Work Text:
Black Suit, Black Tie – Standing in the Rain
Matt could hear Natasha’s heart on the other side of the door. And he almost didn’t answer it. Because he didn’t know what exactly was coming but it was bad. He could feel it in the roar in his ears, in the hitch to his mom’s breath outside, in her presence here, unannounced. He could smell the wreckage of New York on her; hear the grind of the gravel caught in her clothes as she moved.
She shouldn’t be here.
“Matt? You going to answer the door or just listen to it?” Foggy yelled from the living room. They’d been riveted to the TV, tracking the aftershocks of the battle as they waited to hear if the water in their neighborhood was safe to drink.
Matt was tempted to say “Just listen to it, what else?” but not as a joke, no, he was serious here. He didn’t want to answer the door. For the first time in his life he didn’t want to see his mom. The city outside his window was a crumbling wreck and twelve hours ago the sky fell during what should have been just another day at Landman & Zack and three hours ago he and Natasha and Clint clung to each other like shipwreck survivors and spoke Russian to each other in a half-flattened shwarma joint (Matt had given each of his parents one last crushing hug before leaving – going back to his soulless internship because the powers that be hadn’t given him leave to vacate the office they’d all been huddled in when the fighting had stopped and he’d gone tearing off through the city. He hadn’t said goodbye to his parents, hadn’t met the other Avengers, he wasn’t really much for words right then, and Natasha and Clint had understood that.). And now, for the first time in his life, he didn’t want to see his mom because she wasn’t supposed to be here. She should be at SHIELD, with Clint, being debriefed by Coulson and maybe Fury.
Her presence outside his door right now meant nothing good.
Heart twisting in his throat, Matt eased the door open. “Mom. Why are you here?”
Natasha had never believed in sugar-coating, never tried to ease him into the hard truths about life. “Phil’s dead,” she said in a low, raspy, wounded voice and Matt knew it was true.
And for a split second Matt understood what it must have been like for Captain America, plunging into the ice, freezing all at once because those were ice shards in Matt’s veins, weren’t they? Ice, chill eating up his whole body.
Phil Coulson was dead.
And Matt hadn’t heard it.
Hadn’t heard his heart stop beating.
Hadn’t heard him call for help.
If he had.
“But…he was family,” Matt managed to say, even though it didn’t make sense, even though he knew, he fucking knew that being ‘family’ didn’t mean jack shit. Love didn’t keep you safe. It didn’t keep a bullet out of his father’s body.
It didn’t save Phil. His uncle. His mentor. His friend.
“I know,” Natasha replied, just as nonsensically.
And Matt slumped forward, burying his face in the crook of her neck and letting her wrap him in a hug like she had when he was so much smaller, younger, weaker.
“Where’s Clint? Does he know?” Matt asked.
“He’s in Medical, getting checked over. They’re doing a preliminary psych eval. Because of the mind control.”
“Yeah. Does he know?”
“Yes.”
Matt nodded and sniffled slightly. Natasha combed her fingers through his hair like she used to, when he was young, before he got to be taller than her.
They clung to each other, shipwreck survivors again.
…
“One of these days you’re going to open a drawer in here you aren’t supposed to and I can guarantee you won’t like the results,” Phil observed dryly from the doorway as a preteen Matt Murdock jumped guiltily and slammed the desk drawer he’d been poking through closed.
“Hi…Phil…”
He heard the slight, barely-there creak of the doorframe as Phil leaned against it, the near-silent shuffle of the man’s suit sliding over his arms as he crossed them over his chest. “Feel free to take your time with your excuse, Matt, I’m not going anywhere.”
Matt felt the blood rush to his face and ducked his head, embarrassed, “I just wanted to know what was in there.”
“And asking didn’t seem like a relevant alternative to snooping?” Phil asked archly.
“Um. No.”
“Eloquent.” Phil observed dryly and Matt bristled.
“Hey, you don’t get to catch me red-handed and criticize my excuse-making technique!” the boy protested, “Just skip to the yelling part already!”
The doorframe whisper-creaked again as Phil pushed himself upright, “What makes you think I’m going to start yelling?”
“You’re mad, aren’t you?”
“Does your mom yell at you when she’s mad?” Phil momentarily sounded honestly concerned and that only got Matt’s hackles up.
“No,” the boy growled. Being the Black Widow’s son was like being a freaking unicorn. No one believed you existed and when they did find out about you they tended to think you were being mistreated and needed rescuing. He hated all those agents with their pinched faces and judgmental stares as they asked their carefully-framed questions. Like they were just waiting for Matt to break down wailing about how Natasha was a terrible mother, how lonely and wounded and deprived he was. Well screw them. He wasn’t lonely, he wasn’t wounded, and he wasn’t deprived. Natasha was a good mom, the best mom; Natasha took care of him and helped him make the world softer, more manageable. She helped him be a real person instead of just a transit station for the rest of the world’s scents and sounds.
Matt had thought Phil was different. He bit back the sharp sting of disappointment and grit his teeth instead.
But the rasp of Phil’s starched collar against his neck suggested he was… nodding? “Of course she doesn’t yell at you,” and he actually sounded like he believed it, “And when your mother is upset with you what does she do?”
“Talks to me about it like a reasonable person?”
“Then let’s talk. Like reasonable people.”
Matt blinked. This was… decidedly not normal. In Matt’s experience, the majority of what adults did, at least in relation to people his age, was shout at children. He just assumed that his dad, Natasha, and Clint were the exceptions to this quasi-universal rule.
But here was Phil, and he should be angry, should be yelling like the guys at his dad’s gym used to when he’d get under their feet, like the nuns had before thwacking him with a ruler for being out of line. But he…wasn’t. He had moved; was now standing serenely beside his desk, having steered Matt firmly but gently away from the drawers he’d been investigating when he got caught.
“So, Matt. You wanted to know what was in my desk drawers. So you snooped. Without asking.”
“Doesn’t asking for permission negate the act of ‘snooping’?” Matt asked, before he could stop himself.
Phil, surprisingly, laughed, a small, dry chuckle, but a laugh. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. So. You were snooping. Why?”
Matt shrugged, “I couldn’t tell what was in your desk drawers.”
Phil’s silence was essentially an invitation to continue, so Matt did, “I can hear, well, pretty much everything. And normally I can figure out stuff like what’s in a desk drawer from the sounds that come from it when someone opens it. So I wanted to figure out what was in your desk, because I couldn’t figure out the sounds.”
He could hear Phil nod. “Reasonable. Except, Matt, please remember who I am and where we are. Some of the things in my desk can be or are very dangerous. Ask me next time you want to poke through my desk.”
Matt nodded glumly.
“Also,” Phil continued, “To further dissuade you from burglarizing my office furniture, I’m asking your mother to lend you to me for the afternoon. I need someone to make copies, hole-punch things, staple things…really, all of the average office minutiae we delegate to an underling.”
Matt opened his mouth to protest against this treatment when Phil’s phone pinged.
“As, yes, there’s you mother,” Phil narrated the irritatingly prompt text, “She seems to think this is a splendid idea, that it will ‘keep you out of trouble’. Excellent. Matthew, you are my new secretary for the day.”
