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Trish drives them home from the precinct - Jessica dozing with her face pressed up against the passenger seat window, Malcolm with his long legs folded up in the backseat. Jessica feels disgusting, but she’s too tired to shower, so she peels off her jeans and collapses into bed.
Something like ten hours later she gets up and showers. Stands in the kitchen with her hair dripping and eats leftover pad thai cold out of the fridge. Finishes off the bottle of whiskey on her desk and crawls back into bed.
It’s late afternoon when she wakes up again, sore all over and blank inside. With nothing better to do, she sprawls in her desk chair and opens up her laptop.
“Shit,” she says when she sees the screen.
“Battlin’ Jack” Murdock Shot After Triumphant Victory; Killer Still At Large
It’s an article from the Bulletin, nearly twenty years old. The last thing she did was research Matt.
It hadn’t been hard to find information on him. The Bulletin in particular is full of his name: how he was blinded. His father’s death. The Fisk and Castle cases, plus dozens of less infamous ones.
He’d ended up in an orphanage after his dad’s death, she knows. No calculating stage mother to adopt him as a PR stunt.
So there’s no family. No next of kin, no one to notify, no one to clean out that huge apartment. Of course, as far as the city of New York is concerned, only Daredevil died in the collapse of Midland Circle - Matt Murdock went missing somewhere between the, uh, misunderstanding that led him to flee the precinct with Luke and Jessica, and the final battle in Hell’s Kitchen. (And God bless Misty Knight for clearing the rest of their names.) Easy for a blind man to get turned around in chaos like that. Barely noteworthy for him to disappear for good in such a dangerous city. A car crash, a subway accident...the city morgues have plenty of white male John Does who might at one point have been a pain-in-the-ass lawyer who believed in God and played piano and said he had a soft spot for her. Even if it was a dumb joke.
“Shit,” she says again, and grabs her keys.
*
Matt’s apartment is only a few blocks away from her own. She’s not exactly sure what she’s planning on doing - it’s not like he has a pet that needs to be fed or anything. But there might be some incriminating Daredevil stuff that she can dispose of before Matt’s landlord inevitably starts sniffing around. Technically it doesn’t really matter anymore, but judging by how squirrelly Matt was about...well, everything, he probably doesn’t want his secret to come out after his death. Helping cover it up is the least Jessica can do.
He has people, she knows, who were at the precinct. The willowy blonde woman who held her chin like she was looking for a fight, and the blond guy with the suit and too much hair pomade. They weren’t only Matt’s - Danny greeted the woman at one point, and Luke talked to the guy, and it was Claire who took them both into a side room and told them…something, at least, about what went down at Midland Circle - but they were Matt’s to start with. She’s sure about that.
It can’t be hard to track them down. She doesn’t know what Matt told them - if they knew he was Daredevil, if they knew exactly why they needed protective custody - but surely there’s some nice, comforting bullshit Jessica can dredge up to make them feel a little better. Not that she’s any good at being comforting.
Maybe she can get Malcolm to do it.
She doesn’t have a key to Matt’s apartment, but that’s never stopped her before. With a quick glance over her shoulder to make sure there are no nosy neighbors around, she turns the doorknob until the lock breaks with a clatter of metal, and steps inside.
There’s a thump from the living room, and her heart lurches. Matt...could he have somehow…?
“Who’s there?” a voice calls.
Jessica’s heart drops back to its normal exhausted position somewhere at the bottom of her lungs. Not Matt.
“You first,” she calls back, walking slowly down the hall to where it opens up into the living room. She’s got a good idea of the answer already, though.
Sure enough, it’s the pomade guy, although he’s much less pomade-y at the moment. He’s wearing a ratty old Columbia sweatshirt and faded jeans, and his hair is flopping into his eyes. It’s amazing how much less douchey it makes him look.
“Oh!” he says when he sees her. “You’re her. Jessica Jones, right?”
“Yeah,” she says, a little wary, more out of habit than because she thinks this guy is trouble.
“Foggy Nelson,” he says. “I work for Jeri Hogarth. I used to work with, um.” He swallows visibly. “With Matt.”
I work for Jeri Hogarth links up in Jessica’s head with Nelson and Murdock in all of those articles about the Fisk and Castle cases, and suddenly a few things about the past couple of days make a bit more sense.
