Memorabilia

Ethan sat in the meeting room, reading the after-mission briefing documents. The mission they, meaning himself, Luther and Ilsa, had been on was for once quite simple. Just chasing down a few leads about the alien tech that was still floating around after the battle of New York. More and more missions had become simpler since the crumbling of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the weight had to be dispersed between smaller organizations, including the I.M.F.

Will was gathering his papers and the meeting seemed to be ending. Ethan picked up his leather jacket and went to stand up.
“We’ll be seeing this evening at Benji’s, right?”
“Yeah yeah, now get out agent Hunt,” Will snarked.
Ethan hummed his goodbye while smiling, exiting the meeting room and continuing his path outside. After some stairs and an elevator ride he finally got to the first floor. People were leaving for the weekend and not many were still around. Only enough to keep the show going through the night and the weekend.

When Ethan finally managed to get to his car the sun was already starting to set. The team was supposed to go to Benji’s this evening to play board games and de-stress. His apartment was the closest to the center of the city out of the six of them. He supposed he could go there a bit early and help out a bit.

The sky was starting to look a bit pink and the blanket cold air settling onto the city prompted Ethan to hop inside his car and start driving to Benji’s apartment. Benji didn’t have a car, living so close to the metro and everything, so Ethan knew he could use Benji’s parking space that was attached to the apartment building.

As Ethan was getting close to the building he knew Benji lived in he noticed that there were no lights in the windows of Benji’s apartment.

“Maybe he went out for a while, I wasn’t supposed to arrive for another hour or two,” Ethan mused, but something cold settled in the pit of his stomach. Ethan opened the glove compartment and took out the pistol hidden there, putting it in his concealed carry holster. Ethan knew he was being paranoid, but he couldn’t help it after the life he had lived.

Ethan went inside the apartment building with the keys Benji had given him and up to the elevator, pressing the button for the 4th floor. Then Ethan noticed it. It was so small that he doubted someone not looking for things out of place would’ve noticed it, but he did. A little smear of dried blood on the numberpanel between the numbers 3 and 4, as if someone’s hands had been shaking so much when pressing a button that they had missed and smeared some onto the dark glass.

Shit.

Ethan immediately was on edge, pressing himself up to the front of the elevator, in a way that hid him from the opening the door would make upon arriving on the 4th floor. Ethan started to listen closely, trying to make out any other noise than the creak and hum of the elevator as it made its ascent. No luck in that but as the elevator finally arrived, Ethan prepared for a possible struggle. He was braced against the wall attached to the opening elevator doors and would be visible as soon as the doors fully opened. But as no one crammed into the elevator and the doors finally opened fully, Ethan relaxed a little seeing as no one was in the hallway. Whoever had left the blood was surely long gone by now.

Ethan slowly creeped up to Benji’s apartment, looking around the hallway for more droplets of blood. He saw a few small ones and prayed that they would lead to another apartment, but something as mundane as a nose bleed felt out of place in Ethan’s mind. Finally after taking the last steps to Benji’s door, Ethan was about to knock when he noticed more dried blood on the door where he would normally knock. Not a huge amount, but enough that Ethan made his decision.

He drew the gun that had been in his holster up till now, to avoid accidentally scaring any of Benji’s neighbors because of some misunderstanding on Ethan's part thanks to his paranoia. But as Ethan was holding the gun and slowly taking out the keyes he put in his jacket’s front pocket, he was trying to hear any signs of life from within the apartment. Nothing. As he slowly and carefully put the keys into the lock and started turning them, Ethan was cringing on the inside, terrified of what he might find on the inside of the apartment. The door finally unlocked and Ethan turned the handle with the same hand. Ethan himself was to the right of the door that was slowly swinging open while hiding behind the concrete walls of the building's walls. The door opened without making any sound and the apartment seemed completely quiet. Ethan slowly poked his head in but the low amount of light mixing with the brightness of the hallway was making it hard to differentiate things in the apartment.

