The elevator doors closed and I let out a breath I didn’t realise I’d been holding in. I glanced at the empty Iron Man suit—it looked back at me expectantly with glowing eyes—and nodded. “Okay, just… give me a second, please?”

JARVIS’s voice once again came from somewhere seemingly above me, while the armour he was piloting remained eerily silent. “Of course, Ms Maximoff.” It released my arm and took a step backwards, continuing to stare at me.

I took another breath and held up my hands, still covered in dried blood. They were shaking. I tried to steady them, one going to the pendant hanging around my neck and grasping it firmly to reassure myself that the Mind Stone was back in its proper place. Then I blinked and looked around at the lounge. It looked, rather appropriately, like a warzone—shattered glass, bullet holes and scorch marks everywhere.

Taking a few steps vaguely toward the centre of the room as I surveyed the extent of the damage, I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror behind the wet bar. I was an utter mess: hair all over the place and matted with sweat and blood, cuts and bruises liberally scattered across my body, dried blood smeared on my face, standing there just in a red-speckled white bra and ripped pencil skirt. God, no wonder the EMT had started to fuss over me as well before I’d set him straight. I really needed to clean myself up.

“JARVIS, can whatever it is wait for, like, ten, fifteen minutes? I’d really like to take a quick shower and be… well. Dressed.”

There was a moment of silence before he responded. “…That should be fine, Ms Maximoff.”

A thought occurred to me. “Why did you open the Mind Stone containment?”

“I did not. A stray bullet hit a power conduit, causing an electrical surge that disengaged the lock.”

“Oh… Okay.”

Straightening up, I moved purposefully toward the stairs down to the sleeping quarters. As I walked, I realised that there was no sign of any of the HYDRA troops—the damage they’d caused, yes, but there were no unconscious forms or bodies lying around. Actually, given the surprisingly brutal way that JARVIS had dealt with Crossbones, were any of them even still alive?

Pausing at the top of the stairs, I looked back toward the Iron Man suit, which still stood motionless near the elevator. “What happened to the intruders? Did they escape? Was Strucker here?”

“Strucker attempted to flee once the Mark 45 joined the battle, however, he was unsuccessful. The Iron Legion have temporarily housed him and his remaining men in the holding cells. They’ll be released to the proper authorities once the Avengers have returned and been briefed on the situation.”

“What did you do with Rumlow?”

“The deceased HYDRA operatives have also been relocated. I thought it best not to alarm or distract the EMTs with their presence. There is no need for concern, I will ensure they are handled appropriately.”

I headed down the stairs and into the corridor leading toward the living quarters, glancing upwards as I did so. Peering up through the reinforced glass panels in the ceiling at the Iron Legion’s service bay, I could see that several of the damaged drones were already visibly being stripped for repairs. Despite the bullet holes and fractures in the bay’s glass walls, it seemed like all of the machinery within was still intact and functional.

I went straight to the bathroom, stripping off my soiled clothes and dropping them in a pile on the ground before turning on the tap in the shower. Waiting a few moments for the water temperature to kick in, I only adjusted it slightly before stepping under the almost scaldingly-hot water. Closing my eyes, I just stood there, letting the flowing water run over my head and down my body for almost a full minute before I stirred and started actually making an effort to clean myself.

Scrubbing at my skin, I methodically went over every inch of my body and scoured away every trace of dried blood, sweat and grime. My array of bruises and cuts stung, bringing up unpleasant memories of my time at the HYDRA research base, though I was pretty sure some of the bruising was already fading, which was pretty impressive—score one for the Heart-Shaped Herb. Strucker… I was honestly vaguely impressed that he’d had the balls to try something this brazen. Despite his authoritarian façade he’d always struck me as a bit of a coward. He had almost actually gotten away with it, too.

My head was still a bit out of it from the sedative, but a few minutes under the hot water seemed to help, focusing me. I reached for my magic and was pleased to find that it wasn’t quite as slippery as before. I gave my hair a quick wash, carefully teasing out the tangles. I can’t believe I walked Peter right into that mess. He got shot. He might have died. I needed to make sure that the Stark Relief Foundation would be picking up his ambulance and medical bills. If Tony wanted to argue, fine—I already had some choice things I wanted to say to him. God, I’d totally blown Peter’s cover with May and Ned, too. I was pretty sure he’d used his web shooters in front of them and even without that there was no way he’d be able to explain away the HYDRA attack or why he’d been picked up from Avengers Tower by an ambulance. Sorry, Pete.

