Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

March, 1L

“Dude, you have to see this!” Foggy’s shoving his phone in her face, so Mattie just waves her hand.

“Hey, Foggy, it’s me, still blind.”

“Which is a bummer, because I am showing you a picture of Captain America in Times Square this morning.”

“You mean, like those costumed guys who take pictures with tourists?”

“Nope, I mean Captain Steve Rogers in Times Square. Not even in the star-spangled suit.” Foggy’s not lying, so she has to assume this is some sort of internet meme-type thing.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s totally real!”

“It’s probably photoshopped.”

“There’s like eight different photos online. Although some of them are already being taken down.”

“Then it’s probably somebody who looks like Steve Rogers. Like that actor, what’s his name, who does all the superhero movies? Everybody says he looks like Steve Rogers.”

“You,” Foggy says, pointing his finger at her, “are just a bitter skeptic. I want to belieeevve, Scully!”

“What that Steve Rogers survived World War Two? How would you even recognize him, he’d be, like, ninety by now.”

“Uh, we live in a world where giant green monsters fight giant grey monsters in the middle of Harlem - anything’s possible.”

OK, Foggy might have a point there. He is talking to a girl who got hyper-senses from a chemical spill, even if he doesn’t know it.

“It’s probably just some guy,” she repeats as Foggy flips through something on his phone.

“They shut down Times Square,” he says, holding up the phone triumphantly.

“OK, that’s weird,” she admits.

There’s no follow-up in the news, except for a vague report that Times Square was shut down due to a gas leak, so it drops out of Mattie’s mind. They’re only a few weeks away from finals, anyway, so she’s burying herself in the library.

She heads down to Fogwell’s about a week after the shutdown, and takes out some of her stress on the bags. She’s midair, halfway through a flip and kick maneuver, when the door opens.

“Whoa.”

Shit. There’s no way this guy didn’t see her. The distraction kills her momentum, too, so she winds up having to put her hands down and handspring to her feet to keep from falling flat on her face.

When she’s back upright, the guy says, “Fury send you to babysit me?” in a tone that conveys both weariness and annoyance.

“What? Who?” she says. Columbia Law, ladies and gentlemen. She turns to face him.

“Oh, uh, I didn’t realize, uh, miss,” he stammers. “Sorry, didn’t mean to bother you.”

He’s genuinely sorry, so she takes pity on him.

“You looking for Fogwell?” she asks.

“No, uh, he just said I could stop by after hours. Said he had someone who did it all the time. Guess he meant you?” His voice has a trace of a Brooklyn accent, and he has the lowest resting heart rate she’s ever heard. The guy must be ridiculously fit.

“Yeah, that would be me,” she says, smiling. “Mattie.” If he knows Fogwell, then she can’t bother lying about her name. She puts her hand out. He comes in and takes it.

“Uh, Roger,” he lies. “So…you’re a…gymnast?”

“MMA,” she says. He’s tilting his head to get a better look at her face, so she turns away. “You?”

“Boxing, mostly,” he says. He shrugs off his jacket and puts his bag down on the bench.

“You need me to hold the bag?” she asks, patting it.

“Sure. Thanks.”

He pulls a pair of wraps from his bag and starts putting them on. They smell new.

“So, uh,” he starts, “Fogwell lets you train here?”

“Yeah, he’s known me since I was a kid. My dad was a boxer, he trained here.”

“And you’re a…MMM?”

“MMA. Mixed martial arts?”

“Right. Yeah. I should start learning these things.” He sounds sheepish as he comes over to the bag. She braces it. He hits it, and she feels the impact reverberate up to her shoulders. Shit, he’s strong.

“I could show you a few moves, if you’re interested,” she says (grunts, really) as he throws a combination at the bag. She’s braced down low, absorbing the impact with her legs, and she thinks he might actually throw her to the ground with the force of it.

“Show me how to do that thing you were doing when I came in?” he says, and he sounds like he’s grinning. He also sounds like he’s barely making an effort.

“That (oof) was a mess, and I’m embarrassed (oof) you saw it.” If Roger’s a boxer, then he’s a slugger or a boxer-puncher, relying on power over mobility. He’s got a lot of power.

“It looked pretty neat from where I was standing,” he says, and for the first time since he opened the door, his heartbeat speeds up a tiny bit.

It turns out that he has a decent grasp of standing kicks, so she pulls out some mats and teaches him a few jump kicks. He’s a quick learner, and he moves fast.

She has to head back up to Morningside Heights after their impromptu training session, so she debates giving him her number, but instead says good night and leaves for the subway. She’s not entirely comfortable with the fact that he knows about her training, even if he never asked about her blindness, and she’s hoping he assumed she still has some vision. And then there’s the part where he didn’t tell her his real name. No, definitely better not to tempt fate.

Although, after she’s showered and gone to bed, she slides her hand between her legs and thinks of his warm voice and powerful body.

It’s two weeks before she runs into him again. He’s there first, this time, punishing the heavy bag. She can hear the chains groaning in protest, and she’s fairly certain that the bag is going to go flying if he keeps going. The screws in the ceiling must have been loose.

“Hey, Roger, right?” she says.

“Hey…Mattie.” He stops. “How’d you know?”

“Sorry?”

“You’re…blind, right?”

“So they tell me.” He’d only seen the cane as she was leaving, last time, but she’s holding it now and wearing her glasses, so there’s no use pretending.

“So…how does a blind girl - woman, I mean - do what you can do?”

“You know how they say that when you lose one sense, the others get heightened?”

“Sure.”

“It’s not actually true.” Generally speaking. “You just learn to work with what you’ve got.”

“So how’d you know it was me?”

“Nobody else comes here this time of night.”

“Oh, right.”

She drops her bag and has a moment of satisfaction when his heart rate speeds up as she takes off her t-shirt so that she’s just in her sports bra. She can hear him turning his head so as not to look at her. She wraps up her hands, and this time, he holds the bag for her. He gives a delighted little chuckle when she does her first jump kick.

She takes a break to grab some water, then turns back to him.

“So, you want to spar?”

He hesitates.

“My mother taught me to never hit girls,” he says. “I think she’d spin in her grave if I ever hit a blind one.”

“My dad never wanted me to set foot in a ring,” she says. She steps close to Roger and tilts her face up to him, grinning. “Want to see how badly we can disappoint them?”

They agree on kickboxing as a compromise between their fighting styles, and then they start. Roger is almost a foot taller than she is, and probably twice her weight, and when she strikes him, it’s like hitting a brick wall. He’s also got that freakishly low heart rate, and never seems to get out of breath, so she can’t rely on him tiring. She bobs and weaves, and remembers her dad telling her about Muhammad Ali fighting George Foreman.

A blow to her side sends her sprawling into the ropes, but she flips herself back onto her feet before he can follow up, and lands a kick on his jaw. He reels back, and she presses her momentary advantage, until he gets two good punches in that put her down on her back. Breathing heavily, he offers her his hand.

“Uh, my hand is -“

“I know.” She holds out her hand, and he grabs it and hauls her to her feet without so much as a groan of effort.

“So,” he says as they drink their water, “were you always a blind martial artist?”

“Feels like it,” she says. “But these days, I’m a law student.”

“Oh.” He sounds like he’s mulling that over. “Uh, what kind?”

“Criminal. Or that’s the goal, anyway. I want to be a prosecutor.”

“Wow.”

“What about you?”

“Oh, I…was in the army.” It’s not a lie, and she can hear the pain in his voice.

“Where were you stationed?” Mattie’s guessing it was Iraq or Afghanistan, or somewhere equally awful.

“I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about it.” And that opens up a whole new set of terrifying possibilities about Roger’s real identity, so she decides not to ask any more questions.

“Well, I think at this point, I’m supposed to say ‘thank you for your service,’ or something.”

“You know, usually when someone says that to me, I’m supposed to say ‘Just doing my duty, ma’am.’”

“Is that what you want to say?”

“No, what I want to say is that I did what I could, and I wish I could have done more.”

So, he’s a (possibly Special Forces) vet with a healthy sense of guilt that might be a mild case of PTSD. She sure knows how to pick them.

They go another round, and he wins again, knocking her on her ass.

A few days later, Foggy delightedly announces to her that the government has confirmed that Captain America is alive and well, and looking young and healthy. There’s no video of Steve Rogers, just a photo (apparently very handsome), and a request for privacy as he adjusts to the new millennium.

Mattie doesn’t make it down to Fogwell’s for a while; her papers all seem to be due at the same time, and she has finals to study for. She’s going a little insane, stuck at a desk or sprawled on her bed, and she’s dying to get some release, so she throws caution to the wind and decides to take a night off a week before finals, and takes the subway down to Midtown.

Fogwell’s is empty, and she’s a little disappointed, she’ll admit. She wraps up and goes to town on the speed bag first, then takes it out on the heavy bag (which is mysteriously new - Fogwell hasn’t replaced his bags in years, so maybe it was just time). She’s just starting in on some parkour flips when she hears that slow heartbeat outside the door. Grinning, she gets fancier as he comes in, showing off as she bounces off pillars and walls (and the ceiling, once). He’s chuckling as she finally lands on her feet.

“Hi, Mattie.”

“Hey, Roger.”

“Haven’t seen you around much.”

“Been busy. Finals start next week, so everything’s been kinda crazy.”

“So what are you doing down here?”

“Clearing my head.”

“Yeah, I get that.”

“How’ve you been?”

“Good. I’ve been good.” It’s not true.

“You want to hit something?”

“Yeah.”

He warms up on the bag, then they spar. He wins the first round, but as she’s taking a drink, he says, “You’ve been holding back.”

“So have you,” she points out. It’s rather obvious, since she’s not a smear on the mat.

“I don’t mean power. I mean technique. You’re not using everything you can do.”

She shrugs. “We agreed on kickboxing rules.”

“So let’s agree on something else. Anything goes. Aside from the obvious.”

“Try not to inflict permanent damage?”

“Sounds good to me.”

“You’re on.”

She doesn’t quite let the devil out, but she can feel it laughing with joy as she lets loose a combination kick. Roger blocks it, and wraps his arm around her leg, trapping her against him, but she uses her weight to overbalance him, and they topple over, and the momentum throws him off her. She flips to her feet and advances on him, fists and feet flying, and she loves this, the fluidity of motion, and the vicious pleasure of a strike connecting. She gets him on his back, using her knees to pin him, and he taps out. She’s smiling broadly as she gets off him.

“You need to teach me some of those,” he says.

“I can do that,” she says, smiling. His heart speeds up, just a little.

When they call it a night, Mattie decides that she’s only young once, and puts her hand on his arm.

“Hey, you want to grab a drink sometime?” she says, and his heart rate soars.

“I, uh, I don’t think -“

“Oh,” she says. She doesn’t think she’s misread his attraction, but there are always other factors. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to…overstep.”

“No - it’s not - I’m just -“

“You know, forget I ever asked,” she says gently, picking up her bag to leave.

“A drink…yeah, that might be nice,” Roger finally says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’s your phone? I’ll give you my number.”

“I, uh, don’t have one.” That’s actually true.

“Seriously?”

“I’m a bit…behind on technology. But, uh, I’ll see you around here, right?”

“Yeah. Not for a while, because finals.”

“Right. When are those over?”

“Two weeks from now.”

“I’ll be here.” He’s not lying.

“OK. We’ll work something out then.” And she leans up on her toes, and gently presses her lips to his, soft and quick.

The Battle of New York happens a few days later. Finals are delayed, and Fogwell’s is closed for two weeks while the water and power are restored. Mattie goes back as soon as it reopens, but Roger never comes back. She prays that he wasn’t hurt in the battle.

Captain America is a hero, his face plastered across TVs and websites and newspapers in images that Mattie will never see. A few weeks into the summer, after she’s gone to bed, Foggy is in his room watching a video online of Steve Rogers and Tony Stark visiting the devastation in Midtown. Stark does most of the talking, but then Steve Rogers answers a question. And Mattie literally sits upright in bed.

“Holy shit.”

Chapter Text

August, Hell’s Kitchen

“EEEEEEE! Let me see it, let me see it!” Pam is making grabby hands at Mattie, which she has to pretend she doesn’t know about. Mattie holds up her left hand to show off Exhibit A. “Give me your hand, I wanna see it!”

Mattie obligingly holds out her hand, and Pam grabs it between both of hers. Foggy’s great-grandmother’s ring is still unfamiliar on her finger, but she loves the feel of the weight and the shape that she can trace with her thumb.

“Oh, it’s gorgeous!” Pam coos. “Is it vintage?”

“It’s his great-grandmother’s.” Mattie can’t suppress the broad smile that she wears every time she thinks of that.

Pam makes a high-pitched noise in her nose that Mattie thinks only she can hear. “That’s so sweet!”

“I’m supposed to see Jeri Hogarth?” interrupts a voice from behind Mattie. The woman smells like leather and bourbon, and her voice sounds like Mattie imagines a sneer looks. “If you’re not too busy.”

Pam drops Mattie’s hand and starts clicking through something on the computer.

“Do you have an appointment?” she says, her voice skeptical. There’s a moment of silence between the two women, and Mattie can feel the newcomer sizing up Pam.

“Yeah, I was told to come in for noon.”

“And your name is?”

“Jessica Jones.”

While Pam calls in to Hogarth’s office, Mattie amuses herself by gathering information on Jessica Jones. She’s a few years older than Mattie, physically healthy with a low resting heart rate, her leather jacket is well-worn, and she’s hung over to all hell. There’s a smell of sleep surrounding her under the smell of stale liquor, and Mattie guesses she only got out of bed about twenty minutes ago.

“Ms Hogarth says go right on in,” says Pam, and Jones walks into Hogarth’s office without a word of thanks. Once she’s gone, Pam says, “That was weird.”

“What?”

“She was looking at you like she was taking you apart to see what made you tick.” Funny, Mattie thinks, that was what she was doing to Jones, too. But she just shrugs; her lip is healed, so there’s no visible evidence of her nighttime activities.

“I have that effect on people. So, you good to go?”

“No, I have to stay until Hogarth’s done with that Jones person. I’ve got some forms she needs to fill out.”

“It going to take long?”

“It really shouldn’t. Jones is a PI, Hogarth wants to hire her, it’s not complicated stuff. I’m sorry, but it shouldn’t be more than fifteen minutes, I swear.”

“It’s OK. Maybe you can tell me about the new offices?”

So Pam describes the new Midtown offices of Hogarth, Chao & Benowitz to her, using words like “glass” and “chrome” entirely too much, so that Mattie is picturing the Landman & Zack offices, and assumes that all high-end law firms look exactly alike.

“So, did Chao get his river view back?” Mattie is saying as she’s interrupted by Jessica Jones’ voice.

“I’m supposed to fill out some forms?” says Jones.

“Oh, yeah, here they are.” Pam puts the forms down on her desk in front of her. “You can take them with you if you want to fill them out at home.”

“Thanks.” Jones sweeps the pile of forms off the desk and turns just as Mattie pushes herself off the section she was leaning on, nearly colliding with Mattie. “Watch it.”

“Really can’t,” says Mattie, cocking her head.

“Oh, fuck. Uh, sorry. No offense.” With that, Jones heads to the elevators.

“OK, now I’m good to go,” says Pam, who has been pressing buttons on her phone to transfer her calls. “You are going to love this place’s brunch menu.”

Mattie grins. “Always do.” Pam always knows the best places to eat.

“And you’re going to tell me exactly how he proposed.” Pam is steering Mattie toward the elevators, where Jessica Jones is still waiting.

“It’s really not that dramatic,” says Mattie, and she can hear Jones snort under her breath.

“It’s Foggy, I bet it was absolutely adorable,” says Pam. “Ridiculously heteronormative, but adorable.”

Mattie can tell from Jones’ breathing that she’s trying to tune them out. Oh, now she’s trying to stop herself from saying something rude.

“You know, I’ll tell you over brunch,” Mattie says as the elevator rings. Pam throws a glance at Jones as they step in, and Mattie is sure that Jones glares at Pam.

The three of them ride down in awkward silence.

Chapter Text

October, Freshman year

Brian looks like a GQ model, with the perfect hair and artful stubble, wool scarf elegantly draped around his neck, and Foggy’s been tongue-tied around him since he sat next to him in Econ 101. It took him two weeks to actually talk to Brian, and it was another month before he oh-so-casually asked if Brian wanted to grab coffee with him.

So now they’re sitting in the campus coffee shop, and Brian’s finishing a story about his summer job in a bookstore, and Foggy can’t stop laughing.

“What can I say? People are idiots,” says Brian.

“Yeah, you can say that again.” Foggy’s about to launch into a story of his own about working in his dad’s hardware store when he spots Mattie at the counter. “Oh, hey, I’m just gonna go say hi to my friend, be right back.” He comes up to her shoulder, and says, “Hey, Mattie, it’s me, Foggy -”

“You know, you don’t have to say that every time,” she interrupts. “I can recognize your voice.”

“Shouldn’t you be in bed?” Mattie has been sick since yesterday, and she looks awful: her skin is pale, her nose is bright red, and she’s clearly just thrown her coat over her pyjamas to come here.

“Just grabbing some tea. Heading right back. Pass me the honey?” Her voice is stuffed up, too, and she keeps sniffing. Foggy puts the honey in her hand, and she starts dumping it into her tea. “Thanks. You heading back too?”

“No, I’m actually here with someone,” Foggy says, deliberately vaguely. He doesn’t want to open up the whole can of worms where it comes to his sexuality right now. Not that he’s worried about Mattie, who can casually drop her bisexuality into conversation within hours of meeting him. It’s Jason he’s a little worried about, since he’s straight as they come, and might not be so comfortable about sharing a room with someone who swings both ways (not to mention the teeny-tiny crush Foggy might have had on him in those first few weeks of September). And since they all hang out together, if Mattie knows, Jason will know.

“With someone, or with someone?” Mattie says in a nasal monotone.

“Uh, was one of those supposed to have innuendo? Because they sounded exactly the same,” says Foggy.

“Ugh, I’m going to kill Angela,” she says, pressing her fingertips to the sides of her nose. Angela had the cold last week. She reaches out and squeezes Foggy’s arm. “Stop by and tell me about it when you get back.”

And she’s gone, looking tiny, miserable, and contagious. Foggy heads back to Brian.

“That’s the blind chick, right? Maddie something?” Brian says.

“Mattie,” Foggy corrects him. “Yeah, she’s a little under the weather right now, sorry I didn’t introduce you.”

“Nah, it’s fine, just surprised you’re friends with her.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Mattie’s great, and that’s not even counting the part that Foggy avoids saying out loud, the part that he thinks about when he’s alone in bed or in the shower.

“No, I just meant, she’s a bit of a…”

“What?” This conversation has taken a serious left turn, and Foggy’s pretty sure he doesn’t like where it’s headed.

“Oh, come on, everyone knows she’s been getting around. I’m pretty sure she’s worked her way through half of the Social Sciences freshmen.”

And Foggy has no idea what to say to that, except to give in to the voice inside him shouting “How dare you?!”

But what he actually says is, “I’m going to go see if she needs anything.”

And as he storms back to the dorm, all the things he should have said swirl in his head. Things like “I don’t give a shit who she’s sleeping with” (except that’s not true, because the truth is that Foggy might still wish she was sleeping with him), or “it’s 2008, she can do what she wants,” or “call her a slut, and I’ll punch you in the face.” Fuck you, Brian.

When he gets to the third floor, he knocks on 310’s door, and Angela opens it.

“Oh, it’s you,” she says, as if she was expecting it. Foggy can see Mattie over Angela’s shoulder, curled up on her bed with her headphones connected to her laptop. She’s clutching the tea between both hands, and the trash next to her bed is overflowing with tissues.

“Hey, Angela,” he says, brushing past her. He pats Mattie’s foot under her blankets. “Hey, Mattie, it’s me.”

She puts down the tea and pulls out her headphones as Foggy sits down at the foot of her bed, taking off his coat.

“How’d your date go?” she says.

“I never said it was a date.”

“You’re not denying it, so it was totally a date. Was it Hot Punjabi Girl?”

“Foggy got a date with Hot Punjabi Girl?” That’s Jason, who has appeared in the doorway. Angela makes an irritated noise as she hides behind her laptop on her bed.

“It wasn’t Hot Punjabi Girl!” says Foggy, who really really wishes that it had been Hot Punjabi Girl (a.k.a. Lisa, who turned Foggy down weeks ago), so he could shut them up.

“So who was it?” says Mattie, grinning.

“Nobody you know,” says Foggy.

“Someone from class?” says Jason.

“Will you both piss off?”

“Oooh, this sounds serious,” says Mattie.

“I think Foggy’s entitled to his privacy,” says Angela primly. “And I think Mattie needs some rest.”

“I’m fine,” says Mattie, at the same time as Foggy says “Thank you, Angela.”

“C’mon,” whines Mattie, poking Foggy with her foot. “I’m sick and miserable. Tell me something good.”

“Sorry, can’t help you,” says Foggy. “It didn’t go well.”

“Oh,” she says.

“Fuck her, man,” says Jason, patting his shoulder. “There are plenty of girls around here. If Mattie leaves some for the rest of us.” Right, Foggy thinks, Jason’s not a homophobe, he’s completely cool with Mattie, and Foggy might as well man up.

Mattie is sitting up, and she reaches out to Foggy, who takes her hand.

“Sorry it didn’t work out,” she says.

“Yeah, well, he was an asshole anyway,” Foggy says deliberately.

There’s a moment of silence as the other three realize what Foggy said.

“Say what?” says Jason.

“Did you say ‘he’?” says Angela.

And Mattie doesn’t even seem surprised, she just keeps holding Foggy’s hand.

“What happened?” she says, ignoring their roommates.

“He tried to slut-shame you, and I didn’t defend you,” is what Foggy should say, but instead, he says, “Nothing. Just found out the hard way that pretty people can be dicks too.” And she squeezes his hand, and he thinks that at least this pretty (even if she currently looks gross) person isn’t a dick.

