in technicolor

Brett had thought that knowing that Matthew Murdock was a teeth-smashing fuckhead would change his life dramatically and in some ways it did, but not in any of the ways that counted.

For example, he now had a fuckload of unfounded and unwelcome anxiety when Daredevil was sighted limping away from a crime scene.

Even though Foggy straight up told him it wouldn’t do shit, he tried coaching the guy in how and when to use emergency services. Yet, no matter how many times they went through the drill, it always ended up like:

“Okay, so if a civilian gets hurt then you?”

“Call an ambulance.”

“Perfect. And when you get hurt you?”

“Assess the damage.”

“Uh, okay—”

“Fast right hook.”

“No--”

“Incapacitate the target.”

“Matt. Matt, no—”

“End the altercation. Pressure on the wound. Maybe take an ibuprofen.” 

Brett had laid on this man in his living room, hissing and spitting, trying to impart the correct information the best he could, but the closest Matt got to ‘go to the hospital’ was ‘go see Sister Maggie.’ Which Foggy told Brett was as good as he was going to get.

So that was one kind of anxiety.

There were also the new concerns that came with the realization that Matt was, in fact, still very, very blind. Although he had alternate ways of navigating the world, these came with whole new set of their own problems. Colors, for example, still spelt trouble to the guy (“Listen, Matthew. If you encounter an explosive device, and there are wire-things, what do you do?”  “Find a sighted friend or take it to Wade.” “What? No. Take it to the police.” “That what I said. Or Wade.” “Not Wade.” “Frank?” “No.”) so did screens. Not to mention that any distraction or detraction in his awareness, for so much as a second, meant that he could damn well just walk out into a street and get hit by a car. He didn’t do crowded spaces well. He didn’t do snow well. There were so many things which Brett was now suddenly hyperaware of when the captain asked him to deal with Daredevil on something or when the guy’s name came up in relation to one of those absurdist, gang ambush crimes.

And yeah, those new fears had changed his outlook on Daredevil dramatically, but then Matt went and did shit like teaching Spidey how to fight four people at once or stealing Frank Castle’s rifle in the middle of Midtown, and Brett was swiftly reminded that Matt was more than capable of being a functional violent idiot all on his own.

Most importantly to Brett’s work however, he was a bad fucking influence.

Brett had received an extraordinarily polite letter from Colonel James Rhodes, and after he’d died a little at the honor of receiving any form of correspondence from Colonel James Rhodes, he’d opened it and found it formally asking him to stop giving Spidey resin in return for information or aerial support.

Why, you might ask?

Because he’d made resin knives.

Resin.

Knives.

Knives made out of resin.

And when he wasn’t satisfied with this, he’d gone out his adorable, doe-eyed little way to invent a new type of polymer from the acquired resin which made even sharper, even lighter not-quite-resin knives. These he took to Deadpool and DD and these, to Matt’s delight, could be slipped through metal detectors, including the ones at the courthouse.

In return for such gifts, someone had trained Spidey in the art of knife-throwing and he was getting far too good at it, Colonel Rhodes wrote. The kid was developing almost superhuman aim and had been causing chaos in Stark Industries’ labs in increasingly creative and concerning ways.

“We are pleased that Peter is learning how to work with the NYPD, but we would humbly request that all future rewards, bribes, etc. take the form of edible or otherwise age-appropriate goods.

Sincerely,

Colonel J. Rhodes.”

Brett respected this letter and what it stood for, but it meant he occasionally had to google teenage culture because he had no fucking clue what was both age-appropriate and appealing to people Peter’s age anymore.

Peter did not like any of the google results half as much as he’d liked the resin. And that was an issue. He’d started to reject some of Brett’s jobs on the grounds of a lack of an equivalent exchange.

Brett had gone to Matt, because wow, look, finally a perk of knowing the asshole, and Matt had given him one of his confused, but ultimately disinterested looks.

“Fuck Rhodes, just give him what he asks for,” he said.

No. Nope. Wrong answer.

