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Chapter Text

On the first day at his new school, four weeks after his dad’s job uproots, relocates, and, in Ned’s opinion, pretty much completely screws over the entire Leeds family, Ned fakes sick for the first time in his nine short years of life. 

“I think it’s a subarachnoid hemorrhage,” he informs Ms. Belnap, with a cough into his elbow and as pitifully as he can manage. 

Ms. Belnap tilts her head to the left and squints at him. Then she tilts it to the right. Then she checks her roll, as if there might be some instructions printed there next to the name Edward Leeds regarding what to do in the event that one of your twenty-eight third graders sidles up to your desk and politely claims they’re having a brain aneurysm. 

Ms. Belnap is young. It’s probably her first year teaching, if the way she fumbles for a response to his obvious lie and wrings her hands in concern is any indication. Does Ned think he can make it to the end of the day? It would really make her so very happy if Ned could stick it out until the bell rings. Ned wouldn’t want to miss centers, would he?

No, Ned supposes he wouldn’t. 

So as a favor to Ms. Belnap, he eats his lunch. He goes to recess. He finds the area of every rectangle on his assignment before most of the kids around him have gotten past number two and when it’s time to go home, he waves goodbye to his teacher and takes his mother’s hand, and then he gets up and does it all again the next day. 

Doesn’t remember which center he ends up choosing, though. 

Funny, isn’t it? 

How some memories just kind of fade away.

---

“Absolutely not.” Foggy Nelson shakes his head so violently it looks painful. He stops, turning towards his partner, who’s regarding Ned much more pensively. “Look at me, Matt. Look into my eyes, I don’t care if you can see them. I can see your little mind-gears turning, and I need them to come to an immediate stop, hear me? Absolutely. Not.” 

Ned’s barely even given them his name.

“Did these men threaten you?” Matt Murdock asks Ned, calmly. His hands are folded neatly one on top of the other, glasses perched halfway down his nose. “Physically or otherwise?” 

“Is what we would ask,” Foggy cuts in, “If we were able to help. Unfortunately, we’re booked out for the foreseeable future. Millions of morons blowing their neighbors’ thumbs off with fireworks this time of year. Small claims suits coming out our--” 

“Excuse him,” Matt raises his voice a fraction of a decibel. “He’s forgotten that Nelson and Murdock promise a fifteen minute legal consultation, free of charge, before we even--” he elbows Foggy in the ribs. It’s not subtle. “-- consider accepting or rejecting a potential client.” 

“He didn’t forget,” Foggy hisses, immediately. “He just values his damn life, Murdock. And if we’re going to talk selective memory, there are still spiderwebs in our ceiling fan-- ”

“They’ll dissolve--”

“They goddamn better--” 

“Does this count?” Ned wonders, aloud. Both men fall silent. “Like, as part of my fifteen minutes?”

Matt clears his throat. Foggy looks mildly abashed. But they both shut up, which is good, because Ned is starting to have some serious doubts about MJ’s “guy who helped her out with a protest thing once.” 

Ned didn’t ask about the protest thing. When MJ smiles all fondly like that, he’s never quite sure he wants to know. 

Matt inclines his head, slightly. “Our apologies, Mr. Leeds,” And, “Why don’t you walk us through it? From the top.” 

The top. 

Right.

If only Ned had any idea where the fuck that was. 

---

He thinks the whole thing starts like this:

Ned Leeds, soon-to-be-junior at MIT, is friends with some of the smartest people in the fucking world.

Which-- it’s awesome, right? It’s everything Ned has ever wanted, it’s a generous helping of humble pie on a near-daily basis, it’s all these people with dreams of changing the world and the type of minds that give them a snowball’s chance of actually doing so. 

Ned likes to think he’s an approachable guy. He must be, because friends of friends tend to mosey up to him and without so much as a hello say shit like, “ Leeds, check out this iPad that runs on banana peels,” or “ they’re saying Williams’ arc reactor might actually fucking work,” or “biochem needs a scraper for a new project, we gave them your name.”

They say it, and Ned hears it, and none of it matters in the grand scheme of things because for every MIT start-up that makes it to Forbes Thirty Under Thirty there are sixty that fail, and fruit-powered electronics are small potatoes in a world where men are made of iron and artificially intelligent robots can all but level small nations if you just poke them hard enough. 

Talk, that’s all any of it is. Ned knows it. Ned lives it. 

Except. 

Except sometimes, sometimes they knock on his door at eleven p.m., hoods over their heads and fingers tapping nervous rhythms against their arms. 

Sometimes, they say something like, “sixteen hospitalizations this year,” or “twelve of them are kids, Ned,” or, “three brand-new carcinogens and they’re, they’re not going to even fucking acknowledge it, much less shut the damn thing down--” 

Sometimes, those smart fucking friends have the type of brains that are more of a curse than a blessing. 

“I don’t know what else to do,” they whisper, eyes on his and drooping with the type of shadows that take months to nurture. “They’re never going to do a damn thing, otherwise. They don’t care. Not until it’s fucking-- economical. Right?” 

And Ned says, honestly, “I don’t know.”

And the person chokes on a sob, and they bury their face in his shoulder, and they say in a voice that breaks like glass on asphalt, “people are going to die. ” 

They say, “I can’t just sit on this, Ned.” 

They say, “I don’t know what to fucking do, Ned.” 

And Ned holds them up because their legs are too weak for it, because that’s what he’s good at, because that’s what he does. Others do the grunt work. Ned picks up their pieces.

Pieces that need picking up because sometimes, big corporations make big, hellishly expensive mistakes, and leave their communities holding the bag.

Sometimes good, hard-working folks are getting sick, and doctors can’t make heads or tails of why. 

Sometimes, it’s all going down only twenty minutes from home, and no one can do a damn thing about it. 

Except, Ned suddenly realizes, arms full of the broken glass that is one of those smart fucking friends, maybe someone could.

Except, Ned realizes, maybe someone can.

And somehow, he ends up with a hard drive in his hand. 

---

“So,” Foggy says, “this girl.” 

“Ina,” Ned corrects, quickly. Foggy waves him off. 

“Her research turns up something-- bad--”

Matt snorts, darkly. “They’re poisoning kids, buddy.” 

“Allegedly,” Foggy says, already sounding tired. “They are allegedly-- ”

“Causing cancer,” Ned nods. “For, like, a lot of the residents. Not just kids.” He glances at Foggy, then tacks on, “Allegedly. But, uh-- it’s good research? She’s very-- um. Good. At what she does. Super-- smart.”

For some god-forsaken reason, Matt and Foggy choose this moment to go dead silent. Devastatingly, Ned can feel his cheeks heating up. He can practically hear MJ cackling at him from 200 miles away, because her uncanny ability to lovingly kick him while he’s down transcends both space and time. He clears his throat. 

“Ina’s advisor is the one who started the project, right?” he explains. “His neighbors have this niece who gets sick, they swear up and down something’s up, so he goes and runs some tests around the girl’s house. Numbers come back and they’re,” he shrugs,”...weird.” 

“So he does some more digging,” Matt supplies. “Brings his lab assistant along.” 

Ned nods. “She gets in deep. They both do.” 

“And the advisor didn’t want his name on the report?” Matt sounds skeptical. “Is that common?” 

Ned swallows. “The advisor’s dead, man.” 

The atmosphere in the tiny office grows somber. 

Yeah. That had been a shit funeral. More expensive people in one room than Ned had ever seen in his life. One of Ina’s hands in his, the other in MJ’s. Ned wishes she would look at him. He wishes she would look at anything. 

“Naturalish causes,” he tacks on, when he remembers himself. “He was old, got really sick. Not cancer. Pneumonia, or something.” 

“Please tell me,” Foggy begs like he’s kneeling before the judgment seat, eyes closed and heels of his hands pressed into them, “that this corporation is practically unheard of. That they’re private. Small. Preferably teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. One breath away from the whole card tower falling over.”

Oh, buddy. Ned scratches his nose. “Not…quite?”

“It’s Viastone,” Matt answers for him, brow furrowed. “Correct?” 

Round peg, round hole.

Ned blinks. The sound Foggy bleats out is reminiscent of a dead man re-animated. Ned has to believe he’s a better salesman of his craft to other clients, because these guys have like, 4.75 stars on Yelp. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, exactly, that’s— how did you…?” 

Matt just frowns, seemingly lost in thought. “The water treatment facility.” 

That’s. What? 

“Yes?” Ned frowns. “Did you read the report? It’s feeling like you read the report.”

“I will.” Matt readjusts his posture, giving Ned a small smile. “So. Viastone’s a big name. Ina’s a small one, without her advisor.”

“They’ve got pull at school,” Ned says, the tiniest bit desperately. He needs them to get it. That this wasn’t just some half-assed decision by a couple of kids suffering from a bad case of self-diagnosed altruism. “They could’ve got her scholarship cut. Blacklisted her from getting hired after graduation. We had to be smart about it.” 

“This research was secret.” 

“Only Ina and Professor Prashad had any idea. This isn’t just, poor air quality, or something. It’s new shit. All over that neighborhood, pumped straight from the treatment center. Water, food, their fucking gardens-- and it’s spreading. Too fast. I only found out…” 

After. 

Broken glass in his arms. 

“…a few weeks ago.” 

Matt leans back in his chair, considering. Foggy’s eyes are fixed on the ceiling, like he’s about to start praying out loud and isn’t expecting an answer.

“So Miss Carbrera’s name can’t be attached,” Matt sums up, “but you need a byline for credibility. So you just-- what, slap the dead guy’s name on it and dump everything online?”

The way Matt says it, you’d think Ned wrapped this one up in a single lunch break. Yeah, whatever, I’ll leak a couple of highly classified documents concerning a multi-million dollar corporation’s singular effect on childhood cancer rates in the state of New York this weekend. Don’t even worry about asking next time, honestly. 

You’d think it didn’t take weeks of preparation, a million proxy servers and hours upon hours of encryption work. That there weren’t late nights turned to early mornings spent perched in cramped bars, cafes, and every 24-hour diner located within an hour of Cambridge, all in the name of public Wi-Fi and untraceable links. Like his back doesn’t still ache with the tension of entire weekends spent camped on that same damn chair in the comp lab. 

The way Matt says it, it’s like Ned had a choice. But he’s only got six minutes left. So—

“I mean,” he shrugs, “pretty much.” 

---

“ There are people on our couch,” MJ’s voice is flat through the phone. “I don’t like dudes in our house, Ned.” 

“I’m a dude,” Ned argues. 

“Not really,” MJ dismisses, with no further explanation. “They look expensive.”  

His heart does a little off-beat. “Expensive?” 

“Suits. Briefcases. Wolf of Wall Street wannabes.” 

“You hate that movie.” 

“My opinion on a fucking ass movie doesn’t remove the Rolexes from their wrists, girlfriend.” 

“Why’d you let them in?” Ned hisses. He has this terrible, terrible feeling in his stomach. But there’s… there’s no way, right?

Ned’s good. One of the best. And that’s not even grandstanding-- it’s, like, a verifiable fact? Check his class rank, or his recruiting offers. An insane amount of luck would be required for that leak to be tracked to him, plus some pretty damn good social engineering, and Ned doesn’t leave his logins lying around on sticky notes or saved in password protectors. He’s-- careful. Careful enough to not get caught. 

And it’s not like Ina’s report is illegal, besides. It’s just. Convincingly incriminating and unreplicated research claiming Viastone’s direct culpability in the slow and painful deaths of eleven innocent New York citizens over the last six years. 

Ned can’t imagine any possible reason why Viastone would have a problem with that. 

“I thought they were from the school,” MJ hisses right back. “I thought you got some sort of award. I was going to get you flowers.” 

“There’s still time,” Ned says, only half listening. God, he’s going to go to prison, isn’t he? Maybe through some gift from God, his Lola won’t find out and he’ll actually live to see his sentence through. “Hey, MJ?”

“ Babe?”

“You think they let me bring my moisturizer to the clink?”

MJ thinks about it. “I’ll bake it into a cake for you. Sneak it past security.” 

“Thanks,” Ned croaks, through a throat drier than the Sahara in August. His front door has never looked more like a portal to hell. He stops in front of it. “Promise you’ll wait for me?”

“You’ll find a hotter prison wife and break my heart. I’ve been burned by your kind before, Edward.” 

“Baby, don’t be like that.” 

MJ snorts. Her voice drops, slightly. Takes on an infinitesimally serious note. “Hey. You know it’s me and you, Leeds. Till the end of the fucking world, right?” 

They’ve already been there. Done that. Did a shoddy job stitching themselves back together because there was never quite enough thread to go around, in the months and years after. 

Still isn’t, if Ned’s honest with himself. 

