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Frank never wanted this. He checks in on Red every few weeks, through a rifle scope, perched far enough away that he trusts the city to mask his heartbeat, even from the keenest pair of ears he’s ever had the displeasure of encountering.
Frank watches, and the more he sees of Red, the more he needs to see of him, because something’s wrong.
He gets up, goes to work, comes home with takeout, eats alone at his kitchen table, and gets dressed. That’s when Frank leaves, because he knows what happens next, and he doesn’t need to stick around to see it.
Sometimes, he brings someone home, has sex in the dark. He probably pulls the charming blind guy routine, says he hadn’t noticed the lights were on once and the bulbs had burned out. He doesn’t want them to see him, Frank thinks grimly, doesn’t want their eyes tarnished by his scars, doesn’t want to deal with questions, or the lies he’d have to give as answers.
But the people Red picks don’t seem like the type to push for answers. They’re always beautiful, sometimes with tattoos swirling on their limbs, sometimes impeccably dressed in business suits or dresses that hug their curves. The women have the sort of glossy, perfect hair that’s normally reserved for magazine covers. But they know what Red’s offering—a night in the sheets, no return visitors, and they take him up on it.
Frank doesn’t blame them for it, and it’s rare, anyway, only happens once every couple weeks, when Red can’t stand the feeling of being untouched anymore, wants to feel skin against his skin. For a few nights before, he ramps it up at night, hits harder, lets himself get hit more, favors his fists over the batons, lets the scum he’s fighting closer to his skin—the only contact he allows himself, until he yields like wet paper and goes out to a bar.
He puts on the right clothes, tight on his arms and chest, caressing the muscles of his ass and thighs. He goes to the right places, seedy nightclubs, dark gay bars. He puts out the right vibe, smiles charmingly, listens and offers well-practiced compliments. He attracts the right people, lets them teach him how to throw darts, or play pool. He lets them guide him to the dance floor, lets them put their hands all over his body, pressing against theirs. When the time is right, when he senses their arousal, he leans in close and makes them an offer he knows they’ll take, and brings them back to his apartment for a good time. They all leave well before morning. There are slender women, on nights he wants a gentle touch, and tall, strong men, on the nights he craves a different sort of pain.
Frank watches. When he picks a louder club, Frank even follows him inside, sits quietly near the speaker, drinks scotch, neat, watches him inevitably attract someone—always beautiful, always, always beautiful, and how does he know?—and watches the stranger fall in love with the blind man, the costume that Red wears, pretending to be incompetent. He bites his lip, raises his hand tentatively, asks in a sweet, shy voice if he can see the other person, and they will always, always take him up on it.
Sometimes they head off to the bathroom and fuck there. Sometimes they just kiss in the bar, the stranger looking dazed when they pull away from Red’s mouth. In a few minutes, Red stands up, asks if they want to get out of here.
They always want to get out of there.
Frank’s left alone in the bar, sipping at his scotch, savoring the warm, smoky burn of it. He gives them a few minutes before taking the rooftops to his spot, settling in with some coffee to cut through the relaxation he feels after the scotch. Stimulant to counter depressant.
He doesn’t watch Red and the stranger in bed. He doesn’t need to know the mechanics of the act, really. He’s more interested in what comes after, in the way Red’s still just as wound up after an orgasm as before, the way he stalks out of his apartment like a wolf on the hunt, so similar to the way he looks as he leaves to go to his place of choice to pick people up.
Concussions and broken bones don’t slow him down. Bullets and knives don’t put him out of commission. A weak orgasm would have no chance against that iron will. Frank knows the orgasms are bad ones, because the Red that slips out the window a few minutes later, not even bothering to shower in between, doesn’t move like a man satisfied. There is none of that liquid, feline grace to him. He looks like a man who took care of a need, forced himself to feel something, and hated himself as soon as the endorphins receded.
Even his business as the Devil feels different. Before, Red had lived for this. This was his real life, everything else a hazy mirage, boxes he had to check off before he could do what he really wanted to do. But now, even this seems routine. He still does it, and still does it well, but the passion is gone. There had been times when he had taken Frank’s breath away, the way he moved, the tightly coiled aggression in his limbs, his strong, indomitable heart. There had been joy in it, a feral sort of happiness, too ugly for the daylight, a sense of fierce satisfaction in taking down someone who deserved it.
Now, he gets in, knocks them out, takes the hits he can’t avoid and maybe a few of the ones he could’ve, if he’d bothered to try. He calls the police from the burner—Frank wonders if he changes out his burners, whether he’s really so trusted by the cops that they won’t track his number, won’t chase him down and try to arrest him. He wonders whether Red’s so trusting that he’d give them the chance.
He works at a medium-sized practice, not fancy enough to have its own building, not as badly off as he and Nelson had been, back when they’d been together. He gets in, smiles at his coworkers, works for hours and hours, makes his court dates, wins more cases than he loses. He takes on more pro bono cases than anybody else in the firm, if the records are to be trusted. Word’s getting around that Nelson and Murdock are still good guys, even if they’re at different places now. The people still know they’ll take care of them as best they can.
