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Moving has never been hard for Ava. Everything she owns fits into two cardboard boxes and a backpack. It made her life easier, she could be where S.H.I.E.L.D then O.X.E and now, apparently, the government needed her to be.
“Is that all?” Yelena had asked when Ava had carried in all her belongings in one trip, ignoring her offers for help and powering through the dull ache in her body.
“It’s not like you have much more anyways,” Ava fires back, flopping onto her bed. This is the best place she’s had to move into in a while. Working elevator, a room bigger than a matchbox, and housemates. Ava hasn’t lived with anyone since Bill, and she’s scared she’s forgotten how to.
“Should I even ask if you want help unpacking?” Yelena drawls, leaning against the doorframe.
“You know, I think I might be able to handle this task,” Ava laugh softly, then adds, “thank you, though.”
When her door clicks shut, Ava lets her smile drop. Through her door, she can hear everyone else shuffling, living around her. She hears snatches of everyone’s voices — raised in argument or jest, she really can’t tell — but they all sound so at ease it unsettles her. The past couple of weeks have been a flurry of changes that Ava hasn’t addressed, and the effort of avoidance is wearing her down, exhausting her. She hears John and Alexei cheering, and she’s hit with a wave of FOMO — made worse by the fact that she doesn’t need to be missing out. She could get up right now and go find out, but even the thought fills her with dread.
It’s juvenile, if she’s being honest, but she gets the distinct feeling that once she joins the group something in her will suck the ease out of the group. Like the early orphanage days where she’d laugh at a joke, and the rest of the laughter would taper off awkwardly as all eyes turned to Ava who was blurry at the edges after a lapse in concentration. It didn’t matter that these were the same people she’d survived almost being incinerated with, she might not be quite as charming to them when the stakes are ultra-low.
She wants to get up, but the fear of rejection wins, so she takes a nap and hopes the crowd has dispersed when she wakes up.
To her absolute delight, it’s quiet when she wakes up. No footsteps, no voices. It’s dark too, and if she wasn’t so hungry she’d feel ashamed that she’d been that dead to the world. Ava debates ordering food or checking to see if she could put something together from what little food she’d seen in the kitchen when she’d had a walk around in the afternoon.
“No harm in checking,” she sighs, letting herself drift up from the bed. She doesn’t bother letting her feet touch the ground, letting herself drift through her door. She’s only half-way through when a small takeout container on the floor catches her eye. There’s a sticky note on top of it.
Fried rice. If you don’t like it then that’s your fault, sleepyhead.
— Yelena.
Ava barks out a laugh, but she appreciates the gesture. She picks it up and moves back into her room, pressing the sticky note onto her wall, smiling at it as she eats her dinner.
Adjusting to this new life isn’t as easy as Ava thought it might be, so she reverts to old habits and spends her days memorising everyone else’s patterns, finding where she can slot herself in without disturbing the energy too much. She knows that John’s the first to wake up, and if she gets up before him, she can make herself breakfast before anyone else comes into the kitchen.
She can avoid the awkward conversations about sleep, and weather, and Valentina’s next big plan for them by only showing up to group training sessions right as they start, and ducking out as soon as they finish. If she can get to the gym unseen after midnight, the only person she risks running into is Bucky and he doesn’t normally expect a conversation.
It’s easy to avoid people during the day, the problem is night time. No one has a normal sleep schedule, and Ava finds herself cursed with the affliction of being a life-long midnight snacker. When she lived with Bill he grew accustomed to her midnight snack rampages, and as her condition worsened, he’d eat with her on the nights where he’d been working too hard to fall asleep. He didn’t share her sweet tooth, but he’d let her split a tangerine with him, watching as she focused all her energy on peeling the fruit. When she could no longer hold it for very long, he took over and did it for her, joking the entire team about Ava making her poor old dad work.
The memory of Bill makes her chest hurt, and all of a sudden she misses those late night talks. She wants nothing more than to split a tangerine with him one last time. She wants to know how he’s doing, wants to show him how much she’s changed. She imagines the incredulous look he’d give her when she told him she lived with the others now. She wants to show him she’s fine, and that he no longer needs to worry. Ava sighs. She remembers seeing tangerines in the fruit dish earlier, and there are no signs of any other life, so she pushes herself out of bed and floats along into the kitchen.
It’s not the same as peeling it under Bill’s loving eye, but the action is enough to make Ava feel a little better. She takes her time, because once the peeling ends, she’ll have to face the reality that she has no one to share this with. Her fingers slip, once, twice, then three times as she tries to stop herself from crying.
“Do you want some help with that?”
