Chapter Text
Part 1: Neverland is Home to Lost Boys Like Me
Matt Murdock was 10 years old when he ran away from the orphanage.
He didn’t mean to run away; this was not a premeditated desertion. He woke up that morning and braced himself for the proverbial ‘one day more’ (if you know your Les Miserables, which at that time 10 year old Matt Murdock did not). He closed his useless eyes and clenched his little fists and tried, tried, tried to make the world make sense again through the endless screaming cacophony that seemed determined to batter him from all sides.
Heartbeats. He counted them. Seven other boys in the dormitory, all sluggish and steady in deep sleep. Two nuns in the hallway, their pulses the light pitter-patter of waking hours. More nuns elsewhere, one, two, three, four, five… ten total minus the ones in the hall. All awake, all working. All content. Nine heartbeats thrumming along in the girls’ dormitory across the yard. There used to be ten, but 3-year-old Gretchen got adopted last week. The nuns had given her a small going-away party; there was cake and Matt couldn’t eat more than a bite or two because he could taste the chemical wrongness of the frosting and the other boys made fun of him and Sister Constance called him wasteful when he scraped it off.
Breathing was much the same. The same body-count as before. Sister Mary Catherine’s asthma was acting up, Sister Claudia Sophia’s cold had gotten a bit better overnight, Sister Elizabeth was carrying something heavy, he could hear her huffing and puffing. Her steps were heavier too. She was too far away for him to be able to tell what she was holding. Maybe laundry. He could smell the soap in the air. A sister would come in soon and tell them to get up and strip the beds before breakfast; it was time to wash the sheets again.
Matt’s nose wrinkled involuntarily. He hated laundry day. The sheets would come back reeking of the abrasive detergent the nuns favored, the fabric harsh with unnecessary starch. A whole week devoted to making the bedding soft again, making it smell familiar and comfortable, only for another Friday to come around and the whole process repeated over again.
Matt rolled over and buried his face in the pillow, only to pull away gagging when the conflicting scents of harsh soap and old pillow and his own shampoo assaulted him.
A new nun out in the hall, her feet a brisk clip-clop on the floor. Sister Abigail. A sharp crack of sound as the door opened and a simple command to get up and make sure they strip the beds and carry the sheets to the washroom before washing up for breakfast and morning prayer.
Matt squirmed out of the cocoon of blankets he’d made to insulate himself against the world, already on his feet and moving as his bunkmates began to stir, their sleepy grumbles aggressively loud to Matt’s sensitive ears. He dressed with brisk efficiency and stripped his bed, trying to force his brain to only focus on the sheets, the feel of their edges, the snap they made when pulled off the bed in one smooth motion. The babble of the other boys was a rising tide behind him, like ocean waves trying to swamp a beach.
Sheets. Just focus on the sheets.
He’d gotten his bed stripped, the blankets in a neat pile at the foot, when the other boys’ usual morning chatter suddenly spiked. Voices raised, sharp and piercing, the sound of scuffling feet and the bang-bang-bang of adrenaline-fueled heartbeats rattled around and through Matt’s skull as he tried to orient himself relative to the fight. And fight it was. He could hear the familiar wet thump of flesh striking flesh. He could smell blood in the air and wondered if this was what sharks felt like.
The Murdock boys have got the Devil inside them.
Do they, Dad? Do they?
Matt could feel his fingers curl tighter and tighter around each other, a messy tangle of sweat-salt-skin.
No, keep the Devil locked up. Keep the Devil inside.
Matt forced his fingers to uncurl; forced himself to reach for his cane like this was any other day. He didn’t have a stake in this fight, it didn’t matter to him, it wasn’t important. He just wanted to hit someone, hit something. Make someone pay in blood for everything that was wrong with his tiny, dark, inferno of a world.
He could feel the cool material of his cane against his palms. It was grounding, a steady point of focus in a mad, mad world.
He should have heard it coming. If he wasn’t so preoccupied keeping the Devil inside, keeping his senses under control, keeping the nearly-ever-present headache at bay, he might have. As it was, when the knot of fighting boys slammed into him, he was surprised enough to let them take him down with them. They hit the floor. There were two boys, more focused on pummeling each other than him, both older and bigger than he was, and they were heavy and as soon as they hit the ground they were rolling, dragging him with them in their vicious tangle. Matt’s ears were ringing and his world was spinning and suddenly…
CRACK.
His cane, the one his dad had bought him the day he’d brought him home after the accident, snapped.
“Dad?”
“Hey, Matty, I’m here, I’m here.”
