Chapter Text
March, 1L
“Dude, you have to see this!” Foggy’s shoving his phone in her face, so Mattie just waves her hand.
“Hey, Foggy, it’s me, still blind.”
“Which is a bummer, because I am showing you a picture of Captain America in Times Square this morning.”
“You mean, like those costumed guys who take pictures with tourists?”
“Nope, I mean Captain Steve Rogers in Times Square. Not even in the star-spangled suit.” Foggy’s not lying, so she has to assume this is some sort of internet meme-type thing.
“That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s totally real!”
“It’s probably photoshopped.”
“There’s like eight different photos online. Although some of them are already being taken down.”
“Then it’s probably somebody who looks like Steve Rogers. Like that actor, what’s his name, who does all the superhero movies? Everybody says he looks like Steve Rogers.”
“You,” Foggy says, pointing his finger at her, “are just a bitter skeptic. I want to belieeevve, Scully!”
“What that Steve Rogers survived World War Two? How would you even recognize him, he’d be, like, ninety by now.”
“Uh, we live in a world where giant green monsters fight giant grey monsters in the middle of Harlem - anything’s possible.”
OK, Foggy might have a point there. He is talking to a girl who got hyper-senses from a chemical spill, even if he doesn’t know it.
“It’s probably just some guy,” she repeats as Foggy flips through something on his phone.
“They shut down Times Square,” he says, holding up the phone triumphantly.
“OK, that’s weird,” she admits.
There’s no follow-up in the news, except for a vague report that Times Square was shut down due to a gas leak, so it drops out of Mattie’s mind. They’re only a few weeks away from finals, anyway, so she’s burying herself in the library.
She heads down to Fogwell’s about a week after the shutdown, and takes out some of her stress on the bags. She’s midair, halfway through a flip and kick maneuver, when the door opens.
“Whoa.”
Shit. There’s no way this guy didn’t see her. The distraction kills her momentum, too, so she winds up having to put her hands down and handspring to her feet to keep from falling flat on her face.
When she’s back upright, the guy says, “Fury send you to babysit me?” in a tone that conveys both weariness and annoyance.
“What? Who?” she says. Columbia Law, ladies and gentlemen. She turns to face him.
“Oh, uh, I didn’t realize, uh, miss,” he stammers. “Sorry, didn’t mean to bother you.”
He’s genuinely sorry, so she takes pity on him.
“You looking for Fogwell?” she asks.
“No, uh, he just said I could stop by after hours. Said he had someone who did it all the time. Guess he meant you?” His voice has a trace of a Brooklyn accent, and he has the lowest resting heart rate she’s ever heard. The guy must be ridiculously fit.
“Yeah, that would be me,” she says, smiling. “Mattie.” If he knows Fogwell, then she can’t bother lying about her name. She puts her hand out. He comes in and takes it.
“Uh, Roger,” he lies. “So…you’re a…gymnast?”
“MMA,” she says. He’s tilting his head to get a better look at her face, so she turns away. “You?”
“Boxing, mostly,” he says. He shrugs off his jacket and puts his bag down on the bench.
“You need me to hold the bag?” she asks, patting it.
“Sure. Thanks.”
He pulls a pair of wraps from his bag and starts putting them on. They smell new.
“So, uh,” he starts, “Fogwell lets you train here?”
“Yeah, he’s known me since I was a kid. My dad was a boxer, he trained here.”
“And you’re a…MMM?”
“MMA. Mixed martial arts?”
“Right. Yeah. I should start learning these things.” He sounds sheepish as he comes over to the bag. She braces it. He hits it, and she feels the impact reverberate up to her shoulders. Shit, he’s strong.
“I could show you a few moves, if you’re interested,” she says (grunts, really) as he throws a combination at the bag. She’s braced down low, absorbing the impact with her legs, and she thinks he might actually throw her to the ground with the force of it.
“Show me how to do that thing you were doing when I came in?” he says, and he sounds like he’s grinning. He also sounds like he’s barely making an effort.
“That (oof) was a mess, and I’m embarrassed (oof) you saw it.” If Roger’s a boxer, then he’s a slugger or a boxer-puncher, relying on power over mobility. He’s got a lot of power.
