log: matt + dean WHO: Matt Murdock + Dean Winchester WHEN: Afternoon, April 11 WHERE: Gym (602) WHAT: Matt and Dean are both the fighting sort, but Dean's curious about actually learning to box. What starts as a straight-up boxing lesson turns a little bit vicious as the Mark of Cain takes over, leaving Matt curious and concerned about what's eating away at Dean. (Slight content warning for violence of the fisticuffs kind, a little bit of blood.) STATUS: Complete!
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Matt needed to let off steam, at least. The hallways were crowded, the air stale, the buzzing of old fluorescent lights adding to the constant white noise of generators and the dam off in the distance. Every place had its hum, its underscore behind the louder sounds. This was footsteps on concrete and echoing voices, the sound of metal doors slamming shut. It reminded Matt more and more of prison every day, closed in like its own little world, without fresh air or sunlight.
The city was dirty, but it was open. The sounds were more varied, and not everything echoed. Scents and sounds dispersed upward and outward rather than bouncing back and forth, trapped.
He'd been there a matter of days and he was already homesick. Not that it mattered, considering he'd packed up Nelson and Murdock and was prepared to leave Hell's Kitchen for good. He would have been homesick no matter what, but this was a little more isolating, to say the least.
God, he hoped Foggy was okay. He hoped Foggy was alive.
He tipped his head when he heard footsteps come into the gym, jerking him out of his thoughts. Heavy footfalls, slightly labored breathing, exhaustion and weariness. The stench of booze and grease, and a marked effort to be polite and clean it up, cover it with soap.
"Dean Winchester?"
After talking on the network, Dean had recognized Matt over breakfast and made a point of introducing himself. He was cool with the internet, don't get him wrong, but it still felt artificial to him not to have some kind of physical interaction if he was going to be talking to people. (Maybe that was why he'd never had any luck with picking girls up online. If they didn't turn out to be sex workers, it always lacked something. Harder to read people, maybe.) Hey, how are you had turned into a little more talk about their personal lives, and had ended with an invitation for a boxing lesson after Dean had gotten some work done.
Weird to think he'd never been taught how to fight, not really. That couple months of wrestling as a teenager didn't really count.
"What, am I breathing too loud or something?" Dean was used to people saying his name in some otherwise ominous way, but... still. Come on. Blind guy.
Matt flashed a smile, dusting off his hands on his thighs as he stood. He'd arrived in a suit rumpled from a day of packing, and he was now in his undershirt and a pair of shorts that he'd gotten here. Same with the sneakers. "I have very good hearing," he said vaguely. He left his white cane leaning up against the wall and took several steps forward, stopping a comfortable distance from Dean.
Part of him loved this. Initial meetings, the awkwardness, the surprise that sometimes he really could get around. He had to learn to love it, to find it funny, or it was going to irritate the hell out of him.
"So," he said, cracking his knuckles. "You want to beat up a blind man?"
Oh. Good. That was terrifying.
Matt was obviously blind, but he was also a superhero and damn well looked the part now that he wasn't in a suit. He was just a human, even one with powers, but there was something about a man who didn't need to see you to wreck you that was worth a little respectful fear. Someone -- or a few someones -- had put Matt Murdock through a meat grinder at some point, and he'd come out on the other side cracking his knuckles and offering to punch almost strangers.
"If I did, we wouldn't be boxing. But I learn fast." Even if he felt a little... odd in sweats and a t-shirt. He really never dressed like this. Usually if Dean was fighting with someone, he was boots and a bit more bulk. Funny how that changed the context. "You're not going to whine if you get hit, are you?"
Matt chuckled, bowing his head. There was a fading bruise at his temple. "I cry like a baby," he said, "which you'll find out as soon as you manage to actually hit me."
He wasn't certain how much of this was really a lesson in proper boxing with proper rules; Matt hadn't forgotten the rules from the days when his dad fought, but he never applied them when most of his fights were in dark alleys and abandoned warehouses. Matt just seemed to find some kind of kinship in Dean right off the bat, something violent and familiar. People like them got cagey in places like this, and for Matt he knew it was anxiety. It was the thought that he was away from Foggy, that he'd assassinated his own career to save his friend, he'd faked Foggy's death to save him, and now he wasn't there to protect him. It was the creep of worry and fear and depression, the sort of thing that dragged him down and tugged at him until it tore him apart.
He needed to run. He needed to hit something. He needed to stop thinking about spiraling anxieties for a while so he could get over it. Rooftop jumping wasn't an option here, but boxing a monster hunter was.
He took off his glasses, taking his time to fold them up. His eyes were a clear, pale blue, unsettlingly blank and surrounded by faint burn scars. He hadn't told Dean how he'd lost his sight, but the scars told the story themselves.
