𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐅𝐎𝐔𝐑

𝘞𝘖𝘙𝘒 𝘛𝘖𝘎𝘌𝘛𝘏𝘌𝘙

━━━ AFTER THE DISASTER ENDING TO THE PARTY, TONY HAD SCOOPED UP ALL THE PIECES OF THE LEFT BEHIND ULTRON ROBOT ALONG WITH BRUCE AND USHERED THE TEAM AND THE MCCALL PACK INTO THE LAB — SANS THOR WHO HAD STALKED OFF. Everyone spread out as their minds whizzed with all their thoughts and questions on what the hell had just happened back in the party area. One second they were laughing and joking about as they got to know each other more, and then the next second they were fighting off robots. It was like a never ending domino effect when it came to Meilani and facing random dramas when she least expected them.

Steve exhaled heavily, rubbing a hand over his forehead in stress while Tony and Bruce inspected over the left over pieces from Ultron. He looked incredibly stressed and Meilani could practically smell the sour scent of the air of his nerves. She placed a comforting hand on his bicep where she sat on the lab table that leant against and offered him a small smile to show him that everything would be okay. Even though Meilani didn't really know if things would actually be okay.

"All our work is gone. Ultron cleared out. He used the internet as an escape hatch," Bruce announced to the team, though more so Tony than anyone else. His voice was forlorn and sad, clearly upset over the loss of everything he and Tony had been working on when it came to Ultron. A secret project of sorts considering no one else on the team besides Bruce had even known that this Ultron had even existed. It was still a wonder how Ultron had even gained the power he did in the first place.

"Ultron," Steve repeated, eyes drifting from the hand that rested on his bicep and over to Tony and Bruce. 

Natasha shook her head from where she stood on the other side of the room, flipping through files on a holographic table. A gray sweater and black sweatpants now adorned her body as she'd ran to get changed quickly before meeting up with the team just a few minutes later. Meilani partially wished she'd followed in Natasha's footsteps as her dress and heeled boots were starting to pinch her in uncomfortable ways. This was exactly why Meilani never wore dresses and hells unless it was necessary. "He's been in everything. Files, surveillance. Probably knows more about us than we know about each other."

"He's in your files, he's in the internet," Rhodey spoke up next, pushing off from where he'd been leant comfortably against the wall next to the table that Natasha had been flipping through. "What if he decides to access something a little more . . . exciting?"

"What would Ultron want with Tony's files?" Apollo asked, shifting on the lab table he'd perched himself on with his chin resting on Victor's shoulder that slouched against the table in front of him. He hadn't let the Blight boy out of his sight since the attack and, knowing it was never a good idea to fight with Apollo, Victor obliged and let his boyfriend cling to him like some sort of koala. "Is there something in there that Ultron could use against you guys?"

"Nuclear codes," Rhodey informed, crossing his arms as he began to pace around the room. "Look, we need to make some calls, assuming we even still can."

Adrian furrowed his eyebrows, crossing his own arms across his chest in confusion. One leg was bent at the knee and rested on the edge of the chair he sat on while he twisted the spinny chair side to side in thought. "Nukes? But . . . he said he wanted you guys — and I'm assuming the rest of us in association — dead. And I gotta tell you . . . dealing with dead people is really not fun. It's actually quite annoying so if we can keep that from happening, that'd be great."

"Adrian!" Meilani huffed at her red haired best friend, shooting him a look to knock it off. "Not the time."

"He didn't say dead," Steve interrupted before Adrian could shoot a snarky remark back to the true alpha. This earned all eyes to the super soldier who bit the inside of his lip momentarily. "He said extinct."

"Same thing," Adrian waved his hand and earned himself a slap to the back of the head from Stiles, who merely shot him an innocent smile when he turned to glare at his boyfriend.

"He also said he killed somebody," Clint reminded the team and the pack, leaning his arms on the railing of the small raised floor he stood on that overlooked the rest of the room. "Who could that even be?"

