Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Matt’s alarm clanged in his ear. He had an instant, wild impulse to throw the thing across the room. He hit the button for the time instead. Se-ven o-clock a-m, the clock said dispassionately. Ugh. He sat up, fully intending to get out of bed, but he felt…off. He was used to operating on little sleep, so he wasn’t sure why he felt so hazy now. He should get up and meditate. Clear his head. Spend time with God.

Rolling over, he pushed his face into his pillow. Some days, not often but some days, the guilt was just too heavy to think about. This was, for some reason, apparently one of those days, but his phone then started chirping Foggy’s name.

“Foggy. Foggy. Foggy.”

Matt fumbled for his phone. “Hello?”

“How bad are you hurt?” Foggy greeted him. How could it possibly be this early in the morning already? Lurching out of bed, he tried to think.

“…What?” He’d showered last night, so all he needed was to get dressed. And eat breakfast? The mere concept was disgusting. Just clothes, then. That was his priority right now. “I’m fine, Fogs. I didn’t even go out last night.”

“Dude, it’s ten o’clock. Don’t tell me you have a concussion.”

He hadn’t slept in that late since college, unless induced by a concussion or something. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

“Matt?” Foggy asked, real concern evident in his voice.

Still holding the phone to his ear, Matt hurried to the wardrobe. “No, sorry, I’m here, I’m fine. I just, uh…” He rifled through his suits, running his finger over the braille tags. “Give me twenty minutes.”

“Are you sick? You sound awful.” Did he? Was he? Sickness would explain throwing up last night, but Matt really didn’t want to discuss any of that with Foggy. This wasn’t anything for him to worry about.

“I just overslept.”

“I have never in my life known you to oversleep.”

That wasn’t even true, and what was this, a cross-examination? “Hanging up on you now,” Matt said, sounding a little more irritated than he meant. “I’ll be there in twenty.”

Lee Owlsley stood at the window of his 52nd floor corner office in the Financial District, looking uptown. So far, everything was going according to plan. Even before his father’s broken body ended up at the bottom of an elevator shaft, hurled there by Wilson Fisk, he and his father had put their plan in motion, transferring Fisk’s assets to themselves and sequestering them offshore. After the discovery of his father’s body, Lee continued to carry out the plan, not preparing to leave anything out.

That was until the State of New York and the Feds, those Fisk hadn’t gotten to, froze the crime boss’s remaining assets. In the two years since his father’s death, Lee had overseen the slow, painstaking process of laundering those assets and putting them to use for good.

Fisk’s money had enabled him to move to New York from Chicago and set up his own financial services firm, the perfect cover for his real business. Unlike his father, Lee was not going to remain idle.

He was here to rule the city.

Unlike his father, Lee was not content merely to be the money man for a crime boss; he was going to be the boss himself. Some sixty blocks north of his office was the perfect territory, just waiting for someone like him to take it over in the wake of Fisk’s downfall: Hell’s Kitchen, and would always be the one calling the shots.

There was a knock at his office door. Lee put down his newspaper, the Late City Edition of the Bulletin. He looked up to see Martin Broadus, his Chief Operating Officer and right-hand man, entering the office, clasping his hands together. Thin, wearing a suit and tie, watching him closely.

“Well?” he asked, leaning back in his chair. He didn’t recall scheduling a meeting tonight.

Broadus hesitated a moment before answering. “We need to make bail for two more.”

“God damn it! Who the hell is doing this?”

“I don’t know, boss,” Broadaus sighed. “This could be anyone.”

Lee gritted his teeth. It wasn’t Martin’s fault. He was only the messenger. No, that wasn’t true. He was much more than a messenger. He was as close as one man could be to indispensable, the man who got things done on both sides of the business. Now in his mid-forties, he was starting to go gray, but he was still as fit as the twenty-something who went to work for Lee.

Lee had recruited him himself and never regretted it.

