Three days later, Matt goes to class as usual, goes to the library with Foggy, comes back to his room around midnight, checks Facebook, and leaps to his feet like someone lit a fire under him.
“Whoa, what—” Foggy begins.
“They’re taking you off life support tomorrow,” Matt snaps, grabbing his wallet and checking to be sure he has his MetroCard where he left it.
“Dude, who are you talking to?” Nate asks.
Matt forgot he was in the room. “No one!”
He barely remembers to get his cane before he runs out the door, too fast too fast, but he really doesn’t give a fuck about maintaining his cover at the moment. Foggy yells at him as he tears across campus, then is right beside him, saying, “Matt! C’mon, buddy, listen to me.”
“I’m listening.” Matt crosses the street and ducks into an alley, doing the math. This time of day, there’s actually no way public transportation will be faster. He’s going to have to run.
He throws himself at the nearest fire escape and starts climbing.
“Oh my God,” Foggy breathes, from down on the ground, and then he’s on the roof. “I feel like the fact that you’re a secret Olympic-level parkour athlete should have been mentioned at some point, Murdock, holy shit.”
“Never came up,” Matt grunts, leaping from one rooftop to the next.
Foggy meets him over there and paces him this time. “Matt, what’re you gonna do? Fight the doctors? Put my parents in a chokehold till they agree to wait?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to do something.”
“I don’t want you to.”
That brings Matt to a screeching halt, right on the edge of a rooftop. “What?”
“I don’t want you to do anything.” Foggy sounds completely calm and absolutely sure and it makes Matt feel like the roof’s disappeared beneath him, he’s in freefall and Foggy’s still talking in that unperturbed, measured voice. “Chances are, my brain is permanently damaged and I’ll die soon regardless. I’ve had a good life, better than a lot of other people’s. And at the end of it, I got to meet you. There are worse ways to go out, you know?”
“Foggy—Foggy—” Matt gulps for breath, air knocked out of him in a way physical exertion could never manage. “I don’t want you to die,” he finally says, and it sounds wrong, like he’s a kid whining about an early bedtime. The words are too simple for the fundamental no that’s roaring in his chest.
“I know. Me neither. But I’m not going to have you killing yourself to try and fight the world for another week or two of me breathing in a hospital bed. There is something you can do for me, though. Maybe.”
Matt collapses into a seated position, hamstrung. “Anything.”
***
It turns out that Foggy’s right about his hunch. He can get to the right hospital if Matt shows him the way.
Anna’s standing outside, on the phone, talking to what sounds like Foggy’s dad. “Tell Candace she can come in the morning with you… No, there’s no sense in all three of us staying here.”
“I’m going to go talk to her,” Foggy says.
Matt waits in the shadows, focusing on the street sounds so he doesn’t unwittingly intrude on what should be a private moment.
Foggy sounds like he’s carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders when he returns. “Okay. Onward and upward, my friend.”
Foggy clings the inside of Matt’s elbow as they exit the elevator. They’ve figured out that he can hang onto Matt’s clothes, though Matt still can’t feel Foggy’s hand and Foggy says it feels like he’s just holding a shirt, not a shirt that’s being worn by a person.
“We’re going to have to wait until someone goes in or out and sneak in after them,” Matt warns. “It’s restricted access.”
Foggy laughs. “I just nodded like you were gonna be able to see that. Okay. Sneaking into my own deathbed like a heist movie. Got it.”
Matt’s able to get in again with hardly any trouble. No one expects people to try to break into long-term care.
When he steps into the room, Foggy makes a sound like he’s been punched in the gut.
“I know it must be strange, to see yourself like that,” Matt says, as quietly as possible.
“No, it’s, uh… I can’t see myself.”
“What?” Matt has a pretty good sense of Foggy’s body, still warm, heart still pounding slow and steady. The bedsore-type bruising is still there, but in more places. The nurses must be moving him regularly to prevent them getting worse. “You’re right there.”
“I know. I can see the equipment and everything, but—it’s like I can’t look at me? My eyes won’t turn in the right direction.”
