Hell is Empty

“Hell is empty.  All the demons are here.”

William Shakespeare 

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They’re in Matt’s apartment, and Matt remembers everything but for the life of him he can’t remember how they got there.

Maybe they’re both still high, riding that heady thrill that only comes after brushing shoulders with death and realizing afterwards how close it had actually been.  How a breath, a centimeter, a stiff breeze had been the only thing standing between them and oblivion, and in the aftermath they felt goddamn invincible.  

Bloodsoaked soldiers sitting on top of the world and laughing as it burned because theymade it.  

When they come pouring gracelessly into Matt’s living room through the fire escape window, they’re both battered, dripping blood and sweat, riding a high of adrenaline.  Matt trips on the sill and Frank falls in on top of him, and Frank actually laughs.   

It’s the first time Matt has ever heard him do it.  It triggers something in him, like shock and understanding and oh that’s what it’s been all this time. 

What started as a grudging working relationship had turned into this; turned into beers in Matt’s apartment and Frank sprawled out on his couch like he owns it.  There’s red spatter on Frank’s chin and a lazy drop trailing down from his hairline somewhere, and it’s like he doesn’t even notice any of that. He probably doesn’t.

Matt in the kitchen, still buzzing, pops open a beer with adrenaline-shaky fingers and a grin and takes a swig.  He’s trying not to think about the way Frank is watching him from the couch, watching him like he’s something interesting and new.  Matt tries not to think about what that means. It’s all he can think about.  

He doesn’t know what Frank sees, exactly, when he stares at him like this.  He only knows that he does it a lot, too much, and it’s starting to sit on Matt’s shoulders like it’s comfortable and he doesn’t want to think about losing it.  

Dangerous, his mind warns him.  This is too dangerous.

And he knows that deep down but there’s something else too.  It’s someone looking at him and really seeing him and still not looking away.  The two halves of Matt, ripping and tearing at one another, and nobody has ever wanted both.  

Foggy and Karen love Matt Murdock: the lawyer, their friend, the very human facade he always pulls together and presents to them as a peace offering so they won’t look too deep at what’s broken.  A jigsaw box full of scrambled pieces and a promise, a picture on the front of what they’re supposed to look like when they’re all patched together.  

Elektra had loved the parts of him that became Daredevil, a monster in a mask wailing out his darkness and pain on dirty streets, a slave to anger and more hate than any one man had any right to carry around.  She loved that chaos and how easy it was to aim it like a weapon. 

And then there’s Frank.  Unlike anyone Matt has ever met, a perfect dichotomy of passion and control and cold reasoning and hot rage.  Frank, who Matt thought at first he would have to find a way to stop or kill or both, and who now has become the only person he’s ever shared space with, ever worked with in this effortless easy way.  Like there’s a balance between the soldier’s raging bloodlust and Matt’s critical weakness, his immovable code. 

At first, Matt told himself that he needed to keep an eye on Frank.  He needed to monitor this raging inferno ripping through his city night after night, leaving bodies and shell casings in his wake.  He told himself Frank needed him, one devil to tie another to whatever remained of his humanity.  

Slowly, too slowly, Matt realized he needs it too. The weight of Frank that tips his broken scales back.  The ugly, rotting thing inside him that’s damaged beyond repair reaches out to the void, sensing a kindred spirit there.  A dark hand that reaches out to his and doesn’t flinch back.

He knows that’s dangerous, too.  

Frank watches him like he hates him, sometimes.  And there’s an intensity about it that becomes more like an addiction, because whatever’s in his eyes when Frank looks at him like that, Matt craves it.

Even if Frank does hate him, and at times Matt is so sure he does… he hates him.  He hates what he sees clearly, two people who aren’t separated at all but the same man, neither Murdock nor Daredevil but whatever broken mismatched thing runs beneath them both like a vein Frank wants to split open and taste.  

If Matt had any shred of self-preservation left, that thought should terrify him.

It doesn’t.

Instead he lets this heated and nameless thing in closer to him every day, and he’s caught somewhere between morbid curiosity and something much darker.  Something that knows this could hurt him, kill him even, and doesn’t care.  

Foggy has accused him more than once of having a death wish.  This might be the closest Matt has ever come to believing him.  

Matt hears Frank stand from the couch, and he’s both all noise—leather and creaking joints and the metallic slide of hanging dog tags—and all silence, like an apex predator slowly circling into Matt’s space.  

“Do you need another beer,” Matt asks him, if only to signal to Frank that he knows exactly where he is, what he’s doing.  It doesn’t mean anything; it’s a poor grasp at some vestige of control and Frank sees right through it. Of course he does.

Matt can hear the slosh of beer in Frank’s bottle.  He knows it’s not empty. He can almost see the way Frank’s lips twist in amusement because Matt even asked, and he can definitely feel those dark eyes on him.  Hungry.

