I'm not completely sure what this is. Probably an attempt to cut my pain over Matt/Elektra right out of my heart, to be quite honest. It's probably also my profession of love to Daredevil the show after a magnificent second season. I was so excited for Elektra and they didn't let me down. Hopefully this fic won't let anyone down either. Let me know if you enjoy! Or if you're still crying over Matt/Elektra as much as I am. Sigh.

Supernova

Her problem, Elektra thinks, is always wanting too much. She's a fire that burns too hot and fierce — and fire consumes. Matt/Elektra. Spoilers for the entirety of Daredevil, Season 2.

Elektra's blood burns.

"You know your problem, Ellie?"

You, she wants to snap back, and possibly punctuate the verbal blow with a physical one. But Stick always anticipates her. He always knows.

As if to underline her point, the creases of his leathery face pull into a smirk. His dark glasses are aimed at a point above her head, his ear tilted in her direction when he raises his staff to tap against her ribcage.

"Gotta reign this in," he says, pressing none too gently into the skin and bone covering her heart. "You want too much. Sacrifices are necessary —"

"This isn't a sacrifice. It's a waste of my time."

She feels the bruise blossoming under her skin when she steps back abruptly and turns away. This mission is foolish, unnecessary, and insulting to those who had never left Stick's teachings behind. It's a slap in the face to those who had begged to stay with him and been sent away for endless years.

It's an insult to her.

But Stick will do this with or without her, and Elektra has objectives of her own. Satisfying her own curiosity, first and foremost.

For the life of her, she doesn't understand why Stick is so set on recovering Matthew Murdock.

He's a blind law student with shoes several hundred dollars too cheap for the party he's crashing, but he threads his way through the crowd with ease, a lifetime of poverty cleverly hidden behind a passable suit and a manufactured aura of belonging.

His smile, when he turns it in her direction, is sweet, but not without edges. She recognizes the danger under the decency the way she recognizes her own reflection in a mirror. Something in her blood heats and sings, and Elektra smiles to herself.

She likes him.

Stick's mission falls by the wayside as weeks and months pass and Elektra is still playing games with Matthew Murdock.

He is full of closed doors, she finds, even as she feels for the locks of each one. He tells her about his father, about his training, about living life always in the dark. She stares at him and reads so much in his unseeing eyes. There is darkness roiling inside him like a living thing, and something in her chest stirs in response.

She supplants Stick's mission with a mission of her own. She will find all Matthew's doors, and fling them open wide. What they will do after that…

That part eludes her.

"You like telling me stories about violence," Matthew chides her with a laugh. It's a night like a thousand others; they're sitting on a roof in an unfamiliar part of town, drinking too much and talking about everything and nothing. Elektra wants to look up at the stars, but finds herself studying their reflection in Matthew's glasses instead.

"What kind of girl do you think I am?"

Matthew raises his eyebrows at that, but doesn't comment. "I know when you're lying," he says, and it should raise her hackles, a statement like that, but his smile makes it safe. "I can hear your heartbeat."

Betrayed by her heart, then.

She speaks for his benefit, smirks for her own. Neither response can quite distract her from the sudden hollowness in her chest.

"That's cheating, Matthew."

She stares hard at his face and a fire impossibly soft and exquisitely painful burns behind her sternum. Her smile falters as she realizes her heart has betrayed her in more ways than one. In her mind, the one silence even Matthew's keen ears can't penetrate, she thinks a traitorous word.

Love.

There is a pain in Matthew Murdock that holds him back from all he could be. It's the last door he's barred her access to, she's sure, and one night, in a darkened mansion that isn't hers, she kisses Matthew feverishly, her blood boiling with the fact that she finally, finally has the key.

They tie Roscoe Sweeney to a chair and Matthew lets out his beautiful pent-up rage on the man who killed his father.

"Kill him," Elektra whispers, and her eyes are wet with joy. She wishes he could see her smile.

"I can't," he says, a whisper made hoarse by horror and regret. It is a language she can't speak, and one that Matthew has never spoken to her before. His eyes are wet too, but they're damp with pain instead of longing. He looks at her with sightless eyes and she catches the moment he doesn't recognize her.

She wonders if this is what it's like to be Matthew, lost in impenetrable darkness.

Matthew, unseeing. Elektra, unseen.

She fumbles for the latch of his final closed door, and finds it firmly barred against her, light leaking over and under and through all the cracks.

