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Chapter Text

Seeing Daredevil limp out of the medbay, Bruce Banner seized the opportunity. He needed a qualitative analysis of his fear-response neural maps that no machine could provide, and Daredevil’s hypersenses could be the key. "Your sensory input is the closest thing I have to a live feed of the autonomic nervous system," Bruce said, dragging Daredevil into his lab. "I need you to look at my brain scans and tell me what I'm missing."

"I can tell you what a racing heart sounds like or the scent of adrenaline in the air," Daredevil replied, his voice careful and even as the door hissed shut behind them. "But my understanding is visceral, not visual. Your screens might as well be blank… Perhaps if you described the data to me?"

Within the lab, the air was cool and still, the sterile scent undercut by the faint, warm aroma of soldered circuits and old coffee. Bruce's shoulders were hunched, his brow furrowed as he scrolled through a cascade of data on a large, glowing monitor. The images flashing before Bruce’s eyes were stark and colorful: functional MRI scans highlighting the searing, hyperactive glow of a fear-response in the amygdala, alongside smooth graphs charting the brutal, jagged peaks of cortisol levels in the bloodstream.

He pinched the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses, a gesture of pure frustration. The data was perfect. Clinically pristine. And it was absolutely meaningless.

“It never quite captures it,” he said, his voice a low, weary murmur that was swallowed by the room’s silence. He wasn't really speaking to his guest; he was arguing with the screen. “You can see it right there. My amygdala lights up like a tiny supernova, a panic button pressed deep in the brain. The chart shows the cortisol flood, the biochemical tsunami of a stress response… but it’s just… shapes. Numbers. It doesn’t show my experience. The raw, terrifying, all-consuming feeling of it. It gives me beautiful pictures of averages, but stress happens in milliseconds. The scan can’t keep up.”

He finally turned, his thoughtful, tired eyes landing on the figure who had been a silent, statuesque presence since entering. Daredevil had perched himself on a stainless-steel stool, perfectly still, his head tilted at an angle that suggested a focus far beyond the room’s four walls. The crimson of his suit was a violent splash of color against the lab’s muted greys and blues.

Bruce continued, a hint of scientific curiosity cutting through his frustration. “Tony confirmed your senses are enhanced. All of them. That you perceive the world… more.”

“He’s not wrong.”

Daredevil didn’t move. He was processing a universe of information Bruce’s instruments could never hope to measure, even if he could convince the Devil to sit for a scan: the hum of the tower’s power grid, the scent of Bruce’s faint adrenaline from his own frustration, the minute shift of air currents from the ventilation, the distant, rhythmic heartbeat of someone sleeping three floors below. He was the living, breathing answer to Bruce’s problem, a source of qualitative data so profound it made the quantitative figures on the screen look like cave paintings.

Bruce swiveled in his chair, fully engaging now. The clinical frustration was replaced by the focused energy of a scientist laying out a foundational hypothesis. He gestured toward the scan still glowing on the monitor, specifically highlighting the deep-brain structures. “The key to understanding any extreme stress response,” he began, his tone becoming lectural yet earnest, “is the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal axis, the HPA axis. It’s the body’s central command for dealing with threat. It’s a beautifully orchestrated, yet brutal, cascade.” He leaned forward, tapping a finger on the desk to emphasize each point.

“It starts in the hypothalamus, here,” Bruce continued, pointing to a region on the scan. “It releases corticotropin-releasing hormone, CRH. That signals the pituitary gland to secrete adrenocorticotropic hormone, ACTH. That’s the chemical message that rides the bloodstream to the adrenal glands, sitting on the kidneys, and orders them to flood the system with the two key players: cortisol and adrenaline.”

Bruce paused, making sure the chain was clear. “Cortisol increases glucose in the bloodstream, enhancing your brain’s use of it and tuning up the availability of substances that repair tissues. Adrenaline? That’s the immediate action hormone. It skyrockets your heart rate, elevates your blood pressure, and boosts energy supplies. It’s the entire fight-or-flight response, distilled into a biochemical command.”

Then his voice lowered, becoming more personal, the science curdling into lived experience. “For a normal person, this is a temporary state. The prefrontal cortex, the seat of executive function, right here,” he said, tapping his own forehead, “can eventually assess the threat and apply a brake to the amygdala, dialing the HPA axis back down.” A dark, wry smile touched Bruces lips. “The gamma radiation… it didn’t just give me a new tenant. It rewired the building’s entire electrical system. My HPA axis isn’t a temporary response system anymore; it’s a trigger. And the Other Guy… he’s the bullet.”

He looked directly at the red silhouette, his expression deadly serious. “The trauma of that day, the fear, the anger, it’s no longer a memory stored in my hippocampus. The radiation physically altered my neural pathways. It created a direct, hardwired link between that emotional state and a physiological transformation. It completely bypasses the prefrontal cortex. There’s no rational override. No cognitive brake.”

He let the statement hang in the air, the culmination of his theory. “That’s the core of it. The trauma isn’t just a memory I can process. It’s a physical switch. And my finger is permanently on the button.”

Daredevil was silent for a long moment, his head tilted as if listening to the echo of Bruce’s words, dissecting the precise biochemical pathways the doctor had just described. When he finally spoke, his voice was a low, measured counterpoint to Bruce’s clinical fervor, not contradicting, but offering a different paradigm. “A switch implies a binary state,” he began, the words deliberate. “On or off. Calm or transformed. My reality isn’t a switch. It’s a… filter. Or a dam holding back a river.”

Daredevil shifted slightly on the stool, a minute adjustment that spoke of a body constantly processing immense input. “The data you see on your screen, the cortisol and adrenaline… for you, that’s the trigger. For me, that’s the baseline environment. My senses provide a constant, uncompromising firehose of information. The scent of bleach from a clinic ten blocks away, the pressure change from a subway train passing beneath us, the minute fibrillation in the atrial chamber of your heart… it’s all there. All the time. Control, for me, isn’t about preventing a new state from being triggered. It’s about the perpetual, conscious management of a pre-existing, overwhelming flow.”

He turned his head, the red lenses seeming to focus on Bruce with an unnerving intensity. “You speak of your prefrontal cortex being bypassed. For me, it is the most essential tool. It’s the engineer at the dam’s control station, constantly opening and closing gates, directing the torrent, preventing a catastrophic spillover. Fear, anger, pain; they don’t flip a switch to a new state I don’t normally inhabit. They don’t create something new. They break the dams.”

