Chapter Text
“I'm sorry,” Matt says to Claire, trailing behind her with the cane he'd thought bent before now twisted at such a sharp angle that it keeps catching on corners and feet and snagging against every crack in the sidewalk. He feels like a broken record. Like the repetition is wearing the groove out into something warped and crackled, a parody of its original power, but it's all he has to release any of the sickly regret and self-hatred stewing in him, the reservoir sinking a little deeper and wider with the passing of every Godforsaken day.
He picked a fight right after sitting through an entire Sunday sermon about turning the other cheek. If he wasn't ready to damn himself to Hell before he thinks having the gall to laugh at this self-made irony might do it.
He stumbles into to the negligible privacy of the nearest alley and lets go of her hand so he can brace himself against the wall, hold his tie to keep it from hanging in the way, and retch. Half-digested bread, turkey, and cheese splatter the ground, close enough to his shoes that he knows they'll stink of bile for at least a week. A couple more hacks and his stomach's blessedly empty again but the sick is thick in his nostrils as his panting turns to hyperventilation, his burned throat constricting, lungs shriveling in his chest around the physically painful beating of his racing heart, muscle and aorta clenching like a fist gripping tight to all his fear as he remembers the inane yet disproportionately wrenching loss of the leftovers, the missed appointment, the unblocked punch. The who are you. Stupid, all of it, but even as he thinks so he's going numb, shivering, as if the cold is radiating out from his very core.
Useless. Worthless. Selfish. Careless. Stupid. Weak. Nobody.
And other assorted synonyms for Matt Murdock.
Claire is rubbing his back, far enough away so as not to smother him, her face averted to pretend at preserving some scrap of his nonexistent dignity until he's done purging, but she starts to draw away to give him even more space as she recognizes his symptoms before he shakes his head, the motion sending his perception spinning, and, shuddering, presses the line of his spine back against her hand.
“This all right?” she asks, apparently just to be sure, and he nods again, chokes out an affirmative.
“I'm sorry,” he whispers, after another moment. He's not sure he's speaking loudly enough for her to hear him, has to form the words carefully with his bitten tongue. “I'm sorry.”
“Do you want me to call someone?” she asks, steady and soothing.
His breath hisses and stutters when he sets his incisors against his lower lip. “F— Foggy.” Foggy's seen Matt have an attack like this before, way back. Won't be as shocked as the others.
“I'm not leaving you, I'm right here,” she says, as she pulls out her phone. “I'm right here.”
I didn't ask you to be, he wants to say. Fuck off, he wants to say. Don't ever leave me, he wants to say. He says nothing. Works on slowing his pulse and breathing, centers it all in his abdomen and expands that space of calm to the rest of his body, bit by bit.
“He's not answering,” Claire relays as she cuts the dial tone short, the subsequent soft clicks of the burner phone's buttons beneath her thumbs. “I'm leaving a text.”
Matt feels himself slip a little before clawing back his self-enforced serenity. He's stopped trembling so much and the world has solidified enough that he can spread himself out, cast around for a distraction. There's a child, maybe five years old, playing with wooden blocks in a waiting room up the street. The wood, old and painted smooth, clops and clatters reassuringly as the kid stacks it up into the four walls of a roofless building, the churn of the spare blocks echoing dully in their plastic bin when the child digs around for just the right addition.
“It's fine,” he says. “I think it's passed.” The second surge of adrenaline is already flushing out of his system, leaving him drained and exhausted though the jittery electric crackle of anxiety is still darting in his veins, nibbling at his edges like hungry minnows seeking a way in.
What are those freshwater fish related to barracuda? Pike, he thinks. Swift and toothed and insidiously invasive.
“I thought I— thought I could shake it off, with the fight,” he says, and it's surprisingly hard, still, to keep his teeth from chattering, his words from slurring. The bitemark sliced into his tongue is still oozing more or less freely, the fast gummy clot of the scab breaking open at the slightest movement, too fresh and wet and the injury itself too deep for it to hold. The blood is starting to drown the acid taste of bile, cloyingly thick. “Or.”
Or what? He'd headed a first one off at the pass only to succumb to a different one barely minutes later? Either way there had been no reason for such a reaction. Much less reason for him to give in to it.
“I take it this wasn't your first panic attack?” Claire asks.
He laughs weakly, straightening. “No. But they aren't often.” He's managed to make it whole years without suffering one, in the past. He's usually more attuned to his body, if not his emotions; is generally able to tell when one's coming and avert it either by way of meditation, or by punching something, expending the buildup of energy as anger before it can reach critical mass by itself and turn on him. Exploding on his own terms, so to speak.
