Chapter Text
In any course of events as strange and ridiculous as the life Matt Murdock leads, the fact that something happens is generally more important than how it happens.
This, for the record, is how it happens.
-
Matt can hear Karen stifling little huffs of laughter behind her hand. Foggy, on the other hand, isn’t even trying to hide it. Matt frowns and crosses his arms.
“Are you done?” he asks, raising an eyebrow.
“Not even close,” Foggy says as he catches his breath. “You couldn’t settle for fighting normal right-wing nationalist zealots. It had to be occultist right-wing nationalist zealots. What’s next? Alien psychologists? Zombie construction workers? Uh-- Karen, help me out here.”
“Mad scientist veterinarians?” she suggests.
Matt groans. “This is why I don’t like telling you guys about my… extracurriculars,” he complains.
“Of course,” Karen says in that sweetly sarcastic tone that means Matt is about to get his metaphorical ass handed to him. “It’s not your Catholic guilt or trust issues. It’s because we make fun of you.”
She pats his hair to show that she’s just teasing, and Matt can’t quite keep the frown on his face.
“Anyway, the worst I got hurt was grabbing a knife away from somebody. It cut through my glove, but I can pass this off as a paper-cut.” He holds up his hand, showing off the tiny cut that didn’t even need stitches, honestly, why are they worrying?
“I wouldn’t call that a paper-cut, unless we’ve recently re-named sheet metal ‘paper,’ but whatever floats your boat, buddy.” Foggy shrugs, and his heartbeat flutters enough to mean he’s only sort of lying. “I’m just grateful you didn’t try to walk to work with a broken leg again.”
“It was a sprained ankle,” he replies testily.
“So,” Karen interrupts, before they can rehash this argument again, “what are you going to do with the, uh--?” She gestures to the ‘artifact’ that Matt recovered from the site of the ritual, which he overheard the cult members say they had spent decades searching for. It lies on Karen’s desk, and all of them feel irrationally afraid to touch it.
“Why do we need to do anything with it?” Foggy asks. “I mean, it’s just a quill pen, right? Pretty old, but it’s not going to do anything without the GOP’s favorite sorcerers.” He sounds unsure. Matt can hear him flexing his fingers nervously against sweaty palms.
“I don’t know,” Karen says. Matt thinks she might be leveling a suspicious glare at the quill in question. “Maybe we should find somewhere safe to put it? Just to make sure the, uh, occultist right-wing zealots don’t get their hands on it again.”
“I stopped the ritual,” Matt points out. “But if it makes you two feel better, I’ll keep it with me until we find a way to get rid of it.”
Matt grabs the quill off Karen’s desk, and several things happen at once.
The slice--okay, fine, maybe it’s more than a paper-cut--on Matt’s palm burns with a sudden, searing pain. There is a sound that Matt can feel the reverb of in his chest, like the split second before thunder when lightning rips the air apart. Karen and Foggy both cry out. They flinch violently from a spot in the middle of the office, though Matt can sense nothing actually there.
In the next moment, there is something there.
Or rather, someone.
A man appears in the law office of Nelson and Murdock out of thin air. His balance is thrown, Matt can sense that: the way his stance shifts unsteadily to the sides of his feet against the wooden floor, the wobble and clench of his arms. Still, the stranger regains his composure from apparent spontaneous magical travel impressively fast, if the colorful string of confused cursing he lets loose is any indication.
Matt reacts first.
He has straightened from his position of leaning against Karen’s desk and is across the room before he even registers moving. He has a hand wrapped around the upper arm of the man who came out of nowhere. Everything about the situation reads threat, but the man gives no indication of violence. Instead, he merely makes an affronted sound and tries to pull away from Matt, who hauls him bodily into Foggy’s office and slams the door shut before anyone else can do more than gape in astonishment.
“Okay,” Matt says calmly as his back presses against the door. “What the hell?”
