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Foggy is rounding the corner with donuts from the old Chinese bakery that’s newly reopened again now that half the world returned when he’s accosted by the kid.
It’s happens pretty fast. One minute, he’s checking a text from a client about this new housing development, holding the container of donuts and his briefcase and an umbrella because maybe it’s going to rain later, and the next, a prepubescent thief has the donuts and the briefcase and Foggy is fumbling for his phone, which has crashed to the ground with an unfortunate cracking noise.
“Hey!” he says, deciding to leave the phone and go for the briefcase and the donuts. He manages to grab his case back, which sends the skinny kid to the ground, his floppy brown hair in his face, his hands still clutching the bag of treats. They both scramble up, but the kid is fast and takes off.
Foggy isn’t sure why he follows once he has his phone and his briefcase back. But there’s something odd about the whole thing. He rounds the corner where the kid ran and finds him sitting in the back of the little alley, eating one of the donuts, his head tilted at a funny angle.
“Those are my donuts you’re eating,” Foggy announces.
The kid doesn’t look at him and that’s when Foggy realizes that the kid isn’t actually looking at anything. He knows that funny not quite there look. “Are you blind?” Foggy asks, slightly incredulous.
“So?” the kid says, his mouth full. “The wrong building is here. There’s supposed to be a garage that you can go through to get to the other side. Now there’s a brick wall.” He sounds more annoyed than anything.
“The wrong building?” Foggy says.
“Are you going to try and turn me in?” the kid asks. “Because I wouldn’t if I were you.”
Foggy doesn’t have any particular plans. He just followed because those were his donuts. He can always go get more though. “Did you just threaten me?”
“I can take care of myself. I don’t need anyone,” the kid says.
And that’s when something sinks through Foggy’s brain, something that never would have a decade before. But he’s now seen aliens invade, enhanced superheros literally flying around and stopping bullets, and a mystery blip that had his best friends off in the ether for a full five years. So. Anything’s possible.
“Matt!?” Foggy says.
“I don’t know you,” the kid says. The kid who is apparently Matt says.
“You’re Matthew Murdock,” Foggy says.
“So?”
“Fuck my life,” Foggy says.
* * *
When Foggy finally convinces the kid to come with him, it somehow doesn’t occur to him to call Matt. He doesn’t need to call Matt. Matt is literally a spindly punk kid in baggy clothes who doesn’t remember Foggy or law school or anything else that Foggy is marching into the office.
But the moment they get to the office, it’s clear Matt is already there. The real grown up Matt stands in the office looking flummoxed when Foggy opens the door.
“Foggy, why do you have a child with you?” Matt asks.
For a moment, Foggy freezes, unsure what to even say. But then Matt cocks his head and does that thing that Foggy tries not to find creepy where it’s clear he’s basically sniffing the air like a bloodhound. “Foggy, who do you… Foggy?”
“So, buddy, this kid who is with me is named Matt Murdock.”
The kid huffs. “Who are you?”
“Young Matt, meet… um… Old Matt.”
“Old Matt?” Matt says.
“Dude, I didn’t think you’d even be here. I thought this was you. I thought you’d been shrunk down with some de-age-inator or something.”
“De-age-inator?” Matt asks. “Seriously?”
“Crazier things have happened!” Foggy defends. “Like, last week, wasn’t there a town in Jersey in a literal bubble created by a witch? So… I’m just sayin’.”
“Witches aren’t real,” Kid Matt says. “You’re both lying to me.”
“I let you have those donuts,” Foggy says.
“Foggy,” Matt says, frustrated. He crouches down so that the kid is now taller than him. “Matt, listen to me, you can hear my heartbeat. You know I’m not lying and neither is Foggy. I’m also Matt Murdock, just grown up.”
There’s a pause where the two Matts face off, then Kid Matt reaches his hand up to Matt’s face, touching him lightly. Matt endures it, taking a deep breath and relaxing even further.
“Are you… are we… did Stick do this?” Kid Matt asks. “He said there’s things I wouldn’t understand and would practically think was magic, but…”
“No, I don’t think so,” Matt says, sounding unsure. “I’m not sure what did this.”
Foggy plants his hand on his forehead. “Oh my god. Time travel!” he exclaims.
“Yeah, it would seem,” Matt says.
“Not some de-aging machine.”
“No,” Matt says. “Not a de-aging machine.”
* * *
Foggy gets stuck babysitting.
“Matt, I don’t think it’s a good night to, you know, go out as aredevilday,” Foggy says under his breath once they get Kid Matt home.
“Foggy, he can hear you. He’s me,” Matt points out.
“I live here?” Kid Matt asks, running his hands over everything and stalking through the little apartment.
“With Foggy,” Matt says. “We’re roommates.”
“Housing shortages mean we’re roommates again!” Foggy says cheerfully. He actually does feel cheerful about this most of the time, despite the insane swings of disruptions in his life in the last year, the heartbreak, the economic mess, the rise in homelessness, the food shortages. But there’s nothing like watching your best friend turn to dust to remind you why you might want to put up with his extracurricular activities, even when you don’t approve of them. In the months since the Blip ended, they’ve staked out a careful truce that Foggy is hesitant to upset.
“I don’t like the smells,” Kid Matt says, with a sigh.
“You get used to them,” Matt says.
“Stick says I have to learn to ignore that stuff,” Kid Matt says, his voice steely.
