InsaneJournal

It probably hadn't been since college that Sam had gotten this quality and quantity of sleep - namely, not good and not much. In his conscious mind he blamed it on this place. Too used to New York, the silence seemed to press in around him, suffocating, making his brain try to compensate by turning the nothingness into a sort of high pitched tone as though imagining someone blaring a whistle at him without even a pause to breathe would somehow be more comforting than the countryside quiet. Times he's been out of New York he's usually at least been in cities. If not cities then towns, with the electric background hum of streetlights and fridges and idle computers and all the other digital detritus that formed modern human life. Even the few days he'd spent stranded on Exile Island - scared out of his mind, sure he was going to die on some stupid tropical island and his brother and sister would never even know what happened to him - there had been the white noise of the ocean.

It was a simple answer. It made sense. It didn't explain why his run of insomnia stretched back several weeks before he'd arrived. (He had to find the time somewhere to surf Twitter for the memes, hot takes and blistering social analyses he'd been getting into lately, and rarely replying to people had the advantage of allowing him to schedule his own few posts for a normal time of the day so it wouldn't be so obvious to Joe Public and his nosy friends that he was consistently out of bed at two o'clock in the morning.)

No Twitter here, though. No news stories about his latest failings to dwell on. Nothing to focus his mind on one thing so he at least won't flit between seven different dark thoughts in the space of half a minute, not even a book to read - which people might not expect to be so rough for Sam, who back home had floor-to-almost-ceiling bookshelves across two entire walls that had left more than one person slightly gobsmacked on first sight.

"You just seem like more of a jock than a nerd, you know?" one of his old girlfriends had tried to explain. Porque no los dos?

He wandered outside at some point, half-intending to work more on the coop he'd been putting together from dismantled furniture. The sound of the hammer was going to be like an explosion in this quiet, and the sound was going to travel. For a moment he considered at least prepping more wood, separating pieces out and prying out the plugs holding them together (nothing even as advanced as proper nails), but.... but.

Instead he ran. It was dark, so dark that he could see thousands of (probably fake) stars in the sky instead of the scattered two or three you could pick out in New York, but that didn't matter much to him - there were nocturnal birds enough that he could adjust his sight to see through their eyes, something that was disconcerting but by now weirdly familiar. Most people never got the opportunity to see themselves going about their business from a third party perspective, but he wasn't most people. (He was Captain America.)

Even without workout music, running helped. He had to find a rhythm, his breathing falling in time with his feet hitting the ground, slowly exorcising everything else from his mind. He knew from experience it was only a temporary reprieve, but he welcomed it anyway, closing his eyes to make it easier to see only what the owls - or whatever they were - saw, scanning the ground in front of him for obstacles as they scanned it for prey. He skirted the edge of the town, passing by empty houses like crypts where he was less likely to bother any light sleepers or the odd few others who might happen to be awake at this hour.

It was fine. He'd be fine. Maybe he'd even tire himself out enough to snatch a couple more hours of sleep before the sun was fully up. Stranger things had happened.