Chapter Text
Ava is particularly talented at holding grudges, and she hates John Walker’s guts.
She’s been seething since the mission was assigned, and she certainly isn’t going to stop now that it’s begun. She’s furious about being deployed with him, just him, and his smug, infuriating, pompous face that she really wants to punch.
It isn’t just his insistence on holding onto the Captain America mantle, which is ridiculous—he’s at the end of the list of Captain Americas, the last man the public thinks of as deserving that shield. When the Void had bent the weapon in half, she figured it was karma for bludgeoning a man to death with it. He’s annoying in this way, still wearing his country’s colors and operating like he’s in the military, embarrassingly eager to follow orders.
His general sense of arrogance and indifference is enough to make her blood boil. He doesn’t even act upset in front of Val when they’re briefed, even though she knows he’s annoyed. He simply gives her a smug grin and promises he will fulfill the objectives no matter what. He’s still eager to please despite the military stripping him of his titles and the current disastrous state of his marriage. Eager to follow orders and forge into battle and drive Ava absolutely up the walls.
“He’s the worst,” Ava moans to Yelena after the briefing, hoping for some commiseration. “And now we have to go to Canada together. Just us.”
Yelena inspects the knife she’s cleaning as she nods sympathetically. “I’d kill myself if I had to go on a mission with that idiot.”
“I’m going to kill him,” Ava says, scrubbing a hand over her face. “That jet is going to come back with just me, because I’ll have dumped his body in the Canadian wilderness.”
Yelena snorts out a laugh. “It’s just two days, right? I think you can make it without strangling him. But it would be easy to hide the evidence out there.”
Ava nods thoughtfully. “Very true. They might never find him.”
Her anxiety and frustration only grow as the op approaches. Val never gives them much time to actually prep, so it’s to be expected that she and John head out early tomorrow morning. But she doubts she’ll get any solid sleep tonight, which will affect her performance and probably mean she’s in more pain tomorrow. It’s all connected—her stress, her sleep, her mood. Any wrong variable or even just random chance can lead to an episode.
It’s not just that the pain will risk the mission and make her hate Walker even more. She’s worried about slipping up in front of him, about giving him another reason to tease her. To doubt her presence on the team. Most days, she still feels like an escaped lab rat who doesn’t really belong on a steady, somewhat powerful team of supersoldiers and spies and assassins. If Walker figures out she’s at risk for—well, dissolving—who knows how he’ll react. She half expects him to march into Valentina’s office and try to get her kicked out.
She can practically hear it now, the snark in his tone as he whines that she’s a liability, a risk, a freak—
Ava rubs her temples and winces, swearing there’s a headache coming on. Walker just has that effect on people, she supposes.
She tosses and turns for at least an hour before falling into a shallow, troubled sleep.
—
John Walker isn’t sure of a lot in his life right now, but he knows with absolute certainty that Ava hates his guts.
It’s not a secret at all that he hardly belongs here. All his bravado and lies to impress them, shot through. Exposed and embarrassed. The failed Captain America, used up and disposed of by his country after over a decade of grueling service. He’s lost friends and suffered and wakes up at least once a week screaming over the things his own country made him do.
Everyone knows of this failure, just as they know of his failures as a husband and father. Olivia isn’t even speaking to him, and he can’t blame her. He doesn’t deserve it, and he doesn’t deserve to be on a team that treats him halfway decently. They don’t look at him like he’s a complete and utter failure, but he’d prefer if they did. If they were honest and didn’t go to the effort of hiding what they really thought from him.
Ava doesn’t, though. Her bracing honesty and sharp tongue are refreshing, and the moments they bicker are moments when his thoughts aren’t lingering on what the team thinks of him, if anything he does is meaningful. He knows what she thinks of him, and it’s easier that way. To fight and shout and relish the flash of anger in her eyes.
Take today, for example. He thought Ava was going to explode from how red her face got. He’s never heard her call Val so many names after the briefing concluded, and he almost laughed at how ridiculous it was to pair him and her together. Even Val knows they hate each other’s guts. He’d be better off going on a mission with anyone else on the team.
But there are the moments when she isn’t looking, and he finds himself staring at her. Thinking, even when they’re screaming at each other, that she’s beautiful. It’s ridiculous to entertain the thought at all, and if she found out, she would skin him alive. But he wonders if maybe he loves fighting with her because she sees him for who he actually is. Because he feels alive when they argue, when he’s with her.
