AMERICA'S POV

I draw in a shallow breath and back into Steve as I see the figure that spoke. A deteriorating member of the Iron Legion, barely a skeleton, a suit with sparking blue eyes.

"Worthy... No... How could you be worthy? You're all killers." The voice is metallic, tired, broken, but menacing.

"Stark," Steve whispers sharply.

"JARVIS," Tony mutters, tapping his device impatiently.

"I'm sorry, I was asleep. Or...I was a-dream?"

"Reboot, Legionnaire OS, we got a buggy suit."

"There was a terrible noise...and I was tangled in... in...strings. I had to kill the other guy. He was a good guy."

My blood runs cold when he says this. "You- you killed someone?"

"Wouldn't have been my first call. But, down in the real world we're faced with ugly choices."

"Who sent you?" Thor demands.

"I see a suit of armor around the world." Tony's voice. No. This can't be happening.

"Ultron," Bruce says, turning to Tony with understanding in his eyes. Ultron.

"In the flesh. Or, no, not yet. Not this...chrysalis. But I'm ready. I'm on a mission."

"What mission?" Natasha asks. Thor's grip on his hammer tightens, Maria loads her gun, and I sneak behind the bar to retrieve a knife. My muscles tense, waiting.

"Peace in our time." More suits burst out through the wall, sending us all flying. I duck behind the bar counter to avoid as much of the debris as I can, but quickly realize that my little knife is pointless against suits of armor. We need force to break them. Enough momentum. With a new idea that will probably cost me later, I get up, ball my hand into a fist, and run toward the first suit I see at full speed. As expected, my hand goes straight through, but my skin rips with it. I hold in a groan and attack another one. After a few minutes, we've taken down all except one, and no one is badly injured. I walk over to Steve, keeping my sight on the last robot. Ultron.

"You okay?" He whispers. I nod, and he moves to stand in front of me just the slightest bit.

"That was dramatic," Ultron drones. "I'm sorry, I know you mean well. You just didn't think it through. You want to protect the world, but you don't want it to change. How is humanity saved if it's not allowed to...evolve?" He grabs one of his fallen suits and crushes the helmet. "With these? These puppets? There's only one path to peace: The Avengers' extinction." Unable to stand any more, Thor throws his hammer at Ultron and sends him through the wall. As the light in the suit dies out, he starts to sing. "I had strings, but now I'm free. There are no strings on me, no strings on me."

There are no strings on me.

No one speaks. I find a towel at the bar and start cleaning out my shredded knuckles when Steve follows me. He takes the towel from my hands and looks at my scrapes. His voice is quiet as he speaks. "What did you do?"

I know he doesn't just mean the injury.

------

"All our work is gone," Bruce says in dismay while examining the file databases in his lab. "Ultron cleared out, used the Internet as an escape hatch."

"Ultron," Steve mutters under his breath only loud enough for me to hear. I don't know if I've ever seen him so angry, but it's contained, at least for now. The real fury is in his eyes. Blue flames burn the hottest of all. I'm not looking forward to being alone with him later, even though we're newly engaged. I'm going to get a lecture I completely deserve and it's not going to be fun at all. I just stay quiet and continue to bandage my knuckles.

"He's been in everything. Files, surveillance. Probably knows more about us than we know about each other." Natasha folds her arms and looks around at us all. What does he know about me?

"He's in your files, he's in the Internet. What if he decides to access something a little more exciting?" Rhodes asks.

I follow his line of thought, and it scares me. "Nuclear codes."

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

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

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

"He also said he killed someone," Clint points out.

Maria looks up from pulling shards of glass out of her foot. I'm lucky my heels had straps. Now I've traded them for bare feet. "But there wasn't anyone else in the building."

"Yes, there was." Tony's voice is less boisterous than usual, more defeated. He pulls up an image for us all. A consciousness destroyed. It's JARVIS. Tony doesn't say anything else. I know that in a way, JARVIS was like family to him, and my heart aches, but we have bigger problems to face right now.

"This is insane," Bruce mutters, pushing his glasses up to get a closer look.

"JARVIS was the first line of defense," Steve says. He ducks his head. Instead of approaching him, I give him space. "He would've shut Ultron down, it makes sense."

