"THE RED VICTORY SAGA" - Chapter Five: Chaos Resounding

We swapped duties on this roleplay. LaFataMorgana took up Echo's shoes while I tried my hand at writing for Daredevil.


The following night...

ECHO "He was blind. I was deaf. It didn't make a whit of difference. In fact, it removed the barriers that might have been between us. There were no social stigmas to tip-toe around because we both know what it's like to deal with something that puts us at serious disadvantages. I wish the fact that I'm deaf meant that I could block out the voice of my own conscience telling me how wrong I was to, pardon the pun, blindly believe Fisk when he said the Daredevil was responsible for my father's death. My conscience never shuts up." Maya Lopez sighed, setting down the cup of coffee that had grown cold between her tanned hands as she spoke. Nothing greeted her in the form of a response other than the static of silence. Vibrations. Not that she'd been expecting anything. Amber eyes flicked upwards, inspected the night sky. Uncurling her legs to dangle them over the precipice of the 8-story building her penthouse sprawled across, Maya smiled. She was her own best form of therapy. She could say whatever she wanted, never hear herself speak, and get things off her chest to the empty, starless sky. A shiver ran over her back as she stared down at the alley far below. Nothing fascinating. A couple's giddy laughter on the street reminded her of Matt tonight. Sometimes he stayed out of her thoughts for days at a time, some nights five minutes of blank though was a luxury. Brushing the raven hair out of her face that the wind whipped there, Maya leaned back to lay against the cool cement of the ledge. Tonight was one of those nights.

DAREDEVIL Matt Murdock's curse lay not in his visual handicap but in the women who entered his life and constantly defined his person. On that same token, Daredevil shared his fate. The hour was a late February evening, under a clear winter sky that he hadn't seen in close to fifteen years. He was warm in uniform - red kevlar, toasty boots, matching gloves, a hood that broke the cold from his eyes and kept the wind out of his ears. The tight jacket he wore was the only sense of close intimacy he had embraced these past few months. This was one of those nights where he was free to traverse the rooftops for the sheer pleasure of being airborne. This was one of those nights where he wanted to keep the hell away from lowlifes. He had been under tremendous pressure in his most recent case, which had entered its climax earlier that morning. For all the troubles on his mind, Matt was in the mood to lose himself to the night. Daredevil was in the mood to fly.

DAREDEVIL A somersault saw the avenger's figure soaring sky-high past the brickwork of an old apartment building, the billy club strapped to his calf simultaneously whipped out in the middle of his execution. The wind rushing past his ears was deafening, but the sound had grown on him throughout the years he spent taking it in, and was therefore comforting. Rather like an affectionate old friend. Unlocked, the club whipped out its hooks extended thirty feet of cable, allowing the Devil to grapple from power line to power line as nothing more than an scarlet shadow. His momentum carried him from avenue to avenue, landing on concrete only to bounce back up the next second. In this manner, Daredevil glided throughout half of the city, until he suddenly arrived at a familiar location, the lofts of townies and borderline millionaires. Not some place he belonged. Not some place he would have visited were it not for a particular woman on his mind tonight. Why her, of all the women...?

ECHO "There's something addictive in wearing a costume and dancing through the shadows," Maya continued, speaking to the loaded air as if it were just someone she were having an idle conversation with. The night was a consummate listener. Never spoke back to her, save for it's rumbles now and then, which was nothing more than a passing truck below. Just listened. Shrugging deeply into the thick, luxurious cashmere sweater that graced her trim figure and matched the shade of her hair, Maya's eyes slid closed. In this self-inflicted darkness, she struggled to see some mental image of the imposing figure clad in scarlet. In the days after she'd met Matt Murdock, she'd done this same thing with her eyes open, hoping vainly that the shadow she stared into would send forth the Daredevil. When the fruitlessness of that particular effort saddened her, she turned to calling up her memories of him, in the darkness of closed eyes. His own territory. If she squeezed them closed tight enough, filtered out all the light, and pictured his crouched figure... maybe one day it would be real. She could never -go- to -him-. Not after she'd played judge, jury and executioner to an innocent man. A good man.