Ava almost screams when she sees Walker in front of her.
“Don’t sneak up on me,” Ava huffs, letting her feet touch the ground.
“I didn’t. I was loud, but I guess you were distracted,” he says. His hand is still stretched out towards her. “Can I help?”
Ava hands it to him, watches as he makes short work of peeling it.
“You’re a slow peeler,” he remarks. Ava watches him hesitate before he hands it to her, and Ava doesn’t think twice before she breaks in half.
“Do you wanna share?”
Walker refuses at first, but all it takes is a raised eyebrow from Ava, before he sheepishly accepts the other half.
They don’t talk much while they share the fruit, but Ava’s willing to admit that it’s better than eating by herself.
Ava doesn’t actively avoid everyone else anymore, but the routine and the timing is written into her very cells now. Up before John so she could eat breakfast alone, in bed practically straight after dinner so she could dodge any small talk about her day.
She starts by no longer avoiding the gym, and her body thanks her for it. It turns out everything feels better when you sleep before two in the morning. She lingers in the kitchen after dinner and helps put stuff away even when everyone swears she doesn’t need to. She lets herself make small talk when she passes Bob during the day instead of disappearing before he can say hello. She shows up a little earlier to meetings, and drags her feet when they’re done.
She slowly begins to feel a little more at home, but something’s missing, and she doesn’t know what until one day, a package arrives for her, and Yelena promises to hold it hostage until Ava comes to get it from her herself instead of pleading with Bob and Walker to do it for her.
“What is it?” Yelena asks when Ava finally has it opened.
“It’s a photo album,” Ava gasps. She knows every picture in this album by heart. She’d only made Bill look at it with her a thousand times — and she’d pored over them twice as many times when she was by herself. She makes a mental note to stop running and pick up the phone and thank Bill properly for this little piece of home.
“Can we see baby Ava?”
Yelena asks, eyes locked on the album in her hands.
Ava almost lets her gut do the talking, clutches the album tighter, before remembering the times she’d seen Yelena cosied up in a corner of the couch, flipping through the photos of her and her sisters.
“Sure,” Ava says, and cringes at how reluctant she sounds.
“Oh don’t sound so excited,” Yelena laughs, and Ava laughs along with her.
“You’ve gotta stand up and present it to us,” Bob says. “Like show and tell.”
Yelena, John, and Bob sit themselves in front of her, looking at her eagerly.
“Oh you guys are serious about the show and tell part,” Ava scoffs.
“Yes, you’re so mysterious, we wanna know everything,” Yelena answers, motioning for her to start. “Be very detailed, don’t leave anything out.”
This is the first time since she became a fugitive that Ava’s had an audience of people she hadn’t tied up.
“I guess I’ll start from the beginning?”
“That’s normally the best place,” John replies, which earns him a soft smack from Yelena. “I’m joking! She knows I’m just kidding, right Ava?”
Ava considers making him sweat a little, but she just nods and laughs at the relieved sigh he lets out. Before she can think herself out of it, Ava flips open to the first page. She doesn’t need to look to know that it’s the first picture she’d ever taken with Catherine. She no longer feels grief when she looks at the pictures, but hearing everyone else ask about her mother brings tears to Ava’s eyes. She can’t stop herself from telling them everything she knows. Some of the facts are remembered — like the days spent in the garden with Catherine listening to her speak about different flowers and watching bugs amble by lazily in the grass — and others are parrotted, committed to memory from her conversations with Bill.
They all tease her over the pictures of her in the lab with Elihas and Catherine, and though Ava bristles at the thought of being called a nerd by any of them, it feels good to be known as something other than Ghost. They ask a lot of questions: about her, about Elihas and Catherine, about Bill, and Ava finds herself answering willingly. She’d spent so long only talking about her parents with Bill, that she’d forgotten what it was like to share those parts of herself with other people.
“You look like her, you know,” Yelena says, pointing to a picture where both Catherine and Ava are leaning over a microscope. Ava remembers that day because she’d caused such a fuss about looking into the microscope, begging and pleading until her mother had pulled up a stool she could stand on and look comfortably.
“I know,” Ava smiles sadly. When she was younger, and she’d really missed her mother she’d stand in front of the mirror for hours at a time, until her face seemed to morph into Catherine’s and she could see her fully one last time.
“You okay?” Bob asks, after Ava zones out.
“I’m here. Bill never asks quite as many questions,” she chuckles as she turns the page. “You guys aren’t doing anything wrong. It’s just a little different,” she smiles.
“Good different or bad different,” Yelena asks cautiously.
“Good different,” Ava says, and she means it.