Martin nodded. “We’ll figure this out. Only a matter of time.

”Get it done.” He poured himself a drink from the bar.

”Yes, boss.”

Now was the time for information. Lee lowered his hand back to his side.

“But we gotta stop the bleeding. That’s ten of our guys taken off the streets in the last week. And it’s not only Daredevil that’s the problem. There’s a new player who’s started showing up and taking out our people, too. We need to do something. Fast. Before we get thrown out along with the previous people.”

This was not something Lee needed to deal with. Then again, Lee didn’t expect Daredevil to still be around after all these years and was lucky enough to fly below his radar. He sighed through his nose. “If this independent operator is working with him, they have to be taken down either way before-“

“Most of the other gangs were shoved to the side when Daredevil showed up,” Martin swept on. “Whether this person is a new player on their own, or someone working with the Devil, we really should be putting out more muscle on the streets. They can protect our dealers and distributors and deal with Daredevil and this new guy, whoever he is. They’ll be ready for the task, and this player won’t stand a chance against us.”

Seemed like a good idea. He took a deep breath. “Do it. Put the word out.”

“And there’s one more thing.”

”Just one more thing, or twenty?”

”Boss.”

Lee shrugged his shoulders. “Whoever this player is, he knows how to cover his tracks- my guys haven’t been able to dig up anything substantial. I’m just telling you to do whatever you have to do to get this under control.”

Martin bobbed his head, somewhat nervous, before he finally started to clear his throat. “Sorry about that, boss. But as you can see, we’ve got a bit of a situation here.” Lee absorbed this piece of information, but made no comment. Martin continued speaking regardless. “See, our people on the inside, the ones we’ve already gotten out on bail, are reporting that Daredevil is asking them to name names, specifically, yours. Some of them have gotten beat up pretty bad, but they’ve all kept their mouths shut, so far. They haven’t said anything, so maybe he just thinks that it’s someone else.”

“Then we should keep it that way,” Lee grunted in acknowledgement. “Make sure they know there will be consequences, severe consequences, for anyone who gives up my name.”

Martin nodded and left.

It was official: she was bored.

She really wished the Owl could have stayed out of her way. He’d had plenty of chances. Instead, he had to stick around. And the terms of her alliance was that she couldn’t go after him, not without a whole legal mess first. But his crimes were so bad, even the Devil hadn’t made any headway so far in catching him.

Why spend thousands of tax dollars to target the other players, while letting drug addicts out on probation just so they could kill themselves with an overdose?

It made no sense.

At least Hell’s Kitchen had other people she could deal with while he waited.

So she walked the streets at night, hands tucked in the pockets of her red leather jacket. As a young woman alone, she knew she looked like a target. And more than a few men obliged her, letting her lure them into shadows and kill them. Well, not all of them. It’d be fun to coax Daredevil into hunting her, but she didn’t need the NYPD looking for a serial killer. Most of the men, though, she killed. Men like that, who were willing to do such evil things, were broken. And they could never be fixed.

Humanity was basically good, though. She saw it even when she was slinking through the streets at night. That older man helping a young couple whose car broke down. The kids whose laughter rang down from the open window in their apartment. The woman setting out food for a stray cat. See, this was what humanity was supposed to be. These were the people who weren’t broken. These were the people she had to protect.

“To not oppose evil is evil itself,” she whispered. It was the first lesson she learned. Then they put a knife in her hand and showed her how to use it.

Sure, people could say forgiveness was a virtue. Maybe it was. But only to a point.

Take these men for example. They were loitering in a motel parking lot. Mary had been watching them long enough by now, perched on the roof of the cheap pizza place across the street, to know they weren’t alone. They had a few girls with them, sitting on the curb in clothes that advertised everything they were offering. She didn’t know if the men planned on selling the girls in the motel itself or if this was just a rendezvous point the buyers could take them somewhere else. She didn’t really care.

