Frank snorts, shifts just far enough to slide the mug onto the coffee table. Shuffles it a quarter-turn. Wonders if he should pry further but has to be real with himself - he's never met a knife he doesn't want to twist, just to see what more there is. He pushes himself up and heads into the kitchen, the breeze from the window cool on his chest as he opens freezer.
"Watchin' you two..." Down the scope of a rifle. It wasn't his fight, wasn't his kill. But how it played out, well. Frank's hand lingers for a moment against the cold of another ice pack. "Watching you work. That was like watching a goddamned ballet. She was your ride or die?"
"Yeah, that's pretty much Stick in a nutshell. He was an asshole," he replies with a faint laugh.
The question doesn't bother him. He's had time to mourn and he's lost since then so it's hard to quantify where the pain of Elektra's loss starts to mold into others. "You will be surprised to hear this but me and Elektra were complicated." It's a flimsy joke. "She was my college girlfriend. My first love. Maybe my only love, if I'm being real with myself." People had come and gone out of his life before and after her but none held the sway over him that Elektra had. "Yeah. She was. You know that building that fell on me? I was only under it because of her. Once it became clear there wasn't a way out, that we were gonna die together? I found myself at peace with it. Only problem was I didn't."
Frank doesn't understand a whole lot, but he understands what two people who know the guts of each other move like together. It's like finishing each other's sentences but without the need to aggrandize about it: it just is. It's not flash, and bang, it's self-awareness that includes another person as self. He and Maria could move around their kitchen like that. He and Bill, fuckin' Bill, they had that once upon a time when they were shoulder-to-shoulder under a goddamn hailstorm of bullets.
Red and Elektra fought like that. Like they'd ripped into each other far enough to share the blood and came out the other side.
Frank grabs the ice pack and knocks the freezer closed. "Midland Circle? Yeah, I heard about that. Only thing is..." Frank drops back into the chair, chases his knee with the ice. "I don't see how a dead woman got under that building with you."
He and Elektra could move like they shared a single pulse. Cynically, he could say it was because they were trained by the same asshole who had forced them to a collision course with each other in some pathetic attempt to win Matt back to a war he wanted nothing to do with but it had felt like more than that. Especially in the end.
He faintly smiles in response and sets his empty mug aside to go back to resting on the couch. Even going so far as to pull the plush throw blanket off the back of it to wrap around himself while his head settles into a throb instead of a spin. "Yeah. They brought her back from the dead. It's a...long story. She wasn't her at first. But she remembered me. Remembered that I loved her in the end. That's the part that matters." Easy to say when he's just handwaving her return from the dead. "Mourning her twice--that's a bitch."
Frank accepts the hand-wave, though his mouth opens, stays quiet, closes. He knows there's shit out there that's happening that doesn't involve him. That he doesn't want to be involved in. Metas. Crazy shit. So what if it includes resurrection?
Yeah. So what.
"I don't think there's many things in this life anymore than can break me, Red." Frank roughs a hand over the top of his own head before settling his chin in his fist and letting go of a long, slow breath. "But that would do it. Gettin' Maria back, just to--"
Doesn't involve him. Never gonna. There wasn't enough left of her to come back. His hand in his lap is shaking; he curls it into a fist. "I'd eat a fuckin' bullet." The words are nothing but breath and gravel, too low for anyone to hear aside from this man keepin' him company, wrapped in a goddamn blanket and head-injury. Frank gets to his feet, scraping his face with a palm before dropping the ice pack onto the table and moving away. The bathroom door slams behind him.
It wasn't Matt's first introduction to crazy shit but it was a hell of a punch in the gut that, if he's honest with himself, he's not so sure that he's really completely recovered from. Even with all of the years that have passed, it's part of the what-ifs and the alternate realities that he thinks too much about. What if he'd been able to save Elektra? What if they'd just left together and, for once in his life, he didn't do the right thing?
"Yeah. When she came back...she didn't have her heartbeat. I didn't even know I was fighting her at first when she came back and came at me as an enemy. And then...I mean. I guess that's why I was pretty comfortable dying with her." He knows that Frank has taken in the words and lines were drawn. He doesn't follow when he backs away and flees to the bathroom. If he just found out about people coming back from the dead? Yeah, he'd probably do the same.