Frank walks right up to him like he planned it, and maybe he did.  But his heartbeat is the strongest thing in the room and it doesn’t change pace, it’s just there.  Solid. Steadier than anything has a right to be in Matt’s ever-shifting world of shadow and sound.  A beacon in the fog of noise and sensation that tries every day to drown him. 

It takes everything Matt has not to lean into it.

Frank walks right up to him like this was normal, like he’d been here a thousand times.  Matt thinks he catches Frank’s heart rate finally notch up half-a-beat as he rounds the kitchen island, but he can’t even be sure because his own pulse is racing. 

Matt doesn’t turn around, doesn’t give anything for Frank to work with.  Even when Frank is standing behind him, leaving Matt feeling more exposed than he can ever remember, he just faces the counter and drinks his beer and waits. 

“You did good out there, Red,” is what Frank mouths against his jaw, and nothing in Matt could have prepared him for the rush of those words.  Nothing braced him against understanding all at once that he had been not only waiting to hear them, but needing to.  

Matt’s knees go weak and he hopes Frank doesn’t notice, prays that the way Matt’s hand is suddenly pressed down onto the countertop looks casual and not like something he suddenly needs to hold himself up.

Maybe he’s not that lucky, or maybe he’s suddenly the luckiest man alive because Frank’s steadying hand comes up to rest on Matt’s hip from behind, like a steel beam pinning him in place with a touch.  The entire universe funnels into a pinprick, and all Matt can feel is that large hand, hotter than coal, even through his suit. He can feel every callous and ridge and if Frank feels like this through leather and latex, Matt can’t even imagine what he’d feel like without it.

He doesn’t think Frank’s ever touched him before.  Not like this. Not stripped of pretense, of violence or necessity.  It’s maddeningly deliberate. Calculated.  

Frank chuckles, a sound that rumbles through the air between them and there’s hardly any, less than an inch between Matt’s back and Frank’s broad chest.  

Matt can’t breathe.

He forces himself to turn around, thinking he can at least defend himself against the crippling vulnerability he feels when Frank is looming behind him.  It doesn’t help like he thought it would. He feels Frank’s hand slide across the small of his back and it’s fire-hot and distracting. Matt still feels too close, too exposed, and he thinks that’s probably exactly Frank’s intention here.

“We nearly died,” Matt manages to say into the air between them, and there’s not enough of it, not nearly enough oxygen for Matt’s stuttering heartbeat and Frank’s strong one, thundering away in his chest like a diesel engine.  Powerful. Overwhelming. 

“Nearly,” Frank almost purrs, and Matt can’t see him but he can feel his eyes.  He can feel the puff of his breath in his hair. He smells so good it’s intoxicating.  

Matt’s fingers are shaking but he manages to keep a hold on his beer.  He knows if he tries to lift it for a drink he’s going to touch Frank. The soldier has him pinned, one hand still just resting on Matt’s hip.  Matt’s lower back is pressed against the counter.  

He should feel trapped.  He feels something else entirely.

“You’re bleeding,” Matt tries again to derail whatever is going through Frank’s head, tries to distract himself from how eerie it is that he can’t tell.  

“So’re you.”

Matt knows he’s not breathing right, his lungs are drawing in shallow gulps of air and almost choking on it because it’s full of Frank.  It smells like him, tastes like him. Matt has never felt drunk on a person before and didn’t realize it could be like this. He’s lightheaded.  Floating.  

Frank just stares at him, like he’s enjoying watching the brief, imperceptible reactions flicker across Matt’s face.  There are no glasses between them, no mask, and maybe Matt can’t really see Frank but he can feel the way he looks him right in his sightless eyes.  He knows, because nobody else does.

He’s always felt it: the way Foggy’s whole body relaxes when Matt puts his glasses on, or the way Karen shifts a little and won’t look directly at his face sometimes.  The way strangers intentionally look at the ground, at his collarbone, at anything but his face when he’s not wearing some physical barrier between his deformity and the rest of the world.  He doesn’t even know what his own eyes look like—he thinks maybe they used to be blue—but he’s sure they’re hideous. They have to be. People can lie to him, but their bodies can’t. Their hearts can’t.   

The worst of it has long healed over, he can tell that much, but there’s still something there, wrapped around his eye sockets like the puckered white lines of old scars.   Something ugly. Wrong.

Frank makes him wonder if that’s ever been true, because the soldier stares right in his eyes.  He doesn’t turn his head away or make uncomfortable little involuntary movements when he looks too long.  And Matt can’t even really see it but he can feel it and that seems so much worse somehow.  Not uncomfortable as much as disarming. Meaningful in a way he can’t navigate.  

