#Dante 'Reddy Freddy' Johnson/Gabriel 'St. John; Keller

[countessklair]

Dr. Gabriel ‘St. John’ Keller, Director of the Medical Division of the Avengers Initiative

“Don’t mistake my kindness for weakness. I am kind to everyone, but when someone is unkind to me, weak is the last thing you will remember about me.”

Gabriel Keller grew up in inner-city Chicago, raised on his father’s stories of being in the Marines, and after graduating high school became a full-time caregiver for his ailing father. The experience would define him, as Gabe had always wanted to help people, and watching his beloved father die was nothing short of agonizing, but it did give him the desire to become a doctor, to provide health where he could. Gabe joined the Marine Corps when he was twenty-one, a week after burying his father, partly to honor his decision to become a doctor, but also as a way for Gabe to stay close to the man who raised him. Gabe got his medical degree through the Corps in record time and was bounced around for a while, nothing really sticking, until finally he was assigned to be the medic for Captain Maureen Walker’s squad, and after day one knew he had found his place in the Corps. Day one of his relationship with the squad, the XO Dante Johnson, who, in Gabe’s opinion, had eyes way too pretty, took it upon himself to check that the resident doctor was combative ready. One hour and a broken nose later, Gabe earned the nickname ‘St. John’ because, in Dante’s own words, somewhat muffled from the towel holding all the blood in his face, “Ok, so you can break a bone. Let’s see how you do at putting it back together.” Five minutes after that Dante was almost speechless. “I’ve broken this nose four times now, and that was the quickest, and definitely the gentlest any doc’s ever reset it.” Gabe knew he was fucked when Dante looked over his shoulder and smiled brilliantly through the dried blood on his face. ”You got skills of a saint. You’re all right, Gabe.” Gabe found a family in his squad, though from the third time he patched up Dante, after the man inevitably lost his temper with a bigot in a bar, he would look into the other man’s eyes and think ‘I just fucking had to fall in love with a straight man with anger impulse control.’ The summer after their first deployment as a unit, Gabe and the others were invited up to Missouri to spend two weeks with Maureen and her family. They met Maureen’s husband Sean and their daughter Ava on Ava’s fifth birthday, and Gabe fell in love harder than he’d ever fallen before. Gabe had never really been interested in children, and that still stood, but of all the children in the whole wide world, he was glad that Maureen and Sean had had Ava. She was sweet and always laughing, she was the spitting image of her mother and constantly trying to understand every facet of the world around her, she was intelligent and quick to love, especially when it concerned her mother’s squadmates.  Being a doctor and occasional Black Ops agent was incurably emotionally damaging, but every time they came back from a mission and got their mail call, there was, without fail, a drawing for each of them from little Ava. And those did, inevitably, work wonders. When Ava was eight, Rieker and Harvey spent the summer before deployment road-tripping and drinking in the South. Maureen and Sean spent the month before deployment going on a second honeymoon in Scotland visiting extended family, and Gabe and Dante babysat Ava for the duration. That whole month was the pinnacle of Gabe’s happiness in that era of time, Dante and Ava running through actual fields playing tag in the summer sun, the three of them going to the Ozarks and swimming in the lake, the three of them playing endless games and holding nightly campfires. The image of Dante lit by firelight, singing a silly song designed to make Gabe and Ava laugh, his eyes locked onto Gabe’s and a soft smile replacing the usual steely frown, was too much for Gabe to handle at the time. It felt too much like what he wanted with Dante. Even overseas, Gabe felt at home with this squad, even through the hell of warfare. Which is probably why it all fell apart. In May of 2005, two months before Ava’s twelfth birthday and one month before they were set to go home, Gabe was forced to sit back and watch their commander Lt. Colonel Thaddeus Ross send Maureen out into the field on her own, with no explanation beyond a snotty sneer and a thoroughly uncaring, almost hateful look in those grey eyes. Gabe waited, prayed, wished and fucking hoped she would be fine, but thirty-six hours later she came back with no pulse and half her blood gone. Gabe and Harvey and Rieker had to hold Dante back from killing Ross, and Gabe had to hold the four of them together when they went back for the funeral, Gabe holding little Ava’s hand when the coffin was lowered