Yeah, so basically all of these stories are going to be post season 1 for DD and ignore most of season 2 because season 2 has Matt and Claire not speaking and THAT IS UNACCEPTABLE.

Ahem. Anyway.

This story takes place after both 'The Vigilante Case' and 'The Supernatural Case'. You don't have to have read the other two to be able to read this one, but it does reference them and Peter Parker does make an appearance. I'll be making a timeline in the series description for all your reading purposes.

I don't really have anything else to say, so enjoy.

It is a very strange day.

Matt had woken up with an odd feeling in his gut, like the scent of blood in the air when there's about to be a murder or the sensation of heavy water droplets in the atmosphere before it rains.

He'd rolled out of bed, stomach churning with unease and the internalized knowledge that something fundamentally different was going to happen today.

He'd been right. It's pretty obvious, now.

But Matt Murdock at a quarter past seven in the morning passes it off as the remnants of a bad dream, seeing as nothing is obviously amiss, and ties his tie and buttons his coat and futilely attempts to comb his hair as usual.

(He hadn't been kidding all those months ago when he told Karen that combing his hair was just sort of frantically brushing in one direction and hoping for the best.)

The walk to the office is long enough that most would take the subway or a taxi, but Matt prefers the brisk feeling of the cold air on his face, tinted as it is with garbage and urine, to the horrible rattling noise of the subway or the money wasted on a taxi. He can walk and get there faster than a taxi, too, in traffic like there always is on the early morning streets in the heart of Manhattan.

Matt inhales, a small smile on his lips as he tastes freshly baked bagels in the air. The sound of a small child sleepily reciting her ABCs in an apartment above dispels his earlier unease. It was nothing. It meant nothing.

Maybe he's becoming paranoid.

In a sudden fit of rare optimism, Matt detours into the opening bagel store and buys a dozen; five plain, three egg, and four pumpernickel. One sniff tells him that these are the good kind, made fresh with fresh ingredients from clean machines and old family recipes.

The plain bagels must have been made first. They smell faintly of the citrus soap that was used to clean the machinery.

At a quarter till eight Matt walks into Nelson and Murdock with his bag full of bagels and is met with chaos.

Matt stops dead, clutching his bagels and his stick like lifelines and lets the door close behind him. He takes a deep breath.

"Foggy. What the hell are you doing?"

There's a rustling of hair over shirt collar as Foggy turns his head and offers what Matt imagines must be a sheepish grin. "Uh, hey, Matt."

There's a pause, the air full of the sound of fluttering wings and gentle cooing, and then they both speak at the same moment.

"Are those bagels?" "Are those pigeons?"

Another pause, and then Foggy speaks. "Maybe you should go first."

"Yeah, maybe l should. Foggy, why are there pigeons in our office?"

Foggy lightly rattles the cage in question and the pigeons shift. One of them pulls a bug from its plumage and swallows it. Another dribbles bird guano into the bottom of the cage.

Matt wrinkles his nose in disgust.

"So you know that pretzel stand guy who needs our help with his landlord demanding way too much rent? Well, he doesn't have money, as per usual, and apparently if he just gives us pretzels he'll get fired and lose both his job AND his pretzel stand, but his sister apparently breeds pigeons so he asked if I wanted a few and I think I accidentally said yes."

Matt blinks.

"So are you sharing those bagels or what?"

Matt ponders for a second, then pulls the bag closer possessively. "Get those birds out of my lawfirm and then we'll talk."

He disappears into his office, ignoring Foggy's cry of, "It's our lawfirm!" and shutting the door behind him.

(As it turns out, they are very good bagels.)

The next strange thing comes at lunch time when Matt walks into a Jewish deli and bumps straight into Claire. Literally bumps into her; she grabs his arms to keep from falling, and he subconsciously helps her steady herself even as his brain freezes from the surprise. He'd thought he'd smelled her shampoo, but it was hard to tell in the rush of lunchtime city-goers so he'd written it off.

He should really stop writing things off.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Claire begins, sounding harried as she brushes herself off. "I wasn't looking where I was—Matt?!"

Matt flaps his hands at her in some sort of shushing gesture and almost decapitates a dachsund with his cane. The owner makes a grumbling sound and picks up her dog, the jingling sound of its collar fading into the crowd.

"Matt, what the hell? You can't keep surprising me like this! I have a life, you know. One outside of your craziness."

"Claire."

"And you know what, Matt Murdock? I am getting really sick of your shit. Maybe you should get a better suit, or an actual super-doctor. I hear the Avengers are recruiting. Did you know they even offered Spider-man a job? How is it that they haven't approached you? Or have they already, and you just turned them down because you're a broody loner?"

"Claire, keep your voice down. And I wasn't looking for you. I just wanted a pastrami sandwich."

Claire freezes.

"Oh."

"Yeah."

She clears her throat and adjusts her posture, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear. "Well, then. In that case, carry on."

Matt smiles a little bit and moves to do as he was told, but Claire stops him with a hand on his arm. "Seriously, Matt, maybe you should talk to the Avengers."

