Chapter Text
Elektra Natchios turned her Porsche 911 into the drive of what used to be her family’s Long Island estate. It was a chilly late-September night, and she drove with the top down. The cold air bit into her skin and whipped her dark curls about her face, reminding her that she was still alive, that the world was still turning in spite of everything. And besides, no one bought a convertible to drive it with the top up .
The blue-white beams of the headlights illuminated the gutted corpse of the house, charred walls and jagged beams casting huge shadows, making the whole ragged mess look even more ghastly than it did during the day.
There was a man standing in front of the house.
Elektra's grip tightened on the steering wheel, and for a second she considered ramming the trespasser with her car, but the Porsche didn't deserve the abuse. She reached into the pocket of her jacket and gripped the handle of her little subcompact pistol, placing her thumb on the safety. He wasn’t a cop. He was too well-tailored to be a squatter. He was wearing sunglasses at eleven-thirty at night and holding a long white cane…
She let go of the gun and turned off the car and got out, leaving the headlights on.
“I should call the cops on you for trespassing,” she said.
The corner of the man’s mouth quirked up in a half-smile. “Technically, this is a crime scene. You’re not supposed to be here either, without a police escort.”
“‘Police escort.’” Elektra scoffed. She tore off the yellow police tape criss-crossing the house like a grotesque Christmas present. “Oops.”
He laughed. His laugh reminded her of fireworks in the summer, reminded her of the smell of leaves in the fall and how it felt to not be alone. His laugh annoyed her. And it annoyed her that he looked every bit as handsome as she remembered, that her ex didn’t get fat and sloppy after college like everyone else’s.
“Why are you here, Matt?” As she walked up to the porch, dead, blackened grass clutched at her ankles.
“I thought I’d pay my respects.” They had good memories here. She used to drive him out here when it was too hot to go out in the city, and they’d swim in the pool and he’d make them lunch, and they’d have sex in the shower when her father wasn’t home.
“What are you going to do with it?” Matt asked, gesturing with his cane toward the wreck of a house.
“I don’t know.” The property, or what was left of it, was hers now. What an inheritance , she thought. A pile of burned splinters. “You could’ve come to the funeral.”
Matt turned towards her. She wished he wouldn’t look at her like that, even if he wasn’t really looking at her at all. “I thought that might be...awkward.”
“I heard you got your own practice,” she said, changing the subject. “How’s that going?”
“With Foggy, yeah. ‘Nelson and Murdock.’” Foggy Nelson . Elektra recalled Matt’s slightly goofy best friend/roommate/shadow back in college.
“We’re still working on making our first million.” He grinned, showing a mouth full of white teeth. That fucking smile . She always thought he had a nice smile. She wished he would have left that at home.
Elektra turned away from him. She was happy that things had turned out well for him, but she didn’t need to deal with their memories right now. There were enough memories of happier times haunting her already.
The front double doors of the house still stood in their frame, blackened but intact, save for the little glass windows that had been blown out. The rest of the windows were gone too, and there was a gaping hole in the front wall.
She could have gone in that way, but turned the handle on one of the front doors instead. This was her father's house, the house she played in as a little girl and snuck out of as a bigger girl. She wasn't going to enter through a hole in the wall like a cockroach.
"Hey! What are you doing?" Matt grabbed the back of her jacket, but Elektra shrugged him off. Two steps in and she skidded across the ash, a slip that would have left a less agile woman on her ass.
"You should have worn sensible shoes," Matt said, chuckling. That laugh. It was really getting on her nerves.
Elektra looked down at her wedge heeled boots. "These are my sensible shoes."
It was hard to believe anyone had lived in this place in the last one hundred years, let alone a month ago. That she had grown up here. Ash had settled on everything like a thick layer of dust, half-revealing and half-concealing the twisted shapes of melted furniture and broken things. The house was a grotesque shadow of its former self, hauntingly familiar and utterly alien at the same time.
It made her think of her father's corpse wrapped in a plastic garment bag on a stainless steel slab. They made her identify the body. How am I supposed to do this ? How could that be the same man who tucked her in at night and called her his princess? It had his nose, his chin, but that thing in the morgue was cold and gray and the back of its skull looked like it had been blown out with a hammer.
At least he didn’t suffer . That’s what one of the detectives, the one who could actually pronounce her name, had said to her. How in the fuck did that make this any better? Her father was dead, gone, but it was quick and painless and so it was fine? They were unable to conceal the wound completely, so she had spent the entire funeral looking at the nickel-sized hole between his eyes, not even able to pretend for just a moment that he was just sleeping.
