Work Text:
Foggy Nelson is six years old when he gets his wings.
This is actually slightly earlier than typical- though only slightly- yet for some reason six year old Foggy had already come to the conclusion that he was not going to get them at all. Neither of Foggy's parents have wings, after all, and though the extra appendages aren't genetic they do tend to run in families. Besides, only about one in every fifty people have wings, making them rather special—and there was nothing special about Foggy Nelson.
(In his opinion, anyway.)
So when Foggy's mother catches his shoulder to keep him from walking past, tugging the back of his t-shirt down slightly, Foggy assumes that he's got a cut or a bit of dirt or something on the back of his neck.
"Mooooom," he whines, wriggling in Rosalind's grip.
"Shirt off," she commands, in that no nonsense tone he normally only hears when she's on the phone with clients, and he acquiesces without complaint.
"When did this happen, Franklin?" There's something in her voice like—satisfaction, maybe? He's not sure exactly what's going on, and he feels a little uncomfortable under her scrutiny. (He's more used to distracted head pats as she walks past, talking rapidly on her cell phone, and the occasional chiding comment like "Stand up straight, Franklin.")
"I dunno, Mom." He twists, trying to get a look at his back. "What are you—"
He cuts off, eyes bulging, as he manages to catch a glimpse of pure, unnatural black. There's a moment where, doglike, he attempts to spin on the spot, but Rosalind reaches out to stop him.
"Come on," she says, and settles her hand on his shoulder to guide him to the bathroom, a hint of amusement joining the satisfaction in her smile. She withdraws a handheld mirror out of one the drawers, then holds it for him so that he can see the reflection of his back in the mirror over the sink.
Foggy stares at the tattoos he'd never expected to receive, thin black lines that stretch gracefully along his back to form the illusion of a set of folded wings. They start between his shoulder blades and curve up, nearly touching the top of his shoulder before turning back, stretching down until the wingtips disappear to somewhere just below the edge of his jeans. The feathers seem to ruffle of their own accord as Foggy rolls his shoulders, and he lets out a small gasp.
He looks up at Rosalind, eyes still wide, and asks, "How do I…"
"I've been told all you have to do is imagine it," she tells him. "You probably won't have much control just yet, but that will come with time and practice."
(Foggy realizes, years down the road, that even if he hadn't expected to get wings, Rosalind had been preparing for the eventuality. He wonders how she knew, but these days it's not worth getting in contact to ask.)
Six-year-old Foggy stares intently at the mirror, tries to picture the ink peeling away from his back, to imagine the flat lines gaining thickness and color and—
He cries out, seeing stars as his wings snap out and painfully collide with the walls to either side of him. He nearly tips over backwards at the sudden change in balance, but one of Rosalind's manicured hands snaps out to catch his arm. With a trembling hand, Foggy reaches out, brushes the underside of one of his wings.
It's soft and white and far fluffier than he would have expected- the only person whose wings he's ever seen had had ones like an eagle's, powerful and dark and broad- and Foggy kind of falls in love immediately. He looks up, excitement on his face, as Rosalind releases his arm to run a hand down the length of the bone.
Her lips are pursed, but she nods decisively. "I'll get you a trainer," she says. "So you won't hurt yourself in the future."
Foggy beams—
He's six and too excited to recognize the look on her face as disappointment.
(She'd always imagined herself as a bird of prey, of course. She'd rather expected her son would be one, too.)
***
Foggy and Matt have been roommates for six months, and despite an auspicious start…
Things aren't going so well.
Foggy's messy, clothes everywhere and a tendency not to wash them until he's worn each piece several times. His music always seems to be this shade of too loud, no matter how low he's listening to it, and Matt makes a face every time he opens a bag of chips.
And Foggy tries to be a good roommate, you know, but then he gets back from classes and he drops his books wherever and flops down and thinks "I'll pick it up later," and the next thing he knows it's eleven 'o'clock at night and there are crumbs everywhere.
Matt tries to act like he's not bothered by all of it, but Foggy can tell, okay? The guy only has a good poker face only on occasion; the rest of the time he's an open book.
Sometimes when Matt calls him "Foggy" it kind of sounds like an insult. Foggy's not certain exactly what association Matt has in mind to make it an insult, but he probably also doesn't really wanna know.
