Work Text:
It's been a long, long time
Since I've memorized your face
It's been four hours now
Since I've wandered through your place
And when I sleep on your couch
I feel very safe
And when you bring the blankets
I cover up my face
“I’m sorry.” He kisses the back of her throat, where her dark locks gather her scent, where the tension of her muscles is almost like a second skin. He runs his lips slowly over the arch of her spine. “I’m sorry.”
Jessica lets her head fall in her chest. She doesn’t want to forgive him. She doesn’t plan on ever forgetting either. But the tenderness of the moment turns her rage into ache and her eyes flutter shut. She almost wants to see what he sees in the dark.
Matt rests his cheek against her back and stares into nothingness. Her heart beats like a pendulum that is about to break and he circles her waist and pulls her tight against him. “I’m sorry.”
“You fucking asshole.”
There’s no exclamation point in her voice. She’s reached a foregone conclusion. Her anger is like white light when metal reaches melting point. She punches him so hard she cracks his jaw and sends him reeling against the brick wall. He can’t feel his teeth in his mouth...or his mouth for that matter. She lands a blow against his ribs and makes him double over. She’s certainly generous tonight. He grins and blood runs between his lips, spilling on the pavement.
He could subdue her violence, he could immobilize her with a flick of his wrist, but you don’t put your hand inside a hurricane.
She lifts him by the collar of his shirt with one hand until his feet are dangling in the air. Her strength is savage and ruthless. She's never had a teacher, she's never learned restraint. She could destroy so much if she wanted to. But she doesn’t.
She’ll only rough you up a bit. Matt is grateful for these wounds.
“How dare you. You made us all think – you shithead.”
“I had to make sure-”
“Save it!” and she slams him into the ground without compunction. For a moment, he feels his bones realigning. God, this is going to hurt worse than a building falling over him. He laughs in the cool night air.
“Oh, so you find this shit amusing?” she snarls, straddling him. He feels the warm cage of her hips around him. She could easily crush him. He feels a short thrill at the thought.
“No. I just – I missed you, Jessica.”
His calm, lawyer voice drives her insane. She grips his shirt and pulls him forward.
“You dick. You don’t get to die, come back, and then talk to me like we’re fine.”
“I know. I wanted to contact you…”
“You just thought mind-fucking us was more entertaining.”
And for the first time, his face creases in pain because he can hear the unspoken accusation in her voice. The last thing he wanted to do was remind her of her tormentor.
“I will never do that to you, Jessica.”
She doesn’t reply. She could hurl another insult at him, could really hurt him by showing him how much she hurt these past months. But she won’t allow herself to be weak.
They’re both panting, steam coming out of their mouths, bodies dirty and bloodied.
“Fight me. Get up and fight me.”
He doesn’t want to. But this is what she needs.
His arms reach out and grab her ankles. Before she can blink, he’s got her pinned to the ground in his place.
He blocks her fists with his elbow and she digs her knee in his chest. The buzz he gets whenever her strength ricochets against his body is like undergoing shock-therapy. His nerves electrocuted, his blood vessels popping. Like a good Catholic boy, he relishes its punishing sting.
They wrestle in the city grime and it’s as good a homecoming as he'll ever get.
Why does he always yearn for the women who cull his blood?
Jessica’s blows are different from Elektra’s. The latter was elegant in her form of destruction. She lured you to death with a broken rib. The former punches you into living, indiscriminate of your ribs.
A week before he reveals himself to her, he follows her discreetly from the roofs of buildings. He knows how good she is at tracking others, so he does his best to remain unremarkable. But perhaps he doesn't have to bother. He hears her stumbling out of a bar long after midnight and she crashes into the garbage bags on the side of the road. She snarls and snaps at the passers-by who want to help her. She wants to remain immobile; she wants to be left alone.
A month before he reveals himself to her, she thinks she sees him on a fire-escape and she calls out a weary and disillusioned “Matt” because she thinks her inebriation is playing tricks on her imagination. He can’t be real. He hates that he can’t say her name back, not yet.
