Five Years Later
Vanessa rushes around her apartment trying to find her keys. "J?" She yells. "Yeah?" Answers the ghost who's sitting on the couch watching a movie. "Have you seen my keys?" "They're in the kitchen counter." Everyone was still coping with the Decimation that had occurred. After what happened on that planet with Thanos, Vanessa had decided that it was best if she went home. She was still in contact with everyone, especially Nat.
Every month she would go to New York for their meeting and stay for a couple of days just to make sure that the older woman was okay. Every time it consisted of Nat trying to train Vanessa. This meant that after 5 years of going over, Vanessa was an incredible fighter. More than she was before. "Come on, we're leaving now" she called out to Jason, as she turned off the tv. "Why do I have to go? This is your job, you're the Avenger or whatever it is you are." "So you want to stay?" She asked him as she locked the apartment door. "Of course not, you're going down to San Diego. No way I'm staying." Vanessa shook her head and rolled her eyes at his dramatics, she was about to tell him to shut up when someone else called her name.
Vanessa turned around to find Ethan, her next-door neighbor, standing a few feet from her. "Sorry, I don't mean to bother you. I've been meaning to ask for a couple of weeks now I just never really gotten the courage. Would you like to get dinner with me sometime? If you want, of course, not trying to pressure you into anything" he says with an awkward smile. "Yeah, I would like that" Vanessa answered him, "I'm going out of town for a few days, but after I get back we can set up something. I'll see you."
Meanwhile, Jason was laughing his head off. "Do you have to make it so awkward?" He asked. "I'm sorry. His fiancé was affected by the decimation. I'm pretty sure this is the first time he's asked anyone out since. Oh my, I'm the rebound" Vanessa says.
Vanessa got into the car as Jason got into the passenger seat. Vanessa never planned on ever getting her license, in reality, she hated being in cars especially if she wasn't driving. But after 24 years in this miserable world, Natasha had encouraged her to do so because it would be beneficial for any future missions. "How's Emily by the way?" Asked Jason. "Being a bitch as usual. I offered her my help with running the bar, but of course, she hates me. Said she didn't need my help and now she's running the bar into the ground."
After she'd gotten home for New York she'd gone over to visit Roxxy, only to find that the woman was gone. The bar had been left to her daughter Emily, who had absolutely no clue how to run a business. Vanessa did her best to try and help her, but the 30-year-old hated Vanessa for a reason she didn't quite understand. After a rather big argument between the two, Emily had fired Vanessa. So instead Vanessa spent most of her time doing things for The Avengers, which was mostly checking that there wasn't any crime that might cause big trouble for them.
So that was what Vanessa was currently doing driving down to San Diego, to make sure that the string of bodies found wasn't anything to worry too much about. "We're going on a trip in our favorite rocket ship. Zooming through the sky, Little Einsteins. Climb aboard, get ready to explore" sang Jason. "There's so much to find, Little Einsteins. We're going on a mission, start the countdown 5, 4, 3, 2, 1" Vanessa sang with a roll of her eyes. "You know if you keep rolling your eyes, they are going to get stuck." "I won't hesitate to shut you out J" threatened Vanessa. "Okay sorry I'll shut up now, but can you change that music this is going to make me fall asleep," he said.
Vanessa arrives at her location, 2 hours later. She looks around to see that the area was been close off by the SDPD. She goes inside and finds that it has already been cleaned out. Vanessa places a small disk in the middle of the room and turns it on. "Recreate crime scene," she tells it. Flashes of light shine around the room for a couple of seconds, before settling and creating three holographic bodies. Vanessa bends down to take a closer look and finds that all of their throats have been slit open. "Yeah it's definitely him," she tells herself.
"I would not like to come across this guy," says a voice behind her. "Jesus Christ! Nate, you have to give me a little warning" says Vanessa as she removes her hand from her dagger hilt. Nate smiles, "Warning," he says, "Where's Jason?" "Outside, says all of this grosses him out." "You know their ghosts are probably here, you could always ask them who did this to them" Nate said. "No need. I already know who it is, the thing is I don't exactly want to go after him" Vanessa explained as she picked up the disk and began to walk out. "Why? You fought against aliens. What's can be so dangerous about one guy?" He asked. Vanessa turned to look at him in disbelief, "Did you not see the things he's done in there? Besides, I don't know if you remember but we lost against those aliens." "Just saying, I think you could totally take him."
Once in the car, Vanessa quickly takes out her phone and dials Rhodey. The two of them are the ones who have been checking up on all of the crimes determining who it is that's doing this. "Hey Rhodey, it's me. Where you at?" She asks him. "Flying down to Mexico, got a report that there was another murder. Did you check up on the report from San Diego?" "Yeah, I'm here now. And it's definitely him. Three drug dealers all with slit throats. One of them seems to have tried to run away, ended up with a knife in the back. I'll get the police report as soon as I can but what are we supposed to do?" She asked him.
There was a moment of silence and for a second Vanessa thought that the call might've failed, but then, "We have a meeting with Nat soon. I'll let her know and see what she wants to do. You go over there right?" "No, I'm staying in San Diego for a few days, personal business, but if anything happens let me know."
After getting the report, Vanessa made her way to a hotel to rent a room. She pulled out all the files and spread them out in the bed. 'Three men found in an abandoned warehouse. Presumed to be drug dealers as multiple methamphetamines were found on them. Autopsy shows that the cause of death was a slit throat that went through the carotid artery. One of the victims had a knife to the back, believed to have tried to run away. Murder suspect believed to be another drug dealer who took out his competition or a drug deal gone bad.' Vanessa continues to read the report, but there was nothing in there that she didn't already know. Many of the strings of murder were pinned on the same thing: drug deals gone bad, a cartel, or gang rivalry. So far nobody had connected the dots that all throughout the country criminals were all dying in the same way.
Vanessa put away all the papers and took out her laptop. Throughout these five years, Vanessa had been trying to get more information about where her powers had come from, but with all the chaos that was still going around, she'd found nothing. What she had found was there there was another way for her to summon ghosts and give them corporeal bodies. There was a good and a bad thing about this method. The good thing was that it didn't drain her energy as much as the other ways. The bad thing was that it didn't last very long. She'd found that if she summons a small amount of energy and threw it at a ghost it would temporarily give them a body. But, since they didn't have a constant energy source it would disappear in a couple of minutes. But for how good she had gotten at fighting, she thought that maybe she wouldn't need ghosts to fight for her anymore.