He has something in him that is far greater than she realized. A light stronger than his darkness — stronger than hers. She stands in front of him and is alone in that dark. For the first time since Stick left her standing in a house far too grand to meet a family that was not her own, she feels cold.

She turns to face the only open door left to her, and runs into the night.

She won't let herself think of him for a long time. Months without speaking his name leave her with the sensation of cooling ash in her chest, as if any mention of him might stoke the dead fire back to life. Years pass before she feels safe enough to type his name into a search engine. Her smile pulls like scar tissue when she sees the internships he's been contenting himself with.

"Matthew," she whispers. "You are so much more."

She is distracted by Stick's missions and her travels as part of the ambassador's family. Stick is as relentless as always, merciless in his criticisms and shocking in his compliments. He offers praise like blows designed to knock her off balance — unexpected, swiftly retracted, and never coming from the same direction twice. She almost hates him when she has rare moments alone.

She throws open her windows wherever in the world she is, and thinks of the night air in New York City, sometimes warm, muggy, and smelling of exhaust, sometimes chilled, stinging, metallic. Matthew's laugh and the feel of his skin against hers accompany each memory like the drag of a dull blade across her mind. The memories of being not alone are lesions distantly, eternally bleeding.

She wishes she could go back.

But she always manages to catch herself before she walks too far down the dangerous path of dreams, a path that leads straight into those stars beyond her open windows.

She thinks of Matthew when there was no space between them, and feels alive.

She remembers doors closed in her face, barring her from the light, and reminds herself that there is no going back for people like her. Shadows and light can never mix.

He deserves better.

She repeats it to herself until it tastes like blood in her mouth.

Matthew is the Devil of Hell's Kitchen.

She hasn't smiled so wide or so genuinely since the last time she saw him. The grainy pictures on various news sites ignite her suspicion; Stick's confirmation stokes it into an open flame. When he follows up the announcement with the news that he's sending her back to New York to try re-recruiting Matthew Murdock a second time, she isn't surprised. She's excited.

Something stirs in her veins, humming underneath her skin. It feels like fear, but it's possibly something even more dangerous.

She suspects it is hope.

He's cold and cautious when she sees him for the first time in ten long years. There is no hint of softness in his words — his rejection — even when she sorts through them afterward, looking for hints of the man she knew.

So much the better.

She needs him to fight beside her, not give in to gentler thoughts. Elektra is fluent in the language of aggression, and Matthew seems intent on offering her nothing else. Very well — she can work with that. He doesn't seem to know it, but this violence was always part of their dance.

And dance they do, in the glimmering light of opulent parties, the shadows of offices locked and dimmed, in the light of the moon. They fight like two halves of one warrior, twisting and striking in perfect tandem.

Stick would be so proud, she thinks. His two warriors, like two swords for him to wield.

It stings, sometimes, being someone else's weapon.

But when she and Matthew are planning the missions and making the calls, it's easy to forget that Stick has any part in this at all. It's easy to forget that they are fighting a battle, not against New York street gangs, but against an ancient group that will never end and never stop. She has always loved the fight, but with Matthew it becomes more than just playing, it becomes a dance with purpose. There is meaning behind their blows when they strike together.

Matthew flashes her a smile she recognizes at last, and she sees him clearly behind the fossilized anger he has erected between them. Like all things weakened by time, it begins to crumble away.

She isn't foolish enough to think that human beings are capable of being more than alone — not anymore. But in the moments when she and Matthew are extensions of one will, she feels something fit into place inside her.

Maybe they aren't together. Maybe no one ever really is. But whatever they are, it's certainly not alone.

It takes a brush with death to pull Matthew back to her side. He holds her hand like her life depends on it. When she is out of danger, he holds on like his does.

"When I thought I might lose you…" His voice cracks, and that iron control of his crumbles. She can just catch a glimpse of that last door rattling on its hinges. Her blood is hot under her skin as she watches him and wonders about what it might be like to be together. About fighting beside Matthew instead of beside Stick…fighting for a life and a family of her own choosing. She twists her hand until her fingers notch between his.

This, she thinks…this might be enough.

It takes another death to pull Matthew away forever. The blood on her hands is hot enough that it would have steamed in the open air.

The blood in her veins is cold when Matthew tells her in a tone as hard and unforgiving as a stone-faced cathedral that she needs to leave. He will fight alone rather than enlist her help.

He will live alone, too.

She remembers what alone feels like when she leaves his building with unthinking steps, pummeled by the sounds of New York at night. Sirens and horns rip the air like screams. It will be difficult to go back to living without Matthew.

