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: My writing process usually has the story ending as Matt embarks on the road to recovery. This chapter marks uncharted territory for me. I sat for days writing crap wondering, "Where do I go from here? What is this 'plot' the characters keep referring to? Isn't this the part where Foggy arrives and saves them with a speech?"
I realized about halfway through this chapter that Matt is scared. I thought, at first, I was channeling my own fears about mismanaging this fic (and fear runs strong with me, so I don't rule this out), but the more I worked, the more the reaction made sense for him. Matt is the man without fear because he doesn't give himself time to think of all the terrible things that could happen to him. Being stuck at Frank's apartment for a week facing a conversation he doesn't want to have - without an outlet - struck me as the ideal conditions for him to experience fear. I tried to keep this as in-character as possible for him (and Frank).
Readers, I write this every time because it cannot be said enough: thank you. Your kind support, your insights, your interest – it's what keeps me going. It's what brightens my day. Thank you so much. I hope it's nice where you are.
"I've got wild staring eyes
I've got a strong urge to fly,
But I've got nowhere to fly to.
…when I pick up the phone
There's still nobody home.
I've got a pair of Gohills boots,
And I've got fading roots."
~Pink Floyd, "Nobody's Home"
Thirteen
The difference between Red's behaviour after the phone call in the morning and the text message at night is the difference between getting shot and getting set on fire.
Frank has seen both. Guys who catch bullets stew for a while about what they could've done different. What they would've done if they had another chance at the situation. With immolation, there's no time to wonder about alternatives. There's the blazing now. Frank saw a guy escape an explosion once. He ran out of the building, carrying the flames with him, before dancing around the street in a frantic inferno of charred skin and muscle. His body needed to do something even when the only thing left to do was burn.
Red's not good at burning. Kind of funny for a guy who is so damn good at setting himself on fire. He twitches and shuffles, Karen's most recent text message prodding him more deeply than his broken leg. He turns his phone off and shoves it in the open duffel under the cot. And just when Frank thinks Red's in for another fifteen hour standoff against proper pain meds, the kid nabs the T3 and swallows it dry.
He drops back onto his pillow, twitching on the outside from how badly he's flailing on the inside. Burning is, all told, one of the worst ways to go. His motions seem random at first, but as the kid settles into sleep, Frank notices him turning his head deeper into the pillow. Angling his ear towards the phone he worked to bury as if he's expecting it to go off again.
It dawns on Frank that Red's attentiveness isn't for Karen. He talked to her on the phone this morning, and then waited for the blow of someone else's call. She's the bullet. That Nelson guy? He's the bomb.
Matt comes to appreciate the T3s. He certainly prefers Aspirin for focus. His mind is less a world on fire than a pool of embers occasionally punctuated by a burst of sound or smell. A haze of codeine surrounds his perception, thin enough that he doesn't notice its presence until he's lost his thoughts in it.
The pain is better with the pills though. His leg throbs dully, shuttered from him, and worry ceases to eat away at him through the fugue. He passes hours comfortably, mostly in control (for which he's grateful), especially once his leg is set in the walking cast. Frank brings one home the following day along with a pair of crutches. Sato arrives the day after, and no sooner is Matt's leg inside the boot, he is up and moving around the apartment.
"Thank you," it feels like the first time he's really said it to Sato after everything she's done. After the shitty conditions she's had to work through in order to do it.
Sato gives nothing away in her tone or respiration. This is another day in the OR for her. She packs up her things in preparation to leave. "You're welcome. Remember to elevate and ice it."
That won't be difficult. Being upright for a few minutes causes spikes of pain to break through the narcotic mist gathered in his mind. Matt returns to the cot and undoes the Velcro straps holding the boot to his calf. Frank drapes an ice pack over the injury without being asked.
Matt takes to wandering the day after. Frank gives him the space, but he retreats only as far as the parking lot. His sounds carry faintly under the door: car hood lifting, doors slamming, boots crunching over gravel. Matt wishes he would go. The fight's over. There's nothing for Frank to worry about. After Sunday, they can part ways until they cross paths in the field twelve to sixteen weeks from now.
