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Five days have passed since the Anti-Vigilante Task Force chased Matt one way and his Shadow– Foggy – went the other. For months, Matt couldn’t get him off his back and now that he finally knows who he is? Nothing.
There’s little more he could do than stand in front of a spotlight on live TV to draw more attention to himself and still no sign of Foggy. Yes, it’s good that people are feeling emboldened enough by Daredevil’s renewed presence on the streets to start pushing back against the Fisk administration, but that’s not what’s important right now. Knowing Foggy is alive isn’t enough. If Matt can’t find him, he can’t help him. Can’t ask him what happened. Who did this? Why, why, why?
The endless press of the city in on him is different these days with the curfew being so strictly enforced. Like a dog with a limp, the rhythm is off-tempo and hurting. Matt hates it but he has to listen. He flays himself open searching for even a whisper of Foggy’s too-slow breathing, his altered gait. The Shadow had always been the one to track him down, but maybe if Matt can find Foggy first…
There, on a rooftop three blocks away. Matt gets to his feet and starts sprinting.
Something much worse than what Matt had initially feared must have happened if Foggy doesn’t even know his own name. Matt has no idea what he could possibly do to fix that but he needs to do something. Five days of inaction, of knowing Foggy is alive somewhere out there and that Matt had been completely ignorant of having him within arm’s reach, has been eating away at him. He’s spent the days listlessly searching social media with Karen for any mention of Benjamin Poindexter, itching for the sun to set so he can get out of the safehouse. Every night, she sets him loose with a kiss on the forehead and a plea to go find Foggy, and he’s let her down every day until today.
Matt’s not exactly sure of what he was expecting from this encounter, but it wasn’t Foggy slamming into him so hard they’re both knocked off their feet. He usually keeps his distance first, targeting Daredevil long range with his pistol before he closes in. All the wind gets knocked out of Matt when his back hits the roof, and he doesn’t recover before Foggy lands hard on him.
“Make it look good,” is all Foggy says before he sits back and starts punching. He’s pulling for some reason, definitely not hitting as hard as Matt knows he can. Matt gets his hands up before the fourth blow lands and manages to push Foggy hard enough to throw him off.
They both scramble to their feet and Matt realizes he has absolutely no idea what to say to that. What the hell is anyone supposed to say in a situation like this?
“Foggy, we don’t have–”
“Do not call me that,” Foggy says warningly, ice cold. The affront spurs him into action again, giving up grappling in favor of a flurry of quick kicks and jabs.
Matt slips and dodges where he can and blocks the rest. He has to get through to Foggy somehow.
“I want to help you! Please, can we talk?”
The only response he gets is a headbutt.
Matt’s starting to run out of patience for this. He lets Foggy throw a cross that lingers a second too long and uses it to trap him in a standing arm lock.
“We don’t have to do this,” Matt tries again.
“Stop it,” Foggy growls, “They’re watching us.” He feints like he’s about to break free and uses Matt’s split second distraction to try to sweep his legs out from under him.
“Who?” Matt lets his knees bend, lets Foggy wrestle his way out of Matt’s grip on him. “Who, Foggy?”
Foggy pulls out his pistol and jams it into Matt’s cheek.
“I’m going to say this one last time: make it look good or else.”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Matt says around a hard swallow. Not any more than he already has.
Foggy sighs as if Matt’s doing him a huge disservice. “You were never going to make this easy, were you?” Then he pistol whips Matt so hard the whole world slips away.
“Something’s bothering me,” Foggy says as Matt swims back up to consciousness. He’s been placed in a rickety wooden chair. They’re somewhere relatively quiet and mostly empty. He’s not able to gather more than that with his head pounding.
“Just one thing?” Matt mutters under his breath.
“Do you not know what ‘make it look good’ means?”
What could have made his voice lower, rougher? Does whoever has him even know that he was never formally diagnosed with asthma, but he’d borrowed his mother’s inhalers for years?
“Who was watching us?”
“I have employers, Daredevil,” Foggy says, and an old, old echo of James Wesley rears its ugly head. “They get concerned.”
“Who are they, exactly?” Matt has his educated guess, but Foggy’s said nothing to confirm it.
