Chapter 105: Tony's Greatest Superpower Is Being Rich
The story, properly told, started with Tony saying hang up, JARVIS and JARVIS deciding that this instruction, weighed against available mission data, was suboptimal.
JARVIS had not been built to be suboptimal.
Ethan was drinking tea.
This was, in the grand scheme of his recent weeks, a rare and underappreciated activity. He had been to a parallel universe, fought multiple interdimensional villains, recruited a physicist from another timeline, given a retired crime lord superpowers, had a conversation with HYDRA about supply chains for transformation equipment that he had made up on the spot, and was now, finally, sitting quietly in his restaurant with tea.
His phone rang.
Unknown number.
Ethan looked at it. Looked at his tea. The tea was better than whatever the phone was.
He declined the call.
The phone rang again.
He declined it again.
It rang a third time.
These people, he thought, with the specific irritation of a man who considered messaging to be the correct mode of communication and found phone calls presumptuous. He declined it. It rang again before he'd set the phone down.
On the fifth attempt, his phone did something phones are not supposed to do — it answered itself.
Ethan stared at it.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Cross." A measured voice, clearly synthetic, clearly expensive. "My name is JARVIS. I apologize for the persistence. I've taken temporary control of your device because Mr. Stark declined to call you himself and the situation has reached a point where I've assessed external assistance as necessary."
Ethan processed this.
"Is this a scam," he said.
"I understand why you might think so. The method is unusual. I can provide verification—"
"What does a scam AI do when you ask if it's a scam?"
"Says no," JARVIS said. "Which I'm also saying. However, I've taken the liberty of transferring one hundred million dollars to your account as a good-faith demonstration. The bank confirmation should arrive in approximately—"
Ethan's phone buzzed. He pulled up his banking app. Read the number. Read it again.
He set the tea down.
"Where is he," Ethan said.
JARVIS released his phone's systems and sent him the coordinates, and Ethan stood in his kitchen doing the mental arithmetic of one hundred million dollars, thirty-minute flight by conventional means, immediate portal availability.
He also thought about the Space Stone.
Fury had it. Fury had been sitting on it since before any of this started. Ethan had been meaning to have that conversation for several months and had been consistently interrupted by other things. He was now being handed a reason to walk into SHIELD headquarters with his credentials already established, and it would be genuinely inefficient not to handle two things at once.
Tony, he thought, your AI is smarter than you.
He opened the Sling Ring.
On the plaza, Tony was on the ground and Natasha and Clint were approaching to collect him, and then the air did the thing it does when a portal opens, and everyone stopped.
Ethan stepped through.
He surveyed the scene with the unhurried attention of a man who had arrived somewhere after the violence was already over and was assessing the aftermath. Cracked pavement. A car that had participated unwillingly. Tony in a suit that looked like it had been used as a punching bag from the inside and outside simultaneously.
"Huh," Ethan said. "Floor comfortable?"
Tony sat up. Something happened in his face — relief, then the slightly pained expression of someone who'd been found in a situation they'd specifically been trying to avoid requiring help with.
"You came," Tony said.
"Your AI paid me," Ethan said. "Let's be clear about that."
Tony blinked.
"How much did it—" He stopped. The specific calculation ran across his face. "That's why you're being so nice about this."
"I helped you up and fixed your hair," Ethan said. "I also answered an unknown number five times, which is above and beyond."
He looked at the assembled SHIELD personnel maintaining their perimeter, then at Fury in the entrance, then at Steve Rogers walking toward him with the deliberate pace of someone who had decided a conversation was necessary.
Tony grabbed his sleeve.
"The body," Tony said, quietly. "Bucky. I need it. That's why I'm here."
Ethan looked at him. Read the expression carefully — not the urgency, but the thing underneath it, the thing that was making the urgency necessary.
"I know," Ethan said.
He turned toward Steve.
Steve stopped about six feet away. He was doing his own assessment — the portal, the reaction of SHIELD's agents, the way Natasha and Clint had both stopped moving and were watching rather than engaging.
"I don't know you," Steve said.
"No," Ethan agreed. "But you've heard of me."
The flicker of confirmation in Steve's expression was small but present.
"My friend's body is inside this building," Steve said. "And you're here to take it."
"I'm here because Tony called me," Ethan said. "Which he didn't do directly because he has opinions about asking for help, but here we are." He glanced at Tony. Tony looked at the middle distance. "What Tony needs from Bucky's body is evidence. The arm's systems, the neural conditioning records — there's information in there about an organization that has been running assets for fifty years inside SHIELD. The same organization that sent the Winter Soldier to try to kidnap people I care about, two nights ago."
Steve was very still.
"The same organization," Ethan continued, "that pointed Fury at Fisk and made sure the footage was delivered without context, so that the person who watched it would come away thinking the right answer was to go to Hell's Kitchen looking for a fight."
A long pause.
"You're saying someone used me," Steve said.
"I'm saying someone used the footage. The anger was yours. The grief was real." Ethan's voice was even. "But the direction you were pointed in — that part was arranged."
Fury had walked out from the entrance and was now standing at the edge of the conversation. He didn't interrupt. He was listening with the quality of a man who was learning something he'd suspected but hadn't confirmed.
"Who," Steve said.
"Pierce," Ethan said. "Secretary Alexander Pierce. He's HYDRA. He's been in SHIELD for twenty years. He used your friend as a weapon, and when the weapon became inconvenient, he arranged for it to get killed in a way that redirected the reaction toward me." He paused. "Your friend was not a bad person. He was a person who was made into a tool for fifty years and died still being used as one."
Steve's jaw worked.
He looked at Tony. Tony was watching him, the urgency still there, but waiting.
"The body," Steve said. "What do you do with it."
"Tony builds a case," Ethan said. "Evidence of HYDRA's operations. Who gave orders. Who knew. What they've been running inside this building." He looked at Fury directly. "Which some people in this vicinity will find inconvenient."
Fury met his gaze.
"Twelve hours," Fury said. "Same offer as before."
"Twenty-four," Ethan said.
"Fifteen."
"Twenty."
"Eighteen," Fury said, with the air of a man who had decided this was a reasonable midpoint.
"Done," Ethan said.
He looked at Steve.
"You should come," Ethan said. "You have a right to be there when it's opened. And there are things you're going to learn that you're going to want to learn from Tony instead of from a report."
Steve looked at him for a long moment.
"Why are you telling me this," he said.
"Because you're not the problem," Ethan said. "Pierce is. And HYDRA is. And I'd rather we both point at the same thing than spend the next month pointing at each other."
The plaza was very quiet.
Then Steve Rogers said: "Okay."
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