We do not disregard war heroes’ requests. That is very bad form, Matthew.

“What the hell do I care about form? What’s he done for me?”

Preserved your country?

“Doing what? Murdering children in the Middle East? No thanks, fuck Colonel Rhodes. Pete’s in a sharpening-things phase. We’ve all been there. Let him have his fun.”

Have we? Is that really a thing we all go through?

Brett thought fucking not.

Brett found himself spending the night following this bonkers conversation standing between two parties of screaming drunk people while trying to examine a body in the middle of the street. On the way back to the car to escape the noise, he noticed a little silver coin in the street. It was bloody and had an insignia on it he didn’t recognize.

He called forensics over and they took pictures and told him they’d send him their findings soon.

He got a blown-up image of the insignia the next day and had been frowning at it for a full minute when Ellen passed by and whistled.

“That a token?” she asked.

A token? Well, apparently.

“Yeah, I heard that the Irish started handing them out to people they want taken care of.”

Oh, no shit?

“No shit.”

He had to pass the case along, and didn’t really think much more of it until Fogs called him and asked him if he could collect a piece of evidence from an “anonymous tipper.”

There was a woman pinning Matt to his apartment floor and yelling at him when Brett arrived and he quickly saw why. The guy looked like a trainwreck. He was too tired and sad and pained to yell back for once, so the gal was taking the fucking mick out of him while she could.

“What happened?” he asked Foggy as the lady, Claire her name was, pulled shards of glass out of Matt’s abused side.

“He won’t tell me,” Foggy groused, fuming in Matt’s direction.

Claire then did something which made Matt make a horrible little whining noise and Foggy’s irritation was replaced immediately with sympathy, and he abandoned Brett to go hold his boo’s hand, er. Head. The hand wasn’t allowed to be touched at the moment.

It took some coaxing (and some illegal morphine) but Matt finally revealed that he’d had the living shit kicked out of him by, guess who?

The Irish.

They’d left him to bleed out, but he said one of them had put something on his eyes before they’d left. He’d held onto them, because he’d never had anyone do that before and he wanted something to stuff down their throats when he got ahold of them in future. Foggy handed Brett two coins with a very familiar insignia on them.

He’d bagged them and thanked his anonymous tippers, then left Matt to sleep it, and the rage, off.

He didn’t have to wait long before he got a call from Anthony Goddamn Stark asking him if he would mind coming by Stark Industries like now.

You don’t exactly refuse a call from Tony Stark.

Ellen and fucking Goldberg went with him.

The first thing Brett noticed about Tony Stark’s personal lab was that one of its automatic doors was shattered.

Shattered but still fully functional. Merrily scattering bits of plexiglass with its every move.

He decided that he was going to pretend that that had absolutely nothing to do with him giving Peter resin at all.

The inside of the lab was not a lab. It was a scrapyard. Brett’s mom’s worst nightmare. Colonel Rhodes, as he led them in, took the novel approach of screaming for his buddy, rather than trying to locate him like a normal human being.

And for good reason.

Once located (through mutual shouting), Stark was half inside something which reminded Brett of the Iron Giant’s head, cursing like his life depended on it. Peter was slumped over the table next to him, with no shirt on and a chest plastered over in bandages. His forearms and elbows were torn right the fuck up and he didn’t wake up to greet Brett like he normally did.

Brett gut reaction was to gather the kid up and take him home. He needed to be home with that kind of damage, not in some cold ass lab.

He refrained for the sake of professionalism.

“Mr. Stark—” he started to say, but was interrupted by Colonel Rhodes snapping,

“Tony, what the hell are you doing? Cops. Here. Now.”

Which was, uh. One way to do it.

“Tony” must have smashed his head against something in that giant dome because the whole thing suddenly rang like a bell. He re-emerged, shorter than Brett had expected him to be, with his hands covered in a foul mixture of flaking blood and oil.

“Ah, detective. Nay, detectives. Which one of you is Mahoney?”

Brett grimaced and raised a hand.