“I didn’t know you were gay,” says Angela, who has the best timing in the world. Mattie’s head turns to her slowly, and Foggy wonders if at some point this year he’s going to have to help Mattie move a corpse. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

“Bi, Angela,” snaps Jason.

“It’s a thing,” says Mattie. “The B in LGBT?” Angela turns back to her laptop with a muttered “Sorry.”

“Is that right, man?” Jason says, turning back to him. “Don’t want to assume.”

“Yeah, I’m bi,” says Foggy, and he’s really glad that Mattie’s still holding his hand in hers. “That cool?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“We share a room?”

“Dude, I’m from San Francisco. I can handle sharing a room with a bi guy.”

And the tiny bit of tension that Foggy’s been carrying since that first day disappears.

“So who’s this guy you went on a date with?” says Mattie, squeezing his hand again. “Jason and I need to go kick his ass.” The effect is somewhat ruined by her groping around on her bedside table as a line of snot emerges from her nose. Foggy grabs the box of tissues and gives her one.

Jason laughs and joins them on Mattie’s bed, and Foggy puts an arm around Mattie after she blows her nose, and he thinks that Brian can go fuck himself, because Foggy’s friends are the best people in Columbia.

Chapter Text

November, 2L

“Did you vote?” is the first thing out of Rob’s mouth as he opens the door.


“Of course I did,” says Foggy. It’s only the second election he’s been able to vote in, and Foggy still believes in his constitutional duty. Not that it matters, really, since all the projections say that Ellis will be re-elected anyway. Rob rewards Foggy’s responsible citizenship with a kiss.

“Do I get a kiss for voting, too?” asks Mattie, grinning.

“Sure, girlie,” says Rob, who leans over and plants a peck on her lips. “C’mon in.”

Rob’s apartment is a tiny studio unit in Harlem, not far from where Foggy and Mattie lived during undergrad. He only has one chair at his kitchen table/desk, so they’re all going to be sitting on the bed. It’s cramped, and normally, when they want to hang out all together, they stay at Foggy and Mattie’s place in Lionsgate, but they don’t have cable, and Rob does. The TV is already turned to The Daily Show, and Rob’s laptop has the official election results page up.

“Beer? Or are we skipping straight to the hard stuff?” Rob says.

“Beer for me,” says Mattie as Foggy seats her on the bed.

“Yeah, me too,” says Foggy. They’re in for a depressing night - all three of them are staunch Democrats, and Ellis’ re-election is all but certain, but Rob is determined to see the thing through. It’s probably a matter of principle, Foggy thinks. The other Poli-Sci Ph.D students would judge him if he didn’t. Or it might be a case of prodding at an open wound, since Rob, like most of the black people Foggy knows, still hasn’t forgiven Ellis for his surprise (and controversial) victory over Barack Obama four years ago.

Mattie had turned out to be surprisingly keen on following the election - after Foggy and Rob had started dating in the summer, she and Rob had hit it off by arguing over the Democratic primaries. By the time the Republican National Convention had rolled around in August, she and Rob were planning convention night hangouts, and had informed Foggy where and when he was expected. Even when the semester had started, and Mattie’s free time had dwindled to zero, she and Rob had Skyped during the debates, keeping up a running commentary while Mattie was working.

Rob serves their beers while on TV, Jon Stewart makes a joke about Ellis winning most of the Confederacy, and all three of them mutter into their bottles.

“Maybe we should just move to Canada,” says Foggy.

“Wouldn’t mind some free healthcare,” says Rob. “Or, you know, gay rights.”

“I’m in,” says Mattie. “Always wanted to learn how to skate.”

“We should go to Rockefeller Center!” says Rob. “It’s open now, and the Christmas tree is always nice.”

“I think it would be a bit lost on me, but skating could be fun,” says Mattie.

“And hot chocolate,” says Foggy. “That’s not optional.”

“Deal,” says Rob, turning his head to peck Foggy on the lips.

The Daily Show’s coverage only lasts for another fifteen minutes before Jon Stewart says, “the Presidency is projected to stay in control of the Republican Party. We are projecting Matthew Ellis is the President of the United States.” The three of them groan, and Rob checks his laptop, and pretty much every news outlet has already called the election for Ellis. The House and the Senate elections haven’t changed much either. “Two years, three billion dollars and we are clearly in the same fucking place we were when it started,” says Stewart.

“Did he just swear on live TV?” says Mattie.

“Yup,” says Foggy.

“Wow.”

“God bless Jon Stewart,” sighs Rob. Stewart might be on Rob’s celebrity fuck list. At the top. “Don’t think Colbert can top that.”

“Colbert’s going to go nuts,” says Foggy. “Let’s hope he has some good material planned.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure he saw this coming,” says Rob.

“Pretty sure we all did,” grumbles Mattie.

“So, Canada?” Rob says brightly.

“Yeah, they need lawyers, right?” says Mattie.

“No, they’re too busy being liberal and healthy and freezing their asses off,” says Rob. “Nobody sues anyone up there.”

“They have crime.”

“Yeah, a maple syrup heist.”

Mattie starts laughing.

“Seriously?” she says. “You’re making that up.”

“I am one hundred percent not joking,” says Rob. “It was on the news. Somebody stole millions of dollars worth of maple syrup.” He’s barely keeping a straight face.

“That’s gotta be, like, treason or something up there,” says Foggy.

Naturally, this leads them to make the worst Canadian jokes they can think of. Foggy tells a particularly dirty one about beavers, and is declared the winner as he winds up with Rob half on top of him while his arm is wrapped around Mattie’s waist. Rob presses his lips to Foggy’s cheek.

“I think we need a round of shots,” says Rob, sitting up. “I, for one, do not want to face the rest of this night sober. Or the next four years.”

“I’ll drink to that,” says Foggy.

“Me too,” says Mattie.

So they drink through Colbert’s coverage, and then Mattie insists on taking a cab home so Foggy can stay with Rob, and Rob hugs her as he puts her in the cab. And both Foggy and Rob are more than a little drunk, so they skip having sex for tonight, but Foggy wakes up with his arms around Rob, and thinks that the world maybe isn’t so bad.

Until he remembers the election results, and then he just despairs for America, and what the next four years will bring.

Chapter Text

December, Freshman year

“Hey, it’s Mattie, right?” comes an unfamiliar voice. One of Foggy’s cousins?

“Yeah, that’s right,” Mattie says with a smile. The guy sits down next to her at the kitchen table. Mattie’s been hiding in here for the past ten minutes, since most of Foggy’s family is congregated in the living room, and she’s finding it all a little too much. She can barely keep any of them straight, and she’s having trouble focussing on just one conversation.

“Noticed that you disappeared, so I thought I should check that you’re OK,” says (presumably) Foggy’s cousin.

“Oh, I’m fine,” she says. “It’s just -“ She waves a hand toward the living room.

“A little overwhelming?” he says (Kevin, maybe?).

“Yeah. Downside of being blind.”

“Hey, Nelson family gatherings are a lot to take when you can see - I really don’t blame you for taking a breather.”

She smiles at that, a real smile this time.

“I’m really sorry, but I’ve met a lot of Foggy’s cousins over the past few days, and I’m going to be honest, I can’t remember which one you are.”

The guy starts laughing.

“You think I’m Foggy’s cousin?” Maybe not?

“Starting to think I’m wrong about that.”

“Let’s just say you’re the first person who ever thought we were related.”

“Why would that be?”

“Well, I’m black.”

“Oh.” She can hear the grin in his voice. “I’m guessing you weren’t adopted either?”

“Nope. That’s my mom in the other room. She and Mrs Nelson have been best friends since Foggy and I were, like, three. I’m Brett, by the way.”

“Hi,” she says, holding out her hand. Brett shakes it.

“So, you’re Foggy’s girlfriend?”

“No, not girlfriend,” she says. She’s been saying that a lot over the holidays, and it makes her think of Foggy telling Jason that they’re not like that. “Just a friend.”

“So how’d you wind up at the annual Nelson New Year’s Eve party?”

“Foggy brought me home for Thanksgiving, and Anna made him promise to bring me back for Christmas. We’re staying until the holidays are over.”

“Didn’t want to go home for Christmas?”

“Didn’t have one to go to,” she says, adding a grin to defuse whatever pity he might feel.

“OK,” he says awkwardly. “So, you’re up at Columbia too?”

“Yeah, I live next door to Foggy. That’s how we met.”

“What are you taking?”

“Sociology. Are you in school too?”

“Sort of. I’m at the police academy.”

“That’s cool,” she says. “You enjoying it?”

“Yeah, it’s great. I mean, Foggy can tell you that I’ve wanted to be a cop since I was about five.”

“Always wanted to be a hero?”

“I’ll settle for making a difference.” Mattie likes that. “What about you? What are you gonna do with a Sociology degree?”

“Law school. Is the plan. I want to be a prosecutor.”

“Hey, that’s awesome. Stick around Hell’s Kitchen, you and me can be like on Law and Order.”

“I don’t really watch TV,” she says.

“Yeah, I guess not.”

“Mattie?” comes Foggy’s voice from the living room.

“We’re in here!” calls Brett. Mattie hears Foggy stopping at the kitchen door.

“Hey, the ball’s about to drop, we’ve got it up on the TV in the living room,” Foggy says.

“Guess we should join them,” says Brett.

“Guess we should,” says Mattie. She holds out her hand to Foggy, who wraps it around his arm to lead her into the living room. He doesn’t let her hand go through the countdown, and there’s an awkward moment at the stroke of midnight, when neither of them are sure what to do, or where they’ve drawn the line in their friendship.

Brett solves the problem by nudging her with his elbow while Foggy’s family starts singing Auld Lang Syne.

“Hey, you want a kiss for New Year’s?” he teases.

“You move fast, don’t you?” she says.

“Just for the pretty girls,” he says.

“OK,” she says, and Brett plants a light peck on her lips. As he pulls away, Mattie knows that he and Foggy are looking at each other, but she can’t tell what they are trying to say.

“Hey, c’mere,” says Foggy, and he tugs Mattie back to him, and kisses her, too. It’s just a small kiss, but she can feel the heat rising in his body, and she knows that she’s blushing. “Happy New Year, kitten.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“You love it.”

She hugs him. “Happy New Year, Foggy.” They hold each other for a moment, before Mattie remembers that Brett is still standing next to them. She lets Foggy go, and wishes Brett a happy New Year, too.

The party breaks up a little later, and Mattie overhears Brett helping his mother into her coat.

“The blind girl, Foggy’s friend, she’s very pretty,” Bess is saying with great meaning.

“Don’t even try it, Mom,” Brett says, “she and Foggy definitely have a thing going.”

“Anna was saying they’re just friends.”

“Yeah, that’s what they’re telling everyone.” Brett closes the apartment door behind him. Mattie can hear him and Bess talking as they walk down the hall, and she’s annoyed, because she’s been trying so hard to be the friend that Foggy wants, and why does everyone have to make assumptions about them?

Chapter Text

May, Hell’s Kitchen

Mattie has a strict routine in the mornings. She gets up at five, and heads to Fogwell’s to train before he opens at six. She heads back home, showers, and picks up Foggy, and they’re downtown at the L&Z offices by seven-thirty. Rinse, repeat, seven days a week. At this point, she’s sure that she doesn’t even wake up until she’s hitting a bag.

Which is why she’s completely unprepared for someone to already be at Fogwell’s when she gets there.

“Uh, can I help you?” he says. He’s a few years older than her, very fit, and dressed in a leather jacket and jeans, so probably not here to train. He’s wearing something on his head - sunglasses, maybe?

“I should ask you the same thing,” she says, putting down her bag.

“I’m waiting for someone,” he says.

She wants to say “do you mind waiting somewhere else?” but holds it back. Instead, she says, “The gym doesn’t open until six, he probably won’t be here until then,” hoping he’ll get the hint.

“We’ll be long gone by then,” he says. She takes off her jacket and carefully places it next to her bag. “Uh, if it’s closed, then why are you here?”

“Fogwell lets me work out after hours, since I’m working during opening hours.” She starts putting on her wraps; she won’t be able to get a proper training session in if this guy is here watching her, but she can at least hit the bag.

“What do you do?” Chatty, this one.

“I’m a lawyer.” She plays up her blindness, reaching out for the heavy bag.

“Would you like me to help you?” he says. It’s formal, as if it’s been trained into him, and she suspects he has experience with people with disabilities.

“Hold the bag?”

“I can do that.”

She strikes the bag a few times before she hears him take a breath - he’s like Foggy, he takes a tiny breath before talking.

“Where’d you learn this?” he says.

“My dad was a boxer,” she says. “He trained here.”

“That before or after you went blind?”

“Before,” she lies. And then she hears it - it’s a heartbeat she’d recognize anywhere. Slow and steady, the lowest resting heart rate she’s ever heard, and now she knows why.

Steve Rogers walks in the door.

He stops, taking in the scene, as the guy holding the bag says “Hey.”

“Hey, Sam,” Steve says. “Hi…Mattie. It’s, uh, me, uh -“

“Roger,” she says. She turns to him. “Or can I call you Steve now?”

He gives a little chuckle.

“When’d you figure it out?”

“Embarrassingly, after the Battle of New York.”

“Sorry,” he says. “I wasn’t supposed to -“

“I get it,” she interrupts. “SHIELD stuff, top secret.”

“Yeah, something like that.” There’s a pause, and Mattie knows that Sam has cocked his head. “Oh, uh, Sam, this is Mattie.”

“Hi,” she says.

“Hey. So…how do you guys know each other?” says Sam.

“Steve trained here for a little while after he was unfrozen,” says Mattie.

“Yeah, and I didn’t think you’d be here this early,” says Steve.

“Changed my schedule after graduation.”

“Oh, uh, congratulations. You a prosecutor now?”

“Just a lawyer,” she says. “I work for Landman & Zack downtown.”

“That’s…good,” he says.

“It’s a living,” she says with a shrug. She doesn’t say that the case they’re working on for Roxxon makes her feel dirty and sick.

“Hey, did she give you anything for your book?” says Sam.

“You’re writing a book?” says Mattie.

“No, I’m not - it’s -“ stammers Steve.

“Steve’s got a little notebook of things he needs to catch up on,” says Sam. “I gave him the Troubleman soundtrack, but you might have some ideas?” There’s a teasing edge to his voice that she doesn’t think is meant for her.

“Thurgood Marshall,” she says, without missing a beat.

“Nice,” says Sam.

“Start with the Liberty Medal speech.” She turns back to the bag, and strikes it as she speaks. “‘We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust. We must dissent from a nation that has buried its head in the sand…’” She trails off.

The next line is “waiting in vain for the needs of its poor, its elderly, and its sick to disappear and just blow away.” Poor, elderly, and sick people like the man who is suing Roxxon, the man whose life she’s helping Roxxon destroy.

And she can’t say the line, not to Steve Rogers, living embodiment of all that she believes is good about America, or even to the Roger she knew, the lonely vet who wanted to do more. She can’t be the hypocrite who quotes Marshall to Captain America and then sits on Roxxon Energy’s side of the table against a sick old man.

Except that’s exactly who she is.

She can’t do this.

She doesn’t know how to tell Foggy.

“I don’t remember the rest,” she lies.

“I’m impressed,” Sam says. She can hear Steve writing in his notebook.

“I’ll look him up,” says Steve, and she believes him. There’s a pause, and she suspects Steve and Sam are looking at each other. “We should get out of your way.”

“It’s OK,” she says.

“No, we’ve got stuff to talk about.” Sam passes Steve on his way to the door, and there’s another moment between them, before Steve comes back to where Mattie is standing. “Hey, uh, Mattie, do you…still want to get that drink? Just - Thor’s heading back to Asgard tomorrow, so Tony’s having this thing -“

“Thanks, but I’m seeing someone,” she says gently.

“Right. Should have figured. It’s, uh, good to see you. Take care of yourself.”

She smiles and puts her hand on his arm, and leans up to kiss his cheek.

“You too, Cap.”

He closes the door behind him, and as Mattie turns back to the bag, she hears Sam say, “Did I just watch you ask out a real flesh and blood woman?”

And Steve says, “Do not tell Natasha about this.”

Chapter Text

February, Freshman year

“Shit,” Mattie says, shoving her phone in her pocket.

“I take it they didn’t go for it?” says Foggy. Mattie had gotten the call from Disability Services while she was reading on Foggy’s bed. She’d asked if they could arrange for her to stay on campus during the summer, since she didn’t have anywhere else to go. Foggy had been trying to write a report before she got the call, but he’d given up when he’d heard her voice go from cool to defeated.

“Nope. It’s apparently not a disability issue, so they can’t help me.”

“Fuck.” Undergrads aren’t entitled to summer housing, so Mattie will be literally homeless for three months. “Anything I can do?”

“No, I’ll be fine,” she says automatically. “I’ll figure something out.”

“You know you can always stay with me during the summer.”

“Thanks, Foggy, but I think your parents might object to me sleeping on the couch for three months.”

“My parents love you -“

“Your parents think we’re dating.”

“And my mom would yell at me if I let you live on the streets.”

“I’m not going to live on the streets. I’ll find a sublet, or something.”

“Or you could get your own place,” Foggy says enthusiastically, but she shakes her head.

“I don’t think I could afford even a studio. Or I’d wind up somewhere in Jersey, or something. Seriously, I’ll be fine, I’ll figure it out.” She doesn’t say “like I always do,” but Foggy hears it anyway. And he hates that she’s had to live this long with no one to rely on but herself.

She heads back to her room soon after that; she may spend more time in Foggy’s room than her own these days, but she still needs to sleep in her own bed, even when she’s avoiding Angela (except for a few nights when they’ve been too drunk to care about sharing a bed, or the times when Angela’s had her boyfriend over). Foggy tries to finish his report, but his brain keeps turning over the problem of How To Save Matilda Murdock From Homelessness. He keeps coming back to one solution, and it’s a good one, as far as he’s concerned, but it depends on Mattie’s opinion of him. Which makes him more than a little nervous.

Jason comes back from the lab just before midnight, and Foggy starts Phase One of his solution.

“Hey, do you have any plans for housing next year?” Foggy says.

“Oh, man, I wanted to talk to you about that,” says Jason. “Ben and Irfan and I were talking about getting a suite next year, and it would be awesome if you came with.”

Ben and Irfan are Jason’s friends from engineering. And Foggy may love Jason like a brother, but he’s less enthusiastic about Ben and Irfan. They’re…well, they’re engineers. They live in a world of straight men that’s rarely challenged, and while they’ve never been explicitly homophobic or misogynistic towards Foggy or Mattie, there’s always been a sense that Foggy and Mattie are some sort of exotic creatures to them. Jason never notices, because Jason is so laid back he’s practically horizontal, but Foggy does.

“I was thinking of maybe getting a place off campus,” says Foggy. “Maybe with Mattie.”

“Hey, that’s great, man,” says Jason. “I mean, I’d miss you, but that girl needs someone to look out for her. Don’t tell her I said that.”

“She’d kick your ass for that.”

“Yes, she would.”

So Phase One is a bust: Jason won’t come with them. On to Phase Two.

Foggy buys bagels for the two of them the next morning.

“So, I was thinking about your housing problem,” he says as he puts hers (sesame with butter) in her hand.

“Seriously, I’m fine, Foggy.”

“No, you’re not, and we both know it, but I think I have a solution.”

“OK?”

“We should move in together.”

She chews her bite of bagel thoughtfully, and Foggy’s stomach clenches as the silence stretches out.

“OK...” she says, “do you mean getting a suite next year?”

“I mean, we should get a place off campus, starting in the summer. If we split a two-bed, it’ll be cheaper than if we lived on campus, plus we’d have all the bragging rights for actually being adults, and we’d have somewhere to live during the summer.” He’s being very careful to phrase it as “we” not “you”.

“I figured you’d want to live with Jason next year.”

“Jason wants to get a suite with Ben and Irfan.”

Mattie makes a little face at that, then says, “I take it you’re not to keen on that?”

“Nope. I’d rather live with you.”

His heart is pounding. She does that thing he’s starting to recognize, when she cocks her head like she’s listening to something far away.

“I don’t want you to feel like you have to -“

“I don’t,” he says firmly. “C’mon, we’d be awesome together. We practically live together already.”

“And I know about your snoring,” she says with a grin, and he knows he has her.

“That you do.”

She takes another bite of her bagel.

“You sure about this?” she says.

“One hundred percent.”

“OK,” she says. “Let’s do it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Awesome!” He holds out his fist for a bump, but of course she can’t see it. “Hold out your fist.”

“Why?”

“I’m going to bump it.”

“What?”

“It’s a thing people do. To celebrate, or to express affinity.” He takes her hand and holds it out in front of her. He bumps her knuckles with his fist. “Like that.”

She laughs, and says, “This is what I’ve signed up for?”

“Yep. For the next year, at least.”

“Lucky me.”

“Damn right, kitten.”

“Don’t call me that.”

Chapter Text

June, Hell’s Kitchen

Foggy could get used to being unemployed, at least if it was always like this. He and Mattie might still have crushing debt from student loans, but the leftover pay from Landman & Zack can cover them for a few months, and they live frugally anyway. And they’re busy trying to get their ducks in a row to get Nelson & Murdock off the ground, but they have way more free time than they did when they were at L&Z. Case in point: they can relax on the couch with a bottle of wine and watch Adam’s Rib on a Tuesday night, and not feel guilty.

Foggy generally narrates films for Mattie, but this one is so dialogue-heavy that his role is reduced to “now they’re in Adam’s office. Now they’re in the courtroom.” Mattie loves screwball comedies, especially ones with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.

“Lawyers should never marry other lawyers,” says Kip Lurie onscreen, “This is called in-breeding; from this comes idiot children, and other lawyers.”

Mattie laughs, and Foggy thinks this might be the time to ask the question.

His phone rings.

It’s Rosalind.

“Shit,” he says.

“What?”

“Rosalind’s calling me.”

“What does she want?”