He shrugs. "I don't work very well with others," he says, and then continues on into the store. Matt knows that Claire is aware that he can hear her when she mutters a quiet, "Of course you don't," behind his back, but it makes him laugh anyway.

(Foggy cracks up around a mouthful of kosher meat when Matt tells him. Karen walks in on the scene and promptly turns around, declaring that they were too much for her to handle at the moment and that she wants a sick day.

They let her go because no one tells Karen to do anything, and Foggy was still laughing too hard to do much, anyway.)

The third strange thing comes while Matt is on patrol. He has just finished delivering a mugger to the local precinct when he hears a very familiar voice muttering to itself in distress from a rooftop.

"Goddamnit, why? Why is this my life?" says the young voice of Spider-man, and Matt takes off running. He lands on the rooftop in a crouch and cautiously moves towards Peter, sniffing the air for the scent of blood.

There is none. All he smells is graphite and paper and the bland Dove soap that Peter uses.

Then it hits him. "Peter," says Matt, coming up beside the younger hero.

Peter sighs, rubbing at the back of his head. "Oh, hey DD. How's it going?"

Matt cocks his head at the resumed sound of a pencil scratching and some sort of gentle tapping noise, like the keys on a phone way back when they actually had keys. "Peter, what are you doing?"

Peter moans and slumps over onto the concrete, papers ruffling underneath him. "Chemistry. I have a test tomorrow. How the hell do you find the bond angle of a molecule?"

Matt takes a moment to reflect on the absurdity of finding Spider-man doing chemistry homework on a rooftop in Hell's Kitchen before answering. "I don't know. Why are you on the roof?"

"Um…" Peter stops scribbling and makes an aborted half-gesture that Matt recognizes as the teen trying to chew on the end of his pencil only to be blocked by the fabric of his mask. "Cuz?"

"Peter, go home."

"But I have to fight crime!"

"Peter. You have a test tomorrow and I am on patrol. Go home."

The teenage vigilante huffs through his nose and begins to push his papers into a sloppy pile before shoving them into a canvas backpack that smells like sweaty gym clothing. "Fine. But you better take care of this city while I'm home."

Matt smiles. "You know I will. Now go home, study, sleep, and good luck on your test."

Peter moves towards the edge of the roof and then hesitates, one foot already half off the overhang. "Can I just stay out for a few more—"

"Peter. Home. Now. Go."

"Ugh. Fine."

And then he leaps from the roof, a web splitting the air a moment later. Matt cocks his head and follows his progress until he's certain that the younger man is indeed headed home, then turns to continue this night.

(Later this becomes routine and he stops thinking it's so strange. Peter has a penchant for rooftops and procrastinating schoolwork.)

It is the fourth and final thing that is the strangest, and it is the only one that makes the leap from strange to weird, and then forgoes crazy completely to jump straight to insane. It is this thing that makes Matt wish he'd listened to his instincts this morning, even though there's no way he could have predicted this.

He is sitting on the edge of a rooftop, poking at a knife-tear in his suit to see if he needs to get it repaired, when something changes and he sits up straight, suddenly alert. It takes him a moment to pin down what's wrong, and even then it's not very clear what's happening. All he knows is that the air is suddenly charged, faint static dancing with the wind and the barest whisper of electricity across the exposed skin of his jaw.

Matt stands, scanning with his ears and his nose and his taste buds and everything he has.

Something's wrong. Something's different. Something's about to happen.

And then something does.

The street below is deserted. It's a quiet block (that's why he's resting here) and it's far too late for anyone credible to be out and about. There's nothing below him but the sound of newspapers fluttering at the base of a trash heap and rats scurrying through an upturned carton of Chinese food. He is alone.

And then, suddenly, inexplicably, he isn't.

The static grows stronger, louder, and Matt clutches his head as the air fills suddenly with a violent, high-pitched whine. Something tears, though he's not sure what, and there is a person in the street.

There is a flicker of electricity and then the person is gone, taking with them the whine and the static and the lightning. Matt straightens and drops his hands, tasting the burnt air on his tongue.

A lesser man might have convinced himself that the whole thing was imagined, but Matt had fought demons two months ago and Matt had cowered beneath his bed on the day of the Chitauri invasion and listened in agony to the screams and the crashing as an army tore his city to pieces, and after that he promised himself never to dismiss anything as imagination ever again.

(He'd tasted Loki's portal in the air, tasted the far-off stench of a hideous army, tasted the nuclear weapon that had been launched and aborted and not one civilian was the wiser to, but Matt knows and he fears and he prays and this? This is not nothing.)

There was a tear and a person and electricity, and Matt knows the feeling of it on his skin now. He can find this person, find their motivations, and take them down if necessary, never mind the fact that this is, in all possibility, probably a job for the Avengers.

But this is smaller than the Invasion, and he handled that thing with the demons just fine and he is his own man. And yes, maybe Claire had a point earlier about him being a broody loner, but he's going to ignore that part.

The person was fast. Far too fast for Matt to ever catch. But the person is also a person, and people get tired. They'll have to stop eventually, and when they do Matt will be ready.

