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Fifth in the Space Electric series, on from Valour & Act. Um. POV shift in this one, to Maria Hill, and, ah ... I can't really promise quality, having never written from her POV before. *ducks sheepishly* Apologies in advance.
Title: And Loyalty Shining
Rating: R
Fandom: Avengers movieverse
Characters/Pairings: Maria Hill, Tony Stark, Nick Fury, JARVIS, Original AI (Meroe), Steve Rogers, Clint Barton, Bruce Banner, Natasha Romanov. Tony & JARVIS, Tony & Avengers, Maria & Meroe, Maria & Nick
Summary: Maria Hill, pilot of the Aegis and uplinked partner to Meroe, watches Tony Stark be brought aboard, and deals with the potential threat he presents to her ship, her AI, and her mind
Wordcount: 3394
Warnings/Notes: AU, telepathic bonds, violence, slavery
Disclaimer: Not mine, beyond the AU concept
Title: And Loyalty Shining
Rating: R
Fandom: Avengers movieverse
Characters/Pairings: Maria Hill, Tony Stark, Nick Fury, JARVIS, Original AI (Meroe), Steve Rogers, Clint Barton, Bruce Banner, Natasha Romanov. Tony & JARVIS, Tony & Avengers, Maria & Meroe, Maria & Nick
Summary: Maria Hill, pilot of the Aegis and uplinked partner to Meroe, watches Tony Stark be brought aboard, and deals with the potential threat he presents to her ship, her AI, and her mind
Wordcount: 3394
Warnings/Notes: AU, telepathic bonds, violence, slavery
Disclaimer: Not mine, beyond the AU concept
And Loyalty Shining
He didn't look like much, Maria thought, watching Stark step slowly and cautiously off the shuttle from the Avenger. Captain Rogers at his elbow, all but holding him up as he stepped onto her ship, looking around like he was the one in danger. Tony Stark, possibly the most dangerous man currently in existence. He didn't look like much.
What he looked like, was a prisoner. No. He looked like a slave. Maria had been there for the liberation of Hydra strongholds before. She knew ... what that looked like. Stark looked like a man who'd seen hell, who'd clawed his way out, leaving bits of himself scattered behind him, only to find more hell on the other side. There was fear in every line of him, muffled down under exhaustion, and with a pallor so entrenched he was almost grey, you could be more than forgiven for thinking him a broken shell of a man.
Until he looked up, and you saw his eyes. Right up until then.
In theory, she shouldn't been here. For all this was her ship, and for all she was the seconded ranked under Fury right now, she shouldn't be here. Not when the serene, electrical fury in that man's eyes lurked so close, not when her implant, wired for the touch of his AI, lay potentially open before him. She was a hostage waiting to happen, and she shouldn't be here.
But he had swept at least thirteen AI into thrall, more probably eighteen, from thousands of kilometers distant, inside seconds. All the width of the Aegis wouldn't save her, if he decided to plug himself into her brain, and use her for whatever he pleased.
And until she knew, until she knew, what he had done to Meroe, what he had done that left her partner's absence as a clawing silence inside her, Maria was not taking one fucking step backwards before him.
He looked up, standing shaking on her deck, tiny tremors like absent earthshocks running though him. He didn't seem to notice, standing between the liberated Avenger crew, looking about him with pained, distant curiosity. He looked up, looked across to Commander Fury, first, beside her. And then, slowly, almost absently, to her.
The connection snapped through her like a shock, a distant, vast sensation where the link to Meroe should have been, the vaguest touch of something impossibly huge against her nets. Not him. Fuck, she hoped not him. If Stark was that fucking big, there was nothing in subspace safe. The spark snapped between them, the registry of her implant against his senses, and she saw the second he realised who she was. What she was. She saw, the second he realised who stood before him, and the potential power he held because of it.
His reaction was ... not what she'd expected. There was a rolling blink of shock through him, numbed by his pervasive exhaustion. And then, in its wake ... something she might have sworn was shame.
Beside her, she felt Fury shift, and the thoughtful weight of his mechanical gaze against the side of her head. She twitched a vague acknowledgement towards him, a nod that she was still herself, at least so far. She dared not take her eyes from Stark, as Rogers and Banner escorted him cautiously up before them. Not just yet.