“It looked pretty neat from where I was standing,” he says, and for the first time since he opened the door, his heartbeat speeds up a tiny bit.
It turns out that he has a decent grasp of standing kicks, so she pulls out some mats and teaches him a few jump kicks. He’s a quick learner, and he moves fast.
She has to head back up to Morningside Heights after their impromptu training session, so she debates giving him her number, but instead says good night and leaves for the subway. She’s not entirely comfortable with the fact that he knows about her training, even if he never asked about her blindness, and she’s hoping he assumed she still has some vision. And then there’s the part where he didn’t tell her his real name. No, definitely better not to tempt fate.
Although, after she’s showered and gone to bed, she slides her hand between her legs and thinks of his warm voice and powerful body.
It’s two weeks before she runs into him again. He’s there first, this time, punishing the heavy bag. She can hear the chains groaning in protest, and she’s fairly certain that the bag is going to go flying if he keeps going. The screws in the ceiling must have been loose.
“Hey, Roger, right?” she says.
“Hey…Mattie.” He stops. “How’d you know?”
“Sorry?”
“You’re…blind, right?”
“So they tell me.” He’d only seen the cane as she was leaving, last time, but she’s holding it now and wearing her glasses, so there’s no use pretending.
“So…how does a blind girl - woman, I mean - do what you can do?”
“You know how they say that when you lose one sense, the others get heightened?”
“Sure.”
“It’s not actually true.” Generally speaking. “You just learn to work with what you’ve got.”
“So how’d you know it was me?”
“Nobody else comes here this time of night.”
“Oh, right.”
She drops her bag and has a moment of satisfaction when his heart rate speeds up as she takes off her t-shirt so that she’s just in her sports bra. She can hear him turning his head so as not to look at her. She wraps up her hands, and this time, he holds the bag for her. He gives a delighted little chuckle when she does her first jump kick.
She takes a break to grab some water, then turns back to him.
“So, you want to spar?”
He hesitates.
“My mother taught me to never hit girls,” he says. “I think she’d spin in her grave if I ever hit a blind one.”
“My dad never wanted me to set foot in a ring,” she says. She steps close to Roger and tilts her face up to him, grinning. “Want to see how badly we can disappoint them?”
They agree on kickboxing as a compromise between their fighting styles, and then they start. Roger is almost a foot taller than she is, and probably twice her weight, and when she strikes him, it’s like hitting a brick wall. He’s also got that freakishly low heart rate, and never seems to get out of breath, so she can’t rely on him tiring. She bobs and weaves, and remembers her dad telling her about Muhammad Ali fighting George Foreman.
A blow to her side sends her sprawling into the ropes, but she flips herself back onto her feet before he can follow up, and lands a kick on his jaw. He reels back, and she presses her momentary advantage, until he gets two good punches in that put her down on her back. Breathing heavily, he offers her his hand.
“Uh, my hand is -“
“I know.” She holds out her hand, and he grabs it and hauls her to her feet without so much as a groan of effort.
“So,” he says as they drink their water, “were you always a blind martial artist?”
“Feels like it,” she says. “But these days, I’m a law student.”
“Oh.” He sounds like he’s mulling that over. “Uh, what kind?”
“Criminal. Or that’s the goal, anyway. I want to be a prosecutor.”
“Wow.”
“What about you?”
“Oh, I…was in the army.” It’s not a lie, and she can hear the pain in his voice.
“Where were you stationed?” Mattie’s guessing it was Iraq or Afghanistan, or somewhere equally awful.
“I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about it.” And that opens up a whole new set of terrifying possibilities about Roger’s real identity, so she decides not to ask any more questions.
“Well, I think at this point, I’m supposed to say ‘thank you for your service,’ or something.”
“You know, usually when someone says that to me, I’m supposed to say ‘Just doing my duty, ma’am.’”
“Is that what you want to say?”
“No, what I want to say is that I did what I could, and I wish I could have done more.”
So, he’s a (possibly Special Forces) vet with a healthy sense of guilt that might be a mild case of PTSD. She sure knows how to pick them.
