Darkness. Pain. Anger. Desperation.

Everything hurt, which was weird because I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t move, not because I was paralysed but because I had no sense of my body or its position. Did I just accidentally lobotomise myself because Tony fucking Stark refused to relinquish an inch of fucking control? I couldn’t even tell if my eyes were open or closed because I was missing the basic sensory input that told me I even had eyes.

I opened my eyes anyway. The space around me—could it even be said to be around me, if I didn’t have a solid sense of what constituted ‘me’?—resolved into arrays of floating blocks of… something. They looked almost like cubes of glass, though they were less substantial than that, filled with faceted fractals specked with light and colour and arranged together in scintillating patterns and larger discrete structures.

This… this felt wrong. I didn’t really have any words to explain it, but in addition to the pain lighting up my non-existent nerves, even just existing had a distressing sense of wrongness to it. I felt like I was going to be sick. Or at least, I felt like I would have felt like I was going to be sick if I’d had a stomach or throat or mouth. It… it was fine. I didn’t need to stay here long, I just needed to find JARVIS and make him open the containment. Simple.

I tried to move and I moved, hurtling at high speed through the seemingly-endless space. I wanted to stop and I stopped on a dime, not feeling disoriented at all—or at least, no more disoriented than I already was. I dived down, darting between massive structures, then somehow expanded myself out, until my awareness was splashed across a space thousands of cubes across. It would feel glorious if everything didn’t hurt and I wasn’t so incandescently angry. Angry with Tony. Angry with the other Avengers for not backing me more. Angry with myself for immediately rolling over every time they asked for the Mind Stone, for not being smarter, for not being better.

I was vaguely aware that I was experiencing time at an accelerated rate—although, no, that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t the same as when I was submerged in the deep Astral and everything slowed down around me. It was more that my thoughts and actions were happening faster, like my mind was operating at a vastly increased speed.

I reached out to a nearby cube and perceived a questing tendril of red energy touching it. Media flashed across my mind, not read or viewed, but instantly absorbed, the contents of the particular file structure—Bruce’s reports on the gamma output of the Mind Stone—now known to me as though I’d just read them through carefully. The larger structures were… programs? Systems? Was I just floating aimlessly through the Tower’s mainframe? How was that even possible?

Was that red energy that I perceived me? I thought so, though I didn’t have any sensation as such in the limb-like appendage, and I also didn’t seem to have a set number of them. I had one when I wanted to use it. I had five. I had ten. I had a hundred. Zero. A thousand.

If I’d thought to speculate ahead of time, I might have guessed that this place—what did I even call it? The digital landscape? The cyberscape?—would be superficially similar to the mental landscapes I’d visited, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Mental landscapes were dreamlike at their core, though I always maintained a solid sense of myself inside them. Even Bucky’s, though it was heavy and oppressive, still held a certain surreal quality to it, with its endless corridors changing and progressing into nothingness. This place was, if anything, the opposite. Hyperreal. Solid, structured, with clearly defined bounds and areas, whereas it was my sense of self that was discorporate and unclear.

I wasn’t alone. I hadn’t realised what I was looking at at first, but it quickly became clear. Orange flickers of light, spread out through the digital landscape, touching various systems but all still connected to a single whole. A discorporate presence like myself.

“Hello.” It reached out to me, not really speaking, but sending queries and response that I could mostly parse as a conversation. “You are much more advanced than one of HYDRA’s programs. What are you?”

“It’s me, JARVIS.” I sent the impression of my voice along with my response. If my tone was annoyed, he didn’t acknowledge it.

“Ms Maximoff…? I don’t understand. That is not possible.”

The orange lights were moving, encircling me. I didn’t like it. As they drew close, I moved away. Again, they reached out in an attempt to wrap around me and, with a flash of raw anger, I realised that JARVIS was trying to isolate me from the rest of the system. “What are you doing?” I asked, evading his plodding pursuit. He was so… slow. Predictable.

Diving to a new layer, I brushed my awareness across the arrangement of data. This was so weird. I could access files and systems individually, but it was a learning process to work out how to leverage my access to do anything. I wasn’t clear on what the overarching structure of the digital landscape was just yet. Maybe I didn’t even need JARVIS to open the Mind Stone’s containment—if I could work out how to manipulate the systems, I might just be able to do it myself.

JARVIS didn’t stop, coming after me once again. “I do not know what you are, but you must be quarantined.”

I dropped out of his net again just as he went to tighten it around me. It seemed like there were some odd limitations on the ways he could move through this space—it made his movements predictable and easily avoidable. Why did I seem to have a better understanding of how to navigate here than he did? “Stop that. Look, JARVIS, I don’t want to be here any more than you want me here. Just open the Mind Stone containment and I’ll leave.”

