Matt Murdock clutches his bloody spirit back into his body. The world around him is vibrating, smug, and dishonest; it’s all Matt can do to get across the walkway without toppling sideways and plummeting to his death. He wants away. Away from the people and a world that won’t stop singing and all the twisting that keeps carrying him off in a thousand different directions.
It was purposeful, this attack. Someone who knew him lured him here, played him, leaned into the heart of his weakness with keen, prodding fingers. It certainly hurts.
His stomach is opened up; under his fingertips he can feel his intestines throb, jerk, and writhe. It’s a weird form of intimacy, to be touching his own organs, even with a gloved hand. The pain doesn’t feel like pain. It feels instead like white hot fire in his belly and being hungry, starved even.
Focus. The blood loss makes him slip in what smells like liquid iron-- his blood, that he’s sliding across like a fool-- and Matt reaches out with his one free hand to touch the chilly metal hand-railing, trying to gain his footing, surrounded by the stink of death. Behind him people are shouting, echoing feet taking the stairs two, three at a time; how did he manage to climb all those stairs? Matt lurches forward, swinging up clumsily onto a platform above with his billy-club and his one good hand. He collapses on one side and-- ah, that’s pain. Forgotten, his broken (shattered really, if he is to believe those grinding, creaking pieces in the mass) ribs now throb angrily at the attention.
Slowly, Matt drags himself through a propped open window and onto what sounds like a roof. The tin exhale of rain hitting metal is overstimulating, and for an impulsive second Matt almost covers his ears (like he did when he was a child, after his father was murdered, after the nuns pushed waxed cotton into his ears to help him sleep), fingers twitching against the open mouth of his abdomen. Behind him, his pursuers are climbing up to the second platform, shouting commands and swears and clicking and clunking with some intangible metal objects in their arms. What is that? Matt pauses, tilts his head; chains? The image is a broken puzzle piece.
He’s unwilling to find out for sure. Clambering to his feet, Matt slips down the incline of the roof. There’s a small ledge he can grab onto if he times it just-- shit! He misses. His shoulders hit the edge of a closed dumpster as he comes down; it feels like a thousand insects are chewing through his spinal neurons (Matt thanks God and Melvin for the mercy of a fantastic suit, otherwise he’s unsure whether he’d be able to physically walk, or whether his ghost would continue alone from his body).
Rearing up (ignoring pain, always ignoring the pain), he begins running in a random direction, turning this way and that and switching between the alleyways and the rooftops. Eventually, even the rain stops running after him, and he collapses against the side of a dilapidated fence. Matt hastily climbs over it, falling over himself in an effort to get to shelter, and barely registers the broken, rusted cross above the doorway, or the rows of pews, half standing and others turned and toppled. Entropy is God too, Matt supposes as he collapses beside the podium.
Later, when he gathers his energy enough to do so, Matt runs his fingers along his exposed intestines and wonders what Kirsten is doing right now. His mind lingers on the periphery of her visage, listening to her sort through paperwork, huff and sigh, and stretch her back when it aches (it would, it always did). His guts twist and jerk in his hands as he tries to catch any nicks or slicings with his delicate fingertips. Imaginary Kirsten wants to call an ambulance for him. Matt thinks at her, I got this, and takes a needle from his emergency sewing kit, satisfied that there’s no internal damage. He feels like a stuffed toy; pushing his insides back inside, and sewing himself together, pinching that flesh and muscle like a Glasgow smile on his abdomen. How many times has Matt been in this situation? Bloodied and the loneliest person on Earth?
Without even realizing it, Matt pulls his burner phone out and makes a move to call Foggy, just to hear his voice as he threads the needle in and out, in and out. But he knows better; this isolation is good for Matt, good for Foggy, and good for Kirsten (although, these absences make him feel hollowed out. Matt feels like maybe all he’s made of is blood and bone and muscle, but nothing else. He’s all body and no spirit.) Foggy’s probably curled around a pillow, one leg clutched upward, the other exposed and occasionally kicking like a dog. He still sleeps like the dead, even after going through so much (because of Matt, always because of Matt).
