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Frank doesn’t remember how it came to this--Red curled up on his leather couch in an apartment where he could barely see and, shit, he only has the light of the fucking neon sign outside that casts long shadows across the kid’s dreary living room. It make sense of course. Lights would be wasted on a blind guy, but Frank can’t help wondering where his law partner was, or the blonde secretary.
Karen, a voice reminds him. He shakes it away as soon as it appears at the surface of his thoughts, pushing it back down where it belongs. He doesn’t have time to think about it, instead trying to figure the fuck happened to the kid. What had happened the smug faced lawyer and royal pain in his ass?
Without his mask or those red glasses of his (guy really has a thing for the color, Frank notes), the kid’s face seems younger in the dim light of the room, not as young as his little ones were, and he flinches at the thought, but young enough by his standards. He recognizes the pain that crosses the kids face that he tries to hide within the folds of his hoodie, but Frank knows that pain like he knows his guns. He might never have been a soldier by name, but Red had seen some shit in his time.
They had both lost those they had loved.
Frank frowns as Matt--that was his name he remembers, the Murdock end of the firm of Nelson and Murdock. He had a face behind the mask, but here Frank could tell he was seeing the true side of Red. Frank feels his grip tighten around his gun as the kid’s face screws up and his fists press against his eyes. It takes him a moment before he realizes the kid is having a nightmare.
Fuck. This isn’t my job, I’m not Red’s baby sitter...but he couldn’t just watch him squirm either. It’s more than the fact that the kid would tear out the neat stitches he had made earlier into Matt’s abdomen, but Frank would not admit that to anyone else, not even the kid.
Slowly, he moved across the room from his seat by the wall, placing one hand against the kid’s shoulder and rubbing circles into his back. “Calm down, kid,” he muttered. The fact that he was trying to calm a grown-ass man the way he might have calmed his daughter did not escape him, but it seemed to work as the tension left the kid’s shoulders.
He resisted the urge to roll his eyes at the weirdness of it all, but at least he had stopped squirming, and he watched as Matt seemed to fall back into a deeper sleep, free of the nightmares. Frank shook his head with a sigh as he brought the blanket back up to the kid’s shoulders, causing him to cuddle deeper into it. Jeezus, he really was a kid, Frank thought, chuckling under his breath at the look of mortification that might cross the lawyer’s face in the morning at the revelation of his sleeping-self’s behavior.
Frank watches Matt from his place beside the couch for the rest of the night, but for whatever reason, the nightmares don’t return, and the kid sleeps well into the morning. Frank passes it off as nothing, shaking off the old feelings from a life that was long gone. He just didn’t want to see the fucking idiot destroy the stitches he worked so hard on last night, that was all. But Frank leaves a mug of coffee on the counter and two pieces of toast, lightly buttered, the way his daughter used to like it, just in case the kid wakes up hungry before he picks up his bag and makes his way back into New York City.