maskormenacelogs | oh, if I could only coax you overboard,

Entry tags:

oh, if I could only coax you overboard,

WHO: Matt Murdock and Lillian Crawley-Jeffries
WHERE: by the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea...
WHEN: March 23 (backdated like whoa)
WHAT: Not-a-date lunch date
WARNINGS: Two adults who should know better being ridiculous?

[Matt's not really sure what he's doing, to be honest. He should be spending his lunch (and maybe his afternoon) into cases and research, trying to figure out a starting point for the plans he needs to put in motion. He'll need to give Frank a target soon, a goal; he'll need to figure out a solution for Harvey slightly more permanent than loose conditions. At some point, he needs to get back together with Kate; he needs to take the bar and get out of this government-handout job (an ugly way to put it, but he can't think of a better one, sadly.) And yet here he is, propositioning Lillian Crawley-Jeffries for lunch. And not just lunch: an adventure lunch.

The justification of course would be that she's having a difficult time, and he should be a good friend (with no Foggy here to point out how utterly selfish he can be at times.) Or that he needs to blow off some steam (again, no Foggy here to point out how unlike him that is, quite like this, how he used to be grim and serious and far off from the time he might have casually invited a woman to the beach.) But this is Florida and he can take a few hours off to go do something that's not work. A few hours are not going to make a difference in a case like this.

So he hangs outside the sandwich shop, jacket and tie abandoned back at the office, shirt sleeves rolled up, the picture of casual loitering. Except for how he's listening through the crowd for the sound of her heartbeat, waiting to catch a scrap of the smell of her perfume. Been awhile, since he'd done that.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ A mystery wrapped in an enigma. She has to keep herself from looking too amused at that, pressing her fingertips to her mouth to suppress an entertained smile before lightly clearing her throat. ]

Guess there is a lot I dunno about you.

[ Though, she does know enough to consider him good company. That's what matters, at the moment. It's obviously joking when she goes on: ]

Y'could be a serial killer or somethin'.

A blind serial killer?

[His eyebrows raise over the rim of his glasses, mock-dubious. But god, stranger things have happened. Stranger things have happened to him.

~~They involve killing more than he'd like.~~]

What would be my motive?

Somethin' tragic, maybe. Or revenge. Ain't it always revenge?

[ Lil shrugs a little, idly toying with the idea in her mind. Not that she actually believes it at all -- though it's true, stranger things have probably happened to them both -- but it is sort of fun to think about, if only because it's completely ridiculous. ]

If y'are a serial killer though, I ain't gonna be much fun for you. Not alotta ways y'can kill an invulnerable gal, y'know?

Revenge. As if it ever did any good.

[No amount of striking back ever made the hurt any better. Not even when it was truly deserved. No matter how much he wanted it to. Defeating, killing Bullseye, destroying the Kingpin...none of it brought back anything or put it to rest.]

Maybe you wouldn't be a victim, though. Maybe-

[No. The more he thinks about it, the less funny it becomes, all of a sudden. He shakes his head.]

No. You wouldn't be. Anyway, let's talk about something else.

[ It's a path of conversation that suddenly seems to have shifted from idle and implausible fantasy into the realm of reality. She doesn't ask him to finish what he was saying, mostly because she suspects -- and while she isn't ashamed of the things she did in her wild and varied past, bringing up the fact that she once did prison time for being manipulated into the highly villainous act of aiding in the murder of a nationally loved superhero seems like it might ruin the mood. Just a little bit.

So, instead, she exhales a bit, shrugging a little for a second time. ]

If y'want. Murder's a little grim for a nice day at the beach anyway, ain't it? [ Though hanging out with Lil in general is always a touch morbid, with her expiration date, but. ] Y'want me t'ask y'about somethin' less morbid? Favorite color? Favorite food?

[Contrary to what Harvey seems to think about Matt Murdock...he's no saint himself. If his capacity for forgiveness can be great, it must at least help that he's fallen fairly far, even without demonic influence pushing him along. He was the Kingpin of New York. Maybe not a Wilson Fisk...but not much better, either.]