Elektra made her way to the remains of her father's office - fortunately on the ground floor - more by touch and memory than visual cues. The light from her car only came in through the holes and missing windows, projecting eerie blue-white phantoms along the walls and corridors.
“We really shouldn’t be in here," Matt said. That idiot had actually followed her inside.
"Then go back outside.”
"What are you looking for?" He was still following behind her, managing incredibly well amidst all the clutter. Somehow, that didn’t surprise her. Elektra ignored him and kept walking.
The walls of her father’s office blocked almost any light from the outside from entering the room, so she had to fish her phone out of her coat pocket, silently praying the dry cleaner could get the ash stains out of the satin lining. When she turned the screen on she half-expected some kind of ghostly apparition to be hulking in the corner, but it was only more of the same: broken furniture and charred walls. Her father's desk looked as if somebody had hit it with a sledgehammer. They were looking for something , she thought. But did they find it ?
Elektra turned around and found Matt standing in the doorway.
"This is the room. Just stay there."
She walked to the northeast corner, furthest from the doorway, and shone her light on the ground, counting as she walked over the large marble tiles. Three spaces, then two. Knight to C-2. Kneeling on the ground, already resigning herself to the fact that her jeans were ruined, she pulled a large flathead screw driver out of her pants pocket and began to pry around the edges of the tile. She managed to lift it an inch maybe, before it fell back down with a heavy thud.
"What are you doing?" Matt asked.
"Come here."
"You just told me to stay where I was."
" Come here ." Elektra got up and dragged him over to the loose tile, placing his hand on it.
"My father's safe is under here. You pry this tile up enough for me to get my hands underneath and then we can move it." She handed him the screwdriver and Matt ran his fingers along its edge.
"Don't you have a crowbar?"
Elektra frowned. "Why the hell would I have a crowbar? I don't even know why I have that ."
Matt felt along the perimeter of the tile with one hand, tool in the other, until his fingers located a spot that must have been looser than the rest, although Elektra couldn't tell any difference. He wedged the screwdriver in between the tiles and with a bit of a grunt pried that side up. Elektra shoved her hands underneath.
"I got it." With Matt's help, she pushed it over, facedown against the adjacent tile, sending up a cloud of ash all around them. When it cleared, she saw the safe.
The only thing clandestine about the safe was its location. The combination was painfully simple: her birthday. When the last number was set on the dial and the lock clicked open, Elektra held her breath. Surely if the person - or people - who had murdered her father opened it, they wouldn't have bothered to close it up and put the tile back into place.
The items on top were ordinary documents - birth certificates, deeds, her father's proof of citizenship - that she hastily shoved under her arm. The tile and the thick lead walls of the safe had protected the papers from the flames. It wasn't until she saw the fat leather folio that she could breathe again.
"Yes! It's here!" She turned it over in her hands with reverence, like she had just discovered the enigma machine.
"What is it?"
Shit . She shouldn’t have said anything. "Company records. Shipping contracts, manifests - that sort of thing.” She knew Matt didn’t believe her.
Someone had torn up her father’s Manhattan apartment and then done the same out here on Long Island, eventually burning the place down. They were looking for something...and Elektra was pretty sure she had just found it. She was certain the name of the person who had wanted her father dead was lurking somewhere in these files.
Promise me , her father had said to her half a year ago. Promise me you’ll destroy everything in the safe if anything happens to me . At the time she had laughed and told him he wasn’t that old, but she did make the promise. Now she thought he must have known, somehow, that this was coming. Elektra would keep her promise - but she had to go through the papers first.
"You need to give that to the police," Matt said.
“It’s just business stuff,” she said, trying to sound nonchalant. He could always tell when she was lying. But her father wanted this to stay secret for some reason, and she wasn’t about to betray him to her goody-two-shoes of an ex-boyfriend.
“You don’t go sneaking around a crime scene at midnight for ‘just business stuff.’”
"Then get a warrant," she snapped.
"Subpoena." It was too dark to see him clearly, but she knew Matt was smirking at her.
"Whatever."
Elektra got up, trying to dust the ash off her knees but only succeeded in rubbing it in all over her legs. She led Matt back out of the house after she briefly considered leaving him there. He’d just find his way out anyway. As soon as she got a look at him in the full light of the car she burst out laughing.
