The Avengers Initiative (Part 2)
Seeing that Xia Yu seemed to know the man, Tony took Pepper Potts over to the sofa and sat down. "So, who are you?"
Before Nick Fury could speak, Xia Yu answered Tony. "He used to be one of my grandpa's clients. I treated him once afterward. He's a decent guy, but now it looks like he works for some government agency, like that Strategic Something-or-other."
"It's been renamed. It's called S.H.I.E.L.D., and I'm its director, Nick Fury. I don't know why the wellness doctor I met in New York suddenly turned out to be Tony Stark's friend, a major shareholder in the Herbal medicine Group, and a man with a set of mysterious superpowers." Nick Fury came over and sat down on the sofa as he spoke.
Xia Yu was heading to the kitchen to get things ready. He liked eating outside. Hearing that, he said to Nick Fury, "We're off work, Nick. Whatever it is, let's talk about it tomorrow. And what I have aren't superpowers. They're martial arts."
Nick Fury stood up and shouted toward the loft, "Damn it, you still owe me several treatments! I signed up for a membership card and loaded money onto it. You've stopped working, and I haven't gotten a refund. Do you want me to take you to court, Xia? I was your grandpa's friend, too."
Xia Yu came over carrying a huge pile of things and said with a smile, "A visitor is a guest. Stay and have dinner, Nick, my friend."
They threw together a makeshift dining table, and the four of them gathered around a copper hot pot, cooking meat and vegetables. Xia Yu had turned a gathering of Marvel superheroes into something that felt like a few mob bosses dividing up territory in a Hong Kong movie.
Halfway through the meal, Nick Fury launched into a vivid account of the Avengers plan for Tony Stark and Xia Yu. As he talked, he fished out a slice of fatty beef and shoved it into his mouth, baring his teeth. Xia Yu stared blankly at him, feeling that the whole scene somehow seemed off. It was just like meeting one of those smooth-talking swindlers at a dinner party in his previous life, stuffing food into his mouth and peeling sweet pickled garlic as he asked, "Brother, I've got an eighty-million project that'll pay for itself in two years. Interested?"
And yet it also felt completely real. After all, how could anyone always stand in someone else's home with the lights off, wait for them to come home, then slowly turn around and ask some pretentious rhetorical question?
"Nick, I've got a question for you," Xia Yu said.
"Go ahead." Nick Fury readily agreed.
"Did you stand there with your back to the front door and the lights off the whole time after you got into my house? Weren't you bored? What if we hadn't come back for three hours, or spent half an hour chatting downstairs before coming up? Wouldn't that have been awkward? Would you have needed the bathroom? Or were you secretly watching from the window, and as soon as you saw us coming in, you hurriedly turned off the lights and struck a pose? Were you actually sitting on the sofa watching a talk show before that?" Xia Yu fired off the questions in rapid succession.
Nick Fury: "..."
They moved on from the topic that had left the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. so embarrassed and returned to the Avengers. But Tony Stark clearly wasn't very interested. For one thing, there was no alien threat at present, and things were still relatively peaceful on Earth. Even Hydra hadn't surfaced yet.
Xia Yu, on the other hand, said he could accept, but only as a member of the Avengers. He didn't want to take part in any S.H.I.E.L.D. operations. He still preferred a little more freedom, and he had plans of his own. But Nick Fury's next words made him unable to sit still.
"Since you're not very interested in joining S.H.I.E.L.D., Xia, I'm planning to send Natasha on a few more dangerous field missions from now on. After all, S.H.I.E.L.D. is short on personnel right now, and agents as outstanding as Natasha Romanoff are hard to come by." As expected of the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., Nick Fury had gone straight for Xia Yu's weak spot.
Xia Yu and Natasha thought they had kept their relationship well hidden, but before Nick Fury, it was like a woven sack fluttering in the wind, full of holes.