Chapter 154: Did Fury Just Kill Himself?
The moment the last federal vehicles crossed the perimeter and kept going, Hell's Kitchen went very still.
Then someone said it.
"Did we win?"
The voice was quiet, uncertain — the voice of someone who has been bracing for the worst for so long that good news arrives feeling like a trap.
The question moved through the streets.
Did we win? We won. We actually—
Nobody celebrated immediately. They'd been in Hell's Kitchen long enough to know that the federal government had a history of the thing you thought was over not being over. They watched. They waited. They checked every direction twice.
When the last agent cleared the boundary and the military cordon began to dissolve in earnest, something in the collective chest of the neighborhood released.
"We won!"
It started with one voice and became all of them.
People who had been holding rifles with shaking hands dropped them and grabbed whoever was closest. People who hadn't cried in years found they were crying now, without particularly deciding to. The gangsters who'd been through their first actual war — not a turf dispute, not a street fight, a war — let the adrenaline convert into something loud and directionless and celebratory.
"Hell's Kitchen doesn't fall that easy! Not for the feds, not for anybody!"
"We're alive!"
They shouted Ethan's name into the sky. It echoed off the damaged buildings and came back changed, amplified by the sheer number of people making it.
The market women and the veterans and the people who'd been described for years as problems to be managed stood in streets that were still smoking and decided that whatever came next, they'd earned the right to stand there.
The celebration had its textures.
The arms dealers, with the specific clarity of vision that comes from seeing demand materialize in real time, were already doing inventory. "All rifles, half price tonight only! Buy a hundred rounds, get twenty free! Limited time!" Their voices bounced off the buildings with the enthusiasm of men who had correctly identified the moment.
Some of the street workers announced that tonight's services were complimentary, on account of the neighborhood surviving.
One gang leader, deep in the euphoria of having shot at federal agents and lived, shouted something about free product for the whole block before he registered the particular quality of the silence that descended immediately afterward.
He looked up.
Ethan and Tony were visible in the sky, roughly a hundred feet up, apparently in the middle of a conversation.
"I meant — drinks!" the gang leader announced loudly. "Free drinks! That's what I said! Drinks on me!"
His crew looked at him.
"That's what I said," he repeated, with less confidence.
Ethan, for his part, was occupied. He gave the situation below approximately one and a half seconds of attention and decided that tonight warranted some latitude. He had bigger things to deal with.
He was currently explaining to Tony why Tony was going to pay for a significant portion of the reconstruction.
Tony was pushing back on this with the energy of a man who knows he's going to lose the argument and is running down the clock anyway.
Outside the Fortress boundary, the rest of New York had its own reaction.
The people who'd been watching the livestream with what they'd believed was the comfortable certainty of a predetermined outcome were processing a result that hadn't been in their models.
The government lost.
They spent — how much? And they lost? To a neighborhood?
I want my tax money back. I am being completely serious. Refund.
What happens now? Is the Lord of Hell's Kitchen going to— are we safe? Should we leave the city?
My friend lives three blocks from Hell's Kitchen. Should I call him? Does he still exist?
The White House, separately, was having a difficult evening.
"Who authorized the nuclear option?"
The voice of America's top elected official had reached the register that occurs when the person speaking has identified something that is definitively not their fault and is furious about it anyway.
"Three of them. Three. In the middle of Manhattan. The most watched city in the world, with every camera in existence currently pointed at it, and someone decided that was the moment to deploy three nuclear warheads?"
"They weren't deployed, sir, they were—"
"They were armed and aimed at New York City! Do you understand what that looks like to other countries? Do you understand what S3 Season means to— never mind. Find me Fury. I want him in front of me in the next—"
The secretary leaned in.
"Sir. We've just received word. Director Fury has been reported dead. Apparent suicide."
The silence that followed had its own specific texture.
"He what."
"Suicide, sir. The acting Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. is now Alexander Pierce."
"He— how dare he— he died?" The President's expression cycled through several stages. "He died conveniently? Before I could—"
"Sir."
"That is the most cowardly, the most— how dare he die and leave me holding this! Get Pierce on the phone. Get those warheads stood down immediately, I don't care what it takes, stand them down. And someone find me a scapegoat that isn't the President of the United States!"
If Ethan had been listening, he would have had one immediate reaction to the news about Fury.
That's not what happened.
Nick Fury was not a man who killed himself. Nick Fury was a man who had survived things that should have killed him by understanding that surviving was a skill, not a gift, and practicing it with the same rigor he applied to everything else. Fury committing suicide because an operation failed was the least plausible explanation for Nick Fury's death that Ethan could construct.
Fury had enemies. Fury had HYDRA in his own organization. Fury had a double.
And now Fury was conveniently dead, and the person holding the directorship was Alexander Pierce.
Pierce, Ethan thought. Who has been running a HYDRA operation inside S.H.I.E.L.D. the entire time.
He filed this under not actually resolved, probably about to become relevant.
Something about the night wasn't finished yet.
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