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Before it happened, Matt had still had nightmares.
He doesn’t remember what they were about when he was little - maybe normal kid’s fears of monsters under his bed, or bullies; or maybe the nights when his Dad came home a little too bloody, a little too drunk - only the aftermath.
Fragmented memories of his Dad holding him as he whimpered, calloused hand softly rubbing his back. Of gentle, murmured reassurances that you’re okay, Matty, everything’s okay.
They changed as he got older. The memories grow sharper, more fragile, like they’ll shatter and break if he thinks about them too much. There’s flashes of his Dad snapping at him to go back to bed, to stop crying, of knowing that if he’s overtired and messes up in school the next day that he’ll have ruined everything.
He thinks he was seven then.
That would’ve been two years before the accident.
After it happened, Matt expected the nightmares. He wasn’t stupid, even if his nurses thought so now. He could tell from the way they talked about his case right in front of him, even more so from their callous comments in the break rooms nearby (he’d never been able to hear that far before. It hurt. It hurt so much.)
Either way, he knew that when the doctor told his Dad - not him, they never spoke directly to him - that Matt was likely to experience emotional disturbance from the event, that it meant nightmares.
He’d had them before. He was used to them. Stop crying, don’t get up, you’re meant to be sleeping. It was practically routine by then.
What he hadn’t expected was how bad they’d be.
Screeching tires, and the man in front of him falls, rolls, his walking cane buckling beneath both he and Matt’s weight. Somebody screams, distantly, and then there’s a frozen moment as Matt sees something huge and metal fall too close, too hard and it cracks, painfully loud and - and -
Something wet and searing and painful spills out, a huge splash of it, and Matt freezes, prepares for the fiery pain that engulfed his face, only it misses - it misses -
Matt looks down at where the man has fallen in front of him, and the man’s head turns to stare at him and it’s only darkness.
A black hole has stolen the man’s face, the edges of it crusted with scabs and blood eerily akin to the ones Matt cleaned from his dad’s skin after a fight, and Matt recoils and -
He wakes up, pulling away from the pillow, gasping for breath.
Someone is saying something, over and over, voice panicked and tense in a way that only makes his chest constrict tighter. It’s an uphill battle to drag air in, until his flailing hands hit the bandages and gauze tight on his face and he cries out in pain.
The voice stops, and Matt realises it was him speaking.
‘ I can’t see, I can’t see.’ A terrified mantra, one of the first things he said after he woke up and they got him to stop screaming.
He could still see in the dream. It felt real, it felt so real, and it had been real.
Right up until the corrosive acid had hit the wrong person’s face and suddenly there was blood and pitch black whirlpools that had pulled him in until he couldn’t breath, he couldn’t even scream.
Matt doesn’t think his face looks like that.
The gauze was only on his eyes, really. He can’t feel them. Maybe they move, maybe they roll in his sockets behind the sterile white of hospital bandages, but he can’t tell. That area is just a haze of pure fire and white hot pain and tingling numbness at the edges. Although his entire face and several parts of his body burn constantly, that part is the worst. It barely even ebbed away when they pumped him with a fresh dose of what he thought was some strong painkiller.
Surely, though, he’d be able to tell if his face was gone, replaced by a swirling void of darkness and blood.
‘I can still talk,’ he reminds himself, throat hoarse from crying (he’s been doing a lot of crying since - since the accident). The sound of his own voice startles him, surprisingly crisp in the fog of terror that lingers from the nightmare.
If he had a mouth to speak with, his face wasn’t completely obliterated, and Matt clings to this thought desperately, rocking forward as a wave of relief washed over him.
This is real. The accident was real. His voice is real.
It was a dream, it was just a dream, but it was real. Now is real. He’s not sure. But he can speak, and in the dream he could see, and now he can’t. Something is real, and now he can’t see, but he’s not dreaming, he’s awake.
The doctors said he’d probably never see again. His Dad pleaded for a different answer. Matt had heard him, and it made his stomach lurch. Battlin’ Jack didn’t beg . Except he did, now, when Matty was involved, and when he was asking for any information on potential surgeries or medication or anything that would help his boy see again.
There was nothing.
His corneas were completely obliterated.
Okay, he wasn’t quite sure what those were, but they had to be important. His were gone now, burned away by spilled acid in a freak accident.
He’d heard that. The doctors didn’t like to speak to him here. Only about him, to his Dad or to nurses. They thought he was stupid, but he wasn’t. He’d worked so hard not to be stupid. He could still hear them, even when they left the room now.
He’d listened then, so he could listen now, and Matt rocks back and forth as he pulls himself out of whatever foggy state the nightmare had forced him into. It’s loud. He knew it was loud. It’s been so, so loud since he woke up in the hospital bed. Now, in the middle of the night, it’s a time he would’ve expected to be quiet before all this.
It’s not.
Matt can hear nurses whispering to patients, chatting quietly in break rooms; he hears footsteps and a steady, rhythmic pounding as someone passes by his door. He can hear the other patient's breathing, raspy or clear and calm, low in sleep or heightened by stress.
Outside, sirens scream and people yell and somewhere nearby, a dog barks shrilly.
It hurts, it hurts so much, and as he curls up on the hard hospital mattress with his hands clamped over his ears, Matt thinks that the nightmare might have even been better than his new reality.
At least in his dream it had been quieter.
