As soon as the bathroom door closes, Foggy can smell the blood -- Matt's blood. It's fresher than Foggy's busted nose and not so crusty-sweet. Some of it might not even be Matt's. He's upright, limping maybe but ambulatory. Foggy pries his eyelids open, like wrenching up an old-school garage door, and feels a fresh throb of pain.
Matt must not know this place that well; he's still putting out a hand to feel for the edge of the sink or the murky outline of the radiator. This apartment is nearly empty; there's little in it to suggest it's anybody's permanent year-round dwelling, but what's there doesn't seem overtly out of place. Foggy keeps looking, his squinting eyes keep skittering around the baseboards and the taped-up windows. It's nearly pitch-black in here, except for-- a freaking night light plugged in at the baseboard, a lonely rectangle of chemical blue. He doesn't know what he expects to see.
Whatever it is Matt senses, it isn't pretty.
"Jesus, Foggy. Jesus, oh--"
For a long moment speech is impossible, and Matt is just standing there taller than life in the blue near-dark. Foggy presses his working wrist against his more operational eye socket, feeling the tenderness like a missing tooth.
"How bad is it?" Then again, stupidly, because Murdock hasn't answered and he's not even sure he heard him trying to talk around a mouthful of spit and sore gums -- "Is it bad? Matt, are you bleeding? I think you're bleeding."
"Not bad. But you're alright. You're safe now."
"Me? What about you?" How many times has Matt been bleeding and Foggy hasn't noticed? Bleeding under his clothes?
"Safe is a relative term." He's trying for a quip, a charming Matt-icism, but it makes Foggy flinch. "It's handled."
Handled. Foggy is floating, a little island of pain -- but he's not there any more, and he could cry, he's lying on tile and not laminate tabletop, Matt is here.
One thought snags like a broken tooth.
"Where's Karen? What happened to Karen?" Foggy tries to sit up, which is stupid and instantly upgrades each distinct unpleasant sensation from discomfort to kill-me-now. Matt guides him back against the porcelain.
"Just stay put, okay? You have a concussion."
Foggy exhales sharply between the gaps in his teeth. He's dirty and he stinks and he's not wearing pants; Matt needs to be nowhere near him right now. It's just like freshman year. "Yeah, that makes sense. Was that your friend who came along with the pen light, because--"
"Yeah, she won't do that again. You can hear me alright?"
"Clear as a bell," Foggy says, feeling a slimy web of blood migrate out from between his teeth. "I think I just took a bad hit."
Already he can't remember. He can't remember, which makes him next to useless. Even trying to think about last night is like sweeping up broken glass.
Matt settles down in a cloud of painful earnestness, depositing a plastic bag of ice wrapped in a dishtowel. "Don't talk. You've got a broken cheekbone -- Claire doesn't think you'll need surgery, but you've got a hell of a black eye."
The side of his face is swollen like a plum; he can feel it. It encroaches onto his vision a little, but all things considered given that anything brighter than basically no light at all makes him want to start vomiting again and never stop, it's okay. He's fine, he's all right. He's gotten knocked around a little before. One time he got elbowed in the face playing touch football and it hurt worse than this. Foggy tries to inventory the injuries he can tell Matt about. His head, his shoulder. His whole face, which has got to be ugly judging by the way Matt sucks in a breath and shifts on his feet every time he tries looking him in the face, but Foggy's whole face was a work in progress to start with. In another 12 hours he'll be needing to shave.
"I think I fucked up my hand," is what he settles on. His hand is bound up uselessly, close to his body, and he still feels the phantom of somebody else's grip.
"Claire jimmied everything back into place. You just need to keep it immobilized for now."
Foggy cautiously swallows a mouthful of saliva before trying to talk again. "Jimmied? Is that a technical term?" The press of the swelling would be painful on its own, but at least some of what Claire the Friendly Nurse had him dry-swallow earlier must be taking, because it's only a dull pain now, like a bruise and not like, say, a broken finger.
"Until you can get an x-ray, it's the next best thing."
"Matt, what the hell am I going to tell somebody at a hospital?" It's impossible not to raise his voice a little and immediately Foggy regrets it.
