Stark, Coulson
Aug. 9th, 2012 08:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aa_natashaNow we'll see what he does with it. Little would surprise me from him, at this rate, but I don't think Rogers has it right on him. My original assessment isn't wrong. But assessments change. People change. Pretending that they don't is the fastest way to get yourself dead.
I don't think even he knows, yet.
So we'll see what he does with it.
=NYC= Shield HQ - Midtown - NYC
The Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division -- or SHIELD, as the branch is commonly known -- makes one of its few public homes in the heart of midtown Manhattan, not far from the bustle of Times Square. The lobby is drawn in lines of sleek, modern metal, with a good deal more security in place than your average city skyscraper, although the measures are perhaps not obvious to the trained eye. The front windows of the building allow sunlight to stream in during daylight hours; it is not immediately evident how big a gun would be required to dent them. You can barely tell there was just recently a hole in the ceiling. (Thanks, Thor.)
SHIELD agents on the ground in France have gathered more information about the anomalous signals identified by Dr. Banner -- but they are ill-equipped to interpret the information. Though SHIELD might not like to admit it, when it comes to tracking and interpreting energy signals similar to, say, an arc reactor -- there is really one expert in town.
Two if you want to count Banner. Stark doesn't.
Despite (because of) his expertise, SHIELD keeps a close watch on Stark when they allow him into the SHIELD control center. He has a babysitter in the form of a taser-armed supernanny: Phil Coulson. He has scarcely had time to drop any bugs to hack SHIELD's system. He has been forced to stay on his best behavior as he looks over the data and bounces it back to JARVIS for comparison to readings taken at Stark Tower. He is dressed in a neat pinstriped suit. His heels just possibly are a little higher than usual today, because his head /maybe/ comes out /above/ Coulson's. /Slightly/. "I think better without you breathing down my neck. Very inhibiting. Do I seem like an inhibited kind of guy?" His complaints are delivered with the absent-minded distraction of habit rather than real irritation.
Natasha appears without the benefit of warning, booted footsteps somehow silent against the floor. Only the brief sort-of-polite rap of her knuckles against the door announces her presence before she greets, "Mr. Stark. Hard at work complaining, I see."
"Ms. Romanushman," greets Stark with a brief lift of his eyes toward Natasha. His gaze skims in swift appraisal of her gear and her stance: are you armed for war? Are you walking wounded? We can assume that Coulson probably greets her all civilly in turn, but I am going to go ahead and skip him for now. "Keeping my hand in. I'd hate to neglect that skill and forget how to complain."
Tony complains; Phil endures. He hears but doesn't listen and is not near enough that he needs to dodge elbows. Not literally breathing down Stark's neck, then. Only nearly. Never further than arm's reach and reluctant to blink.
"Agent Romanov," he greets in turn, without looking at her. As civil as is to be expected.
He isn't interested in her 'gear.' Or her stance. He just smiles.
To her eyes it may look slightly pained.
"If you did, we might suspect you'd been replaced by an impostor," Natasha agrees with a very slightly amused tip of her head. She pauses, glancing toward Phil with a firmer nod and a returned, "Agent," before she flips a small plastic rectangle between her fingers, hefting it up in a suggestion of a toss toward Tony, brows raised. Catch?
"I'm sure there are a number of things that would give that away sooner: a lack of wit, intelligence, charm." Stark cants his head and focuses on the rectangle -- SD card? His fingers curl in a quick twitch but he then taps the counter next to the display he is working on. His thing about being handed things clearly extends to catching things today. "What did you bring me?"
"We've been here for two hours," Phil tells Natasha over Stark's head (not literally -- he can't, literally), helpfully informative in the way that he always is with his hands at his sides and his shoulders level and his eyes inscrutable.
It's not easily construed as a complaint by bystanders who make a practice of pissing and moaning with sledgehammer subtlety. But that is exactly what it is.
Bigger - ID card, complete with Tony's pretty picture. She twists it between her fingers in a deft roll, and after studying him for a moment exhales a resigned sigh and steps forward to slide it onto the counter next to him in the same moment that she rolls a sympathetic look toward Coulson. "Bet they've been fascinating," she replies before tacking on "--a present. Though you're probably a bit too busy to use it just now."
