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Ava stretched, grimacing. Her left elbow clicked, then her right shoulder, and then a half-dozen things in her spine clunked in unison. She'd spent too much time in the suit again.
It was hard sometimes to separate her new reality— mostly stable phasing, a government-funded supply of quantum energy, a public life as a (New) Avenger— with the life she was used to, where she'd been lucky if she could spend more than three hours out of the suit without every molecule of her body going to hell and back. In the field, or on missions for Fontaine, she simply wouldn't take the suit off. Dirt and sweat would smear itself against the suit and her, a constant film on her skin. She'd have the constant urge to claw the thing open with her bare hands and take a shower.
Now, though, she could stabilise pain-free and safely for twelve hours at least, and that meant she could take as many damn showers in the Watchtower as she wanted. She needed her brain to get the memo on that, though. 'Suit = safety' had kept her alive this long, so she got a different kind of itchy outside of it, exposed and anxious.
The greasy feeling on her skin had finally won out, though, so now Ava was under the frankly luxuriant rain shower on her floor in the Watchtower. Her floor, like that wasn't excessive too. All of the New Avengers had gotten a floor of the thing, and none of them had used that space effectively or well. Ava, for her part, had taken a small guest room on a random floor, close to the entry and exit but only if you can walk through a half-dozen walls, and had neglected to inform her teammates where she was quartered.
Still, even in this 'small' room, she lived better than basically anyone in the city: she wanted to bask in that luxury but again, her head couldn't get onboard with relaxing. Ava resolved that she was going to spend at least five minutes just standing under the showerhead before washing her hair, just to prove she could.
Until, of course, only thirty seconds in, the shower inevitably started to rattle, gutter out, and then go completely dry. Ava glared at the showerhead, then smacked the controls with the heel of her palm, and when that failed, she irritably leaned forward, phased through the wall into the crawlspace behind it, and rattled the water pipe, which gurgled sadly.
Midway between the shower and the crawlspace, Ava glanced around— and then jumped out of her skin, jolting back from the wall and sliding on the wet shower floor as she went tangible again. She blinked, heart thudding, then poked her head back through the wall.
Looking right at her, smile frozen to his face, were sixty cardboard cutouts of Captain America.
"She's doing it again," John said ominously from the kitchenette.
"What?"
"The phasing thing."
"Phasing thing her thing," Alexei shrugged. "What of it?"
John narrowed his eyes as Ava, suited and masked, slid up halfway from the floor, looked around, then phased back down into the floor and disappeared. "It's like whack-a-mole, it's freaking me out."
"Uh-huh," said Yelena. "Can you pass the coffee?"
"No."
"Walker, pass the coffee."
"You didn't see what she was doing, and I'm telling you, there's no good reason for her to be spending hours every day doing weird shit in the walls of the building we sleep in."
Yelena, who had gotten back from a mission thirty minutes ago and looked like shit, put her Glock on the breakfast table and thumbed off the safety. John said a prayer under his breath that one day Yelena would be in some horrible accident that would cut off both her hands, and handed her the french press.
Alexei leaned back, kicking up his feet on the table: his socks had once, presumably, been white. John grimaced.
"Always worrying," Alexei said, grinning up at him. "If she wanted to kill you in your sleep, you'd be dead! Relax, sit down."
"Okay, she wouldn't, though —"
"Kill you in her sleep," Alexei mused to himself, at a volume that was probably intended to be under his breath.
"—Because I'm experienced in embedding in enemy territory. You guys, though, are so off-guard that if whatever she's doing is designed to fuck us over, you will get fucked over."
"Experienced," Yelena quoted between sips of coffee, "in embedding in enemy territory. Mm." She shared a glance with Alexei, and the two of them looked at him with weird expressions.
"Walker, what you need to do is learn the difference," Alexei said in a disgustingly perfect American accent, all his grammatically incorrect Russian-isms vanished, "between enemy territory and an environment that remains neutral until it's hostile."
