Archive of Our Own

“You can’t stop me, Red,” Frank says, encounter after encounter, like a broken record, even with three of his finger bones cracked under the butt of his own gun.

“Watch me,” Matt snarls, but Frank hacks a laugh through his own bloody teeth. “Uhhun. What are you gonna do with me? I was in prison for about five hours,” Frank points out, ruthlessly. “And I killed fourteen more people. Did that part not make the news?”

Matt punches him in the face again. Even though he’s down.

“What I do, it’s not on you,” Frank mutters, lower, truculent, teeth catching a little on his split and swollen lips.

“What happened to that choice on the rooftop,” Matt snarls, “What about prevention, what about that -”

“It was bullshit,” Frank growls. And his heart does a squirmy thing - not a lie, but not all true. Believes it for Matt, maybe, but not for himself. “I just wanted to crack you.” Half-lie, again, and Matt wonders what else he wanted, if he even knows. If he wanted to die that night.

“You won’t kill me, so you can’t stop me. That’s your choice, Red. The rest is mine. On me. S’what choices are.” Matt leaves him tied up on a different rooftop, which he expects will give him a few hours, at least, to get the guy he’s pursuing into custody. But it pings around his head later, at odd times, lime juice stinging in his scraped knuckles at a taco stand, lying awake and aching in his silk sheets, listening to the early-morning rumble of the garbage trucks before rush hour.

It’s not on you.

Frank reminds him of those horrible philosophy exercises that were extra reading in his torts class, with the train always barreling down a split track, with different people tied on each side. Matt can save some people from him, sure. But you can’t ever stop the train.

“This isn’t your fight, Red,” Frank says, the next time Matt manages to kick his ass. “There are people you can stop. Quit wasting your time on me.”

“I can stop people now? I thought I was a half measure,” Matt spits out, trying not to throw up at the sounds coming from the sloshing synovial fluid in Frank’s dislocated shoulder.

“Eh,” Frank says, lurching against the brick wall, using his own body weight to shove the joint back into place with a horrible pop. “Yeah. But some crooks are only half-baked to start with.”

It catches him by surprise, right under the ribs; Matt doesn’t mean to laugh so hard.

*

Something shifts inside him; a thrown switch, a gear catching its teeth. The sharp winter sunlight stops feeling like acid on his face; the untouched, blood-speckled depression on Elektra’s side of the bed feels more like a shallow grave than a bottomless pit. Instead of lying cold under the covers, listening to the banal lives of his neighbors and waiting for dusk, Matt puts on civilian clothes and goes outside in them for the first time since Karen.

Matt tracks Foggy for most of the day, just lets his feet take him there before he can think about it too much and talk himself out of it, from his new coffee place to his new office to his new bar. His shampoo is the same but there’s a note of cucumber-based hair gel added to the mix now, and it doesn’t swish as much - combed back, Matt realizes, in lieu of getting it cut. He has a new assistant too, an incredibly chipper girl with too much lavender body wash whose clacking heels make Matt grind his teeth.

“Tell me the truth,” Foggy cajoles as he takes a stack of files, and Matt clenches his hands around his cane. “You were a cheerleader, weren’t you? Cheer captain! Queen of the quad.”

“I was a mathlete, Mister Nelson.”

“Well, what are you doing here, then? Go invent some robots, take over the world.”

“Maybe I am,” she says, brightly, spritely, either out of natural inclination or because of Foggy’s talent for putting people at ease, or both. “Don’t blow my cover, or I’ll have to kill you.”

Foggy gasps in mock horror.

“You wouldn’t! I’m the best boss!”

“Yes, Mister Nelson,” she agrees gamely, with a choral cadence like it’s the rote required answer, but her heart trips along in time. Of course it’s true; of course he is.

Matt tells himself this is what he wanted to hear. That Foggy’s settling in, that he’s making friends who won’t cover his gentle hands in blood, that he’s happy. He escaped Matt’s orbit, he survived Matt, and thank god someone could. Matt made the right choice; it’s better if their worlds don’t touch. He gives himself the rest of the day to listen. Just to hammer home the lesson. Then he goes back to his apartment and starts filling out job applications.

*

Spring lingers and drips and melts into the muggy crush of summer. Foggy impresses people, and Matt gets a lot of rejection notices. Karen gets into trouble and valiantly rescues herself; Matt flinches, poised to leap, when the hints of pepper spray drift downwind. He runs into Frank once when he’s following her, like the creepiest comedy of errors, Frank muttering “Damnit, Red, she’ll see you in that clown costume,” and Matt mouthing are you spying on her through a rifle scope you maniac as clearly as he can.

Mutual stalking aside, Frank is spending less time pursuing targets in the Kitchen proper; Matt stops seeking him out, unless he can smell enough smoke and blood to know Frank is already post-firefight. There’s a terrible vertigo in being near Frank and not fighting him, in doing nothing, perching side by side in the high wind over the city, or sharing 24 hour take-out and coffee before dawn in a basement weapons locker with muffling concrete acoustics. Frank doesn’t think what Matt does is worth it, but he never phrases it as Matt doing not enough anymore, not after shoving him off the ship into the river. He understands, wordlessly, what drives Matt forward and - appreciates, if not precisely respects, what holds him back.

He stops bothering to argue whenever Matt slips back into trying to convince him about the value of life. He just gets up and leaves: walks the dog, or puts another pot of coffee on. It’s galling, impassively vicious, though Matt doesn’t know if Frank knows how affecting it is. Matt wishes he could say it didn’t work on him so well, that his pavlovian response to footsteps, to wordless leaving wasn’t just as strong as any poor fucking lab dog who’d been electrocuted a dozen times, but it kind of is. It takes exactly six departures for Frank to train Matt out of trying to save him.

They belong, stubbornly, in the same world: Matt can’t pull him out, or drag him down.

Sometimes they talk about things other than murder and sometimes they don’t talk about anything at all, but after that it’s easy being near Frank, even as everyone else in his life is lucky enough to slip away, easy and groundless and strange, it’s such a relief. The rhythm of Frank is relaxing, his slow athlete’s heart, the smooth practiced clicks of guns taken apart and put back together, the measure of his deliberate footsteps. It’s easy just to listen without having to justify anything, without having to share or explain or hide his bruises, and Frank doesn’t care to justify anything to him either.

Frank makes his own damn choices. When Frank hurts people, it’s not Matt’s fault. When Frank gets hurt, it’s not Matt’s fault. Everything smells like oil and metal and blood, like half the city does, but Frank is a train, or leukemia, or a tidal wave. Unstoppable. Frank is living, bleeding proof that some terrible things in the world are not Matt’s fault. It’s like crawling out of the subway, the shocking pressure of tons of earth and stone and steel and scuttling life overhead suddenly giving way to open sky.

*

“...someone else has been here,” Matt realizes, slipping into Frank’s latest base as summer creeps toward its zenith, a tiny oven loft with scant breeze through the busted window but decent roof access. Who the hell would Frank let in? Who talks to him, other than Matt? But there’s definitely someone.

He can smell red bull and gatorade and hot pockets - none of them Frank’s particular vices - and too recent to have been the legacy of the previous tenant, if there even was such a person. Matt suspects from the lingering mildew and only recently-removed mouse droppings that Frank may actually be squatting. There’s faint sweat from someone less physically healthy than Frank is, though about the same age, cheap laundry detergent, and a weird chemical bitterness that he identifies, very suddenly, when he stops trying to think of it and lets his brain remember: the keyboards and Landman & Zack. The bittering agent is a deliberate additive in the compressed air dusters, to discourage huffing.

“Jealous, Red?” Frank asks, and - it’s not a joke. Matt wishes it was a joke. There’s no clean way to deny it.

When the facts aren’t on your side, argue the law.

“If you’re dragging someone else into this -”

“He found me,” Frank says, clipped.

”Which definitely suggests he’s trustworthy,” Matt switches tack immediately. “You think Fisk is the only scumbag who’d be delighted to use you -”

“I say anything about trust?” Frank asks, gravelly, aiming for amused but missing by a mile.

“He was here,” Matt reiterates. He likes to think it speaks for itself. There are some deeply shady people Frank has to deal with - informants, arms dealers, the occasional forger - but they never get to see where he sleeps. Matt thought.

“Don’t,” Frank warns him heavily. “Don’t yank this thread. You fight with him, you fight with me, and we already know that goes nowhere fast.”

“So that’s how it is,” Matt huffs, rocking a little in his boots, wanting to lash out at something with no appropriate targets.

“Has been for awhile,” Frank informs him, calmly, bloodlessly. He has a way of conveying a shrug without actually bothering to do it. “You wouldn’t find him anyway. Man’s a ghost, way better at it than me.”

Matt wouldn’t bet against himself. But he can’t tip off the police on someone who doesn’t appear to exist, and - he doesn’t want Mister Computer Cleaner informing on Frank and subjecting the Kitchen to another manhunt, so -

“Fine,” he grinds out, swallows, hates it. “I’ll leave it.”

“What are you here for?” Frank says, instead of thanking Matt for his entirely unearned forbearance for Frank’s mysterious and probably terrible accomplices. He’s already said his piece.

