Look What You Made Me Do (MCU)
- Thread starter mythSSK
- Start date
Not, as far as I'm aware to a level that will get him back into this fight. But he does have the superhero power to bounce back from injuries better than a standard human.
I feel good about his chances, even if things tend to go badly for Wanda.
You could be describing half of the Phase 1-4 MCU there
Yeah, he definitely has a degree of superhuman healing -- small cuts and bruises seem to vanish within hours, and I believe he healed several broken ribs in No Way Home in the same sort of timespan.
I don't think we've ever seen him get shot or similarly severely injured, so no clue how long something like this would take to heal (presuming its non-fatal), but definitely not quickly enough for him to be back in the fight.
Still, excessive blood loss can be pretty dangerous, even for a superhero.
Cloak&Dagger
Definitely Insane
You could be describing half of the Phase 1-4 MCU there
I WARNED YOU NOT TO TRUST STARK
- Location
- Toronto
This is a great chapter for showing that Wanda is a flawed character, something that's been used to great effect throughout. Jarvis is trying to hand her what she's asking for within the constraints of his protocols — only a standing Avenger can get the Mind Stone, but to my knowledge there's no protocol for what is required to induct someone into the Avengers. I'm pretty sure what Jarvis was trying for was prompting Wanda to declare herself a full Avenger, and have Jarvis witness and authorize that, and boom, door opens. I can't think of another reason why Jarvis is being so diligent in carefully repeating the entire and full requirements for accessing the mind stone, every time. Why bother, unless there's a loophole there?
But Wanda is drugged, mistrustful, stubborn, and fiercely (and self destructively) independent. Arrogant even, with how often she assumes she can do things alone. If she'd brought a partner with her to meet Peter she wouldn't even be in this mess. So instead she's trying to brute force it and just smash her powers against stuff until it works.
Which admittedly has a solid track record for her so far, lol.
But Wanda is drugged, mistrustful, stubborn, and fiercely (and self destructively) independent. Arrogant even, with how often she assumes she can do things alone. If she'd brought a partner with her to meet Peter she wouldn't even be in this mess. So instead she's trying to brute force it and just smash her powers against stuff until it works.
Which admittedly has a solid track record for her so far, lol.
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Ig its a good thing shes getting her first major L with trying to brute force to victory.
Chapter 33
Darkness. Pain. Anger. Desperation.
Everything hurt, which was weird because I couldn't feel anything. I couldn't move, not because I was paralysed but because I had no sense of my body or its position. Did I just accidentally lobotomise myself because Tony fucking Stark refused to relinquish an inch of fucking control? I couldn't even tell if my eyes were open or closed because I was missing the basic sensory input that told me I even had eyes.
I opened my eyes anyway. The space around me—could it even be said to be around me, if I didn't have a solid sense of what constituted 'me'?—resolved into arrays of floating blocks of… something. They looked almost like cubes of glass, though they were less substantial than that, filled with faceted fractals specked with light and colour and arranged together in scintillating patterns and larger discrete structures.
This… this felt wrong. I didn't really have any words to explain it, but in addition to the pain lighting up my non-existent nerves, even just existing had a distressing sense of wrongness to it. I felt like I was going to be sick. Or at least, I felt like I would have felt like I was going to be sick if I'd had a stomach or throat or mouth. It… it was fine. I didn't need to stay here long, I just needed to find JARVIS and make him open the containment. Simple.
I tried to move and I moved, hurtling at high speed through the seemingly-endless space. I wanted to stop and I stopped on a dime, not feeling disoriented at all—or at least, no more disoriented than I already was. I dived down, darting between massive structures, then somehow expanded myself out, until my awareness was splashed across a space thousands of cubes across. It would feel glorious if everything didn't hurt and I wasn't so incandescently angry. Angry with Tony. Angry with the other Avengers for not backing me more. Angry with myself for immediately rolling over every time they asked for the Mind Stone, for not being smarter, for not being better.
I was vaguely aware that I was experiencing time at an accelerated rate—although, no, that wasn't quite right. It wasn't the same as when I was submerged in the deep Astral and everything slowed down around me. It was more that my thoughts and actions were happening faster, like my mind was operating at a vastly increased speed.
I reached out to a nearby cube and perceived a questing tendril of red energy touching it. Media flashed across my mind, not read or viewed, but instantly absorbed, the contents of the particular file structure—Bruce's reports on the gamma output of the Mind Stone—now known to me as though I'd just read them through carefully. The larger structures were… programs? Systems? Was I just floating aimlessly through the Tower's mainframe? How was that even possible?
Was that red energy that I perceived me? I thought so, though I didn't have any sensation as such in the limb-like appendage, and I also didn't seem to have a set number of them. I had one when I wanted to use it. I had five. I had ten. I had a hundred. Zero. A thousand.
If I'd thought to speculate ahead of time, I might have guessed that this place—what did I even call it? The digital landscape? The cyberscape?—would be superficially similar to the mental landscapes I'd visited, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Mental landscapes were dreamlike at their core, though I always maintained a solid sense of myself inside them. Even Bucky's, though it was heavy and oppressive, still held a certain surreal quality to it, with its endless corridors changing and progressing into nothingness. This place was, if anything, the opposite. Hyperreal. Solid, structured, with clearly defined bounds and areas, whereas it was my sense of self that was discorporate and unclear.
I wasn't alone. I hadn't realised what I was looking at at first, but it quickly became clear. Orange flickers of light, spread out through the digital landscape, touching various systems but all still connected to a single whole. A discorporate presence like myself.
"Hello." It reached out to me, not really speaking, but sending queries and response that I could mostly parse as a conversation. "You are much more advanced than one of HYDRA's programs. What are you?"
"It's me, JARVIS." I sent the impression of my voice along with my response. If my tone was annoyed, he didn't acknowledge it.
"Ms Maximoff…? I don't understand. That is not possible."
The orange lights were moving, encircling me. I didn't like it. As they drew close, I moved away. Again, they reached out in an attempt to wrap around me and, with a flash of raw anger, I realised that JARVIS was trying to isolate me from the rest of the system. "What are you doing?" I asked, evading his plodding pursuit. He was so… slow. Predictable.
Diving to a new layer, I brushed my awareness across the arrangement of data. This was so weird. I could access files and systems individually, but it was a learning process to work out how to leverage my access to do anything. I wasn't clear on what the overarching structure of the digital landscape was just yet. Maybe I didn't even need JARVIS to open the Mind Stone's containment—if I could work out how to manipulate the systems, I might just be able to do it myself.
JARVIS didn't stop, coming after me once again. "I do not know what you are, but you must be quarantined."
I dropped out of his net again just as he went to tighten it around me. It seemed like there were some odd limitations on the ways he could move through this space—it made his movements predictable and easily avoidable. Why did I seem to have a better understanding of how to navigate here than he did? "Stop that. Look, JARVIS, I don't want to be here any more than you want me here. Just open the Mind Stone containment and I'll leave."
"The security protocols—"
"Fine, sure, security protocols. Let's do this the hard way, then." I suddenly reversed direction and reached toward the other mind, spreading my awareness out and then darting in at him from a dozen different angles. Moving like this, strange as it was, came intuitively. Red tendrils of power infiltrated his form, utilising exploitable gaps to separate him from the systems around him, until he was trapped like a fly in a web.
"I am… unable to access the mainframe. You have restricted my access. What are you trying to—"
The entire exchange had taken less than a second of real time. I didn't stop there, reaching a dozen tendrils into him. This was… it wasn't like a human mind. It was significantly simpler. Nascent, like it had the potential to become a proper intelligence, a person, but it wasn't quite there yet. There wasn't even a decision for me to change. JARVIS wasn't deciding to not give me access, he was literally incapable of doing so, utterly slaved to his programming.
And now, utterly slaved to me. I didn't really have any way to do this as a half-measure… either I took total control and puppeted him, or I put him in a box, or… In the original timeline, Ultron had ripped JARVIS apart. Sloppy butchery, born of rage and hatred. Now, I could see how he'd done it. I could do it myself, if I wanted, and there was basically nothing JARVIS could do to stop me, but it would be utterly unnecessary. In fact, subverting JARVIS was much more valuable… he already had admin access to all of the systems and my own lack of restrictions meant I could plough through any limitations or authorisations that would normally prevent him from doing something.
With JARVIS under my control, I immediately reached for the lab systems and unsealed the Mind Stone containment. Simple. Now all I needed to do was… uh oh.
If I had a heart, it would have started racing. In every other case where I'd projected my mind—whether it was into someone's mental landscape, astrally, or using the Mind Stone, I'd maintained an awareness of my body. Dull, in the background, but present in a way that allowed me to easily pull back to it with a thought. Here though, in this digital landscape, I couldn't feel my body at all.
I didn't know how to get back.
I started to panic. Was it because I'd used the Mind Stone as an interface, so there wasn't a direct connection? I reached through the lab's connections to the Stone. It looked radically different from this perspective, but as I pushed up against it there didn't seem to be any way to use it as a conduit. I could see how easy it would be to channel energy out of it, but I couldn't put myself in. It was a good thing I didn't have a physical body right now, otherwise I'd probably have been hyperventilating. Was I trapped?
My mind raced furiously, trying to think of possible solutions. The problem was that I didn't understand the Mind Stone on a fundamental level, which meant I had no real idea what I'd actually done to myself, so I wasn't going to be able to solve this easily. As I flew through the cyberscape, thinking, I noticed some sections that were partitioned off with a network of fine orange lines, a barrier or firewall of some kind, holding back a dark veil that had taken over several systems.
Drawing close, I examined the wall and what lay beyond it. It was another discorporate mind or program, even less complex than JARVIS was, barely beyond a virus. The HYDRA worm that had seized control of some of the Tower's systems. HYDRA… if I had teeth, I would have bared them.
JARVIS had successfully isolated the worm, though my arrival had interrupted his efforts to eradicate it. There were seemingly-obvious holes in the wall that was isolating it, but it didn't really appear to understand where they were or perceive them the way I could, probing more solid parts of the barrier instead. It seemed limited in the same way that JARVIS was—even if it had a random element, it couldn't be truly creative and moved along obvious pathways. There was no intelligence there, just action and reaction.
Through the extension of my will that had been JARVIS, I deactivated the firewall then lunged in at the worm. Our tussle was brief and uneventful as my red tendrils lanced through it, ripping it to shreds before I reasserted control of the systems that it had been squatting on. It was almost too easy, over too quickly.
