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Background & CRAU
Apr. 1st, 2018 10:50 pmAva is the daughter of quantum physicists for the Red Room. She spends time there as a child, but is taken as a subject the OPUS project when she's eight years old. When she's nine, Natasha rescues her as part of a SHIELD op, though this is later shown to be an intentional machination – the OPUS project “links” two people together and Ava and Natasha are the first successful test case though they don't realize it at the time.
Natasha hands Ava over to SHIELD, while telling her that she'll come if she needs her. She never does, and instead Ava spends the next five years locked up in an off-the-books SHIELD safehouse, before running away at fourteen to be a homeless Brooklyn streetrat. She meets her bestfriend Oksana in a rat-infested alley behind a dumpster at a soup kitchen, who gets her into fencing. When she's fifteen she starts having “dreams” about a boy that turns out to be because of her link to Nat.
At a fencing competition she both meets the boy from her dreams – Alexei – and Natasha, because the man responsible for OPUS all those years ago is back and Natasha thinks he's coming after Ava. After being shot at, Natasha and the two teenagers escape in a Quinjet and go to the Triskelion where Tony Stark deduces the purpose of the OPUS device-- weaponized quantum entanglement-- but fails to separate Ava and Nat. After Nat threatens to lock Ava up again, Alexei and Ava break out of the Triskelion together intending to solve the problem.
Ava and Alexei go to Odessa, managing to avoid SHIELD, and go to a shipyard where they find a lead on the device and the man behind it, finding there are over 100 other entangled people that could be used to compromise world security. Natasha tracks them down just in time to prevent a shootout, having discovered that SHIELD tampered with her memories and Alexei is possibly her little brother. Working together and using the quantum entanglement to their advantage, they manage to find a way to stop the device with a code that was imprinted in Ava's memories using Swan Lake. Also Ava and Alexei fall in love, but it’s super skeevy.
They manage to stop the device but Alexei dies in the process. Ava goes to SHIELD academy, and she and Nat bond over shared trauma, going on an adventure in South America. Then the events of the film Winter Soldier happen, and Ava runs from the fallout of the reveal of HYDRA. She spent several months on her own, and then came to Riverview, where she spent eight months.
She made some friends while in Riverview, notable individuals being Loki (MCU), Bucky (MCU & 616), Peter Parker, Steve (616 & MCU), and had a rather contentious dynamic with Alexander Pierce. She didn't actually get a lot of development in those months, however. Most of her issues from home never really got touched in any meaningful way, and her biggest change while there was in regard to her slowly becoming more comfortable admitting to her powers and having more control over them, mostly due to working with Loki. In the end she left due to a combination of being terrified in the wake of some tech from home, feeling lonely and missing Sana. She didn't bother telling anyone, not even the people she lived with.
The world she went back to wasn't actually quite home, but it was close enough. It was a world that was largely based on Marvel 616, but that continued her narrative thread from her canon. Sana was there, and ICly that is the important part for Ava, and why she won’t dismiss the events as “not hers”. SHIELD hadn't fallen, and she was back in the Academy. And then Natasha approached her about trying to track down the remnants of Ivan's Red Room. Ava agreed.
The plotline for this is seriously a mess, so I'm going to sort of just talk about the most important fallout pieces to prevent this from getting ridiculously long and involving far too many question marks.
Natasha hands Ava over to SHIELD, while telling her that she'll come if she needs her. She never does, and instead Ava spends the next five years locked up in an off-the-books SHIELD safehouse, before running away at fourteen to be a homeless Brooklyn streetrat. She meets her bestfriend Oksana in a rat-infested alley behind a dumpster at a soup kitchen, who gets her into fencing. When she's fifteen she starts having “dreams” about a boy that turns out to be because of her link to Nat.
At a fencing competition she both meets the boy from her dreams – Alexei – and Natasha, because the man responsible for OPUS all those years ago is back and Natasha thinks he's coming after Ava. After being shot at, Natasha and the two teenagers escape in a Quinjet and go to the Triskelion where Tony Stark deduces the purpose of the OPUS device-- weaponized quantum entanglement-- but fails to separate Ava and Nat. After Nat threatens to lock Ava up again, Alexei and Ava break out of the Triskelion together intending to solve the problem.
