Chapter Text
Matt Murdock’s relationship with the concept of snow could probably best be described as ‘complicated’.
It was often said that snowfall was a blanket over the city, and the idiom was truer to Matt than it was to the people who visually saw the white sheet covering up the concrete. It was a barrier between his senses and the city, muffling the sounds he used to judge his path outside, and lulling away the symphony of heartbeats, conversation, joy, and pain from the world outside his window.
When he was young, long before he could ever wear the mask, it was almost something of a blessing. To an extent, yes, the snow lessened the ease with which he moved through the outside world. But inside, inside he could understand his surroundings just the same as he normally could. He moved unhindered - unmuffled - through the convent, from class to class and room to room with the confidence of a lawyer winning a case with his second-best argument, holding the win in his hands with the Ace still up his sleeve.
The most important difference, at least to Matt, was that for a day - maybe even two or three if his luck held - he simply didn’t have to carry all the weight of Hell’s Kitchen with him.
Years later, as a man, when he thought — when he knew for sure he could do something about the pain he spent most of his life hearing, the quiet of the snow was less of a comfort, and far more like a barrier. Up close, his senses worked perfectly fine, even outside. He could still sense his immediate surroundings, and the people beside him, with near total precision. Outside of his immediate surroundings, however, his abilities became - for a lack of a better word - frustratingly normal.
Matt could only describe the effect of falling snow like it was a series of very tiny, very persistent, synchronised white noise machines. The settled snow quieted and changed the way noise carried around streets, the way it bounced against buildings and objects.
As it fell, the snow would alter the way the air itself felt, and over any longer distance, it would scramble it slightly between where it flowed around something that moved, and where it reached Matt. It threw off the outer reaches of his depth perception, like everything he picked up on was right, just two steps to the left. If it were consistent, he could have learned to adjust his understanding, to tell himself in the moment that if it seemed like it was here, it was actually there. But it wasn’t consistent, the direction in which it was off was ever changing, so it was more akin to all the furthest pieces of the world his senses mapped out for him suddenly taking on the guise of television static.
Just the threat of snow in the morning air left a note of something sharp and clean above the scents of the city, diluting the familiar into something a little more difficult to parse out.
The sum of these effects was that Matt’s world shrank back down to that which surrounded him, with everything over about fifty feet in each direction - and the rest of Hell’s Kitchen - reduced to a quiet, almost buzzing, haze. He could barely hear the trials of his city, and when he could, when a moment of someone’s pain slipped through the knit of the snow-blanket and made its way to his ears, there was very little he could do about it.
He had tried, once, when a robbery in the family-run bodega across the street from his apartment had managed to filter through. By the time he had managed to don the suit and make it outside they were blocks away, their footfalls sounding as soft as those normally much further from where they were, and by the time he made it to the last alley he had heard them run down, they were an impression in the static at the edge of his perception.
And Matt had entirely lost his sense of place.
He wasn’t even in Hell’s Kitchen anymore, and with his mental map fading out somewhere around the end of the unfamiliar street, he wasn’t sure which direction led home. It wasn’t like he could ask a stranger for directions as the Man in Black, so he wandered the city, keeping to alleyways and the dark spaces beneath awnings for cover. It was a while before the familiarity of his surroundings as he made his way back into Hell’s Kitchen broke through the muffling quiet of the snow, and he could make his way with ease to his own rooftop, to the loft waiting for him.
Daredevil was never spotted on snowy nights again.
It wore on him, like a tiny stone lodged itself inside his shoe the moment he tasted the metallic threat of snow in the air. Foggy had always known the snow had a habit of throwing Matt’s mood slightly off his normal rhythm, and post finding out about Matt’s moonlight gig, he was pretty quick to fill in the gaps of the why. He would always try to remain neutral, but Matt could hear the way his heartbeat steadied, the way his “See you tomorrow, Murdock.” at the end of the day came out with more surety than hope.
Karen was different. She could read him so well that sometimes he forgot she couldn’t read his heartbeat too, that she could read the tension in his shoulders but not the lack of irritated heat in his muscles that gave away the days without overexertion. She didn’t have the context of his past, and, in the stillness of the office, Matt could feel the way her own muscles would tense, the slow heat of frustrated gears turning rolling off her as she tried to fit the disjointed pieces of his fragmented mood together, until they turned into a puzzle that explained exactly what he was so torn up over.
She found out on a damp Friday in March. One of those days where the rain and the snow seemed to be engaged like battling stags somewhere in the clouds, with rain winning out for most of the day. They had just closed a case, one of their first big ticket jobs since the firm reopened with a third name embossed and printed on the business card. Matt had laughed that “big ticket” was probably a little hyperbolic of an adjective to give to a standard wrongful dismissal suit, but both Karen and Foggy argued - successfully, they would add - that any case that included a real life check that didn’t bounce when it hit the bank clerk’s counter counted as “big ticket” in the eyes of their collective checking accounts.