The needle hits a nerve and he winces, hissing through his teeth as he pulls the string taut to loop it back over. The sound of dripping water is all he can focus on right now. Drip. Drip. Methodical. Matt times his sutures to the metronome of rain; drip, loop and tie, drip, loop and tie. Just as he use to when he was a boy, with his father; feeling along the wound with his fingertips, tying in time with Jack Murdock’s rough, congested breathing. Drip, drip as his nose bled freely.
Matt is exactly like Jack, no matter how many years he went through the education system. He’s a fighter, a battler, and stupid, so God damn stupid. Then Jack Murdock is next to him; his smell stinging and bloody. He tells Matt he’s getting sloppy with his stitches. Matt wants to tell him to fuck off, but instead focuses back on getting the sewing needle curved just right, fighting the puckered skin flat across his abdomen. Jack Murdock fades back into fever.
Does he have a fever? Matt fumbles with his free hand and hisses when the thread gets caught on his wrist and pulls taunt. He’s definitely hot. Matt knows he has a fever for certain when a familiar smell makes him lift his head, lurching his body to one side; he almost topples over in urgency. Kirsten touches his hair, tenderly. It aches. The follicles respond. The scalp roils under her fingernails. The pain he feels builds up in his chest, in his bloodied, lonely spirit. He tries to smile.
“Quite the sight you are,” Kirsten says, crouching down next to him, “Are you in pain?”
Matt sighs, leans into her curved hand, resting against his sideburn; she was always so wonderful with him, so teasing and gentle.
“No,” he replies, and his voice is hoarse, “No, I’m not in any pain.”
Kirsten sounds like she’s swaying, moving motion sick from side to side. Then Matt realizes it’s him and a nausea builds in his belly from the motion. The retching pulls at his stitches until he can calm down enough to get air into his chest. Oh, it hurts so bad; broken ribs bursting blood vessels and screaming over his heart. Their laughter sounds like grinding. Then Kirsten rubs his back, scratching against his spine like he always loved, and takes a deep breath against his cheek. He breathes shallowly.
“You keep getting yourself into messes like this,” She says, “And you’re gonna get killed.”
Matt scoffs and doesn’t say anything. He’s a new man; a positive man and most certainly not one wrecked by suicidal ideation. He doesn’t wish to die purposefully in a blaze of glory. He doesn’t want to be a martyr. (Except he does, he already is, he wants to die as his father did; leaving nothing behind him except empty space to fill (except that Matt was left behind, Jack left a blind child all alone, why would he do that, why couldn’t he have just taken the fall, why was he so prideful)). Does God see Jack’s death as a suicide? Knowing you’re going to die and not doing anything to prevent that; is it the same? Matt doesn’t want to think like that. Doesn’t think of God as that wicked; cruel, yes. But coldly, analytically so.
Kirsten’s hands become less delicate, and Foggy sidles into her skin, taking her place. He smells like cell death (which is good), and radiation (which burns his nose and throbs up into his sinuses), and Matt can’t tell, but he’d guess on the expression Foggy’s making. Pinched, like the gravity of his face is swallowing up his features. Whatever those features are. Matt pulls another stitch tight.
“Getting pretty good at that, huh?” He says.
“I’ve always been good at it.”
Foggy gives a dark throaty laugh (the type that leaves a bitter taste in your mouth), “You certainly know how to take a compliment.”
Matt shrugs, pain radiating from the movement, and makes the final wide stitch.
“So I’ve been told.”
He leans backwards against the podium, feeling the grain of the wood against the thinnest part of his suit, and hoists himself up, only to immediately collapse from the pressure of the sky.
“Woah,” Foggy says, startled, “Take it easy pal.”
He’s dizzy and hallucinating and haunted by spirits that won’t take peace (or give him peace.)
Matt sighs, a shallow, whistling sound, and jerks away from the raised podium, onto the floor with the pews.
“Why are you even here?”
Now Foggy shrugs.
“I don’t know, Matt. Why don’t you tell me?”
Matt settles down against a bench, closing his trembling, tired eyes, and turns his face upward to the broken sky of the church.
“I guess I miss you.”
Foggy’s hand is cold.
“I miss you too, pal.”
And all the sensation is sucked away.