#and my baby dawn !! she’s practically non existent for so many episodes

[slugessence]

guess who’s once again mourning how s7 has some of the most interesting character/plot set-ups across btvs and somehow fumbles the execution on every single one

[willowbilly]

Title: Leave Me Alone, Let Me Be (Ch 11/?) Fandom: Daredevil (TV) Relationship: Frank Castle/Matt Murdock/Franklin “Foggy” Nelson/Karen Page Rating: Teen and Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Chapter Word Count: 4,118

I finally updated this thing after an approximate eternity and seeing as I’m inordinately proud of myself for doing so I decided to start posting chapters on Tumblr, so here ya go! The entirety of LMALMB (or as I like to call it, “The Fuck-Off Fic”) is now officially over 50k words of Matt’s poor but hopefully improving mental health and slow burn OT4 (avocadokastle? mattfoggykarenfrank? mattfoggykastle? kastledevil...fog?) rife with fluff and pining. There are a ton of additional tags on Ao3 which you might wanna check out just be safe, and warnings for this specific chapter includes themes and discussion of suicidal ideation, depression, grief/mourning, an implied minor dissociative episode of a non-PoV character, and very brief imagery of canonical past trauma. Chapter One can be found here! 

The long-awaited Saturday rolls around.

Karen lets Frank sleep over again the night before so he doesn't have to hike there from his safe house, though he takes the couch this time and tosses and turns all damn night on the precariously narrow, saggy cushions. Ends up fleeing with the dawn to do his usual morning circuit of the streets, which takes a while, but still not long enough.

Nelson likewise shows up hours early, buzzing with anticipation which Frank sees spread to Karen as easily as if from one cell in an organism to another and which he's hard pressed not to succumb to himself. He unwisely drinks a couple beers to kill the feeling of queasy hope and holds tight to his misgivings instead, camped out in Matt's corner chair with his laptop as Karen and Nelson put on some smooth jazz and stumble through increasingly tense matches of chess as evening creeps over them. The whole day is spent wrapped up in stifling wait, a waiting bogged down with the same airless quiet of a funeral speech where you'd feel too guilty to dare risk a glance at your watch to check the time but too detached to invest yourself in actual mourning.

They all stand too quickly when the knock comes.

Nelson—Foggy, Frank's gotta get into the habit of first names with the guy now that he's not just “one of the lawyers” to him, shoots Frank a pointed glance the moment Karen opens her door and Red's on the other side, perking up all happy and victorious and see? because he thinks his old buddy is really there with them, present inside that thick, funny skull of his, standing there in his rumpled suit and his beat-up blind-person shades.

There's no way to tell him, with Red right there, what Frank knows, what he can feel way down thrumming underneath him like the vibrations from a mortar reaching up through the rubber of his boot soles; this is too soon to be anything other than a polite facade of progress, too soon to allow Red time to get his head in the game. Hell, besides being all for show, the very artificiality of this'll probably knock Red right off track before he even has the chance to start, start him faking again to ease their fears.

But it's not like Red really could've been allowed to come back to them completely in his own time, either.

Frank had thought, at first, that he'd be able to keep tabs on him while he's out, that maybe they could manage to keep in contact and help him out organically, without enforcing specific dates and times to meet like a trio of concerned parole officers with their charge, but there hasn't been hide nor hair of him on the streets since they'd dragged him off them to recover from the flu and Red hadn't tried to get in touch with either of the others before tonight, the agreed-upon date for when he absolutely had to, which, again, raises the thought that he's set out to do all of this for them rather than for himself.

And just the other day he was trying to convince them that Red was fine out in the snow, doing what he wants. Which... they can't make him not do what he wants, so he figures his point stands.

Frank can't tell if Karen and Foggy realize that they've picked the less bad option out of a pair of bad options, if they mistakenly think that that this situation already feels so stagnant because it's like a lull before enough energy builds up for them to really start to roll in the right direction, instead of what it really is: just stagnation, itself. If they can tell that they're still balancing on the peak of that hill, that they— that Red could still end up tumbling on backwards with the barest shift of the wind.

But none of them have a better solution. Frank very well isn't any sort of damn expert on this shit.