“You do,” Matt says and Foggy can hear a careful note in his voice. “But also, it’s okay to choose things that are more comfortable for you when you can.”
Foggy isn’t sure if things Matt is doing will mess up some grand timeline. But Matt already nixed his suggestion to call in the Avengers and explore the possibility that they’re about to completely screw up space and time. No one is even really sure what they’re up to now, after the Blip.
“That stuff makes you soft,” Kid Matt says and Foggy feels like he’s accusing his future self. He wonders if 12 year old Foggy met him if he’d think he was a complete sellout. He’s not sure that’s something he’d like to find out, actually, so he feels for Matt right now.
But Matt doesn’t argue with his childhood self. “It can,” he admits instead.
“But you’re not soft. I can hear that you’re not.” Kid Matt cocks his head and Foggy imagines that he’s feeling out everything in their apartment with his ears or his tongue or something. “You’re a solider. Was it the war?”
“What war?” Foggy asks.
“The thing that changed all the buildings. It’s all different,” Kid Matt insists. “There was some major destruction that blew lots of stuff up. Was Stick right? I thought maybe he wasn’t, that maybe there wasn’t a war, but something happened. And you, you are a solider. I can feel it. And you have to go out tonight. Is it for him?”
“No,” Matt says. “Stick wasn’t right. There is a… conflict that he’s involved in. But it’s not my fight. It shouldn’t be yours either. And it’s not what happened to New York.”
“But you are going out to fight,” Kid Matt says.
“I am,” Matt says.
“Take me,” Kid Matt says.
“Nope,” Matt says. “Foggy, look, this won’t take that long, but… it’s these tracksuits. No… before you say anything. It’s just a low level deal, just reconnaissance. But I need to be there to see if they meet the boss. I know almost nothing about what they’re doing.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Foggy says. Because he didn’t. He doesn’t now. He tries very hard not to. And Matt seems to be trying very hard as well. He has only come home needing stitches a couple of times in the last few months since the return. Given all the chaos, Foggy is trying to take that as a win.
“Right,” Matt says. Foggy tries to remember that for Matt, these fights are in the very recent past. For Foggy, they’re all more than half a decade in the past.
“Go on,” Foggy says. “We’ll be fine. We’ll get whatever you want, Matt. You want pizza?”
“Sure,” Kid Matt says.
“No,” Matt says. “Get something from that organic place two blocks from here, the one with all the farm to table stuff. Um, nothing with egg. Get the lamb kebabs and the bean salad.”
“For the kid,” Foggy says.
“I’ll pay. The kid is me, Foggy.”
“This is so fucked up,” Foggy says.
Kid Matt snorts, but Matt ignores both of them.
Foggy orders online. The place thinks they’re so special that they don’t do regular delivery and Foggy has had only bad experiences with DoorDash getting into his building lately, so he tells the kid they’re going to walk.
Kid Matt is in observation mode. Foggy remembers young Matt this way their first year in college, when Matt would pull in on himself and say nothing for long swaths of time. By then though, Matt was charming and faked being normal really effectively. It was effectively enough that Foggy had thought Matt was basically normal for years. Kid Matt doesn’t seem to have learned those skills yet. Since he knows that Foggy is in on all his secrets, he makes no efforts to hide himself from Foggy and has none of the cagey attitudes that Matt still carries. He also has essentially no manners.
“Why are you telling me that?” Kid Matt complains when Foggy tells him the curb is two more steps ahead.
“Habit,” Foggy admits.
“Your feet really smell,” Kid Matt says as they round the corner to pick up the food.
“Gee, thanks,” Foggy says.
As Foggy makes small talk and flirts a bit with the cute tattooed woman at the counter, Kid Matt taps his cane impatiently against wall.
“Why am I friends with you?” Kid Matt asks, sounding bemused after listening to Foggy interact with other people. “Do you have some superpower?”
“Uh, no,” Foggy says. “Not unless it’s my cheerful optimism.”
Kid Matt scrunches his face. “Ugh.”
“I know the world sounds like it got weird, but really most people are still pretty normal.”
“There are witches and aliens,” Kid Matt says. “Stick was right.”
“I thought he was like your special sensei. Your own personal Master Splinter. Did you ever doubt him?”
“I don’t trust anyone,” Kid Matt says, sounding ruthless and proud of it. “Not even Stick.”
“Did Stick tell you to do that?” Foggy asks. “Because that’s some great life advice there.”
“You’re being sarcastic,” Matt says. “I’m not an idiot.”
“I never said you were. I’ve actually never thought you were. I have, however, thought maybe Stick was.”
“You don’t know anything about him, then,” Kid Matt says. “Because he’s a genius.”
Foggy hefts the expensive takeout bag as they reach the apartment again and he opens the door. “Fine. Tell me about Stick.”
Foggy is shocked that this actually works. Foggy has heard almost nothing about Stick from Matt since he first discovered Stick had existed. He knew Matt had seen him again, and that he had died. And that, as Matt put it, Stick was a “dick.” Foggy suspected he was possibly more than that. But hearing about his finer qualities from Kid Matt is another experience. Matt can come off as short on words until he’s not. Apparently that was true of him as a kid as well.
Stick can tell what’s in food down to every chemical ingredient. Stick can tell what’s in the air. He can tell what anything is made of. Kid Matt has learned all of those, he explains proudly. Stick also has a lot of nuggets of wisdom about life as well. Matt shares some of them and each one is more appalling than the last. People are a distraction. When you don’t hit first, the world will hit you. It’s better to be feared than loved. Foggy is pretty sure Stick got that one from Machiavelli.