See, she could wait for the buyers to show up so she could take them out too. But she was restless. And she planned on leaving enough of a mess that the buyers would get the message loud and clear anyway. Better to leave them alive, actually, so they could go tell all their little friends.

She decided to use a suppressor. Not because she cared about waking up the neighborhood—the screams would definitely do that anyway—but because she didn’t want to advertise her position too much. Besides, she spent more on the tax for this suppressor than on the gun itself. Seemed like a waste not to use it.

The suppressor screwed easily onto the barrel of her SIG Sauer. She picked a man at random and aimed at the femoral artery, hoping for lots of blood going everywhere.

She fired.

The man went down screaming. Blood pooled on the asphalt around him.

The others snapped into action, drawing guns and grabbing the girls to shield themselves behind their victims, herding them to their trucks. Curling her lip in disgust, Mary fired three shots and punctured one tire on each truck. Now the men were scrambling towards the motel, a few shooting wild shots her direction.

Cool. She set her gun aside. She needed a bit more precision than she could get with a SIG Sauer to make sure she didn’t hit the victims.

Dropping off the roof at the back of the pizza place, she slunk around the wall, coming up behind the motel. Whatever activity used to be inside was still, everyone taking cover thanks to the gunshots. She smashed a window with her elbow and climbed in.

The motel was filled with faint, whimpering voices. Mary moved slowly down the darkened halls with an awful, dirty orange carpet. Who thought orange carpet was a good idea? Every time the floor creaked under her feet, the voices in the nearby rooms hushed in terror.

The innocents here didn’t need to be afraid. At the same time…she couldn’t deny the small thrill of satisfaction at their reaction.

On the second floor, she heard deeper, harsher voices. Figuring the odds were about seventy-thirty she’d found the right room, she pulled a small cannister from the inside pocket of her jacket. It was her own little invention: a compressed air can, but filled with red Devil in gaseous form. (She killed the guy who sold her the drug before. A weapon like this in the wrong hands….)

The gap under the door was just wide enough for the can’s nozzle. Mary took a deep breath, held it, and fit the nozzle under the gap. Seconds later, spluttering sounds and curses came from inside the room. The idiots hadn’t seemed to figure out how the gas was getting in, since they didn’t light up the door with bullets. But Mary was already several feet down the hallway anyway, a knife in hand. Once the gas dissipated and the screams started, she’d move in.

She wished she didn’t have to dose the victims too. But dosing the whole room was the only way she could guarantee none of the traffickers would escape. Sometimes collateral damage was not just inevitable but justified.

To not oppose evil was evil itself.

Apparently, getting over six hours of sleep did wonders for his disposition come nightfall. Bounding from rooftop to rooftop, Matt was having more fun than he could remember having in ages. Besides, it was a weeknight and things were fairly calm. He got into a few fights, but most of his enemies dropped whatever they were doing and just took off running when they realized he’d found them from the shadows.

Normally, a lack of combat only left Matt feeling even more restless. Tonight, he mostly just found it amusing.

However, it also left him with more time to think than he was used to.  After he put himself between a tourist and an angry mugger with a bat, he won the fight but walked away thinking about how he missed his suit. He was better at dealing with knives now, true. But the suit also offered more protection against bruising. A helmet, at least, would be nice. He’d been trying to look into Melvin’s situation and had so far failed to even track him down. Matt assumed this meant that some of the agents who’d captured him had been working for Fisk at the time, had been able to make Melvin disappear.

Betsy Beatty was still alive and still working as a parole officer, which led Matt to believe that Melvin was still breathing.

Or he was trapped in a bureaucratic maze. Matt stubbornly tried to push away the stab of guilt that always accompanied thoughts of Melvin. By making the fake Daredevil suit, Melvin had aided in each and every attack Dex ever made while wearing the suit. If not for Melvin, Father Lantom might still be alive.

