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Karen
Peter had this down to a science at this point. Civilian spots a guy dropping out of the sky onto a fire escape, there's really only two options. Scream, or freeze up. That's it. That's the whole menu.
This woman just turned around, looked at him, and said, "You're a hard man to find."
Peter, one hand still on the wall, brain already doing the thing where it tries to figure out if this is a trap, a journalist, or somebody's mom, did not love that sentence.
"I'm really not. I'm extremely findable. I have, like, an Instagram. Not — not my Instagram, obviously, I don't — that's not the point. The point is I'm right here, hi, hello, who are you and why do you sound like you've been on a manhunt."
"Three weeks," she said. "I want that on the record. Three weeks of asking around."
"Asking around where? With who? Do you have a guy? Is there, like, a Yelp for finding vigilantes, because if so I have THOUGHTS about my reviews — " He stopped. Actually looked at her. Blazer, the kind of tired where you can tell it's job-tired and not just regular tired, the specific energy of someone who'd spent the day in a building with fluorescent lighting and a Keurig that lies about how much coffee is left. "Okay wait. No. I know this. I've seen this movie. This is a Matt thing, isn't it."
Something flickered across her face. "He said you'd figure it out fast."
"Tell him I want a medal. Also tell him — actually, did he tell you to specify you're not the Punisher? Because I've had a week, and that's relevant context, and my heart rate would genuinely appreciate the clarification up front next time."
"I'm not the Punisher."
"Cool. Great. I mean, obviously I knew that, but still. Building trust already. And on that subject, why does Matt Murdock apparently have a roster — like a full bench — of people he's sending to ambush me on rooftops? Is there a depth chart. Am I going to meet all of them eventually like some kind of horrible vigilante fantasy draft."
"Karen Page." She said. "I'm a friend of Matt's."
Peter blinked behind the mask, which, fun fact, does not actually do anything visible, but it felt important to do anyway. "Ms. Page, I know you are more than just Matt’s friend. And I still have trouble believing Matt Murdock — blind guy, secretly Daredevil, currently incarcerated Matt Murdock — has a girlfriend. One who seems so totally awesome and is currently attempting to be a worse stalker than her boyfriend."
"I’m not stalking you."
"I feel like Matt only makes friends with stalkers. What, do you all get together and exchange best ways to tail a person? I didn’t expect him to have time for that, you know, with the whole being in prison thing!"
"I'm aware of where Matt is, thanks." Dry as a desert. "I visit him. Tuesdays and Thursdays, mostly. There's a vending machine in there that's eaten more of my quarters than I want to admit out loud."
And — okay. Matt, behind however many layers of prison they put between people, sitting across a table from someone who showed up twice a week with pockets full of quarters for a machine that was actively stealing from her. Peter didn't say anything for a second.
"Okay so why are you up here, then, instead of, you know, there."
"One, visiting hours are over. And two, because he asked me to find you."
" He doesn't even know my name. He doesn't know anything about me, he knows I climb walls and apparently dress like a fire hazard."
"He doesn't," Karen agreed. "Which made this an annoying assignment, frankly. Do you know how few leads 'young, athletic, climbs buildings, wears red' gives a person in a city of eight million people?"
"Hey! I’m not that young! And that feels like an actual pretty solid starting point, especially the whole masked vigilante thing — "
"It narrows it down to a genuinely concerning number of parkour guys, is what it narrows it down to."
Peter laughed before he could stop it — short, surprised, the kind of laugh that catches you off guard because you forgot you still had it in you. He hadn't done that in a while. Not the real version, anyway. He did a lot of jokes lately. Not a lot of laughing.
Karen noticed.
"Why does he even care," Peter said, settling back onto the railing, some of the wind-up gone out of his shoulders now. "He's in prison. He has, I don't know, prison problems! Actual ones! Bigger than whatever I'm doing on a random Tuesday!"
"You'd think." Karen leaned against the brick, arms crossed, looking out at the skyline instead of at him. "Frank told him about your roof top encounter. That you’ve been kind of out of it. And Matt's spent his whole life noticing the people nobody else bothers to look out for. That's sort of his whole thing, in case you hadn't clocked that yet."
"He isn’t subtle."
"So he noticed you. And then he couldn't stop noticing you. And he can't exactly go looking himself right now, so he's been — recruiting, I guess. Calling in favors. Sending people who can go where he can't."
"That is unbelievably unhinged behavior for a man currently cosplaying an orange."
