Chapter Text
In the shadowed alley behind the warehouse, the burnt orange light of a cigarette glowed in the darkness. Frank tracked its progress through his scope from the vantage point of a nearby roof, skull-painted Kevlar pressed to concrete, trenchcoat around his shoulders to stave off the cold. His breath steamed out in the winter air; down in the alley, smoke from the lookout’s cigarette did the same. Without it, the broken streetlight above might have rendered him invisible. The man’s measured gait held no sign of nerves, the cigarette flaring at regular intervals on the inhale. It told a story Frank knew, of many nights spent like this, of making all the wrong choices and ducking beneath the long arm of the law.
Tonight would be his last.
The cigarette moved into the center of the crosshairs. Moved just past it. Frank breathed out as his finger pulled back the trigger.
A spot of burnt, orange light fell to the ground.
When Frank reached the alley a minute later, it was still burning. He ground it out with his heel, stepped over the body, and pressed his back to the wooden wall of the warehouse. Every five minutes, the lookout was supposed to radio in, sounding the all-clear. In about two and a half, the door would open, and he’d exterminate the rest of the vermin, the arms smugglers he’d been tracking for weeks.
Muffled voices, muffled footsteps. Frank clicked the safeties off his pistols and held them at the ready. The door cracked open to reveal a thick-bodied man, the light behind him rendering his front a faceless, black cutout.
“Hey, what’s—?” he tried to say.
A bullet silenced him. Famous last words, Frank thought. Shouts and swears greeting him as he pushed his way into the warehouse, the man’s body catching the first barrage of retaliation, bullets riddling the corpse at a rate that made it spasm in Frank’s arms.
Letting it fall, he took out two more of the dealers that made the mistake of getting close with clean shots through their heads. His Kevlar caught a slug in the white skull marking its center, punching Frank’s breath out and doing its job. He raised his guns again—
And the lights went out.
“Ah, fuck,” one of the arms dealers swore.
On that, if nothing else, Frank agreed with them heartily. He blinked rapidly, willing his eyes to adjust and cursing himself for not realizing where he was, not remembering to bring his fucking night vision goggles. Too close to Hell’s Kitchen, and the Devil had found them.
Sounds reverberated through the darkness: the smack of a blunt object against flesh, cries of pain, the thud of someone hitting the ground. Frank crouched low, anticipating the line of return fire and dropping out of it.
Emergency lights flicked on, casting glaring light and long shadows. A handful of unconscious arms dealers lay on the dusty floor, leaving about two dozen to shoot back. Frank sidestepped behind a pile of crates for cover and nearly collided with a man in a red bodysuit, complete with a mask that left only his mouth visible and featured a pair of horns curling up from the corners of his forehead.
Daredevil, the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, a strictly non-lethal vigilante and recurring pain in Frank’s ass. His suit looked as stupid as ever, but Frank didn’t have time to mention it. Daredevil threw his club again, bringing a fuckin’ stick to a gunfight, knocking another arms dealer down and alerting the rest to their presence. A rain of gunfire split the wooden crates forming their precarious shelter, and Frank spared a thought to be thankful none of them contained grenades or plastic explosives. At a pause, he risked a look over the top and shot a few rounds back, all he managed before that accursed fucking club knocked his pistol of out his hand.
“No killing,” Daredevil said.
Not for the first time, not for the goddamn hundredth time, Frank wanted to strangle him. Out of all the myriad vigilantes New York spawned like a raw steak left in the sun sprouted maggots, the Devil usually held the distinction of not being the absolute worst. Frank didn’t mind working with him on the occasions their goals aligned and they could set aside their differences, the Devil’s no-killing rule marginally less annoying when he had the skills to back it up. Whoever hid behind that mask must be a hell of a fighter. Frank would sometimes scan underground boxing matches with idle curiosity, watching for a familiar jab.
At the moment, though, Frank strongly suspected Daredevil had gotten them both in a good few miles over their heads. A rattling boom shook the warehouse and took out a box of artillery they’d been standing behind a second ago, throwing spare ammunition like confetti and making Frank hiss through his teeth. He reached for the spare handgun in his belt—only for that club to knock his hand away again.
Infuriated, Frank spun around and shoved the stupid boy scout a few steps back. “You shit-for-brains goddamn idiot!” he shouted. “You’re gonna get us both killed!”
Whatever Daredevil said next got swallowed by the next round of heavy artillery. He threw his club again, hitting his targets and coming back to his hand like a boomerang, and Frank grabbed a rifle off the ground and got in a few errant shots that probably accomplished fuck-all. He spun away from the next burst of exploding crates, guns clattering out of this one and nearly tripping Frank as he ducked back into their rapidly diminishing cover.
Just outside it, the Devil fought hand-to-hand with his club, narrowly dodging the stream from a semi-automatic and knocking the man in his jaw. It must’ve been glass, because he dropped instantly. The Devil turned to him with a smirk of triumph or just the adrenaline-pumping joy of the fight. Frank didn’t smile back. If they got out of this alive, there was still a fifty-fifty chance the Devil would turn on him next, try to hog-tie him and leave him for the cops to scoop up.
Unfortunately, the chances of Frank getting out of here without his help were already spinning the drain. He knocked his back into the Devil’s and felt the press of shoulders in response, presenting a unified front. Behind him, the Devil raised his club, and Frank raised his salvaged gun at the remaining arms dealers surrounding them, still too fucking many.
Shots rang out again. Frank returned fire, taking advantage of Daredevil’s distraction to get one of them between the eyes and one in the throat. He felt the motion of the Devil’s arm as he swung his club. Then, he felt his body jerk. A soft, sucking breath sounded in his ear, somehow audible among the continuing noise.
For a second, Frank was back in the desert again, in the marines. One of his buddies standing beside him one minute and gone the next. He was in Central Park, holding his bullet-riddled wife and children as they took their last breaths. His mind rushed through the war he’d fought since, his personal war, the sound of every life he’d taken, every one he’d failed to save.
Daredevil took a stumbling half-step. Frank turned in time to see him press a gloved hand to his side, for it to come away wet and glistening, for the Devil to trip sideways and fall to the ground.
“Red!” Frank shouted, but Daredevil didn’t answer him. Only another explosion did, followed by the staccato rhythm of steady gunfire.
