Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Jack stopped going to Clinton Church long before he went and married a nun and gave all the old biddies something to stare at when Sunday rolled around. 

Back in the day, there wasn’t a Sunday where you wouldn’t find the Murdock family all lined up in a pew, all stuffed in their Sunday best and sitting up straight for the Lord. They’d be a bit ramshackle--there was never a week without one of the Murdock boys sporting a fresh shiner to go with his dress shirt and tie--but by God, they were there, and anyone in the congregation would tell you that you couldn’t find a more devout family around. 

Jack wonders what they would tell you if they knew just how badly his father had beaten him the night before. The Devil always got loud in Daddy before it was time to be with the Lord. He’d drink until his face was red, and then he’d get loud, and he’d get mean. And then he’d start swinging. Sometimes, Jack suspects the only lesson his father ever taught him was how to take a punch. 

Come Sunday morning, his father would be full of repentance, and would swear up and down that his life belonged to Christ and Christ alone. He’d sit in a pew with his hands pressed tight with fervor, and he’d promise Jesus above that he’d never touch another drop. Sunday leaves, week passes, Saturday night comes through again and Dad stumbles in the front door stinking of whiskey. 

Funny thing about clockwork is that sometimes you break before the gears do. Clock keeps ticking, no matter how goddamn hard you try to stop it.

After he left, and started putting his skills at getting hit to use by getting paid for it, he could never bring himself to go back to Clinton Church. He was convinced he’d go in, see Daddy with his cheeks still red and hands raised to God, and he’d realize he was still a little boy wearing his brother’s hand-me-down dress shoes. Dad went into the ground, sooner rather than later, thanks to the fact that Saturday night kept cropping up every week. Jack didn’t go to Clinton for the funeral, and found he couldn’t forgive himself enough to go for any other reason. 

Things work out, in the end. Sometimes, you knock up an aspiring nun, and Jack’s been Catholic long enough to know that he’d find himself awfully lonely during the sign of peace. Wasn’t a congregation for him to miss by the time he and Maggie found each other. 

After Matty was born, he tried again. He waited until Matty was bigger. Old enough not to cry, at least, which means maybe no one would realize how piss-poor Jack was at being his Daddy. And old enough to give Maggie some time to get to heal. He thought, maybe, Maggie might like to see her baby as he got older, even if she wasn’t going to be raising him.  

He doesn’t know if she ever did. Maggie, she never made an appearance with the rest of the nuns at the masses he brought Matty to. But he kept bringing him, just a couple of times a month.

He knows Maggie, as sure as he knows Matty. Just because he don’t see her, it doesn’t mean that she isn’t there. If she didn’t want to see Matty at all, then she would have found a way to make herself clear enough. 

In the end, his and Matty’s occasional masses at Clinton had to come to an end too. Accident happened, Matty lost his sight, and he started having all these issues with his senses. Doctor insisted it was normal, but fuck if Jack believed them. Matty would start gagging on the smell of incense before they even turned the corner down the block, and he never made through the front doors again. Jack had to find a new mass for every week, not just Clinton, because the other church they went to used incense too. He spent ages finding one that never used the stuff, not even Easter or Christmas, where priests start acting like God Himself asked them to trigger the fire alarms. 

He’s in Clinton now. He didn’t know where else to go. He guesses it makes sense that he came here. When you don’t know where else to go, you, you just go home.  

“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” says Father, on the other side of the screen. 

He must not smell the blood. 

“Bless me Father,” says Jack. 

For I have sinned. That’s how it goes. You sin because you’re human and you tell someone about it for much the same. His Daddy taught him the words, and then he taught him in practice, getting drunk and swinging his fists and leading by example with how goddamn stupid a man can be. Whenever Jack asked any priest to bless him, he passed it up in his head for his father instead. If there ever was a man who could use some blessings, it was Jack’s Daddy, because it wasn’t like he had any fucking other thing going for him.

Jack doesn’t want to lend his father any blessings right now. He needs them all for his baby. 

Jack taught Matty his prayers. Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, Act of Contrition, St. Michael and all his battles. Back when he first left his father’s house, he couldn’t find it in himself to give a fuck as to where he spent eternity. Couldn’t imagine heaven after living in that shithole for so long, and couldn’t see how hell would be any different. 

But he wanted more for Matty. He wanted to give him the whole damn Pearly Gates. 

Instead, all he ever managed was another stinking shithole with rats in the walls and mold in the vents. He wonders if the prayers ever did enough to let Matty believe there’d ever be more. 

He hopes the prayers did enough. He hopes they do that and more, because he needs more right now. He’d take all of heaven and hell if St. Peter offered. 

“Bless me Father,” Jack tries again. “For I have… Just, just bless me, Father, please, please, bless me--”

Father Lanthom’s voice catches. “Is everything alright?” 

That’s not how this goes. But Jack’s already fucked it, hasn’t he? He’s messed it all up, and he can’t remember the damn words that will fix this. 

“I’ve been prideful. I did something I wasn’t supposed to because I wanted--I wanted--” His voice breaks. He brings a hand up to swipe away the tears, and red streaks across his face, red over his eyes and the bridge of his nose. Like all the blood that poured from Matty’s face with the accident, after the acid started eating at his skin. Jack can’t forget how loudly his baby screamed. And he’s tried, by God. “I just wanted my boy to be proud of me.”

“It’s not a sin to want to do right by your child,” says Father, gently. “Though sometimes we sin in its pursuit.”

“It’s a sin. Oh God--not even God could forgive what I’ve done to my boy. I’d do anything to fix it, Father. Please--I’d do anything, there has to be something, I just, whatever it is, I’ll, I’ll--”

There’s a pause at the other side of the screen. Father must finally smell the blood.

“If someone is hurt, an ambulance needs to be called,” says Father, voice level as can be. There’s a tremor to it, though. Barely there. Jack can always tell when someone’s afraid. He spent so much of his life being it. “I have a telephone. We can send it to where Matt is, Jack.”

“I don’t know where he is,” confesses Jack. “I swear to God, Father, Father, I’d be there right now, I’d bring my boy home but--they took him, Father, they took him and I tried to get them to tell me where but they wouldn’t tell me and--I--I--I just wanted Matty back, Father. I would have stopped if they told me where Matty was.”

Another pause. Clothes shifting. Father rises from his seat in the confessional and a moment later Jack hears the door open and Father steps out. His footsteps round the box, and Jack can see his shadow through the wicker of the screen as he stops before Jack’s door. 

This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. None of this is happening the way it was supposed to go. It was supposed to be Jack who paid for this. 

The confessional door creeps open, and the light creeps in with it, and Jack can see the look on Father’s face when he sees him, with the blood and the bruises and the tears streaking his face. 

“Oh Jack,” says Father Lantom, his voice heavy. 

“They took my boy,” says Jack, as if it were a prayer. And, “I would have stopped if they had just given my boy back.”

…

The public defender says that Jack best plead guilty to all charges, considering he did as much when he blubbered the whole story to the police. He says he’ll do what he can but Jack’s going to jail for a long time, and he’ll be an old man when he walks out again, if he ever does. Jack says that’s just fine by him, so long as someone finds his boy. He’d sit in a metal square until Elijah climbed down from heaven to witness the world and its tombstones and all the damn garments of white if it meant that someone went and found Matty. 

“The police are doing the best they can to find Matthew,” the public defender tells him, face unmoved. “Right now, we need to focus on your own case. You’re facing serious charges, Mr. Murdock.” 

Jack already goddamn knows that. Does he think Jack doesn’t know that? He killed the bastards himself. 

…

There’s a phone in the prison block. Black, plastic, smells like petroleum. Cradle always clicks when he picks it up, and a robotic voice reminds him that all calls are recorded. He gets one fifteen minute call per week, and he uses every last one to call the detective in charge of Matty’s case. Every damn one. There’s no one else on the outside that matters. His baby is the only goddamn person in the world left to care about, and he’d spend every last minute of his life to fix what he did to his boy.

Six months in, the receptionist doesn’t quite cover the phone enough during the handoff. 

“It’s that guy with the missing blind boy again,” she says, and her voice sounds prim and distant, like she’s relaying the weather. “Someone oughta tell him his kid’s not coming back.” 

Jack breaks the cradle when he slams the phone back down. Loses his phone privileges for a good long while for that one, but it doesn’t matter. 

Ain’t no one on the outside to call. 

…

This is the thing:

Matthew Murdock is not dead. 

As stupid as he is, he knows what everyone thinks. The door was busted down and his boy’s blood was on the floor, and the sort of men that took him weren’t the kind to keep him alive longer than his use. And his baby was a tiny thing. Blind. Ain’t no way for him to defend himself against big men with big guns. 

He isn’t dead. 

Jack can’t explain it. It’s faith, he supposes. The only religion he wants now that God’s abandoned him. The certainty lives in his bones and Jack will trap it there, keep it there, let it live on in him so that way his boy will keep living too. Matt Murdock lives and breathes and Jack, Jack would do anything to find him again. 

