Chapter 143
“I hear congratulations are in order,” Matt Murdock said with an easy smile, unseeing eyes looking past me as he gestured for me to step inside. He was wearing a dark navy pair of dress pants and a white shirt with the top button left undone—probably the remains of his work outfit, given it was 4pm on a Tuesday—a bit of stubble hugging his jaw. His usual pair of red-tinted glasses covered his eyes. “It’s not every day I get to play host to an Avenger.”
I grinned back at him as I entered his apartment. “Thanks.”
“I know it was something that meant a lot to you,” he said. “I’m glad you worked out whatever complications were keeping you away.”
“Me too.”
I wandered down the short hall, past a side table, wall-mounted coat rack, and a short bench with a couple of pairs of shoes tucked under it, Matt following closely behind. His apartment practically dripped with aesthetic when seeing it on a screen, but in person? It honestly felt a little grungy. I had a vague recollection of Stick calling it an ‘expensive shithole’ and, as much as I was loathe to agree with anything that douchebag said, it wasn’t like Matt was the greatest at maintaining the place.
The yellow paint on some of the walls was faded and badly chipped in places, the wooden floorboards were heavily scuffed and marked, anything that wasn’t often used or moved had a layer of visible dust… I mean, as far as slightly slobby bachelor pads went, it was at least tidy, but still. And it was huge—much bigger than Nat’s apartment—with high ceilings crossed with gorgeous wooden support beams.
“I still have no idea how you can afford this place,” I told him, looking around the place as I walked over to the wooden coffee table in the middle of the lounge area, tucked between a cracked brown leather couch and a pair of corduroy armchairs.
“There’s actually a—”
“I know about the billboard.” It was still fairly light out, though the afternoon was fading fast. I wondered what time it turned on. “Even so, this place is massive. And light blocking curtains and blinds exist.”
Matt shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you.”
I pointed at the pair of windowed metal doors embedded in one of the walls. “I’ve always wondered, what’s with those?”
“Freight elevator doors. Kept from when the place was converted into living space. It’s an aesthetic thing,” he said. “Can I get you a drink?”
“Sure.” While Matt went to retrieve a pair of beers from his fridge, something else caught my eye. “Huh.”
“What?”
I moved over toward the open doorway that led through to Matt’s bedroom, stopping short of entering so I could stare at the squat metal cabinet tucked into the corner. It was painted bright red, with two doors—each had two sets of slotted ventilation slats, like you’d see on lockers, and a simple keyhole with no handle. A fine layer of dust had settled on top, disturbed only by an oddly-shaped artistic lamp and a small wooden chest.
“Weird. I used to have a cabinet like this one,” I said, rapping the metal gently with my knuckles. “Like… exactly like this one. The legs on mine were painted, too, but apart from that, they’re identical.”
It was actually a little unsettling. In the memories I had from the me from another world, I’d had that cabinet for years and years, and I didn’t remember noticing that Matt had an identical one in his apartment when I’d watched the Daredevil series. Had I just missed it?
“I suppose we both just have good taste in furnishings,” Matt commented absently as he opened the bottles.
I returned to the centre of the room at the same time he did, sitting down in the corner of the brown leather couch. He sat down next to me and offered me one of the beers.
“Beck’s?” I asked, trying not to make a face as I took it.
“Not a fan?”
“It’s not a favourite, but I’ve never been overly picky when it comes to free drinks. Cheers.” I held it out expectantly for a moment so we could clink them together before I took a sip. Eh, not great, but drinkable. “I’ve been kind of spoiled alcohol-wise, lately. Remind me to let you try an Asgardian ale.”
“That does sound pretty intriguing.”
“Sorry if I pulled you away from work,” I said. “I hope I didn’t make you think this was urgent.”
I’d messaged Matt half an hour ago, asking if I could meet him at his apartment when he was free, and he’d responded pretty much right away and told me he could come straight here.
“Not at all,” he said, shaking his head. “It was good timing. It’s nice to catch up.”
“How are things going with Karen?”
He shifted a little awkwardly. “They’re, ah, not.”
“Oh.” That was a shame. “I’m sorry.”
“It is what it is,” he said with a small shrug.
I had hoped that taking the Hand out of the picture would’ve helped there, but I suppose the Hand wasn’t Matt’s major malfunction right now when it came to romantic entanglements. “…Elektra?”
“No.” His initial response was immediate, but then he grimaced and bobbed his head in a so-so motion. “It’s complicated.”
“Well, I mean, I don’t have any other plans for this evening, if you just wanted a few more drinks and something less complicated.”
