Chapter Text
“You wanted this.”
“No, I counted on it. Now, I can ask you face to face. Who was there that day? Who killed my family?”
Red. A fucking altar boy to the end, Frank Castle finds himself thinking as he wheezes and the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen drags him up a quiet, dark hill littered with death.
“C’mon,” the Devil says, starting to buckle under Frank’s weight.
Not that Frank can offer him much relief. He’s not entirely sure where his legs are at the moment, but they sure as hell aren’t attached to his body. Maybe he left them down in those tunnels. Maybe the Irish took them along with his family.
How much more does he have to lose?
Finally, the kink-suited bastard deposits Frank against one of the seemingly enumerable graves, and Frank drops like a rock, flopping ungainly backwards to fetch up against the carved stone surface.
For a moment, he can’t find it in himself to care about anything aside from the fact that it hurts. It still hurts. All of it. His heart. His memories. His future. It all causes him so much pain, he’s astounded he’s still breathing, no matter how raggedly.
Looking at the Devil through banged up and bloodshot eyes warps those red goggles and horn embellishments into something beyond nightmares – something Frank honestly feels he deserves. But then he blinks the sweat, tears and shit out of eyes, and it’s just Red. His equal now, surely. If not morally, definitely physically.
“Hey,” Frank croaks out, eyeing his unlikely saviour. “Not bad.”
“Thanks,” Red chuckles in response.
The pain from only a moment ago relents the tiniest bit as Frank keeps talking. “I guess, uh… I guess I was wrong.”
Turning those unnerving red goggles on him, Red queries, “About?”
“About you being a pussy.”
Again, the Devil laughs, quietly enough to mix in with the night sounds masquerading as silence, as though he craves nothing more than to be as shadow-like as possible.
“Don’t get all sweet on me now, Frank,” he responds, finally.
Now, it’s Frank’s turn to laugh, intending to reply with either a veiled sentiment of gratitude or a shockingly candid expression of solidarity – whichever he would’ve figured shocked Red the most – but, instead, his mirth turns to a merciless hacking cough.
Does he imagine the concern in his voice when Red promises help coming?
Either way, Frank thinks he’s had enough now. He’s done. There is nothing inside him anymore but pain and glaring emptiness.
“Nah,” he barely manages to breathe. “You should go. I’m past saving. At least I’d have company, right?”
Glancing comically out at the graves is definitely not the most macabre thing Frank has done, but the Devil is apparently still in the mood to grant mercy, because he takes a seat on the grass, seemingly content to wait with Frank for whatever help may be on the way.
Frank just isn’t so sure he’s surviving this time, though. He’s already pushed way past his luck.
And he knows how Red feels about death.
So, he tries again. “I think I might cash out. You’d have made a hell of a Marine, Red.”
Still utterly undeterred, Red cocks his head, gazing blindly through his cowl at Frank.
Finally, “That rhyme. What’s it mean?”
For a moment, Frank is at a loss. Rhyme? Did they bonk Red too hard on the head or something?
“What you say?” Frank slurs out.
“Thing you say,” Red continues. “Right before you pull the trigger.”
Jesus.
Is this guy an honest-to-God superhero? How the fuck else does he have fucking bat-hearing?
Frank only barely manages to respond, “You heard that?”
Ever-so-quietly, Red says gently, “Yeah, I heard it.”
Frank definitely becomes clearer as he talks now, but no more coherent to his own ears. He’s losing blood by the pint at this point. Maybe this is hell?
“What the...? I gotta say, sometimes... Sometimes, I think you really just might be the devil.”
“Sometimes, I think I might be, too,” Red volleys.
Deciding that the least he can do for Red for giving him the courtesy of dying out here in peace is give him answers, Frank settles in.
“It's, uh... "One batch, two batch. Penny and dime." It was her favorite book.”
It’s so easy, then, to lose himself to memories of Lisa – of his little girl. Even now, he can still recall so cruelly clearly what her little body in his arms felt like.
So, he drones on.
“You know, you... You gotta cross the ocean... and go fight. You see... Whole time you're thinking you're gonna be scared, right? But, then, you're not. See, that part was always easy for me. Killing. Even watching my buddies die, it just... it didn't mean nothing.”
His bleary eyes find Red’s mask. “The first time I got scared was on a plane on the way home. I kept thinking God was gonna pull the rug out from under us, you know? Shit, that's his kind of funny, you know? But the plane landed safe and we were home. Driving through traffic. Yeah, you pass fast food and donut shops and all that... that greasy shit. It's the shit you fought to protect, and then the car stops.
