Open

[blindninja]

» WHO? Matt Murdock & OPEN
» WHEN? Now
» WHERE? Deck 6 => 6.27 => Deck 5
» WHAT? Arrival
» WARNINGS? TBC

Arrival Hall (CLOSED to Frank Castle)
It's cold.

He's not where he was before. He knows that much. He squeezes his eyes shut and lets his senses go, scanning his surroundings like an uncalibrated radar. Metal. Lots of metal, clanging, banging. But everything is wrong. Lighter, like things are floating even when they're not. People are talking. Laughing, maybe. But distant, like the next apartment building over, or somewhere down the next block. The fine hairs on his arms and on the back of his neck stand with the low buzz-hum of the vessel, creaking, engine churning like an old ship, suspended in space.

It's like a hangover, except. He feels heavy even though he's light. Shackles on his feet. His head hurts. Everything hurts. And God, what is that noise?

Less of a waking up, more of regaining consciousness as Matt rolls over with a pained cry and a grimace.

His hand crawls over to the smartwatch, trying to mute the beeping and humming and screeching grating against his ears. What day is it? What time? What happened? He clutches the device with one hand and runs the other hand down his body. Daredevil's gone. Only Matthew. A jumpsuit covering the bandages. Stitches. Blood. No pearly gates, no apostles. No questions to answer about how he's lived his life, whether he's lived it well, whether he's repentant. Paid enough of a price. Just a jumpsuit... and a pair of boots?

"...lectra." Talking feels like rousing up a sandstorm in his throat. He groans and struggles to his feet, using energy he doesn't have to drive him forward. Out. Just the one thing on his mind.

I have to save her.

He gets blood on his palm as he presses his hand over a wet bandage, stitches having been ripped as he sluggishly stumbles deliriously down the corridor. His boots clunk along at an uneven, unsteady pace. Everything is too loud. Too cold. Too heavy. There's blood on the wall where he braced himself against it. And then there's a door. Everything flickers behind his closed eyelids. Black, red, black, red, black, black, black...

Room 6.27. Where everything's a little quieter. And he can just focus. Keep the red lights on in the dark.

6.27. Matthew. Chapter Six. Verse Twenty-Seven. 'Can any one of you, by worrying, add a single hour to your life?'

Hn. That's funny. The chuckle bubbles to the surface. For all the pain He's inflicted, God still has a decent sense of humour.


Departure Lounge (OTA)
He doesn't take kindly to being dumped in the med bay, but there's not much of a fight he can put up against Frank Castle in his current state. He's not sure how long he's been resting there, but when he's well enough to orientate himself again, he's not staying in the med bay. The machines are noisy. He has questions. He's scared.

Matt makes it two steps out of the med bay before space sickness kicks in. The sheer wrongness of the gravitational pull throws him off, throws everything around him off. He sinks down to his knees and clutches his head, curling up against the wall. He looks pale, like he's about to throw up.

Comments

[resleeves]

"Yes, we're talking about death and yes, I know what that fucking feels like," Kovacs says, rolling his eyes. "Anymore than that, you're going to have to talk to those that have died here. I've avoided that so far."

He'd just found the body of a loved one dead. Rotting. He was trying not to think of that.

"But feel free to try it out for yourself," Kovacs offers, shrugging one broad shoulder. "Better hope you're not the exception to the rule though. That would be terrible."

[blindninja]

"You don't really think that," Matt says flatly. It's easier to focus on that than dwell on the idea of the impermanence of death. It seems... cruel, to keep coming back like this. Prolong the suffering.

This guy isn't exactly giving off the sharing and caring vibes. Maybe it's an unfair judgement but it probably wouldn't bother him at all to be stepping over corpses around this place.

"But I appreciate the sentiment."

[resleeves]

"I don't mean a lot of things I say," Kovacs agrees, watching Matt steadily, "but I still say them."

It just means that whoever he says things to has a challenge on trying to figure out what the fuck he means and what the fuck he doesn't.

"Taking it you've never died before?" Kovacs asks. Which meant he wasn't from a place with stack technology and he didn't come from whatever fucked up world this station was stuck in.

[blindninja]

"Not yet." It hasn't occurred to him that maybe he had died at the bottom of Midland Circle and got brought back here.

"It doesn't work, you know. Shutting people out." Matt's clearly more concerned about Tak's odious personality than dying.

[resleeves]

"That so?" Oh Matt, you were trying to pep talk the wrong person here. You'd have better luck with almost anyone else on the station. It was admirable that you wanted to try but it wasn't going to work.

"I don't know, been working pretty fucking well for me for most of my life," Kovacs says, ignoring that few years span where he had let people in and had felt pretty fucking good about things.

"Is this where you give me a lot of advice, newbie?" Kovacs wonders.

[blindninja]

"My name is Matthew." They don't have to be friends or even get along but he's not going to be intimidated. He doesn't yet understand how much they have to play nice in order to make it out of this station alive but he just knows that even an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff is better than a dumpster filled with rubbish bags full of broken glass.

"We're all stuck here together. You're not going to make it out of here on your own. Even if that's how you've been living your life up until now."

