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Chapter Text

Foggy only stepped in when things appeared on the very edge of ‘too far.’ As in, after he’d woken up to tapping on his apartment window at three in the morning and looked out to watch the last minute or so of Spiderwoman getting the tar kicked out of her by his old grad school roommate.

He liked to pretend that he hadn’t had a grad school roommate sometimes.

And when that failed, he liked to imagine that his grad school roommate had been a nice, sweet blind boy from Vermont. Who didn’t stash weapons in the bottom of his desk drawers. And who had never once in his life thrown open a window to nab one of two local dueling tomcats from right off the fire-escape. Foggy liked to pretend that the guys next door to them in student housing had never asked him once if Matt had stolen the cat to roast and eat.

Matt called the cat ‘Cat’ and Cat had vanished with Matt after he’d dropped off his keys to the building reception desk, Cat under one arm, shiny new diploma and stick in the other.

Cat had half an ear, no tail, and meowed like an un-oiled streetcleaner. Literally the only person in the world who could have loved Cat was Matt Murdock, and so Foggy liked to imagine that this was a sign of Matt’s humanity, locked deep down in that maze of a heart of his. Hidden away behind the mystic waterfalls of acid and rotting fruit.

Foggy thought about Cat a lot these days. Especially since two separate ADAs had recently puked on or around his shoes this week.

Cat had been an ace at that.

Spiderwoman—or Gwen, as Foggy was now allowed to call her—appeared to have been in an accident recently which had severely damaged her ability to sense danger and go the other way, which was a shame really, because Foggy couldn’t think of anyone who needed that sense of self-preservation more.

She’d also been hallucinating, the poor thing. She’d taken to scrambling in through his office window a couple of times a week to sit and chat with him for a few minutes while he did paperwork. Foggy thought it was a way of catching her breath between rounds with perps and Matt, all of whom were almost always lurking somewhere outside, just out of eyesight.

She was a good kid under all that ire, he thought, and she had some pretty interesting, abstract ways of thinking.

For example, she told him that she had imagined a world just like their own, except instead of a Spiderwoman, there was a Spiderman, and instead of Foggy and Matt being DA and morally bankrupt half-orc (her words, not his), they were best friends who ran a tiny law firm together in Hell’s Kitchen.

He thought that that was very sweet.

So he told her about Cat.

It didn’t exactly have the same uplifting message to it, but he thought it maybe went a ways towards convincing her that not all hope had been lost for Matt. Foggy was pretty sure that he hadn’t eaten the cat, after all.

Gwen asked him if he was 100% sure, and he said he was.

But really, if he was honest, it was more of a 70% than a 100%.

Semantics.

He was purchasing an absurd amount of paper plates and kitchen rolls for an office picnic that weekend when Gwen came up to him in street clothes. She didn’t do much of that these days. She didn’t want to be seen as associated with Foggy in any way.

But that Friday, she popped up and offered to help him carry some of the stuff home. Foggy knew an excuse to chat when he saw one, but shrugged it off. He had underestimated how much stuff there actually had been in his basket and surely a little daytime chat with Gwen would not be the end all, be all of their existence. So he let her carry half of the bags towards his apartment.

He bumped into Matt, literally shoulder checked him, that same night. Matt leapt straight up into the air in surprise and whipped around in shock, which was surprising to Foggy. It shouldn’t have been, since Matt was blind, but he always seemed to know when people were coming, and surprising him had always been nigh impossible in their dorm, regardless of how early or late Foggy had come in.

So it was a little suspicious.

But Foggy didn’t say anything unusual. Just gave his usual, ‘hey, hi, how are you, man?’ spiel and was prepared to be left hanging, also as usual, because Matt’s idea of returning his small talk had always been offended gawking.

This time, however, Matt told him that he had to go and blustered exactly the opposite way from the one they’d both been headed, again shoulder-checking Foggy as he went.

Now that was weird.

Matt Murdock did not stammer.

Gwen swung herself back and forth while hanging upside-down from Foggy’s office ceiling, and it was kind of mesmerizing, if he was honest. She appeared to have forgotten he was there again. Chattering on and on about this guy she’d met in her hallucinations. She called him Itsy. And he was a spiderperson like her.

Adorable.

She told him that she’d also made/met Itsy’s twin, who she called ‘Bitsy.’ And that she was happy because she’d also found that there was a ‘Peter’ out there who liked bubble tea like she did. She told him that the other Peter she’d imagined called bubble tea “the worst kind of liquid roulette.” Which was pretty good and apt, if Foggy said so himself.

“Hey, what would you do if Murderdock liked you?” she asked out of nowhere on the thirtieth swing or so.

What now?

“If he liked you. What would you do if Murderdock liked you?” she repeated for him.

Well, this all felt very middle school, but he decided he’d play along. It was either that or paperwork and lord knew how little he wanted to do paperwork.

“Like, if he liked me? Or if he like-liked me?” Foggy asked.

Gwen stopped her swinging and gave him her rapt attention.

“If he like-liked you,” she said.

Oh, boy.

Well.

That was.

“I guess I’d hide,” he said with a shrug. Thought of Cat.

Matt tended to eat things that he liked. Apples. The blood of his enemies. The ends of novelty pens. Guy had a bit of a gnawing habit. Foggy thought that maybe if he ate more in general, this wouldn’t be such a problem for him, but what did he know about weight management?

“What if you couldn’t hide,” Gwen stipulated, “What would you do then?”

“Well, I guess I’d ask him out on a date,” Foggy said. Seemed like the only other option here. Rejection would end poorly if it was Matt they were talking about.

“Where would you go on this date?” Gwen asked, swinging again. She was enjoying this. Foggy couldn’t blame her, it was kind of fun. Harmless fun. A novelty in their lines of work.

He set down his pen and smiled, thinking about it.

“Maybe a movie? Ah, actually no, that wouldn’t work. Maybe a museum or something, something with an audio tour?”

Gwen wriggled in glee.

“And then what?”

“Hmm, well. I guess after that, you’ve gotta get something sweet. Ice cream or the like.”

“And then what?”

“Depends on if it goes well or not, doesn’t it?” Foggy teased.

“Let’s say it’s going well,” Gwen said.

It wouldn’t, not in a million years. Because even in this hypothetical scenario, Foggy would find something which would tip Matt over razor thin edge of his patience and he would either throw everything down and storm out or he’d get unbearably bored and try to manipulate the servers into a feud or something.

But sure, let’s say, for the sake of argument, it was going well.

“I guess this has been a day-date, so if it went well, I’d ask him on a night-date.”

Gwen made a questioning noise. Foggy decided that she’d never been on a night date.

“You know, dinner and a show? That kind of thing?”

“Oh, so you’d go to a concert,” she said.

Foggy was struck with a vivid memory of Matt’s silent, though deadly war on their metalhead neighbors’ internet connection when their music got loud enough to be heard through the wall. Foggy didn’t know how or what exactly he’d do, but one minute there would be blaring, and the next minute, there would be loud complaints about the damn loading time and Matt would giggle to himself before hunkering back down with his textbooks and headphones.

Those guys had fought with their internet provided for months.

No. No music.

“Maybe not a concert,” he said. “Maybe something interactive.” To reduce the potential sources of damage Matt could do. A busy and distracted Matt was the only safe kind.

“Like a board game?”

Absolutely not, he did not want to die here.

“More like a pottery class,” he said.

Gwen’s suit eyes blinked at him in disgust.

“What?” he asked, “It’s soothing.”

“Mr. Nelson.”

“Hmm?”

“You’re so old.”

Ha.

Cute.

Gwen reappeared a week or so later with a broken arm which she neither acknowledged or wanted to discuss. She had questions about Cat.

How long did they have Cat? Where did Cat sleep? Did Matt ever try to maim and/or torture Cat? What did they feed Cat, if they fed him? Did Matt show any sort of emotion towards Cat?

Oh, also. Did he know where Gwen could find a guide dog school?

A guide dog school?

“I just think he’d be happier with a guide dog,” Gwen said patiently. “Maybe it would make him less homicidal. Maybe he’s lonely or frustrated. Maybe he likes animals better than people.”

Oh.

You know what?

That was a great point and observation, right there. Gwen was so smart, wow.

The whole guide dog thing stuck with Foggy longer than it had any right to, especially since he’d caught Matt, once again, in the street, although this time, he was trying to amend a coffee order at a bodega. It was a conversation he evidently did not want to be having and the bodega owner didn’t care if he was the Kingpin of NYC or the Queen of fucking England.

No refunds. Take your shitty coffee and scram.

When Foggy tuned into the argument, Matt was very validly pointing out that salt and sugar should not be in the same type of container, nor placed next to each other at the same station.

The bodega owner told him flatly that they were clearly labeled. Foggy could actually see one of the veins in Matt’s neck start throbbing.

Not even the kingpin, it would appear, could intimidate some of the local small business owners. Even when he was actually in the right on this one. But this show of arrogance was no match for the Kingpin. He smoothed out his face and folded up his cane and grabbed the bodega owner’s hand. He dropped the cane in it, curled the guy’s fingers around it, then did an about face and walked right out into traffic.

Needless to say, he got that refund.

Foggy couldn’t help but think that this was all maybe a little unnecessary.

It wasn’t that he cared about the guy or whatever, it was more that for the sake of all of his bodega owning potential clients and all of the potentially blind coffee-purchasers in the city, it would be better if there was a more explicit way for people to tell that Matt was blind.

Certainly, the stick did it for most people. But Matt, because he was some kind of insane asshole, sometimes like to forsake his stick and wander around like a crazy person. Foggy had never understood this. When Matt had done shit like this in grad school, usually when he was more than a little drunk or high and doing his damnedest to get back home despite it, Foggy had grabbed his hand and tucked it into the crook of his elbow.

Matt hated this and amended it so that he gripped the outside of Foggy’s elbow instead but went along with it anyways. A little googling nearly ten years later, now revealed to Foggy that this was the correct and proper way to guide a blind person.

The same googling session told Foggy that there was a foundation who set blind folks up with guide dogs ten blocks away from his apartment.

It wasn’t a big thing, he just put Matt’s personal phone number, the one he still answered when Foggy called him at, on the calling list. And that was it. That was all.

He concluded that he would meddle no more.

“Murderdock has a dog,” Gwen informed him seriously about two weeks later.

“A what?” he asked.

“A dog. I think he hates it. He was swearing at it a lot yesterday. It kept trying to follow him when he was chasing me.”

Foggy’s brain was busy trying to process the fact that Matt had not only actually answered a call from the guide dog foundation, but had gone forth and acquired a dog and some training for it.

This had not even been the remotest possibility in Foggy’s head. Sure, yeah, he’d moved the first pawn. But he’d totally expected Matt to cough, spit and change his number forever once he’d gotten that call.

Well, fuck.

“Is it a cute dog?” he asked.

“It’s blonde,” Gwen said, “But it’s not as cute as Tuesday.”

Tues…day?

“She’s big Red’s guide dog.”

Right. Which one was Big Red, now? He had to backtrack through all Gwen’s hallucinations to try to find this character. She’d made up different worlds for each set of spider people and Matt and Foggy combinations. She had a new one lately in which Matt was a big broad version of himself and was married to a skinnier, grumpier version of Foggy who wore beanies all the time.

Foggy accidently met the new guide dog. He was minding his own business, picking up dinner from the El Salvadorian place two streets from his apartment, when the guide dog broke character and training to bark at him like she was a sniffer dog and he was a cadaver. She lunged towards him, harness and all, from the pavement and he soon found himself chest to chest with an off-guard Matt.

Matt shoved away from him immediately and snarled at the dog to shut the fuck up, but alas. Dogs, like bodega owners, were not affected by the kingpin’s murder vibes.

Foggy felt like he’d finally found Matt’s mortal enemies. His kryptonite, if you will.

The blonde behemoth carried on barking at Foggy in the middle of the sidewalk, and while he tried to soothe her and tell Matt that it was fine, he’d just move, Matt told him, “No. Shut the fuck up, we are going to make progress, so help me God.” And Foggy got to witness, for the first time ever, Matt Murdock out of his element as he threatened the dog under his breath with evisceration and she just got louder and started directing these noises at Matt. Matt stopped making the threats.

With startling clarity, Foggy realized that Matt was about to kill this animal in public.

He had to do something. There were kids peaking out of windows to see what the commotion was in the street.

“Here, let me just—” he said.

“No, I’ve got it, it’s fine,” Matt argued.

“No, really. It’s fine. Here, let’s just get her away from people.”

“I just said—”

“Matt, just shut up and hold this, alright?” He put Matt’s hand on his elbow and wrangled the harness off the dog so he could just hold onto her collar and then pulled both man and dog into an alley where there were less upsetting noises and eyes.

The dog barked at him a few more times, but then abruptly decided that actually no, Foggy was okay. It was Matt who was the enemy here. She tucked herself behind Foggy’s legs and refused to come out when Matt snapped at her to ‘come.’

His fingers flexed into the shape of fists when she refused.

The dog whimpered.