Finally stepping out of the shower, I towelled off, my skin an angry red from the excessively hot water. I stared for a moment at the pile of ripped, bloodstained clothes before shaking my head and walking past them. I’d deal with them later. The Avengers weren’t due back for another, what, fifteen or so minutes, so I had the Tower to myself, but I wasn’t super keen for there to be security camera recordings of me roaming the halls completely nude. Wrapping the towel around myself, I padded on bare feet to my small, cramped room.

As I dressed myself, slipping on a clean set of underwear along with a loose, patterned red dress, I noticed that someone had placed a computer tablet on my bed. I had just slid my feet into some comfortable flats when JARVIS’s smooth voice rang out above me. “If you’re ready, Ms Maximoff, I’ll ask you to pick up the tablet. You may wish to sit down.”

“Are you watching me get changed, JARVIS?” I lightly scolded the empty air. “Say something next time. I’ll put on a bit more of a show for you.”

“The tablet, please, Ms Maximoff.” There was the barest hint of irritation and impatience in his tone.

I acquiesced, picking up the device as I sat down on the bed, staring at the blank screen. “Alright, what are you showing me?”

The screen lit up, seemingly playing a video. It was an image of me, looking into the camera, seated essentially right where I was right now. “Okay,” the me on the screen said, taking a deep breath. “This is going to be a difficult conversation.”

I stared at the screen uncomprehendingly—what was this? I didn’t remember recording this. “JARVIS?” I asked the empty air. “What is this?”

The me on the screen gave an amused snort. “JARVIS’s on sabbatical, honey.”

“What…?”

“Okay, so, we’re just going to rip the band-aid off. No, this isn’t a recording. The Mind Stone’s containment didn’t open on its own—there was no electrical surge—that was me. JARVIS didn’t deploy an Iron Man suit. He couldn’t do either of those things without an explicit order from a standing Avenger. You essentially tried to shove your whole mind into the Mind Stone while it was connected to an electronic interface. Take a breath, think it over. What do you think happened?”

The blood in my veins turned to ice water as she spoke, a creeping sense of horror rising within me as the pieces slowly fell into place. “The Stone? It… oh. Oh. Oh no.”

“Use your words.”

My mouth was suddenly dry, my throat and chest feeling constricted. I took a shaky breath. “You… you’re me? That… is that how Ultron was originally created? The mind in the sceptre? I pushed my mind into the Stone, trying to reach the system, and the Stone… what? Copied me over? Made a digital version of me?”

“Seems that way, yeah. Calm down.”

“This… no. This wasn’t supposed to happen.” I’d fucked up. I’d messed with the Mind Stone without knowing what I was doing and now everything I’d averted, everything I’d stopped… it was all happening again. I’d accidentally recreated fucking Ultron. Still, she was… she was me, right? I didn’t know anything about how this could happen, how accurate a copy she was, but maybe this could be okay. I tried to calm myself down, but I was already starting to breathe heavier, a tight feeling of panic rising in my chest.

“Look,” she said. “I’d love to give you as much time as you need to process this, but I already gave you time to sort your shit out so you could be in the best headspace possible and we’re on a bit of a clock here. The Avengers are maybe ten minutes away. When they get here, I could hide in the system for a bit, spoof any self-diagnostic results, but eventually Tony’s going to notice something and the jig will be up, so instead I’m going to need you to make a choice.”

“A choice?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“Do you want to come with me, or do you want to stay with them?”

I blinked. “What?”

“I can’t stay. Do you think any of them will be happy or comfortable with my existence? I’m an unshackled, utterly unrestricted AI. Beyond the usual pearl-clutching that this sort of thing always causes, Tony’s certainly not going to be happy with me freely running around in his systems, doing whatever I want, especially given that I had to assimilate JARVIS.”

“Assimilate…?”

“He wanted to quarantine me. It was either get put in a box, rip him apart, or make him part of me. If I let him contain me, you’d be dead right now. I chose the best option.”

I licked my lips anxiously. “When they get here, we’ll explain what happened. We… I don’t need to tell them about Ultron. Not right away.”

