Thank you all for your patience! I've been in and out of wi-fi zones lately, so getting this cleaned up and posted has taken much longer than usual. But here it is!
She wanted desperately to laugh at the way everyone in the building had frozen like figures in a painting when Tony Stark had sauntered casually through the doors. But, as she slipped quietly around him, her plainclothes and unfamiliar face allowing her a sort of immunity in the room full of people, she couldn't bring herself to even crack a smile.
Her mind was already inside the room.
The room where she would try to talk to the Scrimorus. Where she would do her best not to end up slaughtered for the attempt.
"Hey guys!" she heard Tony greet the cluster of tourists, the sound a mite tinny through her com. "How are you all enjoying the Big Apple?"
"Elizabeth, the back door's open," Bruce informed her. He and Pepper had been stationed at Stark Tower to handle all of the security overrides. They didn't know how vital such precautions would be, but Elizabeth had mentioned that she felt like her sneaking into unused parts of the building would be frowned upon. Best to make her invisible.
To the cameras, at least. Going unnoticed in a crowd full of people was up to her. Still, if there was one thing that came more naturally to her than breathing, it was ranking second on people's list of priorities.
"Can you see me?" she murmured, trusting the fancy bit of technology in her ear to pick up her words.
"Yep," Bruce replied. It was still beyond her how something like that was possible – he was miles away at the tower, and yet he could see her. The notion almost impressed her. Almost.
She took a breath, sinking into the crowd like a shadow.
In her ear, she could hear Tony working the crowd behind her, and she could feel one of his eyes on her back while she wove her way through the maze of tourists that thronged together in the lobby. "Here you go, sunshine," he said, presumably to one of the group, "a bona-fide autograph." She thought she heard the person – a little girl, by the sound of her voice – thank him. "Always looking out for you," Tony responded, and she knew that his words were as much for her as they were for the girl.
She followed a hallway toward the elevator which she would take to the top, then finding the door that would take her to the dilapidated stairwell. As she rounded the corner from the lobby, there was an abrupt lack of people. Feeling oddly exposed in the solitude, she whispered to Bruce, "Can they see me?"
"No; you're blocked." Pepper instead, this time.
"And just in case," Bruce cut in, "I've got the feeds recording directly into JARVIS so we can delete anything we don't want and replace it with footage of an empty hallway."
As she continued down the hallway, careful not to make a sound or draw any attention to herself, a door about ten feet down the hall and to her left opened. A short man in blue coveralls stepped out into the hallway, a disgustingly acidic smell following in his wake. He looked up just in time to avoid crashing into her, and they both pulled back, wide-eyed.
"Do me a favor and stay outta there, okay?" he said, pointing with his thumb to the door that had just swung shut behind him. "Whole room's covered in wet paint. Gotta go get a fan. Corporate's coming tomorrow morning, and we gotta impress 'em, know what I mean?"
"Of course," she replied seamlessly. "Anything for corporate."
He narrowed a pair of beady, dark eyes at her in a look of harmless curiosity. "I didn't know we had any Brits working around here," he told her.
She had no idea what he was talking about, but she didn't dare ask what he meant by "Brits," or how he had come to the conclusion that she was one of them. Instead, she just smiled and gave a noncommittal shrug. "Oh, we're everywhere."
"Guess so," he returned. "Well, have a good one, miss. Remember to stay outta that room." He gave her a courteous and borderline friendly nod, brushing past her in search of the fan he had mentioned.
The man's footsteps had faded into nothing as they headed down the hall, thankfully in the opposite direction of her. She moved along, careful not to seem too rushed but also not exactly strolling leisurely. A moment later, she had pushed the elevator call button and stood, waiting, scanning the hallway nonchalantly for unwanted company. When the elevator landed with a light ding, she boarded and hit the button to close the doors immediately—a timely move, as she saw a pair of men in three-piece suits coming down the hallway and looking very much like they wanted to hitch along on her elevator ride.
"Cameras are clear in the elevator," Bruce told her.