Three days before he reveals himself to her, she is in bed with a business man who hired her to find his pot-head son.
He stands on the roof of her building and he tortures himself with the sounds of her body. She rides her client with solitary precision, chasing her own orgasm. Matt is intoxicated by her selfish moans. He can hear the beads of sweat running down the valley of her breasts. Normally, he doesn’t like to contemplate naked flesh and all its undignified acoustics. Normally, he blocks the sensations from his mind. Normally.
Now, he just wants to break the man’s neck.
A few hours before he reveals himself to her she’s checking Malcolm’s fever and shoving a handful of ibuprofens down his throat. She goes to the local bodega and buys some warm chicken soup. She sits with him on the bed watching Cheers reruns. He asks for muffins at one point because he loves being spoiled by her and Jessica grumbles under her breath and says she wants him out of her apartment tomorrow but she grabs her jacket and scarf and she’s out the door.
Matt follows her quietly.
Until he calls her name. And all hell breaks loose.
Jessica rubs ointment on the long cut on his forehead. She runs her fingers across his swollen nose. She did that to him.
“It’s a good look on you.”
Matt smiles softly. “Black and blue?”
“More like purple and yellow. Hold still.”
Her rough touches fall on him like warm rain. She handles him in the only way she can. With unapologetic ease. She is like the nuns in that way, but he knows she’d bite his head off if he told her. He wants to tell her about many things, though.
“Do the others know?”
“You’re the first,” he informs her quietly.
“Don’t make me blush,” she drawls, pulling a small shard of glass from the side of his head.
“I thought about you…all of you…every day. But you took up more space. You tend to do that.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere.”
“I would argue that it got you on my couch, cleaning my wounds.”
Jessica scoffs. “Like that’s a prize.”
Matt raises his fingers to her chin. His thumb brushes against her cracked lips. Jessica inhales sharply and pulls away.
“Don’t do that, weirdo.”
“I can’t ever tell what you’re feeling,” he mutters, glancing over her shoulder. “Whether you’re angry or just…putting up a front.”
“Just assume I’m always pissed, it’ll save you the trouble.”
He grins in that boyish way of his that makes her want to break his teeth. “There was this parable we used to read in Sunday school.”
“Oh God, the Bible is where I draw the line,” she grumbles wearily, but she waits for him to continue because she's got nowhere else to be right now. Or, rather, she's forgotten whether there's anywhere else she needs to be.
“It was about this man who went on a journey and left his house and belongings in the hands of his servants and told them to watch over his possessions carefully. He warned them that he might come back in a day or in a year…at midnight or at dawn…but his return would be a mystery. So they should always be ready for him, just in case. Because if he caught them sleeping, it would end badly for everyone involved.”
Jessica snorts. “How can they take care of his possessions if they can’t even sleep? Sounds like some feudalistic bullshit.”
Matt smiles. “I asked the teacher the same question. And she said that this is the work of a lifetime. To stand guard even when you’re asleep. To be ready for God even when you’re not awake.”
Jessica whistles. “God is one needy guy, isn’t he? But I guess that explains you.” And he hears her hand swishing the air in his direction.
He catches her wrist. “Actually…I brought it up because I think it applies to you more.”
She lets her hand lie in his palm. He can feel her pulse, a jumbled back and forth between two warring instincts. To leave or to stay.
“I mean…I don’t get much sleep, but it’s not because I’m waiting for some divine figure, I can tell you that."
He runs his thumb across the jagged lines of her palm, tracing a figure eight. “No…but you’re vigilant. You’re ready for Judgment Day - every day. You punish yourself constantly…because you think it’s only going to get worse, and you want to be ready. You drink yourself to death not because it numbs the pain, but because it never lets you forget. You want to be reminded it was your fault.”
“Fuck you.”
The way she says it, it sounds more like a plea to stop.
Matt brings her battered knuckles to his lips. He knows what he’s talking about. All his life, he’s lived with the conviction that he sent his father to death. So he says this for the both of them. “It’s not your fault, Jessica. It was never your fault.” And he kisses her knuckles.
