Chapter Text
Foggy only stepped in when things appeared on the very edge of ‘too far.’ As in, after he’d woken up to tapping on his apartment window at three in the morning and looked out to watch the last minute or so of Spiderwoman getting the tar kicked out of her by his old grad school roommate.
He liked to pretend that he hadn’t had a grad school roommate sometimes.
And when that failed, he liked to imagine that his grad school roommate had been a nice, sweet blind boy from Vermont. Who didn’t stash weapons in the bottom of his desk drawers. And who had never once in his life thrown open a window to nab one of two local dueling tomcats from right off the fire-escape. Foggy liked to pretend that the guys next door to them in student housing had never asked him once if Matt had stolen the cat to roast and eat.
Matt called the cat ‘Cat’ and Cat had vanished with Matt after he’d dropped off his keys to the building reception desk, Cat under one arm, shiny new diploma and stick in the other.
Cat had half an ear, no tail, and meowed like an un-oiled streetcleaner. Literally the only person in the world who could have loved Cat was Matt Murdock, and so Foggy liked to imagine that this was a sign of Matt’s humanity, locked deep down in that maze of a heart of his. Hidden away behind the mystic waterfalls of acid and rotting fruit.
Foggy thought about Cat a lot these days. Especially since two separate ADAs had recently puked on or around his shoes this week.
Cat had been an ace at that.
Spiderwoman—or Gwen, as Foggy was now allowed to call her—appeared to have been in an accident recently which had severely damaged her ability to sense danger and go the other way, which was a shame really, because Foggy couldn’t think of anyone who needed that sense of self-preservation more.
She’d also been hallucinating, the poor thing. She’d taken to scrambling in through his office window a couple of times a week to sit and chat with him for a few minutes while he did paperwork. Foggy thought it was a way of catching her breath between rounds with perps and Matt, all of whom were almost always lurking somewhere outside, just out of eyesight.
She was a good kid under all that ire, he thought, and she had some pretty interesting, abstract ways of thinking.
For example, she told him that she had imagined a world just like their own, except instead of a Spiderwoman, there was a Spiderman, and instead of Foggy and Matt being DA and morally bankrupt half-orc (her words, not his), they were best friends who ran a tiny law firm together in Hell’s Kitchen.
He thought that that was very sweet.
So he told her about Cat.
It didn’t exactly have the same uplifting message to it, but he thought it maybe went a ways towards convincing her that not all hope had been lost for Matt. Foggy was pretty sure that he hadn’t eaten the cat, after all.
Gwen asked him if he was 100% sure, and he said he was.
But really, if he was honest, it was more of a 70% than a 100%.
Semantics.
He was purchasing an absurd amount of paper plates and kitchen rolls for an office picnic that weekend when Gwen came up to him in street clothes. She didn’t do much of that these days. She didn’t want to be seen as associated with Foggy in any way.
But that Friday, she popped up and offered to help him carry some of the stuff home. Foggy knew an excuse to chat when he saw one, but shrugged it off. He had underestimated how much stuff there actually had been in his basket and surely a little daytime chat with Gwen would not be the end all, be all of their existence. So he let her carry half of the bags towards his apartment.
He bumped into Matt, literally shoulder checked him, that same night. Matt leapt straight up into the air in surprise and whipped around in shock, which was surprising to Foggy. It shouldn’t have been, since Matt was blind, but he always seemed to know when people were coming, and surprising him had always been nigh impossible in their dorm, regardless of how early or late Foggy had come in.
So it was a little suspicious.
But Foggy didn’t say anything unusual. Just gave his usual, ‘hey, hi, how are you, man?’ spiel and was prepared to be left hanging, also as usual, because Matt’s idea of returning his small talk had always been offended gawking.
This time, however, Matt told him that he had to go and blustered exactly the opposite way from the one they’d both been headed, again shoulder-checking Foggy as he went.
Now that was weird.
Matt Murdock did not stammer.
Gwen swung herself back and forth while hanging upside-down from Foggy’s office ceiling, and it was kind of mesmerizing, if he was honest. She appeared to have forgotten he was there again. Chattering on and on about this guy she’d met in her hallucinations. She called him Itsy. And he was a spiderperson like her.
Adorable.