Dean knew the story (vaguely), but it wasn't the same as seeing Matt's face in person. But he'd seen worse on people, been and done worse. The sight of Matt's scars almost had Dean reaching up to touch his own face, and he wondered idly if radioactive waste felt anything like fire or acid. It had been a good few years since Hell, but he'd never forgotten it (how could he?). He was familiar with burns like that, and ones bad enough to take someone's eyesight...
Maybe it was better not to think about it.
"Manage? Ouch. I feel like you're counting me out before we start, now my feelings are hurt." Dean ventured a little closer so he could lightly punch Matt's arm.
Matt went with it, rolling his shoulder. "Phew, ouch, keep hitting like that and I'll be down in a matter of seconds," he teased. He went back to the wall, reaching out with his fingertips to make sure he was in the right spot: cane, check — sweatshirt, check — and then his glasses went on top of the shirt.
"You want gloves?" he asked. "There's a supply closet, I figure if we rummage around enough we can find a couple hundred-year-old pairs." It was boxing, after all.
"Yeah, let me take a look. Mount Weather's old military, they had to have kept some of it." People had to sacrifice when they got stuck underground like this, but they wouldn't toss out that much working equipment if they could help it, especially if some of them were soldiers. They'd need the physical outlet if they weren't allowed to leave.
Dean wandered away to the supply closet, nudging aside old equipment. "So you get a lot of people trying to hit you once they know you can't see?"
Matt tipped his head toward Dean, but his gaze was vacant. He smirked. "Sometimes that just makes them more angry," he said. "Don't tell me you're feeling guilty. I wouldn't have offered if I didn't think I could hack it."
"Getting punched in the mouth is a man's inalienable right," Dean replied, only half sarcastic. He unearthed a pair of ancient boxing gloves and, after brushing off the dust and giving it a thought, he tossed them over to see if Matt would catch them. "Far as I'm concerned, I'm rude if I don't sock you."
Matt felt the dust, heard the gloves leave Dean's hands, realized if he just stepped slightly to the left he'd catch them just fine — but he didn't. The gloves hit the ground near his feet with a thud.
He paused, raising his eyebrows. "Did you just throw gloves at me?"
Dean was actually a little disappointed. Oops.
"...Yeah. I did."
Matt hesitated, taking a small step forward and pushing one foot across the empty patch of floor to his right. "And they're… where, now."
"I know you do that radar thing, dude."
Matt tucked his hands into the pockets of his shorts. "What radar thing."
Dean just stared, quirking up an eyebrow.
Matt fidgeted a little. "Are you … doing something, or."
"Oh, yeah, sorry." (Matt would hate Cas, he realized.) Grabbing another set of gloves, Dean came back and leaned down to grab the stray pair off the ground, thumping them to Matt's chest. "You still sure about this?"
"I'm telling you, I can handle it," said Matt with a cocksure grin, clapping his hand against the gloves to hold them. "Everything Ben Affleck did is completely accurate. Sure. Sure it is. I'm exactly that great." He tucked his hands into the gloves, snickering quietly. "So don't hold back now."
"I know when a dude's fucking with me." After a second, he added, "Usually." Dean took a couple steps back and slipped on his gloves, flexing his hands to see how far he could move. His fighting was usually bare-knuckled, unstructured. Having protection felt odd.
Matt tested the gloves, smacking them against each other, and rolled his shoulders. He had old bruises and aches that still hadn't faded, but nothing was out of the ordinary about that. "So this demon hunting that you do. I take it you don't box them to death."
"I wouldn't call it boxing, no." It should have concerned him more how little he used actual weapons these days. He'd won his last fight with pool balls and a snapped off cue. (And those kids, they'd deserved to be swindled for being douchebags but they didn't deserve to be used and hurt the way Rowena had, putting them in his path and knowing he'd attack them.) Dean mimicked Matt, smacking off some of the dust and wondering if these things would still hold up. "You'll have to remind me what the rules are. Something about not chewing each other's ears off."
"That's a start," Matt said with a chuckle. He raised his fists. "So what are we talking? Weapons? Street fighting? I want to know what I'm dealing with before I can teach you anything."
"Mostly guns. Knives. I get into a lot of barfights," Dean replied, flippant enough that it clearly wasn't a joke. "My old man was a Marine. Taught me how to throw a punch, but mostly it was just 'get out there, don't cry when you get punched in the mouth'. Everything else I picked up on the way. I don't know if that counts as street fighting."
"So, he trained you? Military?"
"More or less. He was more concerned about teaching me to shoot. He showed me some knife tricks, but he thought learning to get my ass beat until I figured out how to hit back was some rite of passage. 'I can't hand everything to you, Dean.'" Dean's impression of his father wasn't so far off from his own voice these days, but he still thought of him as gruffer, more serious.
