in technicolor

Peter was sleeping in the hollow space under an old metal staircase in the rain.

Brett didn’t like that. He especially didn’t like that the kid didn’t move when the flashlight hit him.

They hadn’t gone out looking for Spiderman, he and Ellen, they were looking for a body. One, not two.

Peter was all crunched up in there, facing away from them, had probably ducked under to escape the rain. It was really coming down. Brett hadn’t noticed him mind the rain before, but it wouldn’t have been surprising if he’d gotten frustrated with getting slapped in the face with wave after wave of water.

He must have ducked under and fallen asleep. That had to be it. He must have been really tired to lose track of time like that. It was nearly four in the morning. Peter generally didn’t stay out past two or three.

The closest part of the kid to Brett was an ankle, wrapped in red and in desperate need of feeding. He reached between the metal steps and gave it a little shake.

Peter didn’t respond.

He got another shake.

Then Ellen tried his knee, having smaller hands than Brett, which more easily slipped between the stairs.

And then panic set in because Peter didn’t move. Didn’t wake up. Didn’t so much as flinch or grumble. Whatever he was up to under those stairs, it wasn’t sleeping. Brett and Ellen exchanged looks and then set to trying to find how the kid got into his little hollow in order to expedite his imminent exit from it.

They had to shove past a load of trash and crates to find the beams holding the stairs up and only then did it become obvious that little Peter was bleeding. The arm he’d rested his head on was soaked through with blood dribbling from his mouth and nose. Something was wrong with the suit. It hung off him like a second skin, pooling around his body like it was too tired to stay up.

 The flashlight didn’t do him any favors, bleaching the red fabric into white and the blood into black.

Once he squeezed through the beams, Brett knelt down and had to dig through the suit material to find the boy’s neck. It was ghostly pale at first, bleached out by the flashlight. Then, as Brett got in closer, he saw that it wasn’t all that pale.

It was red. Red from the top of his throat to the clavicle.

He was wheezing softly.

Brett was sorry because whatever had happened, he knew that neck was only the tip of the iceberg and he couldn’t leave Peter to sleep it off outside, healing factor or no. Ellen helped him roll the kid into his arms and navigate the beams on the way out.

Peter went to Queens. Brett didn’t know where he lived, but he knew it was Queens and he knew that Peter couldn’t be seen by anyone else before he got home. Ellen found his phone. They’d gotten lucky. Peter had it in one of his hands, any lighter of a grip and he’d have dropped it back at the stairs and they’d have had their hands full of kid with nowhere to go.

As it were, they now had a phone and Peter’s thumb and Ellen found herself immediately on the contact page.

Peter had a lot of contacts. It took some scrolling to find May Parker’s number. She answered on the third ring and her voice shook as she gave them her address.

Peter’s room was cozy. His home was cozy. The Parkers were nesters. May must have tidied a bit in her anxiety, as everything was stacked up neatly in the front room and Peter’s bed had a dark sheet thrown on top of the covers. May was a smart woman, an experienced gal. She knew this game. She knew there would be blood and who knew what else.

Peter didn’t wake up when Brett laid him on the bed. He didn’t wake up when May pulled his mask off the rest of the way and started checking for broken bones.

He woke up to vomit.

Then groan. Recognize his aunt through bleary, half-closed eyes, and start hiccupping a little bit, reaching for her.

She wiped his face and pulled him up into a hug to keep him out of the puke on the bed.

She held him there, shushing him, and balled the sheet up.

May Parker was a professional. She felt along her nephew’s head and had a trashcan at the ready the next time the kid puked. She tucked him close and told him that she wanted him to lay very, very still and help her get him out of the suit.

Brett and Ellen helped. It didn’t take much, the suit was still loose.

Peter’s chest looked okay, but his side was almost iridescent with purple and blue. He whined for his aunt and tucked his face into her neck when she came back to try to help him into a clean shirt. It was an old habit, Brett suspected. One learned from early childhood.

Peter didn’t debate going to the hospital like Brett expected him to. He couldn’t stand up without having vertigo. He couldn’t keep anything down. He was still wheezing through the swelling on his neck. In his throat.

May asked Brett if he thought she needed to call 911 or if she could just take him to the hospital herself. Brett didn’t think the Parkers had a car, and he didn’t know if uber was the best course of action for a kid with a concussion.

He put them in his car.

The story was that Peter had been assaulted. Mugged on his way home from messing around in Harlem. He didn’t have much to do with this story, given that it was taking all his focus to stay conscious. He didn’t seem to recognize Brett very well, only wanted his aunt. She held his hand and called all the nurses in the ER by first name.

