Author's Notes: Look, I wrote somethind and managed not to curse every two sentences. Anyway, I started this for Samtember, and am not sure I'll be finishing, but ¯\_(⌣̯̀⌣́)_/¯ It's cute so far, I guess?

"You have got to be kidding me," Sam said, staring into the garment bag in disbelieving horror. Across the counter, the cute desk guy - clerk? What was the proper title for someone working the front of house at a dry cleaners? - looked up at him from the register. "Oh, no."

"What's wrong?" the guy asked. He had startlingly blue eyes, wide and pale, rimmed by long dark lashes. His brown hair was pulled back in a low ponytail and covered with a faded, nondescript ball cap. Sam was pretty sure they'd met before, but couldn't quite put his finger on when or where or under what circumstances. It didn't help that he had way bigger issues to deal with right now than trying to figure out how he knew Conventionally Attractive but Generic Front Desk Guy. Maybe they went to the same gym, or something. Sam put the bag on the counter and pawed it further open, hands trailing over the too-slick fabric.

"No," he said again, more forcefully this time. This could not be happening to him. "No, no, no."

"No what?"

"This is. . ." Sam trailed off, then pulled the red and white costume out of the bag to shake it accusingly at the guy. "This isn't mine!"

The guy checked the tag on the bag again, then shrugged. "It has your name on it."

"Yeah, but. . ." Sam groaned. How could this happen? Steve swore by this place! He was an Avenger, too; just because he wasn't Captain America didn't mean that they could mess with his super suit. "Look, man: this isn't what I brought in."

"Are you sure?"

"Are you for real right now?!" Sam was gonna punch this jerk right in his stupid, handsome face. "Do I look like a spandex kind of guy to you?"

Front Desk Guy gave him a deeply assessing look that made Sam's face flush with color, then put up his hands in a placating gesture. "I don't judge," he said, which didn't help his chances for not getting the scruff smacked off him. Did this jerk even own a razor?

"You got any idea who I am?" Sam asked. The guy shrugged. And that, of course, was precisely when Sam's phone went off with an obnoxiously catchy remix of the Star-Spangled Man, followed by Steve's recorded voice saying, "Avengers, Assemble!"

Because Tony Stark was totally the type of person who hacked people's phones just to change their ringtones, and Sam was having the absolute worst luck imaginable today.

Sam swore. He didn't have time for this. He grabbed the suit and garment bag, and leveled the front desk guy with a glare that could peel paint. Generic Front Desk Guy didn't even blink at the finger Sam jabbed into his face. "This isn't over, man."

"Uh-huh, sure thing, hero," Front Desk Guy said, the final word dripping with the same heatless derision Sam had gotten used to in the Air Force. He tipped his chin up, brows climbing. It looked like he was fighting a smirk. "Don't you have a kitten to rescue, or something?"

Sam wasn't going to respond. He was a grown man, and an Avenger. He was a superhero now, and superheroes didn't get into fist fights with minimum wage losers at the dry cleaners who couldn't even afford a decent hair cut. He turned sharply on his heel and stormed out the door.

Steve whistled appreciatively at him as they loaded up onto the quinjet.

"Lookin' good, Falcon," he teased, eyes sweeping down and mouth curling up into a grin. Sam blushed so hard he felt lightheaded and scowled. He'd had no choice but to wear the super suit he'd mistakenly been given at the dry cleaners. It wasn't made of the same specially designed Kevlar weave of his regular body armor, which could stop armor piercing rounds and redistribute force so that the high-velocity impacts left only bruises instead of breaking bones, but it was better than strapping on his wingpack over jeans and a t-shirt, which offered exactly zero protection.

He wasn't sure what the red and white material actually was, but it wasn't - as he had first assumed - really spandex. The stuff was just as lightweight and flexible, but it was a lot tougher. Not tough enough that he thought he could survive getting shot with anything more powerful than a 9mm or a 40 S&W, of course, but tough enough that he was comfortable taking it out on mission. It wasn't like he'd never worn Type II or III body armor before.

Sam had just never worn any body armor that was this. . . well, tight. Form-fitting, really. Like, so tight that if he hadn't been wearing a cup underneath it, he was pretty sure Steve would have been able to tell whether he was circumcised or not.

And, yeah, they were good pals, but they didn't need to know each other quite that well.

"Yeah, yeah. Yuck it up, man," Sam told him testily. He tugged the brightly colored cowl up over his face. "You don't get to give me crap: you wore tights and shook your butt for money."

"Y'know, you make the USO sound a lot more fun than I remember it being." Steve chuckled, and solemnly added, in his best stage voice, "Every bond you buy is a bullet in the barrel of your best guy's gun."

"Exactly."

There were some things about the uniform that Sam did like. The cowl, for example, was fun. Sam was kind of a big fan of the cowl, even if he thought it looked a little silly with his high-tech Falcon goggles.

