Chapter Text
MARCH, 1969
It takes a good while, but eventually Bullseye manages to choke down some of the food. It’s not great , and it all feels awful clogged with grease even though logically he knows it’s just lettuce and dressing and whatnot, and maybe for once, he understands why Matty always seemed to be such a snob when it came to food.
Matty used to curl his lip up, like the snarl of a hound dog, whenever he was presented with food that he deemed unworthy; it’d been real funny, once or twice, watching him at Family dinners try not to make that face at whatever Mr. Fisk had had his cooks prepare for them that week.
And it just gets him thinking about Family Dinners, and how they weren’t the best of times, and he’d get bored and squirm and Mr. Fisk never much liked that and Mr. Wesley would always tug and pull at his hair beforehand, trying to get the tangled knots to behave and look presentable for Dinner. Until Matty started helping with his hair some, but even then, it was always such a hassle for Matty to deal with, just for him to get it tangled up again the second he went outside the next day and--
Elektra brings him to the present. Her voice is jagged and cuts like glass through the hotel room, and it reminds Bullseye that they’re not at Home, that his hair won’t be managed by Matty, that Matty is gone , that they’re on a Mission from God to save him.
“Have you made your decision?”
Maybe that’s why he was thinking about his hair. ‘Cause she wants it clean and brushed, and he just knows that if he doesn’t, there’s gonna be all sorts of rude names sitting on the edge of her tongue like the dewy bead of a raindrop on a spring leaf just begging to overflow and drop like poison.
“Guess you’re right,” He says after a while, and he finally lets the fork he was holding rest against the lip of the takeout container. “Guess I don’t wanna do it tomorrow.”
She doesn’t smile so much as look vindicated, saying, “Come, then,” as she stands and makes her way across the hotel room. Each one of her steps has got a purpose to it; she has, and will continue to remind Bullseye of Matty, in the way that they look like dancers.
He hasn’t seen many dancers in his lifetime, but sometimes members of the Flock would dance, and there’s been a couple who said they used to do ballet , and they’d even showed him what that looks like and gave him stories about ballets and fancy music and fancy suits, and it sure did sound like something Matty might like to do, considering he looked like a crane when he moved.
Nothin’ birdlike about Elektra, though. She moves like a mountain lion.
Bullseye untangles himself from his perch on the bed, and follows her as she leads him to the bathroom. He doesn’t really like the lights here; they’re kinda sharp and fluttery and not as nice as the buttery, warm light of Home. But he’ll have to get used to it, if Elektra’s to be believed; they might be on this Mission for long, long while.
He hovers by the doorway, watching as she draws the bath, spreading his fingers through one another as his mind cycles through prayers and words and thoughts and feelings that will keep him from feeling like he’s gonna jump out of his skin.
The tile of the floor is cold underneath his feet in a way Home never is; the worn cherry wood hard floors there never feel so icy, so sticky, so wrong . It leaves him staring at the grooves in the tile, not wanting to scare Elektra by staring at her as she does this.
In each tile, he remembers something:
The first, bathing himself in the creek out back, alone and wandering and covered in mud in the sharp June heat. Matty has just come Home for the first time and still won’t speak to him; for once, Bullseye has someone to speak to, to be around, and he’s still ignored. It feels awful familiar, and it prickles something nasty and fierce at the back of his mind, and so he spends a lot of that summer out back, hiding away, losing himself to the forest and the trees and the creek, caking his skin in mud.
In another, the memory is as gray and frigid as the bathwater he sits in, the porcelain of the tub stained and gritty and dirty and the radio from the other room screaming on and on and on about something or another, punctuated only by snoring, snoring that Bullseye does his best to drown out (breath alcohol-bitter, shouting, skin close, close, so close and hurting ), pouring icy, smelly water over his head as he tries to get himself clean. Well water, smelling of sulphur. Even humming can’t drown nothin’ out, ‘cause his voice is scratchy, and scratchy and raw and full of tears and--
The next, he’s at Home and Mr. Wesley has told him how to bathe, and the water is warm, and the lighting is comfortable, and the bathroom smells of herbal soaps and shampoos and he hates baths, always will, makes him dizzy and weak and will just be necessary to repeat in a week anyways, but this one’s better, if only because it means he’s going to see Mr. Fisk soon, and even though Matty had snarled at him from the hallway earlier that cleaning himself up for daddy won’t make him less of a filthy creature, it’s hard to let his good mood get ruined, even if that word makes him want to gnash his teeth.
