Mary sits on the edge of the lumpy mattress and plants her feet on the floor, every rut and scrape in the stone clear through the thin soles of the soft shoes they'd provided in place of her boots. Her hand drifts towards her chest but she glances up towards the camera again, that blinking red all-seeing eye, and forces it back down to her side.
Waiting, again. She's good at waiting. She's always been good at waiting. Her toe taps frantically against the floor and she has to clench her hands in the loose fabric of her scrub pants to keep her fingers from drumming. She closes her eyes, reaches for memory, for something to sustain her.
“You look like hell." "I feel like it." meathshieldshotgun mayhaps 👀
spideytorch-but-not-this-spideytorch au again
//
Spider-Man's apartment is a piece of shit. It's a single main room, barely larger than the hospital room Ava finally got to call her own the year she turned thirteen, when Jillian's staff had moved Diego to the newly-emptied room next to Michael's. No, she can't get caught up on that now, on them, on the lab, on the burst of blue light that had– Spider-Man's apartment is a piece of shit, a sheet tacked up to separate what Ava assumes is a bed from the rest of the area, where a battered couch and coffee table and cloth-shrouded easel vie for space in the scant few feet between front door and fire escape.
Spider-Man watches her with a knowing glint in her eye. "It's not much," she agrees to Ava's unstated opinion, "but it's home. You have one of those to go back to, kid?"
Ava shrugs, tugging her knees up to her chest as she settles against the scratched-up couch arm. She wraps her arms about her legs, hugs them close, and it feels almost alien, the press of legs against arms and arms against legs and the pressure of the rough couch cover against her flesh. It makes her skin crawl, but she tamps herself down against the shudder that tries to break free, finds herself unable to speak.
"If you don't wanna tell me, that's fair enough. You have a name, at least?"
"Ava," she replies softly, rubbing her thumb against the weathered span of denim stretched across her knee. "I'm Ava."
"Nice to meet you, Ava. I'm–" Spider-Man pauses, eyes darting to the side, then shrugs. "In for a penny, in for a pound, I guess. My name's Shannon, and I'll be your waitress tonight." She produces a sheaf of glossy pamphlets from behind her back like a magic trick and leans down to fan them out across the coffee table, heedless of the open textbooks she disturbs with the motion. "Anything you want, just give me a head's up so I can call in the order."
"Anything I–" Ava sways forward, gaze caught by the bright shine of the pamphlets. She reaches out her hand, uses her palm to drag one of them halfway off the edge of the coffee table so she can pinch it between thumb and forefinger.
"Oh, Ollie's is great, they always give me an extra serving of rice. Do you like Sichuan?"
"I don't know," she says quietly, stroking the smooth page with her thumb, awed by how easily her skin slides across the sheet.
"You don't know as in you have no preference, or you don't know as in–"
"As in I haven't eaten solid food in a decade," she admits, and her voice is almost steady.
Shannon's grin is easy, as so much about her seems to be. "Let's remedy that, then," she says, and Ava could kiss her for not pushing the topic. "Anything there that looks interesting? Or I could get a selection of things, maybe help you figure out what you like?"
Ava looks from the takeout menu in her hand down toward the mess on the coffee table and back again, the options almost overwhelming in their vastness. "Whatever you want to do," she manages, tossing the pamphlet in the direction of the table and pulling her arm back around her knee.
The pamphlet skids across the table, off the far edge, plunges over towards the floor. A thwip, and it's in Shannon's hand, translucent strands connecting it to her wrist.
She stares. She hadn't been able to make out the mechanism by which Shannon had pulled them from building to building in those long, floating arcs, but she's listened to enough of Diego's excited recountings of news stories to know the consensus was that the webbing came from a gauntlet, perhaps, or a canister. Ava suspects there must be an aspect of costume design built specifically to fuel those rumours, because a puncture in Shannon's skin itself extrudes the strands of web.
She doesn't mean to, but her eyes stay glued to Shannon's forearm long enough that she's caught in the act. Shannon watches Ava watching her and heat floods into Ava's cheeks. She knows better, should know better, can remember how every too long stare had made her feel small, inconsequential, other. "I'm sorry," she starts, but the cloud has already shifted from Shannon's eyes, leaving them bright and clear again.
