#House trying to give wilson a birthday cake after he dies

[countessklair]

Harvey ‘Cannon’ Sanchez, Head of Combat Training Division for the Avengers Initiative

“Sometimes I feel like giving up. Then I remember I’ve got a lot of motherfuckers I need to prove wrong.”

Harvey Sanchez was born in Miami, and by all accounts had a normal life there, immersed in the culture of a Latin American, his family still telling stories from Mexico while making stories in America. He grew up proud and so totally secure in himself he never felt the need to be anything else. He went to school for an Engineering degree, and he loved his major, he did, but he caught sight of a Marine Corps advertisement one day after graduation and knew immediately why Engineering had never cut it. His family thought it was strange that he wanted to go into the Marine Corps, because Harvey was a sweet boy, hadn’t ever had any fights at school. (That they knew of.) But Harvey, always a firm believer in fate and in his God’s plan, went with his gut the way he always did. Harvey was a natural, could make a weapon out of anything, and could almost unerringly win any given fight. (Truth was, he’d had a lot of practice dealing with the bigots that had been his schoolmates back home.) A few years went by before he was assigned to Black Ops under the leadership of Lt. Colonel Thaddeus Ross, serving directly under Captain Maureen Walker and alongside Dante Johnson, Gabriel Keller, and Leroy Rieker. Harvey knew within ten minutes that these men and this woman were going to play a very important part of his life, and treated them as fondly as he was able because of it. Harvey had always been good about getting people to fall into each other and work better together, it was one of his best strengths as a Marine, and this squad was no exception. In fact, it might have worked a little too well in the case of Dante and Gabe, who looked at each other in every single way Nicholas Sparks had ever described. It only took about a month before Maureen, Rieker, and Harvey placed bets on when the two men would get together.  Dante, as the XO, had taken it upon himself to test the combative readiness of Gabe, Rieker, and yes, Harvey too.   And while Harvey’s soft and caring nature was still such a big factor of who he was, it was his prowess as a combative that earned him the nickname ‘Cannon’; as in Dante’s own words, “He may not look like he’s got much muscle on him, but goddamn his fist hits you like a cannon blast.” Harvey soon held the squad record for most bar fights, often over his zero-tolerance policy on the remarks often made about himself or Gabe or Maureen in the bars they frequented. Harvey loved his squad, more than almost anything in the world, save his Mama. The summer after their first deployment to Afghanistan, when they were all home and missing each other like crazy, Maureen called them all up and invited them to visit her, her husband Sean, and their daughter Ava for two weeks in Missouri. Harvey left practically that minute, too excited to meet the little baby girl whose picture was always in Maureen’s helmet, and was thrilled to meet Maureen’s husband Sean, a retired Marine turned Private Investigator, and even though he had a grumpy demeanor which meant Sean and Dante got along swimmingly, Sean melted around Maureen. It was clear that the man lived for the women in his life, and Harvey understood how amazing Maureen was, he’d seen that in her since the moment he met Maureen. And then he met their daughter, Ava, who was easily the most charming girl Harvey had ever laid eyes on. Ava treated her mother’s squadmates like family, called them ‘Uncle’ through her gap-toothed grin, laughed and ran through the fields surrounding her house as easily as she breathed, and Harvey even got to (quietly) teach Ava a little about how to make a weapon out of every part of her body. Harvey wanted to give Ava the tools he had, so he taught her how to see around corners and look for threats in every facet of the world around her. Harvey taught her to be wary but to feel safe. Even when the squad was not deployed, the five of them stayed at each other’s homes, spending Fourth of July celebrations or Thanksgivings in Miami with Harvey’s family, spending Christmas/Hannukah joint celebrations or New Years with Leroy’s family in Atlanta, or tried their best to charm their way into babysitting Ava for a week so Maureen and Sean could be alone for a bit. The summer Ava turned six, Harvey and Leroy spent the month before deployment running back and forth between Atlanta and Miami, definitively proving that Miami was the best city for partying and food. (While also proving that Rieker was crazy.) That summer, while Harvey and Rieker’s greatest concern was that Gabe and Dante would be taking care of Ava, together, for a month, alone at night, hoping that through it, their family would get a bit bigger, someone else’s family got bigger. Eliana Lacasa, daughter of Andres and Isabella Lacasa, conceived a daughter after a one night stand with Harvey in Roswell, New Mexico. Eliana kept Harvey’s