DAREDEVIL wasn't amoral, for being a consummate practitioner of the law, he was forever conscious of his own actions. But all the same, Matt was nonetheless human. He was prone to the same mistakes as other men, was even victim to some of their weaknesses, even though his handicap had taught him how to rise above the status quo. For the moment, this was the only explanation he could come up with to excuse the fact that he missed the girl. There were few people in his life who ever absorbed the incessant ramblings of his depressive outlook with perfect attention, and Maya was one of those people. Elektra would listen but never respond, in the way he could talk to a reflection on the mirror that could never speak back to him. Anyway, she had distanced herself much too far from his heart to be any source of comfort to him anymore. And Foggy... Foggy would listen but respond right on back, sometimes with too much information. Natasha would lecture him... Karen would patronize him... What Matt needed right now was to be in the presence of someone who was just like him. Who could understand him. Who was lonely like him. Shooting his grapple onto the roof edge of her building, Daredevil recoiled the cable and was jettisoned back into the air. Complex aerial maneuvers ended in a triple twist until a heavy thud on concrete announced his arrival. His landing was in perfect alignment to the woman in front of him, his figure low and crouching, his boots absorbing the fall. There was a click of metal, and the serrated hooks on his billy club swiftly disappeared back inside the handle as Matthew stood up to survey Maya in meditation.

ECHO For once, the night's vibrations made her a promise. A promise that she wasn't by herself on this cold rooftop. Would it follow through if she opened her eyes? She'd been let down by her senses before - sometimes a flutter of pigeon wings could feel like leather brushing against leather. Sometimes a pan dropped into a sink nearby reverberated with the same frequency as a grappling hook catching a fire escape. What would that thump of rubber soles against the concrete turn out to be if she left the haven of blindness? She had a brief flash of resentment for the night and all its false hopes. It played games with someone who wasn't entirely stable enough to be played with. A bitter expression crossed her dusky Native features and she opened her eyes, just to spite the trickery. When the dim light of the world filtered back into her recognition, one thing stayed the same. Maya closed her eyes, and opened them again. That crouched figure was still there. She sat up quickly. The night had come through for her. "Matt?" Maya asked, watching the figure's face intently. Her words were no indication of her handicap. She spoke precisely, clearly. Minute control of her muscles allowed that luxury. After the longest months, there was hope on her gaze.

DAREDEVIL There was recognition in the girl's voice, and for that, Matt was relieved. "Past midnight," he replied by way of greeting, strolling closer to her where his senses had directed him. The brief sound of serrated metal scrapping against the housing of his billy club was enough to project sound waves and determine her location. "Not an early sleeper?" He should know. He had kept her awake a number of times before in bed. But that was nearly eight months ago, back when he was still innocent of all the accusations she had thrown at him in light of her involvement with Wilson Fisk. Not wanting to appear hostile to the young woman, Matt peeled the mask from his eyes and advanced until a comfortable length of distance was established between them. After all, this was the same girl who once tried to kill him and nearly...very nearly, succeeded. Matt lent the silence between them a bit of his own musing as his gaze adjusted to her presence. It might not have been perfectly centered on her face, but his attention was on her. There was an awkward beat. He smiled the greeting of a man who just wanted to be heard, a man who meant her no harm, who wasn't the bad guy. "Hi, Maya..." The casualty in his tone was fake, but Maya couldn't tell the difference. He spoke to her as though she could hear.

ECHO Score one for the night. She stretched idly, at once relaxed in his presence. Matt was a comforting person to be around. "No one has ever proven scientifically that sleep is required for the body to function," she replied. "Besides, I have a problem with alarm clocks." Rueful humor. For someone who couldn't even hear herself, she seemed to inject the exact amount of wryness into her words to bring around a chuckle from most people. She remembered making Matt laugh. She'd had to hold her hand on his shoulder to feel the rumble of it, but he had a handsome smile. One she'd never forgotten. There was nothing more than a sense of deep friendship in her touch when she reached for his hand and led him to sit by her. It was true she loved Matt. But his heart was elsewhere, and she'd come to accept that over eight months. His companionship was good enough for her. "How've you been, Matt?" She watched his lips expectantly, smiling at just the cant of them, posed in a perpetual expression of solemnity.

DAREDEVIL offered a side smirk, the only reaction he ever employed when amused. For a guy who had to wash away someone else's blood beneath his fingertips on a nightly basis, Matt wasn't the laughing type. Milky blue eyes were cast skyward, listening with one ear pointed towards his audience. A blind man's habit. Sensual, almost, in its reverence. She sounded different to him tonight; calm, immovable. Grown up. It upset him to wonder if he had been the reason she changed so outwardly over the months since he last saw her. Matt had been the source of her frustration for a time... No, it had been much more serious than that... She genuinely had an interest in killing him once. But as he struggled to separate her heartbeat from the rest of Hell's Kitchen, Matt detected only the nervousness of a young woman who seemed anxious to see an old lover. That worried him, too. The girl's feelings. They were still indistinct from the way she felt about him before. When they were in love. Daredevil, not Matt, revolved the billy club in his hand, weaving it down a complicated path through his fingers. "I'm on my tenth alarm clock," he humored dryly, though it was no joke that Matt took to beating his errant snooze button on some mornings with the same well-placed violence he dished out upon nightly scum.