"Tell me about it." Karen looked back at him. "I told him it was a lot. He just said — " she paused, picking the words carefully " — he kept thinking about how nobody came looking for him until it was almost too late. He knows now it was his own fault, and he didn't want that to be true for somebody else too."
Peter didn't have a joke for that one.
"For what it's worth," Karen said, softer now, "nobody sent me to pry into you. I came because he asked, and because — " a small shrug, like the rest of the sentence embarrassed her a little " — because from what Frank described, it sounded like you could use somebody checking in. That's it. No agenda."
"That's a very normal thing to say to a man in spandex at eleven PM on a Tuesday."
"I've had an abnormal few years."
"Fair, honestly, that tracks." Peter looked down at the street, the ordinary churn of people who had zero idea any of this was happening eleven stories above their heads, completely unbothered, probably thinking about pizza. "Tell him I'm fine."
"I'm not going to tell him that."
"Why not?"
"Because he'll know I'm lying, and then he'll just send somebody else." A faint, amused edge crept into her voice. "Honestly? Brace yourself either way."
Peter went back that night. Up the wall, across the ledge, in through the gap he'd long since decided counted as an open invitation whether or not anyone had meant it that way.
Matt was already smiling before Peter's feet hit the floor. Of course he was.
"WHY ARE YOU WORRIED ABOUT ME?" Peter didn't bother with an inside voice, didn't care that it probably carried straight down the cell block. "What is happening, Matt? You are in PRISON. You have actual prison-shaped problems to deal with! And instead you're — what, running a whole network? Recruiting your girlfriend to go track down a random vigilante you literally don't even know the government name of?"
Matt's smile didn't move, exactly, but something underneath it did. Small. Gone before Peter could be sure he'd even seen it. “So Karen found you okay?”
"That's not an answer!"
"No," Matt agreed. "It isn't."
He didn't offer anything else. Just sat there, hands folded, patient as a guy with absolutely nowhere else to be — which, Peter supposed, was technically true, just not in the way that made him feel better.
Peter dropped his head into his hands. "I hate that this is my life now."
"No you don't."
Jessica
She was already on the roof when he got there. Sitting on the ledge like she owned it, drinking out of a flask that probably wasn't carrying water, not looking at him even though he was pretty sure he hadn't made a sound landing.
"You're late," she said.
"I didn't know I had an appointment."
"You didn't. I'm just naturally disappointed in people on a schedule." She finally looked over. Unimpressed in a way that felt almost professional. "Jessica Jones.
"I know who you are." It came out faster than he meant it to. "Alias Investigations. You're, uh — you're kind of a name."
"Don't."
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're doing the thing. The starstruck thing. Stop." She took another pull from the flask. "I'm not interested in being anyone's name right now."
"Okay. Cool. Noted. Retracting the thing." Peter dropped down onto the ledge a few feet away, already exhausted. "Let me guess. Matt."
"Matt."
"I'm gonna need him to stop giving my coordinates out like it's a frequent flyer program."
"Nobody gave anybody your coordinates. That's the problem, actually — it would've saved me two days I'm never getting back." Jessica didn't look at him when she said it, just stared out at the skyline like the city owed her money. "He called in a favor. Said there's a kid in a mask who isn't okay, go look. So. I looked."
"And?"
"Two days." She said it like an insult aimed at herself. "Used to take me less than that to find guys who were actively trying not to be found by their wives. You're not even trying and you almost beat them." She took a pull from the flask, unbothered. "Anyway. You're male, late teens, early twenties. Favor your left side coming off a fall — old injury, not fully healed. You patrol on a rotation that lines up with no real schedule, which points probably to freelancer, although given the spandex I can’t rule out just straight discipline. You change in and out near the same six blocks in Queens, twice, which means you got sloppy, which means you should fix that before somebody worse than me notices. I charge by the hour, by the way. This one's free. You're welcome."
The rooftop went very quiet.
"That's — " Peter's voice came out smaller than he meant it to. "You can't just — "
"I'm not finishing it." Flat. No performance in it. "Don't care who you are. Not my circus." She screwed the cap back on the flask, hard, like she was annoyed at the conversation for existing. "I took the job because Murdock doesn't ask for favors. Means it mattered. Otherwise I'd be home with my kid instead of freezing my ass off up here."
"You just rattled off, like, a forensic file on me, and you want me to believe you don't care?"
"I don’t care who you are under the mask, no that I don’t care." She shrugged, not gently. "Different thing."
