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“So you hear a gunshot in an alley behind your building.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And you go check it out to find some guy bleeding out on the ground.”
“That’s right.”
“And when you look for the shooter, you see…”
“The elf.”
“You’ve lost me.”
Danny lets out a groan as he turns back around to restart his pacing. He rakes a hand through his hair before dragging it down his face, drawing in a slow breath in a commendable effort to quell his bubbling frustration. “Guys, come on. I know what I saw.”
Danny’s eyes flicker across the room, but the vote of confidence doesn’t come. Jessica’s lips are parted in something that’d could be a sneer if it weren’t for the confusion in her furrowed brow, and Luke’s eyes are fixed on the table in front of him as his mouth forms a thin line. Matt’s facing Peter and giving him a slight shake of his head as if to say it’s not usually like this, and judging by Peter’s small nod in return, it’s a lie he’s still just naïve enough to believe.
“An elf,” Jessica’s voice becomes impossibly dryer, “with a gun.”
Danny throws his hands up in the air. “Yes!”
“When you say elf—” Peter scoots his chair closer, but not without hesitance “—are you talking more… elf on the shelf or Legolas?”
“What’s Legolas?”
Matt cuts in before Peter can finish sucking in a breath. “What makes you sure he was an elf?”
“I don’t know, the green tights, red hair, the bells at the end of its shoes?” Danny huffs.
“Are you sure he’s not a leprechaun?” Peter pipes up.
Danny scoffs. “It’s Christmas Eve. It’s an elf.”
“I mean, if I were a leprechaun with murderous intent-” Peter cuts himself off at Matt’s mouthed don’t.
Luke leans forward in his chair, his gaze scrutinizing. “So… a dwarf dressed as an elf?”
Danny spins around on his heels so quickly that Luke can’t help but stiffen. “After it shot at me, it looked me dead in the eyes—” Danny fixes Luke with an unblinking stare “—and said, ‘nobody will believe you.’ Then it snapped its fingers and vanished. Matt, tell them I’m telling the truth.”
To his credit, Luke doesn’t break Danny’s gaze, but he does take a swig of the beer bottle Jessica passes him when Matt draws Danny’s attention away. “He…” Matt angles his head to the side, “believes what he’s saying is true.”
The look of betrayal that crosses Danny’s face is lost on the person it’s aimed at.
“I believe you,” Peter says with a small shrug. “I’ve faced some bad guys with pretty weird shticks.”
“Thank you.”
Jessica rolls the base of the bottle on the table with a snort. “Tell the kid how you got that fist of yours and see how long that lasts.”
Danny opens his mouth, finger pointed in the air, then promptly closes it in favor of taking a deep breath. He closes his eyes for a moment before speaking again, his tone level to a point where he’s not fooling anyone. “Somebody was murdered behind my building, and the thing that shot them is still out there.” Danny searches each face around the table. “Can you guys help me stop it?”
“Sure.” Matt breaks the silence and pushes himself to his feet. “Whoever it is, we’ll stop them.”
Peter’s quick to follow suit; Luke is considerably less so.
“What the hell?” Jessica finishes off her drink. “Not like I had plans for tonight anyway.”
The cops are gone by the time Danny leads them to the scene.
A barrier of thin, yellow police tape is all that separates the alley and the sidewalk, but there’s not much to deter the public from in the first place. The body’s already cleaned up and the lack of a guard implies that the police have taken all the photos and forensics they could get, and considering how little time has passed, there wasn’t a whole lot to collect in the first place. There’s a dark puddle on the ground that requires a second glance against the blacktop and a spattering of blood that glints in the city lights on the adjacent brick wall, but beyond that, it’s no different from the next alley over.
“It was right here when it disappeared.” Danny traces a shoe against the asphalt at the end of the alley, a slight jerkiness to his foot as if he’s wishing he’d planted it in the elf’s face.
“Did he say anything else?” Luke asks mildly, treading carefully around the puddle and more carefully around the Iron Fist. “Aside from the nobody believing you thing?”
Danny shakes his head as he stares off into the sidewalk. “It laughed.”
Jessica fails to stifle a scoff and Matt’s pursed lips are the only thing discernable from under his cowl.