He thinks, looking at the way Karen cradles Red's elbow, leaning into him to nudge him towards Ne— Foggy, that even if they don't think it, they feel it; that basic flaw inherent to any way they approach this. The gravity tugging at their polite little balancing act. The two of them wouldn't be alive if they didn't have the right instincts to divine the sort of duplicity which so easily insinuates itself into your own mind, wrapping you up in comforting apathy, telling you not to worry, to let things go and leave them as they are.

Hell, if they were the kind to give in to that sort of thinking Red would be dead already.

So maybe they are on the right track. Frank's been wrong before, that's for damn sure. And doing nothing is the same as giving up. Quitting.

Like fucking hell.

“You all right, Frank?”

It's Red, modulating his monotone into something with just enough intonation to pass as life, his face appearing plastic as he raises his eyebrows, pulls the corner of his mouth up. A near-perfect impression of true expression trying its damnedest to avoid the uncanny valley and failing.

“Are you?” Frank asks, trying to deflect attention from what was probably a protracted period of worried glaring on his part.

Red shrugs, the half-smile stretching wider, but before he can visibly muster the energy to verbally respond he's saved, as he has been so many times before, by Foggy cutting in.

“Did they just passive aggressively express concern for each other?” he whisper-shouts to Karen, leaning over in front of Red and theatrically shielding the side of his lower face with his hand.

“Baby steps,” Karen replies, in the same fashion. “The purging of toxic masculinity... it's a process, you know?”

“So you mean at some point they'll graduate to just aggression, none of the passive?” Foggy jokes, voice rising. “Won't that be dangerous?”

Red slaps him lightly with the back of his hand, his smile momentarily solidifying into a glimmer of real emotion, soft and tired, but there... before fading again.

Frank feels his jaw clench, and looks away.

Karen must catch it because the hand not at Matt's elbow stretches out to alight on Frank's shoulder, bridging the gap and bringing their whole group into a sort of huddle, Foggy immediately leaning in with a grin and looping his arms around Frank and Matt's necks. Matt is back to focusing on Frank, the echo of bemusement pinching at his eyebrows; of course he'd heard his teeth grind. Probably wondering what the hell Frank's problem is.

Frank's wondering that, too.

“Sorry,” Red murmurs, apropos of nothing, and ducks away to drift towards the couch, Foggy's hand hanging outstretched in the air for a moment as though reaching after him, his smile flickering as his ever-present undercurrent of worry threatens to break through.

Karen shakes her head and smooths her hair and then her skirt, clearing her throat and pointing awkwardly towards the kitchen with a matched set of finger guns and a click of the tongue before subsequently following her own lead and going to retrieve the food.

Frank steers Foggy, still hanging around his neck, to the couch as well, nudges him down. Red stands for a bit longer, clearly torn between trying to liberate his armchair from Frank's laptop and letting it slide. He finally sits his indecisive ass down next to Foggy as Karen kicks the fridge shut and bustles over to set the veggie tray on the coffee table, pulling his legs in tight to give her more room.

“I thought... this'd be more casual?” Karen half-asks, gesturing to the tray of raw produce arrayed around a veritable pond of ranch dressing. They all take a moment to respectfully consider the vegetables and then as one just as respectfully dismiss them. The background jazz devolves into a soft, unbroken succession of crashing, the endless, silvery shivering of an interminably prolonged cymbals solo. Karen screws up her face, stares down at her wildly unpopular veggie tray, and with a chagrined grimace mutters to herself, “...Yeah. Not going so hot.”

“I bring down the mood,” Red offers, and he's so flat of affect that it's hard to tell whether he's aiming for levity or not.

“It's not like that's your fault,” Foggy says, and he is going for lighthearted but even Frank can tell that for once it's exactly the wrong thing to say. The words But it is my fault are practically buzzing in giant neon letters over Red's head in unsaid response.

“I, um. I also have some potato chips somewhere!” Karen rallies, wringing her hands, but she doesn't make any move to get them. Too nervous to leave, maybe. “Or we could make some actual food. Like, a meal? Dinner?”

“Those're good to have every now and then,” Foggy says, with a sidelong glance at Red which absolutely fails to even exist within the same dimensional realm as subtlety. So much for those cautious interrogation plans he and Karen had sketched out. “Meals. Made of food.”

Red doesn't react at all. Might not even be listening.

