i am elektra natchios.

Luke had never been terrible at reading people and that was why he could tell that something was up with Elektra. She was cool, calm, and collected. It was rare that she asked if she could do anything. So, when she asked if she could come by and have a drink, he was concerned. Just slightly. Not enough to let it show. He handed her a drink when she sat down and he sat down beside her shortly thereafter grabbing another bottle. “Nothing but the best for you, Ms. Natchios,” he retorted before taking a sip of his wine. A moment of silence passed and he asked, “Everything alright?” 

The knowledge that your death was likely impending was far scarier when death was something you had experienced before. Elektra knew what it felt like to bleed out, knew about the pain and agony that came with dying. It wasn’t something she wanted to repeat and, yet, she knew she was on her way there. She intended to make the journey interesting, at least, and that involved having a drink with Luke Cage. It was odd, the not-quite-friendship she had with the man, but it was comforting. She took the drink he offered her with a nod because that, too, was a comfort. “I should hope so. I am your favorite customer,” she countered with a smirk. She took a long swig from the glass at his question, sighing quietly. “Between you and I, I think I’ve dug myself into something of a hole. I’m worried it’s not the sort people get out of.”

Matthew knew that Elektra understood the weight of his words. His life was now in the hands of a man like Wilson Fisk, and it wasn’t just his life. It was Karen’s. It was Selina’s. It was Karen’s. They were all puppets dangling on strings that were like nooses around their necks, just waiting for the bottom dropped them to their deaths. Her apology was like a bullet tearing through him, and Matt wasn’t sure how much resolve he had left in him before he completely fell apart – as if he hadn’t already been torn apart with every word that Fisk had spoken.

“Please, just… take me home,” he asked, struggling to his knees and then leaning on her for support so that he could stagger back to his feet. Home to the four walls of his apartment because Matt didn’t know what to do. He was lost – lost in a way that he hadn’t been since he was a boy, suddenly fatherless. He didn’t have an answer for Elektra, because he didn’t know if there was anything that could be done to help.

It had been inevitable. Wilson Fisk was a powerful man, the sort who always got what he wanted in the end, and Elektra had always known that him putting the pieces together was the inescapable end to this story. She’d told Karen as much, told Frank when he confronted her. Somehow, though, she’d thought they’d have more time. She’d thought they could have a chance to get ahead of it, thought they could provide themselves with some sort of breathing room, come up with a plan to stay a step ahead, but that had never been in the cards. There was no getting ahead of a man like Fisk. There was only clinging to what you had and praying you somehow managed to survive the storm.

“Okay,” she agreed, voice softer than it had ever been with anyone else as she took his weight to help him stand. He should have been in a hospital, but she knew he’d never agree to it. She’d known Matthew a long time, long enough to know that any help she offered beyond the basics would be refused. He’d always been stubborn --- it was part of what had made her fall in love with him so quickly, so completely. She wanted to do more, of course. She always wanted to do more for him, but she never could. He’d always clung tightly that martyr complex, always been so willing to take the brunt of everything. There was no changing him. Elektra didn’t even know if she wanted him to change.

The only people who Gamora found that knew every aspect of her life and didn’t look at her like she was a monster were the other children of Thanos and Peter. The other Guardians might have tried to understand, they spared her their judgment (sometimes, but after all, what were families for?) but none of them would really understand what it was like to be raised by a man like Thanos. To have their entire existence revolve around what be wanted. Peter was the closest one she knew, having been taken as a child and forced to be someone else. But this woman was the second person to have any semblance of understanding for what Gamora had been through. And it was almost funny that the only people outside of her ‘siblings’ to understand were Terran. There was no pity or judgment… Or any of the reactions that Gamora had become accustomed to, the woman didn’t seem to care about her being otherworldly either. She offered the other woman a smile before finally introducing herself. “Gamora Titan.”