Stark pisses and moans with sledgehammer subtlety: "I'd--" I. Always I. Not we. "--be done if you guys let me take this data back to my workshop. What's so sensitive? Did you guys murder someone to get it? Piss off the French president's mistress? What?"
Nearly as soon as the card hits the counter, right as she lets go of it, Stark lifts it to turn it over between his fingers. He inspects the particular security precautions employed by SHIELD -- I ASSUME -- with a close and curious eye. "Too busy? Why? Does it let me access your pool, and if so, is it any better than /my/ pool?"
Stark goes for the card and Coulson keeps his eyes on the other hand, feeling -- maybe -- that he's operating at a level a little beneath his paygrade today. There's a kind of bland resignation about him. Something in the brows.
"No, it lets you access our Asgardian toys." Natasha's brows slide upward, briefly expectant as she watches him flip the card. "I've updated the retnal security as well. I suppose I could have just updated the access on the card you have--" And she, in fact, has "--but I thought this picture was prettier." It totally is. Tony's making a rather interesting face in it. Clearly a-- let's call it a candid. Plus handing over a new card is way more satisfyingly dramatic.
Stark's other hand creeps into the pocket of his trousers. He glances oh-so-casually over to catch Coulson's scrutiny; his hand stills. Just getting comfortable, Phil. Nothing suspicious here.
His hand comes back out when Natasha clarifies so that he can take the card in both hands and then tap it against his palm. His features wake with the bright light of bad ideas. "/Excellent/. I'm working on getting a pretty wide base of Asgardian tech. I've got Valkyrie and her sword and--" Wait, don't say that out loud. "--some other stuff in the works. This will-- wow. Who was your intrepid photographer?"
Phil's eyeline is on a string until the card's taken up Tony's full attention, undeterred by the relevant hand's brief proximity to his tackle. "I like it," he contributes, when there's a lull. Talk of Asgardian tech fails to catch. He may be determined not to engage in its discussion. "No airbrushing."
Natasha's smile edges a tiny bit wider as she turns to meet Phil's gaze, and her brows twitch slightly as she doesn't answer Tony's question. "Then I trust you'll dive right in once you've finished with the numerous things that seem to have exploded while I was gone."
Stark slips the card into his breast pocket, right behind a handkerchief that cost -- well, a lot. "Please, Agent." That's Coulson, first name Agent. "I don't need the airbrushing. You guys keep me running in circles as it is. Quite in shape." (Trim, he may be, but he is often hungover: red-eyed, puffy-faced. He may be one of the most air-brushed individuals in America. Don't tell him that.) "I was only /peripherally/ involved in the explosions. Not my fault."
"Technically," Coulson is being helpful again, "nothing exploded when he released Johann Schmidt into the present." He is just clarifying in Tony's defense, non-responsive to reassurances of shippy shapeness. "Loki didn't invoke any munitions during his visit either."
"Well," Natasha answers both dryly. "That's a relief."
"You guys made any progress on where E.T. was dialing home to?" Stark asks the pair of agents, but without any particular expectation of a new answer. If they had, and they were going to tell him, they would by now. "Please tell me you are still working on it. I can't do everything around here."
"Oh," says Coulson. In continuation.
Still helpful.
"The most recent incident with 'Amora.' No fireworks there. -- Not literally, anyway." But what about E.T.? He's kind enough to provide a simple, "We don't know anything that you don't," now that he's finished with his list of things that Stark hasn't directly assisted in blowing up.
Natasha's nod confirms Coulson's statement, and she adds, "And we're as concerned as I'm sure you are." Her gaze skitters away toward the door, and after a moment she adds a bit wistfully, "I suppose a bit of a break was too much to hope for."
"Ah," says Stark. To that continuation. "Wide base of Asgardian tech." Wiiide base. See that gesture he makes? Right there? That is the base, not anything crude. As he returns his attention to the display, Stark moves a bit more quickly through final conclusions. He has toys he wants to go see. "Oh, I don't know. At least our most recent portal only brought one guy through instead of an army. Things are obviously calming down." (Never say that.)
