Alright, guys! In case you need something to get you through those last few hours before Season Three drops! I think it looks much more promising than Season 2, and I will probably die of anticipation before tomorrow.

I'm aware that this chapter will probably get no attention because everyone will be busy watching the new season (myself included!) but I was just so excited to have finished this chapter that I had to post it. So hopefully some of you still take the time to read it and review, and if not, I hope you're reading this when you're done watching!

This is a long, loooooong (the longest yet!) chapter full of lots of dialogue and legal talk, so hopefully that's your jam. Parts of the last scene will probably look a little familiar. I'm not following the Season 2 plot in this story, but the last scene incorporates a mix of some parts of 'Dogs to a Gunfight' and 'Guilty as Sin'. I'm sure you'll recognize the parts I'm talking about when you get to it!

Enjoy!

(PS: I'm sorry that I was so so so awful at replying to reviews for the last chapter. I barely replied to any because I was kicking my own ass trying to get this chapter done. But I'll do better this time!)


Chapter 36: Telling Lies

Waiting in an NYPD interrogation room wasn't Sarah's ideal way to spend a chunk of her night, but it could have been worse. It was bigger than whatever room McDermott and Donovan had put her in last time, at least. Attached to the table was a phone, but she hadn't touched it yet. There was also a large window that looked out into the hallway, and the blinds were open so she could see if anyone was standing outside listening.

Being handcuffed to the table was unpleasant, but there wasn't much she could do about it.

She had to wait in the room for a while before anyone came to check on her, which gave her time to think about whether it was smart to call Foggy. If Jason had set her up, then he already knew she was working against him, and it didn't matter if she called Nelson and Murdock to defend her. But if he didn't, then it got a little more complicated.

After nearly an hour, a young cop with bright red hair stuck his head into the room.

"Hey. Have you contacted your representation yet, or do you need a public defender?"

Sarah sat up straighter.

"Actually, um…is Sergeant Mahoney here tonight?"

The cop furrowed his brow. "Why?"

"If he is, I'd—I'd like to talk to him."

"Uh…well, he's not assigned to your case, but I can see if he's busy," he said slowly, as though she were trying to trick him.

"Thank you," she said.

"So, you…haven't called your lawyer yet, then?"

"No."

He gave her another odd look before leaving the room.

It was only a few minutes before the door opened again and Sergeant Mahoney stepped inside. He didn't seem as surprised by her request to see him as his colleague had been.

"You know, you're really supposed to ask for a lawyer, not for more cops," Mahoney informed her. He took a seat across the table. "You haven't made a phone call yet. Any reason why?"

Sarah chewed her lip as she debated whether to ask him for this favor.

"When you arrest someone and they call their lawyer, it…gets recorded somewhere, doesn't it? Who they called."

"The call itself doesn't get recorded, if that's what you mean. You still have attorney-client privilege," Mahoney clarified.

"No, I mean…someone who works here could look up my arrest and see what lawyers I called?"

Mahoney gave her a confused look. "Yeah. I suppose they could."

Sarah nodded.

"Um, I've heard that sometimes you pass along cases to Nelson and Murdock?" she said tentatively. "Then they just…mysteriously show up at the precinct when people need lawyers."

Brett's eyebrows went up. "And who'd you hear that from?"

Sarah gave a vague shrug.

"If I did do that on occasion—and I'm not saying I do, because no cop worth his salt would willingly cooperate with defense attorneys—why would I need to call them for someone who I'm pretty sure is already a client of theirs?" Mahoney asked.

"I'm not," Sarah said. It was obviously a lie, but she didn't really care if he believed her. All she cared about was that he would be willing to play along. "One of my neighbors is a client of theirs, and they just helped me out one time because she asked them to."

"…right," Mahoney said, his voice heavy with skepticism. "So, if you have their number, why can't you call them yourself?"

Sarah just looked at him hopefully. She didn't really have a reason she could give him, but she was hoping maybe he would help her anyway. Matt and Foggy both considered him a friend in some way, after all. And this wasn't all that different from what he normally did.

Mahoney sighed.

"Alright, tell you what. I'll call Nelson and tell him and his partner to come down here. And in exchange, I have a few things I want to talk to you about before they get here."

"Is that…I mean, can you do that?" she asked. "Talk to me without them?"

"Sure. If you temporarily waive your right to counsel. When your lawyers get here and ask to see you, you can evoke counsel again."

"You want to talk to me about what happened tonight?" she asked warily.

"Related to it, but no. Not exactly."

Sarah considered the idea. Was it worth it to make sure there was no record of her calling Nelson and Murdock? She couldn't exactly try her luck with a public defender; she'd never be able to explain her situation.

"Okay," Sarah agreed, pushing her hair behind her ear. "If you call Foggy, I'll waive my…whatever."

Mahoney glanced behind him at the large window, then pulled out his cell phone and dialed.

"Hey. I got a client for you," he said when the other end of the line picked up. "Sarah Corrigan." He listened as Foggy replied with what Sarah assumed was confusion. "Yeah, your guess is as good as mine. You want to get down here and let the front desk know you're offering to represent her?" Foggy must have agreed—thankfully—and Mahoney hung up.

So now he'd done his end of the deal, and she had to uphold hers. She had to admit she was curious; what did he want to talk to her about so badly if not what had happened to Mrs. McDermott?

Mahoney reached for the yellow legal pad that had been conveniently placed on the table, presumably on the off-chance that Sarah might be in the mood to write a full confession unprompted.

"You know, I've had a lot of thoughts in my head lately, and I've found it helps to write them down," he said. "I made a kind of chart, actually. I'll show you."

He drew a small box in the middle of the page, then six ovals branching out around it.

"Here's a few of the things I've been thinking about. The first one, obviously: Aaron McDermott and his mom," Mahoney said, writing McDermott in one of the ovals. "Donovan," he said, filling in the second oval. "Orion." The third oval. "Ronan Greenfield." The fourth. "And of course…Nelson and Murdock," he finished, scrawling N&M in the fifth oval. Both the sixth oval and the square in the middle were still blank. "Do you know what all these thoughts all have in common?"

Sarah just looked at him, a sense of dread stirring in her chest.

Unsurprisingly, he wrote her name in the middle box.

"That's a lot of different things all leading back to you."

She tried to appear unruffled as she looked down at the legal pad.

"What's in the last oval?" she asked.

Mahoney gave her a pointed look, then scrawled a single word in the circle: Daredevil.

"The vigilante," Sarah said neutrally. Internally, her heart was possibly going to beat out of her chest.

"Yeah. You know, I actually get along with him better than a lot of guys on the force, but he's handed my ass to me enough times that I'm real familiar with what his mask looks like," the sergeant told her. He leaned forward and lowered his voice, though they were alone. "Enough so that I recognized it right away when I found it outside your apartment the night you got attacked."

"I…don't know anything about that," she said.

Mahoney wasn't fazed by her denial. He rested the tip of his pen on the box surrounding her name.

"This little diagram actually gets pretty crazy if you really look at it. For instance…we found Donovan beat half to death outside your apartment…" he said, drawing another line from her name to Donovan, then over to Ronan's name. "…supposedly by your coworker Ronan Greenfield, who died from the same kind of tranquilizer that we think was used on Cheryl McDermott tonight. Donovan was McDermott's partner, and right next to him is where I found Daredevil's mask." He continued drawing lines between ovals to illustrate his point. "You and Ronan both worked at Orion, which was owned by Fisk, who's in prison thanks to Daredevil and…your lawyers. Nelson and Murdock."

Looking down at the web of lines crisscrossing the page, Sarah started to feel a little dizzy. Sergeant Mahoney had figured out pretty much all of the pieces, and while he might not know everything, he certainly seemed to understand that she was at the center of it all.

"Why are you giving me all this information?" she asked. There was a slight shake to her voice. "Shouldn't this…be on a whiteboard with red string somewhere?"

"Because things don't add up. When Ronan Greenfield died from a tranquilizer overdose, I remember thinking it sounded familiar. I remembered a teenage girl who was brought to the hospital a few months ago. Took three of those darts to the chest, and they nearly killed her. And I remembered you coming in and talking to Donovan and McDermott about it. But when I tried to look it up, it's like it never happened. No records of that girl being in the hospital, no records of you being questioned. Nothing."

Was that why he was telling her this? He couldn't get any answers from his own police department, so he was hoping she would just make it easier and implicate herself? Sarah knew very well why there were no records of her being here: because Donovan and McDermott hadn't actually been questioning her on behalf of the NYPD. They'd been questioning her so they could report back to Jason, and they'd done a good job of covering their tracks afterwards. The only lucky thing was that they apparently hadn't thought it was worth reporting to Jason who her lawyers had been.

"So…what are you trying to say, exactly? What's the point of making all these connections?" she asked.

"Good question. I guess figuring out all these connection has made me realize what I really need to take a closer look at...is you. So far all I know is that you made a good living as a pianist until last year, when you suddenly started working at Orion in a lower paying secretarial job. I know you recently signed paperwork to transfer your father into an assisted care facility that's way above your income level. And I know that despite being the most annoying lawyers in the city, Nelson and Murdock usually only take on clients who they think are innocent—or, at the very least people who are getting a harsher punishment than they deserve. It's rare for them to represent someone who's tangled up in this much organized crime. But they do have a history of trying to undermine said organized crime by digging up dirt. Previously with the help of the Devil of Hell's Kitchen."

Sarah didn't say anything. So, he thought she was working for Nelson and Murdock? Or for Daredevil? Or both?

"It's possible that you're just a girl who's consistently been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and gotten mixed up in a whole lot of death and destruction. But…if someone is paying you to help build a legal case against Orion? You all need to be very, very careful. Because that is a bad idea. You know what happened to the last person who helped those lawyers and that vigilante get information about Fisk and his dealings? His name was Ben Urich, and he ended up dead."

Sarah stared at him, completely thrown by how easily he had almost everything figured out considering he'd also only interacted with her a handful of times.

There was a knock at the door, and then a police officer poked her head in.

"Her representation's here, Sergeant," she said.

"Send them on in," Mahoney told her.

The office opened the door wider and Foggy stepped inside. The sight of him didn't give her the sense of calm that Matt's presence would have, but it was a relief to have him there all the same.

"Brett! Come on, man. Talking to my clients before I get here? You know better than this."

Mahoney sat back in his seat with his hands up. "She said it was alright."

Foggy turned his attention to her, looking exasperated but not particularly surprised. "Sarah! You know better than this."

"Sorry."

"Handcuffs? Really? What is it with you guys?"

"You know the rules, Foggy. She got charged with resisting arrest, so the handcuffs have to stay on," Mahoney said. To his credit, he at least sounded apologetic about it. "Where's your better half?"

"He has court. We're a busy firm these days. Can you give us the room for a few minutes?" Foggy asked the sergeant.

Mahoney got up from his chair. "Sure. Take your time. My guess is, they're not going to charge her until it's almost to the deadline."

"Thanks for the heads up," Foggy said.

Sarah sat up straighter as Mahoney reached for the doorknob.

