"Nick Fury, you mentioned Batman to me before. I want to talk about him."
Inside a seaside villa in California, Tony Stark lounged in a specially made zero-gravity chair, speaking to the image of S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Nick Fury on the screen in front of him.
On the screen, Nick Fury smiled like an old fox who had long anticipated that Tony Stark would bring this up.
"Oh? You want to talk about that? No problem at all—but in exchange for the intel, I'm going to need one of your suits."
Tony was about to bristle, then instantly remembered that he had never told a single soul he was the one wearing the Mark III and flying around as "Iron Man." Fury was bluffing him.
Tony recovered in a split second and put on an expression that said classified was classified.
"Fury, the armor does technically belong to Stark Industries, but there's only one suit right now, and it's currently being worn by my personal bodyguard. Unless S.H.I.E.L.D. wants to become my personal bodyguard, the suit isn't available."
Nick Fury regarded Tony with his one good eye, casually reached off-screen, pulled out a cigar, and lit it.
As Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., Fury had sent Agent Phil Coulson to find out exactly how Tony escaped the Middle East the moment he returned to New York.
Coulson's repeated attempts to schedule a meeting with Stark had failed, but S.H.I.E.L.D.'s intelligence network had still managed to piece together some useful facts.
For example: Tony had built a suit of powered armor in a cave and used it to escape.
For example: the prototype for the Iron Monger that Obadiah Stane piloted the other night was based on Tony's armor.
And for example: the second armored figure who fought Stane's Iron Monger at the Ajax Security plant was, with extremely high probability, Tony Stark himself.
But Nick Fury had no intention of calling Tony out directly. Instead, he wrote a blank check.
"Tony, I told you before—S.H.I.E.L.D. urgently needs cutting-edge weapons to protect the world and keep powerful individuals like Batman from running around unchecked."
"If you're willing to hand over the armor… no, I don't even need the whole thing. Just a portion of the technology—like the repulsor beam tech your 'personal bodyguard' uses—if you share that with S.H.I.E.L.D., I can get you in on the Tesseract research."
Fury knew Tony would bite. After all, the Tesseract was deeply tied to his father, Howard Stark.
From the moment it was recovered from the Arctic, Howard Stark had been one of the core researchers on the Tesseract project. His work on its energy had directly inspired the arc reactor theory beneath Stark Tower.
And years later, Tony had turned that theory into reality with a miniat Spear-sized reactor that let him escape that cave in the Middle East.
Even now, one of Howard Stark's old notebooks was still sitting in a S.H.I.E.L.D. vault.
Fury puffed on his cigar. Tony smacked his lips at the sight—he didn't share the cigar habit—turned to the bar, and poured himself a drink.
He took a small sip, made a soft "ahh," and faint worry lines appeared on his forehead.
He stayed quiet, just drinking while Fury talked.
"You decided to stop making weapons. On a personal level, I respect that. From the perspective of the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., I'm deeply disappointed."
Unlike the brooding, tight-lipped Batman, Nick Fury could talk until the cows came home.
"Since you're asking me about Batman, I assume you also see him as a potential threat. Short of deploying an entire army, in an urban environment he's a permanent Sword of Damocles hanging over everyone's heads."
"Realistically speaking, your 'personal bodyguard' Iron Man—aside from flight—is completely outmatched by Batman. If he ever set his sights on you, who besides S.H.I.E.L.D. do you think could stop him?"
"Besides, Batman isn't—"
Maybe it was because S.H.I.E.L.D. had a lot of Black agents, but Fury was starting to sound like he was about to drop a rap verse. Tony's head began to throb. He hurriedly cut in.
"Stop, stop, stop. I can give S.H.I.E.L.D. some tech—non-weapon tech."
"In exchange, you give me everything S.H.I.E.L.D. has on Batman."
That was exactly what Fury had been waiting to hear. He scratched his graying temple with the hand holding the cigar and grinned like a fox who'd just raided the henhouse.
"I'll have a plane pick you up tomorrow and bring you out to sea."
Click.
Fury ended the video call the instant the words left his mouth, leaving Tony frozen in place with a half-finished glass of scotch.
Somewhere over the ocean, aboard the Helicarrier.
S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Black Widow—Natasha Romanoff—watched Fury chuckle coldly after hanging up, flicked her wine-red curls off her shoulder, and asked,
"Are you sure you want to bring that playboy here? Onto what is arguably one of the most classified locations on the planet?"
"Never question me, Widow," Nick Fury replied.
With eighty percent certainty that Iron Man was Tony Stark, and given Howard Stark's deep history with S.H.I.E.L.D., Fury knew he had to reel this guy in.
Even if he couldn't get the core secrets of the iron suit, having Tony Stark—the notorious playboy and universally acknowledged genius engineer—provide S.H.I.E.L.D. with things like flight systems or power sources would already be worth it.
And sharing the Batman files with Tony Stark cost him nothing. On the contrary, it would subconsciously put Tony on the same side as S.H.I.E.L.D. in his mind.
Somewhere in Wyoming, inside the Cube prison.
The scientific team tasked with analyzing Tesseract data had been losing hair by the handful these past few days, yet they still couldn't figure out where the problem was.
"Even the most basic data sets are wrong—never mind trying to build weapons from the Tesseract," a middle-aged man with an incongruously thick head of short hair grumbled, rubbing his eyes.
Agent 19, the bionic Mockingbird Barbara "Bobbi" Morse, sat chewing gum in a chair, by far the most relaxed person in the hidden lab buried inside the Cube.
She had heard the science team complain dozens of times these past few days that someone had tampered with the Tesseract data.
Especially the gamma radiation parameters—even the older, already-documented values S.H.I.E.L.D. had on file had been altered beyond recognition, never mind the newest research from the heavily guarded Adirondack facility.
Stealing data from that mountain base had been nearly impossible; it had only succeeded because Black Widow and Hydra agents worked together to physically courier the information here.
And it was still corrupted.
Under these circumstances, building weapons based on the Tesseract was indefinitely delayed. They would have to wait for the next successful data theft—at least another year or two.
Yet Nick Fury was demanding functional weapons within the next few months. An impossible task.
Unless they could locate that gamma radiation expert—Doctor Banner.