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1. Ava, 2018
It was the rush of rot that startled Ava awake.
Not the bite itself, not the cracked teeth finding purchase on her shoulder before she phased free — not that, but the decay, crawling at an unnatural pace down her arm and over her chest and up her face, all that glitch-torn tissue putrefying. Even hidden beneath the sterile white of her containment suit, she could feel it, the melting flesh, the accelerated withering.
Ava gasped out as the icily sweat-soaked sheets materialized around her. In her dream, the sun had been pounding down on Fisherman’s Wharf, but this room was dim, and she was cold and damp and trapped. Without thinking, she let the intangibility rip through her, phasing right through the suffocating blankets and stumbling onto her feet.
She had to lean on the bedframe for a moment, taking big heaving breaths with her eyes squinted against the pain of intangibility. She shouldn’t have phased. But she’d done it on purpose this time, and her body had restabilized almost immediately — a relief she had Janet van Dyne’s temporary intervention to thank for. In her dream, the flickering had been the unpredictable menace she remembered so well, and Janet had… Janet hadn’t done that.
Through the tall slanted windows of the living room, Ava could see a nearly-full moon only halfway through its skyward path. But going back to sleep right now was out of the question. Hugging her arms around herself — she still wasn’t used to the soft fabric of pyjamas, or, for that matter, to most garments that weren’t components of her suit — she set out straight for the kitchen.
She needed something to get those images and that hallucinated rotting sensation out of her head. And the stench of it. With moonlight and muscle memory guiding her, she got the kettle boiling and took a mason jar from the cupboard: dried herbs, little buds. She transferred a spoonful into the metal strainer, taking a deep, shuddering inhale of lavender. It didn’t quite erase it.
Ava was pouring the tea when, behind her, a lamp flicked on and sent soft yellow light diffusing into the room.
Bill. It wasn’t often that he caught her off guard in this semi-shared space of the old Starr house; usually, quite the opposite. She was the stealth operative, after all, and she’d never been able to shake that habit of keeping tabs on all the sounds around her. God, she was out of sorts, and for what a ridiculous reason.
“Nightmare?” Bill asked, in his sympathetic, all too familiar way of asking.
He had his glasses on, and he hadn’t even changed out of the jumper he’d worn during the day. Ava narrowed her eyes. “Have you not even slept yet?”
It was her attempt to evade his question, but he dodged hers right back. “Don’t worry about that,” he said, waving it away with a hand.
A hand that still held a component of her work-in-progress new suit. Part of the belt? She didn’t get the chance to properly see before Bill noticed what he was holding, cracked a sheepish grin, and hid it behind his back, like that would fool her. In spite of herself — in spite of the damp hair clinging to her forehead and the lingering shrieks of her dreamscape — she was a little amused. Terrible example, that Dr. Foster, when it came to sleep habits.
Setting the dark grey material on the counter behind him, he joined her by the kettle, pulling up one of the tall barstool chairs. He sat and Ava stood. Steam curled from her mug, lavender chamomile vapour caught in the lamplight.
Bill’s silent offer to listen hovered in the air, too. He hadn’t said anything, but moments like this had happened often enough over the years that he didn’t need to. They both knew the rhythm of this. She sort of hated it, his immediate assumption that a nightmare was why she was awake at this hour, and she hated it even more that he was right.
But this nightmare? In comparison to the collapsing ceilings, the panicked shouts of her father, the moment she broke free from her mother’s hand? In comparison to all those dreams that sent her back to the S.H.I.E.L.D. labs, all those shadowy corners they’d made her haunt? This one…
“You were right,” Ava admitted, though it was obvious he’d already figured as much. “But it was incredibly stupid.”
And then there it was again, that sympathy. “I’m sure it’s not.” That same soft voice he always used. “It’s okay if —”
“No, really!” She couldn’t help but laugh a little, a slightly bitter sound that felt more like a scoff as she made it. “It wasn’t anything that actually happened.”
Bill nodded slowly at that, a look of understanding dawning over his face. “Something you were afraid might happen.”
“No...” She cupped her hands around the warmth of white ceramic. They held. “No, definitely not.”
“You know, just because you’re physically out of the woods doesn’t mean your brain’s not still processing everything that —”
“Bill,” Ava groaned, “it was bloody zombies!”
A beat. “What?”
“Zombies in San Francisco.” Zombies on Fisherman’s Wharf. Zombies in the lab she’d stolen. Zombie Janet van Dyne, leaping from the rescue pod. “Told you it was stupid.”
