"That's your question? Not the wonder of volcanoes?"

"Almost all of your stories are about drinking. And being drunk."

"You were a drinker before you met me, that's what you always said. First drink at nine, right?"

"It wasn't like, I wasn't, I don't want...I don't want you to think Dad was a drunk okay? It was a sip. It was a, a," he seemed to get caught on the word and worked his jaw for a moment before continuing, "he wanted me to know he trusted him and that we were on the same team."

Foggy smiled. "Hey, I never said your dad was a bad influence. I strongly approved of your dad's style."

"He wasn't doing it for style," Matthew said.

"I know, Matty." Foggy sat down in the other chair. "I'm sorry if I made you feel like I thought bad things about your dad. I know his memory is incredibly important to you. And everything you've ever said lets me know that he did his absolute best by you, the best he knew how. I know that, okay?"

"Okay." Matthew waited a beat and then continued. "So we're not alcoholics?"

"Umm, well no promises about Karen. She's another friend from when you're older. And I've dabbled. Maybe indulged a bit too much in college. But you're definitely the best of us as far as inebriants of the boozy sort. I don't think you like feeling really drunk. You said it makes you sick," Foggy said.

"Okay."

"Okay then. Volcanoes," Foggy stood up with a flourish. "Are you even going to ask me what volcanoes are, or am I going to have to direct this monologue all by myself like the finest Shakespearean castmember?"

"I can hear you know. I can't see-"

"-for shit, but your hearing is spectacular. Good point. So we know volcanoes are white bread, butter, sugar and cinnamon. But what happens next?" Foggy opened the fridge and got out the butter, then opened each cabinet in turn in search of something. On the last drawer he found a knife, which appeared to be the object of his search.

"We get out a knife?" Matthew guessed. "I dunno, this isn't my snack."

"Sure it is. You invented it. Or maybe you found a recipe on the internet. I never bothered to ask. Anyway, you taught me the fine art of volcanoes in junior year of undergrad, when there was a toaster oven in our dorms communal kitchen. Okay, Jarvis, are there any bowls or measuring cups or anything safe to go in the microwave?" He asked.

"Upper cabinet, all of the glass bowls are microwave safe."

"Thanks, Jarvis. Okay, so this is actually really easy. First we melt some butter. How much butter? I quote the great guru Matthew Michael Murdock, circa that one night when we were not drunk but quite a bit tipsy - 'I dunno, Foggy, not a whole stick or anything'. I have taken this to mean a great deal. Like maybe half a stick."

He cut the butter as such and put it into the microwave, tapping in a time to melt it, then pausing. "Will the microwave bother you?"

Matthew shrugged. "Everything bothers me."

"Okay, well it's only set to twenty seconds. If it really bothers you, stop me and we'll warm this up on the stove top somehow."

The low hum of the microwave seemed fairly innocuous, but Matthew set his jaw and didn't move for the whole of it. Foggy floundered a bit, finger hovering by the stop button but waiting on his word to stop. He popped the door open at one second, averting the standard microwave alert that JARVIS had been fighting for the previous nineteen seconds. Who programmed the alarm sounds into the base code of the microwave such that the volume was immutable?

"Okay, now we add some sugar and cinnamon. I'm going to need your super tasting here, actually. You do this part to taste, usually with a frankly excessive number of taste-tests. The flavor we're looking for is 'intensely cinnamon, but not painful'. I'll do the sugar and you can add the cinnamon."

Foggy added enough sugar to the liquid butter that the mixture became a thick paste, then got out the cinnamon and a separate spoon for scooping.

Matthew considered the setup dubiously. "I haven't cooked since the accident," he said.

"I have great faith," Foggy said. "And you absolutely have. Just in a weird timey-wimey kind of way that you can't remember because of magic."

"The future is really complicated," Matthew said, scooping the barest sprinkling of cinnamon into the bowl and stirring it in. He sniffed and added a bit more.

"You're telling me, buddy. And I haven't even told you about the aliens yet."

"Aliens?" Matthew froze with his pinkie finger halfway to his mouth. "There are aliens?"

"Aw yes, there are aliens. And Captain America is found, alive in the Arctic. You were really excited about that one."

"I had his comics," Matthew said, adding a bit more cinnamon. "Is he one of the people who own this fancy future building?"

"Something like that. It's probably all a bit complicated to explain to you know, especially since you're going to go back to being adult you soon and then I'd be explaining it to somebody who already knows all this stuff."

