Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Two simultaneous thoughts follow him into unconsciousness:

He’s going to die here.

There’s a devil is at his side.

-

Things are decidedly less Boschian the next time he comes to.

For starters the sky isn’t on fire, which he can appreciate. In fact Foggy doesn’t think he spends enough time appreciating how not on fire the sky normally is. He’s gonna have to change that.

He’s lying on a too thin mattress in a room where the ceiling tiles overhead are starting to go a little yellow at the corners. There’s the distinct scent of industrial strength bleach wafting up from the pillowcase under his head that reminds Foggy of summer nights spent in road side motels when they drove out to visit his grandparents in Michigan, and for a second he half expects Ruth or Candace to jump up on the bed and tell him it’s time to hit the road, but there are wires stuck to his chest and a little pinchy thing on his finger and a mask over his nose and mouth, all of which are pretty dead giveaways that this isn’t some Super 8 on the road to grandma’s house.

He lets his head roll to the side and there’s Matt, creased and rumpled, slouched against his cane. Foggy’s still wondering where Matt came from (did they have a presentation today? Oh god had the hospital called Matt out of an interview?) when Matt lifts his head, cants it towards the bed. “Foggy?” he asks, because Matt’s always had the best worst timing, or the worst best timing, Foggy’s never been able to decide. Foggy wants to answer but all that comes out is a croak. Matt’s out of the chair and coming towards the bed in half a second, knocks his cane to the floor with a sharp clack in his rush. Foggy tries to warn him that he’s about to hit the bed rail but Matt reaches right over it, his fingers cold against the back of Foggy’s hand. “Foggy? Are you okay? Do you want me to get the doctor?”

Matt sounds terrible, voice scraped raw, but he somehow manages to look worse, hair a mess and face unshaven, pale under the stubble and holding himself too still, like he’s waiting for some sort of proverbial shoe to drop.

“What happened?” Foggy asks, and he winces when it sounds like he’s been gargling with sand. Condensation builds up beneath the mask, makes the air humid and Foggy reaches up to push the mask away and oh, wow that hurts. His right hand is completely mummified, wrapped in layers of gauze, fingers immobilized inside some kind of oversized bandage-mitten. “Oh shit—”

Matt’s hand covers Foggy’s free hand, his fingers curling over Foggy’s middle and index fingers and latching on. “It’s okay.” Matt says, but his pants might as well burst into flames here and now for how convincing he is. “You’re okay.”

“What—”

“I’m so sorry, Foggy. It wasn’t the Klokovs at all. Villalobos hired some people—they broke into the office. The police have him in custody now…”

Foggy completely misses the rest of Matt’s story, blood throbbing in his ears, drowning out everything Matt’s saying as his heart kicks into overdrive. The office? Karen? Apparently someone was hired to start a fire and Foggy was just lucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and now Foggy’s here, but none of it makes sense. Matt’s mouth snaps shut midsentence, his fingers tighten painfully around Foggy’s. “Foggy?” he asks, face pinched with worry but Foggy can’t take a deep enough breath to answer. His chest hurts. Matt’s reaching for something on the table top next to Foggy’s bed and starts clicking it rapidly before Foggy can tell him not to, he’s fine, really, he just needs to breathe.

Matt let’s go of his hand to touch the edges of the mask and hold it steady, voice soft but pleading when he says, “It’s okay, it’s okay now.”

Foggy wants to believe him.

-

The doctor introduces herself as Doctor Karr before she shines a retina searing light into Foggy’s eyes and asks him how he’s feeling. It feels like a trick question. She makes Matt step out into the hallway while she checks Foggy over, and Foggy’s heart wrenches itself loose inside his chest as he watches him go.

Matt said something about a fire but it doesn’t feel real until now, until Doctor Karr is explaining smoke inhalation and the possibility of carbon monoxide poisoning and concussions. “You’ve sustained second degree burns to your right hand. We’ll walk you through how to check and change your bandages.”

She gives him the all clear and goes to get Matt. Foggy lets himself relax into the shitty hospital mattress for the first time since he woke, let’s some of the tension bleed out of his sore and achy body. It’s gonna be alright, he thinks right before Matt comes back in and takes a seat at his side, reaches for Foggy’s hand again. It’s weird, Foggy’s usually the more tactile of the two, but maybe Matt’s as shaken by all this as Foggy is. It’s nice, Matt’s hand rougher than Foggy expects, but warmer now that it was before when it covers his. “I’ve called Karen, to let her know about—everything. She’s on her way.” Matt says it so easily, like an afterthought, leaning back in his chair until he tenses, sits up again. “Foggy?” He says, like he can sense Foggy’s confusion in the air.

Now is as good a time as any Foggy figures. “Who’s Karen?”

-

“What is the last thing you remember?” Matt asks. Somehow he looks even worse than before.

Foggy tries to think gently, but his head hurts regardless. Apparently blows to the head have that affect.

“Um. L&Z want us to interview…” Foggy rubs at his face with his uninjured hand. Matt’s suit and his weary face and the memory of fire and greasy black smoke spin through Foggy’s aching head. It feels like a part of him should be missing too, but he doesn’t feel any different, just tired. “Is there any point to asking if I got it?”

Matt, the overachiever, finds a way to look grimmer. “Yeah, you did.”

Foggy sits up too quickly. His whole body hates him. “Are you kidding me? Please don’t say you’re kidding Matty. I’m injured and in a delicate state.”

Matt chuckles drily. “Not kidding. They were even going to offer us permanent positions.”

“Us? Yes! Didn’t I say you were a shoe in—wait—were?” His elation plummets into the icy depths of his stomach. “As in they’re not anymore or…”

Matt clears his throat and looks, of all things, guilty. “You and I started our own firm.”

Foggy’s mouth literally falls open. “We what?”

-

According to Matt’s Cliffnotes version of the last five years, Foggy’s life has been eventful.

“So we flipped L&Z the bird, started our own firm, and helped take down a criminal kingpin, but we’re still drowning in debt. And now some mob goons want us dead?” Foggy summarizes, “Am I missing anything?” He feels like he’s fallen into one of his grandmother’s day time soaps.

Matt’s mouth twists. “Well technically we don’t have any conclusive evidence connecting Villalobos to any of the families.”

Foggy groans. “Now is so not the time for your semantics Matthew.”

-

Karen, as it turns out, is a gorgeous, no-nonsense woman who tears into Matt the minute she arrives. Foggy is instantly in love.

“Are you guys okay?” Karen asks, and Foggy doesn’t miss the completely unsubtle shake of Matt’s head. “Were you in the office?” Foggy asks and Karen looks at Foggy, then looks at Matt askance. Foggy wonders how long she and Matt have been dating. It can’t be too long if she still forgets the part where Matt can’t see her quizzical face.

“No,” Matt says carefully, “I wasn’t.”

His knuckles are white where they’re squeezing around his cane, and he tips his head towards the bed. “Foggy—”

“Got clonked on the noggin before the marshmallow act got started.” Foggy supplies because he doesn’t think he can stomach hearing Matt say amnesia, just, no. “Hope you don’t mind introducing yourself again since Matt’s being incredibly rude at the moment. Geez Murdock, I can see you haven’t learned how to treat a lady.”

Karen blinks a few times, clearly as thrown by this development as Foggy was and honestly still is. “Wait. What? Are you going to be okay? I mean do you know— does he—?” She looks at Matt again, eyebrows pinched in the middle, then back at Foggy.

Foggy shoots a look back at Matt, his face taunt and mouth pressed thin, pale behind the dark round lenses of his glasses.

Foggy looks back at Karen and tries to smile reassuringly but something tells him he doesn’t really hit his mark.

-

Foggy spends nine painful minutes convincing his parents, who are in Austin, Texas (“What?”) visiting his sister that they don’t have to jump on the first plane back to New York. Foggy spends another six assuring Ruth—who Matt helpfully informs him in pregnant (“Oh shit, for real?” “You’re knitting a blanket.” Matt says, and Karen gives him a shaky smile. “Well, you’re trying.”)—that no, really he’s fine; a little bruised and battered and charred but otherwise healthy and hale. He leaves out the part where he’s a little fuzzy on the details of the last five years and that his hand looks like some sort of bandaged claw. Worrying them won’t fix anything any quicker.

His mother harasses him until he passes the phone over to Matt, who promises Foggy’s family he’ll look after him, and Foggy’s just thankful Ruth can’t see Matt because Foggy would never hear the end of it (“Listen Foghorn, he’s gets this look okay, like you invented toaster strudel or something.” “Please Ruth, as if Matt would ever eat toaster strudel.”).

Matt goes pink at something on the other end of the line before he passes the phone back to Foggy. Ruth starts before the phone is even up against his ear. “Alright your man’s under strict orders to keep you in one piece.”

Foggy groans. “He’s not—” but his sister just starts cackling, her apparent fear for Foggy’s life over and done with. He still can’t believe she’s procreating.

He promises to call back as soon as he’s discharged and then hangs up, slumping back into his lousy hospital pillow.

-

Matt excuses himself to speak to the nurse who comes in—she’s not Foggy’s regular nurse, but she smiles kindly when she meets Foggy’s eye and there’s a brief flare of panic at the back of Foggy’s mind, what if he knows her? What if he knows her and doesn’t even know it?—and Karen drags Matt’s empty chair closer, sits down and stares at Foggy like she’s the one who’s trying to remember.

Foggy tries for another smile. “How’s your day going?”

Karen exhales a watery laugh. “Oh you know. Woke up and found out my workplace was the sight of attempted arson and that my bosses were both at the hospital. I decided to give myself the day off.”

Foggy snorts, which hurts, but everything hurts even with whatever drugs the doctors have him on for his medium rare hand, which is honestly terrifying if Foggy thinks about it too much. If it hurts now how much more is it going to suck once he comes off the good stuff?

“An excellent call.” Foggy says sagely, which earns him a grin. They make small talk for a few minutes, which is made easy by the sheer lack of inhibition Foggy’s feeling right now. Sure, Foggy gets distracted easily in the middle of sentences (seriously, hospitals have the best drugs) but Karen doesn’t seem to hold it against him, keeping up with the conversation and gently guiding him back to his point. She laughs at him once, at something he says, and Foggy thinks Matt’s lucky to have found a girl like her.

Karen stops laughing and gives him a funny look. “What?”

He takes it back. Drugs are the worst.

“Uh.” Foggy says slowly because he lacks a brain to mouth filter at the best of times, and right now his brain is definitely a little on the scrambled side.

Karen sits back, color rising in her face as she blinks at him. “Me…and Matt?” She says slowly, like the two words don’t fit together at all. Her face hardens, and whoa it’s sort of scary, her eyes narrowing like she’s zeroing in on a target. “Me and Matt?” She says again, incredulity sharp with something else, and Foggy wonders if Five-Years-Later Foggy has more control of his mouth than he does. Karen stands abruptly. “I’m going for a cup of coffee.” She says with the ease of a practiced liar. “Can I get you anything?”

Foggy feels heat creeping up the back of his neck. “Um—no I’m okay. Are we—okay?”

Karen nods, “We’re fine.” Foggy listens to the soft slap of her flats as she makes her way out of the room.

-

Matt is blazing red when he comes back. Karen has yet to return with her coffee. Foggy has a feeling it might be entirely metaphorical in nature.

“I’m not dating Karen.” Matt says apropos of nothing. Foggy stops flipping through the five decent channels on the tiny television mounted on the wall. “She works with us. She’s our office manager.”

“Oh. Okay.” Foggy says. Karen had told him as much.

Matt makes his way closer, cane sweeping the ground, “I—the doctor said you might be a little overwhelmed. Processing all this information at once.”

Foggy doesn’t nod, but he does say, “Yeah, I know I was there when she told you.” Matt scratches at his head, looks properly chastised. Foggy doesn’t know what Karen said to him but he sort of wishes he’d been there to hear it.

“I, uh—I should tell—”

Doctor Karr knocks at the door and Matt steps to the side, listens dutifully as she explains that they’re keeping Foggy for further observation but that barring any complications or concerns, he should be free to go home within a few days.

“You were saying something?” Foggy asks once Doctor Karr excuses herself but Matt just shakes his head, sinks back into the chair Karen vacated. “Later.” He says with the bleakest smile Foggy’s ever seen. “We’ll talk later.”

-

It’s late by the time Foggy’s dotted his last I and cross the last T at the hospital—and boy is he ever so grateful, for perhaps the first time in his life, to have been born left handed—the day already disappearing into a humid night as Matt follows him into a cab and gives the driver Foggy’s address.

Home turns out to be a decent sized apartment with an ungodly billboard sign blazing outside windows. It is also, hands down, the neatest apartment Foggy has ever kept on his own. He recognizes some of the posters on the walls, and some of his books on the shelves, though some of the shelves look weirdly empty. He’s apparently purchased a pretty dope record player at some point. Foggy just hopes he’s not one of those people who never shuts up about how you can’t appreciate music until you’ve heard it on vinyl. There’s an alcove beneath the stairs that must lead up to the roof (sweet), and a framed boxing poster hanging on the wall there. He leans closer to it, notices the lack of glass in the frame before he registers the name on the poster. “Hey, this is from your gym—” He starts and then stops, “Wait, uh, do you know I know about the gym?”

Matt sets the keys down on the kitchen counter (Foggy’s keys? Or does Matt have his own set of keys to Foggy’s apartment? That wouldn’t be so weird. Matt’s his emergency contact, it makes sense he’d have his own set of keys so he can let himself in just in case he ever needs to discover Foggy’s body before it gets eaten by roaches or rats or rabid pigeons or…Well it’s nice to know the painkillers are still doing their thing). “Yeah.”

Foggy sighs, “Man, this is gonna get old fast.”

Matt fiddles with the keys, splays them out one by one on the countertop. “Don’t worry about it. Ask whatever you need.”

Foggy wanders over to the kitchen trying to get a better idea of who he is now. Health conscious judging by the rabbit food in the cupboards, he notes, filing it away. Matt’s finally rubbed off on him.

He opens the cabinet on the far left and takes down two glasses, which is a trip, the bits of muscle memory that have remained intact when so much else has gone missing. He has to carry them each other to the sink and fill them with tap water one by one. It’s a drag. He sets the first glass down by Matt’s hand and tells him to drink. “I’m gonna have to go grocery shopping.” He says, putting together a list of things he can manage, and the keys clink against one another when Matt moves them a little too forcefully.

