girl whose mailbox is above yours? I’ve got a few more things for you.”
A brown eye appeared at the peephole in the door.
“Oh right, you.”
I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. “Yeah, me. Sorry to disappoint.” On the plus side, the sooner he started annoying me, the sooner I could lose interest in him. Win-win. “Do you want your mail or not?”
I could hear him undoing multiple latches and locks and then he opened the door about a foot. “Yeah, thanks,” he said, breathlessly glancing over his shoulder. His face was paler than usual and his hair all disheveled.
“Are you okay?” I then remembered the time I’d passed his apartment while he was, ah, very audibly entertaining some female company. Oh god, did he have a girl here now?
“Huh? What?” He asked.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah! Maybe. I don’t know.”
He looked over his shoulder again. Okay, he had to have a girl here. That was my cue.
“Cool, okay, well, see ya around.”
“No, wait!”
I turned back, surprised at the urgency in his voice. His eyes were darting around, and he was visibly sweating. I sighed, annoyed by a new realization. “Dude, are you high?”
“I fucking wish,” he muttered. “No, I just…” His voice dropped to even more of a whisper. “I think I’m being followed.”
“Ooookay. By who? Have you called the cops?”
“Why? They’re probably in on it!” He went wide-eyed. “And if they come here, what if they try to evict me again?”
Was he having some sort of mental breakdown?
“And they can’t know I have this now,” he whispered, pulling a gun from his waistband with shaky hands. Instinctively, I jumped back—nearly out of my body.
“Jesus Christ, man!”
He looked at me with his wild eyes. “Emily. Emily, right? Emily, it’s all so fucked up.”
My ability to get involved in this crazy-ass shit? Yeah, it was fucked-up, all right.
“Sam, is anyone here with you?” I.E. what would the body count be if I couldn’t get this gun off him? Now I was sweating.
“No, no one’s here.”
“Okay, then can I come in?”
“No, no, the people following me, they’ll hurt you too.”
At the moment, I was more worried about him accidentally hurting me—or himself.
“I’ll take my chances,” I said, nudging him back into his apartment and closing the door behind me. “Can I see this?” Who in their right mind would give this dude a gun?
“My friend went missing, and I’m trying to find her, and everything’s fucking crazy! Nothing is what you think it is, Emily.” He leveled me with a look. “Nothing.”
“I believe you. Let me just…” I gingerly pried his fingers off the gun. “There we go, okay.”
“But I need that,” he whispered, his eyes terrified. “What if they find me?”
“Look,” I said, holding up the gun then putting it out of reach, my heart pounding. “It’s still here, but I don’t think either of us should be holding a loaded gun.”
“Oh, I don’t know if it’s loaded.”
“WHAT?” All diplomacy was out the window now. I glared at him. He started stammering.
“I mean, it might be, I just don’t know, I didn’t load it, and when I shot that other guy—“
“Whoa, whoa, stop talking!”
Sam looked hurt. “I’m sorry if I’m freaking you out—“
“No, I mean, stop talking because, plausible deniability, okay?”
“Oh. Yeah, good call.” He waved a finger at me. “You’re smart. Maybe you can help.”
“Sure, yeah, maybe. Can we sit down? Maybe in the living room.” Maybe further from the gun? “Can you tell me what’s going on?”
“Yeah, yeah, in a sec.”
I moved out of the way so he could redo all the locks and latches on his door. As he did that, my phone started ringing in my back pocket. Sam watched me intently as I pulled it out and took a look at the screen.
“Oh, it’s just my mom. I’ll call her back.”
“Wait, no, don’t stop it—I know that song. It’s… from a Nintendo game?” He somehow sounded both sure and uncertain at the same time.
I felt myself almost smile. “Oh, yeah. It is.” My ringtone ended, and I slid my phone back into my pocket.
“Super Nintendo?
“Indeed. Super Mario World.”
“Huh. Wait, are you into all that shit?”
“Uh, yeah. I grew up on all that shit. I used to destroy all the neighborhood boys at Mario Kart.”
“Ha!” He looked positively delighted. “Which one?”
“Super Nintendo first, obviously, then 64.”
Well, this was proving to be a fruitful topic. I wondered if maybe he was unmedicated or sleep deprived, and not actually being followed.