Karen will probably stay with him. She won't want to, but she'll do it. Her compassion knows few bounds. Matt trembles in pre-emptive revulsion at the prospect of being pitied, of being a charity case, which he supposes he is now that they aren't friends.
He staggers through Frank's space, distracting himself. The apartment is narrower than Matt's perception initially suggested. Thank God Frank isn't cluttered. The crutches catch on the munitions stacked neatly along the walls of the apartment as it is. Matt can't imagine working his way through a mess, not with his senses dulled and distracted by the haze.
There are three windows in the living area, all thrown wide open in an effort to catch the autumn breeze. They fail miserably in their attempt. Matt listens for the draft, waits for his skin to prickle from the drop in temperature and paint his world of embers into floor plan. The impression wisps and vanishes. He's left relying on touch, so the crutches have to double as his cane on his lap around Frank's place.
It's slow going. Matt stops at the far wall to catch his breath. Pain stabs into his left thigh. His right leg, meanwhile, aches from sudden use, and his arms tremble from exertion. Perception turns from smoke curls into television screen static. Matt braces himself against the wall until his bearings return.
His other hand finds the punching bag and instinctively balls into a fist.
Knuckles itch. The canvas helps. Matt gives the bag a small tap, then another. It's grounding: the impacts, the vibrations, the clank of chain. The devil wakes up and comes out to play.
"Get up, Matty. Work to do."
Matt tears himself away from the punching bag and forces his bad intentions back to their dark hiding places. One thought springs on him from within the fog: he isn't ready. For any of it. Not taking on Fisk or Hell's Kitchen, Elektra or Karen and Foggy. The Punisher. He's facing questions on Sunday he doesn't want to have answers for, concern he can't accept, friends he doesn't want. Meanwhile, Elektra is looming, Fisk is mobilizing, Foggy's in danger, and his break is screaming to be brought back to bed. It hurts. Every inch of him hurts, including the dark places where the devil hides.
He hobbles his way quickly through the apartment and drops onto the cot. His mind reels, knowing full well what's hiding in the haze. Stick finds him then, and the old man cusses Matt out for being a pussy. Warriors don't run. They face the pain, the indecision, the fear head-on. Matt wishes he had that kind of stamina, but the brilliant part of codeine is that his brain doesn't fixate. It ambles away from Sunday, bloody Sunday, and onto other things.
After a longer rest than he intends, Matt rises. He follows the opposite wall this time, stopping by the desk. Frank's set-up is similar to his Hell's Kitchen apartment. The corkboard is a snarl of pushpins, strings, and photographs. Matt traces a hand over what he knows is a map, but the paper is so cheap the ink bleeds through the page. He has no indentations to follow, just the shift in coloured inks. Grainy blue for the rivers, sharp black for street names, powder gray for the roads. He suspects its Manhattan based on the jumble of activity on the lower left side. He needs a narrator to discover more than that. Matt's focus shifts. He smells new cardstock in the corner of the board. Ticket stubs. These ones have indentations. Matt gets through tracing out 'Central Par-' before recoiling in sympathy. Apparently, Frank still goes to the carousel. One of the most wanted men in America ventures to Central Park to pay his respects to his slaughtered family.
Matt bravely, masochistically, stretches his hand back to inspect the space beneath the ticket stubs. He finds a photograph and bites back an apology for the Castles, Frank included. He died as much as they did that day, and it's no doubt their faces smiling up at his outstretched hand.
The desktop is organized chaos. A journal, a pen, and a small collection of tools lie beside the police scanner. Matt fumbles for balance against the desk, dizziness washing over him from the sound of his fingertips plunking against the surface of the desk. It's the same sound Frank's trigger finger made the night with the ammo. Instinctively, Matt yanks open the drawer. There's a stack of legal pads, some pens, a discarded shell casing; a stash of paperclips and a staple remover shoved into the back corner. Useless, all of it, particularly given the context. Whatever Frank had hidden in there, whatever he was so eager to lay hands on that night with the ammonia, it's gone. He knew better than to leave it for Matt to find.