"Sounds rough," Matt said, and he meant it. He had a tough father, but his father wasn't the one who taught him how to fight. A little bit of boxing, sure, but mostly Jack Murdock taught him to properly study. Hit the books, not other people. "He just hit you until you learned to hit back?"
"What? No. I was a stupid kid. I got into fights more than I should've. He just thought I should handle it myself." But there was a flutter in his heartbeat. Dean wasn't lying, but it would be wrong to say he was being honest. "He just didn't believe in fighting my battles for me. Would've taken up too much of his time, anyway. I was asshole. Probably still am."
Matt heard the flutter. It was a lie, sure, but it was one that he was willing to let slide. "Well. Let's see if you learned anything."
* * *
Five minutes later, and actually teaching boxing rules went out the window. It became a game of testing each other's skills, feeling each other out. Matt barely let Dean hit him, anticipating his moves and ducking out of the way, spinning underneath his fists and enjoying the shock. Sorry, Dean, Matt was kidding about not knowing about the "radar thing." He was fast, choosing to avoid actually hitting Dean.
He ducked one of Dean's punches and swung his leg around, taking Dean's ankles out from under him.
When they were both on the ground, Matt grinned. "You afraid to hit me?"
"No." Maybe. Dean reached over to smack Matt's arm before picking himself up. "You keep flinching like that, I just feel sorry for beating up some poor disabled ginger."
"Flinching?" Matt whistled low. He pushed himself up to stand, planting his feet firmly on the ground. "Come on," he said. "I won't move. Hard as you can, I'll give you one for free."
"I'm not sucker-punching a guy who hasn't even tried to kill me yet."
"Kill you?"
"It's a general policy."
Matt chuckled. "All right, fine, that's fair," he said, before delivering a harsh right hook to Dean's jaw.
Dean actually swore. It was stupid to be surprised.
After that, he stopped pulling his punches.
* * *
At some point, the whole "boxing" part went out the window and the gloves ended up discarded on the floor. Matt was more flippy and nimble than he'd seem at first, and Dean made up for his lack of style in tenacity. Dean wasn't the type to spar with people, but it felt like being back in high school, wrestling for fun and throwing out insults between exchanging blows.
The more comfortable they were, the harsher they became, giving in to instincts, trying to impress each other. Dean stopped seeming so tired, his blood rushing through his ears. There was an ache in his right arm that he ignored; the rush of a fight was better than food, better than sex.
And it was a fight before too long. Matt wasn't an enemy, but he was a means to some vague end, and Dean took the swift kick to his stomach as permission to strike back with a punch to Matt's jaw that would definitely leave a nasty bruise.
Matt crumpled to the floor with a thud. He could taste blood in his mouth, feel it at the corner of his lip. For a few seconds, it seemed to stun him, his senses thrown off — but then he was slowly pushing himself back up. He wasn't exactly expecting a punch that hard.
Matt didn't get far. Dean was on him before he could stand, taking a handful of his shirt and slamming him back down onto the floor. There was something wrong now; his heartbeat was too fast and too eager, something about the way he breathed had gone shallow and inhuman. There was the faintest smell of sulfur, though whether or not Matt had the chance to pick up on it while Dean slammed his fist into his face was a toss up.
Dean's arm burned, and if Matt could see, he'd have been looking up into black eyes.
Sulfur burned his nose, something sudden and foreign and altogether not right. Something had shifted in Dean, something Matt hadn't expected, and suddenly this had gone from a friendly fight with a few hard punches to something vicious.
Matt's ears were ringing, his radar thrown off, and he spat blood onto the floor. He caught Dean's wrist on the next punch, using it as leverage to twist his body around and give Dean a swift kick to the face.
"Dean!" What the hell?
That kick to the face seemed to be the shock he needed. The smell vanished and Dean stopped fighting, landing on his back while Matt moved away. "Shit." He brought up his arm to get a look, grateful that Matt was too blind to see the Mark on his inner arm. It wasn't glowing, but it was prominent and defined, and Dean covered it and pressed down to ease the burning.
"Shit. Sorry, Matt."
Matt grunted softly, pushing himself up enough to sit. He hunched forward, gingerly touching his fingers to his jaw. "I'm… shit. I'm fine," he muttered, but he was listening hard to the sound of Dean's heart, to his breathing. Something in Dean had changed, something made him seem something other than human, and now it was gone.
He knew he hadn't imagined it.
"A few nasty bruises are good for the soul," he said, fingertips tracing over his lip. "Not bad." He chuckled, trying to make light of it even as his mind was racing.
Dean sat up, moving like he was incredibly sore all of a sudden. That rotten egg stink was lingering. (Second time in a week, how was he going to explain this to anyone? What was he supposed to say?)
"Yeah, I uh..." Dean forced a short laugh. "This is where I explain that I'm not a very good person."
"Make it up to me with a beer," Matt said as he passed him, clapping a hand against Dean's chest on his way by. "We'll call it even."