Marvel's Hell's Kitchen - Clem & Matt Who: EMT!Clem & a very bloody Matt Murdock What: Patching up the man in mismatched black Where: Hell's Kitchen When: Backdated - Just before the Stark Tower attack Warnings/Rating: Blood
Someone else called the phone number. He had it in the book, and the book was in his largest coat pocket. It was amazing this generous (and cowardly, they hung up almost immediately after communicating the location of “the body”) personage had managed to read said number through the blood, because it was everywhere, and had soaked through most of the arm and side of his coat, and as for his shirt and close-fitting trousers, it was hard to make out what was black oil, what was stained by the thrift store bin, and what was caked-on blood.
This was largely because he was lying in the shelter of a massive pile of crushed automotive relics, their former glory smashed down into crinkled steel bars and tinged wire. The junkyard smelled of stale water and coolant, and the metallic sear of Matthew’s blood in the air barely made a dent in the overwhelming ozone scent of rain coming in fast. A bleak Hansel-Gretel trail of bloody prints marked his path back from the edge of the city, and it was obvious he had chosen this particular yard because it had been lately abandoned. The fence, the cars, and the old padlocks were all rusted together, and the acidic yellow of the streetlights didn’t reach so far into the metal skeletons of the modern graveyard.
More bloody steps marked where the anonymous coward had obviously helped him collapse, and the prints grew less and less defined as they trailed away to the street, and from thence on into the night. The prints were not large. A small woman’s--or a child.
Clementine was two days into a four-day run, and it was her turn for resting. But she wasn't in the mood for sitting on the firehouse couch and playing games, pizza smelling so strong that she carried the grease in her nostrils for hours after. She wasn't tired neither, and the row of beds she called home four days out of the week was left behind after a few minutes of sitting and dithering. When the call came, she was outside, walking, hands deep into the pockets of her FDNY blues, and her t-shirt crested over her breast and proclaiming her employment like it was something to be real proud of. And truth was, she was proud. Fire folks, they took a whole lot of pride in what they did, and she weren't any different on that account.
But she was out, hunting down some kind of park, even if it was real small with sapling trees that wouldn't never flourish in this concrete jungle. She missed Savannah days like these, Spring when the willows would be weeping real hard and the azaleas would be blooming. But the call came, and she had no clue who it was, but she wasn't about to ignore it. Could be anyone, and she cared a whole lot about too many folks these days.
It took her seconds to go get a kit strung across her chest, and she didn't think of calling for help or asking any of the boys to come along with. She just took off, and the junkyard was real close.
By the time Clementine got to the place, its stink of water reminding her of the bay back home, she was mussed some, but she lived for moments like these. She was good at her job, and it was on account of being fearless in the face of folks bleeding all over the place. And this man bleeding all over the place, Clementine hadn't never met him.
She crouched, and she opened her kit and started hunting for her scope and light, gloves snapped on her hands quick and unthinking, like breathing. She found the light, and she shone it into the eyes of the man there, looking for reactive pupils. "My name's Clementine Murphy, honey. Can you hear me?" she asked, and flick, flick went the light. She didn't have a whole lot of empathy, but what she did was saved for these moments, for ailing folks doing bad.
Matthew groaned, and both eyes, not just the one she held in front of her twitching little light, came open. They were dark and wet, wide open as he came up through a deep pool into consciousness and a lot of pain. Neither the pupils nor the eyes made any response to her investigative slashes of pinprick white, and Matthew himself didn’t even see the purpose of the flashlight, but instead stared up, at, and then through her. He didn’t know where he was, just then, and it was a soft boy’s face under the stubble and the lines that grimaced at the pain and waved a weak but panicked hand above his head and then in her direction.
“Murphy,” he said, in a rich Irish brogue so thick it was hard to imagine it existing somewhere with so much concrete and metal. “Why, ‘tis a sound Irish name that’s found me in--” here the half-delirious commentary stopped, and he gasped, realizing just how much of the pain was in him and through him. He was unable to finish the sentence, and the flail of his hand found her arm. He was wearing gloves torn along the palms and at the heels, where he’d tried to stop himself falling, and there was more tears and gravel in his shoulder and down the side of his knee.