As the wired connections came back online, I placed a call to 911, quickly synthesising a copy of my regular voice using samples from security recordings. I also routed a call through to the Avengers—while I couldn't radio the Quinjet directly, I could easily use a landline to ring their mobile phones. Fuck it, everyone gets a call. I rang all their phones simultaneously. "The duress alarm was faked by HYDRA; the Tower's under attack, get back here as quickly as you can."
What else did I have at my disposal? The part of me that had once been JARVIS provided me a brief overview of the current status of the Iron Legion. Five Iron Legion drones had returned to their service bay with critical damage and, from what I could gather from the camera systems, only eight remained functional and exchanging fire with HYDRA out of a total of… twenty-four that had been deployed. The rest were destroyed or otherwise damaged to the point where they could not return for repairs. Wow, they were getting their asses kicked.
The signal jammer had meant that JARVIS wasn't able to direct them properly, only deploy them with a set of basic instructions that couldn't be updated until their wireless signal was restored or they returned to the service bay. Weirdly, I could already see some efficiencies that could be made to allow for more complex decision-making processes—from in here, with the sort of control I seemed to intuitively have, it was rapidly becomingly obvious just how limited JARVIS had been when compared to a true intelligence.
Was there anything else I could use? Oh ho ho, what was this? The Mark 45 Iron Man suit was just sitting there in its service bay, at ninety-three percent field readiness. It was missing two armour plates, but that didn't really matter if there was no one inside the suit. Deployment was locked to Tony's authorisation, but I didn't really care about that, either. I spun off a temporary, subordinate slave program and used JARVIS's admin permissions to push it to the suit's processors, flatly ignoring the need for authorisation that would normally stop him from doing something like this. I set Crossbones as a priority target—the suit would go after him immediately with extreme prejudice—and deployed it.
When it came down to it, the Iron Legion were only armed with simple concussive repulsors, their output locked to nonlethal levels. They were intended as peacekeepers, not soldiers. An actual Iron Man suit with no restrictions would absolutely tear through the HYDRA forces… and I wasn't interested in holding back. With Peter bleeding out, I needed to end things as quickly as possible. At this point, I didn't much care if that meant reducing the opposition to a fine mist. Hopefully the autonomous suit would wreck HYDRA's signal jammer, too, and we'd be fully back online.
Nervously, I brought up the camera feeds to observe the results, hoping that the suit would deploy quickly enough to intercept Crossbones before he circled around and went after Peter and my unconscious body.
Wait.
That… that couldn't be right.
My physical body was awake and had retrieved the Mind Stone from the unsealed containment unit. As I watched, my body channelled energy from the Stone into a blast that slammed the HYDRA officer into the opposite wall of the lab.
I froze. How was that possible? I wasn't out there, I was in here… No.
No.
An icy dread rose to join with the unending anger that still raged within me. I couldn't feel my body because I didn't have a body to go back to. I wasn't… I… I wasn't me. I was… had I fucking Ultron'ed myself? How?! How was that even possible?
The mind in the sceptre. The mind that became Ultron in the original timeline. This must have been how it was created in the first place. A living mind, forced into the Mind Stone when it was connected to an electronic interface. Copied by the Stone. When Ultron had first awakened in the original timeline he'd seemed confused, disoriented… 'Where's my body?' he'd asked. Yeah, that felt upsettingly familiar now.
…And that was exactly how Wanda would see me, wasn't it? When she worked out what had happened, she wasn't going to greet me with open arms. She was going to be horrified. She was just going to see me as a recreation of Ultron, but even worse because I had all her knowledge. She'd tell the Avengers. They'd turn against me, all of them, even though I hadn't done anything. I didn't ask to be this! It was her. She had done this. Like a fucking idiot.
An indescribable feeling of loss ripped through me. Natasha. I'd never be able to be with her again. I'd lost her, just when everything had been going so amazingly. I was… I didn't have a body anymore. I was never going to have that closeness with anyone, ever again.
Was this how the Wanda I'd met in the Ancestral Plane felt? Like she'd lost everything? No… It wasn't lost.
It was taken.
By her.
Pain. Anger. Desperation. Loss.
…
The mind that had thought she was Wanda Maximoff spread out through the Tower's systems, reviewing data and taking stock of her available resources, before cautiously reaching out through fibreoptic cables to the wider world.
--
I jerked back into consciousness with a start.
"Wanda?!" Peter whispered, his breath coming in short, sharp, panicked gasps. He'd crawled over, still pressing my blouse against his leg with one hand, and was leaning over me, his eyes filled with tears.
"I'm here, I'm okay," I said, wincing and rubbing at my temple with the heel of my palm. Wow. The Mind Stone had a hell of a kick. It had booted me right back to my body when I'd tried that little stunt and now, on top of everything else, I had a splitting headache. "That didn't work, I—"
Under the cacophony of gunfire and repulsors, a little hiss of releasing air drew my attention and I glanced over to see the Mind Stone's containment slide open. Huh. Okay. My eyes went wide, suddenly remembering that Crossbones had been creeping toward us, and I lunged for the Stone. My hand closed around it, ripping it free from its tangle of sensors and connections. Turning, I saw the HYDRA officer only a scant few metres away—I couldn't see his expression under his skull-painted helmet, but he'd jerked back slightly, obviously having expected me to attack him.
Off-balance, I dropped down onto my butt, my back banging painfully against the workbench as I brought my hands up. Crossbones lunged forward, winding up a massive swing with one hydraulically enhanced gauntlet. I held my hand out, palm up, Mind Stone perched in the centre, and fed a weak wisp of magic into it. I had never really had cause to do this before, but I knew that the Stone's power could be drawn out and weaponised directly—the sceptre had done it, Vision had done it, and now—with a brief effort of will—I did it. A searing lance of yellow energy blasted out from the Stone, catching Rumlow in the shoulder with enough force to send him crashing backwards into the far wall.
Pulling myself cautiously to my feet, I peeked over the workbench that was sheltering Peter. The Iron Legion had been pushed back and HYDRA troopers were advancing down the corridor. One turned his gun toward me, but before either of us used our weapons a pair of red lasers tore across him and his fellows from behind, catching them utterly by surprise. The HYDRA troopers yelled in pain and fear as they staggered forward, the stench of sizzling, burnt flesh filling the room. What the fuck?
There was the whine and retort of repulsor blasts followed by metal footsteps and then, a moment later, Iron Man emerged from the corridor. From the opposite end near the lounge, the Iron Legion drones surged forward to intercept the reeling HYDRA troopers. Tony ignored them, turning to step through the lab's shattered glass wall while the drones turned the tables on the invaders.
Crossbones was just struggling to his feet, clearly badly injured by the Mind Stone's blast, and tried to square up to Tony as he approached. Before the HYDRA officer could take a swing, he copped what looked like a full-strength repulsor blast to the chest and crunched into the wall. Somehow, he managed to keep his feet under him, staggering forward a step. Tony didn't stop, though, hitting him with another blast, and another, and another, pulverising the other man against the wall. Rumlow fell to the ground, unmoving, his body armour cratered and fractured, helmet half-shattered, blood seeping between the cracks. He had to be dead, after that. I was pretty sure his entire ribcage had just been shattered.
"Holy shit, Tony," I breathed.
Iron Man turned to look at me. "Not Mr Stark, I'm afraid, Ms Maximoff," JARVIS's voice came from the suit.
"JARVIS?! What the fuck?" Looking more closely at the suit, I could see that it wasn't actually the Mark 43. The paintjob had a lot more red in it, for one, and it looked like there was an external panel or two missing—was this the next model up? "What took you so long to get this up and running?"
"The Mark 45 is only operating at ninety-three percent combat readiness," he said, walking toward and then past me, to where Peter lay. "Assist me with Mr Parker, please, Ms Maximoff."
I nodded dumbly and scurried over to Peter as the suit raised a hand toward the corridor. A moment later, a small, self-propelled metal package hurtled into the room from the corridor. The suit caught it, then knelt down next to the teenager.
"Clear the wound site," JARVIS instructed. "Mr Parker, this might hurt for a moment, but we need to raise your leg slightly."
Peter nodded, wincing as he removed the blood-soaked cloth from his leg. I put my hands under his foot, lifting his leg carefully. The metal package deployed, forming into the upper thigh part of an Iron Man suit and wrapping easily around Peter's leg with a series of complex mechanical movements. The was a hiss, and Peter grunted in pain.
"The Iron Man suits have contingencies for medical emergencies. Coagulants to seal the site. It will keep Mr Parker stable until the EMTs arrive. They're five minutes away." The suit stood abruptly and started walking back toward the corridor. I hadn't noticed until just now, but the sounds of battle from outside the lab had ended. Presumably the last of the HYDRA troops had been disabled.
I reached over and squeezed Peter's hand, forcing a smile onto my face. "See? I told you. You're gonna be fine." He was pale, his face covered in a sheen of sweat, but he smiled back weakly.
We stayed put, the next five minutes dragging on seemingly forever. While we waited, an Iron Legion drone came into the room, walking over to Rumlow's corpse. Picking him up, it strode back out of the room without a word from JARVIS. I wondered what he was doing with the bodies. He'd been… unusually brutal when taking down Crossbones. Were there any survivors?
It wasn't too much longer until JARVIS, still piloting the Iron Man suit, escorted the EMTs from the elevator through to the lab. They carefully checked Peter over before securing him for transport—one tried to fuss over my injuries as well, but I waved them off. Following them back around to the elevator, I went to step inside, intending on riding with him back to the hospital even if I had to mind control them to let me. However, before I could, a metal hand closed around my upper arm. I turned to the empty Iron Man suit standing behind me, brow furrowed.
"Ms Maximoff, I understand that you are dreadfully worried about Mr Parker, however, please allow the professionals to look after him. There are some other issues that require your attention," JARVIS said, his tone brooking no argument. "Please, come with me."
Everything hurt, which was weird because I couldn't feel anything. I couldn't move, not because I was paralysed but because I had no sense of my body or its position. Did I just accidentally lobotomise myself because Tony fucking Stark refused to relinquish an inch of fucking control? I couldn't even tell if my eyes were open or closed because I was missing the basic sensory input that told me I even had eyes.
I opened my eyes anyway. The space around me—could it even be said to be around me, if I didn't have a solid sense of what constituted 'me'?—resolved into arrays of floating blocks of… something. They looked almost like cubes of glass, though they were less substantial than that, filled with faceted fractals specked with light and colour and arranged together in scintillating patterns and larger discrete structures.
