Her prediction had been right, as it nearly always was. New was not good.

When Hermione had reached the armoury, she had been greeted by Director Fury, Agent Romanoff and several hunks of smoldering metal. Her directions from Fury were brief and as light on details as possible, as they always seemed to be. "Members of the Avengers team had a run in with some… magic while on assignment," he had said. "We need their tech to be warded – priority over all other projects. This is what's left of their gear," he had gestured at the hunk of metal, "so we'll have you work on the tech of those who weren't on the mission yet while Stark rebuilds these."

And that had been all. Hermione had been sent back to her office with a crate full of a mishmash of Stark and SHIELD tech to begin casting protective wards around it.

Three days later, Hermione was given new instructions: she was to report immediately to Stark Tower to work on her next batch of tech to ward. Oh, and that Tony bloody Stark had been informed… enough about her. Hermione was explicitly instructed to reveal no more than was needed to perform the warding. Her provided cover story was that she was a mutant with unique protective abilities. Bloody fucking great - at least at SHIELD she'd been able to work and speak freely with Fury and Romanoff.

T – T – T

Tony Stark was a fucking genius. He'd never met a piece of tech he couldn't use or improve, and when something he wanted didn't exist, he created it. And yet, SHIELD had the audacity to send in someone to "help" him. As if he, The Tony Stark, was incapable of creating new tech to withstand… whatever that force in Plovdiv had been. He was motherfucking Ironman.

To top off the sheer audacity of sending someone to "help", they were sending someone who even SHIELD's files had little to say about – when he'd hacked their database, there'd been nothing more than a single photograph, a name, and a bullshit line about her being a "researcher and scientist of extraordinary talent". If she truly had such extraordinary talent, why the fuck had he never heard of this Hermione Granger? Utter bullshit. A Google search had similarly pulled up little beyond a Facebook account he presumed belonged to her which revealed little and a copy of a convocation program from Columbia which listed her as having completed an undergraduate degree in sociology. Sociology, of all things. What would she know about weapons?

And so Tony did what Tony did best – he tried to push through and solve everything on his own.

It was an uphill battle from the get-go. The frying of the tech in Plovdiv meant that he had no camera footage, no comms recordings, and no evidence of what had happened. SHIELD had refused to disclose what had caused the tech to malfunction, though Tony got the impression that they did, in fact, know and just didn't want to loop him in. Without a proper understanding of what had happened, how was he supposed to build new tech that could withstand it?

He had hacked every recording device, sensor and satellite he could get his hands on to try to identify the problem. Radiation? None. Electro-magnetic pulse? None. Some sort of Asgardian trickery? Nothing he could detect.

How do you solve a puzzle when you have none of the pieces?

And so Tony was forced to do the thing he hated most in the world: sit on his hands and wait for help… metaphorically speaking, of course. And at 10:23am, help – in the form of a short, curly-haired woman – arrived at Avengers Tower. If Tony didn't go to greet her when Jarvis announced her arrival, then it was purely because he was too busy with work, and certainly not out of spite for the help he maintained that he did not need.

H – H – H

In her time in New York, Hermione had grown accustomed to tall buildings. The newly rebranded Avengers Tower, however, was in playing in a separate league – or maybe even a whole different sport. It towered above the New York skyline from a distance, and from Hermione's view standing at the base it almost seemed to vanish into the heavens. Talk about overcompensating.

Entering the lobby with its impressive marble floors and towering glass windows, Hermione moved towards the security desk placed front and centre. Infuriatingly, the guards seemed to have no idea about her arrival and refused to let her up – despite the assurance in Fury's communique that Stark had been informed that she would be coming. After fifteen excruciatingly long minutes of trying to assert that yes, she was supposed to be there and yes, Stark knew she was coming, the guard finally agreed to summon Stark's personal head of security. It took a further fifteen minutes for him to arrive and a subsequent ten for him to receive confirmation that yes, Hermione was supposed to be working with Stark in one of the R&D labs. All in all, the process was sufficiently irritating and lengthy to put Hermione squarely in a bad mood.

So it was that as Hermione and the head of security (who had decidedly not introduced himself) walked off the elevator on one of the top floors of the tower and directly into the workroom where Tony Stark had been waiting for them – or rather not waiting for them, as he would insist.

Shoring up her confidence and muscling down her frustration at the complete and utter horseshit that had been her morning, Hermione stuck her hand out. "You must be Mr. Stark. I'm Hermione Granger, it's a pleasure to meet you."

Stark paused for a moment, looking her up and down, before firmly returning the handshake. "The pleasure's all mine, Miss Granger."

"Agent," she corrected firmly.

"Agent, right," he ran a hand through his hair as he glanced around the lab.

Following his line of sight, Hermione took a moment to take in the workroom. In a word, it was chaotic. While it seemed clean enough, she could see that it was well used – borderline lived in – with bits of tech, tools, and even the occasional forgotten glass of water dotting the many tables in the room. Along a back wall, there were several Ironman suits, amongst which Hermione recognized several older models from press coverage of Stark's work. There were several robots dotted around the room, working quietly on a variety of tasks.

"So," Stark began, but before he could get more than a word out, Hermione had cut him off.

"Is one of your robots wearing a dunce cap?"

"Yeah," he replied with a chuckle, "He knows what he did."

A/N: Okay so this is a very short one, but we finally see Hermione meet Tony! The next chapter will be a longer one as the two start to work together and Hermione tries not to blow anything up. I'm not gonna lie, this chapter really fought me - hence how long it took despite its short length. I'd love to know what you think! ❤️