But it’s nothing but idiocy, a lapse in judgment. No one would want him like that after everything, and certainly not Ava. So he shoves the thoughts aside and settles for the routine, the familiar: wallowing in self-loathing and trying to forget the faces of the people he’s lost, the people he’s killed.
John Walker is pretty sure Ava hates his guts, but he hates himself more.
—
Ava’s going to kill John Walker right here in the middle of bum-fucking-nowhere, Canada.
“What the hell was that?” she screams, ripping off her helmet as they tear away from their target building. It’s in flames, which is far messier than the operation was supposed to be. It sends a giant signal to anyone in the vicinity that she and Walker have just raided the facility and taken out the entire staff.
“It’s called helping you!” Walker barks, clipping his stupid shield to his back. She wants to beat him over the head with it until he’s unconscious and therefore unable to talk back.
“No,” Ava snaps, practically steaming at the ears. Her fists are clenched, eyes wild. “You should have warned me, Walker. I told you I had it under control!”
“They had quantum disruptors!” Walker shouts, throwing his hands up in frustration. “What was I supposed to do, let you—?”
“Let me do my fucking job!” Ava retorts, running a hand through her sweaty hair. Her anger is reaching a fever pitch, hot and spiraling inside her, her cells still buzzing with the aftermath of the mission. “Not come bursting in like the hero you want so badly to be!” God, she hates him.
The disruptors hadn’t been used long, and she’d been able to get out of range quickly. But the op was supposed to be a few hours, not ten, and she pushed herself too far. She can feel it in the steady pain creeping through her limbs, the way her hands shake and not just from how much Walker is pissing her off. She needs privacy to curl into a ball and ride it out, but there’s none to be found in this sparse forest miles from their safehouse.
She should be conserving her energy for the walk, not screaming at him for (maybe) saving her life. But he won’t stop snarking back at her as they stomp through the woods and her head is spinning and he makes her so fucking angry—
Ava stumbles on a root, Walker’s voice tuned out as she stops for a moment, scrunching her eyes against the wave of pain. She pushes off a tree trunk and continues on, begging her body to hold it together.
“See?” Walker says in his obnoxious, told-you-so voice. She hates how often he uses it. “You’re slipping. Who knows what you would’ve done if I hadn’t made a judgment call to go in and help.”
“Shut up, Walker,” Ava snarls, the words unfurling under her ragged breath. It hurts to talk, and the world shifts as pain blurs her vision. “For God’s sake, shut up.”
He scoffs, scraping his dirty-blond hair back from his brow. “Just because you hate talking doesn’t mean we shouldn’t debrief—”
Ava’s knees buckle, hitting the dirt floor of the woods hard, her limbs no longer able to support her. A faint buzzing noise fills the air as her cells work like hell to keep her in one piece, to keep her from dissolving half-into the dirt.
A strangled noise escapes her throat, somewhere between a whimper and a plea. Agony tears through her body, blinding her, and she tilts forward to fall straight into the dust, knows she will collapse into a limp, pathetic ball of suffering until it passes. Walker will realize what a liability she really is, will mock her for this relentlessly.
Firm hands catch her before she can faceplant in the dirt. Hands that move to her shoulders and squeeze, hold her firm, and a voice that’s far less cocky and confident than she’s ever heard it.
“Ghost? Ava!”
Ava blinks hard and part of her vision returns; she works to focus on the face in front of hers, the wide blue eyes devoid of any harshness. His mouth, which never stops talking, forms the shape of her name.
“Ava,” he says urgently, his hold tightening as she tilts again. “Are you hurt? What happened?” Assessing the situation like the good soldier he is, trying to solve a problem that can’t truly be fixed—her. Her body. Her unraveling, the constant pain that lives with her like a shadow. A curse.
Ava tries to speak, murmurs something that’s incoherent even to her own ears. Walker frowns, taking hold of her jaw to try and snag her attention.
“Ava,” Walker repeats. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
She frowns. Is that fear in his voice?
“It…hurts,” she manages, eyes fluttering shut in an effort to ward off another wave of it.
“What does?” He runs a hand down her ribcage, searching for something obvious. He won’t find anything—her wounds are rarely visible.
“Everything,” she whispers, the outline of her body flickering. Walker withdraws his hand, frowning.
“Your phasing?” he asks, frowning. “I thought the suit protected you.”
Ava drags her eyes to his: confused, frustrated. “It helps. But today was…long. Too much phasing. Overdid it.”
Walker mutters a curse under his breath. “Okay. How do we fix it?”
She tries to shake her head and instantly regrets it; the sensation of glass drives through her skull, so fiercely she groans. “Can’t. Just have to…ride it out. Safehouse might have some…stabilizers.”
