Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“So … Fisk is awaiting trial, the yakuza are gone, the Russians are gone, United Allied is dissolved, and the Triad pulled their heroin out of the city. Am I leaving anyone out?” Foggy asks, eight days after it all goes down.

“Sounds about right. Except for the Japanese. They’re still pissed, probably looking for a way back in,” Matt corrects him. “They just haven’t found it yet.”

“But basically, all of your enemies are out of the way.” Foggy thumps his head against the back of Matt’s couch. “Ugh, that sounds so badass. Forget I said that. All of Fisk’s people are out or caught.”

Matt hums under his breath. “There will always be more scum to take their place.”

“Yeah, I know. You’re not going to stop,” says Foggy.

The couch cushions shift, and Matt has plenty of time to react but he lets Foggy flick him just to the side of a knife wound that they both know is still healing. “I can’t,” he says.

“I know, I get it,” Foggy says, sigh whistling over the mouth of his beer bottle. “No, that’s a lie. I don’t get it, but I get that if I want you then I have to be okay with him too.”

“You make it sound like Daredevil is your boyfriend’s asshole best friend,” Matt says, trying out a smile.

“Which I kind of feel like he is,” says Foggy, “but that’s not the point! The point is that you don’t have any excuse not to tell Karen now.”

“Excuse me?”

“She deserves to know. Maybe even more than me,” he adds grudgingly, in the direction of the floor rather than to Matt himself.

Matt peels himself off the couch so that he can turn to face Foggy, pulling his legs underneath him and his elbow up on the back of the couch without moving fast enough to pull any stitches. He shakes his head. “It’s bad enough that you know. They’ll k— the Russians? They found out that Claire was helping me, and they, um. They took her.” He arrived and he saw: the oxidization of her blood on the cold metal surface of the baseball bat; her sweat where it met the chemical bonds in the duct tape strangling her skin; and the echoing footsteps of men built larger and more deadly than her, surrounding her, solid constructs of ill-intent that filled him with fury.

“Matt?” Foggy prods him in the shoulder.

He grinds the heel of his hand into his forehead. Claire is safe. The Russians are gone. “I don’t want that to happen to anyone. I especially don’t want it to happen to either of you.”

“That is one thing we can agree on. I also don’t want to be kidnapped,” says Foggy, with a flourishing gesture in Matt’s direction. “But come on, man. Karen was the one who got framed for murder, and then decided to go up against the multi-billion-dollar corporation that framed her. She’s tough enough to decide for herself whether she wants to stick around for your crazy stupid heroics.”

It’s the most positive thing that he’s said about Matt’s other life so far. “Foggy, I’m trying, but,”—

“And I don’t like lying to her. She deserves better.”

Matt tucks his elbows in and squashes himself further into the couch cushions. “I’ll think about it.”

~~*~~*~~

Matt waits another week and a half before he leans in to Foggy on the walk between Chifa Wok and Foggy’s subway stop and says, “Do you have plans Saturday night?”

“Marci,” says Foggy, and Matt smirks like he’s completely pleased that his best friend is sort-of seeing his ex again, instead of mostly pleased and a tiny bit jealous. “Why? What’s up?”

“If Karen reacts as well as you did to finding out about me…” He shrugs uncomfortably.

“Then I will blue-ball myself for her sake,” Foggy assures him. “I won’t let Karen freak out alone about her other boss being a hypocritical dick. And Marci will probably never let me darken her doorway again. That’s how much I care about you guys.”

Matt tightens his grip on Foggy’s elbow, giving his arm an awkward half-hug. “You’re a hero,” he says, an attempt to lighten the mood that falls just short of its mark.

Foggy pats his hand. “Don’t I know it.”

~~*~~*~~

Foggy leaves the office the next day with a loud, unnecessary comment about going to watch baseball (even though the season ended two weeks ago) with Stumacher and Price’s hottest new corporate attorney, and that they should enjoy their weekend. He squeezes Matt’s shoulder on his way out, presumably as a show of moral support. It mostly has the effect of transferring just enough harsh chemical smell of cheap soap from his hand onto Matt’s jacket to be annoying. Matt clasps his wrist in return.

He waits until the clock on the wall has ticked its way around another four minutes before he breaks the quiet of the office. “Karen?” He turns his head in her general direction, until the rhythm of papers being sorted slows and he has her attention. “Are you free tomorrow night?”

“Um.” She pauses with a drawer still open. “Yes, why?” she asks.

“Do you remember when I got hit by a car?”

“Of course. It wasn’t that long ago.” She doesn’t elaborate, lets the unspoken whatever it really was hang in the air.

“I’d like to talk about it, if you want — if that’s okay with you.”

Karen shuffles her papers together more quickly, rushing to pack them up without crumpling anything important. “Depends. Are we still going to talk about it like it was a car accident, or are you going to tell me what really happened?”

He laughs bitterly, ducks his head and clicks his cane against the floor. “That second one. Can I pick you up at your apartment?” She flushes, an uncomfortable rush of blood to her extremities and the surface of her skin that has him backtracking before she can utter more than a confused choked-off noise at the back of her throat. “I realize how that sounds, but I’m not asking you on a date, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He adds a disarming huff of laughter.

She swallows, and he can hear the rasp of hair on skin as she presumably tucks her hair behind her ear. “Oh, thank god. I don’t think — not that you’re. Oh. Yeah, I guess you can. Are you going to tell me where we’re going on this not-date?”

He cocks his head. “That depends. How about we decide when I get there?”

Karen is still too-warm and flushed with adrenaline, but she makes a sharp movement and then says, “Sorry — I nodded. How about eight o’clock?”

He smiles. “Perfect.”

~~*~~*~~

Matt binned most of his old uniforms a month and a half ago, and now that he has the option of not being stabbed as frequently, he doesn’t want to go back, but he locates a few incomplete sets of black clothing around the house, and after he’s washed the mask thoroughly (it had been under the bed and smelled, among a myriad of other unpleasant things, like dust and feet and mouse droppings; and he loves Karen more than almost anyone else but Matt’s not going to subject himself to that if he can help it) he ties the mask over his face and heads for the rooftops.

It’s a little past eight when he gets to her apartment building, and she’s pacing, wandering aimlessly around her apartment. He drops over the rooftop edge and down onto the fire escape. He climbs down the side, rather than taking the stairs: in a few apartments, there are people near the windows, even someone with the window cracked halfway open because they live near the boiler room so their apartment is stuffy even well into October.

When he reaches Karen’s window, he swings over the edge of the railing onto the landing and knocks on the window before he can think too much about what a stupid, dangerous idea this is. She breathes in sharply, accompanied by a halo of heat and sweat and assorted fear chemicals that he can feel through the walls. He jumps back onto the opposite railing, giving her enough space that when she opens the curtain, they won’t be directly face to face.

She approaches the window, pauses, and then yanks on the blinds so sharply that the anchors in the drywall groan along with the zip of the shutters collapsing together. She jumps, a shout of surprise muffled by a physical object — she covers her mouth. Matt waves to her and slowly, slowly unfolds himself from his perch on the railing and steps onto the landing. He smells pepper spray in a plastic aerosol bottle, and is careful to make his movements as obvious as possible.

“May I come in?” he asks through the glass. There’s a crack between the upper and lower panes of the window where the insulation has started to pull away; he can feel a whisper of heat from inside the house escaping, so she should be able to hear him all right.

There’s a long pause in which Matt briefly wonders if he’s made a mistake — this isn’t Karen, or it is but she’s changed her mind about Daredevil…

The window creaks open, he shakes himself, and Karen steps to the side, pepper spray still held at chest height. “What’s happening?” she asks. “What do you need?” She brushes past him to slam the window shut, locking it twice and yanking the blinds down with as much force as she had hauled them up. She needs to stop doing that, or they’re going to break in a month or so, Matt thinks, but he doesn’t say it because she is still afraid and he really, really doesn’t like pepper spray.

“Nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to talk to you,” he tells her, hands up. “I owe it to you.”

Heat rises in her cheeks. “Okay.” Her voice is higher than normal, strained, and she’s breathing too fast. Matt tilts his head. Not quite fear… hysteria, maybe. Possibly attraction. “I have a friend coming over in a — well, he should have been here by now, but it’s rush hour. Oh, but he said you’ve met, it’s okay.”

She’s trying so hard to remain calm, forcing herself to breathe normally and opening and closing her free hand into a fist. Her voice is directed all over the place: she isn’t looking at him, she’s looking into corners, like she’s trying to find somewhere for him to hide. Matt is surprised by the warmth that floods through him from his chest outwards, and gives her a small smile. “Can we sit down somewhere?”

“Yes,” she says, heartbeat still too quick. She clenches her fingers around her pepper spray and her hands are still sweating as she leads him to the kitchen table. He uses the scrape of chair legs on linoleum and the direction that she slides into her seat to find his own without hesitating.

The spine of the chair digs into the wounds still closing on his back. The water in sink tap burbles and doesn’t go anywhere. Karen’s neighbors next door try to tune their radio with a broken antenna. Upstairs, someone plays a video game.

