Discordant

Discordant

Summary: When you risk your own life to save Matt's, he gets (very) angry with you. 

Pairing: Matt x fem!reader

Warnings: Sex trafficking, use of swearing, violence, misogyny, descriptions of blood

The sheets were abnormally cold. 

Half-asleep, you stretched your legs out, searching for the warmth that was Matt. Sometimes he rolled over away from you in his sleep, and then you'd have to shift yourself and your pillow closer to him unless you wanted to shiver all night. But he wasn't there. Blearily you checked your phone and squinted as you turned the brightness down as far as it could go.

It was almost three in the morning, and while Matt was nearly always home at this time, it wasn't impossible for him to still be out. What jarred you was the text notification that you had from him:

On my way back now.

It was his way of giving you peace of mind; you insisted that he always text you when he was on his way home so that you'd know something was wrong if he was out late and there was no text. 

But the text you had received tonight was sent an hour ago, and Matt should have returned long before now. Still, this didn't lead to a nefarious conclusion for certain, because if he couldn't sleep you'd find him reading over a case in the living room sometimes, the lighting nonexistent save for the neon swirls emanating from the billboard. Or, other times, he'd be on the roof, wearing a sweatshirt and just listening to the city. 

Sleepily you climbed out of bed and pulled on your flannel pajama bottoms. You were wearing Matt's tee shirt and it smelled like clean laundry detergent. You almost hoped he was on the roof tonight; you wouldn't mind sitting up there with him and looking out over the city. When you came into the living room to find it empty, you made your way up to the roof, slowly waking up as you ascended the stairs. 

But the roof was empty, and only then did your stomach plummet. He wasn't back. He never made it back, even though he'd said he was on his way. Dread twisted inside of you; even if something innocent had delayed him, he would have texted you a second update, letting you know that he wasn't actually going to be back soon. You tried calling but it went straight to voicemail. Calling the police was out of the question; Matt would never forgive you if his identity was compromised. 

Not that his identity would matter much if he was dead.

Where had he gone tonight? He'd mentioned to you over dinner that he was going to be investigating a sex trafficking circle... but where? DeWitt Park? But that felt wrong to you — no, that was where he had been the night before. It might have been the water. That sounded familiar. 

42nd Street, Matt had mentioned. Or had it been 52nd? Or it was 46th. Each number sounded equally likely. But there was no time to waste, so you landed on 42nd just because that was the first address you had thought of and it was closer to Matt's apartment. You slipped on your sneakers and a light jacket, and then slipped out the door into the night. 

It was much colder out than you were expecting. How on earth did Matt come out here, all year, wearing nothing but a hard suit? You scrunched your arms around yourself as you hurried down the sidewalk, praying that none of the criminals Matt took down regularly saw you, alone, in the street. The only saving grace was that you were still wearing the baggy flannel pajama bottoms and Matt's tee, so you weren't exactly dressed as though you were going to a gala; still, you found yourself glancing over your shoulder every minute or so. A siren shrieked in the distance, and you flinched as the echo of a man shouting in the alleyway resounded next to you, hurrying past as quickly as you could. 

Out of desperation, you pulled out your phone and tried calling Matt's burner again, but to your shock, there was a fuzzy sound on the other end as the call was picked up. 

"Hello?" you demanded. "Where are you?"

"I think a more appropriate question would be who are you?"

The voice on the other end was not Matt's, and you froze in your tracks. "Why do you have this phone?" you asked, choosing your words carefully for fear of giving away Matt's identity. Had you said his name when the call first went through? You already couldn't remember. 

"Well, we're not going to get anywhere just asking questions, are we?" the voice responded. "I'm Hugh, by the way. And you are...?"

"Coming to bust whatever operation you have going on," you said, trying to channel that cool confidence that you'd seen the Avengers use in clips online you'd watched of them (in your defense, who didn't watch recordings of the Avengers in action and wonder what they would do in their position?). "So I'd recommend listening carefully. That phone doesn't belong to you. Unless you release its owner now, you will seriously regret it. I mean it, dude." You were shaking as you spoke, not from anger but from fear, and felt immensely lucky that this wasn't a face-to-face conversation you were having. 

