Foreword: The following is a Marvel's Daredevil/The Punisher AU piece. I do feel it should be noted, this project as a whole was created to be a sort of joint project between myself, Jael Randell (who the readership will likely know as the cowriter for Chronicles of the Fallen's second installment, Layers), and HaloRecoil. There will likely feel like there are… not necessarily huge missing parts, but like there are skips ahead to different parts of the overarching plot, as I will only be posting the pieces I myself have written. Familiarity with the storylines of Daredevil is, therefore, highly recommended. That said, there are going to be some deviations from said plot, and the overall world of this AU was constructed prior to the premiere of The Punisher, so it will likely not follow the exact story arcs that show will employ. It feels moreso like a situation where one must know the rules before breaking them.
Also, while this has its roots as an Angel Sanctuary gone Daredevil/The Punisher AU, this piece features Nemaelle Mudou, OC for my CotF series, Azreal, HaloRecoil's OC for her Coming of the Seraph series, and Zephyrel, OC for Jael Randell's Eve of the Earth series. It should be noted, however, that these characters (and all characters, really), have been 'normalized' in their features – no otherworldly colors, bringing everyone down to earth, so to speak. For example, Nema's trademark white-haired, red-eyed look has been toned down to a pale blonde, chocolate brown-eyed look.
The War for Hell's Kitchen
Sugar-Coated Monster
By: Brenli
… This was it. This was the end of the line. It had to be, lying in a holding cell, faking sleep and trying desperately to block out the world. To block out Hell's Kitchen.
Maybe the irony was in the name. She'd run far away, across state lines, straight into the belly of Hell's Kitchen like it could become her personal Heaven after all the legitimate Hell she'd been raised in, and all she'd lost to it.
For a while, that's what it was. Trading out worn denim and tank tops for silky blouses and lovely skirts, her beat up off-brand Chucks for shiny patent leather high heels. An unassuming secretary gig for Union Allied Construction, nothing particularly grand, but that was fine. It was even what she wanted. People liked to dream enormously huge; they wanted adventure. They wanted to have some kind of connection to grandiose groups, who did major, maybe even top-secret things.
It was easy to want those things when you weren't actually a part of it. Hell... technically, she hadn't been a part of those things. No, she'd only been on the peripheral, for as long as she could remember.
But she'd seen enough... and done enough, too.
She had no problem dreaming small. At least they were her dreams; she had them and obtained them all by herself. She liked being a sweet and sunshiny secretary. She liked twisting up her pale blonde locks with pens and forwarding phone calls. She liked the brief hellos that she shared with Daniel Fisher from down in Legal, and listening to him beam about his family. It was simple and it was easy, and she couldn't believe that life finally felt natural as oxygen. Not complex and deadly, like radioactive cobalt.
But maybe she should have known this would happen. Like the cobalt had somehow leeched its way under her skin and rendered her toxic, no matter how nice she was. Maybe she hadn't escaped, maybe it was forever a part of her, and just like it had killed her family, now it killed Daniel. Maybe she was cursed, maybe she was like a walking atomic bomb, and all the more dangerous because she dared to be friendly.
Nema writhed in the uncomfortable cot and tried to pass it off for deep sleep movements, aware that a surveillance camera was watching her... not too different from Vermont. She remembered her father decorating the camera up in the corner of her room... He made it look like a great big moon; he used to say the blinking red light was from a space ship that landed there, looking for moon cheese. She missed him...
Or, she missed that part of him...
She shut her eyes tighter, like she anticipated all the images of the final, fatal night in Vermont. How terrible, how guilt-inducing, to feel relieved that instead her brain was stuck on the visual of Daniel, dead in her apartment, with the knife clutched in her hand and no idea how it got there. God, she never should have asked to meet him, never should have shown him what she discovered.
Her fingers clutched at her pillow as she tried to swallow down the guilt. She had plenty of things to feel guilty about, but Daniel wasn't one of them. Right? She hadn't killed him. Yes, she was holding the knife, and her hand was smeared with the red of his blood, but she had no recollection of actually harming him. Much less any desire to do so...! No, the blood of one innocent soul was too heavy to carry; she didn't want any more!
Would the lawyers be able to help her? They seemed kind, even if the more approachable one had nearly ran out on her when she warned them that she had no money. The less approachable one, tall and long-haired and blind... it was he who ultimately preserved the unimaginable safety net to catch her as she fell. All because, as he simply put, he believed her.
Why? She had no idea, but his smooth voice spoke with the conviction of a mountain, massive and unwavering. He believed her... and she would have to cling onto that belief.
Even if, at the time of talking, Setsuna Nelson and Uriel Murdock had only been practicing law for about seven hours. It was all she had and she was desperate. Nema knew a lot about being desperate. You dug your fingers like claws into whatever you had to help you, no matter how unsure you were...
