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who: Ava Orlova & Other People
what: Memories
when: Memshare Event
where: Dreamscapes
warnings: Emotions, shitty familial relationships, violence, Red Room type trauma, child murder, child torture, I'll update as needed.

[ooc: All memshares are dreamscapes unless your name is Natasha Romanoff. If we didn't plot something, feel free to tag-in and get something random, or PM me or hit me up at

natalia_vdova for any and all plotting needs.]

For Tony

The darkness bleeds into familiar sounds, hushed voices almost drowned out by the soft drone of the engines of a departing quinjet. Ava watches her own memories, doesn't notice that she's not alone at first as three people approach what's clearly the SHIELD Triskelion. There's Ava' looking a little younger, but also a little pale, a bottle of water clutched deathly tight in one hand. There's a dark-haired boy walking next to her, holding her hand, and then there's a rather sour looking Natasha Romanoff. The similarity between Ava and Nat is more obvious when they're standing so close together. They approach the security door, and as it slides open, there's a familiar face: Tony's face. Briefcase in hand, three-piece suit that probably costs as much as a low-end car.

The boy stops dead in his tracks, wide-eyed as Ava stops too. "Is that--?" He asks, like he's seen a ghost. Or, you know, an Avenger.

Natasha just shrugs, a touch of a smile tugging at one corner of her mouth. "Like I told you. I have friends in low places." Friends. That's Natasha's word for Tony.

"Agent Romanoff, what are you doing here? Or do you just happen to be stopping by to submit your proprietary plan for alternative energy subsidies, too?" He grins, teasing lightly.

"Not so much," Natasha says, crossing the distance and pulling him in for a brief but easy hug. "I was hoping you'd be here, actually."

"First Saturday of the month. Where else would I be?" Tony points out, a cock of his head to the side. "I thought you were off hunting bad guys in Bahrain?" It's friendly, the easy conversation of two people that keep in touch enough to know each others' schedules, including what part of the world she's in shooting at people.

"Turns out the bad guys are hunting me. Surprise." Natasha quips with an easy shrug as she pulls back a step. The two teens just watching quietly for the moment; the boy in shock and Ava's a little pale, like she's maybe not having the best day.

For Bucky (616)

Ava doesn't sleep easily, even now that she has her own room. Nightmares and memories, but tonight it feels different. She's there, watching her memories, like some kind of ghostly observer. Less visceral. The world fades into being, two teenagers in a room in the Triskelion; all grey walls, perfunctory bunk beds that seemed like they'd fit better in a prison, blue lights on the door lock. Ava's clearly younger, but only by a few years, maybe seventeen. The boy seems about the same age; short dark brown hair, brown eyes, broad shoulders. He looks at Ava like she puts oxygen in the room, though Ava seems distracted by something else, a tension as she moves. She lets go of his hand, pulling her backpack over her shoulder and getting ready to open the door, sparing a conspiratorial look back at him.

He nods, "You go left, I'll go right."

But Ava shakes her head. "I've got a better idea." She murmurs, opening the door. "Hey," she calls, getting the attention of the SHIELD agents patrolling near the door. She puts her hands up, a charming smile, brown eyes guileless. Just a girl, not a threat. "It's just me. Can I ask you for a favor?"

She holds up a roughed-up iPod, and manages to talk one of the agents into letting her use his comm to test the speaker, drawing him in when he reaches to retrieve it. It takes them a few seconds to put down the agents; Ava slams the door into his skull hard, though the sound thuds more than rings. She steps into the room as his partner charges, and the boy grabs him and slams his head into the frame of the bunkbed.

In a matter of seconds they've dragged the bodies out of immediate view, stolen the agents' earpieces, key cards, and sidearms, though the commlink the boy takes seems to be broken. It takes them twelve seconds after that to make it to the elevator. He's about to press the keycard to the panel, but Ava grabs his hand, touching a finger to her ear.