Few people knew what it was like to have your childhood stripped away in favor of a mission you were too young to believe in. When she was a little girl, desperate to impress the Chaste and earn Stick’s praise, Elektra told herself she understood what she was fighting for. She told herself she wanted everything the Chaste wanted, told herself she needed to be who Stick wanted her to be. And then she’d stood in front of him, covered in the blood of the man she’d killed, and she’d realized there was no pride in his eyes when he looked at her. There was a vague sort of affection, something she’d clung to, something she’d called love, but he’d abandoned her all the same. She’d dedicated her life to his mission, and in the end, he’d still tried to kill her the moment it became more convenient to have her dead than alive. Few people understood what that felt like --- but this woman did. Elektra could see it in her eyes, in the set of her jaw and the crease of her brow. “Elektra Natchios,” she replied, giving her real name with far more ease than she normally might have.

“You think I give a shit if these people watch me beat the hell out of you?” Jessica hissed, grip tightening on Elektra. One hit is all it would take, Kilgrave’s voice whispered in her ear. C’mon. You’ve done it before. You know what you are. And look at her, what good is she to the world? Maybe she’s like me… And now there was a vision of him, standing beside Elektra, running a hand down her cheek. Maybe she needs to be taken care of? 

Jessica’s chest was heaving, and her jaw was clenched so tightly she thought her teeth would shatter. She let Elektra go, just enough to put her feet back on the floor, and then dragged her towards the door. 

“If you’d like to spend a bit more time in a prison cell, I suppose you’re free to do so,” Elektra replied, tensing as the other woman’s grip tightened. The fire in her eyes was undeniable --- and perhaps familiar. What were the odds that Jessica Jones would kill her here? Elektra was willing to bet they were higher than zero, a thought that had her heart pounding nervously in her chest despite the bored look she had plastered onto her face. Elektra, in spite of the impassive act she often put on, didn’t want to die. Not anymore, not again.

Fisk let Elektra talk. Part of the game was letting them think that they’d won, slowly garnering hope until you ripped the floor from beneath them. Elektra was not a woman so foolish as to hope, but she had dared to play his game. She was in checkmate, and he was closing out the game. Only a few moves left to make and then all would be over for the insolent heroes of this city. The city would soon acknowledge its king.

“I can assure you that you are not going underused.” There was a glint in his eyes. Elektra was quite useful without deploying her to assassinate any individuals. Her ties to Matthew Murdock were useful on their own. “I’m afraid that your resignation might be better worded as a termination if you choose to accept that route. You see, you have been quite useful to me here. I did not take you for a fool though, so surely you are aware of when you are being used.”

There were many things Elektra detested. Some, like combining navy and black in outfits, were entirely insignificant. They annoyed her, she’d avoid them, but she could live with them if she had to. She could stomach them. Others, though, were harder to swallow. They were things like people underestimating her because of her gender, her race. Things like people writing her off as someone not worthy of being listened to, things like people assuming she was little more than a pretty face. 

Things like people claiming to value her for her skills and then using her to make the men in her life suffer.

She turned towards Fisk, jaw twitching at the implication. A few years ago, she might have snapped at him. She would have done it in a way that sounded polite but was undeniably an insult, something Fisk would have been intelligent enough to pick up on. She might have done something stupider than that back then, too, but things had changed. She’d died once, and she had no intention of doing it again. She certainly had no intention of letting Wilson Fisk be the one to take her out. 

“Is that a threat, Mr. Fisk?” She asked instead, bringing the glass of scotch to her lips and taking a slow sip. “Because you should know, it’s a bit rude to leave a girl with vague implications. If you’re going to threaten me, I’d prefer you do it without the uncertain terms.” She set the glass down, leaning back against the wall and studying him for a moment. “I’m certainly not a fool. I’m also not someone who’s willing to allow my talents to be wasted because you need something to hold over a man’s head. You and I are done, Fisk. I’d prefer to walk away, but if you’d like to do things the hard way, I think you’ll be unpleasantly surprised to find how much damage I can do before you make good on your threats.” Fisk wasn’t a man to be underestimated. She knew that. If she went against him, it was likely that she wouldn’t live to tell about it. But she was still a woman who’d gone against the likes of Jessica Jones and Luke Cage and still come out on top. She could still do enough damage to leave him vulnerable enough for Castle to make good on his promises and finish the job. She could still ensure that he was less of a threat to Matthew, to Karen, to Frank. She couldn’t win this fight, but she could make sure he lost, too. She was good at that.

