Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When Matt gets a call from the one and only Frank Castle, he knows something must be drastically and terribly wrong. He’s at Josie’s with Foggy and Karen - he hasn’t had much to drink yet, though Karen’s gone to get whiskey - but the smell of ale, thick in the air, is starting to make his head swim. Cold fear hits as soon as he hears the monotone of the phone ringing; Frank Castle, Frank Castle - because Frank doesn’t call people, he hates calling people; he hates people, in fact, the calling is just an additional vice.

He answers the phone. Foggy, sitting next to him, pauses in sipping his beer and watches Matt’s face carefully, trying to gauge his reaction to a call from a man who has saved Matt’s life almost as often as he has tried to end it.

“Murdock,” Frank says. His voice is neutral, but that could mean anything; Frank isn’t the type to verbally emote. Or emote at all, really. He’s about as easy to read as a brick wall - a brick wall Matt keeps running into and getting concussed by.

Literally. It hasn’t even been two months since Frank tried to shoot him in the head for the dozenth time after Matt, along with the Defenders, had shut down a spree of gang-related attempted murders Frank had been planning for months.

Matt tries to clear that from his head as he focuses on Frank’s words. “- on the corner of second and third,” he’s saying, “Hell’s Kitchen. Your kid, your turf, your problem. I’ll give you ten minutes and then I’m pushing him into traffic and ditching.”

“Wait, wait, Frank,” Matt interrupts, before Frank can hang up. “What’s happened?”

“Again,” Frank growls, and Matt corrects his former conclusion that Frank never emotes, because he sounds pretty pissed. “I’m in an alleyway on the corner of second and third with a very concussed Spider-Man and the fucker who did it. This is your problem, Murdock, so come deal with it.”

He hangs up with a click.

“Shit,” Matt says, standing abruptly. He grabs his coat, his wallet, starts rummaging for cash. “Fogs, I gotta go, a thing came up.”

“A thing, huh?” Foggy says. His voice is cold, irritated, and Matt tacks that onto his ever-growing mental list of things to deal with later. “A thing involving Frank Castle?”

“It’s not like that, Fogs,” Matt says. “Come on, just -” He thrusts a few bills towards Foggy without knowing which ones they are. “For the drink. Give me the change later.”

Karen rushes over from the counter, bearing drinks. “Hey, woah, Matt,” she says. “You alright?”

“I have to go, sorry Karen,” Matt says, and her mouth opens a little in dismay. “It’s important.”

She doesn’t try to stop him.

~~~

Frank is right. Peter’s definitely concussed. When Matt approaches, the kid tries to stand from where he’s slumped against an alley wall, but sways and collapses again with a soft groan.

Frank’s leaning against the wall, picking at his nails with a penknife. He smells like secondhand cigarette smoke and rotting garbage; an effect of spending so much time in street alleys, Matt suspects, rather than a reflection on Frank himself. He straightens at Matt’s approach.

“Murdock,” Frank says, voice gravelly. “‘bout fucking time.”

“Is he alright?” Matt asks, fixating on the shallowness of Peter’s breathing from where he sits slumped over a few paces away, head in his hands. “Peter, are you alright?”

“He’s fine,” Frank grunts. Peter glances up, nods at Matt’s direction, mumbles something incomprehensible, and then puts his head back in his hands. “He got pistol-whipped by a would-be murderer and then got a few solid kicks in the ribs before I showed up. Nothing too bad.”

It wouldn’t be too bad, either, if it were happening to someone like Frank or Matt; but this is Peter. Matt has to bite back his urge to shove Frank aside and check Peter’s pulse, though he can hear it anyway.

“And the guy who did it?”

Frank flips his knife closed and tucks it into a pocket. “Tried to shoot him,” he says. “But wunderkind here threatened to jump in front of the gun if I did, so instead I threatened to shoot the cop who arrested him two minutes ago if he tried to arrest me.”

Matt presses his fingers into his nose, takes a deep breath, and then forces his hands down to his side. Tilts his chin up to give the impression of eye contact. Forces his expression to smooth out. There’s no mask here to hide behind.  “Thank you, Frank,” he says. “I’ll take care of him.”

“Next time maybe do that first,” Frank grunts. “Before I gotta keep him from having his ribs kicked in in any more alleys. Kid needs more training. Good at the job, but needs more training. And some proper goddamn weapons instead of that shit that comes out of his hands.”

“Yeah,” Matt murmurs. “I know. I’ll take care of it.”

Frank eyes him for a moment, hand tapping slowly against the gun in his belt, and then strolls out of the alley, clapping Matt hard on the shoulder as he goes. “See you ‘round, Murdock.”

Matt tucks his hands into his pockets. The alley is quiet now exceptfor water dripping from a nearby gutter and the soft hum of nighttime traffic, and the chill is starting to settle through Matt’s coat and linger on his skin. Peter is sitting differently now, his chin resting on his arm resting on his knees, which are curled up against his chest. He glances up as Matt steps nearer.

“Hey, Mister Murdock,” he says. 

“You alright, Peter?” Matt asks, crouching by him. “Frank said you got hurt.”

“Yeah, uh, a little,” Peter says modestly. “I ran out of webs.”

“Can you stand?”

“Sort of, I just get really dizzy.”

“Okay,” Matt says. “Try to get up, I’ll help you. My apartment isn’t far.”

“‘Kay.” Peter gets to his feet, swaying a little, and holds onto Matt’s shoulder to stay upright. Matt gives Peter his coat to hide the Spiderman suit from prying eyes, and Peter shoves his mask in a pocket. It’s cold, and when they step into the street, Matt ducks his head down against the wind coming from the cars. Everything smells like sewage.

