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The crash on the fire escape outside Kirsten’s bedroom makes her heart go still. She pauses the TV and sets down her box of sesame chicken before slowly lifting up off the couch. In the back of her mind, she thinks about calling someone, anyone, just in case there’s a real issue going on outside. What if someone’s trying to break in? What if the robber has a gun? What if she walks into the bedroom, and there’s someone waiting to attack her? All of these thoughts rush through her head as she eases one foot in front of the other as she makes her way to her bedroom.
You’re being stupid, she tells herself. Call someone. You need help!
But Kirsten McDuffie is stubborn and determined if nothing else. Her heart is beating so loud she can hear it in her own ears, can feel it threatening to leap out through her ribcage and burst from underneath her skin. As she continues to make her way to the bedroom, she thinks back to every book that has ever described fear as paralyzing. Well, they’re not wrong, she thinks. They are definitely not wrong.
“Kirsten, it’s me,” a low, familiar, pained voice calls out. The voice is male, and it’s muted by the sound of something blocking it. Kirsten sees movement out on the fire escape through her bedroom window, and that’s when she sees Daredevil’s red uniform slumped against the railing of the fire escape.
“Oh, shit,” she hisses. In an instant, she’s at the window and yanking it open. “Matt? Matt, what are you—oh my God.”
She goes still as her eyes land on a beaten, bloody Daredevil. His uniform is ripped in various places, and the red is stained a darker red with his blood. It’s funny how she always associates red with him, she thinks without warning. Matt’s red suit, Matt’s red hair, Matt’s red blood. Matt and the color red are connected and cannot be disconnected to her. Matt and the color red are one and the same.
“I’m ok,” he groans out. Which is a lie. A total lie. Kirsten knows he’s not ok. “Just a little…banged up. Your place was closer than mine. Thought I should probably take a few minutes’ rest before trying to make it back to my apartment.”
“Few minutes’ rest? Matt, you can barely sit up straight. You’re not going back to your apartment.” Kirsten hears her lawyer voice coming out, the voice she uses whenever she’s in court or dealing a particularly difficult client who doesn’t want to do what she says to do.
Matt smiles, slow and pained. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
“Come on. Let’s get you inside.” Kirsten reaches out a hand to him through the window, and he takes it, allowing her to pull him forward and through the window. She catches the wince on his face as he ducks under the window frame before all but collapsing on the inside of her bedroom. “Jesus, Matt. What the hell happened?”
“Got a little ambushed. Started out as a simple robbery, but the guys knew me. Knew I get sensitive with sound, and then they just kind of used that to their advantage and went to town from there. I’m ok, though,” he says with another grimace. “I’m just going to take a few minutes to recuperate here on your floor before I try to move, though.”
Kirsten kneels down in front of him and looks at him. “What are your injuries?”
“Not sure,” Matt admits. “Haven’t done a full assessment yet.”
“I’ve got a First Aid kit. We can get you cleaned up. You can use my shower if you want to. Some of your clothes are still here, too.” Kirsten wants to stay with him until he’s ok enough to move, but she needs to get her First Aid kit and a change of clothes for him, the latter being if he even wants to change out of his uniform. As she leaves the room, she glances back at him and sees him slumped on the floor in pain and decides that he probably doesn’t want to take a shower.
She walks out into the kitchen where she keeps her First Aid kit, trying to calm her heart rate as she goes to grab it. She’s seen Matt get a little banged up before. God, he’s Daredevil—how could he not get banged up from time to time? However, she’s never seen him quite this bad before. The worst she’s seen on him was a black eye spreading out from beneath his sunglasses, and even then, he wouldn’t tell her how he’d gotten it. Then again, that’d been back when they were still playing their game of You’re-Daredevil-No-I’m-Not, so of course he wouldn’t have told her.
Gripping the First Aid kit in her hand, she walks into the bedroom right as the sound of the shower starts up. Matt’s no longer on the floor by the window, so Kirsten assumes that he’s doing a little better. She tosses the First Aid kit onto the bed and crosses to the dresser where Matt has a few clothing items stowed here. She doesn’t remember when that started happening, but it’s a pretty recent development. Sometimes he needs a change of clothes because of Daredevil reasons, and sometimes he just keeps a few extra items here for when he spends the night, also a pretty recent development.
If she thinks about it, she doesn’t remember how all of this happened. She isn’t able to remember when Matt started making himself at home in her apartment or vice versa. No matter how hard she tries to remember, she can’t recall when Matt started knowing which cabinets hold the glasses and plates and which drawers have silverware inside. It’s just kind of…happened, she realizes. Perhaps the most intimate sign that she and Matt are a little something more is how he just climbed into her shower less than five minutes ago without a second prompt.