So Matt cocks his head and he listens and he waits.

Barry is a little annoyed.

He'd been having a great day. Really, he had. The tachyon device strapped to his chest makes him fast fast fast, and it is exhilarating. And yes, maybe at first he had trouble controlling his speed, but that doesn't matter because now he's got it down pat. Cisco even shrunk the device down and stuck it underneath the lightning bolt on his chest, and it's so inconspicuous that Barry keeps forgetting it's there.

And that's exactly what got him into this mess.

Well, part of it.

One second he's running, enjoying the feeling of wind on his face and the crackle of electricity around his legs. The next, there's a flash of blue in the corner of his vision and Barry freaks.

It's Zoom it's Zoom it's Zoom, his mind tells him. It's Zoom and he's come to finish you for real and you can't beat him you can try but you'll never be that fast and he knows and he's come to kill you.

It's not Zoom, of course, but Barry would be lying if he said he doesn't have some PTSD going on and PTSD is not known for thinking things through before initiating a panic attack.

So of course Barry's already rapid-fire heart rate speeds up and his breath quickens and he runs as fast as he can in the other direction.

Well, as fast as he can is a lot faster than it used to be and suddenly the air around him squeezes and sticks and stretches and then spits him out in a different dimension.

Again.

And this dimension is nowhere near as bright and sunshine-y as Kara's alien-filled scifi world. No, this one is kinda dark and smelly and crowded and feels like Star City in that the air is so thick with disrepute that it sticks between your teeth and fills your mouth with motor oil and dread.

Barry hates cities like this. He's also starting to hate dimensional travel.

His feet leave skid marks on the pavement as he zips around a corner, disrupting papers from outside a nearby bodega. He dodges the occasional pedestrian, leaps over a cat, and swerves to miss a trashcan that's in the middle of the street for some reason.

Ew. This city is kinda disgusting.

He finishes his fifth loop around the block and heads out towards the brighter expanse of the city beyond, amending his prior opinion now that he sees that his entry point was in a particularly scummy neighborhood. The rest of the city isn't too bad; it still smells bad but that sort of comes with the territory when you're a city this size with this many people. And the city is huge; Central City is small by comparison, and much less densely populated.

And cleaner. But as far as he can tell, this city doesn't have giant shark-people, so there's that.

Barry skids to a stop at the edge of a river and stares at the huge, green statue across the water.

"Oh," says Barry. "New York."

So okay, maybe this world isn't that bad. His own world has both Central City and Star City, after all. And Kara's world probably wasn't all sunshine and aliens, either. She'd seemed oddly pessimistic when the subject of her sister had come up, and the DEO had met him at gunpoint.

Barry realizes that people are staring at him when a little boy pokes him in the leg and asks for a picture. Under most circumstances, he would readily agree, but something tells him that's a bad idea in this world so he gently turns the little boy down and takes off back towards where he came from. He'll do a couple more laps of the city, find something to change into, and then find a library to do some research in.

Also food. He needs to find food.

He's partway through his second lap when he hears screaming. He's back in that grimy neighborhood where he entered and some part of his brain tells him that no, this isn't his city or even his world, and no, he really shouldn't do anything that'll draw attention to himself, but he can't help it. He's a hero.

Barry runs toward the scream and finds himself in a disgusting alleyway with five other people.

Slumped on the ground with her back to the wall is a young woman. She is dressed in a lilac party dress, the sleeve hanging off of her shoulder and the skirt torn. Her hair is awry and she is clutching her knees to her chest, burying her head in her legs and sobbing. She is the one who screamed.

Around her are three men. They are all large and sloppily dressed and they all smell strongly of alcohol. Two of them are also on the ground, except unlike the woman, they are unconscious.

The third man is still standing, but from the looks of it, he won't be for much longer, because he is currently getting his ass handed to him by the fifth member of the alleyway party.

And the fifth member is definitely the strangest.

Like Barry, he is dressed in red leather. Unlike Barry, the armor seems built more for protection and less for speed. His mask is a half-helmet, also like Barry's, and it has a pair of frankly ridiculous horns on top. The man is stockier than Barry; he is more muscular, and he is shorter, and he's not wiry in the way that Barry has always been. Honestly, the way he moves remind Barry of how Oliver moves; power and brutality and aggression built into every line of his body.

But something's different, too. The stranger moves with a certain grace that Oliver lacks. Oliver certainly doesn't flip like that, and he relies more on his bow and arrows. More importantly, Oliver can't move as fast as this man, who seems to sense the punches thrown his way before they even begin.

(Barry would never say it out loud, but he thinks maybe this man is a better fighter than Oliver.)

All these thoughts cycle through Barry's head in the moment it takes for the stranger to flip his aggressor onto the ground and knock him unconscious. There's a very brief pause, and then the man turns his head towards Barry.

"Who are you?" says the man in a low, breathy growl. "And what are you doing in my city?"

No idea when the next chapter will happen. I have a tendency to let my stories stew for months and then write entire chapters in short bursts.

Please leave a review and tell me what you thought!