He stays where he is. He tries to focus elsewhere away from any sounds Frank might make or the way that his pulse is faster. Privacy. Some measure of respect. He listens to the world beyond the room instead. Strains for distant sirens and neighbors and any part of the world that isn't invading Frank Castle's space.
Frank runs the tap. Splashes cold water on his face. Grips the sides of the sink hard enough to turn his knuckles white and stares at himself in the mirror.
He's had a death-wish since his family died, never any use pretending otherwise. His heart was dead but it was still beating so he decided to put those beats to good use. Walking into bullets, abuse, dumb-decisions and dead-ends the way only a suicidal man could, and yet none of it stopped him. He'd said Maria and the kids were worth it and he meant that, he said he'd do it again. But another go-around is different then what Red's told him. That's a second chance. And to lose it...
He knows that he couldn't survive that. The only rage left in him would be pointed inward. He knows it, because he still has nothing else, and can't hold his own eyes in the mirror.
It takes a few minutes for Frank to come out of the bathroom. Walks past Red to pull down two glasses and grab the bottle of good whiskey. Dumps them on the coffee table and pours more than a finger into each before pressing a glass into Red's hand. His pulse is steady now, his breathing even. "I don't know what the fuck we're drinking to. Just feels like..." He shrugs and downs his own pour in a single swallow.
Matt would have been content to die under Midland Circle and there was a time when it felt like it was a tragedy that he hadn't. He's past that, he thinks. For the most part. Sometimes he thinks about Elektra and he wonders if maybe he could have done something different to save them both but in the end, death is supposed to be the end and as much as he hates it, he has to believe that things happened the way they did for some kind of reason. Faith. Blind and stupid faith but he doesn't talk about that part of it.
Frank returns and there's whiskey. He considers telling him that it's really only the celebration stuff, that the mourning whiskey is a different bottle where the taste doesn't matter, but he doesn't.
"To the women we've loved," he says, holding up his glass with a faint, nearly pained smile. "Elektra would've liked you. She didn't hold my same sense of morals so she probably would've loved how you bust my balls about it." He takes a sip of the whiskey and lets it burn on the way down before he drops his head back to the cushion.
Mourning should fucking matter, in every way, up to and including the whiskey. Mourning deserves the highest shelf shit there is.
But Christ, Red.
Christ.
Frank shakes his head and teethes whiskey from his bottom lip. "To the women we've loved," he just repeats, setting the glass back down on the table. Maybe Red's made his amends, made them good enough to say shit like that. It's only fresh to Frank. "To be fair, from what I've seen you know how to pick 'em." Maybe he would have liked Elektra too but they'll never know. Like Maria, she's just an empty shape where a woman once was.
He exhales. Lets it go. "You got anything tonight that needs sewing up? Gonna have to tell me; I can't sniff it out." But the first-aid box was taken out before he got here, so there's something.
There's no way to compare his college love who left his life in tatters and returned to blow it up again to the wife that Frank loved and lost and he wouldn't presume to. Except to know what it is to mourn, they were nothing alike and neither were their relationships. One was a marriage that, from everything Frank has ever said, was built in real love and the other was a love built in a push and pull of light and dark until neither one of them won.
"Foggy used to say my real super power was finding the most beautiful and morally questionable woman in the room," he faintly smiles.
Matt shifts, pushing the ice pack on his ribs over to the side. "No. Thought maybe the inside of my lip but it stopped on its own. Those always feel like mountains instead of molehills. Ribs and my head are enough to deal with for now." He doesn't ask about Frank. He already knows.
That line gets a breath, a laugh, yeah. "Yeah, I can see that. Got a lot fuckin' charm when you've got a tie and a cane." Asshole has an undeniable charm even when he's being an asshole. Frank hates it enough that it circles back around to a grudging respect. "Luckily I don't have the same problem. Never been in danger of anyone accusing me of being charming."
He's drifted during the conversation. Physically. Now he opens the fridge. Just looking. Shooting shitbags always eventually makes him hungry.
