Work Text:
There are moments in life that divide everything into before and after. For Ava Starr, the moment came wrapped in heat and noise, light too bright for the eyes, and the scent of ozone splitting the world apart.
Ava was a bright but curious child.
At first it started out as small, inane questions a child was expected to ask in the early years. She would crawl in her backyard in the morning with the bright sunlight beaming down on her pudgy cheeks as big, brown eyes watched a lone butterfly land on a nearby hydrangea plant.
Why was it green? How many legs does it have? What does it eat? Her parents would look from afar by the porch, smiling at their curious little girl as she tries to touch the captivating critter with a chubby hand. Their overwhelming love for their daughter evident in their proud faces was no small feat, she is their everything.
As she grew older, her interest grew alongside her as well. Ava soon started to develop a fascination for science, an interest in animals and an affinity for nature. She does well in school, attends church every Sunday and tends to their plants dutifully, befriending all the stray animals by the street to the point of giving each and every one of them names. She was a kind, gentle-hearted girl, the manners she was taught not straying far from her.
She was just a child. A little girl in a yellow dress with soft curls and the beginnings of wonder in her voice. Her father, Elihas Starr, had always been a driven man. Sharp as glass, ambitious, brilliant, but consumed. Ava never understood his obsession with quantum energy. She only knew his hands were always stained with grease and wire, and his mind forever elsewhere, floating in particles and equations. Her mother would sigh in the evenings, trying to distract the girl with lullabies while Elihas argued in the next room about funding and risks with Hank Pym over the phone.
That night, it was different. Elihas had lost his last sliver of patience after Pym discredited him for his life’s work. S.H.I.E.L.D. had turned him away, a huge blow for her father. The dream of revolutionizing space-time burned too brightly in him to be abandoned. So he did it alone. He brought them into his lab, his wife and daughter, as if sharing the moment of his victory would make it sweeter.
But the calculations were rushed. The containment field cracked before he could stabilize it. Ava remembered the roar more than the explosion. The air tore open in front of her, sound and fury and particles whipping through space like strands of a shredded soul. Her father turned—no time to shield them, and then—
Nothing but white.
And then pain.
Ava lived. Somehow. The lab disintegrated. Her parents are dead. They told her later that her body had been found in the rubble, twitching, flickering. Not just in pain, but in phase. One foot slipping through the floor. Fingers dissolving through her own skin. Like a ghost trapped between realities, caught mid-breath in a world not her own. She remembered the look of confusion and fear in the rescuers’ eyes when they tried to grab her from the ground. That look was the start of something terrible.
She cried in a hospital bed that no one could touch her in. Their hands would pass through. Her bones couldn’t settle. Her molecules wouldn’t stay still.
No one in the orphanage would approach her, too scared of what she is. Not a human, not entirely. The children avoid her, the adults barely talk to her.
Then came Bill Foster.
He wasn’t like the others. He knelt down the first time they met, lowering himself to her level, introduced himself to her, and offered her a gift. A fluffy white bear. Once before the accident, Ava had a stuffed brown rabbit. It reminded her of it.
“It's alright,” Bill murmured gently, so patient as he watched Ava visibly deflate when her hands passed through the toy like smoke. “Try again.”
He was the first person who offered her a real smile since the incident.
He fought for her. Demanded she be treated like a human. Over time, he became her anchor. Her only tether to something like childhood. When she wept at night, because the phasing wouldn’t stop, because her skin felt wrong and her lungs like static, Bill sat with her and whispered to her about his life and science, distracting her from the pain until she fell asleep at the sound of his low voice.
Bill taught her how to breathe through the flickering. He installed dampeners in the walls of her room to help stabilize the fields. He kept a journal, pages filled with observations of progress and symptoms. Every tiny moment where the pain lessened, even for a second. Every attempt she made at holding herself together. He celebrated them like miracles.
She lost her father but gained another one.
But even Bill couldn't shield her from everything.
The suits arrived like shadows. S.H.I.E.L.D. saw a weapon in her agony. A tactical advantage in her curse. A little girl with molecules ripping apart and reassembling endlessly? They called it quantum disequilibrium. And they have the best use for her.
They took her away from Bill, screaming and crying out for him as he tried to fight his way back to her, being pushed away by those horrid men in suits. They trained her like an asset. Locked her in a facility beneath the desert, her bedroom a cell with mirrored walls and cameras she couldn't phase through. Doctors and soldiers in turns injecting her, strapping her to machines, and watching her scream as they forced stability through her veins. Every moment was pain. Not dull pain. Constant pain.
Her cells never stopped unraveling. She lived with agony and disconnection, scared of fading into nothing. The phasing was killing her slowly. She was a candle melting in fast-forward.
At eleven, she overheard her file being discussed in one of the briefing rooms. They didn’t know she was listening from the air duct, her new trick, slipping through the wall and hiding in the vent’s shadow. She lay flat on her stomach, body humming with effort as she strained to hear.
“She’s viable,” said one voice. A man.
“But unstable,” interjected another. There was then some shuffling and footsteps.
“Not for long,” the first one snapped. “With the right conditioning, the right incentives, Ghost can be field-ready within a year. The prototype suit is ready.”
Ghost. They had given her a codename.
At first, they framed it as missions. Assignments to help people. Words chosen carefully by handlers in dark suits with immaculate shoes and hollow smiles. Ava was a teenager, but they still spoke to her like she was glass. A thing that might shatter if they pressed too hard. The once curious child she was is gone, replaced by this being that now inhabited a quantum suit. The light in her eyes dimmed the moment her parents stopped breathing.
The pain never left her. The constant ache in her bones, the hum in her veins, the flickering at the edges of her vision. She slept in fifteen-minute intervals, waking always to the sensation of her body sliding out of itself, limbs stretched thin by forces she couldn't name.