“No such thing,” he said, but his tone was lighter now. “You know I had a nightmare about a butterfly once?”
It was Ava’s turn for confusion.
“Yeah,” Bill confirmed, dragging the word out with a smile. “Took the wrong suit and went tiny instead of big. You do not wanna know what a butterfly looks like up close.” An exaggerated shudder. “Or, at least, what my subconscious assumed it would look like? Either way, it was more than enough for me to leave the shrinking to Hank.”
Janet’s corpse of a husband, close behind her…
“Speaking of them, maybe Scott should bring over a different game next time? One with fewer jumpscares?”
“There were hardly any,” Ava protested weakly. “And I was mostly in it for the cutscenes.”
And to marvel at the solid controller in her hands, the clicky buttons and a trigger you could swirl in circles. While Bill and Janet (and Hope and Hank, even) were writing equations on a board and debating hypothetical designs for a particle containment unit, Scott had been… there. No, that would be somewhat harsh; Ava actually had heard him contribute a few ideas to the brainstorm. But he mostly seemed to have tagged along for moral support (he said as much) and to be with Hope (which he didn’t say, but it was obvious). He’d brought crisps and a PlayStation (“in case anyone needs a break!”), and Ava swore that half the time he spent showing off his post-apocalyptic video game was just an excuse to poke fun at his partner.
“She fought you,” he’d loudly whispered, his grin conspiratorial as he pointed over at Hope. “So you would think she’d be able to beat this chapter, but…” Cue the Wasp’s eye-roll.
Hope’s winged escape. Scott, torn apart on the laboratory floor.
“You were there too, in the dream,” Ava said without thinking.
Bill’s eyebrows rose. “Now I need to know what happened.”
She had regretted the words from the moment they left her. She regretted them even more now. She took a long, slow sip of her tea, let it warm her, stared deep into the amber liquid pooled in the mug. She took another sip.
Bill cleared his throat, then. “You don’t actually have to tell me,” he assured her, and the relief washed over Ava with the lavender.
The great Hank Pym, abandoning the bloodied pile of limbs that was once his protégé. Snarling toward another unconscious body. Ava, phasing erratically, throwing herself forward in an attempt to stop him, failing, failing like she’d failed to save herself — no, Janet had saved her, Janet had reached out with her glowing hands — and she’d failed to save Bill, who was ripped open, rising from the dead…
Actually, Ava had something she needed to know.
“If you threw one of those blue discs at a person, would it…” With two hands, she mimed a rapid upward expansion.
The scientist didn’t even blink at her change of subject. “Theoretically, yes, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Even with these suits we build, there are health risks, and to grow organic matter without one could cause catastrophic cellular damage. Now, Hank does this with his ants at whim, but that’s a conversation for another day — I’m sorry, why are you asking?”
“You chased me out of the lab,” Ava said. Giving up, she supposed. It kept returning to her regardless. “Zombie-you.”
“The lab? As in…?”
“That lab. It was all just some horrid version of the day Janet came out of the Quantum Realm, only she was dead here. She didn’t help me.”
Bill just listened.
“You kept pulling those discs out of your jacket pockets and throwing them at seagulls. And people. And zombies? You had this infinite supply of them, and you just kept going and growing everything.”
“And then?” he prompted.
“And then I got bit and woke up.”
She’d been right. It was ridiculous. Especially narrated out loud, this way.
“Well,” Bill said, clapping his hands together once for effect. “I’d like to think that if I, as a zombie, still had the mental faculties left to use a Pym disc, I’d be aware enough of the risks to avoid using them on living beings.”
“Seemingly not.” She gave a small smile and took another sip of tea. “Hank was a zombie too, but I never saw him out there throwing anything.”
Bill gasped in mock offense. “Now, that’s how you know it couldn’t have been real.”
“Mm.”
A peaceful silence settled over them. He’d meant it mostly as a joke, Ava was pretty sure, but something about that statement made the chamomile taste earthier and the lavender more soothing. It wasn’t real. Janet had emerged unscathed, and no one had died. Not even Ava, though she’d been glitching like she was about to, before Janet approached.
Maybe Bill was right after all, and she was still processing it.
“In all seriousness,” he added gently, “I’m really glad things turned out the way they did, that day.”
She’d failed, same as in the nightmare. But Janet had approached with energy in her fingertips and eyes that softened when Ava told her it hurt. Bill hadn’t left her side. No one had. And there were new days in that lab, with the equations and the banter and all the pieces of a dark grey suit coming together, and zombies that lived on a screen and on a screen only.