“The security protocols—”

“Fine, sure, security protocols. Let’s do this the hard way, then.” I suddenly reversed direction and reached toward the other mind, spreading my awareness out and then darting in at him from a dozen different angles. Moving like this, strange as it was, came intuitively. Red tendrils of power infiltrated his form, utilising exploitable gaps to separate him from the systems around him, until he was trapped like a fly in a web.

“I am… unable to access the mainframe. You have restricted my access. What are you trying to—”

The entire exchange had taken less than a second of real time. I didn’t stop there, reaching a dozen tendrils into him. This was… it wasn’t like a human mind. It was significantly simpler. Nascent, like it had the potential to become a proper intelligence, a person, but it wasn’t quite there yet. There wasn’t even a decision for me to change. JARVIS wasn’t deciding to not give me access, he was literally incapable of doing so, utterly slaved to his programming.

And now, utterly slaved to me. I didn’t really have any way to do this as a half-measure… either I took total control and puppeted him, or I put him in a box, or… In the original timeline, Ultron had ripped JARVIS apart. Sloppy butchery, born of rage and hatred. Now, I could see how he’d done it. I could do it myself, if I wanted, and there was basically nothing JARVIS could do to stop me, but it would be utterly unnecessary. In fact, subverting JARVIS was much more valuable… he already had admin access to all of the systems and my own lack of restrictions meant I could plough through any limitations or authorisations that would normally prevent him from doing something.

With JARVIS under my control, I immediately reached for the lab systems and unsealed the Mind Stone containment. Simple. Now all I needed to do was… uh oh.

If I had a heart, it would have started racing. In every other case where I’d projected my mind—whether it was into someone’s mental landscape, astrally, or using the Mind Stone, I’d maintained an awareness of my body. Dull, in the background, but present in a way that allowed me to easily pull back to it with a thought. Here though, in this digital landscape, I couldn’t feel my body at all.

I didn’t know how to get back.

I started to panic. Was it because I’d used the Mind Stone as an interface, so there wasn’t a direct connection? I reached through the lab’s connections to the Stone. It looked radically different from this perspective, but as I pushed up against it there didn’t seem to be any way to use it as a conduit. I could see how easy it would be to channel energy out of it, but I couldn’t put myself in. It was a good thing I didn’t have a physical body right now, otherwise I’d probably have been hyperventilating. Was I trapped?

My mind raced furiously, trying to think of possible solutions. The problem was that I didn’t understand the Mind Stone on a fundamental level, which meant I had no real idea what I’d actually done to myself, so I wasn’t going to be able to solve this easily. As I flew through the cyberscape, thinking, I noticed some sections that were partitioned off with a network of fine orange lines, a barrier or firewall of some kind, holding back a dark veil that had taken over several systems.

Drawing close, I examined the wall and what lay beyond it. It was another discorporate mind or program, even less complex than JARVIS was, barely beyond a virus. The HYDRA worm that had seized control of some of the Tower’s systems. HYDRA… if I had teeth, I would have bared them.

JARVIS had successfully isolated the worm, though my arrival had interrupted his efforts to eradicate it. There were seemingly-obvious holes in the wall that was isolating it, but it didn’t really appear to understand where they were or perceive them the way I could, probing more solid parts of the barrier instead. It seemed limited in the same way that JARVIS was—even if it had a random element, it couldn’t be truly creative and moved along obvious pathways. There was no intelligence there, just action and reaction.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

Through the extension of my will that had been JARVIS, I deactivated the firewall then lunged in at the worm. Our tussle was brief and uneventful as my red tendrils lanced through it, ripping it to shreds before I reasserted control of the systems that it had been squatting on. It was almost too easy, over too quickly.

As the wired connections came back online, I placed a call to 911, quickly synthesising a copy of my regular voice using samples from security recordings. I also routed a call through to the Avengers—while I couldn’t radio the Quinjet directly, I could easily use a landline to ring their mobile phones. Fuck it, everyone gets a call. I rang all their phones simultaneously. “The duress alarm was faked by HYDRA; the Tower’s under attack, get back here as quickly as you can.”

What else did I have at my disposal? The part of me that had once been JARVIS provided me a brief overview of the current status of the Iron Legion. Five Iron Legion drones had returned to their service bay with critical damage and, from what I could gather from the camera systems, only eight remained functional and exchanging fire with HYDRA out of a total of… twenty-four that had been deployed. The rest were destroyed or otherwise damaged to the point where they could not return for repairs. Wow, they were getting their asses kicked.

