The weather was steadily getting warmer, and Sarah found that she didn't need her sweater for the walk home, even with the evening chill. She folded it up and fidgeted with the fabric in her hands as she and Matt made their way through an alleyway, letting her mind drift to the comfortable bed that was waiting for her at home.
Matt was a good bit taller than she was, and she had to take two steps for each of his strides. It wasn't until she tripped over a flattened cardboard box that he seemed to notice how quickly she was walking to keep up with him, and he slowed down.
Sarah glanced over at him as he fell back to keep in step with her.
"Are you sure you can afford to walk me home?" she asked him. "Isn't there, like…crime you should be stopping?"
He shook his head. "Most of it won't start up for another couple of hours, when people start leaving the bars. But I'm keeping an ear out."
"Oh," she said, then squinted at him. "So, at any moment you might just…parkour away and leave me in this maze of sketchy alleyways?"
Matt chuckled. "It's possible. You might want to actually start telling me about what happened at work, just in case."
Sarah blushed as she realized that she'd been walking in silence for the first ten minutes of the walk, so completely lost in her own thoughts that she had forgotten she was supposed to be updating him on Orion. After all, he wasn't just walking her home to be nice; this was still a business meeting of sorts.
"Sorry," she muttered tiredly. "You should have said something."
He shrugged. "I figured you'd snap back to earth eventually. What happened today?"
"Nothing good. I got promoted," she said gloomily.
"Promoted to…what?"
"I can't really tell what my new title is. It was all very vague. Like a secretary, but with extra stuff. Something about running errands, which sounds less than legal," she grumbled. "I'll be working for Jason now. Which I'm not looking forward to. He's very…unsettling is the word, I guess."
"How so?" Matt asked suspiciously.
"I don't know. It's hard to describe. It's like he's not even human. I…I just can't read him. I don't understand what he's thinking or what he wants. With Ronan, at least I knew what he wanted," she said, and even in the dark she could see Matt's jaw twitch in that now-familiar way. "And that was awful, obviously, but not being able to read Jason at all is worse."
"You think he's going to try to hurt you?"
"No," she said slowly. "Well, not right now. But I also get the feeling that if I wound up dead, he wouldn't care at all. Which makes me a little nervous about the kinds of errands he'll be sending me on. A lot nervous, actually. Ronan was…a lot of awful thing. Mean, and creepy, and gross. But he was also dumb, which was nice. Jason is smart, and I know he doesn't trust me."
"Do you think you'll still be able to stay below the radar?"
She frowned and looked down, carefully stepping over a few plastic crates scattered around the ground. "I mean, I'm going to try, obviously. But in case you haven't noticed, I'm not very good at all of this, so who knows."
"You're doing alright."
Sarah had to laugh at that. "I'm doing awful. I'm the Amelia Bedelia of spies, Matt."
"You could be doing worse."
"How so?"
Matt shrugged. "You…could be dead."
"Thank you. That's comforting."
"Or you could have run off and left the whole thing behind."
"Don't think I haven't thought about it," she muttered under her breath. Sometimes she still forgot about his enhanced hearing, and she winced when he turned his head in her direction at the comment. "Not—not that I'm going to."
"You said yourself that you aren't a professional spy. No one expects you to be."
"Apparently Claire does. Did you hear her ask me if I'm a vigilante, too?"
"I did hear that," he said, cracking a small grin and shaking his head. "I guess if a blind guy can do it…"
"Oh, I could totally do it. They'd have to be very small criminals, though," Sarah said thoughtfully, watching her feet in the dark so she didn't trip. "Or very lazy ones. Jaywalkers, maybe. Or litterers."
Matt chuckled slightly, presumably at the image of Sarah intimidating any sort of criminal.
"People who ride their bikes on the sidewalk," he offered. "They always knock into me."
"That's a good one," she agreed. "Maybe people who don't let others get off the subway before they try to get on."
"I'm not sure that's actually against the law."
"Maybe not," she admitted. "But it's a dick move, anyway."
"Always been enough motivation for me."
"I've noticed. I don't think I'd be very good at hitting people, though. Turns out, it kind of hurts your hands," she said idly, frowning at her split knuckles before looking up at Matt, who she could have sworn was smirking slightly at the obvious statement. "You…probably already knew that, though. Because you hit people for a living."
"Practicing law is my living, actually," he reminded her. "And you were probably doing it wrong."
"Practicing law wrong?"
"Punching wrong."
"Alright, well…we didn't all go to vigilante school, Matthew," she grumbled.
Matt laughed. The sound was short and sudden, like her remark had taken him by surprise. "I just mean that it doesn't hurt that much if you have a good technique."
"I have a good technique. It's called not getting into fights with people."
"Right. I never quite mastered that one."
She gave him a sideways glance. "Shocker."
He laughed again, and she found herself studying his face, hoping he didn't notice her staring. It was so rare that she got to see him show any sort of sense of humor, and amusement still seemed like such an oddly foreign thing to see on his masked face.
He took a sharp turn around a corner, and she followed. He led them down a darkened side street with a few old cars parked along the side.
"This is a pretty convoluted shortcut," she pointed out, eying the broken windows that dotted the buildings above them.
"Maybe not one you should take by yourself."
"I don't just go wandering down dark side streets in Hell's Kitchen by myself," she protested. "I do have some sense of self-preservation, you know."
"Yeah?" Matt said, turning around to face her while lazily walking backwards. "I don't know if I need to point out that you're currently following a masked vigilante through a bunch of darkened back alleys."
"Well—okay, that's fair. But this is a one-time thing. Meanwhile, you know this route so well that you're just walking backwards like it's no big deal," she pointed out in exasperation.