Foggy put his hands on Matt’s shoulders as gently as he could and squeezed. Matt went from glowering at the dog to glowering at Foggy.

“I hate it,” he told him.

Hey, good job expressing feelings, bud. If nothing else, at least that had happened. Maybe this was a teaching moment.

“I see that,” Foggy told him. “Why don’t we take her back, then?”

Matt’s face dropped a little of its snarling and he cocked his head at Foggy a little bit like the thought hadn’t crossed his mind.

“Take her back?” he repeated, oddly confused.

Foggy didn’t know what to say to this. It was kind of an obvious solution here.

“Yeah, you know? To where you got her? We’ll just take her back and they can pair you with a new one or not if you don’t want it, I guess,” he tried.

Matt blinked at him.

“I can just take her back?” he repeated.

What exactly the fuck else did he think he was going to do with her?

“Yeah, man. You can literally just take her back,” Foggy assured him.

Matt pulled back out of Foggy’s grip with a frown.

“And that’s it,” he said, snapping back to his suspicion immediately, “They’ll just take her. And what? What’ll they do to her?”

“I dunno, probably give her to someone who she suits better,” Foggy said.

Silence.

Matt cleared his throat.

“I guess--uh. I’ll do that then.”

“Okay, yeah. You should,” Foggy told him.

“Fine, I will.”

“Alright, good.”

Silence again.

“I’m gonna—” Matt started with a thumb over his shoulder.

“Oh, yeah. Me too,” Foggy told him.

“Right. Uh. Th-Thanks?”

“Oh.” What the fuck. Was the world ending? The world was ending. Matt never said thank you. Never did anything which warranted it. “You’re welcome.”

God this silence was not only awkward now, it was painful.

“Bye,” Foggy said stepping away from the other two and towards the mouth of the alley, “Don’t uh, kill her.”

Matt’s face stayed trained on him, but he said nothing.

Foggy beat it as fast as he could. His heart pounding in his neck and chest.

“Murderdock is broken,” Gwen pouted, “What did you do to him?”

Why did it have to be something he’d done to him, Gwen?

“Because he likes you and I can’t find any bodies,” Gwen told him irritably.

Foggy had to shakily set his papers down that time because he needed to look at her full in the face. Matt didn’t like people. He didn’t. He hated that dog. He was going to kill that dog.

Why hadn’t he lashed out at Foggy?

Foggy had even touched him without asking.

“What do you mean, he likes me?” he asked with bile right at the back of his throat. Gwen looked up at him and shrugged. Then pushed off his desk.

“I gotta go,” she said.

“Wait—”

Too late. She was gone out the window.

This was fine. Everything was fine. Matt—no. Foggy wasn’t not thinking about Matt anymore. Foggy still felt weirdly sticky from thinking about Matt the other night. And last night. Why the hell had he been thinking about Matt so much lately? It wasn’t his problem. The guy was literally not his problem.

Except when he was. The Kingpin was Foggy’s problem.

Matt Murdock was not.

Wait. No. That didn’t make sense, they were one and the same.

No, no. That wasn’t quite true either.

It was more like this. The Kingpin was the bane of Foggy’s existence. Matt Murdock was not the kingpin because the kingpin didn’t order coffee from local shops and temporarily adopt guide dogs. That was not kingpin behavior.

No, see. Foggy had suspected the whole time of their acquaintance that Matt had some kind of bipolar disorder or dissociative personality disorder. He had ups and downs. Really low lows and really high highs. And he was a different person in both of those modes and in the space in between. So it only made sense that Foggy could see Matt Murdock as one person and the Kingpin as the other.

Right?

Right.

Okay, good. Excellent. Matt probably had some kind of thing going on with his head. Foggy could allow for that.

But why did that make him feel like he had heartburn?

He got anti-acid tablets from a doc and they helped more or less.

“Murderdock got a new dog,” Gwen reported back dutifully. “She’s much better than the other one. She’s not Tuesday, but I think we’re getting closer.”

Foggy was starting to become concerned about Gwen. These hallucinations and imaginary worlds she’d created were getting more and more detailed. She seemed to have built these characters up, almost as though they were real. She talked about them as if they were real too.

He wondered if there was some kind of reality test he could perform on her. Even if there was, he wasn’t sure she’d be amenable to it, so he could only watch and listen during these late night office visits.

She’d come by less lately. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe she was fighting more. Or maybe she was taking a break from being Spiderwoman. Either way, she didn’t talk about it.

He found that thinking about that gave him heartburn, too.

“I’m gonna be gone for a minute.”

Oh?

“Where are you going?” he asked without looking up. He shook his pen. Then reached for another one. Couldn’t find one that worked.

He went to make a note to his secretary to buy more pens, but realized that he couldn’t do that without having a functional pen. Fine. Highlighter it was, then.

“My friend B. is having some problems in his verse and he asked for help,” Gwen said casually. “He never asks anyone for help, so we’re getting all hands on deck.”

“Oh? You and who else?” he asked.

“Huh? Oh, the usual. Me, Itsy, Peni, Noir, and Ham. We’re scared to bring Tats and Bitsy because they haven’t met Ham yet and we don’t know how well it’ll go down with them. They’re kind of, uh, intense. All of them.”

Right, the usual. Always the usual.

The—

He put down the useless pen.

“Gwen, honey, you know these people aren’t real, right?” he asked, making sure to make eye contact with the wide, white eyes on her mask.

She only shrugged.

“Yeah, I guess that’s a fair reaction,” she said.

Yeah, and you know what that was, darlin’? The wrong one.

“They’re not real,” he reiterated, “How did you come up with them? I’m not trying to be a jerk or anything, I just want to know, if that’s okay.”

Gwen watched him with a cocked head.

“I didn’t come up with them,” she said matter-of-factly, “I just met them. And we became friends. We’re friends now. Maybe I’ll introduce you sometime. But you gotta warm up to the idea first, otherwise I think you’ll just insult them.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. If these were figments of her imagination, he was afraid that if he met them, he’d have to section her. And he really didn’t want to do that since she was still so young.

“Okay,” he said, because that was the only middle ground. “Sure. Okay. Whenever you’re ready.”

He was headed back home. It was getting hot. He wanted desperately to get out of his collared shirt.

And then he met Lola.

Lola who was a big chocolate lab and who bumped placidly into his knee and moved aside, taking her new Master with her. Matt. Her new Master. Who jerked upon recognizing Foggy.

Foggy learned Lola’s name over a cup of iced tea. Matt had strong-armed him into it and now said nothing, zip, zilch. Even though he was sitting, more or less like he would vibrate right out of his skin at any moment, right across from Foggy.

“So,” Foggy tried for the fourth time, just as awkwardly as the first three, “Do you like her?”

“No.”

Alright, well. Good talk.

“Do you like her better than the other one?” he tried.

“No.”

Even better talk. You know, Matt, for a guy who cannot physically shut up while doing Kingpin things, you’re being pretty fucking closed off right now.

“I’m going to take her back.”

Wait, what?

“Oh. I see. Why?” he asked, careful to keep the surprise out of his tone, lest Matt sense danger or judgement and try to murder him in front of this café. .

Matt was doing something, Foggy realized. Something he’d never seen him do. He was fidgeting. Rubbing the pad of his thumb against the side of his middle finger’s first knuckle. Lola stopped leaning her muzzle into Foggy’s hand and turned around to lay her head on Matt’s knee.

He started fidgeting with even greater intensity, but without moving any more than before.

Huh.

It reminded Foggy a little of him sometimes wandering around their old apartment with Cat clutched in his arms against his side. Cat loved this, for whatever reason. Probably because Cat was a broken cat and considered pressure and affection to be the same thing.

Huh.

“Matt, don’t take this the wrong way, but, like. Are you sure you don’t like the dog?” he asked.

Matt stood up. Lola stood up with him.

He left without saying a word. The dog watched after quizzically for a moment, then did a little doggy jog to catch up with his left leg and stayed there, even though Matt didn’t touch her harness.

There was a tap on his apartment window a few days later. He sat up in full anticipation of that tap being Gwen. He opened the window and thereafter became a co-conspirator in a dog-napping.

“I’m baaaack! Did you miss me?” Gwen, with a singed suit, asked Foggy who could not make himself flatter against his desk.

“Yes,” he whimpered.

Gwen paused in her jubilation to lean over him. He could feel her heat doing it.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

Oh, so, so many things.

“Matt took the lab back to the foundation,” he explained into the hardwood of his desk.

“Oh. Figures. She’s not Tuesday.”

For the love of fucking—who the fuck was Tuesday?

Gwen didn’t react to his frustration, surprisingly.

“Wait here,” she said. And then she was gone and Foggy was left to scream into his elbow himself because Matt could not possibly be a normal person ever and Foggy’s extension of concern a few days earlier had apparently been processed in that thick fucking head of his, as some kind of affection for the dog. And Matt, like a fucking sociopath, did not understand emotions and so did not understand that he did not want to give up this dog. He could not understand having positive feelings towards anything but chaos and ruining Foggy’s and everyone else’s lives and so handled that by combining this newfound object of positive emotion with both of those things so that it fit better into his world view.

So what Matt did was he gave the dog back to the foundation. Cycled through a whole lot of emotions which Foggy was 90% sure he did not understand, such as grief, sorrow, and self-loathing, and then went back to steal the goddamn dog, which he then took to Foggy’s apartment and thrust in at him through his window. All because he was operating under the impression here that Foggy was allowed to have positive emotions and since he wasn’t and Foggy had shown affection towards this poor animal one time before, the dog belonged most safely and justly with him.

So Foggy then had a kidnapped guide dog in his apartment, who was hands-down the sweetest and most well behaved creature ever. But the fact remained that he was harboring a stolen animal.

He took dog back to the foundation the day before yesterday. But then Matt had, again, in that fucking villainous pea brain of his, thought that someone else must have re-stolen the dog and so stole it a-fucking-gain so that he could return her to her alleged rightful place in Foggy’s living room.

The dog was the not the most frustrating part about this situation.

The frustrating part of this situation was that Matt was so tied up in this weird-ass Kingpin and sociopathic reputation and behavioral pattern that he literally could not see the forest for the fucking trees.

He loved that damn dog.

He didn’t understand that he would murder an army for that damned dog.

But that meant nothing. He loved that damn dog the way that he loved his damn Cat who, Foggy was now aware, was still fucking alive. Uneaten. Highly pampered. Living it up in Matt’s frankly shitty-ass loft apartment with nothing in it but a fucking cat palace and a bed with some silk sheets and an enormous duvet.

Matt did not want to take the dog because he was already in a complex, confusing relationship with this cat. And he didn’t want to upset that balance.

Which was a good thing in some ways, Foggy thought, because he and the cat were probably at the same level of emotional development.

Matt couldn’t cope with having two things in his life which he genuinely adored because he was, Foggy had also come to learn, fucking paranoid that both of these animals would be killed in front of him. He had some pretty vivid fantasies about how they would be killed. He laid them all out defensively when Foggy tried to move the dog to its rightful home in this shitty, empty apartment.

Furthermore, Matt would not hear the words ‘overprotective,’ ‘love,’ or ‘feelings,’ in his presence. These, he threatened Foggy, were words of weakness which had no place in any space in which he made habitual presence.

So the jury was finally fucking in, and Foggy now knew that Matt Murdock was a furious, humanoid pigeon with the emotional capacity of a seed, which had just revealed itself to be a fucking rock this whole time, and he, himself, was inexplicably fascinated with him.

How the ever-loving fuck could a man like that be the fucking kingpin? And how the fuck could someone with genius levels of intelligence and organizational skills be as completely emotionally incompetent as him?

Matt was a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in another mystery, coated in irony, and doused in a toxic, flammable mixture of arrogance, skittishness, and irritation.

And Foggy.

Was.

Fucking.

Hooked.

Like a sap. Like an idiot. Like a moron and the worst attorney in the history of the United States as an institution.

He wanted nothing more than to watch Matt move through daily life, meeting all these little conflicts which forced him to experience, for just seconds, for just the barest moments, for just the tiniest hiccups of space-time, self-reflection and personhood. Because all this did was make him confused and upset and the way he handled these little interactions, time and time again, was absolutely wild.

It wasn’t even an issue of morality. It was an issue of watching the most powerful ant in a hill shake its pincers at the universe, screeching its dominance and insidiousness at everything and then realizing abruptly that it does not know how to swim.

Foggy wanted to drown because the only thing he was feeling right now was endearment and everything he’d ever learned, done, or worked for informed him forcibly that this was the entirely wrong reaction to be having here.

So when Gwen came out of a fucking rip in the fabric of the universe, clutching a wiggling, wagging mound of golden fur and proclaiming this to be Tuesday, he threw up his hands and announced with joy, “Of course, it is!”

Because sometimes the only way to deal with an existential crisis is to fucking lean in already.

Because Foggy had finally reached clarity in his interactions with Matt, he could now take over the role of manipulator because, and he no longer cared what anyone thought of this, he was damned sure that Matt was just as attracted to him as he was to Matt. Not for any kind of power relationship or anything like that, Foggy was sure. No. Matt was probably fascinated with his ability to have multiple emotions all at the same time and come out on top of them with polite social behavior.