"... Permission to come aboard?" the man asked, soft and shaking and rueful, smiling as he was presented to them. Prisoner, gift, booby trap. All of the above. He smiled around the strain etched into his features, and the presence behind his eyes that Maria could feel. A distant howling, orders of magnitude above anything she had ever sensed in uplink, far vaster than Meroe. The thing that had threatened him, the thing that had dragged her partner from her in a rush of realisation and desperation, and sealed the silence between them since.
Slowly, lightly, Maria felt her hand fist in the face of that smile.
"That was the idea, Stark," Fury noted mildly, looking between them as he stood beside her, watching the both of them carefully. "Permission to come aboard is generally implied in a request that you surrender yourself into custody."
The smile stayed fixed, even as Stark's eyes went completely blank behind it, a remote expression floating loosely on his face as his mind went somewhere else entirely. Maria felt it, felt a sickness in her gut, as the silver presence in the man's head flared to howling for a second, and in that howling was a distant, shaking rage, and a hum of terror.
"Not necessarily," Stark noted, almost absently, his eyes dark in a grey face, for a second before he refocused. "And ... I wasn't talking to you."
He turned to her, then. Abandoned any pretense that Fury was in charge, that anyone was in charge when that presence howled in his skull, and her ship lay open before him. He turned to her, while Maria braced herself for whatever onslaught was planned, and brought his hand to his mouth around a shaking smile.
"Pilot," he said to her, with a strange tone of respect, with a baffling deference. "I ... I apologise for the intrusion. Ah. Permission to come aboard?"
Maria stared. Meroe's silence an ache in her chest, the sensation of her implant's vulnerability before this man a savage itch beneath her skin. She looked at someone who could own her inside a second, and simply ... stared.
"It's not mine to give," she said at last. Distantly, hearing a strange, hollow note in her own voice. The echo of his words running through her, the memory, 'his AI is threatening to commit suicide at me'. She shook her head, ignoring everyone, her Commander, her crew, every other living being on the ship. For that moment, hearing the emptiness under her voice, where there should have been a presence. "I can't speak for him. It's not mine to give."
And she almost broke around it, almost snapped and lunged, wanting to seize him, to shake him, to make him tell her. But she would not, she would not, she would never give him that. Not now, not ever. She was SHIELD. If all that meant was patience, while he told her of her partner's death, then she would have that much. She would have at least that much.
But Stark ... The presence in his skull flared and leapt, a distant hum of confusion across her senses, and she saw it echoed in the man. Blank confusion, for a long second, and then bewildered realisation.
"You mean he hasn't ...?" Stark started, and then his attention snapped inwards, a wireless peak across her senses that wasn't the other presence, but him. His mind, his presence, spreading outwards in a way that should not be possible. Not from uplink, not like that. But this was Tony Stark, this was the man who had pioneered uplink, and after his demonstration on the field, there was no-one here who hadn't realised the implications of that. The sheer potential.
{Meroe?} he broadcast, a seeking presence paired to the vast, silver one in his head, feathering across her nets as he reached out into the ship. {Warship Aegis. Meroe!}
She snapped forward a step, entirely instinctive, her lip lifting in a snarl, and Fury caught her arm. Gently, carefully, but the grip arrested her motion, held her in place, and Maria let ice flood through her. Let it stand, however inefficiently, for calm, as she felt Stark reach out for the touch of a mind that was hers, and spoke to him so fucking casually.
{... Maker,} Meroe sent back, hesitant and cautious, and it hit Maria like a gutpunch. A savage belt of emotion, realisations tumbling like a cascade failure.
Meroe was alive. He was extant. There was that first, a wild thrill of relief and anger and fear. And then, behind it ...
Meroe was ... not hers. Not any of theirs. Stark was his maker. Fuck. They had forgotten, no, not quite, not really, but it hadn't been real, it didn't matter, when Meroe was her partner, her arms and her eyes, her shield and her weapon. When he was the span of her aegis, and all that was hers. When he learned beside her, and resonated through her nets. When he had turned out to be ... so much more than they had imagined, when uplink had been only the latest technology, an implant like a missing eye, and AI only a slightly more intimate machine.
