Okay friends, first chapter since Season 2 premiered! I had a lot of good talks with you guys about what I liked/disliked this season, and in the reviews I saw a lot of you asking who/what from Season 2 I might incorporate into the story. To answer briefly: Frank Castle and Elektra were amazing, but will not be appearing in this fic. I just can't work them into the plot I have laid out. And no ninjas.

More importantly, many of you said that you spent much of Season 2 waiting for Sarah to appear, to which I can only reply by evilly drumming my fingers together and saying, "My plan has succeeded."

With the release of Season 2, this story has gotten a zillion new readers, so: welcome! Thanks for reading so many words to make it this far.

I think that covers everything! Again, kindly refrain from mentioning any major spoilers when reviewing this chapter, in case there are readers who (as inexcusable as it may be) haven't finished Season Two yet.

Alright, enjoy the chapter! I kept it mostly (mostly) angst free just to help with the pain of Season 2 being over, but don't get used to it or anything.


Chapter 21: Impact

Sarah loitered near the corner of the platform and watched Matt carefully as he walked along the perimeter of the ring, trailing his fingers along the rope. She felt a pale flutter of nervousness in her stomach as she realized that she really had no idea what kind of situation she was stepping into.

"Have you ever taught anyone how to fight before?"

"Nope," he said, coming to a stop at the opposite corner of the ring, where he leaned back against the ropes with his arms spread wide. "Why?"

Her mind flashed to standing on the roof, watching Daredevil brutally wrench a man's arm out of its socket, and she couldn't help but speculate as to how much of that side of him he was about to bring into the ring. She hadn't really thought to ask about how this whole thing would work, and now she found that she didn't know what to expect.

Matt tilted his head as she fidgeted with the stretchy boxing wrap that was wound around her hand. She had tried to mimic the complicated wrapping pattern that she'd watched Matt do, and she'd done a good enough job that it held out throughout her hitting the punching bag, but was now starting to come partially undone.

After a few moments, he pushed himself away from the ropes and crossed the ring, stopping in front of her and reaching out to fix the boxing wrap. He took her left hand and began slowly unraveling the wrap. Once it was undone, he started to redo it, working quicker and much more deftly than Sarah had. He didn't anything to her at first, so she waited, positive that he wasn't standing in front of her simply to help her with her boxing tape.

"Having second thoughts?" he asked quietly. She knew that he'd been picking up on her slight tick of nervousness.

"No. I just..." she shrugged, glancing around the ring before exhaling and figuring she might as well get right to the point. "Okay, scale of one to ten, with one being...Lawyer Matt who has pretty waitresses read menus for him. And ten being, like, straight-up Daredevil. Who am I looking at here?"

"Was that waitress pretty?" Matt asked innocently, and Sarah groaned.

"That's so not the point of the question."

Matt just nodded, apparently thinking about his answer as he continued wrapping her hand.

"Three?" He pressed his lips together and tilted his head as he reconsidered. "Three point five."

Sarah cast her eyes towards the ceiling and huffed slightly at how unsatisfactory her arbitrarily-chosen scale had been at helping her evaluate the situation, and Matt chuckled lightly at her reaction.

"I don't plan to take it easy on you, if that's what you're asking," he told her bluntly. "It would defeat the point. If you have to use anything I teach you against someone who isn't me, you know they aren't going to go easy on you."

"Yeah…I noticed," Sarah muttered, thinking of the force with which Ronan had hit her across the face. It had taken weeks for those bruises to fade completely.

Matt kept his focus on re-wrapping her hand as they talked, allowing her to process what he was saying without that x-ray feeling he sometimes gave her.

"There's no way to show you how to defend yourself without putting you on the defensive, but…you know that I'm not going to hurt you, right?"

Something about the way he asked made Sarah question if he was reassuring her or if he was looking for her to reassure him.

She watched him wind the boxing wrap around her hand: bringing it around her wrist, then her knuckles, back down over her thumb. She couldn't help but be reminded of the last time she had watched him wrap her hands up, the night of her struggle with Ronan. The first real glimpse she'd had that Matt Murdock could be anything other than a threat.

"I know. It's just that this…" Sarah nodded to the boxing gym around them. "All of this is—is your world. I don't...really know what to expect."

"Well, luckily for you, I'm not the one in control of what happens in this ring," he informed her as he finished wrapping her left hand. "You are."

Sarah narrowed her eyes at him skeptically. "I think maybe you're confused. Probably the concussion you wouldn't let me ask about."

Matt laughed as he switched to the wrap on her right hand. "I'm serious. This is supposed to be an opportunity to help you, not an excuse to toss you around the ring. I mean it when I say I'll push your limits a bit, but in the end you're still the one who gets to set them. If you want to stop, we stop."

As she agreed, he finished up re-wrapping her right hand. The boxing tape was much tighter now than it had been, anchoring her wrist more.

"Plus...you'll get to hit me," Matt said with a wicked grin as he began slowly walking backwards, using his light hold on her wrist to tow her into the center of the ring. "Which I'm sure you've wanted to do since the day you met me."

Despite herself, Sarah laughed as Matt raised his eyebrows knowingly.

"I'm not answering that," she told him.

"I figured you might not," he stopped once they were both in the center of the ring, still hanging onto her wrist. "You ready?"

Sarah looked at him suspiciously, aware that he hadn't let go of her wrist yet. "I guess."

"Good," he said, and as she had suspected, he tightened his hold on her wrist. "We'll start here. If someone wants to keep you from running away or hitting them back, the easiest thing for them to do is grab your wrists, and it's hard to break a hold like that."

Sarah knew that already, of course—in part because Matt himself had used that particular hold against her more than once.

"If their hold isn't too tight, try to rotate your hand so that your thumb lines up here," he said, gesturing to where his thumb overlapped his index finger. "Then bend your elbow towards your body as hard as you can."