~~~

Peter’s feeling better by the time they get back to Matt’s apartment, so Matt gives him an icepack and sits him down on the couch. Peter tries to look at his phone, but Matt confiscates it. After a few minutes, when they’ve established that none of Peter’s ribs are broken and he probably isn’t going to die anytime soon, Matt clears his throat and tries to start a conversation he very badly doesn’t want to have.

“Peter,” he starts, “We need to talk about… this.”

“What’s ‘this’?” Peter asks, sipping on the glass of water Matt had handed him. 

“Frank was right,” Matt says. “You need more training. And I -” He falters a little, not sure how to continue. He hasn’t exactly been training Peter, is the thing; at least not to the extent that they’ve admitted it. Because when he first met Peter, he maintained quite insistently that he would never, ever, ever, take up training anyone, much less a seventeen-year-old with the kind of insufferable optimism that made Matt’s head hurt.

But Peter, for a boy who doesn’t  seem like he could be intentionally manipulative if his life depended on it, is remarkably good at getting what he wants. At first, it was the occasional co-op mission, like that time Peter asked him for help breaking up a gang den. Matt had gone into these with the impression that Peter knew what he was doing, only to realize that it had been a setup to trick Matt into showing Peter what to do. To Peter’s credit, it worked magnificently. Matt showed him what to do, and Peter did it brilliantly. It was successful enough that when Peter suggested they team up again a week later, Matt didn’t protest.

So they set up a kind of pattern. It wasn’t training, as far as Matt would admit, but it was evidently enough of something that people like Frank Castle had begun to consider Matt responsible for Peter’s well being.

Matt didn’t like that in the slightest. It had been exactly what he was trying to avoid when he rejected Peter’s training proposal the first time, had been the kind of baggage Matt didn’t need. Or, more accurately, he felt it was liable to turn into the kind of baggage Peter didn’t need. Matt had an unfortunate habit of becoming people’s burdens.

Peter’s watching him, waiting for him to continue. Matt clears his throat. 

“It’s not enough, Peter,” he continues. “What I’ve showed you, what you’ve learned. I trained for years before I faced even a quarter of what you do as Spiderman.”

Peter blinks at him, glances down, fiddles with the icepack awkwardly. “I’ve trained for a while too, Mister Murdock - I’ve been doing this for a long time now.”

“Not like I did,” Matt says, and swallows at the thought of Peter going through the kind of training Matt was forced through as a child. Tips his head down, swallows, angles it up again, moves on from the memories with the careful purpose of a soldier plodding on against the tides of war. “And that’s good, Peter - trust me, it is. But it doesn’t change that you need more training if you’re going to keep putting yourself in danger like this.”

Peter drops the icepack to his side and sighs. Matt feels a pang of regret; it’s possible that talking to Peter about this so soon after his injury wasn’t his best idea.