He was probably transfixed by Foggy’s ability to build and maintain relationships with other humans and, because he was Matt, he was no doubt doubly transfixed by all the little holes and gaps which Foggy left there, which could be exploited and abused and generally poked at and manipulated. He’d been interested because Matt functioned best in concretes and he built relationships like he built cases. He filled every loop and hole with whatever the fuck he needed to, to get his way.

He was not one for mess. He was not one for frivolity. He understood complexity the way a general did, but not the way that a salon owner did.

Foggy, however, not only lived one life, but two. He lived Foggy, the DA and he lived Foggy the New Yorker, and he did both to a more or less effective degree and Matt probably wanted some of that, Foggy thought.

Matt thought he could only be one thing at a time and he’d chosen to be the Kingpin, so by god, he was going to be the motherfucking kingpin.

Foggy wanted to ask him who Matt Murdock was and watch him squirm.

It was a little mean-spirited of him, but what the fuck ever. Matt had been playing him like a fiddle for years now.

It was his turn.

“Why are you here?” Matt opened with, standing over Foggy at the same little table he’d met Lola at in a pitch black suit. Lola was pleased to see Foggy at least. She nudged her muzzle into his hand.

“I wanted to see you,” Foggy said, and watched Matt’s brain halt all functions for a second.

He squinted immediately, hard, and fast. Then pulled the dog back.

“For what?” he demanded, refusing to sit down. Foggy patted at the seat across from him on the table so that Matt could hear it.

“Just wanted to shoot the shit, buddy,” he said.

Matt physically recoiled at the endearment, looking so shocked and uncomfortable, that it took everything in Foggy not to burst out laughing.

“Is—who—what?”

Foggy smiled and cocked his head.

“You okay?” he asked.

Matt was not. He edged away a little bit.

“Hm. Well, alright. How’s Lola, then?” Foggy asked. Lola wagged her tail a bit at being acknowledged by name. She nosed Foggy’s hand again. Foggy smiled at her. “She looks nothing like Tues,” he said without looking up.

“WE’VE GOT TO GO,” Matt announced suddenly, yanking the dog back.

“Oh, okay. Well, I’ll see you around, I guess,” Foggy told him.

Matt edged back, obviously horrified and completely unable to hide it, even in public. He tried to find Foggy’s face, then grabbed Lola’s vest and gave her a swift tug and took her with him briskly, as briskly as her little jog would allow him, down the sidewalk. He kept glancing back as though searching for Foggy, trying to watch Foggy watch him.

Foggy took a sip of coffee that was suddenly far, far too sweet.

“Gwendolyn.”

“Franklin.”

“I see what you’ve been doing now.”

“Why Mr. Nelson, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He laughed maybe a little hysterically. Gwen grinned at him as he collected himself.

“That’s pretty good, Gwen,” he said. “Very clever.”

She kept on grinning and then folded her fingers together and leaned them and her face forward onto the other side of his desk, like it was her desk. And honestly? It may as well have been in that moment.

“Would you like to keep playing, Mr. Nelson?” she asked. “Because if you do, I may be able to provide an assist.”

Did he want to keep playing?

Hmm. Well, given the mountain of the actual shit Matt had given him over the past ten years, the workplace harassment, the moral corruption, the undermining and blindsiding.

Yes.

Yes, he did want to keep playing.

Chapter Text

It was nice, having a side project. Especially when that side project was guaranteed to make Matt suffer.

Foggy maybe had a bit of schadenfreude going on here alongside that unhealthy fascination, but the look on Matt’s face when he’d mentioned Miss Tuesday the other week had been oh so good. Too good.

Addicting.

Gwen, the devious little shit, thought so, too.

She brought Foggy little bits and pieces of information that she picked up from her space-time travels.

“Hey, Big Red is all about with melon right now,” she dutifully informed Foggy during the first breath of a heatwave. “Bitsy says he’s been waxing poetic about it in their group chat.”

Foggy knew which other-dimension Matt Big Red was now. He was the one who owned Tuesday. Little Red was the one who Gwen described as ‘existing purely in low and high key and nothing in between.’ He was Gwen’s friend Itsy’s buddy, and while Big Red was apparently craving melon at the moment, Little Red was super into daikon radish, like. Highly obsessed with daikon radish.

Allegedly, Itsy was concerned because while this radish was good, he wasn’t completely certain that Little Red was getting enough calories out of this love affair. Gwen said that he and she were now on a mission to steer Little Red away from the health food for once in his life. She advised Foggy to look into summer foods as these appeared to be occupying a great deal of mental real estate for the other Matts she’d met at this particular juncture of time.

Matt, if Foggy remembered properly, fucking hated the heat. About as much as he hated the cold, but at least the cold was closer to the internal temperature of his heart, so he was willing to put up with that for a longer period of time. Heat, though, was the closest thing to Matt’s actual kryptonite that Foggy had witnessed him experience.

In grad school, Foggy would come home alternately to every possible window in the place gaping wide open to entice a cross breeze through the place or the very same orifices locked down and blacked out with curtains. Fans running. Matt despairing miserably on his back in his room, staring—no, glaring—up at the ceiling with his arms thrown out wide.

Soaking in sweat and general antipathy for the world.

Foggy tried to remember what college Matt ate all those summers ago, but mostly all he remembered was their fridge being stuffed full of lettuce.

Salad? Was Matt a salad kind of guy?

He couldn’t for the life of him remember. All he knew was that, these days, Matt was an apple kind of guy. Green ones specifically. For all his love of red, red apples were not acceptable to him. Nor yellow. Foggy concluded that he liked the sour, acidic taste. It probably reminded him of his trauma as a youth. That was the kind of thing he likely found comforting.

Regardless, having learned that the true way to get under the kingpin’s skin was to approach him with social grace and minor inconvenience, Foggy did what he thought was the only thing he was truly able to in this situation.

He mailed the guy a coconut.

He woke up a few days later to his adversary standing over him in the light of dawn, wielding a katana in one hand and the coconut in the other.

He went to work smelling of coconut.

Matt had figured out pretty quick who had sent him this present.

“You do not want to play this game, Nelson,” Matt threatened him, post-coconut shower. The point of the katana scraped against his Adam’s Apple, but Foggy was surprised to find himself cool as a cucumber. And not just because of the coconut water.

“It’s just a gag, Matt,” he said with a smile. “I remembered that you didn’t like the heat the other day and thought I’d send you something to cool off with.”

Matt started to go a little purple.

Fury. Confusion. Endearment.

He had only a handful of receptors to carry emotions across the blood-brain barrier. Processing more than one at a time was like asking four accountants to do the whole DA office’s taxes on April 14^th.

Foggy let him attempt to process for another moment or two and then pointed out that he had to get going and hey, where was the dog?

Matt didn’t answer this question. He just stood still for a few minutes by the bed, frowning and unmoving, while Foggy washed his face for work. When he came out of the bathroom, Matt had gone. The window was open. And the remnants of coconut had disappeared.

“Whatever you’re doing, I think it’s working,” Gwen said the following evening, bouncing along after him on the way home from work. He took the sidewalk, she took the walls, fences, and rooftops beside him. “Murderdock’s only come at me for blood twice this week, and one of them, he didn’t even follow through with. Hey, what exactly did you do?”

Foggy liked to imagine Matt starting into lunge at Gwen and then grumbling and throwing a dismissive hand at her instead before staggering off into the city, tormented by thought of coconuts. He loved this thought. This thought was like a long drink in a desert.

“Sent him a gift,” he said.

“Woah. Was it a horsehead?”

He laughed.

“This isn’t The Godfather, Gwen,” he chided.

“Well, maybe not yet,” Gwen thought out loud. Then stopped like a memory had tripped her. She leapt off the wooden fence she was currently on and landed with a soft patter in front of Foggy, facing him.

“Peter told me he met a new Red the other day,” she said. “He said he can’t tell if he’s different or the same as the other two. I’ll ask to tag along with him when he goes back to that verse and see if that guy’s got anything good to say.”

Yeah, okay. Why not?

“Be careful,” Foggy said because it felt like the right thing to do.

“I’m always careful.”

Gwen was gone for longer than usual. Weeks, plural, at this point. In her absence, Foggy had three major trials and a mountain of forms needing signatures and stamping. He bought the interns a few boxes of coffee as a way to keep them from quitting all at once. It worked, more or less.

Caroline, one of the office managers, told him that he didn’t have to do that, the interns all liked him just fine without the bribes. For that, Foggy made a huge jar of his mom’s lemonade to leave in the breakroom.

Many compliments all the way around. He forwarded them all to his mom’s email and she was delighted.

He realized after sending Julio, his last intern, home for the day that Friday, that he hadn’t seen Matt in a minute either. It was hotter than hell, so he was probably languishing away somewhere. Or he’d finally transformed into his true form, a mole rat, and had burrowed himself several stories underground where the sun’s power was diminished.

Foggy couldn’t tell if he was disappointed or not.

He resolved not to poke at that bear too much. Then went to reward himself with Thai food for a solid week’s work.

He bumped into Marci Stahl from grad school at the counter.

Marci was a stunning woman. A brilliant human being, in everything she did and anything she set out to do. She worked for a huge corporate firm these days. She wore pink to work every day, like it was written in her job description. In college they’d all joked that she was the real-life manifestation of Elle Woods and she wore that like a badge of honor. Elle Woods was her hero, she’d told Foggy far too seriously over some ridiculously over-iced, under-boozed drinks one time.

“I wore her Harvard outfit to my Columbia interview and I think that’s what sold them on me,” she’d confided.

Foggy had been busy thinking about how desperately he wanted to give Marci Stahl head in that moment and so had said, half-serious, “Right, it was definitely that, totally not all that underlying genius that did it.”

Flattery, thy name is wingman.

He and Marci had had an on-again, off-again thing for most of grad school, but then she’d gotten her internship and had seemingly been swallowed into the world of corporate legal defense. Foggy hadn’t seen her since, besides occasionally on Facebook, taking selfies with her friends at various bars in the city.

Now, however, they both had a moment. Surrounded by the heat and the smell of coconut and lime and savory basil, his take-out Thai dinner turned into a sit-in dinner with Marci Stahl.

He woke up the next day and panicked, then remembered it was Saturday and flopped back down on his back. Marci sniffed herself awake next to him and then proceeded to do the exact same thing. Except it turned out that she really did have a reason to panic because her gal Ulla was getting married that day and she had to go help tie covers on chairs.

She left Foggy with a kiss and a flirty wink, saying that they should reconnect more often.

Her summer perfume smelled of jasmine and citrus. It lingered in his room and his bed as late as that evening.

“Dude.”

Oh hey, Spiderkid.

He knew now when Gwen was smiling at him under her mask.

“That’s what B. calls all of us,” she said.

B., right, he was the one who…which one was he again?

“The one who hates bubble tea.”

Ah, yes. B. Foggy remembered now.

“Is he older than you guys?” he asked.

“Yeah, he’s like 36? 37? Something like that.”

Wow. Good for you, B. Foggy couldn’t imagine someone who lived Gwen’s type of lifestyle making it to 30 to begin with.

“His back pops like crazy,” Gwen continued, “he asks me and Itsy to walk on it all the time and when that doesn’t do it, he makes Peter and Benj do it too, but they hate the noise.”

“Who’s Benj? You haven’t mentioned him before,” he asked offhandedly. Gwen was up early for a Sunday. He’d have thought she’d want to sleep in like the rest of her youthful people.

“Oh, Benj and Noir are the same,” Gwen told him, “We call him Benj when he’s not in the mask because he looks like a totally different person.”

Complicated.

“Hey, you smell kind of weird. Were you in a drug store or something?”

Smell kind of? Oh yeah. Man, that stuff really lingered.

“Met up with an old law school classmate. She’s really into summer scents,” he said.

Gwen hummed.

“I like it,” she said. And then she stopped and looked around. She cocked her head and then turned to Foggy. “Itsy wants to hang out with me here as normal people. I’ll have to introduce you two sometimes. But in the meantime, I think we’re gonna go to the movies. I’ll see you around, Foggy.”

And away she went, back the way they’d been walking. Foggy watched her hop a brick wall and navigate a sleeping cat to jump up onto the side of an old roof. She held her hand out to nothing and then one of the weird space-time rips glittered open. A thin African American kid stepped out, holding her hand; the first thing he did was point straight up to the sky. Gwen appeared to laugh at whatever he was saying and then the two of them scampered off the side of the roof in tandem and vanished into someone’s backyard, probably off to change into normal people clothes before the movie.

Huh. Two spiderkids.

Seemed very summer appropriate.

He opened his door and had put away half his groceries before he noticed Lola laying with her head on her paws by the side of the couch closest to the kitchen doorway.

She wasn’t wearing her harness.

Both windows were still open, as Foggy had left them.

