Chapter 160: Avengers, Abandoned
Hell's Kitchen.
The Avengers still on the ground got the message like everyone else.
Steve Rogers — battered, one hand braced against a wall, moving like a man whose body had filed several formal complaints — was already trying to reach Fury when the alert came through. His jaw tightened as he read it. He tried the line again. Nothing. He tried S.H.I.E.L.D. command. Nothing. He tried the general emergency frequency.
Silence.
Something's wrong inside the organization. He'd suspected it since Bucky. Now the suspicion had calcified into something colder.
He looked at Clint and Natasha. They'd read his face before he said anything.
Clint shook his head. "Can't get through either."
Natasha said nothing, which meant the same thing.
They were cut off. No chain of command, no extraction, no fallback. Just the four of them — Steve, Clint, Natasha, and Banner, who was sitting off to the side with the particular stillness of a man carrying a problem he couldn't put down. He hadn't found a solution to the transformation issue yet. He'd been hoping to. Now this.
Steve scanned the street and made the call. "We move. Now."
He caught Clint's eye, then Natasha's. The three of them pulled together and started making their way out of the Kitchen, covering each other's limping.
None of them noticed Banner slip away.
They didn't get far before the street itself became a problem — not because of wreckage, but because of people. Hell's Kitchen residents were out in force, moving with calm and purpose, sweeping debris off the sidewalks, stacking rubble at the curb, working through the mess with the unhurried efficiency of people who'd been cleaning up after things for a long time.
Steve stopped. He looked at them. He looked at the sky.
They know, he thought. They've seen the alert. And they're sweeping the street.
He approached the nearest group. "You need to get out. The warning is real — there are nuclear warheads inbound, this isn't a drill—"
A few of them looked up. They recognized him. One or two sets of eyes went flat in a way that communicated, without any words, exactly which side of the recent operation they remembered him being on.
If they'd thought they could take him, the look said, this conversation would already be over differently.
Nobody answered. They went back to sweeping.
Steve stood there for a moment, genuinely at a loss.
Then a woman — older, a push broom in both hands, the air of someone with a very specific list of things to accomplish before lunch — stopped and gave him the look you give someone who has walked into the middle of your kitchen and started explaining cooking to you.
"Did you read the whole message?" she said.
Steve blinked. "The message said—"
"The whole message. The part at the end." She leaned on her broom. "Ethan said he'd handle it. So we're handling our part." She gestured at the street. "You want to help, there's a pile of bricks over there."
Steve opened his mouth. Closed it.
"That's three nuclear warheads," he said, because it seemed like the relevant fact.
"I know what it is." She looked at him the way you look at someone who keeps saying the same thing louder and expecting a different answer. "Ethan said he'd take care of it. Your people tried to take apart this neighborhood and couldn't manage it. You didn't beat him. Why would this beat him?"
She went back to sweeping.
Steve looked at Clint. Clint was studying the middle distance with great interest.
Natasha had something she clearly wanted to say and equally clearly had decided not to. She'd done the math on the distance to any exit, and the math had not been encouraging. We're not outrunning this. She glanced at Steve. We'd be safer staying. She didn't say it out loud. Some part of her recognized that Steve's pride had already taken enough damage today, and she wasn't going to be the one to walk on it.
A few blocks over, the X-Men and Magneto had gathered on a stretch of street that had been relatively spared. The bandaging on Colossus's wounds was neat and professional — someone had done good work. He tested a fist against the pavement anyway, and the impact sent a hairline crack running several feet in both directions.
"I knew it." His voice was tight. "The government never intended to let us walk away. Kill the mutants and Hell's Kitchen in one shot."
Logan was against the wall with his arms crossed, saying nothing, which was his version of agreeing.
Hank adjusted his glasses. "There may be a misunderstanding somewhere in the chain. Nick Fury isn't — this doesn't read as his decision-making. He's cautious. He calculates. This is reckless."
"Whether it's his decision or not," Cyclops said, "three warheads are three warheads."
Jean had been quiet since recovering. She stepped forward now, and her voice was steady in a way that suggested she'd made a decision while everyone else was still arguing. "If they get close enough, I can intercept. I'm not letting them detonate."
Scott's eyes went to her immediately. The concern on his face was unambiguous. He'd watched her come back from the edge once already today. He did not want to find out where the second edge was.
"Jean—"
"I'm fine, Scott."
"You were Dark Phoenix forty minutes ago."
"And now I'm not." She met his gaze. "I can do this."
Scott didn't have a counter-argument. He had a feeling, and the feeling was loud, but he couldn't turn it into words fast enough to matter.
Everyone looked at Xavier.
Xavier sat in his chair, hands folded in his lap, watching the sky with an expression that was difficult to read. He'd been quiet for longer than usual. When he didn't speak immediately, the silence stretched.
Magneto broke it.
"Why is everyone panicking?" His tone was the verbal equivalent of a shrug. "Look around. Whose territory do you think this is?"
He let the question sit there.
One by one, they got it.
Cyclops frowned. "You're saying Ethan will—"
"I'm saying this is his neighborhood, and those are his people, and he is not going to let nuclear weapons detonate on his front doorstep." Magneto's voice carried the patience of someone explaining something obvious. "You came here, fought him on his own ground, and lost. What exactly makes you think a warhead does better?"
"He's never faced anything like this before," Hank said carefully.
"You don't know that."
"Do you?"
Magneto said nothing. He had seen enough of Ethan Cross to have formed an opinion, and his opinion didn't require the approval of a room full of people who'd just been defeated by the man in question. The facts would arrange themselves shortly.
Cyclops wasn't convinced. "We can't just put our lives in the hands of someone we've been treating as an enemy."
Magneto looked at him with the expression of a very old man listening to a very young argument.
"You can do what you like," he said. "I'm staying."
They came.
Three of them, inbound from separate vectors, tracking toward the center of the city. The sky over New York went wrong in the way skies do when something catastrophic is already in motion — a pressure change, a silence that fell over the street noise, a collective intake of breath from ten million people looking up at once.
And then a figure launched out of Hell's Kitchen and into the open air above the rooftops, moving fast, climbing higher, a point of light against the overcast sky.
The city watched.
It couldn't make out who it was — too far, too fast, too much distance between the street and the altitude he'd already reached. But it watched anyway. It couldn't look away. Something about the trajectory, the speed, the fact that there was one person going toward what everyone else was running from — it held them.
In Hell's Kitchen, the woman with the push broom paused her work and looked up.
On the street where the X-Men stood, Jean Grey's hands relaxed at her sides.
In the ruined block where Steve Rogers had stopped walking, Clint Barton shielded his eyes against the grey sky and watched the figure climb.
The city held its breath.
And waited for a miracle that one person had already promised to deliver.
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