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Elektra loves American Christmas. Raised primarily in posh British and French boarding schools, where Christmas had a considerably more Victorian cast, she’d never experienced the gloriously tacky splendor of Santa mania in New York. Normally, her attitude toward American excess could charitably be described as skeptical, but Christmas was different.
Matt had laughed as her anticipated horror of the Thanksgiving Day Parade almost immediately collapsed beneath the weight of her own delight (“So that’s what marching bands are!”) and converted her utterly to the hothouse innocence of the American holiday season. “I know it’s fake,” she breathed in wonder. “But it feels so real.”
“It is real,” Matt had said. “It’s just a great big Pavlovian wonder-induction machine.”
“You seem rather immune to its charms.”
“Well, that’s because I’m a contrary son of a bitch, sweetie.”
Now, she delights in the lights and the cheesy pop songs and the tinsel that always seems to get trapped in scarves and hats. She delights in the delight of the tourists, too, lining up to see the animatronic window displays at the fancy department stores, and the children whooping as they dragged their parents into FAO Schwarz. She loves the exhausted moms and the cranky dads, and the world-weary Santas and elves smoking in the alley behind Macy’s on their lunch breaks. She discovers a perverse and profound love for Starbucks’ holiday peppermint mochas.
Most of all, she loves the skating rink at Rockefeller Center, and after weeks of persuading, she finally convinces Matt to come with her. He’s never skated before in his life, ice hasn’t exactly been his friend over the years, and he’s never tried to manage his senses at anything faster than a run, but he’s learning that Elektra’s a hard woman to say no to for long.
And, okay, fine: He loves it. After some wobbly trial and error, he gets the skate strokes down, feels confident enough to pick up more speed. They fly around and around the rink, laughing and breathing hard, the cold wind in their faces making them feel as if they’re moving even faster than they really are. They skate and skate and skate, and with each lap, Matt’s distaste for Christmas, for the crowds and the noise and all the families that aren’t his to have, falls further and further away.
The crowd thins out the closer they get to the center of the rink, and his nervousness thins out too. The sound is so weird here, a strange salad of Christmas carols and laughter and heightened heartbeats and children’s squeals and city traffic, all reflecting sharply off the smooth ice below before ping-ponging off the plexiglass barriers and vanishing into the open sky above. He’s more lost than he wants to admit. But with less risk of running into anyone—or anyone running into him—he begins to relax into the rare joy of moving fast in public.
They skate faster and faster, until the rink guard whistles at them to slow down, but instead of moderating their pace, Elektra guides him into the center where the more skilled skaters jump and spin. She pulls him round a few times in a lazy ring-around-the-rosy before drawing him in close and threading her hands around his waist.
“I’d buy you your own skating rink just so I could see the smile you have on your face right now,” she says, a laugh rippling around the edges of her words and a burst of perfume bubbling up from her scarf whenever her hair brushes it.
Matt holds her tight and tilts his head to kiss her. They kiss for so long people think they’ve gotten engaged—there’s a smattering of applause and aww’s mixed in with the sighs of teenage girls and exclamation of one very perceptive kindergartner who announces boldly, “Mommy, they’re kissing!”
They laugh and kiss again, paying their audience no mind. Let them stare. Let them wonder. Let them envy. This is what happiness is supposed to feel like, he thinks. This is what it means to be whole.
It’s Christmas in New York and Matt Murdock is in love.
Eventually, though, a rink guard glides past with a gentle but firm, “Either skate or get a room, kids,” and they laugh and Matt clasps Elektra’s hand and kisses it.
“Let’s go again.”
Much later that night, sore from the unaccustomed movement and exhausted from the cold, they lay in bed after making love, too spent for another go but still too blissed out to stop touching each other. Matt loves the curve of her brows and the planes of her cheeks, the delicate little whorl of her ear and the long sweet slope of her lip. He could keep going but she’s sensitive everywhere right now; even the lightest touch to her neck makes her jump.
It doesn’t matter: There’s no part of her he couldn’t take pleasure in touching. She hums as he does, a sweet aching melody he later learns is a Greek Christmas carol.
