Chapter 127: Hell's Kitchen Must Be Eliminated
The papers arrived the way bad news always does — all at once, from every direction.
Wade had found them first. He came downstairs carrying four different front pages, each with its own variation on the same theme, and dropped them on the table in front of Ethan with the energy of a man who had been personally insulted.
"Look at this," he said. "Look. At. This."
Ethan looked.
THE 21ST CENTURY'S MOST DANGEROUS CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION: HELL'S KITCHEN
EXCLUSIVE: THE MAN BEHIND HELL'S KITCHEN — AND HIS BILLIONAIRE FRIENDS
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ANNOUNCES THREE-DAY DEADLINE FOR HELL'S KITCHEN OPERATION
Pietro had come in from outside with three more. Different papers, same story. The operation had a public face now — not just SHIELD's problem, but a federal action, blessed by congressional committee, backed by military coordination.
"They worked fast," Pietro said.
"They had help," Ethan said.
May turned on the television.
It was, in retrospect, not the right move. But she'd been trying to change the mood, and the television was the first tool available.
The screen showed a reporter with a congressional representative, the kind of interview that had been scheduled in advance and talking-pointed to within an inch of its life.
"Why now?" the reporter asked.
The representative looked into the camera with the expression of a person who had been told what to say and had rehearsed it enough to believe it.
"We have always had this responsibility," he said. "Hell's Kitchen represents a concentrated failure of civic order. The people living there deserve better, which is why we're acting to restore a safe environment. The criminal elements that have taken root there — and the individuals who profit from them — cannot be allowed to continue threatening innocent lives."
May changed the channel.
A street interview. A reporter approaching pedestrians.
A child, maybe seven, clutching her mother's hand: "Mommy says if I'm bad I'll get sent to Hell's Kitchen and the monsters will eat me."
A teenager on a skateboard: "That place is where criminals go. My friend went in once and didn't come back."
An elderly man, actually angry: "It's been like that since before I was born. All darkness and violence. I'm glad the government is finally cleaning it up."
May turned off the television.
The room was quiet.
Ethan sat with the papers for a moment.
He was not, he told himself, surprised. This was how Fury had said he would respond when the recruitment approach failed. Public pressure, federal legitimacy, the construction of a narrative that made Hell's Kitchen the problem and the operation the solution.
What surprised him, slightly, was the speed.
Pierce, he thought. HYDRA has propaganda infrastructure. Fury wanted two days; Pierce's people accelerated the timeline.
He looked at the papers again.
The people being quoted — the child, the teenager, the old man — weren't lying. That was the difficult part. Hell's Kitchen's reputation had been earned over decades, earned before he arrived, earned by conditions he hadn't created. The reporting wasn't inventing a problem. It was accurately describing a past that he'd been working to change, and presenting it as if nothing had changed.
Which, to people who hadn't been here, was indistinguishable from the truth.
He thought about the families at the school. The kids who'd arrived with weapons in their backpacks because that was just what you carried. The ones who'd started leaving them behind. The ones who'd started showing up for morning sessions because something here was worth showing up for.
He thought about the residents who were right now watching the same broadcasts and reaching different conclusions — some defending him, some blaming him, some sitting in silence because they didn't know who to believe and couldn't afford to be wrong.
"Woo," Wade said, reading another headline. "We're full-on villains now. That's kind of exciting."
"Wade," Pietro said.
"I'm just saying. We've got the coverage. We've got the narrative. We've got the dramatic countdown. If this were a movie, we'd be the final boss."
"That's not helpful."
"I'm establishing the tone." Wade set down the paper. "Also I think we're going to win, which is the thing I'm actually saying under all of this."
May put her hand briefly on Ethan's arm.
"They're wrong about us," she said. "The people here know that. And the ones who don't know yet — they're going to find out."
Ethan looked at her.
May Parker had come here from a different universe, took a waitressing job, kept her nephew in school, and had apparently developed opinions about Hell's Kitchen with the same quiet completeness she brought to everything else.
"Thank you," he said.
He meant it.
Pietro stood up.
"Whatever happens," he said, "we're with you. All of us."
He said it the way Pietro said things he meant — directly, without decoration, the speedster's relationship with excess words being well-established.
Ethan looked around the room.
The people here. The training room where Harry and Peter were probably still running patterns. The school down the block where Frank Castle had quietly made himself indispensable in ways that would make any outside force think twice. The restaurant that was also a Homestead, that was also a cross-dimensional safe room, that was also just a place where May made good coffee and people ate breakfast.
He thought about what the Ancient One had said.
They're more capable than you're using them for.
He thought about Earth-42 and the portal opening at dawn.
He thought about Fury's two-day window and what it meant that he needed to be in another universe when that window closed.
"Alright," he said. He put the papers down. "Here's what we're going to do."
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