Matt lifts his chin in an approximation of a shrug. "Car door?"
"Did it bounce off my hand and hit me in the face?"
"Stranger things have happened, Foggy."
Like Matt and his car accident, Matt and his mylar balloon with a monkey on it. That much is reassuring, in the sea of shifting variables: it can't be that bad, because Matt's had it worse. He doesn't have any broken ribs. He doesn't have a popped lung or a broken arm or a busted eardrum.
The pit of his stomach hurts, like something is broken in there, like something is bruised. The sensation of something torn located not far off makes a nice counterpoint to it, and both of them combined present a persuasive reason not to get up and wobble away.
"Where's Karen?"
"Karen's fine. Karen's safe. What the hell happened, Foggy?"
Someone else pushes through the doorway, indistinct in the blotchy dark until the figure's close enough to be in approximate focus. Somebody wearing white. Claire holds out a hand, lets it press against Matt's chest in an eloquent gesture of forbidding. "I'm going to need you to step into the other room for a while."
Matt takes the hint.
*
"Nice place you got here," Foggy says, slippery with weird detachment as the pills settle in his stomach and Claire tugs his waistband down, slides his pants out from beneath him. "Very modern. Lots of charm."
"It's not my place. I'm just borrowing it for a little while from a friend."
"A friend who knows about your secret life of crime?"
She sucks a little breath between her teeth. "Just a friend. But yes."
Claire's still in her pyjamas, underneath the oversized white sweatshirt shucked up to her elbows. She has steady hands, and she's still really pretty, even like this -- which hadn't jumped out at him that first meeting on the night with Matt, because he'd had bigger things on his mind then -- like now he doesn't, like this isn't some confusing brute-force effort to short circuit his brain into not thinking. But she's pretty and she's all business and she smells nice, which makes sense because this must be her bathroom.
Foggy lets his brain go blank, empty like an empty room as he braces. Claire is tearing the packaging off a swab, rustling around in a gallon plastic bag for a wad of cotton.
"How many guys?"
Foggy's sore tongue goes to make the syllables I can't remember, but he stops. Everything is fogged and dim and gray, but he can remember. That much is concrete. Laid out plain, like the details in a brief. How many bad guys? How many doers?
"One." Just one. He's pretty sure.
Claire doesn't tsk or exhale, but when she speaks again her voice is brusque and tight. "He used a condom?"
"Yeah."
Foggy remembers that.
Then, not like a doctor but like a friend: "Fuck. I'm sorry, Foggy. I really am."
Foggy doesn't know if that's dismay at this state of affairs, or just a general comment on it, on the perpetrator, on Fisk. Foggy doesn't know if that basic fact is good or bad. It could have been worse.
What happens after that could certainly be worse.
* * *
Claire's hands are steady; she has small, steady hands. When Foggy's voice finally comes unstuck in his throat it isn't much more than an empty rasp. "Don't tell Matt."
"I'm not going to tell anybody unless you want me to. In which case I'm more than willing to say how I found you."
His eyes are scabbed shut with salt. "Great."
"If you press charges, you're going to need to get checked out in a hospital. I can't do that here."
"I'm not pressing charges for this, all right? Why, why would I stand in a courtroom and--"
"I get it, okay. Believe me, I get it. You're going to want to talk to somebody about this. But it doesn't have to be Matt."
*
Foggy Nelson's pants are in a paper bag in the fridge so Matt can't smell them quite as well. The laundry room's all the way in the basement and no way is Claire making that haul alone, or Foggy with her. From the waist down he's 75% beach towels and little sticky wing bandages, draped for modesty in a festive throw blanket and a sheet -- why couldn't he just get shot? There would be dignity in getting shot.
The swelling darkness presses in on everything, it sucks him down like a whirlpool. Part of him feels like he should call his mom. He's not sure what he'd tell his mom, but these are the times you're supposed to call your mom. Not when you can't move your jaw without it clicking.