"Uh, wait, Sergeant Mahoney?" Sarah said. Mahoney turned around. "Just…please don't leave that piece of paper laying around anywhere."

He gave her a long, hard look, then nodded.

"Yeah. Okay."

After Mahoney left, Foggy raised his eyebrows.

"What piece of paper?"

Sarah hesitated. She was never quite sure how much information to let Foggy in on; she wanted him to help her stay out of jail, but she didn't want to make him the keeper of a bunch of incriminating information.

"It's…nothing," Sarah said, shaking her head. "Just some ideas he had."

"…alright. Well, let's jump right into things, then," Foggy said. He flipped open a folder in front of him. "You've kind of stepped in a lot of shit, here."

"I figured."

"Don't get upset, because I really have to ask…did you have anything to do with…what happened to her?"

Sarah shook her head adamantly. He really had to ask that?

"No, of course not. I found her like that."

"Okay. And I'm assuming the reason you were randomly in her home has something to do with your, uh…job," Foggy said.

"Jason wanted me to bribe Mrs. McDermott to stop talking to the media about her son's death," Sarah explained. "I was supposed to give her five thousand dollars today as a kind of…down payment? And then more payments would come as long as she kept quiet."

"Bribery. Okay…not the best reason to be there, but not the worst," he said, looking down at the papers in the folder. "What happened after you got there?"

"The front door was open a little. It didn't…feel right. So, I went inside, and when I went into the kitchen I saw her on the floor."

"Did you touch anything? Move anything?"

"I moved her onto her side so she wouldn't choke, and pushed aside some broken glass. And I used her house phone to call 911."

"Okay, okay," Foggy murmured, concentrating on whatever he was reading. "Uh…this resisting arrest charge. What's that about?"

Sarah winced.

"I…I didn't think he was really a cop," she admitted. "I know it sounds dumb, but he wouldn't show me his badge, and he wasn't wearing a uniform, and they showed up so much quicker than I thought they would…"

"Probably because they were watching the house. I'd bet they've had a detail on Mrs. McDermott since she went public, to make sure no one…" Foggy trailed off.

"…stabbed her in the chest with a tranquilizer dart? Well, they did a shitty job, because someone did. Just—not me," she clarified hastily.

"So, what happened when the police showed up? You tried to run?"

"No! No, I just kept asking to see his badge, and he was acting all twitchy and telling me to stop asking questions, and then he wanted to put handcuffs on me and I wouldn't let him, and…" Sarah leaned forward as something occurred to her. "I never hung up the phone."

"What?"

"I used her house phone to call an ambulance, and I never hung up, I just set it down. I don't know if the operator hung up or not, but if not then maybe my conversation with the cops might be recorded somewhere?"

"Excellent. I'll look into that," Foggy said, scribbling something on his notepad. "Now, what about—"

They were interrupted when the door to the interrogation room opened and Karen Page stepped inside.

Sarah blinked in surprise. "Oh—Karen. Hi."

"Right. I meant to mention that Karen would be joining us. She was just…'getting something from the vending machine'," he said, putting a strange emphasis on his words.

Karen caught sight of Sarah's quizzical frown.

"He means I was eavesdropping," she explained, taking a seat next to Foggy.

"Technically, the legal firm of Nelson and Murdock does not support eavesdropping on the police and would not participate in any such activities," Foggy said, wielding his pen at Sarah. He turned to Karen. "That being said, what did you find out?"

"Is she alive?" Sarah interjected. "Mrs. McDermott?"

"She's alive, but…it sounds like it's touch-and-go right now," Karen said. "They took her to Metro General to try to get her stabilized. "

Sarah closed her eyes as a faint wave of guilt swept through her.

"They think they know what kind of tranquilizer it was, which is helpful for the doctors," Karen continued. "I guess someone's been selling these darts all over Hell's Kitchen, and they're notorious for having unpredictable levels of sedative in them. Sometimes four or five will barely have an effect on a person, and sometimes just one will make someone overdose. They haven't had time to test it to be sure, but they're assuming it's the same stuff they've been running into."

"You found all that out just now? At the…vending machine?" Sarah asked.

"Karen's sleuthing skills put Nancy Drew to shame," Foggy said, giving Karen a fond look.

Sarah raised her eyebrows. Apparently whatever bump Matt's secret had created in their relationship had been smoothed out. For her part, Karen did a good job of hiding her pleased smile at Foggy's praise, instead choosing to continue her info unload.

"I also caught the name of her arresting officer. Cavanaugh," Karen said, raising her eyebrows at Foggy as though the name should be significant.

Apparently it was, as Foggy's face lit up.

"Cavanaugh? That'll be a huge help to your case."

"Why?"

"That dude's crazy. One of the most maliciously incompetent NYPD officers to ever fail straight up the ladder. He has about two dozen complaints for excessive force, unlawful arrest, searching without a warrant, you name it. The department tries to keep him out of the public eye, generally. A real nightmare for their PR. The only reason he's still an officer is because he has family in the DA's office, but they only have so much sway. And it's great for you, because his history of poor police work will make it easier to get your charges thrown out."

"You think that'll happen? They'll get thrown out?"

"That's what we're aiming for. It'll just depend on what they actually bring against you."

"Why are the waiting to charge me?" Sarah asked.

"They're probably trying to get a search warrant for your place first," Foggy said. "It's unlikely they'd be able to, but just in case they do…you don't have anything incriminating in your apartment, right?"

Sarah hesitated.

"Um."

"…do you?" Foggy prompted with some chagrin.

"No. Well, sort of. I have the same kind of tranquilizer she was poisoned with on a shelf in my closet? And, um, and also a cell phone that belonged to her son, in—in the same hiding spot. And…a bunch of surveillance photos with her face circled in them. They're in my desk at home." Sarah paused, chewing her lip as her gaze flicked from Foggy to Karen and back. "Is—is that…bad? That's bad, right?"

The silence after her question was deafening.

"…what?" Foggy asked.

"But I didn't take the photos," she said. "I just…have them."

"Well, possession is nine tenths of going to jail," Foggy hissed.

"I also have, like…three more stun guns in my apartment," she added. "If that matters."

"Is this a joke? Did you have Brett call me down here as some weird prank?"

Sarah winced.

"Not a joke. I'm sorry."

Foggy and Karen exchanged a look that made Sarah feel less than confident about her chances of walking out of here. She realized she really needed to pull her story together before the cops came back in.

"Wait, so what do I tell them about why I was there?" Sarah asked "I can't say I was there to bribe her."

"My advice is always to tell as much of the truth as you can," Foggy said. "I know that's not the most helpful thing to hear, but you're in a better position than I am to know what will or won't get you in deep shit at Orion."

Foggy was right; that really wasn't helpful. But she couldn't exactly blame him. Foggy was largely in the dark when it came to what information she could tell the cops without getting killed for it. And it was probably some kind of breach of ethics for him to provide her with lies to tell the police.

Karen, on the other hand, seemed to have no such reservations. She leaned forward and locked eyes with Sarah.

"I saw McDermott's obituary in the paper. It said his mother was having visiting hours yesterday and the day before," Karen said. "Tell them you wanted to pay your respects after seeing her on the news. It won't sound as weird as you think; the story has been all over TV, so probably a lot of random people have been showing up before the funeral. Say you got confused and thought she was having visiting hours today, and that's why you went inside. It was just a mistake."

Sarah was slightly taken aback by Karen so frankly advising her to lie. Obviously she was going to lie, but she had expected Karen to dance around it the same way Foggy had. It made her feel a little better that she hadn't.

"Yeah, that's…that's good. That'll…make my boss happy, too. Thanks."

Foggy and Karen briefly went through a few other questions with her before two detectives came to question her. She'd met so many cops today that she didn't even catch their names.

The detectives who were in charge of questioning Sarah were straightforward and quick. They asked her all the questions she expected them to: How did she know Mrs. McDermott? I didn't. Why was she in her house? I saw her on the news and wanted to give my condolences. I thought the visiting hours were today. Why did she have five thousand dollars cash in her purse? I don't trust banks. Did she know carrying a stun gun was illegal in New York? I do now.

Sarah asked for a few more minutes with Foggy after the detectives were done. Karen left the room to give them some privacy, or maybe just because she still felt as uncomfortable around Sarah as Sarah did around her—especially now that they both knew how Sarah actually knew Matt and Foggy.

"So, what happens now?" she asked Foggy once they were alone again.

"Now…they'll bring you to the holding area for the night."

"Holding area? Like…jail?"

"Like jail," he confirmed with a sympathetic grimace. "They can only legally hold you for twenty-four hours before charging you. They're going to send a prosecutor from the DA's office tomorrow morning to meet with you so they can determine how they want to proceed. Supposedly around nine, but these things tend to run late. Basically it's a chance for them to figure out what they think they can get away with charging you with, and whether or not they want to offer you a deal. Matt will be with you for that part."

Sarah was relieved to hear that.

"Could you do me a favor?" Sarah asked.

Foggy pointedly glanced around the room.

"Believe it or not, I am currently doing you a favor. You need a favor-within-a-favor?"

"Yes?"

"Very demanding, but go ahead," he said.

"My dad has a doctor's appointment tomorrow morning that I was supposed to take him to. Obviously I won't be able to, but it's really important, and if we have to reschedule it'll be months before they can fit him in again. This is my friend Lauren's number…" Sarah scribbled Lauren's phone number down on the yellow notepad, along with an address and appointment time, then tore it off and handed it to Foggy. "Will you please call her and ask if she'll take him? She's the only person other than me that he might still recognize."

Foggy studied the scribbled information on the paper.

"You know you can make phone calls from inside the holding area?" he asked. "The whole one phone call thing is just on TV. As long as you're not acting up and the person on the other end is willing to accept the outrageous collect call fees, you can pretty much call whoever you want."

"Yeah, but it's recorded, right?" she asked. Foggy nodded. "I don't want her phone number connected to any of this. In case anyone looks into it."

"Would that be why you had Brett contact me through Super Stealth Mode instead of just calling me from the precinct's phone?"

"Pretty much."

Foggy heaved a sigh as he looked down at the paper again.

"Is this Lauren person going to yell at me for calling her so late at night?" he asked.

"Probably."

"Excellent. Just how I like to spend my night," Foggy grumbled, but there was no real malice to it. Had Sarah not been so tired and stressed, she might have pointed out that waking her up in the middle of the night with a phone call was exactly how she'd been introduced to Foggy, too, and their friendship had turned out just fine. "You need anything else? You've only used two of your three wishes."

"That's all. But, uh, Lauren, she—she doesn't…know," Sarah said meaningfully. "I mean she knows who I…spend so much time with. But not who he actually is. As far as she knows, you guys are Mrs. Benedict's lawyers, and you're just helping me out, too."

"Got it. Keeping secrets from best friends," Foggy noted, with no small amount of bitterness in his tone. "I'm used to that."

Sarah bit her lip. There wasn't much she could say to that.

"Thanks, Foggy," she said quietly.