Karen, Madani, Curt, Amy – they all accepted what Frank did, to varying degrees, because they loved him in spite of the warning signs. They welcomed him into their homes when he was covered in blood, when he was bleeding out himself, when his focus was elsewhere and he couldn’t carry a conversation because his mind was replaying over and over again what the man looked like when his throat opened under Frank’s knife. Of course, there was acceptance, and then there was acceptance. Karen had seen Frank drag Schnoover out of his home, crash into his car, beat him to within an inch of his life, and it was almost enough to have her turn from him completely. The notion of violence was different to the reality of it. People had a tendency to downgrade what Frank was capable of, to try and compartmentalise it. Elektra had never been part of that group, probably because she was exactly the same as he was.

They’d killed people together in various ways. Clean cut, a slice across their necks, a bullet between their eyes, or hours’ worth of torture interspersed with polite conversation and sometimes Frank making a food run if their target remained unconscious for long enough. They’d dragged bodies down to the Hudson, dug shallow graves (or at least Frank had – Elektra was very good at directing, and maintaining her manicure), thrown men into liquid concrete to keep the cops from identifying them until the traces were gone. There was a certain level of camaraderie that came with that, despite his best intentions, and a certain level of trust, too. He knew Elektra wouldn’t sell him out to the cops, but that was honour among killers – and because she knew she was just as dirty as he was.

“Depends on your definition,” Frank retorted, a quirk on his lips as he looked over at her. By his definition, Elektra fit in that category against all odds. “The shit he knows, hell knows where he gets it,” Frank said. “He saw me for the first time in his life and he knew the men involved in my family being killed. He led me to one of their cells, let me put a knife in his throat.” Fisk had done all of that to have something over Frank, to endear him to him. It made sense that he would play the same game with Elektra. Frank never would have told her about it before, but there was a part of him that wished he had, if only to warn her. “She’s seen worse,” he said quietly. Mostly because of him, he had to admit. Elektra was clean precision where he was coffee pot to face. “Believe me, I would’ve gutted the guy anyway. You did everyone a favour in the end.” Funny how those things worked, and funnier still how Frank was trying to comfort Elektra. “I’m a soldier, not a spy,” Frank replied, shrugging a shoulder. “You tried. We all have. Now we try something else, yeah?”

Friendships had never been things Elektra was good at maintaining. It was difficult to find people she had much in common with, hard to find anyone who could relate to her very specific sort of hobbies. The housewives who often roamed the halls of the buildings she lived in were so infuriatingly mundane that she wanted to scream at the sight of them, their problems so small and insignificant that she often locked her door and pretended not to be home in an attempt to avoid the threat of hearing about them. The people in her line of work were often insufferable in a different sort of way. The world of assassins was dominated by men, and they were competitive creatures by nature. Few of them ever enjoyed knowing a woman was better than them, and they tended to get nasty when it was an undeniable fact. Elektra never had much patience for stroking egos, and that prevented her from befriending most of the people she met in her workplace.

Frank Castle, though... He was different. Like her, there was some level of morality to his killing sprees. He wasn’t the sort of man uncomfortable with being bested by a woman, wasn’t the sort of person who felt the need to brag about his various exploits. He did what needed to be done and he moved on. Elektra respected that. And the two of them, they worked well together. They’d established a certain sort of rapport between them, a comfortable back and forth that put their victims on edge and gave them both a laugh. Elektra didn’t have much in the way of friendships, but she was beginning to think that whatever it was she had with Frank Castle might qualify. 

There was a certain edge to Elektra that didn’t just come from the fact that she casually sidestepped his enquiries into her surname, not that it had been hard to deduce. She was the daughter of a famous man, and Tony knew from personal experience that meant your personal business was up for public auction at any given moment, but even at that, there wasn’t much chatter about her in society, no scandalous rumours, no messy parties, no nights where she only got out of jail on account of her daddy’s bank account. It was possible, of course, that not all rich kids had their moment of rebellion, and certainly that most didn’t have moments that lasted as long as Tony’s had (and still was), but Tony had always been of the opinion that if someone seemed too good to be true, they always were. Even the Avengers, in the end, had proven that to be true. Maybe that was why the Guardians had been so refreshing, in that they didn’t even try to hide the fact that they were assholes. They were definitely easier to trust, at least.