name, service number, and phone number close, but she didn’t call, and Harvey never knew about the little girl he left behind in New Mexico. When they were deployed a month later and Harvey learned that Gabe and Dante were still in the ‘Eternal Pining’ stage for each other, Harvey honestly considered locking them up together in a closet and refusing to let them out until they were honest with each other. As a whole, Harvey’s family was doing great and when they were deployed, there was always a sweet note Ava’d send with each one of them telling them that they were gonna be ok. It was a good luck charm for them. Until one day it wasn’t. Harvey didn’t really know what or how or why but one day, their barely tolerated commander Lt. Colonel Ross sent Maureen out into the field to complete a mission. Alone. And whatever Dante had seen in the mission specs made him go white with fury and worry but it meant nothing in the end, because all there was left was a body bag, a folded flag, and broken hearts all around. Harvey had heard of inept commanders before, but Lt. Colonel Ross took the goddamn cake. The bastard even got a promotion out of it. So, after finishing their tour while leaving a heartbroken man and his equally heartbroken daughter alone, Harvey suggested they all leave the military. Gabe and Johnson immediately agreed, sick of the lies and the secrets, because they didn’t fail to notice the weirdness surrounding Maureen’s death. Rieker, who wanted to give the Corps one more chance but refused to go into combat without Maureen, opted for switching tracks, sending himself to Arizona to train snipers for the Corps. And so for a few weeks, they parted ways, going back to their roots and trying to understand what the hell had just happened. Harvey’s family was heartbroken at Maureen’s death and outraged at whatever agenda or ineptitude had led to it. Harvey couldn’t blame them. Two weeks after arriving in Miami, while the Sanchez clan did what they could to soothe Harvey, Sean, and Ava’s broken hearts, Gabe called him and said there was no point in waiting any longer. The two of them tracked Dante down to a bar he’d inexplicably bought, standing there unsure of what to do. And the four of them got to work and fixed it up, fixed it up so that there was enough room on the upper two floors of the building could support seven living there, comfortably. And honestly, even if Leroy and Sean didn’t understand it, Harvey understood why Dante bought the bar. Dante needed something, anything, that he could understand, and so it was inevitable when he became a street vigilante. Because as things often do when you’re a man trained to eliminate targets, Dante and Harvey, even in the midst of helping raise Ava while Sean chased the shadows of his wife’s death, turned to cleaning up the crime around the bar to keep Ava safe and keep the voices in their heads silent. Gabe followed them, rolling his eyes at their stupidity and patching them up every time, though his hands never failed to linger on Dante, and not long after Ava’s fifteenth birthday, Rieker came back to them for good, dragging along a man named Wade Wilson who carried a dishonorable discharge like a black mark on his soul. Rieker started helping out with their ‘odd jobs’ around the globe, while Dante hired a man he and the bar patrons called Weasel to attend to business while they were away. And Ava grew and grew, became stronger and quicker and smarter, so fucking smart so used to searching for answers she could find one anywhere she looked, and everyone was so fucking proud. Sean dropped Ava off at Harlem three weeks before her eighteenth birthday, his eyes alight with the promise of victory, saying he was close to every answer they'd ever needed about what had happened when Maureen died, he knew it. Sean left Harlem whole and hopeful for the first time in years and came back, just like Maureen, in a body bag, two weeks later. Once again, Harvey helped Ava bury a parent, and Harvey buried another dear friend. Harvey trained more with Ava, desperate to prepare her for something he knew he’d never see coming. Gabe helped her too, and the two of them taught her how to fight and how to win. But all around between the four men that were left as parental figures in their little Ava’s life, easily their proudest day was when Ava went to Harvard to pursue a motherfucking triple doctorate, because, as Walkers were ought to do, she never did anything by halves. Harvey got that strange itch on the back of his neck that something was weird about the offer of her internship at whatever top-secret spy organization had offered it to her, but Ava insisted and they relented. And two years later he was grateful for it because he knew that sometimes they didn’t get away from their jobs clean, especially with Dante’s rap sheet, but they got away with quietly making the world a better place each and every time. Now, if only Gabe and Dante would just get over it already and admit their undying love for one another, once Dante got out of jail, everything would be perfect.

Faceclaim: Nicholas Gonzalez