A/N: Wow, can't believe I actually wrote something. I've been away for a while so my writing probably sucks at the moment as I am way out of practice but whatever the muse wouldn't leave me alone.
Full disclosure, this started off as a character study of Ava and devolved into a kind of self-therapy. I loved Ava's character (not just because it's Hannah John-Kamen and I totally have a thing for taking messed up characters and making them my children) but because I felt represented by her in a way. There aren't a lot of characters out there who deal with chronic pain and flashy marvel superpowers aside that is what she's suffering from. Like Ava, my pain started when I was a child and it's been there all the time ever since. Of course, I'm pretty sure having your cells torn apart and put back together every day might be a little more painful than what I'm dealing with but I digress. So some of Ava's thoughts, feelings and experiences in this story are inspired by my own life. In saying that, this is in no way a self-insert. Ava and I are very different people who have had vastly different experiences and that's shaped who we are.
Also be warned, I have been watching a lot of Killjoys lately (if you haven't seen this show what the hell are you doing with your life?) and some of my Dutch might accidentally slip into my Ava in later chapters, so yeah.
"When the nights were long and the days were deep
There lived a girl and her father in a beautiful castle."
"Was he a king? I like when they're kings."
"He wanted to be.
Sometimes he thought he was.
He was on a quest to feed his people.
But he had disturbed something old, deep, deep under the land.
All gifts come with a price.
The girl's father had awoken an ancient darkness, something in search of a name, a voice, and without knowing it, he gave it one. . ."
- Killjoys: Season 3, Episode 10
...
She's six years old, the first time they're introduced.
Oh, don't get her wrong. They've crossed paths before, strangers brushing each other on the street, glimpses in the crowd, quick and forgotten. The ache of bone stretching through tender, fleshy gum - faded from memory almost as soon as it's passed; a bump of the head against a table leg, tears of surprise and cries for the arms that will pick her up and make it all go away; a scraped knee, stinging long after impact and hobbling her step for days - more from remembered hurt than anything that lingers after; a hoarse throat, cramping stomach and clogging nose that keep her home from school for a full, dreaded week...
But these are nothing. In a few months, a year, she won't even remember them. The only traces left behind little more than a vague wariness of certain circumstances, a preparedness for when they might come again. It is a taste.
Six changes that.
But isn't that what aging is all about? Change.
(if so she is quite the master at it, constantly metamorphosing, becoming uglier and uglier with each evolution - the reverse butterfly)
Her parents are fighting, again. She can hear them from all the way down the stairs, down the hall, down into their new living where she sits on their new couch in their new house, in their new neighborhood, in their new country (everything so new). Shouts and silences and shouts again, pitching anger that make her clench inward and her stomach scream.
She mistakes its protests for hunger.
Perhaps it is. It's been a long time since that sandwich, after all, the one she nibbled at distractedly for afternoon tea, shying from the ever present tension in the room.
She knows something is wrong. Has been for a long time. Ever since that day her father came home, big and small all at once, angry and sad, desperate and broken. She knows it has something to do with a shield, not like her Captain America one that she runs around the back yard with, slinging at Hydra soldiers left and right. A different one, bigger, scarier. And there's a 'Hank', the word she and Mummy never say but hear too much, a word that is bad like 'shit' and 'crap' and 'ass' - words she's not supposed to know. And there are long nights she sits in her father's lap ('can't sleep, Daddy, just a few more minutes', 'not yet, Daddy, please') and stares without understanding at paper after paper strewn across his desk, scribbles of nonsense that might have been pictures and might have been words, as his desperation with the pencil grows and grows - because she knows that he needs her, even if he's never said it, and so she'll stay with him until he doesn't (like the seven dwarfs keeping their vigil around Snow White's bedside, waiting for her to awake and return to herself once more). And then there's the fighting. Like now. She didn't know what fighting was until her father came home that night and she would give anything to return to the days when she didn't, to go back to those few seconds before he walked in the door, further even, to that morning when he kissed Mummy on the mouth - icky but good - and lifted her up above his head, sprinting around the kitchen to give her wings so she could fly like The Wasp.
(she laughed so hard, not knowing she would never feel that bubble in her chest so full again)
But that was then, and this is now.
Now, she is hungry.
She doesn't want to bother the voices upstairs, though, doesn't want their anger turned on her, to feel the rage of that fire up close - she knows from experience how it can scorch. Besides, she's a big girl. She can get her own dinner.
Stepping into the kitchen, she looks around, a little lost, a little desperate.
She doesn't know how to make a sandwich yet and doesn't really want one besides. There's macaroni and cheese in the cupboard but you need a bowel for that and they're all up too high for her to reach - she tries, stretching, stretching, just a little farther . . . but no. She settles for an apple. She likes apples.
