He screams when they try to touch him, spine arching and snapping. He claws at his head – not at his eyes, but his ears, tearing at his own soft flesh with pale nails until the skin tears and thin red welts rise and bleed.
The nuns come in and usher out the Tierneys, finally, but they let Brennan stay. Perhaps it is a kindness, or perhaps a cruelty. One nun runs into the room with dust-covered straps that they use to bind Matt's arms to the bed.
“These were used in an exorcism, years ago,” says the young women, and Brennan wonders why she tells him this.
He doesn't want to know.
And the tears are horrible. There's always something tragic in a child's tears, which are so fast and futile, but usually shallow, too. Matt's tears, though, are warranted, even if perhaps no one can understand why. There is something here, a real tragedy they can't fathom, one which Matt can't – or won't – tell.
When he cries his eyes continue to stare straight ahead, blank, unseeing. These eyes can't help him any longer, but they can still bring suffering.
He doesn't quiet until night, when most of the nuns have filtered away and the orphanage is silent. They have been considering calling a doctor, and the change is a relief.
But when Brennan reaches out to grasp Matt's hand, meaning to comfort him, the boy flinches away.
“It's too much,” says Matt.
“What is?”
Matt shudders. His bony arms twitch and pull against the bindings, testing them, weighing them. His head lolls to the side, and his tongue swipes out to flick over his teeth.
Brennan barely hears the response.
“Everything.”
The orphanage tells them that they have found someone – a good man, they say – who can help Matt. Another blind man. Someone interested in fostering him, teaching him, helping him adapt.
“He's been having such a hard time,” says Sister Valerie delicately. This is in reference to his recent fits. “We think this person can help.”
But they won't give out a name. Standard policy, of course. Names can't be shared. Just this; there is someone who might be able to help Matt, and it is not them.
“We have to do what's best,” says May, and Brennan agrees.
So they drop their plans, quietly, without consulting Matt or causing him conflict. It's too bad that they don't plan ahead, though – because the next time they visit the orphanage, Matt's gone.
“He doesn't even have our number,” says May. They walk slowly and carefully away from the orphanage, clinging to each others arms, looking back at the familiar building occasionally.
“It's probably better this way,” says Brennan, blinking slow and hard. “A clean break. Right?”
“Right,” she says. “ - Right.”
And that's the last they hear of him for a long while.
But familiar habits are hard to break, so after two months of uneasy peace something snaps. Brennan picks up his hat one day, twists a tie around his neck, and steps out into a sunny stream of light with his foot still wavering over the threshold of the door. He isn't quite sure what he's doing. But he leaves, and by the time he reaches St. Agnes', he still hasn't made up his mind. The nun at the entrance seems surprised to see him.
“Matt isn't here,” she says, because he is known.
“I know,” he responds, because it's a painful truth. “But I wanted to know if I – if there's anything else I could do here. If I could volunteer - “
She smiles.
There's not much an old man with arthritis sparking through his knuckles can do, so he thinks. But he sits inside on rainy days and reads Alice in Wonderland to the younger children. He wrestles over math puzzles with the teenagers and exchanges stories with the older, half-wary residents who don't know quite what to do with his presence and sometimes don't even want him there. None of them are Matt. But it can be nice.
He tries to go at least once a week, sometimes more, because it's not as though he does much work these days. And it becomes a habit, for over a year, until the path to the orphanage is more engrained in his mind than the way to the nearby grocer's or his own sister's house. His routine never differs too much. So it's a shock, a real shock, when he steps up to the doors of the orphanage and Sister Lian flutters her hands at him.
“Oh, good,” she says. “Please, come with me, maybe you can help. He's been so upset - “
Brennan follows at a distance as she leads him inside. Children he knows stop and go quiet as he passes, staring at him and turning away. Some look embarrassed. Some look resigned. A few, especially the older ones, look angry.
They walk to the end of a familiar hall, one vaguely remembered, and Sister Lian opens a door. His breath catches.
“Go away,” says Matt Murdock.
Lying morosely on his bed, Matt looks old and thin and worn compared to the last time Brennan saw him. His arms have formed banded cords of wiry muscles, and bruises – hand-shaped bruises, some of them – are splotched visibly under the short sleeves of his shirt. Brennan stares.
He doesn't understand.
“Matt,” he says.
The boy freezes.
“Matt,” he says again.
Slowly, though it takes an age, the child shifts his shoulders and rolls around so he's facing the wall. “Go away,” he says again, more softly.