Instead, they slip down the hall to an alcove where the stairwell is; another two agents. Ava grins as she looks over at him, magnetic. "Now you take left, I'll take right."

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He shouldn't be surprised.

He's had other people invading his dreams, so why shouldn't he be in someone else's? It's actually more of a relief, he'd rather be seeing the intimate details of someone else's life than have his splashed all over without any opportunity for hiding it. Though once he sees who's stood next to him, his heart does go out to her a bit.

People like them, they shouldn't be laid bare like this.

"...sorry."

"It's not your fault," she answers softly, looking over at him. She'd been in his dreams, so she supposed there was some parity to it at least. That doesn't mean she hates it any less.

The blackness gives rises to a different sort of darkness. There's a younger version of Ava here; a child, maybe seven years old. The walls are some sort of Russian military complex, all metal and barred doors. There are men in Russian military uniforms, and a group of young girls in grey clothes that don't seem nearly warm enough for the cold. They all look to be around the same age as Ava, but she's small, petite, underfed.

Beside him, she tenses, and there's recognition. "I don't usually remember this so clearly," she comments, as if that can detract from the horror that she knows is coming. And it is clear, all sharp details, down to the stars on their shoulder boards and the guns the soldiers carry.

The surroundings are at once alien and completely familiar. He might not know this exact base or those exact soldiers, but he's been in places like this over decades and he knows what's coming.

"Dreams make things clear that we'd rather stay muddied, and never let us see the things we wish we could remember."

He almost reaches out to her, an aborted twitch of his right arm, but in the end he doesn't know her well enough for that.

For Ava, this was her home for a period of years, even if it was never any home at all. There's a sad nod of her head at his words. "You're right. I try to remember my mother sometimes, but I always end up here," she admits softly. They don't know each other well enough for him to offer comfort, or for her to ask for it, but she does shift just a little closer. Proximity is good, even when nothing about this is.

There's a sharp bark of a command in Russian, and the girls form into two lines, heads slightly bowed to the floor, watching as a man approaches them. The girls are hard, despite their young age. Hard and hungry, grasping to survive. Ava's probably about seven, the only redhead, and if James is sharp he might catch that her eyes are brown here instead of the sharp blue of the young woman that stands near him in the dreamscape.

"But you shouldn't have to see this. No one should," she murmurs quietly. What she really means is that she doesn't want anyone to see. The very sight of him makes her flinch: Ivan Somorodov. In her dreams he was usually a demon with blacked out eyes, but this is worse. Just a man in a uniform. It makes her shoulders tense, watching as he looks them over. Ava was his favorite. But in a place like that, being anyone's favorite wasn't a good thing.

He points to her and one of the other girls, and they move to the center of the room. Ava's smaller, but well: she's still standing here.

Bucky knows what she means. There's no way that she actually means that he doesn't deserve to see this stuff, because he's seen this and worse before now, he's lived a long time and there's nothing that could be done here that he hasn't already gone through himself. It's just a case of privacy, of not wanting to show those ragged edges to anyone else.

He turns to face her, grown and aware of him, rather than pay attention to the training that seems likely to be about to begin. It's a small concession to trying not to see, but it's the best he can do.

"This is your dream, perhaps you can change it if you try?"

He turns to face her, and that eases a small piece of the tension. Even if she knows it doesn't really help, doesn't stop him from knowing or seeing the pieces of her past, the gesture matters. She tries to focus on the dream, tries to stop it, but it doesn't seem like it's changing anything.

She hasn't really seen this before, doesn't remember it, not like this. For her, it's always in flashes, feelings, not this stark, crystal video perfection, like whatever this is can pull together the fragments. Somehow that's more horrifying than intriguing.

"Begin," Ivan barks in sharp Russian. The girls start to move toward each other. Ava's fast but the other girl seems like she hits harder. The style is largely the same sort used in Russian Special Forces, but Ava has a fluid grace to her, too. The other girl is violent, aggressive, an undercurrent of viciousness while Ava is evasive. But the redhead is good at taking the other girl off balance, hitting harder than she seems to expect.

