krasnaya_vdova | Forever Red Plot (WIP) (Reply)

Putting this here so it's easy to get to. Need to trim it down drastically before I can turn it into a proper background. What follows is my best attempt at putting the events of Forever Red into some kind of chronological order. Which is still kind of a mess. Please excuse the salt.

Ava is born, her mother and father are both Quantum Physicists working for the Red Room, which seems to have survived the end of the Cold War. Possibly due to Ivan's referenced connections with the KGB and the SVR.
At some point prior Ava's mother gives her up to Ivan, where she spends some time (I estimate probably ages 6-8) as a Red Room girl before being taken as a test subject in the OPUS program. The OPUS subjects were to be trained as master spies, though Ava never finished her training there, but is implied to have had it continued in SHIELD custody. When Ava was one of “Ivan's Girls” he used to handcuff her to a pipe under the sink so the other girls could hear her scream when he tortured her.
Alexei is mentioned as being part of the OPUS program though how is never clarified. There is not a lot, or anything really, said about Alexei's Red Room days. Best guess is some sort of version of the Wolf Spiders.
Odessa, Ukraine. Near the Black Sea: Natasha is sent on a mission to eliminate Ivan Somodorov, a former KGB officer and teacher for the Red Room. Ava is being used as a human test subject in one of Ivan's undisclosed experiments known as OPUS which links her to Natasha Romanoff.
After rescuing the girl, Natasha hands her over to SHIELD, while giving her half of a 5 Euro note with an hourglass drawn on it and the words “black widow”. She says Ava can take it to any embassy if she needs her and she'll come for her. This mission is later implied to have been arranged between SHIELD and Red Room / HYDRA elements.
When Ava is brought to the States, she's taken to a baseball game and a department store. And then she's taken to a place she calls 7B – an off the books SHIELD safehouse in DC where she is effectively imprisoned until she escapes when she's 14.
While she's tutored in various subjects, mostly seeming to revolve around international politics and technological devices and how to circumvent them and operational procedures, she literally does not see the sun until she escapes, and seems to have been half-starved and threatened and canonly has her memories wiped and is lied to about how she came to SHIELD.
The setting seems between IM3 and TWS (Tony is on a "break from chaos", but SHIELD is still operating in the open). Natasha passes on birthday presents for her with no card and no name, and Ava knows it's her, but what she really wants is to not be alone in the world.
At the age of 14 she runs away, taking with her a SHIELD-issue attache case full of stolen spy toys. She again takes the hourglass euro to the Ukranian embassy, where they again laugh at her and she realizes the Black Widow is never coming for her. She leaves DC behind and lives as a homeless orphan on the streets of Brooklyn. She meets the girl that becomes her one and only friend; Oksana Davis, when the other girl finds her behind a dumpster down an alley infested with mice. Oksana calls her myshka and they bond over both speaking Russian.
Natasha and Alexei are both put through the Blank Slate protocol in return for Natasha rescuing him from the Red Room. Alexei is presumably 15, which means he must have been in cryo or otherwise not aged for the past several decades, considering there are flashbacks to Natasha having been a small child in the bombing of Stalingrad.
Ava starts having dreams about Alex Manor, a boy living in Clairmont, and his best friend Dante, but also of the life that he had beforehand.
At the age of 17, Ava's living in the basement of a former YMCA turned nursing home and attending fencing classes. She draws when she's able, especially the things she sees in her dreams. Oksana is pretty flabbergasted by how skilled of an artist Ava is.
Oksana and Ava go to a fencing tournament in Philly to compete, as do Alex(ei) and his friend Dante. Ava and Alex meet briefly, and she is shocked to see the boy from her dreams in the flesh. Natasha poses as a member of the registration team, and uses Ava's lack of a birth certificate as a way to get her alone, taking her up to the roof for some Red Room drama.
Natasha reveals that Ivan Somordorov is alive, and in New Jersey (this fact is promptly ignored -- no one ever looks for Ivan in New Jersey), and he's tracking down Ava. Children are disappearing from orphanages again and Natasha thinks he's back to his old Red Room experiment tricks.
Ava does the logical thing and punches Natasha in the face.
Alex raids the roof, thinking Ava's in trouble. After a brief conversation, they're attacked by snipers. With Natasha's help they make their way through the convention and to the bridge outside. Ava pulls off some complicated acrobatics to land unharmed on the ground fifty feet below, which Natasha calls "textbook Red Room". Natasha refers to Ava as seeming like “a shadow”, and Coulson extracts the three in a SHIELD quinjet right after Natasha touches Ava and Ava passes the fuck out.
Natasha wants to go to the New York Triskelion for access to the mainframe and to track down the tech that they stole from Ivan back in Odessa. She has pointed anxiety about going back into a SHIELD facility, but with Alex holding her hand she calms down. Natasha recruits Tony Stark into helping her, and after attacking the local brass ("half of the Avengers," Natasha pointed out. "The cute half," Tony said.") they're able to get Ava and Alex into the Triskelion.
