Avengers Tower – Common Room 2:13 a.m.

There’s bourbon in your glass and mischief in the air.

The kind that crackles between tired teammates with bruised ribs and bruised egos and nothing left to do but pretend the weight of the world isn’t perched on their shoulders like a ticking bomb. The party had thinned. The dignitaries and suits and reporters had vanished with their cocktails and polite laughter hours ago. (©TRS0625CAI)

Now it was just the core crew—relaxed, half-drunk, sprawled around like college students cramming for an exam called Impending Doom 101.

Tony sits like a king at the center, one leg thrown over the arm of his chair, glass of scotch held aloft as he spins some anecdote that no one asked for. Steve is smiling more than usual—must be the whiskey—and Clint’s snark is in rare form. Nat’s curled on the arm of the couch beside Banner, fingers ghosting across his forearm in a way that makes you pretend not to notice.

And Thor, glittering and golden, drops his enchanted hammer on the coffee table with a thud that rattles the liquor bottles.

A challenge.

"Whosoever holds this hammer, if they be worthy..." Stark drawls, mockingly reverent. "Blah, blah, insert Norse mythology here."

The attempts begin. Tony. Tony and Rhodey. Steve—who actually budges the damn thing just enough to wipe the smug off Thor’s face for half a heartbeat.

You laugh into your drink. “Oh, I’m not trying,” you wave them off when Thor raises an eyebrow at you. “I know exactly how unworthy I am. No need to confirm it with mystical Asgardian paperweights.”

“Come on,” Clint grins. “Let’s see what your unresolved trauma looks like in hammer-form.”

You roll your eyes but rise anyway, placing your glass on the table with a clink. The moment your hand closes around the handle, your fingertips go numb. Like the hammer is taking inventory of every dark thing in you, weighing sins and regrets on some ancient scale.

You jerk your hand back. “Yeah, that’s enough of that.”

They laugh. The moment softens again.

And then the lights flicker.

For a second, you think it’s just the tower’s backup grid—Tony’s always tinkering with something. But then the temperature drops. Not physically—something else. Like the room exhales and forgets to breathe back in.

The voice cuts through the air like rusted metal dragged across concrete.

“There’s only one path to peace… your extinction.”

Everyone stands at once.

From the shadows stumbles a grotesque figure—patchwork metal welded together into a vaguely humanoid shape, eyes glowing like molten gold. It lurches forward, voice warping through static.

“You all think you're saviors. Gods playing house.”

Tony steps forward, glass discarded, jaw tight. “JARVIS?”

But the thing ignores him. Its eyes—if they can be called that—scan each of you. Until they land on you.

And stop.

“You,” it says, almost awed. “You weren’t part of the plan.”

The tension in your chest coils like a loaded spring. “Cool. Neither were you.”

It tilts its head. “You’re different. Not enhanced. Not built. But… fractured.”

“Great,” you mutter, fingers curling, power humming just beneath your skin. “Stalker-bot with a poetic streak.”

Then everything erupts.

Ultron surges forward. Thor throws Mjolnir. Steve dives into action. And chaos explodes like a bomb in a bottle.

You dodge flying debris, firing blasts into the metal corpses spilling from the walls, only half-focused because he’s still watching you. Not fighting. Stalking.

“Come with me,” Ultron croons through the carnage. “We could reshape the world.”

You hurl a pulse of energy at him so hot it melts half his faceplate. “Yeah, hard pass.”

But he doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t retaliate.

Just grabs you by the wrist when you turn, his metal claws digging into your skin.

He leans in close, sparks raining from his fractured chassis. “You’re not like them. You break the pattern. I want to understand.”