#matt murdock au | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

madschiavelique · 11 months ago

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𝐆𝐨𝐫𝐠𝐨𝐧!𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐱 𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐭 𝐌𝐮𝐫𝐝𝐨𝐜𝐤 𝐀𝐔

This au was first talked about on 04/11/2023 with my amazing bestie @sunflowersandsapphires and I thought it could be cute to share these thoughts !! (I'm gonna post several AUs ideas we had and discussed on throughout the months because DAMN the thoughts are delicious)

please note that english is not my first language and that there might be some little grammar mistakes here and there !

word count : 2,2k

We’re all familiar from up close or far of the myth of Medusa, also known as one of the gorgons. People often tend to forget that there were 3 gorgons on this myth : Medusa (of course), but also her sisters Euryale and Stheno.

To give you a bit of a refresh on the myth of Medusa – just from memories okay, the versions of each myth vary in mythology and this is the one i remember best – she was in love with Poseidon and the god decided at one point to bring her to one of Athena’s temples so that they could make love there, her two sisters helping her getting in.

The two lovers were taken during the act by Athena herself who cursed the 3 women by making them gorgons, creatures with snake hair (and body too I believe) that could turn to stone anyone that made the mistake of looking at them in the eyes.

So my mind went like “huh, wait a minute you’d have to be able to see to actually turn to stone right ? So what would happen if-” and it all clicked.

I think somehow Athena’s magic on the gorgons would make them prone to often get reached by men that are ill-intended. So who knows, what if reader is one of the gorgon sisters, hum ?

What if men in the past have tried to come and attack you, what if men in the past successfully killed your two sisters and that you’re now all alone ? What if you lost faith in the possibility of anyone being nice to you, or of anyone not considering you as the monster that you are ?

You lived bitterly, secluded in an area people never walked by in fear of getting attacked by you. You're just so used to people coming to you with the intention of killing you that you expect everything to be a threat. You know better than to be afraid, your powers serve you well enough that you don't have to live in fear.

Until one day, Matt gets lost. He’s never passed through that area before, and the surroundings are so different to his sensitivity. There’s a certain presence, an aura that makes his senses blurry as he walks hesitantly.

Of course, you notice his presence. You’re used to living underground, and the vibrations his footsteps and his stick send through the earth are enough for you to come to the surface. You get out, ready to fight, ready to stare, ready to kill.

He hears you, turning around and simply asking “Hello ?”

But ironically, you’re the one to freeze this time : he is looking in the void, and the usual signs of petrification are not lining up on his body. You frown, and the gut wrenching feeling of fear takes you as much as the weight lifting sensation of relief.

Maybe your powers aren’t working anymore, maybe this is your last moments of torment, maybe you will join your sisters in Hell, maybe you’ll die and get humiliated once more.

But maybe you’re finally free from your curse, maybe only the snakes remain on your head but you can’t turn anyone to statues anymore : maybe you can finally get out of this situation where you’re all alone.

You just want to make sure though, so you step forward a bit, not entirely in case he tries to attack you by surprise, and ask “Why have you come here ?”

He tilts his head towards the sound of your voice, a curious gleam passing his eyes as his eyes won’t settle on you.

“I’m lost.” he answers.

Now you scoff, thinking it’s another trick to make you fall. You’ve had wise men trying to kill you in the past, using their wits to trap you in enigmas or other stupidities that would bring your downfall.

“I don’t fall for tricks and traps,” you say as you step closer to him.

He doesn’t seem to step back, nor does he seem afraid, not in the slightest. You tilt your head a bit until your eyes bore into his, making sure your gaze is aligned with his own.

He frowns, tilting his own head to the side, “Tricks and traps ?”

Your eyes go wide and your shoulders fall as the realisation hits you : he’s blind.

The fear dissipates, but gives its place to disappointment. Of course your curse is not lifted, of course the possibility of you going back to a semi-normal life is purely impossible. You step back, looking at him as if discovering him for a second time.

“You’re not here to kill me ?” you question as you cross your arms over your chest.

He’s the one to scoff now, placing both of his hands on his stick.

“Kill you ? Why would I do such a thing ?”

There’s genuine confusion in his tone, but you’re not ready to let your guard down about all of this.

“Don’t play ignorant, you know why.”

“I assure you I don’t.” he answers.

Now you’re both confused.

You are mostly because it’s the first time your powers don’t act on someone, as well as the first time someone isn’t here to kill you nor is aware of your existence.

As for him, he’d just arrived here because he had lost his way, and now here he was in front of a woman that was claiming he was here to kill her. So who could she be that people came so often here with that purpose only ?

There was something different about you, your smell indicated a strong presence of wet stone, but of something much different. Something that smelled like warm sand, like diluted metal, like scales of snakes. He wondered if perhaps you had one on you, or if the area had plenty of them he had to beware of.

You couldn’t tell if he knew of the legends, for who knows : maybe your sister’s tale had gone forgotten. If he was aware of your story however, he looked like someone pretty calm about it, which made the word ‘unusual’ turn into a euphemism for your situation.

“You’re simply lost ?” you end up interrogating.

“I never used this passageway before,” he conceded, “I wanted to use it as a shortcut, but I’ve never gone this far away from the places I know by heart.”

You continued looking at him. He was well built, enough that his physique could be considered as one of the many heroes that had tried harming you. Yet the more you looked at him, the less the thought of him being here to cause you pain and kill you faded. He only had a bag, and his walking stick.

Your silence perplexed him.

“Why would people want to kill you ?” he asked again, pulling you back from your reverie.

The question made you feel weird, because it seemed like such an evidence to you that seeing an alternative to this interrogation seemed impossible on the spot. Why would they not want to kill you ? They had plenty of reasons anyway.

“Doesn’t matter,” you answered on the spot as this being somehow the only thing your could provide as an answer.

“I think it does,” he interjected, and your parted your lips.

In all these years of being a gorgon, never had your had much of a conversation like so. He surely didn’t care about your life, and maybe was this another ruse to lure you in and make you easier to kill.

Guessing how answering these questions wasn’t one of your fortes, he sighed.

“Could you help me find my way back, please ?”

You’re hesitant on the case of his demand. Every man before him had wronged you, had turned against you to try and bring some glory to their pathetically short lives while you remained eternal and undefeated.

What if it was another trick by Athena ? What if this was her final resort to bring glory to humans ?

And in any case, men had taken away your sisters, how could you not be angry at them and not wish to help them ?

But this one… He seemed kind, disinterested in any kind of glory in any shape or form, just a blind man lost in your woods.

Not daring to be closer to him or even touching him in case this could ease your way into death, you grabbed the foot of his stick and rose back up.

“Hold on to it,” you mumbled as you started walking towards the next path.

You turned a second to him, a grin plastered on his face. Not a vicious one, to your relief, but a grateful smile.

“Why’s a lady like you all by herself on this desertic passage ?” he questioned, walking at your pace as he tried to make sure by waving his arm in front of him that he wouldn’t be hitting anything.

You weren’t here to make friends with men, but you hadn’t talked to anyone in a while. The sight of him having so much trouble directing himself because of your gauche handling of his stick sent you a wave of pity. You dropped the wood, and he stopped, surprised.

“Already there ?” he asked in surprise.

But you came to him, taking his hand and have it circle your arm so that he could still use his stick.

“Thank you,” he softly smiled as you both started walking again, your mind trying to chase away the way his arm against yours felt. “So, why are you all alone in here ?”

��Because bad men chased me until there was no place other than there for me to live,” which wasn’t far off the mark.

“Exiled ?” he interrogated.

“Feared.” you breathed.

“How could you be feared ?” the question rang wrong to him.

“How could I not,” you almost laugh as your free hand comes to caress the neck of a snake.

“I don’t find you terrifying,” his lips came to form an inverted smile as he rose his eyebrows.

“It’s because you are safe from my unwanted danger.”

“Am I holding the hand of the most dangerous person to ever be ?” he laughed, the lack of seriousness in his tone making the situation all the more ironic for you.

“You just might,” you answered, a bit less tense than you were seconds ago.

“Well, it pleases me,” he admitted and you stiffened.

Trying to play it cool and not get nervous that this could be your last conversation ever, you asked :

“To be in danger ?”

His head turned to yours, his gaze still lost somewhere you could never be in.

“To be in good company.”

Your walk with him came to an end, and Matt had by now remembered the way to get to the path. He wished you goodbyes, and you came back to your cave thinking how much of a strange situation it had been.

He hadn’t tried to kill you on the way, but maybe had an acolyte of some sort of his placed a trap in your cave. You meticulously made your way back to your place, but nothing different was to be found.

What an odd encounter.

And thus he came a second time to you.

“I’ve lost my way again,” he had explained.

“Have you got the memory of a goldfish ?”

But nevertheless, you had accompanied him back again, and had chatted again, and waved goodbyes again.

But still, he kept getting lost, and kept coming back to you for your guidance.

You had the full conviction by now that he had the worst sense of orientation a man could have ever gotten.

And he had the full conviction that you were not a monster, so he pretended to not know his way although he now knew it by heart just to have an excuse to meet you again and talk to you.

“Seems like I really can’t remember my way anymore.”

“Matt, you always come to me with the exact same path, you know that right-”

“Really can’t remember it anymore, such a shame, looks like you’ll once again have to accompany me.

“It’s the second time you’ve come to see me today.”

Of course he tries to play it off and placing this on his atrocious sense of orientation, but there are some moments where he accidentally lets the cover slip.

“It’s near a huge rock.” you explain again.

“You mean the one shaped like a heart that is about 300 steps from here ?”

“Yes exact- wait a minute, if you know the placement so well, how come you always get lost ?”

“...”

“...?”

“Amnesia has taken me, what were we talking about ?”

“Matt you’ve gotten ‘amnesia’ three times this week. You need to speak to someone about that.

“You shouldn’t worry. Actually I feel like I have most of my sense in your presence lately, your company cures me of my own obliviousness-” he says as he trips over a rock immediately.

And you’re quite oblivious to this, but also the more you understand about this, the least do you complain about it.

Maybe loneliness started slipping away from you after all.

(I could continue on this au but I have WAY too many others in mind that I want to put out there !!! I'd love to see any of the thoughts you'd have on this au besties <33)

#mads' thoughts ⟢ ݁ ˖‧˚₊ ☁︎#mads' aus ⟢ ݁ ˖‧˚₊ ☁︎#mads rambles ⟢ ݁ ˖‧˚₊ ☁︎#matt murdock x reader #matt murdock x you #matt murdock x y/n #matt murdock x fem!reader #matt murdock x female reader #matt murdock imagine #matt murdock one shot #matt murdock au #matt murdock fic #matt murdock fanfic #matt murdock fanfiction #matt murdock #daredevil #daredevil x reader

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farfromstrange · 2 years ago

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Total Eclipse Of The Heart | Matt Murdock

Matt Murdock x Vampire!reader (f!reader)

Part 1 // Part 2 (currently here) // Part 3 (coming soon)

PART TWO - Humans are dying at the hands of her species and she has to do something about it, but how can she when the object of her attraction just so happens to stumble into her path over and over again, as if he's just as addicted to her as she is to him?

Warnings: 18+ MINORS DNI! Very explicit sexual language, dubious consent (inappropriate touching, dirty talk), blood, vampires, death, bad humor, plot, religious imagery (?), submissive Matt Murdock, Dom!Reader, DARK FANTASY (dead dove do not eat), really, this is absolutely filthy dark, AND not proof-read

A/n: This is so dark, holy shit… Here’s the second part! I hope you’re not mad at me that I left you waiting. 2023 already feels so weird I don’t know why, but I’ve finally finished this chapter and I’m getting to work on the third one as we speak. The smut is coming soon, I promise. Until then, I’m just going to get you all worked up :)

DARK CONTENT UNDER HERE, 18+ ONLY!

Ever since the beginning of time, humans have felt threatened by their fellow species. The goal is self-preservation rather than preserving the world around them. At the same time though, there has never been another species so hell-bent on destroying their habitat than the human race.

She watched the seasons come and go. Where one life ended, another started. Humans were fast to reproduce, she realized, but they were also just as fast to die. Sickness and injury are the biggest threats to the human body. You could be okay one second, then on your deathbed the next. While the female body could withstand the terrible strain of childbirth, it stands no chance against cancer. You could bleed out in seconds if the right vein is nicked, and if you fall the wrong way, a broken neck will either kill you instantly or leave you dependent on machines for the rest of your life.

While humans are considered the most sophisticated species since the beginning of time, they are all collectively fragile.

The last time she was actively human, she didn’t even have a quarter of the knowledge at hand that she gained later in life. Times have changed since then. The world grew into something new, something modern, and the human race evolved with it.

They’ve never had many nice words to say about her kind, so it came naturally to be terrified of a species that was more than willing to eradicate her own.

Sure, killing and blood-sucking isn’t something that goes over well with a crowd, but she often emphasized that they weren’t all cold-blooded murderers. Not all vampires were the same, and the lore often got it wrong.

Cold, they were, but only temperature-wise. Her half of the litter, anyway. And they were murderers too, else they wouldn’t have survived this long. Drinking blood to survive was a curse she wished upon no one. It naturally made her species reborn killers; they had to take a life to sustain their own, and since death and starvation weren’t in the cards without a stake through the heart, they had to follow their most primal instincts.

She tried to refrain from murder like a good citizen, and it worked, most of the time. There are other ways to get blood that doesn’t involve murdering an innocent. In Hell’s Kitchen, she could easily roll open a map and point to a random place, and she surely would have found criminals deserving of punishment.

But there were also humans who didn’t fear her species, those who were willing to give to the cause voluntarily. They liked to call themselves blood-submissive as if it were a sexual practice on its own – the sex was a nice byproduct, and some of those people were born to be whores, but making it a new trend was something she wished would never happen.

Though she was well aware of the subculture around humans fetishizing vampires, who were all more than ready to give their blood. Humans are so susceptible to overstimulation, especially through strange forces, even the smallest taste of a vampire’s blood could get them high enough up the precipice to push them into an orgasm.

That was the one thing that enticed her the most; the human anatomy, and how responsive they were to stimuli. She knew all about it, and yet she found herself surprised again and again whenever she lay with someone new.