Matt clears his throat and stands. “Just think about it, Peter,” he says. “Now get some rest, I’ll call your aunt.”

~~~

“You’re worried,” Clint says abruptly, cutting off the solemn silence into which the room has descended. Matt, tapping his fingers against his beer bottle, tilts his head towards Clint and raises eyebrows in question.

Clint takes a swig of his own drink and leans forward in his chair. At his feet, his dog reaches up and nudges his knee with its nose. Clint scratches it behind the ears obligingly. “You’ve got this… thing,” Clint says, gesturing to his own face. “This expression. Your brooding anxiety expression. It’s the same look Batman gets when he thinks about his family.”

“I’m just thinking.”

“About your family?”

Matt grimaces at the topic.

“Here’s to that,” Clint crows, and takes another gulp of beer. He’s already drank more than Matt, probably because Matt’s been too busy, as Clint put it, brooding.

“Come on,” Clint urges. “Spill, what’s the worry? I’d say ‘penny for your thoughts,’ but I’m broke as hell.”

“I thought you got rich.” Just a few months earlier, word of Clint’s sudden wealth had gotten around to Matt. More specifically, Deadpool had made an entire powerpoint explaining to Daredevil exactly why the two of them should pull off a heist and rob Clint of his supposed stacks of gold; Matt hadn’t had the heart to tell Deadpool he couldn’t read the slides.

“Naw. My brother stole it all and bought a private island.”

Matt makes a mental note to tell Wade. It will save him some disappointment and an arrest when he inevitably tries to break into Clint’s building.

“Hey, it’s not all bad, though,” Clint says. “I’ve still got more than I used to. I mean, I own this building, for chrissake. Just last week I had to go around and collect rent , it made me want to vomit. Kate felt so bad for me she made me a souffle and burnt it. I mean, I think the souffle was mostly for her, but she offered me a piece after it caught fire. But enough about me, tell me about you and your brooding anxieties.”

“I’m just worried about the kid,” Matt says.

“Who, Kate? She’s fine, just terrible at baking. You should be worrying about my oven; it’s the real victim in this scenario.”

“No, not Kate,” Matt responds. “Peter. Spiderman.”

“Oh-ho,” Clint says. “Spiderman. That is one special kid, man. Just last week he saved me from certain death when I fell off a building in the middle of a fight.”

“He got beat up a few days ago,” Matt said. “Concussion and all. Narrowly avoided a dumpster toss.”

Clint winced and leaned back. “That’s rough, man. They get who did it?”

“Yeah, Frank turned him in - but it’s not like that was the only criminal in all of New York who’d beat up Spiderman if given the chance.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Clint said. “I mean, I wish I could help, but that’s the way it is here. I worry about Kate too. She’s barely twenty and she’s already got the kind of enemies on her trail that - I mean, I just. Only so much you can do, right? I’ll train her as long as she lets me.”

“Peter needs more training,” Matt says. “And I’ve shown him what I know about, about drug busts and the right places to hit a man to crack a few ribs, but it kind of just comes down to that ninety percent of my fighting style is that I get beaten up as much as the other guy. I get up and walk away from it, he doesn’t. That’s the only difference.”

Clint is silent for a moment, sipping absently at his beer. His dog sniffles and rolls over, stretches out and yawns.

Clint leans forward. “Okay,” he says, and sets his beer on the coffee table. “Okay, Matt, I’m going to propose something and you’re going to let me finish before you say no, okay?”

“Okay,” Matt says, fully expecting to regret it.

“So, we both have the same problem here. Dumbass overly optimistic trainee isn’t learning enough from our training and keeps getting beaten to shit and tossed in dumpsters.”

“Peter wasn’t tossed in a dumpster, actually, just the beaten to shit part -”

“I said no interrupting , Matt, so don’t interrupt - and let’s be real, it’s a matter of time before the dumpster tossing era arrives for Peter, he’s toeing the line there - but my point is. My point is. We both have dumbass, overly optimistic trainees, and we both want to give them more training experience, and neither of us are sure how. So.”

“So?”

“Matt, have you ever watched Wife Swap?”

Matt gives Clint a look. Clint cringes.

“Right, okay, bad question. But. What I mean is - what if we trade apprentices for a week? You’re worried about yours, I’m worried about mine, so we expand their horizons, let them learn from someone new.”

Matt sips his drink and broods, trying to find a flaw in the argument. He can’t. “That’s… not a terrible idea.”

“You don’t have to sound so surprised.”

Matt realizes something and chokes halfway through a sip. “Oh, God.” 

“Huh?”

“This means I have to spend a week with Kate Bishop’s insufferable optimism. I might not survive.”

 “I think this is a brilliant idea,” Kate says, and she’s grinning. “I get some time away from the cranky old man who calls himself my mentor, and Peter gets some experience in elder care. Hey, do you have any sodas? I’m so dehydrated.”

“They’re behind the lettuce in the fridge,” Peter pipes up, from where he’s perched on the back of Matt’s couch with his feet resting on the arm. He then steals a nervous glance at Matt, as if unsure if he’s overstepped.

Matt ignores Peter. “You didn’t tell me she was so mean,” he tells Clint, amused.

Clint looks up from sorting the quiver of arrows he’s emptied onto the carpet and shrugs. “I figured you’d expect it, man. She’s nineteen, it’s in their DNA.”

“Twenty,” Kate yells, from the fridge.

“I wasn’t like that when I was a teen.”

