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They stay like that for awhile, Matt wrapped in Frank’s arms on a rooftop.
“Can we go home now?” Matt says again, pressing the words against Frank’s necks “please?”
“No punching out muggers tonight?” Frank asks him.
“The streets are quiet.”
Frank doubts that anything is ever quiet, for Matt.
“Quiet enough,” Matt amends.
“Then sure, Red, we can go back to yours.”
He follows Red, wondering if Matt’s ever gone back home without dealing out justice.
Red slips back through his window.
Frank follows behind, smiles a little when Matt steps back towards him, pulling him in for a kiss as if it’s the only thing in the world that makes sense.
“Go take a shower, Red,” Frank murmurs against the skin of his neck, careful of the ugly bite mark blondie had left behind.
“And then we’ll go to bed?”
“And then we’ll go to sleep. You need to sleep, you’re killing yourself, the way you work.”
“I—I don’t like sleeping,” Matt admits quietly, “I usually wake up more tired.”
“Just try it tonight. If it doesn’t work, we’ll figure something out.”
Matt nods. “I just—I can’t believe you’re here. I can’t believe you care.”
Frank lets out a playful little growl. “I’m not saying I care, okay?”
“You didn’t have to say it,” Matt says with a little smile, leaning up to press his lips to Frank’s cheek, “I still heard it.”
Frank rolls his eyes as Matt walks to the bathroom, unzipping his pajamas as he goes.
He takes a moment, stares at the bare skin of his back, takes in the scars and the bruises and the shift and ripple of well-formed muscles.
Once he hears the water running, he heads into the bedroom—it’s a big place but there are all of two doors, so it isn’t exactly hard to figure out where to go. He strips the sheets efficiently, balls them up and sets them in the corner where Matt won’t trip on them.
He digs through Matt’s things until he finds where the spare sheets are and puts them on the bed.
“You changed the sheets?” Matt asks, still wet as he stands in the doorway.
“Well, I’m not sleeping in the sheets you fucked some other man in,” Frank says, and the thought makes him feel something now, hot and bitter in his gut.
He leans in, digs his fingers into still-wet hair, and pulls Matt in for a kiss. Matt wraps his arms around him, not caring that the light is on, that he’s wearing a towel and nothing else—not even his glasses.
Matt hums a little, sags into him, trusts Frank to keep him upright.
“Let’s go to bed, hm?” Frank says quietly.
Matt nods, pulls away from him to grab a pair of soft sweatpants from the closet.
“You can borrow something if you want... if any of my stuff fits you.”
Frank rolls his eyes and grabs another pair of sweatpants.
He feels Matt—staring, for lack of a better word—as he strips down and pulls on the sweatpants.
“Come to bed,” Matt says quietly, reaching out his hand. “please.”
Frank is undone by that please. It is the easiest thing in a long time, to reach out and take Red’s hand.
Matt curls up into a ball, hides his face against Frank’s chest, and it makes sense, suddenly, why he’d never let anyone sleep over before. He’s so vulnerable, with his damp hair and his bare skin and his eyes uncovered.
Frank turns off the light, but there’s a full moon tonight and the pale beams fall across Matt’s skin.
There are words for this, words he used to know, used to speak, but his tongue is rusty and they stay locked away in his brain rather than tumbling out into the air between them.
He wraps his arms around Matt Murdock and watches him until he falls asleep, watches him until Frank himself begins to feel drowsy. Watches him until his eyes fall shut without his consent and he smells the mild vaguely-herbal scent of Matt’s shampoo.
He dreams of Maria smiling at him, but then she fades, and there’s just Matt, bruised and miserable and afraid to be seen.
He leans in, kisses him. When Matt starts to work at his clothes, he stops him and just holds him in his arms. Frank can feel him trembling, can feel the magnitude of it now more than he could through the scope of a rifle. The man he’s holding is so lost he’s ready to cling to anything, so afraid that he’s ready to swim down and kiss the ocean floor with his dying breath.
“I want you to live,” he whispers into Matt’s hair.
