Tabula Rasa

Chapter 2

He wasn't interested in her.

Yes, he was attracted, but that was just biology. Pheromones and synapses and chemistry.

Completely involuntary.

And given his over-developed senses, not something that he could turn off. He couldn't block her scent from penetrating his defences. He couldn't control the way it affected him, distracted him, aroused him....but he rendered it a background pleasure. Like a piece of art on the wall. A beautiful bit of decoration in his spartan world.

But nothing more.

He diligently ignored the fragments of noise that would spill from her apartment as he passed by her door. He stopped straining to hear hints of the life she was living behind those four walls.

He stopped following her trails as she left the building; stopped trying to collect puzzle pieces.

He didn't engage her in conversation - even the time they ended up in the same elevator together.

The old Matt - the one from a few years ago - would have pursued her without reservation. He would have succumbed to the attraction, flirted, asked her out. Seduced her into his bed.

But there were so many reasons why this Matt was staying clear.

Unfortunately, one night - about a week after Foggy's warning - he slipped.

He was returning back to his rooftop after a particularly brutal night roaming the streets as Daredevil. It was a night that once would have sent him down a nihilistic spiral, where he would wonder if any of it - the pain, the sacrifices, the lies and the danger - was worth it. If he was making a difference at all, or if the city was doomed to suffer under the weight of the corruption and evil that permeated it.

He was beyond those kinds of existential crises now. He'd come to terms with the fact that the city he loved was violent. And dark. And that it would probably never change.

But he was compelled to try.

And he would keep trying, no matter what.

That resolve didn't stop the despair he sometimes felt though.

Like tonight.

Whilst standing vigil over the city, a series of faintly whispered pleas and choked gasps had reached him on the wind. Responding to the sounds, he'd dashed across the skyline searching for the woman in distress. He'd eventually spotted her, teetering on the roof of one of the newly developed high rise apartment buildings on 52nd. As he raced closer, he could hear her panicked breaths and the thundering pulse of her heart. He could also detect a familiar scent in the air around her - the acrid organic compound that he'd first detected from the thugs in the bar.

He found an extra gear and put on a burst of speed... but he was too late. Before he could get within speaking distance, before he could call out for her to 'stop', she launched herself over the edge and plummeted 30 stories to the ground.

Matt had skidded to a stop, shocked at what he'd just witnessed. At the sudden, senseless loss of life. And as he'd made his way back across the city, grief burned the back of his sightless eyes. It leadened his joints and pressed down on his shoulders like a vice. It made him yearn for the few comforts of his home - the warm shower; the silk sheets on his bed; the soft sweats he wore against his bruised skin.

The scent drifting from next door...

The weight of his failure, and the sorrow sinking into his bones rendered him helpless to resist when he saw her again on the rooftop.