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“Oh - I didn’t know we had a client!”
Bucky spun around at the unexpected female voice. She was pretty, objectively. Small. Not a threat.
“Not a client,” the blind man who had found him corrected. “This is Bucky.”
The name still felt wrong. But it was the name that went with this face, so he accepted it.
“We found him in a dumpster,” his partner added.
“Oh my god.” The woman looked horrified. “Did you really?”
The horror wasn’t at him. It was at his situation. It bothered him anyways - and it was incorrect. He hadn’t been found in a dumpster. He’d been found -
“Nah. We actually found him sleeping on a park bench. Matt took a liking to him, I guess.”
The partner looked bemused, as if this had happened before. Bucky was fairly certain that the lawyer Matt Murdock was not in the habit of taking home stray assassins with amnesia, since he imagined that there simply wasn’t enough of a supply to create that kind of pattern. Maybe Murdock simply took home people on park benches- unusual, but much more likely. The dumpster comment was an inside joke, he deduced. He didn’t understand it but he didn’t understand very much these days, with a memory like swiss cheese.
“Well then. Would you like some tea, Bucky? Or coffee?” The pretty woman offered.
Bucky was bewildered. Just like that, no further questions? He had noticed something.. off… about the blind man who was somehow not blind. He was too fast, too certain in his step. He reacted too soon, he heard things he shouldn’t. Whoever he was, he was not an ordinary man. The woman, though, she seemed ordinary. So did the partner. They must have seem some unusual things to simply accept without questioning. He remembered the question, and registered the patient silence.
“He doesn’t talk,” the partner began to explain, but Bucky interrupted.
“Coffee… please. Thank you.” Manners. He could almost remember something, a blonde woman chastising him with a wooden spoon and a smile.. and then the memory was gone, like it had never existed. He frowned. The pretty woman was gone, probably making coffee. The partner stared at him.
“Oh, so you talk to her, huh? Well, that’s alright, everyone likes Karen.”
“Don’t mind Foggy. Make yourself comfortable. And, if you don’t mind me saying… maybe you could use our services after all. I assure you, at no charge.”
Bucky thought of his face on the televisions. Wanted by every major intelligence agency in the world for assassinations and murders of the grisliest sort. He looked at Murdock, sizing him up.
“Maybe I could,” he said eventually. To have him acquitted (did he even deserve it? He had some idea of what he’d done) would take no less than a miracle, but something about Matthew Murdock told him that maybe this man would be the miracle he needed to get back to Steve.
The partner looked confused. Bucky took no notice of him. He focused on Murdock. “Mine is not the kind of case you win,” he said, voice gruff with misuse.
“Mine usually aren’t,” he answered smoothly, as if it was no great obstacle. “I’ll clear your name.”
Bucky could hear the promise. He almost believed it.