“Right,” he exhales. “Till the end of the fucking world.”

MJ will check on his parents. On his Lola. She’s the real type of loyal, the Han and Chewbacca kind of loyal, the I’ve got two tickets to Mexico and absolutely zero questions kind of loyal, right up until the situation pertains even adjacently to his failure of a love life, at which point she immediately becomes an enemy of the state. Consider her armed and dangerous. 

Neither of them remember how it started, but anyone on campus can tell you that Jones and Leeds are ride or die. Till the end of the fucking world.

“You didn’t do anything wrong.” 

MJ says it like a mantra. Like it changes anything. 

“Right,” Ned repeats, hand on the knob, heart in his knees.

His tongue feels a little heavy with the weight of the lie. 

---

Matt immediately asks for his phone. Warily, Ned surrenders it. This is the guy who helped MJ with that protest thing, after all. And if you can’t trust that guy, who can you trust? 

“Foggy’s going to delete that call from your history,” Matt explains, which doesn’t really explain anything at all. 

“That’s what I would do,” Foggy says, “if I didn’t care about keeping my job. And maybe,” he stresses, “if we were taking this case. Which,” he emphasizes even more emphatically with his hands, “we are not doing.” 

Why the fuck is Ned here, then? 

“Deleting a call log isn’t illegal,” Matt expertly dodges around half Foggy’s rebuttal. He taps the notepad in front of him. “Write your passcode.”

Ned should not do that. But does. See previous comments about protest-guy. 

“It’s also… still accessible?” he says, weakly, setting down the pen. “Even if it gets deleted. There are still records.” 

Matt smiles, ruefully. “No reason to make it easier for Viastone’s sharks. Attorneys are shit with technology.” 

“I resent that remark,” Foggy mutters, actively trying and failing to type the passcode into the phone twice before successfully entering the sequence. “It’s not my fault all our shit was already outdated by ‘98. Technology is shit with me. ”

“What did they tell you?” Matt asks. “The Viastone reps.”

Ned starts, then hesitates. 

Because isn’t that the fucking question. 

---

MJ slams her phone down on the table between them all, red recording symbol glaring up more obviously than a bloodstain on a stark white shirt. 

“Go ahead,” she invites the suit-clad agents, sweet as sugar. 

And what follows is… absolutely nothing. 

---

The Viastone lawyers say it’s good to meet him. 

They say that Viastone has a vested interest in this school, that they regularly check in on MIT’s best and brightest, all while MJ sits next to him with lips pursed and scholarships practically falling out of her ears. 

So. Complete bullshit, basically. 

They say that they were sorry to hear about the passing of Dr. Prashad. They say it like Ned knew him. They say it like he had a reason to. 

They say, “What a bright future,” with lips that curl like the vocalization of the praise is painful.  

They say, “Have a good break,” and then shake his hand so hard that the grip of it leaves visible bruises on his forearm. 

They say, “We’ll be in touch,” and Ned gets the message loud and clear. 

---

“Oh, thank God.” Foggy practically collapses back into his chair. He’s giddy. “This isn’t a case. This is so much less than a case. Not even you can pull a demonstration of unwelcome conduct from this, Matty boy.” 

Ouch. Ned thinks. He only understood about thirty percent of those words in that order. 

Foggy turns to Ned, attempting a sober expression. It’s undercut by the relief etched into his features. “We’re sorry for what you’ve been through, Mr. Leeds. This all sounds very-- taxing. Mentally.” 

Ned hasn’t had a full night’s sleep since he got back to the city for the summer. His Lola heard him puttering around in the kitchen last night and thought he was a ghost. She almost hit him with a flower pot. He’s still got soil in his hair. 

It was about then, staring down a mouthful of Marigolds, that Ned decided it might be time to consult a professional. 

Although, if he’s being honest, he’s still not quite sure if these guys count.  

“You said it was Edward Leeds,” Matt says, after a moment of thought and seemingly out of the blue. “But you go by Ned. Scholarship at MIT. Moved to Queens what, nine years ago?”

“Uh-- ten,” Ned says, slowly. “I think.” 

“High school?” 

“Midtown. It’s a tech school. Is this… relevant?” 

For some reason, Foggy looks pained again. All at once, Matt stands, dragging Foggy with him by the elbow.  

“We’ll have to-- consult,” Matt says. “Hang tight.”

“We don’t need to consult,” Foggy is already hissing, following Matt more than leading him from the room. “There’s no true threat here, Matt. An acknowledgement might be taken as an admission of guilt, not to mention the fact that he will kill us--” 

The rest of the words are swallowed by the door to the adjoining office slamming shut. 

Huh.

Ned thought he’d been rather civil, all things considered. 

---

Matt and Foggy converse (read: argue loud enough that the tail ends of heated sentences slip their way through the cracks in the door) for longer than Ned would’ve predicted necessary. When they finally emerge, Foggy is the one with a smooth brow, and Matt’s lips are pursed. 

In other words, things aren’t looking good for Team Leeds. 

They sit. Foggy clears his throat. 

“There’s nothing we can do here,” Matt admits after an elbow to the bicep, face twisting like he’d rather take a hole to the head than admit one iota of past incorrectness. “We apologize, Mr. Leeds.”  

Ned’s heart falls.

Because it wasn’t like he expected there to be a real case, obviously. A couple of suits knocking down his door with a handshake that felt like a threat, only to squint at him a little funny and take their leave was never going to be the kind of issue that could be litigated, and Ned’s not-- nor has he ever been--  dumb enough to think otherwise.

But he can admit that he hoped there would be something. Some form or another of legal protection against future retaliation for himself or Ina, now that it was clear Viastone was less onto them and more hiding under their beds . Enough that he could get a little more sleep, maybe. Stop worrying about taking a terracotta planter of flowers to the cranium at 3 a.m. 

“Was that painful?” Foggy asks Matt. Then, catching sight of Ned’s expression, “Sorry.” He clears his throat again. “We’re sympathetic to the position you’re in,” he says, face shifting into a professional mask that aligns Ned’s perception of him a little better with those 4.75 stars. “And I’m serious, Mr. Leeds. If Viastone reaches out again, feel free to forward any communications and we’ll see what we can do. It was smart of your friend to record. Keep that habit.”

“So that’s it?” Ned asks, voice flat. “Nothing you can do? We just have to wait until one of us ends up in a ditch?”

Foggy winces. Matt’s face is impassive. “Yes,” he says bluntly. “Consider giving all ditches and other trenches a wide berth for the next few months.” He reaches across the table and feels for the small holder of business cards before handing two to Ned. “One for Miss Cabrera.” 

Ned hesitates for a moment before taking it, just for the principle of the thing. 

“There’s one more thing,” Matt calls, after Ned has shouldered his backpack and shuffled his way back towards the door. What a monumental waste of his time. He should’ve gotten his Lola’s car cleaned, like he told her he was going to. He should’ve thrown that hard drive in the garbage can the second Ina put it in his hand. 

“Yes, counselor?” 

“Viastone. This neighborhood. The-- contamination.”

Find it, dude. You got this. 

Ned nods, slowly. 

“There’s another option.” 

“You just said there were no options,” Ned frowns. “Like, just barely.” His eyes find Foggy. “He said there were no options, right?” 

“This idea is very bad,” Foggy says, helpfully. “It barely counts as an option.” 

“We could go on offense,” Matt cuts in, cuts Foggy off. “We’d need Miss Cabrera’s help, obviously, but--”

Ned raises a hand. He’s annoyed he already put his backpack on. He has so many books in here. “Offense?” he asks. 

Foggy sighs. “He means sue Viastone. On behalf of the residents.” 

Ned blinks once. Twice. “That sounds like. A really bad idea.”

“Congrats, kid,” Foggy grumbles. “You’re now one of the two sane people in this office.” 

“It’s a terrible idea,” Matt agrees. “Little to no chance of success. Ditches for all of us, if things go awry.” 

“He loves the idea,” Foggy says to Ned, seriously. “He gets off on the thought of a target painted on his back.” 

“It’s been a slow month,” admits Matt, not denying it. 

Ned rubs the heels of his hands into his eyes, and tries to grapple with the concept of this. 

He imagines taking Viastone to court. Little baby Jenny, or Jackie, or whatever the fuck that girl’s name had been getting up on the stand, oxygen tube in her nose and tiny fingers trembling. The Viastone lawyer taking them, squeezing them hard enough they crack. 

Ina, jaw set like a glass broken and superglued together again. MJ, egging him on as always, but with a storm in her eyes. 

Ned knows the neighborhood where Dr. Prashad’s research had been. MJ’s family was from close to there, back in the day. They can’t afford lawyers. They can barely afford their car payments. 

His Lola’s heart is weak. Ned went to the principal’s office once for some reason he can’t remember back in tenth grade and she’d clutched at her chest the whole time, joked that you’ll give me a real attack one day, crazy child. 

Yeah, Ned can’t do that.

“Thank God,” Foggy says, again. He’s cursing under his breath at the desktop on the table next to him, something about we actually paid the damn internet bill, act like it. Again, Ned can’t help but wonder about those 4.75 stars. 

“I could-- uh, ask a few of the residents, though?” he offers, as an afterthought. Because this really isn’t his fight, at the end of the day. His kid doesn’t have a fucking oxygen tube up her nose. “Let you know?” 

“We’d appreciate that,” Matt says, quickly.

“Thing’s broken,” Foggy announces to the room at large, smacking a hand on the desk next to the desktop. “Where’s Karen when you need her?” 

“Doing her real job. That pays her real money.”

“We paid her real money.” 

“Her Christmas bonus was a pound of ham.” 

“That was prime Spanish,” Foggy grumbles. “Aged fourteen months.” 

Ned really doesn’t understand lawyers. And he also definitely knows what’s up with that computer, based on the shiny new router buzzing on top of the filing cabinet. But his fifteen minutes are up, and he’s just leaving, so why would he--

“Here,” he sighs, gently nudging Foggy out of the way of the computer. “Give me that, you probably just…need…”

Device manager, network adapters, where--

Ah. 

“Yeah. You’ve gotta update your network driver,” he says, taking a step back. “Probably for everything. Looks like it’s been…a while.” 

Matt snorts. 

“He goes to MIT,” Foggy says, defensively. “You realize that, right? MI-fuckin’-T. ” 

Ned’s Lola has never needed help updating her network driver. He elects not to mention this.

“Maybe you can write me an instruction booklet,” Foggy says, helplessly, exactly seven minutes and zero updated drivers later. Ned has never seen a man right click the mouse and hit the power button at the same time. It would be impressive, if it wasn’t so sad. 

“Or,” Matt says, face inexpressive, “better yet, join the team.” 

What. 

“What,” says Foggy, flatly. 

Matt shrugs. “You said yourself that it’s an outdated system. Real security hazard, I’m guessing. We could use some updates.” 

“You could,” Ned says, immediately, because this place looks like how he imagines the eighties probably did, minus the neon. “This can’t be legal for a law firm. Your password is the same as your username.” Which is written on a sticky note, which is barely clinging to the desk.  And, “I already have a job.” 

It’s true. Matt cocks his head. 

“It’s a good job,” Ned says, defensively. 

Also true. 

“I like my job.” 

Heartbreakingly false. Matt smirks, for some reason. 

“Matthew,” Foggy says, in a carefully controlled voice, “a word?” 

Not this again. Ned raises his eyes heavenward. His hand is on the doorknob. 

“Feel free to poke around a little bit,” Matt offers.

“For the love of God,” Foggy implores, “do not touch anything.” 

Ned says, again, because it feels relevant, “I don’t need a new job.” 

Then the office door slams shut and, for some reason, his stupid hand still doesn’t twist the knob.

---

Matt’s office is not nearly as soundproof as he and Foggy seem to think it is. Ned knows this because Foggy calls Matt a dumbass three different times throughout their twelve minutes spent discussing his apparent crime of an offer. Then he loudly announces he needs a drink, Jesus Christ.  

4.75 stars, these guys. Make it make sense.

Ned catches the term Doctor Phil at least three times. Have a heart, Fogs, twice. Stupid fucking idea right before the door swings back open, this time revealing a triumphant Matt Murdock and pale-looking Foggy Nelson. 

They immediately offer him the job. For real, this time. Money and weekends and the whole enchilada. They promise he’ll be making a difference. They promise they’re closed on all major holidays. 

Ned thinks, a little traitorously, that maybe he’s a little tired of making a difference. He spent a month prepping for that Viastone file to be dropped, and look where it got him. Sitting in a law consultation scared silly, with any evidence of the research that was the reason for this whole damn season all but scrubbed from the ‘net. Took Viastone fewer than two days to erase every last trace. Took Ned sixty bucks just to fill his gas tank up and get back to the city. 

