Fic: Like a Handprint on My Heart (Part One)
Title: Like a Handprint on My Heart
Fandom: Daredevil (TV)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: "The day Foggy’s supposed to start working at Hogarth, Chao, and Benowitz, he wakes up, walks into the bathroom, starts to take a leak, glances down to check his aim, and freezes when he sees black letters on the inside of his right elbow." Soulmate AU, Matt/Foggy and Matt/Elektra.
Notes: Using this for the "heartbroken" prompt on my Daredevil Bingo card. Title is from "For Good" from Wicked, and I'm sorry for those feels you're having now. Thanks to queenitsy for the beta!
The day Foggy’s supposed to start working at Hogarth, Chao, and Benowitz, he wakes up, walks into the bathroom, starts to take a leak, glances down to check his aim, and freezes when he sees black letters on the inside of his right elbow.
His bladder forgotten, he brings his arm up, closer to his face and horizontal, as if he couldn't tell what the word was immediately. As if he'd somehow misread it, even though it's only four letters.
Matt.
“Of fucking course,” he says, and turns around to sit down heavily on the toilet seat, head in his hands.
*
He’s never told anyone this, but the first morning he woke up in the dorms, the day after he met Matt, he took the longest and most thorough shower of his life. Not for the purpose of bodily hygiene, though - he was hunting, searching every inch of his skin for the name he was almost certain was on there somewhere.
Matt. Matthew. Hell, even the letter M would’ve been enough to make him happy. Anything that said that this feeling of connection, of rightness, wasn’t just in his head. That this was fate, him and Matt. Nelson and Murdock.
It wasn’t just that Matt was hot. Foggy had met hot people before. Foggy had dated hot people before. But there was something about Matt’s smile that made Foggy feel like he’d walk on burning coals just see it again, something that told him he’d be stupid about that smile for a long time. A lifetime, if Matt would let him.
He was already being stupid about it. Matt had given every indication that he didn’t even like boys, judging by how he’d reacted to Foggy’s boneheaded admiration the day before. But soulmates were platonic, sometimes. Foggy could deal with platonic.
But there were no words on his skin, just the usual stretch marks and freckles.
That was okay. They could just be friends. They could be the best friends ever, and Foggy would still be happy. He would be cool about this.
And if he couldn’t help thinking as he dried off that sometimes it took a little while for soulmarks to appear as the people in question got used to each other, well, no one ever had to know that but him.
*
Foggy scrubs the skin of his elbow raw in the shower, but the letters don’t disappear. Of course they don’t.
He’s not immune to the irony that they sit right where Matt’s hand would fall when Foggy guides him. When Foggy used to guide him.
Foggy covers Matt’s name with a sedate blue shirt and a tie with no pattern on it at all, and goes to work.
*
He doesn’t let himself check all day, despite how easy it would be to roll up his sleeve in the privacy of his corner office and peek. Even when he gets home, he waits until he’s halfway through a beer before he unbuttons his cuff and folds the starched cotton back.
Matt.
He’s not sure if he’s relieved or disappointed. He thinks he’s both. Relieved, because if the mark had been gone he would never have known whether it was really there in the first place or if he’d just imagined it, and the idea that he might be hallucinating Matt’s name on his skin is a troubling one, to say the least.
Disappointed, because now he has to figure out what to do about this.
“Why now?” he asks aloud. His voice echoes in his empty apartment. He holds his elbow up to talk directly to the letters. “Matt and I broke up. He told me to leave. No more Nelson and Murdock. You’re ten years too late.”
“Broke up” is a strong phrase, of course, considering they were never actually dating. But that’s what it feels like. Which is probably why Matt’s name has suddenly appeared on his skin - it’s like a stress breakout. His stupid skin is just reacting to his stupid heartbreak.
He knows that’s not how soul marks work.
“Don’t get your dumb hopes up,” he tells the letters. “It’s not like Matt’s suddenly got the word ‘Foggy’ on him.”
He doesn’t actually know that that’s true. He knows Matt hasn’t already had Foggy’s name on him - there’s very little of Matt’s skin Foggy hasn’t seen, thanks to Matt’s charming habit of getting himself nearly killed and leaving Foggy to put the broken, bloody, boxer-clad and ludicrously-toned pieces back together. It’s entirely possible that “Foggy” or “Franklin” or “the loser you walked out on, you dumbass” has suddenly appeared somewhere on Matt’s perfect body. It seems unlikely, though, considering the way Matt practically pushed him out the door the last time they spoke face to face; considering that Matt was too busy juggling two different women to bother coming to see Foggy in the hospital.
At least he knows Matt doesn’t have “Elektra” or “Karen” anywhere on him, either.
He feels petty and ashamed the minute he has the thought. Matt isn’t his. Matt’s never been his. Even the name on Foggy’s arm doesn’t mean Matt belongs to him - just that Foggy belongs to Matt, which is the least newsworthy fact in existence. If someone else can make Matt happy, Foggy shouldn’t begrudge them that.
And he’s been so good at not begrudging the hordes of swooning admirers Matt’s left in his wake over the past decade. He shouldn’t start now, when he’s lost whatever tenuous claim he already had to Matt.
Besides, it’s entirely possible that Matt has one of their names on him now. If Foggy can suddenly have Matt’s name after they’ve parted ways, who’s to say there’s not a brand over Matt’s heart telling him he belongs to Karen after all? Or that now that he and Elektra are back together doing whatever insane things they do together - breaking and entering in more Long Island McMansions? fighting ninjas? Foggy has no idea - she’s not stamped across his back like a beacon?
And honestly, how would Matt even know? The letters don’t feel any different than the rest of Foggy’s skin. Matt could have a hundred names and just be waiting for someone to tell him about them.
Maybe Foggy should call him.
Foggy bites back the thought as soon as he has it. He’s cut Matt out of his life. It was the healthy thing to do, both emotionally and not-getting-freaking-shot-wise. He knows it was the healthy thing to do. For all that people are fascinated by soul marks, the science on them isn’t really there. “Soulmate” is a poetic name, but considering that they can shift and change, that some people can have one or twenty or none, it doesn’t actually mean that you have to be with the person written across your body.
And the fact of the matter is, Matt doesn’t want Foggy back.
Foggy finishes his beer and gets up to get another one. Plenty of people have marks they never do anything about. Foggy will just be one more.
But he's going to need a lot more alcohol to cope with that knowledge right now.
*
The problem with trying to avoid your ex-partner/best friend(/soulmate) when you both live in the same tiny neighborhood is, well, you both live in the same tiny neighborhood. And Matt and Foggy are in agreement as to the best bagel place in Hell’s Kitchen, so Foggy really shouldn’t feel like his stomach has dropped to his knees when he walks into the tiny bakery on a Sunday morning in late January and sees the back of a familiar messy head.
He thinks about bolting, but he knows Matt already knows he’s there. Matt probably smelled him coming half a mile out. Foggy's not about to let Matt Murdock keep him from the pumpernickel with the works he's so richly entitled to.
Unbidden, his left hand curves around the mark hidden beneath the sleeve of his right arm.
Matt places his order - Foggy's not quite close enough to hear, but he knows it's a whole wheat bagel with plain cream cheese and a black coffee, because Matt is nothing if not a creature of habit and boring dietary choices - and steps to the side to wait. He doesn't betray a hint of recognition until Foggy places his order. Because heaven forbid the bagel guys suspect Matt's secret life, of course.
“Pumpernickel, extra toasty, everything on it, and a large coffee light and sweet,” Foggy says, and Matt makes a show of startled recognition that, now that Foggy's watching for it, makes him wonder how he ever believed a single one of Matt's lies.
“Foggy?” Matt asks, like he's unsure.
“Oh, Matt, hi. I didn't see you there,” Foggy says for the benefit of the bagel guys, because he knows Matt heard his heartbeat start to race when Foggy saw him. Hell, Matt could probably smell him sweating.
Foggy drops his change in the tip jar and steps over to the waiting area with Matt. Matt looks a little gaunt, extra stubbly, and very nervous. Foggy wishes all three of those things didn't have such an effect on him. “How've you been?” Matt asks.
So they're doing the small talk thing. “Fine,” Foggy says, because “great” will read as a lie but “fine” might squeak by under the wire. “You?”
“Yeah, fine. Good.” One of the store employees calls out Matt’s order and he collects it, but he doesn’t leave. “How’s HC&B?”
“Fine.” This is excruciating. Foggy decides to cut to the chase. “How’s Elektra?”
Matt goes pale. What, did he think Foggy wouldn’t have the guts to ask? That Foggy would hear about Karen finding another woman in Matt’s bed - because Foggy’s still talking to Karen, even if she read him the riot act about keeping Matt’s secret for so long once Matt finally came clean with her - and wouldn’t be able to put two and two together?
Matt swallows visibly, and the hand clutching the paper bag with his bag shakes so badly the rustle of paper is audible. “I,” he says, “I, I,” and Foggy starts to worry. “I just remembered. I. I have to go.”
Foggy opens his mouth to say - he’s not sure what. But Matt’s already booking it out of there, cane whipping back and forth so fast that the other customers leap out of the way to avoid being hit.
That’s...not what Foggy expected. Did Matt and Elektra break up again? There’s something about the shattered expression on Matt’s face that reminds him of all those years ago in college when Foggy came and found him at that mansion way out in the middle of nowhere, when he had to practically scrape Matt off his mattress every morning and carry him to class to keep him from failing. If he had to leave Matt’s emotional wellbeing in hands other than his own, they wouldn’t be Elektra’s.
But, he reminds himself firmly, he’s not responsible for Matt’s emotional wellbeing, no matter what the word on his arm says. After all, Matt doesn’t have Foggy’s name in return. If he did, he wouldn’t have fled like that, right?
The guy behind the counter calls out his order and Foggy collects it without much enthusiasm. Somehow, he’s lost his appetite.
*
He’d...checked.
Not every day. Even he wasn’t that pathetic.
But yeah, occasionally, when he was feeling particularly gooshy towards Matt, he’d do a quick perusal in the shower, just to be sure the name hadn’t appeared when he wasn’t paying attention. When he went home to his parents’ for the weekend, he’d lock himself in the bathroom and crane his neck to scan his own back in the mirror, secure in the knowledge that, say, Chad from down the hall wouldn’t walk in and towel whip him for being a romantic weirdo where everyone in the dorm could see. When he and Matt were squished onto Foggy’s bed together watching a movie and Matt would doze off with his face pillowed on Foggy’s chest, Foggy couldn’t help looking over his hands and arms, tugging up his own shirt to check his stomach and sides, because surely, surely…
How could he feel this much for someone without it being fate?
He checked Matt, too. Oh, he refused to let himself take discreet glances at Matt when he changed, which would've been well beyond the creepy pale, but Matt was functionally allergic to shirts in warm weather, and Foggy was the one charged with putting sunblock on him the two or three times they went to the beach. There wasn't much of Matt he hadn't seen even before he'd been reduced to cutting Matt's bloody clothes off of him. And there was never any writing on that perfect body, not one single letter.
He remembered thinking, as he screwed the Nelson and Murdock sign into the wall outside their office, that this was better. This was metal and brick and stone, and they'd chosen each other, even after everything. They were together because they wanted to be. That meant more than fate.
The sign is still there. At least, Foggy's pretty sure it is. He always takes the long way around that block.
Now that he's got fate and choice alike on his side, he's starting to realize neither one means shit to the drunken stumblings of a pointless universe.
*
“Holy shit,” Marci says over a working lunch in February, three weeks after Foggy runs into Matt.
“What?” Foggy asks around a mouthful of dry chicken Caesar salad wrap.
“I'm reading the society page,” she says. He gives her a look over their laptop screens. “Fuck you, Foggy Bear, I can take a break. Anyway you remember that ambassador’s daughter we went to college with? The Greek one? She dropped out halfway through sophomore year and there were all those crazy rumors?”
Foggy swallows his mouthful with difficulty and puts the rest of the wrap down. He doesn't think he'll want it. “Elektra.”
“Oh right, didn't Matt date her for a while? What a weird couple. Anyway.” Marci’s eyes go wide as she drops her bombshell. “She died.”
There's no air in the room all of a sudden. “What?”
“Yeah, all it says are ‘tragic circumstances’ and that the family requests their privacy...probably a drug overdose, right? Or a DUI. She was always kind of wild.” Marci drums her nails against her trackpad, thoughtful. “She wasn't even thirty. God. Do you think Matt knows?”
Matt's face is never far from Foggy's mind’s eye but he sees it now, pale and gaunt. Grief-stricken, even if Foggy didn't know it at the time. “I don't know,” he lies, and pushes the rest of his wrap into the garbage.
*
He doesn't let himself hesitate before knocking on Matt's door, because if Matt's home he already knows Foggy's there. He’s not sure what he expects, but Matt’s still wearing work clothes when Foggy opens the door, though his tie is loose and his sleeves are rolled up. Foggy wasn’t even sure Matt was still going to work.
“Hi,” Matt says.
“Hi,” Foggy says. “Can I come in?”
Matt steps back to let Foggy into the apartment. It’s hardly an effusive welcome, but Foggy probably doesn’t deserve anything more.
No - now he’s not being fair to himself. How could he have known about Elektra?
Still. In his worst moments he’d have given anything to be able to hurt Matt anywhere close to as deeply as Matt’s hurt him. Now that he has the bloody weapon in his hand, he wishes he could drop it.
