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Matt’s first sweep of Hell's Kitchen is remarkably uneventful. Normally he’s up to his waist in sweaty thugs and various crimes, barely getting a minute’s rest, but today it seems like all the criminals are taking some time off. There were events, sure - an amateur mugging, a guy attempting to jack a car, and crying lost child whose parents turned out to be twenty feet away (don’t ask) - but they were all swiftly dealt with in record time.
And Matt didn’t even have to punch anyone.
When he comes full circle, he climbs up onto the nearest rooftop and stands on the edge, eavesdropping on the city beneath him. His patrol has only just started; he’ll go around Hell’s Kitchen another three or four times, maybe five if he hears something particularly interesting.
But right now, there’s nothing happening. He filters through the voices one by one, hearing snippets of gossipy phone conversations and road-raged drivers shouting expletives at each other, but nothing that he should get involved in. Good. Hell’s Kitchen deserves a break every once in a while.
Then a different noise filters into his consciousness over the chatter. It’s strange, distorted and buzzing like electricity, and Matt cocks his head as he tries to pinpoint where exactly it’s coming from. He can’t say for certain, but he thinks it’s somewhere in front of him, and then he doesn’t have time to react before the source of the noise is slamming straight into his forehead, snapping his neck back and knocking him off his feet, flat down onto the roof.
Sprawled out on the gravel, he immediately focuses all his senses to try and regain control of the situation. He scans for heartbeats, breathing, footsteps, clothes rustling, different smells, changes in temperature - any and all signs that let him know someone's there - but his adrenaline fades to confusion when he realizes that there is, in fact, no one there.
He’s vaguely thankful that no one was around to see his particularly graceless performance just then, but he’s even more disconcerted that he can’t detect anyone nearby because something had just knocked him over and he can’t figure out what.
It had been something, right? Matt reaches up to prod at his forehead, right where he’d felt the blow. His skin is tingling slightly under the cowl, but there doesn’t seem to be any other evidence that he’d been hit at all.
Well, except the bone-crunching headache he gets when he finally sits up. Slamming his head against the hard surface of the roof had been far from comfortable. Fortunately, it doesn’t feel like he’s bleeding, but then again he can’t feel much at all when his head is throbbing like it is now.
He groans as he pulls himself to his feet, head spinning violently enough that he thinks he might fall straight back down to the floor again. He makes another attempt to find whatever it was that had knocked him down, but his senses-sweep turns up empty once again.
Maybe he can’t find anything because there was never anything there in the first place. Maybe he’s so sleep-deprived and burned out from all the fighting that he simply lost balance and fell over all by himself. Foggy and Karen and Claire are always telling him that he pushes himself too hard. Maybe they’re right.
The thought makes Matt’s stomach twist, but he decides it’s time to give himself a break. It seems like a quiet evening, and besides, Matt doubts he’ll be any use at all in a fight when his brain is trying to thump its way out of his skull, so he cuts his patrol short and heads back home.
----
It’s not particularly late when Matt staggers back to his apartment, so the sound of a familiar heartbeat lounging on his couch isn’t surprising at all. Said heartbeat picks up slightly when Matt opens the roof access door, but immediately settles when Matt slips in. The fresh air on the walk home had fixed the worst of his headache, so Matt manages to send a small smile in the direction of the couch without wanting to throw up.
“Foggy,” Matt says in greeting, but the sound of his own voice makes him freeze at the top of the stairs. The name hadn’t sounded right. It hadn’t felt right in his mouth. The first vowel had been rounder than usual, his voice slightly lower as it fumbled out the different sound.
Great. Now he has a headache and he’s messing up pronouncing simple words. He must be more tired than he thought.
He briefly entertains the thought that perhaps Foggy hadn’t noticed the weird slip, but then he hears a soft snort of laughter and knows that he could never be so lucky.
“Foggy?” Foggy mimics, hitting the vowel much harder than Matt had, making the whole thing sound posh and absurd. “Are you British now?”
“No,” Matt snips, tugging his cowl off. His irritation must show on his face because Foggy laughs again, that same laugh he does right before he’s about to make fun of Matt.
