—together

if we go down, then

we go down together.

is gone. Ultron cleared out, used the internet as an escape hatch." Bruce informed the team.

Tony was staring at a broken Iron Legionnaires that was on top of the table, as of inspecting him. But his mind was clearly not doing so. It was wandering on something else.

"Ultron." Steve bluntly said.

"He's being on everything. Files, surveillance." Romanoff entered the conversation. "Probably knows more about us than we know about each other."

Rhodes stood up from where he was laying on and decided to speak too. "He's on your files. He's on the internet. What I'd he decides to access something a little more exciting?"

"Nuclear codes." Agent Hill said in realization as she took pieces of glass from her foot with tweezers.

"Nuclear codes," Rhodes confirmed. "Look, we need to make some calls, assuming we still can." He proposed while pacing through the room.

"Nukes? He said he wanted us dead." Natasha frowned.

"He didn't say dead, he said extinct." Arabella's voice came out strong when she entered the room, with clothes without blood this time.

The baggy old Black Sabbath t-shirt hung loosely on her frame and was tugged inside of her shorts. Her grey sneakers padded softly against the polished floor as she stepped inside.

"He also said he killed someone," Clint added.

"But there wasn't anyone else in the building." Agent Hill said as a matter of fact.

Tony finally removed his attention from the Legionnaire and turned around to face everyone. "Yes, there was." He brought up an image of Jarvis' destroyed consciousness.

A wave of sadness took over his face. He lost more than just his artificial intelligence after all. He lost a friend, a partner and a somewhat vivid memory of his late butler.

"This is insane." Bruce moved closer to the yellow pieces that were left of Jarvis.

"Jarvis was the first line of defense. He would've shut Ultron down, it makes sense." Steve reasoned the why of the situation.

Bruce adjusted his glasses to take a better look at the shattered consciousness. "No, Ultron would've assimilated Jarvis. This isn't strategy, this is rage."

And then, out of the blue, Thor stormed in the room with an angry look plastered on his face. He walked forward, past the hologram of Jarvis consciousness and right to Tony. His hand found its way to the shorter man's neck and lifted him from the ground.

Arabella's body jolted forward at the sudden action and her eyes grew wide. "Hey! Put him down."

"Come on, use your words, buddy," Tony said, quite out of breath.

"I have enough words to describe you, Stark." Thor spat at the man.

"Thor!" Steve called out to get his attention. "The Legionnaire." He demanded.

The god dropped Stark and turned to the Captain. "Trial went cold about a hundred miles out, but it's headed North, and it has the scepter." He turned to Stark with an accusing glare. "Now we have to retrieve it, again."

"The genie's out of that bottle. Clear and present is Ultron." Natasha slightly rolled her eyes.

"I don't understand." Everyone turned focused their attention to Doctor Helen Cho, who had yet to argue about the matter. "You built this program. Why is it trying to kill us?"

She had a point. A very good point. Why was the program who was supposed to protect them planning on killing them? Why did he switch sides? Why did he make a different call? And as the thoughts and possible answers of the many questions ran inside her head, Tony laughed. A light-hearted laugh escaped his lips as he placed his forehead on the wall.

Everyone looked at the chuckling man, not quite understand the humor in the situation. Bruce shook his head to stop him from laughing more but it was no use. It was his coping mechanism after all.

"You think this is funny?" Thor menacingly asked.

Tony stopped chuckling and turned around to face Thor. "No. It's probably not, right? Is this very terrible?" He rhetorically questioned. "Is it so... Is it so... It is." Tony said between small laughs. "It's so terrible."

"This could've been avoided if you hadn't played with something you don't understand." Thor lectured Tony as a father would lecture his child.

"No, I'm sorry. I'm sorry." He clearly didn't mean the apologies that came out of his mouth. "It is funny. It's a hoot that you don't get why we need this." The veins from his neck were popping by the time he finished the sentence.

"Tony," Bruce warned. "This might not be the time to-"

"Really?! That's it?" Tony interrupted him. "You just roll over, show your belly, every time somebody snarls."

