frank castle / the punisher (mcu) (outofmyskull) wrote in the100, @ 2016-04-10 02:23:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log/thread, frank castle / the punisher (mcu), matt murdock / daredevil (616) |
WHO: Frank Castle & Matt Murdock
WHAT: Matt visits Frank in medical when he arrives
WHEN: April 2nd (backdated)
WHERE: medical
WARNINGS: discussions of the bad stuff that's happened to them in canon, which involves lots of dead family members and violence.
A lot of things had been said to him, but Frank wasn’t saying much of anything. He’d listened to their bullshit, quietly, and shuffled it away somewhere in his mind. Most importantly, he understood what they wanted from him. To do a job. Behave. Start fresh. Fight in their military.
What a concept.
He hadn’t dismissed the idea, but he wasn’t sold on it either. He was mostly waiting for an opportunity. A way out. It wasn’t going to be shooting his way out of this medical bay, he knew that much. Just by looking at them he could tell they were good people. But if he kept his mouth shut and his head low, he could figure something out.
And then a familiar figure walked into the room. Frank huffed, a wry chuckle. “Should’ve known you’d be here, Murdock.”
--
"Frank."
Matt was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, far different from the suit that Frank was more familiar with. Everything about Matt seemed a little bit off to someone who'd met him but didn't know him well, making one question the details they thought they remembered: he was a little taller, his hair a little lighter and a little redder, and he seemed a bit older. There were fading bruises on his face, a cut on his jaw.
He tightened his hands around his cane but he didn't move further inside.
--
“You here to represent me?” There was the smallest of smirks on Frank’s face and a wry tone in his voice, although it wouldn’t have surprised him if that was actually true. If this was a better, cleaner world - completely unlike his own - then he was probably supposed to be back in jail. It would’ve made a lot more sense than all the bullshit he’d just heard, anyway. “Am I back on trial?”
--
"No." Matt ran his fingertips over the grip of his cane. "But I am one-third of any legal counsel you might get here. Hopefully you don't do anything that makes us go down that road." He sounded tired, like getting up out of bed this morning hadn't been easy.
He tipped his head a little, like he needed a better angle at which to listen. "Just saying hi."
--
Frank tilted his head a little too, eying him, taking in every detail. “One-third,” he said, after a moment. “You mean Nelson, Murdock, and Page?”
It was a detail he might have taken as a given, if they were anywhere he recognized. But things were different enough to make a man think he was crazy - except for Frank. He knew he wasn’t crazy. Which meant he had to figure out how much of what he was being told was plain old bullshit, and how much of it was true.
--
Matt raised his eyebrows in surprise. "'And Page'? Karen didn't mention anything other than being an assistant," he said. "But no. No. Jen Walters. She-Hulk, if that means something to you. Probably doesn't."
He was toeing the line between friendly and familiar while remaining standoffish.
--
It didn’t mean anything to him, but Frank gave no sign one way or the other. His expression stayed exactly the same, eyes slightly narrowed, lips pressed together.
Finally, he said, “So, that’s it? All you’ve got to say?”
--
The corner of Matt's mouth twitched slightly. "What is it you want me to say?"
--
“I figure you’ve got some reason for visiting me in here.” Frank might have been vaguely amused, too, but it was hard to tell. His expression didn’t change much, even if the rest of him never seemed to be quite holding still; his head moved ever so slightly from side to side, and every so often, his trigger finger twitched. “Everyone in here’s had something to say, so far.”
--
"Then what I say depends on what's already been said."
Matt knew these hospital rooms well by now, and he finally made his way inside in order to sit, his hand brushing over the chair before he sank down.
--
Frank shook his head, glancing down at his hands for a moment. “Already got the lecture about not killing people, so you can go ahead and skip that part.”
--
"What did they tell you about different universes?" Matt asked, leaning forward a little in his chair. "It's either going to sound old hat to you or you're going to think it's a load of bullshit."
When Matt got a long, silent stare instead of an actual answer (he had to assume it was a stare, as it didn't sound like Frank had fallen asleep), he sighed and slumped back into his chair. Great. Frank either talked too much or talked too damn little.
"Why don't you start with what you know about me, and we go from there."
