Once, in conversation over drinks, Foggy had inadvertently compared Matt to a dog.
It was said in good will, a joke, but the sentiment stuck with Matt. It wasn’t that he compared Matt to a puppy, something soft, but a fighting hound. The two men were a few beers in at Josie's after a long day at the firm, and in a rare phenomenon of curiosity Foggy had asked Matt about his nightly activities, a topic he tended to avoid. Matt knew that the avoidance was a kind of ‘don’t think about it and it doesn’t exist’ tactic. Nevertheless, he indulged. He owed his buddy that much.
Gradually the topic had stuttered hesitantly into the territory of how Matt managed it every night, the lack of sleep, the staying awake, the “kicking ass”, as Foggy had so eloquently put it. At the time Matt couldn’t really give a clear answer, he’d told Foggy that once he got into that headspace, once he slipped into the devil’s skin, he was on a one-track mind until it was time to retire for the night. There wasn’t a timeframe for when it was time for him to go back, sometimes he’d be up for the majority of the night, sometimes it would be for an hour or two, it mainly depended on what he could hear. If he heard anyone in distress he couldn’t rip that skin from his body until it was done.
Some nights, even if there was no danger, he still had trouble coming down from that rush. Couldn’t get back to Matt Murdock.
“So kinda like a dog, right? A fighting dog? When their blood is up they don’t stop, even if the fight is over.”
It was a joke, sure. But it stuck.
That’s what Matt was stuck in that first night. The blood was still up, he couldn’t come down. It didn’t matter that tonight Hell's Kitchen was uncharacteristically quiet in terms of crime, it didn’t matter that he’d run himself ragged the night before. The devil wasn’t going quietly, and so out he stayed, patrolling the rooftops like a dog in a pit, waiting for his next bout.
He’d known it was late, he knew that much. Too late for anyone to be up cooking anyway.
But you were.
He’d been pacing a rooftop a couple of blocks away from his own apartment, some kind of nugatory attempt to exhaust himself into coming back down when he’d caught a snatch of sound, amongst the usual white noise of car horns, AC units and engines. He’d stopped in his tracks immediately, body freezing and tension coiling through his body like an overwrought spring. Danger Danger Danger.
He had cast his senses as wide as they’d reach before zeroing in on the noise he’d just heard, drifting from an apartment within the building opposite the one he stood on. A voice, your voice. Singing.
It was something so unlike anything he’d been expecting to hear in the headspace he was in, his very being primed and ready to react to anything remotely unpleasant, so when he had heard your voice drifting through the night air, so utterly carefree, it actually gave him pause. The sheer unexpectedness of it was almost disorienting, as if he’d forgotten the night could contain something decent, something good. He had stood there for a moment, head cocked towards the sound, just listening. It had taken a bit more effort than usual, given his bloods were still so high and his body was alert for anything that could be construed as danger, but he had managed to bring his focus in on the sound. Music drifted from a small speaker as the metallic clattering of utensils resonating from the space told him you were cooking. A quick inhale on the breeze brought the soft, sweet smell of cake batter. Chocolate.
“Shit. Fuck.” Matt’s head tilted a touch more, a brief and subconscious smile flitting across his lips at your cursing, “Oh god this looks awful.”
A pause. You'd picked up your phone and skipped through a couple of songs, apparently not satisfied with any of them, as much as you grumbling to yourself had told him. Were you seriously baking at this hour?
“Oooh, yeah. Yep. This is the one.”
A new song drifted through the air and there Matt stood, completely and utterly focussed on you, guilt creeping at the back of his throat like bile. He kept an ear out for people all the time to try and make the Kitchen a better place, sure, but he was under no illusions how truly invasive his abilities could be, and this? He knew this had crossed some kind of line.
But for the first time in a long while he’d tried to ignore it, and on that roof he remained, because the longer he had listened the more that perpetual tightness in his body left him, the lower his shoulders dropped, and the more his heart rate slowed.
And for the first time that day, he had felt it; that glorious bone deep exhaustion he’d been needing, craving, the one his body had refused to give him. Until then.
He’d left as you were cleaning up, singing to yourself as you did so and not realising the cake you’d stressed over making so much was catching as it burnt.
–
Matt tried not to make it a habit, it was never intentional. He knew it wasn’t right, he hated the idea of invading someone's privacy and there he was, doing just that. The nights he didn’t absolutely need to come down, the nights where he could manage to claw some semblance of something that roughly defined sleep, he didn't come. He avoided loitering longer than absolutely necessary around the area he’d come to think of as yours. If anything he lingered there less than he usually would on an average patrol, overcompensating for his guilt, trying to afford you as much privacy as he possibly could.
But god, the nights the devil didn’t go quietly, you were the only fucking thing that actually helped.
Sometimes you weren’t home, and sometimes you’d decided to turn in early for the night. Those nights were the worst. If you weren’t home he’d be wound up and ready for a fight, resigned to pace the kitchen like a caged animal until he felt the kiss of warmth the light of dawn brought to his bloody, bruised skin. It was infinitely worse if you were sleeping, the guilt consuming him entirely as he poured all his awareness into the sound of your breathing, his incessant pacing gradually slowing to a stop as the world dropped out from under him and it was just you. He thanked god often that your sleeping pattern was almost as horrible as his.
Once he’d resigned to the fact that this was the only thing that helped him come down, because seriously, he’d tried literally everything fucking else, he set himself ground rules. Ones he would never break.
He never, never stepped foot onto your actual apartment building, as if somehow it helped to know that he didn’t step onto what he’d come to consider your territory. If you had friends over, he left. If you had lovers over, or anything along that description, he left even quicker. He never listened to phone calls.
He didn’t want to learn anything about you, not one singular thing if he could help it. Any sense of privacy he could afford to you, he did.
He was eternally grateful for what you unknowingly provided for him on the nights he struggled, and he both wished he could tell you and often prayed he never even got the chance to. He knew what he did never ran down into anything other than necessity. He wasn’t falling in love. Any thought, any association of you was accompanied by the sharp sting of guilt as it ran through his guts like a knife. He wasn’t stalking you, he told himself, not even close.
He knew that, but it didn’t help.
And yet, despite his self-flagellation, he’d return on the nights he truly couldn’t bear it any longer. The nights he wanted to claw out of his own skin. The nights he was so suffocated by the city he’d die to protect. Suffocated by himself. And sometimes you’d be there, a lighthouse standing firm in his savage ocean, there to help guide Matt back to himself.