Ava and Alexei go to Odessa, managing to avoid SHIELD, and go to a shipyard where they find a lead on the device and the man behind it, finding there are over 100 other entangled people that could be used to compromise world security. Natasha tracks them down just in time to prevent a shootout, having discovered that SHIELD tampered with her memories and Alexei is possibly her little brother. Working together and using the quantum entanglement to their advantage, they manage to find a way to stop the device with a code that was imprinted in Ava's memories using Swan Lake. Also Ava and Alexei fall in love, but it’s super skeevy.
They manage to stop the device but Alexei dies in the process. Ava goes to SHIELD academy, and she and Nat bond over shared trauma, going on an adventure in South America. Then the events of the film Winter Soldier happen, and Ava runs from the fallout of the reveal of HYDRA. She spent several months on her own, and then came to Riverview, where she spent eight months.
She made some friends while in Riverview, notable individuals being Loki (MCU), Bucky (MCU & 616), Peter Parker, Steve (616 & MCU), and had a rather contentious dynamic with Alexander Pierce. She didn't actually get a lot of development in those months, however. Most of her issues from home never really got touched in any meaningful way, and her biggest change while there was in regard to her slowly becoming more comfortable admitting to her powers and having more control over them, mostly due to working with Loki. In the end she left due to a combination of being terrified in the wake of some tech from home, feeling lonely and missing Sana. She didn't bother telling anyone, not even the people she lived with.
The world she went back to wasn't actually quite home, but it was close enough. It was a world that was largely based on Marvel 616, but that continued her narrative thread from her canon. Sana was there, and ICly that is the important part for Ava, and why she won’t dismiss the events as “not hers”. SHIELD hadn't fallen, and she was back in the Academy. And then Natasha approached her about trying to track down the remnants of Ivan's Red Room. Ava agreed.
The plotline for this is seriously a mess, so I'm going to sort of just talk about the most important fallout pieces to prevent this from getting ridiculously long and involving far too many question marks.
- There's some drama with nukes, but the most important thread here for Ava involves a substance / drug that is referred to as Faith. The actual make-up of it is unknown, but it is revealed to be non-terrestrial, with Tony Stark theorizing it might come from another realm. It has noted similarities to Terrigen Mist. It has the ability to both kill some people while others are rendered
brainwashedhighly-susceptible to suggestion.
- A young woman targets Ava and Natasha. After much jet-setting and globe-trotting and getting shot at, it's revealed that part of her plan involves using the Avengers Parade that coincides with the annual lighting of the tree in NYC to affect people, by dropping Faith from the character balloons in aerosol-based form. The official response of last-resort involves enough explosives to kill anyone that might potentially be exposed, and Nat and Ava are supposed to stop it coming to that. No pressure.
- A very high amount of Faith is injected into Ava's best-friend, Sana, rendering her what canon refers to as The Alpha. Her body shifts, turning her about eight feet tall, and with crystals of Faith forming and reforming on her body. She seems to lose most of her sense of self. Yet in this state she is able to control people that have been exposed to Faith. Because this series sure wasn't done with its mind-control tropes.
- Tony Stark and Captain Marvel are able to get rid of the balloons before they disperse their contents, with Carol popping them where they theoretically can't do any harm, but Tony steals one to be able to study the Faith.
- Upon finding out that Sana is the Alpha, and realizing that Natasha is going to have no choice but to kill her best friend, Ava steals Natasha's sidearm, and then moving to distance, points it at her, where they have a stand-off because Ava wont let her kill Sana. Ava pretty clearly had no intention of actually shooting Nat, but Natasha finds herself unable to shoot Ava, even to save the people around them that are apparently still at risk despite Tony and Captain Marvel having dealt with the aerosol everyone was so worried about.
- For better or worse, a cop shoots Sana, dropping her and breaking up the stand-off. Sana is left in a coma that no one knows how to fix, and Ava has very little hope of her ever waking up, telling Coulson not to lie to her when he tries to be optimistic about Sana's chances.
- She breaks ties with Natasha, giving her back the motorcycle that Natasha gave her for her birthday, and telling her that however they might be connected, that the thing she knows is that they're not better off together. Ava then leaves off on her own.
- ...Which is the point at which she gets pulled back into RV because wow does her life suck and she absolutely feels displaced and like home (such as it is) has nothing for her anymore.
