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outshinethestars · 1 year

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Abilities (Daredevil fic)

Matt touches the back and seat of a chair before he sits down. He does it every single time, as habit. He does it when no one would notice him not doing it, and when no one is there to see it at all. He’d do it as Daredevil, if Daredevil ever had cause to sit in a chair, unless someone was watching and he caught himself.

He does it, every time without thinking. Just a quick verification, there’s the back of the chair, there’s the seat. And the thing is, Matt doesn’t know whether he does it because he’s blind, or because he pretends to be.

It’s not like he doesn’t know where chairs are. Chairs are simple objects, flat horizontal and vertical surfaces. The way sound bounces off a wooden or plastic or metal chair is distinct and precise and extremely easy to understand. Padded chairs are more muffled, but still, Matt would have some serious problems doing his night work if he couldn’t understand chairs.

But there’s a difference, between being able to figure something out, even automatically, even almost subconsciously, and being able to feelsomething, or see it, for that matter.

So he verifies. Practiced movements without thinking. And he doesn’t need to, but it would feel odd not to, just a little unsure.

But then again, is that really any different than if he could see? It’s habit, he’s done it since he was nine years old. If he could see, and he’d still been used to feeling out chairs before he sat in them, wouldn’t that still feel natural? Wouldn’t it still be a comfort to have that verification, be nice not to have to look where he was sitting? The thing is, it’s not worth it for sighted people to get into the habit of touching the backs and seats of chairs, not when they can see them. But If Matt had never had to learn to begin with, if he’d always been able to use his senses the way he does now, if he didn’t have to pretend, would it be worth it for him either? Would the small extra effort, small extra inconvenience, be worth it for the tiny extra sureness, if it wasn’t habit to have that reassurance already?

The thing is, he doesn’t know.

And there are so many things like that, so many tiny little gestures, movements. So many ways in which he understands and interacts with the world, unconsciously, instinctively, that he uses because he’s blind, because he was taught how to be blind, because he pretends to be blind.

He’s a fraud, he knows it, he just doesn’t know how much of one.

There are some things that he needs as much as any blind person, having super senses doesn’t tell him what color his clothes are or help him read a screen. And there are some things that he doesn’t need at all, parts of the blind man act that are purely annoyances that he’s happy to leave behind as daredevil.

But in between there are so many other little things, parts of living as a blind person that sighted people don’t even think about. There are things that he doesn’t need but make life easier, and things that he doesn’t need at all but are nonetheless ingrained, indelibly a part of him, and it’s hard to make sense of which are which, hard to dissect his life and find the lies that he has lived so long that they are part of his bones.

Karen said to him once, kindly, “You know, you can drop the blind act when it’s just us. It doesn’t matter when it’s only me and Foggy who’ll see.”

And Matt didn’t know how to explain to her that he didn’t know how to drop it, that he didn’t know how much of it was an act. So he avoided the explanation, shrugged his shoulders and said, “You never know when someone’ll walk through the door.” And she and Foggy accepted it.

It was a lie. Matt would know. Matt would know before they even got close.

That horrible night, when Foggy found out, he asked if Matt was even blind.

He didn’t actually mean it that way. After being Matt’s friend for so long, after living with him for seven years, of course Foggy knew Matt was blind, that couldn’t be faked, Foggy couldn’t have failed to notice.

Foggy asked “Are you even blind?” the way he might have asked, “Are you even from Hell’s Kitchen,” or “Are you even Jack Murdock’s boy?”. The idea that Matt was Daredevil was such a complete impossibility to him, he was asking, “Do I even know anything about you? Is everything I know, even the most basic, fundamental things, a lie?” He still thought Daredevil was some sort of terrorist, and he was either drunk or hungover at that point, he could be forgiven for being a little irrational.

Of course, that implied that the most basic, fundamental thing Foggy knew, the thing he thought of when he thought of Matt Murdock, was that he was blind. That was its own kind of gut twisting wrong.

But regardless, Foggy asked: “Can you see?”

And Matt replied: “In a manner of speaking.”

In a manner of speaking, Matt can see. In a manner of speaking his very life is a deception. In a manner of speaking, Matt has trained his whole body to lie so thoroughly and for so long that he doesn’t even know where the lies end and the truth begins.

