Disclaimer: Daredevil and Elektra belong to Marvel Comics (Although these versions belong to 20th Century Fox Entertainment) and Angel and company belong to Joss Whedon; the challenge below belongs to cherrycoke
Feedback: Please do
Challenge: Matt Murdock has moved to LA and is hired by Angel to be a lawyer at Wolfram & Hart. When a string of murders begin to occur throughout LA, Angel and crew are on it, not knowing that Daredevil is on it too. But when Angel is almost killed, Matt learns that his past has caught up with him. The killer is none other than his former girlfriend, now professional assassin, Elektra Natchios. (don't know if that's how you spell her last name).
Requirements:
Elektra being behind all the murders.
Elektra being hired by Eve to take out Angel. She doesn't know he's a vampire, so she uses a sai and leaves quickly.
Eve specifically tells Elektra not to kill anyone but Angel.
Angel and Daredevil getting into a fight, each thinking the other was the bad guy.
Taking place at the beginning of season 5, with Spike as a ghost.
Justice is Blind
As he exchanged an awkward glance with his friends, Angel was grateful to see that he wasn't the only one uncomfortable about what he was about to say; Matt might seem trustworthy, but that didn't mean that they should feel comfortable about telling him something that would almost automatically turn his entire life and the world as he knew it upside-down.
On the other hand, given that Matt was already clearly not a normal lawyer himself even before he came to Wolfram & Hart, they would probably have been obligated to tell him about this kind of thing anyway; the only thing that had changed was that they were telling him about it a bit sooner than they might have chosen to do so if this incident hadn't happened.
"Well..." Angel began, crossing his fingers in his pocket as he looked at Matt, hoping the other man wouldn't react too badly to the upcoming news. "Basically, I'm a vampire."
"Huh?" Matt said, 'looking' in Angel's direction in surprise.
"A vampire," Wesley repeated. "The reason you can't hear his heartbeat is that he doesn't have one, since his body's been dead for over two centuries; he spent the first hundred and fifty or so years as nothing more than a conventional vampire, but about a century ago he was cursed with his soul and thus regained his conscience, giving him the ability to once again distinguish right from wrong and therefore the ability to choose to do good rather than just keep killing like the rest of his kind."
"Oh," Matt said, a thoughtful expression on his face as he took in the information he'd just been given, before he finally shrugged in acceptance. "Well, that makes sense."
The people around him could only blink in surprise.
"That's it?" Fred asked, looking at Matt in surprise. "I mean, not that we're not grateful you're not calling us crazy, but if you didn't know about any of this before now...?"
"I was raised Catholic, and I still try and take it relatively seriously," Matt clarified. "Went to confession a bit more than the usual guy back when I was starting out as Daredevil, and I still try and drop in every week or so even after I've... thought things over."
"Thought things over?" Gunn asked.
"Let's just say I used... questionable force... back when I started out and leave it at that," Matt replied with a grim tone that made it clear he wasn't going to elaborate on that issue (Not that Angel particularly wanted to; the idea of a human using 'questionable force' in Matt's secondary line of work raised more questions than he liked right now). "The point is, I might not have always taken the rules of the church as seriously as I could have, but I still believed in it enough to feel that there were some things out there beyond what we could see; getting confirmation like this might be... a surprise, but I still had some ideas that there was something there."
"Ah," Angel said, nodding in understanding at Matt's explanation. "So... you don't mind?"
"Well, you haven't tried to kill me or anyone I know yet; I'd consider that a point in your favour," Matt said with a slight smile. "Besides, at least that explains why you were able to hold your own against me like that; I haven't taken a beating like that since the last time I fought the Kingpin."
"Kingpin?" Gunn said, looking at Matt in surprise, "As in, Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin of Crime?"
"The who?" Lorne asked.
"Major crime boss back in New York a year or so back; I read up on his history back when we started work here," Gunn explained. "He controlled most of the crime in the city before he was taken out; there was a few rumours that this masked vigilante Daredevil had been... involved..."
His voice trailed off as he looked at Matt, the implications of his costume hitting them for the first time.
"You're Daredevil?" he said, looking at the Hell's Kitchen resident in surprise.
"Costume didn't give it away?" Matt retorted with a slight smile.
"Well... OK, maybe it was a slight clue, but dude, you took out a whole bar without being able to see a thing?" Gunn asked, his face splitting into a slightly incredulous grin as he looked at the lawyer before him. "How the Hell'd you pick up moves like that?"
"Practise, improvisation, and what I picked up from what my opponents tried to use against me," Matt replied. "Amazing what you can pick up when your senses and reflexes are operating as quickly as mine are; whether it was the radiation in the waste that hit me or just some luck of the draw, I ended up with a radar-like sense of sound and a sense of touch that gives me an acute awareness of my surroundings, basically allowing me to use the sounds around me like a bat uses its ears to hear."
"And you didn't go for a 'bat' motif?" Gunn asked with a slight smile.
"The cape I'd have needed to create the impression of wings would cloud my senses; it's hard for me just to fight in a team because I can't tell who's who in a fight, the last thing I want is something that makes it even harder to hear what's happening around me," Matt said with a shrug.
"Point," Angel said with a brief nod. "And you started investigating the murder because...?"
"Well, actually I was just following you at the time and made a mistake; what we knew suggested that you were going to be the assassin's main target, and when I 'saw' something holding a weapon I pretty much went into action automatically," Matt said, looking apologetically in Angel's general direction. "Sorry about that."
