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The bite of manilla ropes against his skin greeted him when he woke. One of his gloves had been tugged out of place, leaving his wrist exposed and vulnerable against the rope burn that was already beginning to form there.
The stench of piss and sweat cut through the disoriented haze that dogged his senses, letting him know that he had been drugged. He groaned lowly, twisting his hands to test the hold of the rope that was tied tightly around his wrists, which were secured behind his back. His heartbeat pounded against the inside of his skull, and he struggled to collect his thoughts enough to make sense of his surroundings.
“‘That you, Red?” The familiar voice of Frank Castle jolted him out of his head.
Shock flooded his body as he realized how close Frank was to him. Ordinarily, he would not have been caught off guard by Frank’s presence, his enhanced senses doing the heavy lifting of transforming a hodgepodge of auditory and olfactory information into a detailed metal image with the help of the concentration skills he had honed over the past two decades.
But right now . . . His senses were a discordant mess of competing information that his drugged mind could not quite parse.
"Frank?" He rasped, his throat dry as the desert.
"Looks like they got both of us. Hard as shit to see in here, but I guess that don't matter much for you."
“Fuck,” Matt groaned, tilting his head forward to try to ease his headache only to grimace when the motion set off the klaxons that were firing inside his skull. His helmet remained blissfully intact despite his captivity, but its weight did nothing to ease his headache.
Now that he was aware of Frank’s presence beside him, it was easier to recall the sequence of events that had led them here. He had run into Frank while staking out a human trafficking ring that was operating out of a warehouse near the docks. It was an example of the sick underbelly of society that was sure to draw both of them out. With both of them there, it had been simple enough to combine intel and decide to attack that night.
What they hadn’t anticipated was the aerosolized drugs that the traffickers used to keep their victims complacent. Matt kicked himself now for not realizing the faintly acrid odor he could smell wafting around the warehouse had a more sinister purpose than the drums of industrial cleaners that dotted the warehouse. As he had found out firsthand when face to face with one of the traffickers, the scent belonged to a newly synthesized drug meant to overpower and incapacitate.
It smelled nothing like any of the street drugs he had encountered before, but he wished he had been more suspicious. They could have left to get masks before coming back to the docks.
Matt swallowed thickly, sagging back against the industrial metal shelving the ropes were tied to. The metal dug into his back painfully, but sitting ramrod straight wasn’t an option with his head swimming the way it was. Whatever the drug was, it had left his mouth dry and parched. “Are you okay?” He asked, feeling woefully out of his element. “My head is spinning, it’s . . . it’s hard to get a read on things.”
“Probably no worse off than you,” Frank said wryly. “Came to a while ago.”
He struggled to concentrate in spite of the cotton stuffed in his skull. The creaking sounds of the warehouse warred with the far-off voices of people milling about the docks and the skitter of tiny claws across concrete and inside the walls. All of the sounds felt somehow both immediate and hard to place, making it difficult for him to form an understanding of his surroundings. He pulled his thoughts together in fits and starts, finally managing to say, “Can you tell me anything about the place?”
Frank sighed, clothes rustling as he tried to get comfortable despite the ropes that kept most of his own body immobilized. “Not much. Like I said, it’s dark as shit. Someone came down briefly to check the ropes and I could see a bit when he turned on a flashlight, but not much useful. Just a lot of shelving, big gallon drums. That’s it.”
“Shit,” Matt huffed. His senses were slowly settling into place as the haze started to clear from his mind, but not fast enough to provide him with much more information about his immediate surroundings than Frank had just given him. Until he could put his head back together, he wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the location of their captors or plan an escape route. “I can’t believe they got the drop on both of us.”
Frank snorted. “Ain’t every day the bad guy sprays you in the face with chloroform.”
“I don’t think it was chloroform, Frank.”
“It sure felt like chloroform,” Frank griped. “I don’t see you spitting out the real name, so it’s chloroform until we find out what the hell we were actually sprayed with.”
“You go around getting sprayed with chloroform a lot, Frank?” Even with the tension and urgency of the situation surrounding him, the humor in his voice was clear.
“Chloroform? Nah,” he said. “Been drugged a few times, though. Usually they just go for the tranquilizer dart. Less risk of blowback that way.”
“It is pretty brazen to knock someone out with a spray that could just as easily get on you,” he laughed. “But no one ever said criminals were all that bright.”
His mental image of his surroundings was starting to become clearer, helping him place the steady beat of Frank’s heartbeat a few feet to his right and the rats moving about the warehouse thankfully much further away. He could hear the distinct buzz of halogen lights far off in the warehouse, but not overhead. Frank hadn’t been exaggerating when he said they were in the dark. He tried to stretch out his senses and use them to parse the layout of the place, but they snapped back like a rubber band, ratcheting his headache up another notch.
He’d only been conscious for a few minutes and this was already getting old. He sighed.
“Spit it out, Red. I can hear you sighing over there.”
“My senses, they, uh. I’m trying to figure out where we are but these drugs still have my head in a vise.”
“‘You a lightweight, Red?” Frank sounded amused by the revelation. “I should have known a Boy Scout like you couldn’t handle your liquor.”
