Chapter 125: Captain Marvel's Attitude Problem
The morning after the reunion was, by any objective standard, excellent.
Harry and Peter (Tobey) had claimed the training room before breakfast and were in the process of generating the specific sounds of two people who had been sparring together long enough to make each other genuinely better. Tony had apparently slept somewhere in the building — Ethan didn't ask where — and was already running weapons tests in the training space between Harry's rounds, muttering things about material resonance and feedback calibration.
May had arrived for the morning shift, seen Tony Stark eating a bun in her restaurant, done a rapid and visible recalibration of her understanding of who she worked for, and decided to be slightly more enthusiastic about her job.
Ethan had made breakfast and was eating it.
He was two bites into a bao when his Observation Haki picked up the incoming energy signature — fast, powerful, and aimed at the building with the directional clarity of something that had been given coordinates.
He grabbed another bao and went upstairs.
The sky over Hell's Kitchen was clear.
He stepped off the building's roof edge and let gravity do a partial job while the Gravity-Gravity Fruit filled in the rest, floating out into the morning air with the relaxed posture of a man who had somewhere to be but wasn't particularly rushed about getting there.
John was already airborne.
He'd come up from the street — white coat, hands in pockets, wolf nowhere visible but clearly nearby — moving with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had felt the same thing Ethan had and decided that building security was still technically his job, retirement be damned.
They floated there for a moment, side by side.
The incoming figure resolved from fast-moving blur to recognizable human shape: gold-blond, blue-and-red uniform, the energy signature of a photon-powered human being traveling at a comfortable percentage of her maximum speed.
There she is, Ethan thought.
Carol Danvers. Captain Marvel. Fury's ceiling-raiser, his long-range contingency, the person he'd been waiting for since the Triskelion incident. She'd been in the outer systems. Now she was here, flying toward a set of coordinates Fury had given her, and she hadn't waited for a briefing.
She pulled up when she saw them. The stop was controlled, precise — someone who'd done this ten thousand times.
She looked at John first.
White suit. Quiet face. The particular quality of stillness that came with someone who had been very good at very difficult things for a very long time. She assessed him and filed him as significant.
Then she looked at Ethan.
Jeans. T-shirt. Flip-flops. Half a bao in his left hand.
She looked at John again, clearly revising her initial candidate.
"You're the Lord of Hell's Kitchen," she said to John. "Fury sent me."
John looked at Ethan.
"That's you," he said. "I'm just the doorman." He turned back toward the building. "Nothing I need to be here for."
He descended.
Ethan watched him go with the expression of a man who was going to have a word about the just the doorman framing later.
He looked at Carol.
Carol was reassessing. The aura she'd projected — the full-height confidence of someone who had been the most powerful person in most rooms she'd entered for the past several decades — hadn't changed, but she was now directing it at a man in flip-flops eating breakfast, and the math wasn't producing the intimidation it was supposed to.
"Nick Fury," she said, "wants me to pass on an offer. Join the Avengers Initiative. Everything from the SHIELD incident gets cleared."
Ethan finished the bao.
"Is that all?" he said.
"That's the offer."
"Pass." He turned toward the building.
The energy in the air changed. Carol's patience had a shorter runway than she usually let herself acknowledge, and the man in front of her was being so unimpressed that it had started producing a reaction she recognized as irritation.
"That's your answer," she said. "That's it?"
"Go home," Ethan said pleasantly. "Tell Fury there's no problem here as long as no one makes one."
"Last chance," she said. "Join. Or don't expect us to be understanding about what comes next."
Fury's voice came out of somewhere on Carol's person — a transmitter she'd been given, apparently operational.
"Cross." His voice had the quality it got when he was trying to sound more in control of a situation than he was. "You're asking the people of Hell's Kitchen to carry the consequences of your choices."
Ethan stopped.
He turned back.
He looked at the transmitter location — the slight outline at Carol's collar — and addressed Fury directly, with the clarity of someone who had thought about this particular argument and had an answer already prepared.
"Two things," he said. "First — threatening a neighborhood to control one person is not justice. You know that. I know you know that. The fact that you're saying it anyway tells me you're out of moves, not that you've got leverage." He kept his voice even. "Second — I've been left alone more or less since I arrived here. Every conflict has started because someone came to me. You came to me. Pierce came to me. The Winter Soldier was sent to my people, not the other way around." He paused. "If you leave me alone, I'll leave you alone. I've said this before. The answer to whether that's still true hasn't changed."
A brief silence.
"Whatever you're going to do," Ethan continued, "do it. I'm done discussing it."
He looked at Carol.
Carol was standing in midair with the expression of a woman recalibrating something.
"You," Ethan said, not unkindly, "are a very capable person who has been pointed at the wrong problem. That's not your fault. But I'm not the problem."
He reached out with his right hand.
The Sling Ring traced its arc — gold sparks, circular aperture, the aperture expanding into a portal that opened directly into the deep outer void behind her, a stretch of actual empty space considerably far from anything inhabited.
"Take the day," he said. "Think about what you've actually been told versus what's actually happening. Come back when you want to have the real conversation."
The Chaos Magic moved.
She went through the portal — controlled, not violent, with enough force to ensure the transit happened but not enough to be cruelty — and the portal closed behind her.
Ethan looked at the empty sky.
He finished his bao.
She'll be back, he thought. But she'll come back having thought about it, which is different from coming back with orders.
He went downstairs to see if there was more breakfast.
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