The two adults wait. When no other reaction is forthcoming, they eventually do.
In the hall, Brennan Tierney closes his eyes and rests against the wall. He think about hands that can bruise. He wonders about how easy it is to make mistakes.
Matt is different now, distant. Vigilant. Brennan tries to think traumatized, except that's not quite right. It should be. He knows enough about Matt's situation, after all. The boy was blinded, then touched the still-warm face of his dead father after the man was gunned down in an alley. Now he's been abandoned back at an orphanage after some treatment he still won't talk about. But though his movements are careful, his words cautious, he is never afraid.
If anything, he is confident. But cold.
“He's not the same kid,” Brennan tells his wife one night over dinner.
“He's older,” May answers, and prods her sister when the woman seems to linger too long over a suspicious-looking speck on a plate. “Of course he's not the same.”
“It's not that. I don't know that I can connect with him – that he would even want me to.”
May peers at him. “Are you sure you're willing to try?” she asks, not unkindly.
He sputters.
He doesn't know how to respond.
“We can't change how we are,” he says at last.
“Or what's happened,” she says strangely, which doesn't really help clear up anything.
“I mean, it's probably for the best,” says Jenna.
He still thinks about it, sometimes, what it would be like to sit Matt down and ask him the question. That question. “Do you want to be family. Officially. Do you want...”
But Matt smiles a lot, these days, and all the smiles are false. Brennan is not sure what the answer would be. He is not sure where the answer would come from. He does not ask.
But when Matt watches over a group of smaller children playing hop-scotch in the yard, Brennan can't stop the questions that comes to his lips. “Did you want to go with him?” is the first one. And then, because that doesn't really mean so much; “Did you like him enough to want to stay?”
Matt stiffens. He even moves differently, now, shifting his head like he's being hunted all the time. He seems to weigh the question more than it's worth. “...He didn't want me,” he says at last, and the simple truth of that statement is heartbreaking.
“That's not what I asked.”
“I understand why the other families don't want me, I do,” Matt says. “It's a lot to expect. There are other kids here who are younger, and aren't blind, and just easier. But we were the same. And he still didn't want me.”
“You're nothing like him, Matt. Not in any ways that are important.”
“In all the ways that are important,” Matt says firmly.
Brennan sighs. “I – the nuns tell me he wasn't even a normal foster-parent. How did this happen?”
“They hired him specially. I guess they thought he could help.”
“They hired him?” Brennan asks blankly. “With – with what money?”
“With my money,” Matt says.
He says it simply. But the thought fills Brennan with fury.
“The money Jack left you,” he says flatly. “They gave it to that – they paid him for this? With your money? What gave them the right to make that decision!”
“They just wanted to help.”
“Some help!”
“People make mistakes.”
Brennan shakes his head, furious, helpless. What makes him angrier than anything is the fact that Matt doesn't seem to understand the injustice in any of this.
“This isn't a mistake,” he says. “What he did to you - “
“I should have been smarter,” Matt says.
“No. You couldn't have known what he was like.”
“He wouldn't have left if I was smarter, I mean. If I'd understood what he was after.”
Brennan's throat seizes. He doesn't understand why Matt would want to stay with that man. He thinks of the bruises again. But Matt is turned away. His knee swivels slowly and he taps his cane against the ground in deliberate, even strokes.
“...Bad things happen,” say Brennan softly. “But it's not your fault.”
“They are,” says Matt. “They really are.”
It's probably for the best that they don't adopt him, Brennan decides in the end. People change. Matt changes and so does Brennan. But they keep in touch.
Matt gets his undergrad in English, then gets a scholarship to Columbia. What the scholarship doesn't pay for the rest of Battlin' Jack's money does. “He would be proud of you,” Brennan says, and he means it.
He's not entirely surprised when Matt settles down with a law-partner to work his own, tiny firm in Hell's Kitchen. Trying to work with and for the people, with ridiculous idealism, sounds exactly like the thing Matt would do.
They meet for celebratory drinks not long after Matt passes the bar exam. Brennan's joints are horrible by now. Between him and Matt they make quite a pair, he's sure, the two of them shuffling down the street hand-in-arm.
The chairs in Josie's are uncomfortable no matter how old someone is, anyway.
While he's there Matt tells him about his new secretary, and Brennan updates Matt about May's latest schemes to get him out of the house. When the TV over the bar changes, he glances up and says, “Don't suppose you've heard anything 'bout that devil, now?”