***
Matt is stitching a wound above his Dad’s collarbone, blood drying on his fingertips, biting his lip to stop himself from cringing at the tautness of the skin as he pushed the needle through it.
The blood runs down his hands, red, so red, and his head in spinning as he realises he’s in an alleyway, and his dad is standing back, watching, as Matt’s classmates punch him in the gut over and over, and it hurts, it hurts, but nothing hurts as bad as - as -
His ears ring from the sudden bang of the gun, and he’s looking down at his hands to find that it’s him holding it, fingers slick with blood but tight around the barrel.
Everything is foggy when he looks back up, and his dad is standing at the end of the alley, blood trickling down his face, and - and -
Matt screams when he wakes up, hands fisting in the too-rough sheets as he throws his head back and wails, the sound cutting through the darkness of the waking world like a dagger. It echoes in his head, mingling with the crack of a bullet firing until he’s all but thrashing on the bed, tangled in the thin blankets as his hands go up to press against his ears, a desperate effort to shut off the sounds both real and memory.
Eventually he clamps his lips shut, pressing back into the mattress and swallowing his breath.
His hands are wet, and it takes him a moment to recognise that the smooth dampness is from tears, rather than the sticky clots of blood that press at the edges of his mind. The salty tang in his mouth pulls him back from the memories and he pulls himself up to sit against the end of his bed.
As Matt extracts his legs from the bedspreads, he presses one hand to his chest, struggling to regain control over his tattered breathing. His chest aches, the soreness of his throat suggesting he was screaming for longer than he thought.
The dreams about his Dad were always the worst.
After losing his sight, Matt had been confused to find he could still see in his dreams, only to learn that this was a regular phenomenon in people who’d gone Blind, rather than been born without vision. It was sort of useful, a grounding fact that he could use to differentiate between nightmares and reality, between then and now.
Issues arose when he realised he had no visual memories of his Dad dying.
It didn’t stop his mind from being determined that he should relive Jack Murdock’s murder almost every night.
The fuzzy mess of noise and visuals was worse than Matt could’ve imagined, his brain conjuring up grotesque confusion to compensate for a lack of real images, and it sent him into the same terror that haunted every corner of his life ever since he’d held is Dad’s body in his arms.
He tucked his knees up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them as he re-orientated his senses. Reaching out beyond the lingering panic, Matt was unsurprised by the lack of worried murmuring, the lack of anyone coming to help him.
Someone had, a couple of times, back when social services first dumped him in this halfway-home attached to the church.
But there were a lot of kids in the orphanage, and more of them had nightmares than not. Matt didn’t deserve special treatment. He knew that. They’d taught him that when they’d moved him to an isolated bedroom with no roommates to wake up with his agonised screams.
He presses his head against the back of the bed, hair sticky with sweat and damp against the wood, and clamps his hands back around his ears. Maybe, just maybe, if he blocked out enough of the cacophony that followed him everywhere he could block out the echoing memories of gunshots and screeching tires and his own screams as well.
***
When Stick comes, the nightmares stop.
Matt doesn’t dare let himself believe they’re gone forever. That would be too easy, too simple, too impossible for someone with Murdock luck. He suspects that the training he was doing was wearing him out just enough that he could sleep through the night, or maybe that learning to understand his senses gave him a grasp on them good enough to prevent the bad dreams that have tortured him for a decade at this point.
It’s a welcome reprieve, even if he still went to sleep each night wondering if that would be the time he woke himself up screaming once again.
But eventually, he starts wishing they would come back. Maybe the barrage of memories and stale fear resurfacing would drown out his current pain and confusion, as his training intensifies and he starts going to bed with broken fingers and creaking ribs.
Then Stick left.
At first, everything is fine (Matt barely left his bed) and he doesn’t have any nightmares (half the time he wasn’t sure if he was awake or asleep).
The first time he wakes up soaking wet and filled with panic fueled by dreams he didn’t remember, he makes the mistake of asking for help. 12-year-old Matt trails miserably out of his room, fumbling through the fog of terror to find his way through the echoey hallways of the orphanage and to the Nuns’ sleeping quarters.
He should’ve known it was a bad idea. They’d long stopped answering his cries for help in the middle of the night, and he isn’t naive enough to imagine this ending in a comforting hug or even a cup of tea. He just - well, he hopes that something more physical, more obvious would elicit more support than the muddled dreams of memories that hurt too much to think about. At the very least, maybe someone would help him use the washing machine.
He knocks on the door that he hopes belongs to one of the Nuns, his senses still too fuzzy from the barely held-off panic attack to reach them out and tell who was inside.
It takes a couple more increasingly anxious knocks before the door swung open. Someone stands over him in what sounds like a nightgown, from the air currents around where the garment ended, and yawns. Matt isn’t sure how someone manages to make a yawn sound annoyed, but Sister Phyllis certainly achieved it.
‘What do you want?’ she asks, voice tired but still sharp with irritation.
Things go a bit fuzzy after that. He thinks he’d mumbled out something about wetting the bed, and then there was a part where he was being all but dragged down the hallway, which only added to the lingering disorientation from the nightmare. His head is spinning .
Then he’s back on his bed, soggy sheets rubbing uncomfortably against similarly damp pyjama trousers and Sister Phyllis is snapping something about not waking people up for stupid accidents and he thinks maybe he’s crying. Everything is muddy and mixed up and his bed hurts, the wet bedclothes too rough and too painful against his sensitive skin even as the Sister slams the door shut behind her.