She told him that she’d also made/met Itsy’s twin, who she called ‘Bitsy.’ And that she was happy because she’d also found that there was a ‘Peter’ out there who liked bubble tea like she did. She told him that the other Peter she’d imagined called bubble tea “the worst kind of liquid roulette.” Which was pretty good and apt, if Foggy said so himself.
“Hey, what would you do if Murderdock liked you?” she asked out of nowhere on the thirtieth swing or so.
What now?
“If he liked you. What would you do if Murderdock liked you?” she repeated for him.
Well, this all felt very middle school, but he decided he’d play along. It was either that or paperwork and lord knew how little he wanted to do paperwork.
“Like, if he liked me? Or if he like-liked me?” Foggy asked.
Gwen stopped her swinging and gave him her rapt attention.
“If he like-liked you,” she said.
Oh, boy.
Well.
That was.
“I guess I’d hide,” he said with a shrug. Thought of Cat.
Matt tended to eat things that he liked. Apples. The blood of his enemies. The ends of novelty pens. Guy had a bit of a gnawing habit. Foggy thought that maybe if he ate more in general, this wouldn’t be such a problem for him, but what did he know about weight management?
“What if you couldn’t hide,” Gwen stipulated, “What would you do then?”
“Well, I guess I’d ask him out on a date,” Foggy said. Seemed like the only other option here. Rejection would end poorly if it was Matt they were talking about.
“Where would you go on this date?” Gwen asked, swinging again. She was enjoying this. Foggy couldn’t blame her, it was kind of fun. Harmless fun. A novelty in their lines of work.
He set down his pen and smiled, thinking about it.
“Maybe a movie? Ah, actually no, that wouldn’t work. Maybe a museum or something, something with an audio tour?”
Gwen wriggled in glee.
“And then what?”
“Hmm, well. I guess after that, you’ve gotta get something sweet. Ice cream or the like.”
“And then what?”
“Depends on if it goes well or not, doesn’t it?” Foggy teased.
“Let’s say it’s going well,” Gwen said.
It wouldn’t, not in a million years. Because even in this hypothetical scenario, Foggy would find something which would tip Matt over razor thin edge of his patience and he would either throw everything down and storm out or he’d get unbearably bored and try to manipulate the servers into a feud or something.
But sure, let’s say, for the sake of argument, it was going well.
“I guess this has been a day-date, so if it went well, I’d ask him on a night-date.”
Gwen made a questioning noise. Foggy decided that she’d never been on a night date.
“You know, dinner and a show? That kind of thing?”
“Oh, so you’d go to a concert,” she said.
Foggy was struck with a vivid memory of Matt’s silent, though deadly war on their metalhead neighbors’ internet connection when their music got loud enough to be heard through the wall. Foggy didn’t know how or what exactly he’d do, but one minute there would be blaring, and the next minute, there would be loud complaints about the damn loading time and Matt would giggle to himself before hunkering back down with his textbooks and headphones.
Those guys had fought with their internet provided for months.
No. No music.
“Maybe not a concert,” he said. “Maybe something interactive.” To reduce the potential sources of damage Matt could do. A busy and distracted Matt was the only safe kind.
“Like a board game?”
Absolutely not, he did not want to die here.
“More like a pottery class,” he said.
Gwen’s suit eyes blinked at him in disgust.
“What?” he asked, “It’s soothing.”
“Mr. Nelson.”
“Hmm?”
“You’re so old.”
Ha.
Cute.
Gwen reappeared a week or so later with a broken arm which she neither acknowledged or wanted to discuss. She had questions about Cat.
How long did they have Cat? Where did Cat sleep? Did Matt ever try to maim and/or torture Cat? What did they feed Cat, if they fed him? Did Matt show any sort of emotion towards Cat?
Oh, also. Did he know where Gwen could find a guide dog school?
A guide dog school?
“I just think he’d be happier with a guide dog,” Gwen said patiently. “Maybe it would make him less homicidal. Maybe he’s lonely or frustrated. Maybe he likes animals better than people.”
Oh.
You know what?
That was a great point and observation, right there. Gwen was so smart, wow.
The whole guide dog thing stuck with Foggy longer than it had any right to, especially since he’d caught Matt, once again, in the street, although this time, he was trying to amend a coffee order at a bodega. It was a conversation he evidently did not want to be having and the bodega owner didn’t care if he was the Kingpin of NYC or the Queen of fucking England.
