summary: the blip took place in your life and matt's. the absence not only affects matt, but you too upon your return.
warnings: pure angst! a little cheating? depends? i don't know. there is no happy ending.
word count: +10k (yeah, i know...)
a/n: one-shot thanks to this request! i apologize for the delay. <3
clarification: english is not my native language, so i apologize in advance for any mistakes.
The mornings you spent with Matt had never been particularly extraordinary, and perhaps that was why you loved them so fiercely. There were no grand gestures waiting behind every sunrise, no dramatic confessions or promises whispered as though the world might end before nightfall. There was simply him, barefoot against the old hardwood floors of his apartment, moving with practiced certainty through a place he knew better than anyone ever could, and there was you, still wrapped in the lingering warmth of sleep as the smell of freshly brewed coffee slowly coaxed you into the day.
Outside, Hell’s Kitchen had already found its rhythm. Tires hissed over damp pavement after the night’s rain, impatient horns echoed somewhere farther down the avenue, and the muffled chorus of conversations drifted through the cracked kitchen window. It was noisy, alive, wonderfully ordinary.
Matt liked mornings for that reason.
Not because they were peaceful—they rarely were—but because every sound reminded him that the city had survived another night.
“You’ve been staring at me for almost five minutes,” his voice carried easily from the kitchen, touched with the smallest hint of amusement.
You smiled against the pillow. “I have not.”
You laughed quietly, pushing yourself onto one elbow. “Are you counting?”
He could hear the way your breathing shifted whenever your attention lingered on him. The tiny changes in your heartbeat whenever you caught yourself admiring him without meaning to. He’d teased you about it enough times that you had long since given up pretending he was wrong.
When you finally wandered into the kitchen, one of his mugs was already waiting where it always was, your coffee prepared exactly the way you liked it without a single word exchanged. He heard your footsteps before you reached him, turning slightly just in time for you to slip your arms around his waist from behind.
“You spoil me,” you murmured into the soft cotton of his shirt.
“I fail to see the distinction,” he said, with a sideways smile.
His chuckle rumbled beneath your cheek before he rested one hand over yours, absentmindedly tracing his thumb across your knuckles. It was such a familiar gesture that neither of you thought about it anymore. Matt loved through habits more than words, through quiet touches and remembered preferences, through the certainty that he’d always know where to find your hand.
“I have court in an hour,” he said.
“You’ll be late for work.”
“But you’re still standing here.”
“I know,” you repeated as if nothing had happened.
This time he laughed properly, shaking his head. “You are impossible,” he said.
“And yet…” You leaned around just enough to press a quick kiss against his jaw. “...you keep me around.”
“I question that decision every morning.”
His smile softened into something quieter. “I am.”
The admission came so naturally that it almost disappeared beneath the sounds filtering in from outside.
He would choose you every morning if given the chance.
You didn’t need him to say it aloud.
You had learned to hear it in the way he always reached for you first before leaving the apartment, in the way he tilted his head whenever you spoke, giving you every ounce of his attention, in the way his fingers searched for yours whenever the sidewalks became too crowded.
Love with Matt had never been loud.
It settled itself into the smallest corners of everyday life until it became impossible to imagine one without the other.
By the time the two of you stepped onto the sidewalk, the city had fully awakened around you. Someone argued with a taxi driver across the street. A little girl laughed as she chased a pigeon through the square. Music escaped from an open deli, blending with the endless hum of traffic that never truly stopped.
Nothing about the morning felt unusual.
Nothing warned you that within minutes, the world would become unrecognizable.
You glanced at Matt as he adjusted his glasses against the bridge of his nose, sunlight catching briefly on the dark lenses before disappearing behind the passing shadows of taller buildings.
He found your hand without looking.
His fingers intertwined with yours as effortlessly as breathing.
And for one fleeting, ordinary moment, with your shoulder brushing his and the familiar chaos of Hell’s Kitchen surrounding you, you allowed yourself to believe that life could remain exactly like this forever.
There were mornings when Hell’s Kitchen sounded almost gentle.
Matt had long ago learned that gentleness, in the neighborhood they called home, had very little to do with silence. It lived instead in the familiar cadence of ordinary things: the newspaper vendor unfolding stacks of fresh print on the corner before the first commuters arrived, the impatient hiss of buses kneeling at their stops, the uneven footsteps of children already running late for school while exhausted parents hurried after them with backpacks slung over one shoulder. Beneath it all, layered so naturally that he barely noticed it anymore, rested the endless orchestra of heartbeats that had accompanied him for as long as he could remember. Thousands upon thousands of lives unfolding simultaneously around him, each one distinct enough to recognize if he chose to focus, yet blended together into a single rhythm that had become as familiar to him as breathing.
It was the heartbeat of his city.
Of the life the two of you had built together without ever realizing how fragile it truly was.
Your hand rested comfortably inside his as the two of you walked down the sidewalk, your thumb absentmindedly brushing against the back of his hand every few steps, a habit so deeply ingrained that neither of you thought about it anymore. He smiled almost without noticing, more to himself than to you, because your heartbeat carried the easy steadiness it always did whenever the two of you walked side by side. It grounded him in a way nothing else ever had. No matter how chaotic the streets became, no matter how many voices competed for his attention or how many sirens split the morning air, somewhere among all of it was you, and finding you had become as instinctive as drawing his next breath.
It was so subtle at first that he almost convinced himself he had imagined it.
Perhaps someone had stepped into a building. Perhaps distance or concrete had momentarily swallowed the sound. Stranger things had happened.
Yet before his mind could settle on any reasonable explanation, another disappeared.
The rhythm of the city stumbled.
You noticed immediately, your fingers tightening around him. “What is it?” you asked worriedly.
His head tilted ever so slightly, every instinct sharpening until the rest of the world seemed to recede behind the sounds he chased with growing unease. Somewhere across the avenue, a conversation ended in the middle of a sentence, not because the speakers had fallen quiet, but because one of the voices simply... ceased to exist. A mother called out her son’s name with sudden panic, twisting every syllable. Tires screamed violently against asphalt before the deafening crash of metal echoed through several blocks at once, followed almost immediately by another collision somewhere farther away.