Matt clamps his hands over his mouth as he brings his knees up to his chin, body bent in a barrage of muffled sobs as the leftover fear from the nightmare intensifies.
He’s alone now.
Around him, the heartbeats of other children beat steadily, low in sleep, just recognisable on the edge of his consciousness as he focuses on forcing down the tears that threaten to overwhelm him. He’s fine with being alone . He has to be fine. It was foolish to think that someone would help him.
It takes longer than he’d like to calm himself down enough to change from the pyjamas into a pair of boxers, before he huddles at the top of the bed, pressed into the headboard.
It’s somehow worse that he doesn’t remember the nightmare, the memories of whatever led to the terror he’d woken up with just out of reach. He’d longed so many times to forget, to be able to block out the sounds of his Dad being shot or the feeling of acid scorching his face, but now that there’s something he really can’t remember, he’s left feeling lost.
Anything could have led to the nightmare, could’ve led to him waking up pathetically wet like a baby, and that meant Matt couldn’t fix it. Not that he could fix any of it, really, but this left him with even less of a chance.
The room stinks of ammonia, and he shudders, nestling further into his pillow.
In the morning, Sister Phyllis re-appears, and directs him to the laundry room. As he lugs the dirty sheets through the halls, Matt does his best to ignore the snickers and jibes of the other kids who are definitely watching . It’s almost worse than Stick sneering when he failed again and again at what was supposed to be a simple move.
As he shoves the bedclothes into the washing machine, all Matt can think of is his Dad. His Dad, who was so proud of him for growing up so fast, for being so mature and smart. His Dad who let him help with taxes and stitch up his face.
This must be the opposite of what his Dad wanted him to become. He’s not grown up anymore. He’s not smart. He can’t even sleep through the night, and now he’s behaving like a toddler just because of a little bad dream.
Next time, Matt doesn’t go to any of the Nuns. He learns to use the washing machine quicker than he thought he might, and he can only be thankful that it’s too far from the sleeping quarters to wake anyone up.
***
When he goes to law school, Matt is determined to have a roommate. He is going to have the normal college experience, as much as he can, and part of that is definitely not waking up a stranger with this habit of bad dreams that he still can’t kick.
He’s already singled out enough with his cane and the fact that he’s constantly having to remind lecturers that he can’t see their powerpoints and that he needs information in braille (despite having already sent what felt like hundreds of pointed emails). It’d be the final straw if the fact that he had an unfortunate tendency to wake up drenched in sweat and hyperventilating was spread among the student body.
Matt had moved into the dorms a few weeks early, to give him time to map out the layout of both that building and the main university. While it had certainly been useful for that, he was far more thankful for it when the move ended up triggering a series of unusually bad episodes.
He’d mostly stopped waking up screaming as he grew up, the nightmares taking the potentially worse but less disruptive form of waking up mid-panic attack and, horrifyingly, bed-wetting. (That was one thing his roommate would not be finding out about, if Matt could help it.) However, the new environment seemed to have dragged back up the whole screaming issue.
It took about a week of living in the student dorms before Matt could sleep more than a few hours without waking up yelling, his throat hoarse.
The other students, including his roommate, hadn’t arrived till a fortnight later, to his relief. Hopefully it meant he could avoid waking up half the building by shouting out like he was being attacked. That would’ve led to one awkward conversation.
For the first couple weeks of classes, everything is relatively fine.
Matt is kept busy, traipsing between lectures, freshers fairs and various meetings with wellbeing and careers staff. He doesn’t sleep much for the first few nights, accompanying his friendly roommate to early year parties and getting shitfaced enough that when he passes out he doesn't dream at all. It’s frankly a relief, and the roommate - Foggy - is possibly an actual blessing from God, though Matt surely doesn’t deserve that.
It’s closer to a normal start to college than he expected, and it lasts longer than he’d hoped, with the whole thing being exhausting enough that when he does sleep he’s conked out completely and the only bad dreams he has are minor ones that he can shake off with a cup of coffee and some late-night studying.
He didn’t dare let himself believe it would last, yet somehow it still surprised him when it all came crashing down. He’d been trying too hard, not sleeping enough and living off of cheap coffee and whatever cafeteria food he could stomach when all of it tasted like sweat and faeces, his mind going a mile-a-minute to keep track of class times and note taking and homework.
Frankly, it was a surprise that he hadn’t had some sort of total meltdown in class, but apparently his brain was kind enough to wait until he’d finished the assigned reading and finally fallen asleep to the sound of Foggy’s gentle snoring.
Matt extended a foot to feel where the roof dropped off, the wind sharp and painful against his freezing cheeks. Stick’s voice rang in his ears, a grating order to jump across and do it right, because there was nothing there to catch his fall, and his heart stuck in his throat as he backed up, steeled himself and ran forward -
His throat burned as he fell, a scream disappearing in the wind while his head spun and he lost track of up or down, of any direction, his hands scraping desperately at something, anything to save him -
He landed with a smack of flesh against metal, clinging onto a fire escape that must’ve been just below the other building’s roof, his chest heaving, when he realised someone was looming over him. It must be Stick, and the panic reared in his mind again, his lungs practically aflame from trying and failing to catch his breath. Stick is there, Stick must be angry and he can’t escape, he can’t back off, the rusted metal of the fire escape pressing painfully into his spine as he scrambled backward.
