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“What do I look like?” Matt asks.
“Ahh, you’ll just let it go to your head.”
“Please, Frank.”
“Please, Frank,” the tank of a man echoes dryly under his breath, misshapen head dropping between his misshapen knees. He gives a resigned sigh. “Fine.”
Frank pauses. He only looks at Matt for a second before he seems to have all the information he needs, turning to address the skyline.
“You’re beautiful. You’re one of the most beautiful people I ever met,” he states matter-of-factly, in a way that only Frank could. Not a compliment. Just how it is. “Your nose has been broken, and broken, and broken, but you can only tell if you know what to look for. Same thing with your scratches. There’s a bunch all over your face, your chin, you know, but they’re so small they blend in. The scruff helps.
“Your eyebrows are curved. Makes you look, I don’t know. More neutral, when you’re not scowling. Prob’ly comes in handy, you bein’ a lawyer and all. But you hold your head in interesting ways, makes ‘em more expressive. Scares the shit out of the bad guys,” he chuckles in that low rumble of tank tread on gravel. Matt’s mouth lifts at the corner.
“Then you got yer eyes. You got some serious eyelashes on you, Red. You’d think they’d match your hair, but they’re darker. Your eyes are usually a little lidded, at least when you’re on the rooftops- seen ‘em pretty wide in your monkey suit. They’re really somethin’ colour-wise. Your pupils might be a little lighter than most people’s, I don’t know, you can’t tell. In the middle they’re light, light brown- not warm brown, cold. Almost grey. Like dust. Then they get kinda hazy green to the middle, and then darker brown like whiskey. Sometimes, you can’t see ‘em for the dark- they’re black. But sometimes, they should be shadowed by all means, right? But they’re pale. Pale in the dark where they should blend in. No idea what that’s about.”
Matt’s gone completely still, listening. Even the city’s stopped to listen, enraptured. That’s what he thinks for a moment, but he realizes in another that it hasn’t, he’s just so focussed on Frank’s words and the masterpiece they’re forming into that he can’t hear it. The sounds of car horns and arguments fade into the subconscious processes of Matt’s mind as he strains instead to recall what green looked like, what shade whiskey was.
“Your cheekbones are just on the soft side of high, and they got this middle ground between pronounced and gentle that also changes dependin’ how you hold your head. You change a lot between day and night, you know. And then you got your jaw, it’s always just a little too used to bein’ set. That’s the tell. You look all soft and harmless in your shades and ties, but your jaw stays hard. Your scruff’s darker than your hair, kinda rough-lookin’. Like some rich boy style grew out a bit too much.”
Matt snorts quietly. He’s never had the cash lying around to get a rich boy anything. Except maybe the silk sheets.
“Your hair’s easy, Red. Takes up most of your face. Prob’ly doesn’t bother you gettin’ in your eyes like that, but it makes it that much more of a conscious effort to find ‘em. It’s thick. Not straight as straight, not curly either. It’s ginger red, orange brown, but Murdock- I swear I seen it go dark. That’s another thing I don’t know how it happens.
“Your lips aren’t crazy thin or thick. Got an insufferable smirk on ‘em, most of the time. Even when you’re not smirking. Not quite a happy smirk, either. More resigned. That’s even worse, it’s like you think you really do know everything just cuz you got a good set of ears. They match you like that, Red. Very ‘woe is me’.”
Matt snorts a little louder.
“And you move like a dancer. But you’re fightin’ always kinda looked like dancin’ to me anyway. Not somebody who dances when they’re happy. A professional. Like one of those tango dancers that live and breathe their craft. Maybe they like it, maybe they don’t, but,” he shrugs. “It’s who they are.” He pauses for a sip from his thermos. “It’s kinda like you were taught to move, Red. But I don’t think you got an off button for that.” Frank digs his heel into the gravel on the roof. Back and forth. “That’s what you look like.”
Matt breathes his sincerity in, his- his frankness- like a man dying of thirst would water. It’s so fucking rare. It’s never as simple as ‘truth’ or ‘lie’, as much as he wishes it was- people have a thousand faces, a thousand lenses they see things through. Matt’s never met anyone who could line them up and speak through them, for them, like Frank does. He wants to give even a fraction of that back.