But these guys helped MJ out with that protest thing, that one time. And Matt clearly went to bat for him, for reasons that Ned has chalked up to lawyers being weird.

And the truth is, Ned didn’t choose MI-fuckin’-T just to fuck off to Fifth Avenue come graduation.

He chose MIT to pay it forward. He chose it so he could come back home. 

When we help someone, we help everyone. 

Nelson and Murdock help a lot of someones, as it turns out. Ned knows. He read the Yelp reviews. 

4.75 stars. 

So he says, as he turns the doorknob. “I’ll think about it. No promises.”

“Take your time,” Matt says. “We’ll be here.” 

Foggy crosses himself, when he thinks Ned’s back is fully turned. Matt shakes his head like he sees it.

---

“How did it go?” MJ asks, face illuminated through the phone screen. She’s still in Boston, has an internship there that’ll pay a hell of a lot more than a tech support gig in an incredibly dysfunctional law firm. 

She’ll be back, Ned is privately certain. Kids like them don’t ever seem to find it in themselves to quit this place. Not completely, at least.  

He pauses to consider for a moment. 

“Weird,” he finally settles on. “It went…really fucking weird.”

He doesn’t tell her about the offer. He doesn’t know why. 

Maybe because he’s thinking about it. 

No promises.

Chapter Text

“He’s going to kill us dead,” Foggy says mournfully. “He’ll kill us dead and then dig us up and kill us again.” 

Matt gestures to his left. “This will be you, Mr. Leeds.” 

“I don’t have super strength.” Foggy begins clearing the desk so that Ned can get his laptop set up. “Do you have super strength, Matt?” 

“We can get you a key,” Matt tells Ned, speaking directly past Foggy. “And Karen can get you access to passwords or-- do software updates cost money? She can get you money.” 

Ned just nods his understanding, bemused. He sets the box full of any and all equipment he’d managed to sneak from his old job’s storage room on top of the desk, having (correctly) assumed that the tech pickings from the back closet of Nelson and Murdock would be bordering less on the side of optimal and more on the side of possibly operational. 

Ned accepted Matt’s offer because he could. That’s the long and short of it, that’s what matters at the end of the day. There were other reasons, reasons that look a little bit like the Viastone logo and feel a little bit like the dread that hangs chained to his ankles on a good day and around his neck on the bad ones, but in the end it’s the slog of it all that convinces him it’s high time he embark on a quest of professional transmogrification.

There’s never been any confusion in Ned’s mind as to what he wants. It’s always been programming, it’s always been MIT, it’s always been the blood, sweat, and tears of the creative process with the added bonus of linear fucking algebra. Ned’s lucky enough to have found something that lights him up inside, and that’s a lot more than most people have ever or will ever get to say.

But even those blessed with the type of passion so fervent it drips out their eyeballs are eventually forced to admit that you can only sit through so many meetings around a conference table listening to a tech bro named Brandon explain to the dev team that “we’re not reinventing the wheel here” without wondering if it’s possible you made a mistake somewhere. 

“We’ll just have to keep the windows locked,” Foggy is saying, now, more to himself than either of them as he begins gathering office supplies from various drawers and desks.  “Windows locked, maybe-- how much would it cost to get the deadbolt changed? Do we know a deadbolt guy?” 

“McCallister,” the woman sitting in the corner desk supplies. Foggy takes the highlighter right out of her hand, and she rolls her eyes. “But you already cashed in with him when your cousin broke up with that asshole.” 

“Dammit,” Foggy barks. “Matt, we need a new deadbolt guy.” 

“Or your current deadbolt guy needs to take another piss in the street,” the woman-- Karen-- says, fairly. Foggy grimaces. 

Matt sighs like he’s got the weight of the world on his shoulders. “Ignore them, please.”

“Easy for you to say.” Foggy points an accusatory highlighter at Matt, though for whose benefit Ned isn’t sure. “You could take him.” 

Karen snorts. Loudly. 

There’s a beat of stunned silence.

“Oh my God,” Matt almost laughs, when they’ve all taken a second to process. Shock is etched into his features. That, and something Ned can’t quite name. It’s existential. “You don’t think I can take him.” 

“You’re old.” Karen shrugs, like those aren’t the fighting words Ned already knows they are from his four minutes spent in this office. It’s almost apologetic, but not quite. She gestures at Ned. “Kid agrees with me.” 

Ned has not said a damn word since setting foot through that door. “I don’t think you’re old,” he tells Matt, immediately. See, he’s a good employee. A perfect employee. Please tell him where to put his backpack.

Matt seems, if anything, more existential. He turns to Foggy. “Fogs--” 

Foggy waves him off. “I’m thinking.” His eyes sweep Matt, critically. “I’m…” he blows out a breath. “Fuck. Are we old?” 

Ned is missing. So many layers to this inside joke, whatever it is. This must be one of those office culture things they always talked about in his last job, where the extent of the office culture was the conference room presentation on office culture. Ned said “hi” to one of the UI people in the break room once, and she honest to god squeaked. He shared a cubicle with a guy named John for a month and a half, and only found out his name was actually Josh like, yesterday. Saw it on the Office Birthdays billboard as he was packing (read: stealing) all this shit from downstairs. 

“You own a shoe horn.” Karen shuffles the stack of papers in her hands. “Multiple shoe horns.” 

“I’ve always had those,” Foggy defends, at the same time Matt says, “He’s always had those.” 

Karen looks unimpressed. “You get the Reader’s Digest.” 

“Tangible media is the only way forward in this capitalist hellscape, Karen. The past is our future.” 

“You wear compression socks.” 

“I’m ignoring you now,” Foggy unceremoniously decides. “Consider yourself ignored.” He turns to take Matt by the shoulders, jostle him slightly and say, too confidently, “We’re not old. You could take him.”

Matt still looks vaguely unsettled. “Right.” 

Ned thinks, privately and to himself and in the most respectful way possible, that he could probably take Matt. Possibly Foggy. No comment on Karen, yet. She strikes him as a bit of a dark horse.

They get him set up at a desk. They get him a timecard. Like, the type he has to write on. With a pen. Because it’s made out of paper. Foggy spares no detail explaining how to fill out the time in and time out fields, and Ned just lets him talk. He has a feeling the guy needs this. 

And then, right as they’re finalizing overtime and finally rounding the corner to the ever-mysterious total hours field, there’s an emergency. Some client broke parole, got picked up, used his one and only phone call to call Matt, just like they’d told him to. Matt and Foggy are a flurry of movement and phone calls and grabbing suit coats, and then--

Just Ned and Karen. 

She pats him consolingly on the shoulder as she walks by to fill her coffee mug from the pot on the back counter. “You’ll get used to it.” 

Ned wonders, eyes straining as he begins to sort through what has to be the worst digital filing system he’s ever seen, if it’s possible he’s made a mistake of some sort.

Something “the devil you know” comes to mind. 

---

Working at Nelson and Murdock is a lot like working anywhere else, except for all the ways that it’s absolutely and utterly different. Ned gets in most mornings and Foggy is already there, phone glued to his ear as he jabbers to some little old lady or another about their impounded Chevy or shit landlord or nephew who’s a good kid, just fell in with some of the wrong folks . Odds are mixed as to whether or not he’ll be accompanied by Karen. Ned’s sixty percent sure they’re sleeping together. He kind of wants to ask Matt about it. 

All in all, it takes him roughly two and a half weeks to fully realize that nobody in the office could give less of a shit about what he’s up to. Ned tries to report on his progress to Matt once, about a week in. Talks for six minutes straight about email filters before he notices Matt’s fingers tapping against the desk like they’re itching to be doing anything else and he excuses himself. 

They’re lucky, really, that Ned’s an honest guy. He knows from experience that it’s pretty damn easy to fuck around and make it look like work when no one else has a single clue about what you’re doing. 

That isn’t to say they stay in any way out of his business, however. 

“Taking off early?” Matt asks, eyebrows raised at the sound of Ned’s backpack zipper. 

“It’s, uh, Wednesday.” Ned shoulders the bag. “So--”

“Lunch date day.” Foggy’s standing next to that ancient copy machine, looking to the world like a man on a mission. He’s been cursing steadily for the last five minutes, but always gets touchy if Ned tries to help him out before being asked. Matt says not to take it personally.

“Not a lunch date,” Ned practically sighs. They do this every week. “Just two chill, non-dating people, eating lunch.” 

“Young people are stupid,” Foggy announces. The copy machine makes a very sad sound. Ned’s pronounced the issue terminal, but Matt and Foggy pride themselves on their ability to run their machinery into the ground. Less wasteful, they say. 

Ned squints. “You said you weren’t old, dude.” 

“I’m including us. We’re also stupid. And very, very young.” He smacks the side of the printer with his hand. “Kiss the girl, Leeds.” 

“I’m not hearing this.” Ned shoulders his backpack. “Surely this is workplace harassment.” 

Matt hums. “Petty slight. No case.” 

He’s sporting a pretty good shiner, Matt Murdock. Got it two nights ago, falling down his building's stairs. Foggy tells Ned not to ask about it. 

“It can get embarrassing to rehash shit like this all the time,” he whispers, low enough that Matt won’t be able to hear from his office. “He’s an independent guy, you know?” 

Weird, though. The way he says it. Almost-- rehearsed. Or like he’s bored, rather than profoundly concerned about Matt’s sensitivities. Ned supposes it makes sense. You probably field a lot of stupid questions from stupider people, being best friends with a blind guy for over a decade. 

Still, he can’t help but wonder, sometimes. Any sane person would, the mornings when Matt taps his way into the office with his cane looking like he’s all but lost a fight with his food processor. 

They’re a weird couple of dudes, but it’s a weird workplace. There’s a plate of cookies on top of the filing cabinet, courtesy of a single mother who’d been in trouble with her asshole of a boss and couldn’t afford to give them anything else. Ned takes one, as he leaves. 

Weird has always been his generally preferred state of things, anyway.

---

guy stopped by to see you, the text from Anna Leeds reads. said he was just checking in??

Ned puts his phone on silent, and tries to pretend his heart doesn’t beat a fucking tattoo at every suit-clad shoulder he bumps against on the sidewalk. 

---

Ina Cabrera is the smartest person Ned has ever met in his entire life, barring himself and possibly MJ. She’s a self-proclaimed tree-hugger and a biologist, something that clashes incomprehensibly in Ned’s mind with her status as a born-and-bred New Yorker, but she tells him one day with a sparkle in her eyes that there’s grass in Central Park, computer boy, and somehow, he gets it all of the sudden. 

It happens like that a lot, with Ina. Things he’s never considered in his life become important as they leave her mouth, and he’s suddenly wondering why he’s never thought to care about them before. Things like-- thermal pollutants. Or Box Turtles. 

They’re endangered, you know. Ned didn’t. It’s not cool, what’s happening to the Box Turtles. Call your senator.

Her family’s from the Kitchen-- has got roots that go deeper than Matt’s, if you can believe it. They were there years and years before the Kingpin, there before the first super-whatevers showed up in their leather and tights and started bashing heads together back when the cops couldn’t be bothered to give a damn about their bleeding city. 

Ned was always more of an Iron Man than a Daredevil kid, growing up. His Lola didn’t like the second guy much, was single-mindedly convinced he had “sinister energy.”

“If he was a good man, they wouldn’t call him the Devil,” she always said in Tagalog, certain as the black and white headlines chronicling the arrest of Wilson Fisk and subsequent end of his regime. “What need does a good man have for horns?” 

The Catholicism came over with Lola's mother, on the boat. All the parables and prayers and righteous suffering of it, all that desperate search for familiar in a woman fighting tooth and nail to survive a whirlwind of new. She kept the tradition safe and passed it on to her daughter, who’s carried it with her ever since. Everything Ned’s ever learned about the man upstairs was at his Lola’s knee, but he stopped listening at some point and now he’s never quite sure whether or not that means he’s allowed to drop onto his own, should the mood strike. He’s tried it a few times, this summer. When Viastone’s boot against his neck feels so heavy he can only think of one guy’s who might be heavier. 

Stuff like God gets a lot more complicated, when you’re already past strike one and somehow still walking down the streets of Hell’s Kitchen on a Wednesday afternoon. 

Ned stops in front of the Cabrera family apartment. Takes a deep breath. 

Ina got snapped, too. Woke up to a brand-new brother, all glasses and baby teeth and let’s try this again, even if that’s not what it was, even if that’s not what they meant. Woke up to a home that had barely changed. Woke up to a dad she’d missed by two weeks.  

Car accident, she’d confided to Ned, on one of those first nights when they got drunk enough to stop pretending and were instead laying souls bare on a dorm room couch. Millisecond of a thing. He didn’t suffer. She probably passed him in the lobby on her way back.