He fantasizes about it, sometimes. The guard calls him, finds him in the yard, bangs on the door of his cell. He tells him, “Murdock, you got a visitor,” and Jack squints at him through puffy eyes and says, “There ain’t no one around to visit me,” and the guard says, “Murdock, get your dumb ass off the bunk, I don’t have time for this.” 

Jack, he shrugs, shuffles to his feet, stretches and drags the walk along as he wonders what poor fuck is about to miss a visit because they grabbed the wrong poor fuck. He turns the corner, walks through a metal door to the visiting booths with all its petroleum black phones lined up along bulletproof glass. 

His baby sits on the other side. His cane’s propped on one side and he’s already got his phone in his one hand, and he’s the most beautiful goddamn sight that Jack has ever seen. 

He’s the most beautiful thing Jack has ever seen.

Jack rushes to the phone back, picks up his own plastic handle, and brings it to his ears with shaking hands. And Matty, his boy, his baby, he opens his mouth and says, “Jesus, Dad, you really were too stupid to even try.”

…

Because that’s the other thing, isn’t it? Jack’s baby is out there, and there ain’t a goddamn soul in the world looking for him. And that’s Jack’s fault. 

He’s a stupid man. He’s always been a stupid man. He knew that, and he told himself that that didn’t matter, because Matty got all his unused brains and then some. Matty was the smart one, the brilliant one, the one who’d make something of himself some day. Jack was just the sack of bones and meat that could take a hit to keep a roof over his head until that point. 

A smarter man wouldn’t be sitting on his ass in a cell while strangers hurt his boy. A smarter man wouldn’t have let it happen in the first place. 

That’s the thing. The thing where this is all Jack’s fault. Jack’s the big, stupid piece of shit that fucked around with the mob and didn’t think that it would blow back on his boy. Jack’s the dumb fuck-up who killed the only folks who could have told him where his baby was, and now there’s no one left to tell and no one outside to ask. 

He’s sitting in a cell with years upon years hanging over his head, and he robbed Matty of the only person out there to look for him. He can’t even hire a private investigator to look. He’s got no money, no resources, and no one who gives a shit. Which means that somewhere out there, his boy is out there getting hurt, and there is no one trying to save him. 

That’s the bit that Jack can’t forgive himself for. 

…

Of course, there are people who visit, or at least try to visit, but they’re not Matty so Jack won’t see them. Fogs comes a few times. The boys from the gym. But Jack will never see him. His daddy never had a problem facing his family after hurting his kid, but Jack isn’t his daddy. He won’t look his family in the eyes knowing what he did to their boy. 

And that was Matty. The village’s baby. He spent every goddamn day of his life since he was small in that gym, under every foot, and Jesus, he was loved. Matty was so goddamn good at being loved. 

It aches, the thought of that damn empty folding table in Fogwell’s gym, with no Matty to sit in it. Jack knows that Fogs left it up, same way he knows that his locker is still untouched. Fogwell is a tough son of a bitch, but he was also a sentimental one. He would never get rid of his grandbaby’s table. 

Fogwell believed in him so goddamn much. Potential, he said. Jack can’t face him. Not as he is now. He sent him a letter one day, begging him to keep up the search for Matty, and didn’t read the one he got in return. 

One day, the guard finds him in the yard and says, “Visitor.”

Jack doesn’t get up from his place on the ground. “If it ain’t my kid, I don’t want to see them.”

And the guard says, “Some nun says she’s your wife.”

Jack gets up. 

…

Maggie looks the same. 

She always had a sort of sharp beauty, and Jack, he was always good at shoving his hand on things that cut him. She was always stern. Tough as nails. Small enough that she seemed like she could take flight, but Jack knew she wouldn’t. Bones of steel, heavy to her center, never so much as trembled. Except after the baby. After their son. When Maggie was nothing but hurt and Jack couldn’t reach her. 

There are wrinkles around her eyes that weren’t there before. 

When Jack sits at the other end of the glass, he picks up his petroleum phone and puts it to his ear. Maggie hasn’t touched hers. She just stares at him. With a solid, unflinching stare. The generous part of Jack reminds him that Matty was her baby too. 

But the part of him that walked through a busted-in door to find his baby’s broken cane on the ground and his blood on the floor only cares that she picked to leave him. Couldn’t even goddamn bother to see him in Sunday mass. 

With steady movements, she pulls a handkerchief from her sleeve. She covers her other hand with the other sleeve and uses it to pick up the end of her plastic phone, and, with meticulous care, wipes the receiver down with her little white handkerchief. She tucks it back down her sleeve, then brings the handle to her ear. 

Jack says, “He answer any of your prayers?”

Maggie hangs up without a word. 

…

People don’t bother him much in prison. It was a problem at first--people thought it’d be a good idea to take on the guy with all the murder charges, make a name for themselves off Jack--but it stopped being a problem after Jack let the Devil out a few times. Most of the time, when someone starts causing trouble, Jack hits and hits and hits until he can’t feel his hands and the swelling, endless ache is gone from behind his eyes. Sometimes, though, sometimes he just stands there while the guy pummels him, lets the guy hit him ‘til their hands break and it’s not enough, it’s never enough, because nobody knows where his kid is. Sometimes Jack thinks that if he just took enough hits the fact that Matty’s gone would knock out his ears and he wouldn’t have to think it anymore. 

Hell is made for the Devil, Jack knows. It’s made to hurt him. Torture him. Punish him for all his wrongdoings. And Jack really does wish he could call up St. Pete and tell him how goddamn sorry he is for all his sins, and he hopes that’s enough to put an end to it all because Jack can’t bring himself to suffer through atonement for a second longer.

They say Hell is the absence of God. Don’t really mention what the absence of your kids is, but Jack would reckon it’s much the same. 

…

There is one other visitor Jack gets while he’s in prison. 

Guard finds him in his cell. He bangs on the door with the back of his hand, and tells him, in a short, tired tone, “Visitor.”

Jack doesn’t stand. “If it ain’t my boy, I don’t want to see them.”

Guard says, “Stop wasting my goddamn time and get up, Murdock.”

For a second, Jack thinks about resisting. He thinks about telling him to go fuck himself and ending up in isolation for his trouble. 

But he dreamed about Matty the night before. His baby in that line of phone banks, cane propped at his side, ready to tell his daddy all the ways he failed him. And Jack thinks he’d be the happiest man alive, hearing what a shit dad he was, as long as it came out of his boy’s voice. 

He gets up. Lets the guard shackle him, shambles away to the line of phone banks. Before he can make it through the door, though, the guard jerks him. 

“Not there.”

“Huh?”

Guard grunts. “Contact visit.”

Jack slows to a stop. 

He hasn’t done a meeting that isn’t separated by glass and a telephone since he got here, but then again, he hasn’t done too many meetings at all. He can’t imagine why they’d change now. 

The guard jerks him. “Jesus, Murdock, keep walking.”

Jack stays as solid as a tree. “Who is it?”

“Murdock--”

“Who?”

The guard rolls his eyes. “Find out in ten fucking seconds, Murdock. Move it.”

Jack can hear his heart in his ears.

Thud. Thud. Thud. 

…

Thing is, Jack remembers having faith. 

He had it for a long time. Maybe he even had it after he stopped going to mass, after his daddy and all the screaming and screaming and wailing and wailing and he couldn’t quite figure out how to care whether St. Peter gave him the time of day. It wasn’t that he stopped believing. 

He just got tired. 

He believed even during Maggie, after Maggie, when Maggie came into his life and gave him Matty and almost took Matty from him again, and then she was gone back to the Lord’s house and it was just him and his baby. 

It was after Matty. Then. That was when it got hard to imagine a merciful god. 

But right now, he thinks about praying. 

He’s spent this entire time sitting on his ass waiting for a miracle. He’s a lump of driftwood past his prime, and it’s been a long time since it made any sense to still hope of his boy making his way back to him. 

But Jesus, he still can’t help but hope. He doesn't know why. 

It feels like a moment where miracles happen. 

…

The guy at the table has long blonde hair and eyes that work.

It was foolish anyway. Wouldn’t make any sense, his boy being found and only finding out when he comes himself to see Jack. They would’ve told him. There’s got to be some kind of law about it, telling folk’s daddies when they’re found. 

Guy at the table hops right up and shoves his hand in Jack’s direction. The guard makes some kind of noise about it in the back of his throat, but in the end, he just unlocks Jack and shuffles from the room. 

He’s never seen this guy in his life. 

He’s young, that's for sure. A little nervous, but lots of folks are when they’re in a prison for the first time. Dressed up in a fancy suit, but he can’t hide the sheen of a nervous sweat, or the slightly pinched look to his eyes. 

“Mr. Murdock?” says this guy, still holding out his hand. “My name is Foggy Nelson. You have no idea what a pleasure it is to meet you.”

