A/N: I was inspired by a very beautiful fic by ALsannan on AO3. It's called "something beyond burns through" and it's just fantastic. Highly recommend. Speaking of AO3, I got an account there under the nom de plume of TolkienGirl, and you're welcome to check me out for cross-posting if you prefer AO3's format. So far I have a few fics up from here.
Without further ado, a tribute to the mind and suffering of Matt Murdock, through the lens of Yeats' "The Second Coming."
(Spoilers for Seasons 1 and 2).
Matt's first fear, when the world is stone-still and silent around him, is that he's going to die.
His second is that he's going to live.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
Scale back. Look back, if he can.
It's better at night, worse in the morning. Better when he can open and shut his eyes in what he knows to be real darkness, tell himself that he's shut blackout curtains and the sky is sightless and blank above the endless city, and he isn't blind, not really.
(In the morning he wants to see the sunrise.)
In the morning he turns his back on the windows and guides the coffee pot to kiss the edge of his mug with a pristine clink.
It's better when he's praying. It's an equalizer. Nobody can see God, and blind faith is nobler than mere blindness.
It's better when he's fighting, when all his senses come alive.
It's worse afterwards, when he bleeds and aches, and his fingers run roughshod across his tattered skin.
It's worst of all when Foggy's laughing, or Karen's smiling, or there is snow in Central Park, and Matt just wants—he wants—
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
There is a hollow space between his ribs, and on the quiet Saturdays, when his head pounds and his heart pounds, he feels as though his chest will cave in. It all weighs. His feet are heavy on the sidewalk.
Blood is heavy on his hands.
Thicker than water, thicker than water.
It's what drags him down.
It's what gives them life.
Them. Fisk and Gao and Nobu, on and on and on.
Fisk is a man whose skin pumps blood slow and steady and swirling, under the flabby skin, coursing through the massive head and shoulders. Such heaviness, too, but he weighs upon the world—it does not weigh on him.
Fisk lights a fire and grinds flesh and blood into the ground with savage delight.
Matt is on the ground—is the ground—he aches, aches, and he does not light a fire; he burns.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Matt's a guy with a story as stupid and nostalgic as any other New York pedestrian—he loved a girl in college.
The secret is that he loved her too much.
The tragedy is that she could not quite love him back, though she wanted to.
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
He used to beg for answers, at the altar, at the skyscraper heights—why me? because he is blind. He is blind. He is the boy with hands and tears falling on his father's lifeless face, and he is pain, pain in his knuckles, pain in his eyes—I can't see—and pain in his heart when they all leave him.
Why me?
He knows he must save his city, but he does not know how.
Later, the question leaves him too. And he no longer asks why me? as though he has been chosen. He asks for nothing, because he has failed—failed his friends, failed his city, and it is ugly, how quickly sacrifice can become self-righteousness when there is no one to break his fall.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
He's so grateful for shoelaces. Muscle memory, in the little things. It makes him feel normal. Because he can be Daredevil, and he can ricochet off breath and heartbeats, but some things don't make a sound and sometimes colors matter and sometimes he is tired.
And it's then that he's grateful that his father taught him to tie his shoelaces when he was five years old, because it's just one thing he doesn't have to think about.
(God, but he's pathetic.)
(God, God help him.)
Matt's mother left before he was old enough to remember. He can't see her, but for once it isn't because he's blind.
(Somewhere a storm is coming. Somewhere a storm has come. And somewhere Matt heaves in a breath like a prayer swallowed backward, in the eye of the storm. For yes, even storms have eyes.)
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
In the end, all he can do is pray. And not as children pray, with hopeful hands pressed—starched—together.
No.
At midnight, when the church is long since empty but for the hidden face of God and the vigilant red candle, Matt prostrates himself before the altar, letting the worn, nubby carpet grind into his skin.
To be so close to dust, to the passing of so much shoe-leather—it would, anywhere else, make him gag. But here Matt smells only incense, and breathes only the silence and the sacrifice.
He doesn't know how Frank Castle can bear to do it alone. Matt may be the smallest mote of nothing, but even so—he can come here, and in between flickers of candle flame, he is never quite alone.
He rises to his knees at last, shaky and shivering. The air is cold. Elektra is dead and his friends are gone and the city doesn't feel like home anymore but that's how he knows that it still is.
Matt strains, pushes every sense—and he can feel the heat of the red candle-light, almost like the touch of a hand.
He prays. Or he means to, but all that leaves his lips is—
Why me?
And strangest of all is that it almost sounds like hope.