The Speciation of Birds
i.
The first thing everyone always asks is, "Have you always been blind?"
"No," Matt will say, patient and understanding. That's what they teach you in trauma class. Patience and understanding. The traumatized are strange and incomprehensible to the untraumatized; patience and understanding help everyone get along and learn each other's boundaries. "No, I haven't always been blind."
The second thing everyone always asks is, "Can you still fly?"
The question never fails to make Matt's wings mantle, feathers bristling up off his flight-fingers like thorns or teeth. He can feel the wind tug through them. He knows the exact angle he'd have to flick them to get airborne from a dead standstill. He knows which winds will take him high up, so high no one else can follow.
Matt understands the necessity of the lie, he really does. Stick was very empathetic with that lesson. Normal blind guys aren't supposed to be able to fly, and Matthew Murdock is very, very normal.
"No," he says, and the words stick in his throat. "No, I can't fly."
ii.
The Devil of Hell's Kitchen can fly.
"Some kind of vulture, maybe," Foggy says one night at Josie's. They're all in various stages of drunkenness (raging from "drank the eel" to "stone cold sober") and Josie has the news on TV. They're showing that footage from the night of the bombings again.
"No way," Karen argues. (She drank the eel.) "He's too fast. Vulture's wings aren't made for that kind of maneuverability." Karen should know. Maneuverability is her kind's blessing. Matt has never seen her wings, but he's felt them stirring, heard her shake rain out of them once or twice. They sounded like the wind between skyscrapers or whistling underneath the Brooklyn Bridge.
"No way he's got any falcon or swallow, though." Foggy's wings sound colorful. They're bigger than Karen's and rounder than Matt's, and the air that moves through them tastes like clean cotton and soft oil. "Look at those things! They're huge!"
Matt hides a smile. His own wings fit snugly against his spine, feathers sleek with contentment. "Sounds like he's got an admirer," Matt teases, and feels Foggy's feathers fluff up in embarrassment.
(He asked somebody, once, what Foggy's wings looked like.
"Big," the girl had said. "Blue. There's white underneath them and black along his primaries. They're beautiful."
"Thanks," Matt had said. He had been blind for thirteen years and had mostly forgotten, by then, the finer elements of color, but he remembered blue.)
Karen laughs and Foggy splutters and Matt leans back in his chair, careful to keep his wings pressed against his back. They ache fiercely and he can hear the blood moving through them, feel the bruise on his left from a stray fist, the cut on the underside of his right that had taken out a fistful of secondaries and cost his attacker three teeth.
He almost never unfurls them, not anymore, but then again, nobody ever asks him to.
iii.
Battlin' Jack Murdock had a crow's wings. It was Matt's mom that was the owl. She gave him his hair and his chin and the barred pattern on the underside of his wings, the hooked thumb-feather coming off his wing-wrists on either side.
"Good thing, too," Jack would say, ruffling Matt's hair. "Maybe you'll grow up smart as her, huh? Fly right on outta here."
Matt got his wings from his mom, but he got the devil from his father. He could have told you, even at eight years old, that he would die in Hell's Kitchen.
iv.
When the Devil of Hell's Kitchen meets Wilson Fisk, face to face, wingtip to wingtip, he knows he's fucked.
Matt can feel the holes in Fisk's wings, the missing feathers, the shiny, scarred-over skin, and the width and the breadth and the fury in them, and he knows.
He's so, so fucked.
The beating that follows is swift and very nearly fatal. It's only a window and a cross-breeze that get him out alive; the wind cradles him, holds him steady, and all he has to do is keep flying. One wingstroke, two wingstrokes, three wingstrokes. His wings have never let him down before and they won't now.
Fisk watches him fly away, colored feathers and black mask quickly hiding Matt to even an eagle's sight, and sighs.
"Wesley," Fisk says. Wesley's own wings are folded neatly, not a feather out of place. Wesley drags a hand down one of Fisk's wings absently, smoothing the feathers down. They're slick and warm and red. "Put the word out. Five million to whomever can bring me his wings."