Peter didn't say anything. His hands were shaking, but not from the cold. Which felt rude, honestly.
"You're loud," Jessica said, after a second, not looking at him. "The way you talk too much when somebody asks you something normal. Took me about ten seconds and I wasn't even trying. You're basically a smoke alarm in a onesie."
"Great pep talk."
"Wasn't trying to give you one. I don't do pep talks. I barely do talks." She was already standing, flask gone into her jacket. "Somebody should say it, I guess. Since the guy who actually cares is stuck behind bars and decided the next best move was farming it out to a woman who hates this stuff and is billing him in favors she'll be collecting on until he's eighty."
She was over the ledge before Peter could find a response, gone the way people who do this professionally go.
He went back that night. Up the wall, in through the gap — and Matt was already turned toward the window before Peter's feet touched the floor, head tilted, listening to something Peter couldn't hear yet.
"Your heart rate is faster than usual," Matt said. Not a question.
"My heart is fine. My heart has every right to do a thing. Do you know what your friend did to me?"
"Hm?"
"She profiled me. Two days, Matt. She knows I'm left-handed. She knows I've got an old injury I never fixed right. She knows what block I live near." His voice cracked somewhere in the middle of it. "That's not a wellness check. That's a file."
Matt was quiet long enough that Peter almost filled the silence himself.
"I didn't think she'd go that far," he said finally, and there wasn't any performance in it, none of the usual practiced calm. "I just asked her to find you."
"Well she found me."
"I hear that." Matt's jaw worked.
"You gotta stop doing this," Peter said, quieter now. "Sending people. I don't — I don't know what you think is gonna happen, but it's not gonna end with somebody finding me and it being fine."
"I know."
"Then why do you keep — "
"Because I don't know what else to do," Matt said, and that came out fast, almost before he meant to let it, and then he stopped like he'd surprised himself by saying it at all.
Peter didn't have anything for that. Neither, apparently, did Matt — he just sat there, hands folded, facing a window he couldn't see out of.
Kirsten
Peter almost didn't stop. He was three rooftops past her before his brain caught up with what he'd actually seen: a woman in a blazer, standing way too close to the edge of a building, phone held out in front of her, looking down at the street with the specific stiff posture of someone doing math they did not want to be doing.
He doubled back. Better safe than reading about it tomorrow.
"Hey — hey, ma'am, can I just — are you okay?"
She startled so hard she nearly went over the edge for real, which, fantastic, great start, and Peter lunged and grabbed her arm before gravity could get any ideas.
"Oh my — okay, you're — okay." She was breathing fast, hand pressed to her chest, looking at him like he'd materialized out of a fire escape, which, fair, he sort of had. "You're Spider-Man."
"Yeah. Hi. Are you — were you about to — is everything okay? Do you need me to call somebody, do you want to sit down, there's a whole ledge right there that's much further from the falling to your death part of the building — "
"I'm not — no. God, no. I wasn't going to — " She pressed a hand to her face. "I was looking for you. I wasn't going to jump, I was trying to figure out if this counted as a rooftop you'd actually patrol or if I picked a stupid one. Apparently I picked a stupid one, because you almost rescued me from a height I cannot actually fall from, there's a railing right there."
Peter looked. There was, in fact, a railing right there.
"Okay so to be clear," he said, "you're not in crisis."
"I am extremely in crisis, just not the one you think." She held out a hand, very businesslike, like she was about to hand him a contract instead of standing on a roof at ten PM having nearly given a vigilante a heart attack. "Kirsten McDuffie. I'm Matt's law partner."
Peter stared at her for a second, finally recognizing her. "Of course you are."
"You say that like it should mean something to you."
"It means I'm starting to understand how this guy's contacts list works, is what it means."
"He asked me to find you," Kirsten said, in the tone of someone still actively regretting saying yes. "I want to be upfront that I have no idea how to do that. I'm a lawyer. My skill set is depositions and reading people's faces in a conference room. I do not have a — a protocol for locating a vigilante. I tried three rooftops before this one. I almost called it in as a missing person, except the missing person is you, and you're not missing, you're just — annoyingly hard to find."
"In my defense, I don't have an inbox."
"Clearly." She exhaled, visibly recalibrating, the way Peter imagined she probably did before walking into a courtroom. "He just said — find the kid, make sure he's eaten something in the past 24 hours. That's it. That was the whole brief. I billed zero hours to this, by the way, in case you were wondering, because there is no client matter on Earth I could file 'rooftop welfare check' under."
