Two equally powerful sounds met each other. Hammer-like knocking on rich oak, met by a boisterous call from deep within the townhouse. “Come in.”

The door was already unlocked, Touko opened it and entered. Discourteous host as he was, Fisk left her to wander its halls and find him on her own. When she opened the door to the dining room, he was at the end of a long, laid table, cutting into a medium well steak with a fork and knife.

She noticed a second plate prepared at the opposite end of the table.

“Sit. Eat.” It wasn’t an invitation, it was a command.

Obnoxious. That he predicted she would call for a second meeting was obvious, flaunting his prediction was needless, pointless, just like a man to be so proud of himself.

Touko quickly covered her sneer with a polite smile. “I’m sorry you went to all this trouble for me, but I actually already had dinner.”

“I insist.”

“A girl has to watch her figure, you know.” Regardless, she did pull out the chair and sit across from him.

His sunken eyes stuck to her, oppressively, expectantly, even as he moved through his meal at a hefty pace. Conflict would only beget more friction in their transaction, so she decided to humor him, even as his game was obvious. Lit candles and bouquets between them, it was a simple matter to, like playing tea time with a child, make a show of cutting her food and then placing it to her mouth and, rather than chew and swallow, flick the chunks behind her and onto his million dollar rug. She had to stop herself from smirking.

“Now, you wanted to speak with me?” Fisk said.

“I’d like the opportunity for renegotiation,” Touko said. “We were under a lot of stress yesterday and thinking with our hearts instead of our minds. In the sober light of day, however, I hope we can both agree that this whole game is beneath us. We saw that in Freeze Tag. Regular humans will squabble with themselves and comprise the bulk of the chattel killed. We’re not under threat so we have nothing to gain from an alliance.”

The movement of Fisk’s eyebrow was so hidden beneath decades of stone resolve and weight gain that it was nearly imperceptible. Nearly, if Touko hadn’t been studying his expression so closely. “You don’t consider me normal.”

“You don’t consider yourself normal,” Touko abandoned the pretense of her false eating and leaned forward. “You told me yourself. The name Kingpin was made to elevate you.”

“Hmm.” Fisk continued eating.

“And maybe, maybe you’ve been waiting your whole life for this moment. Like the finely tailored suits that stretch across your frame, you’ve been constrained by the civilized world. Made to do business, spend money to make money, operate by the rules of fiat and bartering. For… however long this takes to get through, you can kill. You’ll kill and you’ll be justified in doing so, and when we return to the waking world it’ll be like it never happened to anyone but you, who will savor those memories for the rest of your life. You don’t need me for that. So-”

“I need to live,” Fisk said tersely. “As do you. As do all humans, though not all will.”

“Are you afraid, Mr. Fisk?”

“I’m thorough,” he said. “Which is why I put a bomb in your food. To ensure your cooperation.”

Touko flew through her reactions to that information. Her eyes flashed wide in panic, then her brow furrowed in thought, then the corner of her lips pulled into a knife-edged smile.

“I didn’t-”

“You already ate. An hour ago at Giancarlo’s. You had the chicken cordon bleu with a french onion soup and the house salad.” As he spoke, his focus stayed on his meal. He was no longer watching her. The trap had already closed. “Giancarlo was lucky. Not many services still remain open, but you are a visitor and like all visitors to New York you are reliant on services. Giancarlo was lucky, he’s young and athletic enough to have tagged someone. Still young enough to make mistakes. I think he felt that going back to going back to cooking, that ignoring the next game to come, would help him to relax. But he’s young enough to have made mistakes, years ago, and those mistakes indebted him to me.” Fisk turned up to look at her. “It was in the chicken, if that wasn’t obvious.” Then back down. “It will be in your stomach by now, impossible to throw up properly. The bomb is on a deadman’s switch. For the next 36 hours, if I do not press it once at the top of every hour it will detonate and kill you on the spot. You don’t need to worry about me, though. I have a mind like a steel trap, I won’t forget.”

Touko’s smile didn’t drop. Rather, it grew tighter and tighter, sharper and sharper.