"Why would that be any different than walking forwards? I can't see anything either way."
Sarah narrowed her eyes at him suspiciously, trying to figure out if he was bullshitting her.
"So, what, there's no difference for you between what's in front of you or behind you?"
"Not really. It's sort of a 360 thing," Matt explained, swinging back around so that he was walking forward again, keeping even with Sarah's slower pace. "People with sight see what's in front of them, and a little bit of what's beside them. But the way my senses work…I pick up on every direction equally. Comes in handy when I'm fighting, since there's no real difference between someone sneaking up behind me or attacking me to my face."
Sarah observed the dark alleyway as they continued their trek, trying to imagine what it would be like to be equally aware of everything around her. It sounded overwhelming.
As if on cue, something far away seemed to catch Matt's attention. Whatever it was, Sarah couldn't hear it, but she knew Matt was listening when he stopped walking and tilted his head to the side slightly.
"What's wrong?" she whispered.
He shook his head. "Cops around the corner. They're on one of the sides streets I was going to take us down. Checking out an abandoned vehicle, or something."
"Do we need to turn around?"
"Nah," he said, walking farther down the side street before coming to a stop next to a narrow space between two buildings. "We'll take a detour."
Sarah looked down the alleyway—if it could even be called that—dubiously. It was incredibly narrow, to the point where they'd have to walk single file through it, which was not an appealing idea to her. Even less appealing was the complete lack of light; the alley was covered by construction awnings, effectively blocking out even the weak light from the apartment windows above. She could see about three feet into the space; beyond that it was pitch black.
"You're joking," she said.
"This will take us almost all the way over to your apartment."
"But there's no light. I can't see anything."
"Sounds hard," he said dryly.
"I—okay—very funny," she said, glaring at him. "I'm serious, I do not want to go down there."
Matt sighed and tipped his head back against the brick wall, looking exasperated. "Okay. You don't have to. But I'm going down there."
She looked at him suspiciously. "You're the one who insisted on walking me home, I know you aren't going to just leave me here."
He tilted his head and slowly took a few steps back into the dark alley. "Are you sure?"
"Matt!" she whispered loudly as he started to disappear into the shadows. "You cannot seriously want us to go that way. There could be serial killers in there."
"You really think there are multiple mass murderers in this tiny alley?" Matt asked. Sarah just shrugged. "All I ever run into down this alleyway is the occasional homeless person."
"That's not any better. Foggy and I stole that shopping cart from a homeless person not too long ago. We're probably on some sort of list."
"I don't think homeless people really organize themselves that way," Matt pointed out, before stepping back out of the shadows and towards her. "I promise there is no one anywhere near this alleyway but us."
"Is—is that supposed to make me feel better or worse?" she asked tentatively.
"Look, this is the only other route that doesn't require climbing over rooftops, which you've already made clear that you don't want to do," he said. "You'll be fine. Just follow me."
If Sarah's phone wasn't close to dying, she would have brought it out to use it as a flashlight. Instead, she repressed a frustrated sigh and took a few steps forward until she was behind him. He quickly disappeared into the shadows of the small alleyway, and she followed.
The trip did not go well. Sarah didn't like the way the walls felt like they were closing in on her, and she tripped over objects or stepped on gross sounding mystery items almost constantly.
She squinted ahead of her, thinking that Matt had moved off to the left. She did the same, and ended up tripping over something that made a loud clattering noise, echoing off the walls of the alleyway. The vigilante came to a halt ahead of her.
"Sorry, sorry," she whispered.
Matt sighed, then stepped off to the side. "Switch with me."
"What?"
"It'll be easier to guide you through if you go first. Then you wont trip over every paint can and trash bag we come across."
Sarah wrinkled her nose at the jab, but had to admit he was right. Reluctantly, she slipped past him, brushing against him in the narrow alleyway. Once she was in front of him, he put his hand on her upper right arm. His other hand hovered over her left arm, but he apparently couldn't find a spot that was free of bruises, so instead he placed his hand lightly on her waist. She jumped slightly, caught off guard by the contact. Matt didn't say anything, just gave her a light push to get her to start walking forward.
At first she was hesitant, worried that she'd run into something, especially now that Matt's hand on her arm made it difficult for her to put both hands out in front of her as a shield. But true to his word, he guided her safely through the alley, gently steering her around things that she couldn't see, but that he must have been able to sense.
"This is a fabulous shortcut, Matt," she mumbled. "There are probably rats in here."
"There are definitely rats in here, actually. I can hear them."
"What?" she exclaimed. Her back hit his chest as she stumbled to a halt and squinted at the ground for signs of rodent movement, but Matt continued propelling her along firmly.
"You've had a mouse living in your apartment for weeks now; how can you possibly be scared of a few rats?"
"That's one tiny mouse," she argued. "And he's small and cute, and I can always see where he is. A pack of giant street rats swarming around in the dark are a different story. What if one touches my foot and I get the plague?"
Matt laughed, so quietly that she wouldn't have caught it if she couldn't feel his breath close to her ear. "I think you'll manage. Just think about something else. Did anything else happen while you were at work?"
Sarah wondered how she was supposed to think about anything other than being stuck in a pitch black alleyway with a vigilante's hand on her waist and rats potentially covering the ground, but she struggled to get her mind off the subject anyway. The only thing that stood out to her from the day was the way Jason had creepily wiped her blood on his white tie—not an image she really wanted to think about at the moment. But she told Matt about it anyway, just to have something to discuss.
"Doesn't that seem kind of psychotic?" she finished.
"I'd say so," Matt said, sounding disturbed.
