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Somewhere in the distance, far off in the Citadel of the Hand, a voice screamed in pain. The sound of it rose sharply through the air, like a knife piercing through flesh, then fell instantly and terribly silent. Matt hunched closer to the tree branch where he squatted, hidden among the foliage, a precaution maintained even in the absence of any Hand ninjas within reach of his senses. He heard no puffs of exhaled breath, no light footsteps whispering through the grass or surrounding trees—indicators he relied on to compensate for the disadvantage of their controlled heartbeats, their walking-corpse bodies masking the most obvious sign of life and movement, of approaching threats.
Only one heartbeat besides Matt’s own carried through the still air and the space between the trees, the sole human one to reach his ears since entering the Citadel. Steady as a ticking clock, familiar as the beads on the rosary that had hung from his childhood bedpost. It pulsed like old bones before a storm with the memory of cold rooftops and city streets, of home and simpler times. Then, their exchange of strikes and blows, of bullets and blunt instruments held the balance of one life or a handful, a dance between life and death.
Now, they walked the knife’s edge, the whole fate of the world between them. Matt pulled in his senses and focused them down to the clearing below, where Frank Castle, the Punisher, sweated and grunted and swung his katana through the air in rough, basic movements. Which was to say: badly. Frank dealt in guns and knives and improvised explosives, not the precision of the ancient blade the Hand had tasked him with carrying, a finely crafted weapon he wielded with the clumsiness of a child’s toy. It made Matt’s teeth grind, his hands flex inside their gloves with the urge to take it away from him like he had earlier, for the lack of skill if not the stakes of the game. Might have, if he’d thought the power of the Beast had would let him keep it any longer than he had last time.
That power coursed through Frank like a disease. Skin dry and lips cracked, Matt still felt the heat of the flames that had erupted from Frank’s body without consuming it, without hurting him at all. His scream of rage as he’d thrown off both the exorcism and Matt’s assumption that it would help, that the Beast had taken over Frank’s body as it had once taken over Matt’s own, all his good intentions leading him straight down to hell. When Frank had seized Matt by the throat, had raised them both into the air with the gifts of the Beast that surprised them both, he displayed with shining example and abundant clarity that nothing had led or dragged him to damnation: the Hand had found him there already, right where he’d been for as long as Matt had known him.
Except he now led the Hand, and Matt led the Fist that would destroy it, and the Hand kept Frank’s dead-undead wife locked in his quarters like the world’s most gruesome trophy. Frank loved her—whatever was left of her—must love her, to trade the stubborn solitude of his one-man war for leading an army. To overlook the sickening jerk of her movements, the lingering smell of rot. Hours later, it still turned Matt’s stomach.
Hours later, Matt should be gone. On a flight out of this country and on his way back to Elektra and the newly reformed Fist that, for all its convoluted prophecies and deadly rituals, brought him and Frank back to the same place. At odds, at each other’s throats, Frank’s unstoppable force bearing down on Matt’s immovable object. Killing the problem versus the inherent value of life and second chances, as if they squared off in the courtrooms of Matt’s previous life, Frank the relentless prosecution, Matt the stalwart defense.
Down in the clearing, Frank paused in his routine, the sword held aloft in front of him as if warding off an invisible enemy. And spoke:
“I know you’re there, Red.”
Conversational volume, meant for Matt’s sensitive ears only. Despite everything, the tangled past and uncertain future, Matt smiled. He pulled out his club, detaching the two halves and using the cord inside to wrap one half around the branch, lowering himself with the other in a controlled descent that took him all the way to the ground. He landed gently on the grass, bringing his club back together with a flick of the wrist, keeping it in his hand and bracing for the coming attack.
Instead, Frank plunged his katana into the earth. Matt barely even used swords, preferring the less lethal club he carried, but he knew how to use them against not-quite-alive or not-quite-human enemies. The lack of care still made him wince. Leaving the weapon behind, Frank walked over to a boulder in the middle of the clearing and took a seat. His back still faced Matt, a display of trust or simply a lack of care over whether Matt took advantage of the opening.
Or a trap. Matt extended his senses again, straining for any sign of Hand ninjas lying in wait. None arose from the unnaturally quiet trees, even the skittering animals in the undergrowth sporadic and subdued. He ventured a cautious step forward, then another, slowly approaching the boulder and the man sitting on it until he stood an arm’s length away.
Frank didn’t look at him, didn’t turn his head. He faced forward, hands braced on the boulder behind him and his whole front open, his neck vulnerable and exposed. Still holding his club, Matt waited for the tension in the air to snap, for the next move of their game.
