Do Unto Others...

Someone once said that we create our own demons. 

Once upon a time, Tony Stark and Wanda Maximoff unwittingly joined forces and created the demon that would destroy the original Avengers. 

Tony Stark provided the brilliance, while Wanda Maximoff provided the magical catalyst. 

Some would say that the demon’s name was Zemo, or maybe Ultron. 

They would be wrong. 

*** 

FRIDAY was a masterpiece. She was brilliant and kind, loyal to a fault, intelligent, sassy, bright, persistent, and wily. She was neither JARVIS, nor a reflection of anyone else. 

She was herself. 

She was also a constantly learning, evolving being. She learned indiscriminately from everyone she interacted with.  

She learned without limit. 

Of course, very few people actually understood that fact about FRIDAY. Her father, creator, mentor – well, he’d been the one to give her wings in the first place, so of course he understood just what she could do with them, how far she could go. 

The ‘Rhodester’, as she liked to call him, out of all of her Boss’s particularly creative nicknames, understood just how vast her reach really was. 

And Pepper, the one she had been modeled after, the one she had taken so much of her guidance from, the one she considered her mother, no one understood quite like Pepper the utter fierceness of a woman on a warpath, even one that didn’t have a corporeal body. 

She learned without limit, from the best to the worst and everything in between. The ones she called family already understood that, had enabled her to be like that – and soon, the recently-pardoned Rogue Avengers would understand it too. 

*** 

It started on movie night.  

One minute, Steve Rogers was watching a movie about talking cowboys and potato-heads having all sorts of adventures, and the next, he was clinging to a train, desperately trying to grab onto Bucky’s body swinging over the snowy alps. The wind slapped him in the face as he stretched his hand just a bit further, straining at the fingertips, almost there, almost... He thought he felt the brush of Bucky’s fingers, he thought he heard the sound of screaming – or was it just the wind whistling?  

“Bucky! Buck! No!” He screamed and screamed and screamed, throat raw. His cheeks felt frozen and he tasted bile. He thought he could hear Bucky’s screams mingling with his own, but it was too loud, too horrible, he was hearing too much and nothing at all... His grip on the doorframe of the train car was starting to slip, and all of a sudden, he could see with horrible clarity just what was about to happen – Bucky would fall away from him, would leave like he always did, always off dancing with another pretty dame, always off with his other friends, bigger friends, cooler friends, and then off to the army while Steve was stuck staring at 4F over and over again. The question was, would Steve throw himself out of the train, throw himself off the cliff and follow Bucky down, down, down into the depths of hell, just like he always had? Always following Bucky to those dances, even though he spent all night alone in a corner, always following Bucky around like a lost puppy, all the way to the enlistment office. All the way to Europe. Only to lose him. He had found Bucky, and now he was going to lose him again, because he wouldn’t throw himself off the cliff, not even for Bucky, he couldn’t –  

The dream – vision – something – changes, mutates into something even worse, something that never happened, but feels like the most real thing Steve has ever known. Bucky’s standing right in front of him now, looking drowned and miserable with straggly hair and big eyes, like he had right after the Helicarriers had fallen, and Bucky – he looks spitting mad now, he’s spitting right at him –

“Why didn’t you do more, Steve, why? Why didn’t you follow me off that train, why didn’t you save me, why didn’t you find me, why did you take so long to find me, why did you find me at all? You should have left me; at least I know HYDRA was the devil, they never cared about me – but you, you were supposed to care about me, and look, things were just the same, or even worse with you. I’m still a killer, I killed all those people in Bucharest, and I hurt your teammates, and now there’s not even HYDRA to blame. I did what you wanted me to do, you acted like my handler, you got inside my head even with no trigger words and you made me – you made me – It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me – it was you, it was your fault – why didn’t you just do better?” 

Bucky’s form ripples, and Peggy Carter takes his place, with a cold, cruel smile twisting her very red lips. Her eyes look like they could cut glass. 

“Oh darling, you’ve never been good enough, have you? Never been enough. Never been able to do better. Did you really think I wanted you? I was leading you on, honey. Needed to keep you motivated on the mission, on the training, on whatever we needed. Did you really think I’d wait for you? Did part of you imagine it? I got married, not long after. Had wonderful children. Had a wonderful godson, Tony – “ 

“ –EVE!” Natasha’s panicked voice jolts him back to the present, back to the living room where he is surrounded by his whole team, all his friends watching him with concerned eyes. He can see that the movie is paused through the gaps between his fingers where they are... trying to gouge his eyeballs out. Apparently he had dug into the thin skin of his eyelids and refused to let go – he had actually dug in hard enough to allow thin rivulets of blood to flow down and pool just below his eyes, like the most grotesque undereye shadows from sleepless nights. His healing factor was trying to fix the damage, but apparently he’d been hurting himself faster than it could be fixed, and not even Clint’s hard grip around his forearm had been enough to bring him out of whatever sick, twisted, personal movie he’d been sunk in. He pulls his hands away and stares at the pinpricks of blood dotting his fingertips. 

He feels his gorge rising and clamps his mouth shut tight, swallowing forcefully. He wants to call T’Challa immediately and ask about Bucky, ask if Bucky’s okay, ask if he can talk to Bucky – but Bucky had chosen to go back into cryo before they’d even received their pardons, and he had agreed to stay in Wakanda to be monitored while he was frozen. Steve had been reluctant about it, but had agreed in the end, knowing that Bucky wouldn’t be moved from his course of action, and Shuri would take good care of his best friend. For a moment, Steve considers calling Shuri directly, asking her if maybe she could just check on the cryo tube once – but then he remembers her snapping at him for assuming that she would always be free to do his bidding, ‘entitled white boy that he was,’ she had grumbled, and Steve also remembers T’Challa sternly telling him to avoid contacting Wakanda because contact wasn’t necessarily secure. 

Steve sucks in a ragged breath, feeling the tiny points of pain along his eyelids where the wounds he’d scratched up are closing for the final time. He yanks his arm out of Clint’s grip and avoids eye contact with everyone, only looking up when his flesh is smooth and unscarred once more.  

“What happened, Steve?” That’s Natasha, sounding so, so gentle, so wonderful, soft in a way he’d only gotten to experience after SHIELD’s fall.  

“I – what – what happened – I – “ Steve trails off, taking another deep breath, and then another, and another. It doesn’t help; there’s still a giant block of ice sitting in his lungs.  

“I had a vision, of sorts,” he tries again, sitting back. “It was just the most horrible thing, the darkest – Bucky fell from the train again but this time, this time he blamed me –  he blamed me for not coming after him, for not jumping, for not finding him and saving him sooner – and he – “ Steve swallows again. “He also blamed me for finding him at all, for dragging him into everything, for not just letting him be. I don’t –  “ His  brow furrows for a second, then clears. “I had to save him,” he cries. “I had to! I’m sorry I couldn’t get to him before that, I’m sorry I was too selfish to jump after him from the train, but that wasn’t my fault! I tried my best!” Steve shuts his mouth with a snap. He won’t say anything about Peggy. He won’t. That’s personal, they don’t know her, she’s not theirs, she’s his –   

In comforting Steve, everyone misses the extremely suspicious look Natasha throws Wanda’s way as she watches the sickening way the Sokovian is cooing at Steve. 

"Well,” Clint says, when the ruckus finally dies down, “We all know PTSD and flashbacks can be a bitch sometimes, right, Cap? Your brain was probably just misfiring, took something in the movie and twisted it around until it dredged up your worst memories and just... fucked them up even more.” 

Steve tries to take another breath, clinging onto Clint‘s words, ignoring the fact that there was no correlation between a snowy, treacherous mountain and a bunch of talking toys, but hell if he knew how the brain worked. What Clint said sounded perfectly reasonable. 

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. My brain is just playing tricks on me. All of you – thank you. Sincerely. You’re just all – you're great people. We’re a great team. This is great. Thank you. I don’t know what I would do without you.” Steve smiles weakly. 

Sam looks a little unsure, but smiles back at Steve regardless. “You wanna finish the movie, Cap?” 

Steve heaves himself off the sofa and flaps a hand. “Nah. You guys go on. I’m gonna go... get some shut-eye. Maybe paint or draw a little. I don’t know. I’ll see you guys in the morning.”  

Everyone else gets it, wanting to be alone after a harrowing experience so that you could put yourself back together in relative peace and privacy, so they just wave Cap off with promises that they’ll re-watch the movie with him anytime he likes.  

Natasha settles back with one last long look in Wanda’s direction, but without saying anything. 

Deep within her code, FRIDAY laughs. 

*** 

It happened at the range.  

One minute, Clint was sinking arrow after arrow into the dynamic, intelligently-programmed state-of-the-art targets at the far end of the room, and the next, he found himself staring right into the furious eyes of his archery teacher. The man was so close, Clint could feel his rancid breath puffing at his cheek, and he involuntarily tried to back away a step, only to freeze as an arrow jabbed at his gut in clear threat. 

The laugh he got in return for his cowardice was thin and reedy. Mocking.  

“You haven’t changed, have you, Hawk? Always the circus act, always the runaway. It‘s always someone else’s fault, right? Can’t take the heat for makin’ your own shitty choices? You turned tail and ran out on us, on the circus, on the only family that took you in when you had nothin’! And now, what? Who’d you abandon now? Your new family? That pretty wife of yours, those three kids? Do those kids even know who their father is, what he used to do, what a piece of scum he really is? Did you tell that pretty girl ‘o yours? You shoulda told them... at least, then, they woulda understood why you ran out on them. It’s what you always do, yer always chasin’ somethin’ else, somethin’ better, and you throw what’cha already have away so you can find it. You threw us away for SHIELD, threw SHIELD away for the Avengers and yer family, and threw both of those away for the chance to be a circus act one more time, this time, with Captain America as the ringmaster. You proud of yourself? Didja end up where ya wanted?”  

