A/N: Yes, I still ship ClaireDevil in the corners of my heart.
This is real life, and so Matt Murdock returns to hers.
Time and again, he appears and reappears, as though daring her to forget him. Not that he says as much, and not that she would even want to.
Not today.
.
Luke is kind of the ideal boyfriend, if you put the predilection for peril aside. (As far as Claire's world goes, he's one of the tamer ones). Luke is sensible. Kind. Makes a good cup of coffee, metaphor or no.
When he's gone—caged as he does not, has never deserved—Claire wraps herself in sweaters against the gray cold of a New York winter, and prays.
Luke was a preacher's son, but he wasn't the one who made her believe in martyrs.
.
Someday, Claire Temple will tell Matt Murdock that her heart loved him, even though her head and hands knew better. But not today.
.
There is too much to read about in the papers, these days.
Or maybe Claire knows too many heroes.
It's a little bit of both.
.
Luke comes back and the world falls apart in what feels like the same twenty-four hours. Claire gave up quiet Saturday longings a while ago.
She sees Murdock, all bloodied knuckles and raspy voice and tired, pained bravado, and she has to remind herself that she gave him up, too.
One day, she's going to tell him she misses him. Not—not like that. She can't miss him like that.
As a friend. She misses the way he sees and doesn't see, the way he laughs at a bad joke, the way he never winced when she patched him up. She doesn't miss the way she worried, she doesn't miss the way she was terrified, but then again…that was then. Before this was her every day.
If she'd met Luke first, and then Matt, might he have been her every day?
It doesn't matter. Not today.
.
All things considered, she's pretty damn good with her fists. All things considered, they're damn lucky she's there. She and Colleen and Misty, the common mortals, saving worlds the old-fashioned way—blood and hope.
But Matt was too much blood and too much hope, all at once. No one should live like that.
When the building shudders and groans and falls before her eyes, she only knows that no one should die like that.
She wraps her arms around herself and wheezes out a sob, too much noise and staccato for actual breath, and prays. Prays, as though she believes in prayer. Loves, as though her heart ever stopped.
Her friend was in that building. The last shall be first, his Bible said. And the first—the first one she knew, the first one she followed—the first is now last, the last one out.
As if last is the same as never.
.
Claire Temple, in her own way, has been everyone's hero. But the Devil of Hell's kitchen was hers.
Yesterday, Claire thinks, she might have told him.
But not today.