Title: Goes Like This
Fandom: Marvel comics (Daredevil)
Rating/Warnings: PG-13, none.
Wordcount: 484
Summary: In the end, things happen like Foggy always knew they would.
Notes: So I finally got around to writing that Daredevil fic. Next one I write will hopefully be a bit more cheerful. Cheers to
tartanshell, whose existence goaded me into writing for this fandom.
Goes Like This
It ends with a death. Foggy's been pretending to ignore the fact that he's been expecting it. From the day Matt showed him that costume, Foggy's known the way their story would close. He's been setting aside fond recollections so he'll have something to hold on to afterwards, like he sets aside money for his retirement fund. (He never pointed out that Matt had no retirement fund. They both knew what was coming.) So when it happens, he closes shop for a while, does the bit of grieving he can afford, and goes back to work, head held high.
Matt doesn't go down in a blaze of glory. He does whatever it is he does out there, in the Kitchen, at night, and then he limps all the way to Foggy's fire escape and wakes Foggy up from comfortable snoring with a few urgent bangs on the window. "Help me out, one more time," he says, and Foggy's chest seizes up and he forgets to breathe for a second, because he's not an idiot. He knows what that means.
"Don't overreact," he says, and pulls Matt inside. The costume goes - red leather stained darker, duller, smelling like rust, completely unusable now - and Foggy fills the bathtub while Matt bleeds all over an old towel. Then Matt bleeds all over the bathtub and Foggy calls 911, and then he sits in the bathroom, by the tub, and they make terrible dark jokes as the water stains pink.
"I'm sorry," Matt says eventually, laughter dying in his throat, and he stares down at his scraped knees and the long gash down his right thigh. Foggy tries to avoid looking at the bullethole in his stomach, and ends up staring down at his own hands.
"Yeah, well, so am I," he says.
When the paramedics arrive, Matt has fainted from bloodloss, and Foggy only nods when an earnest young man (and when did twentysomething look that young? He is getting old) tells him that there's only a limited chance of survival. "But we'll do our best for him," he says. Foggy can tell that this kid still hasn't got it, even now, even after Captain America and the Wasp and Cyclops and Iron Man - the kid doesn't understand that heroes can die, and heroes do die, and another one is just about to.
Foggy follows them to the hospital and waits around in the IVU for hours until some indistinguishable time after sunrise a tired Hispanic woman comes to tell him that Matt Murdock died of his wounds at seven oh three, and is Foggy his family?
Foggy's the closest thing to family Matt had, and he has the paperwork to prove it. It all stands up in court. Not that it matters; Matt doesn't leave much behind, when he goes. Just a legacy and a law firm and Foggy, who keeps going like he always does.