“You,” Foggy says, poking Matt’s socked feet as he throws himself at the foot of Matt’s bed on a rainy Saturday morning, “have been avoiding me.”
“I haven’t,” he says, pulling the pillow he’s been hiding under off his head. He sits up to make room for Foggy, draws up his legs and clutches the pillow tight against his chest. He offers Foggy a wide smile, and hopes it’s a convincing one, because the truth is, he has been avoiding Foggy. Not shutting him out, just, making himself conveniently scarce.
“Hey now,” Foggy says, elbowing him in the ribs. “None of that.”
“Ow. None of what?”
“That. That patented Murdock ‘you can’t hate me, I’m way too cute’ smile. Ain’t buying it, buddy.”
Matt grins wider, says, “You really think I’m cute?”
“Yeah. Real friggen,” Foggy says, as he slugs him in arm.
“What’s with all the violence?” he says, but angles his head away the moment the words leave his mouth, because while he meant it as a joke, the memory of the man he eventually grows up to be comes flooding back, and it’s all he can do to keep his hands from forming into fists. He tries to cover his growing frustration with another smile. Fortunately, Foggy remains blissfully unaware. He breathes out, and this time his smile is more genuine.
*
It’s been at least nine months since that night in his future living room with a grown-up Foggy, and he can’t help it. He’s been thinking about it a real lot. Fantasizes about controlling it, going where and when he wants to, going back there, sitting there with him again, talking to him, asking him about everything he knows since he learned the truth about the person he’ll grow up to be. Just the thought, the idea of talking to someone who knows him, someone who truly understands him, is unbelievably… arousing.
He thumps his head against the wall on Foggy’s side of the room, and bites his lip as he and a self from two weeks from now trade frantic and clumsy hand-jobs. He hopes Foggy’ll walk in on him right now, catch him… catch him in the act, learn the truth about him this way, when he’s so, when he’s so… He wants, oh, God he wants—
“He won’t. He doesn’t,” two-weeks-from-now Matt says, voice strained and breathy, and Matt groans, because he’s equal parts relieved and frustrated to hear that; relieved because there’s something comforting in knowing he’s still thinking about it, still… obsessing over it days and days later, and frustrated that it’s still… a thing he’s thinking and obsessing about days and days later. Not to mention the fact that he’s going to break the fragile peace of a too rare quiet spell.
When it’s over, Other Matt grabs a t-shirt from the floor, cleans them both up, and then pats down his hair after he’s thrown the shirt into the hamper.
“Hey,” Matt says.
“I don’t know,” Other Matt says in a near whisper. About Foggy’s use of past tense back in the car. We did great work. It was our practice. It might not mean anything, and he is oh so very much aware of how fucked up tense usage can be where he’s concerned, but still. Matt can’t stop thinking about it. “It’s only been two weeks since,” he vaguely gestures at Matt, “you know.”
“Yeah,” Matt says.
Before slipping out the door, he says, “hey. Don’t forget to leave yourself some clean clothes. In the men’s room. Not this Monday night, the next one.”
“Yup,” he mutters as the door clicks shut. He flops down on his bed, boneless and worn, and presses his pillow over his head until he falls into a deep, dreamless sleep.
*
“You’ve been sleeping a real lot; you know that, right.”
Matt shrugs. He hasn’t been sleeping a lot. He’s been hiding under his pillow a lot.
“Well, I’m off.” To some party they’d been invited to. He doesn’t know. “’kay.”
“Matt. You sure you don’t want to--”
“Have a good time, Foggy,” he says, pulling his covers further up over his shoulders and turning over.
*
He doesn’t realize he’d fallen asleep until Foggy’s banging around the room at some ungodly hour.
“Got you something,” Foggy says, even though Matt’s still pretending to be asleep.
He gives up the pretense and groans. “Yeah?”
“Sure.” He doesn’t sound very happy.
‘Something happen?”
“Nah,” he says, and comes over to sit on the bed next to him. Foggy takes the pillow from his lap and replaces it with something cool and heavy. He moves his hands along its sides, revealing a squat bottle with a long wax covered neck.
“Whisky!” Foggy announces.