So, anyway, yeah. Foggy and Matt aren't close, so Foggy hasn't exactly… he hasn't told him about the wings.
He just feels like it's a little too personal to share with the roommate who lowkey hates him, you know? There may be no scientifically proven rhyme or reason to who has them or why they have the kinds of wings they do, but it hasn't stopped people from drawing conclusions and creating stereotypes. Foggy's tend to make people (including his own mother) think he's a pushover, and he hates it a little bit.
That's really not the impression he wants his roommate to have, given how many spats he can already imagine in their future. The problem will only be exacerbated if Matt thinks that Foggy will let him get away with stuff like bringing visitors over the night before Foggy has a test or borrowing things without asking and all of the other little things that can make roommates get frustrated with each other.
So Foggy doesn't tell Matt, which means that Matt doesn't know.
Unlike some people, Foggy's not really fond of having his wings out and waving around- he's clumsy enough as it is without adding an extra two (unwieldy, despite all of the training Rosalind put him through) appendages, and shirts to accommodate them are expensive- and it's not like Matt can see the tattoos on the sparse occasions when Foggy's shirtless in his presence, so Foggy would have to tell him for him to know.
Of course, then a professor accuses Foggy of plagiarizing a paper, and Foggy gets expelled, and there's really no point in telling Matt anything except goodbye.
"You're expelled?" Matt says, and Foggy can't see him because he's curled up on his bed, facing the wall, and maybe crying a little bit, but Matt barely sounds like he's paying attention. (He's going through his own issues right now (AKA a big scary envelope from the financial office labeled "FINAL NOTICE," which Foggy knows about even though he's been pretending ignorance).)
"York says I plagiarized a paper," Foggy says, and he's really not ashamed to be on the wrong side of hysterical because, "WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO TELL MY FATHER?"
"I don't know," Matt says, exasperated and vaguely sardonic. "Everything?"
"No! Nothing!" That is such a bad idea for so many different reasons. Not the least being that Foggy's dad probably wouldn't believe him. "He can't ever know! He—" Foggy breaks off on a sob and shuts his eyes tight.
"Matty, it's not fair," he says, voice broken, and he wants (needs) Matt to believe him, even if Matt really has no reason to. "I would never cheat, ever! I tried talking to the department chair, but it's that tenured old bastard's word against mine, so case closed!
"It's not fair," he repeats at a whisper, and he hears Matt's desk chair squeak as he turns to face Foggy.
"You really didn't cheat, did you?" There's a tone in Matt's voice that makes Foggy tentatively hopeful as he rolls over, sitting up and wiping the tears away from his eyes.
"I swear," he says, forcing every ounce of sincerity into his tone that he can, and Matt nods.
"I believe you. Let me go talk to York," Matt says, and with all the confidence of the teacher's pet that he is, he adds, "He'll listen to me."
York does not listen to Matt.
York does piss Matt off.
And that's how- instead of packing his bags and leaving- Foggy ends up hunting down all of York's TA's, finding himself alibis for all of the times he could have possibly stolen the supposed "original paper," and obtaining the logs from all of the copy machines open for student use while Matt comes up with 90% of a plan.
And then Matt waltzes into York's class five minutes late with Foggy, an accordion folder, a Satan bobblehead, a chain and a padlock.
"What is he doing here?"York demands, his glare focused on Foggy as Matt locks the door, and there's a smirk on Matt's face when he turns to the room at large.
(Foggy becomes certain, in that moment, that this was a very bad idea. He probably should have had this epiphany earlier, around when Matt told him they'd use the bobblehead as the judge of their impromptu court scene, but Matt has charm and confidence that kept him from questioning him even a bit.)
"Mr. Nelson, sir, is present as a witness for the prosecution," Matt says confidently, tossing the key to a girl in the second row. "Which would be me. Welcome to the mock trial in the case of Leopold York v. Foggy Nelson." Matt finishes with the kind of smile that would scare Foggy shitless if Matt wasn't on his side.
An hour later, Foggy is a student of Columbia Law once more, and despite the fact that he was the one to find the winning piece of evidence when York almost squirms his way out of Matt's trap, Foggy definitely owes it all to Matt.
Foggy wants to help Matt since Matt helped him, and it's easy to figure out what to do- he's got a monthly stipend from his father that is far more than a college student on a meal plan could ever need-and it's also easy to recognize that this is the start of a beautiful friendship.