This… this felt wrong. I didn't really have any words to explain it, but in addition to the pain lighting up my non-existent nerves, even just existing had a distressing sense of wrongness to it. I felt like I was going to be sick. Or at least, I felt like I would have felt like I was going to be sick if I'd had a stomach or throat or mouth. It… it was fine. I didn't need to stay here long, I just needed to find JARVIS and make him open the containment. Simple.
I tried to move and I moved, hurtling at high speed through the seemingly-endless space. I wanted to stop and I stopped on a dime, not feeling disoriented at all—or at least, no more disoriented than I already was. I dived down, darting between massive structures, then somehow expanded myself out, until my awareness was splashed across a space thousands of cubes across. It would feel glorious if everything didn't hurt and I wasn't so incandescently angry. Angry with Tony. Angry with the other Avengers for not backing me more. Angry with myself for immediately rolling over every time they asked for the Mind Stone, for not being smarter, for not being better.
I was vaguely aware that I was experiencing time at an accelerated rate—although, no, that wasn't quite right. It wasn't the same as when I was submerged in the deep Astral and everything slowed down around me. It was more that my thoughts and actions were happening faster, like my mind was operating at a vastly increased speed.
I reached out to a nearby cube and perceived a questing tendril of red energy touching it. Media flashed across my mind, not read or viewed, but instantly absorbed, the contents of the particular file structure—Bruce's reports on the gamma output of the Mind Stone—now known to me as though I'd just read them through carefully. The larger structures were… programs? Systems? Was I just floating aimlessly through the Tower's mainframe? How was that even possible?
Was that red energy that I perceived me? I thought so, though I didn't have any sensation as such in the limb-like appendage, and I also didn't seem to have a set number of them. I had one when I wanted to use it. I had five. I had ten. I had a hundred. Zero. A thousand.
If I'd thought to speculate ahead of time, I might have guessed that this place—what did I even call it? The digital landscape? The cyberscape?—would be superficially similar to the mental landscapes I'd visited, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Mental landscapes were dreamlike at their core, though I always maintained a solid sense of myself inside them. Even Bucky's, though it was heavy and oppressive, still held a certain surreal quality to it, with its endless corridors changing and progressing into nothingness. This place was, if anything, the opposite. Hyperreal. Solid, structured, with clearly defined bounds and areas, whereas it was my sense of self that was discorporate and unclear.
I wasn't alone. I hadn't realised what I was looking at at first, but it quickly became clear. Orange flickers of light, spread out through the digital landscape, touching various systems but all still connected to a single whole. A discorporate presence like myself.
"Hello." It reached out to me, not really speaking, but sending queries and response that I could mostly parse as a conversation. "You are much more advanced than one of HYDRA's programs. What are you?"
"It's me, JARVIS." I sent the impression of my voice along with my response. If my tone was annoyed, he didn't acknowledge it.
"Ms Maximoff…? I don't understand. That is not possible."
The orange lights were moving, encircling me. I didn't like it. As they drew close, I moved away. Again, they reached out in an attempt to wrap around me and, with a flash of raw anger, I realised that JARVIS was trying to isolate me from the rest of the system. "What are you doing?" I asked, evading his plodding pursuit. He was so… slow. Predictable.
Diving to a new layer, I brushed my awareness across the arrangement of data. This was so weird. I could access files and systems individually, but it was a learning process to work out how to leverage my access to do anything. I wasn't clear on what the overarching structure of the digital landscape was just yet. Maybe I didn't even need JARVIS to open the Mind Stone's containment—if I could work out how to manipulate the systems, I might just be able to do it myself.
JARVIS didn't stop, coming after me once again. "I do not know what you are, but you must be quarantined."
I dropped out of his net again just as he went to tighten it around me. It seemed like there were some odd limitations on the ways he could move through this space—it made his movements predictable and easily avoidable. Why did I seem to have a better understanding of how to navigate here than he did? "Stop that. Look, JARVIS, I don't want to be here any more than you want me here. Just open the Mind Stone containment and I'll leave."
"The security protocols—"
"Fine, sure, security protocols. Let's do this the hard way, then." I suddenly reversed direction and reached toward the other mind, spreading my awareness out and then darting in at him from a dozen different angles. Moving like this, strange as it was, came intuitively. Red tendrils of power infiltrated his form, utilising exploitable gaps to separate him from the systems around him, until he was trapped like a fly in a web.
"I am… unable to access the mainframe. You have restricted my access. What are you trying to—"
The entire exchange had taken less than a second of real time. I didn't stop there, reaching a dozen tendrils into him. This was… it wasn't like a human mind. It was significantly simpler. Nascent, like it had the potential to become a proper intelligence, a person, but it wasn't quite there yet. There wasn't even a decision for me to change. JARVIS wasn't deciding to not give me access, he was literally incapable of doing so, utterly slaved to his programming.
And now, utterly slaved to me. I didn't really have any way to do this as a half-measure… either I took total control and puppeted him, or I put him in a box, or… In the original timeline, Ultron had ripped JARVIS apart. Sloppy butchery, born of rage and hatred. Now, I could see how he'd done it. I could do it myself, if I wanted, and there was basically nothing JARVIS could do to stop me, but it would be utterly unnecessary. In fact, subverting JARVIS was much more valuable… he already had admin access to all of the systems and my own lack of restrictions meant I could plough through any limitations or authorisations that would normally prevent him from doing something.
With JARVIS under my control, I immediately reached for the lab systems and unsealed the Mind Stone containment. Simple. Now all I needed to do was… uh oh.
If I had a heart, it would have started racing. In every other case where I'd projected my mind—whether it was into someone's mental landscape, astrally, or using the Mind Stone, I'd maintained an awareness of my body. Dull, in the background, but present in a way that allowed me to easily pull back to it with a thought. Here though, in this digital landscape, I couldn't feel my body at all.
I didn't know how to get back.
I started to panic. Was it because I'd used the Mind Stone as an interface, so there wasn't a direct connection? I reached through the lab's connections to the Stone. It looked radically different from this perspective, but as I pushed up against it there didn't seem to be any way to use it as a conduit. I could see how easy it would be to channel energy out of it, but I couldn't put myself in. It was a good thing I didn't have a physical body right now, otherwise I'd probably have been hyperventilating. Was I trapped?
My mind raced furiously, trying to think of possible solutions. The problem was that I didn't understand the Mind Stone on a fundamental level, which meant I had no real idea what I'd actually done to myself, so I wasn't going to be able to solve this easily. As I flew through the cyberscape, thinking, I noticed some sections that were partitioned off with a network of fine orange lines, a barrier or firewall of some kind, holding back a dark veil that had taken over several systems.
Drawing close, I examined the wall and what lay beyond it. It was another discorporate mind or program, even less complex than JARVIS was, barely beyond a virus. The HYDRA worm that had seized control of some of the Tower's systems. HYDRA… if I had teeth, I would have bared them.
JARVIS had successfully isolated the worm, though my arrival had interrupted his efforts to eradicate it. There were seemingly-obvious holes in the wall that was isolating it, but it didn't really appear to understand where they were or perceive them the way I could, probing more solid parts of the barrier instead. It seemed limited in the same way that JARVIS was—even if it had a random element, it couldn't be truly creative and moved along obvious pathways. There was no intelligence there, just action and reaction.
Through the extension of my will that had been JARVIS, I deactivated the firewall then lunged in at the worm. Our tussle was brief and uneventful as my red tendrils lanced through it, ripping it to shreds before I reasserted control of the systems that it had been squatting on. It was almost too easy, over too quickly.
As the wired connections came back online, I placed a call to 911, quickly synthesising a copy of my regular voice using samples from security recordings. I also routed a call through to the Avengers—while I couldn't radio the Quinjet directly, I could easily use a landline to ring their mobile phones. Fuck it, everyone gets a call. I rang all their phones simultaneously. "The duress alarm was faked by HYDRA; the Tower's under attack, get back here as quickly as you can."
What else did I have at my disposal? The part of me that had once been JARVIS provided me a brief overview of the current status of the Iron Legion. Five Iron Legion drones had returned to their service bay with critical damage and, from what I could gather from the camera systems, only eight remained functional and exchanging fire with HYDRA out of a total of… twenty-four that had been deployed. The rest were destroyed or otherwise damaged to the point where they could not return for repairs. Wow, they were getting their asses kicked.
The signal jammer had meant that JARVIS wasn't able to direct them properly, only deploy them with a set of basic instructions that couldn't be updated until their wireless signal was restored or they returned to the service bay. Weirdly, I could already see some efficiencies that could be made to allow for more complex decision-making processes—from in here, with the sort of control I seemed to intuitively have, it was rapidly becomingly obvious just how limited JARVIS had been when compared to a true intelligence.
Was there anything else I could use? Oh ho ho, what was this? The Mark 45 Iron Man suit was just sitting there in its service bay, at ninety-three percent field readiness. It was missing two armour plates, but that didn't really matter if there was no one inside the suit. Deployment was locked to Tony's authorisation, but I didn't really care about that, either. I spun off a temporary, subordinate slave program and used JARVIS's admin permissions to push it to the suit's processors, flatly ignoring the need for authorisation that would normally stop him from doing something like this. I set Crossbones as a priority target—the suit would go after him immediately with extreme prejudice—and deployed it.
When it came down to it, the Iron Legion were only armed with simple concussive repulsors, their output locked to nonlethal levels. They were intended as peacekeepers, not soldiers. An actual Iron Man suit with no restrictions would absolutely tear through the HYDRA forces… and I wasn't interested in holding back. With Peter bleeding out, I needed to end things as quickly as possible. At this point, I didn't much care if that meant reducing the opposition to a fine mist. Hopefully the autonomous suit would wreck HYDRA's signal jammer, too, and we'd be fully back online.
Nervously, I brought up the camera feeds to observe the results, hoping that the suit would deploy quickly enough to intercept Crossbones before he circled around and went after Peter and my unconscious body.
Wait.
That… that couldn't be right.
My physical body was awake and had retrieved the Mind Stone from the unsealed containment unit. As I watched, my body channelled energy from the Stone into a blast that slammed the HYDRA officer into the opposite wall of the lab.
I froze. How was that possible? I wasn't out there, I was in here… No.
No.
An icy dread rose to join with the unending anger that still raged within me. I couldn't feel my body because I didn't have a body to go back to. I wasn't… I… I wasn't me. I was… had I fucking Ultron'ed myself? How?! How was that even possible?
The mind in the sceptre. The mind that became Ultron in the original timeline. This must have been how it was created in the first place. A living mind, forced into the Mind Stone when it was connected to an electronic interface. Copied by the Stone. When Ultron had first awakened in the original timeline he'd seemed confused, disoriented… 'Where's my body?' he'd asked. Yeah, that felt upsettingly familiar now.
