Chapter Text
Matt can’t remember how he got here, and the wooden arm of his chair feels smooth.
For some reason, the latter observation bothers Matt far more than the first. Maybe it’s because wood has never felt smooth to him. Wood, even polished wood, is comprised of countless, tiny grains that always seem to catch on Matt’s fingers. If Matt concentrates, he can spend hours getting lost in the dips and whorls of a piece of wooden furniture.
But Matt’s concentrating now, and the wood still feels smooth. He worries at the observation like it’s a loose tooth, and presses his fingers harder against the chair as if that will make any difference.
“Mr. Murdock?”
Matt startles, and then startles at the fact that he startled. That…doesn’t usually happen to him.
He gathers himself enough to give a charming, embarrassed sort of smile. “Sorry, I—didn’t hear you coming. I must be getting a head cold; I’m a bit out of sorts today.”
“Hopefully not too out of sorts for your interview,” the person says pleasantly. “Mr. Landman is ready to see you.”
Right. Matt remembers now: he’s here for an interview. He’s here for an interview at Landman and Zack. If only he felt more prepared for it. Simply walking down the hall turns out to be a herculean task. It’s as if Matt’s wading through mud and smoke instead of carpet and air—everything is just so damn muffled.
Matt breathes a sigh of relief when he can still hear the flutter of a heartbeat coming from inside Landman's office. At least his hearing isn't completely shot. Still, he muses as he knocks on the office door, he probably shouldn't go out in the mask tonight with his senses like--
Matt’s train of thought screeches to a halt when Landman opens the door and greets him.
"Am...am I in the wrong office?" Matt says, wincing when his voice lilts up at the end of the sentence.
"Matt Murdock, right? Here to interview with Paul Landman? Looks to me like you're in the right spot," says...the person who sounds like Landman. Matt doesn't forget voices, and he hasn't forgotten Landman's: thin, reedy, with a bit of an echoing croak born from years of smoking. So Matt knows this is Landman's voice, but-
But it's not his heartbeat.
Landman clears his throat. "You okay there, son? Don't worry, I won’t ask too many out-of-left field questions. I leave that for the phone interviews.”
Landman’s lips smack loudly as they stretch into a grin Matt can actually hear. Matt winces—Landman is always doing that, smiling in a way that hurts Matt’s ears.
Matt forces a smile of his own. He’s nearly decided to chalk up the heartbeat thing as being a weird artifact of his head cold, but then Landman makes the mistake of adding, "Nothing to be nervous about."
Landman’s heartrate speeds up. Lie.
Matt narrows his eyes, only just stops himself from baring his teeth.
“You’re Landman?” Matt asks again, needing to make sure.
“Of course I am,” Landman says in exasperation. Lie lie lie. “Do we need to reschedule this meeting, Mr. Murdock? You’re clearly not feeling well.”
Matt straightens. Somehow, this person both is and isn’t Landman. The impossibility of such an occurrence doesn’t seem relevant right now. What does seem relevant is ascertaining what threat this imposter poses to everyone else in the building.
“Oh, I’m fine,” Matt says. “Or, I will be: once you stop pretending to be someone you’re not.”
The man’s heartrate spikes at Matt’s words—screaming caught, caught, we’ve been caught—and Matt grins. He grips his cane tightly in both hands: not much of a weapon, but it will do for now.
And maybe it’s just the adrenaline flooding his system, but Matt can now hear through the cotton in his ears. He grips his cane all the tighter at what he hears: the hiss of wobbling glass, the whisper of creaking wood, the groan of shifting steel—all coupled with the racing beat of Landman’s heart.
“How the hell are you doing this?” Landman mutters. His voice is less raspy, less reedy—less Landman—and low enough that Matt can barely make out his words over the din of the shaking office building.
“How are you able to perfectly impersonate someone you’re not, right down to the voice?” Matt says. “How are you not concerned that there’s apparently an earthquake in downtown Manhattan-”
The floor tilts as if some force has grabbed it by the corner and tugged upward. Matt is nearly thrown to the ground. Landman—or whoever he is—grunts and grabs onto the desk, but otherwise doesn’t react. He’s not surprised by whatever’s happening.
This is no earthquake.