"I don't think it's working," she comments quietly. "Maybe we can leave?"

The scene itself doesn't surprise him. They were obviously all candidates for training and fighting one another is a simple and effective way of weeding out the weaker links, as well as a brutal method of teaching that only the strong survive. That following orders, even if it meant getting the blood of comrades on you, was more important than literally anything else.

He notes her fighting style and strength, filing it away in the back of his mind in case they ever come face to face and he needs to take her down. Probably a mercenary thought when he's seeing a child fight, but he can't help it.

"We can't."

He's already tried that in his own dreams.

"We just have to wait it out."

"Oh," Ava says softly, because she's not sure there's anything else to say. "I'm going to kill her," she says softly.

As the fight ticks on it becomes clear that both girls know they're going to be asked to kill the other. It makes the other girl vicious, while Ava tries to avoid it. Knocks her down but doesn't pin her, like she's trying to find a way out of this.

The blonde girl manages to take advantage of it, because kindness is never rewarded. Manages to use Ava's softness to get her arms around her neck. Ivan nods, that curt affirmation that's a death sentence. But Ava is fast, kicks her legs out from her body, hands holding onto the girl's arm as she takes them to the ground, denying her the leverage she needs to snap her neck.

The blond struggles back to her feet, by Ava manages to get on her shoulders, small hands strangling her with the collar of her tee-shirt. She tries to tear it from Ava's grasp, but only succeeds in tearing the fabric. They crash back to the ground, but she can't seem to get the redhead off her. She loses her strategy and starts to panic, flailing as that band of fabric bites into her skin, making it impossible for the other girl to get her fingers around it.

Ava's legs keep her pinned in place through the thrashing, eyes dark and flat as Ivan watches them with a smile.

Bucky doesn't judge her.

He lost the right to do that a long time ago, and he's done the same and worse when he had the orders to do so. If Ava hadn't killed that girl, she would have been killed in turn, and maybe someone else would have killed her further down the line. Those were the situations they were put in, and there was nothing to be done about it.

"Do you feel guilty about it?"

There's no condemnation if she doesn't, she did what she had to do to survive, it's just that he's curious. Bucky feels guilt for most of the things he did as the Soldier, but not all.

At the question she quiets for a moment. "Not really. It's more- sadness? I don't really remember this. Not the details, what happened. It's just-- shadows. The ache of it." She's sad that she had to, sad that she was thrown into a place like that, the machinations of her own mother she still didn't really understand.

But the memory doesn't end there, with the lifeless body of a girl not much older than she was. "Don't jump out of the nest when your wings are clipped," Ivan says like a threat. They feed her like an animal, from a plate on the floor. They're literally starving the girls. Keeping them hungry, desperate, using the fact that food is a prize to ensure they don't band together.

The fact that she'd gone against orders, hadn't been lost. She gets her meal, but afterward, Ivan pins her face to the floor. His boot on the back of her neck, and his eyes are cold and hard. The words are harsh, almost like whispered poison with how they cut. He makes her into something less than human, where she's only useful if she learns to process orders with total obedience. She's an animal, a weapon, sentiments repeated as his foot pulls back from her neck and he kicks her in the side. Ava barely twitches.

Her eyes stay focused on the floor, and she doesn't pull away or try to protect herself; like she knows better. She just absorbs the impact over and again. There's something off; that strange state of being almost comfortable with abuse, where pain is so common and pervasive, that between the experiments and everything else she'd adapted to it. Pain was just another state of being, like cold or thirsty or lonely.

Outside of the memory Ava flinches and she shakes, eyes wide. This hits something raw inside of her, just shy of fight or flight. Her fingers tremble, her shoulders pulling inward.

Strangely, it's not the way she takes the beating that bothers him, it's the way that she's reacting now. That fear, visible even to him, is vulnerable and raw, and he hates to see it. It means she's broken a lot further from what she used to be than he ever has, because he can still look at the memories of them dehumanising him with a neutral expression.