‘That wasn’t very good, was it?’ Stick all but growled, his anger clogging Matt’s senses. The words pound in his head, repeating over and over in his mind, an unmissable threat that made his shoulder ache where Stick dislocated it last time.
‘Don’t,’ he begged -
Matt bolts upright in his bed, his breath caught in his throat as he clutches at the duvet. Stick’s there , in his room, he’s sure of it - how did he get in - how did he find him, why did he come back? He’s going to punish him.
His ribs throb and he can’t be sure if it’s from his hyperventilating or if they’re cracked again, if Stick’s going to beat him and re-break them and they’ll ache for months because he still hasn’t gotten the hang of meditating and it hurts. It hurts, but it’s what he deserves, that’s what Stick says. That he always deserves it.
Why would Stick have come back?
He clamps his hands over his mouth, trying to muffle the ragged sounds of his own breathing so he can extend his hearing to the rest of the room. His senses are out of sync, the sheets rough like metal against his skin, the air thick with the stench of anger, Stick’s voice cruel in his ears. Echoes from what must’ve been a nightmare. It had to have been. Stick couldn’t be there.
There are only two heartbeats in the room, and Matt feels the edges of his adrenaline soften, the terror easing slightly as he focuses on Foggy’s steady heartbeat, deep in sleep. His own heart races in panic, his chest clenching.
Matt’s shaking as he flexes his fingers, removing his hands from his face. He can’t - he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe. His fingers hurt, joints aching where they were broken years ago, because it was years ago, not now, but then why can’t he breathe.
The routine is practically muscle memory now, as he presses his palm uncomfortably against his chest.
In, out. In, out.
Stick isn’t there. Stick is gone, he left over half a decade ago, Stick is gone and he can’t hurt Matt anymore. He can’t breathe.
Matt clenches his fist around his pyjama shirt, the silk smooth and calming against his skin, and he focuses on re-orientating his senses. Foggy’s breathing is quiet and regular, surprisingly still asleep despite Matt’s poorly muffled panic attack. He forces his own breathing to sync with his roommate’s, focusing on the slight snoring sound instead of the ghost of Stick’s voice in his head.
In, out. In, out.
The smell of anger leeches away, replaced by reality: Foggy’s pine tree deodorant and the lingering stink of the greasy takeout pizza they’d had for dinner.
As he brings himself back down to earth, the ache in his ribs lessens, his breathing evening out. The pulsing pain in his fingers eases, and as he fully realises he’s sat on the firm mattress of his dorm bed, the memory of rusted metal against raw skin fades, replaced by the acute dampness of his pyjama pants and sheets.
Shit.
He’d known this was likely to happen, he’d even taken the precaution of ordering a plastic undersheet to avoid ruining a university-provided mattress. He’d expected it, after years of having to calm himself down and deal with it at the orphanage there was no reason it would stop now. At least it wasn’t as common anymore.
Matt takes a deep breath, peeling the duvet away so he could swing his legs out of bed and head to the toilet, grabbing a clean pair of boxers as he went. Thank God Foggy hadn’t woken up - the guy was understanding, but Matt couldn’t bear to imagine the disgust that would surely fill his voice if he saw this.
After changing into the fresh boxers, it took him longer than he would’ve liked to gather up the bedding and fumble his way to the laundry room (he may or may not have ended up in the communal kitchen at one point, his heart pounding with nerves at the constant risk of someone seeing him and guessing what had happened).
He doesn’t realise he’s crying until he’s shoved the sheets into the machine and is desperately running a hand along the top of it, trying to locate the laundry liquid. It’s only once he’s found it and shakily started the washing cycle that he lets out a choked sob and crumples on the floor, bringing his hand to his face to feel damp cheeks and swollen eyes. Matt pulls his knees to his chest, wrapping his arms around them as he rocks back and forth, biting back a wail as the washing machine hums to life.
As he buries his face in his knees, he can only think that at least he doesn’t have to face the humiliation of telling someone again, even if it’ll leave him sniffling and teary in the laundry room more nights than not.
***
When Matt starts his vigilantism, he lets himself believe that maybe it’ll finally be the cure for the nightmares that had plagued him for decades at that point. Maybe the fact that he's finally helping, finally making things better will be enough for his mind to be quiet through the night. It’s a nice thought, an imaginary world where he can sleep right through on comfortable silk sheets.
It’s wishful thinking.
PTSD is not that kind, especially when you're triggering it near-daily by beating up muggers and rapists on the streets.
In many ways, Daredevil helps.
It’s a way for Matt to let his anger loose, a way for him to yell at the world, at God, at Stick and his Dad and everyone who left him. It’s not quite self-harm, but he’d be lying if it wasn’t a punishment to some degree. Like Stick said: he’s not good enough. He’ll never be good enough. You can’t save everyone.
More importantly, Daredevil helps other people. The Devil of Hell’s kitchen helps the little girl who was being abused by her father; the old man who nearly got the shit beat out of him by the guy he let sleep on his couch, the lady whose date slipped drugs in her drink and nearly got her in his van. Matt sat with her till the ambulance came.