DAREDEVIL sobered then quite suddenly and set his jaw to an angry clamp. "Alive," he continued. "Wishing I -was- asleep instead of spending my Saturday thinking about the Roscoe VS. Lenore case I've been smothered in." Come to think of it, Matt's health had never been the same since his foray into crime fighting began. The pressures in the courtroom was enough to tax his mental reserves, but to consider his night life? "Swung by your block... Wanted to check up on you..." Despite the frailty of his words, Matt took to his reply with a look of supreme confidence and machismo. If Maya knew him well enough - which she didn't - she would have realized that Matt was often a one-man teleprompter. He often did things that were beyond his reasoning, that could be considered slightly neurotic... But since when did anyone need a reason to pay an old friend a visit? It was then, Matt wondered, if he even meant anything anymore to the girl. "You look good," he added, teasingly. He was blatantly lying, but grinned absolvingly. She'd appreciate the joke.

ECHO chuckled, a gentle sound, at the reply she read on his lips. If Matt knew her well enough - which he didn't - he'd have realized that she could tell what sort of emotion went into his words just by the way in which he spoke. She saw through bravado the way he could hear a lie in her heartbeat. Perhaps they knew more about each other than they thought. "I appreciate that," Maya answered, and there was every ounce of sincerity in her words. It helped to know she wasn't forgotten. Voluntarily exile from seeing him over the past eight months was something she could make herself do because she honestly felt like she'd done the man a terrible injustice. She didn't think she could be forgiven. She'd almost taken his life. And there was no one less deserving of that fate than Matthew Murdock. Closing her eyes, Maya leaned back slightly, enjoying the rush of air that tried to dissuade her from freefalling backwards off the ledge, only to collect herself into a position she'd learned from watching Daredevil himself and landed safely below. That lure was another of the night's games. In reference to his joke, she smiled winningly. "It's nice to hear your voice again." A tease in kind. Maya fell silent. She missed that banter between them. Unbidden, the memory of seeing a movie together (an exercise in futility, but fun nonetheless) traipsed through her mind. He'd tell her what was being said if she couldn't read the lips onscreen, and she'd describe the sights to him. If he asked her, she'd admit that she missed him. If he wondered, he still meant everything to her. She had to ask herself, though, if she'd in fact ever meant anything to him. A long line of women went before her in Matthew's heart. "There're no stars tonight," Maya reported to him wistfully, out of habit.

DAREDEVIL sighed heavily, not out of irritation but in agreement. "I know," Matt replied. His tone bore no insult or mockery, but an explanation was still needed. "Listened to the weather forecast this morning. Said it was going to be clear until midnight and then there would be a rainstorm by dawn. Clouds are out." Matt inhaled the air and found no traces of sweet moisture that usually precipitated a shower. He made it his life's work to be sensitive to his environment at all times, investing all of his training on sharpening his remaining senses. Not unlike how she had been honed her talents at mimickery and adapted to the world around her. Matt once marveled at how excellent that talent of hers really was, was even subject to a personal demonstration. Besides his books, the lawyer had kept abreast of kinetics, the science of movement, and several other laws of motion in college. He obsessed over them, in fact. Given that, Echo had a tremendous sense of balance even without her sense of hearing, which greatly assisted in keeping normal folk centered. Hell, she had better balance than most people. She boxed. She danced. She kicked his ass. "Do you believe in forgiving people for anything," Matt continued quietly, his 'gaze' fixed in front of him, "No matter how crazy and fucked up they were in the past?" He had been paid an unexpected visit by an old friend last night. A visit that had completely disoriented everything he ever knew about that woman... Despite his faith in Catholicism and forgiveness, Matt believed that everyone would be judged eventually, one way or the other. He had to make sure there was still hope in saving Elektra...

ECHO watched his lips intently to discern what he'd asked her. It made her smile softly - a smile that could be heard in her words. "Who are you trying to save this time, Matthew?" There was only an affectionate appreciation of his crusades to look after the people he cared about. Honey-brown eyes flicked off his face when he said nothing more, and she offered her own sigh. "There's always room for forgiveness if you love someone enough," Maya added. But then she thought further on that and continued. "But then... if you love -her- enough, not forgiving her would be unthinkable and you wouldn't be asking me this question." It seemed Maya was more observant than she let on sometimes. She picked up on nuances in his speech that told her who he was speaking of, even if she couldn't hear the desperate hope in his voice. Crossing her legs beneath her, she once again settled her gaze on his features and waited. She knew that, given the encouragement that forgiveness was in fact possible, Matt could make this woman he spoke of very happy.