-
Foggy feels, distantly, that he should really stop being so surprised when Matt drops the helpless blind guy act. The thing is, it’s hard to reconcile the “clumsy” best friend he’s known for the better part of a decade with the no-nonsense vigilante who just zipped across the office in the blink of an eye and locked a screaming, teleporting interloper in Foggy’s office, what the hell, Matt?
“Matt,” Karen says with a rising note of hysteria, “what did you do?”
“I honestly have no idea,” Matt responds. He jolts slightly when the man currently locked in Foggy’s office starts banging on the window right next to Matt’s head. The blinds rattle against the glass. “I must have activated the ritual.”
“What exactly was this ritual supposed to do, anyway?” she asks.
“Can we maybe deal with the guy in the waistcoat trying to break down my door first?” Foggy pleads before Matt can answer Karen. Matt’s mouth falls open a little in confusion.
“Waistcoat?” he repeats.
“Yeah,” Foggy confirms. “He’s dressed like he’s ready to dump some tea in the Boston harbor.”
Matt’s eyebrows shoot up above the rims of his glasses.
“Shit.”
-
Matt explains the basic premise of what the occultist right-wing nationalist zealots (“Geez, that’s a mouthful. Did they have a catchy name for themselves or anything?” “I didn’t stop to ask, Foggy.”) were trying to accomplish. Namely, bringing the people who founded America back from the past to “get this country on the right track.”
“That is the stupidest fucking idea I have ever heard,” says Karen.
She changes her mind when Matt and Foggy agree that she should be the one to talk to their accidental prisoner first. That, in fact, is the stupidest fucking idea she’s ever heard.
Somehow, though, she finds herself moving the chair they had propped up under the knob and knocking on Foggy’s office door. She has a mug of tea in her hand, which might not be the best peace offering ever devised, but it will have to do.
“Um, sir?” she greets nervously as she opens the door. The man stopped pounding on the window several minutes ago, and is now standing in the middle of the office with the posture of a military man facing down the enemy with honor.
He’s short, shorter than Karen by a couple of inches, at least, though considering how he holds himself she might not have even noticed. His eyes are distracting. He has a keen gaze that, a year ago--before the horror and the grief that Karen knows has turned her own stare into folded steel--would have sealed her lips shut without a word.
“I assure you,” he says before she can speak, “if you seek a ransom, you have captured the wrong man.”
“Uh, no.” Karen shakes her head. “No ransom--”
“So you’re working for the British, then,” he interrupts. There is a fiery spark in his eyes, and his lips fold into something like a sneer. “The war has been over for years. We are building a new nation from scratch, a historical feat that is difficult enough without the interference of England’s god-blessed crown. Just accept defeat and move on, you tyrannical, bull-headed, despotic--”
“We’re not British!” Karen shouts just to shut him up. The mug in her hands threatens to spill its tea, and she reins herself in. “Look, I know this must be very confusing for you, but we didn’t… Kidnap you, or whatever it is you think happened.”
This earns her a skeptical eyebrow.
“Then tell me, how is it I was in the middle of the Philadelphia convention one moment, and the next found myself being bodily thrown into confinement by a group of suspicious characters?”
In a short span of time--less than an hour, now that Karen thinks about it, Jesus-- filled by one shock after another, this manages to throw her.
“Philadelphia convention?” She repeats. She takes a closer look at him. There’s something familiar in the slope of his nose, the arch of his angry brows. Old portraits aren’t always the most accurate things, but… “What’s your name?”
“Are you implying, madam, that you don’t even know the name of the man you hold prisoner?” His jaw clenches, and he looks ready to start cursing again.
“We’re not trying to hold you prisoner.” She forces a charming smile (the muscle memory required for that is stronger than anything else about her, she sometimes thinks). The man’s shoulders relax ever so slightly and she realizes. Ah, chivalry. Probably why Matt and Foggy sent her in. She bristles internally a little, but she’ll get them back for that later. “We were as surprised to see you as you were to be here, believe me. My friend panicked and locked you in. As far as we know, you could be a… A spy for the British.”
Once again, his posture shifts. There is less of the military rigor in him now, but if anything he tries to pull himself to an even greater height which he does not possess.
