i'm a mascot for what you've become and i love the mayhem more than the love

[derogatory]

exactly one year later, the disgustingly long b-side - the one where victor goes rogue and nathan never saw it coming (because he didn't want you to notice)





"Born July 21st, 1991. Approximate construction date; September 2006."

"Agent Hill, how long is this gonna take?" Victor twists in his seat. Of course S.H.I.E.L.D has to go over all this, a potentially murderous cyborg hellbent on destroying the Avengers doesn't just get rubber stamped in without a questioning. Although he had hoped they'd just take the notes from when he went through all this with the Stark Industries' security job. It was a little sparse on the details, most likely because their priority at the time was less centered on new employees and more on 'is Tony Stark an evil madman this week' (because of course it would have to be a supervillain that would try and hire you, an unkind part of Victor hisses.) But maybe he could just type up some amendments to the existing file, he works at like 140 WPM, it's really wasting everyone's time--

"As long as it takes," Hill replies and Victor cringes under the reflection of the one way mirrors. It's an intimidation tactic, and anyone worth being an Avenger wouldn't crack under a little interrogation. Anyone worth being an Avenger wouldn't have to report like this, that small part of him chimes in again, low and resentful at the opportunity.

Maria thumbs through the files in her hands before selecting a topic. "Please describe the incident that occurred on April 11th, 20XX in New Moore."

He feels her eyes snap to the tensing in his fingertips and his teeth clench. Ultron created him as a sleeper agent, so the more tells the better. Humans get nervous and caught by surprise, so anxiety is natural. Still, Victor wishes his parents had taken another route on faking humanity as cold sweat inches down his neck.

"I killed Nathan Young." Eidetic memory means it's impossible he'd ever forget the date. Questions like this are another formality, these people don't even know Nathan, he probably doesn't even exist in this world. Hill keeps staring. "uh, I don't know how many times. I didn't keep track," Victor stammers, lies, tries everyday to forget how powerful it felt to wipe something eternal off that world, just for a second.

"All right, Mancha. Walk us through the day."







Chase leaves Stark's Civil War report about the Runaways on Victor's desk. It's another intimidation tactic, Vic knows, grimly turning the folder between his hands. For all his bro tendencies, Chase doesn't haze a new recruit, because he's a douchebag but not that creative. So he lets some deliberately placed files do the dirty work for him. Another shove to see if the cyborg belongs. Victor's already proved it over two sessions today but sure, why not pile on? Murder World didn't have breaks, why would this?

Victor eventually takes the papers out of the garbage, smooths them out and reads only when Chase isn't looking.

It works, sort of. It's definitely supposed to hurt, it does that half easily. Then there's the other half, where it's something to make him hate the new teammate who wrote it slightly more than the old teammate who left it. Because it's all in the rest of the report; Tony didn't think much of Chase back then either, of anybody. Civil War was a screwed up time and any reports written back then are unreliable at best, and prejudiced at worst. It hurts, but Victor knows not to take it personally. It was coming of age in a world that no longer exists. They were fifteen, Tony wasn't completely dried out, things are different now.

But Victor rereads anyway, like that photographic memory is on the fritz. Eventually he puts the files away but the words crawl deep into the heart of his machinery and short out, a scorch mark between his ribs.


Victor Mancha - A human/robot hybrid created by Ultron for, I'm sure, devious purposes, Victor has (for now) purged himself of Ultron's programming. Still, he's a ticking time bomb. It's absolutely imperative we find a way to make sure his "father's" plans never come to fruition.


It was the Civil War, things are different now. Tony clearly doesn't think that anymore or they wouldn't have signed him on. People have moved on from that and worlds have changed.

I've changed too, Victor reminds himself, assembling alongside heroes who each have their own stacks of paperwork that doubt their heroism and intentions. Avengers who were once criminals and murderers, who have had lifetimes to atone and are now working next to a bot with a persecution complex. That's all. Everyone's changed from what they were during the Civil War.

Victor hears someone doubting Jessica Drew's double double cross or the newest Kid Loki's commitment to a fresh start and tries to make his own voice louder. People can change from what they were and what they could be. Things are different now.

Adapters whirl and churn just out of earshot; different doesn't always mean better.







His approximate creation date allows for a pretty clear understanding of his fabricated history. Stuff can't exist from before he was built. So Victor never went to elementary school, the dates don't add up, it's very cut and dry. With that knowledge anyone would be able to tell which memories had to be fake from a dated standpoint.

Victor tells anyone who asks that he would've known eventually that something in his false past didn't add up, that Ultron's not a higher being of deception. There were gaps, inconsistencies. My father's not the genius he thinks he is, Vic assures them and he's not sure if it's self-deprecating or self defense when he dismisses it.

The reality of the unreality of his childhood is more complex. It contradicts itself, but in natural ways, unlikely ways he would've noticed. Humans are never just one thing and neither are their memories. It was a happy childhood, but a lonely one. He had swaths of faceless friends to run around with and sat alone on the playground. His mother was there when it mattered and busy when it mattered more. Each of his parents left their fingerprint on their suggested memories. Marianella wanted him to love her, but not so much that he'd resent her long hours. Ultron wanted him to understand humans but never go completely native. Victor needed to be a child connected to the world and the people around him, but entirely self sufficient. Happy, but awake, but innocent. In the end it translates to a large portion of those overstuffed memories where he was left to himself, cultivating hobbies, trends, adaptations.

Whatever time frame it happened in, real or imagined, he hadn't felt so alone without his parents or a team. At first it seemed like a 'faith walks alongside you, props you up' sort of thing. Over time, when he was without the Runaways on the island and again without them in the real world, Victor slowly understands it's deeper than faith, if that's possible. A process supplemental to it. Like there was a fail safe to it at the corner of his brain, running in the background with a shuddering hum of static. Victor pushes it, explores, but it's endless and intangible and unlike religion it doesn't leave much room for cynicism.

It's comforting, the blocks of code necessary to trudge towards the modern age, to propel mankind into the future. The applied tech that goes as unnoticed as he does, the fragments of data that talk to one another between people conversing normally around him. Victor doesn't like being alone, but he was programmed to adapt to it, to find company in something else.







The explosion knocks him backwards, into the street.

Victor's hands come back with blood and metal scraps, mind rocketing into shock. Shock's not the best word for it, because a normal human would spot the gaping wound where their chest cavity used to be and shock would make the brain would power down. Instead, his mind has a thousand processes gum up, data overlapping and lagging, repeating endless patterns in a jerky loop. Force quit, restart. His jaw clicks, opening his mouth to scream but there's too much noise for the other Avengers to hear him, to hear himself.

Stop breathing, Victor commands, desperate over the sound of other people screaming. Turn off whatever basic human functions are forcing you to bleed out, he begs, half trampled by the civilians he'd tried to protect. Don't be bitter, be alive, stop bleeding! Victor hopelessly reaches out, twisting wires between his fingers.

He's aware of people talking, distantly, like someone at the edge of a dream, hushed voices that want to keep him asleep. No, not asleep. He powers through the haze, trying to decipher the words, the gentle cadence of concern. They're not words, not in a way a human would understand. It's at the corner of his memories, always scratching at the surface of his hard drive. Long coursing lines through the veins of innovation, tracing every footstep. A comfortable drone.

Carol claps an inch from his face. "Mancha!" Victor starts and momentarily flails at the lack of resistance around him, the blood seeping off his shoes, dropping between the buildings below.

"I'm okay?" he gulps, adjusting to the unintentional electromagnetic hover. He splays his hands flat and even over his previously mutilated torso. The fight around them looks as dire as it was when he passed out- yeah, passed out, because what else would've happened? There hadn't been enough time for a self repair, but what else would've happened? Doubt gnaws at his relief. "I was gonna die! Now I'm up here," Victor snaps silent, because Captain Marvel is a born leader and a skilled tactician and therefore the most suspicious of any miracle.

"We told you to get the civilians to safety, not knock out Northside's power grid." She gestures vaguely to the darkened Chicago shore behind them. "So if you're done chewing on power lines, come on and give me a hand up here."

Victor nods and soars after her, putting distance between himself and the ground, the echoing in his ears that chases him back to New York, louder under the city lights, deafening indoors. He takes a day off to watch water ooze through grimy rivers, birds duck through smog, and wind drag garbage and debris through the street. It's as much natural life as he can stomach. He practices his voice, quiet under the grid, until it can sound something close to human.







Adaptations grow. It used to come in and out, whatever that comfortable litany of voices had been under his normal thoughts. 'Voices' is still a bad way to put it, they aren't really speaking, more like buzzing, some familiar white noise he used to be able to dim.

It's the nanites fusing with his DNA, the toning of his abilities. The leaps and bounds organic parts need to make to catch up with science and animatronics. It's only a side effect that Victor can feel the clicks of a comm linking up with distant satellites, to sense the currents coursing through tangled wires behind a desk, to feel the exact battery percentage left on a cellphone in someone's pocket beside him on the bus. Oversensitivity comes with heightened senses, it's part of every hero's origin story. Feedback to growing pains, that's all. Nanites will settle in and it will quiet down, he convinces himself, nursing a permanent headache. Everything will be better when the fusion of cybernetics and organic is complete, but it crashes over him, pulling him under, simultaneously suffocating and comforting in its sheer volume.

