InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Ever wonder why we're here?"

"Matthew D." (propatria) wrote in rooms,
@ 2015-06-22 21:04:00

Entry tags:

!marvel comics, *log, bucky barnes, matthew murdock

log: bucky barnes/matt murdock, alley fight
Who: Bucky and Matt Murdock
What: Matt gets in a fight, Bucky wanders by and can't resist.
Where: The alley outside Clem's.
When: Immediately following that forum conversation.
Warnings/Rating: Violence?

It was swiftly becoming a habit of his to wander the city. He wasn't looking for memories, or excavating the past, or anything so prosaic. No, he just wanted to be out, and to see the place, to map it. He felt better when he had a strong sense of his surroundings, and New York wasn't familiar. He knew it was supposed to be, but it wasn't, which meant starting from the beginning and pacing the lengths of it like a cell. But what a cell.

He wore unobtrusive clothes and stayed as anonymous as possible. After the first few long stretches out by himself, he didn't relax, or stop looking for tails out of the corner of his eye, but he did start to take in his surroundings with a slightly less narrow view.

It felt like years since he'd collapsed on a street vendor in Eastern Europe, dragged down by fragments of memory firing in his head. It had only been a few short months, though. Those kinds of memories had slowed down when he was awake, but he didn't risk a relapse in New York. He could walk around out in the open so long as there was no sign he'd drawn anyone's attention. That was the rule. He stayed out of narrow places, alleys, bars after dark. He stayed away from the perched, dirty girls waiting for cars to pull up around sundown. It wasn't idyllic, but moving through the city was a good way to keep the restlessness at bay, and it helped him sleep to be on his feet until he couldn't be. It wouldn't satisfy him forever, but it was enough for now.

When he walked past an alley and heard the distinctive impact of fists and flesh, the grunts of men fighting, he didn't really intend to stop. Fights definitely broke that rule of lying low and avoiding attention. He looked, though, of course he looked, he was always too stupid not to.

Five guys on one never was fair, especially not when the one was fighting injured, and there was no question of that fact. But look at how well the one was holding his own against the five, even with the injury.

He stayed still for a moment. That scene, the one guy dodging and weaving away from the others, fighting fierce and hard against all odds when he ought to be wheezing all the way, it brought back something, more a feeling than a memory.

That was enough to carry him into the alley. He tugged the hood over his head down a little lower, and came face to face with one of the five, who'd broken off the brawl to tell the homeless guy to mind his own business. He held up his left hand, supplicating, then grabbed the back of the man's shirt and yanked him down to meet his face with his knee. The crack was distinct and satisfying.

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log: bucky barnes/matt murdock, alley fight

sightless
2015-06-24 06:17 am UTC (link)

The fight was ugly and explosive, dragging on through the minutes as all six of the men did their best to break and batter each other into submission. If anyone had seen it from the street or through a window, the bizarre sight would probably be too much for even the seasoned New Yorker's immediate response, a shirtless man in a blindfold with blood running down his chest exchanging bare-knuckle blows with five other men not being common except in certain types of parades. They fought on a carpet of garbage and glass, the tattered edges of one of Clem's living room windows hanging open above them, and the broken body of the first man to try to break through her door still draped over one of the dumpsters like a discarded doll.

Matthew had learned how to fight in alleys just like this one, from people four or five times his size armed with everything from blacksmith hammers to rifles. He wasn't that small anymore, but he made up for it in cunning and sheer brutality, and as he heard a seventh heartbeat (strong, so steady as to be practically indivisible from the exertions of his five attackers) he let his senses light up with the cohesive shape of a fist driving through humid air toward his face. All five men had fists that smelled strongly of his blood, but he had disarmed one, this one, who smelled strongly of chemical gunpowder and new metals. Matthew shifted his head two inches to the right to let the attacking fist whip past, turned, hauled his battered body into a second man to avoid a kick, and then drove the heel of his open palm into, and then through, the back of the gunman's elbow. The ripe, raw snap of the joint was rapidly echoed by yet another crack, the softer cartilage crack of a nose.

Matthew turned his head, to open more of his attention and direct his sense of space and temperature toward the opening of the alley. He took in the newest arrival, listening for what felt like an incredible amount of time before he heard another of his heartbeats. This man was exceptionally strong, likely a fighter or an athlete. He smelled of metal so strongly that Matthew wondered if he wore armor, and Matthew detected the concrete powder and recent crumbled asphalt that told him the man came from Manhattan. Matthew couldn't tell where his hands were yet, he hadn't moved them enough, and the smell of metal made it impossible, in that moment, to tell if he was armed.

Matthew paid dearly for his brief moment of inattention. One of the three men still standing (the one with the shattered elbow was just sitting and screaming) caught him with a kidney punch to the left his spine, reopening one of the bigger knife wounds with a stretch of stitches and skin that Matthew heard as well as felt. He grunted in new agony, flailed backward with an elbow, and swiped the man before he fell backward into the ground. It was a fall that Matthew expected to last forever--until abruptly it stopped. Hard.

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Re: log: bucky barnes/matt murdock, alley fight

propatria
2015-06-25 02:44 am UTC (link)

The man who had connected with his knee wouldn't be getting up again soon, but when he turned his attention to the rest of the fight, he had already been absorbed into its body. He caught a glimpse of the one man fighting two men at once, and doing such a smooth job of it that he quickly cataloged professional training, very fast for wounded while the third man was coming in for an uppercut to his midsection.

He absorbed the body blow with such stiffness and tight muscle that the other man's surprise left him open. His left arm was still on the fritz, but the hand clenched well enough, and it swung like a wrecking ball when he pitched his body into it. This created an improvised style that was lurching, and lopsided, and brutally effective. He aimed a hook with his right under the offending arm and into the man's side, then swung the other arm in with a jerk forward as the man tried to box him in the ear. The metal weight connected hard enough to knock the man clean off his feet, and he'd be lucky if he escaped the night without internal bleeding.

He saw the man who had been targeted fall, and he moved toward the two remaining men. One stayed on their target, while the other turned his undivided attention to the new arrival.

No one tried to convince him what was happening here was none of his business - it had gone too far for that, nor did he look like the sort of man you bargained with. He regretted, then, that he couldn't use the knife in his boot and end the situation quickly and cleanly, but bodies were a surefire way to draw attention he didn't need.

These were men who had learned to fight through trial and error, street brawls and the improvisation required to not get killed in a bad situation. It meant they fought what they thought of as 'dirty,' and they thought on their feet. It also meant they expected one good punch to end a fight, as it so often did, in reality. When they punched a man in the face, they expected enough disorientation to close things quickly.

But where the penultimate man saw an opening, there wasn't one. He fired off a few short, fast punches before catching a fist to the jaw, hard enough to crack bone against bone and burst the joint. He hit the ground keening.

Through the fighting, his heartbeat stayed measured and his breathing stayed steady. As the adrenaline kicked in, it sped up, slightly. But there was no tang of fear running off him, no nervous sweat, and no voice. The arm at his side, injured as it was, clicked and whirred, nearly silent, surely, to anyone by the man on the ground. The plates didn't collapse quite right and the elbow joint hardly bent, but that didn't stop the servos inside it from spinning to life when he swung the arm into flesh, solid and heavy as a stone.