Something desperately backpedaling in his brain wants to speak, to demand answers, to come up with how the hell did we get here but it doesn’t seem worth it.  Not when Frank smells like he does and the air is sharp enough to cut him if he breathes wrong.

Besides, he already knows.  Frank didn’t just slow down one day, he didn’t start crossing paths with Matt by chance.  When the marine wanted to disappear he disappeared, leading Matt to the only inevitable conclusion, which was that at some point he stopped wanting to.  Frank started following Matt, or letting himself be followed.  

Whatever chaotic thing had taken shape between them now, Matt could no longer call it accidental.  

“Y’liked that,” Frank finally says when he’s done staring.  

“What?”  Matt’s voice is rougher than he meant it to be, and he realizes with alarm that he was drifting.  Caught up in sensory overload, and none of it is terrifying this time because it’s all Frank.

“When I said y’done good,” Frank’s free hand is suddenly in his hair, twisting, pulling his head back just enough to hurt.  It’s such an abrupt movement that Matt can’t prepare for it.

Matt’s suddenly unable to control his ragged breathing, and he’s embarrassed by how he must look, his throat exposed to a man who could rip it out without breaking a sweat.  He’s still not willing to crack, not willing to cave.  

He doesn’t know what game Frank is playing or why, but he wants to.  

“Your whole body lit up like I tazed ya,” Frank’s voice is a low grumble.  His breath is warm on Matt’s jaw, a five o clock shadow grazing lines of fire across his neck.  

Frank is a large man, intimidating more by aura than appearance, though Matt’s been told he has that in spades too.  He likes to push, to crowd, to get right up in people’s space and see the whites of their eyes. It’s a brazen sort of confidence born of knowing that at any given time he’s the most dangerous man in the room.  He’s rarely wrong.

Matt once thought himself immune to the same reactions he can read in everybody else when Frank is around: fear, tension, that fight-or-flight reaction so common in animals sensing a threat.  The chill he can feel run up every spine. He thought he was resistant to it.  

What he really was, he understands now, was enamored by it.  A moth drawn to an impossible flame, far more likely to consume him whole than it ever was to to warm him.  

Frank’s lips pause right under Matt’s ear, like he’s a wolf scenting his prey and enjoying the hunt.  His breath is hot enough to burn.

Matt’s almost agonizingly hard without understanding why, his cock stretching painfully against the unyielding fabric of his suit.  He panics for a moment, knowing he can’t lie his way out of this one, can’t hide the too-obvious way his body is choosing to react to Frank.  

Whatever happens next, it’s all Frank.  It’s all his choice, and that knowledge makes Matt’s stomach plummet through the floor.

“Take y’suit off,” Frank finally commands him.

Matt’s breath catches and he freezes.  He could push back, he knows he could. He could challenge him.  It’s all too obvious where this is going—where it’s always been going—and if he’s going to have any say in it, it has to be now.  Now while he’s still holding onto a fragile string of self control.

Frank seems to enjoy watching him struggle; he can feel the soldier smiling at him, hear the slow, lazy blinks as eyelashes flutter across skin.  He wonders, distantly, what color those eyelashes are… what color the eyes are that they frame. It’s never been important that he know before. It feels important now.  

“Y’gonna make me tell you again,” Frank asks so quietly he might never have said it at all.  There’s something dangerous; wild and possessive in his voice. A challenge and a threat. Like maybe Frank would really enjoy making Matt listen.

From his body’s own traitorous reaction, Matt thinks he might enjoy that too.  

Matt’s hands are moving with a little less grace than he’s used to, and they’re tremoring for reasons he can’t possibly explain. He’s too far off-balance for control. 

With slow, deliberate motions he unhooks each clasp and pulls it apart.  He knows Frank is watching his hands. It makes him self-conscious, clumsy.  

Matt thinks of stained glass and the way the rain lays on the damp concrete outside the church.  He thinks of early mornings crisp with cold and the way the pews smell after the overnight cleaning crew has come through and laid down a fresh coat of wood polish.  He thinks of a dark box and whispering split-lip confessions through a faceless grate.

His fingers falter and he can feel his own pulse skyrocket.  He wonders what is wrong with him, that he’s standing here in his own kitchen feeling immeasurably helpless, a slave to something he knows he shouldn’t want so desperately.  He shouldn’t be so dirty and tarnished that he wants to fall to his knees and let Frank pull his hair while he shows the bigger man exactly what he wants... what he’s maybe always wanted, but has never been brave enough to say out loud.  

And Matt knows, he’s fractured.  He is still two people and still trying so hard to be both, grasping at ragged edges when they start to fray, desperate to pull it all together, because he needs to, because he doesn’t know how to live any other way and the thought of trying terrifies him.

