There was a brochure left on the coffee table in the waiting room. Sam picked it up as he collected all the soft teddy bears that had made their way out of their basket and went to dump it in the recycling by the door, but then he stopped.
It was for a college.
Smooth and glossy and definitely right from a recent open house.
He threw it away and tried not to think about it anymore.
Sensei was brutal when they trained. He was always brutal because he told Sam that he needed to learn how to fight someone better than the people he would meet in the streets, which Sam got. Normally, it didn’t get to him. Normally, he would duck the kick, block the punch, twist his wrist out of the grip with no problem, but for some reason, the old guy’s grip was too strong that day. His incoming shin was faster than it had any right to be. His knuckles caught Sam right in the gut and he went down, clutching at Matt’s knuckles.
Matt let his arm go loose. He didn’t tsk--he never tsked--but his silence was heavy with disappointment.
“Sorry,” Sam said automatically.
“Get up,” Matt told him.
He didn’t want to.
“Get up, Samuel.”
He got up.
Matt left him to go rewrap his knuckles.
“What’s goin’ on, kid?” he asked flatly, peeling tape off and rewinding it, peeling it off and rewinding it, until he got it exactly how he wanted it to be.
It was nothing.
Just a weird feeling.
“Feeling sick,” Sam said.
Matt paused in his winding.
“What kind of sick?” he asked.
Sam didn’t know. The kind that made his stomach and throat ache. That kind of sick.
“You’re not in the right headspace,” Matt said. “Let’s call it in for the night.”
But they’d barely started?
“It’s fine, Sammy. Sometimes it just doesn’t want to happen. I’d rather not kick you while you’re down. You need a coke.”
Sensei thought that coke settled stomachs despite all evidence to the contrary. He thought the same for ginger ale. It was a toss-up which one of them he’d inflict on you if you mentioned feeling queasy.
“I’m okay,” Sam said.
The back of his tongue tasted like acid.
“A coke,” Sensei repeated. “C’mon, kid.”
Sometimes, Sam wished he’d been younger when he met the old guy. It would have been easier to learn from him. Easier to retrain his body, to chase his own learned movements out of it and replace them with Boss’s.
Not to mention it would have been nice to have a guy like Matt in his life back in New York. Back when it had been him and Hannah and sometimes Mom, at least when they all got home from work on the same day around the same time.
It was a nice thought. But it was only that.
Matt hadn’t been in the right headspace back when Sam was a kid. Sam remembered the headlines. Sam remembered the shootouts and the bombings and the spiraling rat race that Daredevil played with the kingpin day in and day out.
Matt wouldn’t have been the guy Sam needed in those days. He’d have been too hard still. Too angry. He’d torn through the city like a man possessed. He’d fought tooth and bloody, cracked nail for every inch of his so-called territory. If Sam had run into him back then, he probably would have come face to face with the most twisted face the devil had to offer.
He’d gotten softer with age. Even his horns didn’t seem as sharp as they had back in New York.
Still though. It was nice sometimes to dream of the what-ifs.
What if Matt had stayed in New York? What if he’d taken Sam on as his apprentice in that city? What if Mom had lived? What if she and Matt had met under better circumstances—normal circumstances?
What if.
What if.
There were no answers. The scenarios cut themselves short before they even finished unfurling.
These were the wrong what-ifs.
Sam lived a very different set of them. A very different world from the what-ifs that other people got to experience. His what-ifs were nightmares of documents—documents, sir, can I see your papers? Sir, I need you to come with us.
Put your hands over your head.
Stop crying.
Stop screaming.
No one is going to help you.
Matt didn’t need to know about those what-ifs. Matt would try to do something about them if he did, and he didn’t need to. They weren’t his problem.
Although nowadays, it seemed like Matt thought that a lot of Sam’s problems were his own problems. Hannah said that that was his radioactive brain latching onto Sam’s and getting confused as to which thoughts were his and which were Sam’s. Hannah then said, after Sam told her to just be fucking real for once, that that was probably just his way of caring. Daredevil, they both now knew, was just one of Matt’s many means of helping people. His whole sense of being was wrapped up in that and when he couldn’t help someone or fix a problem, he kind of started to freak out about it. Obsess over it.
