Chapter Text
CHAPTER 1: The Third Floor Bathroom
The Murdock file lands on your desk at half past two on a Tuesday.
It's not a significant file. A motion to continue — Nelson & Murdock requesting a two week extension on the Delgado hearing, standard language, nothing that requires more than a signature and a timestamp. You've processed a hundred like it this month alone. You flip it open, scan the header, and there's his name. Matthew M. Murdock, Esq. printed in clean type above Foggy Nelson's like it belongs at the top of things, which in your experience it usually does.
You tell yourself you're reviewing it thoroughly. You are a Clerk of Court. Thoroughness is the job.
What you are actually doing is sitting at your desk on a Tuesday afternoon thinking about Matt Murdock, which is not the job, and which you are aware enough to be privately annoyed about.
You've known him for going on three years now. Long enough to have a working theory of him, long enough for that theory to have been revised more than once.
The first time you saw him he was coming through the main doors on the ground floor — Foggy Nelson at his side doing most of the talking, the way Foggy usually did, and Matt with his cane and his very good suit moving through the lobby like he had the floor plan memorized. You'd noticed him the way most people noticed him, which is to say immediately and without quite being able to explain why. He wasn't loud. He didn't perform. He just had a particular quality of presence that made a room re-orient slightly in his direction without anyone deciding to do it.
You'd watched him work, after that. It was hard not to — you spent enough time in and around the courtrooms to catch pieces of his cases, and he was genuinely good. The way he stood in front of a jury, head tilted at that specific angle like he was listening to something just underneath what was being said. The way he always seemed to know exactly when a witness was about to contradict themselves, leaning forward a half second before the tell. You'd asked Marcy from the DA's office about it once, casually, and she'd said that man is either psychic or the best read of a room I've ever seen, and you'd filed that away with the rest of it.
You'd also catalogued his reputation. Everybody had. Late — chronically, legendarily, with creative explanations that were just plausible enough to be insulting. Disappearing acts. The kind of absences that other people spent energy covering for, which Foggy Nelson did with the loyalty of someone who had decided a long time ago that the math still worked out in Matt's favor. You didn't have the context to agree or disagree with that assessment. You just had the pattern.
Friendly, though. He was friendly in a way that felt different from the attorneys who were friendly to you — strategic warmth, the practiced kind. Matt was friendly like he was actually interested, and his attention when he gave it was specific and focused and very easy to disappear into if you weren't paying attention. You'd had drinks with him a handful of times — the bar on Worth Street that half the courthouse ended up in after a bad day, cheap beer and too many people talking at once — and the conversation had always been easy in a way that you hadn't fully anticipated. He was funny, genuinely. He asked questions and waited for the answers.
You are aware that you have a crush on Matt Murdock. You are not proud of it. You consider it a lapse in an otherwise solid judgment and you have managed it accordingly — filed it neatly behind professional and realistic and absolutely not, where it has remained for the better part of two years. Mostly.
You close the Murdock file. Stamp it. Set it in the outgoing tray.
Then you stand up, because you have been sitting for three hours and the records annex is warm and slightly airless and you need five minutes that do not involve anyone else's paperwork.
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The third floor women's restroom is not on anyone's map of the building. It's tucked behind the records annex, past the supply closet and the door that's been marked maintenance for as long as you've worked here. Half the building doesn't know it exists. The other half forgot. You found it in your second month on the job and you have been quietly protective of it ever since — cleaner than the others, always empty, the kind of small reliable thing that gets you through a long afternoon.
You push the door open.
You stop.
Matt Murdock is at the sink.
His suit jacket is thrown over the edge of the counter, dark fabric pooled against the porcelain. His shirt is open and hanging off his shoulders and he has his hands pressed to his left side, working at the edge of a bandage that has bled through — dark and wet at the center — and he is doing this entirely by feel, jaw set, and it is not going well.
Your brain registers several things in quick succession. How broad his shoulders are — you'd noticed his build before but the suit jacket always smoothed the specifics of it, and without it the specifics are considerable, the kind of physical structure that belongs to someone who has spent a serious amount of time doing something strenuous. How bruised he is — his ribs on the right side shadowed with something deep purple-green, a cut along his left forearm that has been cleaned but not dressed, and the bandage on his side that is losing the argument with whatever is underneath it. How still he goes the exact second you step through the door, before you make a sound.
You gasp. Sharp, involuntary. Not your most composed moment.
He doesn't flinch. He goes still in the way of someone who heard you coming and was waiting for the confirmation.
Then, without turning around: "Hey."