He let out a small chuckle, sipping from his beer.
A light flush touched my cheeks. “Ah! I mean, that wasn’t intended as an offer of, like, sex,” I clarified, then hurriedly tried to clarify my clarification. “Or, I mean, um, it wasn’t an offer of not sex, either! I mean, that could be on the table. Or not on the table! Or… I might just stop talking now.”
He was grinning, unseeing gaze fixed on a point just past me. “It might be nice to get dinner. Have a couple of drinks. I’d been planning on going ‘out’ tonight, but not after anything specific.”
I took a quick breath, willing away the slight blush that had crept onto my face after my last disaster of a sentence. “Just looking for trouble?”
“I do usually manage to find it.”
“Oh! Speaking of trouble,” I said, then downed the rest of my beer and twisted in my seat, bringing a leg up onto the couch so I could face Matt properly. “Wilson Fisk.”
He frowned slightly. “What about him?”
“I’ve been really distracted up until now. There’s just been a lot of stuff going on. I know he’s still in prison, but something tells me that’s not always going to be the case.” I had missed seeing the third season of the Daredevil series, but I had a vague idea that Fisk came back into the picture in it. I mean, when it came right down to it, he was theKingpin—how could he not?
“Your visions?”
“Something like that. I just wanted to say, if he starts acting up again, you can call me, okay? I’ll help stop him. You’re good at what you do, but I have a lot more in the way of options than you do,” I told him. “Not just you, either. Give my number to Karen, to Foggy, tell them the same thing. Just in case something happens and you’re not there. So they have someone they can call if you’re missing or in trouble or whatever.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it. Really,” he said, nodding slowly. After a second, he reached out to put his empty beer bottle on the coffee table. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Frank Castle.”
“What about him?” I repeated Matt’s own question right back at him.
“You knew about the Hand. Elektra. Fisk. Did you know about him? That he’d get out? What he was going to do?”
I hesitated briefly, then nodded. “I did.”
“And you didn’t do anything about it.” It was a statement, not a question.
“I was busy.”
“A lot of people died because you were ‘busy’.”
Good, I almost blurted out, but managed to catch myself before I actually said it out loud. Instead, I let out a sigh, leaning sideways against the back of the couch as I picked absently at the label of the empty beer bottle in my hands. “You don’t know all that much about me, Matt,” I said softly. “No one who does would ask why I didn’t stop Castle from killing the men that murdered his family.”
Matt just tilted his head slightly, listening.
“I lost my family too. Twice, even.” Don’t cry. Don’t think too much about it. Don’t think about my parents. Or Pietro. Or Vision. Or Billy and Tommy. My grip on the bottle tightened, squeezing it, my knuckles turning white. I had to actively take a moment to pause and stop myself, otherwise it might’ve shattered in my hand. “If you’re looking for someone who would’ve stood in Castle’s way, stopped him from getting his revenge, then you’re looking in the wrong place.”
“I’m sorry,” Matt said quietly. “I didn’t know.”
“You handled things a lot better than in my visions, at least,” I told him.
“Oh?”
“Everything blew up in your face. The Hand, Elektra, Castle… it was all too much, all at once. And honestly? You were kind of an asshole about it. Nelson and Murdock broke up.”
“I believe it,” Matt said, letting out a small, wistful-sounding laugh. His expression fell a little. “Was Foggy okay?”
“He got a job working for Jeri Hogarth, I think.”
“Huh. Good for him.” The conversation stalled out briefly, so Matt changed the subject. “You said you’ve been busy. I’m going to guess those have something to do with that?” he asked, gesturing toward my arm.
“You can see them?” I was a little surprised. The golden Celestial markings across my arms and chest weren’t raised from my skin or anything. They did have a slight metallic texture to them, but I wouldn’t have thought it was enough for him to tell the difference.
“I can hear… something. Kind of. May I?” He half reached out to me and paused.
I nodded. Unfolding myself from the corner of the couch, I deposited my empty bottle on the coffee table next to his, then leaned forward with my arm held out between us.
Matt rested his fingertips gently on the inside of my wrist, brushing against the Celestial markings there. “It’s almost like a weak electrical current,” he murmured, slowly following them up the inside of my forearm.
