Chapter 205: Mayor Fisk and Principal Magneto
In a blink, Ethan was back — standing in the Lucky Dragon, the familiar smell of it settling around him like a coat he'd forgotten he owned.
John Wick was at the door, doing his rotating security shift, looking as unbothered as a man could look while technically working.
No one else was around. Not even Wilson the dog.
Ethan scanned the room, then frowned. Wilson almost never left the restaurant.
"Hey, Boss. You're back," John Wick said, lifting his wolfberry tea in a lazy greeting.
"Where's Wilson?"
John Wick took a slow sip. "Out on a date. With a dog Lady May adopted. Name's Lady Lion, apparently."
Ethan stood there for a second.
Even the dog.
He shook his head, pushed the thought aside, and went inside.
He'd half-expected to come back to a full house. Instead he found Tobey-Peter, Harry — expression unusually subdued — and Aunt May. Everyone else was somewhere else entirely.
He asked May. She caught him up.
Pietro was over with the X-Men, helping the newly arrived mutants get settled in Hell's Kitchen.
Deadpool was off somewhere with Wolverine, the two of them having apparently decided they were now close personal friends with joint business ventures, details unspecified.
The Vongola family was dealing with a newly emerged gang — the Serpent Brotherhood, their name apparently chosen to advertise how subtle they weren't. Significant problem: their leadership tier consisted entirely of powered individuals. The Vongola were working on it.
Wanda was still managing Fisk Enterprises, now with Jessica Jones in tow. She and Matt had restructured everything formally into Hell's Kitchen LLC, with Matt as chief legal counsel. Organized, documented, above board — or at least, above a certain board.
The Brotherhood of Mutants had a new leader: Lorna. She'd apparently stepped into the role with a decisiveness that had surprised people who thought she'd defer to Erik, and had been winning over her people steadily since. Not all the mutants had stayed — Mystique, Sabretooth, and Pyro had split off and formed something called Freedom Force, which Ethan filed under monitor, don't ignore. The ones who'd remained — Domino, Nightcrawler's sister, Juggernaut, and a few others — had done so for a mix of reasons: loyalty to Erik, trust in Ethan's track record, or simple exhaustion from a life spent moving.
Then May told him about the school, and Ethan had to take a moment.
Magneto was the new principal.
He'd apparently been stewing for decades about Xavier running a mutant academy, and had decided — upon becoming a Hell's Kitchen Family member with access to actual real estate — that he personally could run a better one. He'd asked for the job. Nobody had quite found a way to say no.
The previous principal — Fisk — had moved on.
Fisk, it turned out, had looked at the political situation following the federal assault on Hell's Kitchen and drawn a very simple conclusion: without a Hell's Kitchen voice in government, Hell's Kitchen would always be at the mercy of whoever did have that voice. So he'd entered the city council race. The neighborhood's gratitude over Ethan stopping the warheads had rubbed off on Fisk by association — the city knew he was Ethan's godfather, and that had apparently been enough to carry him over the threshold. The federal candidates had been persuaded to make things go smoothly.
He was now a city councilman. He was planning to run for mayor in eighteen months.
Ethan sat with that image for a moment. Kingpin. Mayor.
Of New York.
He was not sure whether to be proud or afraid. He landed somewhere in the middle.
The neighborhood itself was mid-reconstruction — Tony's donation, the federal reparations, and the High Table's quiet investment had all arrived roughly simultaneously, and the result was ongoing construction on what was becoming, block by block, something genuinely different from what it had been. A new hospital was scheduled to open. Tony himself had disappeared from public view entirely after writing the check, which Ethan understood completely — he was almost certainly in a workshop somewhere taking apart the BUILD Driver and Fullbottles Ethan had given him, building something that didn't have a name yet.
And then May described the school's current faculty roster, and Ethan started laughing before she was halfway through.
Banner — seven PhDs, currently teaching. Hank McCoy, currently blue and furry and teaching. Dr. Connors, back in human form, chemistry. Ben Grimm, who looked like a walking pile of orange gravel, apparently working with the younger kids. And the existing roster: Caine, Frank, Yinsen, Otto, Sandman, the Vulture —
He counted. He actually counted.
Doc Ock, the Lizard, Sandman, Vulture, Banner, the Thing, Beast.
If you squinted, that was almost the right lineup for two separate supervillain teams, all teaching at the same community school in New York.
And somehow every single one of the transformation-related people had ended up at the school. Sandman, Lizard, Hulk, Thing, Beast — all there.
Are they going to start a course? Introduction to Involuntary Transformation? How to Be Enormous and Manage It?
He was still laughing when a more serious thought replaced it.
The Serpent Brotherhood. He had a bad feeling he knew what that was. The name, the structure, powered leadership, appearing specifically after Hell's Kitchen's crackdown on trafficking and narcotics — that had HYDRA's fingerprints on it, specifically the kind of thing they'd stand up when they needed a new channel for work that couldn't officially exist anymore. Ordinary criminal organizations had stopped being useful in this neighborhood. Only a powered one could hope to operate.
It was a pressure valve. A containment strategy. A way of ensuring Hell's Kitchen stayed too busy managing its own backyard to expand its influence further.
He would deal with that when he got to it.
For now, he had one more thing to collect.
Miguel had a debt to pay.
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