That evening though, she woke up with a heavy feeling in her stomach. One that wouldn’t go away.

She entered the kitchen of her shared home to find a stranger sitting on one of the stools at the kitchen counter. Two very obvious holes adorned the young man’s neck. He didn’t look terrified when he saw her, only overly tired and perhaps a little drained.

She sighed heavily, moving to get herself a drink from the fridge. Not that she had one already sitting there, but he wasn’t hers to take. He had already been labeled with two very sharp fangs that could only belong to one person.

“Eli, you left your dinner in the kitchen!” her voice bounced off the high walls, doing black flips until it finally made the human twitch. “No offense,” she said. “I’m just not a fan of waking up to blood banks sitting at my kitchen counter.”

He opened his mouth, but no words would come out.

She grinned. With her mug in hand, she returned to ask the boy, “Coffee?”

He declined.

“Well, you can’t say I haven’t tried to be hospitable with you.”

Just in time, Eli came around the corner wearing nothing but a pair of boxer briefs. She rolled her eyes. It was one of those guests.

She met Eli somewhere around 1800 when she spent some time in the deserts of Egypt. He was only a couple of days old then, bitten by a passing vampire with no regard for human life. Eli was lucky to have survived, but with no one to teach him, he went rogue and slaughtered his entire village in a hungry haze. When he came to, the life he once knew had been destroyed beyond repair.

She saved him. Initially, she planned to just pass through, but the word about a vampire on the loose traveled fast, even back then, and so she found herself in Eli’s village soon after, convincing him to join her. She saved his life and therefore, he felt as if he owed her. They never left each other's side again.

Though sometimes, Eli was particularly hard to live with. He was almost like an unruly child, and he left his food lying out most of the time – he tended to forget that wasn’t the only hungry one in the household.

“Would you stop calling every human I bring home a blood bank?” he said.

“If you stop letting them stay for breakfast,” she retorted.

He met her bitter smile with a sour one of his own. “Not everyone feels the need to submit to you as Talon does.”

“Maybe I should make that a rule then. I mean, I am the head of this coven, after all. The least you can do is give me some respect.” She eyed the young man still sitting at the counter, completely hypnotized by the shirtless man prancing around the kitchen. “And your blood whores, too, before you start giving them a sexually transmitted human disease. Or turn them into one of us.”

He scoffed. She patted his shoulder as she passed by him, taking the chance to whisper into his ear, “Would be a shame if I had to drive a stake through one of them when all they signed up for was just a little fun.”

She couldn’t help herself. On her way out, she passed by the helpless human, pulling his head back by the hair to reveal his deliciously long neck, and she dipped her nose to take him in. The blood running through his veins smelled beyond divine. Sweet temptation. She wanted to bury her teeth in his soft skin and suck until he was empty. “Ah, delicious,” she said. “Youngblood, untainted, pure. Excellent pick. I wonder if he tastes as good as he smells.”

The tips of her sharp fangs scratched at his neck, and she had to force herself to pull away before she could make the mistake of taking Eli’s food off his plate.

“Get him out of here,” she told him. “Before I make you bathe in holy water for the rest of the week.”

He rolled his eyes. “Yes, ma’am.”

The respect issue was a problem she had to deal with. She wasn’t someone to play around, with except for the bedroom. She was nothing if not playful there, with someone writhing underneath her and begging for the mercy of pleasure, and they would always get what they wanted and deserved. She was considerate like that. But her lovers also never struggled to pay her respect. That seemed to be a family problem only.

Perhaps she had to assert more dominance over them too, even if it was just for kicks. They would learn soon enough. It wasn’t exactly easy to be a leader, after all. That was common knowledge even amongst the undead.

The vibrations of the phone in her pocket caused her to look up. She checked the text – a piece of technology she was quite fond of, the cell phone – and if she hadn’t been pale enough already, she surely would have turned white as a sheet right about now.

“What happened?” she asked as she entered the main room.

Talon nodded his head. “I just got word from my source at the police station,” he told her.

“And?”

“There’s been several suspicious murders in Hell’s Kitchen in the past week.”

“If I wanted a broken record player, I would have gone into the attic. Spit your words out now, Talon, or I will cut out your tongue.”

He flinched, remaining in his position with his head bowed downward. He couldn’t look into her almost blacked-out eyes and be met with disappointment.

“The victims have been drained of most of their blood, but the injection sites are sloppy, so a lot of the blood got wasted and spilled around the corpses,” he said.

“That’s… graphic.” She rolled her eyes. Chaos only compelled distraction. “But not at all the details I need,” she said.

“Yes, I was just getting to the important part. There’s security footage that shows a foreign party escaping from the site of the murder, and the same person is shown a couple of days later attacking the third victim in a blood-thirsty rage.”

The scenery sounded all too familiar. She tilted her head, intrigued by his report, and moved forward. “What exactly are they saying?”

“The police are blaming it on a new drug epidemic that has the users acting out to the point they would cause a blood bath. The drug supposedly triggers hallucinations that make them unaware of their surroundings and crave violence.”

“You mean blood. The drug is making them crave blood.”

“That’s what they’re thinking, but it’s not in the official report.”

“Yeah because that drug is called vampirism and that’s not exactly an epidemic that should be happening,” she said.

Talon nodded. “Police are issuing a warning,” he told her, “without knowing what they’re warning from. It’s just a couple of kids overdosing and bleeding out in the most ghastly of ways. They’re saying it’s drugs because they don’t understand.”

She grew more and more agitated with every word that slipped past his lips. The pedestal that kept her above the man made her seem much taller than she actually was. She paced the floor. It gave her a sense of superiority that she fought very hard to receive. Her status surpassed those of the people around her. She was older and wiser and perhaps slightly more sophisticated. Her moves were calculated yet often brutal because she learned that you get nothing in life if you’re not willing to spill a little blood, literally and figuratively. To have something or someone threaten her precious freedom like that was an obvious call for action

She halted her movements when he went quiet. “Do they have proof?” she questioned as if she expected him to tell her himself.

“No,” Talon said.

“Good. Call a meeting. I need to know who did this. And make sure no one knows beforehand. The last thing I need right now is a fucking vampire uproar.”

“What, you suspect it was one of us?” He had a doubting frown resting on his pale face.

“While I have faith that you can keep your fangs in your jaw, I need to make sure I’m not misplacing that faith,” she stated. “If I’m wrong in my suspicions, that is good for you. If I’m right and one of you idiots is behind this, I will drive you to hell myself.”

“If you want to have my opinion…”

She smirked, “I really don’t.”

“But if I may?”

“You may not.” Stepping down from the pedestal, she eyed him. “Call the meeting,” she ordered. “In the meantime, I’m going to get myself a bottle of Scotch to drown my sorrows, and then I’m going to steal from the police.”

Talon yelled after her, “Do you need any help, boss?”

“Yes. You can help yourself to stop crawling up my ass! That would help me a lot, actually. Don’t get me wrong,” she said, “I like my men submissive, but your behavior is just getting pathetic now. I’m your boss, not your mother. She’s dead. Deal with it.”

It wasn’t the first time she broke into the police station in Hell’s Kitchen. Crime rates exploded at night, which meant a higher police presence in the building, but at the same time, the cells overflowed with the many criminals they caught. They were always drowning in paperwork, and the crime never seemed to take an end.

She waited until the commotion in the bullpen caused the officer at the front desk to jump from his seat and escalate the situation. She sped toward the file cabinet, retrieved what she needed, and disappeared just as fast as she had come.

The officer looked up to find nothing but a strong breeze knocking the documents off his desk. He frowned, choosing to ignore it as the man underneath him writhed against the handcuffs.

Talon said a lot yet nothing at all. She eyed the pictures in the moonlight, the dead eyes staring straight into the security cameras, the man’s body covered in blood as he left a trail of bodies along the Hudson’s riverbed. He downplayed it. This was bad, a monster out of control, someone who shouldn’t even have existed in the first place and yet somehow came to life. There were clear rules. Those rules had been broken in more than one place, shattered on the ground, and then walked over with utmost disrespect.

And he wasn’t the only one. Every murder was accompanied by one of the herds escaping, later appearing on the scene of another crime. To the untrained eye, it appeared as if these kids were high and just playing around. The blood around the bodies was significant, so the ordinary human might sort it as an overdose after all. An accident. Though none of the things she saw were accidental.

They killed without a care, without remorse, and at the rate they were going, she was sure they wouldn’t stop anytime soon.

It wasn’t the first time she had to run against the clock, but it had been a while since she was tossed into such a situation where she had to choose between peace and her most primal nature. She had to appeal to her common sense. She knew better than to let them continue this.

Humans aren’t stupid but often underestimated. At this rate, if they kept going, war seemed inevitable.

These strangers were hunting on her turf and they turned everything upside down. She wasn’t having it. She had to do something.

The wind came from the far east and blew through the streets. Many different smells lay in the air that night, but the most prominent hit her nose at the front step of the precinct.

She tilted her head. She could sense him clearly now. He still smelled the same, his blood a bittersweet taste on her tongue, and she craved more. His heartbeat filled her ears, an elevated sound. She searched for him in the night until the sound of his scruffy, careful voice caught in her ears.

He stood on the fire escape of the precinct’s second floor. The metal creaked. A door fell shut. He wasn’t alone.

“Look, man, I’d be happy to help you, especially because we are way in over our heads with this case, but I told you,” the second voice said, “The file is gone.”

She stared down at the brown folder in her hands.

“What do you mean gone?” he asked, finally, and her eyes rolled back at the mere sound of him.

He was everywhere, so goddamn overwhelming, all she wanted was to pull him off that fire escape, into the alley, and turn him into a helpless mess until he was begging her for mercy with tears in his eyes – she could only imagine the soft color behind the red glasses. Were they brown, green, or perhaps even blue? They surely would turn black with lust and then gloss over with exhaustion from the sheer overstimulation when she was done with him. Though she would only stop when the color of his eyes would disappear behind his eyelids as he slipped into a state of unconsciousness, the pleasure causing his mortal body to shut down and submit even more to the power she wielded.

“Apparently, someone took it.”

“Since when do people steal files from a police station, Sergeant?”

The man shrugged. “It’s not the first time,” he said. “Happens more often than you might think.”

“What now?” her nameless stranger asked.

She could only imagine his mouth moving in sync with his gravelly voice, the movement of his Adam’s Apple in his throat as he swallowed, and the way his hands balled to fists at his sides, the beautiful veins protruding and his knuckles turning white. She wondered how those hands would feel somewhere other than a cane or a metal rod. How they would look tracing not the brim of glass but rather a different opening. Playing with wetness until his hands were coated in it the same way he played with the condensation on the glass of his drink.

“Sergeant, if you want me to help you, I need more than a whim to go on. Do you have anything you could give me?”

“Look, I can’t help you,” the Sergeant said, “but if I did know something, I would suggest scouting out the docks. Ground zero seems to be close to the docks, but I’ve also got word that the rest of Manhattan might be involved too, so I’d be careful if I were you.”

“Thank you.”

“Yeah, whatever. We have heightened police presence there since the first suspected overdose, consider that before you make any wrong moves.”

That stopped him. “Suspected?” he questioned.

He was a smart one. Her lip curled into a distant smirk.

“I’m not saying it’s not an overdose, I’m just saying they’re too suspicious to be instantly ruled as such. It’s my opinion, not the official statement, and everyone else here at the station and even the DA’s office agree with the drug epidemic explanation. But I’m not sure it’s right to assume that, not yet, not without evidence,” he said. “We judge people way too quickly these days.”

The stranger chuckled again, his voice darker than when she met him, but the darkness he displayed was something she thoroughly enjoyed. It was enticing, eliciting an excitement she hadn’t felt in quite a while.

“Are you talking about me?” he asked sheepishly, and she imagined him smirking. He seemed more confident in that alley, fully in his element, not at all as submissive as he had been around her.

She wondered if there were two sides to that man whose name she still hadn’t figured out.

The Sargeant scoffed, opening the door back into the precinct. Hot air met the cold one outside, causing the air to condensate. She could feel it even from a distance, the changes in temperature, the warmth that felt more wrong than it felt right.

“Just be careful,” he told him.

The fire escape squeaked and the sound of his boots disappearing into the distance had her frowning. Blind men don’t jump rooftops and they don’t do parkour. There was more to him than she first suspected. He wasn’t the innocent man he made himself out to be. He had dark secrets that went way below the surface. Her curiosity was spiked. She needed to see him again and she needed to have him now.

She held the file in the air, watching as the edges started to crinkle and the fire spread from her fingertips, infecting the paper. The folder lit up, filling the night with yellow flames and the ashes of the several documents gone with the wind.

When the paper fully dissolved, she closed her fist and the last remaining flame vanished.

As the mysterious stranger made his way over the rooftops of the city, she turned in the opposite direction. Her first instinct was to follow, but there was no fun in chasing him just yet. She wanted to play some before she did that and wanted him to know more about her before she completely destroyed and corrupted him. His beautiful soul would only remain a faint memory.

The doors into the old, abandoned church swung open. The benches were occupied with exactly five people, two of them Eli and Talon, and the rest of what she liked to call her family, but historians would have called them a coven. An assembled group of vampires qualified as such, as did more than one witch sharing the same ideologies and sharing the same living space. That’s what the two species have in common - they are both widely hated by all kinds of religions except for Satanity.

Six vampires living in a church sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but the place had been abandoned years ago and there was no official owner, so it was run-down and, most importantly, they didn’t require an invitation to enter. So they made their home there, choosing Hell’s Kitchen as their turf and claiming it as their territory. That had been years ago and the small chapel grew significantly to feel like home since then.

“Cold-blooded murder,” she recited as she walked down the aisle, “Blood baths, two injection sites on the neck, suspicious behavior making humans thirsty for blood, and the police declared it a fucking drug epidemic!” she said. “What century are we living in, people? Is this the seventeenth or the eighteenth? Have we traveled back in time so that these words can be used in the same sentence again, right here in New York? What bad dream am I having right now, because it surely can’t be real?”

She reached the pedestal, stepping up in front of the altar.

