4088/As the Mist Leaves No Scar

As the Mist Leaves No Scar
Date of Scene:	17 March 2018
Location:	New York City
Synopsis:	Matt and Elektra share a night, and discover, to their sorrow, that sometimes love isn't enough.
Cast of Characters:	Daredevil, Elektra

---

Daredevil has posed:
The quiet suited Matt, as Elektra had said earlier, words could be hard and in their hands, they could be weapons, intended or not, they had made each of them bleed more times than they could count. So, silence, shared between them was nice even if it was fleeting.

His breath is exhaled, as he feels her fill the space beside him, her hair cascading across his shoulder before its joined by the gentle weight of her head. Their fingers intertwine and Matt strokes the space between her thumb and index finger idly.

He couldn't see the moonlight or the sky, those were lost to him, but he could feel the glass of windows cool with the night air, the city so far below them humming quietly with the sounds of his city at night. It had the same effect of peace and quietude.

"I see it," he says of her trying to make changes. "And I'm proud of you, but there are things about me I can't change either, even if it would make this so much easier."

He'd decided that much tonight. As much as he needed Elektra, wanted her, he was still Matt Murdock, still the Devil of Hell's Kitchen, he couldn't let those things go and still be someone he could live with, someone Elektra could still love. It was a beautiful trap they were in unable to let go, but unable to make the changes that would let them truly be together.

He does manage to smile in spite of their situation, a tight thing born of grim determination against what seems like the inevitable, if Matt were to label it, he'd call it his Catholic smile. "I hoped for it, but yeah, I didn't think we'd ever be here again. And I didn't hate you back at Fogwell's, I was just frustrated," a little exhale of a laugh there. "And wasn't sure if it'd be another two years before I saw you again." The smile shifts again growing easier, "Besides, this is much more comfortable than a boxing ring."

He breathes long and slow, "I'm glad we had this Elektra, I want you to know there's no regrets."

Elektra has posed:
"Well," Elektra murmurs, her thumb running along top of his, "I'm not sure I did any of it to make you proud of me. Though there was a point I wanted you to notice. And then I got angry. And then I stopped caring."

It wasn't really a lie, even if she hadn't really stopped caring. She'd just accepted the inevitable and told herself she didn't care. She'd moved on and carried on with her life without that contact between them. Elektra had known it was a Hail Mary of a thing to begin with, and likely wouldn't ever have changed anything between them. It was childish, even.

It's why when she started her next project, the one Foggy had helped her pick a site for, she'd not made any effort to let Matt know what she was up to. They lived in the same city, but in a city of millions, they may as well have been strangers.

Gotham was a far cry away from Clinton. That, too, had been deliberate.

Then, when she and The Hand had their final showdown, it had been better that he knew nothing of her. Had perhaps forgotten her, relegating her away to college misadventure. She'd told herself she wanted it that way. It saved all the decisions neither of them could make.

The very decisions that lay with them in her bed.

She smiles, then. "Yes, you were angry with me. And frustrated. But you'd have hated me if I'd slept with you and the truth had come out. There was a time I'd have slept with you anyway, consequences be damned. I suppose I grew up that tiny little bit."

"I know what I said in the past, Matthew, but that was then. We are who we are. It took a long time to accept, but I can see that now. " Her fingers tighten within his momentarily, then relax. "We have tonight, though."

Daredevil has posed:
"I know you didn't, doesn't change the fact I'm proud of what you've done," Matt says quietly before saying, "I didn't understand it, I didn't see the change in you, just the opportunities the contracts could be twisted to be used against me." He lets out a breath. "I am sorry. I should have had more faith in you."

Looking back it stung him how cruel and stupid he'd been. Here was Elektra trying to change and offering a chance for him to help her, but he turned away from her. It wasn't as though there were a lot of other people she would reach out to like that.

Matt nods, "It's true," he says. "I would have been furious and it'd take more than a cold shower and some recklessness in the suit to fix it," not that he'd really fixed the things broken at the gym until tonight. "And maybe a bit," he teases lightly, which should tell her he had noticed.