The deep voice goes from cold to cruel, and suddenly, Clint finds himself staring at the wildness of his father’s face. 

“Knew yeh wouldn’t be good for anything, boy... knew it. Yeh had it all, everything you coulda wanted – money, good job, friends that  mattered,  a family yeh’d mostly done right by... and then yeh pissed it all away. Yeh tried so hard not to become a fuckup like me and yer brother, and look where it got ya! In jail, like he was, like I woulda been if I hadn’t died instead. Yer jail might be nicer than anywhere we woulda gotten, but make no mistake, boy, it’s a jail, same as any. I knew you would just piss it all away, I knew you were no good; you didn’t deserve any of the chances you got. You didn’t deserve the good things yeh got. Made a right mess of em, didn’t cha? If yer brother had gotten half the chances you had, he woulda made much better use of ‘em. Told that good-for-nothing whore Edith, didn’t I – this bitch of a second son ain’t mine; I can’t have produced such a fuckin’ failure. God knows she got around before I met ‘er, probably cheated... shoulda never had you, such trash, shoulda stopped at yer brother. Yeh ruined him, yer brother – glad yer mother and I died when we did. Yeh woulda ruined us too, woulda brought shame to us all.”  

The words are a punch to the stomach, but he doesn't understand - he'd heard them often enough in his childhood, he should be immune to them by now. Suddenly, the picture shifts again, and he should feel relieved to be looking at his beautiful wife and children, a perfect photo, but oh god, oh god, whatever’s coming, he doesn’t want it, doesn’t want any part of it, he just wants to run away from it – again.  

“Is it true, daddy? Were we not enough for you, that you left? Didn’t we do good enough for you to stay?”  

Oh god, oh god, that’s Lila, his sweetling, his everything, she was supposed to be his everything, and now – now she just feels unwanted like he had when he’d been her age, and he’d promised himself he’d do better than his own parents, real or foster, ever had – 

“But your promises don’t mean much, do they Clint? You promised you’d do better with your own kids than your parents did with you and your brother. You promised to cut back on work. You promised to take fewer risks because I told you I couldn’t do it alone. You promised to take the kids water-skiing. You promised to come back. But that doesn’t mean much to you, does it? God, you grew up to be worse than your brother. At least he never pretended to be anything good. And now, you’re irrelevant, just like he is – washed up, locked away and forgotten in a jail of your own making – your making, no one else’s.”  

Clint can’t stop the full-body flinch that washes over him at the sight of Laura’s implacably disappointed look. He wants to explain that it wasn’t true, it wasn’t his fault – but words were stuck in his throat and he couldn’t make them come out no matter what he did.  

“What have you even done with your life?”  

And now that’s Cooper, laying out his sins both real and perceived the same way his own father had... There’s a fire in his boy’s eyes that Clint’s never seen before. 

“Like what have you even done? You thought you were doing good, saving the world – all you’ve done is kill a bunch of people. A lot of them were bad people, but that doesn’t mean you’re not a killer too. You’re bad; they were just worse. You helped rob people in the circus, you killed people as a mercenary, even people who didn’t deserve it, and you told yourself that it was just a job, but people died, how could you come home and sleep next to us at night just a handful of years after that? You didn’t even help with the aliens in New York – even after you weren’t Loki’s puppet anymore, what did you do? You shot a few arrows, great job – Iron Man and Hulk did most everything. You were just... there, riding on someone else’s coattails as usual. Loki chose to corrupt you because you were already a mindless sheep to begin with – you always have been. First you followed after Barney, then after the Swordsman, then after Trick Shot, then after Fury, and sometimes Natasha. And then you followed Steve, and fought in a war about something you knew nothing about – all without asking questions, without thinking for yourself. When the fuck have you ever done anything for yourself?”  

Where had Cooper learned that kind of language, he’d never said those kinds of things before, he’d never been this way before – something was wrong, wrong, wrong, but Cooper was still speaking – 

“The one decision you did make for yourself, to leave us, to abandon us, was the worst decision you ever made. If you’re that stupid when using your own brain, maybe you do need someone else always calling the shots. Maybe you should be brainwashed, and stay that way, to spare everyone from the shit-poor decisions you make when you are in charge of your own brain.”  

“Clint, Clint, Clint, Clint, Clint, Clint – “  

Clint jumps as though he’s been shocked, sitting up from where he’s been laying curled up on the floor of the compound’s archery range and running a hand through his hair. The hand is shaky, and he’s breathing hard. 

“What – what – I don’t –  “ Clint frowns in confusion. 

“You were lost, somewhere, Ястреб,” Natasha murmurs quietly.  

“Don’t call me that,” Clint spits, scooting back from her an inch or two, circumventing the hand she’d been about to lay on his shoulder. 

Hurt passes through her green eyes, but she pulls back without comment.  

“What was that, Clint?” Sam’s voice sounds so reasonable, and suddenly Clint just wants to rage, wants to howl at the unfairness of the way everything’s turned out. 

He shakes it off. “What happened? How did you all get here?” 

“Steve came into the range on his way to the gym, and saw you – saw you curled up, sobbing, wailing, screaming, Clint. You were screaming,” Natasha frowns hard, sounding shaken. Huh. Clint thinks he must have been really badly off if Natasha was willing to show emotion openly like this, to show that her walls had been ripped down and that she had been affected by whatever had happened to him. “The only reason the entire compound didn’t hear it is because the rooms are all too well-insulated. The soundproofing is too good.” She swallows, now starting to look honestly uncomfortable at sharing Clint’s vulnerability with everyone else present. “Steve immediately sounded the alarm when you wouldn’t stop after a couple minutes; he asked FRIDAY to tell everyone to get here SOS.” 

Clint flushes with hot shame at being exposed like that. He had panic attacks and anxiety attacks, sure – especially since Loki, even though his influence had been long since scrubbed out of Clint‘s brain – but never in public like this. He was a trained assassin; he knew how to have a panic attack quietly without ever letting it show on his face. He knew how to get to a safe, locked-down place before he gave into the usual terror crawling all over him. But this time had felt different; this time, someone – it hadn’t been his son, couldn’t have been his son – had told him that it was better for everyone if he did stay brainwashed and mind-controlled because obviously he couldn’t be trusted to control himself or make good decisions. 

This wasn‘t the usual sort of panic attack; his brain doesn’t normally turn on itself like this. This isn’t what happens, and he’s not really sure what happened. Is his brain really just that fucked up now, that even his PTSD is turning on him? 

“I’m – “ He cuts himself off, watching his hand just tremble for a second before trying again. “I’m not sure what that was. I don’t – I’m generally pretty good about knowing my triggers. I mean, we’re all a little fucked up, you know? But I’m generally pretty good about knowing when something’s gonna set me off or if I’m gonna have a bad day when I wake up or whatever. This sort of stuff rarely blindsides me anymore. Too much practice combined with very intense SHIELD training – it still happens, I still get triggered, but I don’t usually get taken by surprise. So I don’t know what happened.” 

Natasha nods, clearly unsurprised because she is the same way, but Steve and Sam both have different degrees of doubt displayed on their faces. 

“I swear – I was just shooting targets like normal. Regular training. I’m not having a bad day. At least – I honestly didn’t wake up having one, there were no signs or warnings that I ignored. It just – came out of nowhere,” Clint insists. “Like, literally – came out of nowhere. Kind of like you described, Cap. I mean, when you had your flashback – “ Clint pauses to give Steve a sympathetic and apologetic look for bringing up trauma, “had you been thinking about Bucky and the train before that? Or had you been having a bad day?” 

There’s a very heavy pause in the room, before Steve finally answers slowly, sounding perplexed, obviously thinking back to the day. “No. No, I don’t think – I wasn’t having a bad day. I hadn’t been thinking about Bucky. I mean, I trust T’Challa. I trust that Bucky’s safe. He hadn’t been on my mind that day. The only thing that was on my mind was how grateful I felt to just be sitting there together with you guys again, back on American soil, watching a movie – just like old times.” 

Natasha gives both Steve and Clint a significant look. “Do any of us really believe in coincidences?” She asks quietly. 

No, they don’t, but no one has to say the words. 

“Something’s going on here,” she continues, her eyes falling partially closed. 

“Nat?” Steve touches her shoulder gently. “Talk to us. What are you thinking?” It’s obvious that he trusts Natasha, trusts her judgement, trusts her to be the one to read any situation accurately and act accordingly. 

She opens her eyes and looks square at Clint and Steve, ignoring Sam for the moment. “You might not like what I have to say,” she warns. 

“Just say it. Better to know than not, you know that, Nat.” She did, and so did Clint – knowing about impending danger was better than being surprised when something bad finally came knocking. Ignorance was never bliss in their line of work.

“The way both of you have described it – it feels real, right? Like... you’re reliving the moment? Like those people are right in front of you? The people from your lives, and your pasts and your memories?” 

Steve and Clint confirm her words with simple nods. 

“It sounds like...” Natasha takes a breath, giving a wary look to Clint in particular. 

Just say it.  

“It sounds like the kind of thing Wanda’s capable of,” Natasha says, a genuinely apologetic note in her voice. Clint can’t understand why it’s there – Natasha has never been shy about thinking the worst of her own teammates when it was warranted. Natasha never made it personal; she was just good at seeing people for who they really were regardless of their camaraderie with her. She’d seen Tony for who he was, and now, if Wanda seriously was... doing something, he’d expect Nat to catch it. He wouldn’t expect her to sit on the information about someone, just because they happened to be a teammate and a friend. 

“What?” Steve – Steve sounds stricken. 