“I assume you haven't gained an interest in Catholicism,” Matt says.
“You know what I mean. The Devil of Hell's Kitchen, they're calling him.”
“...I like him,” Brennan decides. “ - He punches like a boxer.”
There's a pretty blonde who looks up from her desk when he opens the door, visibly startled. After a moment, a smile breaks out over her face. “Oh, hello! My name is Karen Page - “ she stands, starting to move around the desk. “ - How can we help you at Nelson and Murdock?”
“I'm not here for business,” Brennan assures, and her smile visibly falters. “I'm here to see Matt – he's a... family friend.”
The smile is back, though she still seems surprised. “Oh! Uh, sure, Mr. - ?”
“Do we have a – Hello!” a man has just appeared from one of the two side-doors. “I'm Foggy Nelson, one of the partners here - “
“He's here for Matt,” Karen cuts off the newcomer, and the man pauses, then slumps.
“Of course you are,” Foggy mutters. “Here, let me - “
Brennan doesn't exactly need to be shown around the tiny office, but Foggy steps around him and opens the only other door, letting Brennan step through. “Guest, Matt,” Foggy adds. “Um – what's your name?”
“Brennan Tierney.”
“Right! Uh – you do know him, right?”
Matt doesn't look much different than the last time Brennan saw him. Clearly his childhood tendency to find trouble has carried into adulthood. He has a healing cut on the side of his head, cleanly treated. Same Matt. His red glasses glint in the pale light.
“I – yes. Of course I do.”
The healing scrape on his head must itch, because as he tilts his head toward Brennan, he makes an aborted motion toward the wound.
“...Wait, Tierney?” asks Foggy. “Hey, aren't you the guy Matt - “ and he abruptly falls silent.
“Yes,” says Brennan, because people should know about this. People should know about the sacrifice Matt made, should know what a hero he is. “He told you?”
“I – read about it,” Foggy mutters, glancing between them. “Should I - ?”
Matt smiles his polite-smile. It's a development that was crafted in the orphanage. “I think Karen printed the files for the Reyes case this morning.”
“Right. Sure, I'll start on those. I'll be... in my office.”
With one more disconcerted glance at Brennan, Foggy leaves, closing the door behind him.
“I didn't expect you to come here,” Matt says.
“It's ridiculous how little we see you, now that you live in the city again,” Brennan says. “Besides, you have your own firm now! It's the dream, right, you big-shot lawyer?”
“Right,” Matt murmurs.
“You'd a made your dad proud, you know,” Brennan says, coming around and sitting in a chair across from Matt. He leans over the desk, though he knows Matt can't see him. “He was always saying – well, you know - “
“Use my brains.”
“And you've got 'em.”
A faint smile touches Matt's lips.
“You really should visit,” Brennan continues. “May wants an excuse to spoil you silly. You're like family, you know?”
For some reason, Matt takes awhile to answer. He's oddly still for a moment. “You were always like family to me, too,” he says at last.
“I'm glad you say that, you know? I never had a son. And I'm sorry you never had a father, after Jack.”
“I used to think you would,” Matt starts, and stops.
“What?”
Matt's throat works. Then he smiles once, quick and hard. “Nothing,” he says. “Just something I heard... But I suppose it would have been a bad idea, anyway.”
Brennan doesn't understand quite what Matt's talking about. But he can see that Matt's struggling with some idea. “Things always work out right, in the end,” is the only platitude he can make.
“Right,” Matt bursts, almost breathless. Brennan peers at him. “It – that's exactly what I thought. It would have... ended the same way, anyway.” A pause. “...Everything ends the same.”
When they walk, Matt's nostrils keep flaring. He twists his face like he smells something unpleasant.
But if he does, Brennan can't smell it. At one point, apropos of nothing, Matt asks, “Have you been keeping up with your medical appointments, Brennan?”
“I'm old,” he shrugs. “It doesn't matter so much.”
“No,” Matt says. “I suppose not.”
Matt seems somewhat subdued the rest of the day, but all in all Brennan thinks the visit goes well. They stop for ice cream on the way back to the office. It melts down their hands in the evening heat, and Matt insists on taking the cone-wrapper from Brennan personally. Brennan watches as he tosses it unerringly into a nearby dumpster. His blindness doesn't seem to hinder his accuracy.
It's nice, Brennan thinks, how well Matt knows his city.
Re: Family of old man Matt saved follows his life (3/3)
He screams when they try to touch him, spine arching and snapping. He claws at his head – not at his eyes, but his ears, tearing at his own soft flesh with pale nails until the skin tears and thin red welts rise and bleed.
