7
Matt heard steps approaching Jessica’s front door. The heavy thudding of boots, the click click click of kitten heels. There was also the unmistakable shuffle of plastic bags swinging and Matt had to hold back a laugh. Having a decent paycheck really did Karen Page some good — Matt didn’t expect her to be such a shopper.
Sometimes his existence felt segmented, the people and situations never quite overlapping like those of an average life usually would. His blindness played a big part in that. Not to mention Daredevil, which plunged him into an entirely different world. But he felt the divide even in his personal life in times like this, when two very different people from very different worlds were meeting somewhere in the middle.
Matt had his history with Karen and he always would, no matter how emotionally complex or physically simple it may have been. And he hadn’t known Jessica for long, but Peter’s birth meant Matt planned on changing that. The mother of his child and the one that, for her sake, he was glad got away, shopping together on a Thursday afternoon. It was a weird way for the separate sides of his life to mesh, but the more he thought about it, the less he minded.
“About time,” Matt called out, listening to Jessica and Karen stumble their way through the front door. “I thought maybe you’d made a run for it.”
Peter pulled himself up onto his hands and knees. Matt felt minute tremors penetrate the floorboards as Peter rocked back and forth, interest apparently peaked by the talking and commotion. The air surrounding the baby whooshed and displaced as one of Pete’s little arms raised, the opposite back leg bent and primed, but just as he went to push himself forward he slipped and fell back to the playmat. Despite his unnatural strength, crawling was still a work on progress. He seemed to make up for the excess muscle with supreme clumsiness.
Pete wasn’t deterred by his failure and rose onto his hands and knees again. Matt gave him a light pat on the back. “You got it, buddy.”
Once inside the living room, Karen dumped their bags on the floor and bodily slumped onto the couch. Jessica bent and kissed Peter atop the head before turning on her heel and doing the same.
Matt huffed. “Rough day?”
There was a charged moment of silence. Karen’s heartbeat jumped, just for a second, but Matt spent too many years listening for ticks like that to miss it. “Is everything okay?”
“Fine,” Jessica replied, a bit too quickly.
“It was great,” Karen added. “Really great.” Her heart started jackrabbiting beneath her sternum.
Jessica sniffled. Her jacket rustled as she brought a hand up to rub at her nose, and that’s when Matt got a whiff of it. It was strong, fresh, how the hell did he not notice it when they walked in—
“Matt?” Jessica asked. “You’re all stiff. I’m back now, if you’ve been waiting to take a shit because you didn’t wanna leave the baby, now’s your chance.”
“Why do you smell like blood?”
“Wow, you really know how to make a lady blush.”
“I’m not joking, Jessica. You reek of it.” Matt walked forward on his knees until he was closer to the couch and tried to not make things too awkward as he sniffed the air. “Jess more than Karen, but it’s still on both of you. Are either of you hurt?”
Karen chuckled nervously. “I’m concerned by the fact that you know exactly what blood smells like.”
Matt was too busy scanning his senses to respond, cataloguing whatever he could without pushing into either woman’s personal space. The atmosphere was coppery and strong around both of them, though more heavily concentrated near Jessica. There was a firm, almost congealed quality to the particles somewhere near her head. They pushed against where air met delicate skin, as if forming under the surface but atop the bone.
“Your face is bruised,” Matt pointed out.
Jessica’s jeans scraped against the velvet of the couch as she shuffled. A dead giveaway. “How the hell do you even know that?”
“So I’m right.”
“I’m a bit banged up. This is an average Thursday for me.”
“You went shopping with a friend and came home injured. And a simple bruise wouldn’t make you smell like that. Forgive me if I have questions.”
Jessica’s leather jacket rubbed as she crossed her arms. “Now you’re saying we stink?”
“Come on, Jessica, you know that’s not what I meant.”
“Maybe we should just tell him, Jessica,” Karen said. “He’s going to find out eventually.”
“Shit, you basically just told him. Now he’s gonna go snooping.”
“Can someone please just tell me what’s happening right now?”
