Prompt Post #5

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Comments

Re: fill: "why ask politely, why go lightly, why say please" 2b/3

[(Anonymous)]

*

Matt again in the frigid dark, Matt's hands on his shoulders, trying to press him awake like he'd rather be shaking him. Foggy wants nothing more than not to be there, and Matt keeps dragging him back.

"Stay awake, come on. I need to know what you remember."

Foggy swallows, feeling his throat tighten. Dirtiness prickles on his skin. "I remember Fisk. He thought you had one of his pals whacked, and he took it really personally."

"I need a name, Foggy. Did he give any kind of indication--"

"He didn't say. I don't fucking know, Matt." It's like a test he didn't study for, these answers are potentially of critical time-sensitive importance to their case and they're nowhere to be found. "He knew you were -- you. Or maybe he thinks you work for the guy in the mask, I can't tell."

"What?" Matt stiffens, drawing back. "Foggy, are you serious? Are we compromised?"

"I don't fucking know, maybe ask someone who doesn't have brain damage. What does that even mean, are we compromised--"

"This isn't to make your life harder. I need to know what we're dealing with."

His lungs are aching with the effort not to scream. Keep his voice down. People can hear. Hell, maybe they aren't even in Hell's Kitchen any more. "I didn't tell him anything. You've got to believe me."

"I can hear your heart beating," Matt says, voice flat with exhaustion. "I know you're not deliberately lying."

"But you think I'm lying on accident?"

"I'm saying you wouldn't necessarily know. Tell me what you saw. What you heard."

"I didn't see anything. It was just a room, there was a table, and -- and I'd know if I told him anything, Matt. If he knew anything about you he'd be here already."

(Two options present themselves. Somebody who thought he could shake down the guy in the mask by freaking out his lawyer. Or somebody who thought Foggy didn't matter enough to kill.)

Matt says nothing.

"I'm not lying, Matt. One of his guys got shot, and he thinks you did it. He didn't even ask me any questions."

Foggy is crying now, hunching up against his knees with the sharp ugly embarrassing tears bubbling up in his eyes. Matt is recoiling. What's worse -- He had bigger shit to deal with at the time, or: He didn't even know you were gone? Where the fuck was Matt? Where the fuck was he?

"All right," Matt says, nakedly uncomfortable. "All right, I believe you."

Lifting his head, Foggy grimace-smiles, feeling his cheek tug and tear. Things were a lot easier when he was just getting jabbed full of broken glass.

*

Somewhere after that, Matt folds, and lets Claire make the judgment calls. Last time Foggy was in a hospital he was still wearing a tie. They ask him questions in the hospital; they're not like Claire's questions, and Foggy must give good answers, because they keep bumping him up in the line.

He just keeps thinking, he doesn't freaking have the insurance for this, twice in six months? After managing to get by without a hospital visit for six years -- when it rains it pours. They know that there, about his terrible insurance at the hospital he doesn't know the name of, and they let him go. They don't know about anything else. Nobody's looking too closely at his ass when he's only complaining about his face -- when somebody mugged him for his phone, conveniently thumping him in the noggin hard enough to make an ID impossible, and Claire's just his Good Samaritan friend-of-a-friend who picked him up off the ground after a bad night. It might as well be true, and he keeps stupidly groping for the mobile device that isn't there, in moments when his head's not swimming. He doesn't want to think about where it is.

They don't notice cuff marks in with the mottled bruises; either that or they don't look for them.

There's only an hour-long wait for x-rays, since the rest of him is in such piss-poor shape -- sixty minutes without Matt, too damn long when all Foggy can think when he can't even think straight is that they shouldn't have left, that it can't be that bad, that it doesn't matter if his hand stays fucked-up forever because he walked right into that one and Matt is off somewhere touching base with Luke Cage, man of mystery, and hopefully not getting chopped up into little pieces by ninjas or gangsters. Big looping sentences, forced through his brain that still feels like a sieve.

As expected, his hand's broken, but it's not a bad break, not after Nurse Claire's expertise in jimmying things back into place. He's bleeding into his underwear when the doctor tells him he's free to leave. Provided Claire can wheel him home.

They let him go. They don't know.

Compared to Claire's place, the hospital barely registers, a moment in time that winks away like nothing. It barely makes an impression. Institutional blue and gray blinks out of view and it's back to green walls, gray carpet.