--
“Or,” Frank suggested, “We could do that the other way around.”
--
Matt smiled crookedly. "Oh, buddy, you don't have enough hours in the day for me to tell you what I know."
--
Frank laughed mirthlessly, and straightened up in his seat. “Looks like story time isn’t going to get anywhere, then.”
--
"Christ." Matt laced his fingers together, taking time to crack each of his knuckles and each one giving a satisfying (or cringeworthy) pop. "The spiel when you get here. They do their best to interview you and figure shit out. They tell you you're in another universe, give you a welcome packet, try to sort out what and who you know. Now — Karen told me you were here. I know you're from her world, but that's all I know. And in my world, you and me, we go way back. So I just want to know how far back you think we go."
--
Frank stared at him, seemingly oblivious to the sound of the cracking knuckles. After a moment, he said finally, “Probably not as far back.”
--
"So I say 'Daredevil' and you say …?"
--
Frank stared at him a moment longer, and then started to laugh. A real laugh this time - darkly humorous, but genuinely amused nonetheless. “I’d say hey, Red.”
--
So, that was news to Frank. There was no use keeping a secret identity here, and Matt had given up trying to live a double life, anyway. It was a dangerous way to go, to leave the shadows and walk in the light, but circumstances really hadn't given him a choice. There was nothing to do but embrace it.
He smiled vaguely. "Gonna talk to me now, Frank?"
--
“Yeah, sure, why not.”
Frank shifted on his seat, settling in a little more. He’d had a hunch -- that was it, just a hunch, because he hadn’t actually interacted much with Murdock. He’d been conveniently absent for a lot of the trial and the preparation for it. But there had been something about that voice, the way he moved his head, that had been familiar. Frank always remembered shit like that. There had been a part of him that had suspected, but he’d never confirmed it. He hadn’t really cared enough to try.
“You - he - started tracking me. Wanted me to stop killing people. Kitchen Irish. Dogs of Hell. The Cartel.” He paused, looking at Murdock. “Sound familiar?”
--
"Frank, I always want you to stop killing people," Matt muttered.
--
Frank looked at him, soberly. “Always? Never once considered coming over to my side of the line?”
--
Matt fell silent. It wasn't that he hadn't discussed this with Frank before, and argued it, and debated it. There were reasons they were never going to get along as friends, and fundamentally different philosophies were a huge part of it. No matter how dark things got, no matter how necessary it felt, Matt never set out to kill anyone. He played judge and jury, but not executioner.
And yet —
He sat back a little more. "Yeah," he said quietly. "Yeah, I considered it. And I did it."
--
Frank sat back, letting out a long breath. “Ah, shit. I tried to tell you you wouldn’t come back from that, Red.”
--
Matt didn't make excuses. He could say he'd been possessed by the Beast, he could say that he wasn't himself, but it didn't matter. He'd still had those thoughts, that desire to get revenge, that desire to kill — and he'd chosen not to, time and time and time again, but the problem kept coming back.
The problems always came back, even after they died.
"There's a lot of shit you can't come back from," said Matt. The problems came back, sure, but you couldn't get back your innocence. "I … y'know. I don't like what you do. I don't like how you do it. But I understand why."
He ran a hand over his mouth, then gingerly checked on the cut on his jaw. "A lot of stuff with me, it's not personal. But this…"
--
Frank made a low, non-committal sound in the back of his throat. He turned his head and glanced over at the gun they’d returned to him, sitting on the bed beside him. The small one was under his coat, but the big one, the one from the Blacksmith’s arsenal, that one didn’t fit under his jacket. He was still more than a little surprised that it had been given back to him at all. No one had ever willingly given him a gun, not since his days in the military. It made him wonder what exactly Karen had told them.
But this wasn’t the moment for wondering. His eyes lingered there only for a second before he looked back up at Matt. “What happened?”
--
"When you don't kill your enemies, they stick around," Matt said reluctantly. "You try and do the right thing, you try and put them away, you try and do it clean. And I'm telling you, Frank, it works. Most of the time, most guys, it works. Most guys don't deserve to die, even if they keep coming back. And you can argue with me all day on that, but I'm not budging."