The war took him back. His targets snapped into focus, the arms dealers still firing and hitting Kevlar if they hit him at all. Everything else fell aside, shed like old skin. Frank advanced. Shot two more in the chest, slipped under an arm and shot that one in the back of the skull. Got a knife in his hand and slashed the throat of one that tried to get in his space. Dropped, rolled, came up with two semi-automatics and fired in a circle to take out the rest, until one remained.
One that might be a problem. Unlike the rest, this one wore gear. Kevlar covered his torso, and the padding around his arms and legs suggested equal protection. They raised their guns at each other, headshots both, and pulled the trigger.
Empty clicks echoed in the ringing silence.
Frank tossed away his gun and raised his fists. The man was big, bigger than him, but Frank had fought worse—this asshole wasn’t the Avengers, was no goddamn Captain America. But they didn’t kill people, and this guy, this giant of a man, looked at Frank and smiled like a wolf at an injured rabbit. His hand drifted almost lazily to his belt, and he pulled out another gun that he aimed right at the center of Frank’s forehead.
The hole at the end of the barrel looked like death. Maybe it would take this time, a bullet in his skull to join the one already there, the one left there the day his family died. This was it, the end he’d always seen coming.
“Say your prayers, Punisher,” the man said, which as far as these things went, was pretty goddamn pedestrian.
Maybe he’d see his family again.
You never hear the shot that gets you—or at least, that’s what they say. The crack of a firing gun filled the empty warehouse. Frank started in surprise and nearly, stupidly, touched his own head to check—before he noticed the gun slipping from the other man’s hands, those hands going to his throat in a vain attempt to staunch the flow of blood.
It leaked out from between his fingers, a perverse waterfall as he choked on it, unable to scream. He dropped to his knees, to the floor, and went limp while all Frank could do was stare at him.
With the man dead and the threat eliminated, Frank looked around for the smoking gun. He found it in the only place that made sense, in the shaking hand of the only other living person in the warehouse, though it didn’t really make sense at all. Daredevil leaned heavily against the wall, his free hand pressed to his side. The gun slipped from between his fingers and fell to the floor.
“He would’ve killed you,” he said, and again, “He would’ve killed you.”
Then, slowly, almost gracefully, he collapsed.
*
Someone was screaming.
The coppery tang of blood filled Matt’s nose. Acid vomit. Sick stench of excrement. Burning, chemical smell of bleach and alcohol and cleaning supplies, all mixed together. Briny salt.
Nausea rolled his stomach; Matt willed it back down. He tried to piece the disparate parts together into something that made sense, but those continuing screams kept shattering it. Wounded, animal screams of the hurt and dying, and he had to go, had to help—
Pain lanced through his body, immobilizing. For a second, Matt couldn’t even breathe. The lack of overwhelming smells came almost as a relief, then returned in a rush as his starving lungs gasped for air. Abruptly, the screaming stopped. Other noises filled its absence: crying, praying. A dozen overlapping conversations. Beeping machines. Running feet.
Sensory input tugged him like a whirlpool current, ready to plunge him down into chaos. Matt shut it out, smell by smell, sound by sound. Focused on his body, laying flat on a padded surface—a bed. Scratchy sheets above and below him, rough against his exposed skin. Throbbing pain in his side. He twitched his fingers and toes to make sure everything still worked.
A new sound came, of a door opening. Matt titled his head towards it, bringing a familiar cadence of footsteps, a comforting scent. He cracked his eyes open, no difference to him in the forever dark of his blindness, but it served as the easiest way to show he’d woken up. The owner of the footsteps stopped and gasped, pulse spiking.
“Foggy,” Matt said.
His voice sounded mummified.
Across the room, Foggy unfroze. “Matt!” he cried, ran towards him, stopped halfway, ran back to the door and yanked it open to shout into the hall. “He’s awake! He’s awake!”
Spinning around again, almost at a rate that tipped him over, Foggy skidded over to Matt’s bedside and grabbed the side rail. “Hey, buddy, you scared us for a minute there,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
“Been better,” Matt managed, all he did before the door to his room opened again, bringing in Karen and a doctor and two nurses that quickly ushered his friends back out.
The doctor checked his vitals and set him into the rhythm of the usual questions: his name and age and profession, the year, the president. He accepted a cup of water and let the nurse help him drink a few sips before answering. Adequately, by the doctor’s unchanged heartbeat if not Matt’s own recollection.
At the foot of his bed, the doctor examined his chart with the dry sound of flipping paper. “Do you know where you are?” she asked.
“Hospital,” Matt guessed vaguely. The sounds and smells of the place finally came together in cohesion, an unpleasant background static no longer threatening to drown him as they had in his childhood, in those first few, awful weeks after the accident. He’d lain in a bed like this one, fists clenched in the sheets, bandages over chemical-burned eyes that would never work again—chemicals that coursed through him and enhanced his other senses to compensate for the lack.
“Metro-General, to be specific,” the doctor told him. “Do you remember how you got here?”
He paused to consider it, then hit a dead end. “No,” Matt said. He remembered changing into the Daredevil suit, leaving for patrol, the rest of the night a terrifying expanse of nothing. For the doctor, he rewound a little—HIPAA didn’t cover breaking the law. “I think I remember leaving work last night.”
“Mr. Murdock,” the doctor began, her voice taking on a slow tactfulness that filled him with dread, “your firm partner, Mr. Nelson, says you last left work on Wednesday. It’s now Sunday.”
Four days? He couldn’t have lost four whole—Matt handled the water on his own this time, drank again. “What happened to me?” he asked.
“There’s no nice way to say this,” the doctor said. She took a breath and continued, “You sustained a gunshot wound to the stomach. Someone who may or may not have been the shooter dumped you in the back of an ambulance outside of our emergency room in nothing but your underwear.”
The doctor’s speech lapsed for a moment, likely to give Matt time to adjust. “Beyond that, Mr. Murdock, we have no idea what happened to you,” she said next. “We were kind of hoping you could tell us.”
Matt’s head swam. He leaned back against the pillows. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” the doctor said, her prior tactfulness bleeding into a practiced sympathy. “Memory loss surrounding traumatic events isn’t uncommon. It may come back with time, and even if it doesn’t—” She shrugged. “You survived, and with some physical therapy, you can expect a full recovery. Hold onto that.”