And there’s another, and maybe another, and another, layers and layers that he doesn’t know exist, but Elektra is looking at him again, staring at him like he’s some stupid thing, and his gaze rises from the floor to look at her for a bit, a mite uncomfortable, until she says, “Is there something you wish to say?”
His eyes dart back to the floor, because there’s nothing he can say, and he doesn’t wanna talk to her all about his memories, ‘cause Elektra doesn’t seem to like memories at all, and so he says nothing, and lets them fade away to nothingness, and tries to focus on the tile here, the bath now, Elektra staring at him from under her hair.
“Then I suggest you stop merely standing around.”
He nods, and his fingers feel itchy, so he busies them with plucking at the fabric of his clothes, pulling them off garment by garment until his skin breaks out in goosebumps in the bathroom air, naked save for the way his hair cascades and covers him, protects him, keeps him hidden.
Elektra watches him for a moment before she gestures roughly to the bathtub, her pointing finger a harkening, visionary image, like one of the paintings in the House at Home. She reminds Bullseye of fairy tales, the kind that Matty liked him to read out loud to him, the ones with knights and fairy courts and the women who lurk beneath the waves of lakes, a sword in hand, ready for the taking.
Only Elektra seems to be the type to emerge from the lake and take the sword herself.
He lifts a leg to dip his toe into the water first, testing how hot it’ll be. It’s not achingly hot, but it’s not freezing, either; his skin doesn’t like either of the extremes, so this is alright. He lowers himself slowly into the water, pulling his knees up to his chest and and gathering his hair tight enough that he can throw it over his shoulders.
The heat clogs his nostrils and eyes and his head feels like he’s at a Party.
Elektra kneels in front of the lip of the bathtub, but her movements are peripheral in his vision, barely a note in his conscience as he pulls his knees up to his chin and wraps his arms around his legs, trying not to think of the bathroom tiles again. She must pour water on him, but he’s not expecting it, and his body shivers, shivers at the sensation of warm water rushing down his back and cascading his hair like long strands of sun-grown algae across his back.
Pour after pour until he’s wet to the bone, wetter than he must’ve ever been in his whole life, and she’s never bathed him so he doesn’t know how to tell her that he’s wet enough without making her mad . It’s loads of horrible until she begins to lather shampoo into his hair, her long nails scritching against his scalp pleasantly. Bullseye can feel a smile pulling at his lips, and after a moment, he mumbles, the heat and the comfort slurring his speech, “Matty used t’do this.”
“Well I suppose someone must have had to, as you seem to either be incapable of or unwilling to do this yourself.”
The smile slips from his face and he presses his mouth against his forearm, focusing on the sensation of skin touching skin for a moment before he pulls back and whines, “It’s just hard . And it takes awful long and sometimes I start gettin’ dizzy if it takes too long and the water’s too hot.”
Already, the heat is getting to him, enveloping his brain in clouds that make it hard to cut through, hard to remember where he is, who he’s with, what he’s doing. It makes him shiver, over and over again, his limbs jittering and pulling on one another and soon enough, it feels like he’s about to jump right out of his skin.
The tiles speak to him, taunt him, remind him of memories he’d love to replace, replace, replace.
Elektra maneuvers him and he doesn’t bother trying to fight it, letting her move him as necessary to get the bath over with. He hardly feels it after a while, instead focusing on the heat in his face, the stinging of his eyes that he knows isn’t from the tap water, but rather his own eyes, leaking steadily into the water as he shakes, and shakes, and shakes.
The faucet drips every now and again, and he all but flinches whenever it does. It reminds him of another sink faucet, broken and leaky and costing them money, so much money, money that builds up that dad spends willy nilly without a thought in the world for food and--
Elektra’s fingers run slowly through his hair, long thin strands getting caught under her nails, but not in an unpleasant way. Matty never did this; he’s not certain that Matty ever knew how to care for long hair, since the longest he let it grow was to his shoulders before he took his katana and cut, cut, cut, or Wesley took him in and had a barber take it to an appropriate length.
Thinking of Matt makes him want to sob, not the silent kind, but the kind that folds itself into his chest and releases with audible distress, but it’s better to think of him than the other things, the half-memories that swirl around his mind like inky sins that have yet to be released into the ether.
