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If Matt can avoid it, he doesn’t leave Hell’s Kitchen. It isn’t that he’s totally helpless beyond the 24 block radius that encompasses his neighborhood; it’s just that functioning outside that range is a little more difficult.
Within the familiar bounds of the Kitchen, Matt can always tell which street he’s on. He knows the chemical scent of the dry cleaner mixing with the spicy smell of Thai food means he’s on 48th Street. Sure, he can still hear the sounds and (sometimes, regrettably) smell the smells elsewhere in the city, but the same input in an unknown area can’t put a detailed map with street numbers in his head. He doesn’t know that the Mediterranean food cart is always set up on a certain street in Harlem.
He isn’t helpless, but he is inconvenienced.
Eventually, this inconvenience leads to him wandering a lot further around Astoria than he’d intended to after a client of his gets arrested up there. Much to his annoyance after getting his client released, Matt can’t find his fucking way back to the subway. He can hear the trains running beneath the street, but tracking them back to a station is damn near impossible with the way the tracks wind beneath buildings.
Right around the corner of who-the-fuck-knows and why-the-hell-bother, Matt hears something that catches his attention.
“Check out this sick flip, Karen!” a high pitched but definitively male voice says, almost cracking.
Matt’s not sure what it is that brings this one voice to his attention above all the others (probably the name ‘Karen’ if he’s being honest with himself, which he rarely is), but once he focuses in on it he can’t help but realize it’s coming from the roof of a building half a block away.
This absolute moron of a teenager is about to do a flip on a roof, possibly off a roof, and Matt is in no way close enough to get to the kid and stop him before he accidentally manages to gravely injure himself.
He tenses as he hears the kid’s heart rate pick up and readies himself for the awful sound of a body hitting the pavement from five stories up, but instead there’s a strange thwip sound that Matt’s never heard anything like in his life followed by the sound of a human moving through the air.
A female voice that’s just barely artificial comes from the same space that the person flying (swinging?) above the street occupies. It sounds somewhat fond as it says, “You nailed that, Spider-Man!”
The inflection that the voice uses on the pseudonym makes Matt think that the superhero name is reserved for use as a term of endearment.
“Thanks, Karen!” comes the teenager’s voice again as he continues to swing down the street and out of his hearing range.
So. Matt thinks. Spider-Man is a kid.
That’s fine.
It is, most certainly, not fine Matt decides the day he overhears a news story spilling all the details of how Spider-Man, adored and beloved local superhero (Matt is not at all bitter about that branding, nor is he bitter about the fact that police officers will take selfies with the kid instead of trying to arrest him. Nope, not in the slightest.) got into a smackdown of truly epic proportions with a supervillain by the name of the Vulture: a slightly past middle-aged man whose real name is Adrian Toomes. He has a daughter who’s probably just a little bit older than Spider-Man himself, and that just pisses Matt off all the more. Spider-Man’s voice is painfully obviously juvenile, so either Toomes never heard him speak (unlikely, according to most encounters Spider-Man is quite the chatterbox) or he knowingly fought and apparently tried to kill a teenager.
Matt stalks into the office the next morning surrounded by an aura of particularly pissed off. He’s holding his shoulders rather tightly, and he all but throws his bag down on his desk before slamming the door behind him.
Karen and Foggy exchange a look through their open office doors; thankfully their college student secretary isn’t coming in for another three or so hours since she’s taking her grandma to the doctor.
They play a silent game of rock paper scissors across the office to decide who it is that’s going to check on Matt and most likely and unfortunately be on the receiving end of a rant with little to no context.
Foggy loses and after a deep sigh gets up from his nice comfy desk chair to go check on Matt.
“Hey buddy?” he says, knocking on the door lightly.
He gets two raps in before an incredibly irritated face comes into view as the door is shoved open from the inside, just barely not hitting him in the face.
“What?” Matt snaps, crossing his arms over his chest.
“You alright?” Foggy asks.
“I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Positive?”
“Foggy.”
“Why are you slamming doors and stomping?” Foggy asks because he knows just how much he has to fan the flame of Matt’s anger in order to get a real answer out of him.
“Because all these supervillains deserve to rot in prison for the rest of their goddamn lives, but they always get out!” Matt finally snaps.
Karen, who has been listening in on the conversation, perks up at that. “Is Fisk bothering you again?”
“What? No, this isn’t about Fisk. Well, it is about Fisk because he keeps fucking getting out too, but this is about that new guy—the Vulture.” The outburst a minute before seems to have deflated Matt’s temper enough that he can speak coherently and without raging, thank God.
“I thought that Spider-Man caught that guy. Did you deal with him too?” Foggy asks, leaning against one side of the door frame so Karen can lean on the other side and effectively help block Matt into the conversation.
“I never met him. But every news story that, might I add, I am constantly hearing is going on this bullshit sympathy for the devil track. Oh, his business was ruined after the Incident. He had to do something to make money to support his wife and his teenage daughter—like his bullshit alien weapon dealing didn’t put other people’s kids in the line of fire! He could’ve killed them!” Matt turns around and stomps back over to his desk after that, abruptly shoving his headphones in as a signal that the conversation is Over with a capital O.
