Matt’s Dad had worn a St. Christopher. He remembered the weight of it, the feel of the medal in his own smaller hand as he sat on his Dad’s lap. He’d asked him once, before the accident, where he’d gotten it from and why he wore it.
“Your Grandma gave it to me when I left home. St Christopher’s for travellers, he protects people Matty. He carried the baby Jesus right across a river, on his back. I wear it so I know there’s always someone on our side”
Matt remembers thinking that it was stupid. He didn’t need anyone to protect him when his Dad was there, and his Dad didn’t need to be protected from anything. Battlin’ Jack Murdock was scared of nothing and no one. They didn’t need anything else.
-
In the days after his accident, Matt’s Dad prayed to St. Jude. Writhing and crying in his bed, he hears his Dad praying in the hospital chapel two floors down. For the first time ever, he hears his Dad crying, and it startles him enough to sit still and listen.
“St Jude, Please take care of Matty. He’s just a kid, a good kid who was trying to do a good thing, he doesn’t deserve to suffer like this. Please help him to heal, I don’t know what I’d do without him. Please, God, look after him.”
Later, when his Dad was gone and he was living at St Agnes’, he had asked one of the nuns what St Jude was the saint of. He had wanted to cry when she told him it was lost causes.
It figured, he thought years later. At this point, Matt’s entire life was one big lost cause, and St Christopher hadn’t done shit to protect either of them in the end. His Dad was wearing the medal when he was shot. Matt remembers scrambling to feel it on his neck as he crouched over the body. The cold weight of the metal confirming that his worst nightmare had come true. He never found out if he had been buried in it or if someone else had taken it. They hadn’t let him visit his Dad after everything. He often wished that they had. Maybe then he’d be able to think of something other than the feeling of the blood he’d knelt in or the coldness of his face when he thought of him. He had always hoped he had been buried in it. He thinks his Dad would’ve liked that.
When it came to choosing his confirmation name at fifteen, Matt had chosen Jude. He needed all the help he could get.
-
He listened to a lot of people’s prayers whilst living at St Agnes’. Prayers for help and advice, for vengeance. For a while, he’d thought that he was hearing God’s voice. He even allowed himself to hope for a while that it meant his accident had happened for a reason, that it had brought him closer to God and to the people around him. That maybe, just maybe, he could turn it into something good.
Stick had beaten that right out of him.
His training with Stick had confirmed what he’d overheard his Grandma saying when he was a kid. The Murdock boys have the devil in them. There was something wrong with him. There was something dark and dangerous deep within him that Matt couldn’t control. He wasn’t like other people, Stick said, couldn’t be. He was wired differently, something within him fundamentally flawed.
It often made him think of the idea of Original Sin, Adam and Eve’s enduring gift to humanity. All people were born sinners, Matt knew that, but Baptism was supposed to wash it off. Give everyone a new start, a blank slate. Something must have gone wrong at his Baptism, he thought. They hadn’t gotten all of it. A little bit of sin had been left in Matt and turned him into this. There was something evil inside of him, eating away. If he allowed it to take control then eventually there’d be nothing left.
He couldn’t let it get to that, couldn’t allow himself to become what Stick wanted him to be. Matt wasn’t a killer and he definitely wasn’t a soldier. To Stick that meant he was worthless. He wasn’t useful to him if he wouldn’t let the devil out. Matt had made the mistake of thinking that Stick cared about him, that he’d accept him as he was. Not as a soldier, but as a son. He’d trusted him.
He wouldn’t make that mistake again.
-
During his undergrad, Matt took a Religious Philosophy class. The class covered a lot of things, one of them being the Problem of Evil in relation to the existence of God. If God is all-powerful, all-loving, and all-knowing, the professor proposed, then why does evil exist in the world? How could a truly benevolent God allow suffering on the scale at which it exists in the world?
These were all things that Matt had wanted answers to. He’d taken the class hoping it would be able to answer some of the questions he’d had about the world ever since his Dad’s death. The professor had proposed lots of answers to these questions, some disproving God’s existence and some doing the opposite.
However, the one that had stuck with Matt was the concept of the Free Will Defence. In order for humanity to have true free will, they must have genuine permission, opportunity and ability to commit evil. Moral evil has nothing to do with God, the professor said. It’s a choice that people must make every day to turn away from evil. Evil is the easiest path, but goodness? That is always a choice. Evil and Suffering is worth our ability to choose.
Of course, Matt wasn’t ignorant. There were many problems with this idea. It didn’t account for things like natural disasters, and he wasn’t completely sure that he agreed with the idea that free will was worth the price of evil but he did agree with the idea that goodness was a choice. It was a choice that Matt had to make every day, to control the devil inside him and try to do good in the world.
If Matt could choose to be good, to keep the devil inside, then maybe he could make a difference. Maybe his suffering would be worth something.
He had to believe that God had made him this way for a reason. He didn’t know what he would do if he let himself believe otherwise.
-
Matt thought that God might have been giving him a break by allowing him to meet Foggy Nelson. After his Dad and the orphanage and Stick, Matt had created carefully constructed walls around himself and his emotions. He hadn’t really made any friends in his undergrad. Sure he had acquaintances, people he could pair up with for group projects and would say hi to in the street, but he hadn’t really let anybody in. In truth, he hadn’t thought that he could.
Foggy managed to bulldoze through all of his walls in one afternoon. As soon as he shook his hand in their dorm, he was screwed. As he sat in a coffee shop on campus at Columbia with his new roommate, Matt began to hope that he might just have found someone that he could trust again, and sent off a silent prayer of thanks to God for allowing it to happen. Foggy was his own little once in a lifetime miracle.
