Chapter 5

As Parker steps out of the car and stares up at the massive steel building, she wonders how such a giant building can still seem so inconspicuous. There's not a sign anywhere stating that it's SHIELD headquarters right up until she enters through the revolving door and sees the giant eagle insignia looming over the entire lobby.

The receptionist at the front desk doesn't look particularly surprised to see a teenage girl approach her and ask to see Phil Coulson, but Parker gets the feeling that not much fazes the people working at SHIELD. She's directed to the fortieth floor, which is only a few away from the top floor, she discovers as she presses the button on the elevator.

She steps out onto the fortieth floor, relieved to hear Phil talking on the phone through the door of his office as she approaches it and knocks twice.

"Just a second!" Phil quickly finishes his phone call up and opens the door, smiling the moment he sees Parker. She relaxes a little without even realizing she had tensed up; at least some things aren't different, even though she understands a lot more about Phil's job now. "Hey. You get here okay?"

She nods. "Yeah, I did. Are you really that high up in SHIELD?"

Phil raises his eyebrows. "What makes you say that?"

"There are only forty-three floors in the building," she points out and he grins back at her.

"Well, I didn't want to brag." She rolls her eyes and he ushers her into the office. "Come on. We're still waiting on your trainers, so you can stay here in the meantime." The office is large and neatly decorated, with a few potted plants in the corners and a couch near the window overlooking the city below. Phil's desk is made of polished dark wood with a few framed photographs and a laptop sitting on it, and a leather chair behind it.

"My trainers?" she echoes as she takes a seat on the couch.

"A few of our agents, some of the best in the world," Phil answers, taking a seat at his desk. "They don't know how to bend, of course. No one does except you. But they can teach you the moves you need and how to control it."

Parker's a little disappointed that she won't get to see people who can actually control their bending, but stamps it down to ask, "So how can they teach me when they can't bend?"

"I don't know a lot about it myself," Phil confesses, "Not many people do. But from what I understand, bending each element is based on certain kinds of martial arts, so we can start by teaching you those. The good thing is, we've got a few journals for you in storage. Information your past life wrote out for you."

"She wrote out stuff for me?" Parker echoes, surprised.

"Yeah. Smart, right?" Phil cracks a grin. "Turns out she never really had that much training herself, and she wanted to pass on as much as she could to you. I guess she figured you'll pay it forward in the future."

Parker doesn't really want to think about dying and being reincarnated into someone else. "When can I look at these journals?"

"I'll have somebody send them home after your training today," Phil reassures her. The landline on his desk rings and he presses a button on it before picking up. "Coulson." Parker notices that his voice sounds different, just a little less warm and more professional. "I'll bring her down in a minute." He hangs up before turning back to Parker. "Looks like your trainers are ready in the gym, if you're ready to head down."

Parker nods, getting to her feet. "Yeah, I'm ready."

I wasn't ready, Parker decides mentally as she buries her face into the soft carpet in the living room of the mansion several hours later.

"Um, why are you on the floor?" Pepper asks, bewildered, and Parker tilts her head up so that Pepper can see her exhausted expression.

"Can't move. Everything hurts." She presses her face back into the carpet, scowling into it as Pepper barely stifles a giggle. "Traitor."

"I'm sorry, I just haven't seen anybody look this miserable in my life," Pepper apologizes, still chuckling as she settles on the floor beside Parker and sets her briefcase down before patting the top of Parker's head reassuringly. "Training went that badly, huh?"

"Not really," Parker concedes as she rolls over and forces herself into an upright position even though her muscles protest the movement. "It's just that I'm not nearly in good shape like they thought I was."

It really hadn't been so bad meeting SHIELD agents Melinda May and Natasha Romanoff, both tall, intimidating women who hadn't given Parker even a moment to catch her breath between teaching her different fighting tactics and walking her through various martial arts stances. The sparring session before she had returned home is the real reason that she's so sore now.

"Well, I just thought I'd let you know that a package arrived for you from SHIELD," Pepper says, drawing Parker out of her musings about her training session.

"Yeah, Phil said he had some journals for me," she recalls, getting to her feet reluctantly and accepting the box that Pepper hands over. "Thanks."

"Go shower," Pepper calls after her as she heads upstairs to open the box and Parker huffs a little as she sets the box on the bed, frowning at her sweaty appearance in the mirror. Maybe a shower will do her some good.

Once she's scrubbed herself clean and dressed in some soft pajamas, her muscles just a little less achy, she settles herself in the new window-seat that Pepper had had installed while she had been at SHIELD headquarters - she makes a note to thank Pepper later - and opens a journal labeled with a sticky note that says "Read this first" to begin reading the note on the first page.

To the new Avatar -

You're probably scared and very confused. I was, too, when I first found out who and what I was, why I could do the things I could. That's why I started this journal, to try and share as much of what I've learned to make it easier for you.

