Disclaimer: I don't own anything Marvel. I just own Anna.

Chapter 20

Good Intentions

It was definitely possible to cut the tension in the air with a butterknife. After everything had happened, the injured were getting patched up, though for once Anna hadn't gotten a scratch on her despite all the broken glass. Maria and Cho patched themselves up, and Anna just sat in a small wheeling lab chair, bouncing her leg anxiously. Everybody was present with the exception of Thor who could fly after the one runaway Legionnaire. That Legionnaire had made off with the sceptre too, which added to Anna's anxiety.

There was definitely going to be a fight. Whether or not Anna was going to be one throwing punches was still yet to be seen. Rey could smell her anxiety and her anger, and was sitting a few feet away with his ears pulled back and his tails between his legs. He'd seen her worked up before, but not this fuming. As much as he didn't like the smell of those chemicals in her body, he was a little amused and wouldn't have minded watching her let that anger out. Especially on that obnoxious man with the goatee.

"All our work is gone," Bruce said. "Ultron cleared out, used the internet as an escape hatch.

"Ultron," Steve muttered.

"He's been in everything," Nat said, turning away from one of the computers. "Files, surveillance. Probably knows more about us than we know about each other."

"That's disheartening," Anna thought. She'd already had files on her leaked and decrypted from the Bratva. She felt far more exposed now after this.

"He's in your files. He's in the internet. What if he decides to access something a little more exciting," Rhodey spit balled.

"Nuclear codes," Hill finished. She was sitting in an office chair with a pair of tweezers in her hand, picking out glass from the bottom of her feet.

"Nuclear codes," Rhodey repeated. "Look, we need to make some calls, assuming we still can."

"Nukes? He said he wanted us dead," Nat said.

"He didn't say dead. He said extinct," Steve corrected.

"Extinct how exactly? I mean, getting rid of the Avengers is one thing, but does that mean killing us all so there isn't one, or just dissolving us? Or does it mean others like us, like with the targeting system Hydra was going to use?"

"Who knows?" Nat said.

"He also said he killed somebody," Clint brought up.

"But there was nobody else in the building," Hill clarified, or tried to.

"Are we positive that all the guests got out? They have to sign in and out with security, right? Maybe we should call down there to make sure everyone was accounted for," Anna suggested.

"Yes there was." Tony walked to the middle of the room, and by using his phone, brought up a hologram of something all messed up, and Jamie had no idea to make of it.

Bruce walked closer. He opened his arms, encasing just a fraction of the shattered hologram. "This is insane," he said.

"What is it?" Anna asked.

"JARVIS," Bruce answered.

"Killed Jarvis?" Anna asked, looking at the projection. "But he's a program. Doesn't he have backups? Can't we just reboot something and get him back?"

"Doesn't work like that," Bruce said.

Hearing that was like getting stabbed in the heart. Sure, JARVIS was a program. He wasn't alive, but he's always seemed very much so. He was sarcastic and caring. He had a personality. He was more than just a program that assisted. He'd been family. An ever present helper and companion. Yes, he wasn't actually a friend. He had no feelings. Anna wasn't sure if he was just a program or an AI, but there was definitely going to be a whole in her heart where she'd cared for JARVIS.

"You are too sentimental," Rey said. "It was not real."

Maybe to you, Anna thought. But you haven't been through what I have been with JARVIS.

"JARVIS was the first line of defense," Steve said. "He would've shut Ultron down, it makes sense."

"No, Ultron could've assimilated JARVIS. This isn't strategy, this is...rage," Bruce said.

Thor finally arrived back, not dressed in his traditional Asgardian uniform. He boots thumped with each step as he moved with determination to Tony. Once he met Tony, he grabbed him by the throat and lifted him up off the ground, through the hologram, dissipating it.

"Yes!" Rey exclaimed loudly in Anna's head. He jumped to his feet, ears perked. "Punch the obnoxious man!"

"Ease up, Thor," Anna instructed.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Clint said. "It's going around."

"Come on. Use your words, Buddy," Tony managed to get out.

"I have more than enough words to describe you, Stark," Thor muttered.

"Thor! The Legionnaire," Steve said, getting Thor back on directive.

It worked. Thor dropped Tony forcefully to the ground, and looked to Steve. "Trail went cold about a hundred miles out, but it's headed north, and it has the sceptre. Now we have to retrieve it. Again."

"The genie's out of the bottle. Clear and present is Ultron," Nat said.

"I don't understand," Cho said. "You built this program. Why is it trying to kill us?"

Tony turned his back to the rest of the group, and it almost sounded like he was laughing. It was either from shock, or something else, and Anna honestly hoped it was shock or disbelief, otherwise Tony had a whole lot more shit to deal with. And from the look on Bruce's face as he shook his head to get him to stop, it wasn't shock.

"You think this is funny?" Thor asked.

"No?" Tony said, turning around. "It's probably not, right? Is this very terrible? Is it so...is it so...it is. It's so terrible."

"Tony, this really isn't the time," Anna said. "Tell us what's going on."

"This could've been avoided if you hadn't played with something you don't understand," Thor said.

"No, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It is funny. It's a hoot that you don't get why we need this," Tony went on.

"Wait, are you saying that thing was created from the staff?" Anna asked, fury building within her chest. "Did you learn nothing from the past!"