Matt hums and peels up the wax coating. Foggy takes the bottle from him, and wordlessly pours them each a generous amount into wide plastic cups. When Foggy presses one of the cups back into Matt’s hand, he makes a show of testing its weight before saying, “I think this is more than a couple fingers.”
Foggy huffs a laugh. “A handful, I’d say,” and Matt’s not sure, but he strong suspects that was a dig, so he lifts his handful of whisky in Foggy’s general direction as a sarcastic toast, and Foggy meets his little too forcefully, sloshing liquid onto both of their hands.
“Shit,” Foggy mutters as he scrambles for something to wipe up the mess. “Hang on.” He produces a t-shirt from… somewhere and proceeds to mop them both up with it. The jostling makes Matt’s cup slosh even more, and he can’t help from laughing.
“Dammit!” Foggy says, and whisks the cup away before it can do anymore damage.
“Thanks,” Matt says. He doesn’t mean the spill.
“Anytime,” Foggy answers, and Matt’s pretty sure he doesn’t mean the spill, either.
*
God, traveling is awful. Why he forgets this basic fact every single time will forever remain one of life’s mysteries. He’s hunched over and dry heaving when someone materializes behind him and starts flogging his naked back with a cane. He tries to roll away and block the raining assault with his arms, but this only earns him more thrashes. Thrashes to his stomach, to his sides, to his ass.
“Get off the floor,” the man says. The man, of course being Stick.
“Don’t tell me you lost your hearing, too. Get off the goddamn floor.” “No, no, please.” Make it stop.
“Beatings will continue until morale improves,” the asshole drawls. He thwacks the back of Matt’s head once for good measure before finally taking a large step backwards.
There’s blood, a lot of it, and he can smell it, he can feel it seeping from every pore and every angry welt on his body. He breathes; in, out, in, out, and slowly rises to his feet. He squares his shoulders and juts out his jaw. He isn’t bothered by his nudity this time; he doesn’t have anything to hide here. There’s a heartbeat pounding somewhere behind him, and it’s himself as a kid. With Stick. His stomach clenches, and he tries not to gag, because now he understands what and where he is. His stomach drops, because this was bad enough the first time.
“Matty, get your dumbass teenage-self here something to wear, wouldya?” “But--” young Matt starts.
“Go, please. Thank you.” And he does.
“I’m not a kid, Stick.”
“How old are you, Matty.”
“…nineteen.”
“Nineteen years old, and here you are, the Prodigal Son returned.” He waits a beat and says, “no? Well, ain’t that a crying shame. And here I was thinking you’d have figured it out by now.”
“Figured what out.”
“How to control it, Matty. But you can’t, can you. You didn’t even want to come here, so tell me. Just who is Matt Murdock, all grown up at nineteen-years-old.”
“I’m a… I’m a student.”
“Sounds promising.”
“Yeah, um, I’m a college student?”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m sure. I, uh, I’m a lawyer? When I’m older, I mean.”
“Hm. A lawyer, you say. That’s unfortunate,” Stick says.
Matt lowers his head and clenches his fists. Here it comes.
Young Matt returns with a stack of folded clothes, and Stick snatches them away and lobs them at Matt in one fluid motion. He makes a half-assed attempt at reaching out for them. He catches the shirt, but the heavy jeans evade his reach and slap onto the floor like a dropped body.
“And this is me throwing in the towel,” Stick says to Matt. He turns to young Matt, says, “it was nice knowing ya, kid.”
Matt tries to breathe as his younger self yells out, “for real? You’re really leaving? Just like that?”
“Just like that,” Stick says, pausing in the doorframe. “Come find me when you’ve decided you’re done flitting around the timeline like some damned temporal pest. ‘til then, ta-ta.”
In the wake of Stick’s departure, Matt twists the t-shirt in his hands. His younger self lunges at him with something like a roar, and starts raining down an unholy barrage of fists over his head. Left, right, left, right, and Matt just takes it, lets the t-shirt slip from his fingers to join its fallen friend on the floor, lets his arms hang loose at his sides and takes the beating as it comes, just takes it and takes it, until his legs fail him, until he’s crumpled on the floor with only the discarded pile of clothes to catch him. *
“—Hey! Hey, what the hell happened to you?”