***
Foggy and Matt have been roommates for over a year now, and things are awesome.
Matt is, hands down, the best friend Foggy's ever had, especially now that Foggy's learned how to keep his side of the room decently neat and bought Matt really nice noise-reducing headphones for Christmas.
They do everything together; they study (or, well, Matt studies, and Foggy goofs around for a while and then crams the night before), they go to meals, they do the stupid touristy stuff neither of them ever did despite growing up in New York, they partner together for everything they can in the classes they have together, and they practice against each other for the classes they don't. They even double date a few times, although that proves to be a pretty awful idea when they both get broken up with for spending more time talking to each other than their dates.
The point is that Foggy and Matt are freakishly close.
Nonetheless, Foggy still has not told Matt about his wings.
Directly after the whole plagiarism thing, when they were really, properly getting to know each other, it never came up. Foggy's not just claiming that because it would've been awkward to randomly announce it six months into knowing each other, although, yeah, it totally would have. It's just that there were more important things for them to realize—like that they both absolutely hated the Dixie Chicks for no specific reason, and that Foggy was so talented at catching popcorn in his mouth that it didn't matter that Matt was blind and rarely threw it within two feet of Foggy's head.
Foggy forgets about his wings himself, most of the time, so he really wasn't being intentionally duplicitous. Nonetheless, he's feeling weirdly guilty about it, and he thinks that maybe he should tell Matt.
But today is the first day of decent weather after several weeks of rain and gloomy skies, and Foggy puts it out of his mind. It seems as if the entirety of Columbia has decided to visit the quad while they can, and Foggy coaxes Matt into joining them.
"Sno cones," he tells Matt, having gotten an email from some club that was trying to drum up new membership via bribery.
Matt is not sold on the sweets alone, but after a judicious use of melodramatics he gives in. "Sno cones," he agrees, a smile tugging at the corners of his lips, and Foggy cheers as he jumps to his feet.
Not long later, they settle onto a partially shaded bench, ice, sugar, and food dye confections in hand. Matt pats the bench to either side of him, a thoughtful look on his face, and then scoots onto the sun-warmed patch to his right. He makes a noise of approval, turning his face up to the sky, and Foggy snickers into his sno cone.
Matt turns to Foggy, cheeks scrunching in that way that Foggy knows means he's narrowing his eyes behind his glasses. "What?"
"Nothing." Foggy bites back a grin. "It's just. You're such a cat."
Matt opens his mouth, reevaluates whatever he'd been about to say, and settles for a bemused, "I'm sorry?"
"You just sought out a sunny spot and then started making little rumbly noises." Foggy shrugs. "I just shrugged. It's just a very cat-like thing to do."
Matt laughs, "Oh. You meant a literal cat."He takes a bite of his sno cone, and Foggy stares blankly at the side of his face.
"What… what else would I mean?" Foggy asks slowly, and Matt throws his empty hand into the air in exasperation.
"I don't know! But I had no context, and I know nothing about cats!" He scowls, slouching back against the bench. "Shut up and narrate, Nelson."
"Touchy touchy," Foggy laughs, but he settles back and scans the crowd for some place to start.
"There're two girls who have spread a blanket out on the ground to hang out on," Foggy says, pulling out his best storytelling voice (which never fails to make Matt roll his eyes and poorly hide a grin), "and Matt, I'm telling you, they have two of the cutest puppies with them that I have ever seen. Basset hounds, or something, I have no idea because I know nothing about dogs, but there are really floppy ears and big tongues and they can't run in a straight line and my heart is melting in my chest, okay? One of the girls is laying on her back while she talks to her friend, and one of the puppies keeps trying to lick her face. The other one has crawled into the friend's lap and fallen asleep. So fucking cute. I want one, Matt. Sign up for a seeing eye dog so I can have it in the dorm; you don't even actually have to use it, I know how you value your independence and stuff. Just. Dog, Matt."
"I'll do it just as soon as we get back," Matt agrees, tone full of laughter, and Foggy grins and continues watching the puppies for a second before he turns his attention to the rest of the quad.
