𝐀𝐈𝐑 𝐁𝐋𝐀𝐃𝐄 » avengers x reader

84. Confusing Peace With Quiet

We hadn't had a wink of sleep trying to track Ultron's next moves. The group, minus Rhodes and Helen Cho who had departed during the night met in the lab once again waiting for news on Ultron.

We knew Steve was out with Maria, likely gathering intel on Ultron and the Scepter's whereabouts. Meanwhile, I spent the night wondering what Tony was thinking.

"What drove you to create such a lost creature?" I asked him sincerely.

"Lost." He scoffed. "I explained this earlier. We can't do all of the heavy lifting. There are some things we will never be able to deal with and that's what Ultron was supposed to take care of."

"You keep mentioning New York. I thought you were over that. I thought you got help with that. You destroyed all of your suits for Pepper, remember?" I tried to get the truth out of him. I knew he was holding something back.

"New York has been playing on my mind like a broken record every day since," he explained, but I believed it to be something more.

"We can't always rely on technology to fight our battles as much as you want to. We've been trusted enough by the world to protect them so I think we should do it," I lectured him.

"She's right," Bruce backed me. "We were nowhere finished with the coding and I doubt that even our two brains combined would've been able to create such a complex AI."

"If we had more time I believe it could've worked," Tony felt.

"And by more time you mean years? Do you even know the endless contingency codes we'd have had to create in order to make sure Ultron didn't take any commands out of context?" Bruce brought up.

"Yeah, you didn't even think to make sure Ultron wouldn't come after us regardless of the circumstances," Natasha chipped in.

"Don't you think that says something about us? About this team?" Tony theorized.

"No, no, no. We are not the problem here, Stark." Thor clarified.

"Well, that's not what Ultron seems to think," Tony argued.

I shook my head. "That's not what you seem to think," I corrected him. "Ultron is made from your brain. He reflects your own insecurities, and maybe a bit of Bruce's."

Tony dropped his head realizing what he had done. I didn't want to make him the scapegoat, but the truth was he was overthinking and getting into his own head, now the entire team had to suffer the consequences.

Steve and Clint rejoined the group as he handed Thor the tablet with a picture on it. Thor looked before slamming it into Tony's chest. I peered over his shoulder to check the image out, "What is this?"

"A message." Rogers disclosed, "Ultron killed Strucker."

It was a photo of Baron Wolfgang Strucker's lifeless body leaning up against a wall. On the wall above him was the word 'PEACE' painted in Strucker's own blood. We assumed the culprit was Ultron himself.

"And he did a Banksy at the crime scene just for us," Tony remarked as he passed the tablet on to Bruce.

"This is a smokescreen," Natasha called out. "Why send a message when you've just given a speech?"

"Strucker knew something that Ultron wanted us to miss," Steve assumed.

"Like what?" I questioned as Natasha began typing away at her laptop.

"Yep. Everything we had on Strucker has been erased," he revealed.

"Not everything," Steve reassured as he instructed us to search through all of the hard copy files we had on Strucker.