"Exactly. And I mean, if you think it's psychotic—" Sarah faltered awkwardly when she realized how her words sounded. She hoped he hadn't caught it, but of course, she had no such luck.
"I'm sorry, what?" His voice was close to her ear, and he sounded darkly amused.
"I mean, not that you're…psychotic," she backtracked. "Just that, you know, your threshold for psychotic stuff might be, um, higher than—most people's—"
He steered her to the right slightly sharper than was strictly necessarily, and she stumbled a tiny bit, although his grip on her arm and waist kept her from actually falling.
"Friendly reminder that you did say you'd be on your best behavior," she said nervously.
"That's true. But to be fair, I never specified how good my best behavior is."
"Matt…"
"Be a shame if you whacked your head on a fire escape."
Sarah looked back at him in alarm, but obviously couldn't see his face in the dark. "I can't tell if you're joking."
"Good."
"This is not helping make you seem less psychotic," she mumbled.
But Matt didn't steer her into any fire escapes or other painful objects, and within a couple of minutes they were at the end of the narrow alleyway. When they emerged, she was surprised to see that they actually were very close to her apartment building; only about a block away.
Sarah took a deep breath of fresh air. She never thought that she would consider the air in Hell's Kitchen to be fresh, but compared to the dank alley they had just been in, this was like an open meadow. She couldn't imagine how bad parts of the city must stink to someone with a super enhanced sense of smell.
"That was kind of a terrifying shortcut. I mean, I appreciate you walking me home. But maybe next time I could just text you when I get home safely, like normal people?" she asked, half joking. She winced when she realized that might be a stupid suggestion. "Or—I mean—I don't know if you can text, I guess."
Matt looked mildly offended by the suggestion, although it was difficult to tell under the mask.
"I'm blind; I'm not eighty," he said. "There are phone apps I can use to send text messages."
"Well, I know that. It's just that you use a flip phone that I think is from the nineteen nineties, so I didn't know if it was able to do that. But being able to text you would be a lot easier than always having to call you."
Matt frowned in confusion, and Sarah realized that they were talking about two different phones. "Oh. Right. No, I…I can't read texts on my burner phone."
"Oh. Okay. Well, nevermind," Sarah said awkwardly, looking down. "I can just call you if I need you."
Matt's frown didn't disappear. He seemed to be debating something, so Sarah stayed quiet and looked up at some of the windows they were passing by. After a few minutes of walking in silence Matt suddenly stopped, turning to her. When he didn't speak right away, she shifted her weight from one foot to the other uncomfortably.
"What…what are you doing?" she asked finally.
He tipped his head back for a moment, almost as if he was looking up at the sky, before exhaling deeply and facing her again. "Do you have your phone on you?"
Sarah pulled her phone out of her pocket slowly, raising an eyebrow at him. "Are you…stealing my phone because yours is old?"
"No. I'm—I'm giving you my real number," he said reluctantly. "For my actual cell phone."
Sarah blinked at him in surprise. "Like your…Matt Murdock cell phone?"
"Yeah," he said warily. "That one. If you need to text me, use this number. Don't send me anything incriminating."
She nodded and brought up the contacts screen to save his number, typing in the digits he told her. The bright light of her screen lit both of their faces with an eerie blue-ish light from below, making Matt look especially similar to the devil his name evoked.
"Can I can save this one as your actual name? Since it's your day phone?" she asked uncertainly. Matt paused, then jerked his head begrudgingly, which she took as a yes.
"Good, because there's no lawyer Emoji."
"What?"
"Nothing. What am I supposed you text you about if I can't say anything incriminating? The weather?"
"Just…don't use names or specifics. Preferably don't use it at all unless you need to."
Sarah nodded quickly in agreement as she typed his name in. She was almost one hundred percent positive that she would never actually contact him on his day phone; it seemed just a bit too familiar, like she'd be crossing a line. When she looked up, he was already continuing down the alleyway a few steps ahead of her.
"You must really think Ronan's going to come after me," she said, trying to keep the nervous tinge out of her voice. "I mean, if you're walking me places and giving me your real number."
Matt took a long time to respond to her question, even by his usual taciturn standards.
"I spend a lot of my time fighting guys like Ronan," he said finally, speaking very quietly. "Guys who are obsessive…sadistic. I've seen what happens to women that they get their hands on. What Ronan tried to do to you. I'm not planning on letting him finish the job."
Sarah wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly feeling slightly chilled, although the air was still warm. She wasn't sure if that was what tipped Matt off to the anxiety building in her chest, but he spoke up again after a few moments of silence.
"I guess hearing that probably doesn't help your sleeping problem."
"It's fine. I probably wasn't going to sleep a whole lot until the sun came up anyway," Sarah admitted as she tucked her hair behind her ear.. "But tomorrow's Saturday, so I can sleep in. I usually go see my dad on Saturdays, but…I'll probably pass on that this weekend."
Matt nodded, and they walked in silence for a few minutes. It seemed like he wanted to say something, but kept stopping himself. She waited, curious to see if he would speak.
"Your dad…he's not very old," he said carefully. Sarah immediately understood the actual question behind his words. It was one that people had often.
"No. He's not. My parents had me right after they graduated high school," she said. "It's, um…it's early onset. The Alzheimer's. It started about a year ago."
"I'm sorry."
Sarah gave a half-hearted shrug, crossing her arms. She didn't like talking about her dad much if she could help it; she'd rather go back to the banter she and Matt had been having earlier, tense as it had been at times. "It's fine. It makes it a little easier for me to lie to him about what I do, at least. He still thinks I'm a pianist."