Matt fidgets. Karen leans forwards, table creaking slightly with the transfer of weight. “Hey. I’m on your side. What is it?”

He wishes that he had rehearsed this — rehearsed it more, with different scenarios, maybe. “I’ve been lying, and I’m sorry…” he sighs, and slides his fingertips under the edges of the mask to press against his temples, then to pull off the black fabric and bunch it tightly in his fist.

Karen goes still. Matt registers the faint sour taste of nausea on her breath, bile low in her throat, stuttering breaths as she faces him. “What the fuck?” she says, and, “Matt?”

“I’m so sorry,” he repeats.

She scrubs her face with both of her hands, over and over, heart racing. He reaches out to touch her shoulder. She jerks away. “No,” she says, and even without any enhanced senses, it would be easy to hear the incipient tears in her voice. “No, you don’t get to do that.” She stands up, steps behind her chair — like it would make a difference if he wanted to reach her, Matt thinks, and is sickened by himself. He rests his hands in his lap, leaves the mask on the table, faces the wall across the room.

“May I say something?” he asks her.

“What’s to say?” she asks. “’Sorry I’ve been lying to you the entire time I’ve known you’? Don’t bullshit me.”

He twists his lips into a smile and hopes like hell that she understands he’s being sincere. “I won’t. I promise. Only the truth.”

“Sure.”

“Karen. I’m not — I’m not sorry that I didn’t tell you before. I’ve been lying about this my whole life. I’m sorry that it’s hurting you, right now.”

“Okay…” Her voice is a little steadier, although she’s wound tightly around herself, still sounds and smells and feels like she’s an inch from spraying him with pepper and running. He supposes it’s the best that he can ask for, under the circumstances.

“I don’t expect you to care, or to trust me after this. I don’t even expect you to believe me. I’d — I’d like it if you did, but I know I don’t deserve it.” He breathes in, and tastes salt in the air: she’s crying, which somehow hurts worse than anger. “I just wanted you to know that I was afraid, if you found out, that it would make it easier for them to track me; or that Fisk would use you to get to me, and if I didn’t find you in time, I don’t think I could…”

He trails off, because now Karen is laughing, tears still rolling down her cheeks and uneven hysterical laughter coming out of her mouth: too loud against the low background hum of the city, too sharp and broken to fill the room the way that it should.

“Can I get you some water?” he asks, even though he wants to touch her and make sure that her lungs, her heart are going to keep working properly.

“No, Matt, you cannot get me some water,” Karen says. “You can tell me how the hell you managed to save my life when you can’t even — you’re blind.” She hiccups and starts laughing again, wild. “I’m sorry, but what the hell, you asshole.”

If he wasn’t already on shaky grounds, Matt would point out that there are plenty of situations he can think of in which a blind person could save her life without superpowers. He explains himself, as simply as he knows how, starting with the assurance that he really is blind, but he’s got a much safer costume now.

Her breathing becomes more regular as he talks. He gets to the end, the part where he tracked down Detective Hoffman, and still hasn’t figured out yet if her stillness is because she’s calmed down, or because she is about to get very angry.

She swallows hard. The tendons and ligaments in her hands stretch, and her nails press into the skin of her palms. “There’s wine in the fridge,” she says. The cold, sharp edges in her voice that he first noticed two weeks ago are back, overriding the watery notes of hysteria. “Is that something you can do? Find a bottle of wine in a stranger’s fridge?”

“It’s in my repertoire, yes.”

She sucks in a slow breath. “Go get it.”

Her whole refrigerator is layered with the traces of various wines and beers, most of which are under a month old; right now, though, there is only one bottle. She yanks out the cork and drinks without bothering to pour herself a glass. Matt leans against the counter behind her.

“You’ve been drinking a lot lately.”

“No, I had a lot of alcohol in my fridge lately. I threw it out. Wasn’t a good idea. Didn’t want to end up like.” She tosses back another mouthful of wine. “Never mind.”

Matt sniffs. “I’m sorry.”

Karen drinks what sounds like half the bottle before she finally lets go of the neck. “I tried not to involve you, either,” she says. “I thought, maybe, if I kept it between me, and Ben, and the masked man, then you and Foggy wouldn’t get hurt. Three guesses how that went.”

Matt tries to wet his lips so they don’t crack when he speaks. “We ended up involved anyway,” he says.

Karen rises to her feet. Anger, acrid-smelling and hot, fills her from the top down, mingling with the wine and fresh tears. “They threatened to kill you,” she says, slowly and with great deliberation, and cold shivers its way down his back. They. “They threatened to kill you and Ben and Foggy and everyone else I cared about before they would let me die. I know how that feels. I can’t not know.”

She drops the bottle down on the table. “I understand why you didn’t tell me. It blows. And I want to yell at you, but I’m so tired of being angry,” she says, voice cracking. She steps forwards; when he reaches for her this time, she lets him pull her against his chest and wrap his arms around her. She presses her face into his shoulder, fists trapped between them, and starts to cry in earnest. Matt hugs her tighter, willing his hands to stop shaking. They’re the same height, but her frame is lighter, shaped by a lifetime of desk jobs and yoga instead of martial arts. The thought that someone tried to threaten Karen Page — tried to lever his life against her compliance — floods him with adrenaline, but the threat is gone. He can only listen to her let go of whatever is trapped inside her, feel her breath near his skin and her pulse racing to match his. “Neither of us are alone,” he says softly. “Not anymore.”

Karen’s voice is muffled and hoarse when she finally speaks. “I thought my world was bigger. I liked knowing that there was someone else out there besides us who cared that much.”

He nods, knows that she can feel it against her hair. “I’m sorry.”

Karen huffs and shoves her head against him. “Screw you, Matt Murdock,” she says, but she pries free her arms and wraps them around his shoulders. It’s enough to go on, for now.

~~*~~*~~

Matt isn’t sure what’s going to happen at work the next day; he goes in bracing himself for the worst, for awkwardness, or for Karen to have woken up and decided that she has enough energy left to be angry, after all.

When he gets to the office, Foggy is on the phone, using his Professional Voice at someone getting defensive over her company’s inability to release the records to which he insists he is legally entitled. Karen is at her desk, still and apparently focused on the computer slowly overheating in front of her. Matt eases the office door shut to avoid disturbing them.

“Morning,” Karen murmurs, so quietly that Matt isn’t sure whether she means for him to hear it or not. He frowns at her. “Don’t want to interrupt him,” she explains in the same quiet tone. “I had a couple of questions about our insurance plan. I’ve been comparing it to some others but I wasn’t sure if you two had specific reasons for the one you’d picked…”

“Oh. Um.” Matt makes a gesture in the direction of his own office. Karen gets up and joins him. “We just kind of picked something that had dental and hoped for the best, honestly,” he says, as she closes the door to his office.

“I figured,” she says. “Want me to give you the short version?”

That’s it? he wants to ask. It’s so mundane — terrifying, in its own way, but fundamentally ordinary — that it’s almost a letdown. “Sure,” he says.

Foggy knocks on the door partway through Karen’s rundown of small business insurance options, which all sound mostly the same (and it’s not like he’s ever gone to the hospital, anyway), and Matt breaks away with relief.

“You two good?” asks Foggy.

Karen’s hand brushes his over one of her printouts. “Yeah.”

Foggy pauses, evaluating them for a moment (Matt can’t read this from any one thing in particular, he just knows because it’s Foggy). “Okay, so can we agree that the horns on his uniform are kind of hokey? Help me convince him to ditch them, I need an ally on this.”

Matt smiles.

~~*~~*~~

Foggy nags him about bruises, now, even though Matt can tell that broaching the subject still makes him uncomfortable. “It looks like someone gave you a hickey, man, you can’t walk into court like that,” he says, gently touching the fingerprints on Matt’s neck. “Be more careful.”

He sounds sad and disappointed that Matt isn’t taking better care of himself, like the number of times he’s crawled into Claire’s dumpster to bleed in safety hasn’t significantly decreased since he’s started wearing Melvin Potter’s armor, like he hasn’t taken a hundred or so beatings worse than this one before. Matt raises his eyebrows. “Maybe someone did give me a hickey.”

Foggy removes his hand. “Wait, did you actually get that girl from the bar last night?”

“Nope.”

There’s a pause. Foggy shoves his hands into his pockets. “Did you ever?” he asks, suddenly unsure. “All those times I thought you were holding out on me.”

If Matt could see, he’d be able to tell if Karen is watching them or her computer monitor; and then he could figure out whether now is the time to tell Foggy the whole truth. “I never lied about it being violent,” he suggests. “I just … didn’t mention what kind of violent.”

“I don’t know if that’s creepy or kinky.”

Matt shrugs. I’d rather fight scum than have sex, he wants to say, and a complicated feeling, frustration and want and the wonderful simplicity of a well-matched brawl, threatens to choke him; but it is neither the time nor the place to try to communicate it to Foggy. “Probably both,” he says.