“You sent him to me,” she says. “Matt. When I got arrested.”
He tilts his head towards one shoulder, a little nod-shrug of acknowledgement. “Hogarth asked me to make sure that you were covered but that it was...unconnected with our firm. And Matt...I tried to send cases his way when I could. To distract him from...well, you know.”
He lifts his hand like he’s presenting an example, and for the first time she notices that he’s holding something black - a shirt, maybe? There’s a pair of combat boots dropped on the floor in front of him - probably the thump she heard - and more black clothing folded on the coffee table. An open trunk sits at his feet with a spare Daredevil helmet sticking out of it, a patched crack scarring its forehead.
“You know,” she says, gesturing to the trunk. “I mean. You knew. About his secret.”
Nelson - she is not calling a grown man “Foggy” - sighs. “No one knew all of Matt’s secrets,” he says, with a surprising amount of bitterness to direct at a dead man. “But yes. I knew he was Daredevil.” He pushes the stack of clothes aside and sits down on the coffee table. “I figured someone should get rid of everything incriminating before...I don’t know. Before someone checks the apartment? The landlord? The cops? I don’t know how this works. I can’t even tell anyone that he’s…” He grinds the heel of his hand into his right eye socket. “Anyway. He wouldn’t want people to know. So I’m taking care of it for him.”
“That’s why I came, too,” Jessica says. But it’s not really a two-person job, is it? Nelson clearly knew Matt well enough to have a key to his place, and he knew where the Daredevil gear was stashed. He’s got this.
His eyes are red, Jessica notices, even the one he didn’t rub.
Shit.
“You want some help?” she asks.
*
They wind up filling a duffel bag with stuff. Half a dozen black outfits in various states of disrepair from when Matt was just called “the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen.” The extra helmet and a spare set of what Nelson calls “billy clubs” with such a dramatic roll of his eyes Jessica almost starts liking him. First aid supplies that are a little too elaborate to be a civilian’s, grubby old clothes covered in bloodstains Nelson promises came from Matt - that sort of thing.
They leave the trunk itself, which has a pair of boxing gloves in it, and a pristine red robe with “Murdock” embroidered on the back. “His dad’s,” Nelson explains unnecessarily. “It won’t be suspicious that he kept this stuff in a trunk. It’ll all come to me, anyway.”
“What will?” Jessica asks.
“Everything.” Nelson shrugs, looking a little embarrassed. “Ah, it’s stupid. Back when we took contract law, we thought it would be funny to write our wills. Had a couple of classmates witness them and everything. You know, you’re twenty-two, you think you’re going to live forever, you don’t have anything worth passing on anyway, why not write your wills?”
“Wow, they grow ‘em morbid up at Columbia,” Jessica says, and takes a swig of one of the beers she pilfered from Matt’s mostly-empty fridge. She feels a little bad, but after all, he won’t be drinking them.
“Yeah, well.” Nelson shrugs. “Anyway. We left everything to each other. I mean, I put some dumb stuff in there like my baseball cards going to my little sister, but everything else...yeah, to Matt. I think I had like a hundred bucks in my bank account then, it was a joke.” He eyes Jessica’s beer, then takes one himself. “But he didn’t have any family. So unless he made a new will and didn’t tell me…”
“...You get to do this all again in a couple of weeks,” Jessica concludes.
“Yeah.” Nelson looks around the apartment. “Good thing for me he lived so spartan, huh?”
His chin wobbles dangerously for a minute before he masters it. Jessica hides her sigh of relief behind her beer. She’s no good with tears at the best of times, but she really can’t deal with one of Hogarth’s little Hogarthlings breaking down.
“Listen,” she says instead, and points to the incriminating duffel bag. “You want me to get rid of that? It’ll be easier for me than you.” She can take a literal flying leap and toss it in the river or the dump, where it won’t get discovered until it’s too late for anyone to care. Plus, Nelson doesn’t look like he’s any good at skulking around shady places after dark.
But Nelson grabs the bag reflexively like he’s afraid Jessica’s going to snatch it up and book it out of there. “No, that’s okay,” he says. “I can...I mean, I should be the one to...it’s my responsibility.” He swallows hard, once, twice. “Besides, he might...I mean. I think I’ll hang onto it for a bit. Just in case…”
Jessica kind of hates him for making her say it. “They don’t always find a body. It doesn’t mean…”
“I know, okay?” Nelson snaps. “I know that. I just…”
Jessica gets it, she really does. Even if she didn’t have firsthand experience of men she thought were dead popping back up again. It’s impossible not to wonder: what if?