He does so often enough even without duress.
“Matt,” Claire says, and she gently tugs him around, draws him into a hug, he with the awkward length of his broken cane in one hand, her with the compact carapace of the flip phone clutched in hers. Her hair falls over his face when he tucks his head against her neck, smelling of vanilla shampoo, and her skin of the mild sweetness of coconut butter, and of a clean waft of baking soda and iodine and cotton, of freshly-sliced citrus and bell peppers.
“I don't want to go to them,” he murmurs, and in a quiet confession like this, held and supported and already displayed as pathetically as he ever is in front of her, a nerve exposed to the incurious weight of air by painstakingly peeled-back skin, he almost doesn't feel anguished admitting it. Almost; but anguish is by its definition extreme, in whatever capacity.
Yes, he'd promised them. He'd promised he'd return to them all they wanted. But how long until they realize they've invested in stock doomed to failure? How long until they turn on him, or until he turns on them? Hates them in a way he is unable, for once, to set aside? Bites the hand, instigates a beating.
He'd promised to try. He hadn't said for how long. Hadn't said that he'd keep going if they were the ones to give up. He hadn't made them promise to to do so, after all. They were apparently the “sane” ones here. The ones who get to dictate the terms, responsible and adult. Whereas they see him as, what? Some petulant danger to himself, barely qualified to care for himself, barely deserving of agency. Someone in whom they're so unbelievably eager to foster dependency that they're practically tripping over themselves to lure him in and put him at ease and tie him down with all the gushing reassurances they can think of.
They're so insistently opposed to the idea that he doesn't deserve them. Maybe they're right. Maybe they're the undeserving ones.
“No offense, Matt, but the universe has been pretty straightforward in its hints that it's maybe better for you to go to them than to go it alone.”
A spark of that earlier fury rises in him, smoldering low and choking, and spills from his mouth before he can rein it in. “They don't really care. So why the fuck should I?”
Her arms tighten around him in a vice of surprise before she releases both him and her breath in an equally slow, deliberate exercise of mindfulness. He steps away as soon as there's slack enough, his reproach rapidly fading into the familiar fear; he doesn't want her to tell them. They can't know about this.
If they know they'll really leave him after all.
But isn't that what he wants? What the fuck does he want? What do they want?
What do they want of him?
Claire begins to rub her hands together as though to warm them, but the friction she's producing isn't nearly adequate, the methodical motions too constrained. “What makes you think they don't care? Have they said something?” Concern, protectiveness, and a bit of premature anger on his behalf. The same shit Matt always inexplicably inspires, whenever he isn't eliciting eminently more fitting revulsion instead.
“No. I can just tell.” He gives what would have been a loose shrug had his shoulders not been so tense. “Call it a hunch.”
“Hunch” doesn't do the intensity of his misgivings justice, but his emotions always seem cataclysmic and he has nothing besides those feelings informing his viewpoint, anyways, so “hunch” fits about as well as anything. Maybe Claire will be able to understand with it framed in such a way, given that the first time she'd met him she'd helped him purely on the basis of mere hearsay and gut instinct. She might, just possibly, tell him he's right.
She's watching him intently, her eyes flicking only rarely in their sockets. Fixed on his face. He can't quite read her reaction beyond the concern despite how closely he's focusing on her, every obvious tell coolly suppressed as she considers him. When he starts to fiddle with the strap on his cane handle he hears the smooth, liquid clicks of her eyes shifting against her lids in the dry cold, presumably downwards, to his restless hands, and then up again.
“Matt,” she says, firm and even. “It's all right to trust them. They want to help.” Heartbeat indicates truth, or at least what she believes to be. Currently.
He clenches his jaw, winds the strap around his index and middle fingers until the blood flow is trapped there, barely, sluggishly pushing through past the second knuckles, holds it until they go a touch numb and puffy. Unwinds it, the intricate, flexible network of veins filling out in a rush and tingling all the way to the beds of his fingernails. “You don't get it,” he says.
“What don't I get?”
“You—” he waves an arm out, expansive and helpless and ultimately sullen. “I— I just know, all right? You don't get it, they don't get it, but I do. I just do.”
“What don't we get, Matt?” she asks, relentlessly reasonable.
“I—” he stops briefly, disorganized thoughts flitting through his head. “They're acting like me. Trying to support a lost cause and not admitting that it is.”
