The funeral. Sitting in a church causes Matt to remember things that make him ring like a struck bell. Voices are moth wings. The Sighted-hearing world brushes and bumps against him. Is this what haunted houses feel like? Incense doesn’t spice the air. Instead, it’s drugstore cologne and the face powder that only old women wear. He holds Foggy’s hand and tries not to move, even though his body wants to rock the way he did as a child in a pew. Dust, old wood, several candles have been lit. He smells wax and thinks, perhaps, of the flutter of flame. Does he remember—or only imagine—its pulse? Its blue heart?
Not all of his memories of sight come from within himself. Some were given to him—first by a girl, then a woman—who came back into his life during the worst rift he and Foggy had ever survived. It was years ago but unforgettable.
Over. Done, he tells himself, fingerspelling the words, down beside his thigh, fast as an incantation. Over. She’s gone.
The people around him begin to sing, and Foggy starts to stand up. Matt’s body jolts. Dear God. What a horrible vibration. The air atomizes around him, and he sucks in a breath. There’s movement. Then Foggy steps in front of him.
Hey, what’s wrong?
This sign—the “wrong” hand, the “mistake” hand—taps against Foggy’s chin before a palm comes to Matt’s cheek to focus his attention.
Tell me.
The singing…
Matt can’t complete the thought. How can he describe how awful a hundred voices feel when they’re droning like wasps in a swarm, and he’s stuck remembering chapel walls during a time after his own voice got ripped viciously away?
Too much?
Yes.
This is Foggy’s father’s funeral. He shouldn’t be having to manage Matt’s quiet— inexplicable—horror right now.
Is he being quiet? Touching his own throat, Matt tries to control his next exhale. Be silent, he orders himself, his own thoughts raking like claws. Foggy tries to loosen his tie, one-handedly, before giving up and palming Matt’s cheek again.
We can step out.
No. You should stay.
Matt’s signs should be quick and definitive; instead, his fingers shake. If Ben were here, or Frank, they’d have some form of steady help. As it is, they’re both fumbling.
While losing one battle, Matt wins another—unbuttoning the collar of his shirt, wrenching at his necktie, he begins to rock. Foggy puts himself in the space between Matt’s knees, blocking motion, shielding him—presumably—from view.
Are you in pain? We can leave for a little while.
No. No.
Foggy catches each of Matt’s “no”s
OK. We’ll stay. Try to—
He almost—but doesn’t—say “relax”.
Shit. How many damn verses does this song have?
It hurts him to kneel, but Foggy does it anyway, cupping the back of Matt’s neck before pressing his fisted left hand against Matt’s chest, approximating the sign for “hold on”.
Finally, the song ends, and Matt begins to breathe more normally again. People sit back down. The structure of the pew strains, shudders, settles. A blanket of silence drapes over the room, and it’s suddenly very important for Matt to ask: Am I breathing too loud now? Making sound?
He needs to sit still and not draw attention to himself. Foggy, undeflectable, still awkwardly crouched, puts his fingertips on Matt’s throat, neither saying “yes” or “no”. His fingers tremble as if to say he’s wrecked but still here, and that survival—however imperfect—is currently happening, moment by moment.
Who cares? Aunt Lisa is crying way louder than you could ever breathe, OK? Fans are whirring. AC unit going on and off, trucks on the highway whooshing by. There’s sound. There’s cover. You can breathe however you fucking want.
None of his words are angry; every sign is meant to explain, to soothe. Matt reaches out with the absurd desire to confess certain things. There once was a time when she—Elektra—took him back to St. Agnes to show him the stained glass, and he sank to his knees because he was stained glass, and she knew it. She gave him more than he could stand. He literally could not stand.
Blindness is the absence of sight—not darkness. Deafness is the absence of sound. Since childhood, he’d filled the unfilled spaces with other awarenesses of his own that were honed—rich and keen—only to have her drown him with an ocean of color and a firehose of noise. Only she—her filter—her control—could keep him sane, and within days, he was a slave to both her knowledge and her modulations. Within days, he was addicted to what she gave and what she took away. Her greatest skill was tricking him into thinking any of it was real.
Foggy squeezes Matt’s hand.
Someone is speaking at the front of the church. Matt doesn’t want the words. He wants the absence. Elektra once flooded him with color and music that entered him everywhere at once. She could open the floodgates until he begged her to close them, then leave only the exact amount he could tolerate. She could make deprivation feel like mercy and mercy feel like love.
Foggy’s fingers lift to Matt’s cheek, and no strings are attached to the comfort. There’s just the simple truth of him. That’s it. That’s all. Just Foggy. Thank God.