Karen knew her slow, resigned exhale was a dead giveaway, but the last hour had worn her out to the point of not caring. Her and Matt were beyond the point of hiding things from each other. Keeping secrets only ever hurt both of them, and after Matt made it out of Midland Circle they both decided life was too short for half-truths. Even revealing her role in James Wesley’s death had been a weight off her shoulders, despite the nausea and panic she was swimming in beforehand. In the end she was glad it was forced into the open.
So, no, she wasn’t going to keep whatever the hell happened on the subway to herself, especially not with Fisk and Ms. Wesley poking around. A Daredevil impersonator attacking civilians on public transit? Probably something the real Daredevil needed to know about.
“Have you seen the news recently?”
“I haven’t seen anything recently, Karen.”
“For the love of – Jessica, can I use your laptop?”
She waved a hand toward her desk and dropped her head onto the back of the couch, eyes slipping closed. As worn out as Karen was by all of this, she wasn’t the one who’d been tossed around by a masked assailant.
Karen sat in Jessica’s desk chair. It didn’t take long to pull up the live news feed – an anchor with a microphone and a grim expression stood just outside a ring of cop cars and ambulances, all with lights flashing. The vehicles were parked in a protective half-circle at the station exit closest to where the train had been stalled on the tracks.
“New York is rattled today after a seemingly planned attack on Manhattan transit-users.”
Matt went stock-still on the floor. Peter was smacking one of his tiny hands against the playmat repeatedly, upset that his dad was no longer paying attention to him.
“Witnesses say an assailant fought his way through two full train cars before encountering resistance in the third, eventually fleeing the scene. No one has come forward to claim responsibility for fending off the attacker. Authorities believe the blue-collar savior has already fled the scene.”
“Blue-collar savior?” Jessica asked, groaning. “That’s the best they could give me?”
“Exact casualty count remains unknown,” the newscaster continued, “though deaths as well as serious injuries have been reported.”
Matt visibly swallowed. “You were there. Both of you.”
“That’s not the point,” Karen said. “Keep listening.”
The newscaster’s facial expression hadn’t changed, still perfectly schooled into a soft but solemn mask, though the hand at her side betrayed the sensitivity of what she was about to reveal as she spun a ring on her finger. “The most unsettling detail of the case is, surprisingly, the attacker’s attire. Multiple victims claim that the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen is to blame for the fiasco. Despite not being active for over a year, Daredevil has apparently left the confines of his usual neighborhood haunt to attack civilians on their way home from work. Which begs the question – has our grizzled protector reemerged on the vigilante scene just to succumb to the darkness he so often fought against?”
Based on the way Matt was opening and closing his fists, he’d heard enough. Karen shut the laptop.
“You were attacked on the subway,” he said, voice so steady it was unnerving, “by Daredevil.” He aimed himself toward Jessica. “He managed to land a hit on you. You, who has superpowers and hardly let people on the sidewalk brush up against you without having something to say about it.”
Jessica threw her hands in the air. “Forgive me if I was a little distracted, Matt, I thought My son’s father had just slaughtered an entire train car full of people! Yeah, he got lucky. I walked away with a bruise. He ran away with a broken wrist. I don’t think he expected me to open such a flavorful can of whoop-ass and feed it to him fist-first. Give me some credit, here.”
“Give you some credit? You weren’t even going to tell me it happened!”
“Because I knew you’d react like this! We’ve already got the Fisk and Wesley shit to worry about, I didn’t think you need something else on your plate right now.”
“It’s all connected, Jess, it has to be. Why would a Daredevil impersonator show up now? After all this time?”
Too distracted by one another’s hissy fits to think about much else, Jessica and Matt seemed to forget that both Karen and Peter were still in the room. Karen was fully prepared to scoop the baby and go hang out in the bedroom for a bit while the two of them fought it out, but her heart dropped into her stomach when she realized Peter was no longer on his playmat. “Um, guys–”
Matt did nothing but hold up a hand as him and Jessica kept bickering.
“Matt, I really think–”
“Hold on, Karen–”
That’s when she saw it; something moving on Matt’s opposite side. A flash of a knitted sock around Matt’s blazer. The shopping bags at the foot of the couch crinkled.
“Matt! Where’s Peter?”
Matt and Jessica’s fighting ceased immediately. Were the situation any less tense the widening of Jessica’s eyes would have been comical. Matt reached a hand behind him and ran it over the playmat, visibly dismayed to find it empty.
