Brennan Tierney is just having a really awful day.

He wakes up bright and early to the sight of a pleasant summer sun streaming light in through the window – which only aggravates the sinus-induced headache that's become so common these days. He mutters grumpily, rolls over, and considers going back to sleep. One benefit of an early retirement is the luxury of being able to choose when to rouse.

Unfortunately, his wife isn't having it. “Get up,” May says, batting at him half-heartedly. “We promised the O'Fennan's we'd stop by today, remember?”

“You hate both of them,” Brennan mutters, because it's true.

“Yes, but they're not allowed to know that,” May responds tartly. “More importantly, Sean is expecting you to do some consulting work when we drop by...”

So much for being retired. “Alright, alright, I'm up.”

May makes eggs while he manages the bacon, except he overdoes it; not even bacon tastes good when it's burnt to cinders and crumbles away in black flakes on his tongue. “Honestly, Brennan,” May says.

His favorite jacket has mysteriously developed a hole in the pocket, which he discovers while the two are walking to the subway. He hates the subway. Most people hate the subway, in fairness, but Brennan is mostly concerned right now with the fact that he hates it.

He gains a new reason to hate it, this day.

He's looking to the side, squinting at a ludicrous sign lit up with neon lights, when he hears the sound. Metallic squeals ring out and rattle his teeth. His bones shudder with the trembling of the earth. Around him, people are gasping and ducking away. He catches a flash of legs and sneakers darting by as people move. Brennan turns.

A semi-truck is screaming down the road, the back-end twisting around and raising up angry sparks on the pavement. It swings dangerously close to the side-walk, but not close enough to hit Brennan.

There's a squeal of tires from behind him, and a flash of silver.

In a panicked attempt to avoid the collision, another car has veered away and is coming right for him. Brennan twists, throwing up a hand in futile denial – but the breath is knocked away from him far too early.

He hits the ground hard, gripped tight by a kid who doesn't come up to his waist. Wide brown eyes stare up at him as they roll. Blood smears the side of the boy's face.

Somewhere, there's a crash.

Brennan doesn't quite know what happens after that, except that he's trying desperately to get out of the way of oncoming cars and people. Everyone's panicking. Traffic grinds to a halt. Emergency teams arrive. There's a smell of chemicals and oil in the air.

Eventually, he catches sight of the kid again.

He's on the ground, and there's a man leaning over him. They have similar coloring. People are pulling up Brennan by the arms, talking to him, asking him questions. “Your kid saved my life!” Brennan babbles, because he still can't believe it. Because this guy should know.

The man looks up at him blankly, eyes wide. Then he looks back down to the boy.

The kid who saved him is screaming on the ground, hands scrabbling at his eyes with unfeigned panic. His voice is high and reedy with shock. “Dad,” he keeps saying, and the huge man kneeling next to him seems frantic. “Dad, dad, I can't see, I can't see - “

The man's crying as he tries to calm his son, who is now rubbing frantically at his eyes. Paramedics show up and swarm the pair, blocking them both from sight. Soon, they vanish into the distance under the shriek and wail of an ambulance.

It's been an awful, awful day, Brennan thinks. It's been an awful day but he's still alive and whole and well, and there's a kid in the hospital in his place. A kid screaming because he can't see.

He braces himself on shaking limbs and decides he would really like to go talk to May now.



Jonathon Murdock - “call me Jack” - agrees to the visit. But he won't look at Brennan when they talk.

“Your kid's a fine boy,” Brennan says. Jack clenches his jaw.

“Matt saved my life,” Brennan says, and Jack nods, eyes carefully focused on the wall, because this is true.

“Not many boys could have done that,” Brennan says, and Jack emphatically agrees. Matt is splendid. Matt is remarkable. Matt is -

Matt is peering at them from around the corner of the room. Or, he is turned and tilted toward their direction, really. “Who is there?” he wants to know.

“No one,” Jack chokes, and shoots Brennan a quick and sharp glance like he means it.

Then his gaze drops, again, because for all his anger Jack is not hateful even if he is resentful.

Brennan doesn't blame him for the avoidance. He can barely stand himself these days. What happened to Matt wasn't his fault. But sometimes he thinks, if I had turned faster – moved quicker – why, he wouldn't have had to save me, at all, and he'd be fine and happy and...

But the past cannot be changed.

“Matt will be fine,” Brennan says, and Jack says nothing at all.



This would probably be the end of it, for most people. By all rights it should be, and Jack, at least, seems fine with the idea of never seeing Brennan again.

So it's a bit of a surprise when he picks up the phone one day, more than a month later, and hears: “Hi. This is Matt Murdock. Do you want to come to dinner?”

Brennan stands in place, stares blankly into the distance, and tries to think up an answer to this.

There's the sound of muffled voices over the line. Then the boy speaks again. “I'm sorry,” he chirps. “Do you want to come to dinner on Saturday at six?” He pauses a beat. “We're having chicken.”

“Uh,” Brennan manages.

“My dad says it's fine.”

...Which is an interesting statement in more ways than one. Brennan shakes away his shock. “I...”

He doesn't really want to see the kid again, is the thing. In fact, the idea of sitting across from Matt Murdock, staring into the child's absent eyes and trying to make small-talk, sounds fairly horrendous. Brennan does not have children. He does not consider himself particularly good with children, and as for blind children with a good reason to hate him...

Children he blinded. Let's not avoid that, he thinks.

But then. He owes this one, doesn't he?

“I – sure,” he says. “Saturday, yeah. Sounds great.”

“Perfect,” Matt says. “You know the way. It was nice talking to you, Sir!”

