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Foggy considers himself a reasonably intelligent person, but he’s aware that there’s a lot he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know all the state capitals or what, exactly, the purpose of an eyelash curler is. He doesn’t know how the sky can suddenly open up and pour forth an army of alien monsters to slice their way through his city. He doesn’t know why good people like Elena die and the scales never seem to tip the other way no matter how hard he pushes.
But he knows Matt Murdock. Or at least he thought he did.
*
“You’re Foggy?” Claire asks when he opens the door. She doesn’t say it the way people usually do when they meet Matt first and Foggy next. Oh, you’re Foggy, they say, like Matt’s mentioned him before. You don’t look like I pictured you at all.
Whatever that means.
But Claire didn’t know who he was when he called, and it’s clear Matt’s never mentioned him. It’s a stupid thing to be mad about, with - with everything else. But he is.
When she sees Matt sprawled on the floor - Foggy was afraid to move him - she gives him the most purely fed-up look Foggy has ever seen on a human face. Which sucks, because Foggy can’t hate her now, and God, he wants to.
“Can you get the light?” she asks. Foggy flips the switch but nothing happens and they both sigh. Matt’s lightbulbs are burned out half the time, because of course they are - why would Matt need them?
Unless he does. Shit.
Claire puts the first aid kit down on the floor next to Matt, who twitches a little at the sound but doesn’t open his eyes. “Help me get his shirt off,” she says. Her tone is brisk, no-nonsense, and Foggy’s glad, because without her slightly impatient calm he’s pretty sure he’d be breathing into a paper bag right now.
They cut Matt’s shirt off, but they still have to move him around some to get it off of him. He makes a small noise, a whimper like a wounded animal as his shoulders roll back, and some of the gashes in his torso, the deeper ones, start bleeding more freely. Foggy bites his lower lip until it hurts. The air is thick with the smell of blood and between that and the alcohol it’s frankly a goddamn miracle he’s not vomiting on the floor right now.
Claire gets to work, snapping gloves on, uncapping bottles, threading needles. Foggy kneels just out of reach, Matt’s ruined shirt a twisted bundle in his hands. It’s some kind of weird material, like workout gear but not, and it’s slick to the touch. Unless that’s the blood.
The gorge rises in his throat and he pushes it back down, breathing through his mouth.
Matt starts fighting back when Claire goes fishing in the jagged hole in his belly - making sure it’s clean, Foggy guesses, though he’s really not sure. He’s not awake, really, but he writhes, loose fists coming up to block her. “Hold him!” she says, and Foggy drops the shirt and puts careful hands on Matt’s bare shoulders. His skin is cold enough to startle.
Matt fights harder as Claire probes deeper, thrashing on the floor, his mouth open and soundless. “I said hold him,” Claire snaps, and Foggy moves in to put his weight into it, spreading his fingers across Matt’s shoulders. Matt’s strong, surprisingly strong, even semi-conscious with half his blood on the floor, and Foggy really has to lean into it to have any hope of holding him in place, hanging over Matt’s head, his open mouth, his eyes squeezed up tight against the pain.
Which means he has to watch.
He thinks about closing his eyes as Claire matches the torn pieces of Matt’s skin like a jigsaw and pulls heavy, decisive stitches through them, but if she can bear to do it - if Matt can bear to feel it - Foggy can watch. After a while Matt stops fighting and Claire quickly checks his pulse, but he’s just sunk into a deeper stupor or something, because she goes back to what she was doing with only a faint line between her eyebrows.
Foggy sits back on his heels and wipes whatever’s making his hands sticky on his thighs. “I thought you were just a booty call.” So, okay, he’s kind of a douchebag when he’s clinging to the edge of a panic attack.
Her eyes flick up to his, unimpressed, then back to her work. Her work being Matt’s body. “You thought wrong.”
“Sorry. I mean, sorry for...sorry.” Foggy kind of wishes he was still holding Matt because then at least he’d know what to do with his hands. “This is...kind of a lot, you know?”
She smiles a little, but her tone is bitter when she says, “You have no idea.”
And that stings. “I’m his best friend.”
One shoulder goes up and back down. It’s barely a shrug. “Okay.”
“How do you know him? I mean, no offense, but who even are you?” Foggy asks. He can hear his voice getting louder and doesn’t bother to stifle it, even though he knows it’s not Claire he’s really mad at. “How come you know about all of…” He gestures. “...this?”
Claire looks up now, tossing her hair back over her shoulder. She doesn’t even look angry, and Foggy feels like a child for trying to bait her.
“Look,” she says. “I don’t know you. You say you’re Matt’s best friend, fine. That’s probably true. But if he didn’t tell you about any of this, then I’m not going to do it for him. And if you want to know why he didn’t tell you? Ask him when he wakes up. Not me.”
Foggy opens his mouth, then closes it. Opens it again. “I’m going to go wash my hands,” he says, and gets up.
*
They get Matt on the couch and covered in a blanket, and then Claire leaves, taking her first aid kit and all of Foggy’s potential answers with her.
So now he’s sitting on the windowsill of the trashed apartment, studying his best friend. From this angle, passed out on the couch that Foggy picked the color for because Matt couldn’t - because Foggy thought Matt couldn’t - all he can see is the top of Matt’s tousled head, and a suggestion of a huddled form under the blankets. It could be the view from Foggy’s old dorm room bed, with Matt sensibly asleep while Foggy played video games instead of writing papers, or from their first rat-trap apartment after school, when they could only afford a one bedroom.
Instead, the floor is strewn with splintered wood and broken glass from...from something, and Matt is covered in stitches. And Foggy has no idea what to do now.
