Eva had slept over at the HQ. She was stood in front of the mirror in Sam's bathroom, trying to do her eyeliner, and waiting for her hand to stop shaking.
She had had a nightmare. It was reasonable, she figured – in the last half a year she had been shot and kidnapped, and that latter thing had unnerved her more than she cared to admit. It was… well, she wasn't sure what it was. But the nightmares kept happening, and she didn't use public bathrooms anymore, and every so often she would flinch when someone approached her from behind.
And, occasionally, her hand shook. It liked to do it at inconvenient moments, like when she was about to be late for work and had already done half her make-up. Pursing her lips, Eva set down the eyeliner brush and clenched her tattooed fist. Stop it, she told herself. Don't be so stupid.
There was a soft knock on the door, and Sam walked in. "Hey," he said quietly, "you okay?"
"Yeah," she said, looking at his reflection in the mirror and wrapping her arms around herself. "Um… no. Not really."
"It's okay to not be over it, y'know."
She looked down. "This is what it's like all the time for you," she said, "isn't it? With the PTSD?"
"Yeah."
"Does it go away?" she asked, hopefully.
"Sometimes. Not always."
Of course; he was the expert at night terrors out of the two of them. "Thanks for being honest," she said. What else could she say? That she felt like a complete idiot for being so… so weak, when she was surrounded by people who saved the world on a daily basis? When Sam had lost his wingman and just kept on going, while she kept crying whenever she thought about being tied up?
"You wanna talk about it?"
"Not really. At least, not when I'm running late."
"I'm here when you do," Sam said, and his phone bleeped. Upon checking it he swore under his breath. "Gotta go," he said, "emergency."
"'Course you do." She let him kiss the top of his head and watched him run off before turning back to her discarded eyeliner brush. "Right, asshole," she murmured to her reflection, "you're gonna sort yourself out and make yourself look presentable for an eight hour shift in that godforsaken coffee shop. Capisce? Good."
She really needed a coping technique for this stuff. Unfortunately, her usual fallback for when she felt crappy was to drink herself halfway to hell and set fire to the trash can, and sober pyromania just wasn't the same. Just one drink, said a voice in the back of the head, to make you sleep easier. With each new nightmare, it was getting harder to ignore it. She probably should have told someone, but Vision and Sam both seemed to have more than enough of their own problems at the moment with the Accords, and Alvie was… well, Alvie.
I'll be fine, she told herself. It was probably a lie, but she felt all the better for saying it.
A/N so I didn't want to immediately brush off everything that happened to Eva but I didn't want the trauma to, like, take her over either, y'know? Because in my experience, when people deal with awful things the world doesn't grind to a halt for them, and they just have to struggle to keep up. I wanted Eva to deal with PTSD exactly how a twenty-two year old who still has to pay her rent would - that is to say, not very well. Also, this is the last chapter before we enter Civil War storyline, so prepare for spoilers next chapter.