Sawyer scanned the room and noticed that everyone that he knew of were still accounted for, but that didn't mean the other partygoers couldn't have gotten hit on their way out. If Ultron was even built before they left, at least. "There wasn't anyone here besides us after the others left the party, right? I know I'm horrible at math but . . . still pretty sure everyone here looks accounted for."

Tony sighed and picked up a small rectangular device that looked like a small iPad and walked across the room, stopping before a piece of the floor that had an orangey light flickering beneath the smooth glass of it. He tapped the device at a random spot in the air and a pixelated vortex swarmed above the floor in front of Tony. "There was, actually."

Bruce pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose, slowly approaching the orange pixels and stepping onto the holographic scene beneath the floor. His eyes swept around the area as he placed his hands on his hips. "What? This is insane."

"What is that?" Meilani questioned, glancing between Tony and Bruce before her eyes landed on Steve whose face fell in realization. "Steve?"

"JARVIS was the first line of defense. He would have shut Ultron down. It makes sense," Steve explained, referring to the AI system in the Avenger's Tower. He helped Tony on a plethora of things and he even connected to Tony's Iron Man suit. It was an accented voice that Meilani had heard a few times when walking around the tower during her few days inside of it. She'd never realized JARVIS was his name.

"No. Ultron could have assimilated JARVIS. This isn't strategy. This is rage," Bruce said, head still shaking as he tried to figure out what Ultron's angle was.

Before anyone else could give their opinions on the matter, Thor stormed in dressed back into his usual fighting outfit with his hammer clutched tightly into his hand. He was a man on a mission as he stalked across the room, wrapping his free hand around Tony's throat and lifting him up with the one hand as his blue eyes narrowed dangerously on the Stark male. 

"Woah, use your words, buddy," Tony struggled, wrapping his hands around Thor's wrist to keep him from suffocating him too much. 

"I have more than enough words to describe you, Stark."

Steve moved away from the table, causing Meilani's hand that had still been on his bicep to drop and Steve didn't have much time to notice the empty feeling that erupted inside him the second Meilani's contact was gone. He was too focused on the fact the God of Thunder was about to choke out Tony. "Thor! The Legionnaire."

Thor sneered at Tony, but dropped the billionaire back to his own two feet and let him stumble away to catch his breath. "Trail went cold about a hundred miles out, but it's headed North and it has the scepter. Now we have to retrieve it . . . again."

Natasha scoffed and rolled her eyes. "Yeah, genie's out of that bottle. Clear and present is Ultron."

"I don't understand," Dr. Cho, the doctor friend of Bruce's that had flown in to use the lab and also helped heal Clint, stood near the miscellaneous part of the robot Ultron had been inside. She'd been quiet most of the evening and Meilani didn't get much of a chance to talk to her, but the woman was nice from what Meilani got from her so far. "You built this program. Why is it trying to kill us?"

"Yeah, it's really taking me calling myself drop dead gorgeous a little too seriously," Apollo grumbled, wheezing slightly when Victor drove his elbow into his ribs to shut him up. 

"Ignore him. He was dropped on his head as a young wolf," Victor said, waving Apollo off and gesturing for the Avengers to keep working on the issue at hand.

Tony suddenly began to chuckle, almost sounding incredulous as he crossed the room and stood before one of the many computers and began to tap a few keys on the keyboard attached it. However, no one in the room seemed to appreciate Tony's sudden burst of laughter, whether it was humorous or not. Especially Thor who had snapped at the man to cut it out. "No . . . it's probably not funny, right? This is very terrible. Is it so . . . is it so? It is. It's so terrible."

"This could have been avoided if you hadn't played with something you don't understand," Thor chastised, waving his hand around in a mocking manner. It almost sounded like a parent yelling at their child for having their hand in the cookie jar before dinner.

"No. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It is funny," Tony cut off Thor before he could say anything else, moving closer towards the god. "It's a hoot that you don't get why we need this."

