The Lowing

Matt was getting his coat back!

Matt was going to turn into a seal again!

Matt was going to go play in the bay with Foggy while taking his crusade to give MJ nightmares up to the next level!

It was all very exciting.

Johnny thought it was exciting, too. Peter could feel his heart fluttering around in his chest and it made him smile and that made May keep reminding him that he wasn’t supposed to smile when he got his passport picture taken.

Johnny agreed and said that when he’d gotten his passport picture taken, his sister had bullied him hardcore so that that wouldn’t be a problem for him.

“Did it work?” Peter asked him.

Johnny gave him a face that said that that was a stupid question.

The Walgreens guy told Peter to stand in front of the white pull-down background by the staffroom door.

“Don’t smile,” he said.

Matt was getting his coat back, which meant that he was going to Ireland, which meant that they were going to Ireland.

Peter wasn’t sure why at first, but Matt had come all the way to Queens to talk to May about it. He’d done his nervous fidget the whole time he was in the kitchen until May told Peter and Johnny to go dry roses in the shed.

Johnny whispered to Peter that Matt’s selkie energy was all over the place when they got there.

Matt had left shortly after that, though, and May hadn’t said anything about the whole thing for several days until she announced out of nowhere that she and Peter were taking a trip to visit an elder witch in Ireland over Spring Break.

She then said that Matt had informed her the couple of days previous that he was about to take up a Task.

A big one.

Peter had heard of Tasks before. They were very old-fashioned. He hadn’t realized that people still did them. But May explained that in Ireland, Tasks were things that normal humans did to become Heroes, no—not the kind of hero that Peter was thinking of.

Johnny interrupted at that point to flail around, all worked up about heroes. Apparently, he’d heard of them. He buzzed and danced a bit before coming back and wrapping himself around Peter and purring. He told May that Peter was going to be a Hero one day.

May looked like she didn’t love the idea, but covered it up with a funny smile and said, “maybe?”

“So Matt’s gonna become a Hero?” Peter clarified, petting at Johnny’s hair to keep him from further outbursts.

“Mmm,” May said in a high-pitched tone.

That didn’t bode well.

“Is he okay? Why’d he talk to you and not me? Is someone stalking him again?” Peter asked.

“No, baby, nothing like that,” May said. “What’s going on is just very…personal for him.”

Ah.

That sounded like Matt.

Everything was personal until it inevitably boiled out and he stormed around, hitting people and fuming about it.

“Is he sick?” Peter tried next.

“Is he really that close to being a Hero?” Johnny asked. “Is this his final step?”

No, May said. It wasn’t anything like that. It was the reverse.

Matt, she said very calmly, had decided not to be human anymore.

Everything settled way down in the room.

“What do you mean?” Peter asked. “Matt likes being human. He’s good at it. He’s—can he be a hero if he’s not a human?”

Johnny went quiet and pulled himself up straight. His eyes seemed dark and empty all of the sudden.

“He can’t go back,” he said.

“He’s going to try,” May said. “And he needs help.”

Johnny shook his head.

“He’s going to die,” he said.

Peter socked him in the arm. Breathing had gotten hard out of nowhere and a loud ringing sound screeched through his ears. Johnny recoiled and went on the defensive.

“Don’t say that—don’t you ever say that,” Peter told him. “Matt’s my friend. He’s saved my life a million times. He’s my friend, Johnny.”

“Boys,” May said over them. “Calm down. Take a breath. The reason Matt told me and not you is because he knows how dangerous it is for him to step back after stepping forward. He knows what he’s getting into, Johnny. But Peter’s right. Matt’s our friend and he’s helped us numerous times. So it’s our turn to help him.”

The tension dropped a bit, to the point where Peter and Johnny could drop the stiff shoulders and step towards each other again.

“What’s happening?” Peter asked May.

Wilson Fisk was an asshole and a fuckhead most days of the week but hearing now that he was gathering fae to do his dirty work made Peter decide that he was allowed to be an asshole and a fuckhead every day of the week.

Matt was caught between a rock and a hard place.

Wilson Fisk was targeting him, yet again, but this time, he was branching out from harassing Matt and his friends and family to harassing Matt’s people, that is, the fae in general.

That was pretty fucked up.

And it was even more fucked up that Matt had been cornered enough to have decided to make a deal with Wilson Fisk.

Matt.

Human-Matt. Was going to make a deal. With Wilson Fisk.