In the living room, Foggy shoves his hands into his pockets so that he doesn’t have to figure out what to do with them. “I heard about Elektra,” he says.
Matt goes brittle. “Oh.”
“I’m sorry.” It’s laughably pitiful, and at the same time far too all-encompassing. There are so many things Foggy isn’t sorry for.
“Yeah,” Matt says. He’s not wearing his glasses but he might as well be, for all his expression is giving Foggy. “So am I.”
“Matt, why didn’t you tell me?” Foggy says before he can stop himself, then winces.
And Matt doesn’t let how stupid that was slide. “When would it have come up?” he asks. “During our weekly chats? At the bagel place, while you pretend not to know me? At the office?”
“You told me to - ” Foggy starts, then clamps down on it. No. This is not how condolences work. “You could have told me about this,” he says. “I know you don’t have...that you don’t know many other people who knew her. Not that I knew her well, but I would have listened. About this.”
Matt’s jaw clenches. “Yeah, well, if I need to unburden myself, there’s always Father Lantom. At least I know he’s not there out of pity.”
“Feeling bad that something terrible happened isn’t pity, Matt, it’s…” Foggy cuts himself off with a sigh. “You don’t have to go through this alone, is all.”
“Really? Because from where I’m standing, it sure seems like I do.”
It’s only the fact that Foggy knows Matt’s hurting that keeps him from snapping in response. “Look, things are...not great between us. Acknowledged. But I said a shitty thing, and I just wanted to come and tell you that I’m sorry I was shitty, and I’m sorry Elektra’s gone, and I’m sorry you’re in pain. And even if we’re not...partners...anymore, well, I’ve still got ears if you wanna use ‘em. That’s all.”
Matt’s face works through the peculiar series of twitches it always does when he’s feeling a lot of emotions at once and thinks it doesn’t show. “Foggy, in all the time we’ve known each other, have I ever talked about Elektra with you?”
No. Matt had never been one to kiss and tell, but he’d gone total man of mystery when he and Elektra were dating, disappearing at her beck and call and returning at odd hours looking dazed and kiss-bruised. At the time Foggy had chalked it up to whatever low-level criminal shenanigans Elektra was dragging Matt into, and the subsequent tacit banning of her name as the logical result of Matt’s heartbreak. Now he’s pretty sure that whatever she was into, it was at least ninja-adjacent. It makes sense that Matt wouldn’t have shared any of that with Foggy - not before Foggy knew about Matt’s abilities, and not after, when Elektra was the reason Matt hung Foggy out to dry on the Castle case.
Either way, it doesn’t look like Matt’s about to break the old familiar patterns now. “No,” Foggy says, and knows he can’t hide the hurt in his voice from Matt.
Matt sets his jaw. “Then why would I start now?”
It takes a minute for Foggy to find his voice, even though he knew it was coming. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, all right. I get it. Sorry.”
He heads for the door. Matt follows behind him, and as Foggy reaches for the doorknob, Matt pulls in a breath. “Foggy...I appreciate you coming by.”
Foggy shakes his head and opens the door. It’s too little, too late. “Yeah. I’ll see you around, Matt.”
“You gonna act like you know me when you do?” Matt asks.
Foggy doesn’t look back over his shoulder. He knows if he looks at Matt’s face he’ll crumble. “Why would I start now?” he asks, and walks out.
*
He has dinner with his parents at their new place out in Jersey. He brings a wildly overpriced bottle of pinot noir, just because he can. But his dad's tired and red wine gives his mom a headache, so he's the only one to drink any. He doesn't admit out loud that he can't tell the difference between it and the eight dollar stuff.
“How's that fancy firm of yours?” his dad asks as he adds salt to his roast beef. Foggy's mom makes a disapproving noise - Foggy's dad is supposed to be watching his sodium - and Foggy's dad wrinkles his nose at her, teasing. It's an old argument, long past the words they no longer need. The name “Anna” is clear and black on the inside of Foggy's dad’s wrist as he reaches to put the salt back. Foggy swallows down unbearable loneliness.
“It's fine,” he says, and sips the wine. “Keeps me busy. I wish there was more time in the courtroom, I guess, but it's not a bad thing to settle as much as we do. Better for our clients.”
“You always did like an audience, Harold Hill,” his mom says, and Foggy rolls his eyes, because sixteen years is a long time to be referencing a play he starred in in middle school. “Have you heard from Matt?”
Foggy's knife slips and screeches against his plate. “That's kind of a non sequitur.”
“I'm just wondering,” she says. “You boys were inseparable for so long, I just...don't really understand what happened there.”
Well, Mom, Matt was more interested in being a self-righteous criminal with a death wish than in being my partner or friend, so I decided I had enough bullet holes in me and left. Good news, though, apparently he's my soulmate, even if I'm not his.
“I told you what happened,” Foggy says evenly. “Matt and I had different visions for how we should run our practice. In that I thought we should actually show up, and he didn't.”
“Mm,” his mom says, like she's acknowledging that that's Foggy's reason but not that it might be a good one. “It just seems too bad to me to throw away so many years of friendship just because you two aren't working together anymore.”
“Jesus, Mom!” Foggy says, dropping his silverware with a clatter. “I’m not throwing anything away. Matt's the one who left me to defend a mass murderer by myself and walked away from me when I had a bullet hole in my shoulder. I know he's your favorite, but I'm your fucking son. You could at least pretend you're on my side.”
“Don't swear at your mother,” his dad snaps.
“Oh, sweetheart, I am on your side,” his mom says, ignoring Foggy's F bomb. “It's just that you seem so...you seem like you miss him. I just don't want you to have any regrets. That's all.”
Foggy stares very hard at his plate. “Everyone has regrets,” he says quietly. “But I'd rather be unhappy without Matt than unhappy with him. At least this way I've got a little dignity left.”
It's the closest he's come to talking about how he feels about Matt with his parents since he was eighteen, when he brought Matt home for a visit and afterwards his mother had gently said that if there was ever anything Foggy needed to tell her about himself, well… Foggy had turned bright red and changed the subject, which he supposed was answer enough.
He supposed he's always been transparent.
His mother reaches out and squeezes his wrist, and his father clears his throat and says, “So, what's it like working for that Jeri Hogarth, huh? She seems like a firecracker.”
Foggy nods, and doesn't touch his elbow. “Yeah,” he says. “So I was in her office last week…”
They let the conversation move on, and Foggy pours himself a third glass of wine that he knows he shouldn’t have. Otherwise it’ll just end up going down the sink.
*
Freshman year, Matt and Foggy lived down the hall from a guy named Jason who’d had the name “Marisol” on his ankle since birth - incredibly rare for a soul mark.
Senior year, Jason sat next to a girl named Marisol in a philosophy seminar who’d had the name “Jason” behind her knee for just as long.
A week later, they were married at City Hall. One of the frats threw a kegger in their honor - from-birth soulmates finding each other was a big deal - and Matt and Foggy dutifully got wasted before staggering back to their dorm. Matt’s bed was closer to the door, which was a good enough reason for Foggy to flop across the end of it with a sigh. Matt made a pretending-to-be-annoyed noise before sitting up against the headboard and letting his legs drape over Foggy’s back.
“Do you ever wish you had one?” Foggy asked after a long moment of picking at the fringe of the extra-soft fleece blanket he’d gotten Matt last Christmas.
Matt was silent for so long that his eventual “One what?” made Foggy snort.
“You know what,” Foggy said. “Do you ever wish you just...knew?”
“You don’t just know,” Matt said, because the boy was born contrary. “They could get divorced next week.”
“Bite your tongue, Murdock!”
“Well, they could,” Matt insisted. “And some people never find their mates. Some people find theirs after they've already fallen in love with someone else, or their marks don't appear until after they're married. Some marks are platonic, and some, some people have more than one. Having someone's name written on you doesn't mean you're meant to be together forever. It doesn't stop you from getting hurt.”
“Okay, thank you, I took Sociology of Soul Marks last semester too.” Foggy rolled over with a groan; Matt lifted his legs to let him, then resettled them across Foggy's stomach. “It gives you a starting point, though. It gives you some proof that it could be permanent.”
“Nothing's permanent, Foggy,” Matt pointed out. “People die.”
“Wow, you are a maudlin drunk tonight. Don't you believe in romance?” Foggy reached down and wrapped his hand around Matt's sock-clad ankle. Jason had Marisol’s name on his ankle. If Matt had something, would it say “Foggy” or “Franklin?”
Or something else entirely, Foggy reminded himself.
“It's not maudlin, and it's not unromantic, either,” Matt said. “If someone's going to be with me forever, I want it to be because they want to be, and not because some quirk of fate or biology that we don't even understand wrote my name on their skin.”
Foggy closed his mouth before he could assure Matt that he didn't have to worry in that department. Foggy didn't have a mark, but he planned on sticking with Matt for life.
“I guess that makes sense,” he said eventually, and yawned.
“Mmrph,” Matt mumbled in response, sliding down until he was horizontal. “If you're gonna fall asleep here, at least turn yourself the right way so I can use the blankets.”
Foggy let out a long-suffering sigh and squirmed until he was next to Matt, pulling the blanket with him as he went. “You don't just love me for my body heat, do you, Matty?”
“Of course not,” Matt said, rolling over to press his back against Foggy's side. “I also love you for the care packages your mom sends.”
He wiggled his butt against Foggy's hip to show he was kidding, and Foggy smiled into the darkness. It wasn't a soul mark, but Foggy would take it.
*
Daredevil’s on the news in March: a hostage situation that he somehow got involved in, and suddenly there’s twelve innocent civilians in there with some crazy rednecks with guns, and only Matt between them and death, and the cops can’t send anyone in after them because they’re afraid of escalating the situation even further.
Foggy doesn’t really believe in God, not the way Matt does, but he sits and he watches as the live news coverage goes on long into the night, and he prays. Hand curved around the name on his elbow, he whispers pleas to whoever might be listening until he’s forgotten he’s even speaking them out loud.
Just as dawn’s starting to break, the hostages come out slowly, hands in the air to keep the cops from shooting them by mistake. One lucky cameraman gets a distant shot of Daredevil making his escape over the rooftops - moving slower than usual, limping a little maybe, but very definitively alive.
Foggy’s so relieved he’s dizzy, and has to sit with his head between his knees for a minute before he can stand up and go to bed. He calls out sick and sleeps in. That afternoon he walks down Matt’s street on his way back from a late lunch, but all he does is stand outside Matt’s building for too long to be anything but pathetic before heading back home.
*
He sees Matt three days later at the post office - too far to speak, but close enough to see the impressive shiner beneath Matt’s glasses. Matt turns his head in Foggy’s direction, opens his mouth, but doesn’t move out of his place in line.
Foggy buys his stamps and tries to remember how to breathe normally until he’s out of Matt’s earshot again.
*
In mid-April there’s a heat wave, just in time for the AC in Foggy’s supposedly fancy new office to go on the fritz. He loosens his tie and rolls up his sleeves and keeps working.
Three hours later, Marci’s perched on his desk telling him about the misogynistic opposing counsel she eviscerated in court when she freezes. “Um. Foggy?”
He raises his eyebrows at her. “You okay?”
“That remains to be seen,” she says. “Did you...get a new tattoo?”
Foggy stares at her, baffled, before following her line of sight...to his elbow. Where the only part of his mark that’s visible, peeking out past his rolled-up sleeve, is an M and an A.
Oh.
He sighs, then pushes his sleeve up to reveal the rest of the name. Some of the color returns to Marci’s face.
“Okay,” she says. “Yeah. That...that makes a little more sense. Not that I don’t love you, Foggy Bear…”
“I know,” he says quickly. He’s not offended. “I love you too, but we’re not…”
“No, we’re not,” she agrees.
It’s easy, uncomplicated, the way things usually are with Marci. They’re nothing alike, but they understand each other just the same. He wonders if things would be this easy and uncomplicated if she was his soulmate. Isn’t the whole point of soulmates to make this whole “love” thing more straightforward?
Marci’s initial panic has clearly passed, because now she’s stuck on thoughtful. “That wasn’t there the last time I got you to shed a few layers,” she says. They haven’t slept together since he joined the firm - it seemed like a recipe for disaster now that they're coworkers - but it’s still been less than a year since she last saw him naked.
Foggy has a feeling his smile is bitter. “It showed up the day I started working here.”
Marci gives a low whistle. “Well fuck me sideways,” she says. “Someone up there really doesn’t like you.” Foggy gives a wry shrug. “Does he know?”
Foggy shakes his head. “What good would it do?”
“Well, if I know your goody two-shoes overly moralistic altar boy of an ex-BFF, I’d say it’d at least make him feel nauseatingly guilty about all the shit he put you through. Which is more than enough of a reason to spill the beans in my opinion,” Marci says, and beams her sharkiest smile at him.
“Yeah,” Foggy says, because she’s right about the first part, and maybe even the second. “But I don’t want him on those terms.”
Marci sighs, and stands up, leans over to kiss Foggy on the top of his head. “Too good for this world, Foggy Nelson,” she says. “You know I’m always available if you need to get super drunk over this, right? Or just in general.”
“I know,” he says, and this smile is more genuine. “Thanks, Marce.”
The funny thing is, it doesn’t even hurt to talk about it. Much.