"Oh my God. You look like one of those people from a video where they expose the terrible working conditions of coal miners." Elektra ran over to the driver's side mirror and saw her own blackened face. "Oh my God. So do I." The doorman of her apartment building knew better than to ask any questions.
The bright lights of the city twinkled across the water, beckoning her back to Manhattan, but Long Island was dark and dead quiet, aside from Matt Murdock’s god damned laugh.
“Get in,” she said. “I’ll take you back.”
Matt held up his phone. "I can call a cab."
"That'll take forever. And you look a mess. I'll drive you."
"No, it's-"
Elektra ignored him. "Get in." She grabbed Matt's arm and ushered him to the passenger side before hopping in the driver's seat.
"You got a new car," he said as he put on his seatbelt. Elektra carefully stowed the items she had found inside a compartment between the two front seats.
“The last one was, like, five years old.”
" So old ,” Matt said sarcastically. Elektra rolled her eyes. “Let me guess - red?"
"Of course."
“Kind of late in the year for a convertible.”
"What? It's not raining." Fortunately the battery still had enough juice left in it to turn over the engine. It purred under her feet.
Elektra peeled out of the drive and onto the road, pushing past sixty before the house was out of sight. This time of night on Long Island you could drive the highway like a maniac (or in Elektra's mind, drive your Porsche like it was meant to be driven).
She didn’t bother with the radio - the hum of six cylinders was as sweet as any music - and shifted into a higher gear as she picked up speed. “How’s that feel between your legs, Murdock?”
Matt nodded appreciatively. "It’s a nice car." He always liked it when she drove fast. Elektra shook the memory from her head. She should not be flirting with him.
“What do you know about what happened to my father?” she asked.
Matt shrugged. “Just what’s been in the papers.”
“Oh. I just thought maybe you’d heard something because of your job.”
“Cops usually don’t talk to defense attorneys until they’re forced to. They should be keeping you informed, though.”
“They claim they are. So, they’re either useless or they’re lying.”
“Well…” Matt trailed off.
“What?” Matt shook his head. “What, Matt?”
“The force has been kind of a mess since the whole Fisk thing.”
“Oh, yeah,” Elektra said. “I heard about that. They even arrested a congressman, right?”
“Yeah. Which isn’t to say catching your father’s killer shouldn’t be a priority. It’s just that finding out half the force is crooked hasn’t exactly bolstered the NYPD’s recruiting efforts. But I’m sure they’re doing their best.”
Elektra frowned. He didn’t sound sure at all. She could have really used a cigarette, but they were in her bag under the seat, and she didn't exactly want Matt to know she'd taken up smoking.
“I know a cop who owes me a favor," he said. "I can ask him what’s going on.”
Elektra narrowed her eyes. “Don’t do this, Matt.”
“Do what?”
“Be a boy scout.” This was so typical of him. Inserting himself into everyone’s problems. Playing the good guy. She couldn’t stand it.
Matt looked offended. “Calling in a favor from the cops is hardly being a boy scout.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“You just asked me.”
“I asked what you heard . I didn’t ask you to do anything.”
Matt frowned, crossed his arms over his chest. “Fine.” He sighed. “Good to know some things haven’t changed.”
Elektra gave him a dirty look. She knew he couldn’t really see her face, but sometimes she thought he just knew . Like he could smell it or something.
“No. They haven’t.” He was still as self-righteous as ever.
They sat in a tense silence until she came up on the East River and the end of her amateur Grand Prix run. “Do you still live in Hell’s Kitchen?” she asked.
Matt nodded and gave her his address. She had a feeling that even if he were making millions, he would still live there.
It was after midnight and Manhattan traffic was moving at something above a snail’s pace, but the traffic lights were still long and painful to the driver of a car built for speed. Elektra swore when they came up on red again, turning what should have been a two minute drive down a handful of blocks into a twenty minute one.
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry that this happened to you,” Matt said quietly. He turned his head to where he was facing her, looking her in the eye or as close to it as he could get.
Grief welled up in her in an instant, like a bubbling spring. It always came upon her all of a sudden and without warning. Shit , she thought. You fucking boy scout . She clapped a hand over her mouth and tried to will the tears back up into her eyeballs. She didn’t want to cry in front of him.
Looking up, Elektra shook her head, blinked hard to clear her vision. “Oh,” she said. “It’s green.”