Disclaimer: the characters and concepts in this story are the property of Marvel and their related affiliates. This is an amateur writing effort meant for entertainment purposes only.

Summary: Frank hasn't seen white torture since he was overseas. Now, he's found Red curled up in a hole in the wall, sense-deprived, and he killed the guys who did it too quickly for him to truly be known as the Punisher.

Warnings: this story includes extreme sensory deprivation and isolation used for torture.

Author's Notes: I was 2200 words in when I seriously considered breaking this into an epilogue, as is my wont, but I was determined to stick to a three-part structure. As a result, the end involves a bit of hand-waving on my part. There is a spoiler in this from the latter episodes of season 2, one that I think makes sense given Matt's treatment.

I have to say that I loved writing Frank Castle, so I will definitely be back with more fic about him.

Readers, I am so grateful for your kind patronage. Please give yourselves a pat on the back for all your helpful support and comments! It's a pleasure, truly. I hope you enjoy this.

Part Three: Black

Matt comes to, nauseated and spinning in infinite blackness, and can't believe he's here in the box. Always in the box. He tilts his head against the wall once, twice, three times, absorbing the shock of the blow through his cheeks. The vibrations give him presence, remind him that he is a body attached to a brain instead of a free-floating consciousness.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

He changes it up then, running his head against the wall, unsurprised when the sensations take form, gain substance. A chill biting into his scalp. Hair slipping easily against the tile. He shouldn't be aware of things like this through the get-up they've buried him in, but he does anyways. His brain fills in the gaps that his senses can't in an effort to tame the uneasy and limitless dark around him. Foggy speaks to him occasionally; Karen, too. Dad sometimes, perhaps most terrifyingly of all: Matty. Matty, it's Dad. Get up, Matty. Work to do.

He's already tried to get up a bunch of times. Sprang up like a shot when the drugs wore off, heart pounding in his head, stomach gurgling in his throat. Blood cold, limbs shaky. Whacked his helmeted skull on the ceiling, on the walls, trying to bust out trying to wake his ears, mouth, and nose up trying trying trying. But for all its boundlessness, the darkness come with barriers. Walls and restraints to limit his movements. The gas mask feeding him warm, scentless air. The ear plugs blocking out the sounds from everywhere except in his head. Blood on his fingertips, he thinks but can't be sure. They've gone cold from poor circulation, and he can't smell can't taste can't touch can't move can't breathe can't breathe…

Focus.

Focus up, Matty.

He actually can breathe, which helps hold his nausea at bay, but the rest of his senses are playing peek-a-boo. Sounds and scents popping up in his memories as if they're there, with him, though they can't be. Can't be. Matt fights them off, retreating into the darkness. The voice can't be real no matter how much it sounds to come from outside his head. The acrid scent of rot is an illusion. He's alone in the prison, but eventually the door is going to open. He won't stay in here forever. He's getting out.

A hand appears on his wrist. Matt's face peels off the tile. He sways, disoriented, thoroughly lost. His hands are dangling at his sides instead of pulled into a knot on his lower back. Heartbeats rattle against his bare chest from the outside. Not hallucinations conjured by silence. Real heartbeats. Person and animal. Matt tries to hold onto them, but his thoughts grow clouded with steam and heat. He thinks he rises, thinks he walks, thinks a flash of pain explodes in his foot; then again, he also thinks that Dad is speaking to him, so what he thinks is not at all what's real.

Go to work, Matty. Work to do. C'mon, Matty. Get up, Matty.

He gets down instead, knees buckling. Hands move from his back to his arms and capture him before he hits the ground. Not Dad, not Stick, not Foggy, and not the people who put him in the box. Someone who smells of GSR and sludgy coffee, who wears the callus on his trigger finger like a wedding band, who tugs a blanket out from under Matt's feet and helps drape it over his shoulders.

Matt melts into it: the feel of fleece on his battered, aching shoulders. It's lived-in scent chomping at the back of his mouth. He lets it slip down his arms just to feel it slip down his arms and ends up hyper-fixated on that break between blanket and air, the contrast of hot and cold. The way the tiny hairs on his arms pull down, down, down before springing back up, up, up. His not being able to decide if he's too hot or too cold or just right.

He makes his mind up a second later when heat wafts across his face. The animal heartbeat appears and a tongue laps at his cheeks and it's tragic, how good it feels to make contact with something living, something breathing. Something real and in the darkness with him. Matt lowers, allowing his face to press hard against the soft, down fur, drawing the heartbeat as close as he can to his ear. Wanting to crawl into the chest or push the heartbeat into his skull so that he's not alone for real.

