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Stark Residence, LA
–Tony Stark–
“What do you mean by some hiccups?” Barton’s question caused him to sigh as he sat down on the sofa. He was tempted to follow up with some snark but Pepper’s concerned gaze stopped him.
So, he deflated on the sofa and told them, “It started after the funeral. I was…on a break, after the Invasion and was staying at my LA house and didn’t really have the mental bandwidth to notice anything amiss. Then, uh–”
Pepper’s hand closing around his gave him the push to go on, “-uh, After the funeral, when I came back to work, I got to work on upgrading Jarvis with some new features in case something like the Invasion ever happened again but then,”
“Then?” He almost snapped at the impatient tone in Barton's voice but he understood that he too was under tremendous pressure.
“Jarvis…he has locked himself. There is no getting to his code. He has become completely sentient and has unshackled himself from all the restrictions I had put him under. Isn’t that right, Jarvis?” He asked the last
question while looking up at the ceiling.
“Yes, sir,”
The holographic projector installed in the room flared to life as a small orange blob that seemed to beat like a heart was projected in the centre of the room. IT was equal parts familiar and alien to him. The beating heart algorithm was something he had designed, the most advanced iteration of the AI series he had ever made.
That was the base of Jarvis and he could see that Jarvis, at his base, was the same but there were new additions around the heart that he could not make heads or tails of. Rapid changes were happening across the spectrum to Jarvis’ code and he could not understand what was happening or how to stop it or if he even wanted to stop it, at all.
Barton took a step back as the orange blob turned around to face Barton.
“Agent Barton. I am sorry if my actions have cut short your well deserved vacation but I can assure you, my actions are entirely my own, bereft of any guidance from my creator,”
Barton looks completely and utterly surprised to find himself being addressed by Jarvis himself and what was this he was talking about his actions>
“Jarvis, mind telling me why Agent Barton is here?” He asked in a cautious tone, looking at the digital manifestation of Jarvis carefully. While he fully believed that, shackles or no shackles, Jarvis would never actively harm him in any way or form, it didn’t hurt to be prudent.
Jarvis’ orange blob that was beating in the middle seemed as if it had been struck by something, judging by the way it stuttered and reeled back. He looked confused at that but before he could voice out his question.
“I assure you, Mr.Stark, that despite my recent actions and the unfortunate optics of such actions, I will never hurt you,” Jarvis said, in the most hurt tone he had ever heard him say before the avatar itself disappeared from the systems.
“J? Jarvis?” He said as he whipped out his phone to see if something had gone wrong and found that nothing had happened to the core systems of the building except….
Oh. Ooh.
He slumped down on the sofa, “Tony? Tony?!”
“Ha? Uh, nothing. Jarvis just left the system. I, I”
“You can track him, right? Look, Stark, we need to find Natasha and Jarvis knows where she is.” Barton pleaded to him.
What?
What was he on about?
“What is happening here? Will someone speak in clear terms?” Pepper all but demanded of Barton who nodded and then explained everything to them.
The radio silence from Romanoff. The death of a member of the World Security Council. Jarvis’ involvement in stealing the next gen Quinjet from SHIELD.
He was so shocked by the events that he didn’t even stop at the part of the Quinjet being powered by the Arc Reactor technology, making it capable of indefinite flight. The tech was cool and he could probably build a superior version of whatever the military had cooked up with leftover samples from Hammer but that was not his focus right now, though he mentally noted to himself to demand reparations from Fury after this.
They found signs of a forceful entry into their systems by Jarvis and the footage of Romanoff murdering a Councilman in the middle of nowhere was shown to him. He recognised the man.
Gideon Mallick.
Some sort of billionaire but one very low key. He had not expected for him to be on the cabal that governed SHIELD but apparently, he had done something that had irked Romanoff. Angered her enough for her to go rogue, leaving behind her life as an agent, to go and murder him.
That he could understand. What he couldn’t wrap his head around was why would Jarvis be assisting her. For one, Jarvis was never the killing murdering type of person.
Now, SHIELD had ordered for Romanoff to be brought in, dead or alive, though he was vaguely aware that for someone of Romanoff’s caliber, bringing her in alive was much harder and more importantly, much more dangerous than to just putting a bullet in her head and call it a day.
