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Ava is a clone.
Ava doesn’t exist.
Except she does.
She has thoughts about the best way to organize a cubicle. And knows which tactics to use against which enemy formation. And has memories of a 15th birthday paintball party.
She knows how to dismiss Gary’s awkward advances.
And she’s falling in love with Sara Lance.
Except Sara Lance still maybe believes she’s too damaged to deserve love, and Ava is the twelfth in a series of interchangeable parts.
Sara gives Ava the best kiss of her life; kisses her like she’s a person who deserves to be kissed. And Ava wonders what makes her different from the eleven who came before her.
Mallus gets stronger, and the Waverider shoots off to a blind spot and Ava wonders.
Ava wonders what makes her her and wonders what makes Sara Sara and Rip is probably dead and the Bureau is shambles.
And Ava rejected Sara.
She even committed to rejecting Rip’s plan for her. But with Rip gone, and the Bureau she was created to serve essentially gone, and with the love of her short manufactured life beyond the vestiges of time, who is she supposed to be?
Ava loves Sara. And likes (most of) her team. But she’s still an agent.
So after the best night of her life, her first night in Captain Lance’s bed, she had Gideon download Zari’s loophole program onto a portable drive as the AI fabricated french toast with whipped cream, and then she gave Sara two orgasms, and received one more, before they ate the best french she’s ever tasted, dipped in the liquid vestiges of whatever cream was left on the plate in Sara’s bed, without Ava feeling any remorse about the thumb drive in the jacket pocket of her Bureau issued jacket, hung uncharacteristically carefully on the back of Sara’s desk chair.
Ava spent exactly six nights on the waverider, before Sara became afraid of who she was. And Ava became aware of who she was.
Then they made progress with Mallus and made progress with each other and now Rip is dead and the Bureau Ava dedicated her life to is in chaos and Sara and her family are in a temporal blind spot.
And Ava has time.
For the first time in her life, in her remarkably short life, Ava has time.
And Ava has a time courier with 10 centuries of technology, past and future, on it. And Ava has a drive with the promise not to disturb time programmed by the best hacker of the 21st century on her wrist. And Ava added the stolen beta program of the Bureau’s science and tech division that can age or de-age her to best suit whatever situation she finds herself in.
And Ava has literally nothing to lose.
Rip is dead. And Mallus is recouping his power. And the Legends are in the late 1800s. And her parents are actors. And Ava decides to be selfish.
Ava decides to do the first thing in her life that was ever for her.
Ava uses Zari’s program to find the one temporal point that can allow her to be with Sara Lance, without consequences. And if it requires her to be the 14 year old girl she never was, she’s okay with that.
She takes a $200 slug of whisky from the bottle and then hits the key that draws her into Zari’s temporal loophole, to the tune of Gary singing show tunes in the ever-growing distance.
She lands on the outskirts of a playground basketball court, in the body of a girl with a too-lanky frame that she only partially remembers. She immediately feels the growing pains her fake mother used to dismiss daily in manufactured memories as a 13 year old Sara Lance stares at her before a too-hard checked ball to Sara’s chest changes her focus.
Ava stretches out her lanky limbs, and plans some choice words about the legitimacy of ‘growing pains’ for the actor that plays her mother as young Sara catches her eye.
She’s playing an older boy, maybe 15 - he has a foot on Sara - one on one and she’s holding her own. Her opponent, and the few boys standing around watching are all Black even though most of the kids playing in the playground to Ava’s left are white. The kids with gloves and parents and coaches and sliding guards at their shins on the two baseball fields of the rec center are as multicultural as they come.
The kids on the playground, in their Payless shoes and fake acrylic nails and Champion gear are all white.
And the basketball court holds five Black boys in hand-me-down sweats, a young Sara Lance in oversized monogrammed gym shorts and a very-well fitting tank top, and a well-worn WNBA ball. The sun blares its way onto the court, coating a young regal Sara at the top of the key in a rainbow prism as its final roar before it resigns to setting.
Ava may be 14, with a startling amount of pain in her joints, and a general air of awkwardness that would make even Gary blush, but she can read a scene.
She makes her way onto the court, onto one of two worn-down benches, near a young Black boy, either much younger than her or Sara, or just incredibly underdeveloped, who doesn’t take his eyes of the action of the one-on-one match, but silently offers her a piece of Big Red gum from its pack. She takes it with a smile and a ‘thank you’ without even flinching when the image of Ray pops into her mind.