Foggy gets up from his seat on a countertop and starts pacing around the room.
“They get concerned when things like what happened last week happen. And I don’t like when they’re concerned. Concern means closer monitoring, fewer privileges.”
Foggy’s stride is different– not just from the lost weight, but balanced further back over his heels. Some kind of training in stealth, most likely. His footsteps are quiet, but still make enough noise to illuminate the space.
Wherever they are, it’s run down and worn out, with broken windows and smashed counters. Some abandoned storefront, maybe. Not on the ground floor, but Matt can’t pinpoint exactly how high up they are yet.
He abruptly remembers Karen clutching his burner so tightly the plastic case creaked, her other hand clamped over her mouth and not doing anything to muffle her sobs.
“It’s him, oh my God, it’s him, it’s Foggy,” she’d said, over and over again in a voice so shaky the words almost didn’t come out.
She hadn’t let go of the phone for a whole day. She’d drained the battery keeping it on for hours at a time. She couldn’t make herself give it back so he let her keep it.
The fact that he never got around to taking it back from her is what Matt thinks about while he tries to figure out where the Shadow has taken him.
“And the only reason closer monitoring didn’t absolutely tip our hand is that I put on a good show despite your poor performance.” Lie.
“The only reason?”
Foggy stops mid-step. “And that this particular monitor has never seen me out in the field before.” His sly, slinking pace continues.
A lot of implications there to parse, but Foggy doesn’t seem to be feeling very forthcoming. Start smaller. Softball questions. “Your employers. They pay you?”
“They cover my expenses,” Foggy says after his heart rate ticks up again, but it’s not from dishonesty.
“Not really the same thing, is it?”
Foggy shakes himself out, flexing his arms and twitching his head like he’s trying to physically dismiss the question. He keeps pacing.
Privileges, pay. It doesn’t sound like he’s being chained up in a filthy dungeon between evenings out. His armor and weapons are clean. He’s relatively well-groomed, though not as neatly as before. Is that because his captors are invested in maintaining his image, or a reward for good behavior?
Since the head-on approach hasn’t worked yet, Matt tries something different.
“You didn’t tie me down.”
“I couldn’t get you to hit me when your life was at stake. Somehow, I don’t feel endangered,” Foggy drawls.
“How was my li–?” Matt doesn’t get to finish the question before a knife embeds itself in the exposed wood of the seat between his thighs the second he starts to shift his weight. He barely manages to not flinch away from it.
“That being said, I don’t want you getting up either.”
Matt’s lucky that this stranger wearing Foggy’s body even gave him a warning shot first. He yanks the knife free in a shower of splinters and throws it back, hoping that how rattled he feels isn’t showing on his face. Foggy catches the blade between his first two fingers and taps the handle against his chin contemplatively.
“I’ll stay where you want me,” Matt offers with both hands up. Someone somewhere should be respecting Foggy’s wishes.
Foggy nods and starts moving again, cutting in closer this time. The hairs on the back of Matt’s neck prickle.
If Foggy wanted to kill him, he could have done so any number of ways on a dozen different occasions. That he hasn’t yet must mean something, even if he still has the knife in his hand.
He certainly doesn’t mind hurting Matt, though. The aching in his head and bruised ribs speaks to that. That’s enough to keep Matt on his guard.
“Why am I here?” he dares to ask.
Foggy blows out a blustery sigh and flips the knife back into its holster. “Well, I was going to attempt to beat some answers out of you.”
“You don’t need to do that. I’ll answer whatever you ask of me.” That’s the very, very least Matt can offer him.
“I’ve gathered.” He doesn’t continue.
“You can ask me anything, Foggy,” Matt says, and it’s just a little slip, but Foggy flinches away like Matt’s hit him.
Clipped and unyielding, he says, “I told you not to call me that.”
“What do they call you, then?” Your employers, your kidnappers, your captors.
“Sarin.” When Matt raises an eyebrow, Foggy adds, “Like the nerve gas?”
Like something lethal. Like a weapon.
“We call you the Shadow.”
“Ah, so there’s a ‘we.’” His voice does not sound as interested as his words imply.
