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“Matt?” Karen asks, something uncertain in her voice.
She absentmindedly shifts some of the papers on Matt’s desk an inch to the right. He can hear it in the faint scraping noise more than he can actually sense it. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Yeah,” he simply says, tilting his chin up just a notch, the way he does sometimes when he truly wants to pay attention.
“Why do you always wear those sunglasses?”
He makes a little shrugging gesture. “It’s hard for me to know where to look. I’ve been told that makes people uncomfortable.”
“You know, you really don’t need to hide your eyes.”
“So it doesn’t make you uncomfortable?”
“No, they... They’re warm and a really beautiful shade of brown. You say more with them than I think you realize. It’s like you hide something of yourself behind those glasses, like you don’t let people see who you really are.”
His brow furrows and he has to swallow. She’s scraping and poking at a soft spot, and he feels he’s getting closer to that point where it’ll all unravel. He doesn’t want to go there. Really doesn’t. And he wants to tell her she’s beautiful. Her slender figure, her long hair, her inquisitive face, her gentle voice.
Shit. What is he doing? She’s a colleague. More than that. She hugged him when he was falling apart, she let him cry into her shoulder when he needed a friend. She’s the heart and soul that glues Nelson & Murdock together. They’re a team. He’s not even sure he wants to go there.
He reaches up and takes off the sunglasses, tries his best to let his unseeing eyes seek out her face. It’s been over twenty years, and he’s forgotten how that works save for a vague memory that fades around the edges.
He lets his senses reach out, and she’s smiling a kind smile at him. Her heart beats faster, her skin becomes the tiniest notch warmer. But there’s one thing he doesn’t know, can’t know. Unless he asks her.
“Your eyes, what color are they?”
“Oh. Uh. Blue. Or, well, a light blueish gray, I suppose. It’s hard to describe when you... Do you remember colors from when you could still see?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Can I ask why you want to know?”
A sheepish smile flits across his face for the shortest of moments. “It, uh... It sounds a little cliché, but there’s a picture of you in my head that I’d like to complete.”
Something ripples across her face he can’t quite interpret. “And what does that picture look like?”
This is where it gets tricky. Vision in the classic sense has become such an alien concept to him, and anything he can say will not mean anything to her without further explanation of what his world is like. He wants to be honest with her, but he also can’t.
How can he navigate around the truth without resorting to another lie? “Beautiful. Special. Unique.”
“Now you’re just being a flatterer, Matt Murdock.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
Something dangerous crackles in the air, and to him it almost feels like the atoms between them electrify. A self-conscious, awkward harrumph from Karen makes the moment dissipate before he can act on it.
He forces his mouth into a smile, then asks a little awkwardly, “So, uh... Did you find that information on Senator Royce?” He puts his glasses back on.
Karen’s breath hitches for the fraction of a second. Like she was hoping there’d be something more than the law firm connecting them. Like maybe he’d trust her not to hide things from her. Not to feel raw and exposed without the metal frames between him and the world.
And he wants to, but it’s a huge leap. One he isn’t sure he’s ready to take. And maybe he won’t ever be.
Well, that’s what he used to think before one Franklin Nelson waltzed into his life, but Foggy proved him wrong in every expectation he’d ever had of going through life as lonesome maverick Matt Murdock.
Who was to say that solitude was his fate? If anything, the last few years have taught him that the whole guilt-ridden loner thing was overrated. His lips twitch slightly with the beginnings of a decision, but then Karen’s voice brings that train of thought to a halt.
“Yeah, hold on, I think it’s still in the printer. Or lost in the ether of the data highway between my laptop and the wireless connection, cause that damn machine seems to want to eat paper like a starved vampire lusting for fresh blood.”
His mouth curves into a smile at the metaphor, and he lets out the breath he’s been holding as she gets up and walks into the next room.
This whole Nelson & Murdock thing is still very much a work in progress.
Just like everything in his life.