“You been practicing your British accent in secret? Hoping to woo a few ladies with a sexy English voice?”
Matt ignores him, trying not to wobble too obviously as he makes his way down the stairs. Foggy trails after him as he navigates his way into the kitchen, undeterred by Matt’s silence.
“That’s your plan, isn’t it? Trying to make yourself one hundred percent irresistible? Because let me tell you, you’re far from lacking in the looks department, so throw ‘British accent’ into the mix and you’d be literally unstoppable.”
Matt sighs, grabbing a bottle of water out of the fridge. He’s tired from his patrol, his head hurts and he just wants to curl up and go to sleep. He loves Foggy, he really does, but he’s not in the mood for jokes right now; particularly jokes at his expense.
“Don’t,” he warns, aiming to cut back Foggy’s teasing, but frowns as his mouth forms the wrong vowel sound again.
“Yeah, that’s pretty good. Keep it up and you could start introducing yourself as James Bond.”
“No, I’m not-” Matt starts, but his voice makes him stop again. It does sound like he’s British, and that’s both confusing and alarming. He takes a gulp of the water and hopes it might wash the accent out of his mouth.
“Not what?” Foggy asks, sounding remarkably like Sean Connery. He’s leaning against the counter, probably grinning like an idiot, but Matt must look particularly worried because Foggy stands up a little straighter, some of the humor draining from his voice. “Matt? What’s up?”
Matt takes a deep breath and tries again. “I’m not doing an accent, Foggy,” he says, then clamps his mouth shut as he hears his own traitorous voice butchering his regular vowel sounds.
He can hear the way Foggy's breath hitches slightly as he bites back a laugh.
“Say something else,” he demands, palms flat on the counter like he’s bracing himself to be literally bowled over by the next joke to come out of Matt’s mouth.
“No,” Matt replies, feeling slightly strangled.
“Come on, Matt.”
“No!”
‘No' is good. ‘No' is safe. Actually, even 'no' sounds a little different, but it’s short and doesn’t give Foggy enough material to work on.
Foggy sighs, and Matt wants to apologize for snapping at him but he can’t quite bring himself to say ‘sorry’ when he knows it would come out way too circular and make Foggy laugh.
“Did you hit your head or something?” Foggy asks after a few seconds, voice walking the line between amused and concerned.
“Yes,” Matt pouts, crossing his arms over his chest. He still feels like an idiot for falling on the roof, and he really doesn’t want to say anything else with his weird British voice and have Foggy laugh at him. But he’d be lying if he said he’s not worried about the way he’s talking, and he really just needs to tell his best friend about what happened on the rooftop so he can help him figure it out, so he sets his jaw and resolves to just talk. He’s going to power through the accent, and it’s not going to bother him. “But I don’t think that’s what caused this. I’ve hit my head a lot and this has never happened before. Something weird did happen on patrol - right before I came back, actually. I was on a roof and something hit my forehead and knocked me-"
Matt cuts himself off when he registers the strange noises Foggy is making. His breathing is heavy and uneven, peppered with little gasping sounds and the occasional hiccup. Matt scowls as he finally places the sounds.
Foggy’s laughing at Matt’s voice and doing a very bad job of hiding it.
“Stop laughing,” Matt says, and the stretched out ‘ahh’ sound is what finally tips Foggy over the edge.
It’s like a dam bursting. The laughter comes pouring out of Foggy, loud and obnoxious and Matt blushes right to the tips of his ears. Matt tries to wait it out, let Foggy get it out of his system, but thirty seconds comes and goes and Foggy shows no sign of stopping. If anything, he’s now laughing harder.
“It’s not funny, Foggy. I don’t know what’s happening.”
Matt refuses to feel bad when he adds a little whine to his voice to try and amp up the pity factor, laying on the dejected sad puppy face that Foggy frequently complains about (“That’s so unfair; how can I say no to you when you look like that?”). He’s not proud about it, but he will sink to emotional manipulation if it means Foggy will start taking this whole thing seriously.
True to plan, Foggy’s laughter subsides when he catches sight of Matt’s expression. He takes a few seconds to sober up, a few deep breaths to calm his breathing, then he nods firmly, voice determined like when they’re working a case.