"You're welcome. Matt'll be here in the morning," Foggy said, gathering his stuff. He put a hand on her shoulder. "Be careful tonight, okay?"

"I will."


But jail, as it turned out, wasn't so much dangerous as mostly just boring. It was also loud, crowded, and very hot, but the description that stuck out the most after nine or ten hours was: boring.

Sarah was led to the holding area, which was a large cell with concrete benches lining three walls. There was a metal toilet in one corner, with a water fountain rather unfortunately placed directly above it, and a phone on the wall opposite. There looked to be about two dozen other women in the room; every seat on the benches was taken, and a few people were either passed out or attempting to sleep on the very damp looking concrete floor.

She settled for a spot near the side of the cell, where she could lean against a bit of wall that didn't seem too dirty.

The phone in the corner was constantly in use. People made calls to family members, bail bondsmen, lawyers, friends—anyone willing to answer the phone in the middle of the night and pay 25 cents a minute to talk. When Sarah first entered the holding area, there was a middle-aged woman with platinum hair extensions and only one shoe yelling into the phone. She seemed to be trying to win an argument by repeating the same things over and over again.

"—no, no, how many times have I bailed your sorry ass out of jail? Huh?" she was demanding. "How many times? No—how—many—times? Exactly. Exactly. And you know I'm gonna end up doing it again. Exactly. You owe me. I'm not kidding. You owe me. You owe me!"

Sarah tried to tune out her phone conversation, along with the ones that followed. It wasn't as though there was a lack of other noise for competition; the few who were talking to each other all seemed to have very loud inside voices, as did the handful who were talking to themselves. The air conditioning was clearly not working, so someone had set up a huge industrial fan on the other side of the bars. It provided a small amount of breeze and a huge amount of clanking metal noises. A woman a few feet away from her had a wet, hacking cough that never seemed to subside.

There was a clock on the wall off to Sarah's right, but every time she looked in that direction she kept inadvertently making eye contact with a woman who had very few teeth and a large, poorly done Tweety Bird tattoo on her face. As a result, Sarah didn't check the time very often, and it seemed to make it pass more slowly.

As the hours passed, women came and went—but mostly came. The courts were closed for the night, so the only way people were leaving the cell was if someone had posted their bail. At some point, a spot opened up on the bench, and she quickly took a seat. Her body was aching from standing on the concrete floor for so long, but the bench wasn't much better.

Risking a glance at the clock, Sarah saw it was almost 2 am. She did the math in her head: she'd been processed around, what, 7 the night before? Foggy had left her around 9:30 or 10, so it had only been four hours. Her appointment with Matt and the prosecutor wasn't for another seven hours at the earliest.

Goddammit.

Sleep was out of the question, so Sarah was left with her own thoughts for the long stretch of hours. Mostly she thought about Mrs. McDermott, and whether she was still alive.

She was so exhausted and so deep in her thoughts that she didn't notice the woman with the Tweety tattoo had moved to sit directly next to her until she spoke.

"You have witch eyes."

Sarah jumped and looked over at the woman warily.

"…okay," she said.

"Can I touch them?"

"No."

She reached for Sarah's face anyway, and Sarah shoved her hand away.

"Hey. Don't touch me," she warned the woman lowly.

A girl sitting across from them who couldn't have been more than eighteen was watching the interaction, and she started cackling.

"Ooh, the white girls are fighting!" she said.

No one seemed to notice her announcement, including the guards. Sarah was relieved; she really wasn't trying to get into even more legal trouble.

"They cut open your neck," Tweety said. Sarah looked at her in alarm, and saw that she was pointing to the scar on Sarah's neck. "They take all the metals out of your body."

Deciding she had had enough of this conversation, Sarah got up and moved over to the other side of the cell. There were no more spaces to sit, but she'd rather stand than keep talking to her new friend, who didn't bother following her.

Shortly after 4 am, a stone-faced guard opened the metal door to the holding cell and pointed at Sarah.

"You. Come on," he said, nodding towards the door.

Sarah looked around in confusion, although he was obviously talking to her.

"Me?"

"Yeah. Get up."

"Why?"

But the guard didn't offer any explanation. He just looked at her until she slowly stood up. Maybe Matt or Foggy was here to see her? It was possible, but she had a feeling that wasn't it.

The guard led her down the hall to an open, empty cell. It was an actual room with walls, as opposed to the open bars that framed the holding area.

"Inside."

"I'm switching cells?" she asked, her brow furrowed in confusion.

He didn't answer her, instead just giving her that same expressionless look.

Figuring she didn't have much of a choice, Sarah stepped inside. The door had barely clanged shut behind her when she registered that there was someone else in the room.

"Sarah," Jason greeted her. He was standing along the opposite wall. "This is…quite a mess."

A cold, icy dread spread through Sarah's veins.

"Jason. What…what are you doing here?"

"When I hear that one of my top employees is under arrest, I have to come see for myself."

"Did you do this?" she demanded. She knew she shouldn't, but her nerves were so frayed from the day's events that her filter was gone. "Did—did you set me up?"

"Did I set you up?" he repeated, very quietly. Then in the blink of an eye he had crossed the room and was right in front of her. Up close, she could see that his hair wasn't as neat as it usually was, and there were dark circles under his eyes, nearly obscured by the scars. "You think that's what's happened here? Do you think I'm a fool?"

"No, I—" Sarah took a step back.

"You think I wanted the police to start looking into Orion's connection to McDermott's death? That I wanted the newspapers to start asking more questions?" he demanded. "If you think I wanted any of this then either you're an idiot or you think I am."

So he hadn't set her up. That was a good thing. It meant she could still salvage this.

"Okay, I'm sorry. I—I just… I had to know," she said, holding her hands up. "I'm sorry."

Jason locked eyes with her for a moment longer before turning away and beginning to pace the small room.

"What did you tell the police? Do I need to do damage control?"

Sarah tried to focus on her breathing and remember her plan. She'd known this altercation was coming. She hadn't known it was coming right now, in a jail cell in the dead of night, but it didn't have to change anything. She'd had hours of sitting in custody to figure out exactly what to say to Jason to keep him on her side, and she could do this.

"Nothing. I swear. I told them I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"And your lawyers? The prestigious firm of Nelson and Murdock?" Jason spat out. "Everyone's least favorite ambulance chasers? What did you tell them?"

"The same thing," Sarah insisted steadily. "Wrong place, wrong time."

Jason was still pacing the small room now, making Sarah feel claustrophobic.

"It's an interesting choice of defense attorneys, I must say. Why not ask for a public defender?" he asked. "I checked, and you didn't call anyone the whole time you were there."

"I was going to. But then they showed up and offered to represent me. I think they heard my case was connected to a murdered police officer and…I don't know, they thought it would be a big trial they could put their names on," she said. The lies rolling off her tongue were coming easier now.

"Of course they just wanted more publicity," Jason said with a derisive snort. "What happened when they found out where you work?"

"If they recognized the name, they didn't seem to care. I told them I was just a secretary there, s-so maybe it didn't seem high up enough to concern them."

"Perhaps it should have concerned you."

"All I needed was someone to act as a barrier between me and the police. They were already there," she said quietly.

"You'll drop their counsel," he said dismissively. "Orion has lawyers on retainer who actually know what they're doing. They'll make sure you don't say anything about the company that you shouldn't be saying."

"Okay," Sarah agreed. She took a deep breath. "Um, but…I was thinking. It could be good to—to keep them around for this, maybe."

"Is that so?" Jason said with a mirthless laugh. "Do tell why."

"Nelson and Murdock are the ones who helped bring a case against Fisk. I know that. But—but you're trying to build Orion's reputation back up as a reputable company, right? To gain the trust of investors and—I don't know, business…partners? To cut some of the association between us and Fisk?" she hazarded. Jason stop his pacing, coming to a stop with his back to her. "Their law firm is known for taking on innocent clients. Having them defend me—us —could make it more believable that we're a legitimate business now."

"It hasn't occurred to you that these two lawyers might not have your best interest at heart? This could just be another way for them to try to gain access to information about the company. You trust them to represent you in a trial?"

"There shouldn't be one. They think the police don't have case, and that the charges will get dropped. If—if I have to go to trial, I'll get someone else. But for right now…maybe it'd be easier to just let them handle it."

Jason's back was still to her, so she couldn't see his expression as she nervously waited. Her pulse was racing, and she wiped her sweating palms on her shirt. Maybe she'd pushed the lie too far. Images of him bashing her head open on a jailhouse bed frame flashed across her mind.

He turned to her. "Fine. Keep them on if you want. But if this problem doesn't go away in then next forty-eight hours, I'll be stepping in to take care of it myself."

Sarah tried not to let her relief show on her face. She nodded tightly.

"I understand."

There was a short silence, and Sarah had the feeling the rest of the conversation might not go so easy.

"Did you do it?" Jason asked suddenly.

Sarah's brow furrowed. "What?"

"Did she turn down the bribe, and you decided to try to fix things yourself rather than face the fact that you failed the task I gave you of convincing her?"

"What? No. She was already on the ground when I got there. Why does no one believe me?"

"There was a time when maybe I would have. But things have changed. I have to confess that you…you disappoint me, Sarah," Jason said. His voice was so quiet now that she had to strain to hear it. It put her on edge, making her feel like he was trying to lure her nearer. She kept her distance.

"How so?" she asked warily.

"I chose you for this position over Ronan because he was a bumbling idiot and I thought that you were more capable than that. Despite your annoyingly wide-eyed demeanor, you seemed largely…apathetic to what went on around you. Single-mindedly doing your job in hopes of surviving," Jason said. "I liked that. It meant you would follow orders without getting too ambitious. So I promoted you. I invested in you, expecting a payoff in the form of a loyal employee."

"My loyalty hasn't changed," she said, choosing her words carefully. Technically, that was true.

"Perhaps. But ever since I offered to have you act as a conduit between myself and Vanessa, your work ethic has changed, to say the least. I had hoped you would be a valuable asset for coordinating with Vanessa as she deals with her husband's business affairs. My eyes and ears as I tried my hardest to pull this company back together. But instead I have to wonder if your loyalties have drifted from my side over to hers."

"Aren't—aren't you both on the same side?"

"If you think that, you aren't paying attention. Vanessa Fisk has sabotaged my attempt t to move up at this company at every turn. Insisting on doing everything the way her husband would have wanted to. I'm starting to suspect maybe she's changed her mind, and wants to keep it all for herself after all. Does that seem like a reasonable suspicion to you, Sarah?"

"I…don't know. She hasn't said anything like that," Sarah said weakly.

Jason scoffed at that, but didn't say anything.

Sarah didn't really know what else to say. Prolonging the conversation just increased her chances of saying the wrong thing. Mostly she just wanted to get out of this room, to not be trapped in here anymore.

"Is…there anything else?" she asked.

Jason watched her with that lingering gaze again.

"Yes, actually. Since I have you here. There is one more thing."

Something about his tone sent a chill down her spine.

"There's something I keep thinking about. I can't stop coming back to it."

"What is it?"

"Daredevil."