Coulson doesn't take breaks unless he is literally dead, so. He can only pretend to relate, weight shifted to readjust for Tony's abrupt return to work. "Obviously," he agrees. There isn't enough wood in SHIELD headquarters for it to be practical to find some to knock on.
"Sometimes one guy is all it takes," Natasha answers, voice dropped toward a mutter before she takes a step backward and gives first Coulson, then Tony a nod. "I'll leave you to your work, then. May it go-- swiftly." Her eyes flick back to Coulson with a slight twitch, one agent to another, and then she bows out.
Stark's attention is drifting. Rather than finish his current task, he's sticky-fingering in the direction of SHIELD's files on their Asgardian tech, so he has some idea of where to start. It is inconveniently locked, but despite Coulson being /right there/, he things little of taking a crack at it. Obviously it is just oversight that he can't read it. Better keep baby sitting, Phil.
The look is fielded and returned in kind, appreciation for the sentiment lined fine at the corners of his eyes. Even if it probably won't.
Resolve closed coolly back over itself, Coulson watches Stark think about SHIELD cybersecurity the same way he'd watch a cat thinking about jumping onto an active ceiling fan: with a kind of passive, soapstone neutrality.
Stark jumps. He doesn't set off any initial alarms as he eases beneath layers of code to tease out access, but Coulson is /right there/, so you can't exactly say he's undetected. He just wants a peek. Are you going to let him keep this up? Natasha has disconnected.
"Why are you doing this?"
On the subject of cats, Phil asks with a genuine grade of curiosity. 'Genuine' in this instance not to be confused with guilelessness or otherwise friendly uncertainty. There's steel tempered into the prompt, acrid and warm on the edge of confrontation. He keeps his voice quiet -- doesn't move to intercede.
But he wants to know.
Stark taps his pocket where the new ID card rests behind a fold of silk. "I have access, she said." ISH. "I just don't have the password." Not making an attempt to go far, or dig deep, he cuts through the security between himself and his goal in that moment. He is doing it because he can, because he wants to know. All he does, however, is review an inventory of Asgardian tech as would be told to him were he to ask nicely. He doesn't dig to see if SHIELD is hiding any other secrets -- at least not with his nanny around.
Agent Phil Coulson is not a genius. Stark has said so himself. To his face.
Point being that it's possible to see him struggling to comprehend what about doing things this way is so appealing. The hard way.
If it goes so far as to make him a little bit sad it doesn't show. Much. There's a delay in response behind the neutral cut of his suit and the generic, striped blue of his tie that doesn't call attention to itself.
"Those boundaries are in place for a reason," he says. "You know that your ongoing disregard for SHIELD protocol fuels distrust and so further limits material you might have been granted legitimate access to."
"Boundaries," says Stark with idle dismissal. He has the attitude of a man half-listening. He is reviewing the newly revealed information, instead. The analysis, his comparisons: they tick away in another window, processing.
"When you kids quit putting walls between me and what I need to know, I'll quit knocking them down." Stark flicks at the keyboard and dismisses the listing. He half-turns, regarding Coulson more directly. "And I was gentle. I should charge a consulting fee. Now your security team can patch that hole. I want to go test out this new ID. It will take another hour twenty for the comparisons to run anyway. Come on, Grumpy."
It's hard to tell when Coulson wants to argue and doesn't because he is on the clock and also because he is Coulson. Stark may be getting a feel for it by virtue of the fact that he invites contention with an UNCOMMON LEVEL OF DEDICATION.
There's a look, a flex at the back of his jaw. He doesn't smile.
He complies, though, turning from the violated touch screen enough to invite his charge to take the first step. The better to avoid losing observation.
Stark conscientiously steps back out of his security-evading hack and leaves the terminal's access where it should be. You never know what kind of malcontents and ne'er-do-wellers might be found in the government's employ.