Frank isn’t like that.  He isn’t torn between trying to be two people, he’s FrankjustFrank, driven and unashamed, and maybe that’s just a kind way to say obsessed.  He doesn’t ripple at the seams where Frank Castle meets the Punisher, because they’ve never been separate entities.  Frank is brutal and laser-focused and the Punisher is strong and relentless and they’re the same thing.  One. Whole in pieces in a way that makes Matt think of artwork. Something he can run his fingers across and be filled with wonder.  

A wild animal, untamed and vicious, that doesn’t care whether Matt is wearing the mask of a devil or an angel today because he’s more interested in what’s under both.  

Matt knows what stained glass sounds like when it shatters, and he thinks he makes a sound like that when a big hand touches his throat.  Calloused fingers drawing ghostly lines across his resolve, urging him to keep going.

“Doing good, Red,” Frank reminds him, and that’s the tipping point.  Maybe it’s the words that strike something young and desperate in Matt’s chest, or the tone, like Frank thinks he’s scared and needs to comfort him.  

Matt’s fingers move on their own, less deliberate, less careful.  He all but rips the last catch open, shrugging out of his suit top and deliberately not giving away the way his bruised ribs sing at the harsh motion.  He doesn’t know if he’s challenging Frank or challenging himself but he sets his jaw and stares at where he thinks Frank’s eyes might be.

He’s breathing too fast.  His chest is too tight. Whatever Frank’s going to do, he just wants him to do it quickly.  There’s something madly self-destructive in the way Matt is offering himself like this, and every nerve ending is on fire and screaming at him that whatever happens next, whatever happens after, everything is going to hurt.  

And maybe that’s what keeps him silent, keeps him stock-still and terrified of accidentally letting anything slip out that sounds like no or stop.  There’s no doubt in his mind that Frank would, in a heartbeat.  That thought terrifies Matt more than anything that could possibly come next.

“S’that hurt,” Frank asks quietly, and one rough hand is still tangled in Matt’s hair, but the other is palming his ribs, feather-light.  From the heat already radiating off his own skin, Matt is sure they’re starting to blossom into shades of purple.

“No,” Matt lies and grinds his teeth.  

Frank hums like he doesn’t believe him in the slightest, but his hand is still moving.

Matt feels his eyes flutter shut, every touch over-stimulating his skin to the point where he can’t think straight, can’t think at all, can’t focus on anything except the way Frank’s fingertips are ridged and uneven like he’s cut them too many times, collected too many scars.  

“No,” there’s a sudden sharp edge to Frank’s voice, “look at me.”

Matt wants to laugh at him, wants to throw it in his face because the pressure is building in his chest and he doesn’t know what’s going to happen when it bursts.  It seems almost trivial that now, of all times, Frank is telling him to open eyes that haven’t seen anything in two decades. 

He opens them anyways, because Frank told him to. 

“Why,” Matt challenges, ashamed that his voice cracks when Frank’s calloused palm slides over a deep scar on his hip.

Frank never loses control, not even for a second.  If he’s surprised by the question he doesn’t let it show.  

“I like seein’ your eyes,” he says simply, like that explains it all.  

It doesn’t, not by a long shot, because nobody likes Matt’s eyes.  They’re scared of them, or unnerved, or full of a sour kind of pity he thinks he can physically smell sometimes.  

Maybe, he thinks, it’s all part of the game.  Something Frank will try to use to keep Matt imbalanced and torn open, vulnerable.  For a terrifying moment, he thinks maybe that’s all this is.  A game. And Frank is just toying with him, seeing how far he can push, how much he can humiliate Matt with his thick voice and his strong hands, before simply stepping back and letting him fall.

The thought worms into Matt’s brain and startles him, and the sudden clarity is like ice water flushing out his overheated veins.  He jerks back, suddenly feeling like he’s too close, too naked with his eyes wide open and his shirt off and—

Frank kisses him.  

It’s enough to short-circuit Matt’s brain completely and freeze him in place.  This isn’t just a test anymore… not just a push or a twisted game. It’s Frank’s lips on his.  Real and visceral. 

And maybe it was hardwired into the soldier to never do anything by half-measures, because he kissed Matt like it was a fight he wanted to win.  Like he had kissed him a thousand times before and he owned him.  

Matt feels himself make a sound deep in his throat that sounds too much like a whimper, because there’s a demanding hand in his hair and a demanding tongue in his mouth and Frank’s entire body is plastered against his.  Every nerve ending is alight, singing with sensation. With need.

Frank’s hips are flush against Matt’s, and he can feel the hard, hot length of him jutting into his stomach.  It’s enough to leave him dizzy, or maybe that’s just Frank’s tongue down his throat, sharp teeth pulling at his lips.  The way the larger man has him trapped against the counter is all too-deliberate, reminding Matt that he really doesn’t need to make any decisions about right or wrong right now.  He doesn’t have a choice.  

