A/N: After I watched Daredevil for the first time, I found myself thinking constantly about the way ordinary places and routines would feel for Matt: locating objects through spatial awareness, reading emotion through body heat instead of facial expressions. This fic grew out of that; it's different from most of what I write, but adaptation is what it's all about.

This is set in a hypothetical future in which Karen knows Matt's secret and they're dating. I'm not that big of a Matt/Karen shipper, but she made the most sense in the role and I really love her character. I'm sure everything will change for them with Season 2 (it's coming so soon!) so I had to get it out now!

I said: "Let me walk in the fields."
He said: "No, walk in the town."
I said: "There are no flowers there."
He said: "No flowers, but a crown."

I said: "But the skies are black;
There is nothing but noise and din."
And He wept as He sent me back –
"There is more," He said; "there is sin."

"Obedience" by George MacDonald (1824-1905)

Taking Matt out of the city seems like it should be viewed as an act of mercy. If Karen misses fresh air and relative quiet, she reasons, how much worse must it be for him? She brought it up tentatively, knowing he was likely to object to a weekend of comfort and relaxation just on principle, but he must have sensed how much she wanted to go—who is she kidding, of course he sensed it—and now here he is sitting shotgun in a rental car, with her at the wheel and Hell's Kitchen disappearing in the rearview mirror.

Karen gets chatty when she's happy. The weather looks like it's going to be perfect, cottonball clouds rolling jubilantly through the blue, and she wants him to experience it with her, to see through her eyes for once instead of through his ears and skin. She tries to find poetic words for the bright spring foliage lining the highway, so that he'll know that there's beauty here and beauty is good. When he asks about today's sky, she immediately says, "Azure," then laughs at herself because nobody needs to get that precious about a perfectly ordinary color, then stops laughing and repeats it because maybe looking at the sky shouldn't be ordinary.

"Do you want to hike Mount Greylock tomorrow?" she asks when it appears on the horizon.

"Hike?" he echoes, as if he's never heard the word before.

"What, you can walk up a vertical wall like it's a staircase, but you're afraid of a trail through the woods?"

He chuckles, but the uncertainty doesn't leave his voice. "It's just...if it's open to the public, people are going to be asking if you're out of your mind, bringing a blind guy along."

She doesn't try to dismiss his concerns. His secret identity is serious business, and he won't allow it to be threatened. Still, she thinks there's a way around this. "So don't be blind. We won't see anyone who would recognize you; just leave the cane in the car and avoid conversations about celebrity hairstyles."

His eyebrows rise, and he shows her an incredibly cute smile. "That could work. I haven't been on a hike since I was a kid."

"It's been a while for me too," she says, then transitions right back into describing their surroundings. The road has narrowed into two lanes, and on the grass alongside there are stones from the earth stacked into uneven knee-high walls. They look precarious, but they've been there since this part of the country was settled, cobbled together by farmers trying to enclose their livestock. He lets her tell him about it, even sounding interested, until she sees a general store and interrupts herself: "Oh, we have to stop here."

"What for?"

"Your disguise."

She parks the car, leads him inside, and swiftly locates a rack of sunglasses, none of them looking quite worth their five dollar price tag. "Those stoplights on your face are a dead giveaway. Gimme." Taking his red-lensed glasses in one hand, she chooses a pair from the rack at random to replace them.

"How do I look?" He's grinning, but before she can answer he holds up a finger and adds in a deadly serious tone, "Remember, if you lie, I will know."

"In that case…" She's already coming down with a case of the giggles. The sunglasses she's just put onto him are a chunky wraparound throwback in blue and yellow. "You look ridiculous."

The ones they settle on in the end aren't exactly fashionable, but they're typical enough to do the trick - black and oval, the kind everyone wore in the 90's. She isn't lying when she says he looks good, but she knows he knows she's still smiling every time she looks at him, and she doesn't really have an explanation for it.

Determined to keep their journey at a leisurely pace, Karen insists they complete a full exploration of the general store. It's the traditional kind of shop that she loves, quaint and old, catering equally to tourists and locals. She coos over the handmade baskets for sale, reads the funniest of the bumper stickers to Matt, and exchanges pleasantries with an aged fisherman inspecting the tackle. Matt's following with an expression of amused tolerance, but when she tells him about the postcards, he's the one who says, "Oh, we should send one to Foggy."

"We'll be back by the time he gets it."

His answer is a placid shrug, which somehow seems like he's making a really good point, so she picks a card more or less at random and brings it to the basket table to fill it out. After a second of thought, she chooses a felt-tipped pen so that Matt won't be able to touch the indentations, and designates half of the space on the postcard for each of them. When they're finished, her half has a sketch of Matt in his new sunglasses, accompanied by a note, Doesn't he look like Neo from The Matrix? Matt's message below it, in surprisingly neat handwriting, reads only, WHAT DID KAREN WRITE?

In spite of the humor of it, she feels a slight tinge of regret. She's secretly proud of her skill at drawing—she's not Rembrandt or anything, but Foggy will definitely be impressed that she can render a tiny pen sketch of a face in a few minutes and still make it recognizable, and she wants that reaction from Matt too. He would take her word for it, but it's not the same.

By the time they reach the checkout counter with the sunglasses and pen, they've accumulated an armload of other purchases: beer for tonight, ice cream bars for right now, a refrigerator magnet as a souvenir. A teenage girl with soulful eyes affixes a stamp to their postcard and asks Matt if he's seen the waterfall pictured on it yet, then blushes when she looks up at him and gets tongue-tied trying to apologize.

"Not yet!" he says as if he hasn't even noticed anything amiss. "But we're going tomorrow, is it nice?"

The girl hesitates, then shares a tip about where to stand to feel the mist on your face. Matt listens raptly, and her embarrassment has dissipated by the time they thank her and leave the store. Karen wants to know how he always finds the right words to put people at ease, but the real question is how he still has enough compassion to bother trying after he's been fielding this kind of thing every single day for the last couple decades, so she doesn't ask. They've each got a face full of ice cream and it's just not the time for loaded questions.

The sunset comes soon after, filtered through the trees on her side of the road. She sees a dozen different colors in it, and finds a word for each one.