Peter almost laughed. Almost. "Did he say anything else?"
"He said you'd probably try to talk your way out of it." She reached into her bag and pulled out, with the gravity of someone presenting evidence, a slightly squashed granola bar. "He also said to physically hand you something, because apparently that works better than asking."
Peter looked at the granola bar. Looked at her.
"That's — okay, that's actually a little insulting, how well that's gonna work."
"Eat the bar, Spider-Man."
He ate the bar.
He went back that night, granola bar wrapper still crumpled in his pocket.
"You sent your lawyer."
"She's a very good lawyer."
"She almost went off a building, Matt. There was a railing. She looked past the railing."
"Did she give you the food?"
"Yes."
"Did you eat it?"
"...Yes."
"Then it worked."
"That's not — " Peter dragged a hand down his face. "You're running out of people, you know that? You've got, what, three left? Four? What happens when you hit the bottom of the list?"
"I don't know."
BB
"— which is the thing nobody ever puts in the articles," B.B. was saying, like they were already ten minutes into a conversation Peter didn't remember agreeing to have. She had a notebook out. Not recording, just resting against her knee, pen uncapped like a held breath. "Everybody writes the powers. Nobody writes the why. And I've been doing this long enough now to notice the why is always the same shape."
"...Okay?"
"Murdock, it was at first his dad. Castle, it's his family, the whole — everyone knows that one. Jones won't talk about hers but it’s a matter of public record. Everybody under a mask is grieving somebody. It's not even subtext anymore, it's just the job description." She wasn't looking at him when she said it. Just out at the street, like she was thinking out loud and he'd happened to be standing there. "So I've been sitting on this theory for a while. That it's not the power. Powers are just the delivery system. It's grief that doesn't have anywhere to go, and the mask is just — the place people put it."
Peter didn't say anything. His mouth had gone dry in a way that had nothing to do with the wind.
"So." B.B. finally looked at him. Not unkind. Just direct, the way people are when they've stopped performing the question and started actually asking it. "Who'd you lose?"
He was over the ledge before she'd finished the sentence.
Karen
Peter was three blocks from his apartment, hood up over the mask because he hadn't had it in him to suit up clean tonight, just patched together enough to feel like himself, when Karen Page stepped out from between two parked cars like she'd been standing there a while.
"You've got a week's worth of voicemail energy on you," she said.
"I don't have voicemail."
"You know what I mean."
Peter kept walking. She fell in beside him, easy, like she'd planned for him not to stop. "I'm a little busy, actually, so if this is another — "
"It's because Matt hasn't heard from you in a week, and apparently that's enough to make a man who's already in prison look like he's somewhere worse."
Peter stopped walking.
"You've gone every day," Karen said, quieter now. "Or close to it. He didn't say that like it was a complaint, for what it's worth. He said it like it was the only good thing happening to him lately. And then it just — stopped. No warning. And he's been telling himself a different story about why every day this week, and none of the stories are good ones, and I'm tired of watching him do that to himself, so." She crossed her arms. "What happened?"
"Nothing happened."
"That's not nothing. I've watched you not-answer a question for thirty seconds. That's a personal best."
"I don't know, look, it's not — " Peter dragged a hand over his mask, frustration outrunning whatever filter he usually ran his mouth through. "It doesn't even matter, nobody cares about me, the last person who did died, so what's the — "
He stopped. Heard himself a half-second too late, the way you hear a glass hit the floor right after your hand's already let go of it.
Karen didn't move. Didn't react in any way that would've told him she'd caught it if he hadn't been the one who'd heard himself say it.
"That's not — " His voice had gone tight, fast, the rambling-when-cornered thing. "Forget that. Forget I said anything."
"I'm not going to use it." Flat, immediate. "Whoever that was. I'm not going to ask, I'm not going to repeat it, I'm not going to tell Matt, I'm not even going to think about it past the next five seconds if I can help it. Okay?"
Peter didn't say anything. His jaw was doing something complicated.
"Why did you stop visiting," Karen tried again, gentler this time.
"Matt went too far."
"With what."
"With — " Peter dragged a hand down his face, the mask bunching under his palm. "I don't want to get into it. He just — he sent somebody who got somewhere he shouldn't have gotten. Not like Jessica. Worse than Jessica. And I just — I needed some space from it, okay? That's all. I needed a week where nobody was checking on me, because apparently being checked on is its own whole thing now, and I didn't — I wasn't ready to walk back in there and have that conversation yet."
Karen was quiet for a second. Processing, maybe.
