Sammy kept saying that he had a mom now, which Gwen didn’t super know what to do with. The Falcon asked him if she looked like an egg or an amoeba.
Sammy stared at him dead in the face and told him in a terrifyingly even tone that some people were born, not hatched.
Gwen, however, was now double-checking the parental locks on Sammy’s phone so that Elektra didn’t murder her when he inevitably said that again in her company.
The Falcon appeared impressed.
Sammy apparently decided that none of these people had received his news properly, so he was going to go sit with Grandpa and do something more fun.
Benj was having some problems with his team, he told Gwen.
“The Lance Corporal keeps finding booze. I have no idea where he keeps getting booze. He’s been drunk for a week and keeps passing out outside my house. What do I do?” he rattled.
Gwen thought that that was more consecutive words out of Benj than she’d ever heard him say.
“Put him in the tub. Let him sober up,” she said.
“I can’t have a Canadian officer in my bathtub, Gwen,” Benj moaned, dragging hands down his face. “We need somewhere to put the gin.”
Gwen wasn’t touching that.
“God. You think I should wait ‘til he’s gone off it and lure him over to the Devil? He’s super into licorice. I could probably get ahold of enough licorice.”
Gwen wasn’t touching that either.
Disgusting.
“Have you asked your devil about it?” she asked.
Benj fell quiet.
“I should ask the devil,” he decided.
Atta boy.
Elektra was definitely risking her bones chasing after this lady in a publishing house. The lady, who DD refused to give a name, to was just a ‘problem,’ so she said.
DA Nelson scoffed out loud when Gwen asked him if DD’s problem was about to become theirs.
He stood up and grabbed his coat.
“We’ll see about that,” he said.
It was strange to follow Mr. Nelson when he was determined and knew what he was doing. Usually, things went the other way around, but you know what?
There were so few trustworthy adults in Gwen’s life, she decided she was going to give it to him this time.
He took her to a maze. The edge of the city’s underbelly. He knew where Murderdock was operating, then.
Gwen knew that Murderdock had a number of desks throughout the city, but she was surprised to find an actual office at the end of this tromp. It even had Murderdock’s name on it.
It had a commotion going on inside.
DA Nelson stood patiently outside the door with Gwen next to him, sans mask and suit, as he’d instructed, and in no time at all, the door burst open and three huge men came stumbling out, one clutching at his face while the others held him up.
“Come back again soon, boys,” Murderdock crooned after them.
The trio made quick work of getting the fuck out of dodge. Gwen watched them nearly crash down the staircase nearby.
“Franklin,” Murderdock acknowledged, coming over to the door and wiping a hand off on his suit leg.
Mr. Nelson just gave him an unimpressed look.
“The Irish, Matthew,” he said.
“Making friends,” Murderdock beamed.
“Friends,” Mr. Nelson repeated.
A silence hung between them.
“Is there a reason you’re gracing my space?” Murderdock asked. “This is unlike you. You never did like to lower yourself to these depths. If I recall correctly, you said they were—”
“I need information about your sister,” Mr. Nelson said.
Another silence hung. Gwen looked back and forth between the men. Murderdock’s grin twitched into a sneer.
“I told you, sometimes the marks cross. It’s not a matter of teamwork. It’s a matter of efficiency,” he said.
“Not about the Worltons, Matt.”
Murderdock’s sneer vanished with the cock of his head.
“No?” he asked.
“No,” Mr. Nelson said. “It’s about the ADA.”
There was nothing more incredible than Murderdock’s full-body flinch.
“I told her to leave that girl alone,” Murderdock raged within the confines of his office.
It looked, well. Super normal. Very similar to Mr. Nelson’s office, really.
“She’s obsessed,” Murderdock lamented.
“McDuffie hasn’t left the office yet,” Mr. Nelson said. “Elektra can fuck with her all she wants once her space is cleared out.”
“She shouldn’t be fucking with her to begin with,” Murderdock said, throwing up his hands. “The last thing she needs is some publisher’s daughter chasing her tail.”
“Tell her to cut it out, Matt. The more she pushes, the less inclined Kirsten is to leave,” Mr. Nelson said. “She keeps giving her reasons to stay in the game.”
“Hell no. No. Not a chance in hell am I getting more involved with this,” Murderdock said.
“Matt.”