Matt doesn’t understand, but then again he doesn’t really need to. “How about if I walk you there?”
“Worth a shot.”
Matt steps next to the bed and grasps the rail on the side. “Now?”
“No, I—can you please touch me?”
“You want me to?” Suppressing an inappropriate thrill of gratification, Matt surveys Foggy’s body. There’s hardly an inch without some sort of medical equipment attached. “Where?”
“Um… I don’t know. How’s my hand looking?”
Matt doesn’t bother to correct the looking part. Close enough. “Like it’s got a bunch of burst veins from IVs that’ve been in too long.”
“My forehead, maybe?”
Matt reaches for it. There’s a bandage over most of it, but a half-inch between the cloth and where Foggy’s eyebrows should be is still exposed.
The instant his fingers brush the cool skin, Foggy’s heart stops.
“Foggy?” he asks.
No answer.
The monitor alarms are starting to squeal insistently. Down at the nurses’ station, one of them jumps to her feet and starts running toward Foggy’s room.
He gave Matt permission to touch, so Matt leans to kiss his forehead before he slides out of the room just before the nurse turns the corner into Foggy’s section of the hallway. His heart feels like it’s on fire, his whole chest engulfed in pain. His usual surety of foot deserts him and he has to lean on the wall as he stumbles toward the elevator. Foggy’s heart monitor keeps on shrieking.
He hits the down button. Anna’s crying on the elevator car making its way up to where Matt waits, and she doesn’t even know what she’ll find when she gets here.
The monitor’s extended beep suddenly cuts off. The nurse must have decided there was no point since—
Thump-thump.
Thump-thump.
Thump-thump.
Foggy’s heart’s beating again. And it’s speeding up. Matt laughs in disbelieving joy, but he still has to go, and fast.
He slips onto the elevator as Anna steps off and hits the lobby button.
Just before the doors slide shut, he hears a nurse run out of the ward doors and call, “Mrs. Nelson!”
***
Matt doesn’t really expect to see Foggy again. Memory, he knows from all the research they did, is purely a function of information storage in the brain. Since Foggy’s soul, or whatever, was separate from his brain while he was with Matt, it stands to reason that he won’t be able to remember Matt.
Of course, it also stands to reason that the entire episode was an extended, blessedly temporary hallucination on Matt’s part, but he refuses to believe that. He didn’t steal the St. Ives medal for himself, after all.
(He does find out where Foggy got it because Nate discovers the price tag on the floor later. Matt goes and pays for it so he can wear it with a free conscience.)
Winter passes. Spring arrives. A few people try to catch his attention, to become friends or maybe more, but Matt finds he just can’t focus on any of them, despite what he guesses might be their best efforts. It’s like he imprinted on Foggy and now nothing else will do.
He finishes his freshman year and registers for summer courses so he can keep his housing. Nate moves out and Matt gets a room to himself.
Marci Stahl’s taking summer courses too. She catches up with him after class one day and asks, “Seen any dead people lately?”
“Haven’t seen much of anything lately. You?”
“Oh… everywhere.” She readjusts the strap on her messenger bag. “The reason I’m asking is that I saw your dead guy.”
Matt stops so suddenly he practically trips over nothing. “My—my dead guy?”
“Except he isn’t dead.” She tilts her head in that predatory fashion of hers. He gets the feeling she’s stripping his facades and seeing right to his core. “Which is a bit of a shock, to be honest. And by ‘saw him’ I mean I’m seeing him. Right now. Coming out of Kent as we speak, with what looks like his parents.”
Matt reels, clutching his cane with both hands against his chest. Foggy’s here, he’s alive—not that Matt doubted it but it’s one thing to remember his heartbeat and another to have it within a couple hundred feet of him. He recognizes Anna’s voice first, asking, “Do you want to come with us to that little restaurant around the corner we saw?”
The voice that replies doesn’t sound like Foggy’s for a second. Being encased in bone and muscle changes the quality of its tenor. But the intonation is familiar as he replies, “Nah, I’m gonna walk around campus while you two do that. Refamiliarize myself with the place.”