The voice on the other end tutted. "You're out of your mind if you think you have any chance of even getting in here, girl. Now stop calling this number and let me and my men get on with our business."

"Wrong answer. See, I'm an Avenger." You created the fabrication as you spoke, saying whatever popped into your head first. "They call me Thorn. Ever heard of me?"

"There's no fucking Avenger called Thorn."

"Yeah, keep telling yourself that. You haven't heard of me because anyone that's ever encountered me hasn't lived to tell the tale. There's a reason they call me Thorn, Hugh."

In the background you could faintly hear a familiar voice, and your heart jumped into your throat as you realized it was Matt. You couldn't hear what he was saying, but he sounded pissed. 

And if you could slightly hear him, then there was no doubt that he could hear you. 

"Listen up, douchebag dude. Yeah, I'm talking to you, dumb donkey," you said, a bit more loudly, desperately hoping that Matt would understand you were directing your words to him. Double D, Matt, get it? "I'll be there in — uh — eighteen hours, so this is your warning. Shout if you want me to call the cops, and we'll make this nice and easy. Right now. Shout if you want me to call the cops and I'll be dialing 911 as soon as you want."

There was a pause on the other end as Hugh likely interpreted the campiness of your threat. More important was the dead silence in the background; Matt had stopped speaking entirely. 

Damn it. You'd been hoping that he'd let you call the cops; it would have made things easier. "Alrighty, then. Feel my wrath in... awhile."

In reality you were only one minute out from the wharf, but the last thing you wanted was for them to jack up their security right before you got there. 

There was a warehouse right next to the wharf, by a rundown parking lot where three black cars were parked. Though its windows were broken and the exterior decrepit, you could see a few lights on inside the warehouse. Two tall men stood inside, next to a small door on the wall adjacent to the entrance, as though guarding it. Bingo. 

The next step was actually getting in. It was unnerving that Matt did this sort of thing every single night because you didn't even know where to start, except for sneak in find Matt save Matt run. Only then did you realize you'd only brought your phone and nothing else, not even the butter knife that had been right out on the counter next to you when you'd left the apartment. You cursed your own stupidity and searched yourself for anything that you could use as a weapon, but unless the men in there were scared of pajamas, you were going in empty-handed. 

Your identity would be an issue, too. Fortunately, you found an old crumpled face mask in your pajama pocket; it would have to do. 

"Um, okay," you whispered, pulling the face mask up to your nose. "Matt, not sure if you're within range to hear me right now, but I'm outside the warehouse. And I'm going to make a diversion, uh... somehow." You looked around you for inspiration and your eyes landed on a fist-sized rock sitting in the crumbling pavement of the lot. Rudimentary, but effective. It only took a massive hoist that nearly pulled a muscle in your arm to sling the rock through the window of the black car nearest to you — hopefully that's one of theirs and not someone else's — and gape, open-mouthed, as the window shattered like an eggshell. Immediately the car alarm began to wail, and you dashed off in the other direction, your sneakers slapping the pavement of the lot. 

The sound of the warehouse door opening and closing as the men exited to investigate nearly gave you a heart attack and you rounded the corner of the warehouse just in time. You didn't dare use the front entrance, for fear that they would see you, let alone hear the sound of the door, so you vaulted through the broken window and only sustained a small cut to the side of your arm and the bottom of your palm. 

If Matt wasn't in this small room, then you didn't know what your next move would be, but you just about passed out with relief when you flung open the door and saw Matt, still in his suit and chained up to a post in the room. All of the adrenaline felt as though it were rushing to your head and you had to restrain every fiber in your being from simply running to him and hugging him. 

"We probably only have a minute or so," you reported. Your eyes fell on a desk that was unnecessarily large, but would be a good block for the door, at least until Matt could be freed. "Well — two minutes if I could just move this stupid desk in front of the door—" You gritted your teeth and shoved the offending furniture as hard as you could. It budged only slightly, and scraped loudly as it slowly shifted to block the entrance. "Nice. Maybe three minutes." You turned to Matt, hands on hips. "How'd I do?"

