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Hell's Kitchen feels it when Matt Murdock dies.
It's not a wave of sadness across the Earth like what will happen in ten or so years when Captain America is found dead, nor the snap of an Infinity Gauntlet and pop goes Iron Man just months before that.
No, this is different. It's more unsettling than upsetting.
The people feel it when Matt Murdock dies. An absence on their rooftops, the missing screams of a criminal of an evening. They don't cry. They don't give him a funeral, and perhaps it's bitter mourning that they don't. Because even though he saved the lives of hundreds, thousands, he will still always be a vigilante. A criminal. So they mourn in silence and move on, and maybe they shed a tear or two, but they do move on.
Because that is what New Yorkers do.
The criminals feel it when Matt Murdock dies. No more of the dread they feel when stumbling through an alley, no more of the uncomfortable stalking of eyes in the sky. They don't celebrate. He might've been a pain in the ass, the continuous foil to their plans, but he was a part of the city. Their city. But they move on. Slowly, deliberately, and so very imposing, the crime rate ticks up. They aren't glad to move on, but they do nevertheless.
Because that is what New Yorkers do.
Foggy and Karen feel it when Matt Murdock dies. A missing piece of the puzzle that was Nelson, Murdock, & Page. Foggy and Matt do not get to do pizza nights anymore, because a dead man cannot eat pizza. Karen and Matt do not get to go on any more dates, because a dead man cannot fuck. It's long and grueling and maybe they never really do, not inside, but they move on.
Because that is what New Yorkers do.
Elektra Natchios feels it when Matt Murdock dies. A part of her heart that had somehow burrowed back in the place he'd left hollow all those years ago when she'd abandoned him in Roscoe Sweeney's mansion with his corpse (Elektra, months later, had taken it upon herself to kill the shitbag once she'd shaken herself out of self-pity for Matt's departure). There's nobody left to scold her every time she kills someone. She is empty. Elektra Natchios does not move on.
Because she is not a New Yorker.
It's a man named Bobby who finds her by the sewers, coughing up ash and blood and rocks and aching enough that she was half-sure the ratio from non-broken bones to broken was very unfairly balanced. It's cold and damp and not nice at all in the sewers, and her wounds must be infected by now, surely.
"Is that—" Elektra hears a voice in the distance, and it's funny, he sounds like he's underwater. She's in the sewers, not the ocean. How strange. Elektra, despite herself, laughs and immediately regrets it when her ribs start to feel like they're trying to rip through her chest.
"Jesus Christ, lady, are you alright? Is that— oh God, that's blood. Just, just give me a sec," who is he talking to, Elektra wonders. She thought it was only her in the sewer, and as she mulls this thought over, there's a horrid pressure under her arms hauling her to her mangled feet, and Elektra cries out in strangled pain.
"I know, kid, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," the man continues to speak softly, and Elektra doesn't know what to think of this strange little thing. Is he talking to the rats that scuttle along the pipes as she continued to scream and twitch with pain in trembling arms? Maybe Matthew was washed away here too. She would've thought the current would have taken him elsewhere, somewhere where he could fetch some help.
Matthew must have been helped by now, surely. Maybe, if it was night, he was back in his lovely apartment with the bright lights in the window attempting to get some shuteye, or, if it was Sunday, he was on his knees in that little church that her spotty memory can't quite remember the name of. Though she does recall her first funeral was held there.
Perhaps Matthew was having a funeral for her right now, she thought dreamily, the thought of it almost making her pain ease (it doesn't. It still hurts to move and breathe and scream herself ragged). Perhaps he's stood there in the pouring rain that came during New York's long autumns, tears falling down his pretty face from his pretty eyes, and don't cry Matthew, because she's right here!
Her throat may be so hoarse from screaming that Elektra is almost certain that the tangy metal she's been tasting for the last few however long she's been down there is slowly growing more and more and more pungent (or maybe she's just going crazy, because that's always a possibility), but she's right here!
Matthew is alive, Elektra is sure in this belief. She knows this simply because Elektra could not imagine the man who had been so sure that was she was still there under all of the Hand's manipulation and exploitation of her mind, that had been so sure that despite all of her relentless and remorseless murder, Elektra was still redeemable, that there is no possibility that man was dead.
She simply cannot imagine his limp body laying in the rubble of Midland Circle with a halo of blood circling his perfect face, cannot imagine him crumpled and broken with his limbs in all the wrong angles as he lies still in a sewer like Elektra, cannot imagine the blood leaking from his skull as his pretty head lolls back against rock and rubble.
Elektra can taste the tears and the sweat and the snot running down her face as she realises the man is the pressure under her shoulders, and he's dragging her across the floor, and then he lays her down gently on leather, and Elektra cannot stop screaming and screaming, and then her voice stops working so now she's just crying and, Jesus, even that hurts like shit.
Bobby is a taxi driver who's lived in the city since he was born, and he is in his late seventies. He is a kind man, kind enough to drive Elektra to his home after she recovers from her incessant sobbing, and replaces it with insistent head shakes and yelling negatives at his frantic blabbering about getting her 'proper medical care'.