Not with the unmistakable sounds of an attack or an explosion or even a natural disaster. Those had patterns. Those he understood. Violence was loud. Predictable in its own terrible way.
This felt like reality itself had forgotten how to remain whole.
Heartbeats dissolved from every direction.
Entire pockets of life disappeared so abruptly that the spaces they left behind felt louder than any scream.
For the first time in years, his senses overwhelmed him.
The absence was unbearable.
His grip around your hand tightened instinctively until he almost feared he was hurting you.
“Stay with me,” he murmured, the request leaving him before he fully understood why he had spoken it.
You squeezed his fingers in response. “I’m right—”
The sentence never ended.
One moment your voice surrounded him, warm and unmistakably yours.
His hand lurched forward on instinct, desperately trying to hold onto fingers that no longer existed beneath his own. Instead, his grasp closed around empty air so suddenly that the motion nearly pulled him off balance. For one impossible heartbeat, his mind refused to understand what his body already knew. His other hand reached blindly toward the place where you had been standing only an instant earlier, searching for your sleeve, your shoulder, anything that might anchor you back into existence.
There was nothing to find.
Only the faint trace of your perfume lingering in the breeze.
The heartbeat he could have recognized among a million others...
Not fading into the distance.
Not hidden by the city’s endless noise.
His breath caught painfully in his chest.
“No…” The word escaped him as little more than air.
He turned toward the space beside him again, refusing to believe what every one of his senses insisted was true. His hands searched frantically through emptiness while voices erupted all around him, strangers crying out names that would never answer, children sobbing for parents who had vanished between one step and the next, engines roaring unattended as abandoned cars rolled through intersections without drivers to guide them.
Hell’s Kitchen had become a symphony of grief.
Yet none of it reached him.
He was still listening for you.
For the familiar cadence of your breathing.
For the quick flutter your heart always made whenever he kissed your forehead.
For the laugh that began quietly before escaping you completely.
He searched with a desperation that bordered on madness, extending his senses farther than he ever had before, combing through every street, every rooftop, every apartment window, willing himself to find the smallest trace that would prove this impossible moment had some explanation he simply hadn’t understood yet.
A hollow so vast it seemed to swallow the entire city.
And for the first time since the accident had taken his sight as a child, Matt Murdock found himself terrified not of what he couldn’t perceive...
If grief had taught Matt anything over the years, it was that the world possessed an astonishing talent for continuing without asking whether anyone was ready.
The city did not slow because half of its people had vanished. The trains still rumbled beneath Manhattan every morning, coffee shops unlocked their doors before dawn, judges continued filling crowded courtrooms with cases that refused to wait, and somewhere in Hell’s Kitchen another frightened kid still needed Daredevil to appear before someone else decided his life was worth less than another man’s greed. The world demanded movement with an indifference so complete that, after a while, remaining frozen began to feel less like loyalty and more like surrender.
For a long time, though, Matt surrendered anyway.
The first year after your disappearance passed beneath the weight of exhaustion so profound that he often struggled to remember where one day ended and the next began. He buried himself beneath impossible workloads during daylight hours only to spend every night throwing himself into the city’s violence with a recklessness that left even Foggy speechless. Broken ribs healed only to be replaced by fresh bruises. Cuts stitched together before splitting open again. More than once, Claire had looked at him with that mixture of frustration and pity reserved for people who had quietly given up on protecting themselves, and Matt had lowered his head because explaining the truth felt impossible.
He was not trying to die.
He simply no longer cared whether he came home.
The guilt never loosened its grip. It accompanied him into every confession, lingered between every whispered prayer and every sleepless hour before sunrise, always returning to the same unbearable certainty that perhaps, somehow, he had failed you. Reason reminded him that there had been nothing to prevent, nothing to fight, no enemy to strike down before they stole you from his hand. Faith insisted that some mysteries belonged to God alone. Neither voice proved strong enough to silence the one already living inside his own conscience.
If he had held on tighter.
If he had reacted faster.
If he had noticed something, anything, before the world unraveled around them.
He knew those thoughts were irrational.
Three years passed before he accepted something he had resisted from the very beginning: your absence had not become smaller. He had simply learned to carry it.
There had been no funeral from which to walk away, no gravestone where flowers could slowly replace fresh grief with familiar ritual. Loving someone who disappeared left no place for goodbye. Your photographs remained tucked inside a box at the back of his closet because their framed presence was too much, yet putting them away had hurt even more. Sometimes, while walking home after patrol with dried blood stiffening against his knuckles, he still found himself listening without meaning to, his senses wandering through the endless rhythm of Hell’s Kitchen in search of the heartbeat that had once anchored every corner of his world.
Every single time, memory arrived a fraction of a second too late.
It was remarkable how often hope could survive after all evidence had abandoned it.
He met Elena on an ordinary Tuesday.
She had come to Nelson, Murdock & Page to consult on a case involving corporate fraud, carrying herself with the effortless confidence of someone who had long since learned that intelligence spoke loud enough on its own. She was brilliant in a courtroom, ambitious without becoming arrogant, and her work pulled her across the country often enough that airport terminals had become almost as familiar to her as her own apartment. Foggy admired her before the first meeting had even ended.
Matt noticed something else.
She wore grief with the same quiet dignity he recognized in himself.
It took months before either of them spoke about it.
The conversation happened late one evening after a deposition that had stretched far longer than anyone anticipated. They had stopped for coffee because neither felt particularly eager to return to empty apartments, and somewhere between discussing witnesses and impossible judges, she mentioned, almost absentmindedly, that she had once been engaged.
“He disappeared during the Blip,” she said softly, not looking at him as she wrapped both hands around the paper cup. “Our wedding invitations had already been printed.”
There was no dramatic pause afterward.
Only the silence shared between two people who understood that some losses became too old to cry over and too deep to ever stop hurting.
Matt found himself telling her about you.
