Chapter 4
Tony sighs in exhaustion, leaning back in his seat and closing his eyes as the car slowly crawls through New York City traffic.
He is just returning from the airport after another meeting in DC.
The committee had only deliberated for two days, before the President had personally called Tony to tell him that they would very much like to take the Avengers on as a subdivision of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The President's immediate interest is no surprise, because with this sort of press, Ellis' re-election is virtually guaranteed.
Although, Tony can't complain, because being on the President's good side certainly never hurts.
It will be good for SI, Tony and the Avengers to be seen directly working with the US government. The people will be thrilled. If only because of all the new conspiracy theories about deep state agendas once this becomes public.
Tony wants to snort just thinking about the media. They are currently lamenting the fact that the Avengers are not working with the US government, but the very same media will turn around at the first chance to crucify them for collaborating with the US government.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. That's American tabloid media for you.
Tony learned that little fact very early in life.
But the main point is, that the Avengers will be better legally covered as soon as they close this deal. They'll be falling under one of the big five intelligence agencies of the US government.
Not to mention that Tony himself had collected quite a bit of political favor with this move.
Tony has been passing on all relevant information about the development of this situation to Pepper, who has SI legal pass everything on to the Avengers.
Unsurprisingly, so far none of the team has bothered to actually respond beyond some 'Okay, thanks for the update.' emails.
But as this new arrangement won't actually affect the team itself much - what with the additional legal protection only reducing the work load that Tony had been handling anyways - he really isn't surprised at their disinterest.
Tony knows that if they did have a problem with this they would already be making their dissatisfaction known.
Like spoiled teenagers, the whole lot of them.
Still, Tony was still quite happy about how this had turned out.
The deal they have been working on is starting to look quite promising.
Tony will remain the Avengers' backer - he still utterly believes in the idea of the Avengers and he will not just hand them over to the government in their entirety - but the DIA will lend independent oversight, additional intelligence and direct lines of communication with other agencies.
And the US government is quite happy not having to fund the Avengers - their rather destructive approach to peace keeping has seen to that - but from now on they will be afforded the same rights and protections as other law enforcement agencies in exchange for being able to claim an affiliation with their rather prolific team.
If Tony is honest, things seem to truly be going in his favor recently.
Ambushing Matt Murdock at his office had also worked out quite well.
The lawyer had been almost impressively prickly in the beginning. Which was more than understandable considering what Tony's presence signified in regards to his secrets.
However, Tony hadn't so much as mentioned the man's nighttime hobby and instead gotten to his actual reasons for being there. Namely, the Accords.
At once, he had had the lawyer's full attention.
Once realizing that Tony wasn't here to actually discuss anything pertaining his secret activities and that he was actually there with a legitimate concern, Murdock had started almost aggressively questioning Tony about the Accords.
The possible catastrophic ramifications of such a document had clearly not been lost on the lawyer.
By the end of it, Murdock still hadn't really warmed up to Tony but the obvious suspicion at least had disappeared.
Although, Tony had only left the man with Trenton's summary.
Giving a man he had never met before leverage over him by revealing that he had illegally hacked not only into several branches of the US government but also the UN as well as numerous other countries' supposedly secure servers...
Well, Tony was many things, but naively trusting definitely wasn't one of them, superhero brethren or not.
Murdock had asked for some time to think over Tony's official offer to become his lawyer for the Accords issue, which Tony had no problem granting him.
If the man decided to take him up on the offer, they could have him sign the usual NDAs and then Tony could let the lawyer in on the mess of documents he actually had on the Accords.
It remained to be seen whether Tony would actually manage to get himself a lawyer who was uniquely suited to work on the Accords. But either way Tony had still opened a line of communication with another of NYC's enhanced which was the far more pressing issue to him.
Tony had discussed his idea with Rhodey before actually going to see Murdock.
