Work Text:
Sam realizes he can't look at art the same way anymore. Metaphorically, well literally too, but he means metaphorically. It's jarring to him, even though it feels like an obvious- what's the word? Side effect? Consequence?- it feels obvious that getting his eyes popped out by an eviler, inhuman banksy would change how he thinks about art. But he didn't realize it until an accident on patrol left him knocked out in an alley in Hell's Kitchen. He'd woken up to a very concerned Daredevil gently shaking him awake, and when he looked past Matt he could just make out a large graffiti mural on the wall of the alley. He flinched. Hard.
The realization hits him as Matt helps him up and brings him back to his and Foggy's apartment, because he worries too much to send Sam back home on his own. Art is bad now. He can't enjoy art. Sam is overcome with a deep sense of mourning, he remembers loving the graffiti in his city and the art museums. He remembers bonding with Hannah over a shared love of street art and fashion. Hell, when he was making the suit he had considered the whole craft an art form in itself. From drawing up the designs, to making the delicate machinery that allowed him to disappear, to stepping into the stripes for the first time. It was all intensely personal, and intensely expressive, and it was art.
The thought makes him feel sick now, and Matt must sense that somehow, because when they arrive at the apartment Matt settles him on the couch with the second softest blanket he and Foggy own and some ginger ale. Sam tries to put the issue out of his mind.
-
A week or so later, Sam vaults into Hell's Kitchen to check up on Matt, as he often does. The guy is a mess, an intensely competent mess most of the time, but still a mess. Sam likes to be sure he's okay, plus it's nice to hang out with him outside of work, when they're both in their element. He does not find Daredevil out on the streets, calm and powerful and snarky, he finds Matt. Matt, in the daredevil suit, having a full on panic attack next to a dumpster.
He calls Foggy, he isn't sure what to do other than that. But that's fine because Foggy is one fast motherfucker when he's worried, he's there in 5 minutes. Sam spends the five minutes between the call and Foggy's arrival speaking softly and keeping a safe distance from Matt. He's never been around Matt when he's like this before, he doesn't know how he gets. By the time Foggy gets there Matt's realized who Sam is and decided he needs to put himself between Sam and every evil thing in the world. It would be sweet if it wasn't a little terrifying, because Matt was sobbing.
Foggy knows what to do, he gets Matt home and tells Sam to take a lap. Sam gladly does this, parkouring around the Kitchen until he manages to make some sense of what just happened. A part of him didn't know that could really happen. Or more so that it could happen to Matt. Something about the whole "man without fear" mythos, he guesses. He starts to think, has he ever really seen Matt afraid before? He hasn't, not until tonight. Even when Sam captured him before, Matt had seemed more severely disappointed and sad than actually scared . He feels oddly calm, he finds the whole thing more strange than anything. It jars something in the back of his mind, and he chooses not to poke at that.
When he comes back to the apartment Matt has, apparently, passed the hell out, and is under five different blankets on the couch. Foggy pulls him aside to talk to him.
"Matt's been through a lot," Foggy says, "before Daredevil and then after. If you asked him about it he'd probably say something about having a 'devil in him'. Really though, Matt's super traumatized. I know that was the first time you've seen him like that, but you did a good job keeping him calm."
And yeah, that makes sense. Sam did a lot of research into various vigilantes, and even disregarding the various reasons they became vigilantes, almost all of them have had some fucked up things happen to 'em during their time as heroes. Daredevil was certainly not an exception, he was a shining example of that rule. Matt's like the poster boy of vigilante trauma.
-
He goes home after that. Lies in his bed and just stares at the ceiling. It's dark. When he closes his eyes he sees too many colors, he sees spray paint and fuzzy figures with bright, bright eyes. It scares him. Art scares him?
Really though, he doesn't think he can wrap his mind around it. The loss. To have something as deeply human as art taken from him. It's an insurmountable pain. It hurts worse than when Muse actually stuck his fingers in his eyes and pulled, and his tears feel just like blood and vitreous running down his face.
He doesn't go to sleep, he thinks about devils.
He walks out to the roof, and hides away in his shed until exhaustion finally takes him. He couldn't even bring himself to work on anything before he passed out, he just sat there and stared at his desk for hours. It all reminded him too much of passion, of art. Why is it all art? Why did Muse have to make art ? Why'd he have to ruin it? His sleep is fitful, and his dreams are bright and colorful, like he'd been staring at a light for too long and now the impression was temporarily burned in his sight. The colors trail and follow him, and he wakes with a gasp, staring into his desk lamp and feeling around his eyes for blood.
