in technicolor

Daredevil’s secret identity was Matt Murdock and all they had to do was prove it.

Or so the captain claimed.

His office felt stuffed full of silence at this information, as the detectives gathered all tried to process it without pointing out all the obvious flaws in the captain’s theory here.

Namely the glaring one that no one dared broach upon fear of swift death.

Brett took a stab at it because his nephew was sick and had played Pepper Pig all fucking night long and he was no longer confident that there was a benevolent God after all.

“Sir, Matt Murdock works a nine to five job, on top of doing charity work for the National Federation of the Blind and Clinton Church. If he was Daredevil in addition to all that, the man would literally never sleep.”

Relief is a tangible thing in an office of high tension.

“Maybe that’s his superpower,” the captain postulated. All the heads which had lifted in hope once again redirected themselves towards their boots.

“We will find out for sure, once we find him. Bring him in.”

Brett had already done his service in the question-asking department. He waited for someone else to take up the call. Ellen lifted her head.

“Sir, on what charges are we supposed to bring him in on? Suspicion of being a vigilante?”

“Did I stutter?”

Ellen stared desperately at Maynard for backup. Maynard pursed her lips and shook her head.

Same, girl. Same.

“Mahoney, bring him in.”

Wait, what?

Matt Murdock was very confused at the three police officers standing outside his door and jerked his face between Brett and his officers and the family of six crowded inside his shoebox office.

“Uh? Detective, I get that you hear this a lot and it probably doesn’t mean anything, but—”

The matriarch of the family started sobbing.

“—Now is the opposite of the best time.”

The grandmother’s grandson tried to comfort her, but it was no use. The lady’s son blinked tears down his cheeks and laid a hand on his mother’s back.

Brett was many things, but he wasn’t cruel.

“We’ll wait,” he said.

Becky, Nelson, Murdock & Page’s office manager, made Brett and his officers sign in. He didn’t know what the fuck to do with that, but the way she told him to do it suggested that there wasn’t actually a decision to be made here. He signed himself and his officers in and they waited in the little waiting area with a collection of highly judgmental clients.

Foggy had already tried to shoo Brett and his guys out of the office, but upon being informed that this wasn’t a joke and that failure to comply would have undesirable consequences, he’d settled for glaring at them furiously through his door. Brett could hear his purposeful typing halfway across the room. Probably submitting a complaint to the department or, hell, the fucking state, as they sat.

Karen had similarly cracked her door. She stared icily and unblinking at Brett in her nest of paperwork like a pissed off barn owl waiting to strike.

Murdock finished up soothing the grandmother and sorting through whatever it was he had to in another half an hour. He emerged, speaking to the family in Spanish, to direct them to Becky’s capable clutches, but was soon caught up in trying to extricate his face from the grandmother’s grateful hands and affection.

Once her family had left the office entirely, he shook himself out and surreptitiously tried to scrub the lipstick off his face with his jacket sleeve. All that he managed to accomplish was smearing it all over his cheek but he seemed to think he’d done a good job, and told Brett that he’d just be a second, he needed to give all the files to Foggy, who had started typing, if possible, even louder and more pointedly.

Brett could not believe they were about to arrest a blind man who was defeated by a distraught abuelita’s lipstick.

Foggy had the decency to scrub his buddy’s face for him before reminding him to say jack shit.

And with that, they took Matt Murdock into custody.

Matt Murdock was very polite in custody, as he was in most all places except court. He asked Brett if he could know what he was being charged with and Brett decided that he was going to stay as far away from that impending catastrophe as possible.

“My captain, uh, wants to tell you himself,” he told him.

Murdock was understandably baffled by this.

“The…captain?”

Yeah, buddy. And it was only gonna get crazier.

He offered Matt a consolation coffee and Matt accepted on the grounds that he thought he was gonna need it. Brett told him that he wasn’t going to give it to him black for all their sakes.

He delivered the coffee and got one of Matt’s infuriatingly handsome smiles in gratitude and left him to wait for the captain.

Everyone shut the fuck up as the captain strode in, tall and proud, clipboard of interview questions tucked into his armpit.  Even the drunk and disorderly and assault case folks recognized that there was something bigger going on here and respected the sudden drop in mood.

The captain opened the door.

The captain closed the door.

Every detective on the floor started praying for Matt Murdock’s soul.

The calm lasted exactly twenty minutes until the slamming of shit in the interview room made everyone in the bull pen leap a foot in the air.

