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Matt’s fairly certain that he would have killed himself if so many other people hadn’t had the same idea.
Foggy blipped. Foggy blipped, and so did Theo and exactly half of the whole Nelson clan. Claire blipped, Jessica blipped, Danny blipped, Luke blipped, Frank Castle blipped, even Spider-Man blipped, and that last hit unexpectedly hard. It was just, damn, kid couldn’t be more than sixteen. Called himself the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. New York just couldn’t have nice things, huh.
But Karen hadn’t blipped, and Father Lantom hadn’t, and his mom hadn’t. Matt was lucky, he knew, he was lucky.
That night, Matt went up to the roof and did nothing but listen. Understaffed hospitals were swamped with people dying, from car crashes and plane crashes and people whose caretakers had disappeared. Matt had never heard so much grieving before. It was too loud and too quiet at once and his city didn’t sound like his city anymore with half the universe gone.
And Karen came and put a hand on his shoulder, and he leaned into her touch. They just sat there until morning, and Karen said, “We’d better get to the office. I’m sure there are loads of people who need a good lawyer right now.” And really, Matt was lucky.
But Matt would have killed himself, or gotten himself killed, thrown himself at every armed idiot he could find, until sheerly by the laws of probability, he ran into a fight he didn’t make it out of. Except that next day, the suicides were reported on the news, and the numbers were staggering. And then there was more grief, and every suicide bred copycats, and Matt didn’t have time to self destruct, he didn’t have time to pick fights.
Every night Matt listened. He learned to recognize the sound of too many pills being poured out by trembling hands, what a heartbeat sounded like when a mind had decided to end its beating forever. He listened still for the sound of a gun cocking, but now he heard it echo in lonely apartments, ran towards it and listened to the bang that followed, broke into homes with the smell of blood in his nose and called 911 and did his best to keep them alive till they got there.
He got very, very good at breaking into buildings quickly, and very, very good at first aid, learned what to do when someone’d poisoned themself, shot themself, hung themself. He went out every night, and there was so much death, and so much of it was quiet, he missed so much, and he came too late as often as he didn’t, but if he saved one life it was enough, it had to be enough.
He prayed. He prayed so much in those first few months, prayed like he hadn’t done since he was a kid. Because when a fourteen year old girl slit her wrists in a public bathroom, and he had already done everything he could to stop the bleeding, and was just waiting for the ambulance to come, there was nothing left to do but pray, pray like he meant it, humbly. Because there was nothing else left in his power, and no one was listening but God. (“Oh, God,” he had heard her say, “Oh God, that’s a lot of blood. Shit, I didn’t, I didn’t mean it. Daredevil, they, uh, they say you can hear people. Daredevil, I fucked up.”)
(She lived. That girl lived, and that was enough. In the quiet of a city more than halved, that had to be enough.)
Nelson and Murdock and Page without Foggy felt like a hole in his chest. They still were in the supposedly temporary office above Nelson’s Meats, and Matt hadn’t realized how much he’d gotten used to the sound of it, of the bell that rang every time a customer entered Nelson’s Meats and Theo’s cheerful voice. Nelson and Murdock and Page was too quiet, painfully so. The space was too big without Foggy’s warm presence to fill it. So they disbanded. He and Karen packed everything up into boxes and left. Karen wanted to go back into journalism anyway. She was good at it, and the world needed people who knew how to look into darkness and put hope into words for them.
“I’m moving in with you though,” Karen informed him, “I’m not letting you go down a depression spiral again.”
Matt might have protested that, but, first of all, it was true, and secondly, he knew that Karen was secretly terrified of facing this new, broken world alone.
He might have turned in on himself anyway, might have buried himself in night work, because it was so immediate and so much simpler, and didn’t remind him so acutely of Foggy, if it weren’t for Marci Stahl.
He was having weekly brunch with his mom, when it occurred to him that Marci really didn’t have anyone apart from Foggy.
“What are you worrying about now,” Sister Maggie asked in the reproving tone that used to make Matt’s insides turn to slush with guilt when he was a kid. But Matt just smiled.
“Nothing,” Matt said, “Just thinking about mothers, and how you’re not a shitty one.”
Later, Matt looked up Marci’s asshole parents in the registry. They’d both been blipped.