“Is this how you look at me?” she asks sleepily. “Does it help you see me in your mind?”
“No,” Matt says, kissing her forehead. “I don’t see anything in my mind anymore. I don’t need to.” He lets his hand drift lightly across her cheekbone. “I know your skin feels like a—kind of like a peach. It’s smooth and a little dry, and you have—is that a little mole there?” She nods against his hand. “And I know you taste like salt,” he says, touching his tongue to her lower lip, “and copper and strawberries.” He presses his nose against the crown of her hair and breathes in deep. “And you smell like vanilla and lilies and just a little bit of sweat because you didn’t wash your hair today. It’s a smoky scent, almost, like a fireplace in winter. It’s cozy and warm and I want to wrap myself up in it forever.”
“Mmm,” Elektra murmurs, wrapping her arms around him and snuggling in close. “You make me sound so delicious.”
“Because you are.” Matt nibbles on her lower lip again and she smiles and presses her forehead to his. “And when you speak, I can feel your voice resonate through your bones, like a bell when it rings.”
“I’m not so sure about having my head compared to a bell, Matthew,” she says with mock skepticism.
“No, it’s beautiful, trust me,” Matt protests, rubbing his nose against hers. She laughs at this and the music of it spills out between them like honey.
It was her voice he loved first, the perfect Castilian accent she spoke with in the Spanish literature elective they’d both taken the year before to meet their foreign language requirement. He’d been shocked to learn she wasn’t Spanish at all, that she speaks perfect Parisian French and posh London English just as fluently in addition to her native Athenian Greek. She’s also learning Japanese; there’s always room for more words in her head, and if she occasionally forgets which language she’s speaking and slips into a different one, what does it matter? Her voice is beautiful no matter what words it shapes.
Braille escapes her utterly, however—she simply can’t get the hang of it. She’s not lying, either, just to patronize him—she’s genuinely foiled by it. And Matt tries not to gloat, tries not to enjoy the fact that there’s at least one language he knows better than she, but he does anyway.
Sometimes at night when she can’t sleep, she’ll ask him to read aloud to her so they don’t have to turn on the lights. Not everything comes in Braille, but for his birthday she’d bought him a tall stack of Hemingway novels, and later she’ll tell him that she’ll never be able to read old Papa again without hearing his words in Matt’s voice. This gives him a weird possessive pleasure, as if he’s tattooed her somehow, marked part of her mind as his own.
They’re only halfway through A Farewell to Arms when everything falls apart and she leave him forever. He’s never finished that book, and he doesn’t think he ever will. But he’ll never forget her favorite lines: We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.
Ten years later, he’ll inscribe it on her tomb.
The Midnight Mass crowd at Clinton Church gets smaller every year. Father Lantom takes an equanimous view: Neighborhoods change and diversity is a good thing. The gentrification, less so, but at least it means the clothes donated for the kids at St. Agnes are much nicer than they used to be.
The smallness of the congregation—the intimacy, Lantom would say—is what Matt prefers about it. Christmas Day is chaos, even at a church with diminishing numbers, but tonight he doesn’t have to dodge squalling babies and wailing toddlers and the confused cacophony of twice-a-year Catholics mumbling through the liturgy and forgetting the melodies of the hymns and the pitying ghouls who turn to stare at him whenever they get to the part about the light shining in the darkness.
Midnight Mass at Clinton Church is for the nuns and the older orphans, the Wednesday-morning mass-goers and the twice-a-week confessors, the junkies and the prostitutes who want a warm place to sit for a few more hours after a supper of lasagna and salad in the church basement and a handful of Filipino sailors whose billets have carried them to the other side of the world today. It’s for the elderly Irish widows who remind Matt of his grandmother and the Congolese cab driver who hasn’t seen his children in nine years and the two aging Puerto Rican brothers who Matt knows aren’t really brothers and a uniformed EMT who just wants to take squeeze in 45 minutes of Christmas before her 24-hour shift begins.
