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Foggy grips his wrist, and Matt can feel Foggy’s pulse beating against his fingertips as he squeezes tight. “Do you hear that?”
He does. It’s like the wind, soft and unrelenting, but it’s not . Matt knows the wind and how it sounds before a storm, or through a window, or high up on the naked rooftop of a building. This not the wind. It’s not. He doesn’t know what it is. He strains his ears, tries to feel the disturbance, but he doesn’t know, he doesn’t have any idea what it could be. It’s —
The screaming starts before he can think to answer.
For an eternity — for seconds — the screams are all he can hear. He grips his head and tries to block them out so he can focus, but people as far as he can hear are shouting oh, god, no and Dante, what is happening and stop and come back and what’s going on and no, no, no, Sandra, no and where did you go and what the hell is happening and don’t go, please and why and where and what’s happening and —
And then he feels it.
The breeze.
Inside him, bursting out and sweeping over his skin ever so gently.
“Matty?”
Matt wishes he could say something, but his body is tingling and the breeze is picking up and in a breath, there’s nothing left to hold onto.
And in the next breath, there’s nothing left of him at all.
In a blink, he’s back and it feels like waking up. He gasps and takes stock of himself: his fingers, his toes, his glasses – all there. He’s all there. It’s like he imagined the breeze, and maybe he did, maybe it was all a dream, maybe he jolted himself free from a nightmare.
But he’s not in his bed. Or his home.
He’s on the street, where he was in the dream.
There are people screaming, and crying, and running. Just like before.
So. Not a dream.
The screams are different now. Matt feels the emotional whiplash in them like a punch. He hears she’s back, she’s got to be back now, right and Dad and what happened and will he still be there and I have to find Jake and thank god, thank god, thank god. He can’t make sense of any of the string of sentences, of the taste of happy tears in the air. People knock into him in their haste to get somewhere, wherever they all seem to be going, and it doesn’t make sense, and he reaches for Foggy to steady him as he struggles to ground himself but —
Nothing. His hand only finds air.
“Foggy?” he says quietly enough that the words are practically swallowed in the crowd around him. “Fog?” he says, a little clearer.
But Foggy’s not there. He knows Foggy’s heartbeat as well as his own. He knows the slightly too fast rhythm of it when he’s had a cup of coffee, the way it skips when Matt’s fingers brush his own, the way it slows when they’re all together — Matt, and Foggy, and Karen — and they’ve had a few beers at Josie’s, and they’re walking arm and arm on the way home, and the night is warm and the world isn’t so loud. He would hear it if Foggy were there and he’s not now, but he was there just a few seconds ago, he was right next to him. But he’s not there now, and the air smells different than it did a minute ago, and Matt can’t think.
He needs to regroup. He needs to focus. He needs to get away from this all.
For the first time since he was a boy, he uses his cane to guide him through the chaos raging all around him.
He can’t get into his apartment building – the fob to open the front door doesn’t work. He almost groans, but Stick’s voice inside his head, still present after all these years, reminds him that annoyance is a waste of an emotion. Matt turns down the alleyway and climbs the fire escape, and the pandemonium from below dampens some as the wind gets stronger the higher he goes. The metal rungs feel more rusty than they did last night.
He reaches the roof quickly and bumps into something immediately. A chair? It’s a chair. He takes a cautious step forward and senses other objects on the roof that weren’t there before. A table, lights strung above his head, potted plants near the door to his apartment. He feels movement below his feet, hears an unfamiliar voice coming from inside his apartment. Laughter. Another voice joining the first completely normally, like they aren’t breaking and entering. And then it hits him.
This is his roof, but it isn’t. That is his apartment, but it isn’t.
This is his life, but it isn’t.
He sits on the chair, the one he tripped over, and doesn’t move for a long while.
The city noises hit his ears differently than they used to at night. It’s the buildings, he thinks. The streets below him are the same but the wind moves differently up here now. The skyline is marked with new buildings, ones that seemingly sprouted overnight. But it wasn’t overnight. It couldn’t have been.