“We can go in the morning…there’s some left over pasta from dinner the other night if you’re hungry. You, uh, there’s a grocery delivery on Saturday.” Matt says quickly, words all run together, “How’s your dressing, do you want to check it or—”

Foggy blinks a few times, “Dude.” He says slowly, after a measured sip of water. “Chill. Take a breath.” Foggy eyes Matt carefully, wonders when was the last time he even slept. He seems to have always been hanging around the hospital, ready and at attention every time Foggy came to. He wonders if Matt plans on staying the night—is that something they do? Do they have partner sleep over nights like they did in school where they stay up too long and Matt complains about Foggy’s snoring and Foggy complains about Matt’s whining and in the morning they get overpriced donuts from that one place Matt like? Foggy has so many questions.

Matt chugs his water.

-

Matt does not chill. He doesn’t leave either.

Actually aside from a brief disappearing act he pulled the day before during which Karen stayed with Foggy and introduced him to Claire, the nurse Matt had been talking to, Matt hasn’t really left him at all.

Again, not weird. As far as Foggy knows they’ve been living atop one another for the last four years, in dorm rooms and then the series of crappy apartments crammed full with salvaged furniture. It would probably be weirder if Matt wasn’t around.

Matt rummages through Foggy’s fridge and produces a takeout box, sits on the couch with him while Foggy eats his reheated ravioli. He downright fusses over Foggy when he announces he’s going to shower (sponge baths, like most things derived from porn, are only erotic in theory). Matt offers to help him, red-faced and stuttering, but eventually settles for helping Foggy tie a plastic bag around his bandaged hand. “Do you—I can sit here,” Matt says, gesturing in the general direction of the toilet, “In case you need anything. Promise I won’t peek.” His grin is strained and his hands are clenched around the ball of Foggy’s clothing he carried into the bathroom for him. Foggy stares at him so hard Matt must feel it, he goes even redder than before and excuses himself, walking out of the bathroom and then turning back around to deposit Foggy’s clothing by the sink. ‘Matt’s taking this really hard’, Foggy thinks to himself, embarking on what will only be the first of many unhappy experiences wrestling his clothing off with only one hand.

The bathroom itself isn’t that hard to navigate. Everything seems to have a proper place, from the floss on the counter to the bath products arranged in a single file line in a shower caddy hanging from the showerhead. Foggy stares at them in mild disbelief, wonders at the pod-person he’s apparently become.

Showering proves a harder task than Foggy anticipated. Rubbing ineffectually at his hair with only one hand, trying to open a bottle of body wash and squeeze some out onto a wash cloth, rubbing at his skin and watching the water run sudsy and grey down the drain. He leans against the steam-warmed tiles and let’s his eyes close, feels the water beat over his back and just tries to drown out everything else. He stays until the water goes tepid, steps out of the shower carefully so as to not end his life naked on the floor.

Afterward he opens the mirror and pokes through the medicine cabinet, feels like he’s snooping even though technically it’s his. He’s got a crazy good first aid kit, which will help with the whole burned hand thing. He hops and tugs his way into basketball shorts, rips the plastic bag off his bandaged arm and gently maneuvers it though the sleeve of his t-shirt. He feels tired afterward, frustrated at his own helplessness, but he’s determined to see this through by himself. He’s not asking Matt for help, not with this. Matt and Foggy are close, sure, but a man needs to have limits. Accepting help while naked and wet from your stupidly gorgeous friend who you may or may not have been desperately in love with once upon a time should probably be one of them.

Foggy sort of expects to find Matt sitting outside the bathroom door when he opens it, but the hallway’s empty. He thinks maybe Matt’s gone home, and even though he knows it’s a long shot, he’s still mildly surprised when he finds Matt still there. He turns his head a little towards the sound of Foggy’s footsteps, but he doesn’t get up from the couch, still listening intently to whoever is on the other end of his cellphone.

“No, not yet.” He says, so diplomatic it pings on Foggy’s BS-radar. “But I will—yes Karen, I will.”

Matt rubs the back of his neck, flustered. Foggy hears one last, “Okay, I’ll be there…” as he eases the bedroom door shut behind him.

The bedroom is more of the same. The bed is unmade in the center of the room, but the floor is spotless. Suspicion grows with every opened drawer, triples when he opens the closet door and sees the empty hangers.

He sits down on the bed, feels the water dripping down his neck from his damp hair. Foggy’s lived with Matt for almost five years already. Last Foggy remembers they were considering looking at places of their own, provided they nailed their interviews with L&Z. Which they did.

Until they left to start their own firm (“Nelson and Murdock,” Matt had said with a small, proud smile, “We even have a sign.”).

When Matt told Foggy about his life now he hadn’t really gone into detail about Foggy’s life outside of the office and the cases and the arson that landed Foggy in the hospital. But sitting in his bedroom and looking around at all the empty spaces around him Foggy starts to put some things together for himself.

Because Matt brought him here and Matt knows his way around without direction, and there’s a poster for Battlin’ Jack Murdock’s last fight hanging in Foggy’s living room.

Foggy loiters behind the sliding door while Matt draws his conversation to a close. “Karen’s set up a meeting with the insurance rep tomorrow morning to go over the damage.” Matt explains to him once Foggy wanders out and Foggy honestly feels a little crazy for even considering what he’s considering but the last few days have been chalk full of reasons to feel more than a little crazy so he doesn’t think it can’t be held against him.

“Hey Matt?”

Matt sits up a little, hands clasped around his phone. “Yeah?”

“Do you live here?”

Matt stays suspiciously silent.

“Buddy?”

Matt opens his mouth and Foggy can practically see the gears at work inside his head. Matt closes his mouth. There might as well be crickets.

“Jesus Christ.”

-

Matt sleeps on the couch that night because Matt is a self-sacrificing idiot who apparently took it upon himself to hide all evidence of their cohabitation (their relationship) by sticking his things in a padlocked closet under the stairs. “Okay, but did you think that I would never notice the mysteriously padlocked closet? Or that you never left? Were you planning to sleep on the roof?”

Matt hadn’t really had anything remotely close to an excuse, nothing other than the same lackluster protest of “I didn’t want to overwhelm you.”

Foggy spends the night in a too big bed in what basically amounts to a stranger’s bedroom contemplating the fact that Matt is a lying liar who lies and that at some point in the last five years Foggy’s infatuation returned with a vengeance and apparently developed into this. Whatever this might be.

Matt’s partially stammered explanation earlier hadn’t really been as informative as Foggy would have liked it. Apparently it’s been going on for a little over a year, their current living arrangement a more recent development.

And it’s not necessarily that Foggy doesn’t believe him—or the rather conclusive evidence all around him—it’s just that none of it feels real. Like he’s just crossed over into another dimension, one completely beyond even Foggy’s wildest daydreams. He looks over at the corner of the room best lit by the billboard sign outside the window and half expects to see Rod Serling standing there with a clever turn of phrase about the horror show Foggy’s life has become in the last twelve hours.

Not that living with Matt, being with Matt, is a nightmare or anything. Foggy loves him, but he hasn’t been in love with Matt for years, and as far as he knows Matt’s never been in love with him. Foggy honestly can’t fathom how the dots connect on this one. He needs someone to draw him a map but he’s pretty sure the whole thing would be covered in sea serpents.

He swipes through the pictures on his phone looking for clues, but hasn’t quite figured out the question he’s trying to answer. His pictures are a mess of Karen with her face half-hidden behind her fingers and dogs on the street and signs of things Foggy probably needed to remember. There’s a picture of him and Matt standing in a poorly lit room that looks vaguely familiar, one of Foggy’s arm around Matt’s shoulders, the camera angled downward an arm’s length away. It wasn’t taken too long ago, but they don’t look any different from anything Foggy remembers.

His contacts are sparser than when Foggy last saw them. Marci’s back in there, which Foggy’s definitely gonna have to investigate. There’s Karen, but Claire is nowhere to be found. There’s a number for a P.I. and another for a guy Foggy hasn’t talked to since undergrad. Brett is still there thankfully so Foggy thumbs the dial icon and listens to the thin dial tone on the other end. He eyes the sliding door skeptically and then, feeling the full weight of his ridiculousness, slides under the blankets. The Matt Foggy remembers had crazy good hearing and Foggy’s not gonna trust that time has dulled it any.

The phone rings for so long Foggy has practically resigned himself to hanging up and trying to sleep when Brett finally picks up. “Foggy, someone had better be bleeding.”

“Am really I dating Matt?” The words practically squeak out of him.

Brett makes a confused sound. “What did the hospital put you on?”

“Is that a yes?”

“Are you honestly asking?

This is the worst game of twenty questions ever.

“Things are a little fuzzy right now, bud.” His voice breaks around the final syllable, but man is it ever a whopper of an understatement. Matt’s obviously been rubbing off on him. And oh god, that’s probably taken on a terrifyingly literal meaning. In this bed. Foggy refuses to think about it.

“You okay?” Brett sounds a little more awake now. “I heard about what happened—you and Murdock know how to pick ‘em huh?”

Foggy’s hand is starting to throb inside the bandages, and his head hurts, and he should just be a grown up and ask Matt to help him pry the lid off the pill bottle but he can’t just yet.

“You know what they say; some guys have all the luck.” Foggy swallows a few times, hopes he sounds a little more normal. “I’m okay,” He adds, “A little crispier. Might have gotten a few screws knocked loose in my head. You know how it is.”

Brett makes a skeptical sound. “That’s why you’re calling me at ass o’clock asking me to tell you about your personal life?”

Right. Okay then.

Foggy worries his lip between his teeth, pulls up a little strip of dried skin and peels it off. It stings when he wipes his tongue over it, leaves a metallic tang in his mouth.

“Never mind dude.” Foggy whispers, clutching the phone tighter, “I’ll let you go to sleep—”

“You guys are gross and Mom’s expecting the wedding invitation any day now. That answer your question?” It might be the concussion talking but Brett sounds a little worried.

Foggy hangs up not long after that, resurfaces into the significantly cooler air of the bedroom. He turns on his side, his back to the living room and to Matt.

-

By morning the need to pee and the pain in his hand make it impossible to hide any longer. The couch is empty when he slides the bedroom door open, spare blanket folded neatly at one end. Matt’s in the kitchen, poking eggs in a frying pain, still looking vaguely contrite. Foggy takes a second to look at him. His hair’s a mess and he’s not wearing his glasses, still dressed in a t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants Foggy feels warm just looking at. Matt hasn’t gotten any taller but his arms and shoulders are insane, more so than usual, and there’s a massive bruise on his forearm Foggy hadn’t seen until now.

“Hey.” Foggy calls out as he approaches, and Matt doesn’t flinch but it’s a close thing. There’s no way Foggy surprised him, but Foggy apologizes anyway, leans up against the counter. “Good morning.” Matt answers, sliding eggs out onto a plate. “You should eat so you can take your medicine.”

It reminds Foggy of countless disagreements they’ve had before, resolved through beers and coffees and pizza slices. Foggy already knows it’s not going to be enough this time around. “What happened?” Foggy asks, studying the bruise on Matt’s arm. Matt looks at him quizzically so Foggy taps one finger at the edge of it where it’s less likely to hurt. Surprise flashes across Matt’s face, though he smothers it quickly. “I bumped into a filing cabinet. At the office. I hadn’t even noticed it. Guess I’ve been sort of distracted.”

Matt nudges the plate over to Foggy and he’s honestly not hungry but he does want to take his meds so he shovels food into his mouth until he’s eaten enough to wash a pain killer down with some of the tea Matt sets down besides his plate. “So am I a tea drinker now?” Foggy asks, face still scrunched against the taste of it that lingers on his tongue.

Matt picks at something on the tile counter top. “Not at all. I just thought this might be my only chance to get you to drink any.” He almost grins.

“Oh, you’re still an ass then?”

Matt does smile this time. “Definitely.”

-

Foggy wakes up on the couch. He’d been trying to catch up with five years’ worth of life events but got sidetracked somewhere around Facebook stalking his friends and family and wound up looking at pictures of some wacko in S&M gear running around Hell’s Kitchen trying to take a bite out of crime. He falls asleep wishing he hadn’t abandoned his own stupid Facebook account seemingly years ago and bitter that Matt has literally no social media presence. Both he and Foggy make a few short cameos in things Karen posts, but Karen’s account seems to be mostly work related stuff, posts about free legal clinics and other community resources.

It’s no wonder he dreams some nutty amalgamation of fire and Matt, wakes up with his heart pounding in his throat and his chest tight with fear. His eyes scan the room for an intruder, a threat, but there’s nothing, no one. There’s a blanket draped over him, the orange and blue monstrosity Candace had given him while he was in undergrad, his laptop closed on the coffee table.

“Matt?” He asks, his voice rough with sleep, but there’s no answer. He digs his phone out from under the couch cushion, and okay, there’s a new text message from Matt waiting for him. Apparently he’s gone out to meet with the land lord and the insurance guys. Call if you need anything. Matt added, and Foggy drops back onto the couch with a sigh, heart slowly decelerating until it no longer feels like it’s trying to orchestrate its great escape from his chest. Exhaustion creeps back up over him, aided by drugs and pain, and Foggy wants nothing more than to sink back into the couch cushions and sleep the rest of the day away. He’s almost there too, eyelids heavy and his hand a dull throb he’s working hard to ignore when there’s a knock at the door.

Foggy peels his eyes open, wonders if he should just let it go. What if it’s some New Foggy acquaintance Foggy doesn’t have the slightest idea how to talk to? What if, he thinks, sitting up a little under the blanket, it’s whoever torched the office? Nelson and Murdock isn’t a huge firm from what he’s gathered, and Hell’s Kitchen is tiny, it wouldn’t be that hard to track someone down. Matt had said something about police custody but what if there are more hired goons out there trying to finish the job?

The door knob jiggles and Foggy’s sleep-addled brain jolts into overdrive as he throws himself off the couch. There’s a bat by his side of the bed if he can get to it before—

“Foggy?” A woman calls his name, freezes Foggy in his tracks. When he pivots he finds himself looking at the nurse from the hospital. Claire.

Foggy drops the blanket he’s still holding with one hand, feels his face go hot. “Oh, hey.”

Claire gives a tiny wave, steps further into the apartment. “Sorry I let myself in. Matt asked me to check in on you; see how the hand was doing.”