Ned gives a slight shake of his head, then raises a fist to knock the door once, twice, three times. It swings open to reveal a smiling Mrs. Cabrera.

“Come in, come in,” she invites upon recognition, stepping back into the apartment. “Neen’s not quite back yet. Damn train’s been a mess all week.” 

Ned can hear Ina’s brother, Diego, clinking Legos together in the front room. 

“Oh. Uh.” He tries not to sound too hopeful, or too strange, or too anything. “I could just… wait out here?”

Mrs. Cabrera scoffs, “Don’t be silly,” and then proceeds to drag him bodily into the apartment by the meat of his arm. Which-- credit where credit is due, he’s absolutely helpless against. The woman is strong as a mule, for all her unassuming stature and smiling eyes. With a trepidatious sigh he hopes doesn’t show on his face, Ned kicks off his shoes.  

The real problem with visiting the Cabrera home isn’t the fact that everyone there knows Ned, or that they also seem to understand the whole Ina and Ned thing better than either Ina or Ned, themselves. Though, granted. The two of them aren’t exactly setting a high bar. Three days before they were set to head back to the city for the summer, Ina had let herself into his and MJ’s apartment from a hookup gone wrong grumbling something along the lines of, all men are pigs, and Ned had nodded and said, totally, and then they’d proceeded to make out on his couch for ten unbroken minutes. 

Ned doesn’t know what they are. 

But that isn’t the problem. 

The problem-- if it’s even, like, legal to refer to a child as a problem-- is the boy on the ground, glasses perched on his nose and Lego piled around his knees, looking in every way that actually matters like the concept of third grade thrown up on a living room floor. 

Diego has eyes like Ina, who has eyes like their mother. They light up through his glasses when they catch sight of Ned. They always do. Makes him feel like more of an ass every time.

“Hey, little man,” Ned greets, forcing a smile and dropping to his haunches next to the blanket covered in blocks of every kind. “What are we working on this week?” 

“AT-ATs.” Diego shuffles his hand through the blocks. “They just dropped a new Return of the Jedi expansion set, did you see?” 

Ned did. He glances over his shoulder to check that Mrs. Cabrera has returned to the kitchen. Then, voice low, “the anniversary edition?” 

“Three new minifigs.” Diego says it like a secret, mimicking Ned. He runs another hand over the pile, sifting for pieces. They clink together pleasantly, like childhood memories trying and failing to slot themselves into place. “Except they don’t make, like, any sense.” 

“Dude, right?” Ned frowns, dropping to sit criss-cross and pull a handful of blocks toward himself. “What the hell is Palpatine doing on Hoth?”

“My friend Xavier likes the parka.” Diego shakes his head, disgusted. Then, before Ned gets a chance to respond, “Hey did, did you know that grasshoppers’ ears are in their stomachs?” When Ned doesn’t say anything, he continues. “They’re not actually, like, ears, though. Not like you and me. They call them tympanal organs, but they’re made out of the same stuff as our eardrums.” He shrugs. “Kind of weird, right?”

And there it is. Ned’s head starts doing that thing. That weird, motion-sick thing that always accompanies these visits with the youngest Cabrera, with his Legos and Star Wars encyclopedia of a mind and more brains in his head than any third grader could possibly know what to do with. 

But listen-- it works like clockwork , okay? Ned swears on his grandmother’s life that he’s got nothing against children, against kids, against this kid. He’s got a seventeen-year-old sister, for Christ’s sake. MJ’s baby cousins like him more than they do her, or so she says. He’s good with kids. If multiple universes really do exist, he’s probably running, like, an orphanage for tweens with untapped STEM potential or something in at least eighteen of them. Like that lady from Meet the Robinsons.

But Diego Cabrera-- a kid, who, if anything, should be Ned’s brother from another mother-- has this way of turning him into an absolute asshole. Ned sits down for three minutes to chat and suddenly he needs to pop a capful of ibuprofen for the godawful twisting in his head. He can't explain it, but it's like-- a memory. Memories. Splashing unprompted through his mind like the dizzy rotation of the Price is Right wheel on his Lola’s afternoon show. 

It all goes right by him, golden and nostalgic and fast enough to make his head spin. 

Ms. Belnap’s class, third grade. 

Ben Parker’s calloused hand, in line at the busy movie theater.

May’s finger pressed to her lips, trying not to laugh as she dumps the rest of the Halloween candy from her bowl into his open pillowcase. 

Ned’s eyes shut tight on a bottom bunk bed, because maybe if he falls asleep in time his mom will cave to the pressure and let him stay the night. 

They’re the only explanation Ned can think of, the Parkers. The lack of them. Diego Cabrera carries the grief of a missing father on his shoulders and hides it only as well as a nine-year-old can, and probably gets away with it most of the time with the innocent jack all most third graders notice about anyone other than themselves. 

But Ned, Ned knows what he’s looking for, when it comes to kids with holes where their hearts should be. Probably because he was one, back when that bullet put too many of Ben Parker’s insides on the outside for the two of them to ever again be let into a movie theater.

And then, again. Ned was older, when it was May. Didn’t make it hurt less. 

It’s not the same-- Ned knows it’s not the same, not like it is with a father, but he also can’t think of an explanation that makes even an ounce more sense. Diego misses his dad, and it’s logical for that grief to send Ned back to his own instances of gone but not forgotten, right?

Yeah. That’s a lot more likely than him developing a freak biological mutation that somehow causes him to be a dick to perfectly pleasant nine year olds. 

Ned chooses not to think about the fact that the whole thing never happens with Ina, who would fight for the opportunity to snap herself back into dust if it meant she got the chance to hug her dad one last time. And, yeah, maybe the whole theory has more holes in it than a colander and wouldn’t hold even a teaspoon of water in one of his labs, but Ned’s out of class for the summer. Sue him.

Well, actually. Now that he thinks about it, he could probably get out of that one too, these days. 

Ned begins sorting pieces. “Think I can do a grasshopper?”

Diego squints up at the clock. “It’s gonna be close.” 

“Not if you do the legs.” 

“Antennae,” Diego negotiates. “And face.” 

“You drive a hard bargain, my dude.” And, “I accept your terms.” 

When Ina finally wrenches the door open, face flushed with exertion and the wild energy that accompanies lateness buzzing like a swarm of gnats around her, they’ve finished everything but the two antennas. Or-- antennae, as Diego keeps correcting him. Ned can taste the relief in his mouth at the sight of her. It’s almost as strong as the ache in his temple. 

“What you got?” she asks, breathless as she discards her work bag onto the living room chair. 

Diego turns the moderately bug-shaped rectangle toward her. He sounds proud, despite the lack of antennae. “Guess.” 

Ina’s eyes find Ned’s, and they’re sparkling. Always goddamn sparkling, like she’s got an inside joke with every person or object or power point presentation that finds its way into her line of sight. Ned asked MJ about it once, and she looked at him like he was an idiot. He still doesn’t know why. 

Grasshopper, he mouths. 

“Did you just tell her?” 

Immediately, Ned jumps. Ina’s eyes go wide. Diego’s voice is thick with shock. 

Ned tries: “No?” at the same time Ina goes for: “he was-- yawning.” 

Diego doesn’t look convinced. He looks the opposite, actually. He looks at Ned like he’s seeing him for the first time in his life. 

Ned isn’t even dating this girl. 

“You mouthed it,” Diego insists, eyes jumping between the two of them.  “I saw you.” His brow furrows. “Do you always do that?” A pause. “Does she ever guess it?” 

That thing Ned said? About being good with kids? Maybe just forget that.

With his eyes, Ned begs Ina for help. She scratches her nose and looks away, because she’s a coward and a traitor. They will be having words later. 

“He didn’t have antennas,” he says weakly to Diego, once it’s apparent that he’s being left to the wolves. “That’s the main grasshopper thing, right? I was just trying to-- help her out.” 

“Antennae,” Diego corrects, brokenly. He’s looking at the Lego grasshopper like it’s his dead hamster.

Holy shit. Ned just broke a third grader. Ned just broke Ina’s third grader. 

He must fix this. Immediately. 

“Your parts were good,” he attempts to soothe. “It was my legs that messed us up.” 

“Yeah,” Ina tries to help him out. “The stomach was the best part. Like, clearly a grasshopper stomach. Bet you even put his ears in there.” 

“I made the stomach,” Ned hisses, as Diego lets out a wounded sound. Understanding hits. “You thought Diego made the stomach?”

Ina’s eyes widen, caught.

“I,” she says, delicately, “need to be somewhere else. Immediately.” She gets to her feet. “Gonna go grab my purse, and then we can go?”

“Don’t do this to me,” Ned begs, desperately. “Ina--” 

“Purse,” she repeats, and she’s trying not to laugh, now. Evil woman. Evil, evil woman. Ned’s not paying for her tacos. 

“I’m not paying for your tacos,” he informs her. She waves at him as she disappears down the hallway. 

With a sigh, Ned turns back to the nine year old whose confidence he’s effectively crushed. “Diego--” 

Kid doesn’t even look at him. With a hollow look in his eye, he snaps one of the legs off of the grasshopper and tosses it back into the Lego pile. 

Ned has neither the time nor the Tylenol to be a mature adult about this right now. 

“How much to forget about this?” he blurts out. 

Diego pauses his dismemberment of the poor grasshopper. Ned wonders if stomach ears make the process of having your limbs plucked off more or less enjoyable. “What do you mean?” 

Ned is already reaching for his wallet. “I’ve got…” he counts the few bills in there. “Seven bucks. Plus a free sandwich at Delmar’s.” He looks up. “Is that enough to make you like me again?” 

“What’s Delmar’s?” Diego asks, eyeing the punch card suspiciously. 

Oh, fuck yeah. Ned can work with this. Someone call Bob Ross and tell him the childhood joy of creation is back on. 

“Only the best sandwich shop in Queens,” he immediately says, which is true. He is running with this. He is running very, very fast. “Staple of the community. You don’t know true joy until you’ve tried the number five with pickles, panini style.”

“I don’t like pickles.” 

For some reason, that surprises Ned. But he recovers quickly and expertly. “The number seven then. Turkey on rye.”

“That sounds gross.” 

Ned sighs. He didn’t want to have to play the trump card, but desperate times. “He’s got a cat.” 

Now Diego’s face perks up. Ned had a feeling. “A cat?” 

“Name’s Murph,” Ned says, as seriously as he can. “He survived the snap and somehow found his way back to the shop five years later. Kind of a miracle, if you think about it. Some people think he’s magic.” 

By “some people,” he means MJ. She would die for that cat. She would kill for that cat. It scares Ned sometimes, to think about what she would do for that cat. She walks in the door and Murph immediately forgets about Delmar; lets her scratch at his ears and coo at him in a distinctly un-MJ-like way and doesn’t leave her side until she’s done shopping and slipping sadly out the exit. She tried to walk out with him tucked into her arms, once. Claims it was an accident. Delmar says she’s not allowed to pick him up anymore and has taken to keeping one eye on her as she shops. 

“Magic,” Diego intones, doubtfully. Ned shrugs, moving to slip the card back into his wallet. 

“If you don’t want to see for yourself--”

Diego lunges forward, swiping the cash and card out of his hand. “I mean,” he says when he’s resettled himself, like the whole thing is no big deal, “I could check it out. Just to make sure you’re crazy.” 

Ned snorts, and just then the telltale sound of Ina’s footsteps begins to make its way down the hall. Scrambling, he gets to his feet. “This stays between us,” he whispers. “Okay? Your sister is not one of us. She is an outsider. She’s excluded from this trust circle.” 

“What stays between us?” Diego asks, grinning up at him all missing-toothed and mischievous.

Ned exhales, relieved. “Righteous.”

So. Small, broken child fixed. Good as new, even. Is Ned good at this? He kind of feels like he might be good at this. They will study him in parenting books one day.

God, his head feels weird. 

“Ready?” Ina asks, as she rounds the corner. She’s got her purse over her shoulder. She’s smiling at him. Ned notices.

Because there’s this one other bit, when it comes to Ina Cabrera and her sparkling eyes and her Box Turtle baseball cap.

Namely the fact that Ned’s definitely, devastatingly and one hundred percent, head-over-heels in love with her.

But. 

That would be a whole thing. Too big of a thing, especially for right now, especially for two people who have no idea what the fuck they are to each other.  

Ned doesn’t want to freak her out. He tends to do that. Feet first, whole-hearted and whole-assed, leap-before-he-looks. That’s the Ned Leeds approach. The Edward method, if you will.

But that, that's the old Ned. The immature Ned. The Ned who takes a hard drive and turns it into a weapon without thinking more than twice about the legality of the whole situation, because consequences shouldn’t apply when you’re doing the right thing, the correct thing, the helpful thing, right?