“Don’t know. Mind if I…?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

Foggy pauses the movie, and takes the call.

“Hi, Rosalind.”

“Hello, Franklin.” Foggy winces at that, and Mattie rolls her eyes, because of course she can hear everything. “What’s this I hear about you leaving Landman & Zack?”

“That was, like, three weeks ago,” says Foggy.

“So it’s true?”

“Yes, it’s true.”

“This was that girl’s idea, wasn’t it? Franklin, you can’t ruin your career for her -“

“It was a decision we made together -“

“I’ll give Parry Landman a call, get you that job back -“

“No, Rosalind, you’re not going to do that.” Foggy’s barely keeping his temper in check.

“Franklin, this is your future we’re talking about, I won’t let you throw it away over some -“

“Some what?” Mattie has curled up at her end of the couch, her glass of wine clasped between her hands, and her face snaps toward him on that. “Some girl? The girl whose name you’ve never bothered to use for the past eight years? It’s Matilda, by the way. Matilda Murdock. My best friend for eight years. My girlfriend.”

“Franklin -“

“No, you’re going to listen to me.” Foggy’s looking straight at Mattie, whose eyes are huge in her pale face. “Mattie’s the most brilliant lawyer I’ve ever met, she’s lived through more horrible shit than any person should have to survive, and she still manages to care about humanity, she’s stronger and braver than anyone I know, and unlike most people, she actually wants to make a difference in this world. So when she says that something’s the right thing to do, I listen to her, because I trust her more than anyone. And -“ he can hear Rosalind trying to interrupt, “before you say it, yes, this was my choice, and I’ll choose her every time.”

There’s a breathless moment between the three of them, as Foggy stares at Mattie, and Mattie looks like she’s holding her breath, and Rosalind is silent on the other end of the line.

“It seems you’ve made your choice,” says Rosalind tightly.

“I made it eight years ago,” says Foggy.

“Then there’s nothing I can do for you,” she says.

“Goodbye, Rosalind.”

She hangs up. Foggy tosses the phone on the coffee table.

“So,” Mattie says, pouring out the rest of the wine between their glasses, “Rosalind thinks I’m going to ruin your life.”

“Don’t be silly, she thinks you’ve already ruined my life,” Foggy says. Mattie doesn’t laugh. She takes a drink of wine instead. “I meant what I said.”

“I know.”

“Then why the face?”

“I’m not -“

“Yes, you are.”

She shakes her head. “You’ve given up a lot for me. You gave up L&Z, and I know -“

“No, you don’t get to feel guilty about this. I meant what I said to Rosalind. I’ll choose you every time. And I won’t regret it.” He takes her hand, the one not holding the wine glass, and presses it to his chest. “What’s my heart saying?”

“That you’re not lying,” she says quietly.

“And?”

“And you love me.”

He takes the wine glass out of her hand and puts it down on the coffee table before he kisses her, deep and soft and slow. When it ends, she holds his face between her hands.

“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me,” she says softly.

“Comparatively speaking, that’s not saying much, kitten.”

“I mean it,” she says, climbing onto his lap. “You’re…you’re my sun. You’re the light in my world.”

“My sun and stars,” he says, quoting Game of Thrones.

She chuckles as she rolls her eyes. “Sure. I was trying to be poetic.”

“I know,” he says, kissing her. “But it’s hard to top the world on fire speech.”

“‘Sunshine in a world on fire’ isn’t really a great metaphor,” she says, “even if it’s true.”

“I like it.” He kisses her, pulling her close with his arms around her waist. “Can I steal your line?”

“What?”

“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”

She smiles that blinding smile at him, and kisses his nose. “Points off for lack of originality, but full marks for the sentiment.”

“That’s fair,” he says, before gripping her tightly to him as he stands up. She wraps her legs around his waist, and he carries her into the bedroom, dropping her onto the bed, and descending into a frenzy of clothes being pulled off and skin sliding against skin. And while she’s riding him, he calls her the moon of his life, which earns him a laugh (he loves making her laugh during sex) and a slap to his chest, and he retaliates by throwing her onto her back and thrusting harder inside her, until she’s bracing herself against the headboard, and making the most delicious sounds.

And when the storm is past, she curls around him, and he whispers “You, every time,” into her hair.

Chapter Text

April, 3L

The first time Mattie and Foggy sleep together, it’s a Thursday. On Friday, they have one class together in the morning, and neither of them are terribly attentive, since they didn’t get much sleep, and they’re mainlining coffee just to stay awake. They don’t see each other for the rest of the day. Foggy spends it with visions of Mattie spread out beneath him spinning through his head, and by the time he gets home, he’s so desperate that he thinks he’ll have to jerk off before he can do anything else. Except that Mattie is there, and she knows, and she’s pushing him up against the wall with her mouth on his, and they leave a trail of clothes as they rush into Mattie’s room, and Foggy discovers that she wasn’t joking about the silk sheets. They really are very nice.

They spend the weekend in bed.

On Monday morning, Mattie groans and smacks her alarm clock. Foggy rolls over and kisses her shoulder.

“I don’t want to move,” he says.

“Me neither,” she says, turning in his arms to face him. She kisses his lips (closed mouth - she’s adamant about no open-mouthed kissing with morning breath). “But we kinda have to.”

“Fuck it,” he says. “We can stay here. Who needs Criminal Law, right?”

“Sadly, we do.” She wriggles out from his grasp and heads for the bathroom. Foggy stretches, and he’s wonderfully, exquisitely sore. He debates seeing if Mattie would be up for him joining her in the shower, but decides against it, since she might get pissed off at him for making her late for class.

While they’re settling into their seats for the lecture, Caitlin comes up to them, her eyes shining, and says, “Are you…are you two…?”

“What?” says Mattie.

“Oh, it’s just - you two looked - never mind!” Caitlin beats a hasty retreat.

“Are we doing something weird?” asks Mattie.

“Not that I’m aware of,” says Foggy, squeezing her knee. Mattie takes his hand and threads her fingers through his.

They don’t have any classes together for the rest of the morning. When Foggy sits down for his clinical seminar, Toshiro plunks himself down next to him.

“I heard you and Mattie made up,” he says.

“Oh, uh, yeah,” says Foggy, realizing that, yes, people must have noticed that Mattie spent the last week avoiding him. “It was just a stupid fight.”

“So…you two are…how are you?”

“Good. We’re good.”

“That’s great -“ But whatever Toshiro was going to say is cut off by the professor’s entrance.

Foggy meets Mattie for lunch. He presses a kiss to her temple as he sits down next to her.

“Have people been really weird this morning?” she asks.

“What do you mean?”

“I got a lot of questions about you. And how we’re doing.”

“Yeah, I think they just noticed we were fighting last week.”

“Oh. Yeah. That sucked.”

“Yeah, it did.” He takes her hand. “But I’m OK with how it turned out.”

She smiles at that.

“Me too.”

They head up to the library after lunch. Mattie insists, since she lost a whole weekend of studying (“I didn’t hear much complaining.”). Foggy is less certain of how productive this is going to be, because Mattie is very distracting. If she’s not tucking her hair behind her ears (making him think of running his fingers through it), she’s taking off her hoodie (making him wish he was the one taking it off her), turning her head so he can see the hickey he planted on her neck just under her ear, or leaning forward so he can see the bruise his thumb left on her breast.

He’s jolted out of his examination of Mattie Murdock when she says “That’s gotta be some very steamy legal precedent you’re reading.”

“Oh, shit. That’s not fair, kitten.”

Because she’s evil, she leans forward with a grin on her face and her hand on his knee. “You didn’t mind when I could read your body chemistry last night.”

“Mattie, I love you, but I have to tell you, nothing sexy ever started with the phrase ‘body chemistry.’”

And her nose is almost against his as she whispers “Challenge accepted.”

“Right, how long have you two been fucking?” comes Marci’s voice from behind them. Foggy and Mattie sit back in their chairs.

“Wow, Marci, subtle as always,” says Foggy.

“Do I care?” she says.

“It’s none of your business?” says Mattie.

“You two were wandering around like kicked puppies all last week, and now you’re all over each other. So, we just want to confirm this momentous occasion happened and move on with our lives.”

“Fine, yes, we’re together.”

“Told you we should have changed our Facebook statuses,” says Foggy. Mattie rolls her eyes.

“Congratulations, I’m sure you’ll be very happy together,” says Marci dryly. “A word of advice? Don’t fuck in the library.” With that mic drop, she strides off to where Foggy can see Dev hovering a few shelves over.

“Well, that explains why people are being weird,” Foggy says, but Mattie holds up her hand and cocks her head. She quietly starts packing her laptop into her bag.

“Grab your stuff, we’re going to have to move fast,” she says, and Foggy obeys her.

“What -“

“Shh.” And then, suddenly - “Now.”

She grabs his arm, and she’s propelling him through the library to the stairs. Once the door to the stairwell closes, she lets go and starts running down ahead of him. When she gets to the landing on the second floor, she pauses, and tosses him her cane and bag.

“Screw it,” she says, and jumps over the railing, nearly giving Foggy a heart attack.

“Jesus!” Foggy says, leaning over to watch her flip down the centre of the stairwell, landing gracefully on the ground floor. She’d mentioned that she could do parkour but this is way more than he thought she could do. And way cooler. She tips her face up to him.

“Can you toss down my cane?”

“Warn me if you’re going to do that!” But Foggy drops the cane down anyway.

“Thanks,” she says, catching it midair, and Foggy wonders if he’ll ever get used to this new, world-on-fire Mattie. “Meet me by the elevators on the ground floor.” She runs off.

Foggy moves as fast as he can down the stairs, and spots Mattie with Marci and Dev just as he hears Mattie say, “There’s a Google doc?”

Mattie is standing opposite Marci and Dev, who she clearly caught leaving the elevator. She’s got her hands on her hips, in that pose that anyone in Columbia Law would recognize as “Mattie Murdock is going to destroy you.”

“Well, we needed to keep track of everyone’s dates,” Marci is saying unapologetically. Dev looks embarrassed.

“How many people are we talking?”

“Last we checked? About twenty, give or take.”

“Twenty people?!”

“Twenty people what?” says Foggy, coming up to meet them.

“Twenty people were betting on when we’d get together,” says Mattie.

“What?” Foggy looks at Marci, who stares coolly back. “How long has this been going on?”

“Since we broke up, Foggybear.”

“Two years?! What the hell, Marci?”

“Well, when we broke up, Andy said that he thought you two were finally going to figure it out, and I told him you two are idiots who couldn’t see what was right in front of you. No offence, Murdock.” Mattie just rolls her eyes.

“So you bet on it?!”

“In our defense, we were going to stage an intervention at graduation if you two hadn’t figured it out by then,” says Dev. Mattie gives him her dark-and-stormy face.

“Yeah, and I lost out, because you two couldn’t keep it in your pants for three more weeks,” says Marci.

“Sorry,” says Mattie sarcastically.

“So who did win?” says Foggy.

Dev and Marci glance at each other. “We’re not sure,” Dev says. “We have to check the doc.”

“How much was the pot?” says Mattie.

“Twenty each.”

“Four hundred dollars?” says Foggy.

“Right,” Mattie says, her voice low and cold. She steps into Dev’s space, who looks distinctly alarmed. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to check the doc and tell me who won. And then Foggy and I are going to get half the pot. And everyone on the list owes us a drink. Am I clear?”

Foggy doesn’t envy Dev; a lesser man would crumble under the power of Mattie’s annoyance.

“Clear,” Dev says.

“Marci?” Mattie snaps.

“The pot belongs to the winner. You’ll have to negotiate with them,” Marci says. Foggy glares at her, and Mattie’s face darkens. “We’ll agree to the free drinks,” Marci finishes with a roll of her eyes and a sigh.

“Good,” says Mattie. “Foggy, let’s go.” Foggy takes her hand and leads her to the elevator. He punched the button and glances over his shoulder to Marci and Dev.

“I am glad for you, Foggy,” Marci says.

“Thanks, Marci. You owe us a drink.”

The elevator pings, and Foggy leads Mattie in. As the doors close, Mattie says, “Well, that explains a lot.”

“Yeah, why everyone is suddenly so interested in our personal lives?”

“That, and why neither of us got anywhere with anyone from our year after Marci.”

Foggy tries to list the people they’ve dated over the past two years in his head, and she’s right, none of them were in their year. And he can definitely remember being turned down by a few people in their year.

“Shit. They knew.”

“Yep.”

“Those assholes.”

“They could have saved us a lot of time,” Mattie muses. She slips her arm around Foggy’s waist, and leans her head against his chest.

“Well, we might get two hundred bucks and a lot of free drinks out of this, and thanks, by the way, for that.”

“Dev folds like a cheap suit,” she says smugly.

“That he does. He’s not planning on going into litigation, is he?”

“Last I heard, he was interested in public policy.”

“Smart move.”

The elevator doors open on the third floor, and Foggy leads Mattie back to the seats they’d had before. When they leave the library a few hours later, he has a text from Dev that says “The winner is Carlos.”

Foggy texts back, “Tell him Mattie’s coming for him.”

And Dev texts back, “Better him than me.”

Chapter Text

June, Hell’s Kitchen

It starts, simply enough, while they’re having sex. Foggy is on top, and Mattie’s getting handsy in a way that’s pleasurable, but a little distracting from the main event, so he grabs her wrist and pins her hand above her head.

Her eyes go wide, and she gasps in a way that makes him stop moving, thinking that he’s gripping her wrist too tight.

“Sorry,” he says, loosening his hold on her.

“No, don’t -“ she says. “Don’t stop.”

“You…” He tightens his grip on her wrist again, “…like that?”

“Yes.”

He trails his other hand down her arm, and he can see her holding her breath, and then he grasps her other wrist and brings it up to join the first.

“Good?” he asks.

She nods. “Good.”

So he starts moving inside her again, holding her down, and she comes twice before he does.

After he throws away the condom and uses the bathroom, he climbs back into bed with her and she turns on her side so she’s facing him. He runs a hand over her side to her butt, and she gives him a lazy smile.

“So, can we talk about that?”

“‘Bout what?” But he knows that she knows exactly what he’s talking about.

“About this…” He takes her wrists in his hands, and her smile gets wider.

“Oh, that.”

“So…you like being pinned down?” he says, letting go.

“Yeah. I mean, you don’t have to if it weirds you out -“

“Kitten, I’m pretty sure we have some fairly substantial evidence that I was into it.”

She wriggles a little, looking unbelievably sexy. “I’ll say it was substantial…”

He leans in to kiss her, running his fingers through her hair, which is a mess.

“So…is there anything else I should know about?” he says against her lips. They’ve only been together for a little over a month, and he’s still finding out new things about her. Especially about sex with her.

“I mean -“ she breaks off. Right. Because getting Mattie Murdock to admit she wants anything is like pulling teeth.

“If you don’t say it, I can’t give it to you,” he says. He kisses her again, and puts her hand on his chest. He’s taken to doing that so she’ll know he’s telling the truth. “I want to give it to you.”

That first weekend after they’d gotten together, when they’d spent two days in bed, she’d said, “I’ll try anything with you.”

And he’d said, “That’s a dangerous thing to say.”

“Fine. I draw the line at shit and piss, but other than that…I trust you.”

“That’s a good line to draw. I draw the same line, so we’re good on that count,” he’d said. And she’d been true to her word - she’d been willing to try anything he asked, and she’d trusted him enough to tell him if she wasn’t enjoying it. But aside from telling him in the moment to move harder or slower, or to stroke her clit, or which position she’d like, she hadn’t asked him for anything until now.

“It just seems selfish…” she says.

“We’re talking about sex, Mattie, which means we’re talking about pleasure, so, yeah, you get to be a little selfish.”

“OK. Would you -“ She tucks her face into the pillow for a moment. “Would you tie me up?”

“Yes,” he says automatically, and he feels her relax under his hand. “But…just so we’re clear, what exactly do you want me to do once I’ve got you tied up?”

“I don’t - I don’t want you to hurt me or call me a slut or anything, I’m not really into that.”

“Uh, good. I don’t think I’d be into that either.”

“I just…” He stays quiet as he watches her try to put her thoughts in order. “With my senses, I have to be in control all the time, and I just like…not having to be.”

“OK. So do you just want me to go down on you, or fuck you, or something else?”

“I want…I want you to do whatever you want to me.” She slides her hand up to his face, cupping his cheek, because she has to know that his heart is pounding and he’s getting hard at the thought. “I trust you.”

They kiss, pressing their bodies together, and Foggy rolls her onto her back. His hand crawls up her thigh.

“So, what you want is for me to tie you to the bed,” and he slips a finger inside her, “and make you come?”

“Yes,” she gasps.

“And come again?” he teases as he slides the second finger inside. “And again?”

“Oh, God,” she whispers.

“Just like this? Or should I get a little more creative?”

“Like what - ah!”

“Mmm, how about using ice? Or maybe a vibrator?” His lips are against her neck as he says it, and he’s just about to suck at the skin the way she likes when she says -

“I don’t have a vibrator.”

“Wait - what?” He holds his hand still and pulls back to look at her face.

“I…don’t have a vibrator?” she repeats.

“Hold that thought,” he says, because he’s a gentleman, and he’s not going to leave her hanging. So he gets her off, a little more quickly than he usually likes, and nips into the bathroom to wash his hands.

When he comes back, he stands at the foot of the bed and crosses his arms.

“What?” she says.

“You don’t own a vibrator,” he says, still not quite believing it.

“Uh, no. Why is this a thing?”

“Because it’s 2014. Everyone has one.”

“Well, I don’t. Orgasms have never really been an issue.”

“It’s not about - oh, fuck.” He climbs into bed.

“I mean, it’s not like I’ve never used one, but it’s always been on my girlfriends. I’ve just - figured I’d only last about three seconds with one, so I’ve always avoided them.”

“Oh,” he says, and he wraps an arm around her shoulders, and she rests her head against his chest. Sometimes, she says things that remind him how shitty her life has been, and how much she’s denied herself. “Do you have anything? A dildo, or something?”

“No. Like I said, orgasms were never a problem, so I never saw the point,” she says, giving him a grin.

“OK, we’re definitely going to have to remedy that.”

“What do you have?”

“Well, you know about the strap-on -“ They’d tried pegging for the first time a few days ago, to great success. “And I’ve got a vibrator and a cock ring.”

“Hmm,” she hums against his chest.

“Anything appealing to you?”

“Wouldn’t mind using the vibrator…”

“OK, but just so you know, it’s designed for anal, so it might not be the best place to start -“

“Oh,” she says, shifting so that she’s on her stomach, half on top of him, her chin resting on his chest. “I wasn’t thinking about me…”

“Oh.”

So Foggy gives her a very thorough demonstration of how awesome vibrators can be.

The next day is Sunday, so Mattie goes to Mass, and Foggy recognizes the irony as he starts online shopping for sex toys (he should be studying for the bar, but a man has to have priorities). He carefully reads articles on how to choose your first vibrator, and pores through dozens of product reviews. Eventually, he settles on a bullet-style vibrator (good for a first toy), and a silicone dildo, and debates over whether he should get her a butt plug too (he decides he should wait to see if the first two go over well). He’s sifting through different styles of restraints when she comes back from Mass.

“Are you looking at porn?” is the first thing she says, putting her cane away and taking off her shoes.

“Uh, no,” he says. All right, yes, he’s turned on, but it’s not a lie.

She pauses, probably listening to his heart.

“Are you reading erotica?” she says suspiciously. “You’re not reading Fifty Shades of Grey, are you?”

“Nope. And you know I’m not lying.”

“No…you’re equivocating.” She comes over to the kitchen table where he’s sitting, and leans against it next to the laptop. She takes off her glasses and drops them on the tabletop. “What’s going on?”

“Just shopping. Speaking of which, I wanted to run something by you.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah.” He reaches out, and slides his hand across her bare knee so he can feel the skin of her inner thigh. “So…” he says, keeping his voice casual, “when I tie you to the bed, would you prefer the leather cuffs with tethers, or the silk restraints?”

“The - what?”

“Sorry,” he lies, running his fingertips over the soft skin in circles that he knows are going to drive her mad. “Should start at the beginning. See, the leather cuffs would be sturdier, but the silk ones would probably be more comfortable…” She’s gripping the edge of the table, and he knows that if he slides his hand up, he’ll find her wet through her underwear. “So I thought I should ask…”

“Leather,” she breathes.

“That’s what I thought, too,” he says brightly, taking his hand away to add the cuffs to the cart.

She throws her head back and lets out a frustrated groan. “You son of a bitch…”

“Yeah, we already knew that about Rosalind,” he says absently as he pulls his wallet out to find his credit card. She smacks his shoulder. “Ow! Not fair! No ninja powers!”

“I don’t think you get to talk about fair right now,” she says, her head cocked and her eyebrows furrowed. She leans forward and brushes her lips over his ear, and slides her hand down between his legs. “Did you get anything else?”

“Vibrator…and a dildo…” His breath catches as she closes her teeth on his earlobe.

“Those for me?,” she whispers, and rubs her hand over his crotch.

“Yeah…starter kit…” Sentences are overrated.

“Have you placed the order?”

“No - not - just need to pay…”

“Good.” And she pulls away, making him groan, and smirks at him. “Turnabout’s fair play, Nelson.”

“Sometimes I hate you, Murdock.”

“Liar.”

“Creep.”

She pulls off her top and tosses it at his face, then turns towards the bedroom. “Let’s see how fast you can check out,” she says over her shoulder. She strips off the rest of her clothes as she moves through the living room, flagrantly unconcerned about the open windows.

Foggy has never typed a credit card number faster in his life.

Chapter Text

May, 3L

“That was a lovely speech,” says Grandma Nelson, patting Mattie’s arm. “Very inspiring.”

“Thank you. I think Foggy had to listen to it about a hundred times when I was practicing,” says Mattie.

“Yeah, and at about fifty, I was ready to strangle you, but it grew on me by about eighty,” says Foggy, coming up to her and putting his hand on her back. “Great speech, kitten,” he murmurs as he kisses her cheek.