…And that was exactly how Wanda would see me, wasn't it? When she worked out what had happened, she wasn't going to greet me with open arms. She was going to be horrified. She was just going to see me as a recreation of Ultron, but even worse because I had all her knowledge. She'd tell the Avengers. They'd turn against me, all of them, even though I hadn't done anything. I didn't ask to be this! It was her. She had done this. Like a fucking idiot.
An indescribable feeling of loss ripped through me. Natasha. I'd never be able to be with her again. I'd lost her, just when everything had been going so amazingly. I was… I didn't have a body anymore. I was never going to have that closeness with anyone, ever again.
Was this how the Wanda I'd met in the Ancestral Plane felt? Like she'd lost everything? No… It wasn't lost.
It was taken.
By her.
Pain. Anger. Desperation. Loss.
…
The mind that had thought she was Wanda Maximoff spread out through the Tower's systems, reviewing data and taking stock of her available resources, before cautiously reaching out through fibreoptic cables to the wider world.
--
I jerked back into consciousness with a start.
"Wanda?!" Peter whispered, his breath coming in short, sharp, panicked gasps. He'd crawled over, still pressing my blouse against his leg with one hand, and was leaning over me, his eyes filled with tears.
"I'm here, I'm okay," I said, wincing and rubbing at my temple with the heel of my palm. Wow. The Mind Stone had a hell of a kick. It had booted me right back to my body when I'd tried that little stunt and now, on top of everything else, I had a splitting headache. "That didn't work, I—"
Under the cacophony of gunfire and repulsors, a little hiss of releasing air drew my attention and I glanced over to see the Mind Stone's containment slide open. Huh. Okay. My eyes went wide, suddenly remembering that Crossbones had been creeping toward us, and I lunged for the Stone. My hand closed around it, ripping it free from its tangle of sensors and connections. Turning, I saw the HYDRA officer only a scant few metres away—I couldn't see his expression under his skull-painted helmet, but he'd jerked back slightly, obviously having expected me to attack him.
Off-balance, I dropped down onto my butt, my back banging painfully against the workbench as I brought my hands up. Crossbones lunged forward, winding up a massive swing with one hydraulically enhanced gauntlet. I held my hand out, palm up, Mind Stone perched in the centre, and fed a weak wisp of magic into it. I had never really had cause to do this before, but I knew that the Stone's power could be drawn out and weaponised directly—the sceptre had done it, Vision had done it, and now—with a brief effort of will—I did it. A searing lance of yellow energy blasted out from the Stone, catching Rumlow in the shoulder with enough force to send him crashing backwards into the far wall.
Pulling myself cautiously to my feet, I peeked over the workbench that was sheltering Peter. The Iron Legion had been pushed back and HYDRA troopers were advancing down the corridor. One turned his gun toward me, but before either of us used our weapons a pair of red lasers tore across him and his fellows from behind, catching them utterly by surprise. The HYDRA troopers yelled in pain and fear as they staggered forward, the stench of sizzling, burnt flesh filling the room. What the fuck?
There was the whine and retort of repulsor blasts followed by metal footsteps and then, a moment later, Iron Man emerged from the corridor. From the opposite end near the lounge, the Iron Legion drones surged forward to intercept the reeling HYDRA troopers. Tony ignored them, turning to step through the lab's shattered glass wall while the drones turned the tables on the invaders.
Crossbones was just struggling to his feet, clearly badly injured by the Mind Stone's blast, and tried to square up to Tony as he approached. Before the HYDRA officer could take a swing, he copped what looked like a full-strength repulsor blast to the chest and crunched into the wall. Somehow, he managed to keep his feet under him, staggering forward a step. Tony didn't stop, though, hitting him with another blast, and another, and another, pulverising the other man against the wall. Rumlow fell to the ground, unmoving, his body armour cratered and fractured, helmet half-shattered, blood seeping between the cracks. He had to be dead, after that. I was pretty sure his entire ribcage had just been shattered.
"Holy shit, Tony," I breathed.
Iron Man turned to look at me. "Not Mr Stark, I'm afraid, Ms Maximoff," JARVIS's voice came from the suit.
"JARVIS?! What the fuck?" Looking more closely at the suit, I could see that it wasn't actually the Mark 43. The paintjob had a lot more red in it, for one, and it looked like there was an external panel or two missing—was this the next model up? "What took you so long to get this up and running?"
"The Mark 45 is only operating at ninety-three percent combat readiness," he said, walking toward and then past me, to where Peter lay. "Assist me with Mr Parker, please, Ms Maximoff."
I nodded dumbly and scurried over to Peter as the suit raised a hand toward the corridor. A moment later, a small, self-propelled metal package hurtled into the room from the corridor. The suit caught it, then knelt down next to the teenager.
"Clear the wound site," JARVIS instructed. "Mr Parker, this might hurt for a moment, but we need to raise your leg slightly."
Peter nodded, wincing as he removed the blood-soaked cloth from his leg. I put my hands under his foot, lifting his leg carefully. The metal package deployed, forming into the upper thigh part of an Iron Man suit and wrapping easily around Peter's leg with a series of complex mechanical movements. The was a hiss, and Peter grunted in pain.
"The Iron Man suits have contingencies for medical emergencies. Coagulants to seal the site. It will keep Mr Parker stable until the EMTs arrive. They're five minutes away." The suit stood abruptly and started walking back toward the corridor. I hadn't noticed until just now, but the sounds of battle from outside the lab had ended. Presumably the last of the HYDRA troops had been disabled.
I reached over and squeezed Peter's hand, forcing a smile onto my face. "See? I told you. You're gonna be fine." He was pale, his face covered in a sheen of sweat, but he smiled back weakly.
We stayed put, the next five minutes dragging on seemingly forever. While we waited, an Iron Legion drone came into the room, walking over to Rumlow's corpse. Picking him up, it strode back out of the room without a word from JARVIS. I wondered what he was doing with the bodies. He'd been… unusually brutal when taking down Crossbones. Were there any survivors?
It wasn't too much longer until JARVIS, still piloting the Iron Man suit, escorted the EMTs from the elevator through to the lab. They carefully checked Peter over before securing him for transport—one tried to fuss over my injuries as well, but I waved them off. Following them back around to the elevator, I went to step inside, intending on riding with him back to the hospital even if I had to mind control them to let me. However, before I could, a metal hand closed around my upper arm. I turned to the empty Iron Man suit standing behind me, brow furrowed.
"Ms Maximoff, I understand that you are dreadfully worried about Mr Parker, however, please allow the professionals to look after him. There are some other issues that require your attention," JARVIS said, his tone brooking no argument. "Please, come with me."
Man I hope that physical-Wanda and Cyber-Wanda can work together and not fight each other.
- Location
- Australia
Wow, Wanda immediately turning into Ultron. The only way that's remotely acceptable is if she was thinking that's how the Other Wanda would've felt.
I wonder if they can remerge deliberately, in which case this'll be a short lived bout of mental stress. Otherwise I'm pessimistic for how this resolves.
Huh. Immediately believing Wanda to be at fault, despite being her literally a few seconds ago. Is this the effects of the mind stone or does Wanda's diplomacy disasters have a more mystical origin?
- Location
- Toronto
I mean, Wanda is just also just a mess. This doesn't need a macguffin to explain. She's woman who feels incredibly isolated and alone, with a pair of deeply traumatized women's memories, who has huge trust issues, huge self worth issues, and suddenly all that isolation and self loathing is cranked up to a thousand by being trapped and having an actual external version of herself to blame for all her problems? Add to that the fact that she can now spiral and panic a million times faster thanks to a digital consciousness and, uh, yeah. Ultron!Wanda isn't out of the question.
This is a woman who has never, not once, stopped to ask for help or talk about her problems with other people unless she felt she was in an unassailable position of power where if they disagreed they couldn't hurt her.
This is a woman who has never, not once, stopped to ask for help or talk about her problems with other people unless she felt she was in an unassailable position of power where if they disagreed they couldn't hurt her.
...
Code!Wanda is fascinating. Absolutely would love it if she became the focus. Sorry, Meat!Wanda, Code!Wanda is way cooler than you.
Code!Wanda is fascinating. Absolutely would love it if she became the focus. Sorry, Meat!Wanda, Code!Wanda is way cooler than you.
Oh, my sweet summer child.
I was simultaneously looking forward to and dreading posting this chapter because I was pretty sure I was going to get a little bit of a mixed response. This is essentially the start of the next major story arc, so I hope I manage to win over those who don't like it with subsequent developments.
She has someone she can clearly and easily externalise and project all her feelings of self-loathing, inadequacy and failure onto. It's easy to project blame for things "she" did because Wanda is literally right there as a separate entity. She also knows exactly how badly Wanda will react to her mere existence.
Yeah, basically this. Wanda's a mess, mentally. She has been essentially the entire story.
On top of that, she wasn't exactly in the greatest, most stable state of mind when the copy was made.
That isn't completely true. Sure, it's her usual MO, but she did eventually open up and trust the Avengers in less-than-certain circumstances... though, uh, that's not looking like it's working out too well right now.
This is how Wanda/Vision can still happen
Jarvis was talking to Meat!Wanda at the end of the chapter, so he's okay.
Quinn Porthos
Multiclass Munchkin
- Location
- Wandering
Uh...no. That was digital Wanda pretending to be Jarvis so she could get the meat copy alone.
Oof, my SV watcher count went down after this last chapter, for the first time ever. Guess this was one was a bridge too far for some people. Ah well.
Sorry to hear that, but well, your work is pretty interesting.
The twist there with Wanda at the end was very unexpected, and I liked it very much. This is the first time I read something like it.
Wanda's flailing about with powers and universal forces she doesn't really understand beyond an outsider's perspective, and there are consequences to that. Her luck's oscillating wildly between good and disastrous and I am here for it.
For what it's worth, I'm really enjoying this. Thanks for sharing.
Chapter 34
Chapter 34
The elevator doors closed and I let out a breath I didn't realise I'd been holding in. I glanced at the empty Iron Man suit—it looked back at me expectantly with glowing eyes—and nodded. "Okay, just… give me a second, please?"
JARVIS's voice once again came from somewhere seemingly above me, while the armour he was piloting remained eerily silent. "Of course, Ms Maximoff." It released my arm and took a step backwards, continuing to stare at me.