“Alright, we can fix this. You just need to think about the words and how you usually pronounce them. Really focus on what you’re saying, and repeat after me.” Foggy pauses to clear his throat. “'My name is Matt Murdock.’”
Some part of Matt knows how this is going to work out, but he pushes the doubt aside and focuses on forming the words the same way Foggy did.
Absolutely no use at all. “My name is Matt Murdock,” says the British voice in Matt’s mouth, all short round vowels and irritatingly crisp enunciation.
“You can’t even say your own name right!” Foggy howls, slamming his hands down on the counter as he bawls with laughter. Matt’s jaw clenches so hard he’s surprised his teeth don’t crack.
“Okay, that’s it. Get out,” Matt says, wincing at the way the ’t’s clip at the end of his words. Foggy’s making so much noise that Matt has no problem locating him in the room and proceeds to bat at his shaking shoulders until he relents under Matt’s assault and starts moving.
“No, Matt, please, this is comedy gold!” Foggy protests as he’s herded towards the door. Matt registers the tang of saltwater in the air that lets him know Foggy is literally crying with laughter, and starts pushing him harder.
Foggy puts up a brief fight once the door is open, digging his heels into the ground like a small child, but Matt’s stronger than him and really Foggy’s just too giggly and uncoordinated to resist being manhandled out of Matt’s apartment.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Foggy,” Matt grits out, then slams the door with slightly more force than necessary when Foggy’s laughter renews with a vengeance.
He stalks back into his apartment, trying to ignore the sound of Foggy repeating his words, still mocking him even as he makes his way out of the building.
“Tomorrow!” Foggy crows, cackling wildly in the stairwell. “You sound like the Queen!”
He’s still laughing when he gets out onto the streets, probably scaring the people around him, and Matt tries his hardest to tune him out but Foggy with a case of the giggles is just impossible to ignore. Every time it sounds like he’s calming down, Foggy will do something like remember how Matt pronounced his name - Matt hears him choke the word out, emphasizing the accent to within an inch of its life - then his footsteps will stop as he doubles over laughing. It takes him much longer than usual to get out of Matt’s earshot, but when he finally does the silence is blissful.
Matt’s not naive enough to think the laughter has actually stopped, but it’s a relief to not hear it any more.
He starts peeling off the rest of the Daredevil suit, leaving the items wherever they happen to land on the floor as he makes his way over to his bed. He’s exhausted, both from his patrol and from having to deal with… whatever just happened. And his head still hurts, so curling up under his sheets and going to sleep sounds like a fantastic idea.
He detours to the bathroom to brush his teeth - with a little more force than usual, like it would help fix his pronunciation issues - then drops down face-first onto his bed with a sigh.
He can see the humor of the situation, of course he can. If Foggy suddenly turned up stuck with a bizarre new voice, Matt would be reacting the exact same way. He knows it’s hilarious, and he doesn’t blame Foggy (much) for his reaction, but he still can’t bring himself to laugh about it because it’s happening to him.
His mouth is literally preventing him from speaking the way he wants to. The words sound normal in his head, and he is trying to speak in his regular voice, but something happens to the signals as they travel from his brain to his mouth and the words come out sounding painfully neat and English.
Something happened on that rooftop. The noise, that buzzing thing that hit him. That had to be what’s causing this, right? He should go back to the rooftop and search again, look harder for clues or anything that could tell him what happened to him and how to reverse it.
But not tonight. Tonight he’s going to sleep - reboot the systems, get everything running smoothly again. He’s just tired, that’s what his problem is. He needs a good night’s rest. He’ll wake up tomorrow morning feeling completely refreshed and alert, all traces of Britishness erased from his voice.
And even if he can’t sleep off the speech impediment, he’ll at least sleep off the headache so he can start thinking clearly again. Then when he’s back to operating at peak condition, he can go out and solve this problem and everything can go back to normal.
He hopes.
----
Matt’s not sure how long he manages to sleep for, but it’s Karen calling his phone that wakes him up instead of his alarm clock, so he’s either slept too long or nowhere near long enough. He stifles a yawn as he feels for the phone next to him, fumbling with the screen to answer it.