"Okay," she said. "That's fair. You're allowed that."
"You're not gonna push?"
"No." She shook her head. "I came here to find out if you were okay, not to drag you back to a cell on a schedule." A faint, almost rueful look crossed her face. "Which is funny, actually, because that's basically word for word what he's told you, isn't it. That you don't owe him visits. That you should stay away."
Peter didn't answer that, which was answer enough.
"He meant it," Karen said. "He's said it to me too, more than once, like he needed to hear himself say it out loud. And then you actually listened to him for once, and it's apparently the worst thing that's happened to him all month." A small, tired almost-laugh. "He doesn't get to have it both ways. I told him that. He didn't love hearing it."
That landed somewhere Peter wasn't braced for. He looked away.
"I just don't get it," he said, finally, voice smaller. "Why he keeps — doing this. Sending people. Like I'm a problem that needs management. It's not — it doesn't feel like somebody worrying about a friend, it feels like somebody running an op."
"It's both," Karen said. "That's the thing nobody tells you about Matt. It's always both."
Peter looked at her.
"He's worried about you. That part's real. Don't let the chaos of it convince you otherwise." Karen sighed. "Matt is very good at making caring about someone look like a tactical operation."
She rubbed a hand over her face, like she was trying to figure out how honest to be.
"But it's also—" She stopped. Started again. "Okay. I've known Matt a long time, so I get to say this. He does this thing."
Peter looked at her. "What thing."
"He finds the problem he can solve." Karen gave a small, humorless laugh. "Or tries to."
She looked down the block for a second before continuing. "He's in prison," Karen said. "There's a lot he can't fix from in there. You were something he could do something about."
Peter flinched a little at that.
"Not because you aren't real," Karen said quickly. "You are. That's the problem. You matter enough to worry about. But you're also…" She searched for it. " You're something concrete. Something he can send people at."
"So I'm a distraction."
"No." Karen shook her head. "Not just that."
Peter stared at the sidewalk. "That doesn't make it feel better."
"I know."
"No, I don't think you do." The words came out sharper than he meant them to. He dragged a hand over his mask. "Everyone keeps saying he cares like that's supposed to make this easier, but it doesn't, Ms. Page. Sometimes it feels—"
He stopped.
Karen waited. "Like what?"
Peter swallowed. "Like a straightjacket." His voice dropped. "Like every time he sends someone, every time somebody finds me, it gets harder to breathe."
Karen didn't interrupt.
"He says I don't owe him anything, that I can leave, that I can stay away, but then he keeps reaching anyway." Peter laughed once, brittle around the edges. "So what am I supposed to do with that? Because if I pull back, he comes after me. If I stay, I feel…" He shook his head.
Karen absorbed that without flinching.
"Yeah," she said quietly. "That sounds like Matt too."
Down the block, a car alarm went off and cut out again.
“Matt's care can be… intense.” Karen said after a while. “Sometimes so intense it stops feeling like care to the person on the receiving end."
"That's a diplomatic way of saying insane."
A small smile tugged at her mouth. "I've had years of practice translating Matt Murdock."
Peter exhaled, long, the kind that takes something out of your shoulders on the way out. "I don't know if I'm ready to go back yet."
"You don't have to." Karen shrugged. "I just needed him to stop thinking the worst. The rest is up to you."
“Next time you can check the Spider-Man spotted Instagram account. It tends to be almost invasive with how much they post about me.”
Karen shrugged. “It felt better to do it in person.”
She turned to go, then stopped, half-glancing back.
"For what it's worth, he didn't send anyone after you tonight. He told me not to." A small shrug. "I came anyway. He’s not the only one who gets to worry about vigilantes."
She was gone before Peter could decide what to do with that.
The Wall
He went two nights later. Up the wall, but he sat on the ledge outside the cell instead, back against the brick, close enough that he knew Matt would hear him land. Close enough that he knew Matt would hear him breathing, too, and probably a few other things Peter didn't love the idea of being audible, but he'd run out of better options.
Inside, he heard Matt go still. He could almost hear Matt tilt his head.
"You gonna come in," Matt said, after a while.
Peter didn't answer that either.
"Okay," Matt said. Quieter. "We can do it through a wall."
Neither of them said much else. Peter just sat there, knees pulled up, mask still on, listening to the small ordinary sounds of a man trying to read on the other side of a wall, pages turning slower than they needed to, pauses long enough that Peter kept catching himself timing them between breaths like some deeply unwell metronome.