Matt stayed in the memorial park for hours after Foggy left. He sat on the cold ground in front of his name, hands resting on bent knees, his head bowed as he contemplated his friend's words.

It's time to rejoin the world.

It was easy for Foggy to say that. He'd disappeared with the woman he loved, and they'd returned together. They were figuring all this out - together. They were busy making plans for their new future, as if the last five years had been nothing more than a minor setback.

Matt was in a completely different place.

He still half expected to wake up and find that this was all a bad dream. He'd roll over in bed, take Calina in his arms and tell her about the nightmare he'd had of losing her. She'd smooth the hair off his brow and kiss him, and he'd stroke both hands down her back, revelling in the feel of his fingers gliding over her soft skin.

God he missed her skin.

He missed her scent, and her laugh, and her quirky sense of humour and everything else that made her who she was.

He just missed her. So fucking much.

And six weeks after returning to this grey and desolate world, he was no close to finding her. He was no closer to having any fucking clue what her life was like now.

Did she hate it? Did she hate being a Widow again? Being forced to live and breathe the violence she once tried to give up.

Or was she happy? Had she found purpose in this new life she'd created for herself?

Was she with someone new? Someone she loved?

He needed answers - even if those answers destroyed him.

It was the not knowing that was killing him.

But he knew those answers weren't going to be found online. If nothing else, Foggy's little mission to get him out of the house today had made him realise that. Maybe it was the fresh air, or the break in his routine. Whatever it was, Matt knew resuming his search was pointless. The Widows were too good at hiding their tracks. He was just one blind man with rudimentary computer skills - he wasn't going to find Calina online. He wasn't going to find her, full stop. She could be literally anywhere in the world, living under a dozen assumed names, with the combined might of the American government and the UN protecting her location...

There was just no way.

As much as it pained him to admit it, he was going to have to wait for her to come to him. He was going to have to have faith that she would reach out to him. Eventually.

The question was, what would he do in the meantime?

The thought of resuming his previous life - of just picking up where he left off - felt impossible without Calina by his side. She'd become central to his whole world. To every thought he'd had of his future...

But he couldn't keep going the way he was. He was clearly worrying his friends - and they didn't deserve that. Not after all the shit he'd put them through in the past.

So he'd...pretend. For their sakes. He'd look like he was making an effort to acclimatise to this new normal. He'd clean himself up, and buy food for his apartment, and return Karen's calls.

He'd pretend.

Matt stood up, brushed the dirt off his pants and turned to face the stone slab behind him. He found his name again, and traced his finger along the peaks and valleys of the engraving, wondering if Calina had ever stood here and done the same...

Foggy was right. It wasn't a gravestone.

He hadn't died.

But he wasn't fully alive right now either.

———

Over the next week, Matt saw a change take place in the city around him.

As he patrolled at night, and as he walked the neighbourhood in the daytime, he saw evidence that the city was slowly waking back up. Finding its feet again, as the returned and those left behind adapted to this new reality. Clean-up crews - organised and manned by volunteers - started clearing away the debris in the streets. The Mayor organised for all the abandoned cars littering the roads to be removed and scrapped. Broken street lamps were fixed. The neon signs in Times Square buzzed through the night again.

And Matt tried to keep pace. He visited Maggie at her church and caught up with her over coffee. He met Foggy and Karen at Josie's bar - miraculously still in business - for a few beers. And he agreed to start hunting for a new location for the third iteration of 'Nelson & Murdock'.

He was sociable. Friendly.

But it was all an act. A thin veneer hiding the bleak despondency he felt in Calina's absence...and the deep pit of anger roiling in his gut.

The anger had snuck up on him. It was a familiar emotion, one he'd lived with for most of his life - which probably explained why he hadn't noticed its resurgence over the past couple of weeks. But now...some days it was all he could feel.

He managed to hide it from his mother and his friends. From the shopkeepers he interacted with, and the real estate agents that Foggy employed. He put on a smile, and played the role of a man adjusting to this new world...but when night fell, the leash on his rage slipped, and the sinners of Hell's Kitchen bore the brunt of it.

Mercy wasn't a concept that held much sway with him anymore.

He punished.

He inflicted pain.

He beat men unconscious, and barely felt a flicker of guilt.