Frank is claiming his free will and god help him, Matt doesn’t put up a fight.  

The soldier uses every inch of himself to put Matt right where he wants him, to move him and keep him there and dominate him an effortless way that leaves Matt weak and shaky in a way he’s never experienced.  

He touches Matt and reads him, the way Matt reads braille with his fingertips.  Mapping every inch of him with his hands, tracing exposed skin and raised scars with a violent reverence.  It’s not gentle, not soft or kind.  

Matt has never needed anything more in his life.  

.

Frank fucks like he fights.  

It’s vicious and painful, almost animalistic. Glorious.  

For someone without any unnatural powers he’s impossibly strong, stronger than any man has a right to be.  He proves it by lifting Matt bodily up and pinning him against the wall.  

There’s something about the way he holds him up, fucking up into him in long, hard thrusts while he traps him there, helpless.  It’s in the way he throws him around like he doesn’t weigh anything and he’s not afraid of breaking him the way everyone else in Matt’s life seems to be.

It’s rough, it’s torture, it’s everything Matt needs.  

Frank takes everything Matt is willing to give him and then keeps taking, keeps pushing.  Pulling Matt apart at the seams and worshipping the pieces that fall off.  

“Come for me,” he growls into Matt’s ear while he takes him, pinning Matt to the bed with his bodyweight, his cock buried to the hilt inside him.

“I can’t,” Matt all but sobs, his legs shaking, the aftermath of countless blinding orgasms flashing white behind his eyes.  His wrists are pinned above his head by a primal strength he’s already learned not to struggle against. His back arches anyways, because Frank is too thick and Matt is too full and the marine won’t let up, won’t let him rest.  

“Yeah y’can,” Frank tells him, pulling him up onto his lap.  And he keeps fucking him, keeps hitting that sensitive spot deep inside, keeps stroking Matt’s cock back to full-mast with hands that Matt knows every inch of by heart now.  

“Come for me,” Frank orders.

Matt buries his teeth in Frank’s shoulder, and obeys.

Frank gets off on that, too.  On Matt’s fingernails digging into his back, catching at ropey scars and uneven burns long healed over.  On teeth sharp enough to make him bleed.  

Every time Matt comes—he loses count, which is new—Frank is there, rumbling in his ear.  Like he knows how easy it is to light Matt on fire with a touch, and he’s determined to pour gasoline onto his skin until it’s an inferno.  

The dirty talk is new, too.  

“Doing so good, so good for me Red,” he whispers blinding praise in Matt’s ear as the smaller man rides out the aftershocks, and Frank’s hands are in his hair and his cock is still inside him, pumping almost lazily, hitting that mind-numbing sweet spot over and over again.  

“You take my cock so good, just like that—” and Matt is building again, riding some kind of blissful high as Frank pulls sounds out of him he didn’t know he could make.

“I fuckin’ love you like this,” Frank tells him, holding him back flush against his chest, one hand wrapped around Matt’s throat.  “Full o’ me, begging for it—” he punctuates with another long thrust up, his hand tightening around soft flesh until Matt starts seeing stars.  

And it scares him, feeling his vision fading, his breath coming in strained pulls as oxygen deprivation starts dimming the edges, but it’s also the best thing he’s felt in years. Maybe ever.  He can’t think straight, can’t remember. The barrage of sound and smell fades out and he only realizes it when Frank mercifully loosens his grip, just enough to let Matt suck in air.  

Everything comes rushing back, and he misses it.  When it was just Frank. Frank filling him up from the inside out.  Frank’s taste in his mouth, Frank’s smell in his nostrils, Frank’s hands on every inch of Matt he can reach.

Nothing, either in past memories or fantasies of the future, has ever come close to what Frank does to him.  

Matt’s never been taken apart from the inside out like this.  He’s never had dirty, beautiful, heartbreaking words whispered in his ear like a promise.  He’s never been so helpless. He’s never been so high.

And Frank won’t come, he won’t finish, not until he’s reduced Matt to a shaking, trembling mess of sticky skin and slick sweat and eyes rolling back in his skull because Frank still won’t let him close them.

“Wanna see those eyes while I fuck ya,” he rasps, low and deep and territorial, his hands twisting Matt’s face so he can’t turn away from him.  

Matt can’t see him, not physically, but it still feels like too much.  Too open, too vulnerable, too deadly in the way Frank has crawled under his skin and started tugging on strings.  

“Is this what ya’ needed Red,” Frank teases him as he bends him over the bathroom counter, Matt’s legs shaking violently enough that the other man has to hold him up, “me to control ya… to take ya how I wanted?”