Once Ava's been checked out by the medical team, the four of them talk their way into some SHIELD super mainframe. They find the OPUS project and Tony is able to deduce that it's a project to “weaponize quantum entanglement”. The idea being that two peoples' psyches could be tangled together; Tony describes it as “a modern day version of the Vulcan mind meld, but Spock is entirely in the driver's seat and Kirk doesn't even know what's happening”. They talk about the possible ramifications for security, heads of state and leaders of industry, and having worked out that Ava was entangled with Natasha, warns Natasha that she's likely going to start leaking information into Ava's brain if she hasn't already.
Natasha tells Tony to stop the entanglement. Tony electrocutes them about fifteen times to no avail. Ava snaps, she has an argument with Natasha. They have a weird bonding moment over being tortured Red Room girls, but Natasha wants to lock her up to keep her safe from Ivan so Natasha can deal with the threat without worrying about her. Ava isn't pleased, Alex bargains for sending her back tomorrow which Natasha grudgingly agrees to. Ava and Natasha agree to never see each other once things are dealt with.
Ava and Alex snuggle and find out that Alex can apparently speak Russian, despite not understanding it chapters earlier. Hmm, I wonder if this is a plot point? He brushes off the idea that he could be “catching” what's going on with Ava and Natasha. Ava rates Alex's bad pick up line as “half a Tony Stark bad”, and then starts planning how to break out of the Triskelion because she says going back to 7B would literally kill her. There are more overtures to her experiences with mind wipes.
Ava talks a boy into breaking out of a highly-secure SHIELD facility and going to Odessa, Ukraine (but not New Jersey???) to fight a former Red Room commander with her so they don't have a reason to wipe her again. They take out the door guards, stealing their key cards, guns, and comms -- Tony's earlier quip calling her “Natasha Jr.” is starting to come true.
Ava calls her friend who has her taxi-driver father pick up Ava and Alex and take them to JFK where they use some of Ava's stolen SHIELD tech for fake passports. She buys 9 plane tickets to different places, and books a shuttle to the Newark airport to try and leave enough fake trails to make them hard to follow. They pick up a change of clothes and Ivan has a pair of Triad goons try to grab Ava in a shoe shop. It doesn't quite work out.
Natasha can't track them, which Tony seems amused about more than anything. It's confirmed that Ava is using all of Natasha's tricks, and a facial recognition scrambler to get through the airport.
On the plane, showing Alex her drawings of him, Ava realizes that her dreams of him have been because of her link to Natasha. That Nat's been watching Alex, and that's what she's been “dreaming” – they're things Nat sees, and things the other woman remembers.
Natasha is going through Ava and Alex's SHIELD files, looking for insight into where the pair might be, and narrows it down to Odessa, when she notices the words “Alias Alex Manor” scribbled on the last page of his file. She finds a reference to “see Project Blank Slate” which she doesn't recognize but that makes her head hurt. Natasha is listed as the person responsible for the program, and there's an authorization code that's “strangely close to her own”.
She gives herself 24 hours to figure out what blank slate is, and finds out that blank slate is Red Room brainwashing tech being used by SHIELD. And that 22 months ago she and Alex had their memories altered as part of a deal she negotiated for his conditional release to SHIELD.
Meanwhile, Ava and Alex have gone to a shipyard from a photo Ava has of her mother. They oh-so-conveniently find a key that had been impacted into the floor from the explosion on that night eight years ago and find the shipping container it belongs to. Ava finds some momentos from her past, but more importantly they find her mother's files on the OPUS subjects – over one hundred.
Ava and Alex get cornered at the docks, Natasha shows up just in time to prevent Ava from being about to shoot a whole bunch of people. Alex confronts Nat about how his life is a lie because they're related! They spar on the docks, Alex starts to chill out, Nat knocks him out and they all leave.
They find the seediest motel in all of Odessa and probably leave the desk clerk thinking Alex is the luckiest guy alive. Alex and Nat talk and compare notes, and after being his sister for about two minutes, she starts lecturing him about girls. That moment comes where you realize that Ava's attraction to Alexei comes from being connected to his sister while Nat kept an eye on him. Super-icky.
There's also this weird recurring “oh SHIELD totally (coerced us) got us to willingly agree to this, so it's not like they're evil or anything” could they lean on the "btw they're hydra" thing any harder? Geez. Ava awkwardly second-hand feels-watches Nat and Alexei, then they all go to plan their super-secret mission at a cafe in Odessa.
It's a good thing Ivan ends up dead by the end of this and was apparently bad at record-keeping, because if the connection between Ava and Nat is anything to go by, Ivan probably had access to a startling amount of top-secret information from his hundred-plus entangled kids he's put in place around the globe over the past eight years.
Natasha decides that since OPUS was Ava's mothers program, that there's a chance that Ava might have seen something as a child that they could use. Clearly the best answer is to try to exploit their quantum link so Natasha can try and find an answer in the memories that Ava can't remember. Alex doesn't think it's a good idea, but neither of the girls really care what he thinks.