“Murdock? Are you all right? Your face just went the same shade as the sidewalk. It’s gross, if I’m being honest.” Marci steps a little closer.
“I’m fine,” Matt breathes.
“Sure, gray is a very healthy shade for your skin.”
“I’m just going to…” He taps his cane on the asphalt in front of him and starts away. He can’t bear the thought of Foggy walking right by him without so much as a flicker of recognition.
“Okay, bye!” Marci calls after him, sarcastic as ever, and he realizes he was just rude, but he can’t bring himself to care. He heads for the library, Foggy’s heartbeat loud in his ears.
Once he’s on the third floor, he feels more settled. Okay, so Foggy’s obviously going to be a student here after all. His recovery must have gone well. That’s good news.
Matt pulls his laptop out but ends up sitting immobile, trying to figure out what to do next.
He frowns when the heartbeat hits his awareness. He’s only heard it twice, but—
Yeah, that’s Foggy. Matt kind of wants to give St. Raphael the finger, and then immediately stores the impulse up for his next confession.
Obviously he’s not going to be allowed to escape this, so he closes his laptop and just. Waits.
Foggy comes wandering up the stacks, straight toward Matt, humming to himself. His attention must be elsewhere, because he starts noticeably when his head turns in Matt’s direction. “Oh, sorry! I’m being really loud. Probably the opposite of what you were hoping for when you came to the library, right?”
Matt smiles, charmed. Foggy’s heartbeat kicks up a notch in response. “That’s all right. I’m not getting that much studying done at the moment, anyway.” He indicates the closed computer with a wave of his hand.
“I think voluntarily taking summer courses is the definition of overachieving, so you’re ahead of the game. I’m a little behind it, myself. I could probably learn from your example.” His hair’s long, now. Matt’s pretty sure it was short when he saw him last, though it was hard to tell under all the bandages.
“I don’t—I don’t think anyone would consider me a role model.” This is cheating, but he goes ahead and asks anyway. “You’re behind the game? Are you a student here?”
Foggy makes a sort of gesture with his hand, then says, “Oh shit, sorry, I just wobbled my hand back and forth because the answer is sort of. I was admitted awhile back but I—” He hesitates, and Matt can practically hear him debating with himself on how much detail a total stranger would want to hear. “I had some other things I needed to take care of, so I’m going to be starting here a year later than originally planned.”
“Well. I’m glad you’re here now.” Too eager, Matt’s better impulse control chides him, but he ignores it. Force of habit. Also Foggy smells really good and Matt kind of wants to just sniff him all over. “I’m Matt Murdock.” He offers his hand.
Foggy straightens to attention. “No way, dude! I was supposed to be your roomie last year! I’m Foggy Nelson!” He shoots out his hand and takes Matt’s—
And freezes. His hand convulses around Matt’s as the air catches in his lungs, and catches, and catches. His heartbeat speeds up to panic levels.
Matt shoots to his feet. “Foggy? Are you okay?”
“I—I—”
Foggy’s grip has turned painful but Matt’s too scared to care. “What is it?”
“Matt.”
“Yeah? C’mon, buddy, talk to me.”
Foggy heaves a deep breath in, then out. “Oh my God. You complete dick.” He punches Matt once, on the shoulder, not to hurt but to make a point. “‘Are you a student here?’ What the fuck, Murdock, you were really not gonna tell me?”
Matt’s jaw drops. “Tell you? Tell you what?”
In answer, Foggy reaches for Matt’s neck and runs his finger gently down the chain, until he can hook it and draw out the medal. “You’re still wearing it.”
Oh. Oh. Matt’s eyes sting because he can finally believe. His voice sounds gravelly in his own ears. “You’ve been gone a long time. I needed someone to look after me, without you around.”
Foggy steps a little closer. His warmth radiates out and brushes the front of Matt’s body like a caress. “I guess me and Ives will just have to team up, then.”
All of Matt’s words flee in a rush before the surge of emotion that clogs his throat, then. The only thing he can do is nod, and let Foggy kiss him, because Foggy—as usual—knows exactly what he needs.