Midnight Mass at Clinton Church is for people without their people, for the bloody and alone, for the solitary communion Matt’s always felt at home with the most. Midnight Mass at Clinton Church is where people come to be lonely together. It’s been nine days since he buried Elektra, twelve since she died in his arms and the loss is still deep angry wound he can barely breathe around.
He’d stopped missing his sight a long time ago, but sometimes he did miss knowing the world the way everyone else did, and tonight he allowed himself the indulgence of wishing he’d been able to see her, just for one day. To have been able to catch the glint of sunlight in her hair, or find constellations in the faint cast of freckles across her nose he knew she hid beneath her makeup, or delight in the way her pupils widened right before she laughed. To have known if she’d been looking at him when she died.
Stop.
It feels impossible to celebrate the birth of Christ when he can still hear the exact moment the breath left her lungs forever, still feel the tiny shiver and collapse of her heart as it tumbled and stumbled in her breast until it failed. It feels impossible to believe there is still a world left for Him to save without her in it.
A perfect union with God is the mathematical limit that the function of our lives can infinitely approach but never achieve, Matt had once declared angrily to Lantom back in high school, his head full of calculus and rage and the last few shreds of self-pity he’d managed to squirrel away from Sister Maggie’s unsentimental eye.
Lantom had just listened to Matt with ceaseless infuriating patience until the argument wore itself out under the weight of its own adolescent preposterousness, knowing even then that all Matt was ever trying to ask was Am I always going to be alone?
He doesn’t remember Lantom’s reply, but he knows that at least for a little while, with Elektra in his arms and Foggy by his side and Karen’s laughter like music in his ear, he knew the answer was no.
We were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.
It’s the morning of Christmas Eve before he can bring himself to visit her grave—to see whether or not it’s even still there. He’s happy to find that it is, even if he her body isn’t, though he can’t help but wonder if she’d somehow been returned to it. Whether her bones are there or not, he’s just glad to have something of hers to touch still, something solid to remind himself that she was real. The scent of her blood has finally faded from his bed, and with it his last sensory link to her. He’s already begun to forget her voice. Just a little yet, but he’s forgetting all the same.
This stone, false though it may be, will soon be all he has left.
It’s a raw, misty day, but he doesn’t mind. He kneels at the stone and wipes the dead, damp leaves away before removing his gloves and reaching forward. The marker is freezing and slick as glass; Stick had splurged on polished marble for his Ellie. He presses his palm flat against it, letting the cold scald his skin and seep painfully into the aching bones of his always-sore hand.
Matt understands now why Stick had refused to allow himself to be loved like a father; that after sending her away he couldn’t bear the pain of loving another. When Stick said attachments made you weak, this was what he was talking about, and when they buried her, Matt could hear the heartbreak in his pulse. It almost—almost—made Matt feel sorry for him.
But not quite. Not enough to claim his body from the Metro General morgue, to keep him from being dumped into an unmarked grave on Plum Island with the rest of the city’s impoverished dead. Besides, he’d gone into the ground with his head still attached; better for all of them if the Hand couldn’t find him.
Elektra, though. Would anyone ever find her? Had her bones been among the vaporized scraps of flesh and bone they’d found among the nameless corpses beneath Midland Circle? Or had she gotten out too? Would he ever know?
Would he ever be okay with not knowing?
He traces his finger along the sharp edges of her name, just below the Hemingway quote. He pauses at the top of the A at the end of her first name and pressing the pad of his finger hard against the point as if it were the tip one of her sais.
There’s another world inside him that he visits sometimes, the one where they made it off that warehouse rooftop in Brooklyn and found a taxi to take them to the airport. Never mind their armor and weapons, never mind that neither had a wallet or a passport, Elektra kept a private jet gassed up and ready take them anywhere they wanted to go, with enough cash in the baggage hold to buy their way into any country they want.
So they start small, with Montreal. They hole up in an old Chaste safehouse that the Hand hasn’t managed to find while Elektra runs down her old connections for a couple of fake passports, for a couple of fake lives. They pass the time in bed, eating and drinking only when necessary, making up for a decade’s lost time in between.