Meilani's eyes shifted between Thor and Tony, feeling the tension in the air raise significantly and could hear the pounding hearts of both Thor and Tony the more they glared at each other. "Tony, I really don't think this is the time."

Tony slapped his hands to his sides and turned to face the true alpha, disbelief swimming in his eyes. "What? You, the true alpha who has overcame more than a person should, is just gonna roll over and show her belly because it's tough?"

"Tony, you're out of line," Steve snapped, stepping in front of the true alpha with stern eyes. "Don't take your frustrations out on her because you screwed up. She was just telling you to stop acting like you're a god."

"Plus, we did make a murder bot with a semblance of an interface," Bruce chimed in, shrugging sarcastically when Tony moved his betrayed expression over to the scientist.

"Well, you did do something right and you did it right here," Steve said, earning Tony's attention again. "The Avengers were supposed to be different than SHIELD."

Tony poked his tongue into his check, a breathless laugh falling past his lips as he gestured around him. "Anybody remember when I carried a nuke through a wormhole? Saved New York? Recall any of that? A hostile alien army came charging through a hole in space. We're standing three hundred feet below it. We're the Avengers. We can bust armed dealers all the livelong day, but that up there, that's . . . that's the endgame. How were you guys planning on beating that?"

Meilani crossed her legs beneath her and leant her chin on her hands while her elbows rested on her knees. "Oh, I don't know . . . together sounds nice."

"Even with the extra strength from your pack, we'll lose," Tony warned.

"Then we'll do that together, too," Steve suggested, obviously agreeing with Meilani that they all needed to put their heads together if they wanted to get through this. A bunch of heads — especially enhanced and trained ones — were better than one. "Thor's right and Ultron is calling us out. I'd like to find him before he's ready for us. The world is a big place and I think we need to  make it smaller."

Meilani puffed out her cheeks as the rest of the Avengers and some of the members from her pack began to talk over each other with their ideas. She met Steve's eyes and they seemed to share the same thought as they both appeared exasperated. 

This was going to be a long night.

The team hadn't stuck around for too long after the decision to actually work together and get back at Ultron before he got to them. It was late and Tony had mentioned that them working on a well rested brain was better than working on a tipsy and sleepy one. So the team and the pack were both sent off to bed for the night, which Meilani was slightly grateful for as she wanted desperately to get out of Natasha's dress and heels and back into her own clothes. 

Steve had been kind enough to walk her back towards her room, which earned Meilani looks from Adrian as he ticked an eyebrow at them. She had made a "zip it" motion with her lips before she followed after Steve, politely thanking him for escorting her back to the room. He'd merely waved it off, saying that Raymond and Bucky would probably shake their heads at him had he not walked the lady home. Though, Meilani heard a slight shift in his heart when he'd said that, almost like he wanted to do it and not because he felt it was the gentleman thing to do.

Meilani had tossed and turned the few hours she actually got to lay in bed. Around seven thirty she'd been pulled out of bed by Sawyer, who claimed the others were all already up as no one could really sleep after the long they'd had the night before. She'd grumbled as she wanted just a few more minutes of laying in bed, but relented and quickly threw on some clothes and followed Sawyer back to the lab where some of the members of the team and pack were sat. A conversation already happening as the two wolves approached.

" — a message. Ultron killed Strucker," Steve was saying to Tony, Thor, Natasha, Bruce and Clint when Sawyer and Meilani approached. Adrian, Apollo and Scott were all sat in the surrounding chairs and Meilani could only assume the others were all in the kitchen eating breakfast as it was still early.

"And he did a Banksy at the crime scene, just for us," Tony remarked, looking down at the photo of a very dead Struck with the word PEACE written in his blood on the wall above his head. 

"This is a smoke screen. Why send a message when you've just given a speech?" Natasha inquired, looking up from the computer she'd been typing away at as the boys had been talking.