Matt considered this for a few moments, frowning deeply. "Things will get better for both of you. Once you're out of Orion."
"I guess so," she said, and he looked over at her curiously. Even though she knew he couldn't see her face, she turned it away from him and up towards the night sky instead. "It's just…with the timelines and everything. I don't really know…how long we'll really get to enjoy that time together. When all of this is done."
Sarah was dismayed to hear her voice shake slightly at the end of her sentence. She frantically tried to think of an easy change of subject, but was saved from having to do so when Matt came to a sudden stop, tilting his head to the side and concentrating on something. Sarah stopped too, watching him closely.
"There's someone in your apartment," he said, frowning.
Sarah snapped her head up towards her apartment building in alarm. "What?"
"I just picked up on it. There's a heartbeat coming from there." His frown deepened, turning to confusion. "Or two heartbeats? One's small, though. It sounds…muffled?"
Sarah ran a hand over her face as she realized what he was hearing. "Like a pregnant woman?"
Matt tilted his head again as he considered it, then nodded. "Yeah. Who is she?"
Sarah groaned in frustration, kicking a loose stone so that it whacked against the dumpster with a loud bang. "Dammit."
"Not a friend of yours?" he guessed.
"Worse. My best friend."
"And that's a…bad thing?"
"No, I'm just…avoiding being an adult," she grumbled. "Talking to people about things. Like why I look like this."
"What are you going to tell her?"
That I got attacked by a creepy coworker for helping the Devil of Hell's Kitchen crash a hostage situation that I also unwillingly helped orchestrate, because these are things that I do now. Sarah looked up at her apartment building helplessly, almost tempted to go back into the dark maze of alleyways rather than have this impending conversation with her best friend.
"I don't know," she admitted. "That I got mugged, maybe. Or a car accident. Either way I'm lying to someone I care about."
Matt nodded, bowing his head slightly. "That I can understand."
"Did you know it's bad luck to lie to a pregnant woman?"
The corner of his mouth twitched up. "I think your luck is bad enough already. Can't get much worse."
Sarah exhaled a rueful laugh before glancing up her building momentarily. She turned back to Matt to thank him for walking her home, but—unsurprisingly—he was already gone.
Taking a deep breath, Sarah unlocked the door to her apartment and slipped inside. Lauren was stretched out on the couch, reading a baby name book while she waited for Sarah to get home. It looked like she had been there for a while. She looked up, opening her mouth to say something—probably to immediately begin the argument that was coming—but froze when she took in Sarah's appearance.
"Oh, my God," Lauren said, struggling to get up off the couch. "Are you okay?"
"You don't have to get up," Sarah said quickly, putting a hand out to stop her heavily pregnant friend from continuing to try to stand. Instead, Sarah sat down on the couch next to her, so that they were facing each other. "I'm fine, Lauren."
Lauren immediately reached out a hand to trace the cut across Sarah's cheekbone, which was even more noticeable due to the dark bruise underneath it. Her face twisted in worry and anger as Sarah winced slightly at the contact.
"What are you doing here?" Sarah asked her softly.
"Well, I figured you'd call me back that night that I left you that message, and then we'd fight about it and, you know…be friends again," Lauren said, letting her hand drop from Sarah's face and frowning at her. "But you didn't call, and I thought maybe something was really wrong, and…I guess there is. Sarah, what happened?"
"Nothing," she said adamantly. "I got mugged, but I'm fine. I just didn't want to make a big deal out of it."
Lauren narrowed her eyes at her, and Sarah resisted the urge to squirm under the intense gaze of her piercingly green eyes. She had seen this look many times before; it was the one Lauren gave to people when they were lying, and they both knew it.
"You got mugged?"
"I got mugged," Sarah repeated.
"Where?"
"An alleyway."
"Which one?"
"I don't know," Sarah said defensively. "They don't name them, do they?"
"Why were you in an alleyway?"
"I—I thought it was a shortcut. It was dumb. But it's over now," she insisted, desperately hoping to get her friend to stop asking questions.
As if in answer to her prayers, Lauren finally dropped her accusatory look. Sarah resisted the urge to exhale in relief, and instead she nervously messed with one of the bandages on her hand.
"Can you grab me some water?" Lauren asked suddenly. "I've been stranded on this couch for a while now, and I'm thirsty. It basically takes me an hour to stand up."
"Yeah, of course," Sarah said quickly, relieved to have an excuse to leave the tense room. She hurried into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge.
Returning to the living room, her stomach dropped when she saw Lauren holding her wallet. She had apparently gotten it from Sarah's purse, which Sarah had left perched on the coffee table while she went into the kitchen.
"Must have been a pretty shitty mugger," Lauren said quietly, looking up from the wallet in her hands. "I mean, he left your wallet, with all of your cash and cards."
"Lauren…"
"And he didn't take the ring you're wearing, which I know you must have been wearing whenever this happened, because you've worn it every day since I've known you. You even still have your cell phone. What'd this guy mug you for, Sarah? Your Starbucks card?"
Sarah opened and closed her mouth wordlessly. She couldn't think of any way to make the lie more believable. Had it been a stranger, maybe, but Lauren always saw right through her with ease. When Sarah didn't reply, Lauren threw the wallet back into the purse and fixed her with a stern look.
"Do you remember when we were sophomores, and we were at some house party, and you got really mad at Kenny Sizemore and threw your vodka cranberry all over him?"
Sarah just stared at Lauren, bewildered by the apparently random change in topic. She slowly sat back down on the couch. "Um…yeah. I remember. Why?"
"Do you remember why you did that?"
Sarah sighed and shook her head. "Because drinking vodka makes me belligerent?"
