daredevilkink | Prompt Post #4

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Prompt Post #4

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Please notice that I have changed my mind about how many parts this will be.

"Excuse me, is this room 312?" the voice asked.

Foggy looked up and asked who the person was looking for, embarrassed to realize that the man was blind. His empathy kicked in hard as he remembered the emotions he associated with the disability, connections he'd made as a child. Fear of the darkness. Helplessness. Frustration. He shook them off quickly, dismissing them with barely a second thought as he did whenever his abilities dared to resurface, and apologized.

The feelings surged forward into his conscious thought again briefly when the man asked if his blindness would be a problem, along with a sadness that lingered, and Foggy realized that the person in front of him was his new roommate. He quickly reassured the man in front of him that it wouldn't be a problem and changed the subject, his cheerfulness relentless in the face of the feelings bubbling up underneath the dull haze of his suppressants. It wasn't often that he picked up strong emotions from anyone anymore. He didn't like it.

Once he knew the man was Matt Murdock, he remembered reading about Matt's accident in the paper as a kid, used it as a topic of conversation, a way to prattle on and avoid dealing with his own uncomfortableness at the emotions the man was transferring to him without realizing. He joked, did everything he could to get the man to smile, chuckle, be put at ease by him. He even hit on him just to get him to blush and feel the heat of the compliment. And it worked. Foggy felt the rush of awkward feelings fade, told himself that he would double up on his suppressants later just to make himself feel better, and headed off to get coffee with Matt, certain that ultimately the two of them would get along just fine.

And if, later, Foggy had to drag Matt back to their room so he could drink something stronger than coffee, he convinced himself it was only celebratory and had nothing to do with the way the man was affecting him.

"Hey Foggy?" Matt asked from where he was studying quietly on the bed in the dorm room.

"Yeah Matt?" Foggy asked, looking up from his position laying on his stomach own bed watching television.

"Can I ask you something kind of personal?" Matt asked.

Foggy just grinned, even though he knew Matt couldn't tell. "Of course! We live together. It's not like we can really keep a lot of secrets from each other anyway."

"I just..." Matt started to ask, but lost the nerve.

"Just come out with it already, Murdock! Geez!" Foggy said, hoping to push his friend into feeling more comfortable talking to him about anything.

Matt smiled. Mission accomplished. "I was wondering about the pills you take. I noticed that you take them a few times a day. And there's a lot of them. Do you have a medical condition I should know about? In case anything happens."

"Oh," said Foggy, trying to sound casual but surprised by the question since he hadn't expected Matt to notice. "No. I'm fine, buddy. You don't have to worry about me. Those are just my X gene suppressants." Foggy internally crossed his fingers that the man wouldn't be upset to find out that his roommate was a mutant who hid it from him.

"You're... the X gene?" Matt said, clearly trying to wrap his head around it. "You're a mutant?"

"Yep. Well, not really," said Foggy, hopeful. "They're suppressants, right? So technically I am. But it's not like I have any powers or anything."

"Right," Matt said. "But you did?" Matt asked, curious.

"When I was a kid I could sort of... feel stuff. People's emotions. Empathy, you know?" Foggy said. "It was pretty minor in the scheme of things, but I didn't want to deal with it and so... suppressants."

"And they work?" Matt asked.

"Oh, yeah!" Foggy said, reassuring him. "Totally. So you don't have to worry about it. Aside from the DNA being a little different, I'm totally normal. I promise."

"Good," said Matt, but Foggy suspected that there was more his feelings on the subject than that. He never found out though. Apparently, he had sufficiently sent Matt a vibe indicating that he didn't want to talk about it, and so it didn't come up again.

But Foggy was too perceptive not to know, deep down, that there were a lot of things that they never talked about. He just didn't want to deal with it. That's what the pills were for, after all.

Foggy looked up from his laptop, startled by the sound of the slamming door as Matt entered the room in a furious rage. "Dude! What the hell?" he asked. He hated when Matt got angry like this. He always refused to talk about it and It meant that his bad moods could linger for days, draining Foggy's energy and patience.

"I got a D on the case study response for McConnell's class," Matt said, slamming his backpack down on his bed. "A D! Which means that I can't get higher than a B in the class, which means that my entire GPA could be effected."

"Oh, man, really?" Foggy said sympathetically. He shook his head as he remembered that assignment. "I hate to say this, and please don't take this the wrong way, but I kind of saw that coming."

"I know," Matt responded. "McConnell hates me. And he assigned that case study to me on purpose to get me to react. He knew that as a blind man I would have difficulty formulating a defense strategy for a woman accused of murdering her child due to the expenses and stress related to the child's disability. I should file a complaint."

"You could," Foggy said, "but if you did, you'd be doing exactly what McConnell wants, proving to him that you shouldn't be here."

"What?" Matt asked, shocked. "Foggy..."

"C'mon, Matt!" Foggy said. "I'm with you, I am. McConnell's an ass, and I don't blame you for being upset. But you know as well as I do that you deserved the D. You got too emotional, took it too personally, and so it impacted the work you did. Which is exactly what a good lawyer is not supposed to do."