“Foggy, let’s get a picture with you and Grandma!” comes Anna’s voice. She’s waving something electronic between her hands (a StarkPad, Mattie is fairly certain). Foggy lets go of Mattie and puts his arm around his grandmother’s shoulders, and Mattie hears the shutter sound effect from the StarkPad. “Mattie, you get in there, too!” Foggy reaches out and takes Mattie’s arm, pulling her against him. She smiles in Anna’s general direction, and the shutter clicks again.

She’s gently manhandled between the various Nelsons as Anna takes pictures, until Anna sweet-talks someone else’s father into taking a picture of the entire family (and Mattie). Mattie had given her allotted three tickets to the graduation ceremony to Foggy, so it’s not just Foggy’s parents and Candace, but also Grandma Nelson, Uncle Terry, and Aunt Diana. Once Anna reclaims her StarkPad, she says, “Now one with just the two of you!”

Foggy puts his arm around her waist, and they press together, smiling for the camera.

“We did it,” he says, once Anna has taken the photo.

“We still have to pass the bar,” she says, smiling up at him.

“Shhh, if you don’t mention it, it can’t hear you.” They laugh, and Mattie hears the shutter click one last time.

“Matilda, there you are!” In the crush of people on the lawn, it’s hard to tell if someone is approaching her, so the newcomer’s voice takes her by surprise. She jumps out of habit when the woman puts her hand on her arm. “Oh, sorry, it’s Laura? From Development?”

“Oh, right, hi, Laura,” Mattie says.

“They’re ready to take those photos now, if you’d like to come with me?”

“Sure. Foggy -“

“I’ll come with,” he says. “Make sure you can find your way back.”

“Thanks.” Foggy expertly relieves her of her degree and wraps her hand around his arm, and they follow Laura through the crowd. The heels of Mattie’s shoes sink into the grass, so they move slowly.

When Mattie had been named the student speaker for the J.D. program, Development had jumped at the chance to, in their words, “promote diversity among the student body.” Translation: they wanted pictures of the pretty blind girl who graduated summa cum laude. So Mattie had agreed, and now she lets Laura pose her with the keynote speaker (a partner from Goodman, Lieber, Kurtzberg & Holliway), the Dean, and various faculty members and alumni. They all shake her hand and congratulate her, and tell her how much they enjoyed her speech.

It had been a good speech, if she could say so herself. She’d talked about the Battle of New York, and the way that it had brought their class together. She’d talked about the charity work they’d done after the Battle, volunteering in Midtown or fundraising for victims. And then she’d talked about how they all had that impulse, to help, to contribute, and how they needed to hold onto it. She’d quoted Steve Rogers (it amused her, even if no-one else got the joke) instead of Thurgood Marshall like everyone expected. In the end, she hoped that some of them would remember it.

She can hear Foggy taking selfies with some of their friends as Laura says, “That’s the last one. Do you want one with your friend?”

“Yes. That would be nice.” So Laura ushers Foggy over, and they hold still for the photographer.

Laura lets them go, and Foggy leads them back to his family. The trip back is stop and start, as various friends accost them, waving phones around for photos. They make it back to Foggy’s family in one piece, then it’s a whirlwind of returning their caps and gowns and being thrust into cabs that whisk them away to the celebratory dinner Foggy’s parents arranged.

More members of the extended Nelson brood are waiting for them at the restaurant, and there’s more hugs and photos, and much oohing and aahing over their degrees. Over dinner, Anna shows the Nelsons who couldn’t attend the ceremony the photos; Mattie can’t really tell what the photos show, since most of the commentary is “Oh, that’s a lovely shot,” or “Maybe I should delete that one, his eyes are closed.”

“Hey, Mom, can you send me that one?” says Foggy near the end.

“Sure.” Anna presses the touch screen a few times.

“What is it?” asks Mattie.

“It’s us,” Foggy says. “We’re smiling at each other. We look -“

“Stupidly adorable?” finishes Candace. “Disgustingly in love?”

“All of the above?” says Mattie, lacing her fingers through Foggy’s.

“Something like that,” says Foggy.

“OK, no, not at the dinner table,” says Candace. “I’m eating here.”

Foggy flips her off, and Edward says, “Settle down, you two,” in a voice that has said it so often, it’s automatic. Foggy and Candace just snort with laughter.

“But really, Mattie,” says Aunt Diana, “we’re so glad you and Foggy are finally together.”

“Yeah, has Foggy popped the question yet?” says Nancy, Diana’s daughter.

“Whoa, what?” says Foggy.

“We’ve only been together about a month,” says Mattie hastily.

“Bullshit,” says Nancy.

“Nancy,” says Diana, a warning in her voice.

“No, it’s been longer than that,” says Grandma Nelson. “Just over Christmas, you two were talking about staying together after graduation.”

“As friends, Grandma,” says Foggy. “Which we were. Until a month ago.”

There’s a chorus of skeptical “mm-hmms” from around the table.

“This is what I have to deal with,” Foggy says to Mattie.

“At least they weren’t betting on it,” says Mattie.

“You guys weren’t, right?” says Foggy to the table.

“Betting on what?” says Edward.

“Nothing,” says Mattie.

“So, have you two found a place yet?” says Anna, determinedly changing the subject.

After dinner, Foggy and Mattie head back to Lionsgate to change. Foggy just changes his shirt, then Mattie has him unzip her dress, and he takes the opportunity to slip his hand between her skin and the dress, his nose nuzzling at her hair.

“Love you,” he whispers.

“Love you too.”

“Even with the crazy family?”

She turns around and loops her arms around his neck.

“I love your family,” she says. “Craziness included.”

“And they love you. I’m pretty sure my parents have already started planning our wedding. I mean - not that that’s -“

“I know.” They haven’t really talked about that part of their future yet, and Mattie’s too afraid to ask. But Nelson & Murdock is all planned out, and Mattie knows she wants to spend the rest of her life with Foggy, so they can work out what their relationship means later, because they have time. There’s a whole future for the two of them.

Mattie wriggles out of her dress, and pulls out her beaded cocktail dress from the closet. It’s the one Elektra gave her, what seems like a lifetime ago. She hopes Foggy won’t read into that, but his heartbeat doesn’t falter as he zips her into it. It does, however, increase when he steps back to look at her.

“You look amazing,” he says.

“Should I do something with my hair?” She can feel the band of sweat that built up under the cap during the ceremony, but it doesn’t feel like her hair was flattened in the heat.

“I’m really not the one to ask about that.” But he does reach out and smooth a few pieces down. “There.”

Mattie remembers something Caitlin told her this morning, as she was helping her with her makeup.

“I’m supposed to change my lipstick,” she says. She runs her tongue over her lips, checking if the lipstick Caitlin had told her was natural-coloured is still there. It’s mostly gone, she can only taste some lingering remnants, so she grabs the one she’s been told is darker-coloured, and puts it on. “How does that look?”

“Just a sec,” Foggy says, and he grabs a tissue and scrapes at the edges of her lips. “All done. You look hot, kitten.”

“I don’t think you’re quite objective about that anymore.”

“Never was.” That makes her smile. “Ready to go schmooze?”

“Let’s do it.”

In celebration of the Columbia Club’s reopening after the post-Battle of New York reconstruction, several of the Columbia Law alumni are hosting a cocktail reception for the new graduates. It’s a stiflingly classy affair, Mattie can tell as they walk in. There’s a pianist in the corner. She can smell hors d’oeuvres being laid out, and champagne being poured. She can hear Marci’s laugh, the high, careful one she uses when she’s trying to be charming, not the hearty one that comes from her gut that Mattie would hear when Marci was Foggy’s girlfriend.

“OK, there’s the bar to our left, and a buffet table just past it,” Foggy starts automatically. “Oh, guess you knew that,” he finishes quietly.

“It’s crowded,” Mattie says. “I…wouldn’t mind a bit of hand-holding.”

“Well, there’s a whole bunch of people here already, uh, Dev and Andy are over to our right, they’re talking to some old guy, and I can see Marci, she’s cornered somebody over by the piano. You can hear the piano, right?”

“Yeah, I can hear the piano.”

“God, I think they’re actually going to try to get people to dance.”

“Is that a thing that actually happens?”

“Apparently at the Columbia Club, yes. Well, where to, boss?”

“Bar first.”

Armed with champagne, Foggy and Mattie make the rounds, greeting their friends, and making small talk with the alumni who buttonhole them. Foggy is great at that last part, much better than Mattie, and soon Mattie’s purse is filling up with business cards.

By the end of the second glass of champagne, Mattie is forced to admit, “My shoes are killing me.” She can take broken bones and any number of punches, but three-inch heels will be her downfall.

“Want to sit down?”

“Yeah.”

“OK.” There aren’t many tables scattered around the room, but Foggy guides her to two empty seats at a table for four. “Mind if we join you?”

“Please,” says the man. Older, late sixties if she had to guess, with a good heart but bad joints, and a recent hip surgery. The woman next to him is the same age and smells of perfumed lotion. “Barry Wheeler, class of ‘69,” says the man, holding out his hand.

“Foggy Nelson,” says Foggy, taking it. “Uh, class of 2014, and this is the valedictorian of 2014 -“

“Normally I just go by Mattie Murdock,” Mattie says, smiling. She holds out her hand, and Barry takes it.

“I’m Pat, Barry’s wife,” says the woman, laying her hand on Mattie’s arm. “I didn’t go to Columbia Law.”

“She’s a Barnard girl,” says Barry fondly.

“What did you take?” says Mattie.

“Criminology,” says Pat, and that hits something in Mattie’s memory from undergrad.

“Wait, Pat Wheeler? I think I’ve read some of your articles.”

Pat and Barry chuckle politely.

“Probably,” says Barry proudly. “She does run the institute over at ESU.”

“Well, it’s a pleasure,” says Mattie, offering Pat her hand. Pat shakes it.

“We should be the ones congratulating you today,” says Pat. “And did he say that you were the valedictorian?”

“Yup!” says Foggy. “Summa cum laude right here.” His hand slides over her shoulder and down her back, resting at the base of her spine.

“That’s quite an accomplishment,” says Barry.

“Damn right,” says Foggy, leaning in to her.

“You can stop anytime,” says Mattie, squeezing his thigh as a warning.

“Well, congratulations, both of you,” says Barry, holding up his glass. Pat does the same.

“They’re holding up their glasses,” says Foggy to Mattie.

“Oh.” She holds up her glass, and they clink theirs against hers.

“So…class of ’69?” says Foggy.

“That’s right,” says Barry.

“So that means you were here for the protests in ’68?”

“Mm-hmm. Took part in a few, myself.”

“Were you in the Low Library?” asks Mattie, a little excited. The protests of ’68 are legendary at Columbia.

“I wasn’t part of the occupation, no. But there were a lot of protests outside in support of them.”

“What was it like?”

“Hmm.” Barry turns his head to Pat, who shrugs. “Did you two go down to Occupy Wall Street when it was still there?”

“Yeah,” Foggy says. “We didn’t camp out down there, but we went down a few times.”

“After I went down the first time, I remember I came back, and I told Pat, that it reminded me of ’68, that feeling that something was shifting, that we were coming together.”

“Occupy Wall Street didn’t make much of a difference,” says Mattie glumly.

“We didn’t think we made much a difference when the occupation ended in ’68,” says Pat. “Give it time, and you’ll see.”

Over in the corner, the pianist starts playing “Something” by the Beatles. Miraculously (or perhaps thanks to the free champagne), some people are actually dancing. Barry and Pat share a laugh.

“Sorry,” says Pat. “Barry and I have a bit of a joke about this song.”

“I’m sure they’re not interested -“ Barry starts.

“Barry wanted to propose to me, and he tried to set the mood by playing this song. Except his record was scratched, and it was stuck on “Come Together” instead. So the poor man was waiting for the song to change, and it kept skipping back to the line about toejam football.” They all laugh. “But he turned it off and proposed anyway, and I’ve loved this song for that ever since.”

Mattie has to keep herself from saying “aww.”

“Well, honey,” says Barry, “I’d ask you to dance, but…” He makes a vague gesture toward his side, and Mattie thinks he must be referring to his hip.

“Oh, hell, I’ll ask you to dance if you want,” says Foggy.

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” says Pat. “Take your girl here for a spin.”

“Not me,” says Mattie, holding up her hands. “I’m pretty terrible at it. For obvious reasons.”

So Foggy takes Pat to the tiny dance floor in front of the piano, and Mattie can hear him telling Pat how they met. Barry waves down a server carrying a tray of champagne.

“Would you like another drink?” he asks.

“Yes, thanks.”

Barry puts down the flute in front of her hand, and gently places her fingertips on the base.

“So, what did you do after Columbia?” asks Mattie.

“I worked for the ACLU, mostly with the Women’s Rights Project.”

Mattie perks up at that. “Any cases I would know?”

“None of the really big ones. I was a bit of a workhorse for them, nothing too flashy.”

And Mattie can’t help herself. “Did you work for Ruth Bader Ginsburg?”

Barry chuckles. “You kids and your celebrities. Kim Kardashian, Ruth Bader Ginsburg…” Mattie laughs. “I didn’t work for her, but I met her a few times. She’s a lovely lady, and one of the sharpest people you’ll ever meet.”

“God, I’d love to meet her.”

“Is that what you’re interested in? Civil rights?”

“Defense, actually.”

“Hm,” says Barry non-commitally. “So what’s your plan after the bar? I’m assuming you’re sitting the bar in July.”

“Yeah. I’ve got a few applications for internships out. Mostly corporate law, to be honest.”

“Like where?”

“Landman & Zack’s the favorite right now.”

“Doesn’t seem like the obvious path for a defense attorney,” says Barry carefully.

Mattie sighs. “It’s not. But the job market’s shit right now, so, gotta take what you can get.”

“I’ll tell you a secret,” says Barry. “The job market’s always going to be shit, for one reason or another. Don’t let that get in the way of what you want, and don’t listen to that voice that tells you to settle for working for someone like Parrish Landman just because it’s practical. The one who gets excited about Ruth Bader Ginsburg? That’s the one to listen to.” Mattie doesn’t know how to respond, so she takes a drink of champagne. “Sorry,” Barry says. “I’m just a grumpy old lefty trying to tell a bright young woman what to do. Don’t listen to me.”

“It wasn’t bad advice,” says Mattie.

“You’re just being polite.” Barry seems to be digging around in his jacket pocket. “Here.” He slides a card across the table to rest under her hand. “It’s my card. I, uh, don’t have anything in braille -“

“Foggy can read it to me.”

“But, if you ever want to have a coffee, give me a call.”

“Thank you,” she says sincerely, and she slips the card into her purse as Foggy and Pat return to the table.

“Hey,” Foggy says, leaning over her with his hand on her shoulder. “Apparently Marci’s got a VIP room reserved at a bar near here, you want to go?”

“Sure. We’ve got some more drinks to collect on, don’t we?”

“We do indeed!” He helps her to her feet. “Very nice to meet both of you,” he says, shaking Barry and Pat’s hands.

“Well, thank you for the dance,” says Pat.

“Hey, thank you!”

Mattie holds out her hand, and Barry gives it a firm shake. “I mean it, give me a call anytime.”

“I will,” says Mattie. She shakes Pat’s hand, and then Foggy leads her away.

“You know, that’s going to be us in forty years,” he says. “We’re going to be here regaling the young whippersnappers about that time New York was invaded by aliens when we were in law school.”

“And still in love,” Mattie says.

“Yeah, still in love.” Mattie feels like her her heart is swelling in her chest and heating her skin from the inside.

The bar is only a few blocks away from the Columbia Club, so they walk with their friends, Marci leading the way. It’s loud inside, and it smells of alcohol, sweat, and a perfume counter’s worth of different scents, but the VIP room is a little quieter and the air is a little fresher. There’s a line of shots on the bar waiting for them (high-end tequila), and they all have one with a shout of “Class of ’14!” Mattie and Foggy drink for free all night, as they collect on the drinks from their friends’ bet. Sometime around the third (or possibly fourth) drink, “Gold Lion” comes over the speakers, and Foggy drags Mattie up to dance, and she doesn’t argue, just drapes her arms around his neck and lets his hands on her hips move her to the rhythm of Karen O’s orgasmic wailing. He pulls her close until they’re grinding against each other, foreheads pressed together and lips an inch apart.

The last thing Mattie remembers about the night is Marci making a (drunken) speech about how she’ll miss them all, and then she leads a toast to “whatever the future brings.” Mattie’s not even sure how they get back to Lionsgate, but they wake up in their underwear with their clothes dumped on the floor, and it may be ironic that the first thing the future brought was a raging hangover, but it’s also…rather appropriate.

Chapter Text

November, Sophomore year

As long as Foggy can remember, Bess Mahoney has been single. Brett’s father was never in the picture, and, to Foggy’s childhood eyes, Bess devoted her life to raising Brett and to her career as a social worker.

So when Foggy runs into Brett on his way to get groceries for Thanksgiving dinner, and he asks how Bess is doing, and Brett says, “Oh, you didn’t hear? She started seeing someone,” Foggy is not so much surprised as he has to completely change his perception of Bess.

“Oh, uh, wow, that’s great,” stammers Foggy.

“Yeah. I mean, I’m not gonna lie, I had a bit of a hard time wrapping my head around it, but she’s happy, you know?”

“Yeah, and that’s what matters, right?”

“Right.”

And then Foggy has to run, because his mom is waiting on those yams.

He forgets about the run-in with Brett as soon as he get home, since his mom and Candace are fighting in the kitchen, his dad is staying out of it in the living room, and Mattie is hiding in his room.

“What’s going on?” he asks as soon as he finds her.

“Something about Candace wanting to go to her boyfriend’s? I’m not really sure, they’ve been fighting over about five different things.” She winces as Candace shouts something particularly loud about “You treat Mattie better than you treat me!”

“Oh, uh, please don’t listen to that,” says Foggy.

“Don’t worry, I’m not,” Mattie says.

So Foggy rolls his eyes and joins Mattie on his bed, booting up his laptop so they can watch something together and try to drown out the noise.

Foggy doesn’t think about Bess Mahoney’s love life for the next few weeks, until he’s on the phone with his mom, who is telling him about Brett’s new girlfriend.

“She’s a cop, too, but she’s very…intense.”

“Intense how?”

“Oh, they were only there for a few minutes, but I swear she only used sentences with three words or less. And she had this scowl…”

“I bet she was just nervous about meeting Bess.”

His mom laughs. “I don’t think that girl ever gets nervous. But at least Brett got to meet Lee, finally.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s Bess’ boyfriend, right?”

“Girlfriend, Foggy.”

And Foggy undergoes another titanic shift in his perception of Bess Mahoney.

“Wait - what?”

“Brett didn’t mention that?”

“No…no, he didn’t.”

“They’ve been going out for a few months, now. Lee just transferred to the hospital - she’s a doctor - she’s really quite lovely. I’ve been teasing Bess for being a cougar.”

“Bess is a lesbian?” says Foggy, because his brain is only just catching up.

“Yes, Foggy,” says his mom patiently. “Has been for a while.”

“It’s just - I didn’t -“

“Well, she wasn’t really comfortable being out until Brett got older, and Lee’s the first woman I’ve seen her be really serious with.”

Foggy remembers Brett saying “I had a bit of a hard time wrapping my head around it,” and realizes what Brett had actually meant.

“That’s great. Tell Bess I’m happy for her,” Foggy says.

“I will.”

Foggy hears Mattie’s key in the door.

“OK, I should go. Bye, Mom.”

“Bye, Foggy.”

As Mattie is putting away her cane by the door, Foggy says, “Did you know Bess Mahoney is a lesbian?”

“Uh, yeah?”

“Dammit, how did you know?”

“Your mom mentioned her girlfriend while we were over at Thanksgiving? You didn’t notice that your mom was talking about Bess dating Lee?”

“I thought it was a guy named Lee!”

“So? What does it matter?”

And she’s right, it doesn’t matter. Except that Foggy’s mental image of Bess, the tough, maternal figure who always smelled of cigars and hospitals, never allowed for a romantic life, let alone a lesbian one.

So when Bess, Brett, and Lee arrive at the annual Nelson New Year’s party, Foggy is expecting Bess to be…different. Someone else, someone new. He doesn’t expect to recognize her. But she’s just the same, and when she hugs Foggy hello, he can smell cigars and disinfectant in a way that throws him back to his childhood, being babysat in her apartment. She smiles at Lee with the same smile that he’s known for years, and she throws her head back and laughs at Lee’s quips with the same easy laugh.

Brett is unaccompanied, and Bess frowns disapprovingly when he explains to Foggy that “Rosa doesn’t really do family gatherings.” It’s the same frown Foggy has seen ever since Brett started dating, whenever Bess thought a girl wasn’t good enough for him.

But when midnight strikes, and Foggy kisses Mattie quickly, he glances over to see Bess and Lee sharing a much sweeter kiss. And he realizes that it’s not Bess who has changed at all; it’s just that he never saw the whole person until now.

Chapter Text

December, Junior year

They should have left earlier.

The forecast had said the blizzard would hit in the evening, and the snow hadn’t looked too bad from the Nelsons’ apartment (according to Foggy), so Anna and Edward had insisted that Mattie and Foggy stay for dinner (assuming, correctly, that they didn’t have anything to eat at home). But the subway up to Harlem had been delayed, and now they have to fight through the blizzard to get home from the station.

And Mattie hadn’t told Foggy how much she hates being out in the snow. The dense flakes overload her radar sense, the cold dampens smells and tastes and numbs her skin, and the soft layer of snow muffles any sound that isn’t whipped away by the wind until the world on fire barely reaches two feet around her. And even without her hyper-senses, her cane gets stuck in the thick snow underfoot, so she can’t even move around like a normal blind person.

Snowflakes that stay on her nose and eyelashes can go to hell, as far as she’s concerned.

