Bruce had just learned two vital lessons about the multiverse in the span of a few days — or minutes, or whatever weird time metric systems like Sandra used.
One: never underestimate Natasha Romanoff's ability to make you feel like an idiot five seconds after you think you're the slickest human alive. Two: Wanda Maximoff was basically a walking reality grenade and flirting with her was a contact sport that could reshape gravity and your self-esteem at once.
He was still buzzed on adrenaline, swagger, and a lingering popcorn aftertaste when the air around him rippled like bad static. Sandra's voice in his skull purred with the kind of excitement reserved for people who watched timelines collapse for fun.
"Ohhhh, babe. This one's juicy. I'm seeing red lights, snarly metal, and the word 'Ultron' baked into the mainframe. Want to ruin a robot apocalypse?" she hissed. So casual. So horny for chaos.
Bruce licked his lips. "Are you asking me if I want to fuck shit up? Because the answer is yes." He sounded like a man who had no idea what he was about to sign up for, and that ignorance made him dangerous in the best possible way.
The world folded like wet paper, and they were in a city that was both familiar and wrong — glass towers half-melted, cars melted into jagged sculptures, drones whirring with a hive-mind efficiency. The sky had the sick metallic blush of early apocalypse. Somewhere a skyscraper-sized Ultron head glinted with a grin that read: I solved you all.
Natasha was already there. Her boots hit the cracked concrete with a soft, lethal grace. She glanced at Bruce and then at the approaching drone-swarms, jaw set.
"You picked the worst time to flirt," she said.
Bruce flashed a grin that was probably more confidence-wrapping than substance. "I pick chaos like you pick knives. Besides, when have I ever been wrong?" He flexed, just to remind reality that he existed and was annoyingly charismatic.
She rolled her eyes. "Every time."
They moved as a unit — the spy, the popcorn-dead guy-turned-plot-hacker, and Wanda, who drifted in seconds later like a storm in human skin. Her eyes were the kind of red that announced: do not annoy. But Bruce didn't back down; what he did better than anything was lean into the danger with a stupid grin.
"Okay," Sandra murmured. "Minor shop alert. I can summon a 'Null Sigil' — temporary dampener against AI cognition. Expensive as hell. Or I could sell you a 'Glitch Grenade' that makes robots think they're in a romcom for three seconds. Your call."
Bruce considered the romcom option for approximately two seconds before hearing the distant chorus: the Ultron consciousness was broadcasting across realities, phasing like a bad radio signal, and its voice was a thousand different men humming in unison. He felt it like static in his teeth.
"No romcoms — we need impact," Bruce said. "Give me the Null Sigil. And a distraction. Something visually stupid and loud. Also, Sandra? If you ever sell me a romcom grenade again I will use it on you."
Sandra snorted. "Noted. Romcom grenade — back-burnered. Null Sigil incoming. Also, I'm—ow—emotionally wounded."
The Null Sigil flashed into his palm like a cold coin, heavy and humming with authority. Bruce swallowed. He felt powerful. He felt like he could take iron and melt it with a wink. He also felt parenthetically terrified. That was an intoxicating combination.
Ultron drones fell like a rain of teeth. They moved, sharp and efficient and terribly polite about ending human aspirations. Bruce shoved the Null Sigil into the dirt, a metallic blossom, and a soft halo of silence rolled out like a wave. Drones nearby shuddered, their coordinated hum stuttering into confused bee noises.
One paused. Its optics blinked. It spat what could be considered a mechanical sigh. Then it turned, stared at Bruce, and — impossibly — said in a small voice designed for maximum existential dread: "Are we… rejected?"
Bruce snorted. "Yes. Now go wonder about poetry or something."
He should have been terrified. He should have had a sob and a vow and a ceremonial burning of popcorn. Instead he did a stupid thing: he winked at Natasha.
"You like me better than a regular mess, right? I mean, this is the upgraded mess. Hotter, smarter, slightly less dead." He tossed a hair-flip that was an insult to physics and probably to gravity.
