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The leaves are turning.
Matt can smell them decomposing in the gutters. Has since the first rainstorm; the heady scent of clean rot a constant companion to the city’s usual odour of garbage and sweat. If he tries, he can remember, vaguely, the shifting colors and the way they’d fascinated him the couple of times dad let him loose on the park before it was too wet to go out and play.
That’s one of his last good memories of fall. He has a couple more squared away, but in all of them the fact of autumn in the background is a stinging discordant note he’d ignored for the sake of the moment.
The last day he’d seen was in late February, greyish icicles clinging to overhangs and store awnings. The truck, yellow and green, slipping on shiny ice, and the pattern on the old man’s shirt are seared into his memory. There are a precious few seconds there between realization and action that he’s never managed to claw back.
The doctors at the time had said it was a trauma response, his brain’s way of protecting him from remembering how much he’d been hurt. Even back then Matt had thought that was stupid; if his brain couldn’t protect itself from the earsplitting noise and feel of the sheets like needles on his skin then why should he trust it to keep the last thing he’d ever seen from him?
A week of observation in the hospital and three more of recovery, learning how to uncurl enough to press his face into dad’s neck instead of his own knees, gauze changes and saline flushes and pills that made him feel cottony on the inside.
Two more months of trying to figure out school before they’d given up for the summer and then the breath of relief that was being allowed to tag along to practice with dad the whole summer, relearning the gym with his cane and fingers. He’d taught himself to read Braille in the same corner his carseat had once sat, and dad came to join him and hem and haw at Matt’s math homework with him on breaks.
He’d started hating September when it took that away from him and replaced it with disapproving teachers and too much work and kids who whispered terrible things behind his back where he couldn’t hear (but he could, he could hear everything, the scratch of every pencil and the rustle of wax paper in lunchboxes and cars screeching for blocks—)
Or he’d thought it was hate, at least, and didn’t learn better until it was late November and the gun went off, so far, too far, and he’d run and run and he knew now it was always going to be too late but at the time–at the time he’d been sure that it only he’d been faster, hadn’t tripped over the curb or stumbled into a pole, then dad wouldn’t have had to die alone.
If only he’d made it there a minute or a couple of seconds sooner he could have held dad’s hand the way he did Matt’s when he was falling asleep, pressed the side of his face to his chest and heard his heart beat one last time.
The street had smelled the same way then, trash and decomposing leaves and, overpoweringly, blood.
He’d still been able to smell it two days later in the graveyard, standing perfectly still in an overlarge and starched shirt someone had scrounged up for him. Overturned dirt and cheaply cut pine and the leaves and blood.
The funeral had been a relief. He listened to them lower his dad into the ground and let go of the hope that it was all a mistake, that he’d wake up and it would have just been a bad dream, that he’d shake his head hard enough and dad’s heartbeat would be back like it’d never gone, the warmth radiating off his body back in the air rather than dissipated into concrete.
He’d stopped hoping and the fear of falling gave way to the sensation of air rushing past his ears, the calm acceptance that he was going to fall and no one was left to catch him. No one was even watching.
Acceptance hadn’t prepared him for how bad it would be. Matt didn’t talk about his time in foster care unless he was supremely drunk along with anyone in hearing range. It was the only time he was stupid enough to let himself dwell on the memories, because remembering meant thinking about the past and that meant–wondering.
He’d broken himself of the habit by the time he was twelve but at nine he’d been old enough that there was a detached part of his brain that watched him learn to flinch whenever anyone got too close too fast, how to hide bruises and a limp and make his face and voice lie to match his words, and wondered what he’d be doing right now if dad was alive. Not lying in a dank room pressing the cigarette burn on his arm to the tile, it was sure.
At twelve Stick found him, and the pain and exhaustion and pride drowned out the wondering. He knelt on rice for hours and learned how to read anger and fear and cowardice in heartbeats and which fingers were the most painful to break and that he could be something more, something better than a stupid blind kid with oversized clothes and bruises.
