Work Text:
Matt was exhausted as he made his way to work. Last night, he had saved several kids from a human trafficking ring, but the whole ordeal had taken far longer than he would have liked – he didn’t get home until close to 6 am, and he usually got up at 7 for work. He sighed to himself – sometimes it seemed like this superhero gig and his job as a lawyer weren’t compatible … but he brushed the thought aside. Sometimes things got messy and he lost a little sleep, but that was no big deal. He’d dealt with that during Stick’s training plenty of times, after all.
Matt walked into the building and noted that there was a paper taped to the elevator. Most likely an “Out of Order” sign. He sighed again; it looked like he would be taking the stairs today.
“Matt! There you are, buddy! How was the walk up here? Shame about the elevator, eh?” called Foggy as Matt crossed the threshold of their office.
Matt smiled. “Hi, Foggy.”
“Good morning, Matt,” said Karen, and Matt heard her lips form a smile in his direction.
Matt returned her greeting and smiled to himself. It was funny how, even though Karen didn’t know his secret, she always treated him like he could see – smiling at him, showing him newspapers, hiding her face when she was blushing from embarrassment. It was probably because she wasn’t used to being around blind people, but Matt thought it was cute (especially when she got all flustered when Foggy pointed Matt’s blindness out to her).
Making his way to his desk, Matt groaned inwardly as he remembered the large pile of files sitting on his desk, all of which he needed to go through before the case three days from now. With a sigh, he pulled the first deposition toward himself and started reading, his fingers sluggish on the Braille as he tried to get into the right mindset for work.
Matt had been at it for an hour or so (and making less progress than he would have liked) when he heard Foggy get up to use the fax machine. The machine lurched to life, processing the paper Foggy fed into it, and the man moved back toward his desk. But something was wrong – Matt could hear tiny sounds emanating from deep within the machine that weren’t supposed to be there. The thing was faulty – maybe the computer had gotten confused, the machine was glitching, or maybe the fax machine was breaking, and Matt was witnessing it right here. Whatever it was, the sounds were very distracting.
Tune it out, Murdock, Matt schooled himself. He had had to tune out hundreds of New Yorkers going about their days every single day of his life, he could tune out one faulty fax machine. He got up to close his door, as if that would muffle the sound, and returned to his paperwork.
But the noises wouldn’t stop. The worst thing was the anticipation, Matt thought. There were perhaps thirty seconds between each creak or whir, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. It was just long enough that each time, Matt would think the machine was done, only to hear another sound a moment later.
Matt had lost all sense of time, but it felt like days had passed while he was sitting here getting nowhere with his work and praying to God that it would just stop.
“Matt, buddy, you okay?”
Matt jumped in his seat – he had stopped noticing other noises entirely, so he hadn’t heard Foggy’s approach.
“Yeah, Fogs, I’m good,” he replied in what he hoped was an airy tone.
“You must be really engrossed in those depositions,” Foggy noted. “I asked you about lunch twice from across the room.”
Matt frowned. “Oh. Yeah, I must have missed that. Sorry.”
He heard Foggy’s brow knit together, and he hurried to change the subject. “What about lunch?” he prompted.
“Karen and I were thinking Chinese takeout. What do you think?”
A particularly loud (to Matt) grinding noise made the vigilante flinch, and he jumped at his chance. “Actually, Foggy, why don’t we go out to lunch today? I think we’ve earned it, don’t you? Especially after that Feldmann case last week.”
Foggy was still looking at him strangely, Matt could sense it. Matt usually preferred to stay in the office and eat, so this was likely an unexpected suggestion, but at this point, Matt would do anything to get away from that damned noise.
“Sure,” Foggy said finally. “You’re right, we deserve it, just this once.”
Matt gave him a close-lipped smile, and the three of them were soon off to the nearest reasonably priced restaurant.
Matt had hoped that would be the end of it. Surely an hour-long lunch break would be enough time for the fax machine to decide whether it wanted to break or not. But clearly, luck was not on Matt’s side today. He had enjoyed an hour of blessed silence (well, relative silence – Matt hadn’t experienced literal silence since before the accident), but as soon as they walked through their office door, Matt could hear it. If anything, it had gotten louder in their absence.
Foggy and Karen went back to their respective desks, and Matt had no choice but to follow suit. He didn’t bother to close his door (it’s not like that would accomplish anything anyway), he just slunk back to his desk and collapsed into the chair. He moved his fingers across the Braille for a moment, but all that accomplished was creating another sensation to be processed. It was all too much – Matt pressed his palms into his ears, trying desperately to shut it all out. His eyes were squeezed tight in an unconscious and futile effort to block out even more stimuli.
