#stava

Ava Leigh Walker’s life started out about as boring as you can imagine, growing up in middle-of-nowhere Missouri, considering her mother Maureen was an active duty Marine Captain, and her father Sean was a former Marine turned Private Investigator. Ava grew up in an equally boring way, well-loved and well cared for, by her parents and her mother’s Marine squad, until her mother died under ‘mysterious circumstances’ while overseas when Ava was twelve. 

The kind of ‘mysterious circumstances’ that made her mother’s squad leave open service behind, and in the case of three of the four squad members leave the Corps for good to open a bar in Harlem, who eventually fell into doing local, and then not so local vigilante mercenary work. (You’ve heard of Sister Margaret’s Home for Wayward Souls, haven’t you?) The kind of ‘mysterious circumstances’ that made her father Sean disappear for weeks or even months at a time trying to unravel the mystery of her mother’s death. 

When he did leave, her dad would leave Ava with Maureen’s old unit, Dante ‘Reddy Freddy’ Johnson, Gabriel ‘St. John’ Keller, Leroy ‘Bluebird’ Rieker, and Harvey ‘Cannon’ Sanchez. These four men, even when Rieker was off training snipers for the Corps, raised Ava in Harlem at Johnson’s bar whenever Sean was gone. 

Until three weeks before Ava’s eighteenth birthday, when Sean went over to Afghanistan and two weeks later came back dead. 

Johnson came to Ava with a folded up flag and condolences on his lips one more time, because her father had died out in the same mountains as her mother, and again Ava heard the word ‘mysterious circumstances’. And Ava, who may have been sweeter than summer sunshine, had still been raised by people always seeking answers, and Ava wanted to find her own answers. And she wasn’t about to let anything get in her way. 

Ava attended Harvard University for two years, seeking a triple Doctoral degree in Psychology, Chemistry, and Mechanical Engineering, because in typical Walker fashion, Ava never did anything by halves. Ava was preparing for her sophomore finals when she was approached by Nicholas Fury, Director of SHIELD, for an internship with the agency, mainly acting under the Psychological Operations Division. 

Ava didn’t hesitate to say yes, knowing that if she was ever going to find out what happened to her parents, she’d need to have some sort of security clearance. For two years, Ava worked aboard the Shield Helicarrier, studying under the best of the best that worked with Shield. After the Battle of New York, Director Fury assigned Ava to work with Bruce Banner and Tony Stark. And the rest, as they say, is history.