“I don’t have your way with words, Frank-“
Frank grunts, but doesn’t interrupt.
“But you’re a really interesting read.”
Matt wouldn’t do this for anyone else. He’s never done it for anyone else. Anyone else would just find it creepy. But Frank… he just sat there and told Matt about his eyelashes and how his cheekbones sit, and it was just the truth because he asked for it, nothing more and nothing less. It would dishonour Frank to not return the same integrity, in all it’s creepy glory. And he wants Frank to know how he sees him, because frankly, he’s one of the most beautiful people Matt’s ever met, too.
“Your footfall is always heavy. And it’s kind of like you’ve been wearing boots all your life. You’d probably walk like that in flip flops.”
Another indescribable grunt from Frank.
“Your heartbeat is one of the steadiest. Strong and slow. I’ve heard it completely calm when you pull the trigger, but it jumps at the strangest things. Most times I can’t even figure out what. Your tells are entirely incompatible with the general populace’s, it’s baffling. You’re like a whole different species. And sometimes, you’re shockingly human.
“You don’t sweat easy, but you don’t do easy very well either, so you sweat a lot. Tastes salty. Even when you’re not active, I still taste the salt. Gunpowder. You smell of metal and gunpowder, leather and grease and well-loved things, things worn through with use until they just smell familiar. You smell like familiarity. Shaving cream. Blood. Grease. And all manner of dirty things.”
“You always say the nicest things, Red.”
Matt hums thoughtfully, trying to think of how to put it. “I don’t think I... take things, the same way as most people do anymore. Some things smell bad, but dirty things are sometimes just... dirty.”
Frank waves at him to continue. Matt knew he didn’t care anyway.
“You smell indescribably alive, more so than anyone I’ve ever met. You’re indescribably… tangible.” That’s the best way Matt can put it.
”Tangible?”
”Solid. Present. Tangible.”
A few seconds of silence pass and Frank lets out a thoughtful grunt. Matt takes this as his cue to continue.
“Your callouses make nice noises against the things you touch. Your clothes make nice noises against you. Some people, their clothes are too loose, too scratchy, too loud. They smell like cupboards and bleach. You don’t have many clothes, so yours just smell like you. And they’re familiar like you, too. In general, and to me.”
“Okay.”
Matt ignores him, for once confident in these things he knows. Almost proud to know these things about Frank and share them. “It’s kind of interesting how they fall over your scars. Most people are really predictable that way and I get used to it. I guess it gives me something to focus on if I need to. You’re very grounding.”
Matt feels Frank turn his head to look at him. “Tangible, right?”
Matt grins in answer before continuing. “Even when you don’t speak, you make a lot of quiet noises. Tiny breaths. Mumbles. You do a lot of that. I think you’re better at saying stuff that way. It makes more sense than your words usually do, at least.”
Matt waits for the grunt, but it doesn’t come. Frank is silent. Well, as silent as something so tangible gets.
“Pretty much every bone in your body’s been broken at one point. Most mended, but not all neatly. Again, it makes you sound different than anyone else. I can feel the things changed in your body, and trace them back to the scars above them. Shrapnel hiding under an old bullet wound. That kind of thing. Layers and layers of Frank.”
If either of them was going to freak at any point over this, it would be now. Matt is basically describing how he can smell Frank’s insides, and that’s who he is to Matt. A creaky, heavy organ sack. But neither of them do freak. It seems right, somehow. Matt finds he isn’t even worried as he keeps speaking. In fact, he hasn’t felt this calm in years.
”Your dog tags used to be the loudest, most distinctive part of you,” he babbles. He remembers when Frank stopped wearing them, he almost didn’t recognize him. “But now it’s... everything.”
Matt bites his tongue before he can say something about how he’s never met anyone like Frank. It’s implied. Frank knows. That’s another thing about Frank; as good as he is with words, he doesn’t need them.
Frank lets out another one of his funny little sounds, his lungs expanding and contracting quietly with it. His ribcage creaks off beat, out of tune. Matt wonders if this is what people listen to music for.
“Good to know,” Frank hums.