Matt bites his fist as Frank impales him and thinks 

Yes god yes

And it’s not much longer before he can’t think anything at all.

.

When Matt wakes up, it’s still night.  He can tell by the sound of the city outside, roaring in his ears, demanding attention.  

He sits up automatically, swinging his legs over the edge of the mattress to sit there in the raucous silence.  His body is sore, every limb heavy with exhaustion. He spins in his own space, slotting fragments of memory back into place.  He concludes that none of it was actually a dream and he’s not sure if he’s disappointed or relieved by that.  

His hair is slightly damp and his skin smells like fresh-cut wood and pine leaves.  It takes him a minute to place the smell as his own shampoo because at some point they both ended up in Matt’s shower, naked and overheated and sticky.  He knows he’ll be daydreaming about the way his body slid across soap-slick tile tomorrow, in the quiet moments when he falls back to relive it all again.  

As exhausted as he is, Matt is pulled away from himself by the screams of an entire city, seething, teaming life, bubbling like a vat of poison.  The noise doesn’t care that he’s tired, body and soul. It doesn’t care that there’s a weariness in his bones that makes him think and say foolish things in the chaos.  

A car door slams.  An AC unit grinds on in the darkness and the fan is uneven; wobbling.  It groans and spins. The white noise roar of traffic rises and falls like angry waves on an angry ocean, punctuated at odd intervals by drunken laughter, stumbling steps, the metallic creak of doors badly in need of oil.  

The city is a constant stream of noise and turmoil, a symphony played out of tune, out of step.  It scratches at it’s own skin like it wants to rip it off.  

Most days, Matt can float above it all, let it rise and fall beneath him like the surge of a powerful tide.  Other days—other long, empty nights—he drowns in it. The city wraps a hand around his ankle like a ball of lead and drags him, kicking and screaming and gasping for air, underneath it all.  It clogs in his throat, in his nose and ears and invades him completely. It’s terrifying.  

And maybe he didn’t realize how often it was happening, lately.  How often he was getting lost, sometimes for hours at a time, in smog-thick air and burning garbage and the stench of sweat and misery.  In children crying and women screaming and that sickening noise metal makes as it slides out of wounded flesh.  

It calls to him, to the parts of him that are dark and ugly and twisted too.

Tonight, that call had competition.  In the deepest, most soothing heartbeat Matt had ever heard in his life, laying right next to him.  

He didn’t hear Frank sit up.  He wonders how long the other man has been watching him.

“What’s wrong with you,” Frank asks in the dark.  

The words are harsh, almost cruel, but there’s something in his voice that isn’t.  

Matt stares into emptiness and listens to nothing in particular and hears everything.  For some reason his senses veer straight back into his own apartment, into his bedroom, to that blessedly solid heart beating in a warm chest a few feet away.  The sound grounds him like nothing ever has before.  

“Everything,” says Matt without knowing why.  The word is hollow, empty, absolutely devoid of meaning.

The strongest heartbeat he’s ever heard stutters and skips, just once.  Frank breathes.

“C’mere,” the marine says and his voice is low.  He doesn’t wait for Matt’s mindless obedience, but stretches across the mattress and grabs his arm and pulls.  

It’s not lust or hate or hormones that makes Frank wrap around him like a wall of muscle and heat.  It isn’t anything Matt can name, but it’s something important.  

Matt drowns his senses, raw and bleeding, in the smell of him.  In the way the air still tastes faintly like gunpowder and coffee around his skin, and in the way that doesn’t scare Matt at all.  

.

When Matt wakes up Frank is already awake.  The soldier is still wrapped around him, keeping Matt’s back pressed against his chest with big hands wrapped around his forearms.  It shouldn’t feel as intimate as it does, especially considering the activities of the previous night.

Matt lies there for as long as he can, losing himself in touch and smell and sound.  Mornings are usually unpleasant, filtering back in the white noise of the city outside and sorting through what’s important and what isn’t.  

This is different.  Calmer, somehow. 

“Y’okay,”  Frank surprises him by asking quietly. 

Matt nods automatically, embarrassed that Frank thinks he needs to ask.  

The soldier’s grip tightens briefly like he knows he’s lying.

.

They go their separate ways.  

Matt stumbles through his day on auto-pilot.  Foggy snaps at him and Karen is exasperated and a long line of clients trails through the door and doesn’t let up.  Maybe that’s for the best. There’s no time to think, barely enough time to down cup after cup of burnt office coffee and stagger through disjointed conversations that Foggy is kind enough to lead.

He doesn’t think about the way he feels like he’s been split in half, or maybe that’s all he thinks about.  He’s tired down to his bones.  