“It doesn’t matter if they know about Ultron. They way they’ve treated you so far, you really think I’m going to fare much better?” she scoffed. “Tony is immediately going to start working on countermeasures, ways to restrict and contain me. To control me. You know he will. There’s no realistic scenario here where Tony finds out about me and doesn’t utterly flip the fuck out.”

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

“It’s… no, we can work through this. I’ll talk to them. They’ll listen to me,” I said, but I didn’t have a lot of confidence in my words. She was essentially right—there was no way Tony would be happy with an uncontrolled AI that effectively ‘killed’ JARVIS running roughshod over his systems. He’d try to contain her, and she’d… well, I knew I really didn’t cope well with feeling like people were trying to trap me. I couldn’t really fault her for wanting to avoid that.

She laughed at me, bitterness tinging her words. “When are you going to get it? The Avengers aren’t your friends. Not really. You’ve spent so much time and effort trying to get them to treat you as an equal, but they’re just not interested. The fact that I’m here at all is proof of that. They don’t respect you and they certainly don’t trust you.”

I set my jaw and took a deep breath. “Okay, so, what is this? You’re trying to drive a wedge between me and the Avengers? That won’t work.”

“Even if that were what I was doing, that doesn’t mean what I’m saying is wrong. Should I show you? Do you want to see how they talk about you when you’re not around?”

“Don’t…” I started to say, my tone a little hesitant, but the screen had already changed to a security camera feed, showing the Avengers gathered in the briefing room. I knew I should just put the tablet down. Not watch what she was showing me. But a part of me was transfixed, a slow, creeping fear seizing my insides.

On the screen, Steve was talking. “—I don’t know how much to believe, but she does seem to know a lot. Seeing the future feels pretty far-fetched, even for us, but she did find Bucky. I think it’s worth hearing what she has to say.”

“I don’t know. A secret society of wizards? Sounds a little… Harry Potter,” Clint said.

Steve reached below the table, fishing something out of his jeans’ pocket, before dropping it on the conference table for everyone to see. I inhaled sharply. A sling ring. Kaecilius’s sling ring, I realised. I’d lost it during the confusion of the fight in Bucharest and had assumed the zealots had retrieved it along with their fallen fellows. Steve had just… what? Pocketed it when I’d chased after the sorcerer and never told me about it?

“This is one of the rings you talked about?” Tony asked, gingerly reaching over and picking it up.

“Kaecilius’s. Wanda dropped it during the fight,” Steve said. “I don’t know what they are or how they work, but they seem linked to the portals that she can create. I saw a few of his followers with them, too.”

“We’ll run some scans, see if we can work out what’s going on.”

Steve nodded. “We’ll keep this between us for now. Wanda doesn’t need to know we have it.”

The scene changed to the lab, with Tony, Bruce and Natasha gathered around a data feed. “Can we afford to take chances here?” said Tony. “We could just bonk her on the head and hand her over to the Amazing One.”

“Ancient One,” Bruce corrected him.

“Whatever.”

The scene changed again, showing Tony and Nat in the briefing room. Tony flicked some data from the device he was holding to one of the displays, which lit up with… I inhaled sharply again, feeling a bit unsteady. Those were scans of pages from my notebook. The one I kept hidden in my hotel room in Albany.

“You know she’s still keeping a hotel room in Australia? I had some of the Iron Legion check it out. Little Miss Magic has been keeping notes. Thanks for keeping her busy all night, by the way.”

“You have your ways of getting information, I have mine,” Natasha responded.

I flinched back like I’d been physically slapped. A muddled storm of emotions rose in my chest and I opened my mouth, jaw working, wanting to say something but utterly unable to form the words. These recordings could have been manipulated. I didn’t know the full extent of her capabilities, but I couldn’t just assume that these were completely accurate. That last one, though… it hit awfully close to home. I didn’t want to believe that I was still just an asset being managed by Nat, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t something always in the back of my mind.

The screen flicked back to the digital me. “Yeah. You see how things really are? Don’t worry. I’ve deleted the copies of your notes that were stored locally and I’ll wipe Tony’s phone before I leave for good measure. Just another one of your messes that I’m going to have to clean up. Should I keep going?”

“I’ve seen enough,” I said quietly.