Foggy waves back with his bandaged hand, unsure of what to say. Claire seems to read his discomfort, pockets her keys and points at the bathroom. “Is it okay if I get the first aid kit?”

Foggy does some combination of a shrug and a nod, waiting until Claire’s cleared the room before he yanks his phone out of his pocket.

Does everyone have keys to our place? He types out, thumb flicking across his screen as quickly as he can. He double checks his spelling out of habit in deference to Matt’s screen reader and sends it just as Claire reappears.

Matt doesn’t respond.

-

Claire moves around the apartment with an ease Foggy envies. She’s reserved but warm, examines Foggy’s injured hand with a critical eye and asks him how he’s feeling.

“Like pain-wise?” he asks, wincing as she applies some of the ointment the doctor sent him home with. Foggy could probably do this himself, but he appreciates having Claire here and being able to squeeze his eyes shut and not look too closely at the red and blistered skin of his fingers and palm.

Claire looks at him through her eyelashes, before she turns her attention back to the task at hand. “Sure, pain-wise. But how’s everything else? Getting settled in alright?” She might as well be asking about their fight outright, but Foggy appreciates her tact. He has no idea how Matt attracts such incredible women on the regular.

(Okay, he has some.)

Foggy squirms a little but doesn’t pull his hand away. “Well, if you’re asking if I found out my best friend is actually my boyfriend and that he wasn’t planning to tell me, then sure.”

Claire doesn’t pretend to look surprised. Foggy smothers a flare of annoyance at the fact. She rips open a pack of gauze and starts to re-mummify Foggy’s hand.

“Sounds like a lot to take in.”

Foggy doesn’t know how to respond to that. “I mean—yeah.” He wants to ask Claire a hundred questions, but he doesn’t know what they are to each other, if she’s Matt’s friend who tolerates Foggy or a friend to them both, if they talk about personal things or keep things civil and composed. She seems the quiet type, not shy just sure of what she does and doesn’t want to do. Her silence is one of contentment and not discomfort.

“You don’t seem all that surprised.” Foggy mumbles under his breath and Claire’s gloved fingers poke at his palm.

Claire doesn’t even stop what she’s doing, just cracks a thin smile. It isn’t a particularly happy look. “He seemed to think you’d get scared off if he told you everything at once.”

Foggy exhales hard, partly in pain, partly in frustration. “Yeah, no, the lying route was way more comforting.”

“I haven’t known him as long as you have, but I pretty much got a crash course in Matt’s version of a good idea. Once he’s gotten it in his head that it’s the right thing to do, he’s going to do it no matter how bad an idea it actually it. You know that.”

Foggy does. Or at least he did.

It’s hard to think of this grim faced, grown up Matt as the same guy who once argued about Thunder Cats with Foggy in the library when they should have been studying for Con Law. But he is. He’s the guy who stayed awake for 46 hours straight because he was convinced it was the only way he could learn Evidence. The guy who pulled himself out of bed every Sunday, rain or shine, for 7 a.m. mass because he so strongly believed he had to. Matt might be the most bullheaded asshole Foggy’s ever met. It isn’t really any kind of surprise that Matt is also the guy who decided he couldn’t stomach working inside the belly of the beast chewing up helpless people, the guy who decided he had to cut his losses instead. But what does surprise Foggy, more than he wants to admit even to himself, is that Foggy is apparently the guy who followed him. That they’re doing this, together. Is that why he—Foggy pulls the emergency break on that train of thought before it can plow right over the very fragile pieces of Foggy’s sanity.

“Can I ask you a question? As like a medical professional, not like as a life coach or anything.”

Claire, bless her soul, just keeps on wrapping a new bandage around Foggy’s hand. He gets the feeling this isn’t her first rodeo with the weird or crazy.

“As long as it’s within my paygrade I’ll do my best to answer. You wouldn’t believe how many—” She stops short, shakes her head, “Actually, never mind.”

Foggy’s mouth twitches downward, “Would banging my head really hard against the wall help jog my memories?”

Claire outright laughs. “Sorry Foggy, it doesn’t work like that in real life.”

Foggy sighs. Figures.

Silence drapes itself over them languidly, disrupted only by the occasional tear of medical tape. Foggy clears his throat.

“So, uh, what’s the deal with that devil guy?”

-

Claire stays with him for a little while before heading home (Foggy feels shitty about stealing time from her day off but she shrugs his apologies away. “Believe me, there are worse ways to spend my day off.”). She tells him about their friendship, how they met through Matt—she’s carefully vague there, makes Foggy wonder if they used to date before, it wouldn’t be the first time things didn’t work out between Matt and a beautiful woman. “We spend our share of time together.” She says, sounding amused, though she doesn’t elaborate there either. Foggy asks her about everything he could find online about memory loss and most of Claire’s answers invalidate the wilder theories and remedies and confirm Foggy’s worst fears. There’s no real timeframe for when this will fix itself, not even any definite possibility that it will fix itself. Foggy might live the rest of his life with five missing years inside his head. “Don’t get discouraged.” Claire says at the door—he tries not to feel too useless seeing her out. After all she has her own set of keys—and Foggy gives her a tight lipped smile and thanks her for the company. “Take it easy Foggy.”

Matt still hasn’t responded to his earlier text message but he’s been gone for hours. Foggy thinks about sending him another text or calling him directly, but there’s something holding him back. He has no idea where the lines are or when he’s crossing them.

The fridge is still woefully empty since they never did get around to shopping and Matt’s promised grocery delivery is still two days away. Foggy contemplates ordering a pizza and then decides he needs to get out. He remembers seeing a bodega a few blocks away on the cab ride here. Jeans are too hard to pull on with only one hand, and too warm besides, so Foggy sticks to his shorts and t-shirt. Shoes are by far the trickiest part of the whole endeavor, and he ends up sticking his shoe laces inside his shoe rather than try to tie them onehanded. He finds his keys hanging on a hook by the door, recognizes them by the beat up catcher’s mitt keychain Ruth gave him years ago, makes sure to test each of them in the door before locking it behind him. The neighborhood isn’t quite what he imagined, a mix of hipsters and old timers who have Hell’s Kitchen embedded in their genetic makeup.

The bodega owner, a long, thin man with a truly impressive beard greets Foggy by name when he enters the store and he nods back. He’s always been a people person, that hasn’t changed any it seems, and it’s comforting to chatter amicably with someone who isn’t in the middle of the mess of Foggy’s life. He navigates the narrow aisles and becomes even better acquainted with exactly how much of a pain in the ass it is to only have one functioning hand. He sticks a few things into the basket hanging off the crook of his elbow, mostly instant noodles and microwavable cups of mac and cheese, things he can make one handed and quickly. And alone.

It’s not until he goes up to pay that he realizes he forgot his wallet—fuck he actually has no idea where his wallet even is—has to apologize to the clerk, embarrassed and so suddenly so tired, like he pulled a fourteen hour day on too little sleep and not enough coffee, he doesn’t even want to think about the trek back to the apartment. The clerk waves him off when he offers to put everything back on the shelves at least, the people behind him in line starting to murmur and mutter under their breathes at him for holding up the line. He trudges back outside emptyhanded, heat still stinging his cheeks and the back of his neck, the pain in his hand starting up again, a deep throb and tight pull whenever his fingers twitch inside the bandages. He wants more than anything to lay down, to sleep until this grogginess inside him lifts.

The walk to the apartment passes in a daze, and he has to stop twice on the seemingly endless flights of stairs up to the apartment. Foggy’s sweating and uncomfortable by the time he reaches the front door, and he’s barely touched the key to the lock when the door flies open in front of him. He’s pretty sure his heart stops beating all together for a solid six seconds. He stumbles back, heart kicking into double time. His heel catches on absolutely nothing and he losing his footing but he doesn’t have a moment to yelp, Matt’s already darting after him, catching him by the upper arm and steadying him in one of his moments of bizarre intuition. Foggy’s seen a few of them during the course of their friendship, and Matt always shrugs and says there’s some truth to the whole ‘when one sense goes…’ thing.

“Are you alright? Foggy—” There’s a frantic edge to Matt’s voice that Foggy doesn’t recognize at all, his fingers digging into Foggy’s biceps like he’ll disappear if Matt doesn’t hold on.

“What the fuck?” Foggy asks, voice not nearly as steady as he wishes it were, but Matt’s got that drawn and quartered look on his face from earlier, a hang dog expression that makes Foggy feel guilty and worried and mad all at once. Foggy doesn’t think he’s ever seen it as much as he has in the last three days, not even in during the Strep Throat Ordeal their second year of school.

“Sorry,” Matt stammers out, uneven and rough, the cool demeanor Foggy’s always admired completely wrecked. “I just, I thought—you weren’t home when I got back and you weren’t answering your phone and I—I’m sorry I thought—” Foggy doesn’t know what Matt thought but he can’t imagine it was anything good.

Something about that gets his hackles up and Foggy doesn’t want to poke the sleeping bear that’s been snoozing inside since last night but it’s totally waking all on its own right now, annoyed at Matt’s worry and his own fear and this whole sorry mess.

“Matt,” The word is clipped inside his mouth, and Matt’s expression shifts in recognition of the tone. Matty’s not exactly a people person but damn is he good at reading a room. His fingers flex on Foggy’s arms and then drop away entirely. He takes a quick step back, gives Foggy some breathing room. Foggy takes a deep breath and tries to rein in his mounting frustration. “I’m alright, I just had to get some things. I was getting a little antsy waiting around.”

Matt nods, but there’s a lingering uncertainty around his mouth, his forehead still creased with tension. Foggy sighs internally. Being mad would be a hundred times easier if Foggy didn’t feel a little bit like an asshole. “Sorry man, guess I should have let you know I was going out.” And probably not have switched his phone to silent before leaving.

“No, it’s okay. Sorry I—I’m sorry if I startled you right now, I just heard someone at the door and hoped it was you.” He says, sounding contrite. Great now Foggy feels even more like an asshole. Matt’s such a bastard.

Foggy shakes his head, his exhaustion rearing its head with a vengeance. “I’m shaking my head here. Really, we’re cool. Let’s just, um, get inside.” Foggy offers his elbow habitually, and there’s no missing the second’s hesitation in Matt’s hand before he takes hold of it. Matt let’s Foggy lead him inside, steps away once they’ve cleared the hallway. “I brought egg drop soup.” Matt says, gesturing at a bag of takeout containers resting on the table , “And, um, some other things too. From the place near—a restaurant you like.” Matt still looks uneasy and it feels like Foggy has no choice but to give the guy a break.

“Thanks.” He sticks his uninjured hand in his pocket, fiddles with the smooth face of his cellphone. “Uh, are we plates-at-the-table people or…”

Matt gives him a wane smile. “Sometimes. Usually we just eat on the couch.”

Foggy nods to himself, “Cool, cool.” He waits for the awkwardness to break. It doesn’t. “Let’s eat.”

-

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.” Matt says, effectively to blame for scalding Foggy’s esophagus with hot egg drop soup. Matt pokes at his lo mein with the ends of his chopsticks, mouth turned downward at the corners. “Everything is such a mess, I can’t imagine how disorienting this all must be for you. I thought if I could remove some of the…less relevant complications, it might make things easier for you.

Foggy pushes his spoon through the bowl in his lap, clears his throat. “I appreciate the sentiment buddy, but that wasn’t really your call to make.” He twirls this spoon between his fingers, “You can’t just not tell me things because you think I can’t handle it. I mean, maybe I can’t, but that doesn’t mean you’re allowed to keep things about my own life from me.” He exhales hard through his nose. “Not only that but dude it was the worst idea. Just not good. I need you to acknowledge how bad an idea it was. Where were you planning to sleep man?”

Matt tilts his head a little, and Foggy catches the flicker of his eyelashes behind his glasses. “I, uh, I hadn’t really gotten that far in the planning. I was mostly focused on getting my things put away before you came home. So, no, it wasn’t my best plan.”

“Did you just admit you were wrong?” Foggy allows himself a smile, “You really have grown up.”

Matt’s grin goes serious quicker than it appears. “You’re right though. I shouldn’t have kept this from you, it wasn’t my choice to make.”

Foggy didn’t think hearing it would make any more of a difference today than it did last night but somehow it does.

They eat in almost-comfortable silence for a little while. If Foggy doesn’t think about it too hard it’s almost like any other meal they’ve shared, any other night, at any other time in their lives together. So of course Matt has to ruin it by speaking.

“I’d understand if our current living arrangement is uncomfortable for you given…the givens. I can find somewhere to stay if—”

Foggy shakes his head. “I’m not kicking you out of your own apartment dude. If anyone should be crashing at the office it should be me—”

“Foggy—”

“But since that isn’t really an option right now, we’ll make it work, okay? It’s not like this the first time we’ve lived together.”

There’s a pensive silence followed by Matt’s decisive nod. If he’s trying to convince himself as much as he is Foggy, well, Foggy’s not about to call him on it.

Make it ‘til you fake it has gotten Foggy this far in life. It can get them both a little farther still.

-

Foggy leaves the sliding door unlocked that night. Matt stays on the couch. He can’t say he isn’t a little bit relieved.

-

The office, when he finally sees it, is a disaster.

The fire wasn’t as bad as it could have been according to Matt and Karen who walk him through the interconnected rooms. The worst of the flames were in the small conference room off the main reception area, the walls charred black and the carpet thick with soot. (He scours the room for some kind of memory, but all he finds is the dim recollection of smothering heat and choking smoke and fear. He backs out of the room as quickly as he can without running.)

The damage to the rest of the office is minimal by comparison. It’s nothing like the dream office Foggy had imagined for them when they were starry-eyed law students. It’s definitely nothing like the steel and glass lobby of L&Z or any of the sky-high buildings housing the big money law firms Foggy had assumed he’d chase after once he graduated. It’s small and dark and definitely depressing, and all of that can’t be blamed on the fire.

“That was pre-fire.” Karen says matter-of-factly about a hole in one of the baseboards. “There were rats.”

She laughs at whatever she sees on Foggy’s face.

Matt steps in, swinging his cane in smooth arcs over the debris littered floor. “We’ve already spoken to the landlord and our insurance company.” He takes Foggy’s elbow but there’s no doubt in Foggy’s mind that he’s the one being guided out of the office, not the other way around. “And Mick’s offered to take a look and give us an estimate on repairs.”

“My Aunt Cathy’s Mick?” Foggy asks as they step into the hallways, the smell of burnt drywall and gasoline still lingering in the air.