Of course, Father Lantom might also still be alive if Matt had stayed at the church instead of fleeing as soon as he’d learned the truth about Maggie. Then he would’ve been there when Karen found him, he would’ve known Fisk was hunting her, and he would’ve stayed with her. He would’ve heard Dex coming. He could’ve warned everyone. Matt paused, balancing on the edge of an abandoned fire escape.

See, that was the problem. The smallest little thought—a helmet would be nice—could trigger a downward spiral. Foggy called it Catholic guilt and Karen just called it really annoying. His new priest called it personalization.

Actually, Father Nathan didn’t call it that explicitly. What he had done was given him a list of “cognitive distortions.”

The instructions were to identify examples of them and practice for five more hours. It felt oddly like being given homework, but he reminded himself that he was doing this to help himself, not to mention to make Foggy feel better.

Besides, he was now realizing how often their clients slipped into cognitive distortions under the stress of legal problems. If he understood the distortions better, he could better help the clients. That was his rationalization and what made him start going to church all over again every day, at least.

So he made a mental note that he’d just slipped into personalization, which apparently involved overestimating his own fault in any given scenario. Father Nathan hadn’t come out and said that personalization was a particular problem for him, but Matt seemed to come up with more examples of personalization than most of the others. Privately, he sort of thought that if he had to have one distortion or another (and didn’t everyone?) he’d rather err towards personalization than the opposite. At least he was taking responsibility for things rather than blaming everyone else for anything going wrong. But he didn’t think Father Nathan would be impressed with his reasoning.

He also thought he’d engaged in enough introspection for the day, so he let his ears take over. There was a situation developing about three blocks away, outside of a bar, the kind of bar the cops tended to avoid. Police picked their battles in Hell’s Kitchen and this particular bar was clearly on some kind of list.

Matt cocked his head, curious. The situation was developing, sure, but so far it was hovering right at the edge of bloodshed. There were raised voices, and it sounded like one guy had a switchblade. But something was keeping the participants in check.

Matt took a path across rooftops until he was crouched just overhead. Interesting. The two men growling at each other were clearly furious, but they were also holding back—and not just because each was supported by four other men. Matt listened to their stances, took in their posture, and wondered if the strange, mutual respect was a recent development or based on their reputations. He didn’t personally recognize either, but he made a mental note to investigate further.

“Just hand the drugs over and we’ll leave you alone,” one of the men insisted.

“Not my fault your boys can’t tell the difference between the good stuff and hell,” the other spat. “How many of them are still crying for their—”

The first interrupted him off with a torrent of curses.

“We already lost five kids!” The second man erupted from the distance around him. “Don’t you think that the cops’ll get nervous when they sniff us?”

Matt immediately edged away from the rooftop and slunk into the cooler temperature of a shadow. His nose was assaulted with foul, toxic odors. He stalked to the two men talking, something about an owl on it. There were so many particles of drugs floating in the air. He missed the armor to protect his super sensitive nose from that, if he needed to, it came in handy. Getting dosed by red Devil was fresh.

“This is the real shit,” the first man spat. “If you don’t want it, fine, but tell everyone else. We can’t have them not knowing about it. Boss wants to bring more people in.”

Of the two men below, the swearing one had retreated with his followers and the other group was returning to the bar to soothe their agitation, so Matt focused on the two of them, preparing to jump down and end this. He’d clearly been seen, but it seemed better not to advertise that he knew he wasn’t hidden.

The smell was heroin. It was supposed to have disappeared in the wake of Fisk’s first arrest, but he wouldn’t put it past him to sell it from prison. However, based on what he’d been hearing on the street, that wasn’t true entirely. Matt had almost given up on humanity then, and he didn't want any more lost souls to be forced into slavery, their eyesight stolen. It was personal now. A grim smile tagged at his lips once the men eventually noticed him. The second man’s footsteps reverberated in his ears as he set his sights on the other.

The man whimpered, his breath stank, teeth stained by tobacco. "It's..it's you. Oh God." He sputtered.