Somewhere at the front of the church, the speaker pauses, and Matt feels no urge to ask “what am I missing?”
An air-conditioning vent switches on overhead, stirring cool air, and Matt’s own breathing moves easier.
Better now? Want me to interpret?
No. Just come sit beside me.
Once, Foggy asked him for space, and Matt had nearly disappeared into it.
Now Matt asks him only to stay, knowing without a single doubt that he will.
OK. Yeah.
Foggy moves without grace, bumping the pew, and when his balance falters, Matt catches him with the ease of habit.
Years ago, Elektra took him into St. Agnes and gave him the windows. She'd opened the impossible door that existed between them and shoved beauty through it, making a new form of torture. Now, the speaker continues, and Foggy goes still, listening. Matt feels the attention in him: the slight lift through his chest, the cessation of restless movement, and Matt doesn’t ask for more.
The air conditioner shuts off. A truck goes by, and there’s relief in the fact that nothing is being added and nothing is being taken away. Matt puts a hand on Foggy’s knee. Once, a chasm opened up between them after Matt thought he’d been left behind. Elektra had known exactly what to do with that emptiness. She filled it. Filled his eyes, his ears, his mind. Filled every absence until there was hardly room left for Matt himself.
Now the church around him is full of things he cannot perceive. A face at the pulpit, words he isn’t receiving, a hundred people whose private grief is untouchable. But none of it feels empty. Foggy’s hand covers his. Their shoulders touch. Matt rocks when he needs to, breathes as loudly as he wants, and lets the things beyond his reach stay as they are. Maybe that’s the true difference between now and then. Elektra made her own power feel like his freedom. She was a prison disguised as liberation. It was seductive, devastating, and mercifully short-lived. Two weeks became three. Three became a month.
Then he came to his senses by losing them again.
---
Early spring is messing with Manhattan’s rep. A bunch of goofy yellow flowers have come heads bowed under patches of snow—looks like Smurfs live here. Yesterday was warm enough for open coats; this morning the wind’s gone all bitchy, and she can relate.
Elektra steps outside, buttons her wool coat, and plucks the tacky ID badge off. Behind her, the courthouse doors swing closed.
People are getting to know Elle Alvarez a little. That's okay. The security ladies nod; clerks say good morning. There’s coffee she doesn’t totally hate in the third-floor break room. She's doing enough—but not too much—to fit in even if it makes her feel like a dragon trying not to eat the village goats.
She pauses at the bottom of the steps. A bus groans at the curb. Someone swears at a cyclist.
Matthew is not here. She knew he wouldn’t be. Still, her eyes go automatically to the place where he often waits.
There's a broad section of stone near the entrance where Foggy stands without blocking foot traffic, and Matt orients himself without being collided with every six seconds by people who believe possession of a law degree exempts them from having any spatial awareness.
Foggy talks while Matt touches him. He likes to explore in an out-of-order way: elbow, wrist, shoulder, cheek, all while Foggy conducts some elaborate argument with a coffee cup, a court filing, God, municipal government, or all four. From a distance, the contact looks incidental. Elektra knows better.
Their spot is empty today, of course, because OG Franklin Nelson is dead. The funeral is this morning, somewhere in bumfuck.
Elektra looks down at the daffodils and the wind catches her hair, throwing a black strand across her mouth. She tucks it away.
There’d been a time when Foggy’s absence meant something very different than it does now, and she’ll always hate the fact that she had to let go of the only person she’s ever really loved. Again. She’s done it twice now.
Because she is a dragon in a world full of goats, a head-eating mantis, a black widow spider. And none of Matthew’s beautiful brokenness—or any of his quiet strength—can ever fix that.
She wanted more with him (no, from him). Some form of completion. But it came from an ancient, primal place. It was visceral and selfish, and in its own way, beautiful. It came from him. He made her feel it. And years later, she can still remember so much of their time together. It comes back to her in snatches that are brief but vivid…
…Elektra notices how he doesn’t look at himself in the mirror. He's blind. It makes sense. But she always notices the differences between him and a sighted man. She loves the differences more than she should. She's aware of that, her small obsessions... She’s aware of how her gaze will linger on his fingertips as he searches for his wallet with his gaze elsewhere, as if his hands—like octopus arms—have their own cluster of nerve cells inside them (their own ganglia).
She loves all his little asides (askews and askances), the tilt of his chin. He has such elegant listening poses. He has the poise of a cat and wonderful stillnesses. She could—and has—watched him all day, drinking in the sight of him. He has a tendency to pause at windows as if he knows he has silhouetted himself. Backlit with Pulitzer drama as if he knows he’s sepia-toned. As if he knows why she asks him to wear brown cashmere.