“Seriously, what is happening?” she asked.

They all stared at her with wide, confused eyes. Those weren’t the faces of people who were about to cause a supernatural war of the undead. They were pretty much caught off guard by her accusations and that gave her hope, considering she knew them pretty well by now to know their tells when they were lying.

“Please tell me that it’s not one of you currently going on a rampage in Hell’s Kitchen, turning innocent teenagers into ruthless, blood-thirsty vampires, and breaking every rule that was set for us when it comes to hunting humans. Tell me none of you is going on a fucking murder spree!”

Her voice boomed off the high stone walls, almost cracking the colorful windows that adorned the church, pictures displaying passages of the bible and glowing bright red under the moonlight while others shone in blue and green. Though that night, red was truly prominent, and it fell right on her pale face, making everything appear dangerously dark about her.

One of the younger men raised his hand.

“William,” she called.

He stood up, clearing his throat, his hands tangled together in front of his body. He was the shy one, the one she had to pick up because he was starving himself due to his fear of what he had become after he was brutally turned by a woman he thought he could trust. It had been a very dark time back then, early twentieth century, and vampires in the States were still on the loose without a care in the world. There were no rules, only bloodshed, and the covens had body counts higher than the entire population.

“None of us is going on a murder spree,” he said.

“Are you saying that just because I want to hear you say it or do you actually mean what you just said?”

“I, um… you know what, I’m just gonna sit back down.”

“Wise choice.” She nodded. “So, William’s not a killer. What about the rest of you? Anyone trying to start a rebellion?”

Eli shrugged. His answer was obvious, “It’s not me.”

“I figured. You let your dinner stay for breakfast, and you know, you prefer blood whores. Gives you a sense of superiority, which of course, is not how this works. But anyway…”

The group burst out in laughter and Eli glared at her from across the room. “Very mature,” he said.

“I’m just giving you a taste of your own medicine,” she said. “Now, anyone else wanna share?”

Another hand rose in the air. “I’m honestly just knitting,” the woman said. As a demonstration, she lifted the half-finished scarf - they didn’t even wear scarves - and threw the ball of wool in the air. “I tried my hand at a very complicated cardigan, but that project failed, so I’m just going back to my roots.”

“Thank you, Helen, but I never doubted you, not even for a second. You’re a total sweetheart.”

“It also wasn’t me,” Talon spoke up. “But you already knew that.”

“Yes, because you are too stupid to cause such mayhem,” she stated plainly. “That leaves only one…” she let her eyes roam over the pews until she found who she was looking for.

His head hung low. Was he… sleeping?

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, for fuck’s sake! Can someone please punch Adam in the face?”

Eli stabbed him with his finger. The man shot up, causing the bench to creak. “I’m awake!” he declared.

“Thank you for gracing us with your presence,” she answered sourly. “Did you hear anything I just said?”

Adam looked around. All eyes were on him. He rubbed his very heavy eyes. “I zoned out after you said bloodbath.” At least his confession was honest.

She sighed. She was living with a bunch of idiots. She shouldn’t have suspected them. They weren’t capable of the monstrosities that she saw in the police file.

“Never mind,” she said in exasperation. “You’re all dismissed. Now please, fuck off. I need to be alone so I can fucking shoot myself.”

She wondered how they even managed to make it this far without getting caught.

“Talon.”

“Yes?” he replied.

“I need to get back out there. You’re in charge while I’m gone. Make sure that these idiots don’t kill themselves or each other.”

“Are you sure that is such a good idea? Going out there, I mean? We don’t know what we’re dealing with,” he said.

“No,” she stated after a slight moment of hesitation, “but I’m the only competent one in this house, so I have to step up.”

Her version of stepping up was simple. Scout the docks, stake out if necessary, and confront anything she deemed suspicious enough to risk getting caught. She hoped to run into one of the young vampires, at least, so she could make them answer her – the young ones were never bright, always controlled by hunger and the new intensity of their emotions. The anger was the most brutal one.

It’s like that even for humans – anger blinds, anger poisons, and anger can tear worlds apart and start new generations built on the same ideals. She witnessed anger and greed topple empires that had once been strong and flourished. There is no limit to what anger can make a person do. And vampires, like any other enhanced species, experience most emotions ten times deeper and worse than the ordinary human being.

She felt that effect even after years of being trapped in the same body, in the same state she was left in back then, and especially as she stood on the roof of the warehouse by the docks, overseeing the Hudson and the city that laid on the other side of the shore. She learned how to control and live with her anger. She learned how to survive. Though there were moments when even the highest form of self-control failed and she was stranded with the blade of a hot knife stuck in her sternum, digging further to tear apart her cold, dead heart.

The hunger was the worst part. It had the ability to cloud her mind completely and dictate her every behavior with the purpose to stave that hunger, which was a near-impossibility. There was no satisfying a hunger that had been there for centuries, that not even pints of blood could satisfy. In the years she lived, she learned how to live with it, but always going hungry was also no real way to live. It was awful, constant torture, and with every passing century, she grew more tired of the life she was forced to live.

In the distance, the wood creaked. One of the boats on the harbor displayed movements in its belly. The light only faintly fell on the source of the noise. A figure emerged behind the barrels stocked on the pier, heading straight for the oblivious fisherman who seemed to have stayed around to have a celebratory beer after bringing home quite a large catch of fish. She could smell them across the docks, already tied in bags to take home, but the victor was still inhabiting his boat. Humans have always been particularly obsessed with the art of fishing; it had once been their largest source of food income and fish is still pretty high up on the list of shippable goods. Though there was nothing worse to her nose than the smell of several fish perched together in one place. The stench was astronomical.

A young vampire was far more sensitive, though once hungry, there was nothing but blood on their minds and so none of them would run at the smallest hint of fish in the air, let alone the fear of getting caught. They didn’t have that kind of perception, not yet at least, because this particular behavior was taught. Primal nature dictated them to be monsters and without the proper training, the hunger would control them instead of them gaining control over the real monster – the insatiable thirst. Self-control is one of the hardest traits to gain, but it goes a long way, especially for creatures of the night who were born to be the opposite of compliant and self-aware.

If you want to live amongst an emancipated species, you have to learn how to conform to their rules and compromise, if necessary. You have to be willing to change your true nature to fit in and become something more than what history made of you. All of it comes back down to self-control. Without self-control, there can be no rules and without rules, society is doomed to collapse. Rules are what make a society habitable.

If there was one thing all young vampires had in common it was their lack of stealth. The young boy she had heard lurking behind the barrels across from the fisherman’s boat only checked the corner to his right, his eyes bright red as the moonlight fell on his blacked-out irises.

She cocked her head to the side. Someone trying to preserve themselves would have gone about this much differently. He stopped tip-toeing when he caught her scent in the air, slowly turning in her direction, and the way he looked straight at her reminded her of a frightened deer or a child caught in the act of stealing something. He was stealing, it just wasn’t something so easily explained. What he was stealing and risking went beyond what the human mind was capable of comprehending, let alone the brain of a young vampire that had absolutely no rational thoughts left behind.

He froze dead in his tracks and she sighed, almost like a condescending mother trying to teach her disobedient son a valuable lesson.

“I see what you’re doing,” she stated.

The boy licked his lips, revealing parts of his very sharp fangs. Another thing about the young ones – they didn’t know how to mask. One look at them and your first thought would be a vampire. Red eyes, protruding veins around the sockets, pale, clammy skin, and strength and speed they couldn’t control yet. Stealth was little to non existent, as was their sense of self-preservation and control. They were like unruly babies turning into toddlers overnight, the Devil on their shoulders whispering sweet sins into their ears and causing them to make the worst decisions. Right or wrong didn’t exist in their world. They knew what they wanted and they would try everything to get it, rules be damned.

Even though they all started out like this, not many chose to stay that way anymore. Once you learn how to live by the rules, it’s not that hard, and she grew to love the routine.

Without someone to teach them, young vampires could turn into everyone’s worst nightmare, and then everything she had worked so hard toward for centuries would have been for nothing.

“Fair warning,” she said, “Don’t.”

He bared his teeth.

“Oh, I’m shaking in my boots. Not. What’s your name, kid?”

He looked no day over seventeen, at best. His mother was probably worried sick. Little did she know that her worst fear, her son dying, had come true but in a far worse sense than she could ever imagine. Who he was now had nothing to do with the boy he used to be. The young vampire staring back into her eyes dark and empty had nothing left inside of him but insatiable hunger. His soul was clouded by the demon inside of him and chances were that it would never fully recover from the monstrosities he committed and would still commit.

She couldn’t stop him, she knew that. If she took him with her, whoever was responsible for the sudden spike in bloodless corpses would only create more of him, and take more teenagers from their parents until they got what they wanted. She needed to know what that was so she could stop the war that was looming on the horizon. She couldn’t have an apocalypse, not when her life was going semi-normal for a change. She quite liked New York, she wasn’t done yet.

“Who did this to you?” she asked again.

“Leave,” he growled.

“You see, I can’t do that. I want to, believe me, but I can’t. You’re too young, too inexperienced, so I’m trying to tell you this as easy as possible. What you’re doing right now is breaking all sorts of rules. You’re hunting on our turf,” she said. “My turf. My coven and I live here now. If you continue causing mayhem and destruction and turning innocent people into vampires, you’re breaking a truce that is far older than you, your parents, and great-great grandparents together. There is a set of rules for a reason…”

“You need to leave,” the boy repeated.

She ignored him. “This truce,” she continued, “was put in place over a century ago to assure that vampires and humans can live together in peace. Covens are not supposed to turn innocent people into vampires, let alone leave them without someone to teach them the ropes. A vampire out of control poses a danger to all species and if you continue what you’re doing, your actions will lead to war.” Her eyes narrowed. “Or perhaps that’s what you want. Is that it? Do you want us to be at war again?”

He smirked.

“You weren’t there the last time. It was ugly. That’s why there are rules, right?” She motioned as if explaining the way the world worked to a toddler. “To prevent such unnecessary bloodshed from happening again. To prevent us from killing each other,” she explained. “That’s what those rules are for, okay? Prevention, not causation. You’re supposed to stick to the rules to prevent a war that would destroy more than it would fix, and world domination doesn’t happen just because you say ‘fuck it!’ And shine a dangerous light on all vampires in the process. We’re not all alike. Every coven knows that,” she said. “Whoever made you is only using you to get ahead. In other words, you’re fucked and doomed to get slaughtered in the end. Either by your own kind, a war, or maybe even one of the very ancient vampire hunters that are only waiting for a chance to get back at us.”

Talking to him was futile. He didn’t follow a word she said and even if he had, he wouldn’t have understood. Young vampires were so stupid, naïve, useless and a nuisance. To think they all started out this way grossed her out, even though she made saving the lost causes of the world her life’s work.

Her logic was twisted and more often than not illogical, but she was wise and considered herself above average in intelligence, simply because she had been around for quite a while. She saw empires rise and fall. She stared into the darkest pits of existence and still managed to come back from the abyss. Her life had been a series of doors in her face, which led to several life lessons being taught over the course of centuries. She was no angel, but she wasn’t stupid and she had one job: make sure the truce would remain intact. And she would do just that, even if she had to eliminate that young boy in order to do so.

He didn’t say anything for quite a while. “Get out of my way,” he growled. Of course, he would settle on something as dramatically pathetic as this catchphrase. “I’m starving and I won’t hesitate to hurt you if you keep me from my meal.”

“Ouch,” she cocked an eyebrow, “You really bruise my ego, thinking you can get through me without getting hurt yourself. I’d suggest you think about your actions,” she said, “but I know that I’m practically talking to a wall right now, so thinking isn’t an option. You’re incapable of rational thought.”

Fear was the last thing that came to her mind when he showed off his teeth again.

“Listen, I just want to know who’s behind this. Who’s leading your coven, kid?”

“Fuck you!” he spat.

“Hey now, no need to get vulgar. I asked you a normal question. Who’s behind this and is there a chance I might get to have a conversation with the one in charge? Tell me and I will gladly point you in the direction of a different hunting ground,” she said.

The boy nodded toward the boat. “I want that one. He’s mine. Don’t even try to stop me.”

“Yeah, but you can’t have him.”

“I’m going to have him.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Stop disagreeing with everything I’m saying!”

She shrugged. “Can’t help that you’re wrong all the time. I’ve never learned how to shut up. It’s genetic; centuries of untreated trauma are at fault here, and of course, your general wrongness plays a big part in my need to disagree with your embarrassing hypotheticals.”

“Go to hell!”

“Already did. You know, of course, pride always goes before the fall. Such a human trait to have; multiply it by a thousand, where does that leave you? Certainly not more sophisticated than me, someone with hundreds of years of experience. You need to be careful, young vampires like you are at an even higher risk to be discovered and murdered before you even get the chance to learn what you were given with this transition.”

Finally, he launched at her. She sped away, gone in a matter of a second, and appeared a few feet behind him, heaving a heavy sigh. “You kids are all the same,” she declared, looking into his very distraught eyes. He couldn’t believe she had switched that fast. “Fast but reckless and extremely easy to trick.”

A moment later, he stood in her spot and she was gone again, crossing her arms behind her back.

“You done?” she asked. His attempts to attack her only made her laugh, “Oh, so terrifying.”

She had him right where she wanted him, so agitated that he spiraled out of control, no longer aware of where he was going or what he was doing. She watched him dance for a bit. By now, he surely must have realized he wasn’t going to win. But the pride was stronger and he kept going, trying to get to her in all kinds of ways, though never succeeding.

“I feel bad for you. What would your mother say if she saw you like this?”

He stopped. His left eye twitched. She saw the wheels on his head turning and she thought, finally, I got him.

What did she say? Pride goes before the fall.

She caught the billy club that soared through the air in their direction only a few inches from the boy’s face. Her lips pursed and she stared at the red object, feeling the heavy metal between her fingers and the small ripples in the material.

When she turned her attention back to the target, the boy was gone. He had sped away, using the moment of distraction to run. She couldn’t sense him anywhere; he must have escaped the docks completely, not even staying close to the Hudson. He was on his way home. The fisherman was safe and she had diverted quite the disaster, but she still deemed the interruption rude, including the attempt to impale that poor boy with the billy club. She had thought about it, but she would have never gone through with it. Whoever the weapon belonged to had to have been close by.