Foggy and Karen share another look, because they know there’s more to the story that they aren’t being told.
After clearing out Fisk for the second time, Matt sometimes finds himself wondering if the city still needs Daredevil as much as he does. Sometimes he’ll stay out all night and at most stop one mugging. The police seem to have been whipped into shape under Daredevil’s iron fist ruling of them. Anyone so much as takes a bribe and they show up the next day with a sore shoulder and a lie to their coworkers about how they got it. With corruption in Hell’s Kitchen at the lowest it’s ever been, it’s no wonder that crime has become somewhat of a rarity in the neighborhood.
Matt has been on edge lately, and he knows that it’s because of the lack of fights he’s been able to pick. The only criminal he encountered the night before was a sixteen-year-old boy snatching purses so that he’d be able to afford his father’s heart medication that month. He’d still put the fear of God, or more accurately the Devil, in the kid, but he hadn’t laid a hand on him past slipping a twenty into the kid’s pocket. It had pissed him off even more that there was corruption he couldn’t fight in the suit that was still ruining the lives of people in his community, but there wasn’t anyone for him to punch his frustrations out on.
It’s a little bit past six when Matt decides to pull on the suit rather than go to Fogwell’s and beat the shit out of a heavy bag for a few hours. Considering that it’s winter in New York, the sky is already as dark as it gets and therefore an appropriate hour for Daredevil to be out and about.
He does his patrol of the neighborhood in the usual grid pattern he follows, being sure to listen for the cat who always hangs around the general vicinity of his block as he heads out. Within ten minutes he stops a guy from breaking into a car with a little bit more force than necessary. He’s positive that the man learned his lesson, so there’s no real reason to bother with calling the cops when the guy will be out on bail by the next morning. Unfortunately, after that, there’s just under two full hours of time without a single crime that requires his intervention. There’s something that sounds like it’s shaping up to be a fight, but both participants and all the observers run the second a police cruiser starts to roll down the block.
Matt is maybe slightly stewing in his disappointment when he hears a woman screaming followed by a gunshot just a few blocks away. As he runs across the rooftops to the source of the commotion, he realizes that it’s actually slightly outside the bounds of Hell’s Kitchen. It’s not like that’s going to stop him from helping someone who needs it though.
Once he gets close to where he heard the shot ring out, he focuses more to find anything else to lead him to where he needs to be. There’s the sound of a woman sobbing as she runs down the street is what catches his attention, especially since he can also smell blood on her.
Matt makes his way down to the street as quickly as he can and does his best to approach the woman in a non-threatening manner, arms at his sides with his palms facing outward. It becomes apparent after a moment that the blood on her isn’t from a gunshot wound but is instead the result of her running down the street barefoot.
It seems like he doesn’t have to be too worried about the woman being afraid of him though because the instant relief that floods over her when she sees Daredevil is obvious even to him. She still reeks of stress hormones, but the scent lightens up enough that it’s noticeable.
“He took her!” the woman says desperately. “He took my daughter!”
Shit. Matt had noticed a man running away from the source of the gunshot with a child in his arms, but he’d just assumed that the father was trying to get his daughter away from danger. After all, the little girl had been saying ‘daddy’ to the man.
“I’ll get her back,” he promises as he tries to catch the sound of the little girl or the man again. “Wait here, I’ll bring her to you.”
The woman nods, her arms wrapped tightly around herself.
They can’t have gotten too far considering he’d only passed them, what? Two minutes ago?
Sure enough, he hears the little girl’s voice again, this time yelling ‘want mommy’ over and over as the man does his best to hush her.
Matt takes off running after the man, scaling the side of the nearest building to get a better vantage point. Not only that, but it’s also a lot easier to get through the city when traveling across rooftops than it is sprinting down the sidewalk. He’s close enough to Times Square that some wandering tourists might be around, and people like that are usually the worst about trying to get a picture or video of one of the city’s resident vigilantes.
Matt’s getting closer to the man, and he’s so focused on the task at hand that he almost doesn’t hear a familiar voice coming from the same direction he’s headed.
“This better not be another frickin’ used needle that you’re freaking out about,” Spider-Man hisses at what seems to be no one, though he might be speaking to the voice in his suit or himself.
Matt hears his target turn down the same alley Spider-Man is standing in followed by the sound of a gun being cocked.
“Definitely not a used needle,” Spider-Man says with a gulp.
There’s a clicking sound of some sort from Spider-Man’s suit, and when nothing follows the clicking noise, the kid’s heart starts racing.
Thankfully Matt’s on the roof above the alley, and he manages to pull out his club and throw it as he flings himself off the fire escape and lands on the ground between Spider-Man and his target. He has to roll to absorb some of the force of hitting the ground from that high up, and even then he still feels his shoulder twinge (the one that he’d dislocated earlier in the week).