Jessica’s office wasn’t big – it didn’t take her long to spot the baby clumsily crawling his way around Matt and into the space between him and Jessica. He stopped and unceremoniously plopped onto the ground between her boots, close enough to wrap one chubby fist in the denim of her jeans and another in the soft knit of Matt’s trousers. Then, once he had the attention of both of his parents, he let out the most pathetic wail Jessica had ever heard.
The waterworks were instant and noisy, and the baby was a snotty, teary mess in the split second before Jessica picked him up off the floor and cradled him in her arms. “Sorry, sorry, sorry, Petey. Mom and dad didn’t mean to fight. So sorry. We’ll stop, okay?”
There was a pinched look on Matt’s face – Peter’s more shrill crying fits always grated on his enhanced hearing – but the deep lines of his frown softened quickly. “Jess, did he just–”
“Oh my god,” Jessica said, realizing what had happened. “He did. Holy shit, Pete, you did it!”
Matt was up and on the couch with them in an instant. Jessica tried and failed to ignore the way he pressed into her from shoulder to thigh as he reached toward their son. “You crawled, buddy! You’re the best baby ever, you know that, right? I knew you could do it.” One of his fingers wiggled into the space beneath Peter’s chin and Peter giggled. The tears on his cheeks were already drying, shiny and tacky against his smooth skin.
Jessica barely registered Karen grabbing her purse and walking toward the hallway, offering only a meek smile and a short wave before shutting the front door behind her. Jessica hadn’t meant to make her uncomfortable, but she also wasn’t the type to sit by and let Matt accuse her of being reckless. She’d call Karen later, make sure she’s okay after everything that happened. And thank her for the baby clothes — there were alot of clothes.
The apartment was quiet except for Peter’s lingering sniffles. Jessica traced the bridge of Peter’s nose with a fingertip. “I’m not trying to keep things from you, Matt. I just genuinely didn’t know how to tell you.”
“How to tell me what? That someone decided to use my shelved alter ego to beat the shit out of a bunch of people? Really no way to sugar coat that. It was going to sting no matter how I heard about it.”
“Then why’d you get so pissed?
“Because two people I care about got caught up in it. In my mess. You got hurt.”
The end of his sentence was firm, clipped, but Jessica heard what went unsaid. You got hurt and I wasn’t there to stop it.
Because that’s how things went, wasn’t it? Matthew Murdock had a Catholic guilt complex the size of Manhattan. In his mind, everything was his fault if it happened to someone he cared about, especially so in a neighborhood he swore to protect. Jessica understood where the thoughts came from. When you lose as many people as her and Matt had, you start feeling as if maybe you were the problem.
Jessica still feels that way sometimes when she remembers Peter the day he was born, how tiny he felt in her arms, the time he had to spend in the NICU because she was foolish and clueless and a drunk. But hating yourself is exhausting and doesn’t do anybody any good, and eventually Jessica realized she could live a much more productive life if she acknowledged where she fucked up and tried to do better. It was hard some days, but she managed.
Matt, on the other hand, shoved it all down and down and down into himself until something happened and the guilt crushed him full force. It’s why it took him so long to wake up from that coma and tell his friends he wasn’t dead. He didn’t know how to dig himself out.
Matt flinched when Jessica wrapped a hand around his forearm. She didn’t know if it was because he was too deep in his own head or because he still wasn’t used to her touching him. Hell, Jessica wasn’t used to touching him.
Despite that, the hand stayed. “I’m alright,” Jessica said carefully. “Karen’s alright. We’re all good.”
One corner of Matt’s mouth turned upward. “How would you know? You snuck past the cops and obviously didn’t get checked out by the paramedics.”
“I’m intuitive, Matt. I don’t need someone to tell me what is and isn’t broken.”
“Right.”
Jessica hated to ruin this, the calm that was seeping in, but the issue at hand had to be addressed. “There’s still someone out there pretending to be you. He’s hurting people. What are we gonna do about it?”
Matt finally turned toward her. His hazel eyes were trained somewhere over her shoulder. “We?”
“You realize you have people that care about you, right? You can stop all the masochistic bullshit. You’re not dealing with this alone.”
Matt said nothing. Jessica let it slide.