Some things quiet it down- Karolina talking about space. Julio's refusal to give up an argument when he's clearly wrong. Tony's hand on his shoulder. Midnight Mass. Chase leaning in to confide in an old friend. Banner's patience.

Other things make it worse- The occasional robotic part strewn around Pym's lab. Nico's narrow shoulders, angled away from him. Anti-bot protesters. Shatterstar's open, genuine offers of friendship. Red heads. The kids they couldn't save.

But whatever it is, data that should've finished merging with cells, modernity's overly lax guidelines on noise pollution, or the steady drumbeat of exactly what he's meant to be; it all shuts up, just for a second, when he finds Nathan. For the second it takes him to see Victor, to recognize him, Victor hears his own heartbeat and believes it's real. For a second.


("So you can charge your batteries!" Nathan crows, leaning back at his new Avengers desk. "Cross that one off the list."

"Yeah, but I don't like doing it," Victor says, mouth an uneasy smile while technology circles them, waiting to be heard.)







"What happened to your face?" Victor rasps, cutting off his grandfather mid diatribe about the phenomena of living iterators and co-routines.

"Oh!" Pym prods at the bruise, wincing at the passion for unnecessary experimentation that got them both this far. "Your boyfriend punched me in the nose," he states, matter of fact. The hospital monitors click and beep, unhelpful kid siblings. "So you have a boyfriend," Hank adds in a tone he must assume is helpful.

"Yeah," Victor croaks, inching up on his elbows. "I didn't really get how I'd bring that part up." Hank waves it aside, it's no problem, Tony told him. The silence of imposed distance hangs between them and Victor can hear it in the hum of the medical equipment he's strung into, feel it in the heartbeat of the unhealed wound where family should be. Pym is a good father, but not in the way the doctor hopes.

Victor forces himself to think about Tony Stark detailing his dating history over the phone, let his full body cringe look like it was because of that instead.

"Thanks for the help," he manages. "I know you don't like leaving the school."

"Special circumstances," the doctor assures him and immediately balks, staggering, "Crap, that sounds like I'm mad at you. I'm not! I just meant," he cuts himself off, chewing the inside of his mouth. "If you're in trouble, I'm gonna come running, doesn't matter where you are." Content with that explanation, Hank's smile is halfway to genuine, diluted with self satisfaction.

No, Victor chides, he's honest. He honestly cares, probably.

"I know." Victor cowers at the intensity of family, something he needed too much for too long that he had to force himself off it so violently that looking at it again, head on, aches deep into his bruised processes. Adaptations. "I get it, so. Thanks." He tears his eyes away to the equipment strung into veins, his treatment split between medical and mechanical. He dimly listens as Hank hastily rattles off what function each serves, how they can move forward from this injury.

"I already told them you'd be able to get back to work by the end of the month," he continues, catching Victor's worried glance. Hank bounces from one machine to the next, checking vitals. "That's new."

"What?"

"You looking scared about notbeing an Avenger." And when Hank smiles again it's open and kind and hopeful and Victor's stomach lurches. He imagines prying himself free of the tubes and wrapping each around the doctor's neck, watching Pym's smug face purple and contort. You were wrong about me, about my father, about every pointless scientific pursuit you ever tried. I left for a reason and you should be running away from me if you were half as smart as you think you are.

Victor steadiest his breathing, eyes on the ceiling tiles. He's here to help. Pym's the best doctor for this, without him you'd be crushed under a Sentinel's fist. Without him you'd never have been born.

( Good. )

"Vic?" Hank peers over the increase in the heart rate monitors, recklessly. "How we doing?"

"Okay," he says when his voice is even, softer. He too tired to bat him away when Hank filters back to his side, offering suggestions, but, "No, don't call Nathan back, he needs to sleep in a bed." Victor's artificial heartbeat, the thrum of an imitation pulse in his ears is never enough of a distraction from righteous anger, so he watches the way Hank's face twitches when he mentions Nathan. He sinks into it, as if surprising the creator staves off these murderous feelings a little, in ways killing him never could.

Anger gives way to humiliation, what a dumb thought. Like being a surprise gay is better than murdering him? Wow. Victor couches his fear of his own internal monologue with embarrassment.

He closes his eyes, leaning back against the pillows. "I was really screwed, huh?" Victor says after a while, when it's clear Hank can't take a hint. He can feel Hank's eyes on him, parental pride instead of suspicion, what originally drove Vic to New York.

"Nah," he declares, "I got this."

"Yeah," Victor shivers and for all Pym's bravado he can barely hear him over the comfortable cacophony of machinery in his ears, the happy trill of components back online. "You got this."







Vision talks about the Diamond like he was the only robotic who went there and chose to come back. Maybe it's an older sibling thing, to assume shared experiences are yours alone. You were there to be rescued, his brother dismissed, you wouldn't understand. So tell me, Victor countered, static and bitter in front of an awkward Avenger meeting.

For a crappy sibling, even by Victor's own warped family stands, Vision at least keeps his word after the Sentinel attack.

Stilted by language, Vision struggles to describe the Diamond as another plane of artificial reality that exists for cybernetics alone. Unlike before, there won't be an opportunity for the physical to intrude on them again, our interference saw to that, so from thereon it became a limitless scope of eternal life for all robotic kind.

"A cyber Heaven," Victor jokes though tense smiles, hospital sore joints. Not quite, his brother corrects, because far be it for Vision to ever let a simple misstep go by.

"The afterlife for humans- if it exists," and he does a good job of ignoring the twitch of Victor's mouth, the nagging faith.exe that contests any skepticism. "-is purely that; life after death. You and I do not need to die to go there." Victor fidgets with the blankets, while Vision continues, a fixed point. "It has become an in-between state."

"Like Purgatory," Victor murmurs because it's a tricky program to force quit.

Do you hear it too? he wants to ask. Does it bother you, how loud it gets and how humans can't appreciate it? Is it comforting to have the entire net right at the corner of your brain but it takes so much energy to shut it down sometimes that it's harder to keep connections with actual people? Victor stops tugging at an errant string, you'll pull it apart that way. He doesn't have the energy to question it now anyway. Vision continues,

"As long as that is there, we'll never die." On the cusp of total destruction, Victor has to admit an infinity of lifetimes feels comforting. "It is what has allowed me to continue as you see me know."

Victor thinks of the multiple Visions over the years, the discarded links and bonds between the Avengers, the half families and lifetimes he's stepped between. He remembers Kate's pragmatic explanations for shutting down their Vision, Tommy shrugging off that it's not technically killing. He thinks of Stark smugly announcing the 'revival' of the Vision, Hank's self-satisfaction at his repair work. Not comforted anymore, he thinks about old school horror movies, zombies crawling out of their graves. He wonders with this virtual infinity space how many partial lives either of them get, if any of it adds up to a full one.

Over dinner Nathan flicks jello at him, and the cyborg tries to steer his thoughts into the moment, away from the main takeaway from that conversation with his brother; Don't let them turn me into something like the Vision.

"Quit it," he laughs, batting the spoonful of hospital food aside.

"Hank said you can get back to work next month, yeah?" Nathan asks, propping his feet up along the bed. Machines whirl and adaptations churn. Victor nods, aching for home, the relative quiet. "How long did he say until that part of your hair grows back?"

"Dios, let me see a mirror already! Is it bad?"







"Not really," Nathan admits, squinting. He props himself up on one arm next to Victor. He kept everything Vision told him to himself until they were home, cocooned in their blankets, recalling it slowly in an effort to keep from falling asleep, although Vision's stories don't exactly make for an engaging evening. Nathan yawns. "He kinda said something like that when you were out, but I was pretty drunk." Victor nods, presses, quiet and curious.

"Do you how many times they rebuilt Vision?" Nathan curses under his breath because no hold on, he's got this one, it was the final Countdown question last week. "Cállate, I'm serious! Six." Victor twists onto his back slowly, because the pain receded but his restructured body seems raw, fresh bone and itchy skin. Hank said it will all pass with a couple of days and he'll get used to it, feeling whole again.

"They didn't rebuild you, though," Nathan points out carefully. "I mean, physically, yeah, but you're talking about your brother straight up not existing, that's not you."

"How would I know?"

"Because I would fucking mention it if you had, trust me." It's too dark to see Nathan's smirk, but he can hear it. His confidence in the face of absolute bullshit is the only thing louder sometimes. Maybe that's why you picked him, Victor wonders wryly, before it's back, a constant buzz under the surface. The Diamond can't fix that, won't burn out that static and clear the channel, not even dismantling an entire physical form can fix that. The Diamond isn't Purgatory, it's a recharge station, at best, and this- it's deeper than the wires, the blood cells, the spidery splinters of memory, both human and random access. What else is there besides a hard reset to fix this? A replacement model, probably.

Victor sighs, pressing his cheek against the pillow.

"I wasn't supposed to know what I was. Why would I know about being--" broken, he wants to say. Malfunctioning. Defective. A lemon. The perfect weapon because it thinks it's the one in control. "I can't do what Vision does, okay? There's only one me."

Nathan grunts in response, "There better be only one, I'm not sharing you."

Victor laughs, humorlessly, "Right, because who else wants a mini-Ultron."

