Chapter Text
So. They’re a team now.
They have a tower, Avenger’s Tower itself, refurbished and rebranded and everything by Valentina and her team.
Valentina had announced them to the world like they’d been her plan all along, like they were the saviors, the heroes, that the world has craved since the great Avengers scheme fell apart all those years ago.
And now they’re here, in a Tower that doesn’t have bedroom furnishings, but does have technology, a fully-stocked kitchen, a living room, and plenty of soulless, decorative art that Yelena thinks maybe is supposed to represent patriotism, seeing how most of it consists of red, white, blue, and gold abstract streaks.
It’s kind of depressing to look at.
What’s also depressing is the fridge. She’s standing in front of it for like the fifth time tonight, its white glow the only thing illuminating the room as she sighs into the empty abyss once more.
They have nothing to eat.
Well, not nothing exactly.
There’s at least ten boxes of Avengers Wheaties in the cupboard and one gallon of milk, but if Yelena has to eat that one more time, she’s going to set fire to all of Dad’s new so-called Avengerz onesies and maybe his uniform as well.
They really need to go shopping again.
She checks the chore chart, and groans, because of course.
It’s John’s turn to go to the store tomorrow, and because it’s John, the whole fridge is going to look like a jungle.
There’ll be kale and lettuce and cabbage and broccoli and all sorts of leafy greens and healthy, boring things that simply won’t capture the magic that constitutes an American grocery store.
In America, they have instant jello, Cheeto brand mac and cheese, Poptarts, and Oreos, and instead of all of the magical, limited edition flavors of these things, John’s going to come home with chicken breast, lean ground beef, and protein powder?
Ugh. Kill her now.
At least he’s a good cook, even if she’d never admit it to his face. Everything he makes is surprisingly well cooked and well seasoned, but it means that there will be no sweet treats in the kitchen until the super-soldiers in their midst have powered through everything available. It doesn’t help that she had to pull her sour gummy worm stash out of the wall for movie night a few days ago, because Bob had wanted something sweet and they hadn’t had anything.
Luckily, that won’t take long for them to have to buy new stuff. The three supersoldiers are like black holes – ravenous and almost terrifying in their appetite. They’ve had to force Valentina to raise the food budget like five times already just to keep up, and with regular grocery runs about every three or four days, they’ve figured out how to make work.
But she’s going to have to do some stocking of her own if she’s going to survive.
And, she’s going to have to find a new hiding space – Ava’s been exploring all the crawl spaces for “defensive purposes” lately, so that she can know where to go with her glitching, but that means she’s pretty sure her stash location has been discovered.
Hmm. But what does she want?
She’s working her way through all the gummies she can find, and so far, she’s fallen in love with peach rings, Sour Patch Kids, and Skittles. But she knows there are more gummies out there for her to try.
So, maybe this’ll be an adventure.
It might be dark out, but Yelena’s not scared of the New York night, and there will be plenty of corner stores (what do they call them in New York again?) open late enough where she can find some sweet treats.
She texts the group chat that’s she’s going out (Bucky made it a point to tell them that it’s important for missions that they know where each other are, and that just telling each other would be way easier than him having to bug them every day), pulls on her jacket, and steps out into the elevator.
As the doors slip closed, she realizes her mistake, but she misses getting the doors to open and gasps in horror as “Never Gonna Give You Up” starts to play, overly loud and but surprisingly clear for elevator speakers as the lift starts to descend.
“Curse you, Ava,” she hisses, because Bob had convinced Ava that they could Rick Roll Alexei for his first time in the elevator, which Bob had thought would be a nice introduction into modern meme culture, which for some reason, he was trying to teach him about.
They’d gotten the elevator music to change, but unfortunately, they hadn’t figured out how to change it back yet.
Hence, the song currently grating on her nerves. She’d been rappelling down the tower for the last week in favor of taking the elevator, but she’d seen the results. Everyone who’d stepped off it in the last week has looked visibly angry or stressed, except for Dad, who still found it hilarious and was starting to use the elevator unnecessarily just because.
