A/N: I just REALLY love Claire Temple, ok?

A part of Claire wanted to get out of the city, and a part of her knew she never would. She thought of upstate nursing schools, autumn leaves like fragments of stained glass drifting over sidewalks, medical textbooks folded in her arms. Somewhere with a local practice, a TV show kind of clinic, friendly doctors and patients whose names you knew.

And then her mom got sick, and Claire wasn't leaving the city.

In the end, she probably wouldn't have anyway. Because if it's not her mom, it's the kid who comes in with bruises from a crappy foster home. If it isn't the kid, it's an old woman who's slipped on black ice. Or maybe it's a gang member, or a whole spate of gang members. Shards of glass embedded in flesh. Bullets through bone. Pulses dropping faster than a pebble off a cliff; Claire's seen it all.

It's her city too.

It's her city, but she isn't like Matt. She puts on scrubs, not a suit, and she smiles at the new mom in room 307 and gives a death-glare to the young punk in the emergency room who keeps picking at his stitches. This is her city, not seen from the rooftops. She sees it in all its grimy, busy, fluorescent truth.

She wonders, sometimes, if Matt understands. Not that she expects him too—he's got enough on his plate and he keeps shoveling more on. But sometimes, in the middle of the night when she wakes up and misses him, inexplicably.

They've never spent enough time together for her to miss him.

Yet in the middle of the night, she wants to tell him how she tries to be a hero too. How she can't save them all, no one can, not even him.

It probably wouldn't do a bit of good. Matt Murdock is stubborn as hell.

(But so is Claire Temple.)

And when they tell her to be quiet, tell her to forget what she's seen and heard and known, deep in the pit of her stomach—when they pretend that letting her keep her job is some kind of prize she should cling to—

Claire gets angry. She gets angry, and she lifts her chin, ready for whatever hits are coming. Three strikes? She thinks, and then—

Not if I strike first.