She was right, or at least, the unchanging rate of her pulse suggested she believed what she said. To Matt, though, his survival still felt slippery, something he couldn’t grasp around the void of his missing memory, his missing suit. The skin-crawling fear of who might have it, and, if they hadn’t outed his identity to the world yet, just what they might be planning.
Blackmail?
Sale to the highest bidder?
With effort, Matt swallowed the beginning of his panic. “Can I talk to my friends now, please?” he asked.
Foggy smelled like cafeteria food and a minimum of two days without showering in the buildup of sweat and oil on his skin. Clothing rustled as he sat down, the shape of jeans and a t-shirt. Not work clothes: he’d probably shut down the office, and Matt tried not to worry about their clients or their rent. On the other side of his bed, Karen remained standing, shifting her weight from foot to restless foot, her hair damp and coffee on her breath. Matt would bet Foggy had sent her home to shower and change and that she’d only just gotten back when he’d returned to the land of the living.
“Convenient amnesia,” Foggy said after Matt related what he’d told the doctor and what the doctor had told him. “Gotta love it.”
“It’s not,” Matt said, trying not to wince as Foggy and Karen’s hearts jumped. “I remember—I left for patrol.” He shook his head. “That’s it.”
Karen blew her breath out. “Oh, god,” she said. “So, we still have no idea who did this.”
“Or if they’re planning on finishing the job,” Foggy added darkly.
And the last of Matt’s hopes drowned like a newborn kitten. “So, it wasn’t—”
“It wasn’t Jess, Luke, Danny, Spider-man, any of the Avengers, or anyone from SHIELD,” Karen said, ticking them off on her fingers. “We’ve asked around. You weren’t drugged, either. The toxicology report here came back clean, and Natasha double-checked.”
“Nat was here?” Matt asked, sniffing reflexively to locate her scent.
“She snuck in and took a vial of blood,” Foggy told him. “SHIELD tests screen for more compounds, but—nada.”
Great. Matt laughed shortly, causing a throb of pain in his side. “I guess it’s all me.”
“Or it could’ve been a psychic,” Foggy suggested. “There’s no way to test for that.”
Karen cleared her throat, cut in hurriedly: “Well, maybe the doctor was right, and it’ll come back if you give it time.”
“Maybe,” Matt agreed, if only because he lacked the energy to argue. “How long am I stuck here for?”
“I think at least through the night,” Foggy told him apologetically. He leaned over and placed his hand on Matt’s. “I’ll see what I can do about getting you home in the morning.”
They cycled in and out, Karen and Foggy, his doctor and various nurses—and the police, when the doctor asked if he felt up to seeing them. Matt agreed more for a desire to get it over with than because he actually did. A pair of detectives entered, a man and a woman as useless and clueless as everyone else. Switching on a handheld recorder, the woman took his statement while the man scribbled on a notepad and loudly smacked his gum. Matt tried not to let it bother him, failed when they started in on the questions, about his recent cases, about anyone who might want to hurt him.
He sent them away unsatisfied, frustration in the tense line of the woman’s shoulders, indifference in the casual slope of the man’s and the continuing smack of his gum, all the way out of the door into the hall. Foggy entered as they exited through the revolving door of Matt’s hospital room and dropped heavily into the chair at his bedside.
“Fucking vultures,” he said.
“I’d be more worried if they weren’t here,” Matt told him and received a grudging murmur of agreement.
Returning from the cafeteria, Karen helped Matt adjust the bed and balance the tray on his lap. Hospital food tasted cloyingly like preservatives and the tacky powder used to line plastic gloves. Matt choked down half of it before he couldn’t stand another bite. Fortunately, this coincided with Karen’s phone buzzing, with her swooping down to kiss his forehead.
“Sorry. That was Ellison,” she said, naming her boss at the Bulletin. And, with a smile in her voice, “I’m gone a few days, and the whole place falls apart without me.”
Smiling back, Matt said, “Go. I’ll be fine.”
“You’d better be,” Karen said. She patted his hand, squeezed Foggy’s shoulder on the way out.
As the click of her heels receded down the hall, Matt turned to Foggy, let him see his face. “You should go home, too,” he said.
“Matt—” Foggy began.
“I’ll be fine until tomorrow,” Matt said. “Please. I’ll feel better knowing you got a good night’s sleep.”
Foggy let out a long-suffering sigh. “My best friend is in the hospital with a bullet hole in his stomach,” he said. “I’ll be surprised if I can sleep at all.”
Still, he pushed himself to his feet and bent down to awkwardly hug Matt around the shoulders. “See you in the morning,” he said, then left following the same route Karen had taken earlier, the squeak of his sneakers against the floor a contrast to her heels.
The sound faded into the hospital’s noise, and Matt breathed out, Foggy’s presence one last thing he had to navigate. Without the need to keep up appearances, Matt let his smile fall in exchange for the honesty of a pained grimace. He buzzed the nurse to take away his tray and then asked her to turn the lights off, settling in for a long night of surviving Metro-General.
*
Blood leaked steadily from the wound in Daredevil’s side. Frank took an abortive step towards him, then stopped, casting a critical eye to the bodies littering the warehouse floor. His gaze flicked back to Daredevil, hesitating, but—Frank shook himself, prioritized. A gun found its way into his hands, bullets into the skulls of anyone he didn’t know for sure was already dead. It only took a minute, a minute that Frank didn’t know if the Devil could afford, but they could afford one of these assholes waking up and shooting at them even less.
When he knew they were alone in the warehouse, he tucked his hardware back into his holsters and knelt at Daredevil’s side. Pressed two fingers to the jugular, the pulse thready, but present. Frank let out the breath he’d been holding and heaved the dead weight into his arms, over his shoulder.
“You stupid pain in my ass,” Frank muttered, mostly for the sound of his own voice. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
They made it to Frank’s van, doors locked and the lights on, Daredevil laid out in the back like a corpse at a wake. The catches on his suit challenged Frank’s clumsy fingers, the whole thing made out of a Kevlar weave that might’ve stopped a bullet if it hadn’t hit the seam just right. Rotten luck. With a grunt, Frank managed to peel back the upper half of his suit enough to see the damage. He stared for a second, then rocked back on his heels.