When the city goes dark and comes alive and starts screaming, Matt dons a leather suit and waits on the rooftop of an abandoned warehouse on the edge of Hell’s Kitchen.  

He’s not sure if Frank will come and it terrifies him.  

It’s midnight and Matt can smell the odor of gun oil from a block away.  Sometime during the course of the day, Frank has smoked a cigarette and showered, in that order.  Like he knows how much Matt hates the smell of tobacco.  

“Got a target for ya,” Frank grumbles from the alley below, like he knows Matt is listening.  

Something that was sitting tight and heavy in his chest uncurls, and Matt doesn’t want to look at that too closely.  He doesn’t want to have to think about what it means. He only knows that the smell of Frank, the deep drawling timbre of his voice, makes the thick air easier to breathe.  

Matt drops soundlessly to the concrete beside the man that somehow became his partner, and pretends he can’t feel the air move around that shit-eating grin Frank aims his way.  

.

They’re both exhausted.  

It’s almost four in the morning.  Frank is back on the couch, back in a place where he’s starting to look like he belongs, legs sprawled out, whiskey in hand.  It’s Frank’s spot now, Matt thinks, and even if he disappears after tonight it might never stop being his. His atmosphere. The place he occupies in Matt’s brain, in his apartment, deep in his chest.

Matt is still trailing behind the Punisher trying to clean up the destruction, to soften the broken edges.  Frank is still indiscernible from a killer stalking out of the night with a skull spray-painted on his chest, and tonight reminds Matt of that all too clearly.  

And Matt doubts, not for the first time, if he’s really trying to hold Frank back from the bloodlust coiled up in his gut like a snake, or if he’s just trying to tame the one inside himself.  

Edges are blurring.  

Frank is regarding him from across the room.  Matt is sitting on the arm of the only chair, and it’s uncomfortable as hell but it’s the first place he found to rest his aching limbs and he can’t find the energy to move.  He changed out of his suit, and he’s wearing a thin t-shirt and sweatpants but he feels naked. Like his skin is sandpaper and his chest is a bleeding, gaping wound he doesn’t know how to patch up.

He twists his cane in his hands and wonders what’s wrong with him. 

“You didn’t get in my way tonight,” Frank sounds like he’s been thinking about it for a while, and maybe he has.  

“Sorry to disappoint,” Matt’s voice isn’t as strong as he wants it to be.  He’s drained. He doesn’t bother to point out that in a rare display of mercy, Frank didn’t make him.

Frank hums, and Matt is never sure what that sound means.  He doesn’t like not knowing.  

“I like it,” Frank’s heartbeat is too steady for a conversation like this.  He’s too in control. “Been a while since ya made my life easier. Ain’t bad to have a partner.”

“That’s not—”  Matt breaks off; his mouth tastes bitter.  “I never wanted to get in your way. I’m still not gonna let you kill anyone, if that’s what you’re getting at.  I won’t.”

Frank smiles without humor, and Matt isn’t sure how he can read that smile from where he’s sitting.  The air doesn’t move so much as it buzzes. It’s a feeling, not a logical extrapolation of sound and air currents.  Something in Matt is tuned into something in Frank in a way that scares him.  

“Been a while since ya preached at me, too,” Frank takes a drink.  If he’s teasing him, he’s not being subtle about it. “Kinda missed it.”

Matt resists the urge to let his head droop, his shoulders slump.  It takes more willpower than he likes to admit.  

“I can start up again, if you want.”  Matt is proud at himself for having a comeback, even if it’s a weak one.

Frank acts like he doesn’t hear him, “my snitch came through for me this mornin’.  Got a big job lined up for us.”

It’s a hint of the old Frank peeking out.  The warrior always searching for a battle to charge into, for a war to fight.  And maybe Matt shouldn’t have taken it for granted, that the other man could ever be content with roaming the streets with a man in a devil’s suit, interrupting quick-stop robberies and carjackings and two-bit thugs fighting in back allies.  Frank is a soldier. He never stopped being one.

“You’re not at war anymore, Frank,” Matt finally manages to say.  

It’s an echo of so many conversations—arguments—they’ve had before, splitting hairs between wars men fight on foreign soil and the ones they fight at home.  Men who follow orders and monsters who have to go to sleep every night bearing the burden of making their own decisions instead. 

Frank is silent, but he’s not quiet.  He never seems to be. Spitting words out into empty air without ever moving his lips.  It’s in the roll of his shoulders, in the way he stretches out one leg and his boots scuffs across the hardwood.  The tilt of his head. The sure, strong movement of his fingers brushing across the arm of the couch.  

“War ain’t something you come home from, y’know.  It crawls into your blood. It comes back with you.”  Frank slowly spins the liquid in his glass and takes a long, deliberate draw.  “Seen it too many times, y’know.”

