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Heaven's Door 天国の扉 [Tengoku no tobira]   Machiavellian / @windingxpath Riko Amanai was dead. With that death, his world crashed around him. He and Satoru Gojo were the good guys. They were supposed to be unstoppable. With their failure and the blood of an innocent now spilled, everything he knew was in shambles. Suguru Geto had lost track of how long it had been since the ultimate failure had cast him from the top of the Jujutsu Sorcerer world to the depths of depravity. Toji Fushiguro had taken her life and had left Suguru himself gravely injured. He stood alone in the shower as water began to pummel his body. The intensity of the water was so forceful that it left indentations on his skin. Even the wound caused by Fushigoro started to bleed despite the medical attention that Suguru had received. He was so numb, he felt none of it. As the rivulets of water raced down his muscular frame the intermingled crimson drops of blood began to pour down into the drain and fade away into the sewer. His arms moved in front of him as he collapsed into the wall of the shower. His weight shifted and his forehead touched his arm. The falling water hid his face saturated with tears.After a while later, he did exit the shower with a towel wrapped around his waist. His lengthy ebony locks formed tendrils that were still dripping wet. He didn't care. He just wanted to feel something right now when nothing else was getting through to him. On the nightstand beside his bed his phone was on the charger. He could see it blinking with unread texts and voice messages. He didn't bother to pick it up. He left it there. The only one who could remotely understand what was going on in his mind was Satoru Gojo. Who knew what his best friend was doing right now? Suguru didn't. Gojo could have been on the dark side of the moon for all he knew. He took a few moments to fix his bandages again and put on some loose fitting clothing. It was a black shirt and black jogging pants that he wore. He pulled those ebony locks up behind his head and sighed deeply. He was trying desperately to make sense of it all. Everywhere he looked, Geto felt as though he couldn't breathe. These memories were everywhere. The pictures on the wall, a simple basketball laying under a chair in the corner, no matter how big or how small it was, Geto was reminded how happy and innocent they had been before being given this one assignment that destroyed everything. The Jujutsu Sorcerers over them had stressed how important it was to protect non-curse users. It was their job to keep them safe. Geto felt rage begin to rise in him. He started into ripping pictures off walls and flipping tables. Once his outburst was over, he left his room and ran out into the stygian Tokyo night. He had no presence of mind to grab his phone as he left.Countless numbers of people passed him even at this late hour. He stood taller than most people who were inhabitants of the world's most populated city, Tokyo. He could see the streets were littered with cursed spirits among the well dresed and the vagrant alike. Subtle hisses came from one cursed spirit as he passed one particular woman on the street. He wanted no confrontation. He was still reeling from the mental and physical anguish after being so handily defeated and an utter failure. Why should he be concerned for an ungrateful populace who didn't even know that curses existed in the first place?“You shouldn't.” The voice that answered his thoughts came from a small Japanese woman that was leaning upon a gnarled branch of oak that she used as a walking stick. “What has that brought you and Satoru Gojo? Have you won anything other than a pat on the back?” “You know who I am?” The young man asked curiously. “Who are you? What do you want from me?” He could see no cursed spirit around her. He narrowed his eyes to take in the woman's surroundings. It appeared that all around them time had stopped. There were no cursed spirits around her. She was the cursed spirit.“My name is unimportant Suguru Geto. Just know that the key to your destiny lies in the Tokyo Islands. There is a Torii that will lead you to unlimited power. All the questions you're asking can be answered there by my master. He is waiting for you there.” She bowed to him as she further baited the hook.It all seemed a little too easy. His mind called out for answers. With how fragile he was at the moment, he would have normally asked more questions but he was so starved for answers he didn't. “Which island?” He asked. There were multiple islands to the south of Tokyo so he needed direction.“Oshima.” She spoke simply. “My master is waiting for you there on the other side of the gate. Don't disappoint him.” Her appearance was that of an old Japanese woman with many wrinkles and no teeth. She whistled when she spoke because she had no teeth.“Oshima.” He could be there by mid day if he tried hard enough. It was really a shame the ferry didn't run overnight.  "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference." credit: james kriet

Hey! Im roleplaying as amy winehouse. so, keep that in mind!

Alfred Pennyworth was well accustomed to sweeping up the shattered fragments of Bruce Wayne’s complicated existence. The countless domestic responsibilities overseen and assumed by Wayne Manor’s butler over the years actually became secondary to the more human needs of his “eccentric” employer. Assuming the role of surrogate father, tasked with guiding a traumatized billionaire orphan through the many expectations projected upon the Wayne family heir, did not end once Bruce became a grown man. It certainly did not end once the son of Thomas and Martha Wayne became Batman. Far from it.   “Master Wayne?” If anything, Alfred’s more intimate involvement in the billionaire playboy’s adult life transitioned from the roles of legal guardian, valet, teacher and loyal confidante to something more akin to nursing and damage control. Once Bruce came of age and could legally disregard Alfred’s parental concern over health or safety matters, the butler’s voice was relegated to a secondary voice uttering warnings and unsolicited advice. But even when Bruce insisted he’d outgrown the necessity for a parental figure, Alfred remained steadfast in his dedication to safeguarding the Wayne reputation and Bruce’s reputation in particular. Like a devoted father, he lost sleep when the Caped Crusader’s nocturnal crime fighting activities left Alfred alone in the mansion, always relieved when Bruce made it home in the early hours. Bandages would be ready, bones would be reset, wounds cleansed and stitched by Alfred’s experienced hands. And the tea would always be ready, no matter if refreshments were only served after a proper scolding and reminder that there was still time for Bruce Wayne to make a real life for himself. Gotham is not your responsibility, Master Wayne!I’m making it mine, Alfred. Gotham needs me. But in recent months, Bruce’s behavior had taken a darker than usual turn. When small bottles of liquor and drug paraphernalia were found shamefully hidden in various areas of the house while Alfred was cleaning, Bruce barred the butler from tidying the billionaire’s room behind a newly changed lock. The drunkenness Bruce indulged in at parties, previously part of his cover to avoid detection as Batman, was seeping into his private hours as Alfred smelled traces of alcohol mixed secretly into the teacups he washed. Harder substances appeared while Alfred was instructed to look the other way. Bruce’s eyes appeared more red and swollen as the days passed, his anxiety and depressive demeanor worsening, his usually sharp observational skills giving way to a notable indifference to anything beyond an unhealthy hypervigilance for patrolling Gotham’s crime-ridden streets. And when confronted about those matters, Bruce’s responses to Alfred’s “lectures” - what Alfred viewed as well-meaning suggestions - became increasingly belligerent and dismissive. It could not even be said that the pair quarreled more often - their interactions had become progressively one-sided or volatile until Alfred retreated, remembering his role was to serve while allowing his friend more space. Remembering his new place in the scheme of things. Alfred had been roused more than once from troubled sleep well before dawn, habitually searching rooms that were still in use for signs of Bruce’s return from the nightly patrols. This time, he had succumbed at long last to exhaustion, uncharacteristically oversleeping with no alarm set to rouse him, as it was his habit to rise early on his own. Making himself ready for the day only after the first morning light breached the curtains and shutters throughout the old mansion, he hurried to make up for lost time, cursing himself for his tardiness. Surely Bruce was expecting his breakfast, but the sound of Alfred’s name being hollered was decidedly absent. “Master Wayne?” Alfred would have preferred to return to the days when the sight of Bruce’s unconscious form sprawled unnaturally across the floor wasn’t so familiar. Once upon a time it was a startling discovery, enough to raise Alfred’s blood pressure in a tangled rush of fear and relief. Now, the vision of Bruce Wayne once again passed out from whatever substance currently flooded his veins filled Alfred Pennyworth with fury and disgust. The world rested at the billionaire’s feet, allowing him access to every resource available for making himself a better man in every way. Now he was reduced to a pathetic, drunken, drug-addled heap on the floor of his father’s old office on another beautiful, sunny morning. Thomas Wayne would have been horrified by such a display. What an absolute disgrace you are, son!You’re a Wayne, for God’s sake.Get up, brush yourself off and set a good example for the people of Gotham! “Well, that’s bloody productive, innit, Sir? Nursing your wounds with booze and drugs, and who knows what else,” Alfred muttered to the walls as he loomed in the doorway, knowing full well Bruce didn’t yet hear him from where he lay across the room. Just witnessing the younger man’s state was a sort of personal humiliation Alfred felt to his bones. This was Batman, the light for Gotham? It was all done at considerable cost to the man beneath the cowl. Irritated, Alfred stepped further into the room before stopping, glancing about for something a little less subtle to employ for Bruce’s rude awakening. Fetching a nearby vase and making silent apologies to the Chinese evergreen flourishing within, he started to pull the growth and roots free with the intention of dousing Bruce Wayne in a sobering bath of fertilized plant water. Right as he was about to unleash the splash, however, Alfred suddenly froze in a bewildering torrent of voices from the past. If something happens to his mother and me, you are responsible for my son, for his life and his future, to raise him as I would have, as would be expected for a Wayne. Thomas Wayne’s stern directions resurfaced in Alfred’s memories. And that also means no psychiatrists, no counselors.He’s a Wayne, Alfred. And that means you are to trust him to choose his own course.Do you understand? Promise me. You have my word, Sir. And my promise. The memory was not alone. A conversation he’d once had with Jim Gordon in the early days, shortly after Bruce’s parents were murdered, joined in the fray to finally get Alfred’s attention as he paused long enough to digest it all. He's not been sleeping. And when he does, he has these nightmares. Now he's hurting himself. Burning himself. He's cutting.Is he getting professional help?Oh, you mean psychiatrists? Oh, no, none, he won't have them. No psychiatrists, that's a rule.You make the rules, don't you? You're his guardian.Now, Bruce's father gave me very firm orders was him and his missus to die. Now I will raise the boy the way his father told me to raise him.Which is how?Trust him to choose his own course. He is, after all, a Wayne.Sounds like a recipe for disaster. How long had it been since Alfred allowed such memories to truly sink in? It was always too convenient to ignore the glaring truth all those years. So many sleepless nights spent fretting over Bruce’s welfare and Alfred’s many mistakes while raising him into adulthood could not change the past, Alfred knew. It seemed more logical to just move forward, hoping the man would merely come to his senses without betraying a father’s wishes, as if that’s all it took to improve one’s mental health. Traditional values and a chin-up attitude couldn’t possibly undo what was done, but what another, healthier, stronger way existed to make everything more bearable for the child still suffering inside the man? Head up, eyes front. Don’t let them see you crying. The first words Bruce Wayne heard from Alfred Pennyworth when the butler arrived to remove him from a bloodied alley that fateful night started it all. Alfred set the bar from that moment, the expectation - Thomas Wayne’s expectation - that Bruce should work everything out on his own. Public perception, honor and tradition mattered more than the fact that the needs of the child were never properly met. The palpable sorrow arising from consciousness of his own guilt weighed heavily upon Alfred. He’d done the best he could with all that he possessed over the years and made numerous sacrifices for Bruce’s sake, but he could have done more. So much more. You meant well enough, Thomas. But he could never again be the boy you left. Too much changed.We failed him.I failed him.Now who can we possibly trust to reach that boy again where it truly mattered, after everything that’s happened since? Slowly setting the vase down and carefully replacing the plant, Alfred absently wiped his hands on his pant legs, willing himself to slow his breathing. The anger and resentment he’d felt toward Bruce temporarily subsided. If Bruce had lost his way, wasn’t it Alfred’s responsibility to help him find the light? Alfred’s loyalty was pledged to the man, not what the man had decided to do to himself. He couldn’t turn his back on Bruce now, not when the child still needed him and the adult was stranded back in a dark alley painted with the blood of his murdered parents. Stealthily closing the physical distance between them, the butler knelt at the other man’s side, gently shaking him while noting the visible scrapes, gashes and bruises decorating Bruce’s skin. They were a usual sight, but what good was he really doing for Gotham, let alone for himself, if Batman was pronouncing judgment on the city while hyped up on liquor and coke? “Master B?” The old term of affection from all those years ago slipped past Alfred’s lips in a loving whisper. Boundaries between past and present became a blur, with the aging butler reaching out to the grieving little boy living inside the traumatized shell of the battered man. He remembered a time when he’d paced his room most of the night waiting for teenaged Bruce to come home after going missing again, only to find the boy mysteriously unharmed on the sofa later that morning. How relieved he’d been. And Bruce had soundly embraced him, thankful to be safe and whole in Alfred’s protective arms. “Wake up, son. Wake up.” Alfred still saw the boy in the haggard, pained face of the sleeping male. Come back to me, Master Bruce. If Bruce awoke from the haze of another nightmare, Alfred would attempt to soothe away the horrors, just as he’d always done. But not all nightmares were so easily vanquished for a man. Alfred knew that truth only too well, just as he also knew Bruce was no longer obligated to listen to his theories or take fatherly counsel to heart. A serious attempt at intervention may well be necessary. “Ah, there you are.” Breathing a sigh of relief when Bruce stirred, Alfred tenderly snaked an arm around his boss’ shoulders to help ease him upright as they sat together. “You gave me quite a scare, Sir. I imagine you’ve a bit of a headache, to say the least?” All his observations and the recent strains on their relationship aside, Alfred Pennyworth was still unprepared for the coming storm. Reply by @Pennyworth for @warxcrime. (c) made by creativian

Name: JennyTitle(s): The DoctorAlias(es): None YetAge: 23Age Appearance: Early TwentiesSpecies: Gallefrayian (One acception is she IS a clone) Occupation: Time Traveler and savior Hair Color: BlondeEye Color: GreenScars: One over her left heartTattoo's: NoneAccessories/Other: Her home made Sonic Screw DriverCatch Phrase: TBDPersonality: Jenny is spunky and full of life, looking for the best things in life and to find everything she can. Positive one and even when there's a bad situation she marches forward, unlike her father she is more prone to violence but won't kill. 

I OWE: David- 5/15 -Replying tomorrow for Check Krystalyn- 5/25 Brody- 6/1 Isabella- 6/8 THEY OWE:

Summary: “You stick with me, Red,” Frank drops his voice down to a whisper, “I got you.” Frank and Matt deal with the aftermath of the attack at the Bulletin while planning on how to move forward. Notes: Hi, there! Poems and excerpts taken from (in order of appearance):November by Raymond P. FischerAnd the word for moonlight is my name by Jai Hamid BashirLoss of memory by James LanglasLady Lazarus by Sylvia PlathVery many hands by Aaron ColemanForgetting by Joy Ladin Happy reading!     November (Nov.) the eleventh month of the Gregorian calendar. The last month of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere.   May I be blind whenever June clouds pass; Never lie down in sun-warmed meadow grass, Never smell clover; my voice grow harsh and thin, And next November leave me dead in sin.   BLOOM   This mouth is a wound from where I’m learning how to love.   With mid December comes unforgiving cold and merciless noise. Winter parks and Christmas fairs open, stores play Christmas’ songs from nine to five and Matthew can only allow it to flood him, drag him to drown into it as he sits in the cot by the broken window. He sighs at the sound of Frank assembling his gun for the sixth time. They had been easy to ignore at some point, but now each click echoes around his head like a gunshot. His head’s been getting better slowly. It took him a week to improve from the simple flu and two days of Curtis coming and going to reassure Frank the fever was not due to an infection and that Matt’s immune system has been compromised for a while due to poor nutrition and stress. And stress hasn’t been lacking. Fisk, and now he remembers enough of that name that his fists clench with the mere thought of it, is tearing Matt’s life apart. Not long ago he heard an APB on his name, considered armed and dangerous. There was someone using his symbol to kill people and now Daredevil was wanted for murder. A shoot to kill order was issued on Frank twenty-four hours after the whole Bulletin ordeal. Nine people died on the attack - including one that, according to Frank, was the man who shanked Wilson Fisk -, several were hospitalized and the man had escaped custody somehow. Matt opens his eyes at the sound of Frank disassembling his gun again. “Frank,” a grunt, “Frank, it’s the seventh time already.” “You been counting?” Matt stands up from his place perching at the window to sit down on the (uncomfortable, flea-bitten) couch. “Hard not to.” Frank only offers him another grunt. Puts the handgun together and drops it on the table, leans back on his seat and crosses his arms. “Past time we planned ahead, Red.” Yeah, Matt had been thinking the same. Running wouldn’t get them anywhere, but - “You should go, Frank.” A second. Frank’s heartbeat stops for a second before it returns, booming powerfully against his bruised ribs. Matt can feel his stare burning holes through his unguarded eyes. “Excuse me?” At the sharp-edged tone, Matt’s hackles raise. “This isn’t your fight-” “What do you mean, it’s not my fight?” His voice climbs up several notches and so does his temperature, Frank’s muscles tense and ripple. “Fisk is my problem, I’m responsible for this mess, you shouldn’t have to-” “Ah for crying out loud, thought this Catholic guilt martyrdom fest bullsh*t had been knocked clean outta your skull-” “Don’t change the-” “What, Red, you want me to walk away?” Could you do that, he asks him in another lifetime, could you walk away? “Yes! That’s exactly what you should do!” “And you’ll fight that guy in the Devil suit, weighting half of what you did a month ago and with your skull crocheted with wire?” His tone is mocking and it hits him in all the wrong places. Matt’s palms sting when he slams both down against the table. “You could have died!” He exclaims at his face, his own heartbeat mingling with Frank’s until it’s impossible to tell either one apart. “And there was nothing, nothing I could have done to stop it!” The marine’s heartbeat falters before he too rises. But Matt won’t give him the chance to push and prod and bend him. He needs to understand. “Fisk found someone to kill me, Frank. Someone better, faster and what do you think he’ll do if you stand in his way again?” “I’m not the one who dies, Red.” He growls, crowding into Matt’s space. Fast heart rate slows right down. The level of self-control of this infuriating- “So you get your head on straight, because I don’t care what bullsh*t you’re agonizing over right now, we’re doing this, you’re not doing this alone, you got that?” Matt inhales and doesn’t let go. Frank steps and only then he exhales, when the air is slightly less Frank and he can breathe properly. “This ain’t on you, Red.” A hand raises - he almost gravitates towards it before holding back. Frank eventually lets it drop by his side. He should know that Frank wouldn’t do it half-way, even when it came to taking care of Matt, getting him back on his feet. Had never been one for half-measures. And yet, it still seems he thinks Matt’s worth the time. Not like this, Red. He sits back down, unperturbed by Frank looming over him. Since a week or so ago, they’ve been mostly ignoring what had happened, ignoring the implications in Frank’s words, refusing to voice the unmentionable. “It’s like,” he exhales brokenly, “every piece of information I try to make sense of, it doesn’t fit. It’s like reaching for a broken cup to try and glue it together, but finding that most of the pieces are missing. I can see most of the fragments, I don’t know how it looks like when they’re together.” Frank nods, as malleable and open as a solid wall of bricks, giving nothing away. “Any leads?” Matt tilts his head up. “One,” he can mostly sense Frank’s eyebrow curving up. “The man who made my suit.” Frank stops for a moment, his arms cross in front of his chest. “How good was that copy, Red?” Matt feels the devil smile through his teeth. “It was identical.” The marine stops, head slanting to the side as if considering him, something in his face. His heartbeat changes, his temperature rises, blood pumping faster in a rush. Frank suddenly snorts, all the tension leaving his shoulders. “It is good to have you back, Red.”     Frank checks his gear as quietly as he can, leaving Red to his meditation thing. Sig, couple of knives, a smoke grenade because regular ones are bound to f*** up Red’s hearing. Prepares an extra getaway duffle with a lot of ammo, because he can almost count on a sh*t storm when it comes to Matt f***ing Murdock. Makes sure to shove some of the redhead’s clothes and pills and the cream for the fading bruises around his neck. A crumpled piece of paper from a week ago catches his eye. He had already memorized both the addresses scribbled down in there, repeated them until they echoed with his kids’ laughter and the never-ceasing gunfire. Frank’s mind is a battlefield and he’s the last man standing on it. At least, he thinks, eyes straying back to auburn hair, it used to be. He worries the paper between his fingers, eyes going over the same phone number in the back. He wasn’t here for me, Frank, Karen had said between sobs, splattered in blood as she pointed at the corpse slumped in the ground. Jasper Evans, the man who had shanked Wilson Fisk. And the bald a**hole had known. Had known Karen would find him, that she’d bring him in. He had known. It had been a stupid move, what he did. And he was still glad Red had been completely wiped out to notice Frank being gone most of the next day after the attack. He had twenty-four hours to get Karen and Curtis to safety before he went to the address he was supplied with and killed the six people waiting for him inside. He traces the phone number again. Shakes his head but doesn’t immediately throw the paper away, once he crumples it for the second time. It could come in handy. Maybe. His eyes stray back to Red. It’s been getting harder to stop himself from staring, these days. Specially now, that he knows. Knows what his lips taste like, how they move against his, how he grabs like he’s terrified you’ll let go of him. He sits down and watches and waits.     