“Maybe I was just waiting for the opportune moment. I’m not in the business of interrupting a good night unnecessarily.” Of course, the night had not gone entirely as he had planned, but the moment he realised she wasn’t returning, Tony had to admit he found it almost as entertaining as the alternative would’ve been. The maid screaming when she walked in had made him feel a little bad, though. “Is that what you’re banking on tonight?” Tony asked, raising an eyebrow. “I have to admit, you have my attention. I’m intrigued as to who you have your eyes on tonight.” Tony looked over the crowd, coming to rest on a man that hadn’t moved from the door, his eyes dark and focused on Elektra until he saw Tony looking. “It wouldn’t be the guy at six o’clock, would it?”

For a lot of people, the spotlight was an all or nothing thing. Either they were always the center of attention, whether it was convenient or not, or they never were. They either never learned how to step into the shadows or they had no clue how to step out of them. Elektra had never had that issue. She was good at getting only the sort of attention she wanted, and only in the moments she wanted it. It was a rare talent, particularly for children of rich parents. She was positive it wasn’t one Tony Stark had achieved. The amount his name appeared in the papers rarely fell, and the context of those stories often varied from vaguely complimentary to scathing insults. She never put much thought to them, of course. Both the insults and the compliments were probably only large variations of the truth.

There was a little slip there that Colleen caught, where Elektra almost called Danny the Iron Fist rather than by his name – and while Colleen felt defensive about it, she didn’t call the other woman out. It reminded her of the way Bakuto referred to Danny like he was a thing rather than a person. And… Colleen knew that sometimes even Danny thought of himself more as the Iron Fist than Danny Rand. It had been so deeply ingrained in him – in all of them, that it was easy to forget the human aspect. Maybe that was why it was so easy for the Hand to use and manipulate them, they never considered them people. They were things. Tools. Even Colleen was at the end. Whatever they had brought her down into that room for… Bakuto had been clear that she’d die in a way that benefited the Hand. They all had old habits, things that were forced on them that were hard to let go of. 

But as much as there was between them that they could bond over, Colleen couldn’t bring herself to trust Elektra. At least not outright. Her own code? Colleen looked down at her feet and nodded her head. A code was better than nothing, but when it was a personal code… Colleen just had to hope that Elektra wouldn’t break it. “The Chaste?” Colleen had never heard of them – but the way Elektra said it, made her think they were probably a lot like the Hand. “Bushido, I learned from my grandfather,” Colleen said before finally getting in the car and looked at the GPS on the middle console, and put in Danny’s address. It felt so wrong putting in a different address and calling it Danny’s home when it wasn’t the place they shared before. “I brought up codes because I was hoping we could call a truce so we don’t have to look over our shoulders at each other every ten seconds.” It probably sounded childish – maybe even stupid depending on who was listening, but honor and integrity mattered when it came to Bushido. And given the situation they were in, was it really all that crazy?

Both the Hand and the Chaste had a similar tendency to see people as weapons long before they saw them as anything else. Elektra had been a victim of that her entire life, long before she knew of her status as the Black Sky. Colleen, she suspected, had seen a similar attitude directed towards herself. Like Elektra, she’d been a weapon, a tool for the Hand to use. Like Elektra, she’d had any sense of self stripped away. In Elektra’s case, the process had been swift. She’d died and they’d brought her back empty, a vessel to be molded and changed as they saw fit. In Colleen’s case, the process was more lengthy. They’d taken her as a child, molded her for years until she became something they could use, and she’d still broken free. Elektra respected her for it. She couldn’t help but wonder if the thing that broke Colleen from their spell was at all similar to what freed Elektra from it. After all, the way Wing looked at Rand wasn’t all too different than the way Elektra knew she looked at Matthew. As childish as it was to believe, maybe love was the only thing strong enough to break through something like that.