*
Two weeks later, he’s woken from a sound sleep by a pounding on his window. He jolts upright, heart racing, and finally makes out a dark silhouette through the curtain.
“Matt?” he whispers, because any alternative is too terrifying to contemplate.
There’s another knock, a rat-tat double beat that Foggy takes as an affirmative - and besides, who else could have heard his whisper? He’s in motion before he realizes it, scrambling out of bed and pushing aside the curtain, because if Matt’s coming here in the middle of the night he must be in trouble, he must be in danger, he needs help -
Matt’s not alone.
Elektra’s with him. Thin and staring and filthy, eyes like bruises in a deathly pale face, but definitely Elektra.
“I’m sorry,” Matt says. He’s in the Daredevil suit, but it’s still clear from what little shows of his face how frantic he is. “I didn’t know where else to take her. They already know where I live.”
“I...I…” Foggy opens and closes his mouth a few times, like a fish. “Get inside.”
Matt has to practically carry Elektra through the window, which doesn’t actually seem all that difficult because she looks like she weighs almost nothing. She’s silent and very still, except for her eyes, which keep darting around the room, resting on Foggy’s face for a moment before flinching away at any sound. Foggy never knew her that well back in college, but neither “silent” nor “still” ever seemed like words that fit her well.
“I thought you were dead,” Foggy says to her, moronically, because he’s too confused and alarmed for tact at the moment.
“She was,” Matt says.
“Well,” Foggy says. “That’s a new one.”
Elektra falters, and Matt catches her. “She needs to rest,” Matt says. “Maybe the couch…?”
Foggy’s always been his mother’s son, and his nurturing instincts kick in now and save him from shock. It’s like Captain America, he tells himself. Captain America came back from the dead, and so can your ex-best friend’s ex-ninja ex-girlfriend. “Put her in the bed. I’ll take the couch,” he says. Matt pauses. “Sorry, Matt. You come back from the dead, you get the comfiest sleeping arrangements in the place. I don’t make the rules.”
“Thank you,” Matt says, and Foggy knows he doesn’t mean about the bed.
Matt steers Elektra to the bed and guides her under the rumpled sheets. She’s covered in dirt and blood but Foggy tries not to care. He can afford new sheets if it doesn’t wash out. At least she’s not wearing shoes, which is a relief right up until he wonders what she was doing parkouring over roofs and fire escapes with no shoes on.
“Rest,” Matt murmurs, low and tender with his gloved hand wrapped around one of hers. “I’ll be here when you wake up. I promise.”
It’s not something Foggy should be privy to, and he wanders awkwardly out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, where he pulls a couple of beers out of the fridge before rummaging through the cabinets to see if he’ll have enough food for two fugitive vigilantes in the morning. A minute later Matt comes out to join him, pulling his mask off as he does.
“She’s sleeping now,” he says. “I think. I’m not totally sure if she can sleep anymore, or…” He spreads his hands, helpless.
Foggy hands him a beer.
“I am sorry,” Matt says, turning the bottle around and around in his hands without drinking from it. “I just...I panicked. I needed to take her somewhere they wouldn’t find her.”
Foggy nods. “I think I’m owed a very long explanation here.”
Matt tells him, sitting side by side on the couch but nowhere close enough to touch. He tells Foggy about a girl who saw through all of Matt’s pretenses and what really happened the night Foggy came to collect a tearstained Matt from police custody out on Long Island; he tells Foggy about unkillable ninjas and his jackass mentor being even more of a jackass than previously suspected and something called a Black Sky, which would be a better explanation if Matt himself seemed to have any idea what it was; he tells Foggy about a resurrection attempt gone wrong, or right, depending on how you looked at it.
“They wanted to bring her back as one of them,” Matt says. “But I...honestly, I don’t even know what I did, but I interrupted whatever they were pumping into her and...I think she’s herself. I don’t think they got their claws into her. But they’re going to want her back.” Foggy must have some involuntary reaction to that that Matt can perceive, because he hastily adds, “I’m not going to let them trace this back to you, Foggy. I promise.”
“Watch out, Matty,” Foggy says before he can catch himself. “You're making an awful lot of promises tonight.”
Something pained flickers over Matt's face and is gone. “I realize I don't have the right to ask this of you,” he says. “If you want us to leave…”
“Oh come on, Matt, what do you take me for?” Foggy snaps. “This is Elektra’s life. She might not be my bosom buddy but if hiding her here will keep her safe then let's go get her a toothbrush and her own pair of bunny slippers.”
Matt picks at the label on his beer bottle. “I’m,” he says. “I’m sorry for what I said before. About Elektra, when you came to see me. I was hurting and I took it out on you when you were trying to be kind.”
“I said some dickish things too,” Foggy says. It’s not really an apology, because he’s not ready to apologize, and he doesn’t want to say it’s okay when it’s really, really not. But that doesn’t mean he’s been on his best behavior.
“Yeah, well, I probably deserved them.”
For some reason, self-flagellating Matt pisses Foggy off more than prickly, defensive Matt, so he changes the subject. “What’s your plan?” he asks. “I mean, for tonight? I can lend you something to sleep in and I guess you can share the bed with Elektra…”
“No, I don’t want to disturb her,” Matt says. “I’ll keep watch for a while. I don’t think they were able to track us, but if they did…” His jaw clenches. “I’m not supposed to promise you anything, I know. But they’re not touching either of you.”
Foggy takes a minute to let the lump in his throat at Matt’s determination subside. He shouldn’t be touched. Matt would throw himself in front of a bullet for anyone in this city, he knows that. It doesn’t make Foggy special, except that Matt might be carrying around a little more guilt over Foggy than for the average New Yorker. Not to mention Matt’s not great at the post-bullet follow-through.
“Fine,” he says, and gets up to fetch a couple of spare blankets from his linen closet. He hands one to Matt. “In case you change your mind. Otherwise, you know where everything is. Help yourself to whatever. I’m gonna try and get some sleep.”
“Thanks,” Matt says, clutching the blanket like he’s not sure what to do with it. He opens his mouth again, then closes it without a word.
Foggy doesn’t have time to wait for Matt to figure out what he wants to say. It’s nearly dawn, and even though Foggy’s calling out ninjaed tomorrow, he’ll need sleep to deal with all of this by the light of day.
“Right,” he says, and sits back down on the couch. Matt hastily vacates it, and Foggy shakes out his blanket and lies down. “If ninjas attack, wake me up and I’ll, uh, try to bean one of them with a lamp or something.”
“Sure,” Matt says, and takes a seat in the armchair closest to the window. Foggy’s not sure how he feels about Matt essentially watching over him while he sleeps, but he doesn’t have much of a choice. “Good night, Foggy.”
“Good night,” Foggy says, and closes his eyes on Matt’s silhouette, on the conversation, on this whole stupid night.
He doesn’t sleep a wink.
*
When it’s too bright out to feign sleep anymore, Foggy gives up and pushes the blanket back. Matt could probably tell he was awake, anyway.
“Coffee?” he asks.
Matt lifts his head from where he’d rested it on his knees, looking for all the world like an old dog guarding the homestead from attack. Foggy supposes that’s not a totally off-base metaphor. “Please,” he says.
Foggy’s grateful both for something to do with his hands, and for the psychosomatic perking-up effect the smell of the coffee has on him as it percolates. He’s got an open floor plan in his apartment, so he can keep an eye on Matt as he takes mugs out of the cabinet and the milk out of the fridge. “How is she?” he asks.
Matt tilts his head, listening. “Still asleep,” he says.
The worry and fear on his face only hurt Foggy a little. “I think we should call Claire in on this one,” he says. “I don’t have a lot of experience caring for the undead.”
Matt’s eyebrows go up. “And you think Claire does?”
“I’m just saying she’ll have at least a marginally better idea of what to do than I do,” Foggy says. “I mean, if you want someone to vigorously defend Elektra’s rights as a person once declared legally dead, sure, yeah, you've come to the right place, but if you want someone to take a pulse and render a verdict…” He shrugs. “You probably want to keep the circle small and I get that, but I think Elektra’s wellbeing takes precedent here.”
Matt pauses for a moment, visibly agonizing, then nods. “Yeah. Okay, yeah. I'll call her. After Elektra wakes up.”
“Great,” Foggy says. “Meanwhile, I am going to put my coffee in a to-go mug and do a grocery run, because there is nothing to eat here besides FunYuns and some lo mein of uncertain vintage. If you want to slip out of your bondage gear, or if Elektra wakes up and would like to wear something besides a burial shroud, sweatpants and t-shirts are in the third drawer of my dresser.”
Matt nods, and takes the mug Foggy hands him with a quiet thanks. Foggy tears his eyes away from Matt's hollow cheeks and riotous bedhead and goes to put on real pants.
*
When he comes back with the meager groceries he could scrounge from the bodega - a loaf of bread, weird off-brand cereal, some dubious-looking bananas - Elektra is awake and sitting on his couch, wearing his sweatpants and favorite Mets t-shirt. She's clean and her hair is wet, and Matt comes out of the bathroom with an armful of damp towels as Foggy walks in, in another pair of sweats and a “Virginia Beach Is For Lovers” shirt Foggy's sister brought back from a trip as a joke.
“Claire’s on her way,” Matt says.
A ghost of a smile flits across Elektra's face. “Hello, Franklin,” she says.
Right. Foggy’d forgotten that she’d insisted on calling him that the few times they'd interacted. “Hi, Elektra. How are you feeling?”
“Splendid,” she says in a perfect debutante voice. “Wonderful weather we’re having, isn’t it?”
Matt looks pained, and Foggy tries not to roll his eyes. Okay, so maybe his question was inane. Still.
“Matt, you're on egg-making duty,” he says, trading the groceries for Matt's towels. He's not sure if Matt knows where his hamper is, and more importantly Matt is an exponentially better cook than Foggy. “Elektra, coffee?”
“Yes,” she says, just as Matt barks, “No stimulants until Claire says it’s okay,” and they scowl at each other. They've clearly already argued about this. Foggy looks at them, these gorgeous hard vigilantes so rumpled and domestic, and even though it's his apartment and his clothes making them look that way he suddenly feels like he's intruding. Intruding, and cavernously lonely.
He slips around Matt to dump the towels in the hamper in his closet. Matt's stiffly whisking eggs when Foggy returns to the kitchen to pour half a cup of coffee, thinned with lots of milk: a compromise. Matt frowns but doesn't say anything when Foggy hands it to Elektra, who looks surprised, and then rallies.
“I usually take it black,” she says.
“I usually don't give up my bed to people who tanked the biggest court case of my career,” he retorts, and this time she can't hide her surprise.
Claire arrives when they're halfway through eating, and gratefully accepts the coffee Foggy has waiting for her. “I've got a shift in an hour,” she tells them. “What's up? None of you appear to be bleeding or unconscious.”
Matt tells her. Foggy resists the urge to narrate for him that Claire’s staring - first at Matt, then at Elektra, who is pushing her eggs around her plate with less appetite than Foggy would've expected from someone who crawled her way out of the grave less than twelve hours prior. Foggy can't blame Claire. Aside from the general implausibility of the tale, Elektra looks tired and fragile and pale, swimming in Foggy's clothes - hardly convincing as either a vigilante or an undead demonic weapon.
“I just...want to make sure she's okay,” Matt says, and Elektra rolls her eyes so flamboyantly that for a moment Foggy actually likes her.
Claire shakes her head. “Every time I think I've seen everything…all right, Elektra, is it? Bedroom.”
“Fresh,” Elektra says, but follows an unimpressed Claire into Foggy’s bedroom. Matt tries to follow but Claire doesn't let him.
“After all she's been through, don't you think she deserves a little privacy?” Claire asks, and shuts the door on him.
Matt paces the living room as Foggy clears the breakfast dishes. Foggy watches him out of the corner of his eye and realizes how stupid he was to ever think Matt might have Foggy's name on him. He doesn't have Elektra's, either, and the degree to which he's worrying about her puts anything he might have felt for Foggy to shame.
Foggy washes the dishes and makes sure his sleeves are firmly rolled back down before the sighted people emerge from the bedroom.
It’s not long before they do, Elektra flopping onto the couch and finger-combing her hair over her shoulder, a studied, bored look on her face. “She’s fine, at least as far as modern medicine can tell,” Claire says. “A little dehydrated, and I’d recommend taking it easy for a couple of weeks and getting a lot of sleep, but…” She shrugs. Foggy bites back his instinct to narrate again. “If I hadn’t seen crazier things I’d never buy that she was ever dead to begin with.”
“Which means I can have a proper cup of coffee, or at least what passes for one in the States,” Elektra says, and waves an imperious hand. “Franklin.”
Foggy’s eyebrows shoot up. “Claire says you’re fine. Get it yourself.”
Elektra lets out an annoyed noise and returns to examining her split ends. Matt, looking pained again, turns to Claire.
“Thank you so much for coming,” he says.
“It’s what I do. Apparently,” she says, picking up her bag, and looks at Foggy. “Can I speak with you in the hall, Franklin?”
He follows her out of the apartment, closing the door gently behind him. “I hate being called Franklin. And you know Matt can still hear us, right? Stop listening, Matt.”
“I didn’t know you two were back together,” she says.
He’s not sure what’s more humiliating: that he knows Matt heard that, or that he knows Claire can see the hot flush that blooms over his face. “We’re not. There’s no...there’s nothing,” he says. “He needed help. They both did. I’m not gonna let them get ninjaed to death - again - because Matt and I aren’t partners anymore. Isn’t there something about that in the Hippocratic Oath?”