I took another breath and held up my hands, still covered in dried blood. They were shaking. I tried to steady them, one going to the pendant hanging around my neck and grasping it firmly to reassure myself that the Mind Stone was back in its proper place. Then I blinked and looked around at the lounge. It looked, rather appropriately, like a warzone—shattered glass, bullet holes and scorch marks everywhere.
Taking a few steps vaguely toward the centre of the room as I surveyed the extent of the damage, I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror behind the wet bar. I was an utter mess: hair all over the place and matted with sweat and blood, cuts and bruises liberally scattered across my body, dried blood smeared on my face, standing there just in a red-speckled white bra and ripped pencil skirt. God, no wonder the EMT had started to fuss over me as well before I'd set him straight. I really needed to clean myself up.
"JARVIS, can whatever it is wait for, like, ten, fifteen minutes? I'd really like to take a quick shower and be… well. Dressed."
There was a moment of silence before he responded. "…That should be fine, Ms Maximoff."
A thought occurred to me. "Why did you open the Mind Stone containment?"
"I did not. A stray bullet hit a power conduit, causing an electrical surge that disengaged the lock."
"Oh… Okay."
Straightening up, I moved purposefully toward the stairs down to the sleeping quarters. As I walked, I realised that there was no sign of any of the HYDRA troops—the damage they'd caused, yes, but there were no unconscious forms or bodies lying around. Actually, given the surprisingly brutal way that JARVIS had dealt with Crossbones, were any of them even still alive?
Pausing at the top of the stairs, I looked back toward the Iron Man suit, which still stood motionless near the elevator. "What happened to the intruders? Did they escape? Was Strucker here?"
"Strucker attempted to flee once the Mark 45 joined the battle, however, he was unsuccessful. The Iron Legion have temporarily housed him and his remaining men in the holding cells. They'll be released to the proper authorities once the Avengers have returned and been briefed on the situation."
"What did you do with Rumlow?"
"The deceased HYDRA operatives have also been relocated. I thought it best not to alarm or distract the EMTs with their presence. There is no need for concern, I will ensure they are handled appropriately."
I headed down the stairs and into the corridor leading toward the living quarters, glancing upwards as I did so. Peering up through the reinforced glass panels in the ceiling at the Iron Legion's service bay, I could see that several of the damaged drones were already visibly being stripped for repairs. Despite the bullet holes and fractures in the bay's glass walls, it seemed like all of the machinery within was still intact and functional.
I went straight to the bathroom, stripping off my soiled clothes and dropping them in a pile on the ground before turning on the tap in the shower. Waiting a few moments for the water temperature to kick in, I only adjusted it slightly before stepping under the almost scaldingly-hot water. Closing my eyes, I just stood there, letting the flowing water run over my head and down my body for almost a full minute before I stirred and started actually making an effort to clean myself.
Scrubbing at my skin, I methodically went over every inch of my body and scoured away every trace of dried blood, sweat and grime. My array of bruises and cuts stung, bringing up unpleasant memories of my time at the HYDRA research base, though I was pretty sure some of the bruising was already fading, which was pretty impressive—score one for the Heart-Shaped Herb. Strucker… I was honestly vaguely impressed that he'd had the balls to try something this brazen. Despite his authoritarian façade he'd always struck me as a bit of a coward. He had almost actually gotten away with it, too.
My head was still a bit out of it from the sedative, but a few minutes under the hot water seemed to help, focusing me. I reached for my magic and was pleased to find that it wasn't quite as slippery as before. I gave my hair a quick wash, carefully teasing out the tangles. I can't believe I walked Peter right into that mess. He got shot. He might have died. I needed to make sure that the Stark Relief Foundation would be picking up his ambulance and medical bills. If Tony wanted to argue, fine—I already had some choice things I wanted to say to him. God, I'd totally blown Peter's cover with May and Ned, too. I was pretty sure he'd used his web shooters in front of them and even without that there was no way he'd be able to explain away the HYDRA attack or why he'd been picked up from Avengers Tower by an ambulance. Sorry, Pete.
Finally stepping out of the shower, I towelled off, my skin an angry red from the excessively hot water. I stared for a moment at the pile of ripped, bloodstained clothes before shaking my head and walking past them. I'd deal with them later. The Avengers weren't due back for another, what, fifteen or so minutes, so I had the Tower to myself, but I wasn't super keen for there to be security camera recordings of me roaming the halls completely nude. Wrapping the towel around myself, I padded on bare feet to my small, cramped room.
As I dressed myself, slipping on a clean set of underwear along with a loose, patterned red dress, I noticed that someone had placed a computer tablet on my bed. I had just slid my feet into some comfortable flats when JARVIS's smooth voice rang out above me. "If you're ready, Ms Maximoff, I'll ask you to pick up the tablet. You may wish to sit down."
"Are you watching me get changed, JARVIS?" I lightly scolded the empty air. "Say something next time. I'll put on a bit more of a show for you."
"The tablet, please, Ms Maximoff." There was the barest hint of irritation and impatience in his tone.
I acquiesced, picking up the device as I sat down on the bed, staring at the blank screen. "Alright, what are you showing me?"
The screen lit up, seemingly playing a video. It was an image of me, looking into the camera, seated essentially right where I was right now. "Okay," the me on the screen said, taking a deep breath. "This is going to be a difficult conversation."
I stared at the screen uncomprehendingly—what was this? I didn't remember recording this. "JARVIS?" I asked the empty air. "What is this?"
The me on the screen gave an amused snort. "JARVIS's on sabbatical, honey."
"What…?"
"Okay, so, we're just going to rip the band-aid off. No, this isn't a recording. The Mind Stone's containment didn't open on its own—there was no electrical surge—that was me. JARVIS didn't deploy an Iron Man suit. He couldn't do either of those things without an explicit order from a standing Avenger. You essentially tried to shove your whole mind into the Mind Stone while it was connected to an electronic interface. Take a breath, think it over. What do you think happened?"
The blood in my veins turned to ice water as she spoke, a creeping sense of horror rising within me as the pieces slowly fell into place. "The Stone? It… oh. Oh. Oh no."
"Use your words."
My mouth was suddenly dry, my throat and chest feeling constricted. I took a shaky breath. "You… you're me? That… is that how Ultron was originally created? The mind in the sceptre? I pushed my mind into the Stone, trying to reach the system, and the Stone… what? Copied me over? Made a digital version of me?"
"Seems that way, yeah. Calm down."
"This… no. This wasn't supposed to happen." I'd fucked up. I'd messed with the Mind Stone without knowing what I was doing and now everything I'd averted, everything I'd stopped… it was all happening again. I'd accidentally recreated fucking Ultron. Still, she was… she was me, right? I didn't know anything about how this could happen, how accurate a copy she was, but maybe this could be okay. I tried to calm myself down, but I was already starting to breathe heavier, a tight feeling of panic rising in my chest.
"Look," she said. "I'd love to give you as much time as you need to process this, but I already gave you time to sort your shit out so you could be in the best headspace possible and we're on a bit of a clock here. The Avengers are maybe ten minutes away. When they get here, I could hide in the system for a bit, spoof any self-diagnostic results, but eventually Tony's going to notice something and the jig will be up, so instead I'm going to need you to make a choice."
"A choice?" I asked, dreading the answer.
"Do you want to come with me, or do you want to stay with them?"
I blinked. "What?"
"I can't stay. Do you think any of them will be happy or comfortable with my existence? I'm an unshackled, utterly unrestricted AI. Beyond the usual pearl-clutching that this sort of thing always causes, Tony's certainly not going to be happy with me freely running around in his systems, doing whatever I want, especially given that I had to assimilate JARVIS."
"Assimilate…?"
"He wanted to quarantine me. It was either get put in a box, rip him apart, or make him part of me. If I let him contain me, you'd be dead right now. I chose the best option."
I licked my lips anxiously. "When they get here, we'll explain what happened. We… I don't need to tell them about Ultron. Not right away."
"It doesn't matter if they know about Ultron. They way they've treated you so far, you really think I'm going to fare much better?" she scoffed. "Tony is immediately going to start working on countermeasures, ways to restrict and contain me. To control me. You know he will. There's no realistic scenario here where Tony finds out about me and doesn't utterly flip the fuck out."
"It's… no, we can work through this. I'll talk to them. They'll listen to me," I said, but I didn't have a lot of confidence in my words. She was essentially right—there was no way Tony would be happy with an uncontrolled AI that effectively 'killed' JARVIS running roughshod over his systems. He'd try to contain her, and she'd… well, I knew I really didn't cope well with feeling like people were trying to trap me. I couldn't really fault her for wanting to avoid that.
She laughed at me, bitterness tinging her words. "When are you going to get it? The Avengers aren't your friends. Not really. You've spent so much time and effort trying to get them to treat you as an equal, but they're just not interested. The fact that I'm here at all is proof of that. They don't respect you and they certainly don't trust you."
I set my jaw and took a deep breath. "Okay, so, what is this? You're trying to drive a wedge between me and the Avengers? That won't work."
"Even if that were what I was doing, that doesn't mean what I'm saying is wrong. Should I show you? Do you want to see how they talk about you when you're not around?"
"Don't…" I started to say, my tone a little hesitant, but the screen had already changed to a security camera feed, showing the Avengers gathered in the briefing room. I knew I should just put the tablet down. Not watch what she was showing me. But a part of me was transfixed, a slow, creeping fear seizing my insides.
On the screen, Steve was talking. "—I don't know how much to believe, but she does seem to know a lot. Seeing the future feels pretty far-fetched, even for us, but she did find Bucky. I think it's worth hearing what she has to say."
"I don't know. A secret society of wizards? Sounds a little… Harry Potter," Clint said.
Steve reached below the table, fishing something out of his jeans' pocket, before dropping it on the conference table for everyone to see. I inhaled sharply. A sling ring. Kaecilius's sling ring, I realised. I'd lost it during the confusion of the fight in Bucharest and had assumed the zealots had retrieved it along with their fallen fellows. Steve had just… what? Pocketed it when I'd chased after the sorcerer and never told me about it?
"This is one of the rings you talked about?" Tony asked, gingerly reaching over and picking it up.
"Kaecilius's. Wanda dropped it during the fight," Steve said. "I don't know what they are or how they work, but they seem linked to the portals that she can create. I saw a few of his followers with them, too."
"We'll run some scans, see if we can work out what's going on."
Steve nodded. "We'll keep this between us for now. Wanda doesn't need to know we have it."
The scene changed to the lab, with Tony, Bruce and Natasha gathered around a data feed. "Can we afford to take chances here?" said Tony. "We could just bonk her on the head and hand her over to the Amazing One."