"It's alright, it's just been a while since anyone new has seen that. I'd forgotten how it must look from the outside."
"No," Ava repeats, because it's important, because she's waved off lingering eyes in just the same way for so long, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't stare."
"It's okay," and there's a hint of a laugh to it now. She gestures towards the second door, the one Ava figures hides a bathroom, with the takeout menu. "I'm gonna go call in the order and then we can talk about it, if you want?"
"Okay. Thank you."
She watches Shannon until the door shuts behind her, then turns her attention back to the apartment. She knows she shouldn't pry, especially not here, not now, not with the kindness and grace Shannon has already shown her in rescuing her from– Don't, she chastises herself. Don't think about Jillian thrusting her arm into the device, don't think about the electric blue energy emanating throughout the room, don't–
A sweet, smoky scent drifts up into her nostrils and she snaps her gaze down to her hand, flat on the couch arm. What had been her hand. A mass of roiling flame attached to her arm, eating at the cuff of her sleeve, crisping the fabric of the couch. "What the fuck," she mutters reflexively, her stomach sinking. She pulls her hand back, waves it through the air, but the fire clings to her skin– Is her skin? "Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop."
She focuses on her breathing as she had in that warehouse beneath Shannon's careful gaze, drags the sleeve up her arm with her other hand to protect what remains of it. The flames wax and wane as she glares at them, and she sets her mind towards her hand, towards what she thinks it's meant to feel like.
"As if I know what it's meant to feel like," she says, hysterical. But she tries gamely to picture cool flesh, like all those hands on her forehead for years and years, caretakers too rushed to take a moment to scrub their palms together to imbue them with some fleeting kind of warmth. Cool skin, and whole, and definitely not on fire.
The flames retreat back beneath her skin in the blink of an eye and she presses the back of her hand to her forehead, just to check. Cool against the fever flush of her face. Great. Outstanding. And all it took was torching half of Shannon's apartment.
The fabric covering the arm of the couch has turned black-beaded and stiff, and the sweater sleeve now ends halfway up her forearm, and there's nothing she'd like more right now than to vanish before Shannon slips back into the room with her easy smile and easy gait and easy wave of a hand in response to apologies.
She's not given a chance to make an escape, though, because Shannon's emerging back into the room, shoving her phone into the side pocket of her tights and grinning at Ava before she can even begin to form an explanation. "I'm moving out at the end of the month anyway," she says with a laugh, "feel free to burn the rest of it so I don't have to figure out when our bulk item collection day is scheduled."
"I didn't mean–" Ava starts, stops. There's something painful in her chest, constricting her ribs, and she scrubs a shaking hand over her eyes, draws it away wet. "I don't know–"
"It's okay." Shannon drags the coffee table back from the couch, as far as she can in the cramped space, and takes a seat on it in front of Ava. There's a bare inch of space between her knees and Ava's booted feet, toes sticking over the edge of the couch cushion. The navy fabric plastered tight to Shannon's thighs is decorated with that same reflective web pattern as the boots, picked out in infinitesimally small stitches, and Ava's fingertips itch to brush across it, to feel every twist and turn and bump of the embroidery. "It's okay," Shannon repeats, and there's a barefaced truth in her voice that makes Ava lift her head to meet her gaze.
"I don't know what happened, I don't know what I'm supposed to do–"
Shannon smiles softly, the corners of her eyes crinkling. "That's alright, Ava. It will come in time."
"How are you so calm about this?"
"Well, one of us has to be," she says, flat as anything.
Ava's throat tightens around a sob. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I just–"
Shannon cuts her off with a grimace, a touch to her foot. "I didn't mean it like that. No wonder everyone tells me I've an abhorrent sense of humour. Powers are a burden, especially newfound ones, but not one I'm going to make you bear alone. I'm calm about this because when I was in your shoes" – her eyes flick down to Ava's feet in her own costume boots and there's a quick twist to her mouth like she's biting back another joke – "when I was in your shoes I felt alone, was alone. But I managed to survive that, and I have complete faith that you will too."