“Really? I was. I was a bitch and a half when I was a teen. Hey, we all cope in different ways. Kate here copes by insulting me as if I’m not the only reason for her continued existence. What about you?” Clint asks, directing the question at Peter. “Do you insult people to cope?”

“I just watch Star Wars a lot,” Peter says mildly. 

Clint looks at Matt for confirmation. Matt nods. “Really?” Clint asks, raising an eyebrow. “Not even a little bit of blatant disrespect?”

“Wade’s been trying to teach him to properly cuss for the better half of a year,” Matt tells Clint. “It isn’t working.”

Kate walks up next to the couch with a soda in hand. “I can help with that,” she volunteers. “I know the best ways to curse. The trick is to mix them with, like, the right normal words, just weird enough that it sounds like an insult but you’re not sure what it means exactly so it’s possible that it isn’t really. Like, you imbecilic fucking coat hanger; clearly an insult, but you’re not quite sure how. The sting is in the mystery.” 

Matt elects to tune out that conversation and turns his attention to Clint’s arrows, strewn across the rug. “Clint, you better clean that all up before you leave today. Foggy will fucking kill me if he has to get foot surgury because he stepped on an arrow in my apartment.”

“Just tell him it’s a hazard of the job, bro. Or get apartment slippers.”

“Apartment slippers? Really?”

“I have these great purple ones with a Hawkeye logo; remind me to get you some next Christmas. You’ll love them. Hang on, when’s your birthday?”

A year ago that day Matt had been present to witness the Defender’s surprise birthday party thrown for Danny Rand. To Danny, it had been a dream come true. To Matt, it had been a nightmare, rented party balloon-animal man and all. Since then he had sworn a vow never to give his birthday to other vigilantes.

“Around March,” he says vaguely. 

Peter pulls himself out of the conversation with Kate to frown at Matt. “But you told me it was in January, Mister Murdock.”

Different months for different heroes; it had been to throw them off the track. And he’d told Deadpool his real birthday, just because he knew they’d never believe it coming from Deadpool. “Same thing,” he said evasively, and to change the topic, “how are we starting training today?”

“Regular patrols?” Clint asks, shrugging. He’s messing with the tip of a trick arrow, and when he hits something wrong and it spits out a tattered old fishing net. “I dunno, man, I didn’t think it through,” He continues, and attempts to detangle himself from the fishing net with limited success.

“We probably should’ve,” Matt murmurs. “I don’t know what we’re going to do today.”

“Hey,” Kate says suddenly. “Can I have that fishnet?”

Clint stares at her.

“Wanna make stockings,” she explains.

Chapter Text

The plan, to Matt’s infinite surprise, seems to be working. Kate’s a difficult student to teach at times, but she’s also unmistakably and incredibly talented, something Matt realizes around the time she stops a mugging happening a half block away by shooting a blunt-tipped arrow that hits the mugger’s temple and knocks him out, without ever witnessing the crime firsthand. Matt tells her where it’s happening and she looses the arrow on an educated guess. (Although even for her, this seems an unusually impressive feat of skill, something demonstrated by a smug tone that lingers in her voice for the rest of Tuesday evening and well into Wednesday). 

Kate still has plenty to learn. Much of what she’s been taught - or has taught herself - she’s perfectly brilliant at, but the issue’s what she’s never had to learn, or what rarely comes up in her training. Matt recognizes something of Clint in the way Kate moves through Hell’s Kitchen on patrols - steadily, but slowly, and never properly utilizing her environment. Where Matt can cross two blocks of street in five minutes without ever touching foot on the ground or risking being witnessed by passersby, Kate takes use only of the city’s shadows - avoiding attention by lurking along shadows and alleys, rather than removing herself from the streets entirely as Matt does. Matt notices this on the first day of training, which he spends showing her how he usually starts off patrols. He spends the second day teaching her how to travel through the city using a grappling hook, something she gets the hang of startlingly fast. 

They spend the third day at Matt’s apartment. He’s noticed that, while unrivalled with a bow and arrow, Kate’s skill with other weapons - while still impressive - is functional, at best, in terms of necessary vigilante survival skills. So Kate helps him push his couch aside and roll out a training mat, and then rifles through his refrigerator while he sorts through the meager stash of weapons hidden in his locked Daredevil chest.

Firstly, there’s a set of swords, which feel like Elektra’s. Holding them gives him an uneasy thrill in the pit of his stomach, but he sets them aside and keeps searching. There’s a bow-and-arrow set he hasn’t used for years; the arrows are splitting at the tip. Throwing knives and darts, which Matt was never very good at using. How could he be? Stick had left before teaching him. He was still passable, thanks to Wade Wilson, who sometimes invited Matt over to his apartment for beers and, in what he seemed to consider a bonding activity, encouraged Matt to throw knives at painted wall targets. The last time Matt had been over, Wade had handed Matt a knife and gestured with a flourish at a spot of wall that was, for all Matt could tell, just a regular patch of plaster.

“What am I looking at here?” Matt had asked, when Wade’s disappointment at the lack of reaction became evident. Wade slumped his shoulders. 

“I know my painting skills are lacking, but I thought you’d recognize the shoulder-to-head ratio,” he whined. “Come on, man, I spent thirty minutes on that, give it a little appreciation.”