Your name appeared in pieces over the following weeks, woven naturally into conversations that wandered toward memories neither of them wanted to lose. He told her how you laughed with your entire body whenever something genuinely amused you, how you insisted on stealing the fries from his plate despite ordering your own, how you absentmindedly reached for his hand whenever crowded sidewalks threatened to separate the two of you. Elena never interrupted him. She never looked uncomfortable. She simply listened with the quiet respect of someone who knew that loving another person did not end simply because the world had decided to take them away.
Perhaps that was how affection first found them.
Not through desperate attempts to replace what had been lost.
Through the extraordinary relief of discovering another soul who understood that grief did not disappear simply because enough calendars had been turned.
By the time he asked her to marry him, nearly four years had passed since the day you vanished.
Their wedding had been intimate, attended only by the people who mattered most, and when he slipped the ring onto her finger, every promise he spoke was sincere. He vowed to honor her, to stand beside her, to build a home with her, and every word carried the full weight of his conviction. Elena deserved nothing less than honesty, and Matt gave her every part of himself that he believed remained capable of belonging to another person.
Getting married was the natural thing to do, it was what a man who wanted to move on had to do, wasn’t it? He had to move on. It was his duty, you would have wanted him to move on. Damn, if Matt had disappeared, he would have wanted you to get on with your life too… wouldn’t he?
A year had passed since then.
Their marriage was gentle in a way his younger self might never have understood. Elena’s work kept her traveling more often than either of them would have liked, leaving the apartment quiet for days at a time while she moved from one courtroom to the next in cities scattered across the country. She called him every evening she was away, usually from anonymous hotel rooms or bustling airports, telling him about impossible clients and delayed flights while he listened with a smile she could somehow always hear through the phone. She trusted him completely. Trusted the explanations he offered whenever another bruise appeared beneath his collar or another sleepless night settled beneath his eyes.
She never imagined that, after hanging up, he would pull on a mask instead of going to bed.
He hated, too, how easily the silence left behind by her travels allowed Daredevil to reclaim the nights that had never truly stopped belonging to him.
It was unfair, because Matt Murdock truly believed in his wedding vows.
But the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen was something else entirely. He was a different person.
Even when Matt almost told Elena the truth, the reality of Daredevil choked him off, forcing him to realize that, even if he had the strength, he couldn’t open up like that again.
Telling Elena about Daredevil meant being completely naked before her, and that was a risk. It was risky for Elena. It was risky for Matt, because Daredevil didn’t just belong to Hell’s Kitchen, he belonged to you.
That intimacy, that love for the lawyer and the devil, had belonged to you. It still belonged to you even though you were gone.
There were evenings when he watched the city from the rooftop of Saint Agnes, listening to thousands of strangers living lives that had continued despite impossible loss, and wondered whether healing was simply another word people invented when surviving became less painful to describe.
Because the truth was far messier.
He loved her kindness, her intelligence, the steady certainty with which she chose him every single day without asking him to become someone he could never be. Loving her had not erased the man grief had shaped, nor had it erased the memories that still lived quietly inside him. It had simply taught him that the human heart possessed a frightening capacity to grow around old wounds without ever truly closing them.
Yet there remained one truth he had never spoken aloud.
Not even during confession.
Sometimes, in the deepest hours of the night, when Hell’s Kitchen settled into that peculiar hush that only he could hear beneath the city’s endless heartbeat, he allowed himself to imagine the life that had been stolen from both of you.
Not because he wished himself elsewhere.
Not because he regretted the vows resting against the gold band around his finger.
But because somewhere, in another version of the world untouched by impossible miracles and unbearable loss, you had always been the woman he believed he would grow old beside.
That future had died long before he ever stood at an altar with Elena.
He had built another life from the broken pieces left behind.
And still, on nights when the wind carried the scent of rain through the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, there were moments—brief enough to disappear before guilt could fully bloom—in which he caught himself wondering whether loving someone with all that remained of his heart had ever truly meant he had stopped loving the person who had once carried all of it.
Was the internal comparison unfair? The morbid return in the moments of solitude that the devil of Hell’s Kitchen granted him? Was it unfair to you? To Elena?
Unfair to himself because he was torn between man and the devil? Because one thing was clear, Elena’s husband was not the devil of Hell’s Kitchen; the lonely nights took care of making that difference.
Even so, it wasn’t yours either. Because you weren’t there.
The complexity of abandonment, of guilt, of comparison tormented him. Perhaps it would always be this way. Matt was torn in two; between you and the present. Between the man he was left with and the whole man he used to be.
Five years had passed since the world had torn itself apart.
In all that time, Matt had become intimately familiar with the sounds of absence.
It was a strange thing to understand, perhaps impossible to explain to anyone whose world had always been shaped by sight, but cities changed when enough people disappeared. Hell’s Kitchen had never recovered the rhythm it once possessed. New voices had settled into old apartments, different footsteps had replaced familiar ones along sidewalks he could navigate without a cane, children had grown into teenagers, grieving spouses had slowly learned to sleep alone, and somewhere within that endless transformation the city had acquired another heartbeat entirely.
Quieter in ways only he could perceive.
There were spaces within the city’s pulse that had remained painfully empty for five years, invisible to everyone except the man who had memorized the sound of its soul long before the rest of the world realized it had changed.
Matt had stopped looking for those empty spaces.
He had never stopped hearing them.
That afternoon had begun like any other.
The courthouse had finally emptied after a tedious hearing that seemed determined to stretch far beyond everyone’s patience, and Foggy, as expected, had spent the walk outside complaining about opposing counsel with enough theatrical outrage to earn several amused glances from passing strangers. Matt listened with half a smile, offering the occasional remark while the rest of his attention drifted effortlessly toward the familiar music surrounding him. A delivery truck rattled somewhere across the avenue. Someone argued over the price of flowers outside a corner shop. The steady rhythm of traffic rolled through the neighborhood beneath the constant murmur of thousands of conversations unfolding all at once.
Beautifully, wonderfully ordinary.
No violent sound announcing that something impossible had just entered the world.
Instead, it happened with such astonishing suddenness that, for one suspended heartbeat, Matt genuinely believed his senses had betrayed him.
His breath caught somewhere deep inside his chest.