The nuns come in and usher out the Tierneys, finally, but they let Brennan stay. Perhaps it is a kindness, or perhaps a cruelty. One nun runs into the room with dust-covered straps that they use to bind Matt's arms to the bed.
“These were used in an exorcism, years ago,” says the young women, and Brennan wonders why she tells him this.
He doesn't want to know.
And the tears are horrible. There's always something tragic in a child's tears, which are so fast and futile, but usually shallow, too. Matt's tears, though, are warranted, even if perhaps no one can understand why. There is something here, a real tragedy they can't fathom, one which Matt can't – or won't – tell.
When he cries his eyes continue to stare straight ahead, blank, unseeing. These eyes can't help him any longer, but they can still bring suffering.
He doesn't quiet until night, when most of the nuns have filtered away and the orphanage is silent. They have been considering calling a doctor, and the change is a relief.
But when Brennan reaches out to grasp Matt's hand, meaning to comfort him, the boy flinches away.
“It's too much,” says Matt.
“What is?”
Matt shudders. His bony arms twitch and pull against the bindings, testing them, weighing them. His head lolls to the side, and his tongue swipes out to flick over his teeth.
Brennan barely hears the response.
“Everything.”
The orphanage tells them that they have found someone – a good man, they say – who can help Matt. Another blind man. Someone interested in fostering him, teaching him, helping him adapt.
“He's been having such a hard time,” says Sister Valerie delicately. This is in reference to his recent fits. “We think this person can help.”
But they won't give out a name. Standard policy, of course. Names can't be shared. Just this; there is someone who might be able to help Matt, and it is not them.
“We have to do what's best,” says May, and Brennan agrees.
So they drop their plans, quietly, without consulting Matt or causing him conflict. It's too bad that they don't plan ahead, though – because the next time they visit the orphanage, Matt's gone.
“He doesn't even have our number,” says May. They walk slowly and carefully away from the orphanage, clinging to each others arms, looking back at the familiar building occasionally.
“It's probably better this way,” says Brennan, blinking slow and hard. “A clean break. Right?”
“Right,” she says. “ - Right.”
And that's the last they hear of him for a long while.
But familiar habits are hard to break, so after two months of uneasy peace something snaps. Brennan picks up his hat one day, twists a tie around his neck, and steps out into a sunny stream of light with his foot still wavering over the threshold of the door. He isn't quite sure what he's doing. But he leaves, and by the time he reaches St. Agnes', he still hasn't made up his mind. The nun at the entrance seems surprised to see him.
“Matt isn't here,” she says, because he is known.
“I know,” he responds, because it's a painful truth. “But I wanted to know if I – if there's anything else I could do here. If I could volunteer - “
She smiles.
There's not much an old man with arthritis sparking through his knuckles can do, so he thinks. But he sits inside on rainy days and reads Alice in Wonderland to the younger children. He wrestles over math puzzles with the teenagers and exchanges stories with the older, half-wary residents who don't know quite what to do with his presence and sometimes don't even want him there. None of them are Matt. But it can be nice.
He tries to go at least once a week, sometimes more, because it's not as though he does much work these days. And it becomes a habit, for over a year, until the path to the orphanage is more engrained in his mind than the way to the nearby grocer's or his own sister's house. His routine never differs too much. So it's a shock, a real shock, when he steps up to the doors of the orphanage and Sister Lian flutters her hands at him.
“Oh, good,” she says. “Please, come with me, maybe you can help. He's been so upset - “
Brennan follows at a distance as she leads him inside. Children he knows stop and go quiet as he passes, staring at him and turning away. Some look embarrassed. Some look resigned. A few, especially the older ones, look angry.
They walk to the end of a familiar hall, one vaguely remembered, and Sister Lian opens a door. His breath catches.
“Go away,” says Matt Murdock.
Lying morosely on his bed, Matt looks old and thin and worn compared to the last time Brennan saw him. His arms have formed banded cords of wiry muscles, and bruises – hand-shaped bruises, some of them – are splotched visibly under the short sleeves of his shirt. Brennan stares.
He doesn't understand.
“Matt,” he says.
The boy freezes.
“Matt,” he says again.
Slowly, though it takes an age, the child shifts his shoulders and rolls around so he's facing the wall. “Go away,” he says again, more softly.
The two adults wait. When no other reaction is forthcoming, they eventually do.
