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1.
Claire glares at her crazy landlord.
"Clint, no."
"Yes."
"I'm allergic to cats."
Clint simply waves the straws at her.
She exhales sharply, mutters something very unkind about blonds and how they should never be put in charge of anything, and pulls a straw.
She pulls the short one.
Of course she does.
.
All in all, feeding the cats under their building on a regular basis isn't the nuisance she imagined it would be. She has her allergy medicine and it keeps them from tearing the garbage bag to look for food. Also, Claire never really sees the fluff balls, as they only emerge after she gets away from their food. They probably don't trust her, not that she's complaining, but as she watches from a distance she thinks they may not be so bad.
…Unlike that groaning dust bin. There's no way that's not bad.
Claire grabs the nearest weapon –a broken chair leg– and peeks under the dumpster's lid. There's a man inside, middle-aged, brown curls with what seems to be like a nasty hangover. He's also very much naked.
The man moans groggily and opens his eyes. Slowly, letting his eyes adjusts to the light, he props himself carefully on unstable bags of trash.
"Must have been a hell of a night," Claire remarks dryly.
He jerks to face her so fast she's somewhat worried he'll get whiplash. His mouth opens and there seems to be something he wants to say, but after struggling with his words for a few seconds he simply rubs the bridge of his nose and shakes his head.
"There's a reason why they invented designated drivers, you know," the man seems harmless enough. Besides, with the way he keeps avoiding looking at anything darker than grey, she thinks she can take him.
"I'm not drunk," he says in a hoarse voice.
Claire raises an eyebrow at that, "Well, whatever you are you can't stay here without any clothes," she sighs, thinking she might as well, "I think my ex left something that will fit you in my apartment."
She lends him the shower as well and when he comes out she sits him in front of a PB&J sandwich and a glass of water. "Thank you," he says softly before attacking the sandwich with fervency only someone who went hungry before could.
"I've had my fair share of hangovers," she waves him off.
He stops to chew and swallow, and then reiterates, "I wasn't drunk."
She looks at him dubiously, "You ended up in the trash, stark-naked."
He wets his lips, visibly hesitating, "I have this… condition. Whenever it acts up I black out and wake up hours or days later, sometimes miles away from where I was."
"…Naked?"
The man lets out a breath of amusement, Claire can see a smile tugging at his lips, "If I'm lucky I get to keep my pants."
They sit in silence after that. It's barely a minute later when he finishes eating. "I better get going," he says, pausing for a second before adding, "thanks, for everything."
Claire nods, watching him go, and doesn't ask if he has somewhere he can stay the night.
Tomorrow, Claire will watch Harlem's destruction on the news as experts talk about collateral damage and be grateful she wasn't needed at the ER. She won't think about green rage monsters or the men who turn into them.
2.
There's a hole in the sky and it's raining death and destruction. She is crouching behind a garbage can in a back alley. From across the street, a building collapses. Her knuckles turn white around a rusty metal bar. Explosions and screams white out her mind. As debris settle on the ground she wonders if she's going to need to find a new apartment.
Breathe through the mouth. One, two, three. Exhale through the nose. One, two, three.
Rinse. Repeat.
Something falls out of the sky, crashing into the dumpster. A yell escapes from Claire as she scrambles backwards. It's not one of those things, she doesn't think, it's a blond dude with a cape and a hammer that makes all the small hairs on the back of her head stand.
Breathe through the mouth-
Only one of the things does stand in the mouth of the alley. It doesn't have its spear or she would be gone already. Her legs feel like jelly, moving and vibrating without anything solid to support them. The thing lunges towards her. Claire locks her knees in place and swings.
It hits the wall with a teeth-grinding crunch. Her impromptu bat almost goes after it, almost slips from her shaking hands. Hysterical laughter bubbles in her lungs, because the thing is twitching and moving and it's no time at all before it rises to its feet again.
She can't do this. She can't. Her bat is rattling from between her trembling fingers. She's going to fucking die in this fucking alley and no one will ever fucking know because her body is going to be, like, eaten or something by the time they finish cleaning up the mess.
She doesn't want to die.
A blur comes from the corner of her eye, literally crashing into the thing's head and pulverizing it against the bricks of the wall.
Mr. Tall, Blond and Static-y stands there like a goddamn god of vengeance and catches his goddamned hammer.
