Chapter Text
Franklin “Foggy” Nelson is a slick New York City attorney--just ask him--whose parents may literally die of heartbreak--just ask them--if he doesn’t make it to their new home in some sleepy village in North Country, of all places, for Christmas.
Every time he tries to ask why they even moved there, he becomes more convinced the whole thing’s a front for some cult and that his parents have been brainwashed or body-snatched or something.
“We stopped there on a road-trip and fell in love with the place, Foggy, that’s all!” his mother says, when he brings it up for the fifth time.
“Ma, that’s something people say, not something people actually follow through on!” People especially do not sell the brownstone their own parents grew up in and relocate to Champlain after spending maybe a week there first.
“Well, it’s not like we see you any less now than we did when we lived two boroughs down,” his father points out. It’s a closing statement, and they all know it. Foggy’s dad never really stopped being disappointed that their only child went off and got himself a law degree instead of taking over the family shop. Foggy’s mom bought a house with four bedrooms because that way the grandkids she’s sure he’ll start producing any day now won’t be crowded when they come to visit. Foggy cannot miss Christmas with them.
Foggy also cannot stand going through another round of mistletoe-related nonsense, which is practically guaranteed to happen if his parents find out he’s single this year.
Every time he contemplates the possibility, he has a cold-sweat flashback to the four years he spent unattached at Christmas during undergrad and law school, during which he dodged clumsy set-up attempts with every single solitary woman his parents could find, including sympathetic strangers they met on the subway. One notable candidate hadn’t spoken any English and had been under the impression that his parents were showing her the way to LaGuardia. He would rather chew his arm off than repeat the experience.
Marci the Benevolent, Marci the Good, Marci the Savior of Foggy-kind, has graciously agreed to pretend they never broke up for the handful of days it’ll take to make his parents happy.
“Foggy-bear, I’m only going to ask this once, because it physically hurts to care right now, but what about making you happy?” Marci asks, arching one perfect blond eyebrow.
“Getting through this with as little trauma and as little drama as possible will make me the happiest man on earth,” he says, and he even thinks he means it. It would certainly make him a lot happier than he is now, living the life of a hunted man at the prospect of going home alone.
Everything’s going swimmingly, right up until Jessica Jones, their terrifying boss’s terrifying PI, drops three overflowing boxes on their desks. Two are all the evidence one of the firm’s clients needs to take her philandering-scumbag politician husband to the cleaners in divorce court and one of them is everything they need to prepare a prenup.
Attorney-client privilege: Danny Rand is going to pop the question on Christmas Eve, and Jeri wants to make sure the man who’s practically her godson doesn’t do anything he’ll regret before the wedding.
“A Christmas proposal with a thirty-page prenup,” Foggy sighs. “How romantic.”
“I guess it’s better to have it just in case,” Marci points out, grimacing as she roots through the divorce boxes. “How does a city commissioner even have time for five different mistresses? When does the man even sleep?”
“Or spend time with his kids?” They’re old enough that Foggy’s met them; their client wanted to make sure their wishes were taken into account when it came to visitation and custody arrangements. They’re cute as buttons and sharp as tacks, and Foggy almost wanted to take them home himself; he doesn’t know how someone can treat his own family so callously.
They do what they can--Foggy stays till midnight two days running trying to sort through everything--but it’s pretty clear by the third day that Foggy’s not going to make it home for Christmas. It’s bordering on a relief, really, just to know.
“I’ll make it up to them on New Year’s,” he says, not sure if he’s trying to convince himself or Marci. “I’ll take the whole week. I’ll meet everyone in the entire town. I’ll even look at some property up there, if they want. We can tell them we’re getting engaged.”
“Okay, but I want a fake honeymoon in Oahu out of it,” Marci tells him, patting his hand. “And I’m taking half the theoretical house in the fake divorce.”
He scrawls a prenup agreeing to her terms on a spare napkin from last night’s take-out and signs it. She blots her lipstick on the line for her own signature, a perfect cherry-red kiss, and Foggy wishes terribly that he didn’t know all the reasons they’re bad for each other when they try to make the dating thing happen.
