Chapter Text
“You want me to do what?” Matt demanded.
“You heard me,” Sister Maggie replied patiently from behind the desk in her office. “He’s a child, Matthew, an eleven-year-old boy who’s experienced a terrible trauma. He needs our help, something you are uniquely qualified to give him.”
“But I’m not,” Matt protested, waving his hand. “I don’t have the right training to help him. He needs someone who does, a therapist, someone like that.”
“He’s seeing a therapist,” Maggie replied. “It’s not helping. He doesn’t listen to her. He says she’s clueless.”
“Just because we’re both blind, that doesn’t mean this kid and I have anything in common.”
“That’s not it,” Maggie said crisply, “and you know it. His eyesight isn’t the only thing he lost in that horrible accident. His parents died. He has no one, no one at all. He’s all alone. You know what that’s like.”
“You’re really going there?” Matt asked incredulously. “After – ?” He walked away from her, shaking his head. He stood next to the door with his back to her. “That takes a hell of a lot of – I think I need a stronger word than chutzpah.”
“This isn’t about you or me or what I did or didn’t do,” Maggie said to his back. “It’s about a boy who’s slipping away from us. If we don’t reach him, and soon, I’m afraid we may lose him. I know you, Matthew. Your calling is helping people, just like mine.”
“Not exactly,” Matt muttered.
“Yes, it is. You got it from me.”
Matt turned around, frowning. “I’m not really a role model.”
“You’re the best one we have,” Maggie retorted.
“More like the only one,” Matt grumbled.
“True,” Maggie agreed. “But you don’t need to be a role model. You made it through what he’s going through. He needs to know he can, too. Will you at least meet him?”
“OK,” Matt said resignedly. He knew he’d lost this round. “But I’m not making any promises. What’s his name?”
“Tyler. Tyler Shelby.”
As soon as the door to Maggie’s office closed behind him and he started walking away, Matt decided he was making a big mistake. What the fuck could he do or say that would make things better for Tyler? He sure as hell wasn’t going to repeat the pious platitudes and bullshit people spouted at him when he arrived at the orphanage, blind and alone. What happened to Tyler sucked, and Matt wouldn’t sugar-coat it. If Tyler was angry, he had every right to be. Matt wasn’t about to tell him any different. Maybe he should just tell Maggie to forget it. Yeah, right. Like that was going to happen. And maybe there was a chance he could help Tyler grow up less damaged than he was. He shrugged and continued on his way.
Back at the offices of Nelson & Murdock, Matt started preparing for the deposition of the driver of the cab that hit eight-year-old Joey Perez on West 46th Street, breaking his right leg in three places. But thoughts of another seriously injured boy kept intruding. He didn’t have to imagine what Tyler was going through. He knew. He had lived it. The last thing Matt wanted to do was to relive those days. The days after his father’s murder, when he was alone, drowning in grief and blindness and out-of-control senses. The days before Stick. Before he mastered his senses and learned other ways to see. But if he was going to help Tyler, he would have to go there.
Lost in his thoughts, Matt didn’t notice Karen standing in the entrance to his makeshift office, until she tapped on the partition. “What?” he snapped.
Karen recoiled, taking a step back. “Foggy’s making a sandwich run. Want anything from downstairs?”
“Wha – ? Uh, no, thanks,” Matt replied. He didn’t have the heart to tell Foggy, but the smells that wafted up to their temporary office space, above Nelson’s Meats, killed his appetite.
“OK,” Karen said. “Just askin’.” She fell silent but stayed where she was. “You wanna tell me what’s going on with you?” she asked. “You’re usually in a good mood when you come back from talking to Maggie.”
“So, what, you’re monitoring my moods now?” Matt demanded.
“Of course we do,” Karen declared. “It’s our early warning system.”
“Early warning of what? Me going off the deep end again?”
“Something like that,” Karen confirmed. “I mean, it has happened before . . . .”
Matt gave a pained half-smile. “Touché. But it’s not happening again. You guys, you and Foggy, you keep me tethered to what’s important, what’s real. That’s what brought me back, even if you didn’t want to, at first.”
“Touché, back at you.” He heard the smile in her voice. “But old habits are hard to break. You’ve been pushing people away and shutting them out your whole life. Sister Maggie told me you did it when you were a kid. That’s – ” She fell silent when Matt’s expression changed at the mention of Sister Maggie.
“What is it?” she asked. “Did something happen with Sister Maggie?”
Matt shook his head. “No. Not with her, exactly.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Too bad, Murdock. Spill,” Karen ordered.
Matt sighed. He knew Karen wouldn’t stop until she got answers. “There’s a boy, at the orphanage. He’s struggling, having a really hard time. Maggie decided I could help him.”
