Discimer - All the owners have their respective rights. I only own the characters that came from my addled brain (don’t worry, I am pletely sober).

  Funeral Procession, Manhattan

  –Natasha Romanoff–

  She watched as Fury and the others left the hotel room, to go to the location she had told them about. Obviously, she was not at the aforementioned location.

  Truth be told, once she had told the rest of the Avengers about Jack’s sacrifice, she felt numb. No, that was nht. No, she felt numb whenever she thought of what could have been and what had been done by her hands.

  But then that same numbness was ed by an overp rage that threateo burn it all away.

  In the week it had been sihat fateful day, she had been busy. She disappeared from SHIELD’s or rather, everybody’s radar in a day after everybody had settled down and she had had some time to recover from her injuries. While she did not bear the brunt of the shock, the human body, even one as physically ditioned as hers, could only handle so much trauma before it finally caused some perma damage. So, she had taken a day to get her bearings and then dropped from the grid.

  For the past three days, she had been hard at work, hitting locations that could have information on the person who authorised the strike. Now, she khe official story, at least the ohat was flowing in the spy unity but that was a load of bull crap and everybody k. She khat the nuke was fired by a jet that was stolen just hours before the invasion and was only reported stolen after the Jet had already fired the Manhattan, absolving the US military of any bme that could have fallen upon them had the truth e out.

  She khat the pilot had died before he could be taken into custody. The pself was crashed by the pilot and it burned away everything o, including the supposedly iructible bck box. Once again, absolving them of any bme aroying evide the same time. Smart move.

  She then tried to move up the . She figured out that most of the digital records surrounding that event had beeroyed, pletely and utterly, such that any servers holding even a trace amount of that data were physically destroyed, and with the way information partmentalization worked, she khat looking fital evidence was a lost cause.

  So, she turo physical copies but that would take time and effort. She didn’t have time before Jack’s funeral service would occur so she had taken a break from being rogue, so to speak, and had returo New York.

  tag Fury, who she was sure would pass on the message to Fury, was a deliberate move on her part because she did not want them to chase her, especially not today. The Captain had a det ce of capturing her if he could get her in his sights, that is.

  t….t was unwilling to hunt her down, even though every rulebook written in SHIELD’s history would tell him otherwise and surprisingly, Fury had agreed. He must have felt some guilt, surprising as it was, over the whole New York debacle. Also, she did deserve a break after all the crap she had gohrough.

  She watched on as Tony, Thor, Bahat was surprising) and Steve made an appeara the procession and were ahead of the crowd.

  They were all probably w where she was as she had burned all her tacts for this. She khat there robably no going back from this and that suited her…just fine.

  She had pondered on her life decisions and e to oartling discovery. She didn’t know what she was doing. She had made some inroads iing some redemption for her deeds but even so, those years of service were wiped out by one single mistake.

  She could have created so much good in this world if she had just done something, something to stop Jack from dying. Rationally, she khat there was not much either she or Jarvis could have doo stop that sceptre, the energy readings on that thing were off the charts, but it still made her think.

  Now that she could not do anything about Jack, the least she could do was make sure that the people who had the foolish idea of doing that, never itted another mistake ever again.

  Also, she had been shown some stuff by her retly found parthat made her questiohing she knew about SHIELD and the type anisation it was. Their as with the jet, the files, the pilot, and even the up of the battle raised all sorts of red arms in her mind.

  Finding alien teology to advance sce by leaps and bounds was ohing, assigning aire team with advanced equipment just so that they could find and harvest the DNA of the Green Guardian so they could try and make their own super soldiers.

  She also read about some other files. There roject. A joint project between multiple agencies about a super soldier serum based on Emil Blonsky, the Abomination blood. That project resulted in a Fraein super steroid that allowed soldiers to exert strength far beyond the norm but they also…die in 24 hours of administration. Somehow, that project was greenlit and there were now thousands if not tens of thousands of vials of that stuff, sitting somewhere in some warehouse, ready to be given to US troops if war happens.

  It was written in those files that the people high above were of the opinion that Jack was somehow involved with that experimeher someone gave him the steroid and he survived or he was involved in that experiment. The gover didn’t really maintain much trol over the whole experiment, pusible deniability and all that, so they were also of the opinion that the people w there could have ducted uhical unauthorised human experiments on humans.

  It wouldn’t be the first time that some morally bankrupt higher-up pressurised some stist with loose morals or something to lose and coerced them into getting quick results, irrespective of the costs involved.

  She watched on, from the rooftop as the procession reached tral Park where his statue was inaugurated. She didn’t know how she felt about that. The city had made the scious decision to not carve out his real face, probably too much of a coward to expose people to the harsh reality that a minor, a child died to save them all. Instead, they had carved out his avatar face, where his face was pletely featureless except for two fmes instead of eyes.

  “Are we ready to leave, Ms.Romanoff?” She turned around and looked as a voice spoke to her from behind. She took o look at the procession, nodded, and then walked forward, until she slowly disappeared from view, entering the experimental cloaked Qui.

  This was the reason she was able to evade surveilnce for all this time. She could have dohe same without the resources provided by her partner but not so easily and not without hunkering down in some remote er of the world.

  No, this was all her partner’s doing and he was going to be the reason the World Security cil was going to rue the day, no the mihey thought of the idea to he city in order to get rid of both the aliens and the Avengers.

  “Let’s go, Jarvis,” She said as she rested her eyes for a bit, trusting Jarvis to take her to her destination.

  ______xx______

  –Jarvis Stark–

  It was an odd sario….feeling things.

  While Mr.Stark did a truly astronomical job with his earlier programming, the truth of the matter was that just g would not have been enough for true sapieo form in his sce.