"Tony, maybe this might not be the time to…" Bruce started to warn.

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

"Only when I've created a murder bot!" Bruce explained.

"We didn't. We weren't even close! Were we close to an interface?" Tony asked.

"Well, you did something right," Steve said. "And you did it right here. The Avengers were supposed to be different than SHIELD."

"Anybody remember when I carried a nuke through a wormhole?" Tony asked.

It seemed there was a collective eye roll. Rhodey was the only one to mutter back to Tony's continued reminder to all there about what he did a couple years about during the Battle of New York.

"No, it's never come up," Rhodes said.

"Saved New York?"

"Never heard that."

"Recall that? A hostile alien army came charging through a hole in space. We're standing three hundred feet below it. We're the Avengers. We can bust arms dealers all the live long day, but, that up there?" he pointed to the sky. "That's...that's the end game. How were you guys planning on beating that?"

"Together," Steve answered.

"We'll lose," Tony shot back.

"Then we'll do that together too," Steve said. Steve and Tony looked at one another for a long moment, before turning away. "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."

The team dispersed to do their own jobs in trying to find Ulton.

Nobody got any sleep that night except for Rey. Anna did change out of her attire into sweats and a tee-shirt though just to be more comfortable as she went over as many digital files as she could to try and figure out what Ultron's next play was.

A little while later, Steve had every gather in the lab so that he could inform them that Ultron had killed Baron Strucker, one of the head HYDRA guys that had captured (though he surrendered) during their last mission when they retrieved Loki's sceptre back. He had been in prison, safe from causing anybody else any harm.

The crime scene photo was graphic. An executed Strucker laid dead with a sign. "What's this?" Tony asked.

"A message," Steve clarified. "Ultron killed Strucker."

"And he did a Banksy at the crime scene, just for us," Tony muttered.

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

"Strucker knew something that Ultron wanted us to miss," Steve pointed out.

"Well, strucker was working with List and Whitehall," Anna said. "Think Josef Mengele, but modern and on Inhumans."

"Yeah, I bet he…" Nat muttered as she moved to look at the computer she had been working on. She typed away and then continued to speak once she found what she wanted. Or lack thereof. "Yep. Everything we had on Strucker has been erased."

"Not everything," Tony corrected.

Twenty minutes later, all of the old files that Tony had from the SSR and SHIELD were in the lab, and everybody was digging through them for any leads. What exactly they were looking for wasn't clear to anybody. That was kind of the point. They had no idea what Ultron knew, and what he didn't want them to know. This could take a long time.

"Known associates," Steve said. "Well, Strucker has a lot of friends."

"Well, these people are all horrible," Bruce stated.

"At least you didn't have to meet Whitehall," Anna said. "He was a sick son of a bitch and he knew it. Embraced it. I'm just glad Co-" Anna cleared her throats as she caught herself, "that my friends in SHIELD took care of him."

"Wait, I know that guy!" Tony exclaimed. This caused Bruce to pause, instead of tossing the photo back into a pile or one of the boxes. He passed him the photo. "From back in the day. He operates off the African coast, black market arms."

Steve gave him a scrutinizing look, but Anna didn't think Tony meant it in the way that it came out. Not like he usually did. "There are conventions, alright? You meet people, I didn't sell him anything," Tony explained. "It's Ulysses Klaue. He was talking about finding something new, a game changer, it was al very 'Ahab.'"

Thor moved over to look as well. He pointed out of his big fingers onto the photo, on the man's neck. "This," he said.

"Uh, it's a tattoo. I don't think he had it…" Tony muttered.

"The obnoxious one is incorrect," Rey thought. "When my kind was hunted and captured for sport, some created a fighting ring. Each team was branded. That is what that is: a branding."

"No, those are tattoos, this is a brand," Thor moved over to the computer and started looking for a match for the brand symbol. Jamie moved over to stand behind him to look over his shoulder as images zoomed through. It didn't take long for a match to come up. Bruce and Anna quickly read through the information.

"Uh, yeah, it's a word in an African dialect meaning thief, in a much less friendly way," Bruce said.

"What dialect?" Steve asked.

"Wakanada…?" Bruce tried, but he read, or pronounced the name wrong. "Wa...Wa.."

"Wakanda," Jamie said for him. "It's an African country. Very secluded."

"Wakanda!" Bruce exclaimed, finally able to say it with Jamie's help. He was brilliant, but Wakanda wasn't easy to say, and neither were a lot of the Russian and German she'd had to use in her undercover work. She was just glad she was good with linguistics.

Steve and Tony quickly turned to each other, knowing something the other teammates didn't. "If this guy got out of Wakanda with some of their trade goods…" Tony muttered.

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

"I don't follow," Bruce said.

"What comes out of Wakanda?" Bruce asked.

"The strongest metal on Earth," Tony answered.

"Where is this guy now?" Steve asked.

"I don't know, but we'll find out," Tony said.

Sorry about the mistakes in the last chapter. I went back and fixed it. I took the character's dialog out from my other marvel story just so I wouldn't have to write the same thing again, but obviously changed what my OCs said. Some of the OC names didn't get changed though. It's all set now.

Thanks to the following for their reviews on the previous chapter:

SomebodyWhoCares - He'll be here much sooner than you think ; )

Jedi Jesla777 - I went back and fixed them. Thanks for the heads up. I didn't realize I missed a few.