At first Matt thinks it's the morphine Claire gave him, but there's a man sitting in front of him, wearing his own mask and outfit. But he's not Matt, because he's a little taller and smells different: like the sweetish smell of nicotine on your fingers that lingers an hour after you take a smoke, a little saltwater, and of wood - a lot of wood, like surround sound, suspiciously contained in one body. It's like being in a courtroom.

"What?" Matt says. The reason he doesn't attack is because he knows this is a hallucination. So he smiled, a little complacently, in the direction of the presence.

"It's really funny," the person says, and oh - that's funny, the voice is pitched to perfect ambiguity, a tenor/alto. "I haven't had an occasion to confront you yet, even though you've been alive twenty six years. That's almost kind of a record, if you want to know."

Matt keeps his face angled towards the stranger, and brings his hand up to his chin to check that he isn't drooling. That would be really undignified. He isn't, so he says, "Then why now?"

He expects dreamlike nonsense from the hallucination, but the stranger says: "Because you set that man on fire and killed him. Because that was your first kill. Because you've been promising that old priest that you didn't want to, but you enjoyed it for a moment when he went up in flames. Don't you know? If you hadn't, Matt, I wouldn't be here."

Matt's heart, working against the chemicals in his system, picks up speed. "I - I didn't."

There's a patient, exaggerated sigh. "Come on, Matt. I know, of course, you had nothing against the man himself, but one doesn't set out intending to kill a man like Wilson Fisk without murder in his heart. Here's the thing about murder, Matt - the intent is awfully hard to scrub out. It contaminates. It lingers. You set that man on fire. Are you going to convince yourself that it was an accident?"

Matt exhales, feels the emptiness in his chest that usually came after a really hard cry. "You're real."

"Pretty real," the stranger agrees. "Claire Temple is the only one who knows about you, and she's certainly not going to hold you accountable. She likes you too much. And Father Lantom isn't going to do the job either, is he? Because he doesn't know enough, and also because he wants you to stop. Understand, Matt: I don't want you to stop. But I'm certainly going to make you confront it. And unlike them, I don't have the weakness of liking you."

Then the stranger's presence suddenly expands, a thermodynamic flare. There are two sheets of flame spreading out from his shoulders.

Matt lets his head loll back. "Oh."

"Yeah, oh," Satan agrees amicably.

He feels dampness on his cheeks - an unwanted weakness in the face of reckoning. "What am I doing wrong?"