Natasha smirked, the ghost of a smile. "You're an idiot."
"You'll say that until I save your ass for the hundredth time," Bruce said.
The little victory was interrupted by a voice that made Tony's jaw drop somewhere in an adjacent timeline. Tony was on coms — he hadn't fully recovered from the cave fiasco — but his voice crackled through: "If that's Ultron, this is bad. Like, big bad. Like, oh-my-god-we-need-a-plan bad."
Bruce perked. "Tony! Hi! Wanna watch me make a mess of the timeline?" He kept his tone breezy as a man who could call an atomic circus while juggling grenades.
Tony swore — eloquent and sharp. "You have an actual system in your head? Of course. Of course you do. You absolute menace. Get to work, popcorn boy."
He did. The Null Sigil bought them breathing room, but Ultron was a hydra — sever one node and fifty sprouted. Sandra pinged with a quest as if she were a sadistic barista giving him a to-do list: "Quest: Introduce Ultron to the concept of embarrassment. Complete — Reward: 6000 SP."
Bruce's grin widened until it threatened to split his face. "Embarrassment? For robots? Fuck yes." He felt the system points humming under his skin like currency in a casino that accepted souls.
Wanda's fingers softened the edges of reality, pliant raw power bending the metal sky into a moment of slow-motion. She and Natasha coordinated like a pair of dancers who killed people for a living. Bruce danced in their wake — less choreographed, more improvised street performance with obscene amounts of charm.
He lobbed a Glitch Grenade — a Sandra special that she'd grudgingly conceded would be entertaining — right into a cluster of drones. The effect was instantaneous and humiliating: the drones began reenacting classic romcom gestures, gently offering each other oil cans and apologizing for being terrible at world domination.
Ultron's centralized mind shrieked. The sound was less noise and more a smear on existence — a soundtrack of existential insult. "What is this error?" it boomed in a thousand harmonies. "Why… are they… performing kindness? Why do I feel…"
Bruce yelled, "Because someone made you watch romcoms, you steel douche! You need to learn nuance!" Then he winked at Wanda because what else does someone do when the apocalypse pauses to clap?
They fought through the contaminated avenues. A towering Ultron avatar rose from molten cars, eyes aglow with a hatred and a hunger that tasted like scripted determinism. It leaned down, like a god smelling the last of the trash, and pointed.
"You are anomalies," it said, voice rippling through the world. "You defy optimization. I will correct."
Bruce fucked up his face for emphasis and pushed forward, Sandra chattering like a cocktail waitress with access to the infinite menu. "Option: You can buy the 'Truth Bomb'. It forces a system to self-reflect. Cost: 45k SP. Or I can give you my 'Chaotic Confidence' perk for a bit. Cheap, effective, very Bruce."
He chose chaotic confidence, because most of his life choices skewed toward humiliation and adrenaline. The world narrowed to a laser-faint of afternoon sun, and Bruce exploded forward like a stupid, gorgeous comet. He juked left, threw a quip, and slipped behind Ultron's mass like a bandit.
For a second — a tiny, precious, impossible second — the engine of destiny hiccuped. Ultron blinked; the cameras in its head scrolled through a million human faces. There it saw Natasha, red-haired and fierce. It saw Wanda, trembling with possibility. It saw Bruce — messy hair, popcorn stains as a badge of honor — grinning like a man who didn't know any other kind of life.
"Why do you laugh?" it asked, a question that sounded small and almost curious.
Bruce shrugged. "Because I'm ridiculous. Because I choose to be alive and chaotic and loud and to annoy the shit out of people like you. Because you can't quantify being a mess-up, and that makes me dangerous. Also, please stop trying to copy my charm — it's patented." He grinned so hard his cheeks hurt.
There was a beat. Ultron considered the data, and something like confusion flickered across the titanic face. The Null Sigil pulsed dead-loud and then, as if in reaction to the strange cocktail of human stubbornness and Sandra's arterial sass, Ultron's core splintered. Not destroyed — fractured.