Only, she doesn't like them whole.
Doesn't like the way biting into them tears at her gums and makes them sting - for as little as she knows of pain, she is keen to avoid any trace of it. Doesn't like the sticky juice dribbling down her fingers. Mummy or Daddy always cut them into wedges for her but Mummy and Daddy aren't here, and she's a big girl.
She gets a knife from the top drawer - the biggest one, the sharpest one, the one most capable of defeating the hard, stubborn apple - and grabs a breadboard from the dish-rack - she's also a smart girl. She steadies the apple with her fingers, glaring down at it, concentrating, chewing her bottom lip as she balances the knife somewhere over the center. It wobbles around, changing, changing, changing, slipping, slipping, slipping. Twice she loses purchase the apple escapes, bouncing off the breadboard onto the floor. On the third try she doesn't hesitate, impatient, determined, she slams the knife down. It works, to a point. It gets halfway through to the core until her strength gives out, unable to make it go any further. She takes a breath, pushes down - nothing. Annoyed, she tries to free the knife and try again. Nothing. Stuck. She pulls with a little more effort, groans and yanks.
She almost doesn't register the pain.
Not at first.
Instead she sees the blood, the red drops falling onto mangled apple and sticky breadboard and, as she flinches back, tiled floor (she didn't mean to make such a mess, she didn't!). Eyes wide, she raises her free hand, index finger and palm leaking more of the scary liquid. She can feel it now. A sharp, searing throb, emanating from a small slice at the bottom of her index finger.
(pain takes her hand and squeezes.
It is not a nice hello)
She screams.
And cries.
And screams again, her other hand still clutching the knife, forgotten, unable to relax her grip and let it go.
She's not sure if it's the pain or the fear that gets her most.
Because she knows, knew even before she opened the drawer, that she's not supposed to touch the knives.
And now there's blood and mess and pain and everything is her fault.
(it's all her fault)
And she doesn't know what to do. Doesn't see a way out.
But then her parents are there, voices still raised but this time with fear and concern, and they are looking at her and only her, and she is in their arms and in their minds like she hasn't been in months. She hurts and she is scared, but she is not alone. Not anymore.
So she does not mind it so much. This hand of pain that reaches out for hers to shake. The way their skin touches and the sharp unfamiliarity begins to fade. It is not the worst of meetings, as meetings go. Perhaps, the next time It comes, It will not scare her so much.
(if ever there was proof that she was once a child, a real child that didn't fade, that believed in fairy tales and happy endings, a child of innocence - it is this)
How could she have ever been so naive?
. . .
Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong. The machine is angry and Daddy is shouting and Mummy is shouting and now they are running, her legs stumbling after taller, longer strides, a hand pulling her along. It is only when they breach the doorway andkeep going, that she realizes there are only two of them, that the only hand upon her is soft and delicate, not huge and calloused and she turns just to see, just to know, because he has to be there, just behind, just a few steps behind. Because he is her dad and in all these years of running they have never ran without him; because heroes never leave people behind, and heroes always make it out; because her dad is a hero (she knows he is, in the same way she knows that The Hank is a villain) and so is she, he told her so, he told her that she was as brave and powerful as The Wasp and she believes him because he knew her (once upon a time in a land far, far away) and he would never lie to her.
He would never lie to her.
Yes, heroes always make it out.
But sometimes heroes need help.
And heroes never leave people behind.
So she tugs free, wishes there was time to tell her mother that it would all be okay, that she will get Daddy, that she will save him, that they will all make it out. But there isn't and the machine is getting angrier - she can hear its screams - and so instead she just runs, hears a different scream behind her, too scared to be Mummy's (mummy's don't get scared); and then she is through the door and her father is there and she's coming for him, she's coming, almost there. It's all going to be okay-
But then he turns and she sees his face and she knows, she should have remembered.
Should have remembered that Steve Rogers once left Bucky Barnes behind in the snow, because there is no saving what is already lost.
Should have remembered that Captain America flew into the ice and never came back.
Should have remembered that Ant-Man no longer has his Wasp.
But she didn't. And everything is pain and roaring and heat and nothing.
Later, she will think of a story her mother once told her. Of a girl who opened a box that should never have been opened. And all the horrors that came out, never to be put back.
...
"Yale, you must remember the stories I tell you, especially this one."
"It's important."
"Why?"
"Because, Little Bird, this is how it all began."
- Killjoys: Season 3, Episode 10
A/N: I've written a lot more but it's going through the proofreading stages so hang in there.
side note: I was halfway through writing the apple/parents fighting thing when I realized that I was recounting something that actually happened to me as a child.