Marci--he’s pretty sure it’s her, Jeri wouldn’t think of it and everyone else had the seniority to take the week off--drapes a blanket over him when he falls asleep at his desk. When he wakes up, she tells him she’ll stay and take care of the caseload, and he’ll go by himself. He wants to argue, but he also wants to not tell his parents he’s spending Christmas on a divorce case.
He goes out and gets Marci the prettiest, gaudiest, god-awfulest pair of Louboutins he can find in her size, wraps them up like he’s trying to impress a magpie, and hides them under her desk with a tag that says “From Santa.” Her squeal of utter delight can be heard all the way down the hall in his office, and it helps keep him warm on the twelve-hour train ride to Rouses Point.
Foggy’s not sure if it was a bad connection or willful misunderstanding, but he’s surprised to discover when he gets to Champlain that Marci dumped him for Christmas. His little-white-lie attempts to explain that she did nothing of the sort, they broke up months ago, this trip was a trial balloon for maybe getting back together and she simply couldn’t make it, that she’d actually done him a huge favor and was the only reason he’d been able to come at all, go unheard over his parents’ insistence that the town is brimming with eligible bachelorettes.
“We’ve been over this,” he reminds them gently.
“There’s plenty of eligible young men, too,” his mother assures him. That seems mathematically unlikely--plenty of eligible guys and plenty of eligible girls tend to wind up a huge pile of ineligible couples--but resistance is futile.
The town is nice, though. Even with the hustle and bustle of Christmas, Foggy can see why it appealed so much to his parents. It’s quiet. It’s cozy in spite of the snow. Everything’s so festive, it’s easy to forget that he’s going to party after party because his parents are trying to get him a date. Eventually, the third time his mother says, “He’s a lawyer in the city and his girlfriend left him on Christmas,” a pretty woman his mom’s age tells him he has to meet her daughter and pulls him aside. He’s in the middle of letting Mrs. Outerbridge down gently about the whole looking-for-a-rebound thing when she tells him it was an excuse.
She’s looking to get divorced, but the town only has one attorney, and he’s been working for her husband for years.
Oh.
Foggy stammers his way through his condolences, and somehow--the sixth glass of eggnog he gulped down fifteen minutes ago has a starring role in this drama, he’s sure--can’t figure out a way to refuse the woman his card or a promise to meet up and go over her case the next day. He jots down his personal number on the card like the guilty man he is; he can’t bill her for this on Christmas.
He’d like to blame the eggnog for agreeing to help his dad wrangle Christmas trees for a dozen people the following morning, but honestly it was probably shock from the Ghost of Christmas Divorce stalking him all the way upstate. Marci puts him on speakerphone so she can laugh at him properly when he calls her to complain.
“There’s something about your involvement that makes people want to never see their spouses again,” she tells him. “You’ll make a killing once you open your own practice.”
“Not helping,” he says. “Oh, do you know anything about putting up Christmas trees?” He’s never had a place of his own big enough to worry about it. “I guess the local lot’s giving everything that didn’t sell to people who might want one but couldn’t afford it and were too proud to say so.”
“Aw, that’s sweet,” Marci coos. “Does anything about me or how I live my life make you think I know anything about putting up Christmas trees? You’re contractually obligated to tell me, so I can stop doing it.”
“I think it’s the way you’re sweetness and light incarnate,” Foggy laughs. “You’re like a sugarplum fairy made flesh or something.”
“Just for that, I’m taking the whole theoretical house in the fake divorce, Nelson.”
The Christmas tree caper is, it turns out, not that bad. The whole thing with ‘too proud to say so’ means that they’re sneaking the trees onto people’s porches, ringing the doorbell, and running away like overgrown hooligans. The last delivery is the only one they stick around for, and Foggy sees why as soon as the door opens. Or rather, he sees why as soon as he’s capable of noticing something beyond how hot the guy is. White cane + dark glasses = blind.
“Delivery for a Mr. Murdock?”
