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Lawyers can’t just catch bricks, alright? It’s not like there’s a BRK101 class that’s required to graduate from law school, and you know what, yeah, he’ll say it, in general blind men also cannot catch bricks. Peter’s pretty sure. And he would have gotten into MIT if it hadn’t been for… everything, so he’s not an idiot. And he puts it all together. That’s why he shows up at the Nelson, Murdock & Page office after hours without warning: because he’s confident. And really, really lonely.
He’s not sure how Matt’s powers work, but he knows there’s only two people that obsessed with Hell’s Kitchen, and it’d honestly make sense if they were one in the same. The streets here kind of reek. But Queens isn’t exactly a haven, he knows, just home. So he gets where Murdock is coming from.
He straightens his spine at their door, his arm halfway between himself and the translucent glass pane with chipped gold lettering telling him where he is. After Ben’s death, the grief had been all-consuming. Peter had prayed every night hoping to find an answer, or for something to make sense, even though faith, for him, had always been uncertainty. May had gotten her first grays in the weeks after watching her husband bleed out—Peter knows because he’d braid her hair in the silent moments when they ran out of tears.
Isolation, he’d been told, is the worst part of grief. The loneliness accompanies a griever through every stage—even acceptance. During Hanukkah, he’d still made rugelach for two.
He knocks.
Foggy Nelson answers the door almost immediately. The man is tense, with deep lines etched into his face from smiles and frowns alike.
“Hi, can I help you?”
“Maybe,” Peter says, shoving his hands into his pocket. “I’m looking for Matt Murdock. I need to speak with him.”
His words don’t reassure Nelson. “Do you need a lawyer?”
“Not anymore.”
Nelson doesn’t know what to make of this twitchy teenager in dirty clothes muttering some of the most cryptic sentences he’s ever heard. But Peter knows the kind of people who run this firm. He knows what kind of man Foggy Nelson is, a bleeding heart on his sleeve.
“Come on,” he finally says, and he shifts to the side to allow Peter to walk into the office. Ms. Page is standing to the side, a coffee in her hand as she watches the two of them. The hairs on the back of Peter’s neck stand up. She makes him nervous, and he’s not sure why, but he knows there’s more to her than she’s letting on from her relaxed stance.
An office door opens with an awful creak, and it takes everything in Peter not to flinch. Emerging from some hidden crevice comes Matt Murdock, tall and swaggering and bruised across his cheekbone where his red glasses sit.
“This kid says he doesn’t need a lawyer, but he’d like to talk to you.”
“Well, I don’t know how helpful I’ll be if you don’t need a lawyer but,” Murdock gestures to his eyes, “I’m all ears.”
Peter clears his throat, looking at Page and Nelson. “I’d rather talk in private, if we can, sir.”
Murdock twirls his cane in his hands briefly, cocking his head to the side like he’s listening to something in the other room. “Can I ask why?”
Peter shakes his head, feeling like an idiot when Nelson narrates, “He says no.”
“Well, alright then.” Murdock turns around and goes through the door he came from. Peter balls his hands up in his pockets as he follows the man inside.
Murdock makes a point of shutting the door, the latch clicking into place. Peter feels a little nauseous.
“Can I know your name, at least?” he starts, walking away from the door and towards his desk. Peter has plenty of escape options, should he need them. He’s not sure if Murdock is leaving them on purpose or not.
“Peter Benjamin Parker.”
The lawyer in front of him laughs a little. “Good to meet you, Peter Benjamin Parker. I’m Matthew Michael Murdock. What can I do for you?”
“We actually know each other. Or at least, we’ve met before.”
Murdock raises an eyebrow. “Really? I don’t tend to forget a voice.”
“Well, I’m sure you don’t, Mr. Daredevil, but if you can just—”
Actually, he can forget about MIT. Peter is in fact the dumbest fucking person on the planet.
The man doesn’t even blink. “What did you call me?”
“I’m Spider-Man!” he tries next. He’s batting a thousand today.
The man in front of Peter just sort of sighs, a long and drawn out sigh before he stands up and crosses the room. Peter keeps his back to the wall, watching Murdock with apprehension, but the lawyer just walks to his office door.
“Foggy. Karen. Will you please join Mr. Parker and myself?”
