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i.
Ava’s childhood came to a grinding halt when she was ten, and she doesn’t remember much after that. She remembers a man who wasn’t her father, but who looked like he could have been. She remembers trying to cling to him the day they took her away.
ii.
Ava finds Bill because she has nowhere and no one else. She feels stupid and small, running to someone who probably won’t recognise her, who might not even remember her at all.
But Bill looks at her, bleeding on his doorstep, and he says, “Ava?”
He is the only person alive to show her kindness, one of the few bright points in her memory. She gasps and collapses into him.
When Ava wakes up, she’s drowning in downy white sheets. She groans and wriggles, her body weak.
“You’re okay,” Bill says, “I patched you up a little, but I think you really needed time and rest.”
Ava studies his face. It’s faded in her memory over the years, but she recognises him. He still smiles like that, exposing the gap in his teeth. He still makes her feel safe.
She shifts in the bed and brushes against something next to her. It’s a teddy bear. For a moment she’s confused, then there’s a flicker of recognition. It’s the bear Bill gave her the first day they met, its white fur worn and dirtied with age. The bear that SHIELD had made her leave behind, when they wanted her to stop being a child and start being a weapon.
“I thought I should keep hold of Snowy,” Bill says, “In case one day you wanted him back.”
And that – that he hadn’t forgotten her, that she had meant something to him, that someone had cared about her in her whole terrible existence since her parents died – that makes something in Ava’s chest ache. She cries like she hasn’t cried since she was a child, great gulping sobs that tear through her chest and leave her throat raw.
“I’m so sorry,” Bill says, and his voice wavers and breaks, “I should have taken better care of you.”
She wants to tell him that it wasn’t his fault, that she was a child and he was a man and SHIELD was bigger than both of them. For now, it’s enough to tangle their fingers together and press her face against soft fur.
iii.
Bill’s house is beautiful but cavernous in its emptiness. He has never had a wife or children to fill it. Ava can feel the atoms of the place and she knows the empty spaces of it are not taken up with love. They’re just… empty. She thinks Bill knows about loneliness. That’s okay. She does too.
Still, she wonders why Bill lets her stay. Maybe he just likes the challenge of her. Ava is a question that’s never been asked and he might, one day, answer. Ava is a problem that he believes he can solve. Maybe she is nothing more than a muse.
She doesn’t care most of the time. She only really cares when he holds her. Of course, Bill can never really hold her, not properly, not for long. He learns he doesn’t have to, learns that all she wants is to exist for a while in the circle of his arms. Sometimes, the pieces of her that are broken cross over into his, the molecules of them mingling for a few seconds. Bill tells her it feels like static, like electricity under his skin, strange and new and hot. Ava wonders if that’s how it feels to be a part of somebody.
iv.
San Francisco’s a fucking mess and most of it’s her fault. Bill’s still here at her side, holding her up, ducking her into an alleyway to hide from the cops, because he’s a good man but he’ll bend his own rules when it comes to her.
Ava has lived long enough to know the edges of herself, her flaws and her darknesses. She tears herself apart and she lashes out when she’s scared and she loves Bill, she loves him more than she ever knew it was possible to love a human being, and he is gentle and kind and good and she has done more wrong in her life than she can ever right.
Whenever Ava pushes Bill away, it’s because she needs him to prove that he won’t leave, or because she’s good at self-sabotage. She has a reason bigger than her own fears now.
She turns to him.
“I’ve hurt people. But you haven’t. Go, please.”
Bill just looks at her steadily.
“We can make it, Ava.”
We isn’t a word they use often. They talk in mes and yous, the space between them never mentioned but always there. As if the years they spent apart are stretching out before them again.
“Bill…” Ava chokes out.
“I’m not leaving you.”
She forgot. Bill knows the edges of her too. Whenever she pushes him away, he pulls her right back.
She stumbles towards him and they crash together, and it’s the first time she’s ever really felt him. He feels solid. He feels like home.
v.
They check into a motel room outside the city late that night, dirty and exhausted and restless. Bill sits down heavily on one of the beds, the mattress creaking beneath him, running his hand over his face. Ava stands in front of him and pulls her sleeves over her hands.
“You don’t have to be here,” she says, “You could go back to your life.”
“Sweetheart,” Bill says softly, and he only ever calls her that when he thinks she won’t hear it, when he thinks she’s safely asleep in the quantum chamber, “What would be the point of that when you’re the best thing in it?”
And then he opens his eyes and crushes her to him. It’s the kind of hug where you can hardly breathe, the kind of hug that’s so hard it nearly hurts. Ava buries her head in his chest and fists her hands in his shirt and she doesn’t feel smothered, she doesn’t feel consumed, she just feels held.
Bill kisses her, little burnishing kisses pressed to the top of her head. And in between them he says, “I love you. I love you.” Over and over.