Of course, purely as a matter of fact, Matt is as blind as anyone.

There are many, many problems with the Sokovia Accords, many reasons they are unconstitutional, many reasons they are unethical. But the one, selfish, personal reason that Matt hates them, the reason that Matt wants to burn every single copy and never think about them again, makes him want to build a bonfire and then add Ross to the pile, is this:

The Accords define a superpowered person as “someone who, through either technology or biological differences, possesses abilities that are far superior to those of a normal human.”

What the hell kind of eugenicist bullshit is that? What does it even mean? And what the fuck is a “normal human” supposed to be anyway?

Matt isn’t superior to anyone any more than he’s inferior.

The idea that someone could get to decide. The idea that someone could look at Matt, look at the whole, ugly, complicated mess of his existence, look at the accident that blinded him and gave him the ability to smell a fart a mile away and decide. The idea that someone might one day analyze him, might look at the hearing that makes the world so loud he can’t hear himself think some days, the hearing that lets him hear a heartbeat or a person screaming from across his city, might look at his sense of touch that’s so sensitive that right after the accident everything hurt so much, was so much, that he literally thought he’d died and gone to hell, a sense of touch that’s so sensitive and exact that he can feel a person’s body heat from ten feet away, depending on the weather, that he can read their heat signature and know almost exactly where their body is in space. The idea that someone could look at all of that and weigh the pros against the cons, decide whether or not the “enhancements” outweigh the “impairments”, look at all of it in aggregate and decide whether it makes him “superior” to someone “normal”, and then, finally, decide whether or not it’s enough to classify him as a deadly weapon instead of a person.

It makes Matt seethe. It makes him so furious he can’t think straight. Matt doesn’t know what he is. He certainly isn’t letting anyone else decide.

Matt doesn’t know. He doesn’t know how much of being blind is an act he’s playing for the whole world and himself. He doesn’t know if the senses are worth it, doesn’t know what he’d choose if God came down and gave him the option to never have been “enhanced” at all. (Well, he does know, because without his senses there’d be no Daredevil, and he knows every single person that Daredevil has saved. But he doesn’t know if the senses, on balance, make life better or worse for him. )

Matt doesn’t know to what extent he’s a fraud. He doesn’t know how much is need, and how much is help, and how much is act. He has the nagging feeling that he’s cheating, but he can’t quite pinpoint what he’s cheating at.

Alone at the brand new Nelson and Murdock and Page, Matt traces his finger lightly over the back and the seat of his new office chair before he sits down at his new desk. He doesn’t know whether he does it because he’s blind or because he pretends to be, but maybe that doesn’t matter.

The Sokovia accords are wrong. They’re wrong about the human experience, and they’re wrong about humanity. You can’t put a dividing line with “normal” people on one side and “powered” ones on the other, human beings don’t work like that, they’re more complicated than that. People are just people, made of infinite diversity and infinite potentials, living their lives as best they can.

So maybe Matt doesn’t need to define his existence. Maybe he doesn’t have to litigate his every movement, his every fleeting, unconscious gesture.

For better or worse, God has created him as he is, face full of weird chemicals and all. So maybe it’s okay, maybe he’s allowed, maybe there isn’t any cheating. Maybe a part of himself is an act, maybe it has to be, but maybe that’s okay, too. Maybe he’s allowed to exist as he is in this moment, the person that his life has built him into.

And maybe someday he’ll be able to put all of this into words for Foggy and Karen, and maybe someday they’ll understand. But maybe he doesn’t need to, maybe he doesn’t owe them anything.

Sitting alone in his office chair, Matt thinks that maybe, just maybe, he’s allowed to simply be. That act or no, that regardless of what he needs or doesn’t, there is nothing wrong with what he is. Maybe his existence is acceptable, maybe his place in the world is acceptable, maybe it’s his right to take up the space he takes. The Accords were wrong, Foggy was wrong, Matt was wrong. And maybe that’s okay too. There, in the comparative quiet, Matt thinks that maybe, just maybe, there’s nothing wrong with him at all.

#Daredevil (TV)#Matt Murdock #fic and fic-like things #my stuff

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