Chapter Text
Ava glances down at the slip of paper in her hands again. “B10.” The letters are scribbled in blue pen. The fuckers hadn’t even bothered to type up her new assignment on real letterhead or anything.
In the elevator, Ava’s finger hovers over the button for the basement level for a long moment before she jabs at G. If they’re not even going to pretend like this assignment is anything other than the death knell of a once-promising career, she doesn’t owe them a full 9-5 workday either. Besides, she’s pretty sure that the cute barista who works the morning shifts at Dolcezza was giving off flirty vibes last week, and she could really use the pick me up after the week she’s had. Not that she’s more than a day into it. Fuck.
Still, a good matcha latte is enough to fix most days a little bit, and even though Sam hadn’t been working, Ava decides it was the right decision. She almost isn’t resentful as she stabs at B and feels the elevator trundle down to the rarely used basement level of the Hoover Building.
Even though she’s pretty sure the janitorial staff hits all the floors, the air down here feels dusty. Like, call a doctor and order an inhaler levels of dusty. She sniffles a little as she peers down the hallway until she finds office 10, which she thinks might actually be the only office down here. With a grunt of effort and a bump of her hip, she manages to shove open the heavy door without having to put down her latte or her phone or the Post-it. She’s busy enough celebrating her small victory that she barely notices the other body in the room until a loud, “Excuse you,” startles Ava enough to have her latte slipping from her hand and crashing to the floor.
“Fuck!” Ava yells, watching as eight dollars spills across the carpeted floor—and, oh god, carpet? No wonder it smells like the 70s down here.
“Are you just gonna watch that? Pick it up!”
Ava jumps into action, grabbing her mostly empty cup from the ground and tossing it into the trash. It’s only then that she properly notices the woman who’s been yelling at her. She’s dressed impeccably in black suit pants, heels, and a satiny blouse thing, and Ava wonders how the hell she got lost and ended up down here instead of wherever she belongs. Ava’s bet is on legal. Maybe HR… A shame. She’s pretty hot, but probably way too into rule following and chain of command shit to be fun.
“There’s a men’s room at the end of the hall. It doesn’t matter; no one else is down here. And with those shoes…” The woman’s eyes dart down to Ava’s loafers with a look best described as disdain. “I assume it’s not a problem.” So…not HR. Probably. After a moment, the woman lets out a loud sigh. “Paper towels,” she says, like she’s talking to someone particularly dense. “Wet and dry. Obviously.”
“I…”
“It’s already setting. Go!”
“O—okay.” The dim hallway does eventually lead to a bathroom, and Ava gives a knock on the door before pushing it open and calling out, “Any men? Not that it matters! Gender’s a construct, obvi.”
No one answers her anyway. Once she gets over the creepiness of the bathroom’s vibes—if she checks each of the stalls for murderers, no one will ever know but her—it’s easy enough to wet a few paper towels and bunch up a fistful of dry ones, and she’s back in a matter of minutes.
As Ava is on her hands and knees trying to sop up what feels like way more than 16 ounces of matcha, the woman clears her throat, a heeled foot tapping impatiently at a patch of unstained carpet. “What are you doing down here?” she asks.
“I work here.”
It earns her an eye roll. “Obviously. But what are you doing here. In the basement. In my office.”
“It’s not your office. It’s my new office.”
The woman lets out a bark of laughter that sounds anything but amused. “No. It’s not.”
“Yeah, it is. See?” Ava thrusts the Post-it note out at the woman. Now it seems even worse to have little more than this sad scrap of paper.
“Give me a minute.”
The woman strides back over to her desk, and Ava tries not to watch the sway of her hips as she goes.
“Marcus, it’s Deborah,” she barks into the phone.
So a Deborah, then. That sounds like a lawyer name for sure. Fuck. It couldn’t have escalated that far, could it have…? Surely not. Ava’s pretty sure there’s some kind of due process or something. God, she shouldn’t have doodled during that whole HR orientation day.
“I don’t know who sent her, but—” … “What? You’re kidding.” Deborah continues not to sound amused. “No. Absolutely not. Tell Marty—”
The phone is smashed down onto the receiver before the muffled sounds of whomever was on the other line have stopped.
“I don’t care what they told you,” Deborah says, leveling Ava with an impressive glare. “I don’t want a partner, and I won’t work with one.”
“Who said anything about partners? Aren’t you legal?”
Deborah’s eyes narrow even further. “Is that a joke?”
“Um…no?”
“I bet they sent you to push me out.” She shakes her head. “No. They can take away everything else, but I’m riding them for every goddam penny I’m worth until I damn well choose.”
“Look, lady, I don’t even know who you are. No one sent me to push you out or whatever conspiracy theory you’ve cooked up over there.”
“To spy on me then, hmm?”
“I don’t think anyone would even read my reports if I wrote them. Not anymore.”