Matt must have come by to, what? Investigate? Dig through Foggy’s trash? Lord knew what he did when people weren’t watching him.

Either way, he’d left the dog, it would seem. Which, Foggy thought might have been his idea of a treat for her. She liked Foggy well enough, but for Matt, that was enough to use him as some kind of reward.

He sighed.

At least life had progressed far enough that Matt was leaving him his dog and not publicly humiliating him.

He went to the cupboard in search of a hand towel a few minutes and a few clean dishes later and found something more along of the lines of what he’d been anticipating.

He no longer had any bed linens. They were all gone. Peacefully, cheerfully gone without a trace, as though he’d never had them to begin with. His bed, now a mattress with a charming set of bare pillows, sat innocently in the center of the bedroom like it had when he’d just moved in.

Well. That told him what he was doing with the rest of his day.

He set a water bowl out for Lola before he left for the mall.

He was a district attorney of this city, and he worked more hours than he slept these days, so he decided that he deserved a few nice things.

He bought a set of new linens and a light quilt to go over top of them for the summer. It was a nice quilt, made out of neat, little triangles in yellow, blue, light gray, and orange. For shits and giggles, he bought a set of light gray and yellow pillowcases that matched. On the way out, he said fuck it and treated himself to a room spray whose label suggested it smelled of a hammock on some beach somewhere. Mostly, it smelled like sandalwood.

The bed looked a lot lighter and healthier than it had before by the time he was done redressing it.

Silver linings, he told himself. There had been no horsehead. He turned around and noticed that Lola had vanished from the living room.

Foggy started to realize that maybe he’d fucked up when Gwen informed him A.) that Matt hadn’t tried to maim or murder her at all for three consecutive days and B.) that he had seen neither hide or bright orange hair of the guy for nearly two weeks at that point.

He thought of the linens.

Yeesh. This guy. So high maintenance.

So when Foggy had set out on this venture of studying Matt Murdock and maybe, sort of, kind of nursing the babiest of all baby crushes on the guy, he’d never really thought that Matt would, well, for one, catch onto the fact as quickly as he evidently had, for two, consider the behavior they’d been engaging in as some kind of wooing process, and for three, reciprocate that tiny baby crush.

It was the reciprocation part that Foggy struggled with the most.

But the stripped bed was a painfully obvious sign which could not be ignored any longer.

Whatever they were doing, however much Foggy tried to annoy him, Matt seemed to like it. Enjoy it. Maybe even get a kick out of it. Enough that he felt threatened when Foggy spent the night with Marci.

Foggy could get that. It was new. It was different. It was kind of fun for him to be the antagonist in their back and forth banter for once.

But now, he didn’t really know what to do because, well, yeah. Maybe this whole thing had been flirting, but apparently Foggy had fucked up and Matt was offended and didn’t want to play anymore. The most reasonable solution here, to Foggy, seemed to be to apologize, but he didn’t exactly know how to do that without admitting that they were, in fact, doing something.

And that would make it real.

It might even result in a talk.

Foggy hadn’t even realized how much he did not want to talk about this until this exact moment.

Like, fuck.

Damn.

He’d really gone and done this shit, hadn’t he?

Maybe it was time to stop, then. Maybe things were going a little too far. It had been funny before and Foggy had been, he could admit, bored with enduring crisis after crisis in the DA’s office. It made him feel a little apathetic towards it all, like he was a man in a row boat trying to take on the ocean. A few little games with Matt had been interesting, harmless.

Ugh.

Uuuuugh.

God, was he having commitment issues? Was that what these were?

What the fuck. What the fuck.

“Hey Foggy,” Gwen’s voice asked the back of his shoulders. She was probably confused as to why he’d turned off the light in his office if he was still in it. She sounded very young just then. Thrown off balance by his upset.

“Oh, hey Spiderkid,” he said, unfolding himself from his arms.

Gwen’s mask seemed silver in the dim light.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

Oh, honey. How to even start to explain?

“Nothing, I’m good. Just got a bit of a migraine,” he lied.

Gwen’s motionless mask watched him for a few more beats, then she turned and put a hand out of the window. Another hand took it and the silhouette of another small person slid silently through the window. Another set of wide, white eyes stared at Foggy; like Gwen’s they were surprisingly emotive even without blinking.

“This is Itsy,” Gwen said softly.

Itsy was about an inch shorter than Gwen. Black suit, red webbing. A bright red spider adorned his chest. He made no move towards Foggy.

And in that moment, all Foggy could think was that they were both so young.

Alright.

Alright, alright, alright.

He could do this. He was a district attorney for New York City.

Matt’s shitty, empty loft door gave no indication of whether he was in or out. Foggy rubbed his thumbs against the piece of paper in his hands nervously.

If he did this, he couldn’t look back, he told himself. This would be it. It would be greater proof that Matt Murdock could corrupt him, professionally and personally, like no other human.

Was it worth it?

Absolutely not.

But he felt compelled to do it and he hadn’t felt anything so strongly in a long time. Conviction was harder and harder to come by these days and they all lived in this hellhole and who the fuck was anyone to tell him how to live his damn life.

He’d already gotten this deep in the shit. Turning back now would be. Well.

Unfathomable, for some reason.

The thought of things going back to the way they’d been a couple months ago—Foggy sitting in an office surrounded by a fort’s worth of raised stakes. Matt meandering around the underbelly of the city, pushing those stakes from the bottom, raising them higher and higher with each step forward. Of no discussion in between—no humanity from one side to the next.

Foggy just.

It was selfish but.

He didn’t want to go back to that.

He liked Matt. He’d decided. He liked him and his weirdness. He liked that Matt was, through interactions with him over silly things, learning. Learning how to have emotions. Learning how to be confused without violence. Learning how to well, play along.

And yeah, no shit. Matt was a horrible person. Truly a scum bag in there. The worst type of human for whom even redemption was too great a task. But watching him try to understand why the ever-loving fuck someone would send a coconut through the mail was somehow rewarding. Extremely endearing.

Foggy wanted to do more of it. And if that meant maybe a little teeny bit of commitment, maybe marking one or two boundaries. He thought that maybe, just maybe, it would be worth it. At least for now.

Just for now.

He could always lie to Matt’s face later and tell him the whole thing had been a joke, that he’d been fucking with him. Stringing him along the way Matt strung people along, day in and day out.

He could tell him that and they’d be even.

So in the meantime. He could do this.

When he slipped the note under the door, it squirmed a little bit and he heard Cat make his, er, sound. He decided he’d consider that received and turned around and left.

The next day, he came home late and went through the usual routine. Jacket and shoes, off. Dinner in the microwave. Glass of lukewarm water. Shit tv. Shower. Be—

Bed?

One of the pillows had changed color from yellow to light blue. It didn’t match the blue on the new quilt. Too much green. Fabric was too shiny.

Silk.

The placed had been locked up, windows closed, when Foggy had left that morning. The fans had all been off. But now the one in the bedroom was on, even though all the windows were still closed.

Only one person had that level of stealth in this city.

He was pretty sure this was a way of saying ‘you’re forgiven’ without words or touch.

“Murderdock’s injured.”

What now?

“I asked him what happened to his arm, but it turns out he’s ambidextrous.”

What now?

“I think he might actually be left-handed and just like, made his right hand do things until it did them the way he wanted it to. Oh. And there was like, this crazy bitemark on his neck. Think like a hickey, but from a vampire.”

Foggy needed a second here. A hickey? But a bitemark?

Had he?

Had Matt?

Slept with someone else?

“He told me to fuck off like six times, too, which is a little weird for him. He usually uses super proper English when he talks at me.”

Had he fucking gone and slept with someone else to get back at Foggy?

“Mr. Nelson? Foggy?”

Woah, no. Okay, he needed to let that the fuck go right now. That was a future-Foggy problem. Gwen’s collection of material from a case he’d actually asked her to look into was a present-Foggy problem. Focus on that, present-Foggy.

He hadn’t really been thinking this whole thing through after he’d sent Gwen off. He just followed his feet and his feet, it turned out, were monumentally pissed off about this whole thing. They took him right to Matt’s door and then his right hand decided to join the pissed-off party and pound on the wood a few times.

Gwen had been in Foggy’s office for about thirty minutes, which was plenty of time for Matt to drag his ass home from wherever the fuck he’d been. Probably out disturbing the peace with his goddamn hickey.

One of Cat’s scrappy paws popped out from under the door and batted at the toes of Foggy’s shoes. He sneered at it and looked up and pounded harder.

“Open the door, Murdock, I know you’re in there,” he growled.

And then, to his honest shock, the door did open.

Matt blinked at him wearing half of his jacket; he had one of his arms trapped in one of the sleeves.

“What are you—”

Foggy didn’t give him the opportunity. He pushed past and closed the door behind them. Matt’s jaw snapped closed and his look of offense grew.

“What the fuck do you think you’re—”

Foggy could see it now. The hickey. Hoo boy, a good one too. Whoever had done that must have been having a great time.

“So is this how it’s gonna be?” he asked, “We gonna have a double standard or what?”

Matt’s grimace faded somewhat in favor of confusion.

“A double standard? What the hell are you—’

“That, Matthew. I’m talking about your fucking,” he dropped his voice out of respect for the neighbors, “Hickey. Your fucking hickey. What are you, twelve? What is this? It’s out of line if I fuck a gal, but totally fine if you do? Do I get an apology?”

There was a beat of silence. Matt’s jacket slipped off his now slack arm.

“I think I must be having a stroke,” Matt finally said after a few beats, “You wanna run all that by me again?”

Foggy realized at this point that he was kind of being a bit, uh.

Jealous.

What.

“Foggy?”

What.

What.

What.

WHAT.

“Hi, we are still alive, yes? Are you with me?”

How the—

When the—

How could he let himself—

“Whoo-hoo? Nelson? You wanna come back to Earth anytime soon or?”

This had to have been Matt’s plan the whole time. To make Foggy fall in—don’t you dare even think it, Nelson, don’t you fucking dare—with him and manipulate him and get him to chase after him. What did he want out of this? Hadn’t Foggy already given enough? Was it attention? Did he want attention?

“Alright, well. If you’re going to stand around all night, I’m gonna have to ask you to—”

Huh-uh. No. Foggy would not be the loser here. He’d already lost every round he’d ever played with Matt. This one, this one was on his own terms. He’d started it and by god, he was going to finish it.

One of his hands was on Matt’s neck before he could stop it and then the other hand went around his waist and well.

He smelled nice. Up close.

Very nice. Kind of like cinnamon and leather.

His eyes were cloudy, milky bluish white, with a ring of brown around the edges. And they were very, hm. Wide. They blinked at him, once, then twice, and then everything went dark.

Chapter Text

He woke up and was greeted by the timely and unwelcome sight of Cat on his chest, with his three and two-toed paws tucked under his own little furry sternum. He was attempting, Foggy belatedly realized, to purr. Without much success. He was drooling spectacularly though.

Lovely.

Foggy’s head hurt like someone had played basketball with it. Throbbing pain at the back side. About  the size of a—

Oh shit.

He sat up and was met with an empty room. Besides Cat, who was none too pleased to have been so rudely and suddenly dislodged.

Foggy seized the cat and held it up to eye level.

“Where is your leader?” he demanded.

The rattle and roll of a piece of ceramic being dropped brought his attention upwards again. To Matt. Standing in the doorway of his. His bedroom? With a now-empty hand and a plate rattling its way down to the floor.

“What the fuck are you doing to my cat?” he demanded.

Cat was hastily removed from Foggy’s grip and then Matt abandoned him again to go collect the dish he’d dropped and to mop up the water that had spilled out of it. He piled the cat on his shoulder and left Foggy completely alone in the room this time. Sitting stupid and trying to process exactly what was going on here. Lola peeked her head in the door as though to check on him, and then disappeared around the corner once again.

Matt returned a few minutes later with a new dish and Cat still sitting proudly on his shoulder. He held the water out to Foggy with one hand.

“You’re bleeding,” he said flatly.

Bleeding?

From where?

He looked at his hand. Then touched his head again.

Oh. There.

Matt jerked the bowl at him impatiently.

He accepted it and wrung the wadded up cloth inside out, then pressed it to the painful, knuckle-sized lump on the side of his head.

“Did you hit me?” he asked.

Matt scratched the place behind the cat’s missing ear and half.

“You touched me first.”

“And that’s grounds for traumatic brain injury?” Foggy grumbled. The towel came away alarmingly red. “Jesus, man. How hard did you think it would take?”

“You’re gonna want to puke in a minute.”

Oh, perfect.

And sure enough, he did.

Matt sat on the very edge of his own bed, clutching Cat in his favorite position of affection (borderline suffocation) and refusing to address Foggy.

Given the very attractive disaster Foggy had become in the last few minutes, he really didn’t blame him.

“Listen man,” Foggy finally sighed into the silence, “That was out of line. I’m sorry.”

Matt said nothing. Cat carried on making a noise like a malfunctioning engine and drooling.

“I just, I just don’t know what’s happening here,” Foggy admitted.