It doesn’t help that everyone's had it stuck in their head at least once per day since. She keeps getting it from Bob, who can’t seem to stop humming it as he goes about his daily chores or reads his romance novels.
Yelena eyes the emergency stop button, then the emergency roof exit.
She doesn’t have much of her gear, but she’s done more with less in elevator shafts before.
The only question is whether or not it’s worth it.
Unfortunately, it isn’t, so she crosses her arms and leans into the wall of the elevator, letting Rick Astley’s voice wash over her until a pleasant ding finally releases her from this hell.
The ground floor is empty, except for some PR junk Valentina had delivered and an empty desk office. She heads to the door and pulls it open to stride out into the blustery streets.
It’s only eleven, and a Friday night, so the streets aren’t empty, and she pulls her hood up out of instinct as she starts slipping through the crowd, searching for an open shop.
Her phone buzzes – Bob has sent a smiley and thumbs up emoji in response to the group chat text, and she smiles as she slips her phone back in her pocket.
Okay – now for the hunt. Her target is unknown at this point, but she’ll know it when she sees it.
She wanders for a bit, half-people watching and half looking for open stores. It’s a surprisingly nice night – the wind is cooling but in a pleasant way, and the sky is relatively clear. She can’t see the stars, but at least there isn’t a heavy layer of smog and clouds to block out the moon, which is a slim, shining crescent when she can see it between the towering buildings.
Eventually, she sees a glistening “Open” sign, and like a sailor called by sirens, is drawn to the rack of candy towards the front.
She wants something new. Hmm. Skittles are good, but she’s had them. Ooh, what about Skittles in the green package? They’re sour, which could be fun. She grabs a bag, and then spies a bright pink bag – something called Nerds gummy clusters, with funky looking little mascots drawn on the bag. She grabs that as well, and then snatches a bag of gummy worms, just in case she’s disappointed by one of her new choices and has to console herself later.
The man at the desk barely looks at her as she slides cash across the counter, under the security shield to him.
He counts out the change and they leave without exchanging a word, which suits Yelena just fine tonight.
But as she exits the store, she just kind of feels restless. She could go back to the tower, try and get some sleep (she doesn’t think it’ll be the good kind, not tonight), she could go back and train (boring, she trained with the team all morning and actually helped Bob throw his first punch with correct form held throughout, which was cool, but she’s all trained out), or, well, she could just stay out here.
She scans the streets. It’s a relatively quiet night, just groups of people moving with their friends, mostly dressed up for a night out on the town. Nothing too interesting, but maybe she could just take a walk, try and get her head on straight so she can go back to her room at the tower and try to catch some Z’s peacefully.
Pocketing her treats, she picks a direction and starts walking. Hey, maybe this will help her learn more about New York and help her plan battles or execute missions in the future, if she’s more familiar with the city’s layout.
Well, maybe she’ll let her hindbrain do that. She doesn’t actually want to study right now.
Yelena wishes she could lose track of time. That’s a luxury the Red Room removed from them pretty early on, unfortunately, so instead, she’s acutely aware of how much time has passed as she wanders. She makes it all of thirty minutes before she decides walking isn’t exactly going to calm her down or tire her out enough to sleep like a rock, and decides to head home.
As she spins on her heel, though, she comes to a stop, because holy shit, what was that?
They were definitely gunshots, one after another, ringing out somewhere behind her, and Yelena’s curiosity spikes as she spins back around and ducks into a shadow, creeping down the street and keeping her senses on high alert for another sound.
There– another gunshot, and then a high-pitched scream.
Not on her watch.
She sprints across the street to the other side, locating the alley between two buildings. The chain link fence blocking the entrance is rusty, but she vaults over it and twisting in midair to land facing deeper into the alley.
The crouch she rises out of is not a superhero pose, because she is not a poser, but instead a tactically sound decision made to protect her knees and ankles.
“Hey, nice superhero landing,” says a guy in red and blue in front of her. He has big, bug-eyed white lenses that seem to widen as he looks at her, and then he obviously glances behind him, where a man is plastered against the brick wall via something white and shiny.