Matt groans. There isn’t a spot on him that doesn’t hurt. “Who--”
“Jesus, look at you.” He doesn’t recognize the woman’s voice. “Matt. The bleeding I get, but why in God’s name are you naked.” She sits on her haunches and wraps him up in a scratchy towel.
“Thanks,” he says, and, “I’m sorry.”
She blows out a long breath. “You’re always sorry. Come on, let’s get you patched up.”
She tries to pull him up to standing, but he’s made of rubber; someone’s taken out all his bones and deposited his empty shell out here in someone’s hallway like so much garbage.
“You gotta help me out here,” she says, long suffering. Eventually he gets upright, and she leads him into her place and deposits him on the couch.
“There’s something different about you, I can’t put my finger on it,” she says, after tossing a pair of shorts at him. He slips them on, though he leaves the towel draped over his shoulders. He should ask her about their dynamic, about how they know each other, who they are to one another, but he’s not sure he has the energy for that kind of conversation. Plus, he doesn’t want to come across as though he’s suffering from memory loss. People don’t usually respond well to that.
“Not up for talking, huh,” she says, as she roots around in a kitchen cabinet and pulls down a first aid kit. “Well, the joke is on you, pal. Turns out? I actually like peace and quiet. Which is a rare, rare thing when it comes to you.” She sets down the kit next to him on the couch, opens it and pulls on a pair of latex gloves.
“Sure I can’t persuade you on the pain meds?” she says, rattling a pill bottle at him.
“Yeah,” he says. “I think I can be persuaded.”
“Since when,” she says, voice absolutely dripping with incredulity. She runs her hands through his hair, makes a show of feeling for signs head trauma. “Pod-person, maybe,” she mutters before pressing two small pills into his palm.
“Thanks,” he says, and dutifully swallows them.
“Sure thing. One day I will figure you out, Matthew Murdock, but today is not that day.”
He huffs out a small laugh. There’s something appealing about that idea, he has to admit. “Okay.”
“Okay,” she agrees, and sets to work stitching him up and pressing down bandages of various sizes and shapes until she’s turned him into a human-shaped patchwork quilt. He hopes against hope that he doesn’t travel again before his injuries have a chance to heal, at least a little bit.
“Thanks,” he manages, as he moves his hands over his bare torso, cataloging the enormity of this impossibly kind stranger’s handiwork. “Thank you.”
“Sure,” she says. She gets up and fills a glass of water from the faucet. He downs most of it almost as soon as she presses it into his hand, then when the empty glass is empty, he sets it on the floor.
“Anything else you want or need? I have…” she sweeps the glass up, heads back into the kitchen to poke around in the refrigerator.
“There’s leftover pizza if you want some of that.”
“No, no, I can’t… you’ve done so much for me already. Thank you.”
“Hm.”
“What.”
“Matt,” she says. He’s not sure how to parse her tone. She draws in a deep breath, opens her mouth to speak, and then shuts it. “I… was just going to ask you if you want to borrow my phone. Call your friend?” It’s… not entirely the truth but it’s not exactly a lie, either. He’s not sure what to make of it.
Matt opens his mouth to ask her to clarify that for him, whether she means Foggy, but her phone rings before he has the chance to.
“Speaking of,” she mutters, and answers with a, “hey we were just talking about you.”
“Yeah, hi, Claire. I was just calling to warn you that Matt’s gonna be swinging by your place. Cool?”
Claire. His breath catches, he’s not sure why.
“Hm. That’d be a little difficult to pull off seeing he’s here already and crapped out on my couch.” She lowers her voice, for all the good that would do, “just what the hell happened to him? Do you know how I found him? Outside my door wearing nothing but his birthday suit. Like being bruised and battered and bleeding in the hallway wasn’t bad enough.”
“Yeah, I know it sucks. But that’s kinda why I’m calling? Is it okay if I come by, too?” Foggy’s breathing changes. “She deserves to know, Matt.”
Matt frowns as she throws her arms in the air, exasperated. He offers her a weak smile. “There’s something else now? What, the blind vigilante thing wasn’t enough?”
“I know, right? It’s always something with that one. So… is it cool if--”
“I’ll be here,” she says, sounding utterly defeated.
“You are awesome. See ya in few.”
