Chapter Text
“Fuck—” It’s said under her breath so as not to pick up on comms, but it slips so easily from Ava’s lips as something unfamiliar crawls under her skin. It’s been there for a bit, though she’s pushed it away. Boxed it up like every ache she deals with on a daily basis, but it’s different this type around. Pain pulses sharp and inconsistent and it’s so unlike her typical, dull and heavy chronic condition. It’s grown steadily for the past few hours or so. She doesn’t have time for this. There’s a mission at hand.
She’s holed up in a hallway of a weapons facility, waiting in the shadows for her signal to go. The piece in her ear crackles to life; Ava prays it’s not a response to her gasp of pain.
“Bucky, you are a go?” Yelena asks. “You go through and wipe out the first wave?”
Bones crack in the background and Bucky buzzes in, “Already on it. Ava, ready in five?”
“Yeah, all good,” she replies—grateful that between her solitude and helmet, no one can see her face twist up in agony.
Her body has other plans. Pain seizes Ava’s hips like a ravenous wildfire, and for the first time in ages, she can’t control her phasing in the suit. She flickers in and out of reality at a worrying pace, edges blurring into the light spectrum while her own vision is foggy and seeing double; in front of her is the dark hallway, but she can also see it—and herself—from a vantage point of a few feet away. The inability to control herself is something out of her teenage years, a barely-bygone era of hating her body more than any sixteen year old girl in the history of the world. They all wish to be invisible ; Ava can assure every teenage girl, no, immateriality is a fate worse than a few extra pounds. I can’t, not again— Spiraling is inevitable as her mind rushes to the worst-case scenario. She can’t be intangible again. She shouldn’t be. This shouldn’t be happening, not in this suit and not with the control she’s learned. The involuntary phasing and snowballing invasive thoughts make her breathing rush with anxiety tightening around collapsing lungs.
ELEVATED HEART RATE , warns the screen on her wrist and it’s not a message she’s gotten before—not even in the adrenaline-filled throes of a mission. Ava braces herself against the steel wall for cover as the sounds of a fight grow closer and closer, desperately tapping away to dismiss the alert.
It’s the slickness of blood that makes her heart stop.
She can feel it pooling between her thighs, dripping down her legs under her suit. Warm and tacky. Foreign. For the briefest moment it makes her feel human , flesh and bone until—
Bucky’s voice fills her ears. “Redirecting three men your way, Ava. Nothing special, shouldn’t be too difficult before we hit step three.”
“I’m a bit tied up,” she starts tensely, but John cuts in before she can finish.
“Tied up?” The inflection of worry in his voice rises—something that’s grown in the past weeks, to the point where Ava wonders if anyone has noticed and held their tongue. She’s returned the favor towards him whenever things ran risky during a mission. Of the two of them, John’s the one more prone to the kind of danger that makes her stomach drop.
Her hand presses to her abdomen to mitigate the incoming sting, to check that she’s still solid. So far she hasn’t gone totally immaterial and even with the intermittent stabbing, that warrants a small sigh of relief. “It’s nothing,” Ava reassures into the comm after a moment of silence. The yelp of pain that comes after completely undermines her lie.
Yelena cuts through, and Ava can hear the slightest bit of confusion. In a way, it’s warranted; she’s aware she’s not usually the liability in the field. “That doesn’t sound good. We’re sending someone your way.” There’s a pause, maybe a conversation where she can’t hear, and seconds later, Yelena continues, “Alexei, pick up Ava’s wave of assholes.” A grunt of affirmation crackles through piece in Ava’s ear.
The fight’s reached near her end of the corridor. She can hear Alexei clear as day, loudly taking a swing at armed guards. If anything, she’s grateful for the distraction; the impending threat of being surrounded is almost enough to take the pain off her mind. Almost. It’s gotten worse in the past few minutes. There’s no break between spasms, now an incessant stream of cinching and stabbing. The blood feels warmer. Heavier. Thicker, if that’s even possible. Ava reaches out to shift her stance in the corner but she blurs through the steel for a moment, nearly falling backwards on the ground. The assessment of herself as ‘still solid’ may not be all that correct.
Her hand almost goes through the wall again until it’s intercepted.
“What’s wrong?” John asks, squeezing her hand in his. Ava feels the pressure; she wishes her gloves were off and so were his, so she can feel his callouses on hers. Undeniable proof that she’s real and he’s real, that she still has some semblance of control. It’s becoming more and more unbelievable.