Matt stood up and placed Cat on the very top pedestal of his cat tree. Cat lolled himself over and batted at him when he stepped away into the very short hallway to open a cabinet. Foggy caught the towel with his face.

“Go take a shower, you’re disgusting,” Matt said without turning in his direction. His inflection had almost completely gone.

“Okay, sorry. Uh. Where’s the—”

Matt pointed at a door to Foggy’s right wordlessly.

Matt’s shower was absurdly clean. Far too clean for the age of this building. He must have scrubbed the shit out of it or had it entirely replaced when he’d moved in. His soap smell liked him.

Foggy could appreciate these things for at most a full minute or so before the dizziness set in and left him wretching into the toilet.

By the time he had more or less scrubbed his skin free of its post-knock out filth, he was exhausted. Had to wrap himself up in the towel and sit on the toilet lid for a few moments before he could muster the energy to stand without falling.

He opened the door and was surprised to find that the whole bed had been stripped and redressed in navy silk in his absence. Matt was again semi-strangling the cat, although this time with his back against his pillows, on the opposite side of where Foggy had been laying before. Lola appeared to have come in to take up rug space and Cat was preoccupied with hissing at her from his point of advantage. Lola did not lift her head.

“Hey man,” Foggy said, the words feeling thick in his mouth, “I’m really sorry about this, but you think you could call me a taxi? Normally wouldn’t ask, but I’m feelin’ a little—”

“You can’t sleep.”

Sorry, what?

“You can’t sleep. For more than a short period at a time. Got a concussion.”

Oh, well yeah. That sounded about right.

“Is it a bad one?” he asked like a drunk idiot.

Matt gave him a scathing expression over the top of his glasses.

“Word to the wise, Foggy. I don’t do anything good,” he said nastily. Well, at least the inflection had come back.

“You’ll stay here for now. I’ll wake you when necessary.” Matt stroked Cat a few times like he hated him.

“Oh. You don’t have to do that,” Foggy said, “I was the one who came bursting in here, accusing you of shit. I can get someone else to watch me, or I’ll go to an ER, I guess.”

Matt jerked his chin up at him sharply and showed some teeth.

“You’ll stay,” he said, low and dangerous.

Well, okay then. Sure. He’d stay.

Matt huffed in affirmation and then removed himself from his pillows. He stuffed Cat under an arm and gestured for Foggy to do his thing, then strode out of the room altogether. Foggy watched him go awkwardly.

No one said anything.

He looked at the dog and she looked up at him pityingly.

His clothes had disappeared with the bed linens.

Matt, true to his word for once, woke him up every half an hour or so. It didn’t take much. Foggy was pretty sure that he woke up when the frequency of the hatred vibes hit a certain mark faster than when one of Matt’s hands shook his shoulder. Matt didn’t say anything after he woke up, just cocked his head and then left Foggy again for the living room.

He hadn’t changed out of his white shirt, tie, and slacks. It looked uncomfortable, even in his own bare home.

Foggy had to swallow down the suggestion that he change every time he woke up.

They played this game five times. That Foggy could remember. He imagined that there were probably a few more occasions he’d been too out of it to recall. But by the fifth time that he could remember, he decided that it wasn’t worth it trying to sleep and he was intensely uncomfortable laying around in someone else’s bed, mostly naked.

He forced himself to sit up and get his bearings and then peeked out of the room into the living room where Matt appeared to have hunkered down on the couch. It was hard to tell if he was asleep or just closing his eyes. Foggy edged out to try to hunt down wherever Matt had hidden his clothes. He got maybe three steps out of the door, before Matt’s voice called,

“Dryer.”

Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

Was he trying to give him a heart attack, too?

He located the dryer and was pleased to find that there was still a hint of warmth lingering in the fabric as he yanked it on as quickly as possible.

“I can’t see your dick, you know,” Matt drawled after a few moments, twisting his head over the couch’s arm in Foggy’s direction. “And even if I could, you’ve made a mistake to think that I’m interested in it.”

Yeah, yeah. Tell Foggy something he didn’t know.

He folded up the towel and asked Matt what to do with it. He said to just leave it on top of the dryer and then rolled over to cuddle Cat who, Foggy would give him this much, was nothing short of faithful. Foggy sighed, set the towel down and touched the side of his skull gently. It was hot, but it hurt less than it had earlier. He grabbed his shoes and then sighed.

It was either now or never.

“Matt, I really am sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have assumed that there was anything going on here. I’m sure that alien hickey hurts like hell, and anyways, it’s not my business even if it doesn’t.”

Matt continued to stare emptily at Cat.

“Right,” Foggy breathed. “Okay, well. Thanks for uh, not letting me choke on my own vomit or whatever. I’m heading out.”

Still nothing.

Excellent. Everything he’d always wanted. He couldn’t believe that, even for one second, he’d thought he could make something of this. It was absurd. Ridiculous. Matt knew his place better than Foggy knew his and he would do well to—

“Hey, take that shit off.”

Would do well to…to…

“What did you just say?” he asked, with a hand on the door.

Matt shuffled over onto his other side and gave him a grimace.

“I said, take it off.”

“Take what off?” Foggy asked.

“Your clothes, Nelson, you’re gonna fuck me.”

Oh.

Oh, okay.

There had to be something deeply, deeply wrong with him that he could be turned on by such ambivalence and disgust. But alas, there he was. And there Matt was with a broken arm, Foggy could see now. He’d had it pressed carefully to his side the whole time Foggy had been there, but the position had been so subtle that it was hard to tell that it hadn’t been functional. Foggy accidently touched it in the following, er, ruckus on the couch.

Matt took the moment to stop grinding their hips together to swear like Foggy’s dad used to under their beat up old clunker in the garage. He sunk teeth into his lip and breathed through the remains of the pain and then huffed and asked Foggy what the fuck he was looking at.

“You’ve got a job,” he growled.

And wasn’t it a job? Yeah, because Matt was a goddamn task.

He was a picky little shit and he didn’t like Foggy’s attempts to be sexy at all. No trailing fingers. No petting. Just a ‘man, what the hell are you doing, just fuck me already,’ which Foggy had never in his life experienced or anticipated experiencing.

“Are you enjoying this?” he finally had to ask about five minutes in when Matt started swearing again at his jostled limb.

“What?”

“I said—”

“No, I heard you, idiot. I’m just giving you a chance to be less of one.”

Ah, yes. Romance like Brazil. Literally a hemisphere away from this situation.

“Listen, I’m not going any further if you’re not into it,” Foggy finally snapped at him. Matt gave him another wrinkled brow and ‘dude, are you dumb?’ look and then shoved at Foggy with his good arm until he shifted his weight so that Matt could sit up.

Then he jabbed a finger into Foggy’s chest.

“I don’t do shit I don’t want to do, Nelson,” he said. “You remember that.”

Untrue. Foggy had tangible proof in the form of the last few weeks that Matt did all kinds of shit he didn’t want to do.

“Are you questioning my resolve?” Matt demanded.

“No, I’m just making sure this is consensual, you moron,” Foggy growled back before he could stop himself.

“Doesn’t matter,” Matt said. “Just keep going.”

“What? No. It matters. We’re stopping.”

Matt actually jerked in surprise.

“What do you mean, we’re stopping?”

Foggy swung his knee back over so that he was no longer straddling Matt’s hips. He felt for his pants and was surprised to find a hand suddenly over his. Bony. Matt was bony all over.

“I asked you a question,” Matt said. He sounded calmer this time and when Foggy looked over, he saw that he wasn’t pissed off like he’d thought he was. It gave him pause.

“Matt, if you don’t like us having sex, then we don’t have to have sex,” he explained. “It’s cool. It’s fine.”

Matt cocked his head at him.

“You want to,” he said.

“Well, yeah. I fucking guess, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to.”

Silence.

Matt did his fidgeting thing with his thumb and knuckle. Thinking. Processing.

“Okay,” he finally said.

Okay what? What did that even--oh shit. Okay.

Matt settled his weight on his knees, one on each side of Foggy’s hips.

“You can touch,” he allowed.

Jesus, that was hot. Shouldn’t have been. Really shouldn’t. But Foggy couldn’t help pushing up that white shirt to press thumbs into the pale skin on each side of Matt’s pelvis underneath it. The skin there was unfairly soft. And—wait, was that a—

“Eyes up, Mr. Nelson.”

Up they went, to meet Matt’s milky white not-gaze. Foggy could feel the scar now, though. It wasn’t small and it wasn’t short. It ran from one hip clear across his lower abs to the other.

“Where’d you get that one?” Foggy asked.

“Hm. Tokyo.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. I’m going to kiss you.”

Whatever you want pal, after just one thing. He stopped rubbing his thumbs in circles in squeezed for a second. Miles went still at the pressure, puzzled.

“What now?” he asked.

“Are you sure that you want this?” Foggy asked, “I mean. I’m concussed and you’ve got a—”

“Yes, I —oh my god, Nelson. What do you think I’ve been--? For fuck’s sake.”

“Alright, alright, man. Easy. I just had to ask. Alright. Kissing times, ready, go.”

Matt’s face went from furious to irritated and he just kind of glared at Foggy for a minute. It was a little awkward, you know, what with all the hard work it had taken to get there.

“Uh,” Foggy started.

“Tell me what to do.”

“Eh? What, you never kissed a guy before?” he asked.

Matt sighed like he was a moron, leaned back, and waited. Foggy felt like he was back in school all of the sudden, sitting in a room, trying to guess answers to a test he hadn’t studied for.

Then it clicked.

“Oh, shit, you want—”

“Yes, yes, that is what I want. So?”

Fuck, fuck, fuck. He’d never been a dom of any kind in his life. He didn’t know how to do this. Matt observed his panic and then started snickering. Foggy didn’t think that was fair at all. He’d come this far and it wasn’t his fault that Matt had some kind of power play kink that he’d failed to read up on. Study guides mirror tests for reasons, Matthew.

“God, you’re a mess,” Matt said. Then dropped his weight into Foggy’s lap all the way. It felt very nice. Surprising. But very, very nice. Matt pressed their chests together and then leaned all up, millimeters away from Foggy’s lips. “And as always, I gotta do all the work around here,” he said.

Foggy snuck a hand under the white shirt again and pressed it flat against the small of Matt’s back. He got just the barest of gasps in return.

“Better. Keep going.”

Matt’s phone screeched like a banshee and Foggy reached out to grab it but wasn’t quick enough. Matt leaned over his bulk and snagged it before his fingers could even scrape the side.

“What?” he answered, sounding for all the world like he was in a high-rise corporate building and not laying his broken arm and bare, corded, straight-up gnarled chest across Foggy’s own. He had more scars that Foggy could ever have imagined. He didn’t remember Matt ever taking off his shirt in their dorm and could only guess how many of them he’d had back then.

Matt wasn’t keen on anyone touching his battle wounds, though, so Foggy trailed a hand up the center of his spine while he put on his Kingpin tone.

“Listen, I pay you to do a job,” Matt rumbled under Foggy’s hand. He was warm and his back was strong as hell. “Why would I pay you if I’m the one doing 90% of the work? What? Oh, I see. You know, I’m still having a hard time figuring out if this is a me-problem or a you-problem, so I think I’m going to let you have a go. You tell me: is this a me-problem or a you-problem?”

Foggy could deny later that he only wished he could use that tone of voice with some of the people he dealt with.

“That’s right, it is indeed a you-problem. Gold star for you. Excellent. Thank you. Don’t call me again.”

He ended the call and let the tension in his back ease under Foggy’s palm.

“Feel nice?” Foggy asked him. Matt huffed and then shoved off to bury himself back in his fancy duvet. Now that Foggy had spent a night in it, he could totally see why that was where Matt had decided to spend his blood money.

“What day is it?” Matt growled somewhere under all that silk.

“Saturday,” Foggy said.

“Saturday? Saturday. Jesus, Mary and Joseph.”

Foggy couldn’t help but snicker.

“What’s up? Got a date?” he teased. He got a dead arm for it. Damn.

“Get out, I have things to do,” Matt said.

“Bodies to traffic?” Foggy offered.

Matt groaned.

“So demanding. So squirmy—no. Sister’s in town. Get fucked, she’ll murder you if she sees you in bed with me. Already tried to do in the dog.”

He should not have been surprised. He pushed himself up and picked up his shirt, then had to reach down again, because that one wasn’t his. He could tell that Matt was observing him, listening his way as he picked his way through the clothes on the floor.

Once dressed he stood up and checked his phone. Several new messages from work and two from Mom and Candace.

He reached out and patted at Matt’s knee through the duvet.

“Thanks for the lay, man,” he said, “I’ll see you around. Try not to kill too many people in the meantime.”

Matt huffed at him and curled up tighter in a ball. Foggy almost missed the sword scabbard peeking out from behind his pillow.

He tried and failed to pet Cat on the way out and then tried and succeeded in petting Lola. And then he was off, back into the world feeling well, fine. For having slept, in both senses of the term, with the kingpin of NYC. He’d left with his life and a fairly decent night to remember, having paid the relatively minor fee of a concussion and some of his dignity.

