There’s an innocent little kid out there taken from his dad, and Matt knows, he knows how much pain and fear and anger both that kid and his dad must be feeling right now.
So it’s not surprising Matt’s thoughts keep returning to his own father. He doesn’t think Jack wouldn’t have approved of his methods, but Matt strongly believes his old man would’ve at least approved of his mission.
(Bitterly he thinks, But maybe I’ll just ask what he thinks about the whole thing the next time I’m sent back to the car crash.)
When he approaches the abandoned warehouse, Matt thinks he’s finally getting the hang of this whole thing. He’s feeling pretty good about the way everything’s come together. Maybe even a bit cocky. All tonight’s informants and all roads in the Kitchen lead to this warehouse.
Inside he hears men laughing and chatting amiably in what he assumes is Russian. Smells the strong scent of cigarettes and alcohol.
They have no idea what’s coming.
Matt heads inside, and instead of going straight for the drinking, card-playing men ostensibly keeping guard, Matt creeps through the building to find wherever it is they’ve stashed the kid.
He keeps his ears open, his head cocked, and his fists ready.
A terrified little boy’s heartbeat should sound very different from the heavy thump-thump-thumps he hears from the men downstairs, but Matt strains and listens and struggles to find anything resembling the sound he’s looking for. There are rodents in the basement and next to a dumpster outside sits a half-starved dog tied to a chain-link fence, but he doesn’t hear—
A loud crack explodes inside his head and the sharp smell of blood blooms inside his mouth. He’s bitten his tongue.
Did. Has someone managed to sneak up on him? Another crack, this time to his ribs, and he whirls around, lashing out as tries to get his focus under control. So stupid. He’d wasted so much energy looking for the kid, he neglected to keep track of what was going on around him.
A dozen men swarm over him, some of them bludgeoning him with metal pipes while others slash at him with butchers knives and broken beer bottles. He fights with whatever strength he has left and somehow, somehow manages to crawls away. He has no idea how he does it, he only knows the cool night does nothing for him, in fact it saps away any fumes he might have still had in the tank.
He thought he was doing this right, going about it smarter, but no, actually, this wasn’t very smart at all.
*
Matt first met Claire almost a decade ago. He remembers her saying to his older self something along the lines of, “You pretended not to know me, you bastard,” and Matt had envisioned all sorts of scenarios where he had to keep up the pretense. Turns out though, he isn’t so much pretending as he is struggling just to stay alive.
He knows he’s in her apartment and half dead on the same couch she had tended to him that first time.
And at the time she had mentioned pulling him out of the garbage, but he doesn’t remember that now. Not because of any time-related memory gaps, but because she somehow managed to haul him up here while he was still unconscious. (He does smell like garbage, though, so at least he knows she wasn’t just giving him a hard time.)
“Oh no, you don’t,” Claire says. “You are not gonna die in my living room.”
“I am not…” he groans, “going to die in your living room.” He doesn’t plan on staying here long enough for that. He has a little kid to go and get.
A flat palm rests heavy on his chest. “Stay put,” instructs, “because I’m not so sure about your odds here.”
She says it with such authority, it deserves a little cheek. “You a doctor or something?”
“Or something,” she agrees. “Look. This is my one night off. I would much rather take you to the hospital than—”
“No hospitals,” he says, because if those guys were waiting for him at the warehouse, they most certainly would look for him in a hospital.
Claire throws her hands up in frustration when he tells her this, but honestly he’ll take it because for reasons he can’t explain, he’s flooded with relief now that he’s back here.
Claire continues patching him up and says, “You get this torn up a lot?”
“Not really,” he says through another wave of pain. “Still kinda new at this.”
“I can tell. Your outfit is terrible.” Matt laughs at that (Or tries to, anyway.) “Not what I meant, though. Whoever patched you up before did an incredible job. Not to brag, but this looks like a Claire Temple special. That’s me, in case you couldn’t guess.”
“I didn’t want to assume,” he deadpans.
“These have been here a long time, though. If I had to guess? I’d say a decade at least. You sure you weren’t out there getting slashed up by thugs while you were high school or whatever? I’m guessing at your age, by the way.”
“Yeah, no. I wasn’t doing this in high school.”
“Well, that’s good at least,” she says as she fishes a penlight from her first aid kit.
“But it does raise the question—” and Matt grabs her wrist to stop her from checking his pupils.
“Okay, I’ll stop fishing,” she says, but he keeps his fingers wrapped tightly around the delicate bones in her wrist. The penlight drops to floor. “I need to make sure you don’t have a concussion.” She says it slowly, like she thinks he’s stupid. Or concussed.
