Making Me Desperately Wish I Had A Matt In My Life - Tumblr Posts
Are You Okay? | Matt Murdock x Reader
Pairing: Matt Murdock x Reader (gender neutral)
Masterlist
Summary: Sometimes, all you need to hear is one question and one person to make your shitty day not so shitty anymore.
Warnings: Emotional hurt/comfort, fear of failure, not proofread (I put Grammarly over that bitch, but that's it), no y/n
A/n: I wrote this in an hour because I'm stressed as fuck and my state of mind is so complicated right now, I didn't know how else to explain it. Also, why is statistics such a bitch to study? And what do I care about fucking behaviorism? I'm already done with Freud and Piaget and those get on my last nerve already, I don't need Bandura to add to my emotional despair, but oh well, here we are. This is completely self-indulgent and I channeled what's happening in my school life into this one, so if it doesn't fit with the American school system, I'm sorry, but I didn't want to research.
Word Count: 2.7k
You’ve been locked in your room for the majority of the past week, the study notes of the past semester strewn around you, and you swore at the beginning of the week that you would revise every last note at least once. In the end, you panicked more than you studied, but you managed to summarize about half of your notes, which should fill you with glee, but as you stare down at your stack of cards, you’re filled with dread and the purest form of self-hatred. What did you do the entire week that you only got so far? You left your room once, but it was a short walk around the block to air your head, with still many hours of the day left to spare. You swore you would get everything you needed to be done, and you swore to yourself that the next five weeks of exam season were going to be your bitch, but looking at the calendar now you realize, those five weeks still lay ahead of you and you are not even nearly done with everything you swore you would get done.
Your head screams, “Failure!” And you’re starting to think that maybe your head is right. Maybe you are lazy and that is why your grades have been dropping or your teachers are disappointed or you just can’t seem to get the information into your thick skull even though someone once told you, “You can do it!” You figure that was a lie too. There is no way you can manage to ace all your upcoming tests and the final exams, and part of you is starting to fear you might not be able to graduate. There is too much in your head, too much stress, and too much performance anxiety, but as you look around yourself you don’t realize why you’re so stressed - in your head, it appears as if you spent the entire week playing video games and did the bare minimum, and not even that did you manage. You really don’t understand how you can be stressed and not even halfway done with all of your schoolwork. You’re stressed about being stressed, and you’re stressed about studying so you try to study, but your head blacks out and the day suddenly doesn’t have enough hours for you to think about yourself and the work you have to do, so you just sit back and stare at an empty page in the hopes the words will come out and you can just memorize all of the fucking information on your study notes. You don’t want to be the best, you’ve given up on that, but you want to pass, you need to pass because damn, you want to get out, you want to move on and get out and get on with life, but the load keeps getting bigger and your grades keep swindling. How can the load get bigger when you haven’t left your room in a week, and how did you not manage to finish revising all of your notes even though you definitely had the time and the means? You don’t understand and at this point, you have resorted to watching trash tv to keep your mind from reeling, but even that seems not enough anymore. You can’t eat without upsetting your stomach and the thought of going back to class the next day, having to study more and revise more, and the end moves closer and closer, but never close enough, and the entire pile of documents, anxiety, and stress starts to bury you alive. You can’t remember a second you allowed yourself to properly breathe, to stop your thoughts from racing and focusing on something else. You can’t remember a time you allowed yourself a step away from studying or procrastinating and freeing your head so you can get back to work with newfound energy. All of that seems so… impossible now. You want to pass, but your head keeps telling you that you won’t. You won’t pass. You will fail and everyone will hate you because you will be the only one. You’re scared, you’re terrified even and you can’t do this anymore. You want out of your body, out of your mind, and out of this life just for a second, just until the worst is over and everything has resolved itself.
You know that’s not possible.
Your friends are emotionally unavailable, busy with themselves, mostly, and your family is as annoying as ever. No one’s asked about you, most of them have dodged your messages or answered with a clear, “Sorry, we can’t.” It feels as if no one can help you out of this hole you’ve dug for yourself, so you decide to sit in it and wait for the dirt to swallow you.
Your skin tingles, you’re tired and there is this overwhelming urge to cry. You miss being touched, you miss being taken care of, but there is no time and you just can’t ask. The one person you can ask is across campus and has no idea what’s going on because you told him you’d need the week to study, so he told you he’d leave you alone until then. It’s Sunday now. He hasn’t called or texted and you’re starting to wonder if he’s sick of you as you are of yourself.