The damp air had turned to snow around the time they got back into the office, and Matt’s mood seemed to fall along with it,
“Can you hear that, Daredevil?” Foggy had grinned as they walked through the door to their new, tiny but distinctly not-meat-scented, office, turning around to face his friends with a hand cupped around his ear, before catching sight of the way Matt’s smile had fallen into something straight-lipped and harsh, “that’s the sound of my checking account taking a sigh of relief — hey! No! Matthew Murdock, you better turn off mope-mode right now before I force you to make snow-angels in the slush on the sidewalk.”
“Foggy, it’s nothing —”
“You’re damn right it’s nothing, Matty-boy! As in, your night-time schedule on this blessed Friday just became free as a bird, and there’s not one thing you can do to mess that up for me,” Foggy grabbed an arm of each of his friends and swiftly pulled them back around to face the door, dragging them out into the stairwell and back onto the street before Karen could even pull her half-taken-off coat back around herself, “We, the victorious and definitely-not-mopey members of Nelson, Murdock, and Page, are going to the only bar in this city that will still open a tab for us.”
He had explained it all over their fifth round of drinks, or, more accurately, while they were huddled around the dartboard in the darkest corner of Josie’s - arguing over whether Matt’s last dart had quite made it into the bullseye.
“I thought you said you were,” Karen waved her hands around in front of her like she could manifest the word on the tip of her tongue, “muffled - Matt? That’s not muffled!”
He ran his fingers over the little metal boundary between the inner and outer bullseye, cataloguing the way the pin of the dart just made it into the centre, and throwing Karen a grin with just enough smugness that she could tell he had won the game, “Ah - You forget, Miss Page, that it doesn’t snow inside.”
“He’s also leaving out the fact he’s pretty much fine with anything within about half a block outside, too.” Foggy interjected, and Matt could feel the heat rise in his cheeks as Foggy’s face lit up, like a cartoonish manifestation of a lightbulb moment, “In fact, it’s— it’s like he’s just short-radared for a few days, y’know, like when you can’t see things far away? near-radared?”
Matt pulled the darts from the board, laughing as he made a show of taking Karen’s elbow as they fell back into the booth, despite the fact they had chosen this spot due to its distinct lack of prying eyes.
Old habits die hard, he guessed. But as their knees knocked together under the table, with Karen’s hair falling into his face as she leaned across him to steal the rest of his whiskey, Matt wasn’t entirely sure which of their old habits it was.
It became something of a game, something just a little too new to be a tradition.
Matt found he liked the way Karen’s heartbeat picked up as her gaze would catch on the first flakes of a new snowfall through the window of their office. Always at the end of the day, always just as she would begin to pull herself out of her work. it was just a split second of simple, leaping, joy, before her pulse slowed back to a smooth metronome, ticking away the beat of a now well rehearsed conversation:
“You’re not going out tonight.” she would say, lips already drawn into an easy grin, an almost boastful undercurrent to her words, like she’d won a personal battle of wills with the weather.
“It seems you could be right—”
“I am.”
“You are.” Matt would relent from across the room, making a show of cocking his head to the side, listening as God’s own personal brand of soundproofing started to make itself known to his senses, “You know, I think Josie might have actually had the heating system fixed this time.”
“I think Josie is morally opposed to fixing things,” Karen would laugh, clear and easy, hair falling into her face and simply being left there - her nervous habit of tucking any loose strand behind her ears momentarily forgotten.
“Ah, you misunderstand me, Miss Page,” he would say, unplugging his headphones and starting to ease away the files on his desk, “I simply mean that, since last week, she’s probably managed to replace that bottle of cheap scotch that burns just enough to prevent three very broke friends from remembering how cold it is.”
They would meet Foggy en reute if he had been at court that day, his lopsided smile bright as he stage-whispered, “Karen! you’re supposed to be leading the poor guy, not counting snowflakes!” in mock exasperation, as Matt deftly - subtly - prevented her from walking into another light pole.
And matt would always be proven right on the ‘forgetting the cold’ front, but he was never sure how much of that was due to the whiskey itself, and how much was due to the simple ease that came with allowing his world to narrow down into the shape of the people he loved most in the world combining forces to bully him relentlessly. The bullying was usually over some college-aged tale of misfortune that Karen had been told so many times she could probably recite it as well as Foggy, with her filling in the details that the increasingly tipsy Foggy would leave out, and Matt slowly sinking under the table with the warmth of an embarrassment that had long since turned into nostalgia.
He found he rather enjoyed the way their ease softened the air around them, the way their laughter tasted on the air when it was unlaced with the fading aftertaste of adrenaline. It suited them.
Sometimes, when the air outside was thick with muffling snow, and Josie’s was filled with hastily thrown grins and decade old stories, for just a night, Matt let it suit himself, too.
All of this is to say that, over time, Matt Murdock got really good at knowing on exactly which day the weather was going to start turning snowy. Today, he was pretty certain, was not one of those days.