"You don't even know me."
"I know you didn't blow me off when I tried to help you calm down. I know you internalised those instructions and used them to get your powers under control just now. I know you went an hour without setting anything on fire, and then only small patches." Her gaze finds the takeout menus wedged beneath her hip before working back up to Ava's face. "And I think it's fair to assume you've survived much more difficult trials than this."
Ava looks at her hand, splayed across light-washed denim, presses her fingertips into the fabric just to see the way it makes the tendons across the back of her hand press up hard against pale skin. A joy, to move them, to be moved by them. "That's… that's accurate," she allows, digging her thumbnail into the fold of the seam.
Shannon reaches towards her, hand stalling between them, and then she's gone, a blur, sliding smoothly to the front door and opening it, bracing her hands over her head against the frame. Ava hadn't even heard the knock, if there'd been one, and she rocks to the side to try and get a glimpse past Shannon's outstretched shield of a body.
"I didn't think you were coming over today," Shannon says, half on the edge of hearing. "Are you okay? You look like hell."
"I feel like it," a woman mutters. She's standing in Shannon's shadow, the light in the hallway buzzing and blinking and too near dead to properly illuminate her, but then she rocks onto her toes to dart a kiss to Shannon's cheek and there's something familiar in the movement, the careful trajectory of her mouth, the spark in her eyes. "Remind me to get you to vet my next employer," she continues, slipping around Shannon with ease, "so I can have a heads-up on the fledgling supervillain thing. 'Cause you'll never believe the bullshit Salv–"
She spots Ava at the same time as Ava clocks the all-too-familiar shade of scrub pants and stitches together a last few fragmentary memories of those last moments. Eyes widening, breath catching in two chests in unison before the release, the movement, Mary's hand reaching behind her back, a charged thrill shooting up Ava's fingers.
"Mary, this is Ava," Shannon says, sliding between them, a hand pressed to Mary's chest. Her voice is light, in sharp contrast to the tension in her shoulders. "She's not having a great day either."
That's all it takes to defuse Mary, pressing forward into Shannon's palm as though there's nothing else in the universe tethering to this room. "I'll say," she manages to choke out around a hitch in her throat, "seeing how she should be dead. The rest of them are," she continues, shifting to lock eyes with Ava over Shannon's shoulder, "and I saw the hole that you–"
"Jillian Salvius did this?" Shannon interrupts.
"She fucking did something, Shan. With Ava over there, with another kid, with her own son. They didn't tell us shit beyond that, other than 'here's another mess to sweep up, careful, it might be radioactive this time'." Mary pauses, reaches a hand up to touch Shannon's cheek. "How'd you stumble over her? On the way back from the library?" It's clumsy, even to the yawning sound of Ava's ears, you should be dead the rest of them are, like an actor stumbling over their lines.
"She knows," Shannon says dryly.
"Why do I even bother," Mary sighs, "when you just keep dragging in strays and telling them everything and expecting me to help you rehome them. I only have the one couch, and it's already been spoken for."
"They're… They're dead?" Ava interjects, hard, soft, reaching. Diego's grin peeking around the doorframe, Michael's careful strength, Jillian– She doesn't want to think about Jillian.
"They are," Mary says, something raw and aching in her expression, "I'm sorry."
"Okay," she says, "okay." The flame filters into her lungs her heart, ripples hot beneath her skin. She tugs the hoodie over her head in a rush, gasping for air, half-blind with panic.
"Ava–" Shannon starts, shifting towards her, but Mary takes her by the shoulder, holds her back.
"Let her make her choice, Shan." The words are barely audible over the inferno in Ava's chest.
She rises from the couch, keeps rising, midair before them as her fingers turn to flame, her wrist, her forearm. The hospital gown clings tight even as the jeans scorch, burn, flake away in ashen clumps. "I'm sorry," she says, breath scalding in her mouth, and flings herself towards the window, through the rails of the fire escape, spins upwards into the night sky. "I'm so sorry."
a collection of questions i, as a writer, would love to be asked !!!