His voice gained a subtle, grim edge. “When that happens, the careful controls fail. The filtration system shuts down. It’s no longer a question of managing the flow. It’s about being submerged by it. Every sound in a ten-block radius becomes a simultaneous scream. Every scent becomes a physical blow. The heartbeat of every person in this tower becomes a pounding drum in my skull. It’s not a transformation into something else. It is a catastrophic systems failure of the self. The goal is never to stop the flow. The goal is to never stop engineering.”

Bruce leaned forward, his earlier lecture completely forgotten. The charts and scans on the monitor were now irrelevant artifacts. He was staring at a living instrument of unimaginable sensitivity. “Forget the emotion for a second,” he said, his voice hushed with intense, rapt curiosity. “Describe the physics of it to me. The raw data. From a purely phenomenological standpoint, what is the sensory signature of a heightened stress response within your system?”

Daredevil was quiet for a moment, not out of reluctance, but because he was accessing a layer of perception so fundamental to his existence that putting it into words was a unique challenge. “So, you’re almost asking two different questions: how I perceive heightened stress response in general, and how I perceive you specifically, when you… transform. For the latter, I guess the long and short of it is that you and Steve have the same base chemical smell. But with you, it's like the chemical is being cooked, beginning to burn. And when you transform into the Hulk, the smell ignites into acrid ionization. The taste from the chemical is bitter, and… there’s also the taste and smell of blood.”

Bruce nodded. “There are no chemoreceptors for gamma radiation itself. It’s massless, doesn’t have a scent. What you’re describing is a reading of its secondary effects. The bitterness is likely a volatile organic compound, a biomarker of chronic cellular stress and repair. My body is constantly dealing with low-level damage, and that’s the exhaust. But the transformation…” He paused, his voice dropping into a more clinical, yet still grim, register.

“When the change initiates, the gamma flux isn’t just in me. It’s radiating out. It’s ionizing the air around my body, stripping electrons from nitrogen and oxygen molecules. That ‘acrid ionization’ you smell? That’s ozone and nitrous oxides. You’re literally smelling the air being split apart. And the blood… that’s not metaphorical. That’s the rupture of my own cell membranes and capillaries. You’re detecting the aerosolized iron from my hemoglobin and the specific esters released from my own lysing cells as they rupture and change.”

Bruce gave a slow, acknowledging nod, the physicist in him satisfied by the horrifying congruence of theory and perception. "A perfect description of a pathological extreme. It gives us a benchmark." He leaned back, his voice shifting from explaining his own anomaly to inquiring about the universal. "So, if that's the sensory signature of a system undergoing catastrophic failure, what is the baseline? Strip away the gamma radiation and the cellular metamorphosis. What is the phenomenological signature of a standard, human stress response?"

When Daredevil spoke, it was with the chilling precision of a sensor array listing its readings. “The first indicator is rarely a conscious thought. It is auditory. The human heart does not simply beat faster under duress; its acoustic profile changes. The lub-dub sound becomes shallower, the diastolic pressure drops creating a less resonant, more frantic percussion against the thoracic cavity. It sounds like a drumskin being tapped too quickly, losing its depth.”

He paused, as if calibrating. “Concurrently, there is an olfactory shift. It’s like a taste more than a smell. The surge of adrenaline and norepinephrine doesn’t release a direct scent. What I detect are…” Daredevil pursed his lips as he searched for the words. “I guess it’s more the byproducts they trigger. Microchanges in sweat or blood or skin oils, maybe… or trace compounds I don’t have names for. It’s sharp and metallic. I can taste it on the back of my tongue, like… the taste of a storm and old pennies.”

He lifted a hand, fingers held slightly apart. “Then, the tactile and vibrational data arrives. As the nervous system prepares for action, it triggers micro-contractions in the major muscle groups. This tension generates a low-frequency tremor. It’s normally imperceptible, but to me it resonates like a drawn bowstring. The specific frequency and amplitude can indicate the type of movement being primed: a lunge, a throw, a retreat. It precedes the physical action by approximately 400 to 500 milliseconds.”

Bruce Banner was utterly still, his breath caught in his chest. The awe on his face was that of a physicist who had just been shown a new law of the universe. “My God,” he whispered, the words barely audible. “You’re not describing the emotion of fear. You’re cataloging the pre-conscious physiological precursors to the fight-or-flight response. You are perceiving the biomarkers of fear itself—the catecholamine release, the autonomic nervous system activation—before it’s even fully manifested in the subject.”

He stood up, pacing a few steps, his mind racing to keep up with the implications. “That’s… that’s the amygdala’s entire function! It’s the brain’s threat-detection radar, processing subliminal cues of danger to initiate a survival response before the conscious mind is aware of the threat. You…” He stopped and turned, staring at Daredevil as if seeing him for the first time. “Your sensory apparatus isn’t just enhanced. It’s externalized the function of the amygdala. You’re not just feeling your own fear response. You’re perceiving the very onset of the threat state in others.”

The sheer, overwhelming weight of the data Daredevil had just described settled on Bruce. The scientific wonder curdled into a dawning horror at the implications. He slowly sank back into his chair, his voice soft with disbelief.

“A perpetual, subliminal read on the autonomic nervous system of everyone around you… How?” he asked, the question almost plaintive. “How does your own amygdala not interpret that constant bombardment of threat biomarkers as a state of existential emergency? How do you not live in a perpetual, catastrophic panic attack? How can you even begin to systemize and train your senses like that?”

Daredevil’s response was immediate and calm, grounded in the very science Bruce revered. “Neuroplasticity,” he stated, the word a solid, foundational truth. “The brain adapts. It had to. It rewires itself to survive. We’ve heard stories about how blind individuals often repurpose their visual cortex to process touch or sound. My brain reorganized itself, building new pathways to turn overload into function. The initial… event… didn’t just enhance my senses; it necessitated a complete rewiring of my neural architecture to process them. It was that or madness.”

He gestured vaguely toward his own head. “My brain didn’t just get louder. It built new pathways. It developed a filtration and prioritization system where none existed. I didn’t just gain new sensory inputs; I gained the cognitive machinery to manage them. What you call a cognitive override of an autonomic process isn’t a perfect description. It’s more that I developed a parallel process for curation.”

He offered examples, his voice becoming like that of a technician describing a complex machine. “The sound of a human scream contains specific harmonic frequencies and reverberation patterns based on its source. A scream of terror from a nearby alley has a specific acoustic signature; it’s raw, unfiltered, and resonates within a confined space. A scream from a television speaker is compressed, it lacks certain low-frequency vibrations, and is accompanied by the 60-hertz hum of the device itself. My brain doesn’t ‘hear’ them as the same thing. They are processed along different neural pathways from the moment they enter my cochlea.”