"Okay, so, there's also this game of Frisbee going on. There's, like, a several hundred foot square of empty space they're using, and some of the people milling about have stopped to watch. It's pretty athletic; certainly more impressive than anything I used to play at summer camp. We were all geeks, you know, and no matter how good some of those kids were at physics they just couldn't fucking figure out how to throw a Frisbee properly. There was a lot of jogging after stray throws and calling out poorly received- see what I did there- apologies.
"Aaaaaaaaanyway," Foggy drawls, taking the chance to take a bite of his rapidly melting sno cone, and Matt snorts and follows suit. "The game here is very athletic, and a decent number of girls are playing in sports bras while like half the guys are shirtless—this isn't even, like, splitting them into teams by the way. Just a whole bunch of shirtless people because... I have no idea. Because Reasons, I guess."
"Are those reasons the girls playing in sports bras?" Matt asks drily.
"And some of the other shirtless guys," Foggy observes. "Two of these guys keep 'accidentally' colliding into each other and exchanging smoldering glances." Foggy tilts his head to the side as one of those two guys helps the other up off the ground and dusts grass off of his shorts for him. "One has found an excuse to touch the other's ass."
"Good for them, I guess," Matt says with a laugh.
"Very athletic couple," Foggy agrees. "I'm sure the sex is great."
Matt chokes on a bite of sno cone, and Foggy pounds on Matt's back and snickers. He'd timed it perfectly. "Okay there, Matty?"
"Wasn't expecting that," Matt admits, wiping food coloring off of the side of his mouth. (He misses some, but Foggy doesn't bother to tell him. Guy's way too put together way too much of the time.)
Foggy's opening his mouth to respond when one of the shots goes wild, arcing high in the air, and a guy leaps, wings snapping out, and catches it after a few powerful strokes.
Matt's head snaps up, his eyes (or so Foggy extrapolates from his glasses) locking unerringly on the guy even as Foggy blurts out, "Holy shit!"
The guy lands, preening (in more ways than one), and excitement runs through the crowd. People begin flocking (Foggy can't resist the puns) forward to talk to him; they want to touch his feathers, see the way the wings fold and melt away into black ink, and congratulate him on the fantastic catch. Foggy, personally, kind of wants to know how much effort the guy put into learning how to do that because he knows intimately just how hard it is to actually fucking fly.
It's not worth braving the masses just to ask, of course, but the real reason Foggy doesn't even try is because he's concerned about Matt. His friend's face had gone pale the instant the sound of the wing beats had reached them, and his grip had spasmed, crushing the paper cone and spilling obnoxious blue liquid and ice all over his jeans.
"Matty, are you okay?" Foggy asks, touching his fist lightly, and Matt's head snaps from the crowd to Foggy. The glasses make it hard to tell, but Foggy thinks his eyes are wide with fear.
Matt forcibly loosens his grip on the cone, smiles in a way that could more properly be termed a grimace, and shakes his head slightly as if to break out of his thoughts. "Sorry, Foggy, what was that?"
"I asked if you were okay, because as soon as you heard that guy's wings—"
"Wings?" Matt tilts his head innocently. "Oh, is that what that was? I thought something had crashed over. Very loud sound, very blind guy, just got a little spooked, you know. And you didn't tell me what had happened, so I assumed it was something bad."
"Oh, okay," Foggy says, even though he doesn't believe it for one second. "No, one of the Frisbee guys just whipped out his wings to snatch a stray throw out of the air. It was pretty cool."
"I'm sure!" Matt infuses his voice with sincerity and a little envy as if he wished he could have seen it, but his face twists as if he feels sick.
"Sorry for not narrating, I just got caught off guard because it happened so fast and honestly I hadn't internalized what the tattoos actually meant so it totally took me by surprise," Foggy blathers as he rises to his feet. "You've got stuff all over your pants, though, so we should probably—"
"Yeah, dorm. Right." Matt's on his feet in moments, foregoes his cane in favor of grabbing Foggy's elbow. "Lead me away, Fog."
Foggy feels a little bit like an asshole, but as they're walking away he spots a girl whose wings are loosely folded behind her rather than written in ink across her skin, and he carefully, casually steers them just close enough that Matt's arm brushes feather as they pass. Matt flinches hard enough that Foggy's probably going to have fingerprint bruises on his arm the next day, and Foggy knows then and there that whatever Matt tries to claim, something bad happened to him once upon a time, and someone with wings was the one who did it.
Foggy also knows then and there that he's never going to tell Matt that he has wings.
