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It was cold and wet and Gwen’s breath made clouds in the air.
“You need a coat,” a voice she wouldn’t have expected announced from behind her.
Her teeth chattered.
“I don’t need advice from a murderer,” she hissed.
“Fine, have it from a human, then. You need a coat,” Murderdock observed further.
She glared over her shoulder at him and turned to tell him to go jump off a bridge, but then stopped.
“Dude,” she said, “Did anyone tell you it’s not subtle?”
Murderdock’s coat was an enormous, puffy blue affair—but not any blue. Like, crayon blue. Ambulance lights blue. ‘Look at me, I am a target,’ blue. He shrugged and the whole thing moved with him. His legs looked like sticks jutting out from the bottom of it.
“Foggy says its ‘charming,’” he said like this was any type of real reason to wear that monstrosity.
“What are you even doing here?” Gwen demanded through a series of chills.
Murderdock angled his face more or less towards the horizon.
“Looking for something,” he said. Then turned Gwen’s way. “Didn’t find it.”
“Good,” Gwen huffed. Murderdock snickered.
He spun around on his bird legs.
“Get a coat!” he called over his shoulder.
Get fucked, Gwen thought after him.
Gwen stared at Mr. Nelson for long enough that he started to get uncomfortable.
“Matt spent half of his youth in Japan,” he finally said. “Apparently it gets pretty cold there. Just take it Gwen, it’s not anything malicious.”
“I don’t take gifts from murderers,” she said, then flicked her eyes down to the offensive garment. “And it’s pink.”
And again, not just any kind of pink, eye-searing highlighter pink. Pink with an equally painful green lining.
“Well, you can’t really blame him, Gwen. He’s blind. He probably asked for a women’s coat, size small and picked the first thing they brought him,” Mr. Nelson said. “Just take it. Pretend it’s from the dog if it makes it more acceptable.”
Well.
If it was a gift from Lola, then it was more or less acceptable. But only if it was from Lola.
“Don’t be getting any ideas,” she threatened Murderdock a couple of nights later. “It’s from Lola. Not you.”
Murderdock didn’t seem too bothered.
“She is delighted by your acceptance,” he said flatly, tilting his head back and forth, and back and forth, trying to find something in the city.
Gwen jutted a lip out at him.
“What you are even looking for?” she demanded.
Murderdock frowned.
“None of your business, Spiderwoman,” he said.
Fine. Fuck you, old man. And here Gwen was, trying to be nice.
She found the object of Murderdock’s interest on the way home from an early night the following one. It was not guns, or drugs, or chemical weapons.
It was Cat. He was pretty unmistakable with all his war wounds.
She sat on the curb with him, listening to his yowling for a while before sighing.
“Alright, asshole, come on, I’ll take you home,” she said.
Cat yowled at her and pawed unhappily at her knee.
“Yeah, dipshit, you went and did that,” she told him. “Had a nice, warm house and left it all behind for a little freedom. How does it feel, huh? You feel accomplished?”
Cat sunk his nails into the fabric of her suit and yowled impossibly louder.
He freaked out when she tried to pick him up and carried on doing that, hissing and spitting, until eventually, she went the couple blocks home and grabbed a towel to grab him with.
Her dad asked her without looking up from his web-browsing who’s cat she’d just stolen. She ignored that and held Cat up and looked at him.
“Did you ride the subway to get here?” she asked him.
Cat was a pretty good roommate once he was less cold and wet. He couldn’t meow for shit, or purr if they were being honest here, but he tried, bless his idiot cat soul. He followed her around her room and demanded to sit on her laptop while she tried to do some last minute research.
Gwen made him a cardboard box nest to sleep in and climbed into bed. She woke up to find him curled up on her hip, paws tucked under his chest, making his fucked-up purring sound.
And drooling.
All over everything, this cat was drooling.
“You are so lucky to have found the only person in the world who can love you,” she told him.
He opened his mouth and made a raspy noise, which he followed up with a sneeze.
She took Cat to DA Nelson and he cut his eyes at him like they were nemeses.
“So, you’ve returned,” he noted unemotionally.
Gwen wondered if he was the one who’d tossed Cat out the window to start with.
DA Nelson offered to take Cat back to his home fort, but Gwen suddenly found that she didn’t trust him not to murder and dispose of Cat’s body on the way.
“You can just lead,” she said, hugging Cat close. Normal cats would probably have hated that, but not Cat. Cat seemed to despise most contact which was not at least semi-violent. He purred when she clutched him to her chest.
She’d never seen Murderdock genuinely happy. He looked like Big Red when he let himself go. All wide smiles and laughlines.
“You found him,” he breathed.
“Yeah, he came to Queens,” Gwen said, handing over the goods. Murderdock took his beast back with care; he laid Cat against his shoulder like he was a human baby. Cat yowled and buried himself under Murderdock’s chin, then started up purring and drooling.
Murderdock looked touched.
“What do you want in return?” he asked, not at all in the usual way. He stroked Cat’s fur. Mr. Nelson winced at this.
Gwen considered it.
She could ask for a lot of shit here. She could ask for him to leave her alone. She could ask him not to kill their current contested body. She could threaten Cat and offer his safety in return for even more leverage.
But.
“You already got me a coat,” she said. “We’re even.”