So Matt can’t stop. Even if Foggy is more concerned about him every day, even if Karen kept leaving pamphlets about domestic violence and Alcoholics Anonymous on his desk.
He wishes he could, though, when he virtually falls through his skylight and sheds the Daredevil suit to collapse in a shaking heap on his couch. He’s probably bleeding on the leather, but that’s a residual thought quickly drowned out by the panic that floods through him.
Matt hears gunshots most days, hears cars backfiring and smells gunpowder and blood every day. He’s had more practice than most acclimating to triggers, considering that those triggers only need to exist anywhere within a three block radius for them to affect him. When he’d been a fraction too late to stop a man being shot in the gut in a side alley, he’d been fine. He’d compartmentalised - his favourite tactic, no matter if it only aided his dissociative tendencies and was ‘wildly unhealthy’ (thanks, Foggy, he did not care) - and had knocked the assailant out with a well-timed billy club blow before crouching down to try and stop the injured guy from bleeding out.
Then a door had opened and someone had come out and her heartbeat was so light, so young and her voice wavered when she cried ‘Dad!’ and Matt’s pulse had gone into overdrive.
Everything was fuzzy between then and the couch, a blur of panic and pressing on bullet wounds and the guy’s daughter calling an ambulance while Matt tried not to cry or scream. He was just glad he’d made it through without breaking down in front of the kid.
Writhing on the couch, he presses his hands against his ears, vainly trying to block out the gunshot that repeats in his mind. The one that killed his Dad, the one that destroyed his world, the one that he heard but was too far away to stop. Too weak to stop it, to save his Dad’s life.
Matt tucks his knees against his chest, smears tears uselessly across his cheeks with a bruised forearm and tries not to hyperventilate too much. The hum of the city is agonising even through the palms of his hands, the smell of old leather too strong and mixing with real or not-real gunpowder.
He fumbles his way into a sitting position, grimacing at how the movement aggravates his probably-cracked definitely-bruised ribs.
One, two, three, four. Square breathing.
Foggy taught him that one back in college, when he’d curl up on their bathroom floor and shake for hours.
It helps, somehow, though frankly Matt isn’t sure how much of it is the breathing exercise and how much is the calming memories of Foggy sitting next to him, leading him in calming down from whatever panic attack or flashback he’d been stuck in.
Either way, his chest expands, his breathing steadies. Shaky, but passable, and he even takes his hands from his ears. A car alarm screeches down the street and Matt winces, before he takes another deep breath, shrugging it off.
He isn't stupid. He’s been dealing with this for years, since he was just a kid, and he knows that if he sleeps now he’ll wake up far quicker than he’d like, sweating and shaking and crying.
Still, he’s so exhausted. And he has work the next day, and his entire body aches in a way that is screaming out for soft sheets and firm mattress. It probably won’t be that bad. He’s staved off the flashback so far, clinging to the feeling of leather on his thighs and the clean smell of his apartment enough that he’s mostly present.
The ridiculous amount of overpriced coffee pouches in the attached kitchen seem to stare at him, the final reminder that he really does need as much sleep as he can grab between working hours and his night job, so he crawls to his bedroom.
His silk bed clothes are a blessing to his bruised skin, and as he sinks into the bed his eyes drift closed without another thought.
Matt was being good. He was waiting up for his Dad, listening to Battlin’ Jack’s fight playing on TV even as he focused on his maths homework, getting more and more excited as his Dad looks closer and close to winning - it’d be a huge win, the biggest of the season, kick-starting a whole new era in Jack Murdock’s boxing career.
And Matt was being good. He’d checked the door was locked and checked the windows, then re-checked both of them, and he’d repeated the mantra of where to hide and not to talk, not to make a sound in the event of a break in.
He’d even gotten out the first aid kit and the bottle of scotch, ready to mop up his Dad’s scrapes when Jack got home, hopefully euphoric from winning.
His homework was nearly done, and he was being good, so good, following the rules and -
The gunshot is soul-shattering, the noise annihilating his mind, a reverberating bang that is more painful than Matt could’ve imagined. He knows, somehow, he knows who was shot, and that in itself is the worst pain, but it doesn’t make sense.
None of it makes sense, because the fight is still playing on the TV even as Matt is wailing in an alleyway with his father’s blood on his hands, and it can’t be true, it can’t.
He was good, he tried so hard to be good, but he wasn’t good enough to save his Dad.
When he wakes up drenched in sweat and gasping for air, Matt's first coherent thought is that he should not have slept. It isn’t even a bad nightmare, not really, not compared to some of them. His thoughts aren’t too disorganised, he even knows where he is.
The worst of it is the stickiness of his hands, the thick liquid drenching his palms and running down his arms, dripping off the tips of his fingers. He thinks he knows what red looked like, remembers the way blood looked smeared on scraped knees as a kid, but Matt’s never sure how much of that is real and how much imagined anymore.
He isn’t sure if the blood on his hands is real.
It’s horribly sticky, tacky as though it's drying, smearing along his knuckles as he desperately tries to wipe it off on anything. On his pyjamas, on his stupidly expensive sheets.
It doesn’t come off.
Matt hears rather than feels his breathing speeding up, his mind too fixated on the blood oozing across his hands to register much else. It’s thick, viscous, half there and half not, and he stumbles to his feet in a panic. The bathroom. The sink, he can wash it off, it has to go, it has to. It’s too wet, too oppressive, like syrup on his skin. He can even recognise the metallic tang of blood in the air, and that’s the final straw as he throws himself into the bathroom, knocking painfully against the ceramic of the sink.