into the ground, while Sean stared in numb silence at the turned over dirt and the freshly carved headstone. Harvey, ever the realist with what to do next, suggested they leave the Marines. It just...wasn’t the same without Maureen. Gabe, Dante, and Harvey left the Corps. Rieker stayed behind, wanting to give the Corps another chance, but he transferred divisions and started training snipers in Arizona. For a few weeks after everything happened, Gabe and the other squad members parted ways. Gabe went back to Chicago, visited his father's grave, put in some time at a few outreach centers, went to see a shrink to pour his heart out, and drove into the middle of nowhere to scream until he couldn’t talk. Everything was at such a low point, Gabe knew that he really didn’t want to even try to attempt civilian life without Harvey or Rieker or Sean or Ava or Dante, God he didn’t want to ever be without Dante in his life. So Gabe called up Harvey and Rieker, and they tracked Dante down to a hole in the wall, abandoned bar in Harlem. They walked in to find Dante looking around, lost and smaller than Gabe had ever seen him. And without a word about why Dante had bought the place, they fixed it up, and fixed up the two floors above the bar area too, with enough bathrooms and bedrooms to house the four of them and three guests. Gabe stuck around with Harvey and Dante while Rieker went back to Arizona, and while Dante set up ‘Sister Margaret’s’ and while Sean investigated Maureen’s death, Gabe and Harvey and Dante and Rieker helped raise Ava. Gabe taught her how to box, it was her fifteenth birthday present, and he taught her how to fight dirty when needed, cause the good Lord knew that girls weren’t safe on the streets. Lucky for them, turning into some kind of mercenaries was good in that regard. It didn’t clean up Harlem, they were magic, but it did keep Ava safe. A year and some change later, Rieker came back to Harlem for good with a sniper in tow, Wade Wilson, who was carrying a dishonorable discharge and downcast eyes, who had the smartest mouth Gabe’d ever heard. Wade Wilson was mouthy as fuck, but he was a good man and Gabe was glad he was around. Gabe knew what happened to most soldiers with a DD, and he didn’t want that for the guy who helped Ava get over her first douchebag boyfriend and who walked with them all in the Pride Parade. Gabe even liked the Weasel guy Dante hired to watch the bar when they went off on ‘excursions’ around the world. Because Gabe knew, had known for years, that wherever Dante went, he’d follow. It wasn’t perfect, the whole of Ava’s puberty was something of a disaster even though the psychologist Gabe had talked to said they had done good by her, but it was damn near close to perfect. Which was probably why it got ruined. Again. Sean dropped Ava off at Sister Margarets the beginning of July, three weeks before her eighteenth birthday, his eyes alight with the promise of answers. Sean had promised to come home within two weeks with everything they had ever wanted to know about Maureen’s death. Two weeks later Dante came into the bar holding an envelope and a folded flag instead of Sean’s duffel, because Sean Walker had been a Marine too, and that’s what people did for the military when they died. They gave them flags because there was nothing fucking left. Gabe again held Ava’s hand and watched another coffin lowered into the ground in the middle of nowhere Missouri, thinking that this couldn’t be all life has to give them. And Ava changed a bit, a harder look in her eyes than before, a certain set of her shoulders that hadn’t been there before, and though she cried and mourned and screamed her hatred of this development into the world, she soldiered on. Gabe was proud of their girl because Lord was she strong. She went to college, went to a fucking Ivy League school, went to fucking Harvard, and aimed for a triple doctorate, at that. Even as proud as they were, and as aware as they were of Ava’s very impressive skills, none of them liked it when Ava took an offered internship at some hush secret spy organization she wouldn’t give a name to. But Ava was happy, and Gabe knew it couldn’t be a coincidence that whenever the four of them were off around the world doing their not so legal work, they always managed to escape the notice and pursual of any federal forces. The only reason Dante wound up in jail was because getting caught beating the shit out of some scumbag for the tenth time in a year got you thrown in jail, no matter how big of a scumbag said scumbag was.  With Johnson in jail and the jobs asked of them getting weirder and weirder, Gabe could only hope they lasted long enough for Gabe to finally kiss Dante under the mistletoe at Christmas because if he was gonna get one last thing out of his life, it was gonna be his romantic comedy moment, God help him.

