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'"zizi pets one lizard and thinks that makes her relevant like 20 years later as if catchat hasnt got like a billion other better versions of exactly her thing but with like… actual depth lol"
Zari didnt care what trolls had to say. Really! She didn't! She hadn’t been lying to Mick when she’d told him all they were looking for was her attention. But something about this comment, at this moment, struck a nerve.
Doubting herself, and comparing herself to others was never something that she had felt the need to do, she'd never been in any doubt that there was nobody like her.
But that was just the problem. Apparently now there was.
It wasn’t really that she cared whether ‘@dragonEWsque’ thought she was still relevant. Her millions of followers and 500 million net worth showed her quite clearly she was. But at that moment, it wasn’t her CatChat followers’ opinions she was concerned about.
One of the first things you have to get used to when you become a global icon is that everybody suddenly wants to be your best friend. But the second thing you have to realise is that none of them really want to be your friend. Even if they don’t just want to latch on to your fame, they want to be friends with this perfect idea of you they have. Zari had convinced herself she was fine with that, what’s wrong with everyone only knowing your best angle? That was, until the Legends had crashed into her life. Suddenly she had these ridiculous people, the kind of people her brother was friends with, surrounding her. They were like this huge second family he had never told her about, and at some point she realised that the thing she wanted most was to be a part of that. She convinced herself she only wanted to come to the French revolution because she thought it sounded fun, but when Ava called her a member of the team, an interim legend even when she had screwed up, her heart had leapt in her chest.
At first she sometimes just felt like Behrad’s sister, tagging along for the ride, not a permanent member, even after she had started to connect with the rest of the team. But when Behrad had died (something she was simply not thinking about the current emotional implications of. He was back and everything was absolutely totally fine.) she had found herself motivated by something stronger, weaving her into the fabric of the team (an appropriate metaphor, she supposed) until when he returned she realised she was connected to the team with threads that no longer only passed through him.
Now she had something she had never known she wanted, but had grown to value more than almost anything… real friends, who liked her for her. Or maybe they did. She couldn’t suppress the growing worry that perhaps it was exactly the opposite. They liked her for someone else. The other Zari.
Had they only warmed to her really because the other Zari was still a part of her? Did they even like her now they knew another version? A better version? A version with ‘actual depth’? A version gone so she could stay. She hated that where she used to feel so self assured her brain was now constantly swirling with these questions, that she’d sunk so low as to obsess about something some random Catchat commenter had said.
And that wasn’t the only thing on her mind. With Sara gone, the mood on the ship was simultaneously subdued and frantic, every day spent desperately searching for where she could have gone that Gidget couldn’t find her, but barely speaking about her beyond this search, as if acknowledging her disappearance would make it permanent.
She and Behrad had been the only ones sober, and even he had been high, yet she still hadn't noticed. More questions still: would the other Zari have noticed? She wondered if she wasn’t the only one thinking that. She wondered if Ava was thinking that.
The first thing Ava had done, realising Sara was missing, was to have Gidget run every single kind of scan she could for her, every day for a week. All they found was blurring security footage being beamed out of sight as they walked away oblivious. Ava's body language got tenser and jerkier with every failed attempt to see where that had taken her, and the circles under her eyes darkened. Eventually, after spending two successive nights awake at the control panel, and finally screaming at Gidget to stop calling her captain, she let Nate guide her into the captain’s office. Zari could hear her sobbing into his shoulder from where she lingered out of sight in the doorway, and wished she could feel as sure that her comfort would be welcomed.
If Ava broke down in front of her, she wasn’t sure she’d even know what to do. Maybe other Zari would have. Maybe she was just shallow and emotionally incompetent.
But as it turned out, she hadn't had to find out how she'd deal with this, because after that moment with Nate, Zari hadn’t seen Ava shed a single tear. The woman standing at the control panel when they walked on to the bridge the next day seemed like a completely different person to the one Zari had grown so close to.