Claire, Claire, deposits the phone on the kitchen counter and makes her way over to sit on top of her coffee table, pulling up her legs until she’s in a loose lotus pose.
“You mind telling me what’s going on this time?” she says, voice impossibly soft.
For some reason he really, really wants to try saying her name. Feel the way his lips move around it, hear the sound of it. He breathes. In. Out. Then: “Claire,” and he’s amazed at how reverential it sounds, almost like her very name is a--
“Matt.” His name on the other hand, is the polar opposite of what a prayer should sound like.
“Yeah, um. Sounds like Foggy’s coming by?”
“Don’t be a smartass. If you weren’t already beat to shit, I’d slug you one, right now. Pow.” She mimes a punch to the arm, though it doesn’t actually connect.
“I don’t even know where to start.”
“I dunno about you, but I’ve heard that the beginning is usually a good place.”
Matt laughs. “The beginning. I don’t think my life actually works that way.”
“Of course not,” she mutters. Then: “Okay, how’s this. You tell me what happened to you tonight, and we’ll see where it goes from there.”
That’s fair, he supposes. “Well, turns out I have some unresolved issues.”
She breathes out. “No shit. I could have told you that.”
“What happened to me today was my fault. I’ve been blaming myself for it for years, but there wasn’t anything I could do to stop it. I mean, it happened when I was a kid, so.”
“Wait,” she says. “Hold up. What happened to you today happened when you were a kid? How does that make sense?”
“I’m not sure I can explain it. Maybe we should wait ‘til they… ‘til Foggy gets here.”
“He didn’t do this to you.” She sounds alarmed. She gets up, paces. “No! No, I did it. It was all me.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“What the hell kind of lawyer are you anyway. You’re not exactly winning your case, here.”
“Probably because I’m not a lawyer. Usually you have to pass the bar first.”
“…are you shitting me?”
Outside, Foggy and Present Matt steel themselves, finalize their strategy, and part ways. Present Matt vaults up to the fire escape outside Claire’s window and lingers there until Foggy knocks on the front door. Matt holds his breath and waits.
Re: [Fill] Always Crashing in the Same Car 4/?
“You,” Foggy says, poking Matt’s socked feet as he throws himself at the foot of Matt’s bed on a rainy Saturday morning, “have been avoiding me.”
“I haven’t,” he says, pulling the pillow he’s been hiding under off his head. He sits up to make room for Foggy, draws up his legs and clutches the pillow tight against his chest. He offers Foggy a wide smile, and hopes it’s a convincing one, because the truth is, he has been avoiding Foggy. Not shutting him out, just, making himself conveniently scarce.
“Hey now,” Foggy says, elbowing him in the ribs. “None of that.”
“Ow. None of what?”
“That. That patented Murdock ‘you can’t hate me, I’m way too cute’
smile. Ain’t buying it, buddy.”
Matt grins wider, says, “You really think I’m cute?”
“Yeah. Real friggen,” Foggy says, as he slugs him in arm.
“What’s with all the violence?” he says, but angles his head away the moment the words leave his mouth, because while he meant it as a joke, the memory of the man he eventually grows up to be comes flooding back, and it’s all he can do to keep his hands from forming into fists. He tries to cover his growing frustration with another smile. Fortunately, Foggy remains blissfully unaware. He breathes out, and this time his smile is more genuine.
*
It’s been at least nine months since that night in his future living room with a grown-up Foggy, and he can’t help it. He’s been thinking about it a real lot. Fantasizes about controlling it, going where and when he wants to, going back there, sitting there with him again, talking to him, asking him about everything he knows since he learned the truth about the person he’ll grow up to be. Just the thought, the idea of talking to someone who knows him, someone who truly understands him, is unbelievably… arousing.
He thumps his head against the wall on Foggy’s side of the room, and bites his lip as he and a self from two weeks from now trade frantic and clumsy hand-jobs. He hopes Foggy’ll walk in on him right now, catch him… catch him in the act, learn the truth about him this way, when he’s so, when he’s so… He wants, oh, God he wants—
“He won’t. He doesn’t,” two-weeks-from-now Matt says, voice strained and breathy, and Matt groans, because he’s equal parts relieved and frustrated to hear that; relieved because there’s something comforting in knowing he’s still thinking about it, still… obsessing over it days and days later, and frustrated that it’s still… a thing he’s thinking and obsessing about days and days later. Not to mention the fact that he’s going to break the fragile peace of a too rare quiet spell.