Matthew couldn’t quite remember what had happened to him, not yet. His face was purpling and he could feel it as it tightened and swelled, but it was the overwhelming scent of his own blood (identifiable even in this state to a man like him) that frightened him. He tried to clutch at her but his hand dropped. “What hath befall’n me?” he asked her, in a genuine scratch of a tone that made the antique phrase all fear.
His pupils weren't reactive, and Clem was a second away from pressing the button on the walkie that was up against her shoulder, hovering at the strap of that bag she had crossed over her torso. She'd call a bus real quick, because non-reactive pupils were as bad as injuries got. She was all ready to lift that hand, but the man groaned enough to give her pause. He looked up at her, or it seemed as if he did, like he knew where to go looking, even if his eyes didn't do what they ought. He groaned, but he didn't panic along with that grimace, and that gave her even more pause. He just said her surname, and he didn't ask why he couldn't see her, and she breathed easier some. Normal folks, seeing folks, would have been panicking hard over the darkness, but this man wasn't doing anything like.
"My daddy's people were Irish," she said, because keeping someone talking was a good thing. Shock came quick and without much warning, and if he was talking she'd have an easier time knowing it was atop him. She started checking vitals, fingers quick and skilled. Pulse, lung sounds, belly sounds, anything that might give her signs of internal breathing, and all without stirring him any. "Don't move. Don’t go moving on me," she said, listening to his gut and her stethoscope up under his shirt, plastic cover warming metal against the skin. She looked on over at his arm when he reached for her, and she smiled some, though she knew now he couldn't see. "I'm here. I ain't going anywhere," she assured him, assessment still running.
She slapped the stethoscope over her neck a second later, and she started palpitating where she'd just been listening, finishing off her search for bleeding inside by watching him for wincing. She'd move to that bloodied arm next, after checking mobility best as she could without harming anything that might already be bad off. "I ain't sure what befelled you, and I got no idea how you had my number, but you're the second person I talked to recent that said things funny." She sounded like there wasn't a thing to worry about, and that was deliberate to counter the fear in his words. Clem, she had a real good poker face, one which he couldn't see. "How long you been blind, honey? That ain't from tonight. Anything else I should know about?"
Matthew could hear the smile in her voice, and despite himself he was soothed by it. He should have been more concerned, because in his confusion he had forgotten where he was, and he had no reason to believe she had any more medical training than your average village midwife (at best). “Fever,” he said, after a quick tremble of lips that betrayed the effort. “Dost thou think--” he stopped again, coughed, and had the incredible wherewithal to turn his head and spit blood to the side instead of at her, “I should have stayed abed, and found God then? ‘Twould save thy effort.” He was indescribably relieved not to be alone when he was dying, a common fear but a real one, and since his body was screaming in every place he could feel, death did not seem far off. He could hear the air moving around some tool on strings she had about her neck, but he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what it was.
The right side of his body screamed. There had been a… a vehicle, a... car. He just thought of it, and said it aloud, in his old tongue twisted around the short, ugly little phrase. “Hit me with their damned… car. What are they that move so fast?” He was warbling in and out of consciousness, deep water and new pain. He didn’t see much point in trying to stay awake to experience it all, and yet it was not in his nature to give up. He would not.
He had gotten stuck under the vehicle for a short distance, scraping away on the skin and fabric, it had obviously caught him unaware on one side, because the ribs and skin there were battered, as if by wrecking ball. It was hard to tell if the beating had come before the car or after, but there had been one, and there was purpling tissue all over what was visible, his jaw and eyes and mouth. The blood was coming from several knife wounds, most of them on the safer outside of his arms, where he’d clearly defended himself. There were several more stab wounds high on his shoulder, and two shallow but nasty ones on his right side, where someone had meant lethal business. Or several someones. There was a lot of contusions.
The only thing he hadn’t done was bash his head open. Seemed a small mercy.