“And acting like you is a bad thing? Because... your causes are all lost ones?”
“No,” he says, stung, because he's trying to use the logic they always apply to him against them, not have it turn around and bite him in the ass anyways no matter which way he tries to direct it. “I mean that they won't admit anything.”
“The way you won't?”
“I don't have anything to admit,” Matt says, again banishing the niggling doubt that he's being laughably hypocritical. “I just mean they think I do, but they're the ones hiding something.”
“Hiding what?”
She just keeps asking, and the more he tries to explain the more he feels his argument crumbling around his ears because they can't actually be hiding the disgust he knows they must harbor towards him; there would have been slip-ups for him to catch, conversations overheard. He has super-senses which preclude secrecy of any such magnitude in others, and he would have caught more than what could possibly be construed as a cutting undertone in a joke directed his way, more than a pause after he's asked a question which leaves him certain that he's fucked up and that they despise him before their blithe reply comes after all.
They can't actually be lying to him, are hiding absolutely nothing beyond being conduits in and of themselves for every single insecurity which makes him its home.
Unless.
Unless he's simply even worse at reading others than he thinks, or they're even better at playing him than he knows to guard against.
“I don't know,” is what he says to Claire, harsh and desperate enough that he senses someone hesitate on the sidewalk outside the alley before seeing his cane and glasses and the circumspect distance he's maintaining between himself and Claire and moving on. “I don't know what.”
“Look,” she says. “Hear me out, here. Is it possible that there isn't anything being hidden from you? That they really are trying their best to help, for no other reason than that they care about you and want you to be okay.”
Matt scoffs. “There's always something,” he says. “If not now, then eventually.”
“But maybe not now,” she says. “You're maybe scared, all right? And you're getting a little paranoid.” There's a hitch in her breath which suggests that the “a little” was a last-millisecond addition but she pulls it off almost indiscernibly nonetheless.
“I'm not paranoid,” Matt protests.
“You have 'a hunch' that your friends don't give a damn, and only a hunch, but until they admit it they must be hiding it. Or hiding something worse.”
“Exactly,” Matt agrees fervently, his need for validation outpacing the realization that she was paraphrasing him ironically. There is a pained moment of silence wherein they both await Claire's correction in chagrined resignation.
“Matt, that's— that's kind of paranoid,” Claire finally says, with another hesitation undercutting the pitying leniency of her modifier.
“Kind of,” he sighs, falling back onto empty concurrence as the last of his stamina abandons him. Deciding, in essence, to lie. Again.
As always.
Claire heaves a sigh as if girding herself, deep and soft and compassionate. When she exhales he can put together an image of her breath as it drifts along the air currents to reach him, is barely able to track the contrast of clouded steam and carbon dioxide as it billows out, satiny and incrementally denser in the thin, crisp chill as it swirls along the city draft to eventually mingle with his own, roiling like an insubstantial ghost of suffocation pillowed, discarded, melding, before his face, all of it easier to discern with such a great disparity of temperature. “I have something to say,” she says, “something I've been thinking over as a likelihood for a long time, and I want you to listen. Is that all right?”
Matt smooths his tie as he nods, reaching up to adjust the knot, synthetic silk catching on his callouses. Undoes his top shirt button. The blood all over and a bit below his collar is already drying, wrinkling and tightening the cloth in crusty splotches. It'll set. Leave a stain.
“I think you have it pretty damn hard. And you make it hard for people around you. You go back and forth between trusting too much and too little, caring too much about some things, too little about others. About yourself. Like you exist in extremes.”
He swallows thickly, his head ducked so his Adam's apple brushes uncomfortably against his loosened collar.
“But I don't think it's your fault, Matt. Not always. I think it's just another... problem you can't help but have.”
“Something inside me?” he says, fragile amusement papered over self-flagellation, over born wrong, born evil. Born with the devil inside.
“Something called a personality disorder,” Claire says, and Matt flinches and tugs at the knot of his tie in surprise, holds his breath for a few seconds as he then fumblingly rips it away from his neck, causing his previously oxygen-deprived brain to go lightheaded, the ground beneath his feet and the rough alleyway walls all subtly tilting and swaying.
“I don't— there's nothing wrong with me,” he says, choking, stepping back from her, because it would be the worst sort of disingenuous to pounce upon this suggestion and cling to it like a drowning man to a raft of reeds. He isn't drowning. He can't take this proffered excuse and fold it over himself as a shield from culpability. His misdeeds don't stem from some sort of disorder. They can't. They're his. And he's fine.
