oedipisms

Matt wakes up.

It’s wrong. Everything is wrong. The world feels like it’s been pumped full of ketamine. It’s sluggish and inverted, tilts back and forth like a boat stranded in the open ocean during a windy storm. His head throbs angrily. There’s some kind of sedative coursing leaden and molten lava through his screaming veins.

He’d been chasing Peter’s tail across northern Manhattan last he remembers. Definitely not still doing that. The back of his head presses against something unforgiving as a reminder. He’s been knocked unconscious (or tranquilized, more likely) and then moved against his will. Now he’s somewhere walled off, stuffy and static with stale, humid air. He’s sat propped up against what feels like a cylindrical concrete column.

He tries to move but his progress is halted by the harsh coils of a heavy chain constricting his torso. It has his arms pinned tight to his chest. The chain pushes some air out of his lungs as it tightens. Seems to be anchored to whatever he’s leaning against, but his surroundings are still too scrambled to make out many specifics.

He tenses his legs, but they’re also restrained. He can’t quite pin down the material, so he shifts to try to get a better sense of it. The stuff makes a horrible squeaking sound, and he realizes it’s some sort of saran wrap and duct tape concoction wound tightly from his ankles to his mid-thigh. He turns his head to--oh. That’s new.

His mask is gone.

His mask is gone and there’s nothing covering his face.

He snarls against the feel of the bitter, wet air over his cheeks. It’s so, so wrong.

He closes his eyes to push away the intrusion of the damp, almost imperceptible wind.

He tests his hands’ range of motion, but they’ve been crushed against his lower abdomen by the chains. His muay thai wrappings are gone and his knuckles sting with split skin and the abrasive, microscopic grazes of road rash. He tries to kick out with his feet. No dice.

There’s something else--some other article of clothing draped over the black shirt of the suit. It interacts with the rough texture of the concrete column and the metal chain weirdly, but he can’t pin it down. Slippery? Not quite. Not wet either. His head sways. Dizzy. Blurry.

He shoves his upper body forward, up, down. He tries to wiggle one leg so that it crosses over the other to give his ankles some relief from the pinch of cut-off circulation. With every movement, the chains dig painfully into the material of the top half of the suit and that strange, silken fabric in a manner reminiscent to the time Castle lashed him to a chimney on that rooftop.

Silken.

What the hell is it? Why are the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end?

Matt inhales hard. He smells familiarity. The piece of clothing reeks of old sweat and broken-in combat boots. Smells simultaneously worn in and neglected. There’s a couple of cheap dyes in there and a muted wave of burnt plastic. If only his damn head would stop pounding. If only he could get a full breath in without strangling himself.

He tries slouching hard and that affords him a better angle from which to draw oxygen into his lungs. He gasps in as much air as he can and the memory hits him like a fucking mack truck: his dad’s boxing robe.

Why the fuck is he wearing his dad’s boxing robe; no, hold on, that’s not the question. Who the fuck took it from where it’s been stored, unmoved, for fucking years?

No one knows about that. There are approximately--exactly--probably--maybe--eight people who know him in and out of the mask. He trusts them all completely. None of them would ever drug him and fucking take his father’s robe and--

Castle knows about the mask. Does Castle know about the robe? They’ve spent enough loved ones’ death anniversaries angry and blackout drunk and trying to kill each other all over the roofs of Hell’s Kitchen, spilling frustrated and grieving into Matt’s apartment for more alcohol and a break from the violence. Castle can’t know about the robe in the trunk in the closet. Right?

For a second he entertains the idea that it’s Castle. No, no, it couldn’t possibly be him. Not his style. Whoever tied him up wants him to stay where he is. Wants him to feel it. To simmer in knowing that he can’t get out, that he’s been caught. Deer in the headlights, freight train hurtling towards where he’s tied down to the irons of train tracks. Red hands captured from his desperate sinner’s prayer and brought before God for judgment.

He’s well and truly trapped. Someone hunted him and caught him and now he’ll die. Without a mask, smothered by the dewy, tepid air that is wholly unfamiliar and infinitely punitive.