Shit. Frank couldn’t fix that. An arm or a leg, he’d dig the slug out, patch the guy up, and give him fluids until he woke up and could stumble away on his own, but he wasn’t a surgeon—he couldn’t go digging around in his guts without making something worse. Curt—Curt was a goddamn field medic. He couldn’t do this, either. And with the Night Nurse’s last known clinic blown to shit…
Under the ceiling light, the skin visible beneath Daredevil’s mask looked pale, his lips bloodless. He needed a hospital, or he was gonna die here in the back of Frank’s van, after going against everything he believed in to save Frank’s life.
“Sorry about this, Red,” Frank told him, even without the Devil awake to hear it.
He began stripping off the suit, gloves and boots, the separate parts covering his legs and torso. Frank saved the mask for last like that’d do any good, hesitated like an idiot with his hands on either side of those stupid horns. Red would never in a million years want Frank to do this, but he wouldn’t want to die, either, and the only other option would be to find his name out later when it hit the news. Like this, Frank would have a face without a name, someone he couldn’t find again unless he went looking.
Frank took a deep breath and pulled the mask off. Sweat-slick, it slid off easily and revealed the face beneath.
Between the death pallor and the context, it took Frank a few seconds to place what he was seeing. Who he was seeing. Then, recognition flared through him like a strip of gasoline set on fire and, for a costly few seconds, Frank gaped.
He knew him. He fuckin’ knew him. “Murdock?” Frank blurted in a strangled whisper, but of course, Matt fuckin’ Murdock didn’t answer. It was him, though. The bleeding heart defense attorney who kept showing up on the other side of the glass when Frank got arrested, doling out help Frank hadn’t asked for and acting like he was on a mission from God to keep Frank from the electric chair. The stone blind defense attorney, never seen without his cloudy, red glasses and white cane, one of a whole goddamn slew of reasons that made his face about the last one Frank could have expected to see.
That forced a laugh out of him, wheezing, hysterical. How many fuckin’ times had this asshole called him into visitation, the perfect frown and the picture of sympathy, just a few hours after he’d thrown him into a cell in the first place? It was crazy, was what it was, Murdock was crazy and hypocritical and probably lying about being blind—
And it didn’t matter. None of that was enough for Frank to let him die.
Sighing, Frank pushed Murdock’s sweat-damp, red hair off his forehead. Next to it, his skin looked white as paper, all the way down to the shockingly bright blood still coming sluggishly out of the wound in his side. His black boxers rode up a little, twisting around his hips, and Frank absurdly recalled childhood church services he hadn’t thought of in years, Jesus dying on the cross.
“You’re a real piece of work, you know that?” Frank asked Murdock, asked no one, grunting as he stood. “Die on me after all this, and I’ll fuckin’ kill you.”
On the way to Metro-General, Frank thought of the watchful eyes of CCTV cameras and hunched his shoulders reflexively. He pulled out his phone and called David at a stoplight.
Despite the clock pushing midnight, tipping Wednesday over into Thursday, David answered groggily on the third ring. “Hey, Frank.”
“Hey,” Frank replied, then dove right in. “I got a package to drop off at Metro-General, and I don’t need any eyes on me when I do it. You got that back door?”
“Ever since the last time you landed there, yeah,” David said. “Gimme a minute to get to my laptop. What’s your ETA?”
Frank checked the street, checked the clock. “Ten minutes out.”
“Ok,” David said. “Stay on the line.”
Which he did, through David’s humming and hmmming and trailed-off mutterings of unintelligible techno-babble. A few blocks from the hospital, David cleared his throat, and Frank started paying attention again.
“And we’re live. I set it to loop,” David told him. “I see an ambulance coming in hot. Should get there about thirty seconds before you.”
In the private darkness of his van, Frank smiled thinly and stepped on the gas as the light changed. “Thanks. I’ll call you in a few.”
“Should I put some coffee on?” David asked drolly.
Even though David couldn’t see him, Frank shrugged. “Might as well.”
The ambulance came screaming into the drop-off zone like clockwork. Frank slowed his van to a crawl in an imitation of a lost driver or one waiting to pick someone up. Springing out of the ambulance, the paramedics ran a body on a gurney out of the back and in through the emergency room doors.
As soon as those doors swung shut, Frank moved. Threw the van into park with one hand and unbuckled his seatbelt with the other, on his feet before it fully retracted. He moved into the back where the shallow rise and fall of Murdock’s chest showed he hadn’t died yet, and Frank hauled his limp body into his arms, said, “Hold on. You’re almost there.”
Out of the van and across the thin strip of pavement, Frank deposited Murdock into the back of the ambulance, doors left slightly ajar in their haste to get inside. He bit back a chuckle at the thought of the looks on those poor schmucks’ faces when they came out and found a body in the ambulance like it’d dropped from the sky, but he sure as shit couldn’t stick around and watch. He leapt down cat-like and stole back to his van without a backward glance.
Safely away, he dialed David again, who answered with: “They got your package.”
“Good,” Frank said. “Can you keep an eye on him?”
Confusion or just curiosity carried through the line so thickly Frank could almost take it. “Sure,” David said. “Status reports on John Doe.”
“His real name’s Matthew Murdock. They’ll probably figure it out eventually,” Frank said. They’d come looking: Nelson, that law partner of Murdock’s with the penchant for bow ties; Karen, their old secretary turned journalist. “Can I—?” Frank started to ask, but the rest stuck on his tongue. Fuck it, he thought and forced it out. “Can you get me a copy of his medical records?”
“Uh, yeah. I can,” David said slowly. “Can I ask why? Has he done something?”
“Don’t know yet,” Frank told him, though the truth veered closer to him not knowing where the fuck to even start. “That’ll help me figure it out.”
A yawn, and David said, “Sure. Check your email in a couple hours.”
“Thank you,” Frank said. He held the phone between his shoulder and his ear as he turned a tight corner, took it in his hand again. “I didn’t wake Sarah, did I?”
“Little bit, but she’ll get over it,” David said. “She sends her best, by the way. The kids miss you, too.”
The smile that cracked Frank’s face almost hurt. “Give ‘em a hug, but don’t say it was from me,” he said, mentally kicking himself for asking about Sarah. For his occasional reliance on David’s tech skills and how he couldn’t stop caring about David’s family, any more than he could stop them from caring about him.
Once upon a time, Frank had saved David’s life, and David had helped him take others in turn, gotten Frank revenge for the deaths of his family. Probably, Frank thought on occasion, neither of them would ever stop paying for it.