Once all four of them are in the room together, Murdock closes the door again. This time he locks it. Peter’s fingers twitch, still shoved in his pockets. It’s alright, he thinks. He’s a quick draw.
All three faces in front of him are grave, and Murdock pushes his glasses to the very bridge of his nose. There’s a fine white line in the bags of his eyes, like someone had tried to cut one of them out.
“Before you try to, like, say you’re not Daredevil or something, I feel like it’s important you know that I saw you. Use your powers.”
Nelson crosses his arms and huffs. “Christ, Matt, I told you you can’t just go throwing your canes around New York City.”
Murdock pointedly ignores his partner, keeping himself facing Peter. “When do you see me? And where?”
This is the part Peter’s been dreading. His hands finally come out of his jeans just to end up embedded in his hair, his weight shifting from toe to heel as he steadies himself. “Alright, well, how well-versed are you three in the theory of the multiverse?”
“He’s crazy, right? Time travel and spells are taking it a little far, even for us.”
Peter shudders at Page’s words, sitting folded up in their waiting area while the three of them discuss inside Matt’s office. She’s making sense, sure; he doubts his own story most of the time. Wonders if he’s gone crazy with grief, made up something in his head after his friends left and May died. Maybe he was never real to begin with. He doesn’t exactly have proof otherwise. But hearing it from someone else…
Nelson counters, “I think we can all agree that the rest of New York has gotten weirder than Hell’s Kitchen.”
“Weird enough to believe this?”
“The kid can shoot webs out of his arms. He’s clearly telling the truth about some of it.”
Matt’s voice interrupts. “I believe him.”
“I don’t even think Catholics are allowed to believe in wizards, Matt.”
“He’s not Catholic anymore.”
“Thanks for rallying my defense, Foggy.” Matt sighs, and given the creak of the floorboards, begins to pace. “I mean, half the world got turned to dust because of a tyrannical alien snapping his fingers. Isn’t this… I don’t know, it’s not as crazy as that.”
“Matt, I get it, he’s a sympathetic kid. But even according to him, you were just his lawyer. Why’s he coming to you for this? Not this Doctor Strange or his old friends?”
Peter feels pretty close to banging his fucking head against the wall. He’s been thinking about doing that kind of thing a lot. “Isn’t it fucking obvious,” Peter mutters, and he does not expect a resounding laugh from the office. Given how quiet Page and Nelson are, he doesn’t think they expected it either.
The office door swings open and Murdock leans out, eyes resting about five feet above Peter’s head. “No it’s really not.”
“What?” Peter stammers.
“Obvious?”
Peter feels the heat of his cheeks, and clenches his jaw, terrified. Murdock winces.
“If you want to hang around here, there’s no teeth grinding. It’s an awful noise.”
“So you have super hearing or something?”
“Or something.”
The two of them pause, the air between them on fire even with the shitty heater keeping the room cold.
“What did you mean?” Matt asks.
“I just…” Peter clenches his fists, his legs starting to bounce. “You’re already parading around the city at night beating up criminals. I can’t fuck up your life anymore than you already have.”
“You’re looking for a friend?” Nelson asks, emerging from behind Matt.
“An ally.”
Matt Murdock’s face doesn’t shift at all, even as Page begins to look down and Foggy makes some expression bordering on pity, on shame. The vigilante hides beneath a mask even when he’s not in the suit.
“Well, we could always use an unpaid intern,” Matt finally says.
He still sleeps with a nightlight on. It’s probably funny, objectively, that Spider-Man has a small spaceship that he plugs into his wall every night before he sleeps. It’s probably, objectively, a little less funny that he had to buy the spaceship one because it was the only night light that lit up so much of his studio apartment that he stopped seeing fingers crawl from the shadows.
Night terrors are what his psychiatrist had called them. Tended to happen at young ages. Tended to go away if not given a reason to continue. Peter had given them plenty of reason.
“So what made you decide to become a superhero?”
“I’m not—” Daredevil interrupts himself. “Do you call yourself a superhero?”
“Well, no, but I’m like, eighteen. With a cotton-spandex suit I sewed myself. Your helmet is bulletproof. How are you not a superhero?”
“My partner prefers the term vigilante. I prefer not to talk about it. Especially while on the job.”