[resleeves]

Kovacs just eyes him steadily before he rolls his eyes and shakes his head. "I'd say it a pleasure, Matthew, but it's not. You don't want to be here and I sure as fucking shit don't want to be here. But, I've been doing pretty well on my own so far."

No, you haven't, Kovacs. You'd been doing terribly and, yeah, he kind of hasn't been on his own really. Not if you count Miller and Ricki and a few others. But, Kovacs isn't thinking about that and he's definitely not going to admit that to someone he doesn't know.

"You planning on making friends with everyone, then?"

[blindninja]

"No." Matt's too fiercely independent to want to be seen as sidling up to people just because he might need their help or whatever it is they think of a blind man stumbling around their ship. But maybe this time around he won't push people away at the earliest opportunity. First he has to mend his old bridges before he can build new ones.

"I'll lend a hand where I can. If friendships happen then so be it."

[resleeves]

"You're gonna get a lot of people who want to preach the power of friendship," Kovacs says wryly. People who wanted to try and change you, to make you into a better man not thinking that you were always as good as you could be.

"I tend to throw doors at them," he says but his tone and expression don't make it easy to discern if he's lying. "For lack of any better weapons in this fucking place."

He'd wanted a gun. He'd gotten his sister's body instead.

[blindninja]

It's easier if they get along if they want to be able to work together harmoniously. But they don't have to be overly friendly in order to cooperate. After all, those team-ups have tended to be a lot harder on Matt when things go south.

"How exactly are you planning on slicing or shooting your way out of here?" Matt can't help but quip back.

[resleeves]

"Haven't decided yet." It was definitely something to think about though. And, when that time came, he'd take that prick Miller with him because he wasn't totally alone so there, Matt.

"But, there are hangars here. If there's not a fucking ship in there, I'll make one out of fucking alcohol bottles and toilet water."

Again, he doesn't know how but he'd figure it the fuck out. "If you wanna blow a bunch of hot air to give us a boost, I'll take it."

[blindninja]

If Tak takes Matt to the hangars he can probably tell him exactly what's in there. Matt makes a note of the existence of them anyway. Maybe he can ask someone else discreetly to take him, when his senses aren't going haywire.

The comment about hot air makes Matt laugh even though laughing seems to be making his vertigo worse.

"Sure. I suppose that's something I'm good for around here."

[resleeves]

Look at that, they're bonding. Or at least Matt doesn't look like he's wishing for death because it would be nicer than feeling like he was going to puke and having to listen to Kovacs talk shit about him.

"Good. Then maybe I'll bring you along for propulsion power," he says dryly. "Wouldn't want to be stuck in space with Miller's chalky ass and no way to do anything but float. I'd kill him before the first day was out."

[blindninja]

Matt linefaces at Tak, not liking this relegating him to some sort of burden or stowaway because he can't possibly be of any use to them even though, well, he's blind so he can't reliably drive anything.

"How about I stop you two from killing each other?" That's kind of useful, right? Matt can be the voice of reason when certain women aren't involved.

[resleeves]

Kovacs considers it for a moment before rolling his eyes. "You think you could stop me from doing anything?"

He looked about as breakable as Miller did in his current condition. Kovacs is pretty sure that a stiff breeze would be enough to fell Matt enough that he wouldn't be able to get back to his fucking feet.

"I'm almost tempted to take you on this hypothetical fucking voyage just to see you try." He has no confidence in your skinny ass, Matt.

[blindninja]

"Yeah. I could." That's the irritating lawyer talking, probably, thinking he could appeal to whatever common sense Tak had. Daredevil likely can't stop bullets but whether he might be able to stop Tak in his tracks when he's recovered remains to be seen.

"Who's Miller? Did you know him before you came here?"

[resleeves]

"No." He probably wouldn't have paid any attention to Miller if he had. Miller would have been BCPD and Kovacs worked super fucking hard to get on with Ortega like he does. Miller would have been irritating and cloying and probably filled with hairline fractures.

"Met him here. The only person I knew when I got here was me," Kovacs tells him, shrugging. "That's a good thing. I don't need anyone from my world showing up here."

Not after Rei.

[blindninja]

“I wouldn’t wish this on anyone I know either.” It is completely not what Tak meant and Matt sort of knows it, but he’s going with the kinder interpretation of the sentiment anyway. Unfortunately it seems like a few people Matt knows are already here fumbling around trying to figure this place out.

“If you found Noah’s ark in the hangar, wouldn’t you want to save everybody?”

[resleeves]

"Want? No," Kovacs says with a quick shake of his head. "But, that doesn't mean I'd leave everyone here and take the shit for myself. I'd think about it, sure, but I wouldn't do it."

So, there you go, Matt, maybe he wasn't completely fucking heartless. He wasn't going to go out of his way to run through the ship and make people come along but he wasn't going to take something like that for himself and leave everyone behind.

That would just ensure someone find him and kill him and too many people know about his stack here for him to take that chance.

[blindninja]

Well, regardless of whatever is motivating that line of thinking, Matt thinks Tak can't be that bad. Especially when he's not lying when he says that just to look good even though he wouldn't have to in front of a blind man. Matt can't help but smile and offers a quiet 'okay'.