“I want that, too,” Matt mumbles back into his neck, and their shared body heat is enough to stave off the cold air.
He wakes to an empty bed and the sound of the shower running. He lays still. When was the last time he’d slept soundly enough to sleep through the person next to him getting out of bed?
He feels almost rested, for the first time since the day after he got back, when he’d slept so long and woken to Maria’s voice.
“Wake up sleepyhead.” She’d stroked his cheek, and it had been the first soft touch he’d had in ages. It had felt strange, to think that he could be touched gently, that he, who had killed innumerable people in cold blood, could be loved.
The door to the bathroom opens and the sound pulls Frank out of his thoughts.
“Oh—you’re up,” Matt says.
Frank nods, taking in the sight of him. He’s half-dressed, shirt hanging open, tie dangling around his neck. He doesn’t have any pants on, just a pair of boxer briefs clinging tight to his hips. Frank tries and fails not to notice the outline of his dick, nestled in black fabric. He tries not to fixate on the muscles of his thighs or his ass, either. He closes his eyes for a moment, tries to recenter himself.
“Did you sleep?”
“Better than I have in awhile,” Matt says quietly, “you were right. I didn’t realize how tired I was until I woke up. I didn’t feel like every inch of me was stretched out and sore and on the verge of snapping, and it—Frank, it felt like a fucking miracle.”
There’s this expression on his face—a shade shy of ecstasy, the relief that he never wore after a romp in the sheets with one of his conquests. Frank looks at that face, the way the sunlight falls on it, gives him a healthy color, rather than the sorry pallor he’d worn in the moonlight. It’s strange, to think that he might have had a part in it.
He doesn’t know why, but he steps forward, starts at the bottom of Matt’s shirt and begins pushing the buttons through the buttonholes.
He watches the way the scarred, toned flesh hides behind white cotton and feels a faint pang of remorse. Last night, if he had let it go the way Red had wanted it to—he would know that skin, know the feeling of it under his hands, under his fingernails, surrounding him, soft and firm and sweet.
He takes the ends of the tie in his hands, wonders how they remember the motions that he hasn’t performed since before. There’s a change, in doing it on someone else, and it slows him down, but he takes a deep breath and moves meticulously.
“Thanks,” Matt murmurs, leaning up to kiss him, those lips pressing against Frank’s cheek, the sharp stubble that had sprouted overnight.
“Make yourself at home—help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge. I have a spare key somewhere, but I can’t remember where,” Matt says with a sad little twist of his lips. “Uh, Foggy gave it back, once the firm dissolved, so. You can use it, if you find it. Otherwise, just leave the roof access door unlocked if you wanna go out, I haven’t got much worth stealing.”
Frank recognizes it as what it is—a plea not to go, not to leave him.
I wasn’t planning on it, he thinks, surprised at his own mind for supplying the words.
“Go to work, Red.”
Matt nods, and he heads towards the door, but then doubles back, fists Frank’s t-shirt in his hands, and leans in to kiss him, hard and full of some sort of emotion—passion seems the wrong word, maybe need? Yearning? Loneliness?—and far, far too short.
Matt’s blushing, his skin tinted pink and Frank marvels at it, at the way the sunlight gives him another gift this morning, the pink of Matt’s cheeks.
“Go to work, Red.” The words are the same, but his voice is softer, tenderer, and Matt smiles a little bit before he says goodbye.
Frank is so very fucked.
It’s less awkward than it should be, scrounging up breakfast, wearing Matt’s sweatpants, drinking his fancy Colombian coffee. when Matt’s gone. Matt’s fridge isn’t empty, but it isn’t full, either. Just the basics, really—bread, peanut butter, a few apples, some eggs, a nearly-empty carton of milk.
He shrugs his shoulders, digs through a few drawers until he finds a key, and tries it in the lock to make sure it fits before he leaves the apartment.
He goes back to his safehouse first—the one he’d been using most recently. When he walks in, he finds a light layer of dust on one of his spare rifles—not his first or his second or even his third favorites, but one of the ones he keeps around just in case and cleans when he needs something to do with his hands. It’s strange, seeing it in less than pristine shape, and it prompts Frank to clean it all thoroughly now, every gun, every knife, every case of ammo. All of it. He hadn’t realized quite how much time he’d spent tracking Matt.
