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Matt didn’t regret moving back to Crime Alley. It was home, for better or worse, and he loved it, he loved the people here. And it wasn’t as if he didn’t hear things elsewhere in Gotham.
The idea of leaving Gotham altogether was out of the question, he’d never been out of the city in his life, and he didn’t want to. He doubted, though, that even if he went to the farthest reaches of the globe he would ever find somewhere that was quiet.
It was hard though, it was hard to hear the suffering of his city and know that there was nothing he could do to help, nothing immediate anyway.
It was better, now that he and Foggy had started Nelson and Murdock, right here in the middle of the poorest part of Gotham. It was good to be able to help.
But there was a little girl in his building who cried almost every night, and Matt couldn’t help with that.
He’d tried. He’d left an anonymous tip with the police, he even talked to the mother, but she didn’t believe accusations against her husband (and honestly Matt didn’t blame her, who would want to believe something like that about someone they loved?) and there wasn’t any real evidence, so nothing came of it.
He was tempted, so tempted, to teach that man a lesson with his own two fists, the itch to do something burned at him.
But Matt was just a blind attorney. Sure he had super senses, but he wasn’t sure how much use that’d be in a fight, and he had zero combat training unless you counted all the boxing lessons he’d begged off his dad’s buddies all the way back before he lost his sight.
Still though, Matt would bet on himself over his abusive neighbor. The man was out of shape, over aggressive and thought he was hot shit when he really, really wasn’t.
But what then? Matt could give him a couple of black eyes, but then what? What good would that do besides relieve Matt’s own feelings a little? The man would just go back to hurting his daughter, and if he guessed why Matt was after him, he could take out his anger on the girl. Matt couldn’t risk it.
Matt lay in bed, not sleeping, thinking about the little girl who had finally fallen asleep, and trying to tune out the city around him. It was quiet tonight.
“Thanks, Oracle. Got anything else for me?” Nightwing’s voice. Matt’s apartment was on his patrol route, and he heard him swing by fairly often.
“Nothing’s showing up in your area,” said the mechanized voice in Nightwing’s earpiece, “It’s a quiet night.”
Nightwing was practically on Matt’s roof now, performing acrobatics in a relaxed, playful sort of way.
Matt thought, why not? It was worth a shot.
Without bothering to get dressed, Matt scrambled out of bed and up to the roof access.
“Hey, Nightwing,” he called out into the cool evening air.
Nightwing was far too professional to jump, but his heartbeat did. He turned to face Matt.
“Hello,” he said, a little uncertainly. He was tensed, not quite ready to fight, but assessing.
“There’s a little girl in my building, her name’s Alice,” Matt said, “Her dad’s been sexually abusing her, and I can’t get her mom to see what’s happening, the police won’t do anything either. Can you help?”
“Who are you, how’d you know I was up here?” Nightwing asked, cautious but not quite unfriendly.
Matt shrugged, “Just a concerned citizen. I was up anyway, and I heard you talking.” That was a normal thing to hear, right? A normal person could have heard that.
“Alright,” Nightwing said, “I’ll look into it.” And he meant it.
A couple weeks later, Alice’s mother was filing for divorce. Nightwing and his associates had broken into the father’s internet history and found child pornography. It was enough to convince the mother, at least with Nightwing’s earnest testimony backing it.
Afterwards, Nightwing came back, knocking on Matt’s roof access door.
“You were right about the girl,” Nightwing said.
“I know, I heard,” Matt said, “Thank you.”
“It’s my job,” Nightwing said with a shrug that seemed as much habit as communication. Matt wasn’t sure if Nightwing had noticed yet that he was blind, “I should be the one thanking you. I don’t suppose you can tell me how you knew what was going on when the girl’s own mother didn’t notice?”
Matt had only ever told one person that he was a meta. He and Foggy had gotten drunk one night in college, and Matt had tried to explain how it all worked for him, the way he experienced the world. One person, in his whole life, he hadn’t told Father Lantom (superpowers weren’t a sin after all), he hadn’t even told his dad. Having powers wasn’t, it wasn’t something that was safe to talk about, and Matt had always known that on instinct. Between shady government organizations and super villains there were so many people who would love to get their hands on a power like Matt’s. Matt wanted to live his life, he wanted to help his city, he couldn’t afford to risk people finding out he was meta, he couldn’t afford to get caught up in super hero business.
“I’d rather not say,” Matt said.
“I understand,” Nightwing said, sounding like he did, like he meant more than just face value, “You don’t have to worry. I’m keeping this off the books, Batman doesn’t have to know you exist.”
“Thank you,” Matt said again.
“It’s no problem,” Nightwing said, and turned and flipped to the next roof over.
Matt didn’t want to get involved, couldn’t afford to, but…
Matt was on Nightwing’s patrol route. Several nights ago there’d been a mugging a couple blocks over. It escalated, and someone was stabbed to death. They hadn’t talked, Matt didn’t know if they were a man or a woman, didn’t know how old they were apart from being vaguely adult sized, he didn’t know anything about them, but he heard them die.
Nightwing had been there, he’d been close enough he could have stopped it, could have gotten there in time. But there hadn’t been gunshots, and Nightwing hadn’t been close enough to hear, hadn’t been close enough to see. And Nightwing had been too far away for Matt to call out to.
Nightwing could have stopped it, if he’d just known, Matt could have stopped it, if Nightwing could only have heard him.
“Wait,” Matt called after Nightwing. He stopped at the far edge of the next rooftop and turned around.
“I hear things,” Matt said, “I hear a lot of things, people who need help. I heard you talking to someone on comms, Oracle. They see through all the security cameras, right? They tell you where there’s trouble. I could help with that. I could tell them when I hear people who need you, people they don’t have eyes on.”
Nightwing was quiet a moment. From this distance, Matt couldn’t get a good read on his body language.
“O doesn’t just look through cameras for us. She’s our security and information gatherer. If I tell her about you she’ll want to do a background check, all kinds of illegal invasions of privacy,” Nightwing said.
Matt bit his lip. “Will she tell the rest of you what she finds out?” He asked.
“Not if I tell her you don’t want her to. She’s probably the best of us at keeping secrets, and that’s saying something.”
“I want to get in touch with her, then, I want to help.”
“I can’t promise anything, but I’ll let her know,” Nightwing said, “You got a code name we can call you by, if you’re not wanting us to know your real one?”
Matt made a face. “I’m not really a code name type of person,” he said, “Just a concerned citizen.”
Nightwing hmmed. “Usually when we have a civilian on comms we use an initial, d’you have one of those we could use?”
“M,” Matt said.
“Alright then, Agent M, I’ll be seeing you around,” Nightwing said, and grappled away.
“So, O,” Matt heard Nightwing say later as he drifted off to sleep, “I met this guy…”