His club strikes right where it was aimed, and the man yanks it back to his chest reflexively, letting the gun clatter as it falls to the pavement.
Matt steps forward and yanks the child away from the man who is apparently in shock at having ended up in an alley with not one but two superhuman crime fighters.
Now, Matt is an excellent fighter, but he’s never fought with a baby in his arms and he doesn’t plan on that changing today. He turns around and hoists the now crying child off on Spider-Man who seems shocked as well but takes the kid anyway.
It takes him all of thirty seconds to put the kidnapper on the ground with a broken nose and orbital bone, courtesy of one very well-aimed kick to the face with his steel toed boot. Matt feels Spider-Man’s eyes boring into his back, so he turns around to check that both the kid and the baby are okay. He doesn’t smell any blood on either of them, and while their heart rates are both accelerated neither seems to be in real medical distress because of it.
He has to think for a moment, but he manages to recall how far he’d gone past his known street numbers and can figure out exactly where he’d left the child’s mother.
Matt says what he’s pretty sure is the right building followed with a simple, “Take her home, Spider-Man.”
Spider-Man looks star struck for another few seconds before he shakes himself out of his stupor and heads towards where he’d been told to go.
As Spider-Man walks away, Matt can hear him whispering furiously to what he’s assuming is the AI in his suit.
“What was that, Karen?! Why didn’t the webs work?!”
“It seems like neither of the fluid cartridges were viable. It appears as though both mechanisms are jammed due to the improperly mixed compound,” Karen replies evenly. “I recommend not mixing the fluid during class next time so that you can pay attention to the proper ratios.”
Spider-Man clearly bristles at Karen’s barely masked sass, but he doesn’t snap back at her. Instead, he turns his focus on the child and starts speaking to her sweetly as he carries her towards where her mother should be waiting.
Matt continues to half pay attention to the pair as he drags the kidnapper out of the dark alley and onto the sidewalk. The guy is moaning in pain and cradling his nose, but that doesn’t stop Matt from stomping on his hand when he makes a feeble attempt to reach for his gun.
With his boot still grinding the man’s now-broken hand into the dirty cement, Matt bends down to pick up the gun. A moment later and he’s ejected both the round in the chamber and the clip from the gun. He tosses the gun into the man’s lap but takes the bullets with him to dispose of elsewhere.
It isn’t hard at all for Matt to catch up to Spider-Man considering both his abilities and the fact that he knows exactly where he sent the kid. Vaulting over rooftops to get there helps Matt think a little more about the situation.
When the kid’s webs didn’t work, he had absolutely nothing to fall back on. It’s painfully obvious that nobody ever even considered taking the time to teach him how to fight past the most basic self-defense techniques. That’s odd considering Iron Man recruited him to go fight Captain America and half of the Avengers.
Matt nearly misses a jump when he realizes that Captain America dropped a jet bridge on a child. He’s pissed at the Captain for that, but he quickly redirects a healthy amount of that anger towards the man who put the superpowered child in a position to fight super soldiers and terrorists in the first place.
He finally gets to the roof across the street from where Spider-Man is being profusely and tearfully thanked by the woman for returning her daughter safely. Spider-Man keeps brushing off the praise, saying that Daredevil is the one who she should be thanking instead, and that he’s pretty sure her ex won’t be bothering anyone again for a long time.
Eventually, Spider-Man manages to slither out of the entry hall to the apartment building he’d been standing in with the woman, and as soon as he’s out on the street he tenses up, swiveling his head around until he spots Matt standing at the edge of the roof. The kid’s eyesight must be something special for him to be able to see him without looking too hard.
Spider-Man hesitates for just a second before lifting one hand and… waving at him.
In that instant, Matt decides someone needs to teach the kid some damn self-preservation skills and it might as well be him since it appears nobody else has been willing to step up and fill that role in the kid’s life.
He smiles just the tiniest bit and holds up a single finger to Spider-Man as an indication to stay put before turning and walking away from the roof’s edge, out of sight of Spider-Man.
It’s easy enough to make his way down to street level, and once he’s there Matt circles around behind a group of people to avoid being spotted as he heads across the street to where Spider-Man is standing just inside the mouth of an alleyway. He silently makes his way into the alley via a fire escape and drops down just a few feet behind Spider-Man as quiet as is superhumanly possible.
His feet hitting the ground still make enough of a sound to alert the other to his presence though because Spider-Man immediately spins around and throws a sloppy punch that Matt manages to avoid easily.
Spider-Man claps his hand over his mouth and gasps. “Oh my God, I’m sorry,” he apologizes immediately. “You scared me.”
Matt takes a deep breath as he confirms in his mind that he really is going to do this. The kid needs someone to look after him and teach him; he clearly doesn’t have that. Part of him is terrified that he’ll end up fucking this kid up like Stick did to him, but another bigger part of him says to suck it up and offer to help him. Lord knows Matt could’ve used some sort of vigilante guide when he’d first pulled on the mask.
“You must be new to this,” Matt says.