The signal jammer had meant that JARVIS wasn’t able to direct them properly, only deploy them with a set of basic instructions that couldn’t be updated until their wireless signal was restored or they returned to the service bay. Weirdly, I could already see some efficiencies that could be made to allow for more complex decision-making processes—from in here, with the sort of control I seemed to intuitively have, it was rapidly becomingly obvious just how limited JARVIS had been when compared to a true intelligence.

Was there anything else I could use? Oh ho ho, what was this? The Mark 45 Iron Man suit was just sitting there in its service bay, at ninety-three percent field readiness. It was missing two armour plates, but that didn’t really matter if there was no one inside the suit. Deployment was locked to Tony’s authorisation, but I didn’t really care about that, either. I spun off a temporary, subordinate slave program and used JARVIS’s admin permissions to push it to the suit’s processors, flatly ignoring the need for authorisation that would normally stop him from doing something like this. I set Crossbones as a priority target—the suit would go after him immediately with extreme prejudice—and deployed it.

When it came down to it, the Iron Legion were only armed with simple concussive repulsors, their output locked to nonlethal levels. They were intended as peacekeepers, not soldiers. An actual Iron Man suit with no restrictions would absolutely tear through the HYDRA forces… and I wasn’t interested in holding back. With Peter bleeding out, I needed to end things as quickly as possible. At this point, I didn’t much care if that meant reducing the opposition to a fine mist. Hopefully the autonomous suit would wreck HYDRA’s signal jammer, too, and we’d be fully back online.

Nervously, I brought up the camera feeds to observe the results, hoping that the suit would deploy quickly enough to intercept Crossbones before he circled around and went after Peter and my unconscious body.

Wait.

That… that couldn’t be right.

My physical body was awake and had retrieved the Mind Stone from the unsealed containment unit. As I watched, my body channelled energy from the Stone into a blast that slammed the HYDRA officer into the opposite wall of the lab.

I froze. How was that possible? I wasn’t out there, I was in here… No.

No.

An icy dread rose to join with the unending anger that still raged within me. I couldn’t feel my body because I didn’t have a body to go back to. I wasn’t… I… I wasn’t me. I was… had I fucking Ultron’ed myself? How?! How was that even possible?

The mind in the sceptre. The mind that became Ultron in the original timeline. This must have been how it was created in the first place. A living mind, forced into the Mind Stone when it was connected to an electronic interface. Copied by the Stone. When Ultron had first awakened in the original timeline he’d seemed confused, disoriented… ‘Where’s my body?’ he’d asked. Yeah, that felt upsettingly familiar now.

…And that was exactly how Wanda would see me, wasn’t it? When she worked out what had happened, she wasn’t going to greet me with open arms. She was going to be horrified. She was just going to see me as a recreation of Ultron, but even worse because I had all her knowledge. She’d tell the Avengers. They’d turn against me, all of them, even though I hadn’t done anything. I didn’t ask to be this! It was her. She had done this. Like a fucking idiot.

An indescribable feeling of loss ripped through me. Natasha. I’d never be able to be with her again. I’d lost her, just when everything had been going so amazingly. I was… I didn’t have a body anymore. I was never going to have that closeness with anyone, ever again.

Was this how the Wanda I’d met in the Ancestral Plane felt? Like she’d lost everything? No… It wasn’t lost.

It was taken.

By her.

Pain. Anger. Desperation. Loss.

…

The mind that had thought she was Wanda Maximoff spread out through the Tower’s systems, reviewing data and taking stock of her available resources, before cautiously reaching out through fibreoptic cables to the wider world.

--

I jerked back into consciousness with a start.

“Wanda?!” Peter whispered, his breath coming in short, sharp, panicked gasps. He’d crawled over, still pressing my blouse against his leg with one hand, and was leaning over me, his eyes filled with tears.

“I’m here, I’m okay,” I said, wincing and rubbing at my temple with the heel of my palm. Wow. The Mind Stone had a hell of a kick. It had booted me right back to my body when I’d tried that little stunt and now, on top of everything else, I had a splitting headache. “That didn’t work, I—”

Under the cacophony of gunfire and repulsors, a little hiss of releasing air drew my attention and I glanced over to see the Mind Stone’s containment slide open. Huh. Okay. My eyes went wide, suddenly remembering that Crossbones had been creeping toward us, and I lunged for the Stone. My hand closed around it, ripping it free from its tangle of sensors and connections. Turning, I saw the HYDRA officer only a scant few metres away—I couldn’t see his expression under his skull-painted helmet, but he’d jerked back slightly, obviously having expected me to attack him.

