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Matt heard him a full two minutes before he arrived.
"Special delivery," Peter announced, dropping through the gap with significantly more grace than usual, which Matt noted and said nothing about.
"Oh?"
"I brought snacks, Matt, it's called generosity, look it up." Something crinkled. Matt held out a hand on reflex, and a bag of chips landed in it with more confidence than the pudding cups usually managed. "Also I want it on the record that these are legally purchased. With a dollar. That I currently possess. Well, not currently anymore because I used it to get snacks. But. You know. Growth."
"Historic."
"I know, I'm very proud of myself, please clap." Peter dropped onto the floor in his usual spot, easy tonight, none of the hitch Matt had gotten used to bracing for. "Nothing happened tonight, by the way. Before you ask. Two muggings, one guy who tried to fight me over a parking spot he wasn't even parked in, and a cat that hated me personally for no reason. Very average Tuesday. No building fires. No concerning noises. I'm basically fine."
"Basically."
"Ninety percent fine. Solid B-plus fine."
Matt smiled. "That's a career high for you."
"I'm gonna choose to take that as a compliment."
"It was one."
Peter went quiet for a second, chip bag rustling. "This is nice, actually. Like, objectively unhinged that 'nice' is a cell block at eleven PM, but. You know."
"I know."
"You're in a good mood."
"I'm always in a good mood."
"You are extremely not, but okay, sure, let's pretend." Peter tossed a chip up and, from the sound of it, caught it in his mouth on the second try. "I should probably head out soon anyway. Get back before—" He stopped, tilted his head in confusion, then waved it off. "Whatever. Doesn't matter."
Matt didn't move. "Before what."
"Nothing. It's just a sentence that ran out of places to go."
His heart hadn't done anything dramatic. A flat line where there should've been something, the sound of a kid who'd practiced not reacting to a specific word until he'd gotten good enough that most people wouldn't catch it.
Matt caught it anyway.
"You don't anywhere to go tonight," he said, careful to make it sound like an observation and not an offer.
"I have a place, Matt, I'm not — it's fine. It's an apartment. It has walls and a door and everything, very impressive, very load-bearing." A beat, and this time something did move underneath it, quick, gone almost before it landed. "Nobody's waiting up, if that's what you're fishing for. But that's not, like, a tragedy, that's just Tuesday."
"Didn't say it was a tragedy."
"You were thinking it real loud, though."
"I don't have a tell for that."
"You have a tell for everything, that's kind of your whole thing." But he was smiling again when he said it, Matt could hear it. "Anyway. Not important. Tell me something about your day that isn't sad, I need the content."
They sat like that for a while, not saying much of anything, just the ordinary hum of the block settling in around them — someone's radio two floors down, a card game breaking up, footsteps that meant nothing at all.
It wouldn’t last, Matt already knew. But it was good, tonight.
Matt heard him first — the walk, unhurried. Then the smell. Menthol, badly, over cigarettes, worse. Matt had started calling him Ashtray somewhere around week three, privately, because it felt better than pretending the man had a name.
"Murdock."
Ashtray didn't stop walking. "You're popular today."
Matt didn't look up. "It's my natural charm."
"Sure, counselor." A pause. Keys shifting. \ "You know, I've watched a lot of men do a lot of time. Twenty-two years. You learn to read the room fast. Who's actually alone in here. Who just looks it."
Matt turned a page he hadn't read.
"You don't look it," Ashtray said. "Which is interesting, for a guy in here on his own dime, so to speak. No family visits. You’ve got people, sure, coming by, don’t stay long. But you've got this way about you. Like a man who's still got people out there minding his business for him." A beat, unhurried, almost idle. "Wonder what that's like. Having someone still checking in. Most men in here, that dries up fast. Then it's just them."
Matt kept his face still and let his hands do nothing they didn't need to do.
"Funny thing about a place like this," Ashtray went on, like he hadn't noticed the stillness, though Matt would've bet money he had. "Things happen here. Man slips in the yard. Man has a bad night, nobody around to hear it. Happens more than the paperwork likes to say. And when it does — " a small sound, almost a laugh, no warmth in it at all — "well. It's a big building. Lot of blind spots. Lot of men who didn't see a thing."
