Tony looked at Lucius with a deadpan expression.
Lucius returned the look, tilted his head, and waited.
"Now," he asked, with perfectly reasonable confusion, "why would I do such a thing?"
Tony leaned back in the chair and began counting on his fingers with insulting patience.
"Because you are, apparently, my friend. Because you are the second-largest shareholder of Stark Industries. Because you enjoy expensive travel, motor sports, free alcohol, pretty women, and standing near disasters just in case they become entertaining. Also, and this has nothing to do with my request, you are a miracle worker in times of crisis."
Lucius scratched at the side of his head and tried to remember whether he had ever lied to Tony about liking motor sports. He had certainly lied about other things, repeatedly. Sport, though, seemed beneath the effort.
He still failed to notice that Tony wanted him there because Pepper would be there, and Tony was already half convinced the universe had started taking bookings against him.
"Have you hit your head on something hard recently?" Lucius asked. "Perhaps that helmet finally did the world a favour and slowed you down a notch or two."
Tony let out a breath through his nose.
"Look who's talking. Just so you know, Fruit Ninja, I'm exactly as brilliant as I've always been. Possibly more. Unlike someone who keeps hovering over my shares like a Victorian aunt over an inheritance."
Lucius's face brightened at the word shares.
"Well, of course I can travel." His smile turned oily. "The real question is what's in it for me?"
Tony pointed at him.
"That sentence should be printed on your family crest."
"I don't have a crest. I have taste."
Tony rose from the workbench and moved to the bar.
"You'll get to travel to Monaco with the sexiest man alive, you'll watch his race, the view, a hotel better than this one, and the chance to stand next to me while I pretend I'm not being hunted by governments and corporate parasites." He poured two fingers of something expensive into a glass. "You also get to keep Pepper company while I'm occupied. That alone should count as charity work."
Lucius narrowed his eyes.
"First of all, I don't swing that way; secondly, you're using me as a private bodyguard."
Tony took a sip and did not deny it.
"I'm inviting you as private insurance with a very good travel package."
Lucius considered that and found no insult in the arrangement. He respected honest selfishness.
"Fine," he said. "But if I save your life again, I want something better than thanks."
Tony did not even look surprised.
"You always do."
"Yes. That is why I continue saving you."
--
The Monaco racetrack looked exactly like a place people should not have been allowed to race through. The city, on the other hand, had enough sunlight, and unnecessary yachts counted as civilisation.
The grandstands were packed. The marina glittered. Engines screamed round the circuit in sharp bursts that shook through concrete, railings, and human chests with equal disrespect. Money sat everywhere, pretending not to sweat.
Lucius, meanwhile, had already grown bored.
The race started. Cars tore past in flashes of colour and noise. The crowd reacted on cue. Lucius sat beside Pepper in dark glasses, leaned back, and let one elbow rest on the arm of his seat with the calm of a man who had not come here for the race.
After ten minutes, his eyes had drifted half shut.
Pepper noticed and turned to him in disbelief.
"You are dozing off at the Monaco Grand Prix."
Lucius did not move.
"I am conserving interest."
A burst of engine noise climbed through the stands. Pepper looked back at the track, then at him again.
"People spend thousands trying to get seats like these."
"And yet they still have to sit through laps."
After a while, Lucius's eyes opened properly.
There was a man on the track.
He stepped out in a prison of crude harness, crackling whips of energy in both hands, and cut the first car in half so violently that the entire circuit turned from spectacle to panic in a heartbeat.
Pepper stood.
"Tony."
Lucius was already looking past the crowd, past the smoke, past the first shock, and straight at the madman with the whips.
Vanko looked worse in motion than he had on screen. Like somebody had taken rage, wire, and prison engineering and taught them to walk upright.
Pepper stared at the track in disbelief.
"Your standards remain very optimistic," Lucius murmured and rose at last. "Stay here. On the bright side, that improved the event at once."
He did not rush onto the circuit. He simply watched the timing. One strike. Tony swerving. Another whip snapped across metal and ground, close enough to turn the entire situation from fun to fatal. Vanko came in again, arm drawing back for the second proper hit.
Lucius lifted one hand.
The man froze.
Vanko's body locked in place mid-stride. The whip arm jerked in the air like a puppet whose strings had been cut and replaced by something angrier. The crowd noise around them became stranger all at once because nobody in the stands understood why the lunatic had suddenly frozen like a badly edited special effect.
Tony saw it a second later.
Then he saw Lucius walking onto the edge of the track with the unhurried pace of a man arriving late to a problem he had never classed as difficult.
Vanko strained against the telekinetic hold hard enough to make the harness shake.
Lucius kept smirking at him.
"You built this in a cave, too?"
Tony was halfway out of the car now, dazed, angry, and still not quite believing he had nearly been cut open at a racing event.
Lucius gave Vanko a little twist in the air, just enough to disarm the line of attack completely.
"No," he decided. "This one feels more like misery with a welding licence."
Security and police finally found the courage to rush in now that someone else had removed the part involving personal risk.
Pepper reached them just in time to hear Tony answer through the breath still trying to return fully.