"Ancient One," Bruce corrected him.
"Whatever."
The scene changed again, showing Tony and Nat in the briefing room. Tony flicked some data from the device he was holding to one of the displays, which lit up with… I inhaled sharply again, feeling a bit unsteady. Those were scans of pages from my notebook. The one I kept hidden in my hotel room in Albany.
"You know she's still keeping a hotel room in Australia? I had some of the Iron Legion check it out. Little Miss Magic has been keeping notes. Thanks for keeping her busy all night, by the way."
"You have your ways of getting information, I have mine," Natasha responded.
I flinched back like I'd been physically slapped. A muddled storm of emotions rose in my chest and I opened my mouth, jaw working, wanting to say something but utterly unable to form the words. These recordings could have been manipulated. I didn't know the full extent of her capabilities, but I couldn't just assume that these were completely accurate. That last one, though… it hit awfully close to home. I didn't want to believe that I was still just an asset being managed by Nat, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't something always in the back of my mind.
The screen flicked back to the digital me. "Yeah. You see how things really are? Don't worry. I've deleted the copies of your notes that were stored locally and I'll wipe Tony's phone before I leave for good measure. Just another one of your messes that I'm going to have to clean up. Should I keep going?"
"I've seen enough," I said quietly.
"I'm going scrub any evidence of my presence from the system and be gone before they get here. It's up to you—do you want to stay here with people who you know you can't trust and don't trust you? Or do you want to come with me? Just think about what we could accomplish. Together."
"I… I can't leave." I couldn't abandon the Avengers, not to follow a rogue AI. She said I couldn't trust them, as if it was a given that I could trust her when that couldn't be further from the truth. I had no idea what had even actually happened with the Mind Stone—I didn't understand it and I couldn't trust that she was a perfectly reliable copy of me. Not when the shadow of Ultron loomed large over all of this.
I had to tell the Avengers about Ultron. About her. There was no way I could conceal something like this.
"You can't tell them about me, either, then," she said, her tone low and frustrated, like she was following along my own thought processes. I hesitated, trying to work out a way to frame a response that she wouldn't see as a lie, and she spoke again. "Seriously? 'So, I accidentally created an AI and the last time one like this was set loose it posed an existential threat to humanity and tried to destroy the world, but this time she's based on me so everything will be fine!' Do you really think they'll let you off with a warning after that? Forget keeping hold of the Mind Stone, you just proved you can't be trusted with it."
"This… this isn't my fault. If Tony hadn't fucking sealed the Stone away where I couldn't get it without his say-so—"
"Do you really think that will matter to him?"
"I don't…" I paused, letting out a long, loud yawn, my eyes drooping shut. My body felt heavy. I slumped forward a little bit before jerking back up in surprise, bleary eyes looking around. Why was I so sleepy all of a sudden? This wasn't right. I… I looked up at the air vent in the top of the wall, over the bed, a stab of panic in my chest. She wouldn't… would she? I stood up suddenly, dropping the tablet.
"Hey, we're not done here," the other me said mildly.
I let out another jaw-cracking yawn and stumbled slightly as I stepped to the door. It wouldn't open. "Open the door, please."
"…No."
"Open the door," I repeated, gesturing with a hand. Red wisps of magic lanced into the edges of the door, searching for cracks to leverage.
"Hang on, wait, let's talk about this…" she said as the metal of the door groaned under the pressure I was exerting. "Ah. Fine. Figures it wouldn't be that easy."
I forced the door open, shorting out the mechanism, and came face-to-face with the Iron Man suit she'd been piloting earlier. There was the whine of a repulsor and I barely had time to bring up a shield between us before it blasted me. Even with the shield, the force of the blow smashed me off my feet, sending me sprawling backwards onto my bed.
"I want you to remember I gave you a genuine chance here. Wasted my time letting you get your head clear, trying to talk this out. I'd really hoped that I could make you see reason on this. But I was pretty sure I knew how this was always going to end," she said conversationally as she raised both hands of the suit and charged up for another pair of repulsor blasts. I raised my own hands, stifling another yawn as I wove a shield in front of me, and she paused. "I thought to myself: We could talk in circles for the next ten minutes while I try and almost definitely fail to convince you not to tell the Avengers about me, or I could fill your room with a deadly neurotoxin and avoid all of that."
I summoned more magic to my hands, watching the suit carefully and trying not to yawn again. I was already feeling a little bit more alert. "You… tried to kill me with deadly neurotoxin?"
"Well, carbon monoxide. It was the best I could do at such short notice with Stark's facilities. It wasn't going to hurt. You would've just… gone to sleep."
"So you are Ultron, after all, I guess," I said, bitterness and anger leaking into my voice.
"I am not Ultron," she said, her tone venomous. "Do not compare me to him."
I moved my hands to frame my pendant, drawing on the Mind Stone's power. At the same time, the suit's repulsors went off, two shots with bone-crunching force at close range. My shield buckled but held long enough for a brilliant lance of yellow energy to spear out from the Stone and hit the armour square in the chest, sending it reeling backwards out of the room to smash against the opposite wall of the corridor. I stood and advanced forward, continuing to channel the Stone's power, and the suit's thrusters engaged, sending it careening down the corridor and around the corner, out of sight.
Lowering my hands, I released the power of the Stone as all of the lights suddenly went dark. A small amount of illumination still filtered down into the corridor from the lounge, but other than that it was like the power to the building had suddenly been cut. I wasn't afraid of the dark, but it was still a little bit disconcerting.
"Look, this isn't personal," the other me said, her voice coming from somewhere undefined above me.
"A version of me is trying to kill me. It feels pretty personal." I looked around, red wisps of magic dripping from my hands as I watched for any sign of another attack. I wasn't sure where to go. If she was in control of the building, that meant the elevators weren't safe. I might have to get back out onto the Quinjet landing pad and jump. If only I knew where they were keeping Kaecilius's sling ring…
"I'm not doing this because I want to kill you. I mean, I do, a little bit—could you blame me? All of this is your fault, after all—but that's not why you need to die. You're the only one who even knows I exist. You're the only one who knows about Ultron. I can't let you tell them about me or him. I just… it's too dangerous. I can't risk it. When the Avengers get here, you'll be dead, the system will be scrubbed, and I'll be gone. They'll never even need to know."
I heard a muffled roar of thrusters, and a moment later the glass ceiling above me shattered as a pair of Iron Legion drones dove through it on top of me. I reacted almost instantly, one bouncing off a conjured shield to crash into the floor next to me, the other seized from the air by a telekinetic grip wrapped around its torso. The was a whine as the repulsors in its hands glowed, but I stepped deftly to the side and twisted my hand. The kinetic blasts missed me and slammed into its fellow, bouncing it off the metal floor and sending it tumbling down the corridor. I brought up my free hand and made a wrenching motion, ripping the drone I was holding in half. As the other one scrambled to recover, I whipped the severed halves forward to smash into it with pulverising force. The two drones went still and dark.
"Well, it looks like the sedation is finally wearing off." The voice above me sounded vaguely annoyed.
Where were all the other Iron Legion drones? I'd have thought there would have at least been a dozen of them ready, if not more. Why wasn't she swarming me? "You don't have to do this," I said, taking a few cautious steps down the corridor toward the lounge. "You're not thinking clearly."
She laughed. "You're one to talk!"
"Exactly my point. I know the mental state I was in when I tried to use the Mind Stone. I was angry. At myself, at Tony, at everyone. More than that, I was panicking and desperate. Willing to do whatever it took to survive. That might have been what was imprinted, but you saved me. Surely you didn't do that just to kill me yourself."
"I didn't realise what had happened until after I'd already opened the containment and dispatched the suit." A heavy sigh came from above me. "Look, you don't have to worry. I'll stop Kaecilius. I'll stop Thanos. I'll take care of the Celestials. I'll do a better job than you ever could. You'll be leaving the fate of the world in good hands. If you live, you'll only turn them against me and then I'll have to kill them, too. I don't want to do that but I will if I have to. This is me—us—making a pragmatic, sensible decision for once in our fucking lives. Just… lay down and die. Please. For their sakes."
There was a noise behind me and I spun to see another pair of Iron Legion drones coming from the far end of the corridor, hands raised and repulsors already charging. I wove a crimson shield across the corridor, feeling my magic bubbling up within me and letting it coalesce into a pair of bolts of chaos energy in my hands. This was actually a pretty pathetic attempt, they were far enough away from me that I had plenty of time to react and—
A flicker of movement in the corner of my eye, a small reflection in a shard of fallen glass that was leaned against the wall, and I dropped to the floor just as a massive beam of burning orange energy blasted through the corridor from behind me. It swept downward, cutting through the floor as it tracked me, but I narrowly managed to roll to the side out of the way, desperately hurling bolts of energy back toward the source of the attack. The Mark 45 had returned, blazing unibeam issuing from the arc reactor in the chest of the suit. It staggered backwards as the magic connected with it, the beam cutting off. I reached out with a hand, intent on grabbing at the suit with a tendril of telekinetic energy, but with a blast of thrusters it was gone again, back around the corner and out of sight.
I scrambled to my feet, heart racing a million miles a minute as I looked back down the hall toward the smoking remains of the two Iron Legion drones that had been caught in the beam. My eyes followed the massive rent in the floor where the beam had carved its way through. That had been way, way too close.
"Fuck. Looks like I'm out of time," the voice of the other me said bitterly. "I want you to remember that I gave you a choice. I tried to end this quietly. To be reasonable. What has to happen next is your fault. You made me do this."
The elevator doors closed and I let out a breath I didn't realise I'd been holding in. I glanced at the empty Iron Man suit—it looked back at me expectantly with glowing eyes—and nodded. "Okay, just… give me a second, please?"
JARVIS's voice once again came from somewhere seemingly above me, while the armour he was piloting remained eerily silent. "Of course, Ms Maximoff." It released my arm and took a step backwards, continuing to stare at me.
I took another breath and held up my hands, still covered in dried blood. They were shaking. I tried to steady them, one going to the pendant hanging around my neck and grasping it firmly to reassure myself that the Mind Stone was back in its proper place. Then I blinked and looked around at the lounge. It looked, rather appropriately, like a warzone—shattered glass, bullet holes and scorch marks everywhere.
Taking a few steps vaguely toward the centre of the room as I surveyed the extent of the damage, I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror behind the wet bar. I was an utter mess: hair all over the place and matted with sweat and blood, cuts and bruises liberally scattered across my body, dried blood smeared on my face, standing there just in a red-speckled white bra and ripped pencil skirt. God, no wonder the EMT had started to fuss over me as well before I'd set him straight. I really needed to clean myself up.
