The video appeared online less than ten minutes after the café doors closed.
At first it was nothing special. A shaky clip posted to a small social media account with a caption that read:
"I don't know who this guy is, but the instruments started playing by themselves. This was unreal."
The footage was imperfect. The lighting was warm and uneven. You could hear cups clink, someone whispering in disbelief, a soft gasp when the drums began moving on their own. The camera shook slightly as the person recording tried to stay unnoticed.
Then Erik's voice came through.
Clear. Warm. Unmistakably real.
The algorithm did what it always did when something resonated with human emotion.
It listened.
The video jumped from a few dozen views to a few thousand in minutes. Comments started flooding in.
"How are the instruments playing like that?"
"This gave me chills."
"I swear the song felt like it was aimed at someone specific."
"Is this some kind of ARG or performance art?"
"No edits. I checked. This is raw footage."
Someone reposted it. Then another. Then a popular music reaction channel stitched it with wide eyed disbelief. A sound engineer slowed the audio down and analyzed it frame by frame.
"There's no backing track."
"No hidden speakers."
The comment section began to shift in tone.
"This doesn't feel like a trick."
"I'm not religious, but this felt… important."
"My sister is deaf. She watched this and started crying. She says she felt it."
The clip crossed platforms.
By the time Erik and Lady Death reached home, the video had already hit trending in three regions.
Erik paused as he felt it.
A ripple.
Not through space. Through people.
He stopped walking.
Lady Death glanced at him. "You feel it too."
"Yes," he said quietly. "They are listening."
Across the city, across the country, across the world, humans replayed the video. Some out of curiosity. Some out of skepticism. Some because something about it felt like hope pressing gently against their chest.
A therapist paused the video halfway through, hands shaking. A war veteran replayed the chorus twice, then sat in silence. A musician stared at the screen, whispering, "That shouldn't be possible."
And somewhere much higher up the ladder of power, the attention shifted.
In a dark office overlooking the city, a massive man watched the footage on a large screen. He replayed the moment the instruments moved on their own. Paused it. Zoomed in on Erik's eyes.
The waves within them.
Kingpin's jaw tightened.
"That's not a trick," he muttered.
Behind him, one of his men spoke nervously. "Sir, that's the guy from the café. The one who stopped us."
Kingpin leaned back slowly, fingers steepled. "Run facial recognition. Pull every camera angle. I want to know who he is, where he came from, and why my daughter was sitting in front of him."
The man swallowed. "And if he's not on record?"
Kingpin smiled thinly. "Then he's a problem."
Elsewhere, in a quiet lab filled with screens and arc reactors, Tony Stark watched the same clip in silence.
He replayed it twice.
Then a third time.
Friday spoke softly. "Sir. There is no technological explanation for this performance."
Tony leaned back in his chair, eyes narrowed with focus rather than fear.
"No," he said. "But I've felt something like this before."
He pulled up a separate readout. One tied to the Zergbuster suit.
A faint harmonic spike appeared.
Identical to the one from earlier.
Tony exhaled slowly.
"So that's you," he murmured. "The mystery musician."
Back on the street, Erik finally moved again.
"I did not intend this," he said.
Lady Death smiled knowingly. "You never do. You simply are."
"Will this cause trouble?"
"Yes," she answered honestly. "And hope. Often at the same time."
Erik looked out over the city skyline, feeling thousands of hearts vibrate faintly in response to something he had created without force or command.
He had played one song.
For one person.
And the world had listened.
Whether it was ready or not.
__________
Tony Stark did not sleep.
He sat alone in his workshop, the lights dimmed low while holographic projections floated around him in layered rings. The video of the café performance played again, slowed to a fraction of its original speed. Instruments moving without visible force. Sound waves behaving incorrectly. Harmonics folding in on themselves like reality had briefly forgotten its own rules.
Tony rubbed his chin. "You're not just talented. You're impossible."
"Sir," Friday said calmly, "the resonance pattern embedded in the audio file is repeating across multiple spectrums. It is not merely sound. It appears to be structural."
"Structural," Tony echoed. "As in reality level structural."