“You do it. If you’re so concerned, you insert yourself between Elektra and her mark. See how well that goes for you. I’ve already done my time,” Murderdock said.
“Matt. The more she jerks Kirsten around, the more involved Kirsten will get into our lives. My life. Your life. Gwen’s life. We don’t need another body interfering in this mess. It needs to stay contained,” Mr. Nelson said seriously. “That was our agreement.”
Oh.
So that was why things had felt so insular lately. There was boundaries in place now.
Huh.
Maybe it really had been a good thing that Mr. Nelson had caught feelings for the beast.
Murderdock tapped a toe irritably against the linoleum flooring. Gwen would have thought his office would be fancier, she wasn’t going to lie. She would have thought he’d have pimped it out with kingpin money.
“It’s more than a chase,” Murderdock said.
Mr. Nelson grimaced.
“No. Nope. I didn’t hear that,” he said. “This isn’t happening.”
“She likes her,” Murderdock grumbled, rolling his whole head as though his eyes weren’t enough.
“No, she doesn’t,” Mr. Nelson said. “Take it back and make it stop.”
“Psh. As if I have any foot to stand on,” Murderdock huffed. “Any time I bring it up, she just says ‘you’re fucking the DA, Matthew.’ And that’s it. Conversation over. What am I supposed to say to that?”
Wow.
This was far more messy than Gwen had thought.
“Okay, fine. Tell her to fuck ‘er and leave ‘er. You’re both pros at it,” Mr. Nelson said.
Murderdock pursed his lips and crossed his arms.
“Don’t play,” Mr. Nelson warned.
“I’m not saying that I have a great track record here,” Murderdock said. “But at least I have taste.”
Mr. Nelson’s face said otherwise. Gwen covered her mouth to let this conversation happen organically.
“Kaleb Urmstead,” Mr. Nelson said.
“An oversight,” Murderdock said immediately. “A mistake.”
“Justin Palos.”
“Another one.”
“Mindie—”
Murderdock thew up his arms.
“Okay, fine. I have no taste. But her taste is worse,” he relented.
“I don’t care if they fuck,” Mr. Nelson said seriously. “I do care, however, if word gets out that my assistants are sleeping with Daredevil to get city business done. And I care even more if it gets out that I’m having relations with the city Kingpin to keep things at a standstill in Hell’s Kitchen, Matthew. Kirsten’s too smart to take that kind of dirt with her into publishing. She’ll ruin this for everyone if she catches onto a story to make her mark.”
Gwen could not believe her fucking luck.
Shit like this never happened to her.
She was always the one who had to find and fix problems.
Now Murderdock had to do it?
Amazing. Brilliant. Ten out of ten stars.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Murderdock growled at no one in particular. “Girl, can you not keep it in your pants for twenty minutes? God.”
“Thank you,” Mr. Nelson said.
“GOD.”
“Tell me how it goes. Come along, Gwen. I think we’re done here.”
Gwen was basking in her suddenly free weekend. Reveling in it. Wondering if this was what all sixteen-year-olds felt like.
But then there was Benj.
“I lured him to Maidíu but Maidíu just took him to a match and now they’re even closer, Gwen. Help me. They can’t be friends. LC will teach Maidíu how to shoot and once he’s there, he’s gone forever. I’m never seeing either of them ever again, and then I’m back to square one with no team. What do I do???”
Benj’s idea of teamwork was so weird.
Explaining to him that making a team did not require networks of dependency was like pulling teeth.
“But if they don’t need me, what’s the point?” he asked.
Um?
This sounded like an adult discussion. Possibly a therapist’s problem.
B held his hands out to Benj and explained everything that Gwen already had in a deeper, more authoritative tone, and Gwen had hopes that hearing it that way might actually make it stick.
She was wrong, but you know.
She’d at least tried the hoping thing.
Dad said he was proud of her for having tried the hoping thing. He said she was setting a good example for Sammy.
The double-hitter of approval there felt very nice indeed, even if Benj’s problem was still parked right where it had been from the start.
“If they don’t need me, then there’s no reason for a team,” Benj explained very carefully to her and B. “If they have each other, then they will fill in all the holes between them and there is no reason for them to work with me again. And I can’t afford for that to happen. I need them to need me because I need them.”
B covered his mouth to hide just how painful he was finding this conversation.
“Okay,” he said after a moment. “Okay, so I think what we’re dealing with right now are layers.”