"Well, yes," Lauren acknowledged dismissively. "But do you remember why you got so mad at him to begin with?"
Sarah thought back to that night, one of the many drunken blurs that made up a good portion of her and Lauren's shared college career. A particular memory did stick out to her from that party.
"Because…because he called you a dumb blonde bitch," Sarah recalled slowly.
"Yeah. And you told him that I might be a bitch, but I wasn't dumb. You also told him that I wasn't even a real blonde, which I didn't really appreciate, because I definitely have some naturally blonde undertones—but that's not the point. You always got so mad at anyone who treated me like I was stupid. So why are you doing the same thing to me right now?"
Sarah stared at her helplessly. She wanted nothing more than to tell Lauren everything, let it all out into the open and let her friend relieve some of the stress and fear that constantly filled her days lately. But she couldn't put that burden on Lauren, who should be focusing on her new family. Not to mention it would involve letting her in on a lot of hazardous information, and if Sarah had learned anything lately, it was that knowing too much always put you in the crosshairs of dangerous people.
"I'm sorry," Sarah whispered. "I just…I can't involve you in this. I can't. It's not safe."
"What's not safe?" Lauren exclaimed. Her words were laced in frustration. "What's going on?"
"I can't tell you, and if you don't want me to lie to you then you—you need to accept that," Sarah said, trying to sound firm. Instead, it just came out sounding incredibly sad.
"Are you…on something?"
"What?"
Lauren reached into Sarah's purse and pulled out the unmarked pill bottle that Claire had given her, holding it up with a concerned look on her face.
"Those are just antibiotics. I have an infected cut on my back," Sarah said, glad that she could at least be honest about that part.
Lauren only look partially convinced. "Are you sure?" she asked gently. "I would get it, you know. It wouldn't even entirely be your fault. Problems like that, they can be hereditary, and with your dad—"
"—I'm not on any drugs," Sarah interrupted her firmly.
Her friend gave her a long look before putting the pill bottle back in her purse. "Is it someone you're dating?"
"No," Sarah said adamantly. "Of course not."
"Then this has to do with that place you work at," Lauren said, shaking her head. "You've been weird ever since you started working there. You never talk about what you do, and you've lost all this weight, and now you look like you just went ten rounds in a boxing ring."
Sarah chewed the inside of her lip anxiously. There was no way she was going to be able to continue keeping Lauren one hundred percent in the dark. Not if she wanted to keep her as a friend. There had to be some middle ground between completely lying to her and letting her in on everything.
"Yeah," she said finally. "It…it's a problem I had at work."
"Someone there did this to you?"
"Yeah. A really unstable coworker. But it's—it's done. He's not there anymore, and…it's being taken care of."
"By who?" Lauren demanded. "The police? Lawyers? Both, I hope?"
"Some—something like that," Sarah said vaguely. Technically there was a lawyer taking care of it…
"When did this happen?"
Sarah looked down. "Uh…the night we were supposed to meet up for dinner."
There was no immediate response, so Sarah glanced up to see Lauren looking horrified.
"And then I left you a mean message. Oh, my God. I'm an awful friend."
"What? No—" Sarah protested, but Lauren continued, growing more upset with each word.
"I'm so sorry. I was just upset because the waiter kept giving me judgmental looks because I was eating all of the breadsticks while I was waiting for you, and then you didn't show up, and he kept having to refill the basket, and I think he thought I was lying about another person coming because I just wanted free breadsticks, and you know I eat a lot of carbs when I'm upset—"
"—Lauren," Sarah interrupted her rambling gently. "It's fine. Everything you said in that message was true. I haven't been around at all for a long time, and I've been missing out on one of the most important parts of your life, and I'm really, really sorry about that. I'm working on it, I am."
Lauren let her hands rest on her swollen stomach, looking at Sarah sadly. "You know that I'm aware there's more to this than just a violent coworker, right? Something bigger is going on."
Sarah just pursed her lips and looked away.
"But…I know how you are. You've always been the independent one, and the secretive one. You play things close to the chest, and you always have. I get that, I accept that. But this?" Lauren said, reaching out to gently touch the injured part of Sarah's face again. "This is not okay. Please just tell me that I don't need to worry about something like this happening every time I can't get in touch with you."
"You don't. You really don't. I'm—I'm working on getting my life back to what it used to be. And I'm not doing it alone. Please don't worry about me. Okay?"
Lauren nodded, then sniffed loudly, and Sarah realize that the other woman was about to start crying.
"Oh, no. No, no, don't cry."
"I'm not crying," Lauren snapped defensively, dabbing at her bloodshot eyes with her wrist. "The—the baby is crying. You made my baby cry and she's not even born yet. You're going to make a horrible godmother."
Sarah grabbed a box of tissues from the side table, looking at Lauren hopefully. "So…that means I'm still going to be the godmother?"
Lauren threw her hands up. "Well, I don't have a lot of other options, do I? I'm not asking Greg's sister. The woman once told me that she didn't know JFK and Jack Kennedy were the same person. And he was our hottest president. Of course you'll still be the godmother."
"And I still get to throw your baby shower?"
"Ugh. If you can fit one in before this kid pops out."
"Good. Now stop crying, because when you cry, I always cry, too, and you know I'm an ugly crier."
Lauren laughed and took a deep, shaky breath, waving her eyes with her hands. "You really are. You get all splotchy and gross. It's not sexy."
Sarah grinned back at her as she handed her another tissue. She knew the conversation wasn't completely over—Lauren would undoubtedly bring it back up next time Sarah ditched out on plans or didn't answer her phone. But for now, her best friend wasn't mad at her, at least, and it felt like an enormous weight was lifted off her chest.