Turning his head so she could see his face if she chose, Matt says, "No. I refuse to accept this all we get, I mean I know it seems impossible, there has to be a way," he had come to the same conclusions as she had, but to hear them spoken aloud, they sounded so final, so heartbreakingly wrong, that he had to fight. "I meant what I said, about the Hand. We could run, or we could betray the other leaders to Danny and the Chaste," he blinks, feeling the pang of conscience even as he said those words. It would mean deaths, albeit the deaths of monsters, but deaths.

He slams his fist into those expensive sheets, but before he can continue a sudden realization makes his blood run cold.

"Elektra, if I'd signed when you first made the offer, would this have happened?" he asks. He wasn't sure when she struck her deal, but given when the Hand had gone quiet in New York he had a rough idea. "The Hand I mean."

He'd left her alone against the Hand and she'd done the only thing she could do to survive.

Elektra has posed:
Elektra draws his hand to her lips to kiss the indent between thumb and forefinger. "I'm still the same me, Matthew. I don't know that I deserved the chances you think you should have given."

She chuckles softly. "Funny, when I first brought those contracts to you, I wanted those chances. I wanted you to see that I was trying to do better. That even if I couldn't be what you wanted, I could still do good."

She sighs softly.

"It just didn't turn out that way. And I'd be lying if I didn't initially hope it would force you to deal with me, if not on a regular basis, at least until things were underway. Only that led to all... everything that went wrong in between then and now. I should have offered it to someone else. Not spoken to you. Only, you're you. And who else lives and breathes believing in what I was offering? You were really the only choice, even if I wasn't."

She doesn't need to turn to see the earnestness within him. She can hear it in his voice. Feel it reverberate through his body. "To what end, Matthew? So that your friends can die? For what. For something that isn't their fight? For something that I accepted to stop to bloodshed?"

It was true. That was one of the reasons. The other was.. she couldn't be what Matt wanted. She had this need for something in her life, and she hoped that this would fill that void. That if she gave that darkness within her a place to go, it would stop owning the rest of her and allow her to be better.

It was a delicate dance, but she liked to tell herself that she was doing it.

She doesn't answer his last question at first. It was another of those things that she could not change, so why fill him with regrets? Only, no answer was an answer, and the story he'd create for himself would be infinitely worse.

"You didn't make me have to take the offer, Matthew. You couldn't have changed things. It would have just been more of that bloodshed I mentioned. I made a logical choice." She chuckles softly, again, wryly even. "A deal with the devil, if you must. It's better this way. Truly."

Daredevil has posed:
Before, a part of him would have agreed with her, that what she did didn't deserve forgiveness, but her campaign against him had silenced that voice. If he was willing to offer forgiveness and chances to monsters, he could do the same for her.

"Bullshit," Matt says, "You deserved them, hell you were the one who taught me that with your files, I wasn't fair to you. And you are doing good things Elektra. You've got to give yourself more credit."

Maybe that wasn't her intended lessons with the files but it was the one he got from them.

"I should have signed the first time you asked," Matt says. "It should have been different, but with how things ended last time, I just saw it as a trap." His voice is pained, and full of regret. She was right though, she'd found the perfect thing to offer him, the chance to do what he always wanted to do with Nelson and Murdock, help those who couldn't help themselves, to be a hero without the suit, which is why he was afraid of it. The way he'd grown up, things that were too good to be true often were. That lesson had made him miss out on things before but none of those others stung like this.

The rest? The rest just breaks his heart.

She was right of course, there was no running, if they left, then his friends would suffer for it. If they fought, the Hand was legion, they'd do damage, but again they'd die.

"We could-" he begins. "Or-"

No solutions came that didn't end in blood, blood that he had no right to ask be spilt in his name. He wanted to though, he wanted to call Stick, Luke, Danny, Jessica, Natasha, everyone else he knew who could fight and wipe the Hand from the Earth, but he knew the cost of that war, even if it could be won, and it was too much to ask anyone else to pay, even for her.

