Rhodey hit Tony harder than Tony expected and worse than he deserved.
The fight had started like too many of Tony's recent disasters, with booze, ego, and the stupid belief that a man could insult the people still trying to keep him alive without eventually getting one of them across the face. By the time it ended, furniture was wrecked, the workshop looked like a machine shop had been mugged, and Rhodey was flying out in the Mark II while Tony lay back in the remains of his own evening and called him a traitor and a thief with all the moral authority available to a genius drunk on palladium and self-pity.
Rhodey handed the suit over to Hammer without thinking much about what he was doing, which, to Lucius's future amusement, really was betrayal with extra dipping and a side of vegetables.
Tony, meanwhile, got Coulson in his house, Howard Stark's old material in a box, and just enough of his father's legacy shoved under his nose to force the next step.
Coulson had turned up with the same measured face he always wore when delivering information that would later become Stark's salvation.
"These belonged to your father," he had said, setting the box down. "We thought you should have them."
Tony had not thanked him properly. His life had become a competition between betrayal and nausea. Still, he opened the box.
The Expo plans, the old notes, the buried intent in Howard Stark's work, all of it pushed him onto the road that would eventually end with a new element and a way out of palladium poisoning.
Fury knew opportunity when it sat right in front of him with a half-dead billionaire and a chance to shove SHIELD back into the room.
So he pounced.
Tony had been waiting for Pepper at a restaurant, already irritated by the day and increasingly hungry enough to resent cutlery, when the chair opposite him scraped back, and somebody else sat down.
Tony looked up and found a bald, one-eyed man settling in with the absolute confidence of someone who had long since stopped confusing manners with necessity.
Nicholas Joseph Fury.
Lucius's description had been offensively accurate.
Romanoff stood near the edge of the room, composed and alert. Coulson was there too, still radiating the same polite administrative doom he always did. The last man, broad-shouldered and watchful, nodded once at Tony and took a position slightly off to the side where he could watch the perimeter without pretending to be decorative.
Robin Hood, Tony thought at once.
He wondered whether Hill was somewhere nearby as well, just out of sight and ready to look disapproving at furniture.
Fury, without invitation or shame, reached for something on the table and started eating as though the evening had been arranged for him from the start.
Tony stared.
Then he looked at Romanoff, then Coulson, then back at Fury.
"This is new," he said. "I've stopped doing orgies, and even when I was enjoying them, I don't think your team would have ranked very high."
Coulson looked down with suspicious speed. Barton's mouth moved by a fraction before he flattened it again. Romanoff remained expressionless.
Fury chewed once, swallowed, and ignored the jab with professional contempt.
"I was working on procuring some Light Healing Potions to help offset the effects of your palladium problem." He picked up the water glass as if this were his table now. "Then I remembered the only supplier is the second largest shareholder of your company, and I decided you probably don't have trouble getting a private audience. Maybe I should be asking you to get me access to his new variants instead."
Tony kept his face still.
Lucius's fingerprints were all over the phrasing. The man really had described Fury well enough that Tony could identify him on sight from pettiness alone.
Tony leaned back.
"Excuse me." He looked past Fury as if genuinely confused. "I'm waiting for my girlfriend, and I don't appreciate you taking over her seat."
Fury did not move.
Tony continued anyway.
"And for the record, the group format still isn't improving the atmosphere."
Barton looked away and studied the restaurant wall with great interest. Romanoff's gaze stayed on Tony.
Fury set the glass down.
"I'm here to repair what can be repaired between SHIELD, Stark Industries, and you."
Tony gave him a small, disbelieving smile.
"Well, that's easy." He folded his hands. "All you have to do is tell me you didn't kidnap a friend of mine, didn't run experiments on him, didn't extort him, didn't destroy the only house and car he had left from his parents, and didn't send a hot spy into my company while pretending it was for my own good. We'll be cool as lime."
Romanoff went still in the way dangerous people did when the conversation had stopped being abstract.
Fury's eye hardened.
"The arrest was a bad call."
Tony lifted a brow.
"That is a remarkably soft phrase for kidnapping."
Fury ignored it.