Yelena looks him over and oh, there’s a spider on his chest. This is Spider-Man, the mysterious vigilante with strange, unexplained ties to the old Avengers. He fought with her sister against Thanos.
But first things first – “It was not superhero landing, okay? It was not a pose.”
Spider-Man shifts from foot to foot, looking awkward.
His eye lenses go a bit sharper, though. “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. When you’re a superhero,” his hand waves at her as if she’s the case in point, “And you do a landing, it’s a superhero landing. Trust me, I know.”
“But if you came about the gunshots,” he points to the man on the wall, “I already took care of it. The person he was terrorizing already ran off, she’s fine.”
“Did you call the cops?” Yelena asks. “Or are you just going to leave him there forever?”
Yelena feels the eye roll more than she can actually see it. “They’ve been notified. And my webs don’t last forever, like JJJ likes to say when he argues I’m polluting the city. They’ll be up for two hours before they start to dissolve.”
Huh. He gives away information rather freely, doesn’t he, for someone who’s surprisingly hard to photograph and even harder to find verifiable information on.
“Okay,” says Yelena, “Well, I’m glad you were able to help, Spider-Guy.”
They stand there for a second, both awkward. Yelena doesn’t really know what to think about the vigilante – she doesn’t know much about him, and doesn't really have an opinion yet. All she knows is that he was sort of on the Avengers in a way, and helped with the whole Thanos debacle.
Which – “Hey. Where were you last month when the whole . . .” she trails off and wiggles her fingers dramatically, miming the shadow Void had made that had slowly engulfed New York.
“Oh,” says Spider-Man, lenses sharpening further and tension building in his shoulders, “That.”
From his tone, that’s all she needs to know. “The rooms got you too, didn’t they. That’s okay, we couldn’t exactly stop the problem by hitting it this time.”
“I’m glad you stopped it, though. It sucked.”
Yelena chuckles, and then kind of comes to a quick decision. Spider-Man seems younger than she expected, especially for someone involved in Iron Man and Captain America’s little tiff all those years ago. “Yeah, it did. But if you ever want to help out again, you know, I think the New Avengers might still have some space open in the tower, you know. You were part of the old Avengers, yes?”
The tension in Spider-Man’s shoulders skyrockets, and he actually shifts backwards, away from her, head tilted up a bit like he’s scanning the roof for anchor points.
Ah, she’s losing him.
“Not to insinuate anything or whatever. I’m just saying it might be nice to have more people who have worked with a team be on the team, you know? Might make things smoother.”
Spider-Man’s fists clench so tightly she can hear the squeak of the material, but it doesn’t seem aggressive. He glances over at the man webbed to the wall, who’s luckily still knocked out, and then sighs.
“I’m not really a,” his voice trails quieter here, a bit awkward, almost sad, “team player these days. So thank you, Miss Black Widow, for the offer, but I’ve gotta be going now. Crimes to stop, kittens to rescue from trees.”
As he launches off, Yelena turns to shout at him, “Hey! Don’t call me Miss, I’m not that old! Also, I’m not the Black Widow!”
Hopefully he heard her as he disappeared into the night.
Huh. She’s going to have to look into this. Not because he’s crazy interesting or because she cares about what he’s doing, or whatever, but because he definitely had a bullet wound, likely just a graze, on his arm, that he didn’t even seem to notice or care about.
Also, he has superpower and can move very fast, and while he’s not a flier, their team is missing the aerial component of battle, at least until Bob finally decides to give his powers another shot in a healthy way. So maybe he could be an asset.
She’ll have to ask Bucky about this, but first, research.
Getting back to the tower takes longer than she wants it to, but when she gets there, she finds the odd lab/office/computer space empty, and she gets to work, grabbing the tablet connected to the AI system they have installed.
“Pull up everything known about Spider-Man. Generate a full report. I want to know everything.”
The computer voice confirmed her request, then got to work. Meanwhile, she took the chance to pull up social media and look up Spider-Man.
