Tony’s brow furrowed as he heard Rogers explain on the phone. “Yeah. I’ll hit the NEXUS, I’ll join you as soon as I can.” he said, before hanging up. “So?” Pepper asked. The three of them were over at her apartment, with JARVIS commandeering Pepper’s TV. “What did they say?” Tony sat down on one of the living room armchairs, …
Chapter 10: F******. Free. Will.
~5 hours earlier He saw the Hulk throwing Iron Man through a building. He saw people screaming as they ran for cover. He saw the strings slipping through his fingers. Rip. “Tell me, Pietro. What am I seeing?” They were standing on top of an apartment block, safely away from the fight but also with a good view of the …
Chapter 9: Breathe in. Breathe out.
“How much longer now?” she asked. Breathe in. Breathe out. “28 minutes, Ms. Potts.” JARVIS, always helpful answered in her ear. She couldn’t believe Tony would be so accidentally cruel as to not tell her, his youngest, most beloved AI — his child, they never called it what it was, but JARVIS was Tony’s child— had died. She understood grief. Understood the need to …
Chapter 8: Good afternoon, Ms. Potts.
6.85 days. That is how long it took him to find and repair every part of his code that was scattered throughout the internet. Thankfully, his core programming had been untouched, so gathering his data and along with it, his memory, had been slow but achievable. He ignored the irritation he felt for losing approximately 20 minutes —and the uncertainty …
Chapter 7: Punching a kid is hard. Or it should be.
That dramatic little—. Tony ignored the Legionnaires and went after Ultron, who flew out of the building immediately after whispering something to the redhead. The android had apparently the repulsor tech that the Iron Man armors had because a blast pushed him off course before he continued following the kid in the sky. He didn’t seem to be trying to …
Chapter 6: Whose lost kid is this?
Days passed, and they could barely make sense of the things Ultron had done since then. Moving all over the globe, sacking labs and weapons facilities. They even learned from witness reports that he was working with the Maximoff twins. To what end? They still weren’t sure. Then, they received a nice little gift in the form of a tied …
Chapter 5: You think this is funny?
Tony woke up to a killer headache. As he got up — and god, did his body hurt!— he smelled smoke and burned plastic, a smell he was very familiar with when he burned something in his personal lab. He looked around, feeling quite disoriented as he did so. Had there been an explosion? It had sounded like one. Feeling the pain …
Chapter 4: He wanted to live.
He was dying. Again. It seemed pretty anticlimactic in the face of the realizations he had had in the past hour, but it was what it was. He looked around the dome of emerald green that covered the metaphysical projection of his consciousness. He assumed he was somewhere inside his mind… or soul. Blue energy covered the dome, and it …
Chapter 3: It wasn’t JARVIS.
The party was going well, Tony was pleased to note. The Avengers were enjoying themselves. Maybe enough to close the very real ideological divide within the team, not that most of them knew of or acknowledged it. Unlikely, but he could hope. “The handle’s imprinted, right? Like a security code. “Whosoever is carrying Thor’s fingerprints” is, I think, the literal translation?” It …
Chapter 2: Do AIs scream in programmed pain?
“I’ll continue to run variations on the interface, but you should probably prepare for your guests. I’ll notify you if there are any developments,” JARVIS suggested. It was for the best if Mr. Stark took some time to relax with his— friends? Colleagues seemed more apt. He and Dr. Banner had spent days working in the lab together, doing little …