Hannah told Sam that he was a new source of problems for Matt, whether he wanted to be or not. That was the risk that they all took when they accepted someone new into their families.
She was wise like that sometimes, Hannah was.
Sam wished that she didn’t have to be.
He cradled her unvoiced ‘what-ifs’ to his chest. Thinking about them felt like swallowing sand.
Sam found another flier. He threw it away immediately this time, but the damage had already been done.
It was a rough day.
He went home as soon as the office doors were locked, even though Matt and Foggy and Kirsten invited him out to dinner with them.
He said he was going out for drinks with Jia. Jia had canceled on him that morning though, since she couldn’t get wasted two nights in a row. She’d sent him a row of sad piggy faces.
Tuesday met him at the door and he gave her the best pet he could muster before shuffling past her to his room. He closed the door behind him.
Everything suddenly seemed so quiet.
He flopped down face first on his bed and buried himself in as much of the comforter as he could reach.
There was no point in dreaming, he told himself. He was already living better than he had in the big city. He should have been happy. Should have been satisfied. He had a room of his own. A teacher and mentor who gave a shit whether he lived or died. He had a real job—a job that was more than just picking up other people’s trash.
He should have been happy.
College had never been an option. College was an option for Hannah. She was going. She’d gotten financial aid and everything and with her having to go down to part-time hours for her studies, Sam needed to work as much as possible to send her enough cash that she could keep the apartment.
She told him that he didn’t have to. That the financial aid helped her make up for the decrease in hours, but like.
No.
Hannah was only 20. She didn’t deserve to have to hold down a whole apartment in New York City on her own. And Sam was coming home. Sensei said that in two years, they would probably go home. All of them. Him and Kirsten and Foggy—Foggy missed Hell’s Kitchen. He missed his family and he missed his home streets and neighbors and he’d done a solid job holding all that in for the last couple of years, but cracks were starting to show in his façade and Matt and Kirsten worried about him.
Those latter two were the kind of people who didn’t have as many attachments as Foggy and Sam, just like, generally. Kirsten was happy to maintain a long-distance relationship with her city friends and her father and, yes, Matt absolutely loved Hell’s Kitchen with his whole heart, but Matt had learned to love San Francisco. He’d already figured out all the nooks and crannies to land on and hide in. His name was on people’s lips out this way now.
But at the end of the day, he’d do anything for Foggy. That was how they’d ended up out this way to begin with. And that’s how they would find their way back home.
Sam was quietly grateful for that.
He loved San Francisco. He loved his friends and how he felt like he could just breathe without looking over his shoulder all the time.
But he was a New Yorker. He missed the hustle. Missed the bustle. Missed the screech and the roar. The shouting, the laughing, the lights and the wind and the warmth of Chinatown in August. He missed getting home and hearing Hannah come in and collapse onto the couch in the living room. He missed all their plants in the window, all in mis-matching pots. The box fan in the living room blaring. The neighbors all telling him not to work so hard.
He missed Columbia.
He missed college.
He missed learning.
He was learning. Sensei was teaching him.
But that wasn’t the same.
Sam’s brain never shut up. It buzzed like live wires. Like a bee hive. His thoughts swirled round and round; they billowed against each other, crashing like waves.
What if what if what if
They each grew taller and taller and taller as another ‘what if what if what if’ grew taller and taller and fatter opposite them until they all collided and shattered and sent Sam snapping awake from a dead sleep and scrabbling around for something to write with. A phone. A tablet. A receipt and the stub of a pencil, crayon, chalk, Sharpie—anything.
Paralegal work was good. Paralegal work was fine.
It was new and exciting and there was endless work and research to be done.
But it was the work of atoms and metal and currents that truly called to him.
He reached up and turned off the lights overhead.
He tried to sleep.
It was the only way to drown out the sound of the waves.
Matt knew something was up. He was like that. When he was being Sensei or Boss, he tended to leave that stuff alone. He let Sam have his thoughts and his secrets. When he was being Daredevil, he hugged Sam to his chest and told him to breath easy, things were okay. When he was just Matt, though, he scampered around such things like an alarmed ferret. He started coming in at speed, only to abort the mission halfway and stumble back with some kind of wide-eyed excuse.