Jason was so still as he said it, like a statue, with his unsettling eyes fixed directly on her. As he stepped closer to her, she realized this was never an afterthought. He'd been waiting to get bring this up.

Sarah's heart was beating in her throat. "W-what about him?"

God, she hated that stutter. It always instantly made her sound guilty. Going off Jason's expression, he agreed.

"I keep thinking about that night in the parking garage. He looked right at you. I saw it. You screamed, and he saw you there in the car, but he didn't go after you. And he didn't go after you the first night he broke in to Orion, or when he interrupted Ronan's idiot kidnapping plot. You've been there every time he's shown up, and yet you never get a scratch on you. Why do you think that is?"

"I...don't know."

"Just tell me why."

"I don't—I don't know," she repeated. "I—"

Jason seized her tightly by the arms and she let out an involuntary gasp. All of his calm from just moments ago was gone, and the unhinged look was back in his eye.

"Answer the question. You're so smart, Sarah, so tell me why the Devil of Hell's Kitchen won't hurt you."

"I—I—"

"Give me some good reason why you've been the only one so lucky as to avoid being targeted, or I will bring that wonderfully well-disciplined guard in here and have him hold you down while I break every single one of your fingers one by one," Jason snarled. Sarah felt like she was paralyzed, staring at him in wide-eyed panic. Even if she fought back, she was trapped in this room. "Will you enjoy going back to your musical career then?"

"I'm not the only one," she blurted out before she could think. She swallowed hard. "He—he's never hurt Vanessa, either. Even though it would make sense for him to."

Jason stared at her; whatever answer he had been expecting, that wasn't it. She'd thrown him, which was good.

"I—I think he maybe has some hang up about hurting women. I've never heard of him doing it," she stammered. "That's the only reason I can think of, I swear. I swear."

After a long pause, Jason let go of her. She stumbled backwards, and her shoulder banged hard against the metal bunk bed behind her before she caught her balance.

"He won't hurt women. How very old fashioned," Jason said, sounding downright delighted. "Of course."

Sarah was genuinely somewhat shocked that he seemed to believe her excuse. Jason had always been unpredictable and strange, but she had never seen him hurtle from one extreme to the next and back quite like this: rage to approval to paranoia to downright glee. He was truly becoming even more unhinged.

"That's fascinating. Really, really good information, Sarah."

She looked at him oddly, feeling like this was a trap.

"Thank you?"

"Good enough information that you can come back to work on Monday," he said. She hadn't been aware that not coming to work was an option. "We'll talk about this more then. There have to be some interesting routes we can take if he won't hurt women. Specifically if he won't hurt you. You can play a much bigger part in that aspect of things than I had anticipated."

"Oh, I don't know if—"

"It's not a request," Jason said tersely. "It's an order. If you're considering no longer following orders, then please won't forget that I have some video of you and McDermott that the police would be very interested to see."

Sarah froze. She hadn't forgotten about the surveillance video, but she'd kind of been hoping that Jason had.

"From this point forward, either you're a hundred percent dedicated to your job, or you're useless to me. Do you understand?"

Sarah nodded and folded her arms to conceal how badly her hands were shaking.

"Good. Do whatever you need to do to fix this. I expect you back to work on Monday."

Then he was gone, and the stone-faced guard was back to return her to the holding area.

Sarah looked at the clock as she came back in the room. She still had nearly four more hours until her meeting was supposed to begin. Just enough time to get completely lost in obsessive thoughts about what had just happened.

Great.

One conclusion that she did come to during those last few hours: she wasn't going to tell Matt what had just happened. Not until she figured out for herself if she'd just made things better or worse. Especially if Jason was planning on involving her in whatever plot he came up with to go after Daredevil. Because she knew Matt's first instinct would be to keep her out of danger even if it meant putting himself at risk, and she couldn't let him do that.

So, she decided, she simply wouldn't tell him yet. She could lie to Matt about this one thing, couldn't she?


Sarah didn't get a single minute of sleep that night, leaving her in a tired, disoriented state the next morning. She had stopped checking the creeping hour hand on the clock for her own sanity, and she barely registered the guard telling her to get up, that it was time for her meeting with the prosecutor to discuss her charges.

The only thing that cut through the fog was the sight of Matt waiting for her in the small interrogation room the guard led her to. He looked tired as well, but much more put together than she did, with his dark suit and tie serving as a sharp contrast to her rumpled day-old clothing and disheveled hair. His expression was one of professional indifference as she entered the room, but she could read his concern in the tension in his shoulders and the way his fingers tightly gripped the handle of his cane.

The relief that came with Matt's presence was quickly dampened when she saw there was another occupant in the room: a tall, thin woman with her graying black hair pulled back in neat cornrows and her expression set in strict lines. Sarah assumed this was the prosecutor. She'd thought she would get a few minutes to talk to Matt alone about what was going on before the meeting began, but apparently not.

"Ms. Corrigan," the woman greeted her tersely. "My name is Regina Rice, and I'm here to discuss the charges that my office will potentially be bringing against you."

With that, Regina took a seat at the interrogation table and opened the file in front of her, apparently ready to get down to business. Sarah looked over at Matt uncertainly.

His mouth was pressed into the tight, unhappy line. It was such a familiar expression that she wanted to wrap her arms around his neck and breathe him in to calm them both.

But of course, that wasn't generally how people greeted their lawyers who they barely knew and most certainly were not dating.

Matt extended his hand towards her, just slightly off center.

"Ms. Corrigan," he greeted her politely.

Sarah paused. This all felt so odd, like they were putting on a play for the prosecutor watching them.

"Mr. Murdock," she replied, shaking his hand. He gave her hand a quick, subtle squeeze before releasing it.

"Please, take a seat," he said, gesturing in the general direction of the table. She did so, and he felt around for his own chair before taking a seat beside her.

Now that they were all greeted and seated, Regina jumped right into things.

"So, Ms. Corrigan," she began. "It looks like the pending charges against you, in order of severity, are as follows: attempted murder with a possible elevation to murder one if the victim dies; breaking and entering with possible elevation to burglary; resi—"

"Burglary?" Sarah interrupted. "No one said anyth—I didn't steal anything from her!"

"You had five thousand dollars in cash in your purse," Regina said. "The detectives are still trying to prove if it was yours or if you found it in the house, but one possibility does seem more likely than the other."

Sarah opened her mouth to argue, but Matt rested a hand on her leg under the table. She reluctantly stayed silent.

"As I was saying, the remaining charges are resisting arrest, and criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree," Regina concluded.

"I believe the emphasis here is on 'pending', Ms. Rice," Matt said. "We're all aware that most of these charges wouldn't stand up in a court of law."

Sarah glanced over at him. Were they all aware of that? Was she supposed to be feeling the same sense of confidence he apparently was?

"Your client was found in the victim's house, standing over her unconscious body, in possession of an illegal weapon and a very suspicious amount of cash. She then proceeded to resist arrest. What part of that doesn't sound like it will stand up to you, Mr. Murdock?"

"Circumstantial," he said dismissively. "If you truly had any solid evidence you wouldn't be dragging out this whole process in hopes of finding something stronger. What you have now wasn't even enough to get a search warrant, so why would you expect it be enough for a conviction? Besides, let's be honest; you don't want this going to trial."

Regina raised an eyebrow. "Is that so?"

"You know the press is less than crazy about Cavanaugh, and everyone in the city has heard about McDermott's death. This case would bring a lot of attention to his behavior within the NYPD before his death, and to Cavanaugh's behavior now," Matt said calmly. "He has a fairly shaky arrest record, if I'm correct. It might seem contradictory to the your office's claim that they supposedly already cleaned out all the bad apples on the force."

Upon hearing that, Regina seemed to switch tactics.

"And why don't you want to go to trial, Mr. Murdock? You have a very jury-friendly client," she said with a nod towards Sarah. "One would think you'd want another media frenzy now that your buzz from the Fisk trial has died down."

"Maybe so, but my client doesn't. She's a very private person."

Regina looked to Sarah, who blinked and quickly nodded. The prosecutor sighed and shook her head.

"At this point, we won't be pursuing the attempted murder charges," she said. Sarah's rush of relief was so strong it practically made her head spin, until Regina fixed her with a stern look. "But the investigation is still open, and if Cheryl McDermott doesn't pull through, you'll be looking at murder one charges when you end up back in here."

"Alternately, your police officers might consider putting their efforts towards trying to find the actual perpetrator instead of trying to just pin it on my client," Matt suggested sharply. Sarah bit back a grin. After hours of following every mind-numbing order given to her by guards and police officers, it was kind of nice to listen to Matt throw out a few caustic remarks on her behalf. "I understand there's an element of pressure with a highly publicized case like this, but mistakenly taking the wrong person to trial isn't a good look for the DA's office."

Regina sat back in her chair and eyed Matt with some irritation. "I'd heard you could be an arrogant one."

"I just have a very low tolerance for bullshitting."

"I see. Well, we're still left with the other charges. Breaking and entering, burglary—"

"Burglary is a stretch," Matt argued.

"It would be, if not for that five grand. That much money, with no explanation or proof that it's hers? It sure doesn't look good. Especially in combination with resisting arrest and the weapons charge."

"Weapons charge? You want to have a full jury trial because a single woman in Hell's Kitchen had a ten dollar stun gun in her bag? I hope you're prepared to show evidence that your police force provides such widespread and thorough protection to each and every resident of New York that none of them have ever been forced to defend themselves," Matt said. A bitterness slipped into his tone as he spoke. After all, he spent a lot his time trying to protect people where the NYPD failed. "The city will love to hear you're wasting their tax dollars."

A flash of annoyance crossed the prosecutor's face; Sarah hoped that meant Matt was winning the argument.

"We've established that neither of us wants to go to trial over any of this. And clearly Officer Cavanaugh has a history of…questionable arrests," Regina said. "Neither the NYPD nor the DA have any interest in adding to his list of botched arrests, or in making him the center of media attention. So we're willing to offer a deal. Take the unlawful weapons charge, and the resisting charge, and we won't pursue the elevation to burglary. Just plain breaking and entering, along with the two misdemeanors. No trial."

Sarah's eyes widened. Did this woman really want her to admit to multiple crimes just to avoid being charged with other crimes she hadn't even committed?

"Drop the B and E altogether," Matt countered. "It won't stick, and it's a waste of your time and money."

Regina regarded the papers in front of her for a few moments as she considered it.

"Fine. Ms. Corrigan takes the two misdemeanor charges and we'll drop the breaking and entering charge. The attempted murder stays on the back burner pending further investigation," Regina said. She snapped her folder shut and stood up from the table. "I'll let you discuss it with your client."

Matt paused after Regina left the room. He tilted his head, listening for anyone outside the interrogation room. When he seemed satisfied that they were alone, he turned to her. He didn't say anything right away, and she wondered what he was picking up on: the exhaustion in her bones, the soreness in her muscles, the low, racing panic in her veins?

"Are you okay?" he asked her softly.