“Oh,” Deborah says, like everything makes sense now. “Well…welcome, I guess,” she says with a sardonic grin and sweep of her arm around the large but dingy office space.
Ava’s still lost as hell. “Welcome to what?”
“The home of the FBI’s least wanted, of course.” Deborah’s smile is all teeth and sharp edges. “Just another, what? Fifty more years to go until your retirement?”
Ava blinks back at her. Something niggles at the back of her mind, curling its way through the recesses of her memory. Some Quantico horror story that got whispered over drinks on Fridays. “Sorry…what, um, what’s your name?”
“Deborah.” Deborah extends a hand that’s cold to the touch. “Though I imagine Agent Vance might jog your memory a bit more.”
Oh fuck. “Fuck,” Ava says—aloud this time.
Deborah’s smile widens into something shark-like. “So tell me, Agent Daniels, what did you do to earn a life sentence?”
“How do you know my name?”
Deborah arches an eyebrow. “You think they didn’t tell me the name of my new partner when I called in about your very…loud arrival?” Her gaze flickers down to the large wet spot still staining the carpet.
Ava isn’t paying attention anymore, though; she’s already grabbing her work phone off the filing cabinet and calling Jimmy up in HR.
“Ava!” he answers, and there’s a feigned chipperness to his voice that can only mean he was expecting her call. “How are you settling in? Are you and Deborah best buds already?”
“Oh, you mean Deborah “The Hack” Vance? Absolutely not. What the hell did I do to get sent down here?”
“Well, for starters—”
“We don’t need to rehash it,” Ava interjects. “But I can—I can go on transcription duty. Wiretap calls day in and day out, baby. I type like lightning.”
“We actually have machines for that these days.”
“I could edit the transcriptions, though. Still need that human touch.”
“You, uh, you didn’t get great marks on attention to detail on your last performance eval.”
“Stakeouts! Long-term stakeouts! Overnight ones! Shitty neighborhood! I can do those!”
“Ava, this is coming from above my head. But it’ll be good for you. Both of you!”
“Print that on my fucking tombstone.”
“Do you want to keep your job or not?” Jimmy sighs.
No, Ava thinks, she decidedly does not want this job. Not anymore. Not even before she found out she was partnered with the partner-killer. But bills are bills, and debt is debt, and she won’t have her mom losing her goddam mind when they’re all still reeling from—no, she won’t go there. Not at work. Ava swallows hard. “Kay,” she manages before hanging up.
When Ava glances back up at Deborah, she’s met with a frosty glare. “There are boxes to organize.”
Ava glances behind her at the veritable wall of mildewy boxes lining one of the walls. “You haven’t been on an active case in decades.”
“And?”
“Haven’t you organized the files by now?”
Deborah folds her arms across her chest and lifts her eyebrow again. “I’m your superior officer. Paperwork’s below my paygrade.”
“What have you even done for all these years?”
“Exactly what the Bureau wants me to do. Nothing. Now get to sorting.”
---
After a week of “getting settled” in her new office and desperately trying to requisition a second desk, only to be told that B10 has all the equipment she should need for her new role again and again, Ava finally does begin to poke around at the files.
It is decidedly not because Deborah told her to. And it has nothing to do with the way Deborah has been glaring at her from across the massive room for the past five days while Ava fucks around and plays Candy Crush on her phone. Besides, it’s not like Deborah is doing anything useful with her time in the office. Ava’s pretty sure she saw her playing solitaire or poker or something the one time she actually managed to set foot behind her desk before being shooed away.
Ava’s simply curious. That’s all.
There’s enough dust in the first box to make Ava choke on the air, and she hears Deborah chuckle from across the room. Ava lets herself fantasize about toppling over Deborah’s mostly functional office chair.
“Where do you even want these to go?” Ava calls to her.
“In the filing cabinets. Obviously.”
“Obviously,” Ava mimics under her breath. It would probably be faster to just go alphabetically and ignore everything else, but Ava doesn’t think anyone upstairs is in a hurry to let her back on active duty, so she flips open the manilla folder and scans the pages. As she does so, her brow furrows. “Vance,” Ava yells as she stands up. “When did they bring this to you?”
“How should I know? They show up overnight half the time. They’re just for the archives.”
“Uh, no. They’re definitely not.”
“Uh, yes, they are,” Deborah says, mocking Ava’s cadence.
Ava rolls her eyes. “This is an unsolved case. It should be open.” Ava drops the file onto Deborah’s desk, barely hiding a grin as a plume of dust explodes into Deborah’s face, dirtying her floral blouse.
Grimacing, Deborah flips open the cover and pulls on a pair of glasses. There shouldn’t be anything sexy about readers—especially not on someone like Deborah Vance—but Ava finds her mind reconfiguring that fantasy of tipping Deborah’s chair over into one of throwing her leg over it and settling in Deborah’s lap anyway. She idly wonders if she’s already starting to lose her mind down here in the dungeon.