“...have you heard anything about new designer drugs coming in lately? No one’s OD’ed yet, but four different junkies have been through the ER with dyskinesia and none of them remember later what they took.”

Frank hums and gets out a notebook.

“Tell me where they were picked up.”

Matt sits. And - settles. And tells him.

It’s nothing like fighting next to -

(No, no, he can’t, he can’t think about that.)

It’s not a rush. It’s not a sizzling acrobatic high. But it works, somehow, it feels real and solid as the rough woodgrain of Frank’s unvarnished table, steady as the scratch of his pen. They do the work.

*

Matt keeps checking on Foggy. Just - to make sure he’s happy. Which he is, sometimes, except when he isn’t, when he’s all quiet sighs and jokes that come out just a little pinched and late nights tossing in his sheets, except when he comes home from eighteen-hour days and drinks in silence before he goes to bed.

“What’s wrong with Foggy?” He asks Karen, while she’s sitting outside a café, fifteen minutes early to meet a source.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Karen says, chair screeching a little on the sidewalk as she jerks. “You’re lucky we’re in public, Murdock.”

(I’d kick your ass, am I lying about that?)

“Please,” Matt says.

“Maybe you should ask him,” Karen tells him, not mean but hard, unflinching.

“I can’t,” Matt stammers, doesn’t know how to explain how it’s different. Karen liked him, the man she thought he was, but she never gave up a whole future for him, never planned her life around him. Karen is so strong, slim and curved and chiming as she slices through the world, like one of Stick’s swords, and Matt can do this, can reach out without ruining her.

Karen shakes her head, hair brushing in soft wisps against her shoulders.

“Well, there you go,” she says, tightly, blunt and disappointed, and Matt doesn’t understand what the answer even was. “Now get out of here before you scare off my contact.”

Matt goes. It was all the time he had anyway; he has a job again, lunch breaks and all. He goes back to his desk without eating, and finds one of Frank’s disgusting ration bars sitting on top of his depositions. He laughs because he doesn’t know what else to do, scrubs a hand over his face, chokes it down.

*

It’s easy to kiss him, to lean in one crisp autumn night when the sirens are echoing in his head so badly he can’t tell how many of them are real, and his skin is crawling from the interminable drip and sting of his own sweat. Matt wants to scream, to stop, to peel off everything down to his bones and clatter in a heap instead of feeling so much, instead of choking on smog and a million eternally buzzing streetlights. He needs Frank to touch him, needs rough steady hands to blot out all the static, needs someone to lift his bloody thrashing heart out of his chest for a while without flinching.

Frank’s mouth is soft, impossibly, incongruously: ordinary flesh, not even chapped. Matt doesn’t understand it for a moment. Frank is supposed to run him over. Frank is supposed to be the train.

Matt presses harder, whines with the urgency sparking inside him, and the bone of Frank’s mandible under the skin is reassuringly solid, refuses to give way, refuses to let Matt in. Frank grabs him at the shoulders, grips tight enough that Matt can feel the pressure through the armor, holds him a few inches back. Matt could twist out of it in an instant but he doesn’t, sags a little, lets Frank hold him up.

“You hit your head tonight?” Frank asks, voice raspy like the stubble on his cheeks, like a secret rhyme.

“No,” Matt lies. Not hard, anyway. “Say no if you’re saying it, don’t be a fucking gentleman with me -”

“Ain’t gonna be a handy monster you can feed yourself to, either,” Frank growls when Matt falls abortively silent, twitching with impatience and resentment and sheer insuppressible reflex at the overload that’s devouring him already. Twisting on the hook.

“Just touch me,” Matt begs, ashamed of himself but relieved too, at the unprecedented ease with which his ugly, needy insides come spilling out. There’s no point in hiding himself from Frank, because he’s never going to be impressed anyway. “That’s all I want, I can’t - my head’s so full of everything, but it doesn’t matter around you.”

Frank makes a low noise, a thoughtful hum, then hauls Matt over to the reinforced slab of the safehouse door, pins him there, gives him what he needs.

*

When Matt wakes up Frank’s scanner is reeling off mid-morning trivialities - codes for vandalism, suspected-truant skateboarders, a suspicious package in the subway that is far more likely full of literal dirty laundry or weird bootleg porn than a bomb. Matt can smell fresh dark coffee (although those are the only two things it has going for it - Frank’s not one for luxuries), a hint of cheap shaving cream, and ink from a ballpoint pen. There’s a quiet schick sound as Frank uses a straightedge to draw a sharp line in one neat motion, maybe on a map. He seems like the type. Matt stretches, feels all his assorted aches, and doesn’t ask.

He shuffles naked across the cool unfinished floor and kisses Frank’s smooth cheek as a diversion, engaging in a brief tussle over the coffee cup, before emerging victorious with his paltry but piping hot spoils. He sticks his tongue out when Frank grumbles at him, and Frank tilts his chair back contemplatively on two legs, then smacks Matt’s ass with the ruler he just used on the map, sharp and quick. Matt jerks, spills hot coffee on his chest, curses loudly.

“Justice for the wicked, Red,” Frank drawls, and Matt can hear in the shape of it that he’s fighting not to smile. Why he bothers when he knows Matt can’t see it Matt wouldn’t dare to guess.

“Worth it,” Matt tells him, because the coffee isn’t but the easy loose-limbed feeling is. He can’t remember the last time he woke up after someone else who was in his space, instead of jerking awake with their changing noises - probably not since some terrible hangover during college. “Is Justice going to give me a napkin or is that too close to compromise?”

Frank throws a rag at his face - definitely the one he cleans guns with, going by the smell. Matt catches it mid air, wrinkles his nose but wipes himself off anyway, gulps down the rest of the coffee in a few mouthfuls.

“What time is it?” he asks, stealing a pair of jeans and a too-big T-shirt that doesn’t feel like it has a skull on it, shoving the crumpled pieces of his armor into a duffle bag that also smells like guns. “I have court at noon,” and it almost doesn’t hurt anymore, his lonely cubicle in the frantic ant farm of the New York Legal Aid Society, barricaded in stacks of braille paperwork like a medieval fortress. Frank snorts, but Matt cuts him off. “It’s traffic court, not mobsters. But if she loses her license she’ll lose her job too, probably custody -”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re the savior of the unfortunate,” Frank mutters, pouring himself a new cup of coffee, but he isn’t lying. “It’s barely ten, you have time to get your other monkey suit.”

Matt kisses him again before he leaves, quick but sweet on the lips when Frank puts a pair of plastic dollar-store sunglasses on his nose. “Don’t be weird,” Frank tells him, “These are the pink ones, they came with the pack but they’d do shit-all for making me inconspicuous.”

“I’m not being weird,” Matt says, manages to bite back the part of him that wants to say you’re weird with no idea what he means by it, like a giggling middle schooler.

“Mmm,” Frank says, unconvinced.

*

Next time, Matt doesn’t wait until he’s jumping out of his skin to make a move.

He’s just - hungry, a raw, coiling, idle feeling strung through his body, like a slow-sliding python draped over tree branches. Or maybe he’s the python - Matt feels like a cold-blooded animal, whenever the Devil’s fire burns out at the end of a patrol, leaves him with heavy boots and raw knuckles and a hollow chest scattered with cinders. Before, he’d slink into work and bask in Foggy’s easy jokes and Karen’s foul-mouthed compassion like sunlight. The gratitude of the people he helps at the Society now is a poor substitute, a cluster of candle flames - bright spots in a dark home, but too small and transient for any warmth to penetrate past the skin.

Frank isn’t any kind of light. He’s cold-blooded too, more than Matt is, tracks his victims and executes them with perfect sangfroid. He lives in a cell, eats for fuel and nothing else, allows himself no comforts. Frank is austere out of deliberate intention instead of guilt and forgetfulness and it’s - horrifying, frankly, it makes Matt’s stomach turn over when he thinks about it too long, like a precariously-recovering anorexic looking at photoshopped models, halfway between that can’t be real, a human can’t do that and there but for the grace of god and but what if I could, after all.

Frank seems in some perverse and visceral way to thrive on it, like the ancient fish recently discovered only in antarctic waters, with antifreeze proteins in their veins and ice crystals preserved between their bones, even in summer. He likes being able to pack and move his base in an hour, hardware included, no trace left behind. He keeps everything sorted in a way that makes it easy for Matt to navigate. He lets his mission absorb him completely, in a way Matt never really could manage without breaking down, spinning out. His shoulders are loose and his breath even the more killing he’s done, the more neatly arranged he keeps his ever-increasing, perpetually-polished armory.

Cold as the grave. Frank’s mouth is cold the next time Matt kisses him, heat whisked away from him on the wind as he dismantles and packs up his rifle and scope; it feels stranger for Matt to run his hands over the curves of muscle under his coat and find plain warmth there, human shoulders, human arms. He isn’t stone, no matter how long he’s been perched up here, like the gloomiest gargoyle; he isn’t dead like he claims to be, like so many of the people Matt’s failed. They’re a sick, sorry, cold-blooded pair, but their hearts are still beating, and they can make up for it with friction, shedding armor like scales and sliding skin on skin, teeth scraping without piercing, without poison.