Foggy picked up on this at work and shouted at him to chill the fuck out or get the fuck out.
Kirsten agreed with this and, over Leilani and Achara’s giggling, Matt was dragged out of his own office and sent out to fetch coffee for everyone so that he could get his jitters out.
Sam smiled after him, feeling a little guilty.
Matt always got the short end of the stick with other people. He caught the blame for everything, even if it wasn’t his fault. Even if he was feeding off other people’s energy.
Matt came back and gave everyone coffee but Sam. Sam got red tea and a barely there touch on his shoulder.
Matt was bad at feelings.
He’d rather suffocate than touch them, Foggy said. He had, on many occasions, actually gone out and almost drowned rather than talk about his fears and worries to another human soul.
This was one of the reasons why he was so obsessed with the dogs. He talked to the dogs all the time. He told the dogs everything. He made the point constantly to Kirsten and Foggy that the dogs weren’t half as judgmental as they were.
The dogs had taught Matt how to deal with emotions.
Just sit on them, the dogs had told him. Just fuckin’ sit on ‘em and get in their face and get underfoot until they have no choice but to either yell at you or accept your presence.
Matt wasn’t good at talking about feelings, but he was very good at just being there when you had them.
The shoulder touch and tea was a promise of an eventual stilted conversation. Sam didn’t want to have it. He took a sip of tea that promised to be sweet but somehow tasted bitter.
Daredevil got it out of him. Not Matt. Matt was busy being a worried ferret and Sensei was busy being a dick. He caught Sam pulling punches again and took him down to the floor in half a second flat to make him regret it.
It worked.
Sam definitely regretted it.
His hip clicked when he moved it.
Sensei asked him why he wasn't focusing. Sam tried to shrug it off by saying it was nothing. It didn’t matter.
He lied and said he was fighting with Jia.
Sensei loomed over him like a mountain.
Human lie detector. Right.
Now he really knew something was wrong.
Damn.
Sam didn’t want to admit it to Sensei, though. He wanted to talk to DD. If anyone was allowed to hear, it would be DD.
Sensei sighed and told him to go walk it off for now.
Daredevil found him at home the next evening after a shitty day at work that involved getting yelled at by an angry client in front of the whole front room. The man had let spittle fly in Sam’s face, raging and red like a bull.
It brought all Sam’s memories of getting yelled at by customer after customer, boss after boss in restaurant after storeroom after restaurant right back up to the surface.
He felt angry. Hot. Boiling.
Boiling enough for tears to form in his eyes. To make his jaw tremble.
The people who did shit like that always somehow managed to make him feel small, even when he could break their limbs without even trying too hard. Even when he was surrounded by friends who stood up for him in the moment.
His whole heart wanted to retreat into the hollow in his chest.
His lips wanted to shake even when he told them not to.
All this time—all this training—all this becoming—and he was still just a punching bag in the eyes of daytime society.
Daredevil came downstairs with Tuesday at his heels. Sam barely heard his step on the stair.
He slipped into the room and, as though the specter of a long-dead grandparent, eased his weight down onto the mattress.
He laid down next to Sam on top of the covers on his bed. Sam stayed under them. He didn’t have to move or check who it was.
Sam knew it was DD because he just stayed quiet and close. Tuesday nosed at Sam’s foot from the bottom of the bed. She panted hot air onto it.
Sam couldn’t swallow very well.
“Come here, Sammy,” Daredevil said.
The floodgates broke.
Sam buried himself into DD’s chest and even though it was awkward because he was still covered in the duvet, DD laid an arm over him and pulled him in even closer.
“What’s goin’ on with you lately, kiddo?” DD asked, smoothing a hand through Sam’s hair.
Sam apologized because he didn’t know what else to do and he felt like a little kid every time DD took that gentle tone with him. It made everything feel like it was too much. Like he was drowning in the waves threating to spill out of his throat.
“Sam,” Daredevil said. “Breathe, hon.”
His neck was very warm. Wet now with Sam’s tears.
The realization made Sam want to apologize more than ever.
DD sighed and shifted so that he could awkwardly dig the duvet out from around Sam. He replaced himself where he’d originally been once it had been shoved against the wall. With it gone, everything felt even bigger and emptier and colder, but Sam could feel more of DD’s heat through his t-shirt. He could feel his chest rising and falling and the motion was comforting.