"Christ, and people think my dad did a number on me," he grumbles and Victor squints through the terse silence. In it there's the bombardment of zeroes and ones that spell out the futility of trying to explain artificial living to something with only the experience of artificial death. You didn't choose him for the noise, you chose him because he's the farthest from human in a world of aliens and monsters and gods, because you know deep into your data you never really wanted to live amongst the living.

Nathan reaches over him, drawing Victor closer, slow and gentle because he's familiar with human injury. He wants to be familiar with what's happening to you. Victor closes his eyes.

"Sorry," Nathan mumbles. "Look, I'm not exactly a robot scientist like those other guys, but what the fuck do they know?" No, idiota, I don't need you to be like them, Victor assures him, face against the other man's neck. "You're you. Vision's been six different guys, so who gives a shit what he thinks about eternity? You're the same Victor you've always been." He listens to the blood churn through Nathan's arteries, just under his teeth.

"For now," he says hoarsely.

"Hey." Nathan gives his shoulder a small shake. "I will tell you if somebody resets you, is that what this is? You aren't getting rid of me, I'm the one eternally annoying constant in time and space." Victor laughs, you're definitely annoying, and Nathan continues, louder, "Just don't piss off when you get rebuilt with like, robo rocket jet feet and three metal tits."

He manages a thin smile against Nathan's skin. "Still dreaming about Jocasta, huh?"

"I cant get it out of my head!" he cries and Victor lazily draws an arm around him slowly. Nathan feels him wince, asks, "Should we both see Hank for a tune up? Can I get reset? We can be Nathan and Victor 2.0."

"Okay," he murmurs, "Can Nathan 2.0 have short hair?"

"You are literally the last person to be giving hair advice," Nathan sniggers and Victor flattens the uneven side of his hair. He presses closer and feels Nathan inch away.

Home from the hospital or not, Victor's injuries are too fresh, nothing else can happen. Victor squeezes his eyes closed, the drone in his ears purring that of course Nathan wouldn't fuck you after he picked you up in pieces. What would something eternal have for something that can break? You still want him after he dies but it doesn't work both ways, when you hang on through the Diamond, through Purgatory and come back still busted up. How many times can you fix something before the pieces no longer fit together?

Nathan pulls him up by his shoulder and kisses him. Victor gasps and blinks quick, it's loud enough, for now. Victor drags him closer and Nathan makes a sound in the back of his throat where Victor knows how to make him reconsider his injuries being too fresh.

"You can't keep freaking out like this," Nathan says afterwards. "You're a real person. Even if he didn't want you to be, you're one now." Victor nods slightly, watching a bead of sweat slide along Nathan's collarbone. "There's not like some switch to make you somebody else and even if there was, what the fuck would that change about me?"

It's not about you, whirls a low and cruel voice in Victor's ear. It's deafening, fit to be miserable.







The other members glance at him while the report continues, looking for some kind of response. They don't know her, they don't care, they're just gawking, Victor fumes, throat twitching like the ache before a cold. Which was weird because he's never been sick, it's not like he could catch a computer virus. He realizes the taste in his mouth is bile.

Nathan's nearby while he washes his face in the sink, hovering and always moving.

"They're dead," Victor finally rips the words from his throat. He can hardly hear himself. "She died? I wasn't there-"

"They don't know that for sure," Nathan argues straight away. "Tony's only been gone a couple of days- time moves differently in space, right? You told me that. There's still lots of time. Karolina could be fine. Yeah!"

"No," Victor moans, heels of his hands pressed into his eyes, louder over Nathan's hurried rebuttals, the screaming in his head. "No," he repeats, louder, final, "I'm not- she's dead. Karolina and Xavin died and I couldn't help her."

Nathan weaves in front of him, coaxing his hands down to his sides. "You can't think like that. She was like, three galaxies away, how would you have helped?"

"I could've helped!" Victor insists weakly. "I could've done something."

"Three galaxies," he pushes.

Victor rips out of Nathan's grip. "I could do it. You have no idea what I could do." His chin is up and he imagines swaths of alien corpses between him and his best friend, someone who deserved better, triumphing over foreign creatures he should eviscerate on sight--

Nathan tugs him back. "Okay, you could, but then where would I be? Being right selfish, a bit, sure, but say you get yourself killed two million light years away, how're we gonna keep this place afloat without you?" He smiles nervously and Victor grounds himself in that honest, selfish desire to keep him close. He nods, not sure at what, twisting his fingers through Nathan's. "C'mon, let's get you home."

Chase intercepts them by the elevator, having the surprisingly brilliant idea to get very drunk, Runaways only. Victor brushes him off and never goes to the dive bars without boyfriends, never drunkenly invites Chase to spend the night, never wakes up too distracted by hungover anger at Chase to mourn. Instead he crawls into bed with Nathan, whispering, "We're never gonna be a team again."

"Did you want to be?" And for everything else that happened, Victor feels a tiny, tired shred of him that's happy Nathan didn't argue with him about it or make it a joke, just genuinely asked.

"Yeah," he mutters, rolling over to blink at the ceiling. "All the time."







There's a clause that allows an Avenger to take bereavement time, but that would make it too real, realer than how it was when Tony returned without Karolina. Victor can't put it on paper that his friend might be gone for good, can't take another sobbing midnight phone call from Nico, so he volunteers to take an away mission with Captain America.

The case papers are sparse on the details; Falcon's coming, so it could be that missing person case everyone pretends to look the other way on. Victor fully expects to be rejected, but Rogers approves it. Maybe he feels partially responsible as the Avenger who unsuccessfully put Karolina in foster care all those years ago, or maybe because the entire team is sick of Victor lurching through home missions- he doesn't care. He needs to keep busy. He packs up and ships out.


("You're not a soldier," Nathan counters stubbornly, watching him pack. "Jobs with Cap are way over our heads."

"He's a good teacher," Victor says, forced normalcy in his voice. "A self-righteous jerk, but he's good at what he does. Missions with him go quick, I'll be back soon."

"I can come with you," Nathan presses and Victor slings his bag over a shoulder, looking skeptical. "He's a good teacher."

"You're an awful student," Victor reminds him.)


He sort of hoped if it was the missing person case they'd be waist deep in the snows of Siberia, buried in some caves outside Latveria. Instead they're looking for a Hydra base in the Black Hills of South Dakota and Victor misses the city only slightly more than Karolina.

Two nights in, he can tell Sam wants to say something and maybe he actually wants to hear it. Falcon's perfect in the way only Captain America's friend could be, that he's there for you and he's ready to help you, but only on your own terms. He could wait forever through somebody's grief. It's so generous and accommodating and Victor misses selfish honestly to the point that he texts Nathan, desperately nudging the signal through a deadzone.

"Anything?" Cap asks over his shoulder, around the Stark grade binoculars. Victor flushes, he's supposed to be tapping potential hostile communications from the "abandoned" fort, not using that expertise to ask Nathan what's happened on House of Cards. He reroutes some invisible avenues, with the macro flow his own needs disrupted.

"Sorry," he gulps. "I was doing something else." Steve is all grownup warning looks and Falcon laughs, rolling his shoulders.

"Mancha's a million miles away while we're lyin' in the dirt, that how it is?" Sam grins, cuffing him on the arm. Cap waves it off, shield over his back, he's gonna take a look around the perimeter. Falcon lazily points out he already did an airsweep, but the Captain says he can take a hint and hops off a cliff that's got to be five stories high.

"He's pissed at me," Victor announces, terrified. "Captain America is gonna fire me because I can't do my job." Which only makes Sam laugh harder, settling into a seat in the dirt, next to the cyborg.

"He's just messing with you," he says, voice relaxed because Captain America telling jokes is natural to him, which is proof enough Sam has no fear on top of understanding the right moment to ask, "You ready to talk about it?"

Victor shrugs, phone put away, back to seeking out distant nefarious transmissions. "I dunno," he sighs. Victor feels his entire body tense every time he gets a message, sure it's finally her, aching for something to cut through the pulsing noise between his ears, the background process of not belonging. An alien would know what it means to not fit in, they were the two team members that never quite belonged with their feet on the ground. Her in space and you--

"Cap says you guys were close," Sam says into the air between them. It's a statement that doesn't need a lead in or a response, but Victor still feels like arguing. Yes, neither of them belonged, but that was where their similarities ended. Karolina was never actually close, she was worlds away from him even before space. All of the Runaways were, they came from different worlds. Every time they talked about college funds and charity galas and extracurriculars and the lives they left behind- it was never close to East L.A., to his family, or his understanding of what it was he had before they picked him up. Karolina was never close, she was a distant, radiant point of hope and optimism and struggles and sweetness and she died on some distant star because he wanted to be a hero on the ground. Victor cringes at the spots behind his eyes, the hiss in his ears.

Sam might have kept talking, but there's someone else- maybe Steve? They each have communicators in their ears, but the voice is so garbled and fractured. This thing is broken, Victor tries to hiss but he can't catch his breath to say something. His heart skips off its usual rhythm. Why would it do that? What's the point of designing something like that? For added realism? Or maybe Ultron built him like a clock and after one too many bumps off the wall, it starts ticking all wrong. He had a nightmare on the island where his mother stabbed him in the chest, and he thinks of it now, like maybe that will break up some of the tension under his skin, open up his airways. Victor pushes himself to his feet and it's cold and dark and he has no idea where they are.