Matt groaned theatrically, because when you’re twelve there is nothing so terrible as being forced to do office work. But Phil was chuckling and Matt was pretty sure his mom and Clint would think this was funny, and it was good to be somewhere he almost belonged.
…
There were two funerals for Phil, one with the Avengers and one without. Matt didn’t go to the one with. It was just a memorial service and hey, look, there were a thousand things to do at the office, and when Natasha told him to cut the crap and stow the excuses he’d let his shoulders sag and admitted, voice sounding too small, too fragile, to his own ears, “I can’t do it. I can’t say goodbye to Phil in front of strangers.”
And Natasha had understood.
Matt had told her that he’d spend the night working on paperwork for L&Z (ironic, really, an internship wasn’t much different from running errands for Phil at SHIELD had been all those years ago). Matt didn’t lie to Natasha much, but he lied to her the night of the memorial. He was pretty sure she knew. She just didn’t stop him.
Foggy tried to. “Matt, you’re grieving, the city’s a fucking mess. Put away the damn supersuit.”
Matt just shook his head and grabbed his body armor – body armor, body armor that Phil had gotten him when Clint and Kate peeled him off the pavement that night he almost died.
“Matt, now is not the time, you’re going to get yourself killed and them I’ll probably be out a roommate and definitely out a best friend. Matt, goddammit, listen to me.”
Matt stopped and turned to his friend, Kevlar and leather still caught in his clenched fingers, “The city’s broken, Foggy. I can hear…all the cracks.” It was harder and harder to keep up his filter in the wake of the invasion. He kept being caught by surprise when sound came from a different angle, when the air currents shifted and pulled, yanking voices and car horns and music – the beat and pulse of New York City tugged and twisted in new and strange directions around the wreckage.
“Matt, I do not have time for your impressionist – expressionist – romantic hero bullshit right now.”
“Romanticism was an artistic movement nearly a century before expressionism or impressionism.”
“Matt. You are hurting. You’re more than a little messed up right now. Putting on your fancy spandex and going out to save the city from itself is probably the dumbest thing you could do right now.”
Matt just shrugged, “There’s looters two streets over, someone’s pushing a new drug three blocks away, a teenage girl got separated from her friends, she’s calling people, trying to get a ride. She’s sacred. She should be, I haven’t managed to completely crack the newest human trafficking ring.” Phil had been helping him get intel on that. Phil was dead.
Foggy sighed. “I get it, buddy. I get it.” A surrender; then, or maybe a compromise, “Just don’t get killed, okay? I don’t think Kate wants to be down a big brother and I definitely don’t want to be down a best friend.” Foggy’s humor was brittle, but appreciated.
Matt nodded tersely before vanishing into his bedroom to don his body armor and beat his fists bloody on this damn city.
His damn city.
Across town, he thought he could catch the barest hints of sound, the smell of sad appetizers (expensive, of course, tastefully dismal – Tony Stark threw the best parties – even funeral ones).
He couldn’t, of course. There was too much sensory input; the city was just too dense with sound and smell for his range to extend that far. Not even his senses were that acute.
He hit extra hard to drown it all out anyway.
…
Jack Murdock’s funeral had been small and dirt cheap. His gravestone was simple, almost painfully Spartan, but what about gravestones wasn’t painful? They didn’t stop hurting until everyone who remembered when they were a person, not a name on a rock, was in the ground with them.
After the funeral broke up, dissipating like aspirin in a glass of water, Matt knelt on the fresh grave and ran shivering fingers over the letters on the headstone. He couldn’t remember if the day was actually cold, he just remembered his fingers, the shake that wouldn’t leave them.
‘Jack Murdock’ it read, rattling off his birth and death dates beneath his name, cold, dead numbers. Matt always hated math. It was so immutable, so permanent. You couldn’t bend math, you couldn’t craft it or change it. It just was. And then, there, beneath the hateful numbers, was the inscription ‘fight the good fight’. Matt couldn’t puzzle it out. Was it an instruction? A description? A stab at gallows humor? What was his father thinking when he asked for those words, wrote them out in his will and made it all permanent?
Matt didn’t know. Matt didn’t understand. Matt would have to go with Sister Agatha, who hovered at the edge of the burial plot, her wimple snapping testily in the gray wind. She’d be wearing all black, wouldn’t she, she was a nun and this was a funeral. Matt thought she must look like an oversized vulture or crow perched there on the edge of things. Of course, he wouldn’t know.
‘Fight the good fight.’
Matt ran his fingers over the inscription again and again and again, hands rougher, gestures jerkier every time. His fingertips started to feel raw and bruised.
‘Fight the good fight.’
But, Dad, what does that mean?
…
Matt would attend Coulson’s second funeral, the real one, that wasn’t just a memorial service. It’d probably be one of two ‘real’ funerals (one of three vaguely funeral-like gatherings). Right now all Phil’s blood family knew was that he’d gone missing in the chaos of the Battle of New York (as the news outlets had begun to call it). Fury would probably wait a bit before telling them, giving the imaginary paramedics and relief workers an imaginary realistic amount of time to find and ID a body that was already really in the ground. There’d be another funeral then, where his blood family could mourn his tragic death in the catastrophe. Collateral damage in the war.
This first funeral was for his SHIELD family, the people who’d known him best, the people who would honor his sacrifice for what it was: noble. Who would know and respect that he’d fallen in the line of duty.
Clint had almost not come. He’d been alternatively jittery and morose since the end of the battle. Natasha said he’d even had withdrawal symptoms the third day. Matt hadn’t been allowed to see him, even though he was family. Clint hadn’t wanted anyone but Natasha in the room with him as he sweated and thrashed his way through feverish quasi-delirium.
“He didn’t want to risk hurting you or Kate,” Natasha had explained to Matt quietly in the hallway, where he’d been exiled.
“Just be glad Kate is out of state at college, then,” Matt said, “She’d have broken in. I’m the good child.”
Natasha had squeezed his fingers gently, but the usual humor felt a little hollow after everything that had happened. (Kate would have broken in. She’d threatened to leave campus, drop out, anything to get back to New York in the wake of the freaking alien invasion. But Natasha had told her no in her command voice, the one that brooked no argument, not even a dissenting thought. Kate had stayed at school, under protest.)
“Do you ever regret letting our family,” Matt gestured vaguely, “Be more than just us?”
Natasha hummed, then sighed. “I don’t know sometimes, Polygraph.”
That was okay. Matt understood what she meant.
…
“Hey, Phil,” teenage Matt Murdock was all wayward limbs, gawky and over-angular as he grew into a new body. Natasha’s insistence on a daily training regimen (dance, martial arts, fine-motor skills) and Matt’s own enhanced, albeit unique, spatial awareness was really the only thing keeping him from being a complete disaster on legs.
“Hey, Matt,” Phil adjusted his speed so the teenager could trot at his side. Matt in motion was like a landslide, everything moving, everything displaced by everything else. Matt sitting still was like a porcelain figurine, like something unreal, perfectly frozen.
“I need someone to help me practice for mock trial class and I was wondering…” Matt didn’t so much as trail off as stop, abrupt and suddenly unsure. “Can you practice debate with me?” he finally asked, each word precisely placed, stiff with fastidious exactitude.