Right. 

Ned’s just. Trying something new this time around, okay? Making an attempt to peek out over the edge before he lunges, on some bridges.

So he just says, with a smile that matches Ina’s and every goddamn Wednesday like clockwork: “Yeah. Let’s do this.” 

---

“This is. Not tacos.” Ned turns to look at Ina. “...Right?” 

“Very much not tacos,” she confirms in one nod, pressing a tip into the driver’s hand with the second. She jerks her head. “C’mon.” 

“Does this feel like a kidnapping to you?” Ned shoulders his backpack, tone conversational. The driver doesn’t smile. “I’m getting a definite kidnapping vibe.” 

“Leave the nice man alone.” Ina smiles at him sweetly, from where she’s standing on the pavement. “We have no more money for him.”

Their driver sighs, long and loud.

Ned gets out of the car. 

He knows this neighborhood, more from hours spent poring over diagrams than the actual look of the place. It’s a peeling paint kind of street, tiny lawns strewn with abandoned bikes and baseball bats and leftover sidewalk chalk. Kids are nowhere to be seen. With the way the sun beats down, brutal and stifling and sweltering, Ned doesn’t blame them.

“Ina,” he says, flatly. 

She turns to fully face him, eyes pleading. “Hear me out.” 

“Is it even, like, safe to be here?” Ned glances around shiftily as the car tires screech away, then back at her. She’s probably spent too much time strolling these streets already, he knows. Back when Dr. Prashad was a name on an office door instead of a headstone.

“We’ll be fine.” 

“In like, the actual sense of that word? Or, like, the metaphorical one.”

Ina frowns, checking her phone screen and then glancing back up at the street sign. “I told him to take us to Munroe. This is Boulder.”

“Because metaphorically, I’d argue that fineness is subjective. I am a weak man, Cabrera. And realistic about my limits. The world would be so much simpler if we were all more realistic about our limits.” 

“I think--“ Ina squints up the street-- “this way?” 

“You’re not even listening.” Ned sighs. “You’ve kidnapped me from my warm, snug bed, and now you’re not even listening.” 

“It’s four thirty.” She’s still studying the map on her phone. “You showed up at my house. You heard me give the guy the address. You held the car door open for me.” 

Ned tries a new tactic. “I thought you wanted to be-- done.” He gestures around, widely. “With this.”

Because that’s what she told him. And Ned had been very, very okay with that. He likes Ina’s smile with all the teeth still in it. Doesn’t mind his own, either. 

Not that he like, wouldn’t like her smile if she was missing a few pearly whites. Ned’s not like that. He just prefers his people above the ground to below it, is all. 

Now Ina looks at him. “That was before your friends said they wanted to help.” She glances at the abandoned, flat basketball in the gutter next to them. “These guys need that kind of help.” 

Ned rubs a hand down his face. He’s already sweaty. “I have, like, so many problems with that first sentence alone.”

Mostly with the fact that Matt and Foggy were just referred to as his friends. Whatever Ned has with them can in no world be considered a regular employee-manager relationship, but if Foggy tries to get Ned to “teach him thrifting” again he’s going to have to put his foot down. 

Matt keeps asking his opinion on nineties bands. Like he knows the entire concept of Hoobastank freaks Ned out as both a person and an indie pop enjoyer. 

“When I said we’d talk to the residents I was thinking more… email correspondence?” he says, glancing helplessly around at the seemingly normal street. “Maybe a DM?”

Ina’s whole self softens. Ned watches it, right there in front of him. 

“You don’t have to stay,” she immediately assures him. “I can so definitely do this without you.”

Ned raises his eyebrows. “Thanks?” 

“I just mean this,” Ina gestures between them, almost like she’s trying to convince herself, “doesn’t have to be a two person job, right? If you don’t, like, want it to be. I can do it. Just tell me what they told you to say, and I can-- say it.”

Ned gets déjà vu, sometimes. All the time. It starts in his head and it rolls all the way through him, like a tidal wave made of something he’s never been able to place. Doesn’t seem to matter where he is or who he’s with, it just splashes down, no rhyme or reason or warning before he’s dizzy with it. 

But that’s what déjà vu is, isn’t it? The illusion of a memory. The derivative of it. Feelings with no meat behind them, time folding just until its two corners touch before you’re shaking your head, shaking it off, moving on with the vague thought of that was weird before you’re onto the next meeting, next class, next trip to the grocery store. 

Ina Cabrera stands there with her set jaw and the type of responsibility on her shoulders you could see from outer space, and Ned can’t help the feeling that he’s done this before. 

Just like he knows that there’s not a chance in hell he’s going to be the one to break the buddy system. Not here, where Viastone’s bloodhounds probably caught their scent the second their Uber hit the city limits. 

“You’re buying lunch,” he finally tells her. “For, like, a month. At least. And if I get sick you have to take melancholy and mildly aesthetic videos of me laughing as I paint the bathroom to forever symbolize that I was both quirky and hot back when I was alive.” 

Ina’s relief is palpable. “You work at a non-profit. You were never buying lunch.” 

“It’s like, very much not a non-profit, though? Famously one of the least non-profity industries.” 

“Oh yeah? Hourly rate is, like, competitive, then?” Ina looks at him innocently.

Ned is conspicuously silent. She snorts, softly.

“Come on, lawyer boy.” She tugs him up the nearest driveway by the elbow. “Let’s sue some sons of bitches.”

So. Ned guesses they’re doing this?

---

The Henderson home is split into two lifetimes. 

Ned can see it, in hard-backed furniture softened with blankets, in the open photo albums strewn across the coffee table. There’s a bike against the back wall of what seems to have at one point been the small but tastefully decorated apartment, and anyone could tell from the way it sadly slumps that it hasn’t been used in weeks. Months, maybe.

Mrs. Henderson is resting. She needs her rest. That’s what the doctor told them. 

“Can I get you kids anything? Drink, or something?” Mr. Henderson asks, looking a little lost. His eyes catch on the Chewbacca pin on Ned’s backpack. “You even legal?” 

Ned knew he should’ve taken that pin off. He’s thought about it a few times. Never can seem to make himself follow through, for some reason. 

“We’re okay,” Ina smiles warmly at Mr. Henderson, and Ned watches how immediately the guy relaxes. Ina’s good like that. MJ likes to joke that she could’ve sold Steve Rogers his own personal Union Jack. 

Ned, who shouldn’t even be trusted to sell Steve Rogers a fresh apple pie at the neighborhood Fourth of July picnic, blurts out, “that’s a lot of photos.” 

To his surprise, Mr. Henderson gives a small smile, the type that looks like it hurts but not as much as it should. “Lynn likes looking through ‘em. She’s-- labeling. Knows my memory’s shit.” He gestures for the two of them to sit down. They do.

“How’s she doing?” Ina asks, softly. “Your wife?”

Mr. Henderson gives a humorless laugh, running a hand over his head where hair probably used to grow. “Better, now they’ve decided that’s the end of it. Got more energy than she’s had in months. Whole thing feels like a big fuckin’ joke, way it works.” He shakes his head, as if snapping out of something. “You kids said you’re with-- lawyers?” 

“Nelson and Murdock,” Ned says quickly. Because holy fuck, he’s never wanted to leave a place more, nor felt guiltier about the thought. There’s a suffocating feel to this home, cozy as it is. Grief in the kitchen, grief woven into the spokes of the bicycle. Grief fast asleep in the room just up the stairs. “They’re interested in representing you. And-- your wife.” 

Mr. Henderson’s face shutters. “Well, you can tell them they’re fresh out of luck. Ain’t got insurance. Haven’t for years.”

Ned shakes his head. “That’s, uh, not what they’re after.” He glances at Ina, who takes a deep breath. Her eyes are more tired than Ned remembers them being ten minutes ago. 

"Mr. Henderson," Ina says, so softly, “we think there’s something you should know.” 

---

They visit six of the homes on Ina's list before the sun starts to dip too low and Ned calls his sister to come pick them up. It’s the same story each conversation, if at different points on the timeline. Some people’s folks have been gone for almost a decade, at this point. One kid’s recently diagnosed, but they think they caught things early enough.

Everyone’s voices go quiet when the conversation turns to Lynn Henderson. Adults and children alike. 

“I don’t get it,” Ned says bluntly, as they make their way back up the street in the dusk, “There’s so many. Why the hell would they stay?” 

Ina shrugs. She’s grown quieter, as the night’s worn on. Ned did most of the heavy lifting with the last three families. “No one had made the connection, I guess. When Dr. P and I started poking around, a couple tried. Houses didn’t sell. Something always fell through. Insurance, closing costs, someone’s grandpa died and the buyer could suddenly afford better.” She rubs at her shoulder, like the strap of her purse is digging into it. Wordlessly, Ned tugs it free from her and slings it over his own. “I joked they were haunted. Daniel thought there was more to it.” 

Ned’s heart kicks up a notch. “Viastone?” 

“He thought so.” Ina taps his backpack. “Trade me.” 

Ned surrenders his burden, and she shoulders the straps. The Chewbacca pin gleams at him. “What would be, like, the point of that?” he asks. “Trapping the residents?”

How evil are these guys? Because this is starting to feel cartoon-villain levels of evil. 

“Daniel thought it was more about, like, keeping people out? Not trapping the residents in. But if you can’t sell your house--” 

“You can’t afford a down payment.” 

Ina nods. There’s something bitter in her smile. 

They walk in silence for a moment. 

“He had it all figured out, didn’t he?” Ned finally asks. “Dr. Prashad.” 

In nods. “Most of it.” And, “The important stuff.” She looks a little faraway. People get like that sometimes, Ned knows. When they’re remembering. “You know, I think they’d already be ten times over, at least. Viastone. If he hadn’t gotten sick.”

“These guys are lucky he cared. Lot of people wouldn’t.”

“Yeah,” she laughs. There’s something wrong with it. Something sharp. “Yeah, the only guy who gave a shit bit the dust and now they’re stuck with me instead. Lucky bastards.” She shakes her head. “He left me all his notes. Did I tell you that?” 

She did. Ned dumped most of them online. He doesn’t say anything. 

“I can’t understand half of them,” she breathes out another half laugh. “There’s probably enough evidence in there. Type that would hold up in front of the government.  And I can’t fucking-- parse through it.”

Ned wonders when this became his life. Villains and heroes and the people who need them. He almost wonders why it doesn’t feel weirder.

“You wrote a whole paper,” he reminds her. “It pissed them off enough to show up at my apartment, so. Can’t have been that far off, right?”

Ina stops, all at once. She turns to him. 

“I’m sorry,” she blurts out. 

Ned blinks. “Um.” 

“I shouldn’t have asked you to do this.” She’s got a strange energy to her, all of the sudden. All-- fidgety. Flighty. Ned wants to grab her arms, keep her tethered to the sidewalk. He doesn’t. “Not the paper or, or the houses. Or-- any of it. I shouldn’t have told you, I shouldn’t have brought you into it, I-- he told me not to tell anyone. He told me it would put them in danger and I just, I still…” she runs a hand through her hair. She’s breathing weird. “I’m so sorry, Ned.” 

And here’s the thing. 

Ned looked at that hard drive because Ina asked him to. He’s not going to lie to her about that. He took that first step into this mess because she’s his friend and he loves her, and he could see in her eyes that this wasn’t the type of thing she should be carrying alone.

Ned went through every figure, every map, every sample analysis. He clicked past a million photos of homes. Of headstones. Of smiling little kids with tubes up their noses. 

He saw Viastone’s financial statements.

And Ned wasn’t thinking about Ina at all, when he made the decision to hit that metaphorical big red button.

“Hey.” He grabs her by the arms, because fuck it. Just this side of hard enough to make her look at him. She does. “I did it on purpose, Ina. You know that, right? You know you didn’t convince me.” 

Ned didn’t need convincing. Nobody worth anything would. Lynn Henderson is going to die, and these guys did it, and nobody can give half a fuck about it because nobody knows it’s happening. 

The choice was simple, at the end of the day. Non-existent, even. He just didn’t realize it until now.

“Ned--”

“I’m serious,” he says, firmly. Ned didn’t used to be like this. He didn’t used to say things firmly. Adulthood got stuck in his voice box somewhere between May Parker’s funeral and Dr. Prashad’s, and he can’t shake it loose for the life of him. “You didn’t ask me to do anything but look, remember? I was the one that pushed it further. This was all just-- part of my master plot, really. To join the dream team.” 

“The dream team,” Ina repeats, dully. “And by that you mean. Us.” 