The truth of that left him feeling hollow, her reassurances fell on deaf ears, he knew this was in part his fault, if he'd been there, things could have gone differently, they could have found some other way; instead he turned his back and damned her.

"Heh," Matt says finally, "Not funny," though a tight smile appears at her words. "Elektra. I'm losing you, I don't see the better in that."

Elektra has posed:
"You say that because.." Elektra begins of his 'bullshit', of how she 'deserves a break '. She wanted to say 'because you love me' but it seemed too smug a thing for this moment. And she wanted to believe she deserved some credit, not because he loved her, but because maybe... just maybe... she wasn't her past.

Only, she was, wasn't she? She'd been raised to this. She'd accepted The Hand's offer so that she'd have this outlet. Sure, it was a tempered outlet - damn Matt, he really had reached her in unexpected ways - but there were still things she had no compunction about doing, including killing.

Unlike Matt, she didn't see the need for mercy. Or, more to the point, she didn't find the need for mercy within her often. She had, multiple times now, looked into the face of someone she'd stopped in an alley and taken down, and contemplated being him. Contemplated not finishing the job. Not killing. She still found herself doing the deed, though, that spark that should be within her never flaring into life and saying 'no. not this time, no.' It always remained silent, not daring to draw attention to her while she finished what he would not.

Though she would admit that those moments happened more often now. Even in her greatest fits of pique with Matthew since her return to New York, she'd found herself stopping and wondering...

When he tries, and fails, to find another solution, she murmurs softly, her voice touched with sadness, "It's okay, Matthew. I think I always knew it would come to this. All I've done is accept the inevitable and perhaps mitigate the damage."

She tries to keep the bitter edge from her voice as she says, just as softly, "At least now some of your job will be easier. There are things we are not doing anymore. I'm restructuring. I can't make it all go away, though. Some things are too ingrained. I'd be signing my own death warrant."

Elektra doesn't tell him how aware she is that she's still signed her own death warrant with the move she's made. All she's done is perhaps buy herself some extra time. And maybe, if she buys enough, she might become powerful enough, and legend enough, that it will become a moot point.

She knew of at least one in The Hand who few would dare raise their voices to, let alone a weapon.

It's the last, though, that breaks her heart. Her first instinct, thoughts of 'but you never had me Matthew', only she doesn't say that. She doesn't want those words to be true. Only here they are again, back to the same argument. The same truth they both knew would haunt them. The irreconcilable differences that had inevitably thrown them apart in the past. The things that neither could change about themselves.

It was all well and good to be lying here in a circled pool of moonlight, on a bed with expensive Egyptian cotton sheets, and pretend that the outside world didn't exist, only it existed, and what then?

"We can steal nights." Her lips form a similar smile to his own, only where his is grim, hers is sadly resigned. "This is where we're supposed to say that as long as we both know the other is alive and safe that it's okay." She gives a bitter little laugh, stroking her thumb along his where their hands are still joined. "You can't save me, Matthew, but I can make sure you're safe." Safer. She really couldn't keep him safe. He was what he was. "And I know what direction the knives will be coming from."

Daredevil has posed:
There was some truth in what goes unsaid between them in that he gives her a break because he loved her, but also that she was worthy of them, and his love, on her own merits. She has good in her, he wouldn't have found things to love about her otherwise, but he knew that goodness was so often choked with boredom and darkness that she lost sight of it, hell, he'd lost sight of it too in their time apart. It had been easier to think of her as some sort of ex from hell, even if he'd missed her desperately for the years had been apart. But it was there, he'd seen it when she laid out all she'd been doing with the community centre and the contracts. Even what she professed to be doing with the Hand, stopping bloodshed, those were good things, something a monster would never contemplate.

And yet, there were things she did that he couldn't ever accept, that was the crux of them, he was in love with the woman but appalled by her acts and he could find no way to get over that, but at the same time he couldn't walk away. Seeing the good in her, everytime he thought of turning his back again, all he could see in his mind's eye was the bright light of her goodness sinking out of sight into a sea of darkness until it was snuffed out entirely.

