[Her history was darker than he imagined; her parents had been the ones that created the OPUS project, scientists working for Ivan, and she'd been raised in a lab as its first test subject. All the others had been orphans, except her.
Her Widow Ops training had been to satisfy Ivan's desire for all of its subjects to be spies and soldiers, and then he'd handed her over and Ava still didn't quite understand it. What his plan had been, just what he'd wanted to make the world into and where she was supposed to tie into it all. She's played over that final confrontation in Istanbul and she's still not sure what his play had been-- either a misjudgment from delirious insanity, or he'd wanted things to play out as they had. And that thought is even more terrifying.
He looks almost penitent, with his head bowed and the rasp of his breath exhaled into the thin air between them. She doesn't trust it; maybe that he had struggled with sacrificing those of his own people, but she wasn't sure she believed that he was sympathetic to losses in general terms, except when it suited him.]
There's too much chaos in the world to end it. But the struggle can be guided so that-- I just mean, you can't get rid of bad things happening, not entirely. There will always be battles, lives will always be lost, because even in the absence of war people always come back to hurting each other. But you can try and make the families destroyed into more than statistics, to make the world something better than it was.
[She does not like this line of conversation, not one bit. She feels like the words are the wrong thing, but she doesn't know what else to say. Nothing she says is wrong, but there's something about the way that it hangs in the air between them that makes it feel that way. These are things she's never really thought about too much, about what they meant. Lessons taught to her in her formative years, when she was just starting to question the world.
They were talking about sacrifice and protection, which should have been benign enough and yet all of a sudden it felt treacherous, like Pierce had pulled out the knives when she hadn't been looking. Had he? She wasn't quite sure. If she was reading too much into it or not.]
I'm still figuring it out. [Which of those questions, or all of them? She didn't particularly feel like clarifying. All of them. She didn't know who she was, who she was supposed to be. She knew her strengths but she didn't like all of them, and even that she was fighting to control.]
no subject
Her Widow Ops training had been to satisfy Ivan's desire for all of its subjects to be spies and soldiers, and then he'd handed her over and Ava still didn't quite understand it. What his plan had been, just what he'd wanted to make the world into and where she was supposed to tie into it all. She's played over that final confrontation in Istanbul and she's still not sure what his play had been-- either a misjudgment from delirious insanity, or he'd wanted things to play out as they had. And that thought is even more terrifying.
He looks almost penitent, with his head bowed and the rasp of his breath exhaled into the thin air between them. She doesn't trust it; maybe that he had struggled with sacrificing those of his own people, but she wasn't sure she believed that he was sympathetic to losses in general terms, except when it suited him.]
There's too much chaos in the world to end it. But the struggle can be guided so that-- I just mean, you can't get rid of bad things happening, not entirely. There will always be battles, lives will always be lost, because even in the absence of war people always come back to hurting each other. But you can try and make the families destroyed into more than statistics, to make the world something better than it was.
[She does not like this line of conversation, not one bit. She feels like the words are the wrong thing, but she doesn't know what else to say. Nothing she says is wrong, but there's something about the way that it hangs in the air between them that makes it feel that way. These are things she's never really thought about too much, about what they meant. Lessons taught to her in her formative years, when she was just starting to question the world.
They were talking about sacrifice and protection, which should have been benign enough and yet all of a sudden it felt treacherous, like Pierce had pulled out the knives when she hadn't been looking. Had he? She wasn't quite sure. If she was reading too much into it or not.]
I'm still figuring it out. [Which of those questions, or all of them? She didn't particularly feel like clarifying. All of them. She didn't know who she was, who she was supposed to be. She knew her strengths but she didn't like all of them, and even that she was fighting to control.]