Karen locks the door behind them (the shattered remains of the window pane have been boarded over, but Foggy thinks anyone who really wants to get in won’t be stopped by a lock and some plywood), steps forward and flanks Foggy’s other side. “The one and only.” She says with a wide smile, keeping just enough distance to avoid jostling Foggy’s bandaged arm. “We’re gonna be up and running in no time. You’ll see.”

Foggy studies her, her smile and the steadiness in her eyes. She’s more like Matt than anyone would think to notice at first glance, has the same steely resolve and firebrand determination that would make weaker individuals coward. She filled Foggy in a bit more about their history together, how she was their first client who stayed on as their full-time secretary after they cleared her name. Matt said they would never have taken down Wilson Fisk without her. “From what Matt says you’re a real life Lois Lane.” Foggy had said to her when she’d finished. Karen had blushed but hadn’t denied it, “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Karen debriefs them on their current caseload as they step out onto the sidewalk, “Of course thanks my ingenious filing system none of our active cases were damaged.” Karen says sunnily and Matt chuckles drily on Foggy’s other side. “I don’t think you can take credit for the fact that our lack of storage space led to the filing cabinet in the kitchen.” Karen ignores him. “You’d think hired arsonists would be a bit more thorough in their ransacking before they light the matches.” She jokes and Matt tenses at Foggy’s side for a split second (because Foggy was the reason they weren’t more thorough. Foggy and the bruising scab on the side of his head and the pulsing heat in his right hand) until Foggy responds, “Yeah, people just don’t take pride in their work anymore.”

“Kids these days,” Karen agrees with faux solemnity, golden hair whipping around her face at a sudden burst of dry, warm wind. “Anyway I contacted our current clients to let them know we’ll be working out of the Columbus Library for the time being.” Karen continues as they keep walking. Matt’s hand flexes in the crook of Foggy’s arm. Karen announces when they come to a red light and all three of them come to a stop at the corner of the street.

“ “Let’s cross.” Foggy says after the light’s changed and he’s looked both ways to make sure traffic’s actually come to a stop. The three of them step off the curb together.

-

Life goes on.

The bandages come off. The skin beneath them looks pink and pale and thin, a stark contrast to the rest of Foggy’s skin. It splits like wet tissue the first time Foggy scratches at the insane itch he feels embedded in the skin of his palm, and after he’s been reprimanded by Claire and worried at by Matt, he agrees to wear the compression glove Doctor Karr recommends. The glove helps, not just with the itching but by covering the majority of the scarring. Even after all the times he’s had to look at it while changing his dressing, looking at the burn is still hard to do.

Matt accompanies him to his follow up appointments, hounds him about finger stretches and physical therapy. Foggy draws the line at a burn victim support group the doctor recommends. Matt doesn’t try to convince him otherwise but he frowns long and hard when Foggy tells him his decision. Foggy doesn’t know how to explain that he doesn’t consider himself better than those who choose to attend; he just doesn’t think his injury merits that level of attention. (Foggy doesn’t know the right words to say that some days he doesn’t feel like he’s survived anything at all, like all of it happened to someone else and he’s just living with the aftermath.)

The repairs at the office are completed. Mick is as affable and easy going as ever, jokes with Karen and flirts with Matt and gives Foggy shit about everything under the sun. The day the office is officially reopened Foggy and Matt go into the office together. It’s not unusual now that Foggy’s gone back to work, though today they don’t take the now familiar route to the library, covering the blocks between the apartment and the red brick building that houses Nelson and Murdock.

Foggy doesn’t really know what it looked like before, not outside of a few pictures but there’s a weird sense of pride the first time he walks up to the new front door, the glass pane replaced, their names written on the glass now rather than a file folder. “It was a gift.” Karen says with a knowing smile and Foggy can’t weasel the identity of their anonymous benefactor from her no matter how hard he tries. The interior still smells faintly of drying paint. Matt wrinkles his nose at the threshold but he smiles as he walks Foggy through the different rooms as though it’s his first time here. Which it kind of is.

Karen brings danishes to celebrate their first official day back in the office. Foggy’s spent the last ten weeks reacquainting himself with this new life of his, can see why they’ve managed to make this work for as long as they have. Sitting at their brand new second hand conference table, licking sugary cherry filling off his lips, while Karen and Matt debate over who should be allowed the lone cheese Danish, he can’t help the sudden swell of optimism that rushes up inside him.

Things at home have settled into a routine.

They go to work together and they go home together and make dinner together and review files together and watch movies on the couch together and go to bed. It’s exactly like living with Matt has always been, except that at night Foggy slides the bedroom door shut as Matt arranges blankets on the couch.

Sometimes Foggy wakes in the middle of the night, lies still in the never-full darkness, heart pumping hard against his ribs with some sort of imaginary dread that hangs around him like a ghost in the dark. Sometimes he hears Matt get up, listens to him walk around. Foggy thinks he hears Matt go up and out onto the roof. He’s not sure what Matt does up there, isn’t sure if he’s allowed to ask when he’s the reason Matt’s stuck on the couch for the foreseeable future. He still exhibits traces of an intimacy Foggy can’t remember, wears it on his face as a kind of wistfulness that makes Foggy feel like he should look away. He answers Foggy’s questions when Foggy lets himself ask them, helps him fill in some of the gaps in the last five years. Matt never tries anything out of the ordinary, not since the initial handholding at the hospital, though even that hadn’t been completely uncharted territory for them (see: the Strep Throat Ordeal). His hand never strays from Foggy’s elbow when they walk; but there’s a level of restraint to the way Matt carries himself now that Foggy’s never seen before. For all that Matt needs to feel out spaces it’s like he never loses focus of their bodies in proximity to one another’s, like he’s constantly calculating the distance between them in order to maintain it.

Matt still sneaks out to the gym, either late at night or early in the morning, and some weekends Foggy wakes to an empty apartment, eats breakfast and goes out—for walks or to meet with Claire or go to the doctor—and when he comes back Matt’s there, knuckles red and tender to look at, or with a bruise swelling to life on his chin.

Foggy isn’t any closer to remembering. Matt never pushes.

Matt seems more than happy to follow Foggy’s lead, doesn’t say anything at all about their living situation. Neither of them has brought up the topic of someone moving elsewhere since that initial conversation. Foggy wants to pretend they can go on like this indefinitely, living in this weird limbo between what they used to be and what they are now.

-

Autumn hangs on by the skin of its teeth despite the impatient winter hounding at its heels. Their mild morning walks are suddenly plagued by a series of cold snaps and rain/hail combos that leave Foggy frigid and his shoes flooded by the time he and Matt arrive in the office. Apparently, even after all the renovations done to the office, Nelson and Murdock is still without real central heating. Foggy isn’t sure whether or not he should laugh the morning Karen arrives dripping wet and clutching a secondhand space heater Foggy is at least eighty-three percent sure is against New York city fire code.

The poor weather seems to get the better of Matt. He goes quiet and broody like the rain’s telling him the plot of a Dickens’ novel. Matt always gets weird about the rain, Foggy still attributes it to the obstacle course of rain-slick streets and opened umbrellas since he doesn’t have much else to go on. Every time he’s asked Matt, he just shrugs Foggy’s questions off and says it’s nothing. Foggy wonders if Future Foggy has the truth figured out, if he knows what makes Matt so tight lipped and serious at the sound of rain pelting against the windows.

“Headache.” Matt says when Foggy asks if he’s alright for the third time that morning. Matt’s head hurts a lot these days. He’s still not sleeping at night, and his prolonged stay on the couch can’t be helping the insomnia any.

Foggy believes him for the most part (he remembers a few migraine incidents in law school) but he hasn’t been able to take Matt’s word at face value since the truth detonated in their living room his first night out of the hospital. Matt’s always been too good at hiding things he thinks Foggy shouldn’t or doesn’t need to worry about, that obviously hasn’t changed. Be it a relationship or not having anywhere to go for winter break, Matt loves his secrets if he thinks it’ll make life easier to keep them. Foggy’s only ever been half as good at figuring those things out for himself. It’s not something he likes to acknowledge, not even to himself, but some days he worries he doesn’t know Matt at all.

He doesn’t say as much to Claire when they meet for coffee one Sunday morning. Matt’s at church, because Matt still drags himself out of bed for mass at the butt crack of dawn. He invited Foggy once, a while ago, but Foggy doesn’t think it’s something they do frequently even now. Matt hasn’t asked again since so Foggy’s here instead, watching whip cream melt into his coffee while Claire picks cranberries out of her scone.

“You could always ask him.” Claire says bluntly. She has a fascinating manner of giving you her full attention while still projecting only a causal level of interest that Foggy will never be able to replicate.

“Talking hasn’t really been our strong suit since all this got started.” Foggy waves a hand in the air to capture the this-ness of everything. Claire looks unimpressed.

“You’re sort of making it sound like it was at one point.”

Foggy makes an affronted noise. “We talk. Or, at least, we did. I assume we still talk.” He looks down at his drink. “Do we not talk?”

Claire sighs, “Foggy you know you can’t ask someone to know a relationship from the outside.”

Foggy scowls at the shrinking swirl of whipped cream like it’s to blame for all the sense Claire’s talking. “What am I supposed to say: What else are you keeping from me? A little on the defensive don’t you think?”

Claire mutters something under her breath in Spanish that probably translates to ‘Why am I surrounded by idiots?’ Give or take a few words.

“Okay maybe don’t lead with that—” Claire says with a teasing grin, and Foggy opens his mouth to answer but the words lodge in his throat. The feeling that rises up inside him is indescribable, hot and sharp and merciless, something that transcend anger or sadness or fear.

“Foggy?” Claire’s voice spikes through the haze, her hand is too warm where it covers the back of Foggy’s hand on the table. “Foggy are you okay?”

He thinks he manages to nod but he can’t be sure, blood throbbing along the surface of his skin and cold rolling outward from the center of his chest. His tongue tingles behind his teeth, his throat dry. The air tastes warm when he gasps in a mouthful and he worries, for a blinding second, that this is what dying feels like (it isn’t quite a memory, but it’s there, a lurking shadow, smothering heat and black smoke and Foggy can’t breathe, he can’t—). Claire is still talking but Foggy’s heart is racing, the cold growing more insurmountable by the second. There’s the scrape of chair legs on the wooden floors and then Claire’s fingers are in Foggy’s hair, guiding him until his forehead is pressed against his knees. He can see her shoes, scuffed black boots with dirty laces. She paints her toes pink sometimes, he knows it. Foggy remembers the sight of her bare feet on the threadbare rug Foggy had brought for the apartment—was that the weekend Foggy moved in or after? He can’t pin the memory down, can’t examine it closely or pick it apart; it almost doesn’t feel real at all.

There’s other people coming closer, pressing in, and Claire’s hand squeezes at his shoulder even as she shoos people away. “It’s okay,” she says when he comes up for air, face hot and sweat collecting between his shoulders. “You okay?” She asks the second time around once Foggy’s capable of drawing a full breath, fingers at his wrist and eyes on her watch.

He nods. His eyes are wet.

He hasn’t had a panic attack like that since right before sitting for the bar, embarrassment churning in the pit of his stomach as he becomes increasingly aware of their fellow patrons staring at their table.

“Let’s get some air.” Claire says gently, talking Foggy’s elbow and leading him outside. Outside she eyes him carefully, and Foggy’s sort of afraid she’s been a secret mind reader all along and that she’s picking apart his brain right now but Claire just keeps staring at him patiently. It takes him a minute to figure out she’s waiting for him to talk.

“I’m okay.” He says, because if he says it enough, it’ll be true. He’s thirsty, but at least the dizzying nausea is already starting to fade. He’ll be fine.

“You should talk to Matt.” Claire says with an air of finality, like she’s washing her hands of this mess. Foggy doesn’t blame her for wanting to be done with it. Fuck, he wants to be done too.

The whole episode really puts a damper on the rest of their time together, their coffee cold by the time they head back inside.

Matt beats Foggy back to the apartment. He smiles when he greets Foggy, open and warm, and Foggy almost hisses “What are you doing?” but he already knows it would require more of a conversation than he’s willing to start right now.

He might have told Matt he could handle the truth, but he’s starting to think that might not be as true as he wishes it were. It reminds him of when he was a little kid, when he would wake up in the middle of the night, too afraid of what might be lurking in the dark to open his eyes even as he told himself there was nothing.

-

“We really help this guy? Or does he help us? Do we have his number?” Foggy asks in the checkout line at the Duane Reade down the block from the office where he’s browsing through the pages of the Bugle. There’s an artist rendering on page 3 of the daredevil (“Makes it sound like he’s gonna jump Snake Canyon on his dirt bike.” Karen gives him a funny look as his sense of humor goes underappreciated yet again). There’s a story about how he saved a school bus of blind orphans or something. Karen peers over his arm at the paper, makes a considering noise. The chip bags in her hands crinkle. “Yes, yes, and no.”

There are a lot more superheroes running around New York City these days, with Hell’s Kitchen acting as home for more than a few of them, which Foggy sort of remembers. What Foggy didn’t remember was that for some reason he’s been rubbing elbows with them. Life’s funny that way.

“So like, do we have a bat signal—or would it be devil signal? No, wait, that sounds Satanic—or does he find us? How does this business relationship work?” He tries to keep the right level of distant curiosity in his voice to keep Karen from going quiet. Daredevil is apparently on the list of things Matt thinks Foggy will find overwhelming, and one of the few Karen and all other shared acquaintances seem to agree on.

Karen glances down at her watch and then at the line of customers ahead of them. “You’re full of questions today.” She muses lightly. She’s a tougher nut to crack than Matt and Foggy’s woefully out of practice.

Foggy gives his best nonchalant shrug. “I just want to be ready in case we’re called on for our services.”

Karen gives him a look out of the corner of her eye, discrete and not entirely happy. “He doesn’t really make house calls.”

Karen’s phone chirps in her pocket and Foggy leaves his paper in order to hold her things while she digs it out. She taps out a quick response and Foggy doesn’t have any kind of evidence to corroborate the feeling, but he’s pretty sure he’s been talked about. “So,” Karen asks once she’s slipped her phone back into her pocket and before Foggy can pick up his line of questioning. “How are things with Matt?”

Karen is obviously not a woman to be messed with.

“Oh, y’know, fine.” Foggy sniffs. It’s very blasé. Karen grins magnanimously in response. Foggy frowns. “Has Matt said they aren’t?”

