Don't You Worry Child

Lost Stars

Chapter Summary: Three years have passed since Samantha was abducted and things have changed... a lot. Now Samantha has to get used to it all and she isn't sure how she'll handle it.

Soundtrack: Lost Stars by Keira Knightley

"You've been gone for three years Samantha," he said and she looked at him in utter disbelief. Three years? How had she been gone for three years? She was just at the senate hearing mere hours before.

"That can't be right, I-it can't have been three years! I was at the senate hearing a couple of hours ago. I-I'm twenty," she said in a stream of consciousness. Three years? That was so long. That was 36 months, it was 1,095 days; that meant 26,280 hours which meant 1,576,800 minutes and that meant 94,608,000 seconds. How had that much time passed without her noticing? Why didn't she know that it had been three years?

"I'm telling you, that was three years ago. You've been gone for three years," he said and she felt the need to sit down. What was going on? What was this? How could this even be possible? "You didn't know?" he asked gaging her reaction.

"N-no," she answered, still confused by the turn everything had taken. How had she been gone for three years? It was the only question that her mind could even begin to formulate. Hold on a minute... if she'd been gone for three years that meant that she was twenty! She still felt as though she was seventeen. Was this some sort of practical joke? Was this her father's idea of a prank?

"After the senate hearing, you were bundled into a car by someone – we never found out who, we thought it was HYDRA – and then... then a year later there was a body found. The only thing there was to go off of was dental records. I-I couldn't believe it, the body was burned to a crisp and dumped on a highway, aside from that, there was nothing. We had to bury you," he said, tears in his eyes matching the tears in hers.

"W-what have I missed?" she asked, confused by everything, wanting to know every detail of what had happened since she'd gone missing. Was everyone okay? What about S.H.I.E.L.D? What had happened to the organisation she worked for?

"You have a little sister," her father told her with a smile, the smile that she knew to be the one of paternal love. There was a point where that smile was only saved for her, not that she minded sharing her father with another sibling. One of her few memories of her childhood was of her begging her mother for a sibling. She'd always wanted one and now she had one.

"I do? Wait – is she Pepper's or one of the girls after Audrey?" she asked, it was a necessary question really, what with her father's history. She didn't care about the fact that she had called her mother by her first name. The woman had been a liar and a killer, she didn't deserve the name 'Mom'. Hadn't, she hadn't deserved the name 'Mom', Audrey had been dead for three years now. God, three years, it had been three years since she had shot her mother.

He laughed a small laugh "Pepper's. We found out she was pregnant just after you went missing," he answered and she smiled.

"What's her name?" she asked, a sweet smile on her face.

"Sophia Katherine Stark. I wanted to name her Irona after the suits but Pepper was convinced she'd get beaten up at school with a name like that," he said and she laughed a hearty laugh.

"Do you have any pictures?" she asked eagerly, all the while the thought of 'I have a sister' kept running through her mind. Her father took his phone out of his pocket and showed her a picture of Pepper with a blonde little girl. The girl had his brown eyes with that mischievous glint and Pepper's everything else "She has your eyes," she commented, a watery smile on her face.