“Tell me,” Daredevil rumbled over his head.
Sam did.
He choked out his stupid feelings about that stupid, ever-present brochure. How it reminded him of Columbia. Of the ocean of atoms in his head. Of equations and soldering late into the night. Of Hannah and the smell of Chinatown in August, in June, in the rain of January.
He wanted to go home.
He missed home.
He wanted to be better than he was. But he also wanted everything to go back to how it had been before all this.
He missed Mom. He missed Hannah. He missed home.
Did it even exist anymore?
Could it even exist anymore? Without Mom there with her perfume and her humming and her scolding--
Daredevil’s hand on his hair fell away as Sam apologized for being so fucking ungrateful.
“Sammy,” DD said.
Sam couldn’t hear it. He just needed to apologize. He just needed to suck it up. He’d gotten too hopeful, that was all. His dreams had started to get ahead of his reality. He’d forgotten his place in the world. He’d started to get too uppity.
“Sam,” Daredevil said. “You’re not being ungrateful.”
He was though.
He had everything that he needed and most of the stuff that he wanted. What else could he possibly ask for?
“Alright, come on. Move. Up you go.”
Sam couldn’t help but groan. He already felt like a kid. Being dragged up onto DD’s chest made him feel even younger, even messier.
DD didn’t care. He never did.
He was all about fixing problems. And Sam had presented him with tears to dry and stuttering to quiet.
“Better?”
No. Fuck off, old man. You’re all bony and shit.
DD laughed and his chest bounced against Sam’s cheek.
“You’re so stubborn,” Daredevil said, “So fuckin’ stubborn, kid. Truly amazing.”
Sam couldn’t decide whether to punch him or give in to the inevitable.
A broad calloused hand made the decision for him. Its thumb came up to brush itself rhythmically against Sam’s cheek.
Rude.
Go away.
Sam wasn’t a baby.
He wasn’t Matt's son.
He was just some—
He was just a—
No one.
He wasn’t anyone. Never would be. Never could be. And he needed to be okay with that. He needed to stay that way. He could only help people if he was invisible. He had to stay invisible.
Even if it hurt.
“Sam, if you want to go take some classes at college, go take some classes at college,” Daredevil said. “If you’re under-stimulated, then that’s a problem. I’m sorry for not noticing sooner. I’m not smart like you are. You and Pete just got those hamsters running in your heads, throwing chemicals all over, and me and Fogs and Kirsten just got heads full of raccoons eating shit and shredding paper.”
Sam sniffed and wiped surreptitiously at his face because that wasn’t true. DD and Fogs and Kirsten were incredibly smart people. They problem-solved faster and more efficiently than anyone Sam had ever met. In their office, everything was simply a sequence of events waiting to unfold and it was everyone else’s job to try to keep up with the arguments and precedents and legislation that those guys rattled off like they were reading it out of the books behind their eyes.
“You’re pouting,” DD said.
He wasn’t.
“Yes, you are.”
“I can’t just take classes, Matt,” Sam eventually sighed against DD’s hairy arm. “I can’t afford the tuition. I don’t even know if I’m eligible for admission.”
“Okay, so take online courses,” Daredevil said. “There are loads of free ones.”
Sam huffed.
It just…wasn’t the same.
It wasn’t about the courses themselves. It was about the fact that no matter what he did, he’d never get to sit in a class with people taking those kinds of classes. He’d never be able to join that community. Sure, there were scholarships and yeah, there was bound to be some neo-liberal bleeding-heart millionaire out there willing to fund a handful of especially pitiful undocumented students, but even that was complicated.
He didn’t want to give out any of his information to anyone, honestly, including a school, college, university, whatever.
It was all too much. It was cutting things too close.
Back at Columbia, he could pretend, at least. The profs he’d spoken to had been impressed with him. More or less kind. They’d had empty seats in their lecture theatres and so hadn’t minded Sam slipping into one of them between his shifts.
They’d let him stay back and pretend for an hour that he was one of their flock, asking questions about the reading. They’d told him to email them for the next week’s material and no, it wasn’t any trouble. It was exciting to have such an engaged student.