"They teach a course on it in law school," he deadpans as he stretches out on the sofa a little more. Elongating his spine feels good and he turns his hips to adjust his back. "You have a special kind of asshole charm." It's not the same thing, of course. Matt can lay it on thick in the straight world of suits and ties and day jobs and Frank doesn't have to these days, but there's still something about Frank that pulls him in all the same. The confidence in himself and that what he's doing is right.
He doesn't pay it much mind when Frank looks for food. There's leftover Korean, ingredients for a salad and a few other staples that would require some cooking to make into anything resembling a meal. He assumes Frank will go with the low energy leftovers.
If confidence was the same as charm, he'd have had a much easier time with all the badges in his life over the last few years.
"Yeah that's what they all tell me," Frank says as he starts opening the tops of leftovers, sniffing. He slides one onto the counter. Then he goes back into the fridge. "That my asshole's got a lot of charm." More shit hits the counter: lettuce, carrots. Two eggs are grabbed from a cutesy little holder like god didn't invent packaging for a reason. "You know I bet I fell into the same trap that everybody does, you tell me."
Water, frying pan, pot, the clickclickwhoosh of a gas burner catching. "Looking through the scope that night, you didn't have your mask on. And I thought, 'shit, Red kinda looks like that shitbird lawyer who never showed up for my case.'" Efficiently pre-cut salad vegetables in the pan, he scrapes them around before starting to open and close cabinets while they begin to sizzle. "But then, right, and it's funny, because the next thought comes - 'nah, that shitbird's blind. No way he's up here on a fuckin' roof in red jammies fighting...' Well, goddamn ninjas, I guess."
Red can probably smell it when the sesame oil is opened up. Soy sauce. Chicken bullion. Staples of anyone with half a taste-bud in New York. They hiss as they hit the pan. Water boils and the two eggs are dropped in. "So I told myself I was crazy and wrote it off. Then the next time I see you - got yourself to a hearing of mine eventually - you said my name. That was it, you know? I couldn't see past either suit, not until you said my name." Vegetables wilt, are stirred. "That's when I knew it, but you know, I'm not so sure most people can. I think most people thought just what I thought - no way a blind guy could be the Devil. Christ, Red. I mean. That right there is some kinda bait and switch."
Matt stays settled on the sofa while Frank makes himself at home in his kitchen. He has no objections. He’s comfortable with Frank’s presence and there are no secrets to be gleaned from the contents of his refrigerator except that he doesn’t take great care of himself. He eats clean when he can and it explains why he has what he does but not how bare it is for everything else.
The story doesn’t surprise him. He knows the broad strokes of it. He smiles while he lays on his side, listening to Frank’s voice and the sizzle. “I heard your heart skip a beat when you figured it out. I knew you had,” he confirms.
“If you want to call it a trap, sure. The same that everyone has. Don’t take it personally.” People tend to. As if they should have pieced it sooner. “I knew who I was defending even if you didn’t know about me. I remembered what you told me in the cemetery. One batch, two batch. I think that’s why I took the case. I knew you were more than a psychopath.”
Yeah, his heart had definitely taken a little tap-dance. A little tap-dance, in fact, had been necessary to get his brain around what he knew, what he saw on that roof and had talked himself out of.
Frank's going to say something about Red knowing who he defending when 'one batch, two batch' wipes it away. The spatula doesn't stop so much as stutter, one off-beat clunk against the side of the pan.
He'd forgotten that. Forgotten explaining it to Red. Hearing it now he can catch the edges of the memory, pry them away from some of the blood loss, pain, rage but... it's not all there. Talkin' about Lisa, yeah, but - not why, not how. Just the smell of the earth, the cold of the stone against his back, the shape of the Devil in the darkness. A Devil who'd saved his ass that night. Who thought - out of everyone else in the city - that he was worth that effort.
"Man you pissed me off that night." A dismissive sniff. Frank dumps the left-over container full of noodles into the pan. "Saving those assholes from me." Frank tips the pot into the sink and turns on the water to cool down the eggs. "I was too pissed off to even be impressed by that bouncing trick shot." Bowls are pulled from a cabinet, a pair.
