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: These particular lyrics have been playing in my head since I started writing this fic. I resisted using them: "Near to You" is a break-up song, a deeply intimate one, and while these lines worked, the rest of the song didn't seem to apply outside of a romantic context. I have been trying to find songs that work as a whole instead of piecemeal. But the melody fit too nicely, and this chapter had so many walls coming down, I felt I could justify using this track.

Readers, dear Readers, thank you so much for your kind support and attention. I could not have made it this far without you. You can look forward to some Karen, Foggy, and Lantom in the next two chapters. Cheers!

"He and I have something different

And I'm enjoying it cautiously.

I'm battle-scarred. I am working oh-so-hard

To get back to who I used to be."

~A Fine Frenzy, "Near To You"

Chapter Thirty

Nighttime cools the world on fire. Sounds billow. Scents sharpen with chill. Matt lets his mind wander through the cityscape. Through the Bronx's dark corners and alleyways, up and down the streets; chasing cars and conversation. Music throbbing in clubs. A party in a nearby apartment. Classical wafting over from Rina's. Sirens in the distance. Police scanner buzzing behind him.

The bathroom window slaps open. Matt jerks out of his reverie.

"Hear anything, Red?"

Matt can't help but smile. "I hear lots of things."

Frank steps out onto the fire escape, joining him. "How far you reach with those ears of yours?"

"Depends on the volume. And the height. I can hear more then higher up I am."

"Doesn't make a damn bit of sense." Frank half-sits on the windowsill. "How you do what you do with the senses you got."

"It's best not to think of it as four senses," Matt replies quickly. He stops shy of delving straight into the world-on-fire speech, trying to reformulate his perception in a way a guy like Frank will understand. "Probably better not to think of each one doing a separate job. Sound isn't just something I hear; it's something I feel. I can calculate distance, dimension, density, stability. I can track my opponents. Smell and taste help too. They complete the picture. Depending on where I am, the city has a particular scent, a rhythm."

"You know you're in the Bronx?"

An ache blooms in Matt's chest. "I know I'm not in Hell's Kitchen."

He waits for Frank to cut into him with some line but nothing happens. The nighttime stands between them peaceably.

Matt basks in the calm – the scratch of the police scanner melding with the fizzling of Rina's music on the far side of the building; the sirens in the distance (robbery? Murder? Assault? Their destination is too far to tell). He draws his perception back to the fire escape. "Your senses do the same thing, they just have visuals to correspond to. Figure as a sniper, you depend on sight."

Surprisingly, Frank answers: "Making a shot's not just about seeing. Gotta consider distance, wind speed, and direction. Ammo changes things too." He mentions that last bit as an afterthought. Frank's clearly got ways of working any bullet he's given into his enemies. "Got pretty good at measuring all that. Can't tell me it's the same though, Red. Met plenty of people who can't do half the shit you do: blind or not."

Rina changes the album; Mozart begins to play. Pebbles scatter in the parking lot from a passing breeze. The rooftop looms silently overhead. "I've had training," Matt states.

That isn't the end of it for Frank. "Training can't get you to hear ninjas breathing from two blocks away."

Matt smirks, vaguely remembering his shout into the darkness of the animal hospital. "I may have been exaggerating," he concedes.

"Not by much," Frank says with certainty. "Training helps, but you said your senses were heightened? How?"

Matt toes the question's edge carefully, acutely aware this this is about the change things. His senses always change things. "It was an accident."

"Accident?"

"Yeah. I got these…" He considers lying. Decides against it. There's nothing left for him to hide. "…these chemicals spilled on me when I was a kid. Burned my eyes, left me blind, but all my other senses became heightened."

"How'd that happen?"

Matt gives a small laugh. He sees exactly where this conversation is going to go, can predict Frank's reaction clearly. "There was this truck loaded with barrels. I saw a man about to be hit by it, so I pushed him out of the way."

A groan. "Don't give me that shit."

"It's not shit." He laughs some more at the symmetry of it all. "That's how it happened."

"How old were you?"

"Nine."

"Jesus. Diving in front of cars at nine. You started young."

Matt turns the conversation around. "When'd you learn to shoot? Take it you started young too."