“What is this?” Matt yells over the groaning and shrieking building.
“My worst nightmare, apparently,” Landman sighs.
At Landman’s words, something finally clicks in Matt’s mind. All of the little details that’d been bothering him since he walked into this office flood his thoughts now. This man isn’t Landman. Matt doesn’t even have an appointment with Landman this week.
And Matt can’t remember how he got here.
“T-this isn’t real,” Matt gasps, before the ceiling caves in and-
And Matt wakes up gagging, retching his breakfast onto the floor. Anxious heartbeats, the clicking of computer keys, droning phone calls, the shifting of paper—all of these sounds slam into him with the force of a truck. Between the noise and the stench of his own bile, Matt nearly throws up again.
But amid the chaos of the office building, Matt can still hear Landman’s—or the man who pretended to be Landman’s—heartbeat, so he tries to sit up anyway. The scratchy pull of something in his arm stops him in his tracks. Matt feels along his arm and finds—
A needle. Someone has drugged him. Matt’s a hypervigilant loner with enhanced senses—how the hell had anyone managed to drug him?
Matt hisses as he takes the needle out, but forces himself to take a deep breath, to focus. The chaos flooding his ears gradually thins and disperses until only two voices are left: the ones of the people who’d drugged him.
Said people are also arguing about him, apparently.
“We are so fired,” one of them hisses. His heartbeat marks him as the Landman impersonator. “Actually, we’re pretty much out of a job forever, because there’s no way anyone’s taking us on after this. You did not tell me he had training!”
“That’s because he doesn’t. Where would he have gotten training?” The second voice belongs to a woman. She’s kneeling on the floor, hurriedly packing up a…briefcase? It’s shaped like a briefcase, but it hums with chemical heat, whirrs with mechanical energy.
A briefcase-but-not, Landman-but-not. What the hell is going on here?
“He was only under for two minutes before he figured out it wasn’t real,” the man says. “There’s no way he could’ve done that without training.”
“The wood was smooth,” Matt slurs, and wants to kick himself as soon as the man and the woman’s heads whip toward him. But Matt can’t help it—disoriented and sick, he grabs onto the man’s voice like it’s a lifeline, responds to it.
It’s doesn’t matter. Matt can play this up: play the weak blind guy until he knows who they are, what they want.
“The wood was smooth,” the man repeats. “How much did we dope him up again? Bad enough we get the architecture wrong, but now we’ve blown out this guy’s brain cells-”
“The architecture wasn’t wrong,” the woman says icily. “I don’t know why the dream collapsed, but it wasn’t because of that. And he’s only out of it because he woke up before he was supposed to—his brain cells are fine. What do you mean, ‘the wood was smooth?’”
Matt wobbles—still recovering from ‘waking up too soon,’ whatever that means—but manages to make it to his feet.
“Are…are you seriously asking me questions after you may or may not have just ‘blown out’ my brain cells?” Matt asks. “I hate to break it to you, but whatever business you’re in, I think it might be the wrong one.”
“Yeah, well, you and my mom are in agreement on that,” that man says. “But instead of owning my own deli shop, here I am, talking to you about how smooth wood feels. Come on, Ka- come on, let’s not stick around and interrogate the guy. We need to get out of here.”
“Not going to happen,” Matt says, nearly growling when the man snorts in response. Fuck this. Matt’s done playing it safe. He’s done playing along. He wants answers, and he wants them now.
Matt can’t do much fancy maneuvering when he’s this disoriented, but he doesn’t need to, not in these close quarters. It takes no effort to simply pull the man toward him and wrap an arm tight around his neck. The man squeaks in his grasp, but then immediately stills. Good—he can tell what Matt’s capable of.
“I think it’s my turn to interrogate you,” Matt hisses. “Now talk.”
The woman slowly stands from where she’s been messing with the strange briefcase. Her heartrate skyrocketed when Matt grabbed her partner, but when she speaks, her voice is steady.
“Let go of him,” she says, “and we’ll tell you what you want.”
Lie.
“Let go of the gun tucked in your waistband,” Matt says, grinning when her hand jerks away from where she’d been reaching for the piece. “And I won’t scream as loud as I can.”