When it’s over, Other Matt grabs a t-shirt from the floor, cleans them both up, and then pats down his hair after he’s thrown the shirt into the hamper.
“Hey,” Matt says.
“I don’t know,” Other Matt says in a near whisper. About Foggy’s use of past tense back in the car. We did great work. It was our practice. It might not mean anything, and he is oh so very much aware of how fucked up tense usage can be where he’s concerned, but still. Matt can’t stop thinking about it. “It’s only been two weeks since,” he vaguely gestures at Matt, “you know.”
“Yeah,” Matt says.
Before slipping out the door, he says, “hey. Don’t forget to leave yourself some clean clothes. In the men’s room. Not this Monday night, the next one.”
“Yup,” he mutters as the door clicks shut. He flops down on his bed, boneless and worn, and presses his pillow over his head until he falls into a deep, dreamless sleep.
*
“You’ve been sleeping a real lot; you know that, right.”
Matt shrugs. He hasn’t been sleeping a lot. He’s been hiding under his pillow a lot.
“Well, I’m off.” To some party they’d been invited to. He doesn’t know.
“’kay.”
“Matt. You sure you don’t want to--”
“Have a good time, Foggy,” he says, pulling his covers further up over his shoulders and turning over.
*
He doesn’t realize he’d fallen asleep until Foggy’s banging around the room at some ungodly hour.
“Got you something,” Foggy says, even though Matt’s still pretending to be asleep.
He gives up the pretense and groans. “Yeah?”
“Sure.” He doesn’t sound very happy.
‘Something happen?”
“Nah,” he says, and comes over to sit on the bed next to him. Foggy takes the pillow from his lap and replaces it with something cool and heavy. He moves his hands along its sides, revealing a squat bottle with a long wax covered neck.
“Whisky!” Foggy announces.
Matt hums and peels up the wax coating. Foggy takes the bottle from him, and wordlessly pours them each a generous amount into wide plastic cups. When Foggy presses one of the cups back into Matt’s hand, he makes a show of testing its weight before saying, “I think this is more than a couple fingers.”
Foggy huffs a laugh. “A handful, I’d say,” and Matt’s not sure, but he strong suspects that was a dig, so he lifts his handful of whisky in Foggy’s general direction as a sarcastic toast, and Foggy meets his little too forcefully, sloshing liquid onto both of their hands.
“Shit,” Foggy mutters as he scrambles for something to wipe up the mess. “Hang on.” He produces a t-shirt from… somewhere and proceeds to mop them both up with it. The jostling makes Matt’s cup slosh even more, and he can’t help from laughing.
“Dammit!” Foggy says, and whisks the cup away before it can do anymore damage.
“Thanks,” Matt says. He doesn’t mean the spill.
“Anytime,” Foggy answers, and Matt’s pretty sure he doesn’t mean the spill, either.
*
God, traveling is awful. Why he forgets this basic fact every single time will forever remain one of life’s mysteries. He’s hunched over and dry heaving when someone materializes behind him and starts flogging his naked back with a cane. He tries to roll away and block the raining assault with his arms, but this only earns him more thrashes. Thrashes to his stomach, to his sides, to his ass.
“Get off the floor,” the man says. The man, of course being Stick.
“Don’t tell me you lost your hearing, too. Get off the goddamn floor.”
“No, no, please.” Make it stop.
“Beatings will continue until morale improves,” the asshole drawls. He thwacks the back of Matt’s head once for good measure before finally taking a large step backwards.
There’s blood, a lot of it, and he can smell it, he can feel it seeping from every pore and every angry welt on his body. He breathes; in, out, in, out, and slowly rises to his feet. He squares his shoulders and juts out his jaw. He isn’t bothered by his nudity this time; he doesn’t have anything to hide here. There’s a heartbeat pounding somewhere behind him, and it’s himself as a kid. With Stick. His stomach clenches, and he tries not to gag, because now he understands what and where he is. His stomach drops, because this was bad enough the first time.