That brow-furrowing befuddlement is the cutest thing Foggy’s ever seen, right up until Mr. Murdock inhales, and a sunny smile splits his face. Foggy’s heart melts.
“You shouldn’t have, Mr. Nelson,” he says, and his voice is smoke and honey and Foggy’s doubtless turning bright red or gawping like a fish out of water. It doesn’t help when Foggy’s dad introduces them--Mr. Murdock’s first name is Matt, and even the calluses on his hands are sexy--and Matt insists on helping where he can, and it turns out that Matt is also built.
“My father was a park ranger,” Matt explains, the second time Foggy asks if he’s sure he wouldn’t prefer Foggy handle the saw. “I learned how to do all this practically before I learned how to write.”
“Just let me know if you need an extra hand or two,” Foggy says cheerfully, backing off. He doesn’t want to come off as patronizing, and it’s not like he has a leg to stand on in terms of expertise. It’s also not like it’s a bad view, watching Matt work. He doesn’t have to worry about Matt thinking he’s a creeper--Matt can’t see Foggy ogling the way Matt’s muscles ripple under his knit cotton shirt as he handles the tree. And if he picks up on the way Foggy’s about as smooth as the road they drove up to get here, that doesn’t matter either--Foggy’s only in town a few more days.
Foggy’s dad has hauled the tree stand out of the closet and set it up by the time Matt’s stripped off the broken branches and cut a section of the trunk off, and the three of them carry it inside and set it up without further incident, provided Matt’s hand brushing against Foggy’s doesn’t count as an incident. Matt doesn’t act like it does, so Foggy’s sure it doesn’t.
It’s almost enough to make him forget all about the lunch date he agreed to with his future-divorcée.
Foggy can’t tell if it’s a relief or even more depressing that the whole thing seems so mundane, once he sits down with her. Her husband had an affair, a few years back. Her husband has been distant, ever since. He doesn’t know she knows, she’s pretty sure. He denies anything’s wrong, when she tries to talk about it. She’s tried this and that since then, hoping to rekindle the spark, but nothing seems to take. The kids are both away at college now, and she’s sick of haunting her own marriage like a ghost. “I love him, but it’s like coming home to an empty house. I don’t want to live like this until I’m too old to start over.”
Foggy can sympathize. He runs through her options, diagrams out the likely scenarios about assets given state law and manner of acquisition, rattles off the sorts of paperwork and agreements they’ll need to liquidate or transfer joint assets. She doesn’t want to hurt her husband, doesn’t want any more than what’s fair. It’s sad but refreshing, after seeing so much righteous rage and pain in cases like these. “Your best bet is arbitration. If you can come to an agreement without going to court, it’ll be cheaper and less acrimonious. You’d only need an attorney for the paperwork.”
Mrs. Outerbridge thanks him for his advice, and he lets her pay for his coffee and sandwich. She hugs him, before she leaves, and he’s so startled that he lets her. He thinks about it the whole walk back to his parents’ place, the way he can’t remember the last time he got a hug from someone besides them.
Marci’s great, but she’s not a hugger. None of the lawyers they hang out with are, either, for both personal and professional reasons. The people he does pro bono work for tend to demonstrate their gratitude in baked goods instead of hugs, which is also for the best. It can’t really be the time he got Jessica’s boyfriend’s blatant set-up of a drug-bust record expunged, can it?
Foggy decides it not only can be, but is, and he gets depressed all over again in spite of the fact that it was an awesome hug--Luke Cage is like if a teddy bear was also a bodybuilder, and getting that felony off his record had basically given him his life back. No wonder Foggy’s drooling over strange hotties during tree deliveries. Maybe he should let his parents set him up after all. A brandy-fueled whirlwind of a Christmas fling with someone who bakes and walks their dog and sings carols and goes to bed at a reasonable hour before he heads back to the unforgiving wasteland of being a lawyer might be exactly what he needs.