It’s fine, it’s fine. It’ll come off now, he tells himself, it’s just - he can’t even rationalise it, not really, can’t fathom why it’s there, but somehow that only intensifies the panic in his chest.
The water does nothing, splashing uselessly against his wrists while the blood oozes across his fingers undeterred. Matt lets out a strangled gasp, thinking wildly that maybe his sink is suddenly running blood instead of water and only adding to the mess, and stumbles backwards to sit uncomfortably on the toilet.
He hunches over, wiping his hands helplessly on his pyjama trousers. The cool ceramic of the toilet seat is rough concrete and cold night air and the blood on his hands is too warm, too fresh, pulsing out of a bullet wound.
In the morning, he’ll think it through rationally over a pot of coffee. Recognise the flashback for what it was, realise that the smell of blood from healing wounds didn’t help anything in the aftermath of the nightmare. Understand that he wasn’t that kid anymore, he wasn’t crying in the street, begging for someone to bring his Dad back.
For now, though, Matt can’t be sure if he’s in his clean bathroom or the grimy alley behind a boxing gym, and he sobs like he’s ten years old again.
***
Foggy knows about his nightmares. Matt doesn’t try to kid himself into thinking otherwise, not when he’s heard Foggy’s heartbeat jump awake when Matt’s woken up sobbing or muddling a scream. Not when, back in college, Foggy started buying more of the expensive unscented washing liquid when Matt had to stop using it for his sheets because he was running out too fast.
That doesn’t mean Matt has to acknowledge that he knows.
He does the opposite, in fact, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge them at all. Pretends that if he never mentions them, maybe they won’t exist or Foggy will just conveniently forget about it.
(He drinks a lot of coffee. It’s definitely noticeable.)
When Matt started spending nights at Foggy’s and vice versa, it was terrifying, but crucially, manageable. It’s been years at this point, he’s well versed in recognising when he’s triggered enough to have a nightmare bad enough that his partner would notice, and Foggy is reluctant but understanding when he insists on heading home.
It’s a little more tricky when they’re round at his, but he passes it off as needing to stay up late on a new case, or just barely sleeps. If he only dozes, he doesn’t dream, good or bad.
Luckily, Foggy picks up on it fast. It helps that he sees Matt’s apartment not as an underpriced, well-placed flat but as a couple soulless, empty rooms - they spend most of their time together round at Foggy’s anyway. It’s nice there. Foggy’s been good about keeping things orderly since college, where Matt quickly grew tired of tripping over random heaps of clothes or take-out boxes discarded on their floor.
After Foggy finds out about Daredevil, things are - tense - but Matt has a convenient, built-in excuse for heading back to his place. Vigilante activities. Normal things for your boyfriend to be doing at night! No weirder than late nights studying law or early mornings trapped in the clutches of yet another nightmare! Totally!
The distrust is painful, the way Matt knows that Foggy has re-written all of their previous interactions with the new information. Maybe he thinks Matt didn’t have nightmares at all, just creepy super senses or something. Worst of all is the disappointment that weighs down Foggy’s voice when he says goodnight and goodbye and heads back to his place.
It takes too long for their trust to build up again. Long enough that Matt wondered if it never would, if this was the end of something - the end of their relationship or their friendship or their law firm.
Then Foggy asked Matt to move in with him.
He knows it’s so he can keep an eye on him, make sure he isn’t coming home beat up and bloody every night, make sure he cleans his scrapes and checks for cracked ribs and gets at least a few hours of sleep. It’s supervision, that’s all, but Matt lets himself imagine it’s out of love, out of a want to be near him, to share more than just a law firm and occasional nights together.
The first few nights, Matt sticks strictly to his routine of law and Daredevil and comes home to rest next to an already asleep Foggy. Or, more accurately, a Foggy that is very clearly pretending to be asleep, but whose heartbeat pulses rapidly when Matt slips through the door.
He doesn’t sleep well , per say, but well enough that he doesn’t wake Foggy when he jolts awake with a sharp intake of breath or a stifled whimper. It’s uncomfortably close to how it was in college, when intimacy or even friendship were practically a foreign language to Matt, but it’s manageable. It’s fine.
Nearly a fortnight after he moved in, Matt staggers through the door shaking and exhausted, despite returning from patrol earlier than usual. Everything is spinning as he strips off the Daredevil suit, shoving it into his chest with careless abandon, too focused on the pounding of his head and heaving of his chest to deal with it.
His lungs hurt, each breath too harsh and too loud in his ears. Even the softer fabric of his undershirt and boxers is sharp on his skin, rough and patchy where he thinks absently that he might have bled on them.
Rubbing uncomfortably at his eyes, which are watering threateningly, Matt sheds his underclothes as well and stumbles into the shower.
The water is hot enough to sting, pulling Matt out of the haze of dissociation that had been haunting him since before he even left for patrol, and highlighting the ache in his bones. It takes a moment for him to recognise the sticky feeling on his hip and shoulder, before he realises it’s clotting blood by the smell, and fumbles to wipe the scrapes clean.
