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“Stop listening to my heart,” Foggy says, mostly joking these days, but also a little not.
“I can’t just not listen to your heartbeat,” Matt says.
“Sure you can, just listen to something else.”
It’s silly, it’s silly of him, the way his own heartbeat speeds up at the idea, at the concept of just… letting go, unmooring himself from the steady drumbeat of Foggy’s heart, anyone’s heartbeat, but especially Foggy’s.
“I don’t— it doesn’t work like that,” Matt says. He doesn’t explain. If Foggy thinks that just being a walking lie detector is invasive…
In the beginning, Matt was dead.
There was the old man, the truck. Pain, burning in his eyes. His dad’s face, scared scared scared like he’d never seen it before. The sky turned black.
(Ba-thump, ba-thump)
Now there is chaos, the screams of the damned, beepings and screechings and all manner of awful noise.
(Ba-thump, ba-thump)
Booming voices. Too loud and far off and alien for him to parse. Too big and close, as though they are coming from everywhere and nowhere, too many of them overlapping, unceasing, condemning.
(Ba-thump, ba-thump)
Wailing. He wonders if one of the screams is his.
(Ba-thump, ba-thump)
Pain. An awful scraping against his skin, air too hot and too cold at once, too much, too much. His eyes burn. Everything burns.
(Ba-thump, ba-thump)
All he sees is hellfire. He sees nothing at all. He’s not sure which it is that he sees. Either way, hell is the eternal dark.
(Ba-thump, ba-thump)
Everything is noise. Rowdy, crowding over itself, nothing steady enough to parse. Except, beneath it all, quieter, unchanging… a heartbeat?
(Ba-thump, ba-thump)
Do people have heartbeats in hell?
(Ba-thump, ba-thump)
A voice weaves in and out of focus. Too loud, drowned out, too loud. It feels like it is coming from inside his own eardrums, a whisper, deafening.
(Ba-thump, ba-thump)
Does he recognize the voice?
(Ba-thump, ba-thump)
There’s definitely a heartbeat. People don’t have heartbeats in hell, he’s pretty sure. You can’t have a heartbeat if you’re dead.
(Ba-thump, ba-thump)
The heartbeat is close, steady and not exactly quiet, but not too loud like everything else. Matt doesn’t know how he can hear heartbeats, but it’s real. It has to be. He reaches out and grabs on to the heartbeat with all he is worth.
(Ba-thump, ba-thump, ba-thump, ba-thump)
The voice is back, one of the many voices, but this one is close. He follows the heartbeat to it.
It’s familiar, he’s sure of it.
Dad?
It’s still too loud-far-close-much for him to make out the words, but he recognizes the cadence now, comforting. It’s his dad.
Dad’s too good for hell.
It’s his dad’s heartbeat, the heartbeat goes with the voice, they’re coming from more or less the same place, he thinks. It’s his dad’s heartbeat, his dad’s alive.
Matt’s alive?
Matt focuses on the heartbeat. His dad is right here, and his heart is beating. He can’t understand what his dad is trying to say, but heartbeats are simpler. Matt listens to the heartbeat, lets it carry him (his dad will always carry him). Matt listens to his dad’s heartbeat and lets the other sounds fade out. This isn’t hell, it feels like it, but Matt has found his safe harbor, the heartbeat tethers him to calm. He knows where he is now, he’s with his dad. His eyes close (His eyes were open?), he breathes with the heartbeat and falls asleep.