A/N: This first chapter is meant as more of a prologue than anything, so we'll get into all of the fun stuff a little later. This will be a Steve Rogers x OC fanfiction that takes place (mostly) in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, after the events of Avengers: Age of Ultron, but with a few mixes in there already - just to give you a little context for now :)
It was a Monday.
Evaline Kaeser woke up to sunlight peeping in through her blinds. The newspaper was at her doorstep already, a layer of perspiration on the plastic due to the humidity in the air. The coffeemaker was still warm from her roommate's cup that had presumably been made earlier that morning, a testament to the issues of buying technology secondhand. The milk was still fresh, the cereal still crisp, the dishes all clean as she sat down to her newspaper and laptop.
Her computer pinged incessantly as e-mails rolled in from various clients, and she began organizing them with her own private system. As a graphic designer, she had a special relationship with her computer and its files that only she could appreciate; each was taken care of, ranked by importance, and fine-tuned so each request held only the most vital of information.
She opened her first file of the day that had been sent to her from an e-mail she didn't recognize as one currently existing in her little black book of clients. Still, the unfamiliar address didn't stop her from downloading and opening the pictures that had been attached to the message. Sipping her coffee and savoring the kick of the caramel sweetener that she made herself with dulce de leche syrup, sea salt, and cream, she allowed for herself to look down at her phone while she waited for the files to open.
A groan emitted from the doorway behind her as a boy stumbled out, his glasses on but his eyes still closed behind them as he blindly shuffled toward the counter opposite of him, where the coffee maker still sat steaming. Right beside the pot was a freshly made cup of coffee, as Evaline made for him almost every morning; she didn't trust him to be around hot liquids before he actually had his own coffee and woken up a little bit.
She tried her best to fight back her too-big grin as she commented, "Good morning, sunshine."
Luke grumbled something that sounded more like an insult than a proper response to Evaline's well wishes, and she let loose her grin. His words became more comprehensible as he said, "Why are you so bright and joyful today?"
"I just feel good," Evaline said, shrugging her shoulders and giving him a small, relaxed smile. "It's not my fault that you woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning."
Her roommate had just opened his mouth to no doubt fight back, when Evaline's computer began to glitch, the windows on the screen bouncing around erratically until her e-mail popped up again, showing a whole slew of e-mails from the same mysterious address she had unwittingly downloaded images from earlier. Just like that, her bright mood was depleted; obviously, there was something sketchy about the e-mail address.
"Karma," Luke commented snidely, his words coming out a bit muffled considering his mouth was still on the edge of the mug and his voice was directed straight into the coffee. He finally bothered to lift his head as he said, "The gods have decided to punish you for your eternal cheeriness, and give you a dose of reality at long last."
Evaline shrugged off his mood, her copper hair sliding behind her shoulders as she reached to the top of her laptop. "Whatever, I'll just restart it and hope it'll stop… whatever this is."
Luke rolled his eyes as he saw her finger directly over the power button, but he barely moved as he commented, "I swear to God, Eva, if you hit that power button and take the childish way out…"
Despite his warning, she pressed the power button for thirty seconds, then started it back up again, all to the sound of Luke groaning and complaining about how little he was appreciated in the household that held himself, Evaline, and Marley, their third roommate. Meanwhile, Evaline was having a crisis of her own; what she thought was the beginnings of an error message had begun to scrawl across the black screen in white print as she growled, "Shit."
She was about to just try the manual restart again, despite the fact that she was sure Luke would throw his mug at her, coffee and all, when she actually deigned to read the message on her screen.
You have been in a coma for six months now. Please wake up.
She leaned back in her chair, leaning on profanity as well to help her accurately portray her feelings with a simple "What the fuck?"
"What now?" Luke asked in what Evaline and Marley had always called his 'doomsday voice'. Luke was constantly finding the downside of things, and the potential complications that could arise; he had been that way since she had met him and Marley in their freshman year of high school, in a Art Studio class. Her annoyance with this characteristic of his was that he was usually right in guessing what consequences would occur.
She didn't verbally answer his question, instead gesturing vaguely to the screen. Footsteps padded in behind her until she felt Luke's presence cowering behind her now, the scent of his Happy Hour hangover wafting over her as she nearly gagged, gasping, "Luke."
"Oh, hush," he commented grumpily, ignoring her as he squinted at the screen facing both of them. As an additional comment, he offered, "I told you that you shouldn't shut down your computer manually. Now, you've got a virus."
Evaline turned from her laptop as Luke started making his retreat back through the kitchen. "I'm not sure that the two of those are connected."
"Well, who are you to say?" Luke asked primly, taking a sip of his coffee as he kept his honey-colored eyes locked on Evaline in judgment. She remained silent for the rest of his drink, before he lowered the mug from his lips and said, "On that note, I take my leave."