Karen starts plucking items out of Foggy’s arms. “Matt hasn’t said anything. You two are on full lockdown mode. It’s like pulling teeth over here.”

“Well now you know how I feel.”

Karen shakes her head. “I know this sounds hard to believe but there is no conspiracy in place. We’re just,” she looks a little lost, staring down at the bag of chips in her hands, “We don’t want you to get hurt. Neither of us…besides this is probably a conversation you should have with Matt.”

“Is Matt the head honcho of this operation? Or do you guys just think he’ll break it to me the easiest? Because if you think Matt knows anything about bedside manner you’re in for disappointment. Just last week he basically told me I was free to see other people.” And boy, hadn’t that been fun.

Karen turns to look at him, “Is that what was up with you guys last week?”

“Yeah. One minute we’re having dinner and the next thing I know he’s telling me I should feel free to see other people if it’s what I want.”

Karen’s eyebrows fly up. “Do you?”

Foggy grunts, picking up a sleeve of powdered donuts from one of the bins set up along the checkout line specifically for impulse buyers like him. “No—I, I mean,” he tosses the donuts back, “No.” He says again more emphatically. “How would that even work? Am I supposed to go out and pick someone up and then what? Bring them back to my place? ‘Oh don’t mind the man sleeping on the couch, he’s my business partner and best friend and, gee, we used to date before I got hit on the head and forgot about it.’” This line is never going to move. They’re going to die here.

“Things are just weird right now, y’know?” Karen nods because that’s what you’re supposed to do when your friend’s life is a disaster zone and there’s really nothing for it. “I feel like he keeps trying to give me an out.”

The line finally crawls forward half a foot. “Maybe he thinks you’re looking for one.”

Foggy doesn’t answer, picks up a box of animal crackers instead. He’d been pretty upset with Matt for offering, and maybe more upset with himself for not taking him up on it. It would have been easy to say, “Thanks man.” That doesn’t mean he would have acted on it. But what if it was supposed to be a two way street? What if agreeing meant Matt was free to look elsewhere too? Foggy’s not above petty jealousy. It’s good to know he hasn’t outgrown it.

“Maybe he’s looking for one too.”

Karen doesn’t bother to hide her eye roll. “Listen to me Foggy, I know it’s not my place to tell you what you should do about your personal life, but if it were I would tell you: you’re both being stupid.” The line shuffles forward another half inch. Foggy really hopes the people around them enjoy hearing about his shortcomings as a human being.

“Wow, I’m glad you’ve decided to abstain from commenting on my life then.”

Karen cracks a grin, dispels their earlier tension. “It really is for the best. Otherwise I’d have to request a raise. I can’t be pulling double duty as office manager and relationship counselor without adequate compensation. Which we probably can’t afford and then I’d have to sue, which we definitely can’t afford.”

Foggy laughs. He knows how to accept an olive branch when it’s offered. “If you ever change your mind I can recommend a good lawyer.”

-

“So was it this rough the first time around?” Foggy asks one night while they’re sitting in the conference room burning the midnight oil. Karen’s in the kitchen, rooting through their cupboards for something other than tea bags and Splenda, Foggy can hear her fruitless rummaging from here.

Matt sits back in his chair, hands folded at the back of his head. “Yeah, we had a view bumps. Karen likes to say if she hadn’t been framed for murder we would have closed shop in under a week. I think we could have made it at least three.” He grins at Foggy, the worn-in humor of an old joke brightening his features.

Foggy’s heard at least seventy percent of that charming story, knows there are pieces missing, reads them in Karen’s unhappy frown and Matt’s nervous fingers fiddling with whatever’s nearest. “And us? Did we have a few bumps too?” He gives Matt his best smile, tries to ensure it carries in his voice so that Matt knows he’s okay talking about this.

The topic has sort of been an elephant in the room since that first conversation over egg drop soup. Matt’s been so vague with all the details of how this happened.

He says there was a fight about the Fisk situation, that they’d picked themselves up and worked through their problems. Somehow they’d arrived here. Foggy’s poured over every scrap of information he’s been able to find about their work taking down Wilson Fisk but unfortunately there isn’t much to be found regarding the developments of Foggy’s personal life. Even his attempts to get information from his supposed friends hasn’t yielded as much information as Foggy needs. (“Sorry,” Karen said apologetically when he asked her, red-faced and mortified, “I wasn’t exactly there when it happened. But it was sweet. You said it was sweet, if that helps.” It doesn’t.)

And for all that Matt offered Foggy information freely, there’s something to the guilty look that settles on Matt’s face when Foggy tries to ask him about this that tells him it’s not a subject Matt likes to dwell on. They’ve fought before (about cleanliness and the application of sauerkraut on hot dogs and whether or not Foggy is allowed to be angry about how people treat Matt if Matt isn’t bothered by it) but something about the way Matt talks—or doesn’t talk—about this one tells him this fight isn’t anything like the others.

Matt’s face does this scrunch up thing it does when he’s considering multiple answers, and then he says, “Yeah actually.” There’s a puff of laughter at the end, like Matt never thought of it himself until now. “We were really bad at it.”

Foggy huffs a laugh, glancing down at his keyboard. “Yeah?”

Matt tilts his head towards the ceiling, balances his chair on its back legs. “Yes. On our first date, I um, I tried taking you to dinner and it, um, we spent the whole night talking about work. We were…nervous I guess. Then we went home.” Matt drops his chair back onto the floor. “Not together. We each went to our own homes.” Foggy looks up at that but even the yellowish lighting in the conference room isn’t enough to cover up the color that’s risen in Matt’s face. “What no good night kiss?” Foggy asks, feeling reckless—it’s safer somehow, to have this conversation here and not at the apartment, easier with Karen in the background and the paper covered table top between them—and Matt’s fingers go still at the top left hand corner of a file.

“Not that time.” Matt’s grin borders on damn right flirtatious.

Foggy gives a low whistle, tries to keep his heart from picking up against his will. “Sounds brutal.” He shuffles a few files around. Let’s the conversation rest for half a minute before curiosity gets the better of him. “How’d you manage to score a second date?”

Matt’s grin stretches wider. Foggy might mistake it for beaming in any other situation where it would not be a hazard to his health to do so. “You asked me actually.” Matt tells him, fondness over the memory it so thinly disguised Foggy feels full of a gut-wrenching need to remember he can’t ignore.

He clears his throat. “And you said yes? Even though the first one sucked.”

Matt bows his head, smile slipping into something smaller before it disappears from view. “You made a passionate appeal about the merit of second chances.”

-

It’s a perfectly nondescript Thursday when his mother marches into his office. Contrary to her accusations he has not actually been avoiding her. Or Dad. And he sure hasn’t been trying to withhold Matt from them. It was just so god forsakenly awkward the one time the four of them had dinner together after they came back from seeing Ruth. They’d been so visibly upset about the fire and Foggy’s injuries that he hadn’t wanted to make it worse by telling them about the whole ‘retrograde amnesia’ thing. Matt’s been frowny and disapproving about Foggy’s decision but since he has exactly zero legs to stand on in any sort of discussion about the importance of honesty, he hasn’t tattled on Foggy yet.

“Since you always seem to be getting on the train whenever I call you,” She says, once she’s done passive-aggressively giving Foggy hell as only a mother of three can, “I decided to come here in person to remind you that it’s your grandmother’s birthday this weekend and she is expecting to see you there.”

Foggy totally doesn’t sigh. Just barely. It still counts.

“This is going to be a disaster.” Foggy groans for the third time since they arrived on the subway platform. He’s flanked by Karen and Matt; because he figures the more people there are, the more he can use them to draw fire away from himself. Karen pats his shoulder consolingly. Matt sniffs delicately, rubbing at his nose. He’s been oddly quiet this whole morning.

Matt hates the subway. He complains that it’s loud and crowded and gross, which is all true, but it’s also the cheapest way to get to Queens. Foggy reaches down to take Matt’s hand in his, lays it in the crook of his elbow. Matt gives him a wane smile and Foggy really hopes Karen’s okay with carrying them both for the next three to four hours because neither him or Matt are looking too hot right now. “It’ll be fine.” Matt says softly and totally unconvincing, but Foggy appreciates the effort.

By the time they get to his parents’ place the apartment is already chalk full of Nelsons and Nelson spinoffs, kids running wild underfoot and adults closing in to greet them.

“Frankie!” His grandmother greets him, pulling him down with her soft, creased hands for a kiss on the cheek. She’s the only person in the world who is allowed to call him that, but Matt still grins playfully at him in response, waiting diligently to one side until Nan turns on him. “It’s good to see you again Matt.” She says, and Matt bends forward, accepts the kiss she presses to his cheek with a smile. She hugs Karen too, ushers them inside asking a hundred questions about the firm and the city and how things are going for them. She asks about Foggy’s knitting and Matt throws him under the bus by telling his grandmother that Foggy went to Bess Mahoney and learned how to crochet instead. Nan laughs at that at least. She rubs Foggy’s hand when she sees it, and he can feel himself go red. It isn’t something he likes to draw attention to. It’s mostly healed now, except for the occasional dryness and tightness that develops in his knuckles. The scars aren’t pretty but he tells himself it could have been so much worse, he’ll take a few scars to any of those alternatives.

People keep arriving and it isn’t long before Foggy gets himself roped into manual labor, setting out more chairs and helping his Uncle Iain set up a table in the living room, refilling plates of chips and trail mix and opening juice boxes for kids.

“Is that a robot hand?” One of the kids asks him when she accepts her juice box from Foggy (he thinks she’s his cousin Lloyd’s. Maybe.). Foggy flexes the fingers of his hand. “Yep. Like Luke Skywalker.”

Her eyes widen and she runs away calling out, “Uncle Foggy’s a robot.” Which isn’t even right but what can you do?

“You’re a robot now?” Matt asks drily when Foggy takes a seat beside him in the living room (they lost Karen to his cousins about half an hour ago. If he strains his ears he can almost hear them arguing about the World Series). Matt had been hovering up until the moment Mom had asked if Foggy could help with a few things. Since then he’s been situated on the couch, going through a revolving door of couch buddies, from his Aunt Cathy who thanked him for hiring Mick to a wayward four year old who kept trying to hit Matt with his own cane. Not that Foggy’s been checking in on him. Foggy slumps back, happy to be off his feet and out of the way of the crowd for a little while.

The couch is still a squishy corduroy monster under their combined weight; sends them slouching towards each other slowly, until they’re touching shoulder to hip to knee. Foggy thinks about napping on this couch after finals at the end of their first year of law school, waking up with Matt’s head on his shoulder, his glasses knocked askew and his mouth hanging open. It’s a good couch.

“I think the PC term is android.”

Matt laughs like the total nerd he is. He closes his hand around Foggy’s knee briefly, fingers squeezing, before he’s pushing himself up off the couch. He’s been slipping up like that a lot today ever since Foggy took his hand in the subway (a hand at the small of Foggy’s back while they navigate the room, his fingers over Foggy’s wrist before he stepped away). Foggy finds that he doesn’t really mind. “I’m going for cake.” Matt says, smile easy and affectionate, “Want anything?”

Foggy shrugs, oddly lighthearted despite the confusion buzzing at the back of his mind. “Surprise me.” He answers.

-

It’s drizzling by the time they arrive back in the city, a kind of fuzzy dampness that seems to coat everything, not falling out of the sky so much as it seems to just hover in the air. They walk Karen the three blocks to her apartment building. “Thanks for inviting me.” She says warmly when she hugs Foggy goodbye, and Foggy tightens his arms around her—thin and tall and sharp, Karen Page is steel wrapped in silk and Foggy loves her, he knows he does, it doesn’t matter if it’s left over from before or has grown on its own in the months since they’ve met, it’s still true. “Please, pretty sure my family would have turned me away if I’d shown up without you.” He teases softly, and Karen’s smile is bright, it washes over him in a wave of corresponding happiness.

Outside the sky has darkened significantly, daylight shrinking more and more with every passing day. The air is colder, damper, the clouds hang lower overhead. Matt tips his head skyward, “We should hurry.” He says, like he can hear the oncoming storm, but Matt’s always been a little bit of a weather wizard, though he says there’s no magic about it; that the atmospheric signals are all there for people to notice for themselves. “Sure, sure.” Foggy usually answers, because it’s fun to give Matt a hard time whenever the opportunity presents itself.

He doesn’t second guess Matt this time though, because even without reading into all of Mother Nature’s cues, Foggy’s pretty sure it’s going to pour. They start towards the apartment, Matt’s cane sweeping over the sidewalk and his hand secure on Foggy’s arm. They’re still a long block away when the sky opens up overhead, drops pellets of freezing water down on them. There isn’t really anything else for it but to half-run, half-stumble the rest of the way, leave a trail of wet foot prints behind them when they finally cross over into the lobby of the building.

“Okay, but the real question is how did you convince me to move into a top floor apartment in a building with no elevator.” Foggy huffs after the fourth flight of stairs. Matt stops abruptly, one hand on the banister, cane dangling in the other. “I’m pretty persuasive.” Matt says, shooting a sly smirk in Foggy’s direction and there is a hundred percent, no room for doubt about what Matt’s referring to.

And yet, because Foggy is can be an ass with the best of them, he asks, “Are we talking about your dick?”

Matt swats at him with his cane and Foggy throws his arm up to defend himself from the blow. Someone behind them clears their throat significantly, and Foggy really hopes their neighbors don’t know them well enough to know they’re supposed to hate the two dudes on the top floor. Foggy shuffles to the side to let the person pass them before they continue their thousand mile hike to the top floor.

They leave their shoes by the door to dry, walk in amicable silence into the kitchen to deposit the collection of Tupperware his family sent them back with. “I’m going to grab some clothes.” Matt says, words carefully edged with warning. “I’ll be quick.” Foggy stills, Tupperware of corned beef still clutched in his hands as he watches Matt make his way over to the bedroom.

Their bedroom.

It’s strange, out of all the shared spaces they’re accumulated they’ve somehow managed to avoid being in there together since Foggy arrived from the hospital. Foggy hadn’t wanted Matt living out of a duffle bag in his own home, had asked Matt if he’d like to put his things back where they were before he decided hiding them in a closest was the best way to reintroduce Foggy to his life. Yet whether by coincidence or design Matt usually grabs his things while Foggy showers, never crosses the threshold while Foggy’s inside. Matt’s clothes might be back in the drawers but Foggy’s had the bedroom completely to himself.