"So what?" Matt said, "Am I just supposed to be indifferent? Cast aside my basic decency and morality?"

Foggy sighed. "I know that you have this vision in your mind that being a lawyer means fighting against injustice and standing up for people in need. I've heard you quote Thurgood Marshall, I know how passionate you are, Matt. But you're going to have to learn how to work within the reality of what the law means. The law is reason, free from passion. That's Aristotle! Fundamental. Built into the concept. We're here to learn how to separate out our emotions from our ability to reason to reach ultimate truths. That's how we help people, and that's why I'm here."

Matt slumped down to sit on his bed, looking defeated. "You're right," he said quietly. "Dammit. I can't believe I got a D. I let him get to me."

"It'll be fine," Foggy said. "It's not like all your other grades aren't impossibly high. If anything, this has put me off of my growing suspicion that maybe you are actually a robot programmed for higher learning. Your possible secret is safe for a little while longer. Plus, knowing you, you're already planning how to fit in extra credit work to make up for it."

"Yeah, I am," Matt said, sighing and laying back on the bed. "Hey, Foggy?" he asked, head turning in an attempt to look Foggy in the eyes.

"Yeah?" said Foggy, returning to his own studying.

"Do you really believe that?" he asked. "That there's no truth in people's emotions? That separating out how you feel about things helps people?"

"Take it from a guy who was once able to feel everything," Foggy replied, "People are better off when they don't let strong emotions get in their way and cloud their judgment."

Matt looked like he wanted to say something, to ask Foggy to elaborate, but he didn't. Foggy was grateful. He didn't want to talk about it.

"Are you still here?" Marci asked as Foggy lazily moved to turn off his phone's alarm and sit up. She whacked him in the side with her arm, irritated.

"Yeah, sorry," Foggy said. "You wore me out last night, woman! I wore you out too, apparently, so you didn't notice and I didn't think it would be a big deal."

"Foggy Bear, you need to ask permission next time," Marci said. "I don't want you getting any big ideas about this being a relationship or something."

"Believe me, I have none," Foggy said. And he didn't. He knew what he had with Marci, and he wanted to preserve it as much as she did. What they had was simple. Fun. It was good conversation and great sex. For her, it meant he paid for dinner or drinks. And at the end of the day, there were no hard feelings. In fact, there were no feelings at all.

Feelings were messy, especially lately. His control seemed to be deteriorating and more and more strong emotions had been bleeding through his defenses. His doctor had doubled the dosage of his suppressants.

Initially, Foggy has suspected that it might be Matt's fault. Matt had wormed his way into Foggy's heart like an adorable but wounded puppy. The more Foggy learned about the man's life and struggles, the more his empathy kicked in, investing him in Matt's world in a way that he wondered if the other man had noticed.

But in the end, the culprit was just his age. His doctor had told him what he was experiencing was typical. Apparently, many mutants' abilities became more developed as they transitioned into adulthood, and his had already been very developed for his age when he began taking them. Foggy had been surprised, and more than a little terrified, when the doctor told him this. His memories of his childhood before he began taking his suppressants were slowly fading the further he got from them, into a dull haze of sadness, loneliness, frustration and fear. Thinking about what might happen if the pills ever stopped working made Foggy's gut churn with anxiety, his heart beat fast in his chest. He didn't want to think about it.

"I'll see you in class later?" he asked Marci as pulled on his shirt and grabbed his backpack.

"Maybe," said Marci.

As he left, Foggy realized that he didn't care if he saw her or not. It probably should have bothered him more than it did.

Foggy listened patiently as Matt quoted Marshall at him, once again, in their tiny windowless broom closet at Landman and Zach. "We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent..."

"...from the fear." Foggy finished the sentence, having heard it so many times before.

"Do you think what happened in there today was right?" Matt asked, and Foggy reflected on how often this same argument had happened between him and Matt over their years of friendship. Sometimes he wished that Matt could just give an inch and agree to disagree with him rather than force the issue, but he understood why it never happened. Was grateful for it, even.

"No, Matt, I don't think it was right," Foggy said, frustration in his voice. Didn't the man know him better than that by now? "But according to the law, if he did disclose trade secrets to a third party other than his doctor..."

"He didn't," said Matt, and the certainty in his voice irritated Foggy. How could Matt be that certain about anything? Foggy could feel it, knew it to be true. It pushed itself forward into his conscious thought alongside the potent mix of determination, optimism and fierceness that he'd come to associate with the man who he would follow anywhere.

"How the hell do you know?" Foggy asked.

"Because I... I have a feeling," Matt replied.

"Last time I checked," Foggy said, "those are inadmissable." He continued trying to convince Matt to be practical, to think about the larger picture, to not let his emotions get in the way of their success, of their bright future at Landman and Zach. But in the end, it was futile. Before the argument even began, Foggy knew in his heart that Matt would win. He always did.

Foggy was surprisingly okay with that.

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Prompt Post #4

FILL: A World of Emotions (2/?)