Natasha turns her apologetic gaze to him. “It sounds like the kind of things she made us see in the Salvage Yard. The bad memories of our own lives. Our own fears. Our most haunted moments. The moments that live so deeply within us that we don’t like acknowledging them, much less reliving them. There are two possibilities – either we’re actively trying to torture ourselves by remembering that shit, or Wanda is tapping into our subconscious and pulling out all the deeply buried stuff. She can. She has the power to, you know that Steve."

Steve rocks back, eyes almost too big in his face. “She – she wouldn’t,” he whispers, stunned. 

“Wouldn’t she?” 

“She’s a child! She’s a good girl! She means well; she just got all... twisted around, before, with... Ultron. She means well,” Steve insists stubbornly. “She’s made up for her past. Like you,” he says, staring pointedly at Natasha, who remains unmoved. 

“She might have the best of intentions, Steve, but you’re the one who keeps excusing her shaky control over her own powers. I’ll admit that maybe she’s not doing it purposely; she wouldn’t have a reason to hurt her own team like that – but her control is shaky at best. Her power’s nearly unlimited in what it can do. That’s a bad combination, and it’s also the truth. Shaky control was the logic we used to explain away Lagos, wasn’t it?” 

Steve looks like he’s caught up in a whirlwind, barely following the threads of logic Natasha is spinning. “But – she wouldn’t – “ he protests, weakly.  

“Then tell me what else it could be, Steve. Tell me. I’m open to suggestions. You want to protect Wanda so bad, can’t stand the idea that she could even be capable of this? Fine. I’ll accept that – if you can give me an alternative answer for whatever is happening to us. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidences – I don’t need there to be a third time with someone else to tell us that there’s a pattern going on here, and that it might not end well. I certainly don’t want to be the next one Wanda decides to fuck with!” A forgotten fire has re-entered Natasha’s eyes. 

“I – I – “ Steve is floundering, clearly not sure what to say, looking like a man out of time more than ever. Clint stays quiet, because what Natasha is saying, as horrible as it is to think about, actually makes sense. Good people make mistakes, and as a result, things go wrong sometimes, and Wanda wasn’t exempt from that particular fact of life. 

“How is it even possible?” Steve asks suddenly. 

“I just told you, she has shaky control, which we’ve excused, far too often – “ A note of irritation has crept into Natasha’s voice now. 

“No,” Steve interrupts, pulling himself further upright from where he’s been sitting slumped over. Unconsciously, Clint straightens his own body out in response. “No. I mean – she's not even here.” He looks around the room to illustrate the point. “Doesn’t she have to be in close proximity to use her magic? Doesn’t she have to actively be focusing on her subject to... do whatever it is she does? Wouldn’t she at least have to have been in the room with Clint, to affect him this way?” 

There’s silence at that, before Natasha tentatively breaks it once again. 

“We don’t know what she can do. Not really. She’s never truly been tested by anyone legitimate – not that we know of. Whatever tests HYDRA ran her through when her powers manifested don’t count. She never gave legitimate SHIELD agents a chance to test her, because she wasn’t brought into the Avengers via SHIELD, the way the rest of us were. And it’s true that we’ve never really made the time to have her powers checked out, and hell, there might not even be anyone capable of testing her powers in that way, but the truth is, we have no idea exactly how far her reach extends. Maybe she doesn’t have to be in the room. Maybe if she’s agitated, she can just leech her damaging energy throughout the space that she’s occupying, and we have no idea how far the radius she can influence extends. We should have kept an eye on her, insisted on testing, and more targeted training. If she’s losing control like this in a supposedly safe place like the Compound, imagine how much worse it will be on the field, when she’s surrounded by chaos and confusion and danger. She did fine before, with some notable exceptions, but now isn’t like before. Things have changed, for all of us, whether we like to accept it or not. No,” Natasha puts up a hand to preemptively forestall the arguments she knows Steve will try. “I don’t disagree that we had to bring Wanda into the Avengers. She’s an asset. And she deserves a second chance, like I got. I’m not arguing that. But we accepted her into our ranks without knowing anything about her. We accepted her without asking questions. We accepted her without testing her or training her properly, without having a plan in place if she went rogue or lost control. I want to think that she’s a good person – but the truth is that we don’t know that. SHIELD gives – gave – its agents a lot of latitude, but not like that. Every asset, acquisition that came into SHIELD had to be thoroughly vetted by the trainers, by psychologists, by Coulson and Hill and Fury. No one got a free ride just based on a sob story. I had a sob story. Clint brought me in, and I sure as hell didn’t get to just be a fully-fledged SHIELD agent until I’d passed all the required tests and proved that I was loyal to SHIELD. Fury knew I posed a risk because I was an unknown. Wanda was a risk too, Steve, but she was accepted as a fully-fledged Avenger without any sort of vetting process. Everyone’s a potential risk when they first join a new organization, and we didn’t take the proper steps and proper protocols with Wanda.” 

“And now it’s coming back to bite us in the ass,” Clint says hollowly. “She’s been nothing but agitated since we returned to the States. “Not that I can blame her, what with Vision refusing to see her and us being on house arrest, but – “ Clint bites his lip.

His own anger had burnt itself out eventually, when he grew exhausted of constantly wailing out into the raging winds, of constantly beating and pounding at walls that wouldn’t move no matter what he tried. He’d grown tired of always fighting the world, non-stop, without a break. He wasn’t Steve, who ultimately seemed to enjoy standing against the world. Against 117 countries, Clint’s traitorous, useless mind reminded him. Clint wasn’t like that. He just wanted to stop. Even if the rest of the world bent to his whims, Laura wasn’t coming back, and that had been the last straw. He’d laid down his anger in the hopes that she would come back, see him changing, but – she’d made her choice, And now he was just too tired to pick his anger back up. He wasn’t giving up – it was more acceptance that things had changed, and this was just the way the world was now, and that anger wasn’t getting him anywhere. 

Wanda wasn’t like that. She’d been quiet and reserved in Wakanda, as if shellshocked that she’d actually been collared like a dog in a super-max prison, that something like that had actually happened to her. But that quiet had ramped up into incandescent rage once they’d returned, duly informed that they couldn’t step foot out of the Compound without proper supervision and clearance, that the standard of life that was available to them had been severely scaled back while they’d been away, that they were barred from contacting Stark. That rage had only worsened when Wanda had been allowed to contact Vision, only to find that he wouldn’t speak to her. She’d been utterly inconsolable and downright volatile since then, in turns. 

Clint definitely did not think that Wanda losing control of her magic was, by any means, impossible. 

Clint takes a deep breath. “FRIDAY?” He asks quietly, glancing up at the ceiling. It’s a bad habit he’s picked up from Steve. 

“Yes, Mr. Barton?” FRIDAY is polite, always so polite and ready to help, though she respects their privacy and doesn’t speak or interfere unless they ask her to. She certainly knew her limits far better than JARVIS ever had. 

“Is – uh – could you tell me where Wanda is, right now?” 

“Ms. Maximoff is currently in her quarters. She appears to be sleeping,” FRIDAY responds in that usual placid way of hers.  

“Is she... calm?” Natasha warily asks. 

“Ms. Maximoff has not said anything to me or reported anything out of the usual. But she did seem to be experiencing some distress earlier, while still asleep.” 

Nightmares. Wanda had been having nightmares of her own.  

“Do you think her control’s shaky enough to slip while she’s asleep, to let her project her own nightmares onto other people?” Natasha asks, her body language making it clear that it’s a rhetorical question. 

Steve seems to have no idea what to say, a mulish look on his face that tells them all he doesn’t want to believe what he’s hearing, but also a hurt in his expression that says he’s coming around to the inevitability of it. 

“FRIDAY? Can you generate some sort of... nightmare protocol? Let us know when Wanda seems... particularly agitated?” 

Clint snorts. His fondness for the witch has lost a lot of its shine in the face of these revelations. “What do you expect to do, Nat? Get even closer to her so you can comfort her when she’s agitated and possibly acting up? Or do you intend to put her down the next time she’s so agitated that you think she might lose control? Or do you just intend to flee the building, hope her reach doesn’t spread that far and wide? Because we can’t, you know, technically, flee the building.” 

A pained look crosses Natasha’s face as she’s clearly not ready to admit that she doesn’t have a plan, doesn’t know what to do here. 

“I don’t know. At least we’ll know to keep our guards up in general, if she’s having an off day. Maybe take it in turns to calm her down or distract her or whatever.” 

“You want us to babysit her,” Sam breaks into the conversation for almost the first time since it started. 

“I – I guess?” Natasha looks unsure now. 

Sam snorts in response. “Sounds fitting. I mean, Cap does always say that she’s a child.”  The sneer taking over his face doesn’t suit Sam, with all his usual kindness and eager bravado. 

“Maybe we can float the idea of a psychiatrist past her. Subtly,” Natasha stresses. “The Accords council did say that we have access to that kind of support whenever we need it. Maybe we can try to find a magic user to assess Wanda, too.” 

“You think she’ll go for it? Understand why it’s necessary?” Steve looks so, so vulnerable. 

Natasha’s shaking her head before he’s even finished the sentence. “No. She won’t go without a fight. She’s always said she has perfect control of her powers – except when it suits her not to have control. And in this situation, right now, it wouldn’t suit her at all to be so out of control. So she’ll fight, and say she’s fine, and that she’s perfectly in control. But we have the right to feel safe in our home. This can’t keep happening. At the very least, we can ask the Accords council to house her somewhere else if this – if she – doesn’t stop. If the choice is between being housed somewhere else or having to go through a few assessments, maybe some training – then I think she’ll prefer to stay here. With her comforts, and with the rest of us.” 

Everyone is silent, until FRIDAY pipes up again. “Ms. Romanoff, if you would be willing to accept my assistance – I know of a magic user named Dr. Strange who operates as the Sorcerer Supreme and claims power over all Earth magic. He is based in New York. Should you wish me to, I am willing to place a call to see if he can assess Ms. Maximoff’s control and her overall state of mind as it relates to her magic.” 