Ava's enthusiasm and individuality had been the things Zari had grown to admire about her, but now she was barely even talking, let alone rambling about something she was interested in. Zari had seen Ava as a leader, she knew that she liked to have rules and guidelines, but now there was no A.L.O.H.A. There were only brusque orders, and everyone else on the team seemed to just be going with that, unconfused by the idea of Ava acting like this.
The last straw came at breakfast the day after a lead they had been following came to nothing. Zari was sitting at the table next to Nate, drinking some of the green juice nobody else would touch when Ava walked in. Immediately, Zari noticed something was off.
“Ava! Your hair!” Zari jumped up from her seat as Ava turned, confusion flashing across her face for a second before it smoothed back into her set expression. “I’m all for experimentation but like this you can’t have the second best hair on the team, after me of course-” Nate made a protesting noise, his mouth full of cereal, at this ranking, but Zari ignored him and rushed over to where Ava still stood by the fabricator, “Not with it up so severely. Here, if you’re going for hair up now I have so many great updos that will be just perfection with your colour and bone structure, let me just-” She reached up to loosen the tight bun Ava’s hair was pinned into, but just before she touched it, Ava jerked her head away.
“This is more professional.” She said shortly. "Extra frivolous touches just take away from its purpose: being effective.” And with that, she turned away, leaving Zari standing with her hand still raised, and a shocked expression on her face.
Hair had been a cornerstone of her and Ava’s friendship. Ava’s hair had been the first thing Zari had admired about her, and since they had become friends it had become a regular thing for them to sit in Zari’s room, or for Zari to shoo Sara out of her and Ava’s room, and sit and talk while Zari messed around with Ava’s hair, acting like the carefree teenagers neither of them had ever really been. Sometimes Ava even let her film hair styling videos with her hair (she was a bit short on content now she had to pretend she wasn’t travelling through time with superheroes so allergic to fame that they had convinced the world they were frauds. Some people spend their whole career trying to avoid that!)
One time, just before the 'The Smells' concert, they had let Sara stay and Ava had ended up with her head in her hands half jokingly bemoaning why so many of her friends seemed to be attracted to John Constantine (“should I just call Gary to join in with this instead?”), and compelled to discuss it in front of her ("you're all bisexual, you have twice the pool of perfectly good 'Not John Constantines" to be attracted to!").
This had devolved into a conversation about how Ava had totally got lesbian vibes from Zari Tomaz, (“all that flannel, you know?”) and the bet she and Sara had had about her and Nate (Zari had been rather surprised herself at that romance. She would’ve gone for Charlie.).
At that point Zari knew Ava well enough to know her absolute blindness to chemistry between men and women, (she still wasn’t sure if it was willful or genuine) and had pointed out that if they were playing into stereotypes here then maybe they should be chopping off all of Ava’s lovely long hair instead of styling it. Even after that threat, which had sent her shrieking to an amused Sara for protection (as if she wasn't just as able to defend herself) from the scissors Zari had produced from somewhere, Ava had easily let her get back to the intricate braid she was arranging.
But this time was different. This Ava wasn’t slightly tipsy and joking around, she wasn’t even looking at Zari anymore, let alone grinning at her. She had busied herself with the fabricator, her mask only cracking for a second as Zari saw her hand move automatically to the button for the coffee Zari knew she didn’t drink.
Zari quietly sank back into her chair, her mind whirring. Ava’s flinch had felt like concrete proof that Zari’s worries had been correct: Ava blamed her. Maybe that was why the rest of the team hadn’t seemed as confused by Ava’s behaviour, was she acting the same away from Zari? The whole while Ava fetched her plain breakfast, avoiding the French toast Zari knew was her favourite, she sat in silence, her thoughts spiralling.
Once Ava had left the room with her breakfast, the tension seemed to decrease slightly, but the mood remained grim and silent. Zari couldn’t bear it. Her fault or not, she needed to understand what was going on, even if it hurt her.