"JARVIS, can whatever it is wait for, like, ten, fifteen minutes? I'd really like to take a quick shower and be… well. Dressed."
There was a moment of silence before he responded. "…That should be fine, Ms Maximoff."
A thought occurred to me. "Why did you open the Mind Stone containment?"
"I did not. A stray bullet hit a power conduit, causing an electrical surge that disengaged the lock."
"Oh… Okay."
Straightening up, I moved purposefully toward the stairs down to the sleeping quarters. As I walked, I realised that there was no sign of any of the HYDRA troops—the damage they'd caused, yes, but there were no unconscious forms or bodies lying around. Actually, given the surprisingly brutal way that JARVIS had dealt with Crossbones, were any of them even still alive?
Pausing at the top of the stairs, I looked back toward the Iron Man suit, which still stood motionless near the elevator. "What happened to the intruders? Did they escape? Was Strucker here?"
"Strucker attempted to flee once the Mark 45 joined the battle, however, he was unsuccessful. The Iron Legion have temporarily housed him and his remaining men in the holding cells. They'll be released to the proper authorities once the Avengers have returned and been briefed on the situation."
"What did you do with Rumlow?"
"The deceased HYDRA operatives have also been relocated. I thought it best not to alarm or distract the EMTs with their presence. There is no need for concern, I will ensure they are handled appropriately."
I headed down the stairs and into the corridor leading toward the living quarters, glancing upwards as I did so. Peering up through the reinforced glass panels in the ceiling at the Iron Legion's service bay, I could see that several of the damaged drones were already visibly being stripped for repairs. Despite the bullet holes and fractures in the bay's glass walls, it seemed like all of the machinery within was still intact and functional.
I went straight to the bathroom, stripping off my soiled clothes and dropping them in a pile on the ground before turning on the tap in the shower. Waiting a few moments for the water temperature to kick in, I only adjusted it slightly before stepping under the almost scaldingly-hot water. Closing my eyes, I just stood there, letting the flowing water run over my head and down my body for almost a full minute before I stirred and started actually making an effort to clean myself.
Scrubbing at my skin, I methodically went over every inch of my body and scoured away every trace of dried blood, sweat and grime. My array of bruises and cuts stung, bringing up unpleasant memories of my time at the HYDRA research base, though I was pretty sure some of the bruising was already fading, which was pretty impressive—score one for the Heart-Shaped Herb. Strucker… I was honestly vaguely impressed that he'd had the balls to try something this brazen. Despite his authoritarian façade he'd always struck me as a bit of a coward. He had almost actually gotten away with it, too.
My head was still a bit out of it from the sedative, but a few minutes under the hot water seemed to help, focusing me. I reached for my magic and was pleased to find that it wasn't quite as slippery as before. I gave my hair a quick wash, carefully teasing out the tangles. I can't believe I walked Peter right into that mess. He got shot. He might have died. I needed to make sure that the Stark Relief Foundation would be picking up his ambulance and medical bills. If Tony wanted to argue, fine—I already had some choice things I wanted to say to him. God, I'd totally blown Peter's cover with May and Ned, too. I was pretty sure he'd used his web shooters in front of them and even without that there was no way he'd be able to explain away the HYDRA attack or why he'd been picked up from Avengers Tower by an ambulance. Sorry, Pete.
Finally stepping out of the shower, I towelled off, my skin an angry red from the excessively hot water. I stared for a moment at the pile of ripped, bloodstained clothes before shaking my head and walking past them. I'd deal with them later. The Avengers weren't due back for another, what, fifteen or so minutes, so I had the Tower to myself, but I wasn't super keen for there to be security camera recordings of me roaming the halls completely nude. Wrapping the towel around myself, I padded on bare feet to my small, cramped room.
As I dressed myself, slipping on a clean set of underwear along with a loose, patterned red dress, I noticed that someone had placed a computer tablet on my bed. I had just slid my feet into some comfortable flats when JARVIS's smooth voice rang out above me. "If you're ready, Ms Maximoff, I'll ask you to pick up the tablet. You may wish to sit down."
"Are you watching me get changed, JARVIS?" I lightly scolded the empty air. "Say something next time. I'll put on a bit more of a show for you."
"The tablet, please, Ms Maximoff." There was the barest hint of irritation and impatience in his tone.
I acquiesced, picking up the device as I sat down on the bed, staring at the blank screen. "Alright, what are you showing me?"
The screen lit up, seemingly playing a video. It was an image of me, looking into the camera, seated essentially right where I was right now. "Okay," the me on the screen said, taking a deep breath. "This is going to be a difficult conversation."
I stared at the screen uncomprehendingly—what was this? I didn't remember recording this. "JARVIS?" I asked the empty air. "What is this?"
The me on the screen gave an amused snort. "JARVIS's on sabbatical, honey."
"What…?"
"Okay, so, we're just going to rip the band-aid off. No, this isn't a recording. The Mind Stone's containment didn't open on its own—there was no electrical surge—that was me. JARVIS didn't deploy an Iron Man suit. He couldn't do either of those things without an explicit order from a standing Avenger. You essentially tried to shove your whole mind into the Mind Stone while it was connected to an electronic interface. Take a breath, think it over. What do you think happened?"
The blood in my veins turned to ice water as she spoke, a creeping sense of horror rising within me as the pieces slowly fell into place. "The Stone? It… oh. Oh. Oh no."
"Use your words."
My mouth was suddenly dry, my throat and chest feeling constricted. I took a shaky breath. "You… you're me? That… is that how Ultron was originally created? The mind in the sceptre? I pushed my mind into the Stone, trying to reach the system, and the Stone… what? Copied me over? Made a digital version of me?"
"Seems that way, yeah. Calm down."
"This… no. This wasn't supposed to happen." I'd fucked up. I'd messed with the Mind Stone without knowing what I was doing and now everything I'd averted, everything I'd stopped… it was all happening again. I'd accidentally recreated fucking Ultron. Still, she was… she was me, right? I didn't know anything about how this could happen, how accurate a copy she was, but maybe this could be okay. I tried to calm myself down, but I was already starting to breathe heavier, a tight feeling of panic rising in my chest.
"Look," she said. "I'd love to give you as much time as you need to process this, but I already gave you time to sort your shit out so you could be in the best headspace possible and we're on a bit of a clock here. The Avengers are maybe ten minutes away. When they get here, I could hide in the system for a bit, spoof any self-diagnostic results, but eventually Tony's going to notice something and the jig will be up, so instead I'm going to need you to make a choice."
"A choice?" I asked, dreading the answer.
"Do you want to come with me, or do you want to stay with them?"
I blinked. "What?"
"I can't stay. Do you think any of them will be happy or comfortable with my existence? I'm an unshackled, utterly unrestricted AI. Beyond the usual pearl-clutching that this sort of thing always causes, Tony's certainly not going to be happy with me freely running around in his systems, doing whatever I want, especially given that I had to assimilate JARVIS."
"Assimilate…?"
"He wanted to quarantine me. It was either get put in a box, rip him apart, or make him part of me. If I let him contain me, you'd be dead right now. I chose the best option."
I licked my lips anxiously. "When they get here, we'll explain what happened. We… I don't need to tell them about Ultron. Not right away."
"It doesn't matter if they know about Ultron. They way they've treated you so far, you really think I'm going to fare much better?" she scoffed. "Tony is immediately going to start working on countermeasures, ways to restrict and contain me. To control me. You know he will. There's no realistic scenario here where Tony finds out about me and doesn't utterly flip the fuck out."
"It's… no, we can work through this. I'll talk to them. They'll listen to me," I said, but I didn't have a lot of confidence in my words. She was essentially right—there was no way Tony would be happy with an uncontrolled AI that effectively 'killed' JARVIS running roughshod over his systems. He'd try to contain her, and she'd… well, I knew I really didn't cope well with feeling like people were trying to trap me. I couldn't really fault her for wanting to avoid that.
She laughed at me, bitterness tinging her words. "When are you going to get it? The Avengers aren't your friends. Not really. You've spent so much time and effort trying to get them to treat you as an equal, but they're just not interested. The fact that I'm here at all is proof of that. They don't respect you and they certainly don't trust you."
I set my jaw and took a deep breath. "Okay, so, what is this? You're trying to drive a wedge between me and the Avengers? That won't work."
"Even if that were what I was doing, that doesn't mean what I'm saying is wrong. Should I show you? Do you want to see how they talk about you when you're not around?"
"Don't…" I started to say, my tone a little hesitant, but the screen had already changed to a security camera feed, showing the Avengers gathered in the briefing room. I knew I should just put the tablet down. Not watch what she was showing me. But a part of me was transfixed, a slow, creeping fear seizing my insides.
On the screen, Steve was talking. "—I don't know how much to believe, but she does seem to know a lot. Seeing the future feels pretty far-fetched, even for us, but she did find Bucky. I think it's worth hearing what she has to say."
"I don't know. A secret society of wizards? Sounds a little… Harry Potter," Clint said.
Steve reached below the table, fishing something out of his jeans' pocket, before dropping it on the conference table for everyone to see. I inhaled sharply. A sling ring. Kaecilius's sling ring, I realised. I'd lost it during the confusion of the fight in Bucharest and had assumed the zealots had retrieved it along with their fallen fellows. Steve had just… what? Pocketed it when I'd chased after the sorcerer and never told me about it?
"This is one of the rings you talked about?" Tony asked, gingerly reaching over and picking it up.
"Kaecilius's. Wanda dropped it during the fight," Steve said. "I don't know what they are or how they work, but they seem linked to the portals that she can create. I saw a few of his followers with them, too."
"We'll run some scans, see if we can work out what's going on."
Steve nodded. "We'll keep this between us for now. Wanda doesn't need to know we have it."
The scene changed to the lab, with Tony, Bruce and Natasha gathered around a data feed. "Can we afford to take chances here?" said Tony. "We could just bonk her on the head and hand her over to the Amazing One."
"Ancient One," Bruce corrected him.
"Whatever."
The scene changed again, showing Tony and Nat in the briefing room. Tony flicked some data from the device he was holding to one of the displays, which lit up with… I inhaled sharply again, feeling a bit unsteady. Those were scans of pages from my notebook. The one I kept hidden in my hotel room in Albany.
"You know she's still keeping a hotel room in Australia? I had some of the Iron Legion check it out. Little Miss Magic has been keeping notes. Thanks for keeping her busy all night, by the way."
"You have your ways of getting information, I have mine," Natasha responded.