“Hey guys,” Karen interrupts from behind her computer. “Did you know that Aeroflex has an office in Chelsea?”

“No they don’t,” Foggy says immediately. “They shouldn’t. Do they?”

“Look at this.”

Foggy joins her behind her desk and starts reading the opening titles of the company’s incorporation documents aloud to Matt. Matt touches the scrapes from a desperate attempt to strangle him barehanded the night before, chastising himself for not covering them before he left home this morning. Pray in the innermost goddamn room, he reminds himself, forgets to pay attention to the middle of what Foggy is reading, and listens to him complain without heat about how he should just make Matt use the goddamn screen reader if he’s not going to bask in the glorious oaken tones of Foggy’s voice.

~~*~~*~~

There’s too much that is dark in the streets some weeks, harsh words and too much adrenaline and anger singing from the alleys; it seeps into Matt’s body and scrapes across his skin like so many cloth-wrapped knuckles, just asking to be beaten back and beaten down. He makes it home without losing his cool, and that’s long enough. He forgoes a real dinner in favor of pulling on his gloves, his uniform, and stretching before he heads for the roof. The devil is pushing against his skin from the inside out, but as he reaches for the window, he makes himself pause. He goes back for his cell phone, the one that isn’t a burner, and dials.

“Hey, buddy. What’s up?” asks Foggy, cheerful and incongruous.

Matt hesitates. “I’m going out,” he says. “Nothing in particular. I’ll probably be back in a few hours.”

“Are you okay?” Foggy asks, and Matt becomes aware that his voice has dropped: he’s used to letting go of the pleasantries and professional polish once he’s in the mask. He doesn’t talk like that to Foggy if he can help it; it makes him feel strangely exposed.

“Yeah,” he says, clearing his throat to dispel the gravelly notes. “Yeah, I thought, in case I don’t answer when you want to tell me about how drunk you are…”

“So I can be more specific when I’m worrying about what sort of trouble you’re getting yourself into?” Foggy says.

“You could just not worry,” Matt suggests.

“Or you could come throw darts with me and One-Eyed Joe, who — for the record — has incredible aim for a guy with no depth perception. I could use someone to make me look like less of a schmuck.”

Matt can feel the tightly-coiled anger in his muscles starting to unwind, the longer he listens to Foggy speak. He could take off the mask and put away his escrima sticks and go down to Josie’s bar. But even pretending to be too blind to hit a dartboard with Foggy, as much as Matt loves him, would just be a stop-gap. He’d go off the next night anyway.

“Not tonight,” he says, and as a compromise, “I’ll let you know when I get back.”

“Don’t get yourself killed,” says Foggy, just a little too sincere.

“Well, since you asked so nicely…”

Foggy makes a huffing noise into the phone. “Hey, Matt,” he says.

“Still here.” Pacing, waiting to get outside and into the guts of the city, but still here.

“Thanks for calling.”

That, right there — if they were face to face, Matt would be hard-pressed not to hug him, the sort of full-body obnoxious tackle that he can usually only get away with after three or four consecutive shots. “Don’t gamble away the firm, Nelson,” he says, grinning, and hangs up.

Now he can get to work.

~~*~~*~~

“Morning,” says Matt. “How was darts?”

Foggy takes him by the arm and leads him around the office, guiding his hand to the pebbly plastic surfaces of the various machines, to the mini fridge, the desks, the chairs, and the Karen sitting in one of the chairs. “You’ll notice that all of the furniture is here,” he says, like he’s giving a tour of an old mansion with thick moldy air instead of a midsized Manhattan office. Heart beating a little too fast, he adds, “How was Fight Club?”

Matt smiles. “No new stitches.”

“How much paperwork is Captain Mahoney going to have to fill out today?”

Matt considers the least incriminating answer that he can reasonably give without lying. Apparently he takes too long. “You should see the look he’s giving you, Matt,” says Karen.

“Like he’s tired of putting up with my shit?” Matt guesses.

“I’m trying to decide whether I should be proud of you or not. You know, like Katrina’s geriatric dog trying not to pee on the rug,” says Foggy, exasperation and fondness warring in his voice. “She was Matt’s almost-girlfriend our second year of law school,” he explains to Karen.

She snorts. Matt fiddles with his glasses and bites down on a pleased smile. He turns his head in Foggy’s direction, and he thinks he might accidentally make “eye contact”, because Foggy’s heart jumps like he’s been startled. “You know what, it’s more than I deserve. I’ll take it,” says Matt, rolling over it like it never happened.

~~*~~*~~

Matt tries to remember, even though it feels restrictive and juvenile to check in every time that he goes out.

“Jesus, do you really do this so frequently?” Foggy asks, the third time that he calls that month.

“Yeah, usually. What did you expect?” Matt jumps up onto the couch and balances along the back.

“Maybe you were working overtime because a giant angry mafia type was tearing up the neighborhood. What do I know about being a vigilante?”

“Basically everything. There isn’t much I haven’t told you.” Matt jumps from the couch to the floor again, does a cartwheel with the phone still held in one hand. His armor is warm, which is great for autumn nights outside, and less great while bouncing around his apartment.

“I’m your friend, not your nanny. I appreciate what you’re trying to do here, just … pick up your phone once in a while, okay? And tell me if you’re hurt, don’t get all stoic and Catholic on me.”

That, at least, is a little easier. So when Foggy asks him if he wants to hit up O’Flannigan’s in Chelsea, Matt tells him honestly that he’s got a date with the rooftops, and Foggy goes all tense and anxious even though his tone doesn’t change when he says, “Okay, no problem. Don’t get stupid.”

Halfway through November, Matt gets back from accidentally scaring the shit out of some stoned teenagers and discovers three missed calls from Foggy. It’s late, he probably has a hairline fracture in his left ulna, but Claire is on shift until six in the morning, and his feet ache from a particularly rough landing off a dumpster. Just stripping down and cleaning up feels like a monumental task, let alone trying to sound normal with Foggy.

He balls his good hand into a fist and punches his own thigh. Christ was whipped, tortured, and staked through the wrists to a piece of wood for your sorry ass. You can pick up the phone and call your best friend. He dredges up yet more reserves of energy and dials. “Sorry, I was busy,” he says. “Couldn’t reach my phone. You okay?”

“Yep. I ran into Professor Delaney, I was gonna ask if you wanted to come down. Guess not, huh.”

“Please tell me he didn’t bring up the mock trial,” Matt says, and, “I might have broken my arm, but only a little.”

“You’re a fucking idiot,” says Foggy.

Another time, Matt does hear his phone. Marci, Karen, and Foggy are watching this really amazing free concert in Midtown, apparently, and Matt listens to them chattering and talking over each other and the music for a few minutes, until he smells coca leaves and limestone bundled up in paper further down the block.

“We missed you,” says Foggy the next day.

“We work together,” Matt reminds him. “I’m around at least eight hours a day if you want to see me.”

“That barely counts. You better have done something really heroic and legal." Foggy hits him in the shoulder.

Matt hides a wince. “You know me. Saving babies from burning buildings left and right.”

“Your idea of a good time is messed up, man,” Foggy tells him, and wanders away with a faintly reproachful air.

~~*~~*~~

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving sees the office closing early in the afternoon: Foggy has a train to catch out to Centerport, where his parents moved a few years ago (”There are hills, and trees, and this tiny purple flower plant fucking everywhere. I thought my mom hated that stuff,” he says every time that the subject comes up) and Karen has one to take up to some tiny town outside of Ithaca. Matt had known Foggy’s plans well in advance — had been hauled along for the holidays two years ago, in a moment of weakness — but Karen’s come as something of a surprise.

“I didn’t know you had family around,” he says. “You never said.”

“They’re not the sort of people you want with you in a crisis,” she explains. “Or when you’re in a really good mood.”

“Sounds promising. Sure you don’t want to become a Nelson for a day? You’re tall and blonde, no one will even notice,” Foggy interrupts, locking his office door with a metallic click-click-click-thunk of the tumbler.

Matt tilts his head as a new thought occurs to him. “Do you look alike?” he asks.

There’s a pause, and then the rasp of hair being run through fingers. “She’s a little more platinum-y than me,” Foggy announces. “I wouldn’t say we’re twins or anything, but we could probably pass for cousins.”

“Huh,” Matt says. The new knowledge jostles uncomfortably in his head against his mental pictures of them.

“That’s sweet, but I don’t mind. My dad liked them, and my cousins aren’t too bad yet,” says Karen. Her tone of voice doesn’t invite questions. Neither of them ask.

Matt isn’t leaving the city or finding any dubious relatives with whom to spend time, but he has his own plans. There’s a dinner at Sacred Heart church; while he can’t fake not being blind well enough to actually help with the setup, or the cleanup, he can show up with guacamole and sit down where Father Lantom guides him, and he can charm the older women and lonely homeless men who show up until coffee is served. The fluorescent lights of the church basement buzz over and around the forty-odd near-strangers grouped around small tables, fading into the background as the conversation becomes less stilted and formal throughout the meal. By the time that they all join hands to pray after coffee, tiny Dolores with poor circulation grasps his hand less tentatively, and Barbara on his other side actually laces her fingers through his. It’s a touching expression of the sort of small, strange community that he does his best to protect; the sort that he thinks he fits better from the outside.