That was the most diplomatic way of saying ‘your head is so fucked up, I’m gonna need a knife to cut into this mess’ that Gwen had ever heard. She wrote it down on her palm to use it in the future.
B assigned Benj the task of team-building. What he meant by this was for Benj to find something that he could bond with the older guys over. It didn’t have to be related to vigilantism. In fact, it would be better if it wasn’t related to crime-fighting or crime-doing at all.
So now Benj, sweet, dopey, nerdy Benj, was going to a boxing match.
He was terrified.
“What if someone hits Maidíu?” he asked. “Do I like, get up there and--?”
“No,” B said. “Absolutely not. Do not do that.”
“But? But? Team?”
Gwen wondered if Benj had had friends before, like, at all. He really seemed to be struggling with the nuances of support here.
“No. Sometimes teamwork means cheering for your guy while they do the hard thing on their own,” B explained.
“So I just let him get punched, Peter?” Benj asked in manic horror. “How could I—he’s blind! He’s BLIND.”
They had to take a timeout to calm down.
Once it was reclarified that it was Maidíu’s literal, actual job to get punched repeatedly for the entertainment of others, they moved onto a discussion of appropriate behavior at a sporting event.
Benj, B told him, needed to up his masculinity. And he needed to follow the Lance Corporal’s lead so he didn’t get pummeled by the crowd.
“Let him teach you about the game,” B said patiently. “It will make him feel important and smart and when you make people feel important and smart, they like you more.”
Gwen took notes.
“This is my mama,” Sammy told her resolutely later that week, showing Gwen a picture of a woman on his phone. The Falcon leaned over her shoulder to see and Sam slammed the phone down face-down onto a pillow. “No looking,” he told the Falcon. “Only for nice friends.”
The Falcon scoffed and went back to reading wrestling news on his own phone.
Sam squinted at him hard before bringing the phone back up for Gwen to see again.
“She’s very pretty,” Gwen said of this woman. She was. Although there was just something about her clothes that didn’t look right. Her arm around Sammy and her smile seemed…brittle.
“No looking,” Sam scolded The Falcon again.
“Yo,” the Falcon said nervously.
Gwen looked back at him.
He edged back slightly and then flicked his eyes over towards her.
When Sammy abandoned them at the sound of Dad’s keys in the door, the Falcon came in closer and whispered, “That lady’s with the Hand.”
Say what?
“I’ve seen those uniforms before.”
Oh shit.
“What do we do?” she whispered. “Do you think he knows?”
The Falcon stared.
Right. Obviously not. Sammy was smart, but he was still a baby.
“Does his adopted mom know?” the Falcon asked.
Ahahahahahahaha.
Oh god, DD was about to kill Sam’s real mom.
She gunned it to Mr. Nelson’s apartment while the Falcon took over babysitting responsibilities and tried to teach Sam the subtleties of pro-wrestling. Just for the hell of it, Gwen snagged Benj from his workbench in his verse and dropped him into the living room for a pre-game crash-course on professional fighting entertainment before his big event.
Dad was supervising. All kinds of manly things were happening and would be for however long it took for Gwen to make Mr. Nelson aware that his sort-of sister-in-law was about to do some real shit.
She found him, thankfully at home on a Friday night, focusing intensely on a game of Jenga with Murderdock who’s current level of concentration and dedication Gwen had never before witnessed.
She suspected there was something riding on this game.
Cat rolled around in Murderdock’s lap when she shoved the cracked window all the way up breathlessly.
“Don’t ruin this,” Murderdock snapped at her forcefully.
Mr. Nelson gently tapped on one of the blocks, then decided not to pick it.
“Did you need something, Gwen?” he asked.
Gwen had no idea how a blind man played Jenga. She was kind of taken off-guard when Mr. Nelson found and placed his piece and it was then Murderdock’s turn. He traced his fingernail ever so delicately through the cracks between the blocks to know which way they were facing and then tapped on the short ones to figure out their level of give. Once he figured out which one he wanted, he tapped it out and let it fall down beside the tower so that he didn’t have to deal with sorting out how long the piece was and what angle he had to remove it at.
It was kind of mesmerizing.
But that wasn’t why she was here.
“Elektra’s gonna kill Sam’s mom,” she announced.
That got their attention.
Mr. Nelson was furious with Murderdock and it was a beautiful thing.