Ava flips open her helmet and makes the mistake of looking him in the eyes. She can’t see him well—not between the effects of phasing and tears pooling—but the glint of concern is unmissable. Her mouth goes dry as she struggles to come up with some explanation. “It’s just, a little imbalance,” she says. The grip on his hand is iron-tight until she phases right through him.
“Looks like more than a little.” John shifts his position, standing between her and the rest of the hallway, keeping her protected in the corner. “How long have you been like this?”
“The phasing?” she asks.
His eyebrows raise. “There’s more than just the phasing?” John retorts and Ava immediately regrets her choice of words.
“No, well, yes”—she squeaks as another lightning crack of pain shoots through her lower back and his hand immediately comes to her cheek, cupping the skin softly—“there’s been some other things.”
“Like?”
“Pain, more than normal. Not the usual—”
He finishes her sentence. “Not like, the dull kind? Sharp?”
Ava nods, nearly grimacing. Her head turns but his hand stays gently against her face. The feel of his fingers—grimy, hot—is incredibly grounding. “Different. It’s more, here…” She catches herself going flustered, while still in the throes of torture, at the prospect of explaining it to him. Even she doesn’t fully understand what’s going on. Her blurred hands go to her hips and she’s relieved when she’s stopped by the rigidity of the suit.
John’s eyes widen, slightly, and a bit of a grin crosses his face as he leans a little closer—hand still very much on her cheek, a contributing factor to her racing heart. His voice is soft and Ava can see he’s dying for some levity. “I wasn’t too rough with you last night, was I?” he asks with a laugh, tone a tad too flirtatious given their circumstances. As if you were the one calling the shots, oh, I could kiss that smirk off your face , she thinks, but the constant pain grows stronger and she flickers out of reality for a second. She comes back to a brush of his thumb against her clammy skin.
Footsteps round the corner and John’s hand drops hard and fast as he steps back, narrowly missing a collision with Bucky.
“Starr,” Bucky starts, moving in to get a better view before stopping suddenly. Ava watches his expression oscillate between concerned and confused. His line of sight leads her down to the concrete floor below her.
Damp. Red. Steady drips of blood from the fabric of her pants patter down in a sizable puddle at her feet.
Bucky reaches for her, fails to grab onto something material and tries again until she’s whole, then begins to lead her through the hallway and out. “Extracting Ava. Get the jet, have medical on standby,” he barks into the comm. Yelena replies, something questioning what’s going on, but Ava doesn’t pick up on it.
She’s too preoccupied with the reality of pain and the much-preferable memory of moments before.
Peeled out of her suit and laid on the medbay table, Ava feels more exposed than she’s ever been. She’d put up a fight over getting out of the suit; no one (well, almost no one) on the team had seen her in less than a hoodie until now. Somehow, being in only a tank top is worse than having nothing on from the waist down under the thin hospital blanket draped over her legs. They’ve hooked her up to an IV, in an attempt to relieve some bit of her discomfort, but she doesn’t have the heart to tell the medics that their due diligence is ineffective at combating technically-intangible pain. It’s worse now, actually. A ball of flame feels like it’s dragging through her hips. Lights blur at the edge of her sight. Staying solid on the table takes every ounce of her slipping control.
One of the doctors glances between Ava and the rest of the team surrounding her. Bob’s joined them too, sneaking down a few floors when the jet landed, and the blindingly-white room’s barely big enough for all of them. “Do you want some…privacy?” A red haired doctor asks as the rest of her colleagues go back into the adjacent lab, the woman’s hand hovering near Ava’s leg like she’s afraid to touch.
A little late for that . “I don’t know. I mean, this is fine,” Ava replies. She’s too exhausted to care; her head rolls back and eyelids flutter as the muscles in her lower back tighten. With each bout of worsening pain, she feels herself flicker and phase.
Yelena moves into her field of vision and quietly asks, “You need a drink?” Something strong enough to knock me out , Ava thinks, but knows that’s not what she’s asking.
“Yeah, please.” Her voice hitches in reply and she wordlessly watches as Yelena banishes Alexei out to retrieve coffee for the team. The rest of them—Bucky, Bob, Yelena, and John—remain in the room.
“As far as we’re aware, what’s going on is intense bleeding from, well…” The doctor looks away, unable to meet the eyes of the men in the room. Just fucking say it , Ava thinks. Stop dancing around whatever the hell’s going on. Bucky snaps at the woman, actually snaps his fingers in her face, and Yelena pulls him back before he can really pick a fight.