“Wilson Fisk,” Matt had guessed, because Fisk was the only man he’d ever known with the body proportions of a reverse bobblehead. 

Wade had slapped Matt on the shoulder hard enough that he stumbled a little. “Knew you’d get it, hun - come on, aim for the head.”

Matt had just prayed for the best and thrown his knife at a random spot from which the smell of paint was issuing. Wade guffawed. “Right in the crotch, babe. Brutal.”

The memory of that experience alone is enough for Matt to tuck away the throwing knives and keep searching. Aside from a few broken or rusted old batons, a set of iron knuckles that Matt doesn’t recall ever owning, and an honest-to-god thumbscrew that Matt makes a mental note to get rid of later, there is only one other set of viable weapons - two arm-length staffs, made of a light but sturdy wood, which he hasn’t touched in years.

Matt picks them up and weighs them in his palm. He’s always been good at fighting with staffs, as they had been Stick’s preferred weapon. He knows how to win a fight with an enemy using a staff, so by extension he knows how to win a fight using a staff himself. At the very least, he knows how to survive a fight with one, which had been his primary focus when he fought with Stick. Get up, keep fighting, don’t go down, and when you do, survive. Just don’t let him hit you one too many times. He’ll do it. You don’t want to believe he will, but he will. He has to , was what he’d told himself at the time. He has to do these things because you have to learn. How can you ever be a soldier if he can’t teach you to survive? He’s doing it for you. Be grateful, at least, as he beats you bloody and the ringing in your ears clouds your radar and the nuns think you’re lazy and slacking on chores but not really, not really, you just can’t do the laundry today because you allowed yourself to be hurt. You allowed it, did you not? So be grateful. This is a gift. This survival is Stick’s gift.

Matt tries to keep his expression from clouding visibly as he tucks away the staffs. The thought of teaching someone else to fight with the same weapon Stick had used for so many years is not one he cares to entertain.

Kate’s sitting at the table flipping through her phone when Matt finally selects the pair of swords that Elektra left behind. They’re long and thin, sitting heavily in Matt’s gloved hands. He’s wearing the black suit without the mask, but not the Daredevil armor, thinking it might reassure Kate, since her own suit had about as much utility as plastic wrap when it came to injury prevention.

“I think we’ll start with these,” Matt announces. 

“Alright,” Kate says, and crosses her arms as she stands from her chair. “I’ll just not think about why you have fucking samurai swords in your closet, I guess, this is fine and normal and dandy. Can’t wait to learn how to fight with a sword because that’s a skill I will definitely need at a number of points in my near future.”

“Sword fighting can increase motor control and improve balance,” Matt counters. “And anyway, a lot of criminal circles still use swords, and you can’t win a fight unless you know how your opponent is fighting.”

“Or you can shoot your opponent and save yourself the trouble,” Kate suggested.

“And has that strategy worked out well for Clint?”

“Point taken,” Kate muttered. Matt’s phone buzzed from the coffee table and he picked it up. The screen reader read out a row of messages:

Clint Barton 7:06 PM: hey someone broke into my apartment

Clint Barton 7:06 PM: just telling you so you can keep an eye out because this definitely wasn’t random. who breaks into a random apartment in bed-stuy and chooses the one with four locks on the door and a booby trapped keyhole. 

Clint Barton 7:07 PM: and whoever it was didn’t take anything, but they flipped over a bunch of furniture and also ate a bunch of my food and fed my dog the turkey i’ve been saving and shot my laptop and coffee table dead center and then took the can of paint i’ve been using to touch up the arrow shot holes in the kitchen plaster and wrote i’m sorry on my wallpaper in blue paint. 

Clint Barton 7:07 PM: anyway don’t know what’s going on there but i thought i’d ask you to keep an eye out for whoever it could be

Clint Barton 7:15 PM shit i mean ear out keep an ear out 

Matt waits for more messages and is met by silence. Kate, standing by the coffee table, stares at Matt’s phone.

“What,” Kate says. “What the fuck does that mean? Even I have trouble getting into Clint’s apartment, and I have all three keys - ever since he got deafened by a literal clown Natasha’s been insistent on security. She added three locks and she changes them every month.”

“You mean he didn’t have a lock before?” Matt asks.

Kate waves this aside. “Irrelevant. My point is. You heard my point. The fuck?”

“I don’t know,” Matt says honestly. He doesn’t, for a moment. For a moment, he genuinely cannot think of any person in his realm of knowledge who is batshit enough to break into the apartment of one of the best-known vigilantes in New York City, mess up the furniture, eat the food, feed the dog, shoot the laptop, and then take the most obviously incriminating route of apology possible to atone for what he seems to have recognized as a mistake only after committing to the crime.

The ignorance, for what brief time it lasts, is blissful.

And then Matt realizes.

Matt keeps silent and spends the next three hours of the evening teaching Kate how to properly use Elektra’s swords, narrowly avoiding decapitation. Despite Kate’s lack of appreciation for the concept of using swords in, as she emphasized, “the twenty-first century”- a criticism Matt finds a little rich coming from a young woman who specialized in using one of the oldest technological weapons known to man (“not old, timeless,” or so she insisted), she is a quick learner. Matt cuts them off early and claims he has business to attend to. It’s not untrue.