He loosened his grip slightly so that she could try it, which she did.

"And if their hold is too tight?"

"That's when you get to have some fun figuring out the best places to hit them to make them loosen their grip."

"You have an interesting definition of fun," Sarah pointed out, to which Matt just smirked, before taking her wrist again.

"If they're trying to pull you towards them," he said, tugging her so that she stepped forward, "Go with it. They're expecting you to be try to pull away; instead you can surprise them by stepping even more in their space. They're already bringing your hand closer to them, meaning you can probably reach something you can hit: their nose, temple, windpipe."

They spent a while practicing having her hit the places he listed, with him easily deflecting her hits but allowing them to come close enough that she could gauge her aim. When they moved on to lower targets—the solar plexus, the side of the rib—he occasionally allowed her to actually land a blow, though they didn't seem to affect him much. As they practiced, he continuously reminded her to watch the placement of her feet and not to telegraph her moves by stepping into them. She struggled to remember that while also trying to focus on hitting him and then immediately retracting her arm—he warned her that the longer she stayed within reach of her opponent, the more likely it was that they were going to be able to grab ahold of her again.

To prove his point, Matt waited until one hit where she completely failed to retract her hand in time—landing a push punch instead of the desired snap punch. Before she could blink, his hand closed around her right wrist again, this time spinning her around so that her back slammed into his chest. He locked his other arm around her waist, pinning her left arm to her side so that she was effectively trapped in place.

"The longer you stay in their territory, the more opportunities you give them to get the upper hand," he reminded her, his voice calm in her ear.

Slightly frustrated, Sarah didn't wait for Matt to release her. He was holding her right wrist at such an angle that she could still move her arm, and she brought her elbow back into his ribs as hard as she could. He made a noise that was somewhere between a pained exhale and a laugh, but it seemed to do the trick, and he loosened his grip enough that she was able to break away.

When she spun around again to face him, she was surprised to see that wicked grin back on his face.

"Good," he told her. "Keep going."

So she did.

Considering the generally short fuse she had known him to have, Matt was surprisingly patient when she messed up—which was unfortunately often. But it wasn't long before she learned that he hadn't been lying when he said he wasn't going to take it easy on her.

As she focused on her aim and her attempts to quickly retract her fist, Sarah's concentration on the placement of her feet wavered.

Sarah went to aim at his temple, but realized a split second too late that she'd automatically stepped into the move, sacrificing the balanced stance she had had. She saw him cock his head slightly and quickly went to move her foot back but Matt had already zeroed in on her mistake. Before she could back out of his reach, he kicked her legs clean out from under her, so that she landed flat on her back in the ring. She gasped as the air was knocked out of her.

She felt Matt crouch down next to her and then a hand on her arm as he slowly pulled her into the sitting position.

"That's how easily you get knocked down if you don't pay attention to your feet," he told her. "You alright?"

"Yeah," she gasped.

"Do you want to stop?"

Sarah rubbed her back, which smarted slightly from the impact. "No."

Matt raised an eyebrow at her. "You're sure?"

"Positive."

"Alright." He stood up and held a hand down for her to take, but she swatted it away and struggled to her feet alone. With a laugh, he backed up to his original position and waited. "Whenever you're ready, then."

The lessons were effective, if irritating, and she was careful to concentrate on snapping her arm back and keeping her feet where they were supposed to be. This left little concentration for her to focus on her aim, but Matt insisted that the rest was more important, and her aim would develop with practice.

"Good. Better," he said approvingly as she snapped her hand back before he could grab it, despite the fact that she had failed to hit him in the solar plexus like he'd instructed-instead landing an ineffective blow somewhere near his upper abs. She shook her head at his definition of 'better', but continued on without comment.

It wasn't until Sarah's back hit the boxing ring floor for the third time that she felt tired enough to call it quits for the evening.

"You okay?" came Matt's voice from where he was crouched down next to her yet again.

To her surprise, she was. Her body ached a bit, and she was exhausted, but in a different way than she had been the last few weeks. Having to concentrate on something physical had left no room in her brain for the stressful thoughts that had been chasing themselves in circles lately.

"…not awful, actually," she decided, then groaned lightly as she sat up. "But, uh...definitely okay with calling it a night."

"You got it." Matt extended his hand down to her, and this time she took it, allowing him to pull her to her feet.

A few minutes later, they were both out of the ring and Sarah had just refilled her water bottle at the water fountain. She was absently studying the posters lining the walls as she drank when a familiar name caught her eye. Idly stepping closer to the poster, she blinked as she read the match it was advertising: Carl Crusher Creel vs. Battlin' Jack Murdock.

She inhaled as she realized what boxing gym Matt had taken her to. She should have recognized the name of the place from the newspaper headlines she had read after the first time they met, about Jack Murdock's body being found in the alleyway out back.

"That was his last match."

Sarah jumped a little. She looked over her shoulder to see that Matt had come up behind her, his eyes cast in the general direction of the poster as he unwound the wrap from his hand. She instinctively felt almost guilty, as though she had intruded on something personal. But he didn't look upset, and he had been the one to bring her here, after all. She brought her gaze back to the yellowed paper on the wall.

"The Creel match?"

"Yeah," he said, coming to stand next to her. "Creel was a legend. Arrogant a son-of-a-bitch, but…he was a good boxer. It was a big deal to even get the chance to fight him."

"Did….did he win? Your dad?" she asked him hesitantly.

"He won the match, yeah. Only problem was, he wasn't supposed to," Matt said, a bitter smile twisting his lips. "I think everyone was surprised but me and him."

Sarah bit her lip as she watched Matt. The articles she'd scanned through had mentioned that Jack Murdock's death might have been connected to fixed fights, but none of them had gone into detail.

"I'm sorry," she said, aware that it wasn't helpful to hear, but not knowing what else to say.

"It was a long time ago," Matt said, before turning to her. "You ready to go?"