Her night just kept getting better and better. That was her assessment, at least, until she heard his heartbeat again. The scent of him brushed the hairs in her nose and she took a whiff, feeling his presence so close in the air, she stopped to let the sensation wash over her. The fire inside of her belly ignited once again, the excitement tickling her cold skin and leaving nothing but lust and hunger to rummage through her veins.

Footsteps thudded against the asphalt, stones crunching under his weight. They were slightly wet from the previous rain, causing a slight slip.

She lowered her hand with the billy club, turning to look over her shoulder at the supposed blind man in a suit. She had seen that get-up before in the papers when he first showed his masked face in Hell’s Kitchen. She never thought much of it since he had never posed a problem before.

The tables had officially turned.

Her lips parted to chuckle. “This is awkward,” she said. In the distance, the waves of the Hudson crashed into the riverbanks. It was colder than usual with a breeze in her hair that caused the water to go wild.

She fiddled with the red billy club, smirking, “Does this belong to you?”

“Who are you?” his voice sounded significantly lower than the night she first met him at that godforsaken gala.

To think she didn’t want to go in the first place; she would have never met him if she hadn’t let Talon convince her that she was supposed to show her face. A political move, he called it, to assert her dominance, which she did, but not in the areas that mattered.

“What are you doing in my city?”

She pouted. “So many questions.”

“Who was that boy you were just talking to? Where did he go?”

“What happened to hello, how are you? What’s your name?” She retorted. “Take a girl out for a drink first, would you? Back then men used to still be gentlemen.”

His chuckle was rather dark, a sound that made her shiver and imagine what it would sound like to reduce him to whimpers instead. The man was a brat, no doubt, not easy to force into submission, but she had cracked worse nuts. Surrendering wasn’t her forte, but she could make it everyone else’s.

“I’m not here to play games,” he told her.

“But I am,” she said.

“What do you want?”

“As far as I can recall, I made that pretty clear when we first met.”

“When we- I don’t know you,” he lied and she realized how bad he was at it for a lawyer.

She licked her lips, the fangs threatening to come out. She was starving. “I quite like an oblivious man. Makes things so much more exciting.”

“Listen, I don’t have time for small talk. There have been several suspicious murders around this part of New York and you’re currently my only connection, so you better talk before I make you.”

“Just out of curiosity,” she said, “what does making me entail?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”

He headed straight ahead, determined to grab her, and she watched with an amused crinkle in her eyes. The downward tilt of his lips was truly something to laugh over.

She allowed him to push her against the wall behind them. His force was surprising – those arms didn’t just look scrumptious, they actually carried a lot of strength for a human.

The stranger bared his teeth and she smirked, eyeing his focused expression. He tried to look intimidating but failed miserably. One of his hands braced against the cement beside her head and the other landed around her neck, a threatening motion to assert dominance. They were all so predictable and foolish enough to think that a woman like her couldn’t fight back.

Everywhere she went, she was underestimated. If only everyone knew her true nature, they wouldn’t be so reckless as to push her into corners over and over again. Or in this case, against cement walls on the docks in the middle of the night, right in the middle of her hunting ground with not another human soul close enough to hear him scream. And water is knowingly a great way to dispose of a dead body.

He squeezed tighter and she unclenched her jaw, wriggling out of his grasp in the process. “You’re a kinky bastard, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Answer my question,” he bit back.

“If you answer mine first.”

“This isn’t a game. Lives are at stake here! Listen, I don’t know who you are or what you are,” he said, “but if I find out that you had anything to do with these innocent kids getting slaughtered or know something about this new drug everyone is talking about, I will find you and I will destroy you.”

“You know, if it weren’t for the way you smell, I wouldn’t have recognized you, all confident in your little devil’s costume,” she purred.

Her finger slid up the leather of his suit, brushing over his tensing abs hiding behind the protective gear and she sucked in a sharp breath at the illusion she received.

“All of this tension and I still don’t know your name.”

He caught her hand and pinned it over her head. She squealed. He was full of surprises, and it only turned her on more. She wanted to bite him, really bite him, and suck on his pulse until he was crying her name and praying for God to save him, but the pleasure would only drive him further to hell and God wouldn’t be coming. She wanted him to writhe under her touch, taste him and make him come undone over and over again and once he believed she was done with him, she would start her torture anew, right from the beginning, pushing him from the precipice just far enough so she could catch him, bring him back to the top and then do the same thing in repetition all over again.

He roamed her face aimlessly, as it seemed, but barely visible behind the mask. “How?” he growled.

“Wouldn’t you want to know?” She chuckled. “It’s unfortunate that we had to meet again like this, but…” In an instant, she had them flipped around, her arms pinning him to the wall instead of herself and her strength remained unmatched. He could struggle, it was of no use. She had the upper hand.

Her breath tickled his ear as she spoke, far too close for comfort, “You smell absolutely divine. It’d be a shame to waste all that sweet, sweet blood for a second time,” she said.

He couldn’t move. Sharp nails raked through his hair and over his scalp, tugging his head to the side until his throat was completely bare to her, naked, exposed. His aorta pulsated wildly under his skin. She could see it bulge with every beat of his heart. That strong, masculine heart, stronger than anything she had heard or felt before.

She tasted the sweat on his skin and the salt of threatening tears in the air. If he was turned on or scared, she wasn’t sure. The lines between fear, pain, and pleasure blurred. It was all the same to her, anyway. Getting close to her would most certainly draw everyone under her spell at some point, no matter the sex or gender, and all the heads would continue turning to her whenever her presence entered a room full of lively human beings. Only then her pheromones could work their wonders.

The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen struggled against her grasp but to no avail. He was powerless, just how she liked him, how she wanted and craved him.

She licked a long stripe over his pulse point. “I want to taste you so badly,” she whispered. “I want nothing more than to dig my teeth into your pretty little throat and suck you dry, and then I want to get on my knees and eat your cum so I can feel it mix with the essence of what your heart has to give, and then you’d be mine. I’d own you. You’d be completely at my mercy, you’d be bound to me and it would feel so fucking good. It would feel so fucking good for the both of us.”

Her fangs began to scratch the surface, enough to make him feel it but not nearly enough to break the skin. She tasted the salt of his sweat even clearer now, wondering how much deeper she had to go to finally reach the source of the sweetness that surrounded him.

“Don’t you want that?” Her hand joined the words slipping from her silver tongue and wrapping around him like a poisonous snake. “Don’t you want to let me corrupt you, to bite you, to eat you until all you can feel is the pure pleasure of having me all over you? My lips, my tongue, my teeth, my body on yours everywhere, all the fucking time… oh, that would be such an orgasmic sight, and the pleasure you’d be feeling, I can’t even describe it. You won’t know until you at least try and believe me, you should. Isn’t that something you want, darling? Doesn’t your body crave to be caressed and receive undivided attention from someone who knows how to make you feel good?”

He sounded small, fragile, and utterly broken when he next spoke, and she hadn’t even started yet. “What are you doing to me?” he asked. The heat of his breath mixed with the cold night air. “What are you?”

She chuckled. “The better question is, what am I not?” The tip of her tongue moved from his neck to his cheek until she reached the corner of his luscious lips. Her nose dug into his cheekbone. “Fuck,” she said. “The things I want to do to you are far from innocent.”

But so fucking good.

Even with fear holding the reins to his body, he melted into her touch. He turned into a puddle of melted chocolate right at her feet. She could have asked anything of him, he would have done so just for the sake of pleasing her. But she wanted him to do it voluntarily not because the smell of her pheromones managed to drive any man into a state of co-dependency.

She wanted him to want her for the sake of wanting her. Like this, she would only compel him to do things he would never choose to do out of his own free will, and while the thought of having him right there on the docks was exciting and had her cunt squeezing around thin air, already wet and wanting, the only treacherous thing about her that was entirely defenseless and could be forced into submission with just a simple flick of the tongue over plump, rosy lips. He had her on the cloud of dangerous euphoria in seconds, already stumbling on the edge and about ready to slip, lose herself, and lose control only to have him, finally, in all the ways she pleased and all the ways that would make him feel good.

She could give him anything he had ever wanted, give him a time that not a single human could give him, and make him come undone inside and outside so many times, he would pass out from the pure pleasure. But he wouldn’t regret it. He would go out this as the winner, fucked out and blissful and perhaps a little addicted to the taste of her as well – she was sure she would be addicted to him as well. She almost already was, just from the scent of his blood and the way his body shivered at the slightest touch. He was so responsive, so human, yet stronger and more unique than anyone else could ever be. He was the one thing she wanted and she was ready to take it as soon as he wanted it, too.

She was used to taking what she wanted however she wanted and screwing the consequences, quite literally, but not with him. With him, the need bubbling up deep inside of her belly was different. It wasn’t just a hunger for blood or a hunger for sex and pleasurable violence, he caused much more than that within her already conflicted soul, and as enticing as that was, the connection confused her. There was a reason she didn’t let anyone close, using sex as a mere pastime activity to get the edge off – she couldn’t toy with him because chances were she would reduce his survival chances to zero.

Allowing a human like him close would only cause pain in the long run, and she’d been through enough of that for several lifetimes. And that wasn’t even an overstatement.

Her lips brushed over his momentarily before she forced herself to pull away, widening the distance between them.

The poor man slumped against the wall, his world rotating. He took it much better than most people, but the sweet taste of his fear in the air reminded her that he was just human, after all. A curious, enticing, and mysterious human, but a human being nonetheless.

Humans serve only one purpose for vampires like animals serve a purpose to humans – predators hunt their victims to feast, sustain themselves and survive. Humans are essentially animals and vampires used to be humans turned into hunters, predators, and dangerous perverts who craved blood to survive while at the same time using it for twisted, sexual purposes that had God locking the gates of heaven to anyone who even dared to fantasize about it. There is no ancestor ready to turn around in their grave because vampires were born from lust and hunger, and the first vampires had been carnal creatures as well, ready to go at it like animals without a single brain cell at their disposal.

Vampires weren’t like that anymore. Sex still played a huge role in their existence, but their main purpose was to fit in. They wanted a peaceful life. Taking everything they wanted was no longer possible, their chances were limited, but at least they didn’t have to fear imminent death anymore. Not ever since the truce was first established, anyway.

If those young vampires continued killing and turning innocent children without mercy, and their coven even supported their decisions, the peace would have been short-lived. She could already see it swindling with every passing second, though fear was not something she wanted to concern herself with, not yet. Her life had more important things to offer before she rang the warning bells on all the vampires she knew, therefore causing a certain commotion that would send the gravestones rolling. Not yet, she decided, but if they kept going at this rate, certainly very soon.

“Go,” she growled into the night. “Do yourself a favor and stay away from the Hudson until further notice. You can never know what blood-thirsty and murderous monsters might lurk in the dark around here,” she said.

He didn’t move.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“You don’t get to tell me what to do,” he said, his voice remaining steady.

She frowned. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah, you don’t scare me. Manipulate me all you want, this isn’t the first time an otherwise scary woman fails to put me under her spell. But,” he smirked, “don’t take it personally. I’m sure you look pretty scary.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” she cooed, her eyes switching from their natural color to a glossy black. “You have no idea who you’re talking to, do you?”

The red nails adorning her fingers grew sharper and in size. If only he could have regained his eyesight, he surely would have changed his mind. Her skin turned even whiter, the bags under her eyes sinking deep into her skull, replaced instead by thick, purple veins that transported the venom from the core of her existence into them. She was chaos, an abomination, humanity’s biggest threat – not scary was a description she wouldn’t accept.

No matter how blind he was, he had to follow the natural order of things like everyone else. He was supposed to be afraid of her. If he couldn’t find it in himself to show her, all of her games would inevitably lose their fun factor. And her ego would suffer the most.

Open an ancient book about demons and a picture like that might stare back at you.

“It takes a lot more than dark magic to scare the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen,” he told her.

It was cute. Remarkable, really. She laughed at his attempt to make himself feel better, and partly because she was starting to grow upset with him.

“Somehow, being infuriated with you only makes you so much more attractive to me,” she said.

“You still don’t scare me.”

“Enjoy it while it lasts.”

Five seconds. The heartbeat of the fisherman rang loudly in her ear. She was starving, her last meal far too long in the past. He wriggled in her grasp, crying, begging for her to let him go, to have mercy on him and, “Oh, God, your face- what happened to your face? Are those- are those fangs? Please, I have a family!”

Her laugh reverberated in her chest. The man stiffened when she tore at his hair to position his head sideways, his neck in perfect reach for her mouth. She looked at the man in the suit before her, his jaw clenched, and he had his billy clubs at the ready. They weren't going to hurt her, he knew that. She would catch them with ease. He could only stand by and pretend he wasn’t scared even though he had never been more in sync with the feeling. They were a package deal when it came to her.

“Don’t worry,” she told the poor fisherman, “You’ll see your family again, and you won’t even have to remember a thing.”

Her mouth opened.

“Don’t,” Daredevil threatened – yes, it was a threat, not even a warning – from the other side of her, and she saw the conflict dance clearly over the revealed lower part of his face. “You don’t have to hurt him,” he said. “The man’s innocent.”

She shrugged. “I know.”

“He has a family.”

“I know. My ears are quite impeccable, can you believe that?”

“How about you think this through before you act? There’s a lot of ways you can go about spiting me, but pulling an innocent bystander into this is not fair. Come on, you said you wanted me, so take me.”

As lucrative as that sounded, she had a different plan.

She hummed, “No.”

“Why? Are you scared? Perhaps you’re not such a bad person after all. Is that it? You want me to be afraid of you, so you’re trying to hurt that man until I cave? Well, I won’t, but I’m offering myself to you instead of him, so don’t try so hard. Just take me. Take your shot.”

Oh, he sounded so amused – time to wipe that smirk off his beautiful face.

“Ancient advice,” she ignored everything else he had said, “Don’t be a martyr,” she said and her lips rained down on the fisherman’s throat in a fiery passion. “History hates martyrs.”

“No, history only consists of martyrs.”

