Chapter Text
Matt knows what it’s like to have a knife shoved into his body and dragged until there’s almost nothing left to keep his feelings, let alone his organs, inside. He can hear disappointment in the unsteady ticking of people’s hearts. Sometimes in the night he remembers why he didn’t yell when Stick took him into the basement, and he buries his head in his pillow and screams to make up for all the years of silence. He knows pain and rejection like he knows what darkness looks like, or what Foggy smells like, or what Karen’s hair sounds like when it brushes against her shoulders.
And that’s why Foggy can’t understand. Matt Murdock has never left an obsession behind—and honestly, that’s what it was, that’s what the prayer and fasting were, a deep obsession with self-loathing and a Father who hated him—no matter how small, never let anything go without a fight, and for the life of him, all Foggy can do is sputter in response at this pronouncement.
“You’re leaving the church?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Matt mumbles around his split lower lip. It’s just the two of them, so Foggy knows he’s not pretending when he stumbles to his couch, curling up into a fetal position like he wants to keep his heart inside his chest and doesn’t think it’ll stay there on its own.
Foggy follows him, questions filling the distance between them. “You have gone to mass every Sunday you’ve been physically able to since you were born. You lived in a Catholic orphanage. You-”
“‘Be careful of the Murdock boys,’” Matt interrupts. “‘They got the Devil in ‘em.’” His voice is so empty Foggy wonders if the angry vitality the spitfire lawyer has is somehow gushing out of one of his many open wounds right now. “That’s what she always said.” Matt’s hands slip into his hair, a traditional Murdock misery tactic, compulsively punishing himself when God hasn’t, and Foggy reaches for Matt’s hands to stop him, but Matt flinches so violently it freezes Foggy in his tracks.
“I know,” Foggy opts for instead. “You’ve told me.”
“‘They got the Devil in ‘em,’” he repeats. He licks his lip, and Foggy knows it probably stings. “I told Father Lantom that. Way back. I told him I had the Devil in me, and he wanted me in his church anyway. He really thought he could save me, or ease that Catholic guilt, but it’s not something that goes away. Not when you had it beat into you.” He laughs and it’s not funny, but Foggy’s starting to realize Matt has a special laugh for when he’s suffering. It’s like he’s laughing around a nail in his throat.
“Matt,” Foggy tries, his own voice garbled. “You’ve gotta know that’s not true. I mean, you’re as Catholic as they come. And no Devil starts his own law firm because he doesn’t think the corporate world helps the little guys enough.”
Matt’s not convinced, and if he’s not wearing a little crown of thorns, he’s trying to make himself hurt just as much with his nails on his scalp. But his hands suddenly jerk away from his head, moving towards his throat, and Foggy can’t watch his friend scratch his own neck or strangle himself, so even when Matt tries to move away Foggy keeps his hands inside of his, and now Matt’s sobbing, his glasses concealing nothing as his face turns wine red. His desperate breathing has to be opening up stitches somewhere in his body, and Foggy doesn’t need to read heartbeats to know that both of them are terrified of whatever is happening right now.
“If the Devil’s not inside me then why can I feel him?” he begs like Foggy has the answer, and his tone makes Foggy really wish he did. “I feel him in my fucking throat, clawing at me. He wants to be let out, and I can’t stop him.”
“M-”
“And I’m not talking about going out at night, I wish it was just this hot rage, I wish that’s what I felt in my soul. I can fix that, I can push that out, I can starve it and beat it but this isn’t fixable, Foggy, and I can’t keep walking into a room of people who hate me for something I can’t stop.” He gasps, and Foggy reaches a hand towards his hair, and Matt lets him comfort him. “I’m not choosing to go to Hell.”
Foggy has no idea what he means, so Matt opens his mouth like a prophet and lets the bloody story spill out.
“Nobody can see God, Matty,” his father answered simply.
“Then how do you know he’s real?”
Matt was five and had a lot of questions that scared him, so he asked his dad, who had never been scared of anything and probably never would be.
“Every time I look into your eyes and know that you’re safe, I know God’s real,” his dad told him honestly, patting Matt’s hair. He moved too quickly, though, and a raw cut on his palms that hadn’t healed properly (and hadn’t come from boxing) split again. Matt’s hair turned thick and sticky suddenly, and Jack Murdock jerked away, not wanting to contaminate his son any more.
“Dammit,” he muttered as Matt stood up. A child shouldn’t know how to clean a wound, but people like the Murdocks don’t get to be children. Matt got out the bandages and a washcloth to soak up the blood and rushed back to his dad who was glaring at his hand like it had betrayed him. He reached for his dad’s hand, but he took the supplies from Matt to bandage it himself. Matt sat down and hunched in on himself a little. He had been hoping that he could prove to his dad he could keep his hands steady without liquor, but now he watched in silence and hoped he could prove himself soon. Once the wound was cleaned and wrapped, Jack turned to his son and grinned, but faltered when he remembered that Matt’s hair shouldn’t be that dark of a red.
