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Ava’s eyes blink open in the dark, and she’s out of bed before she can think. Her body is screaming that there is something wrong, and her mind forgot the dream that frightened her awake a millisecond before she opened her eyes, which means all she has to go off of now is her body’s chaos and the darkness. She casts around for something to anchor her in reality, but her eyes won’t adjust. She could be anywhere at any time.
She could be nowhere at all.
When she takes a deep breath, she can feel it come apart in her chest before it hits her lungs, or maybe that’s her lungs coming apart before they can be of use.
Either way, her chest is heaving and every inch of skin is pricking with cold fire, but when she looks around, stumbling over thin air as she tries to get her bearings, there is nothing.
“Look! A red nightlight for Red Guardian,” Alexei says.
“Why would she want to be reminded of you before she sleeps?” Yelena asks dryly.
“Also, red isn’t a soothing color, what are you even talking about?” John snaps.
“Actually, never mind, I think the red is nice,” Yelena declares. John splutters. Ava laughs.
Ava clasps her head between her hands. That was a memory, but she breathes again, like swallowing glass, and it’s faded away and she doesn’t recognize this room or the burned out nightlight plugged into a corner outlet and when she looks down she sees the outline of a body, which is a good sign, but something’s not right. Something doesn’t feel right.
Unable to abide the darkness for a second longer and beyond considering something as simple as turning on a light, she wrenches the door open and spills into a hallway.
There, she stays still and uncertain.
Distress crawls up Ava’s throat as she stands alone. Her mind, flayed and frayed as it is, has played tricks on her before, but knowing that doesn’t help, especially because she only knows it for a fraction of a second before the knowledge disappears and she is left stranded again.
Restlessly, Ava fiddles with the shirt over her suit. Her head hurts. Everything hurts. That’s normal, at least, but it’s hurt worse before, hasn’t it? And that’s normal too now. At some point it became normal that everything used to hurt much more, but she doesn’t know when that happened.
She looks down at her hands and feels a surge of vertigo. They aren’t moving. She’s not moving. It’s dark. She’s in a hallway and she isn’t sure which way to go.
“I don’t know where I am,” she says, loathing herself for sounding so lost, so small.
This isn’t who you are anymore.
Then who is she supposed to be?
“Where am I?” she wonders miserably.
There’s another voice, she thinks. Somewhere in the world around her, there’s another voice, saying words that run through her mind like blood down a drain, almost drowned out by the sound of her own breathing, the sound of her own body tearing itself apart and then putting itself back together.
“Ava, hey, can you hear me? It’s Bob, I’m your friend. You’re safe.”
Ava. She heard that part. Ava. That’s her. Someone is speaking to Ava, who is her.
“Ava, can you…can you look at me? Please?”
Look at me. Please.
Her head snaps up. Her eyes meet someone else’s. Where did these eyes come from? Ava thinks she’d be attacking the body attached to them if they were unfamiliar, so they must not be. Her body, failure though it may be, still recognizes when she’s faced with a threat, which means she has somehow found herself with a stranger who is not a threat, so perhaps he is not a stranger at all.
She sees him in pieces, as she sees all things, or at least that’s how she feels at the moment, and the moment is all she’s ever felt, which is why she only sees the parts, not the whole. Dark hair, lighter eyes, smooth, pale skin, tip of a pink tongue darting out to wet pink lips, Adam’s apple bobbing in a long neck…
The eyes. She looks at the eyes again.
“Where am I?” she asks. Repeats. She thinks she’s repeating herself, but she can’t recall. On nights like these, her memories are as immaterial as the rest of her, flickering in and out of existence. “Where am I?”
She wants her voice to sound harsh, demanding. That’s closer to who she really is, isn’t it? Harsh. Demanding. Sometimes when she steps into the quantum chamber she doesn’t have time to wipe the blood away and Bill does it instead, follows after her with a warm, wet towel and runs it over her face while she cries because it hurts, it feels like sandpaper run over her exposed nerves, but he’s only cleaning the blood.