***
Foggy has known that Matt has superpowers for approximately thirty-six hours, and he is
so
blindingly
mad
that he almost forgets how fucking hypocritical he's being. Except that he is aware and that makes him feel guilty which in turn makes him even angrier at Matt, even though it's not really fair, but dammit, Murdock, couldn't you have pulled some kind of shit that would have allowed me to be angry in peace?
He knows exactly what Matt meant when he said he had no idea how to work it into casual conversation; it's exactly the same problem Foggy had at first. That doesn't mean—
Jesus. Just because he had been keeping a secret from Matt didn't mean that he hadn't blithely assumed Matt had no secrets from him. Okay, well, Matt had never exactly been forthcoming about his past, but he'd said enough that Foggy assumed that he knew the major details.
It's still a betrayal, even if Foggy's done a little bit of betraying too.
And honestly, he's pretty sure his "betrayal" is more justified, given that once he began actually working to keep it a secret he was just trying to protect Matt. Matt, on the other hand, started actively hiding his when he decided that he needed to cultivate a mild mannered persona so no one would ever guess he was a fucking vigilante.
Foggy cannot believe that Matt has been keeping that to himself; he wants to march back to Matt's apartment and grab him by the shoulders and shake him and shout in his face and tell him how fucking stupid he's been and how fucking hurt Foggy feels and how fucking scared he is that one day he'll find Matt in a pool of blood and Matt won't still be breathing.
That's definitely what Foggy's the most furious about. The whole vigilante thing.
The vigilante thing is Matt getting hurt, and Matt hurting people, and Matt breaking the laws he is supposed to be upholding, all alongside Matt not trusting Foggy to keep his secret or to be able to come to terms with what he was doing. Foggy definitely thinks he has a right to be livid about the vigilante thing, and also some of the uses Matt put his superpowers to, like listening to people's heartbeats.
Yeah.
The vigilante thing definitely outweighs "Oh, by the way, I have wings but basically I really just have tattoos because I never fucking unfold them, to the point where the last time I was at the doctor he kind of yelled at me a little bit because apparently it's unhealthy, or something, I don't care, I hate cleaning up all the feathers."
Foggy groans, drops his forehead to the bar despite how unsanitary it probably is. It doesn't matter that he knows Matt's secret is way worse than his; he still feels guilty for being pissed that Matt's been hiding things from him.
***
Fisk has been in jail for nearly a week, and things still aren't fine between Foggy and Matt.
They're better, so much better, than that awful time during the fight proper, and Foggy is seventeen shades of thankful for that. Still, it hurts every time he sees Matt open his mouth to make a joke and then snap it shut because suddenly he has no idea how Foggy will take it. It hurts every time Foggy extends an elbow unthinkingly but Matt's already brushed past him to exit first. It hurts every time Foggy starts to tell a story from college and then breaks off, realizing why Matt had behaved in that weird way he had, or realizing that Matt knew he'd been lying, or even, in the case of the plagiarism story, that Matt knew he hadn't been. That Matt had defended him out of the same sense of justice and fight-for-the-little-man that now has him running around in leather punching muggers in the face.
Foggy had always thought that Matt had seen that he was a good person, no matter their petty squabbles in the dorm, and decided to back him on faith. That he'd done what he'd done because the other person involved was Foggy specifically.
He hadn't realized how much that had meant to him until he found out it wasn't true.
But Foggy's just… he's tired. Tired of being mad. He's tired of being hurt, and he's tired of his own secrets, and he's tired of not having Matt around. Tired of the way Karen dances around them, trying to keep a smile on her face and avoid their issues even as she hides her own, whatever they are.
He's tired of working separate cases from Matt, tired of this minor property dispute that's turned into an utter nightmare, tired of staring down at case notes as the oppressive atmosphere of the office beats down on his neck.
Foggy tosses his pen onto the conference table that he's claimed nearly three-quarters of and drags his hands over his face as he tries to remember a life before this exhaustion.
Matt's door opens.
Foggy resists the urge to groan because, right. Matt gets to go home at nine, because Matt's cases are all working themselves out neatly with minimal effort.
The man slides out, trying very hard to be surreptitious despite being the only thing moving in the entire office. His cane is clutched tight in his hand—unused, since he knows the layout of this office by heart. (And, Foggy notes with just a touch of sourness, by radar sense.) Matt reaches the door, and Karen calls out a soft goodbye, and Foggy is just so very done with this whole situation.
