unspoken thing |STEVE ROGERS 2|

15

I walked into the dining room later that evening after playing with the kids and Natasha to see Fury standing in the kitchen, dicing tomatoes.

"Fury." I greeted, a small smile on my face as I sat next to Nat at the table. "Long time no see."

"Good evening, Miss Stirling." He replied. "Ultron took you folks out of play to buy himself time. My contacts all say he's building something. The amount of Vibranium he made off with, I don't think it's just one thing."

"What about Ultron himself?" Steve asked, leaning against an archway. Lila ran up to Natasha and me, giving us both a picture that she had drawn. I thanked her and ruffled her hair, then she ran off.

"Ah. He's easy to track, he's everywhere. Guy's multiplying faster than a Catholic rabbit. Still doesn't help us get an angle on any of his plans though." Fury said, preparing the meal.

"He still going after launch codes?" Tony throwing darts at a dartboard, absentmindedly.

"Yes, but he's not making any headway."

"I cracked the Pentagon's firewall in high school on a dare."

"Yeah, well, I contacted our friends at the NEXUS about that." Fury replied.

"NEXUS?" I asked, finally looking up.

"It's the world internet hub in Oslo, every byte of data flows through there, fastest access on earth." Banner spoke for the first time.

"So what'd they say?" Clint asked, examining a dart.

"He's fixated on the missiles, but the codes are constantly being changed."

"By whom?" Stark asked, clearing the dartboard, then narrowly dodged a dart that Clint had thrown, hitting the bullseye. 

"Parties unknown." Fury stated.

"Do we have an ally?" Natasha inquired.

"Ultron's got an enemy, that's not the same thing. Still, I'd pay folding money to know who it is." Fury sipped on his water, clearly unbothered.

"I might need to visit Oslo, find our unknown," Tony said and I hummed in agreement.

"We should have as many eyes on those codes as possible." I agreed. "Stark, is there some sort of algorithm you can use to just keep picking random numbed at like, I don't know, seconds at a time?"

"If I had some time I could work out something like that,"

"We can't use anything like that." Banner interjected. "An algorithm still has a pattern that Ultron could easily get into within a minute."

"Armin Zola," I said suddenly and turned to Nat. "Do you remember that weird computer man?" She nodded and I continued. "When Nat tried to decode the drive that Fury gave us during Project Insight, it kept rewriting itself and denying commands. Like a mouse being chased."

"If we could set that up..." Tony trailed off.

"I doubt that Ultron can keep up with that." I completed his sentence. "If we turned everything about coding upsidedown, the right side up and so forth, he wouldn't even be able to get into the code, much less try to figure out the password."

"I'll talk to my contacts, see what we can do." Fury nodded and I put both of my palms back towards Banner and Stark and they both gave me a high five.

"And here I was thinking that Banner and I were the dream team." Tony scoffed. "What do you say, Bruce? Should we let her in the club?"

"I'd say she earned it right about now." Bruce smiled and I shook my head.

"Alright, let's settle down. I studied coding for like two years before I dropped out of college and I also learned from the last time I was in a war." I waved them off. "I can't be apart of your dream team."

"But also those two years at college was at Harvard so," Steve ratted me out and my jaw dropped. "Take what you will from that." He gave me a devilishly handsome smile that almost made me swoon on the spot.

"I told you never to bring that up!" I exclaimed and crossed my arms. "That's the last time I trust you with any secret."

"Well, that's too bad, hot stuff, you're an honorary member now." Tony shook my shoulder slightly.

"Well, this is good times, boss, but I was kind of hoping when I saw you, you'd have more than that," Natasha smiled sarcastically and I put my arm on the back of her chair. "I mean, newbie helped us more than you."

"I do, I have you. Back in the day, I had eyes everywhere, ears everywhere else. Here we all are, back on earth, with nothing but our wit, and our will to save the world." Fury sat at the dinner table. "So stand. Outwit the platinum bastard."

"Steve doesn't like that kind of talk," I joked and Steve glared playfully at me.

"You know what, Stirling?" I just smirked at him.

"So what does he want?" Fury asked.

"To become better. Better than us. He keeps building bodies." Steve met my eyes and I just blushed and looked away.

"Person bodies. The human form is inefficient, biologically speaking, we're outmoded. But he keeps coming back to it." Tony commented and Bruce walked to the table to see the drawing that Lila had made for me and Natasha. 

It was a butterfly and things seemed to click for him.

"When you two programmed him to protect the human race, you amazingly failed," Natasha grumbled and I laughed, squeezing her shoulder.

"They don't need to be protected, they need to evolve. Ultron's going to evolve." Bruce said faintly, looking at the picture.

"How? He's nothing but a bucket of bolts." I said.

"Has anyone been in contact with Helen Cho?" Bruce took off his glasses and I looked at the group.

"What Cho was doing couldn't create tissue. The regeneration cradle prints tissue and replicates it all the way down to the amino acids and every single atom, it can't just build a living body on its own." I shook my head. Everyone raised their eyebrows at me. "What? I listened when she talked. Didn't anyone?"

"We're talking about Vibranium, hot stuff." Tony shrugged. "We could be talking about anything here. Anything is possible."