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Foggy hadn’t seen his partner in a few days. The last thing he’d thought he’d see was Matt - Not daredevil- rolling over the armored backs of riot police and scooping something from the ground. The screen didn’t show much, the cameras too panicked and quick to really focus on the source of the chaos. But Foggy still caught the tell tale flash of metal in his friend's hand. A gun. Distantly, he recalled something Matt had told him about one of the times he’d been a bit too close to the Punisher. Something about the body count if Daredevil used a gun.
--- Twenty Minutes Earlier ---
Matt was finished. He was tired of it, and maybe Frank had a point. Fisk stood there, standing in the middle of his speech, speaking about the corruption he would stop - despite the source being his own pockets. The blind man had spent days, weeks even, resisting this. He didn’t want to kill Fisk. He wanted Fisk in jail, for the rest of his life, where he belonged. He didn’t want to watch the bastard bleed out on the steps of his own god forsaken home, with a bullet in his throat. He didn’t want that, as much as his hands begged him to do it. That was the problem, his mind had disconnected from the body. That was it.
He’d gotten over it, though. After a long, shockingly calm discussion with Frank Castle.
He wanted to kill Fisk. And he was far too tired to stop himself. He’d spent the last few hours waiting for the moment he would step up on to those steps - invited in a show of fisks new ‘Disability Accommodations’ or whatever bullshit he’d got now. The moment he’d end his career as a lawyer, as Daredevil, as a living man.
He wanted Wilson Fisk dead, and every damn dirty cop that ate up his money like the filth infested rats they were.
“Mr. Murdock, you’re up!” The voice of a young woman pulled him from his own hole of a mind.
“Ah, thank you, miss.” He stood, brushing at his pants. “Am I presentable?”
“Stunning, sir! Here,” A gentle hand brushed his elbow. His fingers found their place at her tricep, and she began to lead him toward the stairs. “I’ll get you to the podium. Would you like me to wait beside you, so I can take you back out?”
“Thank you for the offer, miss,” She smelled like cloves and innocence. “But you need to leave the area as soon as possible.”
“Mr. Murdock, it’s really no trouble!”
“Something is going to happen. Once I am at the door, run for your life. You should have plenty of time to get a few blocks away before something happens.”
She stopped, but Matt had already dropped his hand from her arm and opened the door. The applause of a massive crowd met him, thundering in his too sensitive ears. He smiled, content in the face of the sunlight and the cameras waiting for his words.
“Good afternoon, everyone.” He paused, and let the corners of his eyes crinkle at the scattered responses he received. He pulled the round lenses from his face, letting them rest gently on the podium in front of him. “I generally don’t take my glasses off in public, but I feel it’s appropriate this time.” He lifted his head, and let blank blue eyes stare glassily on through the crowd. He felt a few shudders from the audience through the earth. He nearly laughed. “I want to thank Mr. Fisk for his policy ideas, but I do have a few things to say on the subject. Well, just one thing I suppose.” He smiled, And the huge form beside him shifted slightly. Pride. The bastard. “It takes some context though, so bear with me. A few weeks ago, I was on a nightly stroll. And of course, I know what you’re thinking! Matthew, it’s not safe for a blind man to be walking alone at night! To which I must remind you, day and night are all the same to me.” There was a soft chuckle, and yes, he knew it was a bad joke. “Anyway, I went up to a rooftop, to pretend I knew what the sky looked like. There was a man up there though. He was big. He smelled like gunpowder, ash, smoke, blood, and fear. But under it all, he smelled like rage. It exuded from him, so much so that it overwhelmed me. It was all I could taste. He opened his mouth then, offered me a place beside him, and I took it. Through the stone under my hands and the inches between us, I could feel his heartbeat. He wasn’t angry, he was sad. It wasn’t rage, it was a grief doused in spite. And I wouldn't bore you with these details if they weren’t important.” Matt’s smile grew. “He turned to me, a gun in his hand. I should have noticed him pull it from his boot, but I was distracted that night, not to mention overwhelmed with the hum of his grief. He smiled, not that I could see it, and he said, ‘Hey, Red’. And I did what anyone who doesn’t want to be shot does. Nothing. So he said one word to me, and shot me in the forehead.” a gasp echoed through the streets, horrified. “I’ll tell you what he said right after I tell you this. I survived because he hit my helmet. And I know, that's odd, what sort of asshole wears a helmet everywhere, as lucky as apparently it makes him?” Fisk’s body tightened behind him, knuckled twisting together, he could hear the strained fabric of the immaculate gloves. “Well, it turns out that man, I had met on the rooftop that night was Mr. Frank Castle. The Punisher. My client. I don’t agree with his methods… at least.. That’s what I managed to convince myself. But Frank was right. The man HE met on that roof wasn’t a Lawyer. Wasn’t Matthew Micheal Murdock. It was The devil of Hell’s Kitchen. The daredevil. And as it turns out, and I look up at god and beg for his forgiveness before all for you, In that one word, The Punisher convinced me he was right.” He pulled the pistol from below his jacket, and took a step back from the microphone. All in one swift moment, the gun was resting at Wilson Fisk’s temple.