Frank doesn't answer. Not at first. When the quiet drags on, he admits, "I nodded." Then, "Can't pick up everything can you?"

The thought that he's been tested passes briefly through Matt's head. "No. Not everything." He fights back, reminding Frank this isn't the first time he missed something. "I didn't pick up on the bullet you cracked off my head."

"Picked up on plenty before that."

Matt appreciates the acknowledgement. "Yeah."

Frank pauses in a silent 'don't mention it' before continuing. "Who the hell trains a kid to do shit like this? Couldn't have been you dad's idea."

"No. No, my dad..." Matt presses his spine tightly against the withering brick of Frank's building, hoping for support. He finds little. His world transforms so quickly from a Bronx apartment building to an alley in Hell's Kitchen. Blood and brain cooling on the concrete around the corpse that used to be his father. He pulls himself back on the thread of Frank's heartbeat. "After my dad died, I ended up at St. Agnes's. An orphanage. My senses were out of control. They were getting stronger. I almost ended up in an institution. The sisters there found this guy – blind, too."

"Like you?"

Matt hesitates. There are too many ways to answer that: yes, no, I don't know, actually more like you, Frank. "He was born blind," so no, they're nothing alike. At all. "He trained me. Taught me how to control my senses, how to fight, how to survive."

The fire escape trembles; Frank's shaking his head. "Seen people who fight to survive, Red. That's not what this guy taught you to do." He does well not to say it out loud, the stuff that Stick obviously intended Matt to be able to do. "You ever find out why?"

"Not at the time, no. He finally came back to warn me about the Hand and this…ancient war, but…" Matt bites his bottom lip. He didn't mean to say 'but'. Frank doesn't need to know all this.

Too little, too late: Frank asks, "But what?"

Matt shoves his spine into the wall again, relishing the scratch of brick on his spine. "He left when I was still a kid. Before he could finish my training." He forces himself to laugh a little, ripping the sound of his chest into the frigid air before scuttling deeper into the hoodie he's still wearing. Stick coming back does nothing to ease the sting growing inside him. Matt offers the next bit as a distraction. "Half-training for a half-measure…"

Frank doesn't take the bait. "He left?"

"Yeah. I wasn't…I wasn't the warrior he wanted me to be."

He waits for the judgment that must be coming, the judgment Frank already made that night with the Dogs. What he gets is worse. Frank's answer is ambiguous as hell: "That's shit, Red."

Matt doesn't know what to say, so he says nothing.

Nights pass with no ninjas, but Matt listens. He plants himself on the fire escape for hours, the cold eating away at his strength and nerves. Frank joins him. He brings coffee. Matt can't stomach the way Frank brews it, but there is never seems to be a lot in the mug he's given. Enough that he can hold it for warmth and venture the occasional sip.

They don't talk much, but when they do, the conversations are less fraught. The few times they wound each other, it's intentional and mild, the verbal equivalent of a spar. Once, Frank gets him to start listing off the things he can hear, and it turns into a contest: "A cat in the next alley? Shit, I can hear that and the drunk taking a piss in the lot north. Heightened senses, my ass…"

"I guess you can smell the bourbon he's been drinking too?" Matt snarks.

Frank scoffs. "Don't cheat, Red."

"Who's cheating? Unless you can't name the song he's humming."

"'Danny Boy'." Frank's good. The drunk's humming changes key so many times that Matt has a hard time identifying the melody. "How much change he got in his pockets?"

Matt resists the urge to smile. "None. Those are peanuts from the bar. Which you would know if you were listening instead of looking." And then, because his honour is at stake, "Who's cheating again?"

They're settling in for the long crawl into morning when the game ends. Frank sits on one side of the window nursing his umpteenth cup of coffee. Matt lounges opposite, his leg itching and tense from cold, but he doesn't want to go inside. He misses the night, misses being outside, misses being useful. Crawling onto his cot in the morning is the worst feeling in the world, because he knows he has a whole day of nothing ahead of him.

Matt rubs at his left thigh, trying to ease the tension there. "Why'd you become a soldier?" he asks.

The answer sounds automatic – "I just did" - but Matt knows better. Frank's heartrate is stable and steady when he's ignoring things, when he's disassociating. Now, it's slightly elevated. Curious. He's searching for answers amidst the city torpor. "Nothing to know about me, Red. I mean it: what I do, I just do."
"I don't believe that. You didn't wake up one morning and decide to serve."

