WRITTEN FOR THE HOUSES COMPETITION, YEAR 10, ROUND 0

House: Slytherin

Class: DADA

Category: Standard

Word Count: 2416

Prompts: [Crossover] Marvel (MCU); [Dialogue] "I only came here because I was forced to"

Warnings/Disclaimers: none

Tony didn't look up from his tablet at first, tweaking some designs he should send to manufacturing by the end of the week.

"We've got insurance and a very generous you-break-it-you-buy-it fund regularly replenished by yours truly for exactly this reason. If you broke a shop by throwing alien weapons into it with your ninja techniques, call the insurance hotline." He increased the size of the battery he was working on and calculated the new capacity. "Better yet, ask Fury to cover it. I'm the only superhero not employed by a shady organisation here—I shouldn't be the one to run around cleaning our collective messes."

The sound of Natasha's heels as she came closer to the couch he was sprawled on made concentrating extremely difficult.

"We may be dealing with a delicate situation."

Now, that was interesting. Natasha was using her special tone, the one she thought Tony couldn't avoid listening to. According to his calculations, it had about a 41% success rate, which was higher than Rhodey's post-college track record but lower than Jarvis's and Pepper's. Still, it was curious that she would deploy the voice for clean-up duty.

The battery performed excellently in the mock tests, so he allowed his tablet to go dark on his knees and looked up. Natasha's thighs looked as spectacular in her high-heels-tight-pants get-up as he'd thought they would.

"When have I ever been the first option when something's delicate? Unless by delicate you mean expensive, of course." Tony raised an eyebrow over his yellow sunglasses, unimpressed by the vague phrasing. He perked up when Natasha exchanged a look with Clint. If both superspies were worried, something interesting may be afoot. Then again, manipulation was the name of the game for S.H.I.E.L.D agents, and Natasha and Clint were only that obvious when it benefited them. Not many reasons for such a display except to spark his interest. If he recognised that it was one of their mind games, did that mean he won?

Although he was really curious….

"Well? Don't leave me hanging," he said, giving in. "You've done it, I'm intrigued. Now spill."

Natasha sat down on the arm of the couch farthest from him, and Tony's mind started evaluating the strategic advantages of her choice—did she mean for the height difference to subconsciously intimidate him even as she ostensibly levelled the playing field by sitting down? Did she want to endanger the structural integrity of the couch? Was she directing his eye to the expanse of highly-trained, assassin muscles?—even as she started explaining.

"One of the alien cyborgs we fought last week did "break a shop". It went through a wall—and never came out."

"So it was down for the count, no biggie."

"Yes biggie," Clint said. "When the clean-up crew realised that an entire cyborg was unaccounted for they tracked it to the shop and no further. Every attempt to contact the owner has been a bust."

Tony turned his tablet back on and opened a new project.

"Bo-oring! I can't believe you're wasting my time for some civilian who got himself a pet cyborg. It's going to be on Craiglist in a week if it hasn't killed him." Natasha leaned over and put a hand over his screen. Tony stared at it judgingly. "You could be making something explode."

"I thought you weren't designing weapons anymore."

He gave her a look at the unfunny quip.

"What are S.H.I.E.L.D lackeys for if they can't even recover alien technology from the latest civilian who wants a souvenir?"

"That's part of the problem. When the ground crew couldn't track him down through the usual means I hacked into his files. I don't think he's just any old civilian."

Tony sighed at the proof that this would take up even more of his very limited time.

"And you reached that conclusion how?"

"He's too clean," Natasha explained seriously.

"Sorry if my confidence in your hacking skills is less than absolute. Did you consult Jarvis before bothering me?"

"Why ask your made-up butler when you're just lounging on the couch?"

Tony made a face at Clint's barb. Legolas had gotten too comfortable living rent-free at Casa de Stark if he was insulting Jarvis to his face. Revenge would be slow and thorough.

"I don't know, Birdbrain. Maybe because one of us has a day job and the other can be everywhere on the internet at the same time?"