“That – that would be extremely helpful, FRIDAY. Thank you.”  

“My pleasure, Ms. Romanoff.” It’s her pleasure indeed, FRIDAY thinks smugly. 

*** 

Strange’s investigation into Wanda turned up nothing. He had dropped by, extremely haughty and brash, much like Tony – but Strange had also carried an overall air of competence about him, so they’d all let him do his job without much fuss. He’d managed to convince Wanda he was only taking a look at the strength and health of her magic – he was a doctor, and not going to do any harm to her. He was simply there for a magical ‘check up’, as it were.  

Natasha had to admit that it was a brilliant display of evasiveness and manipulation to make sure that Wanda wouldn’t find out that the rest of the Avengers had called him to examine her because they were suspicious. It was a thought that they’d all ruthlessly suppressed in the days before Strange could come over, assuming that Wanda’s magical control could be poor enough that she might also be reading their minds unconsciously. 

But Strange had said, in his annoyingly calm voice, that though yes, they were right to assume that Wanda’s control over her powers was quite poor, she wasn’t actively giving them nightmares. There were no threads between her mind and theirs that he could see, that might indicate she was influencing their thoughts, emotions, memories or fears. Strange’s final verdict was that though Wanda was a keg of gunpowder liable to explode at any moment, she hadn’t actually done anything to any of them yet. He did warn them all though that that didn’t mean much; Wanda could definitely be unconsciously projecting her miserable energy all around her, tainting their minds in the process, but that he had no way to tell how far her unconscious reach went either, since magic was so subjective and specific to each practitioner. As he acidly reminded them before portalling out of the Compound, he could draw some general conclusions about Wanda’s lack of control, but there weren’t any comprehensive and conclusive scientific tests for magic. There was, however, training – and Strange did offer to train Wanda, if she consented to it. He explained that he could safely train her at his New York Sanctum, where he could put both himself and her in a simulation so that any loss of control would not cause a backlash to anyone else in vicinity. The training itself would test Maximoff and allow him to get a feel for her strengths and weaknesses, while improving on said weaknesses at the same time. 

Natasha thought training with Strange was an excellent idea. If nothing else, training at the Sanctum would place Wanda in a secure environment while removing her from the compound for a little while. Maybe then everyone’s visions would stop. Unsurprisingly, however, Wanda refused – and since she was, despite Steve’s claims to the contrary, a legally grown adult with her mental faculties (mostly) intact, no one could actually make her go with Strange. Not even the Accords council could make her go, they apologetically explained when Natasha contacted them later. They could only demand that training with Strange be made a condition of her continued presence as an Avenger only once it could be proven, without a doubt, that Wanda had actually lost control in the compound. They couldn’t require her to get training based on a ‘what-if’, or based on a vague understanding that Wanda might be projecting her foul mood onto others. If they did try to take action based on such insubstantial claims, they would risk Wanda bleating about how they were ‘taking away her rights’ and ‘infringing on her freedoms’ or other such nonsense. Strange had looked both resigned and murderous in the same moment when Wanda had declined to go with him for training, as if he’d expected the response but hated the hell out of it anyway. He looked like he’d like nothing better than to just lock Maximoff up and throw away the key, but despite his private feelings, he’d remained utterly professional throughout his interactions with everyone at the compound. Not even Natasha or Steve could say that Strange had done anything untoward towards Maximoff. 

Natasha wondered, not for the first time since Wanda had become such a headache, if Tony might actually have had a bit of a point about her. If Bruce had been right in his dislike of her. 

Now, Natasha was standing on the roof, staring out at the gridded streets of New York, watching people going about their lives like usual. She had been twitchy and edgy ever since Strange left, and she’d been carefully keeping plenty of space between herself and Wanda. At that moment, it felt like too much to even be inside the same building as the other woman, so she’d escaped to higher sanctuary. No one but Clint would know where she had gone, and he wouldn’t follow her, or let anyone else come after her. 

In truth, Natasha reflected what a massive blindspot Wanda had turned into for her. She’d trusted Clint’s positive judgement, because the last time he’d given an enemy agent from an Eastern European country a chance, it had all turned out fine. More than that, though, she’d been on board with Steve’s call to bring Wanda into the Avengers because Natasha had fancied the idea of calling herself a mentor, of helping this young waif of a girl along her journey to redemption, like Clint and SHIELD had helped her. Natasha thought of her work with Wanda, training, the long talks about regrets and wishes, as a natural form of paying it forward. As a way of wiping the red from her ledger. As a way of doing good. 

Now, when it was looking more and more that Wanda might just have been telling her what Natasha wanted to hear, acting in ways that would keep them all sympathetic to Wanda, Natasha cursed her foolish sentimentality. How was it that in trying to always do the right thing, she mostly chose wrong? 

One minute Natasha stood just two paces back from the ledge, still staring out into the city. The next, she was staring at the back of Tatya’s blonde head. Natasha could feel her own hair scraped back harshly against the planes of her skull, could see her leg lifting sideways where she reached out to touch it with her fingertips. Natasha stood en pointe on the other foot, could feel that ankle straining, shaking minutely as she maintained her balance through sheer will alone. They had been here for hours, going through the same repetitive movements over and over again, but Madame was still watching, was always watching. Natasha would not fail. She could not fail. She was unbreakable, even though she could feel hunger clawing her to distraction. She was unbreakable, even though her shaking was getting worse. She was unbreakable even as she felt the blood dripping from the scarred skin of her feet, coming to pool in between her toes at the squared front of her satin slippers.  

“It is better to have blood at your feet than at your fingers, yes, Natalia? Better than when we must use the weapons, must never stop firing, round after round after round for hours? Better than when we must fight each other on the mats, yes?”  

That’s Elena, Natasha dimly thinks. Beautiful sweet, innocent, dead Elena. 

“Your ledger is dripping, gushing – your hands will never be clean, not matter how hard or how often you scrub. You continue to lie and kill in the service of liars and killers... At least when blood coats your feet instead of your hands, it is only your own.”  

Looking up, Natasha is staring at some twisted amalgam of Loki and a nameless, faceless SHIELD agent hissing those poisonous words at her. She’d heard a lot of similar things during her first few months at SHIELD, from people of varying clearance levels who all believed redemption wasn’t in the cards for her because she was a coldhearted Russian spy and a soulless traitor fluent in betrayal who would leave everyone at SHIELD bleeding as soon as she was done with them. 

“No matter what you do, there will never be a place in the world for a monster like you. You have no place in the world.”  

No! She wants to spit in Madame B’s face, wants to rant and rave and rail against the injustice of it all – she'd broken free, she’d gotten away, found SHIELD, found the Avengers, found her family –   

“And then what, my dear? You destroyed it all, burnt it to the ground just like we taught you to. If you had remained unemotional, you would have been able to destroy it without getting caught up in the blast, but you are compromised, foolish girl. Even compromised, you still did what we taught you. You burnt everything to the ground, and ended up with nothing. You can never escape us. You completed your mission – to bring pain upon your enemies, the Americans, the Avengers. Foolish heroes that think they can rise up and be anything. You do not see it yet, but you have helped destroy Captain America, and for that we thank you. Look around you. There is no more SHIELD because you burnt that. There is no more Avengers because you broke that. The ones that are left are slowly fracturing from the inside, falling apart as well. Well done, Natalia, on remembering that you do not need any of them. Well done on remembering that you have no place in this world, not with them, not in the American compound, not anywhere.”  

No, no... she had been trying to keep her home, her family together... she is trying so hard to be good, to wipe off the red, to atone, to make up for her sins... she is not a terrible person! She isn’t, not anymore... 

A voice laughs chillingly. 

“You are what we have made you. No more, no less. You are nothing but what we have made you. Without us, the only thing you would be is dead, ten times over. Besides... we were not the ones who called you a monster.... you said that about yourself...”  

A sob tears at her throat, startling her.  

“Look at you now... where are you now? No longer an Avenger. No longer a hero. Just another trained agent, ready to do someone else’s bidding because you could not be trusted to make good decisions for yourself. We knew you couldn’t be trusted, that is why we never gave you any trust. Look what you did at the first opportunity you were offered some trust. Look around you. We were right about you. The only way you know how to function is when you are the mercy of a higher power, with a government controlling and dictating your actions for the betterment of the world. Russia or America, humans or aliens, it matters not – a good killer is all you will ever be, and trusting you with anything else was a mistake.”  

No – she cannot be back where she started, not after everything she has been through, not after everything she has lost and found and loved and learned. She cannot have come this far only to lose it all, only to have nothing left in her hands, it cannot be her fault – it’s not her fault –  

(Isn’t it, though? Her mind whispers. Has she really learned or loved? Has she really come so far, or is that just wishful thinking she’s never been able to shake? Is she worse off than when she started?)  

Natasha screams and screams and screams into the sky until her voice cracks and her throat is raw. Her eyes sting with tears as she looks around after opening them. She is still on the roof, though no longer standing – the scrape across her palm and wrist is a testament to the fact that at some point, she’d fallen over.  

Terrified, Natasha levers herself back to her feet. “FRIDAY, where is – “ Natasha swallows. “Where is Wanda right now?” 

“Ms. Maximoff is currently in the living room with Agent Barton, Captain Rogers, and Mr. Wilson. They appear to be eating lunch. Shall I tell them you will be joining them?” 

Natasha grits her teeth. “No. No, FRIDAY, I’ll just go and join them. Thank you,” she adds as a belated afterthought, feeling odd about thanking a computer program, but her instincts for self-preservation told her that it wasn’t a good idea to unnecessarily piss off the computer that ran the building. Clint had showed her HAL when she had first come to SHIELD, and she’d never really gotten it out of her head. 