A hand come down on her mouth before she could scream, but her brown eyes shot wide as a doe's, and she screamed, anyway. Struggled, kicking into the air as the police officer pressed down hard against her mouth, mashing the flesh of her lips against her teeth. Tears immediately streaked down her face and into her hair because she didn't want to feel this way, and yet it came to her, anyway – the hyperalert adrenaline, fight and flight comingling and waking her up all the more. Her hands pushed, scratched at the crisp white shirt, and her mouth screamed even as the pressure made her lips feel like they might be splitting. She screamed, and she scrambled... and she committed his face to memory. Gray hair starting to recede a bit at the crown, ruddy skin, dark eyes with his brow in a permanent furrow that made him look sad. She scratched and tried grabbing for anything, because anything could be a weapon if you put your mind to it. She spotted a name tag pinned to his uniform – C. Farnum, she committed that detail to memory alongside his face – and tried to rip it off. It pulled free... a magnetic backing. Not the sharp pin she was hoping for.
The officer managed to lift her up, and she struggled to get on her feet. If she got on her feet she'd have leverage. If she got on her feet she could rise up, send her elbow up into his face, something, she could survive, she had to survive.
Officer Farnum's hands dropped away, and that was when her cries went from muffled to an animal roar. Even as the white bed sheet came down around her neck and wrapped tightly, once, twice, three times. She didn't let the fear of dying stop her, planting her feet against the wall and pushing hard against him. It was stupid, it was an aimless move, but she had to try something. Anything. She had to survive. She hadn't come this far just to perish at the hands of a very crooked cop.
The sheet constricted as she struggled, and soon she was reduced from fierce roaring to breathless gagging. Her nails scratched the skin of her throat as her fingers tried to dig their way in past the fabric, tried to pull it free so she could keep breathing, keep fighting, keep surviving. Her fingertips tingled, her vision blurred...
Her hands dropped away.
"I'm sorry..." Officer Farnum whispered. "I'm... I'm sorry..."
Nema's hands suddenly reached up with her fingers hooked like talons, clawing, tearing their way across the cop's face until she sunk her nails into his eyes. The pain of it sent him stumbling backward until his back slammed on the opposite side of the holding cell, releasing her with anguished groaning.
Nema let him suffer as she coughed and panted, dragging in as much breath as she could muster. Crawling like ravaged prey, clinging to the holding cell bars. She inhaled a deep, painful breath...
She screamed.
She screamed like an animal trapped in a fighting pit with another animal.
She screamed like she was on her knees in her apartment, holding a bloody knife and beholding Daniel's dead body.
She screamed like she was in Vermont, holding a gun.
She screamed, even when her blurred vision saw several pairs of feet walk in, one with the frenzied, tapping aid of a blind man's walking stick; she screamed. Crying over the return of death. Roaring for survival.
Nema couldn't pinpoint when she stopped screaming. She only knew that she grew hoarse and that the roars began to sound ugly and rather monstrous. Maybe that was fitting, maybe she was a sugar-coated monster of a girl...
After that she was silent. She felt floaty, she felt like the world was surreal. An odd thing to feel after all the things she'd grown up seeing. All the science, the beauty and the ugliness of it, the terror of cobalt and secrets.
Of course, Nema wasn't naive. She knew the world beyond the giant house turned lab – lab turned house – was full of its own dangers. She just... figured it was rare enough for her to avoid. And hadn't she had enough, already? Was there some kind of suffering quota? Because she was sure she'd more than met it, already.
But here she was, being framed for murder, and nearly being murdered in her holding cell. What if this was the nature of who she was? Maybe she just attracted danger, maybe it would seek her out in every corner of the globe...
"Couldn't find any milk. I hope it's okay..."
Nema was silent as she took the mug, but felt the urge to tell a very gentle-voiced Setsuna that he should probably kick her out.
"We have tea now?" Uriel spoke as he shook open a cheap chair next to a taped-up, cardboard box. They weren't kidding about having only very recently moved in to their offices...
"I stole it from the financial office next door." Setsuna joked warmly, and it reminded her of her brother. Mischievous and cheerful...
She let the memory steep in her like the sachet of tea in her mug, watching Uriel bring the chair right across from her and sit... It was a bit comical. He was just so... so tall, that it made him sitting in that cheap fold-out chair look like he was all limbs. Dark-tinted lenses kept his eyes from view, but the features of his face were genuine in their gentle sympathy as he sighed. "How are you holding up?"
"... Better." Nema's voice was thrashed; it came out weak and scratchy. "Thanks for getting me out."
Uriel smiled, and while she wouldn't necessarily call him a cold man, the curve on his lips made him seem warmer. Like sunlight finding a way to filter through the many leaves of trees.
