Chapter Text
"There are other options," Ava lied. She might have considered other options a week ago, but she was going to die in less than a week and there were no other options! Holding a child hostage paled in comparison to the horrors she had committed for SHIELD, horrors that Bill had known about, some of which he had personally assigned to her. And yet he was getting cold feet over one little kid.
Fuck Bill, Ava thought, and not in the fun way. The girl was the only way Ava could gain any leverage over Scott Lang and the Pyms. The girl was the only person in this equation who didn't amount to little more than a nail in Ava's coffin. She scoffed at that thought; there was no way she'd have a body to be buried in a coffin if this didn't work.
It would work, with the girl.
She couldn't suppress a twinge of guilt as she slipped into the suit. Ava herself had only been nine when SHIELD began training her to become a stealth operative. She knew from experience that being used to further adults’ disputes and wars was one of the worst experiences a child could have.
Dying from molecular disequilibrium was one of the worst experiences an adult could have.
Ava shoved her conscience to the back of her pain-numb mind and started on her way to the girl. The kid, who would be dropped back off at home after Pym allowed Ava and Bill to use the tunnel, no harm no foul.
-
Ava almost didn't go inside the house. It was green, a pale lime green, like key lime pie. Ava hadn't eaten key lime pie for years, it was too solid.
She shook herself out of useless memories and went inside.
It was definitely the right house. Signs of a tween girl were everywhere: the bookbag hanging on the wall with a Wonder Woman lunchbox clipped to it, the calendar on the fridge that reminded everyone that Cassie had a soccer game every weekend, the Harcourt math book that lay open on the kitchen table to a lesson about dividing fractions.
Ava had never had a math book, or any textbook. She'd been six when the accident happened. Her parents had planned to begin homeschooling her when she turned seven because they didn't trust the special education system in Argentina. SHIELD hadn't bothered to educate her in anything beyond what she needed to know in order to be a stealth operative. Bill had given Ava books, yes, but she kept accidentally phasing and dropping them and losing her place. After a while, Bill gave up with the books. He did fight for a computer to be placed in her room, but his arguments were quickly shot down.
She didn't know which room the girl was in, but only two lights had been on when Ava viewed the house from the outside. The kid wasn't in either of those, or so Ava hoped. It was almost three in the morning.
Sure enough, Cassie was sound asleep in her bedroom. Ava didn't bother to take in the finer details of the space; she was focused on its occupant. It would be so easy to simply silence the girl and take her to Bill's house. So easy. But Ava knew that if she told Bill what she'd done before the lab was in their hands, he wouldn't help her. She needed his help.
So what to do with the girl?
Cassie rolled over while Ava ran through a few plans in her head. Taking hostages was easier when you had at least two people on the mic to remind you of the plan.
There were no mic men. SHIELD had collapsed. Ava knew that at least two of her handlers had died in a plane crash three years ago, because Bill had wordlessly handed her a newspaper clipping about the catastrophe. The clipping had been accompanied by a cupcake, so maybe Bill felt the same way about those sickos that Ava did.
Those sickos were out of the picture. The only other people in the current picture were the cartoonish astronauts in a handdrawn picture that lay on Cassie's desk. Ava hardly thought they counted.
Ava had only ever taken hostages for SHIELD, and when she had, it was just the taking. Not the holding. That was for the higher-ups. What on earth did people do to those they held hostage, anyway? Tickle them?
Cassie was just a kid. She didn't deserve to be pulled into Ava's world of pain and desperation. The fact that she was Scott Lang's daughter shouldn't incriminate her alongside her father.
What if the tunnel collapsed, and Cassie was reduced to the same fate Ava had been all those years ago?
That thought sealed Ava's resolve. She backed slowly out of the room, then out of the house. As she headed home, she resigned herself to doing this Bill's way, the humane way. Maybe it would make her sleep marginally better, doing the right thing. She hoped so.