S1E1: Take Me to Church Characters: Iron Man, Captain America. Subject: The beginning, because ya gotta start somewhere... Location: Stark Tower, Tony's lab. Date: Saturday, December 27th, 2014.
You didn’t need to explain the math to Tony, he’d done it – and he'd shown his work. Six Avengers plus new recruits, ten, twenty, hell – one hundred super humans and mutants did not make a safety net secure enough for seven billion people. It just didn’t compute. The Avengers weren’t created in Nick Fury’s creepy little head to be a police force, SHIELD (for all its wicked ways), were the cops, the Avengers were just the fail-safe. The nuclear deterrent (in Tony’s case see: literally) for when the pot of crazy really boiled over. Then SHIELD collapsed under the weight of its on hubris, Iron Man new that it was only a matter of time before something would fill the vacuum the espionage agency left. Because if unchecked, Hydra and possibly worse, would quickly scurry in and make a home in the territory that SHIELD used to... well, shield. He was quite aware of the sensation; he’d watched the United States leave his weapons, his technology behind in hostile territories only to be appropriated by the enemy, then used to kill.
The solution to this particular problem had been murky at best. He’d considered a reboot, a new SHIELD - one with more... well, more Tony. But while this thought survive many drafts, and even many names; S.A.F.E., A.R.M.O.R., W.A.N.D.... it had gotten absurd - Tony new that even with a face lift, a full tuck, at its core it would have the same problems. Hydra, or some other cancer would soon seep its way through the cracks. The problem was people - not a complete shock, he knew, but a detail he couldn't find a way around. Humans were flawed - it's why SHIELD had needed to exist in the first place.
Iron Man didn't shy away from the problem. In fact, with his new marital arrangement, which was, no marriage... Tony had plenty of time to devote to the problem. It was in those quiet moments, when he combed through the darkness in himself, the shadows of humanity, he realized: he needed two very nonhuman sources to solve this puzzle. The first was obvious - he only needed to take a quick glance at his rebuilt Hall of Armor to see that piece. Threat managers, with no need of a human being put in the line of fire. The second piece however, that was trickier to find. It wasn't until Tony decided to catalog the Chitauri equipment left behind in the tower, the things he'd hidden from SHIELD, that he stumbled upon it. The pieces of technology seemed innocuous at first, but it wasn't the devices themselves that got him all riled up - but how they interacted with the Chitauri... on a biological level. Because you couldn't really separate the two... Well, Tony had, with a nuke, and it caused the soldiers to drop from the sky. It wasn't long before the inventor had pulled what he needed from the alien tech and finally created something he'd pondered for years. Nanotechnology that would allow him to transcend just being a man with a suit - he'd be the suit, they'd be one in the same.
Which brought him to the present, in his lab - eyes fixated on the future, an innocent enough looking canister that was filled with Tony's next great leap of faith. "Can you feel it, Jar?" Tony asked the only person (computer) that knew what he'd done. "What are the results from the first test?"
"The results were..." The British man-bot pause, uncharacteristically. "Impressive. The cells in the genetic sample have been healed, not just restored; improved." The computer continued on about how the nanobots worked better than expected but Tony was already lost in thought about the possibilities. A very small force of humans, an army of suits coordinated by Hera, and him, Tony Stark spearheading the peacekeepers with his new biotechnology. Infinitely less corruptible than SHIELD, because he would be... when he was a living computer. Tony stared at the canister long enough that Jarvis noticed. "Sir, you aren't thinking of doing something rash, are you?"
"Sometimes you just have to go with your gut..." Tony offered, but didn't get far before his whim was snatched from the air by a sneaky and elderly super-soldier.
"Tony?" Steve's voice reverberated through the unusually quiet lab - Tony and Bruce kept a loud workspace, they were all about that bass... Steve sighed, glad that he didn't just say everything that came to him. "You okay?" Stark was a particular animal, it only took Steve about half a tick to notice that everything about the other man felt off. "Whatcha working on?"
By this time, Tony had dropped the nanobots and walked away from the workbench too quickly to act as though it was for any other reason than deception. "Yeah, fine. Great." Smoother than taking that gravel road on your roller blades, Tony noticed Cap still had his duffel tossed over his shoulder and he figured the taller man had just returned from his trip abroad. "How about you... drink, cigar, half a bowl? It's good stuff, trust me."
"Excuse me?" Now Steve was sure something was up with Tony, but he was too jet lagged to figure it out now.
"Come on, Steve. Don't tell me you fell for Reefer Madness..." Iron Man said with a smirk, while his hand nervously fumbled with the tools on his other, mostly empty work bunch.
"Okay, Tony. I just wanted to make sure you remembered we we're going to D.C. tomorrow." Steve said, and then adjusted the weight on his shoulder. His eyes couldn't help but stray toward the table Tony had practically run away from.
Tony paused and searched his mind. "I have no memory of that." That didn't mean he hadn't agreed to it, it just meant he hadn't cared so much about it.
"The super-human registration act? We're speaking against it, in front of congress?" Steve didn't raise his voice, exactly... but you could tell he'd had enough Tony for today.
"Vaguely..." That was a lie, but Tony had only originally agreed to go because he felt it was his civic duty to fight the government at every pass.
"Okay, let me make this more than vague - have your ass on that plane tomorrow." Steve had a high tolerance for Tony most evenings, but the fifteen hour flight might have damaged his patience with Iron Man's antics.
"Oh forceful; you should go with that more often. I felt something... did you feel something?" Iron Man's hand illustrated the path Steve's words had crossed, and then pretend his hand was a paper fan.
"Goodnight, Tony." Steve said with a smile and turned to leave - he'd try and catch Clint and Natasha before he headed to his apartment.
Once Steve was gone, Tony quickly scurried back to the work bench he'd abandoned, like Steve was the police and Tony was a vagrant in a tent city. "I thought he'd never leave..." He picked the nanobots up again, he could feel their power... their potential. But then he remembered the flight tomorrow. If he did this tonight, then that wouldn't happen. And the registration... it had snuck up on Tony, not unlike Captain America had. He hadn't talked to the one person whose opinion he cared the most about. "Run your tests, Jarvis. I've got some things to do."