The weirdest part is that Stick’s mantras are creepily ableist. You wouldn’t think a blind guy could convince a blind kid that the strongest, smartest, and most skilled deserved the most in life. Foggy wouldn’t have believed that Matt, protector of the poor and innocent, could be convinced of this. But Kid Matt espouses all of it blithely to prove Stick’s superiority.
Then he moves on to training and Foggy manages to get even more appalled. “And he’s shown me a dozen different ways to get back up when an opponent has you down and I’ve mastered eight of them and I’m going to master the other ones and I don’t think he’s going to have to hit me anymore because now I’m almost too fast for him and… Oh, Matt’s back. That’s cool. He goes in and out of the window.” Kid Matt nods to himself, as if affirming that this is his future and he’s not just resigned to it, but happy.
“Hey, Matt,” Foggy says pointedly when Matt comes in. He’s going to say something about Matt’s childhood training, about Stick. But then he sees the actual look on Matt’s face, pale and unsure and he bites his words back.
“What’s happening?” Kid Matt asks. “Why are you scared of Foggy?” Kid Matt looks annoyed. “Does he have superpowers? I knew it. Because I don’t understand why you’re friends otherwise.”
“Nothing is happening,” Matt says, but even Foggy can hear the uncertainty in his voice.
“Nothing,” Foggy affirms, pushing cheer back into his voice. “And I told you. Definitely no superpowers.”
“This food is amazing!” Kid Matt says. “It’s sunshine and protein strands and clean grass and I can barely taste any chemicals, though they really should have left out that dried thyme. But otherwise!”
“I knew you’d like it,” Matt says.
Foggy goes to sleep thinking about Stick and imagining all the things he’d like to say to Matt, like, why didn’t you tell me it was like this and how the hell did you undo this level of brainwashing, and was the abuse ever worse than this? But he doesn’t think he can. He definitely can’t ask his best friend point blank if he was abused as a kid. Matt will clam up forever. He’d probably bolt out the door and never come back.
* * *
Two days later, Kid Matt is still there. He’s still sleeping on Matt’s bed, now in clothes Matt has picked out for him, reading ebooks with Matt’s Braille terminal, eating a lot of really expensive takeout.
“You don’t eat this level of takeout, Matt,” Foggy complains, but then tries to pull himself back. “I mean… you do you… Like, literally, you can take care of… Ugh. This is a really fucked up situation. I still think maybe time travel should like, necessitate Avengers level intervention.”
“I just want to show him that it’s okay to…” Matt pauses, clearly unsure how to proceed. “It took me a long time before I bought silk sheets, Foggy. I didn’t think I was worthy of silk sheets.”
“I know, buddy,” Foggy says. “I… yeah.”
Because Foggy does know.
In the last two days, Kid Matt has said a lot of pretty screwed up things about life and it’s making Foggy alternately angry and desperate to hug Matt. Or Kid Matt. He’s not even sure how to separate them.
They’re pretty inseparable.
Like right now, they’re literally about to fight. Foggy knows this was not Matt’s idea. He knows because he listened for the last two days as Kid Matt complained about not keeping up his training properly and ran through solo motions of martial arts forms in their tiny, cramped living room. He listened as Matt caved into the kid’s demands and told him they’d go to Fogwell’s to spar.
“It makes you nervous,” Matt said bluntly to Foggy. “So you should come watch. It won’t be… bad.”
Now, it’s the middle of the night and Foggy is sitting in the otherwise empty gym that Matt treats as his own personal midnight playground, watching as Matt gets into the ring with his eleven year-old self.
Foggy hoped that Matt would just let his kid self go through a bunch of drills, but instead he has Kid Matt on the attack and it’s a little bit scary. Kid Matt is vicious and more skilled that Foggy would have thought. He nearly takes Matt down at one point despite the massive difference in their sizes. Matt has to fall to a crouch. Then Foggy hears Matt actually grunt as Kid Matt gets in several good punches before Matt manages to block.
It goes on like that for several minutes, with Matt deflecting the kid and the kid occasionally getting in a few good hits or a sweep where Matt is forced to really move to keep from going down. Even Foggy can tell the kid is getting pretty worked up, but he figures that’s the point of this exercise because Kid Matt has been growing increasingly cranky and this is what you do with kids, at least according to his sister. You tire them out so they’ll get more docile.
Kid Matt looks anything but docile as he screams at Matt in growing frustration, “Stop going easy on me!”
“I’m not going to hit you.”
“I’m not a weak kid!”
“Of course you’re not, but I’ve also have twice your weight and am an adult. When adults hit kids, that’s abuse.”
“What Stick does is training me to be better, to fight!”
Foggy is a little shocked at the violent abruptness of what happens next. Kid Matt charges and it looks for a moment like he’s about to get Matt, fighting dirty, his fingers digging into Matt’s skin as he goes for Matt’s face. But then Matt finally flips him down, pinning the kid completely with one move and landing the kid hard on the mats, then flipping him over to keep his arms restrained while he keeps his legs down.
For the next several minutes, Foggy can tell that the kid is struggling, but he can barely move, so it’s only through his frustrated, aborted noises that Foggy knows this.
“How long do you want to stay here?” Matt finally asks.
* * *
It turns out that it does tire the kid out though. Later, Foggy has leftover normal takeout while Matt eats part of the organic salad he treated the kid to for lunch.
