"I heard you've been meddling with Hammer Industries," Stark said, his tone casual but with a glint in his eye. He looked at Daniel over the rim of his glass, a half-smile playing on his lips.
Daniel paused mid-sip of juice and raised an eyebrow. "You don't seem too upset about that."
Stark gave a dismissive shrug. "Justin Hammer? Please. The guy's a walking disaster. As for Hammer Industries making a comeback? Not with the wolves circling. Let's just say they'll be lucky to survive the month."
Hammer Industries had collapsed overnight. Just days before, they'd been positioning themselves for a massive expansion—leveraging bank loans, acquiring bulk materials, and stocking up for what was supposed to be a game-changing leap in the weapons market. Then everything imploded.
The stock tanked. Executives jumped ship. Supplies vanished. Vendors were camped outside their HQ, demanding payment. And the company's internal systems were hemorrhaging—assets stolen, records wiped, and staff looting whatever they could before the ship went down.
The only thing that kept the company from full liquidation was that Justin Hammer hadn't yet been convicted, and his daughter, Justina, had taken swift control of key finances and infrastructure.
A recent injection of emergency capital kept payroll running... barely. But with morale shattered and theft rampant, the company was more a corpse than a business.
Worse yet, opportunists were watching—circling like vultures. The assembly lines, land, buildings, and even patents were still valuable. All it would take was a well-timed strike to break the company apart and feed on the scraps.
Daniel had simply moved first.
"You're not wrong," Daniel admitted. "They're finished. I told them to file for bankruptcy weeks ago. Better to cut their losses than pretend there's hope. I didn't step in to save them. I just needed some of their equipment for a project of my own. After that, what happens to them is their problem."
For all Hammer Industries' failures in high-tech innovation, they'd built a robust low-end production infrastructure—cheap, fast, and scalable. It was enough to be useful, at least for someone like Daniel who knew how to extract value from what others discarded. As long as someone competent managed the operation, the remnants of the company could limp on.
But Justina Hammer was no strategist.
Still, Daniel was keeping the scavengers at bay—for now.
Stark saw the logic. Hammer had amassed a treasure trove of supplies while trying to outbuild him in the armored suit race. That alone made them worth mining. And Daniel clearly had something ambitious in mind.
"A magical device?" Stark's curiosity piqued. "If that's what you're building… any chance you'd be open to partnering with Stark Industries?"
His eyes gleamed. Ever since witnessing Thor's command of lightning, Stark had been obsessed with the idea of blending magic and tech into a new kind of armor. But he'd hit wall after wall.
Despite his vast network—mutants in Westchester, witches in Boston, even tenuous contacts in Kamar-Taj—no one wanted to help build a "magic-powered Iron Man suit." Understandably so. Most saw it as a weapon designed against them.
They didn't need his money. Or his fame. And the few things Stark could offer… well, those weren't things he was willing to part with.
Daniel had sensed Stark's intentions as early as their encounter in the New Mexico desert. He gave him a wry smile. "Cooperation's possible. But only if my deal with Nick Fury goes through. If that happens, you can come talk to me."
"Fair enough…" Stark said, catching the implication immediately. But rather than deny it, he leaned in with unflinching honesty. "You know as well as I do—this world's changing. Mutants, augmented humans, tech criminals… and now gods from Norse mythology. We need to be ready."
"Loki," Daniel muttered, unconcerned about Stark's motives now. The mention of the trickster god made him grimace. Stark, after all, had nearly fallen to Loki's control during the Chitauri invasion. If not for the Arc Reactor embedded in his chest, things might've ended very differently.
"Loki's beyond us," Daniel said. "If you ever find yourself facing him without a suit, run. And as for countering him with magic? Forget it. He's royalty. I'm working off scraps of Asgardian sorcery—he's had centuries to master it. I'd probably be controlled the moment I stepped within range."
The idea of being controlled made Stark wince. Even if he built a perfect magical suit, the risk was clear—Loki could twist it into a prison, trapping Stark inside his own creation.
"Then I hope your deal with Fury goes through," Stark said, swirling his champagne. "Because I'd rather have a slim chance than no chance."
"It's not a partnership," Daniel said firmly. "It's a transaction. I'll redraw the rune circle from New Mexico. That's it. Whether it works or not is not my responsibility. Once it's done, I'm out."
"You really think it won't work," Stark said slyly.
Daniel glanced over. "Do you know who guards the Bifrost?"
"Heimdall," Stark said immediately.
"Right. He's not a gatekeeper. He's Asgard's firewall. Imagine trying to hack into your own system—while you're sitting at the keyboard, running every defense protocol imaginable. That's what trying to sneak into Asgard is like."
Stark chuckled. It was an apt metaphor... blunt but accurate. As one of the world's top engineers and hackers, he knew how hard it was to breach a system run by someone who wanted to keep you out. With Heimdall watching, they'd never even get close to opening the lock—let alone turning it.
"But there's still a sliver of hope," he said, downing the last of his drink and refilling his glass.
Then he changed the subject.
"I heard you've run into some trouble lately."
"Nothing major," Daniel replied with a shrug. "I just have to play by the rules here in New York. The spotlight's on me, and that limits how I can operate. I've already found Kingpin's base. He's not a threat."
Stark nodded. Even with Wilson Fisk controlling much of the city's underworld, neither he nor Daniel saw him as a real challenge. The issue wasn't defeating Kingpin—it was dealing with the politics afterward.
The government had made its stance clear: it would rather leave monsters like Fisk in place than allow anonymous superheroes to take unilateral action. Not because they couldn't beat criminals, but because vigilantes threatened control.
So Stark had learned to play the game—hiding behind philanthropy, carefully managing his public image. He was Iron Man, but he knew when to act and when to abstain.
He paused, glanced at Manhattan through the glass, then turned to Daniel with a quieter tone.
"I've been meaning to ask you something."
Daniel looked at him curiously.
"Do you think… this thing in my chest—can it be completely fixed?"
Stark tapped his chest lightly, right over the Arc Reactor embedded where his heart used to be.
Daniel's brow furrowed. "Are you feeling something? Any pain?"
He couldn't afford to assume. Stark's health had once been in real jeopardy—the palladium core that powered his suit was poisoning him slowly. Even after replacing it with a new element based on the Tesseract, the psychological trauma had lingered.
That period of decline had driven Stark to recklessness. He'd handed off a suit to Colonel Rhodes, allowing the creation of the Iron Patriot. All to buy himself time.
Later, his successful discovery of a stable, non-toxic reactor had seemed to solve everything. But now, clearly, something was nagging at him.
"No," Stark said, "it's not pain. I proposed to Pepper. We're planning to get married next year. I just want to be sure… that I'm not carrying any danger into that next chapter. I want it gone. For good. So I figured—maybe there's something magic can do."
Daniel paused and shouted, "Wait. Married? You're serious?"
Stark grinned, enjoying his reaction and replied, "Dead serious."
Daniel shook his head in disbelief. Of all the twists and turns he'd seen in this strange new world—gods, monsters, secret weapons—the idea of Tony Stark getting married might've been the most unexpected.
Then again, it made sense. After the Ivan Vanko incident, Stark had proposed to Pepper. A wedding a year or two later was entirely plausible. It just never came up again—probably derailed by the chaos that followed: aliens, invasions, superpowered civil wars.
It figured that somewhere along the line, the universe had simply forgotten about Tony Stark's happily ever after.
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