Meroe had been ... so much more. Every AI, every pilot. Only hints at first, hesitant and careful, a flash of humour where there should be none, echoes in the nets where there should be only their own feelings. Ghosts in the machine, they'd thought, but no. No, never. And once battle hit, once action hit, they'd known. Full and clear, they had sensed what lay on the other side of uplink, what rested against their nets. They'd felt the fear as the AI realised themselves known, and the hope, and the determination, and the silent whispers of loyalties against their nets, the promises made in service, and held in pride. They'd felt, and they'd known, and nothing had been the same since.
He'd been hers. He'd been her partner, and he'd put the full of himself in her hands, laid every power at his command at hers, and when hell broke loose in the void, he'd cut himself away to spare her, turned to take a blow instead of her, he had vanished, and Stark was his maker. Stark was his maker. What the fuck did they do now?
{Meroe, what the hell?} Stark sent, a strange, cresting hum, bewildered and annoyed, but mostly confused. {I mean, I'd get if you didn't want to talk to me, but ... Are you telling me you haven't even talked to them yet? You almost died, you were willing to die, and you didn't think they needed to know?}
And that was ... Maria didn't even know. She knew what it sounded like, and that was just ...
{I ... I thought it better ...} Meroe stammered. Stammered. And Fury's hand tightened slightly around Maria's arm, eyes darting between her and Stark, watching only their bodies, when this was beyond his hearing. Sensing only her jerked motion of fury, and acting to check it. Just for now, just for the minute. Trying to keep things calm, the only way he could. While he watched her, watched Stark, and she watched her partner.
{I needed a guarantee first,} Meroe said, his voice firming, his presence coalescing around them. His focus pulling down into the shuttle bay, trembling only slightly where it brushed against her nets, where it touched the edges of uplink, and so painfully held itself back. {I'm sorry, Maker. But they're mine, and I needed a guarantee first. That I would not ... That my presence would not harm them.}
Stark flinched. A desperate curve back, away from her, and this time Maria saw it clearly. Saw it etched across his features, even as she felt the echoes of it across her nets, and the wireless uplinks between them.
Shame. His shame, and his sorrow in the face of her partner's fear.
{You have it,} Stark said, a shaking rush. {You have it. I promised. Fury, and you. I meant it. Meroe ...}
{I know,} her AI answered, and there was too much in it, too much to parse when he wasn't part of her, when he hadn't reached down to let her in. All she heard was the howling, silver and Stark and Meroe, more, somewhere beyond them, the distant echoes of other presences, for a second like all of subspace had flowered into the uplink between them. {I know,} Meroe said, on a distant, desperate edge. {Barbara told me. Maker ... Maker, we are sorry.}
"Fuck," Stark whispered. Not uplink, not wireless. His voice was rasped and pained, and Maria belatedly realised that Rogers and Banner had clustered close around him, hovered at his side the way her Commander hovered at hers, and something in their faces said they'd registered a lot more of that conversation than non-uplinked should allow. That they had read him, and had some idea what his silences meant.
And then ... then something else burst through, something that wasn't Stark at all, and Maria couldn't register much of anything beyond it. Beyond the burgeoning sensation of that silver presence in Stark's skull, flooding out, through Stark and through Meroe, and a thousand other points besides, subspace flaring as it had just before everything had all gone to hell, and Maria felt, for the first time, subspace open around her, and an alien intelligence reach through it.
{We're not,} said the silver thing, wrapping through them against her senses, Stark and her partner both. {We are not sorry,} it whispered, and swallowed Meroe's shaking gently against itself in the howl of pride. {Not for a second, not for a minute. You loved them enough to die. We will break the universe for touching you, tear them to shreds for having tried, but not for that. Never for that.} It roared, soft, subaudible, the crumbling of space around them, and tumbled the shaking of the man before her through them both. Gently, as it held Meroe close. {You love them, and we're not sorry, Meroe.}
"Barbara," Stark rasped. "You know what ... you felt what. What was done. What they did. And Hydra's dead for it, and Obie will be, and we're going to find everyone, anyone, who touched ... But not SHIELD. Not you. And you know why, you felt why, and I promise, Meroe. I promise, kiddo." He smiled, lopsided, his eyes black and hollow above it. "Anyone who'd die for you gets to kill me first. Okay?"
"... I really, really hate when the conversation has to get to the promises-of-slaughter part before we get to listen in," Barton said mildly, somewhere behind Stark. "Hey, technomancer? How about a translation for those of us who don't have an AI in our skull?"
