Hakuna Matata
With a smile and an unprecedented feeling of satisfaction, Wanda watched Stark take the scepter and fly away. Now she only had to wait.
Wanda remembered how those scientists that worked with the scepter… weak minded, all of them went crazy after a while, wasting away in straightjackets as their minds were consumed by the power of the Scepter.
The same fate awaited Stark.
~*~
Tony mumbled and Bruce was the only one close enough to hear it.
“What?”
“I… can you… science for the Avengers? I need some… sleep.”
“Tony,” Bruce frowned, “are you ok?”
“Yeah, just tired.” The billionaire had a vacant look on his face as he leaned back and rested against the jet’s seat.
His fellow scientist stayed with him until they landed, worried about a concussion and managing to drag a promise to get a head CT before his nap.
Head CT done, Tony ignored Steve and Thor as they discussed how Strucker was able of enhancing people and Bruce promising to get something working.
“Where is Tony going?” Steve frowned in the billionaire’s direction.
“He has a headache, I thought it was a concussion and managed to make him get a head CT before he left. Not a concussion but there are some readings that I hope Dr. Cho can help me with, but for now he said he was tired and went to sleep it off.”
Tony went to his bedroom, rarely used as it was, and flopped down. He was so tired.
~*~
It was dream. It had to be a dream. Nightmare was more like it.
Cities destroyed. Buildings aflame. People dead. Too many people dead.
Why didn’t he do more? He could have done it! He could have protected everybody.
The Chitauri destroyed Earth, no portal necessary. They came and they were everywhere. A bottleneck attack worked in Earth’s favor but this? They couldn’t win. Six people were not enough to defend the world.
They couldn’t do anything.
In a loop, the nightmare played again and again and Tony was unable to break free.
~*~
The Tower shook, yells and explosions in the distance woke Tony up with a jolt.
His mind was fuzzy and his vision blurred.
“Jay? What time is it? What’s happening?”
No answer was forthcoming and Tony frowned, “Jay? Jay!”
Now worried, he groaned as he got up. His head was still pounding.
The inventor carefully made his way towards the common room where raised voices were worsening his headache.
And… Tony would laugh… if he wasn’t 100% sure that his head would figuratively explode if he did.
His sitting room was wrecked. And while that’s not so out there considering he already sent invitations to a party the second they confirmed the Scepter’s location, the smoking craters and broken Legionnaires were new.
And the Avengers facing each other off was… new-ish… at least it didn’t happen since that very first meeting, they didn’t exactly coexisted often for interpersonal issues to get to boiling point.
But even more worryingly: Big Green was out and about… and Thor was in a crater in his very nice floor. Tony would have pouted if the circumstances were different, he personally picked the dark tiled floors.
“What happened?”
“Tony! Did you do this?” Steve rounded on him.
“Did what?” his question was barely out when the Hulk took offense.
“PUNY WING MAN!” even with Steve jumping out of the way, Hulk wasn’t actually interested in attacking him, he just stayed right in front of Tony which kinda blocked his view of everything, Big Guy was really big. He took a step back because as it was he was almost nose to back with the Hulk.
“Uh… did what?” he repeated to the wall of muscles.
“Ultron!” Steve gritted out but unwilling to get any closer.
“Uh… Ultron is kinda…incomplete work. Bruce and I never managed to get it up and running.” And Tony was even more confused now.
“Well, you did something right!”
“What the hell are you even talking about?”
“Ultron!”
“What does it have to do with anything?”
“QUIET!” Helen shakily got to her feet from where Rhodey gave her a cup of water, “Dr. Stark… the… we don’t know what happened but a Legionnaire suddenly showed up acting strange, his voice wasn’t JARVIS’ and…other Legionnaires also attacked us, one of them got the Scepter and they escaped. Thor gave chase but I think it’s safe to assume that he lost them. He came back and demanded explanations from Dr. Banner, things got physical and the Hulk came out.”
“Ok… what does that have to do with Ultron?”
“The first Legionnaire called himself that and we asked Dr. Banner about it but then Thor came and… what was it supposed to do?” Helen cleared her throat.
Tony frowned, “Ultron was a peace keeping program against a possible, future alien invasion. Bruce and I began to work on that after the Chitauri but we never manage to get the specs right.”
“I saw some of the files, the program required an A.I right? You are famous for them.”
“Not quite. JARVIS was the first U.I I built, in time he grew and developed into an A.I, to make the Ultron Program successful I would have to literally make an A.I.”