Matthew pushed the bowl of cinnamon sugar back. "I think that's good."

"Then it's time to get out the bread. This is boring white bread. That is because, as my cooking guru once explained, it's only purpose is to be a boring background palate on which to paint cinnamon. And we were broke and there was white bread in the communal kitchen. So we get out two slices of bread and divide this sugar up evenly between two friends. Since I am larger and also an adult, I get two thirds and you get one third and that is even," Foggy said as he divided the mixture up meticulously evenly, then spread it in a thick layer of sugar. "Then in an ideal world, we'd have a toaster oven, but we do not. Instead we're going to use this tiny stove's broiler."

He bustled about for a bit, setting that to preheat ("always forget to preheat the oven, that is an essential step"), finding a tray and getting the slices of sugary toast under the broiler. Then he sat down back in the other chair.

"And now we wait. Luckily there's a glass window so I can watch till they're ready. You can smell toast burning, right?"

"Yeah."

"Good, that saves us setting a timer. Feeling tired yet, Matty? You've been up all night at this point. That've slowed me down when I was your age. I didn't stay up till midnight on New Years till I was eleven, I think. I kept meaning to, but then we'd fall asleep and my traitorous parents wouldn't wake us back up."

"Maybe a little," Matthew allowed. "But I don't need to go to bed."

"No?"

"No," Matthew said.

They sat in silence for a minute, or proximal silence. There was the bubbling of the sugar as it caramelized and formed large magma-like bubbles, the near silence hiss of steam as the water vapor left the slices of bread, the quiet tick of a clock out in the living room. It was likely silence to Foggy. He looked of a mind to interrupt with a new line of conversation, but just as he opened his mouth, Matthew shook his head.

"I'm sorry. I overheard something and that's bad too, but I want to apologize for hurting you as an adult. I'm sorry I was a bad friend."

"Matty, you can't apologize for that. You don't even remember what you did."

"I got scared you were going to leave me so I made you leave me by being awful," Matthew said, voice clipped. "It's a trend, my trauma recovery therapist said so. If I got drunk and hit someone, could I apologize, even if I didn't remember? It's the same thing. I don't remember, but I did it. I'm sorry I made you sad and guilty and lonely."

"Hey, Matty, I-"

"You don't have to do anything about it. I know you want to talk to the real Matt, not me. I just want you to know. Also, the toast is going to burn if you don't take it out."

Foggy bolted up and in a flurry located the one dish towel that could be used as a potholder, since there were no actual potholders to be found anywhere in the kitchen. He located plates for both of them and distributed the slices of toast, the bubbles now freezing into semi-solid sugar as they cooled.

"If I go to bed will you still be here?" Matthew asked. "When I wake up? I know you have important places to be."

"If you need me here, I'll be here," Foggy said. "What do you think?"

Matthew tried a tiny nibble. "Hot. Sweet. Tastes like cinnamon."

"You, my boy, could replace the entire food review section of the newspaper. Cold. Wet. Might be seafood."

"No, I like it," Matthew insisted. "I don't want to throw up or anything. It's sharp, but good." He tried another bit. "Maybe needed more cinnamon."

---

It took most of an hour to get Matthew settled in bed, but after that he dropped off quickly. Foggy stayed for awhile, sitting on the floor next to the bed, scrolling through his phone sending off messages. Then, at half past six, Captain Rogers and the rest of the stateside team returned. JARVIS sent Foggy a quiet notification on his phone alerting him to that fact and they negotiated a meeting three floors up in the communal break room.

The break room was empty of Avengers when Foggy first arrived. He looked around a little and found himself the coffee machine, started making himself up a pot. Captain Rogers arrived a few minutes later, showered and changed into slacks and a t-shirt. He came in at a jog and Nelson nearly dropped the coffee pot in surprise.

"Sorry about that," Rogers said, slowing to a walk as he hit the kitchen, "didn't mean to surprise you. You go by Foggy, right?"

"Yeah." Foggy stood, staring, for a minute.

"You can call me Captain if you must, but I really prefer Steve. Jarvis is always going all formal on me, but you don't have to. Mind if I have some of that coffee? It was a long night for everybody," Steve said, grabbing two coffee mugs from the top shelf.

"That would be great, Ca-Steve. Sorry. It's been a long night and I really never expected this."

