daredevilkink | Prompt Post #4

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Prompt Post #4

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"The Incident", the real estate agent called it. With a capital I.

"Is that what we're calling it now?" Matt asked, and Foggy couldn't blame the woman for snapping her answer back at him.

The Battle of New York had changed everything. For everyone. The entire world had watched as the neighborhood Foggy and Matt had grown up in was nearly leveled by alien invaders from a portal that reached to the other end of the universe. Watched as supermen, heroes in suits of armor and unfrozen from WWII, saved the day. How could it not have put everyone on edge? How could it not have created a strange new world order that seemed to permeate every aspect of life in the city?

Personally, Foggy remembered very little of that day. He was grateful for that, since the brief screaming headache and sense of impending doom he had experienced just before blacking out had been painful enough. He couldn't bear to think about what it would have been like to have to sit in the locked-down dorm room and watch the events unfold on television, to not know that Matt was trapped in a darkened and crowded subway car or that his sister was cowering under a restaurant booth listening to death and destruction happen around her.

But Hell's Kitchen's loss was turning out to be Nelson and Murdock's gain. Foggy shook his dark thoughts off and attempted to haggle, and the agent continued selling them on the run-down, cramped office space. She was right. It was a good deal. It didn't make Foggy any more okay with Matt deciding for both of them though. He chuckled as Matt said they'd take it, and engaged his new partner in another round of their usual argument over what kind of clients they planned on taking. At this point, Foggy only did it for fun. He knew Matt wouldn't listen to him, and he didn't particularly mind. But one of them should at least try to be the voice of reason.

Sometimes, Foggy just didn't understand Matt. For all that he could read Matt's stronger emotions, the intense periods of anger, depression and helplessness that frequently bubbled up underneath his calm exterior, the man could be maddeningly obtuse and withholding when he wanted to be. And right now, Foggy could tell that there were things that his friend was keeping from him, things that were motivating his actions that Foggy could only guess at.

Why had he offered to take Karen Page's case when the woman had admitted to them that she had no money? They were a new practice. Now was not the time for the two of them to be standing up for the little guy. Now was the time for them to be establishing themselves with the medium-sized guy, someone who could help them build a reputation, gain stability, and keep the lights on. Foggy had known that Matt was serious about only defending innocent clients, but they needed to at least charge them. It was crazy to Foggy that Matt couldn't see that. And that he was so convinced that their client was innocent in the first place.

From the moment Foggy had met Karen Page in the police interrogation room, a wave of emotions had swept over him that his suppressants hadn't been able to tamp down. Strong emotions. Ones that told him immediately that there was so much more to the woman than anyone knew, more than she was telling. And none of it was good. Of course he would never tell Matt that.

"There's something not right about this case," Matt said. "I can feel it."

"You can feel it?" Foggy asked. Matt had been saying that a lot lately. Foggy was getting frustrated by Matt's feelings, especially when there was clearly more to them than he was saying. But the thought of confronting him about it made Foggy feel like a hypocrite, and so he kept his mouth shut.

"All right," he said, "I'm just gonna say this once, and we can move on. You don't necessarily show the best judgment when beautiful women are involved, Matt."

And that was true. Matt didn't even try to deny it. Foggy had come to Matt's rescue in that respect on more than one occasion in the past and, for all that he complained, he had done it happily. In a lot of ways, life had hardened Matt. But Foggy knew that, for all the ways that his blindness and his upbringing had made him have to be tough, deep down Matt was soft. He had too big a heart, and it was squishy like a stress ball. Foggy was always careful with it, but too many of the people Matt had let near it had squeezed it so it oozed between their fingers and it broke Foggy's heart every time. He didn't want Karen Page to be another person who let Matt down.

But Matt needed Foggy to back him anyway. And so he would. He always did.

Later, as Foggy dug into a great meal served to him by an innocent woman and filled with virtue, he reflected on the fact that following Matt, and all of his strange feelings, somehow always ended up being worth it in the end.

Foggy knew exactly why Karen was still in the office so late. How could he not? Her fragile emotional state didn't seem, to him at least, to be all that well-hidden. Foggy was certain that even someone without his abilities must be able to sense what she was going through.

Although given that more and more emotions had been slipping past his barriers lately, he also sometimes wondered if it really was just him. The thought of it made him go cold.

As he accompanied her to Josie's, he felt her terror, her deep sense of mistrust but also her naivety. Her admirable but ultimately wrongheaded determination and stubbornness. But primarily, he felt her resignation and cynicism towards a world that seemed determined to beat her down. He couldn't fault her for that. He'd felt it before too. He knew firsthand exactly how much darkness, loneliness and isolation the city that never slept had to offer. It was why he took the suppressants, why he was now taking almost triple the dosage he had been on as a teenager.