He gets into a fight later that night — or, he breaks up a fight. He doesn’t have anything but a cloth mask to tug over his face, but the men only have their fists, so it doesn’t matter much. Fair fight. They’re brothers, arguing over one of their wives like she’s a piece of meat even though he can hear her breathing right there next to them. Matt leaves his cane in the space between two large metal bins full of garbage and wades in. Dinner weighs unpleasantly in his stomach. “Get away from her,” he orders them.

“This is family business, little man,” says the one with the deeper voice and mild cardiac arrhythmia. Matt thinks he’s the one who’s married to the woman who apparently looked once too long at her husband’s brother. What a load of shit.

“Should’ve picked another alley,” he tells them. The two brothers are huge slow masses of displaced air, swinging their fists in side-sweeping arcs that are easy to anticipate and easy to dodge, but he can’t move them. His foot just sinks into the man’s beer gut and bounces off.He circles so that his back is to the woman, cutting her off from the brothers. They’re backed into a corner, which suits Matt just fine: there’s a dumpster just to his right that he can use as a step if he needs to bolt, and this way neither man can get around him to the woman. “You all right?” he asks her.

“I didn’t do anything,” she protests. It doesn’t sound like she’s addressing him. “It was just a cigarette.”

He tunes her out when arrhythmia brother roars and lurches forwards. Matt braces himself on the dumpster with the arm that isn’t probably broken and swings out so that his knees drive into the man’s solar plexus, relishes the man’s swearing as he doubles up wheezing and the jolt that runs through his own bones on contact. This is better.

~~*~~*~~

Karen comes to work the afternoon after Thanksgiving with the smell of unfiltered cigarettes and — inexplicably — peppermint still clinging to her skin. Matt doesn’t react only because he’s spent most of his life pretending that he isn’t a little thrown when someone close to him doesn’t smell like themselves.

“What sort of time do you call this, Miss Page?” Foggy asks in his most official of voices when Karen walks in.

She stops short. “Three? Like you said, right?”

“He did. Ignore him,” Matt advises, and she relaxes.

“Hey, I didn’t tell her she was late. I sincerely asked her if she knew the time. My watch is broken.”

This is a lie — Matt can hear the familiar ticking of the watch from his desk — and Karen gives him an exasperated sigh. He skims down the page and resumes his reading. They currently only have one case open; today will consist of brushing up on the legal structures and restrictions surrounding the specific law that their client, a young Mr. Shaun Black, is charged with violating — resisting arrest over what he insisted had been a deliberate misinterpretation of his words — and a meeting with said client in an hour or two.

The office is quiet (as much as any one location can be in Manhattan). Matt pitches himself into reading and shuts his door so he can dictate notes to himself without distracting Karen any more than she already is, bursts of fidgeting followed by periods where she catches herself and stays as still as possible. He can still hear her through the door, of course, but she won’t have visual confirmation of that. It persists up through their client’s arrival; and Matt isn’t wholly surprised when she touches his shoulder after they conclude their meeting.

“I want to talk to you,” she says.

“Okay,” he says, keeping his voice light and pretending that he can’t tell that, whatever she wants to say, it’s been bothering her since she arrived. “Now?” They have maybe a minute before Foggy comes back from walking Mr. Black to the front door.

Her hair rustles against her blouse. “I just shook my head,” she says. “When you told me about … what you do … I said that they’d threatened me.”

He freezes. “I remember.”

Karen breathes out hard through her nose. “We are going to get more drunk than either of us have ever been in our lives, and then once I recover from the hangover — if I recover — you are never going to bring it up again unless I tell you that you can.”

“Do I get to hear what it is before I agree to silence?” Matt asks.

“No.”

Foggy is walking back up the stairs. Matt wonders if she timed this so that he wouldn’t have the space to debate the issue. “I’m not bad at keeping secrets,” he says, with a crooked smile. “Just tell me when.”

~~*~~*~~

‘When’, Karen decides, is the following Friday after they close for the weekend. ‘Where’, she decides, is Josie’s Bar.

Forty-five minutes after they arrive, Josie offers them something called Zachariah’s Green Eel. Matt has been persuaded to try enough of the questionably legal brews that she sells that he raises his glass without question, but Karen covers his hand with her own to keep him from accepting anything. “No way,” she says. “The eel is for happy times. We’re trying to be sad drunks.”

Matt frowns, tries to remember whether he’s supposed to know what she’s talking about.

Josie bursts out laughing deep in her chest. “Smart woman,” she says, and brings forth a heavy glass bottle for them instead. “Here. If you’re still smiling in an hour, drinks are free.”

The drink, whatever it is, burns on the way down his throat, and leaves a grainy aftertaste on his tongue so bitter that he actually shudders. Karen clinks her shot glass against his knuckles. “No turning back,” she says. “Cheers.”

They relocate to a booth at the back of the bar after Matt becomes dizzy enough that he knows the instant he falls off of his stool, he’s going to give up on fighting gravity and just lie on the floor until everything stops being so much. He doesn’t think that’s a bad idea, per se, but the sticky-tacky spilled drinks and footprints on the floor would probably make him throw up if nothing else did. They stagger back.

Karen is a confusing blur, less than an arm’s length away, of grain alcohol and sweat masked by deodorant mixed with cotton and acrylic fibers — the Levites will be unhappy with her, even though she’s not religious so it probably doesn’t matter — he wants so badly to put his head down against the table but there are so many — so many — sticky rings on the waxy wood.

Towards the end of the bottle, talking becomes too much of an effort. Matt tries very hard to stay aware of Karen against everything that keeps happening around them. Karen is steeling herself — he can read it in her heartbeat and the way that she breathes like every inhale costs her. He makes himself drink water while he waits for her to talk, so he’ll hate himself a little less in the morning.

“I’m gonna ask you something,” she says into the mostly-empty glass near her face.

“Nothing too complicated.” He could probably give a really good closing statement right now, could give one in his sleep, but if she needs him to try to explain how he sees things, or to do math, then she’s shit out of luck.

“Have you ever killed anyone?” Karen asks him, and his whole body goes numb. “You do your whole … justice! … thing. Have you ever had to?”

Matt grips his glass tighter in his hands. “I tried. I don’t think…” There was frying blood and roasting meat mixed in with burnt cotton, but that hadn’t been — that wasn’t him. “I wanted to. I thought about it. I still think about it, but Foggy wouldn’t even kill me, he’d just be disappointed, and I’d probably damn myself because I wouldn’t regret it — not for the right reasons,”—

“I have,” she says loudly, words punching through his swirling half-formed thoughts.

Matt shuts his mouth. His stomach curdles, sucking all the heat from his skin and leaving a burning impotent horror in his core. Karen is right next to him, close enough to touch. He’s not dumb enough to reach out. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

There are a thousand fifty reasons he should be sorry, up to and including not incapacitating every single threat to her safety; for not understanding why she’d started to sound different a few months ago; for letting her carry this alone. He doesn’t think he can say any of the important ones. “I’m sorry you had to.”

“When you came to my apartment. When you told me. I thought he’d be the one who knows what it’s like, of all the people I know, and so I thought you’d get it.” Karen slumps forwards and rests her head on the table, sticky rings be damned. Her heartbeat levels out despite the sweat under her nose and her arms, and she sounds tired, worn down like the moments just before Matt’s dad used to get his killing wind and beat his opponent bloody.

“What happened?” he asks. His mouth is dry. He makes himself drink more water. It changes nothing.

Karen shakes her head, and Matt wants to tell her to wash her hair because he can hear the crusty drink particles clinging to the strands as they brush the tabletop. “He was right in front of me and he was alive and then he wasn’t,” she says.

“Who?” Matt asks gently, or tries to. It comes out too loud, but the bar is packed and even though he can hear every fucking conversation here, even though he’s having some trouble shutting it all out at once, this isn’t a problem that everyone has, right? They’ll be fine as long as Karen keeps mumbling into her arm like she’s doing now.

“He knew exactly who I cared about, who to threaten me with. I could see you dying, all noble and not knowing that I had the chance to save you and I threw it away. I didn’t know what to do, and then he acted — god, he acted like he knew me, like he knew exactly how little of a threat I was, and so I — I shot him. And he just kept looking at me, and his cell phone was going off and oh god, what if he answered?” Karen lifts her head off the table, pulse picking up again. “What if he didn’t die, and I didn’t know, and then the next day Ben — Ben showed up in the bay somewhere? What if I came in to work and Foggy was…? and I just. Kept. Going.”

She punctuates the last sentence by punching the table, knuckles cracking down in all the wrong order and putting too much weight on her ring finger and Matt wants to take her hand and show her how to form a fist, a proper one that’s less likely to break her knuckles. He focuses on her hands as they fold over each other, one thumb rubbing over the knuckles of the other hand, and he struggles to hold onto all of her words.