But first, Matt yanks Frank’s belt open and goes down on him right there on the roof, in front of God and the incurious pigeons and the three stars Matt has been told can be seen even through the city haze. Frank hisses and pulls at the helmet and Matt thinks he’s pushing him away for a minute, Matt hates it with a hot flare of irrational anger like walking over one of the subway vent grates in the sidewalk. How dare he, Matt thinks, how dare he touch Matt back and then act like he’s above this, like he doesn’t secretly need it too. Except he’s only tugging the mask off, slides chilled fingertips into Matt’s hair, stutters and tries not yank.

Ha, Matt thinks, his smirk mostly distended out of identifiable shape around Frank’s cock, each time Frank fails and betrays his appreciation with an unintended thrust or a quiet gasp or a clenched fist stinging Matt’s scalp like a scatter of sparks. It all feels like an off-the-record confession that Frank isn’t just a killing machine, that he can’t survive on MREs, coffee, and obsession after all. He wants. He enjoys.

Matt pushes his nose right into the coarse patch of Frank’s pubic hair, smells plain soap and sweat and maleness, unadulterated and unapologetic, his throat working in regular, futile gulps. Frank forces his hands loose and strokes through Matt’s hair a few times in a way Matt knows, from pulling the same move on girls, is all about just savoring the softness of their hair. He swallows when Frank comes, nasty-bitter from all the coffee and canned drek, but Matt keeps licking his tingling lips afterward, savoring the evidence of Frank’s carnality.

*

It’s not every night. It’s not every week. But when he’s restless, or frustrated, or just lonely, when he needs to hear something other than curt, harried prosecutors or feel something other muggers’ noses crunching under his fists, he tracks Frank down, wherever he’s lurking, fucks him until Matt can breathe again.

Now they’re lying together-but-not-quite, sweat drying in the chilly unheated box of a room, Frank’s breath angled in the way that means he’s already back to watching the exit. Matt reaches over and flicks his nose.

“I’d hear anyone coming,” he whispers, doesn’t know why he’s whispering. Frank hmphs.

Matt rolls back on top of him, rests his head on Frank’s chest, physically picks up one of Frank’s hands and puts it on his hair, catlike and shameless. Frank huffs but pets obediently.

*

Elektra comes back, or most of her does.

A year to the day, Matt realizes, dizzy with whatever they dosed him on, as a dozen gloved hands drag him before her - her throne, that’s definitely a throne.

“Did you miss me?” She asks, sickly-sweet and scalding, like wine that’s gone to vinegar, acid on her tongue.

He did and he didn’t, bricked it up inside himself and let the anguish suffocate before it could suffocate him, thought of her not at all because anything else would have been unbearable, because picking up in the wake of her was the one thing he already knew how to do, filling his time with work and filling himself with more manageable losses. But now there’s a sledgehammer punching through the walls in his heart, all the skeletons falling in a mess with the broken masonry, and he has to account for the selfishness and the betrayal, and he can’t, he can’t, he has no defense at all.

“Please,” he says, and this is perhaps his greatest sin: he doesn’t even know what he’s asking her for. “Whatever they’ve told you -”

She slaps him across the face exactly like Karen didn’t, but wanted to. Matt feels like city ice, shattering off facades and overhangs.

“They don’t own me, Matthew,” she hisses, trying to sound cold, but she can’t; if Foggy and Karen are sunlight, Elektra has always been a bonfire, crackling and dancing, dangerous to hold. “I own them. I am not a weapon, or a silly pampered runaway, I am a queen.”

“What do you want,” Matt begs, from his knees. He wants to give it to her, wants to touch her and know she’s real, wants to destroy the brittle edge in her voice, whatever made her think she had to bring him here by force.

(Or maybe she didn’t think that: maybe she simply preferred it.)

“You made me certain promises, Matthew,” she murmurs finally. “When I was a small, scared girl. When I had no one else. You wanted to control me but not to use me, so I will make you one promise in return: I am holding nothing and no one hostage.”

Matt doesn’t mean to, but he relaxes, the tiniest release of breath, a minute lowering of his shoulders. Elektra doesn’t miss it. She makes a soft, disgusted sound that almost hides her hurt. She makes some small gesture he can’t see, and a staff introduces itself to the back of his head, and the darkness turns heavy and thick and full of stars.

*

She’s gone, and the Hand are gone, and there’s no sign of where they went or that she was ever back. Matt calls in sick for the rest of the week. He sounds like he’s dying on the phone, still woozy, throat ruined with crying. He’ll try again next year.

He stays in his apartment, eating anything he can scrounge that doesn’t feature actual mold, until Frank breaks in on Christmas Eve, muttering darkly about Matt’s locks, and physically pulls him off the couch, manhandles him into the shower, and then into a suit. Matt’s too tired to fight him, and it’s soothing, Frank doing up his buttons, combing his hair, tying a perfectly neat tie, crisp folds you could measure with laser precision. He marches Matt to church - midnight mass, Matt realizes dimly, as the swollen choir of seasonal participants picks up its carols - and sits next to him in the pew, one hand on Matt’s wrist like a stubborn parole officer. Matt leans his head on Frank’s shoulder and shakes.

They part exactly once: when Matt stumbles forward to take communion, Frank stays at the bench, and it’s a stranger who smells like gingerbread that offers him an elbow, helps him through the flowing crowd.

“How do you do it?” Matt asks, in the snow after the homily, the one thing they’ve had in common all along but never, ever talked about. Frank knows about the anniversary; Matt wonders if he knows anything else. “How do you - she’s still gone and I can’t -”

“You keep going or you don’t,” Frank says, like that’s all there is to it - not like it’s easy, but like it is simple. Break everything down, Stick used to tell him, piece by piece, blow by blow, sense by sense. Strike and counterstrike, options and objectives. It’s a choice, even when the world is crushing, even when you have nothing, you have a choice. You keep going or you don’t.

Back at Matt’s place, they get extravagantly drunk on unlabeled cider Frank acquired from God only knows where. Matt thinks they talked, jackets crumpled on the floor but pants still on, about Maria and Elektra and Karen, but when he wakes up with his face stuck to Frank’s slightly ill-fitting dress shirt and his head full of jackhammers, he can’t remember what they said.

*

Matt keeps going.

*

He gets a new client by the name of Mary Walker, quiet and nervous, jumping at shadows, and she’s telling the truth when she cries into a kleenex that she didn’t do the assault & battery she’s accused of, in spite of the eyewitnesses, truth again when she insists that she’s terrified of violence. Eyewitness testimony is actually hideously unreliable; he squeezes her hands gently and promises her that he’ll make it okay.

He’s walking her home after trial, demurring her teary gratitude, when the cadence of her heart changes, and she grabs him, pulls him deeper into an alley and kisses him hard on the mouth.

“What -” Matt stammers, tries to be gentle as he pushes her away, “No, what -”

“Oh, you shouldn’t have said that,” she laughs, a wild teetering sound, and her heartbeat changes again, and she punches him in the stomach. He can’t fight back - she knows exactly who he is and he has no idea what is happening, so he can’t fight back, just goes down and curls into a ball, tries to protect his head as he whimpers in very genuine confusion and she kicks him in the ribs over and over.

“What - Mary, what are you doing -”

“It’s Bloody Mary to you, asshole,” she snarls, and she sounds like a completely different person. “Mister Fisk said you might need a little reminder.”

*

The appeal is next week. Matt quits his job, steals some of Frank’s emergency adrenaline injections, and spends every moment tailing Foggy, walking the perimeter of whatever building he’s in, sitting on his upstairs neighbor’s balcony all night.

His new building is nice. He still doesn’t really have friends - just colleagues who are exasperated and charmed by turns. He works too much and laughs a little too loudly. Matt feels raw and prickly and stung after days of sudden, uninterrupted exposure; even weak sunlight can burn you if you’ve been hiding in the dark for too long.

He’s an idiot; she disguises her heartbeat, somehow. He doesn’t recognize Mary until she’s already on the inside stairwell, almost has a heart attack racing to intercept her. He hopes Foggy’s neighbor doesn’t wake up, or at least that he and Foggy don’t talk to each other. He’ll pay the man back for his ruined locks.

This time, he’s allowed to hit back. He does not expect her to pry the elevator open with telekinesis and drop him down the shaft; she does not expect him to climb back up the cables and knock her out with one desperate throw of his club as she recedes down the hallway.

He carries her limp body across the city and he doesn’t even care where, as long as she’s away from Foggy. The weight of her is good; it keeps him from trembling. Her breathing is shallow, her heart quick for someone who’s been knocked out - closer to the Mary Walker he’d first met than whoever Bloody Mary, is that she becomes, at least until she wakes.

He ties her up and waits, because he needs answers, but of course rope doesn’t hold her, she doesn’t need hands to untie it. She chases him across three blocks, slams him into buildings hard enough to crack brick and put tiny hairline fractures through his zygomatic bone, then sets him on fire, because of course she can do that too, screaming all the while that men are all the same, that he’s a sick twisted piece of shit, that he’s never going to touch her again.