No refunds. Take your shitty coffee and scram.
When Foggy tuned into the argument, Matt was very validly pointing out that salt and sugar should not be in the same type of container, nor placed next to each other at the same station.
The bodega owner told him flatly that they were clearly labeled. Foggy could actually see one of the veins in Matt’s neck start throbbing.
Not even the kingpin, it would appear, could intimidate some of the local small business owners. Even when he was actually in the right on this one. But this show of arrogance was no match for the Kingpin. He smoothed out his face and folded up his cane and grabbed the bodega owner’s hand. He dropped the cane in it, curled the guy’s fingers around it, then did an about face and walked right out into traffic.
Needless to say, he got that refund.
Foggy couldn’t help but think that this was all maybe a little unnecessary.
It wasn’t that he cared about the guy or whatever, it was more that for the sake of all of his bodega owning potential clients and all of the potentially blind coffee-purchasers in the city, it would be better if there was a more explicit way for people to tell that Matt was blind.
Certainly, the stick did it for most people. But Matt, because he was some kind of insane asshole, sometimes like to forsake his stick and wander around like a crazy person. Foggy had never understood this. When Matt had done shit like this in grad school, usually when he was more than a little drunk or high and doing his damnedest to get back home despite it, Foggy had grabbed his hand and tucked it into the crook of his elbow.
Matt hated this and amended it so that he gripped the outside of Foggy’s elbow instead but went along with it anyways. A little googling nearly ten years later, now revealed to Foggy that this was the correct and proper way to guide a blind person.
The same googling session told Foggy that there was a foundation who set blind folks up with guide dogs ten blocks away from his apartment.
It wasn’t a big thing, he just put Matt’s personal phone number, the one he still answered when Foggy called him at, on the calling list. And that was it. That was all.
He concluded that he would meddle no more.
“Murderdock has a dog,” Gwen informed him seriously about two weeks later.
“A what?” he asked.
“A dog. I think he hates it. He was swearing at it a lot yesterday. It kept trying to follow him when he was chasing me.”
Foggy’s brain was busy trying to process the fact that Matt had not only actually answered a call from the guide dog foundation, but had gone forth and acquired a dog and some training for it.
This had not even been the remotest possibility in Foggy’s head. Sure, yeah, he’d moved the first pawn. But he’d totally expected Matt to cough, spit and change his number forever once he’d gotten that call.
Well, fuck.
“Is it a cute dog?” he asked.
“It’s blonde,” Gwen said, “But it’s not as cute as Tuesday.”
Tues…day?
“She’s big Red’s guide dog.”
Right. Which one was Big Red, now? He had to backtrack through all Gwen’s hallucinations to try to find this character. She’d made up different worlds for each set of spider people and Matt and Foggy combinations. She had a new one lately in which Matt was a big broad version of himself and was married to a skinnier, grumpier version of Foggy who wore beanies all the time.
Foggy accidently met the new guide dog. He was minding his own business, picking up dinner from the El Salvadorian place two streets from his apartment, when the guide dog broke character and training to bark at him like she was a sniffer dog and he was a cadaver. She lunged towards him, harness and all, from the pavement and he soon found himself chest to chest with an off-guard Matt.
Matt shoved away from him immediately and snarled at the dog to shut the fuck up, but alas. Dogs, like bodega owners, were not affected by the kingpin’s murder vibes.
Foggy felt like he’d finally found Matt’s mortal enemies. His kryptonite, if you will.
The blonde behemoth carried on barking at Foggy in the middle of the sidewalk, and while he tried to soothe her and tell Matt that it was fine, he’d just move, Matt told him, “No. Shut the fuck up, we are going to make progress, so help me God.” And Foggy got to witness, for the first time ever, Matt Murdock out of his element as he threatened the dog under his breath with evisceration and she just got louder and started directing these noises at Matt. Matt stopped making the threats.
With startling clarity, Foggy realized that Matt was about to kill this animal in public.
He had to do something. There were kids peaking out of windows to see what the commotion was in the street.
“Here, let me just—” he said.
“No, I’ve got it, it’s fine,” Matt argued.
“No, really. It’s fine. Here, let’s just get her away from people.”
“I just said—”
“Matt, just shut up and hold this, alright?” He put Matt’s hand on his elbow and wrangled the harness off the dog so he could just hold onto her collar and then pulled both man and dog into an alley where there were less upsetting noises and eyes.