How can a year feel like a second? How can the world collapse and right itself and he not take notice?
The couple in the apartment — the apartment, not his apartment, not anymore — hasn’t noticed him. They got tired and went to bed an hour ago. He can hear them sleeping in a bed that’s in a different place than his own was in that same bedroom. They breathe in unison; softly, content. Nothing has changed for them, or maybe it had before, and they’ve just had time to get used to it.
Matt takes out his phone with numb fingers and tries to call Foggy, but the call won’t go through. His number doesn’t exist. Maybe he doesn’t exist anymore, either.
He stands up and climbs down the fire escape, hardly making any noise at all. When his feet are on firm, solid ground, he heads to the only place he can think to go when the world is falling apart all around him: Clinton Church.
He passes Karen’s building on the way, or what was her building yesterday, anyway. He breathes deeply, but he can’t smell her lavender shampoo or hear her familiar heartbeat through the walls up above. She’s not there anymore, either. He wonders where she’s gone and if the wind took her away, too.
The church is the one thing that seemingly hasn’t changed. The sounds bounce off it just right, meaning the facade hasn’t been renovated. Frankincense and myrrh burn his nose as he takes a deep breath, familiar as the smells of his own home. But he can’t feel Father Lantom at all.
His hand is on the gate when he hears footsteps running towards him; a man panting, out of breath; a jacket billowing behind him as he closes the space between them. And there it is: that heartbeat. That beautiful heartbeat, signing for him.
“Foggy,” he breathes just as the footsteps stop down the block. It’s him. His cologne is different and his hair must be shorter because he doesn’t push it away from his face. But it’s him, it’s Foggy.
“Matt?” Foggy calls, standing still. Unsure.
“It’s me, Foggy,” Matt says. The biggest grin pushes its way onto his face and he doesn’t even try to hide it. Relief floods through him so acutely that it makes him weak. He staggers the first few steps towards Foggy until he finds his bearings. And then he’s running toward Foggy, and Foggy is running toward him, and then they meet and Foggy’s arms wrap around him and he is home.
“God, it’s been so long,” Foggy whispers in his hair, squeezing him.
“It hasn't even been a day,” says Matt, even though he knows deep in his bones that it’s not true. The Foggy he is hugging is smaller than before, more defined. The planes of his body have changed. That doesn't happen overnight.
“Matty,” says Foggy, pulling away and gripping him by the shoulders. Matt can practically taste the salt in the tears streaming down his cheeks. “It’s been years.”
The walk to Foggy’s new apartment building isn’t quiet, even though the two of them don’t say anything to each other. People are reuniting all around them, and it seems as though every street is a party and every song is their song. They can’t catch a cab in the mayhem but it’s all right with them. They walk hand in hand out of Hell’s Kitchen and across Broadway and the monstrosity of Times Square, past Bryant Park and the Chrysler Building until they hit a building in Tudor City right on the water. Matt can hear the East River lapping at the docks as they take the elevator up and up until they reach the fourteenth floor. Foggy doesn’t let go of Matt’s hand until they reach what must be the door to his apartment. Foggy fumbles for his keys — his fingers are shaking — but he eventually manages to open the door and usher Matt inside.
The apartment is bigger than his old one. Less cluttered, but with more stuff. The couch is still the same, but he’s got room for a kitchen table and chairs, and a new bookshelf that Matt can tell is half-empty in the corner, waiting to be filled as the years beat on. He must cook more than he used to – the pots hanging by hooks over the stove in the kitchenette smell like they’ve seen war. But the strangest thing Matt finds is a cat nuzzling at his legs, rubbing its scent all over his pants.
“You got a cat.”
“Marci got a cat,” Foggy grumbles. The words are a sucker-punch, a bullet wound, the world caving in. “The cat liked me better.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, she follows me around everywhere. Even to the bathroom, dude. And Marci only got her so she could have something to cuddle,” says Foggy. He seems to pick up on how gutting his words are because he adds, “Marci doesn’t live here anymore. She left Jackie here with me.”