The phone clicks off with a beep.

Brennan pulls it away from his ear and stares at it with a faint sense of betrayal.



Dinner is awkward. Jack moves around Brennan with slow, resentful motions, his eyes dark and hard. But Brennan can't even blame him for this, which is the worst part. He can see the way the scarred and hardened boxer visibly softens when he looks at his son. He treats Matt like the kid hung the moon and keeps the stars in the sky.

Brennan, after all, is just the reason Matt can't see them.

When the food is eaten Jack goes to the kitchen and Brennan can hear him cracking open a beer. Matt tilts his head but doesn't seem bothered by the sound.

It's the silence that prompts Brennan to speak. “I'll never be able to thank you enough,” he says suddenly. Matt frowns a bit. Brennan knows he's jamming his foot in his mouth right now. He thanked the kid about a dozen times in the hospital, with Jack half-crying by the bedside and looking like he wanted to throttle him, but somehow he can't stop. “If I could take this from you, God...”

“You know, I think you're holding a lot of guilt in you,” Matt says.

Brennan bites his lip. “You know, kid, between the two of us I don't think you're supposed to be doing the comforting here,” he says.

He regrets it immediately, but Matt doesn't seem offended. “Everyone has been trying to pity me lately,” he says. “Except for the kids at school who call me a cripple. But all the adults act like I can't do anything, except for my dad. Murdocks are stronger than that. I'm fine.”

He tilts his chin like it's true, too, clenching his jaw. Somehow it only makes him look smaller.

“It can't be easy.”

“Life's never easy. You just gotta get back up anyway.”

“I guess that's true enough.”

“So you need to forgive yourself,” Matt says. “Bad things happen. But it's not your fault.”

Brennan scrapes his fork along his plate. He's a little surprised to find it empty. He considers Matt. “My wife would say that that's it not what happens to you that matters, you know. It's how you react to what you're dealt. And good people will always make it in the world. You – you're something else, kid.”

Maybe he shouldn't have said that, either. The kid looks embarrassed suddenly. But he ducks his head, and says wistfully, “Your wife sounds really nice.”

Brennan's not sure what impulse compels him to say, “You should meet her sometime.”



Matt and Jack look strange and out of place against the soft, muted colors of the Tierney's home.

Jack seems to be aware of this, raising one hand to touch a gauze of red-dotted cloth stuck to his face. His skin is scabbed over and hard, his lip puffed and swollen. He smiles tightly and politely at Brennan and May, but it doesn't reach his eyes.

Matt, though, is painfully earnest. When May greets him he switches the side holding his cane so he can wave his hand in front of him, trying vainly to shake a hand that isn't there until she bends down to accept the gesture. “It's very nice to meet you,” he says, undeterred. Brennan can tell his wife is smitten already. Her sister, Jenna, has joined them tonight and doesn't even look as grumpy as usual.

They go to the kitchen to eat fried fish on nice plates and ask Jack how work is doing (fine) and Matt how school has been (better than the week before, apparently) and Brennan tries to ignore the glances Jack gives him all night long, the ones that ask, What are you even doing?

Because if he figures it out, he'll let Jack know.

Maybe Matt has an idea, though. “I've heard it said,” he tells them at the end of dinner, “that people's lives can be connected forever. Even after death.”

He doesn't elaborate. He doesn't really need to.

After death. He clings to that. “You're religious?” Brennan asks, for lack of anything better to say.

There are a lot of Irish people around here, of course. Brennan's a lapsed Catholic, he supposes is the term, but old enough that he barely remembers the sensation of knocking his knees against the floors in church. Matt is nodding; Jack isn't. “His grandmother was... devout,” Jack says. He doesn't sound like this pleases him.

“Grandma used to say everyone believes in a god. Even if they say think they don't. Some people believe in ideas and hopes and dreams. And that's almost like God, sometimes.”

“What about bad people,” Brennan asks, just trying to be devil's advocate.

“They have idols,” Matt says. “Which isn't really good, but – but, there's something everyone worship and loves. No one is without love.”

“Well,” May says. “That's a nice thing to think.”

Matt frowns. He looks a little puzzled. “ - Is it?” he asks.



Jack calls them up a week later. He's bruised a few ribs in an out-of-city fight. He's laid up and won't make it to Hell's Kitchen for a few days.

“And, well, I could ask some of the guys I work with,” he says. “But, some of them ain't so good with kids...”

“We'd love to have him over,” Brennan says, barely hearing his own words.

Jack clarifies that he is certainly not asking Brennan to host Matt, he would just like the couple to maybe check in on Matt once or twice, because of course the kid can take care of himself.

Brennan doesn't really like the sound of that. So him and May drive over to the Murdock place and take Matt back with them, anyway.

Matt seems pretty unfazed by all of this. “Happens all the time,” he says. “Dad's always fine, though. Nothing can keep him down.”

Brennan asks how often Matt's alone at home. “I can take care of myself,” Matt dismisses. Nevermind that he's a nine-year old blind kid in the slums of Hell's Kitchen. “And Dad does what he can,” Matt adds, which is a little reassuring, but not very.

He loves his dad, though, that much is clear. When Jack comes a few days later, face covered in purple splotches, Matt drops his cane and lunges for the door to wrap himself around the man's legs. Battlin' Jack looks oddly soft when he reaches down to touch Matt's hair. He sighs, and the air sweeps out of him with the creaking sound of a broken house. He seems tired.

Brennan feels like an intruder; so he's not sure why, when Jack looks at him, he offers, “You know, we'd be happy to watch him any time.”