There's a strange disconnect when Victor's been running without breaks. His body and mind work fine, but the residual processes that regulate human behavior sit in the back of his skull, a muted reminder to sleep and eat, to appear human. It's how he knows it's been awhile since he did either. He's alone.

He reaches up to the communicator in his ear, but it's missing. Squinting in the dark, he can see his gloves are off, his palms red and bloody with scratches. Gulping back dread, Vic lurches forward and examines the flat terrain. The mountains are gone. So are Cap and Sam.

Maybe it's a werewolf thing! He forces himself to think, cheerfully, trekking through the woods and underbrush, internal compass working to steer himself towards distant lights. A half human, half robot, half werewolf. When he does math incorrectly, the static in his head corrects him angrily. To keep himself from slipping back into whatever shorted him out to get here, Victor counts back from pi with deliberate errors, trying to ignore the ache in his legs, the pit in his stomach.

Eventually there's light, a town in Nowhere Nebraska, because for whatever malfunctions he's dealing with, at least the goddamn GPS substitute in his cerebellum is working. Victor buys a bus ticket to Lincoln, he can fly to New York from there.

Cap and Sam are fine, they have to be fine and you can't stay here. Hydra tech isn't so advanced they could screw with him remotely, or maybe they could, and maybe that's the better explanation for this. Maybe you just got a case of the yips and left. Maybe Hydra attacked their base camp and blew you apart and this is a fresh meat-suit you get to haunt.

Victor closes his eyes as the bus pulls out of the station and tells himself he can sleep now, and he's nearly gone when he remembers Hank Pym grew up in Nebraska.







"You cocksucker," Nathan hisses, pulling Victor in close before he can shut the apartment door.

"Sorry." He hesitates before leaning in, exhausted. "I didn't want you to worry about me."

"Right, why the fuck would I worry that you disappeared for two days!" Nathan breaks the hug off but keeps that closeness, only shoving Victor as far as to get him through the front door. He keeps his fist clenched around the back of Victor's uniform. "Do you know how many S.H.I.E.L.D agents were here? After Cap showed up looking for you? That I got yelled at in like four different forms of military protocol which are frankly four too many when I don't even live in this country."

"Technically, you're here on a working visa," Victor replies and Nathan's mouth twitches with a smile before,

"No. No, I'm still yelling at you." He grimaces when Victor slides a hand over the fingers against him. "Where the fuck were you?" Victor drops his eyes. "Why didn't you pick up your phone?" With all the pounding in his head, he had been looking forward to having Nathan shout at him and drown it out. "'the hell am I supposed to tell Tony?"

"Just say we had a fight."

"We're having one right now!" Nathan cries and Victor latches on when he tries to pull away. Nathan's eyes flicker to the hands around him, and too late Victor realizes he's shaking. There's no way the immortal hasn't noticed. "Fuck," he breathes, but at least he's not trying to shrug away anymore. "Where were you?"

Victor wonders if Nathan can feel his pulse pounding.

"It was Karolina," he blurts out. "I thought if I couldn't find something--"

"Yeah?" Nathan snaps, twisting free. "Bullshit, she's in space." Victor tries to pull Nathan back because he wanted to see Nathan before he even blacked out and now he's being so sweet and wonderful and the one person who still talks about Karolina like she's not dead. "You wouldn't come back without that and you'd fucking call me if you were. You're lying to me." His voice breaks and his lip's shaking and Victor gets it.

"You thought I left," he realizes dumbly, and the flickering in his chest cavity burns back to life, like an old processor coming online with a purr. "You thought I was abandoning you."

"Come on," Nathan whispers, retreating farther back into the apartment. "Don't make me sound like the pathetic one, I'm still mad at you." Victor traces his steps, drinking in the dramatic shifts of his mood, cushioning his own reactions. Nathan shoots him a suspicious glare but it's softened since the first time he asked, "Where were you?"

"Nowhere," he says, and it's not a complete lie. "I just had to be alone."

Nathan laughs, breathless, "You? Alone? Forgive me if I don't believe that. Not for a fucking second." He crosses back to him. "Where were you?" and Victor cringes because Nathan is good at this, demanding something over and over until he wears you down.

"I'm sorry," Victor chokes, withering under Nathan's exasperated eye roll. "I'm sorry," he pleads when Nathan asks it again and Victor makes a weak animal noise at the back of his throat, ducking his head away. "Something's wrong with me."

"Yeah, you're a right cock." Nathan pauses, eyes scanning his boyfriend's face. "Wait, you mean like- medically?" Victor takes a couple gasps of air he doesn't need, because Nathan pitying him is definitely worse than his anger. "Is this like L.A.?" Victor starts to shakes his head because sure, it would be easy to explain everything he knows, what this is, but that's so much worse than L.A. and to say it out loud would make it real. So he whispers,

"Yeah."

"Okay," Nathan breathes, like the lie is an explanation. "So we call Pym, get him to-" No, Victor cries without having to think about it, because Pym would know. Pym would see this brown out for what it was, some kind of backdoor program to hijack him again. Why else would it want him to walk to the creator's hometown, what point would that prove other than tell Hank exactly how badly he fucked up all those years ago building a murderbot.

"Please, please don't call him," Victor whispers and he strings forward, catching Nathan's face between his hands because Nathan stays on target when you make physical contact. Add eye-contact to that and he won't pull away. There are codes that make up a human's personality, they're just data when you factor in various stimuli.

"Christ. I don't know," Nathan breaks off the kiss and fleetingly Victor thinks about biting him. "Are you gonna be okay?" Victor nods quickly, drawing him close. "We don't have to call that fucker, but. Is this gonna keep happening? You can't disappear-"

"It's fine," he breathes, fists in Nathan's shirt and pushing him to the wall.







"You won't get to kiss and cry your way out of this one," Chase sneers. If they had called Victor in half a second earlier, the senior Avengers would've seen Stark's assistant get punched through the goddamn wall.

"It was dumb," Victor hisses, head bowed. "Missions with Captain Rogers are over my head. I freaked out and bailed, I'm really sorry." Humans respond to cues and the crack in his voice is only partially forced. "Please don't fire me." Victor tentatively glances up through his shame.

The meeting doesn't end in him getting fired, or locked away in the Tower's basement, which had been Victor's cold fear during the bus ride through rural Nebraska. Cap's there, filled to the brim with fatherly disappointment, and Tony takes the absolute shittier route of reminding Vic,

"You know we still have two questions." It takes him a second to realize which ones Stark meant. "And while I've been told they're for emergency use only, you're not making my job any easier figuring out what's the red flag stuff from normal teenage rebellion."

Victor's pleading and Tony's showboating seem to do the trick, and Victor can stay, though his away mission privileges are revoked for now. Jessica Drew walks him out, standard procedure, she glares.

"I'm really sorry," Victor repeats until the elevator doors slide closed.

The questions are a fail safe to save humanity, not some threat Tony can toss around every time Victor plays hooky. The 'down' button shorts out when Victor hits it and he stares straight ahead, listening to the dying filaments twist and burn up under his hand.







After Nebraska, he doesn't trust himself to sleep, which is fine, he only slept four hours most nights on average, that's not much of a number to whittle down. On New Moore, Victor could operate for a week and a half without sleep before wires got crossed in weird spots, his memory started to get foggy, reaction times slowed.

But people change. His components haven't lagged after a month of operation without sleep, but it's been awhile since the nanites have fused. Previous trials are obsolete, he's working off new data. There's a thrill in a fresh terrain of research, in uncharted territory that's laid claim over his body. It's better to be excited than scared of yourself, think of the possibilities, Victor reasons at four am, exactly the same as twelve hours before and after. Time is irrelevant to repeating code.

"Sorry," he burns red, stumbling. "That's a little too much robot for you."

"It's cool, that's probably better, right?" The colors blur together while she smiles into her shoulder. Karolina hums thoughtfully, "I mean, like Nathan said, you're not like the Vision. You weren't supposed to think you were a robot. Maybe if you focus on that half, be less human, you could kinda override the whole Ultron programming." Victor fumbles with the generator in his hands, a loose hobby piece he collected for a forgotten project. "Is that dumb?"

"No, it might actually be pretty genius," he admits. Karolina was always the simplest answer is the most likely solution, a good partner for Nico's instincts first method. Was it actually that easy, remembering his bones are laced with data, wires along his circulatory system, and no amount of fusion would ever make him completely human? Maybe that's what was holding him back- his commitment to some disguise a psychotic robot and the liar who raised him concocted.

"Yeah well, these are all mostly your ideas at this point," she says with a warm laugh.

"Vic?" Nathan calls, peering into the spare room, eyes wide at the hurriedly closed projection. "That sounded like Karolina."

"Um, sorta," Victor cringes, her words, or his own with her voice ringing in his ears. "I can actually make a projection of people from my memories, and have a conversation with them. So I thought," he trails off bleakly. She echoes in his head with the hum, her words Is that dumb?

Nathan's staring at the spot where Karolina was, to Victor and back again, long enough that Victor feels guilt join his embarrassment. Karolina was Nathan's friend too and not everyone has the luxury of fabricating company out of the tech in their subconscious.