It's the small things he does that can make her stop in her tracks. She can become transfixed by his forearms and the act of rolling up his shirt sleeves, slowly, with precision. It can be the way the top button of his shirt takes a long time to undo.
Occasionally, light will catch and reveal the exact color of his eyes, and she’ll think of jewelry resting on black velvet pulled from a box inside a locked vault. She’ll think of titanium-core doors that are a foot thick.
When he smiles, she sometimes rocks back on her heels, some inner gyroscope spinning.
Then she’ll look at the smoothness of his skin under stubble and feel like she’s standing in an art gallery listening to someone discuss the elements of contrast. These are the same people who luxuriate in saying words like “oeuvre”. If anyone is a complete set of creative works, it’s Matthew Murdock.
Sometimes, in the middle of the day (perhaps while seated at an outdoor café, casually observing the path of a pigeon as it struts under a metal table that is decorative but mass-produced, latticed and molded), she will hear him say her name inside her mind. It will be unintentionally seductive. Soft. Low. Interrogatory. "Elektra?", crystalline with consonants. He will make her name sound like jewelry resting on black velvet.
And she will love him like a uterine cramp, with the flex of smooth muscle, involuntarily with accompanying pain, feeling like an animal. Feeling like a fox that produces musk to attract a mate and eats centipedes found in leaf litter on forest floors.
She does not want to love him, but there’s a drive inside her to discover the concept of newly born kits as soon as contractions begin, to lick birthing fluids off fur before slipping away to hunt for voles, for shrews with small crunchy skulls.
She gets a warm feeling inside her, joints softening, heartbeat going rich and crimson. She becomes protective, attentive, deeply tolerant. An entire afternoon might be spent seducing him with nothing but pheromones and proximity, almost (but not quite) touching him, dancing the paso doble without music.
At these times, he becomes fixated, fervent, and he will tenderly yearn for just one kiss. She has such exquisite power over him—and under him. He's hers because she's captured him. He'll stay out of awe, loving each illusion she dazzles him with. She's a magician, a sorceress who has made his dreams come true. It's as real as it needs to be.
Deep down, she knows it shouldn't last. She's injuring him in a thousand invisible ways. Corrupting him. This is entrapment. He has begun to ask for sight and sound the way a junkie asks for a fix. His body shudders—sometimes there's a guttural grunt—when she gives him what he wants. He transforms, opens, and thinks he's free. Her gifts are expensive cruelties, encrusted with diamonds. His joy is inflicted. And it's also self-harm.
She knows.
She knows.
But she can't stop…
… She did stop eventually. That part's less pleasant. It was Foggy who intervened and made things right. Not single-handedly. Matt would hate that version of the story, and it wouldn’t be true. He wasn’t stupid. He'd never been stupid. At the time, he was starved, flooded, dazzled, in love, furious, lonely…and chemically desperate for sensations his brain had once known and could suddenly have again.
Foggy stepped in—in his stubborn, painfully Foggy-like way—and he got through to him. He made a small tear in the illusion, and Matt found it. Of course he did. And once he found one frayed seam, he started pulling.
He questioned her. Tested things. Went back over conversations and memories she had given him, comparing what he knew through his own body against what had arrived through hers. He began separating perception from interpretation, interpretation from suggestion, and suggestion from outright lie.
God, he was magnificent when he finally understood. Terrible. But magnificent. And it came just in time. Another few days of her, perhaps another week, and Elektra does not know what would have happened. Already, Matt had begun to ask for sight and sound with frightening regularity. Sometimes his hands shook before she even opened the connection. His own world had begun to feel insufficient to him. That frightens her now. It hadn't frightened her enough back then.
There was one last time at Fogwell's gym, after they'd sparred—neither one of them winning. Foggy came barging in. Elektra stayed in the shadows as Matt turned toward him without seeing him, furious and devastated and finally suspicious of everything she could give.
He'd asked for the truth. Just one time, unadulterated. Give him to me. Just him.
Elektra could have refused.
Worse, she could have used the request. Her own perceptions had become remarkably easy to weaponize by then. A shift of attention here, an emphasis there, and Matt might have received whatever version of Franklin Nelson best served her purpose.
Instead, for once, Elektra took herself out of the gift as much as she could. She looked at Foggy plainly and let Matt look with her. The colors stayed exactly as they were. Every awkward angle, every asymmetry, every imperfect detail remained untouched. She resisted the instinct to compose the image, to direct Matt toward what he should notice or decide what any of it meant.
She simply showed him Foggy.
