Chapter 104: Oh, So You Get to Call for Backup
Tony ran the numbers one more time and didn't like the results.
Right leg damaged. Energy at sub-twenty percent. Three opponents with complementary skill sets — Rogers providing the physical pressure, Barton controlling the angles with arrow suppression, Romanoff filling every gap the other two created. He'd been handling Rogers alone fine. Rogers plus two was a different problem.
"JARVIS. Status."
"Right leg assembly compromised, sir. Energy reserves at eighteen percent. Projected combat duration at current engagement intensity: four minutes before flight capability is lost. Probability of successful mission completion: less than one percent."
Tony ducked an arrow that had been aimed exactly where he was going to dodge to, which was unsettling.
"And the probability of withdrawal?"
"Fifty percent. Recommend immediate disengagement."
Tony did not disengage. He fired instead, adjusted trajectory, took a hit from the shield that he'd been half-expecting, and held the ground anyway.
The math was simple and bad. If he retreated now without the body, SHIELD would move it somewhere he couldn't find it. If he waited, Tony suspected Fury's people were already running contingency scenarios that involved a much more permanent solution to the evidence problem. A man like Fury had spent his career making things that were inconvenient for powerful people quietly disappear.
"JARVIS," he said. "Any other options."
A pause.
"One option with one hundred percent projected success rate, sir."
Tony's heart lifted slightly. "Tell me."
No answer.
Instead, from somewhere in the suit's communications array: Dialing Ethan Cross.
"JARVIS. JARVIS, hang up."
Ringing.
"JARVIS—"
He managed to terminate the call himself before the second ring.
He stood with that for half a second. His AI, which he had built from the ground up, which reflected his own priorities back at him in algorithmic form, had just offered exactly one path to success and it wasn't fire more missiles.
It was call the man who already solved your parents' murder, who already killed the person responsible, who is objectively better at this than you.
The answer was no.
The answer was no because Tony Stark did not show up to a problem with borrowed firepower. Because Ethan had already given him the truth and given him the outcome and Tony had contributed losing a fight in a parking lot. Because there was a version of this that ended with him walking up to his parents' graves having done something, and that version required him to be sufficient on his own.
He closed the call for good and went back to fighting.
It took another three minutes.
The suit's right leg gave out first — the joint locking at the wrong angle, forcing him to compensate on the left, which Romanoff immediately exploited. The shield caught him in the chest a second later, Rogers reading the compensation precisely, and the energy reserves hit zero somewhere during the descent.
Tony hit the pavement.
The suit powered down around him with the specific sounds of expensive technology failing in sequence.
He lay there for a moment, breathing, and listened to the suit's final diagnostic running out.
From nearby, Coulson's voice: "I think that's Iron Man down, sir."
Fury's voice, somewhere further back: "Their coordination still needs work."
Tony closed his eyes briefly.
He could feel the grief trying to work its way back up through the gap that the fight had temporarily filled. The specific image of the SHIELD archive footage. The highway. November.
He hit the ground with one fist, not hard — the suit's glove absorbed it — but the gesture helped.
Steve Rogers appeared at the edge of his vision, standing over him. His uniform was worse for wear. He looked at Tony with an expression that was complicated enough that Tony couldn't immediately categorize it.
"Looks like you're not getting Bucky," Steve said.
"Yeah," Tony said, from the ground. "I can see that."
Something cracked open behind his eyes. He didn't mean for it to. He was in public, in front of SHIELD agents and Avengers and a man he'd been trying to fight and Fury watching from the entrance, and Tony Stark did not cry in front of witnesses.
But the footage was still running in the back of his mind, and the math of twenty-five years kept recurring, and the body that contained the last piece of evidence he needed to close the loop was inside a building he'd just failed to break into.
He hit the ground again.
Come on, he thought. You're Tony Stark. Figure it out.
Something changed in the air.
Not metaphorically — a physical change, a localized distortion, a warm light that shouldn't have been there appearing about six feet in front of him. The SHIELD agents who had been cautiously approaching stopped. Clint's hand went to an arrow he hadn't drawn yet.
A portal opened.
A sling ring portal, to be specific — golden sparks, circular aperture, the Ancient One's design translated into a Sling Ring Ethan had been given and had, apparently, learned to use on the return trip.
And Ethan Cross stepped through it in a pair of jeans and a jacket, portal closing behind him, looking at Tony the way you look at a friend who has made a mess you'd specifically said not to make.
"Huh," Ethan said. "The floor comfortable?"
Tony stared up at him.
Natasha and Clint exchanged a look across the plaza — the specific look of two professionals who had just seen their situation reclassify itself.
Tony sat up. The suit's joints protested. He ignored them.
He felt, in sequence: relief, which arrived before he'd consciously formed the thought. Then embarrassment, the particular kind that came from someone arriving exactly when you'd needed them and had spent twenty minutes refusing to call. Then the question — how did you know?
"How did you—" He stopped. Started over. "You hung up when I called."
"JARVIS called," Ethan said. "I let it ring once and then I tracked the signature."
Tony processed this. "JARVIS called me back?"
"JARVIS," Ethan said, "is smarter than you're giving him credit for."
Tony looked at the suit. The suit, powerless, did not respond.
"How did you find me," Tony said flatly.
"Your father's building," Ethan said. "Where else would you go to do something dramatic and self-destructive involving his legacy." He looked at Tony with the expression of someone who had done a great deal of research into Tony Stark over a long period of time and had been correct about most of it. "You okay?"
"No," Tony said.
"Yeah," Ethan said. "I know."
He looked up from Tony, and the expression shifted — still relaxed, still holding the casual register, but something underneath it that was paying careful attention to the distribution of people around the plaza.
Rogers. Romanoff. Barton. Coulson. Fury in the entrance.
And Fury, looking back at him.
"Director," Ethan said pleasantly.
Fury looked at him for a long moment.
"Cross," he said.
"I'm going to help my friend up," Ethan said. "And then we're going to have a conversation about the body. I think there's an arrangement that works for everyone. If you're interested."
Fury's eye didn't move.
"I'm listening," he said.
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