Then he is out the door, with no more thought to the violations behind him. He turns his attention to the waiting Asgardian technology and begins compiling a list of tests to verify data already released, and maybe tease out new information. At least he's quiet with something that better engages his attention.
I don't think even he knows, yet.
So we'll see what he does with it.
=NYC= Shield HQ - Midtown - NYC
The Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division -- or SHIELD, as the branch is commonly known -- makes one of its few public homes in the heart of midtown Manhattan, not far from the bustle of Times Square. The lobby is drawn in lines of sleek, modern metal, with a good deal more security in place than your average city skyscraper, although the measures are perhaps not obvious to the trained eye. The front windows of the building allow sunlight to stream in during daylight hours; it is not immediately evident how big a gun would be required to dent them. You can barely tell there was just recently a hole in the ceiling. (Thanks, Thor.)
SHIELD agents on the ground in France have gathered more information about the anomalous signals identified by Dr. Banner -- but they are ill-equipped to interpret the information. Though SHIELD might not like to admit it, when it comes to tracking and interpreting energy signals similar to, say, an arc reactor -- there is really one expert in town.
Two if you want to count Banner. Stark doesn't.
Despite (because of) his expertise, SHIELD keeps a close watch on Stark when they allow him into the SHIELD control center. He has a babysitter in the form of a taser-armed supernanny: Phil Coulson. He has scarcely had time to drop any bugs to hack SHIELD's system. He has been forced to stay on his best behavior as he looks over the data and bounces it back to JARVIS for comparison to readings taken at Stark Tower. He is dressed in a neat pinstriped suit. His heels just possibly are a little higher than usual today, because his head /maybe/ comes out /above/ Coulson's. /Slightly/. "I think better without you breathing down my neck. Very inhibiting. Do I seem like an inhibited kind of guy?" His complaints are delivered with the absent-minded distraction of habit rather than real irritation.
Natasha appears without the benefit of warning, booted footsteps somehow silent against the floor. Only the brief sort-of-polite rap of her knuckles against the door announces her presence before she greets, "Mr. Stark. Hard at work complaining, I see."
"Ms. Romanushman," greets Stark with a brief lift of his eyes toward Natasha. His gaze skims in swift appraisal of her gear and her stance: are you armed for war? Are you walking wounded? We can assume that Coulson probably greets her all civilly in turn, but I am going to go ahead and skip him for now. "Keeping my hand in. I'd hate to neglect that skill and forget how to complain."
Tony complains; Phil endures. He hears but doesn't listen and is not near enough that he needs to dodge elbows. Not literally breathing down Stark's neck, then. Only nearly. Never further than arm's reach and reluctant to blink.
"Agent Romanov," he greets in turn, without looking at her. As civil as is to be expected.
He isn't interested in her 'gear.' Or her stance. He just smiles.
To her eyes it may look slightly pained.
"If you did, we might suspect you'd been replaced by an impostor," Natasha agrees with a very slightly amused tip of her head. She pauses, glancing toward Phil with a firmer nod and a returned, "Agent," before she flips a small plastic rectangle between her fingers, hefting it up in a suggestion of a toss toward Tony, brows raised. Catch?
"I'm sure there are a number of things that would give that away sooner: a lack of wit, intelligence, charm." Stark cants his head and focuses on the rectangle -- SD card? His fingers curl in a quick twitch but he then taps the counter next to the display he is working on. His thing about being handed things clearly extends to catching things today. "What did you bring me?"
"We've been here for two hours," Phil tells Natasha over Stark's head (not literally -- he can't, literally), helpfully informative in the way that he always is with his hands at his sides and his shoulders level and his eyes inscrutable.
It's not easily construed as a complaint by bystanders who make a practice of pissing and moaning with sledgehammer subtlety. But that is exactly what it is.
Bigger - ID card, complete with Tony's pretty picture. She twists it between her fingers in a deft roll, and after studying him for a moment exhales a resigned sigh and steps forward to slide it onto the counter next to him in the same moment that she rolls a sympathetic look toward Coulson. "Bet they've been fascinating," she replies before tacking on "--a present. Though you're probably a bit too busy to use it just now."