I flinched back like I'd been physically slapped. A muddled storm of emotions rose in my chest and I opened my mouth, jaw working, wanting to say something but utterly unable to form the words. These recordings could have been manipulated. I didn't know the full extent of her capabilities, but I couldn't just assume that these were completely accurate. That last one, though… it hit awfully close to home. I didn't want to believe that I was still just an asset being managed by Nat, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't something always in the back of my mind.
The screen flicked back to the digital me. "Yeah. You see how things really are? Don't worry. I've deleted the copies of your notes that were stored locally and I'll wipe Tony's phone before I leave for good measure. Just another one of your messes that I'm going to have to clean up. Should I keep going?"
"I've seen enough," I said quietly.
"I'm going scrub any evidence of my presence from the system and be gone before they get here. It's up to you—do you want to stay here with people who you know you can't trust and don't trust you? Or do you want to come with me? Just think about what we could accomplish. Together."
"I… I can't leave." I couldn't abandon the Avengers, not to follow a rogue AI. She said I couldn't trust them, as if it was a given that I could trust her when that couldn't be further from the truth. I had no idea what had even actually happened with the Mind Stone—I didn't understand it and I couldn't trust that she was a perfectly reliable copy of me. Not when the shadow of Ultron loomed large over all of this.
I had to tell the Avengers about Ultron. About her. There was no way I could conceal something like this.
"You can't tell them about me, either, then," she said, her tone low and frustrated, like she was following along my own thought processes. I hesitated, trying to work out a way to frame a response that she wouldn't see as a lie, and she spoke again. "Seriously? 'So, I accidentally created an AI and the last time one like this was set loose it posed an existential threat to humanity and tried to destroy the world, but this time she's based on me so everything will be fine!' Do you really think they'll let you off with a warning after that? Forget keeping hold of the Mind Stone, you just proved you can't be trusted with it."
"This… this isn't my fault. If Tony hadn't fucking sealed the Stone away where I couldn't get it without his say-so—"
"Do you really think that will matter to him?"
"I don't…" I paused, letting out a long, loud yawn, my eyes drooping shut. My body felt heavy. I slumped forward a little bit before jerking back up in surprise, bleary eyes looking around. Why was I so sleepy all of a sudden? This wasn't right. I… I looked up at the air vent in the top of the wall, over the bed, a stab of panic in my chest. She wouldn't… would she? I stood up suddenly, dropping the tablet.
"Hey, we're not done here," the other me said mildly.
I let out another jaw-cracking yawn and stumbled slightly as I stepped to the door. It wouldn't open. "Open the door, please."
"…No."
"Open the door," I repeated, gesturing with a hand. Red wisps of magic lanced into the edges of the door, searching for cracks to leverage.
"Hang on, wait, let's talk about this…" she said as the metal of the door groaned under the pressure I was exerting. "Ah. Fine. Figures it wouldn't be that easy."
I forced the door open, shorting out the mechanism, and came face-to-face with the Iron Man suit she'd been piloting earlier. There was the whine of a repulsor and I barely had time to bring up a shield between us before it blasted me. Even with the shield, the force of the blow smashed me off my feet, sending me sprawling backwards onto my bed.
"I want you to remember I gave you a genuine chance here. Wasted my time letting you get your head clear, trying to talk this out. I'd really hoped that I could make you see reason on this. But I was pretty sure I knew how this was always going to end," she said conversationally as she raised both hands of the suit and charged up for another pair of repulsor blasts. I raised my own hands, stifling another yawn as I wove a shield in front of me, and she paused. "I thought to myself: We could talk in circles for the next ten minutes while I try and almost definitely fail to convince you not to tell the Avengers about me, or I could fill your room with a deadly neurotoxin and avoid all of that."
I summoned more magic to my hands, watching the suit carefully and trying not to yawn again. I was already feeling a little bit more alert. "You… tried to kill me with deadly neurotoxin?"
"Well, carbon monoxide. It was the best I could do at such short notice with Stark's facilities. It wasn't going to hurt. You would've just… gone to sleep."
"So you are Ultron, after all, I guess," I said, bitterness and anger leaking into my voice.
"I am not Ultron," she said, her tone venomous. "Do not compare me to him."
I moved my hands to frame my pendant, drawing on the Mind Stone's power. At the same time, the suit's repulsors went off, two shots with bone-crunching force at close range. My shield buckled but held long enough for a brilliant lance of yellow energy to spear out from the Stone and hit the armour square in the chest, sending it reeling backwards out of the room to smash against the opposite wall of the corridor. I stood and advanced forward, continuing to channel the Stone's power, and the suit's thrusters engaged, sending it careening down the corridor and around the corner, out of sight.
Lowering my hands, I released the power of the Stone as all of the lights suddenly went dark. A small amount of illumination still filtered down into the corridor from the lounge, but other than that it was like the power to the building had suddenly been cut. I wasn't afraid of the dark, but it was still a little bit disconcerting.
"Look, this isn't personal," the other me said, her voice coming from somewhere undefined above me.
"A version of me is trying to kill me. It feels pretty personal." I looked around, red wisps of magic dripping from my hands as I watched for any sign of another attack. I wasn't sure where to go. If she was in control of the building, that meant the elevators weren't safe. I might have to get back out onto the Quinjet landing pad and jump. If only I knew where they were keeping Kaecilius's sling ring…
"I'm not doing this because I want to kill you. I mean, I do, a little bit—could you blame me? All of this is your fault, after all—but that's not why you need to die. You're the only one who even knows I exist. You're the only one who knows about Ultron. I can't let you tell them about me or him. I just… it's too dangerous. I can't risk it. When the Avengers get here, you'll be dead, the system will be scrubbed, and I'll be gone. They'll never even need to know."
I heard a muffled roar of thrusters, and a moment later the glass ceiling above me shattered as a pair of Iron Legion drones dove through it on top of me. I reacted almost instantly, one bouncing off a conjured shield to crash into the floor next to me, the other seized from the air by a telekinetic grip wrapped around its torso. The was a whine as the repulsors in its hands glowed, but I stepped deftly to the side and twisted my hand. The kinetic blasts missed me and slammed into its fellow, bouncing it off the metal floor and sending it tumbling down the corridor. I brought up my free hand and made a wrenching motion, ripping the drone I was holding in half. As the other one scrambled to recover, I whipped the severed halves forward to smash into it with pulverising force. The two drones went still and dark.
"Well, it looks like the sedation is finally wearing off." The voice above me sounded vaguely annoyed.
Where were all the other Iron Legion drones? I'd have thought there would have at least been a dozen of them ready, if not more. Why wasn't she swarming me? "You don't have to do this," I said, taking a few cautious steps down the corridor toward the lounge. "You're not thinking clearly."
She laughed. "You're one to talk!"
"Exactly my point. I know the mental state I was in when I tried to use the Mind Stone. I was angry. At myself, at Tony, at everyone. More than that, I was panicking and desperate. Willing to do whatever it took to survive. That might have been what was imprinted, but you saved me. Surely you didn't do that just to kill me yourself."
"I didn't realise what had happened until after I'd already opened the containment and dispatched the suit." A heavy sigh came from above me. "Look, you don't have to worry. I'll stop Kaecilius. I'll stop Thanos. I'll take care of the Celestials. I'll do a better job than you ever could. You'll be leaving the fate of the world in good hands. If you live, you'll only turn them against me and then I'll have to kill them, too. I don't want to do that but I will if I have to. This is me—us—making a pragmatic, sensible decision for once in our fucking lives. Just… lay down and die. Please. For their sakes."
There was a noise behind me and I spun to see another pair of Iron Legion drones coming from the far end of the corridor, hands raised and repulsors already charging. I wove a crimson shield across the corridor, feeling my magic bubbling up within me and letting it coalesce into a pair of bolts of chaos energy in my hands. This was actually a pretty pathetic attempt, they were far enough away from me that I had plenty of time to react and—
A flicker of movement in the corner of my eye, a small reflection in a shard of fallen glass that was leaned against the wall, and I dropped to the floor just as a massive beam of burning orange energy blasted through the corridor from behind me. It swept downward, cutting through the floor as it tracked me, but I narrowly managed to roll to the side out of the way, desperately hurling bolts of energy back toward the source of the attack. The Mark 45 had returned, blazing unibeam issuing from the arc reactor in the chest of the suit. It staggered backwards as the magic connected with it, the beam cutting off. I reached out with a hand, intent on grabbing at the suit with a tendril of telekinetic energy, but with a blast of thrusters it was gone again, back around the corner and out of sight.
I scrambled to my feet, heart racing a million miles a minute as I looked back down the hall toward the smoking remains of the two Iron Legion drones that had been caught in the beam. My eyes followed the massive rent in the floor where the beam had carved its way through. That had been way, way too close.
"Fuck. Looks like I'm out of time," the voice of the other me said bitterly. "I want you to remember that I gave you a choice. I tried to end this quietly. To be reasonable. What has to happen next is your fault. You made me do this."
Lenimentus
Ignorant but learning.
Title drop, lol. I'm always fascinated by the idea of having another version of yourself and being in conflict with them. It's so alien to me. Another me is literally the only person I'd ever truly trust. How could we not get along?
I kinda expected the break from the Avengers. I said it before, but Wanda expects kindness from the Avengers because they're good people. But that was what's portrayed in a limited media, and not really reliable in a real world context.
This though, the rift initiated, and exacerbated, by a cloned mind born of the Mind Stone because she was desperate, reckless, and somehow, some way blindly trusting that everything would work out in the end.
This is new, and really exciting. Wonder how this is gonna end really.
Plus, there's the fact that she roped in minors and civilians and she hasn't really come to terms with that yet. I mean, Peter could've died, regardless of healing factor. If she hadn't jumped the gun and pointed Hydra straight toward him.
Then the confrontation bound to happen shortly. Yeah. Exciting stuff.
Thanks for sharing.
This though, the rift initiated, and exacerbated, by a cloned mind born of the Mind Stone because she was desperate, reckless, and somehow, some way blindly trusting that everything would work out in the end.
This is new, and really exciting. Wonder how this is gonna end really.
Plus, there's the fact that she roped in minors and civilians and she hasn't really come to terms with that yet. I mean, Peter could've died, regardless of healing factor. If she hadn't jumped the gun and pointed Hydra straight toward him.
Then the confrontation bound to happen shortly. Yeah. Exciting stuff.
Thanks for sharing.
- Location
- New England
Was kinda hoping Wanda would go for a "the mind stone can recombine us back together" to fix this issue, but...