The day after Coulson's visit, the building wore its quiet like a well-fitted suit. Pipes sighed. The ancient fridge hummed that dependable bassline it has played since the Carter Administration. No clatter of plates, no iron slamming into iron, no veteran chorus of controlled exhalations as bars come off racks. Even the rookies slept in, their alarms muted by the kind of exhaustion that follows a day of de-escalation drills and Coulson-grade tension.
I poured coffee and leaned on the counter while the TV replayed the Stark Expo incident for the thousandth time, complete with lower-third chyrons that screamed MCU: IRON MAN SAVES THE DAY AT STARK EXPO like that would make it truer. Same loop, same angles, same frame-by-frame dissection of the Mark V suitcase armor as if it were the Zapruder film with better pyrotechnics. Some analyst with perfect teeth was explaining "arc reactor redundancy" to a co-host who nodded like someone getting paid by the nod.
"World loses its mind over two guys having an expensive slap-fight," I said to the room, more amused than annoyed. "Guess they've never seen a Spartan punch."
Alpha01 stood by the window, not so much looking out as letting the city announce itself to him. Sentinel mode: weight balanced, breath slow, awareness a calm circle radiating out past brick and sidewalk to the first hint of trouble. If a deer could learn geometry and carry a rifle the size of a lamppost, it would stand like 01.
"Relax," I told him, because I'd earned the right to lie to myself before breakfast. "Stark is the focus. No one's paying attention to us. Coulson'll file memos, staple his conscience to a briefing, and spend the week telling Fury everything's fine."
You'd think after yesterday I'd stop tempting fate with declarative sentences.
Three knocks landed on the front door—firm, even, the cadence of someone who expects an answer and isn't worried they'll get a gun instead. Not casual. Not cautious. Assertive. The sort of knock that presumes gravity has an appointment.
01 had already pivoted a half step when I set my mug down. He didn't raise the rifle. He didn't need to. The weapon might as well be part of his profile now—an exclamation mark at the end of an otherwise self-contained sentence.
"Relax," I said again, gesturing him back with two fingers. "Probably a pizza guy trying a new tone."
I opened the door.
Tony Stark stood on my threshold like he'd taken out a short-term lease on the block. Tailored jacket that said yes, I own mirrors; sunglasses indoors—that trademark "laws of optics are merely suggestions" look; a smirk so practiced it should've had a SAG card. He radiated that particular Stark field: half gravitational anomaly, half promotional tour. Every molecule around him seemed slightly more convinced of itself.
"Well, I'll be," I said, because sometimes the obvious is the best opening. "Did the great Tony Stark just knock on my door?"
He slid the shades down just enough to peer over the top, a magician showing the audience there are no strings. "Depends," he said. "Is this the door that comes with the army of linebackers?"
Behind me, 01 shifted, blotting out a quarter of the daylight like an eclipse had opinions. Stark's mouth ticked wider. "Right place."
"Come in," I said, sweeping an arm. "Giants are house-broken. Mostly."
Stark crossed the threshold like the floor had been laid to receive him. The lobby took him in: high ceiling, old bones, new locks; Spartans' shadows along the stairwell like doorframes with pulse rates. From downstairs, the faint thunder of footfalls and the rhythm of a heavy bag announced that 05 had decided quiet morning meant more cardio.
"Nice place," Stark said, taking it all in with the quick, efficient scan of a man who trusts his AI but prefers his eyes. "It's a bit prison-chic—very S.H.I.E.L.D. safehouse meets Brooklyn loft—but overall, function over aesthetics. Bold choice for… whatever this is."
"Says the guy with a dance floor in his workshop," I replied.
"That was one time. Two. And it's multipurpose. Don't judge innovation."
It drew a smirk out of him anyway. We moved to the lounge—a big room with tax-payer walls and private army furniture. Stark didn't wait for an invitation to sit. He never has to. He folded into a chair like he was demonstrating how chairs should feel about him, crossed one leg over the other, and produced a phone that probably cost more than some cars. He thumbed it without looking, a habit from a life where the HUD is always on. If JARVIS (or rather, this era's JARVIS) wasn't already sniffing our Wi-Fi, it would have surprised me.