“I don’t have a concussion.”
“Yeah, see,” she says as she collects the pen from the floor, “I can’t just take your word for it.”
“And I can’t let you aim that in my eyes.”
“Yeah, about that. Don’t think I haven’t noticed the way you’ve been looking at things.”
“You mean the way I don’t?”
“The way you don’t,” she agrees.
He shifts his weight on the couch and immediately regrets it.
“I just got through stitching that up,” she complains, but she still reaches for the first aid kit to do it all again.
“You know, Mike, you’re oddly trusting.” To punctuate her point, Claire tugs at that last stitch a little tighter than strictly necessary.
“Mike?” he asks.
“Sure. Unlike you, I have no problem with making assumptions, so unless you want to tell me otherwise, Mike it is.”
“Ha,” he says. “Okay, well, I could…. I could say the same about you. After all, I’m a guy you pulled out of the garbage.”
“A blind guy, apparently.”
Matt winced, and not just from the pain of having a needle repeatedly jammed through his skin.
“You mind explaining that one?”
“Maybe next time.”
“Ha. Ha ha. He’s funny. Well, I hate to break it you, buster, but there is no next time. So unless you pay really well, this is strictly a one-time offer.” A beat: “Do you pay well?” “Sorry.”
Her lips part and she pulls in a breath to speak, but three floors down Matt hears a cop knocking on doors looking for a man fitting Matt’s description.
“They’re coming,” he says, and he tries getting up from off the couch. He doesn’t get very far, in fact he face-plants right in the middle of Claire’s living room.
“Who is. Those guys who did this to you?”
God, he wishes he knew how this plays out. He feels like he’s lost his footing here. Claire helps him back up to his feet and he nods.
“How the hell can you possibly know that?”
“I can hear him,” he says. “He’s searching the building.”
“What so, you’re a blind guy with super-hearing?”
The man is on Claire’s floor now, and Matt closes his eyes and braces himself against a wall. Not now, Claire, he wants to say, but she doesn’t seem to expect a response. Instead, she heads for the kitchen, opens up a cabinet, and pulls out a frying pan.
Matt swallows a small laugh because this isn’t the time for finding things funny, but the frying pan Claire hefts over her shoulder like an extremely heavy baseball bat is in fact the very same pan she threatened his older self with that first night he was here. And he’s thrilled to remember that some things never do change.
Matt smells the guy’s cologne wafting down the hallway, and when he mentions this to Claire, she simply says, “What the fuck.”
“He’s next door,” Matt whispers, as the man masquerading as a New York City cop thanks Claire’s elderly neighbor for her time.
Even though he’s warned her, Claire still jumps clear out of her skin when the knock on her door comes.
He’s got to give her props for how quickly she recovers her composure, though. She answers the door, pulls the “I was sleeping,” routine, and apologizes for not being more helpful.
“Phew,” she says as she shuts the door. She leans heavily against it. “That was a close—”
“He’s not gone,” Matt says. He hears the guy making a phone call. “Oh, no,” he says. “He’s calling for backup.”
He pushes away from the wall from where he was hiding/bracing himself, and moves into action. He’s limping, and he can feel the stitches in his side pull and tear, but he has to move.
He’s not in much fighting shape, but on the stairwell Matt’s able to get a drop on the guy. Literally. He grabs a fire extinguisher from the wall and drops it on the guy’s head as he thunders down the stairs. The guy collapses in a heap, and Claire goes to find a kid she says helped her bring Matt upstairs when Matt suggests they take the guy up to the roof.
*
“I can’t believe I’m condoning this,” Claire says as Matt restrains the unconscious mob guy.
“He has information I need,” Matt says. He checks the binding to make sure they’re secure and grabs the guy by his lapels. “Wake up,” he says. “Tell me where the boy is.”
“Fuck you,” the guy spits.
“Fine,” Matt says and socks him in the face.
As the guy’s head lolls to the side, Claire says, “I'm a nurse, I know my way around the human body. I can show you just how to make it really hurt.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I spent my night stitching up a guy who was ribboned up by assholes trying to keep him from rescuing some kid. This guy’s one of them?”
Matt nods.
“Then yeah. Do what you need to.”
*
Russian asshole’s stubborn though, and tough. Matt follows Claire’s instructions, applies the right pressure to tender and sensitive spots on the body, but the guy’s made of steel, and Matt thinks what he really needs is a stronger incentive.
“All right,” he says and hauls the guy over the edge of the building until he’s mostly dangling over it. “I’m only going to ask once. Tell me what I need to know, and you get to walk away. Do you understand.”