That was a recipe for disaster. Peter could see it and he was a highschool sophomore.

But Matt wouldn’t hear anything otherwise when Peter tried to tell him that he didn’t need to do that. That he had people to help him take Wilson Fisk down as a human. He didn’t have to risk his life like this.

Matt said that he’d made the decision with the support of those close to him, so he was doing this. He had to. If he didn’t, then Fisk would just keep kidnapping fae and he’d start using them to hurt even more humans than he ever had before.

Moreover, Fisk was fixated on him at the moment, and that was good. So long as he kept Fisk’s attention on him, then they’d have time to help the people he’d already snared escape his grasp.

And like.

Peter had just learned about the whole Hero-thing, but if you asked him, this type of endeavor sounded a whole lot like the kind of thing that would get you made into a Hero among Matt’s people. He pointed that out and told Matt that if he just waded through this without giving up his humanity, then he would probably be rewarded with Hero-status.

“That’s what you want, isn’t it?” Peter asked him. “That’s why you became human to begin with, isn’t it?”

Matt sighed.

“Maybe I did,” he said sadly. “But things change, Peter.”

Peter didn’t understand, so he followed Matt around until he broke down and told him. It took a while and some serious work. Matt’s bullshit tolerance was higher than your average guy’s. When he finally broke down and lashed out at Peter, he managed to do it in the horns.

Wade was there and Wade wrangled him back away from Peter and told him to settle down or he’d make him. Matt got mad at that and started fighting harder, until Wade told him to get fucked, he was useless that night.

That made Matt upset, though. He didn’t say it. He never said it. But talk like that really seemed to get to him.

He started to fuck off, but Wade caught him and said sorry. He didn’t mean it like that.

Matt said it didn’t matter.

Wade said it did. They were a team, now, and he’d fucked up. So, sorry.

And it was that that opened the floodgates.

He didn’t want to be human anymore because it hurt, Matt explained in a rush.

It was that simple, in some ways.

He balled his fists tight When Wade asked him cautiously to explain just what ‘hurt’ meant. He said that it was complicated and that he was usually more or less okay for a couple weeks at a time, but selkies normally shifted at least once a week.

Matt didn’t shift at all. He hadn’t since he was fifteen.

That was when he’d given up his coat and without it, he wasn’t able to turn into a seal. Beyond that, nothing else had changed. And that was the horrible part. That was the part that hurt.

Every time he didn’t shift when his body wanted to, his body said ‘fuck you’ and went into convulsions. He described it as a kind of tightness or pressure on every limb and joint. Like when you’ve slept in a bad way for a long time and you were trying to sleep in a good way, except all your muscles and bones still hurt and cramped. Except that no matter how much stretching you did, the pressure—this pulling sensation—never really went away.

He said that his muscles ached and spasmed and cramped for a few days at a time when his body thought he was supposed to shift.

He said that he’d learned to deal with all that, though. It was fine. It was normal to him now.

But that was the thing. If selkies went too long without shifting, then there came a point where they didn’t have control over it anymore. They’d shift regardless of whether they wanted to or not. Hence, the convulsions.

Now, this was basically a non-problem for most selkies because most selkies would rather be seals anyways and shifted multiple times a week.

For Matt, however, it was a problem that happened every month and it was agonizing. He said his instincts panicked. They did things to try to push him towards the sea. They made his body ache and feel super, super dry. They made him constantly want to touch water. They made him hoarser and hoarser until he lost his voice completely and it was usually around then that he took a lot of meds and tried to sleep for a couple days because he said his body would just twist all over itself within hours or days, trying and failing to shift on its own, and it hurt so bad that he would rather not be conscious for it.

Then he’d wake up. And then the whole thing would start all over.

He’d done this every month for nearly fifteen years.

Even Wade didn’t really know what to say to that.

“The fae think I’m stupid and broken,” Matt said quietly with his arms wrapped around himself. “And humans think I’m just flat out broken. And all that’s in the middle of both of those is me feeling sick and broken, so—I just don’t fit anywhere. And it hurts. It physically hurts. And no matter what I do, it’s like I can’t find balance as a human. I can’t make it and I can’t find it and that’s—” he sighed and dropped his head.