He could clean up, he supposes. The broken glass. The bloody gauze scattered around the couch. The fucking mask. His mother was shocked when he got into the habit of picking things up off the floor after a lifetime of comfortable slovenliness, but he hadn’t had a choice. A stray book or pair of socks Matt couldn’t see could mean a broken neck. Learning to be at least marginally tidy was a small price to pay for Matt’s friendship.
But if Matt can backflip off a roof or whatever, he can pick up his own damn gauze. Foggy’s got enough bloodstains on his clothes already.
Matt shifts in his sleep and the blanket slips off his upper body, practically down to his waist. Foggy’s half-standing before he catches himself. It’s instinct, after all these years, to look after Matt. No, he never tucked him in like his hands are itching to do now - Matt’s neither helpless nor a child - but guiding him, looking out for obstacles, narrating for him… These are ingrained in Foggy, like triple-locking his apartment door or loving the Yankees. Like breathing.
Except - Matt never needed any of that, did he? He just pretended he did, for whatever fucked-up reasons are bouncing around that fucked-up head. Letting Foggy read signs aloud; warm fingers on Foggy’s elbow; that whole face-touching debacle. Was he laughing at Foggy the whole time? Or was it deeper than that, darker? Was it all part of a plan to tear through Hell’s Kitchen years later in blood and fire? To slaughter cops and blow up buildings and God only knows what else?
Is Foggy’s best friend a murderer?
Matt makes a soft noise and Foggy thinks he sees him shiver. “Keep him warm,” Claire said. “He might go into shock,” Claire said.
He might have killed dozens of people. He definitely lied to Foggy, to everyone, for years. Foggy shouldn’t give a shit if Matt Murdock freezes to death. He turns and looks determinedly out the window, staring at the glow of the billboard across the alley, hoping it’ll burn the image of Matt’s agonized face from his retinas.
A minute later, he gets up and pulls the blanket back up over Matt’s shoulders. He’s always been a sucker.
*
He watches the news footage of the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen fighting the cops on his phone five times, six times. It never makes any more sense. How can that be his best friend, moving like that? How can that be anyone real, outside of a martial arts movie, with wirework and stuntmen and shit?
He knows Matt’s dad taught him how to box, but that wasn’t boxing. And his body - Matt has always been fit. Foggy has known that since college, from every time Matt came back from the showers in just a towel, every time Foggy studied the line of his back or the dip above his hips with rising heat in his cheeks, secure in the knowledge that Matt didn’t know Foggy was looking.
Unless he did know, and Foggy locks that thought down as hard as he can, because he has even less idea what to do with that idea than any of the rest of it.
But now...mostly when Claire was stitching Matt up Foggy was looking at his injuries and trying not to throw up, but with his head hanging less than a foot over Matt’s bare torso it was impossible not to notice that Matt has, like, a six pack. And his arms do that slightly veiny thing that only Thor and the really jacked guys at the gym Foggy’s been “too busy” to go to for eighteen months have. And under Foggy’s hands, under the goosebumps and the blood, Matt was all coiled power, a strength Foggy never suspected from Matt’s cautious way of moving, from his gentle fingers on Foggy’s elbow.
It was also impossible not to notice the scars, still pink and fresh. How long has Matt been doing this? How badly has he been hurt before?
How could Foggy not have noticed?
*
Foggy splashes cold water from the sink on his face and shakes his hair back. No. He’s not the shitty friend. He’s not the one who’s been lying to Matt for...for however long, who’s been telling Matt to his face to work within the law and then going out and...he can’t even think it.
Foggy likes to think that he has a pretty solid moral compass, but he knows perfectly well that Matt’s always been his magnetic north. Without Matt, he’s at Landman and Zack, feeling guilty as he beats the little guy on a technicality and soothing any pricks of conscience with liberal applications of money. With Matt, he’s poor but pure, using the law to help people like Karen and...and Elena. Or trying to.
Anyway, he’d never have had the courage to walk away from Landman and Zack without Matt. Matt’s always been the guy who knows what’s right and does it, no question, no hesitation. And despite his griping, Foggy’s known from week one - maybe from day one - that he’d follow Matt’s righteous crusade straight into hell.
So maybe it’s fitting that he’s been following the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen this whole time.
Maybe that’s what makes him maddest, in the end. Because if he can’t believe in Matt, what else is there to believe in?
*
The light’s changing; it’s nearly dawn. Foggy’s stomach growls, but there’s nothing in Matt’s fridge but beer and a stale heel of bread, and nothing’s open at this hour. He’s out of drunk and well into hungover and he’s sure spending the night staring at Matt’s bloody face through the darkness hasn’t helped his head.
He’ll wait until Matt wakes up. He’ll get his answers, and then…
And then what? Call Claire again, or a doctor? Call Karen? Call the police?
No, he can’t call the police. Not now and maybe not ever. They could charge Foggy as an accessory, or Claire, or even Karen - and besides, if Matt’s been beating up on criminals, the worst place Foggy could put him is in jail with them.
But that’s how this ends, isn’t it? He’s a suspected cop killer. The whole force is looking for him, and once they find him… If Matt doesn’t get himself killed on the streets, he’ll get himself killed behind bars. Either way, he’s looking to die even younger than his father did.
Forget losing his faith in Matt. This is the part that makes Foggy the angriest.
Matt stirs and his eyelids flicker, and Foggy knows he’s waking up. From the little gasps he’s making, it sounds like the pain is coming back along with consciousness.
Good.
Foggy stands up and heads for the kitchen. They’ve got a long talk ahead of them, him and Matt, and it’s not going to be be pretty. That’s fine - Foggy’s tired of waiting. He’s ready for some damn answers.
But first, he’s going to need a drink.