Tony Stark had done the research, just like Captain America had asked, and it looked bad. John Garret had transferred money to and from dozens, if not hundreds, of criminal allies over the course of his long, long career at first SHIELD and then SWORD. The exact details of all these transfers were hard to parse out – Someone had obviously done a fairly thorough cleaning of his history recently. If the Firefly Commander Ward's allegations were true, it would make sense to go back and do a wipe out of the material.
But Tony had pounded out enough, hacked into enough big bank and secret firms, and read deep enough with the help of Jarvis and the forensic accountant he had hired in the aftermath of Obadiah's death to keep the books clean, that he knew what it all meant and what was probably missing. It wasn't easy, but two weeks in Tony was pretty sure that Captain America was right – At least about Garret.
Part of Tony twisted against the recognition, the thought that once again he had been betrayed by an old friend. Mike had been a decent friend – Sure, he was a lying opportunist but Tony had a lot of friends who were lying opportunists and, he had to assume, most were not members of an international conspiracy to establish worldwide fascist rule.
That hope seemed forlorn. At best, Mike was a patsy. At worst, he was a crucial part of a international fascist conspiracy. Garret had been involved in much that had gone wrong in the world in the last thirty years.
Tony was pissed and he was going to do something about it.
"Jarvis," Tony said, spinning in his chair, "where's John Garret?"
They'd hacked the SWORD protection list to see where the signal was coming from – It was genuinely unforgeable, Mike had made sure of that, but it was possible to piggy back relatively unnoticed. Of course that still meant that Garret could summon a dozen Fireflies if he got jumped, but there was only so much you could do. Hit fast, move fast.
"John Garret has gone to his wilderness retreat, sir," Jarvis said, his voice polite.
"Alright, well," he looked over at his old armor. He'd come a long way since then, "Wait until I make it there, then I want you to publish what we've got. Tell Pepper I won't be home for dinner tonight, superhero stuff."
Tony activated the vibranium nanotech suit that was now his standard and began the long flight to Garret's location.
----
The old house in the woods was nothing special – Wood and stone, dogs, lots of dogs, and not a lot else. "Heat signatures?" Tony asked Jarvis, rotating around the house at a substantial distance.
"Strong temperature differential in the living room, sir," Jarvis replied. "Would you like me to publish the files now?"
"Yeah, do that," Tony said, absent minded. He was thinking now about how to attack – Once he cut the signal, he would only have five minutes to get a confession out of the guy before the Fireflies got there. "And I want a live feed to everything I'm about to see, straight onto the internet, five minute delay. Now cut the signal with the base."
"Very good, sir," Jarvis said and the heads up popped up the five minute counter .
"Let's go interrogate a crook," Tony said and launched himself down and through the one wood wall to the living room.
John Garret was sitting in a chair next to a long table, his Extremis and Super-Soldier chiseled body radiant with heat in jeans and a wifebeater. To his credit, he wasted no time – As soon as Tony was in the room, he was leaping towards him.
Tony only narrowly managed to dodge a latching hand, blasting him as he went by. But Garret's vibranium enhancement nulled that out faster than Tony had anticipated, once Garret landed. "Stark," Garret said, standing up gamely, "What are you doing here?"
"Here to ask you a few questions," Tony said.
"Feels a little less friendly than a few questions," Garret said, approaching closer.
Tony glanced at the ticking of the clock and launched towards him, "You received substantial sums in bribes from a Libyan extremist in exchange."
"That's bullshit," Garret said, drawing closer to Tony and into the gap they had both blown in the wooden outer wall. "You can't believe every little thing Ward says."
Tony's eyes fell on the ticking clock and he sighed, "Don't have time for this bullshit," Tony said, launching multiple deliverable packets of vibranium nanotech onto Garret, wrapping around his feet and gripping him to the ground.
"You also received a substantial amount of money from authoritarian groups in Eastern Europe before the Sokovian Uprising," Tony continued to lecture. "Millions of dollars, in fact."
"I'm not exactly a millionaire on a government salary," Garret said, gesturing to the small house in the woods.