Sarah felt very much like she could cry, and for some reason his question only made the feeling stronger. She drew in a shaky inhale.

"Uh…I've been better," she admitted.

"How was last night?"

"It was…it was okay," she said. She was still sticking by her decision to not tell him about Jason. Not yet, anyway.

He frowned. "Are you hurt?"

She shook her head. "I'm fine. They're really not going to do anything with the attempted murder charges?"

"No. There's not enough evidence, and from what I've overheard, they don't really think you did it anyway. They just think you know who did, and they're trying to scare you into talking."

"But I don't know who did it," she told him.

"I know."

"If they get that search warrant—"

"They won't. Even if they do, there's nothing in your apartment for them to find," Matt said shortly.

Of course. Lawyers weren't allowed to get rid of incriminating evidence against you, but your local vigilante could.

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure," he said. Then he added lowly, "And we'll need to get you a new lock on your window."

Sarah nodded and looked away, feeling slightly guilty that he'd had to do that. It wasn't like Matt was a stranger to breaking the law, but tampering with evidence probably wasn't something he had to do very often. He was usually helping the good guys, not semi-bad guys.

"I think you should take the deal," he said.

"Seriously?"

"The weapons charge and resisting arrest are both misdemeanors. You won't get any jail time, but you'll have to pay a fine. No more than a thousand for each charge," Matt told her calmly.

"A thous—you do realize I barely have enough money for my bus fare every day?" she asked incredulously.

"We'll figure it out. You don't have to pay right away, and I can try to get the judge to extend the payment period. We've done it before."

"I don't understand. Foggy said they'd both be easy charges to fight—"

"It would be. Normally I'd take this to court in a heartbeat," Matt said. "The only reason they're even yanking you around like this is to protect the department's reputation. They want to cover up Cavanaugh's incompetence, and make it look like they're doing something about McDermott's death and his mother's attack."

"So why aren't we fighting it?"

"Because the prosecutor was right. You don't want this to go to trial. If it does, they're going to ask you a lot of questions under oath. Questions about your job, about your connection to McDermott. Either you end up having to reveal things about Orion that would put you in Jason's crosshairs, or you'd have to perjure yourself. And that's a much more serious crime than what you're looking at right now."

Sarah wondered if it was a bad thing that lying was so common for her now that she'd actually forgotten that lying under oath was an actual crime.

"Right. Perjury. That…that would be not good," she said dully. "So I just have to take what they're offering? I'll have a criminal record now?"

"You don't have to. The decision is up to you, and you know I'm with you whichever way you decide to go, but…I really think you should take it," Matt pressed. His brow was knitted with concern, as though he was worried he wasn't convincing her well enough. But he didn't need to worry. If he thought this was her best chance of staying alive and out of prison, she wasn't going to question it.

"Okay," she said, and Matt visibly relaxed. "Okay, so…what happens now?"

"I'll let the prosecutor know we're taking he deal, and then I'll file a waiver of arraignment.," he explained. "Since you're not contesting the charges, you'd sign a form allowing me to go to the hearing in your place and file a guilty plea for you. The judge will decide how much the fine will be, and how many days you have to pay it. They normally take into account reduced income levels, but…"

"But we don't want them looking into my paychecks from Orion," Sarah concluded. Of course she couldn't catch even that break. "I guess I can't tell the judge they keep half to pay off illicit gambling debts, can I?"

Matt tilted his head. "I wouldn't."

"Especially since I just put my dad in an expensive care home, and it looks like the payments are coming from me," she said, thinking of how Mahoney had pointed out that inconsistency. "Will I have to go back to jail until all of this is done?"

"Only for a couple more hours. Until they get all the paperwork processed."

Sarah's heart dropped. She really didn't want to go back to that holding cell.

"And you'll be there when I get out?" she asked.

Matt hesitated. "Depending on how full the docket is, it could take a while for your case to get in front of the judge. If I'm not done there by the time they release you, I'll make sure Foggy is here to meet you so you're not alone."

That was a small relief, at least. Sarah nodded as she rested both elbows on the table and buried her face in her hands.

"Okay," she said. Her voice was small and muffled by her hands.

She felt Matt's hand on her leg again, and she knew he was trying to offer what little comfort he could without drawing suspicion.

"Hey. Everything will be okay," he promised her quietly.

Easy for him to say, she thought as a jolt of bitter irritation went through her. He didn't have to go stand for hours in a hot, cramped jail cell with dozens of New York's best and brightest residents.

But the flash of anger faded as quickly as it came. That wasn't fair to Matt, who was trying his hardest to help her, even at risk to his career.

She lifted her face out of her hands.

"Matt, I—"

His hand abruptly left her leg. Two seconds later, the door to the interrogation room opened.

"We need this room," a guard told them. "If you're all done, I need to bring you back to the holding area now."

Sarah took one last look at Matt before letting the guard lead her away.


Three hours later, she was a free woman again.

The holding cell during the day wasn't nearly as bad as it had been at night. There were fewer drunks, for one, and the courts being open meant people filtered in and out much quicker. Lunch consisted of a packaged ham and cheese sandwich that she wouldn't have been able to identify if not for the label. It wasn't particularly appetizing, so she gave it to another girl in the cell who had a black eye and seemed to be coming down from some kind of high.

Foggy was there waiting when she entered the waiting room with her bag now back in her possession. She'd immediately checked to make sure all of the five thousand dollars was still there, not particularly trusting the NYPD not to steal it.

"Hi," Foggy said. "Ready to get out this joint?"

"Very ready," Sarah agreed.

"I got in touch with your friend Lauren," Foggy said, holding the front door open for her. Sarah had never been so happy to breathe air that didn't smell like stale urine, cigarettes, and body odor. "She was surprisingly thrilled to hear from me so late at night; I think maybe she thought you were dead."

"She might have," Sarah said honestly.

"She agreed to take your dad to the doctor. She also offered several times to pay both your bail and your legal fees, despite me explaining numerous times that you didn't need bail. We will be sending her a bill, though."

"Wait, what?" Sarah said.

"I'm joking. Of course we aren't going to charge you," Foggy said. "Prison life really killed your sense of humor."

Sarah laughed.

"Oh, god. I'm starving. All I want is some real food," she said. Then she looked down at her appearance. "Actually, no, what I want most is a shower. No, food. No—actually, is it weird to just eat while in the shower?"

"I wish I could say I'd never done it, but…" Foggy shrugged. "We have food at the office. No shower, but a serviceable sink that I've used in a pinch before. You can hang out there for a while. Matt should be done with the hearing soon, and he'll probably want to see you afterwards to catch you up to speed."

Sarah looked over at him at the mention of Matt.

"Did you guys…talk much? About what's going on?" she asked, trying to sound casual as they started walking down the sidewalk in the direction of the Nelson and Murdock office.

"Oh, yeah, we completely reconciled while you were hanging out in jail."

"Really?" she asked hopefully. Then she caught sight of the look Foggy was giving her. "Oh…so, not really."

"We talked about your case. Just like we've discussed some of our other cases. But…that was about it," he said.

Sarah bit the inside of her cheek to keep from asking more. This isn't your business, she reminded herself. Matt will not appreciate you getting in the middle of this.

"Why is your face all weird and twitchy?" Foggy asked her, sending her a sideways glance.

"It's not," she said defensively.

"It is," he countered. "You didn't eat any weird candy from anyone in there, did you?"

"Are you even going to try to fix things with Matt?" she blurted out.

Foggy looked like he already regretted opening the door to this conversation.

"It's complicated," he said, sounding not unlike his best friend.

As they waited for the light to change at the end of the block, Sarah looked over at the bus stop a few yards away. She blinked as she realized where they were, but Foggy was already moving towards the crosswalk.

"Okay, wait, wait," she said, quickly stepping into his path and putting her hands out to stop him from stepping off the sidewalk. "Stop."

"What—are you detaining me right now?" he said, looking at her like she was crazy. "What's happening? Is this the sleep deprivation kicking in?"

"Maybe. But look," she said pointing to the bus stop. "That has to be, like, a sign."

Foggy frowned as he followed her gaze. "A sign…for the bus? You're saying you don't want to walk? It's only a few blocks."

He started to walk around her.

"No," she said with a frustrated groan, sidestepping to block his path again. The other people on the sidewalk grumbled as they moved around the two of them. Sarah lowered her voice. "That bus stop. I was sitting at that very bus stop just a few months ago after deciding not to keep that bribe money, and you were standing in front of me giving me a whole dramatic speech about Matt. About how he does dumb shit sometimes, but for good reasons. Don't you remember?"

He looked from the bus stop to her, then sighed.

"I…yeah, I remember that," he said reluctantly. "But that was different. You were considering sending Matt to prison. I'm just…"

"Letting him hate himself even more?" she filled in tentatively. "Making him think he's lost his only friends?"

Foggy looked away in discomfort.

"To be clear, that's still not as bad as prison," he muttered.

"Matt misses you like crazy, Foggy. I can tell. You're such a big part of his life. But he's never going to make the first move to fix things, because he thinks you don't want him to."

"Well—" Foggy tossed his hands up. "Why do I have to do all the work in that relationship just because he's emotionally stunted? That's not how friendships are supposed to work. I shouldn't have to extend the olive branch every time just because he can't do it."

"You're right, it's not fair," she agreed. "But…is it worth just throwing your whole friendship away?"

"Excuse me," came an annoyed voice from behind Foggy. "Could you move?"

"Could you move?" Sarah exclaimed automatically, looking over Foggy's shoulder. The person who had spoken—who she could now see was a short, frail elderly man—looked taken aback. Sarah winced and stepped aside. "I'm sorry. I just got out of jail and I have not had any sleep."

The man gave her a suspicious look and kept walking. Foggy sent an exasperated look up at the sky, then grabbed her arm and pulled her along with him as he crossed the road.

"Look, I've picked up the phone a dozen times. I keep wanting to talk to him, but…I don't know what to say," Foggy admitted. He suddenly sounded very tired. "I feel awful that I blew his secret like that. And I was so busy being pissed at him for making me keep it in the first place that I can't even remember if I apologized."

"You still could," she pointed out.

"And how do I do that without making excuses for him? It wasn't okay for him to ask me to lie to Karen. It nearly made her break up with me."

"So be mad at him for that. But…don't just cut him off. You made him think you'd forgiven him for doing what he does, and then you took it back. That's not fair either."

Foggy's reply was a noncommittal grunt. The fact that he didn't come back with a counterargument seemed like a good sign.

"You know, of everyone I would have expected to end up so staunchly Team Matt, you weren't my first guess," he said.

"Well, someone has to be."

She didn't push the topic any further as they neared the law office, not wanting to annoy Foggy to point of rescinding the free food offer.

When they got there, however, the lure of cleaning herself up a bit won out over her hunger, and she ducked into the bathroom their office shared with a notary public down the hall.

The girl who looked back at her from the mirror was, for lack of a better word, grimy. Sarah's hair was stringy and unbrushed, and her skin looked oily. Her eyes were bloodshot, and the dark circles that seemed to always be present were much more pronounced than usual. Her skin felt sweaty and gross, and her clothes probably smelled like other people's body odor.

