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01. if you're the prosecution I get away with murder (matt/elektra)

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if you're the prosecution I get away with murder
daredevil. matt/elektra. some foggy.
1005 words. college era. ao3 link.

summary: Elektra's his girl, the worst one he knows.

note: written for a bunchof prompts. college!mattelektra is my kryptonite.





Elektra is this: thin bracelets on a thin wrist stacking up with a series of clinks, the gasoline taste of a martini with extra olives, the whisper-soft brush of hair as it spills over a shoulder. Her heartbeat is slow and constant as a metronome and in response Matt's rackets up into pure CBGB noise, hammering so hard he can barely hear anything over it. The adrenaline that shoots through Matt just from standing next to Elektra is astonishing, and he feels it the very second they meet. She's cruel, cruel, cruel and Matt loves to be hurt.

"You're pretty," she tells him, "But you're dumb," the plain denouement of an epic dress-down and Matt's pulse races, races. He knows it's a game without being fully conscious of the knowledge; it's only that he knows exactly how to play, exactly which move to make.

"You're bored," he tells her in return. Worst nightmares. Not as smart as he thinks he is. Not as interesting as she thinks she is.

The one thing Matt will come to count on is that Elektra will never be gentle with him. She knew just how to hook Matt from the jump.





They're intimate from the beginning. Not just sex, though there's that too, crowded together in a stolen sports car not an hour after they first exchange names. They have an intimacy Matt has never experienced before with a person he just met; not even months-long lovers click into place with the ease that Elektra does. She picks up his drink and downs it without asking. She bites his lip before she kisses it.

"Don't swallow," she murmurs after. "You have to spit the poison out."





"I think you know me better than anyone ever has," Matt tells her, inelegantly sprawled on a crappy futon with Elektra in his arms. Ten years later it will become an ironic statement, but when he says it it's just true. Simple and honest. Elektra will always be able to access a part of him that no one else is allowed to know about, even Foggy.

He knows Elektra smiles in response because he can feel it where her face is pressed against his chest. "I hear you, Matthew," she says, slow and witchy. He knows what she means. She hears the subtext, she hears the words he means behind the words he says. She hears his heart. That's a dangerous thing.

So is Elektra.





Foggy hates her. Matt doesn't intend to ever introduce them, Matt prefers keeping the oil and water of his life from becoming one big mess, but spending as much time as he does with them both it's impossible to avoid overlap. "It's about time you introduced me to your boyfriend," Elektra says, amused, and Matt stifles a laugh, only because Foggy has taken to referring to her exclusively as the other woman.

Matt intends a quick casual coffee meetup but instead Foggy stumbles in on them fucking in the kitchen one day when they were too hot to make it to Matt's closet-sized bedroom. After the initial awkwardness is dispersed with the three of them sit down to the worst lunch known to man, each claiming a corner of the beat-up table that's half-heaped with notes and textbooks. Elektra wears Matt's Columbia t-shirt and nothing else, which is made worse by that fact that it's actually a shirt of Foggy's that Matt stole freshman year. Later it will disappear when she does.

Elektra is like a cat playing with its food, baiting Foggy with underhanded comments and showering snide affection on Matt. She's a snob. She's not a nice person and she isn't good at pretending to be one, either. Matt's skin prickles for all of these things, he thrills at every awful thing about her, but put into this very normal context he is aware of just how much she does not fit into the rest of his life. And how much he doesn't fit either.

The next day, Foggy says, "Dude, I get it, she's like crazy set-me-on-fire hot, but really?"

Matt opens his mouth, weighed down suddenly by the heaviness of his life up to this point and unable to convey even an ounce of it to Foggy. "Yeah," he says. "Really."





The thing is, the thing is, the thing Foggy can never get is that Matt never spits the poison out. He swallows it like his father's whiskey, like a mouthful of blood. Matt still takes himself to confession, brings his hand across his body in the sign of the cross, offers up his sins and says his prayers, but none of it cleans him out. Sometimes he's afraid that the darkness is all there is and everything else is just a thin sugar-sheen keeping him together, crème brûlée waiting to be cracked. Glass waiting to shatter.

Elektra is the only one who gets that, so it's funny, ironic even, that she's the one who ends up defining the line for him instead of smearing it to nothing. Elektra wants blurry. She wants Matt to face the worst in himself and kiss it on the mouth. But instead the bloody face of Roscoe Sweeney under his knuckles only reflects back what Matt isn't. What he can't be.

"Kill him," she says. "For your father, for us. Kill him." There are no rules in the world they've made together, just want. The only problem is that Matt doesn't want that. Roscoe Sweeney's broken face won't bring back his father. Nothing will. Nothing could.

It is funny. Matt never would have guessed that that would be the thing that wrecked them; he thought the darkness was what held him and Elektra together.





She leaves but she's never really gone. It's the little things. The sound of a woman's bracelets clinking together. The taste of olives. Every glass Matt has ever broken by accident. Elektra's in all of it, in everything. She leaves but she never lets him go.

Elektra's his girl, the worst one he knows.

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