He sent off the same prayer of thanks years later when Karen Page came into his life. He hadn’t even considered that the woman he met in an interrogation room at Brett’s precinct would ever become so important to him, but like Foggy, she managed to worm her way into his heart and suddenly Matt had two people he could trust. Two people that he considered family. That was more family than Matt had ever had in his life as the only child of an only child.
In Foggy and Karen, Matt had found people that he could rely on to be there for him no matter what. Perhaps things might have ended differently if he had trusted them enough to tell them who he really was.
Daredevil was Matt’s last-ditch attempt to turn the devil inside him into something good. This burning rage inside of him wasn’t something he could escape, Matt knew that now. God had put the devil in him for a reason and he thought that maybe this was it. If he could be the symbol that Hell's Kitchen needed then maybe the people he loved would be safe. Maybe they’d never have to find out how broken he really was.
Of course, it didn’t work like that. No secret stays secret forever no matter how much you want it to. When Foggy found Matt bleeding out on the floor of his apartment, it felt like he could finally breathe. ‘Here I am' he wanted to say as they fought, ‘This is who I really am. This is what I’ve been hiding from you since the moment we met. This is why I’m broken. This is why I can’t love you in the way that you deserve. Do you see now?, why I keep it all inside?’
He said none of this. Instead he watched, tears streaming down his face as Foggy walked away and then wanted to cry in disbelief when he came back.
Telling Karen went slightly differently. There was no blood or tears like last time, just a brown paper bag and a mask. It ended the same way though, with her walking away. Everyone always left Matt eventually, it was just a matter of time. But what Karen and Foggy proved to him was something that he’d never considered before.
Sometimes people came back.
-
In Wilson Fisk, Matt saw real and true evil for the first time in a long time. The Devil incarnate.
He thought often of Father Lantom’s story about the Devil. About Rwanda and Gahiji and the militia commander who slaughtered him infront of his family. He often found himself comparing the man to Fisk, looking for similarities in the stories, ways these two truly evil men intersected with each other. Fisk was proof that Father Lantom’s beliefs about the Devil were true, but this wasn’t what scared Matt the most.
What really scared Matt, what kept him awake at night, was the acknowledgement within his own mind that he and Fisk were two sides of the same coin. Matt might not have been The Devil, but he had a devil inside of him. It would’ve been so easy, he thought sometimes, for him to have ended up like Fisk. Alot of their motivations were the same. Both of them claimed to want to make Hell’s Kitchen a better place and both of them were willing to do anything to execute that vision.
Wilson Fisk was what Matt was terrified of becoming if he ever decided to cross that line and take a human life. Fisk was Matt with no inhibitions, no morals, and it terrified him sometimes how easy it would’ve been for him to become that.
Maybe that’s why the Punisher had gotten to him so much. Frank Castle, Matt sometimes mused, was about as close that a human could get to being an avenging Angel. Like St. Michael being called to exact angelic justice, Frank swept through New York’s underworld until there was nothing left and then he came back for more. Frank wasn’t like Fisk. Despite his actions and despite everything that had been done to him, he was still a good man. His actions were justified and Matt respected him, even if he disagreed with his methods.
Despite this, Matt thought Frank had been wrong about one major thing. He’d said that Matt was one bad day away from being him. Instead, Matt often thought that really, he was one bad day away from being Fisk.
And that scared him more than anything.
-
He was almost relieved when the building fell on him at Midland Circle.
He had nothing left. No job, no friends, no life. He knew he’d be going to Hell (that’s where the devil belonged after all) but he hoped that a merciful God might allow him to see his Dad one last time before sending him on his way. He was looking forward to that he thought, as he closed his eyes. Instead, Matt woke up to the nuns surrounding his bed at St Agnes’. Like a reluctant Lazarus, he had been raised from the dead and he couldn’t help but curse God for saving him.
He knew he should be grateful, but he was so tired. He just wanted to rest. Hadn’t he earned that? Didn’t God owe him something after all the shit he’d been through?
Well if God wasn’t going to give him what he wanted, he didn’t owe God shit. God hadn’t put the devil in him to help him make a difference in the world, it had all been some sick and twisted joke. God hadn’t protected him, or his Dad. God had forsaken him from the moment he was born, thrust him into a life of hardship with no reward. Only misery and suffering and death.
If God really wanted him to be the devil, then that’s what he would be. Matt Murdock was dead. There was only the devil now. He’d much rather die as the devil than live as Matt Murdock.
The devil had no friends and no connections, which meant he couldn’t get hurt. He’d let Foggy and Karen into his life and paid the price for it. After Stick, he’d promised himself that he wouldn’t trust anyone again and he’d broken that promise with them. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
Needless to say, Matt had underestimated the forces of nature that were Foggy Nelson and Karen Page. He should’ve known that they wouldn’t let him go without a fight. It baffled him, how much they seemed to care. He didn’t deserve it, not even slightly. All he did was put them in danger. Their lives were infinitely better when he wasn’t in them. He didn’t understand why they didn’t seem to agree.
(Of course, Matt had completely failed to consider the idea that he might mean just as much to Foggy and Karen as they meant to him)
-
In the end, after everything was over. After Fisk was back in prison and Father Lantom had been buried, Matt stood in the basement of Clinton Church with the mother he hadn’t known existed and thought about his father.
He remembered his St. Christopher and his Dad’s smile as he told Matt the story of why he wore it. He remembered hearing his desperate prayers to St. Jude and the cold feeling of the medal in his hand as he crouched over his Dad’s body.
His life hadn’t been easy. He’d been hurt more times and by more people than he could count, but he’d also saved a lot of people. Done a lot of good. Standing there with his mother by his side, Matt realised that maybe his life had turned out exactly as it was meant to after all.