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 was a lot of hard work. There was a lot I wanted to include, more that I needed to include…and so, like most of my writing, it ended up being so much work that I cut it into two. Unfortunately, that means that some of the details in this chapter are underdeveloped. Fortunately, it means that my next installment is already mostly written. Yay!

Once again – not a doctor, but I write about them in fanfic. Apologies for the poetic license and hand-waving necessary to prevent infection.

Readers, thank you. Thank you so much for your enthusiasm and encouragement. The response to the last chapter was overwhelming. I hope that this fic continues to hold your attention. Cheers!

"Got a secret.

Can you keep it?

Swear this one you'll save.

Better lock it in your pocket

Taking this one to the grave.

If I show you than I know you won't tell what I said.

'Cuz two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.

Yes, two can keep a secret…

If one of us is dead."

~The Pierces, "Secret"

Chapter Seven

"Get up."

He can't.

"Get the fuck up."

Matt tried: he can't. He so much as thinks about moving and his broken bone, the one peeking through his skin, spurts more napalm into his bloodstream. He isn't going anywhere. He is going to sit and shake on this rusty fire escape, and if someone doesn't come soon, he is going to bleed to death.

It's not a good sign that the thought doesn't bother him. The shock has wrapped his impending death in batting and silk, and Matt has to work extra hard to keep his thoughts from resting there.

"Get up."

He shoves Stick out of his head along with the thought of dying. Dad has to go too, but for different reasons. "I'm here, Matty. It's me, it's Dad," followed by the warm press of Battlin' Jack's fight-battered cheeks against his hands plays Matt into a frightening state of calm. He can't be calm. He needs dry-mouth and shivers, pain and nausea. He needs them to break through his disorientation so he can hear the front door opening and footsteps slashing through the gravel parking lot.

A bag of trash hits the ground. The sound of her terrified heartbeat fills the quiet parking lot, a perfect match to Matt's own thready pulse. She smells the way her blanket used to, before it was covered in his blood.

Matt can hear Rina dialing as she rushes up the stairs. Not Frank, he recalls: the mystery number. Some unknown third party coming to deal with him. He resists the urge to swear even as Rina's footsteps jar his compound fracture on approach. There's enough bile and f-bombs collecting in his throat to drown the Bronx if he opens his mouth.

He smells anger and tears and not all of them are his. He doesn't blame Rina for one second when she dashes past him towards Frank's apartment window. Her quiet voice is lost beneath the echo of her footfalls, but Matt picks up on a few things. "I can see his bone," she tells the person over the phone, but there's a surprising lack of horror in her voice. Anger is more like it: not for Matt, for the bone. The bone had one job, and it can't do that right. "There's blood everywhere. Hurry. Whoever you are, hurry."

Great, Matt thinks to himself. Not even Rina knows who she just called. Could be a doctor, or it could be a butcher school drop-out who learned just enough about anatomy to hack off a leg.

Shock muddles his brain to pudding, meting the world into water. Rina wades towards him. She drops a stack of towels at his side. "This is going to hurt," she tells him, her Russian accent finally emerging to make the word 'hurt' sound a dozen stories tall. Matt is about to say he can take it, but Rina doesn't give him the chance. She shoves one towel into Matt's mouth, another over his naked bone saying, again, "This is going to hurt." And her pronunciation of hurt is resigned this time, accepting, which twists Matt's stomach more than the sharp flare of agony as she applies pressure to his wound or the ache in his jaw from biting down on the towel. Rina and pain are old friends, and while they haven't always seen eye to eye, they still have each other's back.

"Don't pass out," Rina tells him, and Matt's own, child-voice agrees saying, too loud and too clear, "Murdocks always get back up." He is going to get back up, because Matt doesn't know how to stay down. He doesn't know how to give in. He has to get back to Hell's Kitchen, and he has to finish what he started in that basement, and he has to beat so much shit out of Frank Castle. He plays chicken with the pain for what feels like an eternity, still not passing out, before a car rolls into the parking lot.