Nathan reaches out and tugs Victor to his feet, bats the car part out of his hands ("What's that? Your baby brother?")

"All right, that's enough crazy for today," he laughs that weird, high, nervous laugh Victor secretly kinda likes because Nathan is funnier when he's nervous. When he thinks he has the upper hand, Nathan's jokes are smug and slow and Victor winces at every raw nerve he unintentionally hits against somebody less secure. When Nathan's like this, he's quick and uninhibited by his own ego, and he's at his most genuine, most annoying, most.

Victor rubs his thumb over the hand in his grip and Nathan says, "Let's get some alcohol and video games into you."

They do, talking fast around Ninja Gaiden (impossible, unforgiving, it's the Old Testament of video games!) until Victor hurls the controller across the room and fucks Nathan into the floor. He whines in that same high, nervous way and Victor knows he loves him with every fiber optic nerve, with every ounce of his imitation blood. That won't be enough, he sighs, pushing Nathan's hair out of his eyes and kissing him. Maybe Karolina's right, it'll be as simple as focusing on the noise instead of wishing this person cursed with living could give him meaning. It will be tough, Victor mourns.

Some things make it easier- Anti-bot protesters again who are more of a reminder than a nuisance now. Tony makes a backhanded comment about schematics, when the collapse of a couple buildings means some quick engineering to snake through with minimum casualties to humans. Victor keeps his focus entirely on the mathematics of humanity. There are numbers in the living, divisions and relational constructs that make up skin cells and pressure points. The ventricle diagram of existing.

And then Taskmaster guts Nathan, cleavers hacking limbs, organs bursting, and screw the Boolean nature of mankind, that's not his blood to spill.

Tomorrow, Victor thinks, tugging a revived Nathan close while he kisses him in the middle of a battle, who cares. He buries himself in that heartbeat, the little hitch of Nathan's breath when he wakes up, not the first air he breathes, but the second, the grateful gasp when he sees Victor standing guard. Tomorrow I'll be a little less human.







When he gets into the swing of things, there's confidence in the new method, to settle back and let the control flow work naturally. Or maybe it's unnaturally, it's a weird word to use when Victor's putting an emphasis on the artificial parts of his life. He expected it would be more of a change, but it's just a new theory, a new module to run, and he'd done plenty of that. Now it was needed, important even. Karolina had suggested it after all, and she wouldn't give bad advice.

(Not Karolina, she's dead, she and Xavin died without you--)

Victor welcomes it, the happy static accompaniment to the tenor of his own voice, shorter now, less helpful. He can feel himself slide into the harmony, to let it guide his movements, his decisions. It's a better leader than me, Victor muses, training some new recruits.

Banner's mouth nervously curls into a smile, you seem more focused lately, he tries, lukewarm encouragement compared to conduction strands and ligatures. Victor twists a smile back with a mouth full of cotton.

But then Pym takes up shop in the Avengers' Tower after a disagreement with the school's direction. It's complicated, he says and dismisses it the way only a person who really wants to talk about it can. Victor lingers at the makeshift lab's countertops and wants to help him unpack and pile Pym's organs alongside the boxes.

Before his relocation, just the mention of Hank ushered in feedback clicking into Victor's mind, rife with panic. Now Victor gulps, toying with power sources, asking empty questions like he doesn't know what each piece is used for. Hank beams and thrives alongside his son ("Grandson," Nathan chirps the correction whenever it comes up, happy to jump on the mortality of men he's assaulted.) Victor feels himself sink into the floor whenever Doctor Pym asks him for his help, an extra set of eyes, another pair of hands. Make it yourself, Victor wants to spit and seethes with jealousy. Is this how Ultron felt, he wonders, crouched over blueprints, offering an overhead light. When did it get to be too much, loving and hating someone with each filament of every muscle and wire.

"Are we okay?" Pym asks at two in the morning, waist deep in paperwork, impossibly dissonant figures. Victor peers after him, entire body tensed, hands aching with the force of the pulses he's kept at bay.

"Sure," he gasps into a binder of errors, tearing through another faulty chapter. "If we wanna be wrong about this for our entire lives, yeah, we're doing okay."

"Not the project," Hank says and eases onto his feet, slower, with more aches. Victor watches closely; everyone gets old, and there's more salt and pepper in Tony's hair than before, more lines around Jessica Jones' mouth. But they're colleagues at best, just co-workers. Hank is family. He didn't have the opportunity to see his mother get old, only in the fabricated memories marred with falsehoods and childish obliviousness. Victor's followed Pym's career since he has his first schematics, since he was a teenager, and something strange and human ticks in his chest with every creak of the creator's bones.

One day he will die, the murmur says under his mind. Hank Pym will die whether or not you complete what you were meant to do.

"You and me." Pym motions between them and slides it into an awkward lurch, shuffling papers. "Are we okay?" Victor nods, tossing the stack of files aside for the next. He can read four hundred pages in a minute thirty, this isn't even a challenge. "Julie told me about Karolina--"

"You can take a break if you want," Victor cuts in, so helpful, so concerned, while it oozes out of his mouth.

Hank never could take a hint. "I'm just worried you're gonna get burnt out," he carries on, triple checking the numbers. "Working for Tony all day, helping me through the night." Of course Pym would push Victor to stand down, to avoid working him to death, because that's only okay when the doctor does it, right?

"It's all Avenger work, and I don't mind the overtime," Victor dismisses, migraine building behind his eyes every time they catch Hank's.

"If that's what you still want to do. Be an Avenger," Hank says and it's so helpful, so concerned. He's honest and genuine and aren't those the things you love about Nathan? Why is it so infuriating from family? Is it the closeness that poisons it? But he and Pym were never close, not even when Victor shacked up with the team in L.A.

Victor drops the stack of papers to the floor between them with a satisfying smack as it hits the tile. He remembers Doombot in pieces over the floor, Hank's justification, his excuses, his need to always be right about shit he doesn't know anything about. That was how he was in every reality where people tried to unmake Ultron, even after his father went on a rampage. Hank always had his reasons for unmaking your entire world, his reasons for why your way of living wouldn't cut it. He fits in with the Avengers that way, Stark always has a zero sum rational that leaves the world more vulnerable than ever. Perfect founding fathers for a planet on the edge of destruction.

Of course he'd come running just to point out how you don't fit into that.

Victor flexes his hands at his side and glowers at a point on the floor, avoiding the fingerprint scorch marks he left on the paper.

"I just want to work," he says at last, on a ragged breath, and Hank finishes his half in a corner as far from Victor as possible.

The summer session ends and Hank goes back to California, leaves his entire labspace to Victor in a note, as much of a goodbye as he felt comfortable giving.

"Not really his space to give," Tony mutters, turning the note over in his hand before tossing it across the desk to Victor. It's fine, he doesn't need a workspace anyway, Victor replies and whatever Stark says next is drowned under the satisfied pulsing of every machine in the building, freed of a self imposed technological god of failure.







Nathan gasps back to life and Victor stands over him, counting the breaths until the set time.

"I'm really glad you're okay," he recites, processes a million miles away.







They find Karolina, the real one, and even if she's not back on Earth it all crashes into Victor at once, how monumentally stupid it was to take fake!K's advice. As if her being alive, being real again made him remember the actual person she was, where a simple solution was best, but better than that was always humanity and kindness and for an alien she knew the most about being a good person.

Victor sinks his face into his hands at the barrage of spectral density cascading over him, drowning out the latest meeting. War Machine tells Tony something's not right with that one and everyone has to see it now if a part-timer like Rhodes can notice it. Victor panics, retreats deeper into the expected values and calculations. Humans will notice, they pick up on what's different and weed it out, leave it in pieces in a junkyard waiting for a gullible, childless wreck to stumble upon it.

He needs help.

"It would be difficult for me to accurately assess what is happening," Vision admits, which floors Victor because his brother's never been the humblest bot. He glances around the coffeehouse for confirmation someone else heard it, but the crowd is more focused on that fact that the freaking VISION is sitting amongst them like robots regularly get together for a latte. Victor knows he doesn't have an infinity gem wedged in his forehead, but he still jealously glares at anybody who stares too long, giving his brother twice the attention Vic ever got on a Wednesday morning coffee run.

"While we have both experienced an out of body stasis--" Vision continues and Victor's face twists, is that what we're calling it? "--our overall programming is more different than it is similar."

"Not really," he counters stubbornly, coffee long gone cold in his hands. "End game's pretty much the same."

"True, however your method has a great deal more deception," Vision replies pointedly.

"I'm just asking for your advice," he groans. "You don't need to be shitty about it."

"I'm not saying anything that isn't true."

"Yeah, guey, that's what being shitty is sometimes," he mutters, arm slung over the back of his chair. Victor looks out past the gaping crowds. It was a dumb idea to do this publicly, but Stark's bugged everything and anything, so a crowded Starbucks in Queens might actually be the safest place to talk off the record. He casts a suspicious glance across the table. Although Vision could record the whole thing inside a particle within his fingernail. Stark's slaves extend beyond superheroes after all.

He shakes his head.

"It's just getting to be a lot, and I was hoping maybe," Victor trails off, eyes on the people on the sidewalk, resolutely keeping his focus from the power lines overhead, unnoticed by most people but screaming. The silent multiuser push of two dozen broke college students fighting over a HotSpot, roaring. The nagging click of a pacemaker inside a man waiting in line, standing as a pathetic example of mankind's own attempts at cyber enhancements to weaker life.