The coward in him prays for it to be over quickly.

Panic starts to edge into his mind. There doesn’t appear to be anyone around. He can’t hear Hell’s Kitchen outside. The sounds of the city are very, very, very far away. He can’t smell the omnipresent mass of humanity, can’t taste the harsh tang of polluted New York City air. He can barely make out the sound of the pulsing, writhing heart made up of millions of people and their infinite tapestry of white noise. It’s overpowered by the obnoxious drone of cicadas and the rush of interstate traffic nearby.

He pushes again against the chains binding his arms to his chest. Almost passes out.

Gets his breath under control and tries harder.

Some time passes. Maybe ten minutes, maybe fifty, maybe a couple of hours. It’s enough for his head to clear some more, enough for him to map out the space in which he’s imprisoned. The walls are farther away than he’d initially thought. The place echoes like a warehouse or a large storage unit. The roof is sturdy and somewhere between thirty to fifty feet above him. The only infrastructure appears to be a couple of weight-bearing columns spaced evenly down the center of the building--it’s definitely a building, not a converted pole barn--and the steel rafters supporting the roof. He’s shackled militantly to the northern-most column. The buzz of sodium-vapor lamps outside harmonizes with the free-swinging fluorescents overhead.

The time lends his senses clarity and his fogged-up head a little bit of calm. He tries to meditate. To settle his jackhammering heart and push down the bile rising in his throat from whatever smell is wafting in through an open window behind him. His head desperately wants to clear.

After a while, he starts trying to escape his binds with increasing fervor. He knows it’s fruitless, but every time he tells himself he’s going to give up, an ever-critical voice in the back of his head speaks up to tell him to get his ass in gear.

That voice haunts his dreams. It contorts them into malicious, omnipotent nightmares that unfurl like fractals in his defenseless subconscious. It’s made up of his dad, who always knows the perfect way to twist the knife to motivate him when he’s almost down for the count. It’s made of Stick, who knows the perfect way to gaslight him until he can do nothing but force himself to push through the smoke and mirrors. It’s made of the overlapping and tireless voices of his worst college professors, of courtyard bullies, the stolid tenor of Father Lantom, Marci Stahl’s college likeness. It’s a unified and immovable cry to action and he has no choice but to obey it, to brace against the steady bruising vice grip on his ribs and to push through the numb ache encroaching on his lower legs.

Another voice catches him off-guard as he’s attempting to contract his thighs in another of endless desperate bids to snap the saran wrap. This voice is halfway between breathy and world-weary and it’s not confined to the inside of his skull like the other one. It sneaks up on him. Seems to have crept in through the only door available in the place, which is located immediately in front of him and on the other side of the south column.

The voice says, “Hey, you’re awake. Hope your noggin’s not too scrambled. Took a nasty fall after I hitchya.”

Matt hears the voice--man, probably, but it’s a guess, the pitch is ambiguous--approaching in tandem with sneaker-clad footfalls. He tries to direct his traitorous gaze at the ground. The fucking lights are going to give him away if his captor hasn’t figured it out already.

The guy stops about eight feet away from Matt. He’s got something around his waist; it smells like year-old sweat and used leather shoes and steel. Some sort of belt.

God, his head hurts. He thinks it might be nice if it could split down the middle, to relieve the pressure.

The man grabs at the right side of the belt and extracts something. Weighty, hard, processed wood, worn-in metal, top-heavy; pounds it in his palm--hammer. Hammer from his belt. It’s a tool belt. Matt flinches away from the slapping of metal on flesh. The guy chuckles and does it harder. His heart rate jumps in interest when Matt flinches again.

Matt’s head pounds to the beat of the hammer.

The guy does a fancy trick with the handle--the effect is lost on Matt’s addled and rattling skull--and tucks it back into its pocket on the belt. He seems to ponder something, and then he strolls behind the column to fiddle with the chains.