"Speaking of sexy, how many breadsticks did you eat?"
Lauren glared at her. "Never ask a pregnant woman how many breadsticks she ate. Everyone knows that, Sarah."
"There seem to be a lot of regulations about pregnant women that I've never heard before you got pregnant."
"I don't make the rules," Lauren said with a shrug. "Now, will you please help me up so I can waddle to your room?"
"Are you sleeping here tonight?"
"Of course I'm sleeping here. It's late as balls, I'm not going all the way back across town."
A short while later, after they had both gone to bed, Lauren turned her head towards Sarah in the dark, nudging her slightly with her elbow.
"You know, if you need someone to beat up your coworker, I can lend you Greg."
Sarah cracked a smile at the thought of lanky, cheerful Greg fighting anyone.
"Doesn't Greg still make you squash spiders he finds in the bathroom?"
"Fair enough. I'm kind of serious, though. Maybe it's just my maternal instincts kicking in early, but I worry about you. And don't take this the wrong way, but…you kind of have a habit of attracting trouble."
"I do not," Sarah said defensively, despite the mountain of contrary evidence that she currently called her life.
"You most definitely do," Lauren argued. "And it would just be nice if you had someone to act as a sort of, you know…buffer. Between you and said trouble. What about that guy I talked to on the phone at the bar?"
"You didn't talk to him so much as you yelled inappropriate things at him until he hung up on you," Sarah reminded her.
"Right, him. The cranky one. Are you still seeing him?"
"I was never seeing him, you made that up in your head," Sarah protested. Lauren just waited impatiently for her to answer the question, which she did, begrudgingly. "He's…around, yeah."
"Is he still cranky?"
Sarah snorted. "Yes. But you get used to it."
Lauren shook her head and yawned. "Well, tell him to direct that grumpiness at people who deserve it. Like your coworker."
"I can take care of myself," Sarah argued tiredly.
"Of course you can. But why go to all that effort when you can have your friends help you?"
Sarah smiled slightly at the sentiment. They laid in silence for a while, and Sarah thought that Lauren had fallen asleep, until she piped up sleepily.
"Do I get to meet him soon?"
"Who?" Sarah whispered.
"The cranky guy."
"Absolutely not."
"I'll take that as a maybe."
"Go to sleep, Lauren."
Several away, the man in question finally stumbled into his apartment around four o'clock that morning, dead on his feet but relatively uninjured. He'd had another unsuccessful night as far as tracking down Ronan went, although his frustration from his lack of leads had channeled nicely into some particularly satisfying takedowns of various lowlifes.
Matt was lucky that the next day was Saturday, and he was able to sleep pretty much the entire day away before finally waking up around seven in the evening. Feeling too tired to go to the boxing gym, he instead found himself heading over to the office to catch up on paperwork.
He'd been there for about an hour when the front door to the office opened and he heard Foggy's familiar voice come from the doorway.
"I knew I'd find you here. It's a Saturday, Matt. The Lord's day of rest."
"That's Sunday, Foggy," Matt said, continuing to run his fingers over the Braille sheet he was reading.
"Well, I'm assuming you also won't be resting tomorrow, so my point still stands," Foggy said dismissively. "Is this what you've been doing all day?"
"No. First I slept for thirteen hours."
"God, you've gotten boring, Murdock."
Matt laughed and leaned back in his chair. "I was always boring. It's why I graduated with a higher GPA than you did."
"But think of all those Saturday nights you wasted studying. And now you're wasting even more Saturday nights holed up in an office going through case files."
"You're also at the office on a Saturday night," Matt pointed out.
"That's true," Foggy acknowledged. "But I'm only here looking for you. I wanted to talk to you about something, actually."
"Alright," Matt said, taking his glasses off and setting them on the desk. "What's up?"
Foggy flopped down in the chair across the desk from Matt. "What would you say about me asking Karen out for drinks sometime this week?"
Matt could hear Foggy's slightly nervous heartbeat and knew that he didn't mean the platonic kind of drinks. He feigned ignorance anyway. "I'd say…Josie's seems like a safe bet. She's only been there with us a million times."
"Right, but…this time I thinking I could maybe make it clearer that I'm asking her out as a…as a date."
Matt wet his lips before answering evenly. "I think that's great, Foggy. You've liked her since she started working here. You should go for it."
Foggy didn't seem convinced by his answer, and Matt could hear him fidgeting with the silver clip on his tie.
"It's pretty obvious that she liked you a lot for a while, there. Maybe she still does, for all I know. But I wasn't sure if you…" Foggy trailed off.
Matt shook his head. "I think Karen and I both understand that's not going to happen."
In truth, there had been a time when Matt thought maybe something would happen between the two of them. It was after Claire had made clear that she wasn't interested in anything as dark as what he would undoubtedly bring into her life. He couldn't fault her for that, but the rejection had stung all the same. By contrast, there was Karen: sunny and innocent, who he enjoyed spending time with, and whose crush on Matt had been at times awkwardly obvious, even without his enhanced senses.
But any path towards a potential romance had been blocked by secrets—as it almost always went for Matt. This time, however, the secrets were on both ends. He kept his Daredevil identity a secret from her, and she was keeping something from him as well—something big. He had yet to pinpoint what it was, but it had slowly been changing Karen, making her more withdrawn and hard—traits that he recognized from his own secret-keeping over the years. Karen was entitled to her secrets, but the disappointment he felt at her reluctance to confide in him or Foggy only made it clearer how much it would hurt her to ever find out about his own big secret—and the pain would only be made worse if they were involved romantically.
