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He senses the blow coming, but his body is too sluggish to move out of the way. Elektra lurches forward in an attempt to throw herself between him and the sword, but she's too far away to make it in time. It feels like it happens in slow motion: the point of the sai pricks the skin of his neck, exposed without his helmet; it slices in, through the layers of his skin, opening up his jugular vein. Elektra gets there in time to stop the sai from penetrating his carotid artery, but Matt knows that it's too late for him. She grabs a hold of the hilt over Nobu's hand, jerking backward to elbow him in the face, then tugs the sai out of Matt's neck. The sound of flesh sliding around the metal and blood pumping out of his vein are joined by the splatter of more droplets as Elektra swings the blade in a wide arc, out of Matt's throat and into Nobu's.
She carves him open with a shriek, slicing through his carotid artery, the rhythmic sound of Nobu's blood joining Matt's own as it hits the ground. The sai tears through Nobu's trachea and esophagus, glancing off the bone of his cervical vertebrae before she's done with her blow. The gust of air as she spins feels like a strong wind, making Matt sway on his knees, and then she's flying past him to kill the remaining members of the Hand in a perfect storm of skill and fury, finally unleashed.
The last man goes down, and Matt is so focused on the relief of knowing that Elektra's won that it comes as a complete surprise to him when his head hits the pavement.
She's there in an instant, hand pressing down on his vein, too late to do any good. Her other hand slides under his head and she leans over him, pressing her forehead to his. "Matthew," she says, voice raw and frantic. "We'll get you to the hospital, I'll-- I'll call an ambulance, you have a phone in one of those pockets don't you? Just tell me where it is and I--"
"Elektra," he breathes, shaking his head. "It's too late for that."
"No! No, I won't let you-- not without me, you can't die without me, Matthew." A hot tear drips from her eye onto his cheek, rolling down toward his ear. "I love you," she whispers.
"Pr-- Promise me one thing," Matt whispers, swallowing against the pain in his body and the pain in his slowing heart. "Please, Elektra, just one thing."
"Anything," she says, lips brushing his. "Anything at all, Matthew."
"Live. Don't let them catch you. Don't-- don't let them win." She smiles against his lips and nods, and he adds, "I love you too."
Then she's crying, sobbing, and he can't quite find his voice but he moves his lips anyway. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.
***
I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry.
He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.
And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the Lord. (Psalm 40:1-3)
***
Breathe.
In.
Out.
In--
Matt wakes up with a start, sheets falling to tangle around his waist as he sits up. He feels for the wall, disoriented, and his fingers contact cool concrete. Blinking rapidly to clear the dryness from his eyes, he extends his senses out around him.
He's in a small room, four walls, one door, no windows, a toilet and sink in one corner. The bed is soft, the sheets silk, but the mattress is narrow. There's someone on the other side of the door, maybe a guard. Armed, by the smell of gunpowder. His ears zero in on an electric hum and he tilts his head to localize it: a security camera, up in the corner of the room. Matt doesn't remember where he is or how he got here, but someone is watching him, and they know he's awake.
Purposeful footsteps echo down the hall outside, and he braces himself as the door swings open.
The man who enters is middling in height, but likely muscular based on the air displacement of his body as he moves. He moves quietly, clearly the result of long training. "How do you feel?" he asks, and Matt tenses at the familiarity of the voice, of his accent. Familiar, but not familiar enough to place.
"Where am I?"
"Safe. What is the last thing you remember?"
Matt frowns and wracks his mind. "I'm not sure," he admits. "How long was I asleep?"
"You have not been awake for six months. I'm afraid it took us some time to perform the procedure that allowed you to return to us."
"There was a-- I was on a roof. I was on a roof, there was a woman--"
"Your memory will take some time to return. I will have food and drink brought to you. Please, rest. If there is anything you need, let the guard at your door know."
"Wait," Matt calls as the man turns to leave. "What's your name?"
The man hesitates, then says quietly, "You may call me Nobu."
***
He eats, drinks, sleeps, remembers. He remembers a little boy, stitching up his father's face. He remembers his training. He remembers a beautiful woman with a dangerous smile; a friendly roommate; an innocent woman covered in blood.
He remembers fighting, and not killing.
He can't remember why it was important.
***
"You're dead," Matt says to Nobu the next time he sees him.
"As are you. And yet, here we are."
"I killed you, once. And then Elektra killed you."
