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It wasn’t often that Matt left New York City. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d gone upstate, but after Father Lantom’s death, there was nothing he wanted more than to get the hell out of Hell’s Kitchen. So, when all his work was done on a particularly slow week, he packed a suitcase and boarded a bus heading north. He didn’t have any particular place in mind, nor did he have a guidebook of any sort, so Matt relied on the people around him. When a woman in front of him referred to a parish church at the next stop, he knew, finally, where he was going. “Our Lady of Perpetual Grace,” she said, “reopened last week.”
The name of the church was familiar. He’d heard it on the news, somewhere or other, between all the murders in Hell’s Kitchen and the lies of Wilson Fisk. Matt had only ever been to two churches, Clinton Church back home and the Church of Notre Dame at Columbia. He considered, now, that maybe this was what he needed. Father Lantom had been his friend and confidant for as long as he could remember. Matt wasn’t sure Daredevil would be able to go on without that weekly confessional. He wasn’t sure he would be able to go on.
Maybe this woman on the bus was God’s way of speaking to him. Maybe, even, this was his way to penance. If nothing else, there would probably be a place to stay. He would rather sleep on a pew than on the bus, after all. When the bus stopped next, he was the second one off, right behind the woman. He was also the last.
—
Vera knows that the man following her from the bus stop is blind. She knows that he is blind, and that she is the only familiar thing for miles around, if she had to guess. He follows her cautiously and awkwardly, stumbling on the gravel as his suitcase catches and holds him back, looking straight ahead but with a line to his mouth that makes it very clear to her that he has no idea what he’s doing there. She’d rather not lead a stranger home, however blind he is, so she walks instead down another familiar road, one that has never felt quite this empty, even on a Saturday night.
Our Lady of Perpetual Grace may have had its official reopening only a week before, but the parish community had been active for as long as Father Jud had been rebuilding. For those of them closest to the church, the deaths had hit hard in a way that staying home on Sundays had done nothing to help. The secret prayer group had quickly turned into a public prayer group, which welcomed frequent guests as word of Monsignor Wicks’s death spread among the local Catholics. It was obvious that he had not been well-liked, because the size of the prayer group doubled every week for the first month of its existence. Vera knew almost everyone there, and half of them she hadn’t even known were Catholic. More than a few new members admitted to driving out to a different church every Sunday after their public humiliations.
To put it plainly, a very small church had grown to the size of a fairly large church, and the first official mass drew crowds like no other. Father Jud’s repairs and upgrades were simple and beautiful, something that Vera hopes the man behind her will appreciate, even if he can’t see it.
Vera and the stranger reach the doors to the rectory just as Father Jud comes out of them, presumably to finish closing the church for the night. His smile is just what she needs, she finds, because her shoulders are relaxing before she even notices they'd tensed. Monsignor Wicks had never had a reassuring effect like that. He’d had more of the opposite, actually.
“Vera!” Father Jud greets her cheerfully. “What brings you out this late?”
The stranger remains silent. Vera feels almost as though she can feel him inspecting her, sightless as he is.
“A newcomer, then,” Father Jud continues, smiling with his mouth but not his eyes. He watches her with a similar closeness, she thinks. She hopes that it's a shared trait of good Catholic men, and not any of the other possibilities that run through her mind.
“If you’d like to leave us, Vera, Lee should be out in a minute. I’m sure he’d drive you home, if you asked.” Pastor’s intuition, apparently, can see farther than she'd gotten in her own plans. As Father Jud walks out from the door, a rattling from the worn floorboards behind him proves his point. Lee comes out with a bag under his arm, as always, and almost barrels right into the man following Vera, who steps out of his way with surprising foresight.
Look, she isn’t stupid, she's just nervous. A man, blind or not, can have good reflexes and a piercing stare without being a danger. Father Jud isn’t just reassuring as a religious leader, either—he was a boxer. She had held that knowledge through every moment of fear she’d experienced in the past year. He'll be safe, just like he’d been safe as four people died horribly in the congregation around him. She will be safe, too, if she just stays right here.
But Lee is looking at her expectantly, and Father Jud has put on his most encouraging face, and he was right. Vera needs to go home. She needs as much sleep as she can get, tonight. It will be a very busy morning.
—
Matt has never met a priest with a body like this. He means it respectfully, of course, as he takes in the the sound of deep breaths and the sense of muscles pulled taut. It feels like his body, when he lets go of the mental barrier he constructed as a child to block his own body from his overwhelmed senses. This priest's knuckles smell faintly of blood. His hands are rough and he can hear the way his callouses rub like sandpaper against the frame of the door. There is sawdust on his collar.
This man is nothing like the priests at home, in the city, but he is still startlingly familiar. Matt remembers, suddenly, a man his father fought with. Not this man, but someone like him—a deacon, maybe, but not a priest. There were never priests in the ring, especially not in Hell’s Kitchen, with the boxing rings where people died. More than anything, he smells like Matt's father did, the one time they took a trip upstate, before he was blinded.
He smells like forests and fights and like a home Matt hasn't smelled in a very long time. Before he was blind, before his dad gave up integrity to pay off the hospital bills—before his dad was willing to drink without first putting his son to bed.
It makes his knees a little weak. The hours on the bus are probably getting to him.
Matt's duffel bag falls to the ground with a thud. He doesn't remember dropping it. What he does remember is the priest he hasn't even met yet gathering him in his arms and holding him tight.
They stand like that for a while. Matt takes the moment to calm his breathing once again and accustom himself to Our Lady of Perpetual Grace's priest. He certainly can't stay long here if he spends every minute remembering his father, and he rather likes this man and the way his churchgoers regarded him. This was a good man, trustworthy in his honesty and trusted in his strength. This was a man who was everything Daredevil wanted—needed—to be.
For the first time since Father Lantom died, Matt allows himself to cry.
—
The man that Vera brought to the rectory was on the verge of a breakdown. Jud could tell even before he collapsed in a stranger's arms. He could see it in shaking legs and shaking hands and the nervous way he held his body. It was a good thing there were vacant bedrooms.
Jud leads the stranger into the building carefully, holding his bag with one hand and keeping the other on the small of the man's back. He's stopped shaking quite so much, but he still has a vacant look about him as he clings to his cane. Jud feels a bit sorry that he can't do more to contextualize this for him, but every word he speaks seems to go unheard. At this moment, he will just have to be a guiding hand and a friendly voice.
The spare rooms in the rectory—Jud staunchly ignores the voice in his head that reminds him whose they were—are next to Jud's own bedroom. They're bare, but they have beds and open space, which is all that a stranger really needs after a good cry. Jud helps the man to bed, then goes about setting things against the wall. The cane stays in the man's hand, but a backpack is slipped off his shoulders and placed next to the duffel bag Jud brought in. The man's baseball cap is set on the headboard and his glasses removed carefully, cautiously. He refuses to let go of the cane, even as he allows himself to be laid down in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar place.
Jud almost smiles.
It takes the man a moment to steady himself enough to speak, and even longer to actually get a word out. “Thank you, Father,” he says, his voice gravelly and firm, like he’s trying to regain a tight grip on his appearance.
Jud hesitates just a moment, before deciding his course of action.
“Sleep well, stranger,” Jud says gently, with a smile. “There's a bathroom to the right and my bedroom is on the left. If you need anything… let me know.”
This is the first time, he thinks, that the man has understood anything he said since Vera left. The gentle smile that follows Jud as he leaves the room lingers in his mind for the rest of the night.