He led Matt to the bathroom to run cold water through his hair, tilting Matt’s head over the edge of the tub. Matt didn’t shiver because he knew that Hell was fiery and cloying, like a hot summer day when the Devil leaks into more than just the Murdock boys, so this bathtub with a broken water faucet would be the closest to Heaven he’d get until he died.
“Do you go to Hell if you don’t go to church?” he asked, thinking about the broken air conditioning at mass.
“No. But you should always try to go. It’s about respect.”
“Respect for God?”
His father nodded.
“Why do people sin if they’ll go to Hell?”
His father’s hands stopped moving in his hair. Matt looked up at him, the light behind his father’s head echoing off his hair like a halo in old paintings. “Because sometimes they don’t have a choice, Matty. It’s God’s job to judge and no one else’s.”
Matt couldn’t understand the intensity of his father’s words. He couldn’t understand how anyone would choose to sin, or why God would make a world where people had to choose an unrighteous path. He closed his eyes as his dad poured water over his hair.
“I want to meet God,” he declared.
His dad chuckled. “Nobody can see God, Matty.”
The door slammed behind them, and Matt wanted to flinch even if he knew his dad wouldn’t lay a finger on him. The tension was thick, and Matt thought he could taste the Devil, but it was really just the blood in his mouth.
“A fight? A goddamn fight?” his father growled, tugging him to the kitchen counter to clean him up. Matt tried not to feel proud that his and his dad’s roles were switched. He was the one who had defended himself, today. That’s exactly what his dad was scared of, though.
“Don’t have anything to say about it, huh? I get called down there in the middle of the day, and I’m worried sick thinking you’re not feeling well, and I hear you punched a kid square in the jaw and fought him to the ground?”
“It was a check hook,” Matt argued, knowing it was more trouble than it was worth. “He was already comin’ for me.”
Hearing the term fall from his son’s mouth made Jack stop dead. The washcloth he had in his hands was millimeters from the water, but for a long moment he couldn’t move it the extra space and get it wet. He sighed, a heavy weight falling on his shoulders, and Matt looked away, knowing he had caused it.
“Why’d you do it, Matty? You know your old man’s no example for how to handle this kinda stuff.” He wrung the washcloth out and dabbed it roughly against Matt’s face.
“He called me a name.”
“That’s no reason-”
“I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was bad. He spit it at me, like I’d done something wrong, and I knew I hadn’t, and I just got so…” he trailed off, not wanting to admit to Battlin’ Jack Murdock that he’d been so scared he’d seen red. Was this what his grandma meant about the Devil?
His dad’s voice was as tense as his hands. “What’d he call you?”
He met his dad’s eyes. Neither of them moved. Matt felt like he was in confession, except the priests weren’t supposed to judge. He didn’t know what the word meant, but he knew somehow his dad would.
“He called me ‘queer.’” The word tasted like fire. He wanted a cold shower.
The Devil came to Jack Murdock in fights, came to him in seething rage and whiskey and bad money. He’d always thought he could keep Matt away from it. But maybe the Devil had come in a different form for his son.
He hadn’t moved or spoken, and Matt wanted to cry, wanted to see if pain and fear could make salt water holy. Finally, he murmured, “Am I queer?”
His dad’s eyes moved away from him, and began moving again, sluggish and heavy. “No. You’re not. Don’t ever use that word again, alright? It’s a cruel word. But you ain’t it.”
Matt got down on his knees that night, his hands clinging so tightly together that he wouldn’t have been surprised to pull them apart and see they looked like his dad’s. When he was younger, he used to pray for God to come visit him. Now, he begged God to keep the Devil out of his body.
“I know it’s selfish,” he whispered, careful not to let his dad hear. “I know I’m asking a lot. But I can’t be queer. I can’t have the Devil, not like that. Make me angry, God, make me fight good like my dad. Just don’t make me what those boys thought I was.”
He fumbled into bed with his eyes still closed. He always kept them closed after praying to stop himself from the disappointed pang in his chest that came from realizing God wasn’t there with him. He kept them closed knowing that no one could see God, but maybe God would let Matt hear Him, or smell him, or touch him. He hadn’t yet, but that’s what kept Matt praying.
Jack Murdock waited until Matt was asleep to pray, just like he always did. Every night he prayed for his son. For the Devil not to find him, for Jack’s suffering to be enough, for Matt to get into a good school and become a real man. Jack knew he shouldn’t be drunk when praying, but if wine was as divine as blood, vodka had to be close to holy water somehow. And after looking his son in the eyes and hearing that word on his tongue, he needed something to make the cut around his soul a little less sharp.
“Dear Father,” he attempted around the lump in his throat. He had been hoping drinking would make the words slide out a little easier, but they hardened and stuck like they wanted to choke him. “I’m sorry to even ask this. I love my boy, I really do. And life’s gonna be tough on him. We ain’t got money, and I’m working to keep him in a good school, I really am. He gets bullied. He’s gonna take after me, I can feel it. I know there ain’t nothing wrong with it, but… he can’t be like that. Make him as normal as he can be, please. I can’t watch him go through all that. I can’t watch him hurt anymore than he does.”