“And everyone will come running to save the ‘helpless’ blind guy?” she says mildly. Her heartbeat doesn’t waver at Matt’s threat.
“You’re not afraid of anyone coming here,” Matt realizes. “Which means…which means they already know that you’re here.”
In his shock, Matt loosens his grip on the man’s neck just enough for the man to choke out, “They hired us, okay?”
“Foggy,” the woman hisses.
The man—Foggy?—shrugs: as he can shrug, in Matt’s grip.
“He’s already halfway there,” Foggy says. “We can’t tell him much he hasn’t figured out on his own.”
Turning slightly to Matt, his warm breath prickling hotly at Matt’s skin, Foggy continues: “Do you know anything about dream sharing tech?”
So that’s what that briefcase is. Matt tries to remember everything he knows about dream sharing, about the briefcase—the PASIV—that facilitates it.
“I only know what was mentioned in the leaked SHIELD files,” Matt says. “The technology is highly illegal outside of military circles—which I’m guessing you two are not in.” Matt frowns. “So wait, that was…that was just a dream? But it felt real.”
“Apparently not real enough,” the woman mutters.
“And Landman and Zack…hired you to do this to me,” Matt says, his blood running cold. Oh God. Does this mean that they know? Did they figure out that he-
“Well, not you specifically,” Foggy says, giving Matt a condescending pat on the arm that is currently around his neck. “They do it to all the people they’re thinking about hiring. We go into the subject’s subconscious, do some digging, and L&Z gets all the dish of a background check plus some bonus skeletons in the closet to manipulate as they please.”
“That’s…incredibly unethical.”
“It is that—but then again, so is putting someone in a chokehold.”
“So is drugging someone without their consent,” Matt counters, forcing himself not to tighten said chokehold. He still needs Foggy to be able to speak. “So what skeletons did you find in my closet?”
The sound of lips spreading against teeth as Foggy says, “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
Matt bares his teeth in return. “Didn’t get much then. Probably could’ve guessed that, since you were only in there for—two minutes, did you say?”
Foggy snorts. “Oh, I like this one.”
“Too bad ‘this one’ is still going to report you to the police,” Matt says. “I don’t care if Landman hired you; there’s no way this is legal.”
The woman’s hand twitches like she’s about to go for her gun again. Matt tenses his legs, ready to leap—but before either of them can do anything, Foggy casually admits, “Oh, of course it’s not legal. But there’s no way you’re going to report us.”
The woman slowly relaxes as Foggy speaks. Matt narrows his eyes, wondering what they’re playing at.
“Why wouldn’t I?” Matt asks.
Foggy takes a deep breath. When he speaks, his words are calm, nonchalant even. He reminds Matt of the lawyers he’s observed in court: the ones who speak to the jury as if they were simply a next door neighbor.
“No offense, but you just put me in a chokehold that looks a bit too practiced for a blind guy with no training that we could uncover,” Foggy says. “You know you’re in a dream faster than I do, even though all you know about dream sharing is what you’ve read from the SHIELD files. Hell, you’ve read through all the SHIELD files. The only reason you’d do that is if you were worried about showing up in them.”
“And,” Foggy says, with the air of a poker player about to reveal their trump card, “you asked me what skeletons I found in your closet. Buddy, no one asks about that unless there are skeletons to find. You’ve probably got more shit to hide than we do, and you’re not about to call attention to yourself by playing whistleblower.”
Matt grits his teeth. Fuck. He’s gone against weaker arguments than that in an actual courtroom.
The woman notices his weakness and immediately jumps on it. “You don’t report us and we don’t report any of what Foggy just said to Landman and Zack. Deal?”
Matt tightens his hold on Foggy, but they all know it’s a toothless move—he’s already lost this fight. Matt blames his addled mind—still spinning from drugs, sensory overload, dream sharing—and the absolute force of nature that is Foggy and this woman.
“What makes you think that I care?” Matt tries. “You really think I want to work for Landman and Zack after knowing they hired you to do this to me?”
“Come on, Matt,” Foggy says, and Matt startles at the sound of this stranger saying his name: how easily it seems to flow from Foggy’s lips. “You’re not stupid. You knew what L&Z were the minute you walked in the door. I don’t know why you want to work for them, but I doubt you’re going to let this stop you.”