A door opens and slams. Footsteps tread quickly towards the fire escape.

The pressure on his leg loosens. Matt loosens with it. His body droops. He fishes the drool-slick towel out from between his teeth and throws it away. His breath comes in rapid gasps and never seems to be enough. "Who is it?" he tries to say, but the words are whisper-soft and dissolve the second they leave his mouth.

Rina's fingers hover over his ear, pirouetting through the air, but she never touches him. She can't bring herself to touch him, so she mimes curling his hair behind his ear. "You're going to be fine," she states matter-of-factly.

Matt forces himself to focus on the clattering coming up the fire escape. He reads the space for details and gets stabs of familiarity. Of Claire. Of neopreme and antiseptic. Hands with surgical stillness. A substantial kit that tinkles with metal and glass at every step.

The knowing doesn't vanish: the closer she gets, the more Matt recognizes. He shuts his eyes so he has a reason to ask, "Who's there?" and the answer becomes clearer. This is how they met: his eyes closed, brain slipping into unconsciousness. The answer hangs on the tip of his tongue, no matter how impossible.

Her exasperation billows in Matt's awareness like the flurries in a snow globe, carefully contained but wreaking havoc below the surface. He can feel her gaze fixed on the inferno that used to be her impeccably conducted surgery. "I suppose I'm your doctor," she releases a tiny, almost imperceptible sigh. All her hard work is bleeding out. "This is the second time I'll be setting your leg."

Matt can't believe it's her, "I thought…I thought he killed you."

The doctor can't disagree with him, "I thought he would kill me too."

"How did you…?" he changes his question: it wouldn't be up to her whether she lived or died. "Why didn't he? What stopped him?"

"I'm still useful," she kneels down to inspect his injury. Rina almost goes into arrest from the proximity. The doctor doesn't notice. She focuses solely on Matt's leg, "Looks like I might stay that way."

The text message comes at the south end of Harlem: an underexposed photo of bloody bandages straining to contain a peg-shaped bulge. Frank doesn't get it, not with his crappy flip-phone's shitty resolution. Thankfully, another picture comes showing Red doing his best impersonation of a corpse followed by a text: He needs a transfusion.

He claps his cell phone shut. Counts to ten, makes it to three before another message arrives: Unless you know another universal donor?

Fucking Red.

He phones her. It's what phones are for, not this messaging shit. "The hell happened?" Frank asks, though he has a few ideas. A better question would be what the hell was Red thinking, but there's no way Doc's gonna know the answer to that.

She can't answer the question he's asked either, "I don't know. Your neighbour called. He was on the fire escape."

"How bad is he?"

This is one he should be able to answer, but the Doc does it for him, "Bad enough for me to text you." Lord knows she isn't going to do that unless absolutely necessary. She lucked out with the Punisher once: instead of getting wrapped around a bullet, the Doc ended up in a cab with the order to lay low, wait for a call. She's not sure he's going to let her go again.

"Fuck, Red," Frank tears into a u-ie that miraculously doesn't get him pulled over. He can't help himself. Four assholes in Hell's Kitchen are getting off easy tonight. And as much as Red's an idiot, geared up is an understatement for what Frank'll be if the kid dies instead of them.

He walks into the apartment to find an operating theatre unfolded on his bathroom floor. Doc's sterilized the place as best she can with antiseptic and a plastic sheet, but there's not enough ammonia in the world to make his shitty bathroom meet hospital standards. Red is going to need some heavy antibiotics after this.

A dose of common sense would be good too. His leg is a fucking disgrace. The exposed bone is the least disturbing part of the scene. Bruising abounds. Swaths of burst capillaries break for patches of impossibly white skin. The incision, formerly pink from good treatment, is now bright red, inflamed: a crimson maw snarling with black butcher's cord teeth and a bone for a buck tooth.