It’s one of those nights, when Red finally acknowledges him. It’s a few minutes after a gorgeous blond man’s walking out of his apartment building with a self-satisfied limp, still smiling at the memory of whatever Red had done to him. Red’s dressed and out the window, and for the first time, he looks straight at Frank.
Okay, he doesn’t look—Frank knows he’s blind, but with the mask on, that’s what it feels like.
He tries to slow his breathing, level his heartbeat, but he stands his ground. A retreat would be more telling at this point than staying and facing him.
It doesn’t take him long to get to where Frank’s camped out, a cup of coffee to ward off the chill that’s always worse at the rooftops than down at street-level.
“Frank.”
“Red.”
“Am I a target?” He asks bluntly.
“Probably, knowing what you get up to at night. But I’m not gunnin’ for ya, if that’s what you mean.”
“So, then, what is this? You following me, watching me. Is that business or pleas—recreation?”
“Bit of both,” Frank says honestly, “good idea to keep an eye on threats, and then I wanted to figure it out.”
“My life’s an open book,” Red says, holding out his arms, “more so to you than most others.”
“An open book, huh? That why you fuck with the lights off?”
“Oh, were they off?” Red asks, too casual by far. “I’m blind, Frank, I don’t spend much time thinking about the lights.”
There are things Frank could say—things that come easily, because in his mind, he’s been preparing for this conversation for months. But he doesn’t want to say them, for some reason, doesn’t want to care anymore. It’s so exhausting—he’d almost forgotten how exhausting it could be to care for someone else. And Matt Murdock’s a thousand times more exhausting than most. He rolls his eyes instead—he still isn’t quite sure if Red can pick up on that sort of thing—and kneels to the ground, packing his things.
“What, you’re not interested now that I know you’re there?”
“Just not interested in talking to someone who won’t give it to me straight. Don’t have time to play games or cut through the bullshit.”
“You’ve spent hours following me,” Matt says, sounding annoyed. Frank pushes down a flash of relief, because at least he’s still in there somewhere. “You’ve spent days watching what I do, and I put up with it, and now that I want to talk, you don’t have time? You’re the fucking king of bullshit, Frank.”
“Yeah, maybe I am,” Frank agrees. “Maybe I am, Red. But I see you. You hear me? You might’ve pushed everyone else away, but I see you. I see what you’re doing.”
“And what am I doing, Frank? What exactly is it that you think I’m doing? Because work at a law firm and this at night is exactly what I was fucking doing the last time we talked. What new information do you think you have? What did you get out of watching me live my life, huh?”
Frank shakes his head. “You’re not livin’, sunshine, that’s the thing. Maybe nobody else recognizes it, but I do. ‘S like lookin’ in a preachy-pajama wearing mirror.”
“You and I are nothing alike,” Red says flatly.
Frank sighs and rises to his feet, all packed up and ready to be anywhere else. “I told you. I don’t have time for games tonight. We both know what we know, and if you wanna pretend, go find your blond friend or Karen. Maybe they’ll let you live in your little fantasy world. I’m not gonna be your therapist. I’m not gonna talk you around to seeing yourself as you really are.”
It’s hard, leaving, but something in Frank settles when Red follows behind him, does some fancy and totally unnecessary flips as if that’s going to get him goddamn style points.
“What do you mean?” He demands, and it’s infuriating, how easily he keeps pace with Frank, the way he’s not even out of breath.
Frank stops abruptly. “Look, Murdock, I don’t even know why I’m here. I have no fuckin’ clue why I spent so much goddamn time tracking you. I don’t know why I care. I just know you don’t, anymore. And it’s gonna get you killed one day.”
“If I didn’t care, why would I go out?”
“Same reason you fuck strangers in the dark. To try to get out of your own head. You want the contact, the endorphins, but you don’t want anyone to see you, to know you. You don’t talk to your man Nelson anymore, you don’t talk to Karen, who was head over heels for you, last I heard.”
“You don’t know who I talk to,” Matt mutters, “you might’ve been watching, but unless you’ve got bugs in my apartment, you don’t know who I’ve been talking to.”
“Don’t need to. It’s written all over you. You used to fight like—god, you used to fight like you were on fire, like you were gettin’ high off it. Like it was the only thing that mattered, and all the rest was just noise, y’know? Now? Now you fight like a guy punching in and out of a dead-end job every night. You live your life like a guy who doesn’t want to go home—too afraid of being alone with your own thoughts.”
“And you’d know about that, wouldn’t you?” Matt says, trying to turn it around, uneasy at the fact that Frank’s seen him. He wants so desperately not to be seen, wants the closest thing to invisibility he can find so he doesn’t have to see himself anymore, either.
“Yeah, I fucking would. Why do you think it’s me standin’ here, not one of your friends?”
“Because I have all of two and a half friends, all of whom have fucked off? As to why it’s you, I really have no idea, Frank. Why don’t you tell me?”
Frank doesn’t have an answer, so he borrows a play from Red’s book—ignores the question, says what he wants to say.
