Blackout | Matt Murdock

prologue | shocking beginnings

DISCLAIMER: The original characters are mine, as is the story idea. Marvel owns the rest. 

The static shock is new.

            Michaela isn't an idiot (most days); static shock as a concept isn't new. She's been terrorizing the neighborhood with it since she was seven and her grandma knitted her a pair of incredibly ugly wool socks that she refused to take off, which were then forcibly removed after she'd gone two days without a bath. And she's hardly a stranger to grabbing onto a pole on the subway and zapping the hell out of herself.

            But this is... more.

            Tuesday morning dawns, presumably, bright and bitterly cold, though Michaela doesn't open her eyes until 8:53, approximately seven minutes before her first class. The only comment she has about the weather is to declare it was too fucking cold as she hurriedly threw on a seasonally-inappropriate jacket on her way out of her apartment. Late as she is, she can't grab breakfast from the cafe on campus, or even a coffee, which doesn't bode well for her attitude for the rest of the day.

            She snaps at a professor or two. Her next paper is probably going to get tanked. Oh fucking well.

            The point is, though, that she wasn't in any state of mind to notice it until well into the afternoon when she's holed up behind the register at Cody's, mindlessly greeting customers and desperately hoping none of them choose to mention her smudged makeup or the unavoidable stains under her arms. This wasn't a clean shirt by any means, hadn't been clean when she wore it last, either. Is it her fault that the washers in her apartment complex ate quarters like they were fucking caviar?

            A few regulars pass through — Diego and Carla, Tommy and Riley, Mr. Yang — but they don't linger today like they might have otherwise. The shop isn't busy, really, there are only a handful of people browsing, so apparently she's giving off pretty strong don't-engage-with-me-I'm-not-human-today vibes, which suits her fine. For the most part.

The absence of friendly conversation is starting to wear on her the longer her shift drags on. Her leg shakes, knee bobbing against the row of drawers behind the register; she worries at a hangnail on her thumb, too chicken just to rip it off; the copper on her tongue comes from having her teeth planted a little viciously in her lower lip. God, she has so much homework for this week, and then finals are coming up, she'll be swamped, how the hell is she going to come into work when she already knows she has three papers, two projects, and an oral presentation due in a few weeks—

Someone steps up to the register and Michaela straightens instinctively, whacking her knee against the drawers in her haste. She hisses out a strangled breath, fighting the urge to crouch down and cradle her leg; instead, she forces a brittle smile at the man in front of her and says, "Hope you found everything alright. Want me to ring you up?"

The man smiles in sympathy, his brows drawn together behind his red-tinted glasses. "Yeah, that'd be great." He loads his things onto the counter and Michaela dutifully ignores them; she's learned not to make assumptions based on what people bought, and more to the point, she doesn't care to make a guessing game out of it, not when she has better things to waste brainpower on. She's already started working his purchases into the register when he says, with a smidge of hesitation, "Are you alright? I heard a bang and it, uh, didn't sound great."

Michaela pauses, biting again at her lip. She doesn't normally take notice of customers, aside from the ones that turn up on a daily basis, but — the guy smiles at her, sheepish but charming, and she drops her gaze to give him an absent once-over and—

Ah. Fuck.

His suit is nice, though she doesn't really have an eye for expensive tastes. For all she knows he'd nicked it from a Good Will bin and it's really thirty years old. But it looks good on him; charcoal jacket and pants, crisp white shirt, maroon tie that she thinks maybe matches his glasses? Short, dark-brown hair, stubble on his cheeks and chin. Cute, overall. And then there's the cane.