They watched Peter wiggle in Matt’s lap. His displeasure from their fight was apparently a result of the noise itself, and now that things had quieted down he was perfectly content to look around the room and eat his own hand.
“He’s crawling, Jessica. Know what that means?”
“He’ll be even more of a menace than before?”
“I was going to say we need to start baby-proofing our apartments, but yes, basically.”
“Now he’s sticky and mobile. This is gonna suck.”
Jessica didn’t notice she was still holding Matt’s arm until he covered her fingers with his own. His hand was warm. She liked it there, so she didn’t bother moving it.
“I have to fix this,” Matt said, resigned. “Fisk acting up, Ms. Wesley, the new Daredevil. All of it.”
“We’ve discussed this already.”
“No, Jess, you’re not understanding me. Fisk orchestrated this, I’m sure of it. First he got Ms. Wesley to poke her nose around, stir things up a bit. Then he used the imposter to put Daredevil back in the public sphere. Your whole excuse for not taking Wesley’s case and trying to unmask me is that Daredevil hasn’t been active. Well, now he is. Fisk literally made me a public enemy. Everyone has a reason to catch me now.”
“You mean he made you more of a public enemy.” Jessica bumped her shoulder against his. “Vigilantism is a crime, you know.”
“I didn’t commit mass murder before all this.
Daredevil’s going to be on top of every watchlist. They’ve got multiple eyewitness accounts of a man in a Devil suit attacking civilians unprompted.”
“And a rich woman running around claiming the Devil killed her son is going to be a lot more believable now.” Not great. Really not great. “But you didn’t kill before. That’s your big ol’ Catholic rule. Shouldn’t that mean something?”
“Not unless they catch the other guy and he admits he isn’t the real Daredevil. Which has about a zero percent chance of happening.”
The more they talked it out, the closer Jessica came to understanding what the point of all of this was. Why Wilson Fisk would go to such lengths. “Do you think this is the guy who killed Ben Ulrich and his family?”
Matt’s lips were pressed tight. “Could be. But if the whole point was making Daredevil look like a killer, I don’t see why he’d only leave the daughter alive. One witness that was too young and scared to tell the cops anything useful. It very well could have just been a personal vendetta and Fisk chose someone already on his payroll to carry it out. Hell, maybe it was a test to make sure the new guy was up for the job.”
“You’re saying almost an entire family being murdered was both a check on a to-do list and a really fucked up job interview.” Just the thought of it left a bad taste in Jessica’s mouth.
“I wouldn’t put it past him. I wouldn’t put anything past Fisk, really.”
“So you said we have to fix this,” Jessica reminded him. “And we will. Have any ideas?”
Matt smiled, but it wasn’t out of happiness. It looked more like an apology.
“One,” Matt said. “You’re not going to like it.”
Two days later, Jessica sat on Matt’s couch with a sleeping Peter in her arms and a pulsing pain behind her eyes. “You’re right,” she said, looking Matt up and down with what she knew was visible disdain. But Matt didn’t need to be able to see her face to hear her displeasure. “I don’t like it.”
It was more than that, really. It wasn’t that she just didn’t like it. She hated it. It scared her. Not because Matt was scary, but because she knew what it meant. Life hadn’t been peaceful before, but Hell’s Kitchen was about to become a battleground.
Because Matt was standing in the middle of his living room dressed as Daredevil.
“Well I couldn’t exactly use the old suit,” Matt said, tugging at the makeshift black mask pulled over his eyes, “Seeing as someone else just killed a bunch of people in it. Plus I have no idea where the helmet ended up, and having a building fall on you really messes with the integrity of Kevlar.”
“So your solution is to go out and find this guy in the original Daredevil outfit, which is made of athletic underclothes and no body armor. After a year of inactivity, too. You’re out of practice, unprotected, and insane.”
“Wow, Jess, your confidence in me knows no bounds.”
“Don’t act like I’m crazy for pointing it out!”
Peter fussed in Jessica’s arms, displeased with the noise, and Jessica readjusted his sound-muffling headphones. When she spoke again her voice was lower. “The only reason this guy ran when I fought back on the subway was because he didn’t expect someone to put up much of a fight. I caught him off guard. If you walk up to him like that he’ll know who you are immediately. He will be, and already is, ready for you.”