Red insists on wearing a black cloth around his head like a goddamn sock, but Frank doesn’t do much besides ruffling his hair teasingly. Matt only gets stuck once, during the ride. Frank wonders if he realizes it still happens. He’d just suddenly stop whatever he was doing and be very still. It wasn’t like his usual dissociative episodes, Frank isn’t sure if he’s just listening to something or lost inside his head. He thinks maybe there’s familiarity in his state. Like a man sitting in the corner of a safe house, a forgotten black guitar on the corner, the memory of Lisa’s giggles when he tried teaching her- Heartbeat must change. His smell - something does, because Red’s eyes snap open, his ear gravitates to his side. Frank has to drag his eyes away from the soft crease of worry between his well-defined eyebrows. Still not as sure as he once was, but focused. Ready. His grip changes around the steering wheel. Telling Red off for listening to his heart would be too much like acknowledging the fact that Red, clueless like a newborn fawn or not, always knew what was going on inside. It was a massive tactical advantage, now that Frank thinks of it. Perfect for manipulation if you know which words provoke the strongest reaction out of someone. But manipulation is not Red’s style, that’s for sure. “Will you be able to track ‘im?” He stops at a red sign only to find Murdock aiming a grin at him. “I forgive you for that.” Frank scoffs. “Right,” he reaches his arm behind him, shoving a hand into the duffel. “You’ll need those.” Throws the twin batons carelessly on Murdock’s lap. “Oh,” Frank keeps his eyes forward to avoid that face Red did - the guilty sh*t that seemed to scream you shouldn’t have at the same time it spoke of a gratitude that just wasn’t proportional to the deed. “Thank you.” He risks looking. There’s the face. Sh*t. He shakes his head. “Yeah, yeah, altar boy.”     Red wants to go barging in for answers once they finally manage to trace Potter back to a warehouse and Frank, unsurprisingly, has to hold his leash and knock some sense into him. So he drags Red to a rooftop, takes his binoculars out and watches. “This is a waste of time, Frank, I can tell you what he’s doing if you insist on recon-” “Shut up, Red.” He sighs at the put upon frown that answers him. Those f***ing eyes. “Yer nifty senses can come in handy, Red, not gonna lie, but we’re doing this my way or not at all. Don’t think I won’t chain you up again.” Murdock frowns. Translates the words to the memory before sighing. “F*** you for that, by the way.” “You’re welcome, Saint Matthew.” Red snorts softly at that and Frank can only pretend there isn’t a smile in his face mirroring the younger man. Reputation to uphold and all that. Frank’s good at waiting - so he settles in and watches, eyes keen on every figure passing by the place. Writes down a few suspicious car plates, photographs two or three people acting sketchy. Red’s sh*t at it. Meditating crap or not, Murdock’s jumping out of his skin by the time Potter finally shows up. He didn’t think it was possible for a guy to fidget as much as the redhead did, but Frank’s ready to shove a bottle of Xanax in his hands and beg him - again - to sit your goddamn ass down, for f***’s sake. He suddenly falls belly down by Frank’s side, his lips a breath’s width away from touching the skin by his ear when he speaks. “That’s him, the tall man. I think he’s bald. He smells like oil. There’s a woman with him, she’s packing heat, that’s-” Red tilts his head at the same time Frank catches the two kissing through the binocular. “Betsy’s his parole officer.” “Betsy?” “Yes, Fisk threatened to hurt her if Melvin didn’t work for him.” Frank’s eyes fall to his tensing knuckles. Red shakes his head in guilty dismay. “He got to him again.” “Any surveillance cameras?” Looks like a goddamn bird evaluating and picking a branch with the amount of head tilts he manages under a minute. “Not directly in the lot, but we might want to avoid the auto-repair shop across it.” “Right. How we doing this?” “Let me talk to him alone.” Frank stops. Stares. He’s more convinced every day that Red’s the human equivalent of a suicidal road chicken. “When he’s tied up and unable to crack your head open again, yeah, Red, sure.” “Frank-” “No, so you’re telling me this guy works for Fisk and has a girl to protect and you think he’ll listen to you? This Melvin, you said he’s strong, right?” Matt doesn’t back down. If anything, he seems more convinced that’s the way to go about it. “I can get to him, Frank, if we treat him like an enemy-” “That’s exactly what he is until he proves otherwise!” And maybe even then. Someone had to be cautious and Red clearly ain’t gonna be it. Frank bares his teeth in annoyance. “After the stunt Fisk pulled a week ago, you think he’s not waiting for you?” “We waited enough-” “Like hell we did, Red. You’re remembering sh*t but you still got a wire holding your skull closed, so don’t you f***ing start. We’re doing this my way.” Red’s skin is hot. Frank can feel it even from their distance. And his eyes- f***. “No,” he shakes his head, conviction in every movement he makes. “No, we’re not.” “F***ing-” “Frank.” “You have a f***ing death wish, Red? Is that what-” “I’ll go in there and I’ll talk to him, Frank.” “Ah f***.” “He helped me when he didn’t have to, he risked his life, Betsy’s life-” Frank throws his head back while still cursing, “when he agreed to it back then, and I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt.” Red aims his eyes straight at him, through him, stripping bare everything in his path. “I’m not letting him down again, Frank.” So he’s left to stare, again. Can’t stop staring. Can’t help letting whatever is blooming in his chest from spreading its vines all over his flesh and bones and taking over, consuming. This is what he had respected about Red from day one, from the moment he realized it wasn’t stupidity or naiveté, it was sheer, unwavering faith and unbelievable strength. Faith he refused to lose in the scumbags that would beat him half to death in the streets. Faith he refused to lose when a piece of sh*t tied him to a chimney and tried breaking him, showing him he was just as dirty. Hadn’t been ready for the truth, then. Now, he just lets it burn him from the inside out. This is Red, all of him. Missing chunks of memory and all, taking all of Frank in turn and not even realizing it. Stares maybe for too long, because Red’s out of sorts by then. Barely listens to his stammering - he reaches a fingertip to trace the shell of his ear, the peach-fuzz texture of his lobe. The soft sigh that leaves Matt in response - it’s too much. He clears his throat. “I go inside with you, Red, that’s final.” Matt nods, leans into the touch for a few moments more before squaring his shoulders back.     Frank sees it coming from a mile away. FBI storms the place, just after Frank shoots the locked gate and dodges having his head cut off with a circular saw blade - Potter is a big guy and abnormally strong and fighting him gets tricky once they’re surrounded. Matt takes care of that pretty quickly. He takes out three agents with a few well-aimed kicks and punches. Frank is careful to hit only legs and arms - there’s time to make a run for it, but the moment Red tries- “No!” Potter manages to grab Red around the waist with crushing force, the agonized gasp from having his broken rib jostled has Frank aiming his handgun at the man in a second. Nausea stabs him deep in the guts when Red is shoved head first to the table. “Hey, let him go!” No clear shot, if the guy as much as clenches the hand pressed against Red’s break- “Let him go or you die here, you hear me?” The tears give him a stop. Barely a second. “He’ll hurt Betsy!” The man exclaims, still holding Matt to the table, Matt with his fractured skull. Frank’s heartbeat speeds up more, his temperature rises. “Let him go, you piece of sh*t, let him go-” “Melvin,” a choked breath. “Melvin, don’t-” “He’ll hurt Betsy!” “Melvin, please.” The telling sound of a canister dropping. “Red!” He fires at the man’s right arm, precisely on the muscle so he lets go of Matt. A scream cuts through the sound of the flash-bang grenade going off, Frank jumps over to Red, throwing his body over his and hands covering his ears. His stomach does swoops at the thought of checking his head. “Hands in the air!” “Frank-” Matt drags himself up to run palms and fingers over his face, out of sorts, looking for injuries. “Frank-” “I’m fine, Red-” “You!” Frank turns over to the single agent up, hands trembling where he holds his rifle, young. “S-stand up! Show me your hands!” “Melvin,” Matt drags himself to the crying man in the corner, kneeling between the crates and boxes surrounding the plate. “You have to tell me.” “Don’t move, either of you!” Frank takes a step forward, covering both of them with his body, hands up in the air and gun pointed up to the ceiling, fingertips straight and away from the trigger. “Easy,” he growls, taking another step closer. Gotta keep his attention on him if Red’s getting what he wants. “Easy, kid.” “Don’t move!” “Melvin, please.” “Don’t you f***ing move!” Frank stops, but keeps himself moored to the ground. No one gets past him. “He didn’t tell me his name,” a muffled whisper comes from behind him, voice teary. “But he was FBI. Mr. Fisk- Mr. Fisk said they needed to catch you with the suit.” Footsteps approach from the hallways. There’s more in the way. “Red, now!” From a second to the other, all the lights shatter above him. Matt is body slamming him behind the safety of a few crates and wooden pallets as the agent starts shooting. Frank’s back to the wood, Matt pressing against his front, a hand clamped tight over his mouth. He makes a soft shushing noise, head tilting carefully up and Frank follow the direction, having a hard time taking his eyes away from the redhead. He catches the faint light coming from the back exit. He nods. “Please, he’ll hurt Betsy!” Potter’s cries echo through the walls as they make their escape. “He’ll hurt Betsy!”     Matt sits under the shower and lets the running water relax his tense, overworked muscles. There’s a bruise forming on the left side of his face, extending all the way to his temple. Matt senses it like a tense coiling of heat, burst veins like cobwebs spreading to his eyebrow and cheekbone. Apparently Fisk’s plans had changed. Trying to kill him turned into trying to disgrace him again - destroy the very symbol he worked so hard for. Frame him for being Daredevil - take away all he has left. Not according to Frank, though. He did mention once Matt had friends, but every time he tried going after a memory, as small or insignificant as it may be, he got lost in the fog. It’s there somewhere, suspended on the haze, holding its breath. Matt feels like a fool trying to touch the unreachable. Frank is back just as he’s finishing up. He had left Matt in the safe house and went back to follow Betsy. Make sure she’s safe, tell her to get out of town. His heartbeat is weird. Matt is so atuned to it, these days, that the shift crawls from his eardrums to his skin, his arms prickling in goosebumps. He pats himself dry quickly, eyebrows drawn in contemplation, tying the towel around his waist. His right side still feels stiff and weak sometimes, but he makes do. Frank is sitting in the living room when Matt steps out of the bathroom, heartbeat pounding against his chest, palms working together restlessly. He’s agitated, there’s heat coiling all over his frame as if he was about to attack, eyes following him when Matt steps into the living room. Frank’s heartbeat slows down but not by much. Matt claps his palms once, using the sound waves to orientate himself towards the duffle bag in the corner. Peruses inside for a pair of fresh clothes - sweatpants and hoodie, smelling of Frank. It’s only after he puts it on and the hoodie sleeves slide past his knuckles that he realizes they’re not his and almost pulls them off on principle. The ghost feeling of a fingertip caressing the shell of his ear stops him short of doing it. Matt sighs through his nose. Puts some socks on because there was a snow alert on the radio that morning and he could smell it in the air. Only then does he find a seat by Frank’s too-fast-too-wrong heartbeat. Knowing the best way to approach the man when he’s geared up helps. He tucks his elbows close to his body and stays quiet. Lets Frank know he’s not a threat or confrontational. If Castle notices his subtle try at communication, his body language doesn’t betray it. If anything, his muscles tense further, his heartbeat keeps pounding deafeningly loud, his blood pressure is through the roof. “Frank,” he tries, carefully reaches to touch his bicep. “What happened?” There’s blood on the soles of his boots, Matt notices, sniffing the air. “Frank...” The marine shakes his head, digs his elbows into his knees and briskly rubs his palms through the sides of his head. His breath hitches once, twice, but he never speaks whatever it is he’s got to say. Matt is just about to ask when the man suddenly leans back, stands up and stomps to the duffel bag. The one with his guns. “What are you doing?” No answer, predictably. The redhead jumps up too, his ribs protest at every deep breath. “Talk to me, Frank.” Frank slams a gun down against the kitchen table and Matt fights a flinch. He’s huffing through his nose, heart speeding up. Hormone levels spike, the bittersweet stench of adrenaline clogs the air - Frank is a bomb about to go off. “I told you. I f***ing told you. I told you we had to be careful, but you never listen to a f***ing thing anyone’s got to say, do you Red?” “Are you talking about Melvin?” No. Something else. There was something wrong. “Frank, what happened?” He takes a step forward, fighting the urge to fall into defense position when Frank’s trigger finger twitches. “Why do you smell like-” “Blood?” The soldier pulls something out of his jacket pocket and thrusts it into his hands, the coppery scent gets stuck to his tongue. He feels for it, the smooth polycarbonate drags across his fingers. The blood stains make it impossible for him to follow any traces of ink. “I don’t-” “Third body I found in the last week, Red. The third.” He takes a step back, brows furrowing down, presses his fingertips harder against the cards, can’t make sense of the ink. “Ask me their names-” “Frank, you’re not making any-” “Richard Murdoch, Matthew Ramirez, Louise Matthews, recognized any patterns yet, Red?” His stomach drops, blood turning cold. And Frank sees it and he’s vicious about it. Crowds into his space so Matt has nowhere to escape. “Yeah, got their eyes plucked out of their sockets while they were still alive before they were shot in the stomach, hands tied so they couldn’t do sh*t about it. This woman, Red? They left her in her kitchen. Her little kid found her. Her little kid.” Bile is corrosive like acid when it reaches his throat, coating the back of his tongue. He thinks maybe his pressure drops, because feeling leaves his fingertips and toes. “Fisk-” “Yeah.” Frank takes a step closer, Matt’s stumbles back when he reaches to pluck the three cards from his trembling hands. But he’s not done yet. Frank’s not pulling any punches and Matt feels like throwing up. “Now, you got a Fed dressed in your pajamas killing people, Fisk tearing your name apart, going after Karen, going after Curt, murdering innocent people to get you out hiding and you gonna tell me this piece of sh*t deserves a second chance, Red?” Matt’s mouth opens to answer but nothing leaves, his own heart hammering inside his chest, pressing against his sore ribs. “I can’t k-” “You’re goddamn right you can’t.” Cold seeps into his bones and Matt wonders if the air leaking out of his lungs is ever coming back, because suddenly it feels like there’s less oxygen in the room. He presses himself against the wall, chest barely moving. “This ends now. I’ll do it my way, my kinda justice.” Matt shakes his head once. Shakes it again more erratically and why isn’t there any air ? Why does his chest burn like it’s being torn apart? “No, Frank, you can’t, you can’t kill h-” “Yes, I can!” Frank steps closer, huffing against his face like a predator about to open his jaws and sink canines into his neck. “And I’ll kill anyone else in this town if it means you’re safe.” The air goes thicker, his heart squeezed tight in his chest and as fast as a hummingbird’s. And trapped between the beginnings of a panic attack and an elated sense of confusion, Matt feels like he finally understands Frank completely, if only for that moment. Sees all of him, the dark and the light, not fighting but constantly fusing. “Frank,” voice weak, his fingertips tremble when he reaches out, traces the bruised contours of his face. There are no words when he goes looking for them, still breathing too quickly, focusing on Frank. Bright like fire in front of him. “Frank.” “Shut up, Red,” had never heard his voice that weak, glass shattering wetly in every consonant. But his thumb comes up to caress Matt’s chin, his lower lip, his cheeks. “Shut your mouth.” Matt kisses him. It’s a conscious decision at first and then it’s not. It’s Frank’s lips, chapped and full against his trembling ones, his mouth hot and wet against Matt’s. It’s him swallowing all of that grief that was ever-present in Frank’s voice so it didn’t spill all over them both. It was Frank holding him up, pulling gently at his hair, a soft apology in each caress, in each peck. It’s tasting Frank’s pain in his tongue and trying to remember a time where he didn’t make sense. He hugs the man’s neck so he won’t let go, moaning faintly under his breath when the kiss turns deeper. When Matt can’t distinguish Frank’s heat from his own with his senses - they look like one and the same. His breath hitches when fingers clench hard around his hip, pressing him tighter against the wall. Frank pants into his mouth when their crotches meet. “Yes,” Matt whispers, begs, as he nods. “Yes, Frank, please-” And his voice is so lovingly wrecked when he murmurs by Matt’s ear, biting at the side of his neck, rolling his hips against his. “Goddamn you, Matty,” a particularly hard bite makes him yelp, “goddamn you.” “Please.” Frank doesn’t need much more convincing. Matt lets him take them to the bedroom and doesn’t think of anything or anyone else for some time.     Red dozed off eventually, back against his chest. He had filled up some but was still skinnier than he used to be. Frank had been there for every meal he couldn’t keep down - could trace them like braille over his slightly protuding ribs. It felt like an year ago that Red woke up for the first time in the cabin, unable to form words in a second and ready to attack in the next. Take me home, his voice echoes. Please, take me home. If he thinks too much about it, at some point, his voice and Matt’s mingle. It’s him, digging his fingers into that nurse’s arm, feeling like death when he brought him close. Take, me, home. But there was no home. Finds it in a small column in the newspaper - Kitchen Irish, Mexican Cartel, Dogs of Hell. He buries his lips in the smooth, velvety skin of Red’s neck, following lazily the dark red bruises decorating the side and falling like a chain around his neck and collarbones. His chest, the insides of his thighs, his hipbones. The contrast is like that of stars in a night sky - the old mottled bruises around Red’s neck had faded. Leaving behind some leftover hues of red, sickly green and yellowish - the love bites looking like little silhouettes of Mars or Venus, shining red among all that white. Stitches were about ready to come out, too, on the wound the Devil gave him. It felt wrong that Red’s body was so quick to erase abuse. That he took hit after hit after hit and continued there, standing, waiting for the next. There was hair very slowly starting to grow over the scar in his head, where it was bright pink and glossy. Fingers roam down to the deep scar above Matt’s hipbones and presses softly into the smooth texture, a grounding kiss. The skin was thin were it had knitted, almost paper-like. It was the worse one so far Frank had found on his body, while licking, biting and kissing him from his sinewy neck to the insides of his thighs. The wound had to be deep - the scar was slightly pulled inwards, like something had hooked in. Wonders if Nelson ever saw all of those scars. Or Karen. Thinking about that - about the three of them, he tries to build a scenario. Nelson, a put-upon frown that doesn’t manage to hide his worry. Karen, a compassionate attempt at stern reprimanding. You should take better care of yourself, Matt, she’d say. And he can see Matt clear as day, hunching his shoulders over with that guilt face he did, agreeing to everything not because he particularly had any care over his own state, but because he’d hate to have them worrying over him. Useless to think of sh*t like that now. Gets him thinking of Fisk, though, stomach twisting in his belly. Of Nelson. Of Karen, holed up in that church, waiting for a way to get out of the country. Curt, staying at a cousin’s home in Virginia. And Red, here, in his arms. With his come drying in him, with his marks spread all over his body. What the f*** is he doing? This is Matt. Matt who has an expiration date stamped on his forehead. Who dives into trouble the first chance he gets, who’s being hunted by cops, feds and scumbags alike. Priority was getting Red through this sh*t show alive, not whatever this was. Keeping Red safe meant taking out this Devil wanna-be before he gets to Matt, because the a**hole kept on coming. Fisk can come later. He needed to resupply, get in touch with David, ask about Louise Matthews and, maybe, give a call to the owner of the phone number forgotten in his duffle. Later, he wonders if it was the change in his heartbeat or his tapping trigger finger on the gentle dip of his waist that woke Matt up, nose still close to sweet-smelling skin. Matt stirs, humming softly before stretching like a cat, turning boneless in Frank’s arms before he squirms, rubbing his naked ass against Frank’s covered crotch. “M’too old for marathon sex, Red.” The fondness in his tone has no business being there. “No, you’re not.” Matt smiles knowingly but doesn’t push. Frank doesn’t let go though, finds that he can’t, nosing the freckles on Red’s most prominent cervical bone. Then kisses it - he isn’t sure he’ll ever get to do it again, so he lingers as much as he allows himself to. Matthew draws slow circles on the forearm trapping him by the waist, squirming at the feel of dried cum and spit between his legs. “I...” a soft, almost soundless chuckle, “I think I dreamed about my eighth birthday.” “Yeah?” “Yeah, I... Dad and I, we didn’t starve but we also didn’t have much money, you know? Food was definitely never wasted there. There’s this one time he manages a few extra bucks with a fight and he bought me a thematic cake. I never had one.” He smiles. It’s abstract, but he could almost remember how it looked like. “Lin was there.” “Lin?” “Lindsey. She was my friend.” Red chuckles suddenly. “I think she enjoyed it more than I did. It was Star Wars themed and she was obsessed with it.” Red tells him about it in whispers. About how she loved every single movie she could get her hands on, how they’d compete about who had memorized the most dialogues. About his dad feeling ashamed that he almost took a tumble and some of the frosting of the cake had stuck to the box. Frank holds him through it, one ear tight against his neck, listening for his heart, chin hooked over his shoulder. It’s quiet - like the eye of the storm, the silence after the gunfire. Lisa had insisted on having all over her birthdays with a different dinosaur theme from ages four to nine. God forbid Maria ever mentioned doing something else. Her giggles as she ran around the house with her plastic dinosaurs in hand, diving through the air, permeate every nook and cranny of his brain. Frank presses his lips softly to Matt’s temple, careful of his break. Moves away from spooning the younger man but doesn’t immediately get out, though. Stays there, hovering over Red’s spent form. “Frank.” He grunts. “Thank you.” Frank shakes his head. Standing up makes his skin rise in goosebumps, Matt’s own skin mirroring his. He’s tucking him into the blankets before he’s even realized what he’s done. Shakes his head again - Red’s got no f***ing reason- “Nothing to thank me for, Red.” The constant, familiar itch of anger poisons the softness of his afterglow. Red only blinks lazily at nothing, doe eyes lost. “Anyway.” Frank stands there, and Matt lies there and none of them move. His fingertips itch to reach out but the marine holds himself back. “Do you ever think about just... riding off?” Frank frowns, not expecting the question. “Just going away, not thinking about anything you leave behind.” “I have nothing to leave behind.” Is his first response. Red pauses, still unmoving. Either because he hears the lie in his heart or because he knows, just knows it’s not true. Not anymore. So Frank sighs. Gives in. “Sometimes, yeah.” “Yeah,” Matt smiles, the curves of his lips tinted in wishful red, the soft curves of his eyes disbelieving of the possibility of ever escaping. Ever getting away. “It’d be nice.”     