…

Jack’s spent time in the prison library. 

He’s got access to all the law books his baby could dream of. That, that Lexis and Westlaw crap. Lots of folks mill about it, trying to figure out ways to get out of the box that most everyone in the building put themselves in. And yeah, Jack spent time like that too. Trying to figure out how to untangle the fucking knot his life. Back then, he still had hope for getting out and finding his boy.

He couldn’t even manage that. Matty could figure it out, Jack knows, but his boy got all the brains and then some in his bloodline. At first, he tried for a bit, but the sentences were long and confusing and the words always sent him scrambling for a dictionary. That wasn’t what did it in for him, though. Felt wrong, Jack getting a legal education when his baby was meant to be the lawyer. Didn’t feel like he deserved it. 

He looked up human trafficking. 

He looked up what happened to babies that were sold. 

When little kids ended up sold, they usually ended up in forced labor, child soldier situations, sexual explotation, or organ harvesting. Jack’s baby, he wouldn’t have been a good candidate for the first two, on account of the blindness. Wouldn’t have been valuable for it. 

Other two options have him throwing up in his cell.

But he didn’t stop reading. He couldn’t. Because his baby is not dead, which means this is the life Jack left to him. He had to read, you see, because he had to find him one day. 

That’s the promise he made to himself. If he gets a chance, he needs to go find Matty one day. 

Matty can hate him until he’s dead in the ground. Jack knows that he deserves it. But he needs to give Matty the chance to spit in the face for what he did. He’d be the happiest goddamn man in the world, having his boy around to hate him.

He never had a chance before to make it real. 

He never had to take it. 

…

“I didn’t have money for an attorney when they first put me in this hole,” Jack tells this guy as he sits. “I sure don’t have it now.”

“This is pro bono,” Foggy Nelson assures him. “Your case has caught the interest of my partner and myself. We think we may be able to secure your immediate release.”

That sounds like a load of horseshit if Jack’s ever heard it. Any lawyer good enough for that is one that isn’t giving services for free to washed-up old farts like him. 

“Uh-huh,” says Jack. “You boys been practicing long?”

“Well, our practice isn’t officially open yet,” he admits, grimacing slightly. “We got our bar cards this morning.”

Jack’s eyebrow’s fly up. “Why in the name of God do you want the first thing on your record to be a hopeless old asshole like me?”

“We’re interested, I told you,” says Nelson. “Both of us are from the Hell’s Kitchen area. We’re… familiar with your case. Also, my partner is Catholic. He has a thing for hopeless cases.” 

“Huh.” Jack can respect that. “Me too. Your partner here?”

Nelson’s eye twitches. “He couldn’t make it himself, unfortunately.”

“Too bad.” Jack shrugs. It’s a chance, if nothing else. Even if it looks like it’s a couple of kids looking to practice on someone already fucked. “Well, I ain’t gonna stop you from helping. Not like I can be hurt anymore. But I’m telling you, don’t go ruining your careers over a man best left to rot. I don’t have anyone waiting for me on the outside.” 

A strange look flickers across his face. “I wouldn’t underestimate us just yet, Mr. Murdock.” 

He opens his mouth, then, and looks like he’s got something else to say, but instead he just stands and gathers his things. 

“Well, congratulations,” he says, and he pumps his hand once. “You are officially the first unofficial client of the soon-to-be Nelson & Murdock law practice.” 

“Murdock?” Jack perks up. “Same name as me?”

“Uh, no.” Nelson’s eye twitches again. Jack wonders if something’s caught in it. “Murdoch, with an ‘h.’ No ‘k.’”

“Huh.” Still, though. “Small world.”

“Isn’t it?” says Nelson, sounding pained. 

…

This is the thing:

Long as Jack’s lived, he’s never had a stroke of luck. If life was a lottery, it had all the same odds as the one they sell to desperate fucks in gas stations. He didn’t get lucky breaks. He didn’t get super star lawyers waltzing in off the streets and handing him his life back without so much as him asking. 

So he can’t really explain why that’s just what happens. 

…

When the state’s attorney spots him on the day the judge tells him he’s free to go, he makes a beeline for him. Jack waits for some kind of movie moment, some point where he swears up and down he’ll see Jack back in orange, but instead he just pumps his hand and says, “The Murdoch fellow you hired. He have any relation to you?”

Huh? No. There ain’t no lawyers in his family. Matty was supposed to be the first. “Not that he’s clued me in on. Why?”

“I thought with how badly he went after me, he must have some kind of family tie,” says the state’s attorney, looking a bit pale at the memory. 

How about that? “You think I got someone special?”

“Mr. Murdock, he was the scariest shark I ever swam with,” says the state’s attorney, with all the wrinkles on his face. “I couldn’t believe he was just out of law school. I know men with decades of experience who wouldn’t have done half so well. I offered him a job on the spot, but he turned me down flat.”

Huh. Odd he wasn’t here today. Odd Jack never got to meet him. 

…

Because that’s the thing--Jack never met him. Not in all the time he was fighting his case. Nelson jumped to talk to him at any chance, but Murdoch might as well have been a ghost for all he made an appearance. 

Nelson always had these grand ol’ excuses too. Mobility issues, he said. Or a cold. Or he tripped. 

Sometimes, Jack wonders if he knows that his eye twitches when he lies. Seems like all the fancy education in the world can’t teach you something. 

…

He gets led down a hall and they hand him a pair of clothes and a tiny, itty bitty check representing a few decades of his work for the state and his personal belongings, which amounts to a picture of his baby and nothing more. They tell him they’re sure they’ll see him again as soon as he fucks this one up, and Jack looks at them for a good long time and says, “I ain’t coming back.”

And the guard snorts a little. Jack gets it. Man like him hasn’t seen the outside world in years. Most wouldn’t know what to do with the freedom. 

 “My boy’s waiting for me outside,” says Jack. He holds up the picture to make his point. “I ain’t coming back.”

And the guard must not know what he’s in for, because he says, “It’s good to have family still waiting for you, this long after.”

So Jack picks up his new clothes and tiny check and he gets out before someone can remind him that his baby is gone. He knows what he has to do well enough without some goddamn asshole putting it into words. 

It’s just him and his baby and the entire world between them. Jack will search every damn corner of it if that’s what it takes.

…

Nelson’s waiting for him outside.

He startles a little bit when he walks out the doors. Real jumpy fellow, him. Eye always twitching. Jack wonders why, before he decides it ain’t his business. He’s mighty grateful, whyever the fuck they did it, but he’s got bigger fish and the whole goddamn world to fry them in. Lawyer being a liar just seems like he’s a fit for his profession. 

“Murdoch ain’t coming for the finale?” he asks, because might as well.

“Mr. Murdoch’s mobility issues were acting up,” explains Nelson, and Jack wonders how the boy made it this far as an attorney without being able to tell a lie well. “He’s sorry for never quite being able to meet you in person, but you should know that he gave your case his absolute all.” 

“Oh, I don’t doubt that for a second.” Prosecution fellow looked like a man who just read his own death certificate by the end of it. “Just wanted to have a face to the name of the man who helped get me out.” 

“I could give him a call,” he says, and he looks like he regrets it immediately. “Give you a voice, at least?”

“I’d appreciate that.” 

Flashing him a pained smile, Nelson steps off to the side, digging the phone free from his pocket. He makes a couple of minutes of terse, hushed conversation before making his way back over to Jack, phone held out before him. 

Jack accepts it, raising it to his ear and saying, “Mr. Murdoch? It’s my understanding that you’re the man to thank for this.”

The line goes dead with a click.

 …

Nelson takes the phone back with an exasperated look on his face and mutters something about a dropped signal. 

“You know, it’s funny. I’ve gotten the sense through all this that Mr. Murdoch was the one in charge of my case, but you’re the only one I’ve seen. Don’t even have his first name.”

“Hm? Oh.” Another eye twitch. Boy really needs to see someone about that. “It’s Michael.”

“Michael?” Now he regrets asking. “That’s my little boy’s middle name.”

Another eye twitch. “Small world.”

Jack sure as hell hopes so. Gives him less space to rifle through. 

… 

Nelson waits until they’re at the taxi to offer him a sealed envelope. 

“We don’t do social work,” he tells him, shoving his hands deep in his pockets. “We don’t do any work, technically. We’re still opening the office. And it’s uh, technically a bit, uh, frowned upon for lawyers to do any, so maybe don't… mention it. But my partner wanted you to have this. To get back on your feet.”

He barely takes in a glimpse of the wad of green bills before he’s shoving it firmly back in his hand. 

“I appreciate everything you and Mr. Murdoch have done for me,” he informs him, voice clipped. “Hand to God, I don’t know why you bothered, but I’ll be grateful until the end of my days. I’m a proud man, Mr. Nelson. I make my own way.”