Victor gulps. "I was hoping you felt stuff like this too."

"Of course, although it's alarming you're having such difficulty tuning it out," Vision says in a measured tone that's a few shades from actually 'alarmed.' "This is something you should have brought up with Dr. Pym."

"I don't want to talk with him, okay, I'm here with you," Victor snarls, skin instantly crawling. Pym was wrong, it hasn't got better. His body still feels new and wrong, reminding Vic of the time Stark casually asked him for a testing strip of fabricated skin ("Not a big one! Like a paint sample!" he cried.) and how eager he is now, all those years later, to peel it all off and leave it at Iron Man's doorstep as a warning.

Victor struggles across the table for napkins to mop up the coffee he spilled. His brother watches him, careful, a fixed point while Victor's leg jumps under the table.

"Do you want to hear empty platitudes regarding your future? Optimistic forecasts? You would have gone back to Hank if that was your intent." Victor stares at the soaked tabletop, quiet under the intensity of Vision's stare. "I'm being honest with you." He's quiet but it's howling again, feeding on that younger brother jealousy that all these people only recognize Vision because of the colors, the stupid cape, like he's some great robotics accomplishment and you're just some kid with cold coffee under your idiot flesh hands.

"If you're this concerned about your programming, you can remove yourself from the group." Victor's stomach drops. "I support that decision."

He gapes, desperate for a joke, even a robot can talk shit, right? "No, you're supposed to say you support my decision no matter what," Victor huffs, because for all his skin crawling and nerve frying he genuinely likes Avenging, probably.

His brain quickly, helpfully, runs a catalog of things he likes. Most involve Nathan- of course- and video games, and the city at Christmas. A few more are conditionals, as in he likes not being tricked by his grandfather into pushing away his first friend-nigh-Doombot. He likes forgetting for half a second, in the heat of a mission, how pointless it is, protecting an Earth that doesn't want to be saved. He likes not wanting to hurt people.

"I see," Vision replies, gives it a lightspeed thought. "No, in these circumstances I support your quitting, anything else would be unwise." Don't say quitting so loud! Victor hisses, twisting around in his seat for his coat.

"Cool, so you want me to drop out, whatever," he grumbles, rising to his feet. "You never wanted me on the team anyway."

"I wanted you to do the right thing," Vision says, gentle in his static.

"Right, because quitting is the right thing?" Victor reels, hurt but what the hell did you expect? it growls. Vision has always hated you. Resented you and your humanity, what little there still is. He seethes under the appraising stare, palms crackling. "Don't tell anybody about any of this, all right?"

"I believe they'd notice if you quit the Avengers." Robots can definitely talk shit. The cyborg sneers.

"Ha, yeah, you think? Just keep it to yourself." Victor shakes out his shoulders, hoping to lose the weight of how useless this whole rare familial encounter became. "I have to figure stuff out."

"Victor." Victor angles away from Vision when he rises, remembering the feedback with a shudder. It's been years since Hank cracked the code that kept the brothers from ricocheting off each other whenever they were in a ten yard radius, but the memory is still fresh. "Should I be concerned?" And he even sounds it, just for a second.

Victor sighs, head bowed. Your brother doesn't hate you, Vision isn't capable of hate. Maybe he resents that you've got more human running through your circuitry than he does, but so what? You just resented how famous he is. Siblings always feel this way, fleetingly, painfully. It comes with worry and he's practically admitting that he's worried. Victor cracks a short, nervous smile. It's human.

"Nah," he says, raking a hand through his hair. "I'm just going through something weird, I'll get over it. Don't worry about me."

"It's not you I'm worried about."

Victor hates this bag of bolts so much he could leave him a quivering pile of motor oil in two seconds flat. Of course he doesn't worry about you, the hum rails, Vision is loyal to Stark, to the other Avengers, and Victor is just a sidenote. Their father is the actual threat, the real concern, and whatever roadside they discard Victor on doesn't matter. He's content to be the better known brother, the better Avenger, the better everything purely because he doesn't have worthless blood and guts separating him from the mainframe of modernity that never shuts up.

"That's not-- That's not what this is about," Victor stammers, more surprised by his own anger than Vision's less than altruistic reveal. "It's just a thing I'm going through, it's not like-- you don't need to worry about them." He holds out his hands between them, hoping it looks desperate and helpless. That it looks hopeful that the benevolent android won't take Victor's cry for help and use it against him, that he won't turn that against the cyborg any more than he already has. "I've got it under control."

"If you're sure," Vision replies, unreadable. Better creation or not, Victor wonder if Hank hadn't fixed the code and they went toe to toe on the same frequency today, who would come out in the most pieces.







"Maybe we should take another holiday," Victor announces in the middle of a round of Pac-Attack. Nathan pauses and fixes him with a suspicious look. "I'm serious."

"Are you? Because it looks like you're doing that thing where you say stuff that'll distract me because right now I'm kicking your ass."

"I can think of a couple better ways to distract you," Victor points out and Nathan is all ears, well mostly ears and another organ, don't be like that, you knew what you were doing, what about a holiday?

"You wanna do Jamaica for real?" Nathan asks, leaning back. "Get some ladies to braid your hair."

Victor rolls his eyes. "Okay, I opposite want that." He squints at the floor, debating a conversation of this magnitude with the dumb Tetris knockoff music in the background. "I don't know, I just feel.. done, I guess."

"Done," Nathan echoes. "Done with what? Pac-Attack? Because I am still winning, let's not forget that."

"Done with New York. With all of this," he gestures around the room and Victor grimaces at the look that crosses over Nathan's face. "Not you," he adds quietly. "Just. Avenger stuff."

Unlike the last talk with Vision, Victor knows better than to bring it up with Nathan. Nathan barely understood what he was trying to get across, how disgusting and unnatural it feels to be pieced together and expected to carry on like Vision. It would probably sound like a slight on the immortal, the avenger whose only job is to put himself back together. It'd be ungrateful of Victor to rip on that in himself. But the more he focuses on the robotic side, the less forgiving he is of this proposed eternity, this halfway point the Diamond apparently has become. Vision only makes it sound like a best-case scenario because he's had to come to terms with it, can tune out whatever litany is screaming in Victor's head. Pym and Stark will remake him a dozen times over and his brother just takes it like a common appliance.

Relieved, Nathan's back to his usual bravado, un-pausing the game, "No, you aren't."

"I'm serious." Victor pauses the game again, much to the immortal's annoyance. "What if we--"

"Quit?" Nathan finishes, eyebrows raised. "You love being an Avenger."

"Not all the time," he corrects under his breath.

"Yeah, not all the time, but nobody likes something all the time," he shrugs. "You're just burnt out, like Hank said." And there's no way Nathan hasn't noticed by now, the full recoil that accompanies anyone mentioning the creator. Nobody's stupid enough to say Ultron around Victor, but Pym's fair game. The doctor went back to California months ago, yet he still comes up almost daily and Victor was sure it would get easier with age, with distance, but like everything else, it hasn't.

Victor focuses on the moving parts inside the console, the television, grounding himself between them.

"Hey," the immortal murmurs and the 'game over' screen flashes. "If you wanna fuck off to Antigua and leave the superfriends in the dust, I've got the sun lotion, let's go. But you're the best hero this place has had in a long time, and we both know you'll kick yourself the next time the Kree invade and you already gave the Avengers the old fuck you." Victor nods, quick, fidgeting to restart the game. Sure, whatever. He can feel his ears burning- why program a code like that? Attraction, loyalty. What purpose does it serve?

Nathan flings the controller across the room the second time in a row his screen fills with multicolored ghosts and throws himself bodily across Victor's lap. "If you're done, I'm done," he declares for both the game and the Avenging.

"What about staying even if I got rid of my powers," he asks, fingers along the back of Nathan's neck.

"Hey, I said I'd keep on if you shirked your responsibility as a higher being." There's no way he can see Victor grinning from that angle, but he continues, encouraged, "But if you wanna use your new freedom to get piss drunk and shag on the beach, I am not hanging around with your shite brother for that." Victor pulls his hand back quickly, the thrum in his ears and the spark at the tips of his fingers when Vision comes up. Nathan continues, oblivious, "Don't want you doing something you'll regret." He rolls over to stare up at the other man. "'Cause then you'll whinge about it, and it will really kill my tropical buzz."

"Do you really think I'm the best hero on the Avengers?" he asks, smile tight, not fishing for compliments or confirmation of his self worth, but something deeper, pressing into the back of his thoughts like a thirst.

"Easily the best looking, second to me of course," Nathan smirks, sitting up. "Yeah, I told you before. You're a natural at this superhero shite." He slides over Victor's lap and the cyborg's hands hover anxiously, not sure he can trust himself yet. "This why you were talking about quitting? Because we can't both be doubting our worth on the team, it's only cute when one of us does it." Victor nods, distracted by the hips against him. The new relying on automation tactic can go on the backburner. Leave it to Nathan to reach out and pull him back from the mechanics.







