ArchivedLogs:The Devil I Know

The Devil I Know
Dramatis Personae Matt Murdock, Morgan
In Absentia	2014-09-07 Morgan interferes with some vigilante justice. Warning: Violence and Strong Language
Location <NYC> Clinton
Despite its rough and tumble reputation of old, Clinton has come far from the illegal gambling and shakedowns of Prohibition, and the gang warfare of West Side Story. Clinton has now become the industrial supply center for midtown Manhattan, with hospitals and the light industrial and commercial businesses required to support so many thousands of people. The neighborhood has become quite expensive, but many actors still cram together in small apartments due to its proximity to Broadway. "Tessier," Morgan speaks clearly into her cell, "And he had a brother named Mathew but it was spelled the weird way." There is a pause long enough for her to flick some ash off of her cigarette, "Well, I don't very fucking well know what way. The. Weird. Way." The scappy blonde woman leans against the dive bar's brick exterior. She doesn't know the name of it. To her, it's just the bar she's been going to since she was finally kicked out of the last one. Seems a little mobby if you ask her, though. "Thank you. Listen, I'm going into a *family thing* so I gotta run. A appreciate the favor, Janice." Wetting her lips, Morgan shifts her eyes to evaluate her surroundings. All paid up, and a little lightheaded from her buzz, she makes eye contact with some thuggish man in a wrinkled suit smoking a few yards away. She scoffs at his interest, looking back out onto the dank city streets. She's not dressed particularly nicely. It's a Sunday night for Christ's sakes so, she's not interested in fooling anyone. She's in a plain black tanktop and the same pair of jeans she's been wearing all week. Her boots say Sheriff's Deputy before they say NYPD. She takes a more exuberant drag of her cigarette, trying to finish it before the man comes over to her. Sunday indeed, the day of rest. And yet there are people at work, just the same. Down the street, three men pass under a street lamp that buzzes and flickers on and off, on and off, headed in the direction of the bar and, due to proximity, Morgan. One man, silent, dark hair topping off a dark suit, leads the way while the other two follow just a step behind, a little looser in dress and looser in tongue than the man they follow. They chatter back and forth, one wearing a trilby and the other not, sounding in good spirits, if a little juvenile. Their words carry as they cajole the man they follow: "Danny, we gotta hit up that new strip joint after this." "Yeah, Danny, we oughta check it out." "Just for kicks, see if any of them girls are any good." "Yeah, yeah." "Shut it, you two," grouses the dark leader they call Danny. "We've got shit to do." They eye the thuggish man when they step into the wide pool of light cast by the lamp over the door of the bar. And then they eye Morgan. "Heeey girl," tries the follower in the trilby. And that is when the lamp over the door shatters, something clattering to the ground along with the tinkling of old bulb glass as the nighttime dark caves in. And, right after that, the guy in the trilby lets out an oof along with a heavy whumpff of a sound, something from up high landing right on him and slamming him down into the sidewalk. "Fuck you," Morgan spits out venomously just before the light goes out. She throws up both hands to shield herself from the sprinkling of falling glass and losing her cell in the process ...but not her cigarette. She side-steps swiftly to keep her back against the wall for safety, blue eyes widening and narrowing as she tries to adjust to the darkness. One thing's for sure: Shit's goin' down. With the rest of the city lit up around them, it shouldn't take long for Morgan, or anyone else, to adjust to the dim. At first, the figure that straightens up from the squashed tribly-wearer looks to be more devil than man, deep red and sporting small horns and glassy eyes. But blink, adjust a little more, and the red proves itself to be a suit of leather and kevlar--with the letters 'DD' emblazoned on the chest--the horns and eyes part of a mask. Blink again, and the devil-man is in motion, fire-quick. Daredevil is on the second follower before the man can fumble a weapon out of his jacket. A gloved hand seizes on the guy's arm and quickly rotates him around backwards, wrenching the wrist up between the guy's shoulder blades. Even as the follower hollers and flails, Daredevil shoulder-shoves him hard, and sends him cartwheeling right into the wall next to Morgan. By this point, the dark-haired Danny has recovered from his initial bewilderment, and draws a gun. A feminine growl escapes Morgan as she shifts her weight forward. She's been around long enough to know when someone is producing a gun and she's certainly been around long enough to know Daredevil when she seems him. Although, usually it's in a blur on a Quickstop security camera. As her growl grows, her small frame flies full force into Danny. Using her momentum to try and make up for what she lacks in size, she makes to grapple him for the gun and turn it to face up above their heads. Fully focused on Daredevil, Danny's caught completely off-guard by Morgan. As she slams into him and forces the gun upwards, it goes off once, then twice. He stumbles sideways, and her momentum starts to carry them over to the ground. Meanwhile, working off of the crystal clear picture the two loud bangs from the gun provided, Daredevil does a running handspring to the shattered ruins of the lamp bulb on the sidewalk, where his baton lays. He grabs it on the rotation, and