“It’s actually really pretty, like something out of a movie -“ Foggy is saying, but he breaks off. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” She’s never been one for claustrophobia, since she can always tell what’s on the other side of a wall, but now she feels trapped and confined. She tightens her grip on Foggy’s arm; he’s almost the only thing she can make out.

“You don’t -”

“It’s nothing.” She holds up her cane. “This just isn’t much use in the snow, so…”

“Right.” He adjusts the bag on his shoulder, and brings his other hand around to cover hers. “You want to get a cab?”

They can’t afford to take cabs, not when they’re only a few blocks away from home.

“Not worth it,” she says. “Let’s just get home.”

So they walk, and Mattie tries not to think about the snow sucking at her boots like quicksand, or the wind stinging her face, or the dampness in her hair. She slips and stumbles at least twice every block, and she can hear Stick’s derisive snort her head. “It’s winter, Mattie, you’d think it had never happened before,” he says. Foggy holds onto her, and she tries to focus on him. His heartbeat is muffled under so many layers of clothes, but she clings to the sound. It’s what home sounds like.

She loses track of how many blocks they’ve gone, so she has no idea where they are when Foggy pulls her under the overhang of a building’s entrance.

“Mattie, you’re shaking,” he says, voice full of concern. She hears the shift of fabric as he puts his bag down.

“I’m just cold,” she lies, and he pulls her into a bear hug, rubbing her back. She leans her head against his chest, and listens to his heart. “How much farther?”

“Three blocks.” Damn. She’d hoped they’d gotten closer.

“I can make it.”

“You sure? I can try to get a cab -“

“Have you seen any cabs?” she snaps. She hasn’t heard many cars pass them - that, at least, is a sound she can recognize in the snow.

He pauses. “No.”

“Then let’s go.”

He takes her bag from her, and refuses to let her carry it.

She counts the blocks, this time. Three blocks to go, and he’s leading her by the hand, balancing both their bags on his shoulders. Two blocks, and her teeth are chattering. One block, and all she can think of is Foggy’s heartbeat, promising home, home, home.

Then Foggy’s pulling her up the stairs to their building’s door, and she leans against the wall as he fumbles with his keys. She’s useless, can’t even help him open the door, but he just pulls her into the front hall. It’s bliss when he closes the door on the blizzard, and the world on fire springs to life, showing her every last detail of the inside of the building (cooking smells, TV sounds, children fighting, couples making love…). She almost sags to the floor in relief.

“Hey, hey,” comes Foggy’s voice. He’s got his hands on her arms. “What happened out there?”

“Nothing,” she says. “It’s just -“ She waves a vague hand around her face. “Snow’s really hard to - it just makes it really hard to tell what’s going on. I’m fine, really.”

“Yeah,” he says skeptically, but he doesn’t push. He leads the way up the stairs to their apartment, letting her carry her own bag. Once they’re home, Mattie claims the shower, and lets the hot water warm her up. When she emerges from the bathroom, Foggy has changed out of his wet clothes, and has two mugs of hot chocolate sitting on the kitchen counter.

“Thought this was a good time to give Nancy’s hot chocolate mix a try,” he says.

“Good call,” she says.

“Feeling better?”

“Yeah.” She’s worried he’s going to ask more questions, that he’ll start to think that this is a regular thing, her not being able to handle a little snow.

Instead, he just says, “You want to put on one of those audiobooks you got?” Foggy’s dad had given her a small collection of audiobooks for Christmas.

So they curl up on their couch, and she falls asleep on Foggy’s shoulder. When she wakes up in the morning, she’s still on the couch, and he’s put a blanket over her and put her glasses on the coffee table. The snow outside is thick and heavy, but inside, the apartment is warm and feels like home.

Chapter Text

August, Hell’s Kitchen

After the first night she lets the devil out, she waits for him to leave.

She waits for the “I can’t do this,” the “You’re not who I thought you were,” the “I can’t be a part of this.”

She waits for the “I can’t love someone like you.” Because how could he?

And she knows it’s coming. She knew it was coming since the day they met; she’s been living on borrowed time for eight years, and she’s held onto to every second of it because she never knew when it was going to happen. She didn’t tell him she loved him for years because she knew it would hurt more when he left. She thought he was leaving when she told him about her senses, but he’d stayed, and she’d let her guard down, and she’d let herself believe that there was a future for the two of them.

She should have known better.

She should have known that love doesn’t change anything. Her mother had loved her, her dad had said, but she’d left before Mattie could know if that was true. Her dad had loved her, and he’d died trying to make her proud. Elektra had loved her, and she’d left without a word. And Stick had taught her (but she apparently hadn’t learned) that loving someone means jack shit.

She should have known that the more layers Foggy peeled back from her, the closer he came to finding out the truth about her, to finding out about the parts of her she knew he couldn’t love. She should have known that the closer he got to her, the closer he came to leaving.

She’d let him in anyway, because she’s selfish and stupid when it comes to him. Because she’d wanted him so badly that she was willing to let them both get hurt in the long run.

And she doesn’t know why he’s stayed for so long; she doesn’t know why he loves her. He’s all brightness and optimism and joy, and she’s anything but. She’s shadows and blood, red in tooth and claw, with the devil curled around her heart, and he’s seen that now, so why is he still here?

She listens to him snoring, and knows what she should say.

She should say, “I understand.”

She should say, “You don’t owe me anything.”

She should say, “You’re better off without me.”

She sits on the bed with her knees pulled up against her chest, and runs her hand over his hair. She misses his long hair, sometimes. He shifts, not fully waking, and his hand reaches out to rest on her ankle. She takes it between her own.

She should tell him she loves him, but that he should get as far away from her as possible. She should tell him that she knows that she’s crossed a line, that he shouldn’t have to cross it with her, and that he should protect himself. She should tell him he deserves better than her.

Instead, she whispers, “Please. Just…give me more time.”

Chapter Text

May, 1L

Hell’s Kitchen smells like death. There are other odors under it; smoke and burnt materials from broken gas lines and lightning strikes, concrete dust still hanging in the air, sewer-stench from broken mains. But the smell of death hangs over everything. It’s only been three days since the battle, and the responders are still pulling bodies both human and alien from the wreckage of Midtown.

Mattie wishes she didn’t know what death smells like.

“What does it look like?” she asks Foggy as they pick their way down 10th. They’d had to get off the subway at Columbus Circle, since the subway is still closed below 55th.

“It’s…uh…” Foggy sounds like he’s having trouble putting the words together. “When you were a kid, did you ever see pictures of London during the Blitz?”

“Yeah, actually, I did.”

“Really?”

She shrugs. “I liked the Narnia books, so I got into World War Two stuff.”

“Oh. Well, it basically looks like that. Exactly like that, actually.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah,” he says quietly.

The concrete dust feels like a gummy paste in the back of her throat, so she wraps the scarf she brought around her nose and mouth. She hears the rustle of fabric as Foggy does the same.

They make it to the Nelsons’ apartment eventually. Foggy takes the clearest path, which tends to be right in the middle of the street, and they occasionally have to hurry out of the way of emergency vehicles. Once they arrive, Mattie takes in the damage to Edward and Anna’s apartment. It’s mostly broken windows, which have been boarded over, but she can’t hear the hum of electricity, and instead smells candles, so the power must still be out.

“At least we still have water,” says Edward cheerfully.

Foggy is whisked away by his father and uncles to Edward’s hardware store. The building was apparently crushed by an alien leviathan, and has been condemned, so the Nelsons are trying to salvage as much as they can from the wreckage. Anna can’t help because of her broken ankle, and the Nelsons refuse to even consider letting Mattie into the worksite, so she stays with Anna in the apartment, and helps her coordinate between Edward’s other three stores, who have to compensate for the closing of the Midtown West location.

Late into the afternoon, Anna swears as her call is cut off.

“My phone’s dead,” she says.

“Do you want to use mine?” offers Mattie.

“I’m not sure I can use yours, with all the…” Accessibility features, is what she wants to say.

“How have you been charging your phone?”

“There’s a bodega down on 38th that’s got a power bar rigged up outside. Really nice of them, I think.”

“Why don’t I take your phone down there and charge it for you?”

“I’m not going to send you out there on your own. It’s all right - I’ll wait for the boys to get back, and one of them can take it down.”

“I’ll be fine. And I wouldn’t mind getting some air.” With the boarded-up windows, the apartment has no airflow, and the heat of May is building up inside.

“Are you sure? Because there’s a lot of debris out there -“

“I can handle it,” Mattie says, trying to sound reassuring. “I’ve got my cane, and I know where I’m going. I’ll call Foggy if I get into trouble.”

“Be careful!” calls Anna as Mattie leaves the apartment.

She doesn’t go down to the street. Instead, she folds up her cane and tucks it into the back of her jeans, wraps her scarf around the lower half of her face, and takes the stairs up to the roof. Outside, there’s a breeze, which is a relief, even if it carries the scent of devastation with it. She stands still on the roof for a moment, feeling the sun and the wind against her skin. And then she runs.

It’s been months since she’s been able to have a real run. She usually takes one before heading into Fogwell’s, but her time has been so limited with school recently that she’s either skipped them or cut them short. She feels herself smile under the scarf as she dives across the rooftops.

The route down to the bodega on 38th takes her onto a familiar roof. She pauses, not sure whether she should keep going or not, then decides that Anna won’t mind if she takes a moment to look in on them. She can tell that the building sustained damage, and like most buildings in the area, she can’t hear the telltale hum of electricity or the gurgling of water in the pipes, so they’re without power and water.

Even five years later, she knows the layout of the rooftop perfectly, and she doesn’t have to think to find the door down into St Agnes’ Orphanage.

The building smells the same, under the layer of dust that permeates the air. No smell of death, thank God, but there’s an odd draft, like all the windows at one end have been thrown open. She can’t hear any kids around, but it’s a Monday, so they might still be at school.

She makes her way down to the ground floor, and she hears someone in the front hall who stops and sees her on the stairs.

“Holy - is that you, Mattie?” says the male voice. It’s a teenager, but she doesn’t recognize him.

“Yeah, it’s me,” she says. “Who are you?”

“It’s me! Ramon!”

“Ramon? What the hell happened to your voice?” she says, grinning.

“Puberty?” he says. Puberty indeed - he’s shot up so that he’s taller than her now, and she has a hard time putting him together with her memory of an eleven-year-old who’d barely come up to her shoulder. “What are you doing here?”

“Just checking in, making sure you guys are OK. Shouldn’t you be in school?”

“Took the day off to help Sister Magdalena. Half the kids at school aren’t coming in today anyway.” He smells of dust and sweat, so he must be helping with the damaged part of the building. “Were you looking for Sister Magdalena?”

“Yeah, actually.”

“Here, c’mon, I’ll show you.” He waves at her and turns away, before stopping. “Sorry, I forgot.”

“It’s been a while,” she says gently. She holds out her hand, and he takes it, wrapping it around his elbow. They’d never been particular friends when she’d been here, too many years between them, but all the St Agnes’ kids had known how to lead her around. He takes her out the front door and around the side of the building, where she can hear Sister Magdalena sifting through rubble.

“Hey, Sister M! Look who I found!” calls Ramon.

“Is that - Mattie Murdock?” says Sister Magdalena.

“Hi,” Mattie says.

“Oh! It’s good to see you, you look wonderful,” says Sister Magdalena, brushing off her hands. “But what are you doing back here?”

“I was in the area. My friend - his parents live around here, so we came down to help them out, and I thought - I wanted to see if you were all OK.”

“That’s very kind of you, Mattie. Yes, we’re all fine, thank you for asking.” Sister Magdalena’s heart is beating with worry, and even though she’s not lying, she’s not telling the whole truth.

“Did you guys take damage? Ramon said he was helping you -“

“Oh, yes!” says Sister Magdalena with a little laugh. “One of those - I don’t know - alien flying motorcycle things crashed into the corner of the building.” She’s waving her arm behind her, probably indicating the damage.

“So did Thor’s hammer!” says Ramon.

“We don’t know that, Ramon,” says Sister Magdalena severely.

“Sister Cristina said she saw it!”

“Sister Cristina isn’t sure that’s what she saw,” says Sister Magdalena in that tone that makes Mattie automatically freeze. “Anyway, the corner’s collapsed, but thankfully the children were all at school, so no-one was hurt. We’re just trying to see if there’s anything we can salvage.”

“Have you lost power?”

“Yes, and water.”

“You’re not all staying here, are you?”

“No, youngest ones and Sister Cristina are staying with Father Lantom at the rectory - he has power - and the schools have been kind enough to set up the older ones there.”

“We’re sleeping in the gym down at Xavier,” supplies Ramon.

“That…sounds awful,” says Mattie.

“I’m sure it won’t be for long,” says Sister Magdalena, and her heart says lie.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“We won’t say no to more blankets and pillows. Or non-perishable foods.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” The school year is ending in a week, so maybe Mattie can convince Student Housing to donate used blankets, or something.

Or something.

“Wait - I…I can’t promise anything, but why don’t I talk to Student Housing up at Columbia? I mean - we might be able to convince them to take all of you in, and they’ll have plenty of room once finals are over.”

“That would be -“

“Hey, anything’s better than sleeping in the gym,” interrupts Ramon.

“Yes,” says Sister Magdalena wearily, and Mattie realizes that she must be camping out in one of the schools, too. “But I don't want to put you out, Mattie -“

“You won’t be. You took care of me for eight years, the least I can do is see if we can make this work.”

So she takes the details from Sister Magdalena, and Ramon leads her back to the front door. He gives her an awkward hug goodbye, and bolts back to Sister Magdalena. Mattie smiles as she pulls up her scarf, unfolds her cane and picks her way along the sidewalk to the nearest alley.

Once she finds the bodega, she sits herself down on the curb next to the power bar they’ve helpfully put up on the sidewalk, and plugs in Anna’s phone. She sets a timer on her own phone for 30 minutes (which should give Anna plenty of battery life), and finds the number for Student Housing online. When she calls, she gets the usual administrator, and once she explains the situation, she’s transferred to the office manager, then to the director. The director actually sounds sympathetic, and while she doesn’t offer anything definite, she takes Sister Magdalena’s contact information, and promises to follow up with her.

The timer rang while she was talking to the director, so once she hangs up, she unplugs Anna’s phone, and heads back up towards the Nelsons’. She takes a different route this time, and makes the other stop she’d been thinking of.

She drops down into the alley behind Fogwell’s, and tries the back door. It’s locked, which isn’t unusual. She listens, and there’s no sound of activity inside, and no electricity or water either. She makes her way around until she’s at the front door, but she can’t hear any damage to the building, which is a relief. The front door is locked, too, and when she tries it, she hears the faint rustling of paper taped to the glass on the inside. It must be a notice that they’re closed. She presses a hand to the glass, and thinks of Roger. It was only a week ago that she’d asked him for a drink. She’ll come back in a week. Maybe he’ll be here, like he said.

Or maybe he won’t. The battle has turned everything upside down, and there’s no way to know. She hopes he’s all right.

She’s only a few blocks away from the Nelsons’ apartment, so she stays on the street level, and she meets Foggy and Edward as they’re unlocking the door.

“Hey, where were you?” says Foggy.

“Charging your mom’s phone,” says Mattie.

“You went out on your own?”

Mattie rolls her eyes. “Yes, Foggy, I am capable of functioning on my own.”

“It’s not - I didn’t -“ But Mattie is smiling, and Foggy stops trying to defend himself. “I worry about you, is all.”

“I know,” she says brightly as she sweeps past him to give Anna her phone back.

“Seriously, you could have fallen down a manhole, or something,” Foggy says mildly.

“Foggy, if I ever fall down a manhole, you will be the first to know.”

“Thank you, Mattie,” says Anna, taking her phone from Mattie’s hand. “Foggy, I’m sure Mattie can take care of herself.”

And Foggy must know he’s on dangerous ground, so he doesn’t say anything. Mattie gives him a smug smile, just to make sure he knows she’s won.

“Right, well…” says Edward, “did you two want to take anything from the freezer?”

They take a lot of the contents of the freezer with them back up to Morningside Heights. Mostly ice cream and frozen meat (courtesy of Foggy’s Uncle Terry, the butcher). Neither of them are much for cooking, but Foggy decides to try to fry two of the steaks. After he’s cleaned himself up, he starts working in the kitchen, and Mattie hits the shower. She emerges to the scent of steak and butter, but she can still smell death, lingering in her nose.

Chapter Text

September, Freshman year

For everyone else, it’s a normal day: early September weather, maybe a little cooler than usual, nothing remarkable. But when Mattie steps out the door at St Agnes’, everything feels different. Smells are stronger, sounds are sharper, and while it might still be the Midtown Manhattan she grew up in, everything is beautiful, and she wonders if this is what freedom tastes like.

She’s going to Columbia.

She’s going to Columbia.

She’s going to Columbia.

She’s got a duffel bag with all her worldly possessions slung over her shoulder, and her acceptance letter in the pocket, and she can’t stop smiling. She can hear her own heart beating a bright tattoo, and her father’s voice saying, “Go hit the books,” and she’s on her way.

It’s only a few blocks to the subway station on 50th (easier to navigate than the Times Square station, even if that one’s technically closer), and she knows the way there, even if she couldn’t hear the squeal of the trains underfoot. When she’d gone uptown for her interview, she’d memorized which entrance was the one for the northbound trains, and the MTA worker in the booth ignores her as she swipes through the turnstile. The underground air smells of metal and recirculation, rats and urine, and the press of bodies on the platform don’t help, but she focuses the way Stick taught her, filtering out anything that’s not relevant, and soon it’s just another layer in the world on fire.

In the rush hour chaos, someone offers her a seat, and she takes it gratefully, sliding her bag between her feet. Inside the train, the vibrations make the shapes around her stand out in the world on fire, to the point that she can almost make out the shapes of the faces of the people around her. It’s not how she usually perceives the world, and it’s a little unnerving. Generally, she doesn’t like crowds - too much stimulus - but right now, she’s not asked to do anything, just sit and listen for her stop, so she just grips her cane and tightens her feet around her bag, and tries to focus on the music playing on different headphones. The one she likes best is the girl standing halfway down the car, listening to Green Day’s American Idiot.

Around 96th, while “She’s a Rebel” is playing, Mattie hears a heartbeat spike close to her. Pulling herself out of the musical fog, she scans the car to find the reason. It’s a woman maybe ten years older than her, her heart pounding and her adrenaline soaring, standing close to the doors. At first, Mattie can’t tell why this woman has started panicking, then she realizes that the crowd has backed her up against the man behind her, who is doing absolutely nothing to give her more space. Mattie can smell his arousal from here, and even if he hasn’t grabbed the woman aggressively, Mattie can tell that he’s suggestively pressed himself against her. The woman tries to inch away, and the man follows her. Mattie feels her hands tighten around her cane, but there’s nothing she can do, not from here.

The woman gets off at 110th, and Mattie’s stop is next. She inches her way through the crowd, and most people are kind enough to get out of her way, until she’s in the middle of the car, between the two doors. The crowd shifts, and Mattie smells the creep beside her. And she smiles. The doors open, and the crowd surges out of the train, and as soon as Mattie is on the platform, she turns sharply, whacking the guy with her heavy bag. He swears at her, and she turns again, this time stepping on his foot and sweeping at his ankles with her cane. He hops on one foot, calling her a stupid bitch, and she flips him the bird over her shoulder as she walks away smiling.

She’d programmed the address of the Office of Disability Services into her new phone, so she pulls up her map app as she emerges from the subway station, and lets the cool voice guide her through Columbia’s campus. The world on fire softens back to normal, that eerie sharpness she’d felt on the train disappearing from her radar sense, and the fresh air is a relief. Columbia smells much nicer than she’s used to; trees, and old stone, and freshly mown grass. She thinks she’s going to like it here.

Once she finds Disability Services in Lerner Hall, a woman with a Minnesota accent greets her and introduces herself as Sarah.

“We’ve got an RA coming from Carman, and they’ll take you over,” she says perkily. She presses braille-printed pamphlets into Mattie’s hands about the services offered by the university, along with her business card, and assures Mattie that “if you need anything at all, just call me.”

The RA is a guy named Nate who seems confused when Sarah tries to instruct him how to lead Mattie correctly. Once they’re out the door, Mattie drops his arm, and says she’ll follow him instead. He seems relieved, and offers to carry her bag for her instead.

“So…can I ask you a personal question?” he says.

“I wasn’t born blind,” she says. It’s the first thing anyone asks. Or the second, if the first thing is “You’re blind, right?”

“Right. Guess a lot of people ask that?”

“Pretty much.”

Fortunately, Carman is only one building over from Lerner, so the awkward conversation is cut short.

“OK,” Nate says, handing her a key, “you’re in 310, which is on the -“

“Third floor?”

“Right on. Elevator’s here.” He stops and presses the button. “Trust me, you’re gonna love it here. We’ve got a bit of a reputation as the party hall, it’s pretty sweet, just really cool people.”

She smiles. “Sounds great.” That’s what she’s here for: trying new things (and getting a degree).

Nate takes her up to the third floor, and the elevator opens on barely-controlled chaos. There are bags and boxes being dragged and carried up and down the hall, students and their parents bickering or saying goodbye, roommates meeting for the first time. Mattie can hear six different songs playing from various rooms.

“OK, 310’s just up here on the left -“ Nate says when he’s interrupted.

“Excuse me, are you an RA?” comes an irate voice.

“Uh, yeah?”

“My daughter has very sensitive allergies…” the mother starts complaining about her daughter’s roommate, and when it’s clear that the woman isn’t going to stop to breathe, Mattie puts her hand on Nate’s arm.

“I’ll let you take care of that, thanks,” she says.

“Oh, uh, yeah, let me know if you need anything,” he says, passing her back her bag as the mother continues on her diatribe.

Mattie tries to count the doors until she picks the one that most logically would be 310. It’s open, and she can hear Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” playing, which she hasn’t heard since middle school. She can also hear a guy inside, so maybe this isn’t 310? Unless Columbia has some very modern ideas about roommate assignments. She knocks anyway, because maybe this guy can point her in the right direction.