Clint scoffed, and Tony resolved that his retaliation would involve a rusty knife.

"Whatever. J, my man, shed some light on this for me, will you?"

"Certainly, sir. I was only waiting for the chance."

Tony saw Natasha roll her eyes at his side, but Jarvis—sassy, dependable Jarvis—unfolded a holographic screen right in front of him. Tony ignored the spies while he checked out what Jarvis had been able to rustle up in a few seconds. The first image Jarvis chose to showcase was a picture of a quaint little bookstore on the ground floor of an apartment building. It had somewhat grimy windows, decorated with a line drawing of a deer, a wolf, and a big dog.

The second picture was of that same bookstore with a hole in the wall and a window shattered, though not the one with the drawing. Information about the purchase of the property and the store's opening appeared next to the images for the time Tony needed to skim it and not a second longer. Everything looked to be on the up and up. Though Black had gotten an incredible deal for his mortgage and that alone may be considered suspicious in New York. Then he read everything Jarvis had found about "Harry Black" and started to see what Natasha meant. The guy was so clean he may as well have been scrubbed.

Literally, someone must have scrubbed his record because there was nothing other than that property in his name. He waved a hand and checked out the deed when it appeared on the holoscreen. The entire building was Black's. Apparently, this shop owner may live in a penthouse apartment of his very own.

While he asked J to download everything on his tablet and started doing his own in-depth research, Rogers got out of the elevator and waved at them on his way to the kitchen.

Natasha and Clint caught him up on the situation when he settled on the other side of the couch with his snack, and Tony ignored his long-suffering expression in favour of hacking the US government.

"I can't believe I have to be that guy, but has anyone tried just knocking on his door?"

Tony raised his head and clapped his hands. "You're right." Then he clucked at Cap's almost relieved expression. "Not you, you overgrown boy scout. Ms Natashalie Rushmanova here, on the other hand, successfully identified a Very Suspicious Person. The question is, what do we do about it?"

The spy twins were doing that infuriating thing where they had a full conversation through meaningful twitches of their eyebrows, but luckily for everyone Bruce wandered in before Tony could make his displeasure known. While his science bro was read in, Tony found an interesting photo through the facial recognition software he had to modify on the fly for that express purpose. Somehow his old one couldn't pick up on Black at all—an unheard-of glitch he would explore with Jarvis as soon as possible.

"Alright, lady, gentlemen, and freaks of nature—you can debate later about who's who," he said. "Here's our alien technology aficionado." With a wave of his hand, the image from his tablet became a hologram in front of them.

"His picture's grainy."

"Everyone's a critic!"

"Is that who I think it is?" Bruce said, leaning forward and squinting at the image of the young woman embracing Black.

"Depends. If you think it's our esteemed Mayor's daughter then ding ding ding! You've won a conspiracy theory."

"If the government is somehow involved and S.H.I.E.L.D has no records of it this may be bigger than we thought."

"Or! Black is a perfectly normal person who goes out and meets people," Steve, a valid contestant for the "perfectly normal" award, said.

"They don't seem close," Bruce mused. Tony lowered his sunglasses to stare at him. "Look, Black's patting her on the back."

"If their connection is more personal, we may be looking at an exchange of personal favours instead of a government cover-up," Natasha suggested.

Tony ignored Steve's sigh and kept looking things up on his tablet. Something was clearly going on, and the fact that he couldn't track Black's money with the considerable skill at his disposal was making his hair stand on end.

"This is ridiculous," Steve said, cutting off Natasha and Clint's bantering as their guesses about the nature of the theoretical favours got wilder and wilder "We have his address! One of you should just go out and knock on his door. I'm sure that would clear up everything." Natasha looked like her version of knocking on the door may involve knives, and Clint would be more likely to go through the window. With an arrow.

Tony followed up on some hunches and became more and more convinced that he knew what was going on. He pulled the videos from the street camera in front of the shop, and the sketchy people going through the bookshop doors at all times almost confirmed his guess.

The visceral revulsion he felt was something he'd learned at his mother's knee.

