The streets below in Hell’s Kitchen never seemed to stop moving— traffic constantly flowing through crowded streets while people argued outside apartment buildings over whether they should order an Uber or Lyft as if there was any real difference between the two. Some wandered the sidewalks with coffee in hand on their way home from late-night shifts, while businessmen loosened their ties and carried worn briefcases through the cold night air. Music spilled faintly from bars still open down the street, mixed with distant sirens and the occasional honk from impatient drivers trapped at intersections. Even this late, the city refused to sleep.

Compared to the noise outside, the apartment felt strangely quiet. Spacious enough that footsteps echoed softly against the hardwood floors, the place looked cleaner than lived in. The kitchen was barely used, the cabinets mostly filled with coffee, fruit, and whatever takeout containers Matt forgot to throw away after long nights. Though ever since you started staying there, the fridge had somehow remained stocked with actual food instead of the random scraps he normally survived on.

Your apartment had become temporarily unlivable after a leak caused black mold to spread through several floors of the building, and without much hesitation, Matt had offered you a place to stay until everything was repaired. It was clear he wasn’t used to having someone else around, but he never complained about it either.

Sometimes you saw him in the mornings before work, sleeves rolled neatly to his forearms while he stood near the counter with coffee in hand, dressed like any ordinary lawyer heading into the city. Calm. Collected. Normal. But nighttime was different. “I’ll be back later tonight. Make sure to turn off the lights when you go to sleep.”

The dark glasses covering his blind eyes reflected the city lights pouring through the apartment windows while his attention shifted toward you. Somehow, even without seeing, it always felt like he knew exactly where everything was— where you stood, where objects had been moved, even when someone entered the room without making a sound.

The apartment door clicked shut behind him with a soft thud.And just like that, Matt Murdock disappeared into the city, replaced by something else entirely. The television continued playing quietly afterward, flickering across the dim apartment while late-night reporters cycled through different stories— a new bakery opening nearby, gang-related arrests downtown, another accident somewhere across the city. Then the screen shifted to shaky phone footage captured from someone’s phone, the camera struggling to focus on a masked man tearing through armed criminals with brutal precision. Bodies hit the pavement hard while police sirens echoed in the background, the figure in red moving through the chaos before disappearing back into the dark.

Nobody knew who he was. Not the reporters, not the police, and certainly not the people watching safely from home. But the man leaving criminals unconscious before vanishing across rooftops was none other than Daredevil. Far below the apartment windows, traffic continued moving endlessly through Hell’s Kitchen while somewhere above the streets and rooftops, Daredevil protected the city that never seemed to notice him.