He didn't often unload like this, and he definitely never would have done it with Frank, but he'd had an emotional couple of days. Karen was here, a reminder of all of this, and Felicia was gone.
"But Bullseye…?" The name caught in his throat. "He got to me. He killed people that I …" Pull it together, Matt. "He killed Karen."
--
From the minute he’d said ‘personal’, Frank should’ve seen that one coming. Some part of him had known, really, that it had to be one of his partners. But of course it wasn’t just about a partner. Someone he cared about.
Someone he even loved, maybe. Frank hadn’t picked up on that before, but then, he hadn’t actually watched them interact much. He’d seen the way Karen looked at Matt, though.
He wasn’t one for sentiment, although this news bothered him. The relaxation of a few moments before was gone, replaced by tension in his jaw and in his posture. His trigger finger twitched, though his hand was nowhere near his gun.
“Bullseye, huh?” he said, gruffly. “Don’t worry, Red. He shows up here, I’ll put him down. You don’t have to do it.”
--
Matt's only response was a small nod as he picked a little dirt out from under his fingernails. "Most people have something to save," he said. "They go bad for a reason, and there's something that can be fixed. You've got to give them that chance, even if you're wrong. But not him."
--
Frank looked away from a minute, but that was the only sign he showed that he disagreed. He would always disagree on that point, but this wasn’t the time to argue about it. There wasn’t anything more to say, anyway, so far as he was concerned. He didn’t want to change the other man’s mind, drag him farther over the line. Last they’d talked, he’d done his best to talk him out of it. He wasn’t going to do that now, either.
Finally, he said, “Is he here?”
--
"No," Matt said quietly. "He might be dead."
Might be. Matt had told Frank that he'd crossed over the line, that he'd considered killing as a viable solution, but also that he'd done it. He'd killed him. Might be didn't seem like a definitive answer.
--
Frank huffed. “He killed Karen, and you didn’t make sure?”
--
"People in my world don't stay dead," Matt snapped. "I killed him. I should have destroyed the body to keep him from being resurrected, but I didn't."
There was a lot he was leaving out, that much was obvious, but he didn't know how long Frank wanted to sit here and learn about how insane his world was. He already knew that things were simpler in Frank's world, that things still were somewhat new.
--
That was new. There was no outward sign of surprise, but Frank didn’t respond for a while, which was an answer in and of itself.
“People who don’t stay dead,” he said finally, slowly. It was almost an apology for doubting him - or at least, it was as close to an apology as Matt was going to get. “Haven’t seen that before.”
It probably went without saying, especially in this particular company, that he didn’t like it. At all. He put people down because he wanted them to stay down. Gone, permanently, forever. If any of the people he’d killed came back to life…
To say that thought made him angry was an understatement. But at least Matt had given him the key to doing something about it. Destroying the body - he could do that. He probably should have done that.
--
"Most of the time, a person dies, they stay dead," Matt said. "But some people are just damn stubborn. Wilson Fisk? Stubborn. Bullseye? He was just stubborn, but then …"
He sighed. How did he explain this to someone who didn't know? "There's an organization, I don't know if you've crossed them yet. They call themselves the Hand. A cult of ninjas who worship a demon known as the Beast. They've got the key to immortality, rituals that can bring a person back to life."
--
Fisk.
Frank made a disgusted noise when he heard that name, and turned his head away. But that wasn’t what he was really concerned about. He made a mental note about the Hand. Demon-worshiping ninjas - where did people even come up with this shit?
“Fisk involved with them?” he asked, after a moment.
--
"Involved?" Matt's smile was humorless. "He ran the Hand for a while. Then again, so did I, so." He waved a dismissive hand. "Last I knew, Fisk was arrested and put away again. I don't know how long that's going to last, but we got him."
He clenched a fist, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. Things between him and Fisk had always been personal, but he'd been holding Foggy and Kirsten hostage in their last encounter. Just thinking about it had his hackles raised.
"And before you tell me I should've shot him in the head, Maya already did that, and he's fine."
--
“You ran the Hand?” Frank wasn’t going to let him just dismiss that one. Maybe he should have, but this was a much darker side of Murdock, Red, Daredevil, whatever the hell he should be calling him now. “That doesn’t sound like you.”