The suit helps, but there’s only so much it can do, and the smoke is choking him; he stumbles into a bodega, feeling the polymers on the outer layers of his armor starting to pop and melt, sinks to his knees in exhausted gratitude when a hollering, quick-thinking cashier blasts him with the extinguisher.

He thinks he can hear Mary’s small, mousy voice choking, “What have I done, oh god, what have I done,” but honestly, it’s probably the stress, and the head trauma, and smoke inhalation, and several gulps of cool formerly-compressed nitrogen with no oxygen to be found, and the psychosomatic manifestation of his own guilt.

*

He limps back to Foggy’s apartment as fast as he can move while staying out of sight, which is actually not fast at all, praying the whole time she hasn’t beaten him back. There’s no sign of either version of Mary, but Foggy is awake, along with a few other early risers, has poured a bowl of honey nut cereal that he isn’t eating, and a TV is playing quietly in his apartment.

The news apparently got ahold the store’s security footage of the Devil on Fire at inhuman speeds. Foggy is crying, silently, breath quivering and droplets splashing on the floor without a single noise from his throat.

Matt has to fix this. Somehow. Something.

*

Matt has only worked with Jessica a handful of times, but she knows Foggy through HC&B, which means she has to like him, even if he’s never found any actual direct evidence that Jessica likes anybody. He knows her too, which Matt hopes will make it less weird if he begs her to play bodyguard for a little while. Just until he straightens this out. Plus, she has powers - real, obvious powers, not just fancy hearing - so he hopes she can shed some light on the situation.

“She could just make you not fight, couldn’t she?” Jessica asks slowly. “With TK like that?”

“I don’t think she has that much control,” Matt answers, because clearly underestimating her has worked well for him so far.

“Hmm. You know, some people you just have to put down.”

He thinks of Frank sneering at him, at the very beginning, when Matt tried to say everyone had some good in them; he thinks of Frank daring Matt to put a bullet in his skull to stop him. He thinks of Frank’s calloused hand on his wrist at Christmas, and the new rough patch on the side his index finger, where Max always pulls at the leash. He thinks of Mary crying in his office, and her heart pounding clear and true.

“I won’t do that,” Matt says, and it feels like the first solid place he’s had to stand on in a month, like maybe he’s borrowing a little bit of Frank’s eternal strength of purpose for his own, even if Frank would disagree with how he’s using it.

“Whatever,” Jess says, “You’re paying me hourly for babysitting Nelson. Up front, and if he threatens me with a restraining order or losing my retainer or any other kind of lawyer-fu I’m bailing.”

Matt isn’t too worried about that. Jessica is lonely and angry and cares about what’s right. Foggy will probably be feeding her muffins inside of a day.

“

“Stay back!” Mary shouts, when he finally tracks her down to a church basement a few blocks south of the Kitchen proper. She smells like salt and ashes, her heartbeat fast and scared. His suit tipped her off - some of the melted places hardened in not-quite-right shapes, crack and pop softly when he moves wrong.

“Mary, I’m not here to hurt you,” Matt promises, comes forward so she can see him even if it’s dumb, hands raised. He’s starting to think maybe he didn’t imagine her voice the other night, after all. He remembers meeting Melvin for the first time, in a flash of intuition, and asks “Is….did someone else threaten to hurt you? Is it Fisk?”

She starts to cry, again, pulls up her knees to her chest in the pew, and Matt pads gingerly closer.

“He has...or one of his people, they have proof...I can’t control her! Either of them, and what she can do, they’ll make me a lab rat if anyone finds out - she’s so bad, she’s done things - not just for him, she hates him, but she hates you too, I’m sorry, I’m sorry -”

“It’s okay,” Matt says, in his best calm-the-witness voice, firm and actually honest, this time. “Mary, it’s okay. I forgive you.” He sits next to her, holds her while she cries into his scorched costume.

“Look,” says Matt, when she’s winding down into miserable sniffles. “What if he just couldn’t find you at all? What if she didn’t do bad things anymore? There’s people that could help you.”

“No,” she whispers, fear and something worse, “No,” as her heartbeat starts to skip, but it’s not Bloody Mary who beat him and burned him, it’s the other one, who kissed him, who wraps a hand around his neck.

“The say the Devil has a silver tongue,” she drawls, all lazy menace, voice still husky with the tears of a moment ago, breath and pulse completely calm. “For shame. Trying to get our sweet Virgin Mary locked up. What kind of a monster does that?”

“I’m not,” Matt murmurs, swallows against her hand, and doesn’t fight her. Not yet. “I promise I’m not. I was - I spent three months at Saint Christopher’s myself, once.” He’s never told anyone this, not Foggy, not even Father Lantom. It was the summer a year after the spring of Elektra, and he was trying to prove something to someone, stole a car in fit of mania and almost killed a kid. “You think I’m not scared of getting cut up for science? But they weren’t - they wouldn’t. It’s not the nicest place - it runs on charity, the beds are lumpy and the food’s worse, but. They’re good people. They took care of me when I felt like running up walls and clawing my face off, when I couldn’t stand my own name. They helped when I needed and never told a soul. I don’t think they even kept records under my real name. You want to protect Mary, right? That’s - that’s what you’re for?”

“Not me,” The other one, then. “I want to have fun like that little coward won’t,” she says, sultry and sulky at once, and it’s only a little bit a lie. She scoots closer to him, gives his neck an extra squeeze.

“Give us a kiss. Just one. Then she can hide away in your little asylum as long as she wants.”

All things considered, it’s not so high a price to pay. He kisses her slow and deep until he feels a hot blush suddenly flare in her cheeks, and Mary’s squeaking in embarrassment, and Matt isn’t much better.

He stands hurriedly and bows and offers her his arm; she giggles weakly and lets him show her the way out.

*

“Your friend is a total sadsack, nubs,” Jessica tells him. “Seriously, I should charge you hazard pay for my brain leaking out of my ears in boredom.”

“Thank you for your dedication,” Matt tells her as earnestly as possibly, just to hear her gag, and tries not to think about hearing Foggy referred to as your friend, because it feels a little bit like being stabbed.

The appeal goes - it goes. Smoothly. The conviction is not overturned. Fisk’s sentence is commuted in accordance with his behavioral record in prison - what of it is provable, anyway - and the standard mathematical equations for such things. It’s textbook. He still has several years to serve. Just. Significantly fewer.

Matt will burn that bridge when he comes to it.

He lurks a little for the next couple of days, just in case Fisk sends anyone else after Foggy, but all that happens is he discovers is that Jessica was right.

He’s still himself. He’s still kind. More kind, even. He gives money to every homeless person he passes, because he has it to spare. Matt listens to him breaking three twenties into fives at the bodega where he buys tequila every night, so he has them in his pockets for his commute the next morning. He tells the exhausted, scut-work interns to take off an hour early, promises to cover for them with the other partners. He’s brilliant in court and gentle with desperate clients.

He jokes weakly with Marci when she flirts with him, but they both sigh and go their separate ways each time. There’s a roteness to their disengagement, a resignation in her worry, like she already tried an intervention, like she’s given up on getting anything else out of him.

He comes home to his nice apartment, rides the working elevator to his floor, drinks while watching the news and falls asleep on the couch half the time. The next day he does it again.

*

Frank greets him with an effusive-by-punisher-standards, “Glad you’re not dead,” which is as far as he gets before Matt climbs into his lap and kisses him, fierce and desperate. He rides Frank hard in his chair and it isn’t enough; he bends over the table, nose ground into the outlines where guns have been, his battered cheekbone aching, growls at Frank to break him in half, and it isn’t enough; Frank dumps him on the cot and gags him with a belt, works him farther open where he’s already slick and dirty until Frank’s whole hand is inside him, and Matt sobs and screams around the leather, and some terrible, impossible, untouchable recess inside of him still feels empty, but at least it wears him out.

“So,” Frank says later, sliding back into bed against Matt’s back after discarding the washcloth he used to clean them both, “Am I supposed to be pretending this was brought on by one more brush with mortal peril?”

Direct and unimpressed, just like always. His steady place to stand. Matt laughs, a little cracked, rolls over in the narrow space of the cot to press his face into Frank’s neck.

“I did the right thing,” he whispers. ”I helped a girl who was just - crazy and lost and used and hurting, no matter how dangerous, and I protected my friend. But he’s sad all the time, I heard him crying last week, I hate it.” Matt feels suddenly like he’s quarrying stone out of his chest for each deep ragged breath, and his heart is in his throat all over again. It’s been over a year. It felt like treading water, like no time was passing at all, but now a year has vanished and they still haven’t spoken, despite all the times Matt let himself linger close enough to hear his voice, his steps, his pulse.

“He was supposed to be happy,” Matt says finally, eyes squeezing uselessly shut. “He’s supposed to - have a new job, and a new life, and a new home with working central heat and no busted windows and new friends and he was supposed to be happy.”

If Frank has an opinion on Foggy - and he must have formed one, during the trial - he keeps it to himself. Instead, he just says, “So do something about it.”

Frank doesn’t argue with any of Matt’s excuses, doesn’t say why not when Matt says I can’t. He just stomps past them, past all every claim that Foggy is better off, that he’d have called Matt if he wanted to see him, that he was relieved at the end, that he said so.

