Chapter Text
The screaming girl was a trap.
Matt should have known. There was something off about her voice, something distant and echoey, but he was in fight or flight mode, and the scream gave him a reason to fight. Being Matt Murdock, he seized the opportunity with both fists. He slammed through the three guards on the door to the building easily enough. There were rumors, whispers around town that this place had been taken over by the remnants of Gao’s Chinese gang. It was probably that fact rattling around in the back of Matt’s mind that made him cautious and saved his life.
The scream was coming from the third floor. There were only half a dozen heartbeats between the doorway Matt burst through and the room the scream was coming from. There was a heartbeat there, elevated and scared, and he assumed that was her. The six people in between were hardly threats. Some were too old to be decent guards, some too young, and he could smell the sweat pouring off a particularly nervous guard just outside the room.
Something wasn’t right.
Matt ran up the stairs to the second floor. Three of the building’s occupants converged at the top of the stairs. They were all on the floor in fifteen seconds flat. The screaming was more persistent now, louder, but the breathing was off. It was too even, not panicked enough, and there was still that echoing sound that didn’t fit the room that Matt could sense above him. And there was something else...a scent, something he’d smelled before, something rare…
Matt swore and bolted into the room to his left. He jumped out the window towards the landing opposite.
The screaming stopped.
The building exploded.
The heat on Matt’s side was incredible. A second before Matt was thrown into the side of the brick building opposite the one he’d leapt from, there was an incredible pressure in his ears. Then there was nothing but pain, the taste of copper in his mouth, and darkness.
When Matt woke up, only pain remained.
He took a great, heaving breath, sitting up and flailing his arms. He felt his hand hit something, but he couldn’t figure out what it was, because he couldn’t hear the contact. No, not just the contact, he realized.
He couldn’t hear anything.
“I can’t hear,” he said, his mouth forming the words that reverberated in his skull. They were lost to him, gone into the vacuum around him. He reached out, up, and his hand met something again. This time the something reacted, wrapping itself around his hand. A person, someone was touching him, holding his hand, holding his shoulder down, pressing it against whatever was behind him. He was lying on something hard. He turned his head, listening for a voice, a heartbeat, trying to make out where he was. Pain shot down his left side and the world tilted queasily below him. No equilibrium. No echoes off the surfaces around him.
Nothing.
“I can’t hear!” he said again, his heart fluttering with fear and pain and panic. “I can’t hear anything!” The hand holding his got tighter, the one on his shoulder tapping him. He turned his face towards it, then back, searching. The hands on him were soft but strong, familiar but foreign. Be calm, the Stick in his head said, but how, how could he be calm when the whole world was taken from him? There was nothing, nothing but darkness and silence and that burning, ripping pain that suddenly flared up from his skull to his toes. Then even that started to slip away from him, and he tried to cling to it, clenching his grip around the hand in his.
His hand slipped away as he lost consciousness.
Maybe Matt was in Hell.
The Devil would devise a Hell just like this for Matt, whose senses were so heightened after the accident. Constant pain and constant silence, nothing to give him a sense of where he was or what was happening. He could feel his arms moving through the air, smell the antiseptic sharpness over decay and death that meant hospital. For Matt Murdock, Hell would be a hospital.
“I can’t hear anything,” he shouted into the void. He didn’t know if anyone or anything was there to hear him. “Where am I? What’s happening? I can’t hear!” His chest tightened around the words, dissolving into a sob. He fell back onto something that was soft, too soft, and maybe this wasn’t Hell after all. Surely the Devil would prepare a bed of nails for Matt Murdock.
He felt the scream tear its way out of his chest.
The hands came soon after. Too many of them, on too many parts of Matt, on his head and his arms and his shoulders, and there were smells of people and disinfectant and latex. The hands pulled at him, pushed him, hurt him. He batted at them, punched out, reared his upper body away from the soft surface behind him. The world lurched and so did he, sideways maybe. The bile rose up in his throat and out through his mouth, the foul taste sharp, the smell of it making his stomach turn again. He coughed. He screamed.
If this wasn’t Hell, then Matt wanted to be dead.
Tears stung his eyes, made tracks down his cheeks. More hands fell on his arms and he shoved the sides of his hands out, hard enough to knock a man down. The hands came back, resting on the sides of his face. Matt felt the soft skin against one cheek, the other hand obscured by something. Something that scratched, blocking the sensation along his face. Something that ran all the way down his left side.
Bandages.
“I can’t hear,” he said once more, helplessly. Desperately. “What’s going on, who are you, where-” The hands on his face dropped away and another sob broke in Matt’s chest. He imagined the sound must be embarrassing, desperate and wild as he felt. His head spun until the soft hands met his, picking them up, gentle, kind. There was another smell fighting through the various atrocities of hospital. Something familiar and homely and kind of onion-y. His hands were guided in the direction that Matt thought was up.
They stopped at soft, damp skin.
Feel my face, Matty, he heard his dad’s voice say in his mind.
Matt took a shuddering breath and then let his fingers start to move. Eyelashes fluttered against the pads of his fingertips. There, in between them, there was a thin nose. Below that a mouth, with short, shallow breaths coming from between warm lips. The round cheeks were damp with tears. His fingers, moving quicker and harder now, felt their way outwards until they met hair that fell down to the person’s shoulders. Matt whimpered his name.
“Foggy.”
Arms wrapped themselves around Matt’s shoulders and reeled him in until his shoulder met Foggy’s chest. He turned slightly, dropping his hands to the space between them. Foggy’s hands (and it was so clear now, that they were Foggy’s, so familiar to Matt in size and shape) pressed against Matt’s back firmly. Matt brought his own fingers up to Foggy’s stomach, then crawled them around until they met at Foggy’s back, wrapped securely around Foggy’s waist. He turned his face against Foggy’s neck, letting the terrain of Foggy’s body be a map to the position of his own. He was on a bed. It gave way beneath him as Foggy shifted forwards, pulled Matt closer, tucking Matt’s head under his chin. Foggy was solid and warm beneath Matt’s hands and against his chest. He tightened his arms until he knew it couldn’t be comfortable, but Foggy only held him closer, running his hands up and down Matt’s back and shoulders, carefully avoiding the side that Matt could still feel burning. He could feel the vibrations of Foggy’s throat and chest against his head as Foggy talked. The breath expelled with each word ruffled through Matt’s hair. He couldn’t hear them. He couldn’t hear Foggy.
Matt cried against Foggy’s chest, soaking Foggy’s shirt front, until everything fell away again and he was drifting.