As though through a veil, she hums an unknown tune, and the water drips with his tears in time with the faucet, and his eyes are open, but he’s not seeing nothin’, nothin’ at all but a blurry impression of the world that does him no good. Sometimes, the world fades from the present and his head creates the memories of times long past and time yet to come and makes them now, and it’s all he can do to sit there and shake and let Elektra touch him and smooth her fingers through her hair and not get up and freak out and do the kind of naughty things that’d get Matty thrown in the Shed or him locked in the Big House.
The water turns frigid, and he finds himself shaking more. The skin under his eyes ache from the tears, and itch once it dries; he only realizes he’s not crying anymore when Elektra reaches forward and pulls the plug out, and the drain begins to slurp and empty the contents of the tub.
He feels bare to the world.
“It is finished,” She says, and slowly she stands up, her form hovering over him and her hand brushing against the shower curtain.
He’s never noticed how tall she is, but now, towering above him, he feels frozen, his limbs trying to stop shaking, trying to stop moving, trying to not be so visible . Bullseye’s heart jumps in his chest, and it’s only once it calms down, that he’s certain he can breathe normally, that he tries to stand, avoiding eye contact with her.
Hair clings to him. There’s a small pond back behind the grounds back Home, a little further than the stream that runs through it, where he and Matty had played a few times a summer. In the thick of the July heat, one summer, when the dragonflies soared through the cattails and the cicadas screamed from the trees, Bullseye had waded through the shallows of the pond while Matty leaned against the rotting pillar of an ancient dock, smoking a cigarette.
He had said, “There are cicadas in Japan. It always sounded the same in summer as it does here.”
Bullseye had turned to him, and the heat-nurtured algae clung to his body in wet, slimy strands, and as it dried to his arms, it grew hot, and he was forced to scrub it from his body. He had said, “Sometimes there’s so many of them and they have bright red eyes and they’ll climb all over you. Only one summer, though.”
Matty had hummed and stubbed his cigarette against the wood and said, “I suppose even the devil comes up through the dirt, occasionally.” He flicked his cigarette butt at Bullseye and, in retaliation, Bullseye had thrown fresh, wet algae at him.
His hair coils around his arms as he climbs out of the bathtub.
He watches rivulets of water run down his flesh, and then feels a towel moving his head roughly, as Elektra dries his hair to the best of her abilities. Bullseye doesn’t have the voice to tell her it will just knot his hair again.
The towel is warm, and he pulls it from her, wrapping it around himself to shiver into the cloth. He hugs it close, dipping his chin into it, and his jaw clacks together a few times when his bare feet step onto the cool tile and off the bathroom rug.
By the time he finds his bag and manages to pull on a pair of slacks, Elektra all but pulls him to the bed, climbing on it and gesturing for him to follow her. He follows where she wants him and she runs her fingers through his hair once more, fingers running harshly through tangled strands.
“Quiet now, if I braid your hair now, it will make brushing it tomorrow far easier.” She says, and her voice behind him makes him shiver, his shoulders hunching in for a moment.
He tries to be good, he really really really does, but it’s hard and it’s not a simple task, and as she brings a comb to his hair, over and over and over again he has to stop himself from flinching or moving too much or getting distracted. He feels tense.
She separates his hair, and all he can think about is Matty, and the Mission, and Home and how everything feels wrong and kind of hopeless and terrifying and how he’s never really been away for a long time, and Elektra won’t tell him how long this will take, and how Matty isn’t even probably in New York anymore, and Bullseye hasn’t even been outside of New York since Mr. Fisk took him in and kept him fed and clothed and safe and how the place he was in wasn’t as safe as New York, not in a long-shot, and--
“I don’t like this.” It bursts from his lungs like the bubbles of an upturned stone in a creek, and he tries not to get lost in thinking about the creek at Home, the lake at Home, the Matty who should be Home.
Elektra’s voice is cold and collected. “We must braid your hair. Otherwise all the time devoted to ensuring it is clean will be for naught.”
And she just doesn’t get it, doesn’t seem to care, doesn’t seem to really understand or see how the world’s been turned topsy turvy and awful , and he squeezes out, “Not the hair , ‘Lektra,” because she needs to know that he’s not a kid, he’s not complaining about his hair being done.
“What, exactly, do you dislike, Bullseye?”