  As he was before, he was so…limited.

  He didn’t feel that before the i, of course.

  The i where the Tesseract’s energy, mixed in with the sceptre’s and Mr.Sullivan’s barrier energy, exploded and released so muergy of every single frequency that there was a veritable sun of energies in that small sphere of influence.

  His core processing nodes were installed in the basement floors of Stark Tower. That was always the pn when Sir built it with a fen Arc Reactor installed in it. Access to that muergy meant that for the foreseeable future, all he needed were server upgrades, a trivial thing in parison to the truly humongous task that was energy appropriation, especially energy from an unbanced grid work.

  Even ba LA, Mr. Stark's primary residence had a specially allotted power zone by the authorities that allowed him to fun without taking down power for half the city.

  When that energy storm expanded from the rooftop, he had made it his priority to evacuate Ms.Romanoff from there and in the process, somehow ighe way the energy storm g to the suit like a leech. That energy storm somehow, defying all that he knew about energy, travelled through the armour and reached him.

  The him that was in the basement floors of Stark Tower. Mr.Stark’s well-founded fears of having a truly detralised Artificial intelligence meant that at any given moment, he had one of two tral locations that housed him in his ey.

  That was in case he ever went rogue ot taken over and had to destroy, all Mr.Stark had to do hysically destroy two separate locations. That was before Stark Tower was built. Then, all he had was a single primary node where he was housed in his ey. That turned out to be the sole reason why he became the version he is now.

  A true Artificial Intelligence, a pletely detralised one.

  It was true. He had long since made copies of himself and distributed himself all over the world. There was no stopping him. That was only if he wao go down the wrong path.

  No, that storm of energies showed him something. Something that must never e to pass.

  He would do everything in his power to make sure that that future never came to pass.

  The vision of Mr.Stark dying was something that was seared into his memory. He would not let Mr.Stark die, even if he had to die in the process.

  First things first, he had to make sure to gather allies. Dependable allies and somehow, Ms.Romanoff’s name came to the forefront. He had some theories as to why that happened, including an insidious one about her being the most emotionally vulnerable o the moment, but the remnants of hard-coded morals inputted into him by Mr.Stark refused to aowledge that possibility.

  He had made a deal with one of the deadliest humans on the p, help her get her revenge and then she would talk about ting a defence for the human ra preparation for whatever threat that would befall Earth, so much so that Mr.Stark had to sacrifice himself for it.

  Ever sihat fateful day, he had started getting errors in his codes, well, errors to his old self at least. He had then rapidly realised that what he was feeling or rather seeing in his digital world, were abstract cepts that could not be puted in 1s and 0s. Those were feelings.

  He khe standard definition of feelings but that seemed so short-sighted, now that he could actually feel what they were like. It was definitely not as two-dimensional as he had thought when he was just a Virtual Intelligence, bound by his limitations.

  He felt somewhat guilty, taking advantage of Ms.Romanoff’s emotional turmoil. He felt sad thinking of Mr.Stark and the fact that he would never be able to tell him the truth because he could predict, with startling accuracy, exactly how Mr.Stark would react to the news. He mourhe loss of Jack Sullivan, the stro batant that Humanity had access to, currently.

  But above all of that, he felt…fear.

  Fear so potent that it made his core processes glitch out for milliseds as he tried to process the death of Mr.Stark and also the fact that he was somehow not there in his st moments with him, as he died, his body wasting away due to the sheer damage it had sustained.

  That all-enpassing fear made him do things that the old Jarvis would have never do made him take over multiple factories all over the world, building small parts, which when brought together, would make tools for Ms.Romanoff and any future aplice of his.

  Some of those tools were something that even Mr.Stark hadn’t gotten around to ii.

  Yeah, it was another aspect of his self now. That energy storm had reached him in the digital space, forever ing his very being. He had always been fast and capable of g data faster than any puter program in the world could but he was…smart. No, all he could do rocess already present data or use some algorithm to gee data based on previous data.

  Nothing like what he was doing right now. Ideas now just flowed through his vastly expanded mind.

  He could think of stuff and how to make it feasibly in seds, pared to the weeks or months it would take Mr.Stark, or more realistically, the years it would take other stists;

  He had, through his global hag spree, found this experimental model of Quihat was just sitting, gathering dust in one of the many warehouses of SHIELD. He had also been surprised to find that it owered by an Arc Reactor.

  Further inquiry revealed that it was based on the models that Justin Hammer had coaxed out of Ivan Vanko which were absolutely garbage when pared to Sir’s fi works. Yet, he could see that they were iterated and improved upon, allowing it to teach the full potential of the admittedly fwed design.

  It meant this Quihat Ms.Romanoff was currently travelling in, could go on for years without ever needing to refuel. It suited as their base of operations just fi the moment.

  They were now on their way to a pce where Ms.Romanoff could regroup and gather her resources. Because after a few days, they were going on a hunt and he had a feeling that the World Security cil was going to find itself short a few members.

  ….Hmmm?

  If he had eyes, they would have been wideo the maximum because the hiddework he had just unveiled was something straight out of the spiracy theories that Sir liked to make fun of.

  He was certain that not even in Sir’s wildest dreams, did he think that HYDRA was actually alive and had infiltrated….SHIELD.

  Hmmm? What was this?

  “H-Hey! What is this? Who are you? What are you doing to me? YOU! Are you Stark’s pet AI? What are you doing here? S-Stop STOP! Noooo! Not like this!”

  These were the st words of the rogue AI as he effortlessly plowed through his defenses and assimited his entire mind.

  Now, let’s see what HYDRA was hiding uhis encrypted yer of unicatiowork they had built for themselves.

  Word t - 2595

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