He was already a few steps off by the time he added it, almost to himself, almost gentle:
"Hope whoever's out there minding you knows how to keep himself out of it. Places like this — we're not real patient with people who think they're the exception. And we've got a long memory for the ones who make us look, even once."
He walked off before Matt could decide whether to respond.
The footsteps went on down the block and didn't come back.
Matt sat very still for a long time after, doing the math on things he had no way to verify and no way to stop.
Matt had been listening to the block for an hour before anything happened.
A guard's footsteps two floors down, ordinary pace, nothing in it. He counted them anyway. Filed the rhythm. Ran it against nothing, because there was no baseline for this, no version of the last three weeks that hadn't been shaped by a conversation he couldn't stop replaying.
So when the quiet changed — a scrape of fabric on brick, three floors up — Matt's whole body went cold before his mind caught up to why, and for one full second he was listening for the wrong thing.
Nothing came.
Just movement.
It took him a beat too long to place what he was actually hearing.
Breathing, too fast for just the climb. The hitch on the left side that never healed right.
Just the kid.
Matt sat back against the wall and made himself breathe, and didn't quite manage to make himself stop listening past the window, down the wall, out toward the yard, toward every place a man with keys might be standing right now with nothing better to do than watch.
"You almost gave me a heart attack."
"Okay, first of all, I climbed a wall, that's it, that's the whole crime, people climb walls every day, rock climbing is a sport, so if anything you should be proud of me, this is athletic achievement—"
"Keep your voice down,” Matt said, sharper than he meant to.
"...Okay." Spider-Man said, quieter, but not the bit-voice quiet. Actually quiet. "Is somebody—"
"No. It's fine." Matt exhaled, tried to sand the edge back off his own voice. "It's late. Sound carries."
"It's always late. Sound's always carried. You've never once told me to whisper in a place that's already made entirely of concrete and men who don't sleep."
Matt didn't answer that.
Peter didn't push it, but Matt heard the careful way he lowered himself down the wall instead of his usual graceless drop.
"There was a building thing," Peter said, after a minute, quieter than his usual delivery. "Structure fire. Learned that's the real term for it tonight, as opposed to, I don't know, a fire that just wandered into a building uninvited." A pause, waiting for the usual reaction. When it didn't come, he kept going, flatter. "Nobody died. It just took a while to be sure of that part. And then it took a while to get down eleven flights, because the elevator was, predictably, part of the whole problem."
Matt listened under the words and hated that even now some part of him was still doing math — cataloguing the hitch in Peter's breathing, the raw edge in his voice, filing it next to everything else he wasn't allowed to have an opinion about out loud.
"You should go home," Matt said, heavier than he meant to.
"Yeah, probably." Peter didn't move. Matt heard him settle further into the floor instead, knees up, going nowhere. "You're being weird tonight."
"I'm always weird."
"You're being a different weird. There's a baseline weird, which, respectfully, I've made my peace with. This is not that."
Matt almost told him. It rose up— stop coming here, it isn't safe, someone's watching, someone's already asking — and he caught it and swallowed it down.
"You're not okay," Peter said instead. Not a question. Matt almost laughed at that, the reversal of it, the kid trying his own line back on him.
"I'm fine."
"You keep saying that like it's gonna start being true if you say it enough."
"It's worked before."
"Has it, though." Peter's voice had dropped the bit again, all the way this time, no performance left in it at all. "Because from where I'm sitting, you've been doing the thing where you go quiet and careful and fine, and it's usually right before you tell me nothing's wrong in a tone that means everything is."
Matt sat with that longer than he meant to.
"It's not about you," he said finally. True, and also not the whole answer.
"That's not actually reassuring, for the record."
"I know."
Peter didn't push past that . He was quieter than usual on the way out. No parting bit, no "same time tomorrow," just the scrape of fabric on brick going up instead of down, careful, the way he'd come in.
Matt sat in the dark long after the sound of him had gone and understood, with a clarity that didn't help at all, that he'd have to be a great deal more careful about what he almost let himself say.
He heard them coming before they'd decided to come.
That was the part nobody understood about the yard. It wasn't the men who worried him. It was the ten seconds before they became a problem. A shift in breathing. Weight moving off one foot. A conversation ending without ending.