as he wheels back into a standing position, then slings it at the thuggish guy, who had pulled his own weapon at the shots. The baton clocks him right in the throat, and the thug makes a strangled, gurgling sound as he drops the gun, instinctually grabbing for his windpipe. On the ground, Danny wrestles for the gun with Morgan, cussing at her. "Leggo, bitch! Jesus fuck!" "You talk to-" Morgan growls behind gritted teeth, "-your whore mother-with that-mouth?" Going near-feral, she rolls the man onto his bag. Straddling him and still bringing the gun up over their heads, she brings her head down onto his. Hard. She does it again. And again. Soon, her forehead and the lower portion of hay colored bangs is spattered with blood. The gun skids away towards the Devil and his thug. That's when the enraged and bloodied Danny throws Morgan off of him like the rag doll she actually is. She tucks rolls with a grunt, thrown into the two other fighters' feet as glass bits crunch under her. Daredevil is quick to kick the gun away when it clatters towards him. This does, however, leave him slightly off-balance when Morgan comes bowling his way. Instead of attempting to brace for and weather the impact, however, he bends backwards with it, so that even as she spills his feet out from under him, he's already in motion, able to recover with a back handspring, his heavy gloves protecting his hands from the broken bulb glass. The thug, meanwhile, goes down completely, choking still from the hard blow to his throat. As Daredevil lands on his feet once again, he rolls a shoulder and unkinks his neck with a tilt of his head, and then steps over to pick up his baton, the crunching under his boots giving him a murky picture of his immediate surroundings. "Daniel Monaco," he says with a rough voice over his shoulder, to Danny lying there all bloody thanks to Morgan. "Don't you know you can't hide from the devil forever?" Morgan hissing in pain, Morgan inches up onto her elbows and crawls towards the thug's gun. The adrenalin helps cut through the drunken haze as she searches her mind for the name. She brings the butt of the gun up and then sharply down, pistol-whipping the already rather helpless thug in hopes of knocking him unconscious. She grunts again as she does this. She probably does the thug a favor, knocking him out. That leaves three unconscious men on the ground, and the one bloody one called Danny that Daredevil starts to advance on, baton tightly gripped in hand. Of course, even in the seediest parts of Hell's Kitchen, gunshots don't go completely unnoticed. The door to the bar pulls open, and a couple of brave men of low moral fiber step out to investigate just what the hell is going on. Daredevil jerks at the sound of them, head tipping more their way to try to listen for the telltale sounds of weaponry. Of course, with the bar being a minor hub of criminal activity, these two have guns of their own. With a frustrated snarl through bared teeth, Daredevil hurls the baton at the face of the closer one, and the impact knocks him backwards into the other guy, sending them back back in through the door. As the baton ricochets off, having hit the the hardness of the jawbone, Daredevil runs to catch it. As he does, he skids to a halt beside Morgan. "Time to go," he says, and offers a gloved hand down to her. "Pussy," Morgan says dryly, pursing her lips in a smirk and arching her bloodied brow. She brings the gun up to frame her face, using her free hand to take Matt's. She's no fool, though. It's definitely time to go. Pushing up with her legs more than relying on the masked man, she winces. Glass glitters in the streetlight as it sheds off of her pants. As the door blows open to eject more thugs who, this time, crouch lower in wary anticipation of pain, Daredevil twists the baton and points it, not at the incoming men, but upwards, and the grapnel fires out, cable pulling behind it. His grip on Morgan shifts to capture her forearm, hand clamping down like a vice, just as the grapnel locks onto the rooftop edge of the building above and, with the push of a button, up they hurtle as the cable retracts. Hope you aren't afraid of heights, Morgan. As they rush upwards, one of the thugs starts shooting at them. But they reach the rooftop unscathed, Daredevil hurling himself over that edge, more of a low wall, before then hauling Morgan upwards after him. "Ah!" Morgan tosses her hair in the wind, throwing herself against Daredevil as she's pulled stumbling up onto the roof. She presses a hand against his chest as she regains her balance, she steps away. The former New York cop clicks the safety of the street gun and slides it into the back of her pants. Looking over her shoulder to where they'd come from, she turns back to regard the Daredevil. Sirens sound in the distance. With one foot planted on the low wall, Daredevil considers what he can make out of the ground below, the scuffling and shouts of the guys that have poured out of the bar painting an irregular picture. The traffic noises from a street over spilling onto the bar's street in lapping ripples. Then, his attention turns to Morgan. "You cost me Monaco," he roughs out, tone clearly frustrated. "Why the hell would you get involved?" With the guys on the street talking about the roof, though, he moves away from the edge. "Come on. If they catch you up here, they won't be kind," he says, heading for the next building over. It's a few stories higher, but as he passes by some pipes, he thwacks his baton on one, and picks out the ladder up from the hollow ring that sounds out. "I cost you getting your punk ass shot by Monaco while you were wasting time on a