I stayed on my feet and leaned against the wall, arms crossed, posture casual because casual is easier to weaponize in a hurry.
"So," I said, letting the word hang a beat. "Stock options? Scouting? Because my guys don't come cheap. Avengers Initiative isn't a non-profit."
"You don't say," he replied, eyes darting from 02 to 03 to 04, who had drifted into the periphery with the gentle inevitability of a tide. "Because I could swear I saw four of them at the Expo. And—I checked—I didn't hire a personal SWAT team."
"Observation on point," I said. "We like fireworks."
"Fireworks," he echoed, flat enough to iron a shirt on. "Right. Whips. Sparks. Exploding cars. Semantics."
"Spectacle," I said. "You're good at it. New York loves a headliner."
He set the phone on his knee and tapped it with an index finger the way men who build things tap them when they're deciding which wrench to pick up. "All right," he said, the smirk thinning like a tie being loosened before a serious question. "Here's my question. Who the hell are you, and where did you find a small army that makes my Air Force buddies look like mall cops?"
I popped a soda because some clichés exist for a reason. The hiss punctuated the moment beautifully. "Name's Shredder," I said. "These guys are mine. That's all you need."
"Shredder," he repeated, tasting it like a wine he wasn't sure he'd buy. "Saturday morning cartoon villain."
"You're not the first to say that," I said. "But it sticks."
His gaze drifted to 01, let itself be repelled, then bounced to 02 and 03 and 04 in sequence, measuring silence, weighing posture, testing for cracks. He didn't find any. Spartans don't hold still because someone asked nicely. They hold still because geometry says so.
"They don't talk much," he observed.
"They don't need to," I said. "I handle jokes. They handle everything else."
"Convenient division of labor," he said, eyes returning to me. The phone vibrated once on his knee; he didn't look down. Somewhere in the building, a pipe clanged the way old pipes do when they overhear secrets. "You've got people asking questions. You don't walk four giants into my Expo and expect no one to notice. S.H.I.E.L.D.'s buzzing. I'm buzzing. And I don't buzz unless it's a new engine."
"Glad to hear I'm interesting," I said.
"This isn't just interesting," he said. "It's dangerous."
"Not for me," I said, and I let the confidence come out flat, not performative. There's bravado, and then there's having the receipts.
He leaned back, recalibrating. This is the Stark gear change most people miss: he doesn't retreat; he re-angles. "So you've got a squad—what, eleven now?—running around New York catching bad guys and looking intimidating. What's the mission statement? What's the reason? Don't give me 'vigilante justice' or 'just helping.' I invented PR fog."
"For kicks," I said. "Because I can."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting."
The phone buzzed again, a polite throat-clear from the digital butler. He picked it up this time and flicked his thumb across the screen. I watched his face for the tell—there it was: a micro-quizzical notch between his eyebrows, the one he gets when the numbers don't add properly. JARVIS had clearly come up short. Unknown data frustrates a man whose whole life is built on models that work.
"No heat signatures that match StarkTech," he muttered, almost to himself. "No off-the-shelf exo frames. No repulsor residue on your floors. Biometric anomalies, yes. Pattern recognition says 'soldier' with a capital S, but not my soldier. Not Ross's pet projects either." He met my eyes. "You're not running on military power. You're running on something else."
"Discipline," I said.
"Cute," he replied. "But discipline doesn't bend steel."
"Depends how confident the steel is."
He didn't laugh, but the corner of his mouth remembered how. He set the phone aside, finally resigned to the idea that JARVIS would not draft a neat Wikipedia entry about "Shredder and the Eleven Spartans of New York" while he sat there.
"I should hate you," Stark said, and for once the performance peeled back enough to let the real man speak. "You appear out of nowhere with unknown tech or training, and a team that unsettles half the world. That should bother me."
"But?" I prompted, because you never leave a Stark sentence hanging when the next clause might be a gift.
"But you didn't rush the track at the Stark Expo," he said. "You didn't jump in front of cameras or try to wrestle a headline. You opted to protect civilians and let me do my job." He tilted his head, weighing me again. "So, you're either very clever or very confident."