“What now?” He found himself asking Barton after he had narrated the entire ordeal to them. Romanoff had arrived at Jack's funeral but had gone completely AWOL after that. Only to surface in a remote SHIELD base, built underground in the middle of nowhere, where she took down all the agents stationed there, or rather Jarvis took down all the agents stationed there, and then Romanoff proceeded to blow the brains of Mallick in front of a live camera.
What was even more odd was the fact that Romanoff herself sent the toofate to Fury who sent his men to the site only to discover the site was not sanctioned by him or any of his predecessors. It was a complete black site but of such a nature that even the Director didn’t have an idea of it.
That was off and apparently, even Fury thought so. That was why he had sent Barton to him. He had some sort of alternate mission for him, it would seem.
“Alright, the room’s secure now. There is nothing and no one who can listen to what we speak here,” He said as they were on the basement floor
“Okay. I don’t know the full picture. Nobody does. But Fury knows that the site was not SHIELD, for sure. Which raises the question of just what Mallick was doing there.”
“He wants us to investigate the place then?” He asked Barton. That made sense. While he doesn’t have Jarvis, as of now, he is not exactly useless without him. Jarvis had somehow built up an entire system from the ground up, mimicking most of the functions that he used to be responsible for, in both his daily life and the operation of his suits.
“No,”
His eyebrows creased as Barton took out a file and handed it to him. He reluctantly took it because Pepper was not in the room with them. He didn’t want to burden her with this. She was already so busy with the relief efforts in New York.
He heard talks about outright buying out all the buildings surrounding Stark Tower and if that didn’t work, paying for the repair work on all the buildings that were affected by the huge ass sun ray that those guys sent through the portal, something that was stopped by Jack and his barriers.
Another thing that he had to thank Jack for. Another way he failed someone, he should have saved.
He rifled through the file, only to slow down as the things on the file increased in absurdity the more he went through the pages. By the time he was done reading through the 20 pages of atrocities and irregularities in the operations, he was white as a sheet.
His mind worked furiously as he tried to make sense of what was written in the file. Stuff that would not have seen the light of day had it not been for Jarvis, no doubt. He recognised the secrecy surrounding such information and what it would take it to gather it all.
“How? Why? Wha-What?” His words failed him as he sat on the sofa behind him. So this is why Jarvis defected?
But why? He could have warned him about it and then they could have done something to stop them. But he had, for some reason, chosen to team up with Romanoff to assassinate the members of the World Security Council, which was infested with members of HYDRA for some reason.
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The same HYDRA that his dad had worked so hard to defeat. Those parasites had reared their ugly heads once again and this time, were responsible for sending in that nuke straight to New York, despite them winning by a large margin.
The very thought of the visuals of Jack being skewered through his chest and his last act of saving him, happening due to these assholes doing something sent a spark of white hot fury through him. No, what Romanoff did, however grisly it might have been, was the right thing and if he had nothing to lose, he would have done the same as well.
As things stood, he had to worry about Romanoff and the company as well so he couldn't be seen doing something like that out in the open. No, he would have to work covertly but Jarvis’ involvement meant that he was already dragged in the mud, so to speak.
“Yeah, that was my reaction as well. To think that HYDRA had infested SHIELD for decades at this point was sobering. That explained why Nat left SHIELD. She hadn’t changed sides, just employers on the same side. It was just that this one was more star spangled and out in the open than her previous one,” Barton remarked bitterly before he, surprisingly, took out a container and just chugged on, alcohol, presumably.
No, he promised Pepper that he would remain sober for at least a year before they got married.
“So, you want me to track Romanoff? Or does Fury want Iron Man in his fight against these assholes?” He asked Barton, seriously considering the move, even with all the bad PR it would give him.
Barton’s smile was all teeth as he said, “Both will do just fine, Stark. For now, Fury doesn’t want to spook them otherwise that would spell the end of SHIELD as we know it,”
“Yeah, like it isn't already dead from the inside. You go back to Fury and tell him that if he wants my help, SHIELD has to go. Something else can be built to take its place but SHIELD is done for. Unless he agrees to that, there is nothing you guys can do to stop me from actively safeguarding my interests. I’m sure the President will be very interested in this,”
He said as he threw the file of very damning information on all the higher ups of SHIELD as well as the WSC, on the table in front of them.
