4. Of Invisible Threats
It took a few hours with the heating turned up to get the living room back to normal. Not that it required any active involvement from Tony, but it was still a nuisance. Tony spent that time in the lab, because there was no way he could go back to sleep now, even though he had quickly diagnosed that the hit to his head hadn't caused a concussion. He had just been robbed by a homeless kid and a tiny hummingbird-woman, who had apparently broken in by using a portable wormhole disguised as a cheap souvenir. And out of all the expensive and dangerous things they could have taken, it was the box of teeth they had wanted. If Tony had gone to the police with this information, they would have laughed him out all the way to the nearest mental facility. Not that Tony would have just gone to the police in the first place. The whole concept of it would have just been embarrassing.
No. Tony would solve this by himself. He spent his early morning studying what little energy signals JARVIS had managed to detect and analyse. Interestingly enough, it was the kid who seemed to be the source of the unnatural coldness in the room. So that meant Tony had been robbed by a homeless kid with superpowers. And some mean reflexes. Tony wiped a hand across his face and sighed. This was getting a bit unsettling. And of course this was when Fury called again.
"What happened there last night, Stark?" Fury asked in a calm voice as soon as his face appeared on one of Tony's screens.
Tony smirked.
"Hey, nice to see you too, Fury."
"I told you to report anything you find out about the energies," Fury said. His tone was still even and if one happened to be an idiot one might have mistaken Fury to be in a friendly mood. Tony wasn't an idiot.
"I don't have much to say about that," he said.
"What do you know about the cold spots all around your tower?" Fury asked again, not giving Tony a break.
"You're spying on my tower?" Tony asked, "I thought we were working together."
"Exactly," Fury said, "What happened there?"
"Something a bit weird," Tony said slowly, pressing his palms together thoughtfully, "The cold spots were caused by a kid who broke into my tower last night."
There was a very audible silence in the lab. Fury's one-eyed gaze was boring into Tony's forehead.
"A kid?" Fury repeated, "Someone got into your tower? What did they steal?"
"Nothing important... I think," Tony said, "I found a box after that explosion and took it here. The kid took it and escaped through a wormhole."
Fury crossed his black-clad arms.
"And when were you going to inform us about this?"
Tony shrugged his shoulders.
"Soon? First I had to make sure the tower was secure."
Fury was still trying to drill holes into Tony with his eye.
"I need to know everything you can tell about this 'kid'," he said.
Tony obliged, and Fury's forehead creased even further with every detail he gave. When Tony was done, Fury turned aside to speak to someone Tony correctly assumed was agent Hill.
"Get Barton here and see if Romanoff is available," Fury commanded, "And call Rogers as well. He should still be in the area."
He turned back to Tony, and Tony raised his brows questioningly.
"So now it's Avengers-bad of a situation? What do you know about this kid?"
Fury didn't give him a straight answer. Not that Tony had been expecting one. Fury simply called him for a meeting and hung up.
The meeting was held in a small, hidden S.H.I.E.L.D. operation centre not too far away from New York. Fury clasped his hands together behind his back and looked at the people in front of him. Barton had been the first to arrive, due to him practically being in the building. Rogers had been next, and he was now sitting in a corner looking a bit out of place in his Fifties' clothing. Not as out of place as Stark, however, who was wearing a Hard Rock Café T-shirt and who apparently hadn't slept at all last night. Well, if what Stark had told was true, he hadn't really. And it most likely was true. Stark would definitely not fabricate a lie that would make him look incompetent. Never.
"Natasha couldn't make it?" Barton asked almost as soon as everyone was present.
"She got held up in South East Asia," Fury said, adjusting a few screens in preparation for the meeting, "If things get serious, we'll get her here."
Barton nodded.
"So what do we got there?" he pointed to the screen, "Something new about the energies?"
"Yes," Fury said, "We got some more information on that. And Stark says he knows more about what's causing them. Stark?"
"Yeah," Stark said, "This 'energy' we got here is a lot like very basic background radiation we're exposed to every day. Almost, but not quite. Whatever caused it is very good at concealment. Especially if it's connected to the cold spots."
"What cold spots?" Rogers asked.
"Haven't you noticed?" Stark asked back, "Manhattan's weather is unusually chilly for this time of the year. Again, nothing too weird. Weather changes. But the thing is that I actually caught the source of this on camera last night."