He hadn’t seen Marci since Foggy’s funeral. It’d been a group Nelson funeral, because no one had the energy or time these days to grieve individually, and it seemed like at least half of what remained of Hell’s Kitchen was there. She’d cried at the funeral, even with everyone watching, and Matt had kept his distance, wrapped up in his own grief. He’d left early. He’d always found the Nelsons overwhelming when they were out in full force, turns out they were even harder to bear now, halved and grieving. Marci wasn’t in the same circles as the Nelson clan, she’d been alone at the funeral.
“Welcome to the orphans club,” Matt said to Marci by way of greeting when he showed up at her apartment. Because just because the world had half ended didn’t mean they were going to suddenly stop being assholes to each other.
“If you’re here for Foggy’s ghost, I’m gonna have to break your poor catholic heart, ‘cause souls aren’t real,” Marci said, case in point.
Matt walked in without her permission, but she didn’t slam the door in his face. (And she would have. She wasn’t above banging a door into the nose of blind man, it was one of the things Matt liked best about her.)
“Got anything to drink in this fancy place of yours?” Matt asked.
“Drank it all,” Marci said. She smelled like it, though she wasn’t drunk now. She also smelled like she hadn’t been sleeping much, and like she’d been crying. You’d never guess it from her voice, and Matt was willing to bet you couldn’t guess it from her face either.
Matt thought that’d always been the main reason Marci hated him, his ability to always read her, smiles and makeup be damned.
Matt bumped into the coffee table in a pointed sort of way, to remind Marci how rude it was of her not to tell him where it was, and Marci grudgingly told him where the couch was without actually inviting him to sit down.
Matt sat and Marci sat, and they were silent together for a little while, before Marci seemed to gather herself up and said, “So I hear your cute little law firm’s finally gone under. I always told Foggy he could do better, but I suppose he always thought it was his friendshiply duty to keep you afloat.”
And Matt said, “I’m still in business. So if you ever come across any clients too innocent for you to give a shit about, feel free to send them my way.”
Matt didn’t stay at Marci’s long. It smelled like Foggy, still. Matt hadn’t expected that somehow. The office didn’t, really, or at least, Matt was so used to how the office smelled that all he noticed was the absence of Foggy. Matt didn’t stay long, but he stayed a little while.
And he kept coming back. He couldn’t exactly put his finger on why, and he knew Marci couldn’t fathom it. It was just that Foggy was gone. Foggy was gone, and Matt remembered when Foggy was all he had, but Foggy was gone and Matt still had people, half the world was gone, and Matt was left with a hole in his chest and his city swept out from under his feet, but he hadn’t been left stranded. But Marci only ever had Foggy, really. And Marci could manage on her own in law school, and she could manage on her own as a career driven corporate shark, but no one could manage on their own in the apocalypse.
So here was Matt, some shitty consolation prize, her dead boyfriend’s best friend, here to drink her fancy bourbon and replace it with shitty beer, and taunt her like they used to do in college, because neither of them knew how to care about someone precious to them without being terrified they’d be taken away.
Matt would talk about his cases sometimes, all the ways he was helping people, and Marci would reply with snarky comments about all the money he wasn’t making, and he would ask about Marci’s cases. But Marci would reply, “To hell with my cases, I’m off the clock. And anyway, what does any of it matter these days?”
And then Marci was coming over to Matt and Karen’s sometimes to berate Matt at his place instead of hers. And then Karen and Marci were bonding (mostly over Matt’s inadequacies and self-destructive tendencies) which was a development that Matt observed with a vague sort of horror. And then Marci was going over Matt’s cases and telling him he was an idiot, and all the ways he should be doing his job better. And then, somehow, there was a new office with a new plaque on the door that said Murdock and Stahl.
Matt and Marci were both the perfect balance for Foggy. Together they were something that, in Karen’s words, should be banned by the Geneva Convention. But Matt knew how to seem friendly and approachable if he put in the effort, and Marci knew how to seem open and relatable if she put in the effort, so they managed well enough not to turn their clients away screaming. And when it came to their opponents, well, more than once they made the opposing counsel cry.
But before all that, Matt sat Marci down and said, “Look, if you’re going to be partners with me, there’s something I need to tell you. I didn’t tell Foggy and it really fucked him over and almost destroyed our relationship, so.”