“I assure you, I am a patriot through-and-through.” There is a long pause as his sharp eyes flick around Foggy’s office. “I apologize for my intrusion, though I, um. Do not remember how I arrived here. Still,” he sinks into a bow and extends his hand. “I’m honored to make your acquaintance. May I have your name?”
Karen blinks. Oh, zero to one hundred real quick. Still, she’s not going to look a gift horse in the mouth, even if that horse is a flirtatious time-traveler from the Revolutionary War summoned by the black magic of pissed off conservatives. At least he’s not yelling anymore.
And, all things considered, there is something earnestly charming about him. The gesture to take her hand is uncomfortably antiquated, and awkward because she has to set the tea down on Foggy’s desk before she can reciprocate, but the gentle press of his lips to the back of her hand isn’t half bad, really.
“Karen Page,” she says with a giggle. Matt can sense everything that’s happening in here. She’s never going to live this down, but that’s alright. “And you are?” She bats her eyelashes just for the effect.
“Alexander Hamilton, esquire, delegate to New York state.”
Karen barely has time to process the minor flood of information that comes back to her from tenth grade U.S. History and a PBS special she caught half of a few years ago--secretary of the treasury, ten dollar bill, something about a sex scandal?--when the door flies open with a bang.
She whirls around to see Matt looking gobsmacked, which is never a good sign. She pulls her hand from Hamilton’s and instinctively catalogs what in Foggy’s office might serve as a makeshift weapon, but then she catches sight of Foggy himself over Matt’s shoulder. He has a hand splayed across his face, wearing the same expression he does when Matt quotes Thurgood Marshall twice in one hour.
“Alexander Hamilton,” Matt breathes. A giddy smile breaks out on his face. “God, hi, hello.” He thrusts a hand out eagerly. Hamilton eyes him with what could be wariness or appreciation before shaking Matt’s hand.
“I’m afraid I haven’t had the pleasure.”
-
When Matthew Murdock was fourteen years old, he did a history project that changed his life.
Each student in his history class was assigned the task of presenting a major project about one of the Founding Fathers. Matt fiddled nervously with the handle of his cane when his teacher read the names of who would be studying whom; even all those years ago, he knew he wanted to be one of the people fighting for fairness and truth under the law. He was well aware of his own ambition toward the cause of criminal justice, and there was a man whose name was practically synonymous with that dream, whose legacy in Matt’s own native New York City propelled him forward every time he thought of it.
John Jay.
So when his teacher called out the names and his own was devastatingly absent from the Jay group, Matt took it as yet another piece of evidence that of course the world would never let him be happy for even a minute. He was so busy wallowing, in fact, that he almost missed the group to which he had actually been assigned: Alexander Hamilton.
Matt was never one to half-ass his studies, even when skimmed over for the only group worth being part of, and so he dedicated himself to knowing everything there was to know about Hamilton. As his fingers skimmed history books and his partners read him articles, a very familiar story began to shape itself in his mind.
An orphan, one parent gone and the other dead, pulling himself beyond his circumstances through a combination of brains, daring, and sheer dumb luck. A fighter and a scholar who never seemed to catch a break. A hero.
When Matthew Murdock was fourteen years old, he knew exactly who he wanted to be. More importantly, he learned that his dream was possible because someone else had done it first.
More than a decade later, Matt finds himself shaking hands with that same man, and he’s unashamed to say he’s on the verge of giddiness. Not only at the prospect of meeting one of his life’s greatest sources of motivation, but because of what he can sense about Hamilton. He couldn't miss how the man’s pulse had jumped in the familiar way Matt knows signals attraction when he kissed Karen’s hand.
Okay, normal. Who wouldn’t be attracted to Karen?
But something swoops low and heavy in Matt’s gut when he hears the same fluttering from Hamilton as the two of them clasp hands. He tries to keep a neutral expression, but he can feel the smallest of smirks on his lips. The history major he dated in college absolutely owes him an apology.