“Is he asleep…?”
“He’s out, Foggy,” Matt says, and he says it with so much weariness that Foggy shoves any half formed thoughts or questions down. Matt is back, Matt is flesh and not a pile of ash in the new office they’d rented together to rebuild Nelson and Murdock. Matt breathes and fights and exists again. Foggy refuses to mess with that.
Matt reaches for his beer and takes a long drink, leaning against the kitchen bar. “Just say whatever it is.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“Foggy, I can hear…”
“Look, Matt, maybe I don’t want to say anything. Maybe…” Foggy cuts off criticizing Matt’s use of his super senses. “Maybe I don’t want to say anything,” he repeats instead.
There’s a pause as they both eat more food, drink another sip of beer. “Maybe I want you to say something,” Matt says finally.
“Like what?” Foggy asks carefully.
“You don’t have to walk on pins and needles around me,” Matt says. “It’s not just the kid. It’s since I came back. I know things are… different.”
They’re both being careful and quiet. Maybe partially for the kid, but partially for each other.
“Look, I do want to ask. I want to ask how fucking bad it was for you, because the things he says, Matt, the things you say at age eleven? They’re not normal and you obviously know that. And not just I’m being trained by a blind ninja not normal but like, really upsetting shit, okay? But you seriously don’t have to share any of that if you don’t want to. And that’s not a passive aggressive comment. Like, maybe once it would have been. But now it’s really not. I don’t have to know. It’s your shit to deal with, Matt. You aren’t obligated to let me in on any of it.”
“I know,” Matt says. “There’s nothing I could say that wouldn’t be pointlessly mundane anyway. I just see him, see myself? Whatever. And I wish I could make it different.”
“You want to spoil him.”
“Yeah.”
“With silk sheets and organic produce and piles of audiobooks. And hugs. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”
“And you, Foggy,” Matt says quietly.
“He barely tolerates me.”
“You’re wrong. He’s as intrigued by you as I was at eighteen.”
For a moment, they’re quiet. Foggy knows Matt is hearing so much more. It’s never quiet for Matt. But for Foggy, everything is silent, just the distant sounds of traffic below.
“I’m not really different,” Foggy says, in part because he worries about it. He’s not sure about whether he’s different. It’s been five years. When he thinks about how different he was from the first year of college to their second year of law school, he knows he must have changed in the last five years. Matt’s presence, unchanged is what makes it uncomfortable, makes him uncomfortable. He’s uncomfortable when he thinks of his choices over the last several years, blissfully unobserved by Matt.
“It’s okay if you are,” Matt says. “If we are.” There’s a long pause. “If you wanted to go back to…”
“Please don’t,” Foggy says. There’s been a great reshuffling of things both during the Blip and now again in this post-Blip world. There’s no one for Foggy to go back to. No new business he’s going to help build. No new identity he’s trying to carve out for himself.
“Paul seemed nice…” Matt starts.
“Oh good grief,” Foggy says. “I said to not. He is nice. He’s perfectly nice. His wife is nice. We’re all nice.”
“At some point, we might have to say things,” Matt says. And if Matt Murdock suggesting they talk about something isn’t the biggest irony of all time, the biggest sign that things in the post-Blip world will never be the same again, Foggy isn’t sure what is.
* * *
Two weeks later and they still have an awkward blind eleven year-old kid living there, which is definitely not the weirdest thing in the post-Blip world. They’re not the only people hosting a stray kid. Still, Foggy is starting to get worried about appearances. And end effects. Kid Matt has to go back eventually because he has to go become Matt. Otherwise there’s going to be a paradox. And that’s if they didn’t already create a paradox, because it seems to Foggy that the kid snuggled in soft expensive fabrics and eating single origin chocolate and reading Matt’s old Braille law texts is not going to turn out to be exactly like Matt. Not to mention that he’s figured out the terminal and Wikipedia and has a lot of questions about aliens and Captain America and a lot of things that simply haven’t happened yet in his time. And that’s a little bit worrying. Maybe even more than a little bit.
Matt is out Daredeviling one night when he takes the kid to hear a free concert in Central Park. It’s mostly just something to do, to get outside in the spring air. Foggy feels like he’s still getting used to how utterly crowded New York is again. It never felt empty exactly, but for the last five years, it was a shell of itself.
Still, in that weird Manhattan is nothing but a small town sort of way, they run into Marci.
“There you are, Foggy Bear. I couldn’t believe it’s been a month since I’ve crossed paths with you.” Her hair is shorter than the last time he saw her, styled in an attractive cut that frames her face and looks more mature than her longer locks. She’s older now, like him. Foggy wonders if she also feels every bit her age when she’s around Blipped friends. He’s knows she’s made partner now and that she’s raking in the money. Sometimes he wonders if for the rest of their lives, they’ll just be each other’s booty calls when they don’t have much else going on.
“I’ve been a little busy,” Foggy says.
“Ugh, don’t tell me you’re dating again. How’s Paul? I think I’m done with dating forever. I briefly got back together with Ben, you remember him? From before the Blip? I mean, he thought we could just pick right up again and it mostly reminded me how tedious I found him. And dating. You can barely get a good table anyway these days anyway with all the shortages. If you can just have sex without dating and there’s nowhere to eat amazing sushi, then I don’t know what the point of dating is.”