They go another round, and he wins again, knocking her on her ass.
A few days later, Foggy delightedly announces to her that the government has confirmed that Captain America is alive and well, and looking young and healthy. There’s no video of Steve Rogers, just a photo (apparently very handsome), and a request for privacy as he adjusts to the new millennium.
Mattie doesn’t make it down to Fogwell’s for a while; her papers all seem to be due at the same time, and she has finals to study for. She’s going a little insane, stuck at a desk or sprawled on her bed, and she’s dying to get some release, so she throws caution to the wind and decides to take a night off a week before finals, and takes the subway down to Midtown.
Fogwell’s is empty, and she’s a little disappointed, she’ll admit. She wraps up and goes to town on the speed bag first, then takes it out on the heavy bag (which is mysteriously new - Fogwell hasn’t replaced his bags in years, so maybe it was just time). She’s just starting in on some parkour flips when she hears that slow heartbeat outside the door. Grinning, she gets fancier as he comes in, showing off as she bounces off pillars and walls (and the ceiling, once). He’s chuckling as she finally lands on her feet.
“Hi, Mattie.”
“Hey, Roger.”
“Haven’t seen you around much.”
“Been busy. Finals start next week, so everything’s been kinda crazy.”
“So what are you doing down here?”
“Clearing my head.”
“Yeah, I get that.”
“How’ve you been?”
“Good. I’ve been good.” It’s not true.
“You want to hit something?”
“Yeah.”
He warms up on the bag, then they spar. He wins the first round, but as she’s taking a drink, he says, “You’ve been holding back.”
“So have you,” she points out. It’s rather obvious, since she’s not a smear on the mat.
“I don’t mean power. I mean technique. You’re not using everything you can do.”
She shrugs. “We agreed on kickboxing rules.”
“So let’s agree on something else. Anything goes. Aside from the obvious.”
“Try not to inflict permanent damage?”
“Sounds good to me.”
“You’re on.”
She doesn’t quite let the devil out, but she can feel it laughing with joy as she lets loose a combination kick. Roger blocks it, and wraps his arm around her leg, trapping her against him, but she uses her weight to overbalance him, and they topple over, and the momentum throws him off her. She flips to her feet and advances on him, fists and feet flying, and she loves this, the fluidity of motion, and the vicious pleasure of a strike connecting. She gets him on his back, using her knees to pin him, and he taps out. She’s smiling broadly as she gets off him.
“You need to teach me some of those,” he says.
“I can do that,” she says, smiling. His heart speeds up, just a little.
When they call it a night, Mattie decides that she’s only young once, and puts her hand on his arm.
“Hey, you want to grab a drink sometime?” she says, and his heart rate soars.
“I, uh, I don’t think -“
“Oh,” she says. She doesn’t think she’s misread his attraction, but there are always other factors. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to…overstep.”
“No - it’s not - I’m just -“
“You know, forget I ever asked,” she says gently, picking up her bag to leave.
“A drink…yeah, that might be nice,” Roger finally says.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Where’s your phone? I’ll give you my number.”
“I, uh, don’t have one.” That’s actually true.
“Seriously?”
“I’m a bit…behind on technology. But, uh, I’ll see you around here, right?”
“Yeah. Not for a while, because finals.”
“Right. When are those over?”
“Two weeks from now.”
“I’ll be here.” He’s not lying.
“OK. We’ll work something out then.” And she leans up on her toes, and gently presses her lips to his, soft and quick.
The Battle of New York happens a few days later. Finals are delayed, and Fogwell’s is closed for two weeks while the water and power are restored. Mattie goes back as soon as it reopens, but Roger never comes back. She prays that he wasn’t hurt in the battle.
Captain America is a hero, his face plastered across TVs and websites and newspapers in images that Mattie will never see. A few weeks into the summer, after she’s gone to bed, Foggy is in his room watching a video online of Steve Rogers and Tony Stark visiting the devastation in Midtown. Stark does most of the talking, but then Steve Rogers answers a question. And Mattie literally sits upright in bed.
“Holy shit.”