Most of the hits were related to J. Jonah Jameson, apparently the editor-in-chief at The Daily Bugle newspaper and the world’s number one Spider-Man hater.
The man has podcasts, papers, polls, propaganda, and videos about his hatred of Spider-Man, everything from his illegal vigilantism to his fashion choices, which the man apparently thinks is a cheap, creepy knock off of Captain America’s colors that ought to be illegal.
Yelena snorts – copyrighting the red, white, and blue? That would put all Americans out of business.
But the man has a serious vendetta against Spider-Man. Honestly, the level of hatred is impressive, and Yelena has to give him props for his commitment to the bit, at least.
Even with all of his articles and information though, nothing is actually concrete or meaningful. Hell, she doesn’t even think they know his height (if she had to guess, he’s only about 5 cm taller than her, and she’s only 165 cm).
It’s annoying to have to sift through all the junk, but from what she can read in between the lines about Spider-Man, he’s actually doing a lot of really important work. He’s helping New Yorkers on a personal level, but he also has seemed to face some really major events, even across European cities, although he wore a different suit and tried to convince people he was going by a different name.
He’s been active for a long time, and some bloggers think he probably got snapped because he wasn’t active during those five years and hasn’t seemed to age enough.
But other than that, there’s not a lot of information to go off of, which is weird, because Yelena’s a Russian spy.
Her whole thing is gathering information on Americans, especially Americans who might pose a threat, but there’s nothing.
The computer search comes up with a long, slow loading bar. For some reason, searching the internet, SHIELD files, old Avengers database, and whatever other private or public records this AI has access to is taking absolutely forever, which is unusual, because it’s never taken this long before.
She sighs deeply. Maybe she’ll bring this up to the team, maybe she won’t. It depends on how inspiration and team spirit strikes tomorrow morning.
For now, at least she’ll be able to catch an hour or two while the computer cycles and before her body wakes her up like they’re still trapped in the Red Room’s brutal cycle.
Not bothering to go to her room, she just curls up on Bob’s giant bean bag chair in the common room. It’s not really Bob’s, but he uses it the most, so it’s kind of become his default spot, but Yelena finds that it’s perfect for napping, and so she buries herself under some very soft blankets that Dad found at Costco (his newest obsession) and falls asleep.
It’s not a fully restful sleep, but it feels like only a minute passes before she shoots up, grabbing her shoe from where she kicked it off blindly and chucking it at the sound that woke her.
“Ouch!” Cries a voice, and Yelena sighs, coming down out of fight mode, because that’s John’s whiny voice.
“You woke me up, douche. What time is it?”
“Next time, don’t sleep in the public space if you don’t want to be woken up. But it’s like 05:15.”
“Ew,” says Yelena, “Why are you up so early?”
John sighs. “I’m going on a run, and then I’m going shopping when the stores open.”
He looks around the counter. “Hey, where's the Costco card?”
She shrugs and pulls the blanket up around her shoulder some more, snuggling into the plush bean bag. “Dunno. Who was in charge of shopping last?”
John checks the chart, and Yelena can literally feel his grin grow as he turns to look at her.
“Oh no,” she says, “It’s too early for however petty you’re about to be.”
“Oh yes,” says John, “and no, it isn’t. Little Miss Perfect Ava shopped last, and she didn’t put the card back in the designated spot. I’m gonna have to go get it to complete my mission.”
Yelena can see it now: John waking night owl Ava at the asscrack of dawn, the eruption of violence and hatred, a screamfest that wakes the whole tower somehow, even though they all live on different floors.
“Leave me out of it,” she mutters, and pulls the blanket up over her face.
What is it they say? Not my circus, not my monkeys? That’s the energy she’s trying to channel this morning.
Drifting, she vaguely hears John go up the stairs, cursing as he too is assaulted by Astley’s smooth verses, and then notes a few distinctive warbles and vibrations indicating that Ava’s using her powers.
“Kick his ass, ghosty,” mutters Yelena.
She’s planning to just rot for a bit in the bean bag and wait to see if anyone decides to make a breakfast she can mooch off of, but finally, her tablet dings, and she drags herself up, wrapped in blankets to slog over to it.