He winces slightly at the clatter, not from the volume of the sound but because he knows that he has inadvertently struck a nerve with Frank and his memories that he hadn’t intended to pull on. He offers a weak smile of apology in response to it and doesn’t comment further on the remark. Of course he remembers what Frank told him. It was soft and tragic in the wake of a violent, terrible night.
“Is there a night that I haven’t pissed you off?” It seems rhetorical. Probably not. “I didn’t care about your revenge. I just wanted to get you out alive. That’s what matters.” He expects that could spark an argument and he doesn’t want that. Instead, he pushes himself upright with a soft groan since it seems like dinner is almost ready. “Was a pretty good shot though. You sometimes act offended that I call myself blind. I assume that sort of thing is why.”
Eh, he's all fuckin' nerves on his best day. He'll take the silver lining; more that he knows that his shit stinks too, the less of a fuss he'll make the next time it's pointed out. Frank hadn't offered that story to an impartial witness, any ol' Joe Schmoe walking down the street. He offered it to Red, because even though he was pissed at the guy, there was already some of their personal brand of fucked-up trust beginning.
No moral argument tonight, though, or maybe not about the point made: getting Frank out was what mattered to Red. Frank doesn't agree with it in general but that's only his opinion - and it's an opinion tempered by knowing now that he would have never found the real answers behind what happened to his family if he'd died in that place.
A bowl is tucked into Red's hands as Frank once again lowers himself into the chair. "Damn straight it was a pretty good shot. That's what pissed me off." He forks some stir-fry into his mouth, blowing at the heat of it around the chewing and swallowing. "And you're the hot-shot lawyer, you tell me. Is there a legal definition that I'm missing? I know you don't need that cane but I'm guessing when you're reading those big fancy books that you're not seeing the words."
Getting Frank out alive had mattered. Nothing was going to be made better by him dying at the hands of the Irish and he knows that Frank told him that whole story because he'd heard him whisper the words right before guns were fired and because he'd chosen to stay with him next to that gravestone instead of leaving him. They had been in a war together, even for just a night, and Matt had felt trust start there, even if he still didn't have any when it came to Frank's ability to have any semblance of self control. That's why he was there. The angel on his shoulder dressed like a Devil to forcefully still his hand, even if Frank bitched and complained about it.
"I'm legally blind by every definition that would be used to assess me, if that's what you mean," he answers as he waits for the contents of the bowl to cool a little bit. "I can't see color. I can't see screens or words in a book that aren't braille. Sometimes I can feel them, depending on how they were printed, but it's not sight. I have an idea of what you look like because of the sound of the room moves and how your heartbeat and your voice make the noise that vibrates, and from hitting you, from touching you, but I have no idea what color your eyes are. I can't see the sky or a sunset. It's more..." he pauses, tilting his head down while he considers the answer. "It's not all black for me. It's reds. It's like seeing the world on fire. The way people describe it as echo location or sonar or...it's a world burning, all the time."
He doesn't think he's ever really taken the chance to explain it but he knows Frank has made enough sarcastic comments that he probably deserves to actually know what he's fighting next to. "I don't need the cane but I don't navigate the world like someone with normal sight, so it's just easier to put on a facade." He takes a bite. "This is good, by the way. Thanks."
The sarcasm's always come from the fact that Red contradicts himself. He uses a cane and then leaps across rooftops. Fumbles a drink when it's convenient, catches an apple in the next moment. Frank's already seen Red fight - a description now isn't gonna change anything.
"Yeah you're welcome." Almost absent, pushing it away to continue on with the conversation at hand. "Why's it easier - because you'd have to stop and explain to people why you don't act like a blind guy? Easier to meet their expectations?"
He doesn't push on the thanks and just eats while he considers the answer to Frank's question. "Yes. I shouldn't be able to do what I do and people have an expectation of what it means to be blind. I can try to pass myself off as sighted, and it works in brief bits and pieces, but I can't make meaningful eye contact or do a lot of other things that you can do. So it's just easier to let people think I'm not as capable as I am than to have to explain chemicals in my eyes, super senses, training with a ninja, yadda yadda." He stirs the food around in the bowl. "People get weird about it once they know what I can smell or hear or taste. Some get self conscious. Some get worried." Frank doesn't seem to be capable of either of those things so it's easier to talk to him about it, and he figures after all this time, he owes some explanation.