“Something like that,” she says. “I just...think you should be careful. You didn’t choose this life. You shouldn’t have to be hurt by it.”
“The Hand doesn’t know where we are,” Foggy says.
“I wasn’t talking about that kind of hurt,” she says. “Thanks for the coffee, Foggy.”
“See you around, Claire,” he says, and leans against the doorframe to watch her go. Even after she’s disappeared down the stairs, he stays there, steeling himself before he goes back inside. She’s right, of course - she usually is.
She’s just also far too late.
*
Foggy calls out of work and changes the muddy sheets on his bed before bracing himself for the next conversation. “So what exactly is the plan here?” he asks. “Because if the three of us are going to shack up indefinitely in some kind of terminally awkward living arrangement, I think we should relocate to that penthouse Elektra used to have in college, if just for the whirlpool tub. I’m assuming there’s a whirlpool tub.”
“Please, what do you take me for?” Elektra asks, inspecting her nails, which are ragged and short. Foggy wonders if there’s still grave dirt beneath them. “Next you’ll say all the upholstery is leopard print and there’s a disco ball in the bathroom.”
“We don’t want to impose on you too long,” Matt interjects. “Just give me a few nights to deal with the Hand presence in the city, and then we can - ”
“You’re not going without me,” Elektra interrupts.
“You shouldn’t go at all!” Foggy says. “They nearly killed you last time, and the time before that - and they did kill Elektra - ”
“Which is why I’m not letting them get near her again!” Matt says.
“You don’t have a choice, Matthew!” Elektra retorts. “They don’t want you, they want me, and they’re not going to stop until they have me back. They’ll kill you to get to me. They’ll kill him.” She nods at Foggy.
“So what, I just hand you over to them again?”
“Have either of you ever considered calling the police about this?” Foggy asks. “Or the Avengers, somehow?”
They ignore him, and why shouldn’t they? It’s only his apartment they’re squatting in, after all. “You heard Claire, you need rest,” Matt says. “You’re in no condition to be fighting.”
“And you’re no match for Nobu!”
“How about no one fights any ninjas until you have more than three hours of sleep and half an egg to eat between the two of you, huh?” Foggy says.
Elektra waves a careless hand, dismissing that. “This doesn’t concern you, Franklin.”
“It does until you’re not in my fucking home wearing my fucking pajamas!” he snaps. “You get to set fire to my entire life exactly once, princess, and you’ve already done that, so until I’m no longer feeding and clothing both of your lunatic asses, my plans go. You know, the ones where no one breaks the law or dies?”
Elektra chuffs an annoyed sound and looks away. Matt makes another tragic Mom-and-Dad-are-fighting face at them. “I know this is a huge imposition, Foggy…”
“Save it, Matt.” Foggy doesn’t want to hear another empty apology when Matt will never change, or give Foggy the apologies he really wants to hear. “This may come as a shock to the Suicide Twins, but I do actually want to keep both of you alive. So you’re welcome to stay here as long as you need to, both of you. But not if you’re going to act like idiots, and not if you’re going to be shitty. Those are the conditions. Take them or leave them.”
Elektra gives him an appraising look. “Well, someone’s found their balls after all,” she says. She glances at Matt. “Or maybe this isn’t new? That would make more sense. You always did get off on losing a fight, didn’t you, Matthew?” She stands up with a swish of hair. “If you gentlemen will excuse me, I think I’ll retire to the bedroom until I can get my shittiness under control.”
She slams her way into the bedroom. “You know, I’m starting to see why you kept us away from each other back in college,” Foggy says.
Matt puts his face in his hands and groans.
*
In the end, Elektra stays with Foggy, and Matt leaves. Foggy’s apartment isn’t really big enough for three, and Matt has work and clients. He promises not to engage the Hand until Elektra’s well enough to join him, and that’s about as non-reckless as Foggy can talk either of them into being. Foggy doesn’t love the idea of sending Matt back to his apartment when the Hand knows where he lives, but hopefully they won’t attack while they’re still trying to get Matt to lead them back to Elektra, and anyway Foggy supposes it’s no different than all the times Matt’s been in danger that Foggy didn’t know about.
He also doesn’t love the idea of having Elektra as a houseguest indefinitely, but he’s not about to leave her to die either, so. That’s that.
Elektra catnaps the rest of the day after Matt leaves, and Foggy tries to get some work done despite the fact that he’s so tired the computer screen keeps swimming before his eyes, and that his imagination turns every noise outside his apartment into a horde of ninjas about to turn him and Elektra into katana pin cushions. He orders a pizza for dinner, expecting Elektra to complain about being fed peasant food or whatever, but she surprises him by emerging from the bedroom when it arrives and eating three slices.
They eat in near silence. Foggy’s not complaining. He has no idea what to say to her.
When night falls, Elektra relinquishes the bedroom back to Foggy, and he makes up the couch properly for her, with sheets and a couple real pillows. He retreats to the bedroom to change, but the minute he comes out in a t-shirt and boxers to brush his teeth, Elektra goes eerily still.
“How long has that been there?” she asks.
For a moment Foggy can't figure out what she's talking about; then he follows the line of her gaze to Matt's name on his arm. He fights the childish urge to cover it.
“Does it matter?” he asks instead of giving her a real answer, which is probably also childish, but he's putting up the ex-(and current?)-girlfriend of the man who broke his heart. He's earned a little childishness.
“Does Matthew know?” she asks, then answers herself. “Of course not. Which means you didn't have it in college, because he asked, and he’d know if you'd lied.”
“He didn't - how would you even know if he'd asked?” Foggy says, annoyed. They'd talked about soulmates, sure, and Matt had known Foggy didn't have a mark, but he'd never asked specifically about himself. Why would he? People only asked that of people they hoped were in love with them. And Elektra’s probing analysis is, quite frankly, very rude.
“You have no idea, do you?” she asks. She's still looking at his mark - glaring at it, really - and it takes a minute for Foggy to place the hot, angry look in her eyes as what it is: jealousy.
His first feeling, he's ashamed to say, is triumph.
“You don't have one, huh?” he asks. He’s gloating, a little. He can’t stop. “After all that. After he walked out on me for you, and it turns out I'm the one with the mark.”
Elektra's sharp and pale with anger, livid circles beneath her eyes. Foggy's not sure he's ever seen her have a real emotion before, let alone one this intense. “That is not how I would describe the sequence of events,” she manages through gritted teeth.
“We were happy,” Foggy says. He’s carried this long enough. “Maybe he didn't love me, maybe it was never like that between us, but the life we had, before you showed up? It made him happy.”
“You don't know him at all,” she says. “And you don't want to. You want to keep him small and dull and pointless like you are, so that you never have to think about how pathetic your sad little life is. You found a tiger and treated him like a house cat, and you blame me when you get bitten. And least I know what he is.”
“He's a person!” Foggy says, stung. “Going to work and trying to make ends meet and do a little human kindness along the way isn’t pathetic, it’s life. This glorious quest you have in your head where it’s the two of you against the world? It’s gonna get him killed. It already got you killed.”
“Yes, it did,” she snaps. “And I’d take a blade through my chest again right now over the kind of slow death you want to sentence Matthew to.”
“It’s not a - I don’t - God, would you listen to yourself? I’m not asking him to sell his soul!” Foggy says. “I just want an ordinary life!”
“Well, he’s not ordinary! He never has been.” She draws herself up, haughty and regal even swamped in Foggy’s pajamas. “You fell for a con, Franklin. The man you want? He doesn’t exist. I’m sorry for you,” and there’s the vindictive edge of pity in her voice, “but I won’t take the blame for it.”
“Yeah?” Foggy says, feeling small and mean. “If you know him so well, where’s your mark?”
The look on her face reminds Foggy abruptly that she’s deadly. Rather than answer, though - or stab him - she turns in a swish of hair and slams her way into the bathroom.
Alone, Foggy deflates. The door-slamming is appropriate, really; they’re arguing like teenagers, fighting over a boy that Foggy would swear to anyone else he doesn’t even want.
And it’s a fight Foggy’s already lost. There’s only two ways this can end, really: either the Hand will kill Elektra again, and Matt with her, or Matt and Elektra will somehow manage to shake the threat of them, and, well…
Matt’s already made his choice. Soul marks, present or absent or ten years too late, didn’t enter into it.
*
Foggy hadn’t seen Matt for three days when he got the call asking him to come out to Southampton and pick Matt up at the police station. The three day absence had become sort of par for the course - Matt had developed a habit of vanishing for long stretches at a time after meeting Elektra, and rarely told Foggy where he was going or when he’d be back. He seemed blissfully, almost drunkenly happy, though, so Foggy bit his tongue about the missed classes and occasional odd bruises and kept his pining to himself.
The police involvement, though...that was new.
It was a two hour bus trip out to the Hamptons, and ran Foggy nearly forty bucks just one way; then he had to wander around in a chilly drizzle for forty-five minutes until he found the police station. It was tiny and almost cozy, nothing like the busy precinct where Brett's dad worked. Matt was sitting on a bench just inside the front door, curved in on himself like someone had scooped him out.
“Matt, oh my God,” Foggy said, and Matt's head turned vaguely towards him. “What happened? Are you okay? Where's Elektra?”
“She left,” Matt said. His voice was hoarse. There was blood on his shirt.
“What do you mean she left, she just took off with the car and the - why are you at the police station, are you hurt, what happened?” Foggy could hear an edge of hysteria in his voice, all the anger and worry of the past months coming out at once.
“I...I don't…” Matt said, and then lapsed into silence.
“Matt!”
“Are you the roommate?”
Foggy turned to see a genial-looking, gray-haired cop approaching them. “Yes, sir, I'm Franklin Nelson,” he said. Authorities, he'd learned, didn't love his nickname. “Is Matt in trouble?”
“Oh, no no no,” the cop assured him. “Well, maybe just a little girl trouble, but we've all fallen for the wrong gal at least once, right, son?”
Matt’s face somehow grew even more tragic. The cop plucked at Foggy's sleeve and drew him a few feet away, as if Matt somehow couldn't hear them from there.
“Your friend’s fine, just a bit shaken up,” the cop says. “Seems his girlfriend gets a kick out of breaking and entering. These rich girls, you know,” he added conspiratorially, as if he and Foggy both got their hearts broken by heiresses on a regular basis.
“Uh, right,” Foggy said. “So they...broke into someone’s house?”
The cop nodded. “And a good thing they did, because it seems they scared off a real burglar who’d already roughed the owner up a bit. A whole messy scene. Owner’s saying your friend did it, but that’s ridiculous of course, seeing as how he’s, you know. Blind.” He finished his little speech in a stage whisper, glancing significantly at Matt like Foggy would think he meant someone else.
Foggy frowned. “Yeah, not deaf.”
“And thank God, right? Can you imagine?” the cop asked. “Anyway, the burglar took off but your friend insisted on calling us in and the girl rabbited. Like her daddy couldn’t have gotten any charges dropped before she so much as chipped a nail in a holding cell.”
“But...but you aren’t charging Matt with anything, right?” Foggy asked, just to be sure.
“Oh no, of course not!” the cop said. “Kids will be kids, and no harm done, right? In fact, if they hadn’t shown up, who knows what the real criminal would’ve done? You look at it the right way, your friend’s kind of a hero.”
Foggy looked over at Matt, taking in his hunched, furtive posture and reddened knuckles. “Yeah,” he said. “If you look at it the right way.”
Unfortunately, he was pretty sure “the right way” bore only a passing resemblance to the truth.
He waited until they were on the bus back to the city before starting to probe. “So, Matty...that police officer said you and Elektra walked in on some burglar beating the crap out of the owner of the house you br...uh, the house you were in.”
Matt’s chin dipped slightly. Foggy wasn’t sure if it was a nod or just exhaustion, but he went with it.
“That must’ve been kinda scary. Like, I probably would have pissed myself, no lie.”
Silence.
“Is that why Elektra left?” Foggy asked gently. “Because she was scared? Or...did you two have a fight?” More silence. “Matt, what happened to your hands?”
A muscle jumped in Matt’s jaw, but he didn’t say anything. Foggy pushed back the urge to yell, the one being worried always brought out in him.
“You don’t have to talk about it now,” he said. “I think it would help if you did talk about it, eventually, and I’m here if you want to do that. But we can just sit for now, if you want.”
He didn’t want to say that. He wanted to demand answers - how much criminal activity had Elektra been dragging Matt into, and why had he gone along with it, and why had she left, and were they broken up now, and oh God, had Matt beaten someone up somehow? And lied about it?
But he knew Matt. Maybe this was all a big misunderstanding, maybe the crazy behavior was the inevitable acting out of a super-repressed do-gooder raised by nuns, but he knew, he knew that Matt couldn’t have been involved in anything too terrible. Couldn’t have done anything too bad. This was Matt. He was the best person Foggy knew.
So until Matt was ready to tell him, he could wait.
He reached for Matt’s hand, brushing his fingertips gently against Matt’s wrist first to give him a chance to pull away, then wrapping Matt’s hand up in both of his, careful of his injured knuckles. Matt went stiff for a minute, then seemed to deflate, sinking into his seat and dropping his head against Foggy’s shoulder.
“Thanks,” he said hoarsely - the first word he’d spoken since the police station.