Foggy's constant circling is aggravating the animal part of Matt’s brain; going past his conscious awareness into something deeper and more basal. He would never, ever find or target Karen but the veiled threat of a threat makes a deeply disloyal distrust well up under Matt’s tongue.
“It’s just you and me here.”
Foggy says nothing.
Every circuit he completes ratchets up the tension in Matt even further. Being tied down might have been easier, because it would have invalidated the nagging need to turn around and keep his back away from the Shadow. Where he is doesn’t matter to Matt’s senses, but it still feels like a concession of power to let himself be in a vulnerable position without having the option to defend himself.
When Matt is starting to feel like he might just crawl out of his skin, Foggy takes a slow, deep breath.
“My employers aren’t the most forthcoming with the details of my circumstances.” The tightness all throughout Foggy’s voice rings a deafening bell in Matt’s head; Foggy is sick Foggy is hurt Foggy needs help fix it Fix It FIX IT–
He can’t without knowing more. The need sharpens Matt’s focus, draws him back in.
“With regard to which details?”
“When I woke up, they told me I had been in a coma after a mission gone wrong and came out the other side with amnesia.”
“I don’t know if that’s– You were shot a-and as far as I was aware, you…” Matt isn’t surprised that he can’t say the words. He is surprised that Foggy doesn’t want him to.
“I died, I presume. And then she spun me a story that never felt entirely true. All the treatments and training and conditioning… None of it ever fit right.”
One pronoun is all Matt needs to be sure. If Vanessa has been lying to Foggy about what happened and he knows it, that can be the wedge that drives them apart, that pushes Foggy away from the Fisks.
“I wouldn’t put it past her. Nothing she does is ever without an agenda, not her or her husband.” It’s an easy lob, but who else could the Shadow’s other employer be? If Fisk knew about Foggy all this time…
Foggy huffs out through his nose and shrugs.
No, if Vanessa had planned Foggy’s assassination on her own, there’s no reason to think she couldn’t have arranged this nightmare without her husband too.
“Why am I here?” Matt asks again, and he has to bite down on Foggy’s name so it doesn’t sound like he’s pleading for a chance to atone.
Foggy comes to a stop in front of him, so close their knees almost brush.
“Something is wrong here and I want to know why you’re the only other person who seems to think so.”
There is something so horrifically wrong here that it’s like the world’s been turned inside out, like nothing had ever been right to begin with. But Foggy thinking so is a victory of some kind even if it feels like it comes at an impossible cost.
“Why you?”
Foggy’s asking the right question from the wrong perspective. The real question is why him? Why would anyone send Foggy after Daredevil unless they knew? Why would they turn Foggy into this lifeless automaton, so devoid of joy and humanity?
Because Vanessa Fisk has an axe to grind, and she evidently wants to wear it down to nothing.
“Who are you?”
The question contains an ache and provokes one too.
“You don’t know?” Matt asks, his voice cracking on the emotion.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
“You and I, we used to run a–”
“No,” Foggy cuts in sharply, “The less I know, the safer we both are. Don’t tell me anything they can take from me.”
The flash of anger that burns through Matt at the panic buried in Foggy’s voice makes him realize what he’s been missing this whole time. He’s been horrified and miserable and drowning in guilt, but his rage hasn’t returned to him until he finally got something other than cool disaffectedness from Foggy.
“What do you mean, ‘take’ from you?” Matt doesn’t bother to disguise the hatred in his voice.
“They can get inside my head, take memories away or implant new ones. I don’t know much about the procedure. I’m under anesthesia for most of it,” Foggy rattles off like it’s nothing.
The Fisks have money, but not this kind of money. Even if the Five Families pooled their resources together– and why would they? –maintaining and using the kind of equipment that can do something like that is expensive and difficult. The incumbent Democrat whose seat future Congressman Barnes is gunning for keeps bringing up the estimated costs from those age-old S.H.I.E.L.D. leaks, as if the worst thing about the Winter Soldier Program was the wasted taxpayer dollars.
Matt has to force himself back from that brink. Less on them, more on Foggy.
“I won’t say more if you don’t want me to. What do you want to know?”
Foggy moves to stand behind him and puts his hands on the chair back, his knuckles just barely brushing Matt’s shoulders.