Honestly, Frank realizes he's been thinking about Red's blindness in a purely physical sense. Not that he considered that Red was lying about the rest but in Frank's presence the guy is always so physically here, eyes generally covered by lenses or hooded in lust that there hasn't been a lot of room for the in-between - to the point that he understands he'd discounted it. That was an oversight.
No pun intended.
He's glad for the explanation. Doesn't know what he's gonna do with it, but is glad to know. Like seeing the world on fire. That's fuckin' something. "Still sounds exhausting," he says, after another mouthful. "I'm a prick, but at least I don't have to pretend not to be." But then again, he doesn't have to worry about maintaining a life, either.
He knows how he presents to Frank, who has seen him fight and bleed and move through the world in a way that most people with all of their senses can't. It makes sense that he might not understand and that's okay. Matt doesn't mind explaining it and getting to be honest about it in ways that he's typically not granted in the course of a normal life.
"It is," he admits between bites. "It can be, anyway. People might see you a lot of ways but I'm sure none of them look at you and see helpless. It's weird that way," he replies. He knows he feeds into it by virtue of his decisions but it's still difficult sometimes. "I catch myself even with you, reminding myself that I don't have to fake it. It's nice though. To be real."
It's not just that Red has two lives to Frank's one. Red has two distinct lives, as different from each other as almost humanly possible. It's not even something that Frank can wrap his head around - he's never been anything as much as he's been dug into being himself, the sum of his own parts.
"Is there a real for you when you're not in the suit?" Question's mild, honest, not asked to start a fight or pass judgement. "Yeah, you got your reasons, but doesn't that just mean you're making it easier on other people? You talk about fakin' it. You doing it for them? Burning yourself out for them?
"Maybe it would take just as much work to do it the other way. But you wouldn't be fake."
He's not suggesting Red live as the Devil. But he's thinking that Red maintains that helplessness so that the Devil can survive.
It used to matter more, having those distinct lives, when he had more people to protect. The numbers have gotten fewer over the years and sometimes he does wonder who he maintains it for. Selfishly for some part of himself still, but there might come a time when all that remains is the Devil. He thinks Frank would be fine with that outcome.
"I'm not in the suit now," he answers. "When I'm alone, of course. But around other people? I'm not sure there is," he admits and he can actually agree to that point that Frank is hinting at; Matthew Murdock is the disguise and Daredevil is who he really is. He's known that for a while now.
"It's a little late for that. I can't really have a 'miracle' recovery from an accident that happened when I was nine in front of the world," he shrugs before taking a couple more bites to finish off his bowl. He sets it on the coffee table and tugs the blanket back up over his shoulders so he can rest his head once again. "I know this life of mine is on borrowed time. It was from the second I put on the mask. Eventually something's going to give. Maybe when that happens, I'll be honest. But not yet."
Maybe Franks wants Red to be the Devil, yeah, but after tonight it's not gonna be the same. There have been new lines drawn in the grey in-between. He doesn't need Red to give into the reality that justice is never gonna be the Almighty thing that Red wants to believe it is, he can continue to battle his conscience and Frank will bat those battles back in face. But becoming the Devil means something different now. It means letting go of Matt Murdock.
And even Frank knows that's a trickier thing. Excuse the language, but fuck his personal life - Frank's seen the man stand up in court. He thinks that the tether.
"You got a timer on that, Red? Do you hear it? Tick, tick, tick." Frank makes a sound, almost amused, and stands to grab both bowls to take to the sink.
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Frank snorts, shifts just far enough to slide the mug onto the coffee table. Shuffles it a quarter-turn. Wonders if he should pry further but has to be real with himself - he's never met a knife he doesn't want to twist, just to see what more there is. He pushes himself up and heads into the kitchen, the breeze from the window cool on his chest as he opens freezer.
"Watchin' you two..." Down the scope of a rifle. It wasn't his fight, wasn't his kill. But how it played out, well. Frank's hand lingers for a moment against the cold of another ice pack. "Watching you work. That was like watching a goddamned ballet. She was your ride or die?"