He flicked his wrist and brought up another display. The Zergbuster telemetry logs. A faint but unmistakable harmonic spike blinked on screen, timestamped earlier that morning.
Tony overlaid the data.
The patterns aligned perfectly.
He leaned forward, eyes narrowing. "That's not coincidence."
Friday continued. "The resonance signature from the café performance matches the anomaly that stabilized the Mark X Zergbuster's neural interface. The probability of this occurring naturally is statistically negligible."
Tony exhaled slowly. "So the guy with the magic coffee shop concert is the same something that reached out and tuned my armor like it was a guitar."
He paused, then added quietly, "Or someone."
Tony began isolating the harmonic frequency, peeling it apart layer by layer. Unlike normal sound, this resonance did not decay. It propagated through space like a living equation, adapting to distance rather than diminishing.
"That's new," Tony muttered. "Sound that refuses to fade."
"Sir," Friday said, "I am detecting similar harmonic echoes across public infrastructure sensors. Power grids. Seismic monitors. Even old SHIELD satellites."
Tony blinked. "He didn't just go viral online. He went viral in the universe."
He stood and paced, hands moving as screens followed him.
"Okay. Let's assume you're not hostile. You didn't scramble comms. You didn't fry electronics. You didn't hijack networks. You played music. You made people feel things."
Tony stopped pacing.
"And you helped my armor."
That part stuck with him.
Tony brought up a city map and highlighted the café's location. He traced the harmonic dispersion outward, watching how it curved around buildings, water, and human density. The resonance bent toward people, not machines.
"That's intentional," Tony said softly. "You aim at emotion."
Friday added, "There is another anomaly, sir. A second presence appears consistently near the resonance source. Cold. Absolute. Conceptual rather than physical."
Tony raised an eyebrow. "Conceptual."
"Yes. The data correlates with known metaphysical signatures associated with death across multiple belief systems."
Tony stared at the readout.
"…You're kidding."
"I do not joke, sir."
Tony laughed once, sharp and disbelieving. "Of course. Of course the universe decides to drop a cosmic musician and Death herself into my backyard right when I'm dealing with space bugs."
He stopped laughing just as suddenly.
"Run a cross reference with mythological entities. Endless. Abstracts. Anything that matches that signature."
Seconds passed.
Friday spoke carefully. "Match found. Probability high. Entity designation: Death. One of the Endless."
Tony sank into a chair.
"Well. That explains the confidence."
He pulled the café video back up, focusing on Erik's face. The eyes. The subtle wave patterns no camera should have been able to catch, yet somehow did.
"You're not hiding," Tony said quietly. "You're just not afraid of being seen."
Tony tapped a control and sent a narrowband harmonic pulse outward. Not a weapon. Not a ping. A question. A simple echo shaped from the Zergbuster's resonance core.
Hello.
The response came almost immediately.
Not in words. Not in sound.
In understanding.
The lab lights hummed softly, syncing for just a second before returning to normal. Tony's heart skipped.
He smiled.
"Okay," Tony said, standing up. "So you can hear me."
Friday spoke. "Sir, was that wise?"
Tony shrugged. "Maybe not. But if he wanted Earth gone, we wouldn't be having this conversation."
He grabbed a jacket and glanced once more at the screen showing Erik mid performance, a man who looked human but clearly wasn't.
"You helped my armor," Tony said. "You helped people. And you didn't ask for anything."
Tony headed for the exit.
"Friday," he said, "keep tracking the harmonic signature. But don't escalate. No satellites. No drones. No scary stuff."
"Understood."
Tony paused at the door.
"And if our mystery musician decides to play again," he added, "I want front row seats."
Somewhere in the city, Erik felt a familiar vibration brush against his awareness.
Curious. Brilliant. Human.
He tilted his head slightly, sensing the echo of a mind reaching out not in fear or aggression, but in fascination.
Lady Death glanced at him. "Someone clever is listening."
Erik smiled faintly. "That's all right."
The universe hummed softly between them.
And two geniuses, born worlds apart, began to notice each other.
With a third on the way.