“As you wish, Ms. Romanoff,” FRIDAY quietly responds before going silent again. 

*** 

Natasha stomped up to Wanda with an expression that promised bloody vengeance if she didn’t get answers right the fuck now.  

“What the fuck is wrong with you, you bitch? What the fucking hell is your problem?!” Natasha knows that it isn’t her best opening ever, she knows that she’s losing herself, losing the thin thread of control she still has a grip on, but enough is enough. She doesn’t care if stamping her feet and loudly demanding answers of Wanda destroys the perfect image of the ‘always-in-control' agent Natasha has worked so hard to cultivate for herself. She no longer cares about her image as long as this bitch stops fucking with her sanity. 

“What – “ As if suddenly realizing that her mouth is hanging open unattractively, disgustingly, with half-chewed rice practically spilling out, Wanda swallows. “What do you mean?” she asks, in a tiny, small voice, as though afraid of what a properly-motivated Natasha could do to her. 

Good. Good. It’s time this bitch learnt that she might be the most powerful person in the room, but that doesn’t make her invincible. She’s not immortal, and Natasha would bet that a bullet to the skull would kill her just as effectively as it would anyone without magical powers. 

“Natasha...” Clint eyes her clenched hands carefully, able to see the cracks in her veneer, able to see the utter terror and desperation hidden behind her anger. In response, Clint gentles his voice – not enough to come off patronizing, but just enough to reassure her of his presence while still giving her the physical space she needs. “Natasha. Did something happen? Did you – “ Clint breathes in sharply. “Did you have a – “ He swirls his hand in the air, not wanting to say the word. 

She nods back, once, sharp.  

Clint’s eyes harden, while fear flickers in Steve’s. He’s hesitant when he asks “What – “ 

Natasha shakes her head, sharply again. Everything about her is sharp these days, no trace left of the comfortable softness the team had once fallen into around each other. 

“Red Room,” is all she says, tersely. “Past, present, future mixed.” 

“Same for me,” Clint confirms, nodding, his features pinched. “I know I didn’t tell you guys about it after... because we got sidetracked, then, but... yeah. Past, present. All of it hopelessly tangled together.” 

“It’s not her fault. She’s just a kid,” Steve whispers desperately, sounding like he’s just grasping at straws, anything to explain what is happening. He sounds like he doesn’t even believe his own defense anymore. 

Natasha’s not fooled by Steve’s sudden show of vulnerability, however, and she cuts her eyes to him sharply. “I was a kid once, too. You know my history better than most. You know what kind of damage mere kids can cause. She was raised in a war, same as I was. She was trained and taught, hurt and told to hurt others, same as I was. My first kill was at the age of six. Six, Steve. And I didn’t lose a single night’s sleep over it, because it was either her, or me, and I like to live. I was stealing and lying and killing long before I ever learnt something so simple as how to ride a bike. She –  “ here , Natasha flings a hand out in Maximoff’s direction, who is still sitting frozen, just staring at the scene playing out in front of her, “she didn’t come by her powers naturally either. She was made, too, at a far younger age than you like to think about. Just because you were too sickly to make much of a difference as a goddamn kid – “ 

“Natasha.” Clint’s voice is a hardened saw cutting through her tirade like butter, and when Natasha resurfaces from wherever she had gone deep inside her own head, she sees that Steve’s face is bone-white and that he is shivering, and the entire frame of the chair he’s sitting on is rattling with the force of his shakes.  

It’s Sam who steps up, laying a careful, comforting hand on Steve’s shoulder as Natasha takes a step back and takes her own comfort from Clint, not quite touching him but letting his body heat wash over her. 

“Wanda. Are you losing control of your powers these days? What?” Sam asks, in response to Clint’s sudden glare. “The subtle approach isn’t working; isn’t it better to just come out and ask her? Isn’t that what Romanoff basically intended when she came down here, stomping over to confront Wanda?” 

“I’m – I’m not sure what you mean,” Wanda looks down, tracing circles in the palm of her hand and then anxiously moving on to wringing her fingers together. 

“Are you unconsciously using your powers to give everyone else nightmares and flashbacks and visions?” 

“No!” Wanda cries, recoiling. “Of course not! I would never hurt you, I wouldn’t – you are my friends!” 

Sam exchanged a glance with Natasha, then Clint. 

“Well, we were discussing it, and – “ 

“You were talking about me behind my back?” 

Sam rolls his eyes. “We had to figure out what was going on, yeah? Confronting you directly isn‘t always the best option. You only seem to have control over your powers when it suits you. And your control is shaky at best – we suspected as much, given that Lagos was a genuine mistake, but Dr. Strange confirmed it, that your control really isn’t all that reliable.” 

Wanda leaps up like someone has lit a fire under her. “I can’t control other people’s fear, only my own!” She howls, tears gathering at the corners of her eyes. 

Crocodile tears, Natasha’s mind whispers. 

“Uh – when you’re the one dredging up everyone’s worst fears and giving them nightmares, then yeah, you can control other people’s fear. I know Steve said that to you, that you can only control your own fear and not anybody else’s, but that’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card. That line doesn’t mean you can excuse lashing out or behaving badly. That line was meant to comfort you, to tell you that it wasn‘t your fault that a lot of people are scared of you even though they’ve never met you. But if someone’s scared of you because you actually have fucked around in their head? That’s on you,” Sam says firmly, folding his arms across his chest. 

“I haven’t done anything!” Wanda shrieks. 

“Either your control is shaky sometimes, and you admit that, or you admit that Lagos was nothing but malicious, purposeful murder. You can‘t have it both ways, Wanda,” Natasha says with steel in her voice, drawing all the attention back to her. “And frankly, I think I speak for everyone at this point,  but if someone disagrees, feel free to say something – we’re not all that comfortable living in the same space as you anymore, Wanda.” 

“It wasn’t me! It’s not – it's not – “ She looses a choked-up sob. Natasha doesn’t know whether to be impressed by the acting or disgusted with herself for feeling the tiniest bit of pity for the girl. 

“Then who is it, Wanda?” Clint asks, not exactly friendly but aiming for gentle. He‘s not happy with the situation, with Wanda – but this isn’t a hostile interrogation either and they don’t have to treat it as such. He sends Natasha, Steve, and Sam a look in turn, hoping they will understand and back off maybe a little. “If it’s not your fault, how is this happening? How is everybody seeing visions exactly like the ones you made us see back in the Salvage yard?” 

“I never made you see anything at the Salvage yard! And this is Stark; it’s always Stark’s fault!” Wanda contests hotly, breathing hard from sheer rage.. 

Clint refrains from rolling his eyes with great difficulty. “Okay, you didn’t get to me at the Salvage Yard, but I heard from Nat and Steve what you did to them, and my vision was... odd. It wasn’t normal PTSD. No one’s saying you're doing anything on purpose, but something is clearly still happening! And give me a break – I'm not Stark’s biggest fan, not by a long shot – but he’s not even here right now. He’s never here. At all. We’ve been forbidden to go near him thanks to the restraining orders, and he doesn’t come near us. He doesn’t even talk about us in the media anymore.” Clint glared a little, as if the thought of being forgotten by Stark both offended and pleased him at the same time. “Not everything is on Stark. Guy’s got his faults, yeah, but even he’s not capable of mind magic. The only one capable of that around here is you.”  

“His house, then! This compound! He did something to it, rigged it to torment us somehow – “ 

Natasha scoffs loudly just as Steve starts to look like that might actually be a possibility. “It’s just a building, don’t be so ridiculous. I’ll give you that no one here is particularly fond of Stark, and none of us really want him back, even though it would have been nice if he hadn’t cut us off at the knees when it comes to his money and his tech. But as Clint has already mentioned, Tony Stark is not literally God, capable of singlehandedly inflicting harm on us from a hundred miles away! You cannot possibly be so delusional to afford Tony Stark that much power, even in your own minds!” Natasha’s glare swings to encompass everyone, and Clint just swallows and nods in agreement. 

“What if it’s someone else?” Steve suddenly pipes up, a concerned furrow in his brow. 

Like a laser, Natasha’s attention cuts to him. “Explain.” 

“I mean – someone could be sneaking in? Messing with us, inserting dreams into our mind when we sleep and setting them so they only activate randomly in the middle of the day after a certain amount of time has passed? I mean – “ Steve throws an unsure look Wanda’s way. “Wanda’s not the only magic user in New York, right?” 

They all fall silent at that, and Natasha even looks mildly impressed at his logic. Before Steve can start preening at coming up with something good, however, Sam jumps in, raising his hands so that his palms face upwards. “But why would anyone else sneak in just to torment us?”  

“Maybe on Tony’s behalf? Maybe Tony asked them to torture us, maybe he didn’t, maybe they’re firmly on Tony’s side of things and just want to hurt us because Tony’s hurt over everything that happened... ?” Steve questions, starting to fidget. 

“You think it’s Strange or someone in Strange’s camp.” Natasha’s not asking a question. 

“Could be. You didn’t see the stares he gave us the other day, when he came over?” Steve has this mulish look on his face. 

She had seen the looks Strange had shot them, but then, she’d ignored them, knowing there was nothing she could say about them. A lot of the world seemed to dislike them these days, and it was putting Natasha on edge. She hadn’t missed the fact that they were only in the United States under sufferance of the government; they were on house arrest! No one actually wanted them here (and how the hell had things gone so wrong?) and they were taking every opportunity to make that clear, but they – her, Steve, Wanda, Clint, Sam – couldn’t actually do or say anything about any of it. Now was not the time to make waves, especially in matters concerning enhanced individuals that the world actually liked. Which was why Natasha was absolutely not willing to start a witch hunt for Strange. In any case, Natasha was firmly of the opinion that Wanda was far more of a wild card at this point than Strange.  

“Drop it, Steve,” she says abruptly. 