“Matt?” Karen says when he picks up. “Hey, how are you?”
“Fine.”
He can hear the smile in Karen’s voice. “Did I wake you?”
“Yes,” he replies, sheets rustling as he pulls himself upright. He’s pleased to note that his head is no longer pounding, and while his voice is a little scratchy, he feels mostly normal again. “What time is it?”
Oh no, there it is. That accent. Matt shuts his eyes and just lets the embarrassment wash over him as his mind replays the ‘wot’ that had just come out of his mouth. Sure, the headache might be gone, but the Britishness remains.
To her credit, Karen doesn’t draw attention to it, answering his question without missing a beat. Maybe she didn’t even notice it?
“Almost nine. Me and Foggy were wondering if you were gonna show up today.”
As soon as she mentions Foggy, Matt resolves to never get his hopes up ever again. He sighs, the urge to bury himself back down under his sheets and pretend that this isn’t happening almost too strong to resist. Of course this isn’t just a courtesy call. His friends aren't concerned about his wellbeing. If Karen had spoken to Foggy, well. There’s no way Foggy would have kept something like this to himself.
“He told you, didn’t he?”
“He sure did!” Karen cheers, and Matt hears a noise that sounds suspiciously like a high five. If Foggy and Karen know, then, being the loudmouths that they are, pretty soon the whole world is going to know about Matt’s stupid new accent. He’s never going to be able to live this down. “And I didn’t believe him because, hello, that’s ridiculous, why would Matt be stuck talking with a British accent? But he swore it was true so I had to call you and see for myself, and, oh my God, Matt, it’s adorable.”
“Thanks,” Matt says automatically, then holds back a groan as Karen makes a noise halfway between a gasp and a chirp. “Look, if it’s alright with the two of you, I’m going to take the day off. I have to find a way to fix this as soon as possible.”
‘And I don’t have the strength to deal with you two giggling idiots right now,’ he thinks, but keeps that to himself.
Karen’s breath hitches just like Foggy’s did yesterday, but she’s not so much laughing as she is squeaking. It’s the same noise she makes when she watches baby animal videos on the internet, all giddy and excited over something that she finds absolutely precious.
Matt’s not sure if he prefers Karen’s giggling or Foggy’s laughter. He doesn’t particularly enjoy either of them.
“Adorable,” Karen repeats, cooing into the phone, and Matt assumes she means ‘yes, Matt, of course. Take the day off. Take all the time you need,’ so he moves to hang up on her.
“Goodbye, Karen,” he says, then immediately regrets using her name because of course it comes out sounding different. It’s sharper somehow, less relaxed and not as drawn out. He always liked how soft her name is, but with his new voice it’s all edges.
Then he hears her yelp back “Karen!”, probably shouting it to Foggy so they can both use the pronunciation against him for the rest of his life, and he ends the call without waiting for a real reply.
So turns out ‘a good night’s rest’ is, in fact, not the miracle cure people always say it is. Matt still sounds English, and it’s still weird and confusing. What little novelty it had has long since worn off, so now he’s just plain desperate to find a way to get his regular voice back.
And now that he’s given himself the day off work, he can get down to business.
----
It feels a little strange to be out as Daredevil in the daytime. From the hushed comments he overhears as he leaps between the rooftops of Hell’s Kitchen, the city finds it strange as well. He’s also apparently a lot more noticeable without the cover of darkness, but he doesn't need to be stealthy right now. He just has to find a way back to yesterday's rooftop and start investigating.
He's only about a block away when he hears someone cry out, the sound immediately followed by dark laughter. Matt pauses in his mad dash over the rooftops, tilts his head and listens.
There are four people in an alley - three bad guys, and the boy they’re currently threatening. The boy's heart is beating fast, and his voice cracks as he begs at them to “stop, please, don't!”. Matt guesses he’s just a teenager, and an innocent one too.
He can put his own mission on hold. It’s time to step in.
He drops down into the alleyway, landing just a few feet behind the three thugs. Their matching jumps and surprised gasps are beyond satisfying.