Nelson doesn’t look surprised. “Yeah,” he says, a slight smile on his face. “Figured you’d say that. You remind me a lot of someone I know.”

“Yeah? They must be dumb as a sack of bricks then.”

“Oh, he is so much worse.”

… 

Here’s the thing:

Jack had a plan for after prison, and the plan was this: find Matty, beat the fuck out of the sons of bitches who have him, and grovel at his baby’s feet until the end of the world. Stop at the point that St. Peter taps him on the shoulder, tells him to get the fuck up, son, everyone’s donning their garments of white and you, you’re embarrassing yourself in front of them all. Pick back up on groveling as soon as he crosses through the Pearly Gates, if he even makes the cut at all.

Here’s the problem:

That’s more of a goal than a plan. He still needs the plan bit. Execution, it’s a bit tricky. 

And Jack still ain’t the brightest bulb around. 

First, he sits on a park bench, because where the fuck else is he going to go. There ain’t a home anymore. He hasn’t paid rent in, oh, couple decades or so. Then he thinks. All the ways he fucked up. All the ways he might do it again. 

Thing is, he might have gotten Matty back if he hadn’t been so goddamn stupid about it.

Not the cops. Cops never could help. But the boys at the gym? Matty was the apple of their collective eye. They could have stopped him from killing all the folks who could have told him where the village baby was. They could have got him back. 

After, Jack couldn’t face them. All the folks whose boy he lost. He wanted to be miserable in it. He wanted to feel sorry for himself.

It’s been a long time. And he’s old now. And he thinks he’s had enough of feeling sorry for himself. It’s about time he goes and does right by his boy.

Jack’s never been smart enough to manage these things on his own. And he guesses that’s what you do. When you don’t know where else to go, you, you just go home.

…

There’s this thing about confession. You seal yourself up into a wicker box with a priest who’s a sinner too, and you kneel, and you cross yourself, and you say all the words, and you ask forgiveness from a God who’s supposed to somehow be able to fit in between the slats of flimsy wood to cram into the box with you. You say the words aloud, all the goddamn terrible shit you’ve done, as if He wasn’t supposed to be standing right next to you while you fucked it all up. 

You lay it all out. Not supposed to hide a single wrong deed. That’s another sin that you’ll have to come back to the wooden box to air out to another sinner. 

After you’re done cutting yourself open, the priest gives you a few words, and offers you forgiveness as if he didn’t have his own goddamn sins on his soul. And you’re supposed to be better, now, a different guy walking out the confessional without the same sins on your immortal soul. 

But there’s a part at the end you have to do first. Your act of contrition. Father gives you your penance and tells you to say your lines, and you read off a script about how fucking sorry you are for everything that you are. He tells you to get up, go forth, and not be the same fuck up you were before--you promised God, after all. 

Jack has never been more sorry for anything than all that he is and all that he’s done. And he thinks he needs the fiction of being someone new so he can make it right. 

He doesn’t want forgiveness. He doesn’t want absolution. He wouldn’t let anyone take this sin from him even if they could. But he just wants to be someone else, just for this. He just wants to be the kind of man who can be there for his son. 

He goes back to Clinton Church, and there isn’t blood on his hands that anyone can see. Maggie’s probably somewhere inside, but Jack isn’t looking for her. He’s only got one person to find, and everything else is just going to be getting there. 

Mass isn’t on. He hasn’t a godly clue when confession is. He doesn't even particularly care who he’s giving it to. All he needs is a chance to slough off the part of him that’s a stupid son of a bitch. There isn’t anyone around that he can see, so he finds a place in the front and settles in to wait. His hip pops, because he got old somewhere down the line. 

He thinks he may hate this place. Huh. Wonder when that happened. 

It’s been growing in him awhile, he thinks, taking root like a tree. Starts small, so small he barely noticed, and then he had a good long while for it to grow, with plenty of soil and water to feed it. 

Once, he thinks he felt something good in these pews. God, maybe, he’s never been quite certain. But he also felt all the aches and pains of his father’s fist, and that little bit of resentment at the sight of Daddy with his eyes shut and his hands clasped before him, praying more devout than anyone there. Applaud him, the old son of a bitch. He’s such a good Catholic. 

He sat in these pews with Matty. He dragged his boy there in his Sunday best and waited for his mother to give him the time of day, and he never so much as caught a glimpse of her. At the time, he never begrudged her for it, all the pain she carried in her. He knows sometimes people get sick in the head, and it ain’t their fault. 

But he’s lived long enough in the absence of their son to never be able to understand willingly staying away. 

He won’t come back to Clinton Church after this. He thinks, in order to make himself new, he needs to be the kind of man who doesn’t keep coming back to all the places that hurt. 

Right when he’s gearing up to trudge out, there’s a clatter behind him. 

It’s Father Lanthom. He got old too, looks like. Guess he never left to find a better church. Looks like he saw a ghost, staring at Jack. He’s dropped a stack of the gold plates they use for communion. 

He crosses the space between him in two strides and drags him into his embrace. “Jack.”

For his part, Jack finds himself crushed against a black garment that smells like incense. Matty would have hated it. He should hate it himself, but he can’t bring himself to. He should say something, but he can’t bring himself to do that either. 

In the end, he settles on breaking down into horrible, crushing sobs. And he should hate that too, he supposes, but all it feels like is coming home.

…

Father’s hands shake when he gives him his latte. 

“I ain’t gonna hurt you, Father,” Jack promises him. Some folks get nervous around ex-cons. Fair enough, after the state Father found him in last time. “I got out, and I’m--I’m just here to set things right.”

“I never thought you would.” Jack believes him. Father’s always been an honest man. “Jack, I--what things, to be precise?’

He ain’t gonna pretend to repent for killing the men who sold his baby. He hopes they're roasting right now. Hell isn’t something a good Catholic is supposed to wish on anyone, but Jack’s lived there long enough to want the same called due on those pieces of shit. “Matty.”

Father Lanthom doesn’t say a word. 

He doesn’t have to--Jack knows what everyone thinks. It’s been years. Blind little boy like Matty shouldn’t have made it more than a few days. He doesn’t care. He knows what he knows. 

Father Lanthom says, “Have you heard from him?”

“No.” Jack leans forward, wraps his hands around the mug and feels the burning beneath his palms. “No, but I’ll find him, Father. I--Father, I know how I sound, but I know he’s alive. I do. And I won’t stop until I save him.”

Another lapse into silence. 

Eventually, he tears his eyes away from the froth on top of the mug and looks back up at Father. 

Oh, he’s trying to figure out how to tell him that his son was murdered decades ago. 

Jack recognizes the look, but Father wears it a bit better than most people. At least it looks heavy, on him. Looks like he’s carrying the weight of the world on his back. Everyone else just looked vaguely put out, after a while. 

He sits down hard in the chair across. “Have you gotten any inklings since getting out?”

Follows a different script too, Father Lanthom. He should do this for a living. 

“Not a one.” Jack mops a hand along his jaw. Might as well cut him off at the pass. “I know what everyone thinks, Father, and I don’t care. He’s alive.”

“I believe you,” says Father, still carrying that weight. 

It gives Jack pause. Sounds like he believes it too. 

He drums his fingers on the side of the cup. “I came to ask forgiveness for what I did for him.”

“Should we go to the confessional then?”

“No,” says Jack, after a moment’s consideration. “Only one who has any right to my guilt is my boy. Guess I better find him first.”

Then, he slides the mug back across the table, stands, picks up his pack with one hand.

“I think,” says Father Lanthom, with a weary air, “that he may be closer than we all think. I’ll pray that the Lord reveals him to you soon.”

It’s stupid. Jack hasn’t ever needed any kind of validation in his boy’s survival; no one was willing to give it to him, and he knew better to ask. Still, it chokes him up, the belief. Makes it feel like it’ll be true.”

“Thank you, Father.” 

“Please, don’t thank me.” With a sigh, Father pushes out his chair and stands. “You’re always welcome here, Jack. I think it may be… enlightening if you came back again soon.”

“Thanks,” says Jack, and, “I ain’t gonna be back here again, Father.”

If it surprises him, it doesn’t show. He just looks tired. “Something to keep in mind.”

When Jack walks out, he’s the same sinful asshole as before. He was the one that lost his boy, and it’s only right that he finds him again. Way he figures, Matty doesn’t get a way out of what Jack did to him. He doesn’t get one either. 

…

The first time Jack met Fogs, you could count every single one of his ribs through his shirt and he smelled like a sack of rotting trash. He was on the streets, back then, and just got the shit kicked out of him seven different ways to Sunday. But he didn’t go down. And he heard Fogwell’s was the place to go when you needed some money and the only thing you knew how to do was to not get knocked down. 

He walked in the doors, and they didn’t jingle, not the way a shop’s would. He stepped inside and found Fogs leaned up against a set of ropes watching two boys beat the hell out of each other. 