He swung back to the warehouse awaiting David’s email, braced for the possibility of its invasion by cops or other opportunists, but gunshots hardly warranted a nine-one-one call in this part of town, and the arms dealers had picked their venue well. Frank stepped into a warehouse exactly as he’d left it, the corpses still too fresh for rigor mortis. Ignoring them, Frank cataloged the merchandise, wrecked what he didn’t want and loaded what he did want into the back of his van, into the possession of the only private party he trusted with that much hardware—himself.
Before dawn, Frank had the van packed near to the ceiling. He returned to the warehouse to do the last thing, to drag the bodies to the center of the floor and wreath the pile with empty crates. Doused ‘em all with lighter fluid and gasoline and threw the match. Turning away from the blaze, he sprayed the perimeter with enough ammonia to make his nose itch and his eyes water, hopefully enough to destroy the DNA evidence he usually couldn’t care less about. The Punisher, born the day Frank Castle’s family died, never wore a mask, had nothing left to lose.
Matt Murdock, though… Frank didn’t know what to do with him, and he wasn’t going to give the police the chance to decide, to connect this mess of a shoot-out with the guy dumped at Metro-General with a bullet in his guts. The fire might not burn the bodies to ash, but it might just burn hot enough to render the forensics useless, and he’d set it far enough from the support beams that it’d die out without taking the warehouse with it. Someone would discover the bodies eventually. But by then, the dots between this and Matt Murdock would be too far apart for anyone to connect.
Frank drove back to his safehouse in the light of the rising sun. Morning news kept him company, the weather forecast and traffic reports. He drank coffee from a thermos to keep his body moving until he could afford to let it stop.
*
Morning came to Metro-General, and Foggy with it. The measure of his gait and the excitement in his breath told Matt the news even before he opened the door and announced, “Hey! They’re discharging you!”
That still left the task of getting home before him, the first hurdle appearing in the form of a nurse rolling a wheelchair into his room. Matt’s initial impulse to refuse hit a wall; the stiff muscles in his legs hadn’t moved for days and protested at the mere bending of his knees. He let the nurse help dress him in a sweater and sweats Foggy had nabbed from his apartment, then let both Foggy and the nurse lower him into the chair.
He nearly threw up in the hall, movement giving him no time to adjust, the excess of input assaulting his battered body, his battered senses. Matt kept his hands folded in his lap and focused on breathing. Losing the sparse contents of his stomach would only get him sent back to his room, and he needed out of this building like an animal needs out of a trap. He counted the transitions: hallway, elevator, another hallway. Through the hotel lobby, out of the automatic front doors and into the warmth of morning sunshine.
New York greeted him, the sounds and smells of the city, of home, already sweeping the torture of Metro-General away. A genuine smile spread across Matt’s face; his body relaxed. A few steps ahead, Foggy stood on the edge of the curb and waved his arm at the slow-moving traffic circling past.
“There she is,” he said as the nurse pushed Matt up to his side. “You ready to move, Matt?”
“Yeah,” Matt said and hoped his body agreed with him.
It did, at least enough to get him from the wheelchair into the backseat of the sedan that Karen drove. Foggy slid in after him, buckling his seat belt and keeping him upright, though Matt tried not to lean too heavily against him. He settled into the seat, grateful for the cocoon of it, for the comfort of his own clothes against his skin and the company of his friends.
“Hey, Matt,” Karen said as she switched gears to drive. “How are you feeling?”
“Roughly a thousand times better now that I’m out of that place,” he said. “I hate hospitals.”
A sympathetic shudder ruffled Karen’s shoulders. “I can imagine.”
“Thanks for picking me up,” Matt said.
Foggy’s shoulder knocked into his. “Of course we were gonna pick you up.”
They turned down city streets, a single cell in the beating veins of New York traffic. Matt drifted through the motion, the playing radios and conversations in the surrounding cars, the smell of exhaust, the phantom taste of greasy breakfast food from the sidewalk vendors. A testament to his exhaustion and the state of his body, he didn’t notice they’d turned onto his street until Karen began slowing down, and didn’t pick up the shape of the two people waiting outside his building until they stopped.
As Karen hit the unlock button, one of the people on the sidewalk opened Matt’s door, leaning an arm against the roof to peer down at him. “Jesus Christ,” Jess said, offering her hand. “You look like something the cat dragged in.”
Dumbly, Matt accepted it and let her pull him to swaying feet. It took only a fraction of Jess’ strength, the full extent of which could tie a crowbar into a knot like a length of rope, but the stabilizing grip that moved to his arm was still bruising. He balanced between Jess and her husband, the muscled expanse of Luke’s chest unyielding as a wall, as Luke’s bulletproof, unbreakable skin.
“Hey,” Matt said, recovering his ability to speak. “What are you doing here?”
“Good morning to you, too,” Luke said, voice rumbling through his chest.
Car doors opened; Foggy and Karen stepping out. “Your building doesn’t have an elevator, and uh, not to call you fat,” Foggy joked, patting his own, much softer belly, “but you’re a little heavy for Karen and I to carry up six flights.”
Embarrassment brought heat to Matt’s face, and he would have covered it if not for the steadying hold on his arms. “Uh, guys, not that I don’t appreciate it, but this really isn’t—”
“Matt!” Karen’s voice rang out, punctuated by the coins she fed the meter. “For once, just shut up and let us help you.”
At a loss, Matt did. Luke and Jess got his arms around each of their shoulders, better than crutches, and his feet didn’t even touch the floor until they got him through the door of his apartment. There, he used the wall for balance and shuffled over to the couch, mostly succeeding in his attempt to sit normally and not collapse. Bringing up the rear, Karen and Foggy closed the door and sat with him, Foggy on the couch, Karen in one of his kitchen chairs dragged over.
He was home. The smell of his apartment and the sounds of his building made Matt want to cry with relief. Instead, he smiled and faced where Luke and Jess leaned against the wall. “Thank you,” he said. “How’s Dani?”
“Good. Uncle Danny’s watching her,” Jess said.
Matt cracked a smile. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Dani loves him,” Luke added. “He sends his well-wishes and all that. He wanted to be here, but I said, what’s he gonna do that we can’t? Turn on his Iron Fist and punch you up the stairs?”
A ripple of laughter went through them, Matt stopping at the resurgence of the pain in his side. “Tell him I said thanks,” he said.