“The alley’s a dead end,” Peter observes after loudly clearing his throat. “And if Danny was blocking it…”
“Yeah, I’m going to need more than that to buy into an elf with a vanishing act.” Jessica stuffs her hands into her jacket pockets and strides further into the alley, coming to a stop before the bloodstained wall. Her frown grows deeper the longer she studies it and her eyebrows shoot up in a fleeting expression that she’s quick to force back to neutral.
Unfortunately, she’s not quick enough. Danny paces to her side, an odd mixture of hope and suspicion in his voice. “What is it?”
Jessica doesn’t bother trying to cover her sigh this time. “I’m no blood spatter analyst, but this is high enough to be a headshot. Yet if you look at the way the spatter is angled…”
“So it’d have to be someone short who pulled the tri-”
“I was going to say they could’ve fired from the hip,” Jessica interrupts, then closes her eyes and lets out a short breath when Danny’s face falls. “Look, I can believe a lot of weird shit, but I draw the line at Santa Claus.”
“We study Thor in my physics class.” Peter gives a noncommittal shrug and kicks a rock against the wall in his shuffling. “I don’t think I have a line anymore.”
“Well if Thor came down my chimney, I’d have believed in him a lot-”
“Hey.” Matt holds up a palm, his head tilting to the side and his lips parting open.
The crack of a gunshot comes soon after, followed by Jessica’s muttered “shit.”
At least this is something they’re familiar with. In a heartbeat, Peter goes from the ground to clinging against the wall, his lenses whirring when they go wide. Danny shifts his feet into a fighting stance as Luke maneuvers himself between the group and the alley’s entrance. But after a beat of nothing, Matt lets his hand stop hovering over the holster of his billy club.
“Peter, the roofs.” Matt waves to the building and Spider-Man doesn’t hesitate to scale the wall. “Jess-”
“You don’t need me for this,” she interjects flatly. “It’s probably not even our guy. I’m seeing what else I can figure out here.”
Luke’s flash of envy at her ability to make that argument manifests itself as a short sigh as Danny growls out what's perhaps a too eager, “Take me to it.”
Matt obliges, and not a moment too soon. The second he's made his way from the pavement to the fire escape to the roof with a minor web-assist, the gunshots pick back up. Danny and Luke break into a sprint on the sidewalk to keep pace with the pair of shadows flipping between rooftops above them to the source of the bangs echoing down the street. Yet just as they’re about to converge on the alley, as suddenly as they started, the gunshots stop. Danny and Luke manage to halt and simultaneously line their backs against the outside wall and Matt skids to a stop overhead, but Peter doesn’t get the cue.
Spider-Man’s in midair above the alley when he notices his back-up isn’t backing him up, and he fires a web to further himself to the next roof just in time to avoid the hail of bullets from below. Peter’s yelp prompts a visceral reaction that has Matt flinging his billy club down into the alley, sending it ricocheting against the wall to right where the shooter’s head should be.
The only noise that follows is the sound of the billy club bashing into the bricks, proceeded by a startled laugh that ends with a bemused, “Huh.”
Luke’s bafflement hinders his ability to interpret Danny’s sharp breath, and he’s too late in his effort to prevent Danny from shoving past to stand in the opening of the alleyway and face down the gunman.
The mess at the previous crime scene is nothing compared to this. Several streaks of crimson dribble down the wall behind the body of a man sprawled out on the ground. His coat is in tatters from the bullets that tore through his chest, the polyester filling that had erupted through the holes rapidly staining red. His eyes are open and staring at nothing and the pool of blood under him is slowly lapping up more of the concrete.
It’s grisly, but it’s nothing they haven’t seen before. The figure beside the body is a different matter entirely.
If it weren’t for his pointed hat, he’d stand no taller than Danny’s hip. Save for the obnoxiously large golden belt buckle, everything from his tunic to his shoes is a shade of green. He’s got red hair and a sharp beard at the end of his chin that’s not far off in color from the red of the blood splatters on his cheeks.
“Sweet Christmas,” Luke breathes.
“Aw, not this bitch again,” the elf whines, casting Danny a dismissive glance as he kicks the fallen billy club aside.
Danny’s fist lights up the alley in response.
