Tuesday, May 19th, 2009, 11:47 PM
STAR Labs Medical Wing
Operating Theater 3
James Olsen stopped existing somewhere between the anesthesia mask and the surgeon's first incision.
What remained wasn't dreaming. Dreams had logic, even the weird kind. Dreams had James in them, somewhere. This was different. This was becoming someone else entirely.
The truck came out of nowhere on a Hell's Kitchen street, and nine-year-old Matthew Murdock shoved the old man out of the way without thinking. The radioactive waste hit his face like liquid fire, eating through his eyes, his optic nerves, everything that let him see the world.
But that wasn't the worst part.
The worst part was lying in that hospital bed, listening to his father Jack Murdock trying not to cry in the hallway. Hearing every whispered conversation between doctors who thought a blind kid was as good as dead in a neighborhood like Hell's Kitchen.
"He'll adapt," one of them said. "Kids are resilient."
Resilient. Right. Matt learned what resilient meant when the other senses kicked in. When he could hear Mrs. Rodriguez's heartbeat three apartments over, when he could smell the fear on bullies before they even decided to pick on him. When every sound in the city felt like it was happening inside his skull.
Resilient meant learning to fight when your dad taught you to box, even though all you wanted to do was hide from the world that had suddenly become too loud, too much, too overwhelming.
Matt felt Jack Murdock die. Heard the gunshot six blocks away, smelled the cordite and blood when he found the body. His father had refused to throw a fight for the mob, and they'd killed him for it.
That was the night Matt decided the world was broken and maybe, just maybe, he could help fix it.
Law school was torture disguised as education. Sitting in lecture halls where he could hear every student's breathing, every nervous swallow, every lie the professors told when they pretended the justice system actually worked. But he needed the degree, needed the legitimacy. Street justice was one thing, but real change happened in courtrooms.
Foggy Nelson became his anchor to sanity. The guy who could make him laugh even when the sensory overload got so bad Matt wanted to claw his own ears off. Foggy, who never treated him like a charity case or a inspiration porn story. Just a friend who happened to be blind.
Columbia Law was where he met her.
Elektra Natchios walked into his life like a hurricane in designer shoes. She smelled like expensive perfume and danger, and when she spoke, her voice had an accent that made Matt think of knives hidden in silk scarves.
"You're the blind boy everyone's talking about," she said the first time they met, sitting down next to him in Constitutional Law like she belonged there.
"Depends on what they're saying," Matt replied.
"That you're brilliant. That you memorize everything you hear. That you never lose an argument."
"Two out of three isn't bad."
She laughed, and the sound hit him like electricity. "Which one's wrong?"
"I lose arguments all the time. I just make sure they're the ones that don't matter."
Elektra taught him things they didn't cover in law school. How to move like water, how to read people through the rhythm of their breathing, how to kill someone with a pencil if the situation called for it. She was dangerous and beautiful and completely insane, and Matt fell for her so hard he forgot how to breathe.
"You could be so much more than this," she told him one night, both of them bruised and bloody from taking down a human trafficking ring. "Stop playing by their rules. The law is just another cage."
"The law is what separates us from animals."
"No, Matthew. Conscience is what separates us from animals. The law is what protects the guilty."
She left him for the Hand, chose her father's legacy over whatever they'd built together. Matt found her body two years later in a warehouse, killed by Bullseye while he was stuck in court arguing a case he couldn't win.
He held her while she died, and something inside him broke that never quite healed.
Nelson & Murdock opened with two desks, a shared secretary, and enough idealism to power a small city. They took the cases nobody else wanted. Domestic violence victims, illegal immigrants, kids caught up in gang violence. Cases that paid in gratitude instead of money, but Matt told himself that was the point.
The red costume came later, born from frustration and rage and the growing certainty that the legal system was rigged against the people who needed it most. He called himself Daredevil because someone had to be crazy enough to fight crime with billy clubs and acrobatics.
Kingpin ruled Hell's Kitchen like a feudal lord, and Matt spent five years trying to bring him down. Wilson Fisk was everything Matt hated about the world, corrupt, powerful, untouchable. A man who bought judges like other people bought groceries.
The war between them destroyed everything Matt cared about. Fisk discovered his identity, targeted his friends, burned down his life piece by piece. Karen Page overdosed on heroin in Fisk's brothel. Foggy nearly died from a heart attack brought on by stress and fear.
Matt brought Fisk down eventually, but the victory tasted like ashes. The Kingpin went to prison, and three more crime bosses moved in to fill the void. Nothing changed. Nothing ever changed.
The years blurred together after that. New costumes, new enemies, new tragedies. He saved Hell's Kitchen a dozen times over, and it stayed just as broken as before. The neighborhood chewed up heroes and spat out corpses, and Matt kept fighting because he didn't know how to stop.
He trained others. Elektra came back from the dead, because death was apparently negotiable if you knew the right people. She left again. They all left, eventually. Even Foggy moved to California, tired of watching his best friend slowly kill himself one rooftop at a time.
Matt grew old alone, patrolling streets that never got any safer, fighting criminals who multiplied like roaches. His body accumulated scars and broken bones like other people collected stamps. His hearing got sharper, but his reflexes got slower. His faith, once ironclad, developed cracks that let doubt seep in like water through stone.
The end came on a Tuesday night in February. Three teenagers with guns, robbing a bodega owned by an old Dominican woman who reminded Matt of his grandmother. They were high on something that made them jumpy and paranoid, and when Matt tried to talk them down, one of them panicked.
The bullet caught him in the chest, between two ribs, finding the one spot his armor didn't quite cover. Matt dropped the kid who shot him, then sat down heavily against a brick wall while the other two ran away screaming.
Mrs. Esperanza found him there twenty minutes later, blood pooling in the alley behind her store.
"Dios mío," she whispered, kneeling beside him. "Should I call an ambulance?"
Matt smiled, tasting copper. "Too late for that."
"Your family?"
"Don't have any."
She took his hand in both of hers. Her fingers were rough from a lifetime of work, but warm. "Everyone has family, mijo."
Matt closed his eyes and listened to Hell's Kitchen one last time. Sirens and shouting and babies crying and couples fighting and music drifting from apartment windows. The symphony of a city that never stopped moving, never stopped hoping, never stopped breaking hearts.
He'd spent thirty years trying to save it, and maybe he had. Maybe those three kids would think twice before picking up guns again. Maybe Mrs. Esperanza would live to see her grandchildren grow up. Maybe that was enough.
Matthew Murdock died with his hand in a stranger's grip, listening to the heartbeat of a city he'd loved and lost and loved again.
And somewhere in a medical bay three thousand miles away, James Olsen's eyes snapped open to a world he could no longer see but suddenly understood better than he ever had before.
The machines around him were screaming alerts, but what James heard was Mrs. Esperanza's heartbeat, steady and strong. What he smelled was fear and antiseptic and something metallic that might have been his own blood.
What he felt was thirty years of pain and wisdom and brutal, necessary knowledge settling into his bones like it had always belonged there.
He tried to speak, to tell someone he was awake, but his throat felt like sandpaper. Instead, he just lay there and listened to the symphony of STAR Labs around him. Doctors running in the hallway, machines humming, someone crying in the room next door.