"Ew," she muttered at her own reflection.

She washed her face with cold water and a tiny bit of hand soap; not ideal, and it would probably break her out, but she needed to get the layer of grime off her skin. Then she swished some water around her mouth and popped a mint from the tiny container she kept in her purse. Running a brush through her hair didn't help much, but at least it got rid of the knots that had formed from leaning her head against a dirty wall all night.

When she was done, she didn't really look much better.

"I should have gone with the food," she muttered as she scrubbed underneath her fingernails one more time.

As she was coming out of the bathroom, her phone rang. Lauren's name popped up on the screen.

"Hello?" she answered.

"Oh, my god. I can't believe you have your cell phone back and you haven't called me yet," Lauren said by way of greeting.

"I'm sorry. I've only had it back for like an hour."

"Are you okay? What happened? Are you out on bail, or—"

"No, I'm just…out. They dropped the major charges. I officially have two misdemeanors on my criminal record now, but…it's better than the alternative."

"Holy shit. Okay, listen, we will talk super in depth about this later, but right I have to go pick up Noah from Cecilia's. I just wanted to call and see if you were okay, and to tell you that I took your dad to his doctor's appointment."

"Thank you so much. Did it go okay?"

"Uh…yeah," Lauren said vaguely. "It was fine."

Sarah frowned at her friend's tone. "Did something go wrong at the doctor's?"

"No, the appointment itself went fine," Lauren assured her. "And he did seem to know who I was when I showed up, kind of. He kept asking me if you were still in class, so I think he was just a little off…timeline-wise."

"Okay," she said. That didn't seem too bad.

"But then after the appointment I think he got me confused with your mom again," Lauren said gently. "He kept trying to apologize to me for something. I don't really know for what. He wasn't making a lot of sense."

"Oh, god," Sarah said, running a hand through her hair. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I asked you to go do that."

"No, no, it's fine! It's the blonde hair that's throwing him. I'll put it under a hat or something next time."

"There won't be a next time," Sarah promised. "I won't have to ask you to go do something like that again."

"It's really fine. I mean, getting arrested for attempted murder is, like, the most legit excuse ever, so…"

"Still. Sorry I scared you. And that I had a lawyer call you up in the middle of the night."

"Honestly, I was just relieved to get a call from him and not from a hospital or something. And he was pretty nice. His name was Franklin something, right? Is he one of the lawyers you said you met through Mrs. B?"

Franklin? Oh, right. He probably couldn't expect people to take him very seriously as a lawyer if he went around introducing himself as Foggy.

"Franklin Nelson. Yeah, him and his law partner."

"Cool. Well he was very vague about what they're charging you in terms of legal fees, but let me know if you need help with it, okay? Don't be all weird about it. It's just money."

It was kind of her to offer, but even if Sarah wasn't getting the legal services of Nelson and Murdock for free, she still wouldn't take her up on it.

"Yeah, okay. I'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Lauren."

She returned to the office and took a seat on the filing cabinet next to the reception desk that she assumed Karen usually sat at. Speaking of…

"Where's Karen today? Actually, where are all your clients?"

"We try not to schedule much on Wednesdays, so we can use it as a sort of mid-week catch up. Turns out actually having clients is a lot of work."

"Who knew?"

"And Karen's off taking statements. I'm actually meeting her later to—"

He was interrupted by Matt opening the door to the office. There was an uncomfortable pause as he and Foggy acknowledged each other. Sarah wondered if this was the first time Matt had been in the office since their big fight.

"And here's Matt. I guess that means your charges are officially processed," Foggy said.

"They are," Matt confirmed.

"Congratulations, you're officially a criminal now," Foggy told her.

"Thanks," Sarah said dryly.

Matt walked over towards where she was sitting. "You alright?"

"Yeah," she said, although it was much harder to pretend that was true than it had been in the interrogation room. "I'm…I'm fine."

Foggy's eyes moved from Matt to Sarah, and whatever he picked up in the short distance between them caused him to loudly clear his throat.

"Hey—you're a tea drinking kind of girl, right? You like tea. I'll see if we have any tea," Foggy said, ducking into the office's small kitchen.

Matt came to a stop in front of where she was sitting on the filing cabinet and pushed her hair out of her face.

"Seriously, are you okay?" he asked. "Seemed like you had a rough night."

It hit Sarah that she and Matt were finally alone—well, alone with Foggy in the other room—without any guards or DAs or bosses keeping them under a watchful eye.

"Do we still have to pretend like we don't know each other?" she asked.

Matt laughed quietly. "No."

Relieved, she leaned forward and kissed him. She didn't notice Foggy appear in the doorway to ask if she took anything in her tea, nor did she see him make a comically surprised face and spin around his heel to go back in the kitchen. And Matt, as usual, was too preoccupied with Sarah to notice much of anything.

"Thanks for going to the hearing and sorting everything out," she said once they broke apart. "I feel like I probably wouldn't have impressed a judge very much looking like this."

"Of course. How was your night last night?"

Sarah gave him an odd look. Why did he keep asking her that?

"Uh…mostly just boring," she said with a shrug."Jail is a lot of waiting around."

"Really?"

It was technically the truth. It had been mostly just boring, with one big exception.

"Pretty much."

A strange look crossed Matt's face. "Okay. I'm…glad it went okay."

Foggy popped his head out of the kitchen, giving them an appraising look before fully coming into the room.

"I have to get going, but your tea is ready," he said.

"You don't have to leave if…" Matt said, running a hand over the back of his neck awkwardly. "I mean, I can go. The office is your spot."

"No, I'm not…I mean, I'm just going to meet up with Karen," Foggy said. "You can stay."

"We'll be out of here soon."

"Stay as long as you want, man," Foggy said. He met Sarah's eyes for a second. "It's...not a problem."

Sarah gave him a small smile. She couldn't pretend like she wasn't a little disappointed; maybe part of her had been imagining that her talk with Foggy would be enough to prompt a sudden reconciliation between the two, which wasn't the most realistic thing to hope for. They were grown adults with their own complex relationship, and it wasn't like she had any magic words to say to fix things between them.

After Foggy left, Matt was still acting odd. She couldn't quite put her finger on how he was acting strange, but it was like he was waiting for her to say something. Maybe he had picked up on the fact that she was lying earlier, but it didn't usually affect him so much.

"I'm pretty tired," she said after they'd gone over some of the details of the plea he'd given the judge. "I think I'll probably go home and sleep. No—shower. Definitely shower. Then sleep."

"Are we still on for the boxing gym tomorrow night, or do you want to take some recovery time?" Matt asked.

Sarah had forgotten tomorrow was Thursday. But working out some stress on a punching bag sounded like exactly what she needed right now.

"Yeah, we're still on."

"Good. I'll…call you cab," he said.

"No, no, it's fine. The bus stop is right outside."

She could still feel that awkward tension lingering in the air, and Matt definitely looked like he wanted to say something to her. He opened his mouth, paused, then closed it again.

"Okay," he said simply. "I'll see you later, then."

"Bye."

As she stood at the bus stop, she slowly started to realize how stupid she was being. The bus was just pulling up as Sarah turned around and made her way back through the crowd of people waiting to board. She headed back up to Matt's office.

He was sitting as his desk, running his fingers over the Braille display on his laptop when she came back into the office. His lifted his head up, furrowing his brow.

"What's up?"

Sarah moved around to his side of the desk, where she leaned against it next to Matt's chair. She pushed her hair behind her ear nervously.

"Um…I—I think I might have screwed up," she said.

"How so?"

"Jason came to see me last night," she admitted. "When I was in jail."

She was struggling to decide which part of it to tell him first, and what all she should leave out. She should definitely leave out the finger-breaking threats; there was no point in getting Matt further pissed off over something he couldn't have controlled. But the rest of it—about Daredevil, about Nelson and Murdock—he needed to know, even if he didn't like some of the choices she had made.

"I know."

It took Sarah's exhausted brain a moment to catch up with what he'd said.

"What?"

Matt leaned back in his chair, sending an incredulous look in her general direction.

"Did you really think I'd just leave you spend the night in that place and not check in every once in a while to make sure you were alright?" Matt asked. "You were in jail, Sarah. I assumed you knew I'd be around."

He was right; she really should have known he'd be somewhere nearby.

"Why?" she asked. "It's a jail cell, it's not like you could get in to help me if I needed it."

"You'd be surprised how easy it is to get into some of those buildings."

She shook her head. "Were you there the whole night?"

"No. I came by every couple of hours. The first time I could barely even pick your heartbeat out of the crowd in there, but the second time you were talking to someone," he said. Ugh. Tweety Bird lady. "The next time I came back, you weren't in the holding cell. You were down the hall, with Jason."

"You heard the whole conversation?"

"Most of it, I think," Matt said. "I tuned in around the time you were convincing him to let you keep us as on your lawyers. You made a good argument. Hire the attention-hungry attorneys to make your company look more reputable."

"If that's when you got there, then you missed the part where he said he didn't set me up."

"I kind of put that together through context clues. Good thing, too, because it kind of seemed like you weren't planning to tell me about any of it," he said pointedly.

"I…kind of wasn't," she admitted. "I just changed my mind when I left. Why didn't you say anything?

"Why didn't you? You didn't think any of what went down in that cell was information I might want to know?"

"Technically you already knew," she pointed out tentatively. She winced at the look Matt gave her in return. "I'm sorry. I don't know, it made sense at the time. I feel like I made a mistake, back in that cell. And my default mode when I screw up is to keep it a secret until I figure out of I can just fix it myself."

"What makes you think you screwed anything up? From what I could tell, he believed you. Honestly, he seems so far out of his mind with paranoia that I think he'd believe anything he thought might help him grab a little power."

"I was so scared, and I was just saying whatever I thought would get me out of there alive, but...what if by getting some of his suspicion off me I just put a bigger target on you?"

"Then..great," Matt said with a shrug. "That's where I'd rather the target be."

There was that martyr-like answer she knew he'd have. This was exactly why she hadn't wanted to tell him.

"Yeah. I knew you'd say something ridiculous like that. Then what if I screwed up by insisting on keeping you and Foggy as my lawyers? What if he goes home and thinks about it and realizes something's wrong there?"

"This is a lot of what-ifs. And I don't see how any of it's helped by keeping me in the dark?"

"It's not," Sarah said. "I thought it was one less thing I could put on your shoulders, but it was the wrong call. I'm just an idiot, and exhausted, and I smell bad, and I'm stressed, and I should have told you, and I—"

Sarah's nervous rambling was cut off by Matt, who swiftly leaned forward in his chair and kissed her. When he broke away she looked at him in wide-eyed confusion. Was this how he reacted to being angry with her now? That wasn't such a bad change. She could probably get used to it.

"You're not an idiot," Matt corrected her. "The rest is fair game."

Sarah gave a weak laugh. "Are you pissed?"

He considered it for a moment. Strangely, she thought she saw a flash of guilt cross his face.