“Oh, that’s all?” The elf raises his eyebrows as he scans Danny over, then frowns before he purses his lips. “I say that like I was expecting you to start glowing; I am very much thrown off by that. I just thought it'd be… more, you know? You’re like a human firefly, only it’s your hand instead of your ass.”
Somehow, Luke regains enough composure to get out, “What are you?”
“I asked myself that question every goddamn day.” The elf raises a hand and twirls a revolver around on his finger, the bells at the end of his shoes jingling as he starts to pace. “I’ve since concluded…” He trails off to vaguely gesture with the gun between them and nods expectantly with a wide, tight-lipped grin. “You know?”
That’s all the warning Luke and Danny get before they're staring down the gun's barrel, but it's just enough of a warning for Danny to duck behind Luke when the bullets start to fly.
“Shit!” The elf leaps back as the shots ricochet and continues to retreat as Luke steps closer. “Okay- You can- That’s new.” He fumbles a new speed loader into the cylinder and flicks it back into place. “Ah, just give me a second-”
Luke’s forced to put his forearm in front of his face to block a new spray of bullets. The barrage is cut off by a swish and a subsequent thwip, but by the time Luke lowers his arm and Danny peers out from behind him, all there is to find is Peter perched on a dumpster and deliberately looking away from the body below.
“Um, guys,” Peter says, “he’s gone.”
“We have to kill the elf.”
“We’re not killing anyone.”
“It’s insane, Matt,” Danny persists. “You heard what it said.”
“He called you a bitch,” Peter reiterates with a serious nod.
“It shot two people that we know of.” Danny pointedly steps in front of Peter. “It’ll kill more if we don’t stop it.”
Matt exhales slowly. “We’re going to stop him. But we’re not killing him.”
Luke runs a hand down his face. “I dunno, Matt. I’d be with you, but—” his expression pinches as if it’s a struggle to push the words out “—he teleports. We’ve got no way of containing him.”
“Jesus,” Jessica mutters into her drink.
“We don’t know how his abilities work,” Matt counters, resting his hands on his hips. “Or what his motives are. As far as we know, he might not be able to- to teleport if he’s tied down.”
Jessica rolls her eyes. “Motives? It’s an elf with a gun. And if he shot at Luke and Danny, he’s opportunistic. There’s no connection between the victims and the only thing I could find at the crime scene was a candy cane licked into a shiv. There’s no reasoning with this guy, trust me.”
Danny inches closer to her, his chin lowered and his eyebrows raised. “So you think we should…”
Jessica pops the cap off another bottle and pours it into her glass. “Just kill the elf.”
“We’re not killing the elf.”
“If beating him into a coma makes you feel better, be my guest,” Jessica retorts as she props her feet up on the table.
Matt presses his lips into a thin line, then seems to remember that’s not a prospect he should consider with a child in the room. When he turns to face the child in question, Peter’s heartbeat jumps suspiciously. “You’re quiet.”
All eyes turn to Peter, and Luke’s the only one merciful enough to look away. Peter squirms in place, then buckles under the pressure to end up scooting backward and letting out a tiny cough. “Obviously, killing is bad.”
“If the next word out of your mouth is ‘but-’”
“However, even if the elf doesn’t teleport away- I mean, can he be prosecuted? Since he’s—most likely—not an American citizen? Or will he have to be, uh, extradited to the North Pole?”
“You’ve got extradition backwards,” Matt says through the sting of betrayal.
Jessica perks up and returns her feet to the floor. “Does the Constitution apply to elves, Murdock? How’s he gonna be tried by a jury of his peers?”
Matt opens his mouth, takes a breath, then clamps it shut.
Gaining confidence, Peter adds, “And you don’t kill because you’re Catholic, right?”
It’s too much confidence. Matt’s jaw tightens as the rest of his face goes slack, fixing Peter with a warning expression.
“I’m just saying,” Peter shrinks a little as his voice rises, “maybe elves don’t count? Because… do elves have souls?”
Luke brings a fist to his mouth and blows out his cheeks as if he’s wishing that he too could teleport. Danny, on the other hand, is studying Matt with the utmost curiosity while Jessica takes a long drink.