Well. He's a fucking piece of shit, but. Other than that.
He's fine.
“I don't mean it like that,” says Claire, but Matt interrupts her before she can complete her point.
“That's what a disorder is. It's a mental illness. I'm not sick, Claire.”
She sighs again, this time sharply, at the word “sick,” crosses her arms and then drops them. “Try this. What if, all those times you're blaming yourself for acting out, or feeling shitty, and you're saying to yourself 'there's no reason for me to behave this way, why am I like this?' What if you did have an answer? What if there is a reason?”
“I know why I'm like this,” Matt says, stolidly ignoring the fact that he'd asked himself why he was such an asshole loser countless times before, and had in fact been doing precisely that barely more than a minute ago.
Claire stands still for so long, looking at him, that Matt almost begins to fidget.
“If you're so sure a devil is a part of you, drawing you off the right path, making you make your own life Hell,” she says, inexplicably and terrifyingly incisive, “why wouldn't your devil be a disorder?”
He opens his mouth. Shuts it.
Realizes that the sun must have finally broken through the clouds, weak rays of warmth reaching straight into the alley, alighting on the nape of his neck, his turned-out wrist, lessening the starkness of their humid breath but still too cold to threaten the frost or the modest banks of dirty snow piled in the sheltering shadows.
Another sigh, quietly regretful. Tired. The rustle of her coat and the scrape of her eyelashes rubbing against fine, thin, sleek skin as she drags a finger against a closed eyelid, stretching pliant, delicate layers of subcutaneous fat and gossamer muscle over slick, spherical collagen, pushing it back into the socket.
He remembers how as a kid he used to press the heels of his hands against his eyes until he'd seen phantom blossoms and sparks of color which lingered in his vision, how the the way watching the sun would imprint a dark spot, a localized, temporary blindness of royal purple and blue and bruise-black upon the retina, flipping to brilliant neon upon a blink, quickly fading. Wonders if being able to pinpoint these minutest of bodily sounds, these disturbingly, subversively intimate displays of expression manifesting within the physical system of the vividly gory, overwhelmingly complex human machine, is the direct opposite. Wonders if he'd still trade it in for the comforting tricks and illusions and shallow joys of superficial, unenlightened sight, when he can barely reach an understanding of others even when he's a walking, talking, breathing invasion of privacy, as he is now. His very existence so intrusive and yet so very fucking fallible he feels like a miasma. A dripping corruption, sliding away from any sense of self-containment or responsibility. From healing.
He swallows another thick mouthful of freshly-shed blood.
“I have an errand,” Claire says. “Please. Walk with me.”
~~~
He drifts in her wake all the way to the bodega near her apartment. The bell atop the door chimes brightly when they push into its warmth, the cramped aisles of cans and bags and boxes currently empty of other customers, and the kid behind the counter looks up from his phone to say, “Hola, Clai—” before trailing off in blatant shock, mouth agape and the flow of air from his throat breaking from an interrupted speech vowel into a sort of punched-out huff.
Recognition. He recognizes Matt.
“Hi, Santino,” Claire says, and switches fluidly to fluent Spanish. “You remember our friend from the dumpster?”
He's that kid from the night he met Claire. Had seen his face when Matt was dumb enough to lift his mask in a semi-exsanguinated haze and then pass out again before the kid had fetched Claire and helped her lug his unconscious ass into her apartment. Later helped Matt and Claire lug an unconscious Russian mobster to the roof before making himself scarce and presumably flying under the radar from thereon out, Matt's secret safely kept to himself.
Santino laughs in disbelief, confounded surprise transmuting to giddiness, his high, curly ponytail sending the light chemicals of off-brand, ostensibly floral-scented hairspray wafting before the heavy heat blasting from the radiator behind him when he shakes his head, offsetting the pencil graphite and pen ink smudged on his fingers and the pleasant tingle of chili powder clinging to the hand-knitted wool of his homemade sweater, the weave lumpy and bare of tags or seams but lovingly crafted, the yarn sliding softly over the stiff vinyl of whatever spiky graphic design was printed onto the t-shirt he wore beneath. The spilled spices were about a day old beneath the minerals left over from the unfiltered tap water used to wash it out and leavened with mellow hints of baby powder, formula, cornmeal, and mashed banana: a young child in the family, a little sibling or cousin he maybe babysits while doing his homework. No, there's too much ink, a touch of acrylic paint caked beneath his nails, and a notebook and charcoals are squirreled beneath the counter along with the used textbooks; he's an artist as well as a high school student, his hands fittingly steady when he sets his phone down on the counter despite the racing of his pulse. “Sí,” he says. “What's he doing here? Is that blood? He's bleeding, isn't he?”