Faceclaim: Donnell Baylock Jr

#Venger Fam Legacy #VFL CAS #Gabriel 'St. John' Keller #Dante 'Reddy Freddy' Johnson/Gabriel 'St. John; Keller #Dantel #two roads diverged fic #story on AO3 #Aesthetic

[countessklair]

Dante ‘Reddy Freddy’ Johnson, Head of the Global Intelligence and Operations Division of the Avengers Initiative

“You wanna start a fight? Let’s start a fucking fight. Let’s see how well you bleed, asshole. I wouldn’t bet on you, though, cause I’m older and a hell of a lot angrier than you.”

Dante grew up in Colorado with abusive parents, and when he turned eighteen, he joined the Marine Corps and never looked back.  Years later, he finally found a squad that fit him, and he fit in it, as Maureen Walker’s XO in their Marine squad, assigned to carry out Black Ops in Afghanistan. Dante earned the name ‘Reddy Freddy’ due to both his vibrant red hair and the fact that he was always ready for a goddamn fight. Dante respected Maureen and grew to love her and the others in their squad (Gabe, Rieker, and Harvey) pretty quickly, though his gaze landed a lot more often, a lot more intently, and in a much more romantic way on Gabe than it did anyone else. Dante even loved Maureen’s husband Sean, who was quite possibly the only person Dante, or anyone else for that matter could picture with Maureen. And Dante especially loved their daughter, Ava. He couldn’t imagine letting anything ever happen that could wipe that summer grin off her face. This girl, who he watched grow over the years, who laughed like there was nothing more to the world than the countryside of Missouri, who he taught how to tell time and how to salute properly, who he got to babysit with Gabe for a whole month that one summer when she was six and her parents took a second honeymoon, who he held while she cried over her first broken-hearted crush on a stupid boy who wasn’t worth her time, who went to him first when she was scared to tell her parents she had a crush on a girl, Dante loved this girl. He hated even the idea of a tragedy touching her life. Which was probably why one did. One moment, all was well, the squad was nearly through their deployment and was planning for Ava’s twelfth birthday and arguing about whether they were going to spend the Fourth of July in Miami with Harvey’s family or in Atlanta with Rieker’s family, and the next moment Maureen’s commanding officer, Lt. Colonel Thaddeus Ross, sent her out, alone, into enemy territory to complete an objective. No matter how Dante roared and argued with their Commander, his words fell on deaf ears. Within thirty-six hours, Maureen was dead and Dante had to fly back to the US with the others from the squad and hand a folded flag to Sean Walker, while Ava stood, silent and pale in a black dress, burying her mother three months before her twelfth birthday. Dante, Gabe, and Harvey left the Corps immediately, and very briefly parted ways, trying to get a grasp on the situation. Dante stayed in New York for a few weeks, wandering around and trying to decide what to do next, when his eyes were drawn to a busted up old bar in the worst part of Harlem. He contacted the realtor on the weather-beaten sign on the door and immediately bought the place, knowing nothing about why or how. Two days later he was standing in the filthy main room, at a loss for what to do net, when Gabe and Harvey and Rieker walked in, and without a word about his choices, helped him fix up the bar. He named it ‘Sister Margaret’s Home for Wayward Souls’ in a nod to his favorite childhood teacher, as well as a joke towards the intended clientele, as anyone to walk into a hole in the wall bar in Harlem was most definitely a Wayward soul. While Sean investigated Maureen’s death and while Rieker occasionally went to train snipers for the Corps in Arizona, Dante, Gabe, and Harvey found themselves responsible for Ava. Unexpectedly, they did pretty damn well at it. Not that it was easy. Thank God for their local bodega owners, because Ava’s first period had also come the week she went down like a baby deer with Mono. It became harder and harder for Dante to remember that Gabe, his best friend and the love of his life, was his very straight best friend and meant to be the unrequited love of his life, because sometimes when Gabe smiled it felt like the whole world got better. Honestly, Dante sort of felt that way about Ava, Rieker, and Harvey, so part of him had always wanted to overlook the way his heart sped up around the other man. (But after the first one of those dreams of his about Gabe, he knew he was sunk, head over heels in love.) The five of them, six when Sean was around, were happy, but even so, Dante found himself unable to stop being a soldier when he couldn’t sleep at night, thinking about the news of a predator just a few blocks over, and used his training to hunt the bastard down and turn him into the police. And he kept doing it, with other lowlifes in the area, and eventually, people started coming into the bar to hire him to do the things he was already doing, and within five years, Dante, Gabe, Harvey, and their patrons, and even Rieker after he came back from Arizona, were well-respected street mercenaries. When Rieker came back, he came back dragging along Wade Wilson, who even though Dante had initial reservations about, proved himself to be a good sort when he earned the stamp of approval from Ava, and a week later somehow was the only one she allowed into her room during the Boyfriend Breakdown of 07. Despite his somewhat odd home life, Dante didn’t take long to get a rap sheet as long as his arm, mainly for cleaning up crime around his bar, mainly because any way you put it, beating the shit out of someone wasn’t socially, or even legally, acceptable. But after a while, the four of them started getting contracted to do jobs on a broader basis, on a more international level, and so Dante had to hire Jack Hammer, ‘Weasel’, to help him run his business while he and his friends were off overseas doing the kinds of jobs that helped people but pissed off their governments. Ava was quickly approaching her eighteenth birthday, deciding between Harvard, MIT, and Oxford, and Sean seemed happier than he had in years, claiming he was getting close to something big, and when he came back in two weeks for Ava’s birthday, he’d have all the answers they’d all been looking for. Two weeks later Dante wasn’t met at the airport by Sean, but by a representative of the government, who told him it had come to their attention that Sean Walker had died in the mountains of Afghanistan. And Dante had to hand Ava a folded up flag two days before she turned eighteen and see her standing silent and pale in a black dress for the second time in his life. Dante helped Ava go to Harvard, and helped her occasionally even when she accepted the internship at whatever secret spy organization it was she joined, right up until he was incarcerated. So for the next five to ten, Dante was waiting out his time in jail until he can get back to his girl and his family and his bar. And maybe this time he might actually tell Gabe. Can’t turn out worse than the present.

Faceclaim: David Wenham

#Venger Fam Legacy #VFL CAS #Dante 'Reddy Freddy' Johnson #Dante 'Reddy Freddy' Johnson/Gabriel 'St. John' Keller #Dantel #two roads diverged fic #story on AO3 #Aesthetic

[countessklair]

Ava Leigh Walker, Psychological Operations

“I don’t need to have superpowers or carry a gun to be extremely fucking dangerous. Anytime you wanna play a game, I’m good for it.”

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.

Faceclaim: Alona Tal

#Venger Fam Legacy #VFL CAS #Ava Walker #Steve Rogers/Ava Walker #Stava #two roads diverged fic #story on AO3 #Aesthetic