Disclaimer: the characters and concepts in this story are the property of Marvel and their related affiliates. This is an amateur writing effort meant for entertainment purposes only.

Summary: You know you've got problems when Frank Castle is lecturing you on the importance of friendship.

Or: how Matt's broken leg becomes the least of his concerns.

Warnings: Spoilers for season 2.

Author's Notes: This chapter exploded, but I think it covers everything I need it to. My outline has a series of arrows, checkmarks, and scratches. That's a good sign, right?

Readers, I am so happy you're enjoying this! Thank you for stopping by! I hope you are all having a great week!

"My demons are begging me to open up my mouth.

I need them mechanically make the words come out.

They fight me, vigorous and angry, watch them pounce.

Ignite me, licking at the flames they bring about."

~Halsey, "Hold Me Down"

Chapter Three

There's an awful lot of blood in Matt's body and not all of it's his. A good percentage of it pumps into his right arm, hot and heavy. He doesn't need to follow the tube to see who's attached to it, but he does. Unsurprisingly, Frank's murder-hand wraps around Matt's wrist and sets his arm back on the table.

"Still me, Red," meaning they've had this conversation at least once before. Matt wants to say he doesn't remember, but then he doesn't remember what's been said.

He feels submerged inside. Once too empty, now too full of blood and platelets and salt water. His skin has trouble holding it all in, and while his shin is splayed wide open, nothing seems to be escaping. The doctor has her hands in there. Metal claws the muscle open; a scalpel to sheer away the tissue. She drags a long strip of something off his bone and leaves an open stretch of molten rock to gnaw on his senses.

The pain slips away the more he tries to focus. He knows it belongs to him, that those slashed nerves are attached, but hurt is fickle and fleeting. First his leg, then his spine, then his skull, then his chest, and then gone. Away, far away, and Frank's checking his pulse as the doctor applies a deft row of stitches where the metal used to bite.

She says, "I'm not a bad person."

Frank doesn't respond. Hears her, sure. His trigger finger twitches on his leg, the tendon flaring with life to fire. He says nothing though, so the doctor tries again, louder this time, "I'm not a bad person."

His trigger finger doesn't tap this time, but that's because it's not trained to fire more than once, "Never said you were, Doc."

"You said you were going to kill me," she notes. "You only kill bad people."

"You gonna tell me you wouldn't deserve it – doing what you do? Patching up pieces of shit so they can keep being pieces of shit?" Her heart staggers through the next couple of beats. Frank presses on as if he can hear her feeling guilty, feeling worthy of punishment. "Thought you took an oath or something: do no harm. You fix these guys and they go out and hurt more people. That's…that's messed up, Doc."

Matt rolls his head in Frank's direction, mouthing, "Stop. Stop, Frank." He gets a hand on his brow for the trouble before his head's rotated in the opposite direction. Perception spins. The drugs leave him in circles and bursts. He's swept out of awareness again to the sound of Frank: Frank spewing words like animals from the wheels of a car, "And you, what? You got a family? You got friends? The mob's gonna kill them unless you do this? Nah. Mob docs like you, you're not coerced. That doesn't make you a bad person, just you make bad decisions. First for getting involved with the mob, second for being good enough to have me show up at your door."

She goes quiet, quivery. "Please," she begs, "Please don't kill me."

Frank says nothing. Does nothing. He's still next to Matt, blood transfusing from his arm.

The doctor continues working. Her hands are strong at his ankle and knee.

A sickening, multi-syllable crack echoes in Matt's ears like a gunshot, and the pain is back. The pain is furious, the pain is everywhere, and he is gone.

Matt wakes and the doctor is gone too. The scent of death is pooled around his feet, wafting up from a cold, dead carcass on the floor in a cloud of blood and GSR. He can't make out any heartbeats but his, fast and fearful under his naked chest.

"Frank," his voice has bloated from the extra fluids pulsating under his skin. He's sopping, an old sponge, and that's without the lingering anesthetic tugging his senses out from under him. "Frank...God damn it, Frank…"

Rising. Or falling. Matt's not sure which, only that he's moving in the sole direction he can, and movement is awful. The mask slides off his swear-soaked face. His chest throbs. The area under his knee stings profoundly, reverberating off the plush dressings over the length of his shin. He tries to measure the incision in inches, and when that fails, he counts the seconds he spends listening, feeling. He loses track of that number too. Only when he stops concentrating does the answer bubble through his cloudy perception. Ankle to knee, his skin throbs gently. Ankle to knee, posterior to anterior: a poorly drawn cross of broken flesh.

