Chapter 63: The devil you know

On her way out, she had no doubt that this city was hers now, hers alone, with all its sad glory and beauty. She compared it to a man who was sick and needed her warmth.

Then a familiar face caught her eye, though, to be fair, Murdock had spotted Jane long before she'd left the courthouse through the back entrance, hoping to avoid the crowd of reporters waiting for breaking news at the main office, and not at all because of her eyesight. Matt decided to take the opportunity to speak privately with the captain at such an important moment for both of them.

"Captain," she called out to her longtime rival.

"Murdock," Jane's voice usually sounded like a whiplash when she greeted Margaret-usually by simply saying the lawyer's last name, as if it were not a greeting but a challenge. But that was not the case now. Today that voice belonged not to the determined and uncompromising police captain, but to an ordinary woman, mortally tired and gnawing with anxiety.

None of this could have escaped the shrewdest of New York's lawyers, or perhaps of America's.

"Congratulations, Captain..." Murdock said, with absolutely neutral intonations, "but you don't look happy, is that the face of a woman who put Wilma Fisk in jail?"

"But you're too optimistic for a lawyer who lost the highest-profile case of his life," Jane said, and she didn't fully understand the lawyer's motives, as she always did, so she chose the usual low-key, aggressive stance.

"I'm just looking at the future, Captain. And you... are you really that concerned about that school shooting? I heard your department was assigned to that case, too."

"You're taking the piss?" Stacy grinned, taking out a cigarette from the near-empty pack she'd only bought this morning. "We'll find out who's behind this, you betcha," she sounded like a threat.

Murdock had serious doubts about it - rarely had the police succeeded in obtaining reliable information about something that had escaped Margaret's own attention. And this kidnapping... Matt still had no idea who had done it, and more importantly, why they wanted Parker?

Earlier, her former boss had taken notice of the kid, and Murdock herself was interested in him, too. Initially, it was just his connection to Spiderwoman.

"You think too badly of me," the she-devil shook her head. Jane snorted back, letting a puff of smoke out of her nostrils. "An attack on a school full of children is terrible, and I really don't know anything about what happened, and neither does my client, I assure you. You may not believe me, but by trying to pin this case on Fisk, too, you're only playing into the hands of the real criminals."

Again Jane did not reply to the lawyer, only looked at her retreating figure with a heavy gaze. She could not openly agree with the deviless, but she felt in her gut that there was something wrong with the case. S.H.I.E.L.D. had taken an interest in it for a reason.

Still not able to come to any definite conclusion, Jane went to her car. It had been another hard day, she had managed to put one of the most dangerous criminals in jail, but there was no room for joy in the captain's heart, for today she was going back to an empty apartment.

"Where the hell has that boy been for the third day?" The unanswered question, like all of Wanda's preceding outcries of intolerable boredom.

Ever since Parker had brought her out of her medically induced coma, she had been able to endure the pain of a body fighting cancer, but the accompanying physical weakness, almost total infirmity, was unbearable for Wanda.

Wilson, first of all, had never seen her attending physician, so to speak, and secondly, had not been able to leave the room. The mercenary regained consciousness in a sterile room, in the company not only of Parker but also of a representative woman of truly professorial appearance. It seemed that her vocation - a scientist - was attached to her like a second skin, it could be seen in her casual and natural handling of test tubes and other laboratory equipment, reflected in the strict, through the thin glasses, gaze. Parker gave no such impression. Of course, you could see that the kid felt like a fish in water in the lab, but he didn't have that imprint of a man who looked at the world through the prism of dry scientific theory. Parker, for all his theoretical talents, is a practitioner of life, or at least a theorist who supports theory with practice.

The woman's name was Karen, and she introduced herself as the head of the scientific department of the newly formed Parker Industries. Though in the first hours of her waking hours Wanda was not concerned with the identity of this doctor - her post-coma state of health left much to be desired. Hearing from Peter that everything was going according to plan and that all she had to do at the moment was to continue fighting the cancer, that is, in practice: just lie flat and take scheduled medications, Wilson passed into a state close to slumber. A waking dream.

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On the third day, the mercenary felt better, very quickly. According to Connors, who was not very articulate: the body had reached the finish line of a marathon called "Let's give the cunts to cancer!" (Of course, that wasn't what Connors had dubbed the treatment, but it was the patient herself, but who cared?)

And then she was allowed out of bed, and in the bathroom she saw her face for the first time in six long years. Not the mask stolen from the set of the Nightmare on Elm Street and The Walking Dead crossover by a beat-up horror movie fan, but the good old Wanda Wilson, the sultry fucking hottie to the south of Alaska.

"Well hello, my friend," Wanda shaking hands tried to wipe from the smooth surface of the mirror a drop of moisture, unknown how it appeared there. But she couldn't, for it was only the reflection of the first tear she had shed since that unfortunate night in Department X.

Unfortunately or fortunately, there was no one around to share this joyous moment with her or to witness her weakness. After coping with the surge of emotion, Wilson returned to her room, with a series of questions that demanded answers. And with no Parker on the horizon, Connors was the only one to ask.

Karen took the convalescent's communication responsibly, and she had no objection to revealing the details of her treatment to the mercenary. In which she showed a far more progressive outlook than that of the psychiatric hospitals (which were the only kind of hospital Wanda had had to deal with since the activation of the X-gene). This encounter was alternately successful in improving her mental health, in eliminating the hospitals themselves, and sometimes in doing both at once.

Returning to the question of Wilson's appearance: it turned out that her skin and hair had long since regenerated. The fact is that these tissues regenerate much easier and faster than the others, and even more so the internal organs, whose recovery was supported by the symbiote during the first week. When Connors joined the project, Wilson's skin was already fully regenerated.

"In fact, I didn't even get a chance to see what you looked like before" "Connors realized she'd spoken out of turn.

A heavy "before" hung in the air.

"Very accurately said, Professor," Wanda suddenly smiled, "my life has been divided into 'before' and 'after' earlier, this time 'after' seems to be better."

"Yes... I understand," Karen clenched her right hand in a fist. She knew firsthand how one event could change an entire life.

"So," Wilson decided to change the subject, "I was cured by elephant blood?"

"Yes, do you have any preconceptions about that?" Connors eagerly picked up on that.

"No, no, it's just funny; you've heard the story, "Elephant Woman?" Well, I couldn't help comparing myself to her, and now I'm being cured with elephant blood..."

"You're quite erudite," Connors said, not knowing how to respond to the revelation, but the first thing that popped into her head that she immediately regretted.

"For a woman of my profession, you mean?" Wanda caught the incredulity, "actually I just looked through the top two hundred of the best movies on IMDB. I had to kill time between assignments."

They still talked about a lot of things that day. Karen wasn't bothered by the conversation and it didn't interfere with work, and Wanda had nothing else to do. Connors also made no secret of the fact that she and Peter were planning to use the successful cure of cancer in her body as a springboard to take off a new company. And that takeoff promised to be as vertical as a fighter jet.

But there was no way to get information out of Karen about the reasons for Parker's absence. No amount of persuasion worked on the scientist, which seemed no less strange to Wanda than the absence of the boy himself. He could not really have suddenly lost interest in his greatest achievement, which was what Wilson considered the return of his beauty, the greatest, and nothing else.

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