"We did not experiment on him. We ran bloodwork. There is a difference. We compensated him. We apologised. We bought him a new house and cars." He glanced once at Romanoff. "And Agent Romanoff was sent to monitor your health."
Tony blinked twice.
Then his mouth opened by a fraction.
"That bastard," he muttered.
Fury watched him.
Tony looked up again, suddenly far more offended by something personal than by anything SHIELD had just admitted.
"He told me he practically had to beg for those cars. He made it sound like he was on the brink of transport poverty because SHIELD had murdered his beloved Tahoe."
There was a soft, unmistakable sound from Barton.
Tony turned his head towards him.
"You knew?"
Barton raised both hands slightly.
"I knew better than to get involved in a vehicle dispute between you two."
Tony looked back at Fury with real irritation now.
"That manipulative fruit defiler took my collection under false emotional pretences."
Coulson had to clear his throat to hide the smile that almost happened.
Fury, whose patience was already thin enough to read through, slammed one hand onto the table.
The plates rattled.
The restaurant was closed for the evening under Tony's name, which was the only reason the scene still had not become a public incident with waiters.
"We are not the bad guys, Stark." Fury leaned forward. "Your father was one of the founders of SHIELD. We never considered you hostile. I still remember Howard bragging about you to anyone who would stay in the room long enough to hear it. Their deaths weren't only your loss."
Tony's face changed.
Fury saw it and kept going.
"We made a bad call with Noctis. More than one bad call. We corrected what we could. We compensated him. We apologised. Consider that before you buy every last thing that bastard tells you about us."
Tony let the silence sit for a few seconds.
When he answered, the humour had not vanished. It had just retreated enough to show the harder thing underneath.
"The problem with that speech is that some of it sounds true."
Fury did not blink.
Tony drummed two fingers once against the table.
"But here's the issue. You say you made bad calls like they were accounting errors. Lucius says you tried to put a collar on him and called it a procedure. I know which version sounds more honest."
Romanoff spoke for the first time.
"That doesn't mean his version is complete."
Tony turned towards her.
"No? So you did not collar him like an animal?"
The silence was answer enough.
Fury exhaled through his nose. "Then consider our position as well, Stark"
"That's healthy." Tony leaned back again. "See, this is what I'm talking about. You all keep acting like trust should survive contact with bureaucracy."
Fury stood.
Barton shifted weight. Coulson's eyes moved once to the exits and once back to Tony, already predicting where this would go if either man decided pride counted as momentum.
Fury planted both hands on the table and looked down at Tony.
"Noctis is useful to you right now. I understand that. He saved your life. He humiliated some of the people you already didn't trust. He makes products you can buy and problems for people you dislike. I understand all of that."
He straightened.
"But he is not your conscience, and he is not your state. He is a psychotic, unstable, gifted, vindictive bastard with money, influence, and a private grudge against us. You are free to keep him close. Just don't confuse shared enemies with loyalty."
Tony held his stare.
"I don't confuse anything with loyalty. That's why we're having this conversation."
Fury took it, gave one slow nod, and stepped back from the table.
"Enjoy your dinner. Miss Potts should be here in minutes."
Tony looked down at the food Fury had already helped himself to.
"A little late for that."
Fury ignored him and turned away. Romanoff followed immediately. Barton gave Tony another small nod on his way out, the kind one professional sometimes gave another. Coulson was last to move.
He paused beside the table.
"For what it's worth," he said quietly, "Howard Stark really did talk about you a lot; you were his pride. Every person who knew him told me the same thing."
Then he left too.
Tony sat there alone with cooling food, a more complicated view of SHIELD than he had wanted half an hour earlier, and the absolute certainty that Lucius was going to pay for those cars one way or another once Tony got his hands on the bastard.
He took out his phone.
Then stopped.
No. Let the bastard enjoy his temporary victory.
That counted as self-respect.
Or therapy.
He picked up his fork just as Pepper finally arrived, took one look at his face, the disturbed table setting, and the empty chair across from him, and sighed.
"What happened?"
Tony looked up.
"I had dinner with the government. It somehow got worse from there."