Matt places a shaking hand on his knee. Nausea and pain rove through him from the touch. He doesn't recognize the limb or his sense of touch, but that's him. Expertly held together by thick bandages and two pieces of repurposed lumber while his doctor lies dead on the floor.

"FRANK!" he swallows hard to keep from vomiting. "You didn't…you didn't…tell me you didn't…"

The door bursts open for a maelstrom of bullets and bloodshed. "Doc said you might be waking up." God damn it, Frank sounds almost cheerful. His respiration's elevated. Killing does that to him.

Matt shoves off the table, body on autopilot. His right foot catches him when he hits the floor, thank God, because his arms are of no help. Neither is his left leg, all fifty tonnes of it, which drops like an anchor and rages the whole way down.

He grabs Frank. He doesn't know how he grabs Frank – the laws of physics are playing tricks on him or maybe he's playing tricks on them – but all of a sudden he's back on the table, the wind knocked out of him. Broken ribs claw into his lungs. His hands are wrapped under the straps on Frank's bulletproof vest, and he can't let go. "Why'd you do it Frank?" he demands gruffly, tossing his legs. "Why? Why'd you do it? What the hell did she do to deserve it?"

Frank groans. At least, Matt thinks he groans. Hard to tell over spluttering and screaming of lungs as much as nerves. What Matt does know for certain is that he gets pinned. Frank wraps an arm around his knees, "Take it easy, Red."

"She saved my life! She saved my fucking life!"

His voice cuts out. Bile rises in his esophagus. Matt resorts to punching to get his point across. He hits mostly air until chance lands his knuckles into Frank's trachea. Frank grabs his broken ribs in retaliation. What little air Matt has left emerges as a thready scream before Frank plants a hand on his mouth to shut him up. He doesn't need his mouth though; Matt continues throwing punches and landing them, but Frank absorbs them like he did the bullet in his brain. The man collects hurt for ammunition and fires it all back into his enemies.

"You done?"

Matt is not done. He lays into Frank's face and shoulders, ignoring the rising insistence of his leg to STOP. Stop, please stop. "You're a piece of shit, Frank!" he gets shoved back onto the table. His leg screams, burns, and tears. Not because of Frank, shockingly. Because Matt won't stop. He can't stop. Not even when Frank arm bars him.

"Stop it, Red," that's an order. "STOP IT! You come quietly or I make you. You choose."

That's not a choice, not for Matt. He snarls, chomping into Frank's arm. Frank groans this time, a sort-of non-verbal "have it your way". He releases Matt's neck and Matt hurls himself at Frank with everything he's got.

Up becomes down. Matt can't explain it, but instead of landing on Frank, he ends up back on the table with an arm around his neck, head slammed against the Punisher's chest. He can't find purchase with his legs, wrapped as they are in Frank's arm. Not to defend himself but to protect Matt's leg: Matt's useless, ballooning broken leg, twitching behind him as he punches and elbows Frank with the little strength he has left.

He almost sounds bored, "Stop, Red. Fucking stop."

But Matt can't stop any more than he can breathe. The futility of the situation feels far away, buried under the miles of Punisher blood pounding in his skull, the agony of his leg, his fucking leg, the one he didn't lose, but it hurts, it hurts so much. Almost as much as the sound of her voice in his ear, "I've got you, Matthew," as he flitters into the red, white, and black.

Distantly, he's aware of Frank's arm loosening on his neck, of air slowly filling his lungs. His legs slowly descending to the floor, the left one in absolute agony. A hand hovers in front of his mouth checking for breath. Matt moans weakly, sensing he's being pulled away.

"You're okay, Red. You're okay. Jesus, fuck, you're fine," Frank warbles, pacing unsteadily. Matt doesn't know who he's trying to convince. He hears Frank tug at the corpse at the foot of the table for clothing that gets draped on his back a second later.

Matt takes that as his cue to pass out.

The car swaddles Matt's hearing nicely, soothingly. He opens his eyes a crack to the patter of rain on the windows, the swish of windshield wiper blades, and motion that matches the inertia of his thoughts. He isn't nauseated or dizzy here. He can place himself on the back seat, tucked under Frank's duster, his left leg bundled and elevated by his armour.

He's been drugged again. Light enough so he barely notices, or maybe that's the car, but he's drifty and sleepy and not at all bothered by being Frank Castle's passenger despite being strangled into unconsciousness.