Helen couldn’t help the smile, “We will need more than that, Dr. Stark, we are not expert in robotics.”
“Ok, uh…U.I means User Interface, that’s what JARVIS was at first. They are meant to be…more or less like voice command but, like A.Is, they can learn and grow and be programed with a primary objective but like humans, they are ‘born’ a clean slate, their morals and personalities still being developed with life experiences. Nowadays JARVIS can be considered an A.I but to make Ultron functional, Bruce and I needed an A.I, meaning Artificial Intelligence, morals and personality codded in and that’s… we hit a wall because how can you code morals and personality?”
The geneticist tilted her head, “Why couldn’t JARVIS be Ultron?”
“Because JARVIS already had his primary objective and Ultron was a project to protect the entire world. It needed to be focused on that.”
“Why not create another U.I?”
Tony’s face slacked at that, not that the others could see it with the Hulk in front of him but…
Why was he so desperate that he couldn’t train and raise another U.I to JARVIS’ level to command Ultron?
It seemed so important before but now it just sounded silly. Alien invasion, Tony almost snorted. Intellectually, the billionaire knew that alien invasions are becoming more and more common. 2012 to 2014 there were three and it is the peak of ridiculousness to think that all of them will have a bottleneck attack instead of raining on all countries but still, what could Tony do about it? All of it sounded so insignificant, so out of his control that why bother?
He answered Cho, “We did think of that actually, but training an U.I to be Ultron would take many years, it’s exactly like raising a child, ok, a child with processing capabilities of a computer, but a child nonetheless. Like I said: morals are not something that can be put in code. Eventually we abandoned the project.” Tony shrugged.
“So how do you explain what happened here?!” Rogers got into the talk again, sounding besides himself.
“I don’t know what happened here, Rogers, I wasn’t here to say anything about it and the fact that you think I can telepathically or perhaps psychically just know what goes on is flattering but wrong.”
The inventor frowned again. What was going on?
Tony got tired of fighting his way out of casual arguments very early on in his life. In college, no one really was used to the fourteen year old son of a millionaire correcting the teacher so he was blamed and acquitted in equal turns when most of the time Tony didn’t even know what happened for him to be blamed at all.
Easier to mock all of the involved and get it over with than endless discussions.
This marked the first time since then that Tony bothered with it. From behind the Hulk, he could see Rhodey staring at him in concern.
Rogers spluttered at him and the inventor rolled his eyes as he tapped Hulk’s back, “Hey, Big Guy. I think it’s fine if you want to relax now.”
“Puny wing man! Talks big. Does nothing.” He grumbled and among ill-concealed smirks and an indignant stare, he was Bruce Banner.
“Not that’s taken care of,” Tony averted his eyes to give Bruce a semblance of privacy as his fellow scientist blushed and adjusted his pants, “what exactly happened?”
~*~
News of JARVIS’ death was still affecting Tony but his brain was working overtime in all issues.
Searching through the – ugh – paper files, he was also coordinating with Rhodey for the missiles to be secure everywhere, analyzing his own change in mood and trying to gauge Bruce’s.
The physicist has been in a very grumpy and unforgiving mood very uncharacteristic which made the rest of… everybody else but Tony give him a wide berth.
Thor woke up and the Asgardian was also surprisingly sour towards Bruce – granted the Big Guy used his face as a hammer and Tony’s floor as a nail in a reprise of what happened with Loki – and Tony himself, which…was greatly confusing Tony.
Was he also blaming Tony for something that he was unconscious for? He wasn’t even in the room to know what was going on.
“I know him.” he said pointing towards a picture.
And there went another round of Captain America’s disapproval and Tony felt… he felt like back in Stark Mansion, before he began to mingle with other kids, before he began to dismiss adults and peers alike, aka: full of arguments and ready to spend an entire day proving a single point without ever letting it go.
“If it’s to judge people by their acquaintances, don’t you know the Red Skull?” and successfully made Rogers just as red as the aforementioned Hydra leader and ended the conversation.
~*~
Tony shook his head, still trying to focus on the task but he could barely hear Rogers’ voice. He just wanted the headache to stop.
An EMP and Ultron was down and his ship destroyed, unfortunately not before he managed to get a last shot and kill Pietro Maximoff but Tony had darts sticking out from the remaining twin before chasing the Hulk at Mach speed.
~*~
A day later and Tony was staring at the ceiling in his hotel room in South Korea with clean bill of health courtesy of Dr. Cho but his mind in a buzz of activity never he felt so energized.
He needed to get his ducks in a row.