1. What fic of yours would you recommend to someone who had never read any of your work? (In other words, what do you think is the best introduction to your fics?)
2. Go to your AO3 “Works” page, to the sidebar with all the filters, and click the drop-down arrow for “Additional Tags.” What are your top 3-5 most used tags? Do you think they accurately represent your writing habits?
3. What are some tropes or details that you think are very characteristic of your fics?
4. What detail in [insert fic] are you really proud of?
5. What do you wish someone would ask you about [insert fic]? Answer it now!
6. What’s one fact about the universe of [insert fic] that you didn’t get a chance to mention in the fic itself?
7. Any worldbuilding you’re particularly proud of?
8. What song would make a great fic (to either write or read)?
9. How do you find new fic to read?
10. How do you decide what to write?
11. Are you partial to a certain character/pairing or are you more equal-opportunity? If you are partial to any character/pairing, why do you think that is?
12. Are there any tropes you used to dislike but have grown on you?
13. Are there any tropes you used to like but don’t anymore?
14. Are there any tropes you would only read if written by a trusted friend or writer?
15. What’s your favorite AU that you’ve written?
16. What’s an AU you would love to read (or have read and loved)?
17. What highly specific AU do you want to read or write even though you might be the only person to appreciate it?
18. If you wrote a sequel to [insert fic], what would it involve?
19. If you wrote a spin-off of [insert fic], what would it involve?
20. If you wrote a prequel to [insert fic], what would it involve?
21. If you wrote a “missing scene” in [insert fic], what would it be?
22. Who is your favorite character in [insert fic] and why?
23. What’s a trope, AU, or concept you’ve never written, but would like to?
24. Are there any easter eggs in [insert fic], and if so, what are they?
25. What other websites or resources do you use most often when you write?
26. Would you rather write a fic that had no dialogue or one that was only dialogue?
27. How long did it take to write [insert fic]? Describe the process.
28. Does anyone read your fics before you post them? If so, who?
29. What songs would be (or are) on a playlist for [insert fic]? Explain your choices if you want!
30. Have you ever written something that was out of your comfort zone? If so, what was it, and how did it affect your approach to writing fic thereafter?
31. What’s your ideal fic length to write?
32. What’s your ideal fic length to read?
33. If you write chaptered fics, what’s your ideal chapter length to write? Is it different from your ideal chapter length to read?
34. What aspects of your writing are inspired by/taken from your real life?
35. What aspects of your writing are completely unlike your real life?
36. Do you visualize what you read/write?
37. Promote one of your own “deep cut” fics (an underrated one, or one that never got as much traction as you think it deserves!). What do you like about it?
38. Did any of your fics get surprisingly popular (whatever that means to you)? Which ones? Why do you think they were so successful?
39. Is any aspect of your writing process inspired by other writers or people? If so, who?
40. Do you tend to reread fics or are you a one-and-done kind of person?
41. Link a fic that made you think, “Wow, I want to write like that.”
42. Have you ever received a comment that particularly stood out to you for whatever reason?
43. If you take/write prompts: what’s your favorite prompt fic that you’ve written?
44. If you take/write prompts: do you prefer dialogue or scenario/narrative prompts?
45. What’s something you’ve improved on since you started writing fic?
46. Do you prefer writing on your phone or on a computer (or something else)? Do you think where you write affects the way you write?
47. If [insert fic] was a pair of shoes, what kind would it be? Describe the shoes.
48. What’s the last fic you read? Do you recommend it?
49. What are you currently working on? Share a few lines if you’re up for it!
50. Answer any question of your choice, or talk about anything you want to talk about!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/?
Rating: M
Word Count: 2k
Summary:
Ava wakes up alone, in darkness. She doesn’t know it, but she’s a space probe - her consciousness tucked away inside a life boat and exiled to the stars, to trace the paths of solar winds, to live when everything else dies. All she knows is darkness. And then, from inside the dark or (please, please) beyond it - there is a voice.