"No. No, I mean, people keep secrets sometimes. To protect themselves, or...to protect others."

She looked at him for a long moment. Secrets like running around at night with your old mentor? If her brain were functioning at more than roughly three percent, she might have asked him about it. But it could wait. It wasn't like it was a secret that really affected her anyway; not like the ones she always tried to keep from him.

"Besides, compared to how difficult it used to be to get even the slightest bit of information out of you when we first met? This was a breeze." Matt gave her a crooked grin.

"Yeah, it turns out it's easier to break a lying habit when you spend all your time with a walking polygraph machine."

Matt laughed.

"Fair enough. And for the record, I don't think you screwed up with Jason. You said what you had to say to not get hurt, and...we'll deal with it," Matt said. "Go home. Get some sleep. You don't have to be back to work until Monday, right? We can talk about this later. Tomorrow night, maybe. After training."

Sarah leaned down from her perch on his desk and pressed a lingering kiss to his lips. She pulled back and touched her forehead to his.

"How many times do you think I have to shower before you can't smell jail cell all over me?" she whispered.

Matt laughed and squinted his eyes as he considered it.

"…at least twice."

"Got it." She kissed him one more time. "I'll see you tomorrow night."

As she left the office, she felt a little lighter. Still weighed down by stress and guilt and a hefty dose of fear, but just…a little less of all those things. She hoped that she remembered this feeling the next time she had the choice of keeping something from Matt or telling him the truth. It wasn't easy to go against her instincts, which—unfortunately—usually ran along the lines of side-stepping the truth, if not downright lying.

But if there was anyone who made telling them the truth seem worthwhile, she decided, it was Matthew Murdock.


The next night, Sarah texted Matt as she was leaving her apartment for the boxing gym. His replies to her texts were usually short, just by nature of his speech-to-text app, but they were always quick. So it was odd when she didn't get anything in reply. She checked her phone again on the walk there, but shrugged it off when there was no response. Maybe he was busy, and hadn't heard his phone go off.

When she got to the boxing gym shortly before 8:00, she was surprised not to hear the sound of the punching bag already echoing around the space. Usually Matt was already warmed up by the time she arrived, having gotten there early enough to get his own boxing session in before their training. It made sense; it wasn't as though he got much of a workout from guiding her through Boxing 101.

But tonight the gym was quiet as she pushed the unlocked back door open and flipped on the lights.

Sarah shrugged her gym bag off and glanced at the time; she was still a good fifteen minutes early, she supposed. She dug some boxing tape out of her gym bag and began wrapping her hands, figuring she might as well warm up while she waited.

As she started in on the punching bag, she couldn't quite pinpoint why she was feeling uneasy. Maybe she was still jumpy from the events of the past few days, or maybe it was just being alone in the boxing gym at night. She'd never felt unsafe there in the past, but she had always been with Matt, and now with nothing but the sound of her own fists hitting the bag she kept finding herself looking over her shoulder at the entrance, then at the doors to the locker room, half expecting to see someone standing there.

By 8:15, she stopped trying to focus on the punching bag. Something wasn't right. Matt wasn't even that late, but she had the oddest feeling in the pit of her stomach that she couldn't shake.

She called Matt's regular phone first, let it ring all the way through and then hung up when it went to voicemail. She tried his burner phone next, and her heart sank a little when it, too, rang and rang with no answer.

"Hey," she said when the voicemail kicked in. "I, uh, I'm at the gym. It's a little after 8:15, so I don't know if maybe…something came up, or…? Anyway, I'll stick around a few more minutes to see if you show up, but just call me back and let me know if you're…" Bleeding out in an alley somewhere? Sarah shook her head. Try not to sound like a crazy person for once. "…just let me know everything's okay. Bye."

Sarah hung up the phone and stood there for a moment, looking at the door as she debated herself. Something just felt off, and maybe she was being crazy but if she was then she would just have to take whatever teasing Matt would give her for worrying. She was already unraveling the boxing tape from her hands as she thought it through, and a few minutes later she had her gym bag and was out the door.

Out in the fresh air, she'd expected the weird feeling in her stomach to fade, but it didn't. She'd just spoken to Matt earlier that day, she reminded herself, and it was now barely after 8:30; what were the chances he'd gotten himself into trouble in the few hours in between? It had barely been dark for half an hour, and Daredevil wasn't much of an afternoon brawler.

She tried to keep reminding herself of that as she got to his place and knocked on his door. Matt would probably answer with his hair all messy and tell her he'd fallen asleep after staying out late the night before, and she would explain to him that, sorry, but this was just what it was like to date someone with anxiety and she hoped he could handle the fact that sometimes she got an unshakable feeling of dread for absolutely no reason at all.

There was no answer. Sarah knocked harder.

"Matt?" she called out, without high hopes. If he was in there, he would have heard her the first time.

She had just turned to leave when she heard the door open behind her. She spun around, relief already spreading through her before she saw who had answered the door.

Stick. He wasn't wearing the dark glasses he'd had on the last time she'd seen him, exposing his cloudy and somewhat unsettling blue-gray eyes. To her alarm, he had what looked like blood on the front of his shirt.

"Yeah?" he said by way of greeting.

Sarah stared at him.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

"I could ask you the same thing. You're the one pounding on the door."

"Where's Matt?"

Stick paused, then jerked his head over his shoulder, holding the door open wider for her to come inside. She glanced at him uneasily as she went by him and started down the hallway. Belatedly, it occurred to her that she didn't really know what level of crazy Stick was, and that this could possibly be some weird trap. But the urge to find out if Matt was okay outweighed that.

At first glance, the living room looked empty, and Sarah's brow knitted in confusion. Then she looked over by the windows facing the blinding billboard, and her heart dropped.

Matt was on the floor, sitting with his back pressed flat against the brick wall and his legs sprawled out in front of him. He was breathing heavily, his hands pressed flat to the floor on either side of him and his posture rigid. It was clear now that the blood on Stick's shirt was Matt's: both his temple and nose appeared to be bleeding freely, and there was a thick, hastily applied bandage wrapped around the side of his neck. But it was his expression that disturbed her the most; his eyes were wide with panic as they darted around the room, like he was trying to pinpoint something she couldn't see.

"Matt?" Sarah breathed out. He didn't seem to register her presence, and in retrospect she probably should have noted that. But she was distracted by her apprehension as she moved forward and dropped to her knees next to him, then reached out to get his attention. "Matt, what—"

The second she grabbed Matt's arm, the left side of her face exploded in pain as she was hit by what was, to the best of her approximation, a train. She hadn't even seen Matt move, but the impact sent her entire body sprawling to the side. She landed hard a few feet away from him, only managing to catch herself with one hand while the other half of her body weight landed painfully on her elbow.

Sarah groaned and brought her fingers to the corner of her mouth. They came away with blood on them. Black spots danced across her vision, heavily concentrated on the left side, and beyond those spots she could see Matt's living room spinning slightly.

What the hell?

When her vision stopped blurring, she looked back over her shoulder at Matt. He didn't even seem to register that she was still there; he was back to leaning his head against the wall like it was the only thing anchoring him. Tension was woven tightly through his posture, readying him to lash out at any second. But why?

"Probably shouldn't have done that," came a dry voice from across the room.

Sarah struggled to her feet, keeping her eyes on Matt.

"What's wrong with him?" she asked. Speaking made some of the blood drip in her mouth, leaving an unpleasant metallic taste.

"Well, he can't hear shit. And I'd imagine he can't sense where anything is, either. So he's not in a great mood."

Sarah finally tore her eyes away from Matt's panicked expression to send a sharp look over at Stick, who was busying himself with something in the kitchen. Was he really cooking right now?

"What are you talking about, he can't hear? What—what happened to him?" she asked.

"Got side-swiped with a poisonous arrow," Stick said casually, as though that was something that happened to people often. "Lucky it wasn't a direct hit, or he'd probably be a goner right now. But it's screwing up his nervous system, and my bet is it hurts like a bitch, too."

Sarah looked back at Matt in horror. He couldn't sense anything, at all? He had nothing to tell him what was going on around him—it must have been like floating in a black hole.

"Does he know where he is? That he's safe? Does—does he know you're with him?"

"Beats me. He checked out while we were still trying to get back above ground, so…my guess would be no."

It seemed like a good guess. She assumed he wouldn't have reacted the way he did if he knew he was safe in his own apartment, but from the looks of him he barely knew he was on earth. Matt let out a low, shuddering groan as he fought against some kind of pain she couldn't identify. It didn't seem to be localized to any one part of his body, but he was definitely hurting. She watched helplessly, unable to reach out and comfort him like she wanted to.

"How do we fix it?" she asked shakily.

"I'm working on it, if you'd quit asking me questions and let me focus."

Sarah craned her neck to look over the counter. Upon closer inspection, she could see he wasn't actually cooking. A strange combination of household products was assembled on the counter: she could see alcohol, baking soda, what looked like some cleaning supplies. Next to them was a cheap syringe that she'd seen in Matt's first aid kit before, but they'd never had to use it for anything.

"Didn't think you'd be so hysterical about it," Stick said. Sarah narrowed her eyes at him; she really didn't like being called that, and looking at the situation, she thought being a little upset was justified. "From what I understand, Matty gets himself hurt pretty often."

"Sort of, I guess. That happens when you're fighting criminals all the time," she said.

"No, that's what happens when you refuse to kill people. You give them more chances to hurt you. Running around, pretending he's some kind of hero—"

"He is," Sarah snapped at him. She wiped the blood away from the corner of her mouth, then was dismayed to find more of it coming from a split just below her eye. He'd really gotten a good hit in; her whole face was throbbing. "And what Matt does isn't any of your business."

"It is when I have to clean up after him," Stick shot back. "Two children stumbling around with no idea what you're doing. You're both lucky I stepped in the last time you got in trouble and took care of that problem for you."

"What problem?" she asked, but she was barely paying attention. Her focus was on Matt, who was breathing harshly as he rode out another wave of pain.

"The man you very stupidly let see your face," Stick said. Sarah froze. When she didn't say anything, he laughed mirthlessly. "What, you thought he just chose to keep quiet out of the kindness of his heart? Turned over a new leaf because you two asked him to? No. He stayed quiet because I put him in the ground."

It felt somewhat like the room was spinning again. Sarah closed her eyes.

"That's not true," she said.

But she couldn't shake the memory of Matt avoiding her questions that night on the fire escape. He'd insisted the man—god, someone might be dead because of her and she didn't even know his name—wouldn't be a problem anymore, and had offered no concrete reason for his certainty. He'd just asked her to trust him.

"Matty didn't tell you? Huh. You'd think he'd want you to know so you could stop looking over your shoulder all the time," Stick said, walking into the living room with the syringe in his hand. "But I've never understood the choices that kid makes."

"I don't think you understand much about him at all," she said.

"I understand he wouldn't be the man he is today if I hadn't helped him. He'd still be a floundering, scared child."

Sarah could think of a whole host of issues that Matt wouldn't have if he'd never met Stick, but now wasn't the time to get into it.