Guy spits in his face again.
“It’s your funeral,” and Matt says and hoists him up, making like he’s going to throw him overboard.
“Okay, okay,” the guy finally says, and he finally, finally gives Matt the name and address of a Russian restaurant where his pals are keeping the kid.
“Now that wasn’t so hard, was it,” Matt says, and despite what he had just told the guy, Matt tosses him into the open and waiting dumpster below.
“Holy shit!” Claire screams as she comes running over. “This has gotten way out of hand—”
“Guy’s fine,” Matt says. “A few broken bones, but unfortunately he’ll live.” He turns to her, fully. “I have to go. You,” he says, “need to find somewhere safe. Do you have a friend, somewhere you can stay? I can’t guarantee these guys won’t come after you. They know you helped me.”
“Yeah, shit. I have a friend I’m cat-sitting for,” and she gives him the address.
“Good,” he says. “I’ll come see you when I’m done.” He turns and heads for the edge of the roof. In the moments before he backflips off of it though, he hears Claire say to herself, “What the hell have I gotten myself into.”
*
Matt jumps, but he doesn’t make it to the ground.
Instead, he lands inside what seems to be a tiny bedroom. There are two twin-sized beds, a pair of desks.
Shit. This is his and Foggy’s dorm room.
No. No no no no no. He can’t be here! This is—
Goddamn it all to hell. Matt’s fist forms into a ball, and it’s all he can do to keep from bashing it into a wall.
On the other side of the door, he hears his own voice. “Hey,” his impossibly young voice says. “I’ll just catch up you later, okay? I just remembered I have… things. I need to do.” And wow is Matt a terrible liar. Even he doesn’t believe the sincerity of that.
“Are you kidding me, Murdock?” Foggy. Matt wants to cry. “Fine, your loss then, you nerd.” And with that his friend’s footsteps retreat down the hallway.
Present Matt’s body language is rigid and angry, but he doesn’t say a word. Just tsks at him disapprovingly, but Matt remembers how freaked out he’d been to encounter an older self who was that beat up.
Young, naive, and in denial.
This is who I am, he wants to say, but he doesn’t. Just picks up some discarded clothes from off the floor, dresses, and shoulders his way out of the room.
Re: Always Crashing in the Same Car part 23b
There’s an innocent little kid out there taken from his dad, and Matt knows, he knows how much pain and fear and anger both that kid and his dad must be feeling right now.
So it’s not surprising Matt’s thoughts keep returning to his own father. He doesn’t think Jack wouldn’t have approved of his methods, but Matt strongly believes his old man would’ve at least approved of his mission.
(Bitterly he thinks, But maybe I’ll just ask what he thinks about the whole thing the next time I’m sent back to the car crash.)
When he approaches the abandoned warehouse, Matt thinks he’s finally getting the hang of this whole thing. He’s feeling pretty good about the way everything’s come together. Maybe even a bit cocky. All tonight’s informants and all roads in the Kitchen lead to this warehouse.
Inside he hears men laughing and chatting amiably in what he assumes is Russian. Smells the strong scent of cigarettes and alcohol.
They have no idea what’s coming.
Matt heads inside, and instead of going straight for the drinking, card-playing men ostensibly keeping guard, Matt creeps through the building to find wherever it is they’ve stashed the kid.
He keeps his ears open, his head cocked, and his fists ready.
A terrified little boy’s heartbeat should sound very different from the heavy thump-thump-thumps he hears from the men downstairs, but Matt strains and listens and struggles to find anything resembling the sound he’s looking for. There are rodents in the basement and next to a dumpster outside sits a half-starved dog tied to a chain-link fence, but he doesn’t hear—
A loud crack explodes inside his head and the sharp smell of blood blooms inside his mouth. He’s bitten his tongue.
Did. Has someone managed to sneak up on him? Another crack, this time to his ribs, and he whirls around, lashing out as tries to get his focus under control. So stupid. He’d wasted so much energy looking for the kid, he neglected to keep track of what was going on around him.
A dozen men swarm over him, some of them bludgeoning him with metal pipes while others slash at him with butchers knives and broken beer bottles. He fights with whatever strength he has left and somehow, somehow manages to crawls away. He has no idea how he does it, he only knows the cool night does nothing for him, in fact it saps away any fumes he might have still had in the tank.
He thought he was doing this right, going about it smarter, but no, actually, this wasn’t very smart at all.