“You don’t wanna face yourself in the mirror, Red. So you go to work, you fuck some blonde twink, or some busty redhead goes down on you. But you can’t let ‘em stay, because they might get to know you, might get to carin’, and you can’t have that. So you kick ‘em out, but you’re alone again, and you can’t deal with the voice in your own head, so you go out and kick the shit out of some two-bit mugger, pretend that gives your life some kinda meaning.”
“And how is that different form what you do?” Red shouts at him, “how is that any different from you, Frank?”
“It’s not. Only thing is, I lost everyone. You pushed ‘em away.”
“That’s what you think? Really? You lost your family, Frank, and that was awful and tragic, and I can’t imagine how painful it must’ve been. But there are still people who care about you—you must have friends, from the Marines, Karen’s fucking obsessed with you, Foggy and I—“
“There really isn’t a Foggy and you anymore, from what I hear.”
“Fine. Me, then—we’re not friends, exactly, but you got me out of a tough spot, that night, and you know I’d do the same for you, if it came down to it.”
Frank had known that, actually. It was the sort of quiet knowledge he wished he could forget, the kind of thing he tucked into a drawer in a filing cabinet in the back of his mind and locked away behind more immediate concerns.
He turns around, steps forward, until he and Red are nearly chest to chest.
“Do you really think that only goes one way, Matt?” His voice is quiet and serious, not looking for a fight, for once.
Red tenses, his hands twitch as if to form fists.
“You already did me a favor, that night. I owe you now, you don’t owe me anything.”
“Is it about debt, then? You’n me, that night with Grotto, the graveyard, the boat, your girl—was all of that about debt? Because if it was, lemme tell you right now you don’t owe me shit, Red. If that’s what you thought, if that’s why you came up to me tonight, you can turn right around.”
“If it’s not about debt, what is it about?” Red’s voice has gone quiet, hands soft and relaxed. He’s confused, tilting his head to catch some sound that Frank can’t hear over the pounding in his ears.
“I don’t know,” he admits. Red’s neck is soft and pale white, dotted with his dark stubble. There’s a bite mark tucked under the shadow of his jaw—blondie had been mouthy, apparently, and it’s blue and garish and ugly in the moonlight, and Frank frowns at it. That neck, though—it’s crying out for Frank’s hand. He grants it that, pulls him in for a harsh, rough kiss. He’d noticed those lips the first time he’d seen him, had tucked the observation away, the redness of the flesh, the way they curled around his words as he screamed at him. It had been irrelevant, then, simply hadn’t mattered.
Now, it is the only thing that matters.
“I don’t know what it’s about, I just know that you aren’t gettin’ what you need, Red,” he pants into Red’s skin. “Not from your job, not from the suit, not from any of the people you take to bed.”
“And what do I need, Frank?” Matt murmurs, voice low and rough—maybe he knows that voice does things to Frank, is doing things to him right now. Because Matt doesn’t give him a chance to answer before he pulls him back, shoves his mouth open so he can take what he wants. Frank lets him do it, lets him do all of it.
Would let him do more.
“I don’t know,” he whispers again, because he doesn’t. He strokes his thumb along Matt’s cheekbones, wishes he weren’t wearing the cowl, because he wants to see him, wants to run his hand through his hair. He doesn’t know how to get Red out of this. He’s already gone, given himself away to people he doesn’t talk to anymore, whittled off pieces of himself and handed them to strangers who probably don’t even know his name—
“Come home with me,” Matt whispers, finding Frank’s neck and pressing his lips to it.
Frank thinks back to that night in the gay bar, where he’d stood near the speakers, where the bass would drown out his heart, hoping that the scents of the place would disguise him. He thinks about the way Matt let himself fall into the arms of the dark-haired man pursuing him, the way he let himself be held, be guided, from the bar to the dance floor.
He wonders if this is any different, and the thought kills his arousal instantly.
“Your dick’s probably still wet from that blond,” he mutters darkly.
Matt leans down, kissing him where neck meets shoulder, hands tracing Frank’s arms slowly, shoulder down to elbow, lingering on his biceps.
“Then we can go take a shower,” he offers, “conserve water, even—“
“I’m not one of your boys, Murdock. I’m not one of the suits, or one of the guys who have tattoos for the aesthetic, or—“
Matt kisses him again. “I know exactly who you are, Frank Castle,” he promises, “and you know exactly who I am.”
“I see you,” Frank says again, helplessly, “I just want—“
“What? What do you want? I’ll give it to you, Frank, just tell me—“ Matt urges, touching Frank’s cheeks, curling around his ears and stroking through his hair.
“I don’t know if you can,” Frank says softly.
“Tell me. Please.” Matt wraps his arms around Frank’s shoulders, leaning in impossibly close. Frank thinks that the night had been cold at one point, but he doesn’t feel it anymore. All he feels is the warmth from Matt’s body where it presses against his.
“I just want you to live again. Fight like you used to, with that fire. Feel something that fills you up, makes your heart jump around in your chest. You used to—you used to be so alive, Red. I want that for you.”
Matt softens in his arms, looks up at him with that mouth pulled into a soft, sad smile, and Frank can’t help but lean in and kiss him again, wish that smile into a real one.
“I—I want that, too,” Matt whispers, laying his head on Frank’s shoulder and leaving it there, his nose pressed against Frank’s neck.