"Consider it done," Wesley says.
v.
"You mean to tell me," Foggy says, his voice choked up, "that you been able to fly this whole time?"
(Foggy'd offered to take him a few times, back at school. "Come on," he wheedled, "don't you wanna stretch 'em? I'll hold onto you. I won't let you smack into any windows or anything. More than once."
Matt had laughed him off. "You don't wanna see a blind man try to fly," he said.)
Matt doesn't bother folding his wings up. He knows what this looks like. "Yeah," he says.
Foggy leaves him a mess of blood and broken feathers, and Matt deserves it.
vi.
The Bible says that God crafted every person for a purpose. Some He gave swallow’s wings, so that they might fly into tight spaces and come out unscathed. Some He gave raven’s wings, for wisdom. Some He gave the wings of crows so that they might fight and fight and not die. Some He gave kingfisher’s wings, some falcon’s, some eagle’s, some dove’s, some heron’s and crane’s and cardinal’s wings, each beautiful and perfect and divine.
Science calls it speciation, adaptation of certain traits to fit a certain environment, and it’s really the same thing.
Matt God gave an owl’s wings, big and crooked. The Great Horned Owl has horns like the Devil and thumb-feathers like a bat. Owls are night predators, swift, silent, and deadly. Owls have knowledge beyond their understanding. Owls are ill omens. Demon-birds.
Perfectly suited for the dark.
When Matt pulls on his new costume (when Matt puts on any costume), he tells himself that he’s only fulfilling his purpose.
vii.
They win. Miraculously, they win. Nelson and Murdock, first, and then Matt himself in a rainy, blood alley. He breaks Fisk's wings. First one, with a brutal kick, then the other by hand. For Elena, he thinks. For Claire. For Ben. For everybody in Hell's Kitchen.
Fisk shrieks and doesn't lie down, like anybody with two broken wings and nowhere to go should, and Matt can respect that.
When the police finally come, he's standing over Fisk with his wings stretched out so far his primaries are folded up against the sides of the alley. A downstroke and he's up in the air.
In the morning, Foggy tells him gleefully that he's made the front page of every newspaper in New York and he looks fucking ridiculous.
"Dude, what kind of wingspan do you have? Twenty feet? And the horns, man, come on, you have to know the horns look ridiculous, you look like you walked out of a comic book. What color is that? Pink?"
Matt smiles into his coffee cup. "I was told that it was red," he says.
Foggy sighs. "You might wanna look into getting your money back, Matt, because that is not red."
viii.
It's Claire, of course, who accepts it the easiest. Foggy comes around and Matt will tell Karen, eventually. (After he's figured out what she's hiding, what makes her feathers mantle and her wings shake when she thinks so one is looking, but that's another project for another time.)
But Claire knew Mike first, and Mike was blind but Mike could fly better than anybody she knew, so Claire is the one who gets it, in her own way.
"Bring those over here," she says one night, post-Fisk, voice rich with amusement. "It's like you don't know how to take care of yourself. You look like a messy fledgling."
"Believe it or not, your average criminal lowlife isn't looking to groom me," Matt says, bone dry, but spreads his wings for her anyway.
Claire takes the first in her warm hands and smooths down a tangle of primaries. Her touch sets a churr to building in Matt's throat, a hot starburst of a feeling, and he reaches out for her wings too.
"A heron," Matt says, surprised. He recognizes the shape and swell of her wings, the softness of her feathers. He's never felt Claire spread them before. She usually has them relaxed, but tucked close. Conscious of where they are all the time.
"Close," Claire says, untangling another knot of locked bristles, coaxing a stubborn secondary flat. "A crane. Guess your magic superpowers don't know everything, huh?"
Matt can hear her smiling.
"Enhanced," he says.
"Same thing." Claire finishes grooming one wing and moves onto the other. "It's a nice night out. Feel like doing some flying that doesn't end in blood and broken bones?"
Matt laughs. "I can't promise anything about that last part," he says, "but yes. I do."