Queens is, in fact, several train rides away from Hell’s Kitchen, and is not a convenient trip. Peter won’t stop making it anyway, showing up at strange hours to study or try to stick his nose in a legal case or ask about Daredevil’s latest missions.
Peter stumbles in late one night, not Nelson, Murdock, nor Page knowing how he knew they were staying late to work on a case, wearing what Foggy later tells Matt is a shirt reading “I’m Not Single I’m Saving Myself For Thor” and pajama pants. His hands are bruised at the knuckles and his eyes are sunken in, but all Matt notices is how badly he smells of beer. He didn’t even know beer was kosher.
“Hey, Peter,” Karen tries while Peter stands in the middle of the office, swaying on his feet. “You alright? You don’t look so good.”
“Yeah, I’m good!” Peter says, waving them off. “I was just up already and wanted to see if I could pitch in.”
Foggy is unconvinced. “You look like Matt in college.”
“Or Matt now,” Karen tacks on.
“Am I just an easy target or…”
“No really, I’m fine,” Peter insists, cutting Matt off. “I just like to be helpful. Do some good.”
“You’re drunk,” Matt declares bluntly.
Karen and Foggy are both surprised. Apparently neither of them had noticed.
“Oh, but Mr. Vigilante, that’s illeeeeegal.” Peter’s tone is dripping with sarcasm and annoyance.
Foggy and Karen exchange a glance because Peter very rarely reveals himself to be a teenager. He is weirdly mature and stoic and yeah, sometimes a little goofy, but it’s easy to forget this crime fighter is so young.
Peter ignores all of them and approaches Foggy’s desk, looking over the papers like attorney-client privilege isn’t real. Well, actually, from what they’ve been able to gather, it’s that Peter doesn’t think he himself is real. He ends up passed out, drooling on the desk, and Matt and Foggy stay overnight with him.
In the morning, Peter’s eyes are bloodshot and his head is throbbing and there’s kind of auras around everything and everyone. He’s exhausted, and it takes him a while to realize he’s at the Nelson, Murdock & Page office, a cold cup of water being placed in front of him.
“You’re hungover,” Matt says.
“Foggy says you drank whiskey when you were nine.”
“You understand that’s not great, right?”
Peter nods, but the movement makes his brain explode, and he groans.
“Yeah, no, I want to formally declare that I’m never gonna drink again. Ever.” Peter picks up the water.
“Good,” Foggy says. “Because it’s bad for you. And whatnot.”
“And being numb doesn’t make it easier,” Matt offers, and Peter scrunches his face up.
“It kinda did.”
The first time the three of them end up in Peter Parker’s apartment is also the last. They’d been walking through Queens, pointedly avoiding the coffee shop Peter always brought drinks to the office from, when Matt’s stitches had torn. Matt had barely noticed the sting–Karen had been the one to point out there was blood staining his shirt.
Matt places a hand against his chest, and it comes back damp and smelling of copper.
Peter, rather reluctantly, says he lives nearby and has a first aid kit.
“You know, Mr. Murdock,” he says while he fumbles to get his key in the lock, “you really shouldn’t be going for long walks while you still have stitches in. It’s pretty bad to overexert yourself like that.”
Matt doesn’t bring up the two times Peter has fallen asleep on patrol from various combinations of sleep deprivation and caffeine withdrawals because he’s nicer than that. He’d prefer if Peter would offer him the same decency.
The first thing Matt notices when the door finally opens is that hinges need oil worse than any door Matt has ever had the unfortunate privilege of hearing. The second thing is that the room is really, really drafty. Foggy makes a small, strangled sound when he sees the state of the apartment, and Matt wants to ask what he’s missing that’s made Karen’s heart drop like that.
“Sorry about… listen, I just don’t usually have a lot of company.” Peter’s nervous, twitching his hands against his denim pants. “At least there’s not anything for you to trip on, Mr. Murdock.”
Oh, he thinks. The apartment is hollowed out.
He doesn’t understand why that seems to surprise his partners so much. Hadn’t they all been broke and eighteen and alone, once?
He takes a step into the apartment, but before he can get far, Peter stops him with a sudden hand to his chest. The eighteen-year-old pulls away quickly, remembering Matt’s been injured, and Matt can feel the heat radiating from Peter’s face.