A weapon, after all, doesn't feel.

But she's scared, and that's so very human. He doesn't know how to deal with that, and so all he can do is take a step to the side so that his body blocks the view of what Ivan is doing to the memory of her.

He blocks her view of it, and she takes a shaky breath, shrugs her shoulders, trying to ignore that tension. She almost says I'm fine- but while she omits pieces of the puzzle, she tries not to lie to him, even in those ways everyone does. And she doubts he'd believe her. So she doesn't, just nods slightly, looking up at him because that's easier than looking at the memories. The sound of handcuffs being latched around her wrists as she's dragged, and the way they ring against the piping they cuff her to. The sound of impact against skin.

In a way, wiping her had almost been a kindness. There had been eight years, before she started to remember what they'd done to her as more than just jumbled words in her dreams, a woman with red hair and a promise, the piece of paper she hid and kept secret. But the pressure of Natasha stepping back into her life had started to crack open those old memories, and then there had been that moment where their memories had overlapped.

"I know it shouldn't hurt," she says softly. But it does. There's that continuing sound of hands on flesh, and then the sounds become sharper, the abuse less tolerable, and Ava starts screaming. Handcuffed to the pipes so the sound carries. So the others can hear.

"Of course it should hurt."

He knows that he's much worse than her, the proof is right here in her dreams. He can stand with his back to a girl getting tortured, he can hear her screaming and know what is being done to her, and the most his expression alters is a mild tightening to his jaw. He's the monster here.

"It only doesn't hurt when you're what they made you. A weapon doesn't feel pain, a person does. If it hurts, that's good, embrace it."

Because he hasn't learned that lesson entirely yet. He sees what was done to him, what he did, and he's mostly blank in front of it.

She blinks at that, looking up at him. She supposes he's right, but at the same time it feels like weakness, like she should be stronger than this. Have better control than letting this shake her. "The pain stopped hurting, it was almost.. normal, I guess. But, I don't think I ever really got used to how they treated us," she admits quietly. It's something she doesn't share often, even when talking about what had been done to her. But she doesn't think she'd ever really believed the things Ivan said.

She breathes, forces herself to, can't afford to get worked up in this place. So she tries to ignore the sounds of her own screams, tries to parse through this. "They wanted to make me into someone else. I'm not sure if that's worse or better than a weapon," she admits quietly, a tilt of her head, letting herself focus on him as the memory fades into silence.

The fading screams were a relief because it meant that the dream was likely almost over, and soon enough they would both be waking back in their respective bolt-holes for the night and neither would be violating the others' privacy any longer. At least not in this particular way.

"Into Romanoff."

It's not really a question, not with what her username had been.

"Interesting choice. Why her?"

"Yes," she affirms quietly. He was deadly sharp, she'd known that he'd pick up on it. And then there's the why and she shrugs her shoulders a little, quiets for a moment.

"There are pieces I don't understand. The others were children picked from orphanages. And Ivan seemed to have some strange fixation with both Natasha and me. I could make some guesses about Natasha being one of the best spies, and the fact that she defected. But I mean, I was..." She trails off, looks a little uncomfortable.

"I'd rather not tell you in here," she admits, looking around at the strange dream space, arms crossing over her chest a little self-consciously. Part of it was that she couldn't bring herself to talk about it amidst all of this, it cut a little too close, and the memory left her raw and vulnerable as it was. And the second part, was that if she was going to tell him, she wanted to see his reactions. In person, not in this strange space. One of those subjects that maybe cuts a little too close, at least for her.

"But if you want to talk about it later, I'll tell you what I can. Someplace where it's real."

"You don't have to tell me at all."

He has a lot of things in his past that he would never share with anyone, especially not a near stranger who had the potential to be dangerous in their own right. He would fully understand if she had the same sort of issues.

"I don't know how much longer this is gonna last."