He moved his scraped palms again in her direction, obviously not understanding she was doing important things. Catching the tubing of the stethoscope, he pulled at it with new panic, obviously not recognizing it. “What is this? What are you?” He was taking in a breath to batter her with more questions, but the darkness came up in a roar mid-sentence, and he blacked out, hands dropping and eyes rolling up.
Clementine had heard a whole lot of things while tending to folks who thought they were breathing their last. God was on the lips of most folks, even if she found out later they were nonbelievers. She wasn't surprised at what the man beneath her hands was saying. She was just glad he was stringing words together right, which meant he hadn't taken a hard enough blow to the head to be addled. She pulled a pulse oximeter from her bag and slipped it on his finger, checking to see his lungs were moving oxygen to his extremities, and she checked for fever, even though she was fairly sure the man was talking about how he lost his vision, and not anything recent. He didn't act like he even thought he should see, which made her assume the injury wasn't new or just months off, and she couldn't see any red on the cornea easy, nothing loose or angry, not like with something fresh.
"You look for Jesus often, honey?" she asked, that same tone that was nothing but soothing, even as he talked on about cars and being hit, and that did get her hand moving to the walkie. "You hurt anyone, or can I call you in?" she asked, but she wasn't sure the man could hear a thing. She found the drag marks from the car as she checked extremities and his spine, and she could stitch up all them knife wounds, but she wanted him somewhere flat first, where she could be sure nothing was bleeding beneath. She wasn't real concerned about crime. She was just interested in getting this man through this without red bubbling at his lips. "You say," she told him, but she didn't expect much.
A hard curse, and she stood to find boys lingering, because they always did in this part of town. Puerto Rican boys, accents thick and pants hanging past their boxers, like they were still living years ago. She didn't know a lick of Spanish, but she was blonde and pretty enough, and they agreed to stay watching the junkyard entrance until she came back.
Only took minutes, her finding her bus and driving it back into the alley and junkyard maw. "You lift him in careful," she told the boys, orange stretcher clutched to her hip and a brace for his neck, just in case his spine had something going on she hadn't found yet. If she could just get him inside, she could get him hooked up tight, vitals monitored, and she could stitch while he was out. It'd be better that way, doing what needed doing without him realizing it was happening. And she wasn't no doctor. She didn't worry about consent forms or insurance. She saved folks, and that came before any damn paperwork.
Inside the ambulance, Matthew woke up again. This time it was jarring and immediate, and there was no allowance for wavering in and out of it. His senses extended and battered at him in a way that no normal person could understand. He knew which of his ribs were floating loose, and he knew where he still bled from his side, and there were even pinprick points of fully aware pain where there was still gravel embedded in his skin. The movement of the air and his combined sense of heat and distance told him that he was in a metal box, lying on a metal and cloth bed. Several hands had just touched him, male hands, latest meal chicken and spiced rice maybe five hours before; they were four smokers and one that had been carrying a packet of false-fruit gum in his back pocket, and they were moving away from him. Matthew tried to roll over, or find the slurring, kindly voice of a woman he thought should be there, and failed. The difficulty breathing accompanied a new, tightening sensation of the neck brace around his neck, like a rigid collar, and the combination threw him into complete terror.
An explanation is probably needed. When he had still been young, stupid, and overly ambitious, Matthew had spent some time running messages for Red Hugh O’Donnell (as the history books would later name him, Anglicized, like everything else), who was imprisoned in Dublin at the time. Matthew had been hungry for a cause (and just plain hungry) back then, and in his incredible naivete, he had put his trust in the man and his fanatical desire to free Ireland from the heretic queen in England. Matthew had been caught leaving the quarters of a rebel-sympathetic Spanish diplomat by crown soldiers, and in a dark period of several days they had taken turns stringing him up by his arms from the rafters to try to get him to tell them where he was going. The burning, swelling agony generally ended up with him fainting until they got tired of holding him up there. That would have been bad enough, except upon escape, Matthew discovered the precious message he had been tortured for was a list of different types of Spanish weaponry that may or may not be helpful in the event of some vague future invasion. It wasn’t even important; practically ale-chatter. On top of that, he didn’t even get a chance to deliver it, because The O’Donnell was leading an army and already burning Galway to the ground in his insane need to force the entire country to win or die. Matthew’s patriotism had been dealt a permanent blow, and from then on he worked for men who he liked and paid well, or he didn’t work at all.