The change did not arrive gradually, nor did it spread from one street into the next. It happened all at once, like an orchestra in which hundreds of missing instruments suddenly rejoined the same unfinished symphony. Heartbeats flooded back into the city with breathtaking force, so many at once that the familiar harmony of Hell’s Kitchen swelled into something almost too immense for even his heightened senses to comprehend. Voices erupted where only silence had existed a moment before. Footsteps resumed in places where time itself had seemed to hesitate for years. Laughter burst unexpectedly into the afternoon air only to dissolve into frightened cries as bewilderment overtook relief.
The city had become unbearably alive.
Matt stopped walking so abruptly that Foggy nearly collided with him.
“What is it?” Foggy asked.
Every instinct he possessed had turned outward.
He stood perfectly still while the impossible unfolded around him, allowing his senses to chase the tidal wave of returning lives spreading through every block of Hell’s Kitchen. The sheer magnitude of it threatened to overwhelm him. Five years earlier he had experienced the unbearable horror of listening to the city lose half its heartbeat in the span of seconds. He had never imagined the opposite could be even more staggering.
Because absence had a shape.
It simply arrived, overflowing every corner of the world until there was no room left for disbelief.
Somewhere nearby, a man collapsed to his knees sobbing as another voice—one Matt recognized with startling clarity despite not hearing it for years—called his name over and over again. A child cried in confusion while two adults attempted to explain something they clearly did not understand themselves. Engines roared unattended as startled drivers abandoned their cars in the middle of traffic, rushing toward people who had appeared where empty pavement had existed only moments before.
Confusion swept through New York like wildfire.
His entire world had narrowed to a single, terrifying realization.
If every heartbeat erased five years earlier had suddenly found its way back into the city...
The thought never reached its conclusion.
Hope entered him with such breathtaking violence that it nearly stole the breath from his lungs.
For five years he had trained himself not to imagine impossible things. Hope had become dangerous after your disappearance. It whispered lies. It convinced him, on sleepless nights, that perhaps one day your heartbeat would somehow reappear among the countless others surrounding him, only for morning to remind him that miracles belonged in Scripture, not on the cracked sidewalks of Hell’s Kitchen.
Yet standing there, surrounded by thousands of impossible miracles happening all at once, hope no longer felt foolish.
His senses surged instinctively across the city, stretching farther than he had allowed them to in years. He searched without thinking, desperate to separate one heartbeat from another, but the world had dissolved into beautiful chaos. There were simply too many voices, too many reunions, too many tears, too many people rediscovering lives they believed had ended forever. Every street echoed with relief and disbelief woven so tightly together they became indistinguishable.
Not because you were absent.
Because the city was suddenly overflowing with life again.
For the first time in five years, he knew with absolute certainty that searching no longer meant chasing a ghost.
Somewhere beneath that impossible sea of returning heartbeats, yours was beating once more.
Somewhere you were opening your eyes, believing only seconds had passed since your fingers had slipped from his.
The thought shattered something inside him.
Five years had lived inside him.
Five years had carved themselves into his bones, had changed the man he saw himself becoming, had taught him to build a life around a grief that possessed no ending. For you, none of those years existed. The morning had barely finished unfolding before the world had simply... continued without you.
He scarcely realized he had begun moving.
Foggy called after him, confusion evident in every hurried step that followed for only a few seconds before disappearing behind the noise swelling through the streets.
His body had already decided long before his mind caught up.
Every promise, every prayer, every impossible dream he had spent five years forcing himself to bury had suddenly clawed their way back to the surface with devastating force.
He did not think about the gold band resting against his finger.
He did not think about the apartment waiting for him across the city.
He did not think about consequences, or vows, or the fragile life he had painstakingly rebuilt from the ruins left behind by your disappearance.
For one brief, profoundly human moment...
There was only one truth capable of existing inside his heart.
And after five years of mourning a woman he had believed lost forever, Matt Murdock found himself doing the one thing he had dreamed of every night before forcing himself to wake.
He ran toward the impossible, praying that somewhere within the beautiful chaos of a world learning how to breathe again...
...he would find you before he convinced himself he had imagined your return.
There were places a person never truly left behind.
Matt had discovered that long before the accident had taken his sight, long before Hell’s Kitchen had become a map etched not in streets or buildings but in echoes, scents and heartbeats. Memory possessed an extraordinary stubbornness, fastening itself to ordinary corners of the world until they became impossible to cross without reliving the lives once lived there. Some people remembered places because of what they had seen. Matt remembered them because of what they had heard.
There was a stretch of sidewalk on West Forty-Fourth Street where your laughter still lived inside him.
The sound itself had vanished the moment you had.
Yet every time his feet carried him over the uneven concrete where your fingers had slipped from his own, his mind betrayed him with perfect clarity. He could still recall the warmth of your hand, the rhythm of your breathing as you turned toward him to say something neither of you would ever hear completed, and the impossible emptiness that had followed when his grasp closed around nothing but air.
For five years he had avoided that corner whenever he could.
When he couldn’t, he crossed it quickly, as though grief might fail to recognize him if he refused to linger.
Now he found himself running toward it.
His lungs burned from the effort, the afternoon air scraping painfully against his throat as the city surged around him in beautiful, bewildered chaos. Everywhere people called out names with voices made raw by relief. Children cried because strangers they recognized as parents were suddenly holding them again. Cars remained abandoned in the middle of intersections while reunited families clung to one another as though afraid the universe might change its mind if they loosened their embrace.
Matt scarcely registered any of it.
His senses had narrowed until the entire city existed only as an endless sea of heartbeats, each one colliding with the next in a tide so immense it threatened to overwhelm him. Never before had the gift that had guided him his entire life felt so painfully inadequate. There were simply too many people, too many lives returning all at once, each heartbeat demanding to be heard until they merged into a single living pulse that shook the foundations of the city itself.
He reached the corner almost without realizing it.
The world seemed to pause around him.
This was where he had lost you.
Five years earlier the pavement beneath his shoes had borne witness to the moment his future disappeared between his fingers. He had stood exactly here, his hand still suspended in empty air long after you were gone, refusing to believe that an entire life could simply cease to exist without leaving so much as a whisper behind.