"I'm ordering pizza tonight," he blurts out. Matt pauses, hand on the door handle, then turns back towards Foggy. His features vacillate between nervous and hopeful, and Foggy clears his throat awkwardly.
"Whenever I get done here, you know. I was planning to order some pizza because I'm going to be hungry by that point. You have that… thing… tonight," Foggy says, carefully, because Karen is at her desk acting like she's not listening yet grinning furiously at their bumbling attempts to make up, "but hopefully you'll be done in about four hours or so, and—"
"Yes," Matt says, emphatically, cutting into Foggy's babble. "Yes, absolutely. Just let me know when you're done, and I'll meet you at your apartment. I may need to swing by my place to change, but—"
"There's no need," Foggy says, quietly, and Matt stills. "You have spare clothes at my place, Matt, it's not a big deal."
"If you're certain," Matt answers, neutral.
Foggy nods, vocalizing, "I just nodded."
"Then I'll see you later tonight," Matt says, and he ducks out of the office not quite fast enough to hide the goofy grin that spreads across his face.
Karen lets out a whoop of delight before the door is even shut.
"Thank god you have your shit together, Foggy Nelson," she says, beaming. "If you left that up to Matt, you two would be in friendship purgatory forever."
"I can hear you," Matt calls, laughing.
Karen smiles serenely and calls back, "I know."
Foggy beams at her, accepts the fist bump that she gets up from her desk just to give him, and then they go back to work.
Foggy sends Karen home around midnight- "There's really no reason for you to be here other than for moral support, Karen. Go home, get some sleep, and I'll call you in the morning to either cry because Matt and I had another fight or scream unintelligible delighted gibberish that breaks your eardrums."- but it takes him longer to finish than he'd expected. It's two in the morning before he reaches his apartment, and he's exhausted and nervous and really, really glad that it's a Friday and he doesn't have to wake up early tomorrow.
He opens his door, and Matt's waiting on his couch.
Well. Waiting implies some degree of cognizance and expectation; a more correct statement would be that Matt fell asleep on Foggy's couch while waiting for Foggy to get home.
Foggy yawns, lumbers over to his bedroom, and tiredly sheds his suit. He sees the Daredevil costume folded neatly under his window, sees the slightly cracked drawer that Matt had to rifle through to find the sweatpants and t-shirt he kept there for situations similar(ish) to this one, and he tries not to grin. It's probably weird that he's missed walking into his apartment and being able to spot the signs that Matt had ducked in on his lunch break to steal some food out of Foggy's fridge or whatever, but yeah.
He really kind of has.
When he emerges, clad in his own comfy clothes, Matt is struggling into a sitting position and blinking blearily. (He doesn't reach for the glasses discarded on the coffee table, and Foggy takes that as a good sign.)
Matt yawns, fumbles for his phone to have it read him the time. "Good… morning. I guess," he says, pulls a face, and Foggy huffs a laugh.
"Doesn't count as morning until I've slept for at least an hour or the sun has risen," he tells Matt, who shrugs because, well, he had slept for an hour.
"I went ahead and ordered when I got here; I know you prefer cold pizza anyway," Matt says, biting back another yawn as he stretches. "It's in the fridge."
"God bless the twenty-four hour place down the street," Foggy sighs, and he goes to the kitchen to retrieve the food.
Foggy takes a seat on the opposite end of the couch from Matt, feet kicked up on the coffee table and back snuggly fitted into the corner between the arm rest and the back of the couch. The way he's angled, he doesn't have to strain his neck to be able to see Matt, who's sitting cross-legged with the pizza box in his lap.
The silence stretches while they eat, and it's not uncomfortable. Foggy thinks, maybe, that they're both too exhausted to remember how to be tense around each other. There's been this knot in his chest for the last week, a ball of anxiety he's lovingly dubbed "Matt's Fault," and he can feel it slowly unraveling just from this. This tiny step in the right direction.
After his fourth slice (and Matt's sixth, because he's scarfing it down as if he's just run a marathon), however, Foggy sets his pizza box aside and Matt takes the cue to do so as well.
"We need to talk," Foggy says softly, and Matt swallows hard.