Bruce shakes his head. "No, Ultron could've assimilated Jarvis. This isn't strategy, this is...rage."

I helped create this. This is my fault. Thor, who has been silent this entire time, marches up to Tony and grabs him by the throat, pushing him against the wall. No one stops him.

"Woah, woah, woah! It's going around," Clint says, almost joking.

"Come on. Use your words, buddy," Tony sputters.

"I have more than enough words to describe you, Stark!"

"Thor! The Legionnaire." Steve yells. I think Steve is the only one Thor really listens to around here, because he throws Tony to the ground.

"Trail went cold about a hundred miles out but it's headed north, and it has the scepter. Now we have to retrieve it, again."

"The genie's out of that bottle. Clear and present is Ultron," Natasha says, frowning.

"I don't understand," Dr. Cho says slowly, turning to Tony. "You built this program. Why is it trying to kill us?"

Tony shakes his head. Laughter erupts from his lips. Bruce tries to get him to stop, but he only laughs louder.

Thor glares at him. "You think this is funny?"

"No! It's probably not, right? Is this very terrible? Is it so...is it so...it is. It's so terrible."

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

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

"Tony, not now," I say, eyes pleading with him to stop. He's making everything a hundred times worse.

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

"I do when I realize I made a mistake," I retort angrily. "We should have told them, and now we've created a murder-bot!"

"We didn't. We weren't even close. Were we close to an interface?" He raises his eyebrows, knowing that he's won the argument with me. Because we weren't close. Whatever happened, Ultron did it himself.

"Well, you did something right," Steve snaps at both of us. "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 asks, looking around for takers. I roll my eyes, and I'm not the only one.

"No, it's never come up," Rhodes says, shaking his head.

"Saved New York?"

"Never heard of 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 livelong day, but, that up there? That's...that's the endgame. How were you guys planning on beating that?"

Steve meets his gaze with cold eyes. "Together."

"We'll lose."

"Then we'll do that together, too." He looks around at the rest of us, done with Tony's arguments. "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."

Everyone slowly disperses to go to bed for the night. It's been a long one, after all. Steve's halfway down the stairs when I realize he's leaving. Leaving without me.

"Steve!" I call. He ignores me, and I go down after him. Run normally, not with my abilities. "Steve, I'm sorry."

"I know you are." He keeps walking, and I follow him, persistent.

"I'm serious! I didn't mean for this to happen. Bruce and Tony didn't either. We weren't even close." Steve sighs and pulls me into his room, where he immediately starts pacing.

"This is what you've been doing all week, isn't it? You've been ignoring me to create artificial intelligence. And I get it, doll, I know you didn't mean to create something that wants us extinct, but it still happened! What do you want me to say? Every time I asked how it was going, you just said that you didn't really want to talk about it, and I just thought you were still feeling down about your family, so I let it go!"

"Steve, I really am sorry!"

"I believe you, but that doesn't change things, does it?"

"I know I messed up! Don't make me feel worse about it!" We're both yelling at each other now. I'm sure the rest of the Tower can hear us. "We'll figure this out!"

"America, you've never had to watch me die! You know how hard that was? How terrifying it was? How am I supposed to respond to a robot you created saying that it wants to kill us all? What made you actually think this was a good idea?"

"I wanted to protect the world from people like me!" I scream, finally losing any self-control I had. "You know how many people I killed? Because I don't!"

"America-"

"And now I've helped create something that's going to kill a lot more people? I know it looks bad, because it is! So don't tell me that I messed up with the Ultron thing and with us, because believe me, Steve, I know!"

"I'm not fully blaming you! I'm just saying that we're going to have to deal with this now, with your superpowered family on top of it!"

"You know why I'm always tired? Because I still can't sleep at night! I can't get the nightmares out of my head! Each night I'm back, and I thought for a second I could create something to save us all from me! Steve, they could pull me right back in with a snap of their fingers!"

"You told me you stopped having nightmares." His voice is softer now, and I meet his gaze with cold eyes.

"You actually believed me?"

"I wanted to."

I slam the door and run, finding an abandoned room in the Tower to cry my eyes out in.