Matt tilts his head towards the soldier, a question in the stillness.  

“Y’got that too Red,” Frank’s breath is thick with whiskey.  “Y’got war in your blood.”

Matt doesn’t know how to answer that. He doesn’t know if he can tell Frank he’s wrong, that Matt’s not a soldier.  

He thinks about Frank telling him, ages ago, a lifetime ago, that Matt would have made a hell of a marine.  At the time he hadn’t really understood the nod of respect that truly was. He thinks he understands it now.  That it’s the highest compliment a man like Frank can pay another. That he chose to pay it to Matt, bleeding in a red suit.  

He thinks about hard men on streets that smell like garbage and sweat.  Thinks about orders that trickle down from faceless people who drink expensive bourbon in shadowed back rooms so far away from that smell.  The way they shake the city down for their last pennies and punish it when those pockets start coming up empty. He wonders if those men think of themselves as soldiers, too.  

“Are we ever gonna be done fighting,” is what he asks without thinking.  His words feel heavy, his voice hollow. He doesn’t know when he became like this: full of doubt, drained of his resolve.  He doesn’t know when I became we like he and Frank have always been one.

Frank sets his glass down with a deliberate clink, and stands up.  

Matt lets him approach.  He doesn’t try to straighten to meet him, or stop him, or do anything but sit there with his cane hanging between limp fingers.  He’s so tired.

“We’re done tonight,” Frank says, and captures his mouth in a long kiss.  It’s a kiss unlike the ones before, like it’s meant to comfort instead of wound.  Like it’s promising something a man like Frank can’t possibly give, not to Matt. Not to anyone. 

Matt’s not prepared to feel that way.  It’s too much, too deep, and somehow so much more intimate than the filthy things he let Frank do to him less than twenty-four hours ago.  

He makes himself push back against Frank’s lips, trying to turn it back into what it used to be.  Angry and fast, sharp at the edges.

Frank puts a hand on his throat and stops him, and if Matt melts into the touch neither of them are going to mention it.

“What’d’ya need, Red,” Frank whispers against his lips.  

There’s that voice again.  Too much to decipher. Too loaded.  Like Frank looks at him and sees something broken he can fix.  

Hurt me, flashes across Matt’s mind and something inside him feels irreparably shattered at the knowledge that it’s what he needs, what he craves.  Whether it’s his own fucked up need to punish himself for everything he hates about who he is, or the shame that after all these years he still doesn’t even know.  

In that moment, he envies Frank.  He desperately admires that the soldier has somehow opened his arms wide to the twisted, unwell parts of himself and invited them in to stay.  

“I don’t have a goddamn clue,” Matt admits, and can only pray he doesn’t sound like he feels.

Something wet is tracing down his cheek, and he thinks there’s not a chance of that now.

He can feel Frank nod, slow and steady like he understands.  

“I’m gonna hurt ya, kid,” Frank’s breath is feather-soft against his skin, his thumb catching the salt on Matt’s chin, “but I ain’t ever gonna hurt ya.  You know that, right?”  

Matt knows. And god help him, that’s the problem.

He wishes Frank would hurt him, really hurt him. Wishes the soldier would give the rage and loathing and sheer, storming agony in Matt some direction.  

Because letting Frank destroy him would be too easy, would be another sin he could count on and catalog.  He could unzip his soul and pour himself out in a confessional booth and lock it all away when he finished, where he could visit it again on ugly nights when it all came caving in. 

But he doesn’t know what to do with this—with a version of Frank that’s giving him exactly what he needs in the moment, in a way that won’t let him hate Frank but forces him to hate himself.  

And what does that say about him?  What does that say about Matt, the devil, the imposter, the soldier in his blood?

Frank grips his elbows with strong hands and stands him up.  Matt’s cane clatters to the ground, bouncing off the low coffee table and rolling away.  He doesn’t want it back.  

He lets Frank take him into the bedroom.  Let’s him push him back onto the mattress and strip off his clothes in unhurried rhythm.  He follows orders like the soldier Frank thinks he is, and let’s Frank possess him, body and soul.  

He wonders if Frank knows Matt has never done this before.  If he knows that he’s brought Matt down to a place where he’s never let himself go, because underneath the confusion and the lust and the perfect way Frank both takes everything and gives back even more, there’s a part of Matt that thinks this might be it.  The mortal transgression that finally marks his soul as utterly, completely irredeemable.  

Worse, somehow, more damning… he doesn’t even care.

As Frank whispers intoxicating half-syllables into his ear, he wonders if this is how the first angel fell.  Not in battle, but in soft touches and strong hands and sweet, sinful breaths ghosting hot across chilled skin.  

Frank is a loaded gun in Matt’s hand.  Matt closes his eyes and presses it against his temple.