But it brought out his protective instinct. It was one thing for him to have to feel it, for it to be his curse, and another thing entirely for others to have to deal with it. So he did what he always did. He tried to make it better.

And if that meant drinking the eel, well, so be it.

Foggy loved Matt. So much. Too much. If Karen brought out his protective instinct, Foggy didn't know what to call the instincts and feelings that he had related to Matt. Or the feelings that Matt had related to him. Foggy just knew that both sets of emotions were more intense, more overwhelming than anything he had ever conceived of even before he began taking his suppressants. He also knew that he wouldn't trade them in for anything.

So when he felt Matt start to pull away, when he started to realize the potential scope of the secrets Matt was keeping from him, that the man was hurting, he didn't know how to handle it. When Matt stopped picking up his phone, didn't come to the door when they knocked, started having to explain away cuts and bruises, Foggy didn't understand. And he was afraid to. So he upped his dosage of suppressants again, and chased them with alcohol. Because what the hell else was he supposed to do? He felt lost.

Mrs. Cardenas was dead. That poor woman, who had genuinely (stupidly) put her faith in Foggy. She was dead and it was all his fault.

Foggy was furious at himself. Matt had slowly drifted further and further away from him, and he had no idea why. Karen was amazing, and Foggy could feel himself falling for her, but there was also something dark and mysterious about the woman that he knew was dangerous. And Hell's Kitchen, the neighborhood he had grown up in that felt like home, now seemed unrecognizable to him. Karen was right. For all that he tried to pretend that it wasn't true, it turned out that the city was full of dark corners, back alleys and creeping shadows that he'd never noticed before. He'd worked so hard to create an emotional distance between himself and the world, and it turned out that it hadn't helped. He was as naive and soft-hearted as anyone else, and just as susceptible to tragedy.

And so, for the first time in as long as he could remember, he wanted to feel everything he had coming. All the pain. All the grief. It was masochistic, he knew, but he was so sick of the dull fuzziness, his increasing inability to feel anything for himself even as he feared feeling too much for anyone else. So he stopped taking his suppressants. Cold turkey. A very, very bad idea.

It meant that when he knocked on Matt's door, drunk as a skunk, and when he was sobered up by the site of his best friend, the man he loved, laying dying on the floor in front of him, he couldn't handle it. He couldn't handle anything. It was all he could do to dial the right number after Matt took a swing at him, all he could do to sit silently while a stranger stitched Matt up and try not to vomit at the site of all the blood.

When Matt woke up, when they finally talked, he felt raw, exposed like a nerve.

At first, he was angry at Matt. So angry, a burning rage that he hadn't felt in years. But it was tempered, because the emotions coming off of Matt were impressively desperate, wanting, and terrified. The terror was particularly acute. He was convinced that Foggy would leave him. That the confession would drive him away. He was so full of love, devotion, but also determination and self-loathing. What was Foggy supposed to do with that? It wasn't as though he had been entirely honest with Matt over the years either.

So Foggy refused to give in to the emotions, even as he was confronted for the first time with the full force of them. He listened patiently, quietly, to Matt's explanations. He threw the facts back in Matt's face, called upon his skills as a lawyer, his reason and rationality, to help Matt understand what he was doing. Fell back upon the comforting logic and lack of emotion inherent in the law to make his case that what Matt was doing was wrong.

But then Matt told him the story of the little girl and her father. And Foggy couldn't help but understand exactly where Matt was coming from. And it made him sick to think about.

Foggy remembered laying in his bed at ten years old, and being overwhelmed by the sadness of the suicidal woman who lived in the apartment above them, and the lonely isolation of the elderly woman the floor below who had no family and whose only contact with the outside world was a Meals on Wheels volunteer. Remembered the beatings that his neighbor two doors down used to inflict on his wife, on his son, and the helplessness and quiet seething rage that his victims felt. The wounded pride and grandiose arrogance of the man hurting them. He remembered the way that, over time, he had learned how to distinguish between the different kinds of pain that humans could experience. Learned to be able to pull the betrayal of adultery apart from the betrayal of a friend's gossip, the fear of terminal illness apart from the fear of asking a girl out on a date or being confronted by a criminal in a darkened alley. And the way that eventually those things had made it impossible for him to be happy, and desperate for everyone around him not to know. He had heard the sirens too, for a long time, but in a different way than Matt. And he'd turned away. He'd felt like he had to.

And now his friend was crying and bleeding in front of him. And Mrs. Cardenas was dead. And it was all Foggy's fault.

So he left. And he slept with Marci, even though he knew, with more certainty than he ever had before, that she didn't even really like him. And when he finally got home, he took a handful of suppressants without even checking to see how many he grabbed. He just didn't want to have to deal with any of it anymore.

Oh no, Foggy...

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Prompt Post #4

FILL: A World of Emotions (3/?)

Re: FILL: A World of Emotions (3/?)