CHAPTER 30 - REASONS WHY I

[General POV]

Five people were currently sitting around a large table with varying expressions dancing around on their faces. 

Pietro just didn't know why he was there in the first place so he appeared relatively relaxed. And as if mirroring her brother, Wanda was currently swiping through images on the holographic table before her, her fa e as nonchalant as it could be. 

Sam appeared frozen with shock and disbelief on his face as if he was yet to process what had just been said. 

No one knew what Natasha was thinking as her face had nothing except trained calmness as she lightly tapped the table to a rhythm in her head. 

Steve's face, on the other hand, was going through a rollercoaster of expressions. Shock, disbelief, uncertainty, understanding and sometimes relief. 

How could he not react like that when Fury himself had called them before they got to their destination and told them that General Ross was just found dead in his base in Nevada. 

And guess who just went to a military base in Nevada? Bingo! 

They promptly made a U-turn back to base all the while trying to get to Vision to figure out what happened but they couldn't get through, not even Stark could get through to Vision. 

Stark was already making his way here while they waited for Vision to hopefully return from wherever he was. 

"He still isn't back yet?" They all raised their heads to see Tony walking into the room at a leisurely pace. 

Seeing the expressions on their faces, he arrived at an intellectual conclusion. "I guess not." He said as he took his seat and then noticed how differently the twin were behaving. 

"What's up with them?" He asked pointing at them which made the others look at the two of them and see how calm they appeared. 

"Do you both know anything?" Sam asked since he'd thought they would at least be affected by Vision's disappearance given that they spent the most time with the thing? Man? Dude? 

Pietro shook his head as he shrugged and then turned to look at Wanda who finally noticed that the whole room was now focused on her. 

"Oh, Vision? You don't have to worry, he's in the Compound, don't know where though." She said lightly before resuming skimming through whatever image it was that she was looking at. 

"And how do you know that?" Natasha leaned a bit further and asked. 

"I can feel him." She said absent-mindedly, eyes still on the screen. As if knowing what they were thinking, she continued. "I don't know how or why, might be because of whatever that Mind Stone is, but I can somehow sense when he's nearby. At least when he's not actively hiding himself."

She finally looked up just in time to see the doors open as Vision in his human guise walked in. 

"Quite a communion this is." He said lightly, not at all affected by the looks of curiosity he was being showered in. 

"I think the correct word there should be 'commotion'." Tony snorted. 

All seated, they patiently waited for Vision to speak but it seemed the person in question wasn't going to humor them so Steve had to break the ice. 

"We heard Ross was dead. What happened there?" Though he trusted Vision, at least to a certain extent, he couldn't say he understood his thought process. How could he when Stark and Banner couldn't? 

There was not a single shift in Vision's person and the question he already expected. 

He looked at Steve and answered fluently in his bland and slightly robotic voice. "I killed Ross and the two scientists who were with him."

"Why?" This time it was Tony who asked. He was the only one who could say with a degree of assuredness that he had a little level of understanding on how Vision thought since the latter was partly made up of Jarvis' codes. 

The only reason he was this calm was because of that belief he had not that he cared about the old general's death. He was sure that if Vision killed Ross, then something happened there that prompted such a response… and he was correct. But just not the way he wanted. 

Instead of answering, holographic images popped up and a series of gasps followed after they skimmed through the surface of the content presented before them. 

Out of all of them present, surprisingly it was Pietro who was mostly affected as his eyes glanced through everything in front of him at a speed nobody here could read with. 

"… Is this.." He couldn't finish his words as Vision completed it for him. 

"Human experiment.. No, that's wrong. Mutant experiments." He said coolly in an even tone that betrayed no emotion. 

Tony stood up from his seat as his entire focus was successfully stolen by the pixelated display, leaving Steve to ask Vision to expand on what they were all seeing. 

"It's exactly what you are looking at, no filters." Ross and his accomplices' images were alighted. "Your government was secretly greenlighting illegal, inhumane, experiments."

Steve's eyes wavered as Vision bluntly said what he dreaded. 

While he wasn't as intellectually smart like people like Tony and Bruce, he wasn't in any way ignorant or naïve. He only tried to believe that there was good in everyone and sometimes he was right and most times wrong. 

Oh, he knew his country's government couldn't be trusted since the very first day he joined the army but he at least believed things like these were done by those who had given up what made them human. 

"This…" Tony's surprised voice drew back their attention to the files floating around. "How real is this?"

Everyone soon realized what he was saying as they saw pictures and statistical analysis of Bruce Banner and what could possibly be his DNA signature. 

"Ross never gave up on creating his Hulk army… not even after the disaster he inadvertently caused in Harlem." Vision explained. 

Everyone held on to their breaths as he simplified what they wanted to achieve and the current highlight of the experiments before he stepped in. 

"But why mutants?" Natasha who had been silent since the beginning finally asked as it confused her a little bit. 

"Because the active X-gene in mutants have a higher chance of being fully accommodating of the induced mutation and the grafting procedure." He then added after a slight pause. "None have been successful so far."

Tony went back and slumped into his chair while the rest were simply too stunned to know how to properly react. 

"What now?" Sam asked, still not knowing how he felt about all this. 

"This is no longer about the Accords anymore." Natasha commented. 

"No, it's not. Admittedly only a few people in power know about this. They are so small that you can't even consider them a minority but that's not what this is about. The amount of pull something like this will have upon actualization is enough to change the current society into a dystopian rule." 

As Vision spoke, a few random faces and files popped up for everyone to view. 

"Something like this makes the Avengers and the very notion of it look incredibly stupid and hypocritical. Supposed to protect the earth from outer threats? And then what? Leave the inside to rot and contort into the most revolting yet neatly packaged ball of shit?" None of them could say a word to either refute or defend against his words. What could they say? There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this? 

Even if this was a secretive approved program, it still showed how little they cared when innocents were involved. 

They knew. They had all experienced this firsthand when the Council decided to bomb the island of Manhattan even though they were fighting against an alien invasion and millions were in the city. 

It wasn't as if dropping a missile on the city would solve everything, it might delay the invasion a bit but it wouldn't have stopped it in any way. 

"And yet you wonder why Ultron wanted to destroy the world."

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