"Matthew."
He sits up on the cot, hyper-focused, because he smells her. The scent of her perfume lingers on the air in the apartment. It flitters against the tip of his tongue in a soft cloud. The aroma is warm, living, melded with the smell of her skin.
Matt listens, waiting to catch hold of her heartbeat. To have her hand smooth on his cheek, a smile breaking over her face as his name crashes from her tongue again: Matthew, Matthew. He receives nothing. The apartment is quiet around him. Frank's still out, neighbours are sleeping, and Elektra isn't there.
The smell is gone. Hard to tell if it was ever there in the first place or if he imagined the whole thing, since her taste lingers on his tongue. He keeps waiting for her to appear in front of his outstretched hands. The atmosphere grows murky and hot against his skin. He can't breathe; he needs air. He shoves the blanket off his lower half and tumbles towards the fire escape window.
He doesn't bother with crutches. The walking cast is light: itchy as hell, but Matt no longer has to drag his broken limb across Frank's weathered floor. He can easily swing the leg up and over the window sill, allowing it to dangle while he braces himself with his thigh. He gets his right leg onto the landing and slips out.
Nighttime greets him in a cooling embrace. Matt sinks into it. He lets the Bronx flow into him uninterrupted, and gradually, his tension eases. Elektra's ghost vanishes, usurped by the sounds and smells of the city. Sirens whine in the distance, traffic hums, life warbles. He isn't home, but if he blanks his mind, if he allows his perception to generalize into a single stream, he imagines standing on his rooftop, Hell's Kitchen unfolding around him.
Karen and Foggy waiting in his apartment.
Matt scoffs, snapping out of it. His brain is a mess of conflicting emotions, useless emotions. He wants to go home; he wants to get out of the city. He wants to see them, Karen and Foggy; he wants to see her. He needs to be rid of Fisk; he needs to intervene between Fisk and the Punisher. Matt would say this must be what purgatory feels like, but in purgatory, the destination is clear. Here and now and for always, really, Matt doesn't know where he's headed.
Time passes. A car pulls into the lot. Frank's back. Matt didn't even know he was gone. The car door slams, and Frank stalks across the gravel towards the front door, but at the last minute, he rattles up the fire escape stairs. "That you, Red?"
"Yeah," Matt sniffs for GSR and is relieved to find Frank's clean. Then he remembers the ticket stubs on the corkboard. The apology burns on the back of his tongue. Nighttime is the ideal time for a fugitive to pay his respects.
"You alright?"
Matt nods. "Needed some air."
"You sick?"
"I'm fine." A little nauseated. He's burning up from his dream, nothing more. He swats Frank's hand away when it moves to check his temperature. Frank's other hand appears through his hair while he's distracted. The gesture is as much diagnostic as it is obnoxious. Matt scrubs to get the feel of the Punisher's fingers off his scalp.
Frank climbs through the bathroom window. "Why so nervous?"
Matt scoffs, "I'm not nervous." He's terrified. There's a difference.
"Uh huh," doesn't Frank know it. "How long you been up?"
"A while." Matt isn't watching the time. His phone has been off, and he has no intention of turning it back on until the danger of being found is passed. Karen and Foggy may not be able to trace his device, but they don't have access to the same resources as the Hand. "How long were you gone?"
"A while. You eat something?"
"I'm not hungry." His stomach is pretty upset actually, churning away inside him.
"You know, for a guy who sneaks around on rooftops looking for a fight, takes fucking nothing to get you worked up."
Hearing it spoken aloud bristles Matt to the bone. He doesn't bother trying to deny it. What would be the point? Frank's got a bone, and he won't stop chewing till he hits marrow. "I'm good at sneaking around on rooftops. I'm not…I'm not good at…" he spirals his hand. The words are there in his brain, vivid and raw without the haze of codeine, but the pathways between them and his tongue are rotted from lack of use.