I closed my eyes and focused, listening. He was right. I hadn’t consciously noticed it until he pointed it out, but there was definitely something there, beneath my heartbeat and the faint sound of blood rushing through my veins. The enhanced senses that the Heart-Shaped Herb gave me weren’t nearly as sensitive as his were, of course—I wasn’t capable of detecting other people’s heartbeats from clear across the room—but human bodies were noisy little chemical factories, and there was a lot of stuff I just sort of filtered out of my day-to-day. I could even dimly feel the rhythm of Matt’s own heart, conducted through his fingertips.
His fingers reached the inside of my elbow and hesitated. Focused as I was, I was extremely aware of his touch and the slight way my body was starting to respond to it. An inhalation of breath, just a tiny bit sharper than normal, that left my lips parted. A fractional increase in heart rate and blood flow to my skin. And if I was aware of it, I knew he was, too. And knowing that he knew didn’t exactly help.
After lingering in the crook of my arm for a few moments, his hand continued upwards, across my bicep, to my collar, skipping across the strap of my dress and coming to rest a bare couple of millimetres away from the pendant hanging from my neck. “What is it?” he asked, his tone hushed.
“Power,” I told him. “Protection.”
A moment later, he withdrew his hand, seemingly a little reluctantly. Or maybe the reluctance was imagined. Just wishful thinking.
I cleared my throat, feeling another surge of heat in my face. “I did actually, um, come here for a reason,” I said. “I’d told you I was going to look into something for you?”
Matt straightened, his expression stilling. “I’d almost forgotten about that.”
Fumbling in my pocket for a moment, I pulled out my sling ring, then spun up a small, basketball-sized portal I could reach through. The device I retrieved from the other side looked almost like a VR headset, made of some sort of white polymer with raised ridges. Dismissing the portal, I offered the unit to Matt.
He took it hesitantly, tracing a finger over the padded edge where the visor section would press against a person’s face. “What’s this?”
“It’s an auto-doc surgical suite,” I told him. “Um. It’s got the cybernetics pre-loaded in it. All we have to do is turn it on, put it over your face, and strap it down securely. Carol says it should only take a couple of minutes. It might feel weird, but shouldn’t be painful at all. Built-in anaesthetic and everything.”
“Cybernetic eyes from space,” Matt said, echoing my own words from our original conversation about this, as if testing them. As if the sentence they formed was almost unbelievable. “What does it do? Exactly?”
I winced. “Okay, informed consent and all, I get wanting to know the details, but I just want to be really clear that this isn’t experimental or anything like that—this stuff is mass produced by some space megacorporation. There’s almost no risk of complications. I even had Tony Stark look it over.”
That last statement might’ve been a little bit misleading. Tony had looked at it, but basically hadn’t gotten anywhere because the proprietary elements were all behind extremely secure software locks that even Shuri seemed to think would take weeks or months to crack and, even then, they might just brick the thing. And they had other things they were focused on at the moment, in any case.
“I mean, he didn’t look super closely,” I amended. “But he didn’t seem worried about it, either.”
“Okay,” Matt said, a note of uncertainty in his tone.
“So, the thing is, your original eyeballs are… in the way. That’s why we need this. The auto-doc will remove them—there are microscopic surgical lasers and stuff in this thing—then pop in the new cybernetics. After that they’re kinda, uh, plug-n-play.”
“What happens to the originals?”
“…It uses these special bioengineered enzymes to dissolve them.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, just weighing the device in his hands.
“There’s basically no recovery time. Just a minute, that’s all,” I added. “From start to finish, the whole thing should take less than five minutes.”
“Five minutes,” Matt echoed me quietly. “And then I’ll be able to see again.”
“Yeah. Not just a world on fire, anymore.”
He let out a small huff of amusement at my phrasing. “I should stop being so surprised when you know things that you shouldn’t.”
Long seconds passed where we didn’t say anything. Matt turned the auto-doc over in his hands, tracing the ridges of the device with his fingertips.
“You don’t have to do it now,” I said after a while. “It can wait until you’re ready.”
He smiled, then nodded to himself. Reaching up, he took off his glasses and tossed them carelessly onto the coffee table, next to our empty bottles. “No time like the present,” he said, then took a deep breath, exhaling loudly. “Okay. You wanna help make sure I put this thing on properly?”
I nodded, standing up and moving over to stand in front of him, our legs brushing together briefly.
Matt leant forward to rest his elbows on his knees, the auto-doc held in both hands, then raised his head, looking sightlessly up at me. “See you soon,” he joked.
With that, he put the visor over his eyes and I helped adjust the straps, until the unit was firmly secured to his head. There were a couple of buttons on the side of the thing—I held one down for a moment, until the device turned on, then, with two more button presses, triggered the starting sequence like Carol had shown me.