“Holy shit,” one of them says, shoes squeaking on the floor as they all spin to face Matt. “It’s the Devil!”
“You don’t want to be here,” Matt snarls, pitching his voice lower as his default intimidation technique. From experience, this is where the bad guys either turn tail and run, or step forward for a fight. He’s prepared for either of those scenarios, but he’s not so prepared for the awkward pause that follows his words.
Oh, right.
“What?” the man to his left says, and Matt can tell from the location of his voice that he’s looking at his friends instead of at Matt. “Yo, you didn’t tell me the Devil is British!”
“I didn’t think he was!”
“I thought you said you saw him a couple weeks ago?” says the guy to Matt's right, also facing away from him.
“Yeah, but he didn't sound like that!”
“Then what's this, huh? Look, there's the Devil, right there, with a British-ass accent coming out of his mouth.”
“You been lying to us, Ray?”
“What? No!”
Matt takes as step back as the two men on either side move, but stops when he realizes they're not coming for him. They're crowding in on the guy in the middle.
“What the hell, Ray?”
“Guys, I swear, I didn't think he was British! I would have told you! You gotta believe me!”
“Save it, asshole.”
“Teach you to lie to us…”
And then the thugs are wailing on each other, and Matt just stands and listens to the messy sounds of their fight - a fight that by all rights he should be involved in - and wonders what the hell just happened.
And, he thinks with a level of irritation he didn’t ever expect to reach over the subject, it’s an English accent, not British - if people insist on talking about his voice, they should at least use the correct terminology.
Then he hears the skittering footsteps of the teenager sprinting out of the alley, and figures his work is done and he should probably get out of there too.
----
Back on the rooftop, Matt realizes he doesn’t actually have a plan. He had the vague idea of coming back and looking for clues, but he has no idea what these clues would be, if there are even any clues at all.
He starts by searching the area where he fell. He’s pretty sure he was hit by something, so he looks for possible projectiles on the ground: anything out of the ordinary that could have been shot or thrown at him.
He’s kicking gravel around with the toe of his boot when he hears a familiar ‘thwip, thwip’ sound, quiet at first but growing louder as it gets closer to him.
Perfect.
“Daredevil!” Spider-Man calls out as he passes by Matt’s rooftop. Matt breaks his earlier promise and hopes for a split-second that maybe Spidey won’t stop for a chat, but then he remembers that the universe hates him. The webhead makes a swift U-turn to come land on the edge of the roof in front of Matt, positively radiating happiness. “Fancy seeing you here! Thought you were more of night-time man?”
Matt grunts noncommittally, unwilling to share his new accent any more than he has to. Spidey doesn’t seem to mind Matt’s lack of enthusiasm. He crouches on the ledge, settling down to watch Matt absently moving the gravel around. So far he’s found a cigarette butt and several rocks that are slightly larger than the others, but nothing even remotely useful to solving his problem.
“Whatcha doin’?” Spidey eventually asks, stretching the words out in a little singsong voice.
Matt sighs. There’s pretty much no way he’s going to escape a conversation with this persistent chatterbox, so he quickly resigns himself to the fact that soon there are going to be three loudmouths who know about his predicament.
“Investigating,” he replies simply. He has to talk to Spider-Man, but he doesn’t have to say a lot.
“Huh,” Spidey says, then falls silent again. Matt finds yet another big rock and pauses his strenuous investigation to roll it from side to side under his boot. Spidey must notice how very little Matt is actually doing, because even with his voice muffled from the mask, he sounds like he’s grinning when he asks, “Need a hand?”
At this point, Matt’s got nothing to lose.
“Yes,” he says, kicking the rock away with a huff.
Spidey pauses, probably watching the rock skipping across the roof, then he stands and claps his hands together. “Alright, what are we investigating?”
“Something happened to me last night on this rooftop, and I’m trying to figure out what.”
Matt tries not to hold his breath during the awkward silence that follows his speech. His accent had been particularly strong with that sentence - ‘what’ is not a good word for him - so there’s no way Spidey didn’t notice. He settles in for a long wait, but it only takes Spidey a few seconds to reply.
“Why are you talking like that?”