She wonders if he remembers what alone feels like. Maybe it wasn't as difficult for him. It can't have been. Otherwise he would never have been able to do it willingly now.

He's left her with no choice.

When she has nightmares, they invariably involve two moments, crossbred and mutated into monstrosities to stalk her sleeping mind.

She remembers Stick leaving her.

She remembers Matthew looking at her with horror.

Standing deep in the heart of the Hand's hideaway, she finds herself confronted with both realities in the light of day.

In her nightmares, she wants to be loved. In her reality, Stick would rather kill her and Matthew would prefer to shutter his passion behind prison bars that he alone can unlock. Both of them hold so much disappointment in sightless eyes.

She looks at the gleam of longing and adoration in Nobu's gaze, the sheen of idolatry in the eyes of his followers, and thinks that if she cannot have love, then perhaps this will be enough.

Matthew, as usual, doesn't agree. He allows the blade to rest right against the veins and sinews of his throat, close enough that a twitch would make him bleed, and waits for her to choose between life and death. She contemplates the flick of her wrist that would end his life and finds that, even as he stands planted between her and Stick and her revenge, that she can't do it. Not to him. He holds her tightly when he pulls the sword from her grip.

Matthew's arms around her, even like this, call down a flood of memories that she can't control. His touch, his words, his faith in her, were always better than the violence Stick preached. He was always better. And even with words like fate and destiny swirling in the air, in her mind, wrapping around her like chains, he believes that she still has a choice.

So she chooses what she chose ten years earlier, when Stick had berated her endlessly for getting emotionally entangled.

I would trade it all in for a lifetime of smelling your skin.

She had been a fool in her youth. Apparently she still is.

They are locked in a tiny room that opens onto the roof of an abandoned building when Elektra realizes her brief life has come to an end. Matthew knows it, too, although he's holding onto hope and trying to drag her with him. They might as well grasp a dove and expect it to fly them away.

But it's nice to hear his words, no matter how impossible.

"What if, from now on, if we make it…wherever you run, I run with you?"

So it's Matthew who wants to run this time, disappearing into the night and leaving all the pain behind. She's tried that.

He doesn't realize it never works.

But it's a beautiful picture he's painting, and she can't help but gaze at it with him. If these are to be their last few moments together, then they should fill them with dreams. And maybe there is a chance.

Maybe there is a path to those stars always just beyond her reach and only Matthew Murdock can see it.

"You want to end it here or on the roof?" he'd asked moments ago. It feels like hours now. Like an eternity, but not nearly long enough.

"I've always liked the fresh air," she'd answered. She wonders whether the stars will look any closer from this height.

Elektra is cold.

"Does it always hurt that much?"

"Yeah," Matthew answers, his face unmasked and open to her. She can see all the cracks.

He has always evaded her before, but the light she first saw ten years ago, shining around the door he closed fast in front of her, at last slides into focus. That last door finally opens to admit her, and she understands. His light is breathtaking and painful. It burns.

But, for once, she thinks it might be a cleansing fire.

Her barriers have fallen as well. Always she has kept him back with violence, with distance, with her own unworthiness. But now she is bleeding emotion in the crack of her voice, the drag of her breath, the tear spilling down her cheek.

He's listening to her heart, she knows. She can feeling it laboring in her chest, almost twitching as it makes her breath stumble and scrape, coming in shallow gasps instead of its usual easy pulls. She hurts all over, but that pain is fading, drifting away from her as the ragged black edge hemming her vision closes in to take its place. The tightening of Matthew's face makes it look as if he's soaking in the pain as it drains away from her. Always determined to suffer.

Oh, Matthew. Beautiful, deadly Matthew.

He will be alone again. She thinks of the ten years before this, and of the ten years and more that might have stretched on into an indefinable future, and she is more sorry than she has ever been for leaving him. She should never have left.

There are so many things she shouldn't have done.

The stars behind Matthew's drawn face are growing dark. She can't speak, almost can't see, but she focuses her flickering vision on his face. He hears the last beat of her heart as she feels it. For once in her life, Elektra's blood turns to ice.

She is sorry.

And then she is gone.

There is nothing.

Then there is thick darkness.

Pinpricks of light delicate as spiders' web pierce her world again. The stars had faded before her eyes…but stars can be reborn, in silence and in fire.

And Elektra's blood burns.

Did you enjoy? Are you still crying over Matt/Elektra? Please review and let me know. ;)