what they wouldn't do | DAREDEVIL

chapter thirteen: in the dark

                  THE WEATHER WAS STEADILY getting warmer, and Sarah found that she didn't need her sweater for the walk home, even with the evening chill. She folded it up and fidgeted with the fabric in her hands as she and Matt made their way through an alleyway, letting her mind drift to the comfortable bed that was waiting for her at home.

         Matt was a good bit taller than she was, and she had to take two steps for each of his strides. It wasn't until she tripped over a flattened cardboard box that he seemed to notice how quickly she was walking to keep up with him, and he slowed down.

         Sarah glanced over at him as he fell back to keep in step with her.

         "Are you sure you can afford to walk me home?" she asked him. "Isn't there, like...crime you should be stopping?"

         He shook his head. "Most of it won't start up for another couple of hours, when people start leaving the bars. But I'm keeping an ear out."

         "Oh," she said, then squinted at him. "So, at any moment you might just...parkour away and leave me in this maze of sketchy alleyways?"

         Matt chuckled. "It's possible. You might want to actually start telling me about what happened at work, just in case."

         Sarah blushed as she realized that she'd been walking in silence for the first ten minutes of the walk, so completely lost in her own thoughts that she had forgotten she was supposed to be updating him on Orion. After all, he wasn't just walking her home to be nice; this was still a business meeting of sorts.

         "Sorry," she muttered tiredly. "You should have said something."

         He shrugged. "I figured you'd snap back to earth eventually. What happened today?"

         "Nothing good. I got promoted," she said gloomily.

         "Promoted to...what?"

         "I can't really tell what my new title is. It was all very vague. Like a secretary, but with extra stuff. Something about running errands, which sounds less than legal," she grumbled. "I'll be working for Jason now. Which I'm not looking forward to. He's very...unsettling is the word, I guess."

         "How so?" Matt asked suspiciously.

         "I don't know. It's hard to describe. It's like he's not even human. I...I just can't read him. I don't understand what he's thinking or what he wants. With Ronan, at least I knew what he wanted," she said, and even in the dark she could see Matt's jaw twitch in that now-familiar way. "And that was awful, obviously, but not being able to read Jason at all is worse."

         "You think he's going to try to hurt you?"

         "No," she said slowly. "Well, not right now. But I also get the feeling that if I wound up dead, he wouldn't care at all. Which makes me a little nervous about the kinds of errands he'll be sending me on. A lot nervous, actually. Ronan was...a lot of awful thing. Mean, and creepy, and gross. But he was also dumb, which was nice. Jason is smart, and I know he doesn't trust me."

         "Do you think you'll still be able to stay below the radar?"

         She frowned and looked down, carefully stepping over a few plastic crates scattered around the ground. "I mean, I'm going to try, obviously. But in case you haven't noticed, I'm not very good at all of this, so who knows."

         "You're doing alright."

         Sarah had to laugh at that. "I'm doing awful. I'm the Amelia Bedelia of spies, Matt."