Time After Time
Y/N keeps her traumatic past a secret from her closest friends but when Karen invites her, Matt and Foggy to dinner it gets harder for Y/N to conceal her eating disorder in front of them.
Pairing: Matt Murdock x Female Reader
Trigger Warnings: Eating Disorder, childhood trauma, child abuse, angst, anxiety, eating struggles, depression, self-destructive behaviour
It's not proofread yet so please excuse any mistakes! ❤️
Growing up in an abusive household, you persevered the self-destructive mannerisms into your adulthood which you were taught by your parents as a child.
Even though you were already working on some of your issues with a therapist, some of your habits just seemed to stick to you like glue. You couldn't control it and no matter how hard you tried to overcome what's been bothering you the most, you mostly felt like giving up.
Something that was so natural and important to every living being on this earth, a completely normal task in every day's life, was your biggest challenge to face.
Just thinking about it made your heart beat faster and your hands sweaty in panic. Everytime you got confronted with it, even if you just got a tiny whiff of it, you had to fight not to give in to an unbearable demand of your body to throw up.
You felt ashamed that it made you feel this anxious as if you were going to fight a lion in the raw wilderness but what made you this distraught was something so harmless that it almost made you laugh about your sheer fear of it.
Eating.
It wasn't that you were scared that food would hurt you in any way, but still you were connecting pain with eating. It all resulted from a complex trauma you had to endure in your childhood.
Your parents were cold when it came to showing love and affection. They were hard on you, more than your soul could bear and now you were a young adult with more problems to ever catch up on and unable to build a life fitting to your age. On some days you still felt like you were a child - constantly overwhelmed with things every normal adult handles on their daily basis without a breakdown.
But the most prominent damage that stuck with you was your eating disorder.
Since you can think you had to ask your parents for permission to eat something. You always had to wait until they finished eating and had to hope that they would leave something for you but in most cases you had to go to bed with an aching tummy - starving to the point where you couldn't move a single muscle anymore from pain and being too weak.
It's all in the past now and you would think that now that you were an adult and have broken off any contact with your parents as soon as you went to college, you would live your best life - eating every meal your parents forbid you. But it resulted in the direct opposite.
You developed a fear of eating due to your disturbed eating habits your entire life. You were raised with the feeling that you needed permission to eat. That you weren't allowed to eat. That you didn't matter enough to get a plate too.
And this issue has been anchored up so deep inside of you that you were on some nights starving yourself on purpose, because you felt like you weren't allowed to eat something. For example when you made a mistake at work that resulted in you and your colleagues fighting that you felt not worthy of food.
When you opened up about these issues to your therapist for the first time, you remember that she in all sincerety told you that you have the permission to eat whatever and whenever and as much as you want. And you remember that these few words brought you to tears. Because it was unfortunately reality that no one has every said these words to you because for most of the people it is something self-evident. But still you were struggling with eating three meals a day and portions appropriate for your height and age.
It often resulted into a panic attack whent it was time for dinner again and you just got used to it being much easier to just skip the meal entirely and hunger the whole night than to face your fear. You were constantly living on the edge. Too weak, mentally a wrack, always in pain whether it was just a headache or a slight dizziness, never fully present and never fully rested. And the cause of all of this was just your disordered eating. You tried to make yourself clear, that when you started to regularly eat and it doesn't matter what, you just need to eat something, than your body and your psyche will heal. But you couldn't force the improvement. It was all part of the long process you had to patiently accomplish to really see a milestone.
Now given, how utterly complicated this simple task was for you, you were absolutely horrified when your colleague and close friend Karen Page invited you and your two other friends and colleagues Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson to dinner at her place.
She just shortly moved into a new apartement and wanted to invite you all for weeks now. For weeks you dreaded the day where the dinner took place, trying to come up with excuses to not appear but in the end your conscience forced you to go.
Your friends didn't know about your eating disorder.
It wasn't that you didn't tell them because you didn't trusted them, it was rather that you were so deeply ashamed. You were scared that they would start seeing you in a different light - a negative kind. And since you were raised with cold-heartedness, a part of you expected everyone around you to not care about you. You didn't wanted to assume that about your best friends, but when you didn't even matter to your own parents then why would you matter to them?
And these were just some of the reasons why you kept everything you felt so close to yourself.
Right now, you were sitting at the dining table in Karen's apartement next to Matt. Your hands were shaking and you could practically feel every drop of blood draining from your face as you fought against a nausea in fear of having to eat. However that wasn't the only reason why your heart was racing in your chest. No matter how hard you tried to fight it, you couldn't deny that you were in love with Matt and had been so for a while now. But you would never act upon your feelings and tell him - because you weren't good enough. And you'd never be.
You were your own worst enemy.
Talking yourself down like this on a daily basis and just assuming that no one would consider you to be worthy. These were the thoughts you weren't able yet to tell your therapist because you even felt this turmoil against her. That you weren't even worthy to be her patient.
And just like that it was all coming back around to the self-destructive mannerisms you were taught in your childhood. You always came back full circle to your trauma and you desperately wanted to escape this hamster wheel you got put in.
"I tried something new tonight." Karen said proudly with a hint of nervousness as she emerged from the kitchen.
She placed a heavy pot on the table with steam blowing out of it in to the room. Foggy immediately let out a sound of pure ardor and began licking his lips as if he hadn't eaten for months.
You on the other hand buried your hands in your lap to try to keep them from shaking so hard - worried anyone could notice it.
Too weak, since you hadn't eaten since the previous day's lunch (because you were so afraid of this dinner), you couldn't bring a single muscle in your body to even show a tiny smile to Karen.