“I fear we may have unwittingly locked one another into mutually ensured destruction, Mr. Fisk.” The last word slithered from her mouth like a venomous serpent.

“That’s not surprising, Ms. Aozaki.” He continued to eat.

“There is a trump card I had been planning to use as leverage for the adamantium. The Grandmaster is a very stupid man, Mr. Fisk. Did you know that?”

“I could have guessed.”

“He thought to provide artificial gravity and oxygen and all the little things that humans need on our floating rock in space. He did not think about what creatures lay beyond our planet though, those that drift in the cold vacuum suddenly alerted to our presence by his attention. I don’t think he thought very hard about it at all, no, because had I not spent the greater part of the day placing runes around the city limits, they would be swarming Manhattan as we speak and they would leave no one alive. Not you, not I, every New Yorker wiped off the face of the universe, just like that.” She snapped. That got his attention. “Should I die, be it by game or bomb or your own grubby hands, the barrier will drop and the horrors will be let in. You may only kill me once you’ve decided you no longer wish to be alive any longer yourself.”

“I see,” Fisk said, before going back to what was left of his food. A few stalks of roasted asparagus later and the plate was clean. He dabbed his mouth once, twice with the napkin in his collar before removing it and placing it beside his dirty dish. “Then we’re back where we started. Neither of us can afford to see the other lose.”

“I suppose so. What a rotten stalemate this is. I think I might truly hate you, Wilson Fisk.”

“That’s fine.” He stood up and made for the room’s exit. “This was a productive meeting, Ms. Aozaki. I’ll see you when the next game starts.”

***

Somehow, David found it in himself to laugh again.

It helped that Soujuro was such an odd figure, the absurdity of him helped grease the wheels a little in getting David back to relaxed.

Soujuro, if it needed to be confirmed, was from Japan. Specifically, he was from a very small village in Japan and had only moved to New York to learn English. The way he told it, that village might as well have been something out of the 19th century. He had only ever seen one or two cars in his life before coming to America. Midday traffic alone would’ve been a shock to the system, coming from that.

“You’re serious?” At some point, David had sat down on the floor, back resting against the front desk.

“We boiled things all the time, back at home. Or baked them in the oven. Grilled, seared, and roasted. Never fried. I nearly jumped out of my skin when someone first dropped a batch of fries in this thing.” Soujuro was cleaning up his station after having flipped them a half dozen burgers, as well as preparing a backlog of ready-made meals for customers that would not be coming in today.

Both David and Larry had burned through a lot of their metabolism by transforming. Both were thankful for a surplus of greasy, heavy proteins. He’d tried to leave one for Soujuro, but the boy rejected it, and that made sense. He was probably tired of free McDonald’s by now.

They’d been sitting around, talking and sharing stories for hours now. Wasting the day wasn’t quite the right word, they were spending it doing nothing. Their muscles recovered, their minds rejuvenated, rest was important to the human body. So long as they got up to shift positions, hydrated regularly (Soujuro still charged them for their refillable cups), the time was free to fly past.

Larry (still at the table) rested his chin on his hand in thought. “When I first came to America… Well, it was so long ago. I was a big fish in a small pond, but I still had good ideas about the cars and buildings I’d see. Still, nothing really prepares you for New York. And you, you were a tadpole in a puddle.”

“Thank you?” Soujuro said. “I did not know you were also not an American, Mr. Talbot. You fit in so well.”

“Welsh village, rather than a Japanese one, I’m sure a hair bigger than yours. We had a castle, after all, and a town square with shops and a circus that’d come through often enough. It was rustic, you know. A remnant of the old world.” He chuckled. “From the sound of it, I think your village might’ve just been rusty.”

“I didn’t mind,” Soujuro said. “Home is home.”

“I can agree to that.” He nearly sighed in his wistfulness. “Home is home.”

For a while, there was silence in the McDonald’s. Even the kitchen equipment, turned off, didn’t hum or crackle.

Then, the speaker system in the ceiling came to life and began to speak. At the same time, an electronics store across the street had all its display televisions suddenly turn on.

The mood dropped. There was no more laughing.

The Grandmaster made his second announcement.