Chapter 128: The Underground Emperor Wakes Up
The street outside the Lucky Dragon looked different.
Not physically — the buildings were where they'd been, the school was visible two blocks down, the usual morning sounds were present. But the quality of it had changed. The people moving through it were moving differently. Faster, or not moving at all. Conversations happening at lower volumes. A woman standing in her doorway with her arms crossed, watching the street with the expression of someone who had made a calculation and hadn't finished it yet.
Ethan stood in the doorway and looked at it.
Pietro materialized beside him.
"Can't we get someone to counter the narrative?" Pietro said. "Other media? People who've actually been here?"
"We can try," Ethan said. "It won't move fast enough. And it won't reach the people who've already decided what to think."
"That's not fair."
"No," Ethan said. He watched a family across the street — two parents, three children, loading bags into a car. Leaving. "It isn't."
Pietro's jaw tightened. He looked like he wanted to say something about what fair had to do with anything, and the answer to that question clearly wasn't satisfying him.
Ethan turned back inside.
"Get ready," he said. "There's a fight coming."
Deadpool Dog, who had been sitting in the entrance with the focused attention he brought to situations he had correctly identified as significant, performed a crisp salute with one paw.
The community school.
The principal's office had more people in it than it was designed to hold, which was appropriate given that the people in it were trying to hold more than one school's worth of responsibility.
Doc Ock had a resignation letter in his hand, which had been given to him by someone else. He looked at it with the expression of a man reviewing evidence.
"Seventeen teachers," he said. "Three support staff. And the enrollment is down by about a third." He set the letter on the desk. "Parents pulling their children."
Frank Castle said something under his breath that didn't need to be repeated.
Fisk sat with his cigar, smoke rising in a slow column, his expression doing the thing it did when he was running numbers that most people wouldn't like the result of.
"Current population," he said.
Caine answered without consulting notes. "Three hundred and twelve children. All residents. The ones who left had somewhere to leave to. These—" He paused. "These are the ones who don't."
Most of them orphans. Most of them placed through the Vongola family network when the orphanage had closed. Kids who had arrived with nothing and built something here — a routine, a classroom, a lunch table they sat at every day.
"The school stays open," Fisk said. It wasn't a question.
"The school stays open," Caine agreed.
Fisk looked at the assembled people in the room. Yinsen, who had been a weapons engineer once and was now a chemistry teacher and had apparently decided that career trajectory was permanent. Doc Ock, who had come from a different universe specifically to do science with people who could keep up with him. Sandman, who had found something here he hadn't expected to find and wasn't leaving it.
"Caine," Fisk said. "The children are yours. Take what you need."
"Understood."
"William." Sandman looked up. "With Caine."
"Of course," William Baker said. He had been looking at a photo on his phone — his daughter, in the new place, with the treatment underway, smiling in a way she hadn't been able to for years. He put the phone away. "She's safe. I'm here."
"Frank." Fisk looked at Castle.
Frank Castle had received Fury's call the previous day. Take your son and leave. He'd sat with it for a while. He'd asked Monroe what he wanted to do.
Monroe had said: Where would we go?
"My son is here," Frank said. "I'm here."
Fisk nodded once.
"Otto," he said, to Doc Ock.
Otto set down the resignation letter he'd been holding. "I'm not leaving."
"Ho Yinsen."
Yinsen looked up from the equation he'd been absentmindedly working in the margins of a notebook. "I was somewhere considerably more dangerous than this when Howard Stark found me. I think I can manage."
Fisk stood.
He was a large man and the room was smaller for it, and when he stood, the change in the room's atmosphere was the kind that didn't require explanation.
"葉師傅," he said. "The school is yours. Everything in it."
Caine inclined his head.
Fisk picked up his cigar. He was going to the door.
"Where are you going?" Caine asked. Not alarm — just information.
Fisk paused with his hand on the door.
He took a long, slow draw on the cigar and exhaled smoke at the ceiling.
"I retired," he said. "I didn't die." He looked back at the room — at the people who had all, in their various ways, ended up here because of a young man who'd built something worth protecting and hadn't asked any of them to fight for it. "There are people who have forgotten what I was. Some of them are in positions of influence right now, making decisions about this neighborhood." He paused. "Memory is an interesting thing. It fades when it isn't refreshed."
He was thinking about the senators who had given speeches. The committee members who had signed the authorization. The federal officials who had greenlighted the operation with, he suspected, the comfortable confidence of people who had never had reason to be personally afraid of Wilson Fisk.
They had made a mistake.
Not in opposing him — that was their prerogative. In forgetting.
"There are things Ethan won't do," Fisk said. "Because he's a better person than the situation requires." He opened the door. "The situation doesn't actually require him."
He left.
Caine looked at the door for a moment.
Then he turned back to the room.
"Right," he said. "Let's talk about the children."
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