The dog barked at him a few more times, but then abruptly decided that actually no, Foggy was okay. It was Matt who was the enemy here. She tucked herself behind Foggy’s legs and refused to come out when Matt snapped at her to ‘come.’
His fingers flexed into the shape of fists when she refused.
The dog whimpered.
Foggy put his hands on Matt’s shoulders as gently as he could and squeezed. Matt went from glowering at the dog to glowering at Foggy.
“I hate it,” he told him.
Hey, good job expressing feelings, bud. If nothing else, at least that had happened. Maybe this was a teaching moment.
“I see that,” Foggy told him. “Why don’t we take her back, then?”
Matt’s face dropped a little of its snarling and he cocked his head at Foggy a little bit like the thought hadn’t crossed his mind.
“Take her back?” he repeated, oddly confused.
Foggy didn’t know what to say to this. It was kind of an obvious solution here.
“Yeah, you know? To where you got her? We’ll just take her back and they can pair you with a new one or not if you don’t want it, I guess,” he tried.
Matt blinked at him.
“I can just take her back?” he repeated.
What exactly the fuck else did he think he was going to do with her?
“Yeah, man. You can literally just take her back,” Foggy assured him.
Matt pulled back out of Foggy’s grip with a frown.
“And that’s it,” he said, snapping back to his suspicion immediately, “They’ll just take her. And what? What’ll they do to her?”
“I dunno, probably give her to someone who she suits better,” Foggy said.
Silence.
Matt cleared his throat.
“I guess--uh. I’ll do that then.”
“Okay, yeah. You should,” Foggy told him.
“Fine, I will.”
“Alright, good.”
Silence again.
“I’m gonna—” Matt started with a thumb over his shoulder.
“Oh, yeah. Me too,” Foggy told him.
“Right. Uh. Th-Thanks?”
“Oh.” What the fuck. Was the world ending? The world was ending. Matt never said thank you. Never did anything which warranted it. “You’re welcome.”
God this silence was not only awkward now, it was painful.
“Bye,” Foggy said stepping away from the other two and towards the mouth of the alley, “Don’t uh, kill her.”
Matt’s face stayed trained on him, but he said nothing.
Foggy beat it as fast as he could. His heart pounding in his neck and chest.
“Murderdock is broken,” Gwen pouted, “What did you do to him?”
Why did it have to be something he’d done to him, Gwen?
“Because he likes you and I can’t find any bodies,” Gwen told him irritably.
Foggy had to shakily set his papers down that time because he needed to look at her full in the face. Matt didn’t like people. He didn’t. He hated that dog. He was going to kill that dog.
Why hadn’t he lashed out at Foggy?
Foggy had even touched him without asking.
“What do you mean, he likes me?” he asked with bile right at the back of his throat. Gwen looked up at him and shrugged. Then pushed off his desk.
“I gotta go,” she said.
“Wait—”
Too late. She was gone out the window.
This was fine. Everything was fine. Matt—no. Foggy wasn’t not thinking about Matt anymore. Foggy still felt weirdly sticky from thinking about Matt the other night. And last night. Why the hell had he been thinking about Matt so much lately? It wasn’t his problem. The guy was literally not his problem.
Except when he was. The Kingpin was Foggy’s problem.
Matt Murdock was not.
Wait. No. That didn’t make sense, they were one and the same.
No, no. That wasn’t quite true either.
It was more like this. The Kingpin was the bane of Foggy’s existence. Matt Murdock was not the kingpin because the kingpin didn’t order coffee from local shops and temporarily adopt guide dogs. That was not kingpin behavior.
No, see. Foggy had suspected the whole time of their acquaintance that Matt had some kind of bipolar disorder or dissociative personality disorder. He had ups and downs. Really low lows and really high highs. And he was a different person in both of those modes and in the space in between. So it only made sense that Foggy could see Matt Murdock as one person and the Kingpin as the other.
Right?
Right.
Okay, good. Excellent. Matt probably had some kind of thing going on with his head. Foggy could allow for that.
But why did that make him feel like he had heartburn?
He got anti-acid tablets from a doc and they helped more or less.
“Murderdock got a new dog,” Gwen reported back dutifully. “She’s much better than the other one. She’s not Tuesday, but I think we’re getting closer.”
