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Ava picks at her nails during the team meeting, listening with half an ear while Bucky, Yelena, and John discuss plans to destroy a building in Nevada that currently houses several abandoned, decommissioned nuclear weapons.
John points out the quaint, charming neighborhood currently surrounding the facility and says something about needing to evacuate the people there before going in to do the job. Yelena shoots that down, saying something about the order from the "higher-ups" that their whole mission should be done as quietly as possible without alerting the masses to the fact that they had been living with WMDs for what seemed like decades now. Something about government secrecy and privacy and all that shit. Bucky merely shakes his head, saying that there is absolutely no way to basically erase an entire place from existence without making some noise about it. People's welfare should always be prioritized in this case, and if that includes disobeying direct orders from higher-ups by telling the public the truth about what they've been living with--
"Ava," Yelena calls out to her - the way the Russian always did when she finds herself standing against two super-serumed idiots with seemingly no way out, "your thoughts?"
Ava merely looks at her over her nails.
Well, she has several, actually.
All centered around the fact that the building was in a fucking desert, so planting a timed explosive that could be detonated from miles away is something Ava could do in her sleep, and if the quaint, charming neighborhood around it would go kaboom in the process, then it's so sad, so unfortunate, boo-fucking-hoo. They had one job to do here, everything else be damned, including the people who didn't do their due diligence before buying a property near a suspiciously large, abandoned warehouse. Besides, the government could - and would - eventually cover the incident up with something plenty believable, anyway, so. Problem solved.
That was how SHIELD trained her to think, anyway. A weapon pointed at something would not care about collateral damage. It wouldn't care about the aftermath. It wouldn't care about anything at all. It only needed to find its mark and do what it's supposed to. That was its job.
Except the last time she said something along those lines - something about prioritizing the goal at the expense of everything else, even civilians, to make the job faster and easier to finish - the three of them merely stared at her in dead silence, John finally breaking it when he asked, in a stunned voice, "What the fuck's wrong with you?"
And, try as she might to deflect or deny the thought, she felt like being asked that again, by these people specifically, would sting.
Because there are plenty of things wrong with her, obviously.
She knows that already.
Doesn't mean she enjoys these people seeing and pointing it out to her, too.
So she swallows the thought and says, very carefully and very much against everything SHIELD taught her to be, "Depends on what the primary goal is."
"Oh fuck, here we go again," John mutters, throwing his hands up for good measure. "This ought to be good."
"Walker," Bucky admonishes him with a glare.
"What? I'm just saying--"
"Let me finish, you absolute wanker," Ava says, leaning forward now. She points at the map laid out in front of them and says, "If the primary goal is destroying that building without doing anything about the people there, then Bucky's right - there's no way in hell that's going to happen, not without a Susan or a Roger hearing it when they live only a couple of blocks away from the site. There's just no fucking way we'll be able to block out that sort of noise without someone noticing or seeing the fireworks; we're basically being set up to fail from the get-go if we try it. Now--" Here she glares at John, "--if the goal is to save people and keep them in the dark about what seems like decades' worth of government incompetence, then that's something we can't do on our own. That's something someone else needs to do first. We can help with the evacuation, sure, but the reason for the evacuation? Coming up with that is above our pay grade. We're just the muscle here. We can echo the message they want once we're there, but it should come from them, not us."
Silence.
"So," Bucky says, steepling his fingers together, "not our job unless the government does its part first."
Ava nods. "That's how I see it, yeah. They get the people out of there ASAP. Then we come in to start punching and shooting things the way we're built to."
For once in his life, John doesn't say anything. Well, anything against her anyway. He just rubs his brow with his thumb and tells Yelena, "I'm amenable to that," in a tone that made it seem like he's swallowing glass.
Yelena sighs and turns to Bucky. "You?"
Bucky glances at Ava for a second before shrugging. "You already know my answer."
"Oh, I do."
Ava doesn't even acknowledge the sly smile that appeared on Yelena's face when she said that.
Yelena slams the briefing folder shut and sighs aloud. Again. "Well. Guess it's time to talk to Mama Val, then. Always the highlight of my day, telling her that, actually, we're not going to follow her instructions to the letter." She nods at Ava. "Good work, Ghost Lady."
Ava rolls her eyes at that.
Later, though, she finds herself thinking about the words: Good work, Ghost Lady. All for going against the instincts that SHIELD beat into her. All for not voicing the fact that, actually, she won't be opposed to letting all the faceless Susans and Rogers in Nevada die if it means getting the job done.
It's going to be tiring as fuck, working like this. Being considerate of people's welfare. Finding other ways to do the work, or choosing not to do it at all, if the regular way meant innocent people getting hurt in the process.
A part of her wants to ask the others, how do you do it? How do you automatically think like that? How can you give a fuck about people you don't know and haven't met?
Except she wouldn't, because it'd be like inviting them to ask her in return - again - what the fuck's wrong with you that you don't?
"Oh, where to begin," she tells herself wryly, looking up at the ceiling of her quarters and thinking, not for the first time and certainly not for the last:
I'm not cut out for this Avengers business bullshit.
She shows up to work the next day anyway.