Chapter Text
Being a hero is not what Ava thought it would be, not even close. Less time saving the day and more time in makeup chairs as Mel feeds her lines for interviews. She’d even take volunteering at soup kitchens, actually helping those who needed it most over this. Another day, another magazine interview, another question about her past that she’d never fully be able to answer.
She’d gone from Ghost: OXE assassin, to Ghost: Avenger and nothing about her life had changed — not meaningfully at least. She was still being jerked around, the cure for her pain dangled in front of her face, but she’d swapped the covert operations, heists and assassinations for something far worse: the limelight.
Days spent workshopping her image just to make her “the mysterious one”. Hours spent redesigning her suit just to stick to the current one. Press junkets that dragged on and on, the same questions that she had to give the same rehearsed answers to.
The worst thing about all this is that people aren’t buying it. There’s a leak in the system, someone giving insider information to the press about previous covert assignments. It’s easier for the others to explain away their shady pasts. Yelena, the former widow following in her sister’s footsteps, borrowing goodwill from her sister’s reputation. Alexei, Yelena’s father, protected by the image of both his daughters. John, former Captain America who may have had a bit of a stumble but at least he was on the right track now. It was a lot harder to explain why the infamous Ghost could be seen as a hero — known only as a fugitive assassin, Ava was finding it harder and harder to answer the questions thrown her way during interviews. Unlike John she didn’t have the military history and Captain America stint on her resumé. She was a S.H.I.E.L.D lab shut-in, let out only so she could kill and steal — how was anyone supposed to believe that she had really turned a new leaf? A couple of good saves during a world-ending event was nowhere near enough to turn the tides in her favour, and disappearing into the background doesn’t work when she’s plastered all over cereal boxes and lunch tins.
“You’re a PR disaster,” Val says to her one day, fresh off another disappointing talk show where Ava can’t explain why there’s footage of her breaking into American research facilities and stealing trade secrets. Val won’t hear it when Ava questions how this footage is coming out, and why it’s Ava’s fault. Ava doesn’t even want to be a hero. She wants to be cured. Wants all the years of pain and fighting and stealing and murdering to finally mean something, but all she has for her troubles is more eyes on her and a deep unsettling feeling that none of this is going to be better.
She’s going to be picked apart and put back together every single day until there’s no more of her left.
“Maybe you should’ve had a game plan before announcing a bunch of criminals as the next Avengers,” Ava shoots back.
Val’s office is unsettlingly tidy, and the way she paces has Ava on edge.
“You’re being given a second chance, Ava,” Val sighs. “You need to work with me here.”
Val walks back to her desk, slides the manila file folder with Antonia’s name on it towards Ava.
“This is your saving grace,” she says. “We tell the world you took a dangerous criminal off the street of your own volition,” she emphasises with a tap on the front, “and you will be loved Ava.”
There’s a slight pause, before she smooths her skirt down.
“Maybe not loved. Not quite as questioned though.”
“And how will you explain what I was doing in the vault first place?”
“I’ll worry about the details. It’s your job to go out there and make sure everyone knows that she was evil and you dealt with her. A little breaking and entering means nothing if you got rid of a real threat.”
Ava stares at the folder, Antonia Dreykov’s life and exploits packaged neatly, ready for her to commit to memory so she can launch the smear campaign that saves her life.
“I saved people, when everyone was being sent to the shame rooms. That should be enough,” Ava reminds her. This is the most amount of time she’s spent talking to Val and it’s beginning to wear on her. Her body’s beginning to buzz with something more than discomfort and a headache is working it’s way behind her eyes. She wants to sleep and wake up and find out that this whole mess has been untangled but she knows that when she leaves this office — file tucked under her arm for further study, no doubt — she won’t even be able to do that. She didn’t sleep well on her best days, but since having old wounds reopened while trying to save Bob and Yelena, her quality of sleep had gotten infinitely worse.
When she closed her eyes she saw all her worst moments on a loop. Her desperation and pain came back tenfold, warped through the lens of her trying to be a hero now. She heard the anger in her voice as she’d threatened Scott’s daughter and the echo of Bill’s body after she’d thrown it across the lab after he’s tried to dissuade her from carrying out her plan. She felt the echoes of all the heartbeats she’d stopped with her bare hands as if she were stopping them again for the first time. She heard the gunshot that ended Antonia’s life and the dull thud of her body hitting the floor followed by Bob’s retching. Over and over and over again. Then she’d wake up and have to play the hero, struggling through the day as makeup artists did their best to cover the bags under her eyes.
“Are you even listening to me?”
Val is unimpressed, and Ava knows their meeting is drawing to a close. Antonia’s file still sits on the table, and Ava can’t take her eyes off of it.
What Valentina is offering is a lifeline, and she knows she’d be stupid not to take it but Ava doesn’t know if the lifeline is worth what she’s being asked to do.
“I’m not doing it,” she sighs, standing up to go.