The wind whistles. Matt tips forward, forward, forward, and falls.
He catches himself on a windowsill and comes through swinging, broken glass falling around him.
There could be a million other worlds out there. It’s likely, even, with the shit people are getting up to in the rest of New York. Matt doesn’t fuck with alternate universes and magic and other nonsense, but the news loves it and Karen buys a different newspaper every day of the week and has a tendency to mumble while she reads, so he knows more than he wants to.
Maybe in the rest of them Matt’s life looked different. Maybe there he never knew what a knife to the kidney felt like, never started craving the feeling of a nose breaking beneath his fist.
He doubts it.
When he was young he wondered what his life would be like if things were different. He can’t imagine them any way other than as they are, now. It’s been twenty one years since the last time he saw his own face. There’s no version of it he can conjure up in his head that doesn’t have the slight crook of his nose, the bloom of a scar at his temple mostly hidden by his hair, the gnarl of skin from a serrated knife just under his jaw.
He’s a year older than his dad was when he died. The thought feels jagged and incomprehensible.
He can’t shake the twist of conflicting feelings that this wasn’t how things were supposed to go, and that he’s had not a sliver of a chance at changing them.
He waits and thinks and the chill of the season creeps up the soles of his boot and finds the marrow in his bones and whatever twisted thing inside him he keeps in there with it.
When the helplessness starts to lock fingers around his throat he tips his head to find the closest panicked heartbeat and jumps.
Foggy had asked him once, back at the beginning of law school, what he’d wanted to be when he grew up, and Matt had lied and said a priest and not someone who could have stopped me from becoming who I am.
He knocks a gun into the Hudson and takes a punch to the ribs for his trouble. The woman it was aimed at scrambles away before he manages to trip its owner into the water too, and he thinks about what a stupid wish that had been.
Foggy finds him on the roof that night at four in the morning, out in the rain.
Matt hears him coming up the stairs, feet clunking on the steps in his big rain boots. The umbrella opens, displacing the fall of the rain. It’s purple, to match the boots. He knows because Karen had been so delighted by it last year when Foggy had shown up to the office that she’d bought Matt a purple windbreaker so both of them would match her favorite violet beanie for the rest of the winter. Foggy had whispered to him that it was too neon to really fit in but it was the thought that counts. Matt was too busy trying to remember the last time he’d worn a raincoat to have an opinion.
He can still smell the leaves. It’s raining the way Foggy calls bucketing down, now, and the umbrella can’t be helping much because the wind sweeps the sheeting water sideways. The world feels blanketed with static like this. It’s strangely comforting, between how much of the world it hides and the way the cold is numbing his knuckles.
Foggy’s hand feels like a brand against his skin when he takes one of Matt’s, rubbing his thumb over the back of his wrist. “Matt?”
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he says, holding in a sigh of disappointment at the umbrella over his head. The absence of the rain drilling down on his helmet allows other things to start creeping back in. He’d been enjoying it, the way it had been peaceful like the few seconds between the recognition of oncoming unconsciousness and passing out.
There was something about being fixed in place and incapable of fighting that was such a relief. If he could struggle then there was nothing else to do, futile as it had always been. To be forced to give up meant he could accept whatever was coming instead of trying to avert it like a pebble holding back a river.
“Come inside,” Foggy says, tugging on his hand. “How long have you been up here? You’re freezing.”
Not long enough. For Foggy, though—
“Okay,” he agrees, and allows himself to be led into the stairwell.
The rain is louder on the tin roof, like a hail of bullets, but it quiets out once they get into Foggy’s apartment. Matt stands by the door and drips on the doormat while Foggy gets him a towel. The cold starts to hurt the warmer he gets, fingers pins-and-needling back into clumsy. He grits his teeth against the sensation and doesn’t notice Foggy coming back until the towel’s around his shoulders and he’s finding the helmet’s hidden catches and lifting it off Matt’s heat with gentle hands and plunking it down next to his key dish.