The concrete had not changed.
The traffic lights still clicked patiently above the intersection. The same bakery on the opposite side of the street still carried the warm scent of fresh bread drifting through its open doorway. Somewhere nearby, someone laughed with the same carefree abandon that had once made you smile whenever you passed this corner together on Sunday mornings.
Only the two of you had not.
His entire body went rigid.
Among the impossible chorus surrounding him, one rhythm emerged with such breathtaking familiarity that every other sound seemed to dissolve around it. Soft, steady, carrying that tiny irregular flutter that appeared whenever you were confused or anxious, the one he had teased you about countless times because your heart had always betrayed emotions your voice tried so hard to hide.
For five years he had searched for that rhythm in dreams he knew could never become real.
Now it existed barely twenty feet away.
Matt forgot how to breathe.
His senses clung desperately to it, terrified that if he looked away—even for the fraction of a second blindness had taught him never to waste—it would disappear again.
Your heartbeat was racing.
He heard your breathing quicken as you turned slowly in place, trying to make sense of voices that sounded older than they should, of strangers embracing one another in tears, of traffic halted in impossible disarray. Shoes scraped uncertainly against the pavement as you took hesitant steps, and beneath every movement your pulse climbed higher, overwhelmed by a world that no longer resembled the one you remembered leaving scarcely a heartbeat ago.
You had simply been walking beside him.
You had begun answering whatever he had whispered.
You had felt his hand around yours.
No passage of time. No years. No absence. Only a single blink before reality returned wearing a face you no longer recognized.
Matt felt his chest tighten with such force that it bordered on pain.
Of course you were frightened.
Of course you were searching for him.
Your heartbeat kept shifting from one direction to another, each turn accompanied by tiny movements of your breathing as though your eyes desperately scanned the crowd for the man who, as far as you knew, had been standing beside you only moments before.
How could you? To you, he had vanished.
The realization struck him with heartbreaking clarity.
For five years he had believed himself to be the one left behind.
He had never stopped to imagine that, from your perspective, he was the one who had disappeared. That somewhere inside your frightened heart, you were wondering why his hand had suddenly let go.
A sound escaped him before he even realized he had spoken.
Barely louder than a whisper.
Yet his voice carried through the chaos with the certainty of someone who had spent five endless years saying that name only inside prayers.
For one suspended, impossible moment...
The entire world seemed to wait.
The sound of your heartbeat changed the instant you heard your name.
Matt recognized it before anything else.
Confusion gave way to disbelief so quickly that both feelings seemed to blend into a single heartbeat, accelerating against his chest with a force that made his own tremble. For countless nights he had imagined what it would be like to hear that rhythm again; he had thought that perhaps he would cry, that perhaps he would be unable to move, that the pain of the years would finally paralyze him just as the miracle unfolded before him.
Reality was much simpler.
His legs began to move before his mind could stop them.
He pushed through the crowd, oblivious to those running in the opposite direction, dodging bodies by pure instinct, guided only by the heartbeat he knew better than his own. Each step closed the distance between them until your breath ceased to blend with the others and filled the space that had remained unbearably empty for five years.
For a split second, neither of you said a word.
You stared at him, not understanding why he had suddenly appeared at the other end of the street, why he was breathing so heavily, why his shoulders were trembling as if he had run for miles. You didn’t understand the silent tears streaming down cheeks you had never seen break down like that, nor the desperate gesture with which his hands seemed to search for you before even daring to touch you.
Because for you, five years hadn’t passed.
It had been just an ordinary morning.
You remembered the warmth of his fingers in yours, the quiet murmur of the city around you both, and that familiar feeling of walking beside the man you loved. You remembered starting a sentence...
...and then, somehow inexplicable, he was no longer by your side.
There was no gap between those two memories.
Matt was the one who bridged that distance.
His hands first found your arms, with an almost fearful delicacy, as if even then a part of him was convinced that one too abrupt a movement would be enough to make you disappear again. His fingers slowly traced the fabric of your jacket, the curve of your shoulders, the contours of your face, memorizing every tiny detail with an urgency only someone accustomed to knowing the world through touch could understand.
Your heart was still beating beneath his hands.
The air left his lungs in a tremor he couldn’t control, and before he knew what he was doing, he pulled you against him with desperate force, burying his face in your neck and hair as if he needed to hide there from the rest of the world.
His hands roamed over you as if they were touching you for the first time. Matt didn’t think; he simply touched you, embraced you, and his hands moved up to cup your face and press his lips to yours.
It was a desperate union, one you didn’t manage to reciprocate in time because he broke the kiss to bury his face in your neck and hold you tightly.
The embrace wasn’t elegant.
It was the embrace of a man who had spent five years clinging to an absence and who, suddenly, discovered that the emptiness had an end.
His arms encircled you so tightly that he almost seemed to want to convince the entire universe that this time he wasn’t going to let go.
His breathing was ragged.
You could feel his chest rise and fall against yours, how the heart you had heard so many times in the silence of the early morning now beat with an unfamiliar force.
Then he spoke, not to explain. He couldn’t, he didn’t even know where to begin.
The only words he managed to utter were a broken whisper against your hair. “You’re here…” His voice cracked. His fingers tightened a little more on the fabric of your coat. “You’re here…”
He repeated it like a prayer.
As if saying it out loud could make the miracle permanent.
As if the mere sound of those words could prevent fate from snatching him away again.
Each repetition sounded different. The first was filled with disbelief. The second, with relief.
The third, a love so immense that not even five years of silence had diminished it.
You remained motionless in his arms, too confused to understand why this encounter seemed to hurt him so much. Your own hands took a few seconds to react, hanging awkwardly at your sides as you tried to make sense of the chaos that continued to erupt around you. People were crying, others were shouting names you didn’t recognize, some were embracing each other with a desperation that seemed disproportionate to a simple afternoon in New York.
The only thing that did...
You recognized the way he said your name.
You recognized the clean scent of his cologne mixed with the unmistakable aroma of rain and brick that always seemed to cling to him after a day exploring the city.
