Chapter 421: The Justice League
From the Adirondack Mountains to Stark Tower, Tony Stark moved without pause. He retrieved Black Widow from the building roof where Batman had deposited her, then pulled in the rest within the hour -- Daredevil and Jessica Jones from Hell's Kitchen, Hawkeye already with them, Electro rounding out the group. Six people in various states of alert, arranged across the sofas and standing spaces of Stark Tower's top floor.
Tony tried the encrypted channel.
"Batman."
"Tony. War is coming. Be ready." A pause, then silence. He'd already closed the line.
Tony lowered the communicator and turned to the room. Jessica Jones was sitting forward with her elbows on her knees, looking at the floor.
"How is he? Luke Cage."
She shook her head once. "Not good."
Tony looked at Hawkeye and Black Widow. "When I reached the Helicarrier, the two of you were in the carrier's prison cells. I'd like to know what happened."
Hawkeye's eyes hadn't left his bow since they'd sat down. "It connects to something that happened two years ago."
Tony waited. Two weeks ago, Batman had asked him the same question -- about two years ago. He still didn't know what the question was actually pointing at.
"What happened two years ago?"
"We don't know exactly." Hawkeye took a moment to find the words. "After we received Garrett's list, we went back to the Helicarrier and worked through it. Almost everyone on the list -- we caught them. But when we moved to take Nick Fury and interrogate him about HYDRA, an agent intervened. Someone we'd never paid much attention to before."
"Who?"
"Daisy Johnson," Black Widow said. "Codename Quake."
Tony let the name sit. "That's a good codename."
"She had no knowledge of the HYDRA list. Clint and I found out afterward that she stepped in because she assumed we were going after Fury on account of what happened two years ago in Latveria." Black Widow paused. "Not because of HYDRA."
Daredevil and Jessica Jones both went still at the word Latveria. They turned toward Black Widow without speaking.
"Don't look at me," she said. "We don't have the details either. As it stands, Captain America, Nick Fury, and Quake may be the only three people who know what actually happened there."
"The present problem may be more pressing than the history." Max Dillon's voice cut across the room without particular urgency. He had been standing near the window in a yellow windbreaker, maintaining his baseline human appearance. Now he walked slowly to the glass and looked out at the city.
The skyline was wrong tonight. Emergency lights strobed through Hell's Kitchen and toward City Hall, and from this height you could make out at least two distinct columns of smoke, the fire department response already visible as moving colored points below.
"Whether it's Latveria or the Adirondacks base -- you're all at the center of this. The people who engineered tonight's events are still moving. Quake is probably already tracking your position. HYDRA is headed toward New York." He didn't turn from the window. "The jailbreak hasn't resolved. Those people will come back too. I don't know what their specific plans are, but they're en route. All of it is converging."
Hawkeye and Black Widow exchanged a look. They knew Iron Man. They knew Batman. Daredevil they'd come across in files and rumor. But neither of them had any information on the man in the yellow windbreaker who had just laid out a military situation assessment from the window of Tony Stark's penthouse.
"Who are you?" Black Widow said. "And why are you confident in that analysis?"
"Max Dillon." He pointed one finger at his own temple. "Through network access I can absorb information fairly quickly. That assessment is based on military doctrine I've studied."
Tony turned the word back over in his mind. HYDRA is en route. He thought about the jailbreak, about Boomerang, about the Crimson Dynamo, about the names from the prison rosters that had all walked out at the same hour. Those people were not finished. They were somewhere and they were going to reappear.
SHIELD. HYDRA. A block of escaped and coordinated criminals. A situation in Latveria that no one at this table remembered clearly. And everything tonight had the feel of things that had been planned for some time, set to arrive together.
He understood now why Batman had said it the way he said it.
"We need to work together," Tony said. "No single one of us can hold against four separate hostile forces independently. It doesn't matter how capable any of us are individually -- the math doesn't work if we're isolated."
He looked around the room. Jessica Jones had straightened up slightly. Daredevil was listening without showing it. Hawkeye had put the bow down.
"Sitting in this room comparing notes doesn't solve anything. We fight back together. The jailbreak. HYDRA. SHIELD if it comes to that. We need a name -- something that tells anyone who hears it that we're the same unit."
He thought about the night he'd first identified the figure that kept appearing in his city's threats and data streams. The conversation he'd had, the threat he'd made before he knew who he was really talking to.
"Avengers."
The word landed in the room and settled.
"Guys."
It was the first time Batman had addressed them that way. He used it without apparent awareness that the word was unusual coming from him, and that single shift in register was enough to make Otto and Morbius both close their mouths over whatever they'd been about to say.
Batman never wasted time on approach when the substance was urgent. He went straight to it.
"This world is not as stable as it appears. All of us know that. There are things beneath the surface that ordinary people are never meant to see."
He let his eyes move across them. Hulk. Lizard Professor. Morbius. Dr. Otto. Venom Robin.
"A dinosaur invasion. A coordinated bombing campaign. HYDRA agents hidden in every corner of this city. A group of gamma-enhanced creatures we've been holding under a subway station." He paused. "What we're facing now is more serious than all of that put together. Our enemies aren't only human organizations. We may be facing things from a category that most people would call mythology."
Against Loki -- who had hidden himself entirely until tonight, who had moved through four walls and the Hulk without resistance and appeared simultaneously in two locations -- the Red Hulk and the others who had escaped were a secondary problem. A dangerous one, but secondary.
Electro had been able to identify HYDRA's movement toward New York through the electrical network and connected systems. Batman was not less informed. The collision was coming, and it wasn't far off.
"Khonshu told me: darkness will come like a tide, and the heroes are still only forming." He said it without inflection, as fact. "To hold against whatever is approaching, I need you standing with me. Not just here, not just in the background. Alongside."
Hulk reached up and scratched the side of his head. "Hulk just fights."
Dr. Otto glanced back at his mechanical tentacles, the two that remained functional. Professor Morbius looked down at his hands.
Both of them had made mistakes that had taken years to begin walking back. Otto had pushed every limit available to him in pursuit of a vision of scientific progress that had resulted in thirty-one police officers dead. Morbius had killed inmates on Ryker's Island while the hunger had control of him. What they were doing now -- the prosthetics project, the emotional regulation work, the research -- was restitution. That was the word they each used privately, though they didn't say it to each other.
And now Batman was telling them that a group of people who were, individually, considered among the most dangerous entities in or near New York City should form an alliance -- and that the purpose of that alliance was not containment of each other, but defense against something worse.
It was a lot to absorb. In the silence that followed, almost every person in the room privately and simultaneously concluded that they did not qualify for the word Batman was implying.
He had anticipated this. "I once stood on a rooftop," he said, "watching the lights of the city, and I thought about one thing. I kept trying to make the city believe I was necessary. But no matter what I did, I remained a figure in the dark, and people fear the dark."
He let that stay where it landed.
"This city has people who sleep in sunlight without a thought for what might come in the night. It also has people who, if we do nothing tonight, will not be alive tomorrow." A pause. "If we are going to be monsters regardless, then we should be the monsters who protect this place. If we are going to be feared regardless, then let us be feared by the things that deserve it."
Venom Robin's hands were already moving. The double-bladed greataxe was practically vibrating against his back.
"Just say it, old man. Say our 'Frankenstein League' is official!"
The name was obviously something the Lizard Professor had suggested to him at some point, probably during one of the North Brother Island sparring sessions.
Batman shook his head. His gaze moved deliberately across each face in the room -- Otto, the Lizard Professor, Hulk, Venom Robin, Morbius -- and settled.
"We are not called the Frankenstein League."
"We are the Justice League."