A strange quiet takes over the apartment the next couple of weeks, while they lay low. Daredevil’s latest attack at the Bulletin and the Punisher sighting and mysterious eye-gouging murderer take over the news. They don’t leave often and Red takes in to checking the perimeter with his weird super senses and, for some reason, that gets Frank sleeping better at night. Most of his days, he fiddles with his police scanner - looking for word of people he had marked to be in Fisk’s payroll, FBI ops, anything the NYPD caught a wind of. Cops were apparently clean since Nelson and Murdock saved the day back then. Frank sighs at himself. Red is rubbing off on him, more ways than one. Although, the other ways don’t happen again after that night. Not for lack of want - they both orbit each other a few feet away, pulling closer as the day progresses without noticing. Frank’s a moon courting an impossible sun. Red is back to training, though, so there’s no time for them to suffer through talking and weird discussions. It happened, they both liked it, they both knew it, they didn’t talk about it. Simple. Frank is admittedly a bit worried at first when Red starts - building himself up to pull ups and push ups. He appreciates that unyielding strength of his (an immovable object, a fire you just couldn’t put out), but if there’s one thing Red’s no good at, is recognizing when it’s time to stop. Sh*t, look at all the things that happened to him and he was still kicking. Still hanging on to those high morals of his. Doesn’t matter that Frank found him half-dead with his skull bashed in, Red still had the strength to to have faith and hope and believe in people, when Frank, well, doesn’t. Even training, Murdock doesn’t last longer than an hour at a time. He doesn’t say it but he gets dizzy and exhausted fast. Frank would watch him across the safe house - he’d drag himself to a corner, guzzle down a bottle of water with shaking arms, eat a fruit or a bite of a protein bar and then he’d sit, cross his legs and go quiet. When he opened his eyes, minutes, sometimes an hour later, Frank could barely recognize the lost, messed up kid he brought to that shack. He’d go down, eyes dead - his arms would stop shaking, his shoulders would relax back and he’d start again with renewed vigor. Red would do it again and again until exhaustion finally caught up to him and he’d crumble by the bed and sleep for a long time. He gets used to being quiet around the place. Training took a lot out of him and Red slept five to six hours during the day. While he does his thing, Frank begins researching. Fisk’s immediate detail has to be it, no other way he’d get in touch with someone trained as quickly as he did. And after Melvin’s admission, well. Ray Nadeem’s face doesn’t surprise him among the files and pictures Micro leaked him. The thought of calling him, setting up a meeting to ask about the copycat is tempting enough, but Frank is resigned to waiting for the time being. He’s just going through the last of the files when a somewhat familiar face catches his eyes. Chiseled jaw, blonde hair, dead shark-like eyes. There was just something about it- Matt rises and jumps up so quickly Frank has no second thoughts when he immediately reaches for the gun in his pants, pressing it close to his chest, eyes checking all possible entrances. Bathroom, kitchen window, front door - no movement. But Red is still standing there, eyes focused and head tilted, whole body locked in defense. He either heard something or he’s in one of his flashbacks again. “Red,” he walks towards him, checks his breathing, his eyes. He’s calm, although alarmed. Frank doesn’t need more reassuring before pushing the redhead behind his body. “Where?” Bathroom, kitchen window, front door. Bathroom, kitchen - Red’s face. His furrowing eyebrows and the confused little twist of his lips. “Roof. Only one.” His muscles twitch, eyes go wide. “I know her,” he whispers, fingers suddenly reaching out to clench tightly to Frank’s sleeve. ”I know her, Frank.” A shift of red and black in the window directly across them and Frank is shoving Red behind him again, pulling the safety off. No way she got there from the roof, there was only one f***ing person he knew that could do that and he was standing right behind him. She steps inside the loft like a shadow spilling. Woman has a presence on her, the walls almost warp towards her. “Matthew,” a thick accented voice greets, her tongue curling around the double T. “You’re awfully hard to find these days.” “Who are you?” Frank’s eyes narrow. Red may not recognize her, but Frank does. Head may be a battlefield of gunfire and contingency plans and his kid’s laughter and Red’s soft voice but he remembers her. It gives him a stop, because that can’t be. He saw her bleed out on that rooftop through his scope, saw Red cry over her corpse. But then there were the initial reports of Midland Circle - Daredevil and an unidentified female trapped underneath. He tries to fight the nausea that comes with the thought. He saw her die. “The f*** you doing here?” But Matt is already stumbling forward and away, face a mask of confusion when he steps closer. Frank wonders if he feels the grief, even if he can’t properly recall it. “Matthew, why don’t you introduce us?” “No, wait, wait. I know you.” Her pretense drops for a moment, eyes calculating when she studies Red’s face, his body language, before turning to Frank. And by then, her gaze is a promise of death and not and easy one. She smiles, small and dry. “What did you do to him?” “I didn’t do sh*t-” “Frank didn’t do anyt-” Both stop at the same time. Red’s fingers close around his bicep, the muscle twitches in response. He stares at him, taking him in, the delicate curve of lips and light stubble. Lips he kissed. The surge of protectiveness almost destroys him. “I remember you,” he growls out, “on that rooftop with all the ninjas.” Her eyes cut sharp like a dagger when she finally stops staring at where Red’s palms were locked to him. The satisfaction is short-lived but Frank savors it all the same. Her face changes, like day and night. The way she looked at Red rubs him off, too - something between helpless affection and toxic, hungry possessiveness. As if Matt was the embodiment of salvation and the picture of meat that she was just dying to dig her claws in. “And I remember you ,” she smiles with little humor, “Matthew was awfully entertained with you back then.” “Was about to say the same.” “No, wait, you know each- Will any of you just tell me what’s going on?” The frustration bleeds into his voice but the girl and Frank are trapped in a conflict of their own. Her hands caress the daggers strapped to her thighs, Frank’s finger twitches against the trigger - but their weapons point down, Red’s presence a weighting on them both. “What happened to him?” “What happened to you?” He shoots back, she raises her eyebrows with a twitch of her head. “I thought you were dead.” Uses the moment to drag Red behind him again because he doesn’t trust the lady as far as he can throw her. “I was,” Frank’s whole body tenses, heartbeat flat-lining in his chest. He tries and fails not to think of Maria, of Lisa, of Junior. “I’ll ask again then, shall I? What happened to him?” “Would you stop talking like I’m not-” “Got his skull bashed in,” Frank rises in volume, “and you didn’t answer mine, the f*** do you want?” “Stop, stop, stop.” Red broke from his hold, taking three steps towards the woman before he froze altogether, his shoulders shaking. “I remember you. I remember fighting with you, you... you died, I held you-” her stance changes but it’s barely noticeable. Frank’s well aware she’s still a threat (probably never wasn’t a threat at any given moment), but something soft creeps at the corner of her lips. She reaches out to push a strand of red hair behind Matt’s ear, quiet fondness in her touch. Almost reverent. Red doesn’t lean into it but doesn’t run either and Frank’s guts twist. “You hurt me,” he whispered then, “I hurt you.” Her hand trembles where she’s touching him. “I don’t even know your name.” Her eyes find Frank’s, raw and desperately trying to cover it. All of her that felt inhuman before seems to melt away then. “Elektra,” she says, eyes still locked to Frank’s. “I heard you were missing.” Too much vunerability, her face twists in disgust at herself. Only then does Elektra finds it in herself to step away from Red and that’s about the only thing he can relate to. Frank can still see it in her eyes. She wants to kill him - do something about Frank being in Red’s immediate surroundings. He can’t say he doesn’t feel the same, and can’t claim to not know why they both don’t do it, the reason standing shakily between them. Their familiarity doesn’t stop there. He sees the way she looks at Matt - the hunger, the protectiveness, the helpless respect. “Take care of yourself, Matthew.” She jumps from the same window she came from, leaving them both there, standing, unable to say a word. NOVEMBER   There was a time when you thought things like that mattered. When you thought everything did.   He shoves the over-packed first aid kit into Red’s hands and the younger man puts it into the duffle as Frank power walks towards the black batons tangled with the sheets at the cot. “Frank, do we really have to-” Christ Jesus, this again. “Yes.” Red follows him like a duckling, still sporting those blushed cheeks against too-pale skin that Frank couldn’t bare looking at sometimes. He looks anyway, every damn time. “She didn’t attack us, she clearly could have-” “Ain’t up for discussion, Red, we’re going.” He reaches out a hand to stop Frank on his way to the ammo boxes stacked away close to the wall because Red had nifty senses, but was still f***ing blind and kept tripping on them. Fingers curl around his bicep. “Just, will you listen to me?” “Didn’t before, Red. Don’t figure I’ll start now.” “Frank...” his goddamn voice, Jesus Christ. Doesn’t need to look at him to know he’s giving him the f***ing eyes. “No,” he drops basic hygiene items into the getaway bag and kicks it out of the way, crowding into Red’s space with powerful steps. “This safe house is compromised. We’re not talking about this sh*t again.” But Red is good at grasping at straws. Spent a whole f***ing lifetime barely hanging on and he’s a pro at it by now. Even more now that he’s got cabin fever - desperate for any proof of connection besides the marine. “Please, Frank, I know her. You clearly know each other, I- she knows me.” More than knows if Frank’s got anything to say about it. Didn’t need to be close to know she was the type of girl that enjoyed playing the game as much as she liked winning it. The cat and mouse thing was her style. Manipulative to a fault. Just look at the way Red reacted to her - like a stray sniffing an owner. Made him f***ing sick to his bones. I know you, he thinks, selfishly, stupidly. “You stick by me, Red,” Frank drops his voice down to a whisper, “I got you.” Matt is still pissed. He can see it in the bullseye forming between his eyebrows. Frank steps closer, stares into the hazel-green of his eyes and reminds himself of all the marks hiding under those clothes. His mouth, his fingers, his bruises. He kisses his cheek chastely, slowly, nosing his temple when he stops pressing his lips to Matt’s skin. Holds on to that warmth he knows he won’t have close for long. “We can’t stay,” he enunciates, not as sure under all the solidity of his voice. Matt sighs and Frank doesn’t let him step away. Not then. Not yet. And there are those eyes again. All that light- “If something happens to you, I-” it dies down. Gets stuck in the cage of muscles spasming around his throat. Red takes a deep inhale that Frank feels overfilling his own lungs, his eyes wide. He steps back, every muscle in his body suddenly calling him to action. But he stays - stays to watch Matthew’s face fall, understanding flooding and creating rivers in the cracks of his anger. “Frank...” He shakes his head in response. He already said too f***ing much he can’t take back. Words just keep spilling out of him, these days. His chest feels flayed open. He needs back - back to before. Just him, the next target, the next mission. Not this. Whatever this is. Whatever Red is. He turns away from Matt, grabbing the getaway bag on the floor. Shoves an extra blanket in it before closing it. Red gets cold these days. “Let’s go.” Grabs what scrap of courage is left to look at him. Red’s face is almost serene, slightly dazed with solemn understanding. Frank thinks he preferred the anger. The anger he knew how to deal with. They walk down the stairs and leave Harlem.     Matt rubs his hands for warmth, presses his digits to feel where old cracks and hairline fractures had knitted his bones. Frank is quiet by his side, but his voice is all Matt can hear. And I’ll kill anyone else in this town if it means you’re safe. If something happens to you- He can’t tell where one neighborhood ends and the other starts, but the scents slowly become more familiar as they go. Smoke gives way to the tall trees of Central Park that gives way to Mexican food, coffee and alcohol. Chatter rises and so do faint sirens. Grocery stores and a Greek food restaurant and universities. Something that smells like childhood. Hell’s Kitchen. Besides his Dad, it was one of his only intact memories. It was difficult to track people besides that. Lindsey’s voice often got mixed and he can’t always remember what she looked like. The nuns all sounded the same, the priest (the good one) was surrounded by fog and the bad one... Well. Matt doubts he had any clear memories of him even before the injury to his head. Elektra... he can define the edges that separate her from the other women in his life, now. The one that smelled sterile like a hospital and the other one in the rain. Elektra was the soft voice in his ears, was the way he’d chant her name when she played with him - and she did play with him. She’d chuckle as she spread him out, coo as she made sure Matt knew he wasn’t in charge. That he was hers, body and soul. He can’t remember when her desires became his, our when his became hers. He does remember feeling utterly broken in her absence - faced with something she saw like a gift and felt like betrayal. He remembers fighting by her side and telling himself he wouldn’t let her come too close again. But soon he was kneeling, waiting for the clarity of her touch, the unburdening of letting himself be taught, guided. Matt figures he always liked himself better that way - when he was someone else’s. And in the middle of all that storm and chaos, right where Matt was taught to thrive, there’s Frank. Who feels more real than anything else in his head, solid and unwavering. There’s memories of him from before and after the injury and the fog. After he decided Frank wasn’t an enemy, and... When did that happen again? When did Frank became something between an ally and more? He sighs and tries to ignore the uptick on Frank’s heartbeat at the sound, the minute acknowledgment of worry. It twists the knife deeper - Frank worries. It should feel like something he should run away from. His finger sneak to his side, pressing against the finger-shaped bruises on his waist, the bite marks all over his torso, thighs and neck. Maybe it’s too late to run. The car stops. Matt steps out of it with a sharp inhale - desperate for air that wasn’t saturated with the smell of Frank’s skin, Frank’s hair, Frank’s clothes and the air that left his healing broken nose. It doesn’t surprise him that the fresh air makes no difference. Frank’s smell is stuck to him - it’s in the clothes he wears, in his hair, in his skin. He wonders if Frank would do it. Grant him that unburdening. Strip him away of the control he so desperately wishes he didn’t have at times. Elektra had bent him out of shape and broken him, but Frank... Frank would put him back together, wouldn’t he? He’d never leave him behind to pick up the pieces. Set him on fire and leave him to burn. And he wouldn’t have to hide from him, Frank’s seen all of Matt. He wouldn’t need to pretend like he did with- Karen. The name comes to him like a punch. It’s what Frank had said that day, to the woman who knew him at the Bulletin. “Karen,” he suddenly exclaims. Frank grunts in return. “Karen, it’s... Karen, it’s Karen. She, she was the woman in the rain, the one who helped me at the office!” It’s muddy, perceptions are tangled, there are thoughts and feelings he can’t put to context. “I didn’t meet her at school, I met her somewhere else, but I can’t remember where, I...” I can’t do this alone, he told her, I can’t take another step. And then she hugged him, didn’t she? You’re not alone, Matt. Blurry edges sharpen like blades. Her image carved like cut-out paper in the back of his skull. Only person besides Frank and Elektra that was actively part of his life that he remembered. Frank is quiet but there’s something weird with his body temperature. Blood pressure drops before it suddenly goes up, up, up. Not anger or frustration, something else. His heart goes scarily steady. “Frank?” “Yeah, that’s... She’s your assistant. I think.” “Oh.” Of course he knew. Matt keeps forgetting that Frank knows more that he lets on. It makes him wonder how deep Frank had been into his life before all of this. And he can’t bring himself to ask now. Not after what he said. What they’ve become - whatever that is. “C’mon, Red.” Frank helps him upstairs, the fog buzzing in his ears. No matter how much he tries, he can’t build up a timeline around Karen. Everything he remembers splintered, wrong, lacking.     “You sound like you’re meditating when you do that.” Frank raises his eyes to meet Red only once before turning back to his gun, checking the recoil strings. “Oh, yeah?” He asks, nonchalantly. “What does that sound like, sunshine?” He moves on to wiping the outside, making sure the bore of the barrel is clean enough. Chances another glance at Red when he’s putting the clip back in and assembling the gun back. He’s folded into a pretzel in the middle of the room. F***, he’s flexible. How far did that leg f***ing go, sh*t- “Your heartbeat slows, your breathing goes even. You almost sound like you’re asleep, peaceful.” Huh. Frank isn’t sure his breathing is even now, face twisting in calisthenics when Red folds into yet another impossible-looking position. Isn’t sure he ever sounds peaceful, either. Got war in his blood. Long before his family. He saw that in Red, too. A soldier wearing a civilian mask. A devil wearing a person suit. And right then, right there, Frank gets to see him free of the need for masks, brains knocked clean. The price of blissful ignorance. “Generalizing, you find something to focus on, usually your own breathing, and lets your mind stick with it. It’s basically what you’re doing.” Figures Frank’s own brand of meditation would include guns. He pauses. Watches Red make faces and clutch at his ribs while he keeps trying to get a tricky position right. “What do you focus on?” Matt blinks and stops altogether, tilts his head to study him in that unnerving way of his. When he speaks, he’s bluntly honest. “Your heart.” Frank halts, waits for the punchline. For something. “And that, what, brings you inner peace?” F***, he shouldn’t ask. He really doesn’t want to know. “It’s not that, it’s...” Matt turns his face away to think and Frank’s almost thankful for it. But Red’s not a quitter and he’s soon turning to face him again. “It’s safe.” Frank stares at him, unable to process what he just heard. And then, trying to find a catch. But there’s Red, who begged him for help and ended up with his skull bashed in. Who Frank’s been arguably holding hostage and hiding sh*t from. Who once bounced a bullet in his f***ing head, telling him Frank’s safe. “That’s f***ed up, Red.” The redhead smiles. “I know.” Frank shakes his head, turning away. Stands up already geared up for the discussion he knows is soon to come as he goes looking for his sniper rifle. Red’s been getting used to the new safe house the last few days but it doesn’t mean he’ll stay put when- “Where are you going?” Bingo. Frank doesn’t stop moving, his back to Red. Checks the rifle before putting it back in its case and grabbing it. Stands up with a sigh. “Gonna find a devil.” And an FBI agent, but Red didn’t need to know that part yet. Murdock stops, his silence saying a thousand things. Frank has to drag his eyes away from the last fading hickey over his Adam’s apple. They hadn’t done it again, besides the one night they got to Hell’s Kitchen and Red... well. Was f***ing angry and determined to show it. Determined to push until Frank finally gave him what he wanted - pushed him against the wall and kept him there until he begged. “Are you going to kill him?” “What do you think?” Can’t fathom how Red sticks to that sh*t anymore. Pain in the ass. Red suddenly stands up, fists clenched tight by his sides. Frank doesn’t want to but he will knock him back on his ass if he has to. “I’m coming with you.” “Like hell you are.” Frank scoffs, eyes instinctively jumping to the bright pink scar over his right ear. “You almost had your skull bashed in again the last time, Red, f***’s sake-” “I’m trained for this-” ah, f***, there he goes. Child soldier bullsh*t. “This concerns me, I’m coming with or without you.”

  summary: Little chapter in my au of “everyday with you."Leon and Ada fall into a "domestic” routine while Leon’s on one of his much deserved vacations. Now that they’ve in a little sweet spot of their relationship, Leon fantasizes about a normal life with Ada. While Ada lets down her walls and becomes more comfortable with Leon.Leon wants to be a little bit more selfish with what he wants notes: just a thought i had about the idea of domestic lifestyle for them. tried to focus on descriptions on sounds environment etc.also i was talking about this to my friend and i said it wasn’t smut but then proceeded to say “so they were just f***ing a bunch” // There’s always a soft sound, even in the most quietest of moments. The roaring hum of the heater kicking in, fuelling the home with warmth. Cold air seeping in from the windows as autumn leaves gently brush against the glass. The ticking an analogue clock on the nightstand. The dripping of water drops panging against the metal in a kitchen sink. The crackle of oil and eggs in a frying pan in the morning. Soft changes in the light filtering in from the windows as the sun rises and sets each day, as the birds sang their pretty calls according to the time of day. The quiet moments in his home were never truly silent. There was always something to keep him present and grounded. Little peaceful moments of daily life that he craved and longed for. It contrasted the realities of his life. Of their lives. They were loud and destructive. In the worst of it; deep in the depths of missions where a split second decision could mean someone’s death. One of Leon’s worst faults was his empathy. His survivors guilt that haunts him, that keeps him from trying to live any semblance of a peaceful life. The screams of death was louder than anything else he had ever heard. And the cries of the victims was a worse pain than anything he had ever felt. Piercing gunshots would leave him with a ringing buzz in his ears; the loudness, he wished it would stop. The constant longing for a pause in his life kept him going somehow. Time to simply be with his own thoughts, worries and desires. Without having to worry about saving the day. Again. What’s the point of being the hero if he couldn’t even save himself. If all he was left with at the end of the day was himself, at least he could spend it- with her. / It was cold today. The sun occasionally peeking through the clouds. Making the light in his home grow and dim like a flickering candle. The days were getting shorter. Leaves turning into shades of coppers and golds while they tightly held onto its branches. The constant thrum of the heater in his apartment was running to keep it warm. The air was dry with each push of warm air. Leon was relishing in the warmth of his bed, relaxing against his light grey cotton sheets that was decorated with some sort of indiscernible pattern on it. He hadn’t picked it out. She did, and it was some sort of brand she liked. They were one of the softest sheets he had ever owned. His body was still wrapped around her. His arm tucked underneath her, his hand trailing up and down along her side. Her dark lashes kept her eyes closed as she laid her hand a top of his chest, drawing simple little shapes. Red glazed manicured fingernails grazed over every little scar and muscle. “You hungry?” Leon’s voice finally broke the silence. Hours had passed before either spoke. The time on the clock was ticking, but neither had a chance to have a look. Leon felt her stirring and her head shaking ‘no’ against him. She simply let out a long comforted sigh before returning to trace lines against him again. Pure blue eyes opened to look down at her, only seeing the top of her tousled dark black hair. Her hair was scented with her; warmed cherries, sugar and a hint of peonies. A simple inhale of her scent was invigorating. He watched her delicate fingers dancing along his bare chest, moving in rhythm as his chest rose and lowered. As if she were able to predict each breath. Ada could always feel every little change in him. His racing heart. The flutter of his lashes and the warm flush on his cheeks that would radiate towards his chest. The very image of him in his younger, more innocent self still coming forth whenever she had her effect on him. It was entertaining sometimes. To see such a strong man crumble at the sight of her. To feel his heart skip a beat at her touch. Little did Leon know, she was starting to feel the random heart beat skip in her chest. It was getting harder for her to hide it. In his peripheral, he saw empty plates of breakfast they had a few hours prior. Still hastily stacked on the nightstand. The silent urge to get up and clean them was still there, but he ignored the thought for now. What’s just a little bit longer. His larger hand reached for hers, grabbing it easily as she ceased her movements. Letting her hand be pulled towards his lips as he pressed a kiss against the back of it.Whenever Leon was lost in his affectionate ways, (which was quite often) his romantic notions would get the better of him, as more of his kisses were peppered on each of her fingers and fingertips. Ada finally opened her eyes, peering up at him as he did so. Watching each kiss be placed so delicately and affectionately. Much like he had been the past few hours. Desperately wanting to cover every inch of her body with his lips. “Is this all we’re going to do for the rest of your vacation?” She asked with the smallest raise of her brow, albeit with no complaint in her tone of voice. “Well, we might run out of food before that,” he murmured between his kisses, pausing as he reached to press another against her lips. Warmth blooming against the both of them before they parted. A warmth that they craved that came from deep inside of their chests that left butterflies fluttering in their stomachs. “That wasn’t a ‘yes’ or a ‘no,’ Leon,” she breathed out in a soft moan as her naked body pressed up against him. Doing