the Sprawl

Matty was sleeping.

Thank fuck.

Thank Jesus.

And Mary and Joseph and all the saints all the way down the line.

His fingers twitched a little bit on the edge of the bed and his brow furrowed and smoothed out a few times every minute or so. And while it didn’t look like it was a nice sleep, it was still a sleep and so Jack was going to count that as a win.

Matt had always been a nightmare to get to sleep. At first it had been a mix of separation anxiety and generally being hungry or wet or cold. The guys at the gym had told him that that would improve when Matt got older, and in some ways it had, until it hadn’t and people eventually ran out of advice for him. As a little one, from about three to eight, Matt had been insufferable around bedtime. Jack had literally dreaded bedtime because it was like his angel-child transformed into a demon. Matt would cry and cry and cry when dinner had been eaten, homework had been done, and the daily scrub had been inflicted upon him.

Jack had tried reading bedtime stories. He’d tried soothing music. He’d tried tiring the kid out and telling him that he didn’t have to sleep, he just had to be in bed. But none of it had really had any significant effect.

In the end, he’d had to just let the boy cry himself to sleep.

It was the worst. Jack felt like the worst dad every fucking time.

And a lot of those times, he’d given in. He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t bear to hear Matty suffering, especially because Matt’s hiccups triggered these memories of laying between the sheets, trying to stifle the tears and the sniffing in case Ma or Dad or Tom or Mary heard. He’d have no end of it if any of those folks had heard him ‘whining.’

Fuck them. No.

Jack’s baby wasn’t going to have to hide his fear or his pain from him. And, as much as Jack could help it, he wasn’t going to let him suffer it alone.

So his resolve crumbled and sometimes, he smashed it himself and went to lay next to Matty, stroking his hair and cheeks, promising him that everything was okay. Wrapping his boy up in his arms and singing and rocking him, even when he was probably a little too old for that kind of thing.

Matt never complained that he was too big for that stuff, even when he was eight or nine and better about nodding off on his own. Even when he’d waited up for Jack for four or five hours. He still held up his arms and wrapped them around Jack’s neck after pawing at his face and making sure that he was still in one piece. And even after those five, going on six, hours of waiting, he’d bury his fingers into Jack’s t-shirt and fall asleep on his shoulder to Jack’s low humming or rocking.

It had become second nature to rock Matt when he held him. There was nothing that soothed the boy faster.

Now, of course, Jack knew that a lot of that lack of sleeping had to do with Matt just being uncomfortable from his senses. He could understand that. It was hard for he, himself to sleep if it was just too hot or too cold. Surely, being hyperaware of every stitch and fold in the sheets, the blare of every tv in the building, and the echo of every footfall and siren in the street outside made that shit ten times worse.

Matty didn’t sleep much of the time, not because he didn’t want to, but because he couldn’t. He needed something to distract him from the hum, rattle, and screech of the world around him. He needed something to calm him down enough to block that shit out.

And while Matt hadn’t always had this affliction, and separation anxiety and a very valid fear of Jack not coming home one day had probably had more to do with his childhood insomnia, it seemed to Jack that he’d always been a hypersensitive kid. And so the rocking and singing had probably served that distracting, calming role back then.

Foggy did a lot of that work now. Matt slept on him all the time, much of it without even thinking.

It was adorable.

Matt, perpetually tired, would drop his head against Foggy’s shoulder in exasperation at some point and if you left him there for more than a couple seconds, there became a real danger that he’d just drop off entirely.

If Foggy was settled in on the couch, texting or reading briefs, Matt would worm his way in, through one of the thousands of stock excuses he’d made for himself, to cuddle against the guy’s chest and listen to his heart.

And then, again, in moments, they would be Matt-less.

When Foggy wasn’t there, Jack honestly didn’t know how Matt got himself to sleep besides pushing his body to the point of exhaustion. Turned out that even Daredevil was only human.

Jack slept on the couch. It was a fold-out bed type of thing and it was one of the fanciest ones he’d ever seen or used. Matt tried, every damn day, to get him to use his own bed, but Jack wasn’t having that. This was Matt’s apartment. Matt’s home. He’d picked his bed and he’d worked hard for it and Jack would rather die again than take that from him, no matter how much fucking whining that resulted in.

The sofa bed was great. Jack liked making it and unmaking it. It gave him something to do as a nightly and early-morning ritual when his blind son was out getting the tar beat out of him and refusing to let anyone do anything about that.

Matt usually took a short nap before he went out on the town. Sometimes he took it at home, but more often he took it wherever the hell Foggy was.

He’d sleep for an hour or so and then get up to yank on his helmet and then away he’d go.

Occasionally, when Foggy was lacking, Matt would attempt to nap with Jack.

Jack hadn’t recognized this for what it was at first and had been concerned that Matt was depressed, going to sleep so early in the evening. His solution had been to wake the kid up for a few more hours until a more appropriate bedtime.