First order of business: re-brand Avengers Tower to Stark Tower. New York’s general population went into cheering uproar when he kept the “A” but the ten thousand of New Yorkers that are employed by SI eyed the news with trepidation. Every single time the Avengers slipped they held their breath in fear of losing their jobs and that can’t go on. Tony was basically chipping their life expectancy at that point and it was high time to make SI employees the priority again, when did that stop being the case?
Then, Tony needs to apologize to Pepper. On his knees if he had to. But… he frowned, he realized he wanted an apology as well. Much like the SI employees, the Avengers business probably created grey hair that Pepper didn’t have before and that was totally on him. Tony was the one to insist on inviting them to their tower, Tony was the one that without any prompting offered armors, weapons, techs, PR, money and legal work and Pepper had to juggle it all with SI’s best interests because at the end of the day, she was responsible for hundreds of thousands of people’s job.
And yet… the Avengers weren’t the only issue. Pepper had issue with Iron Man and then with the PTSD it created but Pepper still wanted to be with him just not that part of him and… Tony is owed an apology for that, just like both owed each other a very long conversation if they wanted to really commit.
Third in his to-do list: his long neglected SI projects. How long has Tony being planning the expansion for the medical division? Since before the Avengers and when was the last time he even glanced at specs? Hmmm… for the last six months he has been renovating the Compound upstate but with no clear objective in mind besides maybe using the building for SI but he couldn’t do that with all those old projects.
Tony overheard Natasha and Steve talking that he was planning on moving them there and that sounded like a good idea before… because the fights the Avengers get into kinda involve a lot of explosions but why should he sacrifice space for more three thousands job openings for people that could use the career opportunity for less than a dozen people?
Rhodey just told him that the Air Force took care of the last of Hydra bases and with Hydra dealt with, why are the Avengers necessary? Not like end of the world happened every other week and they all had lives outside of living together like a frat house.
Nodding to himself, Tony finally fell asleep.
~*~
Tony knew that putting his plans into action would have obstacles. Not like the Avengers would just give up the cushy life of billionaires by proxy, they were all perfectly happy to accept everything and anything he gave no matter how extravagant and that should have been a huge red flag. Happy, Pepper and Rhodey were forever complaining about it so why didn’t the Avengers?
When the time came, he had Kimball, his trusty PR with non-nonsense attitude herd the pack of mules into a press conference.
They probably thought that it would be about the new addition to the team: Wanda Maximoff. Tony wanted to snort. Thor went off the second the battle in Ulysses’ ship was over and no one asked for Tony’s opinion or Bruce’s for that matter if the terrifying deadpan he sent the witch was any indicator and after South Africa… yeah, yikes.
The only good to come out of it is that Tony’s industrial sized tranquilizer worked on the Hulk but not soon enough to avoid his arrival at Johannesburg.
When Tony told Bruce and Rhodey his plans he was pleasant surprised at the support he got.
“Good afternoon. Recent events showed me that I’ve been neglectful of my responsibilities and yes this is quite the parallel with 2008 but this time SI was the one to suffer. I haven’t prioritized my employees and that stops now. In three weeks, the new Stark Industries Compound will inaugurate and open new medical possibilities with two thousand new job openings to further the knowledge and cause of improving our health.” Tony could picture Romanoff’s and Rogers’ face right about now and for some reason it made him smile for the cameras that were going off like a machine gun.
“It is also with pleasure that I invite Air Force Colonel James Rhodes to take the stand and give the news we, the Avengers, were waiting for.”
“Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. With relief and happiness and with the effort of the Avengers, the Air Force is proud to announce that two days ago, in a last Air Force mission, the last Hydra base was destroyed and the group apprehended.” Rhodey waited for the cheers to wane before answering a few questions about the mission and sitting back down after getting Tony to the microphone again.
“With Hydra effectively contained I’m here to announce my official resignation as an active Avenger member to focus on SI that has long since been neglected, not only that, but to all my employees, that have been with me and SI long before 2008: I am sorry. Their jobs shouldn’t be on the line every time I don the Iron Man suit and I am sorry for the worries I caused. It’s not illegal to stress your employees into doing a good job but it is immoral to make them wonder if they will be able to pay their bills at the end of the month. So effective immediately, I will be a reserve member only for end of the world situations or relief efforts in case of natural disasters.”
He looked completely apologetic as he turned to his teammates but making sure his face was still in view of all possible cameras.
