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Something seemed very…”off”…about Matt, something that Frank found hard to place at first. He slid a cautious look over at the suited lawyer from across the café table, drumming his fingers against the brown ring of coffees past on its slick surface.
"Could you uh…not…do that please,” Matt requested softly.
Frank obliged, but not without a soft snort into his mug as he lifted it to his nose.“Sure thing, Princess,” he murmured between gulps.
Matt nodded his head in sarcastic indignance."Cute,” he grumped.
Frank stared a few moments longer in the relative silence. It was not very often he got to admire the baby-doll features of his newfound partner in full light. Matt still bore the faint red scar under his left eye from the gang-banger that kicked him so hard his red mask had flown clean off. Frank had emptied a clip into the shit-bag’s head, even though the first shot had blown his brain out the back of his skull, because *nobody* touched his Matt. Then there was the split in the redhead’s bottom lip—that was Frank’s doing, sad to say. He’d gotten a little rough last night and bit down in the middle of a heated kiss. Frank absentmindedly traced a finger over the deep bruise on his own cheek, the one Matt had given him as a direct result of the infraction. He smiled a little.
Then there was the matter of those devastatingly long eyelashes—the ones that veiled his cocoa-dark eyes and fluttered around teasingly in spite of the blood-red frames that caged them. Yup—even when he was pissed off, Matt was pretty. Beautiful, even.
"You, ah…” Frank knew that, ideally, a question should come after that remark. He wanted to say something, start some type of conversation, but beyond “you”, he had nothing. He crinkled his nose, his head swaying from side to side as if to stir up some type of…something…anything. “You got any new hits?”
Fucking Frank! Really? You’re supposed to be on a *date* and you bring up mission shit? He crammed his face back down into his cup.
"Nothing yet,” Matt murmured. His hand flew up to his collar, pulling at the starched fabric and waving his hand as if to swat at a fly.
Okay, now this was too much. “Man, what is with you?” Frank cocked his head, incredulous.
“Sorry, it’s…the ah…” Now painfully aware that he was doing a sucky job at hiding his behavior, Matt shoved his hands down into his lap and chewed on the red split in his lip. “It’s the rain.”
Frank glanced up towards the gentle pattering on the window, the seemingly inviting little spray that trickled down the sills and made all the neon colors of the traffic outside bleed like some fancy painting. “Huh.” Frank took another gulp of cinder-black coffee, as fast as he could swallow it, and knocked it down on the cheap counter.
"Mmmh,” Matt groaned, touching the side of his head.
"Gives you a headache or somethin’?,” Frank guessed.
“No, it, uh…” Matt’s fingers flickered next to his temple. “It messes with my…you know.”
"Gotcha.” Frank was lying, quite a bit, actually. He couldn’t possibly understand how it was Matt *saw* what he did with his hearing. He hadn’t thought much on it, being that fighting alongside Matt was a lot like fighting alongside any other lethally-trained vigilante. Except that this particular vigilante could *smell* the gunpowder and knew the grade of weaponry before Frank even saw them. He could sense the bad-guys, too: could count how many and where just by the number and frequency of their heartbeats. “You wanna get out of here?,” Frank offered, pulling out of his side of the booth without waiting for Matt’s reply.
"Yeah,” Matt said. There was an undertone of relief in his voice, and he followed Frank’s footsteps as they headed towards the door.
That little trickle against the window-pane was now a downpour as the two headed outside, hearing the bell chime above their heads as Frank swung the café door open.
“Shit,” Matt murmured with a hand against his temple.
Frank almost thought it cute—the good little choir boy made the word sound foreign, almost…clean.
Matt dug into the pocket of his trench coat and produced his folded cane.
"The hell you need that thing for?,” Frank sneered.
"I should think it would be obvious.” Matt unfolded the slender steel rod with the flick of his wrist.
Frank let out a soft laugh under his breath. “C’mon, Red.” He slid the cane out of Matt’s grasp and retracted it as if he were disarming a pistol, stuffing it into the pocket of his fatigues and slipping Matt’s arm through his own. “Don’t make it weird.”
Now it was Matt’s turn to laugh. “A little late for that, don’t you think?” He snuck in a squeeze of Frank’s bicep as Frank took the lead.
Neither of them had an umbrella, but most of the walkways were covered and the walk back to Matt’s apartment wasn’t a long one.
Whatever this was—this awkward adjustment period from banging up shit-bags to banging each other—Frank was along for the ride. There was a kind of solace in the soft-spoken lawyer from Hell’s Kitchen. A feeling that Frank couldn’t quite place.
The rain may have fucked with Matt’s sonar to point of making him batty, but it afforded Frank to see a side of him he didn’t usually get to see—the human side. Crazy-ass mumbo-jumbo super-sonic “soul” vision aside, Matt was just a guy. He still bled red.
Frank thought on this as he pulled his jacket off and swung it over their heads, shielding them from the rain. There in the muggy weather, under a cocoon that smelled of gunpowder residue and aftershave, he could keep Matt safe, whether Matt liked it or not.
He could get used to it, Frank thought, smiling down at the grumpy blind man. Hell, Matt might even end up liking it.