“Matty, get your dumbass teenage-self here something to wear, wouldya?”
“But--” young Matt starts.
“Go, please. Thank you.” And he does.
“I’m not a kid, Stick.”
“How old are you, Matty.”
“…nineteen.”
“Nineteen years old, and here you are, the Prodigal Son returned.” He waits a beat and says, “no? Well, ain’t that a crying shame. And here I was thinking you’d have figured it out by now.”
“Figured what out.”
“How to control it, Matty. But you can’t, can you. You didn’t even want to come here, so tell me. Just who is Matt Murdock, all grown up at nineteen-years-old.”
“I’m a… I’m a student.”
“Sounds promising.”
“Yeah, um, I’m a college student?”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m sure. I, uh, I’m a lawyer? When I’m older, I mean.”
“Hm. A lawyer, you say. That’s unfortunate,” Stick says.
Matt lowers his head and clenches his fists. Here it comes.
Young Matt returns with a stack of folded clothes, and Stick snatches them away and lobs them at Matt in one fluid motion. He makes a half-assed attempt at reaching out for them. He catches the shirt, but the heavy jeans evade his reach and slap onto the floor like a dropped body.
“And this is me throwing in the towel,” Stick says to Matt. He turns to young Matt, says, “it was nice knowing ya, kid.”
Matt tries to breathe as his younger self yells out, “for real? You’re really leaving? Just like that?”
“Just like that,” Stick says, pausing in the doorframe. “Come find me when you’ve decided you’re done flitting around the timeline like some damned temporal pest. ‘til then, ta-ta.”
In the wake of Stick’s departure, Matt twists the t-shirt in his hands. His younger self lunges at him with something like a roar, and starts raining down an unholy barrage of fists over his head. Left, right, left, right, and Matt just takes it, lets the t-shirt slip from his fingers to join its fallen friend on the floor, lets his arms hang loose at his sides and takes the beating as it comes, just takes it and takes it, until his legs fail him, until he’s crumpled on the floor with only the discarded pile of clothes to catch him.
*
“—Hey! Hey, what the hell happened to you?”
Matt groans. There isn’t a spot on him that doesn’t hurt. “Who--”
“Jesus, look at you.” He doesn’t recognize the woman’s voice. “Matt. The bleeding I get, but why in God’s name are you naked.” She sits on her haunches and wraps him up in a scratchy towel.
“Thanks,” he says, and, “I’m sorry.”
She blows out a long breath. “You’re always sorry. Come on, let’s get you patched up.”
She tries to pull him up to standing, but he’s made of rubber; someone’s taken out all his bones and deposited his empty shell out here in someone’s hallway like so much garbage.
“You gotta help me out here,” she says, long suffering. Eventually he gets upright, and she leads him into her place and deposits him on the couch.
“There’s something different about you, I can’t put my finger on it,” she says, after tossing a pair of shorts at him. He slips them on, though he leaves the towel draped over his shoulders. He should ask her about their dynamic, about how they know each other, who they are to one another, but he’s not sure he has the energy for that kind of conversation. Plus, he doesn’t want to come across as though he’s suffering from memory loss. People don’t usually respond well to that.
“Not up for talking, huh,” she says, as she roots around in a kitchen cabinet and pulls down a first aid kit. “Well, the joke is on you, pal. Turns out? I actually like peace and quiet. Which is a rare, rare thing when it comes to you.” She sets down the kit next to him on the couch, opens it and pulls on a pair of latex gloves.
“Sure I can’t persuade you on the pain meds?” she says, rattling a pill bottle at him.
“Yeah,” he says. “I think I can be persuaded.”
“Since when,” she says, voice absolutely dripping with incredulity. She runs her hands through his hair, makes a show of feeling for signs head trauma. “Pod-person, maybe,” she mutters before pressing two small pills into his palm.
“Thanks,” he says, and dutifully swallows them.
“Sure thing. One day I will figure you out, Matthew Murdock, but today is not that day.”
He huffs out a small laugh. There’s something appealing about that idea, he has to admit. “Okay.”
“Okay,” she agrees, and sets to work stitching him up and pressing down bandages of various sizes and shapes until she’s turned him into a human-shaped patchwork quilt. He hopes against hope that he doesn’t travel again before his injuries have a chance to heal, at least a little bit.