*
Matt first met Claire almost a decade ago. He remembers her saying to his older self something along the lines of, “You pretended not to know me, you bastard,” and Matt had envisioned all sorts of scenarios where he had to keep up the pretense. Turns out though, he isn’t so much pretending as he is struggling just to stay alive.
He knows he’s in her apartment and half dead on the same couch she had tended to him that first time.
And at the time she had mentioned pulling him out of the garbage, but he doesn’t remember that now. Not because of any time-related memory gaps, but because she somehow managed to haul him up here while he was still unconscious. (He does smell like garbage, though, so at least he knows she wasn’t just giving him a hard time.)
“Oh no, you don’t,” Claire says. “You are not gonna die in my living room.”
“I am not…” he groans, “going to die in your living room.” He doesn’t plan on staying here long enough for that. He has a little kid to go and get.
A flat palm rests heavy on his chest. “Stay put,” instructs, “because I’m not so sure about your odds here.”
She says it with such authority, it deserves a little cheek. “You a doctor or something?”
“Or something,” she agrees. “Look. This is my one night off. I would much rather take you to the hospital than—”
“No hospitals,” he says, because if those guys were waiting for him at the warehouse, they most certainly would look for him in a hospital.
Claire throws her hands up in frustration when he tells her this, but honestly he’ll take it because for reasons he can’t explain, he’s flooded with relief now that he’s back here.
Claire continues patching him up and says, “You get this torn up a lot?”
“Not really,” he says through another wave of pain. “Still kinda new at this.”
“I can tell. Your outfit is terrible.” Matt laughs at that (Or tries to, anyway.) “Not what I meant, though. Whoever patched you up before did an incredible job. Not to brag, but this looks like a Claire Temple special. That’s me, in case you couldn’t guess.”
“I didn’t want to assume,” he deadpans.
“These have been here a long time, though. If I had to guess? I’d say a decade at least. You sure you weren’t out there getting slashed up by thugs while you were high school or whatever? I’m guessing at your age, by the way.”
“Yeah, no. I wasn’t doing this in high school.”
“Well, that’s good at least,” she says as she fishes a penlight from her first aid kit.
“But it does raise the question—” and Matt grabs her wrist to stop her from checking his pupils.
“Okay, I’ll stop fishing,” she says, but he keeps his fingers wrapped tightly around the delicate bones in her wrist. The penlight drops to floor. “I need to make sure you don’t have a concussion.” She says it slowly, like she thinks he’s stupid. Or concussed.
“I don’t have a concussion.”
“Yeah, see,” she says as she collects the pen from the floor, “I can’t just take your word for it.”
“And I can’t let you aim that in my eyes.”
“Yeah, about that. Don’t think I haven’t noticed the way you’ve been looking at things.”
“You mean the way I don’t?”
“The way you don’t,” she agrees.
He shifts his weight on the couch and immediately regrets it.
“I just got through stitching that up,” she complains, but she still reaches for the first aid kit to do it all again.
“You know, Mike, you’re oddly trusting.” To punctuate her point, Claire tugs at that last stitch a little tighter than strictly necessary.
“Mike?” he asks.
“Sure. Unlike you, I have no problem with making assumptions, so unless you want to tell me otherwise, Mike it is.”
“Ha,” he says. “Okay, well, I could…. I could say the same about you. After all, I’m a guy you pulled out of the garbage.”
“A blind guy, apparently.”
Matt winced, and not just from the pain of having a needle repeatedly jammed through his skin.
“You mind explaining that one?”
“Maybe next time.”
“Ha. Ha ha. He’s funny. Well, I hate to break it you, buster, but there is no next time. So unless you pay really well, this is strictly a one-time offer.” A beat: “Do you pay well?”
“Sorry.”
Her lips part and she pulls in a breath to speak, but three floors down Matt hears a cop knocking on doors looking for a man fitting Matt’s description.
“They’re coming,” he says, and he tries getting up from off the couch. He doesn’t get very far, in fact he face-plants right in the middle of Claire’s living room.
“Who is. Those guys who did this to you?”
God, he wishes he knew how this plays out. He feels like he’s lost his footing here. Claire helps him back up to his feet and he nods.
“How the hell can you possibly know that?”
“I can hear him,” he says. “He’s searching the building.”
“What so, you’re a blind guy with super-hearing?”
The man is on Claire’s floor now, and Matt closes his eyes and braces himself against a wall. Not now, Claire, he wants to say, but she doesn’t seem to expect a response. Instead, she heads for the kitchen, opens up a cabinet, and pulls out a frying pan.