“Why me?” Phil asked, apparently curious.
Matt had shrugged, “Mom doesn’t so much debate as inform people of their erroneous thinking – ” in a tone that brooked no argument and took no prisoners – “And Clint’s version of ‘debate’ tends to involve his fists or just shouting illogical things at people until they’re too turned around to stop him when he jumps out a window.”
This…was all very true.
Phil blinked at the boy, “But, why me?”
“It was you or Fury and he doesn’t have much patience for me.” Matt was utterly unapologetic about that fact. Winding Fury up was fun now that Matt was old enough to know better but young enough to still risk it.
Phil nodded wryly, “Very well, I’ll help you prep for debate.”
Matt beamed.
…
In Matt’s experience, it never rained on the day of a funeral. Movies lied about that. Meteorological patterns did not conform to expectations. There was never a good old-fashioned sad-scene-montage thunderstorm.
That was good; thunderstorms gave Matt migraines.
The day of Phil Coulson’s SHIELD funeral dawned lightly overcast and faded into partly sunny as the clouds burned off in the afternoon. It was windy, not in an elegant cinematic way, just in a dreary, persistent, annoying way. Matt wore one of his work suits (the sales associate had assured him they were all black and he had no reason to disbelieve her). Foggy helped him pick out a black tie the day before the funeral. It was their most subdued shopping trip to date. Normally Foggy was all over the novelty tie section, him and Kate pushing more and more outlandish neckware on a laughing Matt.
Phil bought him his first real suit, when Matt was fifteen. The suit Matt had worn to his father’s funeral was an ill-fitting monstrosity dug out of the church donation bin – not his, not really. The suit Phil helped him find actually fit right and the trousers and jacket were lined in silk because that was apparently a sign of good quality formalwear or something. Matt was tempted to wear the damn thing every day just for that silk lining.
Clint and Natasha met him at his and Foggy’s apartment and the four of them climbed in Foggy’s battered car to creep through city traffic out to the graveyard. No one spoke for a solid twenty minutes, not even Foggy, who usually at least had some commentary on his fellow drivers for Matt’s benefit.
Clint sighed gustily in the back seat; Matt heard the creak of his stepfather’s leather jacket as his head sagged. “I fucking hate funerals,” Clint muttered, the words heavy with emotion beyond articulation.
Matt heard Natasha tangle her fingers with Clint’s and pull him over to lean against her, freeing one of her hands to wrap an arm around his shoulders.
“You know,” Foggy sighed gustily, “When I met Phil I was 99% sure he hated my guts. I mean; I was terrified of him, and I kind of babble when I’m uncomfortable, right? And he just kept watching me, all impassive and everything while I just kept talking and talking… and when I told Matt later that I was pretty sure his uncle was going to send scary government hit-people after to me to shut me up permanently you know what he does? He laughs his ass off because he’s a jerk – ” Matt gave him a weak grin in return, “And tells me all off-hand: ‘Oh, Phil likes you, he thinks you’re interesting’. And he just left it at that. I spent the next week pretty sure I was going to wake up in some government lab somewhere. Interesting. What does that even mean?”
That was enough to pry a raspy chuckle out of Clint and a smile from Natasha. Matt couldn’t see his mom’s face, but something just told him she was smiling that thoughtful, halfway sad Mona Lisa smile of hers.
They rode the rest of the way to the funeral in silence, but it was lighter somehow.
…
“Mom’s going to kill you when she finds out you’re teaching me how to shoot.”
“I’m teaching you gun safety and proper handling and maintenance,” Phil said primly, “No one said anything about letting you shoot anything.”
Matt Murdock, thirteen and pretty sure he knew pretty much everything, rolled his eyes. “We’re at a shooting range, Phil.”
“Yes, we are. And have we shot anything yet? No.”
“No, we’re preparing to shoot things.”
“Maybe.”
“Mom’s gonna be mad.”
“Maybe.”
“Can I shoot something yet?”
Phil sighed, but didn’t sound particularly annoyed, “Show me you can take that handgun apart, put it back together and reload it in 90 seconds or less and I will teach you how to shoot it. Safely. Because your mother really will have my head on a platter if you get hurt because I let you talk me into this.”
Matt grinned. No, he couldn’t possibly do all that in 90 seconds. Not yet. But he liked a challenge and today could have been boring. Instead they were here and if he was good enough he’d get to learn how to do what his mom did. Sort of.
“Focus, Matt.”
“Okay, okay.”
…
The casket was empty.
They were at the funeral; Fury was talking, giving a speech. It was a good speech, Matt was sure.
He didn’t hear a word of it. Because the casket was empty.
There was a body, or there should have been. Phil was stabbed, through and through. With Loki’s scepter. That would have left a body. Enough to bury.
But the casket was empty.
Matt had gotten very, very good at listening to the insides of things in the years since he’d been caught snooping in Phil’s desk. Even if everything was still, it wasn’t, not really. Not with the wind rattling the coffin’s sides, ruffling hair, tugging at clothes. And those echoes, the ones from the rattling coffin? They rebounded on and on and on.
There was no body in there.
The casket was empty.
Phil Coulson wasn’t there.
Matt’s brain, still and cold with shock when he first registered the coffin’s vacancy, warmed up and began to turn.
…
“I hate everything.”
“No you don’t.”
Seventeen-year-old Matt buried his face in a couch cushion (a mistake, a mistake, a terrible mistake – couch cushions smelled foul) and groaned theatrically.
“You’re too old to be doing that, Matt,” Phil said coolly from the kitchen table.
Matt mumbled something vaguely offensive into the vile couch cushion. Phil apparently elected to just ignore his teenage histrionics. Matt pried his face out of the couch’s musty embrace to explain, “Life sucks. And all evidence points to it continuing to suck until I die.”
“Well it certainly will with that attitude,” Phil observed blandly.
Matt flopped back onto the couch, on his back this time, to avoid getting up close and personal with couch-related odors again. “Mom and Clint are off on missions and I’m here and school is killing me and the SATs are killing me and can I please just graduate already?”
Phil huffed, a soft, understanding exhalation of breath, “What about school sucks?”
“People,” Matt grumbled, “You don’t have friends in high school, you have allies and enemies unless you’re really, really lucky. And no one thinks the blind guy’s gonna make a good ally,” he sighed, the melodramatic front dissipating in the face of real, raw emotion, “It’s just…exhausting. Knowing all their secrets. Knowing exactly what they say about each other, exactly what they say about me. It’s…hard. And classes are boring and I just want to get out.”
“I understand.” Phil said, tone unequivocal, straightforward and strangely real. He actually meant it. Matt irrationally wanted to laugh from the sheer relief of someone just saying that, just saying they understood.
“I understand,” his pseudo-uncle elaborated, “Because I was a lot like you in school. Always bored, always on the outside. I don’t know if I put myself there or if my peers did it for me. I was just always there and I didn’t know how to be any different,” the rasp of his shirt as he shrugged, “I didn’t really want to be different either, I guess. I don’t know, hindsight changes things, I suppose. But it does get better. I know, it sounds ridiculous. But it does.”
“You didn’t have to listen to it all the time,” Matt pointed out.