“It’s a period, no?” she asks the doctor. Yelena glances between Ava and the tablet at the foot of the table, head tilted like a curious puppy. “Unless you got stabbed in the ass. Bleeding, cramps, I never had all this but I know it is shit. SHIELD didn’t cut yours out?” She gestures vaguely at Ava’s midsection and the question seems to be answered by the red seeping into the blanket.
“No reason, when you’re molec—” Ava tries to reply but others chime in louder than her pained, unusually soft voice.
Bucky seems impatient, if anything. Straight to the point and directing it more at the doctor than her, which would be a bit rude if Ava didn’t want to disappear anyway. It’s his sort of care and concern. “How does a woman in her mid-thirties get her period for the first time now?”
“You don’t know it’s her first,” Yelena says.
“Really? Then why hasn’t this been an issue before? Check the file—ma’am, can you check her file?”
The doctor obliges. The glint of Bucky’s metal arm is enough to convince her. A minute of scrolling through her tablet and she nods her head in confirmation.
“There! That settles it.”
“Isn’t thirty-five a little delayed?” Bob asks and he rounds them back to the whole point from seconds ago. Ava knows he doesn’t have any ill intent adding to the pile-on discussion of her body but she wishes he didn’t remark on her at all. Everyone has something to say.
She sighs and closes her eyes. Ava’s not sure what’s which pain is worse, the cramps or the headache she’s close to developing. “Thirty-two,” she corrects. “I’m thirty-two.”
Yelena shrugs. “Late bloomer.”
Can you…not? As Ava’s hand dangles off the table, John discreetly takes it into his; the surprise makes it marginally easier to hold her tongue towards everyone’s commentary on her body. She breathes out a little as he begins to speak. “She’s clearly fine, guys, her life’s not being threatened so let’s just listen to what the medical team has to say. ”
The doctor attempts to get a word in. “It’s not—”
“See, just let the woman speak!” Ava catches Yelena roll her eyes at John’s inability to shut up himself. But it’s sweet, she knows. His loud mouth is a favorite of hers. Always has been, for longer than she’d like to admit. She allows herself a moment to drift off in reminiscence; the scratch of his beard between her legs, the drag of his fingers before he leans in and the metal of his wedding band cooling her flushed skin, the anticipation of him tasting her, how tangible it all is . The senses, for someone like her, are something to be cherished.
Ava holds onto the memory until she’s violently ripped away.
“It’s likely a miscarriage,” the woman finally says. The room goes uncomfortably silent; it’s a completely different air than before. Confused. Terribly confused. John’s hand tightens around Ava’s but she wiggles it out of his grasp and physically feels him shrink away from her. She’s grateful she can’t see his face. A little gentler, the doctor continues. “Given the type of tissue passed and amniotic fluid present alongside the blood, it’s all but confirmed. We’d need an ultrasound—”
“That won’t work,” Ava immediately replies. Her face flushes red in embarrassment and shock; she’s not sure which is stronger but shame and pain wrap around her entire body as she refuses to look up lest she catches anyone’s eyes. This situation is impossible. No , she supposes it’s possible, given it’s happening, but so very unlikely. Unlikely enough that she never once thought it could happen, took solace in the fact that it couldn’t and rationalized that as a blessing; no worrying over condoms and wrappers found in one of our trash cans, no pills to miss. Look at her now. To be asked to process this in front of all of them, no warning, is simply too much and for once she can’t just phase away. She shouldn’t. But she could . There’d just be a damning trail of blood left in her wake. “You can’t scan me, you won’t see—nothing’ll come up,” she continues with a shaky voice. “It doesn’t work like that.”
The doctor says nothing, confused but sympathetic in her gaze.
“You’ll be scanning the table. I don’t hold up in MRIs, any kind of imaging doesn’t grasp onto me. I’d rather if you didn’t. Please.” As if illustrating her point, Ava flickers and her vision blurs over for a moment. She comes back to the doctor hastily re-covering her legs. It’s much easier to focus on little things, the impracticality of an ultrasound, than the reason she needs it in the first place.
“Are we just glossing over…?” Yelena steps forward, Bob still in her shadow. The question goes unanswered.
Ava meets Bucky’s eyes—startled, almost suspicious—and watches as he flits between her and John. Shit . “Everyone out. Now,” he says. It’s a moment before his request really sinks in. Bob shuffles out and Yelena reluctantly follows with her hand on his back, face twisted in concern but she doesn’t say a word. John stays put. Bucky gives him a glance and a nod before leaving the room.