“We were outside her school. I get to her classroom, right? She's in there, but she's got no idea. She's got no idea that Daddy's home. I walk in. These kids, they're not even studying. They’re…” He has to laugh at the memory. “…doing some kind of yoga. Yeah. You know? She's there. She's doing her poses, you know? She's bending, you know, and she's moving. She looks like a flower. Yeah…
“And, you know, you can't even understand it, you know. How does something like that have… How does something that beautiful… How does that… Does that come from me, you know? And she looks up and she sees me. I see her. By God, that's real. That's real, Red. Boom. In an instant, she's across that classroom floor. She's in my arms. She's squeezing me so tight, I swear I was gonna bust a rib, you know?”
He finds himself comparing that feeling with his definitely fucked up ribs from tonight, and he can’t come to a conclusion, but the side-by-side is funny enough in his state that he laughs, anyway. So does Red, but whether it’s out of politeness or pity is anyone’s guess.
“We just stayed there like that,” Frank presses on, either unwilling or unable to let go of the memory now. “We're holding each other. Teacher, she's filming the whole thing on her phone, you know. She's gonna put it on YouTube or some shit. She can't hold the thing steady because, you know, she's... she's bawling so hard, and the kids are all wailing, you know. They're screaming.
“And me? Shit, I'm the worst of all. I'm a... I'm a rubber-faced clown, you know? I cried so hard.”
The tears come again now, but Frank doesn’t even care to stop them. “But not my baby. Not my girl. You know, she's my girl. She’s… She's not crying – she's holding me up. My girl, she's keeping me on my feet. She says, "I knew it, Daddy. I knew it."
“And then we go home. Wife, the boy. Place is the exact same. It's like it was just holding its breath waiting for me to get back, you know? Then, it hit me. All of it, you know. The first time I felt how tired I was, you know. I was just... tired, you know? Y-you ever been tired, Red?”
He definitely doesn’t hallucinate the weight in the Devil’s voice when he affirms so darkly
“So, you know,” Frank agrees. “It's just, I couldn't do nothing, you know? All the things... I couldn't take my wife to bed. Ball with the boy. Shit… I was too tired. I couldn't even drink a goddamn beer, you know. But not her. My girl was up.
“See, she wanted me to... She wanted me to tuck her in. She... She outgrew it – she knew it – but she didn't care. She wanted it. She had that book. Her favorite book was out on her pillows. One Batch, Two Batch... Penny and Dime. Yeah. I readher that book every night before this shit. I read it every single night, but, see, that was over now because Daddy's home now.
“She looked at me and she begged me, Red.” The tears aren’t a byproduct now. Forcing his voice out is like a knife between the ribs. “She begged. She begged. I said, "No. Daddy's too tired, see. But… I'll read it to you tomorrow night— I'll read it to you tomorrow night, I promise." Yeah.
“Never think that... for her there was not gonna be any tomorrow, see. The last time I'd see her, I'd be holding her lifeless body in my arms. Meat was spilling out of her, Red. The place where her face used to be. Yeah.
“I think I'm done... Red.” Unconsciousness, blessed unconsciousness, threatens to engulf him, and he just wants to let it. Wants to rest, finally. “I think I’m done.”
Matt Murdock spends most of his time listening to the pain of the world around him, whether in his office as a lawyer or from his vantage point as his city’s guardian.
But in all his time, he has never heard pain like the defeated agony in the publicly branded ‘Punisher’s’ voice.
Frank Castle wasn’t apologising or even justifying his actions. He only wanted someone to understand. Just one person in the entire world to begin to comprehend the isolation and self-loathing he feels. He hasn’t killed any of these men because he feels righteous or just about it. They had to die because otherwise he was simply the asshole who got dealt a raw hand and sucked it up.
And if that isn’t Matt’s entire raison d’être, then he has never been Daredevil.
“Get him help,” Matt asks of Sgt. Mahoney, letting himself be cuffed.
But Mahoney doesn’t know what Matt knows. “Shut up.”
So, he changes gears. “Take the collar.”
“What?” Mahoney comes up short.
“You heard me,” Matt presses. “You caught him, not me. It can’t be me. It has to be you.”
“Why?”
Why can’t you just let it go? Matt wants to scream, but doesn’t.
Can’t.
He understands the position the sergeant is in.
“To protect the Kitchen,” Matt goes on. “For law, for order.”
But it seems Mahoney is at least as stubborn and prideful as Castle. “You’re telling me how to file a report now?”
Patience is a virtue, Matt reminds himself before continuing.
“Yeah. Take the collar. Take the credit. Get a promotion, if you can. You’ve earned it,” he lays it on thicker than syrup on pancakes.
“Bullshit,” comes the response.
“No,” he insists. “People have to know the system works. Not his justice and not mine. Vigilante days are done in this town. The police are in charge.”
Infuriatingly, Mahoney refuses to take even the well laid out plan, nevermind the hint. “That’s not how it happened.”
“Then, make it how it happened.”