"Yeah." Sarah nodded, swallowing hard as she turned away from the poster. "Um, let me just…grab my bag. Do you have to go get ready to go out?"

Matt shook his head. "Not tonight. There's a pretty big storm coming in a few hours. Don't want to get caught in the middle of it."

"Can you not fight in the rain?" she asked him curiously. She had never considered the effect of the weather on what he did at night. What did he do when it was icy, or when it was pushing a hundred degrees and humid?

"No, no, rain is fine. It can be kind of helpful sometimes, actually. The way it hits things helps me place where they are. Thunder and lightning are what mess things up. The electricity from the lightning makes it hard to pick up on a lot of things I rely on…temperature, air density, electric currents, things like that. And thunder's just, well…" Matt shrugged. The concept was fairly self-explanatory.

"Kinda loud," Sarah finished for him.

"Pretty much," Matt said with a chuckle. "Makes it difficult to hear the things I need to hear. So I only go out in thunderstorms if it's absolutely necessary."

"Well…good. You could probably stand to take a night off from beating up bad guys, anyway."

"What about you?"

"What, will I be fighting crime tonight?" Sarah asked, slinging her small tote bag over her shoulder. "Hmm, no. Probably not tonight."

Matt rolled his eyes at her answer. "I meant, do you have plans to go out?"

"Definitely not. After this week I really need a couple of drinks. And as much as I'd love to not be trapped inside my apartment again, going to a bar right now is kind of a bad idea, so…" she leaned back against the doorway behind her and shrugged. "I'll be home with a bottle of wine and a book. Exciting stuff."

Normally, a book and a bottle of wine did sound like a perfectly fine night to her, but it just wasn't the kind of night she needed right now. But she would take what she could get these days.

"You know…" Matt began, hooking his finger around the small loop on the top of his cane, which he had pulled out of his gym bag as they prepared to leave. "If you're dead set on drinking tonight—"

"—oh, I am—"

"—then there are other options for places to drink in Hell's Kitchen besides in a bar or in an apartment."

Sarah reached up and undid her ponytail, shaking her hair loose as she pulled the hair tie out. "Yeah? Do you know someplace where no one's going to be sneaking up behind me?"

"As a matter of fact, I know a few," Matt said. "We'd have to stop at the liquor store first."

"My home away from home."

"Yeah, well. You don't get to pick the liquor this time," he informed her as they exited the gym. At the last second, Sarah remembered the turn the lights off—something Matt obviously wouldn't be in the habit of doing.

"I'm more worried about your choice of drinking locale than your liquor. This isn't going to be in some sketchy alleyway, is it?"

"It's not in an alleyway," Matt assured her, but didn't bother to elaborate beyond that.

Sarah sighed. But wherever Matt was taking her, it was sure to be more interesting and less lonely than her empty apartment, so she followed him out of the gym and into the dark streets of Hell's Kitchen.


And so, about thirty minutes and one liquor store visit later, Sarah found herself sitting on the edge of a metal fire escape that snaked up a currently abandoned apartment building, her legs dangling over the side through the wide horizontal rungs of the railing. Matt was sitting next to her, unscrewing the lid from a bottle of whiskey.

"A fire escape. I should have seen that one coming," she noted, looking around. "One of your regular haunts."

"You wanted some place where no one would be looking for you."

Sarah couldn't argue with that; this wasn't one of her usual drinking spots, to say the least. No one—Ronan or any other unfriendly characters from her life—would be making any surprise appearances up here.

"So, why doesn't anyone live here?" she asked quizzically, squinting through the dark window behind them. The fire escape window led into a kitchen, which appeared to have nice granite countertops and stainless steel appliances. It didn't look like a run-down place.

"Oh, the safety codes weren't up to snuff," Matt said casually, before taking a drink from the bottle. "Something about the fire escapes being unstable."

Sarah whipped her head back around to look at Matt in alarm, but then she saw a familiar smirk playing across his face. She shook her head at him. "Very funny. When did you decide to grow a sense of humor?"

Matt's grin just grew wider as he passed her the bottle.

"Sorry. They're being renovated. It's just some interior stuff left now, I think," he said, before his grin faded slightly as he grew more serious. "They had to evacuate all these apartments when they were damaged in the, uh…incident, I guess people call it. And now the owner wants to draw in shiny new residents to live in his shiny new apartments."

Sarah watched him for a moment, noting how the faint bitterness in his voice was reflected in his expression. It seemed like a sore subject, for some reason.

"Well…joke's on him, because the local riff-raff have found their way back here anyway," she pointed out, using the bottle to gesture to their seat on the fire escape before taking a drink. The whiskey Matt had picked was smooth and easy to drink straight, unlike the last bottle of liquor the two of them had shared. She nodded her approval, passing the bottle back to Matt. "You know, I could have bought the liquor. Drinking was my idea."

"Well, I figured I owed you for ruining your kitchen knife."

"And one of my mugs," she reminded him.

"If I recall correctly, you said you got that mug for subscribing to a magazine, so…" he shrugged apologetically. "Unfortunately, you forfeited your claim to that reimbursement."

Sarah laughed, shaking her head as she looked down at the dark pavement far below them. She muttered something about him being a dick under her breath, knowing he would hear her. He just raised his eyebrows as he took a swig from the bottle, and they were quiet for a few moments.

"Hey, where were you for the whole, um…alien thing?" she asked. "Were you Daredevil-ing at that point?"

"No. Not until…a little over a year later, I guess. Aliens are a little out of my wheelhouse, anyway. I was at this law firm that Foggy and I used to intern for and they put the whole place on lock down. No one in, no one out. But especially no one in," Matt said, frowning darkly. "Landman and Zack at its best."

"Landman and Zack?" Sarah repeated, throwing him a strange look. "You interned there?"

"Yeah. You've heard of them?"

"Um, yeah. They do a ton of business with Orion's sketchier clients."

