HOT & BOTHERED
pairing: john walker x ava starr ~ ghostwalker (requested)
summary: after a mission, ava and walker are stuck for a night in a safehouse.
warnings: lightly suggestive but nothing crazy; bonding, bullying, and bickering; john walker is an asshole but he can be a softie; ava starr deserves the world, actually
word count. 3k (I got a bit carried away with this one) | masterlist
The safehouse didn’t have air conditioning. To someone who was formerly deployed in the military and someone who grew up in laboratories, you’d think that wouldn’t be a big deal. It shouldn’t have been, really, but southern Florida in August was a bitch and so was John Walker.
“How mad do you think Barnes would be if I killed you here? Like, kick me off the team mad or a slap on the wrist mad?”
From across the room, Walker glared at Ava as he yanked the curtains closed with a little more force than necessary. The thick material blocked out the hot rays of the sun but made the safehouse darker, prompting him to switch on the lamp.
“You couldn’t kill me if you wanted to,” he said.
Ava scoffed and phased behind Walker, snatching the gun from his belt before she appeared back in the kitchen with a smirk, waving the weapon around with a smug air to her.
Walker glared at her. “Not funny.”
“No, what’s not funny is the team not being able to extract us until tomorrow,” she replied, tossing the gun onto the kitchen counter before she started to rummage through the cabinets for something to eat. “Me stealing from you is actually quite funny.”
The safehouse was pretty well stocked, which somewhat made up for the broken air conditioning.
Walker shrugged and collapsed onto the couch. The mission had been a success with minimal issues or injuries, which is what the team had assumed and only sent the two of them to carry it out.
“I see it as a couple of hours off,” he said, cracking his neck and kicking his feet up on the coffee table. With the title of New Avengers, they were busy tackling incidents all around the U.S and the occasional international trip. It was a lot, but rewarding all the same. Any time they had a break from super-heroing, Walker took it in stride.
With a scoff, Ava said, “Please, if I had a couple of hours off, you’re the last person I’d choose to spend it with one-on-one.” As a team, that was different. Ava was still adjusting to being a part of a team and having people to rely on, report to, and live with. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but Walker was certainly the one she butted heads with the most. Their bickering had become a staple within the group, with the others learning to tune them out.
If she had said something like that to Walker several months ago, he would have retorted with some shitty remark. Instead, he just smirked lazily at the woman digging through boxes of snacks. He would have been defensive, mean, and tried to make her feel worse than the comment made him feel. The odd thing was, the comment didn’t make him feel bad; he found it had little bite to it.
Living with the team, being with a group of people with enough issues to make a therapist cry, Walker found himself less wound so tightly. Sure, he knew he had a tendency to be an asshole and say the wrong thing from time to time, but despite the scoffs and eye-rolls, be did see the team as his friends- no matter how fucked up they all were and thus their relationships to one another were.
“And yet, here we are,” he said. “I think I’m starting to grow on you.”
“Yeah, like a disease.” Ava settled on a snack and took a seat on a bar stool in the kitchen. She ate in silence while Walker sat in silence, thinking about this mission report the following day and what they’d be sent off to do next.
It wasn’t until beads of sweat started to form on his forehead did he break the silence. He tugged at the collar of his suit, heat stuck within the confines of his thick uniform. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand before he unclicked the buckles on the side of his suit top.
The noise drew Ava’s attention. She furrowed her brows and looked up from the spot she’d been staring at on the counter. Walker loosened the top of his suit before he tugged the material off his arms, rolling it down his shoulders to expose a white t-shirt underneath.
“What’re you doing?” she asked.
“Preventing a heat stroke,” he muttered, leaving his suit bunched around his waist. It only cooled him off slightly, but it was a bit better than it had been a moment ago. The windows of the safehouse didn’t open, a safety measure that Walker hadn’t thought was stupid until then. “Jesus, it’s like we’re back in that fucking incinerator.”
Ava felt it too, the heat that wrapped its way around the house. Her suit was heavy, compressing the complicated molecules of her body in a comforting weight. The thick material also amplified the heat. She shifted uncomfortably on the stool and tried to ignore it.
“That’s a bit dramatic,” she said, focusing on irritating him rather than how the heat was irritating her.
He shot her a look. “Says the ones who sweating.”
Ava didn’t even feel the sweat until it rolled down from her hairline. She wiped it away in annoyance and slight disgust. She hated the feeling of sweat, especially as it started to roll down her back and cause the clothing underneath her suit to stick to her body.
“Don’t they ever check these places?” she grumbled, glaring at the thermostat on the wall as if she could intimidate it into working.
“It’s pretty low on the list of priorities,” Walker answered. “Food, water, and first-aid being stocked usually is all they care about. Vanity amenities, not so much.”