“It’s the same with heartbeats,” he continued. “The heartbeat of a victim in distress has a specific, erratic fibrillating quality, often accompanied by a spike in that metallic adrenaline scent and the shallow, rapid breathing of hyperventilation. The heartbeat of a sniper lying in wait is slow, deliberately controlled through discipline, but accompanied by the faint, oily scent of gun maintenance and the barely perceptible creak of a finger applying pressure to a trigger. They are entirely different datasets.”

He turned toward Bruce. “It is not a state of being. It is a state of doing. A constant, conscious act of curation of an unconscious process. The pre-frontal cortex is never offline. It is the chief executive of a Fortune 500 company, and the sensory data is a live feed from every single department, every second of the day. The panic attack isn’t a switch that gets flipped. It’s what happens when the CEO is overwhelmed, when the data stream can no longer be parsed, and the entire system crashes.”

A profound silence filled the lab, thick with the weight of the shared understanding that had just been articulated. Daredevil let the truth of his existence hang in the air between them, not as a confession, but as a clinical fact. He then offered the summation, drawing the direct line between their two hells.

“So you see, Doctor,” he said, his voice losing none of its precision but gaining a layer of grim solidarity. “The fundamental conflict is the same. You fight to keep him in. I fight to keep the world out. The enemy is the same: the unmediated, raw biological response to threat. It’s the same war. We’re just fighting it on different fronts.”

Bruce let out a slow, shaky breath, the truth of the statement resonating deep within him. He gave a single, solemn nod. “Yes,” he affirmed, his voice quiet with the gravity of it. “You’ve perfectly described the… the inversion.” He looked down at his own hands, as if seeing the potential in them. “For me, control is the conscious state. The loss of it, the transformation, is the complete and total surrender of that cognitive override you’ve worked so hard to build. There is no parallel process. There is only a total systems handover.”

He met Daredevil’s gaze again, his own scientific jargon finally capturing the monstrous reality. “The Other Guy… he isn’t a separate entity. That’s a comforting lie. He is the amygdala. He is the HPA axis, the fight-or-flight cascade, given physical form and unleashed. The gamma radiation didn’t just make me strong; it hardwired the trauma response into my very cells. It didn’t just give me a panic attack.” Bruce’s voice dropped to a whisper. “It made the panic attack a physical reality.”

Daredevil absorbed this, the final piece of the doctor’s puzzle clicking into place with horrifying clarity. He offered his own, final point, the core principle of his own relentless battle. “Then the goal remains identical, even if the failure states are opposites,” he stated. “The objective is to keep the prefrontal cortex online. To keep the executive function in the chair. Rational thought. Deliberate action. Judgment.” He leaned forward slightly, the red lenses seeming to bore into Bruce. “The moment I stop thinking and start only reacting… the moment I become just the sensory input with no curation… that’s not freedom. That’s not power. That’s when people get hurt.”

Bruce was silent for a long moment, his gaze distant, internalizing the raw data of their exchange. The sterile, quantitative world of his scans and graphs had just been flooded with a qualitative truth so profound it seemed to recalibrate his very understanding of his own condition. He looked from the vibrant, colorful fMRI on the screen to the man in red, a living embodiment of a neurological frontier.

A slow, deep understanding dawned on his face, the frustration replaced by a kind of awe. “Of course,” he murmured, the words heavy with revelation. “We’re both studying the same equation. The same fundamental law of nature.” He met Daredevil’s concealed gaze. “You from the inside, me from the outside. The calculus of how much pain a mind can take before it transforms into something else. The variables are different—gamma radiation, a chemical spill—but we’re both solving for X.”

He let out a breath that was part sigh, part relief. “Thank you,” he said, and the gratitude was palpable and genuine, stripped of all scientific pretense. “This… this was helpful. More than you know.” He wasn’t just thanking him for the conversation; he was thanking him for a new lens, a new framework through which to view his own impossible struggle.

Daredevil gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod. He rose from the stool with a fluid, silent motion that seemed to disregard the pain of his injuries. He moved toward the door, pausing for a moment on the threshold.

Without turning back, he offered a final, quiet thought, his voice low but carrying perfectly in the still room. “Just remember, the next time you see that switch in your mind,” he said, “that it’s not just you fighting. It’s everyone who’s ever had to build a dam.”

And then he was gone, melting into the shadows of the corridor without a sound.

Bruce did not move. He sat in the sudden, ringing silence of the lab, the only sound the faint hum of the monitor. His eyes drifted back to the screen, to the beautiful, colorful, and utterly insufficient data depicting a fear response. It was just a shadow now, a crude map of a territory whose true, terrifying, and magnificent topography he had just, for the first time, been allowed to glimpse. He hadn’t learned the Devil’s secrets, he hadn't been vying for them in the first place, but he had gained something perhaps more valuable: a profound new understanding of the intricate, brutal, and resilient science of suffering.

Chapter Text

Matt found a certain, strange neutrality in Bruce’s lab. In the past month, a quiet understanding had settled between them. It meant that Matt could sometimes be found in the corner of Bruce’s lab, a silent figure grounding himself in the room's rhythmic hum while Bruce wrestled with data. The space had become an occasional refuge from the Tower’s more overwhelming stimuli. Bruce’s quiet intensity was a predictable, almost soothing constant. No explanations were needed; it was simply where they both knew how to exist near another person without the pressure of performance.

Leaning against a workbench, Matt simply listened to the scientist work, his own presence a silent, accepted fact. The air in Bruce’s lab was a tapestry of sound to him. The dominant threads were the deep, resonant hum of the arc reactor in Tony’s workshop two floors below and the steady, almost musical thrum of the tower’s primary power conduits running through the walls. Weaving through this were the finer strands: the whisper of climate control, the nearly silent flicker of the holographic display emitters, and the soft, rhythmic sound of Bruce Banner’s breathing as he worked.

Bruce was hunched over a hologram, a complex, multi-layered acoustic waveform representing a theoretical sonic calibration. To Matt, it was an intricate, layered chord being played directly into the air, each harmonic and frequency a distinct, tangible element. Bruce muttered to himself, fingers manipulating the controls. He made a microscopic adjustment, smoothing a near-invisible kink in the seventh harmonic of the waveform. The change was so minuscule it wouldn’t have registered on most laboratory-grade audio analyzers.

