AN: Combined a couple prompts for this one because they worked too well together.
Prompt(s): Dandelion seeds, feathers, and dragonfly toes.
Sanctuarium in Natura
New York City isn't exactly an easy place to find a quiet spot for relaxing. Too many heartbeats, everywhere, crushing and shifting and swirling about like motes of dust in a beam of sunlight. Noise and pressure and bodies swarm around him in every direction, overlaid by traffic and construction and a million other sounds all clamoring for his attention. Sometimes Matt wonders if life might be easier if he moved out west somewhere, to a place with wide open fields and farms instead of this overpopulated concrete jungle, but in the end he can't even seriously consider it. Hell's Kitchen is home.
So he learns to control it, learns to master his body and his senses so he can manage to live a relatively normal life without constantly being sidelined by sensory overloads like those early days in the hospital. It helps, and daily meditation makes it easier to keep his centre amid the screeching, growling, rumbling chaos of the city. Most days it doesn't bother him in the least and he can survive in the relative quiet of his top floor apartment and the office in the nearly abandoned building that hasn't quite yet been refilled since The Incident.
Today is not one of those days.
He hadn't been looking for it when he found it, which was the way of such things, he supposed. Standing in front of the church, he had been searching out Father Lantom's familiar presence - gait wavered by age and arthritis that he refused to acknowledge, heavy starched shirt with the collar that scratched against his Adam's apple, the scent of lemon and candle wax and too much sugar in his daily lattes, heart that beat like a balm, calm and steady and with a commanding, forcefulness like a captain leading his men into the breach. He found it, not in any of the usual places, but instead coming from behind the brick building.
Curious, Matt had followed the edge of the building around until he entered the little garden tucked into the shadow of the steeple. The place was cool and gentle, sheltered on one side by a large stone building that had been half-demolished in The Incident and hadn't been restored, and on the other side by the sturdy back of the church. It was mid-autumn at the time and the little square of grass and stone path was interspersed with clusters of flowers that were drying out, brittle and cracking in each gust of wind, little flecks blowing away in a never-ending whirl of decay.
Father Lantom glanced up when Matt's cane tapped against the path. "Matthew," he greeted. He was kneeling in the grass, and he tugged, pulling a weed from the garden in a spray of dirt. Matt heard the series of grating clicks as the individual seeds broke away from the bulb at the motion - a dandelion, he acknowledged somewhere in the back of his mind - and drift away on a lonely zephyr. Father Lantom huffed slightly and deposited the remainder of the weed into a nearby wheelbarrow. "I was just finishing up here, going to head in and have a latte. Care to join me?"
"Actually," Matt hesitated for a moment, cocking his head as he let his senses bask in the relative calm of the little garden, "I think I'd just like to sit here for a while."
Father Lantom must have seen something in his face because he didn't wheedle the way he normally did when Matt tried to brush him off. He stood up with a puff, dusted bits of dry grass from his pants, and then left without another word. Matt found his way to a little stone bench tucked beneath a drooping cherry tree and made himself comfortable.
It was far from perfect, but he was shielded from the majority of the city noises by the buildings that stood on either side like sentinels. Tentatively, he released the tight leash on his senses and found that he wasn't immediately overwhelmed. Plants and moisture, stone and dust. It was comforting and protected and for the first time in ages Matt felt like he could stop fighting so hard just to exist.
On days when the entire world was simply too much to bear, Matt made his way to the church garden. It was rarely occupied at the times he showed up, either ridiculously early in the morning before heading into the office or in the deepest hours of the night before heading out onto the streets. Father Lantom always seemed to be able to tell when he needed the peace, and when Matt bypassed the church doors to head for the garden, he gave him a wide berth. He waited, patient and compassionate like a good Catholic, until Matt came out on his own, and was there to greet him with a latte and firm advice.
It had been a long night, dealing with a child trafficking ring down by the docks, and the whole affair had left him feeling raw and ragged. Emotions humming too close to the surface and making it difficult to control himself. Cases with kids tended to do that to him, which he reasoned was a totally rational response, really. Still, it was going to make concentrating on the casework difficult, and he already put too much of the work on Foggy, so he got up early and traced the familiar path to the church.
As usual, there was no one when he entered the garden and made his way to the bench he had claimed as his own. He propped his cane against the side and deposited his laptop bag on the seat beside him. His glasses went into his breast pocket and he tilted his head back, letting his eyes drop shut. One deep breath in and then he released it all.
The sudden, hypnotic presence of nature washed over him. It was late spring, the days just beginning to turn from damp and muggy to dry and brittle. Everything - the slightly-too-long grass, the little rounded spots of perennials recently planted, the vines that crept over the iron fence and up the back of the stone church, the tiny, well-trimmed trees that edged the garden - all of them smelled vibrant and springy and green.
The constant, low buzz of life swam around him. A bird overhead was hopping around in its nest, adjusting and readjusting the little bits of twig to make a more secure hollow for the little eggs - three tiny, lightning-fast heartbeats. The mother bird's feathers made soft, whispery sounds as they flittered in the air to help it keep balance while it worked. A cat - female and in heat, by the smell - had taken up residence beneath the lilac bush and it was grooming itself with a lazy contentment, the burrs on its tongue scraping and dragging through the fur. He could even hear the bugs, the hundreds and thousands of insects flying and crawling and climbing. Air was disturbed in tiny whorls by a butterfly's wings, a spider was making a meal of a particularly crunchy little thing that had strayed into its gossamer webs, a worm pushed and pulled its way through the damp earth, the contract and stretch of its muscles a natural rhythm. On a flower above his head he heard the drone of wings and the gentle tap of microscopic feet alighting on a closed bud. Not a butterfly that time - a dragonfly, he thought.
Matt leaned back and let himself melt into the comfort of the garden, protected from the outside world by the walls of Hell's Kitchen and God. Here he was allowed to feel safe, to feel sheltered, to feel vulnerable. So while his hyper-senses were distracted by nature, his mind drew forth the memories. The stink of fish and refuse, the thundering heartbeats of bodies - too little, too fragile, too innocent for this - and gasps of breath, the salty sweetness of tears on sweaty skin. The fear, so much fear, and confusion and homesickness and pure unadulterated panic when men with guns pawed at their clothes and hair and skin. They had been only children, lost and alone in a terrifying new world they didn't understand, and it had been too much for him.
Because some part of him, that distant former self hidden away in the back of his mind behind all of the training Stick had (and then hadn't) given him, had understood. The little boy inside of him that he could never completely get away from had related. Enough that the devil had been released in a way he hadn't done since Fisk had gone to jail. Those men who thought that the lives and innocence of children were currency to be traded would not bother anyone for a very long time.
Once his emotions had run their course, Matt straightened up on the bench. He dragged the backs of his wrists over his face, wiping away the salt-tinged moisture that was drying on his skin, and replaced his sunglasses. Slowly, carefully, he began to draw his senses back under his command. It was easier now, now that the demons of the night were faced and dealt with and no longer scratching at the surface of his mind. Once he was finished, he gathered his cane, took one last deep breath of the garden, and then headed for the front of the church.
"Good morning, Matthew. How are you?" Father Lantom asked from the open doors of the church.
Matthew took stock, evaluated himself the way he did a new potential client, and then nodded. "Better. Much better."