Having their own firm was way better than working at Landman and Zach's. Admittedly, they didn't make much, and most of their customers pain in canned beans and meals, but it felt better than it had when they represented the big corporations.

{He had a hero complex then, and he has a hero complex now. The only difference is no-one's sacrificing him to save their own skins.}

They took the small jobs, the ones with wrongful eviction and employers firing employees for no good reason. It didn't pay a lot, but the two of them managed to turn in their rent each month if they were very careful in how they spent the money. Matt managed to find a really cheap apartment, as he'd been told that a bright neon sign across the street lowered its value significantly.

Well. He couldn't see anyway, so why would it matter?

Not a week after he bought the place he donned the mask for the first time to help the little girl next door. The father had been abusing the child, but as there was no evidence-

{-of a little boy locked in a cupboard, bruises around his neck and an empty stomach, with no one caring-}

-CPS did nothing. The night after he called the police he tied a mask around the upper half of his face and followed the abuser till they came to an abandoned construction site. He let the anger, the rage that was burning in his chest-

{-that he wanted to let out because he was hurting, but they were adults and what could he do-}

-out and pummeled the man into the dirt, threatening him till he was unconscious and bloody. It bruised and bloodied his knuckles and he walked away with a split lip, but for the first time in years the roaring in his chest had dimmed down till only the embers of his rage were left.

\\\

Though that first fight in a mask stayed with him, Matt didn't truly start up his vigilante career until a few years later, when he realized that even after the Avengers moved to their tower Hell's Kitchen was only getting worse.

That the people that could help-

{-the headmaster and the ministry, the teachers and the adults that started the whole mess-}

-weren't helping.

(It was fine. He was used to being the hero.)

The outfit he put together was black, with a piece of cloth that wrapped around his eyes and over his hair to not only protect his identity, but also to hide the fact that he was blind. He wrapped his knuckles with gym tape the way Jack had taught him and pulled on a pair of fingerless gloves.

He started off doing small things and breaking up small-time crimes. Robberies, assaults, muggings. The first Mafia boss he decided to go up against was a man named Turk Barrett. He intercepted his men at the docks, who had planned to sex traffic a group of young women, and proceeded to beat them black and blue.

He hadn't experienced anything like sex trafficking as Harry, but the poor conditions and wrongful imprisonment-

{-the Malfoy Manor, Olivander wasting away, Luna, shaken up and trembling-}

-were triggering and made the burning hatred in his chest rise higher.

From the rooftops he watched as the women fled away from the docks, and wondered just what he could say to Foggy this time to explain the bruises and black eye.

\\\

Matthew didn't have many memories of his grandmother.

She'd died when he was still very young, and even though his mind was seventeen years older than his body, it didn't really retain the memories from when his body was still soft and squishy.

Part of him was relieved at that. Who knew how traumatizing remembering your own birth could be?

But he digressed. The point was that granny had died when Matt was barely five years old, and he'd only ever spent the night with her when his dad was in the boxing ring. They'd watch the fight though the thick, boxy television that looked like it had survived the Cold War and munch on the twenty-five cent-a-pound dried prunes that she had boxes upon boxes of.

At that age, Matt didn't know what his grandmother's problem with him and his father was, only that she loved saying, be careful of those Murdock boys; they've got the Devil in them. He hadn't understood what she meant by that, and she never expanded on the subject, so eventually he learned to put it out of his mind.

He knew better now.

As Harry, he'd always had a lousy grasp on his temper. When he was with the Dursleys he'd managed to keep it under wraps, but the summer he blew up Aunt Marge he'd finally snapped. That was how it was for him; his anger built up and up under his skin until he flipped his lid.

But he was never this angry.

In all the seventeen years of his former, short life he'd never felt the way he did now. He didn't scream words at his friends anymore, but the potential for it was always there, twisting just beneath the surface. Instead, he turned that beast on the thieves that were taking advantage of the corruption in the police force, on the rapists that didn't see anything wrong with assaulting women and children in the alleys, on all those beings with a moral compass so skewed that it took a few cracked ribs and eating out of a straw for several months to go straight.

But he didn't kill anyone. He might have had a ball of pain and rage burning him from the inside out, he might have had a monster with teeth and claws growling and thrashing beneath his skin-

-but he wasn't a murderer. Harry had killed someone once-

{Quirrel, with his parents' killer on the back of his head, who tried to murder Harry as a child. It was self-defense, but he still heard his screams of pain in his dreams, still remembered the smell of burning flesh and the feeling of bones beneath skin-}

-and he wasn't too keen on doing it again.