Chapter Text
Matt wakes up to blackness, as he does every morning. Sometimes, he still expects to open his eyes and see again, but it never happens. He has to shake off the brief confusion every time it occurs. He shuts off the alarm, fumbling slightly for it, and groans. He rubs his face and eyes and pulls himself out of the warm cocoon of his bed. As soon as his feet touch ground, his toes curl, at the coldness of it. He feels for his slippers and jams his feet into them as he finds them.
He heads to the bathroom to freshen up, and after relieving himself, stands in front of the sink, imagining for a few seconds what it would be like to see again. His hand reaches out to touch the wall where the mirror would be. He can feel the glassy surface in his memories. But right now, at this moment, all he feels is the the plaster and the roughness of the paint.
Matt sighs. He doesn’t usually allow himself this… weakness, this guilt, whatever this is because all the memories come rushing back and he finds that he’s still dealing and still working through guilt. It’s still his fault that his father is dead, still his fault, and no amount of grief and forced penance in the form of avenging his father’s death helps alleviate the guilt. Well, it actually has a little. But he doesn’t have time for this mental game of back and forth. His fingers curl against the wall, and he allows himself a light tap with his fingers. He finishes the rest of his routine.
By the time he’s left the apartment, he has ten minutes to get to work (he has his phone read off the time to him) and he nods to himself as it’s enough time to get there.
He begins walking, paying close attention to his surroundings. He hears snippets of conversation:
“…I need to get him a present but I don’t know what…”
“…I was like, I know right‽…”
“…The walls should be green…”
Sometimes he does this as he walks, to stretch his abilities to be of use farther, to include a larger circular area. It’s a good exercise, and it doesn’t leave him very drained, so he continues with it. Of course he feels for curbs, with his trusty walking stick, the fifth one in his collection (he knows this because of the little indent near the handle from throwing it into the dumpster when he heard a man attack a woman in an alleyway—grabbing the stick afterward had been a slight issue), but this is a thought at the back of his mind as it always is. He can usually feel the whoosh of cars in front of him, and hear them anyway so it’s an extra caution.
As he walks, he thinks about what Foggy and Karen might be doing. Probably flirting as they often do. He always hears them flirting when he’s just out of reach, and he can hear their increased heartbeats when they speak to each other about something unrelated to work. ‘They really should just get together already,’ Matt thinks. But he knows from the way Foggy speaks to her—and his heartbeat—that he really likes her and that he probably doesn’t want her to be just another quick fuck, not like Marci from Landman and Zack.
Matt thinks of the other expenses of the office and how they’ll be bringing in more clients now that they’ve taken down Fisk. He feels vindication rush through him and a smug smile makes its way onto his face. At this very same moment, someone’s shoulder crashes into him—odd since he can hear how close people are to him—but he stops completely for a different reason, even after the person manages a, “Sorry.”
Matt’s ears pick up the accented voice and it’s familiar, but it’s on the backburner of his mind, because the only thing he’s stopped for at that moment is that for a brief second, shorter than a second really, he could see.
He saw the sunlight for a brief second, the world bright around him, a building across the street, some people walking by. And it was in color. At the moment, his world is on fire again, as if God granted his wish of giving anything to see the sunlight again (what did he give?), but only granted it for a millisecond. He cannot see God as being this cruel, but at this moment, his heart twists in pain and the devil inside believes that He can.
Matt laughs bitterly, unable to calm the turmoil inside. Briefly, Matt thinks that to outsiders, he must look like a crazy man, unhinged, just standing there looking more than a little resentful, but he feels no desire to save face, not when all the foundations of his being have cracked. He’s not even sure he wants to go through today.
Belatedly, he realizes that he only encountered the light after a bump on the shoulder, and Matt freezes. He turns back time and searches for the voice, its sounds, in his mind. When he finds it, he replays it once, twice, and by the third time, he loosens his shoulders (he doesn’t remember tensing them) as it dawns on him. The voice belongs to a particular man, a crime lord he believed was dead, was almost sure he was dead.
Matt laughs again, at the utter shock of Vladimir’s existence. Must’ve been a wiley bastard, that he somehow escaped the tunnels. And now there was a new worry to cradle: what side was Vladimir on and would he be causing more trouble in Hell’s Kitchen?
Matt liked it better when he knew that all the loose ties were tied up. So, to tie them up again, he would have to pay the crime lord a visit. Matt begins walking again, wondering how long he’d been standing still.
‘And touch him,’ his mind helpfully supplies, almost greedily, ‘so that you can see the light again.’
His insides curl in discomfort at the thought, especially since he doesn’t remember showing any interest in men in the past. But maybe it doesn’t have to be like that.
‘Then what does it have to be like?’ he snaps at himself.
They can’t be friends, they can’t be lovers—they have too much history. Matt isn’t even sure Vladimir swings that way, and before today, he didn’t even know he swung that way—Does he swing that way? He’s never really had chance to discover. He usually sticks to his ideals of being a good Catholic boy, which obviously does not encourage homosexuality.
And although he has no qualms about others’ sexualities and homosexuality specifically, he never guessed this would be an issue he would have to deal with. His religion usually answered questions like this for him, not to mention help him deal with his blindness, which many of his partners couldn’t deal with.
Love was simple for Matt. It wasn’t. It just wasn’t. There would be women—attractive women—and then there wouldn’t be. Claire was the closest he had come to a relationship, and even then, even then she wasn’t sure if she’d stay.
And why hadn’t this occurred in the past? The way he’d practically straddled Vladimir in the warehouse? There was an ample amount of touching there. Matt waits for the revulsion of his own actions to pass over him, for being so far from his teachings, but it never comes. He feels nothing (not even lust, he notes carefully) but surprise and he wonders why he never went through a crisis such as this earlier. This is perhaps because of how much he had invested in studying rather than partying as his counterpart, Foggy, did. How much had he really missed out on? How much had he really missed being blind? His chest twists, right near his sternum, and he feels anguish radiate from his center.
Matt reaches the front door of the building that will eventually lead to his office with a sort of trepidation he hasn’t felt for a long time. He hasn’t felt this way since he first lost his sight and it scares him almost to the bone that a brief glimpse of light could derail and devastate him like this. He isn’t sure exactly what he wants anymore, to go to Vladimir and glimpse the light again (he feels the devil in him surge toward this, as a good nab of power) or keep himself away to keep his sanity together (his own morality and moral compass urge him toward this). Matt feels himself pull apart again, two opposites, like he did when he attempted to decipher whether to kill Fisk or not. He doesn’t know what he’ll choose this time, and as he reaches the door of the office, he decides to file it away for another day, because now, now it’s time to work. But even as he walks in to the sounds of Karen’s cheery, “Good morning, Matt!” he still feels the turmoil roiling his blood, like ocean waves that never stop crashing onto the shore. He begins to understand that this disquiet, this unease will never fully leave him. He is Daredevil, after all. And that, that alone makes him paste his smile on harder than before.