Speaking of Frank, "You didn't…." his mouth is dry. Matt licks his lips, tries again, "You didn't have to kill her."

Frank releases a small, nearly inaudible breath Matt didn't know he was holding. The lightness of his drugging takes on new meaning. Frank was worried about the dosage. Not the strangling: the dosage. He hides his concern with his rocky demeanour, "Never have to kill anybody, Red. I get to. I choose to."

Matt's tearing up. Damn it, the meds. The exhaustion. The subtle boil of torn muscle and open skin under his knee. "You feel good about that choice? Young doctor, saved my as..."

"Don't remember her lifting that beam off your leg or hauling your ass across Hell's Kitchen."

"She saved my life!"

"She did a good job on that leg of yours, I'll give her that. Even offered to stitch you up when the swelling goes down."

It's a barb and a good one, revealed strategically when Matt's not capable of doing much by way of fighting back, "She didn't deserve to die, Frank."
Frank scoffs, "She deserve to live? Paying off med school by patching up pieces of shit who go around putting more people in the hospital? Hell of a business model, Red."

Matt perceives her vividly thanks to the magic of pain meds. Her fear palpitating the room. Her careful, measured tone. The gentleness of her fingers probing his muscle. The way she begged, quietly, so as not to be a bother. Tears creep into his hair, and he can't stop them, can't wipe them away, can't anything except hate his leg, hate himself, hate Frank. He tears his mind out of the memory, from the doctor's shuddering voice, by asking, "Where are we going?"

"You got some place you gotta be, Red?"

His heart pangs with longing for a moment. Only a moment. Because it's better this way. "No."

"No more vigilantes to defend? Witnesses to treat as hostile?"

He purses his lips, "Not since you, Frank." And they wouldn't be having this conversation if he'd done his job right the first time.

Frank doesn't notice him stewing, or more likely, he doesn't care. He's too busy being impressed, "Helluva a thing. How long you been blind?"

"Longer than I could see," Matt shifts his head deeper into the seat. The leather upholstery budges, cradling his scalp. He absorbs the bump of the axle through his hair.

"And someone still taught you to fight the way you do?"

Matt isn't having that conversation, "What did the doctor say?"

Before she died. Before Frank killed her.

"Doc said you're non-weight-bearing," among other things – 'please, please don't kill me' being the most notable for Matt. "Not to mention full bed rest until your leg's closed up. You got someone you can stay with? Anyone who knows about you?"

Foggy. Karen. Claire.

"No."

"That law partner of yours?"

"No."

"Your secretary?"

"No. There's no one, Frank." He likes the sound of that, there being no one. It's familiar, like a punch to the gut or a cold-clock to the jaw. Frank's steely silence hits him with the same brute force, and Matt needs to get out of the car. The stagnant air, the gentle motion: he's complacent, docile, and he can't be either of those things when he's already at a disadvantage. He brushes the duster off his shoulders, wincing from his broken ribs and the dead person's shirt he's currently wearing. "I've got a place."

"Not taking you there, Red, not if you don't got help to go along with it."

"Since when do you care?"

"Worked my ass off to save that leg of yours. Last thing I want is for that to go to waste by dropping you off at your apartment," Frank descends back into military-grade silence. Matt's leg is his new job, and there's no getting between a Marine and his work. He breaks out of his quiet, though, to ask, "You serious? There's no one I can call?"

"No."

Frank scoffs. "What?" Matt asks.

"All your talk about…about hope and second chances, your God damn Santa Claus approach to fightin', and you do this by yourself?" Frank laughs. His laugh is ugly, uncanny. All the makings of a laugh but none of the levity. "The hell happened to you, Red. The hell happened to you."

A statement, not a question, one that cuts closer to the truth than Matt cares to admit. "Where are you taking me?"

"My place," Frank says.

"You have a place?"

"Yeah, I got a place."

"Where is it? Where uh…where are we now?"

"North on Malcolm X," and Frank leaves it at that.

Matt tries to guess, "Harlem?"

"For now."

He doesn't panic. The drugs don't let him. "You gonna tell me where we're going?"

Nothing. No change in his heartbeat, no pangs of guilt over kidnapping him, nothing: Frank Castle might as well be a statue in the driver's seat. Matt draws a deep breath, still not panicking, not thinking about how the city is passing him by and he has no way of knowing where they are or how they get there. He focuses on committing the motions to memory. Frank turning right sharply. A bridge. They're in the Bronx. Matt huffs for breath, feigning nausea, "Can you uh…can you crack a window, Frank? I need…I need some air."