His mouth is warm and gentle and feverish and demanding and it sucks her in like a black hole until she can’t breathe.
He pulls her gently forward and kisses the side of her neck, feeling her pulse between his lips, reading the signal there. Staying, staying, staying, it beats. Against her better judgement.
He brushes her hair out of the way and kisses the back of her throat. "I'm sorry."
They fall asleep on the couch together, her head on his shoulder, their hands interlocked in a silent battle of wills. She seems to be tugging his hand back to her, while he is coaxing her forward.
“Ugh. Okay, I smell like shit, so I’m gonna go use your shower,” she announces moodily as she stumbles away from the couch.
The morning sun momentarily blinds her. “You should seriously get some blinds in here.”
Then she catches herself. Because well, he wouldn’t have much use for them, would he?
But he loves her inability to remember that he’s blind. He shrugs, running a hand through his disheveled hair. Which still looks ungodly good. Does he know he's ridiculously handsome? He probably does. Screw him.
“You can help me shop for some.”
She snorts. “Yeah. Let’s go to IKEA together and have a meltdown in the bathroom mats aisle.”
“That’s weirdly specific.”
Jessica starts removing her clothes on the way to the bathroom and he tries not to get distracted. “Yeah, don’t go shopping with a child star and her pill-popping mother.”
Matt gets up slowly, feeling slightly hung-over, as if he’s inhaled the alcohol from of her skin.
He rummages through the fridge and pulls out milk and eggs and orange juice and he tries in earnest to make them breakfast. But it’s a futile attempt to take his mind off her naked figure, drenched in hot water. Has there ever been a sweeter hierophany? He learned that word in church when he was too young to understand. But maybe he does now.
Her coltish body under the elements, a synesthesia of tastes and sounds. God, he really wants to taste her skin.
He bites into her shoulder where the flesh is bruised and calloused, where the alabaster of her skin breaks and reforms and is never the same. When you are blind, every single time you touch something, it's the first and only time, because afterwards, you're always touching some new territory. He's always diving into a new Jessica.
His tongue strokes behind her ear where a nervous apex pours adrenaline into her veins. Her impatient hand sinks into his locks and tugs his head forward with a moan. He raises one of her legs and runs his hand along her hip, fingers grazing against the sensitive tendrils under the skin. He can see them in the dark, a constellation of electric impulses which he exploits slowly, letting her know that he can do this all day, that he will not go faster, that he will drive her mad this way.
“Murdock.”
He strokes her breast and flicks his thumb over the nipple with frustrating slowness, again and again, listening to the way her chest expands, the way her body thrums, enjoying the spike in her heartbeat as the water beats down their backs.
They’re engulfed in steam. Her hand is splayed on the wet tiles and he covers it with his. Their fingers are laced painfully as he thrusts into her. He swallows her muffled screams as their mouths collide messily, spit and blood and water.
“Jessica.”
When they come back down to earth, they’re famished. They don’t really make breakfast. They just ransack his cupboards and fridge and wolf down whatever is available, from half-moldy cheese, to some very sad looking peaches, to a jar of peanut butter.
They sit together at the kitchen island and stuff their mouths in silence.
It doesn’t feel like home yet, but it will. She hasn’t forgiven him yet, but she will. She hasn’t forgiven herself either but…that’s what he’s here for. They’re the former shell of their childhoods but they are slowly rebuilding.
“We should probably call the others,” she mumbles after a third slice of peanut butter.
Matt nods gravely. “They’ll want to know.”
Jessica stares out the window for a moment. “It’s still early, though. No point ruining their morning.”
“What should we do until then?” he wonders idly, even though he still has the taste of her in his mouth.
She worries her lower lip. “There’s this Cheers marathon I’ve been watching with Malcolm.” Then she remembers he’s blind. “You don’t need the visuals. You can just listen to the jokes, right?”
For the first time since he’s back, Matt laughs out loud and it’s not the sardonic chuckle of a guy who feels damned.
She joins him halfway through, her face unraveling in the darkness until he can see sparks, and he thinks this is good. This is really good.