Matthew sat up against the straps of the stretcher, dark eyes wide and unseeing, hands out. He lunged for the nearest warm body, a solid heartbeat and unfamiliar scent. He did this silently, without the Irish babble from the ground in the minutes before, and he was ten times more capable and coherent than any man missing that much blood and skin should be. He found her arm in a grip that hurt and oriented himself in the direction of fresh air. The clouds out there were bursting with rain that hadn’t yet broken free, and the sense of pending escape kept the terror from becoming mindless. He scrabbled with the thing on his neck to find straps and get himself loose, now turning a blind gaze to find her in a flash of anger sharpened by fear.
"You're in my ambulance. It's where I help hurt folks." Clementine, she was real clueless to the past of the man bleeding all over her gloves, but folks panicking when they woke up in her bus, it wasn't nothing new. The man on the stretcher sat up against the straps. She was real calm, even when he grabbed at her, because she'd been held at knife and gunpoint on the job, and a blind man bleeding all over didn't scare her much. Probably explained why she didn't mind this job any, the fact that she didn't scare. "Guess your neck's just fine," she said, her voice lacking any confrontation whatsoever. "I ain't that small, especially not for a woman, but I got some help bringing you in here so I can stitch what's bleeding and wrap those ribs. You lie on back for me, and I'll keep the doors open, and I'll take the collar off, seeing as you just sat up on your lonesome."
Real logical, and maybe too many words for someone injured, but Clementine had learned real early that talking helped tons. Didn't really matter what she said; mattered what she didn't say. Talking around folks, it made them panic more. Made them real sure they were heading for some pearly gates and bright lights, and Clementine wasn't religious enough to have any real clue why that was. But talking to folks, it gave them something to focus at, even if most of them couldn't understand a lick of what she was saying. This weren't no different. Him being blind, she factored that in and expected some extra panic, and she told him extra physical things she wouldn't tell a seeing person, but that was about all.
She undid the carry straps while he reached for them, and the collar went next. "Didn't want you rolling over and falling off while they helped me get you in here. My stuff's all here, for stitching. You going to let me stitch you?" she asked. He wasn't going to bleed out on her damn bus, but she didn't want to sedate him if she didn't need to. She wasn't real keen on sedating. Folks went into it fine, stable, and then she'd lose them unexpected. She was practical enough to know she was going to lose most of the damn folks she tended, because of the nature of her job, but that didn't mean she liked it any; she'd fight those odds as much as she could.
Matthew listened/felt the heartbeat of the woman under his hands. It was very strong and sure, indicating someone of good health and confidence. She was not afraid of him, the tinge in her sweat was effort and not panic, and there was so much of the modern on her (tires, gasoline, concrete, second-hand smoke of the same lungs and hands that had touched him moments before) that he was absolutely unable to avoid the stark reality that he was not hanging from any rafter, and not home, either. His panic began to drain visibly from his face. It was easy to see the expressions moving over it. Because he never had the perception to see the expressions of others, and react to them immediately, he lacked the control necessary to instinctively conceal how he felt. When left to their own devices, his eyelids dropped slightly, too heavy for him and unnecessary in their vital biological function. His pupils didn’t feel the need for protection from light. Instead his mouth and the muscles in his forehead tensed and eased. Relief, resignation, doused fear, pain. “Who are you?” He loosed his grip on her, almost finger by finger.
The surge of adrenaline left him. Matthew swayed where he sat, the straps of the stretcher that still entangled him creaking against his weight. The coat had slid off his shoulder and revealed more black and serious bulk, muscle capable of bearing his weight and more besides. He didn’t look like so much in the coat, something about the way it hung, but now it was clear that he clawed his way through violence most handily, when necessary. Matthew lay back. Fell back. Either. “Murphy,” he said, weakly. “Ay, it returns to me, you say. Tis the woman in the book described.” He rattled off her phone number in his rolling tones, tongue thick.