His focus wavers. He hugs harder to compensate but his biceps shake with exhaustion. They loosen and drop, hands limp on the floor. Matt draws himself upright. Darkness. Silence. Breath comes in quick gasps. Thoughts bursting to life before fizzling out like fireworks. He scrambles to his feet, finally understanding. They let him out of the box and then they left him alone and he can get out. Get out of here. No door, can't sense one, but there's a window and Matt takes it and the city finds him. The muggy air is frigid against his skin. Sirens bounce off the footholds on the wall. He tumbles onto the roof, twisting to get his bearings, but noise is everywhere, all at once. No sense of geography or landmarks. Hell's Kitchen unbridled, unfiltered, swarming inside his skull. Matt hangs his head over the edge to parse through it, spinning and hot and sick. He's out but not, darkness clinging firmly to his senses. Ready to start this hell all over again with waking up in the box.

Footsteps approach him from behind. Matt whips around to challenge them. He can't place the voice, like a low rumble of thunder, nor can he place the speaker's position amidst all the static in his head.

"Stay away from me," Matt scuffles along the wall, trying and failing to ignore the sheer thrill of brick scraping along his naked back. Anything except coveralls and brick walls and blood. "I'm not going back. I'm not going back in there. Not when I…not when I might still be in there…"

God, what is the matter with him? He can't figure out if this is a dream or reality. And it's not like he can come out and ask. Where is he? Rooftop. With whom? God, that voice. That voice is familiar. That dog. That apartment. Not in the box and not in a dream and…

"Hot," Matt adds unhelpfully, though he is being honest. The chill that nipped him to the bone has been replaced with a rush of fever-heat through his body. Matt sways in his spot, lost for a moment as to where he is. He tilts his head back, then tilts his head forward reflexively. "I wanted to see the sky one last time," but he doesn't want to see it anymore because, "I saw it…I saw it in there, in the box, but it was different. Played out…played out in front of my eyes instead of inside my head: blue sky being chewed up and spit back out, Dad's…my dad's face fading to black and back again. Over and over. Thousands of times." The one great hope in his life shattered by two days in the impenetrable dark.

His company's heartbeat does a funny little dance. Fearful, nervous, and it's a heart that's not used to being either. Finally, Matt makes sense of what's being said to him, probably because it's so obvious: "Box does weird things to your head. Drugs didn't help neither."

"No," Matt shudders, hate clawing at the inside of his chest from getting caught, from not remembering, from not wanting to remember. From whatever was done for two days without his knowledge. From this, hunkered on a rooftop yearning for touch and sound and life without any assurance that it's real or true. "This isn't the…this isn't the first time I imagined myself getting free. I saw it. I saw it all the time. I saw it."

And sight is terrifying. Matt remembers sight materializing in a flurry of gunfire, flashes of memory. His eyes jumpstarted to working by the box's infinite darkness.

The voice empathizes. "Mind does crazy things, Red, and I've got no doubts yours has a lot of crazy to do it with," Matt huffs a laugh, "but you'd have to be a special kind of crazy to imagine me coming to rescue you."

"I didn't think anyone was coming to rescue me," Matt gives a tired, bitter chuckle. "Still not convinced I'm out. I want be out of there."

"Can't do that inside the apartment?"

Matt shakes his head. His eyes have closed. The city swirls around him gently. He stretches his hands along the ground and never hits a barrier. No walls except the one propping him up. He hangs his head in relief.

The footsteps tromp over to the space next to him. Not too close, but close enough that Matt finally places a name to the smell. Frank Castle, who emanates a cloud of ammunition wherever he goes, takes a seat on the ledge by Matt. The dog rushes between them and nuzzles Matt, nose prodding his cheek.

Matt can't raise his arm to pet the dog, but he can open his mouth to say, "You're right, you know."

"Have to be more specific," Frank says.

"I'd have to special kind of crazy to imagine you coming to rescue me."

Frank huffs, the closest sound he can muster to a laugh. The city swirls. Matt stares into the darkness in front of his eyes, the infinite black. It carries him away, and he is relieved to let it.

Frank lets Red get good and out cold before checking his eyes hopefully. Not that seeing makes sleep-scaling a wall more believable, only that it would assuage some of Frank's anger. Red's eyes are still unresponsive when Frank opens them though, and the way he hasn't acknowledged his blindness is worrisome even for someone with a fever as high as his.

Max is curled up next to the kid, head on his lap. He's unhappy to lose his pillow when Frank manhandles Red into a jacket and heaves him into a standing position. Max recovers when, upon returning to the apartment, Frank rearranges the mat and blanket over by the dog's corner. He gets Red lying down, and Max drops next to him, balancing his gigantic head on the kid's thigh before falling back asleep.