Stark pisses and moans with sledgehammer subtlety: "I'd--" I. Always I. Not we. "--be done if you guys let me take this data back to my workshop. What's so sensitive? Did you guys murder someone to get it? Piss off the French president's mistress? What?"
Nearly as soon as the card hits the counter, right as she lets go of it, Stark lifts it to turn it over between his fingers. He inspects the particular security precautions employed by SHIELD -- I ASSUME -- with a close and curious eye. "Too busy? Why? Does it let me access your pool, and if so, is it any better than /my/ pool?"
Stark goes for the card and Coulson keeps his eyes on the other hand, feeling -- maybe -- that he's operating at a level a little beneath his paygrade today. There's a kind of bland resignation about him. Something in the brows.
"No, it lets you access our Asgardian toys." Natasha's brows slide upward, briefly expectant as she watches him flip the card. "I've updated the retnal security as well. I suppose I could have just updated the access on the card you have--" And she, in fact, has "--but I thought this picture was prettier." It totally is. Tony's making a rather interesting face in it. Clearly a-- let's call it a candid. Plus handing over a new card is way more satisfyingly dramatic.
Stark's other hand creeps into the pocket of his trousers. He glances oh-so-casually over to catch Coulson's scrutiny; his hand stills. Just getting comfortable, Phil. Nothing suspicious here.
His hand comes back out when Natasha clarifies so that he can take the card in both hands and then tap it against his palm. His features wake with the bright light of bad ideas. "/Excellent/. I'm working on getting a pretty wide base of Asgardian tech. I've got Valkyrie and her sword and--" Wait, don't say that out loud. "--some other stuff in the works. This will-- wow. Who was your intrepid photographer?"
Phil's eyeline is on a string until the card's taken up Tony's full attention, undeterred by the relevant hand's brief proximity to his tackle. "I like it," he contributes, when there's a lull. Talk of Asgardian tech fails to catch. He may be determined not to engage in its discussion. "No airbrushing."
Natasha's smile edges a tiny bit wider as she turns to meet Phil's gaze, and her brows twitch slightly as she doesn't answer Tony's question. "Then I trust you'll dive right in once you've finished with the numerous things that seem to have exploded while I was gone."
Stark slips the card into his breast pocket, right behind a handkerchief that cost -- well, a lot. "Please, Agent." That's Coulson, first name Agent. "I don't need the airbrushing. You guys keep me running in circles as it is. Quite in shape." (Trim, he may be, but he is often hungover: red-eyed, puffy-faced. He may be one of the most air-brushed individuals in America. Don't tell him that.) "I was only /peripherally/ involved in the explosions. Not my fault."
"Technically," Coulson is being helpful again, "nothing exploded when he released Johann Schmidt into the present." He is just clarifying in Tony's defense, non-responsive to reassurances of shippy shapeness. "Loki didn't invoke any munitions during his visit either."
"Well," Natasha answers both dryly. "That's a relief."
"You guys made any progress on where E.T. was dialing home to?" Stark asks the pair of agents, but without any particular expectation of a new answer. If they had, and they were going to tell him, they would by now. "Please tell me you are still working on it. I can't do everything around here."
"Oh," says Coulson. In continuation.
Still helpful.
"The most recent incident with 'Amora.' No fireworks there. -- Not literally, anyway." But what about E.T.? He's kind enough to provide a simple, "We don't know anything that you don't," now that he's finished with his list of things that Stark hasn't directly assisted in blowing up.
Natasha's nod confirms Coulson's statement, and she adds, "And we're as concerned as I'm sure you are." Her gaze skitters away toward the door, and after a moment she adds a bit wistfully, "I suppose a bit of a break was too much to hope for."
"Ah," says Stark. To that continuation. "Wide base of Asgardian tech." Wiiide base. See that gesture he makes? Right there? That is the base, not anything crude. As he returns his attention to the display, Stark moves a bit more quickly through final conclusions. He has toys he wants to go see. "Oh, I don't know. At least our most recent portal only brought one guy through instead of an army. Things are obviously calming down." (Never say that.)
