Chapter Text
The thing about grief, Peter Parker had discovered, was that it did not follow any kind of schedule.
It did not arrive neatly, the way a package did, with a tracking number and an estimated delivery window. It showed up at two in the morning when he was eating cereal straight from the box because he had forgotten to buy milk again. It ambushed him in the cereal aisle of the Key Food on Junction Boulevard when he reached for the brand Aunt May used to buy, the one with the cartoon bee on the front, and had to put it back on the shelf and walk very quickly to the paper goods section and stand there for a long time pretending to deliberate between paper towel brands until the tightness in his chest loosened enough to breathe properly.
It had been a year.
That was the number he kept returning to, quietly, the way you press a bruise to see if it still hurts. A year since the spell. A year since he had stood on a rooftop and watched the last threads of the life he had known dissolve into cold air and the light of other universes. A year since Aunt May. A year since MJ and Ned looked through him at a donut shop counter with the pleasant blankness of strangers, and he had smiled and said sorry, wrong person, and walked back out into the February sleet.
He was nineteen now. He had his own apartment. He had a Spider-Man suit folded under the bathroom sink because his closet was too small. He had a phone plan paid for by a prepaid card he reloaded at a CVS twice a month, no contract, no name attached to anything. He had a GED he had finished online six months ago, sitting at a secondhand desk he had dragged up four flights of stairs alone, because it turned out that being Spider-Man did not actually make furniture less awkward to maneuver around corners.
He did not have a job.
That was the problem he was currently addressing, sitting cross-legged on the floor of his apartment with his laptop open and a cup of coffee going cold beside him, scrolling through job listings with the specific kind of desperation that came from watching your savings account number get smaller every week with the slow, inevitable motion of a tide going out.
The apartment cost eight hundred and forty dollars a month, which was, by New York City standards, practically a miracle. It was small enough that he could touch both walls of the kitchen if he stretched his arms out, and the radiator made a sound like someone was periodically hitting it with a wrench, and there was a neighbor on the third floor named Mr. Delacroix who played smooth jazz at seven in the morning with a consistency that Peter had come to find oddly comforting. It was his. He paid for it with money from a part-time stock position at a warehouse in Long Island City that had lasted four months before the company downsized. Before that, a coffee shop in Astoria where he had worked the six AM shift and had developed the ability to make a cortado in under forty seconds, which was impressive, and had also developed an intimate familiarity with the underside of the espresso machine, because he kept catching things that fell off the counter before they hit the floor and his manager had started looking at him strangely.
The problem with being Spider-Man was that it made it very difficult to be normal. Not because of the danger, or the odd hours, or the fact that he came home some nights with bruised ribs and had to wrap them himself in the bathroom with his back against the door. Those things he could manage. The problem was the reflexes. The problem was that he was constitutionally incapable of letting a coffee mug fall, or a pen roll off a desk, or a coworker nearly trip over a box in the stockroom without being there first, without moving in ways that were not quite explicable by normal human reaction time, and people noticed. People always noticed, and then they started asking questions, and Peter had learned that questions were the beginning of complications.
He was not registered. He was not affiliated. He was, as far as the official record was concerned, just Peter Parker, nineteen, Queens, no employer, some college credits from an online program he was working through slowly in the evenings. The world had forgotten that Peter Parker had once been Spider-Man. His teachers at Midtown Tech remembered him as a quiet, academically gifted student who had taken a leave of absence and then never returned. His neighbors remembered him as May Parker's nephew, a good kid, helped Mrs. Chen carry groceries. The school district had records. The DMV had records. The Social Security Administration had records.
Only the people who had loved him had forgotten he existed.
He did not think about it constantly. He had gotten better at that, the not-thinking-about-it. He thought about it the way you think about a scar: not always, not obsessively, but your hand finds it sometimes when you are not paying attention, and for a moment you remember how it got there, and then you put your hand down and you go back to whatever you were doing.
He went back to the job listings.
The legal field, it turned out, was hiring. Or more accurately, several small law offices in Manhattan were hiring office assistants, paralegals-in-training, file clerks, and one position that was listed as "general office management support" which, based on the description, seemed to mean "person who does everything that no one else wants to do," which Peter figured he was extremely qualified for.