They told her the missions would help. Stabilize her, even. “Movement is good for you, Ava,” they said, as if she were a lab rat needing exercise.
They gave her a suit. An ugly thing with no soul of its own, designed not to protect her, but to control her. It pulsed with frequencies tuned to her quantum signature, forcing her body to obey, to phase on command. It made the phasing hurt less. That’s how they got her to say yes.
The first mission was reconnaissance, an arms dealer in Prague. They gave her a list of buyers and an objective to retrieve a data chip locked in a vault impossible to breach.
She phased through the walls as if the building were made of mist. Guards didn’t see her. Cameras flickered only when she passed by. She stood in the vault, her breath fogging the glass of the secured case, and for a moment, she caught her own reflection in the polished steel.
Not a girl trying to survive, but a pawn.
She took the chip. Returned it to them. They smiled like they were proud of her. It escalated quickly after that.
They sent her into bunkers where no one else could go. Told her to listen when deals were being made. She memorized faces. Stole data. When they asked her to do it again, she didn't protest.
But the day they handed her the knife, she did.
“I’m not a killer,” she told them.
The man in the gray suit smiled thinly. “We’re not asking you to kill, Ava. We’re asking you to neutralize.”
The target was a scientist. A Hydra defector who knew too much, they told her. If she didn’t, others would die. Always the same script. Protect the many by silencing the few.
So she did.
In the cold dark of an Eastern European city, Ava phased into the man’s hotel room. She didn’t speak. Didn’t give him time to beg. She moved through the bed, through his body, her molecules vibrating in and out of phase at a frequency that made his heart stop.
She left without looking back, and threw up in her c̶e̶l̶l̶ room afterwards.
They kept her working. Years blurred into one another, a haze of faces she no longer remembered, hands she could not hold, rooms she passed through but never truly entered. Sometimes, she slipped into enemy labs and retrieved blueprints for weapons she knew would only hurt more people.
Sometimes, she broke into homes and took things she didn't understand.
By then, they didn’t even bother with reasons. The files were redacted. The names meaningless. She did as ordered because the pain never stopped. And they had the only thing that made it bearable; the suit. The treatments. The false hope they dangled like a carrot on a string. She clung onto that promise of a cure like the desperate child she was.
Then S.H.I.E.L.D. collapsed.
The day Hydra rose was not the day they announced it. For Ava, it was months earlier, when the people she knew began disappearing. Dr. Klein. Nurse Ramirez. The technician who used to sneak her candy. Gone, replaced by strangers with pin-straight posture and no names on their badges.
Bill came to her in the middle of the night. He opened the door and just said, “Pack what you can carry.”
Ava didn’t ask questions. She already knew. The cameras no longer turned red when they were on, they were always on.
“Is it Hydra?” she asked.
Bill didn’t answer, his jaw tightened instead.
She remembers it in flashes. The sterile halls, the shrill of alarms. The way her molecules rebelled against her fear, making her phase uncontrollably. At one point, she slipped right through the floor, and Bill had to find her on the sublevel, calling her name through the static of her panicked tremors. He never gave up, not for a second.
By the time they escaped, S.H.I.E.L.D. was already bleeding. Hydra had torn it apart from within. The organization that once promised to protect had become the very monster she had feared becoming.
And still, Bill held her hand tight, as if afraid of letting her go.
They made a life, of sorts, in the cracks.
Ava never called him Dad. She couldn’t. The word got stuck somewhere in her throat, brittle and sharp, something she had lost too early to trust again. But Bill never asked for it. He never pushed.
Some nights, when the pain ebbed enough for her to breathe without grinding her teeth, she would find him in the little kitchen, humming some old jazz tune under his breath while burning eggs in a pan.
He was a terrible cook but he tried. God, he tried.
“You don’t have to eat it,” he’d say with that crooked, tired smile when she stared at the overcooked mess on the plate. “But it might help.”
Ava would sit, shoulders hunched, hands flickering in and out of visibility. She would hold the fork anyway. Go through the motions. Because sometimes pretending helped. Sometimes she could trick herself into feeling like a girl eating bad eggs with her father, not a broken thing hiding from the government.
Other times, when the phasing got worse, when her body tore itself in two directions and the stabilizers barely dulled the static in her bones, Bill would read to her like he had used to.
Old books. Science fiction, mostly. Jules Verne. Bradbury.
His voice was deep and steady, like gravity itself grounding her in the now. Her first father’s voice was gentle and soft, Bill’s was warm like honey.
It didn’t matter that she’d heard the same stories a hundred times. She asked for them anyway. She liked the way his voice softened when he reached the sad parts.
He kept photos of her in frames, even when she told him not to. She hated photos.
They reminded her of what she wasn’t. What she would never look like again. But Bill ignored her protests and kept them up anyways.
In the living room, there was one of her, blurry but smiling faintly, the rare moment she let him capture her on an old film camera. It was her seventeenth birthday and Bill sneaked a raspberry cupcake inside her room in S.H.I.E.L.D. She almost looked like a normal girl celebrating her birthday with Benny the Bear and her father.
Almost.
On cold nights, when the pain crept into her marrow and no stabilizer could keep it at bay, not even the quantum chamber Bill had built for her, he sat by her bed.
He never touched her, he knew better, but he sat close enough that she could pretend.
He told her stories about his life before S.H.I.E.L.D., about the first time he saw snow, about how his mother made him wear mittens three sizes too big, about the way his father used to whistle while fixing the car.
Little, useless memories, but Ava drank them in like oxygen.
She memorized them. Wrote them down in notebooks when she couldn’t sleep, the words jagged and frantic, like if she didn’t write them fast enough they’d disappear.
Just like her someday.