Rolling her eyes, Evaline turned back to her computer, commenting as Luke re-entered his cave, "Thank God."
No longer under the eye of her insistent and stubborn roommate, she once again tried to turn the computer off, more out of fear and discomfort this time. Although she had shot down Luke's supposition of a virus only moments before, she had heard one too many stories about identity theft via computer viruses, and seen one too many horror movies where a killer stalked their victims through the cyber network. When the desktop failed to go black, leaving the message blinking at her, she snapped the screen shut and pushed it away like it was infected, instead pulling her newspaper to her instead.
As she pulled it out of the plastic wrapping, it landed flat on its front, revealing the crossword puzzle on the back. Evaline shrugged; she enjoyed doing the puzzles every once in a while, and she needed something truly mind numbing to get her thoughts off of the possible hacker on her laptop.
Pulling the puzzle closer and grabbing a pen out of the tin can they kept in the middle of the dining room table for this purpose, Evaline eyed the list of clues, scratching in the answers as she found them.
1 ACROSS: What is usually asked before "thank you" (5 letters)
Please.
3 ACROSS: An event that is held before a funeral; also called "a visitation" (4 letters)
Wake.
4 ACROSS: The opposite of down (2 letters)
"What kind of child's puzzle is this?" Evaline grumbled, writing the final word in the provided boxes.
Up.
Her heart lodged itself in her throat as she realized what the words thus far spelled out. As she searched the rest of the puzzle, she realized the remaining words were all normal suggestions, such as the last names of record-breaking baseball players and even more eloquent synonyms for SAT vocabulary words.
But the three words she had already written in stuck in her mind, the same as the message on her computer.
Please wake up.
Quickly, she tore the crossword puzzle's page from the paper and crumpled it up, tossing it into the kitchen aimlessly. She just wanted the words, the spookiness, away from her as she tried to breathe, and tried to settle the raging headache that was coming on.
She reached for her coffee, drinking it in gulps from the mug as the smells of the Colombian beans brought back memories of a summer-long mission trip and studying the Spanish language and Latino boys. It was enough to relax her and bring her back to reality, before she pulled her bowl of cereal toward her.
Taking a mouthful almost blindly, she was surprised to feel a difference in the shape of the Cheerios she had been expecting. While some were rounded, most of them had sharper bits as she looked down into her cereal to make sure she was eating the right thing.
A mockery of alphabet soup, albeit with Cheerios and milk instead of noodles and broth, stared back at her.
Somehow knowing what they were going to say, her curiosity won out as she ladled out a spoonful and spread it on the table, reorganizing the letters to spell exactly what she had expected.
Please wake up.
Slamming her chair back from the table, she winced as it squealed against the tile floor. No matter how hard she stared at the cereal on the table and how hard she blinked her eyes, the shapes of the Cheerios didn't change and the message stayed the same.
The door to Luke's room slammed open, startling her as she quickly swiped the Cheerios so that he couldn't see the message they spelled. Although Luke looked almost as disheveled as he had during his previous appearance earlier in the morning, he at least had bothered to put contacts in and make an attempt to tame his wavy chestnut hair. His eyes were wide as he looked at Evaline practically on top of the counter in an attempt to get away from a unknown threat, and he asked slowly, "Eva… ?"
"I'm fine," she said quickly, shaking her head as she slowly pulled away from the safety of the counter. "I'm fine, I promise. Just a little… skittish this morning."
"Skittish seems to be an understatement." Luke's dark eyebrows knitted together in concern, wrinkling the skin between them. "Are you sure everything is… ?"
"Everything is okay," Evaline interrupted before he could ask, nodding once before she put a hand to her head, which was throbbing continuously with pain at this point, and prepared a lie that came to her a bit too easily. "I didn't get much sleep last night because of a nightmare that I think has left some weird feeling in my stomach. I think I might go back to sleep for another hour and just stay up later tonight."
All humor and grumpiness had left Luke's face by this point, replaced with genuine concern for Evaline. "Okay. Well, I'm off today so I'll just be one room over if you need to… talk about anything."
Evaline had already started backing up toward the hallway, and her bedroom. "Yeah, thank you."
The moment that Luke turned back to his room, Evaline ran to her own, shuffling around in the drawer of her nightstand until she found the nearly forgotten about and nearly emptied bottle of medicine in the back corner. Scrambling to open it, she took out the last two pills available and popped them dry, before settling onto her bed and crawling back under the covers, her heart still racing.
Begging her body to do the opposite of what the messages told her, Evaline finally felt herself beginning to fade. The last sight she saw before the medication lulled her to sleep was the prescription bottle on her nightstand, the white label that was normally emblazoned with names, numbers, and codes empty except a simple line of text.
Please wake up.