I can't see! I can't see! I can't see!
The screams were so familiar to you now that you woke with almost a weary resignation, despite the gasp lodged in your throat and heart pounding like a fist against your chest. As you dragged yourself up in bed, sunlight streamed into your bedroom through the gap in the curtains, but when you glanced across at the bedside clock you discovered it was only a little after 5am. Knowing that you weren't going to get back to sleep any time soon, you slipped out of bed, into your bathrobe and slippers, and out of your bedroom into the dimly lit hallway. Passing your aunt and uncles bedroom door, you literally held your breath as you concentrated on being as quiet as possible, not wanting to wake then on a Sunday and their only day off from The Nook.
A small smile twitched at your lips. The Nook. Your destination. Your most favourite place in the world right now. The comfort zone you needed as you nursed a broken heart.
Quietly exiting the door to the apartment above The Nook, you padded down the stairs into your uncles office, through the small kitchen, and out into the shop.
You hesitated a moment behind the counter and inhaled deeply, savouring the wonderful combination of old books, worn leather and oil paint. The more subtle aromas of coffee and baking, still lingering from a busy Saturday, perfected the heady mix. Apart from the gentle hum of the glass fronted refrigerator, the shop was blissfully quiet.
Your aunt and uncle had owned The Nook for as long as you could remember. It had just been a bookshop until the incident that had ravaged a significant proportion of Hell's Kitchen. When a damaged wall had needed to be partly demolished for safety reasons, some extensive renovations had freed up enough extra space to fulfil your aunt's dream of adding a little coffee shop too. It was only small, and didn't stretch to anything more elaborate than hot and cold beverages, and whatever sweets and savouries your aunt felt like baking on the morning. But it was enough for the majority of its patrons - most of them regulars - who loved its homely warmth and intimacy. Some of them loved the atmosphere a little too much and could occasionally overstay their welcome but your aunt knew the majority of them so well that she had no qualms about telling them to buy more coffee or shift their asses.
But personally, you loved the shop when it was empty like this, when you had it all to yourself. And early morning pilgrimages, when most of the residents of Hell's Kitchen were still sleeping but the sun had already risen, was the most magical time. You could browse the bookshelves, admire the local art work that covered the walls, or simply sit and read, in peace.
Helping yourself to an orange juice from the refrigerator, you padded over to your favourite spot to nestle, a moss-green leather giant of a sofa that was well hidden from the large bay window that looked out onto the street. Getting comfortable at the end of the sofa, against its chunky arm, you hugged one of its oversized cushions to your chest, stabbed the straw into the carton, and sipped reflectively as your thoughts returned to what had woken you and brought you sitting here in the first place.
You had been seven when you had witnessed the accident that had blinded Matthew Murdock. You and your mother had been visiting your aunt in New York and it had been the last day before the long drive back to Ohio. The actual accident itself happened so quickly your memory of it had always been somewhat of a blur. The main thing you remembered were the sounds. So frighteningly loud they had hurt your ears. While the metallic scraping across tarmac had churned your stomach and made you feel sick. A moment of ominous silence had followed, like the world had been holding its breath in shock, though you had long suspected that might be a false memory. That there probably had still been noise but compared to the almost deafening bang of the accident the contrast had seemed like silence.
And then you had heard the screams.
There had been a boy lying at the centre of the carnage, surrounded by large metal drums. Some had been damaged, their contents oozing out onto the road. There had been a horrible smell in the air, so strong that your little hand had quickly covered your nose in a desperate bid to stifle it. It was so intense that it had made you feel even sicker.
When the shrill sound of police sirens had added to the pandemonium your mother had snatched your hand from your face, turned around, and started pulling you away from the scene, dragging you passed the people who were standing staring in morbid curiosity, weaving around those moving towards the accident drawn by a desire to help.
You had asked her, years later, why she had done that, and she had explained that she had wanted to get you away from the chaos as quickly as possible, that it was not for the eyes of a seven year old.
But the damage had already been done. The events of that day had been branded into your memory, every horrific sound scorched into your subconscious, and those terrible desperate screams had haunted you ever since.
In the beginning, you had nightmares every night for months. As time passed they became less frequent - once or twice a week, then a few times a month. But they never completely went away. As you had grown older they occurred a few times a year, usually triggered when you were feeling anxious or upset about something.
You had asked your mother during those early nightmares, if the boy was ok. You had needed to know that he wasn't dead. She had shown you the newspaper article about the accident, hoping it would help put your mind at rest. Yes, the boy was still alive, she had reassured you, and he had been very brave, saving the life of an old man.
But she had taken the newspaper away a little too quickly, and even at that young age you had instinctively known she was keeping something back. So you had secretly retrieved it from the recycling bin when she was taking a bath, and hurried with it up to your bedroom to read the full story. It was there you had discovered that the accident had actually blinded the boy, that the stomach-churning chemicals in those toppled drums had managed to get into his eyes. That was why he had been screaming that he couldn't see.
You had ripped out the article and hidden it somewhere safe, but not before learning the boys name.
Matthew Murdock.
It was the first name that had really registered with any significance in your young mind, searing into your subconscious just as profoundly as the accident itself. You had never forgotten it.
You shook your head despairingly. Sometimes you found it maddening just how much the accident had traumatised you. It made you feel ashamed at times, even embarrassed. You felt you didn't have the right to be so emotionally invested. It was Matthew Murdock's tragedy, not yours. You had only witnessed it for gods sake. While that poor boy had his whole world turned upside down. His whole word reduced to darkness.
In your teens, your frustrations sometimes triggered a variation of the nightmare, where you were no longer a child and was witnessing the accident at your present age. Your mother hadn't been there to pull you away either. You had started walking towards the boy, wanting to help him, comfort him, overwhelmed by an irrational sense of guilt that you had not stayed with him before. That you had left him writhing in pain. That you had somehow abandoned him. You always woke before you reached him though.
You sighed. But you had always been a sensitive child. The accident hadn't been the only thing that had frightened or disturbed you growing up, it was just the most horrific.
By the time you went to college the nightmares were thankfully few and far between. You concluded that you simply had too many other things on your mind for your subconscious to dwell upon. Like classes and studying and tests, and preparing for the world of work.
And love.
When you fell in love for the first time the nightmares stopped completely and, like an old school friend, the name Matthew Murdock faded into the past.
Until now.
Until you had moved to New York and somehow managed to befriend the one woman, in a city of millions, who actually worked with the man.
And now she wanted to introduce you to him and Foggy Nelson, the other partner of Nelson, Murdock and Page, and you were running out of excuses, and it was starting to become awkward, and you didn't want to lose her friendship because she was lovely, and you were sad and lonely, especially after discovering your previous best friend in bed with the love of your life, which was the reason why you had run away to New York in the first place.
You took a deep calming breath, tears pricking at your eyes when you thought of Michael and Amy and how they had betrayed you.
The sad pathetic truth was, that sensitive child had grown up to be a neurotic - mildly neurotic, you corrected defensively - adult. A mildly neurotic adult who knew, given her weird, totally irrational fixation on Matthew Murdock and his tragic past, could never, ever, EVER, look him in the face without shrivelling up and dying on the spot.