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It started when Frank left it in Matt’s place. They had fallen into a routine of patching each other up and the shirt had just gotten thrown into the laundry with the rest of Frank’s blood stained clothes. And after that it had just gotten into Matt’s circulation of t-shirts that were well-worn and washed enough to not grate against his sensitive skin. He knew it smelled like Frank but so did about half of the t-shirts in his possession by now. They wore each other’s clothes after being patched up while the other’s were in the wash or slashed to shreds.
Matt didn’t realize that that certain shirt was a bit, well, incriminating until he woke up one night after a particularly rough fistfight and heard Foggy’s familiar heartbeat in his living room. Wanting to cover up the worst of his bodily bruises, he pulled on a shirt and only winced slightly as he went to meet his best friend.
“Hey Matt! We’ve got a lead on this ca-” Foggy turned around from where he was preparing them both a cup of coffee and his voice became strangled and cut off. “Jesus, are you fucking Frank Castle?”
Matt frowned and looked over at Foggy. “What?”
“Your shirt- his logo... It’s just…
domestic
” Foggy spit out the last word like it was venom.
“Fogs…. What’s on my shirt?”
“You’re wearing The Punisher merch!”
“And how was I supposed to know that, Nelson?” Matt asked dryly as he sipped coffee. “Now you said you had a lead?”
It wasn’t until after Foggy left with a promise to pick this back up at the office that Matt realized that he never denied that he was sleeping with Frank. He relayed this anecdote to Frank the next time he crashed into Matt’s apartment with the smell of blood and gunpowder around him.
Frank just chuckled. “I figure you haven’t gotten that I’ve got your ‘I’m not daredevil’ shirt?”
“Do you? I always thought that one was a bit too close to home.” Matt remarked as he dabbed iodine on Frank’s scraped up shoulder. “‘S not like I know which shirt I’m wearing anyway.”
“You should keep mine.” Frank said after a minute. “Throw people off the scent.”
That made Matt’s stomach twist and his hand almost slipped minutely when he was bandaging the cut. He didn’t think about how it felt knowing that Frank had his shirt and he had his. Foggy was right, it was oddly domestic.
It wasn’t until much later that he actually did start sleeping with Frank. Until the push and pull and easy platonic intimacy they had established spilled out into their physical needs. Until Matt shivered erotically when Frank did nothing more than rub his tender thumb across a split lip and he pressed their lips together in urgent need.
“Fuck, Red.” Frank pulled away with a sharp inhale. “I can’t say I haven’t wondered if that supersense you got goes further.”
So slowly getting to know each other’s body and pressing their cracked lips and bruised knuckles against each other. Giving the other a touch that no other would think to give them. Matt started waking up with Frank’s smell on more than the shirts he stole from him.
And nobody would’ve been any the wiser if it hadn’t been Foggy again coming by one day before work except this time seeing Frank puttering around Matt’s kitchen in a shirt with the trademark “DD”.