"Mr. Murdock?"
A man's voice, loud and piercing, rang in Matt's ears as he turned over on his cot, half-conscious. His bare hand traced the floor underneath him- cold tile, sterile.
"Mr. Murdock, we need to-"
"What?!"
With a start, Matt snapped awake, and his whole upper body flung upward, his nostrils flaring wildly. He pressed a hand to his chest, covered by a white t-shirt in front of a layer of bandages. His face was uncovered- but he still wore the red armored leggings from the costume.
He shot his head to the side, registering the man standing a few feet in front of him- no, not in front of him… in front of a wall of bars. A cell door. Past him, men and women wandered around absentmindedly through a set of hallways and a lobby. Someone behind a desk answered a corded telephone.
It was the fifteenth precinct, a building he had been in plenty of times before. Just never a police holding cell.
Matt's mind raced, and he stood from the cot, grunting from the still-splitting pain in his ribs. He shot his head in the direction of the uniformed man behind the cell door with a panicked expression.
"What- what happened? How did this…?"
"I intend to ask the questions tonight, Mr. Murdock. We are well aware of who you are. You and your partner Mr. Nelson have brought a fair amount of attention to our precinct." The officer tapped on a notepad with a pen, eyebrows furrowed. "We received an anonymous tip about a hostage situation and found you at the scene. Found that uniform. Goddamn Daredevil. Do you have any idea how long we have been-"
"No!" Matt threw up a hand defensively, licking his lips with apprehension. "No, no, it's not- it's not what it-"
"It's not what it looks like? Then what the hell is it? Let me tell you something, Murdock. I was gonna call this in with D.A. Tower the goddamn second they found you at the scene, but our detective sergeant stood up for you."
"Brett?"
"That's right. He said we should hear your side of the story before we made any calls. He's the only reason you're being given this much damn leniency. You better pray you can make the most of it." Pressing the tip of the pen to his paper, he looked partially up at Matt through the bars. "So let's start with this. Are you Daredevil?"
Matt scratched his chin uncertainly, his heart pounding in his chest. "I… I don't know if I can…"
The officer watched as he trailed off. "Aren't you supposed to be blind?"
"I am, I just…" Slumping back down against the cot, Matt ran a bare hand through his hair, resigned. "…I… I… want a lawyer…"
"Yeah, yeah. Figured." With narrowed eyes, looked Matt up and down again. "Fine. I'll tell you what. I call you a lawyer, you cooperate with our investigation, and I will wait to call the D.A."
Matt nodded shakily, trembling. "Yes… yes…"
"You got a name? Or do you want a PD?"
"No PD." Matt spoke fiercely, his teeth clenched. "Nelson. Franklin Nelson. He will represent me."
"You want me to ask him if-?"
"He'll represent me. Just call him."
The officer paused for a moment, then nodded slowly and tucked his notepad away. "Yeah… alright. Nelson. I'll call him."
The two of them faced off for a few moments before the officer reached into his coat to retrieve his cell phone- but as soon as he did, Matt shouted again with surprise. One other pair of footsteps drew his attention from the other end of the hallway.
"Wait. Wait!"
The officer hesitated for a moment, hand wrapped around his phone in his pocket. "What-?"
"Not you. It's not- it's him again. It's him…"
The footsteps pounded against the tiled floor with each step, and Matt's head shot in their direction. His nostrils flared: a wool suit, over-applied cologne, a very slight limp, and a rapid heartbeat. It was Kilgrave, and he was not happy. The officer barely had a moment to shoot Matt a look of confusion before he was interrupted by the shout of a British man, who marched directly up to him without a moment's hesitation.
"You there!" Kilgrave spat, putting himself face-to-face with the officer.
Releasing the phone in his pocket, the officer scoffed in Kilgrave's face, turning. "Who the hell are-?"
"Quiet." Kilgrave silenced him with a word, pointing toward the officer's pocket on the opposite side. "Give me his cell key. Quickly!"
Without another word, the officer placed a small key in Kilgrave's hand, which he tucked into his jacket. Kilgrave nodded slightly and gestured behind him, down the hallway. "Go to the lobby."