Ava wonders how long Bucky’s suspected what’s been going on between her and John. What he thinks about being proven right. She’d much prefer a less dramatic way of it coming to light, but there’s nothing to be done now.
The absence of a crowd leaves room for uncertainty to fill the empty space. Reality weighs heavy. There’s no one to distract her from the pain, the tension keeping her whole, the soaked paper sheet beneath her hips that desperately needs to be changed. John isn’t even beside her anymore. It sickens her how badly she wants his touch now. “Can you—is there a way to make this stop?” Ava asks. Between the pulsing in her pelvis and the nauseating slickness coating her inner thighs, she’s nearly begging the doctor at this point. Nearly. She’s still above groveling. I’ve been in pain all my life and somehow this is the most unbearable. “Anything. I want it gone. Now.”
“If the ultrasound isn’t an option, we’ll have to go straight to surgery then,” the doctor replies. It takes an embarrassing amount of courage for Ava to look her in the eye, but the woman quickly looks between her and John. “Is this…?”
Neither of them say a word.
“Ok. Well. Moral support is always good.” Tapping away at her tablet, the doctor moves on. “Give me a few to prep anesthetic and get the speculum and curette.”
“Anesthetic won’t work. You can’t put me under, it’s—”
“The same kind of thing, I suppose? You’re in for worse pain than you’ve got now.” The doctor speaks with a sigh. I know my condition is a burden, please stop seeing it that way too , Ava thinks. It’s too much to ask. She just nods in reply before the doctor continues. “I’m still gonna give you local anesthetic.”
“It won’t last long.”
“I only need ten minutes.”
“Then you better be that fucking fast,” John says. He’s stepped forward, back in Ava’s line of sight and hand returned to the table beside her own. “She doesn’t deserve to be in pain a second longer than she should be.”
The doctor nods and excuses herself out of the room. Before she goes, Ava sees her glance down to the table where John’s hand rests. No shift of eyes, no reaction. Simply, noticing. Something emboldens Ava and she takes the hand in hers, tightly weaving her fingers between his. Another bout of cinching and stabbing rises in intensity and she squeezes down on him hard. They stay in this silence for a bit.
“I’m sorry,” John says. They’re the first words he’s addressed towards her since the hallway. Already feels like ages from now. He steps around to fully face her and she can feel him look her up and down. It’s all in his eyes. Guilt.
“Don’t be,” she dismisses him. With a cringe and a harder squeeze of his hand, she weathers the pain. Thank God he can take it. “It’s not your fault.”
“It is.”
“It’s not.”
“No, I think this is the one thing that’s very, very explicitly my fault.”
“There’s no one to blame for this besides myself, John.” She’s insistent. Almost cold in her tone but there’s an aching, burning core beneath it. Arguing is a love language the two of them know well. Before there were hands held tight, stolen kisses in the secluded kitchen, evenings that got her into this situation in the first place—Ava catches herself remembering one night, the way he kissed every inch of her like he could pull the lingering pain out of her body himself—there was this. Bickering. Bickering to avoid the feelings they both hold.
He matches her cadence, emphasis placed on her name as it slips from his lips and her heart flutters even through pain and frustration. “Unless there’s something going on I’m not aware of, I’m fairly certain, Ava , I’m the one who got you—”
“Killing this… thing , I mean,” she snaps, before he can say the word. Ava tries to drop his hand again but he doesn’t let her go this time. “That’s my fault. My failure.”
“Ava…” John’s face drops and while she sees him struggling for words, she wastes no time in continuing.
“It’s for the best. Imagine if it worked out.” She scoffs and rolls her eyes, laughs at the prospect of a child while the edges of her eyes blur with water . How ridiculous. How impractical. John gets the Norman Rockwell picturesque family but Ava is well aware she’s never been deserving of that sort of life. The accident ruled it out ages ago. Every choice she’s made since only reaffirms that. Ava can’t stop the words from slipping from her mouth, cruel and spiteful. “Would’ve been an awkward conversation for you to have with your Olivia.”
The low blow lands heavy and knocks him silent. Ava should regret saying it. Part of her does as she watches John look down at her, expression more wounded than she’s ever seen from him. The gold of his wedding band glints from the fluorescent lights and she covers it up with her own finger, pressing into the metal until it hurts them both.
Their silence is broken by the doctor returning.
