Chapter 165: May the Stars Guide Our Path — Farewell
"Well." Pierce's voice was flat. "He certainly knows how to talk."
He hadn't moved from in front of the screen. Ethan's interview was still playing on the rotation of every channel that mattered, and Pierce watched it with the expression of a man doing damage assessment after a storm he'd caused himself.
Three warheads. All three. Not a scratch on the man.
And now, instead of a smoking crater where Hell's Kitchen used to be, there was a global broadcast of the person he'd tried to kill explaining, in simple and apparently irrefutable terms, why the people he'd tried to kill alongside deserved better.
Pierce had survived the immediate fallout only because of the arrangements he'd quietly made with Madame Hydra and Baron Strucker before the operation. Without those — without the institutional insulation that came from having powerful people who needed him functional — he'd be in a cell by now. Or worse.
Patience, he told himself. Hell's Kitchen stays. For now. Everything else proceeds.
He turned his attention to Reed, who was still watching the screen.
Reed's face was doing something complicated.
He was relieved — genuinely, visibly relieved — that the city was standing, that his teammates were alive, that the weight of tens of millions of deaths wasn't sitting on his shoulders. The Fantastic Four would still be there when this settled. Susan. Johnny. Ben. He'd need them.
But underneath the relief was something else. Something uglier and more honest.
He was better on camera than I would have been.
Reed looked at the screen and felt, with a specificity that surprised him, the particular sting of watching someone else occupy the position you'd always imagined belonged to you by right. The cameras, the crowd, the moment — Ethan hadn't even wanted it. He'd been dragged into it and stumbled through it and somehow walked away with the moral authority of the situation sitting entirely in his corner.
If that had been me, Reed thought, I would have done it properly. I would have said the right things, in the right order, for the right effect. I would have been magnificent.
He filed this thought away in the category of debts he intended to collect eventually.
One day, the world will know who actually holds it together. And it won't be the Lord of Hell's Kitchen.
He was still building the speech in his head when he felt Pierce looking at him.
"The Avengers," Pierce said. "What do we do with them?"
Reed snapped back to the room.
Pierce was watching him with the evaluating patience of a man who had already made a decision and wanted to see if the person in front of him would arrive at the same place on their own.
"Once everyone returns," Pierce said, "I'll be appointing you as the team's new leader. That was part of our arrangement."
The words landed exactly as Reed had always imagined they would — and exactly as he'd been afraid they might, because getting what you've always wanted means you're now responsible for what happens next.
The Avengers without Fury were a body without a nervous system. Steve Rogers and Clint Barton were loyal to the old order and would need to be managed carefully. Banner was a wild card who leaned toward the scientific and pragmatic — workable. There were others he could recruit. The architecture was there. It just needed someone with the vision to rebuild it.
That's what I do, Reed thought. I see the structure and I build it better.
"I won't let you down, Director," he said. "The Avengers — the new Avengers — will be the last line of defense this world has. You have my word."
Pierce nodded, once.
Reed turned the plan over. Rogers and Barton — neutralize their influence, not their utility. Keep them occupied, keep them managed, redirect their loyalty gradually. Banner, Strange eventually, a few others he had in mind. The Fantastic Four as the core. He'd be the center of gravity that held it together.
Then, without quite knowing why, a name surfaced.
"Director — I think the team should have a new name as well." He framed it carefully. "The Avengers was Fury's project. His vision, his legacy. If we're building something new, it shouldn't carry his mark."
Pierce looked at him with mild interest. "Go on."
"This is just a suggestion — the final call is yours, of course."
Pierce's expression said he appreciated that Reed had remembered the appropriate hierarchy. "Say it."
Reed took a breath.
"The Illuminati."
The word came out of somewhere he couldn't quite identify — some half-formed association, some phrase that had lodged in his mind and wouldn't let go. It arrived with the ghost of a sentence attached to it, something about stars, something about guidance, something that felt like a memory he hadn't made yet.
May the stars guide our path. Farewell.
He didn't know where the phrase came from. He only knew it felt like something important, and that the name felt right.
Pierce considered it.
Then he nodded.
Reed exhaled. First step. He turned and walked out, already running the next ten moves in his head, already imagining the shape of what he was building.
He didn't see Pierce's face as he left.
Pierce watched the door close and let himself think what he actually thought.
The Illuminati. He turned the word over. You join HYDRA and you want to name your team after the light. After everything I just showed you, you're still dreaming about being on the right side of history.
He understood, correctly, that Reed had chosen a name that pointed toward something Pierce stood against. He understood, incorrectly, that this was deliberate defiance — that Reed had thrown down a symbolic gauntlet.
What he didn't understand was that Reed hadn't chosen it consciously at all. That the name had come from somewhere Reed couldn't explain, attached to a phrase about stars that didn't belong to any memory Reed could locate.
A wolf that can't be tamed, Pierce thought. He filed it under problems that would need resolving after the more immediate problems were resolved. Reed was useful now. Useful people got to keep breathing.
For now.
The Illuminati. He almost smiled. We'll see how long that lasts.
What Reed didn't know — couldn't know, because he'd left immediately after the conversation — was that the other three members of the Fantastic Four were currently in Hell's Kitchen, and that a fault line had opened between them.
The cause was Ethan Cross.
And the neighborhood that bore his name.
☆☆☆
-> 20 Advanced chapters Now Available on Patreon!!
-> https://www.pat-reon.co-m/c/Inkshaper
(Just remove the hyphen (-) to access patreon normally)
If you like this novel please consider leaving a review that's help the story a lot Thank you