Matt shook his head bitterly. "I'm not surprised."

"I'm surprised you guys interned there. They seem kind of…"

"Soulless? They are. That's why we quit to start our own firm, to, ah…varying degrees of success," he said wryly, before turning his head to her. "Where were you?"

"Me? I was in a concert hall. Accompanying this singer who I had worked with a few times before. She's amazing," Sarah recalled, thinking of the singer and how perfectly she had kept with the rise and fall of the piano, rather than leading or falling behind, like so many other partners did. "She was so good at keeping with the pulse of the song, if that makes sense. Anyway, the acoustics made it hard to hear everything that was going on outside; I think we thought it was just a bad surprise thunderstorm. We were in the middle of her fifth song when half the roof came right off."

Matt pressed the bottle back into her hand, and the two of them were quiet for a few moments as Sarah took a drink and looked out at the construction sites that had popped up across Hell's Kitchen since the incident.

"God, I hate this stupid city sometimes," she said finally. "Aliens, and bombs exploding, and creepy corporations with their fingers in everything," she said, before turning to look at Matt. "You know who doesn't have these problems?"

"…most people who aren't us?" Matt guessed.

"Hermits," she said resolutely. "Old mountain men who live up in the Adirondacks."

Matt furrowed his brow and laughed. "Are you thinking of becoming one?"

"I'm not ruling it out," she decided, taking another drink. "I could pack up the mouse and just go live in the woods. It'd be like camping. I'm good at camping."

"Yeah? I've never been."

"Really?" she said as she handed the whiskey to him. "I think you'd like it. You could get away from the smell of old trash and cigarette smoke and car exhaust."

"I don't know," Matt said doubtfully. "I've never left here. I'm used to hearing the sounds of the city all the time. Being out where it's so quiet sounds like it would be…disconcerting."

"It's not as quiet as you'd think. But in a good way," Sarah said, thinking of the sound of cicadas and wind blowing across water that she always loved whenever she'd gone camping. Then she realized what he'd just said. "Wait, so you've never left New York City?"

"No. Why would I?"

"Well, because…" Sarah had to search for the words, dumbfounded by the idea that he needed an actual reason to leave New York. "There's just…there's a ton of other stuff out there. Good stuff, like beaches that don't have trash in the water, and mountain tops you can get drunk on instead of fire escapes."

"I don't know. Maybe if I ever decide to take a vacation someday," Matt said, his tone indicating that he didn't plan on doing so any time soon.

"You should. Just, like…send a telegram to the Avengers," Sarah told him, gazing across the city to where she could barely make out the red 'A' atop Stark Tower. "Let them know they need to watch over Hell's Kitchen for a few days while you dip out."

He shook his head and laughed. "I think stopping muggers and crashing arms deals might be a little small time for them."

"Small time is important, too. I mean, saving the world is great and all—I'm way glad someone does it. But if the world ends…well, that's it, right? We'd all be dead, so we won't be around to care. The day-to-day stuff in between massive alien invasions…that's what people need more help dealing with." She looked over at Matt and was surprised at how intently he seemed to be listening to what she was saying. "No offense to the Avengers, though. Lauren adores them. So does my dad."

She picked at the edge of the bottle's label as Matt was quiet for a minute.

"How is your dad?"

Matt rarely brought up her father; he had clearly caught on that the topic was a touchy one. Generally, he only mentioned him in the context of stopping by his place during his patrols.

"He's…lonely, I think," she said truthfully. "I don't have as much time to stop by anymore, with my work hours being so unpredictable. And he's mentioned it a few times. I still go see him when I can, but even if I'm there, it…it doesn't always mean he is, you know?"

Matt nodded, his expression solemn as he listened.

"I'm sorry," he said simply. He didn't offer any advice or platitudes, which she appreciated. Sarah had sat through more than one well-meaning person talking her ear off about coconut oil or acai berries or whatever other nonsense was supposed to help Alzheimer's, as though she were trying a new diet instead of watching her father's mind destroy itself. Worse yet were the ones who insisted that everything happened for a reason—always spoken with such earnestness that Sarah couldn't even bear to tell them how much that didn't help to hear.

She rested her head on her arms, which were folded on the rail of the fire escape, and watched Matt as he drank from the bottle. The alcohol was definitely taking its effect, and she could feel that familiar warm sensation spreading throughout her limbs and lending her a sense of candor she normally didn't have.

"Is that what changed your mind?" she asked him quietly.

Matt furrowed his brow, not following what she was saying. "Changed my mind about what?"

"About me. Is that why you…eased off on all the alleyway threats? Because you found out about my dad?"

There was a long pause, and in the dark she found it hard to read his expression.

"No."

"Then what was it?"

Matt looked like maybe he was going to tell her, but instead he just jerked his head to the side noncommittally and took a drink from the bottle. She waited, but he remained quiet.

"You really aren't going to answer?"

"This isn't one of your drinking games with the special rules," he reminded her gently, passing the bottle of whiskey back. "I don't have to answer your questions."

She raised her eyebrows at his evasiveness, but didn't push the subject.

"Alright. Well…good thing it's not a drinking game. The last one kept me in bed until like noon the next day, and I have to meet up with Lauren in the morning for more baby shower stuff," she said, taking a drink.

"You know, some people who are being stalked and getting injured might go ahead and let someone else take over the party planning," Matt said, and Sarah immediately recognized a hint of the same tone he used when he told her to lock her windows, or not to answer Ronan's phone calls. She cut off whatever safety lecture was coming with a small noise of protest as she brought the bottle back down from her lips.

"No, no. This baby shower is literally the one thing right now that I would still be doing if I had my old life back. It's important. I can give up going to bars and stuff for a while, but this shower is non-negotiable."

Matt held his hands up in mock surrender, his lips quirking up at the corners. "Okay. Okay. It was just an observation."