-
Blindspot patrols as normal, but when he returns home, Sam is ghost-like. He breezes through the apartment silent as a shadow. Hannah never sees him except for when he burns himself the first time he tries working on anything in weeks, he makes a noise, startled, and he needs to come down for a band-aid. She asks him what the hell is wrong with him.
"I got demons." He says, after a pause. He says it like a joke, but Hannah must not think it's very funny, as she pulls a face. She doesn't push though, and Sam thinks neither of them really know what to say to each other anymore.
Matt notices too, but Matt is more emotionally constipated than Sam and Hannah combined, he has even less of a clue how to approach Sam's recent mood. From a distance though, Sam notes his concern, and he thinks he appreciates it.
-
It's a slow build until the next week, when evidently Matt finally brought it up to Foggy, because he actually asks Sam what's wrong while they're patrolling, and now Sam's the one with no idea what to do. He flounders for a bit, opens and closes his mouth like a dying fish. He is filled with the sudden and inexplicable urge to run and keep running until the horizon swallows him whole, but that's a pipe dream and he knows it. They stand like that for a bit, on some roof in Hell's Kitchen at 2 am. It's dark. Eventually he just has to say it.
"I think he ruined art." Sam pauses, Matt tilts his head, he continues. "Everything used to be art to me, everything still is art, but it's not for me anymore. I can't enjoy it, I can't even think about it for too long. I can't work on my suit, I can't make anything new, I can't look at the graffiti that's literally everywhere cause it all looks like pain. I miss it, I know it never went anywhere. But I fucking miss it." Sam becomes acutely aware of the fact that he's crying. "People need art, I need art and now I can't have it. No more poems, no more engineering, no more paint, no more music. It's gone."
Matt's expression has turned from concern to what may actually be heartbreak, he cautiously hugs Sam, and he holds him as his rambling turns more to babbling nonsense and sobs. When he's cried himself out Matt leads him back to the apartment, where Foggy hovers worriedly around them both. Sam rushes off to change out of his suit, because it doesn't feel right anymore. It feels like art, and art isn't his anymore. The suit isn't his anymore, Muse took it when he took his eyes. He falls asleep on the couch again.
In the morning, Foggy stays home while Matt goes to the office. He makes Sam eggs instead of asking what happened last night. The kindness of that act makes Sam want to cry a little bit, and he knows if he thinks about it too hard it'll just turn back into paint and poetry. Eating is difficult. He tells Foggy that he misses how he used to draw when he was a kid, that he misses how he used to draw in general. And he doesn't know how to get it back, but god he wants to. He cuts himself off when he sees Foggy's eyes watering, and he feels deeply guilty for making Foggy cry . He shuts his eyes tight and sets his fork down, and listens to Foggy get up and walk around the table. He's surprised when Foggy leans down and hugs him.
-
Sam spends the day in a haze, obsessing over his loss. He sits on the couch and stares at the ceiling until it too becomes a haze of washed out color, all the patterns and textures swimming in his vision. He still doesn't know how to say it. He misses it though, he was right about that. It's like he's forgotten how to view the world, and no matter how hard he looks he can't make himself remember. He shifts to his side, and his eyes fall on a stack of old files. He thinks about the photos in his file drawers back home, in the shed on the roof.
When he was gathering information on NYC's vigilantes he would often end up far, far back on subreddits dedicated to hyper specific topics and heroes. One of those nights he found a subreddit dedicated fully to vigilante photography, it was full of candid photos of heroes swinging through the air, or perched on fire escapes, or walking alongside rattled civilians. In a few of the photos the hero in question noticed the photographer, and had turned and thrown up a peace sign or waved, and something about those ones had made Sam smile. It made them all seem so human.
His favorite, though, was a picture of Daredevil. (He finds that a little funny now.) It was grainy, obviously taken from far away and zoomed in. Matt was sitting on the roof of a building, slumped over and resting an arm on one of his knees, his other leg stretched out in front of him. He was backlit by the rising sun, and it washed the whole picture in gold. From what Sam could make out of his face, he seemed tired. Really, really tired. But he was smiling, and Sam had a feeling he was smiling at the camera. Something about that picture had struck a chord with Sam, and he'd printed it out and slipped it into the Daredevil folder.
He misses that subreddit, he wants to go visit it. Wants to see if any pictures of him have made it on there. The thought makes him sit up and brace his head on his knees, curled into himself a little.
Goddamnit.
-
Sam only stays at Matt and Foggy's place for a day. When he comes home he heads to the shed, and he sets his suit and staff down in a corner. Then he leaves, and lays flat on his back on the roof. Stares at the sky and thinks about the color blue. Gets up to eat. Hours later, he stares at the sky and thinks about the hazy darkness that is his vision at night. Gets up to eat. Even later, he stares at the sky and thinks about the pink-orange of the sun breaking through the clouds, and how it slowly, slowly climbs across the horizon. Golden hour, here he is. He catches red at the edge of the roof, and looks over to see Daredevil come to check on him. He chuckles.