her best to gather more warmth from him as she felt the smallest cold breeze seep in from the window. His other hand reached for more blankets, wrapping the edge of it around her tighter to bring her closer to him. Feeling utterly blissful with her wrapped so closely to him, he merely teased her with a lazy smirk. “You weren’t complaining the other day.” “And I’m not complaining today,” she snickered and closed her eyes again briefly. Leon chuckled in return. In truth, not many words had been said between the two for the duration of his vacation. Ada had planned to reject as many jobs as she could. Coinciding with Leon’s little vacation to allow them to spend the most amount of time together. These little moments she could spare with Leon; she was starting to rely on them too often. To feel some sort of pleasure and indulge in the fantasy. To feel like she could shed the mask of ‘Ada Wong’ and simply be herself. The fleeting dream was too tantalizing close now. She could almost taste it. Nothing was planned, and yet it wasn’t a surprise with what they ultimately choose to do. That it was a constant back and forth between his bed and any partially flat surface in his home. That and the kitchen for some sort of sustenance. Which luckily, still had a flat surface. Leon always offered to cook, he didn’t mind it. In reality, he liked cooking for her. Enjoying the challenge of making sure it was up to her standards but to challenge himself as well. Not only that, it was also nice to have an occasional helpful hand, even despite his protests that he “was fine.” And that’s how they spent their days. Quiet moments were spent laid next to each other. Not counting the minutes that went by. Not worrying about every little thing that could go wrong. Tangled in each other’s embrace without a care in the world. No worries in their thoughts. And no plans for the day, or the day after that, or the day after that. Entranced in each other and the few moments of clarity they had together. “If you have any other ideas, I’m open to suggestion,” he whispered as he positioned himself in the bed, getting more comfortable with her still in his arms. “What if I make something to eat?” Ada suggested before pursing her lips. Leon’s brows knitted together, his lips parted to speak but no words came out. Frankly he hadn’t expected that at all. Rather he expected her to respond with something much less wholesome. “Are you sure? What if I don’t have the right ingredients?” He finally spoke with concern in his voice. Almost whining a bit in protest somehow. He felt her stretching her shoulders a bit in his embrace, and he couldn’t help but notice it against her neck. That oh so obvious reminder. Ada was hesitant on ever letting him getting rough with her. Bruises weren’t her favourite thing to wear. Yet her skin was still flushed the lightest colours of reddish pink. It wouldn’t turn into the less desirable colours of yellows and blues as it fades. It would slowly fade to pinks before returning to her skin tone. The perfect little love bite. Staring at it had the memory of it replay in his mind in seconds. It was rare for Ada to completely lose her inhibitions. To desperately be calling for him in such a way that would have her embarrassed if she thought about it for too long. The feat of it wasn’t too rare, but whenever Leon was blessed with it he couldn’t help but indulge in it. Hearing her cries and whines would flush his cheeks, knowing that he could tame her like this. Knowing he had the privilege of seeing her like this. Leon was buried between her thighs, lapping up at her like she was the first sight of water after hours in a burning hot desert. Her fingers twisted painfully in his dirty blond locks as he stared up at her, his hands tight on her hips as he brought her closer to his warm tongue. The final cry for him had him crawling up her body. His hips tightly pressed against hers. His lips chasing hers before he had the rare opportune moment to nip against her neck. Her body curling up into him, her frail neck exposed, a gentle nod from her. “Leon,” she simply cried out from him again. In a desperate breath, she sharply exhaled as she felt him. The slightest bit of pain before it released pleasure. One of the rare instances where he’s marked her as his. Her hands grabbed at him again, cradling his face as he thrusted into her slowly. His hips plunging himself as deeply as he could, feeling her walls tense and hug his c*ck perfectly. With a frenzied kiss, Leon felt a gentle nip against his bottom lip. A returning gesture from her as she grinned wide. A boastful grin that quickly morphed as her mouth grew agape again with another snap of his hips- “Well, if you don’t, then that gives us an excuse to go out then, hm?” She ended her words with a sharp hum, along with a tilt of her head. “What-?” He felt his cheeks flushed warm. Ada’s voice somehow managed to wake Leon of his daydream. A suspicious cough escaped him as he tried to clear his throat. She narrowed her eyes and hummed a low tone and rolled over on top of him, straddling his hips with the blanket still draped over her. With her staring down at him like this, he always felt intimidated by her; despite being so much larger than her. He could feel himself swallow a lump in his throat as he gazed up at her, trying to gauge what she was going to do. He tentatively rested his hands on her hips, hiding them underneath the blanket. Watching her as she lowered her head like at him like he was her prey. Her lips reaching his cheek and nearing his ear. A soft kiss was pressed there and down his jawline and neck. “Ada,” he whispered, feeling that desperation growing in between his legs. His eyes lightly fluttering closed as she worked her warm kisses down his bare chest. Taking her time placing each one like he had to her. She smiled as she saw him relax against her touch, then the tensing of his strong thighs as she worked her way lower. His body reacting to each and every touch from her. A whine slipped from his lips to which she easily captured. Her soft lips pressed there, tongues mingling and slowly exploring. She parted with her lips still upturned. “We should go check,” she merely said and pressed another peck against his lips. A short kiss that smacked their lips together in an audible sound and slipped away from the bed. She left so quickly, grabbing the blanket that was wrapped around her naked frame. Leon heard her feet pattering out of his bedroom and towards his kitchen in a matter of seconds. “Ada wait-“ he groaned and tried to sit up, feeling discomfort in between his legs as he did so and grabbed the other blanket on the bed and mirrored her. Wrapping it lazily around him as he chased after her. After adjusting himself, he found her peeking into his fridge while one of the pantry doors was seemingly hastily pushed open. The hum of the fridge kicked in, the sound of it getting slightly louder as it pushed out more cold air. Still silent, she picked at some of the vegetables in the fridge. The sound of it organic and odd as she pushed them around in the plastic of the fridge. Her lips pouted as she scanned everything, seeing what else he had. He watched her as she prodded at them, seemingly to not find it satisfactory for her needs. “Told you we’re going to run out of food,” he exhaled a laugh through his nose. “You weren’t kidding,” she finally turned around and closed the fridge door. She looked outside, trying to perceive the time from the light from the sun. “It can’t be that late in the day, let’s go out.” She said as her hands kept the blanket wrapped around her and pressed herself into his blanket covered chest. “Are you serious?” He nearly pouted. “Do you want us to starve?” She returned the gesture, copying his pout. // The walk to the store was going to be quick and hopefully they wouldn’t get too chilly in this weather. The two of them bundled up in a thick coats and scarves to ward off the cold. Hands still held together despite it being almost too cold to do so. Leon insisted that human touch would keep them warm as opposed to gloves. Ada’s heeled boots kept a constant clicking sound against the sidewalk, while a soft breeze rustled the tree’s branches above them. The area that Leon chose to live in was almost always this quiet, with mostly older families and those with grown children who had already left the nest. Not much happened around there, and it made it easier for him to rest whenever he was home. Arriving there, the door of the little grocery store was propped open by Leon, letting Ada in first as warm air greeted them. Soft music played over the PA system, easy listening songs with mumbled lyrics that made it so that you could almost fall asleep at the sound. White noise from the freezers filled the rest of the store, and the occasional roll of a shopping cart broke through the rest of the ambient noise. Leon quickly grabbed a cart from the corral and walked next to Ada while she scanned the aisles, grabbing a few items along the way. Plopping the ingredients and supplies in when she felt like it. Leon occasionally doing so also, grabbing a few of his favourites and dropping them into the cart. The vision was almost comical, the both of them simply grocery shopping together. But while they were here, in this tiny little grocery store near his home; the idea of the weekly activity of grocery shopping with Ada. It was so simple, peaceful and quiet. How he desperately wanted this, no matter how mundane it seemed. Perhaps, it was because it was with her. The cart was quickly halted by Ada as she stopped him from pushing it further. A sharp screeching sound that was almost annoying until it stopped almost as fast as it started. Her eyes stuck on one of the cakes that was in the little local bakery there. Bright red strawberries and dark maraschino cherries sat atop a cream colour frosting that was piped lovingly with different swirls and patterns. She continued eyeing it, her lips pursed together softly. If there was one thing that Leon couldn’t fight against, it was Ada’s sweet tooth. Despite how well she maintained her physique with vigorous missions, she found it hard to not indulge in the occasional sweet thing. She remained mostly still, her eyes on the cake as her head swayed a bit from side to side. Silently deciding if she wanted it or not. The wheels of the cart began to turn again as she tugged against it, bringing it almost behind her as she resumed her walking pace. But the cart stalled, with Leon holding onto the handles as she snapped her head around. Her eyes meeting his for a moment. With a tilt of his head, his dirty blond fringe covered some of his eye as his warm boyish smile grew on his face. The cart was filled with more groceries, along with that very cake. Topped with strawberries and cherries placed delicately on top of everything else. Everything was bagged carefully, a majority of them held by Leon on the walk back towards his apartment, while Ada held the bag with the cake inside. Their free hands still holding each others as they walked back in the cold. Leon was right, their hands were still warm this way. The sun was slipping away, early sunset possibly. With the skies painted in oranges and pinks, giving them a warm golden glow. The leaves on the trees were highlighted with bright yellows as the sun hit the high points of them. The edge of night creeping along the far side of the city, the calm of the evening taking over. / Arriving back at his apartment, the scramble to find new homes for everything was laborious. With the both of them trying to find the best places to home the ingredients, correcting each other with what they deemed better. Before ultimately letting the other win. The cake remained in its plastic tray. The frosting still perfectly swirled. While the redness of the fruits began to seep their colours into the cream, making light pink swirls. Ada pressed her hip against the table that had the cake still on the surface of it, her fingernails playfully tracing over the the little plastic window on the box. A delicate ribbon was tied around the box, a complimenting shade of pistachio green against the dark cherries atop the cake. Her fingers were cat like as she tried to undo the ribbon. “You’re going to ruin your appetite if you have cake right now,” Leon tried to scold her, tapping at her fingers. “I wasn’t even going to get the cake, and now that we’ve gotten it, you’re going to make me wait?” She complained with an almost genuine tone of voice, like she was actually annoyed. He narrowed his eyes for a moment, his hands stilled on the box for a moment, “I knew if we didn’t get it, you would’ve complained later that we didn’t get the cake,” he responded with his chin tilted upward, almost like to assert some sort of dominance. “Well now that we have it though,-” she switches strategies as her tone of voice changes. “-Just a taste?” She pouted with a tilt of her head. An expression that would normally make Leon fold like a deck of cards. Instead he tried to resist the temptation. “You know you like waiting. The anticipation of the reward is better than the actual reward-“ he lightly rolled his eyes and he actually fixed the ribbon on the box. Tugging on the loops so it was more perfect and even again. Grabbing the bottom of the box, he leaned in to place it on one of the shelves in the fridge, “-Besides, you always make me wait,” he said from behind the fridge door. “Oh, are you punishing me?” She asked incredulously with a raise of her brow, while her hands supported her from behind against the edge of the table. Once the door slowly closed, he reached over with a few large steps. His hands pressed behind her on the table, trapping her as he leaned in close. “Who said anything about punishment? I never punish you for anything, do I?” He asked in a low whisper, his warm breath fanning across her neck and chest. She was more than willing to wait. He was right, the anticipation was always worth it. And she’d always makes sure the reward was just as good. “Fine,” she narrowed her eyes. Her hand leaving from the edge of the table and pressed it against his chest. Playing pushing him just far enough for her to slip around him. Sat at the little breakfast table in the kitchen, Leon watched as Ada worked, normalizing herself with where the utensils and kitchenware was. It was a strange feeling, seeing her act so domestic. He wasn’t even sure what she was making but he didn’t care, just watching her like this was enough. The sun had set by now, the sky dark blue with a few bright twinkling stars. The very few that were still bright despite the city lights. The inside of the apartment was lit with ambient low lighting. Little bulbs of yellow and orange illuminated from lit candles in little glass jars. His kitchen was filled with an aroma he felt hadn’t smelled before, yet was still so familiar. Warm and filled with a comforting spice. The pan was still crackling with something she was cooking, popping and fizzing while something else was boiling. The flicker of the candle that sat in front of him caught his eye briefly before he looked back up at Ada. Her hair was tucked neatly behind her ear, showing off her profile as she leaned in to taste test something, pressing a spoon against her lips. Licking her lips and pressing them together, she hummed, seemingly satisfied. She silently urged Leon with a twist of her head, luring him closer towards her. With a few steps he closes the space and leans down just enough to catch the spoon, tasting what appeared to be some sort of sauce. She silently gauged his reaction, the spoon still held in her hand. Leon hummed a simple note, nodding with a smile as he looked down at her, “I like it.” He wasn’t sure what to expect. It was sweet with a hint of tanginess, and it made him crave more. After what felt like an hour or so, the table was laid with a few more dishes than he anticipated. This seemed more like a full course meal rather than the few dishes he had been making for each of their meals. Each dish seemed to be prepared with ease, like she’d been making them for years. It made him wonder if these were comfort dishes for her, meals that she was able to make with ease. “I’m impressed, I didn’t expect all of this,” he smiled warmly. Truly and honestly warmed by the notion. “Don’t get too excited, I can’t cook much else,” she snickered and took her seat. It was a change of pace, something she hadn’t anticipated on doing, but felt as though no one else would appreciate the gesture. At least, no one else but him. / The wax in the candle burned, the light in the kitchen growing more dim as the night went on. Their plates were emptied, the both of them satisfied by Ada’s cooking. Leon’s hands were soapy and stuck in the sink as he cleaned up most of the dishes. The rest were piled into the dishwasher for another time. Ada sat patiently at the table, a neat glass of red wine in her hand, the thin stem pressed between her fingers. The apartment was still quiet, except for the running water in the sink. While the crackle of the candles filled the rest of the sound. “Now, are you ready for your reward?” He finally turned around, his hands drying off on a nearby towel. Her fingers twisted the stem of the wine glass, swirling the remains of the dark red before letting the glass sit neatly on the table. “Oh, have I suffered enough of my punishment? Mr. Kennedy?” She tested him with an alluring tone of voice. Sultry enough to make him stumble along the way towards the fridge which elicited a small giggle from her. “Waiting isn’t a punishment, Ada,” he chuckled after finally composing himself. “Although, I suppose can find much more enticing ways to ‘punish’ you,” he gave her a smirk while opening the fridge and bringing the cake out. His fingers pried at the ribbon that was tied around the box, unthreading it and letting it lay on the table. The lid of it was pried off loudly as he removed it. “Oh really? And how would you go about doing that? You know I don’t like it when you play rough,” she narrowed her eyes and watched him as he cut a single slice, plating it on a little pastel blue dessert dish. The little ceramic plate was delicately placed on the table, a single silver fork clanging against it as well as he returned to his seat. Still waiting patiently, she eyed the cake again; seeing the dark red cherries just begging to be bit into. And the cream so delicately swirled. She’d play his little game for now. With a tilt of his head, he tried gauging her feigned obedience. Knowing that somehow she would be winning either way. Her expression remained the same, a bit pouty yet somehow still confident. “I’ll only play rough if you ask of me,” he told her with his signature smile. With the tiny dessert fork in hand, he dug into the cake. Creating a perfect bite of cake and icing and presented it to her. “Open,” he simply asked of her. Licking her lips playfully, she leaned in close; happy to finally have her so called reward. The sweetest amount of sugar, the soft sponginess of the cake. The aftertaste of sweet cherries with a hint of strawberry. She hummed happily, finally quelling her craving for the sweet treat. Leon exhaled a laugh through his nose as he saw her; doing her equivalent of a happy dance in her seat, and dug into the piece for another bite for himself. Eyeing him and the cake, she plucked at the cherry still in the icing. Holding the dark red fruit between her fingers and bit into it. Scarlet spilling against her lips before she quickly licked it away with her tongue. She presented the other half to him, urging him to do the same as he did earlier. “Open,” she repeated with the same cadence. He shook his head with a grin and relented before leaning in. His mouth agape before he could taste the sweet cherry taste. A few more bites were exchanged until the plate was emptied. Quietness filling the room again as they sat together. The little blue dish was left on the table before Ada grabbed at him. Her eager hands pulling at him to bring him back into the bedroom. The back of Leon’s legs hit the edge of the bed before he felt his back falling flat against the soft mattress. The soft light from the night side table illuminated Ada’s figure as she urged him further up against the top of the bed. Comfortably returning to almost the same position they were in hours prior, Leon held her against him. He was already growing eager to shed some of his clothing. Feeling his body growing flush with warmth, yet only removed his dark blue button up which left him in a soft cotton t-shirt underneath. Letting out a comforting sigh, he turned to look at her. Still in a dark red knit dress that hugged her curves perfectly. He watched her as she grew comfortable against him, her eyes almost immediately closing as she rested on him. She fell asleep so easily next to him now. “Was it worth waiting for?” He asked in gentle tone. Still watching her, he saw her gently smile. Taking her time with blinking her eyes open again as she perched herself onto his chest. Her hand raised to caress against his cheek. “It’s always worth waiting for you, Leon.”

Summary: “This is weird.”Frank grunts. Waits for Red to say what he’s got to say.“I know this is all mine, I know it is but I don’t- I don’t feel it. I don’t remember it, I don’t...” He huffs in frustration, holds the box closer to his chest. Notes: Poems and excerpts taken from (in order of appearance):Memorabilia, Deborah TallLate summer after a panic attack, Ada LimónFree fall, William Goldingfrom Salt, David HarsentFrom Please bury me in this, Allison Bennis White Happy reading!❤️     Memorabilia; objects that stir recollection, valued or collected for their association with a particular field, interest or memory.   Let absence be Altogether, but briefly, devastating.   DEVIL   What if I want to go devil instead? Bow down to the madness that makes me.     “Morning.” Frank’s voice brings the images alive. Fire licks at wooden walls, grime-stained windows, bolted doors and two cots, lying on opposites sides of a cramped room. Oatmeal rips through a picture of scents, a dragging sweetness that feels dense when he inhales. Packed. It doesn’t push the other smells away as much as it dominates them, mixes unpleasantly. Sitting up require less effort than before. The smell of food isn’t as nauseating and neither is the pain - controlled for the time being. Still, muscles shake, quake as if tearing away from his skeleton, trying to find other refuge than his skin. His head hangs off his neck like a heavy weight, putting pressure in his vertebrae and collarbones. “Morning,” he manages back. Frank sits down but doesn’t reach to give him the bowl of oatmeal, neither does he say anything else. The routine is expected and if somewhat of a comfort. He sighs softly. “I’m Matt. You’re Frank. We’re in your cabin. It’s, uh, Sunday? November.” Frank’s calloused, thick palms find his, steadies his right hand before handing him the hot oatmeal. “Didn’t call me Fred this time, at least.” He grumbles under his breath and Matt isn’t surprised at the taste of coffee that comes from his lips and tongue, released into the air. Settles back against the headboard and cradles the warm bowl close, the cold morning dew dripping by the window a sonorous facsimile of a heartbeat. Slow and almost in tandem with Frank’s. “Maybe I thought you looked like a Fred.” Frank shakes his head with a huff, mumbles a right under his breath before- “Eat.” Matt does. The ringing in his ear an untraceable vibration that fixates over his right eardrum, poking it with needles. It was usually worse at night. “Are you going to tell me anything today?” If Matthew is like a sponge - absorbing everything and anything around him at all times until he’s spilling over, Frank is rock and concrete. Impenetrable, undisturbed, insusceptible. He gives nothing away - as if he kept the world at bay. Completely unapproachable at times. Embers and fire burn the world bright but Frank Castle was a blotch of ink dripping in the middle of his senses. A stain that stuck. The first heartbeat he looked for when he woke up. The only heartbeat he remembered properly. Castle shrugs, like he had all the days before. “Have nothing to say.” Lie. It’s barely there, not exactly a skip. His pulse speeds for not much more than a second and then settles back down. Red - Matt, Matt, his name is Matt - takes another sip of his oatmeal, slowly processing the taste of the food, the lingering taste of the pan it was prepared in, the old spoon that mixed it. He had time, the last few days, to get himself together, if only just. Stick’s teachings, in return, are a whispered chant in his head whenever he interacts with the strange man. So far, Frank looks like an ally. That could change and Matt tries to create contingencies - where will he run? Where exactly are the traps he heard the night before? How will he survive if he doesn’t know... Well, most of everything about his own life. “And about yourself?” He asks instead, sighing into another spoonful of oatmeal. “You’re military, right? Maybe former.” Tilts his head sharply to the side, listens to the unshakable, relentless heartbeat painting the room red and black. “You have an arrow scar in your shoulder. Are you with the Chaste?” “Marines. The hell is Chaste?” Matt’s lips press together. He thought he had mentioned them before. He had, hadn’t he? Either Frank is an ally or he’s not and if he’s not... Well, there’s a good chance he’d already know what Chaste is. It’s the only answer Matt can find that makes sense - that that’s how he got hurt, working with Stick and the others. But the marine’s heartbeat doesn’t skip nor does it speeds up in that characteristic way. Frank scoffs. Probably at his silence. “Yeah.” But he needs to be sure. “Are you with the Hand?” “I’m what?” Ignores his voice to listen hard to the beating, living thing hiding beneath marred scars and skin tissue. Breastbone and ribs. Matt breathes a bit more easily, if only for a little. Because if Frank isn’t either of them, then how did he find him? How did he know him? How did he know, if partially, about Matt’s senses and skills? None of it made any sense. Frustration rises and swells like a furious ocean, tidal waves rising and rising in height until they reach the skyline. “How do you know me?” “Tell you what, Red,” he drops his empty bowl in the fold-out table. The loud rattle of spoon against porcelain makes him flinch. “You’re a pain in the ass of the highest degree.” He tilts his head, listens closely. “But still, I’m here,” Matt begins, carefully. “Do you want something from me?” Frank shrugs, a heavy exhale getting lost in the distance between them, and so do all of its meanings. “Want you to shut up and eat.” Not working. Not again. “Do I have no one else to get back to?” The bigger man’s heartbeat throbs scarcely faster before it’s forced back down to a resting rhythm. Frank watches him. “Not for now,” and it’s not a lie. Not one Matt can detect anyway, and if there’s one thing he learned about Frank since he woke up in the cabin with his head in bandages, is that he keeps to his promises. The good and the bad. So Matt settles, for there isn’t much else he can do and the energy is already beginning to seep right out of him. He finishes the small bowl of food and takes his medicine. Tries to unlock all the tense muscles bunching under his skin and allows Stick’s voice to chant through his head: mind controls the body, body controls our enemies. Trustworthy or not, Frank is clearly not willing to let him go. If Stick’s alive, certainly he’ll find Matt. Trees may offer cover in a sighted perspective, but doesn’t mean anything for blind people like them. And even if Frank doesn’t know, Matt is likely working for Stick and the Chaste. They had to fight the war, after all. And why else would he get in trouble? Come on, Matty, get to work. Dad tells him. Get to work. He has to get back to his feet. He will. But for now, his head throbs painfully like his brain is threatening to burst out of his skull and the oatmeal plays loops around his stomach. Frank gives him a bucket when he throws up.     