“The official version. The truth lies much deeper than your little human brain could ever explore.”

Daredevil was right about one thing; the man was innocent. No matter how she turned it, there was nothing wrong with him, so death would have been unnecessary punishment.

She wasn’t going to kill him just to spite the man she craved to actually have a taste of. She was just going to take a sip, still a quarter of her hunger and then move on, heal the man’s wounds and make him forget this ever happened. He would be disoriented, but he would be fine.

Humans are the most susceptible to manipulation.

“Don’t be afraid,” she told the fisherman, “I’m just going to have a little taste of the forbidden fruit.”

Her teeth dug into his aorta and she sucked, tasting the blood that squirted into her mouth and all over her face in thick stripes. He tasted nothing like the feast standing right across from her, but it didn’t matter. Her mind shut off. The hunger moved to the forefront and at that moment, everything else stopped existing. It was just her and the life of this particular human in her hands, the taste of his blood exploding on her tongue and her stomach churning with the endless hunger that only got fueled with the small taste. She wanted more, needed it, but she knew better than to let the desperation overpower her.

Passed out and short of a few pints of blood, the fisherman fell to the ground. She licked her lips. He was everywhere, even stuck on her clothes and traces of him had gotten tangled in her hair. He was a bleeder, that much was sure, and if she hadn’t licked over his neck to seal the wound, he surely would have bled out.

Poor thing, but sentiment was useless in a case like this. He would make it. No use crying over a blood bag, she was taught. Humans lived to feed them. It was their purpose and she had no reason to feel bad for wanting to be full for a change, not go to bed hungry because she wouldn’t dare touch someone that wasn’t already in a plastic bag. She deserved this.

And Daredevil cowered in fear at the sounds he was met with. Her night had turned from a total shit show into the sight of victory.

She stepped forward and he flinched away, finally. “You wanted to know what I am. This is it!” she declared. “I’m the monster parents warn their children about and I’m the one thing every church fears because I happen to stand against everything religion stands for.”

“Dear God,” he breathed out.

“God can’t help me now,” she said. Her eyes moved to the sky, watching the stars disappear behind a thick cloud of smog and thousands of lights from the city center. “He stopped doing that the second I died. He’s dead to me now. He cannot be found. There is no God, there is only hunger and I’m probably the most merciful of them all, so I’d run if I were you. I’d run before another one of those demons God gave up on saving, jumps out of the dark and decides to suck the life from your pretty little body. I’d run,” she said, “because there is not a millisecond that goes by in which I do not want to tear your neck open and drink your blood while I also desperately want to suck your dick between my lips and do the same to those veins too, and the longer you stay the more my self-control starts to fade into the thin smoke that comes out of your mouth whenever you speak.”

He shivered and the color faded from his skin, blood pooling in his veins at twice the amount and the smell almost knocked her off her already hazy feet from the first course.

More, her body screamed, but she held back. She learned how to hold back. No one had to die tonight.

“Run now or I’m cutting this short, and then Hell’s Kitchen will no longer have a Daredevil to protect them from the likes of me. They won’t even get the chance to mourn because it’d be impossible for me to drop your body in the Hudson after getting a taste of your blood.”

He turned around, finally getting the hint to run. He jumped the wall up to the rooftop too gracefully for a blind man. She watched, her bloody lips moving into a smile.

“Fear is healthy,” he heard her loud and clear. “Don’t let your pride cloud that healthy feeling from manifesting. And find me,” she said, “when you’re ready to talk without underestimating me.”

By the time she looked back up, Daredevil was gone with the wind, but his scent still lingered long after he had left and she would take it to bed with her where the most unholy of things would happen to the sound of a name she didn’t even know.

She should have fucked him when she had the chance.

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sgt-morgan · 2 years ago

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Sight Unseen 💤

Summary: Matt pulls a late night and comes home to his perfect little family. Life is good. Part of the Robin verse.

Warnings: none. This is short and sweet, sappy fluff.

A/N: Matt is a good dad. Robin is the sweetest. Daddevil strikes again.

Daredevil Masterlist

Matt imagines that this is the cutest sight in the world. His pregnant wife and baby girl curled up in his bed. He has half a mind to take a picture, even though he won’t be able to stare at it. Instead he enjoys the serenity of the moment and tries to conjure an image in his mind of just exactly how sweet this sight must be with the senses that he has while he takes off his suit.

Earlier in the evening he had received your text about the bed already being full and he had laughed.

Robin 🦇🖤💍😍: Careful when you come to lay down tonight devil boy, your little battlin’ Jackie has taken over the bed, and I’m as big as a whale. If you decide to sleep on the couch to avoid a foot to the ribs lmk. Stay safe Bman, love you.

Now when faced with the reality of it his insides turned to mush.

He can smell the sleep in the air, both of his girls smell of it for certain. He takes several deep breaths to better get the picture. Jackie smells like that baby sweat all children get while napping, he can practically taste the salt of it on the air, children run hot when they sleep and his little girl is no exception. He imagines her hair is slightly damp with it, plastering her soft baby curls to her forehead. She also smells like her soap, the sweet smell of no tears shampoo, you must have given her a bath before bed. Next is the new lotion you bought for her, it smells like lavender and camomile, some kind of baby calm stuff, it’s pleasant and certainly does the job, the comforting smell of it allows his shoulders to relax. You always joke that those scents were more for the parents benefit than the baby’s, and he suspects you’re on to something. She also faintly smells of the both of you, she must have been sleeping in here the whole time. She had her own room, but some nights you both just needed the comfort of one another while he was out. It made his heart ache to think that you both would be so sad as to miss him, but when he’s around you always reassure him that it’s fine. He chooses to believe you, but he knows better.

Then there’s you, he can smell your sweat as well, telling him you’ve also been asleep for a while now. He also smells your deodorant, something soft and powdery, he thinks you noticed when he didn’t like the smell of your last one, you said every time you uncapped it he got a ‘smelly cat face.’ Whatever that means. He’s grateful for the change that you so readily made for his comfort, it was thoughtful. He smells his soap on your skin as well. It’s a habit of yours to use his toiletries when you miss him, he must be working too much lately, he makes a mental note to text foggy he’s taking an impromptu day off tomorrow, he wouldn’t mind. You also smell like the sensitive baby laundry detergent you’d begun to use, but it was masked heavily by his cologne, telling him you were wearing his shirt to sleep in. It was also spattered a bit with the smell of Jackie’s children’s toothpaste, so he knows it’s been a playful and eventful evening full of bath times and giggles. He’s sad he missed it.

Then he listens to the sounds around him. Two sets of breaths were slow and deep, three heart beats slow and steady, perfectly in sync. It further drives home the thought of Jackie curling up in your bed from the beginning. The sounds of your tiny matching snores makes him smile, you’re both sleeping good, peaceful and totally relaxed. Good, you deserved the rest. You had been struggling to sleep comfortably the further you’d gotten into your pregnancy, but tonight you seemed to be settled. There’s soft music playing, the sound of a lullaby album you played for Jackie when she was born, she must have been fighting sleep at first, asking you to sing her her lullabies. He also heard a faint breeze from a cracked window, it did feel a bit warm in here. He strains his ears, and he bets the air conditioning unit is broken again, he’d call the landlord about it in the morning. While straining his ears for the air con, he also picks up a faint rasp in his daughters breathing, oh no, she must be getting sick, he reaches out to feel her temperature and- oh, no, not sick, crying. She had been crying. Ah, now this little sleeping arrangement made sense. Jackie was sleeping on his pillow, there were wet spots where her tears had fallen onto it. He ghosts his fingers down her arms, and he finds the feeling of soft fuzz, she’s gripping her Batman teddy. A Christmas gift that matched her PJs, the teddy was affectionately known as her ‘daddy teddy.’ She was crying over him he realized with a deep sigh, he’d have to make it up to her tomorrow. In the mean time, he stripped off her footie pjs so she was just in her undershirt, Robin often said he was like a space heater, and as the little girl was already fairly warm, he didn’t want to risk her over heating. You and Jackie had been laying on your sides, foreheads pressed together. The thought of it was so endearing it physically made his heart hurt, and he rubbed his hand across his chest to release the ache. Once he got his daughter ready, he climbed into bed and settled her between you, her little back pressed to his chest. He ran a hand over your side, and let out a soundless chuckle when baby number two pressed a foot back into his palm, causing you to grumble and snuggle down further into your pillow in an attempt to get comfortable again. You always complained that all of his babies were daddy’s girls, and in moments like these he suspects you’re right. He smooths a hand over your hair, pushing the strands out of your face and caressing your cheek, you sigh contentedly and he beams. All of his girls loved him, the evidence of it was right here, and it made his chest swell with pride.

So maybe he couldn’t see his perfect little family, couldn’t see the way that Jackie was a perfect little carbon copy of his Robin, couldn’t see that you were sleeping in his ‘daddevil’ T-shirt, couldn’t see the picture of him on the nightstand you had strategically turned towards the bed so you and your daughter could see it, couldn’t see the crayon drawing Jackie made of her daddy in his suit, or the sonogram you’d received today of baby number three, but he could hear your heartbeats as they synced with his own, the evidence of your love made plain in all your little habits, and that was enough for him.

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somethingblu3 · 5 months ago

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i can't stop thinking about treason. i need you to think about CIA Agent Matt Murdock here for a second...

#like....#au idea #matt murdock #okay i'll do it myself #charlie cox #treason #daredevil #daredevil au #matt murdock au #matt murdock crossover #adam lawrence

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akariamai · 2 years ago

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Chamomile Tea

Part 1

Pairing: Matt Murdock x Black Widow!Reader

Word Count: 1112

Steam seeped from the porcelain cup, filled to the rim with your Chamomile tea, as you waited for your neighbor to arrive. The table you choose was not made out of thoughtlessness. It was deliberate and precise. The chairs near the table held the same preference. You needed to see the exits of the room, the people walking in and out of the coffee shop, and be slightly hidden away from the world.

The Red Room taught you to be hyper vigilant. To be aware of your surroundings every waking moment of your life. Danger can lurk at every corner of the world. Slowly whisking you away from the little sanity you clasps to.

Last night left you vulnerable. You lost your head for a second, yelling at the woman you’ve all but forgotten. Forgetting the world around you, the man beneath your floor. Facing her was so unexpected and so painful. She was there for a moment and then gone the next. She should’ve never come back to reconcile when there was nothing left to fix. The pieces left were far too small to mend.

Matt, once she had climbed out of your window, came to comfort you in such a way where you wouldn’t feel unease. He sat closely to you but not so close that his shoulders could touch yours if he wasn’t comfortable. He waited for you to reach out to him. Matt truly was a saint. He was patient with you. He didn’t pressure you to talk unless you felt you could open up to him.

You saw him through one of the semi-dirty windows near the front of the building. He was making his way towards the sliding doors of the coffee shop. Tilting his head before heading towards the line to order. He must’ve smelled your Chamomile tea or the fragrance you generously sprinkle onto your body because once he ordered, he walked straight towards your direction. Although there were other ways where he could’ve found you, his sense of smell only being one of them. He could’ve merely asked the staff once he finished ordering if a person similar to you was waiting in the shop and pointed him in your direction.

He made his way towards you, careful not to go too fast, without knocking into anything or anyone. His hands made it towards the chair in front of you and asked, “[Reader] is that you?”

Your first natural response is to nod but nodding will do nothing but make him laugh. You reassured, “Yeah, it’s me.” Taking a sip from your tea, the gentle touch of the notes of apple and a mellow sweetness exploded your taste buds with flavor. “What’d you get?” It was a blatant attempt at ignoring the vulnerability you’d shown last night.

“I ordered a cup of coffee and a glazed donut.” He knew not to push where he shouldn’t. He spent months comprehending the slight substantial changes in your body and registering them to how you were feeling. It was quite difficult especially when he couldn’t read you like others. You were a complete mystery and you so readily intrigued him.

There were questions he wished to ask. ‘Who was she?’ ‘How do you feel?’ ‘How can I help you?’ ‘Why do you push me away when you clearly need someone?’ Granted he was not the best for accepting help nor was he the best at keeping his feelings in check. He wanted to do right to the world, bloodying his hands to do it, and keep the people he cherishes safe from harm. Somehow you had wormed your way into his heart and carved a place there for only you to fill.

He’d never tell you this, however, his past relationships had never held on for too long. He’d either lose them due to his extra-curricular activities or in the death of his beloved. Heartbreak always awaited him in the end. It was like he was cursed to walk the path of vigilantism alone.

“She was someone I considered a sister…” You paused, “when I was younger. More naive to the world around me.” She suffered the same fate as you before she left without warning. The hurt did not come from leaving suddenly or being left in the dark but for not sending help for the rest. The inability to begin the complete and utter annihilation of the Red Room. “I was taken to a vile place when I was a child. Too young to remember the face of my mother or share any memories of anything but blood and weapons.”

His heart ached for you and your lost childhood. He could feel the wave of sorrow spilling out of you and you confessed to him snippets of your past. It was more than he had hoped for.

“One day, she vanished without a word. It was a place where hope could not enter but when word spread of an escape, it rushed in like smoke. That pinch of happiness was all we had. Someone might finally save us but no one ever did and that happiness disappeared like it was never there.”

He could feel tears pooling into your eyes but they refused to fall. He could tell you were holding them in but he stayed quiet. “I’ll never forgive her for not trying. For giving up on us the moment she tasted freedom.”

Matt placed his hand, palming facing the ceiling, waiting for you to choose to take his hand. It was the only way he knew how to comfort you. A gentle smile worked his way onto his lips as he felt your hand inch closer to his. Your hand was rough, the bumps of scars littered all over, and your grip was light. You had suffered all this time and had only now had the time to process such a revelation.

“You don’t have to.” He believed in forgiveness but could not pressure anyone to come to that resolution. It was a path walked alone. The road to be able to forgive is not an easy one. It was taxing and tiresome. Even he, a self-proclaimed man of god, still found it hard to reach the absolution of forgiveness.

“Thank you.” Your lips whispered into the air almost silent enough for his ears wouldn’t pick it up without his senses. He slightly tightened his grip, letting you know he could be someone you could depend on. That you were not alone in your journey to recovery, whatever form it takes. He wants to stay by your side through it all and maybe even learn more of what remained of your past.