“She’s already dead, Ava. Why not let her be useful too?”
Ava’s nauseous. She didn’t know Antonia, of course, but from what Yelena had said she’d spent her entire life being “useful” against her will, and Ava might not be entitled to the thought but she reckoned maybe she finally deserved to rest.
“She was a real person, not a tool.”
Val rolls her eyes.
“Don’t tell me you feel bad, Ava? You’re the one who killed her, happily at that.”
Ava flinches, trying to ignore the way those words invoke the feeling of the gun recoiling as she fired it.
“Exactly. I killed her once already, I don’t need to do it again.”
Val laughs then, high, clear and cruel before wiping a fake tear from her eye.
“You’re only as much of a hero as people think you are, and right now you have a lower approval rating than Alexei, and he’s not even an American hero. Remember Ava, those quantum infusions don’t come cheap, and I’m not sure the American public want their tax dollars going into keeping a known criminal alive. Take the file, go home and read it. You’re dismissed.”
So much for owning her, Ava thinks as she does exactly as she’s asked, slamming the door in a petty act of defiance.
She can’t go home yet, if she can even call the Tower home. They’ll all have questions about her meeting and she doesn’t want to see the look on Yelena’s face when she finds out Ava is expected to drag up Antonia’s past and then tear her to shreds in order to make herself look better.
A voice in Ava’s head justifies it. This would make her life easier, but Ava had already done so much to make her life easier. She’d killed Antonia because she was promised a better life, and maybe promises of a better life were no longer enough to justify the path she’d spent most of her life on.
Ava just walks. She doesn’t have a plan, just needs to kill the time while she thinks of what to do. She ignores the texts asking her where she is, and whether food should be ordered for her, and only slides back into the Tower well past one in the morning when everyone should be asleep.
It’s quiet, like she expected, and she thinks she’ll get away with being AWOL for the rest of the day but she’s not quite that lucky.
“Ava? Is that you?”
Bob. Never asleep when he should be, and refused to just shut himself in his room like the rest of them.
Ava doesn’t respond, just phases out as she tries to move past the common room without him seeing.
“I can hear you. And see you,” he sighs.
Worth a shot.
“Bob! Hello,” she cringes at the chipper tone she has to force. “I was just going to bed.”
She yawns, pretending not to notice the way his eyes flit to the file in her hand.
“Where have you been, everyone was worried.”
“Worried? I’m pretty capable of taking care of myself, thanks,” she says, inching further away.
“Sure, but I think Yelena prefers when people don’t go rogue. When they’re sad that is,” Bob explains.
“I’m not sad,” Ava shoots back. She was many things — tired, frustrated, angry — but not sad.
“You look sad,” Bob argues. “And tired. I think you sleep less than me. I hear you pacing all the time.”
“Don’t you have a book to read?”
“I was reading it until you snuck back in.”
It’s a valid enough reason, and Ava’s not in the mood to argue with Bob so she just shrugs.
“Bad meeting with Val. I’m a PR disaster,” she says.
“Is that what the file is for?” he asks.
Ava just nods. An awkward silence stretches between the two of them.
“Would you like to talk about it?” he asks, gesturing to one of the empty seats.
“You sound like Yelena.”
He shrugs. “It works. It might help, maybe. If you’d like.”
She doesn’t want to talk about it, and she’d much rather pretend to go to sleep, but she figures she deserves a break from the self torment, and Bob was as good a person as any to spill her guts to so she takes a seat and starts from the beginning.
He doesn’t interrupt her, just listens as she starts from the beginning all the way through to the events that led to the file in her hand.
“You’re stuck,” Bob finally says, after mulling over his words. “Is that really the only option you have?”
Ava nods. Val hadn’t given her other options, and there were none that Ava could think of.
“And you won’t do it?”
“No. She’s suffered enough, and she can’t defend herself,” Ava says.
“But what about your … issues. The pain,” Bob presses. “Aren’t you even a little tempted?”
The question makes her bristle, but she moves past it.
“Of course I’m tempted, but it’s not fair. I came back because I thought maybe I could be good. This doesn’t seem like something a good person would do. Besides, I wouldn’t be in this situation if I’d thought first, then shot later.”
Guilt pulses through Ava’s body again, then shame for letting herself be used that way so easily. She should have known better.
“You can’t beat yourself up, Val promised you something. Besides, it’s not like you can go back in time and save her,” he laughs nervously. “You just gotta live in the present and keep moving forward, one foot in the front of the other.”
“Okay, now you sound like Walker, and I’m going to bed,” she says. She feels better though, lighter as she waves Bob goodnight.
As she lies in her bed, the soft hum of the city around her Bob’s words replay in her head.
It’s not like you can go back in time and save her.
For the first time in a long time, Ava feels something close to hope, because Bob is wrong: with a little help she could go back in time. The Avengers had done it before, she’d read all about it while trawling through classified files. She just needed a little help, and a lot of faith and maybe just maybe she’d be able to make things right.