Sarah just hummed neutrally, unconvinced that this was the last he'd have to say on the topic. He held his hand out for his turn with the bottle, then let out a surprised laugh as Sarah purposefully took a much longer drink instead of passing it to him. Finally she did give him the bottle, and they sat in a comfortable silence for a while as Sarah watched the lights of the city reflect off the Hudson in the distance, and Matt—well, she didn't know what he was doing. Listening to some conversation five blocks away, probably.

"It wasn't any specific thing," he said quietly, breaking the silence.

Sarah looked over at him, and it took her a second to realize that he had backtracked in their conversation, returning to her unanswered question from earlier. "No?"

"No," Matt said simply. He wet his lips, picking his words carefully before continuing. "Mostly it just…became more difficult, the more I got to know you. Hurting you like that. It's—it's easy to intimidate a stranger, usually. And I tried my best to keep you at arm's length, but…at some point, you weren't a stranger anymore. You were just you. And you're not someone I wanted to hurt."

Perhaps it was the alcohol, but hearing the usually taciturn vigilante talk about her like that had the interesting effect of making it difficult for Sarah to breathe, and she had to look away from him for a few moments to gather her thoughts again.

As though he could sense how his explanation had affected her, he held the bottle out towards her and said, in a carefully lighter tone, "Plus, you started tearing people's faces open with staplers. I didn't want to be on the receiving end of that."

"That was a fluke, and it was a one-time thing," she protested, but felt the corner of her lips tug upwards as she accepted the bottle.

"Bullshit. Did you not slice a guy across the face with a kitchen knife just a few days ago?" Matt asked, sounding darkly amused.

Sarah paused, unable to think of an argument for that one.

"He was being unfriendly."

Matt let out a sharp laugh. "I'd say so. I seem to remember you hitting me in the mouth with a very heavy bottle opener on your key ring, as well."

"—alright, I'm glad you're enjoying this list so much—"

"How about that guy you hit with a fire extinguisher?"

"Well—I—how did you even notice that?" she asked in exasperation. "Weren't you fighting like a…zillion armed men while that was going on?"

"Yeah, armed men who were in the same room as you. And you were noticeably not staying in the corner like I distinctly remember telling you to do," he reminded her pointedly. "Did you think there was a chance I wouldn't be keeping an ear in your direction?"

Sarah recalled the way Matt had immediately appeared in front of the man she'd hit with the extinguisher, taking him down before he could turn and retaliate against her.

"Is there a point you're trying to make?" she asked finally, unable to refute any of the examples he was bringing up.

"Just that you're not as bad at defending yourself as you keep making yourself out to be. Those definitely weren't all flukes. I think you'll pick up new stuff pretty quickly."

"I hope so," she said, eyeing the darkened skin around her knuckles. They were already starting to lightly bruise from the repeated impact against the punching bag, despite the wrap she had been wearing around them. Oddly, she found that she didn't mind. At least they were bruises that she had put there herself, and they meant she was working towards something instead of just blindly swinging makeshift weapons at the world. "When are we doing another session?"

"We'll wait a couple of days. I think you're going to be a lot sorer when you wake up tomorrow morning. Once your muscles have caught up and the alcohol has left your system," he said, reaching over to pluck the bottle from her hands and take a drink himself.

"How did you learn all of this stuff, anyway?" she asked him curiously. He'd vaguely mentioned learning meditation from someone, but beyond that he hadn't gone into detail about how he'd become the way he was today.

Matt exhaled slowly. "That's…a long story. I had a teacher for a while, when I was a kid. He left. After that, I had to find other ways to train."

"Must have been a good teacher," she noted, thinking of the few times she had seen Matt in full-on fight mode.

"He was, in a lot of ways. The things he taught me...I needed to learn them. But he had a lot of plans that we didn't see eye to eye on. He wanted me to make myself…tougher. Harder. More cut off from the world. I like to think that it didn't work, but I know that in some ways it did."

Sarah thought about what it would be like to not constantly have emotions hitting her like a battering ram. Fear, and guilt, and anger…it was exhausting. Having a barrier between the world and her heart sounded like somewhat of a relief, to be honest. And it was something she had never been very good at.

"Doesn't sound so bad to me. Kind of useful, actually. Being able to harden yourself to the world. Maybe that's what you need to teach me," Sarah said thoughtfully, noticing for the first time how her voice had become slightly raspy from the alcohol. "Maybe I could stand to lose some of my softness."

Her words seemed to have a strange effect on him, and he tilted his head towards her, his sightless eyes flicking to different spots in her direction, as though he were analyzing her.

"Don't you dare," he said very quietly.

Something about the soft sadness in his tone made Sarah's heart constrict, and she cleared her throat.

"You don't seem so cut off from the world to me," she noted, passing the bottle back to him. "I've met your friends, so I know you have some. You have a career. You go to church."

Matt was silent for a long time, lost in thought. When he finally spoke again, he didn't address the points she had made.

"Maybe we've had enough for tonight," he said, handing the bottle to her without taking a drink. "Last time we killed an entire bottle, it ended in some pretty bad hangovers."

"That was cheap vodka," she argued, peering down at the label on the bottle in her hand. "This is…solidly mid-shelf liquor. You can't get hangovers from that."

"Says who?"

Sarah waved her hand around for a few seconds while she thought about it. "…science."

"Convincing argument. But I think I'm cut off for the night," Matt said with an amused shake of his head. He leaned back until he was lying flat on his back on the fire escape, his blank eyes directed up at the metal structure above them.

"Lightweight," she muttered.

She could hear his chuckle from the shadows he was lying in. "I'm pretty far from sober, and you're tiny, so I know you've got to be drunk, too."