"You're not," Tony agreed. "But that's because you funneled that money back into extremist groups and wild scientific gambits, like the so-called Centipede Project that was being worked on by Raina," Tony added. Not everyone appreciated being abandoned. "Gave up on it after the Firefly formula was proven, makes sense I guess, it works better."
Garret growled and started hacking at the vibranium foot shackles and boiling them from , "I'm the Secretary of SWORD," he said, pulling a foot out of a burnt vibranium boot. "I don't need to take fucking insults like this." He ripped his foot out of the next boot and launched himself forward once again.
Tony tried to dodge but failed. Garret's vibranium-qualitied body slammed into Tony's Iron Man vibranium armor, sending a wave of concussive force through the air around them but leaving Tony stabled in the air. Tony flashed his eyes back towards the counter – Three and a half minutes left.
"You paid money to Al-Qaeda in the nineties," Tony said, trying to pry the angry Garret off his suit.
"Warning, Secretary Garret is dealing substantial damage to our vibranium nanotech," Jarvis said.
"Then blast him off!" Tony said, frantically. The central beam began to form almost immediately, blasting into Garret in a wave of concussive force that wafted off him and then another and another till both of them were actually thrown apart. Tony stumbled up, looking at the counter. Three minutes left.
Tony flicked out his hand and formed a rod of vibranium nanites, flying toward Garret on a low trajectory on the ground and knocking him off his feet with a swing of the rod in conjunction with his acceleration. Once Garret was off the ground, Tony whipped the rod around and batted him out through the wooden wall again.
Tony headed out after him, trying to outpace him and keep him from catching the ground and leverage, but Garret managed to tuck himself into a roll, grab turf, and launch back toward him and get another grip on Tony's armor.
Tony looked at the clock, one minute. "You're a crook, Garret, it's past time you admit it." Garret did not admit it, in a way that was surprisingly inconvenient. Movie villains were so much more polite.
"Sir, Garret has damaged our supply of Pym Particles," Jarvis said.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
A pop up on his screen implied he might not have enough to jump. "Alright, time to get this guy off of me," Tony said. "Sorry, Garret, got to go." He'd have to get out of here quickly. Tony checked the oxygen supply, even as the time ticked down and hit zero and then he started upward, flying straight into the sky.
They jetted upward at a very high speed, but Garret still holding on like a maniac – Tony supposed he must figure if he got away in the air, he'd just take pot-shots at Garret. That wasn't Tony's plan – The plan was a tasteful exit. But now they were getting higher and higher, the air thinning, and Garret – for all his durability – still had to breath.
The timer hit zero right as Garret's grip loosened and he started plummeting to the ground.
Then a dozen Fireflies appeared and Tony realized he wasn't going to get away. He darted down and grabbed Garret before the Fireflies could adapt to the low-atmosphere area. "Gentlemen," he said congenially, "You don't want me to hurt your boss do you?"
One of the Fireflies managed to shrug, the jet from his wing unit powering him stable in the air. "We're not supposed to allow hostage taking," he said, blandly.
Then the Fireflies were on Tony. He used Garret's unconscious body as a shield, battering off the others as best he could with the vibranium rod, trying to fly away and escape, staying in high atmo where the Fireflies weren't able to use their Extremis tricks.
But the Fireflies were quite good at what they did, it turned out. Tony wasn't able to outpace them, any time he did they'd just appear in front of him again. They wove through the air for minutes, sustaining a path of contention, Tony beating them back, them appearing in front of him. There was no dodge that quite stuck.
Then one of them, through luck or skill, managed to tunnel directly onto his position. He grabbed hold of Tony and started frying through the vibranium armor toward Tony's arc reactor, forcing the nanotech to start swarming to repair even in the face of the enormous heat of the vibranium. Tony let go of Garret hoping to distract the Firefly on his chest.
"Shouldn't you try to get him?" Tony asked when that didn't work immediately.
"One of the others will catch him," the Firefly on top of him said and
"Jarvis, intercept course with Garret," Tony said. "I didn't come here to murder anyone."