“It’s an honor, sir,” he says. A beat passes. “Oh! My name is Matt Murdock. I’m also a lawyer. I’m very, um. I’m aware of your work.” Keep your cool, Murdock. He doesn’t know how much he’s going to accomplish yet.
He’s still shaking Hamilton’s hand, though the other man’s grip loosens a bit. Matt pulls his own arm back to his side with a quiet cough.
“A lawyer?” Hamilton repeats. “It’s strange… Murdock, did you say? I don’t believe I’ve heard your name. There aren’t a great many other lawyers in New York City.”
Matt flounders.
“I, ah.” He hears Foggy laughing behind him. He’s actually making an effort to hide it this time, but still. Traitor. “I just recently passed the bar.” Not technically a lie, relatively speaking. Not when compared with the fact that Hamilton passed the bar a couple of centuries ago.
“We’re not going to tell him?” Foggy murmurs, too quiet for Hamilton or Karen to hear. Matt tilts his head toward Foggy and just barely shakes it.
He can hear Karen getting nervous, too, as the reality and magnitude of what they have on their hands sinks in. They need to get Hamilton back to his own time, somehow. Or at least move him to a place where the evidence that this time is not his own is not quite so obvious. Karen’s skirt ends above her knees, for God’s sake. There’s no way Hamilton isn’t wondering about that.
It can’t hurt to ask just a couple of questions, though.
-
It’s been two hours.
Foggy glances at the clock again and corrects himself. Two hours and eighteen minutes. Two hours and eighteen minutes of Matt Murdock cross-examining a displaced Founding Father, fueled by the explosive power of his weird historical lawyer crush. Not that Foggy harbors negative feelings for the man in question; he went to Columbia, after all. He’s pretty sure he passed out drunk under the statue of Hamilton at least twice back in college. That kind of thing endears a person to you, even if they’ve been dead for a couple hundred years.
And maybe he’s a tiny bit jealous that Matt is hogging all of Hamilton’s attention. He can’t really blame the guy, of course. Asking “So, how’s Aaron Burr doing?” was kind of in poor taste, and after the face Matt made he was forced to beat an honorable retreat to the neutral territory of leaning on Karen’s desk.
Still, Foggy exchanges an exasperated look with Karen when he hears Matt and Hamilton start in on the Constitution.
“Mr. Hamilton,” Foggy calls out. The door to his office is still open, so he can level a glare at Matt’s head. “You did say you were currently attending the convention to create this constitution, right?” He sometimes wishes his best friend could see the looks Foggy gives him. He always entertained the thought that it might stop Matt from pulling at least a few of his dumbass stunts.
A man can dream.
“Indeed,” Hamilton says. “It is my sincere hope that it will become an essential part of our great nation’s future.”
“It will,” Matt assures him eagerly. Honestly, it’s a wonder his glasses haven’t spontaneously morphed into heart shapes by now. Karen clears her throat. “I mean," Matt backpedals, "I’m sure your hard work will pay off. We, uh, we need a strong consensus to… To unite. The nation.”
Foggy buries his face in his hands.
The only thing that pulls him from his whirlpool of secondhand embarrassment is Karen’s hand on his shoulder. He glances up and sees a legal pad she’s pushing across her desk toward him. He reads what she’s written, nearly bites his own tongue off trying to stifle his shout of disbelief, and grabs his coat.
“We’re going out real quick,” Karen calls to Matt. “We’ll bring, um. Coffee?” Did they have that in the past? she mouths to Foggy. He shrugs.
Matt waves as they go, leaning forward to hear more of Hamilton’s thoughts on the defense of Tories since the war has ended. Foggy doesn’t even have the focus to think of ways to make fun of Matt over how smitten he is with a dead guy, that's how busy he is trying to process this new and staggering information.
They’re two blocks away, which Foggy knows is the range of Matt’s hearing during the day when he’s not listening closely, before he explodes.
“How,” he wheezes, “the fuck,” he clutches Karen’s shoulder, “did you get Iron Man’s phone number?”