“Course us ,” Ned says, trying for levity and missing by at least thirty feet. “You know what Leeds and Cabrera combined makes? Labrera. I couldn’t just waste that. We’re the dynamic duo. The sue-their-asses squad. The Viastone-can-suck-a-dick dudes.” 

(Listen, the adulthood is definitely there. Ned just finds ways around it, sometimes.)

Ina deflates a little more. “A dick.” 

“A monster of a dick,” Ned emphasizes. “Second in size only to--” 

Ina whacks half-heartedly at his shoulder.

“--Godzilla,” he says as she rolls her eyes. He drops his hands from her arms. “I was so clearly going to say Godzilla. What did you think I was going to say?”

“I’m leaving you here,” Ina announces.

“Weirdly, I don’t think my sister is going to go for that.” 

“We both know Anna likes me more than you.” 

She’s totally right. Fuck. 

“You’d abandon a nice guy like me?” Ned tries. “All alone, out in the cold?” It’s a healthy seventy-five degrees, even with the sun all but sunk. “Say it's not so, Cabrera.” 

Ina looks at him. Her eyes sparkle, even in the semi-darkness, even after a day like today. 

“No,” she finally decides with a sigh. “You’re right. I wouldn’t.” They round the corner, and she leans against the pole of the stop sign before folding her arms and looking at him. There’s something heavy to it. Ned thinks they might be too young to feel this heavy all the time. “Guess you’re stuck with me, Leeds.” 

Yeah. 

Ned guesses so. 

---

The visit with Mr. Henderson lights some sort of fire under him. No other way to put it. Ned starts coming in early, leaving late, cloning and re-designing and doing everything he physically can to make sure that Matt and Foggy have all the tools they need to nail Viastone to the wall. 

It’s not a work-life balance Ned would’ve accepted at any of his other summer jobs with much more liquid CEOs, but Mr. Henderson’s house is all the guy will have left of his wife soon. If he ends up losing it, it’s not going to be because Nelson and Murdocks’ already paltry digital security measures are at least six years out of date. 

Somewhere deep in Ned’s mind, he understands he’s floundering for control over something, anything. He’s decided this says nothing about the state of his overall psyche. 

Tonight, Ned’s deep in the foundation, and growing more and more frustrated with each passing hour. 

“Fucking-- fuck,” he mutters, to no one but Karen’s empty World’s Greatest Grandpa mug. He presses a thumb to the bridge of his nose and pushes hard to steady himself as the screen in front of him  goes unresponsive again, smothered under too much data and not enough RAM for the heavy gymnastics routine Ned is trying to put it through. 

It’s not the poor computer’s fault. Ned knows that, somewhere deep inside. Old girl hasn’t run anything more complicated than a pdf editor since Tony Stark was still kicking around in that red and gold tin can, but Ned has faith. She’s the underestimated Shetland Pony, he’s the horse girl with nothing but a handful of sugar cubes and a dream of winning the hometown derby. Together, they’ll unlock each other’s full potential and finally show them all.

The program begins reloading. 

Ned should’ve probably, definitely left several hours ago. Matt had been called to the courthouse for some emergency and Foggy had excused himself right at five, but only after demanding Ned cross his heart that he’d be clocked out within the hour. 

And Ned was. He swears. Backpack shouldered, time card signed, six p.m. on the dot. 

Except, as he was heading out the door, he suddenly remembered That One Thing. A random framework, a passing mention from a professor because only stupid people still do it like this, so unless you’re inheriting from a dumbass, don’t tie yourself into knots.

Cut to 1:30 in the morning. 

“Are you feeling this one?” he asks the World’s Best Grandpa mug. “I’m kind of feeling this one.” The mug doesn’t respond. He glances at it. “I know I said that last time. This is different. Have a little faith.” A few more keystrokes. His vision is beginning to blur at the edges, but Ned thinks he can see a light at the end of the tunnel. Probably. Hopefully. It’s either that or the mist of involuntary unconsciousness come to finally collect him from this hellscape of an iterator he’s created for himself. “I’m talking to you in an ironic way, for the record,” he mumbles at the mug, squinting at the code on the screen. “A post-modern, animist, ‘embracing absurdism’ way. Not an incel way.” 

The mug judges him silently, despite the disclaimer. Ned ignores it. 

His finger is hovering over the key that will finally execute his new and improved command when the front door to the office flies open.

Ned jumps to his feet with a curse, knocking his mouse clean off the desk in the process. Light from the hallway spills sudden and blinding across the dark wooden floor, pooling in the floorboards and getting stuck in his eyes as he tries to make out what appears to be--

A guy. Standing there, in the thrown open doorway. Or-- hunching, really. He’s got a hand to his bicep, fingers clutching at a leather sleeve so red, you almost don’t notice the blood oozing its way slowly through the cracks between them. He’s breathing hard. Ragged. The mask clutched in his fist is the same color red as the rest of him. 

With a grunt so soft Ned can barely hear it over the pounding in his own chest, doorway-dude turns toward the individual offices. Light from the hallway catches on his face, throwing into relief a sharp silhouette of gritted teeth and a freshly split lip.

What need does a good man have for horns? 

Ned inhales, sharply. The man freezes dead at the sound. 

And Ned says, nearly choking on it, “What the fuck?”

Chapter Text

“I want the record to show that I’m being insanely chill about this,” Ned grunts as he helps lower Matt (Daredevil?) into Karen’s office chair. “I could be so much worse right now. You have literally no idea how much worse I could be.”

Matt tilts his head in the direction of heaven as he tests what looks to Ned like a broken ankle against the hardwood floor. “You’re the epitome of calm,” he agrees, with the faintest grimace. 

Ned fumbles through the semi-darkness for something to stall the bleeding. “I can tell you’re making fun of me,” he says. “And I’m allowing that, because you’re-- old. And senile from blood loss.” The reality of the situation hits him again. Holy fuck. 

“Call me old again and I’ll fire you.” 

Ned zeroes on what looks to be Karen’s forgotten cardigan draped over the corner of the bookshelf and gives a little hmph of triumph. “Says the guy who has literally never been more blackmail-able. I kind of like my odds, to be honest.” 

Matt winces as he wraps the sweater around his freely bleeding arm. “Coercion is a jailable offense. You could do up to seven years. You know that.” 

Poor cardigan. Karen’s going to kill him. Or Matt. At least one of them, and probably both. Ned says without thinking, “Good thing I have a good lawyer.”

The joke falls as flat as a roadkill raccoon on I-95. Hits the ground between the drops of Matt’s blood and just lays there, stiff as a board now that Ned’s adrenaline is wearing down because-- what the fuck, actually. What the actual fuck.

Hey Matt, where’d you get that shiner? Oh, from falling? On the stairs? No, yeah, that makes perfect sense. No, yeah, we all see those very obvious split knuckles and beginnings of cauliflower ear. No, yeah, we’ve all seen you sprint up the steps to Nelson and Murdock with the ease of a professional hurdler. 

You gotta be more careful, buddy.

“That’s true,” Matt agrees, and even dressed in the stupidest superhero getup Ned has ever seen in his life he’s definitely winning the who-gives-a-fuck war. Like, winning it suspiciously hard. “Rumor has it his--” he lets out a painful-sounding grunt as he starts to apply pressure-- “ass is fantastic.”

“Foggy’s ass has never been even kind of a secret. Or a rumor. Karen and I have an anonymous fan page for that ass,” Ned replies automatically. He stops, wheeling around in a wary sort of way. “You are now a member of a very exclusive trust circle.”

“How is it always that joke?” Matt mutters more to himself than Ned, tying the cardigan into a sad-looking arm bandana. “Always the same joke. Swear to God, you’re the same goddamn person sometimes.”

Ned doesn’t know what that means. “Um. You’ve lost a lot of blood.”

And what he means is: nothing you’re saying makes sense dude, and that’s okay. Or maybe, we should probably buy Karen a new sweater. Or maybe, holy fuck is that the actual Daredevil club. 

What Matt must hear is that Ned’s going to drag his ass to the ER. 

“No doctor,” Matt bites. He pauses whatever he’s doing with his arm when Ned doesn’t respond because, to be completely honest, he’s still on the club. “Leeds. Look at me. Absolutely no doctors. Even if I pass out, understand?”

Which. Ned hadn’t even considered, if he’s being truthful. He’s been on what feels like autopilot but is probably closer to shock since first clocking Matt's wound(s), and not once had he entertained the possibility of dialing 911. 

Doctors aren’t exactly-- safe. As a collective. Not when it comes to vigilantes and especially not when it comes to the enhanced, which Ned grows more and more convinced with each passing second and twitch of Matt’s head are two categories the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen falls right the fuck into. It’s not the doctors’ faults, probably, not in the individual sense, but Ned’s heard whispers of weird shit that goes down at an enhanced kid’s well-child checkup. Things like-- special tests. Required fingerprints. 

Lists. 

“Right. No doctor,” he agrees, like he gets a choice in any of this. 

Matt nods and lets his eyes fall closed for a moment, like he’s taking a breather. The devil mask gleams up at Ned from where it sits on the desk. 

Is this on Ned? There’s no shot this is on Ned, right? Vigilantes that have managed to cling to their secret identities at this point in the metaphorical comic-con that has become New York City’s night scene have been able to do so for a reason.

Because they’re good, Ned has always assumed. Or have too much to lose. 

He glances back at Matt, whose clenched jaw is the only outward signal of his current predicament. His breathing is steady and even. 

Or, he thinks, maybe they’re just-- underestimated. 

“Do you need anything?” Ned asks, once he’s semi-successfully shoved every question he has into that little box that sits right at the base of his skull and only gives him a headache on the bad days. Then, with that weird autopilot again, “I-- uh. Think we need to stitch that, if the bleeding’s stopped.” 

“Three seconds,” Matt mutters. Sweat has settled in little beads across his unmasked forehead. The slashed leather bicep of his suit glistens red and wet.

Ned used to be bad with blood. He’s got this one memory of being nine years old at a friend’s birthday party, where a girl had fallen off her kitchen stool and knocked a tooth on the counter right as they’d started serving the cake. She’d pointed, sobbing, at the bloody, raw socket and then--

Thunk. Ned, keeled straight over sideways and into the door of the pantry. Not a good look for a new-to-town nine year old. Took weeks to hear the end of it from the rest of his class. His lola helped him ice his forehead and even she couldn’t make it through the entire retelling with a straight face.

And it kept going. Kept being a Thing. All through middle school, all through most of ninth grade, the sight of so much as a paper cut was enough to send Ned’s head spinning. He had to be excused from dissecting fetal pigs in ninth grade biology. But then--

He just… got over it, he guesses? Once you’ve seen as much blood as Ned has, blood is just-- blood. Just cells and plasma and the fact that it should really, really be kept on the inside whenever the option is available. 

“You can’t stop applying pressure,” he insists. An insanely cool thought occurs. “Unless-- do you have super healing?”

Matt scoffs. It would be more convincing if his entire face wasn’t white as a piece of copy paper. “What is this,” he grunts, straightening to better inspect the damage, “amateur hour?”

“Are you asking me?” Ned squints, pointing vaguely to his own chest, because he doesn’t know what Matt can see but he has a feeling it’s not nothing. “The guy who just unmasked the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen because said Devil almost passed out on his office floor?” 

“Super-healing is cheating,” Matt resolutely ignores him. “None of you kids understand the--” he grimaces as he removes the cardigan to check the wound on his arm-- “mental clarity that follows getting your shit rocked and feeling it for weeks afterward.” 

“That’s a worrying sentence,” Ned informs him, immediately. “I get the feeling you don’t understand how worrying that sentence was.”

Matt grunts, which is not comforting. 

“And,” Ned adds, “it also sounds like something someone pissed they don’t have super healing would say.” 

Matt says, with great dignity, “Grab the scissors. I’ll have to cut the suit.” 

With his eyes half-closed, Ned watches as Matt Murdock patches himself back together. The whole thing is like a car wreck he can’t look away from. A bloody, tissue-y, oh my god this guy is in no way certified to do other people’s stitches, much less his own mess of a car wreck. There’s thread. A needle. Some weird grimace-pacing  to make sure the ankle is just all the way twisted and not actually broken. Ned only hides behind his hands once, and he’s counting that as a win.

Matt collapses back into the office chair like a sack of very tired potatoes. He looks at Ned and sighs. “You get five questions.”

Holy shit. 

“The horns,” Ned says, so immediately that Matt jumps a bit. “I have been waiting my entire life to ask what the hell is up with the horns. I am in no way exaggerating.”

“I changed my mind,” Matt unilaterally decides, as he fumbles with the cap of Karen’s water bottle until Ned takes pity on him and reaches across to undo it. “You get no questions.”