Frank starts jiggling on of his legs and resists the urge to start pacing. A meandering progression of cordial saxophone notes spills forth from the radio speakers, the cadence like that of an alternate, more flowing conversation, overheard.

“Frank and I made some grilled cheeses the other day, at my place,” Foggy says, forging desperately onward. “Added some sandwich meats and stuff. They turned out really great.”

“You mean a panini,” Red says. His voice is so soft, lips so still, that Frank almost misses it.

“Well, if you wanna be pedantic about it,” Foggy replies, brightening slightly at this sign of life and tipping over into Red so he can affectionately knock shoulders with him.

Red sways with the movement, letting Foggy draw him in but not expending any energy to either meet him halfway or to avoid him. “You add things to a grilled cheese, you have a grilled sandwich which happens to have cheese. A panini.”

“Yeah, you got me there, buddy,” Foggy says, dimming a few watts again as he concedes unnecessarily to Red's pointless insistence on semantics.

Red cocks his head, reading the room. Karen shifts, sidling closer to Frank's side until his restless leg rustles against her skirt and he stills; they both have their arms crossed. Foggy looks away, off into the dark expanse of the television screen. Red turns his head to the other side, birdlike. Reaches up to pinch the bridge of his nose, lifting his glasses. Frank can just see that his eyes are shut beneath, his lashes fanned over shadows no less deep than when last he'd seen them.

“Sorry,” Red repeats, voice completely dull, now.

Karen and Foggy both hear it, share a glance. Frank huffs as he intercepts it, drops his eyes resentfully to the floor so Foggy can't hold his gaze the way he's trying to.

“I don't want you to be sorry,” says Karen, carefully.

Red suddenly slams his fist against the tabletop and she flinches hard, Foggy likewise startling away, pushed by reflex into Frank's side. No one moves for a moment as Red straightens, thoughtfully flexing his hand and cradling it in the other as though to keep himself from lashing out again, face expressionless.

“Do I get to be sorry for that?” he asks.

“If you're trying to prove a point you're going to have be clearer about it or actually break my table,” Karen snaps.

“I mean. Do I get to be sorry for things I do. For who I am. Am I even allowed to try and show remorse for who I am.”

“There's a difference between remorse and being a dick,” she says. “What is this even the fuck about?”

“Call it the quandary of living as a flawed being and being self-aware enough to regret it.”

Foggy laughs tiredly and falls forwards over his knees, rests his head in his hands.

“You... you don't have to be sorry for being you,” Karen insists.

“And if this is who I am?” Red says, waving towards the table as if it displays the sense memory of violence there for all to see.

“What you do isn't who you are,” Karen tries, flustered, now, the flush high on her cheeks and her body a tight line of tension along Frank's side.

The first side to lose their cool in a debate is always the losing one. Red, Frank's sure, knows this, and Red can't even muster up the wherewithal to give a shit, much less shout. One point to depression, it seems.

“If actions don't illustrate a person's character then what does?” Red says. States, rather. Detached and cerebral, like he's musing about human experience in a philosophy class and not winding them all into some nonsensical debate about whether or not he has their permission to be sorry for existing, and giving off not-so-slight hints which suggest he's toying with the idea of making them give their permission should he not already have it.

“That's— you know that's not what I meant,” Karen sputters.

Red shrugs, sags back into the couch, stretching out the long line of his throat as his face lifts up towards the ceiling, head lolling wearily on the backrest.

Frank hates the sight of his throat exposed like that, his body slack and slouching, open to any attack. Hates how it so effortlessly communicates how little Red even cares to protect himself in their presence, hates how his own mind leaps to razors rasping against jawlines, the edge of a blade sliding snug over the carotid artery, the taste of skin and the sound of breath hitching.

God. Not the time. Not the place. And for the foreseeable future, not the fucking person.

He presses into Karen's slight frame, her comforting solidity driving out the inarticulate wants ghosting through his head. She grabs his wrist in a snake-strike fumble, gripping fit to bruise, and it's only then that he realizes that he's clenching his fists hard enough to dig his nails into his own flesh and consciously relaxes them.

Foggy sighs, goes to lay back the same as Red. Inches nearer again, the couch cushions bowing under their weight and pressing them closer. Red doesn't pull away when Foggy places his head on Red's shoulder, nor when Foggy laces their fingers together.

After a moment Red's fingers twitch, and curl around Foggy's in turn.