And then he told her about Daredevil, and the super senses and all the rest of it, and at the end Marci said, “Huh. You know, it’s insane how not insane that all sounds,” and then, “I knew it! I knew you kept running into things on purpose to guilt-trip me for being a shitty seeing-eye-friend.”
And Matt said, “So, are you going to report me to the police, or?”
And Marci said, “Murdock, you idiot, I literally just said the f word. Come on, don’t get all mopey on me, don’t we have penniless orphans to selflessly rescue or something?”
So every night, Matt went to work and he helped people, and every morning he went to work and he helped people, and the whole world was too quiet and too loud at once, and the whole universe felt wrong, off balance so that Matt always felt he was half a step from falling, but Matt was too busy living for anything else.
Time went on. Slowly the suicides ticked down, the grief less raw, the permanence of the world sinking in. Slowly, crime ticked back up, organized crime reconsolidated, criminals who had taken time off for a while for their own grief, and out of respect for the dead, went back to the streets, as life went on for them like everyone.
And Daredevil was left alone in the city. The defenders were gone, spider-man was gone, even the Avengers were dead or had abandoned their posts.
Captain America had put down his shield and stopped fighting. He’d started some kind of group therapy thing. Karen said that the world now needed a listening ear more than a punch in the jaw. Matt wanted to know why the hell he couldn’t do both. Karen said that just because Matt believed in working himself to death and hadn’t prioritized his own mental health a single day in his life didn’t mean he should expect other people to live that way. More publicly, and in print, she said that Steve Rogers didn’t owe the American people anything, and that he had every right to live his life as he chose. Matt agreed with her completely on that score, but he still thought that what Steve Rogers’ mental health needed most was a good kick in the pants.
But regardless, that left Daredevil. Matt still didn’t leave Hell’s Kitchen, mostly, because he did prioritize his mental health sometimes, (thank you very much, Karen) and he knew full well that trying to solve all of New York’s problems was a straight road to insanity for him. So Daredevil stayed in Hell's Kitchen, but he stayed in Hell’s Kitchen. Through all the chaos of rebuilding a society halved, he was there. He was there through those first few months of suicides, and he was there when all of New York’s various criminals and criminal empires tried to take advantage of the world’s crumbling social infrastructures. He was there in dark alleys and lonely apartments, and no suffering was ever too small, and no odds were ever too long and nowhere in his little pocket of the world was too poor or crime ridden or generally overlooked to be within his notice. When all other heroes seemed to have abandoned them, there was Daredevil, with blood on his knuckles and a snarl on his lips, yes. But Matt never forgot the specific sound of a pill bottle being poured out too many at a time, or a gun cocking in a room with just one heartbeat, and the people, his people, never forgot it either. Matt learned the feel of blood on his hands with no one to fight. He learned how to talk, those times he came soon enough, or those minutes waiting for an ambulance. Learned to find that small frail seedling of hope, and hold it frailly in his hands. Because the world was hard and cruel, and bigger and stronger than you were, but still you had to get up. And you could get up, you could. Not just because you had to, but because it was worth it. He said it, over and over again. Not in words always, but in actions, in listening. Life is precious, no one is alone, not really, life is worth living, life is worth living, life is worth living , so many times, in so many ways that even he believed it.
So when it seemed like all the superheroes had abandoned them, the people of Hell’s Kitchen had Daredevil, and they knew he would come when they called.
And so, to Matt’s bafflement, New York fell in love with Daredevil during those five years after the blip. Because even for the people outside of Hell’s Kitchen, Daredevil was hope, Daredevil was still fighting, Daredevil was still with them, Daredevil never, ever gave up.
Afterwards, you could tell who survived the blip (and they were survivors, every one of them who made it through those five broken years) because if you asked who their favorite superhero was, almost every one of them said Daredevil.
(For five years Matt worked and he lived and he wasn’t alone. For five years he fought with a hole in his chest that eased but never shrank. And then Foggy was back. The world broke all over again because it wasn’t used to being so full anymore, and everything was so loud from the celebrating and the sheer mass of people that Matt had a headache for over a month, but none of that mattered because Foggy was back , and Matt was so damn lucky he wasn’t sure how to believe it.)