Matt braced himself as Kilgrave replaced the officer's position, just a few feet from the bars. In his free hand was the red Daredevil mask, hanging lazily at his side.
"Eight bullet wounds, Matthew. She's getting intensive surgery now. The only reason she'll even live is because she heals faster than you or I do." Kilgrave raised a hand and opened it, and the mask fell to the floor at his feet. It was already splitting down the middle from the earlier blow it had taken, and it broke in half the moment it clattered to the floor. "You know, it's the funniest thing. I spoke to the neighbors, and they told me they called the police because they were threatened by a masked man."
Matt scrambled from his seat, hurrying to the bars of the cell and gripping one with one hand. "I told them to do it. It's my fault. Please." He winced again from the pain in his chest, hand clenched against the bar.
"Oh, I know it's your fault! Don't worry! No ambiguity there!" Kilgrave pinched the bridge of his nose- currently bandaged with medical tape- in frustration. "You have been making my life very difficult. You nearly got Jessica killed. You have been trying to expose me. And you broke my nose…"
Hesitant to say anything too rash, Matt stepped away from the bars, head tilted toward the floor.
Watching him cautiously, Kilgrave continued- as soon as it became clear he wouldn't get any response. "They were out there saying you attacked a police officer."
"I- I didn't have a choice," Matt snapped, turning suddenly with frustration. "He was trying to remove me from the apartment. I- you told us not to leave. I didn't have a choice…" Matt touched the bruise on his face, where the police officer in question had beaten him with the butt of a rifle. Any other day he could have cleared the whole squad on his own, but with his injuries he simply wasn't fast enough…
Kilgrave allowed himself another few moments to watch Matt as he hovered around in the cell. Eventually, he opened his coat and dug into his pocket, pulling out the key that the officer had handed to him.
"Well, he's not the only one you've implicated into this." Kilgrave inserted the key into Matt's cell door, swinging it open and throwing up his hands as Matt turned toward him. "Come along now. Don't touch me, obviously."
A wave of tension washed over Matt in an instant, and he clenched his bare fists tightly- unable to use them. His legs moved one after the other like a toy soldier, following Kilgrave down the hall and into the larger waiting area- and then he froze in place, hands falling weakly at his sides.
There were well over a dozen heartbeats clustered in the room, all of the people that Matt had heard bustling around in the precinct. As Kilgrave clasped his hands together and made his way to the center of the room, he realized that only a handful of them belonged to cops from the precinct. Every person in the room- many of them not even uniformed- stood in a straight line from wall to wall, shifting slightly in place and breathing shakily. And making special effort not to make too much noise.
Matt immediately panicked, his instinct to attack quelled by some unseen force. He felt his hands shaking at his sides. He couldn't remember the last time he felt so helpless.
"You're blind, right? That's what the boys at the station here told me. Must be more to the story, given the… athletics." Kilgrave snickered with incredulity, lifting a hand to gesture to the row of silent innocents in front of the two of them. "Do you recognize them?"
"Some of them," Matt replied hoarsely. "The officers who came into the apartment. And the officers who were already here when I arrived."
Matt's head twisted as he listened to their pounding heartbeats. Brett stood among the other cops from the fifteenth, his uniform different to connote his rank. He took anxious, quiet breaths, just like all of the other innocent cops under Kilgrave's control.
Shaking, Matt leaned his head toward the floor as he spoke. "Brett… I'm sorry…"
"That's right," Kilgrave said as he gestured away from the cops to the civilians on the other end of the room. "And my neighbors- you remember Jordan, right? Plus the four innocent paramedics that rushed Jessica to the hospital. Have a count yet? That's eighteen people, all told, Matthew."
Matt's head jolted to the side, and he murmured quietly to himself as he counted out the heartbeats to himself. All eighteen people had some kind of weapon on them- knives, and scissors, and scalpels. Kilgrave would have to have armed them himself…
"What are you going to do to them?" Matt choked out, voice dripping with fear that he couldn't hold back.
Kilgrave scoffed at that. "No. Not what I'm going to do. What you have done. Don't try to high-road me; you are the one that recklessly endangered these people. All of them. You went out of your way to hunt me down, and you dragged innocent people into it in the process."
"That's bullshit; I didn't want anybody else to-!"