On his stool in the corner, Daredevil’s head tilted a fraction of an inch, a gesture reminiscent of a satellite dish finding a new signal.

“You just corrected a distortion,” Matt said, his voice a low rumble that cut through the lab’s ambient noise. He paused, as if savoring a fine wine. “It sounds… cleaner now. More coherent.”

The soft clicking of Bruce’s stylus on the tablet stopped dead. The rhythm of his breathing hitched, then stalled. Bruce froze, his entire body going still. The adjustment was a theoretical tweak, something he’d done out of habit, a perfectionist’s whim. It was the audio equivalent of smoothing a single, microscopic scratch on a diamond with a laser, a process not meant to be perceived with the naked ear.

Slowly, Bruce turned away from the display, his eyes wide behind his glasses. He stared at the crimson-clad figure who sat in his lab as if he were just another piece of equipment. Except this piece of equipment had just performed a miracle of auditory perception.

“You could hear that?” Bruce’s voice was barely a whisper, laden with a stunned, scientific awe. “That was… incredibly minor, a 0.05% phase distortion in the seventh harmonic. A fractional calibration. That’s not just enhancement.” He gestured weakly at the complex waveform still hovering in the air. “That’s… precision instrumentation.”

Matt shrugged, not quite sure how to answer.

Bruce stared at Daredevil for a moment longer, the scientist in him overriding his shock. He turned back to the hologram, not to work, but to use it as a visual aid for a conversation that had suddenly become the most fascinating one he’d had in years. “Okay,” he began, his voice shifting once more into that lectural tone he used when deconstructing a complex problem. “Let’s… let’s establish a baseline. A common language. What you just did… it shouldn’t be possible.” He gestured at the shimmering waveform. “So, first principles. Sound. It’s not just noise. It’s physics. It’s mechanical waves, ripples of pressure and displacement, traveling through a medium. Air, mostly. But also solids, liquids.”

He manipulated the controls, and the hologram simplified into a pure sine wave, oscillating smoothly. “We quantify it. Frequency,” he said, and the wave compressed, oscillating faster. “That’s what we perceive as pitch. Amplitude,” he continued, and the wave grew taller. “Loudness. And timbre, the unique quality of a sound, the complex interplay of harmonics that makes my voice different from yours, a violin different from a trumpet.”

He let the wave hang in the air, a perfect representation of a theoretical sound. “The stated human limit of perception is between 20 Hertz and 20,000 Hertz. But what you just did…” He shook his head, his curiosity burning bright. “That’s the theory. Now, for you. Where are your limits? Can you perceive infrasound? The low-frequency rumble below 20 Hz that we feel in our bones more than hear? Ultrasound? The high-frequency pitches above our range used in medical imaging? And to what resolution? If that waveform was a landscape, what’s the smallest pebble you can distinguish?”

Daredevil listened to the explanation, a faint smile touching his lips beneath the mask. Bruce was building a box made of numbers and definitions, and Matt existed outside of it. “Limits are a shifting scale, Doctor,” Matt replied, his voice calm. “I don’t hear ‘better.’ I hear… more. The hum of this tower’s electrical grid is a constant, flat C-sharp. Tony’s arc reactor has a unique subsonic pulse. It’s not a sound you hear with your ears; it’s a pressure wave. Like a heartbeat made of pure energy. I can feel the vibration of a conversation three floors down, not the words, but the cadence, the emotion. All as it travels through the steel frame of this building. It’s all just… there.”

He lifted a gloved hand, flexing his fingers slightly. “And it’s not just about my ears. It’s my entire nervous system. My skin registers the slightest pressure changes in the air. My skull conducts vibrations directly to my auditory cortex. A footstep on the roof isn’t just a sound; it’s a vibration through the structure, a subtle shift in air pressure, a minute scent of dust dislodged. It’s all data. My brain just… compiles it.”

Bruce was no longer just listening; he was processing, his mind alight with implications. He snatched a tablet off the bench, his fingers flying across its surface as he began sketching out equations, trying to model the impossible acoustic range Daredevil was describing. The holographic waveform was forgotten; the man before him was the real subject of study.

“Okay, okay,” Bruce murmured, his voice a mix of excitement and intense focus. “Application. Practicality. Let’s be specific.” He looked up, his eyes sharp behind his glasses. “First, the Doppler effect. For a moving sound source, the frequency shifts. But you’re talking about perceiving the internal mechanics of a body. Can you detect that shift on a subsonic, biological level? Not after the fact, but in real-time. Could you tell if a person’s heart rate is accelerating before the next ventricular contraction is even complete? Are you hearing the sympathetic nervous system’s command before the organ even fully obeys?”

He didn’t wait for a full answer, his mind racing to the next hurdle. “Second, signal versus noise. Your ‘noise’ is the entire city of New York. The chaos of millions of heartbeats, conversations, machines, and music. How do you filter? What is your functional signal-to-noise ratio? Is it an automatic process, like a brainstem function, or is it a conscious, constant effort?”

He tapped the tablet, where a complex integral was half-solved. “Third, resolution. What’s the smallest unit of acoustic information you can distinguish? Not a person talking, but the flutter of a single page turning in a book across the street? The separation of two raindrops striking different points on the same leaf?”

Matt listened to the rapid-fire, brilliant questions. He appreciated the doctor’s need to quantify, to put the world into boxes of understanding. His answers, however, came from a place beyond equations. “The Doppler shift…” Matt began, considering. “It’s not a calculation I perform. It’s a texture I feel. A speeding heart doesn’t just beat faster. The acoustic profile of the mitral valve closing changes. The pitch rises slightly, and the sound becomes shallower, more frantic, losing its resonant depth. It’s the difference between a drum struck with confidence and one struck in panic.”

He shifted on the stool. “The noise… it’s like having a thousand dials in my mind. Most are set to automatic, calibrated by a lifetime of practice. I can choose to focus one, to listen to the specific friction of a unique key turning in a lock ten blocks away, but it means I have to consciously turn the others down. The ‘noise’ is always there, a constant pressure. Control isn’t about silencing it. It’s about choosing which channel to prioritize without being overwhelmed by the rest.”