“Matt?” she says, small and cracked.

“I feel like an ass for not figuring out that something was wrong,” he admits. “I heard something. Didn’t know what.” Then he has to stop and think, pressing his fists to his forehead to knead his brain into functioning again.

“He doesn’t think I’m human.”

“Huh?”

“Not — Fisk’s man. Foggy. He said I’m not human.”

Something — jealousy, fear, Matt’s too damn drunk to figure it out — spikes out from his chest into his stomach. “Does he know?”

Karen snorts into her arm. “Hell no. He said it … generally. ‘Bout a month ago, before Fisk went to jail. I think you were fighting, you weren’t there. Like, look at those big bad evil murderers walking around like they’re still human, Karen, isn’t it great that you’re not one of them? Isn’t it so fucking lucky that you’re still human, Karen?”

For the first time in their shared history, Matt kind of wants to punch Foggy Nelson. He tamps down on the anger, channels it into finding Karen’s arm and putting his hand on her shoulder. “Your other boss can be a dick,” he says.

She turns her head towards him so her voice is clearer. “He didn’t say it like that. Not naming names. Being human, yeah. Yeah, he said that part.” She stretches away from him to take a long drink and settles back down. “Anyway, he said the same thing about you being a dick.”

“See? Foggy doesn’t know everything,” Matt tells her.

“I shot a man to death,” she says, acrid undertones to her voice, and if she’s expecting her bluntness to finally make him react badly to the revelation, she’s dead fucking wrong. Matt doesn’t usually let God have all the fun of judging, but Karen is — Karen is…

“I’m not Foggy,” he persists.

“Yeah, I know.” She sniffs. “Thank god, can you imagine?”

“No — that’s not the period. It’s the, um, what do you call it? Semicolon. I’m not Foggy; I don’t have the same … I want to believe that a sin is a sin is a sin, and the law is always enough …” He waits to make sure he’s got all of the words in the right order before he speaks again. “There are dark… things. People. It’s so hard to fight them with light, even though we should. You know that, and I know that. Sometimes it’s not enough. I’m glad that you’re here.” He holds out his hand, palm up. After a moment, her clammy fingers slip between his and hold tight.

They leave the bar a little while later, stumbling along and both of them tripping over Matt’s cane until they’ve found their way back to his apartment. Matt plants himself facefirst onto the bed; he starts to offer her the couch, but she just curls up next to him with her head just below his shoulderblade, because apparently the pillow is too far away to manage.

“Okay?” she asks.

Her skull is nice and round and doesn’t really hurt where it presses against one of the gouges from Nobu’s swinging blades, so Matt supposes that it’s pretty much okay. “Not alone,” he mutters, the last thing he remembers before he falls asleep.

~~*~~*~~

The phone rings early the next morning underneath his pillow. Maybe it’s late the next morning; the only definite thing is that everything is syrup and smells like frying oil and Matt’s mouth feels like it’s been swabbed with a cotton ball doused in nail polish remover.

“What,” he croaks into the phone.

“Do you know where Karen is? I couldn’t get her cell.” Foggy’s voice is grating and loud, and bounces around Matt’s skull like a rubber bullet.

“Uh…” Matt retraces his steps from the previous night. There’s a food cart underneath the window enveloping every other scent with its own, and Matt can’t handle trying to parse out the smells hiding underneath to figure out if Karen is or has been in the room. He reaches out gingerly across the bed, careful not to twist too much in case his stomach decides that it’s all too much and this is the end, goodbye world. A little ways away, his fingers reach a … a cloth thing that isn’t the bedsheets. He investigates further, and encounters a narrow wrist enveloped in the cloth. Shirt, probably. Not one of Matt’s.

“You still with me?” Foggy booms.

“Ugh. Yeah. Yeah, I found her,” Matt reports, as he encounters Karen’s watch still hanging onto her wrist.

“What? Matt! Where did you find her? Are you hungover — did you crawl into a manhole doing vigilante shit?”

Matt pulls the phone away from his ear and presses the heel of his hand against his forehead. It doesn’t help, but he can deal. Then he thinks through the questions, and winces. “Hungover. At my place. She’s with me. We, uh, went to Josie’s.”

“Oh. Okay.” Now there’s a weird note to Foggy’s voice. That’s no good. “You … uh …”

“Jesus, no. I don’t actually — I don’t, you know.” The smell of frying oil weaves through his brain and cuts off any train of thought with a fresh cloud of nausea. “No,” he repeats.

“Okay, good. Listen, Brett says he might have a person in custody who doesn’t have a lawyer. I’m gonna head down to the precinct. You in?”

“Ugh,” Matt repeats. “When?”

“Will you be alive by one?”

Matt tries to locate his watch, and only succeeds in knocking his glasses off the table instead. “What time is it now?”

“Little before twelve.”

“Yeah, see you there,” he says, as the vastness of all that he needs to accomplish before then stretches out before him, a maze of obstacles and regret.

“Try not to look too hungover, man. I’m proud of you, but dude, your timing, it sucks.”

“Love you, too.” Matt hangs up and lets out a groan that gets cut off when Karen’s flailing hand finds his face.

“Shut up,” she whines.

It takes a few minutes to convince her to wake up enough to help him look presentable. She informs him that his glasses mostly distract from the hell that is the rest of his face, which is not particularly encouraging; but once he’s showered and shaved, she pronounces him “basically not a train wreck”. He doesn’t have time to meditate his stomach into submission, so he downs some Advil and bananas, tells Karen she’s welcome to crash again until he gets back, and stumbles out the door to hail a taxi. The bells at St. Paul’s down on 57th street chime the hour a block before the taxi pulls up outside the precinct.

Foggy is lounging against a tree when he climbs out of the car, smelling like soap and cologne vigorously applied over last night’s Thai food. “On your two,” he calls.

Matt walks over and finds Foggy’s feet with his cane, then just keeps walking straight into Foggy and drops his head onto his shoulder.

“What the hell happened to you, buddy?” Foggy asks, patting his back. His arms are a wonderfully warm shield against Manhattan’s wind-tunnel streets, and Matt leans into him.

“Karen said I looked okay,” he mumbles.

“Sure, you’re okay. I’ll try to be the handsome one for once.” Foggy steps away and tugs on his arm. “Come, my weary friend. Let’s go meet the alleged client.”

The alleged client is sitting in the same room where they met Karen, or one which is indistinguishable from it. She washed herself yesterday before she was taken in, but Matt can still taste the blood on her skin and in her hair, and the grilled cheese she was given for lunch. She is clearly uncomfortable with their presence.

Matt lets Foggy do most of the talking, for once. He is able to draw out that her name is Elena Guzman, that she’s here for domestic violence, and that she in no way thinks she deserves to be punished when her boyfriend shouldn’t have raised a hand to her daughter in the first place. Matt pushes past his pounding head to focus on her heartbeat and the warm rounded vowels of her speech as they talk.

“So, how many fingers did you take off?” asks Foggy, and Matt loves him for saying it without a trace of amusement. “You get the thumb, too?”

“Just the four of them. Not even down to the bottom joint.” She sounds as though she regrets not getting the whole hand. Matt bites down on the inside of his cheek. “If I’d planned it, I’d’ve done a better job.”

“And for your sake, we’re glad you didn’t,” says Foggy. “Given the situation, let’s talk about your options.”

~~*~~*~~

Something is going down at the piers. Matt’s been hovering around there all week. He’s identified a few people who always just happen to be in the neighborhood of the as-yet-unrebuilt wreckage of Pier 57: a heavyset man who always has a turkey sandwich for lunch; later at night, a woman shows up wearing a citrus perfume that makes Matt’s nose itch; and a man who’s always the easiest to identify by his perpetual, unfiltered Parliaments.

Despite Matt’s best efforts, he still doesn’t know what they’re doing here. He’s narrowed their area of focus down to a group of five containers that, unlike the others in the area, aren’t full of wood, or sawdust, or have been bone-dry empty for weeks.

The first week of December, the perfume-wearing one’s shift gets interrupted by the chain-smoker, and Matt finally finally has an opportunity to drop to the ground and start in on the lock of the first container.

The world narrows to just the hollow space inside of the padlock, the clock of the lockpicks inside that space, and his own breathing. He’s got most of the tumblers into place before he registers the vibrations of two sets of returning footsteps on the floor. Please, God, he thinks as he lifts one pick up hopefully, even though that’s not how it works, and keeps working right up until he hears the hammer of a pistol about a hundred feet behind him.

~~*~~*~~

Claire sighs when she opens the door for him and steps aside. “Come in.”

“Thanks,” Matt says. He limps towards the couch, keeping his back as straight and stiff as possible.

“Well, you’re not leaving a giant trail of blood this time, that’s encouraging,” she says, clearly weary. She’s in sweatpants, but still smells like the hospital, probably just came off a shift.

Matt manages a huff of laughter around whatever the woman’s bullet and the man’s heavy boots did to his back. “Check for broken bones?” he asks. “Please.”