“Will do. He’ll come by and visit in a few days,” Luke said.
“Yeah, he’s on the rotation for Friday, I think,” Karen said, pulling out her phone and bending her head towards the screen. “Yeah, Friday.”
“The rotation?” Matt asked.
Foggy clapped him on the shoulder. “Yes, the rotation,” he said. “To bring you food and keep you company.” He pointed a finger in Matt’s face and said, “You, sir, are not leaving this apartment until you’re in tip-top shape.”
“Or we’ve all volunteered to drag you back,” Jess informed him smugly.
They weren’t serious. They couldn’t be serious. Matt tried to feel offended, and mostly just came up tired. He leaned his head back against the couch and sighed dramatically, said, “With friends like these…”
“You’ll live longer,” Foggy said, letting go of his shoulder.
Fine—that was probably true. Matt let the rest of them exchange small-talk for a few minutes longer, using most of his energy to stay awake and mostly alert. Then, he yawned hugely, and Karen stopped her story of Bulletin office politics mid-sentence.
“Ok, I think we should let you rest,” she said, getting to her feet. “Do you need anything first?”
“No,” Matt said, and again, to all of them, “Thank you.”
His friends filtered out, Foggy last and locking the door behind him. Matt sighed and summoned the dregs of his willpower to grab the crutches left on the couch and propel himself into the bedroom. His own bed, soft mattress and silk sheets that wouldn’t scratch his skin, beckoned him like a siren call, but something else cut in before he could reach it, a smell curling into his nose like smoke.
Blood and gunpowder.
It took Matt a minute to find it, a few minutes more of using his crutch to pull it out of the back of his closet where it had been stashed and heave it up onto the bed. A duffel bag he didn’t own, smelling of store-bought newness and holding no hints of its origin or who might have broken in and left it. And inside…
Inside, his hands skimmed over the armored fabric of his Daredevil suit. It was all Matt could do to stop them from shaking. The mask and its devil horns, the lines of the body armor that covered the rest of him. The hole in its center where a bullet had skipped along a seam and right into his stomach. Flakes stuck to his fingers when he pulled them away, detached from the dry halo of Matt’s own blood.
*
A night’s work left Frank’s body heavy in a good way, his muscles sore with the weight of accomplishment, the arms dealers he’d been after for weeks cleared out, Murdock deposited at the hospital all parties save Frank none the wiser about his double-life. His jaw cracked on a yawn as he turned the last corner to what wasn’t home, but was a place to sleep and keep his shit.
The latest in a long line of safehouses occupied an abandoned section of the New York subway system. Frank drove his van into the garage of a derelict building that had once been an auto repair shop and was now a sad collection of brick and graffiti. But it served to conceal its true purpose, a hiding place for the elevator large enough for both him and the vehicle, for the hidden keypad where he could enter the code that would take them both subterranean.
White fluorescents snapped on to illuminate the windowless box of underground space. Frank stepped out of the van and leaned against the side, yawned hugely. He needed to unload it, but—the ordinance was as secure here as it would be in storage, and his body ached in the aftermath of the fucking night he’d just had. Frank decided to listen to it. He moved away from his van and to a metal door cut out of the concrete wall, entered the code into the keypad at its side without looking.
Behind it, the sparse furniture and bare walls of his safehouse greeted him, a single room encompassing kitchen and bedroom with the bathroom off to the side. Frank checked his security measures and, finding them airtight, stripped out of his clothes to shower off the night’s work, blood and smoke and ammonia stink. He sent it swirling around the drain, toweled off, dressed in clean clothes. Fixed up some dehydrated eggs and a packet of oatmeal for something that could’ve been breakfast or dinner or just the fuel he needed to stay alive and fighting another day. Then, only then, did he drag out his laptop and flip it open.
A notification for David’s waiting email popped up in the corner of the screen. Frank clicked it and read the message in the body while he chewed:
Frank,
Here’s what I could find. Should be everything, but I can dig a little more tomorrow if it’s not enough.
Your guy’s stable, and he’s in the system under his real name now, so I guess someone identified him.
If you ever wanna tell me what this is about, I’m all ears.
-Microchip
Signed off with his hacker name, like a true paranoid bastard. Frank snorted, then clicked on the attachment, which was where things started to get interesting.
It took him awhile to find it, buried under the immunization records and the dental x-rays before and after Murdock got his wisdom teeth pulled, because David was nothing if not thorough. Frank scrolled back into the past, to the day Murdock lost his eyesight.
He already knew the story—anyone with an internet connection and a bit of free time could pull up the old newspaper articles. Like Frank had, around the third or fourth instance of Matt Murdock offering his services pro bono, as if Frank wouldn’t escape lockup long before his laundry list of crimes ever went to trial. Some thirty years back, nine-year-old Matt Murdock had knocked an old man in the crosswalk out of the way of a speeding truck. Broke the geezer’s hip, but saved his life. Meanwhile, the truck had swerved, throwing barrels full of a seriously nasty chemical cocktail into the air and splashing a not insignificant amount in little Matt Murdock’s face.
Poor kid had been blinded for life, or so the old articles said.
But that was only part of the story. Now, extracted from Murdock’s medical records, Frank had the rest. He zeroed in on the scan of the doctor’s note, written in looping handwriting and dating back to that first, post-accident hospital stay. A few days in, Murdock had started screaming. Covered his ears and writhed around on his hospital bed, his head split open by sounds no one else could hear. He complained of scratchy sheets, the stink of sweat and excrement from surrounding rooms that he couldn’t possibly actually smell, strange tastes on his tongue.
Then, just as suddenly as the complaints started, they stopped. Murdock recovered, left the hospital, and got on with his life.
Frank pushed his empty breakfast dishes to the side and rubbed the pads of his fingers against his mouth in thought. He’d first met Daredevil ten years prior, on a rooftop on a cold, city night. In all that time, he’d never been able to get within a five-block radius of the guy without Daredevil knowing he was there.
Ok. So, Murdock was blind. He was blind, and he could still do what he did, a side effect of the chemicals that had taken his sight in the first place. Weird, sure, but Frank lived in a world where aliens and Nordic gods dropped from the sky. This didn’t even make the top hundred on the list of the most fucked-up shit he’d ever encountered.
