Chapter Text
Later, it will be obvious that something was wrong.
When Karen and Foggy look back, they won’t quite be able to pinpoint the moment where it all started.
Karen thinks it seems to have begun in the liminal time after his resurrection, before Matt reclaimed his life. Those dark, cold days spent wasting away in a church basement – or maybe even before that, the night he spent bleeding out on a beach.
More likely, Foggy thinks – it started a long time ago, and it just got worse after Midland Circle. It’s hard to be positive.
They’re both right, in their own ways. Regardless, whatever it is- it goes unnoticed for far too long.
It’s almost too late by the time they realize that the thing coming to work in Matt’s body is not Matt.
Matt, for his part, used to think of himself as a steady person. He recognizes that that assessment might not be accurate, given his hobby of dressing up in a costume and beating the shit out of criminals, but whatever. That’s his night routine. During the day he’s a lawyer, and a damn good one – half of his job is being calm and rational while his clients freak out.
After Midland Circle, he has to reassess everything he thought he knew.
The man who
tortured
trained him is dead. The woman who he
hated
loved is dead. Foggy and Karen are better off without him, and he is
supposed to be dead
alive.
He’s alive, but he’s trapped. He’s literally trapped in the basement of the church he grew up in, but more than that – he’s trapped inside the broken thing that is his body. His mind can find no peace. As he lies on a cot that stinks of old sweat and blood, he dreams – mostly of darkness, and of dirt – the pain unfurls into something with teeth while he’s asleep.
He wonders often why he had to survive – it would have been so much easier to die.
What’s more – from the moment he wakes up,
the corpse
Elektra haunts him. He can smell her – the fetid stench of dirt and blood and rot. Her voice is croaking and dry, broken by air whistling over her vocal cords in ways it should not. When she moves, her bones grind against each other – once, she snaps a rib and uses it to pick her teeth.
She plucks at the edges of her wounds – and since Matt isn’t positive what killed her under Midland, the wounds keep changing. She lies on top of him and talks, caresses his face with her boney fingers and tells him stories of her childhood, of her time with Stick. Her weight feels like it might crush him - in his less lucid moments, he begs her to leave him alone, but of course she doesn’t answer him. She ignores all of his begging, just like she did when she was alive.
In one horrible dream, she digs herself into his belly. She throws aside his organs, licks his blood off of her ruined arms – and then she methodically breaks every bone in his body from the inside.
He wakes up screaming so loudly that he throws up, and when Sister Maggie comes running down into the basement, he sobs into her arms. She seems confused, but she’s kind to him anyway – she holds him, albeit awkwardly, and runs her hands through his hair the way she did when he was a child.
After he calms down, the nun helps him brush his teeth and wipes his face with a cool cloth. The water is cleansing, but it’s hard to focus on – he can hear Elektra in the corner, wheezing with every breath. He can feel Sister Maggie staring at him – he can’t picture her face, but he knows the shape of it.
“You need to forgive yourself.” She says, very quietly. Matt shakes his head.
“Do you think Job forgave himself? When all of his children died, and his body withered, and his home burned, and then God revealed that it was all some cosmic joke – do you think he even tried?” He responds, and he feels hatred settle uncomfortably inside of him. Maggie sighs.
“I don’t know. I imagine…perhaps he felt as though he deserved it.” This answer surprises Matt - he was expecting to be placated, or judged. A genuine response is more than his statement warranted.
“I think that when bad things happen, we want someone to blame. And if there’s no obvious answer, well. Then we tend to blame ourselves.” She stands from the bed, and he almost reaches for her - but he stops himself, just in time. She stills, but she doesn’t say anything else.
After she leaves, Elektra crawls back over. He thinks she might be on the ceiling, but he can’t be sure - it just hurts more when she drops down onto him.
So: It starts after he comes back from the dead. It starts after he’s spat so much blood in the porcelain sink of his church that his pastor whispers about taking him to the hospital. It starts after Foggy puts a hand to his cheek and promises he’s there for him, and after Karen kisses him on the forehead while she smells like Frank Castle, and after his mother tells God that Matt is too much like his father. It starts when he’s nine years old, lying in the middle of the street and screaming until he’s unconscious. It starts when he feels the hole in his father’s head where a bullet tore through.