Claire stays back and lets him lower himself towards the couch, kneeling with his face on the cushions. “It’d help if you took off your shirt,” she says.

Matt makes a face. It would be dangerously easy to respond flippantly; to fall back into the rhythm of flirting without really flirting, posturing at each other until she’s willing to overlook that he is not a good person, not for her and not for God. He grits his teeth and strips off his armor and undershirt in one quick, agonizing movement that has him gasping into the couch as soon as he finishes. Behind him, Claire makes a sympathetic noise.

“You gonna tell me what happened?” she asks. “Besides you getting a hell of a beating.”

“Wish I knew,” he says. “Better not to tell you, anyway.”

She kneels down next to him. Her hand hovers by his shoulder, radiating heat over where the bullet connected with his armor and left an insistent well of pain behind. “Just tell me if it’s gonna blow up into something as big as last time,” she says. “I’m gonna put my hand on your shoulder now, okay?”

“Yeah, sure. I don’t think so, but who knows? They didn’t even know who they were working for. Strange, not big,” Matt says, before he has to stop talking and concentrate on not making any noise while she manipulates his arm. He recites the Lord’s Prayer in his head to distract himself, dragging through the lines so that the words hold their meaning instead of simply blending together into nonsense syllables with repetition. “Inhale, slowly,” says Claire, breaking the pattern. He obeys. She presses down between his shoulder blade and spine, and Matt whimpers involuntarily.

“Sorry,” she murmurs.

He takes his leave as soon as she’s completed her assessment and determined that, while he probably cracked his fourth and fifth ribs, he’s lucky, and hasn’t punctured anything important. “If you want tea, I’ve got decaf,” she offers. “Before you go.”

Matt is already beginning the process of pulling his shirt back on. “Thanks, but I’ve got work in the morning.” He raises his arms up, twisting over towards the right to see if that will make it any less painful.

“Hold still.” Claire takes his wrist and tugs his shirt down so he doesn’t have to move as much. Her hands are clinical and controlled as ever. It doesn’t stop Matt from wanting to lean into them, to touch with purpose instead of necessity.

He turns away from the scent of her shampoo and goes right back to reciting his sixth our father, who art in heaven until the process is over and he can leave without torturing himself beyond what he must.

~~*~~*~~

The first day of Shaun Black’s trial (the only day, if Matt has his way) starts with the winter winds chasing each other down the streets on the way to the courthouse. Matt keeps trying to hunch his shoulders against the wind and is harshly reprimanded, every time, by the impact wounds on his shoulder and back. The morning does get marginally better when he gets inside the courthouse and Foggy manhandles his free hand out of his coat pocket to give him a cup of coffee. He claps Matt on the back in greeting; Matt winces. “I may have cracked a rib,” he mutters, when Foggy starts to display all kinds of concerned body language.

“Dude,” says Foggy. He runs his hand over the affected area, more lightly.

The day takes a slow, stately nosedive a couple of hours after that, starting when Matt tries to gesture dramatically at their client with his right hand, and his hearing momentarily shorts out with pain. He recovers his balance and forges ahead with their opening statement. But three sentences in, even with most of his attention focused on the jury, he can hear the gradual acceleration of Foggy’s heartbeat behind him. “My client comes to you today — instead of to his church, where he regularly volunteers his time as part of his faith community — because he has been wrongfully accused of resisting arrest,” Matt plows on, because he is a professional, dammit, and if he can move almost normally with deep bruises spread across his upper back, then he can keep his voice level and expression unwavering even while he refocuses on Foggy breathing too fast and too shallow. “The prosecution would have you believe that running a traffic light before he was out of high school makes Mr. Black a suspicious character.”

He tilts his head to bring Foggy into better focus. He doesn’t smell ill, feels slightly flushed but not feverish, and would definitely be pissed if Matt stumbled because he was worried about why Foggy is apparently having a panic attack. It might be bad because Foggy is handling the cross-examination, and it’s not like Matt has no faith in his own abilities as a lawyer, but Foggy is better at rewording arguments on his feet — not to mention, all of his notes are printed and therefore useless. Matt pushes through his last few sentences, keeps his cool, and assures the jury that the evidence will prove far too thin to indisputably place Black at the scene with an appropriate means, even if he had the motive, to attack the officer in the manner described; and all the while Foggy’s body betrays some sort of silent freakout.

By the time Matt slides back into his seat, Foggy isn’t hyperventilating, at least. Matt gives their twitchy client a reassuring nod before he leans in to Foggy. “You okay?” he murmurs.

“Yep. So okay.” Foggy exhales deeply, in the pause before the prosecution begins their examination. He shifts away from Matt, so subtly that Matt would think it was subconscious were it not for the final staccato burst of his heartbeat before it starts to settle. Matt swallows and folds his hands on the table. The prosecution layers questions on the witnessing police officer, voice brimming with calm assurance that gets under Matt’s skin. Foggy and his apparent discomfort remain a much more interesting presence to observe than the prosecution, even though this is important, this whole case is authoritarian bullshit that Matt will fight to his dying breath, but Foggy’s still agitated —

Foggy reaches out and lays his fingers across the back of Matt’s hand, which is startling and distracting until he moves: tap tap tap pause, brush pause, brush brush brush, and so on. Morse code:

Stop listening to my pulse.

Matt smiles in spite of himself. Sorry, he taps back, and makes himself breathe. Foggy squeezes his hand for a second before letting go, and then Matt is able to focus his full attention on the prosecuting attorney up until it’s time for Foggy to take the floor for the cross-examinations.

They get a chance to talk during lunch — first with their client, where they can give him the layman’s rundown of the proceedings and he can ask questions, and then privately when they ask him for a moment to “talk shop”.

“I was just sitting there, it took a couple minutes to figure out what was going on,” Foggy protests. “I hid it really well, Shaun didn’t even notice, and you,” — he prods Matt’s good shoulder — “should’ve been doing your job, not scanning me.”

“I wasn’t consciously trying to read you. It’s hard not to notice. You wouldn’t at least blink if … if a candle, more like a room full of candles, if one of them suddenly started flickering?”

“That’s what a panic attack looks like, huh?”

“It’s not that easy. It’s more like… if someone’s heartbeat goes up and their surface body temperature starts fluctuating, and they start breathing differently, then they might be panicking. And I know you, so that makes it easier to figure out.”

“Anyone ever tell you that’s kind of creepy?” Foggy asks, but he sounds interested, and he’s still sitting close enough for the fabric of his shirt to brush against Matt’s jacket when he moves his arm.

“Once or twice. So you don’t know what happened?” Matt repeats.

Foggy is silent for a moment, playing with the edges of his paper placemat. “Dammit, Matt. A man’s allowed to have an epiphany without his partner’s creepy lie-detecting radar broadcasting it to the whole diner,” he says.

“An epiphany, huh?”

Foggy picks that moment to shove the rest of his turkey club into his mouth. When he finishes chewing, an awkward thirty seconds later, he says, “Yeah. I was sitting there thinking about you up there, being all injured and stoic about it, and I realized what a terrible business decision I’d made, hitching my post to a vigilante.”

Matt kicks him under the table. He’s lying — about what, Matt can’t tell. “You’re an ass,” he says. “You’d tell me if it was important, though.”

“Duh. I’m not — you know I would.” He pushes himself out of his slouch and makes an audible effort to pull himself together. “Also, pretty sure one of the jurors thought we were holding hands because someone had to go be a hero and can’t pass notes anymore,” he says with a laugh that sounds forced. “See? Terrible decision, ruining my chances of looking like a Spock-type badass in court.”

Matt lets the subject drop. “Spock?” he asks, eyebrows raised.

“Sure. In control of his emotions, personal bubble a mile wide,” says Foggy. “You can be Kirk, obviously. Risk-taking, insubordinate ladies’ man.”

Matt bites down on a laugh before he injures himself any more. “I’ll take your word for it.”

~~*~~*~~

So Foggy has his secrets. That’s … well, Matt has no license to be offended by anyone keeping secrets from him, but all the logic and prayers in the world can’t completely silence the part of him that’s used to living in close quarters with Foggy and still wants to know him as completely as he knows the layout of his own apartment. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s possessions goes beyond physical possessions: it encompasses jealousy over another’s talents, their job, and, reasonably, the way that they spend their time, and the inner workings of their occasionally-indecipherable brain.

Even so, Matt feels more settled in his skin once he gets an inkling of why Foggy went panicked and still as he listened to Matt give vague statements about impartial justice and past performance not being an indicator of future results a fortnight ago. It takes a while to put the pieces together; it clicks while they’re on the way to a shop that sells, swear-to-god-I’m-not-exaggerating-Matt, thirty different types of donuts. Along with tea and coffee, but mostly more donuts than could or should possibly exist — so of course they need to go investigate.

“You haven’t seen Marci in a while,” Matt says. He lets the statement hang in the air between them.

Foggy steers him out of the way of a woman talking on her phone, apparently oblivious to the world around her. “What, do I not smell enough like her?” he asks sharply, defensive.