Matt sighs again. “That’s what happened to me. Something hit me and knocked me down and now whenever I speak it comes out in this accent.”
The silence returns. He doesn’t want to get used to that silence.
“Something turned you British?”
“Yes.”
“Dude.”
Matt waits for the inevitable reaction, but oddly enough Spider-Man is more composed than his two friends. Matt can hear all the signs that he wants to laugh - slightly elevated heartbeat, uneven breathing - but Spidey’s managing to keep it under control.
Still, he’d rather get the humiliation out of the way, sooner rather than later.
“Just laugh and get it over with.”
“What? No, I’m not going to laugh,” Spidey says, but he’s laughing before he can finish the sentence.
Matt rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, I sound hilarious, ha ha,” he deadpans. Spidey’s not laughing as hard as Foggy did, but still slightly more than Matt could ever be comfortable with. Some people can take being the butt of a joke with grace and aplomb, but Matt is not one of those people.
“Sorry, man, you just-” Spidey says, after a few seconds, already starting to recover from his giggle fit, “you gotta admit, this is funny.”
“Yeah, sure,” Matt agrees. He’s trying so hard to not be bitter about it, honestly. “But it’s much less funny when it’s happening to you.”
Spidey hums, all signs of laughter pretty much vanished. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’ll zip it up.” Matt catches the motion of Spidey miming a zip across his mouth, and he appreciates it more than he ever thought he would.
“Thanks,” Matt mumbles in reply. It’s a relief that Spidey’s taking the situation seriously, and Matt’s impressed at how quickly he got over the hilarity of Matt’s new accent, but there’s still a part of him that’s stuck thinking about how Spidey could be so understanding about it, but Karen and Foggy couldn’t do the same. He likes Spidey, and he does consider him a friend, but Karen and Foggy are his best friends. They should be the ones trying to help him, and Spidey should be the one cracking jokes at his expense.
This is all wrong. Life is just so unfair sometimes.
“So, something hit you?” Spidey asks, not noticing the little pity party Matt had just started in his own head.
Matt nods.
“And you don’t know what it was?”
Matt shakes his head.
“And you think maybe you can find something around here that will tell you what happened?”
“That was my plan, yeah.”
“Awesome!” Spidey claps his hands together again, making the small jump down from the edge to stand next to Matt with a flourish. “Let’s get to work!”
----
They search the entire rooftop, and the surrounding rooftops, and even drop down to search the streets below in case something had fallen down, but they find absolutely nothing.
“Are you sure something hit you?” Spidey asks, dangling upside-down from a fire escape.
“Yes,” Matt growls, but there’s no heat in it. This whole thing has been beyond frustrating, but he’s not going to take it out on someone else. “It hit me right in the forehead. I felt it."
“No, no, I believe you,” Spidey says, easygoing as ever, “but are you sure it was some thing?”
Matt cocks his head. “What do you mean?”
“Well, you said it sounded like electricity, right? Maybe it was electricity. Or some kind of energy blast. Or magic."
“Magic,” Matt repeats flatly. Spidey scoffs.
“Stranger things have happened.”
Matt leans against the alley wall opposite Spider-Man and thinks. He’d been so fixated on it being a physical item that had hit him, he barely considered the possibility that it could have been something decidedly less temporal. Spidey’s theory would explain why they can’t find a physical trace of anything - magic doesn’t tend to leave any traces behind (well, aside from the effects of the spell).
Matt lets his head drop back against the wall. It’s so simple now that he thinks about it. He could have saved himself a whole lot of trouble if he had taken the ‘magic' route sooner.
He opens his mouth to tell Spidey that actually, he might be right, but the hero’s body suddenly tenses. His heartbeat picks up and the faint scent of radiation that constantly surrounds Spidey surges up into something much more intense. Matt closes his mouth again.
“Something’s happening,” Spidey says ominously, then he’s grabbing hold of Matt and swinging them both out of the alley so fast that Matt worries he’s going to get whiplash. He’s pulled up into the air and carried off down the street by this web-headed lunatic, and the whole thing is incredibly disorienting, and Matt has no idea where they’re going or what’s happening, so he can’t do anything other than just hold on.
