Chapter 35: Tony: Any Chance I Can Get Two of Those Tyrant Things?
On Wall Street, a silver extended Rolls-Royce moved slowly through traffic. The bodywork caught the light in a way that stood out even on a street that had no shortage of expensive cars. The escort vehicles front and rear ensured it stood out for other reasons as well.
Inside the car, Happy was driving and not saying anything, which was his default setting. Tony and Pepper were in the middle row. Matthew and Yinsen were in the back.
Pepper was looking at Tony with the expression of someone seeing something they had been afraid they would never see again. The tears had made it down her face before she could do anything about them.
Tony registered this and immediately recognized that bringing Matthew and Yinsen into the car may not have been his most socially calibrated decision.
He aimed for something light. "What, worried about your chronically absent employer?"
Pepper wiped her eyes and found something between a laugh and a still-wet smile. "I just don't want to have to look for a new job."
The mood came down a degree. Tony turned to the front.
"Happy. Take me somewhere with a real cheeseburger. The one Matthew brought me was not authentic."
From the back seat, where he had been resting with his eyes closed, Matthew opened them.
"You should consider yourself fortunate," he said, "that I brought you an inauthentic hamburger rather than authentic large intestine sashimi."
Yinsen, sitting next to him, looked over. "...Large intestine sashimi?"
Matthew raised an eyebrow. "You want to know what that is?"
A pause. "Yes."
Matthew leaned over and provided a thorough and patient explanation of large intestine sashimi directly into Yinsen's ear.
The color on Yinsen's face went somewhere it had not been before. He turned toward Tony and waved him off. "Tony. Have the burger without me. I think my last meal hasn't quite settled yet."
It had settled. He had simply been described something that made settling feel retroactively uncertain.
The old man in Matthew's story was genuinely brave. To actually eat that. The world was a larger and stranger place than Yinsen had previously accounted for.
Happy stopped outside a Burger King.
Per instructions, he went in and came back with seven or eight burgers and several cans of Coke loaded into paper bags. Tony ate with the focused urgency of a man who had spent three months thinking about this exact moment.
Between bites, he spoke to Pepper. "There's one more thing I need to do when we get back."
Pepper looked at him. Then she looked past him at Matthew and Yinsen in the back seat. Her expression went slightly complicated.
"I'm saying." Tony looked at her. "A press conference. I need to call one immediately. Can you organize it?"
"Oh." A brief pause. "Just that?"
"What else would I mean?"
"Nothing. Nothing at all."
Matthew, from the back: nothing.
"Matthew." Tony had been turning this over since the flight. "Those Tyrant things from the operation. Any chance I could get two?"
The impact they had made on him was not something he had been able to put aside. Functionally terrifying, yes. Functionally extraordinary, also yes.
"No."
"At least, not right now." Matthew was direct about it. "The technology isn't mature enough to explain to the parent company, and I don't have enough units to spare. But if you can help us get the underlying tech to a stable and scalable point down the line, I'll give you ten. Not two."
Tony's eyes lit up. "Seriously?"
"Would I mislead you?"
"Deal." No hesitation.
"In the meantime, I can give you one of these again."
Matthew reached into his jacket pocket and produced a matte black card. He held it between two fingers, and with a small flick of the wrist sent it spinning through the cabin.
Tony caught it cleanly.
He looked at it, then at Matthew. "Nice. Teach me that at some point."
"Anytime."
The press conference venue.
Tony walked in with Stane toward the podium. Matthew, Yinsen, and Pepper took positions at the side of the room and watched.
Stane, moving into the lights, swept his gaze across the room and found Matthew standing there.
The assembled smile held, because it had to hold, because there were cameras everywhere and a room full of journalists. But behind the smile, Stane ran a mental accounting that had been accumulating for some time.
His contract offer had been turned down twice. Tony Stark's rescue had apparently been taken on without hesitation. Were his dollars somehow different from Tony Stark's dollars? Was there a category of client whose money Matthew considered acceptable and another category that didn't qualify?
He had been cursed internally in many creative ways over the past weeks. This added to the total.
Matthew watched Stane absorb all of this behind the smile and felt no particular sympathy.
When Stane looked his way, Matthew gave him a small, cheerful wave.
The twitch it produced in Stane's expression was worth the trip.
At the edge of the room, a man in a dark suit with a lanyard and credentials approached Pepper quietly.
"Ms. Potts?"
Pepper turned. "Yes?"
"My name is Phil Coulson. Good to meet you. Is there somewhere we could speak briefly?"
Pepper studied his press credentials and arrived at the obvious conclusion. "I appreciate you making the effort, but I'm afraid I can't help you. I genuinely don't know what's going to be announced today, and the conference is about to start. You'll have the chance to ask questions directly."
"You may have misunderstood." Coulson was patient about it. He produced a business card from his jacket. "I'm not a journalist. I'm from the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division."
Pepper read the card.
"That is quite a name."
"Yes." He said it with the specific quality of someone who had been agreeing with this observation for years. "I've been working on alternatives."
"The Department of Defense, the FBI, and the CIA have all already been in contact. I assume this falls into the same category–"
"It doesn't. Our remit and capabilities are more specific than those agencies." He met her eyes. "I'd like to get a full picture of how Mr. Stark escaped. The details, specifically."
Pepper considered this for a moment, then looked past Coulson to where Matthew was watching the room with mild attention.
"For that, I'd suggest speaking with Matthew Lawrence. He's the reason Tony made it out at all."
Matthew, hearing his name, made an immediate and practiced pivot.
High-profile moment, cameras in the room. Low profile was better.
"I think Ms. Potts may be overstating my contribution," he said pleasantly. "Tony escaped through his own considerable ingenuity and a remarkable little invention he put together under the circumstances. Umbrella provided some minor security support. The credit belongs to Mr. Stark."
Coulson's attention shifted back to Pepper.
Pepper exhaled quietly. "I'll make a note of your questions, Agent Coulson. We can speak after. For now, the conference is starting."
She turned toward the podium.