Chapter 242: Tony: There's Nothing Money Can't Buy — If There Is, You're Just Not Spending Enough
The desert was quiet in the way deserts are quiet when something large has recently happened in them.
Tony had cleared the civilians efficiently — one pass, no casualties, everyone who wasn't an Asgardian or a robot now standing at a safe distance looking confused. He'd come back to Ethan's position and opened his faceplate and they'd been watching the situation develop with the comfortable detachment of people who had decided this wasn't their emergency.
"We're really not going in?" Tony said.
"Nobody's dead yet," Ethan said. "And this is technically S.H.I.E.L.D.'s jurisdiction."
"S.H.I.E.L.D. is not doing anything."
"S.H.I.E.L.D. is watching, which is what they do. We're also watching. We're fitting in."
Volstagg had just charged the Destroyer for the third time with the specific energy of a man who believes that the first two attempts would have worked if he'd just committed harder. The Destroyer hit him approximately forty feet sideways. He got up.
Ethan watched this and thought about Asgard's population distribution in terms of tactical intelligence. Odin, clearly yes. Frigga, imported from elsewhere if his guess was right. Loki, not actually Asgardian, which explained a great deal. Hela, sealed away precisely because competence in that family was dangerous. Thor was improving but had started from a specific baseline.
Sif had found an angle — a real one, a structural vulnerability at the knee joint — and put a blade through it with the precision of someone who actually thought about these things. The Destroyer went down on one knee.
"Good," Ethan said.
Then the Destroyer hit her and she left the scene at velocity.
"Less good," Ethan said.
Tony was watching the Destroyer with the specific focus of someone cataloguing materials. "That exterior plating," he said. "The thermal signature is completely different from anything terrestrial. You think they'd let me take samples?"
"They won't."
"What if I offered to pay?"
"They won't."
"There's a number—"
"Tony."
"There's always a number. That's a principle."
Ethan looked at him.
"A large number," Tony said. "A very large number. I understand the political complexity but I'm saying in principle—"
"You've spent approximately a billion dollars in the vicinity of my neighborhood in the past year," Ethan said.
Tony was quiet for a moment. "One point three," he said. "Closer to one point three."
"And yet."
"And yet here I am, not having purchased the things I wanted." He paused. "Which is actually a new experience. I'm not sure how I feel about it."
The thing about Tony Stark's money, Ethan had concluded sometime around month three of their acquaintance, was that it wasn't really about the money. The money was just the mechanism he'd found for converting desire into outcome, and when the mechanism stopped working it was genuinely disorienting for him. He'd built enough workarounds by now that he could function without it, but the instinct was still there.
Nothing money can't buy, Tony had said once. If there is, you're not spending enough.
It was a funnier philosophy when you were the one not spending.
Thor was running.
Not away — toward the Destroyer, with the deliberateness of someone who had finished weighing options and landed on the only one that felt right. His friends were down or retreating. The civilian area was clear. There was exactly one move left that meant anything.
He stopped in front of the Destroyer.
Tony started to say something. Ethan put a hand up.
They watched.
Thor said what he said. The Destroyer answered in the only language it had. Thor went down and stayed down and the field was quiet.
Then the hammer moved.
Tony's suit registered the electromagnetic event approximately half a second before visible evidence of it appeared, and in that half second he had time to process something is happening that I don't have a category for yet before the lightning arrived and provided the category.
Thor stood up.
The armor was back. The hammer was back. The Destroyer had maybe thirty seconds left.
"Right," Tony said quietly. "Okay."
The lightning came down in the specific way lightning comes down when it's not random — purposeful, concentrated, the kind that makes the ground remember it happened. The Destroyer absorbed the first strike and the second and then stopped absorbing.
It went down.
The silence that followed had the quality of a sentence that had just finished.
Ethan let it run for a few seconds.
"Now," he said, and walked toward the field.
Tony followed. "I'm still getting samples," he said, quietly, to himself.
"You're not," Ethan said.
"I'm going to try."
"I know."
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