Maybe she’s just annoyed because if no one around her can accept it, how can she?
She puts her empty beer bottle down on the coffee table. “You wanna go get something stronger?”
*
They go to a bar near Jessica’s place. They pass one near Matt’s, a place called Josie’s where a couple regulars wave and call Nelson’s name, but Nelson just waves back and walks faster. Jessica gets it. She knows all about bars with bad memories.
She lets Nelson buy the drinks, since he’s got lawyer money, and since she can throw him in a dumpster if he decides it’s a down payment on sex. She doesn’t think he’s the type, though.
Nelson’s silent for a long time, staring into his glass. Finally Jessica kicks her heels against her bar stool and says, “Look, you can talk about him or you can talk about some other dumb shit like the Yankees or Game of Thrones or whatever, but it’s gotta be you doing the talking. Drawing people out isn’t really part of my skill set.”
That gets a faint smile out of him. “Really? What is your skill set? Besides singlehandedly bringing fingerless gloves back into style. Well, doublehandedly, I guess.”
She points a finger at him. “Fuck you, I’m warm.” He smiles wider. “Whatever. Skills: drinking, sleeping, taking photos of shitty people cheating on their shitty spouses. Punching ninjas in the face now, apparently, that’s new.”
His smile flickers. Shit. She shouldn’t have brought it up. “You didn’t deal with this before, then? The ninjas?”
“Nah.” She takes a gulp of her whiskey. Macallan. Lawyer boy is fancy. She probably shouldn’t be chugging it, but it’s his credit card. “Weird shit, yeah, but not this weird shit. Not until that stabby zombie girl broke into my office.”
He sits up a bit straighter. “Elektra. You saw her?”
“I hit her with a car.”
Nelson chokes on what might be a laugh. “Sorry. I shouldn’t - it isn’t funny, but...she’s really back, then? I mean, she was?”
Jessica nods. “Did you know her?”
“Sort of. Not well,” Nelson says. “Back in college. She was his...I don’t know, his white whale, the one that got away, whatever. But she was just this, this socialite, you know? This little rich girl who got him to cut class and commit misdemeanors. He never told me why they broke up, but he wouldn’t even say her name for ten years.” He takes a sip of his drink. “And then this…” he lowers his voice “...Daredevil shit starts, and suddenly she’s back and she’s Xena, Warrior Princess or whatever, and Matt stops showing up for court, and then…”
“She died?” Jessica guesses.
“She died,” Nelson agrees. “And I mean, she was dead for real. That’s the thing. It wasn’t some spy movie fakeout, or Captain America in the ice or some shit. She was dead.” He takes another sip. “And then she wasn’t.”
Jessica shifts on her barstool. She doesn’t like the idea of resurrection. Not that there aren’t plenty of deaths she’d like to undo - but that isn’t how it’s supposed to work. And there’s one man she wants staying in his grave this time.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I wanted her dead,” Nelson says quickly. “Just...every time she’s around, Matt’s life goes to shit. I thought he was safe. And now…”
He looks at her. He’s definitely not sober. Jessica isn’t either, of course, but he’s worse. “Well, you do it,” he says. “Would you do what he did? Would you die for this city?”
Jessica scoffs, and sips her drink.
“That’s not an answer.”
“This city is a shithole,” Jessica says.
“Neither is that.”
She takes a deep breath, and thinks about it. “I’d risk my life for the city,” she says finally.
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No, it isn’t.” Why is it so hard to say? She’s walked into worse than death to save Trish, to save Malcolm - to save Hope, even if she failed in the end.
She doesn’t like tallying up what she has to lose.
“I guess,” is what she eventually settles on. “If it had been a particularly crappy day or something.”
If it’s a joke - and she’s not sure it is - it doesn’t land. Nelson looks up at her with eyes too sharp for all the whiskey he’s consumed.
“You think Matt wanted to die?” he asks.
Jessica looks away. “Come on. I don’t know. I barely knew the guy.”