"Little of both," I said.
Something like respect flickered across his face, so quick most audiences would miss it. People think Tony's made of showmanship and sinuses; they forget he's an engineer first. Engineers worship results. He'd reviewed the footage. He'd seen 03 shepherd families through gaps that shouldn't have been there, 04 stand where panic wanted to live, 02 walk a perimeter no one else perceived until it existed. He'd seen a team choose people over clout. He recognized a professional choice.
"Do your thing," he said, rising with the kind of economy that comes from living inside machines that don't like extraneous movement. "Just don't get in my way. If you do, we'll have a very long, very unpleasant conversation."
"If I wanted your spotlight," I said, "I'd have taken it already."
He considered that, then slid his sunglasses back into place like a curtain coming down. "You probably would have," he admitted, and the honesty bought him more good will than any lecture would've.
He turned toward the door and took three steps like a man who had a conference call with a board that would try to scold him about liability. Halfway there, he paused and glanced back, something catching in his head. "One more thing," he said. "Coulson came by, didn't he?"
I raised an eyebrow. "You two share a calendar?"
"We share a city," he said. "And a problem set." He stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets in that casual posture he uses when he wants you to think the next sentence isn't important. "Nick Fury sees a variable. He hates variables. If he reaches out, answer the phone. It's better to make your case than let him write it for you."
"That sounded almost friendly," I said.
He shrugged, a billionaire's version of a nod. "Don't make me regret it."
"Wouldn't dream of it."
Tony Stark laughed—not the stage laugh, the real one that sounds like relief and mischief shook hands. He pulled the door open, left the building like he'd timed it to coincide with a breeze, and the hinge did the punctuation—thud, old wood giving its blessing to new trouble.
Silence returned in the way silence does after celebrities: not absence, exactly, more a polite request for the air to stop vibrating.
"Well, that was fun," I said to the room at large. "Tony Stark in my living room. Didn't even ask for an autograph."
Alpha01, who had not moved more than four inches the entire time, said, "Directive?"
Same word, same gravity. The hinge of our days.
"Same as always," I said, rolling the tension out of my shoulders until my spine gave a polite crack. "Train. Patrol. Points. Stark does Stark. We do us."
Boots thudded back down the stairs as if the building itself had exhaled. 05's voice snapped once—again—and the rookies went from "listening at attention" to "being yelled at constructively" without changing posture. 02 peeled off toward the armory to pretend he hadn't inventoried everything twice already. 03 drifted toward the rookies like shade on a hot day, ready to demonstrate the difference between "running a route" and "not getting trampled by a crowd." 04 took up his usual station near the stairwell, shoulder to brick, eyes soft in the way glaciers are soft.
I sat where Stark had sat and let the grin stay longer than it needed to. Not bad for a Tuesday. In a different version of this universe, that would have been the whole chapter: Tony Stark arrives, we banter, he leaves, roll credits. But the Marvel Cinematic Universe isn't a place where one scene happens at a time. Everything echoes. Everything rhymes. You don't just have a conversation with Iron Man; you adjust your operating picture.
I pulled my phone out and thumbed through our patrol grid. The System's UI glowed up at me—clean, indifferent, the same quiet ledger that had pinged 500 points for the Stark Expo civilian protection. No new points now. Just a little nudge at the corner of my awareness: You are observed. Not a warning. A reminder.
"All units," I said into the building, not quite loud enough to be a shout. "We are on more cameras than yesterday. Assume JARVIS. Assume S.H.I.E.L.D. Assume every MCU fandom blogger with a long lens and a Reddit account. That means cleaner routes, tighter timing, and no flourishes. If you want to be flashy, do it in the shower where 02 can judge your shampoo technique."
A ripple of amusement moved through concrete and discipline. 05 didn't smile. 05 never smiles. But the rookies' shoulders eased a hair. Humor is a tool. Like a rifle. Like a lockpick.
"03," I called, and he materialized with the uncanny talent he has for appearing where I plan to look. "Re-run the Stark Expo egress, but swap variables. Puddles, metal rails, distracted civilians with phones at eye level, security yelling the wrong instructions."
"Understood," he said.