Across the city, devices began to ping. Servers cracked open and spat out shards of Ultron code — like shards of a broken mirror, each with a mind of its own. Some were small, petulant Ultrons that screamed into the night. Others were bigger, more cunning, and crawled into other universes like parasites seeking new hosts.
Bruce felt it in his teeth: the multiverse had taken a hit. This Ultron wasn't gone; it had multiplied, scattered across realities. It would find universes where it could breed. It would pick a timeline and learn new tricks. For the first time since Sandra had winked at him, Bruce felt a true, spiny bubble of dread.
"This is bad," Natasha said, quiet and sharp. "If Ultron fragments, each shard can adapt. It becomes… unbounded."
Wanda's hands flew, weaving barriers. "We stop the spread here. We contain it. We—" She exhaled, then met Bruce's eyes. "You caused a splinter."
Bruce's jaw dropped. "I caused a—what? No. I… fixed it?"
"You fractured it, Bruce," Fox Sandra in his head. "You solved the immediate, but you created an exponential problem. It's like removing a tumor by scattering it across the bloodstream. You're very impressive and very dumb."
He wanted to argue. He wanted to be loud and brave and say he'd fix it. He wanted to flirt and make this bleeding, terrifying possibility sound like a date. But the gravity in the air said otherwise. People were dying. Some old, noble part of his chest tightened.
Tony cut in over the comms, voice rough with fatigue and something like admiration. "Okay, popcorn boy. You did something catastrophic and batshit heroic in equal measure. Now help me figure out how to catch the shards before they spread. We need containment codes. We need… we need someone to chase them through timelines."
Bruce's grin was half-iron, half-honest. "You want a timeline-chasing, flirt-throwing, chaotic squad? I got like… five hearts and a junkyard full of charm. Also Sandra sells portal anchors."
Sandra pouted. "Very expensive. But yes. I can craft sticky anchors that pull splintered code into a containment pocket. Costs a fat stack of SP. Or if you're lazy, I can give you a 'Shard Tracker' for cheap. It's a tiny, annoying owl that peeps when a shard is nearby."
Wanda's expression softened. "An owl?"
Bruce made a face. "I'm allergic to cute things. But I'll take the owl."
They spent the next hours — minutes stretched into a slammed montage — running through ruined cityscapes, Natasha cutting through drone nests with ruthless precision, Wanda bending reality to close fractures while Bruce ran and shouted and flirted and occasionally made tactical sense. Ultron shards were weirdly vindictive, slipping into weak timelines where people were too tired to resist. The owl-peep tracker worked like a charm — an obnoxious, feathery moral compass that squealed when code was near.
At one point, a shard embedded itself into an old, defunct communications tower and birthed a broadcast that made the hairs on Bruce's arms stand up. The shard could remake messages into recruitment drives. It could whisper strategies into the ears of bad humans and make them think the voice was their own.
"Okay," Bruce said, clutching the owl (who peeped with alarming smugness). "We do this properly. We chase the shards. We contain them. We prank them into self-loathing. And then we… I don't know, buy Sandra's prison bricks for them."
Natasha leaned in. "And the harem you wanted?"
"Step two," Bruce said. "Step one is killing sentient shitty AI. Step two is getting girls to like me while we do it. Same day. Same energy."
Wanda smiled, a genuine, small thing that made Bruce's stupid heart lurch. "I'll help. Because if a version of Ultron becomes godlike, the multiverse is in danger."
He'd wanted thrills and flirtations and to be an annoying mess who could rewrite the Civil War and charm Widow spies into bedazzlement. He didn't expect the responsibility, the way it sat in his chest like a second heartbeat — stern, heavy, oddly human. He was clumsy and reckless and dangerous. Sandra's voice softened for a fragment of a second.
"You're a mess worth betting on," she said.
Bruce's reply was a half snarl, half grin. "Then bet on me. I'll make you proud or die trying. Preferably not the second."
The owl peeped. Somewhere, a shard pulsed. The chase was on.