“I couldn’t hear you…I thought you were gone.”
“I was, kid, I was, I had to go out for a bit.”
“Why’d you go? I couldn’t hear you. Dad? Dad?”
“I’m here, Matty, I’m here. I brought you something. Had to go out and get it so I could bring it home.”
“What is it?”
“A cane, like you see on tv; it’s to help you get around now that …”
“Thanks Dad. Thank you.”
“Hey, I’m here now. I’m back. I’ll always come back.”
SNAP-CRACK.
Matt let the Devil out. With a cry half human, half animal, he lashed out at the struggling combatants on top of him. His world, always dark, a world on fire, seemed to sharpen, his senses expanding and contracting, the beat of his heart syncing up with the beat of his fists.
Hit-thump-hit-thump-hit
Matt smelled blood in the air and felt no pain. Just a yawning, screaming, emptiness. A half scabbed-over wound ripped open, the shredded remains of something that had been and now never would be.
He wasn’t sure how long he beat on the other two. They were whimpering; pathetic and sniveling in the face of Matt’s pure, hungry and heartbroken rage. They stopped trying to hit each other after the first 30 seconds. After the first minute they had nearly given up on hitting Matt. When they tried to retreat at the minute and thirty second mark; Matt might have chased after them; he wasn’t really sure what he could or would do now. The world was an open sore festering around him, assaulting him with its noise and smells and infection and this was him hitting back and making it feel his pain.
A strong hand snagging the back of his shirt and hauling him bodily backward was enough to give him pause, although he still thrashed for the first few seconds.
“What on earth are you boys doing?” Sister Agatha demanded. Matt could feel her words rumbling through her chest before they emerged.
A dozen aborted explanations hurled themselves through the air.
“Scott and Curtis were fighting – ”
“Murdock – ”
“And they were beating the snot outta each other but – ”
“Murdock, holy jesus, sorry Sister, the kid’s a beast – ”
“And they run into the blind kid and he just starts whalen’ on ‘em – ”
“ – didn’t know a blind kid could fight like that – ”
“Kid’s a literal beast, sister, honest to god – ”
“ – totally deserved what they got, running into a blind kid, breakin’ his cane, dick move, guys, sorry Sister – ”
The noise, the voices, the accusations were building, building, building, a roaring ocean in Matt’s mind and he was still shaking, still raw with the knowledge that he was alone, and he’d done that, and oh god, he was alone and he could smell the blood and the salt and he wasn’t sure if he was the one bleeding and crying, but knew if he was, then he wasn’t the only one and the thought made him sick and dizzy.
Something broke. Just snapped, like his cane under the weight of someone else’s fight. Before Matt could think, before he could speak in his own defense, he was tearing away, ripping his shirt out of Sister Agatha’s hold (a literal rip, he could hear the fabric tear and feel its ragged edges where it fell back against his feverish skin) and running. He ran down the hall, speeding past startled nuns, listening to their hearts skip and jump in surprise at the sight of him. His feet were hard, sharp snaps against the stone floors and there were so many doors in his way…
Until suddenly there weren’t and he was plunging out into the New York daylight. He could feel the sunshine dappling his face, the hot rush of the outside hitting him in a cloud of humidity and city fumes. The sound of the city, no longer muffled by walls and filtered through the sieve of quasi-familiar voices and heartbeats, curled around him in a sinister embrace, crushing, pressing in on all sides, crunching him up like the trash compactor in Star Wars.
He remembered being young, younger than now, back when he could see things like Star Wars, watching the trilogy with his dad on their ratty old couch in their little ratty apartment, warm and safe. He’d been young, so young. The trash compactor scene had scared him more than he would admit. He’d spent days eyeing the walls suspiciously, waiting for the moment they’d start to inch forward and smush him into a Matt-pancake.
But Matt couldn’t think clearly enough to stop. He couldn’t manage the thoughts and he couldn’t manage the sounds and the yawning, open wound that was him wasn’t healing over. So he picked a direction he knew would keep him on the sidewalk and just kept running.
…
A bright, sunny day? A kid running down the sidewalk wearing sunglasses? No big deal, this was New York.
The remnants of a bloody nose on his face and the beginnings of a bruise on his cheekbone? No big deal, this was New York. Probably a perfectly good explanation, no need to bother with it.
The average human being could be very petty when they wanted to. And willfully ignorant when they were able.
So Matt ran and no one stopped him to ask why.