You just sat there without an expression on your face, only half present in the moment and praying that no one would notice that you literally looked like a dead person.
But of course they saw it.
"Are you okay, Y/N?" Karen asked immediately oncerned about your appearance as she sat down in front of you.
"Y-Yes." You shook your head too fast which resulted in you getting a bit dizzy. "Okay." Foggy said elongated, not even the tiniest bit convinced.
"Really." You tried to assure your friends and thankfully they let it go - although your voice could have been another hint that nothing was alright with you.
"Well" Karen put on a big smile after the akward tension, "I made chicken with vegetable pasta and tried a secret ingredient." She announced jittery in excitement.
"Oh!" Matt grinned. "I love secrets."
Foggy agreed laughing while you suddenly felt the prickle of tears building up behind your eyelids.
Everyone was so cheerful and happy, Karen had made such an effort in decorating the table with candles and the expensive napkins we normally can't afford and in cooking a whole dinner for us - but you weren't a part of this wonderful moment your friends shared. Maybe you were physically there, but mentally you were completely emotionless. Which somehow made you want to cry even more.
Foggy put food on his and Matt's plate and it was suddenly all too overwhelming for you, when you slid back with the chair and excused yourself to the bathroom while standing up.
You tried to get yourself together and to overcome the desire to cry.
Locking eyes with your reflection in the mirror, you were begging yourself to at least try to eat a fork full of pasta.
When you felt stable enough to go back, you left the bathroom.
But the moment you sat down, the restlesness inside of you reached its peak again and your whole body clenched itself together. You were suddenly feeling an overwhelming urge to vomit as everything started to spin around you. But you couldn't just go to the bathroom again after you just came back a minute ago.
"Y/N?" You heard Matt softly beside you. He had his face turned into your direction and even with his glasses on, you could tell his face was scrunched up in concern. "Yes?" You asked almost completely breathless.
"Are you sure that you're alright? I can't shake the feeling that something is going on with you."
It was heart-warmingly for you that he might seem to care about you but it also made it harder for you too keep yourself and everything you have been hiding together.
"No, really, everything's alright. I'm just a bit tired from work today. That's all." You tried to justify your behaviour and looks.
Foggy immediately furrowed his eyebrow.
"Tired from work? From doing what? We have literally not a single client." He laughed at his last remark. "That's not true, Foggy." Matt started to argue as he took a bite of chicken into his mouth.
"We have this nice, old man as a client. What was his name again? You know from the case against his neighbour a few months ago. Which we won." Matt added.
"You mean Mr. Pattinkin?" Foggy asked his friend in disbelief.
Matt nodded in confirmation.
"He's dead, Matt." The blonde lawyer stated matter of factly which made Matt curl his lips. "Oh. I forgot." He admitted meekly.
"Like I said. No clients." Foggy repeated and focused his attention back on you.
You have become so dizzy by now that you saw your cutlery twice.
And suddenly everything went incredibly fast. Before you could even register what happened to your body out of the blue, Matt jumped from his chair while Karen and Foggy screamed your name in horror.
You lost all balance and started to tilt from the chair - your consciousness drifting away from you.
Matt thankfully reached you before you fell to the ground, his hands were protectively wrapped around your upper body and he softly supported your head since you were too weak to hold it up yourself.
Foggy and Karen came running around the table but everything was a blur to you and their voices sounded muted to your ears.
The starvation of yourself and the high adrenaline level the entire evening from your anxiety had finally made your body collapse.
But the more you were situated in Matt's embrace with your cheek pressed against his warm chest, the more your stress level sunk.
You were hungry for so much more than just food.
But you still felt so uncomfortable and nauseaus, that you whimpered into Matt's dark-blue shirt.
"I'm putting her on the sofa." Matt announced to Karen and Foggy since you were too weak to respond to anything and still didn't quite realise what was going on. With a frightening ease, Matt scooped you up from the chair into his arms and carried you to the little couch in Karen's tiny living room.
As you lay there on the furniture, you needed to blink a few times to recognize your friends standing around you. Slowly the blurry silhouettes became clearer and you were met with six incredibly worried faces.
"I'm getting you a glass of water." Karen said as soon as you locked eyes with her and disappeared in the kitchen.
"No, it's okay. I'm already feeling better." You lied but you didn't wanted to be a burden to your friends any longer and you were feeling utterly ashamed of yourself again to show weakness like this.
If your parents would have been here, they would have sent you to your room in an instant without a chance of you getting a bite of the dinner for the rest of the evening.
You abruptly stood up with the image of your parents in your mind, how they disappointingly shook their heads at you.
Before you could take a step, you already lost all your balance and started to fall forwards - but yet again Matt came to your rescue.
You were still preparing yourself for the unavoidable impact of your face with the ground, when you felt his strong arm around your stomach from behind - holding you in place with no chance of stumbling.
He didn't hurt you, he held you softly with his arm around you like a border. You couldn't fall as long as Matt was there right behind you and for the first time in your entire life you felt completely safe.
The feeling of continuosly dancing around the edge of a cliff disappeared with such a force that you couldn't control the sob that escaped your mouth. Never has anyone made you feel this safe and protected before and no one has ever given you the stability you always needed physically and mentally but right now in this moment Matt gave all these things to you with an self-evidence you hadn't known before. He made you feel like you were worth of being sheltered and ... loved. If you thought you had a crush on Matt before, you definitely loved him now.
Your shaking hands gripped onto his muscular arm that he had still wrapped around you while your tears kept flowing silently out of your eyes and dropped onto his sleeve.
You knew your way to healing was still far away in the distance but with Matt you felt like you finally reached the beginning of this very difficult journey.
But you know in your heart that as long as you have friends like these you can make it time after time.