"Do you want to kill me now?"
Matt's eyebrows draw together. "I don't know."
***
When he's regained his strength, Nobu takes Matt to spar with the other members of The Hand. He remembers The Hand, remembers how badly he wanted to destroy them, but it feels distant. It's like his previous life was a long dream that he's only just woken up from, vividly seared in his memory but not real.
But this, this is real: the exhilaration of swinging his fists, kicking, flipping to dodge his opponents' blows. The crunch of bone under his knuckles and heels. The heady smell of blood.
When he draws first blood it's like the world slows to a halt, the slow welling and dripping his only focus. His fingers itch for a blade to open up the cut wider, but they haven't given him any weapons. Matt steps forward, aiming for his opponent, but the man is already yielding and stepping back, and Nobu's hand on his elbow breaks the spell.
Matt shakes his head, trying to clear it, but the coppery tang of blood still floods his nose and mouth.
It tastes good.
***
The next day, Nobu brings two worshippers to him. They kneel and press their foreheads to the floor.
"What are you doing?" Matt asks.
"You're their god," Nobu replies. "They're offering themselves to you."
"I'm not God."
"That's a matter of opinion."
The worshippers draw daggers and prick their wrists, offering the drops of blood that well up to Matt. He breathes deeply and licks his lips.
"Don't hold back," Nobu says quietly. "Their blood is yours for the taking. You want it, do you not?"
In another life, Matt struggled with himself, constantly holding back, constantly trying not to kill anyone. In another life, he believed in something other than himself.
In this life, all he wants is blood. He takes the knife from the girl, and leans down to lick the blood from her skin. It's like electricity, sparking through his tastebuds, overloading his nervous system. The thing inside him, the devil he always tried to keep in check, rears its ugly head.
It's too easy to slice open the girl's veins. It's too easy to thrill at the other worshipper trembling as the girl bleeds out, as he wets his mouth with her blood.
It's too easy to accept the sacrifice he's offered as his due.
***
After the first sacrifices, Matt is moved from his cell to a well-appointed room. He has freedom to come and go. It's not that they could have stopped him before, but he had no reason to. There's no reason for Matt to fight The Hand; whatever reasons he had in the past are dead along with the old Matt Murdock, drowned in the blood of sacrifices.
Sometimes, Matt thinks it should bother him that he's developed a taste for blood. If he thinks about it for too long it starts to give him a headache, and Nobu will usually either bring more sacrifices or take him out to the training ring before it gets that far.
***
He's not sure how long he's been with The Hand when he first gets a chance to go out into the world. Nobu gives him a new uniform for the occasion -- similar to the other Hand operatives, but fully black instead of red at the arms and legs. At least, that's what Nobu tells him it looks like. "Why black?" Matt asks, and Nobu says, "Because we are Yami no Te, the Hand of Darkness, and you are the darkness."
Even in his other life, Matt knew he had darkness inside. Now, letting the darkness take over, he doesn't feel guilty. He feels free.
***
The first time they let him loose in a fight, he kills fifteen people.
***
The second time he kills forty. Nobu sends three worshippers to him, after, when he's still in a haze of bloodlust. They offer themselves up to his desires, and he takes their bodies, then their blood.
***
The third time, he kills twenty-three people before Stick and Elektra show up. He recognizes them as soon as they enter the fray, neither masking their heartbeats, Elektra's hair whipping around in the wind. They can't get close to him before the retreat is ordered, but he hears Elektra's surprised exhalation of, "Matthew?" before he climbs on the back of Nobu's motorcycle, so he knows that they've seen him.
He thinks about them on the ride back, sifting through his memories to find the relevant ones. When they're home, and he's stripping out of his uniform, Nobu asks curiously, "Can you kill them both?"
Matt considers. He's beaten Stick before, but he's not sure Stick didn't let him win. He's never really beaten Elektra, but then, they've never really had the kind of fight where they were trying to kill each other. Matt also knows he's never really let himself loose before, not entirely. Not when he was trying so hard not to kill anyone.
"Maybe," he replies. "I don't know if I can take them both myself. With your help, yes, I think so."
"Are you certain?"
"Why wouldn't I be?"
There's a pause while Matt finishes stripping down and wipes sweat from his forehead. Finally, Nobu says, "Indeed. Next time they attempt to interrupt our work, you and I will bring them down."