He didn’t know how long he sat like that before he felt a hand on his shoulder. He flinched away from the sensation, and the hand quickly retracted. It was a few more moments before Matt could summon the effort to remove his hands from his ears to hear what was happening.
“Matt? What’s wrong?” Foggy’s anxious voice permeated the din somehow, but it sounded as though it were coming from a long tunnel.
“It’s…” Matt couldn’t get any more words out. The whirring and clicking was definitely louder now, and he could swear it was speeding up. The damned thing was like a machine gun being fired right next to his ears, and Matt’s hands clamped down on them again.
Matt had lost all sense of anything else. All that existed in the world was that machine and his eardrums, the two locked in a never-ending battle.
Then, quite suddenly, the sounds grew quieter. They were still there, he could still clearly hear them, but they were no longer pounding into his head. Slowly, his other senses came back to him, and he registered the thick, noise-cancelling headphones covering his ears and his friend hovering somewhere in the general vicinity of his side.
“ -etter? Or is that worse? Do they hurt your ears more?” Foggy’s voice was slightly muffled, but Matt was just glad to hear something that wasn’t the fax machine.
Matt raised his head and Foggy’s rambling cut off at once.
“Thanks,” Matt managed, reaching out a hand blindly, trying to find the other man’s shoulder. After a few awkward moments he located his target, clasping it gratefully.
“So … what happened?” Foggy ventured after a few minutes of silence.
“Uh …” Matt was still struggling to form words, but it was getting better with each passing second. “It was the fax machine. It’s broken.”
“Oh.”
Foggy stayed for a few more minutes before seeming to accept that Matt was alright. He moved slowly back to his own office, but Matt noticed that the other lawyer kept his door open.
With effort, Matt turned back to his readings. He briefly debated listening to some tapes to give himself some audio input – maybe he could drown the noises out? – but ultimately, he decided not to risk it. Even removing these noise-cancelling headphones for a mere moment might be enough to send him back over the edge.
He passed another hour and made it through three more depositions before the clicking made itself known again. Either it was objectively getting louder, or his sensitive hearing was beginning to override the headphones. Matt gritted his teeth and grabbed his cane, squeezing it tightly with one hand. He was Daredevil, for God’s sake. He could deal with one faulty machine without losing his mind. He had been through torture much worse than this. He would endure.
… this was too much. His head felt like it was going to split in two, and he felt his hands come up to cradle it – they didn’t even feel like his hands, he couldn’t feel them or anything else. He couldn’t feel and he couldn’t smell and he couldn’t see. The clicking was his whole world now. His world wasn’t on fire at all, he’d been wrong – his world was ticking, like a bomb that’s about to blow, any minute now…
And then it did – an ear-splitting crack that seemed able to bust windows and set off car alarms, yet it was resonating from the middle of their office. That one noise was followed by another, then another, and another – Matt actually felt tears beginning to well up in his eyes from the sheer agony of the noises against his eardrums … and then everything stopped.
Everything stopped. The clicking and whirring was gone. For an instant, Matt wondered if he had gone deaf. It would be worth it, he decided, if it meant he would never have to hear that clicking again.
But no – surely if he had lost his hearing, there would be ringing in his ears? Or some sort of pain? There was neither – for what felt like the first time in Matt’s life, all he heard was sweet, blessed silence.
It took his senses a few minutes to catch up to what had happened. The first thing he noticed after the silence was the labored breathing of his best friend (more confirmation that his hearing was intact). Next, he smelled perspiration combined with lots of dust in the air and the smell of burnt plastic. And – was that pine wood he could taste in the air?
That final, bizarre taste was what made the pieces click together and helped Matt form a picture of the scene in his mind. Foggy was holding the old baseball bat they kept in the office in case of intruders. He was standing over the fax machine – or rather, what had once been the fax machine. All that remained now was a heaping pile of metal and plastic.
“Good?”
Matt’s mouth was hanging open in shock, but he registered that the question was directed at him. Wordlessly, he nodded.
Foggy returned the nod with satisfaction before turning his gaze to the works his hands had wrought.
“Foggy?” came the startled and angry voice of one Karen Page, who had been minding her own business right up until one of her bosses destroyed one of their only working pieces of equipment with absolutely no provocation. “Foggy, what the hell?!”