The less you know about me,

[man_without_fear]

Samaritan.

The good neighbor who steps in to help a stranger.

But why? Kindness? Obligation? Or is it guilt turned around into a form of penance?

Is it a calling? Deeply ingrained. Or is it an excuse?

The man who lives his life to serve others is either a good man, or an empty one.

And when the Samaritan himself needs help, to whom can he turn to, and what is their motivation?

"No, no calls."

"It's okay, I'm just trying to help. We need to get you to a hospital."

We live our lives imagining, hoping, that when the call for help comes we will be brave enough to answer it.

"Don't. You've lost a lot of blood, I think you might have been stabbed."

"I have to leave."

Strong enough to finish it.




First, there was a boy and his father.

Then there were men. Bad men, who beat the father and stole the boy.

In this city it happens all the time.

Matt was there to hear the encounter, but not to stop it.

For two days the screams of the boy follow Matt around, echoing in the back of his mind as he sits at his desk in the office, ringing in his ears when he goes out searching in the evening, and haunting him when he finally turns in at night.

He makes it his mission to rescue the kidnapped child and hunt down the men responsible, and nothing is going to stop him so long as he's still breathing.

Which he is, if barely, when he wakes up on a strange couch, in a strange apartment, his body aching from head to toe.

"Are you gonna listen to me this time?"

The question drifts out of his surroundings and the person asking is strange, too.

"Where am I?"

Blood in his mouth and nose, soaked into his clothes and tacky against his skin.

"You're in my apartment."

It's a woman's voice. She's nervous, afraid, but composed, like having a half-dead stranger on her couch isn't such an unusual thing.

"Who are you?"

Truth told he's nervous, too, mind scrabbling to put the pieces back together. He's been out, someone found him, and instead of calling the cops he's propped up on their, her, couch.

"I'm the lucky girl who pulled you out of the garbage."

The garbage. God, he can still smell the stink of rotten table scraps, someone's emptied ashtray, booze in broken bottles…

His hands lift and feel for the mask that isn't there.

"You've seen my face."

"Yeah."

"Great."

She goes through a litany of his injuries, broken ribs, probable concussion, puncture wound...

"And your eyes? They're non-responsive to light, which isn't freaking you the hell out. So either you're blind, or in way worse shape than I thought."

"Do I have to pick one?" He huffs when he says it, like it's funny, and they go into a conversation that's almost an argument, with neither of them really saying very much about themselves. Her name is Claire, she names him 'Mike'.

"The less you know about me, the better."

It holds true for each of them, and in the end that's where they leave it. She leaves him to rest, and he passes out again, dragged under by exhaustion and injury.

-----

Dreams about his father are always hard, so bittersweet they hurt. The man had always been there, his dad, up until…

As happens so often when he dreams about his dad Matt wakes with a start, only this time no air comes with the gasp he makes.

He wheezes and tries harder, straining and failing to pull in oxygen.

"What is it, what's wrong?" Claire asks, at his side in a moment, fitting stethoscope to her ears.

"I… can't… breath… " A boulder is sitting on his chest and his broken ribs are screaming at him as his muscles tense and hitch in stuttered, ineffective gasps.

"You've got air in your chest, it's collapsing your lung," Claire diagnosis, already reaching for the medical bag she's patched him up out of.

Teeth grit and fists clenched he holds still for her as she drives a needle through his skin. The hollow tube on the end burbles then hisses after a pop and his lung finally refills with air.

Matt cradles his side while sucking wind in thirsty gasps.

Claire coaches him as he catches his breath and brings up the reality of the situation. "Look, let's just say for the sake of discussion I buy this whole, 'we can't go to the hospital because, whatever' story you've got going on, but we need to talk about what happens if you give up the ghost here in my living room."

She wants him to convince her that this is worth it.

That's when he tells her about the boy.

"Jesus," she breaths and that says just about everything on the situation.

Russian mobsters, human trafficking, and a kidnapping ploy to get the vigilante who's been making bad men's lives difficult… it's a lot to swallow all at once but Claire seems to handle it well enough.

"Did you at least find the kid?" She asks, grasping at the thing she asked for, the part that makes all of this worth it.

Matt gives a small headshake, frowning at his own failure. "No, he wasn't there. I barely made it out myself. I was careless. Stupid."

Something someone in his position can't afford to be.

Claire's disappointment almost seems to match his own and she switches to the next issue at hand. "So these men that took the boy, they're out there right now, looking for you?"

Matt goes still.

With his abilities Matt is attuned to everything around him. Beyond sight, his senses function at an almost superhuman capacity and he is constantly aware of his surroundings and beyond. The difficult thing isn't picking up on things, it's keeping everything out.

Even while focused on his conversation with Claire there is 'noise' on his periphery, constant background information like the drone of a television set down the hall, the smell of someone burning pot pies in a toaster oven one floor above, or the knocking of a man down below. It's the repetition of the knock and the man's methodical movement down the hallway that grabs Matt's attention at last, and the questions being asked that zero his focus.

When he doesn't answer or move Claire finally prompts him. "Mike?"

"There's someone in the building. A man going from door to door."

"How-- how do you know that? "

Matt shushes her, gathering more information and sifting through it.

"He's on the third floor already. Smells like… primo cigarettes and discount cologne." With great effort and not a little protest from his body Matt drags himself up into a sitting position. He can feel her staring at him and making that grasp for a response that doesn't come.

"You're looking at me like I'm crazy, right?" He guesses.

"Seems the appropriate response," Claire confirms.

Matt sits back on the couch, trying to draw himself together.

"There's a few things I haven't told you about me yet."

"You haven't told me anything about you," she points out, letting her exasperation show. "All I know is that you're very good at taking a beating."

"Yeah, well, that part I got from my dad."




[dialogue taken from Netflix' Daredevil: 1.2 - Cut Man]