“Don’t get into the specifics, but what did I do before I was… this? Who was I?”
Matt’s mouth is dry and sticky with guilt when he opens it.
“You worked a… a sedentary job. You’d never fired a gun before. You knew basic self defense, but nothing like what you can do now.”
Foggy’s voice is soft and disappointed when he murmurs, “I knew it.”
He pulls his handgun from its holster, holding it next to Matt’s head with the barrel pointing at the wall ahead of them. Less than six inches from his ear, the report from a shot would probably leave him reeling.
He tries not to wince when Foggy’s finger goes over the trigger.
“You helped people.”
The gun falls from Foggy’s hand, hanging only by the trigger guard over his index finger. Matt reaches out instinctively to catch it and the feeling of the barrel in his hand burns through him like wildfire.
“Where did you get this?” Matt barks, yanking the pistol out of Foggy’s grip. Without the silencer, it’s lighter but still undeniably recognizable.
“It’s mine,” Foggy says nonsensically, “Allegedly one of the most accurate handguns in the world.”
Matt chokes back an incredulous noise. As if Poindexter needed any help with his accuracy.
“It should have been destroyed by the NYPD ages ago. Where the hell did you get it?”
Foggy makes to take it back from him, but Matt gets up and steps away before he can. There’s a moment where Matt is sure Foggy is building up to some kind of punishment for not following his rules and he braces himself.
Foggy only holds his hand out, palm up.
“Where did you get this gun?” Matt asks again, softer this time.
Foggy flexes his fingers.
Once the pistol is back in his hand, he answers. “My employer gave it to me.”
Stealing state property out of evidence lock-up instead of just buying another gun speaks to a line of thinking so far beyond rational that Matt starts to wonder if his entire conception of the situation has been wrong from the start. What possible reason could Vanessa have had for doing so?
“It’s a Smith & Wesson 952,” Matt repeats from his memory of the police report.
“Rare, produced in limited numbers,” Foggy says by way of agreement. That wouldn’t be a good enough reason for her.
“Do you know…” How is Matt supposed to say this? “Do you know this is the gun that…?”
Foggy weighs the gun in his palm then turns it on himself, resting the muzzle over the left side of his chest.
“Funny,” he chuckles, like it actually is, “Very funny.” The emotion all vanishes, replaced by deadpan rigidity. “Alright, hit me.”
“What?”
Foggy juts his chin out. “It needs to look like we had a fair fight. Come on, take a swing.”
“No!” bursts out of Matt instinctively. He wonders if the cloying, gnawing guilt of knowing what he’s done to Foggy will feel this sickening for the rest of his life.
“We’ve been here too long and they’ll be even more suspicious if I come out of this unscathed.”
Nausea yanks at Matt’s guts. If he could see, his vision would surely be spinning.
“You’re not gonna make me.” Hadn’t he just told himself he’d never deny Foggy anything again? Here he is, already breaking more promises. “We’re not doing this.”
Foggy’s heart rate picks up. “You broke my nose how many times and now you won’t even give me a love tap?”
Three, and the memory of each one is worse than the last.
“I didn’t know it was you!”
“God damn it.” Foggy bends down and slams his face into the back of the chair before Matt can even try to stop him. His cheekbone is already warm and swollen when he says, “You owe me for that.”
Matt’s hands ache to reach out, but he balls them up at his sides instead.
“Don’t, please don’t...”
“If you care about what happens to me,” Foggy says, rough and uncertain, “We need to act like nothing has changed. I can’t afford any more suspicion, you understand me?”
“What are you going to do?” Matt asks, because that’s the most important thing.
Foggy stands up straighter and folds his arms over his chest plate. It pushes his elbows out at an odd angle, making him feel more closed off. Imposing. Dangerous.
“I need more information. About you, about them… That’s going to take time.”
Even if every instinct Matt has is screaming that there’s not time to give, that they’re running out every second that Foggy is under the Fisks’ thumb, he nods.
“Next Wednesday, forty-sixth and tenth, before curfew. I’ll find you.”
Because that’s what he always does, isn’t it?
“I’ll be there,” Matt promises, and he’ll keep it this time.
“And if you bother to show your face on the streets, I’m not letting you go easy on me again.”