Hair a mess, face exhausted, standing off-kilter, one hand clenched uselessly. His body distributed unevenly around tension and fear. His eyes fixed on Matt with an expression so naked that Elektra almost looked away.
Matt had surely touched that face thousands of times. But he'd never seen it. Until that moment. His whole body stopped. Elektra felt the moment the image reached him. There was none of the ecstasy she had grown accustomed to creating. Something much quieter happened.
Recognition.
Something inside Matt went terribly, terribly still.
Elektra kept looking.
She let him have the truth as long as she could stand to give it. Both the face and the voice: "Matty?"
Foggy’s face changed when he realized what was happening. The recognition went both ways.
Matt lifted one hand toward him; Foggy came closer…and Elektra knew. She could pour the sun itself into Matthew, and he'd still reach for that man.
She hated Foggy for it and, at the very same moment, loved Matt enough to feel relief. Years have done nothing to make those feelings less contradictory.
That was the last image she ever gave him. And, deep down, she is proud of that.
If Matthew carries one real shard of sight and sound that did not originate in childhood, let it be Foggy’s face and his shaky, tear-soaked voice.
Let one thing she put inside him be true.
The wind cuts across the courthouse steps, and Elektra comes back to the present moment.
She's kept track of Matt for years. Sometimes from continents away. Sometimes through people who never knew why she was asking. Court dockets. Hospital admissions. A name mentioned by someone who owed her a favor. Enough to know whether he was alive, whether someone dangerous had taken an interest in him, whether anything from the part of the world she inhabits was moving toward him.
There are people who remember what he once was and harbor… uses… that he no longer thinks about. That gives her a reason to watch.
She's careful to keep the connection between their minds firmly closed. Matt deserves that mercy.
Will it have to change soon? The courthouse is closer than she normally permits herself, and that choice has less to do with nostalgia than it does with a certain old bastard’s apparent refusal to stay gone.
Freakshakes hogging Matt whenever they have a fight among themselves
Frank met Matt first before meeting Karen and getting close to her, and everyone else
Dex met everyone, personally, through Matt even if he knew them as Bullseye
Elektra barely even knew they existed and only became friends & more after Matt introduced them
Karen only met Elektra in Matt's bed and that's not exactly meeting so it took them until after black sky and Matt getting out of the prison for the two to meet
So when they have a fight, the first person everyone goes to is Matt. It's a race, really. Whoever gets there first and gets their story through, gains Matt priviliges. Though of course it only works if they're telling the truth and they're in the right, since Matt can tell when they're not
Elektra and Dex shoving each other while running down the hallway to reach Matt first. Karen locking Frank in the bathroom, knowing he won't break it because Matt gets mad when he does, so it gives her extra time until he's able to pick the lock. Dex guilt tripping Matt whenever Frank is mean to him. Elektra and Karen pulling either arms of Matt towards themselves to try and get him on their side
And Matt is in heaven. He loves being the favorite, the center, loves consoling his sweethearts whenever they're sad. Besides, he's just when it comes to taking sides, so no one can say it's bad to pick favorites. Because he's not picking favorites!!! He's just defending whoever is right. He's a lawyer, for fuck's sake, he does justice
But when it's Matt who's mad at them after a fight...
All hell breaks loose in the house. Everyone is scurrying to take Matt's side. Even Frank
Karen ran off to do something dangerous Matt SPECIFICALLY asked her, please, Karen, not to do?? Dex is by Matt's side, letting him take his anger out on him
Frank or Dex killed someone again with unnecessary violence? Elektra is by his side, laying Matt's head on her lap and consoling the distraught and angry man through head pats and shit talking
Elektra and Frank had a fight and broke something again? Karen lays Matt on her chest, claiming Matt cuddle rights
If Matt is somehow mad at all of them??? Well... Safe to say the house is very quite. It's uncanny
No one is bothering Matt, but magically: the fridge is filled, taxes are done, dinner is cooked, house is cleaned, Matt's suits are ironed, his work files are sorted, Dex is taken care of so he's not eating himself because Matt is mad at him. No one is yelling, no overwhelming scents, windows closed to muffle the noise, thermostat settled on a nice temperature. All of Matt's senses must be relaxed
There's a mutual understanding between everyone that Matt can not stay mad at them. It's simply the rule. So all disputes are put aside and everyone is working together to gain Matt's full forgiveness
Not that Matt is able to stay mad at them for too long, but it's still not nice for the other four while it lasts
When Matt inevitably does forgive them, cuddle time is obligatory. Everyone had apologized in their own way, food eaten, and now Matt shall be suffocated by his darlings once again. But he's smiling wide
#the odyssey
#art
#ao3
#star wars