“The reason fae exist is to help provide balance between humans and the earth,” he explained. “They work in exchanges to advocate for those forces that humans don’t even consider. Like, cool, you wanna dump plastic bottles into the sea? Great. That’s fantastic for you, but if you do that, some selkie or púca is going to come and fill your couch with those same bottles so you’ll think twice about dumping shit in someone else’s home. They’re all like, I dunno, lawyers, I guess. They negotiate and and make sure that everyone is abiding by the right terms and conditions and when people don’t, then they act on behalf of their assigned spirits to do whatever it takes to get everything back in order.”

Matt paused and rubbed knuckles across his scruffy cheek.

“I wanted to do that,” he said. “I think all fae all drawn towards doing it in some way. But I never wanted to do the exchange. The offerings. You know, that kind of thing. Loads of people can’t spare an offering. Loads of people are caught in exchanges that have nothing to do with them. My dad and I always got the short end of every stick and I thought that people like us deserved to get the benefit of an exchange without having to give something we didn’t have to give for it. And I thought that I could do that only if I was human. But I was wrong.”

Peter couldn’t see Matt’s eyes and he was glad because he thought that they’d be shiny and that would make the tightest in Peter’s throat even worse.

“There are countless fae out in the world trying to help humans and asking for little, if anything in return,” Matt said. “And there is just so much more I could do if I hadn’t been such a hard-headed, concrete-thinkin’ kid. So yeah. It’s—it’s not just about me--I mean, it is about me. I’m tired of living like this. I can’t be like this if I’m Daredevil. It impedes the work. But it’s also about increasing the services I could provide. If I had my coat back, then I could be DD, selkie, and lawyer. I could cover all the bases, so to speak, so that no one gets left out. Including me.”

Peter didn’t know what to say.

Wade took a long time before sighing and saying that Matt was a disgusting goody-goody choir boy and that Jesus himself would weep in pride at his self-sacrifice.

Matt smiled a little at that.

Wade groaned obnoxiously and asked him how exactly he intended to get his coat back.

Matt said that he wasn’t super sure. The sea spirits had to tell him and they would probably tell him when he got back to his ancestral home.

Wade asked where the fuck that was, and Matt said ‘the island,’ which, after some truly shitty guesswork, Wade eventually translated to Ireland.

He said that that was convenient. He loved Ireland. There were loads of drunk people to fight in the street at will on a Saturday night.

This was Wade’s way of saying that he was down to help however he could.

Peter watched Matt do his violently-polite thing--the one where he flailed around anxiously and told Wade that he didn’t have to come or help or do anything more than he was already doing--and thought about it. May seemed like she was willing to go. She said that if they went to Ireland, then she was going to spend some time learning more of the craft from an elder witch. She wanted Peter to learn from this witch, too.

She was allegedly very good. Peter was pretty sure he’d seen her name on the inside covers of a few of the books May kept on the living room bookshelf.

“How exactly would we help you?” he asked Matt.

“Like I said, I’m not sure,” Matt admitted. “My mother’s warned me against going alone, though. She seems to think that whatever Task is ahead is going to require a lot of skills that I don’t have on my own.”

Huh.

“Like fire stuff?” Peter asked.

Matt’s face fell from worry straight into annoyance.

“You can leave him,” he said.

Definitely like fire stuff then.

“Okay, we’ll come,” Peter decided.

Johnny’s sister didn’t want him to go to Ireland, and they were having a family feud over it now. Johnny didn’t have parents anymore and his sister was older than him, so he technically had to listen to her.

He didn’t like it.

He said she was nothing but bossy. That their home was one giant sneak-fest. What he meant by that, Peter had no clue, but apparently there was much invisibility and shape-shifting being used against certain Johnnies there.

May offered to speak to Johnny’s sister about what was happening, which Johnny didn’t think was a great idea.

“She’s gonna freak if she finds out it’s to help selkies,” he said.

Peter didn’t get it.

“She’s a boggart,” Johnny finally came clean. “A shapeshifter. But more like a chameleon. She can hide in plain sight, but she’d rather just hide in the dark so she doesn’t have to. She doesn’t like the sea fae ‘cause they’re known to bring light to darkness and as far as she’s concerned, darkness should stay dark.”

Even May was stumped here.

“But you’re a fire demon,” she pointed out.

Johnny rocked on his heels and shrugged.

“Our parents were a real romantic couple,” he said. “Like, opposites attract to the nth degree.”

“How do you two live together?” May asked.