He might have said more about Fisk, although there wasn’t much else to say. If Fisk had run the Hand, he probably knew those damn secrets of immortality, too. At some point Frank was going to have to ask about the best way to destroy the bodies of immortal demon-worshiping ninjas, but that question was shelved for the moment.
--
"Sometimes taking something down means controlling it," said Matt. "I worked with Fisk, we got control of the Hand. He tried to screw me over, we dissolved our partnership. If I was controlling the Hand, I could use them to take out corruption elsewhere in the city. Fisk, Osborn … look, it's a long story. It went to shit. It should've killed me."
--
Frank stared at him for a long moment. “You trying to tell me you think controlling them, working with them - that’s better than going in and taking them out?”
--
Matt leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "You don't take out the Hand, Frank. You don't shoot them and call it a day."
--
“You gotta destroy the bodies,” Frank said. “I got that part.”
He was being facetious, but he understood what Matt was getting at. He was a tactician, he knew that there were subtler ways of going about doing what he did. What they did. Yet the memory of being manipulated by Fisk was fresh in his memory, and he knew he’d never willingly make any arrangement with him, not again. Much less control a gang of the very kinds of people he hated so much.
Sometimes a massacre was the best way to get rid of a problem, compared to the other options. He’d tried to convince the Devil of that, once - the Devil he’d known back home. The one sitting in front of him was different.
--
"How many of them are you gonna kill, Frank? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand?" There was an edge to Matt's voice, but he wasn't angry. Frank just didn't know. The Hand didn't operate like the criminals that Frank was used to working with. "Forget destroying their bodies. Each one you kill dissolves into dust and is replaced by another, and another, and another. They're no longer human, and there's no end in sight."
--
Frank almost said as many as it takes, but Matt kept going. If there were thousands, and they just kept getting replaced - well, controlling them still wasn’t his favorite idea. But: “Guess you can’t just torture their secrets out of them, if they’re not afraid of dying.”
But that would still be the objective, he thought. Find the secret to their immortality, the way they could replace themselves like that. Find it, and find a way to destroy it.
Well, at least he wasn’t going to have to worry about running out of things to do. “Sounds like we’ll have our hands full for a while, Red.”
--
Matt chuckled softly, bowing his head. "We."
He declined to comment further. There was no we, except when there was. He and Frank had a long history, they were fighting more often than not, but they were ultimately allies and Matt knew that. They didn't get along, but as much as Matt abhorred what he did, he could still respect him.
"How long you been doing this, Frank?" he asked, trying to catch up.
--
It was funny, Frank had to give him that. But for all that they weren’t teammates, they had similar objectives, and they worked in the same area. Anything Fisk was involved in - that was something Frank intended to get his hands on. He hated the man with every fiber of his being. He hadn’t met any of these damn ninjas, but he couldn’t imagine liking them any better, either.
“Long enough,” he said, vaguely. Time frames didn’t really seem to matter much, anyway - he doubted the number of months would mean anything to Matt. But maybe something else would. “Finally found the Blacksmith. Took him out. He’s not gonna pop back up again, is he?”
--
Matt lifted his head, frowning slightly. "The Blacksmith?"
--
This really wasn’t Frank’s favorite topic, but something about the Devil had always made him more willing to talk. It was just a matter of deciding what to say, rather than whether to say it, and he took his time about it.
“Colonel Schoonover,” he said finally. “My old CO. You ever meet him?”
--
"No." That was probably good news for Frank, but Matt seemed bothered. "You killed your CO?"
--
“Saved his life, first,” Frank said, not bothering to disguise the bitterness in his tone. “Him and the whole rest of our team, got ‘em all back from the war safely. You know what he did with the rest of his life, Red?”
An extra roughness entered his tone, and he looked away for a moment, swallowing. “Started importing heroin into the city. Used his old team to do it. Except for me.” He didn’t have all the details on how that had worked, but he knew enough. It was strange to be explaining this to Murdock, his old friend the Devil, of all people - but apparently he didn’t know about it any more than Frank knew about the Hand. “There was a sting set up to catch him, a drug deal that was supposed to go down in Central Park. They didn’t clear out the civilians. It went south, everybody started firing. He gave the order.”