"Didn't have to. Made that decision long time before I shipped out. Just needed an outlet."

"That why you married your wife? Became a father?"

"Never questioned it for a second." But even Frank knows that's a lie. His heart races at the mere suggestion of doubt. He slams his empty coffee mug onto the fire escape, adding, sternly, "Didn't know different at the time. Figured the war was out there, not waiting for me back here."

Matt wraps his fingers through the grate, makes a fist, and pulls, pulls until his whole arm hurts. Until the urge to say he knows how that feels goes away. What a shitty, pithy way to commiserate. He doesn't know. He can't. And it doesn't matter, because Frank won't ever admit it.

"I told you my dad made some money by throwing fights." Matt ignores the way Frank's heart detaches from the conversation. Better that than geared up. "He agreed to do it in this one fight, probably the biggest of his career: Murdock vs. Creel. He didn't…want me to know that was the plan, but I overheard. And the night of the fight, I said something…something about Murdocks always getting back up. Because that's what I wanted him to do. He was always telling me to be better, and I thought maybe, maybe I could do that for him too. Help him be better?"

…because he's selfish. He's so God damn selfish. Dad was doing his best trying to put food on the table, and it was never enough for him…

Matt draws a shuddering breath against his sputtering. He can't stop now. Only way out of Hell is through it. "So during the match, Dad doesn't go down. He rails on Creel. Just unleashes all hell. Knocks every kind of shit out of him." Frank makes a sound, like a scoff but lighter, and if Matt didn't know any better he'd say it was a laugh. "And I was so proud, you know? Listening on the television. Everybody's shocked. Everybody's stunned. My dad's a hero, and I always knew, but now everybody else does too."

Cold bleeds through him on the inside. He's the pavement under Dad's corpse as much as he is the hand touching Dad's face in the dark. The world on fire can't interpret death as anything but an absence, a void, which is fitting and awful and Matt wishes he didn't do this. What a stupid olive branch to extend to a man who held his daughter's mutilated body in his arms. "They found him in an alley near our house. He took a bullet to the head. You say you never hear the bullet that gets you? Well, I heard the bullet that got him. I still hear it."

The spot Frank occupies becomes dead air, radio silence. He's drawn himself up so tight that all Matt can do is listen to his heart, an ominous thunder of carefully restrained rage. His voice is a low rumble far, far away, rising out of that sunken place inside Frank. "First time I ever heard shots fired was that day in the park. They're the only shots I hear."

Seems odd to filter through the night sounds after Frank speaks. Everything is muted, and there's a phantom ringing in Matt's head from recent gunfire. He gets his head back in the game, counting heartbeats and breaths, and is surprised to find when he finishes that he isn't tearing at the fire escape anymore.

Frank, similarly, has loosened his hands. He draws a breath in preparation to speak, but he releases it without saying anything.

Matt nods. He hears Frank loud and clear.

Matt wakes up the next morning under-slept and groggy. Head full of fuzz, eyes rheumy, joints stiff. Frank warns him not to get his ass out of bed. "You're making yourself sick." Matt's about to say he's fine, but Frank cuts him off. "You're not fine. Get some sleep."

He tries, laying on his back, to find his breath, but his throat is dry. Breathing stings. The Aspirin is hard to find. His senses refuse to play fair, casting a wide net when he needs them here, in his corner of the apartment. He finally gets two capsules and swallows them along with the glass of water that's now a permanent fixture on the table. As he returns the glass to the nightstand, he accidently nudges his cell phone.

Matt's hands shake under the weight of his obligations, but he doesn't dare retract his hand. He fingers the edge of the device lightly. He charged it up a few days ago but hasn't touched it since, the prospect of finding a missed call from Elektra too foreboding. But Karen deserves a call, as does Lantom. Claire, too, should probably hear that he hasn't died. And there are so many things he needs to tell Foggy.

Foggy.