“Lean back,” I instructed, and Matt did so, resting his body against the back of the couch.
There was a faint humming sound as the auto-doc started working. I stood stock still, not willing to move, my eyes just locked on Matt and the unit strapped to his face.
For the next agonising couple of minutes, I was completely on edge—the steady hum of the machine, the distant noises of traffic bleeding through the walls, the tiny shifts in Matt’s breathing and the way my heartbeat had kicked up hard enough to thud against my ears all ratcheting up the tension in the room. Matt stayed completely still, though I could see the tension in his shoulders and hands as he held himself rigid. I found myself counting the seconds without meaning to, fingers curled tight at my sides, half expecting something to go wrong just because things going wrong had started to feel like the default setting of my life.
Then there was a soft chime. The humming cut off. A thin seam around the edge of the auto-doc flashed green twice before the straps holding it in place loosened on their own. Matt let out a long, shuddering exhale, his hands coming up to tentatively trace the edges of the visor. He hesitated for just a fraction of a second before slowly pulling the device away from his face, letting it drop carelessly onto the couch beside him.
For one suspended beat, Matt just sat there, eyes closed.
Then he opened them, straightening in place as he looked up at me with wide, staring eyes. He blinked a few times as the pupils of the cybernetic implants adjusted themselves, visibly dilating and narrowing again. The irises were a bright hazel, a little lighter than his natural eye colour, the details maybe a fraction flatter. Other than that, it was almost impossible to tell the difference—except that they actually focused on me, first locking onto mine and then flicking around a little, actually seeing what was in front of him.
I stared back with bated breath, unable to keep the eagerness out of my voice as I watched the expression on his face. “So,” I asked, holding my arms out to either side in a wide gesture. “How do I look?”
His eyes shone with wetness, glistening trails tracing their way down his cheeks—I wasn’t sure if they were actual tears, or if it was just a lubricating reaction to the foreign implants. “Beautiful,” he said quietly.
I let out a delighted laugh. “Oh, boy! Well, I know I look pretty good, but I’ve never had anyone think I was so beautiful that they cried before.”
He chuckled along with me, taking a moment to carefully wipe at his cheeks with his fingers before starting to say something else. “I—”
“Ah!” I cut him off. “Don’t correct me! No, yeah. That felt good. That high is going to keep me going for the next three to five business days, at least.”
“This is… amazing,” he breathed.
As he stood up, I tried to scoot backwards to give him space and almost fell backwards onto the coffee table. Matt reached out a steadying hand, catching me easily and almost pulling me into his chest. The sudden closeness made me flush a little, but he wasn’t looking at me anymore. Instead, his eyes were scanning the loft, slowly tracking from the walls, to the ceiling, to the furnishings.
He let go of me and I stepped back as he turned in a slow circle, drinking in every inch of his surroundings. “Just…” He trailed off, his voice awed and a little hoarse. “I can see. Just like that.”
“Just like that.” I was quiet for a long moment, a huge grin on my face, as I watched him. Then something occurred to me. “Hang on, wait a second.”
As I spoke, Matt turned to look at me. It was funny just how much of an impact that seemed to have. It was such a simple action, after all. It was just one that I’d never seen him do before.
“You’ve been blind since you were a little kid, right?” I asked.
“Uh, yeah.”
I held up my hands in a ‘stop the presses’ gesture. “Does that mean you’ve never actually seen a woman naked before?”
He blinked, taking an instant to process what I’d just said, then let out a small laugh. “I… I guess. Yeah. I guess I haven’t.”
I clapped my hands together in front of me, trying not to vibrate with excitement. “Okay. So. I would like to revise my earlier offer of more drinks and something uncomplicated that wasn’t intended to include sex to very much be intended to include sex.” My hands moved to my breasts, cupping and lifting them—Matt’s eyes followed the movement—and emphasised my point by giving them a little jiggle. “Because it would be an honour—no, a privilege—if these got to be the first boobs you ever saw. And the rest of me, too.”
Matt had already started laughing before I finished talking, breaking down into wordless chuckles that left him utterly unable to respond. He dropped back onto the couch, shoulders shaking.
“I am dead serious here, Matthew,” I told him. “But I get it if not. I mean, I’d understand if you’d prefer to save your ‘first time’ for someone special, instead.”
It took him a few more seconds to get his composure back, the smile on his face widening until he was grinning at me like the Cheshire Cat. He leaned back, relaxing into the couch, taking a moment to let his eyes trace the curve of my body.
“Take off your dress,” he said, his voice low.
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