“Badly,” Johnny said. “She wants everything dark and quiet and I want everything bright and noisy and since she’s older she gets what she wants and I’ve just gotta deal. Which obviously isn’t fair. So I, uh. Just try to stay out of the way, I guess.”

Johnny’s heart squeezed tight as he said the words. Peter wanted to touch him. Hug him. Something.

“Is that why you went looking for a friend?” May asked gently.

“Maybe,” Johnny said. “I wasn’t thinking of it all like that. But maybe.”

May breathed out and put her hands on her hips.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Well. Tell me about boggarts.”

Johnny’s sister wasn’t mean, per se, May said, but she was super protective of him and she, just as Johnny said she would be, was outraged at the thought of him helping some selkie.

She said no. Absolutely, unequivocally no.

Not for some selkie. Never for some selkie. God, the thought alone.

Johnny was pissed.

Johnny argued that she had run off into the arms of some half-human, benevolent púca, so she had no right to be telling him who he was allowed to be friends with and who he was allowed to help.

This had led to an explosive argument, May told Peter.

She stroked his hair and promised him that Johnny would come back eventually. He and his sister were family. They’d work this out. They just needed a little time.

In the meantime, Peter ought to try to go talk to Foggy to see what kinds of skills a Task typically required. That way, he and May would know what to bring with them to the Island.

Foggy was talking on the phone when Peter came into the office. Karen waved at him brightly, though, and asked him in a whisper if he was in on the gig.

Karen was so funny.

Peter whispered back that he was and Karen showed him the centuries-old map of Ireland she’d spread over the book in her lap like a kid reading magazines in class instead of following along in their textbook.

Peter loved her so much.

She was completely dedicated to the ancient beasts and mythology aesthetic.

“Mom, I need you to take a deep breath,” Foggy said irritably in his office as Peter admired the map. “No one is going to die.”

He sighed, evidently listening to someone very much not taking deep breaths on the other side of the line. He waited. And waited.

“He’s a cú sidhe, Mother,” Foggy said, then waited patiently again through whatever panic that was causing.

Peter cocked his head and looked to Karen for clarification.

“Big shaggy dog,” she told him. “Scary, scary. Big bark.”

Peter grinned.

“I don’t know. Why would I know?” Foggy said. “No, I—no, Mom. Candace is fine. She’s—no, Mom. Listen to me. Listen. We’re just going to stay at Gran’s place. Yeah, I already check with Uncle--No, we don’t need—no, that will 100% give Mr. Murdock flashbacks. You know how much time he put into that thing? If he sees it now, he’s going to go find a grave to roll in.”

Fascinating. Peter could listen to this conversation all day.

“Is Mr. Murdock nice?” he asked Karen.

“The nicest,” Karen whispered back.

“Is he coming with us?”

“Matt’s mom is arranging to come, so yes.”

Woah.

Matt’s nun mom was coming?

“The mother superior at her old convent died, I guess. Apparently she named Sister Maggie in her will for something? I dunno, Matt says this is a begrudging and highly political thing between their church and the one back in Ireland.”

Oh?

Why?

“Because both churches know Sister Maggie’s a selkie and it’s kind of a point of pride between them that she worked for them both,” Karen said. “Matt says it’s a big deal for the church to have had their selkie convert mentioned by such a respected mother superior, so they want her to go participate in all the ritual things as proof to other churches that they can bring fae all the way into the fold.”

Damn.

That was pretty nuts.

“Does Matt have to do that stuff, too?” he asked.

Karen wriggled in closer.

“Matt says that the Sister thinks that the people at the old church have always suspected him to be her pup. He says that that is really controversial for them and some of the nuns back there don’t like the Sister because of it. He said once, when he was little, he heard some of the sisters at his school calling Sister Maggie a bitch. Like a real one. They were mad that the church had let an animal that couldn’t resist her “instincts” into the convent.”

Holy shit.

“Tell me more,” Peter said, leaning onto his elbows on Karen’s desk.

“That’s all I got,” Karen said.

“MOM. No. Unnecessary,” Foggy shouted in his office.

Karen beamed his way. Then beamed Peter’s way.

“I’ve never been more excited in my life,” she told him. “We’re gonna find Matt’s coat.”

Yeah.

They were gonna find Matt’s coat.

‘We’ was more people than Peter thought.

‘We’ included Captain Rogers who was very much pretending like he had no idea what Peter was talking about when Foggy sent him to deliver an envelope with ‘important information’ in it.