Yelena gestured at Alexei in agreement with her coffee mug. "You're not under attack," she agreed, sounding like she'd been born and bred in Ohio, "until you give the people around you a reason to attack. It's the key to living undercover." She leaned back and slipped casually back into her own accent. "Whatever. Just leave her be. Maybe she's putting bombs in the walls. Who cares? She's not going to do it unless we give her a reason."
"'Who cares?'" John said, snatching back the coffee press. "I care! About bombs in the goddamn walls!"
"So sensitive," Yelena muttered, and Alexei chuckled. John watched Ava's head bob up near the microwave and swim across the wall, then the kitchen counter, and then the floor, sliding like a shark fin under the tiles he was standing on.
"You're all fucking crazy," he managed, and went to go get Starbucks. Maybe this time they wouldn't write 'fascist' on his takeout cup.
It took the better part of a week and a half, but Ava had finally started to map out the system. The epicenter was floor 67, but there were tendrils in the network as low as 3 and as high as 76, and she was certain that with enough hunting she'd find a rooftop and a floor-level exit. Whoever this was left nothing to chance.
She'd only found one definite entry into the system, on her own floor, but given that she didn't have to use the entrance to get in, she wouldn't be surprised if someone who couldn't phase would of necessity find more. That said, every other possible way in she'd seen— service hatches, ducts, plasterboard walls— had been reinforced or welded shut. The building had spent the last year being gutted by Valentina's defence contractors, and clearly they'd not so much as found a trace of it.
What Ava could be certain of was that someone had spent several years living in the walls of Avengers Tower. What she couldn't be certain of was who, or why. She suspected it was long-abandoned, as nothing in it dated after 2015, and coming across caches of rotten food wasn't uncommon, but everywhere she looked in New Avengers tower, she'd find a trace of this long-gone secret tenant.
Above the control room, tucked up in an overhead duct filled with greasy wires, there was a sniper post with a well-cared-for rifle, set up next to a loose section of the ceiling that flush-fit unless removed. She'd looked at it from below and unless you knew it was there you'd have no clue. Weapons caches like this, usually placed in strategic spots, were the most common find. Others, usually closer to or inside the concrete core of the skyscraper, were comms setups, with VF radio and satellite phones stashed in little hollowed-out corners of the elevator service shaft.
The part that kept her coming back to it, though, that made her hunt for days until she'd phased so much she'd gone dizzy, was the fact that whoever this was had been clearly fucking with everyone else that lived here.
One crawlspace on floor 18, which Ava remained impressed that anyone could wriggle into without phasing, was filled all the way to the top with boxes of Pop Tarts: like someone had been sliding in from the air vent above, dropping boxes into the cavity, and leaving again. A post-it note on top of the pile read, in scrawly all-capital letters, 'FIND NEW SPOT HE'S GETTING SUSPICIOUS'.
In the ceiling of the floor that now belonged to Yelena, some signs had been drawn in the same scrawled capitals, and then placed where a curious and well-trained government agent would no doubt sweep. If you removed the light fittings above Yelena's bed, then you'd see a sign through the hole that read 'caught you looking'. Another, in a cut-out hole behind the mirror, read 'sun's getting real low!'.
Another spot, in a clear statement of intent, was right next to a laboratory space that could only have belonged to Tony Stark. It was clearly meant to be the spot for a floor-level vacuum, but the mysterious person in the walls had removed the machinery and instead built a covert viewing platform to watch the lab through the vacuum grate. To keep up the pretense that the multi-floor ducting was still there, Vent Guy had rigged a shop vac to a motion sensor and jammed it against the grate. The hole left behind was perfect, it seemed, for both a place to watch Tony Stark and to steal all his stuff.
