Twenty blocks.
That had always been deeply overwhelming to him. Even as a young boy, before that life-altering accident had changed everything, he would look at the perpetual sea of buildings ahead of him and quietly marvel at the impossible scope. His mind would race ahead of his eyes and try to place a story to as many of them as he could - and within his limited imagination, some of the buildings housed just everyday people, others were home to cops and firefighters. Some of them even housed bad people, who hurt others just for fun. That was the prism from which little Matt Murdock saw the full spectrum of morality. There were the good, normal people, the people of authority, and the bad. The naive kind of thinking that was born out of religiously watching Saturday morning cartoons and being slowly read passages of the Bible by his concussion-addled father. Some days, he still yearned for that innocence.
Others still, like this one, reminded him of a cold hard reality. That there was still a degree of the innocent and the guilty, yes, but that the court of law was always going to favor those who better understood it's fragility over those who didn't. Who could mend and manipulate a set of rules that books and declarations had decided were the cornerstones of society. Whenever Matt had decided to honor his late father's wishes and study law as his major at Columbia University, a large part of his goal in undertaking such a difficult trade was to usefully challenge the ideas of black-and-white that he'd held onto. The kind that told him that because the courts and a judge had decided there was only circumstantial evidence, the murderer of Battlin' Jack Murdock couldn't be held. And that because it was the law, he had to accept that.
He never could. Try as he might, it gnawed at his soul. He'd confessed it to his priest when looking for absolution. He'd alluded to it in discussions with his best friend, the man who would become his law partner, when looking for rationality. He even had long, drawn-out arguments within the confines of his own mind when looking to talk himself out of doing something stupid with his life. And yet when push came to shove, he readily - easily - chose the path that he'd been looking for every reason to avoid. The path of blood and pain, the road of darkness and suffering. The place that would continually break him down until, Murdock feared, there'd be nothing left. Because there was no other choice. Because at the end of the day, no matter how many years had passed - no matter the contradictory fact that his sight had long since been taken from him - he was still gazing up at an unforgiving sea of twenty blocks ahead. Trying to discern which parts of them were safe and needed saving.
Which was why he found himself on a rooftop at four in the morning. For weeks, he'd been working a tenement case involving a landlord that had steadily increased rent to a couple of Hispanic descent. The man had given them every excuse in the book - that they were late with payments in the past, that their credit was declining, that a filing error had led to an overcharge. All of it was a series of lies, and the burden of proof had been on Matt to contextualize why the landlord in question, who had a history of suing tenants out of their savings with the interesting pattern of none of the defendants being white, could easily be countersued for perjury if his clients had the money to facilitate it.
An open and shut case. In law, the approximate number of those wasn't easy to determine. Had Matt wanted to wager a guess, he'd have gone for thirty percent. But this case qualified, and he felt like if this were under normal circumstances, the nature of the case's transparency could allow him to breathe easy. Yet right now he found himself somersaulting over ledges, swinging across increasingly wide gaps, feeling the brittle cold air sink into his skin like sulfuric acid eating through a wall. He wasn't just stressed about the case, he was so stressed about it that he'd gotten out of bed the night before the court date to put on a crimson blanket of armor and wade through twenty-degree winds at high speed - anything to distract himself.
Then he heard it. About seven stories below him. Hard for him to single out the noise in between a bevy of ringing phones, car horns and tires squeaking across the pavement from blocks away, and voices from every direction, but his ears always perked up whenever he heard this distinct noise: bones crunching into bones. Someone was viciously beating into someone else, and the faint scent of copper filled his nostrils the second that he turned his head.
Spilled blood.
"---gonna teach you to come into this neighborhood. This is my turf, you hear?! You hear me, you stinkin'---"
Matt's fist clenched tightly around the billy club. The aggressor's voice was the loudest, but he could also hear muffled cries. Whispers, telling someone else to "keep quiet" if they "wanted to walk away". It was all that he'd needed to hear to transition his trajectory downward. He'd wanted a distraction, and an assault in progress had made him curse that desire. Because he knew that right now, the boy who'd seen the world in black-and-white would have to step aside.
Time to let the Devil out.
Member
Eddie Brock,
Simple Unicycle,
Morden Man,
Roman,
Snowdrops,
Neziul,
udonoodles,
Sep,
Half Pint,
Retired
