A/N: Actually this ended up being more popular than I had expected! Apparently there are either more or just as many Ultron/OC fans as Scarlet Vision. Who'd have guessed? Thanks for the faves, follows, reads and reviews, everyone who did so! Lets see where this is going...

"So, anyone want to tell me why there's a homicidal maniac in the building?" I asked tersely, slathering mayonnaise on wholewheat bread; the only two food items they had in there, unsurprisingly. Upon the unexpected run in with the infamous android, or rather, about three quarters of the android, given his current state, I had dragged the other two carbon based life forms back into the waiting-room-turned-residence to get a straight explanation. While I wasn't keen on leaving the bot unsupervised, I figured it couldn't be any worse than being in the room with him and I needed some answers or I was going to go ballistic.

"There's really no problem, Katja," my Pa tried to reassure me, though I wasn't buying any of it. "It was just a little project that turned out better than we had expected it to."

"Oh, you call this better? I call this crazy! You saw what he did, you were right there," I exclaimed hysterically, turning to give them another angry look while I bit into the sandwich.

Pa shook his head, "Now, sweetheart, be rational about this. You cannot really blame him. He's just a robot with programming, after all."

I sputtered at that and put my piece of bread down. Aleks wisely took a step out of the firing line and stayed quiet. "Rational? You are asking me to be rational?" I, well, honestly I shrieked, jabbing a finger in my fathers chest. "I have spent my whole life dealing with you and your 'rational' schemes, Atyets. You can call me judgmental, you can call me uptight, or heartless, but don't you dare call me irrational when I have given up so much to make up for your irrationality." With rage giving all of my movements a sharpness I picked up my sandwich again, took an angry bite, then muttered around the mouthful, "And don't give me any of that 'programming' crap either, it's clear as day to me that the little pissbot does whatever the hell he wants."

With those bitter words hanging in the air like a sour smell, I stormed my way out of the building, slamming the door behind me. It had been a mistake to come back here. Every time I tried to make things better they just ended up worse. For a minute I looked around the street for a clean spot, but then sighed and sat where I was, at the bottom stair, and put my head in my hands. A few minutes passed, but I'm not sure how many, before the door behind me quietly clicked open and I was joined in my spot. "Go away, Aleks," I mumbled rather pathetically, "I just want to be left alone."

"No, really," came the deep American accent of the person I wanted to see second least of all at that moment, second only to my father, Ultron himself, "please, I want you to go on and on about your daddy issues while I sit hear and nod at various intervals."

While my first response to discovering it was him at my left on the stairs was gut-wrenching fear, the rational response, after hearing that god-awful dry sarcasm I could do nothing more than stare at him with a deadpan expression and take another bite of mayo-bread. "Didn't your mother ever teach you it's not polite to mock people?" I replied in kind, then regretted it. What if he felt like he owned sarcasm and killed anyone who used it other than him?

"Didn't your mother ever teach you it's not polite to talk with your mouth full?"

I couldn't help it, even though I had kind of been asking for it, the comeback was surprising enough that I snorted back a laugh and ended inhaling the offending mouthful. Now choking, to add that to the list of awful things that had happened that day, I coughed and hacked and tried to breathe, getting no help from the chuckling android beside me. Eventually, but with much difficulty, I managed to get the half-eaten chunk back up and promptly spat it into the gutter, trying to catch my breath.

"Well, that wasn't very lady-like." Apparently Ultron had an unwanted opinion for everything. With an exaggerated eye roll in response, I came to the conclusion that the company inside wasn't quite as bad as it was outside, stood and walked back in. Aleks straightened and looked at me in surprise, but I noticed Pa was nowhere in sight. Knowing him, he'd probably gone into the garage to tinker with something until he'd cooled off.

"How'd you guys go?" Aleks asked, and I sent him a bitter look, figuring he was completely aware of the fact that I had gotten a dose of surprisingly sassy murderbot.

That's when the sudden realization hit me: I had just had an almost-conversation with a being that had nearly managed to eradicate my species only two weeks prior, and lived to tell the tale.

And, despite the fact that I could have choked to death while he laughed, it hadn't actually been the most unpleasant thing I had ever done.

"Hey, Pa? There wasn't any food in the house so I ordered pizza. Still like anchovies?" I asked timidly as I stepped into the dim light of the garage a couple of hours later. I had calmed down since our little spat, it was nothing out of the ordinary, after all. However, I had come here with the purpose of seeing if they were okay and helping them through this difficult time. Sure, having a resurrected enemy of humanity certainly added an extra level of complexity, but I shouldn't let it change me or my feelings toward my family. They were grownups, they could make their own decisions. It wasn't going to be easy, but nothing in my life had been easy, and I had managed to do all of that stuff just fine in the end.

He looked up from the workbench and raised the face shield of his welding helmet, smudging grease on his cheek as he went. It was a nostalgic sight. "Oh, you're still here, Katja. I was worried I had driven you away, again," he said sorrowfully, giving me that puppy face that I had fallen for so many times before.

I heaved a heavy sigh. "Atyets, you should know by now that you can infuriate me until the stars die and I'll never leave forever," I told him without meeting his gaze, as emotional talk wasn't one of my strong points, and never had been. I set the pizza box down on the corner of the workbench, noticing the glowing features of the resident android in the corner of the room, hooked up to some batteries and doing something with a notepad and pen. I chose to ignore that elephant for now, not keen on starting another fight just yet.

"When you left last time I thought you had," he replied with a sigh and a scratch at his beard-covered cheek.