Frank reaches back. No automatic windows on his car; he grunts his way through rolling the handle. Rain and chill sail into the cabin. Matt smells the Harlem River giving way to urban smells: old buildings, crumbling edifices; steam and sewer. South Bronx under heavy rainfall. He hears the car passing buildings but can't get a good read on their height, and it's been raining too long for the temperature to give anything away.

Matt reaches a hand weakly to close the window again. A few useless tries later, Frank's hand reappears. He rolls the window back up.

Right, two blocks, left, four blocks…or was it three blocks? Matt shakes his head, but his thoughts don't clear. The motion, the warmth, and the drugs conspire to send him off to sleep again no matter how much he refuses.

His leg comes to the rescue, aching powerfully in anticipation just as Frank turns into a gravel parking lot. Matt hisses, gripping his broken ribs for support and lifting his leg as much as he's able to save it from jostling. "Almost there," Frank tells him, but an eternity goes by before the car is stopped.

Matt doesn't get a chance to think about fighting. The door opens above his head. Frank grabs him by the shoulders and drags him out of the vehicle into the pouring rain. He's instantly soaked, but Frank still wraps him up in the duster before helping him away from the vehicle.

"There's a step there," Frank says. Matt tries to find it, but his senses are muggy, cross-cutting between rain droplets on skin, thunder in distance, Frank next to him, leg burning, leg ripping. He stops short and collapses against the withered brick of Frank's apartment building. Groans warp into tiny screams. The muscle is punching its way through his skin, and God, God, please. God, please. Matt hasn't a clue what he's praying for, only that God intervenes.

Frank grips him under the arms as he sags. The rain mercifully covers up his weeping, but Frank knows. His pulse is turned down low, a pallbearer's march. He pushes the door open, and Matt allows himself to be ushered inside.

Frank slings Matt's right arm back over his shoulder, mostly dragging him over the chipped tile floor. A staircase catches the echo of their footsteps, and Matt blearily makes out the gentle thump of other heartbeats. Frank has neighbours. Two, maybe three of them. One cooking Italian and another playing warped Bach on a squeaky turntable.

The step appears at his toe. Matt's head drops. His hand finds the bannister. Every inch of him, every cell, is gutted and raw, but instead of crawling onto the floor and dying, he gets up. One step, two steps – clinging tighter and tighter to Frank along the way, holding less and less of his own wretched weight. Pain blots out the world for several beats. His groaning and cursing intermingled with Frank's insistence that it's fine, he's fine, almost there. God damn it, Red, breathe. And when he thinks he can't handle it anymore, when he thinks he might die in fire and fury on the stairs, Matt hits the landing and walks some God damn more.

A door opens down the way. Matt's ear tucks towards it, less an act of will and more a result of exhaustion. He can't get much more than a staggered breath and a racing heart before the door closes again. Cello Suites skips on the turntable, then restarts.

Matt bites down on his lower lip, the secret heavy on his tongue. Someone saw them. Someone saw them and are pretending they didn't.

Frank stops suddenly, fumbling in the pocket hidden under Matt. He draws out a key, unlocks the door, and pulls the dangling Matt inside.

No sooner is the door bolted behind them, Matt's good leg gives out, having decided that this is as far as it goes. "Not here," Frank tells him, pulling him a few steps further until Matt falls gracelessly onto a canvas sling. A military cot with a military pillow and blankets that feel like shrapnel on his hands.

Get up, Matty: work to do. But he's not getting up. His arms lie there, his legs lie there, he lies there until Frank strips the duster off his shoulders. Until Frank manhandles him onto his back. Until Frank gets his mangled leg elevated. Blood races back into his chest and head. Matt reels in the contours of Frank's ramshackle space, dizzy and blind and wheezing.

"I'll be back," Frank tells him.

"I'm fine," Matt stammers, lying. Too late. Frank's gone. Out the door and back into the rain to struggle with the creaking doors of his vehicle.

The room steals his ragged breath and remains hidden, inaccessible. Matt jerks his head, hoping to get a better angle, but the space is so Frank, so fucking Frank, that it keeps all its secrets. He's left alone with his pain, no idea where he is in the apartment. No idea where the apartment is in the Bronx. He's stuck on the second floor of a walk-up wearing pain and a corpse's clothing, a crushed leg and Frank Castle for company.

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