__________
The Batcave was quiet in the way only it could be. Not empty, not peaceful. Just controlled.
Bruce Wayne stood before the main console, cape draped loosely over his shoulders, cowl resting on the edge of the workstation. Multiple screens played the same clip from different angles. Different platforms. Different compression artifacts.
Same impossible result.
A man on a café stage. Instruments playing without contact. Sound behaving incorrectly.
Bruce replayed the moment the drums began moving on their own. He slowed it frame by frame.
"No wires," he said quietly.
Alfred stood a few steps behind him, hands folded calmly. "No visible trickery either, sir."
Bruce zoomed in further. The piano keys depressed with no mechanical assistance. The cello strings vibrated at angles that violated normal bow physics. The sound waves on the audio visualization did not decay. They folded inward, reinforcing themselves.
Bruce's jaw tightened.
"That's not telekinesis," he said. "Telekinesis applies force. This is influence."
He pulled up another feed. Thermal imaging from a nearby security camera across the street.
No heat distortion, electromagnetic spike, or radiation surge.
"Then perhaps it's magic," Alfred offered mildly.
Bruce did not look away from the screen. "Magic still follows rules. This follows different ones."
He isolated the singer's face.
The eyes.
Bruce zoomed in further.
The faint white wave patterns inside the irises caught for a single frame before compression blurred them away.
Bruce froze.
He replayed it.
There. Again.
"…Sound-based," he murmured.
Alfred raised an eyebrow. "Sound based, sir?"
"Not sound as humans understand it," Bruce replied. "Vibration. Resonance. Something older."
He pulled up another file. Mars telemetry. Zerg combat footage. A Stark Industries technical brief flagged as restricted but not impossible for Bruce Wayne to acquire.
A harmonic anomaly noted during Zergbuster testing.
Bruce overlaid the data.
The signatures aligned.
Bruce exhaled slowly.
"So Stark noticed too."
Alfred stepped closer. "Is this man dangerous?"
Bruce watched the moment in the video where the singer subtly adjusted the stage. Instruments responding to him like loyal animals. The crowd staring in wonder, not fear.
"He could be," Bruce said honestly. "Anything this powerful always is."
He paused the video at the exact moment Erik looked toward Echo.
Bruce studied that look.
Recognition. Empathy. Restraint.
"But he chose not to be," Bruce added.
Alfred nodded. "That is an important distinction."
Bruce leaned back, arms crossing. "He didn't dominate the room. He didn't overwhelm it. He adapted to it. Focused on one person. One emotional target."
Alfred considered this. "A healer rather than a conqueror."
"Or both," Bruce said quietly. "Depending on intent."
Another screen lit up.
Kingpin.
Facial recognition flagged from café security footage. Known associates entering the building shortly after the performance.
Bruce's eyes hardened.
"And now the predators are circling."
He turned away from the screens, mind already racing through contingencies.
"If Stark is tracking him with technology," Bruce said, "then I'll track him with people."
"Should we intervene?" Alfred asked.
Bruce shook his head. "Not yet. He hasn't made a move. Neither have I."
He glanced once more at Erik frozen mid song, the world holding its breath around him.
"But if this being becomes a focal point," Bruce continued, "then every power player on the planet will want to control him. Or eliminate him."
Alfred's voice softened. "And what do you believe he will do?"
Bruce was silent for a long moment.
"Sing," he said finally. "Until someone gives him a reason not to."
He reached for the cowl.
"Monitor all chatter. Keep an eye on Fisk. And flag any future appearances of our mystery musician."
Alfred inclined his head. "Very good, sir."
As Bruce turned toward the Batmobile platform, the video looped one last time behind him. The instruments moved. The music rose.
For the first time in a long while, Bruce Wayne felt something unfamiliar tug at his instincts.
Not fear.
Concern.
Because whatever that man was, he was already changing the world.
And Gotham had a way of attracting things like that.
__________
__________
That's all for today. Hope you enjoyed it.
Quick question: if I do the scp fanfic, what powers do you think the mc should have?
Anyways like always any questions or concerns leave a comment.