He regrets his moment of weakness as soon as he walks through the front door and finds the world’s youngest cookie exchange just getting started. There’s no way his parents are friends with the girls sizing him up and comparing him to whatever blatant falsehoods his mother has told their mothers about him. He’s called on to sample the wares as an impartial judge, and he makes a tepid joke about only being a lawyer that a few of them still have the courtesy to chuckle at. By the end of it, he’s agreed to accompany a pretty blonde named Karen to a party that evening. She has to go--she’s one of two reporters for what passes as the town’s newspaper, and it’s a town gala--but she’s still entitled to a plus-one. Her interest in him seems to straddle the line between polite and genuine, and Foggy supposes he’ll take it.
She picks him up in a battered old truck, and he can’t help but think of a pearl in an oyster when she opens the door and he sees her in her party dress. She radiates a sort of wholesomeness he’s not used to. Foggy almost misses Matt Murdock tucked into the back seat, and Karen follows his eyes.
“Matt Murdock, Foggy Nelson--” she begins.
Matt cuts her off with a grimace. “We’ve met.”
“This morning,” Foggy adds, forcing a bright grin. Matt is wearing a tux, and Matt looks amazing, and if Foggy can avoid the eggnog and the spiked punch and the rum balls, he might get out of this without embarrassing himself. He keeps up the chatter for all three of them on what’s a mercifully brief drive to the community center. Karen apologizes as soon as Matt’s out of earshot.
“He can get a tad reclusive around the holidays,” she says. “It’s like pulling teeth to get him out and doing things, but he can’t just sit home and mope. I don’t think he gets that people miss him the same way he misses his dad.”
“I didn’t mean to intrude,” Foggy tells her, waving it off. “You two’ve been friends for a while?”
“We dated for a little bit, when I first moved here in high school. We’ve been friends since we broke up.”
Foggy thinks Matt might be happier if they were more than that, but Karen would know that better than him, and so he doesn’t say it.
Mrs. Outerbridge drops by to say hello when Karen drifts off on reporterly business, which seems to involve sipping the mulled wine and nibbling fruit tarts and taking notes about who made what. Mrs. Outerbridge looks five years younger than she did at lunch, and there’s a spring back in her step. Foggy scans the crowd and tries to guess which of the men is Mr. Outerbridge. The hangdog man in the blue sweater by the punch? The sullen one listening to the mayor tell a real whopper about fishing, if the hand gestures are anything to judge by? A call from Marci rescues him from a quartet of his parents’ friends who join in, trapping them both in what was meant to be a brief exchange of pleasantries, and try to keep the conversation going through sheer imperviousness.
Between the bad reception and the noise, he has to take the call outside, and he hopes for Mrs. Outerbridge’s sake that she finds the discussion of proposed zoning changes more fascinating than he did, because he’s not coming back in until he’s sure he can slip into a different knot of people. He passes Matt and Karen dancing, and if Matt scowling in a tux was something, Matt having fun in a tux is more than the universe should allow.
“Marci? No, don’t hang up, the signal’s almost--”
Matt’s back to frowning when he hears Foggy’s voice, though, and Foggy tries not to take it personally. He’d only gone full-blown awkward-penguin at the guy and offered to saw up a Christmas tree like ten times in the space of a minute. Who wouldn’t want that in their house from a stranger during a touchy time of year, first thing in the morning?
The door slams shut behind him, and everything goes quiet just in time for his phone to drop the call. “Damn it.”
“Everything okay?”
Foggy turns, bewildered, and no, it really is Matt asking the question, a few feet from the doorway, cane loose in his hand. Then again, everyone and their brother’s probably well aware by now that Foggy’s from the city, and Matt specifically knows that Foggy’s useless. There’s likely some familial park-ranger instinct that kicked in and left him unable to dance with the prettiest girl in the room when someone might be wandering into a snow drift to die in search of better cell reception.
“I, uh--” Foggy holds up his phone, then kicks himself because it’s not like Matt can see it. “Yeah. Just, um, work. Calling.”
“Work’s calling at eight o’clock the day before Christmas Eve?” Matt asks blandly. “While you’re on vacation?”
