"Don't care if he's guilty, don't care if he's not
He's good and he's bad and he's all that I got...
It wasn't a wrong or a right he could choose,
He did what he had to do."

-The Devil's Backbone, The Civil Wars

FINDING BUCKY

PROLOGUE

There is an olive-skinned woman in her mid-twenties, dressed like she was caught in a thrift shop explosion, lying on the floor of her New York apartment. She is staring unseeingly at the ceiling as her eyes flicker from left to right to up to down. For the last few months, she has been going by the name of Athena- the fact that she chose her own alias, and that the alias is derived from a goddess, says quite a lot about the woman. However, it is still not quite as pretentious as her birth name, which is something at least.

To the outside observer, she looks a little mad, mumbling to herself while sprawled on her back like that. But that is because the woman does not see the ceiling of her apartment; she sees binary and code, and the world wide web flies across her vision as she weaves through it, without moving a muscle. She is the flipside of the science fiction trope wherein a computer gains humanity- born a human, she thought it would be a good idea to make herself a computer. Whether this actually was a good idea remains to be seen.

At the current moment, she is helping an AI named JARVIS constantly and unceasingly rewrite and overwrite the key codes that would launch all the world's nuclear missiles. The AI is working slightly faster than her, because she is being forced to multitask- at the same time, she is also creating a complex false trail of plane tickets and ATM uses that will lead the HYDRA agents chasing her a long way away, and sending a series of rather explicit texts to her significant other, who happens to be the aforementioned organisation's former greatest asset. To mix up any of the three activities would be disastrous, not to mention very embarrassing, so she is taking more care than she normally would.

She looks a little mad because she is. But perhaps this is the wrong place to start.