When The War Dies Down

Chapter 11

AN: I know I've been gone, and I don't have another chapter ready for IronWidow and Spiderson, but here you go!

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When they got back from Hawaii, they were bombarded with news.

"You have 1784 new messages boss, how would you like me to organize them?" Jarvis asked.

"How many are actually pressing?"

"The others," Jarvis' voice held no amount of softness at all, "wish to schedule a talk with you. They want your help finding Sam."

Tony looked at the others, and they shrugged. "Call then up, you know where they are J? Let's get this done with."

"I've put the address up on the screen and their past locations, calling them now Boss."

"Tony." Natasha's voice was cold.

"Romanoff." Tony's said, voice even colder than hers.

"We need your help." Clint said over the phone.

"And why would we help you?" Rhodey asked.

"Because it's about Sam."

"What about Sam?" Rhodey glanced at Sam, who was shuffling nervously. He wasn't sure if he was ready, and Rhodey wouldn't let them attack him. Not now. Not ever.

"He's gone. We're not sure if he's hurt, and we know how to find him if you provide us a computer." Natasha told them

"Just steal one." Scott told her. "You guys seem to do that often anyways."

"You can't steal SI's computers. You can't hack them." Clint said.

"I'll take that as a compliment to birdbrain. But no, I'm not giving you an SI product so you can hack into other places. It's against what I believe in." Tony double tapped his glasses, and was reading an article nonchalantly.

"When are you not okay with hacking?" Wanda inquired.

"Since that huge data breach that happened while you've been gone, that someone, oh, it must've been SI, was told to investigate and it led back to you guys."

The same data breach that chased hundreds of active SHIELD (innocent) agents' locations to be released onto the open internet, for their names and information to be compromised, and for every SHIELD and trusted SI worker to do overtime to ensure that the agents didn't die. Tony and Bruce had stayed up eighty hours straight making sure the mess was contained and sending new addresses for the agents to go to. Sharon Carter has also been with them, calling the agents she knew where gone, and closing all access to the information. Nick and Phil has been containing the mess that it caused. Still, even after their immediate response to the situation, thirty completely innocent agents died within those days.

"People died." Bucky added. "Innocent scrubbed clean Hydra agents. People I knew." His voice was void of any emotion.

"Bucky? Are you okay? Is Tony forcing you to say this?" Steve finally added his voice into the conversation.

"Stevie. You think I couldn't kill him if I really wanted to? I could just sneak into his room in the middle of the night and slit his neck, you really think I'm staying with him because of blackmail?"

"No, but I mean, he used Cassie to get Scott..."

"Really?" Scott asked, even he was amazed by the sheer stupidity. "I left because I didn't like that you were preaching goodness and then stealing weapons and not agreeing with anyone."

"You added Hope onto the team to draw Scott further away from us." Wanda accused.

Hope laughed, a soft silvery laugh. "Yeah, you keep thinking that. I'm not a pawn. I'm a co-leader of the Avengers. Little Tony here isn't going to make me do whatever the hell I don't want to do."