Foggy isn’t trying to sneak up on Matt, keeps his steps as natural as possible while he approaches. Matt’s already pushing his drawer closed by the time Foggy’s actually inside, clutching a sweatshirt in his right hand. They’re an arm’s width away from one another, and Foggy thinks it wouldn’t take more than a few steps to close the distance between them. Matt gives Foggy a tight smile before stepping to the side and right back out the door. Foggy draws in a deep breath. “Well that wasn’t awkward at all.”

Foggy’s skin is goosebumped and stinging with cold, and he has to rub his t-shirt through his hair to dry it somewhat. He throws on a sweater and flannel pajama pants he doesn’t recognize, shuffles out into the kitchen to put food away. Their refrigerator isn’t a desolate wasteland or anything but it’s never really packed either and there’s something nice about seeing it cluttered with food, something that makes Foggy think home.

(This is home, he realizes, stacking containers of left over cabbage rolls and broccoli salad, this is his.)

He’s just put water on to boil—it never fails to amuse him that they own a kettle, like they’re adults or something—by the time Matt wanders out from the bathroom. His hair is drying into an unruly mess a top his head, and he’s left his glasses off. He looks so young just then, standing there in too long pajama pants and an oversize sweatshirt.

Foggy makes a cup of coffee for himself, a mug of tea for Matt, adds a spoonful of amber honey to it and presses it into Matt’s hands, lets his palms rest over Matt’s fingers for a second before passing it off completely. It’s early still so they take their drinks to the couch, kick their feet up onto the coffee table and pick a musical at random off Netflix. “I remember this one.” Matt mumbles, slumping further into the couch. “There’re dancing penguins right?”

Foggy provides his usual advanced audio commentary for this one and, when the time comes, takes extra care to describe the penguins’ sweet dance moves.

The rain’s still going strong by the time the movie’s done, and Foggy pushes himself up, takes their empty cups to the sink. He glances over at the living room where Matt’s stretching his arms overhead. Foggy knows how this plays out. He says good night and Matt sleeps on the couch and Foggy sleeps in their bed and in the morning they don’t talk about it.

“We can share the bed.” Foggy says, and it’s easier to extend the invitation than he imagined it would be. Matt looks startled, though he hides it quickly, fidgeting with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. “The couch is fine.”

“The couch is terrible and cold and pointless when there is a big, warm bed with room enough for both of us right through that door.”

Matt blinks in Foggy’s direction. “You don’t have to—” Matt tries again. Foggy rolls his eyes, leaving the cups in the sink for tomorrow, makes his way back over to Matt. He takes Matt by the shoulders, makes sure to keep his voice easygoing when he says, “We’ve shared a bed before, Matty. I think we can share one now without it turning into a very special episode of Dawson’s Creek.” Matt looks so honestly conflicted, probably struggling with years of Catholic repression and his tendency to make things as difficult as he possibly can.

“You in Murdock?” He asks, still smiling to hide the nervous spike in his chest, squeezing Matt’s arms once before letting him go.

Honestly, Matt caves a lot quicker than Foggy anticipated, which is the biggest confirmation that the couch really does suck. “If you’re sure.” He says at the bedroom door and Foggy shoos him inside while he turns out the lights, double checking the kitchen a bit more thoroughly than is really necessary to give Matt time to get ready for bed.

He still standing at the side of the bed Foggy hasn’t been sleeping in, which figures, the blankets pulled back in his hand when Foggy goes into the room. “The couch isn’t that bad.” He says one last time and Foggy heaves a sigh, sliding the door shut behind him. “Shut up and get in bed Matthew.”

He clicks the lights off before he can psyche himself out, finds his way by the faint lavender light that bleeds into the room through the glass paneling of the door. The mattress dips beneath him as he sits but Matt’s weight is there on the other side to act as a counterbalance as Foggy lays down. “What happened to global warming?” Foggy whines, pulling the blankets up as high as he can without burying them both under, the quiet poking awkwardly at them both the longer they lie side by side.

Matt exhales a short laugh, shrugs beneath the blankets but doesn’t say much, lying on his back a good foot away from Foggy like he’s waiting for someone to pop out of the shadows in order to make sure that they’ve left enough room for the Holy Spirit. “Hey Matty?” Foggy whispers when he can’t stand the quiet a second longer.

Matt remains perfectly still next to him. “Yeah?”

“We have really nice sheets.”

It takes a long time for him to fall asleep.

-

When he wakes up the room is full of bleak grey light, and there’s still the faint drum-drum of rain against the windows, the shrill howl of the wind breaking against the building. Foggy lets his eyes slip closed, too tired to reach for his phone to check how much longer he has before Matt’s alarm starts calling him to church.

Matt. Oh, yeah.

Matt’s back is pressed against his side, warm and solid, his breathing coming in deep and even draws. He socked feet overlap with Foggy’s.

He cracks his eye open thought there isn’t all that much to see when he turns his head, just Matt’s dark head on the pillow, the shell of his ear.

Foggy imagines rolling on his side, curving around Matt’s back, draping his arm over his waist and holding him.

He doesn’t do it. But it’s easy to imagine. And god, that’s always been the problem hasn’t it? Even in the best of times things with Matt are never simple, no matter how much Foggy wants them to be. Matt is always something more, always a challenge and a gift and a friend and an asshole and a beautiful idiot. Matt is always so much and Foggy is full of him, there’s no piece of him left that hasn’t been changed by Matt in some way. It’s not like he never thought about it. Never this exactly, but it, about what it would be like to be with Matt. Foggy had been infatuated from the word go, and it had only gotten worse the longer they knew each other. But Matt had never expressed any interest, and their friendship had become a cornerstone of Foggy’s everyday life. It wasn’t even a conscious decision to move on because there had never really been anything to show for his feelings other than the decidedly warm and fuzzy ones that curled up in his stomach when Matt smiled or laughed or tore a debate opponent apart in class. It just became another every day thing, a part of life, until it was so normal it became secondary to the excitement he felt about the endless possibilities ahead of them.

Loving Matt is a constant state, and Foggy’s starting to think being in love with Matt might be one too.

He is so screwed.

-

It doesn’t happen like in the movies.

Memories don’t reel across his eyes like a home movie, don’t fall over his head all at once like a bucket of cold water all at once.

It’s hard to describe as anything other than remembering, which is both the most accurate and least impressive way of explaining what it’s like. Memories spring up at random, little things that Foggy would have never thought to miss until they’re there again (the color of the dinosaurs in their crawl-space of an office, the smell of the casserole Karen made them, the sound of Matt cackling up on the roof after a pigeon scared Foggy).

There are the ones that occur to him when he’s alone with Matt, when they’re sitting on the couch with dinner on their laps or in the conference room discussing a case. Or in bed (there is nothing quite like staring at Matt’s t-shirt covered back as he’s snoring and remembering the shift of those muscles, the strength Matt carries beneath his skin, under his hands. Awkward is now officially the title of Foggy’s forever unfinished autobiography).

He’s sitting in his office the day he remembers Elena Cardenas kissing his cheek, grime under his fingernails and plaster dust in the air, is caught so completely off guard by the tidal wave of emotion he doesn’t know which way is up for a minute. Pride and happiness and anger and affection and grief, all swirled together into a mess of raw feeling, churning inside him so quickly he has to close his eyes and cover his face with his hands.

“Foggy?” Shit. Matt has the worst timing. He listens to the irregular tap of Matt’s cane, the sharp clack of it against the side of his desk as he rounds it. “Foggy?” His fingers travel the length of Foggy’s forearm; follow it up to the protruding bone at his wrist.

Foggy blinks behind his palms, draws a deep breath before looking up at Matt. “Sorry buddy. I’m fine. Just a headache.”

Matt doesn’t look overly convinced. “Should I call Claire?”

Foggy snorts. “Dude, you seem to be under the misconception that Claire’s our personal physician.” Foggy shakes his head. “Don’t bother her, she’s probably at work, you know, the one that pays her. Or sleeping. After working her paying job.” He exhales hard, drops his head back into his empty hands. “I just need a minute.”

Matt touches Foggy’s hair, fingertips so careful it makes Foggy want to cry. Some more. Instead he leans into the touch, hopes Matt takes it as a sign to keep doing it. Matt does. He’s a good guy that way.

He tells himself it isn’t lying if he doesn’t say anything at all, which is bullshit, but honestly it’s all that comes to mind at the moment. It wouldn’t be fair, he reasons, to get Matt’s hopes up if Foggy’s memories are a scattered mess of disjointed pieces.

It’s been a week now since they started sharing the bed, though Matt doesn’t seem to be sleeping any better for it. He’s still prone to getting out of bed in the middle of the night and sitting out in the living room for hours at a time. Foggy doesn’t usually hear him leave, just wakes up briefly when Matt comes back to bed at some ungodly hour, radiating cold across the mattress. Foggy hasn’t woken up next to him since that first morning, Matt usually making breakfast by the time Foggy pulls himself out of bed. He was right when he told Matt they could share a bed without it turning into some kind of cable-TV movie. It isn’t quite a disappointment, because it’s not like Foggy invited Matt to bed with any kind of seduction plan in mind, but it’s something else. Like being a kid waiting for the bell to ring for recess except the bell never rings, it just scowls when the barista at the coffee shop four blocks over makes small talk with Foggy while handing over his morning pastry.

“Want to get out of here?” Matt asks, and it’s so abrupt Foggy has to look up at him. He looks, fuck, he looks exhausted.

“You inviting me to play hooky Murdock?” Foggy croaks, still aware of Matt’s fingers in his hair.

Matt attempts a grin for him. “Would you settle for lunch?”

Foggy doesn’t pretend to consider it. “If you’re buying I’m there.”

Matt nods, gives one last pass over Foggy’s head. “Deal. Want to text Karen? She should be done at the clerk’s office by now, she can meet us there.”

It doesn’t really solve any of their present problems but for thirty-seven minutes Foggy doesn’t think about them either. He’ll take what he can get for now.

-

Fourteen weeks after Foggy wakes up in the hospital he walks into Matt’s office and says: “What do we do on dates?”

It’s entirely possible that Foggy just downed a Monster and gave himself a pep talk that basically amounted to “He said yes before” before barreling across the reception area and shutting the door to Matt’s office behind him. But this game of relationship chicken has gone on long enough as far as Foggy’s concerned and he might not know what Matt’s not telling him but he does know Matt. Sweet, clueless Matt who never asks for what he wants unless it’s terrible for him (and not in a fun way heathenistic way either, but in a kneel-on-rice-repent-for-your-sins kind of way that makes Foggy side eye organized religion). The ball is completely in Foggy’s court on this one and if he doesn’t throw it directly in Matt’s stupidly handsome face he’s never going to catch it.

Matt’s hands come to a standstill on his screen display. “Huh?”

“Do we—do we still go on dates? Or is that window closed?” Foggy’s not sure if dating expires at some point in a relationship seeing as his longest one has been with Matt. Romantic and other.

Matt clasps his hands in front of him. “Sometimes—usually we grab dinner or drinks, uh, we’re sort of homebodies these days.” He seems embarrassed to admit it, but Foggy’s not entirely surprised. Foggy likes people and going out, sure, but he’ll take Netflix and pizza at home over bar hopping any day. Though, Foggy realizes, in light of this news, he’s pretty much been dating since day one.

“Well at least the company’s good.” Foggy jokes, which seems to put Matt at ease.

“Yeah, it is.”

Foggy rubs his hands together, coming to a decision he’s been ruminating on for weeks now. “Alright Murdock I’m picking you up from work at six and then we’re going for dinner. I expect you to bring your a-game.”

Matt laughs, a little disbelieving, but then it’s probably not every day your amnesiac boyfriend asks you on a first date.

-

“Okay, okay,” Foggy gasps, leaning against Matt as they make their way up the endless flights of stairs. He thinks he might be a little drunk. Which is sad considering he had maybe three drinks, max, but he also has to figure in the part where he hasn’t really been drinking in forever. Matt says he’s just getting old because Matt’s an asshole. And also a little drunk, clutching at Foggy’s arm and shushing him as he goes up the next step, cane cracking against the edge of it. “You shush man, I’m talking. Rude.” Foggy whips his hair back with a majestic toss of his head that almost sends him toppling into Matt’s back. “I need to know Matty, okay? I need you to be straight with me—” Matt giggles, pulling on Foggy’s arm until they’re on the same step again. “Okay you get that one, but whatever, stop interrupting me! Oh, eleven more steps.” Foggy hauls them up the next few steps, Matt still sniggering under his breath. “Last step.”

They reach the top landing, stumble off into the hallway still supporting one another’s weight. “I need to know man, did you use the line?” Foggy finally manages when they reach their door (oh man, their neighbors must hate them, they have way too many conversations in the hallway). Matt fumbles with his keys, feeling them out until he’s fitting the right one into the deadbolt. “What line?” Matt asks with an air of utmost innocence, but he’s smiling way too wide to sell it. Foggy slaps at his shoulder, partially to hurry him along the door opening process and partially because it’s there and slappable.

“You know the one man. You used to use it in school all the time. It was like your closing move!”

Matt taps his keys against his chin, makes a pondering sound. “A line, a line, what line?”

Foggy groans, sagging forward so that his head is resting on Matt’s shoulder instead. It’s a pretty talented shoulder. “Cut the crap Murdock, you know the line! You used to drop it all the time. Just reel ‘em in with your pretty-boy charm.”

“You think I’m pretty?” Matt asks gleefully. Foggy tries to head butt him in the shoulder and almost sends them both to the ground instead.

Matt finally gets the door open and they spill inside, Matt making his way down the hall while Foggy feels around the wall looking for the light switch. The apartment’s not really that dark, what with the billboard and all, so Foggy gives up his quest and follows after Matt before he can out maneuver Foggy’s question. “Permission to treat the witness as hostile?” Foggy calls out, following Matt’s silhouette as it disappears into the bedroom.

Matt guffaws. “Denied.”

Foggy hears Matt throw himself down on the mattress, can make out the shape of him, dark limbs splayed out across the bed, by the lavender light outside. “Too bad because I know you know what I’m talking about. I gave you so much shit about it on multiple occasions. It was an epically terrible line Matthew. A line like that can’t just be forgotten.” Foggy throws himself down next to Matt, pins one of his arms under him and knees him in the leg. Matt grunts but doesn’t try to get free. See this is why they call alcohol liquid courage.