[Fill] If Only It Were True (part five)
Three days later, Matt goes to class as usual, goes to the library with Foggy, comes back to his room around midnight, checks Facebook, and leaps to his feet like someone lit a fire under him.
“Whoa, what—” Foggy begins.
“They’re taking you off life support tomorrow,” Matt snaps, grabbing his wallet and checking to be sure he has his MetroCard where he left it.
“Dude, who are you talking to?” Nate asks.
Matt forgot he was in the room. “No one!”
He barely remembers to get his cane before he runs out the door, too fast too fast, but he really doesn’t give a fuck about maintaining his cover at the moment. Foggy yells at him as he tears across campus, then is right beside him, saying, “Matt! C’mon, buddy, listen to me.”
“I’m listening.” Matt crosses the street and ducks into an alley, doing the math. This time of day, there’s actually no way public transportation will be faster. He’s going to have to run.
He throws himself at the nearest fire escape and starts climbing.
“Oh my God,” Foggy breathes, from down on the ground, and then he’s on the roof. “I feel like the fact that you’re a secret Olympic-level parkour athlete should have been mentioned at some point, Murdock, holy shit.”
“Never came up,” Matt grunts, leaping from one rooftop to the next.
Foggy meets him over there and paces him this time. “Matt, what’re you gonna do? Fight the doctors? Put my parents in a chokehold till they agree to wait?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to do something.”
“I don’t want you to.”
That brings Matt to a screeching halt, right on the edge of a rooftop. “What?”
“I don’t want you to do anything.” Foggy sounds completely calm and absolutely sure and it makes Matt feel like the roof’s disappeared beneath him, he’s in freefall and Foggy’s still talking in that unperturbed, measured voice. “Chances are, my brain is permanently damaged and I’ll die soon regardless. I’ve had a good life, better than a lot of other people’s. And at the end of it, I got to meet you. There are worse ways to go out, you know?”
“Foggy—Foggy—” Matt gulps for breath, air knocked out of him in a way physical exertion could never manage. “I don’t want you to die,” he finally says, and it sounds wrong, like he’s a kid whining about an early bedtime. The words are too simple for the fundamental no that’s roaring in his chest.
“I know. Me neither. But I’m not going to have you killing yourself to try and fight the world for another week or two of me breathing in a hospital bed. There is something you can do for me, though. Maybe.”
Matt collapses into a seated position, hamstrung. “Anything.”
***
It turns out that Foggy’s right about his hunch. He can get to the right hospital if Matt shows him the way.
Anna’s standing outside, on the phone, talking to what sounds like Foggy’s dad. “Tell Candace she can come in the morning with you… No, there’s no sense in all three of us staying here.”
“I’m going to go talk to her,” Foggy says.
Matt waits in the shadows, focusing on the street sounds so he doesn’t unwittingly intrude on what should be a private moment.
Foggy sounds like he’s carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders when he returns. “Okay. Onward and upward, my friend.”
Foggy clings the inside of Matt’s elbow as they exit the elevator. They’ve figured out that he can hang onto Matt’s clothes, though Matt still can’t feel Foggy’s hand and Foggy says it feels like he’s just holding a shirt, not a shirt that’s being worn by a person.
“We’re going to have to wait until someone goes in or out and sneak in after them,” Matt warns. “It’s restricted access.”
Foggy laughs. “I just nodded like you were gonna be able to see that. Okay. Sneaking into my own deathbed like a heist movie. Got it.”
Matt’s able to get in again with hardly any trouble. No one expects people to try to break into long-term care.
When he steps into the room, Foggy makes a sound like he’s been punched in the gut.
“I know it must be strange, to see yourself like that,” Matt says, as quietly as possible.
“No, it’s, uh… I can’t see myself.”
“What?” Matt has a pretty good sense of Foggy’s body, still warm, heart still pounding slow and steady. The bedsore-type bruising is still there, but in more places. The nurses must be moving him regularly to prevent them getting worse. “You’re right there.”
“I know. I can see the equipment and everything, but—it’s like I can’t look at me? My eyes won’t turn in the right direction.”