So it would seem that things were looking up.

Gwen seemed to immediately know something had changed. She showed up with Itsy in tow again, both with arms full of computer equipment with some company’s logo stickers all over it.

It wasn’t in the least bit suspicious.

“Peter said we had to,” Itsy explained.

Peter sounded like a juvenile delinquent. Gwen and Itsy thought this was hilarious for some reason.

“Why’re you all chill?” Gwen jabbed when they were done drafting a text to Peter on Itsy’s phone conveying this information.

“Oh, you know. Just reflecting on my life and life choices with the benefit of hindsight,” Foggy told her amiably. She gave him stank eye up and down and then her mask eyes squinted a bit.

“Hold that thought,” she said, “Miles, did he answer yet? I dunno where we’re supposed to put this stuff.”

Foggy thought this kid’s name was Itsy. He was assured hurriedly by Gwen that it was. And then she turned around and called him ‘Miles’ anyways. And that’s about when he decided that Gwen was still hiding all sorts of shit from him, most likely in plain sight. Seemed to be her MO.

That was fine, he was returning the favor now.

“Did you break Murderdock again?” As promised, she returned a few hours later, sans Itsy-Miles and computer towers.

“Why do you ask?” he asked. She hummed.

“’Cause he’s not around.”

Foggy thought of the apparent sister coming into town.

“Maybe he’s just busy,” he offered. Gwen squinted at him again, then her suit eyes went so narrow, the seams almost met.

“Foggy, you know how you’re always telling me I can’t lie?”

Yes, he did.

“Cool. Hi pot, I’m kettle.”

Damn. So soon, too.

“What’d you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Lies. What did you do?”

“Gwen, I told you. Nothing.”

“Yeah, that goose-egg on your head there looks like a whole lotta nothing.”

Damn. He needed to distance this kid from the detectives before she picked up any more bad habits. He covered the bump with a hand defensively and glared. Gwen glared back.

“You two had sex didn’t you?” she drawled.

“What? No. Why would—me and Matt? Of course not. Have you seen me? Have you seen him?”

“Dude. That thing on your face, you know, the noisemaker? Just go ahead and imagine that’s a shovel ‘cause you’re digging yourself a hole, Foggy. Why? He’s a psychopath. It’s fine if you guys flirt or whatever, but don’t sleep with him. He’s the enemy.”

Well, they do say keep your enemies closer. Not appropriate for this conversation, Nelson.

“Gwen, it was just a fling,” he promised, “Two consenting adults with a lot of mutual friends. It’s fine.”

Gwen crossed her arms and cocked out a hip.

“Uh-huh,” she said, far too knowingly for a teenager.

“It’s fine,” he promised.

“I mean, I bet it is. And I bet it will be right up until it’s not,” Gwen pointed out like an Amazon with a spear.

It hurt especially because it wasn’t like she was wrong.

He sighed.

“Matt doesn’t do relationships, Gwen. You don’t have to worry.”

“Maybe he doesn’t, but he probably knows exactly how to make you think you’re different and special, Foggy. Be careful. I know it’s all been kinda fun and stuff lately, but like. He really does want me dead and I guarantee you that he’d go through you to do it if it comes to it.”

Aigh.

She had a point.

And an important one it was. It followed him home most nights of the following weeks. Including the one where Matt showed up at his place this time, sitting silently in one of the living room windows. Neither in or out. Just straddling that line.

His arm wasn’t broken anymore.

He even let Foggy be on top despite this.

He didn’t stay, though. Barely said anything at all throughout the whole thing. In and out.

Gwen’s words rattled around Foggy’s head as he lay in the quiet, empty aftermath.

“Peter said he met a new Matt the other day,” Itsy-Miles told Gwen on top of the brick wall Gwen had claimed as her own at the very back of the DA office’s building. It was an old wall, had been there longer than the building itself and Gwen, Foggy had come to learn, liked to keep an eye on him, even when they weren’t chatting. He didn’t think those two knew he was nearby, having taken a break to wander outside and reset his attention span.

“He nice?” Gwen’s voice asked.

“He’s not sure yet. He said that he had like, the tiniest Peter ever with him.”

“What, like Peni tiny?”

“Dunno. He’s trying to come up with a name for him. Says he’s like a mini-Tats.”

“No shit? Is his Matt also in desperate, horrible love with his Foggy?”

Woah, wow. Is that how she talked about them behind their backs?

Itsy-Miles laughed. Foggy was kind of offended.

“I guess so; maybe? Peter said he’s going back in a few days to help resolve something. He’s a little iffy, though, because the little Peter’s Wade is like, crazy protective of him. He told Peter if he touched him again, he’d gouge out one of his eyes. So Peter asked Tats if he knew anything about that, since tiny Peter is like a carbon copy of him, but Tats says that his Wade taught him how to unlock safes by locking him in a bunker with a pipe bomb, so he’s got a bad sense of what protective behavior entails and what he can do to get around it. He’s not entirely sure Tiny Peter is him either.”

Dear god. Was this what these children dealt with every day? Did Foggy need to call social services or something to rescue Gwen from herself?

“Well, what if we took this tiny Peter with us for a little while and you know, made friends? Maybe if it’s us and not Peter who helps their team out, that Wade would chill out a bit. He’s probably freaked ‘cause Peter’s kind of old to be running around with kids, you know?”

“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” Itsy-Miles said. “But isn’t it kind of hypocritical? Since Wade’s way older than Peter to start with?”

Okay, Foggy got the joke from the other day now. Peter was just a delinquent, not a juvenile one.

“I mean. I guess,” Gwen allowed, “But Wade’s usually got dad-vibes under his murder vibes, so I don’t know if he counts. It’s like us and B. No one thinks B.’s trying to groom us. He like, radiates dad-ness.”

Foggy wanted to meet B. now, just to be sure.

“Mmm, well okay then. So you wanna bring Tiny Peter to my verse or your verse?”

“Probably yours, if he already trusts Peter,” Gwen said.

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Ehn. B.’s. If he’s cuddly-friends with his Red, and sees mine, then that could go really bad really fast.”

“Fair. Alright. I’ll tell Peter when he gets back.”

“Hey, before you go, got any shit on the new Red?”

“Uh, not much. I guess he’s a huge adrenaline junkie, like way more than Little Red. Peter said he’s also one of the ‘bad touching’ ones.”

“Ah, good to know. Thanks, Miles.”

“Anytime, girl. Bye.”

Bad? Touching?

“Hey Matt,” he said, watching the guy pull a t-shirt over his head. He claimed that he had to be cool for the kids today, which made Foggy extremely uncomfortable. He had a feeling he knew which kids Matt intended to be cool in the direction of.

“Mm?”

“Can I ask you a personal question or are we not and never going to be there?” he asked. Matt gave him a frown before pulling a pair of jeans—actual jeans, what was the world coming to?—out of the bag he’d brought with him.

“No and never,” he said.

“Great, so are there really different universes? I know you’re kind of more in tune with these things than your average bear and Spiderwoman’s been talking my ear off about them, telling me all these stories you know? Stuff about Tuesday and whatever. She’s got it in her head that there are other yous and mes out in the world or something.”

Matt stared somewhere behind Foggy’s head for a long moment.

“There are as many universes as we want to believe there are, I suppose,” he relented. “Although listening to the Spiderkid will get you nothing but stabbed, Foggy. Believe you me.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed and brought up a knee to tie his shoe. Foggy watched his back and then looked at his own empty hand. Tried to imagine a version of Matt who liked touch and who wanted to bury his own fingers in the space between his.

“Stabbed or not, I overheard her talking with one of her imaginary friends, the other day. Talking about some kind of other-universe me and you. You know she said those guy were ‘in desperate, horrible love?’”

Matt set both feet on the ground in front of him and ran a hand through his hair.

Then he stood up.

“They’re not us, Nelson,” he said without looking back.

He closed the front door behind him. Left not a trace in the house that he’d ever even been there.

Yeah.

Foggy knew.

That feeling of heartburn had come back.

The good thing about being honest and square with Matt Murdock these days was that it ensured that Gwen’s fears had no real hope of coming true. Matt was using him purely for sex, Foggy had come to understand. It wasn’t even a manipulation thing. Foggy knew because Matt shut off almost all emotion when they were together. He didn’t bother to try to make Foggy feel special; he offered no promises. Offered no signs of affection.

It was just sex.

It wasn’t as fun as it had been earlier on in this escapade. There weren’t any weird fruit incidents or Lolas. Instead, it was just cold.

And coldness, Foggy realized, he started to reciprocate.

It was a weird feeling, he thought, to be able to give Matt exactly what he wanted only after he’d let go of any hope of kindling a sense of warmth between them. Something about viewing Matt as a body for once, not the kingpin or a potential project, made it easier to tell him to get on his knees. Or to pin him down.

But weirdly, the same detachment which let Foggy behave like this, resulted in Matt doing absolutely bonkers things. He’d suck Foggy off upon receiving an order to do so, and then press his cheekbone into his thigh and just breathe for a moment. Like he was at peace. After being held down while they fucked, he wouldn’t immediately curl away from Foggy when it was all over, like he did otherwise. He was more likely to stay the night when that happened. Sometimes, Foggy would even wake up with two of Matt’s freezing cold fingers tucked into the last two of his own hands.

He couldn’t understand it and wasn’t sure he wanted to.

It seemed very.

Upsetting, honestly.

He wanted to call the whole thing off. Something was wrong with this dynamic.

But that would mean giving up this thing which he’d never thought he’d have and which he hadn’t ever even realized he’d wanted.

And he knew what he wanted now.

He wanted one of the other Matts Gwen talked about. He finally worked up the courage to ask Gwen to tell him about one of these Matts and she looked at him sadly, as though she understood, and then asked him which one he’d like to hear about.

“It’s everyone but Murderdock,” she told him quietly, high up where he’d gone to meet her this time. Her turf. Her stories. He’d suspended his belief and his own corruption to listen for the time being.

“All the Matt Murdocks except ours are kind, in their own way,” she said. “Some of them are more gentle than others and almost all of them emotionally stunted or some way, but they’re all—the ones that I’ve met--men of the people. They fight corruption up high, as high as they can take it without leaving behind the people who they’ve decided to protect. Most of them fought with—fight with Wilson Fisk. They laugh when I ask them if they’d ever take his place. Big Red claims that he’s got it in him, and I guess he’s the oldest one I’ve met so far, but he just loves his Foggy so much. And his friends and his—I mean. He doesn’t live in the city anymore, he got chased out of it by the DA of his verse for being a vigilante. But you can just tell, Foggy. He wants to go back so bad. That’s his home. And he knows the people who live in Hell’s Kitchen and they know him and we were only there with him for a minute, but all these little grandmas and kids and aunties and uncles from all over would come up to him and talk to him and it was all ‘when are you coming home, Mr. Murdock?’ ‘we miss you, you’re our family, you saved our family, Mr. Murdock,’ and stuff like that.”

She sighed.

“And I see him, sometimes, but I see Little Red more often—that’s Itsy’s Matt, you remember?—anyways. He and Peter are like best friends and they’re always teasing each other and Little Red is always showing me new moves and stuff that he thinks will help me fight Murderdock, because he only met Murderdock once, but he was so, so awful to him, Foggy. I mean, they have almost the same face, but Little Red’s obviously younger and well, less ginger. But that’s not the point. Murderdock just like, hated him and he’s so sweet, Foggy. He teaches Miles how to fight and he’s always coming to meet us on jobs that he doesn’t have any reason to, and he hates jumping through the verses, it freaks him out more than anyone we’ve done it with, but he’ll go through that for Peter and Miles, because that’s what friends do. And he’s—he’s done it for me, actually, once or twice. He’s come here and thrown Murderdock off his game a bit so that I can get shit done. But then he goes back to his Foggy, that’s his home, or that’s what he likes to say, anyways. He and Peter flirt all the time, and they had a thing back in the day I guess, but now Peter’s married to MJ and Little Red is just,” she giggled and it made Foggy smile a little, too. “He’s always trying to charm his Foggy. And nothing ever works, like, ever. His Foggy is just constantly done with him. And Peter says that he always waits until Little Red’s worked himself into a huff before he lets him know that he’s affected by it.”

That sounded nice. Nicer than nice. Foggy was so happy for these other Matts and Foggys. Running around, falling in love.

“When I tell the other Matts that our Murderdock is kind of shit, they all immediately ask where his Foggy is,” Gwen murmured. “And obviously, it’s not your fault Murderdock is a hopeless case, but they all just keep saying, ‘well, sounds like he needs a Foggy.’ So I guess that’s how they convinced me to trust you more lately, if I’m being honest.”

Aw. His heart. Thank you, strange, soft Matts.

Gwen shook her shoulders as though shaking the sad out of her.

“Anyways, B. told me to stop thinking so much about all this,” she said a little more brightly. “He says that every hero needs a villain and Murderdock is proof that this verse needs me to be Spiderwoman. So I guess in some kind of way, that means that this verse needs you even more than the other ones, Foggy, because we don’t have a Nelson & Murdock attorney team, we’ve just got you. So you must be twice as good as those other Foggys, if you’re here all by yourself.”