"He had whips."
Lucius looked at him.
"Now, Tony. It's rude to judge people with their kinks and fetishes."
Happy arrived a moment later with the armour, red-faced and furious.
Vanko was taken down after his reactor was unplugged by Tony. He was under a pile of bodies, restraints, shouting, and the vague official hope that no one would notice how close the whole event had come to turning into international humiliation with engine noise.
-
Back in New York, Tony knew exactly what another arc reactor in hostile hands meant.
Pressure would double. The Army would lean harder. Congress would posture louder. Every parasite with a flag lapel pin would decide his inventions now belonged to the nation by moral right.
Tony disliked all of them on principle.
Lucius, on the other hand, was having a lovely time.
The sports cars he got as a thanks from Tony looked much better when they belonged to him, and if there was one thing Lucius liked more than himself, it was getting expensive things for free and then pretending he had always deserved them.
He drove one through Manhattan just because he could, parked it badly outside the hotel once because the angle amused him, and then spent part of the evening thinking about the next inevitable insult in Tony's life.
Rhodey.
Poor Tony really was surrounded by jackals. Even the good friend with the military background and the loyal face would hand the suit over the moment duty, opportunity, and righteous irritation lined up into one convenient betrayal.
Lucius almost felt sorry for him.
Almost.
-
Fury, meanwhile, had decided to try a soft approach for once.
He sat in his office with Howard Stark's documents on the desk in front of him and considered whether salvaging the relationship with Tony through inherited guilt and scientific nostalgia counted as strategy or surrender.
Either way, Coulson was the poor bastard delivering it.
Fury slid the box across the desk.
"You'll take these to Stark."
Coulson looked down at the material and then back up.
"Howard's work."
"Yes." Fury leaned back. "It might break the ice. It might keep him talking to us long enough for one sane conversation. It might remind him that his father left something other than money and unresolved emotional damage."
Coulson took the box.
"That is almost hopeful, sir."
Fury's mouth tightened.
"Don't spread that around."
He looked past Coulson for a second, towards nothing visible and one very specific irritation.
He knew who kept poisoning outcomes. He knew exactly which bastard had turned half his recent operations into farce with money, influence, potions, and private sabotage. What Fury did not have was a clean path to approach him again without inviting another disaster.
Not until Noctis settled properly into the villa he had extorted out of him.
The memory hit like acid.
Fury's jaw worked.
"At least I got the cars cheaper than he wanted."
Coulson, who had learned when not to answer, simply adjusted his hold on the box.
"You want me to go straight to Stark Tower?"
"Yes. Direct handoff." Fury pointed at him. "And if Noctis is there, which, given our luck, is now a statistical certainty, you will be polite."
"I'm always polite."
"That is not the part I doubt."
Coulson left with the box.
Fury stayed where he was, stared at the empty doorway, and wondered whether caution around one 'most probably' mutant bastard now counted as strategic maturity or old age.
He hated both answers.
-
In an office deep within the Alkali Lake complex, Ross sat with a glass of whisky in hand and listened to Stryker with the sort of attention men reserved for ugly plans that might still work.
The room was bare in a practical military way. Stryker stood opposite with a folder in hand and the expression of a man who had decided to stop pretending patience was a virtue.
Ross took a slow sip.
"So we both failed to reverse engineer the damn potions that freak sells."
Stryker did not care for the phrasing, mostly because it included him failing.
"I have another plan."
Ross looked at him over the rim of the glass.
"That's a sentence which usually costs lives."
"Only when it's done badly."
Ross gave a short, amused grunt.
Stryker opened the folder in front of him and spread the first set of papers across the desk. Photos, routes, personnel charts, and movement patterns, along with full intelligence on Noctis's trade flow, public habits, hotel base, and the new military attention around his business.
"I have a team of mutants under absolute control."
Ross leaned forward.
That was the first line he had actually wanted to hear.
Stryker tapped the pages one by one.
"We stop treating him as a vendor or a public relations problem, and we stop waiting for him to hand out more miracles in bottles while every hostile service on the planet takes notes." He met Ross's eyes. "We take him."
Ross set the glass down slowly.
"You think you can kidnap a telepathic, telekinetic, regenerating mutant who has already humiliated SHIELD, sells to the Army, and turns steel giants into soccer balls?"
Stryker's mouth hardened.
"I think I can plan properly where SHIELD improvised badly."
That answer did something useful to Ross's mood.
He leaned over the file and started reading in earnest.
"What do you need?"
Stryker slid the next sheet into place.
"Jurisdiction and transport cover. Equipment access that doesn't bounce through six idiots in Washington. And if we succeed, I need a guarantee he lands with me first."
Ross's eyes moved across the paper.
"You're asking for a lot."
"I'm offering the only path that ends with him in chains."
Ross looked up.
The glint in his eyes came on slowly.
That was the answer Stryker had been hoping for.
Outside, snow lay over the ground around Alkali Lake like the place still belonged to order.
Inside, two men started planning how to take Lucius Noctis alive, which was another way of saying they had not yet learned enough from everyone else's mistakes.