***
It turns out they don't need to wait for their next operation -- The Chaste mounts an attack on the resurrection facility. Something tingles in Matt's spine at the thought of Stick and Elektra walking through the pit that Nobu had lifted him out of.
When they get the news, Matt dresses quickly, ready to be sent into action, but Nobu stops him. "We cannot risk you for this. Now that we have you, the facility is not critical."
"I thought you wanted me to kill them," Matt says. He pauses, considering. "I want to kill them."
"Next time," Nobu promises, settling his hand on Matt's shoulder. "Next time."
***
The loss of the resurrection facility hurts The Hand, but Nobu is not very concerned, so neither is Matt. He starts dreaming about Elektra, though, and about Stick -- but mostly Elektra. He dreams of her whispering in his ear, "Cut his throat, kill him," and he knows that in the past, when she said those words, he refused.
In this dream, he slices open Roscoe Sweeney and lets him bleed out, dips his fingers in the blood and paints it across his tongue, kisses Elektra and shares the metallic taste with her. There's something in her that matches something in him, a kinship at the most basic level, whether he is just Matt Murdock or whether he is the creature he has become. When he wakes, he wonders if they would have bothered resurrecting him, if Elektra had died too that night.
Then he wonders how invincible The Hand would be if they had both of them.
***
It comes to a head on a rooftop, not unlike the one that Matt died on. The Chaste have interrupted their operation, stealing the sacrifices they've been gathering for harvest. It's a frustration to Matt in particular, because he needs those sacrifices to feed his power. With each life he takes, he gets a little stronger, a little faster, a little better at everything. With each swallow of blood his senses become sharper, and the darkness inside him grows.
The ranks of Hand soldiers close around him as he drains the last surviving sacrifice, fending off the operatives from The Chaste to give him more time. By the time he discards the body, the weaker operatives have all been eliminated and the crowd around him thinned. He cocks his head, listening.
Stick is here, at the far end of the roof; with the way his senses have been growing in power, it's not hard for Matt to pick out the creak and slide of the wood and string of his crossbow. A few milliseconds later, Matt raises his hand and catches the arrow before it gets close enough to pierce his eye. Nobu is close enough to see it all, and takes off after Stick.
That leaves, of course, Elektra. She's impossible to mistake, wild and unstoppable, slicing her way through the soldiers surrounding him until the two sai she wields connect with the two short swords in his hands. "It is you," she says as she stabs at his chest, blow going wide when he easily twists out of the way. "How are you alive?"
Matt blocks another blow and makes a move of his own, nearly nicking her neck but not quite. "You know what The Hand does. I know you're not surprised."
"Why are you working for them?" She grunts as the heel of Matt's foot connects with her stomach, but keeps her footing. "What have they done to you?"
Matt licks his lips, still slick with the blood of the sacrifice. "I'm only who I've always been. Who you wanted me to be, years ago."
She spins and they pause for a moment, locked sword to sai. "I only ever wanted you to be mine." He shoves her back, spinning with his blades in the air, and scores a hit on her bare arm. Blood wells up, the scent sharp and thick. There's blood all around them, of course, but Elektra's smells different. It tastes different in the air, spicier, sweeter. It's intoxicating in a way that he hasn't felt with any of his kills, and he's moving toward it before he realizes that he's lowered his weapons. She must be looking at him, at the blood on his mouth and the way he's single-mindedly reaching for her arm, because she lifts it up to meet him. "Is this what you need, Matthew? Take it. You can have my blood, you can have me, just don't do it for them," she says, tears in her voice. "Do it for yourself."
He drags a finger through the blood on her arm and brings it to his mouth. One small taste and it sets his nerves on fire, electrical impulses overloading, surging through his body. "Elektra," he breathes, the first time he's said her name out loud since he woke up in the pit. A world shatters, a world clicks into place, and he reaches for her face and kisses her. All the horror of what he's become crashes down onto him, and there's only one thing he can do to make up for it.
He knows she has a sai in her other hand aimed at his heart. He pulls her closer to him anyway.
The blade pushes into his flesh as he presses his lips to hers, crushing her against him and driving it deeper. When they finally break apart, he falls to his knees and she goes down with him. She's crying, just like she was the first time he died, big salty tears dripping from her cheeks.
"I'm so sorry, Matthew," she says. He smiles.
"I'm not."
***
For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it. (Luke 9:24)