Matt wets his lips. He lets out a humorless chuckle as he shakes his head, but it’s quick to die off. His brow furrows for a moment before he’s able to smooth his face back out, yet he opts to turn around instead of keep up the mask. Slowly, he begins to edge toward the exit and pauses with a stiff, “I need to make a call.”
“We really don’t have time for this,” Jessica says, pushing back her chair to stand.
Matt takes a breath to protest, but doesn’t get the chance.
“Five minutes ago they announced that they found another body.” Jessica briefly holds up her phone, then brings it back to squint at the screen. “Scratch that. Two bodies. Both shot to death in an apartment with the door and windows locked, and no firearm found at the scene. Fits our guy’s MO.”
Luke jumps on the subject change and runs with it. “It would’ve happened a couple hours ago if it’s coming out now. The cops are probably still at the scene since it’s not as cut-and-dry as the others. We should stop by; maybe Matt can pick up something that’s—” Luke narrows his eyes and ruminates “—too weird to be released to the public.”
“Yeah, okay,” Matt relents, yet he still turns back with an accusatory finger. “Just- Nobody’s killing the elf.”
Matt doesn’t get a response, which tells him more than any individual response would have.
Regardless, they all manage to civilly make their way out the door.
Luke turns out to be right.
Red and blue flash from the street below as uniformed silhouettes pass across the window of the apartment in question. Aside from the bloodstains on the glass, everything inside appears orderly and untouched from their vantage point on the neighboring roof. Well, to most of them.
“Thirty-eight caliber bullets,” Matt relays, cocking his head to the side. “Oh- and thirty caliber.”
Jessica’s lip curls. “Are you telling me this elf has an armory?”
“Maybe it’s North Pole technology,” Peter whispers. “A pocket-dimension sack, or something.”
“Uh-uh. My line hasn’t moved.”
“Mine has,” Luke mutters.
“They think the shooter’s a child based on the bloody footprints in the carpet,” Matt pointedly cuts in.
Danny leans forward. “Anything weird?”
The corner of Matt’s mouth twitches as he focuses, shifting his head to the opposite side. He takes in a short sniff, and all at once, goes rigid. A muscle pops in his jaw as his hand closes around his billy club to grip it tight at his side. A quiet, “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” is all he says before he goes from crouching by the edge to backing up to the center of the roof.
He doesn’t offer a single explanation when he vaults himself to the neighboring building’s fire escape and springs up onto the roof.
The sound of blows landing is the only answer they get.
Peter’s the first one to make it over. He rolls into his fall and springs back to his feet, his fingers darting to his web-shooter’s trigger when he takes in the sight in front of him. Matt’s lying on his backside on the roof with blood streaming out of his nose, grunting and straining as he constricts his arm around the throat of the man thrashing on top of him, the white skull bright against his chest.
The Punisher reaches for a gun, hesitates as he remembers the cops a few stories below him, then settles on grabbing it anyway to bash it against the side of Matt’s head until Peter fires a web to yank it away.
Jessica lets out a groan the second she lands behind him. “Really?” she says, pulls a face, then proves far braver than Peter when she strides up to them and pries Matt off.
She keeps a restraining hand on Matt’s shoulder as Frank Castle climbs to his feet, successfully propping himself against the roof’s wall once Danny and Luke make their way over.
“Shit.” Frank’s dark gaze flits across the five super-powered people surrounding him and he spits blood onto the ground. “All hands on deck, Red?” His hand twitches for the pistol in his belt. “You here for him—” Frank jerks his head to the crime scene below “—or for me?”
“That depends on you,” Matt growls. Jessica tightens her grip.
“It’s an elf,” Danny clarifies, which brings the opposite of clarity to Frank’s expression.
“The spree killer,” Jessica says dryly. “Don’t ask.”
Frank scans each of their faces and seems to weigh the possibility of them all going batshit at once.
“Whatever he is, the important thing is that he’s killed four people tonight,” Luke says, not without exasperation.
“Six by my count,” Frank corrects. After a beat, he shifts his stance as if he’s come to some sort of decision. “Would be thirty if I hadn’t tracked down his base.” Keeping his movements slow, Frank reaches into his pocket and pulls out a folded piece of paper. He telegraphs it before he tosses it to Luke, who catches it with a single hand. “Bastard planted an IED under the southwest corner of Eleventh and Forty-third. Set it to go off at midnight; this was gonna to be my last stop before defusing it.”