Phil gave a self-deprecating chuckle, “You’d be surprised what you hear when no one notices you. Do your math homework in the library long enough and you’ll have enough secrets to blackmail the whole school to hell and back.”
“Did you? Blackmail the whole school?”
“No,” Phil admitted, “Too many morals. And I was too chicken.”
That startled a laugh out of Matt.
“But Matt? Just, don’t worry. Things have a way of sorting themselves out.”
“Do they?”
“Yes. I promise they do.”
“Good.”
A moment of silence and then, “Hey Phil?”
“Yes, Matt?”
“Can you help me study for the SAT? Clint pulls his ‘who me, I’m just a dumb carnie’ routine every time I get the study guides out and Mom starts muttering angrily in Russian about standardized testing halfway through.”
Phil chuckled, “Sure.”
“Thanks, Phil.”
“No problem.”
…
Matt needed to break this down logically, needed it to make sense. Why would Fury keep the body out of the casket? It made no sense. The official story to the family was that Phil was one of the people lost in the destruction of the Battle of New York. When the EMTs finally ‘found’ him he’d be 'too battered’ for an open casket. They didn’t need to keep the body around for the blood family. Why not bury it here and now, with his SHIELD family in attendance?
It made no sense.
Three funeral-like events and there wouldn’t be a body for any of them. The Avengers’ memorial service was just that, a service; no body. The SHIELD funeral Matt had just attended and he would swear on everything he had that there was no body in that coffin. And the third funeral, the one for the blood family, they couldn’t risk having a body on-site in case a relative spotted the giant alien scepter hole in his chest.
Three funeral-ish events and no body.
No body, no crime.
Matt’s wildly churning mind came to a sudden, grinding halt.
No body, no crime.
Phil Coulson was alive.
…
“Hey, Matt, what’cha reading?” Foggy asked casually, dumping a bag full of library books on his desk chair.
Matt, who sat on his bed, legs crossed, a torn shipping box and its contents scattered around him, hummed absently, “Hmm? Oh, you’re back.”
“Yeah, I have returned most victorious!” Foggy said faux-dramatically, “The library has ne’er vanquished me yet!”
“I’m pretty sure that’s an improper use of the word ‘ne’er’, Shakespeare would be so disappointed,” Matt said blandly, continuing to flip through the spiral-bound pages in his hands.
“Hey, who here is the theatre minor?”
“Neither of us; you still haven’t submitted your paperwork to the registrar.”
“Hey, I’m working on it; it’s only sophomore year, I’ve got time.”
Matt hummed distractedly.
“Hey, you never answered my question. What are you reading? And why is there an abacus, half of a broken marble, and a novelty alligator head on your bed?”
Matt blinked, forcing his attention away from the pages in his hands, “They’re clues. And I’m reading a truly terrible novel.” He then turned his attention back to the novel.
“Um. What? Matt, that poses more questions than it answers.”
Matt sighed and set the terrible excuse for literature down to fully address his roommate’s (completely valid) questions. “So this is going to sound really weird.”
“Dude, I’m pretty sure your mom is a mafia hit-woman and your stepfather is basically broke Batman with a bow arrow. Okay, so that would be broke Green Arrow, still, whatever. Your life is crazy, man, I am beyond questioning the weird stuff your family does.”
“Foggy. You know what my parents do.”
“Well, yeah, but I definitely thought ‘mafia hit-woman’ for your mom before I found out about the spy thing, which, for the record, was my second guess.”
“Okay, whatever,” Matt steered them back on track, he wanted to get back to the novel, “My uncle, he likes mysteries, puzzles, riddles, that kind of stuff. So he does this thing where he’ll send me a letter with the riddle or mystery on it and then a week later he sends me a box of clues to use to solve it. And I see how long it takes to crack it.”
Foggy blinked, Matt could hear the click and slide of his eyelids. “Your uncle went out and tracked down a Braille copy of a crappy novel, picked up a souvenir alligator skull, cracked a marble in half, and bought and abacus…just to play some kind of weird puzzle-game?”
Matt shrugged, “To be fair, he probably printed the book out on a Braille printer, possibly illegally if you can even do that, and he already owned all the other stuff.”
Foggy blinked again. “Okay, so your family’s a little nuts, but they’re totally awesome.”
Matt nodded magnanimously. This was all true.
Now back to reading his terrible novel (and he and Phil would be having words about having to read this drivel) and calculating whether or not he could, even encumbered with reading the whole damn novel, still have a chance of beating his last record time for fastest Phil-provided puzzle solved.
…
Matt felt a little bit guilty about stealing Phil’s deck of vintage Captain America from the very nice memorial Tony had put up for him on one of the private floors of Stark Tower. He justified it internally by pointing out that Fury had splattered them with blood and then lied about Phil’s survival so really theft was the lesser of two evils.
Matt really needed to go to confession.
Luckily, the tower was deserted, the immense structural damage keeping even Tony Stark out (he was holed up at a hotel, as were Thor, Dr. Banner, Dr. Foster and various and sundry non-New-York-based personnel). Sneaking in and stealing the cards? A piece of cake.
Until the ceiling started talking.
“Whatever are you up to, Mr. Daredevil?” a posh British accent with no body, what was the deal with absentee bodies lately, interrupted Matt’s touch-aided inspection of the various sentimental and meaningful knickknacks arranged beneath the memorial plaque.
Matt saw no real reason to lie, although his subconscious saw many, many reasons to run, run far away from the voice that may or may not be a celestial being. “Gathering evidence.”
“Evidence of what?” the voice sounded wary but inquisitive, although Matt couldn’t really know, could he, because all those little physical cues that helped him understand the people he spoke to every day were gone now. No heartbeat, no breath, no scent. It was…jarring, and more than a little unnerving.
Matt pressed his lips together, wishing he could take off his gloves to feel the objects as he skated his fingers over them. But he couldn’t risk leaving fingerprints behind. He knew his stats were buried in some SHIELD database somewhere; there was no such thing as anonymity as soon as he left a fingerprint or DNA sample behind.
“Who wants to know?” Matt asked. Tony Stark was a technology kingpin; Matt wouldn’t put it past him to leave behind some sort of artificially-intelligent security system.
“At this moment, only me,” the voice said, “But should your actions prove a threat to Mr. Stark or his associates, I will notify them immediately.”
“And who are you?” Matt asked.
“I am JARVIS – Just a Rather Very Intelligent System.”
“You’re Tony Stark’s robot butler.” Matt said flatly, half-disbelieving. Bizarrely, he was struck with the sudden and overwhelming wish to talk to his father. Robot butlers, spies, aliens falling from the sky – Dad would have loved this.
“The city’s changing, Matty. The future’s coming on quick,” He used to say on soft, easy nights when he didn’t have a fight or an odd job to keep him away from home, when he and Matt would sit on their tiny apartment’s tiny fire escape and watch the lights of other people’s homes, cars, lives pass before and around them.
“I suppose one could define me as such,” JARVIS said stiffly.
“And you would define yourself as?” Matt asked, tone playful but intent serious.
“I am whatever I need to be.”
Matt grinned, a bleak baring of teeth, “Sounds like something Phil would say.”