“You know, I don’t know that I’ve ever played a girl at Mario Kart. The girls I grew up with were into, like, Barbies and shit.” He lit a cigarette and sat down on the couch. I took that as my invitation to sit too.
“Well, I was into Barbies too. I mean, come on! It was the ‘90s.”
He smiled fondly. “Yeah. We were all better off back then. Just playing video games and running around the neighborhood…..” His expression darkened. “Can’t do that anymore.” He offered me his cigarette. I waved him off.
“What do you mean? I see you’ve got your NES hooked up right over there.”
“No, I mean, if I go out, they try to kill me. If I stay home, they sneak in and try to kill me.”
I was really hoping there wasn’t actual truth to anything he was saying. I’d been trying to maintain a neutral facial expression, but it must have cracked, because he began stammering again.
“Sorry, you don’t have to stay here, it’s probably too dangerous.”
“Well, full disclosure, I’m really here because I saw you run across the courtyard, and you didn’t look good. Sam, when was the last time you ate? Or slept?”
“There’s no time for that. My friend is missing.”
“You sound like a good friend, Sam. But even good friends deserve to eat and sleep.”
“She might be dead,” he whispered, and my heart nearly stopped. “She just… vanished. One night, we were watching movies, and the next day, she was gone.”
“Maybe she had to beat the rent or something,” I said hopefully. “Does that sound like something she’d do? You must know her pretty well.”
“No, I met her that night—the night we watched movies.”
Wait, what? Was the truth just that bizarre or was he in an actual state of delirium? I glanced around his living room for anything that might distract him—get him back to the calmer state he’d been in talking about Nintendo games. My eyes landed on a pile of magazines on the floor by his TV.
“Stop. You have your old Nintendo Powers?”
“Yeah?” he said, looking confused.
“Can I look at them? See which ones you have?”
“Yeah, sure. Wait, you know Nintendo Power?”
“Uh, yeah!” I knelt down beside the pile on the floor. “I was a subscriber myself. Oh my gosh, look, Nintendo 64 was just coming out. Wow.” I moved slowly through the magazines. “Ocarina of Time! Ah! Love of my life!” I hugged that issue briefly to my chest. “Dude, I remember some of these, like, legit! These covers are unlocking 20-year-old memories. Ah! This was one of my favorites! It had a walkthrough for Harvest Moon, and it sounded like just the best game ever, so I asked for it for my birthday.”
When I turned around, Sam was smiling wearily. He was obviously exhausted, which I took as a good sign.
“Harvest Moon, really?”
“What, were you all about GoldenEye and first-person shooters?” With unease, I remembered the gun in the kitchen.
For some reason, though, he laughed.
“What?”
“Sorry, this is just not a conversation I’ve ever had with a girl in my apartment.”
I glanced away, feeling my cheeks flush with childlike embarrassment. “No, it doesn’t sound like you do a lot of talking when you have girls in your apartment…”
“Uhh, how would you know?” He seemed more amused than anything.
I sighed. “One day, I was passing by, and you obviously had company. Loud company.”
“Fuck,” he said softly.
“On the bright side, with how thin these walls are, someone will definitely hear if you get murdered!” Okay, pump the brakes on the defense mechanisms, girl. “Sorry, disregard! You’re gonna be just fine, and I’m gonna stop talking now!” I awkwardly went back to flipping through Nintendo Power and we sat in silence for a few minutes. I really hoped he wasn’t dwelling on the whole “murder” thing.
“Hey, Emily. You know REM?”
I looked up at him. “Like, the group?”
He nodded.
“Of course?”
“No, it’s just that I was out with this girl the other night, and she didn’t know ‘What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?’”
“Weird.”
“Yeah, she was probably born in the ‘90s or something.”
“Ugh,” I shuddered. “We just hired a girl at work who was born in 1991.” Sam recoiled in disgust. “I know. Same.”
“1991 before or after REM was on SNL?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. What a way to mark time! “Um… after. REM must have been on SNL in early ’91, and this girl was born in the summer.”
He was watching me, a smile forming. “They were on SNL in April. How did you figure that out?”