The procedure is a tangled mess of tension and torture like Ava’s never felt before. To be awake and numbly feel each centimeter dilated, the scraping of her insides until every little bit of baby her body’s built is flushed out whilst willing herself to stay as solid as possible through it all, is a sort of pain she’s never experienced. Her usual chronic condition is ever-present and oppressive, but not as sharp as this. Nowhere as visceral.
She’s seated upright, her feet secured in stirrups. The only comfort is the feeling of warmth as she leans against John—her cheek pressed into his chest, the left side of her body flush to him while his arm wraps around her. Ava squeezes in tandem with each burst of pain; left hand interlaced with his, right hand gripping the edge of the table. He kisses the top of her head after her first cry out in agony and that’s when tears finally spill down her cheeks.
The woman was right; surgery’s no more than ten minutes. Still, it feels like an eternity to Ava. She knocks out from strain and exhaustion before they’ve even removed her feet from the stirrups.
Ava doesn’t remember being moved to her bed. She certainly doesn’t remember being changed into sweatpants and a hoodie. The room is dark and the time is indeterminate. Everything feels wrapped in haze and the only proof she has that events of the medbay weren’t some terrible, twisted nightmare are lingering abdominal cramps and the thick pad wedged between her thighs.
Ava attempts to get up from laying in bed, but movement in the corner of the room catches her attention and her eyes dart that way. She’s seconds from phasing out—
“It’s me. It’s ok.”
John walks towards her from where she supposes he was seated, at the desk chair across the room. He’s in the same clothes as earlier; doesn’t look very well-rested, but Ava’s not sure she’s ever seen him look like he’s gotten enough sleep. A sneaking suspicion’s long lingered under her skin that he only really sleeps when they accidentally drift off together. She’s often phased into his room in the middle of the night to find it empty. He’s up long before the earliest risers of the team make their way into the common areas and is the last to retire for the night. Where he goes, she’s not sure. Gut instinct tells her the gym on the same floor as their bedrooms is the likely place.
If he’s been waiting here for me, she thinks—or hopes, maybe he got a little bit of rest.
“You’ve been here,” she says quietly, voice still heavy with exhaustion. “How long?”
“Couple hours. Twelve, maybe. Lost track when I dozed off.”
She can’t help but smile. “Could’ve left and came back. I’m not sure how comfortable that chair is.”
John just shakes his head. “I should’ve known something was up with you.” He approaches the bed, walking to the opposite side like he knows his way around the place—with the time he’s spent in her room, Ava supposes he really does— and gets on to sit beside her. A moment doesn’t even pass before he’s touching her, hand brushing a strand of hair away from her face. “You’d been weird for a few days.”
She gives him a strange look; defensive, almost, at her behavior. I was fine. I’ve never been less than fine. At least, that’s how she’s always been desperate to present herself.
“You shrunk away from my touch. Sunday night, before you fell asleep on my bed, you moved away when I held your lower back.”
“I was in pain,” Ava replies. He raises his eyebrows— see , she can practically hear him say—and she continues a little more sarcastically, “Well, great oracle, did you think it was…?”
“No.” John fills the gap she leaves in refusing to say the words. It’s still too fresh. “Well, not until they got you to the medbay. I don’t know, it started getting familiar.” Familiar? Ava purses her lips, confused, as she waits for him to continue. A few seconds pass before he finally says something with eyes focused elsewhere. “Olivia, she…”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” Pressing a bruise she wasn’t aware was even there, Ava goes quiet in the aftermath. It never dawned on her that he might have experience in this department. She’s never truly felt second to Olivia (until the incident in the medbay) even though she is , but the reminder that John has years of relationship experience over her is gutting all the same. Every one of her firsts is simply added to his exhaustive list.
John glances back to her, taking Ava’s hand into his and rubbing his thumb over her palm. Pent-up energy is thrumming through his veins; she can feel it. Ava’s content with being his stress ball. “No, it’s alright. Olivia had a couple but, yeah, we got through them. She got through them,” he corrects himself. “Wasn’t really there, with the job and all.”
Ava imagines the hell she faced for hours the past day—and days before, too, when the cramping first began and she didn’t realize it yet—but going at it completely alone. She’s a stronger woman than me. I’d sooner put a bullet through my head.
“Glad I got to be there with you.” John stops the motion and squeezes her hand. The eye contact he makes—genuine, tender—makes Ava’s lip quiver. It’s unexpectedly soft, coming from him, and her throat closes up with something she can’t quite place. In fear of breaking down, she looks away from him. She’s let too many walls down in the past day. There’s a level of distance she needs to maintain, that she must maintain, that’s she always maintained as a means of survival.