Matt concentrates hard on the tool belt as the guy crouches to inspect. There’s the hammer, beside it a length of some steel wire. Smells factory-precision sharp. Other side now: some pliers, something with a powerful, serrated blade--modified combat knife. Tastes like the edges of the machetes issued to certain members of the Hand. Last thing has a smokey, wooden handle and smells like charred animal byproduct. He twitches his head back to try to get its shape and the guy notices. He gives a hard, pointed tug on the chains and Matt can’t breathe. Can’t even try. Ribs stop working, open spiderweb fractures from past breaks and turn in against his lungs.

The guy keeps the tension while he talks: “You’re not gettin’ outta these chains, bucko. I've been watching you. I know how you tick. You just sit there pretty while we get underway, yeah?”

He tugs hard on the chains one last time and then releases abruptly. Matt gasps in disgusting, watery air and coughs it up. The man stands, makes a disgusted noise. Walks away between the sounds of Matt’s heaving, drowning, too-empty lungs.

The guy exits through the big door at the south side of the building. Matt takes a moment to close his eyes and tilt his head back. He tries to shift so the freshly tightened chains aren’t digging so hard between his fragile ribs. He coughs again.

His head clears a bit more. He throws his focus outside and finds the guy rummaging around in some sort of vehicle. It’s shadowy and cool out there. It’s not the Kitchen, although he already knows that. His captor pulls his head out from the cab of the truck and pushes himself up from where he’s braced against it.

The guy’s got--Jesus, Matt can’t make it out. Some sort of metal folding thing. Maybe a table, tray, chair. Other hand holds more chains, something that might be a combination lock. On his shoulder sit a couple of cantankerous, uncooperative ratchet straps that whisper in frayed edges and rusty hardware. Matt's captor starts to head back in the direction of the building. Halfway there, the straps unravel to fall all over the ground and the guy curses under his breath as he picks them up.

Matt takes advantage of the brief intermission to try to worm his hand into a better position. He’s mapping the path of the chain around his trunk and picking out the weak points in the constraints on his legs when the sound of the man approaching cuts him off. The man stops a couple of meters away, drops his supplies, and crouches so that he’s eye-level with Matt. Matt aims his jaw down, as if defeated. The man’s observant; he takes note of the new, cramped position in which Matt’s hand is folded into his abdomen.

“Come on now, I gave you more than enough time to make a break for it. You had a whole hour!”

Matt keeps his head aimed at the ground. He glares.

The man waits. He tires of crouching and shifts so he’s sitting, legs crossed one over the other like it’s an elementary school group.

Matt gives in and asks, “Why am I here?” His voice catches on the last word and it sends him into a full-blown coughing fit. His ribs dig like thorns into his chest and his lungs beg for more air.

The man waits until the coughing has largely subsided before he responds. “What, not even going to introduce yourself? Harsh, man, harsh.” He stretches languidly over his crossed legs, popping a joint in his left arm and shifting into a new position. He continues, “Guess I haven’t done that either. Let’s start over, eh? S’good to see you. Name’s Abe. Not sure you remember me. Might have bumped that outta your skull when I caught you.”

The hair on the back of Matt’s neck starts to stand up again. He tilts his head to get a read on the guy. Furrows his brow, bemused.

“Ahh, you gettin’ it? Yeah, you’re a smart guy. You remember representin’ me? I was one of the guys you brought in, too. In the mask, I mean. Bet you ain’t remember that. I hadn’t done nothin’ wrong ‘cept deal some goddamn weed, man.”

The guy’s voice is getting louder. The friendly facade slips faster. His presence balloons, fills the cavernous space. He starts to raise his voice, cries, “Matt Murdock, huh? Remember when your sorry ass fuckin’ failed at your job? Remember when I went to prison for my whole life ‘cause of you? Huh?” Spit flings itself from the guy’s--Abe’s--mouth and lands on Matt’s brow.

Matt pushes himself back as hard as he can against the wall. Says placatingly, “Hey, Abe, I’m sorry for what happened to you. I tried my best. I do remember you.”