“Karen said you’re a big, shaggy dog,” Peter said to Sergeant Barnes who took the envelope from him over Cap’s shoulder.

Sergeant Barnes huffed a laugh.

“Do you like pets?” Peter asked. “Sometimes, if I look really sad, Foggy lets me give him pets.”

Cap went white and stricken.

“He does what?” he stammered.

“He lets me give him pets,” Peter repeated for his old ears.

Cap executed a strange, flailing gesture which Peter didn’t quite know how to interpret outside of embodying the frustration that came with being horrendously uncomfortable.

Cap dragged Peter inside the house and pulled him way too close to hiss, “Don’t touch his teeth, Peter. Don’t let him bite you.”

This was weird on many levels. Firstly because Peter never liked old men whispering to him. But also because Foggy nipped at Peter’s hands all the time. It was his way of saying ‘I’m done with you, human. Begone.’ He’d never broken skin or anything like that and Karen was always calling their office a ‘rabies-free zone,’ so it wasn’t like Peter was in danger of getting any seal-sicknesses or anything like that.

“It’s okay, Cap. He doesn’t love pets,” Peter told him, patting at his shoulder. “He only lets me have three max before he tells me to fuck off.”

Cap decided that he needed to freak out at Peter saying ‘fuck’ next.

“Are you coming with us to Ireland?” Peter asked him.

“No,” Cap said immediately.

“Back to the motherland, da?” Sergeant Barnes said in a heavy Russian accent behind them. Peter watched him and he gave Peter a big thumbs up.

“No,” Cap said behind him. “Stop doing that.”

“Doing what?” Sergeant Barnes asked in that heavy accent.

Cap’s jaw twitched.

“Is Mr. Wilson coming, too?” Peter asked him.

Cap eyed him up and down.

“No one’s coming,” he said.

“Oh, heya, Pete,” Mr. Wilson’s voice said from the stairs. “You hear we’re going cave-diving?”

“We’re not doing anything,” Cap said before anyone could say anything more. “We’re not going anywhere. We’re having a perfectly—”

“Apparently there’s this guy who lives in a cave and makes hair out of memories,” Mr. Wilson said over him from the top of the stairs. “Buck was telling me about it. Shit’s just wild, huh?”

Woah.

Peter turned hopefully in Sergeant Barnes’s way.

“Are there a lot of fae in Ireland?” he asked. “Are there more fae in Ireland than there are in New York? Can I see them?”

Sergeant Barnes’s grin went wider as Cap threw up his hands and declared that he was going upstairs to brood and if anyone needed him, he’d be locking himself in a trunk.

“So many more than you could ever understand, human-child,” Sergeant Barnes said.

It made Peter shiver.

He couldn’t stop grinning now.

Matt was organizing travel things. Peter was helping him pack, or rather, watching him pack. Irritating him while he packed.

It didn’t matter. They had two days until the Friday before Spring Break and he was buzzing. Everyone was packing. Everyone.

Besides MJ and Ned. They were mad about it, too. They told Peter that it wasn’t fair that he got to run off and do cool shit over break while everyone else just played video games.

Peter didn’t know what to tell them. It was one of the perks of being a witch.

“How long did you live in Ireland when you were little?” Peter asked Matt and his label machine.

“About a year,” Matt said, tucking a paper tag into the collars of one of his shirts.

“That’s where you met Foggy?”

“It is.”

“Is Karen going to freak out?”

“Karen’s been freaking out for weeks now.”

“Is it safe to put Johnny on a plane?”

“Probably not.”

“Can the metal detectors detect fae?”

“We’re about to find out.”

“Why’s Cap still pretending he’s not coming with us?”

“He thinks he’s offended Foggy.”

“Does Sergeant Barnes know that?”

“I am beyond sure that he does.”

“Is Sergeant Barnes gonna turn into a dog when he gets there?”

“Sergeant Barnes and Cap have made a deal with my mother to protect me,” Matt said patiently.  “How he does that is not any of my concern. It’s between him and my mother.”

That was so cool.

“One more question,” Peter said.

Matt paused in his packing to direct a strong, skeptical look to Peter’s right.

“For real. I promise. One more: what are you going to do with you coat one you get it?” Peter asked.

Matt tipped his head slowly to the side.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I guess I’ll figure it out once I’ve actually got it again.”

Cool. Neat. Awesome.

“Okay, but just one more question—”

“Peter.”