Masterlist

#Matt Murdock #matt murdock fic #matt murdock x you #matt murdock fanfic #matt murdock one shot #self-insert #daredevil fanfic #Daredevil #daredevil fanfiction #netflix daredevil #black widow!reader #matt murdock x black widow!reader #marvel #mcu #mcu imagine #daredevil x reader #daredevil #matt murdock au

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ddejavvu · 11 months ago

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sooo mei I was reading through your matt murdock ml and stumbled across the mafia one and pleaseee that is so cute, would you ever expand on that au? like maybe r’s flat is broken into and before she can even go to the cops there’s a bunch of matt’s guys there like don’t worry we’ve got it handled and she’s just ???

mafia!matt is the last thing i thought i'd be writing in the year 2024 but i can work with what you gave me <3

You're not sure whether you'd consider yourself lucky for escaping the bank unscathed, or unlucky for having been in the bank during an active shooting in the first place. Either way, the entire ordeal leaves you unsettled for weeks. You're bordering on agoraphobic, but food is a must, so you set out to brave the streets of Hell's Kitchen in search of something quick and dirty.

Upon your return, you know you're unlucky. You'd locked the door when you'd left, but evidently that doesn't stop someone who's desperate enough to break into a place that's barely up to code. You stare into the gaping, dark recess of your burgled apartment, noting that several electronics and appliances are out of place, but none of them appear to be missing. Your television is cracked, but you suppose your computer will be a suitable replacement until you can manage to afford a new screen.

You back away from the door just in case there's still someone inside; you're not stupid enough to investigate for yourself. However, the moment you step back, you ram into someone behind you, and your mottled nerves make you nearly shoot out of your skin.

All you can manage is a muffled, 'mmf!' when a hand clamps itself over your mouth, but the voice accompanying the hand is quick to assure you, "Easy, tuts, we're not gonna make it worse. We're with- uh, the cops. Okay? We got a call from the neighbors, 'said they heard someone breakin' in. We've got it handled, alright? Just relax. You can head back inside, that creep is long gone. We'll have someone stand guard outside, got it?"

You're only let go of when your captor deems you calm, but your heart is still racing in your chest when you turn to face him. He doesn't look anything like a police officer, but he does look menacing. He shows you a badge and I.D, and they look authentic enough for your arrythmia to settle.

"Go on," He ushers you towards the door, "Get in there, we'll take care of it from here."

You adjust your grip on your plastic bag of frozen meals, passing a couple other men that are now posted at the front door of your apartment. Each attempts a kind smile at you, and you're glad to shut the door on them once you get inside.

There's a man on your couch.

You don't notice until you flick the light switch on, but he's sitting there, clad in a suit and sunglasses. You shriek, and briefly consider whether or not your frozen ravioli could be used as a suitable projectile.

"Relax," The man stands, an easy smile on his face, one that drips with sympathy, "I'm Matt. I'm here to stand guard."

"Why were you sitting in the dark?!" You demand, now doubting the validity of the police badge you'd seen earlier, regretting the decision to trust these less-than-official men.

"It doesn't matter to me whether it's light or dark," He chuckles, and your face flushes momentarily when you realize what his sunglasses are for.

"Oh. Well- well you're not doing a very good job of making me relax, Matt. I feel like I'm more in danger of you than I am of someone else breaking into my house."

The man's smile is gentle, but not weak, "Sorry. Just go about your business, okay Y/N? We'll replace your damaged property and be out of your hair as soon as we can eliminate the threat.”

"Eliminate...?" You echo cautiously, "How long does that take?"

"Depends. A day. A week. Months, maybe. But this is all for your precaution, Y/N," He stands, making his way over to you and carefully feeling out the broken glass on the floor with the toe of his shoe. He places a hand on your shoulder, "Just trust me, I'm here to help. None of this will ever happen to you again- not on my watch."

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cellophaine · 7 months ago

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Sad Girl (Part III)

Read Part I, Part II

Pairing: Matt Murdock x F!Reader

Warnings: Sappy confession. Happy ending.

Author's Note: I'm alive.

GIF Credit

As you joined the street-level crowd from the subway, you pulled your scarf higher as the bitter wind swept over your face. You quickened your pace in the hope of getting out of the cold sooner as if you could catch up with the darkening sky. The interview had taken longer than you anticipated, and you still had to write up the report and have it on your boss' desk by 9 AM the next morning. He had been a thorn in your side, consistently pushing your buttons. He always insisted on having paper copies of every report. "It makes your report more meaningful," he said, "otherwise you're just repeating someone else's words." It took all the professionalism in you not to reach across his cluttered desk and slap him then.

By the time you reached the office, the sky had dulled into a dark grey, and the lamp posts cast their warm glow onto the street. You said goodnight to the exiting coworkers and rushed through the doors to see that Gwen, the receptionist, was leaving, too. She called out to you as you walked past the reception.

"Hey! There's something for you on your desk."

You nodded.

"Thank you."

"Doesn't say who it's from though."

You thought for a moment; a small smile crept onto the corner of your lips.

"I think I might have an idea."

Gwen gave you an understanding look and headed out. You approached your cubby in anticipation and were greeted with a sweet floral smell emanating from the bouquet that sat next to your keyboard. You took it in your hand and marvelled. It was a peculiar combination, one you couldn't really find at flower shops, held together by a simple ribbon of blue cloth. No crinkly wrapping paper. The light shade of blue hyacinth went so well with the bluebells, coupled with orange peonies and a single olive branch, which created a harmony pleasing to the eyes and nose. The piece of paper nestled in the bouquet only indicated your name in a neat font, but other than that, nothing. Still, it brought a smile to your face, a speck of joy on an arduous day. You pulled out your phone and typed out a quick text before sending it off.

Thank you for the flowers. They're beautiful.

You still had a soft smile on your face by the time you got ready to write the report. Your phone vibrated, signaling a text message.

What flowers?

Your brows scrunched together in puzzlement. You took a photo and sent it off. Not a minute later, you got a response.

Wasn't from me.

A slight hollowness carved itself into your throat. You texted back.

Oh. Are you sure?

The response came quickly.

Dead serious. You might have a secret admirer ;)

Never mind then.

You set your phone down only to have the phone vibrate again.

Wannna go out tonight? Me and my buddies are going to this new club on Fifth Ave.

You sighed, dreading the idea of having to stay at work late. But you didn't like the sound of going out either.

I'm alright. Just a little tired tonight. Have fun though!

The read receipt and a heart popped up on your last message. That was it. You turned your phone to silent mode before opening a new document; your recorder and notepad were ready by your side.

By the time your report was put on your boss' desk, it was already 9:30. You exhaled heavily, feeling the weight on your shoulders chip away. You took the flowers with you and nodded to the security guard on your way out. It was late, and you didn't feel like cooking, so you made a detour to the soup and sandwich shop around the corner and placed an order. You sat down on the bench by the window, allowing the gush of heat from the radiator to warm your legs. There was music coming from across the narrow street; its volume changed as people filtered in and out. People were smoking outside, chatting animatedly with one another. It stirred something in you. You worked late on a Thursday night, getting takeout by yourself because you couldn't even fathom the thought of whipping up a simple meal. You opened your last message with Andy, wondering if it was too late to change your mind.

You met Andy through Mindy when her workplace went out for happy hour. It was just shy of two weeks after you cut things off with Matt. He was a nice, easy-going guy who tried to include you in conversations throughout the night. Mindy's forms of suggestion came in the subtle look of her eyes, the slight inclines of her head, and often, a jab of her elbow. It annoyed you how much she tried to look out for you even though you didn't need her help, but at the end of the night, the triumphant was hers. Andy asked for your number, and you agreed out of an obligation you felt for Mindy's relentless effort for you to move on. It had been two months since the first date, with many dates between then and now, and all you could say about it could be summed up in one word: fine. You didn't feel a spark. Andy could be charming at times, funny, and generous. You liked him, but your heart didn't beat wildly for him. He wasn't anything like Matt. Andy was the one you should want.

So why did you still feel a sense of hesitation?

You looked at the bouquet, your curiosity piqued. Taking out your phone, you typed in the flower combination laid on the narrow counter. Scrolling through the array of articles, you noticed the keywords they shared in common.

Apology. Ask for forgiveness. Wrongdoings.

You read and read, and the realization seeped in. The clarification didn't give you any relief, only mild irritation. Matt fucking Murdock. Who gave him the right to remind you of his presence when it still lingered around? It was an undeniable indication of how much you were still so helplessly captivated by your history with him, thinking about him like he was an old wound that ached every now and then to remind you that you had always had it and that you could never be rid of it. Memories of Matt, just like the pain, were a part of you now, and you couldn't bury them or try to forget them. You had to live with them, and hopefully, when it was finally enough time had passed, you could look back at the memories with fondness, a sweet bitterness over someone you couldn't have, but you had long accepted the fact.

For the moment, the fondness was replaced by irritation. With dinner in your hand, you walked out of the door, leaving the bouquet in the trash can of the quaint restaurant.

Over the next six months, so much changed, but the one constant thing that did not was Matt's attempts to reach you and still give you the distance you needed. Once a week, on the same day, a bouquet of flowers was delivered to your desk. They never included the sender, only the recipient, and always had the same connotation.

I'm sorry.

You had to admit it was sweet. It also earned you looks of admiration and teasing from your coworkers, who were cooing over the fact that your boyfriend was such a sweetheart. For the few times someone mentioned it, you had to clarify. Andy wasn't your boyfriend anymore, and he hadn't been for the last two months.

When you broke up with Andy, it came as a surprise to him. He thought everything was going well, but your perception of the relationship was the opposite. You weren't into him; you were into the idea of having him as a placeholder for Matt. It was the cruel truth. Being with Andy didn't make you happy, and you doubted it would be any different if you were with someone else. You wanted more. You wanted the thing that you couldn't have with Matt, and at this point, you had settled for the fact that it would never be yours. But for now, you were okay with being by yourself. You wanted to be alone in your own existence and accepted the fact that when the right time came, it would come with the right person. For the first time in a long time, you felt the burden that clouded your head fall away like a crumbling infrastructure.

You quit your job despite your boss's pathetic attempts to stop you from leaving, promising you a promotion that would make you his right-hand woman. It was more work for just a little more money, and it wasn't worth it. To your luck, shortly after leaving the newspaper, you got hired as a junior staff writer for an independent publishing house. You still got to enjoy parts of the work you liked before, with better pay and a more relaxed schedule. You had more time to enjoy what you couldn't before.

Gwen still kept in touch with you, telling you about the bouquet of flowers showing up a few days after you left. And then, after that week, none at all. You figured Matt had a way of finding out about your new workplace since, shortly after the change, new bouquets were delivered to your desk promptly as if nothing had changed only except for the fact that you stopped throwing them away. You had started to enjoy them. Who knew there were so many ways to apologize to someone with flowers?

You thought you would cross paths with him eventually, but you didn't know it would be a peculiar chance encounter like this.

The gloomy sky haunted the skyline of New York City all day, teasing with little drops here and there. The air was heavy, as if it was holding itself in anticipation of a great storm. You prayed it wouldn't rain before you got home, but as you were halfway there, the sky parted, and the downpour was vicious. You couldn't see too far in front of you, and out of desperation, you ran up the stairs of the nearest shelter. You stood awkwardly on the small porch of the building as heavy droplets railed on the pavement in a frantic rhythm. You leaned a shoulder on the wall, exhausted and drenched, looking helplessly out into the downpour that showed no sign of stopping soon. Water dripped from your lashes, and with each blink, you saw a moving silhouette formed in the misty veil. Your heart beat faster and faster as the silhouette approached until he became someone you knew too well. Emerged from the rain was Matt, his breathing heavy, but you doubted it was from running from the rain, for his footsteps slowed, hesitant as he sensed that the porch he was approaching wasn't vacant. And the space was occupied by none other than the woman that haunted his fitful sleep and waking daydreams.

For a long moment, you could only stare. The water clung to him like how every piece of your existence that used to long for his approval and touch did. And Matt seemed to do the same thing. You couldn't bring yourself to break the silence. Your eyes were wide open as if you were afraid his presence was only something your mind made up. That he wasn't real. And just like that, you were starstruck again. Just like the first time you saw him after you realized that you loved him. In the gradual slip of the initial shock, you took in the newness in his familiar appearance. His hair was a little longer than when you saw him last, prompting the little curls at the nape of his neck. His dripping briefcase did its best to shield his face from the rain, but you could see the strays followed the slopes and rises of his handsome features. His lips parted, pulling in a deep, slow inhale. He looked like a man who was in disbelief, and truth be told, you felt the same way. Only now did you realize how much you'd missed him.

"What are you doing here?"

You croaked and cleared your throat when you realized your voice was barely a notch above a whisper. Matt shook himself out of the trance, clearing his throat.

"This is, uhm– my office."

"Oh!"

In a fit of panic, you didn't realize that it was the Nelson, Murdock and Page office. What kind of cruelty had fate forced upon you? You sighed, an apology on your lips as you put your bag above your head.

"I'm so sorry, I will go–"

Before you could launch yourself into the pouring rain, Matt stopped you with a hand on your elbow.

"No, please. Stay."

And because he knew you so well, he could sense your hesitation.

"You can get warm upstairs and wait until it's better out there."

You watched the way the tips of his ears had turned into a darker shade of pink. This anticipation reminded you of the time when, with just a look, you knew you had fallen for him. You swallowed and managed to croak a soft "okay." Matt nodded, a little breathless himself, as if he was relieved that you agreed to stay. He pulled out the key and unlocked the door before holding it open for you to step inside. You walked the stairs, remembering the last time you were here. Your heart was in fragments, barely held together by your nerves, by the time you reached the final steps.