He started pushing against the Firefly on top of him, prying him free, tossing him loose – Just soon enough to remember that in lower atmo he had little more maneuverability than a Firefly. The other Fireflies closed around him before he could reach Garret, who the Fireflies were simply ignroing in preference to killing him.
"You people are completely psycho," Tony noted as they latched onto him. "Your boss is falling through the sky, you know that right?"
"He's made of vibranium," one of them said, jamming his hand into the melting core space.
"Jarvis," Tony said, worried now, "Tell Pepper I love her as well, won't you?"
"Of course sir," Jarvis said.
Tony peeled upward now, abandoning Garret to his fate and pulling up and up into higher atmo, trying to peel the Fireflies off him and escape. But before he could, he started to feel the hot fire grazing his skin from behind him, the burning sensation cut out faster than he would've anticipated.
Because they got to his lower spine first, he got to reflect that he thought death would be a lot more painful than it was.
----
Andromeda wanted me to come out of my room and I absolutely did not want to do that.
Tony was dead.
Garret was dead too, some mixture of the fall and the oxygen deprivation. But who gives a shit about Garret? He sucked.
Tony was my friend and he was dead. It was, in some sense, my fault. In a very real sense, it was my fault. If I had finked on Hydra – even after Thanos had died - I wouldn't be in this situation now.
I was discovering how much that hurt right as I was discovering the blow he had dealt to our support. The forensic accountants of the world all had access to Tony's work and it was damn good. We had, of course, tried to wipe the traces off the books. But Tony had managed to find the cleaner's fingerprints. The fucking genius bastard. If he hadn't immediately sabatoged that information with what was perceived by many as an assassination, we would've had to hung Garret out to dry and lost a ton of approval. Now we were investigating him posthumously for a terrorist attack, Pepper Potts insisted she knew nothing, through her lawyer of course, and we had no idea where the Jarvis intelligence was but it was fucking up our monitoring programs something bad. It still wasn't quite enough to get us back up to where we would be without the release, but it was keeping us from going totally underwater.
Andromeda wanted me to come out of my room, "Get the fuck up, Mike," she said, yanking the blanket off of me and my headset.
"Isn't a man permitted to mourn, even for a day?" I asked, taking down my headset, desperate to be left alone for a few days and not have to fucking do this any more.
"Look, Garret is dead, and that's sad, but you need to get back out there and show you're not going to be cowed by some billionaire with a fancy toy."
Tony was my friend. He was our friend and she thought this was about Garret? Fucking hell Andromeda. "Garret was an idiot who got caught," I said bluntly.
"Oh my god, you feel bad about Tony?" Andromeda said, her voice baffled. "Jesus Mike, Tony was an idiot. He shouldn't have gotten in our way. Simple as that." I looked at her, narrowing my eyes. "God, I didn't marry a fucking pussy. This is where you draw the line? Now you go soft?"
"Maybe I don't like it when my friends die," I said. This was not a dark, strange corner of the human imagination.
"Someone who tries to destroy everything you ever built isn't a friend, Mike!" Andromeda said. "I'm sorry that you're sad, but Hydra needs you right now."
"I already gave the speech," I said, waving my hand.
"You need to give more!" Andromeda said firmly, "People will listen to you."
I knew better than to say I doubted that. If Andromeda saw weakness in my spirit at this point, that was one thing. But if I poked a hole in her faith in my abilities at the same time...
A knock came on, "Why'd Mr. Stark die?" Persephone asked in a sad voice without waiting for anyone to open the door.
Andromeda came over to the door and opened it, "Mr. Stark attacked a government agent," she explained carefully, giving our daughter the official story.
I pulled myself out of bed to maintain the illusion and walked over to Persephone, squatting next to her, "Daddy's just sad, pumpkin," I said, running a hand over her hair, "he loves his friends no matter what. Just like I'll love you no matter what. But now I have to get back to work, I have to be strong, can you be strong with Daddy?"
Persephone nodded and I gave her a long hug that almost washed out my bitterness.