His palms feel like an oven door when he rests them on Matt’s jaw.
“You were on the roof for forty five minutes,” he says, softly, head tilted up to stare at Matt.
He must make some kind of expression because Foggy’s voice is thick when he says: “The tracker in the heel of your boot sets off an alarm on my phone if you don’t move for more than twenty. After the time at the harbor…”
He trails off and Matt can remember fading out to the sound of water and the radiating pain in his skull and coming to still shivering on Claire’s sofa, wrapped in blankets and having woken himself up by being unable to breathe. He’d gotten pneumonia from the water he’d inhaled and had a fever high enough to hallucinate a little. The concussion had left him with an unpredictable intermittent ringing in his ears for months.
“Okay,” he says, though he thinks he’s probably going to feel something about that later.
“Matt,” Foggy says, again, still concerned.
There are so many things he could say.
I wasn’t ready to come home yet.
The leaves make me remember the smell of my dad’s blood and I was waiting for the rain to wash it away.
It was quiet, for once.
Instead, he says: “Sometimes, in the fall, I dream about being laid in a grave and the feeling of dirt hitting my skin. It would be nice, being buried next to my dad. That’s what I told them when I was fifteen; let me stay at the orphanage or put me in the ground with him.”
Foggy’s hands are gone. Matt lets out a tiny breath and slides his eyes shut, just for the feel of it. “I’m sorry. I’ll go to my place, let you get back to sleep—”
“Matt,” Foggy says again, shoulders setting into anger. “You—”
“I don’t want to die,” he snaps, because that’s what his social worker had thought too, and then his file had had words like suicidal ideation and self-harm risk in it and they’d sent him to a couselor who’d told him it was a sin to take his own life and Matt had told him he knew that, and not said that was the only reason he hadn’t, fourteen and curled up on a bathroom floor. “Okay? It’s not–it would just be nice, if I could give up. If everything could just stop. Not forever, but for a while.”
And everything had been better, when he was with dad. He was tired of how things were without him. There was still a childish little part of him convinced that everything would be fine if only he could be back with dad. But he didn’t know how to put that into words, so he just reached behind him for the door handle.
Heat, everywhere.
It takes him too long to process that Foggy is hugging him, too wrapped up in the feeling of his carotid pulsing against the leather of his armor and the artificial rose scent of his conditioner.
Foggy doesn’t let go, not when Matt relaxes, slowly, leaning against his steady weight, not when he starts shivering, not when the traces of rain left in his joints start soaking into Foggy’s worn sweater.
“I want to go to sleep sometimes,” he whispers, eventually, muffled by Matt’s shoulder. “For a long time. For everything to stop and for all this shit to keep moving on without me because I’m just tired.”
Matt’s breath catches in his chest, heart stuttering at the idea.
“And it freaks me out, just like that,” Foggy continues, pulling back enough to press his palm over Matt’s ribcage. “So it scares me that you aren’t scared.”
“I am,” Matt says, fingers finding their way to Foggy’s wrist.
“For yourself,” Foggy finishes, leaning back in and tucking his head into the side of Matt’s neck.
“I’m sorry,” Matt says, a little choked. His face is wet again, and the salt runs into his mouth.
“I don’t want an apology,” Foggy tells him, low and tired.
“I know.”
Foggy doesn’t let go of him until he’s breathing slow again, worn out and exhausted, and then it’s only for Matt to slip out of his armor and into sweatpants and a t-shirt. He falls asleep to the sound of the rain with his head in Foggy’s lap.
His hand is still buried in Matt’s hair when he wakes up again. There’s a blanket tucked up around his shoulders, trapping the heat, and the sky is still heavy with clouds.
“I don’t love you any less,” he mumbles, twisting his head up towards the direction of Foggy’s face.
“I know,” Foggy echoes, and leans down to press his lips to the side of Matt’s head.