…
Matt was getting tired. It was getting harder and harder to maintain the focus necessary to keep his senses in line and keep him from colliding with somebody or something. A blaring horn and a car alarm later and Matt was reeling, unsure of his footing and temporarily unable to hear anything over the ringing echoes in his ears. Dizzy and disoriented, he teetered, feet tangling up and pitching him forward until he crashed into something heavy and metal and reeking of dirt and grease and meat-that-was-not-quite-meat. His bruised cheekbone sang with pain as it bounced off of what must be a hotdog cart, his ribs creaking as they slammed into the edge of the metal contraption, his small body bouncing off of it and falling to the ground. A nasty sizzle told him he’d caught his hair on the grill and the ends were burning. Head spinning, he tried to pick out the sounds directly in front of him over the sounds all around him.
A man was yelling in a thick accent, the cart was creaking and shifting, unsettled by its sudden introduction to Matt’s face, and people (most likely the ones waiting in line for hot dogs) were murmuring in muted distress.
And then things just got worse.
With a rattle and a groan, the cart (which was beginning to show its age, judging by the heavy scent of rust and muted decay Matt had picked up during his short stint as a hot dog cart hood-ornament) began to roll. Matt could hear the wheezy, croaking pop of the brakes giving way and the squeal of wheels on pavement as the cart made its sluggish, vaguely pathetic, escape.
The hot dog vendor did not accept this turn of events gracefully.
Matt, still struggling to clear his spinning head, heard the sullen squeak of the cart as its belligerent owner grabbed it and manhandled it back into place. He didn’t anticipate the meaty hand of the hot dog vender descending to grab him by the back of his shirt, just like Sister Agatha had (however long ago that was…minutes? Hours? It felt like days.) and haul him to his feet and drag him over. Matt winced away from the pungent battery of scents assaulting his poor nose, everything from the hot dogs themselves, to the cart, to the vendor’s pungent personal aroma. The odiferous vendor was still shouting. Shouting for the police actually.
A hot spike of fear stabbed through Matt’s stomach and he started thrashing. But he was small and whoever had him was big and he didn’t do himself much good with his struggling.
An officer (one of the people waiting in line, he was hungry; Matt could hear his stomach growling) strode over. “What exactly is the problem here?”
“This – ” here the vendor launched into such a string of expletives that even Matt found himself oddly impressed. Nostalgia for the days spent in his dad’s gym, listening to the boxers cussing each other out good-naturedly, smiles bright and fierce, curled through Matt’s gut as he listened to the vendor enumerate all the ways in which Matt had failed as a human being.
“Sir, there’s no need for that,” the officer cut in smoothly, “Please release the boy now.” His heartbeat was a steady drum in his chest; a little fast, harsh and sharp with irritation that what was probably a fairly short lunch break was turning into a sideshow, “What exactly is the problem?”
“Piece of shit tried to steal from me, damaged the cart too!” The vendor grouched, but something in the officer’s face or tone must have taught him better than disobeying the order to release Matt. Newly freed, Matt rubbed at his neck and mourned for the sad, ripped, stretched out shirt that had started the day in relatively good condition. The vender was still shouting. Matt had had enough of this.
He didn’t roll his eyes; the effect tended to be lost behind his glasses, but instead stared harder. “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” he protested, “If I were a thief, I wouldn’t have run into your cart in the first place. Your cashbox is on the other side; I wouldn’t have been able to reach it from the angle I landed. If I were stealing food, I wouldn’t go after a hot dog vendor; I’d go to the grocery store like every other punk. Taking food off the shelves is a lot easier than snatching half-cooked meat off a hot grill. And if, for some reason, I wanted to cause damage to your hot dog cart or, I don’t know, any hot dog cart, I wouldn’t throw my body at it. It hurt me more than I hurt it. And why the hell would I want it to roll away? What does that get me? If I’m a thief then I’m letting my mark roll away. If I’m a vandal, I’m letting the thing I wanted to vandalize roll away. And if I were hoping it’d crash, I’d be way out of luck because that thing can’t go far enough fast enough to get away enough to crash. How stupid do you think I am?” He set his jaw and glared in the general direction of the man holding him hostage.
The police officer, who seemed rather taken aback by his whole diatribe, sighed and said, “Kid, you have a point. Sir, what exactly are you accusing this boy of?”
The vendor sputtered a bit more but nothing concrete or important enough to require objection or rebuttal from Matt.
The officer sighed again. If Matt was younger and less completely consumed by fury and indignation, he would have felt sympathy for the poor bastard who just wanted a hotdog on his lunch break. “So no, you do not have a formal complaint to lodge against this young man?”