"Christ Jesus, I told him," Frank mutters, tearing off his coat, his Kevlar, his weapons. He makes a deadly stack of Punisher shit outside the bathroom door. "I told him that wound was open."

He can't figure out who he's saying it for: Doc knows; Red's out. Red's really out. He's clammy and ashen, flopped limply on the floor like a shucked clam. Blankets cover his chest, right leg, and left thigh to combat shock, and he isn't shirking them off or squirming away from them. He barely flinches when Doc gives his ankle an experimental twist: works his jaw a little, nothing more. Even his shivers seem subdued.

The stillness of the scene is unnerving. Frank's antsy, the way the Doc is maneuvering the exposed meat of Red's leg. "How much Fentanyl did you give him?"

"Usual dose," Doc replies without lifting her eyes from her work. She can't hold Red's thigh and his ankle at the same time. "Supplemented with midazolam. A sedative."

"You tell him that's what you were doing?"

"No."

Figures. As if Red would have consented to being put under. Frank can't say he blames her. He would have dosed the kid if he knew this is what he'd be coming home to.

Doc gives up on the break for a second, running a wrist over her forehead to clear the perspiration. Hauling Red's wiry ass into the bathroom couldn't have been easy. "I'll leave you with more in case he tries to take off again."

Oh, won't Red be thrilled: nothing the kid loves more than meds. Maybe if the Devil of Hell's Kitchen wasn't dumb enough to try and give chase with an open surgical wound, Frank might turn her down. Recovering from a compound fracture is going to slow Red down, but there's no stopping stupid once it gets going. "You want a hand there?"

She nods, out of breath from exertion or fear or a combination of the two. She makes room for Frank at Red's ankle, "Have you done this before?"

"Once," and the guy walked again. Like a drunk trying to carry a beach ball between his ankles, but still: walking. To be fair, they were taking fire when the guy went down, and none of them had solid medical training. Shitty as his bathroom is, Doc knows what she's doing, and they have all the time in the world to get Red's leg right. Or fuck it up more: whatever comes first.

Doc grips Red's knee with both hands. Her fingers barely wrap around the whole joint, but Frank sees the tendons popping out on her knuckles, the strain in her forearms. She's got one hell of a grip. He takes Red's ankle in his hands, locks eyes with the Doc. First time since they met that she doesn't look away. The job overpowers her fear. She nods to him; Frank pulls, twists, and the bone pops back under the skin.

Gasping. Not the Doc, who leaps back to the incision armed with gauze and other instruments. "Red?" Frank can't believe it: the kid's eyes are open, glassy, and he breathes in short bursts. Frank moves to get a grip on him before his tossing starts, which it inevitably does. Head first, then shoulders, slow as molasses and uncoordinated, but enough that Doc's brow has taken to furrowing as she fights to get everything lined up.

Frank glares at her, "Thought you said he was out."

"Conscious sedation. I can't put him out completely without respiratory support."

"So he's aware?"

"Vaguely."

"But he can't do anything about it."

Doc says nothing. She's pressing her bloodied thumbs onto Red's calf to check that the bones are lined up, and he's spun his left cheek into the floor because of how good it must feel. "Midazolam is an amnesiac: he isn't going to remember this. But he can respond to commands," she tells Frank, who already has a hand on Red's cheek to keep the kid from crushing his skull against the tile.

Responding to commands would be a nice change. Frank pats Red on the face. Kid's got his face screwed up tight, and he's whimpering weakly. "Red. Red! Hey, eyes on me, Red. Eyes on…"

Frank's stomach balls itself into a fist. Eyes on him or not, Red can't see. He can't fucking see. This bathroom is a black hole of shit and mould, and he's being manhandled in the dark by strangers, and he's in pain with all this crap in his system…fuck, he deserves to freak out more.

Frank gives Red the gentlest shake he can, and he tries to be nice. Tries to remember what being nice sounds like. "You're okay, Red. Doc's fixing you up. You go back to sleep?" that's a God damn order. "Go back to sleep."