Fogwell didn’t look at him when he came up behind him. Right as Jack was trying to bring up the courage to speak, Fogs said, without looking back, “Dying of old age here. Tell me what you want or stop breathin’ down my damn neck.”

Jack was never good at words. Couldn’t think to explain to the man that he wanted a job getting beat to shit, on account of how much he had done it for free. Instead, he said, “Room for one other dumb son of a bitch here?”

This time, when Jack comes in, the door still doesn’t jingle, and it still smells like old sweaty socks. More of a homecoming than he’d ever thought he’d get. 

His baby’s table is still in the corner. Someone’s posted a sign above it. Cardboard, with black Sharpie. It says Do Not Move, and, beneath that, Do Not Sit. 

Fogs got old. Jack supposes that’s true of him too. He’s got gray hair, all of a sudden, and all these goddamn wrinkles around his eyes. Belly hangs a bit where it didn’t before, and there’s all this stubble down his neck. He’s leaning on the ropes, watching two young guys beat the hell out of each other in the ring. He isn’t paying Jack or the door any mind. Shoulda gotten that bell, Jack supposes. 

Without turning around, Fogwell says, “The fuck you want, buddy?”

Huh. For some reason, it’s disappointing. Part of him expected the same question he asked all those years ago. 

Jack tries to say, “Room for one other dumb son of a bitch here?” but he can’t quite get his mouth to shape the words. His voice breaks the second he tries. He’s an old man now, but he knows when he’s an inch from blubbering like a child. 

So instead, he says, “You kept the table.”

Fogs has to catch himself on the ropes. When he’s on his feet, he turns to see Jack standing behind him, in all his old and stupid and beaten down glory. “Jackie.”

Oh, he can feel it now. The sob trying to climb up the walls of his throat. Jack was never a little boy, not even when he was tiny, but right now, he wants a daddy to tell him it is going to be alright, and his own was never much of one for a job. Fogs was always too good at stepping in the empty role. 

Jack’s not certain what he expects next. A get the hell out of my place, you no good murderer, maybe, or a you killed your own damn son, Jack, fuck off, but he certainly does not expect Fogs to cross the space between them in a moment and yank him down into a crushing embrace. 

“Oh Jackie,” says Fogs, again, squeezing the back of his neck with the same brutal strength he had all those years ago. “I’m so sorry.” 

And Jack doesn’t know what he opens his mouth to say, but it certainly isn’t the low, gasping sob that makes its way past his teeth. 

“I lost him,” he says, blubbering like he didn’t all those years ago. “I lost my baby boy.” 

“Ain’t a day’s gone by that I haven’t missed you and Matty,” Fogs tells him, rubbing his hand in circles along his back. “You two were like my own.” 

“It’s my fault, Fogs, it’s mine, I should have thrown it, I should have just done what they said--”

“None of that now. None of that in my place.” 

Saying it doesn’t matter. Jack already knows the truth. 

…

What happened is this:

Jack was a dead man who made it home alive, and that wasn’t how it was supposed to go. 

He left his robe in the locker. It was one of the nicest things Jack had ever had as his own, and he thought Matty might want it one day. He hoped he would, at least. Back then, he thought Matty had his whole future laid out ahead of him, and it was Jack’s place in it that would be cut short. He hoped that Matty would want to have something to remember him by. He hoped that Matty would still want to remember him at all. 

He’s a crooked boxer that’s worth more losing than winning, and there is nothing about the life that Jack can give his son that is worth being proud of. And call him a fool, but he’d like his son to have something about his life with Jack to be proud of. 

He’s had an epiphany, you see. Jack learned down the line that he’s worth more as a losing boxer than a winning one, and he made that decision despite the ache of shame it left in him, because he’s got a leaking goddamn roof to keep over his baby’s head. 

He’s worth more as a dead boxer than a living one. And that’s a decision that could send Matty to a college one day. One with better roofs than Jack could ever afford. 

More than a little of it was selfish. All his life, he’d never been good for anything but a punching bag. He’d like to have it, just once. Folks cheering for him. Thinking “God, wasn’t he something?”

He wanted Matty to think that. To hear that. And maybe that let him brush off any concerns about what Matty would think after they found the body. There’d be one second where Matt Murdock was proud of his daddy, and maybe that second would make up for the rest of his sorry life. 

Jack doesn’t hide, going home. He knows it’s no good. You don’t screw a man like Roscoe Sweeney and expect to live to tell about it. He puts his robe in his locker and leaves his gloves with it, pulls back on his shirt, feels the trembling shake of his heart in his chest. When he walks home, it’s the same path he always does, right in the center of the sidewalk for God and everyone to see. 

They’ll kill him before he makes it home. It would take a smarter man than Jack to hide from them, and a dumber one to think he had a chance at it. 

As he walks, he fumbles a rosary in between his fingers. It’s been years since he’s tried his hand at praying, but he thinks if there were ever a place to put yourself at the feet of God, it’d be in the valley of death. 

He tries asking for his soul, but it feels stupid, asking for the thing he already decided to discard. He figures it’s in God’s hands to judge, and it won’t matter what Jack says about it after he’s already done his mistakes. He had plenty of time to think on his mistakes, and just as much time to not make them. Smart guy like God won’t be fooled by any Hail Marys in the last quarter. 

No, God’s got all he needs to close the book on Jack Murdock. It’s Matty that he prays for. 

This is the thing about Jack’s son: he’s greater than Jack will ever be. 

He can see it. It ain’t even hidden. Matty’s got the sort of brains that only pop up once in a lifetime, and it deserved a better place to grow than a stinking apartment in the slums. He’s athletic as hell, no matter the noise the fools at school make about the blind kid getting hurt.

And he’s kind. He’s good. Murdocks are nothing but liars and drunks and wife beaters and crooked fucking boxers all with the Devil riding their shoulders, and somehow, they ended up producing the sort of boy who would push an old man out of the way of a truck without so much as a second’s thought. 

Murdocks are the sort of folks who have never had enough of a future to ruin. But Matty’s got more than a future. He’s got fate. Jack can’t quite put his finger on it. There’s something in him, in the way he walks, in the way he moves, that’s got divine plan scrawled all over it. Jack doesn’t know what faith he has left to his name, but he knows that much. Matthew Murdock is a boy with a destiny.

Jack just prays to God it’s a kind one.  

He’s already started to ruin him, Jack knows. Matty was blind in a hospital bed, and Jack signed away all their rights to sue in exchange for hospital fees. Not a penny more. All because some fancy lawyer with a leather briefcase representing the sons of bitches who blinded him in the first place assured him it was the best thing to do. 

His boy will never see the sky again, and he won’t get a dime in compensation for it. All because he had a daddy too stupid to read the forms and too damn ashamed to ask for someone to do it for him. Jesus, sometimes, Jack thinks he won’t be able to face Matty once he’s old enough to ask why there never was any real settlement. 

Guess he’ll never have to. 

Later, Jack can’t quite remember his prayers while he was waiting for Roscoe Sweeney’s gun. He thinks he forgot them the second they found shape in his thoughts. But he thinks they went something like this:

Dear Lord, just let whoever takes Matty next be good. Let them see how special he is. Let them help him find his way. 

Let him be happy. Murdocks ain’t ever find an easy path, not as long as they’ve crawled along the face of the earth. But let him be happy as he walks his. Let him have that much. 

Let him know Jack loved him. He doesn’t ever have to understand why Jack makes this goddamn stupid choice. But let him know that Jack’d spend eternity with him if it’d be any good for him. He never wanted to leave him behind. 

Somewhere between the place he got himself killed and the place where the trigger was meant to be pulled, Jack felt a peace wash over him. Call it grace, if you will. He doesn’t think he’s ever felt God, but he thinks that it might be Him who gives him the reassurance. 

In that moment, Jack knows, with more certainty than he’s ever felt in a church, that Matty’s going to be just fine. There’s an ineffable plan and Matty’s got his own grand role in it, and all that happens next is gonna happen for that greater fuckin’ good. God has him, and that means his baby is safe. Jack almost cries from the comfort. 

The punchline is this:

The dead man lives to make it home. The lock is shattered, and the house is empty, and all the lights are off. 

There’s a red and white tipped cane in the entryway. It’s snapped in half, and the pieces are discarded in a pool of blood. 

Later, the police would decide that the blood belonged to Matthew Murdock. 

…

Fogwell throws everyone out, turns over the closed sign, and makes Jack sit with him at Matty’s fold up table.

The gym’s changed since he was last here. Ain’t so much insofar as decoration, but in energy. In lifeblood. It feels like a foreign place instead of home, and Jack thinks that may be more about the absence of his son than anything else. 

It’s like the world lost a color, and the only one who noticed was Jack. Everyone else can’t imagine it, how spectacular it was, all that got lost. Jack’s left raving about empty spaces that might as well be invisible to everyone else. 

Fogwell sees it. Jack can recognize the emptiness in his eyes. He sees it in the mirror, plenty. 