"Hey, no problem," Angel said with a conciliatory nod. "After all, you're tracking a killer and dealing with a guy who you only know as the head of a law firm; I can't exactly complain about you fighting when you didn't know anything else about the situation."
"You were holding a weapon?" Wesley said, looking at Angel in surprise. "I thought you went out there unarmed?"
"I did," Angel replied, shrugging slightly as he indicated the weapon that Fred was studying. "The weapon was one that was used against me; the blow itself was very decisive- evidently whoever we're dealing with was given the job to kill me; you don't stab as firmly as that when you're just eliminating a witness-, but since they just left after almost stabbing me in the heart, they apparently didn't know what they were dealing with."
"Why?" Matt asked.
"When you kill a vamp, they turn directly into dust," Gunn clarified. "On the bright side, so long as you know what you're dealing with, it makes it hard for them to pretend that you killed them, while what Angel just said pretty much demonstrates why it's hard to kil them if you don't know what you're up against."
"Right..." Matt said, smiling slightly at Gunn's assessment of the situation before he turned to Fred. "Can I... hold that weapon, please?"
"Uh... sure," Fred said, nodding in acknowledgement of the blind man's request as she placed the sai in Matt's outstretched hand.
As Matt felt the dagger in his hands- a dagger that he had never 'seen' as clearly as he might have done, but the brief impression that he had been able to get of it would almost certainly haunt his memory forever-, his blood ran cold at the confirmation of what had only been a vague theory; his initial assessment of the weapon hadn't been clear enough given the rapid pace of the subsequent fight with Angel, but he'd seen enough to form the basics of his original idea even before he received this confirmation.
"Elektra's sai..." he whispered, his now-ungloved hand running over the weapon in shock as he took in what his fingers were telling him.
The image was sharper and clearer than anything he'd been able to pick up when he found himself fighting her during those dark moments before her death- he'd been more focused on avoiding her attacks than figuring out what she was actually using to attack him-, but that wasn't important right now.
What was important was that, based on the scent he could detect on these daggers- their contact with Angel had left the original scent somewhat weakened, but it was still there if you concentrated-, this weapon had definitely been held by the woman he loved; time and distance couldn't erase that scent from his nostrils...
"Elektra?" Angel asked, looking at his new lawyer in surprise. "You know whose weapon that is?"
"Yeah," Matt said simply (For a moment, he thought about lying about his connection to Elektra, but pushed that thought out of the way; it would only make things more difficult later if he lied now and Angel found out the truth later). "I... I think I knew the woman who used this."
"Hold on; how do you-?" Fred asked.
"I recognise her scent on this dagger," Matt clarified, spinning the blade around in his hand so that he could pass it back to Wesley. "Been a while since I smelt it, but that doesn't change the facts; it wouldn't be a lie to say that I know that scent pretty much as well, if not better, than I know my own."
"From your expression, I take it that there's something about the woman in question that we should know about?" Wesley asked.
"She died over a year ago," Matt said solemnly.
"Oh," Wesley said awkwardly.
"How did it happen?" Angel asked.
"She was stabbed by an assassin during a fight," Matt clarified, his tone solemn; the topic was difficult, but his new associates wouldn't have brought this issue up unless they needed answers. "I held her when her heart stopped beating... I felt the moment when she stopped breathing... and I couldn't do anything but run as the police showed up..."
"Hold on; the police showed up?" Gunn asked, looking at Matt with a sudden intensity. "As in, they found her body just after she died? As in, it's possible that-"
"NO!" Matt yelled, sitting up sharply in his bed, 'glaring' at Gunn as much as a man who couldn't see could glare at anyone. "That's not possible; she's dead! I don't know what kind of sick... trick this is, but-"
"Matt," Angel said, placing a firm hand on the other man's shoulder as he addressed the vigilante/lawyer, "as much as I appreciate that this is a... difficult... topic for you to discuss, we can't dismiss something as a theory just because you say it's impossible; if you recognise the scent-"
"She wouldn't DO this!" Matt yelled, reaching out to grab Angel's shirt before he sat back, wincing in pain as he processed the sudden pain in his arm and chest from where he'd taken his earlier beating from Angel.
"Sorry..." he said, wincing slightly at the pain in his arm. "But it can't be her... Elektra wouldn't do this..."
"If you say she wouldn't do this, I'll believe you, but we can't discount the possibility that she's being influenced by something else, even if it is her and not... well, the thing about magic is that it offers a lot of options beyond the obvious ideas," Angel said, looking grimly at the lawyer. "If you think you have an idea- even if it turns out to be the wrong one-, we have to at least try to follow it up if we want to find who this assassin is or who they're working for."
A part of Matt almost wanted to deny it more than he wanted to consider the idea that Angel was suggesting; the thought that Elektra, the most passionate woman he'd ever met, could have reached a point where she was killing people for no apparent reason...
But, on the other hand, there was still the mystery of that necklace he'd found on the rooftop after Elektra's death.
No matter how he might try to rationalise it away, Elektra wouldn't have had the chance, motive, or opportunity to leave that necklace up on the roof before her father was killed, and her attitude after the funeral made it fairly clear that she wasn't interested in anything that wasn't directly related to getting revenge for her father's murder; the only way that necklace could have ended up there was if someone put it there after the fight with Bullseye.
Why she'd left it rather than just telling him that she was alive was another matter, but that didn't mean he could discount the possibility just because he didn't like it.
If there was any chance that his new colleagues- his new friends- could help him get Elektra back, he had to try it...
