It was Eva's day off, so she had decided to spend it lying face-down on the floor of her apartment, alone, blasting Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture on repeat and moving only to get food and vodka. Around 2pm, when Rachel Carson was dozing peacefully on her ass and Eva was on her second punnet of strawberries, the post dropped through the door and onto her head.
"Ouch!" she pulled the envelopes off of her head and leafed through them; bills, bills, rejection letter, bills, envelope from the HOPE outdoor art gallery back home… "huh?"
She opened it.
Dear Miss Kresk,
Having heard that an Austin native had graduated in New York with a degree in forestry and agriculture, we felt compelled to contact you about a temporary exhibit we are establishing in your current city.
HOPE, despite its concreteness, had always been one of Eva's favorite places in Austin- one of the designs graffitied on the walls there had become her first tattoo, sprawled across one of her hips. It turned out the gallery would be combining its usual graffiti with an abandoned public garden in New York; a garden they wanted her to redesign.
"SHIT ON MY ACTUAL DICK!" she yelled, terrifying Rachel Carson. "SOMEBODY WANTS ME TO DO A THING!"
She did a quick google search of the site, grabbed her bike helmet, dropped it again when she remembered she had spent the day drinking, and ran down the stairs. She spent the rest of the day wandering (and staggering a little, due to the amount of alcohol in her system) round the small overrun patch of land, a higgledy-piggledy mess of concrete walls and patches of scrub, sketching out a rough blueprint of what was already there. As she worked, her mind kept creeping back to one thing.
Somebody actually wants me to do a thing, she mused. I'm not a waste of space, Vision was right. Holy crap. I… I would have given up ages ago if it wasn't for someone believing in me, and now I'm designing my own garden. I owe him.
%
She waited until she next saw him to tell him, which was his turn to do the coffee run a few days later. "So guess what," she beamed.
"Enlighten me," he replied, smiling even though he didn't know yet- her happiness must have been rubbing off on him.
"I got a job. Designing a garden. A public one. And I'm getting paid for it."
"I told you that you were brilliant," said Vision.
"I wouldn't go that far, but… thank you for being the confidence in me that I never had, V. I needed it."
"It was completely justified," he said. "Have you told Sam?"
She shook her head. "You're the first person."
"I'm honoured," he replied. "Does this mean you can resign from here, now?"
"God, no. They're not paying me that much and besides, it's just a one off job. But it's a start."
"It is that," he agreed. "I'm sure you will excel in it."
"Which is good, because I'm freaking terrified I'll mess it up and end up stuck here for the rest of my life."
"That won't happen," he said, "I have faith in you, Eva."
"You're so great for my ego," she said. "It's a good thing my self-esteem levels are subterranean, or my head would be too big to fit through the door."
"You make a pleasant change from the Avengers," he said, then hesitated. "Please don't tell them I said that."
"Wouldn't dream of it, my cloaked computer friend."
A/N part of the AoU gag reel is Chris Hemsworth making out with Paul Bettany on the bit where Thor and Vision are talking on the balcony and in that moment I have never been more envious of Chris Hemsworth