Chapter 5

It was well after 9 am when she woke the next morning. In a bed in an apartment she didn't recognize. There was a scraping noise in the en suite bathroom. Whomever she'd gone home with obviously planned to get on with his day. Oh wait. Nope. That would be Matt. And Matt couldn't walk. Or see. Liz hopped out of his bed and skidded down the hall where she found him leaning forward in the seat of the wheelchair reaching for his toothbrush.

"Morning, Liz," he greeted her as he teetered precariously, his fingers inching forward.

She didn't have time for pleasantries. "You should have woken me."

"You seemed like you needed the sleep. And it's really all I did yesterday."

"What I mean is if you fall we'll be starting at square one. Or worse. And then I'd also have to explain it to Foggy."

Matt sighed in understanding. "I get that. I do. But I'm just not used to sitting still and having other people wait on me."

She plucked up his toothbrush and handed it to him after applying a little bit of the paste. "Here."

"Thanks," he accepted it and started to brush. "I'm gonna need to figure out how to get back in the office. I can't sit here for weeks, months."

She dropped her hands to his shoulders. "Give it a few days at least. Let your side heal up, and then you can start with the crutches."

He shook his head. "I was awake out there for more than half the night trying to figure out how I can use them and the cane at the same time." He set his toothbrush back on the sink. "I still don't know how it will work."

"Let's just give it a few days. We'll figure something out between the four of us. And Claire. She's super resourceful about stuff like that."

"It's not even like we have that many clients, but if I can at least do something maybe I'll feel a little less useless."

"We can get you to the office. We can definitely figure that out, but not today and not tomorrow, and probably not for the rest of the week."

"Liz," he whined. She didn't know he had it in him to whine.

"Why don't we just redirect our focus here?" she decided as she sat on the toilet lid across from him to achieve his eye level. If that even mattered.

"Okay." He'd give that a try. "What did you have in mind?"

She attempted to expedite her thinking. "Maybe a field trip? We have the elevator key."

"If we can go on a field trip, why can't I go to the office?" He'd moved from whining to pouting.

"There's no one there but Foggy and Karen, and they'll be here tonight. Pick another spot. It looks like a nice day."

"I don't know." He took a minute to consider this. "Can we at least make it to the roof?"

She'd seen the steps in his apartment, but there might be an alternate route. "Let me explore. Okay?"

He nodded, and Liz helped him back the wheelchair out of the bathroom. She headed back into the hallway and searched for the service entrance. Presumably they'd have to have a way to haul freight to the roof. She stepped into the elevator. There was another position for the key, marked R. They might be in business. She tried it out, shielding her eyes against the glare when the doors opened facing directly east into the morning sunlight. She turned the key in the other direction to return to Matt's floor.

He was waiting for her by the door. "Well?"

"Yeah, we can get there." His entire countenance brightened. "Can I have a minute first?"

"Oh, sure." He pushed himself out of her way. "Take your time." She washed her face and brushed her teeth before she rejoined Matt in the hall just a few moments later. "That was fast!"

"I know you're feeling cooped up in here." She pushed him forward toward the door and then the elevator. She inserted the key and brought their car, then inserted it again to give them access to the roof. The doors opened, and they exited. Matt moved directly into the sun.

"This is so great, Liz." His smile seemed genuine this time.

"Do you come up here a lot?"

"Yeah." He inhaled deeply. "This is my city. I have to look after it."

She pulled a milk crate around so she could sit beside him. "You grew up here?"

He nodded. "I was born about three blocks south of here. It's a Chipotle now, I think."

She shrugged. "There have been lots of changes around here in the past few years, I guess."

"Were you here? When it happened?" The Incident, The Battle of New York – whatever you wanted to call it, it had been horrifying.

"Yes. I was working in Washington Heights, though. It wasn't so much in my back yard like here."

"You went to Columbia?"

She nodded. "Just for residency, though. You did, too."

He nodded. "Undergrad and law school."

"Your shirt says Columbia Law." She touched the letters on his chest.

"Oh." He grinned sheepishly. "I usually don't pay any attention. Foggy's slipped in a couple of concert t-shirts, I think." He shrugged.

"Is that where you met him?"

"At a concert? No." She smacked his arm with quick laugh as Matt nodded. "Yeah. In undergrad. We were roommates. Just kind of stuck."

Liz chuckled with an exaggerated shake of her head. "And I have no idea where my freshman roommate is now, and I'm not about to look her up."