The first time Matthew notices something is wrong is when he’s sitting in the bathroom, taking a sponge bath. Frank helps him with the basics before leaving him to the little privacy he had, sitting beside the half-closed door. He’s glad for the shower curtains. Even a few paces away, Frank’s heartbeat illuminated the whole cramped room with bright spots of sound, the vibrations traveling like tendrils underneath the floorboards and deep into the earth underneath. Echoed strangely against the tiles, but loud enough that finding the offered hygiene products wasn’t a hardship, even with his building migraine. It starts as a feeling - a certainty that he’s not alone that he quickly abandons. Frank is on the other side of the door and his senses are haywire, sensitive to every input his fatigued brain can’t process properly beyond threat and safe. He leans back, careful of the plastic wrapping around his left thigh and remembering Frank’s orders not to get his hair wet. It quickly morphs to unease. It begins like a concept and then evolves. Swells and thickens into something closer to dread - into his heart going faster, his breathing pattern changing, choppy inhales and shallow exhales. He isn’t sure what it is at first, the puzzle pieces are scrambled and he’s too exhausted to put them together properly. There’s a presence that doesn’t make sense, not corporeal enough that he can get a read on it with his senses. But he knows it’s there. Even if the sound waves from their heartbeats and breathing betrayed nothing. “Do you reckon Stick would be disappointed?” He startled badly enough that the soap slips from his hand and slides across the floor towards the drain. Aghast and more than a little alarmed, he abandons the crawling sensation across his skin as the soap suds slid across the expanse of his body to try and make sense of the sound. It felt like a thought. A thought that came too loud, enough that it felt like it was outside of his body, perched right by his right ear. His hand closes on the side of the empty tub, nails digging and slipping at the humid, cold porcelain. “Who-” but there’s no heartbeat, no sound beyond the voice. Until there is. Its heartbeat mimics his own. Sounds exactly the same in its cadence, but the thing, whatever it is, doesn’t carry a smell or heat like all living things do. It’s almost apart from the world on fire, a tear on the fabric of reality he put together with his senses. Something that looked like a man, except for the thick skin and the small horns protruding from its smooth head. “You’re trusting him, Castle will kill you the moment he has the chance, it’s what he does.” The thing shrugs, a smile cutting through its alien face. “You’re not here,” he whispers, as if the simple statement would rip the thing apart, destroy it, send it away. “You keep your enemies close to watch them, take advantage of them. Not so they can captivate you. ” “I’m hallucinating,” he whispers again, nails now digging into his knees. And when did he move his hands? When did he do that? There’s a flicker of time between one second and the other that is missing. Like all the days previous to waking up in Frank’s bed and crawling to this place. “You’re not real.” “Huh, real enough to know you’re easy prey.” The demon-like hallucination smiles big at him. “What are you going to do about that?” The devil, he thinks. This is the devil. “Did you miss me already, Matt?”     Red takes his sweet time in the tub. He should’ve been done with it long ago and Frank - well, he should’ve done it himself. He doesn’t doubt for a second Red could be already plotting some half-assed escape plan and stalling for time in the bathroom. He knocks out of courtesy more than to give him privacy - had seen enough of Red in all states of undress the first three days he had been there. “Red?” No response. Frank doesn’t wait any more than that. In his head, he runs through the list once again: bleeding from nose, ears or eyes - brain hemorrhage. Paralysis, seizure - swelling. Fever, delirium, pus - infection. Runs over it again so it doesn’t fade from his memory - not as pristine as he’d like it to be, although he never got to Red’s situation either. Names and meanings escape him sometimes, is all. Red looks physically well when Frank walks through the door, combat boots squeaking against the tiles. He squints at him, at his nose, eyes, ear (clean), his bandages (dry), his plastic wrapped wounds (pink and healthy). He checks the place out of habit, looking for incongruities hiding between fresh, sterilized towels and semi-transparent shower curtains. “Red,” he calls out again but the kid doesn’t answer, and Frank can’t say he’s exactly surprised. Had happened a few times already, the little shutdowns. Which is why he’s surprised when Red speaks. “Is there-” the redhead swallows, fingernails digging into his knees, his left leg stretched across the empty tub to accommodate the pain of the gunshot wound. “Is there anyone else here?” “Jus’ us, Red,” and he did a perimeter check minutes ago. His eyebrows furrow down to meet his eyes and Red twitches, wonders if he senses the movement somehow. “Yeah. Yer senses going a bit haywire?” Matt startles out of a sudden, one hand closing a tight fist around his knee and the other, the right one, spasming as it tried to do the same. “Can you take me outside, please?” Voice comes as the afterthought of a whisper, barely there at all. But it echoes around the cramped space and makes its path towards Frank’s eardrums. He sighs sharply but doesn’t mention anything else. Mechanically helps Red out of the bathtub and into the towels. Grabbing the folded clothes Frank had separated for him to use, slightly too big in places. Doesn’t need the a**hole’s fancy senses to know something’s up but he won’t ask for now and he’s quite sure Red won’t volunteer the information either - wiped out brain or not. The thought sits heavy in his stomach, a weight that he feels physically when he moves to the kitchen. If the memory loss is caused by brain damage, Curt says, the likelihood of Red ever regaining them is extremely small, specially considering the type of first care he received. There are other options to what was messing up his head, but for now, there was simply no way to tell. “You remember anything else?” He asks from there, fetching the wheeling chair he had stolen from the Costas medical facility the week before. The Lieutenant doesn’t give Matthew time to deliberate, helping him up and into the chair, careful of his injured head, belly and leg. He isn’t surprised when- “I don’t need that.” “I didn’t ask. Sit down.” “I’m perfectly capable of-” “But you won’t.”  He cuts off quickly, adjusting the arm support and adjusting the wheel lock before wheeling Murdock towards the front door. “Not yet, at least.” Murdock twitches, impatience making lines like riverbanks form around his youthful face, but chooses wisely not to start a discussion. He’s been picking his fights, since he realized Frank was just as stubborn as him. He repeats his question and watches Red’s sigh raise a condensation fog in the air, following its swirls through the cold morning air. “Just bits and pieces,” Murdock eventually answers, licking his lips. “It comes and goes.” Frank grunts in response and doesn’t press the matter; but he does help the redhead sit in the steps like a few nights before. To fight. For the war. Sh*t. Of all the f***ed up things. He shakes his head to himself, not enough of a movement that drags attention from Red, who seems content in tilting his head back towards the cloudy sky above the high trees. Won’t think about all he’s learned because they’re not part of the mission, not now. He’ll get the kid better, get him back to his life. Maybe go to the orphanage, ask some questions, start digging. But until then, he sits in the cabin steps with the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen by his side, hugging his knees against the coming cold. “Stick taught me knives. Father Lantom and the... the nun called the cops. I got into middle school. Had a crush on Ian from History class. Dad hates Mrs. Hernandez Bakery’s apple pie.” The messy retelling doesn’t phase him but brings a flashback of their own - his head had processed information similarly, back then, the scar of the bullet just barely closed. His brain had latched to their laughter but he couldn’t remember if the plates made it to the sink. He remembers Lisa’s little voice begging him to read her her favorite book, please Daddy, please, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember the clothes Frankie wore that day. Maria’s voice played in a loop of hey, sleepyhead but he can’t remember how she sounded when she said his name with that fondly exasperated look. Tomorrow, baby. I’ll read it to you tomorrow, I promise. “My wife, she, uh,” swallows the clotted knot of uncertainty in his throat and blinks against the moisture collecting around his eyelids. “She used to try some fancy dessert recipes, from time to time.” He laughs suddenly and brightly, remembering her pout when her chocolate muffins ended up burned for the third time that month and her strawberry cheesecake went wrong and liquid. Red looks surprised at him and the anonymity is somehow... comforting. He doesn’t remember the chaos Frank unleashed in the city, doesn’t remember the headlines and the trial and much less how Frank bounced a bullet off his helmet years ago. They would’ve never sat like this, talked like this if Red hadn’t been brained in that warehouse a little over a week before. “She was a good cook, but her desserts were bad, man. She was real terrible at it.” Red chuckles softly and deja-vu creeps over his skin like a thousand ants. It’s almost a do-over of that night in the graveyard. “The kids tried to be nice, y’know? They’d put on this face, all wide-eyed like it was the most delicious thing they’d ever eaten. Lisa, my baby girl, she was good, Red. Sometimes she fooled even me. But Frankie, my son, he, he was horrible at it, you could see it all over his face. He used to say that he wanted to be a chef when he grew up,” Murdock’s eyebrows go up and Frank scoffs. “I know, right. He’d say he wanted to be like the TV shows.” Lisa was a good sister. She’d taste every crazy concoction Frankie came up with - even mango pancakes, once, which made her sick, and she wouldn’t let Frank or Maria tell Junior about it. She’d always make some ridiculously funny accents when she was playing the food taster, wearing those little bracelets she used to make with her best friend (what was her name? Natalie?). Frank tries to chuckle at the memory but it comes out a rasp of breath, his lungs tearing right off of him. She had been wearing one of those. One of the bracelets written LISA in bold orange letters. It was her favorite color since she was about the height of Frank’s knee. Remembers seeing it stained deep red when he cradled her in his lap. Red’s voice brings him back to the porch, away from the park and Lisa. “What happened?” Scary, how intuitive the kid was. Maybe it had something to do with his senses, but Frank isn’t that sure. He hadn’t thought much of him at first, back then. Thought he was impulsive, combustive and too naive. And then he met him again, wearing crisp but cheap suits and red shades and saw that spark of smart he tried to hide. Frank doesn’t doubt that, should he have been more present in that trial, he’d probably have managed to get the not guilty verdict, somehow. Frank’s silence must be answer enough for Red soon turns his face away in respect. Maybe he sense it somehow; the thick knot tightening on Frank’s throat, the stinging at the corner of his eyes and a moisture he wasn’t that sure he could blame on the wind. “I wanted to be a lawyer,” Murdock offers, his head twitches to the side subtly before coming back to the conversation. Frank catches himself wondering just how far those ears of his went. “when I was a kid.” He finishes softly, extending his injured leg with a certain amount of effort before all air left his lungs in a rush. Ain’t sure if it’s Frank Jr’s ghost hanging over them, close enough that Frank swears he could smell that God awful shampoo he liked only because it came with Captain America’s face plastered on it but actually had a terrible scent. Maybe it’s ‘cause Red is sitting there with barely any memories left in that f***ed up head of his and remembering being a kid dreaming about being a lawyer, not knowing he made it. Against a whole sh*t ton of odds. “You are.” he blurts out. Red turns to him, his whole body still, eyes wide. “What?” “You’re a lawyer,” Frank shrugs at the sudden rush of breath that leaves Red, the confusion turning into awe. Frank resists the urge to look away from the precious turn of his lips. “Good one too, when you wanna be.” A breathy chuckle graces his ears and Frank finally turns away, a small smile in his face mirroring Red’s lips. He waits for questions he’s sure Red made to himself a thousand times the last few days: why is he not a hospital, where are his friends, why didn’t they come looking, why, why, why. But Murdock doesn’t. Just holds his own knees closer with that dreamy little smile upturning his lips, pulling at a long scabbed over cut by his chin. Frank helps him inside when the exhaustion kicks in, once again, and leads him to the cot.     Where did you go? An angry voice close to his face. I can’t do this alone. I can’t take another step. Soft, long hands and arms circling his shoulders. Was it all a lie? Salt and moisture in the air (tears), the scent of his own blood. You’re just one bad day away- Chains pressing him down, hands on his chin. Where did you go, Matt? He wakes up with the whisper a burn bright-hot spot of pain in his chest - not one from any voice that he can remember, but familiar all the same. Familiar enough that something clogs his throat, chokes up his airways. Every attempt at an inhale stops just short of completely cutting off his oxygen, the burn in his chest spreads. Matt blinks away the tears in his eyes - where did it come from? Tries to orient himself in the space he’s in - where? He didn’t know these sheets, didn’t recognize these walls, these- The smell. He recognizes it. Antiseptic, coffee, gunpowder. The fabric doesn’t feel as odd, once he runs his hands through it. It’s another one, but not unfamiliar. Frank changed the sheets again. His heart pounds faster against his chest. Panic brews like a tight boiling-hot coil in his chest - he suddenly feels unsafe inside the room, the cabin walls the body of trees and earth surrounding them from all sides. There’s something he has to do, somewhere he needs to be and Matt can’t for the life of him figure out what or where. A shuddery breath leaves through his parted, parched lips. Feels the skin of his forearms cool off where it spills - sharp like a whirlwind for his oversensitive sense of touch. “Where did you go, indeed?” The Intruder, as Matt had taken to calling him, asked softly. His presence is accompanied by a excruciating ache that manifests itself like a weight more than the agony it really is when it spreads at the edges of his fracture, following the lines connected by wire. He doesn’t need to concentrate to hear bone grind against metal. “You’re not in Hell’s Kitchen, but that’s about as far as you know.” He doesn’t answer. If he ignores him, maybe... “Oh, well now, that’s just desperate.” His teeth grind together. The pull of muscle and jaw sharpens the pain, tendrils of it reaching out to take over the whole right side of his head. Matt wonders if this is what losing your mind feels like. A steady, perfectly natural-feel of circling down the drain. Almost like it’s supposed to happen, almost like he deserved it, maybe. “I suppose you do, but I might be biased.” The Intruder’s voice is oddly detached from where Matt senses its surreal body, the weird texture of its skin, almost like leather. The protruding horns in his skull. As for him, his own skull felt the same - broken bone oddly loose when he follows the line of sutures coming from his temple to an inch past the top of his ear. The creature shifts, his body something like red smoke. “Who am I, again?” The devil. He’s ought to be. Grandmother did always say Murdock boys had the devil in them. How ironic that this is how Matt remembers this - with a hallucination probing at the soft, damaged parts of his brain. The thing laughs, the sound doesn’t rebound, doesn’t act like echolocation like a real one usually would for his hearing. At the proof of it, of the unreality, and trapped in the room with it, Matt attempts burrowing further into his sheets, nose dipping into the fabric and looking for something real - coffee, gunpowder, antiseptic, soap, skin musk. “Are you trying to hide from me? Do you reckon it’ll help?” No. It can’t hurt to try. The Intruder shifts, a smoke trail left behind. The impression of lips close to his ear. “I’m in your head.” “Then get out of it.” Matt misses hours before, when it was only a dripping sound and an uncommon stench. One he became aware of when Frank said he wasn’t smelling anything. He thought perhaps it came from the forest, but further search led to nowhere. The smell didn’t come from anywhere physical, neither did the sound. It echoed just at the shell of his right ear. Frank’s heartbeat had betrayed slight unease and, for his sake, Matt mentioned something about being tired and had retired to his cot. “That wouldn’t be any fun.” “Shut up.” The dripping sound comes back, just around the shell of his ear. Works like an echo of the Intruder’s words. His skin the texture of leather and spandex and something inhuman, almost alive. He sits up suddenly, muscles pulling abruptly under his skin, tightening worryingly at his shoulders where they bunch up to cover his ears. He cowers to a corner, knees to his chest. Attempts to find Frank’s pulse nearby, eyes shut tight together as to ignore the very real breathing that he can feel against his cheek, a predator’s maws ready to attack. No matter how much he tries to work through the sounds, he’s hindered in his efforts. His own heartbeat too loud to properly allow him the focus, hammering and vibrating his eardrums. Only realizes he’s digging his fingernails into his knees when something wet and warm touches the palm of his hand. “What was that song? The one Dad liked?” Go away, he wants to say. Needs to say it, why can’t he say it? His ability to speak was locked up somewhere deep and Matt couldn’t reach it. Couldn’t find it, no matter how much he tried or how much the muscles of his neck worked against the knot tying his throat up. “ When I was fast asleep she threw her arms around my neck.” He clutches at his ears, presses his back against the corner of the bed, eyes shut together. But it doesn’t muffle the Intruder’s voice, neither does it stop him from singing. Strength leaves him. Matthew lets his arms fall to the sides, eyes vacant and searching the opposite wall. “ And then began to weep.” “S-stop,” his voice is stubborn, it struggles to fully leave him, sinks its nails in his tongue and refuses to be let out. “S-s-stop, stop.” It’s wrong. He isn’t sure what, but it’s wrong. Dad never liked that song. Dad liked weird country music and rock. It’s wrong, it’s all wrong, and he needs it to stop. “ She wept, she cried, she tore her hair, ah, me, what could I do?” Hands come up to his ears against and Red clamps them down hard, until the pressure becomes a palpable sound, bursting his eardrums. The break protests, he thinks he hears something snap.. “So all night long, I held her in my arms,” the devil’s voice echoes around the empty room, undisturbed. “Just to keep her from the foggy, foggy dew.”     “It’s alright, kid.” His head hurts. Eyes sting when he attempts opening them. “I just need to clean it, yeah? You popped a stitch, s’bleeding a little.” His head hurts. Make it stop. Please. “Wanna tell me what happened?” He isn’t sure. He doesn’t know. “Someone was here,” he thinks he whispers. “Fr’nk, someone was here.” Frank’s steady hands stop. Matthew blinks through the fog, the hands return. “Frank, I need to go back. I need to go back.” He shakes his head, pushes his shoulders against the bed again. Matt hadn’t realized he was trying to sit. “Just rest, Red.” Frank sighs, coffee-mint-toothpaste-eggs-and-bacon mix in the air above him. “Don’t reckon you’ll be remembering this when you wake up anyway.” He doesn’t. BOX   Yet I was wound up. I tick. I exist. I am poised eighteen inches over the black rivets you are reading, I am in your place, I am shut in a bone box and trying to fasten myself on the white paper.     By day ten, it’s clear something is going on with Murdock. He wouldn’t know for sure, since Red never speaks of it. Never speaks much of anything that really matters, to be truthful - still a master in the art of misdirection even if he probably can’t remember sh*t about his life as a lawyer. Frank is a sniper. Waiting is in his nature, as much as Curt likes to point out he has, as he so calls it, a “modern disease” and craves for “instant gratification” or some bullsh*t. When the time is right, he’ll ask and he’ll aim just right, but for now, he has other things to worry about. If what Curt had said through the phone was true, each day that passed there was less chance Red’s amnesia was from a brain injury. The odds were much of it was psychological - Dissociative amnesia, Curt called it. Less to do with Red’s injury and much more with what happened before it. Frank frowns, eyes locked to his food before he averts his gaze to Red once more. The amnesia might have nothing to do with the hit he took to the head, but everything else certainly did. Red slept up to twelve hours most days and couldn’t seem to sleep at all on others, no matter how exhausted he was. It’d come to a point where he’d shut down, get into that detached, dissociating state he had been on his first few days in the cabin. The bruises under his eyes from the broken capillaries were getting better - Curt told him it was normal, so Frank hadn’t worried too much, though they certainly didn’t improve his appearance. He does it again - twitches his head and loses focus on his food, arm settling down against the wood, hands almost fully covered by the long sleeves of Frank’s borrowed shirt. Had been doing that a lot lately, wandering away into his head, getting lost in his surroundings. “Hey,” the crackle of gravel in his deep tone is enough to snap Red out of it. The flinch doesn’t go unnoticed. “What’s going on?” Something with his ears, maybe? Frank was pretty sure at some point they had used a flash-bang grenade, had found a canister abandoned at the warehouse entrance and track marks from someone being dragged. Red swallows, makes an attempt to go back to his food only to yield. “Nothing,” comes the predictable response. “Yeah, I don’t think so.” He slants his head to the side, gets to watch Red’s uncomfortable expressions morphing and changing. Murdock might have gotten better from looking like death warmed over, but he was still pale. He still had bandages around his head, thigh, torso. Bruises all over. Not for the first time, he wonders just how exactly does he work. Couldn’t help but notice his sharp senses the last time they saw each other - in that rooftop. He had seen him nod to something he said yards away. Wonders just how those senses of his are working now that his skull is broken, fracture extending from above his ear to a few inches past it. Frank reaches behind him into the makeshift counter, grabs the bowl of apple slices. “Eat it.” Murdock blinks, his whole body on pause. “I-” he smacks his lips softly, as if trying to get rid of a taste he couldn’t make much sense of. Frank squints at him. “Yes.” Compliance with Red was different, Frank came to realize soon enough. He was either buying himself time for something or he was closing off, hiding back inside his shell. Distinguishing the two was easy enough - Red was nothing if not an open book at the best of times. Like the past ten days, Frank prods. “Remember anything today?” Murdock shakes his head slowly, eyes roaming from the empty plate to the bowl beside him. As if looking for stains or cracks in the porcelain. He eats the slice of apple with care - too much too quick and his headache worsens, sometimes. “Just... words.” “Words?” Lips twist downward. He doesn’t look too comfortable sharing it. “Yeah,” he abandons the half-eaten slice on his place, somehow managing to avoid the dirty parts. “People saying stuff, sentences, but I couldn’t remember-” “Anything in specific?” Murdock stops moving, shakes his head. Frank lets it go, but he isn’t convinced for a second.     