He can see Fog’s is chewing on the question from the way he’s chewing on his lip. 

“It’s okay,” says Jack, squaring his jaw. He knew how to take a beating. “He was your baby too. You can ask.”

“Police had plenty to say, after.”

“Certain they did.” Jack nods again. “You can ask, Fogs.”

There’s a weight in Fog’s spine that Jack never once saw in all his years of being in this gym. It looks old, now. Like something he had time to get used to. “Jesus, Jackie,” he says, bending forward on his elbows. “What happened?”

Ain’t that the question. Jack mops a hand along his jaw as he considers the answer. 

“They were gonna turn off the heating,” he settles on. 

Fogs doesn’t say anything. 

“Folks at the company for--electric or gas or whatever. Roscoe had offered, once, months earlier, and I told them to get fucked. Still thought I could make money winning. But they--they wanted me bad, you know, because I didn’t go down. I could lose in any round they wanted, on account that I could always stay on my feet. No one else could do that, and… they could bet on that and make more. Matty, he, uh--Fogs, you know that nothing could be hidden from Matty. Anyway, he found out. It was cold as shit that winter, and he--he went off and read some book about, about insulation to keep it warm, and, and proper legal processes and shit. So one day, I come home, and Matty makes me sit down on the couch. You, uh, you remember how’d Matty give speeches, Fogs?”

Fogs’ breath is short, and his eyes are a bit glassy. “Yeah.” He ducks his head sharply. “Yeah, he--kid could go on for hours, once he got going.”

Jack barks a laugh. 

Matty was a born talker. Smart as shit and it showed in his words. He coulda done anything, mouth like that on him. He’d be famous in the gym for it. For a while, you couldn’t come in without seeing Matthew Murdock tripping after some new victim, hour and a half deep into a breathless explanation of the New Kingdom of Egypt or some shit. 

No one complained, either. Fogs wouldn’t have had anyone say a word against his grandbaby in his gym, and no one would have wanted to either. It was considered a badge of honor, having Matty bestow one of his lectures on you. Some of the old fools at the gym used to spend days trying to probe with just right questions to find out what Matty was interested in that day of the week. Everyone loved his attention, the village baby. 

“Well, he spends a goddamn half hour explaining to me his plan for if we’re left without heat in the heart of winter. He had a, a subsection, he called it, for if the water and electric followed suit. And the rent, and…” He rubs a hand against his neck. “Never felt so goddamn useless in my life. Next day, I went out, and I told Roscoe Sweeney that I wanted to take him up on the offer. Paid the bills, and told myself I did the right thing for Matty.” 

There’s an ancient regret rumbling in his chest at the memory. It never stopped hurting, and he never stopped wishing he could go back and change things. 

“And then what?”

“Got tired of losing, I guess.” He shakes his head. “I told them I wanted to, to stand on my own. To try to win. They didn’t like it too much. I… I told them I’d keep with the deal, and then…” He sighs again. “Then I put a bet on myself and put it in an account with my boy’s name on it. For his college fund.”

Fogs is as silent as damnation. 

“They were supposed to kill me for it,” pleads Jack. “I never--Fogs, I was a goddamn fool, but I never thought I was risking him. I didn’t think they’d have any interest in him at all. I’d never hurt him. Tell me you know that much about me.”

“‘Course I know that, Jackie. Don’t be stupid.” He buries his hands in his hair. “Jesus, I’ve known you since you were a boy. You and Matty, you were my family.”

He feels like shit over how he turned out too. “Fogs, I’m sorry.”

“I would’ve helped. I would’ve--bills, watching Matty, any of it--Jesus, anything but get caught up with the goddamn likes of Roscoe Sweeney.”

“I’ve had years I’ve had to live with myself over it.”

“That ain’t--” He sighs. “I just wish I took better care of you, is all.”

“You took plenty good care of me.”

“If that were true, we wouldn’t be sitting at this table alone.”

Fogs regrets saying it, Jack knows, the second it leaves his mouth. He’s been sitting in his own regret for too long. He knows Fog’s is probably just as sick of it as he is. 

Jack says, “He’s alive.”

“Okay.”

“I know what everyone thinks, but they’re wrong. He’s alive. I know it. I gotta find him, Fogs.”

“Okay.”

“And you don’t gotta believe me, but I ain’t gonna stop. Not for nothing. I have to make this right.”

“Okay,” says Fogs. And, “Where do we start?”

Jack stops dead. “You believe me.”

Fogs raps his hand on the plastic table. “I didn’t keep this up all these years because I thought it did wonders for the decor.”

Shit. Jack has to stop himself from crying all over again. All these years of no one believing him, and he told himself that was just fine. Didn’t change how badly he wanted someone to give him the time of day.  

“Where do we goddamn start, Jack? I want our boy home too.”

Ain’t that the question. 

…

There’s a tiny TV playing silently in the backroom. Jack passes it while he and Fogs are busy digging through dusty old boxes of newspaper clippings and police reports. 

On a streaky, stained screen, the news plays. There’s some lady talking on it, in a blue dress and a bunch of pearls. 

He almost doesn’t see it. It’s just at the bottom, scrolling in small yellow print. 

Iron Man claims no knowledge of whereabouts of Captain America or Black Widow; Senator Stern calls for referendum on Avengers;  Stark issues public invitation for Senator Stern to “Kiss [his] iron-cla…

“Something happen to those Avengers fellows?” Jack asks. He heard about the aliens raining from the sky just like everyone else. “I thought they were the biggest thing goin’.” 

“You didn’t hear?” says Fogs. “Christ, don’t they get news in Rikers?”

Jack never cared for it. “Not much.”

Fogs shrugs like it doesn’t matter. “It’s all beyond me, anyway. Everyone makes all this talk and we find out later that it was some kind of super gizmo nonsense. Ain’t for folks like you or me.”

Matty always had a thing for Captain America, ‘specially after the accident. He liked that Steve Rogers was disabled, before the government souped him up. He liked that the fellow struggled. 

Baby would’ve lost his goddamn marbles if he was around to see it. He would have gone fucking feral at the idea of Captain America still being around. That was Matty--smart as a whip, quick as can be, crazier than a raccoon on speed. Jack could never keep up with him. He had never wanted to. It was a great damn thing, seeing your kid be more than you could ever hope to be. You always wanted your kids to be more than you. Matty was more than Jack when he was a damn eight year old who wanted to put up a poster of Thurgood Marshall of all people. Jack could’ve gotten him any boxer on the planet, and instead he had to explain to his kid that they didn’t make fan posters of dead Supreme Court Justices. Matty cried for three days, then tried to petition for equal opportunity poster-making, but he couldn’t figure out who the hell he was petitioning to and no one wanted to sign the damn thing past Jack and the boys at the gym. 

That had been a fun conversation too, explaining to the boys at the gym that his boy had gotten this idea in his head, and he’d be real touched if they all signed his petition. They fell over themselves to get ahold of the pen. Matty had been a smug little shit over the whole thing. 

And Jack was crying again. Damn, Jack was crying. He swiped at his cheek before Fogs could notice. 

“There’s always something going on,” says Fogs. “But a bit ago, Captain and that Black Widow gal disappeared off the face of the planet. All these, these searches and tip lines popped up. Government insists that it’s to find them for their own safety, but… lots of folks are just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Think they found something the government didn’t particularly want them to know.”

How about that. “Huh,” says Jack. “World’s a strange place, Fogs.”

“It wasn’t when I was growing up, let me tell you. Weirdest shit we got was big fuckin’ rats. Size of housecats, let me tell you, and we looked at them, and we said, ‘Golly, ain’t that sure fuckin’ something,’ and we went on with our goddamn lives. Ain’t none of this alien bullshit. Some rat lookin’ Shakespearean dipshit went and invaded New York with all these ugly looking motherfuckers while I was trying to do my taxes, Jackie. Taxes. I don’t know how I’m supposed to do my fucking taxes when you got these dumb Norse sons of bitches dragging out their family shit right in the middle of Times fuckin’ Square. Fight about whether daddy loved you in a fucking Dennys like the rest of us and let everyone else get on with their own shit.”

That don’t seem like a reasonable thing to ask of any man, taxes in such conditions. 

“We don’t have any of the superhero shit in Hell’s Kitchen yet, do we?” 

Fogs snorts. “Depends on who you ask.”

…

“He’s the love of my life,” explains Clark Watson, as the third sentence Jack’s ever heard out of his yap. “Christ on the cross, I’d trade my first and second born to him and ask him if he’d like to go for a third.”

That’s the fourth sentence. 

Clark was one of Fogs’ puppies, Jack could already tell. He knew that he was one of Fogs’ puppies, back in the day, and don’t that hurt to think of now. 

Clark was an innocent, simple fucker with floppy hair and stars in his eyes. He didn’t come in with stars in his eyes, mind you. Those popped right up after Fogs leaned over the edge of the ring and hollered at him, “Watson! Come tell our new trainer about that guy you’re all stupid over. The one who saved your dumb ass.”