“You look like hell." "I feel like it." meathshieldshotgun mayhaps 👀
spideytorch-but-not-this-spideytorch au again
//
Spider-Man's apartment is a piece of shit. It's a single main room, barely larger than the hospital room Ava finally got to call her own the year she turned thirteen, when Jillian's staff had moved Diego to the newly-emptied room next to Michael's. No, she can't get caught up on that now, on them, on the lab, on the burst of blue light that had– Spider-Man's apartment is a piece of shit, a sheet tacked up to separate what Ava assumes is a bed from the rest of the area, where a battered couch and coffee table and cloth-shrouded easel vie for space in the scant few feet between front door and fire escape.
Spider-Man watches her with a knowing glint in her eye. "It's not much," she agrees to Ava's unstated opinion, "but it's home. You have one of those to go back to, kid?"
Ava shrugs, tugging her knees up to her chest as she settles against the scratched-up couch arm. She wraps her arms about her legs, hugs them close, and it feels almost alien, the press of legs against arms and arms against legs and the pressure of the rough couch cover against her flesh. It makes her skin crawl, but she tamps herself down against the shudder that tries to break free, finds herself unable to speak.
"If you don't wanna tell me, that's fair enough. You have a name, at least?"
"Ava," she replies softly, rubbing her thumb against the weathered span of denim stretched across her knee. "I'm Ava."
"Nice to meet you, Ava. I'm–" Spider-Man pauses, eyes darting to the side, then shrugs. "In for a penny, in for a pound, I guess. My name's Shannon, and I'll be your waitress tonight." She produces a sheaf of glossy pamphlets from behind her back like a magic trick and leans down to fan them out across the coffee table, heedless of the open textbooks she disturbs with the motion. "Anything you want, just give me a head's up so I can call in the order."
"Anything I–" Ava sways forward, gaze caught by the bright shine of the pamphlets. She reaches out her hand, uses her palm to drag one of them halfway off the edge of the coffee table so she can pinch it between thumb and forefinger.
"Oh, Ollie's is great, they always give me an extra serving of rice. Do you like Sichuan?"
"I don't know," she says quietly, stroking the smooth page with her thumb, awed by how easily her skin slides across the sheet.
"You don't know as in you have no preference, or you don't know as in–"
"As in I haven't eaten solid food in a decade," she admits, and her voice is almost steady.
Shannon's grin is easy, as so much about her seems to be. "Let's remedy that, then," she says, and Ava could kiss her for not pushing the topic. "Anything there that looks interesting? Or I could get a selection of things, maybe help you figure out what you like?"
Ava looks from the takeout menu in her hand down toward the mess on the coffee table and back again, the options almost overwhelming in their vastness. "Whatever you want to do," she manages, tossing the pamphlet in the direction of the table and pulling her arm back around her knee.
The pamphlet skids across the table, off the far edge, plunges over towards the floor. A thwip, and it's in Shannon's hand, translucent strands connecting it to her wrist.
She stares. She hadn't been able to make out the mechanism by which Shannon had pulled them from building to building in those long, floating arcs, but she's listened to enough of Diego's excited recountings of news stories to know the consensus was that the webbing came from a gauntlet, perhaps, or a canister. Ava suspects there must be an aspect of costume design built specifically to fuel those rumours, because a puncture in Shannon's skin itself extrudes the strands of web.
She doesn't mean to, but her eyes stay glued to Shannon's forearm long enough that she's caught in the act. Shannon watches Ava watching her and heat floods into Ava's cheeks. She knows better, should know better, can remember how every too long stare had made her feel small, inconsequential, other. "I'm sorry," she starts, but the cloud has already shifted from Shannon's eyes, leaving them bright and clear again.
"It's alright, it's just been a while since anyone new has seen that. I'd forgotten how it must look from the outside."
"No," Ava repeats, because it's important, because she's waved off lingering eyes in just the same way for so long, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't stare."
"It's okay," and there's a hint of a laugh to it now. She gestures towards the second door, the one Ava figures hides a bathroom, with the takeout menu. "I'm gonna go call in the order and then we can talk about it, if you want?"