“Well, you know, no rest for the wicked,” Foggy quips. Matt simply frowns at him.
Ha ha, Foggy thinks, I’m a lawyer. Get it? Maybe if he tells enough truly awful jokes after his parents talked him up so hard, they’ll have to move back to their old brownstone and all three of them can forget Champlain exists. Marci does him the solid of picking that moment to call back, or maybe it’s his phone picking that moment to show some bars.
“One of the five mistresses is knocked up,” she announces gleefully.
“Is that really good news?” Foggy asks.
“That’s like an extra week of billable hours, so... yes?”
“Are we, I mean, it’s for sure it’s his baby?”
“It’s a matter of public record that she’s saying it’s his. Front page of The Post.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. We’re finding this out from The Post?” Foggy groans.
“Jones is good, but even she can’t exactly sneak a pregnancy test into someone’s toilet,” Marci points out. “I just wanted you to know, in case you were going stir-crazy up there in the Adirondacks.”
“Thank you, I appreciate the thought, please keep me apprised of any further developments,” he says acidly, and she laughs again and hangs up.
Even Matt’s shoulders and Matt’s waist and Matt’s hips in that tux, all topped with Matt’s serious little frown, can’t take the edge off the news Marci’s given him, and the cold is finally getting to Foggy anyway, so he heads back inside. Matt follows him, and Karen frowns at them, concerned but about what Foggy can’t guess. Foggy makes a beeline for the punch the second Matt declines a cup. He pours two and circles back to Karen.
“Sorry,” he says, handing her the drink. It’s not a date-date, he doesn’t think, but he doesn’t want to be rude. “Is everything okay with Matt?”
There’s no risk of him overhearing them, not the way the mayor’s homed in on him, and Karen shrugs. “His other senses kind of... not make up for his sight, but help. Parties like this are a lot for him.”
Which makes sense. Parties like this are a lot for Foggy, and he doesn’t have to worry about flying blind. He winds up getting a ride back to his parents’ with their neighbors, because it’s been a long day and Karen can’t leave until the wrap-up, and besides Matt’s been hanging around them all night and is pretty clearly hoping that Foggy will take the hint and make himself scarce.
Karen’s nice, and Karen’s lovely, and Karen’s not a thing that Matt can call dibs on, but Foggy’s only in town for a few days and he’s not looking to upset the apple cart. He means to text Marci a run-down of his exploits so far, and instead he falls asleep and dreams of kissing that scrunch-faced frown off Matt’s stupid, stubble-covered, handsome face.
When Foggy wakes up, it’s still dark. Like, really dark, not the sort of perpetual twilight the city slips into between regular daylight hours. He tries to go back to sleep and fails, and so he has breakfast ready and on the table when his parents finally shuffle downstairs.
“Happy Christmas Eve!” he says, grinning. They blink at him, bleary-eyed and hungover, and he’s reminded painfully of all the times he gave them the same look in college. He really should try to be less put out by spending Christmas in the sticks; he doubts he was nearly as quiet as he’d thought he’d been, back in the day when he’d snuck in past curfew. He owes them for past misbehavior.
Coffee and food work wonders, though, and by the time he’s washing up, everyone is verbal again.
His mother hands him an enormous tin of cookies. “Be a dear and run them up to Matt Murdock’s place, would you? I meant to give them to him last night, but I forgot to bring them.”
Foggy starts to formulate an excuse--their SUV is a behemoth, he hasn’t driven in ages, and that was a compact car in the city--but gives up. He’ll drop the cookies on the front porch, knock as softly as humanly possibly, and then run. It will take him twenty minutes, tops, and it will make them happy.
Matt’s on his front porch, leaning against a beam with two mugs of steaming coffee in his hands, by the time Foggy turns off the engine. Of course Matt was already up. Of course Matt heard the car crunching and rumbling its way up the drive.
“Morning, Mr. Nelson,” Matt calls, and it’s night and day between that look and the look Foggy gets when he corrects Matt by opening his mouth.