“Me too.”
2. Ava, 2024
When Ava woke, it was to silence and near-darkness and this hollow, gaping emptiness in her chest. The only visible light here was that which pulsed from points on her suit, from her sleeves as she buried her face in gloved hands.
It wasn’t real.
She leaned backwards against the exposed insulation of the wall she’d pushed this thin mattress up beside. Letting her hands drop, she stared out into the dark. It played the dream back to her.
She’d been home.
No, she wasn’t about to think of it that way.
Things had been different. Things had been bleak in a different way.
She’d been in California, still, in San Francisco, where she hadn’t been since… where she hadn’t set foot in years. Her employer had been the same, though. OXE Group. De Fontaine. Ava hadn’t seen her, but the dream had been tinged with the awareness that they’d struck a bargain, and that there’d been an urgency to it…
It was the sort of dream that stretched out time. Months had played out in a matter of hours as she slept, fragmented moments that were already cutting in and out of memory. The scenes stabbed at her like shards of glass, but here, in the dusty darkness of this attic, there was some self-sabotaging part of her that fought to hold on to them.
Things had been different, and things had been distorted and wrong, and none of it was real. But she hadn’t been alone in the distortion.
Bill, Dr. Bill Foster. Gaunt and grey and sunken-faced, his hair and beard long gone. His brows erased too, which left his face incomplete, entirely altered the rhythm of his expressions. His eyes themselves were the same, though, dark and kind.
The scientist who had taken care of her, once. In the dream, she cared for him.
Hospital waiting rooms, their harsh sterility. Bags of chemicals. Retching.
It had been cancer, the sort of ordinary horror that ordinary people face, not something so anomalous as molecular disequilibrium. But Bill was fading, all the same.
In the dream. It wasn’t real.
“How’s the pain?” “How’s yours?”
What was real was that she’d lost Bill six years ago, with half the world as it crumbled.
The too-fragile squeeze of a hand around hers. Eyes slipping shut. “Thank you, sweetheart,” that word breathed out without thought, like it was her name, like she was really his daughter.
It wasn’t real.
The tears were, though, as they stung in her eyes without warning, as she furiously blinked them away.
Enough of this. Enough sitting here feeling sorry for herself. She’d made her choices, and that part of her life was over, and Bill Foster was fine. Better, even, now that he no longer had a fugitive to harbour. She didn’t need him anymore, or anyone, and he most certainly did not need her.
But she had to get out of this attic. She had to be anywhere but here.
It was a well-ingrained habit to pop the helmet over her face before phasing through the floor. Even as scattered as she was, Ava did that automatically. She dropped down to the lower level of the abandoned two-storey she’d made her hideout — the attic, boarded-up as she’d left it, was accessible only to the intangible — and stumbled outdoors through the wall.
Encased in this suit, with the helmet sealed and the energy supply flowing, the pain of brief intangibility was reduced to a dull, bruising ache. Invisibility barely twinged, with it on. But she was suddenly desperate for the sensation of cool night air on her face, and there was no one around, this late. She’d take her chances.
It didn’t bring quite as much relief as she’d hoped, retracting her helmet.
The London suburb was empty, the pavement glinting with the past day’s rainfall, painted in greyscale by streetlight shadows. Ava bore forward. She didn’t have anywhere to go, just away-from-here, just somewhere. Her steps weren’t anywhere near loud enough to drown out the hacking coughs looping in her memory. Still, she threw one foot in front of the other, her suit’s skirt flaring out around her with the speed of her stride.
Limping from an injury but refusing to answer the question of how she’d gotten it. Bottles of pills, all different shapes and colours, which Ava kept track of — the mind that had built chambers and suits and handled theoretical physics with ease was fogged by chemotherapy. Medicine Ava had paid for.
At least that would’ve been a somewhat noble reason for the work she was doing.
But Ava was not noble, and there was only one person she’d ever taken care of: herself, and she did that well, because she had to. That was all she had.
Thin black letters on sheets of paper, the State of California’s adult adoption paperwork, because it had suddenly become pertinent for Bill to list his next of kin, and — utter nonsense. Complete and utter nonsense, perhaps the most ridiculous fabrication of them all. Imagine that, her name on legal documents, when a dozen nations wanted Ghost thrown in a maximum-security floating prison! Imagine that, Dr. Foster, legally her father!