Not that he'd admit that to literally anyone on the planet under pain of death. Sam would take that secret with him to the grave.

"So," Sam began, as Steve settled into the co-pilot seat. Romanov was still on her way, and since no one actually trusted Steve to pilot anything they didn't want to see smashed into a runway somewhere, they had to wait for her before they could take off. "What are we dealing with this time?"

"Got a lead on Bucky," Steve answered, beaming. Sam wasn't surprised. It would have had to have been a lead to get Steve in such a good mood. "Out in Myanmar. There was a Hydra facility that got blown up near part of its border with India."

It only took an hour and a half to clear the remains of the underground facility and round up the surviving bad guys for local authorities, but then there was another six hours of paperwork and bureaucratic Avengers nonsense, plus the time in transit, so Sam didn't make it back to New York City for two days.

He was in the shower when he realized that something wasn't right.

Because he could hear a phone ringing. It wasn't his phone, of course, because that was resting on the bathroom counter so that he could sing along with Jimi Hendrix's 'Purple Haze,' but it was definitely a phone. In his apartment. Sam frowned, and paused mid-loofah scrub.

He didn't own a home phone. Nobody did anymore. Sam was pretty sure the only person he knew who was old enough to bother having a landline still was Steve.

The phone rang again, louder and more obnoxious this time, a wailing klaxon air raid siren that set his teeth on edge. Sam quickly rinsed the soap suds off and hopped out of the shower, wrapping a towel around his waist as he went. He followed the noise down the hall and into his tiny living room before it stopped just as abruptly as it had started.

He was startled by the ringing of another phone, this time coming from the other side of his apartment. It almost sounded like. . . like it was in his bedroom?

"What the. . .?" Sam muttered, storming across his apartment in search of the source. He was just stepping over the threshold when it went silent, and the siren sound from the living came back.

Somebody was messing with him. Someone had to be messing with him, but the only people who had keys to his apartment were his mom –- who was emphatically not the kind of person who would prank him because Darlene Wilson was an honest-to-goodness saint -– and Romanov. At least, he was pretty sure that Romanov had made herself a set of keys to his apartment at some point when he wasn't looking because that seemed like exactly the kind of thing she would do. She had a sly, slow smile that he associated with cats about to knock an expensive vase to the floor just to watch it shatter.

This time, Sam didn't go to the living room. He clapped his hands over his ears and waited for the wail to end, and then pounced on the renewed ringing the moment it started back up in his bedroom. Sure enough, there was a cheap burner phone duct-taped to the underside of his bed. The dimly lit screen showed the words [BLOCKED NUMBER] instead of the caller's ID. He jammed his thumb into the 'Accept' button and snarled, "Listen here, you –"

But whoever was on the other end hung up immediately. Sam ripped the battery out of the back of the phone and was debating the merits of smashing the whole thing into dust versus taking it in to the Avengers Tower to see if they could trace it when another one went off, this time with the old-timey jangling ring of a rotary phone. What kind of person broke into someone's house to hide burner phones all programmed with different default rings?!

Finding all of the phones took time, and whenever Sam thought he'd gotten the last one, another ring piped up from some corner of his apartment. Strapped under his kitchen sink. Buried in a baggy in his window planter. Hidden in one of his air vents. He ended up demolishing his couch because he could hear one ringing from within its back panel but couldn't figure out how to get it out without tearing off the upholstery. The sky darkened outside and he finally slid to a seat in his hallway with six burner phones cradled in his toweled lap.

"What the hell?" he asked the devices tiredly.

Distantly, he heard a phone ring. Sam closed his eyes and thumped his head back against the wall a few times.

With all the drama and frustration around the Mystery of the Obnoxious Phones in His Apartment, Sam didn't make it down to Lower Manhattan and the dry cleaners with the borrowed suit until the following day.

The same guy was working the front desk today, unfairly cuter than the last time, and just seeing him got Sam's hackles raised. He hadn't slept well and knew it showed, knew there were bags under his eyes and that he should have gotten that extra shot of espresso in his morning coffee to compensate. When he entered, Front Desk Guy looked up from a worn pulp fiction novel with a bored, "Hey."

Sam dropped the garment bag on the counter. "Where. Is my suit," he growled, flat and lacking any rising intonation that might have made it sound more like a real question. Front Desk Guy turned to the next page in his book.

"I don't know, man," he drawled. "Where is your suit?"

"Come on." Jeez, he just wanted his regular, sensible Falcon suit back. As comfy as the red and white suit was, he was going to die of embarrassment if he had to keep wearing it. He'd caught Steve checking him out four times on the way back from Myanmar, and Romanov had bounced a quarter off his butt before they were done with debriefs at the Tower. He could not put it on again for the next mission. "I know you've got it back there somewhere."

"Nope," Front Desk Guy replied, popping the 'p' at the end obnoxiously. Sam groaned and put his face down on the counter next to the garment bag.