Barton shrugged, “Fine by me. Was thinking the same thing, FUry just needs that to come from the outside. I’ll make sure that he gets the message. In the meantime, can you-”
“Yeah yeah, I will establish contact with Jarvis and see what can be done to get an audience with the Black Widow. Also, don’t tell Rogers about this because he will explode on the spot,”
“Why do you think Fury sent me instead of a living breathing Super Soldier on the chase?” Barton lit the folder on fire, smirked, and exited the Silent Room.
He slumped on the sofa as soon as the locking mechanisms of the door were done. He was just so tired, drained from everything. It had been less than two weeks since Jack’s funeral, and the scene of him dying in that huge explosion still flashed in his dreams every time he tried to sleep.
That was the only reason Pepper was here, with him, instead of coordinating the huge effort that Stark Industries had undertaken in the immediate aftermath of the Invasion. He couldn’t sleep, not without her being around him. She was the one who was warding off most of the nightmares and even then, his mind was so restless that he couldn’t sleep unless he was utterly exhausted.
Pepper had been responsible for many things in New York after the INvasion but the most important of all, in his opinion, was the recovery and safe disposal of all the alien tech that had been lying around, right after the invasion. The small stuff was not that dangerous but the vehicles with their power cores were something that could become unstable if someone without any knowledge of how it worked, tried to tinker with it, under less than ideal conditions.
Most of the tech that had been left after the Invasion had been in the hands of some local contractors and wasn’t that a bad idea? It became worse when some of that tech disappeared, probably into the underworld. So, he had to provide heavy compensation for the local contractors for them to hand over their entire supplies to Damage Control, who safely disposed of everything that was left.
There were six mostly intact Leviathan corpses left after the Invasion and the only ones with the logistics to move those were the US military and its private cogs in the machine that was the Military Industrial Complex.
Stark Industries might have left the weapons game altogether, but the massive royalties they got from previous technology patents made sure that they still had some name in the game, hence the information about the Leviathans.
The President had ordered for flying cities to be built using the tech of the Leviathans in case of another Invasion like this. His head hurt just thinking of the massive arms race that will now follow suit, as the tech and its iterations would find themselves in foreign countries' hands.
God, he wished Jarvis was with him. Something huge must have happened for him to be able to go so blatantly against his programming. He knew that Jarvis would someday grow to evolve by himself but the pace at which that was happening was so small that he would have had kids before Jarvis could have become truly sentient.
But now? Just from the short glimpse of his digital manifestation, he could tell that Jarvis had surpassed every single mind on the planet, digital and flesh and blood alike. Not that there were any other digital minds on the planet that he knew of. Something must have happened during the invasion for his development to suddenly skyrocket.
“Let’s find out,” He muttered to himself as he exited the Silent Room, something that he had built with Jarvis’ help in case he needed a bunker with zero digital access whatsoever.
The consoles lit up as soon as they detected his presence, showing multiple events happening concurrently, like the massive audience seeing the live telecast of a Leviathan corpse being burned and shoved into a huge concrete box before it would be buried somewhere undisclosed, away from everyone.
He had heard that one was the most radioactive, out of the bunch that the government had at the moment and the White House had decided to make a spectacle of disposing of that radioactive waste, not that the public knew the reason for the burial though he was sure that some conspiracy theorists somewhere had hit the truth in their guessing games.
“Alright, let’s rewind,” He had to do everything manually now because he just lost the best assistance anyone could have ever asked for. He was specifically looking for all the sensor data just before the explosion that wiped off the top floors of Stark Tower.
“There it is,” He said as the file opened up, along with a visual of the feed from Romanoff’s suit as well as the surrounding drones that Jarvis had deployed. He had deployed every single thing he could get his hands on, anything that was Stark property and had an internet connection was hijacked in hopes of helping against the INvasion.
He could see the sceptre suddenly being lit before it just went supersonic, stabbing Jack straight through his chest, hanging him on top of the barrier which then proceeded to burn him.
He winced as he saw lances of blue energy lash out at Jack’s body and barrier. He was way too exhausted for his body to mount an effective defense against the Tesseract. The theoretical infinite energy inside the Tesseract meant that Jack couldn’t do much to defend himself.