"How are you going to give him that shot?" she asked.

Stick cocked his head in speculation.

"Probably have to pin him down. Might take a bit of a fight to do it, but we'll get there. Does he keep any rope around here? Zip ties?"

Matt did have zip ties, actually, but Sarah was far from crazy about that plan. Matt was already stuck in some horrible limbo with no sight or hearing or way to orient himself—someone attacking him would be terrifying. And if he really did have some kind of poison in his veins, wouldn't getting into a fight just spread it through his system faster?

"N-no, wait. Let…let me try to give it to him."

"That's a bad idea—you have a lot of those, don't you?" Stick said. Sarah bit the inside of her cheek to resist snapping at him. Her alarm over Matt's condition was outweighing her anger at Stick, and she didn't really want to piss off the one person who appeared to know how to cure him. Besides, if Matt's general panic at the idea of her and Stick being near each other was any indication, the man wasn't exactly above hurting her.

Matt winced and let out a low, pained sound through gritted teeth.

"I just need to let him know I'm here. He'll calm down if he knows he's not alone or in danger."

"The boy just knocked you halfway to hell, how do you think he'll react when you try to shove a syringe in his arm? I don't think Matty would be too crazy about me letting him strangle his own girlfriend to death because he doesn't know what's going on."

"That won't happen," she said, sounding more certain than she felt. She wiped more blood away from her face. "He's…he's just scared. I can handle him."

"Sure, you can handle him when he's at his lovey-dovey best," Stick said with a roll of his eyes. "This isn't your boyfriend, kid, this is a trained fighter who's been backed into a corner. You don't know how to handle this side of him."

"You have no idea what sides of Matt I know," Sarah snapped. "I can handle it."

There was a short pause, and then Stick sighed.

"Fine. Suit yourself," he said shortly, holding the syringe out to her. Sarah blinked in surprise. "I don't have time to babysit right now, anyway. Got some people I need to catch up with."

Was he really leaving? Or was he just going to hang out within earshot like his protégé had a habit of doing? Either way, she'd be relieved when he was no longer in the room with her.

"Make sure you give him this within the next thirty minutes," Stick said. "If you let him die because you're too busy holding his hand to save his life, I'll be pissed. Got it?"

Sarah stared at him. That might have been the first time she'd heard him express genuine concern for Matt.

"Yeah. I got it."

Stick didn't waste time saying anything else to her. He simply grabbed his cane and a dirty duffle bag from the corner of the room, slipped on his glasses, and then he was gone. The only sound left in the room was Matt's labored breathing.

Sarah cautiously made her way back over to him and knelt down beside him. He was still sitting with his back pressed against the wall like he was anchoring himself to the only thing he could find, and his wide eyes continued darting around a room he couldn't map out. He didn't react to her presence; he couldn't tell she was there, less than two feet in front of him. She hated this.

She hesitated, watching him warily. This was probably a bad idea, and could backfire pretty spectacularly. Her eyes traveled over the width of his shoulders and down the muscles of his arms. It had been a long time since she'd looked at Matt's hands and thought about the various ways they could hurt her. Because her Matt wouldn't hurt her, and she knew that, but this Matt was drowning in nothingness and was going to lash out at anything that touched him. This Matt was scared, and unpredictable, and potentially very dangerous. But he needed her help, so what choice did she have?

Okay. I can do this. This is just Matt.

Taking a deep breath, she set the syringe aside and reached out to touch his arm, much more gently this time in the hopes of not eliciting such a strong reaction.

Before she could blink, a strong hand snapped around her forearm like a coiled trap, eliciting a pained gasp from her. Matt twisted her arm into a painful position, yanking her towards him, and she had to throw her hand against the wall behind him just to avoid falling into him, which definitely wouldn't help either of them. His grip was painful, but she figured it was better he found her arm than her throat.

"Who are you?" he forced out. His eyes were flicking around her general direction, but never quite finding her. His volume was stilted and his voice hoarse. "Where am I?"

Sarah might have laughed if she hadn't been fairly terrified. It was very like Matt to bark questions at someone despite knowing he had no way of hearing the answers. She answered anyway.

"It's okay," she said softly. "It's okay. It's just me."

Another wave of pain came over his face, and he pressed his head back against the wall, screwing his eyes shut. His grip on her forearm grew tighter, if that was possible. Sarah's heart twisted; she hated seeing him like this. If she could just get him to calm down and realize it was her, she could give him that shot and hopefully lessen some of the pain he was in.

She stayed very still and waited a few seconds for the pain to subside from his face. Then she slowly took her left hand off the wall, sacrificing the small bit of balance she had, and put it over the one that was currently trapping her right forearm in a death grip, lightly brushing her fingers against the back of Matt's hand. The gentleness of the contact caused his eyebrows to knit in confusion, but he didn't lash out further.

Taking that as a good sign, she turned her attention away from where he was holding her arm, instead reaching for his other hand. He didn't stop her as she cautiously took his hand and brought it to the uninjured side of her face. She had no idea if he'd be able to recognize the lines of her face without his senses, but she hoped he could. If not, this was probably a poor choice.

"Come on, Matt," she murmured. "Please. Come on. It's me."

His fingers brushed across her cheek, then moved down around the bottom of her lips, then under her chin. He heartbeat skipped as his hand came near her throat, but the moment passed as he move back up, his fingers moving into her hair and his thumb on her cheek.

The look of pure relief that broke across Matt's face nearly made her cry—partly in her own relief as he loosened his iron grip on her arm. That would definitely leave a bruise.

"Sarah?" he whispered.

Sarah broke into a smile and nodded, keeping his hand on her face so he could feel the movement.

"Yeah," she whispered, deciding it didn't matter if he couldn't hear it. It made her feel better to talk. "Hi."

Matt's eyes were still searching, never quite landing on her. She was right there, and his hand was on her face, and he still didn't seem to be able to place her. God, what was happening in his head right now?

"Sarah…what's happening?" he asked. His voice was raspy and broken, nearly gone, like he'd been yelling, and there was a pleading note to his tone. "I—I can't hear anything, or…there's nothing there, I don't...what's going on?"

She wanted to answer him, but even if she could communicate with him, she didn't know much beyond what Stick had told her. All she could do was press her hand to his cheek and hope he understood she was going to help him.

Slowly, Sarah reached for the syringe Stick had left. She tapped it with her finger, watching for any air bubbles that might float to the top. That was about the extent of what she knew about giving someone an injection. Air bubbles were bad. Luckily, she didn't see any. Was she really about to inject Matt with some strange substance just because Stick said to? But if Stick was telling the truth, then there was no time to call Claire and get a second opinion. And Matt, for as much as he seemed to loathe Stick at times, also apparently trusted him enough to continue working with him in secret.

It seemed like abruptly stabbing him with a needle was probably a bad idea, so she took his hand and touched his fingers to the syringe. Matt tensed. She pushed his sleeve up, exposing the veins on his forearm, then looked up at him. She couldn't tell if he understood what was going on, but he wasn't stopping her.

"Okay," she muttered as she brought the needle to his skin. "Please do not knock me across the room again."

She pushed the needle in. Matt barely seemed to notice. A bad sign for his level of awareness, but a good sign for her chances of not getting punched in the face.

After the syringe was empty, she watched his expression for an indication of pain or—hopefully—relief. But there didn't seem to be any change.

Sarah looked around the living room as she waited for Stick's mysterious potion to kick in. She wished she could move Matt to his bed, or at least to the couch, but he didn't seem to be in walking shape, and there was no way she could support his weight unless he was doing at least some of the work.

Her eyes landed on his laptop, and for a brief second she thought it might help her talk to him. But the hope faded quickly; she had no idea if Matt's Braille reader was even here, much less how to hook it up to his laptop, or what his password was.

Okay. She couldn't get him to bed to rest, and she couldn't talk to him to reassure him he would get his sense back. What could she do?

"I'll be right back," she said, pressing a single finger to Matt's palm. He didn't react much as she got to her feet and made her way to his room.

It wasn't nearly as hot in Matt's apartment as it always was in hers. She glanced around the ceiling suspiciously. Did he have air conditioning? Why wasn't she spending much more of her time here?

Not the point, she reminded herself. After grabbing a blanket from Matt's bed, she moved on to the kitchen to grab some water and his first aid kit. She briefly considered ducking into the bathroom to check out the damage to her face, but quickly decided she didn't really want to see how bad it looked right now. She gingerly touched her cheek, wincing at the contact. It seemed likely that the entire left side of her face was going to be a huge bruise, if the swelling that extended from just below her eye all the way down to the corner of her mouth was any indication.

It also seemed that in his current state, Matt either didn't realize it was Sarah he had struck earlier or he didn't remember it happening at all. Either possibility seemed likely, given how disoriented he was. She wasn't sure how he would react when he did find out, but they didn't need to worry about that yet.

Obviously Sarah wasn't oblivious to how hard Matt could hit someone. She'd seen him in various fights; she knew what he was capable of. But seeing it and actually feeling the force of the blow were two different things. It made it very clear just how much Matt held back when they were sparring in the ring. He was always so careful not to leave a mark on her when they were practicing moves, never really landing a direct hit even when she messed up her blocking. Tonight had really thrown into stark contrast what a joke those training sessions must be to him.

Sarah knelt down on the floor in front of Matt again and hesitated. It hadn't occurred to her until now that in his state of near delirium he might have already forgotten she was here.

She shifted to sit on the floor next to him with her back to the wall, letting her arm brush against his. He immediately tensed, but didn't lash out at her, so she moved closer, pressing against his side. She wanted him to be able to tell she was still there, and there wasn't much way to do that besides just being in physical contact.

It seemed like the injection was starting to take effect, because his eyes were hooded with exhaustion, and his breathing was less harsh. Good. The bleeding from his temple and nose seemed to have stopped, so she set the first aid kit aside for the moment. It could wait until he had recovered somewhat.

"Come on," she said, tugging at his arm to get him to lie down. "I know you can't hear me, but you're too heavy to move, and you need to sleep."

Matt let her maneuver him into a more comfortable sleeping position, so that he was lying down with his head on her lap. It wasn't ideal—he would probably be sore after a few hours of sleeping on the hardwood floor—but it would do. She draped the blanket over him and pushed his hair back off his forehead, which was damp with sweat and blood.

Sarah leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. Her lips twitched as she recalled how on the way over here, she had been thinking about how she could be a difficult person to date sometimes. Had she forgotten that the other half of that equation was the Devil of Hell's Kitchen?

She knew she probably wouldn't get much sleep that night, if any at all. Her face was throbbing and her adrenaline was still pumping. So she just slowly carded her hand through Matt's hair, listening to the steadying of his breathing and watching the light from the billboard dance across the walls.


Please don't expect the story to get too in depth about Stick's grand mystical drama, because the only part that was relevant to this story was the aftermath with Sarah.

I hope everyone enjoys Season 3! I'll be binging it all tomorrow and Saturday, and as usual I'm pumped to talk about it with anyone who wants to PM me, but if you mention it in your review try to avoid any major spoilers!