Red's breath starts to even out, but he doesn't fall back asleep. He keeps his eyes open. They don't come anywhere near Frank's; they flit across the ceiling as he struggles to put together the remainder of his senses.

His tongue flicks at his front teeth. He's trying to talk.

Frank gets closer, "What is it?"

"The…the…the air…"

Yeah, yeah: Frank knows. It stinks. He pats the kid's shoulder, tapping him out. There's no fight left and Red's got nothing left to give if there was. "Go back to sleep, Red."

"…there."

"What?"

"She's there. She got it."

"You sure?"

Red gives what looks to be a nod, and by doing so, he knocks his eyes level with Frank's. The stare has power behind it despite Red's obvious lack of vision. He's not accusing Frank: he's challenging him. Red knows something that Frank didn't want him to know, something empowering. Something the drugs can't make him forget.
And then he's out again: eyes rolling back to whites, jaw going slack, breathing in a chemically ordained rhythm. Frank releases his head back onto the floor, the final look on Red's face emblazoned into his memory. "Kid says you're there."

"What?" Doc asks.

"He says you're there. Everything's in place."

"How does he know that?"

"He just does." The same crazy way he knows whether or not someone's coming from half a building away or how to take out a fuck-ton of killers without sight. Frank's not sure he believes it even having seen it, but Red hasn't been wrong yet. "Sew him up. I'll get a transfusion started."

Doc writes two new notes: one of supplies, another of reminders. She loads a syringe with midazolam and jots the dosage down on a piece of paper for Frank. "It's not an analgesic," she reminds him, "so there's no pain relief. You would only use it to subdue him."

Frank shoves the capped syringe into his pocket for the time being. God damn it, Red better not make him use it. He is getting dumped at the first clinic Frank sees if that happens.

Blood brings the colour back to Red's skin. He starts to look like his idiot self again. Frank detaches the transfusion line and staunches the injection site on Red's forearm. The kid is warm, warmer than he ought to be with shock. Frank slides the back of his hand against Red's forehead. Fever. Because he wasn't out of his head enough.

"That's normal," Doc tells Frank, punching some liquid Tylenol into Red's IV. "His temp should come down by the time he wakes." Which could be soon, the way she tells it, though the blackout from the meds can last several hours after. Frank expects the worst. He expects rolling, kicking, bitching, and forgetting, because Red has made this a pain in the ass so far. Why would he start easing up now? He doesn't move a muscle when Frank carries him back to the cot and gets him settled in, but is somehow still an unmanageable nightmare of limp, dangling limbs.

The new lists replace the old, tattered one in Red's corner. His new IV takes the place of the old. Things look to be settling back into the routine they've established, a thought that grates on Frank's limited patience. He and Red are going to have a chat when the kid wakes up about what will and won't get his ass handed over to the police.

"Did you find what you were looking for?" Doc asks.

Frank looks up, not understanding. He wasn't looking for anything with Red. Oh, she means the address, the one Foley and his boys were trespassing on tonight. The address she gave him in a last ditch effort to save her life the night they met. The address Frank would have been scouting if not for Red's idiocy. "Not yet. Won't for a while with him."

"Sorry."

"No need to be sorry, Doc." She didn't tell Red to take a stroll on his broken leg, fuck up all her hard work. She also isn't under the gun tonight, so there's no need to try and bond with the Punisher. Hell if Frank has the words to tell her that though. She's as smart as she wants to be, she'll figure it out in time.

"I'll be back in two days when the swelling goes down," Doc says, confidence wavering near the end of her statement. The mark of a good mob doc: never expect to be coming back.

Frank doesn't want to put her totally at ease, "You lie low, Doc. Lots of dangerous people'll be looking for you." And he won't be able to leave the apartment to come deal with them if Red insists on being pissy about what needs to be done.

"I will," she promises, confidence returning that at least Frank Castle won't be one of the people gunning for her.

Happy reading!