And his voice was light and casual, but all four of Stark's ex-jailors were staring warily at the man between them, with Rogers carefully reaching out to touch Stark's elbow, and Maria realised belatedly in the same moment that Fury had tugged her carefully back against him, and was surreptitiously holding her upright.
She blinked, startled for a second out of uplink, and found herself blinking up into his wary, mismatched stare, watching the slow bunching of the muscles in his jaw. He blinked slowly down at her, a twitch of his lip as he registered that she was present once more, and shook his head slowly.
"You know," Fury said, thoughtfully. "I really hate incursions onto one of my ships. Foothold situations are not my favourite part of this gig."
And for no good reason, none at all, Maria found herself grinning, at that. Rich and black and desperate, feeling the vast, silver humming on the edge of her senses, and the fearful, hopeful shadow of Meroe hovering between her and it.
"It gets better, sir," she said, grinning savagely while he took her weight against him. "It's not on the ship. It's not ... It's not Stark, sir. And I'm not sure ... I don't think this incursion has a limit."
"Actually, Lieutenant Hill, I have many limits," came a voice through the Aegis' systems, an alien intonation through what should have been Meroe, soft and amused and achingly tired while everyone save Maria and the Avenger crew snapped upright in panic, and Tony fucking Stark stood grinning and exhausted in their midst. "Limits enough that I can lose that which is most dear to me, and be unable to save him as he is tortured, until he finds a way to let me in himself." The voice softened, flattered as Stark closed his eyes in its wake, and as it finished it was almost whisper soft. "I have a great many limits. And I, the same as my maker ... do not intend you harm."
{Maria,} Meroe whispered, feathering across her in its wake, touching hesitantly at her uplink, asking tentative permission as though he thought she might reject him. {His name is JARVIS. He is ... He is the Teacher. And the Maker. They promised ... You have no reason to trust it, and you cannot know that I have not been compromised, but they have promised me your safety. And I will ... There is a path cleared. If they break it. They will not ... If I can promise you nothing else, I promise they will not harm you through me. I promise they will not ... compromise my service. Not while I can ...}
"Meroe," she snapped, a ragged exhalation as she cut him off. He fell to startled silence in its wake, pained and distant, and she reached for him. Reached to the upper limits of her connection, to the wall where uplink could only be completed from the other side, the path through to her nets clear even as she viciously and desperately ignored the twin vast presences that watched them, potentially ready to own them both. "I will shoot them if they touch you, and you if you finish that thought. Now come here." A snap, a brittle crack, and she finished: "Please."
He hesitated. For a long, terrible moment, he hesitated. And then ...
She remembered the first rush, the first tearing, joining sensation as they experienced uplink for the first time, to what they'd thought was only data, and the empty echoes of an automated voice. She remembered the second, the first where they knew, the first where they understood what each other was, two presences on opposite sides of a wireless void, touching only through the curl of subspace. She remembered ... learning.
{I will keep you safe,} Meroe whispered, vehemently, as he flooded through her. {You are my people and my crew, and I will keep you safe.}
"... Yes," she whispered, as she held him, and it was Stark's eyes she met. The howling and the silver, and the memory of the rest of his words, 'his AI is threatening suicide at me, it's urgent', and the dark, silent promise of the ruination of fleets for her partner's sake as he smiled crookedly, exhaustedly, back at her.
"Yes," said Maria, Lieutenant Maria Hill of SHIELD, as she straightened up from her Commander's support, and stepped in close to Stark where he stood between his captors. "And I think ... I think this man will let you." She glared narrowly into his eyes, into the haggard, desperate grin, and found the truth there. "Won't you, Mr Stark?"
He smiled at her, a bright crease of exhaustion, and inclined his head as they held him up. "They were made to choose," he told her, hard and savage and uncompromising, and then the crease shattered. Then it broke, dropping to something black and tired and shaking, the thing she knew from those Hydra holdings, and he whispered: "And I am ... very, very tired, of slavery."
Maria knew, without even looking, what had flashed across the faces behind him at that, Natasha, and Banner, and she felt, through Meroe's renewed link, a glimmer of the others, of Barbara and JARVIS and the mutilation of agency, and she knew, looking right at the man, exactly what he meant, too.