“What did he say?” Matt’s smile never faltered, and he pulled the trigger, his words ringing through the streets, not even the crack of a gun able to drown him out.
“Bang.”
Fisk’s body hit the marble steps with a crash, and Matt leapt from the path of several bullets, landing gracefully on top of the podium he’d just been speaking at. He tucked the gun into his belt, the warm metal against his spine, and let his suit jacket fall to the ground. The mic on his collar remained, its weight distinct from his silk pearl shirt and crimson tie. (At least, Foggy had told him it was crimson). He left it there, pulling the gun from his belt once again.
“I told Frank this, a month or two before he shot me. I told him to beware the day the Devil took up a gun. That he had no idea the carnage that would follow. I told him i could put his body count under the fucking charts in a day if I had a gun in my hand. He said he could see how much I loved a fight.” He sidestepped the bullet that destroyed the podium, boots clicking gently across the marble as he dropped to a crouch. The riot police had arrived, the ones in fisk’s pocket. Perfect. The ones that should die. “And he was right. I was scared. I was afraid of what would happen when I let go.”
He launched himself forward, one hand finding purchase on a smooth helmet. He dropped behind the man, pulling the rifle from his leg.
“And now? Now he’s the one who’s gonna need to catch up. And he won’t. Because nothing will ever match the Devils Last Stand.”
---
“Luke!?”
“Yeah, Danny. Sorry I missed your first call. What's up?”
“How bulletproof are you!?”
“Uh? Very? Why?”
“How close are you to the town square? Where Fisk was speaking this morning?”
“About ten minutes?”
“Make it five. And turn on the radio on your way. The devil’s gone batshit.”
---
He pulled a strip of cloth from the bloodied corpse of the cop at his right, the single bullet hole perfectly centered between his eyes still smoking. He tied the bloody cloth around his head, the way he’d always done with his masks, and straightened.
“Stand down, Murdock! I don’t want to kill you!” Brett Mahoney, wearing several pounds of kevlar. The thin muzzle leveled at the lawyers head, shaking only slightly.
“Hi, Brett. Take the shot.”
“I told you I don't want to kill you.”
“I know. I believe you. Your heartbeat didn’t skip. But your hands do. You won’t pull that trigger. But I will. And I want you to know that. Thirteen cops in riot gear. Not a single one of their hearts still beat. And if you don't pull that trigger, I will tear this city apart. Every person who is in that sack of shit’s cooling pockets? I am going to drag them straight to hell myself.”
Still, the gun shook. And Brett dropped to the ground, unconscious, with the klunk of an emptied pistol against his temple.
“Stop.”
“Hi, Luke.” He stepped forward, tearing the tie Brett was wearing from him, and wrapping it around his knuckles. He pulled off his own tie then, and did the same. One red fist, one white one.
“Red, what the fuck happened to you.”
“Turns out nothing is quite the same when everything you care about is taken away from you. Again. When the one you love is crushed under 40,000 tons of steel, concrete and glass. When you have to watch her blood leak from her eyes while a stone the size of a car crushes her skull. When you have to wait for the same thing to happen to you. This should have happened a lot sooner.”
“You wanted-”
“I wanted to DIE, Luke!” He settled back, stance solid and low. Luke took a deep breath. That was the boxing stance. The one that Matt had bruised him with. The one that meant he wasn’t fucking around. “I wanted to die while I was still a good man! Who gives a shit anymore. Come on.”
Heavy knuckles threw him to the ground, and he pushed himself up without hesitation.
“Come on Luke. Let the devil out.”
--- Several Hours Later---
The body in his arms feels wrong. Like it shouldn’t be real. Like deep red shouldn’t be drenching his own shirt and hands. Like he’ll wake up tomorrow with his hands clean of pale red stains. He wishes the crack of bone would stop echoing in his head, like a broken record. He wishes the bullet hadn’t made such a horrible sound as it passed through his friend's chest. But more than anything else, he wishes he hadn’t been the one to hear Red’s last words. A small prayer for forgiveness, not from God but from Foggy and Karen. And a gentle prayer for peace.
Danny presses a thin hand to their friends face, pulling the cloth from his eyes and gently shutting the haunting, empty blue. A gaze unchanged from life.
“Thank you, Danny.”
“I can’t… Don’t thank me for that. Don’t you dare.”
“Danny, I never could have-”
“Sure you couldn’t. But beating him to death was no problem?” Danny took a sharp breath, and clapped a hand over his mouth. “No, I don’t mean that.”
“It’s okay. He didn’t deserve this. Matt would never just give in like this. Someone must have done something to him. Drugged him or something.”
“He seemed like… Like Matt.” Danny looked up at the taller man, tears in his eyes. “I didn’t kill him for nothing, did I? When we still could have saved him?”
“No. No, He may have been just as calm as normal, and just as resilient, but he was gone. He killed thirteen people, Danny. Even if we did Get him back into his right mind, we would have lost him to his own hand anyway.”
For now though, it was time to carry the shattered body of Matt Murdock back to the two friends who waited desperately for good news. Two friends who couldn’t have known.