Ava bites back a scream and reaches for him without thinking. She grips his shirt with clenched knuckles, desperate to feel something solid, for reassurance that she isn’t going to dissolve into the ether. She cannot find it in herself to be embarrassed that she’s latched onto him in her desperation, just relieved for the living, breathing body in proximity to hers. Relieved that she is not alone like she almost always is during an episode.
“Shit,” Walker says, the sound distant, and he doesn’t shove her away. “We still have a ways to go—”
“I know, I just need—fuck,” Ava gasps, breath hissing sharply between her teeth. “I just need a minute. Need…”
She doesn’t want to ask for help. Her pride is going to prevent her from doing so when she’s on the edge of an atomic-level breakdown of her body and her skin feels like it’s being flayed.
“It’s okay, Starr, I’ve got you.” Walker’s breath is on her neck, suddenly, and a calloused palm cups the back of her neck to hold her steady, keep her close as shivers wrack her body. “Just breathe.”
Easy for you to say, she wants to snap, but it would require too much energy. She leans into him, the coarse fabric of his suit rough and grounding against her cheek. Her shoulders heave with the effort of breathing, each inhale ragged and difficult.
Slowly, the buzzing quiets down. Ava’s breathing lowers to a level that doesn’t indicate a total panic attack. The pain is no longer blinding but still present, aching in her limbs and rendering her weak and shaky, grimacing as leftover shockwaves make their way through her body. Banished for now, but ready to reappear at a moment’s notice. A constant presence that she’s more used to than not—if she has a pain-free day, she’s suspicious.
The hardest part of the chronic pain is the unpredictability of it. Even now, it might vanish for the rest of the day. It would leave her exhausted and drained, but it might leave her alone. Or it could strike again halfway to the safehouse, risking her and Walker’s life again by temporarily disabling her. If someone attacked right now, she would be defenseless. Walker might get himself killed for how distracted he was by her condition.
“You’re going to be fine,” Walker keeps saying, and she’s unsure if it’s for her benefit or his. “Just breathe, Ghost.”
She should be embarrassed that she’s holding onto him like a lifeline, falling apart. Later, she probably will be. But it’s been a long time since anyone comforted her, and she can’t find it in herself to hate that Walker is the one to do it. She’s in too much fucking pain to be angry with him, so she does her best to follow his instructions and stay conscious, to drag oxygen into her lungs while he holds her upright.
Ava isn’t sure if minutes or hours pass, but she finally gets to the point where she can move without screaming. Her body’s settled down for now, as close to stable as she can get in these conditions, and she meets Walker’s eyes with renewed determination.
“Safehouse,” she grits out, moving to stand. “I’ll be fine once we get there.”
Walker takes her hands and guides her to her feet, looking shaken. “Don’t disappear on me, Starr.”
She rolls her eyes at him. “I wish I could.”
The walk back is grueling. By the time the cabin is in sight, Ava’s completely dead on her feet. Walker’s got an arm under her shoulders, helping her bear her own weight, and every muscle in her body is screaming like there’s glass embedded in her skin. The adrenaline of the attack is fading, leaving her shaky and drained.
“Come on, then, Starr,” Walker says, uncharacteristically serious as he helps her up the steps and into the house. “Let’s get you fixed up.”
Ava slumps on the ratty couch, breathing in the stale air of the old cabin serving as their safehouse. Tries to close her eyes and forget that her body is constantly on the verge of dissolving, of ripping into unfixable shreds until there’s nothing left of her. Tries not to remember being a child in SHIELD’s labs, unable to touch another human being, deprived of parents and touch and love, a broken freak who needed to be fixed so she could be a weapon—
“Ava.”
She blinks, frowning at Walker. He’s kneeling next to her, brow furrowed.
“What?” she asks weakly.
“I asked what you need,” he says, and she shifts uncomfortably at their proximity. He’s so close she can make out the varying blues of his irises, see the five o’clock shadows that frame his face. She’s close enough she can see how tired he looks, how he hums with nervous energy.
“You’re being very nice to me,” Ava murmurs, wincing as she shifts on the couch.
“Don’t get used to it,” he warns, but there’s no bite to the words. “What do you need, Ava? Serious question.”
“Painkillers,” she says, shivering. “Blanket. Something hot to drink. They might have stocked this house with quantum regulators, not sure. They’re small portable things, sometimes they help.”
Walker nods, the list clicking into place. He likes to be busy, likes to have clear directives, and flounders without them. This he can do. “Stay put.”