He sits by the table and cleans his guns and goes over the plan in his head for the fifth time. Frank’s been stewing over this long enough. It is a bad idea and he knew it, and knew it well. Taking Red back to the city with the way things were now... well, there were a thousand different ways thing could escalate and go to sh*t real quick, and he wasn’t too happy about the odds either. If they were out there, even if Red remembered his training (or some part of it), he was underweight, slightly anemic and injured. They go to the city and Red’s an immediate liability - he’ll have to look out for him. In the other hand, seeing Red flicker between moments of clarity and haze gets him in some deep, f***ed up part that messes with Frank’s head. Head replays over and over again the sight of him reaching out a hand. Too late, he had said, please. Things are starting to get complicated. At the beginning it was simple - take Red in, get him some place safe to rest, get him back to his life. But then he wakes up with his brains scrambled and what in the world does he do with that? How can he get him back to his life if Red has no goddamn idea what that means? Frank should be damn well past caring: should throw Red, clueless f***ing Red, in the middle of the city with all the wolves he pissed off that are now clamoring for his blood. Envisions going through what Red would do if the situation was different. If it was Frank with his head messed up and a whole city bellowing to take a pound of his flesh. Tells himself Red would do the same thing - just throw him to the wolves. But that’s bullsh*t. Not a goddamn bone in Matt Murdock’s body capable of leaving a man behind to bleed out. Not even a piece of sh*t like Frank. So he checks his supplies before going to Murdock with the idea. Guns, knives, burners - back-up plans, safe houses he has nearby. Places he can lay low if they can’t manage the ride back to the cabin. The city wasn’t a safe place for the Devil and much less Matt Murdock. Someone out there knows the two are one and the same, and Frank has a good f***ing guess as to who. Only a matter of time before Frank puts him down. He’s not your responsibility. Curt’s voice nags at him. Take me home. Murdock says instead. Curtis had asked who he was when even Red couldn’t answer that himself, and well, sh*t. Who wasn’t the appropriate question, was it? What Curt had wanted to ask - and Frank knows this, knows this with the certainty that he knows that Murdock will be back on his feet, no question about it - was who was Murdock to him. Red was a sanctimonious pain in the ass, that’s who. A holier-than-thou prick with a savior complex. A good guy. And Frank had been too late and so had Red and they were both paying for that now. Because Frank knows better than to expect everything will go as planned, he prepares a bag with some bare necessities. A whole bunch of first aid and changes for Red’s dressings. Kid shouldn’t be moving so soon, not after getting his head sewn back together in a mob doc’s table but as good as Frank could be at waiting, it wasn’t his favorite tactical approach and neither was Red. Frank needed him out there, doing his ninja sh*t. Murdock was one step away from getting cabin fever and whatever was going on with his ears that he wouldn’t tell. Red may sleep a lot but God knows he doesn’t do much resting - Frank reckons he has flashbacks but Murdock is rarely coherent enough when he wakes up. And the times that he is, he doesn’t seem to understand anything at all. That’s why, when he finishes packing to find Matthew burrowed into the sheets with a peaceful, restful expression softening his features, Frank doesn’t wake him. He busies himself around the place for a while until there’s no need to check traps or supplies and only then does he take a seat by the cot. Red looks different since he got here. Even with the flashbacks, the constant headaches and the effects of the concussion, there’s a weight missing from him. He still has that soldier-like posture of his, spine straight, shoulders back, but there’s something, an absence Frank can’t pinpoint. It’s in the softness of his eyebrows when he sleeps, in his easy-going talk when he’s not distracted with his messed up head. Maybe it’s the memories he doesn’t have. Maybe. Takes an hour for Red to finally shift, hands twitching away from the cotton sheets tangled around his waist. Frank notices the rashes all over his forearms, bright red where they had been pressed against the fabric. “Hey, Red,” a soft groan answers him. Red scratches at his forearm. “Who am I?” For some reason, Murdock flinches at the question; muscles tensing before he lets go. Frank’s eyes narrow at his figure, Red takes a deep, shuddering breath. “You’re Frank. I’m Matt. It’s Monday. November. I don’t know the date.” Frank stares at him some more. Waits for an answer to pop out of somewhere, a reason for the slightly frenetic twitch of his fingers. Sighs when none comes. “It’s the 21 st .” Murdock nods, before attempting to sit up. He still swayed when he did something strenuous - walked a few steps too many, climbed up the three steps from the porch to the cabin’s door -, and sometimes when he woke up. But if Curt was right and Murdock’s amnesia was psychological, triggers could help him fill the blank spots. The faster he got Red remembering, the faster he was out of there and Frank could go back to hunting down scumbags. “Put those on,” Red tilts his head the second the bundle of clothes leaves Frank’s grasp, catches it neatly with his right one. The muscles there had improved just enough that Red didn’t let things fall all the time now - Curt had left him some hand grip strengtheners the last time he had been there. When Frank had thought they’d have to shove Red back in the van. As luck would have it, the seizure had been mostly due to dehydration and shock. Murdock’s fingers explore the items - thick thermal pants, jeans, a heavy sweater and a parka. Maybe it wasn’t cold enough for the pants, but Red had lost a few pounds and had gone from fit to too damn skinny and he shivered a whole f***ing lot when night fell. He curses under his breath and throws in some winter socks and gloves. Peruses for an old pair of boots that came with the place. A tight fit, but better than Frank’s over-sized ones. “Wher’ we going?” He turns his head away from the redhead. He had seen Murdock in various stages of vulnerability in the last week, but when he woke up slurring his words and curling his tongue loosely and softly around his vowels, it was just different. Got the twist in his chest to settle at the same time it only knotted up more painfully. Reminded him too much of his kids, waking up with soft little smiles. Are we going to the park, Daddy? Rubs at the back of his head, palm pressing into the scar. Red inclines softly towards the sound, a bit more alert - chin cocked up, irises creeping towards the upper left corners, considering. “Your place.” Red frowns before freezing altogether. “There won’t be anyone in there, right?” Disquiet fingers pick at the fabric, flinching away from it before pressing his fingers harder together. Goddamn martyr. “I won’t remember them.” Frank pulls the cotton sheets away from him, throws them in the floor by the growing heap of dirty laundry he had to take care of. Red’s relentless, though. Finds away to twist his own fingers into pretzels, picking at the skin between each one. “Don’t think so.” But then again, what does he know? Midland Circle collapses, Red was supposed to be dead. Reports come about a man in a black mask saving a man and attacking people related to Fisk. There’s a riot in prison, Matt Murdock becomes a wanted man, and then he calls the very same day- “That’s what your fancy hearing is for, right?” Murdock nods gingerly. Gets up quietly and sways only once before dragging himself to the bathroom to change. He comes back dressed and already looking drained, expression unguarded. Soft. Frank looks away. “You can sleep in the car, c’mon.” Red does. He’s dead to the world for two hours.     Hell’s Kitchen doesn’t look any different from the last time Frank had been there. He had half expected it to be. That its walls would be somehow marked with the Devil’s absence. If he’s honest with himself, Frank had half expected it to look like the aftermath of an apocalypse. Stupid. Maybe it’s because he can’t picture the Kitchen without its guardian devil. Maybe it’s because it felt like the world had changed, somehow, not much more than a week ago. Something had shattered, and yet the place remained intact. Frank shakes his head and spares a glance at the man sleeping in the passenger seat, chin to his chest, soft clouds of breath getting puffed by his nose. He looked uncomfortable. He waits for the next light to gently squeeze a fingertip under his chin, help him find a better angle to rest his head. Manages to lean it against the window and Red expresses his content exhaling soft, warm air against Frank’s fingertips, falling back asleep quickly. Making sure he wasn’t resting over the injury - the place where bone was held together feebly by iron, sutures and skin - Frank avoids any bumps in the streets while driving, eyes scanning other cars and rooftops. He doesn’t think the man in the stairs necessarily knew who Red was, but his boss did. He thinks he sees something - rooftop over an auto-repair shop, not too far from them. A blur of black and red. It’s gone before he can register its shape and speed but he keeps an eye on all the rooftops after that. It doesn’t show up again, but Frank files it away as something to consider afterwards. Murdock’s building is an old brick walk-up. Not as much of a sh*thole as Frank’s safe houses in Manhattan, but a sh*thole nonetheless. Red wakes up the moment they pull over a street away, head twitching sideways. He looks more alert than he had back in the cabin, taking in the city, the traffic, the passersby. Frank just watches him for a while, makes sure he’s not about to freak out like he did once or twice already before turning off the ignition key. “Come on.” “We’re in Hell’s Kitchen.” He sniffs the air carefully, looks ridiculously alike a dog while doing it. The same way he did with his head tilts. Frank just grunts in response - of course, of all the things to remember, Red would recall what Hell’s Kitchen smells like. They use the fire escape. Frank catches Murdock missteps a whole lot more than the redhead would ever be willing to admit but he lets the man keep his pride. He’s dizzy and his legs won’t coordinate with his brain - right one mostly. As stubborn as his right arm and hand. He’d raise them barely enough to make a step and trip on the next, hold himself for dear life on the handrail before Frank came along to take most of his weight, awkwardly squeezing together through the tight fit of the stairs. Red’s exhausted by the time they make it to the third flight of stairs and Frank mostly carries him the rest of the way, Red’s legs delaying them rather than helping. It isn’t any hardship - Red doesn’t eat much and keeps even less in his stomach when he manages something. Castle isn’t sure what he’s hoping for when Red finally, gingerly walks down the stairs to his place. Looking more like a stranger than a man walking inside his home. Maybe - stupidly - that he’d walk in, surrounded by all things Matt Murdock, and come to some kind of realization and get back to his life. Get the hell away from Frank’s because he sure as hell doesn’t know what to make of this. Of Red and him in the same space, instead of being on opposite sides in a fight. Or maybe a spark. Something that told him Murdock wasn’t lost for good. Murdock touches the walls with barely concealed hesitation, knuckles feeling for the polished wood. There were cracks on the walls, broken glass on the floor, a crack on one of the window panes. Frank takes it all in and keeps quiet. Clasps his hands in front of him as he shadows Red’s footsteps inside the place. Shaky fingertips find case files over the coffee table. Murdock’s expression twists into something funny. “I really am a lawyer,” he mumbles, some kind of innocent awe tinging his voice that Frank thinks he’d never would’ve heard it otherwise, should he have his memories straight. “That you are.” Murdock’s lips twitch in that confused, unsure smile, fingertips trailing the few books by the files. An abandoned, open laptop attached to a device of some kind. Braille reader, perhaps. He stops at one of the books, fingers spasm before he traces the cover again. “Thurgood Marshall,” his eyes bob from the upper corner to the lower one, his knees still shake from the hesitation of climbing up the fire escape. “I used to read this one a lot when I was a kid.” Frank’s eyebrows go up. There’s something that keeps pulling Red back to the book, even when he feels for the other ones. Frank wonders what is it that makes him gravitate back - a memory, a feeling. What gets him tracing the same dots over and over again on the spine. “Take it,” Frank shrugs, lets his clasped hands fall by his side, “it’s yours.” Should probably get some of Red’s stuff too, while they’re at it. He steps towards the bedroom he peeks by the sliding door, looks for something they can use. Gym bag isn’t big enough for a lot, but enough. He empties one, leaves one of the hand tapes. Murdock looks grateful when he reaches gingerly towards the bag, dropping the book inside with a small smile. Frank resists the urge to tell him to quit it. He finds his cane next, discarded by the couch. Confusion and recognition battle around the creases and soft planes of his features before he carefully attempts picking it up, fingers digging into the back of the couch so he doesn’t topple over. Folds it up almost on muscle memory and seems about as surprised as Frank as he does it. “Remember anything?” He asks, strangely hopeful, but Red just frowns - sniffs the air like a hound dog. “I’m not... sure.” Yeah, he doesn’t look very sure about anything, even as he drops the folded cane inside the bag. He walks into the kitchen with a sway to his step Frank has come to recognize as exhaustion. Confirms it when Murdock’s quick to try and find support on the counter, hands bumping into something. Frank catches a blur of dark red and golden yellow before it falls. Red falls into a series of bird-like head tilts, eyes attempting to find the little red box in the floor. Knows it’s a bad idea trying to pick it up without support moments before the kid almost cracks his head open a second time. “Jesus f***, Red,” he pulls him up before he manages to face plant like the a**hole he was. Pissed off but still mindful of his sutured up head. He takes the box himself with a curse, recognizing the smooth, vinylic surface of gift wrapping before he hands it to Murdock. “Thanks.” His eyes get drawn to the floor again, though. Notices the slump of clothes on the floor by the fridge, some of them with pink splatters of washed-out blood, some with bigger stains. Frank crouches beside it - it had been wet at some point, dried up all wrinkled and smelled moldy to a degree. Suit jacket, slacks, socks, white button-up and a torn, black tie. “Hudson,” Murdock suddenly murmurs, one eyebrow quirking up as the other draws down crookedly. “It’s what I could smell before.” His hands still fumble around with the gift box, even while slanting his head this way and that, sniffing the air as if looking for clues. Frank stands up, leaves the rumpled clothes where they are. Something had happened between the prison rioting, Murdock becoming a wanted man and Frank receiving a phone call. Like the book, Red’s attention keeps gravitating back to the small box in his hands, wrapped up with ridiculous primness, contrasting badly with the skewered, badly tied up golden bow. He keeps tracing the line where the lid met the box, encased by glossy, bright red paper. “I... This is weird.” Frank grunts. Waits for him to say what he’s got to say. “I know this is all mine, I know it is but I don’t- I don’t feel it. I don’t remember it, I don’t...” He huffs in frustration, voice edged higher before it falls, holds the box closer to his chest. Frank eyes it, gazes back to the forgotten tag on the counter. It must have fallen at some point. Frank takes another look at Red then. The disgruntled, hopeless expression on his face. Exhales in a large huff of air. “Look, Red, this is gonna take time, yeah? You went through some bad sh*t. You gotta let your wounds heal, let that head o’yours heal.” Except what the kid needs is a f***ing neurologist and, sh*t, a really f***ing good therapist too. And Frank would be willing to give that to him, if only he wasn’t sure it would end terribly for Daredevil and worse still for Matt Murdock to show up now. Murdock suddenly stands straight - that fighter’s posture Frank had been used to seeing less flawless when it takes over the slumped, hopeless figure of seconds before. “What-” “Shh.” He looks a bit more like the Devil Frank recalled. A lot less like the helpless kid he’s been around the last few days. Frank can’t say he didn’t miss it. “Footsteps,” Murdock whispers, mouth close to his cheek, “coming up the stairs, six, maybe seven, they...” Frank pulls the gun from the holster, one hand clamping around Red’s upper arm to pull him back. His eyes go wide in panic seconds before he suddenly shouts out: “Frank, down!” BRUISE   Here is your space, lie down or stand or sit, it will take your shape. Be still if you can, look into yourself for what is soft and spoiled, for pulp, for that dark damage.   In a second, Red’s apartment becomes a battlefield. It’d been easy once to tell Maria that home was here, with the kids, with her. But Frank knows himself better, these days. Knows how easily he falls into the gunfire, how squeezing the trigger feels more natural than making breakfast for them once did. How landing a punch is easier than landing a caress and how he’d been so selfish to think he could have both. He has three rounds of ammo on him, thirty six bullets for his .45 caliber, one army knife - a TBI patient with no self-preservation instinct whatsoever and at least seven guys coming up the stairs to apartment 6A, armed with assault rifles and whole lot more ammunition. He takes one second to feel for Red’s skinny frame covering his body after tackling him to the floor, his unarmored body and the crisscrossed sutures over his ear before he makes a decision. Grabs the kid by the back of his neck, dragging him off of him before shoving him backwards under the stairs as soon as bullets puncture through the wall a second time. Red, probably completely oblivious as to where the urge to fight comes from, immediately tries to jump out. Frank presses his forearm against him, looks deep into his unseeing eyes before checking his cartridge - fully loaded, all twelve bullets in - before turning to Murdock once again. “You stay under those stairs, you don’t make a sound, you don’t move until I say so, do you get that?” Got not time to make sure the kid understands besides a brief stare, easing up the pressure on his chest incrementally before standing up, walking low to hide behind the hallway wall. He’s just got to crouching when a shotgun blow makes debris and chunks of drywall fly past the place his head had been, seconds before. Frank presses his gun close to his chest, stays crouched low as he waits, tonguing his parched upper lip before checking in on Red, hands covering his ears from the close-range blasts. His breathing is too quick but Frank’s got no time to check for anything else but immediate injuries. He roars out for the pieces of sh*t waiting on the other side of the door. “C’mon!!” The spray of bullets start again, exploding through the door and denting the wall by the fridge. Shattering porcelain mugs and plates long forgotten by the sink. He counts the time, the bullets he can hear. Keeps half an eye on Red, curled up tight under the stairs, eyes panicked. The second the gunfire stops, Frank’s on his feet. Two burst through the door and get shot on sight. Shoulder, head - the blonde guy falls. Chest - the braided woman goes down. A third one appears through the doorway, screaming expletives to the remaining four behind him. Frank recognizes a few operational commands - mercenaries, probably former military - before he jumps into a roll, avoiding a spray of bullets and unloading three knee-level shots at the guy. One hits home. The gunfire starts again, Frank grabs Red by the arm and pulls him out of hiding, dragging him to the table and shouldering it down to the ground, using it as shield. It was sturdy but wouldn’t last long. Red’s partially catatonic, but Frank had expected that too. Either he was caught in a sensory hell or trapped in a flashback or both. Probably both. “Red, you listening?” A sharp, erratic nod. “We gotta get to those stairs, you tell me when they’re almost out of ammo, can you do that?” Another nod, more focused, more sure. “Attaboy.” Two stop to reload, Frank lends him his palm and Red makes a small, objective map. Points the location of the four mercs still shooting, the one sitting by the two dead ones with his knee shot to hell. Immediately shows him the two as soon as they’re on their last bullet. Frank rises up too late to do much damage, but one gets a graze to the thigh and the other falls back with a shot to their armored vest. They have little tactical advantage besides Red’s senses, they’ll be trapped if they don’t move, now. But Red can’t dodge bullets when he’s still swaying over his feet every time he moves too quickly and Frank can’t cover for him at the same time he guides him up the stairs. So he quickly falls into another roll, shoots the second lady with the army jacket and slams his back against the couch. Bullets fly over his head. “You got nowhere to hide, Murdock!” Army jacket lady bellows, Frank’s gaze locks at Red’s face and he waits for the signal. The shakiness and pale skin are almost completely hidden by the determined set of his brow, the tense posture he holds himself in. “Come out now and I promise I’ll make it quick, sweetie.” Murdock rises three fingers. One goes down, another- “Now!” He rises the moment burly bald guy on the back stops to reload and shoots him once in the head. Pulls Red to his feet and drags him up the stairs as quickly as he can without risking his goddamn head. “Frank, duck!” He goes low, brings Red with him. A spray of bullets dent the wall over their heads and Frank shoots once, twice, three times. Ejects the empty mag and shoves another in record time before shooting the remaining three - Army jacket lady, vest dude and bullet-in-the-thigh a**hole. Gives them enough cover fire to crawl the remaining three steps to the access door and reach the rooftop. Murdock is weak - stumbles twice before he manages to find his footing again. But as soon as they’re high up, muscle memory and adrenaline seems to get rid of whatever catatonic spell he’d been in, together with whatever remaining self-preservation instinct he had been running on when he stayed hidden under the goddamn stairs. “Use the ledge.” “What?” But Red - the idiot who had his skull open 10 days ago - is already running. Uses the fire escape only to hang on to it, get momentum enough and jump down to the next building’s ledge, balancing precariously before taking hold of the ladder and having it drop down closer to the ground with him hanging on to it, finding the alleyway ground with unsteady feet, knees bucking violently when he finally does. Jesus Christ, this a**hole. But it’s quicker, so Frank does what he says. Almost misses the first jump but manages to hang on, climbing down the ladder and jumping to the floor the moment a bullet shatters the window over their heads and another grazes his left arm. “F***!” He ignores the urge to clamp his palm tight over the wound in favor of tugging Red’s almost non-responsive body out of the line of fire. There’s a van to the left of the building, one that hadn’t been there before. Frank memorizes the plaque seconds before spotting a tall figure waiting inside. He shoots them in the head without hesitation, eyes immediately darting up to the fire escape where Army jacket lady was hobbling down from, and the building’s front door opening from the inside - bullet-in-the-thigh dude and vest guy burst out of it, Frank starts firing and so do they. Red makes a sound of surprise and goes green when Frank shoves him behind his body. There are retching sounds and a splash of liquid against the back of his combat boots, but he’s got no time to check on him. Gotta keep on moving or they’ll get them trapped in the alley.  