Sarah laughed, but she had to admit that Matt was right. The alcohol was starting to make her just slightly dizzy—always a good sign that she was soon about to go from pleasantly drunk into black-out territory. Lying down to make the dizziness stop didn't sound like such a bad idea. She slowly leaned back until she was lying on her back next to him, letting her hands rest on her stomach. Her tank top didn't offer much in the way of a barrier from the cool metal of the fire escape against her back, but between the alcohol pumping through her and the warmth of Matt's side pressed against her own, she didn't feel cold.

"Can you tell how long until the storm starts?"

Matt was silent for a minute as he listened, and Sarah mentally tried to guess what weird sensory tricks he was doing to figure out the answer to her question. "Soon. I'd say a little less than an hour. Why?"

"I was just thinking we might not want to be sitting on a tall, metal fire escape when the lightning begins," she said, laughing as she gestured to their chosen drinking spot. She could feel the vibrations of his laugh next to her.

"Fair point. We'll get off of here before then."

They laid there in silence for a few minutes, and Sarah found herself wondering if the alcohol in her system would at least help her fall asleep tonight. And stay asleep, preferably. She usually dreamed less when she had been drinking, and considering her dreams usually came in the form of nightmares these days, she was more than happy to avoid them.

"Hey. Can you see when you dream?" she asked Matt suddenly.

He didn't respond right away, and she turned her head to look at him. It was difficult to hazard through the cloud of alcohol whether or not the question had been too personal, but there it was.

"When you dream, your mind mimics what you experience when you're awake," Matt answered haltingly, like he was still formulating his answer as he spoke. "When I very first went blind, I would always dream in pictures. It was just how I understood the world."

"But not anymore?" Sarah asked, turning her head forward again so that she was staring up through the slats of the fire escape.

She felt Matt shrug next to her. "Now I pretty much dream the way I experience everything else: sounds, smells…things like that."

"So you never actually see anything in your dreams anymore?"

"I wouldn't say never. There are a few things from before I went blind that still show up as clear as they ever were. Like the sky. Or my dad. But people who I've never seen, like you or Foggy…I don't have a picture to work with. So my mind pieces things together based on what I know about you, but…it's not the same thing. It's difficult to explain."

Sarah's inebriated mind couldn't decide if it wanted to focus on the uncharacteristically personal details Matt had just shared with her, or if it was still stuck on the implication that she had shown up in his dreams at some point. Mostly she just felt like her head was spinning, and she couldn't be entirely sure that it was from the alcohol. Matt sat up rather suddenly and inhaled deeply.

"Come on," he said, clearing his throat and using the railing of the fire escape to haul himself up before extending a hand down for her to take. "I'll take you home."


Monday, Sarah sat at a table in an upscale restaurant, scanning an expensive menu full of foods she didn't recognize. Jason sat across from her, and to her left sat an empty chair as they waited for their mysterious third guest to arrive. Whoever it was was already twenty minutes late, and Sarah was just beginning to wonder if Jason was insane enough to have invented an imaginary lunch companion when she saw his eyes flick over her shoulder and his false grin grew even wider and falser.

"Sorry I'm late," came a soft, accented voice from behind her. "There was horrible traffic on the way here."

Sarah turned to see who the strangely familiar voice belonged to, and a dark-haired woman came into her view as she took a seat at the table. She was immediately recognizable as the woman Sarah had met on the sidewalk recently.

"Well, hello," she greeted Sarah. "I remember you."

"You two have met?" Jason said curiously, his smile never dropping but his tone betraying his confusion.

"Just for a few moments," Sarah said quickly. "Outside work one time."

"We didn't get a chance to exchange names," the woman told Jason, before looking back to Sarah expectantly.

"Oh, um...I'm Sarah Corrigan. I...work for Jason," she said lamely, realizing as she said it that it was already obvious.

"Vanessa," the brunette replied, a small smile quirking her lips at Sarah's awkward fumbling.

The waiter approached them to take their orders. Jason rattled off some expensive sounding French dish, and Sarah picked one at random that sounded like it had ingredients she recognized. When it was her turn, Vanessa simply held her hand up.

"Just a glass of wine for me, please. I'm afraid I can only stay for a few minutes," she said. The waiter nodded and disappeared, and Vanessa turned back to them. "I just came by to meet Jason's new...right-hand man."

Sarah blinked. "Right. That's me."

So that was happening, then? Jason had only vaguely insinuated that he wanted her to work with him in his efforts to earn a higher position at Orion, and now she was being called his right-hand man. It all made her feel like she had missed something, but Jason and Vanessa both carried on speaking as though everything was perfectly normal.

"There are so many things that we've dropped the ball on since…" Jason faltered, glancing over at Vanessa before quickly pressing on. "It's time that the company got back to what it once was. A place where the influential people of Hell's Kitchen feel comfortable taking their business."

"Okay," Sarah said slowly. "How do we do that?"

"By eliminating the things that are standing in its way. Both internal and external obstacles, you could say."

She wasn't entirely sure what that meant, so she remained quiet, simply nodding instead.

Vanessa leaned forward slightly, tracing her finger around the rim of her wine glass. "I heard that you turned down a very tempting bribe recently, Sarah."

Sarah froze, the sound of her own heart racing deafening in her ears. She didn't bother to pretend like she didn't know what Vanessa was talking about.

"I…didn't have the information they needed," she said, surprised and grateful that her voice sounded steady. "Taking money without giving anything in return seemed like a bad idea."

"I should say so," Jason said with a chuckle. "Two other people offered the same bribe attempted to do just that, and…it didn't end well for them. In the end, that was really the point."

"I thought the point was to catch the man in the mask," Sarah said.

"No, no. Obviously that's something we're working towards, but…it wasn't the point of that particular experiment. I had a short list of people I thought might be useful to me, and I wanted to make it shorter. This was an easy way to see who was disloyal enough to the company to try to take that money and run—and you had as much reason as anyone to do just that."

Sarah stared at him.

"So everything the police said about seeing a dark haired woman talking to Daredevil that night at the office?" she asked, then quickly added. "I figured they just had me confused with another employee…but I never heard anything else about it."