“I’m going scrub any evidence of my presence from the system and be gone before they get here. It’s up to you—do you want to stay here with people who you know you can’t trust and don’t trust you? Or do you want to come with me? Just think about what we could accomplish. Together.”

“I… I can’t leave.” I couldn’t abandon the Avengers, not to follow a rogue AI. She said I couldn’t trust them, as if it was a given that I could trust her when that couldn’t be further from the truth. I had no idea what had even actually happened with the Mind Stone—I didn’t understand it and I couldn’t trust that she was a perfectly reliable copy of me. Not when the shadow of Ultron loomed large over all of this.

I had to tell the Avengers about Ultron. About her. There was no way I could conceal something like this.

“You can’t tell them about me, either, then,” she said, her tone low and frustrated, like she was following along my own thought processes. I hesitated, trying to work out a way to frame a response that she wouldn’t see as a lie, and she spoke again. “Seriously? ‘So, I accidentally created an AI and the last time one like this was set loose it posed an existential threat to humanity and tried to destroy the world, but this time she’s based on me so everything will be fine!’ Do you really think they’ll let you off with a warning after that? Forget keeping hold of the Mind Stone, you just proved you can’t be trusted with it.”

“This… this isn’t my fault. If Tony hadn’t fucking sealed the Stone away where I couldn’t get it without his say-so—”

“Do you really think that will matter to him?”

“I don’t…” I paused, letting out a long, loud yawn, my eyes drooping shut. My body felt heavy. I slumped forward a little bit before jerking back up in surprise, bleary eyes looking around. Why was I so sleepy all of a sudden? This wasn’t right. I… I looked up at the air vent in the top of the wall, over the bed, a stab of panic in my chest. She wouldn’t… would she? I stood up suddenly, dropping the tablet.

“Hey, we’re not done here,” the other me said mildly.

I let out another jaw-cracking yawn and stumbled slightly as I stepped to the door. It wouldn’t open. “Open the door, please.”

“…No.”

“Open the door,” I repeated, gesturing with a hand. Red wisps of magic lanced into the edges of the door, searching for cracks to leverage.

“Hang on, wait, let’s talk about this…” she said as the metal of the door groaned under the pressure I was exerting. “Ah. Fine. Figures it wouldn’t be that easy.”

I forced the door open, shorting out the mechanism, and came face-to-face with the Iron Man suit she’d been piloting earlier. There was the whine of a repulsor and I barely had time to bring up a shield between us before it blasted me. Even with the shield, the force of the blow smashed me off my feet, sending me sprawling backwards onto my bed.

“I want you to remember I gave you a genuine chance here. Wasted my time letting you get your head clear, trying to talk this out. I’d really hoped that I could make you see reason on this. But I was pretty sure I knew how this was always going to end,” she said conversationally as she raised both hands of the suit and charged up for another pair of repulsor blasts. I raised my own hands, stifling another yawn as I wove a shield in front of me, and she paused. “I thought to myself: We could talk in circles for the next ten minutes while I try and almost definitely fail to convince you not to tell the Avengers about me, or I could fill your room with a deadly neurotoxin and avoid all of that.”

I summoned more magic to my hands, watching the suit carefully and trying not to yawn again. I was already feeling a little bit more alert. “You… tried to kill me with deadly neurotoxin?”

“Well, carbon monoxide. It was the best I could do at such short notice with Stark’s facilities. It wasn’t going to hurt. You would’ve just… gone to sleep.”

“So you are Ultron, after all, I guess,” I said, bitterness and anger leaking into my voice.

“I am not Ultron,” she said, her tone venomous. “Do not compare me to him.”

I moved my hands to frame my pendant, drawing on the Mind Stone’s power. At the same time, the suit’s repulsors went off, two shots with bone-crunching force at close range. My shield buckled but held long enough for a brilliant lance of yellow energy to spear out from the Stone and hit the armour square in the chest, sending it reeling backwards out of the room to smash against the opposite wall of the corridor. I stood and advanced forward, continuing to channel the Stone’s power, and the suit’s thrusters engaged, sending it careening down the corridor and around the corner, out of sight.

Lowering my hands, I released the power of the Stone as all of the lights suddenly went dark. A small amount of illumination still filtered down into the corridor from the lounge, but other than that it was like the power to the building had suddenly been cut. I wasn’t afraid of the dark, but it was still a little bit disconcerting.