Ava still keeps her hand in his.
Even though she can feel John’s eyes on her as he speaks, she continues to look down at the blanket beside her while she listens. “You know it’s not your fault, right? Women have miscarriages all the time, out of anyone’s control, and most of the time they’re one-off occurrences. You can’t predict them or stop them. It just happens.”
“It’s different—I just, I didn’t think this was a possibility for me.”
“That you’d lose a pregnancy?”
“That I could have one in the first place,” Ava replies and meets John’s gaze with her wide eyes. Something twists in her gut; guilt or worthlessness, she’s not sure but it blossoms all the same. “And I can , but I can’t. Not all the way. I’m not stable enough on my own, of course I’m not hospitable for a child.”
She can see there’s something he wants to say, the way he breathes in and his lips part, and Ava goes on anyway.
“It’s like being invited to a party, you know? I don’t want to go but I’d like an invitation. I want the choice to say no, I want to have a choice at all.” Her voice cracks with emotion, tears threatening to come back as she dredges up her lifelong self-hatred, but she doesn’t let that hold her back. “I don’t. And if I change my mind down the line—God knows I won’t, God knows if there’ll be a line—I can’t just decide to have a child of my own. It’s not a possibility for me. I don’t get your perfect little life with a spouse, a child, and your American picket fence.”
“Maybe not, but that doesn’t mean what you have is any less.”
“It does. You have, God, a fucking perfect body. Not a single thing wrong with you, and I have this mess —”
“Having a miscarriage doesn’t make you less of a woman, Ava.”
“It’s not about whether I can have a child, John, it’s the principle of it. There’s something wrong with me. There will always be something wrong with me, no matter how hard I try to pretend, and an inability to carry a pregnancy to term is just another example of that. My body doesn’t function normally. It never will.”
“I love you anyway.” John replies before Ava can get another word out. It doesn’t matter. His admission stuns her into silence—it’s the first time either of them have said it. Weeks of sneaking around, holding hands under blankets and kissing in empty rooms, and this is the first time one of them has said it.
Ava’s skin goes hot and itchy; her lungs tighten as his admission sinks in. You shouldn’t , she thinks, because it’s so much easier to deny what she heard than take it as truth. Ava’s searched all her life for reality—something more tangible than her, something that’s true—and once put face-to-face with it, she can’t accept him.
To do so would be to gain someone to lose.
She blinks away tears that she’ll later deny, asking “How many did Olivia have?” John gives her a funny look, confused at the change in conversation. Ava repeats herself. “The miscarriages, how many were there?”
“Four. Three were while we were trying for Henry.” He’s a little quieter as he goes on. “Took us a bit.”
“And look at you, got it in one go with a woman who’s part-time immaterial.”
“I wasn’t the one who had issues,” John replies. There’s an undercurrent to his words. Frustration. Disappointment. They had plenty reasons they didn’t work out, most of them him. Nearly all of them him and he’ll admit it, too. It’s the first time Ava’s gotten any indication there was more to the decline of his marriage than his own personal downfall.
“Four, you said?” She asks after a pause. John nods. “Three recently, well, not that recent, but—the other?” Tentative in her asking, she glances down but flits back to him as he continues.
“Yeah, there was…” He goes faraway again, looking across the room at the furthest wall. Ava squeezes his hand and he returns back to her. “We were young, y’know? We didn’t have any business getting married straight out of high school but, it was just what we had to do. I didn’t mind.”
It starts to piece together. She knows, vaguely, of his upbringing. She doesn’t have to jump far. Ava begins softly, “Olivia got pregnant, so you got married…” John doesn’t say a word and Ava feels him waiting for the gears in her mind to click into place.
“...but she lost the baby.”
For a moment, all he does is nod. “I didn’t find out until I got out of basic training weeks after it happened.” She pictures John in that moment: eighteen and naïve, released from the burden of absentee fatherhood but the weight of a ring still on his finger. He’s beautiful , she thinks, without ever knowing the way childhood graced his features. Utterly beautiful. Ava wishes she knew him then. “It was for the best. If it had worked out…”
You wouldn’t be here.
“I love you,” Ava finally says to him, “and I’m scared of how much I do.”
John takes her face into his hand and Ava’s too distracted melting into a kiss to feel the gold band brush against her cheek. The aftershock pains of the procedure are still lingering but she’s fairly certain with him by her side, she’ll be alright.