👀 + do you ever think about the role you played in nobu burning to death and how it goes against your no killing ideals?
Send my muse “👀 + a question” and they’ll have to answer with 100% honesty. | accepting
“—Yeah, I think about it.”
It was a long, long time before he found out that the burning to death hadn’t—stuck. A long time to remember, to consider and reconsider, to rewrite the scene in his head over and over again as if there’s a way it could have played out that he could really move on from. A long time to feel sick to his stomach every time he was downwind of a barbecue.
The smell had by far been the worst part.
“It was self defense by the most obvious definition. I was fighting for my life, and I took the only option I had to stop him with no intent to kill. It wasn’t murder.” He’s not an idiot; he knows the damage he’s done to people, he knows that not everyone he knocks down is going to walk away, and that even the ones that live might drop dead from internal bleeding days later or end up in a coma they never wake from. But there’s a difference between the risk he takes every time he leaves someone unconscious and—choosing to take someone’s life, knowingly and without direct provocation. A clear, definable difference in the penal code of the state of New York with a universal citation number.
He thinks a lot about why there’s such comfort in that, too—why he can cope with the idea of manslaughter in the first degree as an occupational hazard, why he can shield himself with mens rea and avoid the reality that his hands have never been clean and get bloodier every day. Sometimes, in darker moments, he thinks that the law and Daredevil have always been means to the same end—two different ways to always have an excuse.
“If I’d been stronger, smarter—listened to Claire about the damn body armor a bit sooner—it wouldn’t have come to that. I tell myself that, right? That I didn’t have a choice.
“But there’s always a choice. I know that. I know that I chose to kill Nobu to save myself, and I know that I was never sorry for it. And that scares me. It scares me that I’m capable of it and it scares me that it was that easy to live with it, even when I fully believed he was dead.”
Matt sighs; he hadn’t even realized his fists were clenched, but he can feel the pinpricks of pain of his nails digging into his palms and forces them to relax.
“Foggy asked me to my face if I’d ever—I lied to him then and I’ve been lying to him, to everyone, ever since. Admitting it would make it real—realer, somehow. Self defense or not, that’s not a part of me I can let anyone see, least of all the people I care about.”