But Setsuna, while being the one she'd quickly call the sunnier of the duo, was also the realist. "Don't thank us yet. Just because they released you doesn't mean they won't eventually bring charges."
"Which means it's crucial you don't speak to anyone other than the two of us about what happened." Uriel finished right on the heels of Setsuna's words, but kept the smile on his face.
Nema's lashes fell over her eyes as she spoke into her mug of tea. "I don't have anyone to talk to, anyway..." Too true. Before her New York life got stabbed, she hadn't exactly made many friends. She liked to think she was a pretty approachable person. That she was friendly. But for however kind her interactions with people were, she'd never really made an actual friend. She thought it might have been a New Yorker thing until Daniel came along and was easy to talk to... but maybe Daniel wasn't a born and bred local, either. She'd never gotten around to asking, and now she'd never be able to ask.
She saw Uriel's smile begin a slow fade; apparently her loner status was palpable. "Do you have somewhere you can stay tonight?"
God, they'd already done so much for her, as far as she was concerned. They offered to fight for her. They pulled her out of that cage she nearly died in. They gave her tea. "My apartment's not far..."
"You can't go back there." Setsuna's response was immediate.
Well she couldn't ask them to get her a hotel room... "It's really okay-"
"Miss Page," Uriel cut her off, albeit with a kind smoothness in his voice. "Our immediate priority is to keep you safe. And in order to do that, we're gonna need to have a frank discussion."
He was kind, but his words rang with a finality that had her stammering. "... O-okay."
Uriel didn't mince words. "Do you know who's trying to kill you?"
Nema wished she did. "No."
"Do you know why they're trying to kill you?"
She looked up into his dark glasses and only saw her face reflected back, her eyes a bit wide and doe-like. Fear and old habits made her consider lying... but maybe... maybe this was going to be the key. The way to shed light on what she had discovered. "... Yes."
Uriel didn't so much look at Setsuna as turn his head gently in the direction of his partner. "Do you mind if we record you? Anything you have will be a huge help with your case... and I mean, literally anything."
He seemed bashful about it, like it was somehow his fault they had nothing going to defend her with. It had her placating that sorry look with a soft-toned reassurance. "Sure, yeah. That's fine..."
"Great!" Setsuna made a pretty peppy kind of lawyer... but Nema liked that. "Let's all shuffle on into the other room; I have a tape recorder all set up, there."
And shuffle they all certainly did, weaving through piles of boxes. Uriel's cane tapped against them, though not nearly as often as she would have figured. Maybe he had the layout of the mess memorized by now; these were his offices, after all...
But they shuffled, and they sat, and after Setsuna got the tape recorder going, she sipped at her tea and spoke. "I, uh, work..." She paused, nervously fidgeting. "Worked... in the financial department at Union Allied." She swallowed, feeling the lump slip past where the sheet had strangled her hard enough to leave a deep bruise like a violent necklace... Ugh. It was probably going to be a good long while before she started wearing necklaces, again. "They're overseeing the bulk of the government contracts for the West Side reconstruction."
Setsuna nodded along with her, with his pen at the ready against a sheet of paper. "I've seen their signs all over Hell's Kitchen."
"The last two years have transformed the business... There's new owners, new grants, new contracts."
"Oh yeah," Uriel agreed, "The world watched half of New York get destroyed. That's a lot of sympathy."
Nema wished she could be proud of that sympathy. For a while, she had been... "And Union Allied benefited from every dollar of it. I was the secretary for the chief accountant, and one of my jobs..." She hesitated, eyes darting across the table for words, for courage, "was to coordinate the pension claims for the company. About a week ago, I was emailed a file called, 'Pension Master.'" She found herself leaning down, toward her tea, toward the tape recorder. "It must have been meant for my boss, but I made the mistake of opening it..."
"I'm guessing it wasn't the pension fund."
Nema shook her head, even though she knew Uriel couldn't see it. "It wasn't the size of the pension fund... I couldn't believe the numbers. But it was still being designated as company pension, and it was constantly adjusted. Money coming in and money going out..."
"Going where?" Setsuna asked softly.
"I don't know. It was coded routing numbers, but we are talking a lot of money."
"What did you do with the file?" Uriel spoke this time, his gaze somehow piercing despite his blindness, despite his glasses.
"Well I told my boss about it, and he laughed it off." She sniffed and gingerly handled her tea. "He said that it was a theoretical model that they were screwing around with... but I knew something was wrong. I just... I thought maybe it was just him, you know? Embezzling or whatever..." But it wasn't. It couldn't have been. Stealing money was one thing, but murder was very much another... it was something shadier men were involved with. Nema would know.
But Uriel carried on, unaware of her train of thought. "So how did Daniel Fisher figure into this?"