“How long?” Matt chokes out.
“About two years ago,” says Foggy gently, and Matt doesn’t know if he means that’s how long it’s been since she moved out or since Matt disappeared. Because he did. He must have. He didn’t mean to but he did.
Matt doesn’t know what to say to that.
Foggy does.
“I never stopped missing you,” he says, and Matt can hear the way his heart beats loudly against his chest. “For the first few months, every time I would walk into the office and you weren’t there, I thought it would just be because you were doing something stupid out on patrol or you’d overslept, and I could call you and yell at you and you’d be right over. I’d have to remind myself every time that you weren’t coming back. And I got used to it but it never got any easier.”
“I don’t know where I went.”
“No one does. Half the population was just gone in the time it takes to snap your fingers,” Foggy says bitterly, and it’s only later that Matt will find out how disturbingly accurate his words are.
“Karen?”
“She’s fine, she’s just up in Vermont visiting her dad. They reconnected after . . . well, everything.”
“Father Lantom disappeared,” says Matt, guessing, but not really. “I couldn’t sense him at the church.”
“He should be back by now. Everyone else is.”
“How did you even know where to find me?”
Foggy laughs a little a shakes his head. “I went to where I lost you, right by the office, but you had obviously already left by the time I got there. So then I went to where I thought you’d go if you were lost.”
Matt swallows tightly and says, “You were right.”
“I always am when it comes to you.”
And then he takes Matt’s hand again and it’s warm and sweaty and their fingers fit so neatly together and it feels like the only home Matt has ever known.
They fall into each other the way they always have: quickly and without reservation, like there is nowhere else and in no other time the two of them could possibly be but here in this moment. Their shoes come off first, and then their socks, and then their jackets. And then, well. Then goes the rest.
It isn’t until after that he notices Foggy’s sheets are silk now. Matt would tease him about it, but the words don’t get past the painful lump that forms in his throat when his fingers first brush the fine threads. Matt lifts his fingers to push the hair out of Foggy’s face instead. There are lines around his eyes and mouth that weren’t there yesterday, or years ago, it’s all the same to him. But that mouth is still Foggy’s, and that nose is still Foggy’s, too.
Foggy lets Matt take stock without complaint. The years have been good to him, or maybe Foggy’s just been good to himself. His calves and thighs are firmer (“I took up running,” Foggy whispers in his ear before kissing the lobe), and his hairline is a little higher up on his forehead and it’s only more noticeable because of the haircut. He’s got more freckles on his shoulders, little raised pin pricks that only someone like Matt would be able to feel by touch alone. His fingers trail down his arms and there’s a scar on Foggy’s left elbow that wasn’t there before, like he fell and cut himself on the sidewalk, and there's . . .
There’s something etched on his skin in ink, Matt can smell it, can feel the raised edges of what can only be a tattoo. It stretches nearly all the way around his right wrist, so Foggy would have to see it every time he shook someone’s hand, or wrote something down. Matt traces it with his fingertips and feels the ink form familiar words that bring a smile to his face.
“You got a tattoo.”
“Told you I never stopped missing you,” Foggy says and leans up to kiss him again full on this mouth.
"Tell me about it?" They both know that 'it' is not the tattoo, that 'it' means so much more, and they both know the time is not tonight to discuss it. They will in the coming days, but not now, because now they have months and years ahead of them.
"In the morning," says Foggy like a promise.
Foggy falls asleep as the sky starts to lighten with the first rays of dawn peeking through the window shades. The cat is pawing at the door, begging to be let in, but Matt can’t bring himself to move. He holds Foggy close and listens as he breathes in and out, in and out, all the while tracing the tattoo over and over and over again, the braille words reading “Matthew Murdock” every time. He feels Foggy’s pulse beat underneath his fingertips, underneath his name.
He’s been with Foggy this whole time.