Then he tried to describe the indescribable. “And I don’t ‘see’ shapes, Doctor. I construct them. This room isn’t a visual image…” He paused, wondering how to safely continue this topic without revealing too much. “When I close my eyes, I can still build a complex map from how sound reflects off every surface. The grain of that wooden desk absorbs high frequencies differently than the polished metal of your tools. The thickness of the glass window changes the resonant frequency of the sound passing through it. The weave of the carpet deadens vibrations in a specific, identifiable pattern. My face is the receiver,” he said, a hand briefly gesturing toward his cowl. “And every breath you take, every minute shift in your posture, every rustle of your clothing… it’s all a sonar ping that helps me see more detail. It’s not magic. It’s just… advanced, passive sonar. I’m the instrument.”

Bruce’s hand went still. The stylus hovered over the tablet, a complex equation half-finished. The numbers and Greek symbols, which moments before had felt like the only true language, now seemed absurdly inadequate. He wasn’t looking at the tablet or the holograms anymore. He was staring at the man in red, but he wasn’t really seeing him either. He was seeing the staggering, impossible reality of what he represented.

The sheer computational power required to process that much data in real-time, to perform constant, unconscious Fourier transforms (or the biological equivalent) on the auditory chaos of a city, filtering and integrating frequencies the way the auditory system naturally does but at an unimaginable scale, to build a coherent, three-dimensional world from echoes and vibrations, to overlay that with all the other sensory inputs… it was beyond any supercomputer on earth. And Daredevil’s brain did it as a baseline function.

A slow, dawning revelation settled over Bruce, silencing the physicist and leaving only the awestruck man. “You’re not just an enhanced human,” Bruce whispered, the words filled with a kind of scientific reverence. “You’re a resonant sensor. You’re not just hearing sounds; you’re perceiving the vibrational signatures of matter itself. Your brain is processing the unique resonant frequency of every object, every person, in your vicinity. You’re not listening to the world, you’re… reading its fundamental signature.”

Matt gave a single, slow nod. The description was more poetic than any he’d ever used for himself, but it was unnervingly accurate. “Everything has a song, Doctor. A heartbeat. A lie. A building settling. A bullet fired. I just… listen to the orchestra.”

Bruce leaned forward, his eyes alight with possibilities. “The applications of this understanding…” he breathed, his mind racing. “We could… my God, we could design entirely new forms of non-invasive medical diagnostics. A device that could read a body’s health by listening to the harmonic resonance of its organs, detecting a carcinoma by its acoustic dissonance long before a tumor forms. We could map the structural integrity of buildings, of bridges, just by analyzing their resonant frequencies. We could—”

“—Or.” Matt’s voice cut through Bruce’s enthusiasm, sharp and grim. It wasn’t loud, but it had the chilling finality of a judge’s gavel. “Or,” Matt repeated, the word hanging in the air, “you could build a weapon. A system that triangulates someone’s unique heartbeat signature across a city block, able to find them anywhere in range. Or a device that can hear the vibrations of a conversation through three feet of reinforced concrete, turning every room into a glass box. The power to hear this much…” He sighed. “…it’s not just a gift, Doctor. It’s a responsibility. And I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of that kind of invasion. The world only remains habitable when that power has a conscience.”

Bruce leaned back in his chair, the tablet clattering softly onto the workbench, forgotten. The frantic energy of discovery had drained away, replaced by a deep, humbled stillness. He looked at Daredevil not as a fascinating specimen or a set of data points to be decoded, but as a peer. The physicist had met a force of nature he could only partially model, and he understood now that the model was a pale ghost of the reality.

“I…” he began, his voice uncharacteristically soft, stripped of all its academic certainty. “I study theoretical physics. I work with abstractions, with the mathematics of how the universe should function.” He gave a slow, almost sad shake of his head. “You… you live applied vibrational mechanics. My equations… they’re just a shadow of your reality.” It was the most honest admission he could make. He dealt in predictions. Daredevil dealt in facts, written in a language of sound and vibration that Bruce could only barely comprehend.

A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched Matt’s lips beneath the mask. “Your equations help me understand it,” he said quietly. “I never had the words for any of this before. Just the experience.”

It was a generous offering, a bridge between their two worlds. Bruce had given him the vocabulary for his own existence.

Bruce didn’t reply. He turned his gaze away from the man in red, first looking at the complex, shimmering holographic model of the acoustic waveform still hovering in the air. It now seemed laughably simple, a child’s crayon drawing next to a Renaissance masterpiece.

Then his eyes drifted to the large window, to the glittering, silent panorama of New York City at night. But it wasn’t silent anymore. In his mind’s ear, he could now hear it, really hear it, for the first time. Not as a view, but as a screaming, chaotic symphony of ten million lives. The roar of traffic was a discordant bassline, the wail of sirens a shrieking violin, the hum of electricity a constant, oppressive drone, and beneath it all, the countless, rhythmic percussions of heartbeats.

And one man, sitting quietly in a lab, was listening to all of it. Constantly. Conducting that orchestra in his mind every second of every day, just to function, just to find a single melody of meaning in the cacophony.

Bruce Banner felt a profound and overwhelming sense of respect for the sheer will that must require. And alongside it, he felt a slight, involuntary shudder at the unimaginable burden of it all.

Chapter Text

The only sound in Tony Stark’s private workshop was the frustrated clatter of a wrench hitting a titanium workbench, followed by a low, inventive stream of curses.

“No, that’s not it. The resonance is all wrong. It’s like it’s… grinding. JARVIS, run the harmonic calibration again.”

“The calibration is within 0.03% of your specified parameters, sir,” the AI’s voice replied, impeccably calm.

“Well, 0.03% is feeling a lot like 300% right now,” Tony grumbled, running a grease-streaked hand through his hair. He was hunched over the inner workings of a new repulsor design, a complex nest of micro-actuators and energy conduits that was supposed to be more efficient. Instead, it was humming with a discordant, teeth-rattling vibration that promised a catastrophic failure if he tried to power it up.

A soft footfall at the entrance made him glance over. Daredevil stood there, a crimson specter in the world of chrome and holograms.

“Don’t tell me. The city’s quiet, so you came here to stir up some chaos,” Tony said with a smile in his voice, gesturing vaguely with a laser calibrator.

“Clint had to bail on a sparring session, and I figured I’d trade punches for decibels.” Daredevil’s low voice echoed slightly in the vast space. He tilted his head as he walked over. “You’re building something angry.”

“I’m building something brilliant. It’s just having a temper tantrum. A very expensive, very precise tantrum.” Tony sighed, the fight going out of him for a moment. “The alignment is off. I can’t find where. Everything says it’s perfect. But it feels wrong.”

Daredevil took a few steps closer, avoiding scattered tools and components. “Where does it feel wrong?”

