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"Cut it."
She stares at the dusty, dirty teddy bear that's been shoved into her arms and asks, "I-- what?"
"Cut. It." The man impatiently gestures somewhere along the teddy bear's lower limbs. "Just enough to damage. Not enough to completely ruin it. You understand?"
And the thing is, the teddy bear's already showing signs of awful wear and tear. It's missing both its eyes, like they've been plucked out, leaving behind loose strings. Its button nose, gone. Long gashes run down its body at the front and at the back, half its fluff pouring out of these cracks, so much so that the bear almost looked more like a deflated, pathetic balloon than a stuffed animal.
In any other circumstance, the teddy would have been thrown out with the rest of the trash without a single thought.
And yet.
And yet.
She's seen how desperately that poor little girl clutched this toy to her chest - the kid brought into the lab not more than a month ago. The one who could not have been more than eight years old. The one currently at the center of a small SHIELD side project, the subject of an in-depth "research" on the "unrealized effects of quantum exposure on biological beings," which was, in truth, an excuse to study the child who could, theoretically, walk through walls whenever she wants to.
The one who's got her tiny face and both her hands pressed against the glass chamber wall now, eyes searching frantically for her teddy bear friend.
Back then, when she was dragged here, the toy in her arms appeared whole.
Now, however--
"Why?"
The question comes out of the woman now, even as she longed to give the kid back her toy - a maternal instinct to appease that brokenhearted look on her face surging within.
The man curls his lip as he looks back at the tiny girl in question.
"I'm barely getting any usable data from that-- that anomaly," he snarls, crossing his arms. "She doesn't stay solid enough despite repeated instructions. She needs to be taught a hard lesson - that disobeying me has consequences, and crying will not get her anywhere. Not when I have a study to conduct.
Fortunately," he continues, gaze dropping to the teddy bear now, "she has something I can use to help instill that lesson in a way she'll understand better than mere words."
...Jesus Christ.
When she doesn't move, the man huffs out an annoyed breath. "Do I have to do everything around here?" Then he grabs a pair of scissors from a desk, snatches the bear from her arms, and makes a ruthless cut just above its foot, severing it in the process.
"There," he says, mouth curling into a demented appropriation of a smile. "This ought to send a message. Really, she's lucky I'm not cutting off its head. Or throwing it out. This time."
"Sir, she's--"
She pushes the words out because they needed to be said out loud, "--she's just a child. A scared one at that. Of course she's--"
He slaps her so hard she falls to the floor right in front of him, blood immediately pooling at the corner of her mouth.
"She's nothing but a specimen," he corrects her haughtily. "And you'd do well to remember it."
Then he turns and walks back to the child in the glass chamber. He goes in, hands her the toy, and watches with something akin to naked happiness on his face when she finally notices the bear's severed limb--
--and screams.
She doesn't understand.
This-- this event, this thing happened decades ago, at an offsite SHIELD facility that she was pretty sure had been permanently shut down already. It was one of the memories she worked so hard to repress in the years following her departure from the agency: the poor child, the inhumane experiments done to her in the name of "research", the promise of help that would never come, only because the higher-ups simply deemed her more useful desperate than cured.
So why--
--why is she seeing it being played now, right in front of her? Like she was nothing but a mere spectator to one of her life's worst moments?
She turns away for a second, feeling as though she was going to be sick, and when she looks back at the scene--
--it started playing again.
Right from the very beginning.
"Cut it."
"I-- what?"
"Cut. It. Just enough to damage. Not enough to--"
It went on and on for what seemed like an eternity.
And, while watching it, she couldn't suppress the shameful thought that still plagued her after all this time:
you never did anything to help that poor child.
And then somehow- somehow - she was out of that horrible SHIELD laboratory, and right where she was supposed to be: in a too-bright grocery store near her house, holding her shopping cart.
She looks around her, sees the other shoppers in various states of disarray and confusion, all of them probably thinking the same thing:
what the fuck just happened?
"Seems like we have a new lineup of Avengers now," her husband tells her during dinner. "Ain't that something?"
"Oh, really?" She keeps her voice level as she says it. "How wonderful."
Truthfully, she doesn't give a fuck about the Avengers. She'd seen so much horror during her short time at SHIELD that any person or group adjacent to it is a person or group she automatically didn't trust.
Not that she could ever tell her husband that. Or anyone, really.
"CIA introduced them to the press just this afternoon, right after that whole voodoo nightmare shit that happened to almost everyone in the city. Supposedly, they're the ones who put an end to that nonsense, so."
That nonsense, he said.
As if the scene that showed her at her lowest, most helpless, most useless form could ever be called that.
She steadies her hand as she pushes the peas on her plate. "That's nice, dear," she comments. "Wouldn't want any of that dreadful, horrible thing happening again, would we?"
Her husband scoffs. "You know, the way that CIA woman talked, she made it seem like we've got another god or Hulk in the lineup. Except these guys? The New Avengers? They're a bunch of fucking nobodies. Along with that congressman you said looked too good to work in government. That... yarns guy."
"Barnes."
"Yeah, that. That." He eats a spoonful of pasta and continues, "I mean, I guess they are a team with guys almost as strong as Steve Rogers and this one lady who can walk through walls, but--"
She grabs his arm without realizing it, her grip strong and unshakable.
Then asks, "Lady? Who can walk through walls?"
"Yeah." Her husband looks at her strangely. "That Valentina woman called her 'Ghost.'"
Ghost.
Ghost.
"Loretta, are you okay? You look--"
"I'm fine. I'm fine. Eat your pasta, Gary."
Ava Starr.
She stares at the picture of the woman in the black suit, standing alongside the rest of the New Avengers, and compares it to the image of the tiny child in the glass chamber - the one now living permanently inside her head, thanks to that voodoo nightmare from before.
you survived it.
you survived them.
She'd wondered about her.
In the years following her departure from SHIELD, and try as she might to refrain from doing it, she still found herself thinking about little Ava Starr.
Except she isn't so little now.
And more than that, she's become an Avenger. One of Earth's Mightiest Heroes.
Somehow, it's perhaps the best outcome for someone who was once treated as nothing more than a SHIELD specimen.
The New Avengers' tower was almost empty when she arrived.
There's a section there that locals and tourists could visit. Something with murals of the old Avengers, who still got their fair share of flowers and tiny gifts after all these years.
But there's also a newer section right next to it, the one with a banner that says: Get to Know Your New Avengers
That was her destination.
There, five small posters hang along the walls. Something that showed their headshots and some basic facts about them. Underneath the pictures, people left flowers and gifts, too, though most of them were congregated under Bucky Barnes' image.
Under Ava Starr's, though?
There was nothing.
And she intends to fix that--
--by way of taking out a small teddy bear from her bag, and placing it under Ava's poster. In the toy, she tucked a note:
congratulations.
and i'm sorry. i truly am.
She has no doubt this was exposing her existence to an Avenger, because surely, Ava will take one look at this bear and know what it means.
Still.
Giving an apology is the least she could do for that poor little girl in the glass chamber.
And if one day, she finds Ava Starr on her doorstep, then. Well.
So be it.