~~~

Deadpool’s apartment is a shitty one. The first time Matt visited, this surprised him, given exactly how much wealth Deadpool had amassed from years “completing hush-hush jobs as requested by sponsors who valued their privacy” - this was how Wade had described his job to Matt, who had debated between considering Wade a high-end prostitute and considering him a hitman and finally decided on the latter after smelling all the blood on Wade’s suit. After some consideration, Matt had realized that the reason Wade chose to live in a veritable shithole was probably that none of his neighbors cared to turn him in and risk the exposure of their own questionable ventures.

Wade answers the door on the fourth knock. His mask is only half on, but upon spotting Matt he tugs it down over his chin and thrusts his arms behind his back. 

“Hey, DD,” he chirps, sounding like he’s trying quite hard to sound natural. He’s blocking the entryway. “How’s it going?”

Matt shoves past him into the apartment. It’s filthy, as usual, with garbage piled atop the kitchen counters, and the walls are riddled with bulletholes and knife punctures. Wade rotates where he stands, keeping his arms behind him and shielded from Matt’s theoretical line of sight.

He smells, quite unmistakably, like wet paint.

“Just wanted to see how it’s going,” Matt says brightly, pretending to glance around the apartment. “Make sure everything’s alright. You been home all night?”

“Around,” Wade says evasively. “You know, things to see, people to visit.”

“Oh, yeah,” Matt responds mildly. “I know the drill. You painted anything recently?”

Wade, seeming to sense that the ship of hiding the paint staining his suit has sailed, removes his arms from where they’re hidden behind his back and shrugs. “Painting’s good for the soul, DD, what can I say. I have hobbies like everyone else.”

“Can you show me?”

“Wh - what?”

“What you’re painting,” Matt says, picking up a throwing knife from a pile of them on the kitchen table and weighing it in his palm, pretending to study it. “I’d like to see it.”

There’s a long and pregnant pause which Wade breaks by coughing awkwardly. “A true artist only ever reveals the finished product, DD.”

“Mm,” Matt says uncommitally, and does a quick scan of the apartment walls. It takes only a moment to find the Wilson Fisk target, where Matt’s knife is still thoroughly embedded in what was reportedly the crotch area. He did some quick calculations and came to the conclusion that the human head is, on average, three feet above the crotch, which gives him a target to pinpoint.

“And there’s nothing about this art of yours that you’d like to tell me, Wade ?” Matt asks, and punctuates the last word of the question by hurling the throwing knife into target-Wilson-Fisk’s head, where it embeds itself deep in the plaster and sits there, quivering, for a long moment.

Wade makes a whimpering noise that could be either fear or arousal, and shakes his head.

“Just thought I’d ask.” Matt picks up another knife from the pile. This one has dried blood on it. “But, if you’re not busy, I do have a favor to ask.”

“ Oh ?” Wade purrs, in a suggestive tone which Matt elects to ignore.

“It’s just that I got some texts,” Matt says, and lands the second knife in target-Wilson-Fisk’s right lung. “From a friend of mine. Seems his apartment was broken into and he asked me to find who did it. I know that sort of thing is right up your alley, so I figured you might have an idea who did it.”

“Oh, no,” Wade says reassuringly, and plucks a knife from where it’s embedded in the couch arm. “You know me - I only deal with unusually morally bankrupt businessmen and regularly morally bankrupt politicians.”