Further sputtering, which the nice officer ignored.
“What’s your name, kid? Where are your parents?”
Matt clenched his jaw. He didn’t want to go back to the nuns, back to all the reminders. Reminders that he wasn’t home, he wasn’t waiting for his dad to come back from a match, back to all the reminders of how much less he was now.
“Kid? Where are your parents? Are they here? Kid, you’ve got to answer me or I’m going to have to call Child Services.”
Matt tightened his jaw. Child Services or the nuns? His dad had wanted him to stay with the nuns.
But, a chilling thought; would the nuns still want him after this morning?
So Matt said nothing and held his breath and waited for the officer to lose patience and offer to take him down to the police station. It was a good thing he’d managed to head-butt the stupid hotdog cart. At least that provided a handy explanation for the fresh bruises, and flaky dried blood on his face.
“Oh god, there you are. Young man, you had me very worried. I’m so sorry about my nephew, Officer. He has this horrible habit of wandering off. I hope we haven’t inconvenienced you any.” A woman. A woman with a dry, melodic voice, no perfume, and the kind of extremely neutral accent you see in well-trained actors and news anchors. A woman Matt was 100% certain he had never met in his life. Ergo, a woman who had just told a string of the most outrageous lies he’d ever heard.
But her heartbeat stayed the same. Slightly heightened, faster than average, but relatively steady and controlled. Like a boxer going into a fight.
“Ma’am, you are – ?”
“Natalie Rushman. I’m watching my nephew for the day. My sister had to work, so I thought we’d go out for a few hours this afternoon. Turns out that was a bit of a bad idea.” Matt could hear the smile shaping the last few words out of the woman’s mouth into little curly-cues of sound. But it seemed somehow fake; too controlled. Or maybe that was because he knew she was lying.
He also knew what she was doing. She was giving him an out, if he wanted. He could do one of two things now; he could claim not to know her, kick up a fuss and get dumped at Child Services or back with the nuns, or he could play along. She’d given him a name. It would be so easy to say…
“Sorry, Aunt Nat,” he looked down, trying to remember what a contrite expression looked like and instead just letting his face do what it wanted and trusting the bad angle and his glasses to disguise the less-believable aspects of his expression, “You’re not going to tell Mom, are you?”
“Damn right I am,” she muttered. How was she doing it? How did she sound so real and so fake at the same time? “Sorry for taking up your time, Officer. I’ll just take my nephew and go.”
The officer still seemed suspicious and the vendor was still mutinous and Matt knew it was up to him to seal the deal.
He huffed a sigh and tried to remember what his face needed to do to sell it, “Come on, Aunt Nat, you know how Mom gets. She starts using full names and it’s all over. There’s only so many ‘Jack Matthew Michaels’ I can take,” he hoped he had hit the right pitch with the whining. This was hard and his heart felt like it was trying to excavate its way out of his chest, “And then, when she’s done being mad she just starts crying!”
The woman, thank god, played along. “If you don’t want your mother to cry, you shouldn’t get into so much trouble,” she replied tartly, “Now come on, Jack, it’s getting late.”
The vendor made some displeased noises but the officer silenced him and nudged Matt forward, towards the woman with the steady heartbeat and soothing voice.
Matt could hear the vendor shift, presumably leaning forward to glower at Matt and Matt’s rescuer.
“You little piece of shit brat, I’m not finished with you,” the man snarled. The soft rustle of expensive cloth on expensive cloth told Matt the woman was holding out something to the belligerent vendor.
“Take my card; If you discover any damages on your cart, feel free to call. I’m a lawyer. Oh, and speaking of the law, keep an eye on your mail. I may decided to file a suit against you for harassing my 10 year old blind nephew.” She let the vendor sputter and backpedal for a few pointed seconds before turning to the officer, “Thank you for your assistance, Officer. Have a lovely afternoon.” And with that, she took Matt’s shoulder and steered him in the direction he’d come.
…
They passed a minute or so just walking, the woman’s hand tight on his shoulder as she steered the two of them through the crowd. Walking with her was like flying with a missile, high-velocity, goal-oriented, and absolutely terrifying.
The disagreeable vendor and the overworked NYPD officer far behind them, Matt risked asking her a question. “Who are you really?”
He couldn’t feel her tense, and if her heartbeat sped up, it was such an infinitesimal skip that it didn’t even register on his radar. Somehow he still got the feeling that she was surprised.
“Who says my name’s not Natalie Rushman?” she said blandly.