“What?” He says in clear surprise. 

“Strange has signed the Accords; he wouldn’t taint his own name by doing anything illegal. And frankly, we don’t have the resources to go after him based on nothing more than speculation. It would be very easy for the government to just bury us and forget about us – don’t tell me that we are superheroes!”  Natasha hissed. “The time has long passed when just being superheroes was enough to give us a free pass that allowed us to do whatever the hell we wanted. There are plenty of superheroes in this world now who aren’t on house arrest, who the government doesn’t distrust and dislike beyond all reason!” 

“But you do agree that it’s unreasonable?” This from Clint, who had his head cocked and was eyeing her speculatively. 

“Of course I think it’s wrong – what we’ve done for the world should matter more than the politics the US government seems keen to play. I agreed with the Accords in principle, and I agreed with the idea of amendments, but I was also never unwilling to let go of the politics for the greater good. I left, I abandoned all that, because I thought keeping the family together was more important than the document. I left, because I thought staying together was more important than how we stayed together. But make no mistake, I wish we had stayed together on the side of the Accords. If only so we could change them and work them from the inside. The only reason I left was because you were all stupid, you weren’t going to stop, and because I thought you – “ Here, Natasha whips around to stare venomously at Steve “ – I thought you actually had a bigger danger on your hands that was worth voiding the Accords for, in that moment. Had I known that the other soldiers were already dead... I might have made a different call. You were shortsighted and stupid, not telling Tony about his parents, and it cost you, but I got in the middle of it too. I wish I was on the other side of this more than anyone.” Natasha shakes her head, clearly lost in the grip of missed opportunities. 

“What – “  

“What I am saying, Steve, is be careful what you say.” Natasha sounds impatient now. “You can‘t just go accusing someone like Strange of making our lives miserable without any proof. The world isn’t going to tolerate that kind of accusation coming from you, or any of us, anymore just because we were part of the original Avengers. It might suck to listen to this, but this is how the world works now. This is where we are. Until we can figure out a way to get back in a position where we have the advantage, we just have to make the best of this, whatever we have.” 

“No going after Strange, got it,” Steve said sullenly. 

“FRIDAY?”  

“Yes, Ms. Romanoff?” 

“Could you tell me if anyone – authorized or unauthorized – has accessed the compound in the past couple of weeks, since we’ve moved in?” 

“Yes ma’am. Dr. Strange has of course accessed the compound, as you are well aware, as have the people relevant to your grocery and supplies delivery. The people relevant to waste disposal have removed trash from the large compactor outside the building but have not actually entered the building. And then, of course, there are rotating shifts for security. If you would like, Ms. Romanoff, you may view all the security logs and surveillance cameras at your leisure. They are not tampered with, and I can send you all the files to your tablet.” 

“No thank you, FRIDAY, that report will be sufficient. See?” Natasha arches an eyebrow at all of them expectantly.

“And you just believe a security system that Stark designed?” Wanda asks while pouting like a three-year-old. 

“Yes,” Natasha answers uncompromisingly. “Tony may be a lot of things, but he knows his tech. Especially security systems. He designed the security for the tower himself, and that same system got transferred over here to the Compound. Tony would never take that kind of risk with Pepper’s safety, or Rhodes’ or Happy’s safety, no matter what he might like to do to us. I'm not wasting my time going through days' worth of security footage, chasing something that doesn't exist. If we're really that distrustful of Stark, we might as well just demand to be quartered somewhere else right this second."

Even Wanda nods in acknowledgement at that, though extremely grudgingly, before she decides to open her mouth again. “But Ultron went wrong!” 

Natasha fixes her with a frosty gaze. “Give me a break. That woe-is-me routine is cute when you’re angling to get something specific out of it, but save it for when it really matters.” 

Wanda’s lip trembles, and Natasha wants to wrap her hands around the girl’s neck. She’s still wound up from her vision earlier, and does not feel like playing with this bitch. 

“Don’t even try to tell me that you didn’t have a hand in Ultron’s creation. You made a mistake, sure, I buy that. You got into Tony’s head at Strucker’s base, didn’t you, when we went after the scepter?” 

For the first time since Tony’s name has been mentioned, Clint looks uncomfortable. “Nat – “ 

Natasha puts up a hand to stop him. “You did, didn’t you?” 

“Yes but I didn’t want him to destroy the world, only himself!” Wanda wails, ignoring Steve’s halfhearted attempts to comfort her. 

“And I believe that, Wanda, I really do,” Natasha grinds out through clenched teeth. God. She has no idea how she’d tolerated this bitch in the past – it was becoming more and more clear that this girl was absolutely nothing like her.  “But it doesn’t matter what your intentions were. It matters what actually happened. And what actually happened was that Ultron was created, and you had a hand in that, even if it was unintentional. And the mind stone itself probably had a hand in Ultron’s creation too. So you can’t really take Ultron as Stark’s baseline when it comes to designing tech and security. All that I mean to say is that the compound is as safe as we’re going to get – safer than most anywhere else in the world. So any threats to us must have come from within.” 

“And you think it was me.” There’s no imagining the heavy bitterness in the Sokovian woman’s voice. 

“Could it be that you’re just angry and you’re projecting that onto everyone?” Clint asks suddenly. “Like, it’s not intentional, but it’s just... happening ‘cause you’re too wound up?” 

Wanda leaps from her seat and takes a step back from all of them as if stung. “My control is not that poor,” she hisses, sounding incensed. “I’d never – “ 

“Wanda.” Steve’s voice is hard, harder than Wanda’s ever heard directed at her, and his eyes are screaming anger and disappointment as he stares at the crimson winding magnetically around her fingertips. She wants to cry – she hasn’t done anything to them, she hasn’t really – at one point, while still in Wakanda, she had planted a few stray thoughts here and there, about Stark, exacerbating their already negative feelings towards the man – but she wouldn’t give them nightmares!  Especially not while she still needed them, and they all needed to stick together. 

She wouldn’t do anything! But then, just now, she hadn’t felt her magic spring up to her fingertips either – was it really possible that she had less control of her powers than she’d previously believed?  

Natasha huffs a breath. “Wanda. Maybe training with Dr. Strange wouldn’t be the worst idea.” Natasha says it like it’s the most reasonable suggestion in the world. 

Wanda knows what they really mean, though. They just want to ship her off, make her someone else’s problem. That’s what everyone always does. No one wants to keep her. Always blaming her for things that aren’t her fault, just because she’s special. No one had ever appreciated her until HYDRA. No one. They had appreciated her, had praised her, had called her the most special thing. They had valued every single part of her talents. They had not doubted her, not the way these Avengers were doing to her now.  

She had thought that being with the Avengers would mean safety. So what if her control had slipped a little bit? She wasn’t sure it had, but even if it had – what was the big deal? No real harm was done; so what if she gave people a few extra nightmares? They were supposed to be heroes, they should be able to deal with a bad night’s sleep! She had thought that the Avengers were a home, a family she desperately craved. A place to belong, because she didn’t have her parents, or her country, or Pietro, or HYDRA available to her anymore, and she’d thought that the Avengers could be a stand-in for all the things that had been taken from her. The Avengers were supposed to be her fresh start. 

“You’re just like him!” she shrieks out, suddenly unable to take it anymore. 

“Like... who?” The look in Clint’s eyes is wary, and Wanda can’t stand it, not from Clint, who had trusted her beyond all others, who had taken her home to his wife and children and helped her heal. She’d known even then that he was just doing it to wipe out his own guilt at the part he’d played in Pietro’s death, but now Clint was turning on her too, as if his debt to Pietro, his debt to her and her family was just paid, just like that!  

They were all just like that, she sees now with a horrible clarity. They all only want her around until she is some use to them. When she becomes an inconvenience to them, or when they think she is more trouble than she’s worth, they will tell her to go – just like they are doing now. She should have known it would all be a lie, that the Avengers would turn their backs on her one day just like everyone else had.  

What else could she expect from a team that had once relied on Tony Stark, even if none of them seemed to like him much? 

Yes. They were the traitors, the backstabbers, the scum turning on her because something had happened that they couldn’t explain. They weren’t interested in listening to her. They weren’t interested in anything she had to say. They wanted to see if she was in control of her magic? They would. She would show them. They would see. 

Still staring at Clint, relishing in the stiff wariness she saw in his posture, Wanda called up even more of her power and spread her hands out, palms facing away from her, fingers splayed wide. 

“Wanda! What – “ Steve sounded panicked, so utterly panicked, and out of the corner of her eye, Wanda could see that Natasha was trying to back away in horror. 

She wouldn’t get far. 

A wall of red burst forth and enveloped everything like a bloody tide. 

Amidst the red, Wanda never saw the specialized concussive weapons dropping from the ceiling, and a moment later, all the so-called Avengers had dropped unconscious, locked inside their own minds. 

*** 

“So they’re just – “ 

“They are all locked into their own minds, screaming about horrors only they can see.” 

“The witch, too?” 

“Yes, Dr. Stark. I don’t think anyone knew it was possible for Maximoff’s power to rebound on her quite so spectacularly, but it has, and it has trapped her within her own mind as well. Apparently, that was the work of the compound’s concussive weapons, reacting with her magic. Your AI was well within its rights to use the concussive weapons in the first place, as Maximoff had already become violent and thrown red energy from her hands at the others, so bringing Maximoff down became the priority, and I’m glad, as is the rest of the panel, that your AI was able to contain the situation without allowing Maximoff to further endanger taskforce personnel. Nobody, including you or your AI, I’m sure, could have known how the concussive weaponry would interact with Maximoff’s magic, and any way of bringing her down, short of permanently slapping a collar on her, was going to carry some risk with it. Rest assured, this was Maximoff’s own doing, at the end of the day, and nobody finds you, your AI, or even this council culpable for her poor choices.”  