"Oh, shut up." He clicked his tongue, pacing slightly in front of the crowd. "I've gone to the trouble, now, of protecting you, and I want you to be aware of the costs of that. Everyone here, all eighteen of them, knows who you are now. I'm the one that had to round them all up. I'm the one that's having them shred their records. I'm the one that's having them delete their security footage. I am cleaning up after you, Murdock."
Matt gritted his teeth as Kilgrave spoke, the heartbeats of those in the crowd accelerating the more he rambled on.
Kilgrave waved one hand in front of him. "Weapons ready!"
The room filled with the sound of clacking metal and plastic as eighteen blades were drawn simultaneously, each person in the room pressing one to their own throat.
"Don't do this…" Matt said with a quiet whimper, mouth gaping slightly.
"I don't want to! Trust me, I don't want to." Kilgrave jabbed a finger in Matt's direction, frustrated. "I take no pleasure in this. None at all. You forced my hand. Understand that."
Matt winced at the impossible command.
Kilgrave sighed, shifting toward the crowd again. He nodded once, sucking in his breath. "Do it."
Matt jumped at the sound, of blades cutting into flesh and spilling the contents. In the span of moments, bodies dropped the floor in an enormous clump, soaking every inch of the tile in blood. It trailed across the floor in a wave, like molasses, soaking the bottoms of Kilgrave's polished loafers. Brett's body slammed down nearest to Kilgrave, who pushed him back with one foot, leaving a bloody footprint on the top of his head.
"And just like that, Daredevil's big secret is… well, a secret again." Kilgrave took a step toward Matt, who recoiled from shock. Blood dripped from the bottoms of his shoes as he lifted them off the ground. "This is blood on your hands. I wanted to make that clear first and foremost. This is because of what you've done."
The blood rolled down over Matt's boots, staining the bottoms of them. He tried to speak, but lost the words. Kilgrave approached him without a second thought.
"Tsch. I would have used guns if they weren't so loud. What a mess." Kilgrave straightened his suit, perturbed by Matt's blank expression. "I really don't try to be theatrical like this. But you have to understand; sometimes it's the only way to get someone's attention. Someone like you, anyway."
Matt opened and closed his mouth, barely able to speak. "That's psychotic."
"No, you know what's psychotic? Dressing up like the Devil and running around assaulting people. That is psychotic. What I'm doing is very logical. The unfortunate consequences of some very ill-informed decisions. Your decisions," Kilgrave said pointedly, straightening his suit jacket.
"I didn't want any to get hurt."
"Now who's talking bullshit? You broke my sodding nose!" Glowering, Kilgrave touched a finger to his bandaged nose again. "Didn't want anyone to get hurt… Christ's sake…"
"Innocent people." Matt picked up a boot, and the blood rolled off of it into a pool beneath him. "I didn't… want innocent people to get hurt…"
"Oh, for the love of- didn't I already tell you to shut up?"
Matt furrowed his brow confusedly.
"There will be more," Kilgrave continued. "Four more, to be specific. The doctors in the ER tending Jessica right now. Lucky enough to be working nights at Metro General. Twenty-two bodies… I'm going to be up all night covering my tracks after this one." He pressed two fingers to his temple. "I don't want you ever speaking to Jessica again. You understand me? You're bad for her."
Matt grimaced at him. If he weren't so disgusted already, he thought, he would be laughing.
"What? Nothing else to say? Oh, I suppose I told you to shut up." Kilgrave took a few steps forward to put him face-to-face with Matt, feet splashing in the blood on the floor. "Go on. Tell me you understand."
Matt tensed up. "I understand."
"Tell me you won't speak to Jessica again."
"I won't speak to Jessica again."
The two of them stood firmly across from each other, Kilgrave watching him appraisingly. Matt held fast.
"She doesn't love you," he said, unflinching.
Kilgrave shot him a look, then turned away. He scratched his chin, pensive. "I know that. But… she will. Eventually. As long as she lives long enough…" Taking another few steps forward, Kilgrave stood over Brett's lifeless body, poking it with the tip of his bloodied shoe. "I'm done arguing with you, Matthew. Pull yourself together. You have some cleaning-up to do."