“Because I know you were lying about everything else. There was no difference between when you were lying and when you were introducing yourself. But you reacted to the name ‘Aunt Nat’ so I’m going to guess your real name has ‘Nat’ in it and you’re used to hearing it, that’s why it startled you. In the context of a lie, truth is surprising.”
She didn’t stop, but she slowed down and her fingers on his shoulder tightened. “Difference in what?” her voice was like silk, smooth and deceptively strong.
People liked to say Murdocks didn’t know when to shut up. That was a lie. Matt was learning, in the slow, painful way of children, that silence was a weapon. A well-maintained silence was as powerful as a hundred words.
Her grip tightened. Matt tensed under her hand but didn’t answer. “Why did you help me?” he asked.
“What difference?” she replied.
A stalemate.
A few wordless moments. Another person would have called them ‘silent’, but nowhere was silent for Matt anymore.
Finally, when the empty air between them had stretched on long enough to make a point – (what point that was, Matt wasn’t sure, he just felt better having made it), he asked, “Where are we going?”
The woman suddenly released him and stopped. Not expecting the change, Matt staggered forward a few steps, slightly disoriented, before righting himself and stopping. He turned in what he judged to be her general direction (her heartbeat was one of many and her breathing patterns were subtle, this was the city and they were in public, surrounded by people, ‘general direction’ was the best he could manage). A headache was beginning to drum against the inside of his temples and he curled and uncurled his hands, briefly making fists before releasing them slowly. The feeling of his nails scraping against his palms was soothing, a grounding, vaguely irritating gesture that kept him in his skin when it felt like his heartbeat was trying to escape his chest.
He could feel the woman assessing him. He’d half expected her to leave, to just walk away and leave him here, but she hadn’t and he didn’t understand.
Matt liked to understand things. Especially now, in this new world he’d found himself in the first day he woke up to realize that he was still blind and now his dad was gone and he had nothing left.
“I don’t know,” she finally said. Matt felt like those words must have been difficult for her, hard to let past her lips. Her tone was still cool, assessing and calculating.
“How did you know I was blind?” he asked. It seemed like a safer question somehow.
“I’m very observant.” The words sounded different, almost like the edge of a smile might be curling around the syllables.
“Most people aren’t.”
“You are.”
“Yeah.”
No more words. Again.
Then, “What difference were you talking about?” she asked.
“I’m very observant,” he answered.
A low chuckle, “You’re an unusual kid.”
“Yeah, most of us kids aren’t blind,” Matt said because sometimes it was easier to be aggressive and flippant about his disability, to fling it in other people’s faces before they could make up their minds to tiptoe around it.
“Or play human polygraph.” Her tone was wry and rich with hidden meanings.
“What’s your real name?” he asked. He felt like a lawyer on a police procedural, like he was cross-examining an important witness and this one conversation would make or break his case.
“What’s yours?” Something must have shown on his face, because he could hear her amused huff, “Two can play at the polygraph game.”
“What’s a polygraph?” he asked. He sort of thought he might know; they’d mentioned it on the cop shows on TV, but they didn’t bother to stop and define everything as it came up. Crime dramas weren’t exactly focused on audience education.
She wasn’t thrown by his rapid topic changes and Matt found himself a little disappointed. Normally that worked. Most adults found themselves flustered and scrambling in the wake of his swift conversation shifts. The only notable exceptions were the nuns (who mostly still got flustered but skipped the scrambling and just went back to bossing him around instead) and his dad (who would huff a laugh and ruffle his hair affectionately and say something like “you’re gettin’ to be smarter than me, Matty, you’re gonna be something someday”).
“A machine that tells whether or not a suspect is lying.”
“Does it work all the time?”
“Most of the time.”
“I guess I’m that.” The roar of the city was growing louder and louder, or maybe Matt was just getting more sensitive after so much exposure, like a raw nerve.
“Do you read heartbeats?”
“Maybe.” No answer would be more of an answer than words.
“Then you’re a human polygraph,” the slight smile was back in her voice. Matt liked it; it made all the words warmer without ruining the subtle nuance of the sound.
“Why did you care?” he demanded.
“About what?” she was playing dumb. She wasn’t very good at it. He could hear too much in her tone: amusement, curiosity, and a distant sort of warmth.
“About any of this shit!” he threw out the curse word as a challenge, a bold statement, practically begging for a proper adult reaction. Her heartbeat didn’t so much as flutter in surprise.
He wondered what he face looked like, what expression she was making. He missed being able to read people’s faces.