Being Fogs’ new trainer is news to Jack. 

Sentence one had been, “New trainer?” Which was closely followed by sentence two, “You mean Hell’s Kitchen’s own avenging angel?”

Apparently, what happened was this:

Clark was 6’5” and built like the broadside of a barn, and had all the intelligence of one to boot. He went wandering alone late at night into a part of town that Fogs had told him to go into under absolutely no circumstances, pain of death, you dumb son of a bitch. This was on account of all the folks in that side of town that wanted to fuck him up proper. 

Anyway, he got his ass beat within an inch of his life. 

Then, right when his vision was getting all fuzzy, some guy in a black suit and mask drops from the rooftops like fuckin’ Zorro and kicked the shit out of all the folks kicking the shit outta Clark. 

“You shoulda seen him,” says Clark, half-dreamy. “Never seen someone fight so well in my life. I’d give anything just to ask him a few questions.”  

“Yeah, you gonna find him?” ribs Russel, one of the oldies. Not as old as Jack, but at least he wasn’t a goddamn hipster. “Get down on one knee?”

“I know you’re joking, but I want you to know that I would go out and get my daddy’s ring this very second if I thought I had half a chance,” Clark tells him, seriously. “Ain’t no body on the planet that has any business moving the way his does. I would cherish that man into our golden years.” He squares Russel with a look. “Look at me. Look. You tell me this is not the face of a man who has not questioned every single aspect of his life after this experience. I ain’t ever found religion, but whoo boy, this must be what it’s like. This man made me discover things about myself that I did not know.”

Christ, Clark’s a puppy who doesn't know what are the things that should only be between him and God. 

Apparently, though, Clark ain’t the only one who’s seen this guy. People are talking about it. Some guy in black. Mask wrapped all around his face. He shows up when you scream and handles the thing that made you scream in the first place. Fucks off into the night like a goddamn comic book character. 

Police and the paper haven’t seemed to have caught on yet. But there’s no news that travels faster that gossip amongst the old natives. There’s folks in hospital beds, and they’re usually the one who put other people in hospital beds. 

It sticks in Jack’s mind when he’s walking home that night. A man in a mask. Dropping down from the sky and making sure folks make it home. 

It’s good. It’s something the neighborhood needs. 

A part of him can’t help but wonder if Matty would still be here, had there been a man in a mask running around back then. 

…

The new apartment is empty. 

It didn’t have to be. Back when Jack was first figuring his shit out, Fogs rumbled up behind him like a locomotive and made some grumbling noises about couches and damn old drafty houses and needing someone to help out around the place. 

They’d already started this dance. The one where Fogs takes Jack back in like a kitten he yanked out of a storm drain, way he did all those years ago. He’s a good man, Fogwell. Best one that Jack ever knew. Back in the day, Jack let him haul his dumb ass home easily enough. Felt like a relief, knowing that he had someone other than him watching over his family. Felt like he coudln’t fuck it up too badly.

Managed it anyway. 

He is not the poor fuckin’ kid Fogs took in off the street anymore. He’s grown, now, and he has enough regrets to fill the world. He ain’t got any interest in doing the same thing he did back then. 

There’s this--shit, it was another one of those things that Matty would read and rattle off to him about like he understood a damn word. Jack, for the most part, would try and let him do it. Matty needed folks to encourage that brain of his, and Jack was determined to do it. 

Still, it made him feel fuckin’ stupid, at times. His eight year old had more brains than he ever would. 

Jack’s stacked that somewhere in his tower of regrets. All those horrible thoughts he used to have when all his boy was doing was being excited. He’d give anything for just one more second of Matty hanging off the back of the grocery cart vomiting big words he’ll never understand. 

Back then, Matty was going off about some kind of, of physics shit. Theories. The idea that everything that can happen has happened, just--in another universe or something. We pick one way, but there’s another version of ourselves that picked another way. 

And Jack heard this, and he said, “Does that mean you can pick a goddamn cereal with the knowledge that another Matty covered the rest of the bases?”

He shouldn’t’ve said that. When Matty was born, he promised himself he wouldn’t let his baby ever see him upset with him. Big promise, he knows, sort he was always gonna fail on. But this was his own daddy in him, and the devil that’s been clinging to Murdock blood for as long as anyone’s known. 

Matty, for his part, flopped his head backwards, groaned, but he stomped off and grabbed a box of generic shit that was supposed to be off-brand corn flakes and dumped it in the cart. 

It wasn’t what he wanted, Jack knows. Matty wanted one of the kiddie cereals. The sweet shit all the rest of the kids ate. He just knew they couldn’t afford it. And even as tiny as he was, he was already on his crusade to make up for that fact. He never asked for anything other than the cheapest thing on the shelf. 

Back then, Jack was grateful for Matty saving them both the humiliation. He hates himself for that now. Whatever life Matty should have gotten, it was better than the only one Jack could offer him. 

At the time, other Jacks fucking things up for himself and his boy didn’t make sense to him. He didn’t understand how scientists can just-- say that shit, he guesses. Make it up. No matter what paper of numbers they shove in his face, they won’t convince him that they’ve found another Jack Murdock ruining his own life in a different way. 

He doesn’t care if they can prove it anymore. He wants it to be true. He wants there to be another version of Jack Murdock. He wants to be any Jack Murdock but the one he is. 

Somewhere out there, there’s a version of Jack who got his head blown out the back half of his skull. Jack thinks of him fondly. Face down in shitty little alley with a blood and skull fragments sprayed over dull bricks, giving some poor fucking crime scene cleaner a reason for his job title.

The other Jack, the Jack from the fantasy, he goes down in that alley and he doesn’t come up again. Eventually, someone finds him. There’s police tape and flashing red and blue lights, and Matty’s at the scene, for some godforsaken reason. He cries. There ain’t a version of his kid who Jack didn’t hurt. 

But he’s safe as the cops lead him away. He’s alive, and whole, and so fucking safe. He’s got a bank account with his name on it that will let him go to any school he pleases, and he can use that brain of his to give himself a better life than Jack Murdock ever could build. Maybe, one day, he’d even forgive Jack for it. 

The cops drive him up to the steps of Clinton church, and there’s Maggie on the steps, ready to step up and take care of him. She wraps him in a hug, holds him close, leads him inside, and Matty’s got the rest of his life to have a better one. 

That Jack, the one that died, he’s a lucky son of a bitch, and Jack hates him, most days. He hates that fucking bastard with every single breath in his body. 

He managed it. There you fuckin’ go, you pulled off the plan. Nice work. He’ll never have to live with his mistakes. 

In his mind, though, there’s another version of himself. This one lives, believe it or not. He gets old. He gets better, somehow. Matty grows up himself, puts that brain of his to use, goes to the top schools and gets the best grades. He graduates with flying colors, and there’s Jack in the crowd, stupider than any other parent there and twice as proud. 

Jack gets an apartment. One that doesn’t have mold in the walls risking making his kid sick. It’s small, sure--there isn’t a version of Jack that has enough money to his name for a big place--but it’s nice. Cozy, even. He putters around it alone. His son’s got his own life, and that’s all Jack’s ever wanted for him. 

But, sometimes, there’s a knock at the door. It’s Matty. He’s wearing a suit, sometimes, something befitting a lawyer. Other times he’s in sweats or jeans, because it’s his day off and he thought he might spend it with Jack. 

He lets Jack take his jacket at the door, and he leaves his cane in a basket by the door made just for that. He doesn’t need it. He knows the layout like the back of his hand, on account of how often he’s here. They sit at a small table in the kitchen together. The left leg of it wobbles, and Jack makes noise about how he’ll get around to fixing that damn thing tomorrow. 

Matty smiles at him, because that’s old hat. Jack’s been promising that for ages. All the many visits they’ve already had. 

He puts on a pot of coffee, and when he does, he pours Matty a mug of it and settles it across the table from him. “It’s at your eleven,” the other Jack tells him. “You want anything to eat?”

“I already ate,” Matty says. “But if I stick around long enough, I’ll help you with dinner.”

Jack just grunts. This one’s lucky enough to have had so many dinners with his boy. He doesn’t understand what it means, having his baby there with him to eat. 

They chat at the table until the sunlight from the windows dwindles down. Matty finishes his coffee, and so does Jack. They make dinner together, eat it at the table, push the dirty dishes off from the side so they don’t have to leave it. 

Hours later, his boy blinks. “Lost track of time. It’s late.”

“Stay the night,” says Jack. “No sense trying to go home this late.”

Matty starts gathering up the dishes from the table. “Sure. Thanks, Dad.”

He goes to a room that Jack keeps just for him. He’s got a toothbrush here. Change of clothes. Spare cane, if he ever needs one. 