“She means you don't have to be ashamed for taking up space,” Foggy whispers into Red's chest.

Red's Adam's apple bobs as he swallows thickly, but otherwise his demeanor stays as vacant as ever. “But I do, though. I don't know how not to.”

“Then if... that's a part of you, then that's okay. It doesn't make it right, or... or okay for you. But I mean. I don't think that about you. I'm always happy you're here. Even when I'm mad, or you make me sad, I... I wouldn't be able to face the world knowing there was a Matt-shaped space out there that was... that was emptied out. You got that?”

“No,” Red lies, his brow pinching and hand twitching around Foggy's as he does so. “Quite frankly, I'm not even sure what we're talking about.”

Foggy watches their hands for a long moment, the very picture of downcast mercy. “Yeah,” he eventually agrees. Just to let Red off the hook. “Nothing really makes sense, here.”

“That doesn't make talking any less important,” Karen says, the firmness back in her voice. “Whatever you have to say. Even if it doesn't make sense, I think it's better that you do say it. You're valid as you are.”

“Valid, huh?” Red says, actually smiling faintly.

“Valid,” Karen emphasizes.

“A nice sentiment. Kinda cliché, though, isn't it?”

Foggy jostles their joined hands in exasperation, says, “Man, lay off, we are trying our best here and past school and job awareness sensitivity campaigns are all we have to rely on.”

“Your sentiments are valid,” Red intones solemnly.

Foggy bumps him in retribution.

Red zeroes in on Frank when he makes the mistake of breathing out a chuckle, his head rolling towards him.

“You've been quiet, Frank,” he observes.

This is probably the moment when Frank should say something passive, pleasant. Something to keep the mood from souring again, what with this sudden, mysterious flip towards deescelation. So, quite to his own bemusement, that’s what he does.

“I'm just soakin' in you bein' around. Puzzlin' it out. S'nice.”

“Nice?” Red echoes.

“Yeah, Red,” Frank says, falling back on a more combative tone, gruffly and aggressively teasing, to try and distance himself from his own admission. “What, that so hard to believe? That I can just feel like seein' you's nice?”

“Yeah, actually,” Red says, and Frank has to be careful not to grind his teeth again. “It's not... I know you're not lying. But.”

Therein lies the fucking crux of the matter. The mindset which keeps popping up again and again, the weight at Red's ankle, dragging him under. That silent But I can't bring myself believe you.

Thus the outburst, the second-guessing and the testing.

He's waiting, resigned, for them to take it all back. Their promise of support, their understanding, their... their love. Waiting for his dread to be vindicated, for when he can finally give up without letting any of them down because they will have become tired of him, of dealing with him, they will have moved on and freed him from laboring under the restrictive yoke of their concern, their care. And in the meantime, while he's trying and failing to convince himself that they mean what they say when they comfort and encourage him, he's pushing their boundaries, dropping hints, seeing if he can bring about the inevitable after all, prove to himself that he's not paranoid for doubting.

It reminds Frank of the utter disbelief he'd felt at the sight of his family's blood on the grass, technicolor-bright red on green, the ravaged brain matter blown out of his daughter's skull, clumping gory and wet in the silky sweep of her long brown hair, the barrettes at her temples still clipped neatly in place. After he'd woken up he'd cherished an infinitesimal trace of that disbelief in the core of his furious heart, feeling it prick at him every time he was alone and things were still and quiet. How it'd sharpened into a needlepoint pain whenever Karen talked with him, this queasy, undead yearning. He'd just wanted that voice, that nagging what-if to be proven right, because the reality was wrong, somehow, the alignment of the world inexplicably, ephemerally crooked.

But both of these stubborn, siren-call whispers, his grief-stricken nostalgia, Red's relentless self-defeatism, are the lies which their minds dress up as truths. Wolves decked out as sheep.

There's no way he knows of killing such suspicions. His still crop up sometimes like wistful specters in his dreams, and Red's, now... Red's aren't... his're something like a fucking personality trait of his. Built-in. These aren't questions which can be so easily carved out of a man like so many malignant tumors.

And of any of them, it shouldn't be Frank who realizes this shit about Red first. He is not equipped. It really shouldn't be him.

Fuck, nothing should ever be up to him.