Matt knows he deserves to feel exactly as guilty as he does. “You haven’t mentioned her in a while,” he says, which is true but also not the answer to his question. Foggy draws a breath and holds it for half a beat too long, the way that he does when he’s reconsidering what he was about to say. Matt sucks it up already. “And you use a different type of soap when you sleep at her apartment,” he confesses.

“There it is.” Foggy half-turns towards him and makes some sharp gesture with his free hand. “It’s shit like that that’s frustrating. I never know if I’m being paranoid or overthinking things. Just tell me.”

“You didn’t seem very comfortable with the idea.” It sounds like a weak excuse. Maybe it is.

“Crosswalk,” Foggy says, holding him back. “It’s weird that you know when I’m getting laid, but I know that already. It sucks more that you think I’m going to break if you lie about it.”

“I don’t want…”

“Let’s cross.”

Matt holds his tongue while they leave the crowded sidewalk behind and head towards a building whose glass walls produce a refracted double-echo that he does his best to block out in favor of the more solid rhythm of their footsteps on the pavement above the subway. Foggy’s steps are heavier than his own, and every ten or eleven paces he has to readjust his balance to compensate for the difference in their heights and the length of his stride; he’s been doing it for so long that he might not even be aware of it anymore.

“If you bring your own soap, and don’t put on the clothing from the day before when you go home, that’s most of it,” he offers. “There are other things, but I could … if you want…”

“So if I want you to think that me and Marci are still seeing each other, I should ask to borrow her soap,” says Foggy, a thoughtful humming undertone in his voice.

“You shower more thoroughly afterward, too,” Matt adds.

“Damned if I do, damned if I don’t, huh?” Foggy says. “There’s a chihuahua that’s going for your stick — yeah, your dog, watch that thing,” —Matt pulls his cane to his chest — “Tiny rat. I guess it doesn’t matter. That ship sailed.”

“I’m sorry,” says Matt, and is slightly surprised that he is, he is.

Foggy shrugs against his side. “I told her some stuff. Emotional baggage, you know. She reminded we we’re not actually together. We watched a movie and then I left.” His heart pounds just a little too fast as he says it; juxtaposed with his offhand tone, Matt can tell that whatever actually happened, he’s omitting something important.

“I can hear your pulse go up. You don’t have to tell me. I’ll buy your donuts,” he says, and is rewarded by a friendly headbutt against his good shoulder. “How much farther?”

“Almost there. Lots of scaffolding over the whole building. Stick close, okay?”

Matt is prepared to be underwhelmed by their destination, once they reach it; but when they do, Foggy ends up having to guide him to a table and sit down with him for a moment while he gets his bearings. There are so many variations on the basic "fried dough with sprinkles" smell, plus some truly strange hints of sage and rosemary, and someone who owns a dog that hasn't been washed in weeks, and someone else who was in a candle store before this; there are strange soft decorations on the wall above their head that muffle some sounds and echo others in unexpected ways, and the speakers are playing swing from the nineties twelve feet over their heads. Matt grins at Foggy and reaches into his coat for his wallet.

~~*~~*~~

NPR is doing a surprisingly interesting segment on ethanol-based fuel sources when Foggy calls. Matt turns down the radio. “Mr. Nelson?”

“Hey buddy,” says Karen, in a terrible imitation of Foggy’s cadence. “Quick question. What do you know about quiche?”

“Um, nothing. Why are you — where’s Foggy?”

“What’re you talking about? I’m right here, Matty old boy,” says Karen.

“That’s not what I sound like,” says Foggy in the background, voice bouncing off of what sounds like linoleum. “You’re terrible at this.”

“You kind of are,” Matt tells her. Karen giggles. He frowns. “Are you day drinking?” (Without me? asks a very small and very petulant voice in the back of his mind.)

“No! I am shocked that you would think that,” says Karen. She isn’t even bothering to lower her voice into a Foggy-like register. “I haven’t done that since …” She covers the receiver with her hand, saying, “When was the last time you got drunk before noon?”

“Like two months ago,” Foggy says in the background.

“…in days,” Karen relays to Matt.

“Here, gimme,” says Foggy, snort-laughing the way he does when he’s either tipsy or really, truly happy. Matt grins, hearing it. There’s a brief rustling and tossing noise on the other end. “Hey!” says Foggy, much more clearly this time. “Light of my life and pain in my ass, here’s the deal. How do you feel about free food?”

“Is there a lecture open to graduates somewhere?” Matt asks, perking up. Nelson & Murdock isn’t yet prosperous enough that he’s going to turn down food, no matter how suspicious the circumstances.

Foggy snorts. “Not unless you wanna give it. Listen, we’ve got a quiche. Handmade, lots of love and special gooey feelings baked into it. Should we bring it over?”

Matt raises his eyebrows. “Are you and Karen trying to cook?”

“Not trying! Succeeding!” Foggy insists. “Completely sober, too. Covered in flour, but what’re you gonna do?”

“I told him you can’t measure flour like sugar,” Karen says in the background.

“Anyway,we were going to do lunch on the fire escape of Karen’s building, but it sort of didn’t come out the way it was supposed to, so we thought,”—

—”I thought,”—

“Who appreciates shitty cuisine?”

It all makes sense now. “Thanks, man. Can’t tell you how flattered I am to get the rejects from your lunch date,” says Matt.

There’s a half-second pause, and then Foggy blurts out, “Not a date, so not a date,” too fast and shit, Matt had meant it as a joke, he hadn’t actually thought — they’re so relaxed around each other, none of the unevenness and ill-fitting edges to their voices and movements that usually tell him what eye contact and facial expressions tell other people.

“My bad. Quiche sounds great,” Matt says, even though it sounds like nothing of the sort. “And hey, I hear pasta salad’s pretty hard to screw up. If you need ideas.”

~~*~~*~~

Once Matt recovers from quiche-based food poisoning (they both apologize profusely, but once he’s done puking, Matt is mostly just amused) it’s time to reconsider the situation on the pier. The chain-smoker is easier to locate on a day-to-day basis than the others who just so happen to be in the area all the damn time, so he starts making time to follow him. The man is largely a creature of habit, but there’s one person who stands out in his routine of work-home-work-home-pier-home-work; a woman he meets in various hotel receptions several times over the course of a few weeks — possibly more frequently, but during the day, Matt only has an hour or so around lunchtime to do his work, and his cane makes him too visible to risk eavesdropping even from a distance.

They don’t appear to be attracted to each other, or even to like each other all that much. Her suit is made from material that doesn’t catch on itself when she moves, in contrast to his pilling fabric; Matt guesses that in the chain of people who might lead him to something interesting, someone in a suit is a more likely candidate than the grunts in jeans and poorly-insulated winter jackets.

Matt adjusts his target list accordingly, and prepares himself to confess a mugging to Father Lantom next week.

~~*~~*~~

~~*~~*~~

Nelson & Murdock settles a client’s case out of court during the third week of Advent; no prison or fines, just thirty days of community service that Matt credits partially to being able to call the district attorney’s bluffs, and partially to Foggy bitching the man out spectacularly. They celebrate by holding a small going-away party for the electric bill that they can now afford to pay for the month. Matt drops it in the mail slot with a flourish; Karen and Foggy stand by and clap and shiver.

The days before Christmas consist mainly of paperwork and bickering over which pieces of evidence to submit for Elena Guzman’s case. Foggy describes photos to Matt, and Matt reads phone records to Foggy; Karen corrects spelling errors in their statements and rearranges syntax because, as she puts it, “you talk beautifully for a living; how does that not translate into writing?”

Foggy has, miracle of miracles, wheedled Karen into coming to Long Island with him for Christmas. Foggy’s family collects strays the way that other people collect free samples: with open arms and gleeful abandon, regardless of whether they need them or not. In his better moments, Matt is pleased: it’ll be good for Karen to spend a couple of days surrounded by people who will think she’s wonderful purely on the basis of her association with Foggy. When he’s feeling less noble, Matt reminds himself that Foggy is allowed to bring other friends home to meet his family, that it doesn’t mean he’s putting Matt out on the street for adoption or throwing their office’s sign in the trash (again). (He’d even asked Matt — “My dad missed you at Thanksgiving.” “He knows we’re not actually married, right?” Matt had responded, amused — but the Nelsons don’t live within walking distance of a Catholic church, and he would prefer to go to midnight mass at his own church and not put anyone out.)

On Christmas Eve, once he’s seen Karen and Foggy off, Matt makes a call and then waits outside of Claire’s apartment building, sniffling behind his scarf as he watches pedestrians and cars go by. The cold brings humanity into sharp relief, from their breath heating the air, to their coats surrounding their bodies, fuzzing their outlines with insulation, to the particular way that the slush makes footsteps crackle and splash. If he shuts his eyes, Matt can almost imagine that when he opens them, he’ll be able to see the colors of the people around him.

A familiar combination of scents, aloe and disinfectant and that deodorant that’s supposed to have no smell, comes his way. Matt turns his face to Claire. “Hey there,” he says, voice calm even though he still can’t help the stupid fizzing in his chest or the warmth in his stomach.