“Can you guys take off your shoes?” he asks quietly but urgently. The boy himself has already slid off his sneakers, tucking them as close to the wall as they can get.
“Oh, yeah, sure,” Karen says, kicking her flats off as Matt and Foggy do the same with their loafers. Once they’ve all removed their shoes, Peter steps aside to let them in. Matt can tell there isn’t much to the apartment, but he’d folded up his cane when they started up the stairs, so Foggy leads him to what turns out to be the only surface in the apartment that isn’t for food: Peter’s bed, a verifiable cot on the floor.
“Where’s the first aid kit?” Karen asks, and Peter makes a vague gesture to the one closed off area in the studio apartment.
“It’s in the bathroom, I can grab–”
Foggy rushes from Matt to the bathroom, ignoring Peter’s offer and the fact that he doesn’t know where in the bathroom the first aid kid is.
“Sorry, he’s a little overeager when it comes to stopping me from bleeding,” Matt jokes, and based on Foggy’s very audible huff from the bathroom, he doesn’t find it funny.
Peter follows Foggy into the bathroom, and when Foggy comes back he’s holding a rattling plastic box that’s clearly not as full as it should be. Peter stays in the bathroom, fiddling with something, and Matt can hear something strange in Foggy’s chest.
Karen joins the two of them, standing above Matt while Foggy leans down to inspect the wound, lifting Matt’s shirt up.
“When we made the whole ‘no making out in the office’ rule, I had really been hoping to prevent myself from seeing Foggy ever take your shirt off, Matt,” Karen quips in an attempt to lighten the mood. She’s probably just as pissed at him as Foggy is–the firm is treading water at the moment, and the last thing they need is one of the partners dying in the street from an infected wound.
Foggy doesn’t laugh, just begins applying alcohol to Matt’s cut. Matt thinks his partner’s too upset with him at the moment, or just overthinking, until he murmurs, “He’s got all his mirrors covered?”
“What?” Matt asks.
“Peter. The mirrors are all… well I mean, there’s only one, and it’s in the bathroom, and he’s got it completely covered with a sheet or something.”
Matt gets a sinking sense of nausea in his gut as it dawns on him, but Karen beats him to saying it.
“Shiva,” she says. “He’s sitting shiva.”
Peter emerges from the bathroom, shrugging a little, his heart rate picking up. He stumbles over his words. “Well, sort of. I mean, it’s been longer than seven days, so I’m not sure I’m actually allowed to call it sitting shiva anymore, but… yeah. Kinda.”
Matt can tell Karen and Foggy are staring at him, and Matt wants to tell them to stop. Tell them mourning never stops, and that if they’re going to look at him like this now, they’ll have to look at him like this forever.
Matt makes the mistake once of asking what Peter does for work. The boy darted around the question for weeks until Matt finally dragged an answer out of him. As soon as the confession leaves the kid’s mouth, Matt takes him back to his and Foggy’s apartment, where Foggy and Karen are staying in for the night.
“Mr. Murdock, you’re being ridiculous,” Peter grumbles, standing in the middle of the living room in his full Spider-Man suit.
“Peter,” Matt says, ignoring the teenager’s protests. “Please tell my business partners here how you make a living.”
“Call me your business partner again and you’ll sleep on the couch tonight, I don’t care about your bad back,” Foggy objects, but Matt shushes him.
“Peter, please tell Karen and Foggy what you do.”
Peter rolls his eyes beneath his mask, crossing his arms defensively. “Well. I take pictures.”
“Oh,” Karen says, clearly not understanding why Matt has made him announce this. “Well, that’s… nice.”
“Of?” Matt demands.
“Well, I mean… I take pictures of… Spider-Man. You know.”
Foggy snorts. “Okay, that’s pretty clever–”
“He’s not done.”
“Okay!” Peter bursts. “I take pictures of Spider-Man and I sell them to The Daily Bugle.”
“The…” Karen’s face twists in confusion and more than a little amusement. “The paper that’s declared you a public menace.”
Matt can’t hold back his laughter anymore, and Peter lets himself be the butt of the joke, because he knows it’s funny from the outside. Hell, it’s kind of funny to him, too. Honestly, he’s just not comfortable selling the pictures to papers calling him a hero.