Matt doesn’t understand, but then again he doesn’t really need to. “How about if I walk you there?”
“Worth a shot.”
Matt steps next to the bed and grasps the rail on the side. “Now?”
“No, I—can you please touch me?”
“You want me to?” Suppressing an inappropriate thrill of gratification, Matt surveys Foggy’s body. There’s hardly an inch without some sort of medical equipment attached. “Where?”
“Um… I don’t know. How’s my hand looking?”
Matt doesn’t bother to correct the looking part. Close enough. “Like it’s got a bunch of burst veins from IVs that’ve been in too long.”
“My forehead, maybe?”
Matt reaches for it. There’s a bandage over most of it, but a half-inch between the cloth and where Foggy’s eyebrows should be is still exposed.
The instant his fingers brush the cool skin, Foggy’s heart stops.
“Foggy?” he asks.
No answer.
The monitor alarms are starting to squeal insistently. Down at the nurses’ station, one of them jumps to her feet and starts running toward Foggy’s room.
He gave Matt permission to touch, so Matt leans to kiss his forehead before he slides out of the room just before the nurse turns the corner into Foggy’s section of the hallway. His heart feels like it’s on fire, his whole chest engulfed in pain. His usual surety of foot deserts him and he has to lean on the wall as he stumbles toward the elevator. Foggy’s heart monitor keeps on shrieking.
He hits the down button. Anna’s crying on the elevator car making its way up to where Matt waits, and she doesn’t even know what she’ll find when she gets here.
The monitor’s extended beep suddenly cuts off. The nurse must have decided there was no point since—
Thump-thump.
Thump-thump.
Thump-thump.
Foggy’s heart’s beating again. And it’s speeding up. Matt laughs in disbelieving joy, but he still has to go, and fast.
He slips onto the elevator as Anna steps off and hits the lobby button.
Just before the doors slide shut, he hears a nurse run out of the ward doors and call, “Mrs. Nelson!”
***
Matt doesn’t really expect to see Foggy again. Memory, he knows from all the research they did, is purely a function of information storage in the brain. Since Foggy’s soul, or whatever, was separate from his brain while he was with Matt, it stands to reason that he won’t be able to remember Matt.
Of course, it also stands to reason that the entire episode was an extended, blessedly temporary hallucination on Matt’s part, but he refuses to believe that. He didn’t steal the St. Ives medal for himself, after all.
(He does find out where Foggy got it because Nate discovers the price tag on the floor later. Matt goes and pays for it so he can wear it with a free conscience.)
Winter passes. Spring arrives. A few people try to catch his attention, to become friends or maybe more, but Matt finds he just can’t focus on any of them, despite what he guesses might be their best efforts. It’s like he imprinted on Foggy and now nothing else will do.
He finishes his freshman year and registers for summer courses so he can keep his housing. Nate moves out and Matt gets a room to himself.
Marci Stahl’s taking summer courses too. She catches up with him after class one day and asks, “Seen any dead people lately?”
“Haven’t seen much of anything lately. You?”
“Oh… everywhere.” She readjusts the strap on her messenger bag. “The reason I’m asking is that I saw your dead guy.”
Matt stops so suddenly he practically trips over nothing. “My—my dead guy?”
“Except he isn’t dead.” She tilts her head in that predatory fashion of hers. He gets the feeling she’s stripping his facades and seeing right to his core. “Which is a bit of a shock, to be honest. And by ‘saw him’ I mean I’m seeing him. Right now. Coming out of Kent as we speak, with what looks like his parents.”
Matt reels, clutching his cane with both hands against his chest. Foggy’s here, he’s alive—not that Matt doubted it but it’s one thing to remember his heartbeat and another to have it within a couple hundred feet of him. He recognizes Anna’s voice first, asking, “Do you want to come with us to that little restaurant around the corner we saw?”
The voice that replies doesn’t sound like Foggy’s for a second. Being encased in bone and muscle changes the quality of its tenor. But the intonation is familiar as he replies, “Nah, I’m gonna walk around campus while you two do that. Refamiliarize myself with the place.”
