Mark didn’t sleep that night, not even the pretend kind.
He lay in the narrow bed of their rented crew housing, staring at the ceiling, running the conversation with Coulson over and over until he’d wrung every possible interpretation out of it.
He’d let his guard down.
Five words, *I don’t know any Jarvis*, and he’d handed a trained intelligence officer exactly the confirmation he’d been fishing for.
A rookie mistake.
The kind of mistake that came from a five-year-old’s nervous system running on a grown man’s paranoia, reacting too fast, thinking too slow.
*Get it together.
Panicking now doesn’t undo it.*
He slipped out of bed once he was sure Rosalie was asleep in the next room, padded over to where his hard drive sat tucked in his suitcase, and connected to the production’s shared internet line.
It was slower than what he had at home, but it would do.
“Alice, I need a full sweep.
Anything SHIELD-adjacent that’s touched our network in the last twenty-four hours.”
Alice’s interface bloomed to life on the small laptop screen, her expression shifting into something more businesslike than her usual cheerful default.
Mark had coded that distinction in deliberately, a professional mode for when things got serious.
“Scanning now.” A pause, longer than Mark liked.
“I’m finding traces of a passive monitoring script embedded in the production company’s network infrastructure.
It’s been active for approximately six days, well before you arrived in New York.”
*Six days.
So this wasn’t Coulson deciding to introduce himself on a whim.
Someone flagged the production ahead of time.*
“Can you tell what they’re pulling?”
“Communications metadata, mostly.
Call logs, email headers, nothing content-level yet.
It reads like preliminary surveillance rather than an active investigation.”
That was something, at least.
Preliminary surveillance meant suspicion, not certainty.
Coulson’s fishing expedition on the boardwalk had likely been exactly that, an attempt to provoke a reaction and see what surfaced, rather than a confirmed operation with Mark already identified as the target.
*But I gave him a reaction anyway.*
“Strip it out.
Quietly, nothing that trips an alarm on their end.
“Already working on it.”
Mark sat back, rubbing at his eyes with small, childish knuckles that still felt strange to command after all these years.
He needed a plan, not just for tonight, but for the broader problem Coulson represented.
SHIELD had already connected the CAA hack to somewhere in Los Angeles.
Now they had a face in New York willing to sit down next to him and needle for information.
The net was tightening, slowly, but tightening all the same.
*I need to give them somewhere else to look.*
An idea started forming, rough at first, then sharpening as he turned it over.
If SHIELD’s interest was rooted entirely in the hacking, then the obvious solution was to stop being interesting as a hacker.
Retire the persona.
Let the trail on that particular mystery hacker go cold, no further incidents, no further proof of life.
Interest faded when there was nothing new to chase.
But that alone might not be enough, not with Coulson already having met him in person, already having planted a name and watched for a reaction.
He needed something more active.
A misdirection solid enough to make continued investigation feel like wasted resources.
*What if there was a version of the story that made more sense than ‘five-year-old is secretly a supergenius hacker’?*
He worked through the possibilities for the better part of an hour before landing on something workable.
If a plausible cover story existed, something boring enough not to warrant further digging, SHIELD’s limited resources would likely move on to more pressing matters.
Not perfect.
But good enough, probably, to buy time.
“Alice, pull every trace we have connecting the Cathy Dale files back to their point of origin.
I want to leave something behind, subtly, pointing toward a disgruntled former CAA employee.
Someone real, someone who actually had legitimate access and a plausible motive.”
“That would require fabricating a fairly convincing digital trail,” Alice said.
“It’s within my capability, but it will take time to make it look organic rather than constructed.”
“Take the time.
We’re not rushing this one.”
He didn’t love the idea of throwing an innocent person under the bus, even a fictional composite built from scraps of real employee data.
But the alternative was SHIELD eventually knocking on Rosalie’s door, and that outcome was categorically worse.
Better a stranger take a few uncomfortable questions from an internal HR investigation than his mother lose her son to a black site interview room, however unlikely that particular worst case actually was.
Morning came, and Mark forced himself back into character before Rosalie even stirred, sitting cross-legged on the floor running through his lines with the same easy focus he’d shown every day since arriving. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping.com.
“You’re up early,” Rosalie said, yawning her way into the kitchenette.
“Nervous about today’s scenes?”
“A little,” Mark lied smoothly.
Today’s scenes were the ones he’d already run a hundred times through Alice’s simulation, muscle memory doing the heavy lifting long before the cameras rolled.
Nerves weren’t the issue.
He kept half an eye on the crowd all day, cataloguing faces, watching for Coulson’s return or, worse, someone else entirely.
Coulson didn’t reappear, not that day, nor the next.
Mark told himself that was a good sign, though a persistent, low-grade unease sat with him regardless, a feeling he hadn’t experienced with this particular intensity since the SHIELD hackers had first come knocking months earlier.
Filming continued, day bleeding into day, the crew grinding through scene after scene with the particular controlled chaos of an independent production trying to stay on schedule and under budget.
Rosalie’s performance kept improving, and even Mark, watching with a critical eye sharpened by two lifetimes of media consumption, found himself genuinely impressed by how far she’d come from the anxious, overwhelmed woman clutching her script in dread weeks earlier.
Three days after the Coulson encounter, Alice finished her work.
“The fabricated trail is complete,” she reported, once Mark had a private moment to check in.
“I’ve planted digital fingerprints pointing to a former CAA IT contractor, terminated eight months ago under circumstances that would plausibly motivate retaliation.
The details are consistent enough to withstand a moderate investigation, though I would not recommend testing it against Stark-level resources.”
*Jarvis would see through it in about four seconds.
But Jarvis already knows the truth and has apparently decided to keep quiet about it.
This trail’s not for him.
It’s for anyone else who comes looking.*
“Good.
Seed it somewhere they’ll find it, but not somewhere so obvious it looks planted.”
“Already in progress.”
Mark closed the laptop, allowing himself, for the first time in days, something close to real relief.
It wasn’t a permanent solution.
Nothing about his situation ever would be, not really, not with the kind of powers ticking upward in the back of his mind and a world full of gods, monsters, and secret agencies waiting just over the horizon.
But it bought distance.
Distance was survivable.
Distance meant time to grow stronger before anyone came looking with more than idle curiosity.
He thought, briefly, of Coulson’s carefully unreadable expression on the boardwalk, that faint flicker of confirmation when Mark had slipped.
*Next time, I won’t be the one who blinks first.*
Outside the window, New York’s pale winter sun climbed slowly over the skyline, and somewhere beneath the careful mask of a five-year-old’s face, Mark filed the lesson away for good: power meant nothing if he couldn’t also learn to hide it better than he had.