With the mystery solved, Frank could sleep. He dumped his dishes in the sink to deal with later, brushed his teeth, and fell backwards onto the stiff mattress that served as his bed. An image of Murdock greeted him when he closed his eyes, stripped to his underwear and pale as death save for the bleeding gunshot wound. But between his time in the marines and that day at the park and the war he’d fought since, Frank had spent most of his life sleeping in the company of terrible memories. He made it fade to black, breathed, and let his body pull him under.
Underground living made time a twisting thing. When he woke, it could have been daylight or darkness outside, clear or cloudy, or even post-apocalyptic if an invasion or bomb detonation had carried on overhead while he slept. Groaning at his sleep-stiff muscles, Frank squinted at his phone for the time: a little after five. A little after sunset, at this time of year.
The previous night’s events filtered back: the warehouse, Red, Murdock. The van Frank still had to unload. “Shit,” he muttered aloud, sat up, and rolled his shoulders to get them in the game.
Later, after food and coffee and several hours of sorting through a small arsenal’s worth of hardware and ammunition, Frank found it. Shoved into a corner and pressed flat under a box, he pulled out the remains of Daredevil’s suit. He laid it out in the center of the now-empty van and sat with his back against the wall, staring at the damn thing as if it could reveal the answer to the question knocking around his head: what the fuck do I do with you?
Disposal—the obvious solution. Straight into the incinerator and never think about it again. Except...Red was gonna wake up spitting mad that Frank had taken his mask off and seen his face, and he didn’t need the complication of adding fuel to that fire. The suit was mostly still good, all save for the section marred by the bullet hole, and hey. For all Frank knew, maybe Red had a replacement.
He straightened his leg to fish his phone out of his pocket and texted David: Murdock still stable?
In the space of a few minutes, the response came back: Yep. Expecting a full recovery.
Tension released in Frank’s chest like windows blown out in the force of an explosion. He clambered down from the van and into the safehouse proper where he dragged an empty duffel bag down from one of the shelves and brought it back out. The dislocated pieces of the Daredevil suit fit inside with room to spare.
Matt Murdock lived on the top floor of an old brownstone in Hell’s Kitchen. Frank hadn’t even needed David’s help to find it; he’d found it himself years back, when the lawyer became a recurring theme and he thought the information might be relevant. And so it had been, if not in any way Frank could’ve possibly predicted.
In the small hours, after Frank guessed most of the hardworking citizens had gone to bed, he slipped through the shadows of the building’s back alley and climbed from the top of a closed dumpster onto its fire escape. Slung over his shoulder, the duffel knocked repeatedly against Frank’s hip. He ignored it and climbed higher, all the way to the top.
The damned window wasn’t even locked. Frank snorted in remembrance of just whose apartment he was breaking into and resolved to secure it on his way out. He eased his body over the sill and paused in the center of the living room, shapes of furniture ill-defined in the dim light. The duffel slipped from his shoulder, and he caught it in the crook of his elbow. He couldn’t leave it out in the open. Someone else, one of Murdock’s friends or maybe even his landlord, would almost definitely come in here for something or other before he returned.
So, Frank moved lightly through the space, considering. He tried the two doors leading off from the living room and found Murdock’s bedroom, as good a place as any. Under the bed—no, that’d look weird, like trying to hide something on purpose. He opened Murdock’s closet instead and buried the duffel in the back, under a pile of shoes and rolled-up towels. Even if someone came to get him clothes, they’d have to get real nosy in order to find it. And Murdock, when he came back, would probably sniff it out in seconds with his super-sensitive nose.
His business concluded, Frank left the way he came, down the fire escape and through the alley, to his van parked a safe distance away. Some hours later, in the course of his nightly patrol, it occurred to him that he could’ve left a note—but what the hell would he even say? Frank hadn’t told anyone, and he’d given up the evidence. That said all it needed to.
He trusted Murdock would get the message.
*
Light footsteps landed on Matt’s roof, appearing from seemingly nowhere and darting across the concrete. He shifted his weight on the couch and tamped down mingled relief and trepidation. Anyone else, anyone he knew this well and knew was coming, he’d have picked up half a mile out at minimum. As it was, she’d kept herself hidden, given him only seconds to prepare.
Those seconds passed in a blink. The rooftop access door opened, followed by the creak of someone descending the stairs, the smell and shape of her that stopped at the bottom.
“Hello, Matthew,” she said.
“Elektra,” he replied.
She stepped forward, hand trailing along the wall. “Mind if I turn a light on?”
“Here I thought Stick taught you to fight blind,” Matt said, with a smile to make a joke of it.
A slight huff of an exhale, and Elektra found the switch. Electricity buzzed in the lights overhead. “I may be able to fight blind, but I’m not blind,” she said. “Did you even know it was nighttime?”
He did, from the rhythm of the city outside. Absent his hours at the law firm and patrolling as Daredevil, it served as the only way to mark his days. He switched topics and said, “I appreciate you coming.”
“Yes, well, I heard you got shot,” Elektra said, perching on the arm of the couch on the opposite end from where he sat. “I’ll admit that I’m a little intrigued as to how you managed that.”
This was it, the point of no return. “I don’t know,” Matt told her.
The too-regular beat of Elektra’s heart didn’t waver, evidence of the Hand’s training post death and resurrection, finishing what Stick and the Chaste had started. If she wanted, she could hide her heartbeat from him entirely, but she only turned her head towards him and went very still.
“You don’t know,” she repeated, not quite a question.
“I remember going out on patrol. The rest of the night is missing,” Matt said, accompanied by the sick swoop in his stomach whenever he thought about it for too long, whenever he said it out loud. “I came home from the hospital and found the Daredevil suit in a bag at the back of my closet with a bullet hole in it.”
“Hm,” Elektra intoned. She crossed one leg over the other, and the sai she kept at her belt clinked together. “It’s someone who knows who you are, knows where you live, and has neither come forward nor gone public with that information.”
Matt swallowed. “Yeah.”
“You think they might want to sell it,” Elektra said, arriving at the conclusion with pinpoint precision.
“If they haven’t already,” Matt said.
“I haven’t heard anything, but to be fair, I haven’t been looking,” Elektra told him. “You said you lost your memory. Were you drugged?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“A psychic?”
“I don’t think so, but I unfortunately can’t rule that out.”
The weight of Elektra’s gaze felt heavier. “Did you pick up anything from the suit?”