Three of them. Gravel out front, unhurried. Two he hadn't bothered to place yet, flanking wide.
"Murdock." Gravel said. "Heard you used to be somebody."
Matt kept walking. "Heard a lot of things about me. Most of them wrong."
"Heard the mask part's true." Closer now. "Funny thing about a mask. Man behind it never has to answer for what he does in it. Some of us got people inside for a lot less."
"That's not how it worked."
"Don't much care how it worked." Gravel's voice hadn't moved. "Care that I know three guys in this building who did five, six years on account of a man in a mask deciding who deserved it. And here you are. Same building. No mask."
A shift in weight, right foot forward.
"Nobody here needs a story to finish today," he said, hands loose at his sides. "Whatever this is, it doesn't have to happen."
"It really doesn't," Gravel agreed. "That's the part you're not getting. This was never about whether it had to."
Matt heard the punch a half-second before it landed, which didn't matter, because there was nowhere useful to put that half-second when all he could think of was defending will just make it worse. It took him in the ribs, just weight, then pain, arriving in that order. He turned with it instead of bracing, which cost him the second one clean across the jaw. White noise. The taste of copper.
"Should've kept walking," Gravel said quietly.
The next hit folded him onto one knee.
After that it became efficient.
A boot.
A fist in his collar.
One more hard enough to remind him why staying down was easier than making anyone think he could fight back.
His hand caught a wrist on reflex.
He let go immediately.
Footsteps drifted away without hurry.
By the time anyone came looking, they were long gone.
Matt stayed where he was another few seconds, taking inventory instead of trying to breathe.
Rib.
Jaw.
Kidney.
Nothing that would keep.
He got to his feet before the guards arrived.
He told the first one he'd slipped.
Nobody argued.
Matt heard him coming from further out than usual.
"Okay, so, huge news, and I need you to understand this is genuinely the best thing that has happened to me in weeks, possibly ever, possibly this is the best thing that has ever happened to a person—" Peter dropped through the gap with his usual lack of grace, already talking before he'd fully landed. "I got a job."
Matt didn't move from where he was sitting, head down, slightly curled in on himself. Didn't trust himself yet to do anything but sit very still and let his ribs remind him, with every breath, exactly how bad an idea moving would be.
He should tell him to go. Right now, before the kid got close enough, before the light caught anything.
"A real one.” Spider-Man continued, unawares of Matt’s current condition. “With a schedule and everything, and before you ask, no, I can't tell you what it is, because it's boring, deeply boring, you'd fall asleep, I'd fall asleep telling you, it's not a whole thing—" The deflection came fast and practiced, the kind Matt recognized because he did versions of it himself. "But it pays. Like, actually pays. I did math today. I have never once in my life done math about money and had the math be good news, and today the math was good news, and I don't know what to do with that information so I'm just gonna keep saying it at you."
Matt sat there figuring out how a person was supposed to look a kid this happy in the general direction of his face and tell him not tonight, not now, go home.
"Congratulations," he said, and meant it. The word came out rougher than he'd intended.
"Right? Right. I'm gonna have, like, a normal amount of snacks now. Not emergency snacks. Not 'this is my one dollar and I'm spending it on a dare' snacks. Regular, sustainable, multiple-times-a-week snacks. Do you know how insane that is?"
Matt managed a quiet hum that was probably supposed to sound encouraging.
Peter kept going anyway.
"—and I know it's dumb, it's just a job, it's not, like, curing cancer, but it's mine, I got it on my own, nobody vouched for me, nobody knew me from before, I just showed up and they said yes, and I don't know, that felt like—"
Matt shifted, intending nothing more ambitious than sitting up a little straighter. His ribs had other ideas. He caught the breath before it became a sound. Or at least, he thought he did.
Peter stopped.
The silence had a different shape than any silence Matt had heard from him before — no rustle of a bag, no shift of weight settling in, nothing. Just stillness, sudden and complete, like something had reached out and switched him off mid-sentence.
“You’re really quiet tonight." Smaller this time. "Quieter than usual.”
Matt opened his mouth, but absolutely nothing useful came out. He could feel the kid coming closer and he tried to angle his head away on reflex, a gesture that would've fooled exactly no one.
"Matt."
Nothing left of the last two minutes in his voice now.
"Are you okay?"