Most of them required a degree he did not have. Some of them required experience he did not have. A few of them were clearly just looking for unpaid interns with the word "assistant" used as a thin euphemism, which, no.
And then there was the listing from Nelson, Murdock and Page.
He had scrolled past it twice before he stopped and scrolled back.
It was not a flashy listing. It did not use bullet points with emoji, or promise a dynamic fast-paced environment, or describe itself as a family that worked hard and played harder. It was plain text, almost old-fashioned in its formatting, and it said:
Office Assistant and Legal Support, Nelson, Murdock and Page, Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan. Small civil and criminal defense firm seeking reliable, detail-oriented individual for general office management, client intake, research support, and administrative tasks. No legal degree required but interest in the law preferred. Competitive hourly wage. References required. Please submit resume and cover letter to [email protected].
That was it. No list of required skills that read like a hostage negotiation. No request for five years of experience for an entry-level position. No vague corporate language about leveraging synergies.
Peter read it three times.
He knew the name. Most people in New York who paid any attention to the news knew the name, or at least knew pieces of it. Nelson and Murdock had been the firm that went up against Fisk during the big trial a few years back. He had read about it in pieces, the way you read about things that happen in a city you live in, the way events accumulate without quite adding up to a full picture. He knew Fisk had gone back to prison. He knew the city had exhaled. He knew there were people who thought Daredevil had something to do with it, and people who thought Daredevil was a menace, and people who thought the whole situation was complicated enough that they had stopped having an opinion about it and gone back to complaining about the subway.
He did not know much about Matt Murdock specifically, except that he was blind and apparently very good at his job, which Peter found interesting in the specific way that he found most things interesting, which was to say: he opened three tabs and spent forty-five minutes reading everything he could find.
Matt Murdock. Born in Hell's Kitchen. Father was a boxer, died when Matt was young. Went to Columbia Law. Started a practice with his college roommate, Franklin Nelson. Took on cases for people who could not afford better representation. Had a reputation for being, depending on who you asked, either brilliant or reckless, and possibly both.
The firm had been through things. Peter could read that between the lines, in the way the news coverage shifted and thinned and then came back. There had been hard years. There was the Fisk trial, and before that what looked like a period where the firm had essentially dissolved and then reconstituted itself, which was either a sign of resilience or dysfunction and probably, Peter thought, both simultaneously.
Karen Page was listed as a partner now. She had been a journalist, which was not the usual career path into law, but then, nothing about this firm seemed particularly usual.
He wrote the cover letter in one draft and then rewrote it four times.
The final version was honest in the way that only carefully selected honesty could be. He was nineteen. He had a GED. He had some online coursework in pre-law that he found genuinely interesting. He was detail-oriented and organized. He had experience with document filing, client-facing communication, and office management. He was a fast learner. He was available immediately. He included two references: one from the warehouse manager in Long Island City, who had liked him well enough, and one from his former coffee shop manager in Astoria, who had written him a glowing recommendation that Peter suspected was partly motivated by guilt over the downsizing.
He sent it at 11:47 PM, which he immediately worried was the wrong move because it would show he had sent it at nearly midnight, which might read as erratic or desperate, but then he decided that he was a little desperate and probably it would not matter.
He closed his laptop, finished his cold coffee, and went to patrol.
✧
Hell's Kitchen at 3 AM had its own particular texture.
Peter had started patrolling further from Queens in the past few weeks. He was not sure exactly when it had happened, the slow gravitational drift westward, across the bridge and into Manhattan, into neighborhoods that were not quite his but that had started to feel like something adjacent to his. Maybe it was because Queens felt too full of things he remembered, too saturated with the particular frequency of a life he no longer had access to, and Manhattan was enormous and anonymous and did not remember him either but at least that was honest.
Hell's Kitchen was not the neighborhood it had been. It had gentrified at the edges and stayed complicated in the middle and the people who had lived there through everything looked at the wine bars with a specific expression that Peter recognized as the face of someone who had decided not to waste energy on an argument they already knew the outcome of. There were still people who needed help. There were still people who needed Spider-Man, or someone like him, someone who would show up.