In the hall, Brennan Tierney closes his eyes and rests against the wall. He think about hands that can bruise. He wonders about how easy it is to make mistakes.
Matt is different now, distant. Vigilant. Brennan tries to think traumatized, except that's not quite right. It should be. He knows enough about Matt's situation, after all. The boy was blinded, then touched the still-warm face of his dead father after the man was gunned down in an alley. Now he's been abandoned back at an orphanage after some treatment he still won't talk about. But though his movements are careful, his words cautious, he is never afraid.
If anything, he is confident. But cold.
“He's not the same kid,” Brennan tells his wife one night over dinner.
“He's older,” May answers, and prods her sister when the woman seems to linger too long over a suspicious-looking speck on a plate. “Of course he's not the same.”
“It's not that. I don't know that I can connect with him – that he would even want me to.”
May peers at him. “Are you sure you're willing to try?” she asks, not unkindly.
He sputters.
He doesn't know how to respond.
“We can't change how we are,” he says at last.
“Or what's happened,” she says strangely, which doesn't really help clear up anything.
“I mean, it's probably for the best,” says Jenna.
He still thinks about it, sometimes, what it would be like to sit Matt down and ask him the question. That question. “Do you want to be family. Officially. Do you want...”
But Matt smiles a lot, these days, and all the smiles are false. Brennan is not sure what the answer would be. He is not sure where the answer would come from. He does not ask.
But when Matt watches over a group of smaller children playing hop-scotch in the yard, Brennan can't stop the questions that comes to his lips. “Did you want to go with him?” is the first one. And then, because that doesn't really mean so much; “Did you like him enough to want to stay?”
Matt stiffens. He even moves differently, now, shifting his head like he's being hunted all the time. He seems to weigh the question more than it's worth. “...He didn't want me,” he says at last, and the simple truth of that statement is heartbreaking.
“That's not what I asked.”
“I understand why the other families don't want me, I do,” Matt says. “It's a lot to expect. There are other kids here who are younger, and aren't blind, and just easier. But we were the same. And he still didn't want me.”
“You're nothing like him, Matt. Not in any ways that are important.”
“In all the ways that are important,” Matt says firmly.
Brennan sighs. “I – the nuns tell me he wasn't even a normal foster-parent. How did this happen?”
“They hired him specially. I guess they thought he could help.”
“They hired him?” Brennan asks blankly. “With – with what money?”
“With my money,” Matt says.
He says it simply. But the thought fills Brennan with fury.
“The money Jack left you,” he says flatly. “They gave it to that – they paid him for this? With your money? What gave them the right to make that decision!”
“They just wanted to help.”
“Some help!”
“People make mistakes.”
Brennan shakes his head, furious, helpless. What makes him angrier than anything is the fact that Matt doesn't seem to understand the injustice in any of this.
“This isn't a mistake,” he says. “What he did to you - “
“I should have been smarter,” Matt says.
“No. You couldn't have known what he was like.”
“He wouldn't have left if I was smarter, I mean. If I'd understood what he was after.”
Brennan's throat seizes. He doesn't understand why Matt would want to stay with that man. He thinks of the bruises again. But Matt is turned away. His knee swivels slowly and he taps his cane against the ground in deliberate, even strokes.
“...Bad things happen,” say Brennan softly. “But it's not your fault.”
“They are,” says Matt. “They really are.”
It's probably for the best that they don't adopt him, Brennan decides in the end. People change. Matt changes and so does Brennan. But they keep in touch.
Matt gets his undergrad in English, then gets a scholarship to Columbia. What the scholarship doesn't pay for the rest of Battlin' Jack's money does. “He would be proud of you,” Brennan says, and he means it.
He's not entirely surprised when Matt settles down with a law-partner to work his own, tiny firm in Hell's Kitchen. Trying to work with and for the people, with ridiculous idealism, sounds exactly like the thing Matt would do.
They meet for celebratory drinks not long after Matt passes the bar exam. Brennan's joints are horrible by now. Between him and Matt they make quite a pair, he's sure, the two of them shuffling down the street hand-in-arm.
The chairs in Josie's are uncomfortable no matter how old someone is, anyway.
While he's there Matt tells him about his new secretary, and Brennan updates Matt about May's latest schemes to get him out of the house. When the TV over the bar changes, he glances up and says, “Don't suppose you've heard anything 'bout that devil, now?”
“I assume you haven't gained an interest in Catholicism,” Matt says.