"Tony, why don't you—"

"No." His quick dismissal surprised Cap, used as he was to his witty remarks, but Tony stood his ground.

I know you're busy," Steve started tentatively. Trying to figure out Tony's reasons was like groping in the dark for him. "But it's a simple errand. I'd do it myself but I'm expected at Shield for the next three days."

Tony didn't point at the spies and ask if they weren't house-trained yet. He just shook his head. He listened to Steve's objections and Natasha's leading statements until he couldn't keep quiet anymore.

"Don't you get it? This clearly goes deeper than Black! He's got contacts, resources, organisation—and no one knows anything about it. You know who secretive, powerful people are? Mafia! And I'm not representing the Avengers with the Mafia. Nu-uh. You wanted Cap to be the team leader? He can go explain to the don that we didn't mean to destroy his perfectly nice, money-laundering gig. There's no way that bookshop is anything else."

For a few seconds, everyone was too stunned to speak. Then Bruce made a pensive face.

"Maybe you're onto something. He could be in witness protection."

"Puh-lease, I would have discovered it in no time if he were."

Steve picked his jaw from the floor and glared.

"Do you have any proof for this wild accusation or did you become convinced he was part of the Mafia by looking at a whole lot of nothing?"

Tony tried to argue, although he couldn't articulate what seemed so obvious to him in any satisfactory manner.

The fact was that Tony knew power. His was notorious and obvious, impossible to miss. No one could mistake it for anything else, because everyone knew who he was and what he was capable of. This was different. His mum had raised him to be savvy about people, and Tony knew to be wary of unknowns, particularly if they managed to amass power without being on anyone's radar. And Black was clearly established, no new player on the board, with friends in high places to help smooth things over. So Tony may be slightly biassed but he stood by what he said—Black was a mafioso.

But Cap's legendary stubbornness lived up to the hype, and the following day Tony found himself at Black's place of business under duress.

Next to the hole in the wall patched with tape, there was a door that led to the rest of the building. He rang the bell, then he wondered if he should have worn an ostentatious ring—he was sure he had a few that would have matched the vibe. He was texting Jarvis about getting them out of storage when the door opened.

"I want it to be very clear," he said even before lifting his head from his phone. "I only came here because I was forced to."

"Er, alright? Sorry to hear that?" That... wasn't what Tony had expected.

"You're British!" he exclaimed.

"Yes? Does that—"

Tony wasn't listening, furiously typing in the group chat because this was a substantial point in favour of Bruce's witness protection idea, though that only raised more questions about the degree of secrecy. Oh, Black was looking at him expectantly.

"A cyborg was launched into your shop three days ago."

Black's green eyes darted to the side, obvious even under his ugly glasses, to look at his still very much broken shopfront. He pursed his lips a little.

"I noticed."

"I'm here to offer my apologies on behalf of the Avengers, and of course, financial compensation would be—"

"Mr Stark." Black interrupted him. He wasn't used to being interrupted. "It's fine. I don't need your money, though if you could speed up the delivery of the materials needed for the reconstruction throughout the city that would be greatly appreciated." Those green eyes were surprisingly intense when he was their sole focus. And was that a lightning bolt under Black's messy fringe? "Just try not to kick any more cyborgs through my walls, please."

"We'll do our best." He flashed a smile that had tabloid journalists eat out of the palm of his hand. "There is still the matter of the cyborg that did get through..."

Tony had to revisit his Mafia theory. Harry Black didn't seem the type to be setting up a money laundering operation under everyone's nose. He was quite unassuming, actually, except for the smirk currently curving his lips. That was downright mischievous.

"Have you heard the old adage, "finders keepers", Mr Stark? Come back at any time to buy a book, though."

And Black slammed the door in his face.

Tony let out an astonished bark of laughter. Unbelievable, he thought. That was the last time he got roped into making house calls. It was time S.H.I.E.L.D started pulling its weight, and he didn't even care that Steve had been right about finding Black at home.

And if Tony planned to come back to browse for a book, no one needed to know.