Foggy was starting to become concerned about Gwen. These hallucinations and imaginary worlds she’d created were getting more and more detailed. She seemed to have built these characters up, almost as though they were real. She talked about them as if they were real too.
He wondered if there was some kind of reality test he could perform on her. Even if there was, he wasn’t sure she’d be amenable to it, so he could only watch and listen during these late night office visits.
She’d come by less lately. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe she was fighting more. Or maybe she was taking a break from being Spiderwoman. Either way, she didn’t talk about it.
He found that thinking about that gave him heartburn, too.
“I’m gonna be gone for a minute.”
Oh?
“Where are you going?” he asked without looking up. He shook his pen. Then reached for another one. Couldn’t find one that worked.
He went to make a note to his secretary to buy more pens, but realized that he couldn’t do that without having a functional pen. Fine. Highlighter it was, then.
“My friend B. is having some problems in his verse and he asked for help,” Gwen said casually. “He never asks anyone for help, so we’re getting all hands on deck.”
“Oh? You and who else?” he asked.
“Huh? Oh, the usual. Me, Itsy, Peni, Noir, and Ham. We’re scared to bring Tats and Bitsy because they haven’t met Ham yet and we don’t know how well it’ll go down with them. They’re kind of, uh, intense. All of them.”
Right, the usual. Always the usual.
The—
He put down the useless pen.
“Gwen, honey, you know these people aren’t real, right?” he asked, making sure to make eye contact with the wide, white eyes on her mask.
She only shrugged.
“Yeah, I guess that’s a fair reaction,” she said.
Yeah, and you know what that was, darlin’? The wrong one.
“They’re not real,” he reiterated, “How did you come up with them? I’m not trying to be a jerk or anything, I just want to know, if that’s okay.”
Gwen watched him with a cocked head.
“I didn’t come up with them,” she said matter-of-factly, “I just met them. And we became friends. We’re friends now. Maybe I’ll introduce you sometime. But you gotta warm up to the idea first, otherwise I think you’ll just insult them.”
He didn’t know what to say to that. If these were figments of her imagination, he was afraid that if he met them, he’d have to section her. And he really didn’t want to do that since she was still so young.
“Okay,” he said, because that was the only middle ground. “Sure. Okay. Whenever you’re ready.”
He was headed back home. It was getting hot. He wanted desperately to get out of his collared shirt.
And then he met Lola.
Lola who was a big chocolate lab and who bumped placidly into his knee and moved aside, taking her new Master with her. Matt. Her new Master. Who jerked upon recognizing Foggy.
Foggy learned Lola’s name over a cup of iced tea. Matt had strong-armed him into it and now said nothing, zip, zilch. Even though he was sitting, more or less like he would vibrate right out of his skin at any moment, right across from Foggy.
“So,” Foggy tried for the fourth time, just as awkwardly as the first three, “Do you like her?”
“No.”
Alright, well. Good talk.
“Do you like her better than the other one?” he tried.
“No.”
Even better talk. You know, Matt, for a guy who cannot physically shut up while doing Kingpin things, you’re being pretty fucking closed off right now.
“I’m going to take her back.”
Wait, what?
“Oh. I see. Why?” he asked, careful to keep the surprise out of his tone, lest Matt sense danger or judgement and try to murder him in front of this café. .
Matt was doing something, Foggy realized. Something he’d never seen him do. He was fidgeting. Rubbing the pad of his thumb against the side of his middle finger’s first knuckle. Lola stopped leaning her muzzle into Foggy’s hand and turned around to lay her head on Matt’s knee.
He started fidgeting with even greater intensity, but without moving any more than before.
Huh.
It reminded Foggy a little of him sometimes wandering around their old apartment with Cat clutched in his arms against his side. Cat loved this, for whatever reason. Probably because Cat was a broken cat and considered pressure and affection to be the same thing.
Huh.
“Matt, don’t take this the wrong way, but, like. Are you sure you don’t like the dog?” he asked.
Matt stood up. Lola stood up with him.
He left without saying a word. The dog watched after quizzically for a moment, then did a little doggy jog to catch up with his left leg and stayed there, even though Matt didn’t touch her harness.
There was a tap on his apartment window a few days later. He sat up in full anticipation of that tap being Gwen. He opened the window and thereafter became a co-conspirator in a dog-napping.