“Okay I can’t just sit here in silence anymore, what the hell has happened to Ava? I understand it’s because of Sara being missing but I would expect her to be… I don’t know, frantically hunting, not for her to shut down like this? It’s like she’s a completely different person.” At that last sentence a collective wince went around the table.
“If that bun shocked you, love, you should have seen her hair the last time she lost Sara.” Zari turned to glare at John.
“Not helpful.” She hissed. He looked surprisingly apologetic, but then again she knew he and Ava had a begrudging mutual tolerance nowadays. And maybe he even felt sorry because he cared about her (but having That talk had kind of taken a backseat in all this).
“Well,” Nate replied tentatively, “I don’t know if you know, but Ava is… she’s… y’know, a c-word?”
Not quite processing what Nate had meant, Zari gasped in outrage and raised a hand to slap Nate for his extremely uncharacteristic rudeness about Ava.
“No! No, no, no! Not that c-word!” Nate hurriedly added. “I meant like… can I write it down? I don’t want-”
John sighed, “She’s a clone, love.”
Zari dropped the hand she’d still had poised in front of Nate. “Oh, that. Yes, she mentioned at book club.” The mildly disturbing memories of that book club (she still hadn’t dared ask about the federal agent) had kind of been overshadowed by the party they had held afterwards (one of Zari’s best, especially planned at such short notice, if she did say so herself).
Nate looked at her in slight confusion, “You seem weirdly... not weirded out about that?”
“I’ve been online since I was ten years old, Nathaniel. I’ve seen stranger things than Ava Sharpe.” Zari rolled her eyes. “Anyway, I don’t know what that has to do with the way Ava’s behaving now?”
“Well, when we first met Ava she didn’t like us very much. Think Astra’s view of us when she first joined us on the ship but from an extremely uptight bureaucrat. She was pretty emotionless.”
“Unless that emotion was annoyance with us. She was cold.” Behrad put in.
Zari almost scoffed at that. She could see Ava as an exasperated bureaucrat annoyed by the legends. But cold? “Ava? How cold can she have been? This is the same woman who I saw like… literally melt when Sara laughed at something she said.”
“Yeah.” Mick grunted, joining the conversation. “Sara.”
“I don’t know how much Ava would want us to say, but she wasn’t really… made to do emotions.” Behrad said, his face uncharacteristically serious. “We’ve been thinking that with Sara, the one who brought her out of that, gone, she might be kind of struggling to deal with it, and reverting back to how she used to be.”
“Not that she’s stopped feeling things,” Nate put in quickly. “Just that she doesn’t really know how to deal with it. We decided just going along with it for now might be better. We kind of hoped we would have found Sara by now.”
They had decided, had they? Zari felt an unfamiliar, and unwelcome, wave of discomfort at the realisation that they had discussed this without her. She wasn’t used to not being invited, and now when it was to conversations among her close friends, about the woman she would probably call her best friend… it kind of stung. (A little voice whispered that if Behrad had been there, that meant the other Zari would have been invited too. The other Zari would have understood.)
Perhaps it was just that she hadn’t known Ava then, but what they had told her had done nothing to convince her she should make the same decision to go along with it. In fact, she thinks, a plan forming, she is all the more convinced that even if Ava might blame her, she has to snap her best friend out of this; the Zari Tarazi way.
-----
But the Zari Tarazi way took some preparation. She may not be able to get Sara back for Ava, or even be as understanding or useful a friend as the other Zari, but planning a campaign was Zari’s speciality. And her new one was her most crucial yet, get Ava back to normal. As she marched around the Waverider, her phone open on her DragonPlanner app, she felt more in her element than she had in weeks.
Step one of a successful campaign: an excellent original concept. Just as Zari usually considered what things brought the most positive viewer engagement, she tried to think of the times she had seen Ava at her happiest, independent of Sara. Inviting a serial killer on to the Waverider seemed impractical, so she moved on to her second option: book club.