Yeah. Foggy could wait.
*
Part One
Fandom: Daredevil (TV)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: "The day Foggy’s supposed to start working at Hogarth, Chao, and Benowitz, he wakes up, walks into the bathroom, starts to take a leak, glances down to check his aim, and freezes when he sees black letters on the inside of his right elbow." Soulmate AU, Matt/Foggy and Matt/Elektra.
Notes: Using this for the "heartbroken" prompt on my Daredevil Bingo card. Title is from "For Good" from Wicked, and I'm sorry for those feels you're having now. Thanks to queenitsy for the beta!
The day Foggy’s supposed to start working at Hogarth, Chao, and Benowitz, he wakes up, walks into the bathroom, starts to take a leak, glances down to check his aim, and freezes when he sees black letters on the inside of his right elbow.
His bladder forgotten, he brings his arm up, closer to his face and horizontal, as if he couldn't tell what the word was immediately. As if he'd somehow misread it, even though it's only four letters.
Matt.
“Of fucking course,” he says, and turns around to sit down heavily on the toilet seat, head in his hands.
*
He’s never told anyone this, but the first morning he woke up in the dorms, the day after he met Matt, he took the longest and most thorough shower of his life. Not for the purpose of bodily hygiene, though - he was hunting, searching every inch of his skin for the name he was almost certain was on there somewhere.
Matt. Matthew. Hell, even the letter M would’ve been enough to make him happy. Anything that said that this feeling of connection, of rightness, wasn’t just in his head. That this was fate, him and Matt. Nelson and Murdock.
It wasn’t just that Matt was hot. Foggy had met hot people before. Foggy had dated hot people before. But there was something about Matt’s smile that made Foggy feel like he’d walk on burning coals just see it again, something that told him he’d be stupid about that smile for a long time. A lifetime, if Matt would let him.
He was already being stupid about it. Matt had given every indication that he didn’t even like boys, judging by how he’d reacted to Foggy’s boneheaded admiration the day before. But soulmates were platonic, sometimes. Foggy could deal with platonic.
But there were no words on his skin, just the usual stretch marks and freckles.
That was okay. They could just be friends. They could be the best friends ever, and Foggy would still be happy. He would be cool about this.
And if he couldn’t help thinking as he dried off that sometimes it took a little while for soulmarks to appear as the people in question got used to each other, well, no one ever had to know that but him.
*
Foggy scrubs the skin of his elbow raw in the shower, but the letters don’t disappear. Of course they don’t.
He’s not immune to the irony that they sit right where Matt’s hand would fall when Foggy guides him. When Foggy used to guide him.
Foggy covers Matt’s name with a sedate blue shirt and a tie with no pattern on it at all, and goes to work.
*
He doesn’t let himself check all day, despite how easy it would be to roll up his sleeve in the privacy of his corner office and peek. Even when he gets home, he waits until he’s halfway through a beer before he unbuttons his cuff and folds the starched cotton back.
Matt.
He’s not sure if he’s relieved or disappointed. He thinks he’s both. Relieved, because if the mark had been gone he would never have known whether it was really there in the first place or if he’d just imagined it, and the idea that he might be hallucinating Matt’s name on his skin is a troubling one, to say the least.
Disappointed, because now he has to figure out what to do about this.
“Why now?” he asks aloud. His voice echoes in his empty apartment. He holds his elbow up to talk directly to the letters. “Matt and I broke up. He told me to leave. No more Nelson and Murdock. You’re ten years too late.”
“Broke up” is a strong phrase, of course, considering they were never actually dating. But that’s what it feels like. Which is probably why Matt’s name has suddenly appeared on his skin - it’s like a stress breakout. His stupid skin is just reacting to his stupid heartbreak.
He knows that’s not how soul marks work.
“Don’t get your dumb hopes up,” he tells the letters. “It’s not like Matt’s suddenly got the word ‘Foggy’ on him.”
He doesn’t actually know that that’s true. He knows Matt hasn’t already had Foggy’s name on him - there’s very little of Matt’s skin Foggy hasn’t seen, thanks to Matt’s charming habit of getting himself nearly killed and leaving Foggy to put the broken, bloody, boxer-clad and ludicrously-toned pieces back together. It’s entirely possible that “Foggy” or “Franklin” or “the loser you walked out on, you dumbass” has suddenly appeared somewhere on Matt’s perfect body. It seems unlikely, though, considering the way Matt practically pushed him out the door the last time they spoke face to face; considering that Matt was too busy juggling two different women to bother coming to see Foggy in the hospital.
At least he knows Matt doesn’t have “Elektra” or “Karen” anywhere on him, either.
He feels petty and ashamed the minute he has the thought. Matt isn’t his. Matt’s never been his. Even the name on Foggy’s arm doesn’t mean Matt belongs to him - just that Foggy belongs to Matt, which is the least newsworthy fact in existence. If someone else can make Matt happy, Foggy shouldn’t begrudge them that.
And he’s been so good at not begrudging the hordes of swooning admirers Matt’s left in his wake over the past decade. He shouldn’t start now, when he’s lost whatever tenuous claim he already had to Matt.
Besides, it’s entirely possible that Matt has one of their names on him now. If Foggy can suddenly have Matt’s name after they’ve parted ways, who’s to say there’s not a brand over Matt’s heart telling him he belongs to Karen after all? Or that now that he and Elektra are back together doing whatever insane things they do together - breaking and entering in more Long Island McMansions? fighting ninjas? Foggy has no idea - she’s not stamped across his back like a beacon?
And honestly, how would Matt even know? The letters don’t feel any different than the rest of Foggy’s skin. Matt could have a hundred names and just be waiting for someone to tell him about them.
Maybe Foggy should call him.
Foggy bites back the thought as soon as he has it. He’s cut Matt out of his life. It was the healthy thing to do, both emotionally and not-getting-freaking-shot-wise. He knows it was the healthy thing to do. For all that people are fascinated by soul marks, the science on them isn’t really there. “Soulmate” is a poetic name, but considering that they can shift and change, that some people can have one or twenty or none, it doesn’t actually mean that you have to be with the person written across your body.
And the fact of the matter is, Matt doesn’t want Foggy back.
Foggy finishes his beer and gets up to get another one. Plenty of people have marks they never do anything about. Foggy will just be one more.
But he's going to need a lot more alcohol to cope with that knowledge right now.
*
The problem with trying to avoid your ex-partner/best friend(/soulmate) when you both live in the same tiny neighborhood is, well, you both live in the same tiny neighborhood. And Matt and Foggy are in agreement as to the best bagel place in Hell’s Kitchen, so Foggy really shouldn’t feel like his stomach has dropped to his knees when he walks into the tiny bakery on a Sunday morning in late January and sees the back of a familiar messy head.
He thinks about bolting, but he knows Matt already knows he’s there. Matt probably smelled him coming half a mile out. Foggy's not about to let Matt Murdock keep him from the pumpernickel with the works he's so richly entitled to.
Unbidden, his left hand curves around the mark hidden beneath the sleeve of his right arm.
Matt places his order - Foggy's not quite close enough to hear, but he knows it's a whole wheat bagel with plain cream cheese and a black coffee, because Matt is nothing if not a creature of habit and boring dietary choices - and steps to the side to wait. He doesn't betray a hint of recognition until Foggy places his order. Because heaven forbid the bagel guys suspect Matt's secret life, of course.
“Pumpernickel, extra toasty, everything on it, and a large coffee light and sweet,” Foggy says, and Matt makes a show of startled recognition that, now that Foggy's watching for it, makes him wonder how he ever believed a single one of Matt's lies.
“Foggy?” Matt asks, like he's unsure.
“Oh, Matt, hi. I didn't see you there,” Foggy says for the benefit of the bagel guys, because he knows Matt heard his heartbeat start to race when Foggy saw him. Hell, Matt could probably smell him sweating.
Foggy drops his change in the tip jar and steps over to the waiting area with Matt. Matt looks a little gaunt, extra stubbly, and very nervous. Foggy wishes all three of those things didn't have such an effect on him. “How've you been?” Matt asks.
So they're doing the small talk thing. “Fine,” Foggy says, because “great” will read as a lie but “fine” might squeak by under the wire. “You?”
“Yeah, fine. Good.” One of the store employees calls out Matt’s order and he collects it, but he doesn’t leave. “How’s HC&B?”
“Fine.” This is excruciating. Foggy decides to cut to the chase. “How’s Elektra?”
Matt goes pale. What, did he think Foggy wouldn’t have the guts to ask? That Foggy would hear about Karen finding another woman in Matt’s bed - because Foggy’s still talking to Karen, even if she read him the riot act about keeping Matt’s secret for so long once Matt finally came clean with her - and wouldn’t be able to put two and two together?
Matt swallows visibly, and the hand clutching the paper bag with his bag shakes so badly the rustle of paper is audible. “I,” he says, “I, I,” and Foggy starts to worry. “I just remembered. I. I have to go.”
Foggy opens his mouth to say - he’s not sure what. But Matt’s already booking it out of there, cane whipping back and forth so fast that the other customers leap out of the way to avoid being hit.
That’s...not what Foggy expected. Did Matt and Elektra break up again? There’s something about the shattered expression on Matt’s face that reminds him of all those years ago in college when Foggy came and found him at that mansion way out in the middle of nowhere, when he had to practically scrape Matt off his mattress every morning and carry him to class to keep him from failing. If he had to leave Matt’s emotional wellbeing in hands other than his own, they wouldn’t be Elektra’s.
But, he reminds himself firmly, he’s not responsible for Matt’s emotional wellbeing, no matter what the word on his arm says. After all, Matt doesn’t have Foggy’s name in return. If he did, he wouldn’t have fled like that, right?
The guy behind the counter calls out his order and Foggy collects it without much enthusiasm. Somehow, he’s lost his appetite.
*
He’d...checked.
Not every day. Even he wasn’t that pathetic.
But yeah, occasionally, when he was feeling particularly gooshy towards Matt, he’d do a quick perusal in the shower, just to be sure the name hadn’t appeared when he wasn’t paying attention. When he went home to his parents’ for the weekend, he’d lock himself in the bathroom and crane his neck to scan his own back in the mirror, secure in the knowledge that, say, Chad from down the hall wouldn’t walk in and towel whip him for being a romantic weirdo where everyone in the dorm could see. When he and Matt were squished onto Foggy’s bed together watching a movie and Matt would doze off with his face pillowed on Foggy’s chest, Foggy couldn’t help looking over his hands and arms, tugging up his own shirt to check his stomach and sides, because surely, surely…
How could he feel this much for someone without it being fate?
He checked Matt, too. Oh, he refused to let himself take discreet glances at Matt when he changed, which would've been well beyond the creepy pale, but Matt was functionally allergic to shirts in warm weather, and Foggy was the one charged with putting sunblock on him the two or three times they went to the beach. There wasn't much of Matt he hadn't seen even before he'd been reduced to cutting Matt's bloody clothes off of him. And there was never any writing on that perfect body, not one single letter.
He remembered thinking, as he screwed the Nelson and Murdock sign into the wall outside their office, that this was better. This was metal and brick and stone, and they'd chosen each other, even after everything. They were together because they wanted to be. That meant more than fate.
The sign is still there. At least, Foggy's pretty sure it is. He always takes the long way around that block.
Now that he's got fate and choice alike on his side, he's starting to realize neither one means shit to the drunken stumblings of a pointless universe.
*
“Holy shit,” Marci says over a working lunch in February, three weeks after Foggy runs into Matt.
“What?” Foggy asks around a mouthful of dry chicken Caesar salad wrap.
“I'm reading the society page,” she says. He gives her a look over their laptop screens. “Fuck you, Foggy Bear, I can take a break. Anyway you remember that ambassador’s daughter we went to college with? The Greek one? She dropped out halfway through sophomore year and there were all those crazy rumors?”
Foggy swallows his mouthful with difficulty and puts the rest of the wrap down. He doesn't think he'll want it. “Elektra.”
“Oh right, didn't Matt date her for a while? What a weird couple. Anyway.” Marci’s eyes go wide as she drops her bombshell. “She died.”
There's no air in the room all of a sudden. “What?”
“Yeah, all it says are ‘tragic circumstances’ and that the family requests their privacy...probably a drug overdose, right? Or a DUI. She was always kind of wild.” Marci drums her nails against her trackpad, thoughtful. “She wasn't even thirty. God. Do you think Matt knows?”
Matt's face is never far from Foggy's mind’s eye but he sees it now, pale and gaunt. Grief-stricken, even if Foggy didn't know it at the time. “I don't know,” he lies, and pushes the rest of his wrap into the garbage.
*
He doesn't let himself hesitate before knocking on Matt's door, because if Matt's home he already knows Foggy's there. He’s not sure what he expects, but Matt’s still wearing work clothes when Foggy opens the door, though his tie is loose and his sleeves are rolled up. Foggy wasn’t even sure Matt was still going to work.
“Hi,” Matt says.
“Hi,” Foggy says. “Can I come in?”
Matt steps back to let Foggy into the apartment. It’s hardly an effusive welcome, but Foggy probably doesn’t deserve anything more.
No - now he’s not being fair to himself. How could he have known about Elektra?
Still. In his worst moments he’d have given anything to be able to hurt Matt anywhere close to as deeply as Matt’s hurt him. Now that he has the bloody weapon in his hand, he wishes he could drop it.