"Perfect," Elizabeth replied as she unbuttoned her blazer—actually, Pepper's blazer—and let it fall to the ground. Beneath it was a black shirt that would allow her to move much more freely. She unzipped her pencil skirt and stepped out of it, swapping it for pants that allowed for more mobility. From her attaché case, she pulled two small daggers, hiding them discretely in her sleeves. She glanced at the floor numbers increasing steadily on the digital sign above her head, and, noticing that she was getting close to the top, she stuffed her office clothes into her attaché.
"Nat's in position," Bruce said.
When the doors slid open, Elizabeth disembarked, attaché in hand. As she passed the redheaded woman who was boarding the elevator, their hands brushed, and the case went with it. Thankfully, only a few other people were around to see Elizabeth's less conventional attire. Strangely enough, though, nobody stopped her. Nobody even really seemed to look at her. Elizabeth smirked a little at that.
"Door's open," Pepper said, and she darted across the hall to the door labeled "Authorized Personnel Only" and went in even though she was far from Authorized.
"I'm inside," she informed all on the comms.
"Great," Bruce told her. "Tony, get out when you can. Natasha, Clint, be on deck."
"On it."
"Gotcha."
"Copy."
Elizabeth craned her neck, peering up the stairs. Sure, they seemed perfectly normal now, but, go up a few dozen stories, and the concrete and metal would disappear, leaving age-rotted wood. "Am I clear?" she asked.
"Good to go," came Pepper's reply.
Without giving herself any more time to meditate on the staggering number of stairs, she began to climb. Over the comm, she heard Tony say, "Alright guys, I've really got to be going. I just wanted to pop in and see how you were enjoying the city. Have a great rest of your day!" He sounded much more cheerful than she knew him to be; this must be his public face.
Climbing the stairs was slow going, but she made it much of the way with little chatter over the comms and nothing to distract her from her progress.
She alighted at the top-most landing, crossing the space toward a door labeled "Restricted Area." It may as well have said "Welcome."
"You're unlocked," Bruce said; without hesitation, she slid through the door.
The creaky, ancient stairs greeted her. A plank of wood swung precariously from the only nail that it had left; it was one of what had once been four – one for each corner. Now, only the top-left nail remained.
How comforting.
At least the framework of the building was secure and wouldn't collapse on her. The stairs, she guessed, had probably been a rushed job just to get the builders out at the end of the project almost a hundred years ago. They clearly hadn't been meant to stick around, much less climbed.
She took a deep breath and placed her foot on the lowest step, cringing as the two-by-fours creaked under her weight.
"Elizabeth, you okay? I can't see you anymore, so I'm going to need some verbal feedback," Bruce said through the com.
"Yes, fine," she replied, despite the fact that fine was hardly one of the words she would have chosen to describe her current situation. It had just rolled right off the tongue – a lie that was more familiar to her than the truth.
"What's happening?" Pepper asked. "Are you at the old stairs?"
She tried to climb and speak, but her foot knocked a board loose from the next stair up when she tried to put her weight onto it. With a gasp, she yanked her foot out of the hole left when the wood clattered to the floor. "I hadn't imagined it would be quite this much of a death trap," she muttered.
Everyone was silent on the com; it made her stomach clench uncomfortably.
"You gonna be okay?" Bruce finally asked. "How bad is it?"
She glanced at the general disrepair around her, letting her eyes stray up the staircase to the steps over her head, none of them looking truly safe, all of them daring her to climb. Climb, and see what happens to liars who go poking their noses in where they don't belong. "Bad," she responded.
"Can you climb it?" Clint chimed in.
"I don't know," she said. "But I can tell you right now that, if I can't, then neither can you."
He gave a low whistle. "Listen, we can find another way in," he told her. "We took a better route last time. We can take it again if we need to."
"No, I'm already here. It would look suspicious—well, more so, at least." She cast one more glance at the rotting staircase before sighing, resigned. "I'm going up. If I fall, I fall."
Silence. Then, Bruce spoke up. "Be careful."
"I'll do my best."
It was a very slow climb.
Every single time she took a step, Elizabeth had to scan the surrounding area for any sort of foundering. If she was satisfied, she could gently place her toe on the step, pressure no lighter than if a fly landed on it. If nothing happened, she could very, very slowly roll the rest of her foot down, and, if that went well, she could begin to painstakingly shift her weight onto that foot.