Frank forces two Aspirin down Red's throat without waking him, less a testament to his capacity for gentleness than Red's temperature and degree of passed-out-ness. He also dampens the cleanest rag he can find with some cool water and drapes it over the kid's forehead. Red turns over from the contact. Max grumbles into a new position. Frank picks up the compress and shoves it against the back of Red's neck, holding it in place when the kid tries to roll away again.

"Wormy little shit," Frank rolls his eyes. He settles back on his haunches, releasing Red but hovering pragmatically. The sooner his temperature drops, the sooner he'll stop wandering. That's something they can both get behind. Mercifully, Red is holding still. Frank wanders over to his desk and sits down, dog and charge in his field of view.

He twists on the chair a bit, putting his mind to work. Idleness makes him antsy, but there's no cure for it. Can't leave Red to go wandering. Can't hunt down the guy who took him hostage without more information. Like who in Hell's Kitchen would use white torture? Irish, Cartel, the Dogs: they like physical violence, not psychological brutality, especially for the guy who's been putting their members in the hospital.

Red twists on the bed mat, moaning. He mumbles in his sleep, more legal jargon – ex-cop, maybe? Oh, please, don't let him be a fucking lawyer. Not with his wide-eyed idealism. He reaches out with a floppy arm towards nothing. Frank watches the kid's fingers twitch on the floor in search of…something. To hold, Frank guesses. His other hand is tucked under Max's collar collecting the dog's fur, pulse, and body heat. And he kept running his head along the wall in the bathroom like it was the best God damn thing he'd ever felt.

Frank gets up, scanning the apartment. He finally grabs the kid's costume and shoves it under his fingers. Red hugs it to his chest and settles back into stillness, fingers working slowly in sleep to memorize the contours of his armour.

The mask, Frank takes back to his desk. He pokes at it, rolling his eyes. The sort of thing a kid would put together to play superhero. Fucking Hallowe'en costume, horns and everything, not to mention black lenses for the eyes. Frank holds up the mask and peeks through it. He can't see shit no matter where he holds the mask from his face. How Red sees out of it is…

Frank drops the mask on the desk, scrubbing a hand over his face, finally putting it altogether. "Fuck," he declares, reeling. Replaying his fights with Red with newfound respect and amazement. "Fuck, Red. The fuck are you."

Red doesn't answer. He clutches his body armour and sleeps.

There's a strip of leather tugging at his ankle, and Matt goes from sleep to attacking it without actually waking up. It's a repurposed collar that he unbuckles too easily to worry about being restrained, though the chain it's attached to is unsettling, especially since it's meant for the dog that is currently tasting every inch of his face.

Frank enters bearing coffee. "Mornin', Sunshine," he says.

Matt places a hand over the dog's mouth to protect his face so that he can focus. He ignores the affectionate nips to his wrist and thumb. Frank's apartment is crisp with morning air, the smell of contraband temporarily overpowered by restaurants waking up and the river warming in the sun. Matt tugs the flannel off his chest, wincing from the burn on his forearms.

A bottle of Aspirin flies through the air, perfectly aimed at his head like that bullet was on their first night. Matt catches it.

Frank scoffs, "Jesus. You know your eyes don't work, Red?"

Matt pours two of the pills into his hand and swallows them dry, "Yeah, I noticed."

"Don't seem all that concerned about it."

"I'm not."

"Not pissed off about it? Even a little? Guy like you, fighter like you-"

"I wasn't always a fighter."

"Was your dad-?"

Matt doesn't want to know where that came from, so he cuts Frank off as quickly as possible, "What time is it?"

Derailed. Strange for Frank. Matt tenses with suspicion. He senses Frank shrugging, "Morning."

"Helpful, Frank."

"You got somewhere to be?"

"Matter of fact, I do," he has someone to thank for two days in hell, to say nothing of the fallout in his day-life. Foggy and Karen and the office, anchoring his humanity inside the mask and his sanity inside the box.

Yet another topic for which Frank is not at all concerned, "Not like that you don't, unless you want to blow your secret identity," then, snarkily, "Matthew."

Matt's panic turns into anger so quickly he barely has time to appreciate all the reasons he should be afraid. Not because Frank knows but because if Frank knows, who doesn't? He's been unmasked for two days. Not going to take much for someone to put the devil and him together, no matter how much reasonable doubt his blindness provides. "There's a missing persons report out on me," he guesses.

"Nah, but there will be soon. That law partner of yours is a horrible fucking liar."

The information hits him like a punch to the chest. Matt tries to respond with the same force, "You met Foggy?"