"Yeah. It doesn't usually end up like what we have. That's the one stroke of luck in my life." He stopped talking as a pained pallor crossed his face.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah. It just hurts. And it caught me off guard. That doesn't usually happen." She wasn't sure exactly what he meant, but she reached her hand out to the bare part of his arm and began rubbing, almost absently. Surprisingly, the touch wasn't unpleasant. It actually felt nice, soothing somehow. He did not expect that. He took a deep breath. "I'm sorry. I'm totally dominating this conversation. Where did you grow up, go to college, med school?" She turned toward him with a smile he could actually see as a cool breeze blew across her face, feathering her hair behind her. Matt reached out and smoothed a strand. She reached hers up to meet his hand. "Sorry. I don't know why I did that."

"It's okay," she stammered. "I'm from Chicago originally. I came east for college." She paused. "Yale. And then all the way west for Stanford Med."

Matt whistled. "Ah. So you're one of those," he quipped with a raised eyebrow.

"With lots of scholarships and even more loans? Yes."

He nodded. He was quite familiar with the financial aid counselor at Columbia. But she still didn't feel like one of them somehow. He digressed. "Claire lives near here. She found me in her dumpster."

Liz nodded. "I know that's where she found you. But we work a little north of here."

"And you live a little north of here."

She nodded. "A little less north than where I work. But no. I don't live or work in Hell's Kitchen."

He ignored that confession but pushed a bit further. "What happened with Jim?" Or a lot further.

"It's personal."

He shrugged. "You know a lot of personal stuff about me. You've seen a lot of personal stuff about me."

She couldn't really get around that fact. He might as well know the sordid truth. "I slept with Captain America."

Matt blinked a couple of times, and then he ran a hand through his hair. "Wow."

"Yeah."

"Recently?"

"Recently enough, I guess."

"Did you know who he was?"

"I mean, he wasn't in the suit, but he looks like himself. So yeah. I knew exactly who he was and likely what I was doing."

"So was it like hero worship or something?"

"Why?" she scoffed. "Think you've improved your chance to get lucky here if it was?" She crossed her arms over her chest to go along with her newly-acquired scowl.

Matt coughed and sputtered, not sure how to answer that. "No. That's not what I meant, I just mean, why did you do it?"

"Why I sabotaged my relationship with a really great guy for one moment with some famous guy that I probably won't ever talk to or even see again?" Liz shrugged. "No idea."

"I know him," whispered Matt after they'd sat in silence for a good three or four minutes.

"You what?"

"I mean, not as Steve Rogers, but I know Captain America. And he knows Daredevil. Well, not about all of this, but I'm familiar with the Avengers."

"Okay." Pretty much everyone in the universe was by now.

Matt sighed. "What I meant is if you wanted to try to see if there's something there…"

"There's not." Rogers didn't love her, not even close. They'd both had a bad day at the same time and ended up at the same after party.

"Oh."

She kicked a rock beside her shoe. "It's silly. I don't know why I told you that."

"Because you've seen me where my bathing suit covers," he recapped, hoping to bring a smile to her face.

"If it helps, I didn't really look. I was just there to make sure you didn't fall on the floor or whatever," she vowed.

He leaned toward her, his hand finding her face again. "I didn't. Fall on the floor, I mean."

She closed her eyes. "I know. I was there." Matt reached forward and kissed her. His lips against hers felt soft and sweet and warmed her unlike any kiss she'd ever experienced.

He sat back in the chair. "I'm sorry. I don't know why I did that."

"I told you I cheated on my fiancé with Captain America, who is possibly the most honorable man in the world so obviously that one's on me, and you kissed me. I'm not sure why you did that, either."

"I have a thing for women in healthcare?"

Liz laughed. "And apparently I have a thing for corrupting superheroes."

Matt's own grin slid from his face as he recalled Claire's reaction to who and what he'd decided to be. And there was Elektra. Or there had been. And she was barely gone. What was he even doing? "I shouldn't have done that."

"What? Oh. Okay." Liz pulled her hand back from his arm and stood. "I'll just give you a minute up here."

"No, Liz! Wait." He attempted to turn the chair with several fruitless movements as the brakes were still engaged.

She took a step toward him to stop whatever he was trying to do with the chair. "It's okay, Matt. Really."

"It's all my stuff. Not yours. Everything that happened with her, that was less than a week ago."

She reclaimed her seat on the milk crate to dig into this a little deeper. "And who was she to you exactly? Your girlfriend? Fiancée? Wife?"

He shook his head. "None of those really, just a memory that didn't quite play out the way I'd recalled it."

"Then why the guilt?"

Matt managed a sad smile. "How much time do you have to talk about Catholic guilt?"

TBC