The layout of the apartment as Foggy understands it so far is this:

The empty bedroom is the war room, the arsenal; Claire has some kind of bug-out bag in there permanently unzipped, like a lot of people do after what happened in '12. The empty kitchen is where Matt's burner phone lives and doesn't have room for much else. The living room is for narcotic-induced Foggy naps and the bathroom is for other stuff. Matt has generously loaned him a toothbrush and a pair of sweatpants; under other circumstances, Foggy would appreciate the sensuality of the gesture, since with Matt's senses any leisure wear of his has to be hand-stitched from silk thread by Danish virgins. (Foggy used to think Matt was just fancy, imagine that. Monastic Matt Murdock, getting attached to small pleasures.) But with his ass being basically a wad of pain and gauze it's hard to appreciate how luxe that shit is. The toothbrush is probably a lost cause.

If not for everything hurting and having a memory of the last 48 hours that's ripped full of jagged holes he'd be at ease in his domain -- sweatpants, little beige couch, a nice buzz from the pain meds, all of it. The half-furnished apartment is the size of an Altoid box but for a single lady in New York -- not bad. Less airy than Matt's place, but not lit in neon. More like a panic room. Foggy is too tired for panic; he's landed squarely in some intermittent valley of exhaustion where the dread isn't creeping up on him but already covering him, already over his head. He's too tired to be afraid.

In between sleep he watches the door like he expects someone to come through it. What good is it going to do him to watch?

*

Foggy's feet have only just hit the floor when he claps his one good hand against his thigh, hard. The sound it makes startles Matt into halting in his tracks, and in the weird hollow quiet of the apartment it must have been louder than the actual creak of the opening door. The fingers on Foggy's bad hand twitch against the taped splint.

"Excuse me, were you trying to leave?"

"Actually, I--" Matt coughs a little and turns gingerly on his heel. His shoulders are bunched up almost imperceptibly underneath his coat, but Foggy from his little island of bruises can perceive it loud and clear. All that's missing is the mask. "Yes."

"Matt, you're not seriously thinking about going back out there. I thought you said it was covered."

Maybe they already got him. Maybe the guy's already cooling his heels in jail. Wilson Fisk in a little dark room, waiting for a fancy lawyer.

Matt's face is masklike, almost completely impassive. It couldn't be creepier. "I've got some stuff I need to get from the office. For work."

For somebody who knows exactly what indicates when other people are lying, he's a really shitty liar. For work, because they're really hitting an all-time productivity high these days. He doesn't even have his cane. Knowing that Matt doesn't really need that thing as such for a lot of the stuff Foggy assumed he did demystifies some of his competence, but he's still blind, he shouldn't be booking it unassisted through midday traffic like that -- or early morning, or afternoon, whatever it is--

(not when Fisk's going to come back, he's going to come back and he's going to do it again)

"Bullshit. You know that place is being watched like a hawk. He wants you to bust out guns blazing so he can mess you up a second time. And I'm guessing he's low on manpower." (Manpower. Two guys in suits, maybe three, and Fisk. Foggy feels his throat starting to tighten.) "I'm not asking you this as your friend. I'm telling you. That's not what I need you to do right now, okay?"

Matt slowly, carefully lets the door slip closed. Foggy expects to hear, 'this is bigger than what you need', maybe because he knows it is -- he can't even say it's not Matt's problem. It started being Matt's problem as soon as it happened to Matt's known associate and not just some suspected pal of his alter ego. This is every bit Matt's problem and it's on Matt to make the call, but damned if Foggy doesn't hate deferring to him on anything.

Matt is still, there in the low light from behind the drawn blinds, and without the glasses his eyes are intent and dark. They're wet, too.

It's not hard to tell when Matt's mad; just usually he's quivering with indignation at some social injustice and not rigid with anger because of something that happened to Foggy. All things considered, compared to the people whose cases they handle and compared to -- well, definitely compared to Matt or Karen, Foggy's lived a charmed life. Maybe that's what this is, a backlog of 28 years of misfortune getting dislodged by the universe in one colossal fuck-you to Franklin Nelson, Esquire.

Matt's hands are already balled in fists. Foggy's own wet congested breaths are loud in his ears, and he slowly watches Matt's fingers uncurl.

"Please, Matt."

Matt wipes his nose on the back of his scabby wrist, and asks, "What do you need me to do?"

"Don't freaking walk out on me, Murdock. I don't want to be alone right now." Foggy is blithering like a bad girlfriend and he can't stop, he's pretty sure his nose is running and he's pretty sure Matt must be mortified. A few more paces and he's close enough to smell him now, positively, lurching like a puppet. Matt shouldn't be going back out there anyway.