Peter’s not in Hell’s Kitchen most nights. Matt has a pretty strong grip on the criminal activity within his designated couple of blocks, and he sometimes feels a little stupid knowing Peter Parker, a literal child, is protecting an entire borough on his own, but come on, Hell’s Kitchen has four gangs living within a block of each other. He’s got his hands full.
But some nights, when Queens gets quiet or, as Matt suspects, Peter gets a little lonely, Spider-Man will make appearances in Hell’s Kitchen. Peter insists he hates doing it. “I’ll leave saving the Manhattanites to you,” he’d joked once.
In all honesty, Matt prefers it when Peter steers clear from the Kitchen at night. Spider-Man stops street muggings and magicians with supervillain names. The kid doesn’t need to see the bloody brawls necessary to stop a murder or an assault or a gang war. That’s why, when in the alley below them, a muffled cry comes from a mouth being covered by a hand, Matt prays he’s the only one between the two of them who heard it.
The thing is, Peter may not have hearing like Matt does, but he’s got instincts. Instincts built from years of something Matt’s got no right to question. So when Matt gets this tight panicky sick feeling like the suit’s about to melt off, and he can’t think and he can’t breathe and he can’t move, Peter, apparently, does not have that problem because he’s—
The crack of the man’s teeth is louder than anything Matt’s ever heard Spider-Man do to another person.
“He had it coming,” Peter murmurs, mostly to himself. Matt nods.
There is something exchanged between them, and Matt has to voice it because otherwise they’ll both become intangible.
“Me, too,” he offers. Peter barely manages to nod his head, still staring blankly over the city skyline. It’s hours until sunrise. His mask is off, crumpled in his hands, and if anyone looked up right now, they’d struggle to believe this bruised teenager with bloody knuckles is the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Matt’s having a hard time connecting the wet sounds of the man’s skin splitting and the hands that organize his office’s documents alphabetically.
“Yeah?” Peter says after Matt’s given up on expecting an answer.
Matt nods. “When I was eleven.”
Peter makes a guttural sound, something between a scream and a cry. “I was twelve.”
“I, uh… I go somewhere for it. An anonymous thing.”
“That’s great for you, man.” His voice is still monotone and weighted.
“You could come.”
“Yeah sure,” Peter says, and he sounds genuine, but Matt hears the almost angry uptick of the boy’s heart. “I’ll come. Answer all their questions. ‘Do you have a support system?’ Well, you see, I did, but then my identity was erased and I’m technically not even real anymore, and everyone I love is either dead—hi yeah also I’m a two-time orphan—or doesn’t even remember my name, so—” he cuts himself off, taking a shuddering gasp.
“Fuck. Fuck. ” An exhausted smile enters his voice, one of those twisted ones that Matt wears when he’s talking about his childhood. “It was supposed to be better than this. Being eighteen. I was supposed to get my license and go to college and be with MJ and go to May’s every weekend and get some shitty internship and have a regular coffee shop that I go to because I love it, not because it’s the only place I can see the people who used to love me.”
Matt knows the worst thing someone can do in the face of this kind of pain is to make it seem like it’s possible to understand. It’s not. Peter is going through something new and awful, something Matt will never understand for as long as he lives. And he’s only eighteen.
And in the morning, in the office, there is nothing different. Peter’s heart and breathing patterns and various minutias are all the same. It’s not like when Karen came back after Wesley and he could smell gunpowder mixed with the strongest perfume she’d ever worn. There is no shift in the way he carries himself, and he’s brought in coffee from the same shop he goes to every morning.
“I really get why you love this place so much,” Karen says, taking a long drink. “But isn’t it out of your way?”
“Well, yeah, but it’s got kosher coffee. A lot of places don’t.” Peter’s heartbeat skips on the lie, and Matt knows the coffee really is kosher. It’s just not the real reason he goes there.
Back when Matt was little, he used to play pretend. Well, sort of. He’d wake up from a nightmare, screaming, and for a few moments he would convince himself that every bad thing that had happened to him was made up, a trick of his mind. His dad’s death was a nightmare. Stick was a nightmare. He was loved and respected and at home in his bed surrounded by family, his dad just in the other room.
Childhood is just a fantasy. Matt doesn’t blame Peter for playing house in a coffee shop.