“Not much,” Matt mutters to himself, and Claire snorts and elbows him.
“He got into a scrape but he'll live without medical intervention this time,” she says, heading to the freezer section in the back. “A bag of frozen peas isn't going to go amiss, though.”
“I don't need anything,” Matt interjects, following Claire's lead both in direction and in language, steps squeaking on the linoleum. Feels like a jerk move to just ignore Santino's presence and pointedly continue in English, even if he's passing him by without a second thought to chase after Claire and Matt's best attempt at emulating her melodious accent is less than stellar.
Behind him, he senses Santino twitch in additional surprise at Matt's voice, leaning over beside the cash register to watch him with not-so-subtle intrigue and a touch of apprehension. First time he's seeing the cane and glasses, or hearing him talk more than a few growling monosyllables or gasps of pain. The blood spatters are probably not confidence-inspiring, either.
Matt catches Claire's arm as she's swinging the freezer door closed with a pneumatic hiss, the muffling thump of the rubber seal, the cut-off crinkling of plastic packaging stirred by changing pressure, and a final, desultory slap of stale, artificial cold which pales in comparison with that of the outside. “Why are we here?” he asks her, low, unable to keep the accusation from his tone.
“”It's the only place I know nearby which is open on Sundays and I needed groceries,” she says sensibly.
“And... Santino?”
“He works here, it's just a coincidence. Put these on your face. I'm going to buy them anyway.” The peas are unceremoniously shoved into his hands.
“I can tell where they've been and there's no way I'm placing them against my mouth,” says Matt, feeling rather waspish.
“Are you worried about Santino?” Claire asks, shifting gears as easily as she had between Spanish and English. “I wasn't sure he'd be here but I know him well enough that I figured it didn't matter if he was. He's a good kid.”
Claire must glance behind him at Santino because the kid straightens suddenly and looks away with a reedy whisper of air blown between puckered lips, like he's flirting with the idea of signaling his innocent indifference by way of whistling. “I know," Matt says. "If he was going to try and uncover my identity I think he would've tried to do so before we just happened to run into each other again by chance.” And the true damage was done far before this, anyways.
Claire got him off the sidewalk and out of the public eye. Took him somewhere familiar to her, where there was likely to be a person she trusts, and whom she knows can be trusted with Matt. She'd taken him where she was already planning on going. It only made sense that this would have occurred.
Despite all of this, it takes every last bit of regained emotional energy Matt's scraped together on the walk over for him to keep himself from feeling betrayed. He'd followed her here, after all. He again has no one to blame but himself.
And it's not like he's going to ruin the kid's life just from stopping by the bodega where he works.
It's all right.
“Tell me, if something's wrong,” Claire says, and he dips his head in acquiescence. He thinks he'll be able to.
He always thinks that, before the dread curdles his communication skills and kills the right words dead in his mouth before they're even born.
Good Lord. He is just on a fucking roll with the negativity today.
Another smack of refrigeration hits him as Claire retrieves a pair of tall soft drink cans and a pint of... milk? from behind a different door a bit away, and he actually flinches, pietistically appalled, when she promptly cracks the tab on one of the cans and passes it to him, the frozen peas relegated to being pinned against his chest with one hand as he accepts the drink automatically, the cane strap looped around his wrist with its crooked length dragging lackadaisically behind him before he can figure out a better alternative.
His fingers close around the instantly-sweating cylinder of aluminum and he takes in the whiff of aromatic moisture drifting sinuously from the cool depths of the container.
Ginger ale. To settle his stomach.
“Now you're just coddling me,” he says, biting back some prim comment criticizing the opening of goods prior to purchase.
She shrugs and snaps hers open as well, taking a smug slug right before her burner buzzes and then keeps buzzing with an incoming call. She swallows hastily and tucks the milk beneath one arm so as to answer it. “Foggy?”
“Yeah, it's me,” Foggy says. “How's Matt? Is he there?”
Matt's turns away and lifts the ginger ale up to hide the resentful pull of his battered mouth. The paper-thin metal edge of the hole cuts into the fresh bruising and the carbonation and the mild tang of the ginger stings his tongue when he sips at it, clumsily enough that he slops some down his puffy chin, re-wetting the dried blood and sending coagulated flakes dripping down to itch over the soft, more thickly stubbled flesh below his jaw. He must look a mess.