Past the ridiculously loud noise of the wind rushing by, he can make out a few less-than-comforting sounds. Screaming, yelling, the wet thunk of punches landing and the occasional explosion. Then there’s the whistle of an arrow dangerously close to his ear, and the whir of a metal suit from somewhere up ahead.
Oh look, the Avengers are here. And Spidey’s dragging Matt straight toward them.
Great.
“Sorry, DD!” Spidey shouts, just before Matt feels the spandex slip out from under his hands and he’s suddenly free-falling to the ground. Luckily, he doesn’t have time to panic because the fall is only a few feet, and he lands on his feet, thank God, but there’s a lot of noise around him and he’s still not entirely sure what’s going on.
Then something behind him snarls, and something very hard and very heavy comes crashing into his back. He whips around on reflex, kicking out in a wide arc to try and catch whatever had just attacked him. When Matt's boot connects with what is definitely a human ribcage, his assailant grunts from the impact and the metal bat he was wielding clatters to the floor. He seems otherwise undeterred though, and immediately throws a fist in Matt’s direction. Matt blocks it, but then he’s caught off guard, again, by another hard and heavy thing hitting him from behind, right across the shoulders.
Matt groans.
Spidey just dropped him in the middle of a battlefield, didn’t he?
Matt doesn’t have time to complain, because a third bad guy joins the 'Attack Matt' party and he’s suddenly too busy breaking bones to track down Spidey’s current location and tell him exactly how much he appreciates being dragged into life-or-death situations with absolutely no warning at all.
Eventually, after a lot of blunt force trauma, the three thugs decide they’ve had enough of fighting Matt and are content to just stay down (or are literally unable to get back up again), so Matt has a second to assess the situation. There’s a big fight going on, that much is obvious, but he’s a little way out of it. Spidey must have dropped him on the outskirts before heading into the middle of the fray, and Matt takes back all those nasty thoughts he had about Spidey because that was a pretty cool thing of him to do.
Matt can’t tell what the fight is about, but he knows there are a large number of bad guys currently swarming the Avengers (and Spider-Man). There’s rapid gunfire from somewhere nearby, and the air above Matt’s head displaces as Iron Man comes roaring past, the bullets just missing him by an inch.
“Where are the shots coming from?” Tony calls out, his suit making altogether too much noise as he twists around in the air, trying to locate the shooters. Matt can’t figure out exactly where they are, but he can hear enough to point Tony in the right direction.
“Two men up on a rooftop,” Matt shouts at him, and when Tony finally stops turning he can elaborate, “At your four o’clock!”
Matt expects Tony to spring into action and take care of the shooters, but instead he’s just hovering in place. Matt’s heart sinks.
“…Jarvis?”
Oh, come on.
“Daredevil,” Matt corrects, wishing there were bad guys within punching distance so he do something practical with the fists that his hands had just involuntarily balled up into.
“Daredevil?” Tony echoes, slightly incredulous, but he pulls himself together long enough to shoot a repulsor blast at the targets. “You’re British?”
Matt’s going to start pulling his hair out, he really is. “No, I’m-”
Ah, there are the bad guys Matt had been waiting for. He lets the conversation drop, accessing all his pent-up aggression and using it to beat the thugs into submission. It’s kinda relaxing, actually, using these bad guys as makeshift punching bags.
He’s occupied for the rest of the battle, knocking out a succession of thugs (all wielding metal bats, for some reason) while the Avengers sort out… whatever they’re sorting out. Matt still doesn’t know, and he’s not sure he wants to.
Soon, the bad guys are all laid out on the ground around him, and it sounds like the whole fight is over. The Avengers are assembled on the other side of the battlefield, congratulating each other on a job well done, and Matt is enjoying their distant, calm chatter, right up until Tony’s metallic voice rings out loud and clear.
“Hey, did you guys know Daredevil is British?”
The conversation stops abruptly, and Matt swears he can hear their heads all snap to look at him. He tries to ignore the cold sweat suddenly prickling on his skin.