"Foggy, I—"
"Matt, I'm not mad at you," Foggy breaks in, heading off whatever outpouring of Catholic guilt Matt was about to indulge in. "I just need you to listen to me."
Matt snaps his jaw shut abruptly, so desperate to get back in Foggy's good graces that Foggy feels a little sick.
Foggy closes his eyes, blows out a breath. "Matt, I spent a lot of time being really angry at you, but I'm sick of it. I still haven't really come to terms with the whole vigilante thing, but I guess. I guess I'm starting to get it, and sooner or later you'll have me fully convinced. It's how we work." He opens his eyes, barks out a laugh. "Although you never know, it may actually be Karen who convinces me of this one."
Matt laughs too, a soft sound, and Foggy pauses to savor it for a moment before he continues more cautiously. "There's something I need to admit to you, though. Do you remember that day during our sophomore year, when we were out on the quad and I was narrating that Frisbee game for you?"
Matt's hands are still in that way that Foggy knows means he's uncomfortable. "Yes, Foggy, I remember," he says, slow and defensive, and Foggy almost chickens out.
Except—this is something that's been hanging over their heads for years, even if Matt doesn't know it, and Foggy can't hold this secret any longer. "I—you don't have to tell me, okay? But, especially knowing now that you must have been aware of exactly what was happening, I know that you freaked out because of that guy's wings. I used to think—you know, that maybe it was something from when you were a kid. Maybe some bully at the orphanage that used their wings to push around little kids. Or maybe you just always thought that if you'd had them, you'd have been able to save that guy and also avoid getting hit yourself. Maybe you thought that… that if your dad…"
Foggy trails off, and he can't keep looking at Matt, at how still and pale he's gone, and he looks down at his hands instead. They're clasped tightly, knuckles almost strained white, and he forces himself to loosen them before he continues. "Now I think, maybe, that it had something to do with that guy Stick. It doesn't really matter, though, what happened exactly. I don't need to know, and I don't expect you to tell me. It's just… I…"
"Why are you bringing this up, Foggy?" Matt demands, as Foggy trails helplessly into silence.
"I… um. Well. It's just that I've been feeling a little guilty," Foggy says, and his voice is not steady, not at all, and he doesn't think he can tell Matt after all. He also can't really let things stand the way they are now because he's dragged up a really bad thing from Matt's past, and he can't have done that for nothing since it's not fair to Matt.
"I've been feeling guilty because I was mad at you for keeping your powers a secret. I mean, I was also mad at you for a lot of other stuff, but I was mad at you for that, too, and it was really hypocritical of me because—" Foggy breaks off when he catches a glimpse of Matt's face. "Fuck, I can't—Fuck."
He launches to his feet and strides around to the other side of the coffee table, and Matt turns. His feet touch the floor and he looks like he can't decide whether or not to get to his feet as well, face full of confusion. "Foggy, what are you—"
"I know that you can probably already guess what it is I'm trying to tell you," Foggy says, and then he grunts because his coffee table is way heavier than he remembered it being. "I also know that I am totally not going to be able to actually say it, as stupid as that is, and I know that you need to know for sure what the hell I've been blathering about, and—there." Foggy dusts off his hands, walks back around the table and kneels in the space he's just created.
"Foggy, I don't think this is a good—"
"Matt, please," Foggy begs, tugging his shirt over his head. He spares a moment to thank god for top surgery because struggling with a binder right now would so not be worth it, and takes one of Matt's hands in his. Matt grips back, tight, and his face is turned down to Foggy's, nervous and pale. Foggy whispers, "Please, Matt, you can refuse if you want to, but please."
Matt's knees fall open as he takes a shaky breath, and Foggy moves slightly closer to the couch with a murmur of thanks. He bows his head and guides Matt's hand to just below the nape of his neck, then sets his hands to either side of Matt's thighs, lets out a shaky breath, and focuses.
It's been years since he's done this, and Foggy puts all of his energy into keeping it slow like the trainers used to make him when he was a kid. He needs it to be a whisper of feather on feather rather than a sudden snap, to stay perfectly in control to keep Matt from getting overwhelmed. The wing tips peel away first, and then the rest of the wings follows, stretching afterwards. Matt's hand is set slightly above the place where the wings merge into Foggy's back, close enough that his fingers should brush the bone as the ink pulls away from the skin. Close enough that he should feel the way the muscles shift as Foggy's wings spread to their full span.
