After the events of Daredevil season 3, Matt Murdock is trying to once again balance life as a lawyer and a vigilante. But he's been scarred by loss and betrayal - will a mysterious new neighbour help him heal? Or will her secrets drag him back into...
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Sound came back first.
Muffled. Distorted. As if he was deep underwater...
Then everything rushed in at once.
Sensation, scent, taste...everything coalesced, until he felt solid again, and the world around him took shape once more.
But it was an entirely different world to just a moment ago.
The air was colder, with a bite of frost in the wind. The spring perfume of flowers and pollen and freshly cut grass was now a thick miasma of neglect and decay. The storefront to his left seemed to shift and distort, slats of wood creeping up the window pane until it was nothing but an empty, abandoned husk, so different from the bustling bodega of five seconds ago.
And as this new reality crystallised around Matt, so did the chaos.
Screams. Shrieks. Yelling. Cars crashing. Hundreds of heartbeats suddenly invading his senses. People appearing as if from thin air, and staggering around in confusion. Matt narrowly avoided colliding with a man to his right. A man who wasn't there a second ago.
The man grabbed on to Matt's arm, as if clutching at a lifeline. "What the fuck, man? What just happened?"
"I- I don't know," Matt replied, feeling just as lost as the other man sounded.
"Where's my wife? I was just here with her? Where is she? Why is everything different? What the fuck is happening?" The man stumbled away, calling for his wife.
Calina.
The thought of her banished the last lingering threads of disorientation. Matt grabbed his phone and speed-dialed her number. He started jogging towards their apartment building as he waited for the call to go through.
But all he got was an audio alert instead, informing him that he had no network connection.
He shoved the device in his pocket and started running. For the second time in 24 hours, he started running towards the woman he loved, heart in his throat, fearing for her safety. Yesterday's concern had been for nothing. A false alarm.
He had a horrible, sinking feeling that today would be different.
That feeling grew stronger as he reached his building and entered the lobby. The familiar blend of scents and sounds which normally occupied this space was gone. Gone was the smell of Mrs Schneider's baking. Gone was the smell of talcum powder and milk from the baby in 2F. Gone was the aftershave of the mail carrier - a musky, woodsy scent that usually lingered long after the mail was delivered. The blaring TV in 3C was silent. The scratch of the author in 4D's pen against paper was replaced by the dissonant sounds of rock metal blasting from a tinny speaker. The stomp of heavy boots could be heard in the apartment below that one, where this morning a frail, elderly man had lived alone.