“Why do you care about me?” he demanded, “Why do you care how I knew you were lying? Why did you help me?” His hands were fists again. He didn’t force them to relax.
“I don’t know,” her heartbeat was steady, truth, but her tone was curious and introspective.
“Theorize,” he bit out, too frustrated with this whole morning and the city that wouldn’t shut up, to be proud of the big word he’d pulled out of the conversational hat.
“Hmm,” she hummed contemplatively, “You were fearless. You kept your head. You understood everything about your situation and you used it to your advantage.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I liked you. I didn’t think you deserved to be shipped off to Child Services.”
“What are you going to do with me now?”
“Do you have anywhere to go?”
Matt bit his lip. It felt fragile after this morning’s fisticuffs. He wondered how badly his face was bruising. The skin across his cheekbones and around his eyes felt tired.
He could lie to this woman. It would be so easy. But there was something in him that didn’t want to. There was something in her that called to him, harmonized with him. He felt like he could understand her, given time. Really understand her, not just superficially know her like he did the nuns and the other children at the orphanage.
“I think I accidentally ran away from the orphanage this morning. I got in a fight and ran away when the nuns broke it up,” he admitted.
She made a small sound that might count as a laugh. “Do you want to go back there?”
He didn’t say anything. This time the silence wasn’t intentional, it wasn’t to make a point; it was because he didn’t know how to answer her.
“I don’t have anywhere else better,” he finally offered with a shrug.
“Hmm” was all she had to say to that, then, “Let’s get food.” She started walking, her pace taking her past and ahead of him before she paused, and turned back, “You do want food?”
He nodded. “No hotdogs, though.”
“Duly noted.”
…
They got sandwiches bursting with meat and cheese and pickles, matching bags of chips and sodas. They didn’t talk on the way to the deli, the woman steering him much the same way she had before, but this time her hand was more relaxed on his shoulder. They didn’t eat inside, instead taking their bounty outside and eating on a bench that reeked of chewed gum, spilled booze and unwashed human. But the sandwich’s food-smell smothered most of the stench and out here was better than in there, where dozens of human voices bounced off walls and plate-glass windows only to rattle around the room, clattering around the ears of every gathered customer, even if they didn’t’ realize it. Matt preferred outside, for the most part. It was nice having the open air for the sounds to dissipate into.
“Thank you, Nat,” he offered, licking the last smudges of mustard off his fingers. The deli was a good one, the meat tasted fresh and the bread didn’t feel fake on his tongue.
“Natasha.”
“Thank you, Natasha.”
“You’re welcome, Jack.”
“Matt.”
“Matt.”
…
Natasha did end up taking him back to the orphanage. She didn’t walk in with him, instead leaving him just outside. When he asked her why she wouldn’t come in with him, she replied, “I’m a bit sacrilegious for holy ground.”
“Are you a vampire?”
She’d laughed, a raspy little chuckle. It pulled a smile across Matt’s face and for the first time in a while, it felt real.
“Last I checked, no blood-drinking,” she replied dryly.
“What about turning into a bat and flying off into the night?” he challenged, gratified when he could hear the upkick of a smile tinting her next words.
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Let me know if you do, that sounds cool.”
“Sure, kid.”
He could hear her turn away and suddenly his heartbeat was slamming in his ears like a war-drum and he couldn’t think past it until he was calling out to her, “Hey, you’ll visit me, right?”
“Maybe if I’m in town.”
“Yes or no. It’s an easy question.”
“Yes.” Lie. Why was she lying? Matt decided to leave it for the moment.
“Okay. See you soon.”
A soft snort from her, “Why don’t you just stick to hearing, Polygraph? Leave the seeing to the professionals.”
Matt laughed, sudden, bright and real. “You made a blind joke!”
“You started it, kid.”
“Thank you, Natasha. Hear you soon.”
“Bye, Polygraph.”
And then she was walking away and Matt was pushing open the orphanage’s gates and skulking inside. He listened to her footsteps as they grew farther and farther away, keeping up a steady count in his head, ticking off the seconds.
When he was sure she’d gotten far enough away for this to work, Matt climbed the fence and followed her.
…
Natasha caught him in under five minutes. He found himself right back where he started, listening to her walk away, taking a different, more convoluted route than last time. But that didn’t matter. Not when he could hear her no matter where she went.
He followed again.
She caught on in less than three minutes.
They played this game for a while: her leaving, him following.
Finally, on round eight, when she dropped him off right back at the nun’s gates, she said, “You need to stop. What do you want?”