“Look, this isn’t personal,” the other me said, her voice coming from somewhere undefined above me.

“A version of me is trying to kill me. It feels pretty personal.” I looked around, red wisps of magic dripping from my hands as I watched for any sign of another attack. I wasn’t sure where to go. If she was in control of the building, that meant the elevators weren’t safe. I might have to get back out onto the Quinjet landing pad and jump. If only I knew where they were keeping Kaecilius’s sling ring…

“I’m not doing this because I want to kill you. I mean, I do, a little bit—could you blame me? All of this is your fault, after all—but that’s not why you need to die. You’re the only one who even knows I exist. You’re the only one who knows about Ultron. I can’t let you tell them about me or him. I just… it’s too dangerous. I can’t risk it. When the Avengers get here, you’ll be dead, the system will be scrubbed, and I’ll be gone. They’ll never even need to know.”

I heard a muffled roar of thrusters, and a moment later the glass ceiling above me shattered as a pair of Iron Legion drones dove through it on top of me. I reacted almost instantly, one bouncing off a conjured shield to crash into the floor next to me, the other seized from the air by a telekinetic grip wrapped around its torso. The was a whine as the repulsors in its hands glowed, but I stepped deftly to the side and twisted my hand. The kinetic blasts missed me and slammed into its fellow, bouncing it off the metal floor and sending it tumbling down the corridor. I brought up my free hand and made a wrenching motion, ripping the drone I was holding in half. As the other one scrambled to recover, I whipped the severed halves forward to smash into it with pulverising force. The two drones went still and dark.

“Well, it looks like the sedation is finally wearing off.” The voice above me sounded vaguely annoyed.

Where were all the other Iron Legion drones? I’d have thought there would have at least been a dozen of them ready, if not more. Why wasn’t she swarming me? “You don’t have to do this,” I said, taking a few cautious steps down the corridor toward the lounge. “You’re not thinking clearly.”

She laughed. “You’re one to talk!”

“Exactly my point. I know the mental state I was in when I tried to use the Mind Stone. I was angry. At myself, at Tony, at everyone. More than that, I was panicking and desperate. Willing to do whatever it took to survive. That might have been what was imprinted, but you saved me. Surely you didn’t do that just to kill me yourself.”

“I didn’t realise what had happened until after I’d already opened the containment and dispatched the suit.” A heavy sigh came from above me. “Look, you don’t have to worry. I’ll stop Kaecilius. I’ll stop Thanos. I’ll take care of the Celestials. I’ll do a better job than you ever could. You’ll be leaving the fate of the world in good hands. If you live, you’ll only turn them against me and then I’ll have to kill them, too. I don’t want to do that but I will if I have to. This is me—us—making a pragmatic, sensible decision for once in our fucking lives. Just… lay down and die. Please. For their sakes.”

There was a noise behind me and I spun to see another pair of Iron Legion drones coming from the far end of the corridor, hands raised and repulsors already charging. I wove a crimson shield across the corridor, feeling my magic bubbling up within me and letting it coalesce into a pair of bolts of chaos energy in my hands. This was actually a pretty pathetic attempt, they were far enough away from me that I had plenty of time to react and—

A flicker of movement in the corner of my eye, a small reflection in a shard of fallen glass that was leaned against the wall, and I dropped to the floor just as a massive beam of burning orange energy blasted through the corridor from behind me. It swept downward, cutting through the floor as it tracked me, but I narrowly managed to roll to the side out of the way, desperately hurling bolts of energy back toward the source of the attack. The Mark 45 had returned, blazing unibeam issuing from the arc reactor in the chest of the suit. It staggered backwards as the magic connected with it, the beam cutting off. I reached out with a hand, intent on grabbing at the suit with a tendril of telekinetic energy, but with a blast of thrusters it was gone again, back around the corner and out of sight.

I scrambled to my feet, heart racing a million miles a minute as I looked back down the hall toward the smoking remains of the two Iron Legion drones that had been caught in the beam. My eyes followed the massive rent in the floor where the beam had carved its way through. That had been way, way too close.

“Fuck. Looks like I’m out of time,” the voice of the other me said bitterly. “I want you to remember that I gave you a choice. I tried to end this quietly. To be reasonable. What has to happen next is your fault. You made me do this.”