“Oh, excellent. Here, this is for you.”

And Tony fucking Stark put, in the middle of his palm, two pieces of metal which looked like they’d recently been coughed up by a dog.

Brett knew exactly what they were by then. He looked at Peter. Stark looked with him.

“Kid was choking on ‘em, when I got the alert,” Stark explained nonchalantly, like he hadn’t obviously crammed his fingers down Peter’s throat to save the poor boy’s life.

Oh god, he hadn’t meant it.

Someone take this child home.

And someone else get Brett some damn hand sanitizer.

“He’s going home after Dr. Cho looks him over one last time,” Stark assured him.

Thank fuck there was at least one super person in the world who still believed in official medical intervention.

“It’s unusual of him to send me an alert,” Stark continued, reaching over to pet Peter’s hair. Colonel Rhodes caught his arm before he could and waved at it in disgust. Stark hummed and abandoned them to go scrub up in a nearby sink.

“I thought I’d seen that symbol somewhere,” he said over the water. “I was right. Some idiot left an indentation of it in that guy right there. Used to be down at the docks before I had it brought home for repairs. Some drunk idiot must have punched it with a ring or something.”

“That guy right there” was the Iron Giant’s head, which must have been some kind of SI device.

“It usually holds some of the control boxes for the weather station out there,” Colonel Rhodes explained.

Oh.

Good to know.

Brett and the others bagged the coins and asked if they could talk to Peter. Stark, with clean arms to the elbow, gave them a long look before approaching the kid and gently rolling him to the side. With surprising strength, he scooped the kid up and kicked a button at the bottom of panel next to the sink, which opened to reveal a beat to shit set of couches and a little kitchenette.

It must have been where Stark slept when he locked himself in his labs.

Peter started to wake up a little muzzily, when Stark went to set him carefully onto one of the sofas. He was just conscious enough to bitch at Stark he wasn’t that little. Stark ignored his protests. They were hoarse and slurred.

Peter managed to recognize Brett through the haze and was amendable to answering some questions when Stark and Colonel Rhodes left them alone.

“Peter, do you know what these are?” Brett asked him, holding up the bag of coins.

He shook his head with his eyes half open.

“Do you know who hurt you?” Brett asked next. Peter swayed his head from side to side again, as if looking for the guys in the room with them.

“There were a lot of them,” he croaked, “They were doing something to a lot of girls. Takin’ ‘em somewhere.”

Brett’s skin prickled.

“Where are the girls, Peter?”

“They ran away.”

Oh, thank fuck.

“You distracted them, then?”

A sleepy nod.

“And they beat up on you?”

Another nod.

“They hurt you pretty bad, huh?”

Peter swallowed and was distracted and confused by Ellen and Goldberg. Brett had to call his name to get his attention back.

“Can you tell me what they did to you?”

Peter described something which sounded unsettlingly like what Matt had gone through.

“They said they were gonna make an ‘xample of me,” he concluded.

Fuck.

“We’re gonna get ‘em, Pete,” he assured him. “You don’t go after them, okay? We’re gonna handle this one.”

Peter was already dozing again. He didn’t nod or respond at all. Ellen stepped out to talk to Stark and Colonel Rhodes some more. Brett hunted around and found an ancient quilt which lived in the room, he tossed it over the kid, which got a reaction at least.

He whined and made himself into a Peter-burrito while grumbling that he was fine and why was everyone treating him like he was little today?

It was hard work not to laugh at him.

The final straw was when Frank Castle walked into the station, dragging a screaming, bloody man by the back of his jacket and said that he’d like to report a motherfucking assault.

There was a piece missing from Frank Castle’s ear.

Horrifyingly, he said it wasn’t for him and gestured back to a group of timid young women crowded around the station entrance, all still dressed in club-going clothes, despite it being 8 in the morning.

Brett didn’t know what else to do and was about to offer Castle medical attention when the guy dropped his, uh, prey to the station floor and blurted out,

“The fuck is my car?” before following the same trail of blood he brought in right back out the door.  