"Oh, Atyets, I know you were upset when I went to China, but you know I never did it because I didn't love you. I'll always love you and Aleks, and Ma too. I only left because I needed to experience something more than fixing the neighbor's toaster and updating people's operating systems. That stuff is your life, not mine."

He huffed a little and pouted, "When you were little you loved these things. I would get you a gaming console, and instead of playing you would just pull it apart and put it together. Over and over! You showed much potential, but then-" he cut himself off and pursed his lips, sadness taking over him like a black cloud.

"Then Ma got sick, right, Pa?" I sighed through my nose and traced the pizza box's logo with the tip of my finger. "Someone had to look after you and Aleks. After that I just didn't have the time and energy for games anymore."

At that he gathered me into the rib-crushing hug I had missed when I had arrived, and even though he smelt like solder and sweat, and he had probably put permanent black grease stains all over my sweater, and this definitely wouldn't be the end to our bickering, after spending several hours in Sokovia so far, this was the first time I had felt like I was finally home.

"Get a room, you two," came the nauseated input from the pile of scrap metal in the corner. I rolled my eyes again, earning a snicker from my Pa. "Did you just roll your eyes at me?"

"No, I just looked from you back to the pizza," I replied innocently.

"What, via the ceiling?" Apparently Atyets found Ultron's little jab hilarious and I swatted his arm and groaned.

"I swear, you two are as bad as each other!"

At that point Aleks poked his head through the doorway and said, "I hope you got more than one pizza without Atyets' little fishies, sis, because I just finished the one you left in here."

I gaped a him with an expression that spoke my feelings of betrayal. "You ate my pizza?" Pa and Ultron may have been awful in their own right, but that was when I knew that the real villain in the building was my baby brother.

In the end I had to share Pa's pizza, and just pick off the anchovies. It wasn't the same, but I was hungry enough after nothing but airline food and a nasty mayonnaise sandwich to just force it down and not ask questions. For the record, Aleks did apologize for scoffing the pizza without asking, but he was so tall now, and he seemed so skinny for someone as broad in the shoulder as him, that I couldn't resent him for it for long. Who knows how long it had been since the kid had had a decent meal? I decided I would stock the makeshift house full of the basic food groups first thing tomorrow. I only had about three weeks off school before I fell irreparably behind, but hopefully it would be enough time to put a little meat on my brother's bones, and off my father's. Healthy eating mustn't have been on the cards at all since I left. I gave a worried look at my Pa, who was eating pizza with one hand and measuring sheet metal with the other. "What exactly are you working on, Atyets?" I asked, peering over and trying to get a good look at the plans.

He raised his eyebrows at me, seemingly surprised that I was interested. "Well, we're still trying to get Ultron back to fully functional. He's giving us the schematics, and we're, that is, your brother and I are doing what we can with them."

"And you aren't at all worried about what he'll do when he is up and running?" I asked incredulously.

"I am right here, you know," the robot in question commented with irritation.

I smirked, "Yeah, I know."

"Ultron has given us his word that he won't harm us," Pa answered my question. "And besides, he owes us at least that, he was dead until we put him back together."

While taking someone like Ultron's word was crazy enough to my ears, it was the second statement that made me frown. "What do you mean dead?" I half expected Ultron to pipe up with some grandiose statement that Pa was exaggerating and that nothing could truly kill one so intelligent as he, but the android remained silent for once.

"Well, this one here is bits and pieces from several of the robots that attacked: this one had a head that was mostly intact, this one a CPU, this one a reactor, a memory core, an arm, a leg, you get the picture. And it wasn't easy getting them with SHIELD on cleanup duty." Pa was telling the story like a humorous anecdote, but I was feeling a little sick. That could have just been the smelly anchovies, though. "When we were putting him together, we thought we'd just have a plain old piece of machinery on our hands, a blank slate, we could never have guessed that the Ultron program would resurrect. I had thought that CPU was in fantastic condition considering, but to not have lost any of its data!" He shook his head in amazement, "Incredible."

Our strange and rather unpleasant little discourse was interrupted by a metal hand slamming another few sheets of paper onto the bench. "These are the plans for the reactor repairs, and some others. That should keep you busy enough so you don't feel the need for endless chatter," the android grunted, and skulked back to his previous spot, attaching the clamps back to the receivers in his chest. It must have been odd for him to be so dependent on simple human devices like car batteries and jumper cables. He noticed my staring and I quickly looked away, not wanting to earn his contempt. That could only end in pain.

So instead, I picked up the papers and flicked through them. Most of them were fairly boring, though no doubt Pa and Aleks would find them fascinating, but the last two caught my eye. After pages of technical diagrams of various parts, the aesthetically pleasing image of a intricate robotic face and then a body where an abrupt but welcome change. The images were familiar, but I'd only ever seen grainy photos and videos taken from afar. These were the designs to Ultron's first and prime body, the one that had obviously been destroyed with the rest of him.

Pa picked up on my sudden interest with whatever designs had just been delivered and came to stare over my shoulder, "Beautifully designed and balanced, isn't it? A work of art."

"Yeah," I breathed, "beautiful."

A/N: Okey! So, I don't know if this will be off putting to anyone, but if you're reading this kind of thing to begin with I don't see why you would be... Anyway, Katja is Technosexual and a Mechaphile to begin with (like the author *sob*). She's semi-closeted, but in a world where sentient robots just don't exist how could she not be, and then BAM Ultron. Her body naturally finds his body attractive much the same as we find our preferred gender attractive, and that's just how she is. Of course, that just leaves them to deal with all the obvious problems. There's a loooong road ahead of us in this fic. Happy Endings don't just happen overnight!

Anyway, you keep reviewing, I'll keep writing!