Not startled. Not embarrassed. Just — hey. Casual and specific, like he'd been expecting you in particular, which makes no sense and which you file away automatically behind everything else you've filed about him.
"What happened?" Your voice comes out more concerned than you intend it to.
He turns toward you then — not quite at you, or maybe exactly at you, it's difficult to tell — and his expression arranges itself into something practiced and easy. A mugging, he says. Wrong neighborhood, wrong time, last week, he's mostly fine but he's been moving around more than his doctor recommended and the bandage keeps — and here he makes a frustrated gesture toward his side — keeps.
It's a smooth story. It almost lands. Except the bandage is on his left side and a mugging usually means defensive wounds on the arms and hands, not a deep lateral injury that required a doctor and a dressing this size. And his knuckles. You clocked his knuckles on the way in — split, some of them crusted, the kind of damage you get from impact, not from throwing your hands up to protect your face.
You notice both of these things. You say nothing about either.
"You should see a doctor…." You say instead.
"Saw one…." He says. "Just need someone to help me get this flat. I'm in Courtroom B in eighteen minutes." He says it like eighteen minutes is plenty of time and this is a completely normal favor to ask of a colleague in a women's restroom and perhaps for Matt Murdock it is.
You look at him for a moment. You look at the bloodied bandage. You think about several things, briefly, including your own good judgment and what it has historically been worth when he's in the same room as you.
You set your bag down.
You work with what he has — gauze, a roll of medical tape sitting on the counter — and what you have, which is the small first aid kit at the bottom of your bag that you've carried for years because you are practical and the city is not. You ask him to hold still and he does, with the ease of someone accustomed to being worked on, which you also file away.
Up close, the wound is worse than it looked from the door. The bandage comes away and you have to keep your breath even because the cut beneath it is deep — deeper than a mugging, deeper than anything you want to spend time thinking about right now — and the skin around it is raised and angry at the edges. His skin is warm under your fingers, surprisingly so, and you are aware in a very specific way of the intimacy of what you're doing and you focus on the task.
"This is deep…."
"I know…." He says. The tone of it is a door closing, polite and final, and you don't reach for the handle.
You clean the wound — the antiseptic draws a small tension through his torso, the only indication he gives that any of this hurts — and then you dress it properly, gauze flat and tape neat at the edges. You smooth it down with your thumb and it holds.
When your done he reaches for his shirt and manages the top buttons and then slows, jaw tightening, the lower ones near his ribs asking too much. You step in without discussing it. Your fingers move down the placket and he goes still again, very still, and you are close enough to catch the scent of him — cedar, clean, and underneath it something copper that you understand now for what it is.
You button the last button. You do not immediately step back.
He's looking down in your direction, his glasses level with your face, and even though you know he can't see you there is something in the angle of it that feels like eye contact — deliberate and direct — and your pulse does something you choose not to acknowledge.
Then he smiles. The Matt Murdock smile, the specific one, the one that you have watched dismantle more composed people than yourself from a safe professional distance. Up close it is considerably worse.
"Thank you…." He says. "Genuinely."
"Courtroom B…." You say. "Eighteen minutes."
"Ten now." He reaches for his jacket, shrugs into it with only a slight hitch at the left side, and picks up his cane. He finds the door without difficulty, which you watch and don't comment on, and then he's gone.
You stand in the bathroom for a moment. The faucet drips. The fluorescent light above the mirror does what fluorescent lights do.
You drop the used gauze in the trash. You wash your hands. You look at yourself in the mirror for a long moment — your expression, which is doing several things at once, none of them strictly professional.
You have never had more questions about a single person in your life. You tell yourself that is not the same thing as concern. It is just observation. You are an observant person. It is part of the job.
You go back to work.
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You see him once more that afternoon, briefly, in the hallway outside Courtroom B after his hearing. He's got his jacket buttoned and his bag over one shoulder and he's saying something to Foggy that makes Foggy laugh, and when you pass he turns his head toward you with that particular attentiveness he has and says your name, easy and warm, and asks how the rest of your afternoon was.
Fine, you tell him. Busy.
He says he hopes it gets easier. He smiles again — not the full one, just a quieter version — and Foggy is already moving and Matt follows and that's it. That's the whole exchange. He is kind and easy and he is acting, with complete commitment, like this afternoon did not happen.
You watch him go down the corridor and you think about the bandage under his jacket and the way his voice sounded when it closed that door — I know — and the smile in the bathroom that you are still, inconveniently, thinking about.
You do not know, standing in that hallway, what you have just agreed to. You don't know that you've agreed to anything.
You have, though. For both of you.
You just don't know it yet.