Apparently, Wade’s caught onto whatever method of intimidation Matt was employing with the knife throwing, because he tosses this one and it barely whisks by the side of Matt’s head - so close a breeze brushes against Matt’s exposed jaw - before landing in the plaster wall beyond. 

Matt feigns a look at Wade.

“You’re standing in front of my painstakingly detailed hand-painted decal of Cyclops,” Wade says by means of explanation.

“What did Summers do to piss you off?”

“He keeps kicking me out of the Xavier Institute,” Wade complains, voice long-suffering. “He says I’m ‘endangering the students and destroying property’ - but why would you have a life sized oil painting of Charles jackass-asswipe-dickwad-bitchass Xavier hanging above the mantle in the entrance hall if not to use as target practice?” 

“Do you have an Xavier target?”

Wade gives a grin that Matt guesses is intended to be rakish and jabs his thumb at the closet door. “Target? Darling, I have the painting. Snuck in and stole it right after I’d regrown the hole in my chest from where Scotty dearest glared at me so hard he laser-eyed me right out of the third story window.”

“Oh,” Matt says, taken aback, with no idea how to respond. Not to worry - Wade fills the conversational void, as he can always be depended on to do. 

“I’m thinking about painting over my old Juggernaut target, over by the door, because it’s so big, I could fit a Squirrel Girl and a Magneto for that size, and Juggernaut is a pain in the ass and all but I would be too if my entire comic book appeal was taken over by Hulk and his bitchy green mood imbalances - though that makes me glad this fanfic isn’t a DC crossover, I’d hate to think what Deathstroke would do if he met me.” Wade throws another knife at the Cyclops target, and this time Matt’s hand snaps up and catches it around the handle as it whisks past his jaw. Wade stops talking abruptly.

Matt gives Wade a smile with a few too many teeth to be entirely separate from a snarl, and pulls his arm back with the knife in-hand. A sharp movement, a whisk of air, and the knife embeds itself in the ragged couch in front of which Wade is standing. Wade whimpers again.

“Wade,” Matt says, having come to the conclusion that avoiding the conversation he had come all this way to have was ceasing to be productive. “I know you robbed Clint’s apartment.”

Wade gives a tittering laugh that falters and fades away at Matt’s expression. He pauses, frowns, and sighs. 

“Look, double-dee,” he says, crossing his arms. “I think I’ve already given you a perfectly valid explanation as to why I have the right to rob Clint Barton, as I’m sure you recall.”
“Do I?” Matt asks, unimpressed.

“You do,” Wade whines. “Come on , I made you a whole PowerPoint presentation about this a month ago. It’s like you weren’t even watching .”

Matt clears his throat and segues the subject. “You need to apologize to Clint,” he says, “and you need to help him fix his apartment.”

“ What? Double-dee, no, come on, don’t be a narc. I didn’t even take anything! I couldn’t find shit. All that money he was throwing around back when the shit with the tracksuit Draculas went down? Gone. Nowhere in sight. I looked everywhere and then when that was done I looked under the furniture and at that point his laptop beeped and startled me so I might have shot it two or three times, but I didn’t take shit. Because the only things there were shit, figuratively speaking; there weren’t even any credit cards laying around for me to filch. It’s like he’s not even a multimillionaire anymore.”

Matt, with an unpleasant thrill in the pit of his stomach, recalls a conversation with Clint a few days before in which Clint had revealed that his brother had stolen back the money Clint had used to purchase a bed-stuy apartment building, and at the time Matt had filed the information away to inform Wade of at a later date. Matt had forgotten to pass it on.

The beers, Matt decided, were to blame. There had been rather a lot of them.

“It doesn’t matter,” Matt declares, “you’re going to come with me first thing tomorrow morning and help Clint fix up his apartment. If you don’t, or if you run away before I find you tomorrow, I’m sending Jessica Jones a picture of her throwing knife target.”

Matt doesn’t actually know if Jessica Jones has a throwing knife target, but the guess is confirmed when Wade winces. “Okay, okay, I’ll do it.”

Matt has a suspicion that he’s going to have to twist Wade’s arm further at a later date, but the first step of the plan is complete. He picks up another knife and hurls it at the wall, where, with a bit of imagination, he can suppose that it has just stabbed Wilson Fisk in the nostril.

Chapter Text

Wade’s immediate reaction to entering Clint’s apartment the next day is to say “well, this isn’t so bad.”

This causes Kate to choke on her coffee, Matt to pinch the bridge of his nose and pray for patience, and Clint to rise up from his seat at the kitchen table like an inflatable yard decoration blowing up and give Wade a look of pure fury. He jabs his finger at Wade in accusation.