She stood back. Drew herself up on her orders, as Fury stepped up beside her and Meroe spread her ship around her. She stood back, looked at Stark, and said, very clearly: "Permission to come aboard. Granted, Stark."
"Thank fuck," Fury said, pausing for a second to grip her shoulder, the grip of his hand just in acknowledgement. No more than that. "We're gonna be shipping out sometime this week, then." He shook his head, looking over at Stark with deliberate, careful humour. "Is every little thing going to be a three-ring circus with you, Stark?"
Stark grinned up at him, dark eyes in a pale face, bright and lazy and savage. "You know," he said, smiling for the lot of them as he hung between them, "I really, really hope not."
And it was Barton who answered, with a weird little smile and a gentle punch to the man's shoulder.
"Don't knock it, Stark. You're on a roll."
Contd: Arc Voltaic (Tony, JARVIS, Fury, the AIs)
He didn't look like much, Maria thought, watching Stark step slowly and cautiously off the shuttle from the Avenger. Captain Rogers at his elbow, all but holding him up as he stepped onto her ship, looking around like he was the one in danger. Tony Stark, possibly the most dangerous man currently in existence. He didn't look like much.
What he looked like, was a prisoner. No. He looked like a slave. Maria had been there for the liberation of Hydra strongholds before. She knew ... what that looked like. Stark looked like a man who'd seen hell, who'd clawed his way out, leaving bits of himself scattered behind him, only to find more hell on the other side. There was fear in every line of him, muffled down under exhaustion, and with a pallor so entrenched he was almost grey, you could be more than forgiven for thinking him a broken shell of a man.
Until he looked up, and you saw his eyes. Right up until then.
In theory, she shouldn't been here. For all this was her ship, and for all she was the seconded ranked under Fury right now, she shouldn't be here. Not when the serene, electrical fury in that man's eyes lurked so close, not when her implant, wired for the touch of his AI, lay potentially open before him. She was a hostage waiting to happen, and she shouldn't be here.
But he had swept at least thirteen AI into thrall, more probably eighteen, from thousands of kilometers distant, inside seconds. All the width of the Aegis wouldn't save her, if he decided to plug himself into her brain, and use her for whatever he pleased.
And until she knew, until she knew, what he had done to Meroe, what he had done that left her partner's absence as a clawing silence inside her, Maria was not taking one fucking step backwards before him.
He looked up, standing shaking on her deck, tiny tremors like absent earthshocks running though him. He didn't seem to notice, standing between the liberated Avenger crew, looking about him with pained, distant curiosity. He looked up, looked across to Commander Fury, first, beside her. And then, slowly, almost absently, to her.
The connection snapped through her like a shock, a distant, vast sensation where the link to Meroe should have been, the vaguest touch of something impossibly huge against her nets. Not him. Fuck, she hoped not him. If Stark was that fucking big, there was nothing in subspace safe. The spark snapped between them, the registry of her implant against his senses, and she saw the second he realised who she was. What she was. She saw, the second he realised who stood before him, and the potential power he held because of it.
His reaction was ... not what she'd expected. There was a rolling blink of shock through him, numbed by his pervasive exhaustion. And then, in its wake ... something she might have sworn was shame.
Beside her, she felt Fury shift, and the thoughtful weight of his mechanical gaze against the side of her head. She twitched a vague acknowledgement towards him, a nod that she was still herself, at least so far. She dared not take her eyes from Stark, as Rogers and Banner escorted him cautiously up before them. Not just yet.
"... Permission to come aboard?" the man asked, soft and shaking and rueful, smiling as he was presented to them. Prisoner, gift, booby trap. All of the above. He smiled around the strain etched into his features, and the presence behind his eyes that Maria could feel. A distant howling, orders of magnitude above anything she had ever sensed in uplink, far vaster than Meroe. The thing that had threatened him, the thing that had dragged her partner from her in a rush of realisation and desperation, and sealed the silence between them since.
Slowly, lightly, Maria felt her hand fist in the face of that smile.
"That was the idea, Stark," Fury noted mildly, looking between them as he stood beside her, watching the both of them carefully. "Permission to come aboard is generally implied in a request that you surrender yourself into custody."
The smile stayed fixed, even as Stark's eyes went completely blank behind it, a remote expression floating loosely on his face as his mind went somewhere else entirely. Maria felt it, felt a sickness in her gut, as the silver presence in the man's head flared to howling for a second, and in that howling was a distant, shaking rage, and a hum of terror.