He stopped a mugging on West 46th. Helped a woman whose car had broken down on 10th Avenue, which was not technically superhero work but she had been standing there for twenty minutes and it was cold and he could hear her calling someone who was not picking up. He sat on a fire escape above a bodega that had been robbed three times in the past month and waited, but nothing happened that night, and eventually he swung back toward the bridge as the sky started going gray at the edges.
He did not think about the job application.
He thought about it the entire way home.
✧
The response came at 9:17 AM.
He was asleep when it arrived, deeply and completely asleep in the way that only happened after a long patrol, the kind of sleep that felt like being pressed flat by something heavy and warm. His phone buzzed on the nightstand and he ignored it. It buzzed again. He picked it up without opening his eyes, read the notification, and then opened his eyes.
Dear Mr. Parker, thank you for your application to Nelson, Murdock and Page. We'd love to schedule a time to speak with you. Are you available this week? - Karen Page
He sat up.
He typed back: Yes, absolutely, any time works for me, thank you so much for reaching out.
Then he deleted that and typed: Hi Ms. Page, thank you for reaching out. I'm available any day this week. Please let me know what works best for you.
Sent.
He lay back down and stared at the ceiling, at the water stain in the upper corner that looked vaguely like New Jersey, and allowed himself to feel something cautiously adjacent to hope.
✧
The office of Nelson, Murdock and Page was on the third floor of a building on West 46th Street that had the quiet, settled look of a place that had been there for a long time and intended to remain. The elevator was slow and the hallway carpet was the particular shade of burgundy that had probably been fashionable in 1987 and had since achieved a kind of dignity through sheer persistence. There was a door with frosted glass, and on the frosted glass in neat gold lettering: NELSON, MURDOCK AND PAGE, ATTORNEYS AT LAW.
Peter stood in front of it for approximately six seconds longer than necessary, and then he knocked.
"Come in," said a woman's voice from the other side.
The office was not large. It had the organized density of a space that was used seriously, bookshelves running along two walls stacked with case files and legal volumes, a reception area with a desk that was currently covered in an orderly arrangement of folders, a coffee maker on a small table that was doing active work, and two doors that presumably led to individual offices. There were plants. Real ones, not plastic, which Peter found unexpectedly encouraging. A spider plant on the windowsill was doing extremely well.
The woman behind the reception desk looked up and smiled, and it was the kind of smile that arrived with something real behind it, not the practiced customer service variety. She was maybe mid-thirties, with sharp eyes and the posture of someone who had learned to hold their ground without making a production of it.
"Peter Parker?" she said.
"That's me," he said. "Hi. It's great to meet you. You're Karen Page?"
"I am." She stood and extended her hand and he shook it. Her handshake was firm and direct. "Thanks for coming in so quickly. Can I get you anything? Coffee? We have a good machine, Foggy insisted."
"Um, coffee would be great, thank you."
She gestured to the chair across from the desk and he sat while she poured, and he looked around the office and tried to get a sense of the place the way he always got a sense of places, not just visually but in the ambient way, the temperature of it, the way it sounded. It was quiet. It smelled like old paper and fresh coffee and faintly, very faintly, of something that might have been a man's cologne, cedar-adjacent, present but not heavy.
One of the two doors was closed.
"So," Karen said, returning with a mug and sitting back down, "I read your application carefully, and I have to say, you write a good cover letter."
"Thank you. I rewrote it four times."
She laughed, short and genuine. "That's honest."
"I figured honest was probably a good quality in someone applying to a law firm."
"You'd think so," she said, with a tone that suggested experience had taught her otherwise. "Tell me about yourself. The resume is good, but resumes are just data. I want to know who you are."
It was a good question. It was the question that Peter found simultaneously easiest and hardest to answer, because he had practiced a version of it, the clean version, the version that was true without being complicated, but Karen Page was looking at him with the specific attentiveness of someone who had interviewed a lot of people and knew when they were being handed a practiced answer.
He decided to be mostly real.