Frank doesn't press. He can fill in the rest of that statement pretty well. Neither of them are very good at that. He re-emerges on the fire escape, surveying the night alongside Matt. "You getting around okay?"
"Yeah. Can't stand for more than a couple minutes," for reasons his leg is currently describing to him in excruciating detail. Matt ignores the limb. "I'll be ready to go on Sunday." Ready to return to home and the great uncertainty lying in wait for him there.
"You planning on going to mass?"
"I wasn't making plans," but now that Frank mentions it. "I'd like to go. I should go. But I don't think I can sit through it this week." Embarrassment rushes through him pre-emptively. He gets enough pity from the parishioners as a solitary blind man, let alone one with a newly broken leg.
Deafening silence interrupts his train of thought. Frank isn't bothered by it, but Matt is. He's too busy reeling through the little things Frank's done, the gestures that are too personal to be part of the Mission. Mass isn't part of Matt's recovery. Frank has no reason to offer getting him there except that he knows it's important for Matt.
Matt doesn't want to think about it. Frank is the least contrary person Matt's ever met. For him to act outside of his nature is unsettling. For his gestures to be a part of his nature is even more so. "Thank you."
Frank accepts the thanks with a singular nod. He hurries on to other topics, not wanting to think about it either. "Then, what? You're back home to meet with Karen and Nelson? Figure out what's going on with this…the Hand?"
"Yeah," Matt's throat closes up. He prays Frank doesn't ask him what happens next. He doesn't want to talk about what happens next.
But secretly, he does. He has to ask, because the not-knowing is eating away at his insides. "Frank," Matt stops him from going back into the apartment. He sifts through the words to find the ones that make the most sense while giving the least away. "Karen and…Foggy, they don't…" he restarts. "I meant what I said about not having anyone."
Frank's gaze is pointed, sharp. He stares all the way through Matt's eye sockets into the hurricane in his mind. "Don't need to convince me, Red," because Frank is already convinced of the opposite.
Matt clarifies, "I can't have anyone if Fisk is planning his escape."
Hard to tell if Frank gets it. His posture reveals nothing. His respiration is equally difficult to read. It isn't until he taps at the windowsill, preparing to take his leave of this shit, Frank reveals he's understood. His rare, inexplicable kind of thoughtfulness rears its scary head one last time. "You let me know what you want to do Sunday."
They both know this has nothing to do with what Matt wants. His decision about what happens after Sunday is going to have everything to do with what he can live with. Matt thinks he already knows what the answer will be, but he doesn't want to say it out loud. The thought – ephemeral, unarticulated – brings him relief, and that's scary in its own right.
Sunday comes faster than Frank expects given the whole lot of nothing he has to do at the apartment. Watching the kid make laps of the tiny space and learning how to handle stairs stretches the days into weeks. He takes leave of the place as much as he can - working on the car, checking with contacts, watching the deserted carousel spin - and it still feels like forever.
The most exciting part of the week comes on Friday when Red asks for a pair of scissors. Frank offers the dull pair from the kitchen, the ones left behind by the previous tenant. Red doesn't complain. He retreats to the washroom, clipping away at something before his razor buzzes. When he emerges, he looks like a shaggy-haired version of his former self.
Saturday night sees Red tossing and turning on his cot. He lists towards his powered-off phone still hidden under the bed in the hopes that it might go off. Meanwhile, Frank makes a plan of attack for the Kitchen tomorrow. He's going to have a couple hours to kill in the neighbourhood, potentially all night depending on what the kid decides.
Fuck, that came as a surprise: Red's lame attempt at asking for sanctuary. Distance. After all his bitching to go home, he wants to be anywhere but there. The same kid who runs headlong into brawls with the Irish mob can't bring himself to face old friends. He'd rather stay with a guy called the Punisher to, what? Get strangled some fucking more? Yeah, and Frank's the one with brain-damage. Right.
As far as being kidnapped goes, though, Red's less of a shit come Saturday than he was in the first few days of his stay combined. He's got a smart mouth on him, that's for sure, but there's been no talk about killing or hope or morality. He doesn't do the sullen-captive thing. Once, they have a conversation about Papa Murdock's boxing career, and it's so close to being normal that Frank has to leave the apartment for a while. Remember what is and what isn't and give Red a chance to do the same.
There's advantages. Having the devil in the apartment means Frank doesn't have to run into him on the street, and the kid's connections to the Foot or Hand or whatever the Japanese are calling themselves is worth exploiting for a while. The matter of the leg weighs on Frank too. Ten days out of invasive, butcher-shop surgery and a compound fracture, there's still so many ways Red can mess up his recovery. Karen, bless her, is a powerhouse, but Red's propensity for self-destruction is his fucking superpower. Her patience has gotta be wearing thin. Nelson's definitely not up for caretaking. He isn't up for communicating by the sounds of things – or lack thereof. And trusting Red with his own well-being is like trusting a chimp with a hand grenade. Frank gives him a day, one day by himself before everything turns to shit.
Frank catches a few hours of shut eye on Saturday, waking before dawn to find Red already up, dressed, and pacing. "Neighbourhood's not going anywhere," Frank tells him before rolling over and dozing some more. Normally, he wouldn't, but this might be his last chance to test the kid's patience. He's gotta make it count.
He takes his sweet time with everything - coffee, shower, shave, dressing - waiting for Red to snap. The moment never come. The kid lounges on the fire escape, too keyed up about what's coming to worry about what's happening. Hell, Frank's time-wasting might register as a bit of a blessing. The longer Red's here, the longer he isn't there, with them.
The drive is quiet but quick. They're in Hell's Kitchen and outside Red's apartment in under an hour. Frank gives the kid his number and watches him save it in his phone. "Call me when you're done," he says. Red nods, pocketing his cell. He fumbles for the handle to open the door. Hard call whether it's blindness or nervousness. The latter seems to exacerbate the former for Red. He props himself up on crutches and stands in the open door for a long moment, getting his bearings.
Frank offers a last bit of assistance, "Five paces ahead to your keypad. You good for the stairs?"
"Yeah, I'm good. I'll call you later, Frank."
Red shuts the car door behind him and moves quickly to his apartment door. Frank doesn't stick around to watch. He pulls into traffic, making a hard right at the corner.
It hits him suddenly at the next stop light that Red's duffel is still at his place. Neither he nor Red thought to bring it this morning, because they both knew where it needed to be.
The apartment doesn't feel like his. Matt senses the ghost of himself under layers of must and dust if he really focuses, but he's a fading presence. He has been for a while. A few more days and he would have vanished completely.
He showers forever, relishing the soft water, the unscented shampoo. The heat relaxes him, draws his focus on the present. He is here and he is alone and he has nowhere to be, nothing to do. Karen and Foggy are going to come over, see that he is fine, and then they are going to go away again. Today, he is the day he ties up loose ends, not creates more of them.
It's still more comfortable to wear sweats and a tee than his suits. The walking cast is too large for him to fit actual pants overtop. Matt dons a hoodie and a thick pair of socks to pull the outfit together. His radiator is taking its sweet time heating the place after almost two weeks of being unused.
He settles on the couch, leg propped on several pillows. The pressure continues mounting under his skin despite the elevation, throbbing in time with Matt's heart. He only took Aspirin today, and it is doing exactly what Sato said it would for his pain: nothing.
Matt distracts himself by scanning the building. He doesn't expect to hear puffs of breath coming from his rooftop during the day, but deep down, he hopes to. Her whisper thrills through his mind, catching on the 't' in his name. Matt-hew. Matt-hew.
They were going to disappear together once, back when they thought death was their only option, and he honoured that wish as worst he could. Elektra seems to have followed suit, vanishing almost as poorly as he did, taking residence behind the veil until when, Matt can't decide if he wants to find out.
He picks up his phone. "Call Karen." The device complies. She's answers quickly. "I'm here."
"We're on our way," she replies, and then, before she disconnects, "Yes, we. We are, Foggy."
Happy reading!