"Well, that part was more to give our contacts on the police force an excuse to bring you in. They were understandably worried about their jobs, so we had a different story laid out for each suspect they were going to talk to, in case anyone decided to check in on their activities. Something just specific enough to make whoever they were talking to think they were the main suspect."

The realization slowly hit Sarah that the girl had never really seen her talking to Matt at all that night.

"Wait, so what did the girl in the hospital actually say when she woke up?"

Jason shrugged. "Who knows. Something about wanting to be with her family. It wasn't important what she actually said; what mattered was what we had our translator say she said."

"So, you never actually thought I was working with Daredevil?"

"Me, personally? No. That would require a certain level of recklessness that I just don't think you possess," he said. Sarah wasn't sure what flashed across her face at his words, but he held up a conciliatory hand and added, "You're level-headed. You look out for what's best for you and your own, and I can understand that. I can't see you going out on any limbs that might put that at risk. Ronan, on the other hand...he was fairly suspicious of you."

"Suspicious isn't the word I'd use for his opinion of me," Sarah said, trying to keep her voice neutral, but it came out cold. She hadn't forgotten the way that Jason had merely stood by while Ronan wrapped his hands around her throat.

"Regardless, his opinion doesn't hold much weight in any arena."

"Ronan was in charge of your...task-force, yes?" Vanessa inquired, and Sarah could have sworn she saw Jason wince.

"Unfortunately. Ronan's ideas for bringing the vigilante down were only slightly more cerebral than a Looney Toons plot. Paint a tunnel on the mountain, maybe the road runner will come," Jason said mockingly. "I found him to be...repetitive. There are much more intelligent ways to hurt the man in the mask without putting a handful of Orion employees in the hospital each time."

"Like what?" Sarah said carefully, keeping her tone barely interested. Internally, however, her heart was pounding.

"Oh, don't worry about that for now," Vanessa said as she took a sip from her drink. "He's not at the top of our priority list at the moment."

"What is, then?"

"For now? Combing through our employees. Figuring out who doesn't add anything of value, and replacing them with people who do," Vanessa said. "I have no plans to leaving Wilson's empire in anyone's hands without making sure it's in proper order first."

Sarah tilted her head slightly at the woman's use of Fisk's first name—she wasn't sure she had ever heard anyone do that before.

Vanessa checked the time on her watch, which was delicate and expensive looking. "Unfortunately, I have to go. But I look forward to talking to both of you again soon."

A few formal goodbyes later, she was gone, and she was left with only Jason again.

"Well. It's all very exciting, isn't it?" he asked her.

"Um...yes," she said, failing at sounding enthusiastic.

Jason sighed. "I know why you aren't more excited, Sarah."

She carefully stirred the food on her plate with her fork. "You do?"

"Yes. You're upset about the officers that we assigned to monitor you're father. It's understandable, but it was simply a safety measure. If you're trying to understand someone's character, who better to get information from than their own family?"

Sarah bit her tongue to tamp down the anger that rose in her at the thought of Jason sending dirty cops to spy on her father. This entire deal was meant to keep her dad away from Orion. She gripped her fork tighter, wishing that she never had to hear Jason talk about her family again. But her silent, fuming wishes went unheard, and Jason continued anyway.

"It's not like he was ever in any danger. The officers we sent are trustworthy."

"Then you might want to ask them why they're working with Ronan," Sarah snapped before she could stop herself.

Jason looked at her intently. "Excuse me?"

"I...nothing," she said, immediately regretting it. "I just-I've heard from some people that Ronan has some cops working for him. I-it sounded like it might have been the same two you hired."

She winced internally. That was the vaguest answer she could have possibly given, and she had nothing planned out for any follow up questions.

But Jason merely looked down at his phone, seemingly uninterested. "I see."

He remained focused on his phone for the rest of lunch, leaving Sarah with just her own thoughts.


Later that day, just before Sarah was about to pack up to leave, Jason came out of his office and asked her to come with him.

A deep feeling of dread settling into her stomach, Sarah slipped her phone into her pocket before following him into the elevator. To her dismay, he hit the button to take them up to the fourth floor. The floor was completely empty, and he led her a short ways down the hallway before gesturing for her to step into a room off to their right.

The room was clearly intended to be an office sometime soon—it was being renovated, with fresh white paint on all of the walls and white sheets under their feet to protect the carpeting. Brand new window frames sat leaning against the wall, apparently waiting to replace the cracked and peeling old ones. The only things breaking up all of the white were a single desk in the middle of the room that didn't look like it belonged there, and several chairs around it in a fashion that mirrored the set up Jason and downstairs in his own office. Painting and construction supplies were littered everywhere; paint cans on the ground, a hammer and a tool box sitting on the desk top.

"Do you know what this is?" Jason asked her.

"An empty office?" she ventured.

"Yes. More specifically, it's an empty office that I hope will eventually become my own. Sometimes I like to come up here to clear my head," he said, looking around the space. "Come to terms with certain things."

"Oh," Sarah said softly, unable to think of anything else to say. Something about his demeanor was making her nervous, but she couldn't put her finger on what. The room they were in wasn't helping. It wasn't just the isolated area, it was the strange sense of déjà vu it gave her, despite knowing that she had never been there.

"I looked into it after lunch, and it turned out you were right," Jason continued. "Officers McDermott and Donovan are in fact working for Ronan, despite explicitly stating that their loyalty would be to Orion above all else—including their own police force. You know what I don't like, Sarah?"

She shook her head wordlessly, watching him with wide eyes. It wasn't just his words that were making her hair stand on end; it was something about the way he looked.

"Disloyalty. Liars. Employees who make a fool of this company."

She swore that everyone in the building must have been able to hear how badly her heart was racing as he listed word after word that described her exactly.

