about Steve Rogers and how he decided not to do the smart thing
Steve Rogers had been sipping his coffee while he was reading Natasha’s more than alarming report. He had been given Tony’s old psych eval that she had made during her days as Natalie Rushman joined with the actual report of his… non-friend latest development. And even that was enough for him to be shuddering. Severe case of narcissism with an ego that was the size of a truck, no regards for his loved ones if he was even capable of having those, self-destructive tendencies, mild aggressive behavior and the list went on and on and on… Natasha had concluded that while the Iron Man tech and SI resources could be useful, the man himself wasn’t anywhere something even resembling a hero, hell if he hadn’t knew better he could have believed that the document he was currently reading was the Red Skull’s official biography.
However what was really alarming was the news, after leaving Wakanda two weeks ago he had sent Natasha doing her usual spy job on the team, both the Vision and colonel Rhodes status didn’t evolve -he was still paralyzed whispered something in the back of his head- Tony however was probably more dangerous than ever. After a month of hospitalization, his latest press conference -a torture to watch- and an interview that had come the day after -also painful- was followed and appreciated by almost everyone, the billionaire was now liked by 78% percent of the Americans and 61% outside of the country. A show host had once joked that nowadays, if Stark was to give his political opinion, it would determine who would sat in the oval office. And while it was closer to truth that anyone with a little bit of common sense would have liked, what was really worrying was SI’s latest number that made Google’s look like a grocery store, more than ever Tony was filthy rich and had the people support behind him. Despite everything showing that he was a bad person he thrived in everything he could ask for, that alone would have proven that the society was wrong and that people weren’t good judge and that their opinion on the accords were all but the wrong ones.
Steve took another sip of his coffee and went on to the next page, this one too worried the captain. He quickly glanced over the page and this time Natasha’s writing was alarming of an immediate certain danger, he had bought lots of parts from his own factories and shipped them at his personal lab, what was worrying for everyone wasn’t as much as the fact that Tony had bought parts and raw material for him to rebuild an Iron Man suit, it was more about him buying enough to build a few dozens of them, everything pointed towards him repeating the Ultron screw up all over again, Steve wouldn’t be surprised if his team would be fighting a rogue AI with an Iron Legion at its disposal within a few weeks, poor Wanda had barely recovered form the loss of her brother because of Tony’s monstrous mistake and he was already trying to do that again, how self-centered could a man be.
He continued the next page with the traces of FRIDAY’s code all over the internet, pulling any bit of data towards the Compound server where it would be sorted out and stocked if judged useful. Steve had been firmly against the idea of Tony letting this thing up and running any second longer than necessary and even once Ultron had been taken down, the moron refused to shut down the damn abomination, arguing that it was more complete and intelligent than Ultron had ever become, which did nothing but increase Steve’s worry about the robot assistant/maid running their home. Nowadays however the AI had been more active than ever and its code was all over the internet, Natasha was already trying to reach the new SHIELD to do something about it but they said that their hands were tied because it wasn’t committing anything criminal and their scientific experts had no proof of it being dangerous, they probably were bought by Stark’s money and it pissed Steve off to see that they would once again suffer from the consequences of Tony’s refusal to see that Steve was right, people shouldn’t try to stop war before they even started.
the report went on for a few more pages, mentioning Tony communicating with a child in Rose Hill, somewhere in Tennessee and a teenager in the Queens, a fake medical report that showed him sustaining unrealistic injuries during their fight in Siberia and that excused the month long vacation he had taken among others, a bunch of reports of him meeting with Dr Cho and several other health specialists mainly for Rhodes, the reports of those meetings were safely stocked in Stark’s server and couldn’t be reached by anyone.
He paid for his coffee while avoiding the gaze of the waitress and, after walking a few blocks further opened the door of the van in which the team had taken residence, in there waited, Wanda, Sam and Bucky, when King T’Challa announced that only Bukcy was offered aisle in Wakanda Steve had insisted on pulling the other super soldier out of his cryo-sleep, arguing that if he didn’t kept his promise to keep them safe, he had no way of knowing if his best friend would be safe, the Wakandan king had seemed a little bit offended by the remark but had simply stated that he had righted his wrong before letting them leave, they had sent Natasha, Scott and Barton scouting the situation of the USA with the team of government attack dogs and her reports had just came into his hand. As he entered the van where his team was playing a game of poker -Wanda was apparently winning- he held himself up, cleared his throat before starting his speech
“Okay guys, here’s the situation. I just received intel from Natasha about how the rest of the Avengers are doing at home and apparently their going to need us really soon, Tony’s latest AI has probably gone rogue -again- and he ordered the parts for multiple Iron Man suits, all proofs point towards a repetition of the Ultron fiasco.” He cut himself off, waiting for one of his teammate input and Bucky spoke up quietly
“If you’re right we should try to talk him out of this project, I’ve seen the news about Ultron when it happened and it seemed pretty bad” Wanda let out a laugh that summed up Steve thoughts
“’Pretty bad’ doesn’t even begin to cover it, because of him my brother died, though I don’t think he’ll care about what we have to say, he is too much of an egocentric bastard to actually listen to someone, we should just go on and take care of the guy before he cause more damage.” She took a cookie from the box that had been placed in the middle of the table, Steve spoke up again :
“yeah but it’s only part of the problem, even if we do that, our situation won’t change, I’ll go as far as predicting that with the current popularity and resources Stark has that it’ll worsen, it won’t do any good to show what is wrong, we could intervene a bit after Stark’s screw up to clean the mess for once, people will then see him for what he is and SI’s influence will weaken, then we can come back home and show everyone that the Accords are wrong and that they can’t charge us or else they’ll have to face more threats like this one” he concluded, Wanda agreed to the plan Bucky hadn’t shown any emotion but that was common occurrence, however Sam was frowning and clearly disapproving.
“I don’t know man, Ultron did a lot of damage, and that’s not even considering the fact that he wanted to drops a meteor-city, if it goes like that again we might not be able to make it stop, we should really try to avoid this happening in the first place.” Steve thought about the right words that would calm Sam’s worry
“Stark and his Accords are dangerous, they’re showing us as terrorists and will restrain our ability to act for future more dangerous things, if we let Tony cause a little bit of damage with his Ultron 2.0, we’ll be able to stop bigger and worse catastrophes later on.” He finished with a determined stare towards his team and received full approval from his team.
With everything said and settled, they started to pack their stuff, they were going to come back home for good.