Step two, making a plan and gathering the necessary components for everything to go off without a hitch. She had got the impression books weren’t the most important part of book club, but she had to get every bit perfect, so, using the wonders of modern technology (or was it future technology? When even are you when in the temporal zone? Can one even be in style when you’re in no time period?) she searched up the top selling new true crime books of 2042, and downloaded an audio book (she knew Ava had gotten into the habit of enjoying listening to them with Sara. She hoped that the reminder wouldn't do more harm than good, and bought the ebook just in case.) Ava probably wasn’t meant to know that they’d discovered the identity of the most prolific female serial killer but… technically it was past knowledge and Zari knew this had been the case Ava was most excited making the StabCast episode for.
The most major hitch in this part of the plan is the fact that, less traumatically than Sara had, all the other members of bookclub had departed from the ship. Zari knew she couldn’t send the jumpship out without Ava noticing and questioning it, but, this time with the benefits of careful time management and also technology that was definitely from the future, Zari could work with that too.
Step three; with all the pieces gathered together, all Zari needed to do was perfectly set the stage (like she had learnt to after the 2029 VMAs, the one we do not talk about). Zari was very used to creating an environment for people where she wanted them to feel like she could be their (very beautiful, very stylish) friend, but as she set up her room with blankets and pillows she realised she wasn’t very sure how well she was doing creating somewhere for someone whose friend she desperately hoped she still was (Zari wasn’t used to acknowledging herself wanting desperately for anything much at all since recently.)
She’d done some work in app design, but she wasn’t exactly a master hacker anymore, now that she was split from other Zari. She was sure that other Zari would’ve been able to hack Gidget into doing what she wanted, but she had to settle for asking the AI very very nicely to do what she needed (Behrad had offered to help, but silly as it probably sounded to him, she was determined to be able to do all of this her own way.). All she had left to do was to collect the snacks from the fabricator (apparently the love of donuts persisted against all circumstances and timelines).
So finally, a few days after that awkward breakfast, she was ready for step four: the presentation. She gave Gidget the okay to begin, and sat leaning against the bed to wait, her legs tucked under her, wearing stylish-but-comfortable pajamas from her DragonSnug collection. A comfy set she had had Gidget fabricate for Ava was laid out next to her, because while Ava’s nightwear choices actually tended to meet Zari’s approval, she was sure Ava would not come in wearing anything conducive to relaxation.
Sure enough Ava appeared in the doorway wearing an even more uptight pantsuit than the one from when Zari first met her, her shirt buttoned up to her neck and even the jacket buttoned (which really did make it all less of a good look than it at least had the potential to be). She also still had that bun.
“Zari?” she said questioningly, stepping cautiously into the room “Gideon said you needed assistance with something? I need to be back quickly to monitor-”
“I’m afraid not, Ava” Zari replied, “Gidget, now!”
Before Ava could do anything more than spin around in confusion, the door had slammed shut behind her.
“Isolated lockdown procedure initiated.” Gidget intoned. “A lock has been placed on this door. Except in the case of an emergency it will not be openable for the next 12 hours.’
“What is going on?!” Ava’s voice was rising, the least measured Zari had heard it be in weeks. “Gideon, open this door right now.”
“I’m afraid I cannot do that.” Gidget said, kind but firm.
“I have to check the scanners again, the last scan will have finished and-”
“Behrad and John are checking them for you tonight.” Zari said gently. “You need a break.”
“No, what I need is to be able to go out there and do my job. I don’t have time for-” Ava looked around, looking like a caged animal, “this. That was what- what- I just can’t. Gideon, I am the captain of this ship and I am commanding you to open this door immediately.”
“I’m sorry Captain Sharpe, I am programmed to do what the Captain of this ship needs, and Miss Tarazi is correct, you need a break.”
“No, what the captain of this ship needs is for me to not have failed her! And since that’s been and gone, what she needs now is for you to let me keep searching!” Zari watched in silent sympathy as Ava’s impassive mask crumbled in front of her, her face filling instead with self recrimination and pain.
“Well,” she said cautiously, “Getting our feelings out in book club is off to a promising start.”