“Indeed. Now, Mr. Daredevil, why is it that you’re ransacking Agent Coulson’s shrine this late at night?”
Matt sucked in a breath and debated the pros and cons of admitting his suspicions to a sentient computer system. Then the little, half-rational voice in the back of his head threw up its metaphorical hands and said ‘fuck it’. “I think Phil Coulson’s alive,” he said succinctly, “And I’m trying to find him.”
“Hence the evidence,” JARVIS observed.
“Yes.”
“Would you be opposed to some aid, Mr. Daredevil?”
Matt blinked, hands stuttering momentarily to a halt, fingers tangled in a tiny sea of Phil-centric memorabilia, “In finding the cards or in finding Phil?”
“In finding Agent Coulson. You are just one man, despite your exploits. Am I remiss in thinking you might welcome some assistance?”
“You can’t tell Tony Stark.”
“Wouldn’t think of it.”
Dammit, he couldn’t tell if a computer system was lying. No heartbeat. No tells. “If you betray me,” he hesitated momentarily, “I don’t know what I’ll do, but it will be terrible,” he added a hint of the Daredevil growl to the end of his words, a ghost of the voice he used on drug runners and muggers in the streets.
“Of course, sir.”
“Then, JARVIS, let’s find Phil.”
…
“We’re doing what this summer?” fourteen-year-old Matt Murdock gaped incredulously at the (possibly insane) adults in his life.
“Your parents are needed for a deep-cover mission.” Phil said blandly.
“In suburbia. A deep-cover mission in the suburbs.” Matt said, still disbelieving.
“Yes. Now, we could send them in as a young couple, buying a first home, that sort of thing. But we prefer the couple-with children angle. A child would give them social cachet,” Phil broke everything down, voice dry, amusement fluttering at the end of each word, (Matt could hear Clint's muffled snickers in the background), “If we send them in as newlyweds they have the benefit of being young and cute – every quasi-established couple will want to mentor them, show them around, give them all kinds of advice… However, this has the drawback of turning them into everyone’s ‘pet project’ rather than putting them on the same level as their neighbors. A child would elevate them, mark them as peers.” The shift and slide of skin on paper told Matt Phil was folding his hands on top of the stack of files on his desk. “So, Matt, do you want to spend the summer playing spy in the suburbs with your Mom and Clint?”
Matt sighed. “I don’t have a choice, do I?”
Phil shrugged, “It’s that or summer camp.”
Matt sighed again. SHIELD’s version of ‘summer camp’ was a toned-down version of woodland bootcamp for the children of agents. Needless to say, tramping through the woods with a pack of his sighted peers – many of which had grown up together and already formed the kind of alliances usually only seen in wilderness survival reality tv shows – was less than appealing.
Matt sighed again, “What do I need to know?”
He could hear Phil smiling, the bastard, “It will all be in the briefing tomorrow. Don’t be late.”
Matt pulled a face, feeling sure he’d been outmaneuvered and not sure exactly how. “Okay, I’ll be there.”
A spy mission…to the suburbs. Matt was pretty sure his ‘what I did last summer’ essay next semester was going to be heavily redacted.
…
“Matt…” whatever Foggy was going to say was interrupted by an enormous yawn, “What the hell are you doing?”
Matt blinked, “What time is it?”
“Late.”
“Why are you awake?”
Foggy yawned again, “Was asleep, heard something out here, thought I’d make sure you hadn’t collapsed on the floor full of bullet holes or something.”
“I’ve never done that.”
“There’s a first time for everything. Stop avoiding the question.” Foggy flopped on the other end of the couch, heartbeat still slow and sleepy. “Why’re you still awake at 2am?”
“I’m working.”
“On what? We’re interns. Our work is the definition of boring.”
“Personal project. Family thing.” Maybe if Matt kept it vague enough Foggy would leave it alone.
Foggy did not leave it alone. “Uh-huh. And what exactly is this ‘family thing’? Because Clint’s out on sick leave, and Natasha’s taking time off to help him get his head on straight and Kate’s at school.” He didn’t mention Phil being dead. Foggy was tactful like that.
“Um.” Matt pushed his tired brain into gear, reaching for an excuse Foggy would believe. “Kate’s got a paper. I’m proofreading.” That was a good excuse, right? Nice and simple and believable…and he’d waited too long before saying something, hadn’t he? He never was a very good liar.
“And Kate’s ‘paper’ needs a SHIELD database that I know you don’t have a password for?” And that was Foggy wasn’t it? He let you walk right into the trap before catching you. He was smart like that.
“Um. It’s a complex and multilayered issue?”
Foggy made a sound that could have been a sigh or a laugh or some kind of concerned hum, “Dude, you are a really bad liar. Let’s hope you only get the innocent clients from here on out.”
“Yeah, well, when we’ve got our own practice we can only pick the innocent ones, right?” Matt suggested, aiming a weak smile in his friend’s direction, trying unsuccessfully to change the subject.
“Quit trying to change the subject, Matty,” Foggy said, and it was gentle, but definite. He wasn’t letting this go. “This is about Phil, isn’t it?”
Matt stiffened, “Why would you think that?”
“SHIELD. Database.”
“It could be about Clint,” Matt said stiffly.
“But it’s not.”
Matt didn’t say anything.
Foggy sighed gustily, “Matty, buddy, I know you don’t want to hear this, and I know you don’t want to talk about it, but have you ever considered – ”
Matt was already shaking his head before his friend could finish the sentence, “I don’t need therapy Foggy.”
“I just think you might want to talk to somebody. Grief counseling, maybe? Just, I know the last few weeks have been incredibly hellish, and L&Z’s being dicks about giving you time off to be with Clint, and the funeral probably gave you all kind of shitty flashbacks to when your dad – ”
“Don’t,” Matt said, but it came out more as a snarl than he intended, “Don’t talk about my dad. This is nothing,” he sighed, sucking down air, suddenly desperate for oxygen, an iron band around his ribs, tightening, tightening, pressing down, he wheezed in another breath, “Nothing like my dad.”
“Matty – ” Foggy’s voice was so soft, so kind, but Matt couldn’t listen to it, couldn’t hear it, not now.
“No, Foggy. You don’t get it. I heard my dad die. I heard the gun; I heard his last fucking heartbeats. When he died I felt it. No one had to tell me anything, I knew, before any of them, before all of them; I knew. I knew,” another breath, swallowed down, “I knew he was gone. With Phil…” he trailed off, not sure what to say or how to say it, “I didn’t hear Phil die. I wasn’t there. All I know is what my mom told me and she knows what Fury told her and I know what my senses told me and the coffin was empty, Foggy. They buried an empty casket.
“I think Phil’s alive. And I’m going to find where they’ve stashed him.”
A moment of dead air between them as Foggy wrestled with Matt’s revelation and Matt tried to refocus on the computer in front of him.
“Matt, you don’t know he’s alive – maybe they cremated him, maybe – I don’t know – an empty coffin…it’s a stretch, it’s a huge stretch, man. And, god, okay, so you’re going to do this thing no matter what I say, right? Fuck. Okay. You know this is a long shot, right? You know…you know this probably isn’t going to end the way you want it, right?” And Foggy sounded so worried, so sad and concerned, something in Matt crumbled like dusty old plaster.