Matt swallows a small laugh because this isn’t the time for finding things funny, but the frying pan Claire hefts over her shoulder like an extremely heavy baseball bat is in fact the very same pan she threatened his older self with that first night he was here. And he’s thrilled to remember that some things never do change.
Matt smells the guy’s cologne wafting down the hallway, and when he mentions this to Claire, she simply says, “What the fuck.”
“He’s next door,” Matt whispers, as the man masquerading as a New York City cop thanks Claire’s elderly neighbor for her time.
Even though he’s warned her, Claire still jumps clear out of her skin when the knock on her door comes.
He’s got to give her props for how quickly she recovers her composure, though. She answers the door, pulls the “I was sleeping,” routine, and apologizes for not being more helpful.
“Phew,” she says as she shuts the door. She leans heavily against it. “That was a close—”
“He’s not gone,” Matt says. He hears the guy making a phone call. “Oh, no,” he says. “He’s calling for backup.”
He pushes away from the wall from where he was hiding/bracing himself, and moves into action. He’s limping, and he can feel the stitches in his side pull and tear, but he has to move.
He’s not in much fighting shape, but on the stairwell Matt’s able to get a drop on the guy. Literally. He grabs a fire extinguisher from the wall and drops it on the guy’s head as he thunders down the stairs. The guy collapses in a heap, and Claire goes to find a kid she says helped her bring Matt upstairs when Matt suggests they take the guy up to the roof.
*
“I can’t believe I’m condoning this,” Claire says as Matt restrains the unconscious mob guy.
“He has information I need,” Matt says. He checks the binding to make sure they’re secure and grabs the guy by his lapels. “Wake up,” he says. “Tell me where the boy is.”
“Fuck you,” the guy spits.
“Fine,” Matt says and socks him in the face.
As the guy’s head lolls to the side, Claire says, “I'm a nurse, I know my way around the human body. I can show you just how to make it really hurt.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I spent my night stitching up a guy who was ribboned up by assholes trying to keep him from rescuing some kid. This guy’s one of them?”
Matt nods.
“Then yeah. Do what you need to.”
*
Russian asshole’s stubborn though, and tough. Matt follows Claire’s instructions, applies the right pressure to tender and sensitive spots on the body, but the guy’s made of steel, and Matt thinks what he really needs is a stronger incentive.
“All right,” he says and hauls the guy over the edge of the building until he’s mostly dangling over it. “I’m only going to ask once. Tell me what I need to know, and you get to walk away. Do you understand.”
Guy spits in his face again.
“It’s your funeral,” and Matt says and hoists him up, making like he’s going to throw him overboard.
“Okay, okay,” the guy finally says, and he finally, finally gives Matt the name and address of a Russian restaurant where his pals are keeping the kid.
“Now that wasn’t so hard, was it,” Matt says, and despite what he had just told the guy, Matt tosses him into the open and waiting dumpster below.
“Holy shit!” Claire screams as she comes running over. “This has gotten way out of hand—”
“Guy’s fine,” Matt says. “A few broken bones, but unfortunately he’ll live.” He turns to her, fully. “I have to go. You,” he says, “need to find somewhere safe. Do you have a friend, somewhere you can stay? I can’t guarantee these guys won’t come after you. They know you helped me.”
“Yeah, shit. I have a friend I’m cat-sitting for,” and she gives him the address.
“Good,” he says. “I’ll come see you when I’m done.” He turns and heads for the edge of the roof. In the moments before he backflips off of it though, he hears Claire say to herself, “What the hell have I gotten myself into.”
*
Matt jumps, but he doesn’t make it to the ground.
Instead, he lands inside what seems to be a tiny bedroom. There are two twin-sized beds, a pair of desks.
Shit. This is his and Foggy’s dorm room.
No. No no no no no. He can’t be here! This is—
Goddamn it all to hell. Matt’s fist forms into a ball, and it’s all he can do to keep from bashing it into a wall.
On the other side of the door, he hears his own voice. “Hey,” his impossibly young voice says. “I’ll just catch up you later, okay? I just remembered I have… things. I need to do.” And wow is Matt a terrible liar. Even he doesn’t believe the sincerity of that.
“Are you kidding me, Murdock?” Foggy. Matt wants to cry. “Fine, your loss then, you nerd.” And with that his friend’s footsteps retreat down the hallway.
Present Matt’s body language is rigid and angry, but he doesn’t say a word. Just tsks at him disapprovingly, but Matt remembers how freaked out he’d been to encounter an older self who was that beat up.
Young, naive, and in denial.
This is who I am, he wants to say, but he doesn’t. Just picks up some discarded clothes from off the floor, dresses, and shoulders his way out of the room.
*