"Go," he shouts, "go!"
Claire goes.
3.
Sometimes, Claire thinks as she stares at the screen of her phone, sometime she really regrets her life choices.
.
3 AM and it's fucking freezing. Mike has broken his leg in three different places and even he knows better than to jar it when he doesn't have to.
(That's not to say she didn't have to use her best You're-A-Fucking-Idiot-If-You-Don't-Shut-Up-And-Do-As-I-Say-Right-Now-I-will-Tie-You- Up-In-A-Decidedly-Non-Sexy-Way voice to get him to stay put and out of trouble, and yes she will pick him up.)
The location he gave her is nothing special, an alley with some dirty dumpsters and old laundry lines hanging overhead. It's the kind of place that homeless people go to in order to sleep quietly and without being stumbled upon. She can hear muffled voices coming from further away and on a haunch raises the lid on the second to last dumpster.
Two men look up to see who interrupted them. "Seems like my ride is here," Mike says from under his mask and grips the edges of the bin in order to pull himself up.
Looking at the other man Claire can't help but question "Clint?" even as she grabs Mike by the waist. Using one hand he leans his weight on her while utilizing the second as leverage so he can carefully swing his non-injured leg over the edge of the dumpster.
Clint is already out and has proceeded to the stage of trying to rid himself of anything sticky and gross. "Claire?"
It's been a long time since she last saw her former landlord. She should ask him any number of questions, starting from "How is the wife?" and going all the way to "Bow and arrows, really?" but as she watches him looking methodically for anything that stuck to his clothes the only question she really wants to ask is "How did you even end up in there?"
A small cry of pain escapes Mike's mouth; the muscles in his face are scrunched up tightly and Claire can see him biting his lip hard enough to draw blood. He is trying to navigate his broken leg over the side of the dumpster –using a combination of his upper thigh muscles and his free hand– when Clint gently takes his foot and brings it over the side.
"How did you even end up in there?" she asks Mike as she helps lower him to the ground.
He leans back against the trash can and Claire gets to work on his makeshift splint. "It's a long story," he says with a wince he tries to pass off as a smile, "one that involves windows, clothing lines and oversized fishing hooks."
"I'm sure you could tell me all about on the way to the hospital."
"Hospital?" Mike asks warily.
"You need x-rays and a proper splint," she explains, ignoring Mike's unconvinced expression, "we can say you fell down the stairs and landed wrong."
He nods and his face goes back to its default stony expression. There's a worry nagging at her that they won't buy it, that Mike will be caught and she would be charged as his willing accomplice. It's a familiar worry, one that rears up every once in a while, in nights when she lays sleepless between one shift and the next and thinks about how in all hell she ended up where she did.
She takes a deep breath, inhaling through the mouth and exhaling through the nose, and pushes it down. Mike is blind, she tells herself, Mike is blind and people... people are all too willing to believe the disabled couldn't live a normal life, and what Mike does is so far above normal.
"So you two know each other?" Mike asks, gesturing towards Clint.
"He was my crazy landlord," she answers promptly.
"Crazy-!" Clint squawks indigently.
"Pulling straws is not the solution to every problem that pops up."
"It worked out alright!"
"Mr. Sanchez got stuck cleaning the basement, and he's asthmatic," she says, her expression deadpan.
Mike lets out a small chuckle listening to Clint sputters. "What about you two?" Claire asks.
"He literally fell into my lap," he answers, "there were little bits of glass following him."
Claire looks at Clint expectantly, "This I've got to hear."
And so for the next five minutes the master assassin regales them with the action packed tale of his entanglement with the tracksuit mafia and subsequent defenestration.
"Alright, I'm done," Claire announces before standing up and stretching her legs. She helps Mike rise, letting him drape his arm around her shoulders while she is hugging his waist. "Need a ride?" she asks Clint.
He checks his watch, "Nah, Katie should be to the rendezvous in a few." He nods towards Mike, "You really should consider what we talked about."
"I will." Mike says earnestly and it's enough for her to know he has no intention of doing so. Claire is sure there's a story behind that, but frankly, she doesn't want to know.
4.
"Psst."
Now, Claire doesn't usually acknowledge suspicious whispers in the street –enough time in Hell's Kitchen and all of that– horror movies taught her well what happens to the naïve girl who stops to gawk at anything out of place in a dark backstreet at night.