The roaring was muffled, but it wasn’t muffled enough that people couldn’t hear every dulcet tone of aggression and frustration. Matt’s voice didn’t join the captain’s, so evidently he was clinging to his calm the best he could.

You go, Murdock. You hold your ground, honey.

“He’s gonna die,” Maynard muttered out of the corner as her mouth as she passed Brett with a stack of files.

“No, we’re gonna die,” he corrected. The second Fogs got there, it was fucking over.

The interrogation door slammed open hard enough that Brett got the view of a well-panicked Matt pressed all up against the wall. The captain’s face wasn’t quite the same level of freaked, but it was up there.

“You’re gonna sit,” the captain spat at Matt. “And when you’re ready, we’re gonna try again.”

He slammed the door closed.

Matt, surprisingly did not ask for a lawyer. Given that he was a lawyer, this was suspicious, although Brett figured that Fogs would tell him the same things he was telling himself. Brett went in to check on him and offer him a new coffee or a bathroom break—and importantly to make sure he wasn’t dying. Not that anyone had to know.

He seemed okay. Mostly. Pretty ruffled all the way through. Very bewildered.

“Coffee?” Brett asked.

“You think I could get a priest?” Matt replied shakily. “Maybe some last rites?”

“You’re doing great, man. He’s uh. Kinda fixated. But if he gets too out of line, pal, you don’t have to stand for that.” Brett knew that Matt knew this, but he hoped the reminder would help. Matt smiled at him a little bit and asked if he could use the bathroom.

Foggy was menacing half the station with his aura alone by the time Brett came back from a scene.

“Nelson,” he greeted.

“Don’t talk to me, I hate everyone right now.”

Ah. Excellent.

Brett led his 21 year old burglar to his desk and made him sit in the chair before settling in for a good hour’s worth of paperwork.

There was relative peace for a solid five minutes before they heard renewed shouting in the interrogation room. Matt had been in there for what, two? Three hours now?

Brett didn’t understand what the captain was trying to accomplish here. Even if Matt really was Daredevil, they were talking about a guy who would fight with a broken leg if he needed to. Daredevil wouldn’t crack under a few hours of questioning. He might start to get bored, actually. If he was going to crack, it was going to take possibly a nail gun and a vulnerable target, preferably a child, to make that happen.

“Y’all can’t hold him for more than 24,” Foggy grumbled.

They knew, Fogs. They knew. For once, they were all routing for Matt too.

Matt finally asked for Foggy, although Brett got the feeling it was more to cut down on the volume of the discussion than actual legal counsel. Fogs would be a witness to this abuse and would write that shit up in a heartbeat. When he went in, the kid at Brett’s desk dropped his voice and whispered,

“Is the guy in there okay?” Brett looked at the door and thought about it. No shouting from Foggy so far.

“I think he’s fine,” he told the kid.

“MAHONEY.”

Nope.

“GET IN HERE.”

I know the suspect personally, sir. Not a good idea.

“Get. In. Here.”

Matt was bored out of his mind. He was tired of being yelled at. Tired of being asked the same questions over and over. Was pressing his forehead into Foggy’s shoulder when Brett came in. Fogs wasn’t pleased. Brett wasn’t pleased either, but they’d already cycled through the whole team, and Brett was the only one left.

Honestly? He was damn impressed.

Lawyer or not, Matt had survived 8, going on nine hours of questioning by the whole station. Everyone had their own style and you would have thought that by then, someone’s would have worked. Hell, anyone else might have been pushed to make even a false confession at that point.

Matt was a tenacious son of a bitch, Brett would give him that.

“Matt, you need anything before we get started?” he asked.

Matt groaned into Foggy’s shoulder.

“To leave?” he tried.

Sorry, pal.

“Are you familiar with a person called Daredevil?”

“Yes.”

“What do you know about him?”

“He’s a fucking asshole.”

“Oh? How do you know that?”

“He’s the reason I’ve been here for two million years.”

“Have you or anyone in your family ever trained in martial arts?”

“Ugh, Brett, why?”

“I’ve got to ask, man.”

“Uuuuuugh. Dad. Boxer. Me. Age two to nine. Boxing.”

“Anything after that?”

“Blind.”

“Is that a no?”

“The hell do you think?”

“I can’t write down ‘the hell do you think,’ Matt. You know this.”

“For fuck’s sake.”

