The Flash: Supergirl's Sacrifice (Crossover Crisis No. 2)
TIME BUREAU HEADQUARTERS WASHINGTON D C THE PRESENT In the privacy of her office Ava Sharpe squeezed her eyes shut tight and groaned deep in her throat She was the director of the Time Bureau a beyond top secret government organization devoted to policing the time stream and keeping history on track The pressures that came with that job were almost unimaginable and usually she dealt with them through a combination of rigid authority and no nonsense organization Sometimes though like right now it felt as though she’d been caught in a rainstorm with nothing but an old newspaper for an umbrella A part of her wondered if non-clones ever felt so completely overwhelmed She had been designed and programmed by the original Time Master Rip Hunter to be the pinnacle of human perfection but on days like this she wondered if maybe Rip had dropped a codon here or there in his genetic manipulation if the folks who’d grown her at Advanced Variant Automation Corporation had goofed up and made her slightly more susceptible to deep deep frustration No she figured Everyone felt this way sometimes In fact she reasoned her annoyance was one of the things that proved she was human albeit in convenient duplicate form And if she was the height of human development then maybe her frustration was the apex of all human frustration too Sure that made sense Is it the tuna a voice asked Ava looked up She’d thought she was alone in her office but at some point as she’d been staring fruitlessly at the insides of her eyelids Gary Green had sneaked in Gary was long and lanky his limbs dangling as though they knew they didn’t belong and would run off on their own at the first sign of danger
She trusted Gary She wasn’t quite sure why but she did What he lacked in competence he made up for in loyalty and verve Is what the tuna Ava demanded Gary swallowed hard adjusted his glasses and pointed wordlessly to her desk A half-eaten tuna on rye rested amid the crumb remains of a bag of potato chips I lied he told her That sandwich was in the fridge for two days not one I thought it would be OK but Ava grunted and swept the detritus of her lunch into the trash can next to her desk It’s not the sandwich Gary It’s the situation Things are out of hand The time is out of joint she thought suddenly Shakespeare Hamlet She grimaced Most people would remember that from high school or maybe an English course in college Not Ava She remembered it because it had been implanted in her brain along with false memories of a childhood she’d never had The only memories she trusted for real were the ones she knew she’d made herself since rolling off the clone assembly line and working at the Time Bureau Those were the only ones that mattered Her work Her friends Sara Sara who was missing Well uh Iris West-Allen called Gary said wagging a slip of paper in the air Again That’s the third time today so far Ava told him And five yesterday he said nodding And four the day before that Iris had been calling with increasing urgency for a couple of days now ever since some kind of hole in reality had opened up in Central City From what Ava could tell the Flash had handled that problem She had bigger issues to deal with She literally had no time for Iris West-Allen and Central City The time is out of joint