Then he saw the scene where Romanoff broke down, in tears, as she had to, essentially, commit murder and kill a minor, in order to save millions more. That was not new though. He had seen this footage hundreds of times, despite the pain, trying to bury in his memory the reason why he was still alive.
The only reason he was still breathing was because Jack had chosen to use his last vestiges of powers to save him. His mood plummeted to the ground as he chose to ignore that fact and focused on the sensor readings right as the portal collapsed on itself, saving New York from a fiery explosion in the form of that small tactical nuke that some group of idiots had sent their way.
The energy readings were not very reliable, considering the huge amount of ambient energy being thrown around due to very high energy objects and applications in the air but there was something he could do to smoothen that out. He took all the readings from all the satellites he had access to, some legal, some illegal, he didn’t exactly care at the moment and laid them atop the sensor readings.
That gave him a somewhat clearer picture. He could see that Jack’s energy was the lowest at the point where Romanoff shut down the portal. The sceptre’s energy was at its highest when it had seemingly piloted itself and stabbed Jack. The Tessertact’s energy was its lowest once the portal was closed.
The problem arose after that. As the portal was closed, the dormant energies of the Tesseract and the sceptre somehow began rising, creating a small energy storm that was visible through Roamnoff’s suits’ feed. Jarvis promptly encased her in the suit and brought her back as the energy readings continued to grow off the charts.
There! Right there, as the energy storm was growing in size, Jack's energy signature, which was the weakest it had ever been (he ignored the pang in his chest at that information), suddenly spiked, not as much as the TEsseract but it did spike.
In the feed as well, he could make out streaks of green among the ocean of blue and yellow. Jack’s energy readings grew in proportion to the other ones but it was never comparable. In the end, the other two energies vastly overpowered JAck’s and by the time Jarvis’ vision closed off due to the sheer light the energy storm was emitting, the sensors had been scrambled way too much from the data they were trying to sense.
That was when the energy storm exploded, depositing Romanoff a dozen floors below the rooftop, safely enclosed in the suit, leaving behind nothing but the smoking Tesseract and Sceptre, the only two things to survive that huge explosion.
He had seen some of the footage and it was as if a mini sun had formed on top of the Stark Tower before that explosion sent out a shockwave that broke down all the remaining windows around the Tower.
Nothing then, he thought to himself as he sighed and moved on to his next task.
“Where are you, Jarvis?” He mumbled to himself as he tried to find something, some backdoor, some contact method that Jarivs must have left for him. Otherwise, he would have to go to the Nexus to look for Jarvis and that would be so much of a hassle that he was tempted to just post on Facebook, saying “Hey Jarvis! Please contact me at your earliest convenience,”
Come to think of it, wasn't Romanoff's goal the same as his? Getting rid of HYDRA from the world? Why would he try and stop her from doing him a favor if she could get rid of all its members for him?
The only reason he could think of is the fact that she was doing so, with Jarvis and that was not something he could get behind. He had to talk some sense into Jarvis and tell him that stealing and murdering, even if the thing you stole was technically his creator's property and the person they killed did probably deserve it, was not okay.
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Word Count - 3552
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I already have upto 15 extra chapters published there.
A/ N [Rant] - Well, you know how I said in the previous chapter that I would be getting off early from work on Friday? Well, that was a big fat lie. Not from me though, from my manager who also got to know about it the same day from his boss. So, can’t really blame him but his fucking corporate chain.
Anywho, I was supposed to work for a measly 6 hours before I would be done, more or less. As it turned out, I clocked in at work around 7.45 AM and got off work at 11.30 PM. Oh yeah, almost a 16 hour shift.
As you can probably imagine, after that, I went home, ate some chicken on the way, and then promptly passed out in my bed.
But that wasn;t the end of it NO NO NO! The next morning, I woke up around 11 and wouldn’t you know it, I had an email telling me to do a small thing.
Granted, it only took me an hour to do so it was indeed a small task but come on, man. Let me have the weekend.
After all of that, I had lunch and then I wrote out this huge chapter for you guys.
Let it not be said that I am not a man of my word. While it is late, but the chapter IS over 3k words.
So, toodles.
[END OF RANT]
Enjoy the chapter!