Unfortunately for Jack Murdock, he wouldn’t have to watch it. Neither would Matt.
Nobody can see God.
“I can’t see! I can’t see!” he screamed, clutching his father’s arms so hard he could feel himself drawing blood, but he couldn’t stop.
“It’s okay, don’t touch your eyes Matt, it’s okay-”
He thrashed, trying to shove his dad away and pull him closer at once, and he couldn’t tell what was covering his face, but it burned so bad he wanted to rip his own skin off. His breathing became choking, and he heard his dad yelling but he didn’t know how to respond, and someone was screaming, a little boy, a little boy who was Matt, he realized, and then everything stopped.
The next thing he remembered were the sheets at the hospital. They scratched at his skin like sandpaper, and he tried to stay still so they wouldn’t irritate his skin. All of his senses flooded him, trying to make sense of the darkness. Something rough was covering his eyes, a heart monitor next to him was slowly picking up speed, and the scent of bleach was everywhere. It would have been too much if his hand wasn’t being held by his dad. He didn’t need to see to know his father’s calloused hands, or his cheap cologne, or his heavy breathing.
“Matty, it’s gonna be okay,” his father was whispering, and his father had never lied to him, not once, so why was Matt struggling to believe him?
He lifted the hand that wasn’t holding his dad’s to his face. His eyes were covered in bandages, and he started to pick at them.
“Hey, you can’t do that. The doctors wrapped you up pretty tight for a reason.”
“Dad,” he gasped out, starting to feel something rising in his chest. There was fire here, fire under his skin, fire in his gut that felt like the shot of whiskey he’d had once, and he couldn’t breathe. “Dad can they fix my eyes?” he asked, his voice cracking under the weight of the world.
His dad’s heart lurched, and why did he know that, why could he hear that, why could he hear everything now? There was a patient two rooms down telling her family she was dying, there was a nurse sobbing in the bathroom around the corner and Jesus, the smells, they were so much worse, he’d never smelled this much blood in his life, he hadn’t realized sickness even had a smell but he already knew it intimately, it smelled like terror and churches on Monday nights and he wanted it to all go away so badly.
A doctor rushed in, Matt could hear her, could feel her move the air, and distantly he heard a heart monitor racing and his dad panicking, asking what was wrong but—
Nobody can see God. But Matt Murdock could feel the Devil.
Once, before she died, before Matt went blind, Jack Murdock’s mother had used the word ‘queer.’ She said it like the boys at school had, like it was sour on her tongue and like God might hate her even for thinking about it.
She’s the real Catholic, his dad always joked. Matt knew his grandma knew a lot of things, and when she said “God doesn’t want to see those queers like that,” he knew she was right.
“What’s that mean?” he asked, quiet enough his dad couldn’t hear it from the next room over.
“They’re perverts, Matty,” she hissed, shaking her head with a Catholic mix of pity and disgust. “Not something a good boy like you needs to worry about. They take love and spit on it.”
“They hate love?”
“They think love can happen outside a man and a woman.” She pointed her finger at him, and he felt like he was being accused. “God made Himself clear, it’s disgusting. They’ll go to Hell for it.”
“God hates them?” His stomach was falling. Did God hate him because the boys at school had called him that? Is that why He never let Matt see Him?
“‘You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.’ That’s what the Bible says. Couldn’t be any clearer, could it?”
“Ma,” Jack Murdock’s rough voice cut through the conversation. Matt jumped up, away from his grandma, as if he was guilty of her anger by association. “Matt doesn’t need to hear that. God forgives, don’t He?”
“Those who seek penance are forgiven. That’s not what those sinners are doing, they’re marching around-”
“Stop.” Jack took his son’s hand and pulled him towards the kitchen. “He’s young. He doesn’t need to hear about it all.”
“He’s a good boy, Jack. I’m just making sure he isn’t led astray.” She looked right at Matt, into his eyes, and he started to shake. That red fear pulsed through him, and he tightened his grip on his father’s hand. “Murdock boys. They’ve got the Devil in ‘em.”
She’s long gone, deeper in the ground than Jesus by the time Matt Murdock is forced to wear a suit that feels like a noose and stand still at his father’s grave. A nun from St. Agnes had brought him here and was standing next to him, and she had introduced herself as if he was listening when they’d first met. He senses felt stronger than ever, and he could hear the dirt being tossed on his father’s coffin, taste the liquor on the breath of a man two stones down, smell the grass that had been mowed that very day, and most of all he could feel the loneliness, the complete lack of people to join him in mourning the most important man in the world.
Battlin’ Jack Murdock had been paid to lose that fight. And now he had dignity, but no money and no life to show for it. Six feet of respectable dirt must have been worth it, but Matt didn’t understand. He didn’t want to.
His nightmares at the orphanage are always plagued by the cold, even in the hottest stretches of New York summer.