“So what? If you want it to change, you have to change it. Is he dead? Is he gone?”

“No,” Matt has to whisper, even as he flinches a little, the words hitting him like bullets, concentrated puncturing force. “No.”

“Can you let him keep going like it is?” Relentless bastard.

“No,” Matt says, shaking, because the unbearable, untenable weight of it is all of why he’s here, strung out and defenseless.

“So do something about it.”

*

“I miss you,” he says, darting into Foggy’s elevator before it closes, catches the bottle that Foggy immediately fumbles before it shatters on the tiled floor. It’s not what Frank would say, in Matt’s situation, but it’s how he’d say it: plain, right to the heart of the thing.

“Jesus Christ,” Foggy says, gapes, shock more than anger. Matt doesn’t let it bother him: he doesn’t know what else to say either, and he’s been practicing for a week. (Or a year.) “Jesus shitting Christ on - on a pogo stick, Matt -”

“Ew,” Matt says, with feeling.

And suddenly they’re both laughing, hugely, hysterically, breathlessly laughing, completely unable to speak.

They’re still wheezing when the elevators doors ping open at Foggy’s floor, and Matt holds out the bottle.

“Can I - can I come in? Please?”

Foggy wraps his hand around the neck of the bottle, but doesn’t tug it out of Matt’s grip yet. He can hear Foggy swallow. His pulse is picking up, and his sweat under the winter coat - also new, good wool, one of the fancy soft kinds from the sound of it - takes on the tiniest tinge of bitterness.

Are you afraid of me, Matt could ask, if his throat hadn’t suddenly closed up, if he were strong enough to hear Foggy’s answer. You hurt me kind of a lot, buddy, he might say, the words worn soft with time, gentle enough to break stronger hearts than Matt’s, or maybe, he lets himself fantasize, half wishfulness and half wistfulness for recriminations long past, I’m afraid for you, all the time. You look like shit, Matt. Maybe he’d just say no, and his own heart would betray him.

Probably not that. Foggy’s never been the liar, or the coward, between them.

“You do too much drinking alone,” Matt says, then snaps his jaw shut, realizing too late that now Foggy has to know he’s been spying. He lets go of the tequila.

But Foggy seems to make up his mind, says, “Yeah, I guess,” in the studied-casually way that means didn’t specify on purpose whether he meant the accusation or the question.

“Do you want- ?” His elbow offered at the old angle, but not narrated. Matt takes it, holds on tighter than he means to, because otherwise he thinks his fingers will shake.

Foggy’s apartment is spare and clean, echoes with a nice bit of open space, smells like new leather furniture that isn’t very new but not much used either, a few different kinds of takeout, lingering traces of a ficus that must have died and was then cleared away.

Foggy clinks shot glasses on the glass table first thing, and pours for them both. Matt knocks back his first one because this is harrowing already, because he needs it, and Foggy gamely refills it for him.

“Sooo...how much have you heard?” Foggy asks, after drinking his own. He sounds - uncertain, more than angry or suspicious, embarrassed, maybe.

“I heard you crying,” Matt says, mostly because it’s the answer to the why are you here he thinks Foggy wants to ask, but won’t. His shoulders are hunching without his permission; it still makes him feel squirmy and small to think about it, like he did whenever the nuns caught him doing something he wasn’t supposed to.

“You were here then,” Foggy demands, not a shout only by virtue of the fact that it comes out of him too fast for him to get enough breath behind it. He gulps his second shot. “Someone set you on fire, you should have been in a hospital, or at least a bed -”

“She was after you,” Matt says, and it comes out soft and scratchy with the horror of it. “Fisk was blackmailing her to - make a point, or something. I had to check she hadn’t come back.”

Foggy takes a slow breath, pours. “...you were Jessica’s dickheaded benefactor, then. I assume.”

Matt nods.

“I like her,” Foggy adds, stilted.

“I knew you would,” Matt says.

“I’m safe now,” Foggy says, “If that’s what you were worried about.”

“That’s not just - Foggy -”

“How come I always get to be the safe one, huhn? How come I have to be the one clueless and panicking all the time, and it doesn’t even matter that you friend-dumped me a year ago because - because whatever you were doing was more important, and you didn’t even have the decency to tell me that to my face until I finally figured it out and forced you to -”

But the anger breaks like over-fired clay, brittle from too long baking, and then Foggy’s just ugly crying, takes a swig straight from the bottle and then scoots it over to Matt, companionable as could be.

(Misery loves -)

Matt drinks. He can taste Foggy’s mouth on the bottle, smooth company coffee and his weird bubblegum toothpaste brand, and salt from one of his tears where it slid down his cheek.

“I thought you’d be happy,” Matt says.

(If you’re gonna talk, say the thing that matters. Or else you’re just wasting your breath. Frank has never actually said that to him, but Matt can hear it in his voice. He breathes.)

“You were always important to me. Are. You have to be safe, you have to - you should have everything you want, I wish - but I couldn’t stop and I knew I was being an awful partner and you were upset all the time, and - I thought you’d be happier. If I let you go. But I’ve been - I’ve been listening all year, not just when there was danger, and you’re not, and I don’t know what to do. But. You were always important.”

Matt’s crying too now, sniffles when he runs out of words, offers Foggy the bottle back in their place.

“Keep it,” Foggy says roughly. “For a minute. I’m gonna - I think we’re gonna need pizza.” Which he acquires, instead of kicking Matt out, their old standby order, extra large, half extra cheese and mushrooms for Matt, half pepperoni and olives for Foggy. Matt takes another drink.

“Do you have. Tissues somewhere,” Matt asks, because he is drippy and gross, and he is willing to suffer ordinary pulp levels at this point. But Foggy tosses him a packet of Kleenex Ultra Soft from a drawer without pausing in reciting his credit card number.

“I really didn’t get burned that badly,” Matt mutters later, with his mouth mostly full. “The suit’s good. Took the worst of it. And I wasn’t on fire very long.”

Foggy groans and thunks his head carefully on the tabletop.

“I don’t know what to do either,” Foggy admits, later still, after the ritual rock-paper-scissors for the last cinnamon stick, which they draw, each pulling the same sign as the other three times in a row before splitting it. Matt tears, Foggy chooses: tasks for hands and eyes.

“You said,” Matt tries, wavering, and it feels like he’s pulling the memory up from the bottom of a well. “You said you weren’t gonna rely on me for anything. And thasss - that’s fair but what if we. What if we just did this. Like you wanted.”

He’s sure that happened, too, at some point: Foggy asking him out for drinks. “What if we just. Hang? Sometimes?”

“Okay,” Foggy says slowly. Ooooh-kay. “But if I can’t lecture you about - about Daredevil and walking around with no kidneys like a moron then you can’t lecture me about my job.”

Matt rolls himself back upright (it takes more effort than he anticipated) and reaches over, feels the loose roundness of Foggy’s shoulder, the slope of his arm.

“Do you,” Matt asks seriously, “Feel like you’re doing sunthing - something. Worth. Lecturing, at your job, Mister Nelson?”

Foggy’s tricep goes tense under his hand for a moment, and Matt wants to take it back, but then Foggy throws the empty cinnamon stick box at his head. Matt is so surprised both by the attempt and Foggy’s decent drunken aim that he forgets to dodge, and the flimsy cardboard bounces off his furrowed eyebrows.

“Uhg, you’re so Catholic. No, I don’t even, but Karen lectures me every time. I kind of get why you were sick of it. Even though I was so right.”

“Thanks, Foggy,” Matt drawls, really drags out the aaahhnnn in the middle of the word, and then they’re both laughing again, less desperate this time, fat snorts and chortles like toads hopping erratically around the room.

“Are you unemployed again?” Foggy asks in the morning, wriggling into his suit, miserably hungover.

“Yep,” Matt gurgles, trying to shove another pillow on top of his exposed ear.

“Uhg, I hate you,” Foggy lies, and slams the door just to be a dick, and then whimpers in the hallway, because justice is swift and cruel.

Matt smiles.

*

“Thank you,” he tells Frank later, or tries to. Frank is pretending to be birdwatching, but actually doing recon on the paddleboat house, which he suspects is being used for dead drops, but he isn’t sure who by. Matt throws popcorn to the ducks.

“I’m not the one who did it,” Frank says bluntly.

“Still,” says Matt.

*

Everything isn’t fixed, with Foggy. The year they lost is a chasm, and sometimes it still hurts. There are changes that catch Matt by surprise, innocuous things that feel like tripping over speed bumps his cane missed. Like: Foggy’s writing callous is almost gone from his right third finger. He uses a tablet for most of his notes, now, instead of the old standby yellow legal pad.

There are ways Foggy doesn’t trust him now, which hurt even more than the ways Matt doesn’t know him, because Matt has to admit that much is deserved. Like: “Do you...want your own practice, again?” Foggy asks, gingerly, over nachos and strawberry margaritas somewhere with lively and inoffensive mariachi music. They haven’t gone back to Josie’s, by silent mutual agreement. They aren’t ready for that. Matt flicks his tongue over the sugar around the rim like a cat. It’s pure cane, not too processed, nice stuff.