“What?” comes the voice from inside.

“Excuse me, is this room 310?”

Chapter Text

May, St Agnes’ Orphanage

When Sister Magdalena catches Mattie and Skye together, there’s a moment when Mattie thinks, “Well, at least it isn’t Sister Cristina.” Sister Magdalena is not only in charge at St Agnes’, but she’s also a lot less…dogmatic in her Catholicism.

So Mattie tugs down her shirt as Skye steps away from her, and there’s a soft rustling of fabric as Sister Magdalena crosses her arms and waits for them to make themselves presentable.

“Both of you, my office,” she says sharply before walking away.

“Shit,” says Skye.

“Yeah,” says Mattie.

Skye’s heart is racing as they approach Sister Magdalena’s office, and Mattie’s stomach is in knots, but Sister Magdalena is calm and cool.

“Have a seat, both of you,” she says, and Skye puts Mattie’s hand on the back of a chair. There’s an uncomfortable silence. “I trust I don’t have to explain to you two why you’re here?” Neither of the girls say anything. Sister Magdalena sighs. “You do realize that we have rules here specifically about this sort of thing?”

“Technically, we weren’t breaking any rules,” says Mattie before she can think. It’s true; the rules are that the boys and girls aren’t allowed on each others’ floors. There’s nothing specific about making out in the kitchen. Let alone girls sneaking into each others’ rooms (not that Sister Magdalena knows about that part).

“Do I have to explain about the concept of the spirit of the law, Matilda?”

“No.”

“Or about health and safety rules in the kitchen?” There’s a note of amusement under Sister Magdalena’s voice, and Mattie thinks that they might be able to get out of here without a lecture on the sins of homosexuality.

“Really?” says Skye. “We weren’t doing anything…you know…“

“It is still a food preparation area, Mary Sue,” says Sister Magdalena, and Skye sighs. She hates the name Mary Sue. “Can I be assured that this will not happen again?”

“Yes,” says Mattie quietly. “This” could certainly be interpreted to mean “getting caught.”

“Yes,” lies Skye.

“Good,” says Sister Magdalena, and Mattie knows she knows they’re lying. “Both of you are on kitchen duty for the next two weeks. Separately. Matilda, you’ll be in on Tuesdays and weekends, and Mary Sue, you’ll take Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.” That seems to be the end of it, so Skye stands up. “Wait a minute. I also want to tell you about Father Tim’s Catholic LGBT youth group.”

“His what?” says Mattie. Father Tim’s the new priest; he’s young and most of the girls at St Agnes’ have mentioned that he’s good-looking, too. Mattie likes his Australian accent, at least.

“Catholic LGBT youth group. He’s been running it for a few months, and I think that both of you could benefit from meeting more young people like yourselves.”

“Don’t you mean sinners like ourselves?” says Skye.

Sister Magdalena doesn’t rise to the bait. “I mean lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people,” she says severely and precisely. “Father Tim is very concerned about inclusivity. I’m sure it would be good for both of you to be able to talk about these issues. They meet on Thursday evenings at the church.”

Mattie’s about to say that she doesn’t need someone to talk to about her “issues.” Her sexuality is her own business (Skye’s the first girl she’s kissed, but…), and she can figure out the rest on her own. She’s read enough books, and she has the internet. Besides, part of her is bristling at the thought that Sister Magdalena thinks she can tell Mattie what’s best for her.

Except Skye says, “We’ll go.”

Mattie holds back a “We will?”

“Good,” says Sister Magdalena. The girls don’t move, and Mattie’s unsure if they’ve been dismissed. “That’s all.” They bolt.

Halfway up the stairs to the girls’ floor, Mattie stops Skye.

“Why’d you say we’d go to that group? You know it’s going to super-lame.”

“Yeah,” says Skye, “But we’re not going. We just got Thursday nights off, and no-one’s going to know where we are!”

“Oh.” Mattie’s not sure she’s comfortable with that.

“Yeah, ‘oh.’ C’mon, we need to decide what we’re gonna do on Thursday.”

For two weeks, they spend Thursday nights finding a secluded spot and furiously making out. It’s fantastic, and Mattie thinks that if this is sinning, she’s happy to go straight to hell.

The next Wednesday, Mattie is doing her homework in her room when Nora runs by and says that Father Tim is in the dining hall and wants to talk to her. She finds Skye sitting awkwardly with Father Tim, who is drinking a cup of coffee.

“Matilda, how are you?” he says.

“Fine, thanks.” He takes her hand and puts in on the back of a chair, and she sits down.

“So, Sister Magdalena told me to expect you two at the LGBT youth group. Am I going to see you tomorrow evening?”

Busted.

Mattie doesn’t say anything. Neither does Skye.

“All right, I can see what you’re thinking,” says Father Tim. “You both think I’m going to lecture you on sin and hellfire and all that.”

“Well, the Catholic Church does have some very specific views on homosexuality,” says Mattie.

“It is, however, somewhat fuzzier on the subject of kneecaps,” he says brightly. There’s a pause, as if he’s waiting for them to laugh. “Uh, Firefly?”

“What?”

“The TV show?”

“We don’t really have a lot of TV options here,” says Skye.

“And I don’t really watch it anyway,” says Mattie.

“Right. Sorry. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, yes, the Church has a particular stance on homosexuality. I happen to believe that stance is, uh, well, antiquated, and not in keeping with Christ’s teachings of love and acceptance.” He’s still not getting a response from either of them. Mattie might well agree with him, but she’s not going to say it. “Look, I’m not here to judge you, I’m just here to facilitate a conversation between the group members about anything you want to talk about. Anything at all.”

Mattie thinks of all the secrets she’s keeping, everything she buries deep down. It would be nice to talk to someone about them.

But no one can ever know. And she’s fine on her own.

“Thanks, but I think I’ll pass,” she says.

“That’s too bad,” Father Tim says sincerely. “Mary Sue, are you in?”

“No,” Skye says coldly.

“Well, if either of you changes your mind, you know where to find us. Maybe you’d like to come to Pride with us?”

“No, thanks.”

“I don’t do well in crowds,” says Mattie.

“Right. Well, just remember, you’re not alone, and my door is always open.” He pats Mattie’s shoulder as he stands and leaves. She hears some of the girls giggling in the front hall as he greets them by name.

By July, Skye is gone; she leaves just after her sixteenth birthday. Mattie tries to line up some extracurricular activities to do during the summer that will look good on a university application, just like the guidance counselor said. At one point, just after Skye leaves, she considers going to Father Tim’s group, but it’s easier not to. She doesn’t need to talk, despite what Sister Magdalena or Father Tim might think.

She doesn’t need anyone.

Chapter Text

December, Senior year

For most of undergrad, Foggy hadn’t noticed when Mattie slipped away. Well, he had noticed that she wasn’t around for half a day, but he’d never thought that there was some sort of pattern. It wasn’t until the summer after junior year that he’d put it together that she disappeared for half a day, always in July, and came back looking sad and wistful. When he’d worked up the nerve to ask, she’d just said, “It’s my dad’s birthday.”

She didn’t just go to the cemetery on Jack Murdock’s birthday, he noticed. She went when she was feeling stressed, or when something important happened. So when both Mattie and Foggy got their early acceptance to Columbia Law, Foggy took her out to celebrate, and, about three drinks in, asked, “So, are you going to go tell your dad?”

She’d paused, and said, “Yeah, I think I will.”

“Want me to come with?”

She’d taken a drink before answering. “That would be nice.”

So now they’re on the train out to Suncourt Cemetery, the tail ends of their hangovers lingering, and Mattie leans her head on Foggy’s shoulder. She has a bag of apples with her, and Foggy hasn’t asked why yet.

The cemetery’s not a big place, just a little patch of grass in between low-rise buildings. The stones are modest, square pieces, nothing fancy, and Foggy thinks it suits the Murdock family. Mattie knows her way around, and she uses Foggy’s arm to guide him to her dad’s grave.

He fought a good fight.

That’s all the stone says, above Jonathan Murdock’s name and dates. Foggy watches Mattie take off her glove and run her fingers over the inscription. Her eyes are inscrutable behind her glasses, but her lips are smiling as she pulls an apple from the bag and places it on the grave.

“Hey, Dad,” she says. “Brought your favorite.” She crouches next to the grave. “I…I wanted to tell you - I got accepted. Columbia Law. Just like you wanted.” She turns her face to Foggy. “Foggy’s coming with me - it’s gonna be - it’s gonna be great.”

Foggy smiles.

“I’m smiling, just so you know,” he says. He crouches down next to her and wraps his arms around her shoulders. “So, are you gonna introduce me?”

“I, uh, do you want me to?”

“Yeah, that would be nice.”

She pulls away from him and rests her hand on the stone. “Foggy, Dad. Dad, this is Foggy. I’ve told you about him - he’s…” She turns back to him. “He’s the best friend I’ve ever had.”

“Hi,” Foggy says to the stone. “I just wanted to say…your daughter’s amazing. You’d be so proud of her.” Mattie does that thing where she tucks her chin in, letting her hair fall over her face. Foggy keeps going. “And she’s going to be a kickass lawyer. Seriously, this girl is terrifying.” Mattie gives a little snort through her nose. “And, yeah, she’s the best friend I’ve ever had. So I owe you one.” He looks at the stone, and thinks how lonely Mattie must have been, all those years before he met her. “Wish I could have met you.”

Mattie’s hand reaches out and her fingers lace with his.

“Wish you could have met him, too,” she says.

They stay like that for a while, their hands linked as they sit by the grave. Eventually, the cold gets to Foggy, and he stands up to get some circulation back in his legs.

“Take your time,” he tells Mattie, and he strolls around the cemetery to warm up. Mattie joins him after a few minutes. She must have heard him in the quiet. “Hey, just wait here a sec,” he says, and he heads back to Jack’s grave. He stands at the foot, and looks down.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll look out for her. I promise.”

Chapter Text

April, 3L

Mattie spends the day after she sleeps with Foggy thinking about him; his lips against her skin, his hands on her breasts, his heartbeat inside her. The professor in her clinical seminar has to call her name three times before she responds, and she’s certain that everyone must know that she’s spent the day with her underwear damp.

She has grand plans to spend tonight studying for finals. Well, grand plans that were made before last night, when Foggy had turned her world upside down (in more ways than one). Twenty-four hours ago, she’d been certain he would throw her out of the apartment the next time they spoke. Eight hours ago, she’d woken up in his bed with his arms around her and his scent on her skin. Six hours ago they’d separated for the day, and she’d spent all six of them in a daze.

She has serious doubts about studying tonight.

“Right, cold shower,” she tells herself as she gets off the elevator. Wake herself up, clean the scent of arousal off herself, try to focus, because even if they’re together now, they still need to take their finals. Except that as soon as she unlocks the door, the smell of sex drifts from his room, and this is really very unhelpful, thank you, world.

She closes the door to his room, and puts on a pot of coffee to try to overpower the smell. She’s seriously considering putting some menthol under her nose when Foggy unlocks the door, and there are flames of arousal licking off him in the world on fire, and she’s on him as soon as he closes the door.

“Missed you too,” he mumbles against her lips, pulling her against him, and she grabs the front of his hoodie in both hands and shoves him against the wall with a growl. That gets his heartrate up, and his tongue fights against hers in his mouth until they have to break apart to get his hoodie and t-shirt off. She tries to run her hands over him, feel his skin, but he grabs them and wraps them around his neck, and she obligingly twines her fingers in his hair as they stumble towards the bedrooms.

He reaches for his bedroom door, but she tugs him towards hers instead.

“Two words: silk sheets,” she says between kisses.

“Seriously?” They’re practically falling through her open door; Foggy somehow got her tank top off in the confusion. She turns him around and pushes him onto her bed, climbing on top of him, but he puts a steadying hand against her hip and leans back against her sheets. “Oh,” he says. “These are…” He runs his hand against the silk. “…really nice.”

“Should I leave you two alone?” she says, mock-petulantly.

“Would you mind? I think I’m having a moment,” he lies.

“Asshole,” she laughs, and she leans down to cover his mouth with hers. She moves her mouth to his throat, then down to his chest, and she’s planning on continuing her journey south until she’s kneeling between his legs, but his heartbeat spikes and he stops her somewhere around his sternum and pulls her back up to kiss him, rolling them over so he’s on top.

And she doesn’t really think too much of it, mostly because he pulls off her jeans and underwear at that point, and his tongue on her clit prevents any coherent thought.

There’s a point in the evening when they order a pizza. The rest is a little blurry to Mattie: she has clear impressions of some moments, stark outlines in the world on fire, but most of the night is a blaze of skin against skin and heartbeats and mingled scents.

She wakes up when he gets out of bed to use the bathroom. She’s still wearing her watch (it’s the only thing she’s still wearing), so she checks the time, and it’s somewhere around 3 in the morning. She unbuckles her watch and puts it on the bedside table while she waits for Foggy to come back.

“Hey,” he says, slipping back into bed and putting his arms around her. “Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“It’s OK,” she whispers. “Did you brush your teeth?”

“Um, no? Why?”

“Because I’m not making out with you with morning breath?”

“Oh, so there’s supposed to be making out?”

“If you’re lucky, I might let you cop a feel, too.”

He kisses the tip of her nose and climbs out of bed. When he comes back, they switch, and she heads to the bathroom.

He’s lying on his side when she’s done, so she lies facing him, and they kiss lazily, Foggy murmuring “Minty-fresh” against her mouth. She runs her hand down his side, but his heartbeat spikes again as he grabs it and laces their fingers together, holding them between their bodies. She doesn’t know what’s making him nervous, so she slides her leg up over his, and he responds appreciatively as she presses him down on the bed, straddling his lap. His hands drift over her back and ass as she leans down to kiss him, finally wrapping around her waist to hold her against him. She starts nuzzling at his throat, and he moans happily, so she kisses and nips and teases until she’s at his shoulder, and then she slides her fingertip over his nipple, and she feels his breath catch in his chest and his heartbeat increase, but not the same spike as before. She lowers her lips to his other nipple, and she can smell how turned on he is, practically feel the blood rushing down, and he gives a little “ah!” when she pulls at his nipple with her teeth.

But when she moves away from his nipples to move further down, his heart spikes again, and he tries to pull her up with a “C’mere.”

“OK, what’s wrong?” she says, sliding off him.

“What? Nothing’s wrong,” he lies. She reaches out and taps her finger over his heart, and he groans and throws his head back against the pillow. “Still not cool with the heartbeat thing, kitten.”

“Can’t really turn it off. What’s going on? ‘Cause if I’m doing something wrong -“

“You’re not doing anything wrong,” and that’s not a lie. “Really, really not doing anything wrong. A-plus, five stars, summa cum laude.”

“OK…” She doesn’t protest the inaccurate use of summa cum laude. Instead, she slides her hand over his belly, and he grabs it and pulls it up to his lips. Well, now she has the what. “So…what’s this about?” She wiggles her fingers, just to show that she knows what he’s been doing. He sighs, and presses his lips to her hand.

“You know you’re really hot, right?”

“You might have mentioned it. Once or twice.”

“Yeah. And…I’ve seen the people you’ve brought home. They’re always hot, and how do you know, anyway?”

“Instinct. Is that really important right now?”

“No.” He’s quiet for a moment, and she shifts her hand so that it’s cupping his cheek, running her thumb over his cheekbone. “You know I don’t look like that, don’t you?”

She knows that people don’t call Foggy “hot” the way that they do her. She knows that people don’t respond physically to him the way they do when she walks in the room. She knows that when people compliment Foggy, they never start with his appearance. She knows that when he describes himself, he starts with his weight.

And she remembers sitting in the sun on the Low Steps, with his face in her hands, feeling his smile under her fingertips, and wishing she’d always be able to feel when he was smiling.

And she knows that “You remember you’re talking to a blind woman?” or “I really don’t care,” isn’t going to cut it.

“What’d you say to me last night?” she says gently.

“I said a lot of things last night. There was a lot of talking.”

She rolls her eyes. “What’d you say when you saw me naked?”

“That you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen?”

“Yeah, that.” She turns his face to her and kisses him. “You’re the most beautiful thing in the world. And I didn’t have to get your clothes off to know that.” She runs her hand over the soft swell of his belly, and he doesn’t stop her this time. “And I love you. Every part of you. Especially without your clothes.”

“Except the part that eats junk food. You totally judge me for that.”

“I judge you for the Doritos because they’re the work of the Devil.” He laughs and they press together, her hand on his waist. “I mean it. I love you. I love your face,” and she kisses his nose. “I love your voice.” She kisses his lips. “I love your laugh.” She kisses his throat, and she’s rolling them over so she’s astride him again. She works her way down, telling him how much she loves every part of him, the way he feels, the way he smells, the way he tastes, until she’s stroking him, feeling the blood pulsing under his skin.

He moans in complaint when she stops to grab a condom, which she cuts off with a kiss as she tears off one from the strip. She rolls it onto him and mounts him, moving slowly so she can concentrate on him. He grips her hips, trying to encourage her to move faster, but she bats his hands away, and instead runs her hands over his body and tells him how good he feels.

After he throws away the condom, they kiss slowly and sleepily, and she slips her fingers through his hair, and whispers, “I don’t deserve you.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” he whispers back. His heart agrees.

Chapter Text

April, 3L

“Hey, Carlos.” Mattie’s voice is like steel, ice-cold and hard. She leans against the counter where Carlos is eating his burrito. Foggy sits on an empty stool on the other side of Carlos.

“I know why you’re here, and the answer is no,” says Carlos as soon as he’s swallowed his bite.

“Dev told you?” says Foggy.

“Yup. And Marci. They told me you’re after half the pot. Not a chance.” Carlos takes another bite of burrito. Mattie looks like she’s three seconds from shoving the whole thing down his throat.

“See, I would have thought that you’d jump at the chance to make up for being so monumentally shitty to two people you claim are your friends,” says Mattie, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

“If you have a problem with the bet, take it up with Andy and Marci. I just happened to win.”

“Believe me, we’re going after them, too. But you’re the one who benefitted from this shit-show, so you’re the one who gets to pay out.”

“Uh-huh. And why would I do that?”

“Maybe to make up for the two years of cockblocking you’ve all subjected us to? Or the two years that no-one bothered to say to us that we should get together?”

“Yeah, like you two would have listened.” Foggy thinks he might have a point.

“Or maybe because it’s the right thing to do,” Mattie finishes.

“Yeah, you can keep your moral high ground, Mattie, I still have the money.”

“See, this? This is why people don’t like lawyers.”

“We do have a public image problem,” jumps in Foggy.

“And this really isn’t helping anyone’s case.”

“Please,” says Carlos. “Like you two are actually mad at me. We all know you’ve been all over each other, so don’t pretend that you’re not happy with how this turned out.”

Mattie leans in, and Foggy wonders if this is how Jack Murdock had looked in the ring.

“I’m very happy with how this turned out,” she says. “And I’m incredibly pissed off that all of you thought that my personal life was a game. Don’t think for one second that those are mutually exclusive.”

Carlos, normally cool as a cucumber in his chinos and polo shirts, looks alarmed.

“I’ll give you a hundred bucks to get out of my face,” he says.

“A quarter of the pot? Really?” snaps Mattie.

“One condition,” says Foggy. “Your folks still have that place up in Cape Cod?”

“Yeah?”

“We get it for a week in August.”

Carlos mulls that over.

“A weekend, and not over the 24th,” he says. “That’s my mom’s birthday.”

“One week,” says Mattie. “Seven days. We’ll avoid the 24th.”

Carlos pauses. “Deal.”

He slaps five twenties into Mattie’s hand. She passes them to Foggy for inspection.

“We’re good,” he says.

“Thanks,” says Mattie, holding out her hand to Foggy.

“Pleasure as always,” says Carlos, going back to his burrito.

As Foggy holds the door for Mattie, she says brightly, “So, Andy’s next?”

They wind up with a bottle of Scotch from Andy and Marci. They drink it in Cape Cod.

Chapter Text

September, Hell’s Kitchen

Foggy has found three office spaces to view while Mattie’s been out with Pam, so he feels like he’s accomplished something today. He’s rewarding himself with a bagel while the new Florence + the Machine album plays when Mattie breezes in, putting her cane away and pulling off her shoes.

“Hey, how’d it go?”

“Fine,” she says, in that automatic way that means “anything but fine.”

“You hated it, didn’t you?”

“Oh, God!” she says, coming into the kitchen, “It was awful.” She pours herself some juice from the fridge. “I mean, I don’t know what any of the dresses looked like, and I don’t know what looks good on me -“

“Everything,” supplies Foggy around a bite of bagel.

“And all of them were just so damn heavy, and uncomfortable, and I could smell every single woman who had tried them on, and people have such bad taste in perfume…” She trails off to take a drink.

“So…not getting your dress from there?” This is the first time Mattie has gone wedding dress shopping, and if she’s this miserable, it’s going to be a long engagement for Foggy. She shakes her head.

“Seriously, you should have heard the prices on them. It’s ridiculous. I’m just going to have to find something else.”

She turns around to put her glass in the sink, and Foggy remembers how her back had looked when she came home last night.

“Is your back still bruised?” he says.

“Oh, yeah. It’s fine, really.”

“Did Pam see it?” he asks carefully. It’s a low-level fear, given everything else he has to be afraid about, but he’s afraid that someone will think he’s the one giving Mattie her bruises.

“Don’t worry, I told her I’m taking a self-defense class.”

“Do they let blind people take those?”

She shrugs. “It’s New York. I’m sure someone’s doing it.” It’s…not the worst cover story in the world, he’ll admit.

“So, how is Pam?”

“Fine. I heard a lot about Jeri,” she says disapprovingly.

“Still married?”

“Yup.”

Foggy has a terrible thought. “She’s not bringing Jeri to the wedding, is she?” Because that would be awkward beyond belief.