Foggy bites back a laugh. He knows he has too much hopeless romantic in him for he and Marci to have ever worked out anywhere except in the bedroom. “It sounds like you’ve made a good life choice there, Marce. I’m not seeing anyone. Just work. Matt and I are doing a lot of Blip related real estate cases. And other stuff.”
That’s when Marcy notices the kid. “Who’s this? Don’t tell me a secret lovechild crawled out of the woodwork, Fog.”
Foggy practically snorts. “This is, um, Matt’s cousin. He’s staying with us for a few weeks. He’s um… Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”
Kid Matt has been waiting through their exchange. Foggy always finds it difficult to tell if he’s paying much attention or not. “Hi,” he says curtly.
“Matt’s cousin who is also blind?” Marci asks.
“Yep.”
“But Matt was blinded in an accident as a kid. So it’s not genetic.”
“Weird coincidence,” Foggy says.
“Right,” Marci says. “I’d ask, but I don’t actually care. Call me when you’re free so we can knock boots, Foggy Bear. Also call me if your docket frees up and I’ll kick you some clients if you’re doing Blip related property now. There are a million of them.”
Foggy agrees and accepts a brief kiss from Marci before going back to walking Kid Matt through the Park to the edge of the concert.
It’s nice to hear outdoor music. There’s a medley of showtunes and standards played by a large band and sung by a parade of Broadway stars. Broadway is ramping back up with more shows as the city comes fully back to life. Foggy has heard there will be two different musicals about the Avengers and one very modern rap opera about the Blip.
Kid Matt is mostly quiet through the music and accepts the offer of gelato afterwards. “Who was that woman?” he asks as they walk back home.
“That’s an old law school friend of mine and Matt’s. She works at Chao and Benewitz.”
“She wanted to have sex with you,” the kid says.
“Okay!” Foggy says. “Not an appropriate topic of conversation with a minor!”
“Please,” the kid says. “People have sex all the time. It’s so…” he pauses, thinking. “Stupid,” he settles on and Foggy has to refrain from laughing at his sophisticated choice of words.
“When you get older, you won’t feel that way,” Foggy says.
For a little while, Foggy thinks he’s escaped any more talk of sex with a minor, but then Kid Matt starts again as they get back to Hell’s Kitchen and start winding their way toward their apartment.
“I won’t ever change my mind,” he says suddenly and it takes Foggy a moment to realize that he’s still on the same conversation. “Obviously I haven’t changed my mind as a grown up. I’d be able to tell. I’m not having sex. I thought you didn’t have sex either.”
“Again, inappropriate topic. But also, we are not having sex right now because we’ve got a kid, aka you, staying with us and it’s kept us a little busy what with also having a law firm to run and Matt doing… you know what he does. But myself and Matt are both adults who have had sex. One day you will be too. But, like, a far off day. And also, inappropriate topic,” Foggy says.
“But you don’t,” the kid insists. “You have separate bedrooms and everything.”
Foggy realizes he’s been answering the wrong question entirely. “Matt,” he chokes out. “You should talk to grown up Matt about this.” He’s not sure whether to laugh or cry or run for the hills or what. “I knew this wasn’t an appropriate topic for conversation.”
* * *
When Karen saw Kid Matt she took about two seconds to put it together, which is why she’s an amazing investigative journalist. “Time travel?” she said.
“Foggy thought at first someone had de-aged me,” Matt laughed.
“Okay, but in my defense, Matt was not standing before me as an adult. So you have way more context clues for this, Karen.”
She comes over to hang out with Kid Matt and take him to Coney Island because it turns out Karen loves roller coasters, which is a surprise to no one. She has her new boyfriend with her, who seems to be pretty decent. He was living in her apartment when she came back from the Blip, so that’s a good meet cute. Kid Matt seems annoyed by the continued babysitting, but excited by the roller coasters.
It’s getting almost too comfortable having the kid around. He reads nonstop, which is no surprise to Foggy. Matt takes him out to train most nights and he comes home cheerfully worn out and sometimes bragging to Foggy about all the moves he’s learned and how he’s going to get better at meditation. He still has dark moments when he stomps around the apartment and insults Foggy, but more and more, he seems almost happy.
“Can we please eat something greasy and gross for lunch,” Foggy asks over the pile of paperwork they’re catching up on in the office.
“You can, Foggy,” Matt says. “I’m good.”
Matt has moved from eating takeout often with Foggy to doing it less and less. Foggy can tell his food budget is through the roof, but he and the kid have a much cleaner diet that Foggy thinks he’d probably be wise to adopt, even if he craves greasy Thai and New York pizza. Really, Matt has changed with the kid there in ways Foggy thinks are probably positive. He goes out as Daredevil less, more strategically from what Foggy can see. He seems calmer. Foggy walked in on Matt basically cuddling his younger self on the sofa in front of an old fantasy movie with audio description, which takes the term “self-care” to a whole new level. Foggy can’t remember ever seeing Matt be so touchy with anyone, not even women he dated back in college and law school.
“We should talk, shouldn’t we?” Matt asks a little later, after Foggy prints off the filing for the Ramirez case.
Foggy has honestly been mildly dreading this. “I told the kid it was not an appropriate topic of conversation,” he says.
“What?” Matt asks.
Foggy freezes. “Nothing,” he says. “What did you want to talk about?”
“Foggy?”
“Ugh, okay. Just… the other day? That night you were beating up that tracksuit? I ran into Marci with the kid and she, you know, was Marci.”
“What does that mean?”