Favorite color is red. [He waves that question away gracefully.] What I remember of red. I don't think much about things like color anymore. It's more important what things smell like, or feel like. How they sit in a room.

[ That would be an insensitive question to ask a blind guy, wouldn't it? She forgets sometimes, that he's blind at all. Besides the fact that the man is more functional than most, it seems almost beside the point, given how much she's come to think of him as things other than blind -- like her friend. A good one, too.

Still, it's nice of the man to answer her the way he does. She appreciates that, even if she doesn't apologize outright. ]

Don't think I'd like haven't t'count on what things smell like. Seems kinda funny t'me. [ It isn't any more sensitive of her to say that either, but it seems mostly joking, especially when the way she leans over to give him an audible mock-sniff. ] Sometimes, I even kinda like not bein' able t'feel things as good.

[It is frankly amazing that Matt manages to function at all. Especially after all the things that have kicked him back down again. And yet, here he is, and being blind is the least of his problems, once he learned how to use what he had left.]

Oh, it can be awful. I don't think most people really think about what they smell like. They don't notice themselves at all. But I do. You learn a lot about someone that way. Not all of it terribly pleasant. And there's nothing in the world that truly doesn't have a smell, once you start paying attention to it.

[And he can talk about it- as long as they're not being too specific- without ever explicitly having to discuss his hypersenses. Not that Matt's really hiding his power, or his identity. They've never talked about it, though, and he's not sure if she even wants to know...or if she'd prefer to let all of that sort of thing lie.]

It can be just as vibrant as color, in its way. Or what I remember of color.

[ He's right, of course -- she doesn't normally spend much time dwelling on what she smells like, not as a day-to-day thing. She's as cleanly as the next person, but still. She doesn't exactly make a habit of sniffing herself. She does now though, pausing before she curiously lifts her forearm to her nose for a little smell.

It's almost disappointing, when she doesn't really notice anything except maybe the faintest trace of maple syrup from that morning's breakfast. ]

Maybe I'd rather not pay attention then. I'm pretty sure there's more things I wouldn't wanna smell than I would, y'know what I mean?

[He reaches out, swats her gently on the leg]

Hey now, don't knock it. I haven't got much to go on.

[This is not true, of course. He has much, much more. Things it would be difficult to understand, like how he can tell what the cloth of her dress is just by touching it and hear the sound of her heartbeat.]

A lot of it might be terrible. But when it's something nice, it's just- you know, instinctively, when it's right.

[ She pouts a little when he smacks her leg, though it's entirely for show -- not that he can see it, and not that it actually hurt her. In all truthfulness, she might have even liked it. Just a little bit. ]

Seems like alotta trouble t'me. 'Specially if there's more "terrible" than "nice."

[ Lifting a hand to shield her eyes, she looks out at the view. ]

Wouldn't y'rather jus' be able t'see again?

[The silence drags for a long moment, the question hanging between them. And then Matt reaches up, pushing his glasses up off his face and into his hair, for a moment, and the world is just as dark as it always is even with the sun in his eyes.]

...I think about that, sometimes.

[Not all the time. Not even all that often, anymore.]

When I think about how I don't know what my best friend looks like. Any of my friends. Or my college girlfriend, my partner, my ex-wife. My coworkers and clients. But I don't think about the world in terms of what it looks like anymore. If it came back, I think it would just be a new kind of sensory overload. I'd have to learn how to function all over again.

[He fishes in his hair (already getting sort of long, less clean-cut than it was) and pulls his glasses back onto his face.]

I'm fine how I am. I made it work.

[ He's handsome enough to warrant letting her eyes linger for a moment when he lifts his glasses up into his hair. It's tempting to reach out towards him, though she wouldn't have been able to explain why -- she almost does it, her hand lifting up out of her lap ever so slightly in the beginnings of the gesture before falling back down.

The moment passes. Lil exhales lightly. ]

I know y'did, hon. [ Absently, she smooths the skirt of her dress out under her palm. ] Ain't that what we all gotta figure out eventually? How t'make it work? Otherwise, we're just a bunch of weirdos an' freaks, right?