“I’d like to,” Matt admits. “I mean - my life would be a lot easier, if I could set my own hours. But I never knew how to find people like you, how to...build a brand. And my work history is weird and - I don’t know if it would work.”

“I could send you people,” Foggy says softly, and when Matt immediately protests that Foggy doesn’t have to do that, that it’s Matt’s problem, he wasn’t angling for anything, Foggy taps the table with a fingernail, a thing he learned to do years ago instead of waving a hand for attention.

“No, listen. We do some pro bono stuff at HCB - don’t make that face, we do, there’s tax write-offs, but there’s - there’s lots of people in the middle. Who don’t qualify for that, who can afford something, but not our rates. I could give you referrals, if you’d actually take care of them.”

He doesn’t say it in a snide way, and that’s the worst part. He’s - he’s actually asking.

“Don’t do me any favors,” Matt mutters, and Foggy’s sharp “No, I won’t,” isn’t as cleansing as he wants it to be. Foggy sighs.

“...fine, you shameless prick, even though I know you’re fishing: you’re a brilliant lawyer when you show the hell up, Matt, I would be - really relieved if I could send these people to someone like you, but I need you to tell me you’ll be brilliant and dedicated if I’m not there to pick up the slack. Maybe you’ll just lie to me again, maybe aliens will invade again and it won’t matter, but this is - this is a liability thing here, this is professional ethics, I can’t, in good conscience, recommend you until you say the words to my face. So think about it, okay? Decide if this, the law, all of it, is actually a thing you still want to do.”

It’s tight but not very bitter; the sharp personal edges are worn off it, and what remains is something more objective, more professional, in its own tarnished way more galling: Matt didn’t just hurt Foggy, didn’t just lose his trust. He lost his respect.

He bites his tongue on an immediate yes; using people in need just to prove something is - not what’s going to fix this.

“So tell me how you met Jessica,” Foggy prompts, mercifully and blatantly changing the subject. It’s an awkward story, full of Matt making the kind of decisions that make Foggy grit his teeth and want to lecture, but the truce holds until Jessica’s mocking of his costume, which Matt successfully times to make Foggy snort margarita up his nose, coughing and laughing and wheezing out, “Oh, you bastard -”

“Let’s do this again,” Foggy says despite the awkward patches, as they’re walking through mostly-empty streets afterwards, firmly, like a verdict, or a sentence. He will say it at the end of the evening every time they meet for months, like maybe if he doesn’t confirm it, Matt will disappear again. Matt will be more grateful than he wants to admit.

“Yeah,” he says, for now, and, “I do still want to do law. I do - if you send me clients, I won’t let them down.” He swallows around the I promise that’s prickly and misshapen in his throat; he’s pretty sure it would just sound like an admission of all the things he can’t be sure of. “Not right now, I have a lot of things I need to get ready, but - in a couple of weeks?”

“Okay,” Foggy says, and, “Good luck, Matt.”

*

“So, like, are you dating anyone now?” Foggy asks two Saturdays later, one more awkward getting-to-know-you-again question while he’s elbow-deep in a busted heating unit that might someday make Matt’s new office habitable.

“You….might want to put the drill down first,” Matt suggests.

Matt tells him.

*

He thinks it would be easier if Foggy were angry.

“Matt,” he says slowly. Thickly. He sounds like he’s trying not to cry. “Matt - whatever he told you, it’s not true, okay? You’re not the same as him, you’re not weak, and - you’re not alone, I’m sorry, I should have, I should have checked on you -”

“No, it’s okay,” Matt tries to say, even though it’s nice to hear.

“Matt, you’re not a killer - are you? If he -”

“No, Matt says, louder, kneels next to Foggy, grabs his shoulders. I’d look you in the eye if I could, it means. “No, I haven’t, I’m not going to. He doesn’t push me and I don’t help him and - it’s the opposite, Foggy. I know who I am, next to him. I’m more sure.”

“Matt, that is. Some really spectacular verbal trickery there, way to make hooking up with a serial killer sound good, but you really don’t need to go that far to feel like you’re not the worst person in the room.”

Which - okay, that hits a little harder than Matt wants it to, but -

“Look, Foggy, I’m saying it all wrong -”

“Maybe because it’s a terrible idea?” Foggy’s voice is rising now; there’s a little edge of panic.

“Look, why is murder wrong? Not - I’m not defending him, just follow me here. Because we don’t have the right. Because every person has value even if they’ve done terrible things, because we can’t know - and I hate what he does, I pray for his victims, but the law can’t stop him and neither can I. Not really, not for long, not any way that matters. But there’s good in him, just as much as the people he kills, okay? I’ve seen it. I hate what he does but - he’s good. For me. I’m not - I’m not compromised. We can be friends even if you don’t approve of what I do, right? So how is him and me different?”

Foggy blows out a long, slow, breath. “You’re - reaching in a lot of places, there, buddy. He’s not actually the terminator.”

“You haven’t fought him,” Matt points out.

“Uhg,” Foggy mutters, lets his head thunk back against the wall. “Good for you, though? Seriously?”

It’s not entirely an earnest question, but it isn’t pure skepticism either.

“He’s the one who convinced me to talk to you again,” Matt confesses, which is both his trump card and his riskiest shot, because who knows how much that might hurt to hear. But Foggy has asked him - over and over, and then stopped asking, which was worse - for honesty. “Not much for self-pity, Frank.”

“What am I gonna do with you, Murdock,” Foggy says eventually, shaking his head. He picks up the drill again, and Matt lets go of his shoulders, lets him get back to work.

About ten minutes later, Foggy yells “FUCK,” so loudly Matt can hear the accountants across the hall giggling at the outburst, and a cluster of pigeons take off from the window ledge.

“Uh,” Matt says, brilliantly, just a little bit tense at whatever is going to follow from this epiphany.

“Matt, how am I gonna give the Punisher a shovel talk?”

Matt ducks his head, a smile stretching all the way across his face.

“Maybe you should get Karen to do it,” he suggests. “I’m pretty sure he’d let her shoot him.”

“Yeah, but I think she likes him better than you.” This is, tragically, almost definitely true now. Matt really should try to reach out to her, too. “Maybe I could get Jess to help,” Foggy muses. “She thinks you’re kind of a dumb jumpy bunny. And it’s not that different from serving summons.”

“Are you sure about that?” Matt asks, trying not to laugh.

“The way she does it? Absolutely.”

*

Jessica does not give Frank a shovel talk. Jessica gives Frank a “Just because you’re nailing a vigilante does not mean someone won’t break you in half if you slip up and hit anybody who didn’t earn it, and by someone I mean me,” talk, and Frank says “Thank you, ma’am,” low and very earnestly, and then they are weird friends.

They don’t smile at each other or anything, Matt’s pretty sure, but Jess watches Max when Frank goes away on road trips, and Frank breaks into her apartment and cleans everything once every few months, and sometimes they play icy, cutthroat games of poker with information about various marks and movers as the stakes.

*

Matt tries to give Luke a shovel talk.

“Miss Walker already informed me my life would not be worth living,” Luke says mildly, and Matt needs to figure out how a human being can convey being both so thoroughly impressed and unimpressed with two different people in the same sentence. It would probably come in really handy in court.

Luke doesn’t hold it against him, though, which is nice, because honestly even in armor Matt is the squishiest member of their nascent team, and otherwise ducking behind him would get kind of awkward.

*

For the one-month anniversary of Matt getting his new office off the ground, Karen joins Matt and Foggy for drinks again in celebration, and claims ‘reckless investigation’ as her area of No Lecture Privilege. Matt tears up a little, manfully, after unwrapping a new sign.

“I figure it’s kind of traditional, right? Me getting it.”

“To old traditions!” Foggy announces, toasting, and Matt is pretty sure he means, to old friends.

*

So of course something goes wrong. Matt knows a block before he actually gets to Frank’s current den that something is badly wrong. Max is scratching weakly at the door, and from the smell he hasn’t been walked in - days, maybe. It’s been over two weeks since Matt last saw Frank, but that’s - that’s normal, that’s how they work. This is not. Frank wouldn’t vanish like this, not if he had any choice at all.

*

He’s not dead. Which Matt holds not so much as conviction as an axiom. He can’t be dead. Frank is a survivor. Nothing keeps him down.

(You keep going or you don’t.)

Matt gets Max fed and cleaned and safely to Jessica, and then he’s tearing through the streets, feels rabid and eerily focused at once as he twists arms and swings through cramped alleys. It occurs to him, after thirty-six fruitless hours, that Frank might not be in the city at all.

In the end, Matt is even more ineffectual than the time he helped Frank away from the Irish: he finds Frank stumbling south on the shoulder of the Hudson Parkway, steps weak with fatigue, heartbeat shaky, smelling like plaster dust, chemical explosives, ozone, bile and scorched hair.

“...hey,” he says finally, in response to Matt’s frantic Frank, Frank talk to me, what happened, are you hurt, how long did they have you, who did this - and then he sways, hard, into Matt’s arms.

“Is anyone following you,” Matt finally settles on, as the most pertinent question, and Frank croaks a no. He sounds dehydrated, too, but Matt can’t smell blood, not even Frank’s usual baseline of other people’s.