This kid knew exactly where it hurt. Exactly right there, at the bottom of his stomach. Where thoughts like ‘will this shit ever end?’ and ‘I’m not good enough, maybe I should step down’ flew around in circles, rampant.

She gave him new resolve to be better. Not just for her. But for others; she was right. People were counting on him to be the best that he could be. And he’d done pretty damn well for having no Murdock to lean on.

Although.

Huh.

Well, now there’s a thought.

Chapter Text

He’d passed the file off onto one of the interns and so tracking it down was a bit of trouble. Once the interns got ahold of things, shit vanished into thin air. He had to go through his whole line of Es (Emma, Erica, Eduardo, Emile) to get ahold of the kid, Azyan, who had ended up with the file, and then he had to barter with her to get it back because her sweet little heart was dead set on cracking this one.

He adored the interns. He wished he’d been half as clever and driven as his interns when he was one.

He swapped the file with one from Kabir’s stack and then had to appropriate two from Eddie to fill the new gap in his workload.

It was a Tetris kind of thing. It absolutely threw the assignment board into chaos, but one of the perks of being the DA was being the fucking DA. He apologized to Cecilia and Tasha for wrecking horror upon their tracking system and bustled back to his office, file in hand.

Matt was in a weird mood a few nights later which was a blessing and a curse. A blessing because he was just the kind of off-balance Foggy needed him to be in order to dig his fingers into that chip on his shoulder. A curse because it was very, very hard to have good sex with someone who had to keep taking calls every five minutes or so.

Although maybe that was a blessing in disguise because Foggy got to be close enough to the phone to hear a bit of the goings-on of the city’s underground, where, it turned out, Matt was doing battle with a new kid on the block who had both the gall and the abysmal lack of sense to try to start a coup.

Matt was a little stressed, Foggy saw now.

Not because he, himself was threatened, but because half of his men were freaking out. Terrified that this young upstart was going to come in and ruin the infrastructure they’d been working on for so long. Matt spoke to them without irritation or sarcasm, just straight talking. Like a general.

“Send two around the back, get eyes on them before they go in.”

“No, there is no need for four, three is plenty and all Taig does is cause trouble. He’s too mouthy. I want Anjel on it—this isn’t a discussion.”

“That’s not going to work. Tell Reyes to move his operation tonight. As close to the northern quadrant as he can get it.”

Then he put down the phone and pressed his face against Foggy’s hand and asked smokily, “So where were we?”

Oh, you know. We were at the part where you ride my dick for a minute there, but buddy, that’s not half as interesting as this little thing I’ve got up my sleeve for you.

But he needed Matt a little softer still before they got to that.

For all the uncomfortable detachment going on in this semi-but-not-really relationship, Foggy would never get tired of hearing Matt get all breathy and hot and bothered right before he came. He could not be faulted for that, either. He was but a man.

“Jesus,” Matt murmured against the side of Foggy’s throat while he caught his breath.

“Mm, try again,” Foggy joked. He almost got a chuckle for that one.

That was about as good as things were going to get.

Matt started to extricate himself, but Foggy wrapped arms around him tight, tighter and more affectionate than he was usually comfortable being with Matt since this was still the same person who brought his sword to bed with him, everywhere he went. This time, though, he hugged him close and nuzzled the hair at back of his neck, which Matt took unnaturally well.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked languidly.

“You’re just really hot, you know that?” Foggy asked. Matt huffed. “Something crossed my desk that made me think of you,” Foggy continued in Matt’s neck. He had half a mind to bite it. Matt would probably be into it. Or maybe not. It had turned out that that hickey which had pissed off Foggy the very first time they’d slept together had been a nonconsensual gift from a rather upset client.

Matt had never bitten Foggy, or at least not yet. He had swatted at him plenty of times, though, and he did it then.

“If it’s not coke or pharma, I don’t want it,” he said dismissively.

Wow. Uh. Noted.

“Nah, it’s something a little closer to home,” Foggy told him. “You interested or no?”

Matt pulled away and he let him go so he felt like he was the one in control here. Matt cocked his head slowly one way and then slowly the other, as though listening to the echo of Foggy’s words in the room.

“My plate is more than full,” he said, but not harshly. That was permission, then. Foggy leaned forward and slid a hand up Matt’s side until he was supporting the small of his back. Matt would never admit it, not even under torture, but Foggy could tell that he liked the breadth of his hands. He liked the way that Foggy could support and warm the bottom of his spine with one palm with relative ease.

Every time, without fail, it seemed to make Matt relax just the teeniest, tiniest bit.

“Let me read it to you,” he said, “If you don’t like it, I’ll throw it at an intern.”

Matt hummed. His phone rang, buzzed horribly, but to Foggy’s surprise, he ignored it.

“Go on, then. Impress me, counselor,” Matt goaded.

Well, when you put it like that, my slimy, serpentine friend, there was no way to lose.

Foggy had become a district attorney because he cared about people and doing the right thing.

He was able to become a district attorney because he was damn good at his job.

He pulled the file off his bedside table offered it to Matt, asking him what he wanted read first. The whole thing had Matt’s name all over it.

Well.

It had the Matt Murdock from all those other verses’ name written all over it, but Foggy was hoping that, selfishly, this one’s name would be scrawled on there somewhere, too.

Matt had him start reading.

Fogwell’s was an institution in Hell’s Kitchen. Matt’s dad had fought there for years and years and years. He was a product of Fogwell’s gym, just like the hundred or so professional boxers who came before and after him.

Matt, for all his pock-marked, acid-eaten sense of morality and respect for authority, had adored his father. Hero-worshiped him. That much had been plain to Foggy, who’d recognized Matt once as that local kid from the papers all those years ago. Battlin’ Jack’s kid, the one who’d been in that acid accident. The only thing that Matt put on his desk in grad school was his father’s wedding band. It went right under the computer monitor and, like Cat, and it stayed in that apartment and only left when he did.

Foggy knew this, not because he’d ever asked, but because he was observant, goddamnit, and that ring had been far too large for even Matt’s fingers at the time. It wasn’t actually a hard leap of logic to make.

So this case, in which a sports equipment and fitness chain was bound and determined to purchase the land on which Fogwell’s stood to build their shiny, new facility/store had everything in it that would set Matt’s fires ablazin’.

It had his dad. It had a massive, gentrifying company for Matt to spite. It had a crack team of lawyers from fucking New Jersey. It had honor and community written all over it. And most of all, it had a fight brewing in it that was going to earn whoever won it some serious recognition.

“What do you think?” Foggy asked. “I mean, I asked one of the kids to do some research. Seems like Fogwell’s is in their right to hold onto their property here. These folks just bullied everyone else out of the area.”

It was interesting to propose a case lying on your back with the city’s kingpin sitting straddled, more or less on your dick, and leaned up against your thighs, but Foggy thought that he was down for some new and interesting things. Matt pursed his lips. His right hand fidgeted furiously.

He was pissed.

Beautiful.

The best thing Foggy had seen in weeks. He started to put the documents back in the file.

“I mean, if you don’t want it, that’s fine. I just thought I’d—”

Matt hand damn near crumbled the thing in his fist before Foggy could put it away.

“That’s mine now,” he snarled.

“Foggy,” Gwen squeaked, having squeezed in through his window in the middle of the day in her school clothes. “What’s happening? People are whispering all over. Last night people said that Murderdock’s on the warpath. What’s going on? Is it something I did?”

Oh, honey.

“All hell’s about to break loose,” he told her. “But can you do me a favor?”

She nodded, wild-eyed like a deer in the headlights.

“Let this play out on its own,” he told her.

There was nothing, truly nothing, like watching Matt throw down in court. He’d been the best at everything in their cohort. No one could beat him. He never slipped up and he never slept and he apparently liked it that way and fucking kept it that way.

And yeah, Matt hadn’t come back to New York to be a lawyer, he’d come back to be an assassin. But boy howdy, was he a lawyer. Foggy needed to crush that twitch of interest down there before it went any further. He was in public goddamnit.

Matt was determined not to settle this shit. And Fogwell was flabberghasted that this guy, some low-level boxer’s son, had come out of fucking nowhere to inform him that he was taking his case, and no honey, not for money. This is fucking war.

The battle was only intensified by Foggy’s revelation, through Gwen, that the guy sitting on the table across the aisle was the brother of the guy Matt was unleashing hell on in the underworld.

Matt was determined to destroy that family now. Brick by brick. Hair by hair.

They were getting in his way and unlike the previous kingpin, this one loved to get his hands dirty.

Day one saw all negotiations immediately fall through. Fogwell got real nervous, Foggy could see him sweating bullets next to his new representation. But then Matt did something Foggy had never seen him do: he reached out and touched Fogwell’s wrist. Squeezed it lightly.

Comfort. He offered reassurance.

Gwen clutched at Foggy’s own wrist from where she was hiding behind him, pretending to be one of his interns because he wanted her to see this.

Day two saw Matt allowing himself to be guided by Fogwell to the courthouse where he then rounded the day off by making one of the New Jersey lawyers on the other guy’s counsel cry while court was in session.

Day three saw three of the six lawyers over there alternately weeping and hiding their faces. No, no one wanted to be interviewed by the local news on this one. They’d have to speak to the no doubt scrambling PR team back at the company for a statement.

Matt asked lawyer four if it was ethical to buy out long-standing, family-owned private property in the name of a business entity which could easily afford a similarly sized space ten blocks away in a more affluent part of the city. Lawyer four said that it wasn’t a question of ethics, your honor, this was a question of legality, to which Matt demanded to know in which fucking legal code it was written that it was legal for a corporation to harass and intimidate people until they forfeited their own private property.

Lawyer four argued that his client was not harassing or intimidating Fogwell in any way, and that might have almost worked if Matt had not scoured Hell’s Kitchen the night before for ten witnesses who all attested to a flurry of folks who appeared to be associated with the business and who had appeared to speak threateningly to Fogwell at the counter of his gym.

Lawyer four valiantly pointed out that this was New York City, weirdos threatening business owners was a daily occurrence. No one could prove that these people had been hired by his client to do this. To which Matt volleyed a professional ‘oh, really?’ in the form of four of those weirdos showing up shame-faced to the dock willing to testify that they had indeed been hired by folks associated with the business to intimidate Fogwell.

Gwen asked Foggy in a whisper if they were real witnesses and he got the feeling that this time around, Matt was doing shit by the book, line by line if that’s what it took, to drag this family down. How had he found these witnesses? Well. There was no reason that he couldn’t use his kingpin status and connections to speak with a few guys about their activities two months ago, on Tuesday the 14^th at approximately 10pm in the evening.

Now whether he’d threatened those guys and their families and friends at knife point to get them to testify wasn’t any of Foggy’s business right now. And those folks certainly weren’t going to speak out before the ruling. Not with the Kingpin on their asses.

So as of then, Matt was technically still in the clear.

Day five saw the real drama because Matt was both a brilliant lawyer and a man who slept with his fucking sword. Fifteen minutes into proceedings, out of exactly nowhere, the defendant himself leapt up at his table and admitted to the judge, amid yelling from his own counsel, that not only had he ordered his company scouts to intimidate Fogwell, but he’d gotten the money to do so, not from his own business, but from his brother’s illicit drug operation. The sports business in Hell’s Kitchen could only be where Fogwell’s and its former neighbors stood because it was intended to be a front for the continuation and expansion of that particular operation, which itself was based not far from that location. The defendant also admitted, full-on sobbing, he had knowingly purchased the property around Fogwell’s with this drug money for the purpose of extending his brother’s criminal activities.  

Matt stood by during this speech, holding his stick, with high eyebrows as though he was impressed with his own orchestration of this event. Foggy knew his face well enough by then to know that at least a little bit of that was genuine surprise. Probably at how quickly and loudly this was all suddenly going down. He must have been planning for a few more days of public humiliation.

The judge called everyone to order and then had the defendant repeat his statement for the record and that was it. Case closed. In the courthouse, anyways. The city, however, erupted into complete disarray—Foggy’s office and the NYPD especially, because now they had a major drugs operation to bust and prosecute ASAP, before the footage made the evening news.

Foggy caught Gwen before she got swept up in the crowd and told her to get back to school, yesterday, so she wouldn’t get caught up in the ensuing disaster. He made her promise that she wouldn’t go out that night. Said that she could pick up some of the stragglers in the following days and weeks.

She stared, wide-eyed, from him to Matt, still standing and speaking with Fogwell, then back and nervously gave a little nod.

They’d talk later, Foggy knew.

In the meantime, he had to get back to work.

It was a busy evening for everyone. Foggy because his office was now rammed full of attorneys and police offices. Paperwork pouring out of every open box, cubby, and cabinet. Matt, presumably, because he was busy dealing with the offensive attack the now desperate opposition had launched at his people. Gwen because her dad locked her in the house and forced her to do her damn homework.