Before the thoughts can turn any darker, and they have gotten significantly darker, there is a knock on your door. You probably smell disgusting, your room is a mess and you should have opened a window, but it’s significantly colder outside today, there is snow and you just hate the way everything but your blanket and the new episodes of America’s Next Top Model make you feel. You’ve driven yourself so far into loneliness, you’re starting to believe that this is actually just who you’re supposed to be.
You get off the makeshift seating area among your study notes off the floor and walk to the door. You don’t bother checking who’s outside. If it is a murderer, at least you can miss your exams and not feel guilty, and the general heavy pain that drags your soul down to your feet and keeps it there would finally go away.
Seeing Matt Murdock’s face at your door doesn’t surprise you, you simply step aside and let him in. doesn’t say anything, simply taps his can forward until he can find his way into your room. His nostrils flare, but either he doesn’t smell the bucket of untouched fries and garlic sauce on the counter and how you haven’t showered in four days or he’s being respectful about it. You kind of wish he would just flat-out tell you that you smell and probably look like shit, not that he could judge, but he could probably sense with the way everything feels like a mess around him, that would make your guilt and pain so much worse but at least you could feel something else for a change. You’d be hurt, but it would be a different kind of hurt, one that could distract you from the demons gnawing at your heart.
“You want a drink?” you ask, your voice hoarse from both the lack and the overuse of sleep as a coping mechanism.
He stands lost in the room, or maybe he’s waiting, you’re not sure. You get a beer for him from the fridge, but instead of drinking it, he takes it and places it back down on the counter.
You stare at him, a little confused, and maybe your pride is also a little hurt that he would turn down your nice gesture.
“Are you okay?”
The question confuses you, at first, and you’re not quite sure how to process it. Those three words sound so foreign, the week you’ve been through suddenly feeling like years without him, and as he’s standing before you now, his question awakening something in you, unscrewing the lid and popping the cork, you realize just how much you have missed him. How you have missed this. How you have missed being acknowledged and asked about, even if it was just a simple, “Are you okay?”
It finally settles in and the question makes you feel a lot of things at once, but none of them are simple, and none of them you can explain, but you know how they make you feel and they definitely answer his question with something he can feel in the way you tense up.
You bite your lip. “No,” you admit silently, although it feels wrong to say it because why are you not okay? You should be. You have to be.
But Matt isn’t like that.
“Do you need a hug?” he asks.
Fuck him, you think. He’s read you better than you could have read yourself.
You nod again. “Yes.”
“Okay, c’mere.”
As it turns out, a hug is exactly what you needed and half of the uneasiness you have been feeling must have been a serious case of touch starvation.
He opens his arms and allows you to take the first step, and you do. You step forward to lazily drape your arms around him, but he soon wraps you up tightly in his and squeezes you in the way he knows you need. The physical decompression, his fresh smell, the sound of his heartbeat, and his hands roaming your back open the flood gates, and seconds after you are crying heavily into his chest. You unload all of the stress and all of the anxiety, clinging to him for dear life, but he doesn’t mind. He lets you cry, sob and whimper until you’re too weak to stand and even then he only carries you over to your couch and sits down with you in his lap, still holding you like you are a fragile little thing (which you are, now that you think of it) and he refuses to even think about letting you go.
He kisses your head. You’re still shaking, but there are no more tears to cry. “Why didn’t you call?” he asks you.
His voice sounds so soft and it makes you whimper again, wiping your eyes on his already wet shirt. “Why didn’t you call?” you bite back.
“Because you said you wanted to study. I didn’t want to interrupt you, sweetheart. I know how caught up you get and I wanted to give you space. If I had known-”
You can’t help it. You are safe from the world in his arms so you allow yourself to voice the one thought that has been keeping you on edge, “I’m going to fail, Matty.”
He holds your face away from his, feeling your contorted features and the stress wrinkles on your forehead. “What?”
You only then realize he took off his glasses and you can see his brown eyes perfectly like that. That only makes you shake harder because he cares so damn much and you never have needed him more than you do now.