"That's fair," Steve said. Foggy poured the coffee and they drifted over to the kitchen island. "The bad news is we didn't make any headway on solving Matthew's problem. Strange is convinced that he will revert back on his own 'when the time is right.' I don't really know what that means. All of this magic business is over my head."

"So what happens to him in the meantime?" Foggy asked. "If he's stuck like this for a long time? Could he stay here?"

Steve shrugged. "We certainly have the space, he wouldn't be a burden. But I don't think Matthew would be very happy staying here without you. Jarvis was telling me he calmed down quite a bit after you got here. Before that he was a bit...disconsolate. I mean, obviously, we can't force him on you."

"No, you can't," Foggy said grimly.

"Well he's not a real child, so we're not going to ship him off into the foster system, even if by some horrible chance this turns out to be permanent. If you couldn't take him, we'd keep him here. Hopefully that won't be an issue, though, and this will all fix itself in the next few days."

Foggy nodded. "Hopefully." He took a sip of his coffee. "Can I ask you a question?"

"Within reason"

"How did you forgive everyone? I mean, Barnes, Stark, that must have been a massive hurdle coming back together. How did you go back to being friends after being betrayed?"

Steve put down his coffee and looked at Foggy, catching his eye and holding it. "I didn't have to forgive them nearly as much as they needed to forgive me. And, at the end of the day, everything we'd done to hurt one another seemed real small compared to the amount of hurt that was stopping everything and never seeing each other again. So we made it work. I don't know how much of that applies for your situation," he said, "but even if you can't forgive him, let Matthew get a chance to apologize. That would have mattered a lot to me."

"Mr. Nelson," JARVIS interrupted, "Matthew has just woken up."

"Aw, shoot. I promised I'd be there," Foggy said. He drank the rest of the coffee in one gulp, gave a quick salute to Captain Rogers and then walked out the wrong door, realized his mistake and took off at a jog towards the correct door. The hallway on this floor was mostly empty, since it was a private floor, which made for a quick jog to the elevators. "Is he okay?" he asked, once he was safely within the elevator.

"Matthew is physically fine," JARVIS replied.

"Well, shit," Foggy said. He walked briskly from the elevator to the apartment door, waved through by Ahmed. Who was looking a bit peaky, really, time to send in a staff rotation. Foggy sped up after passing the threshold, jogging again to the bedroom where he came to an abrupt halt.

"Hey, Foggy," Matthew said, curling under the blanket that had recently dwarfed him. "You came back."

"Jarvis, you cryptic bastard, you could have mentioned he switched back to being an adult," Foggy said over his shoulder. Turning back to Matthew, he said flatly, "Hello, Matt. You look well. And adult. I think I'm going to-"

"-wait. Please wait," Matthew said, sitting up. He'd lost his shirt in the shift between sizes and kept one hand holding the blanket safely around his waist. He reached out a hand to where Foggy was standing. "I know I don't, I just want a couple more minutes."

"You know where I live," Foggy said, shifting backwards, hands in his pockets.

"You blocked my phone number. I know you hate it when I push on your boundaries, I didn't want to force myself on you uninvited. Please, just one minute. I've already wasted the rest of your morning."

"Well that's certainly true. Though I did get to meet Captain America, so it wasn't a total loss," Foggy said.

Matt stood up, still holding the blanket around him as a skirt, and drifted over to Foggy. "I need to apologize for hurting you. I let my fears define what we could be. I didn't trust you, I pushed you away and I let you down time after time after time. I built myself in the shadows of people I'd lost and I never managed to grow into something better, even when you gave me so many chances. So, just, I'm always waiting, okay? You can leave, you can come back. If you ever want to start again, no matter the terms, I'll be waiting. And if you ever need me, for anything, I'll hear you. Okay? Just call if you need me."

"Matt." Foggy said. "You know we can't just fix this on good intentions."

Matt smiled, bright and bitter. "I know. I'm not going to push. Do whatever you need to keep yourself happy."

He walked past, then out into the hallway before Foggy unfroze himself enough to turn around. He fished his phone out of his pocket and opened it to the address book, then scrolled down to 'm'. He looked at the screen for a minute, then turned it off and put it away, smiling a little.

"He just walked out of here without any pants on, didn't he, Jarvis?" He asked.

"Most indubitably."

"What a dork. Which way did he go?"

"Towards the roof. Would you like me to stop the elevator?"

"Nah," Foggy said. "I'll catch up with him soon."