In the living room, Foggy shoves his hands into his pockets so that he doesn’t have to figure out what to do with them. “I heard about Elektra,” he says.
Matt goes brittle. “Oh.”
“I’m sorry.” It’s laughably pitiful, and at the same time far too all-encompassing. There are so many things Foggy isn’t sorry for.
“Yeah,” Matt says. He’s not wearing his glasses but he might as well be, for all his expression is giving Foggy. “So am I.”
“Matt, why didn’t you tell me?” Foggy says before he can stop himself, then winces.
And Matt doesn’t let how stupid that was slide. “When would it have come up?” he asks. “During our weekly chats? At the bagel place, while you pretend not to know me? At the office?”
“You told me to - ” Foggy starts, then clamps down on it. No. This is not how condolences work. “You could have told me about this,” he says. “I know you don’t have...that you don’t know many other people who knew her. Not that I knew her well, but I would have listened. About this.”
Matt’s jaw clenches. “Yeah, well, if I need to unburden myself, there’s always Father Lantom. At least I know he’s not there out of pity.”
“Feeling bad that something terrible happened isn’t pity, Matt, it’s…” Foggy cuts himself off with a sigh. “You don’t have to go through this alone, is all.”
“Really? Because from where I’m standing, it sure seems like I do.”
It’s only the fact that Foggy knows Matt’s hurting that keeps him from snapping in response. “Look, things are...not great between us. Acknowledged. But I said a shitty thing, and I just wanted to come and tell you that I’m sorry I was shitty, and I’m sorry Elektra’s gone, and I’m sorry you’re in pain. And even if we’re not...partners...anymore, well, I’ve still got ears if you wanna use ‘em. That’s all.”
Matt’s face works through the peculiar series of twitches it always does when he’s feeling a lot of emotions at once and thinks it doesn’t show. “Foggy, in all the time we’ve known each other, have I ever talked about Elektra with you?”
No. Matt had never been one to kiss and tell, but he’d gone total man of mystery when he and Elektra were dating, disappearing at her beck and call and returning at odd hours looking dazed and kiss-bruised. At the time Foggy had chalked it up to whatever low-level criminal shenanigans Elektra was dragging Matt into, and the subsequent tacit banning of her name as the logical result of Matt’s heartbreak. Now he’s pretty sure that whatever she was into, it was at least ninja-adjacent. It makes sense that Matt wouldn’t have shared any of that with Foggy - not before Foggy knew about Matt’s abilities, and not after, when Elektra was the reason Matt hung Foggy out to dry on the Castle case.
Either way, it doesn’t look like Matt’s about to break the old familiar patterns now. “No,” Foggy says, and knows he can’t hide the hurt in his voice from Matt.
Matt sets his jaw. “Then why would I start now?”
It takes a minute for Foggy to find his voice, even though he knew it was coming. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, all right. I get it. Sorry.”
He heads for the door. Matt follows behind him, and as Foggy reaches for the doorknob, Matt pulls in a breath. “Foggy...I appreciate you coming by.”
Foggy shakes his head and opens the door. It’s too little, too late. “Yeah. I’ll see you around, Matt.”
“You gonna act like you know me when you do?” Matt asks.
Foggy doesn’t look back over his shoulder. He knows if he looks at Matt’s face he’ll crumble. “Why would I start now?” he asks, and walks out.
*
He has dinner with his parents at their new place out in Jersey. He brings a wildly overpriced bottle of pinot noir, just because he can. But his dad's tired and red wine gives his mom a headache, so he's the only one to drink any. He doesn't admit out loud that he can't tell the difference between it and the eight dollar stuff.
“How's that fancy firm of yours?” his dad asks as he adds salt to his roast beef. Foggy's mom makes a disapproving noise - Foggy's dad is supposed to be watching his sodium - and Foggy's dad wrinkles his nose at her, teasing. It's an old argument, long past the words they no longer need. The name “Anna” is clear and black on the inside of Foggy's dad’s wrist as he reaches to put the salt back. Foggy swallows down unbearable loneliness.
“It's fine,” he says, and sips the wine. “Keeps me busy. I wish there was more time in the courtroom, I guess, but it's not a bad thing to settle as much as we do. Better for our clients.”
“You always did like an audience, Harold Hill,” his mom says, and Foggy rolls his eyes, because sixteen years is a long time to be referencing a play he starred in in middle school. “Have you heard from Matt?”
Foggy's knife slips and screeches against his plate. “That's kind of a non sequitur.”
“I'm just wondering,” she says. “You boys were inseparable for so long, I just...don't really understand what happened there.”
Well, Mom, Matt was more interested in being a self-righteous criminal with a death wish than in being my partner or friend, so I decided I had enough bullet holes in me and left. Good news, though, apparently he's my soulmate, even if I'm not his.
“I told you what happened,” Foggy says evenly. “Matt and I had different visions for how we should run our practice. In that I thought we should actually show up, and he didn't.”
“Mm,” his mom says, like she's acknowledging that that's Foggy's reason but not that it might be a good one. “It just seems too bad to me to throw away so many years of friendship just because you two aren't working together anymore.”
“Jesus, Mom!” Foggy says, dropping his silverware with a clatter. “I’m not throwing anything away. Matt's the one who left me to defend a mass murderer by myself and walked away from me when I had a bullet hole in my shoulder. I know he's your favorite, but I'm your fucking son. You could at least pretend you're on my side.”
“Don't swear at your mother,” his dad snaps.
“Oh, sweetheart, I am on your side,” his mom says, ignoring Foggy's F bomb. “It's just that you seem so...you seem like you miss him. I just don't want you to have any regrets. That's all.”
Foggy stares very hard at his plate. “Everyone has regrets,” he says quietly. “But I'd rather be unhappy without Matt than unhappy with him. At least this way I've got a little dignity left.”
It's the closest he's come to talking about how he feels about Matt with his parents since he was eighteen, when he brought Matt home for a visit and afterwards his mother had gently said that if there was ever anything Foggy needed to tell her about himself, well… Foggy had turned bright red and changed the subject, which he supposed was answer enough.
He supposed he's always been transparent.
His mother reaches out and squeezes his wrist, and his father clears his throat and says, “So, what's it like working for that Jeri Hogarth, huh? She seems like a firecracker.”
Foggy nods, and doesn't touch his elbow. “Yeah,” he says. “So I was in her office last week…”
They let the conversation move on, and Foggy pours himself a third glass of wine that he knows he shouldn’t have. Otherwise it’ll just end up going down the sink.
*
Freshman year, Matt and Foggy lived down the hall from a guy named Jason who’d had the name “Marisol” on his ankle since birth - incredibly rare for a soul mark.
Senior year, Jason sat next to a girl named Marisol in a philosophy seminar who’d had the name “Jason” behind her knee for just as long.
A week later, they were married at City Hall. One of the frats threw a kegger in their honor - from-birth soulmates finding each other was a big deal - and Matt and Foggy dutifully got wasted before staggering back to their dorm. Matt’s bed was closer to the door, which was a good enough reason for Foggy to flop across the end of it with a sigh. Matt made a pretending-to-be-annoyed noise before sitting up against the headboard and letting his legs drape over Foggy’s back.
“Do you ever wish you had one?” Foggy asked after a long moment of picking at the fringe of the extra-soft fleece blanket he’d gotten Matt last Christmas.
Matt was silent for so long that his eventual “One what?” made Foggy snort.
“You know what,” Foggy said. “Do you ever wish you just...knew?”
“You don’t just know,” Matt said, because the boy was born contrary. “They could get divorced next week.”
“Bite your tongue, Murdock!”
“Well, they could,” Matt insisted. “And some people never find their mates. Some people find theirs after they've already fallen in love with someone else, or their marks don't appear until after they're married. Some marks are platonic, and some, some people have more than one. Having someone's name written on you doesn't mean you're meant to be together forever. It doesn't stop you from getting hurt.”
“Okay, thank you, I took Sociology of Soul Marks last semester too.” Foggy rolled over with a groan; Matt lifted his legs to let him, then resettled them across Foggy's stomach. “It gives you a starting point, though. It gives you some proof that it could be permanent.”
“Nothing's permanent, Foggy,” Matt pointed out. “People die.”
“Wow, you are a maudlin drunk tonight. Don't you believe in romance?” Foggy reached down and wrapped his hand around Matt's sock-clad ankle. Jason had Marisol’s name on his ankle. If Matt had something, would it say “Foggy” or “Franklin?”
Or something else entirely, Foggy reminded himself.
“It's not maudlin, and it's not unromantic, either,” Matt said. “If someone's going to be with me forever, I want it to be because they want to be, and not because some quirk of fate or biology that we don't even understand wrote my name on their skin.”
Foggy closed his mouth before he could assure Matt that he didn't have to worry in that department. Foggy didn't have a mark, but he planned on sticking with Matt for life.
“I guess that makes sense,” he said eventually, and yawned.
“Mmrph,” Matt mumbled in response, sliding down until he was horizontal. “If you're gonna fall asleep here, at least turn yourself the right way so I can use the blankets.”
Foggy let out a long-suffering sigh and squirmed until he was next to Matt, pulling the blanket with him as he went. “You don't just love me for my body heat, do you, Matty?”
“Of course not,” Matt said, rolling over to press his back against Foggy's side. “I also love you for the care packages your mom sends.”
He wiggled his butt against Foggy's hip to show he was kidding, and Foggy smiled into the darkness. It wasn't a soul mark, but Foggy would take it.
*
Daredevil’s on the news in March: a hostage situation that he somehow got involved in, and suddenly there’s twelve innocent civilians in there with some crazy rednecks with guns, and only Matt between them and death, and the cops can’t send anyone in after them because they’re afraid of escalating the situation even further.
Foggy doesn’t really believe in God, not the way Matt does, but he sits and he watches as the live news coverage goes on long into the night, and he prays. Hand curved around the name on his elbow, he whispers pleas to whoever might be listening until he’s forgotten he’s even speaking them out loud.
Just as dawn’s starting to break, the hostages come out slowly, hands in the air to keep the cops from shooting them by mistake. One lucky cameraman gets a distant shot of Daredevil making his escape over the rooftops - moving slower than usual, limping a little maybe, but very definitively alive.
Foggy’s so relieved he’s dizzy, and has to sit with his head between his knees for a minute before he can stand up and go to bed. He calls out sick and sleeps in. That afternoon he walks down Matt’s street on his way back from a late lunch, but all he does is stand outside Matt’s building for too long to be anything but pathetic before heading back home.
*
He sees Matt three days later at the post office - too far to speak, but close enough to see the impressive shiner beneath Matt’s glasses. Matt turns his head in Foggy’s direction, opens his mouth, but doesn’t move out of his place in line.
Foggy buys his stamps and tries to remember how to breathe normally until he’s out of Matt’s earshot again.
*
In mid-April there’s a heat wave, just in time for the AC in Foggy’s supposedly fancy new office to go on the fritz. He loosens his tie and rolls up his sleeves and keeps working.
Three hours later, Marci’s perched on his desk telling him about the misogynistic opposing counsel she eviscerated in court when she freezes. “Um. Foggy?”
He raises his eyebrows at her. “You okay?”
“That remains to be seen,” she says. “Did you...get a new tattoo?”
Foggy stares at her, baffled, before following her line of sight...to his elbow. Where the only part of his mark that’s visible, peeking out past his rolled-up sleeve, is an M and an A.
Oh.
He sighs, then pushes his sleeve up to reveal the rest of the name. Some of the color returns to Marci’s face.
“Okay,” she says. “Yeah. That...that makes a little more sense. Not that I don’t love you, Foggy Bear…”
“I know,” he says quickly. He’s not offended. “I love you too, but we’re not…”
“No, we’re not,” she agrees.
It’s easy, uncomplicated, the way things usually are with Marci. They’re nothing alike, but they understand each other just the same. He wonders if things would be this easy and uncomplicated if she was his soulmate. Isn’t the whole point of soulmates to make this whole “love” thing more straightforward?
Marci’s initial panic has clearly passed, because now she’s stuck on thoughtful. “That wasn’t there the last time I got you to shed a few layers,” she says. They haven’t slept together since he joined the firm - it seemed like a recipe for disaster now that they're coworkers - but it’s still been less than a year since she last saw him naked.
Foggy has a feeling his smile is bitter. “It showed up the day I started working here.”
Marci gives a low whistle. “Well fuck me sideways,” she says. “Someone up there really doesn’t like you.” Foggy gives a wry shrug. “Does he know?”
Foggy shakes his head. “What good would it do?”
“Well, if I know your goody two-shoes overly moralistic altar boy of an ex-BFF, I’d say it’d at least make him feel nauseatingly guilty about all the shit he put you through. Which is more than enough of a reason to spill the beans in my opinion,” Marci says, and beams her sharkiest smile at him.
“Yeah,” Foggy says, because she’s right about the first part, and maybe even the second. “But I don’t want him on those terms.”
Marci sighs, and stands up, leans over to kiss Foggy on the top of his head. “Too good for this world, Foggy Nelson,” she says. “You know I’m always available if you need to get super drunk over this, right? Or just in general.”
“I know,” he says, and this smile is more genuine. “Thanks, Marce.”
The funny thing is, it doesn’t even hurt to talk about it. Much.
*
Two weeks later, he’s woken from a sound sleep by a pounding on his window. He jolts upright, heart racing, and finally makes out a dark silhouette through the curtain.