It’s Matt’s turn to half-carry Frank through the stairwell, to force him to eat some applesauce and crackers, to maneuver him into the shower. To pull him out again when the water turns cold, get him dried and dressed.

“You were right, Red,” Frank murmurs, so bleakly Matt feels a little sick for ever wanting to hear it. He’s wedged into a corner of Matt’s kitchen, knees pulled up. He sounds like he’s in shock, and Matt can’t - he can’t imagine. Frank was still fighting after being tortured with power tools, and now he’s just - just.

“Right about what?” Matt asks, gingerly.

“Shouldn’t have trusted him,” Frank mutters, even softer, one finger tapping loosely against the kitchen floor.

Which - what? Who? Frank trusts someone, and Matt didn’t- ?

It comes back dimly, like a memory from another life, like a face from a dream where he can almost see.

“Wait, this was Red Bull and Keyboards Guy?” Matt demands, obscurely furious. And Frank makes a huffed, wracking sound, tilts his head back against the cupboards to look at Matt.

“You know if you ever try to change me,” he says now, low and raw and terribly cold, “I’ll take your throat out with my teeth.”

It’s the first time Frank’s ever told him a complete, unmitigated lie.

Matt sits down next to him, threads his fingers through Frank’s trigger hand.

“You know I gave up on that a long time ago,” Matt says, and he doesn’t know if he’s lying back or not. Maybe it depends on what giving up means.

“What are you here for, Red?” Frank asks, his old peremptory refrain whenever Matt wouldn’t stop dancing around something, but it sounds like riddle now, a lament, a wound.

“You’re wrong about killing,” Matt says, and doesn’t let him go. “You’re wrong about people. But you won’t change until you decide to change, I know that much. And for now - you make me better.” He lifts their joined hands, kisses Frank’s knuckles, one by one. “You make me happy. And I don’t think you deserve to be alone.”

“Shut up,” Frank says, hand squeezing Matt’s hand, his face flinching away. “Shut up.”

“Okay,” Matt says, and they sit like that a long time.

*

He apologizes to his clients; he makes up his court dates. He considers coming up with a new excuse, probably some kind of long term illness that will drop him at unexpected times. Brittle Bone disease, or something. He can’t go through with it in the end - he’s dealt with too many assholes already over the disability he actually has.

Frank stays in his apartment for a week, sleeps in his bed - sleeps in what Matt is managing, gradually, not to think of as ‘Elektra’s side’, for all that Frank has already been there longer than she ever was. He never does tell Matt what Keyboard Fucker did, or even what his name was, and Matt doesn’t ask. Knowing Frank - probably it doesn’t matter anymore anyway. Or at least he’d prefer to treat it that way.

Karen probably wouldn’t approve, shining crusader for truth that she is. But Matt figures he has a right to bury his own demons. When he kisses Matt awake, slow and tentative, Matt wraps them together, touches him everywhere, touches him only gently, and doesn’t ask.

*

He loses the new sign six months later, when his identity is all over the tabloids. He’s dead, for awhile, and it’s - freeing, even more than Daredevil was, walking away from everything including his name, and terrible at the same time, a ship adrift. Driven, sometimes, full of wind and waves, still fighting - but his world is still dark as ever, and he can’t plot a course with no stars.

Frank finds him, periodically, and Matt no idea how. The fellowship of dead men.

Frank calls him Jack Batlin in a slow, acerbic drawl in bed exactly once, and Matt cracks like an egg; it is completely unsupportable.

Coming back to life is easier than he expected, even with all the complications of publicity. He times it for Easter, just because he can. Foggy throws three separate martinis in his face, only one of which started the night as his, stabs him in the neck with a tiny plastic sword, and then hugs him until the vodka dripping from Matt’s chin soaks through Foggy’s hair to his scalp.

“Hey, buddy,” he chokes out finally, “Want to go back into business?”

*

While Matt was playing dead, the offices - meaning building, not just the files contained therein - of Hogarth, Chao, Benowitz, and Nelson were demolished by some kind of giant telepathic crabs who were looking, very inefficiently, for information on Jessica, and they ended up folding rather than eat reconstruction costs. Foggy has better offers, but -

“Yeah,” Matt says. “I really do.”

*

Karen demands he sit for a proper on-the-record interview in exchange for the old sign, which she apparently stole from the old building on the off-chance of this particular hostage situation ever arising. Jessica punches him in the arm, gently, and Matt bruises for a month anyway. Danny offers to buy the original tabloid and fire some people, “You know, if it’d make you feel better.” Matt demurrs.

Foggy’s mom knits him a merino sweater that says I’m not Daredevil. Matt wears it everywhere, except around Frank, because he learns fast that Frank wants very much to rip it off him, and Matt prefers it not ripped. He can achieve the same effect by showing up just a little bloody and shirtless to start with, which is frankly more convenient anyway.

*

Frank has messy road rash scarring over part of his left shoulder. Matt has no idea how he got it, or even exactly when, but it’s fascinating, texturally, alternating tight-smooth starbursts drawn over the muscle and rough scalloped divots, and the nerves are intermittent enough that Frank twitches and whines every time Matt nibbles over it, tracing the haphazard shapes with his tongue. Matt rolls his hips, pushing in deep and slow, wondering if he can drag this out long enough that Frank’s arms start to shake. Normally Matt doesn’t have that kind of patience, but it’s a lazy Sunday afternoon, and Frank is panting softly and clenching fistfuls of Matt’s silk sheets, and he thinks, I could do this forever.

It takes him another few long, languid thrusts to realize that it isn’t fanciful, isn’t idle fantasy. The thought isn’t going away.

Because he could. He could have this every day, and still want it. Even when it’s dust and desolation and blood and panic instead of warm skin and certainty - even when everything falls apart, even when he falls apart, Frank is there.

“Matt?” Frank mumbles, mostly out of it, and Matt realizes he’s lost his rhythm. He bites down at the crook of Frank’s neck like he could hold Frank that way, force him to stay, as though he’s ever needed forcing, and rededicates himself to his efforts.

Matt wants -

For once, Matt’s problem is that he knows exactly what he wants.

*

He has to ask. He has to ask - their lives are short and mad and if he doesn’t make himself do it soon, he never will. He already has so many regrets. He tells himself he’s going to ask. Today, tomorrow, today.

Matt chickens out a dozen times. Man without fear, indeed.

Frank still has his old ring, is the thing, on the same chain as his tags. Gold doesn’t have a smell, but it does have a distinct tiny ting, more melodious than the stainless steel tags on their own. (There is a story, probably apocryphal, that the most pious ladies of Paris dropped their gold jewelry into the open bronze smelting molds for the great bells of Notre Dame, to make them toll sweeter.) He doesn’t wear them all the time, but often enough - almost totally muffled under clothes and armor, warm from his skin. He says he isn’t that man any more, but he still carries them like talismans, in spite of all the things he’s discarded, burned down, left behind.

*

While Matt is dithering, Frank gets himself fucking arrested, and not by the one-five this time, either.

“You have to let me see him,” Matt hisses at the jumped-up SHIELD bureaucrat in his way. “I’m his lawyer, this is unconstitutional on about five different levels -”

“I doubt that, Mister Murdock,” says the agent calmly, and it will not help if Matt punches him. He reminds himself of this several times. “As a vigilante yourself, the conflict of interest represented by Mister Castle’s case is untenable -”

“That’s libel, there is no proof, and if it were true my client would still be able to give informed consent to representation -”

“Not to mention possible disqualifying accessory charges -”

“This is deliberate obstruction -”

“Excuse me! Sorry, so sorry, is Matt bothering you? He’s confused.”

“Foggy, what -”

Foggy’s heartbeat is up - he must have run from the lobby.

“I’m his lawyer,” Foggy says firmly. “It should be in all his old paperwork.”

“But -”

Foggy tugs him a little to the side, heads bent close. “Matt, you know you’re too close to this. And even if they can’t prove it, they can keep him in a hole for a year while they fight you about it. So go home and let me do my job, okay?”

“Thank you,” Matt gasps, and his stomach is still a knot, and his head is swimming a little. “Foggy - you don’t have to -”

“I kind of do, buddy,” Foggy says, and gives his arm an extra, gentle squeeze. “Besides, the jurisdictional overreach here is ridiculous, and the freaking Avengers brought him in, you think any of those cowboys know how to do Miranda rights properly? There was probably entrapment, too. Civil liberties in peril all over the place.”

“Go be a hero?” Matt tries, weakly. Foggy huffs out a little breath; Matt thinks, from the shape of it, that he’s smiling weakly. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, I scribbled most of that on my hand in the cab. Now go on, get lost. Make dinner for three.”

“Thank you,” Matt says again, quieter this time, raspier, and shakes out his cane to pointedly tap his way to the door.

*

Foggy doesn’t actually get Frank out in time for dinner, but he does manage it fast enough that Matt feels neither guilty nor silly yelling at him for getting caught in the first place.

“What the hell, Frank, how could you - how could you let this - aren’t you supposed to be some kind of goddamn tactician -”

He’s aware that he’s not making a lot of sense, and that it’s nothing compared to the kind of danger they both face on a regular basis, and that whatever happened was probably either shit luck or a concerted military campaign and not Frank’s fault either way - but, also, he doesn’t care.