That was the thing about New York. You never knew who people were. The janitor could very well be a genius in disguise. The local blind attorney could be a painted red devil.
“Sammy.”
He didn’t want to lift his face.
“Kiddo.”
It was too much to explain without sounding like he was tripping himself before he was even back on two feet.
“Okay. Let’s do this,” DD said, sitting up and forcing Sam to sit up with him. “Let’s take a class.”
What.
“Sensei, I just said—”
“Not that kind of class,” Daredevil huffed. “I mean any kind of class. You wanted to do furniture, right? Let’s take a woodworking class.”
Sam stared.
A blind man. In a wood shop. With circular saws.
No, absolutely not. Matt would leave with zero thumbs.
“No,” he said.
“Why not?” DD sniffed.
“Why do you think?” Sam demanded.
“Alright, fine. Biology. I can do biology. We can take one through the Open University. I took a couple of courses from them once.”
Imagining a scruffy college Matt swearing at a computer over basic biology was very entertaining. But even then.
“Biology isn’t super helpful to me,” Sam said, wiping at his nose. “How about magnetism?”
DD cocked his head.
“Animal magnetism?” he asked.
Oh.
“No, that’s fake,” Sam said.
“It’s not,” Matt argued.
“No, it definitely is,” Sam said. “That’s like, two-centuries ago levels of fake.”
“Could be real, we’ll just have to find out,” Matt decided. “Take a class with me.”
Sam almost laughed.
It was so dumb.
Any class they took that would interest him would leave Matt absolutely baffled and any class that Matt picked would probably be some kind of ethics or philosophy course and Sam would suffocate of boredom ten minutes into it.
“Sure,” he said anyways, because what the hell. Daredevil had come down here when he was feeling shitty and was giving saving the day his best shot with what he had at hand. “Why not? Let’s take a class.”
He’d made a mistake. Sensei was a nerd. Sensei was far more of a nerd than Foggy had ever told anyone.
He needed to read every document provided for each module. He would not let Sam move on until it had all been thoroughly read and discussed.
This would have been fine if they’d settled on something like taxonomy. It was less fine for the subject of fluid mechanics, which Matt had vehemently claimed he was completely prepared for and interested in.
He seemed to have forgotten that he couldn’t do math for shit. Bless his soul. For a guy who could work out some serious physics with his body, he sure struggled with fractions.
“Division doesn’t exist,” Matt insisted apropos of nothing about halfway through the second module’s recorded lecture. Sam stopped and stared at him in awe over the kitchen table.
Foggy gathered all his briefs to his chest in a giant pile and got up.
“I’m not doing this again,” he said, abandoning them for safer pastures in the living room.
“Give me that one, one more time,” Sam said.
“Division doesn’t exist,” Matt reiterated.
Kirsten half-entered the kitchen, then did a really smooth pivot right the fuck back out of it.
Amazing.
Math. Lawyer repellent.
“How does division not exist?” Sam asked.
“It’s just multiplication,” Matt told him. “But inside-out.”
Fascinating.
“Because of fractions,” Matt continued, patting at the table so Sam understood how serious this was.
“Because of fractions? Division is multiplication inside-out because of fractions?” Sam repeated.
This wasn’t even a baby step towards the equation on the screen in front of them. This was like standing on grains of sand in front of the Great Pyramid of Giza: no problems were going to be solved in the next two millennia at this rate, but damn was the view something to behold.
“Yes,” Matt said. “Because the fractions change places. When you divide things, you just switch the fractions so that the numbers on top are on bottom and then you multiply them.”
“Right,” Sam said, choosing to ignore the many, many things wrong with that statement to begin with. “So what happens when all you’re left with is a fraction? Like, 8 over 4.”
“You divide it to get two,” Matt said.
Sam waited.
“No, wait. You can’t—wait.”
Fascinating.
“WAIT.”
Forget the class.
Look at this drama.
“How—no. No, no. Division’s not real,” Matt insisted boldly in the face of a world of evidence to the contrary, “So you’d do one-fourth times eight. Which is multiplying. Yes. Which is multiplying. So it is not division, it’s multiplication by one-fourth.”
Uh-huh.
So what exactly was one-fourth, then?