“Was?” Matt questions.
Frank shrugs, a deceptively light note to his tone when he answers and nods to the paper in Luke’s hand. “You know about it now.”
Matt bares his teeth.
“So what, that frees you up to shoot him?” Jessica presses.
Frank studies her with an unblinking stare, which for a second, flicks to her hold on Matt’s shoulder. “You tell me.”
Jessica meets his eyes head-on, studying him right back. Then she opens her hand and steps back with a shake of her head.
Matt’s caught off guard to the point where he stays in place.
Jessica raises her hands in defeat as she falls back to the fire escape. “I’m sorry, but this is way past my threshold.”
“Jessica,” Luke implores.
“Look, Murdock’s the only one that has a problem with Castle killing the- the elf.” She makes a face as if the word tastes bad on her tongue. “I can’t help defuse a bomb. And honestly, this isn’t how I wanted to spend my Christmas Eve.”
Danny blinks. “You said you didn’t have any plans.”
“Eh, they were the same plans as every other eve.”
She waits for the protest, but it doesn’t come. Luke looks as if he’s trying to find fault with her points, fails, then gives a slight nod bordering on agreement. Peter’s mask nullifies any attempt at puppy-dog eyes that he may or may not be trying to make while Danny gives her an understanding half-shrug. If Matt’s displeased with her call, he’s busy redirecting all the anger via a glower at Frank Castle.
With that, Jessica disappears over the edge of the roof. Frank, evidently less certain of the remaining vigilantes’ likelihood of holding Daredevil back, opts to retrieve his webbed gun from the ground and follow in her tracks.
Luke pinches the bridge of his nose and lets out a defeated sigh. “I’ll take care of the IED,” he decides, unfolding the paper in his hand. “He mapped out the design and where it’s planted, so it shouldn’t be too hard.”
Luke’s voice seems to be the catalyst that gets Matt to stop wavering on whether he should tackle the Punisher to the fire escape. He faces back to Luke with a curt nod and a somewhat distracted, “Yeah, good. Peter’s coming with me to find the elf before Frank does.”
Peter looks to the ground and shuffles his feet like he’d much rather deal with the bomb.
“Okay.” Danny claps his hands together. “I'll lend Luke a hand with the bomb. Send us a text when the elf is dead.”
“Frank's not killing the elf.”
“Send us a text when the elf is out of the picture,” Danny amends, which does nothing to appease Matt's scowl.
“Good luck,” Peter says, offering a fist-bump that Danny eagerly returns.
The sentiment, however, is not returned before Matt grabs Peter by the arm and tugs him away.
The Punisher gets to the elf first.
Usually this means bullet shells and dead bodies, but when the Spider Sense directs them to a rooftop on the docks, that’s not what they find. Frank has his back pressed up against a shipping container on the pier below, a rifle gripped tight in his hands and not an inch of him out of the cover. The reflective shine of bullets embedded in the white skull catches Peter’s eye, the source of which reveals itself a moment later.
A resounding cackle precedes the elf himself. The bangs of the gunshots overpower the jingling of his shoes as he scampers between shipping containers with a high-kneed prance, firing off rounds from a revolver in both hands in each and every direction.
Peter bumps Matt with his elbow. “Matt…”
Matt’s rooted to the spot and struggling to determine if the Punisher or the elf is the greater threat. “Okay,” he starts, his mouth dry. “You-” He’s cut off by a spray of gunfire and the tings of ricochets below. He’s forced to wait a beat for Frank’s war cry to die down before he grabs Peter by the shoulder and says, “Web up the elf. I’ll see to Frank.”
“And if he teleports out of my webbing?”
“Knock him out.”
“And if his elf anatomy makes him un-knock-outable?”
Somehow, Matt’s cowl doesn’t lessen the potency of his glare.
So Peter aims a web and swings into the pier, Daredevil a shadow behind him. He makes sure to keep his landing light when his feet meet the top of a shipping container and is quick to crouch low to stay out of sight of the two gunmen below. Peter tunes into his Spider Sense to jerk back to dodge a ricochet and to anticipate the thud of Matt bringing the Punisher to the ground.