Matt sucks in a sharp breath, and Foggy freezes.
The last of the ink has just peeled away, but his wings aren't fully extended. He strains to hold them there, in an awkward state of limbo, scared that any rustle of feather on feather could shock Matt into releasing the devil.
"Jesus, Foggy," Matt finally whispers, and Foggy breaks into vaguely hysterical laughter.
"Language, Catholic Boy," he wheezes.
Matt huffs, unamused, and moves his hand tentatively. His fingertips run along the base of Foggy's left wing, and he makes a noise of surprise. "The transition is so smooth."
"Almost like they're a part of me," Foggy snarks, and then Matt's running a cautious hand along the bone, as far as he can reach, and Foggy sucks in a breath.
"You can feel that."
It should be a question, but Matt doesn't say it like one. Foggy releases the breath, unclenches his fists from the couch. "Yeah, like I said; they're part of me."
Matt hums an acknowledgement and raises his other hand to continue thoughtfully and tactilely exploring. Foggy tries very hard to stay very still and not suddenly become aware that he is kneeling shirtless between Matt's legs as Matt pets him.
He fails, rather spectacularly, but he forces himself to stay perfectly still under Matt's touch until Matt finally sits back. The man runs a hand through his hair with a frustrated look on his face, and Foggy lets his wings relax, slowly. Matt doesn't acknowledge the movement, lost in thought, but when Foggy tries to move away Matt suddenly snaps his knees shut on Foggy's sides and releases a growl of annoyance, trapping him there.
Foggy freezes again.
"Matt?" he asks tentatively, after about a minute of Matt scowling blankly over Foggy's head.
"How did I not know about this? Why didn't you tell me?" Matt says, and he's obviously trying very hard to not sound annoyed.
Foggy assumes that Matt realizes, like he did, that this is a hypocritical reaction, and politely doesn't mention it. "I don't—I'm really clumsy, Matt, and flying is really fucking hard, so I don't, like, ever use them. Or even open them. Actually, at my last—that's not important."
Foggy swallows hard when Matt turns that glare to somewhere just over Foggy's left eyebrow, obviously recognizing that whatever Foggy just decided not to tell him would probably make him mad. (Given how Matt already tries to hound him to be healthier out of concern, Foggy doesn't want to add something else to the list of Doctor's recommendations he's ignoring.)
"You can't see the tattoos," Foggy continues weakly, "so unless I told you you were never going to find out. And I didn't tell you at first because it wasn't worth sharing, and then it felt weird to spring on you randomly, and then I realized that you had issues with them and I didn't want to make you uncomfortable."
"It's not—that's not—" Matt breaks off with a huff, dropping his hands onto Foggy's and squeezing lightly. "I don't need to be protected, Foggy. And this isn't… It doesn't…"
"I know I don't have to protect you, Matt," Foggy murmurs, turning his hands over under Matt's so that he can squeeze back, softly. He also carefully folds his wings back into place, winces at how awkward the motion feels, and then he continues, smiling ruefully. "But this was something you didn't know about even though we lived in the same room for four years, you know? Telling you felt like going out of my way to hurt you. I only told you now because—"
"Because I told you a secret."
"Secrets, multiple," Foggy points out, raising an eyebrow. "Let's be fair, Matt. The super powers and the vigilantism, though connected, are two different secrets."
Matt makes a face. "That's… fair."
"Of course it's fair," Foggy huffs, rolls his eyes. And then his mouth starts moving before he actually considers what he's about to say. "But it does mean that we're uneven, you know? You've admitted two secrets, and I've only admitted one."
Matt's brow furrows, his fingers tightening around Foggy's. "Is there—do you have another secret?" he asks, and Foggy is very, very close to lying before he remembers that Matt will know.
"Aha, well." Foggy clears his throat awkwardly. "I, maybe. Well. I, um. Can you let me up, first?"
"No," Matt says, and then his hands are on the sides of Foggy's face and he's obviously trying very hard to meet Foggy's eyes, even though it's pretty pointless. He tilts Foggy's face up, and Foggy's breath catches. "What if I told you I have one last secret, too?" he says quietly.
"Assuming I'm reading this right," Foggy begins carefully, "I would say 'kiss me.'"