The next morning, they drink coffee again together, and the chat goes so well that they forget the time. Matty leaves his jacket behind in his rush out the door, but it isn’t a problem. His son’s coming back soon. He can get it then.

Jack’s never been so jealous of anyone as he is of that Jack. He has the world, and he doesn’t even know it. He probably bitches about the price of eggs in the supermarket, because he doesn’t even know how lucky he is. 

For a day, he wishes he could be that Jack. He’d give anything for it, save his own son he’s still trying to find. He wants to know everything about the Matty that grew up. Does he go by Matthew now? Matt? Did he become a lawyer, or find something else to do with his brain? Does he have someone he goes home to? Does he know how much he’s loved?

He wouldn’t want to be that Jack for good. No, he couldn't take that Matty’s Daddy away. He’d just want a day. One where he could pretend that it all belonged to him. 

The new apartment is empty. Barely a stick of furniture to his name, and he has no son to visit. And that’s how it’s gonna be. Until he finds his boy and makes it right, then he doesn't get the luxury of having someone to have coffee with in the mornings.  

Only thing he wishes is that he could afford one with an extra room. One for Matty, whenever he finds him. The Matty that’s his, the one from his universe--Jack doesn’t know where he’s staying. Wherever it is, it probably ain’t good. But--well, the hope is to find him, one of these days. To bring him home. 

Matty’s a grown ass man now who probably doesn’t need a daddy anymore, but Jack would sell his left kidney to get to be his. He imagines it, Matty in his doorway, Matty coming home, and Jack saying, Won’t you stay awhile and I’ve already got a place for you. 

This Matty, his Matty, he lets him take his jacket at the door. He folds up his cane, but he keeps it on him. He still has to learn this apartment, after all. He lets Jack guide him by the elbow, and they sit at his folding table together. Jack asks him how he takes his coffee. They talk late into the night, and at its end, Matty says, “It’s getting late.”

And Jack, he tries to say, “Stay the night,” but what comes out is, “Stay with me.”

The “forever” doesn’t chase it. But it’s implied. And Matty’s smart enough to hear it too.

When Jack is feeling generous to himself, the Matty that’s his says, “Okay.” He tries to help Jack to take the dishes to the sink, but Jack just waves him off, tells him to get his rest. The next morning, the sun dawns and there’s his boy already at the kitchen table, coffee set to brew. Jack sits down across, and they can do that forever, really. They have forever.

But most of the time, the thing that comes out of Matty’s mouth goes a little more like this, “Last time didn’t go too well for me, now did it?”

…

There’s also this:

 “Well, tell me what happened to rest of the the ol’ sons of bitches that ran around this shack?”

Fogs doesn’t look up from his sweeping. “Don’t know what you mean.”

“C’mon, Fogs. Only familiar face I see is yours. Where’s the ol’ crew?”

Fogwell mulls over that a bit. “I think Ernie’s in insurance sales now. He tells people his ugly mug is from a car accident or a break-in to get them to up their coverage. Does wonders for business. Tim’s got family now, wanted something little safer than what we do. Carter ran off to Dallas chasing some girl. Last I heard he was doing that country music bullshit, but he sounds happy whenever he calls.” He chews on his cheek. “Dick’s dead. Cancer in his bones. It was too late by the time we convinced him to shell out for a doctor.”

Jack feels a pit in his chest. “I didn’t know.”

“He wanted to see you, before the end, but he… It wasn’t anything against you, Jackie. He didn’t harbor any bad will to you for a second. But you know how much he loved Matty. When it got bad, he just didn’t have the strength to face the memories.”

He understands that. 

Matty really was everyone’s baby. Way back when he was crawling around their ankles, all the folks in Fogs’ gym were either childless or had mostly-grown kids with wives that were able to stay home with them. What few kids around barely ever showed up at the gym, and they weren’t babies for the community. 

Maggie wouldn’t have been any good as his housewife, Jack knows that now. 

She wouldn’t have been any happy. It ain’t against her. She was always too smart and too sharp to sit home waiting for him to fail at bringing home the bacon. If it came down to Jack going to the gym and Maggie staying at home keeping house and wiping the drool off Matty’s chin, then they would’ve ended up straight where they were the first go around in no time at all. She’s probably happier as a nun than she’d ever have been with Jack. 

In a sick, twisted sort of way, Jack’s grateful for it, and that’s another reason to add to the list of why he’s gonna burn in hell one day. His boy grew up without a mother, and all Jack can do is be grateful that it gave him more time with Matty before he went and lost him.

Jack clears his throat. “What about Kirk?”

Fogs’ face pinches distinctly downwards. 

Jack spots it. “Fogs?”

“He didn’t come back after he served his time.”

His brows fly up. “Kirk went to jail?”

Fogs stands up straight, propping the broom on its end. He chews at his lip for a bit, then says, “Yeah. Assault. Battery. Trespass. Few counts. Got off relatively light, all things considered.”

“Jesus,” says Fogs. Kirk was one of the ones that had his head screwed on nice and tight. Jail doesn’t track with all he was. “How’d that happen?” But before Fogs answers, Jack reads it in the lines of his face. “Matty.”

“Yeah,” he admits, after a beat. “Kirk got it in his head that, well… Look, he got the court documents. From your trial. Police reports… He knew why you went in. Knew what probably happened to the baby after. He got it in his head that, well… if he found to the places where someone may--the places where they--where boys like Matty might end up--”

Places where they sell time with little kids. 

“I know,” Jack tells him, because he’s never been that stupid. He’s stupid, but he’s never not known. 

“He busted up a good few of those shitholes,” says Fogs, sober. “But he didn’t get very far, and… Jackie, he didn’t find Matty in any of them. And after some of the things he saw… he wasn’t quite the same again. He found some tiny town in fuckin’ Utah or something, I don’t know. He doesn’t call.”

Jack doesn’t say anything. 

“That doesn’t mean I’ve given up,” says Fogs. “I--Jackie, I’m old. But Matty was my family. You don’t forget family.”

He supposes that’s true. He’s tried hard enough.

…

It’s not good, being on the outside . Nothing’s been good since he turned the corner on his street and saw his door busted in, his boy gone and blood on the floor. Nothing’s been good since he let his own damn pride hurt his little boy. But it’s better than sitting in a concrete box feeling sorry for himself. 

The good thing is that he’s productive, out here. He goes to work and comes home and pours over old police files until he can’t see straight from the tears. He sleeps when he can and wanders the streets when he can’t. It’s dangerous, he knows, Hell’s Kitchen always has been, but he’s not exactly a lightweight even if he went and got old somewhere down the line. Besides, there’s a man in a mask running around these days. 

Sometimes, Fogs tries to talk to him about it. About Matty, about what probably happened to him after Roscoe and his men took him. Every time, Jack cuts him off. Refuses to listen. Refuses to talk. 

It ain’t forced ignorance. He knows what happened, after. He just won’t let himself think about it. He’ll have to face that when he faces his boy again, but he won’t put it out in the world a moment sooner. 

The bad thing about being out is that he’s about as productive as a bum. 

There’s a detective. Jack pinches pennies and until he can make the retainer, then swallows his pride and lets Fogs add in his own on top of the pile. The case in the police precinct is cold, and no one would give him the time of day when he went down to ask around. 

The jackass would hardly look at him. When he finally finished making sure Jack’s check would clear, he briefly looked up over the rim of his glasses and said, “You know it’s exceedingly likely that there isn’t anything to find, don’t you?”

Jack shifted in his seat. “Jesus, buddy, ain’t I paying you to look?”

“I just want to manage your expectations.”

“You let me worry about whether there’s something to find. Just get to looking.”

Guy’s lips upturned at the corners. But he put a contract in front of Jack--“Standard”--and had him sign, and at least there’s one more asshole in this world looking for Jack’s boy. He wishes there were more. He’s starting to think he might need a whole army before he has any luck. 

This probably would have been easier if Jack started a few decades earlier with a few dozen more IQ points. 

Roscoe Sweeney’s empire dried up with his death. He had some shithead cousin who tried their hand at picking up the pieces, only to get caught up in a pissing contest with an underling who wanted the throne instead. Ended up blowing each other to hell. 

Which means there’s no one left to ask who he might’ve sold a little boy to. And this ain’t the type of business where people keep records. He barely sets down a path before he finds another dead end. 

This is a no-sleep night. A night where he wakes up screaming for Matty whenever he tries to shut his eyes. Tonight, he doesn’t even try. He puts a boxing match on the TV and lets it play in the background while he putters about looking for something to fix. Faucet isn’t leaking anymore; toaster actually works; stove is functional. 

Trash needs taking out. That’s something, at least. 

Jack knots the top and pulls it out, replacing the bag before heading out the back stairwell. The dumpster in the alley is mostly full, but it has enough room for Jack’s bags next to the bloody, unconscious man curled in its corner. 

Huh. 

Wait. 

That’s. 

That’s probably not supposed to be there. 

Come to think of it.