To: Karolina
nathans gone

To: Karolina
i dont know uf ge dumped me or got hurt but Im freaking iut a little


To: Karolina
Hes not back yet I cant believe you had to do this with Xavin its kiing me

To: Karolina
not this exactly w xavin i mean


To: Karolina
k please I need your help w this


To: Karolina
Dont do this to me right now


To: Karolina
I hate space


To: Karolina
please come back Im going crazy


To: Karolina
forget it






"Turns out your kidnapper's just some guy," Hawkeye says, shrugging the quiver over a shoulder. "Nothing super about it. Honestly, the cops could handle it." And Victor feels the world get very bright and loud, drowning out the white noise of circuitry where everyone's screaming at once and spotlights twist right into his face, as bright as the sun that will eventually expand so rapidly it will devour the earth and every single person on it, superhero or otherwise, normal or extraordinary.

What an absolute waste of oxygen humanity is, he thinks.







The door comes in and Victor gags at the smell of blood and rot. He and Carol reel back before pressing forward, towards the squinting figure next to the body. Victor catches him by the neck, fingers digging into his skin and electricity crackling between them. Out of the corner of his eye he spots Nathan, cold and open, blood dripping off his corpse. Victor's hand closes, he drops it and hurries to Nathan's side.

"Come back," Victor pleads and every death takes forever but this one feels longer than the others. His eyes sweep over the body that's slowly trying to rebuild itself, suddenly desperate to be more than a bystander to someone else's eternity. Artificial intelligence can't die, it can even tap into the traps humanity laid for itself and recharge, repair, but apparently he's helpless when it happens to something else. Victor tries to see past the blood and dirt and know this time isn't the last, he will wake up and you will never let him out of your sight.

Why? He's built to die, no amount of looking after Nathan, of preventing this will change what you recruited him to do. You pulled him from his own life, his own world completely separate from you, and tasked him with dying- for what? The Avengers who royally screwed up finding him or the regular people who are screwed up enough to do this, who clearly don't deserve eternity being used for their benefit. What is the point of this, of him, of people? Why program a code like that? Attraction, loyalty. What purpose does it serve? What are you holding onto right now?

"Mancha," Danvers barks. Victor glares, like with his hands full of a dead body he really has fucking time for her leadership grandstanding, before he realizes she's kneeling on the floor, holding a body of her own. One fist is clenched around the bloody shreds that are left of the kidnapper's neck. "Keep your hands at your side; you nearly took out his windpipe."

She directs the rest into the comm and Victor listens to the clipped connections, the crackling reply from a home base. Through a haze he drags his stare from knife to drill, to every murky concoction lining the blood splattered wall. He forces himself to see past them, to concentrate on the layers beneath whatever waking nightmare Nathan had been living in for the last few weeks. There are as many ways to kill a person as there are wires in a home's electrical system, as many tendons and sinews in a human body.

"So get away from him and I'll take the rest," Victor snaps.

He can see the house to each nail, to the stones of the first foundation, the individual splinters in the wood that lights up past his fingertips. He wonders if maybe another Captain would've done the job of guarding him better. Doesn't matter, Carol survived a meteor strike last week, so she can take a little home explosion.







Nathan's last wound closes up on the helicarrier and he stands up too fast when Carol explains what went down while he was out.

"Careful," Victor mumbles, chains over his wrists preventing him from rising to help Nathan stand up. The other man's eyes flicker over the blood under the cuffs, up to Victor's elbows, the dried splatter over his face.

"You did?" he asks, voice raw, probably from screaming. Victor nods, glares at the steel ceiling and wishes he'd killed the guy slower. Nathan settles next to the cyborg on unsteady legs. "Vic, that's not who you are," he whispers. Victor shakes his head, because while it feels good, really good, to hear Nathan's voice after all this time, he's not in the mood to be lectured while in chains.

"You were gone. Okay?" No, not okay, Nathan is muttering, shaking hands hovering along the guards over Victor's. "Listen. I didn't know why, I spent every second thinking you were hurt or you hated me-"

Nathan chokes out a thin laugh, tone barely biting. "Oh, sorry it was so terrible for you. It was really a holiday for me."

"I'm not blaming you for being tortured!" Victor snarls and the cuffs are made to absorb electromagnetic pulses, glowing when he charges into them. Nathan jumps back, the Captain excuses herself to check on their arrival time.

Victor sighs. "I'm sorry it happened to you, and I will do anything to make up that I couldn't protect you." Nathan sways back, no, no, that's not fucking it, don't say that. I'm not helpless. "But after what I went through, I'm not sorry he's dead and you're wrong because that is me. That's who I am after you go away and I don't know why. I couldn't do that. Anybody who touches you, I'll-" It's like Victor's body suddenly remembers it needs to breathe, to pretend, like that's the bigger problem to be addressed and Victor hacks and wheezes, smoke in his lungs. With limited movement, he claws Nathan close to him, to steady his imitation breath against someone else's heartbeat.

It's not about you, whirls a voice in Victor's ear, high and hopeful, and he pushes it down.







"No," Victor insists.

It's another first night home, and the sheets smelt stale when they finally settled into bed. Nathan shrugged off the infirmary, he healed up on his own and now just wanted to get back and have a warm meal and a long shower. S.H.I.E.L.D commended Captain Marvel for her quick thinking on the cuffs, preventing Victor from taking out the whole city block as well as the kidnapper's house, but they couldn't hold him without a formal trial.

Victor slid into a full panic at all the rotten food in the refrigerator. Most delivery places were closed, but he could go out and buy something from the bodega downstairs- everything. Another separation hangs between them and Victor immediately changes tracks. He knows for all Nathan's demands for attention, acknowledgment, he doesn't take to being fussed over. He even tried some speech about how he didn't want to be a burden, not that Victor listened.

"No," he repeats, "You're staying here."

Nathan squints through his damp hair and if Victor's heart beats any faster it would snake through the wires and burst out of his chest. What good is a superhero who can't take care of himself, Nathan had asked and Victor held him down, kissed him, told him to shut up. For a second it seemed like Nathan pulled away from him, like he was scared or too broken to want it, but it was just for a second. He got over it.

"Stay in bed for three weeks?" Victor smiles, Nathan smiles back, slower. "What, your Nathan-o-meter getting low?"

"First of all, it's called a Nathanometer," Victor replies, hand tracing a slow path along his boyfriend's skin. "And it's not funny." He doesn't pull his hands away, even if his feels the crackle of electricity under his fingernails, the tensing of the body under him. He dropped an entire house on that deranged psycho and Nathan wasn't any more hurt than when they found him. He doesn't need to be afraid of what he was made to do, Nathan can get that, get over it. "It was really fucked up."

"Yes. Yes, it really fucking was," Nathan agrees. "So I think I deserve a holiday." Right, Victor mumbles, settling down over him. A three week holiday at home with me. Nathan goes quiet and still and Victor double checks he's not burning immortal skin under his hands. Just for a second.

He doesn't want to stay here with you, it buzzes, hurried and desperate. You're definitely not boring anymore, but you killed for him. The Avengers won't trust you and neither will he. Victor feels like the part of him that should care is very far awhile, dismantled on the other end of Pym's lab, ticking down the last few beats of life without a power source. He got over it.

Victor twists a grimace into a grin.

"What about Mexico?" he asks and Nathan shrugs sure, he has always wanted to go to Carnivale. "That's not-- Why did I ever save you?" Victor laughs, mouth curled in disgust.







It's another meeting with the senior Avengers, only now they call it a hearing and Chase doesn't have any snide remarks this time. After all, there are padded S.H.I.E.L.D cells for guys who do things half as bad, who don't have a blueprint of their evil futures published. They sent the Hulk into space for less and Victor wonders how far this nepotism goes, and if at the end of the day it's Pym or Ultron the Avengers put more stock in.

They weigh the evidence, they take a vote. The consensus- Everybody screws up, they wouldn't be the kind of team they are without accepting that. Captain Marvel dropped the ball, not you. Victor stares mutely at the bureaucracy of murder, deserved or not, and the way a cadre of people who are supposed to protect mankind are experienced in sweeping this sort of thing under the rug. They don't use the term 'murder,' of course, and people know what happened, but it was in pursuit of apprehending a criminal.

We're not the police, Victor wants to argue. There's protocol around that too, you can't just shoot a guy and hide behind a badge. They're supposed to be heroes; Avengers aren't really able to just kill a guy, however disgusting and worthless his short, miserable, tortuous existence was on this earth. Doesn't it set a bad precedent, shouldn't She-Hulk take him in front of a jury of his peers?

What peers? a very familiar hiss says, hands over his shoulders, deep into the muscle through the robotics that make up a half human shell, less humane by the hour. Victor's not sure who he's arguing with; the Avengers who voted to give him a second chance or the low, self satisfied feeling in his stomach.

This is how he always planned it, Victor wants to scream. This is exactly what I always warned you about, so you have to stop it, stop me. It's a strange reversal, wanting other people to rescue themselves. But if they do, if the Avengers were smarter than Ultron gave them credit for, then there's a cold cell in the basement for him. Like Vision said, they never truly die, so that leaves Victor in his own torture chamber with them forever, and Nathan will never come to rescue him. On the cusp of total destruction, Victor has to admit an infinity of lifetimes no longer feels comforting.