minimum wage goon," Morgan chicken-necks, "So, how about some fucking grat-i-tude." Considering her choices while she rolls her jaw, she does decide to move forward as told. "I was fine," Daredevil says, the words hard, low, and clipped. That is apparently the only gratitude she will get. "You could have been killed." He also apparently is not a in a gentlemanly sort of mood, as he shimmies up the ladder first, instead of insisting on a ladies first policy. To be fair, though, he makes it up the ladder so quickly that the average person going before him would have only slowed things down. Three stories up, he waits for her, keeping a sharp ear out for anything that might sound like the rooftop access door of the bar building opening. Glowering, Morgan watches him ascend. "F you, dude," she mutters. Her natural aptitude with time and timing leaves her at least slightly impressed with his speedy climbing. Out of bullheadedness, she pushes herself to a new physical limit making her own ascent. Though not quite as super humanly agile as him, she's fast. Up on the higher roof, she gives him the cold shoulder. The blonde woman breezes past him to survey the new area, pausing only momentarily at the view of the city. Although his eyes and brow are hidden behind the glowering devil mask, his scowl is still plain to see in the downturned shape of his mouth when she reaches him. He heard that mutter. "The next shot I have at Monaco won't be so easy," he says, as she arrives in the new roof. "Now that he knows I'm after him." Up here, vents and pipes hog a lot of the room. Still, though, the sliver of skyline visible is quite striking, lit up and glimmering in the night. Daredevil pays it no mind. Instead, he progresses on to the next building. His frustrations and her cold shoulder or not, he offers, "There's a fire escape this way that you can take." "Then let me help you. You know you have a lot of mother fu-" Morgan gestures rapidly with a hand, stopping mid-sentence as her powers activate. She keeps her hand held out in mid-air, gulping as she considers her options. Her boots crunch against the gravely rooftop as she slowly closes the distance between herself and the Daredevil's frozen form. Wetting her lips, she only moves her hand to curl her finger under the mask's fabric and lift it some off of his jaw. The even gradual movement of her hand triggers him to unfreeze. Her eyes go wide. She gulps, again. "I-" he starts to say, but is cut off when he freezes. "-don't-" comes out of him when he unfreezes. Immediately, though, two things happen: on realizing her close proximity, and feeling the fingers at his mask, he both claps his mouth shut, and a hand flies up, cat-quick, to catch at her wrist. He first yanks it down, and then wrenches roughly to force her to spin, so that he pins that wrist behind her. His other arm goes to lock around her neck. "Okay," he says, through a humorless grin, more an aggressive display of teeth than a grin, really. Like an ape showing a display of dominance. And sharp anger. "That's off-limits." Morgan gasps, craning her neck upward uncomfortably as he headlocks her. "Can't blame a girl for trying," she breathes, chest heaving as she regains herself in this new ...situation. She presses the gun hidden at the small of her back into him, body tensing as she subconsciously tests for weaker points. "If you wanted to compare dick size, you could have just asked," Morgan says behind her own gritted teeth, "Let me go." He's mostly muscle, but then the costume he wears doesn't exactly take pains to hide that in the first place. Tense as an overwound watch spring, Daredevil keeps his feet firmly planted apart, with knees just slightly bent so that they aren't locked, waiting for her to try something as he holds her against him. Any weaker points would be in the usual spots for any average man, although she will be able to feel that the leather of his suit is pretty thick. It probably holds up quite well against knife cuts. At the size comparing comment, he tightens his arm around her throat and practically snarls, "I could have left you there with them." But then he lets go, giving her a light shove away, just for insurance in case she tries to send an elbow or heel his way in parting. Sliding away, Morgan squares off for a moment as if ready for a secondary attack from /him/. When none comes, she backs away towards the before-mentioned fire escape. She dabs her bottom lip with a fingertip and runs her tongue along the inside of her mouth, assessing any damage. "My hero." Glaring, she spits out a mixture of mucus and blood. He remains coiled-tight tense as they have that sort of stand-off, one hand splayed open while the other grips his baton, his head tipped slightly to try to better pick up on the city sounds to try to get any kind of picture of her. The police sirens reach the bar front and silence, dropping some of the clarity. Traffic noises also reach him, but they better reveal the streets below more than anything. "Like I said," Daredevil says, "I could have left you there." He adds, with a gesture, "Fire escape, that way." And then he turns to head in a different direction, picking his way among the vents. Morgan says nothing to the man. Instead, she just waits for him to leave. Better to have no witness to the undignified climb down onto the fire escape. Feeling around in her pockets, she retrieves her cigarettes and lights one. Bringing it to her lip, she winces. Touching her cracked lip her finger again, Morgan turns back to the skyline. Staring out across the city thoughtfully, she's careful when she takes a drag. "I drink too much," she mumbles, eyes narrowing.