He looked back at Matt, directly. “I was there, right in the middle of it. With my family.”
--
Matt knew some of this. He knew that Frank's family had been murdered — everyone knew that Frank's family had been murdered. It made Frank think he was an exception, that his pain elevated him above other people, that he could execute people that he deemed worthy of death. Sometimes Matt understood it, but it was wrong. That kind of judgment, deciding life and death, that was up to God. Some people slipped through the legal system, Matt knew it, and Matt knew that sometimes the problems kept coming back without a permanent solution, but it just wasn't right.
Every person operated on their own scale of morality. Anyone who became a vigilante was operating outside the law, hiding in the shadows to deliver justice in the way they saw fit. Where was the line? There had to be a line.
"I know," he said quietly, putting his own judgment aside. It didn't matter right now. "Not the circumstances, but I know about your family. How long ago was this…?"
--
Frank scoffed. “You know.”
He still didn’t know shit. Didn’t know the half of what Frank knew, or felt, or thought. He still thought he could cross the line one time - whether it was with the Blacksmith or this Bullseye shitbag - and that would be it.
Although apparently that was how it had worked, with Bullseye. He’d done it once, still come back from it believing he could do better. There was something better about him, and Frank knew that. It was why he’d pushed him - the other version of him - off the boat. He didn’t need to be part of any of this. Frank wasn’t any special exception to anything. He just didn’t matter anymore. He was dead.
“Why?” he asked, regaining some of his old dark humor. “You trying to figure out how far I’ve gone, Red? What else I’ve done? I told you. I finished picking off the shitbags that killed my family. Haven’t met any crazy, immortal ninjas or any asshole calling himself Bullseye, but if I do, I’ll be sure to let you know.”
--
"Just curious," Matt said, his voice gentle. This wasn't something he was used to discussing with Frank, but the Frank he knew was more detached. It had been a long time. He'd gone past the idea of revenge for his own family and decided to continue for the sake of other people — which sounded noble as hell, and some people thought it was. Matt wildly disagreed, but that was the problem with vigilantes. There was no real code keeping them all following the same rules. They went around the rules however they saw fit.
It must have been recent. Last couple of years. He could hear the shift in Frank's heartbeat, his breathing. It was too fresh.
He cleared his throat. "My dad was shot," he said after a moment. "Only family I had. Organized crime. He was a boxer. He'd gotten caught up with some gambling, he was fixing fights, making sure the right people walked away with the money. Then he was supposed to throw a fight, and he didn't. Lost some people a lot of money. So they …" He shrugged, deciding to leave the rest unsaid.
--
It was the gentle tone that really got to Frank. Like he really was younger and less far gone than the version of himself that this Murdock knew.
And maybe he was. He remembered standing in that room full of the Blacksmith’s guns and wanting to use each and every one of them. Because there was a part of him that still needed a war. A big part of him that had known that, even once the people who’d killed his family were dead and gone, it still wouldn’t be over. And he wasn’t ever going to be able to do it by the Devil’s rules, because leaving criminals alive meant they could hurt and kill other people and he couldn’t live with that.
Funny, really, how Matt had gone off on a tangent about himself and yet somehow he’d said more about Frank than the other way around.
“Let me guess,” he said, gruffly. “You still didn’t kill them.”
--
"No," Matt said. "I tracked down the gang. Didn't kill any of them, just wanted the guy at the top. Guy named Roscoe Sweeney, called himself the Fixer. He pulled a gun on me, but … heart attack. Died right in front of me, died before he could shoot me. Luck, fate, I don't know."
He sighed. It was hard to find closure, sometimes, knowing that Sweeney had just died. He should have felt good, knowing that he couldn't hurt anyone else — and he did, to an extent, but it also felt like Sweeney never got the punishment he deserved.
"But I found the guys who roughed him up. The guy that pulled the trigger. The guy that carved his face up." Matt's hand clenched tightly around his cane, his knuckles white. "The last guy, I caught him in a brothel. Confronted him there. Stupid, there were innocent people all around. I didn't stop and think that someone else could get hurt."