“I’m baaaack! Did you miss me?” Gwen, with a singed suit, asked Foggy who could not make himself flatter against his desk.
“Yes,” he whimpered.
Gwen paused in her jubilation to lean over him. He could feel her heat doing it.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
Oh, so, so many things.
“Matt took the lab back to the foundation,” he explained into the hardwood of his desk.
“Oh. Figures. She’s not Tuesday.”
For the love of fucking—who the fuck was Tuesday?
Gwen didn’t react to his frustration, surprisingly.
“Wait here,” she said. And then she was gone and Foggy was left to scream into his elbow himself because Matt could not possibly be a normal person ever and Foggy’s extension of concern a few days earlier had apparently been processed in that thick fucking head of his, as some kind of affection for the dog. And Matt, like a fucking sociopath, did not understand emotions and so did not understand that he did not want to give up this dog. He could not understand having positive feelings towards anything but chaos and ruining Foggy’s and everyone else’s lives and so handled that by combining this newfound object of positive emotion with both of those things so that it fit better into his world view.
So what Matt did was he gave the dog back to the foundation. Cycled through a whole lot of emotions which Foggy was 90% sure he did not understand, such as grief, sorrow, and self-loathing, and then went back to steal the goddamn dog, which he then took to Foggy’s apartment and thrust in at him through his window. All because he was operating under the impression here that Foggy was allowed to have positive emotions and since he wasn’t and Foggy had shown affection towards this poor animal one time before, the dog belonged most safely and justly with him.
So Foggy then had a kidnapped guide dog in his apartment, who was hands-down the sweetest and most well behaved creature ever. But the fact remained that he was harboring a stolen animal.
He took dog back to the foundation the day before yesterday. But then Matt had, again, in that fucking villainous pea brain of his, thought that someone else must have re-stolen the dog and so stole it a-fucking-gain so that he could return her to her alleged rightful place in Foggy’s living room.
The dog was the not the most frustrating part about this situation.
The frustrating part of this situation was that Matt was so tied up in this weird-ass Kingpin and sociopathic reputation and behavioral pattern that he literally could not see the forest for the fucking trees.
He loved that damn dog.
He didn’t understand that he would murder an army for that damned dog.
But that meant nothing. He loved that damn dog the way that he loved his damn Cat who, Foggy was now aware, was still fucking alive. Uneaten. Highly pampered. Living it up in Matt’s frankly shitty-ass loft apartment with nothing in it but a fucking cat palace and a bed with some silk sheets and an enormous duvet.
Matt did not want to take the dog because he was already in a complex, confusing relationship with this cat. And he didn’t want to upset that balance.
Which was a good thing in some ways, Foggy thought, because he and the cat were probably at the same level of emotional development.
Matt couldn’t cope with having two things in his life which he genuinely adored because he was, Foggy had also come to learn, fucking paranoid that both of these animals would be killed in front of him. He had some pretty vivid fantasies about how they would be killed. He laid them all out defensively when Foggy tried to move the dog to its rightful home in this shitty, empty apartment.
Furthermore, Matt would not hear the words ‘overprotective,’ ‘love,’ or ‘feelings,’ in his presence. These, he threatened Foggy, were words of weakness which had no place in any space in which he made habitual presence.
So the jury was finally fucking in, and Foggy now knew that Matt Murdock was a furious, humanoid pigeon with the emotional capacity of a seed, which had just revealed itself to be a fucking rock this whole time, and he, himself, was inexplicably fascinated with him.
How the ever-loving fuck could a man like that be the fucking kingpin? And how the fuck could someone with genius levels of intelligence and organizational skills be as completely emotionally incompetent as him?
Matt was a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in another mystery, coated in irony, and doused in a toxic, flammable mixture of arrogance, skittishness, and irritation.
And Foggy.
Was.
Fucking.
Hooked.
Like a sap. Like an idiot. Like a moron and the worst attorney in the history of the United States as an institution.
He wanted nothing more than to watch Matt move through daily life, meeting all these little conflicts which forced him to experience, for just seconds, for just the barest moments, for just the tiniest hiccups of space-time, self-reflection and personhood. Because all this did was make him confused and upset and the way he handled these little interactions, time and time again, was absolutely wild.