Foolishness. And not something she deserved, anyway, or wanted.
She wished she could see him, though. The thought came traitorously. She wished she could see him again, if only to confirm that he still carried himself the way she remembered, that nothing had stolen the weight from his bones or the colour from his face. She wished she could hear his voice, if only to reassure herself that the sound of it hadn’t hoarsened that way.
And, come to think of it… the scientist had spent years exposed to the poorly-understood hazards of quantum energy, with all the equipment he’d set up to keep her alive. He’d…
Ava’s gut twisted like she was the one on chemo.
He’d lived, for years, in direct proximity to a person whose material form was shifting in and out of existence.
Perhaps this fear wasn’t entirely unfounded.
She didn’t know. She didn’t need to know.
There were phone booths on this street. Some of them were even functional. She had a burner in her attic, for Valentina’s assignments — it would ring again soon, and Ava would lift it to her ear, listen, destroy the SIM card, and leave in search of intel to gather or targets to eliminate.
Bill Foster wouldn’t want to see her. It was cruel, for that nightmare to be her most recent, most tangible memory of him, but it was a cruelty she’d have to live with.
Ava kept walking.
3. Ava, 2027
The jolt of it sent her lurching forward, back into her body, back into the back of the stolen truck. They’d hit a pothole. That, or they’d run someone over.
As the vehicle steadied, Ava blinked, settling back into the corner she’d been curled up in. Yelena was next to her, and Walker was leaning back against the opposite wall of the truck bed, and — she’d drifted off in front of the others?
Huh.
This goddamn truck, with its constant rumbling and side-to-side sway, lulling her. Ava could vaguely remember the futile battle to keep her eyes open. At least no one had tried to kill her while she was unconscious. Perhaps Yelena’s oaf of a father wasn’t too far off, calling them a team.
Granted, the bar was low. The bar was no cold-blooded murder while she slept. Though, the fact that she’d somehow let herself get comfortable enough to fall asleep here at all…
In her defense, she’d phased a few more times today than she would’ve preferred. The physical exertion of that was bound to catch up to her eventually, trust or no trust, team or no team.
The dream she’d slipped into, there in the truck with her fellow miscreants, seemed to have had its own opinion on the matter.
Them, standing in a row, standing alongside each other on the rubble-laden New York pavement, standing between civilians and a Hulk-like beast. Ava, them, and a few others —
The playful lilt of a thickly-accented voice broke through the memory. “Did the beauty queen get her beauty sleep?”
Ava’s face went a little hot, and she tried to sit up a bit straighter. Two pairs of eyes on her, hazel and pale blue. “I was hoping you lot wouldn’t notice,” she grumbled.
“Eh, give her a break,” Walker said lightly, shaking his head at Yelena. “She’s been blasted by custom-designed sonic weapons twice in twenty-four hours.”
God, that too, in addition to the usual strain of phasing. But did he have to bring it up? Did he have to make her sound so weak? Ava wasn’t constantly referencing that time he fell from the sky and landed flat on his back, was she?
To his credit, Walker had pulled her away from the gunfire, the second time that the shrill mechanical shriek had incapacitated her. That was thoughtful of him. The grandiosity got on her nerves, yes, as did the incessant use of military jargon, but he’d… if she’d been alone for that… she would’ve been riddled with bullets, probably, what with the way that hellish noise had crushed her body solid.
“My head has just barely stopped pounding from it,” she admitted. They’d all seen it happen, anyway. And Walker, grating as he could be, was far more tolerable than the version of him her dream had conjured up.
Something akin to roid rage, with his eyes crazed, teeth gritted, facial muscles twitching up a storm. OXE had convinced him that his enhanced strength was deteriorating, and Walker had eaten their bullshit right up, and they’d been covertly pumping gamma radiation into his veins the entire time. The result was monstrous. The result was attempting to demolish New York City.
In hindsight, it was almost as if Ava’s subconscious had confused the split-second Captain America with the split-second President, the one who’d torn up the White House. Not a flattering comparison, in her opinion, nor an entirely accurate one.
Well, the man had torn up his own household, metaphorically, according to Bucky. Walker and his oh-so-fulfilling home life. He’d been going on about that family of his from practically the moment they’d all met, and, for just as long, Ava had pretended it didn’t sting. It turned out he was just as alone as any of them.
As alone as Ava had been before this impromptu team-up, anyway. It was becoming uncomfortably clear, being among these people — speaking to these people, being spoken to, being seen — just how isolated she’d become.