That didn’t mean she trusted the other woman, of course. The list of people Elektra trusted was short, and in no danger of growing longer. It was a hard thing to add to considering trust had never gotten her any place worth being. Trusting the Chaste left her locked in a cage like a dog, trusting Stick nearly killed her. The only one who’d never broken her trust was Matthew, and that was only because she’d broken his first. She didn’t trust Colleen, but in this, they were allies. They had a common enemy. For the moment, that had to be enough. “An organization that opposed the Hand. I’m not surprised they didn’t tell you about them. The Hand never was one to publicize their enemies. It doesn’t matter now, though. They’re all gone.” All dead, taken out just before Midland Circle fell. Many of them died at Elektra’s own hand, and though she hadn’t been herself at the time, she didn’t regret it. The Chaste and the Hand, they were two sides of the same bitter, broken coin. As long as one existed, the other would never truly die. She settled into her seat as Colleen entered the address, glancing over as the device turned on. “That would be nice, wouldn’t it?” There was a hint of humor in her voice, a light tone that had once been much more prominent within her. It was something death had taken from her that she was still learning to get back. “I can’t swear on any code, but I can give you my word. I’m not looking to hurt you, or your friends. Not in general, and certainly not tonight.”

Honesty. That was also a term that he didn’t think would often be associated with his family’s name. Not that the public really knew everything his father had gotten into, or his mother for that matter, he was sure there was a trail of people who did know. He’d absolutely heard rumors about his parents’ shadiness and because of that, he would forever be looped into his fathers’ bad choices. No matter how hard he seemed to work to get out from under all the contracts Queen Industries had when he took over, he didn’t think he’d ever get out from under the corporate greed shadow. “A place like what? A restaurant?” he teased. “I’m not going to be eating Lassie’s descendants am I?”

“Oh, there are tricks up my sleeve. I mean, I do own a multi-billion dollar company with a tech division that’s nothing to sneeze at,” he pursed his lips and shrugged as though it were a minor thing, though really he was often surprised by how well that division allowed the company to fund other research endeavors. “I also know quite a few people in the…law enforcement sector.” The pause was two-fold. At first he had meant Dinah, though he wasn’t sure she was still batting for that team, but then he realized that the entire League was about law enforcement. Sort of. If you squint. Until your eyes closed. He shrugged off her compliment. “Takes one to know one, I guess. Gets easier to read things when you spend your whole life trying to figure out how the face you see in the mirror can differ so much from the one you see in pictures in papers with your name in the caption.” A chuckle left as he leaned back in his chair. “Sure. I’m human. We’re social beings. I have a circle of trust. Don’t you? Mine’s just very, very tiny.”

Elektra glanced around the restaurant with a shrug. “A place catering to the rich and powerful,” she provided. Money rarely went hand-in-hand with honesty, and perhaps Elektra was a shining example of that. She was rarely candid in any sort of way that mattered, preferring to hide the truth behind so many masks that even she was never quite sure when someone was getting close to uncovering it. She smirked lightly at the question, waving a hand. “Dog is considered a delicacy in some parts of the world, you know,” she said, though the expression on her face made it clear that he was in no danger of tasting it today. She might not have been an American by birth, but she’d lived in this country all her life. She understood its customs, understood its people’s sentimentality. 

For every “Trope” I get, I will post a TV trope for my muse.

For every “Trope” I get, I will post a TV trope for my muse.

For every “Trope” I get, I will post a TV trope for my muse.

For every “Trope” I get, I will post a TV trope for my muse.

(✉️ ➡️ Elektra Nachos ): He’s a friend of mine lol (✉️ ➡️ Elektra Nachos ): good kid

(✉️ ➡️ Elektra Nachos ): Aww ty (✉️ ➡️ Elektra Nachos ): Yeah (✉️ ➡️ Elektra Nachos ): I’m trying to think of anyone who doesnt have blood on their hands (✉️ ➡️ Elektra Nachos ): Miles probably doesn’t.