It's gone quiet, but as far as he's aware, he can't actually get out of here until she wakes up. They might be stuck like this for hours more.

"I know." She has issues, but it's complicated. He wouldn't be the first person she's told, but he might be someone that really understood what it meant. Or it might terrify him. She's not sure that she could really blame him in that case. "I haven't told her," is what she says instead, with a frown. "I know I should, but-- she doesn't remember me. I think maybe I don't exist for her, which she's better off for." They'd had that conversation. "I don't think it's fair to take that away from her." She sighs softly. "I just don't know which is more selfish."

Instead of fading away, something eventually comes into focus. A basement mostly filled with sports equipment, but old sports equipment, things from decades past, worn and forgotten, dusty and stuffed into large metal shelves. There's a single string of white christmas star lights strung up against a wall, a makeshift bed that's just a plywood board supported by cinderblocks and a sleeping bag set on top. Ava sits on the edge- maybe about sixteen here- skinned knuckles and an abrasion on her cheek, petting a black cat that nuzzles against her shin.

There's the sound of a knock on glass that nearly makes her tense, that touch of old reactions trained into her, but it's a familiar face outside the singular widow. It's just at the level of the alley outside, and Ava gets up, unlocking it and pushing it open with a creak. A girl slides in, pulling a bag in after her. Dark hair that falls to her shoulders in curls, warm eyes, darker skin still a little pink from the chill outside and she wraps her coat a little tighter, her smile turning into a frown as she takes in Ava. "If I'm not around you can't go five minutes without looking for trouble, can you?" She comments, teasing as she grabs a first aid kit hidden in one of the shelves, setting the bag next to Ava's bed.

Standing with Bucky, Ava watches the memory quietly. Because it's nothing important, and yet it's maybe the most important memory anyone's ever seen. There's an easy camaraderie between the girls, but Ava is different here too. With how she was trained, she shouldn't have cuts and scrapes like this, but she does. Something a little lighter about her here, like there's less weighing her down, or like she's almost a little less broken. "That's Sana," she says softly, as if he really needed the explanation.

He can't really comment about the ethics of telling Widow about what's happened or not, that's a choice that has to be personal to Ava and he certainly doesn't know Romanoff well enough to give advice. The only times he's ever come face to face with her have been in violent confrontations. He knows how she fights, he knows she's good, and he knows that he's better. That's about it.

So he focuses on the scene around them instead.

He doesn't need to be told who this girl is when she slides in the room, but he takes her in carefully all the same. She isn't familiar to him, there's no reason why she should be, but she's important to Ava and so he feels like he should at least give her the full focus of his attention.

"She looks nice, looks like she'd kick your ass for getting into too much trouble."

"Yeah, she talked me into taking fencing lessons with her, which I'm pretty sure was just so she had an excuse to toss me on my ass twice a week," Ava said with a wry hint of a smile. "Was always worse for anyone she caught picking on me, though, even if she'd give me a hard time about it," she admits.

"I'm fine," Ava insists in the memory. There's a huff of breath, dragging a hand against her cheek and the blood smears. But Sana hardly seems to care, grabbing the girl's hand and swabbing disinfectant on broken skin. "I heal fast, you know I do. And I didn't go looking for it." Ava insists, managing to look annoyed as Sana starts to wrap bandages around her knuckles.

"Not fast enough, Myshka," Sana lifts an eyebrow, as if saying you're still bleeding. The assertion that she doesn't go looking for it just gets a look, a vague implication that Sana knows first-hand that Ava's definition of 'not looking' is problematic. There's a well-worn disagreement there, but it's one they don't have that night.

"Don't call me that, I'm not a mouse." Ava insists, but her voice carries no particular intensity. Sana calls her a mouse and Ava protests; it's just how it goes. Affection voiced in strange ways, but doesn't make it mean any less.

Bucky is familiar with that sort of affection. He can see in it two smiling young men calling one another idiot and punk, it makes his chest both ache and warm through in an odd way that he can't quite understand.