That safehouse in Montreal is where Elektra Natchios and Matthew Murdock die, and Elaine Nicholson and Michael Murray are born in their place. Elaine cuts her hair and dyes Mike’s a gorgeous auburn that comes out a lot better than she expected, if she says so herself. The first place they go is Dublin, where they quietly marry, but they never stay anywhere for long. The Chaste’s funds are endless, but so is the Hand’s reach, so they have to keep moving. They go to Brussels, Madrid, Tangiers, Lagos, Kinshasa, Chennai, Vientiane, Perth—Mike not only learns to adapt quickly to their constantly changing world but thrives in it. His senses have never been more finely tuned; he’s never been more powerful.
They disrupt the plans beneath Midland Circle before they even begin. There is no explosion, no collapse. He can do nothing to relieve Karen and Foggy of their loss, but at least Misty keeps her arm.
When the Hand finds them, they fight. They—Elaine and Mike—always win.
When they wipe out the Hand, they don’t stop. They wreak good across the Earth, saving people who need saving and giving criminals their due, stopping coups and winning wars. Every now and then they cross paths with the Avengers, but they never team up; neither one of them wants to risk being recognized. It’s the price they pay for their life together, heavier for Mike than Elaine, but he’ll do anything to keep his city, and the friends he sacrificed, safe.
He doesn’t know how it ends, the story of that other world. Likely they die in battle, but he prefers to think that eventually they win. That peace prevails, that they hang up their armor and their weapons, and grow blissfully old together with a rambling old farmhouse full of children.
(This is how he knows it’s a daydream; Elektra never actually wanted kids, and Matt always hated the idea of living in the country.)
A piercing pain in his finger grabs his attention; he’s managed to break the skin on the marble’s edge. He swears softly and instinctively pops his finger into his mouth to stanch the blood.
“How many times have I had to tell you not to play with sharp objects?”
He quickly rocks back on his heels and wipes his hand on his jeans to mask his surprise; it wouldn’t do to let Maggie know she’d managed to sneak up on him.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” he says, standing. He’s not sure how to greet her now; part of him wants to hug her, wants to know what a mother’s hug feels like, but the rest of him wonders how much distance to cover before he has the right to find out. Before she has the right to show him. He shoves his hands into his pockets instead.
“She was important to you,” Maggie says. “I daresay from the look on your face, you loved her.”
Matt gives a wry smile. “You would have hated her,” he says. “But yeah, I loved her.”
Maggie gives an amused huff. “Remind me to tell you someday what my mother said the first time I told her about your dad.” She shifts her weight a little to keep from shivering. The phrase your dad echoes loud in his ear.
“Do you ever visit him?” he asks. “Do you even—miss him?”
“Yes,” she says softly. “And yes. I still miss him very much. Nothing I did can change that.”
“The older I get, the more I wish I could talk to him,” Matt says suddenly, wiping an eye that’s suddenly gone inconveniently damp. “I wish I could just—kick back and have a beer with my old man, you know?”
Maggie threads her hand up around the curve of Matt’s elbow and squeezes his bicep. “He loved you so very much, Matthew.”
“I know.”
Suddenly he remembers what Father Lantom told him back in high school, when Matt was complaining about God’s absence in his life.
“You know, Matthew, everybody gets the Book of Job wrong. They think the lesson is that perfect, unshakable faith is what saves us from all the troubles of the world. And yes, Job does get his health and his cattle and his wealth back. But you know what people never catch? He never gets back the ten children God took from him. God replaces them, but he never restores them. Which means Job still had to carry the most monstrous grief a parent could suffer for the rest of his very prosperous, very long life.”
“So the lesson is that God’s just an asshole.”
“God’s a lot of things, Matthew,” Lantom asked wryly. “The lesson is that loss, even irreplaceable loss, is rarely the end. That eventually you have to find a way to live with the missing. Now, God sends new people your way because He doesn’t want you to bear your losses alone. But you’re the one who has to choose to let them in. God can’t do that for you. He can give you courage, He can even lead you to the right door, but you have to be the one to open it.”
Matt takes a deep breath and covers Maggie’s hand with his own. “She wasn’t a sentimental person. Not remotely,” he says. “But she loved Christmas."