You roamed your eyes around the office as Matt turned on the old heater along the wall. It looked about the same, but now there was a monstera adding a touch of green to the space. You shrugged off your damp coat, and Matt took it out of your hands. The gesture felt so natural, you thought to yourself as you watched him hang the coat next to his by the door. He had stripped down to a simple white dress shirt and black slack, and you averted your eyes at the sight of his torso visible under the wet shirt as if you hadn't seen him naked before. He threw his tie on the desk and came out of his office with a throw blanket. He held it out until you took it. It looked handmade and felt soft to the touch. Matt pulled a chair out for you in front of the heater. You thanked him and put your bag by your feet after taking the seat. A brief moment of silence followed, and Matt immediately assumed his position as the gracious host.

"Do you want some tea? We have the kind that … that you like."

A shiver ran through you. A cup of tea didn't sound too bad.

"Please. If you don't mind."

He waved his hand dismissively and walked towards the kitchen. You listened to the sound of him rummaging around in the small room. Feeling awkward just sitting there and not being useful, you called out.

"Do you need some help?"

"I got it. You stay warm."

You settled against the chair, wrapping yourself in the blanket. Feeling the gentle and warm brush of the radiator on your legs, you shivered slightly. Your heart was hammering in your chest, and you tried to calm yourself down by focusing on the monstera leaves instead of the presence of the man who once broke your heart.

Matt came back to the room with a steaming mug, and you took it gratefully. It looked like he didn't make any for himself. You took a sip, allowing the tea to burn your tongue.

"How have you been?"

His question knocked at the mutual understanding of your situation. You weren't exactly friends, and you were long past the point of lovers. But it didn't have to be awkward. With so much history between you, all the memories twisted and turned and took off, swirling furiously like the storm outside. But there was a blessing in it. The storm was out of your reach, and right here, right now, you were safe. The person who lapped up crumbs of attention from the man who never explicitly gave them was a part of you. But not anymore. You could start fresh.

"I'm fine. I figured you knew about my new job?"

Matt dipped his head sheepishly as if to hide his expression of being caught.

"I did. Are you enjoying it?"

"I am. It's a lot less stressful when I don't have to answer my boss' unreasonable demands. I get more freedom in what I do. The pay is much better, too."

A small smile tugged at the corner of his lips.

"I'm glad. It seemed like you had a bad time at the newspaper."

"Yeah, I did."

You nodded, feeling a brief wash of melancholy at the mention of your old job.

"I know the flowers come from you."

There was no point in avoiding the subject. Your heart was on the verge of exploding, but you had to. You both knew it was coming.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry for overstepping. Just say the word, and I'll stop any kind of contact with you."

When you didn't respond, he continued with his face angled towards you. The window behind him cast sharp shadows on his face, and from this point of view, you could see the agony on his face.

"I'm sorry if I made you feel uncomfortable. I just … I had to try to show how sorry I was. How sorry I still am."

"I know."

You sighed.

"As much as I would like to blame it all on you, it was on me as well."

At that, Matt sat up straighter and protested.

"That's not true–"

Your hand sprung out to hold his hand, keeping him there. Matt stilled as if your touch had paralyzed him.

"Please, listen to me."

You went on despite the slight shake in your voice.

"I let my expectations run wild even though we were clear from the start. It was a mutual benefit arrangement."

His other hand came to rest on top of yours. Warmth seeped from the palms of his hands, and you wished you were enveloped in his embrace instead.

"I stepped over the line myself. I wanted to show you how much you mean to me. I gave you mixed signals and lied to you about my own feelings."

You inhaled deeply.

"What feelings?"

"I really thought it was better to keep you at arm's length and not let myself … feel things for you, but I did anyway. I should have been honest with you. But I thought I wasn't deserving of someone like you."

Your heart rattled in the cage that was your chest.

"What are you saying, Matt?"

A sorrowful relief caressed his face.

"I love you. I regret not saying that to you every day we were apart."

You felt as if all the air was pulled out of your lungs.

"Don't lie to me, please. I don't want you to just– just say what I want to hear. I'd rather never have you than to have you unwillingly."

Matt placed your hand on his heart, letting you feel the rhythm underneath your palm. Erratic, wild and uncontrollable, just like yours.

"I only want you. I think about you all the time. I'm miserable when you're not around."

"I don't know what to say …"

He brought your hand to his lips and kissed it with a tenderness you had missed dearly.

"That's okay. Take your time. I'll wait for you as long as you need."

He paused briefly, then continued as if it took great strength for him to utter the words.

"Even if you no longer feel the same, it's okay, too."

You couldn't conceal the wide smile in your voice.

"I mean, telling a girl that you love her before going on a first date with her? Mindy wouldn't like that."

Matt chuckled, the sound warm like the honey he put in your tea.

"Was Mindy the one …?"

"Yup. She doesn't like you at all."

"I deserve that."

You caressed his face, feeling the stubble along his jawline. There was a feeling you thought you would never get again, but now, you were basking in its glow.

"Can we … can we take it slow?"

His lips found the palm of your hand, kissing it tenderly.

"Of course. Anything you want."

*Likes, reblogs, and comments are greatly appreciated!* Follow my side blog to receive notifications whenever I post! @cellophaine-archives

Taglist for this specific fic: @nyutasgirl @havlindzk @ashlynhasmanyhyperfixations @carstairswife

#matt murdock x reader #matt murdock x oc #matt murdock x y/n #matt murdock x you #matt murdock x fem!reader #matt murdock x f!reader #matt murdock fanfic #matt murdock fanfiction #matt murdock au #matt murdock imagine #matt murdock fic #daredevil x reader #daredevil x oc #daredevil x you #daredevil x y/n #daredevil x female reader #daredevil fic

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donottouchredbutton · 1 year ago

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this might be the weirdest idea i’ve ever had but hear me out: life is strange au but with college!matt murdock

#idk what this is #life is strange au #matt murdock au #daredevil au #daredevil fic #maybe it’ll be a thing idk #idk how to tag #matt murdock imagine

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elgrandeavocados · 1 month ago

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dissolution (part 23) | matt murdock x ofc

Story Synopsis: Elizabeth Herrera and Matt Murdock go way back. Friends since college, the two have known each other for ten years. But as a couple, they’ve been together for four and lately, their relationship is hanging by a thread, and the two are desperate to make it work.

Will their relationship survive? Or will memories of their past hinder them from healing? MATURE.

Author's Note: Well, it's finally here. The one we've all been dreading. So, grab your tissues and press play on that angsty playlist of yours because a new chapter of 'Dissolution' is here. Enjoy 💔

P.S. If you don't have an angsty playlist, a sweet anon created one. You can listen to it here as you read along!

Read Part 23 of 'Dissolution' HERE.

Excerpt from Part 23

“Have I ever mentioned how smart you are?”

I looked away from the painting and up at him. “A few times.” I smiled.

“You’re so smart,” he said. “You’re the smartest person I have ever met.”

I shook my head and laughed. “No, I’m not.”

“You are.” He smiled. “It’s one of the many things I like about you.”

I couldn’t help but smile along with him. My eyes flicked down to his lips, then back to his eyes. If only he weren’t wearing his glasses. I would love to look at his hazel eyes.

“It is?” I asked.

He nodded. “It is.”

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moonpascal · 6 months ago

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self insert x canon will always hold a special place in my heart

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farfromstrange · 2 years ago

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Total Eclipse Of The Heart | Matt Murdock

Pairing: Matt Murdock x f!vampire!Reader

Masterlist ° Parts 1 , 2

PART THREE: There is a lot about the mythology behind vampires to be found on the internet, but is it really true? Matt finds the mystery woman that has been turning his head and she once again makes him question everything he stands for, including his religion.

Warnings: Description of vampirism, mentions of death, mentions of blood, religious imagery & symbolism, blasphemy, dark themes!, not proofread

A/n: IM BACK WITH THIS STORY Y’ALL! This is actually pretty tame compared to the rest. Anyway, after I don't know how long, I have finished the chapter for this series. It's shorter than what I usually write, but I'm saving space for the smut. It's coming, I promise. If I'm correct, it might actually start happening in the next chapter, but it could also be the one after that. We'll see. I don't have a schedule for this story and I don't have the time to update regularly, so just lay back and be surprised by random updates!

18+ MINORS DNI

Vampires - (in European folklore) a corpse supposed to leave its grave at night to drink the blood of the living by biting their necks with long pointed canine teeth.

A person who preys ruthlessly on others.

That’s how Google defines it.

He wasn’t sure what the internet would bring him. He wasn’t even sure what he was searching for when he activated the text-to-speech function on his laptop very late at night as he sat in the complete darkness of his apartment, his figure only illuminated by the red light of the obnoxiously large billboard outside the windows, a light he could not see. He only heard the faint buzzing over the beating of his own heart and New York City screaming beneath him. He tuned it out, focused on what he found most important, and dove into the world of mythology and science - because how else could he explain the strange woman that seemed to follow him anywhere?

She had him in a chokehold. Every time she was around him, he felt compelled to follow her. He felt drawn to her in a dangerous way that seemed almost magical. Matt Murdock didn’t believe in magic, he didn’t believe in the reality of mythology. He believed in facts, and there was the fact that superhumans existed, the Avengers taught him that much, but who this woman was exceeded what he chose to believe. It was unholy, ungodly, and a sin in the eyes of the God he worshipped. She couldn’t be what he suspected because if she were, he would have to take God’s word and put an end to the creature that she was.

He came across an article that seemed ridiculous to read. Even saying the word sounded foreign to his ears as he asked Google to search for one species specifically, one that was not supposed to exist, only a product of centuries of retellings and then the modern media that twisted the picture.

She wasn’t supposed to exist.

“In European folklore, vampires are undead creatures that often visited loved ones and caused mischief or deaths in the neighborhoods they inhabited while they were alive.”

Deaths in the neighborhood. The suspected drug overdoses left the victims bloodless and caused some to go crazy. The injection sites were not often on the neck but on other body parts as well. All of that happened under his nose in Hell’s Kitchen, his home, his turf, his neighborhood.

“They wore shrouds and were often described as bloated and of ruddy or dark countenance, markedly different from today’s gaunt, pale vampire which dates from the 19th century.”

He couldn’t see her but he doubted she looked like that and still appealed to the eyes of human men. At the gala, the men present had practically devoured her, but she had only had eyes for him. In a room full of eligible bachelors and people looking for a quick fuck, she had chosen him. He wasn’t supposed to feel so warm when thinking about her. Her hands were on his body, her distinctive scent, and the lack of a heartbeat. He wasn’t supposed to be aroused by thinking about where her hands had wandered before and the promise of doing it again. And he wasn’t supposed to want her after what she did to the fisherman only the night before.

“Vampires are typically said to be of pale skin and range in appearance from grotesque to preternaturally beautiful, depending on the tale. Another frequently cited physical characteristic is the inability to cast a reflection or shadow, which often translates into an inability to be photographed or recorded on film.”

Preternaturally beautiful. It was as if there was no other word that could have explained her better. She was beautiful, a temptress, the snake in the garden of Eden that drove Eve to her certain demise, and Matt wasn’t sure who he was in this scenario - was he Eve or was he God? Was he going to bite the apple or was he going to serve justice for the cruel acts of the devil? Or perhaps he was a secret third option. Maybe he was the Devil standing behind the snake that was Lilith and they would both fall to their demise. He was no saint, he was merely one of God’s disciples, and he had sinned enough for a lifetime.

“A bloodsucking creature that rises from its burial place at night, sometimes in the form of a bat, to drink the blood of humans. By daybreak, it must return to its grave or a coffin filled with its native earth.”

He brought his research to work that morning, determined to figure out what he was dealing with. With his headphones in it seemed as if he were working on the legal files Foggy left on his desk, while in reality, he scouted the internet for information on a topic that first suggested to him the Twilight Saga on Netflix.

“Tales of vampires are part of the world’s folklore, most notably in Hungary and the Balkan Peninsula. The disinterment in Serbia in 1725 and 1732 of several fluid-filled corpses that villagers claimed were behind a plague of vampirism led to widespread interest and imaginative treatment of vampirism throughout western Europe.”

“Who are you?” he wondered. “What are you? Where did you come from? Where can I find you?”

“A person may become a vampire in a variety of ways, the most common of which is to be bitten by a vampire. Other methods include sorcery, committing suicide, contagion, or having a cat jump over a person’s corpse. Some people believed that babies born with teeth or on Christmas or between Christmas and Epiphany were predisposed to becoming vampires. While vampires usually do not die of disease or other normal human afflictions, and they are indeed often said to have faster-than-normal healing capabilities, there are various methods for their destruction. The most popular of those include a wooden stake through the heart, fire, decapitation, and exposure to sunlight. Vampires are often depicted as being repelled by garlic, running water, or Christian implements such as crucifixes and holy water. In some stories, vampires may enter a home only if they have been invited, and in others they may be distracted by the scattering of objects such as seeds or grains that they are compelled to count, thereby enabling potential victims to escape.”

“What are you doing?”

Matt flinched. Out of shock, his hand got caught in the cord that attached his headphones to his laptop. He hurried to press pause before his friend could hear the ridiculous research he was conducting, but it was too late. The automatic voice sounded in the office and he wished the floor would open up and just swallow him whole.

“These “undead” creatures cast no shadow and are not reflected in mirrors. They can be warded off by crucifixes or wreaths of garlic and can be killed by exposure to the sun or by an oak stake driven through the heart.”

Finally, he managed to press the spacebar to shut off the narration, but Foggy was already laughing by then.

“Are you researching vampires?” he asked, holding his stomach. “Are you in a vampire cult? Is that why you keep coming to work with bruises on your face? Is it some kinky shit you’re too embarrassed to talk about? Because if so, you’ve got a real issue, dude!”

He slammed his laptop shut before Foggy could steal it from him. “No,” he was quick to answer. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Adjusting his glasses, he pulled one of the files from the stack on his left. If he appeared to be busy, maybe he would leave him alone.

“C’mon, Matt, don’t be shy. Tell me! If it’s a girl you’re doing this for, maybe I can help. I could help you train your mojo, y’know. Or I could play wingman. If it’s a cult though, I’m out. I don’t like vampire cults. They’re disturbing.”

“It’s nothing,” Matt waved him off. “I was just… doing some research. Doesn’t matter. I’m done.”

Foggy wiggled his eyebrows. “Are you sure? A vampire chick would be crazy, man, but it would be hot. I assume she’s hot. Is she hot?”