“Won’t seem like vanity when we’re peeled over,” she said. The heat made her even more pissy than usual. She opened the freezer and grabbed an icepack before placing it on the back of her neck.
Walker rolled his eyes, deciding to discard his utility belt and then the rest of his suit. It was the fastest way to cool your body off, eliminate the layers, since there was no threat of the sun burning the skin from inside the house.
“We won’t peel over,” he said, scoffing at her sudden dramatics, not noticing her gaze on him as he kicked his suit from around his ankles and tossed it aside, leaving him in his cotton shirt and boxers.
“For the love of God,” Ava complained. “What happens to manners, golden boy? I doubt Captain America strips in the middle of the living room.”
Walker breathed a sigh of relief at the lack of suffocation from the heat and his suit. The house was still hot, but the exposed skin allowed for breathing room. He had no shame in that.
“Not overheating overrides manners, Starr.” He said her last name with a tone of teasing, dragging it out playfully. “I think Captain America can shove aside his modesty. So can I. You, on the other hand…”
The growing discomfort was easy to spot on Ava’s face, despite her usual closed-off attitude. Her suit looked heavier and was more complicated than Walker's. He didn’t understand half of the features of it, and every time he tried to look at her to figure it out, it earned him a harsh glare that had him huffing and turning away.
“It’s not about modesty,” she snapped, any trace of humor gone from her tone.
Despite that, Walker pushed further instead of sulking back in silence. “Then what is it? Because, from what it looks like, you’re too stubborn to admit you're uncomfortable in that thing.”
Her eyes narrowed in a glare, but it wasn’t pointed at him. Rather, she kept her gaze on the counter in front of her. “I don’t need to explain myself to you,” she said.
He nodded slowly. “Whatever.” He honestly didn’t care, not really. Walker was just trying to make conversation, but clearly that was the last thing she wanted. So, he rested his head on the back of the couch and stared at the ceiling, busying his mind with whatever came to it.
Ava sulked in the kitchen. She was hot, irritated, and there was an uncomfortable feeling aching inside of her, not from the heat. The thing with Ava is, she didn’t like talking about herself, especially not her abilities. The team knew their pasts were all messy, but for her, what they knew didn’t stem much past contract killing. Obviously, they knew of her phasing as she could do it at free will with little pain anymore. They didn’t know how she acquired them; they had tried to ask a few times, as subtly as they could muster, but the look on her face alone shut down that topic of conversation before another word was muttered.
She assumed Yelena and maybe Barnes had looked more into her, but they never brought it up.
The time ticked by as they sat in stretching silence and growing discomfort. Ava stubbornly stayed in her suit as long as she could muster, with the stupid feeling of needing Walker not to have a point or be right. But she was forced to relent when the heat became too much for her to handle in her suit. She slid off the kitchen stool and tugged the top half of her suit off. It landed on the floor with a thud, drawing Walker’s attention. She readied for some smug comment, but it didn’t come.
Ava shot him a look, only to find him just looking at her, not with a smirk or an “I told you so” look, but just looking at her, which she found out of character.
A tank top hung loosely around her frame, the dark material hiding the sweat stains. She narrowed her gaze at Walker. “What?”
He blinked and shook his head before returning to staring and scrolling through his phone.
Ava kicked off the bottom half of her suit, leaving her in a pair of shorts. She folded her suit with a certain amount of care and placed it alongside the rest of their belongings on the kitchen table.
It helped a little, but the house was still hot, and she was irritable. Ava was also bored. You’d think she’d be good at entertaining herself by that point in her life, but she had grown a bit spoiled living with someone chatty like Yelena or full of stories like Alexei. There was no more work they could get done at the safehouse, which left Ava roaming around, looking at the stock photos on the wall until she realized that if she wanted to cure her boredom, even just a little, she’d have to talk to Walker, who was rather content sitting in silence.
“The suit is a second iteration,” she blurted out, eyes fixed on a photo of a black and white flower, the kind of image that came with frames when you buy them with the intention to be swapped out.
Walker looked up from his phone, brows furrowed. “What?”
“My suit, S.H.I.E.L.D. created the first one to stabilize by molecular disequilibrium. That one,” she pointed to the folded suit in the next room. “Was given to be my Valentina when I started working for her.”
Walker was quiet for a moment before he repeated, “Molecular disequilibrium?”
“Mmhm,” she hummed with a nod. “The phasing, it used to be random, uncontrollable. The suit helped, but I used to want a cure.”
“You wanted to give up your superpowers? That’s stupid,” he said, more so thinking of himself if he were in a situation. He wouldn’t go back and not take the super soldier serum if given the chance. It made him different than most, alike with some greats and some not-so-greats. He liked feeling strong, with a different upper hand than most.