After all, it only takes is one night of being sloppy, and he’ll end up in the ground. There was a point in his life when being in the ground wasn’t the worst possible outcome. After Maria and the kids—he’d hoped for it, secretly, had hoped the mission would take him down. But there’s still work to be done here, in the world, and not enough people Frank can trust to do it right.
Besides, he can’t help but think about Matt, losing the only person left who gives a shit, who really knows him. He thinks about him sinking back into the routine Frank’s got memorized at this point, drifting from his depressing apartment to his firm to a bar to bring a stranger in his bed and fuck in the dark before going out and halfheartedly beating up two-bit criminals, letting himself get hit just to feel something.
Frank doesn’t want that for him.
He grabs a duffle bag and fills it with clothes and guns. He pauses and adds his razor, toothbrush, and the book he’s been reading.
He goes back to the apartment and drops off the bag. He’s a little surprised at the fact that he’s in mission mode, focused. He looks in the fridge again and makes a list, and then he goes to the grocery store.
It’s been such a long time since he’s been to the grocery store. It’s just another part of normal life that vanished for him after that day in the park. He’s been living off MREs, cans of beans, cans of soup, all ordered in bulk and delivered to a P.O. box he checks once a week.
There are so many people—so many women with young children. He looks at his watch and hates himself a little bit when he realizes what time it is. Schools have let out for the day, but work hasn’t ended, so moms, nannies, and a few dads are doing the school pickup-grocery-after school activity run. Kids are wearing sports uniforms—one little boy has on a pristine white martial arts uniform—glued to the phones they weren’t allowed to use during the day. There’s a baby, napping in the shopping cart while his mother compares two different jars of peanut butter.
His chest hurts, the way it always hurts when he’s reminded of a life that he can never have again.
When he first lost them, it was like he was underwater, constantly. Since then, it’s receded, but it comes and goes in waves, and sometimes, the grief is so strong it closes his throat and he feels like he’s choking.
He clears his throat and looks away. Focus on the mission, he reminds himself.
There is no mission, but he pretends there is, pretends that he has to go through and purchase all the groceries without having a breakdown in public. That’s his mission.
Suddenly the memory of Matt the night before rises to the forefront of his mind, the soft, sad smile on his face when Frank told him he wanted him to live again.
It gives him clarity, a sense of purpose. It gives him the strength to get out of the grocery store, to check out and walk back to the apartment.
He’s starting to make some sort of dinner when Matt gets back, opening the door and freezing when he senses Frank’s presence.
“You’re still here,” he says quietly, almost in disbelief.
“I’m still here,” Frank agrees, and he steps in, takes off Matt’s glasses and sets them aside.
Matt smiles at him then, almost blinding in its pure, simple joy.
The bar is so low, Frank thinks. He wonders if Matt knows the difference between truly being loved and not being abandoned, between being treasured and respected and adored and just not being left behind.
“You didn’t have shit to eat around here,” Frank says gruffly, “I had to go to the store.”
“I had eggs and peanut butter,” Matt protests halfheartedly, realizing immediately that it sounds even worse when he says it out loud.
Frank smiles. “Get changed if you want. I’m making pasta and you’re doing dishes. You wanna go out tonight?”
Matt freezes, cheeks starting to go red.
“In your pajamas,” Frank clarifies, “to go hit some bad guys?”
The tension leaves Matt’s shoulders and he smiles a little. “Yeah, sure. You gonna come with me?”
Frank shrugs. “Got no other plans, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Matt steps in closer, leans his head up, and Frank takes the hint. He pulls him in closer and presses a kiss to his cheek, near the corner of his mouth. It feels strange—they’d nearly slept together last night, and yet it feels like the spell might be broken, now that they’ve been apart.
“What, are you blind?” Matt jokes. Maybe the spell hasn’t been broken quite yet, Frank thinks. He’s still grinning when Frank kisses him again, properly.