[He finds himself wishing that she'd done it. Without really wanting to take the moment to think about why.]

Is that what you really think?

[Which, technically, blind boy gets superpowered from radioactive waste definitely falls under the "freak" category. Being blind had rated, for awhile. But not anymore.]

Because I don't think either of us are freaks.

[ Her lips tighten slightly. It's not because of him. But no matter how proud she is of what she is -- she won't ever think of it as normal. She'd been through too much as a mutant for that.

Finally, she glances off away, responding with a purposeful kind of nonchalance: ]

Yeah? Y'should've seen me in high school. When I hit puberty, an' I started outgrowin' the boys. "Freak" was one of the nicer things y'could've called me before I grew into my limbs.

[ She shrugs a little. ]

I'm a freak, but it don't bother me anymore.

That's a healthy way of looking at it too.

[Matt recognizes that he's hit a nerve, and knows not to carry on with it any longer. Back off, and let it go, and let her say what she feels she needs to say and dictate this topic.]

I think I'm glad I managed to miss seeing most of high school. You can't feel self conscious about how you look when you don't even know what you look like. Although in retrospect, I was too busy being self-conscious about not being able to see to care about that.

[ She makes a quiet, humming sound of acknowledgment. ]

Must've been hard for you.

[ It's sincere, how she answers at length. There's sympathy in her for any outcast, anyone that's been different enough to feel self-conscious or even ashamed of what they are. It makes it mean more though, that he made it the way he did. It's hard not to be impressed by that.

When she goes on, it's a bit lighter, an attempt to lift the heaviness of her mood on the subject: ]

Probably would've pushed y'around though. I was always kinduva bully.

There's a funny thing about that. You'd be amazed how easy it is to "accidentally" whack someone in the shins with a cane when you're blind.

[Matt rolls over suddenly onto his stomach, reaches out and shoves her at her hip playfully, the move pulling the fabric of his shirt tight across his shoulders for a moment.]

Or somewhere else. You'd be amazed how good your aim can be without sight. People sometimes just breathe so loud.

Yeah? You'd get lucky with me -- I got more shin t'whack than most folks.

[ Her tone is wry, but friendly. As if to demonstrate, she stretches her legs out in front of her, leaning to reach with her fingertips. Long as her limbs are, she doesn't quite manage to touch her own toes. Could blame it on the length of her legs, or the fact that she's technically over the hill. Either way, she only exhales, giving up and laying back, folding her hands over her belly. ]

Anyway, if y'were ever the kinda guy that gets bullied, seems t'me like y'grew out of it.

[Matt thinks about that for a long while. Thinks about the Kingpin, Wilson Fisk, and all his attempts to ruin Matt's life. Thinks about the dogged fights in court and all the attempts to preserve some semblance of a real life and all the nights in the streets kicking two-bit crooks to chase down some lead to the end of justice.

And then, finally, he says:]

...you can just say "stubborn asshole," you know.

[ She tries not to seem too amused at that, but. Well. ]

You said it, not me. I ain't callin' y'names.

[ Not that "stubborn asshole" is necessarily a bad thing. She's pretty stubborn herself. He hasn't been on opposite sides from her on anything yet, so she must seem more or less agreeable, but the truth is, the woman rarely gives in, even when she's obviously wrong. ]

Anyway, y'got plenty of good qualities t'make up for it.

[He rolls over onto his stomach, again, propping his chin up on one hand and giving her an amused look.]

It's a dangerous thing, to feed my ego. I'm warning you now, Lil.

[By which he means, he is not so humble that he doesn't want to hear what all of those good qualities are.]

I'm invulnerable. I ain't afraid of danger.

[ She's joking about the truth, honestly -- not, of course, that she genuinely sees any threat in Matt Murdock. The blindness aside, as far as she knows, he's probably just about the most normal man she's ever been involved with. Though, given her other choices, maybe that's not saying much. ]

Wouldn't be tellin' y'anythin' y'don't already know though.

[ That bit comes wryly. ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

oh, if I could only coax you overboard,

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject