12
Father Lantom found Jessica and Matt alone in the front foyer.
“Can I ask a favor of you both?”
Matt oriented himself toward Jessica — something he caught himself doing more and more often — and felt no skepticism or fear in the steady thrum of her pulse beneath her skin. She was perfectly at ease, a state of being he hadn’t expected from her as long as she was in Clinton Church. They’d all been so stressed since moving into the basement that an elevated heart rate had almost become baseline.
The buckles of Jessica’s boots jingled as she bounced on her toes to keep the baby in her arms relaxed. Peter was, somehow, breathing deeply and slowly, napping despite the excitement of the day and the sheer spatial volume of his baptism outfit. Matt was both endeared and exasperated. Why couldn’t he do that when they wanted him to sleep?
Jessica scooted in closer, forming a sort of close knit triangle between Matt and Father Lantom. “I’d say you’ve earned it. Hit us with it, Father.”
“All I ask is that you both don’t get swallowed up in this.”
Matt felt the muscles of his face pull down. “Swallowed up in what?”
“You know what I’m referencing, Matthew. Fisk. Your own heads.” Father Lantom put a hand on each of their shoulders. “Each other.”
Jessica coughed. “Oh, we’re not—“
His gruff voice turned fully toward Matt. “And your, let’s say, extracurriculars.”
“Father, I don’t—“
One moment Peter was silently rocking in Jessica’s arms, and the next there were salty trails cutting down his cheeks as he screamed at the top of his lungs. He swung his hands about, ruffling the lace of his outfit, arms flailing as if trying to swat away a pesky bug.
Jessica groaned. “Jesus, Pete— wait, sorry, uh, God or whoever, I didn’t mean — whatever. Pete, what’s the deal?”
Something warm splattered against Matt’s cheek.
“Oh! Oh shit.” Jessica stumbled back a bit, then flung herself forward again. “Oh shit! Father? Father, hey, say something.”
Jessica sounded panicked. She’d been so calm before. Why was she panicked?
“Hey, whoa, Matt, Matt! Catch him, he’s going to fall, I can’t, I’ve got—“
His muscles coiled, his ears rang. Matt’s knees bent and suddenly he was throwing himself to the side to catch Father Lantom before his limp frame hit the floor.
They hit the harsh tile of the foyer and the impact of it shot up the bones of his arms. Father Lantom didn’t even twitch.
Jessica kneeled next to them, diving as quickly as she could to the floor without jostling the baby. “There’s…There a lot of blood, Matt, shit, where— oh my god, he’s probably still in here. Fuck , he’s in here!”
Who’s here? I don’t understand.
Matt’s hands were tacky with whatever substance was dripping from father Lantom’s alb. Metal. Smells like metal. Copper. Pennies, pennies, pennies.
“Is he dead?”
Is who dead? God our savior. Died for our sins. In death comes eternal life. Father Lantom said those things to Matt, once upon a time. In death comes life, in death comes life in death comes life—
“ Matt! I don’t know where you went, but come the fuck back!”
A baby was crying.
Peter was crying.
Jessica was still on the ground, one hand holding Peter to her chest and the other shaking Matt by the shoulder.
The upper half of Father Lantom’s body was resting atop Matt’s folded legs. The copper smell was everywhere. Matt slid a hand from the top of Lantom’s neck, down his shoulder, over his shoulder blades, and there. Protruding from his back, perfectly slipped between two ribs, the aerodynamic handle of a throwing knife.
Father Lantom was gasping. His breaths sounded water-logged.
“He’s dying,” Matt said. Slowing pulse, lungs full of blood, Hail Mary, no more grace, slipping out through the stab wound. “ I didn’t hear him. Poindexter.”
Father Lantom coughed. Blood spattered, and Peter squaled.
Matt could hear Lantom’s struggling heart. Why didn’t he hear Poindexter? Or the knife, making a tremendous racket as it cut through the air?
Peter did, though. Maybe didn’t hear him, but felt him. Felt the danger like a tangible thing. The one person in their group who couldn’t have saved Father Lantom was the only one who knew there was danger at all.
“Matt, I’m sorry, but we can’t stay. We’ll come back for him, okay? I swear. But we have to find Poindexter. And get Pete somewhere that isn’t here.”
That’s what it took — Jessica’s panic, Peter’s distress — for Matt to clock back in.
Stepping away from Father Lantom felt distinctly sacrilegious. But as Matt finally forced the distance and whatever fuzzy shield of non-awareness had cloaked him fell away, he decided that in that moment, he’d be more devastated by the loss of his son than Father Lantom, one of the few constants in Matt’s life since the passing of his dad.
What did that make him? A deserter? A sinner?
A father. It made him a father.
He was okay with that.
Matt attached himself to Jessica’s side, back curved over the baby in her arms as they located the nearest chapel exit. They needed witnesses, wide open spaces. Luke was outside, Matt could sense thumping movement in the church’s back garden, and he subconsciously decided to start them toward the rear exit. Jessica didn’t question his direction, just moved along with him. Her back was stiff, strung tight as a bowstring, and Matt had to remind himself that one of her punches was a hundred of his. She wasn’t helpless in all of this, a woman of brain and brawn, and she’d be pissed at him for thinking otherwise.
They only took a few steps before something, someone, was parting the air particles above their heads.
Matt put both palms on Jessica and pushed her in the direction of the back doors. He trusted that she’d know the harsh transition was for her safety. “ Go.”
She wasted no time and took off at a dead sprint.
Matt only had a moment to think about how he admired a woman that could function in a crisis, because as soon as the thought entered and exited he was being thrown to the stone floor of the chapel.
The crack of his head against the floor sent ripples through his skull. If he could see, Matt thought he’d have been seeing stars.
It’s a weird sensation, to be tackled by yourself.
Poindexter wasn’t him. Anyone paying attention would know that. He was taller, leaner. More militant and strict in his fighting style. Matt, while skilled and precise, was scrappy. Willing to cause a mess in a pinch if it meant the job got done.
But to the average person, seeing the Devil costume was enough to either instill fear or dredge up hope. There wasn’t much of the latter anymore, not after Poindexter did so many horrible things under Fisks’s orders and using Daredevil’s likeness.
Which, theoretically, meant there was nothing holding Matt back from absolutely fucking murdering the guy. The public would thank him. Might raise a lot of questions — how did a blind guy kick Daredevil’s ass — but Matt could get over that.
Matt imagined himself standing over Agent Poindexter, boot poised over the eye socket of the Devil helm, heel primed to dig in and push down. Most wouldn’t know it on sight alone, but the eye sockets were the most fragile part of the helmet. Apart from being a gateway to the brain, Matt had no real reason to protect his eyes.
Then he remembered all the times he could have killed someone, how much easier those simple deaths would have made his life in the long run, and how he couldn’t do it. Not when it really mattered. Because no death is simple. Death is death, regardless of the wrongdoing.
Poindexter threw a heavy fist in the air, poised to flatten Matt’s nose. Matt brought one of his own legs up and around, bent at the knee, calf forced across Poindexter’s chest to throw him backwards. It gave him the opening he needed to slide to the side and out from under Poindexter’s bulk.
Poindexter’s speed and stealth were baffling. The agent was back on his feet just as quickly as Matt. His boots hardly squeaked despite the harsh recovery required after Matt’s shove.
It was the weirdest kind of western showdown. Daredevil to Daredevil, one in full kevlar Devil regalia and the other in his Baptism Best. One foot in front of the other, carefully balanced and ready to spring forward at the slightest provocation.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Matt said, knuckles popping as his fingers curled into a fist. The phantom sensation of a serrated knife clipping his shoulder trickled through his arm. He recalled how it felt for Poindexter to stick his fingers in the wound, dig around with reckless abandon. Then a different ghostly touch took the place of the pain — Jessica’s cold fingers sewing the gash closed with concern and careful, uneven stitching. “You shouldn’t have come.”
Dry lips moved against slick teeth — Poindexter was smiling. “Which is it? I shouldn’t have come here? Or I shouldn’t have shown up at all? Would you rather we took care of this somewhere else?” A gloved hand slid down Poindexter’s torso, over the edge of his pants to a loaded knife holster on his thigh. Matt definitely didn’t have one of those. “But I came all this way.”
“Tell Fisk to stop. It’s over. The real Daredevil is gone.”
“No, Mr. Murdock, I don’t think so. Those parts of us never really go away, you know? There’ll always be that thing inside of you, kicking and screaming. Always fighting for something.”
Poindexter’s knife slipped free of its holster. It smelled of metal and antiseptic, like he scrubbed it with bleach and put it back in its leather sleeve before it was dry.
“And now Fisk knows what you’re fighting for.”
Matt had to resist wiping his nose. Harsh cleaning fumes always made his sinuses tingle. “So does the rest of the city. Money laundering and murdering henchmen is one thing. Killing a baby is another.”
“When he wanted to poke the bear of Daredevil’s influence over this city, he used Miss Wilson, a grieving mother, as the stick. He had an entire subway full of people disposed of. You think he cares about the life of a single child?”
“You’re saying Wilson Fisk was responsible for the subway attack? You just implicated your boss in a serious crime.”
Poindexter’s teeth creaked as he ground them against each other. “This is why you’re always one step behind, Mr. Murdock. It’s not about proving innocence or guilt. It’s about justice. About deliverance. Even if a jury decides to keep Fisk in prison, Daredevil is still ruined. The bodily host dies, but so does the virus. New York has been purged of its sickness.”
A subway full of people. Ben Ulrich and his family, killed in their home, a single daughter left alive to tell the tale. Father Lantom, lying on his back on the floor of his church, his god having forsaken him. All results of the so-called virus being purged. Instead of becoming God and banishing the Devil to Hell, Fisk became the Devil and banished himself. At the expense of dozens of lives, in the name of apparent justice.
Matt thinks about nothing but justice as he loosens his tie, straightens his glasses on his nose, and throws a spinning kick toward Poindexter’s face.
Karen startled so severely that she almost fell off the garden wall when Jessica came busting through the church’s back doors.
“He’s here. He’s fucking here,” Jessica said breathlessly, coming to a hard stop before Karen and Luke with Peter in her arms. He was in the midst of a fit, cheeks puffy and red. He was leaning toward the church, arms extended and hands scrunching and releasing in a grabby motion like he wanted to go back. Every time Jessica would try to tilt him back upright he’d howl even louder. “Poindexter. Inside.”
Luke jumped off the brick wall so hard the ground trembled with the force of his landing. “What? How? We were back here the whole time and the front door was—“
“I don’t know. I don’t care. He’s in there.”
“There’s blood on your dress,” Karen pointed out.
Jessica looked down at the soft pink fabric, at the deep red splattered across the front. The hem at her knees was dipped in scarlet. It was actually Karen’s dress, one she’d lent Jessica for the occasion because she said she had no idea what to wear to a fucking baptism. It fit her well, and she looked ethereally beautiful with her fair skin and clunky combat boots. The harsh-edged femininity was so principally Jessica that it somehow worked.
“It’s not mine,” Jessica said blandly, like she’d just noticed the mess. “Or Peter’s. Or Matt’s.”
“Then who—“
“Father Lantom.”
Karen’s heart dropped to her toes. “Oh, no. Poor Matt.” Father Lantom was not only a good man, but one of the only consistent figures in the tragedy that was Matthew Murdock’s life. For him to be killed in front of Matt — that would leave another scar.
“The grieving comes later. Peter needs to be miles away from here, now.” Jessica passed him off to Luke with little fanfare, who immediately wrapped him up in the bulk of his arms as if threats to the child may suddenly rain from the sky. “Don’t tell me where you’re going. You still have the burner phone?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Then go. Both of you. I’ll call when it’s safe, not the other way around.”
Karen snagged Jessica by the arm. “Wait, hold up. You’re not coming?”
“Karen I…” Her lips went taught, so tightly held they were white at the edges. “Matt’s in there. Alone. Poindexter’s no joke. We both know that first hand.”
And Karen wouldn’t soon forget it. The subway incident was never far from her mind. Her terror, palpable both during the real event and even in recall, was a tangible thing. So much mindless violence, and for what? Revenge on a single man? Jessica had a minute-long encounter with the fake Daredevil and walked away bruised. Matt was a force in and of himself but, at the end of the day, was just a man.
Luke looked contemplative. “Pete needs you, Jessica. Matt can handle himself.”
Karen wasn’t sure what was going on between Jessica and Matt. Her and Foggy had discussed it a few times, the palpable tension between them. Jessica’s emotions were usually as tightly sealed as a bomb shelter and Matt was a lover of secrets for the sake of internal punishment, so neither of them had acknowledged it out loud. But whatever the invisible string was, it went above just co-parenting.
“We can’t convince you, can we?” It was a rhetorical question. Karen knew Jessica’s mind had been made up.
Jessica shook her head. Smiled, but there was no joy in it. “He’s a self-sacrificial asshole. I can’t leave him. I won’t. Not again.”
She started to step away, back toward the church, then spun back quickly to drop a kiss on Peter’s head and a pat on Luke’s arm. “Go. Now.”
She took off for the chapel doors, boots pounding against dirt, and shouted “Sorry about the dress, Karen!” before disappearing inside.
Karen wasn’t worried about the dress.
Jessica found it startling how quiet a deadly fight could be.
She hardly heard them as she sprinted back into the main chapel. It was hard to not see them, a flurry of gray and red and jutting limbs, but apart from shoes squeaking on the floor or the dull thud of a landed punch, there was profound, echoing silence.
It was disconcerting for Jessica to realize they were probably trained that way — move in silence, do the job without drawing attention, leave no trace except for the bruising imprint of your knuckles on the other person’s cheek. They both fought with a unique brand of ruthlessness, and Jessica found herself simply watching them fly around each other before realizing she’d be way more helpful within the fray than observing from outside it.
She approached with caution, not knowing whether she’d be ignored or immediately dragged into the action, though she figured Matt knew she was there the second she re-entered the building. The last thing she wanted was to distract him and end up costing Matt his concentration, or worse.
Matt executed a twisting maneuver that sent Poindexter flipping over two rows of pews. He turned to Jessica. “Peter?”
He was out of breath, glasses crooked and tie askew, but otherwise composed. Jessica was having a hard time wiping the image of Matt throwing a grown man out from behind her eyes. She wasn’t sure she wanted it to go away. God, I’m depraved. “Peter’s fine.”
Matt took that for what it was and immediately had to rejoin the scuffle; Poindexter was back on his feet and stalking toward him. Jessica only had a moment to wonder why he was walking so slow when the tinny whistle of something metal pierced the air, and she choked back a gasp as Matt caught Poindexter’s throwing knife, by the blade, in his bare hand. It was an inch from his nose, and blood dribbled from his nicked fingertips. “Hm. I’m unarmed. This doesn’t seem fair.”
Matt spun the knife on his own finger and sent it right back. Poindexter tried to dodge, and it would have worked had he not been stopped by the upturned pew he’d just fallen over. The blade hit home in between the pauldron pads on Poindexter’s left arm. His following shout wasn’t just one of pain, but of simmering rage.
“You forget,” Matt said slowly, “that you’re wearing my armor.”
Which meant Matt knew the weak spots, even if Poindexter’s set was a replica. Every design flaw was his to exploit.
“You forget,” Poindexter said, spitting foamy red, wrapping his fist around the knife jutting out of his bicep, “that you’re wearing no armor.”
Jessica was sure Matt sensed it, or at least had the common sense to predict it. A true marksman never wasted ammo. Most often the economics of it were coincidental opposed to intentional - when you hit the target on the first try, you didn’t need to spend a second bullet.
But Poindexter wasn’t carrying guns today, as far as Jessica could tell, and he only had so many knives. Matt has so kindly returned his first one, so why not use it again?
The human body was fucking crazy, and Jessica would forever be amazed by the things it could produce. For example, her own baked up a whole child, something she could still hardly wrap her head around. Another example, the sound Poindexter’s muscles made as they forcibly tore under the grit of his blade. It was grotesque, like paper ripping and woven rope snapping. But he kept pulling, and Jessica knew the second the blade was free it was soaring toward her or Matt.
She disliked either option. Her solution wasn’t elegant but damn, did it do the job. One solid superpowered kick of a nearby pew ripped it out of its anchors and sent it flipping toward Poindexter, who tipped like a bowling pin and went down with a mighty crash of splintering wood and thudding Kevlar.
Matt’s jacket cuff was tacky with blood. Jessica didn’t care. She grabbed his wrist and with barely restrained super strength pulled him into a dead sprint.
“Where are we going?” Matt asked as Jessica led them away from the chapel, down dark twisting hallways behind the tabernacle.
“Anywhere but in there! We need a fucking plan!”
“We need a plan?”
She glanced over her shoulder to give Matt a face he couldn’t see and almost ran headfirst into a wall. She took a sharp left and kept running. “I know, I know, you’re not used to having those! But I think this calls for—“
Jessica resisted the urge to yelp when Matt bodily threw them into an open room. He shut the door with a contrasting gentleness, the following click of the lock almost inaudible.
“Open that hatch in the back corner,” he said, clearing water stained boxes and dusty storage tubs out of the way.
“Of course you know all of the secret passageways in your church. Why wouldn’t you?”
The door stuck to itself, and Jessica had to pull hard on the string to get it to swing open. It flipped down and out and a folding ladder slid a few inches toward her before coming to a halt, ready for dispatch and ascent.
Matt grabbed Jessica by both arms to turn her toward him. The walls of the storage room seemed to inch closer, closer, closer as he breathed deeply. Wet his dry lips with the tip of his tongue. “We have no plan. I have a plan. You will leave, and you will go wherever Peter is.”
She ripped an arm out of his grasp. She let the other one stay and wasn’t sure why. “I make my own choices, so kindly fuck off. And don’t be an idiot. Your chances of survival increase exponentially with me here.”
“Both of us can’t be here, Jess. Peter needs at least one.”
It took Jessica a few seconds too long to process what he meant. By the time she was ready to scream herself hoarse there were footsteps coming down the hall outside the storage room door. They were slow, heavy, and Jessica hoped it meant Poindexter was concussed from taking a pew to the head, not so confident in himself that he made his murder chase a leisurely stroll.
A tug on the rope cord had the hatch ladder extending down toward her. The pounding of her pulse in her ears was louder than Poindexter’s boot tread. “You’re wrong, Matt. Sure, Peter needs one of us. But he deserves both of us.”
They were both silent, and Jessica knew it was because Matt was considering their respective lives. Him with no mother, a father for a decade, and then no one but an absent God. Her with a family, then no family, then Trish’s mother, who thought she was God. One parent, no parents, why settle for either when both parents wanted to be there?
“I’m going to make sure that happens,” Jessica said. “So I’m staying.”
Matt looked like he wanted to protest. She wasn’t going to give him the chance. Without wasting another beat, because they really didn’t have any more to waste, she grabbed a ladder rung and started climbing.
The door in the ceiling led to a pseudo hayloft, a balconied area with a half wall that opened over the chapel and may have once been a functional space, but had been cordoned off and used for storage as long as Matt could remember. It was always his favorite place to hide from the nuns back in his orphanage days, because most of them had bad knees and refused to climb the ladder.
Jessica had no such qualms and shot up into the loft like a bat into hell. Matt wished she was far away, he wished she was with Peter. He wished he was with Peter, he wished none of them were here. Good god, all he knew how to do was be alone and move alone and survive alone, but Jessica was there and he was not and would not be alone, and he felt guilty about how happy that made him.
Was he a bad person?
There was a tremendous crash from downstairs, presumably Poindexter breaking into the locked closet. Matt pulled the loft door shut, closing the drawstring on their side of the latch so Poindexter would have a harder time opening it. It would save them approximately fifteen seconds.
Maybe Matt was in fact a bad person. But Poindexter was worse.
“Plan,” Jessica hissed. “We need to make that plan.”
“We’ve just cornered ourselves,” Matt pointed out.
“You led us up here!”
“You didn’t let me finish. We’ve cornered ourselves, but once he’s here, he’ll be cornered too.”
Jessica analyzed the piles of discarded boxes and lopsided stacks of folding chairs. Her hair scuffed across her shoulders as she turned toward the loft opening and the towering chapel ceilings beyond. “He’s not stupid. He’ll know what we’re trying to do.”
“He’s angry. Anger makes people stupid.”
“If you say so.”
There was a heat in Matt’s proximity to Jessica, more than the residual exertion of being chased or the frantic flush of nerves. It’s a sun-warmed spot in cool grass, or a heavy quilt in winter. Comfort and peace in a place of wild abandon. He wanted more of it. They were about to fight for their lives and the life of their son and all Matt could think about was getting closer.
So he did. And Jessica did not stop him.
He slid a hand down the back of her arm, gently clasped her elbow. Jessica did not stop him.
He leaned in, close enough to feel her breath on his face. Jessica did not stop him.
He turned, lips aimed at her cheek, desperate for more contact than his calloused hands could allow. This time, she stopped him.
She stopped him to turn her own head and confiscate her cheek. She offered her own lips instead.
Surely these are warmer than her cheek would have been. He reveled in it, the warmth, when the rest of Jessica was usually so cold. She felt like nothing but flame, then, embers beneath a blood stained pink dress.
When she pulled away, because she pulled away first, she did it reluctantly. As if there should have been more, but she couldn’t justify the precious seconds spent indulging herself when there was such prominent danger approaching.
“We should split up,” she whispered. “Get him from both sides.”
Matt was having trouble thinking. “Right.”
“So I’ll stay over here, and you take the other side. Well let him get a few steps in and jump him from there.”
“Sure.”
Matt was trying to reboot his brain when she said, “I didn’t do that just because we might die, you know.”
He knew. But he liked hearing her say it. “Yeah. I know.”
He wanted to revel in it, whatever this was, but the loft hatch rattled on its hinges. Him and Jessica broke apart to take their respective sides.
Matt was barely behind a stack of crates holding old hymnal books when the loft door splintered. The latch failed and popped, allowing the ladder to slide down. Poindexter scaled it in record time.
The false Daredevil wasted no time looking for his victims, simply started throwing things from both hands the second he was through the hatch. A handful of aerodynamic blades lodged themselves in the drywall a few feet to Matt’s left. The rest speared an unused bag of sidewalk salt dangerously close to Jessica’s leg. The granuals started spilling through the cut and bounced against the floor.
Poindexter came to a stop in the middle of the loft. “This is actually insulting. Are you even trying?”
A metallic tang sat heavy in Matt’s nose. Poindexter’s arm was still bleeding. He didn’t seem to care.
Another knife flew, a bigger one with a thick handle that wasn’t meant for throwing but worked all the same when the thrower was as good a marksmen as Poindexter. Matt didn’t have time to jump aside before it caught the outer part of his good arm and ripped a hole in his blazer. What was it with this guy and ruining Matt’s clothes?
The sting and following dribble of blood from the new wound caught him off guard. No, the loft wasn’t huge, but there were places to hide. He wasn’t expecting to be clocked so suddenly. His and Jessica’s plan was an immediate failure — if they wanted to get ahead, they’d have to improvise.
So Matt improvised like he always did, by throwing himself into the thick of things. Relying on his senses and pretending he was invincible despite the mangled scars proving otherwise.
Him and Poindexter fell to the floor in a jumble of limbs, both throwing punches and not always landing the hit. Matt could tell he himself was a better melee fighter, but Poindexter had unparalleled speed.
Poindexter caught Matt’s incoming fist and Matt heard the quiet but distinct sound of a trembling vocal cord, a choked back groan. Matt pushed down harder and the bones of the agent’s arm ground together.
Poindexter’s broken wrist. It had only been a few weeks since the rooftop fight. He wasn’t healed, and therefore still had a weakness.
The distraction was a win, both because it stalled Poindexter and gave Jessica the chance to sneak out from her own hiding spot. She moved with the speed and silence of a raging bull, but that didn’t mean the strength with which she pulled Poindexter off of Matt was any less effective.
Dust twisted through the air and scraped Matt’s skin as Poindexter flew over and collided bodily with a metal shelving unit pushed against the back wall. It crumpled beneath the force of his impact and Jessica yelped— either the shelves were old and unstable, or Jessica put a little more wrist into the toss than necessary. Matt had a feeling it was a bit of both.
Needing a moment to catch his breath but refusing to take the risk of assuming Poindexter was actually down, Matt was already sitting up and trying to push off the floor by the time Jessica stumbled over. She extended a hand and Matt took it with a grunted thanks.
“You’ve got a bit of…” Jessica wiped a drop of blood away from the cut through his eyebrow, “And a little…” then the bit at the corner of his mouth. The pad of her thumb grazed his split lip.
It felt unfair, suddenly, the misplaced intimacy of smearing someone’s blood across their skin. Matt knew Jessica had it in her, the slow physicality that came with rocking a baby, or reading a children’s book word by word, or whispering in the dead of night. Even that which came with the desire to end a life, the patience she exuded as she walked up to Killgrave and snapped his neck.
Not to mention how she loved — soft, when the moment called for it. Heavy and measured when it didn’t. Dragging, teasing, as she traced the scars on Matt’s bare torso with a fingernail.
She was exuding that now, the effortless grace of slow, and Matt felt outmatched. He was nothing if not a man of balance. He needed to even the score.
He lifted a hand of his own, knuckles bloody, fingers calloused, and let it rest on her cheek.
“You’re wincing.“ He navigated the dip between her brows with an extended finger. Felt the downturn of her lips with his palm. “Are you hurt?”
The air was so saturated with the scents of a fight — blood, namely, probably a combo of his and Poindexter’s and Father Lantom’s wafting up from downstairs — that it was hard to differentiate whose belonged to whom. Standing this close Matt could sniff it on her, sums of it. He’d been naive to assume none of it belonged to her.
Jessica didn’t say anything, took a tight, rasping breath, and Matt descended from moderate concern to full panic. He tuned in harder than he had in ages, straining for every sound, risking sensory overload and not giving a fuck if it meant he could identify what happened, what happened, what happened.
“I’m gonna figure it out, okay? You’ll be fine. It’ll be fine.”
She was breathing deeper, or trying to, stalling when her lungs expanded too far. Matt hovered anxiously, trying to identify the issue without touching and potentially making things worse.
The pile of broken shelving in the far part of the loft began to shift. Poindexter was clawing his way out of the rubble. Matt would have been more concerned about that if Jessica wasn’t crying.
It had been a long time since he opened himself up so much, knocked down the barriers between his enhanced senses and the outside world. Usually it was all he could do to fortify those walls, keep from drowning in the excess input that came with hearing and smelling and feeling at a thousand percent. But he had to know what happened. Where he went wrong. Why Jessica smelled like blood and salty tears.
It was when Matt managed to slow the drumbeat of his own heart that his auditory bandwidth expanded. There was Jessica hiccuping in the forefront, her muscles grinding and pulling taught as she fought to stay still and not unintentionally tug at whatever injury Matt couldn’t find.
Beyond that, layered beneath the misery, was laughter. Agent Poindexter, Daredevil imposter extraordinaire, Wilson Fisk devotee, FBI agent, mass murderer, psychopath, was laughing.
Matt’s extensive combat training would tell him that you shouldn’t stand still in the path of a charging animal. His years of real world fight experience would foster a distaste for severe bodily harm. He pretended he had neither as he, unmoving, watched Poindexter crawl out from the mess of the collapsed shelving unit and stagger to his feet.
He was worse for wear; the pew Jessica threw at his head must have compromised the integrity of the helmet. Or the helmet was a cheap imitation of the original and offered little protection because of it. Either way, one of the Devil horns was busted and left a volcano-esq formation atop Poindexter’s head. An unseen draft, so common in old buildings such as this, whistled across the jagged opening. His exposed jaw was crooked, stuck in a lopsided smile; the gritty friction sounded all wrong when he gnashed his teeth together. His bad arm was at his side, presumably poised to grab a weapon, and Matt heard the fine bones of his wrist grinding.
Poindexter’s laugh rattled out of his chest. “Even when I miss,” he said, “it’s still a bullseye.”
He came straight for them, not a moment wasted, navigating the debris strewn across the floor with an agility uncommon in the average man. If Matt didn’t move he’d either be a stationary target for a prime marksman or the world’s worst matador, waiting with open arms for the bull to spear him with its horns.
Matt’s had plenty of life events that made him question the validity of his god. This moment was not one of those. In fact, it had to have been divine intervention, the way both him and Jessica turned on their heels to face Poindexter as he came barreling forward. Throwing knives flew from his hands toward both of them, and Matt barely spared a thought to being impressed by how quickly Poindexter drew them before he was sidestepping, the blade missing him by inches. Jessica also somehow had the wherewithal to dodge despite her unknown injury, and by the time Poindexter made it within a few feet of them they were ready.
The agent’s last ditch effort to incapacitate either of them was for naught. He wasn’t getting anywhere with attacking from a distance, so he came barreling forward with more blades locked and loaded. Matt was almost amused by his persistence. How many secret suit compartments did this guy have?
He made it to them, swung with a frustrated, pained grunt, and found himself trapped by both arms. Matt and Jessica didn’t waste a moment, secure in the knowledge that hesitation would give Poindexter an opening they couldn’t afford.
The angle was all wrong but Jessica’s strength made up for their lack in technique. They both pulled, rotated their shoulders, and launched Poindexter up and behind their backs.
Where he proceeded to slip over the loft’s half wall and fall, fall, fall an entire floor, down to the main atrium, hitting one of the chapel pews spine-first.
It was rare that Matt took in sounds he hadn’t heard before. He was so used to hearing everything that not much surprised him. But Poindexter’s spine crackling like a burning log after falling fifteen feet and hitting solid wood — that one was new.
Poindexter was bent backward over a pew. His feet were draped over the seat, upper half twisted down and out of sight. It was disgusting, it was dramatic, it was an obviously debilitating injury if not a fatal one, and somehow it was not Matt’s biggest concern.
At some point Jessica had taken to using Matt for support. Her shoulder was pressed between the blades of his, side and hip aligned with his spine, head resting against the back of his neck like she’d been looking for a wall to lean on and he happened to be closer.
“Jessica?”
She didn’t try to respond. Did try to take a breath, choked on it, sobbed, choked on that too.
He turned, inching around on his heel, so slowly and with such care that by the time he was facing Jessica she hadn’t moved, just slid across the moving surface of his body. Her arm pressed into his sternum.
“Jess? Come on, I need you to say something.”
She slid further down his chest. Her mouth did not move. Matt gave up on trying to get answers verbally and finally truly listened.
The sounds of a human body: pumping blood, expanding lungs, the pop and gurgle of functioning organs. Bones slipping beneath skin, tendons tensing, air shifting between joints.
The ripping he pinpointed somewhere near her lower back was not normal.
He’d been doing so much hearing, such heavy absorption of sound from everywhere that he hadn’t processed what was right in front of him. Jessica, in pain. The tip of a knife just barely puncturing her right kidney. Microscopically sawing deeper and deeper every time she tried to move or breathe, the wound opening around the implanted blade when her torn skin shifted around it.
Matt didn’t remove the knife. He’d been stabbed enough times to know that was frowned upon. But it was in the way when she passed out, bumping his arm as he supported her full weight so she didn’t hit the ground. He did his best to not touch it. Her dress was tacky with blood, her own now, and he did not want to touch it.
Matt wasn’t sure there’d ever been a time when he didn’t want to touch her. But the evidence of his own failure repulsed him.
The ever present sirens of NYC flared and came closer, units mobilized, according to their car radios, specifically to circle Clinton church. They didn’t know who called in the disturbance and they didn’t care, because they were told there were bodies.
Matt continued holding Jessica, avoiding the sticky handle of the knife protruding from her back, mentally correcting the cops on the radio. One body. There was only one body, Father Lantom’s. Poindexter wasn’t a body because Matt could hear his gurgling inhales from the chapel below.
And Jessica…Not a body.
Jessica could not be a body.