That’s his cue. He jumps to a standing position, narrowly spots a flash of green rounding a corner, and leaps into action. Peter crosses the gap between shipping containers and breaks into a run. He flips off of the edge and twists in the air just in time to fire a web before the elf has the gun pointed in his face. He wrenches it away and sends it sliding across the pier and has a second web sticking the elf’s other armed hand to the wall of the container before he can pull the trigger.
“Ack!” The elf’s nose scrunches up as he tries and fails to pull his hand free. “Agh, does this come out of you? I don’t know if that’s worse than if you choose to make this on purpose. I was cleaning brains out of my beard earlier and this is the most disgusting thing I’ve touched all day.”
Quipping comes naturally to him, but that part and the rest of Peter’s brain takes a moment to kick into gear at the sight of the elf before him, its shoes jingling desperately as it presses its tiny feet against the wall and tries to force its hand free. But he’s not teleporting, so Peter will take the win. “Well, whose fault is that?”
The elf pauses in his straining to cast him a quick glance. “How much time do you have?”
“What’s wrong?” Peter retorts, jumping back to perch upon an adjacent shipping container, because simply standing to look down upon the elf feels wrong, somehow. “Santa didn’t give you the promotion? Did you flunk out of elf practice?”
Suddenly, the elf’s struggles cease, and he plants his feet on the ground to stare Peter dead in the eye. “You don’t know a fucking thing about elf practice.”
Despite himself, something in Peter wants to shiver. He leans forward and squints at the elf below. “So- Wait, are you actually- What are you?”
Of the two of them, the elf is the one that’s unfazed by the shots going off about ten shipping containers away. “‘What are you?’” he parrots. “It’s always, ‘what are you?’ ‘What is that?’ ‘Oh my God, did you just fucking shoot that guy?’ Never ‘how are you?’”
Peter blinks. “Is that why you’re doing this?”
“Oh, no,” the elf scoffs. “I imagine I’m doing this for the same reason you do that.” He waves a finger to encapsulate Peter’s suit.
“Moral obligation?”
“Oh, come on.” The elf shakes his head and tsks. “We both know better than that, Peter.”
Peter’s blood runs cold.
“What’s that one saying you guys use?” the elf continues, his voice sounding oddly distant. “Listen to your elders? What kind of saying is that, anyway? ‘Listen to your elders.’ Old people are always the crazy ones. Now that I think about it, they’re also the same people saying it. That being said…” he trails off, holding up his free hand to pick at the blood under his nails. “Your aunt was right, you definitely should’ve layered up tonight.”
Peter’s mind goes blank save for the buzzing at the base of his skull. “I- I don’t-” He swallows and grips the container tighter when he realizes that there’s no feeling left in his fingers. “How do you-”
“He sees you when you’re sleeping,” the elf answers in a sing-song voice and with a grin that sends chills down Peter’s spine. “He knows when you’re awake.”
“But- But I’m Jewish.”
He’s not sure why that is what escapes his numb lips, but it makes the elf’s expression fall. “Shit,” he says under his breath. He snaps his fingers with his free hand, and Peter jolts up as the elf disappears and air rushes beside him. It takes an enormous amount of willpower to contain his gasp when the elf’s shoes jingle next to him on the top of the shipping container.
“I could’ve sworn you guys were under our jurisdiction. Well. That’s an awkward filing error.” The elf starts to pace, then halts mid-step to aim the gun at Peter’s chest. Peter’s heart jumps to his throat, but then the elf is lowering the barrel with a disappointed grimace. “Yeah, I’m not feeling this anymore. You got me off my rhythm.”
Peter flinches violently when the elf’s hand pats on his calf.
The elf lets out a deep sigh. “Anyone who just witnessed what you witnessed should, frankly, be shot on sight. But I suppose no one would believe you, anyway. Happy late Chanukah.”
Just like that, the elf disappears.
Slowly, Peter sinks to the ground and waits for his hands to stop shaking.
“Jesus Christ.”
Matt leaps up between shipping containers to avoid the gunfire.
“This the hill you wanna die on, Red?”