“Murdock? Are you all right? Your face just went the same shade as the sidewalk. It’s gross, if I’m being honest.” Marci steps a little closer.
“I’m fine,” Matt breathes.
“Sure, gray is a very healthy shade for your skin.”
“I’m just going to…” He taps his cane on the asphalt in front of him and starts away. He can’t bear the thought of Foggy walking right by him without so much as a flicker of recognition.
“Okay, bye!” Marci calls after him, sarcastic as ever, and he realizes he was just rude, but he can’t bring himself to care. He heads for the library, Foggy’s heartbeat loud in his ears.
Once he’s on the third floor, he feels more settled. Okay, so Foggy’s obviously going to be a student here after all. His recovery must have gone well. That’s good news.
Matt pulls his laptop out but ends up sitting immobile, trying to figure out what to do next.
He frowns when the heartbeat hits his awareness. He’s only heard it twice, but—
Yeah, that’s Foggy. Matt kind of wants to give St. Raphael the finger, and then immediately stores the impulse up for his next confession.
Obviously he’s not going to be allowed to escape this, so he closes his laptop and just. Waits.
Foggy comes wandering up the stacks, straight toward Matt, humming to himself. His attention must be elsewhere, because he starts noticeably when his head turns in Matt’s direction. “Oh, sorry! I’m being really loud. Probably the opposite of what you were hoping for when you came to the library, right?”
Matt smiles, charmed. Foggy’s heartbeat kicks up a notch in response. “That’s all right. I’m not getting that much studying done at the moment, anyway.” He indicates the closed computer with a wave of his hand.
“I think voluntarily taking summer courses is the definition of overachieving, so you’re ahead of the game. I’m a little behind it, myself. I could probably learn from your example.” His hair’s long, now. Matt’s pretty sure it was short when he saw him last, though it was hard to tell under all the bandages.
“I don’t—I don’t think anyone would consider me a role model.” This is cheating, but he goes ahead and asks anyway. “You’re behind the game? Are you a student here?”
Foggy makes a sort of gesture with his hand, then says, “Oh shit, sorry, I just wobbled my hand back and forth because the answer is sort of. I was admitted awhile back but I—” He hesitates, and Matt can practically hear him debating with himself on how much detail a total stranger would want to hear. “I had some other things I needed to take care of, so I’m going to be starting here a year later than originally planned.”
“Well. I’m glad you’re here now.” Too eager, Matt’s better impulse control chides him, but he ignores it. Force of habit. Also Foggy smells really good and Matt kind of wants to just sniff him all over. “I’m Matt Murdock.” He offers his hand.
Foggy straightens to attention. “No way, dude! I was supposed to be your roomie last year! I’m Foggy Nelson!” He shoots out his hand and takes Matt’s—
And freezes. His hand convulses around Matt’s as the air catches in his lungs, and catches, and catches. His heartbeat speeds up to panic levels.
Matt shoots to his feet. “Foggy? Are you okay?”
“I—I—”
Foggy’s grip has turned painful but Matt’s too scared to care. “What is it?”
“Matt.”
“Yeah? C’mon, buddy, talk to me.”
Foggy heaves a deep breath in, then out. “Oh my God. You complete dick.” He punches Matt once, on the shoulder, not to hurt but to make a point. “‘Are you a student here?’ What the fuck, Murdock, you were really not gonna tell me?”
Matt’s jaw drops. “Tell you? Tell you what?”
In answer, Foggy reaches for Matt’s neck and runs his finger gently down the chain, until he can hook it and draw out the medal. “You’re still wearing it.”
Oh. Oh. Matt’s eyes sting because he can finally believe. His voice sounds gravelly in his own ears. “You’ve been gone a long time. I needed someone to look after me, without you around.”
Foggy steps a little closer. His warmth radiates out and brushes the front of Matt’s body like a caress. “I guess me and Ives will just have to team up, then.”
All of Matt’s words flee in a rush before the surge of emotion that clogs his throat, then. The only thing he can do is nod, and let Foggy kiss him, because Foggy—as usual—knows exactly what he needs.