He leans back, flexing his neck as water pelts onto his chest and exhaling slowly at the settling of his shoulder muscles. Matt takes a deep breath, focusing on the individual drops hitting his skin and pooling around his heels, letting them ground him as he leans against the damp tiled wall. He’s safe, he’s at home, he’s fine.
Really, he shouldn’t have gone out as Daredevil that night. They’d had a rough time in the office, with a case involving the foster care system that hit a little too close to home and had left him stuck on auto-pilot for most of the day, but he’d been hoping a spot of patrol would help him unwind.
It had done the opposite, apparently, and sent him reeling home fighting off a panic attack.
It’s a difficult balance, protecting the Kitchen while trying not to over-stretch himself on hard days, but it’s one that Matt is trying to get better at maintaining - for Foggy’s sake, if not his own.
As it is, he’s filled with a bone-deep exhaustion as he turns off the shower, feeling his way out of the cubicle to find his favourite soft towel. Even the plush fabric he specifically chose to be tolerable after a shower scrapes against his skin, catching on the scrapes and scabs littering his ribs as he dries off, but Matt just bites his lip and gets it over with.
His shoulders slump as he hangs the towel back up, reaching out a hand to feel drowsily for the bathroom door as he thinks longingly of the silken pyjamas waiting for him back in the bedroom.
The bedroom he shares with Foggy.
Matt pauses with his hand on the knob, his breath catching in his throat as he realises the dilemma.
There’s no way he won’t have a nightmare, and with the flashbacks still burning at the edges of his consciousness he can’t be sure it won’t be a bad one. He can’t wake up Foggy by thrashing and screaming in the same bed as him, he can’t - his stomach curdles at the very idea. If he’s lucky he might get away with just night sweats and a touch of sleep paralysis, but the more he dwells on it the more he decides that’s very unlikely.
Foggy will regret asking him to move in. It’s obvious: nobody wants someone fighting the bedsheets like a wild person or to be woken up by someone yelling at people who only survive in his memories. He might even tell him to find a new apartment, to never speak to him again, to -
Matt’s hand clenches on the doorknob as he forcefully pulls himself out of what was an inevitably irrational spiral, gritting his teeth as he slips out of the bathroom. Whatever he ends up doing, he’s going to need to find something to get changed into.
The bedroom door is open, easily located by the sound of Foggy’s snoring, and it only takes a minute for Matt to run his hand along his side of the bed and bump into his silk pyjamas folded up neatly.
The rhythmic sound of Foggy’s breathing, slightly out of sync with his heartbeat, lulls Matt into something resembling calm as he pulls on the pyjamas, and as he does he considers what to do. There’s absolutely no way he’s risking sleeping next to Foggy now, but he’s definitely not in a position to go back out as Daredevil.
It doesn’t take long for him to narrow it down to two options: either phone up all his friends until he finds someone who is both awake and willing to let him crash on their couch (not unlikely, considering the type of friend he seems to attract), or he crashes on his own couch, out in the front room. The idea of phoning someone up without crying is far-fetched even to him, so Matt sweeps his hands across the bed until he finds one of his fleece throw blankets, picks up his pillow and heads out into the main area of their apartment.
Even with the slanted nature of the couch cushions and the stickiness of the leather against his feet, Matt feels like he falls asleep practically as soon as he pulls the blanket over himself.
Wind throws his hair back in his face as he stands too close to the edge, balanced precariously on the edge of the skyscraper, leaning forward to listen desperately to what is happening below, happening in his city.
People are screaming, fists colliding with faces, skin on skin and knife slicing through flesh and too-fast heartbeats that stop too quickly, too suddenly. Matt’s skin crawls, sweat dripping off him as he realises he’s wearing his work suit, his billy club nowhere in sight, and he can’t do anything -
Kids are screaming, crying, torn away from their parents or being hurt by those who were meant to care for them -
A gunshot rings out and a girl’s sobs tear through Matt’s chest like the bullet hit him instead of her, and he readies himself to leap, to join the fray, even without his suit or his weapon -
A cane smacks against his calf, sharp enough to sting, and Matt screams, Stick’s heartbeat roaring in his ears.
You can’t save them all, Matt, you can’t save them, Matt, Matt-
‘Matt!’
Foggy is saying something, Foggy’s voice, not Stick’s, and it’s getting louder, more frantic even as Matt becomes aware of it. He’s jolting awake, lashing out and shaking and his palm collides with something firm and cotton and when Foggy grunts he realises it must’ve been Foggy.
He’s not on a roof.
There’s no wind whipping his hair, no Stick yelling at him and the only screams he can hear are his own.
He’s on the sofa and he’s screaming.
Matt clamps his lips shut, stifling his yells in a choked gasp, and struggles to sit up. His head is pounding, the echoes of the nightmare still pressing in on him, and somebody is holding his hand. His palm is sticky with sweat and takes a second for him to realise it must be Foggy, a moment more to register that Foggy is speaking to him.
‘You’re okay, Matty, you’re okay,’ he’s saying, over and over and Matt latches onto it, his thoughts too scrambled to overthink it. Foggy is there and he’s okay.
Except he can’t breath, his chest is caving in with every panicked gasp and maybe he’s dying. Maybe he was more injured than he thought and now Foggy’s going to watch him die or take him to the hospital, and that thought only makes his heart pulse even faster in his ears.
‘Matt, listen to me.’