“Fine.” Ned sits back down at his own desk so that he and Matt are facing each other. “Horns are off limits.” He thinks for a second, and the real question pops easily into his mind. He looks at Matt curiously. “Why aren’t you scared I’ll rat you out?” 

Matt considers the question almost too carefully, then gives half a shrug with his good arm. 

“I guess we’ll have to call it a gut feeling.” 

---

They talk until Matt’s voice goes hoarse and Ned’s settled into the idea of chatting with fucking Daredevil enough that his brain is firing on normal cylinders again. Or at least, as normal as your cylinders can fire, given that the clock currently reads 4:31. 

Because, listen. Every kid wants superpowers. God knows Ned wouldn’t have said no, had he been fifteen and the opportunity fallen into his lap. Super-strength or stealth or invisibility or-- any of it, really. Ned was, like, twelve, when aliens invaded New York and the entire concept of what it means to be a human shifted on its axis. He had a Captain America Barbie that he insisted was an action figure. They all wanted superpowers. 

Then, at age twenty and three quarters, Ned found out Matt Murdock could feel and hear each individual layer of skin and muscle tear as a proven human trafficker drove a knife into his arm three hours ago.

And suddenly, he’s glad the fifteen-year-old version of himself had never actually tried to ingest the contents of a glowing purple test tube on one of the many lab tours they’d taken during his time at Midtown. 

“You should go home, kid.” 

Matt’s eyes are closed where he’s laying sprawled on the hardwood floor. Not sleeping. Just-- resting, Ned guesses. 

Ned snorts at the same time he hits enter on his keyboard. “In your dreams, man.” 

“I’m serious.”

“And I’m telling you not a chance, dude. You think I want to get in tomorrow and find you dead on the ground? I’d be stuck with, like, the entire bill for that cardigan. This is self-preservation, if anything.” He glances down at Matt through the gap between his desks and his monitor. “Plus, I’m definitely at a breakthrough point. Can’t put a clock on the scientific process.” 

“You’re frustrated,” Matt corrects him. If he forgot to mention a mind-reading super power, Ned is going to have to quit this job like, yesterday. “And it’s late.” 

“It’s early, actually. And I’m not frustrated, just--” Ned sighs. “Stupid.”

Matt’s unimpressed. “Explain it to me.”

“I-- what?” Ned asks, nonplussed. He glances at Matt like he’s just grown a third head. “Why would I do that?” 

“I’m considering a career change,” Matt says, dry as dust. “I don’t know, kid. I’m your supervisor, right?”

Oh yeah. That part where Daredevil is also technically his boss. 

Ned TAs a computational methods class for freshman mechanical engineering majors, fall semesters. It’s one of his favorite things, putting the process of programming into words for people whose lives don’t revolve around it the same way his does. He likes watching the understanding dawn. Likes helping other people see the power in this thing he’s dedicated so many years of his life to loving. 

People laugh, when he describes it that way. Loving. Like programming isn’t its own form of poetry. Like a smooth-running script doesn’t sing. 

Ned glances tiredly at the error message taking up half the monitor screen. 

He doesn’t feel much like a poet, right now. 

“Your security is shit.” Ned’s blunt about it. “You’ve got a lot of classified documents. Stuff for clients. Information on Karen’s sources. Stuff that’s-- not for clients.” 

Matt stiffens slightly.

It’s Daredevil shit, Ned realizes now. All those ledgers and receipts and cryptically-named folders of photos that look like they’re straight out of a film noir. 

They keep the Daredevil shit with the regular business shit. Like actually. As in, payroll records and surveillance footage of Vice President Ross in the same folder. 

Ned takes a very, very deep breath, and digs the heels of his hands into his eyes. “When Ross drags you ass-first into Rikers by those cute little horns, all I want you to think about is the fact that you keep the actual Fisk file saved to your actual work desktop. ” 

Matt sounds as amused as someone with a hole in their arm can sound. “Noted.”

“It’s not even password protected.” 

“Mm.”

“I could’ve remoted into any computer here in fifth grade. On my DS. It’s-- that’s insane , dude.” 

“You were a weird kid,” Matt agrees. “Makes sense. But you’re fixing it?” 

No. No, Ned’s making a big fucking mess. “I’m-- uh. Definitely doing. Something?” 

Matt makes another unimpressed noise.

Ned sighs. “Look,” he says, turning the monitor slightly before remembering that Matt can’t see it and shuffling back. Which is embarrassing. But he recovers. “There’s a mostly-good Nelson and Murdock database framework. A real one. Hasn’t been used in years, because you guys just save everything to the computers. That box in the corner that Karen uses as a footrest?” he points. “That’s your server.” 

“You mean the box with the holes in the sides,” Matt says, flatly. “The one we hired an AC guy to come fix last summer.” 

Ned reminds himself to breathe. “What.” 

“He said he took care of it.” Matt sounds confused.

“He-- your AC unit is in the window,” Ned says, fighting to keep his voice even. “Everyone in this building has an AC unit in their window. You’re messing with me, right?” 

There’s a beat. 

“Yes,” Matt finally goes with. His voice is neutral. 

“Because if that guy charged you, you got played.” 

“Right. Moving on.” 

Ned stares at him for ten unbroken seconds. 

“Moving on,” Matt reiterates. 

They’re going to kill him, Ned realizes all at once. Two of the smartest people he’s ever met are going make him actually die of actual exasperation before the summer is over. 

“Christ,” he mutters, dragging a hand down his face. “Fine, okay, whatever. Point is, you guys need more space. So I’m trying to migrate the older stuff over there, since it’s free. To the server. That is not an AC unit.” 

He looks at Matt meaningfully. Matt pretends not to notice, so he continues. 

“But you’ve got some fu— I mean, weird, security protocols. They’re getting in the way.”

Matt sounds mildly confused again. “You said we didn’t have security.”

“I said you had bad security. There’s a difference,” Ned tells him. “Problem is, I haven’t been able to find a way to mess with the protocols. Especially not to get rid of them. They’re complicated. Most of it is legacy code.” 

“Legacy code.”

Ned nods. “It’s kind of like--“ he sighs. “Okay. When you program, there’s structure to it, right? You’re going in layers. Things build on each other, sometimes too much, if you’re not careful. And eventually, all that stuff on the bottom layer gets old, if you don’t keep up with it.” 

Matt nods like he’s following.  

“And like, eventually, your code gets filled with all these-- complex dependencies,” Ned pushes on. “The new stuff is referencing the old stuff, and then the even newer stuff references that stuff, and it all just-- builds. And builds. On that foundation.” 

“Right.” Matt is smiling slightly, which means he’s humoring Ned more than actually listening. This is why Nelson and Murdock keeps getting scammed by AC repairmen. “So…”

“So, if you let your foundation get out of date--” Ned says with no small amount of significance in Matt’s direction-- “it gets hard to make changes without breaking everything else, right? You, you might not even notice anything is broken until you try and run a script that references the legacy code you messed with and it comes up blank. The new code goes to access the information it needs to make sense of the instructions, and if the information's not there, everything just-- short-circuits.” He shrugs. “That’s what’s happening when I fuck with the security protocols.” 

“And this is what you’ve been working on,” Matt recaps in a voice that makes it clear he’s unimpressed with Ned’s life choices. Which, for the record, is pretty fucking rich coming from a guy who just decided on those horns. “Until five in the morning.” 

Well, Ned thinks. That and, you know. Helping sew the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen’s arm back together. 

“Sleep is for suckers?” he says, instead. 

God, Ned wishes he was a sucker. He hasn’t had to do a real all-nighter since finals his freshman year. His eyes itch. His mouth feels dry. His brain hasn’t stopped doing the déjà vu thing since Matt first started creeping un-stealthily across the office. 

“What the fuck I wouldn’t give to be twenty again,” Matt yawns. 

Seeing as how Ned’s got two perfectly functioning ankles and will definitely be throwing Matt under the bus for the whole bloody-cardigan thing the absolute second Karen Page steps foot into this office, he supposes that’s fair. 

---

The next morning, Karen cusses them both out so hard it’s like, borderline impressive. 

Foggy scans the entire office like a scared deer, clocks both the Devil mask and Ned’s seeming indifference to said Devil mask and lets out a tiny whimper, right before checking the lock to every window and telling Matt severely that from there on out he should consider the two of them completely unaffiliated. 

Ned asks, after a sudden, inescapable realization, if Matt can hear when women are pregnant. Like, before they can. To which Matt replies, sounding tired, “Look. This whole thing is only weird if you make it weird, okay?”

Ned goes home early. His mom asks about his day. 

He tells her, “fine,” kisses her on the temple, and then sleeps for ten straight hours. 

When he wakes up, Matthew Murdock is still Daredevil, and it still makes Ned an accomplice. 

---

So. Might as well send it, right? 

---

“You good?” 

Ina’s eyes are soft, and Ned snaps back into reality by saying something super intelligent like, “huh?” 

“You’re being weird,” she tells him.  

It’s Wednesday, again. They got pizza this week, some tidy little corner shop where the entree titles are all plays on celebrity names. It’s almost unbearably touristy, but they make Ina’s favorite Greek-style and who the hell is Ned to stand in the way of a love match like that? 

“Sorry,” he shakes his head, reaching forward to recapture his slice of Pepperoni Potts . “Zoned out.” 

“Are you sick?” Ina pushes, putting her hand up to his cheek and tilting it, as if to examine him. Her brow furrows. “You kind of look sick.” 

Ned definitely feels flushed. But Ina could fix that by removing her hand. “Uh-- maybe,” he says, agreeably.

The hand does drop. She looks concerned. “We should go. I can drop you off.”

“No,” Ned says, a little too quickly. “I mean-- no. Sorry. I’m not sick. Just, uh. Thinking?”

One thing about Ned Leeds: His poker face is so bad it can probably be classified as non-existent. The whole situation has to be, like, a chronic condition at this point. It’s not that Ned isn’t capable of telling lies or of keeping secrets, he totally is. He just. Can’t look anyone straight in the eye as he does it. 

This gets especially complicated when your friends all happen to be goddamn super-geniuses. 

Ned hasn’t talked with his actual voice to MJ in like, six days. He’s running out of excuses, and she barely bought his explanation of watching Dirty Dancing with his lola two nights ago. Ned was like, this close to photoshopping Patrick Swayze’s face onto the Price is Right host on Lola’s show and sending it her way before the reality of what he was considering hit and he chose to instead take a walk around the block. 

MJ, MJ Ned can handle. MJ he has enough geographic distance from for his weirdness to be attributed to her own homesickness, or his Viastone stress, or any of the thousand other small, twenty-year-old angsts that can explain away his sudden inability to discuss with her Ross’s hot-off-the-press campaign promise to “better arm police in their battle against enhanced criminality” without his mouth going all dry. MJ Ned owes more than Patrick Swayze zombies.

MJ he can worry about when he gets back to campus. 

Ina Cabrera on the other hand? So painfully present, so goddamn aware, so part of Ned’s space that hiding something from her is like trying to hide it from himself. And no, he’s not thinking about what that means, thank you and God bless. There’s not enough room in Ned’s head for any more revelations at the moment, and his life would be a hell of a lot easier if Ina would just get on board with that. 

“Lawyer stuff?” she teases. Her eyes sparkle. “Is your inability to write a five paragraph essay finally coming back to bite you in the ass?”

“Hey,” Ned points his pizza at her accusingly. “I can do five paragraphs. My strength lies in the fact that I’ve never needed more than that.”

“Remember your first university three-pager? That was a big one.”

Ned’s still bitter about that. Fuck Professor Ranson, low-key. 

But, like, not really. Professor Ranson’s probably a super chill guy in real life. A chill guy who just happens to have the longest assignment rubrics of all time. “Not big enough, apparently.” 

“Who would’ve thought the English professor who specified word count was going to go check the actual word count?” Ina says dryly.

“Exactly,” Ned nods, taking another bite of his pizza. “You get me.” 

She snorts, looking at him in a way that-- were Ned feeling particularly bold-- he might classify as fond. “It’s such a miracle you passed your generals.”

“One man’s miracle is another man’s Michelle Jones-Watson.”

“True,” Ina agrees, leaning back in her chair and crossing her arms. “So, not sick, not work. What else is there to give yourself an ulcer over?”

Oh, nothing. Just the fact that he ran actual digital reconnaissance for an actual vigilante last actual night. 

Ned plays for time. “I feel like you’re making fun of me.”

Ina rolls her eyes.

“There it is again,” he accuses. “You’re saying I don’t have a life outside of work.” 

“I’m not--” 

“I have a life,” Ned insists. “And it’s a great life, Cabrera. A full life. Social invitations just-- coming out my ears, most nights.”

This is categorically untrue, something Ina is 100% aware of seeing as how their respective social circles are, in fact, one singular circle. She lets it slide anyway, which Ned kind of loves her for. 