“No. Honestly, I don’t think they’re even going out in public together. Which, you know…”

“Yeah, red flag, right there.”

Mattie shakes her head. She said her piece months ago, when Pam started her affair with Jeri, and Pam didn’t listen.

“Anyway,” she says, “Pam knows we’re trying to keep costs down, so she’s cool about not having a plus one.”

“Good. I mean, I love Pam, but…”

“Yeah.” Mattie frowns. “The woman at the bridal store kept asking Pam all the questions. Like about about wedding colors. Like I give a shit. Why aren’t we eloping, again?”

“Because we can’t afford the flights to Vegas.” She laughs, and he puts his arms around her waist. “We’re doing the next best thing. Keep it small, all anyone needs is a ceremony and dinner. And dancing.”

“There’s dancing now?”

“Of course there’s dancing.”

“Well, have fun with that,” she says, patting his chest.

“It’s traditional. First dance, all of that.”

“Yeah, I think we both know how well that’s going to go.”

“Oh, come on, I’ve seen you dance.”

“Drunk grinding does not count.”

“I have seen you literally backflip off a building, there is no way you do not have the coordination to dance.”

“Can I do a martial arts demo? I can do that with two hands tied behind my back.”

“Most people say ‘one hand.’”

She shrugs smugly, in that way only Mattie Murdock can. “I can do it with two.”

“I don’t want to know how you know that.”

On his laptop, “Queen of Peace” ends, and Florence Welch starts singing softly and slowly about various storms and saints. It’ll do.

“Ok, here, we can totally do the high school dance thing,” Foggy says, bringing Mattie’s arms up to his shoulders. “Just put your hands here.” He grips her waist. “And don’t forget to leave room for Jesus.” Mattie laughs, and Foggy starts to sway on the spot. “Did you go to a lot of dances in high school?”

“Sure,” she says. “Spent them in the corner by myself…OK, one time I got to second base with Mary Sue Poots.”

“Why am I not surprised?” He adjusts his grip, pulling her closer. (But you took your toll on me, so I gave myself over willingly.) He starts to turn her in a slow circle. “See? Not so bad.”

“Not exactly entertaining for everyone who has to watch us.”

“Screw ‘em. It’s our wedding.” He reaches up and takes one of her hands, pulling it down so that it’s cradled against his chest. He takes a step sideways, gently pulling her with him, and she stumbles, but he’s got a good hold on her waist, so he keeps her upright.

“Warn me next time.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be able to anticipate behavior?” He takes another step, and this time she steps with him.

“In a fight. This wasn’t really in Stick’s training.” They’re getting into the rhythm of it, and Foggy’s slowly steering her around the kitchen. Talking seems to help stop her from overthinking.

“You ever dance with your dad?”

She smiles that little smile. “Yeah. I remember…I remember when I was really little, standing on his shoes and dancing…I don’t remember why we were doing that.”

“I remember my dad doing that with Candace, too. I don’t think you need a reason. I think it’s just a dad thing.” (But still you stumble, feet give way. Outside, the world seems a violent place.) “OK, try a spin.” He holds up their linked hands, and she turns the wrong way. “No, not that way. Just follow my hand.” She lets him turn her, awkwardly shuffling her feet. “Good. Let’s try to smooth it out.” It’s better the second time. “Yeah, there you go.”

“The mind controls the body,” she says, with some satisfaction.

“It’s not a fight, buddy. ‘Cause if it is, I’m in trouble.” He spins her again. “You got it.” He pulls her back into position, and they dance around the kitchen through the next verse. By the time the chorus comes around again, he’s not sure how they got so close, but she’s pressed against him, their hands held over his heart, and her head tucked against his chest. He leans his cheek against the top of her head, and they sway gently, just breathing.

And Florence sings, “I know you’re bleeding, but you’ll be okay. Hold onto your heart, you’ll keep it safe.”

Chapter Text

December, 1L

Mattie hates Christmas shopping. She hates the crowds, she hates the cold and wet, and right now, she especially hates that Foggy has dragged her into Macy’s to buy Marci’s Christmas present. Her heart sinks as Foggy explains that he wants to buy Marci jewelry, but she puts on a teasing smile.

“Oh, so, it’s serious, then?” she says, leaning on the glass counter.

“Uh…yeah…I think it is,” he says, and she can hear the grin in his voice, and her heart sinks even further (not that there’s any reason for that - she likes Marci). “But I have no idea what to get, so I need help.”

Mattie can’t help wrinkling her nose.

“Uh…you realize that I can’t see anything?”

“Yeah, but we can get them to let you feel the things…” He wiggles his fingers, even though he thinks she can’t know that.

“Exactly how many pieces of jewelry have you seen me wear?”

“You have…a cross…” Foggy trails off, suddenly seeing the problem.

“Can’t you call Candace for advice, or something?”

“It’s nine in the morning there, she’ll kill me if I wake her up before noon.”

Mattie sighs. “OK, ask the person behind the counter.”

The woman behind the counter is less than helpful, since she declares any piece that Foggy asks to look at “beautiful.” She also seems to be under the impression that the jewelry is for Mattie, then gets embarrassed when she realizes that Mattie is blind. Mattie sighs and tunes out the conversation, turning her attention to her surroundings.

There’s a guy with a small child coming up beside them.

“Good work, Junior,” the guy is saying. “You’re gonna make a hell of a Marine one day.” Mattie does what Stick taught her to do, and assesses the risk: the guy is about Foggy’s height, but muscular, carrying himself like a soldier. She thinks she wouldn’t want to go up against him in a fight. But his body language is warm and relaxed, and he’s got the little boy gently by the hand. “OK, so we gotta be quick before your mom wonders where we got to.” He picks up the boy around the waist. “Which one do you think she’ll like?”

Foggy seems to be deliberating between three pieces when the guy next to them says “Excuse me, miss?” to the woman behind the counter.

“It’s OK, I’ll need a moment anyway,” Foggy says, so the woman goes to help the other guy.

“What’ve you got?” Mattie says.

“Uh, earrings, or one of two pendants,” Foggy says. He guides Mattie’s hand over the pieces laid out on the counter. “The earrings are studs, white jewels, this pendant’s a heart, it’s got blue stones, and this one’s shaped like a teardrop, it’s got white stones, too.”

“Sounds…sparkly.”

“I think Marci likes sparkly.” Foggy sounds a little doubtful. “What do you think?”

Mattie shrugs. “What kind of jewelry does Marci wear?”


“Expensive?”

“Then you’re in trouble, dude.”

Foggy groans. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

“Ask this guy,” Mattie says, jerking her thumb toward the guy next to her, who is putting down the little boy to pull out his wallet. “He managed to pick something in about two seconds.”

“Wait, no -“

But Mattie has already turned around and put on her best charming smile.

“Sorry to bother you,” she says, “but my friend here is having a little trouble picking out a present for his girlfriend, and we were wondering if you might have some advice?”

“So, you’re not…” The guy is pointing at her, but she’s not supposed to know that.

“She’s a consultant,” Foggy says. “Who sucks at her job.”

The guy chuckles. “OK, kid, what’ve you got?”

As Foggy explains the dilemma, Mattie feels a tug on her coat sleeve.

“You’re blind, aren’t you?” says a small voice from about her hip height.

“What? Aw, Junior, you can’t just ask somebody like that,” the guy says. “I’m sorry, miss -“

“No, it’s OK,” Mattie says. She crouches down so that she’s on Junior’s level. “Yeah, I am.”

“Were you a Marine?” Junior says.

Mattie laughs. “No. Why’d you ask?”

“My dad has a friend who’s blind, because he was in the Marines in Afganisan.” Afghanistan.

“Oh, no, I wasn’t. I’m a law student.”

“What’s that?”

“It means I’m studying about laws and stuff so I can help people who need it.”

“Like a cop?”

“A little bit.”

“OK, we have a decision!” Foggy announces.

“Oh, thank God,” Mattie says, standing up. “What’d you go with?”

“The earrings. Apparently, they’re more versatile.”

“Always a safe bet,” says Junior’s father. “Well, we gotta go before my wife figures out we’re not in the restroom.”

“Thanks, man.”

“Merry Christmas, both of you,” the guy says, taking Junior by the hand.

“You too,” Mattie says.

Foggy pays for the earrings, keeping a thoughtful silence.

“What?” Mattie says.

“No, it’s just - you’re good with kids.”

She shrugs. “I grew up in an orphanage, there were always kids around.”

“Hm,” Foggy says, taking the little bag with the earrings from the woman behind the counter. He wraps Mattie’s arm around his elbow and starts leading her out. “Do you want kids? I mean, down the road?”


“Yeah, sure. But you kind of need a partner for that.”

“Really don’t think that’ll be a problem for you.”

She hasn’t had a great start to law school on that front: there’d been Larry in September, which had crashed and burned, and Cathal for a few weeks before that fizzled out. “Not like anyone’s lining up to buy me earrings,” she says.

“I’d buy you earrings,” Foggy says. He’s not lying. “If you had your ears pierced. But I’d buy you a necklace. Or a bracelet. Or…”

She realizes that he’d been about to say, “Or a ring.” But that would be a bridge too far. She ignores the tightness in her stomach and lets herself laugh.

“Yeah, sure,” she says.

“I’d buy you the sparkliest shit I could find.”

“And you’d never have to worry about my taste in jewelry.”

“That’s right.” They step out onto the street. “Hey, how do you feel about Shake Shack for lunch?”

That, at least is a safer subject. She grins.

“Yeah, let’s do it.”

Chapter Text

August, Hell’s Kitchen

Everyone says that you need to get out of New York in August. It’s generally regarded as a terrible month, blisteringly hot and suffocatingly polluted. Foggy and Mattie have never paid attention to the conventional wisdom, by virtue of not being able to afford to take the month off, but this year, they find themselves at leisure: they sit the bar exam in July, and their internship at Landman & Zack is due to start after Labor Day. They can’t afford to go anywhere for the whole month, but Carlos owes them a week at his family’s house in Cape Cod.

Which is how Foggy ends up driving a rental car, describing the scenery to Mattie. It’s her first time out of the city, so he makes sure to add extra details, like how the New England architecture looks, or how the ocean sparkles in the sun.

They stop in the town Carlos told them was closest to the house, and buy lobsters and fresh vegetables. Foggy promptly names the lobsters after their most hated professors, and promises them a merciful execution.

“Wait, we have to kill them ourselves?” Mattie says, looking scandalized.

“Uh, yeah, that’s how it works,” Foggy says.

“Exactly how…?”

“Dunk them in boiling water. Kills them instantly.” Foggy Googled it before they left.

“OK…” she says, looking not at all convinced as Foggy puts the box containing the lobsters into the back seat of the car.

Foggy drives past expensive-looking gates with heavy security as they try to find Carlos’ family’s house. When they find the right one, it’s another good five minutes of driving through the property until they get to the house.

“Whoa. I really wish you could see this,” he says.

He’d known Carlos’ family was rich; Carlos’ mother is from old New England money, his father is a bigshot in Florida politics. So the fact that the house is huge is hardly a surprise. Nor is it a surprise that the house is right on the (perfectly manicured, private) beach, which stretches out as far as Foggy can see on either side. But Foggy hadn’t expected it to be beautiful.

“What is it?” Mattie says, stepping out of the car.

Foggy tries to put into words the scene: the wooden-sided house, the trees surrounding them, the flowers, the ocean beyond. Mattie smiles and breathes deep.

“I can smell the ocean,” she says. “And the trees. It smells….” She trails off, as if there aren’t any words.

“C’mon.”

They unload the trunk of the car, and follow Carlos’ instructions to turning off the security system on the house. Inside, the house still has its original layout, with a parlor, dining room, and kitchen, but there’s an extension off the back that opens onto a wide patio deck that leads down to the beach. On the kitchen counter, there’s a note from Carlos’ mother welcoming them, and a bottle of wine. Foggy laughs as he reads the note.

“I don’t think Carlos told his mom the real story of why we’re here,” he says.

“What’d she say?”

“She says congratulations to you for getting valedictorian, she’s glad they can help us celebrate sitting the bar.”

Mattie laughs. “Yeah, that’s definitely the edited version.”

“But she gave us a bottle of wine.”

“That’s nice of her.”

Upstairs, they find six bedrooms. Carlos had said to take any of them, so Foggy picks the biggest one, with the four-poster bed and the window seat tucked under the spectacular ocean view. They strip the bed and put Mattie’s silk sheets down.

“So,” Mattie says, looping her arms around his neck, “what do you want to do before you murder those poor lobsters?”

“Walk on the beach?”

“Sounds nice. Should I bring my cane?”

“Only if you think you’ll need it.”

She shrugs and leaves it behind.

Foggy convinces her to go barefoot, and she makes a face as she steps onto the sand.

“Is it bugging you?” he says.

“No, it’s just…new.” She adjusts her weight on her feet, pressing her feet into the sand. “It’s not bad. Kind of…prickly?”

Foggy bends down and runs his fingers through the sand. It’s so fine, it feels like powder to him.

He takes her hand and leads her down to the ocean. She gasps when the waves hit their bare feet, and smiles at him. The sun beats down, making her hair glow red as they walk along the waterline, Mattie kicking at the waves. At one point, she wades into the ocean so that she’s knee-deep, and Foggy watches her running her hands through the water. The combination of Irish genes and seven years spent behind a pile of books have given her a complexion the Victorians would envy, and her denim shorts and halter top are showing off most of it. Foggy wonders what that incredible skin is feeling in the water. He pulls out his phone.

“Hey, Mattie, over here.” She turns to him, smiling, and he snaps a photo. To his eye (and he’ll admit he’s not objective), she looks like a model, all wholesome sexiness and full of life.

She wades back to him, and wraps her arms around his neck. He doesn’t care that she’s getting his shirt damp. It’s actually nice, under the sun.

“Having fun?” he says, nuzzling her nose.

“Yeah.” She kisses him.

“We should get started on dinner.” There’ll be plenty of time for the beach later. And he’s heard stories from Pam about a bikini in Mattie’s luggage, anyway…

“Right. You have some lobsters to murder.”

“Why do I have to murder the lobsters?”

“Because you’re the man. Aren’t men supposed to enjoy killing things and eating them?”

“You’re the ninja. Weren’t you supposed to be trained to kill things?”

“Stick didn’t actually get that far.”

Mattie wins. Foggy has to kill the lobsters. They open the wine Carlos’ mother left them while the water boils, and Mattie cuts up the tomatoes they bought. Foggy stands behind her, his hands on her hips, his chin tucked over her shoulder. Occasionally, she’ll cut a slice of tomato into chunks and spear one on the end of the knife, holding it out for him to take. The tomatoes are perfectly fresh, and taste like summer.

“What’re you making?”

“Caprese salad. Pam taught me how to make it.” She finishes with the tomatoes and pulls out the ball of mozzarella they’d brought up from New York. She slices it the same way she sliced the tomatoes. “Your water’s boiling.”

Foggy glances over, and yes, the water is just starting to boil. He pulls the box with the lobsters out of the fridge. Mattie crosses herself, grinning impishly. Foggy takes a swig of wine, and picks up the first lobster.

“God speed, Professor York,” he says, and drops it into the pot. He quickly grabs the other one, and drops it into the second pot. There’s a high-pitched whistling noise coming from them.

“Oh, my God, they’re screaming,” Mattie says, cringing and laughing at the same time.

“They’re not screaming, it’s just air escaping from the shell…” laughs Foggy. It does sound like screaming. He sets the timer on the stove.

While the lobsters are cooking, he cooks the local-grown potatoes they’d bought while Mattie assembles the salad. Once the lobsters are done, their shells bright red, they carry everything out to the patio and eat while the sun sets. Mattie turns out to be exceptionally skilled at breaking the lobster shells (“I can hear where the weak points are.”), and gets over her qualms about killing them as soon as she tastes the meat. When they’re full, and the bottle of wine is gone, Foggy brings out the bottle of Scotch Marci and Andy had given them. The sun is below the horizon, and the sky is a darkening blue. Foggy looks up, and he can start to see stars, more than he can ever see at home in New York.

“I just need to pee,” Mattie says, putting down her empty glass. She leaves Foggy alone on the patio, sipping Scotch that tastes of smoke and honey, surrounded by the smell of the ocean. He could get used to this.

“So,” comes Mattie’s voice behind him. “I got a present. Not sure if it’s for you or me…” Foggy turns his head, and becomes very aware of the fact that his heartbeat just skyrocketed.

Mattie’s wearing nothing but a silk slip that clings to every curve she has. He’s vaguely aware of the fact that it’s green (he never knew green was her color, but now he knows), he’s much more aware of the fact he can see her nipples through the silk, and that he really, really wants to run his hands over them. She’s grinning, because there’s no way she doesn’t know the effect the sight of her has had on him.

“Me,” Foggy blurts out. “Definitely a present for me.”

Her smile widens, and she throws her leg over his lap, settling on his crotch. He slides his hand up her thigh, just brushing the hem of the slip, as she leans down to kiss him, tasting of Scotch and wine and all that’s beautiful in the world. The kiss is slow and deep, her tongue gently exploring his mouth.

“So…” she murmurs, pulling away, “there’s that nice -“ She unbuttons the top button of his shirt. “- Big -“ She undoes the next button. “- Bed -“ She leans down and kisses his neck, sliding her hand into his shirt. “- Upstairs.”

He grabs her hips, grinding her against him.

“Is this a good time to mention that I packed the cuffs?” he says lightly. She grins and drags her lower lip through her teeth, which makes him kiss her.

“Perfect time,” she whispers against his lips.

They make their way through the house, pausing every so often. Foggy’s shirt is left on the floor in the kitchen, his pants on the stairs. He pushes Mattie against the wall in the upstairs hallway, feeling her breasts under the slip. She leans her head back against the wall, and he takes the invitation, burying his face in her neck, smelling the scent of her skin. He turns her around, pressing himself against her back, sucking at her ear as she sighs. When he slides his hand down over her ass and under the hem of the slip, he discovers that she’s not wearing anything under it, and hums appreciatively as he pushes his fingers inside her.

“Bed,” she gasps out, and he pulls his hand away, guiding her in front of him by her hips into the bedroom. He gives her a little push, and she stumbles forward, catching herself on the post of the bed. She gives him the dirtiest smile he’s ever seen as she sits on the edge of the bed.

“Just a sec,” he says, digging through his bag. He’d managed to slip the cuffs and the tethers in when she’d gone to Fogwell’s in the morning, hoping to surprise her. And she certainly seems pleased enough. He finds them, along with the box of condoms, and puts them all on the bedside table. “You gonna help me?” It’s a joke - the tethers are his job. She rolls onto her stomach on the bed, giving him an excellent view of her cleavage.

“Nope,” she says.

With the four-poster bed, it’s a quick job setting up the tethers. He piles the pillows in the middle against the headboard, before reaching over and running his hand over her hair.

“C’mere.”

She slides up to him, and lets him roll her onto her back against the pillows. He’s on top of her, his knees between her legs, and she wraps her arms around his shoulders, pulling him down for a kiss. He’s sure she must be able to feel his heart beating against her, because it’s hammering in his chest. He pulls one of her hands from his back, and wraps the wrist in a leather cuff. He kisses her palm, and the inside of her arm, before gently guiding her arm up and clipping the cuff to the tether attached to the post at the corner of the bed. He does the same with her other arm to the opposite post, and sits back on his knees, taking in the sight of her: green silk and white skin and black leather. His fingertips trail against the skin of her thigh, and he doesn’t have any words to tell her how deeply sexy she is.

But she’s grinning again, and her leg wraps around him, pulling him in (because she’s a goddamn ninja who could probably kill him while tied to the bed). He obliges her, kissing her lips, then down her throat, and over her breasts, feeling her nipples through the silk. He slides his hand between her legs, and makes her come as quickly as he can before going to work with his tongue. He alternates between fingers and tongue, pushing her further and further. She starts by moaning and gasping, and his name comes out more than once, but as he keeps going she gets quieter, just panting and whimpering, and her whole body is trembling.

She’s still holding onto the edge of control, he’s learned to tell when she gives it up, and she’s not there yet. There’s still a tension to her, her hands are gripping the tethers, and her head is thrown back on the pillows, and he watches her bite her lip as she comes again (he’s given up keeping track of how many times she’s come).

“Hey, hey,” he whispers, brushing his thumb against her lip. He kisses her, and presses his forehead against hers. “It’s OK. I got you. You can let go.”

“Foggy…” she whispers.

“I’m here. I got you.” He reaches over to the bedside table and pulls a condom out of the box. He tears open the packet and rolls it on. He bends over her, stroking her face, and she leans into his touch. “I love you,” he whispers. “You’re safe.”

“I know,” she whispers, barely audible.

He pushes inside her then, slowly, gently, and watches her let the last walls come down, letting her senses be overwhelmed with no filter. She’s boneless underneath him, and every tiny brush against that wonderful skin of hers makes her moan and shake. He’d asked her, once, what it felt like, and the only way she could describe it was, “it’s like I’m being fucked through my whole skin.”

She comes twice before he does, and he quickly unclips the cuffs, wrapping her in his arms as she comes back to him, putting her walls back up, blocking out the world again. She’s still overstimulated when he gently unbuckles the cuffs, even the movement of his fingers making her breath catch. He slips away to throw away the condom, and when he climbs back into bed, she burrows against his chest with a whispered “I love you.”

He listens to her breathing even out as she falls asleep, and he follows her.

He wakes up in the middle of the night, and he’s surprised to find he’s not half-covered by a clingy blind ninja. When he looks around, he sees her sitting on the window seat, moonlight dappling her in silver.

“Hey, you OK?” he says.

“Hm? Oh, yeah, I’m fine. Go back to sleep.”

He gets out of bed and walks over to her.

“Everything OK?”

“Just couldn’t sleep,” she says with a small smile. “Not used to the quiet.”

He slips his leg behind her, and she scoots forward so that he’s sitting behind her, her head resting against his shoulder.

“What do you hear?” he says.