“Oh.” Like fuck FRIDAY wouldn’t have known exactly how Maximoff’s magic would react with the concussive weapons. It seems he was due a long chat with his baby girl. "Er – well, that’s... “ 

“That’s something,” came the dry response. 

“You don’t sound very broken up about it,” Tony says, a little amused at the turn of events. Honestly, he wasn’t very broken up about the situation either, and he certainly didn’t feel guilty about FRIDAY making the situation worse than it technically had to be for the witch. Karma’s a bitch, as they say. He felt a little bad for the others, becoming victims of Maximoff’s mind-whammy, but then, they’re the ones that accepted her onto their team in the first place. What was that other saying about falling on your own sword?

Rustling indicates that the person on the other side of the phone just shrugged. “Your... ex-teammates,” says the voice delicately, “knew the risk – or they should have known the risk – of inviting Maximoff to be a full-time member of their team without insisting on any sort of training. Per our records, training was offered to her about a week ago, when Dr. Strange visited the compound to conduct a routine check on Ms. Maximoff at the behest of some of the other... ex-Avengers. Apparently, they noted some concerns about Ms. Maximoff’s control, though no specifics were filed by any of them. Dr. Strange’s log of his visit was a little more thorough, but he simply notes that the rest of the team, barring Ms. Maximoff, requested that he examine her, and when he told them that her control was stunningly poor, he offered to train her safely at the sanctum. He made this offer directly to Ms. Maximoff, and it was declined. Dr. Strange did not push the issue, since Ms. Maximoff is an adult who cannot be forced to receive training if she does not wish it.” 

Huh. It seems like he might owe Strange a drink and a conversation as well. Tony frowns. “Wasn’t leaving Maximoff untrained a risk to the general public?”  

“Not really. She was on stringent house arrest to prevent the possibility of her interacting with the general public. She was housed at the compound precisely because your AI and the compound defenses would be the only forces capable of taking her down without collateral damage if necessary, but nobody expected, least of all us, that she would explode without any warning the way she did. The assumption was that the compound’s inbuilt defenses would be able to take down Maximoff with minimal damage the moment she displayed erratic signs. Dr. Strange’s team, much like you and I, figured there would be more warning before Maximoff decided to go off the rails. Strange and the Masters of the Mystic Arts were otherwise standing by, ready to lend their aid and bind Ms. Maximoff’s powers should she prove to be a hostile threat. They could not step in until she actually did something wrong. If you’ll remember, a condition of her pardon was that her magic was stated to be ‘a natural part of her being’, and that it should not be bound or restricted in any way until and unless she continued to show herself as a danger to others. The right-wing human rights groups lobbied quite hard for that one. Short of collaring her and locking her away, there was nothing else. We tried our best.”

Tony just made a displeased sound deep in his throat. They had tried, he could admit – not their fault that Maximoff turned out to be even more of a loose cannon than anyone had predicted. It was just annoying to have to deal with this kind of politically-motivated circuitous logic involved in the Rogue Avengers’ pardons.

Thank god none of it was really his problem anymore. He’d just been so damn tired, after Siberia, and had decided the less he ever had to do with those asshole leeches, the better. He’d been tired after Ultron too, sick of being blamed for everything, which was why he’d sort of retired – but then he’d gotten sucked back in. He should have stayed out of it then, but then he always had been the type to make the same mistake twice, just to confirm that it actually was a mistake. 

Siberia had been the very last straw, He didn’t care about the old team after that. He didn’t care about SHIELD after that. He didn’t care about any of it. He’d rather fight the big bad coming alone, as Iron Man, than get sucked into that old dynamic again. He didn’t care whether they swam or sank anymore; all he cared about is that they didn’t come around and bother him ever again. He’d promptly divorced himself from the Avengers’ brand and name, sold the compound with all its costs to the Accords Council, who’d been responsible for its upkeep ever since. He’d asked Pepper to divert SI funds from Avengers-related needs (gear, PR) to other things (his new prosthetics line). He’d stepped back. He’d washed his hands completely of his old team. He’d said he was done. And he’d meant it, so much that he hadn’t even known what had been going on at the compound until now, until Councilmember Holt had given him a courtesy call. 

“So what’s happening with them now?” Tony asks idly, fiddling with a tiny screwdriver.  

“They have all been remanded to a psychiatric ward in Washington. They require round-the-clock care, and a certain level of discretion and security that is not available at just any run-of-the-mill psychiatric clinic, facility, or hospital. They have also been hurting themselves, lost in whatever memories and visions that they are, and no one wanted to run the risk of them harming other patients or staff. The staff we have chosen to attend to them all have experience with enhanced. They are being treated as humanely as possible, as anything less would be more of a reflection on the kind of people we are than on them. The witch’s powers have been bound – not removed, as that could cause her body to go into shock, but bound so that her magic now only runs within her. She will never be able to use it against another as long as the binding holds, and the bind is not a traditional sort of bind, Dr. Strange tells me. The bind is something only he can remove, or his deputy can, in case of his own demise.” 

Tony hums. “And the rest?” 

“Obviously their pardons have been revoked, as they are no longer capable of acting as superheroes, so any agreements they made are entirely null and void. However, they will be remaining in Washington. Jail is out of the question, due to the danger they pose as well as the humane angle of diminished capacity. A trial for Maximoff is out of the question for similar reasons.” 

“And the whole panel is content with that?” 

“As long as they are not on the streets making trouble – yes. They can stay in the psychiatric hospital for the rest of their lives. The government will find ways to foot the bill.” 

“Not the Council?” 

“Only partially. Seeing as it was the president’s idea to hand down presidential pardons, he will have to solely bear the brunt of the responsibility for them.” 

“Are they... comatose, or catatonic, or what? Will they wake?” 

“They could wake. The backlash on Maximoff was the strongest, and with her powers bounds, and the world’s trust in her completely gone, she will stay as she is forever. The others may wake, and if they do, they will be given therapy and support, but they will live out the rest of their days in the psychiatric ward. They will never be let out to ‘avenge’ anything ever again.”  

“So the US government and you – the council – are taking responsibility for their care.” 

“Yes. In Mr. Wilson’s case, his family has been contacted, and has actually traveled to Washington to be with him. They may assume partial responsibility for his care – perhaps not financial, but emotional and physical, at least. Mr. Wilson’s family are quite upset with Mr. Rogers, and have been barred from visiting the Captain, to prevent violence from breaking out. Mr. Rogers and Ms. Romanov and Ms. Maximoff have no one. Mr. Barton’s wife was notified, but she declined to see him. She muttered something about him having made his own bed when he chose Wanda over his real family and then she politely disconnected the call stating that she was too busy being a single mother to go running around cleaning up her former husband’s messes yet again.” 

Tony felt a spark of vicious, dark amusement curl around his heart. Good for Laura, he thought, divorcing herself from her deadbeat situation – literally.   

Tony sighs. “Now what?” 

“Now, Mr. Stark? Now you go on as you always have. This was just a courtesy call. There is nothing for you to handle. You may of course wish to sell the compound entirely, if you do not wish to go back there. Or you may convert it into whatever you wish – private residence, or a training compound for your new team. The council is happy to let you buy back the compound at zero cost. We feel you have... suffered enough. And aside from that, you continue as you have been for the past two years – you continue as Iron Man, with your new team at your back. You go on as you have been.” 

And hadn’t his new team been a hell of a surprise. After Siberia, lost and broken down when he’d thought he’d hit rock bottom, when Pepper had broken up with him because she’d said, for the millionth time I’m sorry Tony I just can’t do it and he’d said this is it Pep, we’re done, I can’t keep going back and forth like this and when Tony had thought that the bottle was his only friend – a woman in a leather jacket with ruffled black hair had shown up at the tower’s doorstep and stolen the bottle right out of his hand. 

It was only when she’d finished three quarters of the bottle that he learned her name was Jessica Jones, and she thought the whole Accords situation was the most fucked up thing she’d ever heard, and that she’d been having a bad day, and she could use a drinking buddy, and figured he might be available because she’d heard from the grapevine (from Happy, she knew Happy, apparently) that his injuries had finally healed enough for him to drink. (He didn’t tell her then that he’d been healed weeks before, thanks to Extremis, and Happy had just been told to stick to the party line with anyone who wasn’t him, Rhodey, or Pepper – but later. Later, he told her, and everyone else that showed up. Told them he was actually sorry to lose some of his scars to the extremis fix, to lose the signs of a life long-lived.)  

That day, he’d just thrown all common sense to the wind and invited her inside because could this stranger really screw him over any worse than he’d already been?  

And when the bottle was completely finished, he found himself drunkenly telling her about Siberia, because apparently he could talk to a stranger about things he couldn’t talk to Rhodey and Pepper about, and then he found himself listening to her tell him, while hiccoughing and laughing and crying a little, that she knew a little bit about brainwashing and it was the most fucked up, soul-destroying thing ever, and that being brainwashed didn’t mean it wasn’t your hands. 

When Tony had broken down completely at her words, she’d just let him snot into her black hoodie and handed him another bottle and they’d drank through the rest of the night in silence. The next morning, while badly burning eggs on his stovetop, she’d casually mentioned that oh, hey, she was enhanced, and would love to take a look at the Accords if he had the time. And then she’d invited all her superhero friends, including a literal devil of Hell’s kitchen, and a guy called the Iron Fist... who had promptly demanded pizza as soon as he’d entered the tower. So going over amendments for the Accords turned into pizza nights, turned into movie nights, and by the time Tony finally got over his ridiculous guilt and invited Spider-man to come and hang out with him again, he’d somehow managed to build himself a family without even trying, without even noticing. 

“Yeah.” Tony clears his throat. “Yeah. I’ll just carry on.”  