"What're you doing?" Matt asks, sitting beside him.
"Remembering." Sam says. Then he pauses, thinks for a second. "Do you wanna hear about the sunrise?"
Matt grins, and Sam tells him about the golden hour.
-
He sleeps until noon, Nelson & Murdock are generous with their days off, and he traverses the city. He buys groceries, and he remembers how food is art again. Bites down on the nausea that rises at the thought, and looks past it. Thinks about love and breakfast food. Then he remembers an old pastime, and goes people watching.
He doesn't think of stories for the people he sees walk by, not yet, he just sits and tries to catch bits of their conversation. Some are clearly having a terrible day, and he sympathizes with them. He overhears a woman's argument with her mom over the phone, steadily rising in volume, and his face twists into something bittersweet, reminded of Lu Wei. He shifts his attention to a group of three, chatting idly about the news. Then his attention is pulled to music, someone is busking around the corner. He sits back on a bench and smiles.
-
When he gets home he makes dinner for him and Hannah. They don't talk while they eat, but that's okay. It's something, and that's more than it's been for the past couple of months. He realizes he's missed his sister. She catches him spacing out and tries to steal his food, and then he remembers that his sister is an asshole.
Later he's contemplating going out as Blindspot that night, and he hears music start up from Hannah's room. It's a loud, loud song, just like the music he likes, because Hannah is his little sister and she loves to break into his spotify account, and to steal his clothes and his style and his food. He smiles, taps his foot to the music, and thinks their neighbors still probably hate them.
-
A couple days later Sam finds himself wandering through alleys, out of costume. He's looking for something, but he doesn't want to admit it. Obviously, he finds it immediately, in tags and doodles and stickers all over dumpsters and walls and street signs. This is New York, after all. When he stumbles on a bigger mural he steps back, turns his head and closes his eyes. Takes deep breaths and reminds himself where he is, gently pokes at his eye sockets. Then he looks again. It's a flower, red and gold and muted green. Distantly, he thinks it's beautiful. Then he ducks behind a dumpster to throw up.
-
Blindspot takes a week off from patrolling, in the end. It feels like too long and not enough time at once. But he needed to wait until it felt okay to be in the suit again. To stand with stripes across his ribs in the angular faux-skull mask, and disappear himself for a little. It feels right now. He resumes his normal routes. Stops a few muggings, makes sure the victims are okay. Walks multiple women home when they call for him, because the people in his town have learned his name, and they trust him.
Around 3 am he hears the shake and hiss of a can of spray paint, he flinches. Freezes on the rooftop, then looks around for the source of the noise. He follows it to a dark alley, he can't tell what the artist is making, aside from a few stark white angular lines, but he knows where this is, and he makes a note to come back in the morning, before he goes off and continues his rounds.
-
Sam comes back in casual wear at 5, and he finds Blindspot's mask staring back at him. It's jarring, to say the least. He takes an instinctive step back, closes his eyes and counts under his breath. When he opens them again the mask is still there, it's clearly unfinished, it looks like the artist ran out of white in the middle of filling it in. But the lines are crisp and smooth, and it's surrounded by all types of colors, shapes that are still unrefined; he's not sure what they're going to be. There's a steady hum of fear there, but when he ignores that, he thinks he likes the piece.
-
Blindspot returns that night, it's a slow patrol. He settles on the fire escape adjacent to the piece and listens to the artist paint. It's a rhythmic process, and it reminds him of sewing and soldering, and the lines on his arms and his ribcage. It helps him slowly relax, Muse's weird lair was silent and cold, but it's a warm night in Chinatown, and life is abundant when he listens for it. The spray paint sounds die off after a bit, and the artist begins to put away their supplies. The clink of the cans bumping into each other is cut off by a gasp and a sharp crash, as the artist presumably drops one. He thinks they've spotted him. Sam waves, and then he disappears to cut the interaction short. He's never been good at conversation, and he wouldn't know how to explain that he can't see what they're painting right now. A wave will do, he thinks.
-
The colors were flowers. Red, gold, pink and teal. They're circled by rings of white. Sam approaches the painting cautiously, like it might bite him. He reaches out and touches it, traces each pedal, then the outlines of Blindspot's mask. His mask, and his stripes. Sam leans against the wall and wipes tears from his eyes. He chuckles.
As he walks away, he pulls up the photography subreddit, and he searches his name.