Summary: Fisk gets put away again, and it feels like that should be the end of it, but it’s not. Of course it’s not. The FBI needs a win. Who better to take that out on than the lawyers who exposed their corruption. I am not Daredevil, Matt says so many times in so many spaces that he almost believes it. His ability to maintain a concept of self was difficult enough before this: this new judgment day, this thing that has fractured him beyond what he thought was possible. He feels like he’s been dropped into the ocean, all his limbs weighted with stones, unable to find which way is up and which way is down, which way is surface and which way is gone. Later, he'll try to think about it objectively, distance himself from this new kind of violence that inhabits his body. He'll grapple with the defined edges of his constantly shifting memory, carefully delineate the before from the after, turn his conclusion over and over in his mind. As it turns out, he observes, living feels a lot like drowning. [An exploration of trauma and memory, of what it might look like if Matt's identity as Daredevil was exposed. Prison fic. Post-S3.] Notes: “There are things unbearable.”—Anne Carson, Decreation      I.   The moment Wilson Fisk steps up to the podium, flanked by his team, somehow more imposing than ever, heartbeats stutter and crescendo across the city: a frenetic, dissonant exposition—and Matt thinks he understands a little bit more now why crowds nearly rioted at the premiere of a ballet once, overwhelmed by its relentless unpredictability, by its apostasy. The pagans onstage made pagans of the audience. The memory of Fisk’s voice doesn’t even hold a candle to the reality of it. Makes his hands curl into fists, takes him right back. If his memory had been a candle, then the reality is a forest fire: violent, irredeemable. “…to frame me. Daredevil. The killer who’s now showing—his true colors. Who’s tried to murder people in newspaper offices—and churches. Attacking our sacred institutions. Believe—me. Daredevil is our true—public—enemy.” It feels like Matt is caught in the crossfire of feedback from every television set in the borough, the fractional delay of sound just offset enough to make it seem as though Fisk’s voice carries beyond the restraints of sound and time, as though his power is truly limitless. The gasps that follow the speech, the uptick in heart rates, the sharp smell of sweat glands and fear arousal overwhelm his senses as he parses through the confused and conflicted responses across the streets: truth, truth, truth, it can’t be true, can it be true— A stuttering swan song of disbelief; it doesn’t matter, he thinks, it really doesn’t matter what he does, how much he does, who he tries to be—a few seeds of doubt, a handful of words, and the people he calls his own turn on him, just like that. A half-measure; a man who can’t finish the job. One bad day away from becoming the villain of his own story. One bad day away from becoming— Nausea battles with helpless rage inside of him as he is stricken with the realization that maybe Castle was right: the system is broken, his work as Matt Murdock is a practice in futility, almost as pointless as his work as Daredevil—not enough, never enough. He imagines for a moment what it would look like to team up with Castle, to end this—once and for all, for better or worse, ‘til death do us part; an unholy marriage of the Devil and the Punisher. How disappointing that his old teacher couldn't be here to witness the ruthlessness he’d despaired of ever finding in Matt. Maybe there's hope for you yet— Matt clenches his jaw against the wave of grief that follows, and pushes himself up to his feet. Foggy and Karen are waiting. — It takes him less time than he hopes it’ll take to arrive, barely exhilarated from the sensation of vaulting from rooftop to rooftop, the wide chasm of empty spaces below him, the promise of adrenaline that comes with every moment that he taunts death, and fear, and his own limitations. “So, I guess you needed my help, after all,” Foggy says smugly, with, to his credit, just a trace of the bitterness that usually accompanies his words. Since that day. Judgment day. When the secrets came bleeding out from Matt’s wounds. So, Matt swallows his pride as Karen steps onto the rooftop after Foggy. “Yeah,” Matt says. “Yeah, I did, Foggy. You’re right.” He doesn’t add that Karen nearly died because she got involved, because Foggy gave her the idea to confront Fisk, because he did exactly what Matt asked him not to do. He doesn’t say anything because he finally understands—there is no protecting each other, and good intentions only pave the way to hurt and hell, anyway. Fisk's speech lingers in his mind, a thick gossamer caught at the barbed edges of his thoughts, as present as the hallucination of Fisk that’s been haunting Matt's footsteps since waking up back at St. Agnes weeks ago.  The worst part, thinks Matt, was not even the speech, itself, no; not Fisk's voice, nor even his accusations; it was the heckling of the protestors fading into rapt silence, the collective gasps which greeted the accusations against Daredevil, the rapid click of camera shutters stuttering one by one into stillness: the cold realization that, after everything, after everything Fisk had done—the city believed him. Fisk, it was Fisk, it was all Fisk— Helpless rage rises up in Matt's chest and his hands flex at his side, curl into trembling, white-knuckled fists. Ten steps behind, always ten steps behind and nothing he did ever— “Do you have any idea how much life has sucked for Karen and me,” Foggy interrupts his thoughts, “while you were, just, off doing your own thing?” All Matt’s ever tried to do is the right thing, and all Matt’s ever seemed to do is get it wrong.  “No, but—I’m sorry, Foggy,” Matt says, grimacing at the profound inadequacy of words to bridge this rift in their friendship, to fill this cavernous space of all the things he's never been able to say. "Maybe I was, was wrong to push you away." “Ok, it’s, insanely hard to fight with you if you keep agreeing with me,” says Foggy, and Matt's own heart skips a beat. He doesn't need enhanced senses to catch that Foggy's heart is almost in the quip, almost— “Good,” returns Matt, “because I don’t want to fight with you.” He releases the breath that's been caught in his chest, and the rest of his apology comes out in a rush of words. “Look, the way I’ve treated you—the way I’ve treated you both—you deserve better.” Foggy's breath hitches in surprise.  "Yes," he says, cautiously, and Matt can sense that Foggy has turned to look at Karen, sense that she is nodding in bewildered agreement. “We did. But... so did you." For a moment, the words don’t register, the corner of Matt's mouth tilting up as though Foggy just made a joke that he didn't quite understand.  “I, Fog, what’re you,” Matt says, the words faltering as they tumble out clumsily on top of each other. “Listen, Matt,” says Foggy, and his voice is doing that thing where it sounds somehow both resigned and determined. “I pushed you away, too, after everything that went down with—you know,” he stumbles, not wanting to say Elektra’s name. “But it wasn’t fair,” he says quickly, to stave off Matt’s inevitable apology. “It wasn’t fair to leave you alone like that after she showed up again. I just—Jesus, I still remember that night at Co—” “Foggy,” interrupts Matt. Karen’s heartbeat is quickening in confusion, in concern, in interest. “We don’t, we don’t have to do this. Just, if you can let me try to do better, give me another chance—that’s all I need.” "No, Matt," says Foggy. "I'm just—I'm trying to say that I know your relationship with Elektra is complicated, has always been complicated, and God knows you probably never learned anything about healthy relationships since your childhood was so supremely f***ed up—" Matt releases a sharp breath of air in an unexpected huff of laughter. “Look,” Foggy continues doggedly. “What I’m trying to say is that—I’m sorry, too. You were alone, and I know that you thought I’d—we’d—be safer that way, thanks to your own personal, a**hole Mr. Miyagi but—whoa, Matt, are you ok? What’d I say?” He must look like he'd gotten punched in the gut at the mention of his old teacher. Matt certainly feels winded, and breathless, and incapable of explaining why. He licks his lips, as though forcing his tongue into motion will pave the way for the words to follow. “Stick's, uh, he's... gone, Fog. She, Elektra—she killed him,” Matt says finally, quietly, as though saying it softly enough might keep it from being true; as though saying it out loud doesn't make him feel like he might fracture into innumerable, irreparable pieces. He's barely a person already, he thinks; there's no way he can survive another blow, another hit like that. “Jesus, Matt,” says Foggy, and the sharp taste of salt hits Matt's tongue. He drags his focus back into the present; wisps of Karen's long hair are getting caught in the night wind, trailing across her tear-dampened cheeks while Foggy is... stoic, which is unlike him, his heartbeat ticking up anxiously in the silence that follows. The regret Matt feels is instantaneous; he should have known better than to task his friends with the unfair burden of grieving these complicated losses, these impossible figures who'd stolen Matt away from them before they'd ever had a chance. “It’s, uh, it is what it is,” Matt says, his voice flat. “I thought I could help her. I thought I could—I don’t know, but,” he shakes his head and laughs, a sound that is entirely joyless. “I couldn’t.” “Oh, Matt,” Karen says, sadly. Foggy takes a halting step toward Matt, stops himself in awkwardly aborted movement. A long moment of silence follows, before she ventures: "So, where do we go from here?" “I don’t want to leave you,” Matt says slowly, reluctantly, “but I can’t—I can't ask you to be accomplices to what I have to do now.” The words linger in the air between them like a challenge. Karen shifts her head away from Matt, displeasure in every closed gesture of her body. Foggy looks between them, settles on Karen: “What’s that supposed to mean?” “Um,” Karen hesitates briefly then plows quickly forward, as though that might soften the blow of the words. “Matt wants to kill Fisk.” There is one vibrating moment of silence before Foggy's words come staccato, rapid-fire, punctuated with disbelief: “What the f***, Matt—you know, maybe that building falling on you really did mess with your head—" “We put him in prison, Foggy—and look what happened,” Matt says, and Foggy hates that his best friend is somehow able to sound calm, and rational, and deeply unaffected while discussing his intention to cross this line that he'd sworn he could never cross, this line that could never be uncrossed. Foggy can still picture the crumpled expression on Matt's face when he'd asked if Matt had ever gone that far before—and Foggy doesn't understand how they got from there to here. Foggy thinks he could fill books with what he doesn't understand about his best friend. “It won't be the same this time,” Foggy returns. “This time, he’ll be thrown into some kind of supermax hole where he can’t compromise anybody. He’ll never see the light of day again!” “Foggy, I know you’re not that naïve—” “It’s called having faith in the system, something you used to have—” “It’s called facing reality,” Matt snaps, but Foggy can hear the exhaustion in his voice, the disbelieving resignation, the stretch and break of him. "The reality that the system wasn't built to contain men like Fisk. Men who are too rich, and too powerful—men who take the law, who take the system and twist it into something that protects them—" “No, Matt,” Foggy snaps back. “This isn’t you. There’s another way to do this—we just, if you can just, I don’t know, take a step back from the murder ledge for one freaking second!” “Matt, just, hear him out, maybe,” Karen interjects. Her voice is soft, pleading, raw.  “Fine.” Matt laughs, and the sound is short, and bitter. “Tell me how the law can possibly fix this, Foggy. I’m all ears. Please. Tell me your plan.” "Ok, simple, step one," says Foggy slowly, deliberately. "We do this together—we devise a plan together. Step two: we, we execute said plan. Together." “Wow,” Matt says, and laughs joylessly again. Not enough. Never enough. “That’s genius. You come up with that on your own?” ”Yeah, well, so I’m still working out the details,“ Foggy replies, but the uptick in his heartbeat belies his too-casual tone. “Ok, ok, ok, what about this—we, we find ourselves another witness,” Karen suggests. “Someone that will flip on Fisk, but, unlike Jasper Evans, we keep them alive this time. Someone who knows the details of Fisk’s operation. Someone with nothing to lose.” "No," says Matt, as the memory of what happened at the church returns to him in a rush of grief that nearly takes his breath again. "Someone with everything to lose." “Nadeem,” breathes Karen. “He helped me get away.” “Yeah,” says Matt. “His family’s in danger, he probably went back to move them. I need to go. Now. Foggy—do you think Brett would be willing to help Nadeem’s family?” “Already on it,” Foggy mumbles, and Matt can hear his fingertips rapidly tapping the screen of his phone. Pulling the mask back over his head, Matt rolls his shoulders back and starts jogging across the rooftop, gaining momentum as he goes until he’s leaping over and across.   —   In some ways, it feels like Matt never stopped running. Fisk gets put away again, and it feels like that should be the end of it, but it’s not. Of course it’s not. The FBI needs a win. Who better to take that out on than the lawyers who exposed their corruption. Daredevil. Our true—public—enemy. They’ve gathered enough evidence against Matt that there’s not much Foggy can do other than insist on protective custody, on the grounds that a blind attorney can't be placed in general population with the same violent offenders he put there. I am not Daredevil, Matt says so many times in so many spaces that he almost believes it. The days following his indictment are a blur of promises and threats bridged together by sleepless nights outlined with crushing absence where language used to be.   II.   It takes only one night in prison for Matt Murdock to realize that his luck has finally caught up with him; it takes thirty-two nights to fully understand what that means. Thirty-two nights of imprisoned men yelling and banging and taunting and singing; thirty-two days of the stench and noise of convicted inmates mixed in with others, like Matt, who are just awaiting trial; thirty-two nights of listening to choked sobs and threats, favors and retributions. Thirty-two days and nights with little sleep, and less food.  Then it happens—the transfer from protective custody to general population. Matt is almost relieved when it happens: it means freedom from the oppressive hum of surveillance cameras in protective custody always watching, always, so that he must act the part of helpless blind attorney every moment of every day and every night, or risk losing his case before it can ever get to trial, risk getting Foggy sentenced alongside Matt for aiding and abetting. The prison guards have demonstrated petty cruelties in the past, but still—Matt doesn’t see it coming when they take him not to his new cell in general population but into an ambush. A closed room with no way out, the door locked behind him and too many heartbeats to immediately count. It’s not that Matt ever considered himself an especially lucky person to begin with, not that he'd ever relied on luck when he could rely on himself, instead; but he's always been able to recognize when good things come into his life that have absolutely nothing to do with him—that have everything to do with chance, or else divine providence, or fate. And if all the good luck allotted to him in life had been spent up on a singular event, Matt's ok with that—because getting assigned to Foggy Nelson as a roommate at Columbia felt like a second chance at everything good that had ever slipped through his grasp—a chance at happiness that didn’t need to be gripped tightly in his fists or hidden beneath a mask. Foggy, who saw Matt—really saw him; not just his disability or the cultivated personality he presented to the world, but who Matt was, who he tried to be. Foggy, who saw with his heart, like Matt— He starts numbering the heartbeats, placing the bodies in the space, tasting the cortisol and adrenaline mingling with sweat in the air, his thoughts involuntarily drifting back to the last time he’d faced this many men, the cavernous space of the sky above as he and Elektra fought back to back on the rooftop where she would die in his arms. Different, he thinks, from the second time she would die: ripped from his arms below the earth as the sky collapsed down upon them. Elektra. It really shouldn’t have come as a surprise to Matt that he would all but free-fall into the kind of life Elektra could promise him, the life he'd been coldly, dispassionately shut out from in the quiet basement of an orphanage: his child's body colored with bruises he'd thought could mean love, his child's heart filled all the way up with shame—he’d been holding onto it for months, had pressed it carefully, tenderly, into the pages of his bible: a paper bracelet made from the wrapper of an ice cream cone— So if Elektra wasn’t quite compatible with Matt’s desperate need to be good, to be so good, well, at least she knew every buried part of him: knew intimately his darkness, his grief, his unbearable rage. Is she sick? Worse, Matty, she’s in love— “You’re Battlin’ Jack’s boy,” says a voice from above the men, atop a set of steps leading up to a door, and there’s something about the voice that strikes a chord in Matt’s mind, that stops him in his tracks, that catches his breath in his throat. Matt had observed the exit behind the man from the moment he’d stepped foot inside, one of three exits from the space. All closed, all locked, all useless. Guards posted outside every one, their pockets lined with blood money, their bodies full of threats. Plata o plomo. Silver or lead. Take our money, or take our violence. Matt always chooses violence. “What’s it to you?” he bites, fighting down the feeling that this is all more than it seems, more urgent, more dangerous than he can comprehend right now, with the evidence he has before him. "You don't remember me?" the man asks, mildly. "I killed your father." You don’t remember me? You killed my father. Well, I hate to break it to you, son, but I killed a lot of guys’ dads. Then let me help you…he hit hard, like this— Matt's body turns to ice, turns to stone, turns to lead as everything comes together to form a memory: Elektra, knife in hand, taunting Roscoe Sweeney, encouraging Matt to tell him who he was—he could taste salt in the air as he beat the other man until his face didn’t even feel like a face anymore, so bruised and bloodied beneath Matt’s knuckles. Good, he'd thought. His father's face hadn't felt like a face anymore either when Matt had found him in the alleyway all those years ago—but Elektra had disappeared after Matt refused to kill him, leaving only the lingering scent of her perfume—sandalwood, ylang ylang, mandarin leaf—as proof that she'd been there at all. Shards of crystal like fractured stars in Matt's hearing on the kitchen floor. Matt, equally shattered, equally disposable, alone by the open door.  He'd stood there numbly until long after she left, until the lonely wail of sirens reached the limits of his hearing. Then he'd hitchhiked and stumbled his way back to the dorm at Columbia, every intention of waiting for Foggy to leave the building before returning to their room—until realizing his keys were gone, lost somehow during the messy events of the evening. Or, just as likely, Elektra had taken them before disappearing; petty retribution for not complying with her command to end it, for not meeting her own desperate need for Matt to be the mirror to her fragmented pieces—to reflect back something whole, something still worthy of love. So Matt had knocked, humiliated, dried blood on his knuckles, on his clothes, mingled with the tears that had tracked their way down his face, and tried to ignore Foggy’s sharp intake of breath when he saw Matt, tried to ignore the frightened uptick in his pulse as the law student succumbed to his tendency to babble in distressing situations. “Oh my god, Matt,” he had said, “you disappeared from the party last night, and I know you can take care of yourself, but I’m always afraid you’ve fallen into, like, an open manhole or, I don’t know—a sinkhole, because I guess that’s more likely to happen than quicksand, not that I really thought quicksand was an option when there’s wet concrete and—” Matt had opened his mouth to say Foggy’s name, to reassure him, to somehow make this seem less bad than it was; instead, he'd heard himself gasp Elektra's name, barely a whisper of a sound, felt hot tears slipping out from the corners of his eyes again. The scent of Foggy’s fear had blossomed into anger, then; he had never liked Elektra, had never trusted her, had warned Matt about her so many times—and Matt had felt bitter shame rise up in his throat. But Foggy had knelt gently, quietly beside him as Matt wept wordlessly, his hands aching to feel just once what it would be like to touch someone and—not hurt, not be hurt. And if Matt had internally railed at the unfairness of it all—he’d thought surely by now he would be ok, surely by now he would have picked up the pieces of his life and fashioned them into something whole, no longer caught in the riptide of shattered childhood dreams and loss—he didn't let it pass through his lips. Not the way he had once allowed it to pass through his lips as a child in the orphanage waking again and again from impressionistic nightmares to unfamiliar rooms, calling out for his dead father, for anyone at all. He'd learned, then, when no one came, that it was better not to ask at all, better not to burden others with his neediness, his sadness, his shame. “Matthew?! Oh, you’re Battlin’ Jack’s boy, oh you amateur. Now I know your name, nothing to stop me from bloodying the street with your corpse, just like I did to your old man—” Scuffle of countless feet across concrete pulls Matt's attention back to the men who circle slowly, densely around him. "Sweeney," he all but spits, almost pleased for the opportunity to face him again. He can feel that helpless rage rising back up inside of his body again and his hands tighten into fists, aching for a fight after a month of playing domesticated house cat for the cameras in protective custody, for the prison guards whose daily cruelties and provocations were their bread and butter. “Murdock,” the mobster responds, almost sweetly. “You put me away ten years ago, and I’ve just been dreaming about getting you back ever since. Then I read about your trial in the paper and realized that I could get you back without ever leaving these walls. Only this, this is so much better than even I imagined.” “What do—what are you talking about,” Matt bites out through gritted teeth, mentally cataloguing everything in the room that could be used as a weapon against him, counting every heartbeat, every obstacle between him and a way out of this alive. A few inmates have switchblades tucked into their waistbands, others have clumsier weapons, and the rest carrying only their loathing for Daredevil, armed only with their bitter memories of humiliation and defeat, with the knowledge that they're locked away in here because of him. “You see, I knew about you, sure, followed along as the media praised the poor blind orphan with a law degree just trying to do good for his community. Except it turns out that you’ve been doing it with your fists instead of your law degree—I wonder how your partner feels about that—how your old man would’ve felt about that—” “Enough—” The word snarls out of him unbidden, his rage uncoiling inside of him until every fiber of him aches to hurt, to be hurt. “Don’t talk about them, don't you dare talk about them—” "Did you know that your partner has personally fought every appeal that I've made in the last ten years?" asks Sweeney, his heartbeat rushing in satisfaction when Matt doesn't respond. "You didn't know, did you? Guess we're all entitled to our... little secrets—" Sweeney's body is suddenly wracked with convulsive coughs; calluses line the inflamed membranes of his nasal passages, and Matt is hit with the realization that Sweeney had never recovered from the beating he'd given him that night, ten years ago. The thought that Sweeney must remember Battlin’ Jack Murdock every single time he takes a breath brings Matt a rush of grim satisfaction. “You’re a survivor, Murdock, unlike your old man," Sweeney says, his voice rasping. "Unfortunately for you, so am I—and I’ve not forgotten what you did. You left me with too many reminders.” "Then you should know now that you don’t want to make an enemy of me,” he bites, the Devil creeping into his voice. Sweeney laughs, drawing a few huffs of laughter from the men around Matt and he is caught in the crossfire of feedback again, kneeling on a rooftop with Fisk's voice in his ears; he shakes his head desperately in an attempt to bring his senses back into focus. Feeling of solid concrete beneath his feet, uptick in the ring of heartbeats around him, low hum of the ventilation system somewhere distantly above. “No,” Sweeney returns. “The mistake was making me an enemy, was making yourself an entire goddamn army of enemies and thinking you’d somehow never end up in here with them. Did you really think we’d never come back for you, pretty boy? For Daredevil?” Daredevil—our true—public—enemy— Sweeney scoffs. "You've only been here thirty-two f***ing days, Murdock, and, from what I hear, you're already losing it: talkin' to yourself in your cell, not eating, not sleeping—well, we've been here for years, so you can imagine that we are more tired, more hungry—for release, for retribution that's owed to us." Matt’s only half-listening to Sweeney’s monologue, his senses trained on the men surrounding him. Mind, body, connection. He forcibly releases the tension in his shoulders, allows himself to relax into the stance of a boxer as he grounds up through his feet. He tilts his head, focusing on the men who are distracted by Sweeney's speech. Adrenaline is coursing through him now, his body practically vibrating with it. “You think I’m afraid of you or these men, Sweeney? You think I’m not hungry for a release after thirty two days and nights of listening to all the sh*t that goes on in this place?” Matt's mouth curves up in a feral smile. “Try me.” Matt strikes the prisoner closest to him, the sole of his foot connecting with his throat; he goes down, and Matt uses the momentum from the kick to erupt into a flurry of motion as the other prisoners scramble to take their shot at the man who put them here. Slipping back on his feet, he narrowly avoids a shiv; taking advantage of the convict's imbalanced footing, Matt throws him face-first into the ascending concrete steps. There's a sharp crack as the man's jaw dislocates on impact. Matt steps over him to get to Sweeney but more men are already grasping at his arms, dragging him back by his prison uniform, by his hair, by anything they can get a hold of. He violently shakes off a couple of his attackers before something heavy is swinging through the air and he's forced to drop back down over the railing. He drops into a roll as he lands, swiping out a leg close to the ground to bring down the attacker closest to him, uses the momentum to spin back up to his feet. He strikes his heel down across the man's temple before Matt is grabbed again from behind, arms restrained this time. He kicks out furiously at one of the men in front of him, lands a hit on one of the men holding him and pulls away— —but there are too many men and they've closed too tightly in on him. He is being restrained again and this time the attacker hurls Matt against the wall, then down against the steps. He hits hard, his senses blurring in and out of focus as he swings out desperately. One man, two men, three go down, but more pile on top of Matt, their hands grabbing at his prison uniform, his arms held high behind him as he tries and fails to fend off the seemingly endless stream of attackers: a chaotic blur of overstimulation for his already exhausted and dazed senses. Then the shiv is cutting through Matt’s prison uniform, leaving a jagged, burning wound across his chest, and he cannot help the agonized gasp that is torn from his throat as the serrated edge of the makeshift blade catches every bit of sinew beneath his skin, as men grasp at the torn fabric, cool air against his skin followed by violent touch—  Mind, body, connection. The mind controls the body— Matt forces himself to exhale, tracks separate heartbeats out of the cacophony, and thrusts his head back savagely into the face of one of the men restraining him. His leg kicks out, and another man goes down as he wildly wrestles his way back up to his feet. His breath is coming out in gasps now; he swipes at the blood around his mouth with one hand, then lowers it to gauge the depth of the wound on his torso, the other arm still dangling at his side, numb all the way up to where his shoulder is braced against the wall. He’ll survive the knife wound, he thinks, his body now trembling with exertion and the effort of fighting off the shock that threatens his hard-won control over his senses. His head tilts as he gauges the heartbeats of the men still on their feet; he can sense the hesitation in their movements, their disbelief that he is somehow still on his own feet, and he knows he won't get another chance. Despite the exhaustion settling into his limbs like a weight, the long days and sleepless nights and weeks of slow starvation, he forces himself into motion, striking at any vulnerable place that might knock down these men enough for him to catch his breath, to figure something else out, to— The world shifts beneath him as he is thrown against the side of the staircase. Matt grabs a fistful of hair as he goes down, drags the attacker down with him and staggers to his knees at the man's side before he can get back up; he hits him until he can feel bones fracturing beneath his fists. “Careful, Murdock,” Sweeney warns, and his voice draws Matt’s focus back to the feeling that he’s still missing something, something bigger, something more urgent, something more pressing; only he can’t pinpoint what’s wrong over the sound of blood rushing in his ears, the sound of his own gasps, his heartbeat pounding against his ribcage, the cacophonous ring of heartbeats still around him, above him, his senses dazed, overstimulated, overwhelmed. What was he missing? What was he missing? Tap, tap—tap, tap, tap— He thinks back to his old teacher and narrows his focus, tuning out the heavy breathing of the other prisoners, the gasping, strangled sounds from men still on the ground—tap, tap, tap—there it is. A tapping sound. Sounds so familiar. Only Matt can’t place it. Another rooftop, he thinks, another lifetime. Karen and Foggy were there, he was typing out a text— Phone. Camera. Low of hum of video in the corner of the ceiling, barely audible, barely distinct from the low hum of the ventilation system just beside it. He stills immediately with the realization, and then something heavy is swinging toward his head again. The blow itself incapacitates him, his hands raising to his ears in a desperate attempt to stave off the high pitched ringing that follows. The pain that follows blurs his senses entirely out of focus for a moment that feels eternal. He gasps as the world swims around him, sounds coming in and out of muffled focus as he is dragged up onto his knees, his arms held behind him in a final defeat, a blade pressed against his throat. “You showed your hand, Murdock, just like your old man,” Sweeney says as he finally descends from where he'd been waiting at the top of the concrete stairs, phone held loosely in his hand. He laughs. “Except I let Jack off too easy for what he did, I think. Should’ve waited ‘til he was home, made you watch—sorry, listen, as the bullet went through his skull, let you think you could save him, let you try to staunch the blood—” “F*** you—” Matt half-slurs, half-gasps, fighting down the too-visceral memories of himself as a child with hands so small, too small—I think that’s my dad, I think that’s my dad—to be feeling for the familiar landscape of his father’s face and finding a bullet hole instead. Matt swallows around the sob in his throat, chokes out: “You think getting sent to prison was the worst thing that could’ve happened to you, Sweeney? After everything you’ve done—I should’ve, I should’ve—” “What, killed him?” says a low, familiar voice, and Matt feels like all the breath has been stolen from him in an instant, feels a horrible cold settle inside of him in its place. “Like you tried to kill me?” “No,” he gasps, his stomach churning. No no no no no no no— This isn’t real, he thinks, it can’t be; he’s hallucinating again, lost to himself. Poor timing, but that’s par for the course. It’s not enough for Matt to fight enemies made of flesh and blood, no; he must create phantoms to haunt his steps, resurrect ghosts long dead. Self-flagellation for the modern penitent. Better lost to himself than this: ten steps behind with a mouthful of blood and defeat. The world around him is still swimming in and out of muffled focus, his tightly wound control over his senses unraveling under the strain of it all: metallic taste of blood, acrid sweat mingling with expensive cologne, adrenaline and arousal, too many heartbeats, too many sounds, too much, it was all too much and he's so tired, he doesn't think he's ever felt so tired before— “What’re you—what does, no—” he tries to say, but his voice falters, catches in his throat as he fights to get the words out past his lips. Played like a fool. Always the fool. His teacher had been right about Matt; but his teacher is gone now, for all the good being right ever did him. Did Fisk do this to you? Fisk, it was Fisk, it was all Fisk— Matt struggles to slow the breaths that hover high up in his chest, fluttering violently like a wild bird trapped in a cage. He can't catch his breath. He can't catch his breath, and he can't tell what's real and what's— Pull it together, he thinks viciously, but Fisk’s presence obliterates his focus, gets deep inside of him where he can't stop it, where he can't shut him out. He leans in close, so close that Matt can feel his too-warm breath in his ear, all but deafening in its proximity, in its intensity, in its intent—and, for some reason that Matt can’t immediately name, can’t immediately place, the feeling is so much more sickening than the blood rapidly seeping out onto his abdomen, than the blade still pressed into his throat. “You’re still so naïve, Matthew,” says Fisk, quietly, for his ears alone, and Matt cannot help the shudder that wracks his already trembling frame. “There are things worse than death for men like you and men like me. Things unbearable that linger, and fester, and take on lives of their own.” Fisk steps back, runs his fingers back and forth across the palm of his hand, a rapid brush up from the bottom followed by a slow return.  "You will only wish you had died, died rather than know what it means to have who you are stripped from you, to understand that you allowed it to happen, to know that you could have stopped it—at the expense, of course, of knowing you've all but placed a death sentence on your partner, of knowing you'll never see him again. The same choice you gave to me, Mr. Murdock. Fair's fair." Matt’s been dealt sh*t hands before, always prided himself on his ability to take the hand he was dealt and shift the cards in his favor, on his ability to hit the mat and get back up again, fists swinging. Now laughter bubbles up inside of him. The ghost of his father had finally abandoned him, it seemed; only fitting that he should face his ruin alone. For it is we who haunt the dead, he remembers bitterly, and not the dead haunt us. He chokes back the hysterical urge to laugh, swallows down the bile that's risen again at the back of his throat as Fisk forcefully grips Matt’s jaw and tilts it up toward the surveillance camera hanging from the corner of the ceiling. Its low, dissonant drone cuts in and out of Matt's hearing like a scratched record, and he feels boneless, uncorporeal. If his body had turned to ice before, now it was dark, drowning water. “They’re watching, Matthew,” Fisk says. “Don’t let the Devil out." Don’t let the Devil out, he says, and Matt hears the promise in the spaces between the words, or your case will fail before it ever makes it to trial, and Foggy will get sentenced, and worse, for aiding and abetting Daredevil. Daredevil—our true—public—enemy— He feels like he’s been dropped into the ocean, all his limbs weighted with stones, unable to find which way is up and which way is down, which way is surface and which way is gone. Surface feels like a fairy-story told to children at night, like enchanted forests.  Light as the breadcrumbs which lead the way up, which lead the way out. This isn’t real, he thinks desperately, like the child who hides under his covers at night from the monsters who live in the closet, who sleep under the bed. If I can’t see it, it can’t be real.  He can practically hear Stick’s response, derisive, cold: C’mon, kid. You, more than anyone, know better than that. Get up. Get up and fight back, your soft partner be damned. Just look at you, a trained warrior—and this is what you’ve become: weak, soft, useless. I was right to leave you when I did— “Time’s up, Mr. Murdock,” Fisk says, dispassionately, and the ghost of his old teacher dissipates like smoke. Then, to Sweeney: “He’s yours. Let your men have him, but he stays alive—or you do not.” A litany of no’s are uttered in quick succession, one after another, as if from someone else, though Matt feels his own lips moving, feels the vibrations in his throat, feels his tongue heavy and dry against the roof of his mouth as the knife is removed from his throat, as different hands roughly grasp his jaw this time, hold him still as the other men press in— Then, nothing; only a few dull sounds in the back of his throat as he resigns himself to muteness, to what he cannot fight, to what he cannot change.  This is the moment Matt understands what it means for his luck to have finally caught up with him, the moment he understands that there is no such thing as paying his dues, that some cards can’t be shifted in his favor. He'd known the risks of Daredevil, had lived for the risks of Daredevil—thrived in the charged spaces between risk and consequence, walked the tightrope between good intention and self-destruction. So, the consequences had arrived. For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them in chains of darkness to be held for— Judgment day.  The formation of a memory like the empty spaces between towering edifices, playing over and over—the smells, he thinks, the smells are what will stay with him the most—but no, because it repeats, and this time it’s the feeling of powerlessness, of observing distantly from somewhere outside of his body, the ringing in his ears rendering his assailants all but invisible to him, if not for their lingering, burning touches on his body, his skin— But no, because the memory repeats and, this time, there’s just nothing there, and he thinks, if he could just remember, just remember what happened, how it happened, he could gather the fragments back together into something that makes sense—except that it repeats, and he remembers, and it still doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t—the blur of faceless touches, the ringing in his ears softening to a quiet drone as nothing happens, nothing, really, because if he can’t remember, then it didn’t, it couldn’t have— —and then he’s on his hands and knees, trembling, vomiting until there’s nothing left but his own blood that he keeps swallowing and he’s dry heaving and shaking as they laugh, and he thinks, he thinks this might be dying because he doesn't understand how anybody could withstand this feeling without dying. His body doesn’t even feel like it belongs to him anymore, because it couldn’t possibly, he can’t think of a reason why— No, he thinks, absently, what happened—it happened to someone else.  He doesn’t try to focus. There is no mind, body, connection, not anymore, not when his mind has violently rejected any connection to his body. In this moment, there are no thoughts of Elektra, or Foggy, or even God; no illusions of a friend or hero coming to his rescue. In his experience, people showing up at the last minute to save the day is a trope strictly relegated to films and books and television shows. In real life, people rarely show up at the last minute to save the day. In Matt’s experience, no one ever shows up at all. Maybe later he’ll rewrite the story; give it a better ending, a better beginning, more realistic, more true—something that makes more sense. Mostly, he remembers that it started and he remembers that it ended; but it felt like it never would, and he feels like, somehow, it never will.   III.   The night passes slowly. He trades incoherent banter with phantoms and mumbles apologies to ghosts. His body trembles violently, and the touch of his own fingertips feels alien as he presses the blood back into his wounds. He can’t remember why. Memory can keep its secrets, he thinks, as a rat scurries across the floor of his new cell.   —   Morning brings a kind of clarity. Unwanted, but there nonetheless. His phantoms (mostly) fade away at the relentless hammering of a bell. Father Lantom lingers. Something to do with Catholic school, he thinks. “Is there a problem, inmate? Why aren’t you prepared for the count?” There’s a heartbeat at the entrance to his cell; he probably should have noticed it before, but there are so many heartbeats, and so many voices, and the effort to focus his senses would only draw energy away from the effort to get to his feet without collapsing. The thought of being touched by anyone else right now is too much for Matt to bear. “No,” Matt says as he shuffles carefully to stand in front of his bed. He holds his arms behind his back in compliance, gritting his teeth against the low moan that rises in his throat. “Sorry.” “Next time you’re late for the count,” the guard says irritably, his hand resting on the baton at his side, “you’ll find out what disciplinary action means, Murdock.”   —   Attending meals is non-negotiable, evidently. Inmates in general population are not permitted to stay in their cells during mealtimes. In addition to learning that neat fact, Matt also learns that asking questions is considered ‘non-compliance’ and, therefore, also cause for disciplinary action. Matt not-so-secretly thinks that the guard just wanted an excuse to use force, but that doesn’t change the fact that he ends up on his knees again, unable to defend himself without giving away his secret. I am not Daredevil, he thinks, swallowing down the burning desire to fight back. It settles in his stomach like hot coals, waiting to burst into flames inside of him. The cafeteria is only a five-minute walk from Matt’s new cell, but the assault of catcalls and jeering on his ears, the sudden touches and hisses, makes it feel endless. Worse, there were so many men—he doesn't know which ones were in the room with him, which ones that— Sweeney signals his approach with the pungent, cloying odor of cigar smoke and expensive alcohol; the combination causes nausea to rise up in the back of Matt's throat. “You look real down this morning, Murdock,” he murmurs, standing close, too close. “So, listen, I’m gonna make this easy for you. This, last night, will just be a taste of what the next few years are gonna look like for you in here. Or, you can choose option B: tell your partner that I want out, and that I want him to get me the deal. Fisk can rot in hell for all I care. I’ll even delete that footage of you—” Don’t let the Devil out— “You have no idea what’s coming for you, Sweeney,” Matt spits, and turns to walk away from the cafeteria line. But the world spins disorientingly around him in vertigo not felt since he was a child: the rough fabric of his father’s shirt pressing desperately against Matt's eyes as the blue sky eroded away like film that had caught fire. I can’t see, I can’t see— He grasps for something to hold onto, something to stabilize himself, but finds nothing, ears ringing, his senses overwhelmed. He stumbles backward into another inmate, and mocking laughter erupts from the line. Flashes of memory return to him: on his knees gasping for breath while they laugh— All the helplessness inside of him transforms into rage in an instant, so suddenly that it takes his breath away—but before he can do anything there are hands grasping roughly at his arms, and he's hauled away.    —   Solitary. Matt registers the small, enclosed space as the gate clicks loudly shut behind him, the footsteps of the two prison guards walking away, but he is on his hands and knees in the filth and grime of countless inmates before him and he can hardly find a shred of feeling left in him to care. His mind is a constant replaying of his latest disaster, his most recent self-destruction; a litany of no’s like a prayer, don’t let the Devil out— His jaw clicks tight against the sudden onslaught of memories and he forcefully jerks his body back against the wall of the cell, sucks in a sharp breath of air through his nose and presses one trembling hand against the throbbing wound at his side. He can feel blood seeping out and through his new prison uniform. He can't remember what happened to the other uniform, ripped, stained, ruined; he supposes they must have thrown it away when they took it off of him. No evidence, no crime. Time passes slowly. He reviews all of Foggy’s cases in his mind, but the exercise is pointless, and he knows it. He’s never heard Foggy even mention Sweeney’s name, let alone mention attending any appeals. Beneath the hurt, Matt feels distantly pleased, vindicated, even, that he’s not the only one who ever kept secrets in their friendship. Still, the secret is out, and now Sweeney knows that hurting Matt hurts Foggy, knows that bending Matt will get Foggy to do whatever it takes to keep Matt from breaking. Fisk may have used the lowlife crime boss to get his revenge, but Sweeney used him right back. It’s almost laughable. Almost. “In conclusion, ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” Matt says, bitterly, “I’m the idiot who can f*** things up for the people I love even from behind bars.” His own voice sounds foreign to him and Matt hesitates to consider the ramifications of this feeling of decorporealization. A sudden echo of footsteps from the corridor catches his attention, then a heartbeat from the other side of the bars. A guard, judging by the sound of callused fingertips impatiently brushing against a baton. “Losing it already, Murdock?” he jeers. “Get up, your attorney’s here.” Matt doesn’t rise to the bait, doesn’t even shift to acknowledge the guard's presence; he’s found that if he holds himself absolutely still, he can slow the spinning and repress the nausea to tolerable levels, slightly stabilize his core temperature from its extreme ricocheting between hot and cold, burning and shivering. He'd given up trying to stop his body from its constant, violent trembling; it'd started at some point during the night, and hadn't taken a break from it since. “Hey, you hear me? Thought you were blind, not deaf!” snaps the guard, and he slides a key into the lock. Matt hears a soft click as the latch unlocks, and the gate swings open. “Your lawyer’s here and he wants to see you. Get up.” “I’m staying here,” Matt says flatly. “I don’t want to see him.” “I don’t give a sh*t what you want, inmate—your a**hole attorney is threatening to file a lawsuit against this entire prison if he doesn’t get to see you, and I’m not gonna be the sorry son of a bitch who gets held responsible. So, get up, and get moving.” Matt doesn’t bother to point out all the lawsuits they would have on their hands if word ever got out about even half of went on in here. Then again, the warden seems capable of making anything he wants to disappear. A veritable bureaucratic magician. The violence Matt had witnessed in here even before this, the things he heard for weeks on end— He stands up slowly, one trembling hand still pressed against the wound at his side, his shoulder pressed gingerly against the wall for support. The guard unsnaps a leather pouch, then gestures wordlessly with a pair of handcuffs for Matt to put his hands out in front of him. Matt grits his teeth, pointedly doesn’t react. I am not Daredevil— “Oh, f***’s sake,” the guard mutters. “Hold your hands out in front you, inmate.” “Is that really necessary?” scoffs Matt. Still, he holds his arms out, bloodied palms splayed up. “I was indicted on suspicion of perjury and obstruction of justice, not for running a fight club.” The irony of the defense isn’t lost on Matt. “And yet, here you are in solitary for fighting with another inmate. Want to avoid cuffs, Murdock? Learn to keep your hands to yourself and your mouth shut. Your fancy degree don’t mean sh*t in here.” The cold metal clicks shut around his aching wrists— You're still so naïve, Matthew— —and the guard walks him down the cellblock. Matt walks slowly, the only act of resistance left to him, feeling suddenly furious that Foggy keeps returning to the prison, keeps risking his safety; doesn’t he understand that Matt can’t keep him safe anymore? Can’t even keep himself safe. He still feels drugged, like he’s only witnessing everything from somewhere deep inside his own body, not actually living it. Like if he tried to speak, he’d be able to say nothing at all. The moment they enter, Foggy is all movement and barely restrained displeasure. He stands up, his fingertips pressing against the plexiglass that separates them, the clean scent of his cologne cutting through the lingering stench of the prison, and Matt, against himself, is grateful for it, for the sense of gentleness and stability that is carried with it. Surrounding yourself with soft stuff isn't life, it's death— “Get those cuffs off of him,” Foggy demands, redirecting Matt's attention away from phantoms lingering in the corners of the room. “This institution may be in the business of dehumanizing inmates, but he’s a non-violent offender awaiting trial, and I’m here to have a civilized conversation with a human being. Get them off, and then get out.” The guard’s heartbeat speeds up in a rush of anger, but he complies. Matt suffers the touch of the guard once more as he removes the cuffs from around his wrists. Tries not to think about the next time the cuffs will go back on, back off, back on; the endless violations of bodily autonomy waiting for him that he can do nothing about.  “What the hell, Foggy,” Matt bites out the moment the guard has left the room. "You may get to leave at the end of this meeting, but I don’t. Maybe try not to make me enemy number one of every single guard in here.” “What do you mean every single guard? Have other guards been mistreating you?” asks Foggy, and his tone indicates that he’s prepared to pick a fight with every single guard that has even so much as looked at Matt. “Jesus, Foggy,” mutters Matt. “That’s the part you hear? I just meant that I don’t need you to antagonize the guards for me on my first day in general population, ok?” “Not ok, Matt," snaps Foggy, but he releases a deep breath of his own and stops pacing long enough to sit down across the table from Matt. The breath hardly helped, Matt thinks, he can still hear Foggy’s heart racing like a cornered animal. “Matt,” Foggy starts to say, then falters, sits down across from him and tries again. “Listen. I don’t know what strings got pulled to transfer you to general population, but I’m working on it. It wasn’t a legal transfer. I’m filing a transfer back to protective custody while Karen is investigating who’s behind this. In the meantime, I just—I need you to keep your head down, ok? There's—there's someone else in here, other than Fisk—someone who has it out for you... and for me." “Foggy, it's fine,” Matt interrupts, not wanting to draw this out any longer than he has to. “I already know about Sweeney.” “Sh*t,” Foggy curses. “Did something happen between you two? Did Sweeney—are you—is that why you’re in solitary? Wait, no, did something happen last night? Is that why he sent that message to me?” For one long, disorienting moment, Matt thinks he’s going to be sick again. The nausea rises up in his throat, and he forces himself to swallow it down and keep it down. The nausea roils, threatens to rise again, his body burning cold with the effort to keep it in check. His very own Sisyphean punishment, he thinks. How appropriate. A fitting punishment for the arrogant hero who dared to challenge a god. What hubris, what naïveté. “What did Sweeney send to you,” Matt bites out through gritted teeth, certain that if he opens his mouth any more he’ll lose the fight with his stomach. “Foggy, what did he send you?” “Just, a text message," Foggy says, his pulse quickening as the clean scent of his sweat begins to sour with fear. "What else would he send me, Matt?” The rigidity of Matt’s posture softens ever so slightly. He opens his mouth to talk, but finds that nothing comes out. He licks his lips, tries again: "I don't, it doesn't matter. I, just, what did he say?" A few moments pass before Foggy answers, and he thinks that Foggy won’t let it go, whatever it is that’s bothering him about Matt’s response. Matt tilts his head back up from the table. Defiantly tries to meet Foggy’s eyes. Probably ends up looking somewhere over his left shoulder. “Sweeney was just letting me know that he’s in here with you, Matt,” Foggy concedes, his shoulders collapsing with a resigned exhale. “Probably trying to make me sweat. But then I get here first thing this morning and they tell me that you’ve somehow already managed to land yourself in solitary. Seriously, Matt, what the hell happened? Did he provoke you into a fight?” "Nothing happened," Matt replies bitterly, almost surprised at his own reaction, that he can still feel so hurt over something as trivial as this: that this must have been Matt's fault, that Matt allowed himself to be provoked into recklessness again.  “Jesus, Matt, do you seriously expect me to believe that? I mean, I know you can’t actually see what you look like, but I'm, I’m personally having major flashbacks to that time I found you dying on your apartment floor,” Foggy snaps back, leaning toward the plexiglass as he finishes his rant in a furious whisper. “So, can you, just, for once in your freaking life be straight with me? Because I really don’t want to drag Jessica or Karen into this, really, really don’t want to interrogate every single guard in here, but if you won’t tell me what’s going on—" Foggy’s breath is high in chest, and his pulse is elevated with emotion, but his heartbeat is steady, no hint of a bluff. Panic rises up in Matt at the thought of—no. Foggy can’t. He can’t— They're watching, Matthew—  

Name: Lillian Marie WinchesterDate of birth: May 2, 1983Place of birth:  Lawrence, KansasSpecies: HumanHair Color: Dark BrownEye Color: Dark BrownHeight: 5'2Birthmarks: FamilyMother: Mary WinchesterFather: John WinchesterBrother: Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester Sister: NoneOther: Twin Children

The Heartbreak    Hearing Sam in the distance as she would be hiding. Hearing a couple of gunshots go off. Then a scream. It was Mindy. Then another scream. Then silence filled the room right outside. Managing to take a few deep breaths as she continued to hide until cue. Sam was fighting Ghostface again then this time Sam ran into the room where she was hiding in trying to close the door but Ghostface put their leg in the way preventing the door from closing all the way.Sam held a buck knife in hand and started swinging then Ghostface dodged the knife swings then grabbed Sam's bloody arm digging fingers into her open wound before knocking Sam back into the wall. But Sam had the gun near her and fired two shots into Ghostfaces body dropping him. Then as Sam went nearing the closet, she knew that it was time. Opening the closet door they came out just as Sam turned to her, a shocked look across her face as she aimed the gun right at their head looking to pull the trigger. They stood there wearing the mask and shroud as she dug her own knife into the side of Sam's ribcage hearing her scream then twisted it. Now it was time for the big reveal, the heart break.Removing the mask, it was revealed to be TARA. A darker look in her eyes as Sam would drop to a knee, "Tara?" A confused look written across Sam's facial features as she couldn't believe it. Then taking the knife out as she wiped the blade in front of her. "Why? How?" Sam looked more confused than afraid in this moment. The other Ghostface had managed to recover and stood up.Taking out the voice modulator from her pocket and brought it up to her lips. "Surprise, Sam". Tossing the voice modulator to the side, "but are you really that surprised, Sam? After everything that's happened, there was only one way this thing could of gone. Everyone looked to you, and thought you would be the one to turn. I was your f***ing anchor and broke you from all of those trances. Call my motive whatever you want. Abandonment issues. Lack of being loved".Sam held onto her wound listening to Tara, "but, why?" Tears coming down her cheek from her biggest heartbreak yet. "Tara, I've always loved you. I don't understa-"."Stop talking" Tara screamed at her sister pointing the knife at her own sister. "Stop f***ing talking before you give me a headache. You may of loved me, Sam, but not enough. Dad left because you weren't his. Mom turned into a drunk and ended up not giving two sh*ts about me. Then you came back into my life, Chad got closer. Then Chad died and it opened my eyes. I realized that no story truly has a happy ending because romance is overrated"."It's TARA?" Mindy's voice behind as she slowly came into the room with a gun in hand, stab wounds shown all over her right arm as the other Ghostface grabbed Mindy and held their knife at her throat. "Keep her there" she commanded. Then turned back to Sam, tears streaming down her own cheek, "what happened after New York? You left again. But you should of seen the way Danny looked at me after you left" wanting to get under her sister's skin as she came closer and brought the blade against her throat. "The majority of the world looked up to you, talked about you wanting to be you. I was just the forgotten baby sister who can go f*** herself, right? I have every reason to do this and my actions are justified, but are yours? Compare me to every f*** up in this family, and I'm seen as the angel among devils. But even the devil was once an angel"."But the best part has yet to come" taking a step away, "because this is just one half of tonight's reveals, isn't that right, partner?" Turning to the other Ghostface and they nodded their head. Then a sinister smile came across her face. "If you think I was a jaw dropper, then you are going to love this next part". Tara nodded to her partner as they would grab the end of the mouth of the mask then started to remove it.      

Father's day was always a bit hard for Isabella, she had lost her father when she was ten years old. She tried to make a trip to New York around that year, she was going to stay in Seattle although she had sent money to her mother to buy flowers for her father's grave site. She had much work going on with the boutique that she couldn't leave for the day. She felt bad but one thing that helped her was being able to write a letter, she wrote letters almost every year to her father, she never sent them, she kept them. This year, wouldn't be any different. Sitting down at her desk, she started to write the letter: Dear dad,Where can I begin? Its been so long since you left us, I always wonder if you would be proud of me and if you would be proud of  Aaron, your son, my brother. You would probably be upset at him for what he has been to. You probably wouldn't be happy that I left New York but perhaps you would of understand why I left. I left because mostly everything there reminded me of heartaches and sad times, great times because of you but sad because you are not here anymore. I am thankful to have had a father like you. You were strong, sweet, loving, caring and truly amazing. I know that you are above us and watching us, I feel you near me all the time. I hope I am making you proud  papà, I miss you so much. Mom is doing great and she never remarried, she always did say that you were her one true love, I hope to one day find the kind of love you two had. I miss you every day dad, I miss you so much, they say that time makes the pain easier but I feel that it is still there, it hurts badly. Thank you for being the best father and even though you left too soon, I know you are guiding me through your spirit. Happy Father's Day, papà! Ti Amo Molto! Mi Manchi Molto! Your daugher,Isa After writing the letter, she started to feel the tears coming down her cheeks. Her dog Mason started to get closer to her and snuggled up with her. "I'm sorry baby it just that it hurts still" she said softly, wiping the tears off her face and cudddling with her dog. 

  THE MANY FACES OF EASTON.outfit 1. Easy doesn't really have a work uniform when he goes to work because it's his shop and he wears whatever is comfortable. Being that he works at a surf shop that sells swimwear and all swim toys and things, mostly surfboards he likes to wear something that is welcoming to the customers eyes. Bright colors and his charming perfect smile seems to make his customers happy and he aims to please.outfit 2. Easton is always in the water. When he's not with family or friends or at work, he's in the water and he has the endless supply of swim shorts, all kinds, every single color. He even has rash guards of every color but only ever wears that when he's surfing and even then he hardly ever wears it because he likes getting dark and feeling the sun on his skin and showing off his tattoos.outfit 3. Easy likes to look good always, especially for a nice event. He likes to use his famous cologne he's known for bringing all the ladies in with his scent and his charm. He's proud of his sleeve tattoo, so anything to show it off he will. As you can see in the third photo he also just wants to look aesthetically pleasing to post on the gram. Image is everything to him.There is no trend, if anything Easton likes to start trends, and when he does it makes him happy.