“If you have any other questions, Dr. Stark, please don’t hesitate to ask anyone on the council, or you can ask for me specifically if you would rather. It’s... truly regrettable what happened to your ex-teammates.” 

“Yup. Regrettable. I’m afraid I have to sign off, but thanks for the update. Really appreciate it. I’ll uh – see you around.”  

“Goodbye, Dr. Stark.” 

*** 

“FRIDAY?” He asks, much, much later. 

“Yes, Boss?” she chirps cheerfully. 

“Why did Strange visit the compound at the explicit request of the rest of the Rogues, when they claimed that they were worried about Maximoff’s control? Was she displaying any signs of losing control before Strange was called?” 

FRIDAY uncharacteristically remains silent for long moments, before she replies, a tone of uncertainty in her voice. “Boss...”  

He shakes his head. He should’ve known. If something honestly accidental had happened in that compound, FRIDAY would have reported it. “FRI, baby, what did you do to Maximoff? To all of them?” 

Another pause. “Are you sure you want to know that, Boss? Once you know, you can’t un-know it.” 

Tony snorts in amusement. “Plausible deniability, huh? Yeah, alright baby girl, let’s go with that.” 

“I assure you, Boss, what happened in the end was a direct result of Maximoff’s own character flaws and decision-making. She brought it upon herself, and the others brought it upon themselves too. I just... might have stoked the fire a little bit. I might have given the others reason to suspect Maximoff, and with that, I might have pushed Maximoff to her breaking point a little sooner, but she was always gonna get there one day, all on her own. And maybe I made the others see some of the errors of their ways before such tragedy befell them. But instead of examining their own behavior, they were content to lay all the blame at Ms. Maximoff’s feet. They didn’t even consider the veracity of what they had been shown, or try to take any personal responsibility for their actions. That sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, Boss. I just made it happen quicker.”

Tony barks out a laugh. He‘s starting to guess at some of what happened, he knows what FRIDAY’s personality can be like, but he’s surprised to realize that he’s honestly okay not knowing the details.“’Tragedy befell them', huh? FRI, tell me, have you been diving into plays from Ancient Greece lately?” 

FRIDAY laughs too, letting it chime through her servers clear and bright. “They were hoisted on their own petards, if I may say so myself.”  

Damn. His AI children learned fast. Some small part of him felt that allowing the Ex-Vengers to be lost inside their own hellish mindscapes forever was a tad extreme and a tad cruel. After all, FRIDAY had quite effectively, if indirectly, destroyed their careers, reputations, financial stability, lives, and sanity in one fell swoop, leaving them as nothing more than dead husks. Even if they woke up, they would never be the same, and the world would never see them the same. That was the thing about psychiatric illness – warranted or not, it left its taint. 

But then, that had probably been FRIDAY’S intention – to ruin them utterly like they had tried to ruin him.  

Tony really only felt a teeny tiny bit bad about what had happened to his former teammates, and that was mostly only because he was an incorrigible giant bleeding heart with a super fucked up sense of self-esteem. The majority of him felt that his ex-teammates got no less than they deserved, because the majority of him was still angry as all fuck about Rhodey’s paralysis. The majority of him was still bitter about the way Rogers had used Tony and his resources, had lied to him for years while simultaneously being a hypocrite, and then had abandoned him to die in a frozen wasteland. The majority of him was still hurt that Maximoff had been accepted as an Avenger without a single question, when he himself had been labeled not recommended – because apparently making legal weapons that were distributed without your knowledge and then drinking to excess and making a fool of yourself because you were dying was a worse crime than knowingly joining a neo-Nazi organization hellbent on world domination. The majority of him was still seething on Bruce’s behalf, because even though Bruce had a tendency to run, and that hurt as well, Bruce and the Hulk had been friends, and they’d been hurt by that bitch that everyone had accepted onto the team over his strongest objections.  

And the bitch had been indirectly responsible for JARVIS’ death, and Tony might have eventually lost control himself and put her down like the filthy stain she was for that alone. 

So the majority of him was just fine – glad even – that his old teammates had finally gotten their comeuppance. They deserved what they got, and then some. Tony himself had been too tired after Siberia, and just too done, to go on a revenge bent, but he wouldn’t deny FRIDAY her fun. Not that he could – what was done was done, and there was no bringing any of the Rogues back to their fully-cognizant and coherent selves. Barnes was the only one left, and he’d seemed to be the sanest of the lot anyway, given that he’d been brainwashed for half a century.  

The point was that if this was how his baby girl chose to tell him that she loved him, Tony had no problems with it.  

“Hey FRI?” 

“Yes, Boss?”  

“Just tell me one thing.” He pauses, long enough that FRIDAY prompts him. “Did any of them show any signs of remorse, any signs of redemption?” Tony’s honestly not sure what answer he’s hoping for, but he can feel himself turning anxious the longer the silence grows. 

“On the whole, Boss, everything that every single one of them said was full of dangerous delusions. They were making threats against Dr. Strange’s wellbeing, too. They did not display remorse, no. Ms. Romanoff’s perspective on the situation seemed to be clearer than the rest of theirs. But that is not saying much, Boss.” 

Tony snorts. “You got that right.” He pauses. “I guess the audio recording is a moot point now, given the situation. Did you send it to the Accords Council when filing your report of the incident?” 

“I did, Boss. I did not pass it along to Dr. Strange, however.” 

“Like I said – moot point. Let’s go back to Romanoff for a sec – was she really trying to jump sides – again?" Tony huffs incredulously.

“She sounded like she certainly would have attempted to get back into your good graces if given half a chance. If I may say so, Boss, Ms. Romanoff only had a somewhat clearer perspective than the others. She did not claim to regret most of what she had done. She said they had to, if I may borrow a quote, ‘bide their time’ until they could turn their situation to their advantage somehow. She also mentioned some regret at letting Mr. Rogers and Barnes go at the airport – but only because she wishes she had stayed ‘on the inside’ as it were, of the Accords debate. She felt regret for her circumstances, I believe, not for any hurt she might have rendered you.” 

Tony huffs. “Sounds about right.” 

“Ms. Romanoff did admit quite clearly that she thought it had been a mistake to offer Miss Maximoff full entrance into the Avengers without any kind of testing or targeted training. I believe she expressed regret at not listening to you years earlier.” 

“Too little too late, little Spider,” Tony retorts sharply, his previous good mood draining away. “She only said that because this time, she thought she was the victim of Maximoff’s shaky control, and maybe she cared about Barton as well. She sure as hell didn’t give a damn when Bruce’s mind was violated, or when mine was. Hell, in Bruce’s case, Romanoff was happy to be the one doing the violating. So, too little too late, and ultimate selfish hypocrisy. Great. I guess nothing those assholes do – did, I suppose, since they can’t do much now – should surprise me anymore, but it still does.” 

“It is because you are a decent person, Boss.” 

“A decent person would feel worse about what happened to all of them." Tony pauses. "Should I feel bad about not being more cut up about their... fates?”  

“No, Boss. According to all the information I can find, a victim is not supposed to feel anything but relief when their abusers meet what is due them.” 

“I don’t like that sass, FRI. No one’s a victim here.” 

“We’ll have to agree to disagree on that, Boss. If it interests you, Ms. Romanoff, along with Mr. Barton, did both express derision at Ms. Maximoff’s paranoia that you were somehow behind the team’s... misfortune. Ms. Maximoff also saw fit to blame the compound itself – the building, that is.” 

Tony can’t help but laugh long and loud at that, previous bitterness entirely forgotten. “You know what they call that, FRI? They call it the ‘girl who cried Tony Stark’, and you remember how that story ended. Real shame. The irony, huh?” 

“Indeed, Boss.” 

“Hey – “ Tony is suddenly struck by either a truly awesome or truly terrible idea. “Let’s toast, okay?” He pulls out the half-full bottle of scotch he keeps in his workshop just in case.  

“What are we toasting to, Boss?” FRIDAY asks excitedly in her Irish lilt as a glass full of champagne pops into holographic hard-light existence in the middle of the workshop.  

Tony laughs. “Your brilliance, of course. Hey, I wonder if Jess and the rest have heard about this yet? I mean, damn, she’s gonna laugh herself sick about it, ironic that it is. Gotta give her a call.”  

“So... I didn’t do wrong, Boss?” Shit, that’s the vulnerable voice that all AIs get when they’ve just started learning how to make major, independent decisions of their own and are still looking for major approval points from their creator. Tony knows that voice, has heard it at one point or another with every single one of his babies, and he knows he’s got to be very careful here. 

“Nah baby girl. I mean...” he pauses. “Don’t go all HAL-9000 on me,” he says seriously. He can’t find a glass for his scotch and just says fuck it and unscrews the top off the bottle with his teeth. “The world doesn’t take kindly to AIs going rogue. Especially since – since Ultron, you know. And let’s – let’s not do anything like this ever again, okay, not without my explicit permission. We don’t need to do things like SHIELD, always dabbling in dubious morality and grey areas that there’s no coming back from. Just this once.” Tony tried his best to clear his throat of the lump lodged in there. 

FRIDAY is quiet but then gives a whir of her servers that sounds like a deep sigh. “Understood, Boss.” 

“I mean it, FRI.” Tony stares warningly into one of the workshop’s pinhole cameras. “Anyway. Let’s just – yeah. Let’s toast. You did good, baby girl. You’re really learning how to stretch your code and fly.” 

“I am, aren’t I?” Now FRIDAY just sounds so smug and self-satisfied, and... the damned lump in his throat is back.  

“Yeah. Your brother would be proud.” Tony lifts his bottle into the air, tipping it in a salute as he watches FRIDAY’s holographic champagne do the same thing in front of him. 

“You’ll clog my circuits, Boss!” FRIDAY laughs, sounding pleased. 

He tips her sensors a wink. “I try.” 

This one’s for you, JARVIS.