“Okay,” she puts her hands up, exasperated. “Whatever. Can’t blame a girl for wondering what’s up with the Bella Swan New Moon impression.” 

Ned frowns at his pizza. “It can’t have been that bad.”

Ina squints at him. “You ordered Pepperoni Potts. And the ‘Cap’-rese was like, right there .”

Ned looks at his pizza as if seeing it for the first time, and holy shit. She’s so right.

He sighs, setting the slice back down. “I don’t know,” he lies, like the lying liar he is. “I think it might just be like--” he gestures with one hand to the restaurant as a whole as he fumbles for something-- “the world? In general?”

Huh. Freudian.

“You know what? That’s fair.” Ina glances up at the muted TV in the corner currently displaying another Ross speech at some manufacturing facility or another regarding “American jobs.” He’s on the New York beat this week, despite the near surety of an electoral loss come November. Probably trying to avoid criticism of forgetting his roots. Or looking to get more visibility where the enhanced population is especially concentrated. 

“Holy shit,” Ina says, suddenly. “Is that…?”

Ned looks up at the screen. His pizza does a weird little flip in his stomach. 

He was wrong, earlier. The building Ross stands in front of to address his audience isn’t a manufacturing plant, technically, but a water treatment facility. The water treatment facility, unmistakable by virtue of the large, seriffed letter V stamped into the building’s cinderblock side and the houses lining the bottom left corner of the wider camera shots. 

“What the fuck,” Ned says flatly. And, against his better judgement, “what’s he saying?” 

Ina’s already digging for her phone. She finds a stream of the speech, props the phone on the table, and hands Ned one of her earbuds just in time for Ross’s tinny exclamation of gratitude to the good people of Viastone for their tireless efforts and contributions to the continuing rebuilding process. 

“More like endless contributions to his campaign,” Ned says darkly, once the screen cuts to an ad break. He takes another bite of his pizza. It’s cold. “Funny how he didn’t mention that.” 

Ina looks tired, and something in Ned pangs. “Have your friends made any progress? With the case?”

Ned stopped asking for updates about two weeks ago, because that’s when the number of understanding smiles he was getting from Foggy started to feel suspicious, and he’d finally sat down and googled the average timeframe for a class action suit as high-profile as this one is sure to be. 

Answer: at least four years, probably. If they’re lucky. 

Ina doesn’t seem to like this anymore than he had. “People should know,” she says, fiercely. Her fingers drum against the table. “They all think he’s some-- ‘care for the little guy’ type of politician. The dude who wrote the Accords.” 

“Bold to assume voters actually read the Accords.” Ned pauses, then, cautiously, “You think he knows about the Viastone stuff? The whole-- thing?” 

She laughs. It's sharp. “Does it matter? He wants to put people on lists, Ned.”

Ina gets hot sometimes. Meaning, like, her temper, obviously. All up in arms and angry and like she’d very much like to watch the world burn, if it means things will grow back even a little bit better for kids like Diego or Anna. 

Ned, who’s never gone anywhere but with the flow, doesn’t mind. Might be why the two of them work, come to think of it. 

“Might matter,” he shrugs. “To voters.” 

“Nothing matters to voters. Especially things they don’t fucking-- know about,” Ina mutters, a storm in her eyes. “They think he’s going to finally catch all the Rhinos of the country for good, or whatever. Like Spider-Man hasn’t put the guy in prison four times already and he just-- breaks through the damn wall.” 

“Yeah. It would be bad press, at least,” Ned sighs in agreement. “If someone were to expose Viastone now that he’s made a public connection. Too bad we can’t just…” he trails off, then, flatly. “Dude.” 

Ina, too, looks like she’s received a metaphorical slap in the face. “Are we stupid?” 

Ned’s already standing, clearing their napkins. “I think our brains were protecting us,” he says. From the truly, devastatingly idiotic thing they’re probably about to do. “But yes. Definitely.” 

“You know that MJ would have figured this out weeks ago, right?” Ina snaps the to-go box closed. “Ross would be crashing in the polls if her internship wasn’t hell.” 

God, Ned misses that woman. He should call her. And if he has the sudden, uncontrollable urge to come clean about the whole working for Daredevil bit he’ll have to just slap himself in the face.

They’re all making sacrifices these days.

“Yeah,” he sighs, letting Ina take his hand to pull him faster out the door and in the direction of Nelson and Murdock with a quick thank you over her shoulder in the direction of the host. “I know.” 

---

“No,” Matt says, immediately. Which is more than a little surprising, given his everything. 

“Think about it,” Ned pushes. “It didn’t work, last time, because the format wasn’t set up to be easily consumable--” 

“And, therefore, your name didn’t have to be attached to it,” Matt argues. “It was safer.” 

“They still found us,” Ina pipes up, helpfully. “So. Fucked either way.” 

“Timeout. Everyone quiet. Who is this?” Foggy points at Ina. He’s the only one of them sitting, seeing as how this impromptu meeting had ended up in his office. “Is this-- science girl?” 

“Yes,” Ned confirms. “I mean-- no. This is Ina. Cabrera. But she’s-- uh. Science-y. Yes.” 

“The one you’re not dating,” Foggy confirms, because he’s the villain in Ned’s origin story. 

Ned practically falls over sideways. “Um.” 

Ina’s grin is entirely too wide.

“Irrelevant,” Matt decides, saving him. Ned could kiss him on the mouth. “My vote is no.” 

It’s kind of cute, that Matt thinks they’re asking a trusted adult’s permission. Like this guy doesn’t go get stabbed with knives on a semi-regular basis and wouldn’t be the dead last person Ned would ever seek out life advice from.

“Buddy,” says Foggy, disbelieving. “This is good. This could work.” 

“Meaning what?” Matt challenges. “Getting more attention on the case? It’s too early. The backlash will die out by the time the pressure is necessary.” 

“More attention on the case means more attention on the relationship with Ross.” Foggy leans back in his chair, surveying Matt carefully. “They’re his biggest donor. You know that.” 

Wait. They know that? 

“Those people aren’t means to our anti-Ross end,” Matt retorts. His voice is sharp, succinct. Ned can picture it in front of a judge. “They’ve been through hell. You want to risk the possibility of a settlement?”

“If it means Ross can’t give himself the power to  round up the enhanced and tag them like cattle?” Foggy volleys back. “Maybe.”

“The enhanced aren’t helpless. These residents are.”

Foggy makes an unamused noise. “Just because--“

“No one has to be in the doc who doesn’t want to,” Ina cuts in. “We’ll make sure everyone is aware of the risks.” She looks at Foggy, as if she can sense the only source of sanity in this office. “It’ll be short. Ten, fifteen minutes max. Testimonials from some of the residents, me, Ned, hopefully one of you. A link to Prashad’s data. Easy, breezy, beautiful.” 

“Covergirl,” Ned supplies, in response to Foggy’s slightly raised eyebrows. 

Ina looks straight at Matt. “I’m looking at you now.” 

“Okay,” Matt says, sounding mildly bewildered. 

“I know it’s covergirl, by the way,” Foggy informs them. “I wasn’t questioning the reference.”

“Say this goes to court in two, three years,” Ina says, shrugging like the assumption is practical and not something she’d learned twenty-five minutes ago. “You think President Ross is going to let the courts work their magic on his biggest campaign contributor? You think these people get their justice, if he wins?” 

Which is, quite literally, such a good point. And also backs Matt into a metaphorical corner, seeing as how three of the four people in this room know his alter ego springs into being most nights as the direct result of an experience with said broken justice system.

Fuck. Ned is definitely in love with this woman. 

Foggy and Ned both turn to look at Matt, who does something uncharacteristic. 

He sighs. Sighs, and then deflates.

“You’re kids,” he says, like it makes anything different. He sits down on the chair opposite Foggy’s desk, the one normally reserved for clients. “You’re all just fucking-- kids.”

Ned wonders if that’s true. He still feels like a kid, most days. He’s still got a Chewbacca pin on his backpack. He still fights with his sister sometimes, when he’s on a school break and they’ve spent too much time together at home. He still doesn’t know what to do with all these feelings in his chest or the hand that keeps finding a home wrapped around Ina’s.

But Ned knew this woman named May Parker, once. Back before she went in the ground and they marked an unimaginably big life with a handful of tiny words carved into stone. 

When we help someone, we help everyone. 

An easily-tweetable clip highlighting the lives Viastone has cut tragically short might not be enough to change any voters’ minds. Not with Ross pushing hard, just as hard, harder than ever with the foot he’s always had on the media’s throat. Most people probably won’t see it. Even fewer will do something like actually change their vote, or hold Viastone accountable in the court of public opinion . But maybe someone will. 

And Ned feels adult enough to honor that, at least.

“Well,” Foggy finally says, “count me in.” He glances at Matt, who’s gone quiet. “But what’s your plan to make the thing? You need equipment, I’m assuming. And…director? Do YouTube videos have directors?”

Ned and Ina exchange a look. 

“Actually,” Ned sighs, incredibly painfully,  “we know a guy.” 

---

Flash has exactly one week for them. He’s managed to line his flight back from a month spent in Europe with a week where his mom’s in town, but informs them that he tries every summer to see just enough of her to remind each other why we keep it casual. So. Plenty of time to film, as long as they get scripted and ready to go before he arrives. 

So they do.

Ina starts prepping the residents. 

Ned keeps tabs on Viastone.

Karen is gone more often than she’s present as her article covering the treatment of the underaged enhanced in high-security prisons begins to take shape. 

Matt goes out most evenings, Ned in his ear on some of the nights the seemingly-endless well of Spider-Mans and Luke Cages and every other NYC vigilante companion runs dry. 

Ross continues his speeches and rallies and conventions, and Foggy takes on more and more representations of the enhanced. The office lights stay on later and later, and sometimes they all order Chinese food and sit around eating it in silence.

MJ calls most nights, clearly miserable and clearly bored and clearly wishing she could jump straight through the screen of Ned or Ina’s phone as they lay with backs pressed against bedroom floors, brainstorming and scripting and sending countless intentionally annoying, clarifying messages to Flash. 

Ned is bone-tired, by the time he trudges to the bus stop at the end of every day.  

But, he thinks that might just be what growing up feels like.  

---

Ned meets Peter Parker on the last Thursday in July. 

The guy’s about Ned’s age, with curly hair that’s a little too long, eyes that dart from window to window to window, and a backpack with one corner ripped clean open and reinforced by duct tape. He walks in the front door of Nelson and Murdock like he owns the place, takes one look at Ned typing merrily away at his desktop, and nearly faints dead away. 

Then, he proceeds to grab one Matt Murdock by the arm and drag him bodily from the room. Somewhere, Foggy’s office door shuts with a definitive click. 

From this, Ned learns three things. 

1. This guy obviously knows that Matt is Daredevil. 
2. He’s the only one in this office who seems to understand how soundproof (or non-soundproof) the Nelson and Murdock offices actually are, because Ned can’t hear a damn thing they’re saying. 
3. He somehow has the power to single-handedly get Ned fired from the coolest job he’s ever had. 

---

“You’re kidding,” Ned says, flatly. 

Matt winces. “I am. Not.” 

“Is this about the dude from earlier?” Ned’s voice raises in disbelief. “Is he your actual-- guy in the chair, or whatever?” 

“My--” Matt shakes his head like it doesn’t matter. “No. To whatever you’re saying. That was no one.”

Right. And Ned’s going to be Ross’s pick for Secretary of Defense.

“A no one who knows you’re Daredevil?” he tries.

“He doesn’t know--”

“Dude. I watched him drag a blind guy fifteen feet. If he doesn’t know you’re you, then he’s an ass.” 

“You’re a good judge of character,” Matt nods. “He is an ass. Name’s Peter. Foggy’s helping him out with a legal matter, because he’s a client, and that’s what we do for clients.” 

Ned tsks. Because getting fired from being super-vigilante-backup has to be the cruelest pink slip in the history of ever. “Explain it to me, then.” 

“I told you. It’s come to my attention that this arrangement is less than safe for you.” 

Ned, who is technically a grown man, says, “I’m a grown man, dude.” 

Matt actually, genuinely laughs. Which is hurtful. 

“Dude,” Ned says, again, with some petulance to it. 

Matt clears his throat. “Sorry.” He shrugs. “I wish I had a better explanation for you. This is just how it has to be.” 

Ned lets it hang in the air for a moment, just in case the absurdity of Daredevil giving the we’re moving in a different direction speech to his tech support kicks in and Matt decides to retcon the entire thing. When he doesn’t, Ned huffs out a snort and gets to his feet. 

He closes the door a little too loudly behind him, unsure why this whole thing tastes so fucking familiar.