It’s true, too. Matt remembers Foggy slapping the puny file down on his desk and telling him to deal with it, that he had some extra pro bono hours to fill so he took the case. He remembers, buried deep under other memories years old, covered in the iron grip of a younger Wade, building rubble, and the touch of Elektra. He remembers all the cases that slipped through his fingers. He remembers falling out of rhythm with Foggy, the dying hope in the face of a younger, less resentful Abe as Matt told him there was no option but to plead guilty.

Matt remembers breaking into an office building months before that, finding Abe’s unconscious body sprawled over thousands of dollars of drug money. He recalls chasing the other half of that deal for weeks, finding a cold trail in the shape of a bullet wound in a head.

Matt remembers thinking about Abe’s case as he’d let Midland Circle come crashing down on top of him. About how it had signified the beginning of the end.

Abe fumes. He huffs out, “Yeah, well it ain’t fucking good enough. Sorry wasn’t what got me out of prison. Sure as hell ain’t gonna be what saves you.”

Without warning, the hammer exits its designated space in Abe’s toolbelt and crashes into the chains gripping Matt’s abused ribcage. The world blanks out as the healing hairline fractures in two of his ribs give out. He fails to breathe once, twice, gulps in a half second of air before the hammer smashes in the adjacent ribs on the other side. Matt thinks Abe is yelling, but he can’t hear anything save the grinding crunch of failing bone structure. The chain slides against and into the space where his ribs used to be and Matt can’t breathe at all. None of the oppressive, wet breeze reaches his throat.

His hearing comes back all at once. He can hear his lungs failing, trying to take impossible, unreachable breaths. Abe is still yelling. “--goddamned mask! Everyone shoulda known who you were! Didn’t take me more’n a coupla fuckin’ weeks to figure it out!” Abe stomps to the other side of the cylindrical column. He’s hysterical, muttering under his breath, “Matt Murdock, Man in the Mask, Daredevil, Red, s’all the fuckin’ same piece of shit blind bastard!” With every name, Abe gives a hard tug on the chains. Somehow he’s tightening them even more. Matt can hear the crank of the old ratchet straps going as the metal digs deeper and deeper into him.

He gets a little bit of air in after Abe’s done with his list of names. Matt holds it as best as he can while Abe gives a final crank. Bone shifts against tissue and Matt loses control, screams all the air out like it’s fire. Maybe Abe screams back. He loses consciousness.

Coming to is the piercing, staticky jab of a million needles working their way into his lungs. He opens his eyes and hiccups in a breath, cries out at the way his ribs jar. It’s only by the grace of God that both of his lungs still work.

The chains are looser. They’re still very much there, snaked around the bruised, broken, bleeding mess of his torso. Still sitting in spaces where bone should be. Squeezing, but not cutting off his air.

Abe’s back to sitting a couple of meters away. The hammer rests in its spot on the belt. Its head is tangy with broken fabric, skin cells, fresh blood.

Matt tries again to breathe. Slow, purposeful, like Stick drilled into him. Abe watches but makes no move to intervene. He doesn’t speak.

Matt gives himself sixty seconds to breathe. When it’s over, he leans his head back to rest against the column. He turns it to face Abe. Fakes eye contact through the swimming, dizzy feeling inside his head. Abe’s heart rate picks up; he’s ready to get back to it. He straightens up and takes a breath in to speak and Matt starts up a fresh prayer in his head.

“Can’t be blacking out on me, Matt. I’ve got a lesson to teach you and it’s really very rude to be falling asleep in the middle of a lecture li--”

Matt miscalculates his next breath and bone grinds hard enough to make him cry out. A wave of frustration rolls off of Abe, but he waits until Matt stops making involuntary exclamations of pain. When the needles subside, Matt doesn’t bother with eye contact. He closes his eyes and returns the back of his skull to its place on the column.

Abe picks up. “I’d really appreciate it if you could try not to interrupt. Just for, like, a minute. I wanna tell you a story. Deal?”

Matt nods microscopically.