"I'm from Queens," he said. "I grew up there, lived with my aunt. She passed away last year." He said it evenly. He had gotten good at saying it evenly. "I've been on my own since then. I finished my GED, I'm working through some online coursework, I've had a couple of jobs that didn't stick for reasons that were more circumstantial than anything else. I'm good at organizing things, I'm good at talking to people, and I'm genuinely interested in the law. Not as a career path necessarily, or at least I don't know yet, but as a thing. I read about cases for fun, which I know sounds like a weird hobby."
"It sounds like a very relevant hobby for this job," Karen said. "What kind of cases?"
"Civil rights, mostly. Some criminal defense. Constitutional stuff. I followed the litigation around the Sokovia Accords for a while, there's still so much happening at the circuit court level with standing arguments that barely anyone is covering." He paused. "Sorry. I tend to go into it."
"No, that's good." She was still smiling, but the quality of her attention had shifted slightly, the way attention shifts when something is more interesting than expected. "Matt's going to like you."
"Mr. Murdock?"
"He's in his office. He was going to sit in on the interview but he's on a call that's running long." She tilted her head toward the closed door. "He'll join us in a minute."
As if on cue, or perhaps because lawyers had an instinct for dramatic timing that developed through proximity to courtrooms, the closed door opened.
✧
Matt Murdock was not what Peter had expected, and Peter was not sure what he had expected, but it was not quite this.
He had not paid closer attention to him at that time.
He was tall and lean with dark hair that had a few threads of gray at the temples and a face that was arranged in the way that very composed people's faces were arranged, the kind of composure that was not the absence of feeling but the practiced management of it. He had a collared shirt, dark trousers, no tie, a white cane held loosely in his right hand with the easy familiarity of someone for whom it had long since stopped being a prop and become simply part of how he moved through the world. He wore dark glasses indoors, which Peter had read about, a light sensitivity related to the accident that had taken his sight.
He was also, and Peter noticed this in the same moment that he noticed everything else, very still in a way that was not quite the stillness of a person standing in a doorway. It was more directed than that. More deliberate. He was standing in the doorway and he was, Peter felt with a certainty he could not have explained, paying attention in a way that went beyond the conversation he had just ended.
"Sorry about that," Matt said. He had a voice that was calibrated for courtrooms, low and clear and carrying. "The call ran long."
"No problem," Karen said. "Matt, this is Peter Parker."
Matt's head turned toward Peter. The glasses were dark enough that Peter could not see his eyes, but the orientation of his face was precise in the way that people who had spent time around blind individuals recognized: not the vague, camera-finding-a-signal turn of someone navigating by sound, but something more accurate than that. Something that landed squarely on Peter as though Matt Murdock could see him fine.
"Peter," Matt said. "Matt Murdock."
He crossed the room and extended his hand, and Peter stood and shook it. Matt's grip was firm and his hand was, Peter noticed distantly, calloused in specific places that did not quite line up with the profile of a man who spent his days at a desk.
Matt did not immediately let go of his hand.
It was not a long pause. Maybe two seconds, maybe three. Long enough for Peter to notice it. Long enough for something to happen in Matt Murdock's expression that was not quite readable, a small tension at the corner of his jaw, a fractional adjustment in the way he was holding his head.
Then he released Peter's hand and stepped back, and his expression was completely neutral.
"Sit down," he said, and he took the chair beside Karen's desk and settled into it with his cane resting against his knee, and he was the picture of a professional person having a professional conversation, and Peter sat back down and told himself that the two seconds had been nothing, probably just a normal thing, just a person being a person.
His spider-sense was not going off. That was important. His spider-sense was quiet, fully quiet, no static at the edges, no pull toward the door. Whatever Matt Murdock was, he was not a threat.
But something had happened, in those two seconds, and Peter noted it and filed it and kept going.
✧
The interview lasted forty minutes, which was longer than Peter had expected and shorter than it felt.
Matt asked different questions than Karen. Karen's questions were about who Peter was and how he thought and what he found interesting. Matt's questions were precise and specific and structured in a way that made Peter realize, about ten minutes in, that he was not being asked to demonstrate knowledge so much as to demonstrate the shape of his reasoning. How did he handle conflicting priorities. What did he do when he had incomplete information. Had he ever been in a situation where the right thing to do was not the easy thing, and what had he done. He asked these questions with his head slightly angled and his hands still in his lap and the quality of his attention was extraordinary, more complete than most sighted people's attention, and Peter found himself answering more carefully than he had planned to, more honestly than he had intended, because it was very difficult to hedge when you felt thoroughly seen.
