what they wouldn't do | DAREDEVIL

thirty seven

Matt hadn't planned on joining Stick's crusade that night. But Stick had been waiting for Matt in his apartment when he got home from a deposition hearing, and—as usual—had been surprisingly convincing as to why Matt should come help him, despite the lack of warning and the fact that it was only just past five in the evening.

("Not that either of us would know for sure, but I think it's still daylight out," Matt had tried to argue.

"Not underground, it isn't.")

It had been enough to catch his curiosity. Stick had been confident that it would be a short recon mission, just checking out the space to make plans. If he had been lying about that, Matt couldn't tell—but then, he could never tell with Stick.

He hadn't been expecting so many opponents, or for them to move so quickly and silently, and he especially hadn't been expecting them to have bows and arrows. He could only guess that Stick hadn't been expecting it either, or surely they would have brought more backup, enlisted some other poor souls that Stick had under his thumb.

But instead it was just the two of them, and somewhere in the ensuing scuffle Matt didn't move quick enough.

He heard the arrow flying toward him and curved away, but it grazed him. He lifted his hand to the back of his neck to check the damage, and there wasn't much blood. Nothing to worry about. So why did he feel so dazed? He'd gotten hurt much worse than this before, but this was different—something was wrong. His balance was going, and he stumbled, still trying to fight off the men around him. One of them delivered a sharp kick to his already cracked ribs, and he lost his footing completely, falling to the ground.

As he tried to get up, the sounds around him grew painfully loud. It was impossible to distinguish one noise from another among the roar. Shouts, bodies moving, weapons swinging—it all blurred into a cacophony of sounds he couldn't make sense of.

Then, very suddenly, the noise gone. All of it. He couldn't hear anything going on around him. He tried to push his senses further, figure out the placement of objects around him, but there was nothing. The pain spread through him, down his spine and through his limbs, to the point where he couldn't tell if it was coming from his attackers or from his own veins. He felt like he was screaming, but he couldn't be sure.

The line between being conscious and unconscious blurred—there was little to let him know when he was awake and when he wasn't. Time and location were impossible to gage; all Matt could really be sure of was that while this might not have been the traditional Catholic idea of hell, it was definitely his own personal version: being lost in nothingness. It pressed in around him, and no matter how hard he tried to reach out there was nothing there but pain shooting through his veins. He lashed out at anything that came near him, but it was difficult to tell if he was just imagining it.

Then somewhere along the way, the pain started to fade a little, but he couldn't remember how or why. There was someone there with him, touching him with gentle hands and guiding him to lie down. There was only one person he could imagine it being, but it didn't make any sense for her to be there. He was deep underground somewhere, far from her.

Maybe this wasn't real. He was just slowly losing his mind, and this was his brain's way of trying to make it easier on himself. But his body was already reacting, his muscles relaxing just a fraction at the familiar contact, and he found that he really didn't care if he was imagining her. Real or not, leaning into the feel of her touch helped some of the panic fade away, so he focused on the feel her fingers in his hair as he slipped from one kind of nothingness into another.

—

As predicted, Sarah didn't really fall asleep that night. Instead she drifted in and out of a semi-conscious state, vaguely aware of the heavy weight of Matt's head on her lap, the slow expanding of his ribcage underneath her hand. She was on the more unconscious side of said state when she was startled awake by Matt abruptly jolting into a sitting position with a shuddering gasp.