She worked there in the ICU.

Peter’s doctor insisted that pictures were taken. He was concerned about Peter’s side, concerned about bruising and swelling in the muscle and possibly the organs. Peter was too far gone to answer his questions. He’d gotten quiet and pliant and obedient, which, in Brett’s experience, meant that he was either exhausted or scared.

He was learning from Matt how to turn pain into fury, but he wasn’t quite there yet.

If Matt knew what had happened, he’d be doing that just now.

May Parker thanked Brett and Ellen for finding her kid, then said that she was going to go with him to have some scans done now. She said that she didn’t know who might have done that to him, but as soon as he was awake and functional, she’d call them so that they could get the ball rolling on the case.

She didn’t call.

If Amos one day woke up and decided that he was going to go out and fight crime, Brett would have duct-taped him to a chair. Then he’d have gone out to find the bastard who put those ideas in the kid’s head and given them a piece of his mind.

But Brett was comforted by the knowledge that Amos wouldn’t do that. Amos was a good, quiet, shy kid who was, on a good day, terrified of everything.

He wasn’t about to go jumping off buildings or fighting bad guys. It wasn’t in his nature.

“That’s how Peter used to be,” May sighed, running fingers through the kid’s hair as he slept on the couch in their living room. “I don’t know when it changed. I guess I wasn’t paying attention.”

She didn’t know who had done it. She said Peter wasn’t coherent enough to tell her yet. She said she’d called their friendly, family lawyer to look into it.

From a legal standpoint, obviously.

“Fisk,” Matt informed him. He’d taken Peter’s favorite perch over Queens. Had come all the way out of the Kitchen to hold the fort for the kid. Brett wondered if they ever traded suits.

“What’s he got to do with Peter?” he asked.

“Not sure. Gimme a few days to find out.”

And he would find out. Matt had a scarily extensive network of informants throughout the city. Even though he stayed in the Kitchen, he seemed to always know what was going on around town, block, and borough.

Matt held Peter’s fort for the two days it took for Pete to get back up on his feet. Then, like smoke, the two of them vanished off Brett’s radar again.

Hawkeye came all the way from Brooklyn with his arm in a cast to tell Brett to watch his fucking back, man. Wilson Fisk was out on the prowl. He was looking to hire a guy and allegedly had an offer no one could refuse. Rather, an offer no one with a decent head on their shoulders would refuse.

Luckily for Brett, neither Pete nor Barton had a decent head on their shoulders.

“He’s trying to woo Daredevil,” Barton told him, cutting pancakes one-handedly in the greasy spoon he demanded Brett meet him at.

“Woo?” Brett repeated. “With what? Coffee? Long walks on the beach?”

Barton snorted.

“Not sure. Red’s mad about it, though. He’s been running around through the whole city as of late.”

Interesting. In a very bad way.

“Does Deadpool know about what happened to Peter?”

The chances of Wade standing for that shit were next to nothing. Barton shrugged, then winced as the movement sent pain down his arm.

“He probably does now. Folks are talkin’.”

“In what way?”

“They don’t like Fisk putting his hands on one of the little ones. Hell, if he’d done that to Katie-Kate, you bet your ass I’d mount his on my wall.”

“His…ass?”

“You heard me.”

Lovely.

Matt was uncomfortable, Brett realized. Foggy didn’t say anything—no one had to say anything because everyone else was saying it for them.

The power of talk would always astound him.

“Daredevil’s been getting chased out of the Kitchen lately,” Brett heard at the barber’s.

“Boy never runs scared. Must be something big chasing after him.”

“Maybe. My guy saw him the other night. Guy was fuckin’ gunnin’ it, man. He must have been some kind of track star before all this.”

“Daredevil the track star.”

“Saw that guy take a bullet once, you know that? Didn’t move for a bullet, but he’s off running now? Doesn’t make sense.”

“Yeah, well,” a new voice chimed in from the center chair, “My girl says she knows that walk. Says it’s a ‘stranger danger’ walk, every gal knows that walk. She thinks someone’s trying to get in his pants.”

“Well, they’re gonna need some fuckin’ Vaseline or something to get those things off him. Boy probably paints those clothes on at night.”

Wait.

Was Fisk literally trying to woo Matt?

Did he not know that Matt and Fogs were together? Or maybe he did? Maybe this was on purpose? Was he threatening Fogs?

There was a crash and a scuffle right outside Brett’s mama’s house at 11 o’clock at night. His mom called him and said whoever it was, was still scuffling around out there and she was worried someone was hurt.

Someone wasn’t hurt.

But it was a close thing.