"I…I couldn't be in a relationship with someone that I have to lie to so often," Matt said hesitantly. The topic of his dishonesty with Foggy was still a sore one between them, and he didn't want to start an argument. Luckily, the tense moment passed.
"So…if she says yes—which is definitely not a given—you'll, you know…be okay with that?"
"Absolutely," Matt assured him, before forcing himself to crack a grin. "Besides, this makes things easier. If she's dating you, we don't have to trick every guy she dates into stopping by the office so we can scare him into telling us his intentions."
Foggy laughed, finally relaxing somewhat.
"And I'm sure the ladies of Hell's Kitchen will be relieved to hear that Matt Murdock isn't about to be tied down to anyone anytime soon. Especially a couple of those paralegals," he said suggestively.
Matt smiled blandly, but didn't respond. He had honestly thought that Foggy would have already made the connection between Matt's supposed late nights with random women and his actual late nights fighting crime. But unfortunately for Matt, it seemed as though his friend hadn't come to the realization until just now.
"Hang on…" Foggy began suspiciously, apparently tipped off by Matt's lack of confirmation. "All those nights that you let me believe you were sleeping with hot paralegals…were you out Daredeviling?"
Matt cleared his throat uncomfortably. "Well…I never actually said I was sleeping with any of them. You just assumed."
"Matt! Sleeping with a hot paralegal is a sacred thing. You can't lie about that."
"Technically, I did go out with some of them," Matt argued. "In the beginning. But then it just got more time consuming and…injury inducing. I don't think a lot of girls are into giant bruises and poorly done stitches. So, I just kept using it as an excuse."
"Wait, so, when's the last time you actually got laid?"
Matt leaned back in his chair and sighed in aggravation. He really didn't want to have this conversation right now—or ever, preferably.
Foggy leaned forward a bit and whispered in alarm, "Are you saying you haven't had sex since you started getting your illicit crime-fighting on? Matt, do you know how long that's been?"
"It hasn't been at the top of my priority list, Foggy," he said in annoyance. "I've kind of been busy trying to keep Hell's Kitchen from being overrun by criminals."
"Okay, and saving lives is great, yes, but you gotta wonder…is it worth it? I mean, you had no shortage of success playing the Handsome Blind Guy card in school—and now you could be playing the Handsome Blind Lawyer card, and you're just letting it pass by!" Foggy sounded scandalized. "You should be disbarred for that."
"Yes, that's what I would get disbarred for."
"Waste of perfectly good blindness," Foggy grumbled, and Matt chuckled.
"Some people might say that I'm doing the opposite of wasting my blindness, you know," he reminded his friend pointedly.
Foggy just groaned and waved the statement away. "Well, Foggy Nelson is not some people, and I'm worried about your love life."
"I don't have time for a love life, Foggy," Matt said, trying to hide the frustration in his voice. "I need to focus on my work. Both in and out of the office. Things are getting serious at Orion, and that's on top of patrolling and all of these new clients we have."
"Okay, fair point. But even the Devil of Hell's Kitchen needs to go out on a date occasionally, right? I'm not saying you need to marry someone. But if I recall our law school days correctly—and it's possible that I don't, because there were copious amounts of alcohol involved—you weren't particularly adverse to one-night stands. The opposite of adverse, actually. In fact, one could be justified in saying you were excessively partial to one-night-stands—"
"I get it, Foggy."
"Plus, I think you underestimate how many girls would be into the Daredevil thing. I bet some of them would totally let you keep the mask on, if you're worried about potential identity exposure. I heard a few of the baristas at that coffee shop on 46th talking about you the other day. Something about being able to see your abs through your shirt. To be fair, most of those baristas were male, but the ladies who were listening looking pretty interested, too—"
"This isn't helping."
Foggy held his hands up in defeat. He sat there for a minute while Matt shuffled some of his papers around before speaking up again.
"And anyway, what do you mean, things are 'getting serious' at Orion? Things are looking up, buddy!"
Matt gave him a skeptical look, but Foggy continued before he could protest.
"I'm just saying. You and Sarah have both already gotten the sweet Jesus beaten out of you. Kids have gotten kidnapped, random criminals have been mysteriously murdered. You've kind of hit rock bottom, or something close to it. Which is a good thing!" Foggy insisted. "That means there's nowhere to go but up!"
"If you say so," Matt said, shaking his head.
"I do say so. I mean, it's not like things could really get worse, right?"
Nearly a week later, things got remarkably worse.
Sarah was on the phone with her father, who she had been calling on a more regular basis to make up for the fact that she had been avoiding going to see him lately. Luckily, her bruises were starting to lighten and the cuts on her face were finally beginning to heal properly, so she hoped she'd look healthy enough soon to go visit him without causing too much alarm.
Mitch was having a particularly lucid day, which Sarah was sad to have missed experiencing in person. But their phone conversation was going well, and he was currently describing some sports game he had been watching earlier. Sarah didn't recognize most of the names or terms he was talking about, but she was happy to hear him sound excited about something all the same, and she interjected interestedly throughout his description.
"—and you know, a lot of people think that he's no good as a player, but really he's just not flashy. People these days expect all of their athletes to be celebrities—"
"Mhm," Sarah agreed, holding the phone between her shoulder and ear as she grabbed an apple out of the fridge. She was distracted from the conversation by a loud, forceful knock at the front door.
She set the apple down and padded over to the door while her father continued talking away on the other end of the line. When she glanced through the peephole, she was startled to see the dark blue uniform and silver badge of an NYPD officer on the other side.
"Uh, sorry, Dad, I gotta go," she interrupted Mitch. "I have…visitors. But I'll call you back later, okay?"