Frank’s rifle is kicked out of his hand when Matt comes barreling down upon him from above. Frank grabs him on the way to the pavement, and they hit the ground hard. Matt’s teeth cut into his tongue as Frank uppercuts his jaw, but his hold on Matt isn’t secure enough to prevent the headbutt he gives in return. It disorients Frank just long enough for Matt to use the momentum to put himself back on top.
They’re veering dangerously close to the road now, and the moment Matt tries to check that there’s no traffic coming their way is interrupted when Frank jabs him in the throat with his elbow.
Matt’s polite enough to cough blood onto the concrete instead of Frank’s face. Frank takes the opportunity to reach down for his ankle, and Matt’s not about to let that stunt get him a second time, but instead of grasping a gun, Frank’s hand comes up empty.
“Woah!”
Both of them freeze.
The elf’s leaning over them less than four feet away, pinching the grip of a pistol between his thumb and forefinger and holding out in front of him. His tone is laced with reproach when he calls, “What the fuck is this?”
Frank's heart does something funny as the elf turns off the safety with a low chuckle bubbling up in his throat.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” the elf huffs, waving the gun between them. “Just take a second and imagine how odd this is for me. I haven’t even spent a day in New York, and there’s already a vaudeville of you spandex motherfuckers trying to-”
The elf breaks off with a squawk when Matt tosses his billy club to knock the gun aside.
Several things happen at once.
Frank twists free of Matt’s grip and lunges for the gun, but in less than a second, the elf’s standing over it with an accompanying whoosh. The elf kicks the gun away, the jingling of his shoes as shrill as his laugh that overlaps it. He scurries back toward the street as soon as Matt throws his other billy club at Frank’s legs and returns him to the ground, then catches the ricochet to send it flying for the elf’s head while he climbs back to his feet.
The billy club narrowly misses. The elf howls in delight, craning his neck to stare back at them as he scutters out into the road. “Ha! You’ll never take me-”
A semi-truck cuts the elf off.
He’s just tall enough for his shoulders to meet the bumper.
The bells at the end of the elf’s shoes are crushed under the wheels and the rest of him follows soon after. A thump repeats three times for each wheel that rolls him over.
The coppery tang of blood explodes in the air, but Matt can’t help his jaw from dropping as he feels the blood drain from his face. Beside him, Frank lets out a quiet, “Shit.”
Miraculously, the semi doesn’t stop. It keeps on its way down the pier, leaving a red and green mess in its wake.
Frank slowly pushes himself back up, eyes never leaving the road. When he crouches down to fetch his gun, Matt doesn’t stop him.
“Frank,” Matt says, more to say something than to have something to say.
He trails after Frank in his walk to the elf’s corpse—it’s definitely a corpse—and stops when Frank stops just outside of the carnage to stare down at it in some kind of morbid fascination. “You gettin’ anything, Red?”
Matt fails to suppress the small noise coming from the back of his throat. “He’s in two pieces, Frank.”
Frank nods, considers this, then fires two rounds into the elf’s skull.
Matt can’t find it in himself to protest.
“How ‘bout that?” Frank scuffs a foot toward the body. “You wanna call this an act of God, Red? That work for you?”
A shrug is the best Matt can offer. And when his burner buzzes from his pocket, at least he’s not the only one that jumps.
“Hey, is this a bad time?” Peter’s voice comes from the speaker once Matt manages to fumble the phone open.
“The elf’s dead,” Matt answers, perhaps too bluntly.
“Oh,” Peter says, though it’s not hard for Matt to pick up on the relief. “Well, Danny messaged the chat. They disarmed the bomb. So… I think I’m gonna go home.”
The exhaustion in Peter’s voice suddenly weighs heavily upon Matt’s own shoulders. “Yeah. Be careful.”
Frank clears his throat once Matt snaps the phone closed. “You think the cops are ready for that?” He nods to the elf remains at their feet.
“Is anyone?”
Frank shoves his hands in his pockets, turns to face the Hudson behind them, then back to Matt.
Matt’s gotten good at repressing the bile that wants to rise in his throat. And, fortunately, the docks have plenty of heavy scraps.
“Merry Christmas, Red.”
The elf’s upper half hits the water with a splash.
“Merry Christmas, Frank.”
Splash.