Fury knew exactly how bad the situation had become.
The carrier was damaged and on the verge of crashing, and Noctis had decided that Maria Hill's spine was the most interesting subject on the bridge.
That first detail worried Fury more than the second.
He had not seen Noctis angry before. He had seen him petty, theatrical, vindictive, and smug enough to make murder sound like customer feedback. What sat before him now was narrower and worse. All of Lucius's anger and hatred had funnelled into Hill with the cold delight of a man who had finally reached the line item he had been meaning to settle for months.
Fury's eye cut once towards the wreckage on the deck.
The broken attackers had become boneless piles of flesh in tactical gear. The lucky ones were dead; others had become ruins of flesh. One of his own agents lay among them as he had fired at the wrong target in the wrong moment, and Noctis had not considered the distinction worth making. That, if nothing else, clarified the rules of the moment.
Noctis did not care who wore which badge.
If you shot at him, your skeleton became negotiable.
Fury's mind raced anyway.
There had to be something. A way to move his attention, buy Hill a few seconds, pull the monster's temper sideways just long enough to stop the next beat. Coulson had done it before, and he was better than Coulson. If Coulson can exchange Romanoff for three tailored suits, he can do something better. Noctis could be redirected. It was never safe, but it was possible.
Then, as if the heavens had finally tired of his internal monologue, the bastard created the opening himself.
"You fingered the wrong sleeping dragon, Agent."
Hill could not move. Could not even blink properly. Could not do anything but stare back at him while the panic in her eyes made Lucius visibly happier.
Fury stepped in at once.
"It's tickling the sleeping dragon," he interjected.
Lucius turned slowly, his attention shifting from Hill to Fury with such suddenness that half the bridge seemed to tighten on instinct.
Fury kept his tone level.
"Not the perversion you just said."
Noctis blinked once. Then again.
"No, it is not."
Fury held his ground.
"The original phrase is about tickling the sleeping dragon."
Lucius's expression altered by degrees into insulted certainty.
"No, Nick. It is fingering the dragon."
Fury stared at him for a beat, then decided there was no room left for dignity on the bridge and committed fully to the distraction.
"Look, Noctis." He lifted one hand in a patient, almost academic gesture. "The original Latin is Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus. That translates to 'never tickle a sleeping dragon'. So no, no fingering is involved. I'm not sure where you got that phrase from, but it isn't that."
For one dangerous moment, Lucius said nothing.
Then he turned away from Hill altogether.
Fury saw the shift and knew, with grim satisfaction, that he had him.
The dangerous mutant now regarded him with the grave disappointment of a teacher forced to correct an unworthy student.
"Nick," he said, "look at me."
Fury, against his better instincts, did.
Lucius extended one hand. Light bent above the command ring. A holographic projection sprang into existence in the air between them, not some crude outline, but a full-scale demonstration rendered in glowing lines and moving colour. A dragon appeared first, vast, horned, broad through the chest, every scale clearly visible. Beside it stood a human figure for comparison. The bridge lighting flickered over both while the carrier groaned beneath them.
Lucius pointed like a lecturer at a particularly stupid diagram.
"An average dragon out of the Potter lot, say a decent adult like a Hungarian Horntail, runs roughly forty to fifty feet from snout to tail and stands perhaps twelve to fifteen feet at the shoulder. Smaug, from a more respectable tradition, is larger by a comfortable margin; call him sixty feet long at the bare stingy estimate and easily twenty feet tall where height matters. Drogon, from the incest-lizard branch of fantasy, eventually grows to something around fifty or sixty feet in length and perhaps fifteen to twenty feet in height if one is being generous and not asking the production team difficult questions about lighting."
The dragon image shifted between models as he spoke.
The human figure remained beside them, tiny, humiliating and laughable.
Lucius stepped closer to the projection, and it obediently zoomed in on the hand of the human figure, then on a dragon's flank, then farther down towards its back. The scale difference grew absurd.
"As you can clearly see," he continued, "the human hand will not be able to affect the lizard in any meaningful tickling capacity over the scales. The only realistic point of contact available to the average idiot is the arse of the dragon."