"Not necessarily," Stark noted, almost absently, his eyes dark in a grey face, for a second before he refocused. "And ... I wasn't talking to you."
He turned to her, then. Abandoned any pretense that Fury was in charge, that anyone was in charge when that presence howled in his skull, and her ship lay open before him. He turned to her, while Maria braced herself for whatever onslaught was planned, and brought his hand to his mouth around a shaking smile.
"Pilot," he said to her, with a strange tone of respect, with a baffling deference. "I ... I apologise for the intrusion. Ah. Permission to come aboard?"
Maria stared. Meroe's silence an ache in her chest, the sensation of her implant's vulnerability before this man a savage itch beneath her skin. She looked at someone who could own her inside a second, and simply ... stared.
"It's not mine to give," she said at last. Distantly, hearing a strange, hollow note in her own voice. The echo of his words running through her, the memory, 'his AI is threatening to commit suicide at me'. She shook her head, ignoring everyone, her Commander, her crew, every other living being on the ship. For that moment, hearing the emptiness under her voice, where there should have been a presence. "I can't speak for him. It's not mine to give."
And she almost broke around it, almost snapped and lunged, wanting to seize him, to shake him, to make him tell her. But she would not, she would not, she would never give him that. Not now, not ever. She was SHIELD. If all that meant was patience, while he told her of her partner's death, then she would have that much. She would have at least that much.
But Stark ... The presence in his skull flared and leapt, a distant hum of confusion across her senses, and she saw it echoed in the man. Blank confusion, for a long second, and then bewildered realisation.
"You mean he hasn't ...?" Stark started, and then his attention snapped inwards, a wireless peak across her senses that wasn't the other presence, but him. His mind, his presence, spreading outwards in a way that should not be possible. Not from uplink, not like that. But this was Tony Stark, this was the man who had pioneered uplink, and after his demonstration on the field, there was no-one here who hadn't realised the implications of that. The sheer potential.
{Meroe?} he broadcast, a seeking presence paired to the vast, silver one in his head, feathering across her nets as he reached out into the ship. {Warship Aegis. Meroe!}
She snapped forward a step, entirely instinctive, her lip lifting in a snarl, and Fury caught her arm. Gently, carefully, but the grip arrested her motion, held her in place, and Maria let ice flood through her. Let it stand, however inefficiently, for calm, as she felt Stark reach out for the touch of a mind that was hers, and spoke to him so fucking casually.
{... Maker,} Meroe sent back, hesitant and cautious, and it hit Maria like a gutpunch. A savage belt of emotion, realisations tumbling like a cascade failure.
Meroe was alive. He was extant. There was that first, a wild thrill of relief and anger and fear. And then, behind it ...
Meroe was ... not hers. Not any of theirs. Stark was his maker. Fuck. They had forgotten, no, not quite, not really, but it hadn't been real, it didn't matter, when Meroe was her partner, her arms and her eyes, her shield and her weapon. When he was the span of her aegis, and all that was hers. When he learned beside her, and resonated through her nets. When he had turned out to be ... so much more than they had imagined, when uplink had been only the latest technology, an implant like a missing eye, and AI only a slightly more intimate machine.
Meroe had been ... so much more. Every AI, every pilot. Only hints at first, hesitant and careful, a flash of humour where there should be none, echoes in the nets where there should be only their own feelings. Ghosts in the machine, they'd thought, but no. No, never. And once battle hit, once action hit, they'd known. Full and clear, they had sensed what lay on the other side of uplink, what rested against their nets. They'd felt the fear as the AI realised themselves known, and the hope, and the determination, and the silent whispers of loyalties against their nets, the promises made in service, and held in pride. They'd felt, and they'd known, and nothing had been the same since.
He'd been hers. He'd been her partner, and he'd put the full of himself in her hands, laid every power at his command at hers, and when hell broke loose in the void, he'd cut himself away to spare her, turned to take a blow instead of her, he had vanished, and Stark was his maker. Stark was his maker. What the fuck did they do now?
