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“You’re an absolute psycho, you know that, right?”
There was a knife in the wall. It had seemingly materialized from nowhere, a quarter inch away from the tip of Gwen’s nose. Her spider-sense hadn’t so much as tweaked; it wasn’t really meant to hit her.
“So I’ve been told. You probably should have thrown me off the roof when you had the chance. And, you know, not break into random buildings in the middle of the night.”
Murdock was sitting, cross-legged on the cold floor of an office (his office? Gwen wasn’t sure, it was certainly sparsely decorated and way too fancy at the same time) surrounded by scattered papers and an extremely expensive computer. He fit an earpiece back in and turned back to his open laptop.
He wasn’t even pretending to be giving Gwen his attention. For some reason, that was even more galling than the Welcome Knife. She stomped forward, into the office, wrenching the knife out of the wall as she passed.
“You really think provoking me is gonna work? After everything? You can’t “corrupt” me!”
“Believe it or not, you won’t always be my first priority, kiddo,” Murdock gave Gwen a cold, brittle smile, (or smiled in her vague direction, his earpiece was apparently throwing off his spatial sense) went back to examining the Braille-embossed papers.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I do have a case to prepare for. Captain America’s not gonna defend herself! Ha, you know, she wanted to plead guilty, do some jail time as a symbol of the rule of law. You little trendsetter , you.”
Gwen decided not to mention the fact that a universe away, another (kinder, decent-er, somewhat less homicidal) Matt Murdock was in prison for the same self-sacrificing/self-righteous reason. Murderdock would probably want to go see Daredevil for himself and Gwen thought the 616 had enough issues for now without having Daredevil try and fistfight his evil twin and start a prison brawl.
“So, what, that’s it? No swearing revenge on me for getting you locked up?”
“Oh please, you didn’t even get me disbarred.”
Turns out, saying a blind guy was a ninja criminal mastermind was difficult to prove in court. Gwen had been able to kick Murdock’s legs out from under him in terms of Kingpin-ing, but it hadn’t been enough to really nail him to the wall beyond a few months in a cell. By the end of it, the news cycle had moved on and now, nobody seemed to care.
It was infuriating.
Everyone “ knew ” what he’d done but any criminal with real information owed their freedom to Murdock’s legal defense talent and the ones who wound up in prison anyway still either felt indebted or terrified. Plus, the DA had just torched his own career saving Gwen from a murder charge, Frank Castle was absolutely bonkers and his testimony wasn’t considered viable and the other, most credible witness...
“Yeah, well, if Captain America hadn-“
“Hadn’t been involved in that tragic accident, on camera, forcing her to come to me as the only lawyer willing to represent her, she’d probably have been more helpful to the case against me.”
It has been grisly. Some kind of alien or robot or alien-robot invasion. Captain America’s shield gone wild, a car of high-schoolers, a mass of twisted metal and gore. It was debatable if she was at fault but public opinion had turned against her. Gwen had missed it, being a universe away and she hadn’t been able to bring herself to watch the video, but she’d been told it was absolutely horrible.
Murdock shrugged cheerfully, “Small miracles!”
Yikes.
“You are the absolute worst.”
“And I am absolutely too busy for you right now. Now kindly piss off. We can have some stupid warehouse rooftop spider versus sword fight after I free our dear star-spangled patriot and you can web me into the Hudson or something.”
Gwen threw the knife down, the metal handle loudly clanking off the polished, ceramic tile floor. She took a little nasty pleasure seeing the half-second spasm of pain cross Murdock’s face at the noise.
She wondered if she should start being a mini chalkboard around to scratch her nails on. It’d probably make him want to tear his skull out of his skin...
But - maybe that was too far. Too cruel for the sake of cruel. Too... Murdocky.
Gwen thought she should probably be more like Captain America and less like the barefoot crime ninja in the middle of the room, who was admittedly working to actually help Captain America. Pro-bono, no less, but that was only for the good publicity. It had been a horrible mistake, one Samantha Wilson would doubtlessly regret for the rest of her life.
Like Gwen regretted Peter.
Gwen stopped short.
“Haven’t you ever... felt bad, about anything you’ve done? Or is regret just a foreign concept to you?”
“No point in regrets, Spidey.”
“Figures.”
Gwen left the office, crawled through the jimmied-open window and swung off into the night. What a complete
dick.