You recognized the sense of security you felt whenever his arms were around you.
So, even though fear still gripped your chest and questions grew with each passing second, you ended up returning the hug with the same ease you had hundreds of times before. Your hands slowly moved up his back until they grasped the fabric of his jacket, gently caressing him as you felt a lump form in your throat, noticing that his whole body was still trembling.
“Matt…” you whispered with infinite caution, pulling back just enough to try and find his face, completely unable to understand why he sounded like a man who had just recovered something he’d spent a lifetime believing was lost. “What’s going on?”
The question hung between them.
And, for the first time since the universe had decided to return to him the one heartbeat whose absence he had never learned to bear...
Matt Murdock had no answer.
Nothing around you resembled the world you remembered, and yet the only thing capable of frightening you was the man standing in front of you.
The chaos unfolding through the streets should have demanded your attention. People were crying openly in the middle of the sidewalks, embracing strangers with the kind of desperation usually reserved for miracles, while somewhere in the distance the endless chorus of sirens continued multiplying until it became impossible to tell where one ended and the next began. Entire families seemed to have materialized out of nowhere only to collapse into each other’s arms as though they had spent a lifetime searching for one another. Voices overlapped in every direction, some trembling with relief, others cracking beneath confusion so profound that even the simplest questions became impossible to answer.
Because Matt was still looking at you with an expression you had never seen before.
Relief belonged to people who had misplaced something precious and unexpectedly found it again. What lived inside his face ran much deeper than that. It was the look of someone who had buried a future with his own hands and was now watching it walk back toward him.
The realization unsettled you before you understood why.
You had spent enough years loving him to recognize every subtle change in the way he carried himself. Matt had never needed his eyes to communicate what he felt. His entire body did it for him. The smallest shift of his shoulders, the angle at which he inclined his head whenever he listened to you speak, the almost imperceptible tightening of his jaw whenever guilt found him before words did. Loving him had taught you an entirely different language, one built from gestures too quiet for anyone else to notice.
Now that language was telling you something your mind stubbornly refused to hear.
Not dramatically. Not enough that someone passing by would have given him a second glance. But you had loved every version of his face long before you realized you were memorizing it. You knew exactly how old he had looked when you kissed him that morning.
This man had lived longer.
The thought entered your mind so softly that, at first, you almost smiled at its absurdity.
How could someone look older within the span of a few seconds? And yet the feeling refused to leave.
There were delicate lines resting beside his mouth that you had never traced with your fingertips before. A faint thread of silver caught the afternoon light near his temple before disappearing again among dark curls that had grown slightly longer than you remembered. Even the way he held himself had changed. Matt had always carried an invisible weight across his shoulders, one born from secrets, faith, and the impossible responsibility of believing he could save a city determined to destroy itself.
This weight was different.
It had settled into his bones.
The strangest part was not seeing those changes. It was realizing that he seemed completely unaware of them. As though they had become so much a part of him that he no longer remembered the man he had once been.
A cold knot began tightening somewhere beneath your ribs.
Nothing could have happened.
You had been walking beside him.
You remembered every second with impossible clarity. The warmth of his hand wrapped around yours. The teasing smile that had lingered in his voice after you stole another kiss before work. The ordinary sounds of Hell’s Kitchen waking around the two of you.
Still wearing the same clothes.
Still carrying the same thoughts.
Still expecting him to tell you that whatever strange interruption had just shaken the city would soon make sense.
Instead, he simply looked at you.
There was such unbearable tenderness in his expression that it almost hurt to meet it. It was the way someone might look upon a photograph rescued from a fire after believing it reduced to ashes. As though every second spent watching you breathe carried its own quiet miracle.
The silence between you lengthened.
Not because either of you wished it to. Because neither knew how to cross it.
“Matt…” His name escaped your lips almost involuntarily.
You expected him to answer.
His mouth parted slightly before closing again, and something inside your chest twisted with a fear that seemed to appear from nowhere. Matt always found words. Even when they were clumsy, even when he hid behind humor or stubbornness, he always reached for something to anchor the two of you.
It was as though language itself had abandoned him.
Without thinking, you reached for him.
The movement was so instinctive that only after your hands had already begun to move did you remember how often you had done exactly the same thing before. Whenever the noise around him became too much, whenever guilt pulled him somewhere your voice couldn’t follow, you always found his hands first. He once confessed that your touch had a way of quieting the world around him, of reminding him that no matter how loud Hell’s Kitchen became, there would always be one heartbeat he never needed to search for.
You smiled faintly at the memory.
Your fingers closed gently around his wrists before sliding downward with the ease of long-practiced familiarity, tracing the lines you already knew by heart. There was the tiny scar near the base of his thumb that he insisted came from cooking despite both of you knowing perfectly well it hadn’t. The roughness across his palms, earned from years of climbing brick walls he never admitted climbing. The familiar warmth of his skin, so achingly real that relief briefly eclipsed every question crowding your mind.
At least you had found him.
Your thumb continued its absent journey across his left hand, but then, it stopped. Something smooth interrupted the path your fingers had traveled a hundred times before. For a brief, almost merciful instant, your mind failed to recognize what your skin already had.
You frowned ever so slightly, your thumb brushing over the object once more with slow, uncertain curiosity.
Your fingers lingered there, unwilling to move, as though remaining still might somehow prevent the truth from taking shape.
You traced it again. Every impossible curve. Every unmistakable edge.
Until there could be no mistake left to make.
The world did not shatter.
It did something infinitely crueler.
It remained exactly as it was.
People continued crying, sirens continued singing through the streets. Somewhere nearby, a little girl laughed before dissolving into happy sobs against the shoulder of a woman who held her as though she had returned from the dead.
The city kept breathing. Only yours forgot how.
Your hand never left his. It simply rested there, suspended over the narrow band of gold that had no right to exist. Your thoughts scattered in every direction at once, each one collapsing before reaching its conclusion.
The word echoed inside your mind with quiet desperation.
You had kissed him this morning.
You had laughed with him this morning.
You had held this very hand...
And there had been nothing beneath your fingertips except the familiar warmth of his skin.