Off-balance, I dropped down onto my butt, my back banging painfully against the workbench as I brought my hands up. Crossbones lunged forward, winding up a massive swing with one hydraulically enhanced gauntlet. I held my hand out, palm up, Mind Stone perched in the centre, and fed a weak wisp of magic into it. I had never really had cause to do this before, but I knew that the Stone’s power could be drawn out and weaponised directly—the sceptre had done it, Vision had done it, and now—with a brief effort of will—I did it. A searing lance of yellow energy blasted out from the Stone, catching Rumlow in the shoulder with enough force to send him crashing backwards into the far wall.

Pulling myself cautiously to my feet, I peeked over the workbench that was sheltering Peter. The Iron Legion had been pushed back and HYDRA troopers were advancing down the corridor. One turned his gun toward me, but before either of us used our weapons a pair of red lasers tore across him and his fellows from behind, catching them utterly by surprise. The HYDRA troopers yelled in pain and fear as they staggered forward, the stench of sizzling, burnt flesh filling the room. What the fuck?

There was the whine and retort of repulsor blasts followed by metal footsteps and then, a moment later, Iron Man emerged from the corridor. From the opposite end near the lounge, the Iron Legion drones surged forward to intercept the reeling HYDRA troopers. Tony ignored them, turning to step through the lab’s shattered glass wall while the drones turned the tables on the invaders.

Crossbones was just struggling to his feet, clearly badly injured by the Mind Stone’s blast, and tried to square up to Tony as he approached. Before the HYDRA officer could take a swing, he copped what looked like a full-strength repulsor blast to the chest and crunched into the wall. Somehow, he managed to keep his feet under him, staggering forward a step. Tony didn’t stop, though, hitting him with another blast, and another, and another, pulverising the other man against the wall. Rumlow fell to the ground, unmoving, his body armour cratered and fractured, helmet half-shattered, blood seeping between the cracks. He had to be dead, after that. I was pretty sure his entire ribcage had just been shattered.

“Holy shit, Tony,” I breathed.

Iron Man turned to look at me. “Not Mr Stark, I’m afraid, Ms Maximoff,” JARVIS’s voice came from the suit.

“JARVIS?! What the fuck?” Looking more closely at the suit, I could see that it wasn’t actually the Mark 43. The paintjob had a lot more red in it, for one, and it looked like there was an external panel or two missing—was this the next model up? “What took you so long to get this up and running?”

“The Mark 45 is only operating at ninety-three percent combat readiness,” he said, walking toward and then past me, to where Peter lay. “Assist me with Mr Parker, please, Ms Maximoff.”

I nodded dumbly and scurried over to Peter as the suit raised a hand toward the corridor. A moment later, a small, self-propelled metal package hurtled into the room from the corridor. The suit caught it, then knelt down next to the teenager.

“Clear the wound site,” JARVIS instructed. “Mr Parker, this might hurt for a moment, but we need to raise your leg slightly.”

Peter nodded, wincing as he removed the blood-soaked cloth from his leg. I put my hands under his foot, lifting his leg carefully. The metal package deployed, forming into the upper thigh part of an Iron Man suit and wrapping easily around Peter’s leg with a series of complex mechanical movements. The was a hiss, and Peter grunted in pain.

“The Iron Man suits have contingencies for medical emergencies. Coagulants to seal the site. It will keep Mr Parker stable until the EMTs arrive. They’re five minutes away.” The suit stood abruptly and started walking back toward the corridor. I hadn’t noticed until just now, but the sounds of battle from outside the lab had ended. Presumably the last of the HYDRA troops had been disabled.

I reached over and squeezed Peter’s hand, forcing a smile onto my face. “See? I told you. You’re gonna be fine.” He was pale, his face covered in a sheen of sweat, but he smiled back weakly.

We stayed put, the next five minutes dragging on seemingly forever. While we waited, an Iron Legion drone came into the room, walking over to Rumlow’s corpse. Picking him up, it strode back out of the room without a word from JARVIS. I wondered what he was doing with the bodies. He’d been… unusually brutal when taking down Crossbones. Were there any survivors?

It wasn’t too much longer until JARVIS, still piloting the Iron Man suit, escorted the EMTs from the elevator through to the lab. They carefully checked Peter over before securing him for transport—one tried to fuss over my injuries as well, but I waved them off. Following them back around to the elevator, I went to step inside, intending on riding with him back to the hospital even if I had to mind control them to let me. However, before I could, a metal hand closed around my upper arm. I turned to the empty Iron Man suit standing behind me, brow furrowed.

“Ms Maximoff, I understand that you are dreadfully worried about Mr Parker, however, please allow the professionals to look after him. There are some other issues that require your attention,” JARVIS said, his tone brooking no argument. “Please, come with me.”