Finally deeming it safe enough, Ethan started making his way inside. Benji’s running shoes were missing from the clothes rack he kept his outside clothes on, along with a grey coat he sometimes used. There was a short hallway between the door and the kitchen island that was immediately visible from the door. Ethan saw the thin door leading to the closet on his left and checked it. It was bare, that much he could make out, with nothing truly out of place, if not a bit messier than he remembered. Full of not much else than some older clothes and some boxes full of various nick-nacks. Leaving the closet, he closed the door and moved closer to the opening of the short hallway.

Then he saw it. A flash of white on the couch. Casting a long look towards the rest of the apartment and the open bedroom door, he decided to investigate the couch. As he moved closer, with what little light he could get, the white mound looked more and more like a body underneath a white bed sheet. As Ethan moved fully up to the side of the couch, now facing the mound, he realized that it was indeed someone under a sheet.

Ethan felt sick immediately and his hands started shaking. He had seen enough friends killed but losing Benji would be too much. He forced himself to move to the other end of the couch that was further away from the door and pull the sheet back from the person’s face. Praying that he wouldn’t see Benji’s face underneath the sheet, he quickly moved it down, like he was ripping off a bandage…And saw immediately that it wasn't Benji. It looked to be a woman in her late 30s to early 40s, of East Asian origin from what he could make out in the dim light.

Releasing a breath he had been holding, Ethan pulled the sheet back onto the woman’s face, straightened up and moved to look through the rest of the apartment. Nothing. Nothing seemed truly out of place but as he returned to the side of the couch he could make out that one of the picture frames on Benji’s bookshelves was haphazardly thrown back onto the shelf and on closer inspection, as Ethan took the frames right-side-up in his hand, he could see that the picture itself was gone.

Ethan took out his phone and dialed Will.

“Good evening, this is William Bra…”, Ethan cut him off.
“You need to get to Benji’s apartment now.”
“Wha…Ethan? What’s happening? Is something wrong? You just left a minute ago.”
“I’m going to be blunt about this: Benji is missing and there is a dead body at his apartment.”
“What?! Jesus Christ, what do you mean that there’s a dead person there? Are they an agent or…?”
“Unknown, female, East Asian origin, late 30s to early 40s. Benji is not here and she has been here for a while I think…”, Ethan paused and checked the woman’s hand, “...yeah, she’s already stiff. So at least an hour if not longer. She’s not that cold to the touch so she hasn't been dead for too long.”
“Okay, okay. Fuck. No sign of Benji? Any other abnormalities other than the fucking corpse?”
“It seemed a bit messier, but nothing to really give away that something’s wrong.”
There was a brief pause on Will’s end.
“Okay, we’re coming there right now with some specialists. Is that okay?”
“Yeah…yeah, that’s fine.”

_______________

Benji adjusted the hold he had on the gym bag and kept walking. Getting to L.A. had been a hassle and it had taken him a couple of days zig-zagging but he had made it. He assumed the people, most likely Widows, that Dreykov had sent after Oksana were still looking for her back home, but it wouldn’t take long for Dreykov to shift his attention to him. Dreykov had known where he lived, so surely he would’ve already started connecting the dots.

Goddammit, at least he had a head start. Oksana hadn’t been much help, but he guessed he couldn’t blame her because she was dying and all of that. Benji knew of a few safehouses, some on Red Room’s radar and some not, that Yelena could have camped out at. He could immediately rule out the ones Red Room either definitively or most likely knew about. She wouldn’t dare go there.

That left two safehouses that the Red Room didn’t know about in L.A.. One near the Marina, on Rubens Avenue, number 12468. Another quite expensive one in the historic downtown area on South Spring Street, building number 626 to be exact, unit #203. Out of the two of them, Benji expected Yelena to go to the Spring Street apartment rather than the Rubens Avenue house. The Rubens avenue house was usually used by more than one person, with plans to leave by boat or airplane. It was both more crammed and more open than the downtown apartment so it was hard to just vanish into the bustling city. Spring street it was then.