Your gaze lifted from your joined hands to his face with agonizing slowness, as though some part of you still believed he might smile gently, explain that none of this meant what you feared it meant, that there was some absurd misunderstanding waiting to dissolve the terror steadily blooming inside your chest.
Instead, you found tears gathering silently beneath eyes that had never been able to see you, and suddenly every tiny detail you had tried so hard to ignore returned all at once.
The silver near his temples.
The deeper lines around his mouth.
The exhaustion woven into his smile.
The unbearable grief that had clung to him from the moment he wrapped his arms around you.
None of those things had appeared in seconds.
Time had placed them there.
A terrible understanding began unfolding inside you, not because anyone had spoken it aloud, but because your heart had already reached the place your mind was still desperately trying to avoid.
Something had happened while you were gone.
Something so enormous that it had changed the man standing before you.
Your fingers trembled violently against the gold resting beneath them.
When your voice finally emerged, it no longer sounded like your own. It sounded like someone standing at the edge of a truth they already knew would destroy them. “...Matt…” You swallowed hard, fighting against the impossible pressure rising inside your throat. “...what? What is this?” you whispered, trembling.
Matt didn’t miss your reaction, he didn’t ignore the way he could almost feel your heart seize inside your chest; the fear that surged through your body and filled his nostrils; the way your hands began to tremble beneath his. He could feel you completely, he wanted to; he needed to feel you even in the pain and confusion that was crushing you. He needed to be certain that you were in his hands even though reality was about to break your heart.
Matt couldn’t think about Elena now; he wouldn’t allow it, nor would he. It was an injustice, a flaw in his character, but in this moment, he didn’t care how much guilt he carried because he had you in front of him, he had you again after five years of imagining you only in prayers and miracles that would never happen.
God, Matt Murdock was always aware that he was a man of contradictions, contradictions that had been battling within him ever since his being split between man and devil.
“You…” you exhaled nervously, as if a ball of uncertainty were forming in your stomach and rising up your windpipe, trying to choke you.
The contact between you two broke with unbearable slowness.
It wasn’t a sudden or impulsive movement. Your fingers simply stopped resting on Matt’s and began to withdraw with an almost reverential caution, as if the mere act of removing them could disrupt the delicate balance that still sustained that incomprehensible reality. The touch between your skin and his diminished until it became a barely perceptible caress, a line of heat fading centimeter by centimeter, and you discovered that the smallest gesture in the world could hurt more than any wound you had ever known.
You couldn’t bring yourself to keep touching him.
Not because you’d stopped wanting to.
For years—or perhaps that very morning, because your heart still stubbornly clung to the belief that both could be true at once—Matt’s hands had always been a refuge. They had been the place where your fears ended after a nightmare, the place you went without thinking when the noise of the city became too intense, or when he returned from a night out wearing a black suit that neither of you ever mentioned aloud. You had learned the shape of his fingers as naturally as one learns the way home.
Now that same hand bore the mark of a life you didn’t know.
The ring still weighed heavily on your memory with unbearable clarity. You could still feel the metal under the tip of your thumb, so cold, so foreign, so utterly impossible, that a part of you still hoped to wake from that absurd confusion and find Matt laughing at your expression as he asked you what on earth you were thinking.
You allowed yourself to look at him again, to look at his face once more, to analyze him again, even though something inside you screamed for you to run.
You wanted—no, you needed—to relive what had happened before. To see those features again, so familiar yet so foreign now. You were a person of repetition, and now your eyes needed to retrace the new path that was the face of the man you loved with the lethal cadence of a weapon.
Even when you longed to fight against the fact that seconds can’t be years, you were certain it would be a losing battle. You had seen it before; you had noticed the passage of time on him.
You forced yourself to look again, this time not with the wonder of someone who encounters something inexplicable, but with the understanding that this was no longer your time, or your person.
There were tiny lines resting around Matt’s mouth that you didn’t remember ever kissing. His dark hair was still as messy as ever, though a few silver strands peeked out discreetly among the strands near his temples, too few for anyone to notice, just enough for you to know they’d never been there that morning.
You had seen those details seconds before, but seeing them again, now with the awareness of a present unknown to you, was devastatingly necessary. You remained, somehow, in the past, while this Matt belonged to a present you couldn’t enter.
Even the way he stood was different. Matt had always carried the weight of the world on his shoulders, but that burden had changed form. It was no longer the restless weariness of a man convinced he could still save everyone. It was something quieter. Deeper. A fatigue that seemed to have settled permanently in his bones.
And the most terrible thing was realizing that he no longer seemed to notice. He had lived long enough to get used to becoming that man.
You felt an emptiness slowly opening beneath your ribs.
It was a feeling much harder to name, because it came from a place where love remained intact while the world insisted on showing you that you no longer belonged to it.
Matt was still Matt. You could feel his warmth, that overflowing and intense warmth that belonged only to you. You could feel how his body, his attention, his senses, were fixed on you; you knew him well enough to know that he was reading you.
But at the same time, he wasn’t your Matt. Not entirely.
The certainty of that thought was devastating.
Your hands slowly descended until they lay motionless beside your body, as if they no longer knew where to rest. Instinctively, you took a step back, just one, but it was enough to make the space between you feel unbearably heavy.
Matt felt it even before he heard you move.
The air left his lungs abruptly.
For five years, he had relived that moment in his dreams with morbid precision. It always began the same way: your fingers slipped from his grasp, the sound of your breathing disappeared amidst thousands of other heartbeats, and when he tried to find you again, only a silence so absolute it physically ached.
Now that same silence threatened to repeat itself.
His body reacted before any thought.
The hand you had just let go reached for yours again with desperate urgency, barely clinging to your fingers before you could pull away completely. There was no strength in the gesture, only a fear so raw it was impossible not to see it.
The last time your hand left his, you disappeared. You were gone for five years, and that memory threatened to shatter everything Matt had built during those five years. His usually composed demeanor vanished because, in that moment, he couldn’t afford to lose you, couldn’t allow the universe to take you away from him.