In the nauseating not-light from the window, Matt's unshaven face is white as a sheet. Foggy tries to focus on it, but can't fight through the blear in his eyes. Matt is sitting in a folding chair and watching him like a hawk; one of those same little sticky bandages is holding shut the cut along his hairline, what must have accounted for the blood. Foggy tries to focus on the clean white edges and instead his vision strobes.
(I know you haven't showered since yesterday. Matt knows he hasn't showered for at least three days, apart from a half-assed cleanup job with a wet washcloth. Matt knows more than that. Matt knows what he's been throwing up. Matt knows more than he ever wanted to know about Wilson Fisk. Two options present themselves: that Matt has no idea what happened, and that Matt knows exactly what happened and will never ever mention it.)
He can barely hold his head up; it feels like it's been hollowed out and stuffed with old socks. He can feel himself slipping back between the pillow and the cushion. Matt's hands are on his face, steadying him, and Foggy grunts in a way that is almost certainly embarrassing.
"Can I get you a glass of water or anything? There's juice, but I don't know if it'd do you any good."
Foggy swallows. The sensation of being choked is embossed on the inside of his throat, and suddenly he's dizzy again.
"I'm fine," Foggy says. "Claire gave me a drink earlier." This is a lie.
Matt's stiff hands withdraw from him. "Still feel like throwing up?"
"Nope. Is that good?" He's still nauseous, awash in weird Tilt-A-Whirl dizziness every time he moves his head even a little. But he no longer wants to vomit everywhere. He'll have to get Claire a big flower arrangement or something, spelling out sorry about all the puking in miniature crinkly roses. They've gotten to know each other pretty well, him and Claire.
"Pretty good, in my experience. How's your hand?"
"Shitty." He can't even begin to think of moving it, no more than he can contemplate going on a brisk jog. "But better. Thanks."
Looking on the corners of those dark eyes creasing, Foggy thinks, what if it had been him? Matt wouldn't have been so incapacitated he couldn't walk -- he'd have limped home come hell or high water. Foggy doesn't remember being carried, Foggy doesn't remember how he got out.
Matt would have gotten out. It wouldn't have been pretty, but he'd have made it out on his own one way or another. Matt would have fought harder. Karen would have gnawed off her own arm rather than spend thirty seconds in the same room as Fisk.
Why him? Why Foggy and not someone else-- he can't say why not Karen, he can't say why not Matt, because those are shitty questions. Because he was there, or if there was something he did that he can't remember in the concussion wash of merciful forgetfulness, because he took a different route home from work, because he turned off on the wrong street--
(because he was soft--)
*
Foggy doesn't remember the time, but he sleeps the heavy dreamless sleep of the dead until the first 2-hour interval for making sure he hasn't actually died. Claire takes a look at his eyes again, and it must be all right because she lets him go back to sleep -- but it's not the same, that druggy twilit sleep where he still half-hears the floorboards creak and the doors close, where even behind closed eyes he sees murky colors. It's too fucking cold.
People are touching him while he sleeps. Claire trying to be gentle, Matt incapable of it, fumbling him in his hands like a coffee cup. Foggy wakes up a couple times and can't remember where he is, too weak to roll off the cushions and too sick to complain even though irritability surges in him. Sometimes he thinks Karen is there, and he jerks upright trying to pull up the tangling sheets to make sure he's covered, only succeeding in fucking up his hand again.
He hears doors opening and closing, bandage tape unspooling from its roll, whispers turning into raised voices. They argue about some guy named Luke for a while. Claire's friend Luke owns the place. Claire wants to make a phone call. Talking about ordering delivery, and Claire laughing, a hard gallows laugh. The words "police custody".
They're not using Fisk's name, but he might as well be there in the room with them. The words are drumming hard against the inside of Foggy's skull, he's gonna come back, he's gonna come back, he's gonna come back. Police custody. Afraid.
They argue about Foggy too. He can tell. Matt's voice, stiff. "No. That's not possible. We need to do it here."
And Claire's voice around the corner, sharp and heated. "He could have a brain bleed." Talking about him like a patient. Like some random injured civilian who just wandered in and passed out. Talking about him like a thing.