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The question doesn't bother him. He's had time to mourn and he's lost since then so it's hard to quantify where the pain of Elektra's loss starts to mold into others. "You will be surprised to hear this but me and Elektra were complicated." It's a flimsy joke. "She was my college girlfriend. My first love. Maybe my only love, if I'm being real with myself." People had come and gone out of his life before and after her but none held the sway over him that Elektra had. "Yeah. She was. You know that building that fell on me? I was only under it because of her. Once it became clear there wasn't a way out, that we were gonna die together? I found myself at peace with it. Only problem was I didn't."
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Red and Elektra fought like that. Like they'd ripped into each other far enough to share the blood and came out the other side.
Frank grabs the ice pack and knocks the freezer closed. "Midland Circle? Yeah, I heard about that. Only thing is..." Frank drops back into the chair, chases his knee with the ice. "I don't see how a dead woman got under that building with you."
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He faintly smiles in response and sets his empty mug aside to go back to resting on the couch. Even going so far as to pull the plush throw blanket off the back of it to wrap around himself while his head settles into a throb instead of a spin. "Yeah. They brought her back from the dead. It's a...long story. She wasn't her at first. But she remembered me. Remembered that I loved her in the end. That's the part that matters." Easy to say when he's just handwaving her return from the dead. "Mourning her twice--that's a bitch."
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Yeah. So what.
"I don't think there's many things in this life anymore than can break me, Red." Frank roughs a hand over the top of his own head before settling his chin in his fist and letting go of a long, slow breath. "But that would do it. Gettin' Maria back, just to--"
Doesn't involve him. Never gonna. There wasn't enough left of her to come back. His hand in his lap is shaking; he curls it into a fist. "I'd eat a fuckin' bullet." The words are nothing but breath and gravel, too low for anyone to hear aside from this man keepin' him company, wrapped in a goddamn blanket and head-injury. Frank gets to his feet, scraping his face with a palm before dropping the ice pack onto the table and moving away. The bathroom door slams behind him.
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"Yeah. When she came back...she didn't have her heartbeat. I didn't even know I was fighting her at first when she came back and came at me as an enemy. And then...I mean. I guess that's why I was pretty comfortable dying with her." He knows that Frank has taken in the words and lines were drawn. He doesn't follow when he backs away and flees to the bathroom. If he just found out about people coming back from the dead? Yeah, he'd probably do the same.
He stays where he is. He tries to focus elsewhere away from any sounds Frank might make or the way that his pulse is faster. Privacy. Some measure of respect. He listens to the world beyond the room instead. Strains for distant sirens and neighbors and any part of the world that isn't invading Frank Castle's space.
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He's had a death-wish since his family died, never any use pretending otherwise. His heart was dead but it was still beating so he decided to put those beats to good use. Walking into bullets, abuse, dumb-decisions and dead-ends the way only a suicidal man could, and yet none of it stopped him. He'd said Maria and the kids were worth it and he meant that, he said he'd do it again. But another go-around is different then what Red's told him. That's a second chance. And to lose it...
He knows that he couldn't survive that. The only rage left in him would be pointed inward. He knows it, because he still has nothing else, and can't hold his own eyes in the mirror.
It takes a few minutes for Frank to come out of the bathroom. Walks past Red to pull down two glasses and grab the bottle of good whiskey. Dumps them on the coffee table and pours more than a finger into each before pressing a glass into Red's hand. His pulse is steady now, his breathing even. "I don't know what the fuck we're drinking to. Just feels like..." He shrugs and downs his own pour in a single swallow.
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Frank returns and there's whiskey. He considers telling him that it's really only the celebration stuff, that the mourning whiskey is a different bottle where the taste doesn't matter, but he doesn't.
"To the women we've loved," he says, holding up his glass with a faint, nearly pained smile. "Elektra would've liked you. She didn't hold my same sense of morals so she probably would've loved how you bust my balls about it." He takes a sip of the whiskey and lets it burn on the way down before he drops his head back to the cushion.
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But Christ, Red.
Christ.
Frank shakes his head and teethes whiskey from his bottom lip. "To the women we've loved," he just repeats, setting the glass back down on the table. Maybe Red's made his amends, made them good enough to say shit like that. It's only fresh to Frank. "To be fair, from what I've seen you know how to pick 'em." Maybe he would have liked Elektra too but they'll never know. Like Maria, she's just an empty shape where a woman once was.