It wasn't as though you were expecting him to be smiling or anything — obviously you'd be in a bad mood if you'd been kidnapped, too. But the look on the lower half of his jaw was so tense that you didn't even want to know what the upper half looked like. "Key is on the wall," he said shortly. "Hurry, they're already coming back."

"Hurry is my middle name. Actually, it's Lightning McQueen," you told him, grabbing the keys and kneeling to unlock the chains. Matt's body was warm and you could practically feel the heat radiating off of him through the suit. You fought another irrational urge to just grab his hand and squeeze it, and focused on grappling with the lock. It was one of those keychains that had five or six keys on it, and if not for the dire situation, you would have laughed at how comically cliched this was. 

Already the men were pounding at the door. You looked up nervously, seeing it shake and shift forward a centimeter. 

"Y/N, you have to move fast," Matt said, his voice somehow even more firm, and it was the startling note of austerity that you never usually received from him that cleared the trembling in your hands. Blood was streaking down your arm, you noticed, and you wiped it away, uncomfortably aware that Matt probably could smell it the moment you got cut.

There was another bang and this time, the door slid open six more inches.

"Shit!" you yelped, digging the fifth key into the lock. It still wasn't a fit, and it didn't help that there was now a face sticking through the crack, red and bellowing. 

"You bitch!" he yelled. "When we get in here, I'm gonna tear you apart!"

Focus, focus, focus. You squeezed the last key in, but didn't have time to turn it; the man in the front finally kicked his way in. Like a flash he was on top of you, shoving your back into the wall. "Hey, bitch. Thought you could sneak in here like this?"

I did sneak in here like this. You forewent the comeback, feeling that it wouldn't be very tactful. "I — I just—"

The other man entered. Immediately you knew that he was Hugh; his disposition was that of a leader and he was much calmer than the red-faced man. "She'll do well, actually," he observed. "I know of a few people who would pay for her."

You swallowed hard, averting your eyes. "I'm warning you again. Unless you... unless you want to die by a thousand thorns poking through your eyeballs and throat, then you'd be wise to not provoke me—"

"Thorn," Hugh snorted. "Can't believe I trusted you for a minute, there." His eyes trailed down your tee shirt and pajama bottoms. "I'll call the boss. He'll know what—"

Thwack. There was a sickening crack as Matt kicked Hugh in the head with an admiral flip through the air, and within a matter of seconds the man pinning you to the wall dropped too. Sagging with relief, you nearly fell into Matt's arms, letting his strength absorb the fear that you hadn't even realized was electric in every single one of your nerves, holding at him like he was a lifeline—

"We need to go, now."

"But... they're knocked out, right?"

Matt's mouth twisted. "There's more of them. They'll be showing up in a truck within a couple minutes. That's how I got taken down — there were too many of them." He grabbed your arm and hurried you forward, running at a speed that you could hardly keep up with if he hadn' t been half-dragging you. Together, you left the warehouse and continued down the street, staying at the same pace with Matt staying utterly silent the whole way. By the time he finally slowed — apparently judging the area to be safe — you were so out of breath that it was embarrassing, and you tried to stifle the air that you were gasping for to no avail. Certain that he'd make fun of you, or at least thank you for going into that stupid warehouse, you didn't speak either, but still he didn't engage in any conversation. Never had you felt so uncomfortable next to him as you did during the entire walk back to the apartment. 

The sun was beginning to rise when you entered the apartment. Exhaustion tugged at your eyes, but you forced yourself to stay as awake as you could. Matt peeled off his helmet, and his hair stuck up at every angle as he paced into the kitchen, still wearing the rest of his suit. 

"So," you said finally, trying to smile at him. "How'd you like my alias? Thorn is kind of cool, right? Maybe I'll even sketch out a costume—"

"Y/N. Not now."

You wet your lips as Matt leaned forward onto the counter, his head hanging towards the floor. "I don't understand. Why are you mad at me?"