Foggy Nelson arrived twenty minutes into the interview.
He arrived in the way that people who are naturally gregarious arrive in rooms: with momentum, with the ambient energy of someone who has thoughts and is pleased to have an audience for them. He was broad-shouldered and fair-haired and had an expression of such uncomplicated warmth that Peter immediately understood why people probably told him things they had not meant to tell anyone.
"Sorry, sorry, traffic was a thing," he said, and then he looked at Peter and said, "Oh, you're the applicant. Hi. I'm Foggy. Franklin Nelson, but Foggy, please. You look young. Is he young, Karen?"
"He's nineteen," Karen said.
"Nineteen," Foggy repeated, with the tone of a man who had recently had a birthday and was thinking about it. "Nineteen. Okay. What do you know about municipal court procedure?"
"In New York specifically, or generally?" Peter asked.
Foggy pointed at him. "Specifically."
"Civil court in New York is split between small claims and regular civil, threshold is five thousand dollars. Criminal arraignments in Manhattan go through 100 Centre Street, which everyone calls Central Booking. The housing court is separate and is specifically terrible for reasons I've read a lot about. Appeals from civil and criminal go to the Appellate Division, which is the First Department for Manhattan and the Bronx."
Foggy looked at Karen. Then he looked at Matt, which was interesting because Matt was not looking at anything in a conventional sense, but Foggy clearly expected a response from him anyway.
"He knows municipal court procedure," Foggy said, to no one in particular. "I didn't know municipal court procedure until second year."
"In fairness," Karen said, "you knew the names of every person on your floor by the end of first week."
"That is also a skill," Foggy said, and sat down on the edge of the desk with the ease of someone who had long since stopped treating office furniture as inviolable.
Matt, through all of this, had not moved. He was still sitting with his hands in his lap and his cane against his knee, and he was still doing that thing with his attention, directing it at Peter with a focus that was not uncomfortable but was not nothing, either.
"You're from Queens," Matt said.
"Yeah."
"You've been living alone for a year."
"Since last February."
"You're not in school."
"Online courses. I'm working toward a degree but I'm doing it slowly, I have to support myself first."
Matt nodded, very slightly. "What made you interested in this firm specifically?"
Peter had expected this question and had prepared an answer, but the version that came out was not quite the prepared one.
"Honestly? You take cases that other people won't take," he said. "I looked at your case history, as much of it as is public record. A lot of firms your size would either specialize to maximize billing or move toward bigger clients for the retainer. You've done wrongful termination cases for people who couldn't have paid much. You've done criminal defense for people who had public defenders and then didn't anymore. You went up against Fisk." He paused. "I don't know what it's like to work here. But from the outside, it looks like a place where the work is actually about something."
The room was quiet for a moment.
Foggy was looking at him with an expression that Peter could only describe as slightly undone.
Karen was smiling.
Matt's expression was, as it had been for most of the interview, very carefully maintained at neutral. But his head had tilted, fractionally, and the angle of it made Peter think of how a person tilts their head when something they hear does not match what they expected to hear, when the frequency is off by a note and they are trying to locate the source.
"We'll be in touch," Matt said. "Thank you for coming in, Peter."
"Thank you for seeing me," Peter said. "Genuinely. This seems like a really good place."
He stood, shook hands with all three of them, and left.
In the elevator going down, he pressed his back against the wall and exhaled and thought: that went well, I think, probably, I hope.
Above him, through three floors of building, he could hear nothing. Which was normal. Which was how things worked for normal people.
He pushed the lobby door open and walked out into the November cold of Hell's Kitchen, and thought about going home, and thought about what to have for dinner, and thought about absolutely anything other than the way Matt Murdock had looked at him for two seconds while holding his hand, like he was trying to solve a question that the data wasn't supporting.
✧
The office of Nelson, Murdock and Page was not, at three PM on a Thursday, particularly quiet.
