New Avengers Tower

[worthallthis]

The press meeting takes way too long. Then they're all taken to a hospital, because most of them are injured in some way. Then Mel takes them back to that stupid tower. Avengers Tower. Watchtower. New Avengers Tower. Nobody knows what they're calling it.

They get a tour, even though they're exhausted and grouchy, and even though half the tower is clearly in some state of construction and clearly not ready to be shown off. The labs are complete, hastily so, but none of them are going to be going anywhere near those. The rooftop bar is still in shambles, and none of them want to linger there. The kitchen and restaurant-like eating areas spiraled out around it seem intact, and well-stocked, at least.

They each have their own floor. Stark had originally made a whole floor for each of his superhero buddies, which hadn't really been renovated at all even in the multiple years the Avengers had been toast, so now they're the cleanest and least disturbed of the whole tower.

Bucky gets Steve's, Walker gets Thor's, Ava gets Clint's.

Yelena gets the one meant for Natasha. Of course.

And Bob gets Banner's, with its combination of calming decor and Hulk-proof walls.

Then they're left alone to "rest" with the promise that Mel and Valentina will be in touch over the next few days, which sounds more like a threat than anything else.

Comments

Bob's floor

[makingitworse]

Bob doesn't remember much since the vault. But there are some rooms in this building that are... familiar. In an uncomfortable way. He's glad the tour in those rooms are brief, because he feels himself hunching in on himself even more the longer they linger in the labs, the room with the container dressed up as a bedroom, the ruined open space with the bar. No one says anything about what happened in those rooms when they pass them, but everyone else seems to know, from their expressions and their own tension.

Then they leave him in a whole suite of rooms. Really fancy rooms, with nice paintings and expensive sheets on the bed and a table full of sand that Bob wasn't sure if it was supposed to be more art or something else.

It all feels wrong. Bob walks around in it and feels out of place, like a thief sneaking into this rich person's house. He has no idea what he's doing here. Yelena and Ava want him here. Bucky and Alexei had agreed, and helped argue against Mel who wanted him... somewhere else. Walker had just looked like he wanted to hit something, but then, he usually looks like that.

He'll do what they want, because he doesn't know what else to do yet, but it doesn't feel right. He sits gingerly on one of the super-soft, minimalist-looking sofas and it feels wrong.

Outside the media room, the morning after

[worthallthis]

Yelena isn't on her floor. She's not on any other floor, either. Bucky knows she's here, because he found the pizza out in the common floor the night before and assumed she had left it there-- he ate several slices while he worked. But now it's morning, and she still hasn't turned up. Had she left at some point during the night...?

He thinks he would have noticed. He didn't sleep all night, spending most of it in the security floor putting the system back together and piecing patchy and scattered footage into something coherent. The cameras on the exits showed no activity all night.

He hadn't been telling the truth when he told Alexei he doesn't get tired, but when he's on mission he can keep going even if he's tired. That's where he's at. There had been too much he didn't know, when the little "team" split up last night, so he set about filling in the holes with a more thorough search of the tower, then retiring to the security floor for an internet research and the cameras. It also had the added bonus of keeping him hidden from Walker, who absolutely tried to corner him early in the evening and Bucky just had no patience for dealing with him right now.

Finally, this morning, he feels better about the holes in his intel, but not about much of anything else. Yelena seems like a good person to start with to talk about it, but he can't fucking find her. He's about to give up and take a nap while he waits for her to surface when there's motion on the sole security camera in the hallway outside... the theater.

Huh.

He starts climbing stairs to intercept, hoping to reach her before she leaves the floor entirely.

After some intel

[musicdied]

Yelena brings coffee and orange juice by the media room in which she and Bob had set their little camp up the night before, and lets him know there's cereal in the kitchen. She doesn't want to ambush him with horrors first thing in the morning, so after helping tidy up, she leaves him be to explore, and goes off on her own to shower and start working some of her contacts.

And then Ava returns, and they spend a few hours digging through the systems in the lab - only partially scrubbed, so they're chasing digital ghosts, which makes them both snicker. They break mid-afternoon, and apparently Alexei has gone shopping in the interim, which is a mildly terrifying prospect, but he has bought cookies, the little puffy marshmallow ones with jam and a thin chocolate shell that she'd loved when she was six years old and a hit of sugar could cure just about anything.

And maybe the curative properties of sweet treats aren't quite what she'd thought when she was six, but there's still something to be said for having cookies to offset bad news, so she snags a sleeve of the overly-sugared monstrosities, and sets off to find Bob.