Don’t have to tell me twice, she thinks wearily, curling into a pathetic little ball. Chills skirt across her skin and her head pounds. She drifts into a half-sleep as Walker busies himself around the cabin, rifling through cabinets and turning the kettle on, muttering under his breath at the sorry state of the safehouse. The team’s seen worse, but it isn’t the best stocked.
“Okay,” he says, cutting through the haze. Ava blinks awake to find him hovering over her, arms full of various supplies and requested materials. “I’ll be having a word with Val about supplies, but I think these will do for now.”
He drops a fuzzy, slightly moth-eaten blanket on her lap. Ava wrinkles her nose as she shakes the dust out, but finds it’s relatively clean and fuzzy, enough to keep her warm. Walker sets a glass of water and several bottles of meds on the coffee table, handing her a steaming mug of green tea.
“I think these are the regulators you mentioned,” he says, shaking one of the containers at her. “And pain meds. You’d better take them now before you pass out again.”
Twisting the cap off with clumsy fingers, Ava removes the syringe from the canister. A strange material designed to be injected straight into her body, providing temporary stability to her cells. She’s used to the huge fucking needle, but Walker blanches at it.
“Maybe you shouldn’t—”
“Stop making me feel like an invalid,” Ava practically growls, slamming the device into her thigh and pressing the activation. The needle pierces her skin and she winces only slightly, sighing as it makes its way into her bloodstream. “I can do it.”
She leans back into the couch and sighs, wrapping her hands around the hot mug and willing it to fix her. Walker watches closely as she takes a sip, noticing her throat is a little sore.
From screaming earlier, Ava realizes.
The stabilizers settle over her, dousing her in soft relief. It isn’t complete, and a dull buzz of pain is still present. But it’s farther away, humming like white noise and far easier to ignore.
“Does this happen a lot?” Walker asks, tracing the rim of his mug absently.
Ava raises a brow. “I thought you read my file, discount Captain America. My cells are basically always trying to destroy themselves.”
He doesn’t react to the jab. “I did. But I thought your suit prevented stuff like this.”
She wants to laugh. If only it were so easy.
Ava rubs her temples. “It can’t prevent it. Nothing can. It can make it less likely or frequent, but not gone. I can normally manage it better, but I never really know when it’s going to flare up. The suit helps a lot, but the pain’s unpredictable. And constant.”
“You’re…you’re always in pain?” Walker asks in disbelief.
She shrugs, tries to make light of it. “It used to be worse. Thank God SHIELD found some use for me, I guess. And Val’s OXE Group suit is a big improvement. I can be out of my suit. But it doesn’t fix the fact that my body’s inherently unstable.”
He stares at her, stunned. “Fuck, Starr. I didn’t know.”
“No one on the team does,” she answers quietly, squirming under the vulnerability of it all. “It’s not something I like to share.”
Walker nods. “I won’t tell them, if that’s what you mean.” A small kindness, when he could just as easily wield this weakness against her.
She takes another sip, the warmth of the tea seeping through her bones. A temporary reprieve, but a routine that always helps. Small comforts are significant, and she’s surprised to find she doesn’t mind being alone in this post-episode routine. Surprised she doesn’t want to scream at him to leave her alone.
“I would appreciate that,” Ava says, taking his word for it. She’s inclined to believe him for some reason.
“Just…” he starts, hesitating.
She cocks a brow. “Yes?”
Walker sighs, running a hand down his face. He looks almost more tired than Ava is. “You can tell me if it happens again, or you feel it starting to. If you need…help.”
He looks somewhat embarrassed. He isn’t necessarily close to anyone on the team that Ava’s witnessed, and it’s like the sincerity is difficult for him. Walker is an annoying son of a bitch, but she never doubts he’s going to do whatever it takes to finish a mission.
“You do have a heart,” Ava pokes, stifling a shit-eating grin.
“You’re a part of my team,” he replies seriously. “And that, today? That was fucking terrifying. Don’t do that to me again, Starr.”
Ava studies the weary lines of his face, the bloodshot eyes red from exhaustion and stress. She outlines the genuine worry in his frame, the anger that doesn’t seem to be directed at her. Like he’s angry she scared him, but not holding it against her. The situation, maybe.
Huh. No one’s ever expressed anger on her behalf besides maybe Bill, and Ava doesn’t like to think about him. How she failed him, or how his life is better off without her.
So she nods at her stubborn, bullheaded, obnoxious teammate and offers her half-empty mug up in a conciliatory gesture. “Deal, stars and stripes.”
Walker clinks his glass against hers with a glare. “It sure as hell better be.”