“This is not about a girl!”

“You sure? You can tell me. I’m your best friend. Well, I’m your only friend, not counting Karen because you do not want to talk to her about this kinda stuff, trust me-”

He sneered, “Just drop it, Foggy.”

The man raised his arms, turning around to face the door. “Alright, keep your secrets, Bella Swan,” he said. “I won’t judge you. Yet. That might change in five minutes.”

Matt chuckled, although it was fake and a little over the top. “Get out,” he said with as much love as possible.

Finally, the door fell shut and he could breathe. Not only did he embarrass himself in front of his friend but he almost blew his cover. He had to be smarter about this. If she was what he suspected her to be, he needed to be more cautious. She could cause all kinds of destruction. If she was this willing to hurt an innocent man, she wouldn’t hesitate to wreak havoc on his life, too, if he didn’t do what she wanted. And he didn’t want to lose his friends to a blood-sucking monster that had no right to exist.

He set his mind on a new mission: find the strange woman and confront her before she could tear his dear Hell’s Kitchen apart.

Dawn came soon enough and on the other side of town in the small abandoned church that they claimed, her coven started to wake from their sleep. She didn’t have to research her favorite object’s species - she knew humans inside and out. After all, she had been one of them a long time ago.

When she woke up from her slumber, he was the first thought on her mind. It was getting sickening, this need for him. She yearned to touch him. He occupied every living brain cell constantly, and she couldn’t get his handsome face to fade from her vision. He was always there, every second, every day. Perhaps she was getting sick. Perhaps she had a tumor (that wasn’t possible) and she would pass away. If she had been human, that would have been a rational fear, but she wasn’t and so she had to admit to herself that she was not only infatuated with the stranger, she was obsessed. And perhaps her feelings were a little confused because he was simply different from any other man she had been infatuated with before. He was different from the men she had wanted before. Her mind reacted much differently than it usually did, and so did her body. She had never craved to tell someone the truth to the point they understood fully until he came along, and he screwed up the plans she made for her residency in New York.

Part of her was screaming to leave. They could start over somewhere. There were several identities left that they could use, but with everything that was going on around them, they were bound to stay, and she was bound to suffer through wanting him until she could finally have him. Though she feared that even then she couldn’t let that peculiar creature go. And she didn’t even know his name.

Well, that was until Talon came strutting into the main room with a brown folder in hand. She half suspected it to be the record of another victim, but she had prevented that the night before. No, what he was holding was much more precious and she considered giving him the kiss he had been craving for so long. But she wasn’t one to give in. The poor man didn’t deserve to be played with. He was one of them, after all.

Holding a mug filled with a mixture of coffee and some leftover B-negative blood, she took the file that was handed to her. “What is this?” she asked.

“The information on the man from the gala,” said Talon. “I thought you said that-”

“Huh.” She licked her lip, set down her drink, and resumed opening the documents. “I didn’t think you’d find him this fast.”

“The guest list was exclusive. It wasn’t that hard.”

“You’re right, I should have given you a more difficult task. My mistake.” Her tongue dripped with the venom of sarcasm.

When she flipped the file open, she was met with the face she adored so much. She sucked in a breath of approval, tracing her finger over the man that was Matthew Michael Murdock, Columbia graduate, and attorney at law in his little law firm in Hell’s Kitchen. Partners with Franklin Percy Nelson and working alongside their paralegal Karen Page, who was just as beautiful as the rest of the group.

“Gotcha!” she murmured with a smirk resting on her red-tinted lips. “Now you only have to find me…”

“Why don’t you visit them?” Talon burst her bubble.

She looked at Matthew’s ephemeral face, then at the man before her. “They’re humans,” she deadpanned, “They don’t work at night unless they’re healthcare or security personnel. Lawyers qualify as neither.”

“If you want a taste, you could just visit him at home.”

“If I want a- Talon, seriously, did you eat your own brain for breakfast? I require an invitation to enter anyone’s home because I am a vampire. You are a vampire too, which means you cannot enter someone’s home without an invitation either. Do you really think he would let me in after I dug my teeth into an innocent man’s throat and almost tore his neck apart right in front of him?” She cocked an eyebrow. “I don’t fucking think so.”

He pouted. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize, just get out of my face,” she said.

“Yes, boss.”

Without a heartbeat, she was hard to track. He roamed Hell’s Kitchen for a sign of her, but she was nowhere to be found. She wasn’t at the docs or in dark alleyways. She wasn’t hunting in the woods like an animal. He preyed at places he thought she would appear. She never came.

But this pull kept him connected to her, and so he soon found himself walking to the border of Hell’s Kitchen, far away from the city center. He could smell her miles away. She tainted the air with her scent, drawing a line toward her whereabouts. He followed that line until he reached the huge metal doors of the abandoned church he had only read about once.

Carefully, Matt pushed his hand against the cold material. The lock gave in. The cold air hit the lower part of his face. The stone radiated little to no heat and the curtains on the colorful windows offered no entrance for sunlight. At night, they were open, and the paintings were as clear as day in the light of the chandelier. During the day, they kept them close.

Vampires are allergic to sunlight, he remembered reading. It still felt like a fever dream. He couldn’t believe that he would even suspect such a thing. He was delusional, sick even. He wanted to know, but he was also afraid to take the first step into the walls of God’s house. It was no longer holy; the building had been tainted by the demonic possession, children of the Devil.

He clutched the crucifix around his neck tightly, and then he dared to enter.

She stood at the altar, having smelled him long before. A chuckle passed her lips and she turned around, her eyes sparkling like those of a viper, and her voice sounded like the song of a thousand sirens trying to draw him under their spell.

It was working.

“This isn’t going to hurt me, you know?” she said.

Matt licked over his lips. “Oh yeah?”

He stopped clutching the golden cross dangling from around his neck, building the perfect contrast to the crimson of his leather-clad suit. The irony of the Devil’s horns paired with the religious piece of jewelry went straight past him, but never past the woman standing right before him on the steps of the small, abandoned chapel in the heart of New York City.

“Aren’t vampires supposed to burn at the sight of a crucifix?” He realized that burn might have been too strong of a word. “…or something equally as dramatic?” he added, the hint of a dark smirk gone lost in his voice.

She chuckled. The sound bounced off the high walls decorated with poison ivy and cobwebs, and the cracks in the stone were proof of the significant age of the catholic landmark. “That’s what humans like to believe,” she said. “In your pretty little heads, it goes something like this: If the sight of Jesus on a cross can make the undead shake in their boots, God must surely be stronger than the evil lurking in the dark. I would know, I used to be like you once. A long time ago. But no, that’s actually a common misconception. The only emotion this crucifix elicits in me is pure, unbridled rage.”

“And you think I’d believe that?”

“I would say take a look in the mirror, but,” she clicked her tongue, “I don’t think you are going to see anything. Not because the mirror would be empty but because you can’t see. That’s important to clarify.”

He chuckled. “Okay, I get it. You also have a reflection. You know, you could tell me anything you want, but that still doesn’t make me believe you.”

“You don’t have a choice though.”

“Oh, I do. I always have a choice,” he said and his conviction was adorable.

“What, you want to throw garlic at me next?” The silence told her that he played with the thought. “Sweetie,” she cooed condescension in its rawest form, “That’s not even going to leave a rash. Don’t like the smell or the taste, but then again, I do not require sustenance, so nobody cares that I don’t like garlic on my food.”

“So, no fear of crucifixes, no allergy to garlic and you have a reflection. Is anything they teach us about vampires real?”

“Fair question, but no. No matter how badly you want those myths to be a reality, they’re just myths. Stories. Retellings. Children of the human imagination.”

“Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”

“Classic literature without meaning,” she said. “But it’s a good book, nonetheless.” He could hear the smile in her voice, which was about the only thing about her that was audible to his ears.

There was something terrifying about acknowledging the existence of vampires. They were dead, abominations, creations of Satan – vampires were unnatural, born from the deepest, darkest pits of hell. It was everything that he gathered after hours of research, and somehow it still wasn’t enough because she simply didn’t fit the picture he had drawn up in his mind of what a vampire would be like.

Her lack of bodily functions made it almost impossible for him to anticipate her behavior and it had him right on the precipice bothering on insanity.

“How did you know?” he questioned next.

She frowned. “That you were the man from the gala?”

Matt nodded.

“I can smell you,” she stated. “I can smell you and hear your heartbeat, that’s how I knew. And you smell oh-so-sweet. I could never forget that smell.”

He wanted to wipe that smirk off her face. She played with the same weapons he had. Her ears were as good as his and she could smell him the way he smelled her. Terrifying, he thought. She was everything he stood against and yet she was the most alike to him than anyone else.

“You figure out my name too?”

“Yes.”

“That I’m blind?”

“Blinded as a boy, lost his father young, grew up in a catholic orphanage. Graduated top of your high school class, then the top of your college class. You became a lawyer. You fight for justice. But then at night… oh, at night, the devil comes out to play. Daredevil,” she dragged out the word, “The man without fear.”

His tongue poked the inside of his cheek. “You did your research, huh,” he said. “You know everything yet nothing at all about me.”

“I could say the same about you.”

“Oh, I did my research too, alright.”

“Well, that was terrible research. Half of what the internet says isn’t true anyway.”

Scoffing, Matt chose to ignore the sheer mockery in her tone. He hated how comfortable she was around him. She had all the advantages and he was naked before her. For a man without fear, he sure was shaking in his boots just thinking about her, but it wasn’t just fear. Matt was excited. His body vibrated with the thrill she sent down his spine and he swallowed the urge to strut up to her and pull her against him, do all the lewd things she had on her mind and that projected onto him.

But he didn’t. Instead, he asked for her name. She complied, of course, saying her name in the sweet poisonous tone she always used. It was a beautiful name, made for her even. He would never tire of hearing it.

Eventually, after her name vanished from where it had hung in the atmosphere for him to taste every last sound of it, she spoke again. “You’re very educated, Matthew. I’m impressed. I like that I can talk to you on an intellectual level, although that outfit of yours is a disgrace hiding behind my favorite color,” she said.

“Why,” he challenged her, “because blood is red?”

“Perhaps, or maybe it’s just because red looks good on almost everyone.”

He scoffed.

“Dear Matthew, I know I’m currently breaking your mind, but fear not! I don’t want to kill or eat you. Not your blood anyway.”

Her eyes trailed over his body. Needy they were. Aroused, even.

He caught up on it. The longing glance, the lick of her lips, letting the saliva drip from her tongue to her bottom lip. He didn’t need to see to imagine her wild eyes undressing him.

“What do you want?” he asked. The last thing he wanted was for her to get the wrong idea.

But that dangerous woman already had the wrong idea. In her head, it was the right one. An attractive man entering her temporary stay… she would be the last person to say no to that.

“Nothing,” she stated. “I don’t have an ulterior motive. I know you want to have a reason to hate me other than the fact that I stand against everything your little catholic heart stands for, but I can’t offer you that.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Myths, novels, folklore, and everything else that even remotely borders on fantasy is something that feeds your human brain with things you understand. You want to believe what you know to be true to justify my untimely death if you were to drive a stake through my heart or something equally as dramatic. That way, you wouldn’t have to feel guilty for murdering me, but since you can probably tell that there is a faint heartbeat in my chest, it’d still be murder.”

“Untimely? I doubt that a vampire’s death could ever be untimely.”

“Three and a half centuries is pretty early for my species. Equals about the age of twenty in human years.”

“I don’t understand,” he expressed, desperate and he looked so small then, standing below her.

“My advice,” she said, taking a step down from her pedestal, “delete everything you think you know about vampires from lore or mythology and start making up your own mind.“

“Why?”

“Ask yourself this instead, why not? Why believe anything you can’t prove to be either false or true just because you have a gut feeling, or your worldviews are different? Isn’t that called prejudice?”

“Prejudice?” he said.

“Yes. I know big words too, Matthew. I mean, I am very old.” Her smirk told him she took this anything but seriously. “Well, you are Catholic,” she said. “Catholics thrive off of prejudice.”

Matt shook his head. “You have no right to judge me.”

“I’m not judging you. I’m simply telling you to open up your mind to the possibility that there might actually be a power that’s even stronger than God. Just the possibility. Consider that. Rethink the world, rethink your religion, even. Rethink everything and reconsider what’s important. Once you’ve done that, come back and have tea with me. If we’re still not on the same page then, you may drive that stake through my heart after all. I know you want to. God knows you want to. The only person who doesn’t know,” she said, tilting her head to the side as if she was talking cutely to a child, “is you, Matthew.”

“Deal,” he spoke before his brain even got the chance to think about it. “But don’t think for a moment that you’re in control of me. I can make my own decisions, and if I end up deciding to get rid of you, that’s my choice too.”

The vampire shrugged. “That’s fine by me. I do not fear death in the way you humans do.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” he chuckled breathlessly, “When I’m done with you, you’re gonna wish I’d been so merciful as to kill you.”

“Feisty, I like it.” A smirk danced on her lips in a heated rendition of salsa. “I look forward to talking to you again, Matthew.”

Her heels sounded faintly against the stone floor as she disappeared into the darkness of the abandoned church walls.

“You’re going to sleep in your coffin now?” he couldn’t help but toss after her.

The sweet sound of her usually so dooming laugh filled his ears. “Bed, actually,” she said, not even raising her voice from wherever she stood to stop and listen to him. “Coffins are so eighty-seven.”

Matt shook his head. He had always feared the creatures of the night, like the sisters at the orphanage told him to, and the priests at church always taught God’s disciples to be weary of Satan because Lucifer hides behind the most beautiful faces. The snake lurks in the dark and every person, male or female, represents Eve in the Garden of Eden, submissive to the silver tongue of the devil. That’s why you have to be on the lookout, they told them. He’s in people you don’t expect, and the creatures of the night wait for you to let them in so they can corrupt you.

Somehow though, this one was different. She was much different from what he expected and somehow, that intrigued him more than it scared him. She could have killed him but she didn’t. She could have eaten him but she didn’t. She had the opportunity, yet she chose not to.

He left the church instead of following his instincts to trap her and lock her away. He left and he decided to rethink everything as she told him to.

What could possibly go wrong?

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