He couldn't let that happen, but neither could he change for her, staying by her side and condoning what she did by his silence. He gave her passes, he turned a blind eye, but somehow being parted from her made it a lapse he could live with, as though, denying his happiness was the penance for the sins he committed by not stopping her.

He sighed.

And on top of all of that was the Hand. They were legion and were he on his own, he'd throw himself into destroying them to get her free, but he wasn't alone and so he was trapped. Even if he turned his back on them today and didn't look back it wouldn't spare them the Hand's vengeance. He knew that much about them.

Still, he could understand the truth of it, while at the same time being unable to accept it.

She could it seemed, the sad resignation of her words broke his heart. How could she just accept her death like that? How could he?

It just lead them back in circles, and his sorrow became frustration and rage. He needed an outlet.

He sat up, pulling away from her as he did, "For how long, Elektra?" he asks of the stolen nights. "At a certain point it just becomes self-flagellation. I'm not that sort of Catholic," the words were spat out in a bitter mockery of the usual jokes about his faith.

He regrets the heat in his words, but the anger is the scaffold keeping him together.

"And I don't want to be safe if that's the cost."

There is a bitter bark of a laugh at them both, a pair of perfectly matched martyrs.

Elektra has posed:
When he sighs, Elektra knows the shift is coming. She might not know what form it's going to take, but she knows it's coming. If they'd lain there in silence, things would have been much simpler, only they were them, and silence was not their language. He was an orator by profession, and she? She was a Diplomat's daughter. Language was what they knew. At times it was their first and most brutal weapon.

When he sits up, she knows she's losing him. It won't just be about the limits upon their relationship. It will evolve into something else. The only way he'll be able to accept her. The only way she knows how to save him.

Apart.

Oh, he'll want to love her. He'll even want those stolen nights he's spitting back out at her - but if he turns this around, turns it into an argument, another of their war of caustic words, he'll walk away thinking he's right. His mind will be filled with righteous indignation and condemnation and he'll have convinced himself that he's done the right thing.

And she? She'll let him. She's the one who began drawing back first. The one who spoke of stolen evenings. Of accepting what they couldn't change. She's the one who embraced The Hand at the cost of any other future she might have - for any and all of the reasons she would and wouldn't tell herself she'd taken that path.

More, she'd do it to protect him. She could keep eyes upon Matthew, and she could send minions to dispatch problems, but ultimately, if it were known that he held not a place in her bed, but a spot in her heart, he could be used against her. He'd be the weapon they'd use to take her down.

And if she refused, they'd take him down.

There wasn't a way to win that. Not without that long and bloody war he'd already stuttered and stumbled around coming to the very conclusion that she had: There was no way to win this at a cost any of them could live with.

Even she couldn't live with the cost of winning that war.

When he sits up, so does she, her hair falling about her shoulders and along her collarbone. "What do you want me to say, Matthew? That I'll stop the killing? That I'll step down?"
5rThere's exasperation in her voice now, a very finely held edge of it; taut like a hair trigger ready to snap.

"Do you think they'll stop hunting me if I do? Do you think your life won't be at risk if I do? What would you choose? You be me, and tell me, what's the answer?"

Irritated now, she slips from the bed, and gathers their scattered items of clothing from the floor, hanging them neatly over the clothing rack for just that purpose before coming to sit on the end of the bed.

"This was a mistake, wasn't it?"

Tiredly, she sighs, leaning her elbows on her knees, and resting her head in the palm of her hands.

"Love shouldn't be this hard," she whispers.

Daredevil has posed:
Oh, Matt definitely wishes they had just lain there in silence, allowed themselves this night, but it wasn't to be. Their natures betrayed them and instead of peace they'd only managed to tear open old wounds and create more in the doing of it.

It was typical of them he knew, but it didn't make it burn any less. He had needed this, just one night of solace with the woman he loved, even if it was all just a lie. He wanted to scream at the heavens and demand what he'd done to wander like Cain without knowing shelter, but he knew it wasn't God's fault, it was theirs, they were different and the same in all the wrong ways and yet unable to quit each other.