Matt wants to grind his elbow into Foggy’s windpipe in response but—Foggy’s right. Somehow, even though Foggy was only in Matt’s subconscious for two minutes, he already has Matt pegged. Even in this small interaction—in which Matt is supposed to be the one with all the leverage—Matt’s given up far too much.
The worst part, he thinks, as Foggy and the woman leave him alone with a splitting headache and a drying patch of his own vomit, is that Matt’s not entirely sure what he’s given up.
But no. Maybe even worse than that is that Foggy was right about him. Because despite knowing exactly what kind of slime L&Z are, Matt continues his interview process with them. Matt’s just that desperate. Beating up criminals isn’t working anymore—half of them only know Fisk as a philanthropist, and the half that do know the truth know little else that’s useful to Matt. So if he can’t find anything on Fisk as The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, then maybe he can find something as Matt Murdock, Attorney at Law. Sneak a look at L&Z’s files on Fisk, hope they have some scrap of information he can use. It’s pathetic, but what other choice does he have?
Unbidden, Foggy’s words replay themselves in his mind: All the dish of a background check plus some bonus skeletons in the closet for them to manipulate as they please.
Matt shouldn’t even be considering this as an option. He’s out of his depth as it is, even without adding invasive, psychoanalytical neuroscience into the mix. Although…it’s not as if it’d be any less illegal than the methods that Matt’s already employing.
This is what he tells himself as he beats up half a dozen white collar criminal wannabes until they give up Foggy and the woman’s usual hangout: a bar in Hell’s Kitchen that’d always successfully kept Matt away with its stench of fermented eel mixed with liquor. Matt scouts out the bar for three days before he hears it: the familiar thud of Foggy’s heartbeat as he and the woman leave the bar.
This is Matt’s last chance to recognize this as an exceptionally bad idea. Even if the whole dream thing is a viable alternative to killing Fisk, Matt still has a more ethical route to consider—now that Matt’s passed L&Z’s “background check,” he has a phone interview with them next week.
And then weeks later there will be a follow-up interview, and then—if he gets the job—weeks more of stomaching their joke of a code of ethics as he orients himself to their labyrinthine building, and then Matt will potentially have access to the files that Landman and Zack potentially have on Fisk.
No. Matt’s done waiting.
It’s a courtesy, of sorts, to approach Foggy and the woman near their favorite bar—their territory—but perhaps Matt overestimated just how courteous they would feel when being greeted by The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. Unfortunately, Matt doesn’t think of this until after he drops down from a fire escape, says, “Don’t run,” and is met with the full force of the woman’s pepper spray. Matt manages to flip away from the worst of the spray, but not far enough away to spare his throat a number of sparking, burning particles.
“I’m not—not here to hurt you,” Matt wheezes.
“Like hell you’re not!” Foggy says, heartbeat racing—he’s panicking. Yeah, Matt really overestimates the city’s good will toward him. At least Foggy isn’t running away: too in shock, perhaps, or maybe just too familiar with what happens to people who try to run from Matt. It doesn’t matter—as long as it gives Matt time to make his case.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” Matt says again. “I’m—I’m here to hire you.”
The words feel awful in his mouth, and judging from Foggy’s skeptical snort, they sound just as bad. Karen, though, her head tilts toward him—she’s curious, despite herself.
Matt turns to her. “I didn’t set off those bombs or kill that cop. I was framed, and I want you to go inside the head of the guy that did it.”
“And you want us to…find evidence? So you can exonerate yourself?” the woman asks, ignoring Foggy’s not-so-subtle tug on her arm.
Mat shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter what he did to me. If the people of this city think I’m the Devil…fine. But the man who orchestrated the bombings needs to be stopped.”
“And who is he?” the woman asks.
“Wilson Fisk.”
“Wilson Fisk the philanthropist?” Foggy asks. He stops pulling at the woman’s arm, curiosity drawing him into Matt’s tale despite the protest of his hammering heart. “You expect us to believe that the guy trying to rebuild Hell’s Kitchen is the same guy who blew it up?”
“It’s the truth,” Matt says.
“Karen,” Foggy says firmly. “Can we please leave this alleyway and stop talking to the crazy vigilante?”
The woman—Karen—doesn’t move. “I’m…I’m not so sure he’s crazy. You’ve heard the rumors about Fisk, Foggy. You know he’s capable of this.”
“Maybe. But the burden of proof on this…Devil guy to prove it is still enormous. You’re also forgetting the very salient fact that this guy wears a mask and beats people up—he’s a vigilante!”
“And we’re extractors,” Karen counters. “You know that the law doesn’t always line up with what’s right.”
Matt can tell that she’s looking at Foggy, but exactly what message that look holds, he doesn’t know. Whatever it is, it must be convincing, because though Foggy huffs out a harsh sigh, he gives Matt a nod.
“Okay,” Foggy says. “Make your case.”
Matt tells them: about how, when out patrolling, he’d heard the screams of a secretary being murdered in her jail cell—an incident later rewritten to be a suicide. How he’d torn through Hell’s Kitchen until he’d found the cause of her death—a flash drive—and then turned it over to the press. He tells them all he knows: about the Russians, Fisk, the bombings, everything. Or, as much as he can tell them without compromising his identity.
“I’ve asked around about you two,” Matt says finally. “No one knows much, but they all agree that you don’t just break the law. You try to help people: take cases from people like Landman and Zack to pay the bills and then spend the rest of your time going into the dreams of people who really deserve it. You can do that again, here, if you help me.”
At Matt’s words, Karen’s skin heats, her heart pounds, and her sweat sings with adrenaline. But even as her body responds to the idea of taking down Fisk, Karen shakes her head.
“I believe you, and I believe in what you’re doing,” she says, “but I don’t take jobs from people I don’t trust. And I can’t trust someone whose name I don’t even know.”
Matt hesitates. He’s already told them far more than he should have, far more than he’s ever told anyone aside from Claire, but—it’s not as if they’re in any position to reveal his secrets. The truce they made at Landman and Zack still holds. And while a relationship based upon mutually assured destruction and a shared hobby of unlawful righteousness probably isn’t a sound plan, at the moment, it’s all Matt’s got.
“My name is Matt,” Matt says, taking off his mask. “Matt Murdock.”
A long moment of silence, and then Foggy breathes, “Holy shit. You, you’re the guy from L&Z! I can’t believe I didn’t recognize your voice, holy shit.”
Matt shrugs. The movement feels awkward with his face so exposed like this. “No one ever does, if that makes you feel any better. People don’t tend to peg the blind guy as a vigilante.”
“Most people haven’t been put in a chokehold by said blind vigilante,” Foggy says.
His heartrate steadies now that Matt’s revealed his face—perhaps because Foggy now knows he’s speaking to someone he knows how to persuade. So that’s what it means to be a forger. Matt had read the term in the SHIELD files, but now he’s reminded firsthand of the full force of Foggy’s skill set: of how easily he can use his words to sway and influence his marks.
Good thing this guy never went to law school. He would’ve raised hell there.
“We still need time to think about this,” Karen says. “To make sure that what you’re saying is true.”
Matt pulls the mask back on. “You have two days. I’ll meet you here once you’ve made your decision.”
“And if that decision is no?” Karen says.
“Then…” Matt says. “Then I find some other way to take care of Fisk.”
“‘Take care of?’” Foggy says. “The sounds kind of dark.”
Matt knows that they’re testing him, testing his reactions to their questions. But he doesn’t know what they’re testing for, what they’re screening him for. So all he can do is say what he knows to be true.
“I know,” Matt says. “That’s why I’m asking for your help.”
Matt leaps onto the fire escape before they can say another word. He spends the rest of his night scrubbing residual particles of pepper spray out of his mask, all the while replaying their conversation in his mind. Matt’s skin crawls in anticipation as he waits for two days to pass.
He suspects that Karen and Foggy felt similarly, because their hearts practically sing with determination when Matt meets them next. He knows even before they speak what their decision will be.
“You looked into Fisk?” Matt asks.
“Yes,” Foggy says.
“And?”
“And he’s willing to kill an elderly tenant just so that he can buy a building,” Foggy says tightly. “Your story is…Jesus, I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but it holds water. We’re in.”
“But you have to come into the dream with us,” Karen says. “Look, I’m not going to lie to you, this is way out of our league. The only way we stand a chance of succeeding is if you help us.”
Logically, Matt knows that she’s right. But he still finds himself blinking in surprise at the request.
“You sure you want that?” he says carefully. “Even after everything that happened at Landman and Zack?”
“We want you because of what happened there,” Foggy says. “Pulling one over us isn’t an easy thing to do, and we’re going to need all the skill we can get if we’re going to take down Fisk. As a rule, we don’t like to bring civilians into dream space, but—you can tell when you’re dreaming, and you beat people up in your spare time. Pretty sure you’re qualified for the job.”
The sound of Foggy’s voice nearly covers the flutter of Karen’s heart, but not quite. There’s something about this conversation she doesn’t like. But when Karen speaks, her voice is steady, only holding the barest trace of hesitation.
“Before we do anything,” Karen says, “we need to know what you’re looking for in Fisk’s head. Information found in dreams obviously isn’t admissible in court, so whatever you want us to find in there, it needs to be connected to something in reality.”
Matt shakes his head. “I’ve been investigating him for weeks, and I’m not sure anything like that exists. Fisk is too careful to leave a paper trail. That’s why I’ve been going after him in the mask, not through the legal system—but no one knows anything about him. If we can get into his head, maybe we can…”
Foggy groans. “You don’t have a plan, do you? You just wanted to go into his head and, what, see what we found there? Look, we really want to help, but that’s not how this works. It took a week of planning just to go into your head, and that was a routine gig! This is…something way beyond that.”
“I know I’m asking too much from both of you, but I can pay for it, I-”
“You’re not listening to me! Money isn’t the issue, Matt, it’s the fact that what you’re asking for is literally impossible-”
“So what, you went into my head to find skeletons, but you can’t do the same to Fisk?”
“Not when I don’t know where those skeletons even are, and not when I have to find a matching skeleton in real life to corroborate whatever skeletons we find in the dream. And especially not when we have to somehow get those skeletons submitted as evidence despite the fact that the justice system is full of Fisk’s bribed graverobbers…or something. My metaphor got away from me. The point is, what you want from us isn’t possible-”
“Inception.”
It’s Karen who says this, and though Matt doesn’t recognize the word, he immediately hones in on the way Foggy stills in response to its invocation. Foggy’s silence only lasts a moment, however, before he says flatly, “Also not possible.”
“It is,” Karen insists.
“It’s never been done before,” Foggy says. “And even if it can be done, we are not the people to do it.”
“Yeah, well. We’re the only people willing to try right now, Foggy,” Karen says. “And if we don’t, Fisk is going to keep hurting people—people just like Elena and that Union Allied secretary.”
Foggy’s quiet for a moment, but then nods. “Okay. Okay, you’re right. Like I could’ve said no anyway, after what that bastard did to Elena. What’s your plan?”
“I know a guy who can help us out,” Karen says. “We can visit his office tomorrow morning.”
Foggy turns his wrist to look at his ticking watch. “That gives us about…six hours to explain to all this to Matt.”
Matt grimaces. Every time he’s around these two, they make his head spin as they speak so quickly and so intricately that he has to sprint just to catch up. Matt would be lying if he said he doesn’t relish the challenge—but he does not like feeling this lost.
“Explain what to me?”
Foggy sighs. “Explain exactly how crazy this plan is.”
Matt’s lips quirk up into something that almost feels like a smile—a genuine one, not something that’s simply polite or threatening. He’s almost surprised his face still remembers how to make the expression.
“So-crazy-it-just-might-work crazy?” Matt asks. “Or just…crazy?”
“Honestly? Probably both.”
Honestly? As Matt runs along rooftops to join them at Foggy’s apartment, as he listens to the steady hum of their hearts, he’s startled to find a rare warmth in his chest, a discovery: that he likes those odds just fine.
***
Inception, according to Foggy, is planting an idea in someone’s mind and praying that it sticks long enough for them to do something about it. It’s highly unethical, but is slightly less unethical than murder, so Matt accepts the plan and resolves to later ask Lantom whether mind control is a sin.
If they even manage it, that is. Karen’s contact seems skeptical. Which is fair, since Matt is skeptical of him. From the way Karen spoke about Ben Urich—a mentor of hers, the one who’d gotten her into the business, a righteous journalist who’d used dream sharing tech to write stunning exposes—Matt was expecting something…more.
He certainly wasn’t expecting this cramped office and its thin walls that barely mask the bustle of the news room. The sound of Ben’s hand wiping across his face is raspy, stilted—he hasn’t shaved in a few days, and, judging by the smell, hasn’t showered in a few days either. A weary foot soldier on his last legs as he fights for the Bulletin. Ben certainly doesn’t scream mentor to Matt, not when his first words when they walk into his office are, “No. I told you, Karen, I’m done with all that.”
“It’s important,” Karen says. “I wouldn’t ask this of you if it weren’t.”
“I know that. But that still doesn’t make it okay to ask me,” Ben says, but he nonetheless ushers them in and closes the door behind them.
When Ben sits back down, his back is straight, spine perpendicular to the floor. His breathing is even, steady. He crosses his arms and presumably looks them over—inspecting them, given how Foggy squirms in his seat.
Ah, not just a foot soldier then: a general.
“This your crew?” Ben says, nodding at Foggy and Matt. “Let me guess: forger and…” He sighs. “Please tell me you’re not training someone new on a job that’s supposedly so important you had to bring me into it.”
“What gave it away?” Matt asks, going for pleasantly charming—but Ben isn’t having it, nor does Matt really expect him to.
“He’s polite, but he’s no forger,” Ben observes. “No architect either. So, what is it he can do?”
“Gave you a flash drive on the Union Allied scandal,” Matt says, smile all teeth. He doesn’t like it when people speak about him as if he’s not there. “And-”
Matt takes a deep breath and listens: harried interns trading gossip over the coffee machine, the hunt-and-peck typing of a receptionist who’s still hungover from the night before, and—ah, an editor putting in a call about insurance for a Mr. Ben Urich. The same Ben Urich whose skin smells of plastic IV pumps, antiseptic, and the microwaveable meatloaf that’s served in hospitals. The same Ben who twists the ring around his finger until the slide of metal against skin rings in Matt’s ears.
Matt’s voice softens. “I’m sorry about your wife, Mr. Urich.”
“Matt,” Foggy hisses—ah, Matt obviously spoke out of turn. But it was either that or risk Ben refusing the job, and Matt can’t let that happen. A familiar numbness crawls into his veins just at the thought of losing the thread of hope that inception had given him.
That thought could easily become a reality, though, given the way Ben’s heart is pounding, the way his hands heat as they white-knuckle his chair.
“Karen,” Ben says slowly. “Do I want to know how The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen knows about my wife?”
“She didn’t tell me,” Matt says. “I didn’t even know your name until an hour ago.”
Karen nods. Her voice warbles—out of concern for Ben, or out of fear of what Matt just showed himself to be capable of?—when she speaks. “He’s…he’s telling the truth, Ben.”
“Then how the hell do you know about Doris?” Ben says—finally addressing Matt himself.
Matt smiles. “Let’s just say I’m very good at knowing things.”
Ben doesn’t relax, exactly, but Matt can hear a barely audible hum of curiosity coming from his throat. He believes Matt—always the reporter, deferring to the evidence that’s in front of him.
An honest forger, a righteous architect, and now, apparently, a humble mastermind. Matt almost wishes that he could associate with criminals as fascinating as these ones more often.
“Forger and point man then,” Ben corrects himself. “Karen? I think that you’d better tell me a bit more about this crew of yours. And this job you’re thinking about taking on.”
Karen straightens. “Where do you want me to start?”
“Where we always start: from the beginning.”
Matt barely stops himself from sighing in relief as he realizes he’d just passed a test he didn’t even know he’d been taking. Point man, huh? Matt thinks about the sleepless nights he’s already spent on Fisk: researching the internet, city hall databases, Landman and Zack’s files. He thinks about how he beat information out of people when those channels turned up nothing, how he channeled all his rage into his fists until he finally got what he needed.
Point man....Matt thinks that he can work with that.