“An admirable woman good with words and with needles,” he tried a smile but it was very haphazard, “yet a wise one would be packing.” His eyes turned in her direction without meeting hers. “Matthew Murdock is a dangerous friend to have, I think,” he said, very softly. He took in a sharp breath through his nose against the pain and rolled slightly to take the pressure off his damaged side.
It was small glances that clued her into the man beneath her hands relaxing some, and she smiled soft where he couldn't see. She wasn't a woman made for soft, and that was Murphy from beginning to end, and her momma was only soft when the script went calling for quiet sighs. But Clem smiled, glad panic was setting itself aside, because it was always easier to treat someone calm, someone who wasn't fighting you and themselves at the same damn time. "Name's Clementine Murphy. I got no clue who you are, and I got no clue how you got my number to have someone call for me."
But he explained near as soon as she was done, while she was tied up in looking at his shoulder, coat gone and muscle showing plenty beneath. Another grin he couldn't see, but this one was ringing clear as church bells in her voice. "Matthew M." She didn't give her number out much, and she was just now back in this world of helping folks, so remembering wasn't hard. "You make a habit of this," she said, and it wasn't a question; the statement was real rhetorical.
"Now, don't go complimenting me too much. Let's make sure you walk out of here first," she said, turning her attention to his side and listening with her scope, hunting out anything that might sound like puncturing before she started wrapping him some. "I ain't real wise, and I like complicated friends. Normal folks bore me to pieces," she told him, but she didn't sound young enough to go thrill seeking. She sounded practical, and she supposed she was some, which was a whole new realization in recent weeks. "You some kind of vigilante? This place has 'em plenty."
“Little more, if so.” His voice had gone soft and weak. His eyes were still half-open, staring blankly into the everyday absence of light that always seemed to pave the way to an even greater darkness. His breathing was equally soft, but growing more labored, and he did little to control it. There was no whistling in the lungs, a good sign, and though his mouth was wet with blood, it was still a good hope that the beatings swelling his face also cut through the generous lower lip. He stayed on his “good” side as she listened and cut away fabric. “I am rife with bad habits, I am, but it seemeth to me today offered… little choice.”
He put out one hand, questing again through the air for her, brushing an elbow and testing the air for anything that wasn’t the metallic sting of his own blood in the air. “They peddle their bitter wares on the…” Now he searched for the word through his own disappointment and anger, flexing his shoulders back against the cot and rolling his neck in frustration. “To the children. They are…” He skipped on the words, chewing through them, translating. “Selling. Selling the drugs to them.” He hissed a breath into his nose.
“Faith, I fear I only lead our way to death’s gate, and bring the demons here. Come, they will… to silence thee...” A new gasp. He tried to sit up.
"Want to say what got you fighting so hard, or you secretive?" she asked, but she could already tell he was talking, and that he wasn't inclined on stopping. But it gave her a chance to listen as she asked, seeing if that blood come up was anything worrisome. But then he went flexing his shoulders and rolling his neck, and she put a real steady hand on that shoulder of his. "You quit rolling that. That side's bleeding still, and I got to get you stitched. Don't you go making it any worse, or I'll fuss at you for making me work extra." She said it smiling, and it carried in her voice, deliberate-like. It was her Sunday-come-calling voice, playful but real firm, something made for suitors getting too handsy, but too damn well-connected to be plain bossy at.
"I worried a whole lot about my nephew and drugs. He was hiding something, and I figured it could be that, back when he was a teenager. Now I think it was something real harmless. Boy likes art, and he thought he'd go getting judged for it, on account of us being from a place where men don't like things that ain't shooting small living creatures." She was talking to be soothing, more than anything else, but her voice sounded fond all the same, and she'd just about decided it would be fine to drive him on home.