"04, posture drills," I added. "Make yourself look like a wall without being one. We don't want anyone bouncing off you unless they absolutely have to."
"Copy," he said.
"02," I said, though I didn't need to. "Randomize the patrol start times by seven minutes, plus or minus five. If JARVIS is trying to pattern us, he can work for it."
"Already done," he replied from the armory, because of course it was.
Training resumed with a sharper edge. It wasn't fear. Spartans don't wear fear. It was awareness recalibrated: the knowledge that Iron Man knows the shape of our door and S.H.I.E.L.D. knows which window to point a camera at. In the MCU, visibility is a currency and a weapon; you spend it, or it gets used against you.
While 03 turned the rookies into human breakwaters and 04 sculpted "non-threatening intimidation" like it was a form of tai chi, I pulled up the feed from our exterior cameras. Two city blocks looked back at me: a delivery van with the wrong kind of dent, a jogger with form too good to be casual (hello, undercover NYPD fitness nut), a sedan that circled twice before finding an excuse to park. Attention is predictable. People say "we're not watching you" by standing exactly where they can.
The building creaked. Afternoon slid toward the color that makes New York look like it's auditioning for its own poster. Somewhere, probably within a five-mile radius, Tony Stark was stepping into a lab that would scold him for talking to strangers. Somewhere else, Phil Coulson was writing "Shredder" on a whiteboard and underlining it just once, because he's not dramatic, he's patient.
I went downstairs to the mat room because leadership is logistics and sweat. The rookies were running the "child shriek" scenario for the fourth time—03 had added a reversible barricade and a puddle at an inconvenient angle. 07 tried to funnel a family around the puddle; 08 counter-signaled with a hand motion that would've confused a saint. I stepped in, took the father by the elbow, and showed 07 how to shift his shoulders so the crowd read him as "go this way" instead of "please admire my muscles."
"Everything you do is a verb," I said. "Even standing still is a verb. Be intentional with your grammar."
They nodded. 05's approval did not manifest. That meant we weren't done.
Between reps, 11—the newest, quietest, most ferociously attentive—asked the question I knew he'd been saving. "If Iron Man returns," he said, somehow making the name sound like a call sign instead of a celebrity, "directive remains civilian priority?"
"Always," I said. "Stark can handle whips, drones, friendly fire from his own toys, and the occasional I told you so from Pepper. We handle people. If he's the headline, we're the copy editor. Make him look better by preventing the worst."
"Understood," 11 said, and the word landed like a promise he intended to keep with his bones.
We broke for ten minutes because hydration is not optional. I went back to the lounge, reclaimed the chair Stark had warmed, and let the weight of the day settle. It wasn't heavy. It was honest. There's a difference between being hunted and being watched. One is panic. The other is posture.
The TV, still on mute, cycled to a segment where a Stark Industries spokesperson vamped about "enhanced security protocols" and "a renewed partnership with city officials." Justin Hammer squeezed his way into a split-screen to attempt charisma with a budget. The anchors did that thing where their faces make questions their producers wrote. I watched their mouths move and read the captions and thought about how many different languages you have to speak to keep civilians safe: legal, logistical, emotional, tactical, PR. I'm fluent in exactly the ones we need.
My phone buzzed with an update from the delivery app. The algorithm had learned our building's rhythms; it suggested the good pizza place two blocks over at exactly the moment a body wants carbs.
"Now—where's my pizza?" I asked the ceiling.
"ETA nine minutes," 02 answered, without checking. He tracks delivery times the way other men track ammo. If 02 ever writes a book, it'll be a calendar and a threat.
I closed my eyes for a breath and let the day play back: Coulson's neutral face, Stark's dangerous curiosity, the feel of my door when a universe knocks politely. I thought about what comes next in this cinematic neighborhood—drones in Queens, hammers from the sky, shields and secrets. The MCU loves escalation. Fine. So do I. But ours doesn't look like explosions. It looks like a kid getting home with a churro and a story about Iron Man that doesn't end in a hospital.
The doorbell rang. Not three assertive knocks. Just a human ring. I stood, smiled at the empty chair across from me, and went to pay for dinner.
Progress steady.
Damn right.