The other guy beat it, his hands drenched in the blood from his nose, before Brett could get a good look at him. Matt slumped against the wall in front of him in relief. There was blood on his face, on his lip. He spat it out and pushed himself off the wall.

He apologized to Brett for scaring his mom, and then he jumped up to catch the edge of a fire escape.

His hands slipped. He tried again and slipped.

He was shaken. Matt was shaken. Scared. Whatever that guy had been doing, or trying to do, it was on Matt’s no-go list.

“Hey, let’s call it quits for the night,” Brett told him gently. “Let me take you home, pal.”

Matt spat again and crouched low. He caught the fire escape this time and pulled himself up for just long enough to take the leap to the next one. He didn’t look back. Didn’t answer either.

Brett could put those pieces together.

“Fogs, Fisk is hiring people to try to rape your boy,” Brett told him, having dragged him down the block and out of ear-shot of said boy the next day.

The lines in Foggy’s forehead deepened and the twitch of his lips said that he knew. He knew and he didn’t want to have this discussion with Brett.

“Man, this is not fucking okay,” Brett snapped, “He tell you he could handle this? Because he cannot handle this. Not by himself anyways. Fogs, c’mon man. What can I do? How can we help?”

Foggy didn’t want to say, he stared at Brett from under his brow when he didn’t want to say.

“Foggy—”

“Brett, I fucking know. I just don’t know what the fuck to do, alright? He doesn’t know what to do--no one knows what to do. We’re not avoiding this, we just have no fucking idea where to go from here, so if you have any helpful suggestions, I’m all ears, pal.”

Well, uh. Wait, no.

Or maybe.

Uh.

“See? See? It’s not that easy—it’s never that easy. No one’s gotten close enough to do anything yet, Matt can’t report it, he can’t describe them, and it’s a different guy every fucking time. What are we supposed to do? Say that every night a different random guy tries to fuck my partner while he’s out in the streets? What are you guys supposed to do with that, Brett?”

Fuck.

“Yeah.”

Fuck.

“Yeah.”

Wade Wilson took over one of Matt’s perches in Hell’s Kitchen. Brett still didn’t know where Peter was. Hell, at this point, he didn’t even know where Matt was. Hopefully somewhere safe. Hopefully with someone safe.

He wondered if he could get Matt drunk enough to be disorderly, so he could throw him in a cell for a little while and keep as many eyes on him as possible.

That relied on two premises, however. The first being that Matt was an angry drunk and the second being that he wasn’t a violent one. No one was moving Daredevil an inch if he didn’t allow it to happen.

Unless you were Wilson Fisk, apparently.

Wade Wilson inspired a different kind of vibe over the city. Some people who saw him up there thought Daredevil had come back, and wow, he’d really bulked out, hadn’t he? Others knew exactly who that was up there and hurried to get the fuck out and stay the fuck out of his sightlines.

He sat way up there over the old church and kicked his feet. Waiting patiently, infuriatingly patiently, for someone to try their luck. He stayed up there. Was up there every time Brett looked.

Hell’s Kitchen was damn near silent that night. Not a single call into the station about a violent crime. One call about a missing kid came in, in which the parent trailed off and suddenly announced that their kid was no longer missing.

Deadpool ruled with an iron fist. And even a place like Hell’s Kitchen had enough sense not to fuck with that.

He’d be a good guy if he chose to be, Wade Wilson. And that only made him more terrifying.

Matt was guarding Queens, it turned out, because Peter was doing something complicated which Matt could not describe. He made several attempts to for Brett’s benefit, but got himself all caught up in the explanation, so that it wasn’t so much an explanation as much as it was a game of twenty questions.

“And I think there’s something science-y involved?”

Science-y.

“Yeah, I think. He said something that sounded like science and Wade agreed and I didn’t want to look like a liberal arts idiot, so I said sure, but now I’m not so sure I should have. Do you think I should have?”

What, agreed to something you don’t even understand, Matthew? You’re asking me if you should have agreed with that?

“See, when you say it like that, it seems so easy.”

Brett sighed.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Matt fidgeted for half a second, then shrugged casually, as if he had not been profoundly disturbed and distressed over the last few weeks.

“I’m fine, it’s nothing I can’t handle.”

Right, that’s why you traded with Wade Wilson.

“Wade said he wanted to watch for a few nights. I didn’t trade with him.”

Oh, buddy. Have you ever heard of kindness?

“He said things have been okay. So that’s good. That’s more than I can do right now with all these assholes chasing me around.”

“Matt, you’re allowed to be scared,” Brett told him, “This is scary. Really, really scary.”

Matt went still. Then melted.

“I’m not scared of him.”

“Fisk?”