Pft. Elektra has not been to a hospital since she was twelve years old, when she split the back of her head open after her adoptive parents kept nagging her to learn how to ride a bike. It was sterile and cold and Elektra has vowed never to return to one. Nor ride another bike.
Bobby offers her hospitality for a handful of months and Elektra makes damn good on this offer. His wife, Anita, is a doctor, and a damn good one. She is the one who cares for Elektra, who changes her gauze and her bandages and even listens to her silly confessions once she's lucid enough to speak and remember.
But the couple are old and stuck in their ancient values, and she overhears Anita talking about calling the police after her admittance to vigilancy, so once Elektra can walk once more, she slits their throats with a heavy heart. She leaves the apartment with a strong will to get somewhere. Exactly where, she's not sure.
Elektra could not tell you how she got to the lovely apartment, because all she remembers is stumbling to Matthew's bed and passing out on his silk pillows, the pretentious son of a bitch.
She dreams of a fallen building and blood and Matthew's there too, of course. It's bittersweet and she assumes it must be a memory because the feeling of his lips on hers should be fresh and real if it were purely imaginative, but the feeling is distant and misty.
Elektra wakes suddenly to the shrill screaming of a blonde woman, and struggles to open her eyes to see Matthew's girlfriend. Karen, she recalled. They'd been close. Elektra might begrudgingly admit they were in love. She is not jealous of Karen, of course. Jealousy is a silly sentiment and Elektra is an adult, not a sensitive, bitchy teenager.
She probably would have slit Karen's throat in college, but that means growth!
After a long and shitty explanation of her previous circumstances to a very confused and very concerned Karen, Elektra is hurting and achey and wishes she had some of Anita's painkillers right now. Karen lets her lie on the couch and decides to help her change her bandages.
Usually Elektra's experience with being shirtless with a pretty woman is pleasant. This is not. It hurts and the girl's hands are not at all steady for a killer (Karen has not admitted this explicitly, but Elektra could see it in her eyes when she told the tale of Bobby and Anita's murder by her own hands), but Elektra lets it slide because if Matthew likes her, Elektra must tolerate her too. Oh. Matthew.
She'd come to his apartment initially in hopes of finding him, preferably alive, preferably willing to help her with the bones still healing, because Anita was a very good doctor, but by no means a miracle worker. Elektra had gotten sidetracked by his comfortable bed which still smelled like him.
"Done." Karen finally tells her lowly, and Elektra pulls the shirt which Bobby had fished out of the room of his daughter who rarely visited back down over her chest. "Thank you. I owe you one, Matthew's girlfriend." Elektra tells the girl, who looks down at her feet.
"And while we're on the topic," Elektra began slowly, pushing herself back upright as Karen walked back to her former seat with the speed of a woman sitting next to a killer. That's probably why, actually. "Matthew. I see he's not exactly prancing around this apartment in glee. Where is he, the hospital?" Elektra spits the last word out with a filthy feel in her mouth. The hospital wouldn't fix Matthew up as well as Elektra could.
Karen clears her throat then, her eyes growing more and more shiny, and she gives Elektra an apologetic look. Elektra thinks nothing of this, because Matthew is not dead. "Matt's missing," Karen blurts out, and the words hit Elektra like a brick, hard and sharp and fast. "What do you mean, missing?" She demands with a tone filled with suspicion, an edge in her voice that wasn't there previously.
"He's, um," Karen cuts herself off with a sharp inhale and Elektra knows when one is lying to themselves when she sees it. "Matt is..." Spit it out already, Karen. "Nobody's seen Matt since Midland Circle." The words are unsure and messy and wobbly and Elektra takes them in stride, because that meant that Matthew was not dead.
"Oh." Is all that comes out of her mouth, and really, Elektra wouldn't know how she could respond to that. She shifts in her seat and ignores the twinge of complaint her healing ribs give her. How does one respond when told their love is missing? Tears? Tears are for mourning housewives, and Elektra is nor mourning or, God forbid, a housewife. Karen seems to understand this and not one word comes from her again.
Karen and Elektra sit in silence instead. It's around the six minute mark when Karen finally swallows with a nod and packs her stuff back up, slings her purse back around her shoulders, and leaves Elektra after a lingering hand on hers and the soft reassurance of
"If you need anything," Elektra nods in understanding. "I'll reach you." In any other circumstance, those words may have been unsettling, but Karen, who must be an angel sent down from Heaven to protect Matthew Murdock disguised as a no-nonsence journalist, understands.
Elektra sits on Matthew's couch for another hour or so before standing up abruptly and moving to lie back down on his silk pillows. She lies there in the dark of his room, in his apartment, in his city, in his city that he swore to protect and now mourn him even though he is still there, a fingertip away from reach and she comes to her final decision.
Matthew is missing.
What is missing can be found. It will be difficult, certainly. An almost impossible task, one that many will try and many will not succeed. A nasty, horrible, fool's errand.
A challenge.
And Elektra does not pass up a challenge.