He glanced sideways at the older Ava, the one stood watching along with him.

"I'm sorry that I have to see this too."

The torture was bad enough, but he knows better than most that the good memories are more fiercely guarded and more personal than anything bad could be. These were pieces of herself that she probably held close and rarely gave to anyone, and he was seeing them where she had no choice.

She looks over at him, and there's a thin press of her lips together. She almost says it's okay, but that's not entirely true. Things like this are precious, and Sana is such a complicated thing for her that she hadn't really dealt with before coming here and now she can't. But there's something about watching this, being reminded of when she was nothing but a Brooklyn streetrat, a waif of a girl who wasn't good at looking the other way when trouble stood in front of her, and she had the sort of friend you could never replace.

"It's not as bad. It'd be worse if it was someone else," she admits softly. Most other people would just see it as some funny little happy memory, and not understand just how fragile this was. How divorced she felt from the redhead sitting there letting Sana wrap her fingers and then put a bandaid on the scrape on her cheek. Or they'd judge her, or feel sorry for her, for being a street urchin that lived in the one-was basement of a YMCA.

"I brought leftovers from dinner," Sana says, reaching down for the bag she'd brought in with her. "There's even cupcakes," she says with a grin.

Ava huffs with a laugh, lifting an eyebrow. "No wonder you're in such a good mood."

"No judging free food. And I brought you one of my old sweaters- if you're going to live in this icebox, you could use some more layers." Sana says as she pulls out a small plastic container. She passes a strawberry cupcake over to Ava and takes the chocolate one herself.

Ava shrugs as she drags a fingertip through the pink icing, the scrawny black cat suddenly seems interested in the proceedings. "I've got a sleeping bag. It's fine. The cold doesn't bother me much, anyway." Ava's tone is stubborn, but it's ruined a little as she squawks suddenly-- Sana swiping chocolate icing against the tip of the redhead's nose, and Ava blushes in indignation.

Bucky watches the interplay between the two girls, a memory made solid for just a few minutes, and he feels a powerful longing to be able to go back and live this sort of thing himself. He wants to be able to put Ava into the life she used to know, he wants to go back to the forties and live with Steve, he wants these good memories to be real again instead of ghosts of the past.

"I won't tell anyone."

He'll keep this as privately as he hopes she's kept what she saw in his head. It's important that they figure out if they can trust each other, because they both live in the same periphery of the rest of the world.

"Did you ever think about getting back in contact with her?"

She feels it too, even if she doesn't say it out loud. That wish that she could reach out, and somehow be back there, again. She doesn't talk about it, but sometimes it feels like remembering was the worst of all. But it's uncomfortable, something she never really admits to. Remembering was supposed to be the good thing, losing it was supposed to be bad. But it just wasn't that simple, even if it felt like it should be.

"Thank you," she murmurs quietly. "I wont either," she offers in return. She knows that sometimes it can be good to hear the words, even if the proof is always in the gestures; in what people do.

"We had a pair of burner phones," she admits softly. "We didn't really talk, but she'd text me song titles, things like that. It was enough to know she was okay, make sure that if something happened she could call--" She lets that trail off, a shrug of her shoulders. "I think about it all the time, but I was always afraid I'd be putting her in danger. That someone would go after her."

Sana was always a weakness.

"If she was your friend, anyone who wanted to get to you would already know to go through her. If she hasn't been hurt by now, she's probably safe."

Maybe that's not the most convincing comfort that he could give, but it's comforting in his eyes. At least it says that Ava wouldn't be putting her friend in any more danger than she was already in, and perhaps that meant that they could have a friendship again when and if Ava left here.

"Or-- maybe you could go back and bring her here, there's nobody that seems to be following us here. No HYDRA that I could find."

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krasnaya_vdova - 2017-11-24 09:51 (UTC) - Expand

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advanced - 2017-11-24 15:23 (UTC) - Expand

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