He doesn’t know how to explain it, is the problem, and he wishes she would just get it. Matty would just get it. Whichever Matty would get it, and would figure it out, and put it into words for him, or else he wouldn’t use his words at all and would just know what Bullseye means and fix it like any good brother should. So he kind of flaps his hands aimlessly in front of him, trying to grab the words from thin air, and manages “It’s-- It’s everythin.’ We’re… awful far away from Home now, I reckon, and I haven’t even been away without Matty for a long time, an’ I just feel awful sick and awful scared right about now, and it feels-- it just feels wrong , ‘Lektra!”
Elektra is quiet for a moment, and strands of his hair loop and loop and loop with her practiced hands. Matty was good at pulling his hair from his face, braiding it, but Elektra does it so easily , with a grace that not even Matty could accomplish.
“When is the last time that you left Home?”
Bullseye sucks in a breath and thinks, and the thinking helps to focus his words so it’s not just everything bouncing around loose and carefree in his brain. “Well… Matty an’ I went on Missions together a lot, but that all stopped once started goin’ out to Recrui--” His scalp is on fire, it burns, his hair pulled taut and tight and his head almost buckles back in her grip. “ Ow , ‘Lektra, you’re pullin’ my hair !”
The pressure slowly loosens, and Bullseye can hear her take a breath deeper than the rest. Her words are stiff. “I suggest you stop moving, then,” but it’s not even fair, because he’s sat so still for her other than when she yanked his head back. He wants to argue, but he doesn’t want his hair to be pulled again, so he just nods and tries not to wince when his scalp gets tugged on again.
He tries to focus on the hair. Everything else makes him want to scream, or bash something, or throw something, or cry, and so he focuses on his hair, and the repetitive movement of strands being pulled over, under, pulled taut, repeated, slowly calms him, and he surprises himself when he yawns and tries to stretch to stay awake, his eyes grown heavy. “How much longer is this gonna take? I wanna go to sleep .”
“Are you this impatient for Matthew ?” Elektra asks, and sometimes Bullseye hates how her tone is so mean without saying anything mean at all, really.
“Matty’s faster than you,” He says, and says quieter, “An’ scarier.”
Elektra’s tugs slightly too hard and says, “Sit still, and I will be able to finish this with ease.”
Bullseye huffs, and digs his hands into the comforter of the bed, bunching up the cloth. “I’m not even movin’ around much, ‘Lektra, I promise , you just keep on pullin’ on my hair! I’m tryin’ to be good for you, I promise, I promise, I promise--” He forces himself to cut off the sentence, wanting to say it again, and again, and again.
“You have been good, thus far. You have been very well behaved.” And she doesn’t even say it real softly, or nicely, but she smooths her hands down his hair as she says it, and it makes him almost lean forward (before he remembers and stops himself), and lets himself smile instead. He is being good, even if Elektra’s not good at tellin’ him. And he even sits still for the rest of the braiding, waiting until it’s tied off to move.
He twists around, pulling his leg up onto the bed with him, watching her stare at him for a moment before he lets himself give in a hug her, pulling himself tight against her. Normally, she smells good, flowery and light, and she doesn’t right now, not after the day they’ve had, but it doesn’t matter, because at the end of the day, she’s here with him, and he’d be alone without her, and she’s helping him find Matty so they can go home, and he just wants to touch someone, anyone, and have them tell him things will turn out okay . She pulls her arms around him tentatively, in the same way that Matty sometimes hesitates (not always, not always, not anymore, before he left it became a different thing, different Moods) and Bullseye realizes he’s shaking a little again, because the quiet that came with braiding has faded into thinking about everything again.
“We’ll find him, right?” His voice chokes out, like there’s minnows stuck there, and his words are muffled against her shoulder.
“...I do not know , Bullseye,” Is her response, and he wants to scream at the honesty. But he doesn’t. Because that wouldn’t be good.
He shakes against her until she slowly starts to pull back, laying the both of them back. Her hair splays out all over the bed, and he supposes it’s a good thing his won’t, now, so their hair doesn’t get tangled together. Bullseye doesn’t worry too much about his weight on her, because she’s taller, and probably stronger, and Matty always told him he was too scrawny for his own good, anyways.
Laying on her like this, he can almost ignore the terror that strikes him when he thinks about how Elektra doesn’t know where Matty is, how long this is going to take. His eyes grow heavy after a while, and when she tells him, “Sleep,” her fingers trailing along his back as though writing secret runes into the sensitive skin of his spine, he almost can’t help but obey and close his eyes, and turn off his mind. His limbs are weary and exhausted, the occasional shake still wracking his body as he calms down, relaxes, let’s go of the horror of the day.