Thursday
Hell's kitchen is a bitch to fight in in January. Snow fills Matt's ears with white cotton, and the numbing of his skin throws off his sense of direction. Despite his costume being fairly watertight, slush still manages to make a home pooled around his feet. It's a miracle he hasn't lost a toe to frostbite yet. If it weren't necessary to chase down the scumbag in front of him, Matt would be curled up under his blanket right now and dead to the world. As it stands, he needs vital information and this man might be his golden ticket.
All over the Kitchen, young men and women have been dying at clubs. A new drug called 'Starburst' has been the culprit – it's said to be better than E, but easier to overdose on because it's so concentrated. It's also implicated in about a dozen sexual assault charges. Passing the drug to someone is said to be an instant way to get them to sleep with you with none of the 'downsides' of roofies or alcohol or human decency. The man he's chasing is near top of the distribution chain, one of the middlemen keeping the cash flowing between the dealers, importers, and kingpins. Perfect intel.
The man Matt's chasing doesn't seem to know the Kitchen very well, because he is easily cornered into a dead end. The crunch of his footsteps halts as he realizes there's nowhere for him to go. Matt runs forward, and lands a blow to the man's face that breaks his nose. He uppercuts his stomach, and then assumes an intimidating position as the man registers the gravity of the situation.
"You're a middleman for the Starbust ring. I need answers, and unless you like having broken fingers I suggest you give them to me right now."
The man doesn't answer. His information must be very valuable, because he takes a second option. He throws his body at Matt like a weapon, and somehow he gets a good angle. Matt is thrown chest first onto a thick sheet of ice. An unmistakable crack resonates from inside his chest, and he cries out in pain as the criminal flees.
Get up, Matt urges himself, blinking back tears. He's getting away.
It's too late. The goon is gone, leaving Matt with no information and a broken rib. He pulls himself to his feet, breathing shallowly, and feels around in his pocket for the burner phone to call Claire.
By the time he gets to Claire's place, his chest has already begun to bruise and badly. He stopped once the entire way to lean against a building and assess the damage, and regretted touching it immediately. Matt's fractured a lot of ribs in the past, but he's never quite acclimated to resisting the internal pain.
There's a nice fire escape in Claire's new apartment, and she has a balcony now. He's grateful that this won't require scaling the building like Spider-Man, but the idea of climbing the stairs is still pretty daunting. The thin winter air is sapping him of much-needed oxygen, especially now that his choices are between shallow breathing and hellish pain. He grits his teeth, and wraps his hand around the fire escape's handrail. Today is not the day that he loses a fight to both a random goon and to a staircase.
He makes his way up the stairs carefully to avoid slippage. The stairs squeak and creak under his boots, threatening to make him lose traction. This noise, unfortunately, does not reduce the scraping sound inside of his chest. If a hairline fracture sounds like an old ship, an honest to god fracture is an unskilled saw rhythmically grinding through the wood refuse of a shipwreck. But it's something else too – his teeth ache at the eerie, unnatural vibrations of bone against bone rattling around in his chest.
Matt reaches the balcony and leaps over the barrier, clumsily but surely sticking his landing. He musters up the most stoic-yet-grateful face he can manage, and knocks on Claire's window. The hum of the electric lights in Claire's apartment flicker more strongly, and her bare feet pad across the floor. A third heavy object scrapes along the floor behind her as she crosses over to the window with an elevated heart rate. It's clear when she sees him because the object drops to the floor and she rushes over to the window to open it. The smell of her perfume and her cooking waft out the window, and Matt smiles.
"A baseball bat?" he says in the direction of the cylindrical object rolling lazily around her apartment.
"I don't get a lot of visitors that come to my window at 3am with good intentions." She holds her hand out to him, and he takes it.
"Am I the exception?" He ducks underneath the window frame, and steps into her apartment.
"Depends on the damages I see tonight. That's a nasty scrape on your chin – did you eat the street? Jesus."
"I'll live through that one," says Matt, removing his cowl. He winces in pain; the fracture scrapes inside him when he moves his arms. "But I uh. I think I have a broken rib and I can't tell how bad the fracture is." He puts the cowl down on her coffee table, and reaches behind him to undo his zipper. Another sharp pain radiates through his chest, and he bites back a cry.
"Sit down, Matt. I'll get that." He sits down on the couch, and Claire sits behind him. She unzips his costume halfway, pulls the top over his shoulders, and palpates his back and side. "I thought this costume was supposed to protect you from this sort of thing."
"It's a work in progress – ah!"
"Sorry," she says, squeezing his shoulder. "The damaged rib is underneath all this bruising. Lie down."
She flips the top of his suit down when he does. Then she leans over and rifles through a drawer in her coffee table before extracting a stethoscope and putting it in her lap. She palpates the front bruise, eliciting another hiss of pain.
"I landed at a bad angle on really thick ice."
"You sure did," she says, putting her stethoscope in her ears. Claire places the cold metal on his chest. "That's definitely a simple fracture. Breathe."
Her heart remains steady as she checks Matt's chest, so it's no surprise when she takes her stethoscope out of her ears and says, "No damage to the heart or lungs. As clean a bill of health you can get with a broken rib."
"Thank you, Claire," he says as he sits back up and shrugs his top on.
"Taking care of yourself while you heal will be a better thanks. Do some deep breathing exercises every couple of hours so you don't get pneumonia in this weather, and lay off of crime fighting for a few weeks, ok?"
She zips him back up, and hands him his cowl. He quirks a smile at her, and puts it back on.
"Ok."