Worse than that, he started to feel almost...good...during those fights. It wasn't that he enjoyed meting out pain - he wasn't a sadist. But those criminals and low-lifes were a physical manifestation of all the injustice and inhumanity that made him sick, and he felt a flicker of satisfaction every time he hammered a blow upon them.

Thanos' snap had been so...random. Good people were ripped away from their lives. Good people lost those whom they loved, and had to endure years of grief. The sudden and unexpected return of everyone who had disappeared was a chance for the world to heal. To start afresh and try to be better.

But the fucking assholes terrorising Hell's Kitchen decided to come back and be just the same as they once were. They saw a world that had been decimated and wracked with pain and suffering...and chose to take advantage of it.

And it made Matt really fucking angry.

With every passing day, he developed more and more sympathy for Ronin. The mysterious samurai had seen the injustice - the fucking unfairness - of the world, and had done something about it. He'd realised that all those killers and thugs and reprobates that had survived Thanos' plight didn't deserve to be spared, and he'd corrected that error.

Matt still didn't condone his methods...but he understood the man's motivations. He must have lost so much, to have felt that much hate.

Matt had lost a lot over the course of his life. His sight. His father. His first love. His mentor. He'd been beaten and betrayed and nearly killed a dozen times. Yet he'd always managed to persevere. To take that hardship, and use it to forge himself into a better, more resilient version of himself.

This time felt different.

He didn't know if it was just the cumulative effect of all that trauma - or whether losing Calina and his future with her hit harder than anything that had come before - but he didn't know if there was another version of himself after this. He couldn't see the path to forging something better.

He just felt...shattered.

The camel's back was broken, and the straw was the snap of a madman's finger.

———

Matt gripped the edge of the shower door and waited for the pain to pass. He tried to concentrate on the slick feel of the glass under his fingers, the cool tile beneath his feet, the steam in the air from the hot water...he tried to concentrate on anything but the burn of agony streaking down his side. He'd maxed out on painkillers, so he was just going to have to power through this.

The gangbanger he'd come up against last night had been unexpectedly skilled in close combat - and he'd carried a knife. In a lucky strike, he'd managed to slip the blade between the reinforced plates in Matt's suit and cut a deep slash across his left flank.

Matt had stumbled home after the fight clutching the wound, trying to stem the bleeding. Then he'd sewn up the gash, chased some pain-pills with three fingers of whisky, and collapsed into bed. He'd spent the day recovering, trying not to move around the apartment too much.

But he had somewhere to be tonight. So he'd slowly wrenched himself out of bed, and hobbled to the bathroom to get cleaned up. Unfortunately, the act of reaching into the stall to start the shower had pulled on the raw and inflamed skin beneath the stitches, shooting spikes of pain through his body.

Matt took a shallow breath and released his grip on the door. He slowly stood up straight, testing the pain levels.

Slightly better.

He gently felt the wound beneath the waterproof bandage, checking for any burst sutures, but it seemed intact. He gritted his teeth and stepped into the shower. The water was just shy of scalding, and he let the sting of the hot spray mask the sharp pain in his side. He slowly and carefully washed himself, making sure to get rid of the trail of dried blood down his outer thigh.

Then he towelled off, trimmed his beard, brushed his teeth and made his way to his bedroom. He opened his closet and rifled through the clothes, looking for something appropriate to wear. As it always did, the absence of Calina's scent caused a brief pang of pain and disappointment. Her strawberries and sea salt fragrance used to saturate this room, clinging to the sheets and and his clothes, buried in the creases of the material like a secret gift.

And he used to take that for granted. The beauty of her scent - which had once seemed so mysterious and elusive as it lured him across rooftops and left him aching with want - had become ubiquitous. Always with him. In his apartment, in his office, as he suited up as Daredevil - it was always there, lingering against his skin.

Now he felt its absence like a missing limb.

Not a hint of it remained in the apartment. Every molecule had dissipated, replaced by dust and chemicals. Her entire presence was wiped so completely from his space, it was as if she'd never existed. He had nothing to hold onto, to centre himself while he suffered this uncertainty of not knowing her fate.