“You'll get there,” Frank says, lies, like an idiot, spouting a sweet 'n soft kinda falsehood right after Red's reminded him he can tell whether it's the truth or not. But Red's the epitome of falsehood in and of himself, a walking oxymoron. A diviner of truth, a righteous, honest man who can't help but act out false prophecies, compelled over and over again to strive for the worst, in himself and in others, to hold the greatest faith in unfounded skepticism.

Red's face crumples, betrayed, but just as he makes to draw into himself Karen shoves Frank over to make room for herself on the couch. “Scooch over,” she demands, and there's a sort of chain reaction of rearrangement, Frank standing and reseating himself as Foggy shimmies over, pushing Red tightly into the armrest and releasing an oomph as Karen throws herself back into the cushions, her remarkably hard, angular hipbone shoved sharply into Frank's, crowding him bodily up against Foggy in turn. It’s a very snug fit.

“This couch is not nearly roomy enough for this,” Foggy complains, slightly short of breath.

“I could go,” Red suggests diffidently.

“Never,” Foggy declares, momentarily releasing Red's hand so as to hook their arms together and then grab his hand even more firmly with an emphatic little shake. “We are chilling.”

“Forever?” Red asks.

“Well. Until we wanna order something and have to get up,” Karen says. “That sounds okay with everyone, right? Matt?”

Red clenches his free hand against his knee, a flex of bruised knuckles, then lets go, curls his arm in to rest over his stomach with a soft, emotionless sigh, sinking deeper into the couch as the air leaves him. “Yeah, all right,” he says.

His breathing is very slow and shallow, but as all four of them sit there they begin to breathe in sync, Foggy stroking his thumb over Red's fingers in time to the deep rise and fall rhythm, their chests expanding on inhale, pushing arms and ribcages into each other like their bodies are trying to meld together, and then contracting on exhale, relaxing a little more and falling a little closer each time, an endless, oceanic pulse of connection flowing through them as artfully wandering piano notes drift soothingly around the living room, accompanied by a low, smoky female voice crooning some painfully apt, poetic pap about love.

“I don't want to fuck this up,” Matt says, flat on his back on the cool cement so as not to disturb the warm, purring weight of Nina, dozing on his chest in a regal little bundle, facing him with her paws tucked neatly beneath her. “But I think I already have. Or I will.” He'd fucking— he'd hit a table. To see how they'd react, if that was all it'd take. He hadn't been able to f— it was like he'd been on autopilot, as if he couldn't fucking feel anything, and so it'd seemed reasonable. To just be an asshole, to act like he hadn't given his word to try not to just say fuck everything. He'd fucking ruined it.

His breath hitches and he reins it in harshly, falls back into a meditative breathing technique to keep from scaring the as-yet unperturbed cat with his hysteria. The fur behind her ears is so fine that it catches on his callouses as he skims over her shape, mapping her out, and he cups a hand gently over the steep, delicate curve of her spine, resisting the urge to crush her to his chest to gentle the terrible tenderness slavering in him like a starving thing. The patch of skin Foggy's thumb had rubbed over still tingles.

Nina is, again, a welcome anchor, soft and heavy and undemanding enough to hold him in the present. Tangible, alive. The same way the other three felt to him, when they were squeezed together on Karen's uncomfortable couch, listening to jazz, ignoring the sour pall he'd brought down over everybody from the moment he stepped foot in her apartment.

For a while, there, he'd fooled himself into thinking that everything was okay.

They can't have forgiven him so easily. It wouldn't be right for them to let this slide.

“How'll you know if you've fucked it up?” Melvin asks, from all the way on the other end of the workshop. He's leaning against his workbench and courteously not looking in Matt's direction, careful not to accidentally catch a glimpse of his face.

“I—” Matt starts, and then he stops himself, trying to force his hyperbolic thoughts back in order as he had his breath. Tries to assess things objectively.

What would be the absolute sign of failure? Concrete, clear-cut. Independent of his own atrocious judgment.

“They'll tell me.”

“So if they tell you, then you'll know,” Melvin concludes. “But they haven't yet, so you're fine.”

Matt lets loose an ugly laugh, again stifling himself for Nina's sake as her tail begins to flick in reproach. Even if he manages to keep from purposely sabotaging things it'll still just turn out to be a matter of time, then. A waiting game.

He sucks at those.