"Okay. Thank you."
She watches Shannon until the door shuts behind her, then turns her attention back to the apartment. She knows she shouldn't pry, especially not here, not now, not with the kindness and grace Shannon has already shown her in rescuing her from– Don't, she chastises herself. Don't think about Jillian thrusting her arm into the device, don't think about the electric blue energy emanating throughout the room, don't–
A sweet, smoky scent drifts up into her nostrils and she snaps her gaze down to her hand, flat on the couch arm. What had been her hand. A mass of roiling flame attached to her arm, eating at the cuff of her sleeve, crisping the fabric of the couch. "What the fuck," she mutters reflexively, her stomach sinking. She pulls her hand back, waves it through the air, but the fire clings to her skin– Is her skin? "Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop."
She focuses on her breathing as she had in that warehouse beneath Shannon's careful gaze, drags the sleeve up her arm with her other hand to protect what remains of it. The flames wax and wane as she glares at them, and she sets her mind towards her hand, towards what she thinks it's meant to feel like.
"As if I know what it's meant to feel like," she says, hysterical. But she tries gamely to picture cool flesh, like all those hands on her forehead for years and years, caretakers too rushed to take a moment to scrub their palms together to imbue them with some fleeting kind of warmth. Cool skin, and whole, and definitely not on fire.
The flames retreat back beneath her skin in the blink of an eye and she presses the back of her hand to her forehead, just to check. Cool against the fever flush of her face. Great. Outstanding. And all it took was torching half of Shannon's apartment.
The fabric covering the arm of the couch has turned black-beaded and stiff, and the sweater sleeve now ends halfway up her forearm, and there's nothing she'd like more right now than to vanish before Shannon slips back into the room with her easy smile and easy gait and easy wave of a hand in response to apologies.
She's not given a chance to make an escape, though, because Shannon's emerging back into the room, shoving her phone into the side pocket of her tights and grinning at Ava before she can even begin to form an explanation. "I'm moving out at the end of the month anyway," she says with a laugh, "feel free to burn the rest of it so I don't have to figure out when our bulk item collection day is scheduled."
"I didn't mean–" Ava starts, stops. There's something painful in her chest, constricting her ribs, and she scrubs a shaking hand over her eyes, draws it away wet. "I don't know–"
"It's okay." Shannon drags the coffee table back from the couch, as far as she can in the cramped space, and takes a seat on it in front of Ava. There's a bare inch of space between her knees and Ava's booted feet, toes sticking over the edge of the couch cushion. The navy fabric plastered tight to Shannon's thighs is decorated with that same reflective web pattern as the boots, picked out in infinitesimally small stitches, and Ava's fingertips itch to brush across it, to feel every twist and turn and bump of the embroidery. "It's okay," Shannon repeats, and there's a barefaced truth in her voice that makes Ava lift her head to meet her gaze.
"I don't know what happened, I don't know what I'm supposed to do–"
Shannon smiles softly, the corners of her eyes crinkling. "That's alright, Ava. It will come in time."
"How are you so calm about this?"
"Well, one of us has to be," she says, flat as anything.
Ava's throat tightens around a sob. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I just–"
Shannon cuts her off with a grimace, a touch to her foot. "I didn't mean it like that. No wonder everyone tells me I've an abhorrent sense of humour. Powers are a burden, especially newfound ones, but not one I'm going to make you bear alone. I'm calm about this because when I was in your shoes" – her eyes flick down to Ava's feet in her own costume boots and there's a quick twist to her mouth like she's biting back another joke – "when I was in your shoes I felt alone, was alone. But I managed to survive that, and I have complete faith that you will too."
"You don't even know me."
"I know you didn't blow me off when I tried to help you calm down. I know you internalised those instructions and used them to get your powers under control just now. I know you went an hour without setting anything on fire, and then only small patches." Her gaze finds the takeout menus wedged beneath her hip before working back up to Ava's face. "And I think it's fair to assume you've survived much more difficult trials than this."