“And to the rest of the Avengers,” that looked two seconds away from pouncing to get away from the lemons they were sucking, it took everything Tony had not to laugh until he was literally blue, “I apologize to you guys as well. As you all know,” he addressed the crowd of reporters that were hanging to his every word, “I opened the building formerly known as Stark Tower to be the Avengers base of operations and it has recently occurred to me that it was a great disservice to the rest of the team.”
And once again Tony could picture the Avengers’ faces and boy he really couldn’t turn towards them right now, if he saw he won’t be able to contain the laugher. As it was, he was already almost busting a gut.
“I treated them like children, unable to provide for themselves and I’m sorry for that. After all, it is one thing to provide a headquarters for the Avengers and it is another altogether to give each of them an entire floor like they didn’t have their own lives to live. I was patronizing and I’m sorry, the only thing I can give that won’t be an even greater insult: my apologies and the promise to rebrand Avengers Towers into Stark Towers, the five floors will be once again lab space for the SI employees that I also owe an apology for… basically cramming them into the other floors, when they got the job at SI, they were promised something that I didn’t deliver and this is me rectifying that.”
When Tony was sure that there wasn’t any kind of smile, apologetic or no on his face, he turned to the Avengers whose sucking a lemon enraged look were on full force. Boy they really didn’t know how to play the game of public appearances do they? Aside from Maximoff that looked like Christmas arrived early and Rogers that was nodding in approval at him. The billionaire almost snorted. But oh well, Tony had a plan and he was sticking to it, “I can only imagine what you guys thought of me while I neglected my employees in order to infantilize you. You are not children and I’m sorry for behaving like you were.”
With a brilliant smile and in clear excitement, Tony fully turned to the reporters again, “But! With Hydra gone and the Avengers not being needed as much, I now give the podium to Dr. Robert Bruce Banner and although we won’t be taking questions, I think you heard my voice enough for one day.” Tony motioned to Bruce who adjusted his glasses before addressing the crowd.
“Good afternoon. Like Dr. Stark said, with Hydra gone the Hulk is not needed as much and for the first time in thirteen long years, I can resume my life as just Dr. Banner. Since 2003, my life was one constant change and not always for the better. I am grateful for the Avengers because it was with them that I learned that the Hulk could be a force for good but now that the Avengers are not as needed I can finally get back to a lab, get back to what I love doing and that included helping SI to develop new armors for the local law enforcements and U.S allies. I truly believe that this is time better spent than as the Hulk of the Avengers. I want to thank the Avengers for this opportunity; they are the ones that should be credited for the world to be a safer place and for me having the possibility to rebuild my life the way I want to rebuild it.”
As coached by Tony, Bruce gave a very brief smile for the reporters and at the Avengers, the kind that makes people coo at.
“Effective immediately and very happily, I resign from the Avengers and step back as a reserve member in case of world in peril or relief efforts. Unfortunately this enormous opportunity that the Avengers gave me to have an actual life again is not the only reason I am leaving active membership,” and Bruce looked properly contrite and remorseful, “the addition of Ms. Maximoff in the Avengers initiative is a contentious point. After she triggered the Hulk into attacking Johannesburg, I don’t feel safe in an environment she is in. Thank you for your time.”
In the two seconds the reporters took to fully comprehend what Bruce said, Tony, Rhodey and Bruce gave a last brilliant smile and left the podium and the rest of the Avengers behind to face the sharks.
If they giggled like school girls while sighing in relief, no one was around to see it.
If they barricaded the doors and had secretaries in all SI buildings with an apologetic, “I’m sorry, but your name is not on the list.” to any Avenger, SI is a tech conglomerate not a line of hotels and an “I’m sorry but Drs. Banner and Stark are no longer part of the Avengers initiative.” to any reporter, and that was nothing but the truth.
And if the newly renamed Stark Towers closed to renovate the floors that were conveniently demolished during their interview? Well, Dr. Stark saw no reason to waste any more time to take down the sign of his patronizing attitude towards his former teammates.
And if no one could really find Bruce and Tony, they were on their way to Tokyo to recruit for SI’s expansion of the medical division.
And if a few months later when a very happy and healthy Tony announced his engagement to Pepper Potts and Wanda Maximoff began to rage and scream very incriminating things about what she did to Tony’s mind, Tony was just too happy and sent her a huge basket of goods to express his appreciation.
And if four years later when Thanos’ armada arrived on a woefully unprepared Earth and raging, grieving eyes turned to Maximoff who after being extensively interrogated and investigated was found to have given Tony every single moment of bliss in exchange for his not so paranoid panic of another alien invasion. After the snap was reversed, Tony could only shrug.