"That's fine, honey. Have fun with your friends. I'll see you soon, right?"
"Definitely," she told him distractedly, looking through the peephole again to make sure that she could see actual badges. "Okay, I'll talk to you later, Dad. Love you."
"Ma'am, this is NYPD. Open the door, please," an official sounding voice called from the other side.
Sarah hung up the phone and cautiously opened the door. There was a second officer standing behind the one who had been knocking, both of them with stern, serious looks on their faces.
"Good afternoon. I'm Officer Franks, this is my partner Officer Grant. Are you Sarah Corrigan?"
"Uh…yes, I am. Is something wrong?"
"Well, we aren't sure yet. Do you know a girl named…Hanh Nguyen?" the officer asked, pronouncing the name stiltedly as he glanced down at the pad in his hand, before looking back up at her expectantly.
"No," Sarah said honestly, shaking her head. She didn't recognize the name. "Why?"
"Well, she's been in the hospital for an incident she was involved in recently at your place of work," he said. Sarah's stomach dropped as she realized who the girl in question was. She tried not to show her surprise on her face, but something in her expression it must have caught the officer's attention. "Seems like that's ringing a bit more of a bell?"
"I—I just heard about it at work the next day, is all. I didn't know that was her name," Sarah said quickly.
"No one did. She woke up yesterday, but it took us a while to get a Vietnamese translator in to speak to her. But she was very helpful in describing some of the people involved in her abduction. Most of them we already nailed for priors, but she did mention a white female employee, with dark hair, about your height and weight, who was there that night."
Sarah's heart was pounding, and she was suddenly grateful that for once she was speaking to someone who couldn't hear it. "I'm sorry, I don't really understand why you're talking to me about this? Orion is a huge company, there have to be a lot of—of women with dark hair there."
"That's very true. We're mostly here because a couple of employees at Orion suggested you might be the one to talk to, due to some unexplained injuries you sustained lately."
Sarah glanced over his shoulder and saw Mrs. Benedict peering out into the hallway through a crack in her door. She lowered her voice before responding.
"I was in a car accident," she said evenly.
"Okay. We can check on that, no problem. And we understand that even if you were there that night it doesn't mean that you were involved in what went down. We get that. But we'd like for you to come down to the station and answer a few questions for us. Just to clear this up. Shouldn't take long."
Sarah resisted the urge to bite her lip, not wanting to look nervous.
"O-of course. That's fine."
The ride down to the police station was tense, although not altogether as scary as it could have been. She had to ride in the back of the police car, but there were no lights or sirens, and the two cops in the front seat just conversed quietly with one another about some new Thai restaurant that was opening around the corner from the station. They barely seemed to remember she was there. She picked at a rip in the cheap vinyl seats the whole ride there, running through the entire night in her head as she tried to remember if there was any definite proof that she had been involved.
The cameras had all either been disabled or wiped, and it was unlikely that any of the men who had been there that night would care enough to come forward and testify that she had been there as well. For the most part, it seemed like it would be the girl's word against her own; she hoped that would be enough.
Once they got to the station, the officers who had fetched her from her apartment led her to a small room with a flimsy looking table in the center. She figured it was an interrogation room, but it lacked the large two-way mirror that she always saw in crime procedurals on television. In fact, she observed as she glanced around the room, there were no cameras either. Just four blank walls, a table, and some chairs.
She'd been there for about ten minutes when two different police officers entered the room. One was tall, with sandy hair, and the other was slightly shorter and had a crooked nose.
The sandy-haired cop let out a low whistle when he saw her, tapping his cheek with one finger, near the spot where she still had the remnants of a bruise on her own cheek.
"Nasty bruise you got there. How'd you get it?"
Sarah held his gaze, trying to keep her breathing even and her face straight.
"Car accident," she said shortly.
The cop exchanged a meaningful glance with his partner, who remained stationed near the door. Shaking his head, he took a seat in the chair on the opposite side of the table from her, leaning forward and fixing her with a serious gaze.
"I'm going to be honest with you, here, Sarah. We don't really care all that much about who took that girl or why. I know, I know, that sounds harsh," he said in response to her surprised look. "But she's going to be fine. A lot of girls get taken in this city, especially ones like her: young, vulnerable, doesn't speak English. We can't possibly track them all down. At least this one made it out alive. So it's not at the top of our priority list to find out who took her or why."
Sarah frowned at the casual way he spoke about the subject, and at the confusing implication of what he'd just said. She glanced from the cop in front of her to the one standing near the door, but neither of them gave her any indication of what he was getting at.
"So, if you don't care about the girl…why am I here, then?"
"Well, she said something that caught our attention," he began, and something in the tone of his voice made Sarah's heart sink. "She was pretty confused about what was going on and who was where, generally. But she did seem to think that it was possible you were interacting with someone interesting. I believe she described him as…'a tall man in a black mask.'"
The cop shuffled through the papers in his hand, finally finding whatever he was looking for. Flipping the paper around to face Sarah, he held it up for her to observe. It was a grainy photograph of Daredevil, taken a few months ago; the one they had circulated in the news when those two cops had been murdered.
"Now, maybe we're jumping to conclusions here, but the description she gave sounded oddly familiar to us. And we are really hoping you can maybe help us shed some light on that."
Sarah continued staring down at the blurry photo for a long moment, while the cop waited for her to respond. Finally, taking a deep breath, she sat up a little straighter and tucked her hair behind her ear before meeting the police officer's eyes.
"I think, um…I think I'd like to call my lawyer now."
Suddenly Sarah found herself grateful that Matt had given her his daytime phone, after all.