“So picture me, or I guess think about me, whatever the hell you do, you fucking bat. Say I’m ten years younger. Just graduated high school; I was the first person in my family to do that, you know? Even got a scholarship to CUNY. I wanted to major in international relations, to make real, legitimate change on a global level.

“But winter break of my first semester I went and got hooked on pills. God, my life went to shit faster’n I ever thought was possible. My folks found out, kicked me out on the street. The only person I could think to turn to was my dealer. He hooked me up with a short time gig running weed for some mobsters working for this big ass bald guy.

“I figured I could get some cash under my belt, pull myself up by my bootstraps, kick the pills. I wanted to go back to college, to give my folks a reason to be proud of me. I still had hope, y’know? But then, Jesus, it was my second week on the job and the buyer got spooked and knocked me out with a crowbar. I woke up in the back of a cop car and the guy driving told me that Daredevil was to blame.”

Abe unpretzels his legs and leans back on his hands. Matt keeps his eyes closed and uses Abe’s measured breaths to stay grounded.

Abe continues, “So then I get all excited when your partner shows up and tells me that my case has been picked up. And don’t get me wrong, I ain’t got nothing against blind people, but you were a pretty shit lawyer. So I got put away.

“Got out on good behavior, no thanks to you. I think I’ve got my life planned out by this point. Went back to baldy and found out he’s been gone for a while, but the guys who took his place were willing to take me on.

“So I’ve got all this righteous fury and pent up rage, and my new gig offers me some pretty sweet fuckin’ scheduling deals. I’ve been making the most of that time. Been doing some recon on you. Figured out pretty quick that you and the guy running around on rooftops without eye holes in his mask were the same person. Got me to thinking; you failed me twice. First time was leaving me there, bleeding from the head, for the cops to pick up like old meat. Second time was in the courtroom, ‘course.

“And I got into your apartment, too. You leave the roof access unlocked all the goddamn day, wasn’t even that hard. I stole a couple of things to play it off as a burglary. But I found your trunk full of vigilante bullshit and that old boxing robe. Thought it might be nice for them to find you draped in your old man’s colors.”

Matt’s having a hard time processing Abe’s words. What colors? He hasn’t seen colors in a long time.

“And you know, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’d do to you. What’s the best way to make you feel the pain that I feel every single second of my fucking life? And I think I figured it out. Ya see, I figure you don’t really need ‘em anyway.”

Abe stands. Walks forward, crouches before Matt.

Matt’s felt a lot of pain in his time. He knows where it hurts worst to get stabbed, to be shot, which bones crack hardest where. He knows that he’d rather die on land than in the watery depths of the Hudson or the East. He’s been crushed to death by a skyscraper and resurrected by the devil for further punishment.

None of that prepares him for what it feels like when Abe grabs him by the back of the scalp, throws his head to heaven, and plunges a carving fork into his right eye.

The pain is the culmination of every trauma his scarred, beaten body has ever experienced. It’s the melting acid of the accident that blinded him, a sudden explosion of agony, of writhing interminable stinging screaming empty numb pain. Matt’s brain hallucinates white-hot burning fireworks for the first time in decades and he’s screaming. He’s screaming louder than he’s ever screamed before while Abe digs harder, deeper, and severs the useless, broken globe from its equally useless nerve and empties the socket.

And then it’s the left side and it’s so much worse. The invasive, tearing terror multiplies, superfluous and wretched with rotten revenge. Matt runs out of air but his vocal cords continue to push something through them because he can’t see and this is the end.

Matt can’t see.

He can’t--

Can’t see.

The world is a vast, impenetrable nothing. It’s just like the first time: paralyzing horror, loss of the sense of existing, but there’s no dad to ground him here, he’s not nine years old, and there’s only the stabbing of the tines reverberating in his skull to feel for forever.

And then it’s over, the carving fork is gone, but the aching void in Matt’s head is infinitely more terrible than the immediacy of the pain he’s just experienced. Blood and salty water clog his nose and Abe takes a moment to gain his composure before starting in on Matt’s ribs with brutally aimed kicks.

Matt gives into the pull of unconscious, drifts blessedly away.