“Not so bad? Wilson, there is paint. On my wall. My laptop? Trashed. My dog? Vomited all day because you fed him expired food. This is exactly ‘so bad’, Wilson.” 

“That turkey was expired?” Kate asks in alarm, and is disregarded.

Wade puts his hands up in mock surrender and takes a step back, only to run up into the raggedy purple beanbag chair that is Clint’s dog’s bed. “Woah there, buddy, no need to get too hasty. I’m here to help, alright? I’m being helpful right now. No need to jinx it.”

“ I’m the one jinxing it? Buddy! Pal! You’re the one who jinxed it, not me! You’re the one who broke into my apartment, not me! I mean, what the hell, dude? What the actual hell?”

“I thought you had money.”

“Tony has money. T’Challa has money. I hardly have a proper job .”

“Yeah, but. You had money,” Wade points out. “Back when you bought the building. Like, a lotta it. Not my fault no one ever told me you spent it all on drugs.”

“I didn’t spend it all on drugs, asshole,” Clint snaps. “My brother stole it.”

“You have a brother?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Where is he now?” Wade suddenly sounds very interested.

“ What’s it to you?”

Wade sulks. “I just want to buy a private island, dude. Being a morally decent human being doesn’t pay half as well as when I was a murderer for hire.”

“Robbing people’s apartments is not being a ‘morally decent human being.’”

“You have a lotta apartments though, Hawk-guy. I figured one wouldn’t make a difference.”

“You shot my laptop.”

“It startled me.”

“ Dude .”

“Okay,” Matt interrupts. “I don’t think this is getting any more productive than it was fifteen minutes ago, so can we stop bickering and get to actually fixing this place up?”

“I agree,” Kate says, putting her empty coffee cup in the sink. “Listening to you two fight is like watching the Muppets but it’s just Statler and Waldorf at each other’s throats with knives for two hours.”

Both Clint and Wade swivel on the spot to scold her.
“Okay, both of you stand down,” Matt interjects. “Wade, paint. By the door. Fix the walls.”

Wade looks at him and makes a face that Matt assumes is meant to be sulky, but plods off in search of paint.

When Peter arrives twenty minutes later, having come straight from school, it’s to find a surprisingly well re-assembled apartment. Wade has almost finished scrubbing the paint splotches from the floor. Kate is sitting in the dog bed, with the dog. Matt and Clint are sitting on the newly-upright couch, Clint watching a soap opera on the television. Peter makes his entrance known by dropping down to swing, upside-down, from a gutter above the window.

Kate lets him in. He politely greets Matt and Clint, high-fives Kate, and then gives Wade an look indecipherable through the mask.

“Hey, Pete,” Wade says brightly. He’s sitting cross-legged on the floor absently scrubbing at it with a sponge. Matt can tell by the smell that even more paint has gotten onto his already stained suit arms. “How’s it crackin?”

“It’s going okay,” Peter says. “I mean, it was going better before I found out you robbed Mr Barton’s apartment, because what the heck dude, I thought you were more chill than that.”

“Hell,” Kate says. “What the hell . I taught you better than that.

Peter looks at her, sighs, and then looks back at Wade.

“I thought he was rich,” Wade says mournfully. “Turns out the writers plot-deviced him back into poverty. A tragedy of the modern era.”

“That doesn’t make robbery okay,” Peter points out. 

“Okay, but. Petey. Riddle me this. If you could steal a few hundred thousand or so from, say, Elon Musk, no questions asked, you’d do it, right? I mean, no one really needs that much money, much less a martian invader posing in an alien skinsuit who keeps setting up reckless plots to achieve a return trip to his home planet despite the risks of invasion taken on by notifying his fellow martians of humanity’s existence.” 

“No, I wouldn’t steal from Elon Musk,” Peter says, looking offended by the very idea. “I just wouldn’t steal, period.”

“I would,” Kate says. Everyone looks at her. She shrugs. “What? The institution of ‘billionaires’ is an inherently flawed one that shouldn’t be allowed to exist and is consistently proving itself to be have a negative on the rest of society.”

“This girl gets it,” Wade says knowingly.

“Weren’t you, like, insanely rich before you quit murdering people, dude?” Peter asks, noticing the lack of available chairs and perching on the windowsill instead. “You’re kind of one to talk.”

“And now I’m just a lonely unpaid vigilante, wandering New York thankless and alone,” Wade says melodramatically. “All that money is barely enough to get me through the rest of my life without properly working a single day again.”

Clint gives Wade a look. Wade just shrugs, unabashed. 

Two minutes later, Clint’s dog jumps into a paint-can and rolls in it like it’s a puddle, and the whole evening goes to hell.