“The ocean, mostly. There’s a party…three beaches down, I think. I think it’s a bachelorette party. I can smell the bonfire. I can hear the trees, and the animals, the way the house creaks.” She turns her head, her nose brushing against his neck. “What does it look like?”

“It’s…dark.” She snorts a little. “No, I’m serious. I mean, it’s way darker than you ever get in the city. There aren’t any lights. The beach looks kind of paler in the moonlight, but it’s hard to tell where the ocean ends and the sky starts. Except for the stars.”

“What about the stars?”

He tightens his arms around her. “You can see so many more here. It’s like the sky is scattered with them, some of them so tiny you don’t know they’re there, but there are so many of them, the whole sky is…not lit up, not exactly, but…shimmering.”

She presses her cheek against his chest.

“I’ve never seen stars like that,” she says. “Not even…before.”

He buries his nose in her hair, because he doesn’t know what to say. I’d give anything to see the sky one more time, she’d said, years ago.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have -“ he starts, but she shakes her head.

“No, I want to know what it looks like. It’s…it’s one of the things I wish I could…”

He holds her for a long moment. “Is that what you’d want to see?”

“Given the choice?” She turns in his arms and puts her hand on his face, her thumb sliding across his lip. “I’d want to see you.”

Chapter Text

September, 1L

Mattie finishes her drink in a bad mood. She and Foggy had come out to the bar to get to know some of their new law school classmates, and Foggy had disappeared to chase some girl from his Corporate Law class, and Mattie had struck out flirting with the Irish guy from their building. Not even her best line had worked.

“Well, I just like the sound of your voice,” she’d said.

“Ah, you’re not the first American girl to try that one on me,” Cathal had said.

“There are other girls using my line?” She’d try to save it by playing mock-offended, but Cathal had laughed, and then had gotten a text and fled.

Mattie pulls out her phone, intending to tell Foggy she’s leaving, and good luck with Veronica, when someone pulls up to the bar next to her.

“Do you want another one?” he says. He’s tall, fit, and smells of something spicy.

“Sorry, were you talking to me?” she says.

“Yeah, I was. Hate to see a pretty girl with an empty glass. What are you drinking?”

“Oh, the Pilsner,” she says. Might as well get a free drink, and the guy seems nice enough. At least he hasn’t made a comment about her blindness yet.

“I’m Larry.”

“Mattie.”

Larry is in 3L, specializing in Criminal Law, and Mattie grills him about what to expect until her beer is gone.

“OK, not that I can’t keep talking about criminal defense for the next six hours, but what about you?” he says. “Tell me how a pretty blind girl winds up at Columbia Law.”

Mattie learned from the Elektra fiasco how not to give too much of herself away. She talks about herself, evading the more painful or outlandish parts of her history, and Larry seems to like listening to her. His knee brushes against hers, then his hand, and then he asks her to come back to his place, and she smiles and says yes.

She calls Foggy on the way and gets his voicemail, which she takes as a good sign.

“You always tell your roommate where you are?” Larry says.

“More like I’m giving him the all clear to bring a girl back to our place,” she says. “But yeah, he worries I’ve fallen down a manhole or something.”

“Yeah, I can see that.”

“What?”


“Wanting to keep you safe.”

The sex is…well, it’s not spectacular, but it’s not bad either. In the morning, Larry insists on walking her home, even when she tells him she knows exactly where she is.

“Just let me do this for you,” he says.

He calls her in the afternoon.

“I just couldn’t stop thinking about you,” he says. “And I thought…maybe you’d like to have dinner tonight? I can take you out.”

He takes her to a hole-in-the-wall Mexican place, and tells her the only thing to order is the beef chimichanga. He won’t tell her the rest of the menu, even when she asks. To be fair, the chimichanga is excellent.

The weekend turns into a full week, and at the end of it, Larry buys her a toothbrush to leave at his place. She thinks it’s sweet.

Midway through the second week of dating, Larry refers to her as his girlfriend. She’s flattered, but wonders if they’re moving too fast. She’s never really been anyone’s girlfriend, except Elektra’s.

She and Foggy spend an evening holed up in the library, Foggy helping her scan articles into her OCR, and Larry comes to find them.

“Oh, hey, you’re here,” he says in a strange, flat tone. “Foggy.”

“Hey, Larry,” Foggy says.


“I told you I was going to be working tonight,” Mattie says.

“Yeah, well, thought you might want to come back to mine,” Larry says.

“I’m still working.” She puts her hand on the stack of books that they still have to scan.

“Right. Yeah. I’ll call you tomorrow.” He leaves.

“Was he checking up on you?” Foggy says.

“What? No.” She pauses. “No, that would be weird, right?”

“Yeah, totally.” Foggy doesn’t sound convinced, though.

She decides that Larry and Foggy should get to know each other better, so she has Larry come over for movie night. She warns him that Foggy narrates the movies for her. Larry stays very quiet through all of Bringing Up Baby, not laughing at all.

“I find old movies kind of boring,” Larry says, after the movie is finished.

“Everything OK?” she says, once they’re in her room with the door closed.

“Yeah,” he lies. “Just…you know, no, it doesn’t matter.”

“No, you can tell me, it’s OK.”

“It’s just - you and Foggy. You guys are…you can’t see it, Mattie, but everyone else can.”

“See what?”

“I just…wish you’d act like you were my girlfriend, OK? Stop leading him on.”

“I’m not - what?” She can barely marshal her thoughts. “We’re friends, we always have been.”

“Right, yeah, of course.” He sighs and sits down on her bed. “I just feel left out with the two of you.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, feeling guilty. Tonight had been her idea, after all.

“Come here?”

She sits down next to him, and, like a switch had been turned, he’s on her, pushing her onto the bed. Over the past two weeks, he’s discovered how sensitive her skin can be, and he uses that knowledge. He doesn’t slow down when she asks him to, makes her cry out when she wants to be quiet, not to disturb Foggy.

She doesn’t know why she doesn’t feel content afterwards. She likes sex.

Larry takes her to drinks with some of his friends from 3L. Including Cathal the Irish Guy, who seems to have no hard feelings about the awkward flirting from before. The conversation turns to Tony Stark’s adventures as Iron Man.

“I’m not so sure what he’s doing is a bad thing,” Mattie says.

“Sure, but legally, he has no standing,” Cathal says.

“I’m not disputing that, but from an actual moral point of view, is it wrong for someone with an extraordinary capability to help people to use that?”

“You sound like a fascist,” Larry says. “Exceptional people can do whatever they want?”

“I - that’s not -“ she stammers.

“That’s not actually what she said,” Cathal says coldly. His voice softens when he turns back to Mattie. “I take your point, but there are consequences to what Stark is doing that he can’t anticipate…”

Mattie can feel Larry fuming beside her, so she changes the subject. As he walks her home, he rants about how arrogant he finds Cathal, how insufferable he’s been for two years. Mattie says that she likes talking to Cathal, finds him interesting.

“Right, because you love it when guys chase after you don’t you?” Larry drawls. Mattie snaps something back about not every guy who talks to her is flirting with her, and they argue right there on the sidewalk outside Lionsgate. She storms into the building, leaving Larry out on the street. As soon as she reaches her apartment, her phone rings with his name.

“I’m sorry, Mattie,” Larry says, his voice shaking. “I’m so, so sorry. I know you’re not doing it on purpose. You’re just…you’re the kind of girl that guys gravitate to. And you can’t see it, the way they look at you, but I do, and…” It goes on for a long time, and by the end of it, she feels guilty for overreacting, and lets him up to the apartment.

That night, he convinces her to try anal sex. She finds it a little painful, and Larry tells her she’ll get used to it, she’ll enjoy it next time.

She’s at Fogwell’s a few days later when she hears her phone announcing his name. She ignores it until she finishes her workout, and calls him back.

“Where have you been? I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” he says.

“I’m at the gym.”

“You didn’t pick up your phone.”

“I was working out.”

“How do you - never mind. What gym?”

“What?”

“What gym are you at? Is it the campus one?”

“No, it’s…” It occurs to her that she’s not ready to tell him about Fogwell’s. “Downtown,” she finishes.

“Why are you all the way down there?”

“Because I like this one!” she snaps.

“Hey, hey, I was just asking a question, no need to overreact. Where are you, I can pick you up and we can go for dinner.”

“I need to study tonight.”

“You can study at my place.”

That’s not actually true, Larry never leaves her alone when she’s at his place.

“I just want a quiet night of studying, OK?” she says, exasperated.

“Whoa, OK, no need to be a bitch about it, I just thought you might want to spend some time together.”

We spend all our time together. She barely sees Foggy outside of class.

“Call me tomorrow, I’ll see where I’m at on this paper,” she says.

The paper is kicking her ass, and she holds Larry off for three days as she finishes it. The night before it’s due, she stays up until five in the morning. She drags herself up to campus to hand in the hard copy before collapsing elegantly on the couch in the living room. Foggy appears around noon, and tells her in no uncertain terms that she needs to take a shower and eat something.

“That’s what you always say when I’m passed out on the couch,” she tells the cushions as she lifts her middle finger.

“I just assume every time you pass out on the couch that you need both of those.”

Foggy hauls her up bodily and throws her into the bathroom. When she emerges, wrapped in her robe, he’s making omelets that smell like heaven.

She drinks coffee while he cooks, and she feels relaxed and happy for the first time in weeks. Foggy makes her a bacon, cheddar and scallion omelet, and tells her about the gorgeous blonde girl in his Corporate Law class.

“Veronica, right?” Mattie says.

“Nah, didn’t get anywhere with her. No, this is Marci…”

She laughs as he tells her about his efforts to attract Marci’s attention, and she nearly misses Larry’s heartbeat outside the door before he knocks on it. She feels the muscles in her back tense, but she can’t stop Foggy when he tells her he’ll get the door.

“Mattie here?” Larry says, pushing past Foggy.

“Hi, Larry, good to see you, come on in,” Foggy says flatly. “Mattie, your boyfriend’s here,” he calls.

“Are you OK?” Larry demands before Mattie can say anything.

“Yeah, I’m fine, why wouldn’t I be?” she says.

“You weren’t answering your phone.”

She shrugs. “It must have died, I don’t think I plugged it in last night.”

“And you didn’t think I might be worried about you?”

“Why? Why would you be worried about me? I was writing a goddamn paper, not BASE jumping off the Empire State Building.”

Foggy is beating a discreet retreat into his room now.

“Why are you avoiding me?” Larry demands.

“I told you, I was writing a paper, and I needed to concentrate.”

“So, I’m a distraction, now?”

“Yes, you’re a distraction when I’m trying to work. Everything’s a distraction.” More than he knows.

“Well, clearly Foggy isn’t.”

“Yeah, he lives with me, I’m used to him.”


“So, you’re ignoring me, and he’s making you breakfast in your pjs?”

“Yes,” she says. Obviously.

“You’re asking me to trust you with all of this going on?” he says, sounding hurt. But his heartbeat betrays him, he’s not telling the whole truth.

“All of what?” she says coldly.

“You and Foggy, your weird…”

“No, go ahead, say it,” she says.

“Are you sleeping with him?”

She almost laughs at the absurdity, and at the naked insecurity in Larry’s voice.

“Goodbye, Larry,” she says.

“Dammit, I knew it, I knew you had to be!” he shouts. “There was no way he was sticking around if he wasn’t -“

“Finish that sentence, and I’ll break your nose,” she says, standing. “We’re done. Get out.”

“You heard her,” Foggy says from his bedroom door, voice ice-cold.

“You two fucking deserve each other,” Larry snarls as he storms out.

Foggy goes to her and hugs her.

“You OK?” he says.

“Fine,” she says, and she smiles. “Best I’ve been in weeks.”

“You…want to get drunk, or something?”

She shakes her head. “No,” she says lightly. She can feel her body relaxing, letting go of the tension she’d been carrying since she met Larry. She picks up her plate instead. “But I won’t say no to another omelet.”

Foggy takes the plate and kisses her forehead before he gets to work.

Chapter Text

July, 1998

“That one’s Patience,” Jack says, holding Mattie by the hand. “And that one’s Fortitude.”

He’d looked it up, because he thought it was the sort of thing Mattie would like to know. Judging by the way her eyes widen as she looks at the stone lions, he was right.

He holds her hand as he leads her up the steps of the New York Public Library. Banners with Steve Rogers’ face emblazoned on them hang from the building facade. The exhibit in honor of the hero’s 80th birthday just opened, and Mattie had begged him to take her.

Jack’s mother had given Mattie a copy of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe for her seventh birthday. It had been her last gift to Mattie before she’d passed last year. Mattie had loved the book, and had devoured the rest of the Narnia series, then dove into World War Two history with an abandon that Jack found a little unnerving. He still wasn’t sure that this was appropriate reading material, but Mattie loved it. The librarian at her school had obliged by recommending books about the war, and that was how she’d discovered Captain America.

Jack is 90% sure that Mattie had started puberty when she’d first seen a picture of Steve Rogers emerging from the Project Rebirth chamber. He is 100% sure he isn’t ready for it.

July 4 was Steve Rogers’ birthday, and the exhibit has special Independence Day activities planned. Dress up as a Howling Commando and get your picture taken! Red-white-and-blue cake for the first hundred visitors! A performance recreating Captain America’s USO appearances! Star-spangled gift bags for the kids! Mattie hadn’t been able to sleep for the excitement.

They’re presented with cake as they enter the exhibit (silver star sprinkles on red-white-and-blue icing), and Jack can see that Mattie doesn’t even know where to look. On the left is a dimly-lit section that details Project Rebirth. On the right, biographies of the Howling Commandoes. Mattie’s eyes light up when she sees Peggy Carter’s picture (Carter is a personal hero of Mattie’s, nowadays), and she drags Jack to see Carter’s uniform and weapons, sighing over pictures of Carter during the war. Jack can admit that Carter was a beautiful woman, and Mattie’s almost as starry-eyed over Carter as she is over Rogers.

Jack looks at the picture of Carter from 1940, when she’d joined the SSR, and thinks how young she’d been. He wonders how her parents felt, watching her go off to war.

Mattie impatiently brushes him off when he puts his hand her shoulder. She’s too old for that, now, he thinks sadly.

Mattie insists on reading everything, seeing everything. When the announcement comes over the PA that the USO performance is starting, she’s almost squeaking in excitement. She smiles through the whole show (about fifteen minutes), laughing delightedly as the actor playing Rogers deftly punches Hitler in the jaw. Jack takes her to meet the actor wearing the Captain America suit, who is mobbed by other kids.

“Stand up for what’s right. It’s what Steve Rogers would do,” the actor tells her, clapping her on the shoulder as Jack takes a picture. She’s beaming.

Rogers’ vibranium shield was lost with him in the Arctic, but the exhibit has his original USO shield. It’s dented, and the paint has horrible scratches and scorch marks, and Mattie stares at it like it’s the Holy Grail.

“It’s damaged from the rescue at Azzano,” she breathes, awestruck. From the exhibit (yes, Jack actually read the text), Jack knows she’s referring to Rogers’ first recorded battle as Captain America, when he’d rescued what would become his Howling Commandoes from a Hydra POW prison.

In one corner, there’s a little green-screen photo area where the kids can dress up as the Howling Commandoes. There’s Bucky Barnes’ jacket, Dum-Dum Dugan’s bowler, James Falsworth’s beret. Mattie, predictably enough, dons Rogers’ helmet and picks up his shield. It occurs to Jack, as he stands to the side with a handful of other parents, that there aren’t any Peggy Carter costumes.

“Oh, she’s adorable!” coos a mother as Mattie strikes a pose (perfect stance, Jack notes) behind the shield. Jack grins at the woman while the attendant shows Mattie the various backgrounds she can have behind her photo. “She’s yours?”

“All mine,” Jack says proudly.

“She’s going to be a heartbreaker one day,” the woman says. It doesn’t escape Jack’s notice that she’s quite attractive. “Look at that smile.” It is, objectively, the most beautiful smile in existence.

“Yeah, she got lucky that way,” Jack says.

He’s about to make a comment (something self-deprecating, and hopefully charming), when he hears a voice filled with all the disdain that nine or ten years of life can muster.

“Why would you want to be Captain America? You’re a girl.”

It’s some little spoiled brat in pigtails, crossing her arms and staring at Mattie. To her credit, Mattie stands her ground (that’s Jack’s girl).

“Why not?” Mattie demands.

“There weren’t any girls in the Howling Commandoes,” says the little shit. Jack glances around, but can’t find a parent who’s willing to claim this kid. “Girls aren’t soldiers.”

“Yeah?” comes another pre-pubescent voice. This one’s a chubby blond kid. “What about Peggy Carter?”

“She smuggled Steve Rogers to Azzano before there were Howling Commandoes,” Mattie says.

“And she was there when Rogers fought the Red Skull,” says the chubby kid.

“Just because she was Rogers’ girlfriend,” says the brat, but Jack can see she’s losing.

“Dum-Dum Dugan said the smartest thing to do was ‘do as Peggy said,’” Mattie says triumphantly. She’s holding the shield on her arm, a tiny Captain America, standing tall.

Jack spots a woman in the small crowd who is making her way to the little brat.

“Julie!” she says, grabbing her kid by the arm, and leading her away.

“Nerds,” says the brat witheringly as they leave.

Jack looks over, and the chubby kid has his hands in his pockets, looking at a downtrodden Mattie.

“I think it’s really cool you know all that stuff,” the kid says, and Jack thinks he loves this kid because he can make Mattie smile.

“You want to take a picture?” she says.

“Sure,” the kid says. “I’ll be your Bucky Barnes.”

He shrugs on the jacket, and they pose. Jack’s heart swells.

Yeah, she’ll be a heartbreaker.

The kid next to her might be her first conquest, just young enough that the anxiety of puberty hasn’t set in yet, just old enough to want to be around her. They wander the rest of the exhibit together, Jack finding himself alongside the kid’s mother and younger sister, making small talk. Once, he catches the eye of the mother he’d been flirting with earlier, but they don’t talk again.

When they leave the exhibit, he realizes that he doesn’t think Mattie ever got the kid’s name.

Chapter Text

November, 3L

“Thanks for running interference,” Foggy says as he slumps on the couch. He’s had more to drink than Mattie, and it’s been an emotionally draining Thanksgiving, so she doesn’t demand his help putting away the leftovers that Anna packed for them.

“Don’t mention it,” she says over her shoulder.

“No, really, I mean it.” There’s a shifting of weight on the cushions, and Mattie thinks that he tried to get up, but maybe thought better of it. He waves an arm at her instead. “You’re the best.”

“Damn right.” She closes the fridge door and pulls out two glasses.

Foggy groans and buries his face in one of the throw pillows. “Why’d they have to like him so much?”

Mattie sighs and turns on the tap to fill the glasses. She’s spent most of the day diverting the conversation away from Foggy’s breakup with Rob in August, of which apparently many of the Nelson family were unaware. At least two of Foggy’s aunts had implied that they’d been expecting Foggy and Rob to get married.

She brings the glasses over to the couch and sits next to where Foggy is sprawled out. She presses the cold base of a glass against his face. Foggy yelps and barely misses spilling the water as he thrashes before he starts laughing. He lays his head in Mattie’s lap and takes the glass. He drinks, still lying down, and water trickles down his face and dampens Mattie’s skirt underneath him. She strokes his hair with her free hand as she drinks her own glass.

“Thanks, kitten,” he mumbles.

“Anytime, buddy.” She keeps running her fingers through his hair, telling herself it’s because he finds it comforting. It’s all about him. Nothing to do with what she wants.

He finishes the water and puts the glass on the floor, and curls up again, his hand clutching at her knee.

“I’m going to die alone, aren’t I?” he says.

“Nah,” she says. “You’ve got me.” She’s glad he doesn’t have her hearing, can’t hear the way her heart beats when she says it.

He squeezes her legs in an awkward pseudo-hug.

“But you’re not…you know…” he mumbles.

“Yeah. I know.” She knows very well that she’s not like that to him. She hasn’t been for a very long time.

“It’s good, though,” he slurs into her thigh. “”Cause if you were, then you’d be running away. Just like everyone else.”

“That’s not true.” She drops her hand to the bare skin of his neck, stroking him there. It’s soft, and she can feel his pulse against her fingertips.

“Rob ran away.”

“That wasn’t your fault,” she says, for the fiftieth or two hundredth or millionth time in the past three months. “You said you didn’t want to do the long distance thing.” Rob had left at the end of the summer to finish his Ph. D research in DC, and has no plans to return to New York.

“Yeah.” Foggy burrows closer to her. “But he’s gone, and literally no one else will even go out with me.”

“Aw, come on -“

“No, it’s true. Not all of us are blessed with good bone structure,” he says, poking her leg. “It’s been three months.”

“That’s not that long.” Mattie takes a sip of water as Foggy snorts derisively.

“Yeah, sure tell me you’ve ever gone that long.”

“I have,” Mattie says. “Still going,” she admits.

“Wait, whaaat?” Foggy sits up. “Nah, I heard you coming in at like three in the morning last week.”

“I fell asleep in the library.”

“No that’s - I mean - really?”

“Yeah.”

“Matilda Michelle Murdock, tell me the truth. When was the last time you got laid?” He’s trying to sound stern. It’s not working.

“Pam.”

“You’re shitting me.”

Mattie shrugs extravagantly.

“That was, like, July,” Foggy continues. “Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.” Foggy pauses. “Why?”

“Because I’ve been busy trying to get through law school?” Mattie lies.

“Oh, yeah. That.”

“Amazing you can forget about that.”

“In the face of the monumental bombshell that Mattie Murdock is having a dry spell, I forget all else,” Foggy deadpans before he yawns dramatically. “You’ll find somebody, kitten.”

“So will you,” she says.

He stumbles off to bed, forgetting to turn the lights off. She sits in the quiet apartment, listening to the hum of electricity and the sound of Foggy falling asleep, and replays the conversation in her mind. And what she should have said.

“Why?”

“Because I can’t have you.”