He didn't know why he was spilling all of this. He'd never told his Frank this before. It had never come up, it had never mattered. But now, talking with him, maybe it felt relevant. "One of the women lost her balance. No. No, she didn't lose her damn balance, I knocked into her and she fell out a window. Thought I'd killed her."
He really didn't need to rehash his failures for Frank. "I don't know why I'm telling you any of this." He was trying to say that he understood pain, and he understood losing someone to this kind of thing, that he understood that anger.
--
Frank watched him, silent and still. It was interesting information, even if it things weren’t the same across universes. There was plenty he could’ve said - about how he would have plugged Sweeney a few times anyway, just to make damn sure, or about how he was always careful about civilians - but he decided not to bother.
He responded only to the very last part, with an amused and derisive snort. “Yeah, you do. You’re trying to make a point.”
--
"Maybe," said Matt, who always had to make a point. He was a lawyer. He always worked his way around to a point. "I'm not going to get you to stop doing what you're doing. And I'm not trying to … I've given up on telling you to stop."
He just wanted Frank to know something about him, about his own history. He wanted Frank to know that he'd lost someone in a similar way, that his father had been killed deliberately by the same kinds of people that Frank hunted. Matt wasn't really trying to be self-righteous or come off as the better person, but Frank needed to know that Matt — that Daredevil — came from a similar place.
They all lost people. None of them were special.
--
“That because you don’t think you’ll need to tell me to stop?” Frank asked, bluntly. “From what I hear, we’re a long way from Hell’s Kitchen.”
A different world. Different universe. He might not have believed it, but Murdock - Red, Matt, whatever - he was different. It was more than just the red hair, or the height difference, or the extra years. It was something that Frank couldn’t have explained to anyone in words, but it was definitely there. Despite being generally considered completely out of his skull, he was more perceptive than most people realized.
--
"You're not the most dangerous person I have to worry about," said Matt. "Different cultures, different rules. Whether or not I like it doesn't matter."
He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, tapping his fingers along the handle of his cane. There were things he chose not to say: he could have snidely told him that Frank's opinions were more popular here, that for many of them justice did in fact mean death, and Frank would be hailed as a hero by most people who lived at Mount Weather.
But he said nothing, and instead he just ground his teeth.
--
“Really.” That was the opposite of what Frank had been expecting. “Who’re you worrying about, Red?”
--
"Lots of people," said Matt, his voice low. "Magneto. The Devil. The Sky People wanted the death penalty removed from the books but the moment they were faced with a case where death wasn't on the table they conspired to kill the accused and murdered him mid-trial."
--
“The Devil.” Matt had said it so seriously that Frank wasn’t joking about it either, but it was still pretty funny, because of who was saying it. If it was a real Devil, though, he shouldn’t be laughing. “You mean the actual Devil.”
--
"I do."
Matt knew it sounded insane, but he'd been here long enough and he'd been a superhero in his own world long enough that almost nothing sounded insane to him anymore. "Lucifer, twice over. Two different universes. One's … I have the feeling that one of them is less dangerous than the other, but right now I couldn't tell you which."
--
“So you’re not the actual devil.” Frank wasn’t laughing, and he also wasn’t writing it off. From someone else, maybe he’d have scoffed, but from the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen - no, he knew better than to dismiss anything Matt said. “You had me wondering, you know.”
He’d already said as much to the man he’d known back in his own universe. More than likely the other version of himself had said as much to the man sitting in front of him, too. But it was worth saying again, anyway.
--
Matt tipped his head curiously, in the way he did when he seemed to want to hear something better. "You thought I was the devil."
--
“Mm.” It was a noncommittal sound that could be interpreted as agreement. The truth was, Frank really hadn’t expected that response, so he was watching Murdock closely. “Never heard that before, huh?”
--
"Not in a way that wasn't just you being an asshole, Frank."
--
Frank huffed, a sound that was almost amusement. “You think I’m not being an asshole now?”
--
Matt smiled. "C'mon, Frank, I always think you're an asshole."
--
“Things aren’t that different then, are they.” Frank reached for the gun on the bed beside him, got to his feet, and slung it over his shoulder. “I’ll see you around, Red.”