It’s blinking a bright white 100% completion at him, and she cracks her fingers before opening the report.
Great. It’s exactly one page, which isn’t a great start, and all of the information is so, so basic.
Stuff like “suspected enhancements – strength, reflexes, unspecified climbing ability. Suspected to have blipped. First sightings: 2016 confirmed.”
But none of it is anything useful or anything Yelena hadn’t already uncovered, which is suspicious and just plain weird, because this is supposed to be a top-of-the-line AI, capable of scraping any data, completing any task.
So what this tells Yelena is that this Spider-Man either has absolutely no life, like doesn’t-even-exist no life, which is basically impossible in this modern era, or that he’s something way, way worse.
Everyone in this tower knows about way, way worse. About being ghosts, sometimes literally, having no trail, no name, no home to come back to so nobody could build a file on you.
But for Spider-Man to have existed this long, even with the Blip, to only have these scraps of information available?
There’s a mystery there, and Yelena’s been so, so bored.
She shuts down the tablet with a vengeance and decides that maybe rotting is for another day. Today? That’s for getting ready.
She’s not exactly sure what kind of getting ready she has to do yet – this feels like the start of an observe-and-report mission, not an eliminate-and-disappear mission, which is on the rarer side for her, but hey, anyone can try something new every once in a while.
It’s then a productive morning for all of five hours. Yelena gets some light calisthenics in (practicing her parkour, because Spider-Man can move according to the videos), finds a protein bar in a cupboard that doesn’t seem too old, and takes a shower, even going so far as washing her hair.
When she’s coming out of her room, still towel drying her hair, she almost bumps into Bucky (damn his winter-soldier quiet movements).
“We’re reporting to the common room.”
“Reporting?” Asks Yelena, following Bucky as he heads to the elevator. “What for?”
Bucky doesn’t wilt, but Yelena can see his eyebrows furrow. Well, she can feel them furrow, because she can’t see his face.
“She’s here.”
Oh no. She’s here. Valentina’s here.
“And what does she want?”
“She called an all-hands meeting about an hour ago, didn’t you see it?”
Yelena sniffs. “No, I was taking a long shower. I’ve been trying to enjoy the simple pleasures in life, see?”
“You were showering for an hour? With hot water?”
“Boo,” says Yelena as they get in the elevator, grimacing as the doors shut and music plays. “Your age is showing. This place has enough hot water for someone to shower for like four weeks before it even went lukewarm.”
Bucky frowns even deeper. “Doesn’t change the fact that the environment is still impacted. You just — No. This isn’t what we’re talking about right now. Valentina’s in the common room. I don’t know what she wants, but we need to be ready.”
Valentina’s hard to deal with, and Bucky’s right to be worried. They might have an insane amount of dirt on her, but she’s like a snake, always weaving in and out of sight and surprising them with new, evil schemes.
Ugh. This won’t be fun, not at all. She nods at Bucky, putting her game face on. He nods back, jaw set like he’s going to war.
When the music finally grinds to a halt, they leave the elevator, and immediately, Val spins to face them, a politician's smile plastered to her face like mud on a pig.
“James and Yelena! Come, join us.”
From behind Val’s back, Ava shoots them a pained smile and drags an imaginary knife across her throat.
It takes all of Yelena’s training not to react with laughter, or even a grin, but she manages, even when Walker catches on and pretends to hang himself. Bob seems to fret nervously from his bean-bag, twisting to frown and them, but unfortunately, Dad catches on, and as he’s pretending to load an invisible rocket launcher to blow Val up, which is an extremely valid plan, she twists and he has to transition into a fake stretch that Valentina clearly is suspicious of.
“What is this about?” Asks Bucky, voice so cold Yelena imagines it had once made all of Hydra’s enemies shit themselves.
“Well, great question, yes, let’s get to it. Now, you know why the first Avengers failed?”
There was half a beat of silence.
“Press! PR! Public presence! They just got together to solve problems for the world, not for the city they lived in. And I have a plan to change that.”