"Yates was an excellent example. I know you cared for him in some way, but his behavior as an employee was just...unacceptable," Jason said, stopping next to the desk and idly tracing his finger down the handle of the hammer sitting on it.

It occurred to her suddenly that Jason wasn't smiling like he usually did; his face was so deadly serious that she barely recognized it.

Sarah tensed as she watched him, but he was closer to her than she was to the door. Even if she got through it, the stairwell was at the other end of the building, leaving only the slow elevator as an exit on this side.

As if on cue, she heard the ding of elevator as someone arrived on their floor. She felt relieved for a second, before she saw that Jason didn't look surprised; whoever was coming must be someone he had invited.

Of all the people she expected to see walk through the door, Officer Aaron McDermott wasn't one of them.

He looked equally confused to see her, but didn't say anything, instead turning towards Jason.

"Some reason you needed to meet with me right away? While I'm on duty?"

"I do appreciate you coming by," Jason said cheerfully. "Please, take a seat."

McDermott threw Sarah a suspicious look before taking a seat in from of the desk that Jason stood next to. It was odd seeing the cop without the falsely kind facade he had projected in his past attempt to win her trust. Then again, the last time she had seen him, they hadn't parted on good terms, so maybe he knew there was no point.

"Do either of you know what the name 'Jason' means?"

McDermott just wrinkled his brow, as thrown by the subject as Sarah had been when Jason and first brought it up. But she had grown curious after his strange conversation on names that day, and had idly looked up a few names on her phone while waiting for the bus. So, strangely, she did know.

"...healer," she said very quietly, barely above a whisper.

Jason looked pleased, and pointed at her. "Exactly. I plan to heal this organization, no matter how difficult it is."

McDermott looked from Sarah to Jason as though they were crazy. "Sorry, what are we talking about here?"

"Do you know the other definition?" Jason asked her, ignoring the police officer.

Sarah tried to think, but the adrenaline pumping through her veins was making it difficult to remember. She swallowed and shook her head. She didn't even realize she had instinctively backed up until she felt her back bump against the wall.

"It's similar to the first meaning. It means, 'One who does no harm.'" The wide smile returned to his face as he turned his gaze back to McDermott. For a split second, Sarah felt relief rush through her—doing no harm seemed like a good sign—and she could see it had the same effect on McDermott. But then Jason shrugged and heaved a sigh as his fingers curled around the handle of the hammer. "But Jason's not my real name, anyway."

With that, he swung the hammer up and under McDermott's jaw, embedding the sharp end directly into his throat.

Blood gushed from the man's throat and mouth as he choked, no noise coming from him beyond a wet rattling sound as he tried to breathe. It must have last less than half a minute, but it felt like hours, and Sarah didn't breath for one second of it.

He finally stopped, slumping down in his chair as his eyes drifted halfway shut. The silence pressed down on them as Sarah leaned against the wall in shock, feeling as though the air had been knocked out of her.

"Well," Jason said, letting go of the hammer instead of removing it from the man's throat, so that it simply slid out and down into his lap. "I'm glad that he was able to meet me today. That would have kept me up all night had I left it until tomorrow."

Sarah didn't reply, unable to tear her eyes away from the officer in the chair.

"I'd really rather not leave him on the property," Jason said, pulling a cloth handkerchief out of his pocket and wiping the specks of blood of his hand. "My recommendation would be for you to take him to the warehouse you delivered to a few weeks ago. But, of course, deal with it how you see fit."

She vaguely registered the implication that Jason expected her to get rid of McDermott's body, but she couldn't do anything but shakily gasp for air as Jason left without another word.

Now alone in the room with McDermott—with what used to be McDermott—the reality of what just happened hit Sarah hard. She leaned forward and put her hands on her knees, hanging her head as she tried to stop the room from spinning. She squeezed her eyes shut to avoid looking at the body that sat a mere two feet in front of her.

With her eyes closed, Sarah didn't notice the slight twitching in McDermott's hand as his eyes fluttered open, out of focus. She didn't see him weakly grasp the hammer in his lap, his last chance at any act of self-defense. She opened her eyes just in time to see him swing the hammer towards her with every last ounce of strength in his dying body.

She moved just in time, and the blunt end of the hammer clipped her temple instead of embedding itself in her skull. Even so, the force of the impact sent her reeling, and she stumbled to her knees a few feet away. Her vision swam, dotted with black, and she tried to regain her surroundings as the room seemed to slam to the side.

Shaking her head to try to clear her vision, she forced herself to focus on McDermott, who was still slumped in the chair nearby. The hammer had dropped to his feet after he swung—she'd been so thrown by the blow to the head that she hadn't even heard it hit the floor. She scrambled forward, ignoring the way that the world tilted on its axis with the movement, and grabbed the hammer, wielding it in her hand as she backed out of reach again.

But she needn't have worried. McDermott's face was slick with sweat, and he made small choking noises as blood continued to seep out of his mouth, darker now than it was before. Sarah, still grasping the handle of the hammer tightly, watched in horror as his body twitched a few more times before going still.

She took a step forward, waiting for him to move but in some distant part of her mind already knowing that he wouldn't. Hesitantly, she pressed her shaking fingers against the pulse point on his neck, coating her fingers in thick blood and feeling for where a heartbeat should have leapt against his skin. Instead, she just felt blood and stillness.

Stumbling back from the dead body, she slid down the wall and sat there for a long time—or maybe it wasn't; the passing of time seemed difficult to grasp as her head pounded worse than it ever had before—and when she was finally able to look away from the bloody man in the chair, it was only to look down at the blood that was slowly drying on her skin.


Well. I said it was mostly without angst and pain. Coming up next is a chapter I've really been looking forward to writing: the baby shower, which will obviously go very smoothly, and nothing will go wrong whatsoever. Also appearing in the next chapter: Grumpy Doctor Matt! And just to mix things up, some Sarah/Foggy scenes and Matt/Lauren scenes.