Chapter 411: A Massacre
T'Challa had stayed in this apartment when he first arrived in New York -- destitute, injured, and without options. It was a small space then. With five people in it now, the air had gone heavy and still.
Daredevil leaned against one wall. Luke Cage sat in the corner with half his face in shadow, hood up. Jessica Jones stood with her arms folded and her jacket sleeves shoved back to the elbows. Wolverine had found a spot near the far wall and taken it over. Batman stood near the center.
Luke Cage and Jessica Jones had not been with Daredevil continuously since Kingpin released them. They were a couple and had their own arrangements. Batman had been tracking their location independently -- finding them tonight had not been difficult.
The introductions and the initial explanation had taken most of an hour. Now the room had been quiet for a while.
"As best as I can determine," Wolverine said, breaking the silence first, "the four of us -- excluding Batman -- were likely part of whatever happened two years ago."
"That tracks," Daredevil said. He did not elaborate.
Batman had not joined the discussion. He had been bent slightly over his forearm since shortly after Wolverine had finished his account, the Gargoyle suit's integrated computer running a quiet search while the conversation developed around him.
His initial analysis of Steve Rogers's contact pattern had suggested the common factor among the targets was early, independent establishment as a powered operative. Rogers had not approached Tony Stark, had not approached Batman, had not approached Electro. He had approached people who had been operating in some capacity for years. The pattern held for everyone in this room, and for Wolverine as well.
"Do any of you have a memory -- however faint -- of a man in a sleeveless purple combat suit, collapsible bow on his back? Or a woman, red hair, approximately five-seven?"
Hawkeye. Black Widow.
Three shakes of the head in sequence.
Wolverine sat with his eyes closed for a moment. Then:
"I've had a lot of experience with memory loss. This isn't the first time. Because of that, the wipe two years ago wasn't complete -- there's a residual. A fragment." He paused. "I have a vague sense of a conversation with a red-haired woman. Her build matches."
"Height?"
Wolverine held a hand at approximately shoulder level on himself.
Batman noted it without committing. The height, coloring, and build were consistent with Natasha Romanoff, but the overlap was not conclusive.
"You don't remember the mission," Jessica Jones said to Wolverine. "Do you at least remember what any of us were doing? Anything at all?"
"No."
"Who ordered it?"
"No."
"How the memory went?"
"No."
"Then tell me what you actually know, because right now you've mostly told us what you don't remember."
Wolverine's expression did not change, but he looked at her with the particular patience of someone who has been alive long enough that other people's impatience no longer registers as an insult.
"I've told you everything I have."
Jessica held the look for a moment and then released it with a short breath.
Batman had not looked up from the forearm display.
"I'll locate Rogers and the woman. Everyone stays in New York and waits for my signal." He straightened. "Go home. I'll be in touch."
Luke and Jessica exchanged a glance, nodded toward Batman without ceremony, and left. Neither of them appeared to have anything else to add and neither of them wasted time staying for its own sake.
The door closed.
Daredevil had not moved. He stood with his head slightly angled, listening to the footsteps recede down the corridor and then the building's stairwell, tracking them outward until the sound fell below his threshold.
He turned toward Batman and Wolverine.
"When I last spoke with you in Hell's Kitchen," he said to Batman, "I withheld something."
"I know," Batman said.
Wolverine looked between them.
"What? You remember the mission?"
"No." Daredevil's voice was measured, careful. "But I've had a suspicion about what it was for a long time. I've never said it aloud because saying it makes it real in a way I'm not sure I'm prepared for." He paused. "I believe what we did two years ago was a massacre."
Wolverine's breathing deepened.
"Where does that conclusion come from?"
"Latveria," Batman said.
He had been running the search while the others talked. He set the forearm display aside and looked up.
"Two years ago, there was a news report -- widely covered at the time, then forgotten -- of a catastrophic gas explosion in Latveria's capital. The official account attributed it to infrastructure failure. The reported casualties were over four hundred dead and more than one thousand injured." Batman's voice was level. "The timing matches the gap in your collective memories."
The room held the weight of that for a moment.
Wolverine looked down at his own hands. The knuckle slits were closed and smooth, the claws retracted. His hands looked like an ordinary man's hands -- weathered, calloused, not young. He said nothing.
Daredevil's jaw tightened visibly under the mask.
"The scale of an operation that would require Rogers, Wolverine, Daredevil, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, and at minimum two additional agents with specialized capabilities," Batman continued, "narrows the list of people with both the authority and the operational reach to organize it. Significantly."
"Fury," Daredevil said.
"Nick Fury." Batman confirmed it without inflection. "Which is why I couldn't reach him through normal channels."
Wolverine had been watching Batman since the name came out.
"Why did you send the other two away?" he asked.
"They're young," Daredevil said quietly. "I wasn't certain they could carry this yet. The truth can wait until we have more of it."
Wolverine absorbed this and nodded once, slowly.
"If Fury organized it," he said, "the records exist somewhere. Everything he does leaves a trail."
"He moves the Helicarrier. It never stays in one place long enough to be reliably located through standard surveillance." Batman stood. "There's one person in this city who has direct physical experience of that vessel and the resources to track it. He'll know where it is, or he'll know how to find out."
"Who?" Wolverine asked.
"Tony Stark," Batman said.
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