“Where am I?” She doesn’t sound harsh. Doesn’t sound demanding. Her voice drifts from her, breathy and hoarse as though her throat could only stay solid for so long and it had to expel the words before they were ready.
The man in front of her—he’s familiar, he is, curious, concerned eyes and anxious hands, anxious like hers which flutter flutter flutter—she flutters—the man in front of her says, with a low voice that holds an almost imperceptible waver, “It’s okay, Ava. You’re home. You’re safe here. You’re home.”
Ava, Daddy says, I’m home. Look what I got you…
No, no, Daddy’s gone, he’s been gone for years. Mummy too. Not just gone. Dead. The machine killed them. They’re all dead. Bill’s dead too. Ashes in the air. Everyone disintegrated just like Ava had been so afraid to for so long…no, she spoke to Bill, it wasn’t so long ago…but it wasn’t so long ago that she held her father in his fear, his despair, only Bill said “it’ll be okay, I’ll drop by soon” and soon meant something different when he said it than what it meant when the machine took everything…
Ava swings her head to one side, then the other. She laces her fingers together. Presses the heels of her hands against her heart. A smile twitches across her face. Rapid, painful…painful? No, not really. She knows pain, and this is nothing. The pain has gone so very far away that she has gone with it.
Bill tells her he is doing all he can. He will always do what he can. When Ava dies, he’ll be all alone. Her mummy and daddy didn’t die alone, but if Bill doesn’t save her, he will.
She presses her hands even harder against her own chest. She wonders if she bruises now.
Between this moment and the years where Ava’s own decaying self was threatening to leave him all alone, Bill became the one more likely to die first, but then Ava picked up a gun again—
Bill says, “Don’t you dare go get yourself killed. Not after everything. Ava, you fought so hard.”
“I’m still fighting, Bill. What else am I supposed to do? I’ve got nothing else to do.”
The solid amalgamation of parts that stands in front of her takes a step back and proceeds to extend a part of himself. Long fingers unfurl. A part of Ava follows as though it is chasing after something it recognizes. The Ava-part is a hand, reaching out, fitting its palm to the other-part, curling its fingers as the other-part curls too…
Ava presses hard, fascinated by the solidity of this being, this being that is her, so present that she doesn’t even need to concentrate before a touch lest her body betray her. This is nice. It’s too bad she missed the part where things got better. She’ll get it back soon enough. She hopes so, at least.
Unless this, how she feels now, how she thinks now, is forever? But it’s never been forever before. Hasn’t it never been forever before? It’s only that before and during and after all seem equally ephemeral at the moment, at this moment. This moment, which must be now.
“You’re home, Ava. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s not. Let’s go, okay? Let’s go to the, we’ll go to the common area, okay? You like it there. You’ll like it.”
Ava hears the words only in pieces— home…not…we’ll go to…okay? Like it…
Solid-part tugs gently at solid-part. Ava could phase away if she wanted. Her solid parts follow instead. She watches her feet in the suit her mangled body’s been poured into. Stepping so lightly. She’s stepping so lightly, and so is the other amalgamation of parts beside her. All of those parts…if she puts them together they make…they make someone she recognizes, she does. “Bob,” she breathes out.
The symphony of parts holding her hand ducks his head-part sort of down and over to look at her. A smile tugs his mouth upwards. The parts are becoming a warmer, realer kind of familiar. “Yeah. I’m Bob.”
She nods. Her eyes go back to the floor. Her feet, snug in her suit, rest on a rug. If Ava were to lie down and press her cheek to the green rug, it would feel smooth and soft. This is the rug Alexei threw in front of the big sofa…
Another tug. Ava supposes she’s still moving, right up until Bob stops and so does she, vision flickering. She’s looking down but she doesn’t know if she’s seeing anything at all anymore. Everything is blurry. Her eyes burn, her whole head aches, her hair brushes against her cheeks, scraping her skin raw.