Ava and Natasha sit in their fleabag motel and try to make their quantum connection... connect. It happens, and it's said they can't tell where one starts and the other begins, “The memories flowed”. The canon examples we gets of what Ava gets to see is Natasha during the bombing of Stalingrad, Natasha at her parents' funeral, and a whole bunch of shitty stuff with the Red Room and Ivan. Natasha meanwhile, figures out that the dance to Swan Lake that Ava's mother made sure she learned before she was sent off with Ivan and the Red Room was some kind of genetic code rewritten as a mathematical sequence, based on Ava's own DNA, that could maybe shut off OPUS... that thing she had Ivan testing on her daughter. There is zero explanation of how Natasha was able to figure this out from seeing Ava dance. But okay.
Ava remembers that her father was also working for Somorodov “in the city with the blue mosque” which Natasha identifies as Istanbul, and so now they know where his new lab is, because nothing is ever unrelated.
Alex and Ava snuggle on the bed while Natasha calls Tony Stark and they check out the names on the list, able to identify eighty-seven assets and they argue about how to handle them and whether or not to alert the 115 global intelligence networks potentially compromised by them. Ava and Alexei have sex which is super not creepy or anything. Hopefully Natasha isn't still out in the hallway???
They go pick up Nat's quinjet that she “borrowed” to get to Odessa in the first place, and they fly to Istanbul. They discuss the morality and viability of Nat's “plan B” being “hunt down and kill 87 brainwashed teen spies implanted in world governments”. They argue over contrived reasons for why Ava has to be the one to plug the microdrive with her mother's code into the machine “it's based on my DNA!” and pretend this makes sense. It feels weird applying "comic book logic!" to a novel, but here we are.
Alexei does point out that Ava is going to lose the Entanglement connection once they do this (this doesn't happen), and so he is fairly reasonably concerned about her being stranded and unable to defend herself, but again, no one cares what he thinks.
Natasha and Alexei need to get Ava in close and cover her while she does her thing – plugging a drive into a port and watching a ten second timer. Clearly that whole DNA thing will end up being super important to that process, right? No. Who even knows where they were going with that?
Natasha is pretty convinced that if SHIELD gets wind of the Entangled mess that they will just kill everyone, including Alexei and Ava and probably even her. And along with the 87 other kids Natasha was already planning on killing. They get chased by some of Ivan's drones that apparently have lasers, which means they've found his Evil Lair.
There's an awkward “this sure is a last stand” moment, Alexei and Nat hug, and then Ava and Alexei kiss each other goodbye but decide to hold off on that whole "I love you" thing. Because they love each other over three days and a super coercive brain-connection. And then they go to have their standoff in a lab underneath a Turkish holy site. Of course.
Natasha shoots Ivan in the face as he goes off on a nonsensical rant about Natasha coming back to him that seems creepy in ways I try not to think about too hard. Blah blah family, blah blah legacy, condescending nicknames and pretending he means something to Nat.
He has an army of entangled snipers and soldiers (“hundreds”) that start shooting, Ava rewires the OPUS machine to accept their drive (yes, clearly her DNA was super important-- if it is, it's never mentioned). Alexei gets shot covering Ava, Ava plugs in the drive, the OPUS device explodes. Just as they can finally start to move Alexei, he dies just before Ava tells him she loves him.
Alexei has a funeral and Ava has a very awkward meeting with Alexei's former best-friend who basically accuses her of killing him, resulting in a lot of guilt and a lot of tears.
Epilogue cuts to a little over a year later, where we have Ava attending SHIELD Academy. Alexei's name is on the SHIELD Wall of Valor. Ava is at the top of her class in every single subject according to Coulson. She has Alexei's fencing foils made into concealable weapons she uses to channel her powers, which helps her control them. She talks to Oksana and apparently even gets calls from Tony Stark who tells her jokes. She has a Glock she uses to literally shoot lightning. Coulson classifies her nightmares as only “a little better”.
Nat tells Ava about how there's this SHIELD base in Rio and a friend of hers has this problem in South America, and invites her to come on an adventure with her. They presumably bond some more and Ava gets some field experience. Nat gets her a gleaming red Harley for her nineteenth birthday before they leave – this time with a card!
On her return, Ava seems to have picked up teaching, and is implied to be an actual SHIELD Agent. Jinx and the two boys she works with are actually pretty cool.
CAWS / AoS: “Out of the shadows, into the light” is the Hydra code to reveal themselves and the SHIELD Academy among other SHIELD sites were under siege by Hydra forces. Agent Simmons reached out to Agent Weaver, who informed her about the Hydra attack and requested assistance. Agent Calderon helped rescue the Academy from the attack. Officially, SHIELD is defunct.
Post-Winter Soldier there is an NSA Special Inquiry into the Line-of-Duty-Death of a Minor Asset due to a Presidential Executive Order into what-was SHIELD. Natasha is put under oath in a closed session with a representative of the DOD where she is questioned about the events with Ava and Alexei.

Forever Red Plot (WIP)

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