Centuries ago, the world used to be split into four nations, each corresponding to a single element - water, earth, fire, and air. Many people from these nations could manipulate their respective element, but only one person could control all four. That was the Avatar, who kept balance in the world and bridged the gap between the spirits' world and ours. Each generation, a new Avatar is born, reincarnated from their previous life, and the cycle keeps changing.

Over time, most benders died out, and nonbenders became more common, until bending itself became barely more than a myth. But the Avatar still keeps being reincarnated, which makes me think that the world still needs us. For what, I'm still not sure. But our job is to do what we can to keep the peace and bring balance to the world however we can.

You have great power in you. Learn to use it, and use my help to guide you. Don't be afraid.

Your friend and past incarnation,

Rachel

Parker traces her fingers over the loopy cursive writing slowly, imagining sitting at a desk and writing the note out for her future self to read. She makes a note to look up as much of Rachel as she can. The rest of the journal contains detailed sketches of a figure moving through various martial arts stances, little embers of fire, bits of rock, or waves of water following its movements. She studies them intently, itching to try them out herself, but not wanting to lose control and accidentally ruin Tony's mansion.

A knock on the door startles her and Tony peeks in, frowning. "Pepper said you've been up here for hours," he points out and Parker's stomach rumbles a little at the reminder that she hasn't eaten yet. Tony grins and brings in a carton of lo mein noodles and chopsticks to pass it over to her. "Figured I'd pass this along before I head down to the lab." He peers curiously at the journal in her hands. "Oh, hey, you got Rachel's books. I was wondering when SHIELD would hand those over."

"Did you know her?" Parker asks as she sets the journal aside to accept the carton and chopsticks from him.

"Not that well, but we met a few times when I was growing up." Tony settles on the window-seat beside her and picks up the journal to skim through it. "She was mostly just friends with my dad. But she was nice enough to me." He shrugs one shoulder mildly.

Parker struggles to pick up a noodle with the chopsticks and Tony takes them from her to quickly wrap the rubber band from the base of the carton around the top half of the chopsticks. She raises an eyebrow as he hands them back after clicking them together a few times experimentally.

"Little trick for beginners," he explains and, sure enough, it's much easier for her to eat. "You know, we've got an indoor pool here. Plus the pool and the ocean outside if you wanna try any of these out." He taps the page open on his knee, where Parker can see one of Rachel's drawings bending a stream of water and then flinging it out like a whip.

"I don't know," she says slowly. "It looks pretty dangerous. I don't really wanna be the reason your house gets ruined."

Tony snorts. "Are you kidding? I wreck something in the house almost every day. Trust me, it's not a big deal. You'll be fine." He sets the journal down, patting her shoulder lightly as he gets to his feet. "You don't have to if you don't want to, of course. Just a suggestion. The sooner you learn to control your bending, the better."

"Thanks," she says as he heads for the door and he turns in the doorway to give her a small smile.

"No problem, Park. Sleep tight." He shuts the bedroom door behind himself and Parker picks up another journal to flip through its contents. This one contains drawings and explanations for the basics of waterbending, and Parker thinks that maybe taking Tony up on his offer isn't such a bad idea.

As the summer kicks into high gear, so does Parker's training. She gets pushed harder each day by Agents Romanoff and May in training and then returns home to balance her bending practice with summer studies.

Deciding that the schooling she's been getting so far isn't up to his standards, Tony arranges for Parker to take a placement test for home-schooling. She's surprised when the results come back proclaiming that she's on the same level as someone who had just completed tenth grade.

Tony doesn't look surprised when she runs into his lab brandishing the test results.

"Well, of course you skipped a few years," he tells her pragmatically. "You're too smart to be in middle school, you should've been bumped up at least two or three years ago." She turns bright red and he grins wryly at her. "When are you gonna accept that when somebody tells you you're smart, they mean it?" She decides to make her escape before he can make her turn more pink. "Just be glad I'm not making you start college next year!" he calls after her, laughing as she shuts the lab door firmly behind herself.

She gets set up with an eleventh-grade curriculum to work through at her own pace, but she struggles to get even a week's worth of material done in a month. By the time July ends, she's able to call a stream of water towards her and flick it out like a whip and send fire blasts wherever she chooses, but can't find the derivative of a function to save her life, much less understand the "hidden meaning" in The Catcher in the Rye.

She complains to Tony one night and he shrugs. "Look, even if it takes you ten years to finish two years' worth of high school, that's fine. You've got a lot more on your plate than any other kid does."

She levels him with a dry glare and he just grins. "Thanks for reminding me," she grumbles and dutifully returns to scratching out solutions to the math problems in the textbooks he had had delivered for her.

Still, schoolwork aside, she's happier than she's ever been in her life. She's not bored by the homework she has every day - if anything, she finds the challenge a little exciting - and Tony makes a point to work on her programming skills with her whenever she finds the time. Despite his abrasive and at times strange humor, he's patient with her when she struggles with a new concept and takes his time in explaining it so she'll understand.