He exhales. Lets it go. "You got anything tonight that needs sewing up? Gonna have to tell me; I can't sniff it out." But the first-aid box was taken out before he got here, so there's something.
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"Foggy used to say my real super power was finding the most beautiful and morally questionable woman in the room," he faintly smiles.
Matt shifts, pushing the ice pack on his ribs over to the side. "No. Thought maybe the inside of my lip but it stopped on its own. Those always feel like mountains instead of molehills. Ribs and my head are enough to deal with for now." He doesn't ask about Frank. He already knows.
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He's drifted during the conversation. Physically. Now he opens the fridge. Just looking. Shooting shitbags always eventually makes him hungry.
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He doesn't pay it much mind when Frank looks for food. There's leftover Korean, ingredients for a salad and a few other staples that would require some cooking to make into anything resembling a meal. He assumes Frank will go with the low energy leftovers.
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"Yeah that's what they all tell me," Frank says as he starts opening the tops of leftovers, sniffing. He slides one onto the counter. Then he goes back into the fridge. "That my asshole's got a lot of charm." More shit hits the counter: lettuce, carrots. Two eggs are grabbed from a cutesy little holder like god didn't invent packaging for a reason. "You know I bet I fell into the same trap that everybody does, you tell me."
Water, frying pan, pot, the clickclickwhoosh of a gas burner catching. "Looking through the scope that night, you didn't have your mask on. And I thought, 'shit, Red kinda looks like that shitbird lawyer who never showed up for my case.'" Efficiently pre-cut salad vegetables in the pan, he scrapes them around before starting to open and close cabinets while they begin to sizzle. "But then, right, and it's funny, because the next thought comes - 'nah, that shitbird's blind. No way he's up here on a fuckin' roof in red jammies fighting...' Well, goddamn ninjas, I guess."
Red can probably smell it when the sesame oil is opened up. Soy sauce. Chicken bullion. Staples of anyone with half a taste-bud in New York. They hiss as they hit the pan. Water boils and the two eggs are dropped in. "So I told myself I was crazy and wrote it off. Then the next time I see you - got yourself to a hearing of mine eventually - you said my name. That was it, you know? I couldn't see past either suit, not until you said my name." Vegetables wilt, are stirred. "That's when I knew it, but you know, I'm not so sure most people can. I think most people thought just what I thought - no way a blind guy could be the Devil. Christ, Red. I mean. That right there is some kinda bait and switch."
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The story doesn’t surprise him. He knows the broad strokes of it. He smiles while he lays on his side, listening to Frank’s voice and the sizzle. “I heard your heart skip a beat when you figured it out. I knew you had,” he confirms.
“If you want to call it a trap, sure. The same that everyone has. Don’t take it personally.” People tend to. As if they should have pieced it sooner. “I knew who I was defending even if you didn’t know about me. I remembered what you told me in the cemetery. One batch, two batch. I think that’s why I took the case. I knew you were more than a psychopath.”
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Frank's going to say something about Red knowing who he defending when 'one batch, two batch' wipes it away. The spatula doesn't stop so much as stutter, one off-beat clunk against the side of the pan.
He'd forgotten that. Forgotten explaining it to Red. Hearing it now he can catch the edges of the memory, pry them away from some of the blood loss, pain, rage but... it's not all there. Talkin' about Lisa, yeah, but - not why, not how. Just the smell of the earth, the cold of the stone against his back, the shape of the Devil in the darkness. A Devil who'd saved his ass that night. Who thought - out of everyone else in the city - that he was worth that effort.
"Man you pissed me off that night." A dismissive sniff. Frank dumps the left-over container full of noodles into the pan. "Saving those assholes from me." Frank tips the pot into the sink and turns on the water to cool down the eggs. "I was too pissed off to even be impressed by that bouncing trick shot." Bowls are pulled from a cabinet, a pair.