Eventually, the shower stops, and she hears movement inside the bathroom as he moves out of the shower and stumbles about the bathroom. She grabs the clothes and heads to the door, knocking on it lightly. “Matt? I have some clothes for you.”
The bathroom door creeps open, and his hand darts out. “You’re a lifesaver.”
“Don’t forget it,” she quips as she passes off the clothes, and the door shuts. While Matt’s getting dressed, she thinks to grab some Aspirin and water for him for when he’s out. God knows he needs some kind of painkillers and a good night’s sleep, considering the state he’s in right now.
By the time she’s got a glass of water and a bottle of Aspirin in her hand, she hears the bathroom door open and Matt’s shuffling, unhappy footsteps as he crosses into the bedroom. She walks back into the bedroom and sees him easing himself down onto the edge of the bed. “Hey.”
He looks in the direction of her voice and offers up a smile, though it comes off as more of a grimace than anything else. He holds his t-shirt in his hand, and as Kirsten comes closer, she notices that his torso is covered in bruises, cuts, and scrapes. Some cuts aren’t bleeding, but others are. “I’m bleeding.”
“I can see that,” she mumbles. “God, Matt. Here. I got you some Aspirin and a glass of water.”
“Kirsten McDuffie, you never disappoint.” He takes them from her and pours out a couple of pills before knocking them back while Kirsten opens up her First Aid kit. Her dark brown eyes scan over Matt’s body, noticing where he’s severely injured and where he’s just downright injured. He has scars from past wounds mapping over his body, but those scars aren’t new to her. She’s seen them before and is slowly working on committing each one to her memory.
“Think anything’s broken?” she asks.
“No, surprisingly,” Matt grunts. He’s still as Kirsten begins pouring out rubbing alcohol onto small cotton pads. “That’s going to sting like hell.”
“Sorry,” she says, genuinely remorseful as she thinks about how it must be for him to experience pain on such a higher level than she would. “The smell’s probably pretty strong, too.”
“Yeah,” Matt says, and then he falls silent. Kirsten spends the next 15 minutes dabbing and bandaging while Matt spends the next 15 minutes breathing slowly and calmly, as if he isn’t in a lot of pain. But Kirsten knows him. She knows how his face looks when he’s happy, and she knows how he looks when he’s frustrated, and she knows how he looks when he’s in pain. He’s in pain.
Her hands work over his body, repairing him and putting him back together bandage by bandage, gauze tape strip by gauze tape strip. He’s almost too hot to touch after his shower, but she doesn’t pull away from him. When she starts taping some gauze into place on his shoulder, she catches a whiff of her shampoo in his hair and actually smiles at the familiarity of it.
Kirsten pulls back and looks over him. “I think I got everywhere. You look a bit like an Egyptian mummy, but you’re in one piece.”
“For now,” Matt says, allowing a small smile to cross his face. At the motion of his mouth turning upwards into a smile, blood starts to run down his cheekbone from a spot that hadn’t been bleeding before.
“Shit,” Kirsten mumbles. She grabs the cotton pad and the rubbing alcohol. “One more to go. That cut on your cheek is running red like the Nile.”
“Nice simile,” Matt replies as she comes back to him. She lifts her hands to his sunglasses and starts to take them off. Kirsten might not have the same heightened senses that Matt does, but she visibly watches his shoulders tense up, his whole body filling with tension as she pulls his sunglasses away. She’s about to tell him to relax for Christ’s sake, but then the realization hits her so fast it nearly takes her breath away. He’s nervous.
Kirsten has never seen Matt’s eyes. At least not without his sunglasses. She’s seen the area of his face where his eyes are behind his sunglasses, and that’s it. He keeps his sunglasses on every other time she’s seen him. He keeps them on until right before he goes to sleep, and he puts them on first thing when he wakes up. Kirsten’s noticed it before because she thinks it’s odd that they’ve been doing whatever it is they’re doing for a while, and she still hasn’t seen his eyes, but she’s never brought it up to him because it just hasn’t been that big of a deal. She’s always thought that it’s been more of a thing of comfort and stability for him than anything.
But it hits her that maybe he’s done that on purpose. He hasn’t wanted her to see his eyes, so he’s been careful to keep them hidden from her. She waits for him to make some kind of protest, but he doesn’t. He just closes his eyes before she has his sunglasses off, and he goes still beneath her touch as she carefully patches up his cheekbone.