He could be sitting right here listening to you guys, is what Foggy wants to say. But he's too ragdoll weak to straighten up, and the words come out looping and garbled. If they hear it they don't let him know.
Re: fill: "why ask politely, why go lightly, why say please" 2a/3
Matt must not know this place that well; he's still putting out a hand to feel for the edge of the sink or the murky outline of the radiator. This apartment is nearly empty; there's little in it to suggest it's anybody's permanent year-round dwelling, but what's there doesn't seem overtly out of place. Foggy keeps looking, his squinting eyes keep skittering around the baseboards and the taped-up windows. It's nearly pitch-black in here, except for-- a freaking night light plugged in at the baseboard, a lonely rectangle of chemical blue. He doesn't know what he expects to see.
Whatever it is Matt senses, it isn't pretty.
"Jesus, Foggy. Jesus, oh--"
For a long moment speech is impossible, and Matt is just standing there taller than life in the blue near-dark. Foggy presses his working wrist against his more operational eye socket, feeling the tenderness like a missing tooth.
"How bad is it?" Then again, stupidly, because Murdock hasn't answered and he's not even sure he heard him trying to talk around a mouthful of spit and sore gums -- "Is it bad? Matt, are you bleeding? I think you're bleeding."
"Not bad. But you're alright. You're safe now."
"Me? What about you?" How many times has Matt been bleeding and Foggy hasn't noticed? Bleeding under his clothes?
"Safe is a relative term." He's trying for a quip, a charming Matt-icism, but it makes Foggy flinch. "It's handled."
Handled. Foggy is floating, a little island of pain -- but he's not there any more, and he could cry, he's lying on tile and not laminate tabletop, Matt is here.
One thought snags like a broken tooth.
"Where's Karen? What happened to Karen?" Foggy tries to sit up, which is stupid and instantly upgrades each distinct unpleasant sensation from discomfort to kill-me-now. Matt guides him back against the porcelain.
"Just stay put, okay? You have a concussion."
Foggy exhales sharply between the gaps in his teeth. He's dirty and he stinks and he's not wearing pants; Matt needs to be nowhere near him right now. It's just like freshman year. "Yeah, that makes sense. Was that your friend who came along with the pen light, because--"
"Yeah, she won't do that again. You can hear me alright?"
"Clear as a bell," Foggy says, feeling a slimy web of blood migrate out from between his teeth. "I think I just took a bad hit."
Already he can't remember. He can't remember, which makes him next to useless. Even trying to think about last night is like sweeping up broken glass.
Matt settles down in a cloud of painful earnestness, depositing a plastic bag of ice wrapped in a dishtowel. "Don't talk. You've got a broken cheekbone -- Claire doesn't think you'll need surgery, but you've got a hell of a black eye."
The side of his face is swollen like a plum; he can feel it. It encroaches onto his vision a little, but all things considered given that anything brighter than basically no light at all makes him want to start vomiting again and never stop, it's okay. He's fine, he's all right. He's gotten knocked around a little before. One time he got elbowed in the face playing touch football and it hurt worse than this. Foggy tries to inventory the injuries he can tell Matt about. His head, his shoulder. His whole face, which has got to be ugly judging by the way Matt sucks in a breath and shifts on his feet every time he tries looking him in the face, but Foggy's whole face was a work in progress to start with. In another 12 hours he'll be needing to shave.
"I think I fucked up my hand," is what he settles on. His hand is bound up uselessly, close to his body, and he still feels the phantom of somebody else's grip.
"Claire jimmied everything back into place. You just need to keep it immobilized for now."
Foggy cautiously swallows a mouthful of saliva before trying to talk again. "Jimmied? Is that a technical term?" The press of the swelling would be painful on its own, but at least some of what Claire the Friendly Nurse had him dry-swallow earlier must be taking, because it's only a dull pain now, like a bruise and not like, say, a broken finger.
"Until you can get an x-ray, it's the next best thing."
"Matt, what the hell am I going to tell somebody at a hospital?" It's impossible not to raise his voice a little and immediately Foggy regrets it.
Matt lifts his chin in an approximation of a shrug. "Car door?"