“You know what I mean. The Devil of Hell's Kitchen, they're calling him.”
“He seems interesting,” Matt concedes. “He helped Karen. I'm reserving judgment.”
“Good fighting form.”
“Which is good if he's on the right side.”
“True enough.”
“What do you think of this devil?” Matt asks.
“...I like him,” Brennan decides. “ - He punches like a boxer.”
There's a pretty blonde who looks up from her desk when he opens the door, visibly startled. After a moment, a smile breaks out over her face. “Oh, hello! My name is Karen Page - “ she stands, starting to move around the desk. “ - How can we help you at Nelson and Murdock?”
“I'm not here for business,” Brennan assures, and her smile visibly falters. “I'm here to see Matt – he's a... family friend.”
The smile is back, though she still seems surprised. “Oh! Uh, sure, Mr. - ?”
“Do we have a – Hello!” a man has just appeared from one of the two side-doors. “I'm Foggy Nelson, one of the partners here - “
“He's here for Matt,” Karen cuts off the newcomer, and the man pauses, then slumps.
“Of course you are,” Foggy mutters. “Here, let me - “
Brennan doesn't exactly need to be shown around the tiny office, but Foggy steps around him and opens the only other door, letting Brennan step through. “Guest, Matt,” Foggy adds. “Um – what's your name?”
“Brennan Tierney.”
“Right! Uh – you do know him, right?”
Matt doesn't look much different than the last time Brennan saw him. Clearly his childhood tendency to find trouble has carried into adulthood. He has a healing cut on the side of his head, cleanly treated. Same Matt. His red glasses glint in the pale light.
“I – yes. Of course I do.”
The healing scrape on his head must itch, because as he tilts his head toward Brennan, he makes an aborted motion toward the wound.
“...Wait, Tierney?” asks Foggy. “Hey, aren't you the guy Matt - “ and he abruptly falls silent.
“Yes,” says Brennan, because people should know about this. People should know about the sacrifice Matt made, should know what a hero he is. “He told you?”
“I – read about it,” Foggy mutters, glancing between them. “Should I - ?”
Matt smiles his polite-smile. It's a development that was crafted in the orphanage. “I think Karen printed the files for the Reyes case this morning.”
“Right. Sure, I'll start on those. I'll be... in my office.”
With one more disconcerted glance at Brennan, Foggy leaves, closing the door behind him.
“I didn't expect you to come here,” Matt says.
“It's ridiculous how little we see you, now that you live in the city again,” Brennan says. “Besides, you have your own firm now! It's the dream, right, you big-shot lawyer?”
“Right,” Matt murmurs.
“You'd a made your dad proud, you know,” Brennan says, coming around and sitting in a chair across from Matt. He leans over the desk, though he knows Matt can't see him. “He was always saying – well, you know - “
“Use my brains.”
“And you've got 'em.”
A faint smile touches Matt's lips.
“You really should visit,” Brennan continues. “May wants an excuse to spoil you silly. You're like family, you know?”
For some reason, Matt takes awhile to answer. He's oddly still for a moment. “You were always like family to me, too,” he says at last.
“I'm glad you say that, you know? I never had a son. And I'm sorry you never had a father, after Jack.”
“I used to think you would,” Matt starts, and stops.
“What?”
Matt's throat works. Then he smiles once, quick and hard. “Nothing,” he says. “Just something I heard... But I suppose it would have been a bad idea, anyway.”
Brennan doesn't understand quite what Matt's talking about. But he can see that Matt's struggling with some idea. “Things always work out right, in the end,” is the only platitude he can make.
“Right,” Matt bursts, almost breathless. Brennan peers at him. “It – that's exactly what I thought. It would have... ended the same way, anyway.” A pause. “...Everything ends the same.”
When they walk, Matt's nostrils keep flaring. He twists his face like he smells something unpleasant.
But if he does, Brennan can't smell it. At one point, apropos of nothing, Matt asks, “Have you been keeping up with your medical appointments, Brennan?”
“I'm old,” he shrugs. “It doesn't matter so much.”
“No,” Matt says. “I suppose not.”
Matt seems somewhat subdued the rest of the day, but all in all Brennan thinks the visit goes well. They stop for ice cream on the way back to the office. It melts down their hands in the evening heat, and Matt insists on taking the cone-wrapper from Brennan personally. Brennan watches as he tosses it unerringly into a nearby dumpster. His blindness doesn't seem to hinder his accuracy.
It's nice, Brennan thinks, how well Matt knows his city.