There’s a hand in hers. Her hand is the one that hurts. She doesn’t let go. She thinks the hand that isn’t held hurts more. She thinks she’d rather be crushed than fall apart. Rather become the remains of something than nothing at all.
There is a soft tapping in front of her, close to her, if she looks up then she’ll be looking in the same direction as the soothing sound. Maybe she ought to look up, then.
“Look, Ava,” Bob says, gentle encouragement as though he knows what she’s been thinking, or maybe he’s already—yes, no, yes, yes, he’s already been speaking. Already been urging her to look, look, or at least that’s what she imagines from what she’s finally registered, because she isn’t sure exactly everything he’s been saying, busy looking at his hand in hers, running her solid thumb over his solid knuckles.
If she tries, just a little bit, she can make her thumb phase so it brushes something inside of him, but it makes him flinch and parts the easy trickle of words that have been bubbling from his lips with a sharp gasp, so she stops. She holds his hand more tightly, not wanting him to pull away. He doesn’t. The words begin again.
“Ava, look,” he’s murmuring. How many times has he said that? How many things has he said since she found him in this place? She thinks maybe she’d like to know what he’s saying now.
His voice is soft, so soft that she has to wade through her own fragmented mind to not only hear him but listen, dig a tunnel inside of her own destroyed neurons and poke her consciousness out. “Look, Ava,” he says, and there! She’s found him! The words are solid now, solid enough to grasp, and the tapping is the sound of the fingertips of his free hand softly hitting the window. Or is it a wall?
A transparent wall. Oh, no wonder she’s here, no wonder she’s solid, this must be the place that keeps her together…no, no, that’s not right, that’s…
”Jesus, what do they have against actual walls?” John complains, clomping through the common area on his way to his room.
“What, scared of heights?” she teases.
“No!” John says defensively. “But Bobby’s scared of heights.”
“Maybe just don’t remind me?” Bob murmurs, twitchy gaze darting towards the outside and then back to the floor.
“It’s all right, Bob,” she assures him. “The view’s actually quite beautiful, especially at night like this. It’s like everything’s sparkling.”
“Actually quite beautiful,” she murmurs, blurring back into herself. This must be her new home, because the other walls that have kept her haven’t ever had a whole cityscape just outside.
Everything is sparkling. The whole world, and she’s a part of it.
Headlights, traffic lights, the lights from endless skyscrapers, so many lights that they cover up the stars.
She runs her gloved fingers over the glass, tracing the cars on the streets below as they race through the night. She doesn’t even have to try to keep her form solid, she marvels. In fact, she actually has to try, if only a little, to phase. She presses her palm against the glass and tries, curiosity divorced from intent.
Her hand hits cold evening air, but as quickly as it happens, she’s pulled back. Who’s holding her other hand? She’s not tearing away from the grip, so she must know…she does know…
She stumbles a bit, but then she’s standing still once again. She squeezes the hand in hers. Looks down. Pale skin against her glove.
“Let’s stay back here,” Bob says. “Not so close to the wall…the window…whatever it is. Not so close, okay?”
“You don’t like heights,” she murmurs in vague understanding, the hand that’s not wrapped around his still suspended in the air in front of her. Her palm pressed against nothing. Like a mime.
“Yeah, exactly,” Bob agrees. “I don’t like heights. So we need to stay at…non-phasing distance.”
She nods. That makes sense. She can still look at the lights, at the sprawling city. She sinks to her knees. Her legs are tired, burning, twitching, there’s this twitching inside of her, the glitches inside of her that never give it a rest, but at least they are inside these days. She is inside of herself.
Her hand is still wrapped around Bob’s, and he follows her down, kneeling next to her. She lifts her free hand to her hair, tugging at a stubborn bit of a tangle until something comes away. She looks down.
“You have so much hair,” Bill laments, tugging a brush through the tangles.
Ava giggles. She feels so real when her hair pulls against her scalp. She’s giddy with it.