"Did it bounce off my hand and hit me in the face?"
"Stranger things have happened, Foggy."
Like Matt and his car accident, Matt and his mylar balloon with a monkey on it. That much is reassuring, in the sea of shifting variables: it can't be that bad, because Matt's had it worse. He doesn't have any broken ribs. He doesn't have a popped lung or a broken arm or a busted eardrum.
The pit of his stomach hurts, like something is broken in there, like something is bruised. The sensation of something torn located not far off makes a nice counterpoint to it, and both of them combined present a persuasive reason not to get up and wobble away.
"Where's Karen?"
"Karen's fine. Karen's safe. What the hell happened, Foggy?"
Someone else pushes through the doorway, indistinct in the blotchy dark until the figure's close enough to be in approximate focus. Somebody wearing white. Claire holds out a hand, lets it press against Matt's chest in an eloquent gesture of forbidding. "I'm going to need you to step into the other room for a while."
Matt takes the hint.
*
"Nice place you got here," Foggy says, slippery with weird detachment as the pills settle in his stomach and Claire tugs his waistband down, slides his pants out from beneath him. "Very modern. Lots of charm."
"It's not my place. I'm just borrowing it for a little while from a friend."
"A friend who knows about your secret life of crime?"
She sucks a little breath between her teeth. "Just a friend. But yes."
Claire's still in her pyjamas, underneath the oversized white sweatshirt shucked up to her elbows. She has steady hands, and she's still really pretty, even like this -- which hadn't jumped out at him that first meeting on the night with Matt, because he'd had bigger things on his mind then -- like now he doesn't, like this isn't some confusing brute-force effort to short circuit his brain into not thinking. But she's pretty and she's all business and she smells nice, which makes sense because this must be her bathroom.
Foggy lets his brain go blank, empty like an empty room as he braces. Claire is tearing the packaging off a swab, rustling around in a gallon plastic bag for a wad of cotton.
"How many guys?"
Foggy's sore tongue goes to make the syllables I can't remember, but he stops. Everything is fogged and dim and gray, but he can remember. That much is concrete. Laid out plain, like the details in a brief. How many bad guys? How many doers?
"One." Just one. He's pretty sure.
Claire doesn't tsk or exhale, but when she speaks again her voice is brusque and tight. "He used a condom?"
"Yeah."
Foggy remembers that.
Then, not like a doctor but like a friend: "Fuck. I'm sorry, Foggy. I really am."
Foggy doesn't know if that's dismay at this state of affairs, or just a general comment on it, on the perpetrator, on Fisk. Foggy doesn't know if that basic fact is good or bad. It could have been worse.
What happens after that could certainly be worse.
*
*
*
Claire's hands are steady; she has small, steady hands. When Foggy's voice finally comes unstuck in his throat it isn't much more than an empty rasp. "Don't tell Matt."
"I'm not going to tell anybody unless you want me to. In which case I'm more than willing to say how I found you."
His eyes are scabbed shut with salt. "Great."
"If you press charges, you're going to need to get checked out in a hospital. I can't do that here."
"I'm not pressing charges for this, all right? Why, why would I stand in a courtroom and--"
"I get it, okay. Believe me, I get it. You're going to want to talk to somebody about this. But it doesn't have to be Matt."
*
Foggy Nelson's pants are in a paper bag in the fridge so Matt can't smell them quite as well. The laundry room's all the way in the basement and no way is Claire making that haul alone, or Foggy with her. From the waist down he's 75% beach towels and little sticky wing bandages, draped for modesty in a festive throw blanket and a sheet -- why couldn't he just get shot? There would be dignity in getting shot.
The swelling darkness presses in on everything, it sucks him down like a whirlpool. Part of him feels like he should call his mom. He's not sure what he'd tell his mom, but these are the times you're supposed to call your mom. Not when you can't move your jaw without it clicking.
In the nauseating not-light from the window, Matt's unshaven face is white as a sheet. Foggy tries to focus on it, but can't fight through the blear in his eyes. Matt is sitting in a folding chair and watching him like a hawk; one of those same little sticky bandages is holding shut the cut along his hairline, what must have accounted for the blood. Foggy tries to focus on the clean white edges and instead his vision strobes.