“What are your feelings on the police? Do you think they do a good job?”

“Right here? Right now?”

“Matt.” Ah. The counselor now counsels his counselor.

“Uugh. Yeah. They’re fine, most of the time they’re fine. Except when they accuse my clients without grounds.”

“How about other people? Do you think they do a good job protecting other people? Do you think your neighborhood is safe?”

“No.”

“Explain.”

“Dogs.”

Um?

“He’s got a thing with dogs,” Foggy explained in exhaustion.

“Care to elaborate?” Brett nudged.

“No.”

“Matt, do you know what parkour is?”

“I’m dying.”

“Okay, I’ll rephrase the question. Have you ever done parkour?”

“Brett. Brett, I cannot. I literally cannot do that.”

“Parkour?”

“Can you get an ophthalmologist in here?”

“Sorry? A—”

“An eye doctor. So that they can shine their lights and do whatever is it they do and just tell you all that I am so. Fucking. Blind.”

“So you can’t do parkour?”

“Well, right now, I’m willing to throw myself off a building to prove it, if that helps?”

“I’ll make a note of it.”

“I tried, sir,” Brett said with a shrug and his arms full of clipboard. The captain rested his head on clenched fists on his desk.

“I know it’s him,” he muttered. “I know it. Get an ophthalmologist.”

What.

“You heard me.”

At 10 at night?

“Mahoney, I’m not in a joking mood right now.”

Well, fine. It’s your funeral.

Dr. Mendez was awake only by the grace of God and she was only willing to come down to the station because she wanted to meet Daredevil. She went into the interview room with Matt and was in there with a flashlight and a handful of other shit for five minutes.

Just five.

The captain knew what that meant. Everyone knew what that meant.

They started to very, very quietly build barricades out of the shit on their desks.

“Dude, I’m surprised he has eyes still, the amount of damage he’s rockin’ in there. I mean, whatever got into them, man. It must have hurt like hell. I’m surprised he doesn’t have more facial scarring,” Dr. Mendez said.

Dr. Mendez was a little off-duty and a little sleep-deprived and her professionalism and human empathy might have taken a brief vacation. But they got the gist of it.

The captain sighed and pressed fingers into his own eyes. They all ducked down into their make-shift fortress, preparing for the explosion.

“One more time,” he said instead.

“Matthew Murdock. Are you the vigilante known to us as Daredevil?”

“No.”

“Are you the vigilante known as the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen?”

“No.”

“Are you the vigilante known as the Man in the Mask?”

“Noooo.”

“Are you the vigilante known to some as just ‘Red?’”

“Jesus Christ, how many names does this fucker have?”

“I’d remind you to watch your language, here, I’ll ask again—”

“NO.”

Matt told  them that they could keep him all 24 hours, but he wasn’t going to change his answers, and to his credit, the only way they’d changed over the last 16 was that they got increasingly more profane.

“How the fuck is he doing it?” The captain, who really, really needed a nap, mumbled to himself. He’d been pacing his office for the last half an hour, and the new shift of detectives were watching in silence, just as Brett and company had briefed them to. They were all getting off very soon and none of them were going to jeopardize another night of sleep by someone putting some new, dumbass idea into the guy’s head.

“How is he doing it?”

“Sir,” Brett said after far too many minutes of this, “He’s doing it by not lying. He isn’t Daredevil. He’s exactly who he says he is. He can’t do parkour. He can’t fight crime. He can’t do anything that Daredevil does. The only thing that connects them is Fogs.”

The captain snapped his head up so fast he almost cracked his neck.

“So, Franklin Nelson is Daredevil?” he breathed.

Silence.

If you laugh, you will get your ass beat.

If you laugh, you will get your ass beat.

If you—

Brett came into the station to serve his punishment of filing evidence just as Matt hit his 24 hours. He kind of stumbled out of the interrogation room and asked Fogs blearily if they had court today, was it today? What was today?

Fogs didn’t have an answer for him because he didn’t know anymore.

They needed a nap, both of them. They were probably going to go off somewhere and be sickening and take a nap together.

On the way out the door, Matt paused and reached over to gently wrap a hand around Brett’s wrist.

“Thank you, detective,” he said. “It’s good to know someone believes in me sometimes.”

And away he and Fogs went. Off to terrorize the world once again.

It was only when he got to the evidence locker that he realized that Matt had been in the interrogation room when he’d said all that shit in the office.