Ava turned around, her lips pulled in a thin line. “Stupid? It isn’t some fun, quirky superpower. I had that suit because without it, my body was becoming non-existent. It was excruciating.” The stress on the word was more intense than Walker had expected. He was taken aback, regretting his ‘stupid’ comment almost immediately. He didn’t have the chance to say something before she spoke again, telling him for reasons he was too clueless. Ava didn’t talk about her, her past, anything unless it was poking fun at him, discussing dinner plans with Yelena, or asking Bob was the latest book he read was about.
“I had some help getting it under control, managing it. A cure fell through once the Blip occurred, so Valentina gave me a purpose, a new suit that helped correct the last bit I have trouble controlling. I can be without it; unlike I used to.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Walker couldn’t help up ask. It made him a little squeamish, with sudden vulnerability. It was a new theme amongst the 'New Avengers,' after the whole Bob situation. Not all of their pent-up feelings and shoved down emotions could manifest into the Void, but Yelena still found it necessary for everyone to try to be less “emotionally constipated” - her words, not Walker's. But Yelena wasn’t around, and no one was asking Ava to open up. Walker, before that moment, had been almost certain Ava would only open up to him if they were on the brink of certain death.
She sighed, standing stiff on the other side of the coffee table. “Because I don’t have to explain myself to you, but what’s that bullshit Alexei always says about us being a team? We have to…be friends, not just co-workers.” Ava thought that was stupid, but she found it a little less stupid as time progressed.
The part she wouldn’t admit to Walker or anyone is that there were very few things she wanted more than friends, people to rely on, and who relied on her. She had craved any kind of intimacy, closeness with people since she was a little girl who lost her parents and couldn’t be touched without hands passing through her or needles poking and prodding her. She wanted friends, and now she had them within the team thrown together by chance, whose bad choices made on their own somehow led to them becoming the poster children for good as a team. Ava didn’t know if she could be considered ‘good’ yet, but she was trying.
Walker scooted from the middle of the couch to make space. He didn’t invite her to sit, but the option was out there.
“Does it still hurt?”
Ava hugged herself, despite the heat. “Not anything like it used to. But, sometimes when I’m out of the suit, I phase in and out and…I can’t really tell if it’s real pain or just a memory of how it used to feel.”
A beat passed, and Ava strode across the room and sat on the cushion beside Walker. She pulled her legs up to her chest and sighed. “It’s weird sometimes, being solid. There was a time it felt like everything passed through me, everyone, like I wasn’t really there. Yet, whether they could touch me or not, it hurt all the same.” Even when she curled into herself, there had been times and on the rare occasion still, where she wasn’t even solid to herself.
Walker knew what he was about to do could end in him getting hit, hard, by the woman beside him, but believed it to be worth it. He bumped his shoulder his hers lightly.
“Seems solid to me,” he said casually.
The faintest smile tugged at the corner of her lips. She outstretched her leg, kicking him in the ribs, but not hard enough for it to hurt even a non-super soldier. He laughed in response, and her smile grew just a little more prominent.
The day stretched into night, the heat lessening only a little as the two made themselves comfortable on the couch.
“At least, if you ever do get cured, you’re not too bad at the whole ‘punching and shooting’ thing,” Walker said.
Ava narrowed her gaze for what felt like the hundredth time that day, only Walker found no trace of actual annoyance beyond it. She had relaxed slightly, less curled into herself as time progressed. “I’m sorry, was that a compliment?”
Walker shrugged. “More or less. I’m still better, obviously, but you’re not the worst.”
She laughed, actually laughed. It was a wheeze, short and sweet, but it was nice. Walker wasn’t sure exactly why ‘nice’ was the first word he’d used to describe it, but he didn’t bother to dwell on it as she shook her head and said, “No, you are the worst.”
The conversation drifted off, and Walker was about to turn in for the night, retreat to one of the safehouse bedrooms. But as he glanced at Ava, he noticed her eyes fluttering to a close and her head tipping forward as she dozed off. He grabbed the pillow from behind him, planning to place it between the two of them and prevent her from face-planting on the cushion, but before he could, Ava’s head landed on his shoulder.
With slightly wide eyes, Walker froze, her weight shifting as she leaned against him, fully out with lips parted in a quiet snore. How she could fall asleep so fast, Walker had no idea. He had only witnessed it a few times on a plane ride home from a mission and during Alexei-mandated movie nights.
He probably should have moved, but for some reason, he didn’t want to chance waking her up. Instead, he dropped the pillow back where it had been behind him and carefully rested back on the couch, doing everything to not jostle the shoulder she leaned against. He closed his eyes, knocking out not long afterwards, knowing that when they woke up, if he so much as uttered a word about what had just happened, she’d kick his ass into next Tuesday.
Walker fell asleep with a small smile on his thinking of that.