“Help him how?”
“There was an accident, a car crash. His parents were killed. Tyler – that’s his name, Tyler – was injured.”
“And – ?” Karen prompted him.
“He’s blind.”
“Jesus,” Karen muttered.
“I doubt He had anything to do with it. But, yeah, Maggie thinks I can help him, for obvious reasons. She couldn’t – she wouldn’t – help me when I was struggling. But she expects me to help Tyler.” He stood up and walked to the window.
“Oh, Matt,” Karen breathed. “I don’t know what to say.”
He turned around. “You don’t have to say anything.” He grimaced, then added, “But you know what’s really fucked up? I’m going to help Tyler, if I can. I don’t want him to grow up to be me. He deserves better.”
“Helping Tyler isn’t fucked up.”
“That’s not it,” Matt said, shaking his head. “Don’t you see, Maggie’s using me to deal with her guilt. If she gets me to help Tyler, she thinks she can atone for what she didn’t do when I was a kid. And I’m going along with it. That’s what’s fucked up.” He went back to his desk and sat down. “I don’t see how I can help Tyler anyway,” he said hopelessly.
Karen went to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t sell yourself short, Matt,” she told him. She gave his shoulder a gentle squeeze before she walked away.
In Maggie’s office the following afternoon, Matt heard the tapping of Tyler’s cane long before he turned into the corridor leading to the office. Still uncertain what he was going to do or say, Matt set his jaw and listened to the boy’s approach. He stood up when the door opened. “Sister Ann,” he said to the nun accompanying Tyler.
“Matthew,” she replied, before addressing her charge. “Tyler, say hello to Mr. Murdock.”
“Hi,” he mumbled. From the sound of it, he was talking to the floor.
“Hey, Tyler,” Matt said, then turned to the nun. “It’s OK, Sister. We got this.” She nodded and left them.
“You wanna sit?” Matt asked.
“Guess so.” Still talking to the floor.
Matt guided Tyler’s free hand to the top of a chair back, then sat down in a chair facing him. Not too close, he cautioned himself. “You can call me Matt,” he told the boy.
“OK,” Tyler replied grudgingly, then fell silent. Matt heard the anger and resentment in his voice. Well, he didn’t want to be here any more than Tyler did. He would wait him out. If Tyler wanted to talk, he’d talk. If he didn’t, so be it. At least he could tell Maggie he tried. He sat opposite Tyler and said nothing. The silence between them stretched into minutes. Then he sensed Tyler fidgeting, and his breathing changed. Finally he spoke. “Sister Maggie says you grew up here,” Tyler said hesitantly.
“I did,” Matt said gravely.
“And you’re blind, like me.”
“I am.” Matt thought for a moment, then added, “Well, not exactly like you. Sister Maggie says you can see a little bit. I can’t see anything.”
“Oh.” Talking to his shoes again. Then he raised his head. “But Sister Maggie says you’re a lawyer.”
“I am.”
“How did you get to be a lawyer?” Maybe his curiosity was getting the better of him. Good.
“I went to school for a lot of years.”
“How many?”
“Four years of college, then three years of law school after that. Then you have to pass the bar exam.”
“Sounds hard.”
“It is.”
“How do I know you’re really a lawyer?”
“You don’t. It’s not like I can show you my bar certificate.”
“So, what, I’m just supposed to trust you?”
Matt sighed inwardly. Was he really having this conversation with an eleven-year-old? “Basically, yes, I guess. Why, do you think I’m lying to you?”
“I dunno,” Tyler replied. “But people, they lie to me, like, all the time.”
“You mean sighted people?”
“Yeah. Why do they do that?”
Matt thought for a minute. “I’m not sure. Maybe because they can. And maybe some of them are – ” He stopped himself before he said “assholes.” “– maybe some of them are just jerks.” He knew where Tyler was coming from. If you were blind, you had to trust people to tell you about what you couldn’t see for yourself. Even he did. His heightened senses only went so far. He had to trust his sighted friends to tell him about things his senses couldn’t detect. At least he knew when they were lying to him. Tyler didn’t have that ability.
“I hate them!” Tyler blurted out. “All of them!”
“Who?”
“The other kids.” Tyler sniffled and wiped his eyes. Matt could sense the salt and moisture in the tears he was trying not to shed. “They take my stuff and hide it, then lie to the sisters about it. No one believes me, because I didn’t see anything.”
Matt knew what that was like. “There’s no one to back you up?” he asked gently.
Tyler shook his head. “No. I had a friend, his name was Marcus, but he left. He got adopted.”