Fury opened up the file Stark had sent him after some stern looks. It displayed a bluish blob, vaguely human-shaped, in Stark's living quarters.
"That thing," Stark pointed to the blob, "got into my tower. Invisible to cameras, looked like a kid to the naked eye. Seemed mildly hostile, stole a box of teeth and warped away before I could ask questions."
There was a thoughtful silence. Finally Rogers asked what was probably the first question that had come to everyone's minds:
"A box of teeth?"
Tony rolled his eyes.
"Not mine, Cap-cicle. I found it after the explosion."
"That's... weird," Barton mused.
"Somehow everyone seems to think that," Stark deadpanned.
"Focus!" Fury commanded, "What happened is still a mystery, but one thing we do know for sure: we are dealing with an elusive, most likely dangerous being."
"A kid," Stark corrected, "What do you want us to do? Catch him and ask him questions?"
Fury nodded gravely.
"That's exactly what I want you to do."
There was a thoughtful silence, which Stark broke in a light tone:
"Oh, alright, then."
"You said we can't catch him even on camera," Barton pointed out, "And if this thing has mastered wormholes or whatever Tony said, he could be anywhere. Where do we start looking?"
That was an excellent question. One Fury didn't have a clear answer for. Not yet at least. But when it came to potential threats, S.H.I.E.L.D. wouldn't give up so easily.
"We know he is out there," Fury said firmly, "And S.H.I.E.L.D. has found very elusive targets before."
Stark leaned back in his chair, looking again like his usual, smug self.
"I don't think finding this kid is as difficult as you might think, if he's still on the planet. We'll just follow the frost."
Despite what Tony had said, it took almost a month before S.H.I.E.L.D. got any proper clues on the mysterious kid's whereabouts. Weather was unpredictable, and as large and resourceful as S.H.I.E.L.D. was, even they couldn't quite be everywhere at once. It didn't help matters that they still hadn't fixed and updated their Helicarrier after said floating headquarters had been wrecked last year. During the few weeks they spent looking for the kid, there were no new sightings of weirdness that would have warranted S.H.I.E.L.D.'s attention. Not on the "strange energies" -field at least. One could almost forget that there had been hints of a new power lurking somewhere on Earth. But the search went on nevertheless, and Tony supposed it was partly out of pride and because Fury didn't like the idea of something presumably significant existing without him knowing much about it.
The search finally paid off when there was indication of a significantly out-of-place cold front above Chicago, and when closer inspection revealed there to be hints of the same chilly blue blob that Tony had caught on his scanners. That was why Tony was now in his Iron Man suit, standing on a roof of a skyscraper in central Chicago, with Steve Rogers beside him wearing the flag. It was a clear day, and Lake Michigan gleamed somewhere behind all the additional information in Tony's field of vision. Tony knew he wasn't alone with Steve. There were a few S.H.I.E.L.D. -agents somewhere in the area as well. Tony could maybe even guess which of the heat signature his thermal scanner picked up were from them.
"Fury seems oddly obsessed with finding this kid," Steve commented, crouching on the rooftop and peering down towards the crowded streets.
"You think so?" Tony asked, not looking at the super soldier as he did. He was in the middle of scanning the area, "Believe me, this isn't his only project right now."
"Do you think this kid really is that dangerous?" Steve pressed on.
"Hey, he attacked me," Tony remarked, deliberately forgetting to mention the kid had also beat him by bashing him to the head with a stick, "Mostly out of self-defence, though. However, he did break into my tower and that's usually not a sign of friendship."
"I suppose..." Steve shrugged, "I wasn't exactly trained to beat up kids, though."
"Weren't you supposed to be the more soldier-y of us, Cap?" Tony glanced down at Steve, but only briefly, "We're just going to take him to custody, preferably without too many injuries. I'm not that happy about this either. But I too want to ask him some questions."
Steve was probably going to say something, but just then Tony caught sight of a bluish blob on the roof of a building.
"We got him," he announced.
Author's Note: 50 reviews? Wow! Happy dance! To celebrate that: have an update! A not-really-but-maybe-fillerish update that is the calm before the storm...
I'm trying my best to keep both sides of this conflict equally right/wrong and equally good at what they do. Even though I feel that the Avengers and the Guardians clashing makes a lot of sense, writing it believably without making either side look like an idiot that jumps to conclusions is surprisingly hard... Well, you'll be the judge on how I will succeed I guess...