I laughed bashfully, staring at my hands, fiddling with my rings. “Because I would have been in first grade then, and I remember walking around my first grade classroom singing ‘Shiny Happy People.’ That was my jam. Dare I say ‘obsession’? And my mom had taped their SNL performance, so I watched it religiously.”
“No way! Fuck! I have a VCR,” he said, pointing across the room. “Do you have the tape?”
“No, not with me,” I said, laughing. “Believe it or not, I didn’t think to pack it when I moved across the country. But you could probably find the performance on YouTube.”
He scoffed. “That’s not the same.”
“Yeah, I know, I love tracking too, it’s the best.” I rolled my eyes, just openly teasing him at this point.
But he laughed! “Oh my god. Do you know how nice it is to be with someone who isn’t asking about bullshit like work, making me feel ancient, or trying to hurt me?”
I just stared at him. “Who are you friends with, dude?”
We both started laughing.
“You might be better off going it alone.” I didn’t realize what I’d walked into at first, but then he grinned at me and started to sing, softly, timidly, and I joined in:
“’Go it alone
Hold it along
Haul it along
And hold it….’”
“Yeah,” he sighed, “everything feels half a world away these days.”
I hesitated, then lightly nudged his hand with my knee. “But not everything is.”
He smiled. “You really came down here because I seemed freaked out?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s very cool of you.”
I just shrugged, blushing. “Why don’t you try to get some sleep? And I’ll… read to you about Harvest Moon.” I waved that issue in the air. “That should put you right to sleep, huh? A farming game walkthrough? Bor-ring!”
He smiled. “Okay, fine. I am pretty tired.” He sighed as he laid down on the couch.
While I flipped through to the right part of the magazine, he caught my hand. “Hey,” he said softly. “Why are you being so nice to me? Why don’t you think I’m crazy?”
I considered that. “Well, because there are people in my life who didn’t treat me like I was crazy when I was going through stuff and probably seemed fucking nuts.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah. Here.” I handed him a throw pillow from the floor, and he put it behind his head. “Okay, you ready?" I cleared my throat. "’You just bought the farm and now you have two and a half years to live off the fat of the land. Harvest Moon is Natsume’s farm fresh hybrid between a simulation and a role-playing game. The object of this game is to turn around a run-down farm and find happiness before your parents return.’”
“That doesn’t sound so bad, really,” Sam murmured, his eyes starting to close. “Living in the middle of nowhere and finding happiness?”
I'd love it if y'all would go check out @heartsandstars46 if you like stuff to do with Andrew Garfield characters. She's still at the part of having a new blog where you get only a couple notes on a post. She's supported my Peter Parker fics and part of why I keep writing them. I'll reblog her masterlist in a minute
If I were to write bf tasm!Peter x gf fem reader having their first time, what would you prefer?
Fluffy fairy tale magic only pls 🥰🧚
Navigating sex after trauma
Loss of virginity
Something else (send an ask so I know!)
Voting ended onJan 4, 2025
It wouldn’t be smut because I don’t think I could write that well at all 😂 But if I were to have them take their relationship “to the next level,” just curious what could be healing for people. My intention is that nothing would get too dark, ie if people wanted to see gf fem reader experience love and connection after trauma, that would be the focus, not the trauma itself. Hope that makes sense. Love you. 🩷
(Would not be this coming week’s blurb, so I can finally, legitimately, use the week poll! 🥳)
I love him so much, he’s one of my first celebrity crushes 🙈
Future
* English is not my first language I apologise
*Gif is not mine
* Triggers: anxiety , love, fluff
Andrew POV
“Let’s go.” She says with a smile on her face while she grabs my hand and guides us through the crowd. “Easy my love, I don’t want to lose you.” She was giggling as she squeezed us through the crowd. “You’re not going to lose me Andrew, just keep walking.” She guides us to a much quieter spot in the park. “Why does everyone else have the same idea as us Andrew.” She slightly complains about it as she wipes her hair out of her face. “I don’t know, maybe it’s the perfect day to eat some ice cream and hang out in the park?” I joked about it as she gently shook her head. “Ha ha very funny.” She rolls playfully her eyes at me and sits down. “Come, sit with me.” She pats on the ground and I crouched down, slowly sitting down and moving closer to her. “I’m always funny.” “Sure, whatever makes you happy.” I smiled as I carefully tucked my hand in my jacket, touching the black box with a ring in it. ‘Just wait for the perfect moment.’