“Don’t scare me like that,” Matt tells him, starting with a command and ending with a plea, Matt’s hands tight on Frank’s arms and his head falling against his collarbone.

“My child trafficking shit turned out to be all tied up in their Nazi hyno-army shit,” Frank mutters, and he actually sounds a little contrite. “I knew they weren’t gonna be keen on letting me carry on afterward, but I could leave the job half done.”

You could have, Matt thinks, If the Avengers were on it, but of course he couldn’t. Of course.

“I’m fine. Fine and free as a bird, what do you want from me, Red?” Frank asks, petting Matt’s hair and shuffling his feet just a little.

“Marry me,” Matt says honestly before he can overthink it again, pulls back enough for Frank to see his face but doesn’t kneel, doesn’t make a production out of it. Frank jerks in his hands anyway, balks like a startled horse.

“What? That’s - Red, there is no kind of future with me. If it’s not this it’ll be something else -”

Say no if you’re saying it, Matt thinks suddenly, a vicious echo, but Frank isn’t saying it, and when has he ever hesitated to shut something down, to say no if he did mean it?

“Forget the future,” Matt says, suddenly breathless, the sparkling mid-air feeling of a fight he knows he can win. “Frank - I’m - this is - I am really invested in my present with you. Okay? Everything we’ve had, these - years, do you realize it’s been years? I want. I want to peel you off the side of the road when you’re broken, and I want to lie awake when you’re gone wrestling with everything that matters most to me, and I want you to roll your eyes at me when I’m being stupid and I want to kiss you every morning even when your breath is terrible, I want every second of borrowed time we’ve got. I am already in this, Frank, and I think you are too. For better or for worse.”

Frank’s heartbeat is racing; Matt finally takes a new breath.

“I want to honor that. Officially. I want the law to say I have the right to stand by you no matter what, not as your lawyer but as your husband, because you’d better believe I’m doing it either way.”

He wants to sanctify it, too, in front of everyone, in front of God and Foggy and New York City. “If you can’t - if it hurts too much, if - it doesn’t matter why. You can say no and I’ll still love you.”

It’s the first time either of them has actually said it. Matt doesn’t think it will be his last chance, but - just in case. “Don’t say anything right now. Just think about it.”

Matt kisses him, after that; he has multiple ways to make his case.

*

Matt is already cooking breakfast when Frank wakes up. He listens to Frank stretch and groan and brush his teeth, then pad over, hover in the kitchen threshold, lean against the open doorway.

“I can’t exactly walk into a clerk’s office,” Frank points out, while Matt still has his back to him, and Matt smirks into the frying pan.

“I’ve been working on that,” he admits.

*

Frank’s birth name is Francis Castiglione. Foggy dug up the papers for the first trial, all that time ago, but it was never relevant to anything.

“Are you sure this is legal,” Frank says, his nervous finger twitching, pen still in his hand as Matt faxes the freshly signed application and carefully selected identification documents to the to the busiest branch office in the borough.

“You can go by any name in New York without formal notification as long as you aren’t doing it with intent to commit fraud,” Matt informs him. “And we are really, non-fraudulently getting married, and hoping your notoriety will be accidentally overlooked while conducting personal matters isn’t fraud either.”

Frank’s pulse doesn’t calm even a little bit. He’s on every terrorist watch list on the planet, probably, but he wants to know this is legal. He wants to do it right. Matt retrieves the pen, kissing him easily while the ancient machine whirrs and beeps like an embellishment over the quick beating rhythm.

*

License in hand, they wait exactly the requisite twenty-four hours, because somebody is going to notice eventually, but there’s no reason to expedite the process with additional public proceedings to get a waiver.

Matt spends these twenty-four hours mostly on the phone. Father Lantom says they still can’t have the ceremony in a Catholic church, but he plays bridge with an Anglican deacon who will let him borrow hers for the afternoon. Karen screams at him creatively for four minutes straight before Matt manages to say anything, because apparently Frank called her first, and Matt still doesn’t know when she’s done whether she’s happy for them or freaking out about how fast she needs to find a dress.

“I’m sure you’ll be stunning in anything,” he promises, and she mutters men, and then, also you’re blind, asshole, and hangs up on him before she can laugh.

He tries to explain to the Nelsons that that it’s going to be small, and rushed, and weird, and no they don’t need to buy a present, and no they absolutely do not have to cook, please, Trish Walker knows discreet caterers, but is forced to accept a last minute cake on behalf of an obscure cousin’s bakery.

(This is how Matt has always thought of the distant elements of the Nelson clan: like one more chapter in the catalogue of minor saints, one for every possible occasion, but who can ever keep them straight?)

Jessica, meanwhile, laughs so hard she drops the phone. She agrees to strangle Danny quietly if he tries to make a toast, on condition that she doesn’t have to wear a dress or give a toast herself.

Matt doesn’t know what Frank is doing; they don’t meet all day. Good luck, Matt insists to himself. That’s good luck. They're probably going to need it.

*

Despite Foggy’s parents and sisters plus the Defenders and friends making a valiantly non-desolate showing, there are actually more people on Frank’s side of the church, and all of them are terrifying, except the for jumpy girl who smells like fresh herbs and woodsmoke and gingersnaps, who is apparently Maid of Honor. Matt keeps losing track of how many hidden weapons he can hear. “Where does he even meet these people,” Foggy hisses, adjusting the collar of Matt’s tuxedo while the hastily-assembled guests mill about warily, half of them watching each other and half watching the tall stained glass windows. In fairness, if the internet catches on faster than Matt hopes, Thor might crash through them at any minute. “There are at least four lady assassins - oh my god, Nick Fury is supposed to be dead- ”

Matt doesn’t care. He’s getting married.

Father Lantom clears his throat; his incredibly game bridge-friend plays the organ. Matt doesn’t take his cane: he has Foggy to walk him up the aisle, to stand at his side.

It’s wonderful to hear Father Lantom give a personal sermon that isn’t for a funeral. Matt is grateful that Karen is recording it, because he can’t remember a word. Maybe one. Love is in there, he’s pretty sure.

“Do you have rings?”

“No,” Matt starts, there hasn’t been time to get any, but Frank says, “Yeah,” a little huskily; Joan, the woman beside him, squeaks softly and rifles in her clutch. “Here -”

“Feel them first,” Frank says, transfers them into Matt’s palm, “If they’re okay -” The rings are heavier than Matt expected, warm little anchors, with smoothly beveled edges and a fine-grained brushed-steel sort of texture on the outside.

“Just so you know, buddy,” Foggy murmurs sotto voce, “Those are pitch black. Very on-brand.” He sounds like he can’t decide if he’s annoyed or impressed.

“They’re cobalt,” Frank mutters, “They won’t crush or shatter, or -”

Or glint, Matt realizes, when he’s just a shot in the dark - which should be terrible, maybe, a betrayal or a perversion to make the decision based on tactical factors, but Matt’s just glad, viciously, viscerally. He wants Frank to never take it off. To remember, in the trenches, someone loves him.

“They’re perfect,” Matt says, and he’s laughing, wondering if he’s allowed to say now let’s get on with it at his own wedding. He feels like he’s going to float up through the ceiling if they don’t say the words soon; he’s so happy, he’s so ready.

Father Lantom saves him.

“As you place the ring on his finger, repeat after me.”

Matt doesn’t really hear him any better for this part, but he knows his lines.

“I, Matthew Murdock, take you, Frank Castle, to be my lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.”

He knows Frank’s hands so well now, every callous, every old burn and break. He doesn’t want to let go.

(He doesn’t have to.)

“I, Frank Castle,” and his voice breaks, but he keeps going. “Take you, Matthew Murdock, to be my lawfully wedded husband to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.”

“Then by the power vested in me by the state of New York, I now pronounce you married. You may kiss.”

Foggy cries.

The reception is on the terrace Trish’s building, honeysuckle and lilacs and ivy mixing with the diluted strains of the city below. Matt keeps twisting his ring around his finger behind Frank’s neck as they dance, in slow unchoreographed circles. There’s something engraved shallowly on the inside - one continuous line, broken with jags -

“A heartbeat?” Matt whispers, suddenly.

“Well,” says Frank. “They are for both of us.”

Under the music - Trish’s professional-quality playlist, from an iphone tossed in a makeshift bowl amplifier - he can hear Karen cornering a man who refuses to confirm or deny being Nick Fury, but is gradually finagled into an interview anyway; Foggy flirts with all of the lady assassins, as well as a gruff British soldier type who tells him “Not my type at all, lad, but good fucking show,” and then a lady hiding at least two guns agrees to dance with him after all. Joan says she’s too nervous for it, but Malcolm sits next to her for five songs, makes easy conversation and eventually they’re giggling, swaying to the rhythm while still in their seats, her puffy sleeves rustling as she does small arm motions.

Jessica takes the pictures. “Most of them are just Max in this sickening flower crown, though,” she warns, grouchily besotted all over again, “No one cares about you two assholes.”

Luke catches the bouquet.