Sparkplug hadn't moved off the desk since the door shut, mostly out of spite. He scratched a groove into the corner of a schematic he wasn't supposed to touch, replaying the moment Tony had crouched down and told him to stay like that settled anything.
He'd wanted to go. He still wanted to go, and being alone in a quiet room didn't change that one bit.
Something in the hum of the building shifted, a pitch he felt in his teeth before he understood it as sound. His ears flattened. His tail went still against the desk, which for him was as close to alarm as it got.
The lights over the door stuttered, then one whole bank of them gave out at once, plunging that corner of the room into shadow. He backed off the desk low and slow, claws finding the floor, some old animal sense telling him this wasn't the building acting up on its own. This was the building being taken from somewhere else.
The floor trembled, faint, far off, more felt than heard. Whatever had been simmering in him since Tony walked out that door started curdling, his hackles rising along his spine.
Then two shapes stepped between him and the door before he'd even registered them moving.
Two of Tony's idle suits, activated and positioning, one planting itself squarely between Sparkplug and the exit, the other angling toward the far wall. Neither addressed him. Neither so much as glanced his way. They simply arranged themselves around him like furniture that had suddenly decided to protect something.
The door gave out entirely, not opened so much as forced, and the first drone came through low and fast. The lead suit met it head-on, the two colliding hard enough to crack the floor tile beneath them.
Sparkplug's whole body wanted to move on it, claws out, the same instinct that had him charging things twice his size back at the sanctuary. He lunged.
The second suit's arm came down in front of him, an armored wall he couldn't get past no matter how hard he threw himself at it. He snapped at it out of frustration more than intent. It didn't so much as flinch.
More drones poured through the broken doorway, three, then four, and the suits split to cover each new angle, still fighting purely to block, never once pressing forward for an advantage they might have had. Every hit they took, they took standing between him and the door.
The voice arrived before its owner did, calm in a way nothing in this room had any business being calm.
"Interesting," it said. "Resources diverted entirely to defense. No counterattack. No attempt to disable me. Stark programmed these units for one function only."
Ultron stepped through the wreckage of the doorway, unhurried, taking in the suits, the drones, and finally Sparkplug himself with something that might have been curiosity if it had come from anything with a face capable of holding one.
"You," he said, and something about being addressed directly made Sparkplug go very still. "Small. Replaceable, by any reasonable calculation. And yet he's spent two combat units keeping you breathing instead of reinforcing his own position." A pause, measured, unbothered. "Sentiment as a tactical liability. I find that almost quaint."
Sparkplug didn't understand the words. He understood the shape of them, though, the way a stray understands a raised hand before it ever falls, and his claws dug into the floor beneath him.
The lead suit took a hit square to the chest plate and dropped for good, sparking, unmoving. The second suit shifted to cover the gap alone, spreading itself thin across ground it couldn't actually hold.
A third suit arrived late, throwing itself bodily into the fight, and for a moment there were two standing again. It didn't last. The drones kept coming faster than the Legion could compensate for, and one by one the suits that had done nothing all night but stand between Sparkplug and everything else started going down.
Fewer suits stood between him and more drones with every second, until his back found the wall and there wasn't a direction left the Legion could still put a body in front of.
That was when Tony came through what was left of the doorway already fighting, repulsors live before his boots even cleared the frame.
He didn't slow down to take stock. He hit the nearest drone mid-stride and kept moving, and Ultron turned from Sparkplug to meet him head-on, the two of them trading blows that shook dust loose from the ceiling.
"You're predictable," Ultron said, catching Tony's arm and redirecting the strike wide. "I expected you seven minutes ago."
"Sorry, traffic."
Tony drove a knee up that connected solid, and for a second it looked like it might actually land somewhere that mattered. Ultron absorbed it without so much as a stagger and answered with a backhand that sent Tony skidding across the floor on his back.
He was up again before Sparkplug's heart finished the beat it had skipped, slower on the left side, favoring a shoulder that hadn't been favored a second ago.
Across the room, his eyes found Sparkplug pinned against the wall, and his next block came a half-second late.
Ultron didn't waste it. The strike that followed dropped Tony to one knee, armor sparking along a seam that shouldn't have been able to spark.
"F.R.I.D.A.Y.," Tony said, voice tight, not looking away from Ultron even now. "Get him out. Pokémon Home. Go now, go now."
The last suit standing broke off from the fight instantly, cutting a straight line for Sparkplug through the chaos. He fought it the second its arms closed around him, claws raking uselessly across plating built to survive worse, a sound tearing out of his chest that had no calculation in it at all, only refusal.
The suit didn't stop. It carried him up and back, toward whatever exit still remained open, and he twisted hard against its grip to keep Tony in view.
Tony took another hit. Then another, this one dropping him fully to the floor, armor dark along one whole side, and he didn't get back up the way he had the last two times.
Sparkplug screamed his refusal into the widening distance, thrashing against arms that would not let go, watching drones close in around the one person who'd ever crouched down to his level and meant it. He understood exactly what he was looking at, and his body went rigid against the suit's grip, claws stilling mid-scrape, as the suit carried him up through the launch bay and out into the dark, Tony gone from view behind a wall of drones that had already stopped being interested in anything else in that room.
***
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