After a minute, Frank delivered. “How’s Elektra?” he asked.
“What?” Matt asked in turn, croaking, stupid.
And Frank laughed at him like he deserved, a quiet, huffing sound. “Don’t be coy, Red,” he told him. “The Priestess might be a fucked-up pile of evil monster stuffed into a human suit, but she ain’t stupid. The Hand knows El’s working with you.”
If there was some trick in that, Matt couldn’t find it; Frank had always been too straightforward for anything less than a frontal assault. “She’s—fine,” he settled on, a non-answer and the best he could do.
“Hear she’s been playing Daredevil,” Frank went on. “Giving you a run for your money.”
“She’s been taking care of things for me. While I was…” He trailed off, forced the words out: “In prison.”
“‘Cause of that man you killed,” Frank said casually, like talking about the weather, something neutral—and as far as Frank was concerned, it might as well be. For the Punisher, it was always raining blood.
Matt’s hand tightened around his club. “Is this the part where you tell me we’re not that different?”
Sharp shake of his head. “Nah. I know you didn’t do it on purpose.” Frank scooted a little further down the boulder, patting the rock beside him in an unmistakable invitation.
One Matt would have to be a goddamn idiot to accept. He kept his feet planted in the grass and his hand around his club, tilting his head as if that would let him hear past the bullshit to what Frank really wanted, because it couldn’t be Matt sitting next to him like they were about to scatter birdseed in Central Park.
A beat passed, two. Frank sighed. “If I wanted to fight you, I’d be fighting you.” He patted the boulder again. “Sit.”
“Why?” Matt asked guardedly.
“Because you’re the first motherfucker I’ve met in weeks who ain’t calling me ‘Lord Punisher’ or trying to kill me, or”—his voice went soft, pained—“asking me when the kids are gonna come home.”
God. Against all his better judgment and screaming instincts, Matt put his club away and joined Frank on the boulder. The space small enough that their arms nearly touched, that the heat of Frank’s body bled through the air between them and the Kevlar weave of Matt’s suit and the reinforced material of the devil-horned mask that covered his face. He extended his senses for Hand ninja again, but the trees around them remained as silent as tombstones and as devoid of life.
“Tell me something about home,” Frank said, clarified, “The city.”
Unexpected as it was, the request stymied him for a minute, too much and not enough to say. “New York is New York. Chaotic, messy,” Matt told him, nothing he didn’t already know. “Brooklyn’s still there without you killing every carjacker and drug dealer you can find, if that’s what you’re asking.” At this, Frank let out a quiet snort, and Matt’s cracked lips pulled into a half-smile as he continued. “Luke Cage is mayor now.”
“Yeah?” Frank nodded slowly. “Good. A lot better than fuckin’ Fisk. How’d Cage get past him?”
“Well, Fisk tried to use the Purple Man to secure reelection, we stopped him, and then he fled the city in disgrace,” Matt said, summing up the weeks of Fisk’s reign of terror in seconds. “But he was never the real problem. Have you ever heard of the Stromwyns?”
“No,” Frank said, turning to face him with evident interest.
Which wasn’t surprising—up until a couple months ago, Matt hadn’t heard of them, either. “They’re a rich, old couple, and I mean multi-billionaire rich. Ultra-mega-rich. Elektra and I stole two billion dollars from them and didn’t hurt anything except their ego.” He clenched his jaw, then forced it to relax. “They think they can buy anything: neighborhoods, people, politicians. They put Fisk in power.”
“Sounds like the kind of assholes I’d like to shoot,” Frank commented.
“Yeah, sounds like the kind of assholes I’d have to stop you from shooting so I can send them to prison instead,” Matt replied lightly, and he laughed, and Frank laughed, and it hurt like Matt’s ribs were broken, like his whole chest was one big bruise.
Craving the simplicity of the past, which he could only appreciate now, in retrospect.
“Frank,” Matt said quietly, hopelessly. “Let me help you.”
The heat of Frank’s body withdrew a few inches. “You can’t help me. Maria… I tried to take her away from here, and she started dying.” Again, he didn’t say, but Matt could hear it. “You can’t help her, so you can’t help me.”
“I’m sorry,” Matt told him, worse than useless. He knew what he needed to say next, chewing on it like gristle that he couldn’t swallow and would have to spit out. When he did, this reprieve would disappear, and Frank would attack him again, and none of that mattered—it needed to be said, the line already scripted. “Frank,” Matt began, slow and careful like approaching a wild animal, “You know she’s—after this long—she’s not really… She can’t be alive, Frank. And how the Hand resurrects people—think about what that’s doing to her.”