“I’m not scared of him.”

“Who are you trying to convince, pal? Me or you?”

Matt’s face hardened and he twisted his body to exit this conversation.

“I’m not scared of him and he’s not going to make me.”

Brett had expanded his knowledge of vigilantes significantly over the last couple months, but what he had not expanded was his understanding or ability to predict what the fuck these guys were about to do at any given time.

Peter, for example, he would not have pinned as an arsonist.

Although, now, thinking about it, it absolutely made sense.

Fisk wasn’t hurt, but his collection of documents and presumably, his alibis, had sure taken a hit.

Peter returned to Queens. Matt returned to Hell’s Kitchen. Wade returned to wherever the hell he went when he was pretending to be a person again.

Brett was pretty sure that that had been an act of war. He shuddered to think about what the next one might be.

It was breaking Peter’s limbs. Then it was siccing a huge gang of folks on Matt. Then it was trying to suffocate Peter with his own web.

And then, to Brett’s surprise, Matt and Peter came together to start hitting back. But not in the way Brett expected.

Peter showed up one day at the station and told him not to panic, but he’d gotten Fisk to hire him on as one of his lackeys, and oh, by the way, he needed to know some stuff about DNA, could Brett introduce him to one of the forensics people?

WHAT.

“Peter.” He needed to be calm otherwise Peter would remember that he was a genius monster-child and could learn that shit on his own if he really committed to it, “I am having strong negative emotions about what you’ve just told me because I’m concerned that it is going to put you in extreme danger.”

Peter blinked up at him.

“Kay, so is that a ‘no’ on the forensic expert, or?”

This fucking kid.

“That is a no,” Brett snapped, “What in God’s name are you doing?”

Peter seemed to stop blinking.

“We’re gonna get Fisk to try to hurt Double D.”

What. The fuck.

“Okay, so, with the full understanding that I, as a police officer, have heard and approve of none of this plan: why the hell are you doing that?”

“Because if Fisk hurts Double D when he’s not Double D, then he says he can do a lot more about it.”

How about no? How about let’s not put our lives in immediate danger? How about there has to be another way to do this?

“Well, Double D says that sometimes you’ve got to play the long con and he’s got a good idea for one that I don’t totally understand, but he’s pretty confident, so I’m going with it.”

Did these two know that neither of them made any sense to the other? Because it was sounding more and more to Brett like they all just ran on blind faith over there.

“Matt made this plan,” he clarified. Peter nodded. “Does Foggy know about this plan?” Peter shook his head. “What happens if Foggy knows about this plan?”

“He’s probably gonna freak.”

Uh-huh. That’s about what he expected.

“And now I’m sworn to secrecy?”

Peter lit up and gave him a huge smile.

Matt was teaching him how to use all them fucking teeth. He was going to murder that man. Murder him and bury him in a graveyard so no one would ever find him.

“Detective, you’re getting so good at this.”

“Whatever. Move along, kid.”

Peter saluted him and bounced off.

They were both going to die. Brett needed to start writing condolence letters now.

Brett didn’t know what the hell Peter did, but Fisk charged Matt on the street with his bare hands at five in the evening three days later, and both of them fell right through a liquor store window. Fisk tried to stab Matt with a piece of glass he yanked out of the store front window he’d shattered.

Matt sat back and protected his face and neck the best he could for as long as he could. He played innocent blind man so well it made Brett’s teeth hurt. He let that fucker stab him in the side, hard enough to nick his lung, although he did manage to do a number on Fisk’s nose and balls.

As the finishing touch, he pulled out some horrified crocodile tears for the witnesses and cops and paramedics when they got to the scene and allowed himself to be taken to the hospital by ambulance in the most un-Matthew Murdock-like move of the century.

Fisk was taken into custody and released shortly after because he was Wilson Fisk and there is no justice in the world.

But Fisk had fucked up, Brett came to learn, when Peter wriggled under his arm while he was buying lunch and asked him if he knew anyone at social services.

Brett did not like or trust any of the questions that came out of Peter’s body anymore.

“I know no one and nothing,” he said.

Peter hummed and fucked off just as fast as he’d appeared.

Brett called Foggy because he could no longer keep this shit to himself.

“Man, Matt’s up to something,” he said, “And I know he’s your boyfriend and shit, but Fogs he’s gonna get himself killed.”

Foggy sounded bored on the other side of the line.

“What else is new?”

What--

Who--

Why were all these people like this??