Deborah’s voice wrenches Ava back out of the fantasy. “This isn’t an open case. It’s a cold case.”
“Well, yeah, but was it when it came to you? Or did you just ignore all these people looking for the FBI’s help for the last 30 years?”
“You think—” Deborah cuts herself off, and Ava misses it immediately. There was something to her voice then that Ava hasn’t heard from her before, and she’s more curious than she probably should be. Clearly the dust and basement fumes are getting to her. “There,” Deborah says instead, spinning the file back around and tapping a manicured nail at the outcome line.
“What?”
“The X.”
There is, indeed, a little X from what Ava assumes must have been a typewriter error back then. “And?”
“It’s shorthand. Unsolvable case. Details not adding up. Suspicious. Too odd. Whatever you want to call it.” She flashes Ava a condescending smile. “Sent down here to die with the agents unworthy of real cases.”
“But no one even went out to…” Ava scans the details again. “Bellefleur, Oregon.”
“A pity, I’m sure.”
Ava scowls. “People were dying! Disappearing!”
“And?”
“Why doesn’t the FBI care?”
“Surely you of all people aren’t surprised.” Ava’s eyebrows shoot up. “Just because your name hasn’t become quite so…infamous doesn’t mean word doesn’t get around.”
Ava swallows hard at the reminder, flashes back to sitting in a conference room with no windows and too many men in suits, remembers her first trip back to her old desk, hearing all the whispers—a pity, they said, such a shame she turned out to be such a disappointment compared to her father. The memories bubble up like bile, and Ava forces them back down. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“No, you were worse than wrong. You were stupid.”
“Fuck you, at least I didn’t get my own partner brutally murdered.”
“No,” Deborah say, her voice going deathly quiet and icy, “you just ruined the possibility of ever getting justice for dozens of people.”
“I was trying to help them!”
“No, you were so full of yourself and your overblown ego that you ignored procedures that have been in place for longer than you’ve been alive.”
“The FBI wasn’t trying to protect those people. I was.”
“And how’d that work out for you, hmm?”
Ava falls silent.
“That’s what I thought. Now go file these in the cabinets where they belong.”
Ava spends the rest of the afternoon sulking and doing as she’s told with a sloppiness that would surprise even the second-grade teacher who had left some rather unflattering remarks in Ava’s report card.
The next day, though, Ava comes back with a large latte and a new sense of purpose, determined to get to the bottom of these weird little X files.
And for hours upon hours she does nothing but sit and read. She’d never been a particularly good shot or all that interested in forensics, but dammit, she was good at taking in information, finding patterns and clues where everyone else overlooked them. And there’s something here; she’s sure of it.
It takes weeks for Ava to make a dent in the files now that she’s reading them all, taking notes and mapping them out as she goes, but she’s actually invested in something for the first time in ages. And it feels good, even if Deborah insists on making snide remarks about how slow she is at filing from across the room.
It’s been nearly a month when Ava arrives one morning to find a not at all dusty folder sitting in the front of the box she’s been working her way through. She flips it open with an eagerness she thought had long since deserted her. There it is: the little X. But this one isn’t from the 80s or the 90s. No, this one is from January, finally marked with an unsolvable X several months later.
Ava’s practically vibrating as she throws the file onto Deborah’s desk a few hours and many, many phone calls and emails later. “Pack your bags, Vance! We’re going to Maine.”
“What?”
“This case. We’re reopening it. Well, technically, it turns out the X doesn’t really close the cases, but anyway, details don’t matter.”
“They most certainly do matter. The Bureau says it’s unsolvable. They’re not going to pay for us to go to Maine to play pretend at being detectives.”
“And that’s where you’re wrong. I already had funds approved.”
For the first time since Ava’s met her, Deborah looks almost impressed. “Really?”
“Mhmm. So pack your shit. We’re leaving tomorrow morning. Bright and early!”
“Dulles or National?”
“Um, neither,” Ava says, trying to project an air of confidence.
Deborah’s nose wrinkles. “BWI? Really?”
Rubbing the back of her neck, Ava manages a little laugh. “So, yeah, they are indeed more than happy to fund the travel, but last-minute flights to Maine are apparently hella expensive, so we’re driving.”
“No.”
“I’m not making you go all the way out to BWI. That’s gotta count for something.”
“Not when you want me to sit in a car for nine hours instead!”
Ava does not mention that they’re actually headed far enough north that it’s closer to 10—and that’s without traffic. “It’ll be fun.”
“If you try to make me play I Spy, you’ll be my second dead partner.”
A shiver runs down Ava’s spine that’s only half fear. “Um, noted. Anyway, they’re giving us a fleet car, so meet here at 8?”
“Bring me a coffee. A good one—none of that green snot-looking shit you drink.”
Ava rolls her eyes, but not even being put on coffee duty is enough to dampen her sense of excitement at finally being back out on a case again.