It was quiet in the way that offices with three strong personalities who had known each other for years were quiet: the surface was calm, but under it there were undercurrents, old arguments half-finished, comfortable disagreements that had long since settled into the architecture of how they worked together.
Foggy was at his desk eating a sandwich and reviewing the Castellano brief. Karen was on the phone with a client, her voice low and steady, the particular register she used when someone on the other end was frightened. Matt was in his office with the door half-open, which meant he was available, which meant he was listening to the office the way he always listened to the office, with the full unfiltered attention of senses that had never learned how to turn off.
He was not reading the brief in front of him.
He was thinking about the interview.
He had been thinking about the interview since the moment he walked out of his office and shook Peter Parker's hand and felt, with the complete clarity of a sense that had spent thirty-odd years being precise about exactly this kind of information, that something was different.
He had spent years learning the landscape of human biology, not in any clinical or deliberate way, but in the accumulated, accidental way that a person develops expertise in a thing they encounter constantly. He knew what adrenaline sounded like in a heartbeat. He knew the specific catch-and-hold rhythm of someone who was lying. He knew grief by the way it sat in the chest and changed the character of breathing. He knew anxiety, excitement, anger, attraction, fear, and the particular flavor of someone who was hiding something, not maliciously necessarily but deliberately, the careful calibration of information flow that people engaged in when they had things they were not ready to share.
Peter Parker had all of those things, in varying configurations.
But there was something else.
The heartbeat was wrong. Not wrong in the sense of abnormal, nothing that suggested distress or pathology, but wrong in the sense of not being what Matt would have predicted. It was too steady for someone who should have been nervous. Not the steadiness of someone suppressing nerves, which had its own tell, a faint tightness in the rhythm that Matt could read easily. This was something different: a genuine, baseline calm that coexisted with the emotional reality of someone who was clearly hoping the interview went well. The emotional content was there. The physiological distress was not.
And there was more. A faint electrical quality, at the edges of what Matt could perceive, the way a sound could have overtones that you didn't consciously register but that added up to a texture, a character. He could not have named what it was. It was nothing he had encountered before. It was not threatening, his threat-assessment had come back clean and fast, which he trusted implicitly, had trusted for fifteen years of trusting it. But it was present, and it was specific to Peter Parker, and he had been turning it over in his mind for the past two hours the way you turn over a lock you don't have the key to, looking for the mechanism.
The knock on the open door was Foggy. Matt knew it by the weight of the footstep, the timing of the knuckles.
"Hey," Foggy said.
"Hey."
"You're doing the thing."
"What thing."
"The thinking-really-hard thing. The thing where you sit very still and your jaw does the thing. The thing."
"I don't do a jaw thing."
"Matt. Buddy. I have watched you sit in exactly that position since 2007. You absolutely do a jaw thing." Foggy came in and sat in the chair across from Matt's desk, which was Karen's chair during meetings and Foggy's chair any other time, a territorial arrangement that had established itself organically and that none of them ever discussed. "The Parker kid?"
Matt considered whether to deflect and decided it was not worth the energy. "He's unusual."
"He's nineteen and he already knows more about municipal court procedure than I did at twenty-three, so, yes, I would agree with that characterization."
"It's not about that."
"Then what?"
Matt considered how to say it. He had, over the years, developed a fairly precise vocabulary for his own perceptions, one that was calibrated for conversations with Foggy specifically, who had long since stopped performing skepticism about Matt's capabilities and arrived at a place of pragmatic acceptance that Matt found, in the very specific way that Foggy managed it, deeply uncomplicated.
"His physiological profile is unusual," Matt said finally. "Not alarming. But unusual. He's not what he seems."
Foggy was quiet for a moment.
"Matt," he said. "He's nineteen. He's a kid from Queens who lost his aunt and needs a job."
"I know what he looks like."
"But?"
"But I'm not sure what he is."
Foggy exhaled through his nose, which was his version of a very long pause. "Did your danger-sense go off? The senses thing?"
"No. Nothing like that."
"Okay." Another pause. "Is there anything to suggest he's a problem? Any actual, concrete reason to think he's a plant, or working for someone, or anything like that?"