His stomach does actually settle a little, though. Maybe.
“I don't think he feels up to talking, right now,” Claire says.
“What happened? Are you both okay? Were you there?” Questions blasting rapid-fire through the tinny speakers, Foggy's voice reduced to its shrillest aspects over the sub-par connection. Or maybe it's the frantic concern making Matt grit his teeth.
Speaking of which. He painfully curls his tongue before his incisors and sucks them clean of what blood he can, washes it down with another sullen gulp of ginger ale. What was that he'd said to Foggy, before, about blood between his teeth? Did this also count as ironic? As a self-fulfilling prophecy? It's funny either way, he supposes.
“Some asshole apparently muttered something unsavory. Matt walked over to him and picked a fight. It was just a couple blows, the whole exchange barely even lasted a few seconds. We're both fine. Matt's fine. He won.”
Matt scoffs and sets about chugging the rest of his drink. Even something so simple, something to do, steadies him. All he has to do is stand here and finish the can.
“He isn't hurt?” Foggy presses. It's odd, not being able to hear Foggy's heartbeat, his surroundings. Just a single, disembodied aspect of him. Like he only exists as a figment. An isolated facet, fractured.
“He bit his tongue, but—” Claire takes the phone from her ear to gesture him closer and he obediently opens his mouth for inspection, lets her set the backs of her fingers against his cheek to nudge him where she wants, firm and gentle.
A touch of blood rubs onto her upon contact, perhaps not even enough to be really seen but enough to be felt when wiped away, smearing stickily over the residue of coconut butter she uses to keep her skin from chapping what with how often her job requires her to wash and disinfect her hands. She releases him without noticing it.
“—it'll heal fine on its own,” she finishes.
The peas clatter and grate like so much gravel when he forgets he's holding them and makes to grab her elbow, halts with the bag of peas drooping sadly in his hand and the mangled, dangling cane angled awkwardly beneath. It gets her attention anyways.
“Don't tell him about the panic attack,” he murmurs, equal parts implacably declarative and imploring.
She pauses. Turns and takes a step back to press herself flush against him, the side of the milk carton bumping into his arm as hers slides into place beside his, and he relaxes against her at the wordless reassurance.
“We're all fine,” Claire repeats. “Just thought you guys should know what happened.”
“Ask—” Matt begins, on some thoughtless, morbid impulse, and then catches himself. Takes another swig of his ginger ale to shut himself up and buy a few precious moments where he can still reconsider and dismiss it all, the can light and hollow in his hand, already drained to the dregs by way of distraction. Wishes it'd been alcohol he was imbibing so he'd have something to blame for this idle, terrible decision. Then makes the plunge. “Please ask him if he'll research possible disorders.”
Her heartbeat does a little kick, and she leans more firmly against him. “Uh, Foggy. Would you mind researching personality disorders for Matt?”
A long stretch of silence, broken by an eventual indrawn breath. “Sure, yeah, anything,” Foggy says, with a sort of intense neutrality, like he's being overly careful not to let loose a savage torrent of avid curiosity. “But, uh. Anything in... particular?”
Claire turns to face him, leaving an opening for Matt to protest, cautiously, mercifully offering him ample time before saying, “I'd start with borderline personality disorder.”
Matt thinks he's heard of it before, but. He might be confusing it with something else. Isn't sure. He doesn't know what this means.
He's not sure he wants to.
He's not sure why there's a trembling, awful hitch of hope climbing up his throat, thin and fragile as a fresh-sprouted shoot of grass.
“Yeah, I will, I'll get right on it,” Foggy says.
Matt crumples the empty can in his fist and breathes.
~~~
It turns out that Santino's been collecting some of the old canes Matt had been discarding every time he had to suddenly run to the roofs. It was kind of a hobby between him and his friends. They'd been meaning to donate them all if they reached a count of fifty without tracking down the owner or owners who'd lost them, and he senses Santino's abashed surprise at being asked to fetch one from the back room by Claire after she pays for her things, has to wave off an embarrassed apology for not realizing and getting one for him earlier as he's trading Santino the broken cane for an old one. Matt's not sure who's more flustered, right up until Claire nicks a napkin from the coffee station for him to wipe some of the blood from his face and he categorically concludes it to be himself.
Claire hugs him again before they part ways outside, strong and warm, lifting herself up on her toes so she can hook her chin over his shoulder.
She tells him she's proud.