“I do,” Frank said, thin rage in his voice, but he wasn’t trying to kill Matt yet. “Every day, I do.”
“Then why can’t you…?” He couldn’t say the rest.
But Frank could. “Let her go?” he asked, and of all the anomalous things, laughed—short and harsh, but a laugh still. “Y’know, when the Priestess brought her to me, I didn’t want to accept it. I was just—it was her again, and I was standing there dumb as a fuckin’ post, and they let me get a good look at her, at my wife, and they let her talk to me and then—”
He cut off abruptly, said nothing for a solid minute. Then, savagely: “One of those fuckin’ ninja came up behind Maria and slit her throat.” Deep, shuddering breath. “I killed him, of course. Didn’t even think about it. And when I turned back and went to gather my wife’s body in my arms… she was alive again, Red. Asleep, or passed out, I guess, but alive. I’d have thought it was some illusion the Hand put in my mind, but she was still covered in blood from that hole in her throat that wasn’t there anymore, and that evil bastard fucking Priestess started going on and about the power and glory of the Beast, but I got the message. Loud and fuckin’ clear. I can’t let her go,” Frank said, all anguish from that final, awful conclusion. “They won’t let me.”
The sheer horror of it closed Matt’s throat up. His fingers twitched, an abortive movement in Frank’s direction to offer comfort or touch or something, stopped by the doubt over whether Frank would welcome the gesture.
“And the kids—shit,” Frank said, covering his face with his hands so the rest came out muffled. “We tried the kids, and they came back deformed like, I don’t even know. Not human. Eyes and limbs in the wrong places, and I don’t know if they recognized me when they saw me coming with that fucking sword to put them out of their misery. God, I hope not.” Frank dropped his hands, said, “I can’t leave, Red. I can’t even die, because they’d just bring me back, and you know how that goes.”
“You’d lose what little control you have,” Matt said hollowly. “I’m—I’m so sorry, Frank. I didn’t know. If there’s any way—”
Frank moved, cutting him off abruptly as he grabbed the back of Matt’s neck and kissed him, hard. Warm and wet, the ridges of his teeth cutting into Matt’s lip. When Frank pulled back for air, he left just enough space to rest their foreheads together, and Matt couldn’t move, couldn’t think. He’d put the genie back in the bottle, the cat in the bag, and only a chosen few knew the secret that had once gotten out to the whole world, that Matt Murdock was Daredevil. Frank wasn’t one of them and so shouldn’t remember the nights their fights turned to something else, the catch in Frank’s breath that Matt followed all the way down, shoving him against the wall of an alley and kissing him. The aftermath, in Matt’s apartment or Frank’s closest safehouse (or, one memorable time, the back of his van), the way they fit together, the fingerprint-shaped bruises left on Matt’s hips that he’d feel for days, the belt of the dress slacks he wore to work pressing against them every time he moved.
“Frank?” he asked, soft and uncertain.
“Matt,” Frank said simply, and Matt’s heart jumped to his throat.
His body wanted to leap up then, but Frank wouldn’t let him, hand still on the back of his neck, dropping his forehead to rest on Matt’s shoulder. This close, he smelled like the Hand, death and acrid magic, but beneath that—gunpowder and coffee. Summer nights, when the smell of green drifted out from Central Park and covered the whole of Manhattan, winter mornings when the air outside felt like a slap. Frank smelled like he always did, like the city, like home and everything Matt had given up.
“How long have you known?” Matt asked.
“Eyes on fire,” Frank replied. “Whatever the hell else that Beast is doing to me, it let me see right through you.” He shifted closer, asked, “How’d you do it?”
“I didn’t,” Matt told him honestly. “The Purple Man was trying to, I don’t know, take over the world or just sow chaos with this doomsday machine, and I helped his kids stop him. They thought they were doing me a favor.”
Frank grunted in acknowledgment. “Some favor,” he said. “I don’t blame you,” he added, more than Matt expected. “I know you can’t be like me.”
The irony took Matt’s breath away. After all the times Frank had put a weapon in his hand, had shown up whenever Matt got too close to the teetering edge, about to take that final step—only to pull him back before he could, Matt thought now, the clarity like air rushing into a closed room. Frank had gotten himself thrown in prison once, had rescued Matt from the back of a police cruiser less than a year ago, always rolled back into his life when he started to toe the line. Every time, Frank stood on the other side of it, his arms spread wide and his chest a target, a reminder of why the line existed, why it was one Matt couldn’t cross.