“Yeah. But Foggy? I need to do this. I owe it to them.”
“To who, Matt? To who?”
“My parents. If Phil’s alive, they need to see it, to know they didn’t fail him.”
“Okay, Matty, okay.”
A lull in conversation where they sat, one on each end of the couch, Matt on his computer, Foggy staring into the street-lit half-darkness of their battered little apartment.
Foggy yawned and sighed again. “Fine. What can I do to help?”
Matt grinned, sharp and bright, “Glad you asked.”
…
Twenty-three-year old Matt Murdock ducked into Phil’s office with a heavy sense of déjà vu.
“What brings you here, Matt?” Phil asked archly from behind his desk.
Matt grinned awkwardly, “Ah, um, hiding from Fury.”
“Why?”
“I may have convinced the helicarrier maintenance staff to unionize?”
Phil burst out laughing, sudden and unexpected, like a water balloon bursting when it hits its target. “Congratulations. You’ve managed to find a way to permanently be a minor annoyance in Fury’s daily life even from long distance.”
“Ah, my lifelong aspiration,” Matt said lightly.
Phil chuckled, “Have a cookie, you earned it.”
…
It figured that Foggy and JARVIS would hit it off.
“Wait, wait,” Foggy waved his hands in some complicated hand gesture Matt couldn’t quite track, “You’re saying he broke into Stark Tower dressed as Daredevil and just, you know, walked off with a top-of-the-line laptop with a linkup to Tony Freaking Stark’s crazy awesome robot butler?”
“Why thank you, “ JARVIS interrupted from the laptop Foggy had opened, “And this is one of Mr. Stark’s many, many spares. I am sure he will not think to miss this computer until a good while after we’ve returned it. And Mr. Daredevil has my express permission to use it as he sees fit until Agent Coulson is located.”
“This is all way too cool,” Foggy concluded. “Except for you wearing the Daredevil mask every time JARVIS’ laptop is open,” Foggy sent this rather pointed observation in Matt’s direction.
Matt shrugged, “That laptop has at least one built-in camera and I’m not comfortable with him learning my identity.”
“I’m pretty sure that ship’s sailed for me,” Foggy said nonchalantly, “Should have warned me ahead of time, man. I would have put on a ski mask, or maybe a really tacky Halloween mask.”
“I did warn you against fiddling with the laptop.”
“That you did,” Foggy assented magnanimously.
“If it is any consolation, I will not seek to learn your identity, sir,” JARVIS said, tone mild and amused.
“Probably for the best,” Foggy said with a shrug.
“So, where do we begin?” JARVIS said.
Matt pressed his lips together, “There was no body in Phil’s coffin, and no indication in any of the official reports that he was cremated or his earthly remains otherwise disposed of. That means he’s in a medical facility somewhere. I want to find that facility.”
“Easier said than done, Mr. Daredevil,” JARVIS cautioned.
“Hmm,” Matt agreed, “But his injuries were extensive and traumatic. Anything that major would require major surgery not to mention several weeks-worth of supplies for recovery. We need to look for that paper trail. Fury’s hiding something. I want to know how and where and what.”
“You are very much like Mr. Stark, Mr. Daredevil.”
Matt snorted, “Not exactly a life goal of mine.”
“You are equally stubborn and dastardly clever,” JARVIS remarked dryly, making Foggy snicker and Matt bite down on a sigh.
“Refocus,” he instructed, “We’ll start sorting through documents; JARVIS, get us into any SHIELD or SHIELD-affiliated database you think might be relevant and start searching security feeds for inconsistences.” Matt grinned a sharp-edged blade of a smile, “We’re going to catch them.”
“This should be very educational,” JARVIS observed dryly.
“And extremely illegal,” Foggy sighed, “Oh well, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” He raised an imaginary glass, “To well-intentioned felonies!”
Matt laughed, feeling light and easy for the first time since the sky cracked open and alien hoards fell on them from above, “To well-intentioned felonies.”
…
“I’m pretty sure this is illegal,” and Matt observed, sitting on the roof, legs dangling over the edge, feet teasing the abyss.
“The drinking age in many European countries is eighteen,” Phil assured him primly.
“This isn’t a European country,” Matt pointed out.
“Do you want me to take your birthday beer away?” Phil asked archly.
Matt shook his head, “No.”
“Then don’t point out uncomfortable truths.”
“Mom’s going to be pissed.”
Phil snorted, “You and I both know she started teaching you the safe way to drink vodka two years ago.”
“Watered down vodka.”
“Watered down vodka is still vodka, Matt.”
Matt laughed, “Fine, fine, I’ll just shut up and drink my contraband birthday beer.”
A moment of stillness as they both sipped their microbrews and hung their feet over the edge of the roof.
“Happy eighteenth birthday, Matt.”
“Thanks, Phil.”
…
Matt was glad of two things. One, that JARVIS was a supercomputer and therefore, a.) didn’t need sleep, and b.) could be in two places at once, meaning Tony Stark never missed him. And two, that Landman and Zack was the soulless, uncaring machine of an employer that it was and therefore did not notice shit.
Matt may have been spending quite a few work hours on his computer doing decidedly not work-related things. Although he supposed that breaking into SHIELD servers with the aid of someone else’s AI could count as ‘law-oriented’, he was pretty sure it was not the kind of law-oriented behavior L&Z wanted out of its interns.
Needless to say, Foggy was a bit concerned his roommate’s behavior was bordering on obsessive.
“Matt, if you do not take a break from your vision-quest and get some fucking sleep I will… I will call your mom.”
Matt frowned in Foggy’s direction.
“No, don’t get that ‘but aren’t you a true believer, Foggy?’ look on your face! Matty, we’ve been working on this for three days straight and I’m 99.9% sure you have only slept eight hours total over the course of the whole three days. Go to your room, get some sleep, or so help me god, I will rain the wrath of Natasha on your sad little ninja head.”
Matt pulled a face at him, too tired to find words to argue his point.
“Go. To. Bed. You ridiculous toaster strudel.”
That was enough to wake Matt up a little bit, “Did you just compare me to a knockoff poptart?”
“Don’t question me.”
“But – ” Matt began to protest, realized the words had stopped making sense in his head and gave up on saying them out loud. “Fine,” he gave up and trudged back to his room and his sorely neglected bed.
He thought he might have heard JARVIS quietly congratulating Foggy on convincing him to rest…and comparing him to Tony Stark again. But that could have just been the beginning of a dream.
…
Matt jerked awake, heart hammering against his ribs, sightless eyes wide and searching, searching, searching, finding nothing, the world a numbing roar all around him. He nearly jumped out of his skin when he felt a hand tap him on the shoulder, his own hands flying up to strike out at the foreign heartbeat he heard thundering beside him.
“Hey, hey, shh, kid, it’s okay,” a voice, Clint’s voice, why was Clint here? Oh, Natasha, he married Natasha last month; he’d been living here, with them, for almost a year before that.
Matt sat up from where he’d been curled up…on the couch? Why was he on the couch? He had a bed. In his room. It was right over there, empty.
“Musta been one hell of a nightmare, kid,” Clint said, voice quiet, non-judgmental, “Want to tell me why you’re out here on the couch?”