"Daniel worked in the legal department." The memory of him had tears lining her lashes. "And I didn't... know him very well. But he was nice... so I asked him to meet me after work." She took a breath, steeled herself to the shock of loss. "I don't know how they knew. They must have people watching me. They must have people everywhere." Maybe that would sound paranoid to them... but it wouldn't have been the first time she'd been watched. "All I did was ask him for a drink. And I start to tell him about what I found... and things got blurry. Like I... I was drugged. And the next thing I know, I wake up, back in my apartment..." The memory of it strangled her like sheets around her throat, shrinking her words to a whisper. "Covered in blood."
The lawyers were silent, and she wished that she knew what they were thinking. Their faces were carefully blank, though she thought she saw traces of sadness around Setsuna's face, and deep calculation on Uriel's.
"They killed him... because of me." The confession burned her throat, her eyes, her heart. But it was the truth. If she'd never asked him to meet her... if she'd never decided to let him in on her discovery... But that was the nature of herself. She thought she was being a good person and yet she brought death upon someone who didn't deserve it... She couldn't breathe. The tears choked her like bed sheets and she couldn't breathe. "I need to get out of here; I'm sorry...!" Her chair squeaked across the floor.
But Setsuna was right up with her, hands held up in an attempt to both stop her and placate her. "We can't advise that, Miss Page."
"No, you don't understand...! You're either with them or you're not. And if you're with them, then I'm dead, already, and if you are not, then I cannot have anybody else die because of me!" She couldn't. One was hard enough. Two was a threshold she never wanted to cross. Any more and she'd be wishing she never survived that car accident, during the fatal night in Vermont...
"We can protect ourselves, Miss Page." Uriel offered from his seat at the table. Hands neatly folded and voice unwavering, the perfect picture of confidence.
Nema wished she believed in her safety that well. All she'd learned thus far was that she would probably never know real safety; she would always feel like she was in danger... "No, you can't. Not from them."
"Miss Page-" Setsuna tried.
"No."
"We can't let you go home-"
"Please, just-!" She burst out, hands folded as though in prayer. For no more blood. For safety. For the end of this, whatever the end meant... The desperation had her sobbing, and Setsuna's tentative, awkward embrace didn't soothe her... it only made her despair worse. Like the act of embracing her marked him for some kind of destruction.
"She can stay with me," Uriel spoke in the silence of the room, "just for tonight. Until we figure something out. I'll keep you safe, Nemaelle."
Again with that tone... not cruel, but utterly final. Nema couldn't fight it; she was too tired to do so. Exhausted from unspeakable things. Running away. Trying to start over. The clean slate being marred with blood...
But to Uriel's credit, he seemed like a very safe person. She couldn't explain it. Most people probably wouldn't have said it about a blind man, but he had a way of coming off strong. Capable. Protecting, and even friendly. He might not have been as open-armed as his partner, but he was a comforting sort of person. Offering to order Thai food from nearby, a dry shirt to change into now that they were out of the rain, and insisting on preparing the bedroom for her. Politeness had her refusing, but he commented that she might not be fine with the couch... She understood as soon as she'd stepped far enough inside. A giant LED billboard shone light through his windows, washing the living room over in purple hues. If she made that sound romantic, she didn't mean to... the thing was obnoxious; if it was her she would have pitched a fit over it. "Holy shit..."
Uriel didn't mind the expletive. It meant she felt comfortable. "It went up about a year ago. I'm told the co-op nearly rioted... some oversight from the developer's agreement." His shoulders lifted in a hapless shrug. "Upside is, nobody wanted it and I got a corner apartment at a Hell of a discount."
Despite herself, she laughed with him, and took the button-down that he offered. It felt a bit awkward... changing in front of him, though clearly he wouldn't be able to see anything. She turned her back toward him, anyway... and laughed again when she turned back around to see he'd done the same. "Why does a blind man need to turn away from a changing woman?"
"Hey, now. It's the principle of the thing." But he smiled as he wandered past her, toward his kitchen area.
Such was the tone for the majority of their evening. She hadn't pegged him for being the type to joke much, yet he seemed to like to, when given the opportunity. Even if it was at his own expense... laughing about how he had to simply hope for the best when he styled his hair. He was also surprisingly open about his loss of sight, and honest about how he missed it.
Which was why she felt guilty about lying when he first implied, then outright asked if she kept the pension file.
Which was why she felt guilty about sneaking out of his apartment once they'd said their goodnights and gone to bed.
He was, in the end, only trying to help her. That was his job, but to make matters worse he genuinely seemed to care. But Daniel had already died because she let him in on it, and she couldn't, wouldn't let Uriel be the next in line to fall for all those crooked numbers.
No... the pension file would be hers to bear and hers alone...