Love Me (Steve Rogers Fanfiction)

Chapter 2

"No, no, no. I'm going to live forever. I'm gonna be made of plastic," Clint replies good-naturedly.

"Here's your beverage."

"You'll be made of you, Mr. Barton. Your own girlfriend won't be able to tell the difference." Dr. Cho smiles.

Clint takes a sip of his drink and mumbles, "well, I don't have a girlfriend."

"Come on, Barton, even Grandpa has a girl," Bruce teases.

"That I can't fix. This is the next thing, Tony. Your clunky metal suits are going to be left in the dust."

"Well, that is exactly the plan. And Helen, I expect to see you at the party on Saturday," Tony says courteously, putting on the charm. I shake my head, smiling to myself.

"Unlike you, I don't have a lot of time for parties." She hesitates, then glances up from her work. "Wil Thor be there?"

"America!" Steve calls from the stairs. "You have a second?"

He has a tablet in his hand and he was talking to Maria Hill. He knows about my family. "Um, actually, I'm helping Tony right now, so, um, not really."

"It'll only take a few minutes," he insists. "Please." I sigh, close my book, and go join him. We walk through the hallway in silence for a few minutes until we're completely alone.

Steve holds up the tablet. "Are you okay? And this time you can't lie, because I know you're not." He hesitates before asking his next question. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I didn't know how to even tell myself." I glance down at the ground. "What do you know?"

In response, he hands me the tablet, and I scroll through the information. Wanda and Pietro Maximoff. Age twenty. I look up, feeling slightly sick. "They... they volunteered?" To my dismay, Steve nods. How could someone do that? She has telekinesis and mental manipulation, and his powers are almost exact to mine. He's not a super-soldier, though.

"You met one, didn't you?" His tone is more curious than accusatory, so instead of lying this time, I nod.

"Pietro. I tried to catch him in the forest after I talked to you guys, but I couldn't, and when I stopped, he recognized me."

"Hold on. He was faster than you?" I nod. "Okay. Keep going."

"He said he thought I was dead, that I was taken more than ten years ago. And he asked me to come back with him." I shrug, brushing the comment off like it didn't really hurt. "I ran. It's what I'm good at."

"Come here," He says softly. I go straight into his arms and will myself not to cry. Because I just found my family, and I can't be with them. "You can't keep this a secret. Maria's sending it out to the whole team. I told her to add that they weren't allowed to bother you about it."

"Thank you." In some ways, I'm relieved. At least I don't have to tell them.

"What are you working on with Tony?" He asks.

I shrug. "I'm not sure. Just figuring out the scepter, I think."

"Be careful, okay? I need a dance partner on Saturday," he teases.

"I don't dance."

"That's okay, neither do I. We'll figure it out."

I wink. "You've got yourself a date, Rogers." I give him a quick kiss and run.

I pull my hair up into a high ponytail as I finish climbing the steps back into the lab. "What's going on, boys?" I ask, startling the two scientists.

"Well, the scepter," Tony says, gesturing to it. "You see, we were wondering how Strucker got so inventive. So, I've been analyzing the gem inside you two may recognize."

He renders an orange 3D image of what must be JARVIS's consciousness.

"JARVIS," Bruce and I respond at the same time.

"Doctor, Miss Evans," JARVIS replies in greeting.

"Started out, JARVIS was just a natural language UI. Now he runs the Iron Legion. He runs more of the business than anyone besides Pepper."

"Oh."

"Top of the line," Tony brags.

"Yes."

"I suspect not for long." I raise my eyebrows at Tony, wondering where this is going.

"Meet the competition." Tony brings up another image, a larger blue one. Similar to a brain. It pulses and moves like one.

"Wow," I breathe. I approach it, circling the new stream of consciousness. "Tony, this...this is incredible. Beautiful."

"If you had to guess, what's it look like it's doing?" Tony asks us.

"Like it's thinking," Bruce says quickly, as excited as I am. "I mean this could be a...it's not a human mind, it..."

"Mhm."

"I mean, look at this! They're like neurons firing!" Bruce looks at Tony, waiting for him to continue. I don't know what to make of this, but I'm glad I read those books. I actually know what's going on. And it's revolutionary.

"Down in Strucker's lab I saw some fairly advanced robotics work. They deep-sixed the data, but...I gotta guess he was knocking on a very particular door." Tony raises his hands, waiting for one of us to answer.

"Artificial intelligence," I whisper.

"This could be it. This could be the key to creating Ultron." Tony nods along with himself. Ultron. A new way to protect the world.

Bruce's expression is unreadable. "I thought Ultron was a fantasy."

"Yesterday it was. If we can harness this power, apply it to my Iron Legion protocol-"

"That's a mad-sized if!" Bruce takes off his glasses and cleans them before sliding them back onto his face. I've seen him do it before. It's a nervous habit.

"Our job is "if." What if you were sipping margaritas on a sun-drenched beach turning brown instead of green? Not looking over your shoulder for VERONICA."

"Don't hate, I helped design VERONICA," Bruce says.

"As a worst-case measure, right? How about a best-case? What if the world was safe? What if next time aliens roll up to the club, and they will, they couldn't get past the bouncer?"

Bruce is sputtering on with his doubts about AI, but my mind is elsewhere. If we could do this, we could finally protect the world.

Maybe even from people like me.

"I want to apply this to the Ultron program," Tony says. "But JARVIS can't download a data schematic this dense. We can only do it while we have the scepter here, that's three days, give me three days."

"So you're going for artificial intelligence and you don't want to tell the team," Bruce says slowly.

"Right. That's right, you know why, because we don't have time for a city hall debate. I don't want to hear the "man was not meant to meddle" medley. I see a suit of armor around the world."

"Sounds like a cold world, Tony."

"I've seen colder. This one, this very vulnerable blue one? It needs Ultron. Peace in our time. Imagine that."

"He's right." The two men turn to look at me. I haven't spoken in a little while. But this could be it. We aren't able to handle all of the world's threats by ourselves. We need help. "Let's do it."

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