“Foggy I really don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t the fog—”

“Finish that one Murdock and you’re back on the couch.”

Matt’s smile gleams in the low light, “Okay let’s see, was it, ‘I’ll assume the risk if you will’?”

The sound that explodes out of Foggy is breathless and ugly but god, a line that bad deserves no less. “Oh my god where did you get that?”

Matt doesn’t bother answering, voice remarkably steady when he says, “Maybe, ‘Counsel files a motion for change of venue…back to my place.’” It gets worse. “‘I’m a passionate oral advocate.’” Or better, Foggy can’t decide. He’s definitely reached that point of laughter where he’s not really making a sound and his stomach hurts. “‘Do you want to collaborate on some pro bono work?’” Matt asks the ceiling and Foggy manages to wheeze, “Ha, we really do do that. No points.”

Matt goes quiet for a second, probably flipping through his rolodex of terrible pick-up lines to continue this assault on Foggy’s ears, so Foggy seizes the moment in self-defense. “Oh my god, I can’t believe you’re making me say these words with my own mouth, but like, you used to get all doe-eyed and say ‘I like listening to the sound of your voice’.”

Besides him Matt laughs again, breathless, and they should have totally gotten drunk sooner. It makes everything better. Easier. “I plead the fifth.”

“So you admit it? You used the line on me!” Foggy throws his fists in the air and almost catches Matt in the jaw in his excitement. Matt bats his wayward arm away, rolling onto his side and dragging his arm out from under Foggy.

Foggy cants his head towards Matt, Matt’s features soft with laughter and the light coming in from outside—lilac and blue and pink. There’s something pensive to Matt’s face, and Foggy thinks, just barely, that maybe Matt’s going to kiss him. His stomach twists with low key anticipation.

He doesn’t.

“Hey Foggy,” Matt says instead, words slurred with laughter, curling over the smile that hasn’t slipped off his face, “I do like to listen to the sound of your voice.”

Foggy’s heart does a series of gymnastic moves worthy of an Olympic gold. His voice is higher than he’d like when he cackles, “You’re so full of shit, Matty.”

Matt laughs too, turns his face into the mattress and knocks his glasses crooked, sets Foggy off all over again. He’s starting to think it’s not really the booze that’s gone to his head at all, that it’s this, the giddy, bubbly feeling that wells up inside him whenever Matt laughs. The sound of it goes straight to Foggy’s head. “You’re gonna bend these and then I’ll never hear the end of it.” Foggy says, reaching up and carefully pulling the glasses off Matt’s face. He’d broken the last pair after taking an errant soccer ball to the face while walking through the park, had worn them all bent out of shape for weeks before finally deciding to invest in this pair. The metal frames are warm beneath his fingers when he sets them off to the side where neither of them is going to roll over them.

Foggy doesn’t know he’s going to do it until he’s done it, which is pretty much how he’s lived his life thus far, he doesn’t think he’ll be changing his methods anytime soon. But Matt’s there, still laughing over his own stupid joke, smile crinkling the corners of his eyes—and it hadn’t sunk in until just now how rare Matt’s smiles can be, the real ones and not the ones he gives because he thinks people want to see them, some kind of endangered species seldom spotted in the wild—and Foggy wants to. He wants to bridge the distance between them and press his lips against Matt’s and kiss him, like he used to think about doing when he was twenty-four and lovesick.

So he does.

Matt’s mouth goes slack beneath his, his stubble rough against Foggy’s skin and his lips chapped. There’s a lingering aftertaste of beer under Foggy’s lips, but the noise he makes when he finally seems to register what’s happening, thin and high and desperate, more than makes up for it. It’s like he comes awake, mouth parted on a muffled gasp against Foggy’s, and Foggy wonders if he’s trying to breathe or speak, isn’t sure Matt’s decided for himself.

He surges forward, mouth determined and hand strong where it reach up for Foggy’s face, holding him in place like he might slip away if Matt gives him an inch. Matt kisses like he does everything else, like it’s what God put him on this green earth to accomplish, like it’s the right thing to do, his mouth firm and steady and sure against Foggy’s. They’re coming at this in completely different ways; Matt making the most of the wildly unfair advantage of knowing Foggy.

Foggy’s no slouch in this department though, has his own fair share of kissing under his belt to know what he’s doing even if his hand is tentative on Matt’s arm and his heart is thrashing inside his chest.

Foggy pulls away and he’s a little surprised Matt lets him, his hand sliding away from Foggy’s face somewhat reluctantly, even if it does settle over Foggy’s shoulder.

“Huh.” He exhales, when he has breath enough to spare, and Matt’s brow furrows with confusion. “Huh?” Matt echoes worriedly. Foggy grins, flexes his fingers around Matt’s upper arm. “It’s nothing—just, you’re pretty good at that.”

Matt grins returns; red-lipped and smug, like the cocky asshole he is. “Yeah, you’ve mentioned that once or twice before.” Foggy doesn’t know about that, but he does know that he just kissed Matt and Matt kissed him back and it was strange and new and terrifying and awesome. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to escalate things from here, after all it’s been months now since Foggy’s been friendly with anyone other than himself while he’s in the shower. But for all that Foggy misses sex he’s sort of okay with leaving this where it is right now. There’s no world where kissing Matt is a disappointment.

Foggy still rolls his eyes on principle. “Don’t get ahead of yourself Murdock. I’m still not putting out.”

Matt sputters nervously, “What? I’m not, Foggy I—”

Foggy laughs so hard he thinks he might throw up.

-

Foggy thinks that in the Lifetime movie of his life, this is totally where the montage music kicks in.

Things are good. Almost sickeningly so.

The weather goes to shit but everything else holds steady. They have a stream of clients and while helping the Mrs and Mrs Ramirez draft a letter isn’t quite the action-packed law career Foggy had imagined, it’s good work. Some things even pick up. At home Matt and he continue their quasi-courtship where Matt pampers him with home cooked meals and terrible pickup lines and a bevy of other things Foggy never thought he’d enjoy as much as he does.

Alright that’s a bold-faced lie. There has never been a doubt in Foggy’s mind that he would enjoy holding hands with someone for no other reasons than because it was an option.

They put a moratorium on kissing in the bedroom, then amend it to an embargo on kissing in bed, then reach a mutual agreement to play it by ear.

(They play a lot.)

Foggy doesn’t think he’s made out with anyone like this in years, unrushed and without any kind of endgame in mind.

This Matt isn’t so different from the Matt Foggy knows. He smiles and laughs and drinks fancy beer. He mocks Foggy’s cooking and hates washing dishes and wears his sweatpants tucked into his socks when he’s cold.

But he also kisses Foggy’s cheek at night before they go to sleep, hums just a little before he pulls away so that it shivers across Foggy’s skin. He maps the scar tissue on Foggy’s right hand with careful fingertips, traces the ridges where the new skin has grown into the old. Once, in the hazy lilac-tinted grey hours before dawn, Foggy comes awake as Matt slips into bed, floats somewhere between sleep and consciousness, while Matt stretches out besides him. He’s almost slipped back into a dream (baseball and green grass and sunlight) when Matt takes up his hand with painstaking care. His lips are cold where they brush over Foggy’s scarred knuckles.

“Matty?” Foggy mumbles, but Matt just shushes him, sets both their hands down over Foggy’s stomach and buries his face in the crook of Foggy’s neck. “Go to sleep, Fog.” He whispers, words warm at Foggy’s throat.

Matt’s so cold but Foggy can be warm enough for both of them. He sinks back into sleep between one breath and the next without another thought.

The holiday seasons descends on them overnight, intensifies significantly even as the temperature continues to plummet. For Thanksgiving his parents fly out to see Ruth again now that’s she’s officially too big to fly. Foggy and Matt host dinner at their place, invite over just about everyone in their tiny circle of friends for what amounts to an orphans’ potluck.

Claire brings some kind of stuffing that’s pretty much an entrée in its own right, a mix of ground beef and root vegetables and seasonings that would have never found their way onto his mother’s table but that Foggy’s glad to have at his. The P.I. in his phone who Foggy now knows as one Jessica Jones arrives late with an impossibly tall guy who could probably break his hand without trying and a woman who looks vaguely familiar (“Is that Patsy?” Foggy mumbles out of the side of his mouth in the kitchen while he helps Matt get more plates out. “She prefers Trish.”). Luke gifts the table with a bottle of whiskey, sets it down next to the stack of pie boxes Karen brought with her. They’re well on their way to demolishing the obscene amount of pasta in cream sauce that Matt made when there’s a knock on the door and Marci on the other side of it. “Sorry I’m late.” She says, smile sharp and clearly communicating she’s not really apologizing, breezing right past Foggy and over to the circle of people amassed in their living room eating. “I brought sushi.”

Dinner is loud and hectic. At some point Foggy even forgets the lingering awkwardness that still creeps up on him from time to time when he remembers he doesn’t actually know most of these people. Matt relinquished his chair to Marci, and winds up sitting on the floor with his back leaning against Foggy’s legs while he talks music with Luke, and Karen’s flushed pink with wine and discussing one of Trish’s upcoming guests. Claire claims the last of the pumpkin pie for herself and proceeds to eat it straight out of the pie tin while she argues with Jessica about what sounds suspiciously like prime time television.

At the end of the night it seems like every single one of their dishes is piled in the sink and Matt’s already bargaining for drying duty (“I actually cooked. I should have immunity.”), all their friends gone but the apartment doesn’t feel any emptier. There’s a comfort to this type of quiet. “That was nice.” Foggy says, wrist deep in soap suds and hot water, “I mean, it would have been nicer if we’d thought ahead and bought disposable dishes.”

Matt mouth flickers into a fleeting smile, small but hopeful. “Maybe next year.”

-

Ruth’s text comes in a little after two o’clock a few weeks later, while Foggy’s trying to convince Matt and Karen that closing early to get drinks totally counts as an office holiday party.

The message reads:

Say hello to Zoe!!!

There’s a picture attached of a wrinkly, red-faced, miniature Yoda-looking person wearing an itty-bitty hat. “We’re uncles!” He calls out, switching gears as he rushes out into the lobby to thrust his phone into Karen’s hands. “Oh Foggy she’s beautiful.” Karen coos, and Foggy has to agree even if she does look a little like a Muppet. Matt comes out of his office too, benevolent grin on his mouth. “Ruth?” he asks, cutting the short distance to Karen’s desk.

“Nine pounds, eighteen inches, she’s still kind of red, but like a pinkish-red, like a sunburn before it turns really bad y’know? And she’s sort of fuzzy and squished-looking. Her face is all scrunched, and her eyes aren’t open. She kinda of looks like a deflated soufflé. But cute.” Foggy rambles happily, “Her name’s Zoe!”

“Ruth just sent you another message. It’s a picture!” Karen shoves the phone back towards him, and lo and behold, there is his niece in all her fuzzy, bald glory, gross little tag of an umbilical cord nub still attached where her belly button will one day be, looking unhappy with the world at large. Foggy describes it to Matt, earns one of Matt’s crinkled smiles when he gets to the part about her navel.

“Oh man, I think we’re gonna have to max out a credit card and fly out to there before Ruth teaches her to make fun of my most tender insecurities. She’s so tiny. ”

Karen turns towards Matt with an expectant look on her face, like she’s waiting for Matt to say something, but Matt just grins. There’s something uneasy beneath the reassuring curve of it, something that sets Foggy on edge.

Maybe kids are sore spot for them nowadays.

He knows they can be sort of overwhelming for Matt, but he’s never been anything less than kind to any of Foggy’s younger cousins, has graciously held his share of napping infants at Nelson soirées so that their parents can go do something baby-free. Foggy’s watched Matt chat with talkative four year olds on the subway and listen to her explain how airplanes work even though she was factually wrong. Besides, it’s not like Foggy’s asking Matt to give him a baby tomorrow. They haven’t even gotten to second base, Foggy’s not trying to start a discussion about parenthood.

Still. “It could be nice,” Foggy starts that night while they’re walking home, untucking his face from where he had it hidden in the folds of his scarf. The wind has died down some today but the air is still freezing, “Imagine it Matty, being warm. Do you remember what that was like?” Matt frowns, tip of his nose already turning red from the cold, his gloved hand tightening around his cane as they round a corner. “Vaguely.” He mumbles, distracted, squeezing at Foggy’s arm through his coat sleeve.

“We could head out after the holiday rush dies down, make a long weekend out of it. Sort of like a mini-vacation. Karen could use it. Fuck, we could use it. And you know Ruth likes you way more than she does me. She thinks you’re, like, totally dreamy.”

He waits for Matt to pick up the thread of the conversation but Matt doesn’t make anything more than a noncommittal noise, lost somewhere inside his head. Foggy stops trying after another block. A morose silence follows them the rest of the way home.

-

“I need to tell you something.” Matt says, jaw set and shoulders squared like he’s walking into the ring instead of their living room. He’s been squirrelly for days now, the sudden shift in his mood jarring after the general wave of contentment they’ve been riding on for the last few weeks.

Matt hasn’t been sleeping well again, getting up in the middle of the night and walking around the apartment. At first Foggy thought he was just frustrated by the bad weather that kept him from going out onto the roof during his worse bouts of insomnia, but the weather’s been relatively mild for days now. The one time Foggy had followed him out of bed he’d found Matt standing by his father’s poster, hands touching the surface of it. “You okay?” He asked, standing an arm’s length from Matt’s back, watching the line of his shoulders in the wavering light that spilled in from outside. Jack Murdock is a delicate subject, even between them, Matt offering up information about his dad in bits and pieces like he’s gauging how much of it he can trust to another person, as though he’s afraid that by sharing his memories of his father he won’t leave enough of them for himself.

“I’m fine.” Matt had answered, letting his hand fall away from the poster. Foggy might not remember everything but he remembers enough to know that ‘fine’ is just Matt Murdock code for ‘I don’t want to talk about it’. “I didn’t mean to wake you. You should go to sleep.” Matt had come back to bed with him, but he’d laid awake at Foggy’s side for a long while, too still and too tense, until Foggy had finally drifted back to sleep himself.

“Do we need to hide a body?” Foggy jokes weakly, closing his laptop and setting it on the coffee table, but Matt’s mouth doesn’t even attempt to come out of the thin line it’s pressed into, though he does shoves his hands in to his pockets.