“For you not to lie when you say you’re coming back.”
“Fine. I’ll come back. Does that suit your nefarious purposes?”
Truth.
A pause. He needed to think. “Fine. Just don’t forget to come back.”
“Deal.”
Truth.
…
The next few weeks were a mixed bag. Natasha came to visit him. They went out and walked the city on lazy summer afternoons, the concrete baking in the sun under their feet, thw world smelling of hot metal, rust and oil. They painted each other pictures with their words as Natasha told him what she could see and he told her some of what he could hear. Not any of the really extreme stuff. Just little things. Tricks, small things just at the edge of her perception, stuff that made the conversation more interesting. It was good to have a friend.
On the downside, the noise was getting worse. Somedays he could barely convince himself to drag his body out of bed; it felt too much like someone was taking a jackhammer to his skull. Everywhere he went was a barrage of smell and sound and sensation. His skin felt rubbed raw, his mind like it was about to pull apart and float away like a paper towel in a puddle of water.
On particularly bad days he couldn’t remember much other than the hot red haze all around him, too close, too close, smothering him in a wall of heat and noise and too many smells to count. His fevered brain skittered back to the past. He remembered being in school and reading the story of Athena; how she pried her way out of Zeus’s skull. It felt like that inside his head, like a person was trying to escape, only maybe it was the devil, it was the Murdock devil and instead of human fingers it was fiendish claws tearing up the inside of his cranium as the creature struggled to get out, get out, GET OUT. He didn’t really remember any of the crying or retching he must have done as his body rejected all the excess sensory input, but the sour scent of vomit burned the back of his throat, laying waste to his sinuses for minutes or hours, he couldn’t be sure. He rolled around on his bed, trying to muffle the cacophony of Outside with his own tiny rustles and writhing, but eventually ran out of energy and just lay, hands clamped over his ears, curled into a tiny ball.
Voices came and went. His bunkmates, alternating between mockery and fear, caustic sympathy and childish apathy.
“Think he’s gonna die?”
“What’d wrong with him?”
“Poor bastard.”
“Hey, weirdo, stop being a wimp, you’re not even sick.”
“Totally gonna die.”
“He keeps making these weird whimper-moans, it’s freaky.”
“You okay, Murdock?”
“Hey, do you think what he’s got is contagious?”
The nuns would swirl through the fog in his brain, making concerned noises and always sounding very nervous. Maybe they knew about the devil inside. Maybe they were worried about it escaping too.
“Poor little thing.”
“Do you think we should call in a priest?”
“We’ll say a prayer for his soul tonight.”
“Has someone called a doctor?”
“He’s just getting worse.”
“Poor, poor thing.”
Natasha visited on his last very bad day. He wasn’t really aware of her presence; her heartbeat just one in a river, an sea, and ocean of pulses, her breath all but gone in a whispering forest of exhalations, her nothing-smell (soap, unscented, shampoo, very neutral, he’d never been close enough to her to decode the scent) literally nothing in the face of all the other appalling odors pressing in all around him, making his eyes water and his nose burn.
The nuns harried Natasha, like small yapping dogs, half the sounds from the sisters’ mouths not registering as words in the turmoil of Matt’s brain.
“Ma’am, we cannot allow you to – ”
“The child is ill – “
“No one should disturb him, he needs his rest.”
“Intrusion will just make it worse.”
He could hear when Natasha stopped them with a look. “If he’s only getting worse under your care then I cannot possibly do any harm trying something new,” she said evenly, “Now. May I talk to Matt?”
The nuns faded back into a whispering sea because Natasha was there, kneeling on the floor beside his bed.
“Hi, Polygraph,” she said softly, “You’re not doing too well, are you?”
He tried to say something. He may have whimpered instead.
“Hey, Polygraph, you need to focus on my voice now. You know why? Because I have something important to tell you. Something that will help you. Are you listening?”
He blinked at her and shuddered at the wet clicking noise his eyelids made on his eyes.
“It’s all in your head.”
He stared at her listlessly.
“We make choices about what we let affect us. Everything’s a choice. We take what we have and we shape it because we are more than our bodies. What we do is our will, realized, made active. You have enhanced senses. Decide what you do with them. Decide what you want to hear, smell, taste, feel. Control it. Or let it control you. Your choice. Fight? Or submit?”
Matt’s voice, when it escaped his lips, sounded less like a voice and more like the ghost of what one might be. “Fight. Murdocks always fight.”
“Good choice. Now. Pick one thing and one thing only to listen to. I’ll help you.”