"You wouldn't be alone. There's Claire, there's Luke, there's Karen--"

(He hasn't even met this Luke guy yet, he's just bled all over his towels, how on earth is that supposed to be comforting? Foggy's cheekbone is throbbing in time with his pulse, and he can feel the craziness rising in his chest, the reedy franticness like he's gearing up to bawl Matt out--)

"So we're just the civilians? You need to stay right here and rest up and tell me if shit gets any worse. It's stupid. I'm sorry. I just need you to be here where I can see you."

He needs to know where Matt is, needs to know for sure. Needs to know he's in one place and not chopped up in a bunch of garbage bags. Who cares if the bad guys got Nelson; he needs to know they didn't get Murdock too.

Matt's shoulders untense a little; his mouth splits from its rigid pink line into something marginally more at ease, showing teeth. This is him beaten. But he's still not happy.

"Then I'll stay."

*

Claire's sleeping the sleep she so richly deserves, and it's somebody else's job to make Foggy Nelson doesn't die for another 2 hours. Matt lowers his body down next to him on the cushions -- so carefully that it's unreal, the showroom-new piece of furniture barely sags under him. The washcloth is slipping down Foggy's cheek, dribbling a rivulet of water down into his ear.

Matt tugs it back into place by a corner, a weird slithering sensation administered by clean hands. "You should eat something. It's no good taking that stuff on an empty stomach."

"Better now than never, I guess. Heavy chewing might be out of the picture. Spices. Tastes. God, now I want a bagel."

"Claire has a toaster, but I don't know about bread."

It comes out kind of burned, but between the two of them, completely wrecked, they can manage two pieces of wheat toast. Who eats just one piece of toast? Matt takes the heel of the loaf, like some kind of culinary martyr. Foggy can barely handle his -- can barely manipulate a piece of toast even with the hand that didn't get pulped -- but his hunger comes back with a vengeance after the first few bites and he finds himself too embarrassed to ask for anything more, too unwilling to have Matt get up from the couch to get it. It's like they're in school again and they both have matching massive hangovers and did a lot of shit they regret and any moment now Matt will just keel over like a felled tree and slow-motion slump against Foggy's shoulder. But if he did that now Foggy would probably be sick, and Matt's rigid upright, quietly thrumming with hurt and horror.

It's Foggy who slumps, heavy with pain and too stiff to move more fluidly; his head's not exactly in Matt's lap, but there's not enough room on the couch for them to entirely not touch.

He doesn't know what time it is or how long it's been, but Foggy calls him by name. His own hoarseness sounds grating. Matt can't look at him, but he still turns his face, and the worry written there makes Foggy so scared he's been calling for him before and just doesn't remember it.

"Yeah," Matt sort of breathes. There's a scrape across his cheek, down from his mouth like a lipstick mark. Even beat up, he still looks kind of pretty. Foggy looks like a reject from the produce section, the kind of bruised fruit they can't sell.

"Would it be too weird for you to pray for me? I'm just saying, I need all the help I can get."

Matt's religious, but he's not the kind of religious that ever made Foggy feel like he was anything less for not really coming along for the ride. Or for that matter, he's not the kind of guy who would do that kind of thing unbidden, except maybe really quietly. Lots of Matt's favorite things are not precisely on the Catholic Church's list of recommended hobbies either. Maybe it's just fanciful thinking thanks to his brain being scrambled but it's not like it can hurt.

Matt sighs, and rearranges his arm so he's not actually touching Foggy, he's just almost touching him. The distance between them is a chasm. "Not at all. It's not weird at all." And with scraped-up hands he makes something that from a low angle looks a hell of a lot like the sign of the cross. Foggy doesn't know why people do that, definitely not now, but he knows that they do and that he's never seen Matt do it before.

(It hurts too much to think, but he does something that's more like a prayer than he'd like to admit, lying in the dark with a hollow belly and a wet washcloth over one eye, still too broken to move -- a clear inward enunciation that he needs Matt to be fine even if he's not, that this can't be the thing that breaks it all. Foggy doesn't know what he's going to do.)

Re: fill: "why ask politely, why go lightly, why say please" 2b/3

[(Anonymous)]

D':

<3

Oh, I hope you come back to this. It's miserably beautiful. Beautifully miserable. Something like that. And I want more.