She and the boy silently watch Sara and her opponent trade points back and forth.
Ava doesn’t know much about basketball but she can follow the action and reads Sara and her opponent. She knows it’s a close game and she can pinpoint the moment Sara wins.
And then she can see the way Sara’s shoulder’s fall and the expression on her face tightens as the boy says “come on you know 11 means nothing. First to 21?”
Sara is resigned, with none of the markers of victory and frankly annoying cockiness she normally shows after a win, as she non-verbally agrees.
Before Ava can stop herself, she’s off the bench, intervening with joints aching and cinnamon taste in her mouth.
It’s field trained instinct that compels her, and she starts to pull back as she gets her adult wits about her, until Sara turns to her, the image of sincere surprise and delight - the same expression she had when Ava pulled her by the collar from the cursed dimension Mallus imprisoned her in, the same expression she had when Ava’s left arm braced her lower back as she flipped them over on the too narrow mattress of Sara’s Waverider bunk that first night.
Ava hears herself saying “two on two” as Sara holds up her right hand for a high five and her opponent picks one of his buddies. Ava’s the tallest of the 4 of them and she prays that the implanted memories of her childhood softball, field hockey, and paintball games hold up.
They do.
She and Sara win after she bullies her way to the basket for the 21st point, but the two boys they’re facing won’t take no for an answer. They say it’s not a real game until you hit 30. Sara’s shoulder’s drop again, but her chin is held high, and Ava gets the feeling she’s used to this.
Used to playing the boys until they give her a challenge she can’t win.
Sara moves towards the bench opposite of the one Ava first settled on, to take a drink of her water bottle, and Ava can't help but follow. It is not until that exact moment, almost an hour after she broke the laws of time and space to join Sara on a city basketball court, and seven weeks after she broke the protocols of the Time Bureau to join Sara in the Viking New World, that Ava realizes she would follow Sara Lance anywhere.
But in this moment, somewhere in the mid-1990s, Sara isn’t offering a plan that breaks the only rules Ava knows how to cling to. She’s offering a quarter-filled water bottle, carelessly drunk and hastily-wiped on the underside of her ribbed tank top to ward off any cooties.
Ava takes it. And gulps the lukewarm water as Sara smiles. Ava hates that she recognizes that smile.
Ava asks why Sara is putting up with this, the boy that refuses to lose. Why Sara has let herself beat him twice without gloating, but instead acquiesces to keep playing.
Sara tells her they’re playing with her ball. That she walks half a mile to this court, three neighborhoods from her home where nobody else can afford a ball, with the newly-issued white and orange WNBA ball she got for her birthday - not Christmas - her birthday, worn smooth by all the kids anxious to be able to show off and shoot around after school. And by the time they get to the hour before the sun’s about to set, it’s only the guys who can beat her, waiting around to actually beat her.
She doesn’t get time on the downtown Starling City courts because she’s a girl, even though she’s one of the best. So she takes her girl-ball to the court where these guys can appreciate it, even if they also have trouble losing to a girl and keep upping the score until she eventually loses.
She watches Sara’s micro-expressions as she tells her this, with an oversized scrunchie on her wrist, as they trade off sips of water from the bottle Ava is ever-more suspecting came from a garden hose, and she comes to understand how this little girl became Captain of the Waverider.
Ava calls a game of 3-on-3 with the short little boy, De’Andre, who gave her the Big Red on their team to everyone else’s, even Sara’s, surprise, and she cheers louder than everyone else when he hits a corner three to win the game for them. For Sara.
All the boys, even De’Andre, clearly pretending, walk away disappointed and angry, but Sara tells her she’s pretty sure they’ll play her again tomorrow, because she’s the one with the ball.
She asks Ava to pinky promise that she’ll be on her team again tomorrow, but Ava knocks her hand away for a sweaty hug instead and says the best she can promise is that she’ll make sure she’s there to team up again when it matters. Sara, with her double french braids, gives her quick kiss on the cheek before pegging her with a quizzical look, but Ava confidently walks away until she’s behind a big enough oak tree.
She couriers back to the Bureau and immediately orders a stunned Gary to find any figures through history sympathetic to the Legends. And a pack of Big Red.
She has a game to win, and she knows that kind, stalwart, empathetic, competitive Sara Lance won't give up until it’s over.