“He’s gonna—”

“Get himself killed? Wow. It’s almost as if he hasn’t already tried that this month. Actually, my bad, as if he doesn’t try that every day of the year, Brett. I’ve had it. I honestly don’t care anymore. All the worrying and fighting and ‘you’re wrong, I’m right’ shit is just giving me ulcers. Whatever he’s doing, he’s gonna do it. If he doesn’t want to tell me, he obviously already knows what I think about it.”

“How the fuck are you so calm about this?”

“This is my life now, man. He’s gonna do what he’s gonna do. And if he thinks that that’s gonna get Fisk out of his life for the time being, then all power to him. Anyways, there’s nothing anyone else can do for him right now, may as well let him feel at least some control over the whole thing.”

Brett didn’t know what to say anymore, so he said ‘okay,’ and he said ‘bye’ and that was it.

Peter and Matt were brilliant little fuckers who had no right being as fucking reckless and stupid and brilliant as they were.

Peter convinced May to convince her friends in the ER to report Matt’s myriad of old injuries to social services. Matt got Foggy to do so as well. Then he asked Sister Maggie at church to do it.

Social services said that they were sending out a social worker to check on him.

Peter reported to Fisk that social services was sending someone out and maybe hinted that it would be a good opportunity to put an end to Matt Murdock once and for all. After all, once Matt was good and strangled, social services would be too embarrassed to admit one of their own had done the deed and so would do their best to cover everything up. That meant that Fisk’s hand in the ploy would go unnoticed, hidden away by the state itself.

Fisk, who was also a mastermind at these types of things, respected Peter’s ingenuity and put him in charge of swapping the state social worker for one of his own people. Peter took the job, then offered it up to the load of scumbags he was now in charge of. Two guys volunteered to do the old switcheroo, and after roughing up the first, sent the new ‘social worker’ on their merry way into Matt’s living room.

Matt played poor blind man again and let the gal into his house, where she attempted to put his lights out and he attempted to make as much noise and humanly possible. The neighbors called the police.

The police walked in on Fisk’s gal with her hands wrapped up in one of Matt’s belts, which in turn, was wrapped around his neck. The gal went to the station and had second thoughts about her employer once her lawyer arrived. She told Maynard who had paid her to do the job. She said that two guys had chased the real social worker away at gunpoint.

Brett found himself sitting stupefied as the gal basically admitted that Fisk had commissioned a murder and second degree assault by injuring a social worker to prevent her from carrying out her duties.

It was unbelievably well-thought out. Better thought-out than Brett had thought either Matt or Peter capable of.

He found himself sincerely glad that those two were technically on the same side as the police.

“Okay, I have something I need to say,” Brett said a week or so later to his now very pleased, temporarily Fisk-less acquaintances. He’d brought the two of them their favorites, coffee and illicit resin, and was in luck enough to find them both on the same perch at the very edge of Hell’s Kitchen, waiting for Wade Wilson to return from a job to join theirs.

Matt and Peter were well bored of him already. It was almost a useless endeavor to get either of them to focus on this point, what with Peter describing, in detail, Fisk’s face when he realized that it had been the two of them who’d engineered the whole thing from the start.

Peter’s Fisk-impression was stunningly awful. It made Matt laugh so hard he couldn’t breathe, his recent near-asphyxiation notwithstanding.

Matt followed this with an equally awful explanation of all the smells he’d encountered in the court room during the first hearing.

Brett cleared his throat and the two of them returned their attention to him.

“I just—I wanted to say apologize,” he said, “I’m sorry that we couldn’t do anything for you two, as civilians. I’m sorry that you suffered and we had no way of alleviating it. I’m sorry that I had no options for you. That’s my job, and I failed at it. And then I thought you two were insane in what you were trying to do and didn’t believe in you, and I. Well. I was wrong. You guys are amazing. Thanks for getting that guy put away, even if it’s just for a little bit.”

Silence.

Peter looked to Matt for guidance in how to deal with this and Brett got the feeling that this was a first for him. It must have been a first for Matt too because he shrugged with his hands.

“You’re welcome?” he tried. Peter bobbed his head enthusiastically in agreement.

You’re welcome. That’s what he had. Even after all those years talking professionally.

Well, fuck it, alright, that was good enough. He nodded and turned to leave them to their dramatics.

“Hey, detective?”

He looked over his shoulder at Peter’s wide white suit eyes.

“Hm?”

“Thanks for caring.”

Aw.

“No, that’s a good point,” Matt agreed. “Thanks for giving enough of a shit to keep track of us. And for not telling anyone about anything.” He smirked. “You ought to be careful though, Mahoney, people are gonna start thinkin’ you like us.”

Dangerous territory indeed.

“Drink your damn coffee, Murdock. You both need an attitude adjustment.”

He could have sworn he heard Peter doing an impression of him as he left.