Coulson doesn't take breaks unless he is literally dead, so. He can only pretend to relate, weight shifted to readjust for Tony's abrupt return to work. "Obviously," he agrees. There isn't enough wood in SHIELD headquarters for it to be practical to find some to knock on.
"Sometimes one guy is all it takes," Natasha answers, voice dropped toward a mutter before she takes a step backward and gives first Coulson, then Tony a nod. "I'll leave you to your work, then. May it go-- swiftly." Her eyes flick back to Coulson with a slight twitch, one agent to another, and then she bows out.
Stark's attention is drifting. Rather than finish his current task, he's sticky-fingering in the direction of SHIELD's files on their Asgardian tech, so he has some idea of where to start. It is inconveniently locked, but despite Coulson being /right there/, he things little of taking a crack at it. Obviously it is just oversight that he can't read it. Better keep baby sitting, Phil.
The look is fielded and returned in kind, appreciation for the sentiment lined fine at the corners of his eyes. Even if it probably won't.
Resolve closed coolly back over itself, Coulson watches Stark think about SHIELD cybersecurity the same way he'd watch a cat thinking about jumping onto an active ceiling fan: with a kind of passive, soapstone neutrality.
Stark jumps. He doesn't set off any initial alarms as he eases beneath layers of code to tease out access, but Coulson is /right there/, so you can't exactly say he's undetected. He just wants a peek. Are you going to let him keep this up? Natasha has disconnected.
"Why are you doing this?"
On the subject of cats, Phil asks with a genuine grade of curiosity. 'Genuine' in this instance not to be confused with guilelessness or otherwise friendly uncertainty. There's steel tempered into the prompt, acrid and warm on the edge of confrontation. He keeps his voice quiet -- doesn't move to intercede.
But he wants to know.
Stark taps his pocket where the new ID card rests behind a fold of silk. "I have access, she said." ISH. "I just don't have the password." Not making an attempt to go far, or dig deep, he cuts through the security between himself and his goal in that moment. He is doing it because he can, because he wants to know. All he does, however, is review an inventory of Asgardian tech as would be told to him were he to ask nicely. He doesn't dig to see if SHIELD is hiding any other secrets -- at least not with his nanny around.
Agent Phil Coulson is not a genius. Stark has said so himself. To his face.
Point being that it's possible to see him struggling to comprehend what about doing things this way is so appealing. The hard way.
If it goes so far as to make him a little bit sad it doesn't show. Much. There's a delay in response behind the neutral cut of his suit and the generic, striped blue of his tie that doesn't call attention to itself.
"Those boundaries are in place for a reason," he says. "You know that your ongoing disregard for SHIELD protocol fuels distrust and so further limits material you might have been granted legitimate access to."
"Boundaries," says Stark with idle dismissal. He has the attitude of a man half-listening. He is reviewing the newly revealed information, instead. The analysis, his comparisons: they tick away in another window, processing.
"When you kids quit putting walls between me and what I need to know, I'll quit knocking them down." Stark flicks at the keyboard and dismisses the listing. He half-turns, regarding Coulson more directly. "And I was gentle. I should charge a consulting fee. Now your security team can patch that hole. I want to go test out this new ID. It will take another hour twenty for the comparisons to run anyway. Come on, Grumpy."
It's hard to tell when Coulson wants to argue and doesn't because he is on the clock and also because he is Coulson. Stark may be getting a feel for it by virtue of the fact that he invites contention with an UNCOMMON LEVEL OF DEDICATION.
There's a look, a flex at the back of his jaw. He doesn't smile.
He complies, though, turning from the violated touch screen enough to invite his charge to take the first step. The better to avoid losing observation.
Stark conscientiously steps back out of his security-evading hack and leaves the terminal's access where it should be. You never know what kind of malcontents and ne'er-do-wellers might be found in the government's employ.
Then he is out the door, with no more thought to the violations behind him. He turns his attention to the waiting Asgardian technology and begins compiling a list of tests to verify data already released, and maybe tease out new information. At least he's quiet with something that better engages his attention.