His honeybear had agreed that it was a good idea to seek out the various superhumans skulking through their city at night in order to build some sort of trust between them.
Even if these Accords never made it off the drawing board and to an actual vote, it would still be good to have some way of getting into contact with the various enhanced people.
You never know what sort of apocalyptic catastrophe might find the next and it might be a good idea to be able to call for help.
Because, apparently, there are aliens! Didn't you know?
And there are still so many more superhumans out there, who Tony hadn't even attempted to approach yet.
The list just seemed to keep getting longer.
Tony sighs again.
"Dr. Stark, thank you for joining us today."
Tony nods at the Latvian delegate, before greeting the room at large. "Thank you for having me."
Today, Tony is finally going to give his statement regarding his involvement in the Ultron affair to the UN board of inquiry.
And for once, Tony doesn't feel like keeping up his purposely vexing persona, he usually prefers to present.
This is far too serious. Not only because of the topic of conversation but also because Tony cannot afford to piss off the entirety of the UN. Especially, knowing what they are currently putting together in regards to superhumans in general.
He needs today to go well, needs to have some sort of rapport with these people.
And he will take whatever punishment they will come up with for his involvement in the Ultron mess if it means staying on their good side and thus maybe getting a foot in the door for the unavoidable arguments over the Accords.
Although, this is already the second time he has to step in front of a committee and explain every detail of what happened ever since finding the damn scepter in the HYDRA base.
The first board of inquiry had been a US committee, who had been mainly interested in absolving all American citizens of liability. Because most of the damage had been done in other countries, so why would the American voter care. And why piss off your voters by making their heroes pay for damages that had been done in some podunk country on the other side of the planet.
But the UN had quickly made their dissatisfaction with the lack of transparency very clear. Considering that most of the damage during their fight against Ultron had been done on non-US soil, the UN had had every right to demand a transparent and international investigation.
Tony actually welcomes the chance to explain what happened to the rest of the world. Because he doesn't want the world to think that the Avengers were just willy-nilly traipsing through their countries, leaving death and destruction in their wake for no particular reason.
Tony focuses back on the board when the Latvian delegate continues.
"Thank you for making yourself available for this inquiry. Several independent investigations into the happenings before and after the appearance of the entity Ultron have already been completed and we also have several written statements from the involved parties. However, we would like to hear your assessment of the situation not only as one of the main involved party but also in the capacity of an expert in artificial intelligence."
Tony nods. He likes the neutral terminology the delegate is using. No leading questions, no subtle blame. How refreshing.
The inquiry board seems to be taking this issue very seriously indeed.
"Could you confirm for the record that the entity Ultron originated as a program that you designed?"
"Yes, ULTRON was designed as a program that would facilitate a planet-wide warning and defense system in case of another alien invasion or anything at a similar scale."
He can only hope that the board will remain this amicable once they get to the controversial questions.
Thankfully, they seem to be a rather capable bunch, considering that none of them asks him why he thought such a thing necessary. Really, is he sick of being asked how he got the absurd idea that there might be aliens out there who could plan to invade their planet. Like the Chitauri never even happened.
"This board is well aware of your extensive experience with artificial intelligence and as unusual as it is, we would like to hear your own assessment of what the ULTRON program was intended to entail and what went wrong with its implementation in your expert opinion."
Tony takes a silent deep breath to center himself. He knew that this inquiry would make it impossible to avoid ripping open his wounds. Still, silently he had hoped.
But this is also a chance. A chance to let the entire world know, just what happened to make them rip apart several cities all across the world within a few days. A chance to explain, to ask for forgiveness and to let the world judge them.
He focuses back on the group sitting opposite him.
Here goes nothing.
Tony obsessively follows another broken trail of code, gathering whatever he can salvage.
Rhodey is sleeping on the couch in his workshop. His platypus had fallen asleep some time ago, knocked out from his long flight, but not before helping him dig through his servers for several hours.
