"What do you think I look like?" asks Foggy one day.
They're stretched out on the lawn before the Columbia dorms, and the afternoon heat has burnt the grass so it smells sharp and pleasant. The hum of distant cars is an ever-present backdrop typical of New York. Matt tilts back his head.
"I have an image," he says. " - An idea. It's probably not accurate. But."
"You used to be able to see," says Foggy. This part isn't a question. His breath hitches like he wants to say something else. But he doesn't.
Matt answers, though. Because he can guess well enough what Foggy's trying to ask. "I wish I never could, sometimes," he says. The words fall out and taste like a lie, but he says it again. "I wish I could never... So much would be easier."
Blue raindrops fall silently over the pavement, huge and fat, and vanish silently before they hit the darkness of the ground. This vanishing is necessary to the delusion; it excuses the impossibility of non-sound.
Matt sweeps his cane along the ground and listens to the footsteps and slow heart-rates of passing pedestrians to orient himself. Some of their hearts speed up as they see him; his very presence engenders awkwardness. With each tap of his cane sound-waves bounce and skitter through the air, bouncing off obstacles in his way. He steps over a discarded plastic bag and avoids a puddle. Tobacco-smoke makes his nose wrinkle.
When he comes to the intersection, he taps the pushbutton around waist-level and waits for the light to change. Someone is standing by his side. She smells faintly like lemons, mint, and moldy bread. In the corner of his vision, a round face with lime-green eyes peers at him and turns. He ignores her.
The blue rain clears up when he approaches the office. White light shines down when he opens the door.
"Matt," Karen says. She is short and dark and lovely and her hair sparkles silver in a flash of sight. "Good. Mr. Muniz was just here with those documents you requested. Foggy has them."
"Why do I always seem to get here first?" Foggy wonders.
Foggy is probably not an orange circle. Matt takes a moment to remind himself of this. It is good to be reminded, sometimes.
"I'm not sure," says Matt easily. "How long have you been fighting with Marci, again?"
"Oh, well, fuck you too," Foggy snorts.
Matt practices his mock-trial in front of an audience of a thousand staring faces.
They do not speak and they do not move and they do not even listen and in all these ways they are very, very different from the actual people he will encounter later. But he sees them. They glow vivid and real before his eyes.
Matt runs his hands over his raised Braille notes. Their eyes seem judging. He tells himself he is imagining this.
He is imagining all of this.
He begins.
A rainbow is a beautiful thing that he has forgotten. He imagines rainbows after days when rain has passed and dew hangs thick in the air. The scent of wet grass and water-swollen pavement makes rainbows creep into the edges of his eyes.
But he associates rain with other things, too. Wet dirt, and the things that crawl beneath it. Writhing worms squirm through holes from out of the ether. They start out as small things and creep across his vision, growing inexorably larger. They move toward him.
They always move toward him.
When Matt goes out as Daredevil the city welcomes him with hands full of blood.
He jumps from roof to roof. Under his running feet, in the yawning chasm between buildings, fingers grasp and tear at his legs. Disconnected arms spread in supplication and pleading. It is a peculiar arrogance, this sort of thinking. But the city itself cries to him. He cannot help but answer her.
Daredevil finds his next targets by hearing the distinctive rattle of a gun or a cry for help; he hears the slap of fists-on-flesh or the clatter of a heart-beat. But Matt Murdock knows the color red. Red is a warning. Red is danger. Red is his own color, and it is the color the city flares when the mugger on 40th unsheathes his knife and advances on a teenage girl.
Golden thread spills around him and Matt sees blood that doesn't exist burst around his fist in impossible arcs as he beats the man into the ground.
The girl is a pink-yellow triangle. He turns to offer her help, but before he can get the words out she flees and becomes faint in his periphery. It turns her into a diamond.
Diamonds are cutting, dangerous things, and he thinks: good.
During mass, Lantom preaches and the people kneel. The room flares white. Angel wings blot out the ceiling.
The people kneel. Stars glitter through the abyss.
The people kneel. There is a god in the front of the room. Matt cannot describe him but he is there.
The people kneel. There is fire on the floor.
The people kneel. There is a river in the clouds, and the clouds are in the church.
The people kneel, and -
The people are not kneeling because Matt is alone in the church and the people exist only here, only in his head, and their faces are the same, the same, the same -
At night he rests in the darkness and listens to his own heart. His lungs crackle with the strain of breathing through damaged ribs. The sound chips like thunder, like a storm, and fog rolls in under his eyes.
He keeps breathing until he blows it all away.