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Home.
It’s a scent that, for almost everyone, changes very little throughout their life.
For Matt Murdock, it’s changed a lot.
It started out as clean sweat and the copper tang of blood.
Jack Murdock had been Matt’s home for the first decade of his life. He’d never had a mother, no plum scented shampoo or freshly baked bread to bask in when he was tired. There’d never been a perfume that lulled him to sleep or a citrus spike to remind him of homemade lemonade on warm summer days.
There’d only ever been Jack.
Jack, at three am after a match, hair stuck to his skin and red crusted to his shirt.
Matt knew most people wouldn’t enjoy this scent, the feel of clammy hands brushing his hair off his forehead to brush split lips against temples.
But most people weren’t Matt and hadn’t grown up, all but housed in Fogwell’s gym.
Most people wouldn’t feel as comfortable as Matt did, as at home, with drops of perspiration racing down his back to meet the ruby he spit to the floor.
After Jack died, home smelled like Clinton Church. And with his newly heightened nose, it was a more powerful feeling than ever.
Home began to smell of old wooden beams, neutral soaps used by all the nuns and the orphans growing up, and of flickering candle flames.
It was different. It wasn’t home in the way Jack had been, rough skin and “Murdocks always get back up.”
It was clinical. It was god-soaked and communion wine laced promises. This home was unsteady at times, but always there. This home, for Matt, was less nostalgic and more character building.
Then, he’d gone off to college. To law school at Columbia. And his home had shifted again.
Foggy Nelson, dorky and sweet with no regard for the fragileness Matt was usually treated with became a new home. Foggy took one look at Matt and the glasses that didn’t quite fit his face and he’d made up his mind to adopt him. Simple as that.
Matt never had a chance to argue.
Foggy’s home, his actual house with his family, smelled of lingering deli meats, of home baked bread, and of a warmth Matt never could put his finger on.
The Nelson’s deli was scented heavily of raw meat, of stinking cheeses, of industrial cleaners that clung just under the surface of everything else.
Foggy just smelled like sea salt and caramel, hints of his mint addiction wafting up, and something crumbly like pie crust.
On the bad days, the days where Matt couldn’t do much beyond breath, Foggy smelled of stress and sugar cookies as he laid beside Matt, surrounding him in home .
On the good days, Foggy smelled like overpriced beer from Josie’s and beeswax chapstick and victory.
Then Karen showed up and Matt was suddenly unsure how home had ever just been one thing.
Karen smelled like gunpowder and cherry liqueur and baby powder. Karen was a tray of contradictions that perfectly made up her and Matt was surprised how easily she slotted into the frame of home.
The office always smelled like home to him. It smelled like chocolate covered cherries, of shredded paper and wood fibers, of the blood and sweat they poured into this business, of happiness.
Nelson, Murdock, and Page smelled like home.
Matt could say that with surety.
After all, he had the best nose in the business.