“I can handle my liquor just fine,” Matt said defensively, knowing it was only half-true. The full truth was that alcohol tended to disorient him, making it harder for him to sort out the sensory information that he ordinarily managed just fine. Much like the drugs he had unwillingly ingested some unknown time before had left him with a pounding headache and limited awareness of the precise location of anything beyond a small radius from him. “Whatever cocktail they came up with, it’s just making it harder for me to think.”
“Yeah, well, the sooner you can go back to thinking, the sooner we can get out of here.” The harsh scrape of rope against metal followed his statement, and Matt realized he was trying to saw through thick rope by dragging it back and forth over the edge of the metal shelving he had been tied to. It sounded like it was working, the rusted edges of the supports providing a rough tooth to work through the fibers of the rope. He must have started at it before Matt woke up.
Matt turned his attention to the ropes tied around his own wrists. They were tight, sure, but the natural fibers of manila rope were easier to cut through than some of the alternatives. And even barring that . . . if he could slip out of his gloves all the way, it might provide just enough slack for him to work one of his hands out of the rope. He struggled to get a good grip on his glove, then tugged at it until the edge pulled fully free from underneath the rope. The resulting loss of tension wasn’t much, but it was something he could work with. He pulled the glove all the way off, then started in on the other.
Once the second glove came free, Matt twisted his wrists in the hold of the rope, searching for a position that would loosen the hold of the rope just enough that he could slip his thumb through the gap. He ignored the sting of the rope as it chafed his skin, and finally, with a harsh tug, he was able to slip his hand through. The rough fibers of the rope scraped over the back and sides of his hand, but it was worth it for having his hand free.
"I've got a hand free," he announced to Frank. "Shouldn't be hard to—"
Frank interrupted him, kicking one of his legs in his direction. "'You think you can reach the knife in my boot?"
"Of course you have a knife in your boot," he sighed, leaning over as much as he could to reach inside. With one of his wrists still tied to the shelf, his shoulder strained painfully and the shelf rattled dangerously in the process. But then he was able to reach the switchblade, and it was much easier after that to cut himself loose and then do the same for Frank.
"'Your ninja senses come back online yet?" Frank asked in a gravelly voice just above a whisper as Matt handed back the knife and put his gloves back on.
Matt extended his awareness once more, feeling pleased when it wasn't as much of a struggle as it had been when he had first dragged his way back to consciousness. It still aggravated the headache he was nursing, but he was able to make more sense of what he was hearing this time. "They're not perfect, but I can make out about eight . . . no, nine heartbeats on this level. There's more in the shipping containers—young, frantic. We're not in the main part of the warehouse. This is a side room."
Frank sighed. "Let's hope we get lucky and the door is unlocked."
The door was not unlocked. They each tried the handle in turn, jiggling it repeatedly and testing their weight against it, but it was a heavy metal door and refused to budge. Even the edge of the knife slid through the narrow gap between the door and the wall did nothing to budge the lock. It was deadbolted.
Matt concentrated as much as he could on their surroundings, trying to sense if there was an alternate route out of this room. But this was the only door, and the room lacked windows.
With no way out, they settled down to wait for the return of their captors. "At least now when someone comes back, we can overpower them and rush the door," Matt sighed.
Frank used the knife to scratch lines into the concrete, making an awful scraping noise that hurt Matt's ears and was surely dulling the blade. “Maybe when we get out of here, I can buy you a beer and you can show me just how good you are at handling your liquor.”
“I think if you want me to show you how well I can handle my liquor, you’ll have to buy me something a little stronger than beer," Matt replied with a quirk of his lips.
Frank hummed, pulling the knife away from the concrete and switching to flipping the blade in and out of the handle in a way that made Matt nervous that he would cut himself in the process. "I don't know if I should be responsible for damaging your virtue like that."
"Virtue?" A laugh bubbled up in him in his surprise. "Frank, I don't think you have to worry about damaging my virtue . That's been gone for a long time."
"I don't know, Red, I think I could find a little virtue left to sully. Sounds like a challenge."
Matt smiled wryly. "Well, then, I guess you'll have to buy me some whiskey. We can't have you going unchallenged ."
Despite not moving an inch, Frank suddenly felt so much closer. "I don't know, Red, I think I could find some better ways to sully your virtue."
He didn't miss the subtext. He cleared his throat, very aware of the subtle peak in the body heat radiating off of Frank. "Is that so?"
"Yeah," Frank said with a swallow that sounded thunderous in Matt's ears. "I could think of some real good ways."
He could feel his own breath speeding up. "Like what?"
"Like this," he said roughly, and sealed the statement with a kiss. It was awkward at first, Frank missing his mouth by a few inches because of how little he could see in the dark, but he corrected course and their mouths met.
Matt kissed back with a gloved hand on Frank's neck. He could smell the sweat and gunpowder on Frank's skin even more clearly this close up, but he ignored it in favor of reciprocating the kiss.
This wasn't how he had seen the night going, but he couldn't say it was an unwelcome development. Frank's voice and the raw power of his body did something for him, and kissing him flooded his body with sensation.
When one of Frank's hands began searching for the edge of his vest, he broke away with a groan. "We shouldn't," he panted. "We need to be ready when they come back. Later."
"Later?" Frank asked again, one hand on his thigh.
Matt nodded, saying breathlessly, "Later." He reached out to pull Frank back into a kiss. "I don't think kissing would hurt, though."
He would have to keep an ear out for the jiggle of keys at the door but this, at least, they could get away with.
But later sounded nice.