See, Clem, she'd sold off her place in Gotham, and she had herself a place on W 37th now. No Manhattan address, and Hell's Kitchen and a short walk to work would be just fine. Course, she'd had Jack carry all her stuff with her for days before he took off to go finding himself, so it was something like Gotham had just up and moved with her. But she liked her things, and she figured her bed was soft enough for this man. His motives were good, and she wasn't real accustomed to good motives. Like getting back into the job, it felt like a real nice change.
He tried to sit up, and she put her hand back on his shoulder. "You lie down, and you let me worry about folks coming to silence me. I ain't scared of a thing." She wasn't. Undead did that to her, and maybe it wasn't half bad. She'd always been real good at country sports, shooting and things her daddy liked, but exorcising her demons and living through the undead twice, they changed a woman some. "Rest, honey. Quit fighting it. You'll be fine with me."
He knew enough of the words to understand what she was saying in context, which is probably much the way he understood what he was saying. He didn’t think she comprehended the gravity of the situation, of the things the people he was fighting would do for their damned money, but he was unable to express it to her. As she spoke of family (distant, to him, he barely managed to listen) he thought he should try to move somewhere protected, away from her, or perhaps hidden for both of them. She didn’t fear, but that didn’t mean she shouldn’t.
“It is a poor corpse and no aid that I leave you.” When he died, she would be left with a body that could get her killed, and the potential tried to put him into a new frenzy of activity--but it was a short-lived attempt. The damaged side would not bear his weight. He thought his time was done, because these kinds of injuries didn’t see a lot of miraculous recovery where he was from. He felt her hand on his shoulder, and he put up his own to touch the outside of her elbow with his fingertips. “I am sorry,” he said, using her phrase, blinking rapidly.
Despite the direction Matthew tried to move again, reposition so he could take in more of her with his additional senses. His bones protested, his flesh stung and stabbed. He stopped, sighing into another stretch of unconsciousness.
She was real bad at comprehending gravity these days, seeing as she worked by running into burning places to slap bandages on folks. It wasn't safe or wise, and she knew that every damn day she went to work could be her last. Blame it on the undead, but she'd lost whatever fear she had of bad things 'round the corner. When you spent a full year doing nothing but avoiding being ate, and when you realized being ate wasn't near as bad at what living folks would do to survive, perspectives changed real rapid. She was living these days, was Clem, and the risks that came along with, they were ones she chose. She chose this one, this man bleeding in her bus, same as she chose the rest.
"You ain't dying on me, honey. I was top in my class. I was good enough for medical school, and only reason I didn't go was on account of it might make my folks happy. Ain't a lot of good in doing something to make folks ornery, only to end up with them real proud at the end." She looked at the fingers that touched her elbow, and she didn't yank away any. Touching, it helped scared folks, and any man thought he was dying was scared folk, even if he was brave and strong.
She could tell he'd hurt something when he moved, and she was fussed and pleased at the same time. It meant she could put him out without anything strong. She needed to work on him, and it'd be real easy if he was still.
She looked at her watch, checked his vitals, and she got to work with her stitching and bandaging.
She was fast, and she was neat, and it didn't take long at all. She drove back home, where she got help from her neighbor's boy to get Matt upstairs and into her guest room. It made her smile some, once Matt was settled and she'd checked his vitals real careful, because he'd be waking in a mess of pink and feminine he couldn't even see, and she got a feeling the man wasn't real used to soft. But she cleaned him up good, got him comfortable, and she set some tea on to wait for him to rouse. The place smelled like azaleas and camomile, verbena and real bright things, and all layered over with Chanel No. 5, and he'd wake up smelling just the same. It made her smile some more.
But duty called before Matt rose, and she was off to Stark Tower with her neighbor's son left sitting vigil. The boy was Puerto Rican, and Clem couldn't understand half what he said, but he was the good sort, a little slow, but real sweet. The sleeping man was out of the woods, and Clem left feeling real sure of that. She figured whatever was going on at Stark Tower, it would be sussed out real quick, and she'd check-in soon as she was done. Any luck, she'd get back before her patient even roused.