It wasn’t even an issue of morality. It was an issue of watching the most powerful ant in a hill shake its pincers at the universe, screeching its dominance and insidiousness at everything and then realizing abruptly that it does not know how to swim.
Foggy wanted to drown because the only thing he was feeling right now was endearment and everything he’d ever learned, done, or worked for informed him forcibly that this was the entirely wrong reaction to be having here.
So when Gwen came out of a fucking rip in the fabric of the universe, clutching a wiggling, wagging mound of golden fur and proclaiming this to be Tuesday, he threw up his hands and announced with joy, “Of course, it is!”
Because sometimes the only way to deal with an existential crisis is to fucking lean in already.
Because Foggy had finally reached clarity in his interactions with Matt, he could now take over the role of manipulator because, and he no longer cared what anyone thought of this, he was damned sure that Matt was just as attracted to him as he was to Matt. Not for any kind of power relationship or anything like that, Foggy was sure. No. Matt was probably fascinated with his ability to have multiple emotions all at the same time and come out on top of them with polite social behavior.
He was probably transfixed by Foggy’s ability to build and maintain relationships with other humans and, because he was Matt, he was no doubt doubly transfixed by all the little holes and gaps which Foggy left there, which could be exploited and abused and generally poked at and manipulated. He’d been interested because Matt functioned best in concretes and he built relationships like he built cases. He filled every loop and hole with whatever the fuck he needed to, to get his way.
He was not one for mess. He was not one for frivolity. He understood complexity the way a general did, but not the way that a salon owner did.
Foggy, however, not only lived one life, but two. He lived Foggy, the DA and he lived Foggy the New Yorker, and he did both to a more or less effective degree and Matt probably wanted some of that, Foggy thought.
Matt thought he could only be one thing at a time and he’d chosen to be the Kingpin, so by god, he was going to be the motherfucking kingpin.
Foggy wanted to ask him who Matt Murdock was and watch him squirm.
It was a little mean-spirited of him, but what the fuck ever. Matt had been playing him like a fiddle for years now.
It was his turn.
“Why are you here?” Matt opened with, standing over Foggy at the same little table he’d met Lola at in a pitch black suit. Lola was pleased to see Foggy at least. She nudged her muzzle into his hand.
“I wanted to see you,” Foggy said, and watched Matt’s brain halt all functions for a second.
He squinted immediately, hard, and fast. Then pulled the dog back.
“For what?” he demanded, refusing to sit down. Foggy patted at the seat across from him on the table so that Matt could hear it.
“Just wanted to shoot the shit, buddy,” he said.
Matt physically recoiled at the endearment, looking so shocked and uncomfortable, that it took everything in Foggy not to burst out laughing.
“Is—who—what?”
Foggy smiled and cocked his head.
“You okay?” he asked.
Matt was not. He edged away a little bit.
“Hm. Well, alright. How’s Lola, then?” Foggy asked. Lola wagged her tail a bit at being acknowledged by name. She nosed Foggy’s hand again. Foggy smiled at her. “She looks nothing like Tues,” he said without looking up.
“WE’VE GOT TO GO,” Matt announced suddenly, yanking the dog back.
“Oh, okay. Well, I’ll see you around, I guess,” Foggy told him.
Matt edged back, obviously horrified and completely unable to hide it, even in public. He tried to find Foggy’s face, then grabbed Lola’s vest and gave her a swift tug and took her with him briskly, as briskly as her little jog would allow him, down the sidewalk. He kept glancing back as though searching for Foggy, trying to watch Foggy watch him.
Foggy took a sip of coffee that was suddenly far, far too sweet.
“Gwendolyn.”
“Franklin.”
“I see what you’ve been doing now.”
“Why Mr. Nelson, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He laughed maybe a little hysterically. Gwen grinned at him as he collected himself.
“That’s pretty good, Gwen,” he said. “Very clever.”
She kept on grinning and then folded her fingers together and leaned them and her face forward onto the other side of his desk, like it was her desk. And honestly? It may as well have been in that moment.
“Would you like to keep playing, Mr. Nelson?” she asked. “Because if you do, I may be able to provide an assist.”
Did he want to keep playing?
Hmm. Well, given the mountain of the actual shit Matt had given him over the past ten years, the workplace harassment, the moral corruption, the undermining and blindsiding.
Yes.
Yes, he did want to keep playing.