Around the bridge, battered SHIELD personnel watched in silence as the telepathic mutant who had just turned a gunfight into an anatomy lesson proceeded to give an illustrated seminar on dragon molestation.
Lucius raised one finger.
"Unless, of course, the human is either courageous or catastrophically stupid enough to reach for the nose."
The projection turned and zoomed again, this time on the dragon's face, nostrils, teeth, and eye.
"That might qualify as poking the dragon. Eyes are also an option if one is suicidal and lacks long-term planning. But tickling?" He turned back with aristocratic disgust. "No, fingering remains the most realistic formulation."
He folded his arms and looked down at Fury with the smug patience of a man awaiting formal acknowledgement of genius.
Fury, meanwhile, was thinking much harder than his face showed.
Today alone, the bastard had demonstrated telekinesis, force fields, lightning manipulation, and now a full, responsive holographic teaching aid in the middle of the bridge under active failure conditions. Noctis, different from the alien named Thor, did not need any apparatace such as a hammer to call lightning. Nor did he need Stark's systems to conjure tactical displays. He did not seem to need much of anything except a thought and the desire to be annoying with it.
Exactly how many abilities did this bastard have?
Enough, Fury decided, that honesty had become a decorative luxury.
He nodded slowly, let just enough reluctant admiration into his face, and raised his brow.
"You know what? I can see where I made the mistake."
Lucius's posture changed at once. The shoulders loosened by a fraction. The jaw settled into expectation rather than hostility.
Fury pressed.
"You're completely right. I was thinking in phrases. You were thinking in scale." He gestured to the dragon projection with believable appreciation. "That is an excellent demonstration. You are wise beyond your years, Noctis. If circumstances were better, I'd offer you a drink right now to celebrate an academic win like this."
Hill could not turn her head, but if she could have, she would have stared at him.
The rest of the bridge might as well have begun a religion.
Lucius soaked up the praise like a desert taking rain, the smugness on his face growing thicker by the second.
His eyes softened with pleasure. The superior little line of his mouth became intolerably satisfied. Fury saw it happen in real time and knew he had found the exact lever required.
Now all he had to do was keep pushing without sounding desperate.
"Truth is," Fury went on, his tone dipping into confessional regret, "I made mistakes in how I approached you from the start. I can admit that. If I'd known how brilliant you actually were, I'd have handled the whole thing differently."
Lucius gave a modest wave that failed immediately under the weight of its own vanity.
"Oh, it happens, Nick. A super genius such as myself is not something one encounters, not even once in ten blue moons."
Fury nodded as though the statement belonged in textbooks.
"Exactly."
Lucius tilted his head.
"So you would have offered me a drink to celebrate my victory?"
"I would have, but as you can see, we are having some issues as of now."
"I'll hold you to that." Lucius glanced at the shattered bridge as though reminding himself that the rest of reality existed. "As for now-"
A bestial roar from outside cut him off.
Every eye on the bridge snapped towards the damaged section of glass in time to see the Hulk outside, furious, half airborne and half attached to the side of a fighter jet that was trying very hard to remain an aircraft instead of becoming an anecdote. The jet swerved. The monster roared again. Somewhere beyond the bridge, pilots and operators were having the sort of day that shortened lives.
Lucius's face twisted with immediate offence.
He stepped away from the academic masterpiece of a holographic dragon and pointed out through the glass like a man catching a drunk shouting through a lecture hall.
"Beast," he barked. "Can't you see we are having a pleasant discussion here? You uncultured green swine, get the fuck out of here."
His hand flicked.
Telekinetic force hit the Hulk broadside and hurled the green giant away from the fighter jet hard enough to send him spinning off across the open sky, severing the immediate mess before it could become the bridge's next problem.
The room fell silent again.
Lucius turned back to Fury with a look of mild irritation.
"Nick, my time is limited. We'll have to continue this later."
He started walking towards the same way he had come, slow, relaxed, and so entirely unconcerned by the armed agents, ruined attackers, even frozen Hill, and the failing Helicarrier that the insult of it landed almost harder than the violence had.
He did not even deem them worthy of another glance.
The bridge watched him go and released the breath it was holding.