Matt crossed his arms over his chest. “He’ll also be fighting with a broken wrist, thanks to you. That gives me an advantage.”
The one thing Jessica could say about Matt’s original suit is that it didn’t hide much. She was glad he couldn’t see her watching the muscles of his biceps shift.
“One you’ll need, if you’re going to fight someone dressed like a toddler on Halloween. This is a bad idea, Matt. Come on.”
Matt tapped his booted foot against the living room rug. Now that Peter was crawling they’d have to have a talk about not wearing shoes in the apartment. The floor was probably nasty. “Fisk did all of this to test me. Get me out of hiding. He knows I can’t let this slide. He wants to finish me off once and for all.”
“Which answers our original question — Fisk knows you survived Midland Circle.”
“Or assumes I did, and he’s checking to make sure.”
Jessica’s headache flared. A tiny part of her wanted a drink, but she reached for her cup of iced unsweetened tea on the coffee table instead. “So your last layer of protection against him is that he probably doesn’t know who you really are.”
“Basically.” Matt pulled the mask off. His hair was disheveled, sticking up in every direction. Jessica sort of liked it. She ignored that fact because she was trying to stay mad at him.
“Then just stay hidden. Don’t take the bait. Make him believe you’re dead and he’ll finally give up.”
“And until that point, we let him keep killing innocent people with my moniker? I’m sorry. I can’t do that.”
Matt’s thought processes were not a mystery to Jessica. She knew his motives. He didn’t want anyone to die because of him, and that was fine. She didn’t want anyone to die, either. But Matt had a hard time looking at the bigger picture. “You know who else is innocent, Matt? Your son. Who is already at risk, and will be more at risk if Fisk finds out who you are.”
With the mask off, Jessica could watch Matt’s face fall in real time. He looked tired. But weren’t they both?
“Peter is all I think about, Jess. All the time. If I’m not with him, I’m wishing I was. I already don’t get as much time with him as I’d like.” Matt turned, body aimed away from the couch, but Jessica could still hear the bit he tacked on to the end. It came out faint, nothing but a whisper, but Jessica heard it nonetheless. “With either of you, really.”
Damn. Wasn’t that just a punch to the gut.
Matt wasn’t done. “Peter doesn’t get to come home to two parents every day. I know what that’s like, you know what that’s like, and I don’t want it for him. Kids need their parents. A boy needs his father.”
Jessica thought back to her research on Matt, the digging she did when her and the other Defenders started working together. Jack Murdock was all Matt had. And then one day, Matt found his father dead in an alley. Now he was a trained martial artist with a mindset that every problem was his to fix. Not having a mom set him up for grief, but not having his dad was the icing on the cake.
“But I also don’t want it for any other kid out there. Ulrich’s little girl just lost her entire family! Those people on the subway had loved ones. I can make sure that doesn’t happen to anyone else because of Fisk and whatever bullshit we’ve got festering between us.”
And that was the truth, wasn’t it? Matt probably could fix it. He knew how Fisk worked. No matter how much time had passed, Matt was still and would always be the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. He dedicated his life to it, and it almost killed him. The evil ex-girlfriend he stayed behind to fight was also a factor, but the intent was there. Matt would lay down his life if it meant protecting people he thought deserved protecting.
The issue is that Jessica was selfish. She wanted to save people, she did, she knew it was the right thing to do. But she wanted to save her people first. Matt was one of her people. She lost him once, and it hurt despite barely knowing him. Jessica could hardly imagine what it would feel like now.
“You’re sure about this? You really think it’s the only way.”
Matt nodded, solemn. “I do.”
That was it, then. Jessica took a moment to push back the burning feeling in her tear ducts. “Then we start slow. You don’t just run around like a madman hunting this guy. You and I, together, develop a plan.”
“We can do that—“
“I’m not finished. If Peter’s dad is gonna be out getting the shit beat out of him, we both deserve to know where you are. Carry a burner phone so we can track you. If you stay in one place too long without saying something, I'll call a babysitter and come find you myself.”
Matt looked less than pleased about that stipulation. “Fine.”
“And one last thing.”
Matt groaned. “There’s more?”
There was. And it was going to be his least favorite part. “You have to tell Karen and Foggy.”