(I know you haven't showered since yesterday. Matt knows he hasn't showered for at least three days, apart from a half-assed cleanup job with a wet washcloth. Matt knows more than that. Matt knows what he's been throwing up. Matt knows more than he ever wanted to know about Wilson Fisk. Two options present themselves: that Matt has no idea what happened, and that Matt knows exactly what happened and will never ever mention it.)
He can barely hold his head up; it feels like it's been hollowed out and stuffed with old socks. He can feel himself slipping back between the pillow and the cushion. Matt's hands are on his face, steadying him, and Foggy grunts in a way that is almost certainly embarrassing.
"Can I get you a glass of water or anything? There's juice, but I don't know if it'd do you any good."
Foggy swallows. The sensation of being choked is embossed on the inside of his throat, and suddenly he's dizzy again.
"I'm fine," Foggy says. "Claire gave me a drink earlier." This is a lie.
Matt's stiff hands withdraw from him. "Still feel like throwing up?"
"Nope. Is that good?" He's still nauseous, awash in weird Tilt-A-Whirl dizziness every time he moves his head even a little. But he no longer wants to vomit everywhere. He'll have to get Claire a big flower arrangement or something, spelling out sorry about all the puking in miniature crinkly roses. They've gotten to know each other pretty well, him and Claire.
"Pretty good, in my experience. How's your hand?"
"Shitty." He can't even begin to think of moving it, no more than he can contemplate going on a brisk jog. "But better. Thanks."
Looking on the corners of those dark eyes creasing, Foggy thinks, what if it had been him? Matt wouldn't have been so incapacitated he couldn't walk -- he'd have limped home come hell or high water. Foggy doesn't remember being carried, Foggy doesn't remember how he got out.
Matt would have gotten out. It wouldn't have been pretty, but he'd have made it out on his own one way or another. Matt would have fought harder. Karen would have gnawed off her own arm rather than spend thirty seconds in the same room as Fisk.
Why him? Why Foggy and not someone else-- he can't say why not Karen, he can't say why not Matt, because those are shitty questions. Because he was there, or if there was something he did that he can't remember in the concussion wash of merciful forgetfulness, because he took a different route home from work, because he turned off on the wrong street--
(because he was soft--)
*
Foggy doesn't remember the time, but he sleeps the heavy dreamless sleep of the dead until the first 2-hour interval for making sure he hasn't actually died. Claire takes a look at his eyes again, and it must be all right because she lets him go back to sleep -- but it's not the same, that druggy twilit sleep where he still half-hears the floorboards creak and the doors close, where even behind closed eyes he sees murky colors. It's too fucking cold.
People are touching him while he sleeps. Claire trying to be gentle, Matt incapable of it, fumbling him in his hands like a coffee cup. Foggy wakes up a couple times and can't remember where he is, too weak to roll off the cushions and too sick to complain even though irritability surges in him. Sometimes he thinks Karen is there, and he jerks upright trying to pull up the tangling sheets to make sure he's covered, only succeeding in fucking up his hand again.
He hears doors opening and closing, bandage tape unspooling from its roll, whispers turning into raised voices. They argue about some guy named Luke for a while. Claire's friend Luke owns the place. Claire wants to make a phone call. Talking about ordering delivery, and Claire laughing, a hard gallows laugh. The words "police custody".
They're not using Fisk's name, but he might as well be there in the room with them. The words are drumming hard against the inside of Foggy's skull, he's gonna come back, he's gonna come back, he's gonna come back. Police custody. Afraid.
They argue about Foggy too. He can tell. Matt's voice, stiff. "No. That's not possible. We need to do it here."
And Claire's voice around the corner, sharp and heated. "He could have a brain bleed." Talking about him like a patient. Like some random injured civilian who just wandered in and passed out. Talking about him like a thing.
He could be sitting right here listening to you guys, is what Foggy wants to say. But he's too ragdoll weak to straighten up, and the words come out looping and garbled. If they hear it they don't let him know.