Tony blinked. “What?”

“The vibration. It’s not uniform. Where is it most wrong?”

It was such a bizarrely simple, sensory question. Not about specs or readings, but about feel. Tony, against his better judgment, pointed to the central housing unit. “Here. It’s a nasty, high-frequency grind right in the core. But every scanner I’ve got says it’s clean.”

Daredevil leaned in, his head cocked at an odd angle. He didn’t look at the device. He seemed to be… listening to it. His gloved hand hovered over the housing, not touching it.

“The problem isn’t in the core,” he said after a moment, his voice certain.

“It has to be. The dissonance is radiating from the central axis.”

“It’s radiating through the central axis,” Daredevil corrected softly. “But it’s starting… there.” His hand moved to the left, hovering over a seemingly perfect, flush-mounted coupling ring that connected two primary energy channels. “This junction. The inner ring is misaligned by… half a degree, maybe less. It’s not seated flush. The outer casing is perfectly aligned, so your scanners read it as correct. But the inner lip is torqued. When the energy tries to flow through, it’s hitting a microscopic ledge. That’s your grind.”

Tony stared. He stared at the coupling ring. He stared at Daredevil. He stared back at the ring. “That’s… impossible,” he breathed. “That ring is machined to a nanometer tolerance. There’s no play. It can’t be torqued.”

“It is,” Daredevil said, utterly calm. “The sound waves travel through the metal differently where the seal is imperfect. There’s a faint… buzz. A friction sound the size of a dust mote.”

Driven by a compulsion he didn’t understand, Tony grabbed a micro-torque driver. He didn’t believe it. But he had no other leads. He carefully inserted the driver into the almost invisible seam Daredevil had indicated. He applied the faintest counter-pressure.

There was a minute, almost inaudible click. But it was possibly psychosomatic; he hadn’t felt or seen a shift at all. He held his breath. “JARVIS? Power up. One percent.”

The repulsor unit hummed to life. It was a pure, clean, harmonic tone. The nasty grind was completely gone.

The workshop was silent save for the smooth, resonant hum.

Tony Stark, one of the greatest mechanical engineers on the planet, slowly lowered his tool. He looked at the perfectly humming device. Then he looked at the vigilante who fought with sticks. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

“How?” was all Tony could manage to say.

Daredevil shrugged a single shoulder. “You said it felt wrong. I just listened to where it was sick.”

“I’ve been using a multi-million dollar sensor array. You used your… face.”

“It’s a useful face,” Daredevil smirked, a hint of dry amusement in his tone. He took a step back. “It’s fixed.”

And with that, he turned and left as silently as he had arrived, leaving Tony alone with a perfectly humming repulsor.

Chapter Text

The rain had begun to fall in earnest, turning the grimy asphalt of the Hell’s Kitchen docks into a shimmering, oil-slicked black mirror. It was a miserable night, which made it the perfect night for moving illegal weapons.

From his perch on a crane, Spider-Man watched the deal go down below. Four figures, huddled under a tarp stretched between two shipping containers, exchanging heavy duffel bags. His spider-sense was a constant, low-level hum at the base of his skull, and his enhanced hearing picked up the muttered curses about the weather, the clink of metal from the bags, the overwhelming cocktail of saltwater, rust, and nervous sweat.

“Okay, party people,” he muttered to himself, “let’s wrap this up before we all catch a cold.” He launched into a swing, aiming to drop right in the middle of the group. But as he descended, a red blur shot out from the shadows between the containers.

Daredevil moved with a precision that was almost unsettling. He flowed under a wild punch, and the thug’s own momentum sent him spinning into the side of a container with a sickening thud. Another drew a pistol, but Daredevil’s billy club was a flash, smacking the weapon from his hand before his finger even found the trigger. He never looked at the gun; he was already turning, his elbow catching a third man in the jaw who was trying to sneak up from his blind side.

Spider-Man landed lightly, webbing the gun to the ground. “Hey! Save some for the friendly neighborhood—whoa!” He ducked as a pipe swung at his head, his spider-sense flaring a split second earlier. He webbed the pipe and yanked, disarming the final thug. “—Spider-Man,” he finished, webbing the man to the container wall.

In under ten seconds, it was over. The only sounds were the rain, the groans of the incapacitated, and their own measured breathing. Daredevil stood perfectly still, his head tilted. “There’s no one else,” he stated, his voice a low gravelly rumble that cut through the downpour. “It’s clear.”

“Nice work,” Spider-Man said, genuinely impressed. “You move like you know what they’re going to do before they do.”

Daredevil simply nodded once, a curt, efficient motion.

They ended up on the rooftop of a nearby warehouse, seeking a modicum of shelter under a large vent. The immediate adrenaline was fading, leaving behind the familiar bone-deep weariness. The rain had finally eased to a fine mist, turning the neon signs of Hell’s Kitchen into smears of electric color refracting through the moisture in the air and reflecting on the wet asphalt below.

“Man,” Spider-Man sighed, slumping against the vent. “Nothing like the smell of wet garbage and exhaust fumes after a hard night's work, huh? It’s like the city’s own special brand of air freshener.”

Daredevil remained standing, a sentinel against the skyline. “The rain washes away the sharper notes,” he replied, his voice quieter now. “It’s mostly diesel and ozone now. And the Chinese food from the Golden Dragon on the corner.”

Spider-Man's head snapped toward him. “You can smell the specific restaurant from up here? From a couple blocks away?” He shook his head in disbelief. “Okay, look. I can smell the Chinese food too, but for me, it’s just one part of a huge wave of information. It all hits me at once. How do you do that? How do you separate a single signal from all the rest?”

For a long moment, Daredevil was silent. Spider-Man wondered if he’d overstepped.

“It’s not a matter of separation,” Daredevil said finally, his tone measured. “It’s all just… there. A constant data stream. The sound of the rain on different surfaces. Metal, concrete, water. Tells me the shape of the world below, regardless of line of sight. The scents all have their own distinct signatures and locations. My mind processes it simultaneously.”

Peter’s brain latched onto the explanation, analyzing it. “A data stream,” he repeated, fascinated. “That’s a good way to put it. For me, it’s more like a… a jumbled feed. I get all the same information, I think, but it’s like a wall of noise I have to push through. I can hear the sirens, smell the food, see every single raindrop if I focus, but it’s not sorted. It’s just… a lot. Your senses seem more like a sorted database you can query.”

Daredevil’s head tilted a fraction. “A database,” he mused, as if considering the term. “That’s a pretty accurate analogy.”