“Now hold on, Jessica—“
“No, Matt, don’t be dense. Do you realize what your vigilante shit did to them? What your death did to them? Especially considering that you lied to them about all of it? If you’re going to go out and get wrapped up in all of it again, the least they deserve is the truth. And they need to know before we start all this.”
“I wanted to start tonight.”
“Then you tell them tonight, and you can start in a day or two. Call them both over here, they should be getting out of work.”
“How do you know when they get out of work?”
“Because I actually listen when they tell me things. Call them.”
Jessica took Peter and went to Matt’s room when Karen and Foggy came over. He was thankful for it, because he was genuinely embarrassed by how scared he was to talk to his friends.
If Jessica hated the plan, his friends were going to all out reject it.
Matt changed into a t-shirt and sweats before they could see him in the suit— he didn’t have a death wish. And when they finally got to the apartment he sat them both on the couch, caught Foggy up on the subway situation, and then told them the plan.
Both of their hearts were pounding. The sound filled his ears, drove him mad, he thought it was all he’d ever hear until —
“You are one stupid son of a bitch, you know that?”
Matt pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yeah, Fog, I’m aware.”
Karen’s hair scratched against her blouse. She must have been shaking her head. “No, Matt, I don’t think you are. This is completely idiotic. But I agree, I think it’s your best shot.”
The leather of the couch squeaked as Foggy turned toward Karen. Matt got a whiff of his cologne — something expensive. “You can’t be serious. He wants to throw himself to the wolves again and you’re giving him permission? You paid his rent while he was dead, Karen! We thought he died!”
“I know that, Foggy! God, do I know that. But you weren’t on the train with me and Jessica. It’s…Horrendous, what the fake Daredevil is doing to these people. And he’ll keep doing it as long as Fisk tells him to.”
“I can handle this,” Matt said gently. “It’s what I do.”
“It’s what you did. Past tense. What does Jessica think about all of this?”
“She obviously doesn’t like it, but she agrees it might be our only choice.” Matt pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “She’s in the bedroom with Pete, he’s taking a nap. You can ask her yourself if you don’t believe me.”
“The little man is here? I’d have been quieter if I knew he was trying to sleep. Damn, I’m trying to be Pete’s favorite and you’re making me the bad guy.”
“I wouldn’t sweat it. As long as you keep doing the thing where you bounce him on your knee he’ll love you forever.”
The break in tension didn’t last long, everyone’s smiles at the thought of Peter and the goofy way he laughed fading once they remembered why they’d been upset in the first place. Karen looked resigned, like she was reliving how upset she’d been when Matt told her about Daredevil the first time, but she knew things had progressed too far now to stop him. Foggy, on the other hand, held onto his anger in the audible clenching of his teeth and the way he kept looking between Karen and Matt like he couldn’t believe they were even considering following through with any of this.
“So you’re really serious about this,” Foggy said. “About going out there, digging all of this shit up when it could just stay buried.”
Matt nodded. “You can’t talk me out of it.”
“I know you too well, Matt. I know I can’t. But I can tell you that if you get yourself hurt, or worse, that’s on you. If Peter ends up without a dad, that’s on you. We’re clear?”
And wasn’t that just a tug at the heart strings? How all of this would affect Peter had been Matt’s main concern from the start. What was best, smartest, safest for him. At the end of the day, becoming the Devil again to take down Fisk once and for all was both the worst and best thing Matt could do for his son.
Matt mentally swore that this regression to his former self would be temporary. A one time thing. Just until he could make sure Fisk wasn’t breaking out of prison, just until he could stop the imposter from killing anyone else. Matt would rather wake up to Peter crying because he’s hungry than he would to his own nightmares in which Peter is crying for entirely different reasons.
“Yeah, Fog. We’re clear.”
It was cold on the roof of Matt’s building.
Jessica stood on one side of the stairwell vestibule to try and block the wind. The tips of her ears were numb. Peter was tucked under a blanket and pulled close to her chest. His open eyes, scrunched nose and utter lack of movement meant he was just as displeased by the weather as she was.
Any other day, for any other reason, Jessica would have stayed inside. But Matt was standing on the roof ledge with a black mask over his eyes and Muay Thai ropes wrapped around his hands, and there was no way in hell she was going to miss this.