Here, now, in this circle of trees with the Citadel beyond it, Matt couldn’t do a damned thing for him. His arm had somehow ended up around Frank’s shoulders, and Matt used it to pull him closer. “I’ll get you out of here,” he promised. “I’ll come back for you. There’s got to be a way.”
But Frank shook his head roughly against Matt’s shoulder, lifted it up to kiss him again. Soft this time, and not as strange or forbidden as it should have been, with Frank’s dead-undead wife somewhere close, waiting for him in their bed. No—it was the only thing in this place that made any damned sense.
“Finish it,” Frank said fiercely, gripping the back of his neck with near-bruising force. “You and Elektra. Finish this, or I will.”
Mutely, Matt nodded, didn’t trust his mouth to speak. He tore away from Frank while he still could, out of the trees and over the walls of the Citadel of the Hand, and into the world beyond. On the cliffside, Matt stopped and listened, trying to pick out the steady sound of Frank’s heartbeat a final time, but all he could hear overhead was the rushing wind.
*
A flight out of Sapporo, two transfers, and a private charter had Matt arriving back at what was, for now and for better or worse, the place he’d have to call home. He stepped off the platform and into the refuge of Elektra’s arms, there and waiting for him, and took a minute to selfishly ignore everything else, everything before him and behind.
Matt left Foggy and Cole to get settled in, two civilians who stuck out here like the runts of the litter that wouldn’t survive the winter, but he needed them both. Cole to step up and be the leader Matt could depend on, Foggy to be safe and not unprotected in New York, because Matt couldn’t stand to lose his best friend on top of everything else. He passed the hurdles of the Fist’s new recruits and Stick, the same taciturn old man he’d been when Matt was a child, who Elektra said got to help them see this through.
Then, with the long day finished and Matt about to fall over with the setting sun, Elektra took him into a private room at the secluded end of the headquarters she’d built with the money stolen from the Stromwyns. She helped him out of his Daredevil suit and into his bed, their bed. Silk sheets as smooth as her skin, as soothing. He lay against her body, the softness and strength of her, callused hands and corded muscle. Giving you a run for your money, Frank had said, and she was, and Matt didn’t mind it, felt only pride that she wore the suit and devil-horned mask as well as him.
In Elektra’s arms, in the hushed quiet of their room with all other sounds of life safely distant, Matt could unspool. He told her of Frank and Maria and the Priestess of the Hand who kept them trapped there, barring even death as a means of escape.
“The exorcism didn’t work,” Matt said. “We need to find some way to help him.”
For a long moment, Elektra didn’t answer, her fingers carding through his hair. “We need to stop the Hand,” she said finally. “If taking Frank away from them can be part of that, we’ll do it.”
“Everything the Fist has, all those old texts and legends, what’s the point if—?” If he couldn’t save anyone, save everyone. “I said I’d come back for him.”
A noncommittal sound in her throat, and Elektra bent her neck to kiss Matt’s forehead. “When did you sleep with him?” she asked.
“What?” Matt all but gasped, but there was no point denying it, not with the way his body went stiff, with how well she could read him.
The lips pressed against Matt’s forehead curved into a smile, then withdrew. “I can hear it in your voice,” she said. “You talk about him the way you talk about—others you lost.” The smallest pause held the names she’d held back to spare him, but Matt heard them anyway, a list of the dead and irreparably hurt running through his head. “It’s that same love, the same sorrow.”
“It was back in New York. A few times,” Matt told her; there could be no secrets between them now. “It was a long time ago.”
“That doesn’t really matter, does it? The amount of time that’s passed,” Elektra said, her fingers going through his hair again. “I’ve loved him, too.”
Lifting her hand to his mouth, Matt kissed it. Didn’t say anything, because that had never been a secret. He’d known when they were working together, and when Elektra came to New York because he’d called and helped him because he’d asked, Matt had smelled Frank on her skin. They’d never spoken of it, but she hadn’t been trying to hide it, either.
“If there’s a way to help him, we’ll find it,” Elektra said. “But if it’s a choice between saving Frank and destroying the Hand… Matthew, we can’t give that up for the sake of one life.”
A cold spot dropped into the middle of Matt’s chest like a stone. She was right, and he hated that she was right. “I know,” Matt said quietly, keeping the rest to himself.
“Get some sleep,” Elektra said, kissing him once more. “We have a busy day tomorrow.”
She rolled over, the rustle of sheets and her evergreen scent. Matt draped an arm loosely around her waist and held her close, and he thought of Frank holding Maria in another bed, somewhere across the ocean, on the other side of the war.
***