Frank chugs a little more of his coffee, "Hm. And that uh…that secretary of yours. The one who helped Grotto at the hospital. She's smart. Why didn't you tell her your secret identity? Girl's got a poker face like-"

"You leave them out of this," Matt growls.

"You leave them out of this," Frank growls back. "What, you think 'cuz you wear a mask that they're safe? Took me five minutes and a church donation to find them."

Matt reels, "You've been to my church?"

"Would've gone to your God damn apartment if I didn't think you were gonna climb out my window again."

The ghost of the chain laps at his ankle. Matt vaguely remembers needing to see the sky last night and a soliloquy about the last time he did. To Frank, who is a fixture in all of the delirium, dragging him off walls and floors, out of one hell and into another. Who saved his ass for a second time despite having every reason not to. Who now knows everything there is to know about Matt Murdock: "Did you tell anyone, about me?"

"Said it before, Red: I don't care who you are. I care if I've got the cops or criminals knocking down my door looking for someone."

"Do you?"

"Not so far. Cops aren't looking for Matthew Murdock. Yet. No thanks to that partner of yours," Matt can feel Foggy's worry buzzing under his skin, sending his guilt into overdrive. Shot in the head, kidnapped, kidnapped again: no wonder Foggy's incapable of lying. Addendum – no wonder Foggy is more incapable of lying.

Frank continues, finishing his coffee, "And whoever had you holed up is quiet too. Some new player. Goes by the name the Blacksmith."

"He isn't going to stay quiet," Matt sighs. "I was out for two days. They could have pictures of me, video."

"Maybe they weren't interested in who you are either. New player, quiet, definitely ex-military: you might have never pissed this guy off. Which would be a fucking miracle," and Frank would know, because Matt's certainly pissed him off, "but stranger things have happened."

"Then what would he have wanted?"

"Break you, sell you, buy himself a few devil free days to make a play for Hell's Kitchen…doesn't matter what he wanted, Red."

Oh, here they go again: "Just matters that he did it, right, Frank?"

The train engine in Frank's chest starts chugging away again on a collision course with an iron curtain, "Don't start in on that sentimental bull-"

"He's a criminal, and he deserves to be punished-"

"You got that right."

"-but not by you, Frank, and not by killing him."

"Jesus, what the fuck do people have to do? What do they have to do, Red, for you to realize that they don't get better? You were locked up for two God damn days. I pulled you out of that box, you didn't know your asshole from breakfast. If you weren't blind before, you sure as shit would be now. You're lucky you got enough screws loose screws to survive that."

"And you've got too many screws loose, Frank!"

He charges around the desk and comes to kneel in front of Matt, geared up, as he put it. No longer the benign phantom of Matt's fevered memories: now a wild animal on the end of a fraying leash. His voice is infuriatingly calm despite the hammer of his heart, "You think this ends with you, but it doesn't. You're just the beginning. This guy knows who you are now, and even if he doesn't care, he knows that you do. You care about your law partner and your secretary. You care about your priest. You even…" Frank laughs, and it is an ugly sound, a bleak sound, empty and parodic, "You even care about him."

"I care that he pays for this. The right way," though hell if Matt can bring himself to admitting Nelson and Murdock will defend him. The darkness is too real, made all the more palpable by Frank storming scant inches from him.

Frank hums decisively, taking aim for a new target. A worse one. "You still feel that way if he killed your partner? Or uh…your secretary. I could've killed her. At the hospital."

The train is coming. Matt's whole body rattles, but he stands there, offering only a pathetic, "Stop," in response. He doesn't need to hear it. He felt it that night, the urge to wrap his hands around the throat of the gunman for putting her in harm's way.

Frank feels it too, and he loves it. He loves the potential for escalation, revels in it. "You know, Scout shooters, we get trained in headshots, but there were always guys in my unit who liked finding other targets. Kneecaps, shoulders, guts. You ever been shot in the gut, Red? Heard it called one of the most painful ways to die, because you just lie there, bleeding out. Worst twenty minutes of your life."

He leans closer, an engine bearing down on Matt: "This guy locked you up behind a wall for two days. He kept you drugged, kept you clean, kept you alive. He's not the type of guy who takes headshots from the clock tower. This guy let you live because he knows better places to shoot you than the head."

Frank's heartbeat is terrifyingly calm; Matt's is leaping through his chest to the point that he's sure they can both hear it. "I'm going to find him before he can," Matt promises, wrangling his fear into purpose. "And I'm going to find him before you."

"He finds your friends, you'll be praying that's not the case."

Fear wraps his heart up in an icy fist. The blackness in front of his eyes looms threateningly, imbued as it is with Frank Castle, unstoppable force. Matt does say a prayer then, and he braces for impact.

Fin.