An awe-inspiring thing. He was usually so resigned to Murderdock’s shenanigans that all he did was sigh.
“And you didn’t tell me?” he demanded this time.
Murderdock held his shrugging hands high.
“It didn’t seem relevant?” he said.
“Matthew. You’ve been obsessively tracking a nameless woman from China. For weeks. What part of that sounds normal and healthy to you?”
Murderdock didn’t get it.
“All? Of it?” he tried.
“MATT.”
“WHAT?”
How the fuck did these two made anything work was the better question here.
“You—Do you even—did it ever—”
Mr. Nelson couldn’t even figure out the right question to ask.
“Look. I had a couple hours. Samuel was in distress. You’re the one who told me to form emotional attachments, so I just did it, alright? I didn’t think about it, why are you so fucking mad? This is what emotional people do, isn’t it?” Murderdock said.
Gwen thought that he maybe needed to have a talk with B.
“Matt,” Mr. Nelson despaired between his fingers. “Impulse control. Impulse control. That was beyond out of line. That was Sam’s decision to make.”
Murderdock didn’t get it.
“He was upset?” he said.
“He’s six. He’s traumatized. He has PTSD. Of course he was upset. When he cries for mom, you need to give him to Elektra.”
“Well, no one told me that. How was I supposed to know?”
While Gwen was living for this very enlightening example of how Mr. Nelson was trying to teach Murderdock morals, there was a slightly bigger problem on their hands.
Elektra was offended to hell when they found her.
“What did you tell them?” she accused Murderdock. “Are you telling people I’m trying to murder my kid’s mom, now?”
“I didn’t say shit,” Murderdock said.
“Is this because of Kirsten? Are you seriously that mad about Kirsten? I told you it’s none of your goddamn business who I see and—”
“Girl, I could not give less than a shit about who you’re trying to get with—”
“Then why the fuck are you—”
“Okay, okay, let’s bring this back to base here,” Mr. Nelson said with placating hands. “Gwen and I need more explanation and to know exactly why we are letting Samuel interact with operative from the Hand, when I am 99.9% sure that there was a discussion here that that would not be happening under any circumstances.”
Elektra growled.
So apparently there had been intense negotiations recently with Sammy that Murderdock and Elektra had failed to disclose to anyone outside their immediate circle.
Sammy’s mom, once she’d been located, wanted Sam back.
That was problematic for many reasons. Firstly, his adoption had gone through, secondly, because she wasn’t a US citizen, thirdly, because she had joined the Hand, and fourthly, because Sammy didn’t seem to remember her and was generally reluctant to spend much time with her alone.
Also, Sammy’s mom had another baby. A little sister for Sam apparently.
Elektra was of the opinion that the new baby would not mesh well with Sammy’s needs.
Sammy’s mom thought otherwise. Sammy’s mom was really fucking offended at that implication and at the implication that she’d sold her first child to a trafficking ring. Apparently, she’d thought that she was giving him to an Olympics-esque training program for young acrobats. She was trying to move him out of the poverty that their family lived in, the same poverty that sent her into the Hand’s grip.
It was all super complicated.
“Look, we’ve just about worked out a functional system,” Elektra said. “Legally, Sammy’s mine because he’s safest with me, but Mom comes to visit him regularly to make sure that he knows who she is and what he ought to about his heritage and culture. This is good. For everyone—except Matt because he is physically incapable of being good company, but we already knew that and we are doing our best to appreciate the effort. Alright? We’re fine. Everything is fine.”
It didn’t sound fine.
Mr. Nelson pointed this out.
“I’m not going to kill her, Franklin,” Elektra said. “I don’t love her, but she’s not my problem. She’s my kid’s mom. She’s allowed to spend time with him.”
Er.
Right.
Okay?
“I hate this and I hate both of you and I hate myself for continuing to put up with your bullshit,” Mr. Nelson told Murderdock and Elektra stiffly. “I want you to know and internalize this.”
“Okay?” Elektra said. “So leave?”
Murderdock loomed over her in fury.
“My bad, my bad,” she said around him. “Don’t leave. I’m sorry?”
That was better. Kind of.
Gwen got back home to find the house empty but for Dad with Sammy knocked out in his lap at the table over a jigsaw puzzle.
She dropped into the chair next to him and he listened to her as she decompressed and explained about the whirlwind of a week she’d had.
It was nice?
It almost felt like she wasn’t so alone anymore.