More than once, the boards collapsed beneath her. More often than that, they let out an unholy shriek as she pressed down upon them. Either effect was far from pleasant.
"How far are you now?" Bruce asked her for what was undoubtedly the hundredth time.
She stifled the groan that threatened to push out of her throat, saying, "About halfway."
"Only halfway?" Tony chimed. "It's been, like, a half hour!"
"Yes, well, hurrying is not exactly an option," she replied, placing her toe on the right-hand side of the next step – the side that appeared the most sound. "A bit of patience would not go amiss," she added, for the benefit of all listening.
No one responded, and she took that as a victory.
"Elizabeth?" It was Pepper.
"Yes?"
"While we've got you in one place and we're all listening, can I ask you something?"
For a moment, she debated saying no. But, Pepper did have a point; she was currently in the middle region of a treacherous staircase with a radio in her ear that connected her to all of them. Running from this conversation was not really an option. "Please."
"How do you know so much about the Chitauri?" Pepper asked.
Everyone else listened.
Gently depositing her weight onto the step, she said coolly, "I have been . . . unfortunate enough to have had dealings with them in the past. Encounters with the Chitauri are not soon forgotten." Toe up to the next step. "They are quite the experts at making one's life miserable."
"Midgard is the only one of the Nine Realms to have been blessed enough to have avoided the Chitauri nearly completely," Thor interjected.
"But what about you, Elizabeth?" Clint put in.
"What about me?" She was purposefully trying to be difficult; it was an unpleasant question with an even more unpleasant answer.
"We're all from Midgard. Thor's from Asgard. What about you?" Clint asked.
"Vanaheim," she lied, so smooth coming off her tongue, just like honey.
From the quiet on the com, she could tell that the Avengers – save for Thor – didn't know about Vanaheim. Precisely why she had chosen the realm of the Vanir. Thor, however, was a less certain bet. He hesitated for just a second before saying, "Of course. Vanaheim. I should have recognized you immediately."
"Indeed," she returned.
Tony piped up again. "But if you're from Vana-whatever, how do you know so much about Loki?"
Rolling her foot onto the stair and watching the wood buckle unpromisingly, she explained, "Vanaheim and Asgard have been on peaceful terms for centuries. I could hardly consider myself informed if I had not met the princes of Asgard at least once."
She had expected Thor to say something, but he didn't. Instead, Steve spoke. "Have you been everywhere? You know. To all the . . . Realms."
"Very nearly," she told him – them – as she skipped the next stair due to an overabundance of termite damage. "There are still some Realms you could not entice me to visit with the most lavish of rewards or the most garish of punishments."
"Kind of like how you couldn't catch me dead visiting Germany on polite terms," Steve equated.
Elizabeth didn't quite know how to respond to that, so she simply said, "Whatever helps you to understand." Carefully, she picked her way up two more stairs, both of them seeming relatively unharmed by age.
"Have you ever fought in a war?" Steve asked her, and she wasn't quite sure as to whether he was still running with his Germany analogy or if he was just asking for the sake of conversation. If it was the latter, it was an alarmingly heavy topic.
She hesitated a moment, grabbing the rail for balance as part of the step on which she was standing disintegrated and plummeted to the floor, at least two stories below. "I have been lucky enough to not have fought in any wars, though my experience in battles is extensive." There was much more that she could have said on the subject, but she held her tongue.
"One time, lots of years ago, I fought in a war," Steve told her. "A lot of my assignments took place in Germany or involved a few specific Germans who wanted to kill me. It was a long, hard war, but we won eventually. Or so I'm told. I still can't look at Germany the same way since."
"Ah," she said, understanding all too well the tensions of which he spoke.
"How far are you now?" Bruce again.
She glanced upward. Over the course of the conversation, she had passed over a good deal of the remaining stairs, with only one more story until she would be right where she wanted. And then the real trouble would begin. "Close enough to where I have to be quiet, lest it find me before I intend it to," she told them all, effectively ending the conversation.
Its face – or whatever the headparts of a Chitauri could be called – screamed at her from within her memory, as threatening as a bloodied sword and more menacing besides. Why was it that she had suddenly lost all motivation to finish her climb?