A companionable silence fell between them. The initial wariness had been replaced by a mutual, professional respect, and now, a spark of intellectual kinship. Spider-Man knew they both had enhanced senses. But sitting there in the rain, he realized for the first time that the word “enhanced” was woefully inadequate. His were turned up to eleven. Daredevil’s were on a completely different spectrum. He had a hundred new questions, but the night was getting old.

With a soft groan, he pushed himself to his feet, squinting against the onslaught of refracted and reflected lights. “Well, this has been educational,” he said. “But my alarm clock for civvie life doesn’t believe in superhero hours. See you around, Double D.”

Daredevil gave a single, short nod. “Spider-Man.”

With a two-fingered salute, Spider-Man stepped off the roof, the thwip of his web a sharp punctuation in the damp air. As he swung away, he contemplated what Daredevil had said. It’s like he was a sensor array of impossible sophistication. And Peter was deeply, profoundly curious about the specs.

~

Two nights later, Spider-Man found himself swinging through the canyons of Hell’s Kitchen with a purpose that went beyond his usual patrol. He’d been analyzing their brief conversation, turning the concept of a “sorted database” over and over in his mind.

It was on the roof of a old, brick-faced office building that he found him. Daredevil was a still, dark silhouette against the city’s glow, perched on the parapet as if he were part of the architecture. He didn’t turn as Spider-Man landed softly behind him, but the slight tilt of his head was acknowledgment enough.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Spider-Man said, walking over to lean against the parapet a respectful distance away. “Quiet night?”

“Quieter than the docks,” Daredevil replied, his voice that same low, focused rumble. “A mugging three blocks east. Resolved.”

“Nice.” Spider-Man looked out at the city. His enhanced sight automatically cataloged the scene: the intricate fire escapes on the building across the street, the way a distant billboard’s light reflected off a thousand individual windowpanes, the slow, hypnotic sweep of a searchlight from a helicopter miles away. It was all so vivid, so… insistent.

He decided to pick up where they left off. “So, that data stream you mentioned. I’ve been thinking about it. My own senses… they’re like everything is dialed up, all the time.” He gestured vaguely at the urban landscape. “Like, right now, I can see the individual leaves on that sickly tree down the block. I can count the rivets on that water tower. It’s great for spotting a glint off a sniper scope or reading a license plate from a mile away, but sometimes…” He trailed off, searching for the right words. “Sometimes it’s just too much raw data. My brain has to work to filter out what’s important. It’s like a constant visual overload.”

He glanced at Daredevil, hoping to steer the conversation. “How about you? With everything being so… precise, how do you handle it? I’ve had an especially hard time with visual. Maybe because I used to wear glasses but… all the lights, the movement, the constant input. Is it the same kind of overload for you too?”

There was a pause. Not a long one, but Spider-Man noticed it. It was the hesitation of someone carefully choosing their words.

“The overload comes from trying to process everything as separate, competing signals," Daredevil said, his tone shifting from conversational to something more instructive. "The key isn't to build a higher wall against the noise. It's to stop treating it as noise."

He gestured vaguely toward the city. "The hum of the power lines tells you about the grid's load. The specific pitch of a siren tells you its model and how fast it's moving. The scent of baking bread from that all-night bakery two blocks over is a fixed point on your map. You don't fight the data. You learn the patterns. You let the consistent signals fade into the background so the anomalies stand out. A shout where there should be silence. A new chemical smell in a familiar alley. A heartbeat spike in a calm conversation. That's what you listen for."

Peter listened, captivated. It reminded him of advanced signal processing. It was brilliant. And it was utterly, intentionally vague about how he personally saw the world. He was teaching Peter a method, not confessing a condition. The deflection was masterful.

“Right, so it’s about… pattern recognition on a massive scale,” Peter said, his mind whirring as he applied the concept to his own experiences. “You’re not just hearing a siren, you’re classifying it. You’re not just smelling bread, you’re using it as a landmark.”

Constantly sorting and cataloguing. It wasn't that Daredevil’s senses were just better; they were managed with a level of focus that Peter was only beginning to comprehend himself. Daredevil’s perception was a refined instrument, while his own still felt like a powerful but sometimes clumsy tool. “Dude. Peak,” Spider-Man murmured. He cleared his throat. “I mean, that’s a next-level system. My brain just gets all the data and panics a little. I’m gonna have to try that… the pattern thing.”

Daredevil didn’t reply, but the tense set of his shoulders seemed to relax a fraction. The conversation lapsed into a comfortable silence, the city’s hum a testament to the very data streams they were discussing. It was nice to have the quiet company of someone who didn’t need an explanation for why he sometimes just had to stop and listen.

~

A week passed before their paths crossed again, this time on the rooftop of a mid-tier hotel. A dry electrical crackle promised a storm was finally brewing. Spider-Man landed softly a few feet from the familiar red silhouette. "Turns out your pattern trick works on subway cars," he offered by way of greeting. "Classifying the different rattles makes the ride almost peaceful. Almost."

This time, the low sound from Daredevil was unmistakably a faint chuckle. "It gets easier."

They stood in comfortable silence for a moment, watching the city lights. Spider-Man's eyes, as always, tracked the constant motion: a blinking plane, a scrolling news ticker, the frantic dance of a moth around a streetlamp. It was a lot.

"You know what I can't filter?" he said, gesturing to a flickering neon sign across the street. "That. 'Tony's Tires.' The second T keeps shorting out. My brain just will not let it go. It's like an alarm only I can see."

Daredevil didn't look at the sign. He was quiet for a moment, head tilted. "I can hear the capacitor failing," he said. "A sharp pop, then a buzz that cuts off. It's a broken rhythm in the block's normal electrical hum. Annoying, but consistent."

Spider-Man considered this. It was a different way of experiencing the same problem. For him, it was a visual distraction. For Daredevil, it was a rhythmic flaw in the city's soundtrack. "Broken rhythm," Peter repeated, nodding. "Yeah, that fits. Maybe I should try thinking of it like that. A stutter in the visual feed instead of a full-blown alert."

"Sometimes redefining the input changes how you process it," Daredevil agreed.

A flash of lightning lit up the sky, followed seconds later by a roll of thunder. The first fat raindrops began to splatter against the rooftop tar.

"Well, that's my signal to head in before I get waterlogged," Spider-Man said, moving toward the edge. "See you around."

Daredevil gave a short nod. "Stay dry."