Only, it's midmorning and she really quite doubt anything in a mile's radius from Avengers' Tower can be called a proper backstreet.
"Psssst!"
"Yes?" she raises an eyebrow, because honestly, the whisper came from the dumpster besides her and by this point she's totally not surprised when Tony Stark's head pops right afterwards.
"Are they gone yet?"
It's times like this these makes her wonder if she ran over a gypsy in a past life. She wouldn't be surprised if there's genuine curse on her.
"Do you mean the garbage bags, Mr. Stark?" if there was one thing she learned from her time as an intern (read: the one who got the shitty jobs) is that manners are a reliable fallback in pretty much any situation – Including but not limited to ridicules superheroes that apparently have a thing for dumpsters. She'll have to ask Matt about it later. "If so, then no. The truck only goes through on Mondays."
"No, no," the man shakes his head empathically, "the paparazzi, are they gone yet?"
"Just you, me and the trash here."
"Great!" Stark climbs down from the bin, brushing off what may or may not be a week old meal from his cloths. "I thought those bloodhounds will never let go," he says, nodding in her direction before ambling away.
Claire can only shake her head and get on with her day.
5.
For such a neat guy, Matt sure is an extraordinary slob.
But Claire has decided to do something nice for him in return for letting her crash at his place and save the money for a cab. Besides, she reminds herself, working off a hangover alone is no fun.
Contemplating the safety hazard that is the highly unstable looking pile of plates at the sink, Claire decides to take out the trash before she goes about tackling the dishes. She grabs the bag and takes her cup of coffee with her to ward against the morning chill. Going down the stairs gingerly, she tries to avoid bright lights and not make any sharp movements. Good thing she's on vacation, if she tried to take a shift the way she is, it would inevitably end in disaster.
The dumpster underneath Matt's house is in a nice shaded area and insulated from most of the city noise. Never before in her life has Claire been more grateful for dark alleys. She puts her coffee down, ready to heft the trash bag strait into the bin and only narrowly manages to avoid crashing the person inside.
The person inside is: redheaded, wearing a catsuit, and absolutely gorgeous. She is also surrounded by what seems like high-tech surveillance equipment. Who needs an unmarked van in this day and age, right?
For a moment Claire thinks about calling Matt –she really doubts there's another person interesting enough to spy on in his building aside from him– but then she considers the distance from his apartment to the dumpster and realizes there's no way he doesn't already know.
The woman – Romanoff? She thinks, her face was plastered all over the media after the S.H.I.E.L.D. debacle alongside Captain America and Maria Hill – stares at her, her raised eyebrow seems to ask, well? Are you just going to stand there all day and gawk?
For the record, Claire wants to state she does not gawk. Drawing on her experience as a superhero's nurse she conjures up her finest unimpressed expression. I'm not the one creeping in the trash, she tries to radiate to the best of her ability.
Apparently it works because Romanoff gives a small, smug smirk that cannot be called anything other than amused. You know I'm still hot, it says.
Well, Claire certainly doesn't have anything she can say to refute that.
It may have been the sleep deprivation, or the hangover, or a sign she was so far deep in the world of superheroes that people in dumpsters became a normal thing, but during that moment it makes sense for Claire to offer her cup of coffee to the spy as a concession she lost their battle of wits. A grin blossoms on her lips at Romanoff bemused expression, "It can't be comfortable sitting there all day," and Matt hasn't kicked her out yet, so she can't be all bad.
She has to make a detour to the dumpster of the building across the road –the one that has the sun shining directly on it, ugh– to get rid of her garbage bags.
When she gets back to the apartment Matt is already up if not exactly awake, nursing a cup of tea while waiting for the waffle iron to heat up.
"I'm going to buy coffee, want me to bring you some?" Claire asks while rummaging for her wallet. She was sure left it somewhere around here.
"Wha-" a yawn cuts him off, "what happened to yours?"
"I gave it the spy in your dumpster," and here was a line she never thought she would say. Crouching behind the couch, Claire swipes her fingers under it and exclaim in success when her fingers brush against her wallet.
Matt hums in acknowledgement and hovers his fingers over the waffle iron to check its heat, "Well, I'm good, so just go ahead."
Claire hesitates, "Matt," he has someone spying on him, that was no little thing by any stretch of imagination, "are you sure you know what you're doing?"
"No," he admits after a second, "but I'm doing what I think is best."
And in the end wasn't it true for them all?
+1
"Hey, Claire?" Matt asks from across the room.
"Yeah?" she hums in reply.
"Don't freak out."
Her gaze snaps to him, "What."
Someone knocks on the door. Claire puts her book on the table but Matt has already opened it. "Yes?" he asks.
"Mr. Murdock?"
"Yes, Come in." Matt takes a step back and ushers him inside, "Would you like coffee?"
Claire can only stare in astonishment. Don't freak out he tells her, kind of hard not to when there's an honest to goodness Captain America in the living room asking for black with two sugar, she rants at her inner Matt.
Rogers towers awkwardly over the rest of the room, peering at Claire and seemly at loss as to what to do, "I didn't know you had a guest," he says stiffly. There's a strange dissonance in her mind between the person in front of her and the one she expected to see. When she will look back on this moment she would acknowledge it was probably the only reason she managed to keep a straight face.
"Claire knows about me," Matt dismisses. He walks carefully back to the table, a cup held between his hands and index finger on the rim to feel for spillage, and sets it gingerly next to their already half-empty mugs from breakfast.
An uncomfortable silence descends as Rogers settles opposite Matt. He seems to wait for Matt to continue talking and fidgets when he realizes he has no inclination to do so. Leaning forward to reach for his cup, he sips from it slowly, mulling over his words, "I have to admit, you're not what I expected when I first heard of you."
"I would have been skeptical as well of a blind man running around in a mask and beating on people," Matt's voice is dry. Flat. Claire smoothes her features before a frown can emerge. His back is ramrod straight and his hands rest in a seemly casual way on his knees. His glasses are on and for the life of her she can't remember when he put them. She knows for a fact he didn't have them on five minutes ago.
"Not as much as you would expect," Rogers lets out a huff of amusement, a small self-deprecating smile spreads on his face, "back before the war I could barely see three feet in front of me and God knows it didn't stop me from getting into fights. I was lucky Bucky was there to get my ass out of trash cans."
"I didn't know Captain America had low vision," then again most of her knowledge regarding him came from the HBO series about the Howling Commandos, the one she may or may not have watched for the homoerotic subtext.
"I think had is the operative word here," he says, the laughter in his voice betraying the familiarity of the joke, "the propaganda directors weren't big on remembering I was this disabled Irish kid before I was their symbol for Truth, Justice and Apple Pie."
Claire gives a bark of laughter. Matt and Rogers were going to get along like a house on fire in whatever strange partnership this visit was meant establish.
Out of the corner of her eye she can see Matt's cheek twitching, a faint smile forming for only a second before he purposely relaxes his face into an impassive mask. Claire feels a scowl threatening to form, a quiet sort of unease settles in her stomach. It takes her a second to realize why Matt is acting so strange, and when she does it hits her like a lighting strike.
Matt doesn't trust Captain America.
Claire bites her tongue. She vaguely remembers Sunday cartoons and tedious history classes, long-winded Memorial Day speeches and half-read comics, and for a second she cannot wrap her head around the thought.
Matt doesn't trust Captain America? What a ridiculous thought.
Yet, she remembers SHIELD. She remembers a friend of a friend who needed her couch and her shoulder and told her about a slew of cases the agencies weren't prepared to handle, of lives lost and lives ruined simply because they were stretched too thin. She told Claire what it was like, returning to the field simply because no other place would take her, overworked and distrusted because of her former allegiance.
(And Claire… Claire remembers aliens and stinking alleys and thunder-hurling not-really-gods.
She remembers coming home to a crumbling hole in the wall and all the electricity blown out.)
Matt doesn't trust Captain America. Maybe he has a point.
Rogers straitens his gaze towards Matt, a startling intensity in his face that makes him look more like the soldier Claire imagined than he'd been this whole meeting, "But what I meant to say was that I didn't expect you, Matt Murdock, the lawyer who brought Wilson Fisk's criminal empire along with Franklin Nelson and Karen Page."
"I'm just trying to make my city a better place," Matt says, hand clenching in his lap, "no different than any fireman or cop."
"And yet," he spreads his fingers, tone earnest, "in all my years I met very few people who dedicated themselves so completely to fighting against injustices. I try to take note whenever they do turn up."
Matt exhales and it sounds like disbelief. When he talks his voice is resigned, "Tell me why you're here Captain," he asks as if he doesn't already know.
"Call me Steve, please," Rogers places his cup back on the table, "I'm here because we need more people like you, people who have the ability to change things for the better and choose to do something with it."
Matt scoffs; his jaw clenches for just a second before forcibly relaxing, "You're here to recruit me," save me the sales pitch, his voice seems to say.
"Yes," and if Rogers is at all fazed for being called out he doesn’t show it, "we've had recent changes to our roster and most of them don't have the experience necessary to go on missions right now. We could use a man of your talents."
A derisive snort escapes from Matt, "I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm hardly capable of punching aliens in the face."
"That's not all we do."
Matt gets up and starts pacing around the room, agitation clear in his tense muscles. Rogers' eyes track his movements, as if facing a caged animal. "And what is it you Avengers do? Hmm?"
"We save lives," Rogers' voice is sincere; his eyes are wide, hands resting on his knees and palms turned upwards. Claire feels something bitter rising at the back of her throat, his act only exacerbating her unease.
"Do you? Do you really?"
"Yes," the words are filled with such conviction that if she didn't know better Claire may have been inclined to think he believed his own words.
"Tell that to Sokovia."
Rogers stiffens, muscles going so taut for a moment he seems to have frozen in place, "We had no control over Ultron," the answer is automatic, memorized.
"No, but you created him."
Staring at his shoes, Rogers remains silent.
Matt stills. Rubbing the bridge of his nose he lets out a huff of discontentment, "Stark and Banner should be tried for their negligence. They should have known better then to mess with alien technology without taking the proper precautions."
Rogers deflates, looking very much like a popped balloon, "You're right; they should. But not when Tony can just throw his army of lawyers at the problem and make it go away."
A silence descends on them, one filled with mutual understanding and the rattling of bones in closets. A dipping in the couch startles Claire. Matt gives her a faint sort of smile before turning to face Rogers.
"Steve, do you know why I started doing this?" he shakes his head. Despite herself Claire perks up, the way she knows Matt this will probably be the only time she would hear the story. "There is this family who lives down the block. The mother likes to bake in the afternoon and the kid wants to be a cop when she grows up. The father is a scumbag whose jaw I broke because he used to go to his kid's room at night." Rogers sucks in a sharp breath. He looks unsettled. "Child Services were powerless to do anything, so I decided to make sure he would think twice before touching his daughter again." A small, fond smile tug at his lips, one that sends chills down Claire's spine, "From what I've been told he had to eat through a straw for the next month and he developed a bad habit of jumping at shadows and going to sleep early.
"Now, imagine I was instead out fighting aliens or hunting down terrorist organizations or whatever it is you Avengers do. What do you think would've happened to the kid? To the woman caught in a mugging gone wrong three days ago, or the homeless guy taken for human trafficking last week or to any of the other people I helped ever since I started wearing the mask.
"Those people would probably never see an alien again in their life, but it doesn't mean they don't deserve to be safe."
"I see," Rogers says with the ring of finality, "and there's nothing I can say to change your mind?"
Claire snorts and feels an odd sort of satisfaction when he starts, "You don't know Matt. Virtually nothing can change his mind when he's like that."
"Besides," Matt quips, "I'm bad with crowds; I won't know who to hit."
Rogers chuckles and gets up from the couch, "Then I guess this visit is over," offering his hand to Matt he adds, "Keep in touch Murdock, you never know when you might need some allies."
Matt hesitates for only a second before shaking Rogers' hand.
"I will."
Claire hears the door slams shut and counts to five. "What the hell was that?" she rounds on Matt.
Matt pauses, fingers still on the bridge of his nose, "What are you talking about?" he turns his stupid, handsome, innocent-looking face to her.
Claire narrows her eyes. She doesn't appreciate Matt's bullshit, "You know exactly what I'm talking about."
There's a silence for a minute as Matt considers his options. "I didn't want to bet on my chances of taking Captain America in a fight," he admits finally, "I knew he wouldn't start anything with an innocent bystander in the room."
Claire's fingers twitch at her side.
In the end, she decides, it won't be Daredevil who kills Matt. It would be one of the people he keeps pulling shit like this on.