Maybe all that was why this dream had… been what it was.
“Well, good for you.” Ava felt Yelena’s foot prod at hers, and she froze for a moment at the contact — did she do that on purpose, or was it the motion of the truck? — but the Widow continued like nothing had happened. “I don’t know how you could possibly sleep in that thing, but good.”
The suit? Ava smoothed her hands over it, adjusting the draping pieces of material that fell over her legs. “I make do,” she said, somewhat stiffly.
Yelena considered that. “So…” Her teal-lined eyes narrowed like she was remembering something. “It keeps your body together, hm?”
“Oh, now you care?”
Beside her, Yelena shrugged. “Alright, then, don’t tell us. Keep being all Ghost-y and mysterious, up to you —”
“It’s a healing particle delivery system that doubles as a containment suit.” The explanation rushed out before Ava could stop it. “If I spend much longer than a day outside of it, I start to fall apart, physically, so I wear it as often as I can. And yes, that sometimes includes while I sleep, but it’s not as bad as it looks, and I much prefer it to the alternative, which is —”
They were both looking at her expectantly, Yelena and Walker. Why was she telling them all this?
Because they were the first people she’d had full conversations with in months, Ava realized, and because — reasonably or unreasonably — she felt safe enough to.
“It hurts,” she said, carefully, “when I phase without the suit. It isn’t pleasant with it on, either, but it’s manageable. So I started sleeping in it, just in case someone creeps up on me and I have to…” she trailed off. “You know how it is.”
From their expressions, she could tell that they did. She could tell they were the knife-under-the-pillow sort, Yelena especially.
“Wow.” Walker chewed his lip. “You get that from OXE?”
Ava bit back a laugh. Of course he would say that. Perhaps her dream’s nonsensical subplot of him accepting suspicious concoctions from Valentina had a slight grain of truth to it, after all.
And then it settled in the pit of her stomach, cold and metallic and heavy, the actual answer to his question. And, funnily enough (it wasn’t funny, not at all), her sleeping subconscious had commented on this topic, too.
The so-called Goliath, standing alongside the Ghost in this so-called heroic lineup. He was throwing her a wide-eyed glance — a silent, “are you seeing this?” kind of look — as their former teammate rampaged. Ava, not even questioning why Bill was there. And in a suit of his own, no less, something straight out of his stories, something blue and white and black, with silver pieces that matched his thoroughly greyed-out hair — now, what would a scientist in his late sixties possibly be doing on a battlefield?
Snapping his helmet shut, exploding to half the height of a skyscraper, and straining to catch a Hulk-toppled crane. Apparently.
Ava, phasing through rubble to get to the civilians trapped behind it.
For God’s sake.
Ava needed Yelena’s father, and all his maniacal ramblings of heroism and glory, to get the hell out of her head.
Bill, too. Dr. Foster, from before the Blip, who’d been there for her back when molecular disequilibrium was her death sentence. Dr. Bill Foster, who had been kind and ordinary and good in a way that drove her to keep him far, far, away from the life she’d chosen. She hadn’t spoken to him in almost ten years.
She’d hardly spoken to anyone in years. She’d somewhat forgotten she could, before meeting the others in the vault.
She’d definitely forgotten that there was anything to enjoy about it. Being around other people.
And she hadn’t gotten this suit from OXE.
“From some old family friends,” Ava said, and left it at that.
John nodded like that explained everything. It didn’t, but she appreciated the gesture.
“Well,” Yelena conceded, sweeping her gaze over Ava, “outside of how terrible it is for climbing elevator shafts, it’s a pretty cool suit. Your family did a good job.”
Before Ava had a chance to respond, or to even process, Yelena was talking about her own suit: her pockets, her weapons, her pockets where she stored her weapons, and Ava —
Ava leaned back against the rumbling wall of the truck. She propped up a leg, rested an arm against it, and just listened.
It was nice, to have people she could sit and listen to again. She’d missed that. She had actually, achingly, missed that.
Maybe, if this ill-advised plan succeeded — if breaking into the former Avengers Tower to take down Valentina actually worked, if they all actually survived this — maybe she would let herself think about making that phone call.
Maybe not. There was a dead woman’s sword tucked in her belt, after all, a dead woman who had been alive in her dream.
“And then I have these little, Widow, zzzt zzzt, bite things…”
Being here, though… in the back of this truck, on the way to that tower, with these people… the possibility felt more real, somehow, here. Where she wasn’t alone. And there had to be some reason she’d had a dream like that.