Foggy’s voice cuts through his rising terror, firm and comforting and routine. They’ve done this before, in very different situations that had similar effects on him (it’s impossible to avoid, as much as he would like to, but at least it’s usually much less intense than his nightmares. Not this time). He knows what’s happening. He does, he really does, he’s not dying after all, but it still feels like he is.
‘You’re having a panic attack. You’re in our apartment, and it’s five am on a Thursday,’ Foggy tells him calmly. His hand is still in Matt’s, and he squeezes it gently.
His heartbeat betrays his anxiety over the situation, but its continuous beat is soothing, steadying Matt’s awareness of his surroundings. He’s in their apartment and it’s early (too early) on Thursday morning. Foggy’s pulse is beating against his palm and as he focuses on it, he hears the heartbeat itself, thrumming steadily around his body.
‘Breath with me,’ murmurs Foggy, his voice distinctively lowered now he can probably tell Matt is listening.
He breaths.
In and out, and he’s not dying. Bit by bit, the room’s sounds come into focus around him, the fear leeching away and being replaced by his partner’s hushed breathing. Warm skin in Matt’s hand, another soft palm on his thigh. The underlying hum of the refrigerator in the adjoining kitchen.
Cars speed past outside, their engines mingling with the sound of people talking in the buildings across from theirs to form the white noise of the city that Matt is so used to. His bare feet brush against the fabric of Foggy’s pyjama pants, chosen to be soft and loose, and he moves to press his back against the armrest. As he does, his trousers shift and stick to the leather of the couch and he realises too late - far too late - that he’s sitting in a puddle of cold piss. It’s pooled on the sofa and soaked his favourite blanket and it takes all he has not to start hyperventilating again.
Matt yanks his hand away from Foggy, recoils in a rush and stands up, pushing the blanket to the end of the sofa as he does so.
He’s ruined it. He knows now and there’s no way he’ll stay. Matt should’ve gone to Jessica’s, or slept in Foggy’s car or not slept at all, or something. It’s the end of everything good, really, and Foggy is already backing off, waving his arms around or whatever he’s doing that’s warping those air currents and Matt has to get out first, before he’s told to.
He spins around, going for the door to the hallway, only slightly bumping into the couch in his haste. He can’t sit there and let someone else leave him. Not again.
‘Matt, wait -’ Foggy’s saying, and then a hand is around his wrist and he freezes.
‘ What?’ he chokes out, not turning around. ‘Want to humiliate me further before you kick me out?’
There’s a tense silence during which Foggy’s hand tightens on his arm, his heartbeat spiking, and then he’s being yanked around to face him.
‘What are you talking about?’ he asks finally, moving to grip both of his hands in his own, and Matt frowns at the worry and genuine confusion clear in his tone.
Matt swallows painfully, shaking his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbles, resisting the urge to turn and run. He’s ruined their relationship, messed everything up with his pathetic nightmares and panic attacks, and Foggy deserves this conversation at least. ‘It’s fine, I’ll leave now. I - I can come get my stuff when - um - when you’re at work, or-’
‘Matt, what are you on about?’ Foggy interrupts, a note of irritation joining the concern in his voice even as he rubs his thumbs along the sides of Matt’s hands. ‘You’re not going anywhere.’
Before he can even open his mouth to object, he’s being tugged forward and wrapped in a hug. He tenses immediately, far too conscious of the damp patch on his trousers even as Foggy presses his head to his shoulder and runs a hand along his back.
‘It’s okay,’ he murmurs into Matt’s hair. ‘It’s okay. I’m not going to leave.’
Matt bites back a whimper, burying his face in Foggy’s neck. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbles again, trying not to cry.
It feels like whiplash, going from the disorientation of waking up from a nightmare to Foggy talking him down from a panic attack to trying to walk right out of their flat to this. He thinks it’s almost a letdown, after nearly a decade of worrying about what would happen if Foggy ever found out, of hiding and sneaking around in laundry rooms and refusing to sleep in the same bed as his partner. Only to have Foggy be so - so casual about it.
‘Don’t apologise,’ he mutters, still rubbing Matt’s back. ‘It’s really not a big deal.’
‘It is, though,’ Matt insists, pushing away from him to stand straight and try to explain. ‘It is. I woke you up screaming, right? And I’ve ruined the couch. And my favourite blanket. It’s gross. I know it is - you don’t - you don’t have to pretend.’
‘It’s whatever,’ Foggy says dismissively, ‘nothing compared to finding you bleeding out, frankly. We can wash the blanket, and the couch is already bloodstained. You should’ve got a new one when you moved in.’
That’s Matt’s couch, and he likes it. It is the one he nearly died on, though, so Foggy may have a point.
He rubs at his eyes, which are watering treacherously, and eventually nods.
‘I’m sorry I woke you up.’
‘I want you to wake me up. I wish you’d slept in our bed. Matt, I love you - I want to help you. I want to be here for you, but you have to let me be.’ Foggy sounds so sincere, so caring, that Matt sniffles again and reaches out for another hug.
Foggy obliges, but steers Matt towards the bathroom as he does so. ‘You get cleaned up and I’ll sort out your blanket, okay? Then we can watch some shitty drama, or something.’
Nodding, Matt takes a deep breath and breaks away to go shower for the second time. Foggy’s pulse beats in his ears as he does so, keeping him tethered, reminding him that - for the first time in a long while - he’s not alone.