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“Is there a night that I haven’t pissed you off?” It seems rhetorical. Probably not. “I didn’t care about your revenge. I just wanted to get you out alive. That’s what matters.” He expects that could spark an argument and he doesn’t want that. Instead, he pushes himself upright with a soft groan since it seems like dinner is almost ready. “Was a pretty good shot though. You sometimes act offended that I call myself blind. I assume that sort of thing is why.”
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No moral argument tonight, though, or maybe not about the point made: getting Frank out was what mattered to Red. Frank doesn't agree with it in general but that's only his opinion - and it's an opinion tempered by knowing now that he would have never found the real answers behind what happened to his family if he'd died in that place.
A bowl is tucked into Red's hands as Frank once again lowers himself into the chair. "Damn straight it was a pretty good shot. That's what pissed me off." He forks some stir-fry into his mouth, blowing at the heat of it around the chewing and swallowing. "And you're the hot-shot lawyer, you tell me. Is there a legal definition that I'm missing? I know you don't need that cane but I'm guessing when you're reading those big fancy books that you're not seeing the words."
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"I'm legally blind by every definition that would be used to assess me, if that's what you mean," he answers as he waits for the contents of the bowl to cool a little bit. "I can't see color. I can't see screens or words in a book that aren't braille. Sometimes I can feel them, depending on how they were printed, but it's not sight. I have an idea of what you look like because of the sound of the room moves and how your heartbeat and your voice make the noise that vibrates, and from hitting you, from touching you, but I have no idea what color your eyes are. I can't see the sky or a sunset. It's more..." he pauses, tilting his head down while he considers the answer. "It's not all black for me. It's reds. It's like seeing the world on fire. The way people describe it as echo location or sonar or...it's a world burning, all the time."
He doesn't think he's ever really taken the chance to explain it but he knows Frank has made enough sarcastic comments that he probably deserves to actually know what he's fighting next to. "I don't need the cane but I don't navigate the world like someone with normal sight, so it's just easier to put on a facade." He takes a bite. "This is good, by the way. Thanks."
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"Yeah you're welcome." Almost absent, pushing it away to continue on with the conversation at hand. "Why's it easier - because you'd have to stop and explain to people why you don't act like a blind guy? Easier to meet their expectations?"
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No pun intended.
He's glad for the explanation. Doesn't know what he's gonna do with it, but is glad to know. Like seeing the world on fire. That's fuckin' something. "Still sounds exhausting," he says, after another mouthful. "I'm a prick, but at least I don't have to pretend not to be." But then again, he doesn't have to worry about maintaining a life, either.
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"It is," he admits between bites. "It can be, anyway. People might see you a lot of ways but I'm sure none of them look at you and see helpless. It's weird that way," he replies. He knows he feeds into it by virtue of his decisions but it's still difficult sometimes. "I catch myself even with you, reminding myself that I don't have to fake it. It's nice though. To be real."
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"Is there a real for you when you're not in the suit?" Question's mild, honest, not asked to start a fight or pass judgement. "Yeah, you got your reasons, but doesn't that just mean you're making it easier on other people? You talk about fakin' it. You doing it for them? Burning yourself out for them?
"Maybe it would take just as much work to do it the other way. But you wouldn't be fake."
He's not suggesting Red live as the Devil. But he's thinking that Red maintains that helplessness so that the Devil can survive.
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"I'm not in the suit now," he answers. "When I'm alone, of course. But around other people? I'm not sure there is," he admits and he can actually agree to that point that Frank is hinting at; Matthew Murdock is the disguise and Daredevil is who he really is. He's known that for a while now.
"It's a little late for that. I can't really have a 'miracle' recovery from an accident that happened when I was nine in front of the world," he shrugs before taking a couple more bites to finish off his bowl. He sets it on the coffee table and tugs the blanket back up over his shoulders so he can rest his head once again. "I know this life of mine is on borrowed time. It was from the second I put on the mask. Eventually something's going to give. Maybe when that happens, I'll be honest. But not yet."
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And even Frank knows that's a trickier thing. Excuse the language, but fuck his personal life - Frank's seen the man stand up in court. He thinks that the tether.
"You got a timer on that, Red? Do you hear it? Tick, tick, tick." Frank makes a sound, almost amused, and stands to grab both bowls to take to the sink.
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