“Thanks,” he manages, as he moves his hands over his bare torso, cataloging the enormity of this impossibly kind stranger’s handiwork. “Thank you.”
“Sure,” she says. She gets up and fills a glass of water from the faucet. He downs most of it almost as soon as she presses it into his hand, then when the empty glass is empty, he sets it on the floor.
“Anything else you want or need? I have…” she sweeps the glass up, heads back into the kitchen to poke around in the refrigerator.
“There’s leftover pizza if you want some of that.”
“No, no, I can’t… you’ve done so much for me already. Thank you.”
“Hm.”
“What.”
“Matt,” she says. He’s not sure how to parse her tone. She draws in a deep breath, opens her mouth to speak, and then shuts it. “I… was just going to ask you if you want to borrow my phone. Call your friend?”
It’s… not entirely the truth but it’s not exactly a lie, either. He’s not sure what to make of it.
Matt opens his mouth to ask her to clarify that for him, whether she means Foggy, but her phone rings before he has the chance to.
“Speaking of,” she mutters, and answers with a, “hey we were just talking about you.”
“Yeah, hi, Claire. I was just calling to warn you that Matt’s gonna be swinging by your place. Cool?”
Claire. His breath catches, he’s not sure why.
“Hm. That’d be a little difficult to pull off seeing he’s here already and crapped out on my couch.” She lowers her voice, for all the good that would do, “just what the hell happened to him? Do you know how I found him? Outside my door wearing nothing but his birthday suit. Like being bruised and battered and bleeding in the hallway wasn’t bad enough.”
“Yeah, I know it sucks. But that’s kinda why I’m calling? Is it okay if I come by, too?” Foggy’s breathing changes. “She deserves to know, Matt.”
Matt frowns as she throws her arms in the air, exasperated. He offers her a weak smile. “There’s something else now? What, the blind vigilante thing wasn’t enough?”
“I know, right? It’s always something with that one. So… is it cool if--”
“I’ll be here,” she says, sounding utterly defeated.
“You are awesome. See ya in few.”
Claire, Claire, deposits the phone on the kitchen counter and makes her way over to sit on top of her coffee table, pulling up her legs until she’s in a loose lotus pose.
“You mind telling me what’s going on this time?” she says, voice impossibly soft.
For some reason he really, really wants to try saying her name. Feel the way his lips move around it, hear the sound of it. He breathes. In. Out. Then: “Claire,” and he’s amazed at how reverential it sounds, almost like her very name is a--
“Matt.” His name on the other hand, is the polar opposite of what a prayer should sound like.
“Yeah, um. Sounds like Foggy’s coming by?”
“Don’t be a smartass. If you weren’t already beat to shit, I’d slug you one, right now. Pow.” She mimes a punch to the arm, though it doesn’t actually connect.
“I don’t even know where to start.”
“I dunno about you, but I’ve heard that the beginning is usually a good place.”
Matt laughs. “The beginning. I don’t think my life actually works that way.”
“Of course not,” she mutters. Then: “Okay, how’s this. You tell me what happened to you tonight, and we’ll see where it goes from there.”
That’s fair, he supposes. “Well, turns out I have some unresolved issues.”
She breathes out. “No shit. I could have told you that.”
“What happened to me today was my fault. I’ve been blaming myself for it for years, but there wasn’t anything I could do to stop it. I mean, it happened when I was a kid, so.”
“Wait,” she says. “Hold up. What happened to you today happened when you were a kid? How does that make sense?”
“I’m not sure I can explain it. Maybe we should wait ‘til they… ‘til Foggy gets here.”
“He didn’t do this to you.” She sounds alarmed. She gets up, paces.
“No! No, I did it. It was all me.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“What the hell kind of lawyer are you anyway. You’re not exactly winning your case, here.”
“Probably because I’m not a lawyer. Usually you have to pass the bar first.”
“…are you shitting me?”
Outside, Foggy and Present Matt steel themselves, finalize their strategy, and part ways. Present Matt vaults up to the fire escape outside Claire’s window and lingers there until Foggy knocks on the front door. Matt holds his breath and waits.