Matt blinked, the past few hours falling into place again. Clint was right, it must have been one hell of a nightmare; he hadn’t woken up expecting to see in years. “I had a dream. I didn’t want to fall back asleep, so I came out here.” He kept the sentences short, tight, chopped-up and tense.
He heard the slight rustle of Clint nodding, “Okay, kid, okay, I get it. Move over, I want a piece of the couch too.”
Almost against his will, Matt found himself smiling as he slid over to accommodate his stepfather. It was strange; sitting here in the dark he felt both painfully young and horribly old. Fourteen years seemed like too small a number for the infinity sitting on his chest.
“What were you dreaming about?” Clint asked, “I mean, you don’t have to tell me, but you can. If you want to.”
Matt sighed and the exhalation sounded too much like a whimper for his comfort. “Death. Dying. Heartbeats stopping. In my dreams I can see; in my nightmares I see my father bleeding out on the pavement, I don’t just hear it, I see it, smell it, feel it. And then it repeats, the same thing over and over again with different people. Mom, you, Phil…and then it starts over again.”
“Oh kid,” Clint sighed gustily, reaching around and dragging Matt into a rough one-armed-shoulder-hug, not commenting when the teenager slumped against his side like a tired-out toddler. “You know that no matter what, as long as any of us can, your mom, me, Phil, we will come home to you. No matter where we are or what we’re doing, we will always come home. Got that?”
Clint’s heartbeat didn’t betray a lie, but Matt knew wishful thinking when he heard it. But for the moment he let himself be comforted, let himself take his stepfather’s words at face value.
“Yeah, got it.”
…
Matt woke up from a dream that could have doubled as a drug-induced hallucination or the next hit children’s cartoon with a start. “What?” he asked, muscles tense, body already winding up, ready for a fight.
“Jesus,” Foggy stumbled back a bit, “You really need to work on not clobbering the messenger.”
Matt rolled his weary eyes; he must have only slept a few hours. “I didn’t hit you.”
“Yeah, yeah, Rambo,” Foggy said good-naturedly, “Anyway, we’ve got something for you.”
“Really?”
“No, the robot butler and I thought we’d play a really mean prank on you.”
Matt narrowed his eyes suspiciously.
Foggy sighed, “Sorry, I’ve been awake too long; I’m being a dick. No, we’re not kidding, yes we found something.”
“A paper trail?”
“Yes, and better, footage and records from a medical facility Fury squirreled away somewhere. It was all on his personal accounts. Which I’m pretty sure my buddy JARVIS and I are going to jail for hacking, but whatever, right?” He laughed nervously; then sobered, “Matt, I think we found Phil.”
…
“Come on,” Matt grabbed Foggy by the shoulders and steered him towards Phil’s office.
“What? Matt, what is going on? Matt, what are the scary people in black tactical suits doing parkouring around the building? Matt – ”
“Ah, you brought a friend I see,” Phil said dryly from the doorway of his office.
“In my defense, I had no idea it was Field Day,” Matt said, propelling them all into the office.
“Field Day?” Foggy’s voice escalated in incredulity.
“Yes,” Phil chuckled, “On a randomly selected day every few months we give the agents and the trainees a field day where they can practice their skills in a safe…relatively speaking, environment through playing games like Sardines, Capture the Flag, tag, and hide and seek. Due to some unfortunate incidents seven years ago, we were forced to discontinue dodgeball.”
Matt could practically sense Foggy doing the mental calculation, “Yes, Foggy, I’m twenty, meaning seven years ago I was thirteen and Mom had just joined SHIELD. Her first Field Day was…memorable.”
“And where do you fit in all this?” Foggy asked, to which Phil simply shrugged.
“Sometimes I show up in the final hour and annihilate everyone left standing. Sometimes I hide in my office and watch BBC miniseries until the madness ends. It really depends on my mood.”
Foggy laughed, “Matt, every member of your family is equal parts scary and awesome and scary-awesome.”
“Well, we knew that already,” Phil said, tone blasé, voice hiding a grin.
…
Matt supposed Fury’s secret ‘medical facility’ didn’t look much like one from outside. It was housed in the basement of a nondescript brownstone, and only a nose like Matt’s could have picked up the hospital reek from the street. He’d gone mostly alone, with only JARVIS and Foggy’s voices on a burner phone to guide him. His co-conspirators, one being non-corporeal and one being generally opposed to breaking and entering on principle, had elected to stay behind.
Matt wasn’t quite sure what he expected from Fury’s little brownstone bunker, but being this easy to break into was not it. Admittedly, he had JARVIS’s amazing ability to override anything that had even the slightest bit of code, and Foggy’s steady narration of the facility’s floorplan on his side, not to mention his own enhanced senses. Nevertheless, Matt was almost disappointed when he easily dealt with the (minimal) human security, and disarmed (with the help of JARVIS) the mechanized fail-safes.
He expected Fury to put up more of a fight. Then again, Fury, paranoid bastard though he was, had probably not anticipated anyone actually finding and breaking into this place.
The place reeked of hospital; the usual hospital bouquet of antiseptic, steel and decay filtered through the halls, rich with a sharp, foreign undertone Matt couldn’t quite place.
He found the single bed in the single room at the end of a hallway that couldn’t in actuality be too terribly long but felt infinite. When he opened the door the heartbeat monitor he’d been listening to since he arrived piped each short, sharp note at him with a kind of smug authority. The oxygen whistled through rubber tubing as it flew into the patient on the bed. The sharp, strange smell that had been nothing but an undertone out there was magnified in here, even sharper and stranger than before.
Matt closed his sightless eyes and focused, the way Natasha taught him all those years ago. He pulled all the layers away one by one, mentally silencing each beep of the heart monitor, each wheeze of the oxygen tank, each gurgle of the IV. He pared back all the layers and layers of sound, focusing on one thing and one thing only.
The heartbeat.
Phil’s heartbeat, slow and steady in sleep.
“Found you,” Matt said, ferocious, victorious, and glad.
…
“Why are you so invested in this Avengers thing?” Matt asked. Another evening, another year; two men sitting on the edge of the roof, feet dangling out over traffic below, too-expensive microbrews in their hands. Matt was older now, a freshly minted lawyer a few weeks away from day one of the internship of a lifetime (if his fellow graduates were to be believed).
“Because the world needs heroes, Matt,” Phil was smiling, absent and fond.
“Cliché.”
“That’s a bit much coming from, what was it again? Oh, right, ‘Daredevil’.”
Matt laughed like Phil had meant him to. “I’m not doing what I do to be a hero. I just want people to stop hurting, to stop being so afraid all the time.”
Phil hummed, amused but something, but didn’t argue or share. “I care about the Avengers project because the world does need heroes, Matt. It needs heroes and heroes need each other. A team like what we’re trying to make would give all these amazing, strange, lonely people partners, people to lean on, to learn from. It would make them stronger.”
Matt didn’t respond right away, instead turning his face towards the fading sun and taking another sip of his drink. “Sounds like something to believe in,” he finally said after a long minute.
“That it does,” Phil agreed.