Maybe if she survived this.
+1. Bill, 2027
Their laughter still echoed. Bill could almost hear it, mingling with the high-pitched ringing in his ears. The giggling kids and their ginger striped alien-cat, who… who had infinite pocket dimensions in her stomach?
And those four had been playing with her?
Nine-year old Hope van Dyne, with her Walkman and her strong opinions on every song in it. Peter Quill, a boy with some extraordinarily humbling powers, the kid the team had been assembled to fight. Hank had ended up taking him in.
Peter Quill? The spaceman who’d abducted Kevin Bacon a few Christmases ago?
Peter’s sister, a girl with antennae, who they’d rescued from the alien siblings’ planet of a father. And Ava, the youngest, who Bill had met in Argentina some time later. She fit right in with the other three, and she struggled to hold things sometimes, but Goose kept purring against her anyway…
Hell of a dream. But reality was stranger.
He must have fallen asleep, somewhere in the middle of it all, because as he squinted in the still-dim light, as the protests of his stiff muscles and aging bones began to register, Bill was waking up right where he’d left off. Slumped over his paper-strewn home office desk, head resting on folded arms. He’d removed his glasses for just a second, just a moment to rest…
The three monitors in front of him had gone dark, but Bill’s hand still sat overtop the computer mouse, and they lit back up as he jostled it. The press release. The articles. All the footage from New York, all still there.
Bill leaned back in his seat, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Behind his hands, he could feel his own face breaking open into laughter, into amazement. It was real.
Not the dream, not its late-80s ensemble: himself and Hank, an alien aerospace engineer, the Wakandan king, even Thor… no, not them. But after he’d spent hours at this desk, in frantic search of everything he could find under NEW AVENGERS NEW YORK, it was no goddamn wonder he’d dreamed that.
Ava Starr was alive, in New York City, and they’d named her an Avenger.
And she was right there on WHiH World News, frozen in the camera flashes, with a cut bleeding from her forehead. Alive. Solid. Paralyzed — from the look on her face, there was no way she’d known in advance about this announcement — but stable.
She was wearing the same suit they’d built together. Bill would recognize it anywhere. Four years of trying and failing to get in contact, of not knowing whether that suit had been enough to save her.
Whether or not it had been, Ava had found a way.
And she looked older, and she looked strong. Bill got his glasses from the desk. There she was again, on the leftmost screen, in some New Yorker’s iPhone recording. In it, a helicopter careened toward a pedestrian, and then out of nowhere, a figure materialized. Ava, it was unmistakably Ava, and she pushed that man to safety as the explosive crash passed right through her. Bill had lost count of how many times he’d replayed the clip.
That dream… it was because he’d fallen asleep watching stuff like this, no doubt.
Towering over Coney Island, drenched in rosy-hued carnival lights, beating that 21-feet record by a landslide. “It’s the end of the world, go big or go home.” Their team’s resident alien, Dr. Wendy “Mar-Vell” Lawson, was falling from a spaceship, and Bill was activating his suit and leaping forward with outstretched palms, leaping forward to catch her…
G.O.L.I.A.T.H. had been a passion project, an application of theory — an impressive application of theory, but little more than that. An exhausting one, too, and not just because it meant working with Hank. It took an immense physical toll, that suit, though in the dream version of it he’d somehow battled an army of sand-people without breaking a sweat. He’d never done anything that strenuous in the lab.
Ava, however…
He hit play again. The helicopter fell. The young woman appeared. The civilian was saved. Bill’s heart could have burst.
And then the ringing returned. He hadn’t even realized it had ceased, but it was back, trilling in his ears, louder than before. And in the haze of half-wakefulness, the sound had resembled tinnitus, but now —
He scrambled for his phone. One missed call. Unknown number.
Unknown. As in, it could be a scam. Or a telemarketer. Or endless other callers — a colleague looking for advice, someone from the Pym van Dyne Foundation, though he doubted it, this early in the morning. Hank, maybe, though he hoped not. In the dream, it had been Howard Stark calling about chaos in New York.
So it could be anything, anyone. Unknown, as in infinite.
But Bill knew a thing or two about parallel realities, and he suspected Ava did as well. He picked up the phone. His throat was constricting. Somehow, he knew.
“There’s a, uh…” The words were stuck. He tried again. “There’s a hero in a containment suit. You know anything about that?”
Infinite, as in the stretch of shaky silence that followed.
“How’s she doing?”
Infinite, as in the joy when it broke.