Matt shook off that thought, not wanting to risk spiralling into depression tonight. He grabbed a shirt at random and got dressed - again, slowly and carefully. Which meant by the time he eventually made it across the river to Karen's house, he was almost an hour late.

She'd been bugging him for days to come for dinner again, and he'd finally relented, especially after she'd unleashed the big guns. "Izzy has been asking to see her Uncle Matt again," she'd told him yesterday. "She misses you." After that, Matt couldn't say no. He couldn't bear the thought of disappointing Izzy - she was the one tiny spark of light in his current existence. But it was getting harder and harder to maintain his act. To pretend he was okay. That he was moving on.

When the complete opposite was the truth.

As he stood on Karen's porch, waiting for her to answer the door, the effort to bury his rage and despair felt monumental. He gritted his teeth, and forced those emotions down deep, then plastered on his 'I'm coping' smile - the smile that had become more of a mask than the one with horns.

"Oh, hey," Karen said, opening the front door, sounding out of breath. "I, um, figured you weren't going to make it."

"Yeah, sorry about that."

"No. Uh, it's fine." She glanced behind her, as if listening for something. After a moment, she sighed, then held the door open wider. "Come in."

Matt stepped into the narrow hallway, frowning at the strange tone in her voice and the general air of nervousness that hung around her. "If it's a bad time now, I can come back."

Karen shook her head and led him through to the cosy living room at the front of the house."It's fine," she repeated, sounding as if it was anything but. "Izzy's asleep though. She was at a birthday party today and it tuckered her out."

"Oh." The disappointment Matt felt made him realise that he actually had been looking forward to seeing the little girl again. "I brought her this" - he held up the stuffed toy in his hand - "But you can just give it to her tomorrow. From her Uncle Matt."

Karen took the little present. She buried her face in the soft fur and sniffled.

"Are you okay?" Matt asked.

"I'm fine." She didn't seem fine. She seemed...off. Jittery, and teary. A bit on edge. But then she straightened up and smiled. "Why don't you have a seat, while I go order us some take out."

She disappeared back in to the hallway, just as Matt realised he was still holding the other gift he'd brought with him - a bottle of wine for them to share. "Karen?" he called softly - not wanting to wake the toddler upstairs. There was no answer, so he went out into the hallway and followed Karen's scent towards the back of the house. He tapped on the door of the kitchen. "Karen? I bought this if you want to open it-"

The scent that hit him when he pushed open the door stopped him in his tracks.

It was the scent that he'd been lamenting just a couple of hours ago. The one that had disappeared from his life almost two months ago. The one that lit up every nerve ending in his body and caused his heart to race.

"She was here," he gasped. "Calina was just here." The scent was fresh. Overwhelming in his potency, as if she'd just slipped out the back door minutes ago...

Matt shoved the wine bottle into Karen's hands and barrelled past her through that door.

"Matt!" she called out to him, but he was already down the garden steps and halfway across the lawn. He yanked on the wooden gate at the bottom of the garden, and swore when it remained closed. He jumped up, grabbed the top it and vaulted over onto the small footpath behind the house. He barely noticed the wrenching pain in his side as his sutures popped from the exertion. He ignored the warm trickle of blood soaking through the bandage, too busy scenting the air, looking for Calina.

He took a deep breath...and found her again, heading west down the footpath. He followed the trail, running down the narrow path until he reached the main road it connected with. He caught a movement to his right and realised it was her, swinging her leg over the motorbike parked at the curb. "Calina!"

Her head whipped around. He could hear her soft gasp even over the sound of the cars rushing by. For a moment she froze there, straddling the bike, looking back at him over her shoulder.

Time slowed, as the two of them stared at each other.

A dozen thoughts whipped through Matt's head at the same time:

Why was she here?

Where had she been all this time?

Was she okay?

Did she still love him...?

But the only word that left his lips was her name, repeated in a whisper. "Calina." Those three syllables held all of the pain and desperation and frustration of the past two months. They were both a plea and a prayer.

He took a step closer, her name falling between them for a third time. "Callie-" But that small step broke the spell holding Calina in place. She jolted out of her daze, her head snapping forward again. She quickly seated herself on the bike and kick started it all in one quick motion. In seconds she was roaring down the street away from him.

Leaving him bleeding and broken on the sidewalk.