…
Natasha may have thought she’d gotten him to finally fall asleep. And in some ways, she had. She’d helped him get to a point where he could fall asleep if he wanted to. But right now, he didn’t. Instead of listening to just his heartbeat, lulling himself to sleep like he’d planned and she’d suggested, he listened to just the conversation on the other side of the wall. Other sounds still filtered in. Loud ones, unexpected ones, a thousand distractions, all at a painful volume, still flitted through his headspace. A few hours work on focusing did not suddenly grant him mystical powers of control. But it was getting better. For the first time he felt like he could think, like he was alone in his own head.
But the conversation on the other side of the wall – that was important.
“He’s coming home with me.”
“We don’t just hand off our orphans to the first person who waltzes in here, Ms. Romanov. We take the care of our children very seriously – ”
“Do you? Because that child’s been suffering from chronic migraines for weeks, Sister.”
A patient sigh, “We are trying our best with Matt. He’s not the easiest child, and his circumstances, not to mention his disability – ”
“It’s not his disability that is hurting him. It’s his ability. And that won’t stop just because you will him to be just like the other children.”
“You can’t just – ”
“I can’t just what, exactly? What was your plan to help that boy? Call in an ‘expert’? Pay someone to take Matt away from here a few hours a day, train him, return him in pristine condition so you can feel proud of yourselves for doing such a very good job raising him? That’s ridiculous and you and I know it. I know him; I like him. He knows me; he likes me. I want to adopt him and teach him to use his gifts. You want to ‘fix’ him via third party.”
“I will not be insulted this way.”
“It’s not an insult, it’s a fact.”
“Ms. Romanov.”
“You may care very much for Matt. But so do I. And unlike you, I can help him.”
Matt’s exhausted body gave up on him before he could hear the rest of the conversation, but the beginnings of hope, hot and fizzy like shaken soda, kept him warm as he drifted off.
…
Matt woke up early, the day just starting to bloom around him, sleepy sounds unfurling through the city like the petals of a flower in the sun. Natasha’s hand was dry and cool on his. She squeezed his fingers lightly. He turned his hand to clumsily lace their fingers together, squashing hers in his, holding on tight.
“Morning, Polygraph,” she said; her voice was like her hands, dry and cool.
“Natasha, are you going to take me away?”
“That depends.” She had callouses like Dad, a web of tough skin curling around her knuckles. ‘You come from a family of fighters, Matty’. Did he, Dad? Could she be part of it?
“Depends on what?” He could hear his heartbeat, thunder in his ears, washing out and eliminating everything else.
“What you want. It’s your choice. Do you want to go with me or do you want to stay here?”
“Why?” He had to know; he had to ask these questions in the early-morning quiet, before the roar of daytime tore every thought from his head. “Why are you letting me choose?”
“Because, making choices is what makes us human.”
Matt’s young brain didn’t know what to do with that. He just blinked slowly at her. “If I go with you – ” he said slowly, groping for each word through the dark of his mind, “Can we stay in the city?”
He thought she might be frowning at him. He remembered, not for the first time; that he didn’t know what her face looked like. He wondered what the crease between her eyebrows looked like now. “Why do you want to stay?”
“Because this is my city.” He didn’t have any other way to explain it. The city was in his blood and bones. Everything that had happened to him thus far, everything that shaped and defined Matthew Michael Murdock, was in this city. He couldn’t leave it behind; not when it held his dad, his sight, his past and probably his future.
He couldn’t lose any more.
“The city is hurting you.” She didn’t sound like she was trying to change his mind, more like she was reminding him of things, testing his resolve.
He grit his teeth and tightened his grip on her hand, “I’ll fight back.”
“It won’t be easy.”
“I’ll fight.”
“Stubborn polygraph,” her voice was still dry and cool, collected as always, but there was something warm running under it all.
“Yeah,” he said in lieu of another response.
“If I swear we won’t leave the city if I take you with me, what will you say?”
“Yes.”
She blinked; he could hear the wet slide-click of her eyelids. “Are you sure?”
“Get me out of here, please.”
“Okay, Polygraph.”
Natasha could help him quiet the world. She was strange and smart and different and his only friend and anything would be better than here with the horrible sheets and no one doing anything to help as every damn day the world exploded inside his brain.
So Matt wasn’t really thinking about family when he agreed to Natasha’s adoption, he was thinking of friendship and shared jokes and safety and the kind of peace he so desperately needed but couldn’t manage to find.
So really, he was thinking about family, he just didn’t have the right words yet.