"Why am I mad at you?" His head lifted, and for the first time since the evening before you got a full look at his face, incredulous and perturbed. "You risked your life tonight, wearing nothing but pajamas and a tee shirt."

"Well, next time I'll be sure to change into my strapless dress first," you deadpanned. "Look. I panicked, I tried my best. And we're both here and okay, right?"

"It was dumb luck, Y/N. Dumb luck that I was able to twist the key and dumb luck that you didn't get sex trafficked or shot right where you stood. Never again will you ever do that, do you hear me?" he said, lifting a finger and pointing it at you, and it was that motion alone that put you over the edge. 

"Don't act as though you can tell me what to do," you said, stung. "It was my choice and I chose to save you. I knew the risks, I—"

"You knew the risks? That's why you came prepared with something for self defense, right?" His tone switched to that of mockery. 

"Maybe if you let me come with you more often, then I'd've been prepared, and I would've brought a knife with me."

"Let you come with me? Do you not understand the danger out there, on the street? It's not a game, Y/N. I don't go out there for fun at night. If you think that it would be okay for me to just take you out there, where you could get injured or worse—"

"That's not fair, Matt."

"It wouldn't be very fair if tonight you died because of me. How do you think I would feel if something had happened to you?"

"And what if something happened to you?" you shouted. "You think I'd live merrily here, knowing that you got hurt and I didn't do anything to try to save you? Of course I had to do something."

"I never said that you had to just sit here! Come on, Y/N, you had a hundred other options to choose from, and all you could think of was calling the police? My phone was here — you could have called Luke, or Danny, or Jessica — hell, even Frank would've picked up the phone and helped out, but—"

"Oh, so it's okay for Jessica to help you, but not me," you said, seething. "You'd be fine if it was her running in there to save you, but you don't trust me enough to—"

"It has nothing to do with trust, don't be ridiculous. Jessica's got powers, you don't. Don't make this into something else."

"I'm not! I'm just saying, if you're going to bring up a whole laundry list of other people you'd rather have seen than me, then you might as well just go hang out with them and not me — sorry I don't have super strength, super hearing, or a glowing fist, or — I don't know, an unbridled yearning to kill people—"

"You're missing the point!" Matt's voice had risen to a shout as well, and it was alarming as it was infuriating. He stepped forward, hands clenched in the gloves of the suit. You could see traces of blood on the outside and hoped it wasn't his. "Everything you did was reckless and there was nothing I could do to stop you. That's why I'm pissed, Y/N, because you made poor decision after poor decision, and I couldn't be there to stop you!"

"Don't you dare call it a poor decision."

In response, Matt slapped the top of the table and spun around, spine rigid and back tense. 

You ran your hands through your hair. Tears were welling, unbidden, in the corners of your eyes, and you wiped aggressively at them. "I don't even know what to say to you right now, Matt. I wish you could see things my way. I wish you could acknowledge that I tried, and thank me, and not make me feel like shit for doing what I thought was right."

He didn't answer. You ignored the headache that was beginning to drum in the back of your head and went into the bathroom. Angrily you turned on the hot water and lathered soap in your hands, entirely forgetting about the massive cut on your palm — it was buried in enough sticky, dark blood clots that you couldn't even see it — and cried out when the water rushed into the open cut. It stung red-hot, burning enough that the tears came back into your eyes and you didn't even notice Matt was at your side until his hand rested gently on your forearm. 

"Can I help?" he asked, and you nodded, the tears spilling uncontrollably now. Gently he cleaned out the cut on both your palm and arm, and bandaged them up with dextrous fingers well-practiced in first aid. After he finished, he wordlessly left the bathroom, either to give you space or because he needed space himself. You didn't say anything either and opted to get into the shower, unable to bear the taut air between you.

You'd make up. You knew you would. Because that was the source of the argument, wasn't it — that you cared about one another too much? But for now, with Matt's stoic silence, you had never felt colder inside, and you let the tears fall in the shower as they mingled with residual blood from your hands.