…
Fury was not precisely pleased with Matt, Foggy and JARVIS’s shenanigans. But this was easily counterbalanced by how very pleased Natasha and Clint were to hear their handler was, in fact, alive, if not completely well, per se.
Matt still wasn’t quite sure what to expect when Fury called him in for a meeting in his office after Matt had called his parents and ‘seen’ them reunited with the still-unconscious but probably-maybe-most-likely subconsciously happy to see them Phil.
“Quit looking like I’m about to call in the firing squad, Murdock,” Fury growled from behind his desk, “Your mother would rain bloody vengeance upon my and everyone else here’s head if you so much as get a fucking paper cut in my presence.”
That was Natasha, a paragon of maternal affection.
“It’s nice being loved,” Matt observed blandly.
Fury emitted some sort of grunt-profanity hybrid and left it at that. “You’ve been a thorn in my side since the day you showed up here and it has only gotten worse as you’ve gotten older and smarter.”
Matt shrugged, smiling blandly.
Fury snorted, “Yeah, smirk away. You know what drives me nuts about you, Murdock? You don’t get the big fucking picture. You’re too focused on the details. You’ve got all these skills and you’re what? Schlepping coffee to the fat cats at some soulless Law Inc. cubicle farm by day and micromanaging a chunk of New York City by night? Seriously, Murdock?”
“Did you call me in here purely to critique my career choices, sir? Because you could have done that just as easily by email.”
“Murdock,” Fury actually sounded close to sighing, “Why’d you chase after Phil Coulson?”
“Because I knew he wasn’t dead. I wanted to know what happened to him, why you lied about it.”
“Why?”
“Because my parents deserved to know.”
“There. There is your problem. You never stop thinking beyond the individual level. The shit I pulled to get Phillip fucking Coulson back to the land of the living isn’t illegal because there literally aren’t any damn laws that cover it. And yes, I damn well said ‘back to the land of the living’. Because Coulson died twice before they managed to get him into an OR. He’s breathing today because ever since that mess in Arizona last year SHIELD’s been poking through some of the alien crap they’ve got piled up down at Area 51 and seeing what could be useful. Phil’s alive because we had enough of the right space crap to cobble together a cure for alien-scepter-to-the-chest.
“And no one and I do mean no one, was supposed to know about any of that. We can’t have any of that leaked, god only know what would happen if the government, let alone the press would do if they thought we could cure death (which we can’t), that we were running around playing with alien junk. Coulson would have come back to active duty eventually, but he would be so highly classified you’d have to have a permission slip signed by yours truly to so much as eat lunch with the guy. Because that’s the kind of shit I have to do in the name of controlling information, keeping all the checks and balances checking and balancing.”
Fury did sigh then, seeming to deflate in Matt’s senses, the blur of heat and concentrated sound that was Nick Fury compressing inward. “Kid, you’re smart. And you’re tough. And you’re a stubborn little bastard. But you are a giant thorn in my side.”
Matt didn’t say anything for a moment, marshaling his thoughts into some kind of order. Then, each word weighed and measured, he said carefully and precisely, “That’s not the whole story.”
Fury made a disbelieving sound, “Then please, do enlighten me.”
“You lied to the Avengers. You told them Phil was dead. You could have said he was just in critical condition. That would have done something similar, right? Given them something to rally around? Someone to fight for? But no, you went with the guilt tactic. Why? Well, perhaps you wanted Phil safely ‘dead’ so he could act as some sort of secret weapon somewhere else and force-unite the Avengers in the moment? Or, perhaps you realized that a union based in guilt is strong in the moment but weak once it passes. It will dissolve once the crisis is gone. They no longer have anything to fight for. He’s been thoroughly and completely Avenged. I think, sir; that you realized that without Phil around in 100% working condition you didn’t have a prayer of keeping a team of volatile superheroes under control. So you took the easy route. You manipulated them, gave them a reason to fight, and a reason to stop fighting. Vengeance is a straightforward story. With the Earth safe and Phil avenged they could all go home happy, content there aren’t any loose ends, that there isn’t anyone who still believes in lasting teams of heroes making earth strong, making each other stronger.” Matt raised his eyebrows and allowed his argument to sink in.
Fury made sound between a scoff and a chuff of surprise, “You’ve got a mind for detail, Murdock,” he hmmed contemplatively, “You seem to ascribe a level of deviousness to me that your superheroic,” the adjective was applied wryly, “ - peers seem to overlook.”
“I’m a lawyer. We’re trained in logic. And misdirection.”
Fury’s duster creaked as he shook his head, shoulders shivering with his quiet chuckles, “Maybe you’re right, Matt. And maybe a guy just does what he can with what he has – while worrying whether or not the EMTs will be able to restart his best friend’s heart if it stops again.” The comment wasn’t offhand so much as slipped in between the barrage of words, like a note passed in class, something secret. “And maybe I’m right and you’re a hyper-intelligent dumbass with chronic tunnel vision. Either way, you’ve found Phil.”
“Yes,” Matt said, not sure where this conversation was going anymore.
“And that took a lot of luck, skills and smarts. So. Good work, Murdock.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Now get your vigilante ass out of my office before I change my mind about the firing squads.”
It was Matt’s turn to chuckle, “Yes sir.”
“And tell Stark to keep his robot butler out of my network and away from bad influences like you!”
…
“Matt, if you could refrain from engaging in your little battles of wit with Fury in front of the recruits, I’d appreciate it.”
“Sure, Phil. But, um, why?”
“Because seeing a teenager verbally spar with the Director has given them ideas I’d like to put a stop to.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Much appreciated, I’m sure.”
…
Natasha, through the kind of strong-arming and blatant intimidation that called to mind icy winters and bloody peasant uprisings, managed to ‘convince’ the staff of the brownstone’s medical facility to notify her or Clint the moment Phil woke up. And the second time he opened his eyes since awakening from his medically induced coma it was to the whole family crammed into the ‘hospital’ room.
Kate’s elbow was digging a hole in Matt’s side, and so many people moving, so many heartbeats thumping so very close was making his head spin slightly, but it was the good kind of spinning, if there was one. Because Clint was laughing, full-bodied and slightly hysterical when Phil cracked open an eye and mumbled, pausing every few words to get his breath back; “All of you…better be…in one piece. Don’t want…paperwork.”
And Natasha was murmuring in soft Russian, “Welcome back;” with the tears she could never bring herself to shed hanging on the fringes of her words.
And then Foggy was slinging a jubilant arm around Matt’s shoulders, saying, “Listen, Phil, I’m psyched you’re not dead. But you have given Matt here completely unrealistic expectations of the grieving process. Now he literally thinks that if you’re stubborn enough the universe just gives up and ret-cons itself. So, be prepared for that down the road.” Phil’s raspy chuckle at that made them all laugh; perhaps a little too hard, high and disbelieving with joy.
“I’ll kick your ass if you die again,” Kate threatened, voice gone watery, soft and fierce.
“Yeah, and I’ll help,” Clint backed her up, “You’ve got the Hawkeye promise there, man.”
“Live,” Natasha commanded in Russian, then, switching to English, “That’s an order. From the family.”
“From the family,” Phil, still weak but alive and beeping away on the heart monitor, “Sounds good.”