“I love you.” Matt says, which honestly is so far out of left field Foggy didn’t even know it was coming; feels blindsided and a little scared if he’s going to be honest with himself. “And I don’t expect you to say it back or anything, because I know we’re still figuring things out and everything is…complicated, but I want you to know that. I do.”

Foggy always sort of thought being dumbstruck was a turn of phrase but oh, wow, it isn’t. “Matty.” He chokes out finally, “You’re not gonna try to release me back into the wild again are you?”

Matt shakes his head, “No I just wanted to preface what I’m about to tell you with that. You should know—that’s where I stand. And I need you to know Foggy, that I—I’m sorry. But that doesn’t mean anything if I keep making the same mistakes.”

Foggy doesn’t know what to expect following a statement like that but he sure as hell does not expect Matt to jerk his hands free of his pockets and yank at the hem of his shirt, pulling it up and over his head. His glasses get caught in the material of his t-shirt, fall to the floor with a clatter. Foggy bends to retrieve them, sits back up and finds himself face to bare chest with Matt. Holy shit.

Because Matt’s standing there, shirt still caught around one wrist, looking for all the world like a man awaiting judgement. Foggy knows what Matt looks like shirtless; you can’t share a shoebox-sized dorm room and one room apartments for as long as they did without the occasional state of undress. But where the Matt in Foggy’s memory was a lithe guy in pretty good shape this guy looks—lethal.

There are bruises across the expanse of Matt’s torso and sides, all in various states of healing, yellow and purple and a nauseating shade of green, patchwork over the scar tissue scattered across Matt’s skin. Foggy jumps to his feet. “What the fuck—how—who did this to you?” His throat goes dry. (It takes him back to a conversation long ago, their second year of school, the worrying stretch of days when Matt disappeared off the radar and resurfaced, quiet and tired and told Foggy sometimes it got too much.) He reaches out, places his hand on Matt’s shoulder. There’s a scar there too, angry looking and jagged, the shape of a fault line under Foggy’s palm. Matt’s shoulder tenses at Foggy’s touch.

Foggy catches the bob of Matt’s Adam’s apple when he swallows, “I did.” Matt whispers, his voice a brittle thing waiting for the shattering blow to strike.

Foggy forces himself to take a step back, pushes his hand through his hair, “There is no way you did this to yourself—Matt you look like someone tried to stick you through a wood chipper. Fuck, you look like someone has and not just once. So whatever you’re gonna tell me you better start talking Matt because I’m freaking out over here.”

Matt nods once, ducks his head and draws a deep breath, stands straight again. His face is devastating to look at but Foggy doesn’t look away.

Matt starts talking.

-

Matt sits on the couch, folds over as though his knees have given out, whatever strength was keeping his back ramrod straight while he stood in front of Foggy sapped dry. He doesn’t stop talking. It’s like a dam springing a leak, what starts as a trickle erupts into a flashflood, Matt’s words coming out quicker and quicker until Foggy has to take a seat beside him on the couch, touch his hand to Matt’s knee and tell him to slow down.

Matt talks about the accident he was in as a kid and waking up in the hospital and being able to smell the nurse’s lunch and the doctor’s cigarette and hear the scratch of his father’s jacket over his wrists. He talks about long night left waiting by the radio, listening for his father’s boots in the hall, touching his fingertips to the swollen, tender skin of his father’s bloodied face and wondering if the same devil was inside him. Matt talks about his father’s death, about lying awake in the orphanage on sheets that scratched like sandpaper, about the way hymns echo off stained glass and all the times he couldn’t be the solider someone told him he was supposed to be. Matt talks about loneliness and he talks about anger, he talks about all the ugly parts inside himself that Matt’s always wanted to hide from. “Be careful with the Murdock boy,” Matt spits out mirthlessly, and Foggy knows this one, he does, can already guess at the final image even if it isn’t entirely in focus. Devil.

The suit is hidden in the closet under the stairs, folded inside a duffle bag stored in a hidden compartment at the back (it’s his work. He knows it as soon as he pulls the panel lose, he made this for Matt, helped him hide this secret and break the law and hurt himself). He lays it out across the floor of the apartment, looks at it in silence kneeling on the floor beside it. Matt lowers himself onto the ground at his side, hands Foggy the horned mask and Foggy almost laughs, almost cries, almost runs away, but Matt’s still talking.

“There was a little girl…” Matt says, hand clammy where it covers Foggy’s as he takes ahold of the mask. Matt talks and talks and talks and Foggy kneels there, spellbound, listens to the impossible things Matt describes with the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen laid out before them, mind blank except for one thought: How could I forget this?

Afterward, after Matt’s run out of truths to share, they sit in heavy silence. “I used to think,” Matt starts, voice hoarse, a thin tired sound that doesn’t sound like Matt at all, “if I could just get another chance I would—I would do it all differently you know? But I didn’t. I haven’t.” Matt’s thumb rubs over the scarred knuckle of Foggy’s pinkie.

“The fight…the one you said we had about Fisk, it was about this?” It doesn’t really feel like a question even as he asks it. Foggy already knows. He looks down at the mask clutched between both their hands. The impression of it feels singed on his bones.

Matt’s face is tight, but he nods. Foggy stares at him, the angles of his face and the hard line of his mouth, the hopelessness that creases at the corners of his eyes. He can’t reconcile this man with the one who teases him for taking too long on his hair, can’t imagine how anyone could mistake him for the man the Bugle claims is without fear.

“How did I—how’d I take it the first time around?”

“Not great.” Matt’s laughter is a terrible sound. “Neither of us—no one handled it well. Myself included.” Another understatement if Matt’s description of events is anything to go by. Foggy’s stomach hurts now, imagining what it must have felt like to find Matt bleeding on his apartment floor, to find out that everything he thought he knew was wrong.

Matt chews his bottom lip, worries it against his teeth so hard blood rushes to the surface. “You could have told me.” Foggy says, voice rough, cold rolling over him as his heart picks up. (He thinks that Matt can hear it, beating away inside his chest, can distinguish every breath he draws and his stomach knotting itself into a snare, Matt can—and Foggy knew. Foggy knows. Foggy stayed.). “I knew, right? You should have known I could handle it.” Foggy must have believed that once even if he can’t understand how.

Matt flinches. “I wanted to. So many times, Foggy, you don’t even know. But every time I tried I just—everything went so wrong last time. And everything is so complicated now—you were hurt and—I couldn’t—when things between us started to—I just—I didn’t want you to look at me differently.”

The inappropriate part of Foggy’s brain immediately wants to retort that Matt has zero reference for how Foggy looks at him. Luckily his tongue is in no way interested in cooperating.

“That night, at the office,” Foggy starts; swallowing hard against the throbbing lump in his throat he thinks might very well be his heart. “It was you right? Or your alter ego? I didn’t imagine it.”

Matt shakes his head, squeezes at Foggy’s hand for a short-lived second. “I’m sorry.” He whispers, “I wasn’t quick enough.” Foggy wonders how long he’s been agonizing over this apology he couldn’t give while Foggy was in the dark.

“You could have told me.” Foggy says again, words shrinking in his mouth. All these months relearning his life, he thought he would feel differently when he finally found out what Matt was keeping from him.

“I’m sorry.” Matt repeats again, and Foggy knows Matt will spend the next hundred years apologizing if he thinks it’s what Foggy wants to hear. And there’s a part of him that wouldn’t say no, and another part of him that thinks he should go. He should grab his things right now and leave. And it would suck, it would hurt, it would mean leaving Matt and leaving their friends and this life he thinks of as his own, the life he’s worked for even if he can’t remember all of it, and he’s so fucking mad he can’t breathe for a second. He’s angry at Matt for doing this and angry at Karen and Claire and anyone else who knew and didn’t tell him. But most of all Foggy’s angry at himself, stupid Five-Years-Later Foggy and his stupid choice to pick Matt over everything Foggy thought they believed in, for letting Matt do this and getting his hands as dirty as he could even if there’s never been a drop of blood on them that wasn’t his own. ‘How could you have been so stupid, man?’

He glances down at the mask and at Matt’s hands over his own uneven patchwork skin, Matt’s fingers uneasy and trembling against his own.

Oh.

Because it’s Matt, he thinks to himself. The anger and the sheer arrogance that guides his bloody fists as he tries to beat an unfair universe into submission, its part and parcel of all the rest of him, one in the same with the parts of Matt that believes in making the world a better place for other people, the part that wants to protect those he loves even as he tries to protect himself. And maybe Foggy isn’t in love with him, not yet, but he still believes in him, in the strength of Matt’s convictions. What’s common sense in the face of that?

Foggy lets the mask fall from his hands. Matt’s face twists, fear engraved in the lines around his mouth. Foggy’s breathing hitches, something wet and uncomfortable caught in his chest, but he pushes pass it, reaches up and cups the back of Matt’s head. Matt shivers under his hand. Foggy leans in and presses a kiss to Matt’s damp cheek, feels him startle beneath his lips. “Thank you.” Foggy breathes, and he wonders if super-hearing can help Matt dissect all its different meanings, if he can hear ‘Thank you for saving my life’ and ‘Thank you for telling me’ and ‘Thank you for trusting me with this’.

He rests his forehead against Matt’s temple, exhales hard. “I’m still going to be really pissed for a while, okay?”

Matt draws in a shaky breath. “Okay.”

They stay on the floor a little while longer. When they’re ready, they get up.

Chapter Text

Matt’s hands are freezing.

“Can Daredevil wear mittens or would that ruin his street cred?” Foggy asks, teeth chattering as he wiggles away from Matt’s icy fingers. Matt grins, the shape of it pressing against Foggy’s shoulder, teeth barely scraping across Foggy’s skin. “I’ll take a poll next time I go out, see what the verdict is in the court of public opinion.” Matt says breezily before shamelessly sneaking his hands back under Foggy’s shirt. Foggy yelps. “Hands off Murdock or I’m gonna—” Matt barks a laugh, as aware of Foggy’s complete lack of threatening material as Foggy is, slips his hands out from under Foggy’s shirt before performing an impressive roll that ends with Foggy pinned beneath him. “You’re a dirty cheater Matthew. What would Thurgood Marshall say?”

Matt just grins down at him, fingers slowly starting to warm but still too cold for comfort where they tuck into Foggy’s sides, knees bracketing Foggy’s hips as he drapes himself over Foggy like a living blanket. He lays his head on Foggy’s chest, hums contently under his breath like some kind of overgrown cat basking in a sunspot. “Comfortable?” Foggy asks, feeling Matt’s fingers leech body heat from his skin, warm little by little until they’re almost tolerable.

“Very. Thank you for asking.”

Foggy rubs his hand over Matt’s back, naked warm skin and muscle, over the slippery-smooth texture of the occasional scar. He manages to draw a sigh from Matt, who goes a little heavier atop him. Foggy wonders what Matt feels when Foggy touches him, if the texture of Foggy’s scarred fingertips ever sets him on edge like the sight of it does Foggy, a constant reminder of what’s happened. As if either of them could ever forget.

“You can’t actually sleep on top of me buddy. I’m gonna roll you over and I can’t promise it’ll be back on to the bed. You know how forgetful I get, can’t be trusted to remember if I’m supposed to go left or right.”

Matt harrumphs, pinches at Foggy’s side, but makes absolutely no move to get off. If Matt weren’t so oppose to Foggy’s overall happiness and just caved on the whole pet thing, there’s not a doubt in Foggy’s mind that Matt would be a cat-person. Vain, little peacocks hungry for attention and liable to bring gross things home in exchange for affection. Dead mouse, corrupt land lord. Yep, Matt was totally a cat-person in another life.

Matt gives a sleepy exhale, turns to deadweight on top of Foggy. He radiates a surprising amount of heat for a man with icicles for hands. He isn’t actually uncomfortable either, his weight reassuring, anchoring Foggy—to the mattress and the moment and them. It’s nice. But if they fall asleep in this position Foggy’s going to feel terrible tomorrow and Matt will get a crick in his neck and complain about how his knees hurt. It’s really for both their sake’s that Foggy practices some of that mediation Matt’s been teaching him, gets his breathing steady and his pulse level, waits and waits and waits until the moment’s right. Then he dumps Matt’s ass over onto the mattress. “Sorry babe, but you weigh a ton.”

“I don’t know why people think you’re the sweet one.” Matt grouses, before whining about how cold his side of the bed is. “It would be warmer by now if you’d just put in the time instead of trying to use me as a human heating pad.” Foggy reminds him none too gently, pulling the blankets straight where they’ve been flailed and ninja-rolled into disarray. “And I am the sweet one. Or at least I’m not the one who punches criminals in the face in the name of justice.”

“Motion to strike.”

Foggy chuckles. “Shut up.”

The blankets settled Foggy moves towards Matt, who happily lets Foggy press against his back, slots their legs together and pulls Foggy’s arm around his waist. Matt Murdock: Little Spoon All-Star. Foggy will never recover. Matt cranes his neck once, plants a sloppy kiss on Foggy’s jaw. “Good night.” He says, hand finally warm where it covers Foggy’s on his stomach (Foggy doesn’t trace the shape of the scar there, but he thinks he almost has it memorized, can picture it behind his closed eyelids, has reacquainted himself with the feel of it beneath his fingers).

“Good night, buddy.” Foggy says, pressing a kiss to the back of Matt’s head.

They won’t stay like this through the night. Matt sleeps with eerie stillness, claims it’s a side effect of almost twenty years of mediation. Foggy thinks it’s it probably a self-preservation instinct, his body keeping still even in sleep to prevent worsening the various and varied wounds inflicted on Matt on a weekly basis. But Foggy will shift in the night, rolls away and turn over and wake on the other side of the mattress. It’s still nice, however, long it lasts.

Matt drops off quickly, he usually does on nights like this, but Foggy fights off sleep for as long as he can. He can’t hear Matt’s heart beat but he can follow he rhythm of Matt’s breathing, his stomach expanding and contracting under their linked hands even after Matt’s grip has gone slack. Foggy watches the flickering lights of the billboard, one color melting into the other (“It’s like the world’s biggest lava lamp.”) until his eyelids are too heavy to keep open. A hundred thoughts pass through his head—coffee with Claire tomorrow before he meets Matt after Mass, the recipe he wants to try for their dinner with Karen and the number to the Greek place in case it sucks, whether he’ll have time on Tuesday to swing by the yarn store after the courthouse and whether it’s ever cold enough in Texas to merit an alpaca wool scarf and Matt, and Matt, and Matt—and follow him into sleep.

-

The End