Even her SHIELD training gets easier with time, her stamina increasing exponentially until she's not even breaking a sweat by the halfway point. She succeeds in knocking Agent May down exactly once and the glower on the woman's face as she climbs to her feet convinces Parker never to attempt it again. Agent Romanoff brings a man with sunglasses to training sessions once in a while and he climbs into the rafters to watch them spar from above, which Parker decides not to think too much about. She's come to terms with how weird some people at SHIELD are. Phil refuses to send Parker out on field missions until she's older, which she understands since she's definitely too inexperienced to not die immediately on the field.

All of that changes when she leaves SHIELD headquarters one balmy evening near the end of August and finds not Happy with the usual black car waiting to take her home, but a large army Humvee instead with a stern-looking man dressed in army fatigues leaning against it. He has short gray hair and an equally gray thick mustache, his lips pressed together in a deep frown.

Parker makes to sidestep him, hoping Happy is parked across the street instead since this guy's clearly blocking the sidewalk, but the man holds out his arm to stop her.

"You're the Avatar?" The disbelief coloring his gruff voice makes her tense a little.

"Who wants to know?" she demands, making a mental note to carry some kind of water container with her so that she can bend it readily if necessary.

"Get in the car and I'll explain," the man answers, opening the door. Parker wonders if he's insane, kidnapping her right in front of SHIELD, but since no one's rushed out to stop them, things clearly can't be as suspicious as she thinks. Slowly, with a glance at the security camera over the front doors of SHIELD, she climbs into the Humvee and the man joins her, tapping on the window separating the backseat from the front to make the driver begin moving. Parker glances out the window, trying to determine where she's going and then glancing back at the man.

"You said you'd explain?" she reminds him.

"Right." The man doesn't look any happier, not that she expects him to. "My name is Thaddeus Ross. General of the U.S. Army." He pauses, clearly expecting some sort of response, and so Parker awkwardly salutes him. He blinks, bewildered, so she assumes that wasn't what he had wanted. "We've got a mission for you."

"We?" Parker echoes and feels her phone buzz in her pocket.

"America," Ross amends as she reaches into her pocket and pulls her phone out to read the text from Phil.

Where are you? Stark's driver just came in saying he can't find you.

She sends a quick message back to him - In the back of a Humvee with some guy named General Ross - as she informs Ross, "I haven't been on a mission before. I'm not allowed."

"Well, there's a first for everything." Ross narrows his eyes at her. "Consider it your patriotic duty."

Her phone buzzes again.

Keep your phone handy. We're watching your tracker. Be safe.

That makes Parker feel just a little better as she tucks her phone away again. Ross watches the movement warily, as if worried that he was in trouble, and she just shrugs to put him at ease. "Okay. What do I have to do?"

He relaxes marginally. "You're needed in apprehending someone and bringing him in." Parker raises an eyebrow. "Normally, this wouldn't really require, er...enhanced help, but in this case, it can't be helped."

He doesn't elaborate further, so Parker ventures, "Why's that?"

"Because the man we're bringing in is, well...let's just say that you're probably one of the few people in the world that can go toe-to-toe with him." Parker's mind spins with possibilities; is this guy another bender? Another Avatar? Of course, everything she's read in Rachel's journals has told her that there's only one Avatar, but the books could be wrong. Ross is still talking and Parker forces her attention back to him. "...he's headed to Harlem, New York."

"Is that where we're going?" She registers that the Humvee is slowing to a halt and the door is quickly opened for them. Ross climbs out and she reluctantly does the same, patting her phone to make sure it's safe in her pocket before looking up to find that they're parked on the runway beside a sleek jet. Ross is already climbing inside and Parker hesitates before climbing inside the jet as well, strapping herself into a seat and fumbling with the harness from how nervous she is. Within minutes, the plane is speeding down the runway and taking off and Parker peers out the window as much as she can to find them soaring past clouds. "We're not flying within flight regulations, are we?" she asks and Ross doesn't look amused when she looks at him.

"Time's of the essence, Miss Stark." She flinches at the stiff use of her new last name, but at least it's better than the generic "Smith" she had been stuck with before. "I've been hunting this fugitive down for almost five years now. The sooner we can get him into custody, the better."

"What did this guy do that was so bad?" she asks and Ross's expression is so thunderous that she decides it's better not to insist on a response. She focuses on the window instead, watching the jet zoom through the clouds at a speed that can't be legal.

A little belatedly, she's beginning to regret taking on this mission and hopes that Phil's promise of keeping tabs on her still holds while she's on her way to New York. Whatever's awaiting her there, she's almost entirely positive she's not prepared for it.

Dun dun dun.

I don't know why it took me until 3 in the morning to summon enough motivation to write this out, but here it is! Hopefully it's not zooming too quickly, but I wanted to get to the end of this chapter so that I can properly get into the MCU! (well, as properly as the movie that's being hinted at in this chapter can be .)

I hope you enjoyed it and I'll try to get the next chapter up ASAP!