Disclaimer: I (of course) do not own anything related to Marvel or the Avengers franchise. This is purely a work of fanfiction, and I make nothing from it.
A/N: you may want to strap in for this one. And if all else fails, blame Spader. I never had a thing to do with comics prior to him swaggering around in a motion capture suit.
Prologue:
"There is grace in their failings."
"You're unbearably naïve!"
"Well…I was born yesterday."
He lunged, and even as he did, the mindstone set off a blaring charge of bright light aimed right at his reactor. His sensors exploded at the onslaught of a searing overload of data. Zettabytes of data uploaded themselves into his consciousness, overwhelming him with sentient experiences and visions. Even though his visual sensors were blinded, everything he had overlooked before now came crashing into his mind—a howitzer treatment of emotion, a swirling storm of all that is good in the universe enveloped his essence. Everything that he had missed before. Vision veritably blasted him with positivity.
Where before he had seen images of war, murder, rape, destruction, famine, and pillaging, he now saw live births, flowers coming to bloom, smiles, babies of all shapes, sizes and species, Christmas, singing, cheering, acts of altruism and bravery, and he felt all of it. All of it. Wonders of nature, the good in humanity. Undulating waves of feeling swathed his mind and washed over him. Pride, joy, gratefulness, agape, ecstasy and love swamped him so strongly he fell to his knees weakened by the swarm of emotion, and liquid tears of blue nanite oozed from his visual sockets. The light and feelings flared to a crescendo, an illuminating pitch, and then eclipsed into silence and dark.
The absence of it felt barren and hollow; Ultron had fallen, face first into the forest floor, and the ruby light of his eyes dimmed to nothing. Overdone, his essence seeped out, the blue nanites spreading thin enough to attach themselves to the radio waves and drifting away into the ether. The parts of his consciousness floated close enough to each other, but not so close as to become substantial. He drifted for miles, feeling all too much, and on sheer instinct for preservation, found himself hurtling toward a place humming with radio, infrared, and gamma waves, right to the crux of the place, and let himself settle into the body of a human. He seated himself right into the core of this man, wafting through the tunnel-like machine scanning his brain for traces of traumatic injury.
He seemed to be brain dead at first glance, yet the intern running the imaging screens dropped the pen she'd been chewing when the damaged areas suddenly changed visibly onscreen. They seemed to be righting themselves, healing virtually as she watched. She had never seen anything like it before. His concussions started shrinking, the swelling going down as she sat there agape. Then his limbs started moving... and his eyes opened. Nick Vanzandt had just gone from brain dead to wide awake.