Brett had two teams of officers with him on this case. They were going to bust the Irish for their recent attempts at human trafficking, but by the time they got to the warehouse their intel said the group was gathering, Wade Wilson was already there, sitting on an old crate, rocking back and forth and swearing at a dollar store crossword puzzle book.

He hauled one of the bodies by his feet up and held their face level with the book.

“Ten letter word for a cave dweller,” he said.

The guy dribbled blood down his front.

“No, I already tried ‘neckbeard,’ that’s only nine,” Wilson huffed.

The guy groaned.

“No, ‘cave-dweller’ is too obvious and there’s a hyphen. Keep going though, you’re doing good work.”

Okay.

So that was happening.

Wade Wilson took to harassing all the people trying to remove his victims from the scene. No one knew what to say, except Kayla, the EMT who, out of fucking nowhere, shrieked “TROGLODYTE” in triumph and got a crow of delight and double high-five in return for her trouble.

Technically they needed to question Deadpool and, terrifyingly, he came along willingly.

Brett couldn’t decide if he was manic or having a schizophrenic episode or what as he stood outside the interview room with a handful of officers and the captain.

Wade was having a great time inside. He’d popped three of his fingers back into place and had made good progress on his crossword.

He kind of bopped along to whatever tune was in his head and Brett emphatically did not want to be the one to interview him.

The captain took pity upon him.

Ellen sat down and had barely opened her mouth when Wilson said,

“They touched my babies, ma’am, there was nothing else I could do.”

And Ellen didn’t know what the fuck that meant, but Brett did and in some fucked up kind of way, it was heart-warming.

Deadpool must have come to know what had happened to his, uh. Compatriots? Teammates? Babies. And set out to put an end to that nonsense.

A warehouse of gang members was, it was now apparent, a walk in the park for the guy.

He explained happily that he’d catfished them. All of them.

Separately.

And told them to meet little old Bella Wilson at this one place at the docks where nobody ever goes, tee hee.

“Uh, is Bella a real person? Should we be looking for her?” Ellen asked because the job made her.

Wilson paused and reflected on this and appeared to be struck by a devastating thought.

“Fuck, I think I made her into one,” he said.

They did not understand. Ellen tried to understand.

“No, no. It’s like. We, people, make other things into people, right?” Wade asked her. She nodded and made a high-pitched affirmative sound because leaving the room wasn’t an option.

“Right, so I, person, Wade Wilson, think that I, person, Wade Wilson, have made her, cat, Belladonna Don’t-eat-That Wilson, into a person.”

“So she’s a cat?” Ellen squeaked.

“Oh, yeah. I’m fattening her up for the winter.”

What.

Was.

Wrong with this man.

The next time Brett saw Deadpool was when he stopped by to make sure Matt was still alive a few days after his latest adventure. Foggy let him in and said Matt was in the bedroom.

Matt was fine.

In a sense of the word.

He was tucked up in bed with Wilson lounging next to him, reading to him from Edgar Allen Poe.

Brett had to have a good long think about this, trying to parse the limits of the definition of ‘fine.’

Matt was deeply invested in this shit, as someone like him obviously would be, and he kept interrupting to point out plotholes in this narrative until Wilson told him that he was going to shut the fuck up, have nightmares, and like it.

Matt hunkered down, all pleased with himself. He told Wade to keep reading.

Brett needed a drink.

Maybe six.

Possibly ketamine.

He found Foggy in the kitchen and crowded him and whispered,

“Fogs, Fogs, Fogs.”

“They’re fine.”

“On what planet?”

“This one.”

“Franklin.”

Foggy cocked a hip and gave him a scathing look.

“It’s this or GhostHunters, Brett. This at least has literary merit.”

What fucking world did these people live in?

Maynard asked him what the fuck he was doing when she came in from her break and he told her he was making a flow chart.

He wasn’t lying.

He needed to figure out exactly how to escape this vigilante prison he’d built himself into.