Naturally, this earned him hissing and grumbling and rapid abandonment.

Foggy had been the one to ask him why he didn’t let Matt sleep before going out to be Daredevil, and it was only then that Jack’s thick skull had finally processed that that had been what was going on.

Foggy had laughed at him. At both of them really, for being mutual idiots incapable of communication. Afterwards, Jack had resolved to do better. But Matt was a man burned. He came home, sleepy, and squinted at Jack with nothing short of supreme suspicion when he suggested a nap.

“No naps,” Baby Matt used to say at every turn.

Big Matt said something similar, except more along the lines of “No naps with you, you callous behemoth.”

It didn’t take much, though, because Jack could still wrangle Matt into his arms and the rocking still worked, even to this day. Matt’s unconscious fingers still found their way into the folds of Jack’s t-shirts and, even though Matt was big and it was awkward to lay with his full-grown son on top of his chest, Jack still found it sweet and endearing and he didn’t want to move him when he’d finally drifted off.

Matty was a rigid guy these days. Stiff in all the worst ways. Like his mama. But also like Jack had been at fourteen years old and constantly aware that the ratio between touch being painful versus touch being pleasant was a good 8:2.

No touch, Baby Jack had decided at thirteen. No one was ever allowed to touch after this.

No touch, Baby Matt had decided at twelve, hell, eleven. No one was ever, ever allowed to touch. Period.

And here Jack had been trying to break that cycle for his son.

Matty was rigid even with him these days, without meaning to be, even sometimes in sleep, and that just broke Jack’s heart.

He could hold Matt and rock him before he ran out that night to be the hero that no one had asked him to be, but the feel of Matt in his arms was never the same as it had been when Matty had been eight, nine, ten. The kid he’d held then would at least relax into deadweight.

Matt didn’t ever seem to relax these days. He faked it for other peoples’ comfort. He faked it in his sleep. Fingers buried in Jack’s t-shirt, but spine tense, all the way down his back. The slightest jostle would wake him immediately. And sure, he’d be bleary and pliable, but the arch of his spine belied this mask.

Matt put on the sleepy act sometimes because if he woke up the way Jack saw him wake up in the morning most days, people would probably be freaked out.

When he was working off instinct or didn’t think people were watching, Matt just woke up. There was nothing before, between, or after. A click of your fingers and that was it. He was getting out of bed and putting on clothes.

 Like he was a machine.

It was a little shocking. Especially since Jack’s baby Matt had been a morning-monster at best. The boy would not sleep when he needed to and then waking him became the next Herculean task. This Matt who had mechanized his wakefulness made Jack’s back teeth sour.

Jack stroked his hair and told him to go back to sleep when he’d just been napping, and sometimes Matt would lean into his palm, almost as though he was considering it, before rejecting the idea and flopping/falling over Jack to go get his suit.

Nothing could come between that boy and his suit.

Not begging, pleading, crying.

Nothing.

Grace said that this was what their son was now and that the sooner Jack accepted that, the less painful it would be for both of them. But it was hard.

Grace pretended that it wasn’t, but it hurt her, Jack could see this. She patched Matt up every so often when he’d let her and she told Jack that sinking a needle into his skin made her feel eighteen years old, staring down at this pale, red-headed baby, and thinking about how there was never a worse mother in the world than she.

But it was all that she’d had to offer Matt for so many years that the act had become one of self-flagellation, which in the end, made her feel useful and connected to Matt and, she liked to think these days, made Matt feel more comfortable with her touch.

Matt didn’t talk about it. Even when prompted.

He called his mama ‘Sister.’

He got quiet and nonverbal when Jack said he was going to see her.

He refused to be with both of them at the same time.

He got upset once and asked Jack why he only called Grace as he did when her name was very clearly ‘Sister Maggie.’

Jack didn’t know what to say to this boy.

In his empty eyes, both of them had abandoned him and come back only when it was convenient. It had to make him feel insecure. Uncertain of what he’d done to deserve the attention and affection. And uncertain when it would leave and what would come in its wake.

Matty kept his distance from both of them while sitting right in their presence and under their hands.

He slept against Jack’s heart with his fingers half-hidden by the folds of Jack’s t-shirt and he settled in, exhausted and yielding, under his mama’s needles and washcloths. But his smiles felt brittle and his grip remained loose, as though to allow for Jack to pull him off, to push him away at any moment.

The world had been unkind—no, cruel—to his little boy, and the fear and violence and stiffness that had once lined Jack’s spine had made a new home in his son’s.

And there was nothing he could do to stop it.

There was nothing anyone could do.

Watching Matt sleep on his own with his fingers twitching and his brow furrowing shattered Jack’s heart. He stepped into the room and pressed a kiss against Matt’s forehead and sure enough, that was all it took to wake him.

“Dad? What’s the matter?” he asked in a slightly hoarse voice.

Nothing you could understand, son.

Not without taking this guilt into your own heart, and Lord knows, you have enough of it.