Chapter 113: Matthew Broke Tony
Half an hour later.
Outside the workshop building.
Matthew and Tony were sitting side by side on a bench at the roadside, each holding a burger and a Coke.
The food was the same. The expressions were not.
Matthew looked relaxed and entirely at ease, occasionally glancing at the birds moving across the sky and the shapes of the clouds, with the general bearing of someone who found the world a pleasant place to be in.
Tony's expression was something else entirely.
He hadn't taken a single bite of his burger. The ice in his Coke had melted to nothing. His brows were drawn tight together in the manner of a person who had encountered something they couldn't make sense of.
Matthew finished his burger and Coke. The silence broke.
"Matthew." Tony's voice came out without buildup. "Do you think my armor design direction is wrong?"
The question arrived without context, and Matthew paused.
He understood it immediately.
That fight had broken something in Tony. Not the armor, which was already on the ground in pieces, but the certainty he had carried in with him: the deep unquestioned confidence in his own position as the most capable thing in any room. That fight had shaken it loose. He'd gone quiet in the way people did when they couldn't reconcile what they'd experienced with what they'd believed about themselves.
Matthew looked at him. "What makes you say that?"
Tony kept his eyes on the Astartes standing motionless at the far end of the range, then glanced at the faceplate sitting beside him on the bench. His voice came out slowly. "I've iterated the armor through generation after generation to get to the Mark VI. And I couldn't break through that suit's defense. Meanwhile it stripped mine apart like it was built out of cardboard."
"Doesn't that suggest a problem with the direction?"
He looked at Matthew.
Matthew shook his head. "It doesn't mean your direction is wrong. It means you're two different things."
"One is a rapidly iterating, technologically versatile combat suit. The other is an infantry-focused suit built for durability above everything else. They're not doing the same job."
"Think about the simplest example: the Astartes can't fly. Put this in a different environment, against a different weapons loadout, and the outcome looks different."
As Matthew laid it out, Tony's expression started recovering its usual quality.
"That suit can tank heavy weapons fire," Tony said, with a note of frustration that hadn't fully cleared. "They put sub-Adamantium alloy in the thing."
Remembering those moments of watching direct hits do essentially nothing, he exhaled.
Matthew brought his hands together once.
A moment later, the Umbrella van rolled up and stopped in front of them. The rear doors swung open.
"What's this?"
Before Tony could finish working out what Matthew was doing, Matthew pointed to the black weapon case sitting at the far end of the cargo space.
"If breaking through that armor's defense is the problem, that can solve it."
Tony's interest arrived immediately. He forgot the burger completely, stood up, and jumped into the back of the van in one motion. He flipped the case open.
Inside it, stripped of its reactor, a railgun lay in the foam.
Tony looked at it. His brow creased. Then he studied it closely.
When his eyes reached the internal construction and design, they lit up.
The principle and application assembled themselves in his head almost before he'd finished looking.
He was already thinking about taking it apart and examining it properly, possibly bringing it back to the workshop, when he remembered this wasn't his company's product.
He cleared his throat and turned to Matthew. "Matthew. Can I take this apart?"
"Do whatever you want with it." Matthew shrugged without particular feeling. "It was meant for you anyway. Just share anything interesting you work out."
"Absolutely, without question." Tony nodded with enthusiasm.
He was one step away from declaring they'd divide the world between them.
[System: +2,000 points. Tony Stark's goodwill has increased again.]
The possession of the railgun cleared away whatever was left of the earlier deflation. Tony was back to himself.
He looked up at the Astartes standing at the far end of the range.
Then he looked at the wreckage of the Mark VI scattered across the ground, and slowly closed his hand into a fist.
One loss was nothing.
He was already certain: when the next generation came out of the workshop, he would settle this completely. He'd put the Astartes on the ground and make sure it stayed there.
SHIELD Headquarters.
Nick Fury's private office.
Fury was at his desk, staring at a financial report with an expression that suggested he found it troubling for reasons the report itself might not have anticipated.
There had been a minor irregularity in the most recent diversion. He'd need to be more careful next time. If the people upstairs noticed, it was going to be a significant problem.
A knock at the door. His attention moved from the report, and he pulled a newspaper over it in one smooth motion.
"Come in."
Natasha Romanoff walked through the door in a change of clothes.
"I'm sorry, Director. My cover was blown."
That was her opening sentence, and it stopped Fury before he'd even formed the question about how the assignment was going.
"You said." Fury looked at her. "Your cover was blown."
Natasha nodded without any softening. "That's correct."
Fury was quiet for a moment. "Did he investigate your background? Work out who you were on his own?"
His gaze moved to Matthew's file on the desk. If Matthew had independently identified Natasha's real identity, the network behind him was considerably more complex than their research had found.
Natasha's next sentence took his expression from focused to something more difficult to describe.
"Director, there's a misunderstanding. He didn't suspect my identity at all. The assignment was actually progressing well."
"But."
"But what?"
"But during the operation I was unexpectedly run into by Tony Stark."
"And he immediately told the whole room who I was."
Fury sat with this.
Motherfucker.
He'd run through every variable. He had not calculated that Matthew Lawrence and Tony Stark were friends who occasionally showed up at each other's workplaces unannounced.
He exhaled.
"Fine. It's done, it's done."
He looked at Natasha. "While you were there, what did you find? Is Matthew Lawrence a candidate for the Avengers Initiative?"
The question landed, and Natasha's memory produced a comprehensive highlight reel of the past several days. The burgers. The dry cleaning. The Evian. The jokes. The complete inventory of ways she had been kept deliberately occupied with tasks that had nothing to do with running a company.
Her fist tightened slowly.
A few veins appeared at her temple.
She set the personal feelings aside and answered the question professionally.