We both walked back to my apartment as she was talking about her next trip. “Does it fit in your schedule? I mean I could postpone it for a week or so.” I shook my head and smiled at her with a goofy smile on my face. “You always fit in my schedule.” I wrapped my arm tighter around her and pulled her closer, placing a small soft kiss on her head. “Andrew, you making me shy.” Her cheeks warmed up and a shy smile was on her lips. “Sorry,I just love making you smile like this.” I was fiddling with the box in my jacket as we just walked through the streets in London. “Are you okay?” She was looking at me with a concerned expression on her face. “Yeah…I’m okay, why?” She shook carefully her head and shrugged her shoulders. “You just looked a bit nervous.” I smiled and kissed her. “I’m always nervous around you.”
She was sleeping in my bed with my T-shirt on. Her legs were exposed and her head was lying on my pillow. ‘God she’s beautiful.’ Her skin looked so soft and she looked so peaceful. ‘I love her….’ I carefully pulled out the box and opened it, looking at the ring I got for her. ‘I hope she wants to marry me like I want to marry her….’ Her body slightly moved and I immediately closed the box and pushed it back in my jacket. “Andrew?” She said in her sleepy voice. “Yes darling?” She tiredly patted next to her. “Are you coming to bed as well?” “Of course my love.”
She was enthusiastic about us going to the shopping mall because she really needs some new clothes. “Andrew look at this.” Her face was all lit up with joy as she was showing me a beautiful dress. “You should try it.” I said to her as she was admiring the dress. “You think?” I nodded at her. “Yes, go on just try it my love.” She shyly nods and smiles. “Okay, only because you say so.”
After a long day of shopping I took her out for some dinner. “You sure you’re not cold?” I asked her for the tenth time. “I’m fine, it’s just a little breeze.” She rubbed her arms and I couldn’t watch her shivering like this anymore. I wrapped my arm around her shoulder and held her close to me as we walked to the restaurant.
We were sitting in a beautiful room, all alone. She was looking around and smiled. “Did you did this for us Andrew?” I smiled and played dump. “I don’t know what you’re talking about my love.” She giggles and playfully slaps my hand. “This, us sitting in this beautiful room, all alone.” I nodded and grabbed her hand, bringing it carefully to my lips. “I asked for a quiet seat to eat because you had a busy and stressful day today.” I placed a soft kiss on the back of her hand. “Andrew…you didn’t have to.” I shrugged and just smiled at her, she giggles softly and looks down at the menu. Me on the other hand, I was getting nervous again as we were having lovely time. ‘Is this the perfect time to asked her?’ I looked around and saw nobody was around. ‘Good, she hates to draw attention to herself.’ I gently squeezed the box in my jacket and bite slightly my cheek. ‘Just do it.’
Y/n POV
He was looking nervous again, like he’s been doing for a while now. ‘Maybe it’s because he’s awkward and a shy guy?’ He let go of my hand and went nervously through his hair. “Andrew are you okay?” I asked as he let out a big sigh. “Yes I’m fine…” he smiles and looks again around us. “What’s wrong?” I looked around us as well, as we were still alone. “Y/n…” he breaths out and slowly gets on one knee. My heart stopped and my tears swelled up with tears. “Andrew…” I said softly. He smiled and grabbed my hand again.
“You are the best person I ever met in my life. My love…you are like a shot of espresso bathed in sunlight, you are incredibly energetic and enthusiastic and….I’m ready to wake up every morning with you by my side, to share my boring life with your fun and playful life. Y/n do you want to marry me?” His other hand came out of his pocket, holding a small black box. His hands were slightly trembling as he opened the box, revealing a beautiful ring. He was still smiling at me, admiring me as I slowly nodded.
“Andrew…of course I want to marry you, I want to be with you too.” My tears finally fell down my cheeks and he squeezed gently my hand. “I love you my darling.” “I love you Andrew.” He carefully placed the ring on my finger. “I can’t wait to call you my wife.” He carefully got up and grabbed both of my hands. “I can’t wait to call you my husband.” He gave me a soft kiss on my lips and we both smiled at each other the whole night like two teenagers who just fell in love with each other.