She flounces over to them, flipping around a tablet, the words “Engagement Plan” flashing on the screen. “Now I know I’m more country-wide, global, and CIA based, but I reached out to the lovely mayor here in NYC and asked him if he had any visions for the New Avengers being based in his city, and lo and behold, he had plenty! And I think that having these new, public facing jobs where you help improve your image will really soften the hearts of the public towards you as the New Avengers.”
Ugh. Fisk. Yelena hasn’t exactly embedded herself into New York’s politics yet, and her blackmail files are sitting empty, but that’s been because she’s been trying to focus on herself and her new friends, been trying to work to heal and take baby steps towards happiness, or whatever.
Happiness might be about to bite her in the butt, though.
“You want us to work for Fisk?” Hisses Ava, voice tight. “You know what he’s done, right?”
Bucky nods in agreement. “This sounds a lot like the Accords, Valentina. Not something we’re signing up for.”
“Oh no, no!” She says, voice like poison, “Nothing like that! You’d just be taking the place of vigilantes in the city, performing sweeps and patrols in their place, but in full view of the law and as heroes, not illegal vigilantes. You’ve heard of his Anti-Vigilante Task Force, I assume?”
“Yes,” says Bucky, “They’re dirty cops, given free reign. I’ve spoken out against them on behalf of my district.”
“Well,” twitters Valentina, “That’s why you can be the solution! You step in, do better than the cops, outperform and stop the vigilantes, all while improving your public image. Actually doing something as a team will let me keep fighting for you, you know. Sam Wilson has raised some very interesting challenges against your name and all!”
“And so what do we have to do?” butts in John. “Do we get deputized? Badges? Are we hero-cops?”
“No, nothing of the sort,” she says, “Just heroes doing what the vigilantes did, but without secret identities and no culpability. Mayor Fisk is willing to sort of look the other way and allow you to operate as Avengers in the city, stopping crime as long as you report it, unlike the unruly and dangerous vigilantes running amok currently.”
“And who are these vigilantes?” Asks Yelena, interested. She was only really aware of Daredevil and Spider-Man.
“Oh, so many. We have dangerous, violent ones like Punisher and Jessica Jones. There’s Spider-Man, Iron Fist and so many more, really, all dangerous and thinking they’re above the law.”
Then Val’s smile goes dark. “And look, I know you all are somehow the bleeding heart type, but the Vigilante Task Force isn’t exactly tasked with bringing them in , right? Just getting them off the streets, no matter the method. You all could stop them a bit more gently, you know? Live up to your Avenger name?”
“I like it!” Says Dad, because of course he does. “We can be flashy, yes? Prove our worth to the people, and they love us more because of it! We will become personal heroes of whole city!”
“What’s in it for you, Valentina?” Asks Bucky, voice tight.
Pretending like she isn’t an evil mastermind, the woman hums, tucking her tablet back under her arm. “Oh, you know, just some information. Some of these vigilantes are surprisingly hard to track, you know, for what basically amounts to mom-and-pop shop crime fighting, and I just think having more information could be helpful, you know, for world security. I’ll send you the details.”
Yelena risks a glance at Bob – if Val had experimented on regular people like this, what would she be able to do with such powerful people? People like Spider-Man, who seem to be helping others?
If she made Bob into Void, what could she do with someone with that level of power?
Suddenly, she is glad she blew up that lab. Less evil scientists to stress about, at least.
“Look,” says Valentina, when nobody says anything for a second. “I get it, you need some time to decide. Let me help you along: I’ll drop you like a hot potato if you don’t take this assignment from me. The information’s been sent to your system, and you have 24 hours to agree. I was just hoping for an enthusiastic yes from you all, as I have a brunch date with Wilson Fisk after this. Deliberate amongst yourselves, but know – I’m telling the mayor you already agreed.”
Then she turns and leaves, flouncing out in a cloud of silk and sickly floral perfume.
“Well shit.” Says Ava.
And yeah, that pretty much sums it up, Yelena thinks. Shit.