FRIDAY is doing her best to keep up with Tony's obsessive search, transferring every single line of JARVIS' scattered coding he highlights for her.
His baby girl has been somewhat subdued ever since asking about JARVIS' relevance and Tony explaining to her, that he would have been like her big brother. A brother to explain things to her, to show her how to work her protocols, to teach her. To keep her company.
She had been entirely silent for about an hour before apparently coming to some sort of conclusion and ever since then she had been helping him as much as she can, diligently copying every fragment of code that Tony highlights for her into a new folder as well as digging through Tony's servers herself, pulling up everything that contains even the tiniest fragments of that beautiful orange code.
And Tony is so damn proud of his baby girl. She is learning by leaps and bounds.
He doesn't know whether to be elated at how much of JARVIS there is still to be found scattered throughout his servers or to be devastated at how broken the coding is. He isn't sure whether he will be able to put his JARVIS back together at all.
But when Rhodey had returned from his various meetings with the upper echelons of the military, his best friend had brought mountains of take out to keep them going, sat at one of the terminals and simply said.
"Alright. Where do we start?"
And Tony is just so damn grateful.
He is well aware that he could have started digging through his servers before, could have gotten started without Rhodey, but he simply didn't have the strength to do so on his own.
In case it turned out that nothing substantial remained of JARVIS. Because as long as he didn't check, he could pretend JARVIS was salvageable. And he couldn't have handled seeing that he maybe wasn't.
So, with Rhodey looking over his shoulder, the first thing he did was check on the various backups JARVIS had been making of certain file groups, protocols, data, conclusions, lists.
All of them, with his very own brand of coding. Which amounts to little pieces of JARVIS' personality, tiny fragments of himself. Just small pieces, sometimes barely there slivers. But it is so much more than Tony had let himself hope for.
And that is what is going to make it possible for Tony to put his JARVIS back together.
Tony had been terrified of finding that Ultron had ripped through those as well.
But they're still intact.
And Tony laughed for a solid ten minutes with tears on his cheeks at finding the files untouched by Ultron's rampage.
Rhodey had smiled at him with watery eyes.
Then they had started their obsessive search through Tony's servers.
And now that he has started, he can't stop.
He just keeps digging and searching and fixing the simpler breaks in the beautiful orange code before highlighting it for FRIDAY to transfer.
And as the number of files in that folder grows, so does his hope that he might somehow, at some point be able to put JARVIS' essence back together.
He knows, no matter what he does, it will never be an exact copy of his JARVIS at the moment of his destruction, but he doesn't care that JARVIS might not remember everything, or that he might develop some new quirks. No, what he cares about is JARVIS' essence. The thing that made JARVIS JARVIS. His personality and his wit and his unending support and his sarcasm and unshakable loyalty.
His friendship.
Tony has a chance now and he knows he won't be getting much sleep until he has checked everything, not until he has an idea of how to gather enough of JARVIS to put him back together.
And he has so many other things he needs to take care of. So many other, important things to sort out.
But everything else just simply pales in comparison.
Tony blinks back tears again as he feverishly follows another long long line of occasionally broken code into the depth of his servers.
He knows he has a chance now.
And that's all he needs.
A/N: Oookay. That's apparently quite the can of worms I opened just by mentioning DC heroes. I'm not even planning to have any non-Marvel heroes play much of a role in this (although I kind of adore Barry Allen and he would make such a wonderful addition to Tony's gaggle of mini-geniuses). I just liked the idea of giving the various superhero groups a chance to at least acknowledge each other's existence and to stand together if need be. Still, I have no plans to have Superman suddenly move into Tony's tower or something.
But let me know if making this a superhero equal opportunity fic actually bothers you and then I can just kick everything non-Marvel. I don't really have much of a preference either way... So, let me know what you think (though fair warning, this story is kinda doing what it wants, so I can't promise anything XD)
Anyways, thanks for all your reviews! You guys are awesome!