“Wrong Mr. Nelson,” Foggy says wryly. He can see Matt debating what to do with the spare mug, and Foggy almost hopes he goes for it and starts drinking from both of them alternately.
“Would you like to come in?” Matt asks, in that curiously neutral way he did last night when he was prodding Foggy about the phone call.
“Sure,” Foggy chirps. Why not? With Matt’s hands full, it would be more neighborly at least to carry the ten pounds of baked goods inside for him. Then again, if anyone could make juggling two mugs and the cookies look good, it would be Matt. For all the scars and calluses, he has the hands of an artist--long-fingered, slender, clean-boned. Nimble. Foggy gets the door, and follows Matt inside, glad Matt can’t see him flushing.
“Coffee?” Matt asks, offering him the spare mug.
“Oh,” Foggy says, meaning to finish with I can’t stay, I’m only dropping these off, my mother sends her love. Instead, he sees the undecorated tree and says, “Yes, thank you, it’s so cold out.”
He unpacks the cookies, feeling ashamed and clumsy even though Matt can’t see him doing it, can’t tell how flustered he is. “They’re labeled, but I don’t think there’s a tactile marker on them...”
“I think I’ll be able to tell what they are when I bite into them,” Matt assures him dryly.
“All I’m saying is that, if there’s something you really can’t stand, I can shuffle it off to the side and mum’s the word,” Foggy says, sipping the coffee. It’s stronger and sweeter than he usually takes it, but it’s warm.
“And here I was under the impression that your silence was pretty expensive,” Matt says. “A couple hundred bucks an hour?”
Foggy manages a nervous chuckle in the face of that bitter edge. Matt’s off by quite a bit; Foggy’s not a partner yet. Matt also makes it sound like there’s something dirty about it, like it’s shameful to want to pay his rent and student loans and have something left to buy food with, after. “For you, pro bono. Are you planning on decorating the tree?”
Matt raises his eyebrows and takes a long sip of his coffee, and Foggy wishes he’d had the good sense to turn around and walk away while the getting was good.
“Aesthetics aren’t much of an issue, sure, but tinsel ropes are fun to put up, and…” he trails off.
Matt isn’t listening to him. Foggy realizes it’s because there’s another car coming, this one squeaking something fierce every time it hits a rut or a divot in the track. He gulps down the coffee and puts the mug in the sink.
“You’ve got company,” Foggy says. “I should go.”
“Stay.” It’s so soft, Foggy almost misses it.
“Sure.” He retrieves the mug, refills it, and then tops Matt’s off too. He’s standing too close to Matt when the door opens, no knock or doorbell or even over-loud boot-wiping as a warning. Foggy’s heart thumps in his chest, Hell’s Kitchen instincts telling him to run. He’s only been mugged a couple of times, but he reads the news. If this was his apartment and someone was barging in , he’d already be dead of a heart attack, no gruesome murder necessary.
He must look like a startled rabbit or a burglar caught in the act, purloined coffee carafe in hand. The tall, dark-haired man in the doorway blinks at him, less caught by surprise than simply surprised.
“Frank,” Matt says coolly.
“Matt.” Frank’s open smile and relaxed posture don’t seem to really warrant the frosty reception Matt’s given him, but then Foggy’s only just met any of them. There might be a long and storied history of jackassery between the two of them, or Frank could have recently stolen Matt’s girlfriend, or practically anything. Something certainly flipped the switch between Matt wanting Foggy the hell out of his house and Matt wanting any buffer he could get.
“I’m not interrupting, am I?” Frank asks, glancing at Foggy and gesturing toward the door.
“Kind of,” Matt snaps. “Foggy here’s going to help me decorate the tree.”
Foggy barely manages not to say “I am?” out loud, because he would have offered, but it also seemed like the last thing in the world he could get away with doing.
A slow grin spreads across Frank’s face, and Foggy’s surprised to see that, in the right light, he’s really a very handsome man. “Well, don’t let me stop you,” he laughs. “Merry Christmas, Red.”
“Merry Christmas to you, too, Frank,” Matt says, and some of the chill finally leaves his voice.