Bed of Roses [N. Romanoff]

Chapter 10

           

Bailey helped James Rhodes into a chair next to where Maria sat.

When he waved her off, signalling that he's fine on his own, she joined Nat by the wall with her arms crossed.

"Isn't that Clint's?" she asked Natasha, nudging her elbow to the jacket the woman now wore.

"Shush," she ignored and focused on where Tony stood, leaning over the area where the sceptre once laid.

"All our work is gone..." Bruce choked out from the monitors. "Ultron cleared out. He used the internet as an escape hatch."

"Ultron," Steve repeated with disappointment in his voice, sighing.

"He's been in everything. Files, surveillance. Probably knows more about us than we know about each other." With the end of her little speech, Nat looked over to Clint and then glanced at Bailey.

Bax then let her head drop, and eyes fell to the floor while her hair covered any emotion she held.

"He's in your files, he's in the internet," Rhodey stood up and started walking across the room.

"What do you think you're doing...?" Bailey ran to grab him.

He shrugged her hand off, and instead held his arms close to him as he continued on. Bailey looked back to Nat with a somewhat hurt facial expression at which the assassin supreme softly chuckled at.

"What if he decides to access something a little more exciting?"

"Nuclear codes," Maria spoke up.

"Nuclear codes," the man agreed, body language full of worry. "Look we need to make some calls, assuming we still can," he now spoke to Tony instead of the room.

Both Tony and Bailey pulled out their phones, but that did not benefit the situation at all as the only thing that lit up was the glitches scattering on her screen. She banged the phone onto her leg, but instead the screen went black and no sound came out of it.

She looked up at Tony whom she presumed had just witnessed the same thing with his own Cell.

"Nukes? He said he wanted us dead," Nat asked, confused.

"He didn't say 'dead'. He said 'extinct'," Rogers corrected her.

"He also said he killed somebody," Clint locked his jaw, and stepped closer to the group and out of the light.

"There wasn't anyone else in the building," Maria raised her hand up for an explanation.

"Yes, there was," Bailey said as realisation dawned in her mind. There was someone she and Tony had both tried speaking to that was non-responsive.

"Right," Tony said with so much defeat.

He pulled out the tablet-card thingy that Bailey really needed to learn the name of, and tapped into the air where a diagram of Jarvis's mainframe fell out of.

The group grew silent, a rare occasion that Bailey usually loved but now felt awkward and frankly, frightened.

"What?" Bruce asked in sadness, and walked over to examine the once-was greatest creation, "this is insane..."

"Jarvis was the first line of defence," Steve identified the diagram.

"He would've shut Ultron down," Bailey caught on.

"It makes sense," the odd monotone of Steve Rogers concluded.

"No," Bruce immediately denied their theory, "Ultron could have assimilated Jarvis. This isn't strategy.  This is... rage."