“Sam, don’t break him. We need him for tomorrow,” Foggy called from the other room.
“One-fourth is a quarter,” Matt said. “Why do you ask?”
“So one-fourth means that there is a whole piece of something that has been divided into four pieces, no?” Sam asked.
He got a more vacant stare than usual.
“That’s a different definition,” Matt argued.
It really wasn’t.
“No, it is,” Matt said.
Oh, do tell.
Sam got the impression that Sensei had thought that doing a class would make him feel better. He’d thought that it would be fun. A bonding experience. A nice little student-mentor type of activity.
He hadn’t banked on being this frustrated.
He was violently confused.
Violently.
Sam didn’t want to say that he understood anything because any time he did, Matt looked like the phrase physically hurt him.
“We don’t have to do this,” Sam tried to tell him.
But no.
Daredevil does not give up.
Daredevil does not stay down.
Matt was going to do this or die trying.
And by that, Sam meant that he was going to actually die trying.
He asked Foggy how to undo this mistake that they’d made. Foggy said that the answer was distraction and redirection. Matt was hyperfocused on the math at the moment, but perhaps if Sam expressed interest in, oh say, a class on history or world cultures, he might be inclined to lay the math by the wayside of things.
Sam found a course on Asian art history and asked Matt if he wanted to learn about art with him. Matt was caught between honoring this much more appealing request and sticking to his guns.
“But what about mechanics?” he asked, gesturing at his talking laptop.
“I’m over mechanics,” Sam lied. “This course isn’t hard enough for me.”
Matt tried to pretend that that didn’t hurt him.
It didn’t work.
“Oh,” he said sadly. “Well. Right. I guess if it’s not interesting you anymore we can move on.”
Fuuuuuuuuck.
Fuck art history. Tort law. Sam wanted to learn about tort law.
Matt asked him if he was sick.
Damnit.
Sam called Spidey.
Spidey asked him what the fuck he’d done. Sam didn’t know, he just needed help climbing out of the hole, man.
“Dude, if you want to take more courses, why didn’t you just say so?” Spidey said. “Dr. Banner’s teaching at CUNY this year. He podcasts all his lectures and records his presentations. I’ll just send you my staff credentials and you can watch them with me.”
Lo and behold: an answer to past prayers.
A little late, maybe, but man, it still came.
“That’s perfect, you’re amazing, do you know how much I love you? But also what do I do about the old man?” Sam asked, checking over his shoulders for the old guy in question.
“I dunno, man,” Spidey said. “I think he’s always wanted to learn how to make kombucha?”
As in?
The tea?
“That’s the one,” Spidey said. “Might be fun?”
“Sensei?”
“Hm?”
“Can we try home-brewing?”
Sensei took an earbud out of his ear just as all Foggy’s papers slapped down against the table.
“No,” Foggy said.
“Without a doubt,” Matt said with a huge grin.
Saturdays were now brewing and filtering days. Three to four days between Monday to Sunday were Blindspot and Daredevil days. Tuesdays were Dr. Banner’s lecture days. Monday to Friday were work days. Sunday was a rest day. And the rest of those nights were a mix of decompression and friends time.
Hannah asked Sam when he’d gotten so busy.
He wasn’t quite sure anymore, honestly. But as hectic as it was, it was also kind of nice, and more importantly, Spidey had remembered that he knew a guy who knew a gal who edited for Materials Science and Engineering, the journal, and was the kid of the alumni association’s founder. She gave Sam her CUNY Alumni ID number and password and told him to go wild on the journal and library sites. She didn’t care, she was changing careers. She told him just not to research anything illegal.
Doors flung themselves open before him and for the first time in months, he dug out the suit and stretched it out across his workbench.
So maybe he couldn’t go to college.
So maybe he couldn’t sit in a lecture hall.
So maybe he was invisible.
A no one.
A whisper in the dark on the heels of a devil.
That didn’t mean that he had to dam up the oceans sweeping around his head.
He would just have to keep finding other ways to move forward. And they would come.
It would be hard.
It would feel like drowning.
But sometimes, things were allowed to be linear, and so he could tell himself that in this moment, right now, he was still moving forward, even when everything else was dropping or standing still. He still had velocity. He wasn’t out of the game yet.