"Only when I've created a murder bot." Bruce softly admitted.

"We didn't! We weren't even close." Tony defended themselves. "We're we close to an interface?"

"Well, you did something right. And you did it right here." Steve cut the bickering short and took a stray forward to him. "The Avengers were supposed to be different than SHIELD."

"Anybody remember when I carried a nuke through a wormhole?" Tony changed the subject.

"No. It has never come up." Rhodes shook his head.

"Saved New York?" Tony continued. Natasha and Arabella shared exasperated looks with each other as the whole situation grew worse.

"Never heard that." Rhodes kept denying whatever his friend said.

"Recall that?" Tony asked everyone in the room. "A hostile alien army came charging through a hole in space. We're standing three hundred feet below it." He paused for a second, not to catch his breath, but to choose his words carefully. "We're the Avengers. We can bust arm dealers all the live long day, but, that up there?" He paused again as he pointed his fingers up. "That's... That's the endgame."

There was yet another pause, this time longer as the whole room stayed silent. "How were you guys planning on beating that?"

"Together," Steve solemly nodded.

"We'll lose." Tony took two steps forward to the super soldier.

"Then we'll do that together too," Steve reassured him. "Thor's right. Ultron's calling us out. And I'd like to find him before he's ready for us. The world's a big place. Let's start making it smaller."

Bruce asked as his eyes scanned the picture of a dead Strucker with 'peace' written in blood in the background.

"A message. Ultron killed Strucker." Steve handed the tablet to everyone for them to see.

"And he did a Banksy at the crime scene, just for us." Tony rolled his eyes and passed it to his daughter, who narrowed her eyes at it.

She scoffed and placed the tablet on the table. "Dude claims he wants peace and yet he writes peace with blood."

"This is a smokescreen," Natasha stated. "Why send a message when you've just given a speech?"

"Strucker knew something that Ultron wanted us to miss." Steve slowly told them.

"Yeah, I bet he," Natasha focused back to the computer and searched for information related to Strucker. "Yep. Everything we had on Strucker has been erased."

Stark looked at them and sighed. "Not everything."

Steve went through a file and read it out loud. "Well, Strucker had a lot of friends."

"Well, these people are all horrible," Bruce commented as he passed through a page.

"Wait!" Tony stopped Bruce. "I know that guy. From back in the day. He operates off the African coast, black market arms."

Steve shifted his gaze from the paper to Tony and gave him an accusing look.

"There are conventions, alright? You meet people, I didn't sell him anything." Tony was quick to defend himself.

Arabella sat with her legs crisscrossed on the floor with a bunch of boxes surrounding her. She recalled reading something about Tony, where they called him 'The Merchant of Death', that was probably what they were referring too. She wasn't sure though, but she assumed. And most of the time her assumptions were right.

"He was talking about finding something new, a game changer, it was all very Ahab. " Stark spoke, snapping the girl from her thoughts. She stood up from the floor and walked next to Thor.

"This." Thor pointed at a man's neck, where a tattoo was imprinted. Stark took a look at it and shook his head.

"Uh, it's a tattoo. I don't think he had it-"

"No, those are tattoos." Thor pointed to the other tattoos the man, Ulysses Klaue, had on his body. "This is a brand."

Bruce searched the sign on his computer and when he found a match, he told what it meant. "Oh, yeah. It's a word in an African dialect meaning thief, in a much less friendly way."

"What dialect?" Steve asked.

"Wakanada?" Bruce squinted his eyes to see if he had pronounced the word right. "Wa-Wa-Wakanda." He stammered.

"If this guy got out of Wakanda with some of their trade goods-" Tony turned to Steve.

"I thought your father said he got the last of it?"

"I don't follow," Bruce confusedly said. "What comes out of Wakanda?"

Tony, Steve, and Arabella looked back at the red, blue and white shield before the girl spoke.

"The strongest metal on Earth."

I hope you liked this new part and keep on reading this book. Thank you if you do! I really, really appreciate it. The lyrics above are from the chainsmokers' paris. I hope you stick around!

love, lili

tales of sacrifice ; issue no.1