“I’m going to fail,” you say again, “because I’m useless and dumb and I can’t get anything right. I can’t even get anything done. I’m such a failure and I am going to fail every goddamn test and I am going to fail my finals and I’m-”
Matt shushes you again by taking you in his arms, and a new wave of tears rattles you. “You are not going to fail,” he murmurs into the crown of your head. “You’re not a failure, you’re not dumb and you are not useless. You made it this far. You passed all of your previous classes. You’re almost there, sweetheart,” he says, “so you are not going to fail now.”
“But what if I am?”
“Everything can happen, but you are not going to fail. I know you and that is not what you do.”
“I barely got anything done this week. I swore I’d study, but-”
“How much do you have left?”
You sniffle and look behind you. God, your floor is a mess. “A lot,” you admit.
“Too much for one day?”
“Probably,” you break off with another sob. He keeps your head upright though. Instead of shushing you, he gets up, kneels on the floor, and touches your study notes. He can’t read them, they’re not in Braille, but he can smell the different highlighters you have used and he can separate the topics accordingly. “It’s the stack on the right, isn’t it?”
You rub your eyes. “Yes.”
“And that’s what?”
“Statistics, behaviorism and, um… I don’t know, cognitive development, maybe. I can’t remember. God!” Thinking about it makes you nauseous. “I can’t even remember, Matt. I am so going to fail!”
He shakes his head, pursing his lips to shush you softly. His hand motions for you to join him on the floor. With some struggle, he finds the stack you’ve been talking about. He hands it to you.
“You’re going to take these and spread them out,” he tells you, “While I take care of those you’ve already summarized, alright?”
You stammer, “What?”
“We’re gonna start with statistics. You are going to go through your notes at your speed while you tell me about them, and I’m gonna rub your back while you do. If you need a break,” he says, “We’re gonna take a break. If you wanna stop, we stop. And if you want me to stay until you’re done with both topics, I’ll stay for the boring behaviorism stuff, too.”
Somehow his readiness to help you without even knowing what he, ever the law student, is helping you with makes you cry even harder. He understands you in a way nobody can, and he never pressures you, not even when it comes to your classes. He knows you torture yourself enough and Matt being Matt, he can’t have you being sad.
He stays true to his promise. He sits behind you, rubbing your back as you go over your notes, summarize them and tell him about them. Statistics are the bane of your existence, but psychology relies on them, so you’re forced to relive the worst module of your life. But with him by your side, telling you every so often, “You are doing such a good job,” and, “I know you can do it, baby,” it’s a lot easier.
At around eight, your stomach growls, but you are long done with the statistics part and have decided, with some of Matt’s encouraging words, that there is still time tomorrow to get done with behaviorism and then when you’re done with both, he told you, he’d help you memorize. He hasn’t decided how yet, but he is determined and as the sun goes down and you lay in his arms, freshly showered and shaven on your bed, you can’t help but stare at his beautiful face. You would have lost your mind without him, you don’t doubt that, and he somehow always knows when to come and what to do. He knows when you feel down and when you need space. He knows you better than you know yourself and that is something no one but Matt Murdock has ever accomplished.
Without him, you are pretty sure you would maybe not have failed your classes but you would have failed at life. Your mind would have failed you and you would have drowned. But with him, you’re a little more alive.
“I love you,” you tell him sometime after he forced you to eat proper dinner, and he gently smiles against your hair.
“I love you,” he says. “And you are going to do great, I just know it.”
“You have so much faith in me.”
“Well, one of us has to. Besides,” he flips you over so that he can hover over you, his brown hair falling from his face into yours and you giggle at his antics, “I am a good catholic boy. If I didn’t have faith in the divine, where would I be?”
His words leave you gasping, but nothing can match up to the force and passion he kisses you with. Psychology and messy room long forgotten, you melt into his touch and let his hands and lips speak a language only the two of you understand, and they always manage to pull you out of any hole with a symphony that has become your favorite music.
“Well, one of us has to. Besides,” he flips you over so that he can hover over you, his brown hair falling from his face into yours and you giggle at his antics, “I am a good catholic boy. If I didn’t have faith in the divine, where would I be?”
His words leave you gasping, but nothing can match up to the force and passion he kisses you with. Psychology and messy room long forgotten, you melt into his touch and let his hands and lips speak a language only the two of you understand, and they always manage to pull you out of any hole with a symphony that has become your favorite music.