Matt curls up on his side away from the table. His leg burns from the movement but settles into a familiar ache as he stills. He wraps his arms around his stomach and drags his head across his pillow, centering himself. Meditation is easy; maintaining it is difficult. No sooner is he in his own headspace than the nagging fears return to him. The wars still yet to be fought play themselves out in his head. Elektra coming for Frank, Fisk coming for Hell's Kitchen, Fisk coming for Foggy…

He gasps – head aching, chest pounding.

A sigh. Bored. "You're fine," Frank reminds him.

Matt doesn't feel fine. He thinks he smells her, Elektra, but that can't be the case. Must be a dream. Sure enough, he cycles his breathing and finds the familiar smell of the apartment coming back to him.

"What time is it?" he asks.

Frank's response is characteristically vague. "Afternoon."

"Early or late?"

"Middle."

Matt stifles a laugh, a bitter one. He could start phoning, then. Karen is good about answering her cell at the paper. Lantom will be in his office. He can leave a voicemail for Claire. And Foggy…

Foggy.

Matt's stomach churns. He buries his head more deeply into his pillow and rounds his spine until his forehead touches the wall. He can never quite seem to bend himself to be as small as he feels.

"I have to go back to Hell's Kitchen."

"Yeah."

That answer surprises him. Matt uncoils himself slightly and lifts his head to face Frank. "Yeah?"

"Made a promise to your priest that he'd see you again, Red, one I intend to keep. Kept all the other promises I made to the old man." Frank gets up from the desk and paces around to the far side of the apartment, popping off two punches onto the bag as he moves past. "You tell your old legal partner that Fisk's gunning for him too?"

Matt returns his head to the pillow and curls up tighter despite the hurt roving through him. God, he's tired. "Not yet."

"Send that shit off in a text message or something. Ain't gonna do him any good to have you stewing about it."

"No, I gotta see him. I should have told him a long time ago." He forgoes the thought of actually trying to contact Foggy. He'll do it; he always does, especially if it scares him. "The Hand are well established in Hell's Kitchen."

"Ninjas are going to be on my ass, Red. Not yours." Frank lifts something off the floor – metal, jangling: toolbox – and brings it back to the desk with him. He digs through until he finds what he's looking for, then drops back into his chair. Matt finally gets a whiff of some of what he's working with, and the awful smell unravels him. Hard to be tense about a conversation with Foggy when he's lying in such close proximity to homemade explosives.

"Elektra will be there." He's overstating the obvious, but the dangers seem so much larger with everything the leg has put him through. "She's been biding her time."

Frank has already considered this. His heart marches calmly through the forgone conclusions. "You go to St. Matthew's. Church is your turf. She isn't going to start shit there."

"But what about after I leave? That puts Lantom at risk, Foggy at risk…"

"That puts her at risk." Frank twists at his screwdriver until metal crimps against metal. He moves on to another, then another, building a small army of tiny bombs. "You keep forgetting, Red, if it was just about keeping you, she'd've done that after nabbing your ass from the animal hospital. Gotten you the hell out of dodge and made good and sure you couldn't get back. She attacks your priest or your partner, you're not coming home with her."

Matt assumes this next bit is part of the growing pile of unspoken shit he and Frank have been amassing together, but it needs to be said: "That goes for you too."

Frank's pulse climbs for a second or two before he can stop it. "Yeah, well, I pissed her off." He sounds a little proud of that face and is quick to hide it. "Besides, can't imagine you're keen on what I do when her ninjas show up."

There's no answer that quite works except, "I'm not keen on people's faces being cut off."

"Better of two evils, then?"

"No." Matt doesn't have a name for it, but it's not that. Words fail him. His brain's muggy with details – nights spent on the fire escape, days spent indoors, waiting for a downpour of Elektra's vengeance on Frank that he has little hope of even helping to fight off. There's a patch of explosives growing nearby. Yet the smells in Frank's apartment bring Fogwell's to life around him. Dad's voice comes into his head clear as day. The gunfire in his head is similar to the one in Frank's.

He jerks awake, having fallen asleep at some point. Behind him, Matt can hear Frank working away on his arsenal. Without missing a beat, he mutters, "You're fine, Red. Get some fucking rest," and he preps another bomb.

Matt settles back into a doze, the thought that this really isn't the time to be feeling safe overwhelmed by the scary truth that safe is exactly how he feels right now.

Happy reading!