Ava looks at her hand, splayed across light-washed denim, presses her fingertips into the fabric just to see the way it makes the tendons across the back of her hand press up hard against pale skin. A joy, to move them, to be moved by them. "That's… that's accurate," she allows, digging her thumbnail into the fold of the seam.
Shannon reaches towards her, hand stalling between them, and then she's gone, a blur, sliding smoothly to the front door and opening it, bracing her hands over her head against the frame. Ava hadn't even heard the knock, if there'd been one, and she rocks to the side to try and get a glimpse past Shannon's outstretched shield of a body.
"I didn't think you were coming over today," Shannon says, half on the edge of hearing. "Are you okay? You look like hell."
"I feel like it," a woman mutters. She's standing in Shannon's shadow, the light in the hallway buzzing and blinking and too near dead to properly illuminate her, but then she rocks onto her toes to dart a kiss to Shannon's cheek and there's something familiar in the movement, the careful trajectory of her mouth, the spark in her eyes. "Remind me to get you to vet my next employer," she continues, slipping around Shannon with ease, "so I can have a heads-up on the fledgling supervillain thing. 'Cause you'll never believe the bullshit Salv–"
She spots Ava at the same time as Ava clocks the all-too-familiar shade of scrub pants and stitches together a last few fragmentary memories of those last moments. Eyes widening, breath catching in two chests in unison before the release, the movement, Mary's hand reaching behind her back, a charged thrill shooting up Ava's fingers.
"Mary, this is Ava," Shannon says, sliding between them, a hand pressed to Mary's chest. Her voice is light, in sharp contrast to the tension in her shoulders. "She's not having a great day either."
That's all it takes to defuse Mary, pressing forward into Shannon's palm as though there's nothing else in the universe tethering to this room. "I'll say," she manages to choke out around a hitch in her throat, "seeing how she should be dead. The rest of them are," she continues, shifting to lock eyes with Ava over Shannon's shoulder, "and I saw the hole that you–"
"Jillian Salvius did this?" Shannon interrupts.
"She fucking did something, Shan. With Ava over there, with another kid, with her own son. They didn't tell us shit beyond that, other than 'here's another mess to sweep up, careful, it might be radioactive this time'." Mary pauses, reaches a hand up to touch Shannon's cheek. "How'd you stumble over her? On the way back from the library?" It's clumsy, even to the yawning sound of Ava's ears, you should be dead the rest of them are, like an actor stumbling over their lines.
"She knows," Shannon says dryly.
"Why do I even bother," Mary sighs, "when you just keep dragging in strays and telling them everything and expecting me to help you rehome them. I only have the one couch, and it's already been spoken for."
"They're… They're dead?" Ava interjects, hard, soft, reaching. Diego's grin peeking around the doorframe, Michael's careful strength, Jillian– She doesn't want to think about Jillian.
"They are," Mary says, something raw and aching in her expression, "I'm sorry."
"Okay," she says, "okay." The flame filters into her lungs her heart, ripples hot beneath her skin. She tugs the hoodie over her head in a rush, gasping for air, half-blind with panic.
"Ava–" Shannon starts, shifting towards her, but Mary takes her by the shoulder, holds her back.
"Let her make her choice, Shan." The words are barely audible over the inferno in Ava's chest.
She rises from the couch, keeps rising, midair before them as her fingers turn to flame, her wrist, her forearm. The hospital gown clings tight even as the jeans scorch, burn, flake away in ashen clumps. "I'm sorry," she says, breath scalding in her mouth, and flings herself towards the window, through the rails of the fire escape, spins upwards into the night sky. "I'm so sorry."
"Does this fanfic writer have adequate enrichment to engage in writing behaviours?"
Fanfiction writers (Scriptor fictus) are intelligent animals who need plenty of enrichment as well as encouragement! If they're stuck in poor conditions (e.g. have studies, work, have to actually write to have something written) then they require the proper enrichment to engage in more healthy behaviours, like writing. Remember, due to poor breeding and socialisation, over half of all fanfic writers suffer from low self confidence and executive dysfunction so take care of them!
Give your fanfic writers proper care. Fanfiction writers are a life long commitment.