“Matt?” he whispers, because any alternative is too terrifying to contemplate.
There’s another knock, a rat-tat double beat that Foggy takes as an affirmative - and besides, who else could have heard his whisper? He’s in motion before he realizes it, scrambling out of bed and pushing aside the curtain, because if Matt’s coming here in the middle of the night he must be in trouble, he must be in danger, he needs help -
Matt’s not alone.
Elektra’s with him. Thin and staring and filthy, eyes like bruises in a deathly pale face, but definitely Elektra.
“I’m sorry,” Matt says. He’s in the Daredevil suit, but it’s still clear from what little shows of his face how frantic he is. “I didn’t know where else to take her. They already know where I live.”
“I...I…” Foggy opens and closes his mouth a few times, like a fish. “Get inside.”
Matt has to practically carry Elektra through the window, which doesn’t actually seem all that difficult because she looks like she weighs almost nothing. She’s silent and very still, except for her eyes, which keep darting around the room, resting on Foggy’s face for a moment before flinching away at any sound. Foggy never knew her that well back in college, but neither “silent” nor “still” ever seemed like words that fit her well.
“I thought you were dead,” Foggy says to her, moronically, because he’s too confused and alarmed for tact at the moment.
“She was,” Matt says.
“Well,” Foggy says. “That’s a new one.”
Elektra falters, and Matt catches her. “She needs to rest,” Matt says. “Maybe the couch…?”
Foggy’s always been his mother’s son, and his nurturing instincts kick in now and save him from shock. It’s like Captain America, he tells himself. Captain America came back from the dead, and so can your ex-best friend’s ex-ninja ex-girlfriend. “Put her in the bed. I’ll take the couch,” he says. Matt pauses. “Sorry, Matt. You come back from the dead, you get the comfiest sleeping arrangements in the place. I don’t make the rules.”
“Thank you,” Matt says, and Foggy knows he doesn’t mean about the bed.
Matt steers Elektra to the bed and guides her under the rumpled sheets. She’s covered in dirt and blood but Foggy tries not to care. He can afford new sheets if it doesn’t wash out. At least she’s not wearing shoes, which is a relief right up until he wonders what she was doing parkouring over roofs and fire escapes with no shoes on.
“Rest,” Matt murmurs, low and tender with his gloved hand wrapped around one of hers. “I’ll be here when you wake up. I promise.”
It’s not something Foggy should be privy to, and he wanders awkwardly out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, where he pulls a couple of beers out of the fridge before rummaging through the cabinets to see if he’ll have enough food for two fugitive vigilantes in the morning. A minute later Matt comes out to join him, pulling his mask off as he does.
“She’s sleeping now,” he says. “I think. I’m not totally sure if she can sleep anymore, or…” He spreads his hands, helpless.
Foggy hands him a beer.
“I am sorry,” Matt says, turning the bottle around and around in his hands without drinking from it. “I just...I panicked. I needed to take her somewhere they wouldn’t find her.”
Foggy nods. “I think I’m owed a very long explanation here.”
Matt tells him, sitting side by side on the couch but nowhere close enough to touch. He tells Foggy about a girl who saw through all of Matt’s pretenses and what really happened the night Foggy came to collect a tearstained Matt from police custody out on Long Island; he tells Foggy about unkillable ninjas and his jackass mentor being even more of a jackass than previously suspected and something called a Black Sky, which would be a better explanation if Matt himself seemed to have any idea what it was; he tells Foggy about a resurrection attempt gone wrong, or right, depending on how you looked at it.
“They wanted to bring her back as one of them,” Matt says. “But I...honestly, I don’t even know what I did, but I interrupted whatever they were pumping into her and...I think she’s herself. I don’t think they got their claws into her. But they’re going to want her back.” Foggy must have some involuntary reaction to that that Matt can perceive, because he hastily adds, “I’m not going to let them trace this back to you, Foggy. I promise.”
“Watch out, Matty,” Foggy says before he can catch himself. “You're making an awful lot of promises tonight.”
Something pained flickers over Matt's face and is gone. “I realize I don't have the right to ask this of you,” he says. “If you want us to leave…”
“Oh come on, Matt, what do you take me for?” Foggy snaps. “This is Elektra’s life. She might not be my bosom buddy but if hiding her here will keep her safe then let's go get her a toothbrush and her own pair of bunny slippers.”
Matt picks at the label on his beer bottle. “I’m,” he says. “I’m sorry for what I said before. About Elektra, when you came to see me. I was hurting and I took it out on you when you were trying to be kind.”
“I said some dickish things too,” Foggy says. It’s not really an apology, because he’s not ready to apologize, and he doesn’t want to say it’s okay when it’s really, really not. But that doesn’t mean he’s been on his best behavior.
“Yeah, well, I probably deserved them.”
For some reason, self-flagellating Matt pisses Foggy off more than prickly, defensive Matt, so he changes the subject. “What’s your plan?” he asks. “I mean, for tonight? I can lend you something to sleep in and I guess you can share the bed with Elektra…”
“No, I don’t want to disturb her,” Matt says. “I’ll keep watch for a while. I don’t think they were able to track us, but if they did…” His jaw clenches. “I’m not supposed to promise you anything, I know. But they’re not touching either of you.”
Foggy takes a minute to let the lump in his throat at Matt’s determination subside. He shouldn’t be touched. Matt would throw himself in front of a bullet for anyone in this city, he knows that. It doesn’t make Foggy special, except that Matt might be carrying around a little more guilt over Foggy than for the average New Yorker. Not to mention Matt’s not great at the post-bullet follow-through.
“Fine,” he says, and gets up to fetch a couple of spare blankets from his linen closet. He hands one to Matt. “In case you change your mind. Otherwise, you know where everything is. Help yourself to whatever. I’m gonna try and get some sleep.”
“Thanks,” Matt says, clutching the blanket like he’s not sure what to do with it. He opens his mouth again, then closes it without a word.
Foggy doesn’t have time to wait for Matt to figure out what he wants to say. It’s nearly dawn, and even though Foggy’s calling out ninjaed tomorrow, he’ll need sleep to deal with all of this by the light of day.
“Right,” he says, and sits back down on the couch. Matt hastily vacates it, and Foggy shakes out his blanket and lies down. “If ninjas attack, wake me up and I’ll, uh, try to bean one of them with a lamp or something.”
“Sure,” Matt says, and takes a seat in the armchair closest to the window. Foggy’s not sure how he feels about Matt essentially watching over him while he sleeps, but he doesn’t have much of a choice. “Good night, Foggy.”
“Good night,” Foggy says, and closes his eyes on Matt’s silhouette, on the conversation, on this whole stupid night.
He doesn’t sleep a wink.
*
When it’s too bright out to feign sleep anymore, Foggy gives up and pushes the blanket back. Matt could probably tell he was awake, anyway.
“Coffee?” he asks.
Matt lifts his head from where he’d rested it on his knees, looking for all the world like an old dog guarding the homestead from attack. Foggy supposes that’s not a totally off-base metaphor. “Please,” he says.
Foggy’s grateful both for something to do with his hands, and for the psychosomatic perking-up effect the smell of the coffee has on him as it percolates. He’s got an open floor plan in his apartment, so he can keep an eye on Matt as he takes mugs out of the cabinet and the milk out of the fridge. “How is she?” he asks.
Matt tilts his head, listening. “Still asleep,” he says.
The worry and fear on his face only hurt Foggy a little. “I think we should call Claire in on this one,” he says. “I don’t have a lot of experience caring for the undead.”
Matt’s eyebrows go up. “And you think Claire does?”
“I’m just saying she’ll have at least a marginally better idea of what to do than I do,” Foggy says. “I mean, if you want someone to vigorously defend Elektra’s rights as a person once declared legally dead, sure, yeah, you've come to the right place, but if you want someone to take a pulse and render a verdict…” He shrugs. “You probably want to keep the circle small and I get that, but I think Elektra’s wellbeing takes precedent here.”
Matt pauses for a moment, visibly agonizing, then nods. “Yeah. Okay, yeah. I'll call her. After Elektra wakes up.”
“Great,” Foggy says. “Meanwhile, I am going to put my coffee in a to-go mug and do a grocery run, because there is nothing to eat here besides FunYuns and some lo mein of uncertain vintage. If you want to slip out of your bondage gear, or if Elektra wakes up and would like to wear something besides a burial shroud, sweatpants and t-shirts are in the third drawer of my dresser.”
Matt nods, and takes the mug Foggy hands him with a quiet thanks. Foggy tears his eyes away from Matt's hollow cheeks and riotous bedhead and goes to put on real pants.
*
When he comes back with the meager groceries he could scrounge from the bodega - a loaf of bread, weird off-brand cereal, some dubious-looking bananas - Elektra is awake and sitting on his couch, wearing his sweatpants and favorite Mets t-shirt. She's clean and her hair is wet, and Matt comes out of the bathroom with an armful of damp towels as Foggy walks in, in another pair of sweats and a “Virginia Beach Is For Lovers” shirt Foggy's sister brought back from a trip as a joke.
“Claire’s on her way,” Matt says.
A ghost of a smile flits across Elektra's face. “Hello, Franklin,” she says.
Right. Foggy’d forgotten that she’d insisted on calling him that the few times they'd interacted. “Hi, Elektra. How are you feeling?”
“Splendid,” she says in a perfect debutante voice. “Wonderful weather we’re having, isn’t it?”
Matt looks pained, and Foggy tries not to roll his eyes. Okay, so maybe his question was inane. Still.
“Matt, you're on egg-making duty,” he says, trading the groceries for Matt's towels. He's not sure if Matt knows where his hamper is, and more importantly Matt is an exponentially better cook than Foggy. “Elektra, coffee?”
“Yes,” she says, just as Matt barks, “No stimulants until Claire says it’s okay,” and they scowl at each other. They've clearly already argued about this. Foggy looks at them, these gorgeous hard vigilantes so rumpled and domestic, and even though it's his apartment and his clothes making them look that way he suddenly feels like he's intruding. Intruding, and cavernously lonely.
He slips around Matt to dump the towels in the hamper in his closet. Matt's stiffly whisking eggs when Foggy returns to the kitchen to pour half a cup of coffee, thinned with lots of milk: a compromise. Matt frowns but doesn't say anything when Foggy hands it to Elektra, who looks surprised, and then rallies.
“I usually take it black,” she says.
“I usually don't give up my bed to people who tanked the biggest court case of my career,” he retorts, and this time she can't hide her surprise.
Claire arrives when they're halfway through eating, and gratefully accepts the coffee Foggy has waiting for her. “I've got a shift in an hour,” she tells them. “What's up? None of you appear to be bleeding or unconscious.”
Matt tells her. Foggy resists the urge to narrate for him that Claire’s staring - first at Matt, then at Elektra, who is pushing her eggs around her plate with less appetite than Foggy would've expected from someone who crawled her way out of the grave less than twelve hours prior. Foggy can't blame Claire. Aside from the general implausibility of the tale, Elektra looks tired and fragile and pale, swimming in Foggy's clothes - hardly convincing as either a vigilante or an undead demonic weapon.
“I just...want to make sure she's okay,” Matt says, and Elektra rolls her eyes so flamboyantly that for a moment Foggy actually likes her.
Claire shakes her head. “Every time I think I've seen everything…all right, Elektra, is it? Bedroom.”
“Fresh,” Elektra says, but follows an unimpressed Claire into Foggy’s bedroom. Matt tries to follow but Claire doesn't let him.
“After all she's been through, don't you think she deserves a little privacy?” Claire asks, and shuts the door on him.
Matt paces the living room as Foggy clears the breakfast dishes. Foggy watches him out of the corner of his eye and realizes how stupid he was to ever think Matt might have Foggy's name on him. He doesn't have Elektra's, either, and the degree to which he's worrying about her puts anything he might have felt for Foggy to shame.
Foggy washes the dishes and makes sure his sleeves are firmly rolled back down before the sighted people emerge from the bedroom.
It’s not long before they do, Elektra flopping onto the couch and finger-combing her hair over her shoulder, a studied, bored look on her face. “She’s fine, at least as far as modern medicine can tell,” Claire says. “A little dehydrated, and I’d recommend taking it easy for a couple of weeks and getting a lot of sleep, but…” She shrugs. Foggy bites back his instinct to narrate again. “If I hadn’t seen crazier things I’d never buy that she was ever dead to begin with.”
“Which means I can have a proper cup of coffee, or at least what passes for one in the States,” Elektra says, and waves an imperious hand. “Franklin.”
Foggy’s eyebrows shoot up. “Claire says you’re fine. Get it yourself.”
Elektra lets out an annoyed noise and returns to examining her split ends. Matt, looking pained again, turns to Claire.
“Thank you so much for coming,” he says.
“It’s what I do. Apparently,” she says, picking up her bag, and looks at Foggy. “Can I speak with you in the hall, Franklin?”
He follows her out of the apartment, closing the door gently behind him. “I hate being called Franklin. And you know Matt can still hear us, right? Stop listening, Matt.”
“I didn’t know you two were back together,” she says.
He’s not sure what’s more humiliating: that he knows Matt heard that, or that he knows Claire can see the hot flush that blooms over his face. “We’re not. There’s no...there’s nothing,” he says. “He needed help. They both did. I’m not gonna let them get ninjaed to death - again - because Matt and I aren’t partners anymore. Isn’t there something about that in the Hippocratic Oath?”