When she’s done, she doesn’t put his sunglasses back on. She takes his hand and opens his fingers so she can put his sunglasses on his grasp. Holding them, he keeps his face tilted up towards hers with a small frown on his face, clearly confused by what she’s about to do. Kirsten studies his bare face, and she places her hands on either side of his head. At her touch, he relaxes a little bit more, but he’s still confused—she can see it in the way he holds his mouth, his lips almost pursed as if about to ask a question but can’t find the words to phrase it.
“Oh, Matt,” she sighs quietly before leaning forward and planting a kiss right between his eyes where his forehead is all wrinkled with a frown. “Matt, Matt, Matt.”
“Kirsten,” he says back, his voice still confused but more relaxed than it’s been all night. He sets his sunglasses to the side—Kirsten notices—and puts his hands on her wrists, lightly holding her hands in place.
“What am I going to do with you,” she mumbles against the warm skin of his forehead, the one spot that isn’t colored with some kind of wound or injury. She notices how he shifts in his spot as if he were trying to hide a chill going down his spine, and she smiles. Sometimes he’s so not subtle at all.
“I don’t know,” he replies honestly.
“You worry me. I hope you know that.”
“I don’t want to worry you.” He sounds worried over the thought of Kirsten being worried, and it makes her touch extra gentle.
“Well…you do. I mean, I know you’ve got everything under control, and I trust that you do, but…what kind of person would I be if I didn’t worry about you?” She runs her hands so, so lightly down his face. “How’s your pain level?”
“Not as bad when you touch me,” Matt replies.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He takes one hand away from her wrist and puts it on her face right where he knows her dimples are. He always knows the exact location of her dimples, and that fact will never cease to make Kirsten smile, which is what she does right then. She watches him touch her face, carefully handling her as if she were the one who’s all beaten up instead of him, and she’s busy watching his expressions that she almost misses when he looks at her. Almost.
He opens his eyes the way he moves in the morning, slow and controlled. He opens his eyes and unfolds before her the way he folds around her at night. And the first thing Kirsten sees is blue. Matt has blue eyes. She doesn’t know why this comes as a surprise to her because it really isn’t a surprise at all. He’s even told her he has blue eyes, but hearing about them and seeing them are two completely different experiences, she decides.
Matt’s eyes are light blue. She can see in his eyes that he’s blind, but that barely registers in her mind as she takes in the sight of his eyes. Gently, she runs the tip of her index finger down the bridge or his nose and over the sensitive skin beneath his eye.
“Sometimes it makes people feel weird,” Matt says suddenly. He doesn’t need to specify that he’s talking about his unseeing, overly direct stare. She knows.
“I don’t feel weird,” she answers, knowing she’s never spoken a more truthful statement other than maybe the sentence, “You’re Daredevil.” She traces over the corners of his eyes and stares down at him. “You have beautiful eyes, Matt.”
He blinks in surprise, not even bothering to hide his shock. “Thank you.”
“I mean it. They’re beautiful,” she says with a little more volume behind her quiet tone. “You look surprised.”
“There’s a reason why I wear the sunglasses,” he says, sounding mildly unsure of himself. “Like I said…sometimes blind stares make people feel weird.”
“You don’t have to hide around me, Matt. I think your eyes are stunning. To me, you’re not the blind guy who managed to get through law school and become Daredevil. You’re…I don’t know. You may be blind, Matt Murdock, but you see me better than anyone else ever has. So.” She presses a kiss to his forehead and lingers there for a few extra seconds before pulling away. Matt keeps his gaze forward as he listens to Kirsten pick his sunglasses up off the bed and hand them back to him. “Let’s get you in bed, Daredevil. You’re injured and need sleep.”
Matt holds his sunglasses in his hands for a few seconds, his head turning in the direction of the sound of her voice. “Ok.”
“I’m going to grab my Chinese from out in the living room. Want any?” Kirsten starts to walk away, but Matt reaches out and takes hold of her wrist. When she looks back at him, she sees him still holding his sunglasses in his free hand while he looks at her with uncovered eyes.
“Kirsten…thank you,” he says softly. Kirsten’s quiet for a few seconds as she stares into his sky blue eyes, and then she smiles. He doesn’t specify what he’s thanking her for, but like always, he doesn’t need to. She just knows.
“You’re welcome,” she replies. He lets her wrist go, and she leaves to grab her Chinese food before coming back and climbing in bed with him. Right away, she notices that he has his sunglasses on the nightstand on his side of the bed—since when has he had a “his side of the bed,” she wonders—and he’s easing underneath the covers.
When she climbs in bed beside him, takeout box in one hand and chopsticks in the other, she feels his eyes turn onto her, and her body relaxes. No, Matt Murdock might not be able to see her, but that’s ok. It always has been. Matt doesn’t need to see her face to see who she is, and that’s something he’s known without her needing to clarify it for him. He knows her. He sees her.