The truth is, though, that Matt didn’t die saving the city. The bombs had already been set. There was nothing Elektra could have done to stop them. Matt chose to stay with Elektra because that was where he wanted to be. But neither Jessica nor Luke nor Danny is ever going to tell Matt’s loved ones that.
Nelson looks down into the glass in front of him. “I always knew Matt had a lot of problems,” he said. “Day one. I mean, blind orphan walks into your dorm room, you know that’s not a happy story, right? And the more I got to know him…” He shakes his head. “I knew he was self destructive. I knew he missed Elektra. But I didn’t think...I didn’t want to believe that there wasn’t enough…” His face crumples. “Why wasn’t I enough? He could die for the city, but he couldn’t live for me?”
And then he’s crying, fist pressed to his teeth to keep the sounds in, eyes shut tight like that’ll keep the tears from falling. If Jessica were Trish, or Malcolm, this is where she’d hug the guy and let him cry. Maybe say something soothing about how she’s sure Matt cared, and that Nelson made Matt’s life better, and that Matt wouldn’t want Nelson to blame himself.
But she’s only herself, and all she can do is wait for him to finish.
Finally Nelson draws a ragged breath and swipes his cuff over his eyes. “Fuck. Sorry,” he says. “Shit.”
“It’s okay,” Jessica says, then rolls her eyes at herself. What about Matt being dead is okay?
Nelson takes another deep breath. “Fuck, I’m gonna have to tell my parents eventually. I’m gonna have to…” He drags his hand across his blotchy face.
Jessica leans over the bar and grabs the bottle of Macallan, topping off Nelson’s glass. “You’re gonna have to finish that drink,” she says. “And then you’re gonna have to go home and watch the dumbest shit you can find on TV until you fall asleep. And then you’re gonna get up, and brush your teeth, and take a shower. Put on one sock. Then the other. Get on the subway. Get off the subway.” She tops off her own glass too, because what the hell. She can’t believe she’s actually repeating the dumb stuff that dumb shrink told her, but it’s all she has. “You can’t do life right now. But you can do the little pieces of it.”
“Yeah.” Nelson nods. “Yeah.” Then he cracks a faint, watery smile. “I think I’ll get in trouble if I get on the subway in nothing but socks, though.”
Jessica rolls her eyes. “This is what I get for helping.”
“Helping run up my tab, you mean,” Nelson says, but he holds up his glass and waits for her to tap it with her own before drinking.
They drink quietly for a while. But there’s something about this guy makes Jessica unable to keep her stupid mouth shut, or maybe she’s just got her own processing to do about Midland Circle. “Hey...if you ever need to talk about him, to someone who knew...you know.” She shrugs a shoulder. “I mean, you should probably call Claire. But you could also call me.”
He swallows and nods. “Yeah. I’d like to...not now. I don’t think I’m ready. But I’d like to hear about...how you knew him. What that side of him was like. I never really got to know it. Maybe if I had…” His chin trembles before he locks it in. “Anyway. Eventually.”
“Yeah,” she says. She taps her nail against her glass for a minute, thinking about Matt, and is surprised by the sudden laugh that huffs out of her. “God, he was a pain in the ass.”
Nelson laughs too and shakes his head, face tilted up at the ceiling like maybe Matt can finally see him from where he is now. “He really, really was.”
Jessica lifts her glass. “To pains in the ass,” she says.
Nelson picks up his glass too, but pauses before he clinks. “To Matt,” he says, voice serious again.
Jessica lets her smile drop away. “To Matt,” she agrees, and they toast.
It doesn’t make anything better, not really. But tonight Jessica will go home and watch something stupid until she falls asleep, and the next morning she’ll wake up and brush her teeth. Put on one sock, and then the other. Let Malcolm tell her about the voicemails he’s listened to on her phone and pick her next case out of them, to give her brain something to do besides wallow in regret.
And maybe in a few weeks she’ll tell Nelson about catching his dumb ex-partner parkouring around an alley in a suit and tie, or listening to him play piano, or the dazzled look on Danny’s face every time Matt identified another dish by smell.
It won’t make anything better either, but if Danny can take over looking after the city, the least Jessica can do is take over looking after this little part of it that Matt loved. She’s not good at that stuff, but maybe it’s like grieving. Maybe she’ll get better at it with practice.
And if not, well, she can always sub Malcolm in.