DAREDEVIL went into conference with his heart a moment. "Her name's Elektra and I'm most certainly not in love with her." Anymore, anyway. He spoke the plaintive truth, at that, even if it came across as an arrogant and defensive response. Besides, Maya of all people must have been aware that Matt had no interest in lying to anyone but himself these days... Daredevil was becoming a joke in the papers. Matt Murdock was being put in the ranks next to serial murderers. There was no easier way to put it - his responsibilities were pissing him off. And then, Elektra's sudden arrival... Her equally mysterious exit... Why was he such a pussy when it came to dealing with women? "I don't know anymore," Matt went on, leaning back against the cool grated wall of the apartment thermos room. "I just dunno..." Forgiveness had always been something that was difficult for Matt. A man loses patience -quick- after seeing so many of his loved ones die. "Sinning is like entering the ring. Sometimes you hit a knockout and you're free to go. Sometimes your glove slips and you get a quick leftie to the nose and suddenly you're on your ass with no one to pick you up." Now he was rambling. Echo had nothing to do with his past, at least not so far down that road. She was too young. "I'm still angry at her, but I don't want that to happen to her..." Matt shut up just long enough to- "We've got about two minutes before it rains."

ECHO listened with that perfect attention he'd come to her for. As he'd suspected, Maya had matured somewhat over the past months. She was now in charge of her own life with neither her father or Wilson Fisk to look after her. Sure, some things had been provided for her - the chic loft she lived in had been courtesy of the Kingpin's fortune, and so had her own bank account. But on the whole, she woke up when she felt like it, ate what she wanted. Worked when she needed to. Freedom and control had come to a graceful balance in her life. She was doing alright. It was even visible outwardly - she was more poised now than she had been, if that was possible. She moved with the indistinct purpose of a dancer. In this newfound maturity, Maya ingested his concerns where before she might have spoken quickly, and for her own purposes. One of their two minutes passed, and she hadn't risen from her meditative pose. It seemed she wasn't overly concerned about the rain. "And sometimes, Matt, you have to stop thinking about things in the context of religion and ask yourself if you can look at her and see anything but what she's done in the past. Faith is faith. Whether her soul can be saved is up to God alone. What you need to worry about is her heart. And her mind." When even she could feel the physical harbingers of rain, she stood and stretched. "Come inside," Maya invited. "I left dinner on the stove. I never like eating alone."

DAREDEVIL responded evenly, "I don't care to look at the situation, or the world for that matter, any other way." It was Matt sticking up for himself, sticking up for the faith that he had so zealously observed all his life. To always be right (or to always -think- he was right) was a curse, like all the women who had entered his life and tried to change him. Matt Murdock was a man stuck in his beliefs - no one on this earth could ever succeed at changing someone who was already way too angry to listen. Sure, he was once hurt by God for taking his father taken away from him, but Matt stayed with the church in order to belong somewhere, in order to give his frustration a place to settle. He realized it wasn't God who killed his dad. God was not a murderer. Matt needed to believe this. He needed to believe that there was someone above his father's killers, who could explain what science and the law could not, who would punish those who -did- take his dad away from him. Sacred Heart Parish was the only place Matt had ever felt at home in after he lost his last remaining relative. All the ministers there were good to him. Told him not to hate. To be forgiving. But no matter how many sermons Matt had attended, no matter how dependent he became on the charity and goodness of the preachers, the boy went on to believe that Hell was not enough of a punishment for some criminals. Judgment by God seemed to him the only satisfying penalty and that sometimes, it was up to the individual to speed up that process. This is what Maya didn't seem to understand. Matt was afraid that Elektra would end up like one of the many criminals whose souls he had sentenced to Hell as Daredevil. He realized, even after this conversation, that he still couldn't confirm whether or not Elektra was truly a doomed soul. Only time would tell, but if Elektra wanted to change, she had to be -serious- with herself. She needed to stop running away. Matthew stood, gesturing over the side of the building instead of following the girl. "No, thank you," he declined. "I think I've disturbed you long enough." Matt left no room for a response and continued to climb onto the ramparts as the rain began to fell. "But you're right. I've been worrying about the wrong side of her. It's not even my place to even care about her soul anymore." The hood was replaced back over his eyes and tucked beneath the collar of his leather jacket. "Goodnight, Maya. I'll be expecting you at the office one of these days. We'll do lunch or something. I'll treat you real nice." He might have been trying to be friendly, he might have been earnest, but as Daredevil's figure turned away from her and fell over the roof edge with his cables trailing behind him, one thing was for certain: the Man Without Fear was slowly arriving to the point where he was tired of giving a shit about anybody in this city.