Out of pure instinct, his hands quickly moved up to your arms to hold you close, even though your body seemed to want to pull away from his touch. Oh, how it hurt him, how it hurt to feel that you were, in your own way, understanding everything around you. You were overwhelmed, scared, and confused; you were grieving the loss of a relationship that never truly ended, but that in this moment no longer existed.
“Sweetheart…” Matt allowed himself to say. That nickname, that sweet word he’d forbidden himself to utter again. He never called anyone that again, he couldn’t, not after you stole the innate romanticism of a man dedicated to charm. “Please…” Matt whispered, his voice betraying his desperation as his fingers gripped the inside of your jacket.
Matt was begging you, a prayer no longer directed to God, but rather to you. Because the last time he had felt your hands leave his, the universe had taken five years to return them, and he still remembered with unbearable clarity every single night he had woken up reaching for the side of the bed that he always found empty.
“No… no…” you whispered, shaking your head as tears began to well up in your eyes, flooding your gaze. “Something… something happened to me,” you whispered as the weight of reality crashed down on your shoulders.
Matt could smell your tears, the salt water gathering in your sweet eyes, which were losing the peace you had felt before; the peace of a morning that was stolen from you.
For you, the world never stopped, for you, the world didn’t move on, but rather froze in a single moment, and the rest was stolen from you. For you, it was still that morning when you two left together, hand in hand. Together without five years of separation and pain.
Your pain and Matt’s were the same. Absence. Your absence, your stolen years. The absence of you and the years of incomplete mourning for Matt.
You were stolen from him. Matt was robbed of five years, years in which he would surely have built his life with you, years in which you would have grown together. Years in which the ring on his finger would have borne your name, not that of a woman whom, at that moment, Matt didn’t allow himself to think about. A good woman who had also lost someone and found refuge in a man who didn’t even bother to think about her right now.
It was so unfair, so painful, because this situation was the kind of miracle Matt had always dreamed of, but he never allowed himself to imagine it could be such a devastating reality.
Guilt washed over him like a wave crashing against the hardest concrete. Guilt because Elena wasn’t a bad woman, because she didn’t deserve to be dragged into darkness like Matt was doing now. Guilt because he didn’t want to, and couldn’t, allow himself to think about anyone but you.
Guilt because he moved on without you. Because he couldn’t wait a little longer for your return, because you would always come back to him.
It was as if the promises you two had made in the past had been reversed: Matt always said he would come back to you, and you said you would always wait for him. You kept his promise; he couldn’t keep yours.
You came back to him, just like Matt used to promise you he’d come back to you every time he went out on patrol at night. You, his sweet love, his sweet girl, the one who was always patient, always there beside the devil of Hell’s Kitchen without complaint.
Matt didn’t wait for you. He moved on.
It was absurd, the guilt that was drowning him and preventing him from explaining the situation you were both in. No one was sure the blipped ones would return, but here you were.
Your same scent, your same pulse, the same person.
You were standing before him, just like the day he lost you. Just as beautiful, just as alive, but this time with a new fear instilled by the uncertainty of an unimaginable unknown.
“Listen to me, sweetheart,” Matt said, his voice not as firm as you knew it, but trembling, almost desperate. “You have to listen to me, please, but don’t let go, I beg you,” he said, tightening his grip on your arms with surprising strength, a desperate strength.
“The ring… you have a ring… I…” you exhaled rapidly, several times. “I… I don’t understand, you… you look… older… you have a ring…” you said, trying to organize the maelstrom that was assailing you, the amount of unspoken information your brain was taking in.
The sirens wailed in the distance; chaos erupted in cries and screams. You weren’t the only one whose life seemed to be resuming just now. Time stood still for many lives that now hoped to carry on as if nothing had happened, as if time hadn’t passed for the remnants who hadn’t left.
“I know, I know, I know, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Matt began to repeat over and over. “You’re here, that matters,” he said, pulling you close, holding you with a force that wouldn’t allow you to pull away.
You didn’t return his hug. You couldn’t.
You had very little information, only the fact that your beloved Matt looked older—not old, but older—and that there was a ring, what appeared to be a wedding ring, on his finger.
But not on yours. There was no ring on your finger. You and Matt had never married, not even been engaged. Even though he had repeatedly expressed his desire to unite you in holy matrimony, there was never a ring. It wasn’t the right time; the moment for you to unite in the most sacred of unions hadn’t arrived.
Hundreds of times Matt told you that marriage wasn’t something he had thought about because of the way his life was, but that you completed his life in such a way that thinking about marrying you was the natural thing to do. You were the only woman he’d ever allow himself to marry; those were his words on countless nights when you were united in the most intimate of loves.
A lie, because this man clearly had a wedding ring. A promise that belonged to another lifetime.
A promise time had stolen before either of you realized it.
One that didn’t connect him to you, but to another woman who took your place in whatever had happened between you and Matt.
The idea settled in your being in such a way that your body felt heavy, and for the first time, you didn’t return Matt’s embrace. You didn’t know what to feel, you didn’t know you were mourning the life that was now only a memory and not the certainty of the present.
You let Matt hold you as he whispered a thousand apologies and reminded himself that you were there. His voice carried an emotional weight you thought you’d never heard before. It held a desperation unlike that of the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, because this devil was no longer the same one who had kissed you that morning; this devil was older and more tormented.
This man who held you, unwilling to let go, was searching in you for something that had been taken from him, and now he planned to slip from his grasp once more.
This time, to walk away willingly.
You didn’t move, you didn’t say anything more as empty tears streamed down your face.
You lost your life, you don’t know for how long, but you did.
In that time, you also lost Matt.
notes: another rather long one-shot! but i started this one a week ago (o more, idk), and i continued it little by little, lmao.
in this case, i wanted to make Matt's contradictions clear; he's a complex character, and he's in a complex situation. love is like that: messy, just like matt. so i wanted to make that idea clear because, obviously, he's going to contradict himself in his actions, thoughts, and words. he loves elena, but does he love her completely, like he loved you? it's a post-loss love that's gentle because elena is good, but at the same time, matt is still matt, and you're still you… idk, i hope the pain came across well. the reality is that there is no right answer beyond the passage of time and absence.