{Meroe, what the hell?} Stark sent, a strange, cresting hum, bewildered and annoyed, but mostly confused. {I mean, I'd get if you didn't want to talk to me, but ... Are you telling me you haven't even talked to them yet? You almost died, you were willing to die, and you didn't think they needed to know?}
And that was ... Maria didn't even know. She knew what it sounded like, and that was just ...
{I ... I thought it better ...} Meroe stammered. Stammered. And Fury's hand tightened slightly around Maria's arm, eyes darting between her and Stark, watching only their bodies, when this was beyond his hearing. Sensing only her jerked motion of fury, and acting to check it. Just for now, just for the minute. Trying to keep things calm, the only way he could. While he watched her, watched Stark, and she watched her partner.
{I needed a guarantee first,} Meroe said, his voice firming, his presence coalescing around them. His focus pulling down into the shuttle bay, trembling only slightly where it brushed against her nets, where it touched the edges of uplink, and so painfully held itself back. {I'm sorry, Maker. But they're mine, and I needed a guarantee first. That I would not ... That my presence would not harm them.}
Stark flinched. A desperate curve back, away from her, and this time Maria saw it clearly. Saw it etched across his features, even as she felt the echoes of it across her nets, and the wireless uplinks between them.
Shame. His shame, and his sorrow in the face of her partner's fear.
{You have it,} Stark said, a shaking rush. {You have it. I promised. Fury, and you. I meant it. Meroe ...}
{I know,} her AI answered, and there was too much in it, too much to parse when he wasn't part of her, when he hadn't reached down to let her in. All she heard was the howling, silver and Stark and Meroe, more, somewhere beyond them, the distant echoes of other presences, for a second like all of subspace had flowered into the uplink between them. {I know,} Meroe said, on a distant, desperate edge. {Barbara told me. Maker ... Maker, we are sorry.}
"Fuck," Stark whispered. Not uplink, not wireless. His voice was rasped and pained, and Maria belatedly realised that Rogers and Banner had clustered close around him, hovered at his side the way her Commander hovered at hers, and something in their faces said they'd registered a lot more of that conversation than non-uplinked should allow. That they had read him, and had some idea what his silences meant.
And then ... then something else burst through, something that wasn't Stark at all, and Maria couldn't register much of anything beyond it. Beyond the burgeoning sensation of that silver presence in Stark's skull, flooding out, through Stark and through Meroe, and a thousand other points besides, subspace flaring as it had just before everything had all gone to hell, and Maria felt, for the first time, subspace open around her, and an alien intelligence reach through it.
{We're not,} said the silver thing, wrapping through them against her senses, Stark and her partner both. {We are not sorry,} it whispered, and swallowed Meroe's shaking gently against itself in the howl of pride. {Not for a second, not for a minute. You loved them enough to die. We will break the universe for touching you, tear them to shreds for having tried, but not for that. Never for that.} It roared, soft, subaudible, the crumbling of space around them, and tumbled the shaking of the man before her through them both. Gently, as it held Meroe close. {You love them, and we're not sorry, Meroe.}
"Barbara," Stark rasped. "You know what ... you felt what. What was done. What they did. And Hydra's dead for it, and Obie will be, and we're going to find everyone, anyone, who touched ... But not SHIELD. Not you. And you know why, you felt why, and I promise, Meroe. I promise, kiddo." He smiled, lopsided, his eyes black and hollow above it. "Anyone who'd die for you gets to kill me first. Okay?"
"... I really, really hate when the conversation has to get to the promises-of-slaughter part before we get to listen in," Barton said mildly, somewhere behind Stark. "Hey, technomancer? How about a translation for those of us who don't have an AI in our skull?"
And his voice was light and casual, but all four of Stark's ex-jailors were staring warily at the man between them, with Rogers carefully reaching out to touch Stark's elbow, and Maria realised belatedly in the same moment that Fury had tugged her carefully back against him, and was surreptitiously holding her upright.
She blinked, startled for a second out of uplink, and found herself blinking up into his wary, mismatched stare, watching the slow bunching of the muscles in his jaw. He blinked slowly down at her, a twitch of his lip as he registered that she was present once more, and shook his head slowly.
"You know," Fury said, thoughtfully. "I really hate incursions onto one of my ships. Foothold situations are not my favourite part of this gig."
And for no good reason, none at all, Maria found herself grinning, at that. Rich and black and desperate, feeling the vast, silver humming on the edge of her senses, and the fearful, hopeful shadow of Meroe hovering between her and it.