He knew walking away right now was the less painful course in the long term, but damn it did he want those stolen nights even now. He punches the bed, teeth gritted.

Matt feels her rise from the bed, hears the shifting of her hair against her skin, his attention fixed on her even though his head remains turned away.

"Yes," he answers her. "That's exactly what I want you to say."

He lets out a breath. "But we don't get what we want do we?"

The questions that follow just stoke his annoyance. "You know I don't have any answers for you," he says. He rises from the bed to stand by the window, his hand pressed against the glass feeling the vibrations to go with the noises of his city, his other lover, his only one at this point.

Her question, has him turning, drenched in the silver of the moonlight. He shakes his head. "No," he says. "Talking was, the rest-" he says. "-The rest, we needed, or I needed." It felt selfish to say it, especially with how much hurt that taste of what couldn't be had caused them.

He turns back towards the window, even as his senses stay with Elektra.

Love, there was that word, he tried not to think of it often, Stick had made it synonymous with weak and as much as he hated the old man for that, it had stuck. Still, it applied here.

"No, it shouldn't," he says quietly. He turns back again, "But when have we been normal?" he asks, his tone is tired, the humor so dry as to be brittle, but it is there.

Elektra has posed:
Her hands fall away, and Elektra lifts her head.

"I can't say it, Matthew. I can't say I'll stop. I can't say I'll leave. Even if I could stop, could leave, do you think they'll let me?"

She sighs softly, agreeing. "Tonight was.." Elektra shakes her head, looking over to him, not knowing how she'd become this woman. How that man had become part of her despite all she'd intended; all she'd been taught. "I wanted it as much as you. Only it didn't change anything, did it? Even if we wanted it to."

Elektra rises from the bed and joins him, wrapping her arms about him, her head rested just over his heart. "It isn't even just us anymore. Maybe it's simplest if we say goodbye. Stop hurting one another with what we can't have."

She says it, but her arms remain about him; her head remains rested against him. She's a contradiction of terms. This is where the bloodletting should begin. Where they should both be making it easier for the other to walk away, heart broken and weary, but without this continual march of Sisyphus up that hill, over and over, the same rock of contention between them.

Daredevil has posed:
"I know they won't let you," Matt says frustrated as the problem he had been bashing his head against since she first confessed to him is brought back into the fore. There was more he wanted to say, about how it was her fault she was with the Hand, but he doesn't put words to those thoughts. Stopping short of doing what was needed to set them adrift from each other. Another half-measure.

Matt can feel her eyes on him, he shakes his head, "I don't think it was supposed to, just a chance for us to not do this," he says gesturing between them. Though it hadn't left them entirely unchanged, it had closed some of their older wounds, ones that stayed closed even as they had begun to savage each other with words again.

Tracing Elektra's steps across the room he takes her in his arms as she takes him in hers. He tenses at oblique reference to the Hand regretting the part he played in that coming to pass even as he regretted her joining. As before, the words are there sharpened to a knife's edge, ready to cut and slash and leave her wounded as she does the same to him, but he can't say them. Not with her leaning against him like that, not feeling the things he'd come here for.

"Maybe," he says of her statement but makes no move to let her go. He breathes in deeply, letting it go before saying, "Or maybe we can steal one night, before we do what we have to."

Elektra has posed:
The answer is simple, then. So very, very simple.

Wordlessly, Elektra lifts her head away from his shoulder and slips her arms from about him, a hand catching one of his at the last moment before they part fully.

"Come to bed, Matthew," she whispers as she leads him back to what little solace is left to them. Morning will bring daybreak and sorrow, while the sun will shine on a city that won't know or care what has transpired here.

That is the way of the world.


As the mist leaves no scar
On the dark green hill,
So my body leaves no scar
On you, nor ever will.

When wind and hawk encounter,
What remains to keep?
So you and I encounter,
Then turn, then fall to sleep.

As many nights endure
Without a moon or star,
So will we endure,
When one is gone and far.

    ~Leonard Cohen; As the Mist Leaves No Scar