“That she propositioned me, dude. What does Marci ever do?”
Matt laughs.
“Oh, don’t laugh,” Foggy says darkly. “Because here’s what happened next. After she left, the kid wanted to know who she was and then, did I have sex with her and was clearly in his tiny Matt is judgey as hell mode about it all. So I was like inappropriate conversation, but hey, I’m an adult, you’ll be an adult one day, kid, sex is super normal for adults and one day it will be super normal for you. Only the kid was like, nope, I will never have sex. And his proof was that he knows that you and I don’t have sex. Like, with each other, Matt! With each other.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, oh. I told him to talk to you. But I guess you didn’t. He didn’t, I mean.”
Matt laughs, then shakes his head. “I had a lot of screwed up ideas about sex when I was a kid, Foggy.”
“Who didn’t.”
“Yeah but…” Matt stops himself and Foggy has a sour feeling deep inside. He wants to ask, but he won’t and he knows Matt won’t say anything.
Then Matt shocks the hell out of him by continuing. “It’s not what you’re thinking. Or, I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I know it’s something bad. No one ever… interfered with me or anything.”
“Interfered,” Foggy says. “That’s got to take the cake for euphemisms for rape.”
Matt huffs. “Well, no one did. For everything that Stick did, he never did anything like that. Neither did the priests. I had a lot of weird ideas because I honestly observed a lot of sex as a kid. Not on purpose or anything, but before I could block it out or control my senses, I heard people having sex pretty routinely and it wasn’t always… healthy or consensual. And obviously it was probably not great for me to be basically watching even when it was healthy and consensual.”
Foggy sits back down at the conference table in their tiny workspace. “If I’d watched a lot of porn at that age, I think I would have come out pretty warped,” he offers.
“It’s not exactly like porn,” Matt says. “Not that I’ve ever actually seen porn. But real people having sex is more… it’s not quite that bad, I think. Except maybe when it’s manipulative or violent. Which it is way too often. At that age, it was… fascinating, but also disgusting. And the thought that I might do that one day was pretty off putting. And it’s not like I had parents with a healthy marriage to model myself on. Stick and the priests… celibacy was probably the one thing they agreed on.”
Foggy isn’t sure what to say to any of this. Matt doesn’t have to share, but he is and Foggy isn’t even sure what to do with it. The world really is upside down. “That sounds… difficult,” he says, feeling stupid.
“I’ll talk to the kid,” Matt says. “I’ll explain… things.”
Foggy wants to say so much. Can Matt explain things to him too? Like why eleven year-old Matt might have even thought he and Foggy were romantically linked when Matt has always, always been straight. Or what their relationship even is? Because Foggy is so deep in it that he would like to know too. And you’d think that more than fifteen years would let a person know, but apparently not.
“What did you want to talk about?” Foggy asks, remembering how he put his foot into it at the start of this whole conversation.
“Oh. What to do about the kid, actually,” Matt says.
It turns out Matt thinks maybe, just maybe Kid Matt should stay, maybe forever. He explains this slightly haltingly to Foggy.
“What? How does that…? Matt. How can that possibly work?” Foggy asks. “That’s not practical. I mean… paradoxes, Matt! And what are we supposed to do with him? Just, again, practically speaking! He has no identity. How do we get him enrolled in school? And are you going to… what? Raise yourself? That’s weird, Matt.” Foggy runs his hands through his hair, tugging at the long ends. “Time travel paradoxes, Matt! I don’t want to be left with a kid while my actual real, live best friend fades away into nothing! Because I have done that! And I didn’t like it!”
He realizes a beat too late that he may have gotten too worked up.
“Okay,” Matt says. “Yeah. I’ll do some research.”
* * *
It’s not Matt that begins to fade into nothingness. A month into Kid Matt’s presence in their lives, Foggy is warming up the previous night’s soup for dinner on the stove because Matt says the microwave messes with the texture. He looks up at Kid Matt sitting at the kitchen bar, fingers running over a thick oversized copy of The Hobbit in braille and he watches, shocked, as the kid seems to flicker like an old light bulb.
“Shit,” Foggy says.
“What just happened?” the kid asks, his voice small.
It happens again the next day while Matt and the kid are training. Matt tells Foggy it felt like a hole in the universe opening up, emptier than the giant hole when the Chitauri came through. More like the terrifying seconds when the Blip began.
“Fuck,” Foggy says.
Two days after that, when the kid has crackled in and out of their reality or time or something, Karen is over visiting and watches as whatever it is manages to make not only the kid, but also the stuffed chair he’s sitting in. When the millisecond flicker passes, the kid is there and the chair is gone.
“He landed on his butt on your floor!” Karen says to Matt when he and Foggy get home. They’re supposed to be having a nice dinner together and instead they’re all freaking out. “You’ve got to do something,” she hisses.
Matt goes to grab the kid where he’s sitting on the floor where the chair used to be. “We’re going to fix this,” he tells his younger self, wrapping him in his arms in a tight embrace.
“I can take it,” Kid Matt says, but his voice sounds shaky and scared.
Later, when the kid is asleep, Foggy is in bed, the lights already off, but not quite out yet, when he hears Matt come in his little closet of a room. Matt slips onto the edge of Foggy’s bed. “What if we made him soft?” he whispers. “What if we made him soft and now we have to send him back? He can’t… I can’t be soft and survive that, Foggy.”