She blinks down at an elastic band, scrunched up in the palm of her hand, strands of hair around it. She must’ve tried to put her hair up before she slept. She sleeps in this place. Well, not this exact place, not here on the common room floor, but her room, “That was my room, where I woke up. Wasn’t it?”
“Yep,” Bob says. “Your room at the Watchtower.”
“I didn’t recognize it in the dark.” She didn’t recognize anything. She recognizes more now, but still not everything. She’s in too many places and in too many pieces to be entirely sure of what’s going on except for the very basics.
(It is strange that she is certain that the very basics include this feeling she has pinpointed as safety.
Strange, in a way that’s about as beautiful as all those lights she can see.)
“I know, Ava,” Bob says. “It’s okay. You’re with us. Bob, Yelena, John, Alexei, and Bucky. The whole team. I mean, I’m pretty sure everyone else is asleep, but. Yeah.”
“Yeah,” Ava whispers as bits and pieces of the parts attached to those names flit through her consciousness, memories pulled apart and coming back together…
Janet’s putting her hands on her, healing her like it’s magic. She knows it isn’t magic. She knows it’s not forever. But she’s not dying anymore. No more than anyone else is, at least.
Trapped inside the quantum chamber, she’s dying after all.
Daddy, she just doesn’t want her daddy to be all alone…
She thinks it should be scarier, the part where she kills people, but she is lost in her body’s shambling march towards oblivion, her cells splitting and sparking and tearing and every day it gets worse and she can’t think, she can’t even think, she doesn’t want to go like this…
Oh, that’s no way to go…
Ava knows what it’s like to die and Ava knows what it’s like to be reborn a ghost. There, not there, there, not there…
“You’re right here, Ava,” Bob says, because, yes, he is still here, isn’t he? He is with her, and solid, they are both solid, and this moment must be now. “You’re home. Look at the lights.”
“I like the lights,” Ava says, maybe in agreement, lifting her eyes to the dazzling cityscape.
“I know,” Bob responds, soft and warm.
In her mind’s eye, Ava gets to her feet, hand slipping from Bob’s with a flicker, and then she runs full-tilt towards the wall, phasing through and hurtling downwards, through cars and asphalt and concrete until she is crushed in the dirt, alone in the dark, more corporeal than she’s ever been.
Ava flinches at the thought, unwelcome almost like it came from outside of herself, and a gasp catches in her throat, a glitchy shudder convulses her body.
“Oh, no, don’t be scared, it’s okay,” Bob says fretfully.
“I’m not scared!” Ava says, fear giving way to scandal. He shouldn’t say things like that. She can’t be afraid of a thought. She’s an Avenger. Is she an Avenger?
“Right, right, yeah,” Bob says, low and soothing. “Not scared. I know. No one ever gets scared here. Except me sometimes, I guess.”
Arms wrapped around her and her own arms flung wide to fit all that she is holding, all that she never wants to let go.
She squeezes Bob’s hand. “That’s all right. You don’t need to worry, ‘cause I’ll protect you.”
A soft puff of laughter is the response. She rests her head on his shoulder.
“I just don’t want to go, y’know?” she says, a pressured mumble. “I don’t wanna go. It’s so easy to disappear in the dark, and then where’ll I be, right? Just unseeable atoms alone in the dark, splitting apart and coming back together forever. In endless agony. I don’t want that. I like it here.”
“I like it here too, Ava,” Bob says. His voice sounds like being rocked to sleep. “We all do. So you’re not going to disappear alone in the dark, okay? ‘Cause you’re not alone. You’re not alone, Ava.”
“You’re not alone,” Yelena says, soft and fierce. The words are a promise, and Ava takes it to heart, because it’s for her too. It’s a promise made to her and a promise she is making.
Ava takes a deep breath. It goes all the way to her lungs. “Yeah,” she murmurs, head heavy against Bob’s shoulder. She closes her eyes. “Yeah, that sounds right.”