As Peter swung away, the flickering sign was quickly obscured by the downpour. This was something he’d had zero success talking to Mr. Stark about. He just didn’t get it. But he’s glad he’d found someone who could relate to his experiences. Sometimes a different point of view was all you needed to quiet the noise.

~

The rain from the previous week had given way to a thick, muggy heat that clung to the city like a blanket. Spider-Man found Daredevil not on a rooftop, but on the fire escape of a tenement, a vantage point that seemed to immerse him deeper into the city's sounds and smells. He dropped down beside him, the metal groaning softly under his weight.

"Man, on nights like this, I really feel it," Spider-Man sighed, the usual energy drained from his voice. "The heat makes everything feel... louder. More intense."

Daredevil nodded slowly, his head tilted as if listening to something specific. "The air is heavier. Input carries differently. And everyone's patience is shorter. There were three domestic disputes on this block in the last hour."

The statement was delivered with a flat, factual tone, but Peter heard the weight behind it. This wasn't just data; it was a burden. One he understood all too well.

"It's not just the noise, you know?" Peter found himself saying, the words coming out more freely in the oppressive dark. "It's the... the constant performance. I have to walk through a crowded street and act like I can't hear every single conversation. I have to pretend I don't smell the gun oil on a guy passing me on the sidewalk or see the tiny flicker of a camera lens in a window a block away. I have to act... normal. All the time. And it's exhausting."

He'd never said it out loud before. The sheer loneliness of the secret. For a long moment, Daredevil was silent. The city's sounds filled the space between them… a shouting match a few buildings over, the relentless thump of bass from a car stereo, the distant, ever-present sirens.

Daredevil spoke, his voice low and stripped of its usual gravelly armor. “Having to ignore the truth the city screams at you. A spike in a heartbeat when a man tells his wife he's working late. The sour scent of fear on a shopkeeper who's being extorted. The sound of a child crying in a building where the power's been shut off. The data stream isn't background noise. It's a... a constant current of pain and deception. I can't shut it off. I can only... navigate it. But. When I put on this suit, the pretense ends. I don’t have to pretend, only filter and react accordingly. No one side-eyes a mask with enhanced senses. The burden while a civilian becomes an asset out here."

"I... I never thought of it like that," Spider-Man said, his voice quiet with a newfound understanding. "I’m complaining about the static. You're... you're listening to the words it's spelling out."

"The weight is the same. We just carry it differently," Daredevil replied, turning his gaze back to the city. "Besides, I’m guessing that whatever gave you your abilities happened not long before you started appearing in the papers.” He continued when Spider-Man nodded. “So I’ve had a lot longer to fine-tune everything.”

Sitting on that grimy fire escape, Peter felt a solidarity that had nothing to do with fighting skills or super-powers. It was the shared, crushing understanding of what it cost to truly listen. They sat in silence for a while longer. The distant wail of a new siren finally broke the stillness, and they both shifted, the moment of quiet confession giving way to the familiar pull of duty.

Daredevil nodded to himself, as if deciding something. "You know," he said, his voice thoughtful, "you said you have to act like you can't hear the conversations. You're fighting the data. That's why it's exhausting."

Spider-Man turned back to him. "What else am I supposed to do? I can't just listen in on everyone's private stuff."

"You don't have to listen to the content. Listen to the pattern," Matt said. "Don't focus on the words of the couple arguing two blocks over. Recognize the sound pattern of 'domestic dispute' and let it become background data unless it escalates into violence. Don't try to read the text on the phone of the guy on the street below. Recognize the pattern of 'person staring at a screen' and dismiss it. Your brain is trying to process every single data point with equal importance. You need to teach it to categorize and prioritize."

Peter was silent, processing this. It was a shift in perspective he hadn't considered. He'd been trying to build a mental wall, which took constant energy. Daredevil was suggesting he build a sorting system instead. "Okay... but how?" Peter asked. "The inputs are so... immediate."

"Start small. Right now, how many separate conversations can you hear?"

Peter focused. "Uh... seven. No, eight. There's a really quiet one from an open window across the street."

"Don't count them. Classify them. Not by what they're saying, but by their emotional context. Which ones are urgent?"

Peter listened again, this time ignoring the words. One voice was raised in anger. Another had the distinct cadence of someone crying. A third was a monotonous drone, someone probably on a business call. "Two," he said. "The angry one and the upset one."

"Good. Those are the ones you note. The rest are just... city noise. Let them become part of the hum of the traffic. They don't require your attention. Your enhanced smell. You said you smelled gun oil. Was it holstered, or is a hand on the grip?"

Peter was taken aback. "I... I don't know. It's just a smell."

"Pay attention to the context of the scent. Is it accompanied by the sound of nervous breathing? The creak of leather as a hand moves? Or is it just a static scent on someone who is otherwise calm? One is a threat. The other is just data. You're perceiving the world…” He worried his lip as he worked through how to phrase it. “In high definition, but you're trying to look at every pixel at once. You need to learn to see the whole picture and only zoom in when a pixel is out of place."

It was the most direct advice anyone had ever given him about his powers. It wasn't about strength or agility; it was about the mental architecture needed to support his senses. "That's... actually really helpful," Spider-Man said, his voice full of genuine gratitude. "The pixel analogy makes a weird kind of sense.” He stood and stretched “I’ll catch you later, I've got some homework—"

He froze. The word had slipped out, a completely normal part of his civilian vocabulary. Homework. For a heart-stopping second, he waited for a reaction, a questioning tone, anything that would force him to deflect. He could maybe wave it off as college, but already knew most masks thought that that was still too young.

But Daredevil's response was immediate and neutral. "Anytime."

No surprise. No curiosity. Just simple acceptance.

The lack of reaction was more telling than a question would have been. It meant it wasn't news. It meant Daredevil’s senses: the heartbeat monitoring, the scent analysis, whatever else… had already painted a clear enough picture: Young. Student. Which, in retrospect, should have been glaringly obvious to Peter. The man had known, or had a very strong suspicion, all along. He'd just never mentioned it.

"Right. Well. Thanks," Spider-Man said, his voice a notch quieter. He offered a brief salute before stepping off the fire escape and firing a web.

As he swung for home, the city's patterns unfolding beneath him as he practiced his new filtering, his mind circled back to that moment. The Devil knew he was young. He knew the burden he carried. And instead of treating him like a kid, he’d given him the tools to carry it better. The respect he felt for Daredevil solidified into something unshakable. He wasn't just a skilled ally; he was someone who saw the parts of Peter that even most of his friends didn't, and had his back anyway.