“Oh, fuck, Matt,” Foggy says. He’s not sure what else to say, so he sits up and Matt lets him hug him, his arms around his best friend, who is real, is breathing, is alive, is not a floating, wafting pile of dust and ash.
Over the next day, they lose braille books, organic apples, and finally most of the bathroom toiletries to the flickering reality around Kid Matt. Karen is the one who comes through with an address.
* * *
It’s not that far south, near Washington Square Park. As soon as Foggy and the two Matts arrive and go inside, there’s a cool breeze and Foggy watches them both go on high alert. The doors opened for them, but the huge hall is empty. A double staircase stretches in front of them.
“I don’t like the feel of this place,” Kid Matt says. He’s standing with his fists literally up, ready to fight.
And then there’s a hole that opens and a tall man with a streak of gray in his dark hair steps out onto the staircase landing.
“Oh god, not another one.” He sounds almost bored.
“Foggy,” Matt says.
“Oh, um,” Foggy says. He has no idea what of this bizarre scene Matt can actually sense, but it’s apparently not enough. “A hole just opened up in front of us, like a hole to another place that’s all sparky and flickering and a guy walked through. He looks like a normal guy, but I’m pretty sure he’s an Avenger or something.”
“I am not an Avenger,” the man protests. “You work with a team once and suddenly everyone thinks you must be part of it.”
Kid Matt shuffles toward Matt, keeping his fists clenched.
“We seem to have a bit of an issue,” Matt says, his voice tight.
“So I see,” the man says. “You’re here twice. Definitely not normal. I thought I caught them all.”
“What does that mean, caught them all?” Matt asks.
The man walks up to them. Foggy thinks he’s not as intimidating close up, but the Matts both tense. “Dr. Stephen Strange,” he says. “A two bit mystical organization tried to use something the Avengers did to their own advantage. It hasn’t worked out well for them. And there were side effects. Like this one.” He bends down to look at the kid. “Matthew Murdock and Matthew Murdock. Sorry about this, but we’ll have you back where you belong post haste.”
“Wait,” Matt says. “Just… just like that?”
“That’s right. Sorry I didn’t get to you sooner. I take it he finally started destabilizing reality.”
“You can’t…” Matt starts, then starts over. “Can’t he stay here instead?”
“Paradoxes,” Foggy says.
“Well, he’s part of a split timeline now,” Dr. Strange says. “So there’s no paradox. That’s not really how time travel works.”
Foggy furrows his brow. That’s how it works in every movie he’s ever seen. But he supposes the wizard standing in front of him probably does know better.
“Then he can stay?” Matt asks.
“No,” Dr. Strange says. “The method the monks at K’un Lun used to try and disrupt their enemies mean that each of the warriors they brought to the present will destabilize the reality around them. You have to go back.” He looks at Kid Matt skeptically. “A young blind warrior?”
“He can’t…” Matt starts to say, but Kid Matt interrupts him.
“I can,” he says.
“Will he remember and change the… I mean, he’s not going to grow up to be me?” Matt asks.
“Not anymore,” Dr. Strange replies.
Foggy doesn’t get to hear much of what happens next. Sometimes, he wonders if his life has been structured like a TV show, where each subsequent season needs a more and more unusual episode. You’d have thought alien invasion tearing up his home neighborhood would be the series finale, but Foggy is still here, so they have to keep topping it somehow. So now he’s watching his best friend bid goodbye to his childhood self while some sort of famous wizard presides over them. His best friend the superhero vigilante, that is. Part of him wants to hear what Matt has to say to himself. But it’s all over pretty fast.
“Good luck, Daredevil,” Dr. Strange says. “Come back if you encounter more time travel.”
It’s just Foggy’s luck that they might.
* * *
Foggy runs into Paul at the courthouse of all places. He’s there to support a friend who is trying to get his business back. Foggy wonders if the legal implications of the Blip will be sorted out in a decade or if it will take his entire lifetime.
They hug, because they’re both adults and maybe because they miss each other. Foggy asks about Heather and after Paul explains that she’s pregnant, Foggy feels a little more at peace, because that’s what Paul wanted always and he finds he’s genuinely happy for him. Paul asks pointedly how Matt is and Foggy shrugs.
“I thought we were asking after our sexual partners,” Foggy says. “So Marci’s fine, thanks for asking.”
“Oh my god, not again. Foggy,” Paul says, but his eyes are laughing. She’s the one who introduced them, after all. “And no. We we’re not. We were asking after our romantic interests.”
“Ha ha,” Foggy says.
“Just calling it like I see it, you absolute closet case,” Paul says.
“Please. I was ready to shack up with you for all the world to see,” Foggy declares. “You’re the one married with a kid on the way.”
“Seriously, Fog,” Paul says.
“He’s fine. We’re fine. Nelson and Murdock is fine. I don’t know if you’re aware, but there’s been a boom in the need for two bit lawyers who can help people who’ve lost their homes and livelihoods.”
The truth is so much more complicated, and Paul is important to him and maybe in another couple of years, they’ll be able to be friends again, when things aren’t so raw. And maybe then Foggy can say it’s complicated instead of fine. But for now, it’s fine.
When he gets back to the office, Matt is making coffee and reading while standing at the little kitchenette counter, his fingers skipping over the dots on his paper.
“Is there enough coffee for me?” Foggy asks.
“Sure. How was court?”
“Fine. No trial date yet. Didn’t expect one, of course.”
“And how… how’s Paul?”
