Chapter Text
“You sure you don’t want anything?” Ava asks, glancing over her shoulder at Yelena. “Orgasm, blood? A smoke?” She nods to the cigarette dangling from her fingers like a prop.
Yelena reclines back on the hotel mattress, rolling her eyes. “I don’t feed where I fuck,” she says, “and were it the extremely rare occasion I wanted to be fucked, I would do it myself.”
Shrugging, Ava offers the cigarette.
“Just because it won’t kill you doesn’t mean it’s not a filthy habit,” Yelena says.
“That’s the point,” Ava declares, grinning cheekily. “‘Sides, I’m still in my teenage rebellion phase, yeah? I’m supposed to do stupid shit.”
Yelena rolls her eyes, but more for show than any actual annoyance. “Brat,” she says, nudging Ava with her foot. “You’re lucky I know how to treat that.”
“Ooh, yeah,” Ava snarks, taking a puff and blowing smoke in Yelena’s direction. “Big tough stone, you are. Topping your way through the fucked-up babes of the underworld.”
“And you’re an impertinent little pillow princess,” Yelena snaps, waving the smoke away. “So intent on testing your limits that you don’t see it could get you hurt worse than you ever were in life.”
Ava laughs hollowly and flops back on the mattress. “So, what, then,” she lilts, “d’you wanna put me in your littlest pet shop? Protect me from the baddies out there?”
Yelena doesn’t immediately respond, her gaze tracking to the ceiling.
“Oh my god,” Ava crows, “you do! You just collect wayward babies, huh. Innocence kink? Redemption mission?”
Well.
The answer is closest to the latter, but Yelena doesn’t just go around admitting that flat out (it would ruin that big tough stone reputation, after all, and she's worked hard for that).
“I don’t like seeing people left behind,” she finally says, since Ava won’t stop staring at her with her big doll eyes.
“Maker issues?” Ava asks knowingly.
“Sister,” Yelena surprises herself by admitting. “We were made by the same monster, but I could never have pleased him like her. She could play his games. I…” She grimaces. Might as well finish now she’s started, she supposes. “I acted under his commands more than of my own volition. She cared for me, but it only did so much. Then he was killed, and she ran without me.”
Ava sucks air through her teeth. “Rough,” she says, deliberately understating it.
“It was centuries before I saw her again,” Yelena continues, softer now to fight off the younger vampire's pity, “and we’re… we’re alright now, mostly. But the old hurt still…”
“Makes your choices?” Ava supposes. “Drives you?”
“Something like that,” Yelena says, turning to face Ava because it feels stronger to say it straightforwardly. “She saves others now to make up for not being able to save me. I do it to make up for not being saved.”
“Better’n me,” Ava shrugs, stubbing out her cigarette and moving up the bed. “I just fuck shit up ‘cause I’ve never known how to do anything else.”
“Do any of them still stand?” Yelena asks. “The ones who hurt you.”
“Don’t think so,” Ava says, too casual. “There wasn’t any one person to blame for what happened to break me, really, but everyone who came after that… either their own stupidity got ‘em or I did.”
Yelena nods, short but approving. “Good,” she declares plainly.
“I didn’t think it’d be possible, most of my life,” Ava continues nonchalantly, “being so wrecked as I was. S’why I let myself get turned. My Maker actually mighta wanted what was best for me, but he didn’t get to stick around to see whatever that would be, so…” She shrugs again, because what else can she do? “I'm stumbling through it, I guess.”
“Tell me about him,” Yelena says before she realizes it. She always has the easiest time being emotionally curious when she knows it might cause a fight.
Maybe Ava hasn't had centuries to become jaded, or maybe she's actually glad to have someone interested in her, or maybe she's returning the favor from Yelena's trauma dump, because she says, “He'd been a friend of my parents, before the accident. When he figured out I hadn't died with them, he stole me away. Acted like a proper father, almost, until he decided I knew enough to make my own decision about becoming a vampire.”
“That's good of him,” Yelena says carefully.
Ava hums her agreement. “I figured, what was the worst that could happen? I'd still be miserable? Turns out I'm more alive as a dead woman than I ever was as a living one.” Her expression turns into a smirk. “Even if I keep testing my luck.”
”I envy that,” Yelena admits, since she’s already said more tonight about her interiority than she has in decades. “I didn’t have the choice, and when I could finally decide for myself I was so lost I didn’t know what to do.”
”You seem t’have sorted it out alright, though,” Ava says, and she reaches to push hair from Yelena’s eyes in the kind of intimate gesture Yelena usually cringes at.
”I got tired of trading one set of bullshit rules for another,” Yelena corrects, “so I just made my own.” She raises an eyebrow at Ava.
”Oh, this is the recruitment pitch,” Ava says glibly. “Forsake my errant ways and join you bein’ the savior of the broken, the beaten, and the damned, yeah?”
Yelena shrugs. “Do you have any other plans for your eternity?”