After Matt told his friends about becoming Daredevil again, he was ready and raring to go. Jessica convinced him to get his head out of his ass and take a day or two to sort things out first, actually prepare to get out there again. That day was today, that time was now, but in the interim between their conversation and that evening Matt took care of grabbing whatever he may need for the late nights ahead. That included new clothes, a restocked first aid kid and, at Jessica’s insistence, a burner phone. No way was he disappearing into the night without a way for her to get a hold of him.
“Aren’t you freezing in that?” Jessica asked. “Spandex isn’t very warm.”
“I’m used it,” Matt said, like wearing just athletic clothes on a winter night was nothing new. “Besides, anything else would restrict my movement.”
“Ah, right. You need to be able to do your little flips and such.”
“Right. My little flips.” Jessica only had a view of Matt’s muscled back, but the way his words came out light and a bit round at the edges made her think he may have been smiling.
Jessica let the sounds of the city wash over her. Noise was something she typically tried to avoid; the shouting and honking and general chaos gave her a headache, not to mention sent Peter into hysterics. But atop the roof, above the road and with a view of the skyline, there was something tranquil about it all. People moved, cars drove, but the city stood. The same skyscraper lights she always saw twinkled and blinked, the same cloud-like haze of city smog and ambient light, and Jessica knew in her gut that no matter what happened here, the city itself would remain. An infection could attack from within, create a disease, infect the host. But souls didn’t die, and no matter how many Avengers-level threats or Wilson Fisks decided to tear the place apart, the spirit of New York wouldn’t waver.
People like Matt Murdock preserved that spirit. People born and bred to survive in a concrete jungle, who stood up for their neighbors and took hits not aimed at them simply because they thought it was the right thing to do. Without them, New York wouldn’t be what it was. Loud, overcrowded, smelly and expensive, but loud in its pride and overcrowded with millions of people somehow sharing an island and making it work, and expensive but so rich in culture that anyone could a find a place in the city they felt like they belonged.
So as the wind rustled the tails of Matt’s mask, something rumbling and unsure turned tranquil and settled deep within Jessica’s chest.
Matt’s head twitched, right ear turning toward the street below. He was tense from shoulders to toes as he listened to something Jessica was sure no one else in the neighborhood could hear yet.
She waited. A few minutes later she heard it — sirens, quickly approaching from down the street. A squad of cop cars turned the corner and their lights turned the surrounding buildings red and blue. Peter keyed in on the noise and started fussing in her arms.
“Time to go,” Matt said over his shoulder, lips quirked in a sorry sort of smile.
Jessica took a few steps forward. Closer, but not close. “You’ve got the burner?”
Matt patted his pocket. “Got it.”
“And you’ve got the number for my burner in it?”
“I memorized the number, Jessica. We’re all good.”
She didn’t know what else to say. She could only stall for so long.
“Then I guess—“
Matt’s hop off the roof ledge caught Jessica off guard. Mostly because he jumped toward her instead of away, and after a few ever-silent steps he was directly in front of her.
Matt looked…Different, in the original Daredevil regalia. Chiseled, made of stone, movements precise but unpredictable. He was a different person when he could hide behind a mask.
But the way he leaned in, bent down just slightly, and placed a soft kiss on Peter’s wind-chapped cheek was all Matt Murdock. “Be back later, buddy.”
Maybe Jessica was wrong. Maybe Matt was just more willing to let his true self bleed through when he could cover it up. Because the lingering kiss he planted on her cheek, just barely grazing the edge of her mouth, was something Jessica knew her mental version of Matt would never dare do. It wasn’t rushed enough, wasn’t charged with the sort of tension that led to couch sex and accidental pregnancies.
Perhaps she just hadn’t truly gotten to know this side of him yet; the side that kissed her cheek to show her he cared and jumped off buildings because he could. “Get home safe,” Matt said. “Don’t wait up.”
And then he was gone, a shadowed blur slipping over the roof ledge. Suddenly Jessica was alone with the wind and a fussy baby and the lingering feel of Matt’s lips on her cheek.
Jessica tucked Peter’s blanket more firmly around him and headed for the stairwell door. “Don’t wait up my ass.”