Foggy doesn’t mention how creepy it is that Matt can do that. He figures he already knows. “He’s good. His wife is pregnant, which is great. I just ran into him. He was at the courthouse.”
“You know it’s fine if you go see him,” Matt says.
“Of course it is, Matt,” Foggy says. “But I probably won’t, not for awhile.”
“Right.”
Foggy assumes that will be the end of that. He’s surprised Matt asked in the first place. That’s why he’s even more surprised that Matt continues.
“We never really talked about Paul. Or other things from when I was gone. You can, you know.”
“Geez, Matt. There’s not much to say,” Foggy says, which is a lie. How can there not be much to say about Foggy’s first real relationship with a guy, about the fact that it happened when Matt was gone, about grappling through five whole years without Matt. Matt can surely hear that it’s a lie with his lie detecting senses. “I’m mostly just glad you’re here again.” That’s not a lie and hopefully Matt hears that too.
It’s later, as Foggy is in that space between awake and asleep, where your brain goes from mundane thoughts about movies and news and what happened during your day to nonsensical dreams over a chasm of fear and anxiety that it occurs to Foggy that maybe Matt is no longer the one who’s not talking. Maybe Foggy is the one who doesn’t share now. The thought wakes him up and keeps him awake for far too long.
* * *
A commotion in the kitchen wakes him up. He automatically taps his phone and sees that it’s nearly two in the morning as he drags himself up to see what’s going on. Matt had been out, so if Daredevil isn’t coming in quietly, that’s a bad sign.
Matt stands at the counter, cowl off and hair wild. He’s stripped the costume to his hip and has the first aid kit out.
Foggy flips the lights, which is when he sees the blood. “Oh, Matt,” he says.
“It’s not that bad. Guy I’d knocked out got back up while I was dealing with another one.”
“Tracksuits again?”
“Yeah. They’re definitely working for Fisk. He’s gone all underground this time. I think despite reports that he wasn’t Blipped. I think he’s been here the whole time.”
“It’s a lot of blood, Matt.”
“Yeah. It… it needs stitches.” It’s clearly killing him to say it.
“Were you going to do them yourself?”
“I was until I tried and realized the angle’s really wrong,” Matt says, clearly forcing his voice to stay light.
It’s not the first stitches Foggy has administered, but he knows he’ll leave a nasty scar. He barely knows what he’s doing. Damnit, Matt, I’m a lawyer, not a doctor! Still, he isn’t as freaked out as his first time, almost six years ago now, with Claire standing by walking him through it.
Matt closes his eyes and breathes slow and deep, stretching his arm above his head and leaning back onto the pile of towels Foggy has brought in the hopes of keeping the sofa blood-free. He always feels slightly awkward wearing latex. They either make his fingers feel squeezed or they make him clumsy, which is the last thing he wants when putting actual stitches in his best friend’s flesh.
“Thanks, Foggy,” Matt says quietly once he’s got a couple of stitches in.
“Sure, buddy,” Foggy says. Because what else is he supposed to do?
He adds another suture carefully in silence. He’s slow at this, he knows. But better to be slow and do it right. “How are you doing with everything?”
“Define everything,” Matt says.
“I was thinking of the kid.” It’s been a week since he went back. Foggy keeps finding little things he left behind, the books from the library, the chocolate he couldn’t get enough of, the soft clothes Matt bought him, the extra pair of sunglasses, little origami’ed bits of paper that he’d unconsciously leave everywhere.
Foggy doesn’t expect much of an answer.
“I keep thinking about him, off in his own world now. I don’t know if I helped him or not.” Matt takes another deep breath as Foggy puts in another stitch. “I asked myself what I needed at that age and then I tried to give it to him. But then… the things that came after for me. I don’t know how I would have handled them if I hadn’t been able to be hard, to compartmentalize.”
“Being traumatized doesn’t help anyone deal with things more effectively,” Foggy says, before he can stop himself.
“Well, seeing as I was already blind and had already found my dad murdered, it was always too late on that front,” Matt says.
“Ugh. Foot, mouth,” Foggy says. “I’ve been so much better, but…”
“No, it’s okay, Foggy,” Matt says. “I know you meant Stick. I know you meant all that brainwashing. He knows Stick is going to leave now and he knows that’s for the best. I don’t know if it’ll help or not, but that’s how it’ll happen for him now.”
“It’ll help,” Foggy says. “It has to.”
“Yeah,” Matt says. “Maybe. You know, I always knew what I needed. Well, not always, but you get the idea. But it’s hard to do those things for yourself. But then I was there, kid me, and I couldn’t not do those things for him, give him the things he needed. And now it’s like…” Matt sighs.
“Like you did do them for yourself,” Foggy says. Because he’s seen that Matt only wears the clothes he finds comfortable, eats the foods he can actually enjoy the taste of, takes time to read books and listen to music more since the kid came. He talks more.
“Maybe.”
Foggy makes sure everything looks even as he ties off the final suture. He bandages everything carefully and gently runs his hand along the rest of Matt’s side before he realizes fully what he’s doing.
“You’re all set,” he says, pulling his hand back.
“Thanks, it feels right. You did a good job,” Matt says. He reaches back to Foggy’s hand and grips it tight for a moment. Foggy feels like everything inside him might break, which is how he feels about everything with Matt sometimes.
“I’m going to go try and get some sleep,” Matt says, dropping Foggy’s hand. “We’ll… um…”
“We’ll talk tomorrow,” Foggy says.
“Yeah. That.”