“No, sorry,” Matt said—and he was, for his blank memory and his own fucking uselessness. “All I could smell was blood and gunpowder. Whoever left it couldn’t have stayed long or touched anything.”
“Alright,” Elektra said. “Do you have anything else for me to go on?”
What Matt had was Luke and Jess and Danny turning over every stone they could find and Peter keeping his ear to the ground. He had Karen doing her own investigation, and, as always, putting herself in more danger than Matt would like. Foggy, taking on Matt’s caseload without complaint and threatening to order anchovy pizza to the office for lunch if Matt took any less than a week off, knowing the smell of it would drive him home again. Natasha, who’d brought his suit to SHIELD for testing, the preliminary results coming up empty.
“I have some friends looking into it, but they haven’t found anything yet. If someone’s sold it…” he trailed off, on the edge of that terrifying possibility. “The kind of people who would buy and sell that information might talk to you.”
For a long moment, Elektra sat still and silent as a statue with the beat of her heart and the rhythm of her breath unchanging. Matt mimicked her, steeled himself. He’d spent hours imagining her voice, cutting into him as sharply as the sai she carried for every time he’d distrusted her and hated what she did, for every bit of his hypocrisy. How he’d turned to her anyway, when his memory failed him and his friends couldn’t help him, Elektra the ninja, Elektra the assassin, Elektra who’d died in his arms. His college girlfriend and the first love of his life.
But all she said was, “Yes, they might.” She slid off the armrest and stood in a single motion, then bent down to cup his face in her hand and kiss his forehead like benediction. “Give me a few days. I’ll call you if I find anything.”
“Thank you,” Matt said.
Elektra’s hand slipped off his face. From the sound of her breath, she might have smiled, though Matt couldn’t tell for sure. She retraced her earlier route, back up the stairs, across the roof, and was gone.
*
The old auto repair shop’s dirty windows filtered the sun only slightly, and Frank winced and looked down as he stepped off the elevator. Meaning, he didn’t clear the room like he should’ve, didn’t look up into the rafters, and didn’t notice the shadow there until it dropped in front of him, feet touching the concrete floor with barely a sound.
A gun was in his hand so fast Frank couldn’t remember reaching for it. He trained it on the intruder, who held her hands up in surrender.
“Hello, Frank,” Elektra said pleasantly. “I’m just here to talk.”
If she wanted to attack him, she wouldn’t have announced herself first. He returned his gun to its holster, a gesture of goodwill. “Ok,” he said. “Talk.”
Elektra lowered her hands and crossed her arms, leaning against the wall. She was dressed for work, a black-and-red stealth suit and red armguards, a pair of sai at her belt and a red, fabric mask that could cover the lower half of her face, but now hung around her throat. It didn’t mean much; she could’ve shown up in an evening gown and been just as deadly.
“Where were you on the night of the twelfth?” Elektra asked.
The twelfth. That’d been the night with the warehouse and Murdock, and Frank could only hope she took his pause before answering as time he needed to think. “Jerking off,” Frank said. “Why?”
“Interesting. Did you film it?” Elektra asked with a smile that bordered on a leer.
“No, I didn’t fuckin’ film it,” Frank told her, irritated because he knew what this was—her trying to get under his skin, take him off guard. To get him thinking of that time in Monaco last summer, the way she’d looked on wine-red bed sheets and the smell of the ocean breeze through the open windows.
She held the expression for a moment longer, uncannily like she could read his goddamn mind. Then, she dialed it back, returned to the business at hand. “Someone got shot. Someone...noteworthy,” Elektra said. “Whoever did it doesn’t seem to want any credit. I thought you might be a likely candidate.”
Two options presented themselves, neither of them good. Either Elektra knew damned well where he’d been and was testing him, or she didn’t know—which meant she’d asked Murdock, and for some fucking reason Frank couldn’t fathom, he hadn’t told her. Like most of the hero-and-vigilante community, Frank held some familiarity with their history. Elektra and Murdock had dated in college, before her assassin days. At some point after that, she’d signed up to be the Kingpin’s pet killer, only for that psycho Bullseye to decide he wanted his old job back bad enough to break out of prison and stab Elektra with her own sai to get it. She’d crawled to Murdock’s doorstep to die in his arms. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, she’d gotten herself resurrected, and they’d had some unspecified amount of involvement since.
It all added up to a shitstorm Frank sure as hell didn’t want to walk into. “It wasn’t me,” he lied easily, holding her gaze as he did. “Who’s paying you?”
“You know that’s not something I’m at liberty to disclose,” Elektra said, aloof as a fuckin’ cat.
Frank shrugged, pretending indifference. “Have you asked Moon Knight?”
“Of course I’ve talked to Spector,” Elektra said, a touch defensively and exactly what he was going for.
Frank scoffed. “Just Spector? Not the other half a dozen alter-egos living in his head?”
“It’s just the two that I’m aware of,” Elektra said.
“Plus his imaginary Egyptian god,” Frank added.
“It may not be as imaginary as you think,” Elektra replied. “It wasn’t Spector—or any of his alters.”
To that, Frank morphed his expression into his best imitation of doubt. “More than half the time, the guy can’t remember what he had for breakfast this morning,” he said, then drove it home. “I’ll tell ya what, if it was that asshole, I’ll buy him a drink.”
Elektra huffed through her nose. “I’ll be sure to pass that on.”
“Happy to help,” Frank said with a smile as insincere as he could muster.
The look he got in return suggested Elektra knew he was being cute and didn’t appreciate it, which made their current feelings for each other fuckin’ mutual. “Take care, Frank,” she said.
She turned to leave, and Frank should’ve let her. But curiosity got the better of him, his mouth moving without his brain’s permission. “Who was it?” he asked, morbidly curious as to whether she’d tell him. “Who got shot?”
Back still facing him, Elektra went still, the line of her shoulders tense and her ponytail swaying slightly with residual movement. “No one you’d care about,” she said and left through the door leading to the alley.
Shaking his head, Frank took the elevator back down to his safehouse, his previous errand forgotten in favor of checking his security measures and just how she’d gotten past them. He thought about contacting Murdock for about half a second, thought about Elektra in Monaco and forced the memory out of his head. Whatever was going on with the star-crossed lovers had fuck-all to do with him, and Frank would do everything in his power to keep it that way.