It was a busy night, but a good one.

He got back to his place at no earlier than 4am. Police sirens still screeched all around the neighborhood, but when had they ever not?

He opened his apartment door and was greeted by a huge volume of blood on the floor and walls of his home. The windows were shattered. Wood crunched. Bullet holes all over.

Fucking hell.

He hadn’t even stepped into the place when he was yanked back by a team of officers, checking him over for wounds and shouting into walkie-talkies that they were on the scene.

An anonymous tipper had called their department to report what they thought was an armed robbery occurring at DA Nelson’s home residence. No, the police didn’t know who the caller was or how they’d known Foggy lived there. All the guys on the floor had tats. A gang. Hired, presumably, by one highly upset conman.

The officers asked Foggy if he had a secure place to stay for the night or if he’d like to come down to the station.

No, he said. He had a place.

He knocked on Matt’s door at 6am and Cat was very shortly stretching his beastly paw out under it, like the shittiest gatekeeper on the planet. The damn thing couldn’t even get claw-purchase on the tips of Foggy’s shoes. How hard could it be? He had three whole toes on that foot of his.

Matt opened the door but stood behind it as it widened. He said nothing, so Foggy stepped into the room and closed it behind him. He then turned around to stare at Matt, sagging, bleeding, leaning his weight and staining the wall right behind the door.

“Hey, good-lookin’,” he said. Matt didn’t have the energy to lift his head but he made a tiny little chuffing noise which was absolutely a laugh.

“Want me to carry you to bed?” Foggy asked. Matt squeaked, then burst out laughing for real this time. He slumped down the wall a little bit.

Yeah.

Yeah, alright.

He wasn’t that heavy.

“Who are you?” were the whispered words that woke Foggy up. He blinked himself awake to piercing sunlight and once the pain behind his eyes had faded somewhat, he realized that that diminishing warmth on his face had once been a hand. He rolled over to face his nemesis whose milky eyes managed to find the tops of his cheeks.

“You talking to me?” he asked.

Matt snorted.

“No, talking to the wall. Yeah, I’m talking to you. Who are you? Are you like Stick?”

Woah, what now?

“Stick. Are you like Stick?” Matt repeated, oddly soft.

“What’s Stick? They your old gang?” Foggy asked.

Matt’s expression flicked through a set of emotions that Foggy couldn’t himself describe. He hadn’t thought Matt was capable of so many all at the same time.

“Yeah,” he finally said, “Yeah, I guess he was.”

He? Stick was a person?

“My mentor.”

Oh, no shit?

“He died.”

Yeah, that sounded about right.

“What you did back there—manipulating me. Using me to fight them. Stick would have done that.”

Foggy wasn’t sure he was understanding. He hadn’t known that the defendant would be Matt’s rival’s brother. He hadn’t known that he was watching the up-top showdown of an underground battle until Matt had already taken the case.

He couldn’t take credit for that.

Matt huffed.

“So you what, just thought you’d give it to me for shits and giggles?”

“No,” Foggy admitted, “I gave it to you because I thought it’d remind you of where you came from. And I thought that maybe that would give us some common ground besides, well. You know. Fucking.”

Matt leaned on his knuckles, staring at Foggy as though he could actually see him. His wounds looked better. Clean, at least. They’d been a bitch and a half to deal with, with Matt barely conscious and Foggy unsure of where everything in this apartment was.

“Well,” Matt said uncertainly, “Congratulations, counselor.”

Con—wait. Cong—

“That’s what I said.”

“You—we’ve reached common ground?”

Matt huffed again and then hunkered into the mattress. Before Foggy even knew what had happened, he’d been dragged under the duvet himself by arms thrown around his neck.

It was dark, but not that dark since it had to be nearly noon outside and there was light blaring through the fabric of the covers.

“You want to know a secret, Foggy Nelson?” Matt told him with a grin and slightly squinting eyes.

“Yeah, I guess,” Foggy said.

Matt’s grin grew a bit.

“I have superpowers,” he said in a whisper. A giggle even.

“Superpowers? Come off it,” Foggy snickered alongside him like a kid at a sleepover.

“No, really. Got ‘em. Had ‘em for ages. Guess what they are.”

“Uh. Okay, you can fly.”

“No.”

“Mindreading.”

“No. Think outside the box, dumbass.”

“Um, how about…is that sword like, connected to your soul?”

Matt started laughing in earnest. Shoulders shaking with real mirth, the kind Foggy had never, ever seen on his face, on his body anywhere.

“I give up,” he said, unable to contain a smile despite himself.

“Supersenses,” Matt told him.

“Supersenses?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Means I can’t see shit, but I can hear everything. For miles. Miles and miles sometimes. I can smell shit that you wouldn’t believe. Enhanced touch—I can feel every hair on your arm, every pore when I touch it. I can feel the vibrations of speech, sound. Heat changes. I know where people are by their heat. Enhanced balance. Enhanced taste. You name it, if you can experience it, I can do it amplified by ten.”

He—he wasn’t joking. He meant it. He 100% meant it.

“Oh my god,” he whispered.

Matt giggled.

“I know. I’ve never told anyone.”

“Oh my god.”

“I know.”

“Wait. But how—”

“The acid. Took my eyes, gave me something better.”

“Why are you telling me this? Are you going to kill me?” Foggy asked.

Matt’s smile slipped slowly back until it was more of a sad one. He dropped his eyes, too.

“When my dad died, my mentor took me in to fight the crime syndicates of this city,” he said slowly. “But they, the Hand, the big one, killed him. Spared me. Took me back to Japan, trained me to be their warrior and sent me back here. To conduct business. But things have gone screwy and now I’m the kingpin.”

“But you don’t want to be?” Foggy tried. Matt scoffed.

“Being the kingpin is great,” he said easily, “Moves things along a whole lot faster than being a grunt. But there’s—I—I don’t know how to describe it.”

That was fine because somehow Foggy knew. He just knew. He reached out and took one of Matt’s wrists and he didn’t pull away. It was getting uncomfortably warm under the covers, but this felt so, so important.

“You became your own worst enemy,” he said to their hands. Matt gave a pitiful attempt at a smile.

“Yeah, I guess I did. Tried to end it all last year and turns out the only thing I’m good at is killing other people.”

Jesus.

Jesus.

“Matt, you don’t have to—”

“No. Shut up. I’m not asking for your pity or your forgiveness or your fucking hope or whatever, alright? I’m just—I just. It felt like I should tell someone and you’re—you’ve been. UGH.”

Foggy couldn’t deal with the frustration and the heat all at once. He tossed off the covers and threw an arm over Matt’s bony shoulders. He was still a bit weak from the blood loss and pliable from his emotional state, so he only put up a show of a fight while Foggy wormed the other arm under his side and around his back so that he could squeeze.

“What the hell are you doing?” Matt gasped.

“Giving you a hug.”

“Why?”

“Because you need one.”

“Okay, great. Can that stop like, yesterday?”

Well, he guessed it could. He eased up on the pressure but didn’t unwrap his arms. Matt glared at his chin.

“You saved my life yesterday,” Foggy said. “Those guys were going to kill me.”

Matt sniffed.

“Don’t get cocky. It’s not like whatever you’re thinking, it’s just that only I can kill you.”

Why did that make his heart feel so full?

“I think you’ve got some specks of good in you, Matt Murdock,” Foggy said, beaming.

“I think you’ve got something wrong with your fucking head if you think I give a shit.”

“We might make something out of you, yet.”

“Yeah, a kingpin. Get off.”

“Nah.”

“Get off.”

“Naaah.”

“Oh my god, Foggy, I will actually kill you. Get off.”

“Alright, so kill me.”

Silence.

“Uh-huh. That’s what I thought. You like me, don’t you?”

“Fuck off.”

“You like me, and this whole time you’ve been bluffin’ like a fool. Hey, how’d you manage that through all those fun, sexy times we had, huh? Some kind of ninja-repression meditation?”

Matt groaned and then just let his whole body go limp like he was playing dead. Cute. Nice try, but Foggy had the upper hand here, once again.

“Would you stop being Kingpin if I said I liked you back?” he teased.

“No.”

“Hm. Okay, would you stop murdering people—”

“No.”

“Well, how about—”

“No. No. No. I’m not doing shit for you, alright? It’s a mistake. This whole thing’s been a mistake.”

Yeah, it absolutely was, so why couldn’t Foggy stop grinning?

“What if I said I liked you back despite all of that?”

More silence. Matt jerked his head his way.

“I’d say you were a fool. A suicidal fool.”

“Alright, well. I guess I’m a fool then.”

Matt’s brain short-circuited for a full twenty seconds this time.

“Don’t you fuck with me,” he suddenly declared, moving to roll out of bed. Foggy grabbed him before he could make it.

“I’m not,” he promised. “I am definitely seeing the full extent of this bad fucking decision, alright? I’m looking at the end of my career. I’m looking at my complete loss of credibility. I’m looking at the guarantee of a violent death. And you know what? I’m looking at that, and I guess I’m still looking at you at the same time.”

Matt’s chest was warm under his hand and he found that if he pulled him bodily back towards himself, he didn’t put up a fight. So he pulled, until Matt’s back was pressed up against his own chest.

“You’re amazing,” he murmured into Matt’s bony shoulder. “And so fucking stupid. So amazingly dumb.”

Matt shoved back at him and he laughed.

“And so insanely violent.”

“Stop.”

“And I think, if you’d let me, I want to try to take care of you a little.”

“Fuck off, I don’t need some kind of carer.”

Yeah, of course he’d take it that way. Foggy needed to backtrack a bit.

“Spiderwoman told me all about those other Matts and Foggys, remember? And you said that we aren’t like them, and I guess, yeah. We definitely aren’t like them, but you know what? We don’t have to be like them the whole way through, you know? We can still have some of that, to an extent.”

“They’re weak.”

“So you do know them.”

“Of course I fucking know them, do you know that your precious Spiderwoman threw me at a crazy Octopus lady and then locked me in a room with all those other fuckhead Matts?”

Well, now that was a story that he had very much not heard.

“Were you jealous?” he teased.

“No, I was disgusted.”

“But?”

“There is no but.”

“Yeah there is.”

“Not there’s not.”

“Matt. You have the emotional range of a burnt peanut. It was only after you were locked in this room with all these Matts that you regained an iota of your soul and started crushing on me, so out with it. What happened?”

He caught a fist right in his chest, ow. Then another one.

“Get off.”

Alright, so this was how they were going to do it.

“You tell me honestly what changed and I will let you go, immediately. I promise.”

Matt growled at him.

“What if I don’t?”

Foggy shrugged.

“Then I guess I’ll let you go.”

Matt gawked, offended.

“You---you can’t just—that’s not a threat, Nelson.”

“I don’t want it to be a threat, I just want you to tell me what changed after you met those other Matts.”

He had broken the kingpin once again. It must have been so hard to not live in a world where violence did not necessarily beget violence.

“Whatever,” Matt finally decided. “I met another Foggy, alright? And he was fine. Tolerable.”

“Holy shit, Matt. Which one was it?”

“What nonsense you going on about now?”

“Don’t play dumb. There are many Foggys. Did you meet Big Red’s Foggy or Little Red’s Foggy?”

“Who the actual fuck are—oh hell no. You are not calling that bastard ‘Big Red.’”

It was unbelievable. It was the worst decision that Foggy could possibly make.

But there was something there, he knew it. Deep down in that frozen wasteland of a heart, Foggy knew that there was a teeny, tiny hint of warmth. Maybe not enough to depose the kingpin. Definitely not enough to bring him back into the light.

But devotion goes two ways. Matt had proven that he wouldn’t let anyone lay a finger on Foggy. That he’d be willing to endure months of emotionally repressed sex in order to be close to him. That he trusted him with one of his greatest secrets, something which could be his very undoing.

And Foggy could use that to throw his ass in jail. To lock him away for good, rid society of his menace, and put an end to this arc in the story of New York crime.

But.

Now that he knew about the spark of warmth, Foggy couldn’t help but think about the reality of his situation. Locking Matt away in jail for the rest of his life wouldn’t stop crime in the city. A new kingpin would rise up to take his place. There was no guarantee that that one would have a spark.

There was no guarantee that Foggy could forge a working relationship there. That this guy wouldn’t then turn around and use that relationship to destroy Foggy or the DA’s office as a whole from the inside out.

There was no guarantee of anything.

With Matt, there was a chance. Not of peace or harmony or any of that bullshit. But there was a chance for occasional truces. Maybe some negotiations.

And if he was being completely honest here, Foggy could admit that he wasn’t like Gwen’s other Foggys. He just wasn’t that good. And he had no interest in attaining that level of overall goodness.

That wasn’t the world that he lived in. That they—any of them, Matt, Foggy or Gwen—lived in. They lived in a world of backdoor deals and agreements gone sour.

He couldn’t be like those Foggys because it just wasn’t his place in the universe to be like them.

But they could have something in common, and if that could be Matt, as tenuous and rocky as that relationship was and could be, then he thought maybe he could live with that.