Steve, who had been dressed in a tight grey work out t-shirt and work out pants, shrugged and crossed his arms. "Strucker must have known something that Ultron wanted us to miss."

Natasha tapped a few more keys on the keyboard and Meilani rounded the computer to peer over the assassin's shoulder. A DNA skin of a fingerprint appeared on the screen with no match, but Meilani couldn't make sense of what it was. "Everything we had on Strucker's been erased."

Tony handed Steve back the tablet and glanced down at Natasha. "Not everything. I have physical files laying about in this lab. We just have to go through it all."

"Fun," Adrian retorted quietly.

Tony hadn't been kidding when he said he had boxes of files laying about. He'd recruited Meilani and Sawyer to haul out the file boxes that were filled to the brim each with files upon files. Where would they even begin with all of the files that Tony had kept on Strucker? They didn't even necessarily know what they were looking for and Meilani had rubbed her face tiredly when she realized they'd have to go through just about every file to even find out what Ultron could have wanted to keep out of the Avengers' knowledge in the first place.

Everyone had gotten to work on grabbing a box each and flicking through the files upon files that rested inside of them. Meilani had taken a spot next to Adrian at one of the desks and she'd snorted quietly when Adrian grumbled about having to read so much even though they'd been done with school for a solid year now. She reminded him it could have been worse had they not had so many hands on deck to help them go through everything, which effectively kept the Martin boy quiet for the time being.

"Known associates. Baron Strucker had a lot of friends," Bruce commented, cutting across the quiet air that had taken over the room as everyone had been pouring over the files in a concentrated sort of silence. "These people are all horrible. 

Tony, who had been flipping through a file near Bruce, suddenly perked up when he noticed about the file that Bruce held in his hands. He took it from the Banner male and eyes flitted across the page that Bruce had been reading. "Hey, I knew this guy. From back in the day. He operates off the African coast. Black market arms. I met him at this convention and he was talking about finding something new, a game-changer. It was all very Ahab."

Thor took one of the photos from the file and stared down at the the SHIELD file with three photos, the name ULYSSEUS KLAUE typed into the top left corner. A man with Aviators, a full beard and some sort of tattoo that wrapped around the back of his head was visible in the photos. Thor pointed to a pinkish brand that rested to the right of Ulysseus' neck. "What is this branding?"

Bruce tapped a few keys on the computer he sat in front of, pulling up a virtual file of the file that Thor held now. He'd pulled up the photo with the branding and ran a search of it through the databases that Tony had installed to his lab computers. "Oh, yeah. It's a word in an African dialect meaning thief. In a much less friendly way, might I add."

"What dialect?" Meilani asked out of curiosity, spinning her chair around so she could face the others with furrowed eyebrows. 

"Wakanada? No, wait . . . Wakanda."

Tony and Steve both tensed up at the mention of the name and shared a silent look, both appearing to know about Wakanda in some way. "If this guy got out of Wakanda with some of their trade goods . . . "

"I thought your father said he got the last of it," Steve cut in, tilting his head and it almost reminded Meilani of a confused puppy.

"Why? What comes out of Wakanda that's so important?" Sawyer questioned, eyes bouncing between Tony and Steve.

Tony jerked his chin in the direction of Steve's shield that rested in the lab against one of the filing cabinets. "The strongest metal on Earth."

"Where is this guy now?"

word count: ( 3.2k )

— so this chapter was kinda slow and that's mostly because this was a filler of sorts. but we're about half way through the movie now when we begin the next chapter! the closer we get to civil war, the more excited I get! also . . . am I changing up Steve's vision in the next chapter when Wanda attacks him . . . YES I AM! you'll find out what he saw later on when Meilani and the others find out *CUE EVIL LAUGHTER*

— also, this chapter is dedicated to roscoeobrien in honor of best friend's day that was yesterday but i didn't get to post this in time. so we're a day late, but my love for you is still strong! 10/10 still your biggest simp, ellis. thank you.