“You look okay,” she says.

Matt grins. “Thanks, I guess?”

Claire’s hands stay in her pockets. “I mean, I think this is the first time I’ve seen you and you weren’t bleeding,” she rushes to explain.

“Ah. Sorry to disappoint. You want me to come back later?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she says, “but no. Not-beaten-up is a good look on you. I’m just wondering why you called, if there’s no damsel in distress.”

“I can be a damsel if you’d like,” Matt says before he can think better of it, and flushes. “Sorry. I swear I’m not trying to, um …” He trails off as she shifts away from him. A drop of freezing rain lands on his nose; the air above thickens with the promise of more to come. “I got you a present.” He holds out the package.

“Why?” Claire asks. She takes it from him slowly, her movements measured. She slides her nail under the tape and unwraps the paper with equal care.

“It doesn’t quite say ‘thanks for saving my life’, but I don’t have that kind of money,” Matt explains. Claire hmphs under her breath as she pulls the DVD case out of its wrapping. “I’ve never seen it, but I hear a lot of people talking about it on the street, and apparently it’s closer to life than other medical shows. According to the internet.”

“You got me Scrubs?” she asks, tone difficult to decipher. One hand touches the corner of her mouth.

“I don’t know much else about you,” Matt admits, hunching in on himself against a few more drops of rain.

“No, you don’t,” she says.

“There’s a gift receipt.”

“No, I liked Scrubs.” She taps the box, sounding thoughtful. “I like Calle 13, too.”

“Oh?”

“They’re a band. So you don’t have to ask the internet what to think about them.”

“Oh.” Matt tries not to beam at her, like she hasn’t just made him feel both buoyant and childishly small. “Thank you.” He shoves one hand back into his pocket, bounces his cane off the toe of his shoe with the other. “Merry Christmas, then.”

“Merry Christmas. Thanks. It was … unexpectedly sweet of you.”

He ducks his head. “I’ll try not to see you too soon.”

“Even better.” Claire leans forwards, and Matt holds very still as she kisses his cheek. She is calm and unaffected by their closeness, and for the first time, he thinks he’s made his peace with that.

~~*~~*~~

Matt and Foggy’s initial plan is to go to Josie’s Bar for New Year’s Eve: an unofficial tradition three years in the running that has never once ended without some sort of injury. Then Karen lets slip that she usually watches the ball drop on TV, and spends her money on really nice champagne instead. Foggy throws a discreet wad of paper at Matt, who flips him off, message received, and finds a way to mention offhand that the weird blend of chaos and synchronicity of the celebration gets to be a lot for his senses, even more so with the combination of crowds and alcohol, so maybe, maybe …

They end up maneuvering their plans so that they arrive at Karen’s apartment a few hours before midnight, bearing pizza and games and, most importantly, booze. Matt reminds himself that pride is a sin and so he should not be this pleased with himself for how happy she sounds when she invites them in. He thinks that it may have more to do with Foggy, anyway. His voice and warmth, always sticking close to her, fill the small apartment with creatively embroidered tales from the days before they met, dispelling the cold corners and the lingering ghosts. Matt has heard — or taken part in — most of them already, so he settles in, wraps himself in the bounding cadence of Foggy’s voice and Karen’s steadily loosening laughter, and listens to make sure that no one’s glass is empty, even though technically Karen is hosting.

By the time that they move from the table to the couch around eleven o’clock, his head buzzes with whiskey and the happy flush that has risen in all of them. He elbows Foggy into the middle of the couch and throws himself down next to him, so that Karen can sit on his other side and they can play cards.

“You’re sure you won’t read our hands?” Karen asks. A handful of cards cut the air with a plastic slapping sound. “No cheating.”

“I promise I can’t read Braille without actually touching it,” he assures her. “I’m not that good.”

He doesn’t know how long they play cards; but after Karen has lost every one of her quarters, she turns on the television, and they listen to a poorly transmitted performance that Matt could hear better from on the roof, probably. He doesn’t say anything — it’s not the time to complain. Now is the time to take off his glasses and sink back as far as the starchy cushions will allow.

“Okay okay okay, one minute to go, how are we doing this?” asks Foggy, moving so that his back is to the TV and he faces both of them. “We all need a terrifying amount of good luck, I don’t want anybody left out.”

Matt is about to ask what he means, but Karen gets there first. “Is it possible to kiss two people at once? Maybe if we all mushed our faces together,” she says, words distorting in a way that suggests she’s squishing her face between her hands to demonstrate.

Matt laughs and rapidly recalibrates. He sees an opportunity and goes for it. “What about Foggy, you kiss Karen, and then you two can flip a coin for me? I think we have some margin for error, as far as luck goes.”

“Now, that’s just depressing,” says Foggy, patting him on the shoulder. “Look at this poor sonuvabitch, trying to be a hero and pretending he’s not the hottest guy in the room.”

“Pour the champagne, you vegetable,” Matt says, grinning and feeling his face heat up. Karen snorts into her drink. “Countdown’s about to start.”

“Shit.” Foggy launches himself at the table and the open bottle. He pours it into the cheap flutes that they bought at the end of their second year of law school. The champagne fizzes and froths. He settles back into the space between Matt and Karen. Matt holds out his hand; Foggy passes him the champagne and wraps his fingers around the stem, sloshing the contents gently.

Ten, says the city, thousands of voices in twenty-odd different languages raised in unison, bent towards a single purpose; nine, and the city is joined by the voices of his family: Foggy, whose arm rests around Matt’s shoulders and whose heart rate and sweat glands indicate that he is for once completely at ease with this, with them; and Karen, who is pressed warm against Foggy’s other side even though she has plenty of room, the cold notes in her voice softened even if they’re never gone. Eight, they count along with the crowd in Times Square on the television. Matt tips his head back and smiles so hard that it hurts his cheeks.

Seven —

Six —

Five —

Thank you, Lord, he says in his head. Thank you for the love and mercy that has been shown to me. “Four,” he counts aloud, at Foggy’s prodding. Karen shifts, the ends of her hair against the same flannel shirt that touches Matt’s arm and the back of his neck. The air is thick with electrically generated heat, with the dust of the three of them and with the debris that they trailed into Karen’s apartment from the outside world.

Three, says the city.

Protect them if it is Your will,

“Two…”

And if it is not, then give me the strength to protect them, and forgive me for what I will do to anyone who tries to harm those I love.

—“One,” they say, volume rising —

Amen.

“Happy new year!” Foggy shouts in his ear. Matt faces the television as Karen lifts her head from Foggy’s shoulder and kisses him, whooping and giggling into his mouth. Foggy’s heart skips; hers goes strong and fast. Matt smiles to himself, and then Foggy twists in his seat, dangerously close to spilling his champagne, and kisses him too. Matt catches his face with his free hand, tastes wine and pizza and saliva and the chapstick that Karen applied a few hours ago. The combination is unexpectedly endearing and a tiny part of him thinks oh and then oh, no.

“Happy new year,” he says, and goes to sit back, but Foggy pushes him forwards.

"You’re not done yet,” he says. Matt has half a second’s warning in the movement of heat and fabric to tell him that Karen is leaning across Foggy’s legs, so he should meet her halfway. Her heart doesn’t quicken the way that it did a few seconds before, but she smiles against his lips, and squeaks when he kisses her nose, too.

“To the new year,” she says, raising her glass. “To making Hell’s Kitchen a better place.”

“To wealthy, innocent clients who have no connection to the Mafia,” says Foggy.

“To the best lawyer and the most kickass legal assistant I know,” says Matt.

They clink their glasses against his and drink against a backdrop of grainy celebratory shouting and music on the television, echoed hundreds of times over in the apartments and buildings that surround them.

The champagne tastes overpoweringly of pear trees and some unholy variation on maraschino cherries. Matt puts his glass on the table, careful not to make any face that would let Foggy know he isn’t thrilled by his alcohol selection. He drops his head onto Foggy’s shoulder and breathes in deeply. Karen changes the channel to a live brass band playing the Star Spangled Banner, and then Oh Say Can You See. Sometime after God Bless America and a commercial break, he registers the slight shrug and a sigh that tells him that, on the other side of the couch, Karen has followed suit. She reaches across Foggy to pet Matt on the head. Her fingers are cool with condensation and tiny droplets of champagne that linger in his hair.

“We’re going to sleep now? Really? Lame,” says Foggy. His voice reverberates pleasantly through Matt’s skull, a lower and steadier counterpoint to his heartbeat.

“Just gearing up for round two,” Matt lies.

“Not me. I’ve got Foggy Nelson and the Daredevil watching over me. I’m going to sleep like a rock, and I’m going to do it right now,” says Karen. “Don’t try to stop me.”

“I’ll go party by myself, then,” Foggy grumbles, but he slowly slouches down until he’s at a more comfortable angle for her to use as a pillow. Matt listens to his breathing slow to normal, feels the muscles underneath him relax, and waits until both Foggy and Karen are completely asleep before he shuts off the television and lets himself drift off with them.