Matt thought about it honestly. The honest answer was no. The heartbeat had been clean. There had been nothing in the cadence of his voice or the micro-patterns of his breathing or the small physical tells that Matt had learned to read the way other people read faces, nothing that said deception or threat or agenda. There had only been the unusual, and the unusual was not the same as the dangerous.
"No," he said.
"Then here's what I think," Foggy said. "I think Karen and I both really liked him. I think he's sharp and he's honest and God knows we need someone who can handle the front office because we've been doing it ourselves since Becky left and we are, as I have mentioned, falling behind on filing in ways that are going to become a problem. And I think that unusual is not the same as bad."
"I know it's not."
"And I think," Foggy continued, with the specific tone of someone arriving at their actual point, "that you sometimes use your senses as a reason not to let people in, when really the thing that's making you hesitate is not what you're sensing, but the fact that you sensed anything at all."
The office was quiet. Through the door, Karen was finishing her call. Outside, three floors down, someone was arguing about a parking spot.
Matt sat with that for a moment.
"Hire him," Foggy said. "On a trial basis, a month, if it makes you feel better. But hire him. We need the help, he needs the job, and your gut says he's not a threat. The rest of it, we figure out."
Matt thought about the interview. He thought about Peter Parker sitting in the chair across from him, answering questions with a carefulness that was not calculated but was genuine, that was the carefulness of someone who had learned that accuracy mattered. He thought about what the kid had said, about the work being about something, and the way he had said it, with a quality of knowing in it that went past research, that had the flavor of personal experience.
He thought about what kind of person, at nineteen, living alone, had that kind of gravity to them.
"A month," Matt said.
Foggy stood up. "Excellent. I'll tell Karen. She's going to be very pleased. She was already planning to have him take over the filing system."
"She should warn him about the Delgado box."
"Matt. No one can be warned about the Delgado box. You just have to encounter it and survive."
Foggy left. Matt sat in his office and listened to Karen make a sound of satisfaction down the hall when Foggy told her, a short pleased sound that she immediately tried to make professional and failed at slightly, and he allowed himself a small amount of what he recognized as relief, which was its own kind of unusual, because it meant he had been hoping.
He turned back to the brief, but he was still thinking about Peter Parker's heartbeat, still turning it in the way you turn a lock, patient and precise.
He would figure it out.
He always did.
✧
The call came from an unlisted number, which meant nothing, because all of Fisk's calls came from unlisted numbers. The man who made the call on Fisk's behalf was precise and professional and wasted no time.
"We have an update on Murdock," he said.
The person on the receiving end of this information relayed it promptly. There was a chain. There was always a chain. Wilson Fisk had not survived as long as he had in the specific ecosystem he had chosen to inhabit by being imprecise about information management. Every node of the network knew only what it needed to know, and every node passed what it gathered upward, and at the top of that structure Wilson Fisk sat in a room in a federal facility that was comfortable enough to not be cruel but restricted enough to remind him, every day, of what he had lost and what he intended to recover.
He read the report when it arrived.
It was brief. Murdock's firm had hired a new assistant. Young. Peter Parker, nineteen, Queens. No obvious affiliations. Clean record.
Fisk read the name twice.
Then he set the report aside and looked at the wall of his room, which was white, as all the walls were, which he had never stopped finding intolerable.
Peter Parker.
The name did not appear in any of the files that had been developed over the years on individuals proximate to Murdock. It was a new name. A new variable. He did not like new variables, as a rule. He preferred to understand the complete landscape of a situation before making any decisions about it.
He would have the name researched. He would have the boy watched. Not aggressively. Not yet. Just the quiet, patient watching that preceded understanding.
He had time.
He had, currently, a great deal of time.
He thought about Murdock, and about the tiresome persistence of people who believed that justice was a thing that held. He thought about New York, as he often did, the city he had spent his life trying to shape into something that met the image he carried of it, something ordered and magnificent and his. He had come close. He had been close.
He would be close again.
In Queens, Peter Parker was sitting at his secondhand desk reading a text from an unknown number that said ‘This is Karen Page, we'd like to offer you the position if you're still interested, can you start Monday?’ , and he was smiling at his phone screen with the particular quality of relief that arrives when something you needed goes right for once, small and true and clean.
Hopefully, at least…