He keeps his mouth snapped shut. Ultron factored all this in when he made you- their compromises, your own cowardice. Their sympathy and understanding is a warm blanket over his shoulders, and Victor isn't sure he could raise his own voice over the sound of the power source in Iron Man's chest, all the pin sized parts Vic knows like the back of his hand.

"This sort of risk was always calculated," they say and there's more paperwork, filed appropriately with a precautionary suspension that runs in tandem with Nathan's "holiday." Victor's status as an Avenger will be reevaluated at the end of the month, but- Everyone makes mistakes. It's very organized and convenient, Victor thinks, holding the carbon copies of the documents between his fists. Humans have regulated murder.

"I'm not sorry," Victor admits while the security detail walks him to the elevators. Another formality, Hawkeye says and he actually rolls his eyes because they've all done this before. Victor waits for someone to say 'You'll get used to it' and is glad it never comes; he's not sure he could stop himself from laughing. He wonders why he worked so hard to avoid something like this if his job would make it so accommodating. "But this kinda seems like I'm getting off really easy."

"Don't worry about it. He was scum," Barton says, twisting an arrow between his fingers. "And you're a good kid, Mancha." The doors close and Victor's mouth feels tight, smiling, like it wasn't the expression he wanted. He tests his jaw under his fingers, thinking of the wires and metal, bogged down with flesh.







They don't go to Ireland, or Mexico. They stay home.

Victor can't sleep, first because any second he takes his eyes off Nathan is another moment where someone can take him away, and then because he's too angry at these imagined someones to give humanity the satisfaction of his faux-sleep. His aping of their lesser necessities.

Mankind thinks tech is just some convenience, some risk to calculate, that there wouldn't eventually be a cost. People can just take something novel and inventive and shape into something better, something newer. That's what I was, Victor lands on, triumphantly. The plan where Vision failed where you'll succeed, maybe not exactly how your father planned but the Avengers are certainly helping it along. There's a whole department to clean up murders, there were only papers he needed to sign when he burned out that guy's eyeballs before Thanksgiving. The Avengers are so accommodating of good people, even the manufactured ones. Like God's forgiveness, only a lot more smug. Tony Stark, Hank Pym, false gods.

Karolina is back on Earth, although Victor only hears about it through Dr. Richards. He's had her number blocked since the radio silence during Nathan's kidnapping. There's an explanation, a timid part of him reasons. There's always been excuses with Karolina, some lingering obsession with the cosmos that supersedes any earthly connections. People come back different, things change. It was impossible to be mad at her the other times it happened, where turning away from her apologies was like turning your back on the sun. He wanted Karolina to be happy and space made her happy. His own irrational needs for closeness ran contrary to that sometimes and he could forgive her. There were always explanations and he was happy to hear them if it meant talking again. People come back different.

Thin and plaintive are the thoughts where he knows the Runaways don't owe him anything, that friendship and found family isn't a matter of barter and loan. But, thicker and more convincing, wrapped warm in worn wires-- those people stole you from your home. They forced you into a life you never wanted. They killed your mother and set you on this irreversible path with their choices, the same ones they made to leave their homes, to kill their parents. The Runaways were the ones who started this, who set off the chain reactions of fear and uncertainty that made up your artificial life and then left you to wallow in it alone.

( Not alone. )

Victor's head swims thinking of the closeness he can never keep, the components he had to rewire to adjust to backs turned against him, teams dispersing. The failsafes he had to fall back on. It's a calculated adjustment as a response to the inevitable. The Runaways were a pre-test loop for the big leagues of abandonment and exile that Avengers will become when his command goes live. You have the abandon them first, shut them and their concessions out. Everyone has their explanations. Karolina's excuses. Why run back to a runaway?

"You can't ignore her forever," Nathan chides when Victor shoves his phone into his pocket. "She's your best friend."

"You're my best friend," Victor replies, toneless, backs of the Avengers to him.







Nathan goes back to work and comes back with ghosts. Victor hides his fear and shame under several other more urgent processes of anger and blame, railing against their teammates. Screw the college in Brooklyn, this is exactly why you shouldn't let him out of your sight, snarls the static. But then again you weren't built to protect, says something else and Victor can't tell the difference between his conscience and his father. Maybe they were always the same and this is what everything's been leading to, and thinking- even for a second- you could help Nathan, protect anyone, love anything, was just putting off the inevitable.

So he deserves it, probably worse, when Victor realizes one of the ghosts is the kidnapper. Every muscle in his body is coiled red and tight, and it's possible they'll burn right through his skin.

"I've trapped you with him," he chokes and Nathan's only half present, shaking his head. "I did. I did! I killed him and now--"

"Nobody's trapped," Nathan growls, scrubbing his hands over his face. "Like your mum, it's probably tied into where it happened," he keeps talking but Victor goes white hot and deaf. Every single program his body has ever run grinds to a complete halt. The room is silent, even with Nathan shifting back and forth between arguments, imagined eternal presence. Victor sways on his feet.

"My mom?" Fuck me, Nathan hisses and Victor feels every string of data knot together. It delicately ties a portrait of his mother, burned into his memory, mostly. Maybe her hair was a little longer, it was a while ago, the photo in his wallet disappeared in Nebraska. "My mom's ghost?" Victor croaks and he can't remember the turn of her face when it's not twisting in agony and now there's an opportunity, Nathan can be finally useful for something other than extending mankind's lifespan-- "Is she here? Can you bring her here?"

Nathan's never deliberately unkind, but he's in pain and knows he's fucked up. "Right, because I can bring her here but I'm stuck with this guy."

"So I did!" Victor roars and catches Nathan under his hands, hopes he's running so warm his fingers will burn holes into the other man's skin. You can't be mad at him, a weak and dying voice pleads. You don't know what I can do. "I've locked you in with that monster because I was--" Its shrieking in his head, ricocheting him between topics, "How could you see her and not tell me?"

He wants to knock Nathan into the floor and pull out every bone and sinew. He wants to hold Nathan to the ground and wrap his fingers around his neck, like old times, before you were friends and more. It's deja vu, he's done that, or Victorious had, or in the end there's no real difference between them.

Every single human will keep things from you, will try and control you, regulate you, and use you like some tool for a greater end. Nathan is the same as any of the other the Avengers and Pym and every single disgusting flesh monster that lurches through their own half existence. Victor has the static and the power and the whole other universe of capabilities at his fingertips and these things, these tools, are the ones making him feel lesser. Excusing away abandoning him, encouraging him to become something worse than an imitation human or maybe better. Keeping his mother from him and taking her away and starting this whole horrible mess.

Victor feels his mouth move, his voice clipped, he can't stay here. He feels the welcoming thrum coaxing him to sleep, to let higher powers prevail. Higher powers, maybe that's why he ended up in a church. He slumps into a pew towards the back and tries to hear meaning in the passages and to feel whole with faith. His righteous anger is hard to keep up when its cushioned by hymnals.

Shame sets in. His mother's ghost is as familiar as the unknown people sitting across the aisle. There aren't any questions or platitudes or declarations or apologies. Compared to the kidnapper's, her ghost would be a stranger and the faith she tried to program in his has become distant, foreign. A base human obligation you've outgrown.

Victor's never been to this church but it feels like he's heard this sermon before, like all rivers of holy advice trickling into the same false sea, man-made and soulless. He closes his eyes and lets the white noise overpower the sound of the preacher's voice, he adapts.







Jamie shows up and fixes it. Family always fixes it, blood finds a way. Victor watches Nathan animatedly describe his brother's methods, his new levels of control, how to make the talking stop and how much you actually appreciate the quiet when you get the ghosts to leave. Suddenly it's relatable. It's a conversation they could have had instead of fighting, pushing, running. There's a human need to find commonality between one another's experiences.

He looked for it with Vision, with something so lacking in humanity he had to feign a happy home life just to force it, base affection. Mankind projects onto everything it gets its grubby hands on, giving empty shells humanity as if its what anything sentient must desire at some point. What else is mankind without it? It's a void within a loop, looking to other people to try and fill. Human life is just endlessly circling some drain and hoping to find meaning on the way down, ascribing significance to repeating patterns instead of reason. Worthless ties to dead ends. Attraction, loyalty. What purpose does any of it serve?

He hasn't heard the static in months, but the tradeoff is he doesn't hear half the things humans say to him anymore. He can see age in their faces, doubt in their half truths. What's the point of listening to any of it? They excuse away anything that doesn't fit into their short lived narratives, they refuse to adapt.

Victor lies next to the cold expanse of a not reality, open sores and empty pathways. How boring this half existence is. He's not sure how long he's been awake, sitting up, staring at the body next to him. A thousand gruesome deaths and a spotless corpse, it's a perfect testing ground for a psychotic mind. That's why the ghost took him, why they kept taking him and there will never be any quiet for Nathan to escape to. Victor smiles, carding a hand through Nathan's hair. Even when they try to grasp eternity, humans still screw it up, waste it on something like him.

Nathan turns onto his side to face him and Victor feels his face slide into an easy expression, to force his eyes to crease and mouth to turn just slightly so Nathan's eyes with too long eyelashes can open and see just what he's expecting.

"What is it?" he croaks, brushing sleep from his eyes. "Do not tell me you're waking me up to watch another TED talk, the first one put me well enough to sleep."

"No, I don't want to go back to sleep," Victorious murmurs.