Unless, of course, you were way sneakier than that, and also clearly a bastard of the highest order. Yes, from the detritus left behind, whoever set this up had been periodically saving thumb drives of data and taking them elsewhere in the labyrinth, but that was only part of it. Strewn across the place were a few unusual gadgets. One that Ava only felt brave enough to test on a laptop that wasn't her own were some thin dart-shaped objects with USB ports on their tips. On being plugged into a computer, the device would wiggle the cursor nonstop. Deeply petty, massively overengineered, as with so many of these anonymous creations. Again, this person had left nothing to chance: the port insert was breakaway, and once the dart fell off shortly after insertion, you couldn't see any evidence of why your mouse wouldn't work.
In short, whoever this was had time and plenty to take all of Stark's data and sell it to the highest bidder, but instead had taken all of Stark's data and then spent the rest of their time finding new ways to be a dick to him. In this case, by throwing darts into his USB ports.
Ava, at this point, had enough evidence to point to one individual — one Avenger — in particular. It just seemed so out of character to his public persona that she couldn't reconcile it. Hawkeye on the news had always been a taciturn and reluctant figure, grimacing at every camera. Here in the tower, however, the Hawkeye she'd discovered was one who hoarded roomfuls of trinkets, propped up cutouts of his teammates to use for target practice, and spent inordinate amounts of time on extremely overengineered pranks.
Then again, Ava mused, what did the public know about her? She rarely spoke unless necessary on camera: someone could look at her public appearances and think of her only as a secondary, forgettable figure in the group. All the eyes went on the erstwhile Senator Barnes, and even then they had no idea he was fucking Sam Wilson most nights.
So fine, fuck it: Hawkeye's in the vents. Who's to say it couldn't happen? Honestly, a world where the New Avengers included her was strange enough.
And if she was inheriting this strange warren of prank tunnels from her similarly secondary Avenger, then she could only hope to do him justice.
John Walker was nursing a bad headache and a frosty temper. This week's self-righteous nose-ringed barista had written 'geneva convention' on his iced coffee and he'd had to throw it in case anyone got a picture.
The walk back to New Avengers Tower was short but the trip from the ground floor to his floor was way longer, and it gave him time to stew. He needed to get the Captain America name back: none of this 'U.S. Agent' crap. Sam Wilson wasn't even working for the government anymore, he'd pulled a Rogers and gone rogue. Hell, if he got Barnes onside, maybe he'd even hand it over just to keep the state department from nailing him for vigilante activity.
If he was Captain America again, he thought, strolling into his room, he could start rehabilitating his image. Give it that New Avengers shine. And then those sanctimonious dumbasses in retail wouldn't keep calling him—
A rustle. John jumped to attention. The bathroom. He yanked the Beretta he kept taped under the bed, hustled to the doorframe, swept the room with gun drawn, silent. Nothing. Then again, a rustle, from behind his own goddamn bathroom mirror, Ava , and he figured either he'd get her in the knee or she'd phase out the way and either way he'd not have her pulling the same trick in his room again. He aimed down and emptied half the clip putting a neat line of rounds at knee-level, and heard nothing but a strange clicking near the mirror.
"Ghost, that you, you asshole?"
Nothing. Then John noticed: the mirror looked askew. He frowned, kept his gun ready with one hand as he pulled back the mirror—
A face, grinning in on him, and John had already put a bullet through it before he started noticing that the face looked familiar, and also weirdly flat.
The cardboard cutout of Steve Rogers grinned on at him from the hole in the wall, now sporting a smoking hole right between the eyes, and distantly John heard Ava laugh.
"Fucker!" he shouted at the ceiling, and unloaded a round into it in hopes of blind luck. All he got for his efforts was a shower of plaster dust in the eyes.
Alexei had always liked the concept of an 'open plan' home, and now that he had an entire floor to himself, he had resolved to make his vision a reality with a sledgehammer and a dream. Had he succeeded in taking down every load-bearing column on his floor, he likely would have totalled the entire skyscraper. As it was, the first wall he hit spilled six hundred boxes of stale Pop Tarts onto the floor, and the rest of his day, after that, was booked solid.