“Daredevil’s British?” Hawkeye says, voice lit up like a Christmas tree. Matt swallows nervously, and starts up a mantra in his head like a prayer. Please don’t come over here, please don’t come over here, please don’t c-
“Daredevil!” Hawkeye shouts, boots thumping over the rubble as he races to get to Matt. Tony’s suit whirs to life as well, and fantastic, even Spidey’s bounding his way back over to him. There’s no universe in which he’ll escape this encounter with his reputation, or his sanity, intact.
Just as Matt’s begging the earth to open up and swallow him whole (the sky opened up last year; surely he’s not asking too much here) he hears a strange but familiar buzzing noise, then something collides with his forehead and once again he finds himself toppling backwards and slamming his head down on the concrete.
This time, he blacks out.
----
“Daredevil?”
Matt groans. He’s lying on the floor, there are heartbeats all around him and his head is pounding.
“Daredevil, are you alright?”
It takes him a second to place the voice, and he's oddly soothed when he realizes it’s Captain America talking.
“I'm fine,” Matt says, moving to sit up, but a hand on his chest, most likely Cap’s, pushes him back down. Probably for the best - if his head already hurts this much he can’t imagine what would happen if he started moving it around.
“This green energy thing just smacked straight into you,” Spidey says somewhere to Matt’s left. “You went down like a rag doll.”
“Huh,” Matt says eloquently.
“Do you think it was the same thing from yesterday?” Spidey continues, voicing exactly what Matt was just wondering.
“What thing?” Tony asks, but they both ignore him.
“I’m not sure,” Matt replies hesitantly, but then he’s immediately sure that it was the same thing from yesterday because he’s got his old voice back!
Spidey whoops at the sound of his regular voice, cheering loudly and just generally celebrating enough for both of them while Matt’s temporarily catatonic from head pain. There’s a confused silence from the Avengers, and Matt knows he’s grinning like an idiot but he honestly doesn’t care because he’s not British any more!
“Man, you told me he was British,” Hawkeye says, and Tony makes a kind of indignant squawking noise.
“He sounded British,” Tony insists.
“I am not British,” Matt says, and he’s so happy it’s in his normal American accent because now these people will actually believe him.
“Then what was that in the fight?” Tony demands, and wow, he’s not going to let this go, is he?
“What was what?”
Yes! His ‘what’s are back! He never thought that word coming out of his mouth could sound so perfect.
"‘Four o’clock’” Tony imitates, laying the accent on and apparently trying his hardest to burst Matt’s little bubble of happiness. Matt’s smile doesn’t even waver.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Matt says, lying through his teeth, his normal American teeth, and it feels so good.
Tony huffs, muttering something about how Matt was British, like, five minutes ago, but stops trying to actively fight Matt about it. Maybe the universe doesn’t hate him after all.
“Aw,” Hawkeye whines, and Matt can picture him crossing his arms and pouting, “I wanted him to be British.”
----
Once the Avengers establish once and for all that Matt is, in fact, not British, and more importantly that his brain isn’t about to start leaking out of his ears after his head’s forceful encounter with the floor, they all disperse and Matt is free to get back to his regularly scheduled life.
Spidey drops him off back at his apartment, swinging noticeably slower than last time because Matt will throw up if his head gets jostled any more than necessary, then thankfully leaves him alone to deal with his headache in peace. Matt decides to celebrate getting his voice back by crawling into bed and sleeping for at least twelve hours.
He checks his phone before he falls asleep completely, and he’s not even surprised to hear he has exactly thirty-seven missed calls from Foggy and Karen. Vultures, the both of them. Trying to capitalize on his pain and misery. It’s despicable.
...Oh, who is he kidding? He’d have done exactly the same thing. But that doesn’t mean he has to obediently sit back while they tear him to pieces over the next few days.
As far as Matt’s concerned, the past twenty-four hours never happened. English accent? What English accent? Foggy and Karen are going to tease him with it, parroting his pronunciations back at him to try and make him blush, and he’s going to play so dumb they’re going to doubt it ever really happened at all.
Matt’s smiling at his plan as he drifts off to sleep. It’s going to be perfect.
Foggy and Karen are Matt’s friends, sure.
But so is denial.