“Something like that,” she says. “I just...think you should be careful. You didn’t choose this life. You shouldn’t have to be hurt by it.”
“The Hand doesn’t know where we are,” Foggy says.
“I wasn’t talking about that kind of hurt,” she says. “Thanks for the coffee, Foggy.”
“See you around, Claire,” he says, and leans against the doorframe to watch her go. Even after she’s disappeared down the stairs, he stays there, steeling himself before he goes back inside. She’s right, of course - she usually is.
She’s just also far too late.
*
Foggy calls out of work and changes the muddy sheets on his bed before bracing himself for the next conversation. “So what exactly is the plan here?” he asks. “Because if the three of us are going to shack up indefinitely in some kind of terminally awkward living arrangement, I think we should relocate to that penthouse Elektra used to have in college, if just for the whirlpool tub. I’m assuming there’s a whirlpool tub.”
“Please, what do you take me for?” Elektra asks, inspecting her nails, which are ragged and short. Foggy wonders if there’s still grave dirt beneath them. “Next you’ll say all the upholstery is leopard print and there’s a disco ball in the bathroom.”
“We don’t want to impose on you too long,” Matt interjects. “Just give me a few nights to deal with the Hand presence in the city, and then we can - ”
“You’re not going without me,” Elektra interrupts.
“You shouldn’t go at all!” Foggy says. “They nearly killed you last time, and the time before that - and they did kill Elektra - ”
“Which is why I’m not letting them get near her again!” Matt says.
“You don’t have a choice, Matthew!” Elektra retorts. “They don’t want you, they want me, and they’re not going to stop until they have me back. They’ll kill you to get to me. They’ll kill him.” She nods at Foggy.
“So what, I just hand you over to them again?”
“Have either of you ever considered calling the police about this?” Foggy asks. “Or the Avengers, somehow?”
They ignore him, and why shouldn’t they? It’s only his apartment they’re squatting in, after all. “You heard Claire, you need rest,” Matt says. “You’re in no condition to be fighting.”
“And you’re no match for Nobu!”
“How about no one fights any ninjas until you have more than three hours of sleep and half an egg to eat between the two of you, huh?” Foggy says.
Elektra waves a careless hand, dismissing that. “This doesn’t concern you, Franklin.”
“It does until you’re not in my fucking home wearing my fucking pajamas!” he snaps. “You get to set fire to my entire life exactly once, princess, and you’ve already done that, so until I’m no longer feeding and clothing both of your lunatic asses, my plans go. You know, the ones where no one breaks the law or dies?”
Elektra chuffs an annoyed sound and looks away. Matt makes another tragic Mom-and-Dad-are-fighting face at them. “I know this is a huge imposition, Foggy…”
“Save it, Matt.” Foggy doesn’t want to hear another empty apology when Matt will never change, or give Foggy the apologies he really wants to hear. “This may come as a shock to the Suicide Twins, but I do actually want to keep both of you alive. So you’re welcome to stay here as long as you need to, both of you. But not if you’re going to act like idiots, and not if you’re going to be shitty. Those are the conditions. Take them or leave them.”
Elektra gives him an appraising look. “Well, someone’s found their balls after all,” she says. She glances at Matt. “Or maybe this isn’t new? That would make more sense. You always did get off on losing a fight, didn’t you, Matthew?” She stands up with a swish of hair. “If you gentlemen will excuse me, I think I’ll retire to the bedroom until I can get my shittiness under control.”
She slams her way into the bedroom. “You know, I’m starting to see why you kept us away from each other back in college,” Foggy says.
Matt puts his face in his hands and groans.
*
In the end, Elektra stays with Foggy, and Matt leaves. Foggy’s apartment isn’t really big enough for three, and Matt has work and clients. He promises not to engage the Hand until Elektra’s well enough to join him, and that’s about as non-reckless as Foggy can talk either of them into being. Foggy doesn’t love the idea of sending Matt back to his apartment when the Hand knows where he lives, but hopefully they won’t attack while they’re still trying to get Matt to lead them back to Elektra, and anyway Foggy supposes it’s no different than all the times Matt’s been in danger that Foggy didn’t know about.
He also doesn’t love the idea of having Elektra as a houseguest indefinitely, but he’s not about to leave her to die either, so. That’s that.
Elektra catnaps the rest of the day after Matt leaves, and Foggy tries to get some work done despite the fact that he’s so tired the computer screen keeps swimming before his eyes, and that his imagination turns every noise outside his apartment into a horde of ninjas about to turn him and Elektra into katana pin cushions. He orders a pizza for dinner, expecting Elektra to complain about being fed peasant food or whatever, but she surprises him by emerging from the bedroom when it arrives and eating three slices.
They eat in near silence. Foggy’s not complaining. He has no idea what to say to her.
When night falls, Elektra relinquishes the bedroom back to Foggy, and he makes up the couch properly for her, with sheets and a couple real pillows. He retreats to the bedroom to change, but the minute he comes out in a t-shirt and boxers to brush his teeth, Elektra goes eerily still.
“How long has that been there?” she asks.
For a moment Foggy can't figure out what she's talking about; then he follows the line of her gaze to Matt's name on his arm. He fights the childish urge to cover it.
“Does it matter?” he asks instead of giving her a real answer, which is probably also childish, but he's putting up the ex-(and current?)-girlfriend of the man who broke his heart. He's earned a little childishness.
“Does Matthew know?” she asks, then answers herself. “Of course not. Which means you didn't have it in college, because he asked, and he’d know if you'd lied.”
“He didn't - how would you even know if he'd asked?” Foggy says, annoyed. They'd talked about soulmates, sure, and Matt had known Foggy didn't have a mark, but he'd never asked specifically about himself. Why would he? People only asked that of people they hoped were in love with them. And Elektra’s probing analysis is, quite frankly, very rude.
“You have no idea, do you?” she asks. She's still looking at his mark - glaring at it, really - and it takes a minute for Foggy to place the hot, angry look in her eyes as what it is: jealousy.
His first feeling, he's ashamed to say, is triumph.
“You don't have one, huh?” he asks. He’s gloating, a little. He can’t stop. “After all that. After he walked out on me for you, and it turns out I'm the one with the mark.”
Elektra's sharp and pale with anger, livid circles beneath her eyes. Foggy's not sure he's ever seen her have a real emotion before, let alone one this intense. “That is not how I would describe the sequence of events,” she manages through gritted teeth.
“We were happy,” Foggy says. He’s carried this long enough. “Maybe he didn't love me, maybe it was never like that between us, but the life we had, before you showed up? It made him happy.”
“You don't know him at all,” she says. “And you don't want to. You want to keep him small and dull and pointless like you are, so that you never have to think about how pathetic your sad little life is. You found a tiger and treated him like a house cat, and you blame me when you get bitten. And least I know what he is.”
“He's a person!” Foggy says, stung. “Going to work and trying to make ends meet and do a little human kindness along the way isn’t pathetic, it’s life. This glorious quest you have in your head where it’s the two of you against the world? It’s gonna get him killed. It already got you killed.”
“Yes, it did,” she snaps. “And I’d take a blade through my chest again right now over the kind of slow death you want to sentence Matthew to.”
“It’s not a - I don’t - God, would you listen to yourself? I’m not asking him to sell his soul!” Foggy says. “I just want an ordinary life!”
“Well, he’s not ordinary! He never has been.” She draws herself up, haughty and regal even swamped in Foggy’s pajamas. “You fell for a con, Franklin. The man you want? He doesn’t exist. I’m sorry for you,” and there’s the vindictive edge of pity in her voice, “but I won’t take the blame for it.”
“Yeah?” Foggy says, feeling small and mean. “If you know him so well, where’s your mark?”
The look on her face reminds Foggy abruptly that she’s deadly. Rather than answer, though - or stab him - she turns in a swish of hair and slams her way into the bathroom.
Alone, Foggy deflates. The door-slamming is appropriate, really; they’re arguing like teenagers, fighting over a boy that Foggy would swear to anyone else he doesn’t even want.
And it’s a fight Foggy’s already lost. There’s only two ways this can end, really: either the Hand will kill Elektra again, and Matt with her, or Matt and Elektra will somehow manage to shake the threat of them, and, well…
Matt’s already made his choice. Soul marks, present or absent or ten years too late, didn’t enter into it.
*
Foggy hadn’t seen Matt for three days when he got the call asking him to come out to Southampton and pick Matt up at the police station. The three day absence had become sort of par for the course - Matt had developed a habit of vanishing for long stretches at a time after meeting Elektra, and rarely told Foggy where he was going or when he’d be back. He seemed blissfully, almost drunkenly happy, though, so Foggy bit his tongue about the missed classes and occasional odd bruises and kept his pining to himself.
The police involvement, though...that was new.
It was a two hour bus trip out to the Hamptons, and ran Foggy nearly forty bucks just one way; then he had to wander around in a chilly drizzle for forty-five minutes until he found the police station. It was tiny and almost cozy, nothing like the busy precinct where Brett's dad worked. Matt was sitting on a bench just inside the front door, curved in on himself like someone had scooped him out.
“Matt, oh my God,” Foggy said, and Matt's head turned vaguely towards him. “What happened? Are you okay? Where's Elektra?”
“She left,” Matt said. His voice was hoarse. There was blood on his shirt.
“What do you mean she left, she just took off with the car and the - why are you at the police station, are you hurt, what happened?” Foggy could hear an edge of hysteria in his voice, all the anger and worry of the past months coming out at once.
“I...I don't…” Matt said, and then lapsed into silence.
“Matt!”
“Are you the roommate?”
Foggy turned to see a genial-looking, gray-haired cop approaching them. “Yes, sir, I'm Franklin Nelson,” he said. Authorities, he'd learned, didn't love his nickname. “Is Matt in trouble?”
“Oh, no no no,” the cop assured him. “Well, maybe just a little girl trouble, but we've all fallen for the wrong gal at least once, right, son?”
Matt’s face somehow grew even more tragic. The cop plucked at Foggy's sleeve and drew him a few feet away, as if Matt somehow couldn't hear them from there.
“Your friend’s fine, just a bit shaken up,” the cop says. “Seems his girlfriend gets a kick out of breaking and entering. These rich girls, you know,” he added conspiratorially, as if he and Foggy both got their hearts broken by heiresses on a regular basis.
“Uh, right,” Foggy said. “So they...broke into someone’s house?”
The cop nodded. “And a good thing they did, because it seems they scared off a real burglar who’d already roughed the owner up a bit. A whole messy scene. Owner’s saying your friend did it, but that’s ridiculous of course, seeing as how he’s, you know. Blind.” He finished his little speech in a stage whisper, glancing significantly at Matt like Foggy would think he meant someone else.
Foggy frowned. “Yeah, not deaf.”
“And thank God, right? Can you imagine?” the cop asked. “Anyway, the burglar took off but your friend insisted on calling us in and the girl rabbited. Like her daddy couldn’t have gotten any charges dropped before she so much as chipped a nail in a holding cell.”
“But...but you aren’t charging Matt with anything, right?” Foggy asked, just to be sure.
“Oh no, of course not!” the cop said. “Kids will be kids, and no harm done, right? In fact, if they hadn’t shown up, who knows what the real criminal would’ve done? You look at it the right way, your friend’s kind of a hero.”
Foggy looked over at Matt, taking in his hunched, furtive posture and reddened knuckles. “Yeah,” he said. “If you look at it the right way.”
Unfortunately, he was pretty sure “the right way” bore only a passing resemblance to the truth.
He waited until they were on the bus back to the city before starting to probe. “So, Matty...that police officer said you and Elektra walked in on some burglar beating the crap out of the owner of the house you br...uh, the house you were in.”
Matt’s chin dipped slightly. Foggy wasn’t sure if it was a nod or just exhaustion, but he went with it.
“That must’ve been kinda scary. Like, I probably would have pissed myself, no lie.”
Silence.
“Is that why Elektra left?” Foggy asked gently. “Because she was scared? Or...did you two have a fight?” More silence. “Matt, what happened to your hands?”
A muscle jumped in Matt’s jaw, but he didn’t say anything. Foggy pushed back the urge to yell, the one being worried always brought out in him.
“You don’t have to talk about it now,” he said. “I think it would help if you did talk about it, eventually, and I’m here if you want to do that. But we can just sit for now, if you want.”
He didn’t want to say that. He wanted to demand answers - how much criminal activity had Elektra been dragging Matt into, and why had he gone along with it, and why had she left, and were they broken up now, and oh God, had Matt beaten someone up somehow? And lied about it?
But he knew Matt. Maybe this was all a big misunderstanding, maybe the crazy behavior was the inevitable acting out of a super-repressed do-gooder raised by nuns, but he knew, he knew that Matt couldn’t have been involved in anything too terrible. Couldn’t have done anything too bad. This was Matt. He was the best person Foggy knew.
So until Matt was ready to tell him, he could wait.
He reached for Matt’s hand, brushing his fingertips gently against Matt’s wrist first to give him a chance to pull away, then wrapping Matt’s hand up in both of his, careful of his injured knuckles. Matt went stiff for a minute, then seemed to deflate, sinking into his seat and dropping his head against Foggy’s shoulder.
“Thanks,” he said hoarsely - the first word he’d spoken since the police station.
Yeah. Foggy could wait.
*
Part One