“Yeah, it happens.” Matt remembered, all too well. When he first came to the orphanage, he made friends. One by one, they were adopted and left, all of them. Eventually, he stopped trying to make friends and rebuffed the kids who tried to make friends with him. It wasn’t worth it, if they were just going to leave. And Stick had taught him friends would make him weak. He still believed that, back then.
“You weren’t adopted?” Tyler asked.
“No,” Matt replied. He’d known he was never going to be adopted. No one wanted a blind kid who was always getting into trouble for fighting.
“No one’s gonna adopt me, either,” Tyler declared. “I’m stuck here.” Matt could hear him fiddling with his cane. Suddenly, he slammed it down on the floor. “I hate this!” he exclaimed.
“What do you hate?” Matt asked quietly.
“Everything. This place, the other kids, the sisters, being blind. I can’t do anything. I miss my mom and dad. It all sucks.” This time, he couldn’t hold back his angry tears. Matt’s heart ached for him. He was just a kid. No child should have to endure such pain.
“I know,” Matt said quietly. “But – ” He hesitated, not sure what to say next. He could tell Tyler that time would dull the pain of his parents’ deaths, and he would learn to live with his blindness. But he was pretty sure Tyler didn’t want to hear that.
Tyler wiped his eyes on his shirt sleeve. “So is this where you tell me being blind isn’t so bad, and it’s all part of God’s plan?”
Matt chuckled mirthlessly. “No. And you shouldn’t let anyone else tell you that, either.”
“But they do,” Tyler protested. “The sisters say stuff like that all the time.”
“Well, they’re wrong,” Matt told him, secretly pleased to be undermining the sisters’ authority. “Being blind does suck – a lot of the time. You and me, we didn’t get a say in what happened to us. And that sucks, too.”
“What happened to you?” Tyler asked, sounding curious again.
“I was in an accident, like you. A truck crashed, and some chemicals it was carrying spilled on me. They got in my eyes, and – ” He snapped his fingers. After a moment, he added, “God had nothing to do with it. He didn’t blind me. A man did, the one who made the chemicals.”
“Did he ever get caught?”
“He did. Some of my, uh, friends helped me catch him. He’s in prison now.”
“You didn’t kill him? I would’ve killed him,” Tyler declared.
“No, I didn’t,” Matt told him. “Killing him wouldn’t change what happened. It wouldn’t give me my sight back. But if I killed him, I wouldn’t be me anymore. I would be a killer. Do you understand?”
“I guess so,” Tyler said reluctantly. “Do you think you and your friends could find the man who caused my accident?”
Matt did a mental double-take. “What man?” he asked.
“The man in the other car,” Tyler explained patiently. “Can you find him?”
“I don’t know. Tell me about him.” Matt was baffled. Maggie had told him the accident was a single-car crash on a back road on Long Island. The cops believed Tyler’s dad fell asleep at the wheel, and the car went off the road. It hit a tree, rolled over several times, and went up in flames. Tyler was found outside the car, but no one knew how he had escaped from the vehicle.
“There were lights, like really, really bright lights, right behind us. And my dad was saying they were too bright, you know, they were blinding him, he couldn’t see. Then there was a big thump, like something crashed into our car. My mom screamed. That’s the last thing I remember.”
“Son of a bitch,” Matt thought. Tyler’s heartbeat confirmed he was telling the truth – or the truth as he remembered it. If his memory was accurate, the accident that blinded him was no accident. “Did you tell the cops about the other car?”
“No,” Tyler replied. “I only remembered later, after I talked to them.”
“OK. We’re going to find out what happened, me and my friends. But you need to do one thing for me.”
“Sure.”
“You have to promise not to tell anyone what you just told me. OK?”
“I promise,” Tyler said solemnly.
Walking back to the office, Matt almost stumbled on the uneven sidewalk. He was finding it difficult to focus, for good reason. His conversation with Tyler had left him shaken, in more ways than one. He was still trying to wrap his mind around the idea that someone had deliberately run the Shelby family car off the road. Who would target them, and why? He had no idea, but he was going to find out, whatever it took.
Then there was Tyler himself. His world had been shattered. His losses were so new, his grief so raw. As Matthew Murdock, Attorney at Law, and as Daredevil, he encountered people in pain all the time. It was part of the job description when you were trying to help people. He had learned to distance himself from their pain. It wasn’t that he lacked empathy – far from it. But he couldn’t do what he needed to do, both as an attorney and as Daredevil, if he let himself feel their pain too keenly. It was different with Tyler. Matt couldn’t distance himself from Tyler’s pain. It was his pain, too. And Tyler had been dealt a much harder hand than he had. Matt had had his father’s love and support after he was blinded. Tyler lost his parents and his sight at the same time. Matt couldn’t bring Tyler’s parents back, but he would make sure Tyler knew he wasn’t alone.