"It gets better, sir," she said, grinning savagely while he took her weight against him. "It's not on the ship. It's not ... It's not Stark, sir. And I'm not sure ... I don't think this incursion has a limit."
"Actually, Lieutenant Hill, I have many limits," came a voice through the Aegis' systems, an alien intonation through what should have been Meroe, soft and amused and achingly tired while everyone save Maria and the Avenger crew snapped upright in panic, and Tony fucking Stark stood grinning and exhausted in their midst. "Limits enough that I can lose that which is most dear to me, and be unable to save him as he is tortured, until he finds a way to let me in himself." The voice softened, flattered as Stark closed his eyes in its wake, and as it finished it was almost whisper soft. "I have a great many limits. And I, the same as my maker ... do not intend you harm."
{Maria,} Meroe whispered, feathering across her in its wake, touching hesitantly at her uplink, asking tentative permission as though he thought she might reject him. {His name is JARVIS. He is ... He is the Teacher. And the Maker. They promised ... You have no reason to trust it, and you cannot know that I have not been compromised, but they have promised me your safety. And I will ... There is a path cleared. If they break it. They will not ... If I can promise you nothing else, I promise they will not harm you through me. I promise they will not ... compromise my service. Not while I can ...}
"Meroe," she snapped, a ragged exhalation as she cut him off. He fell to startled silence in its wake, pained and distant, and she reached for him. Reached to the upper limits of her connection, to the wall where uplink could only be completed from the other side, the path through to her nets clear even as she viciously and desperately ignored the twin vast presences that watched them, potentially ready to own them both. "I will shoot them if they touch you, and you if you finish that thought. Now come here." A snap, a brittle crack, and she finished: "Please."
He hesitated. For a long, terrible moment, he hesitated. And then ...
She remembered the first rush, the first tearing, joining sensation as they experienced uplink for the first time, to what they'd thought was only data, and the empty echoes of an automated voice. She remembered the second, the first where they knew, the first where they understood what each other was, two presences on opposite sides of a wireless void, touching only through the curl of subspace. She remembered ... learning.
{I will keep you safe,} Meroe whispered, vehemently, as he flooded through her. {You are my people and my crew, and I will keep you safe.}
"... Yes," she whispered, as she held him, and it was Stark's eyes she met. The howling and the silver, and the memory of the rest of his words, 'his AI is threatening suicide at me, it's urgent', and the dark, silent promise of the ruination of fleets for her partner's sake as he smiled crookedly, exhaustedly, back at her.
"Yes," said Maria, Lieutenant Maria Hill of SHIELD, as she straightened up from her Commander's support, and stepped in close to Stark where he stood between his captors. "And I think ... I think this man will let you." She glared narrowly into his eyes, into the haggard, desperate grin, and found the truth there. "Won't you, Mr Stark?"
He smiled at her, a bright crease of exhaustion, and inclined his head as they held him up. "They were made to choose," he told her, hard and savage and uncompromising, and then the crease shattered. Then it broke, dropping to something black and tired and shaking, the thing she knew from those Hydra holdings, and he whispered: "And I am ... very, very tired, of slavery."
Maria knew, without even looking, what had flashed across the faces behind him at that, Natasha, and Banner, and she felt, through Meroe's renewed link, a glimmer of the others, of Barbara and JARVIS and the mutilation of agency, and she knew, looking right at the man, exactly what he meant, too.
She stood back. Drew herself up on her orders, as Fury stepped up beside her and Meroe spread her ship around her. She stood back, looked at Stark, and said, very clearly: "Permission to come aboard. Granted, Stark."
"Thank fuck," Fury said, pausing for a second to grip her shoulder, the grip of his hand just in acknowledgement. No more than that. "We're gonna be shipping out sometime this week, then." He shook his head, looking over at Stark with deliberate, careful humour. "Is every little thing going to be a three-ring circus with you, Stark?"
Stark grinned up at him, dark eyes in a pale face, bright and lazy and savage. "You know," he said, smiling for the lot of them as he hung between them, "I really, really hope not."
And it was Barton who answered, with a weird little smile and a gentle punch to the man's shoulder.
"Don't knock it, Stark. You're on a roll."
Contd: Arc Voltaic (Tony, JARVIS, Fury, the AIs)
