Chapter Text
before&after.
It happens like this:
The pain erupts along every synapse, like each nerve has been lit on fire and set to burn, and Matt crumples in on himself. In one ear, he listens as Hell’s Kitchen explodes simultaneously into a compressing silence and a cacophonous chaos. In the other, Foggy and Karen are telling him to breathe, breathe, please just breathe. But he can’t. He can’t.
“Where does it hurt, Matty?” Foggy asks. The question comes through muffled, as though Matt’s underwater. Everywhere, he thinks. Help. Help me. “Matty? C’mon, buddy, talk to me. Matt!”
His bones are splitting apart—
No. His bones are atomizing. They are disintegrating.
Karen’s pulse spikes. It drives like a drill through Matt’s skull and he flinches, recoils, feels his body slip from their grasping hands as Karen says, quavering, “Foggy? Foggy, look—”
“Fuck,” says Foggy. “What the fuck—”
“I’m—I’m fine,” Matt slurs. “Karen?” He reaches out and tries to grab at something solid, but he is no longer solid. He passes through the world as a ghost. “Foggy? Foggy, I—” His tongue isn’t there. Just an absence of its presence, an empty space that he tries to swallow around except he doesn’t have a throat to do that with anymore, either, and what the fuck does that mean, what the fuck is going on—
Their heartbeats thrum together, faster and faster and faster until the silence consumes and then—
—Matt stumbles forward and lands hard on his hands and knees.
“I’m fine,” he gasps again, and for once in his life it isn’t a lie. The agony that had crippled him mere seconds ago is gone, vanished, lost as if it had never existed in the first place. He feels over himself, cataloguing old bruises, the tender sprain of his ribs where they’d been introduced to a pair of brass knuckles three days ago, a healing laceration on the underside of his jaw. None of it hurts. Or, at least, none of it hurts any more than it should. None of it hurts enough to have caused the...whatever it was, that had made him feel like he was being disassembled piece by piece. “Foggy? Foggy, I’m—I’m...”
But he trails off, a sudden clarity cutting through the muddled hysteria with all the ease of a knife through flesh. Because the air tastes of spring through the vents, even though it’s the middle of November. Because the office had smelled of donuts and Karen’s vanilla shampoo, and now it’s musty, slightly damp at the edges, and if Matt were to hone in, he’s sure he’d be able to track down some creeping mold in the corner. Because he can’t hear the hum of electricity that always needles at him when the lights are on.
Because he is here. It’s only been a second.
But Karen and Foggy are gone, and they have been for a long, long time.
**
before/during.
Here’s a secret:
Foggy’s life is split into halves. There’s the first half, the one of endless childhood days spent in summer, skinned knees and melting popsicles dripping down the wrist, arguing with Brett on the playground until their moms drag them home at sundown. It’s a good half, sure. Fine. Whatever. But then there’s the second half. And that’s the one with Matt. It’s—well, Foggy’s not sure good is the right word for it. Can it be good, when he’s living with the constant worry that someday his best friend is going to bleed out alone in the streets and—
Nope. Nah. Not thinking about it.
Anyway.
He’d been living in this second half so long that he’d forgotten about the first one. He’d been living in this second half so long that he’d forgotten how it feels, to be without Matt.
Turns out, that might have been a fucking mistake.
“—oggy. Foggy. Foggy.” It’s Karen, he registers after a moment, her blue eyes wavering into place in front of him, glossy and wide and trying valiantly to be ice. There’s a light pressure curved into his shoulder—her fingers, he realizes, gently shaking him. Weird. He hadn’t noticed. “Hey. Can you hear me?”
The. The donut. Matt’s donut is on the floor. Plain glazed, no sprinkles: The way he likes it best. Half a bite is taken out of it—no, not even a bite. A nibble. And then. And then. And then. Dust. Matt, crumbling to pieces between Foggy’s fingers. His body, lurching forward, as though he’d been stabbed through the stomach and the blade was jutting out through spine. His voice, tremulous and anxious and pitched high. His eyes, big and wide and swallowed by nothing until the only pieces left of Foggy’s best friend are a pile of ash and a piercing ache in Foggy’s heart. Gone. Gone. Gone.
“Foggy,” Karen says again, fiercer this time. “Foggy, please say something.”
“I,” Foggy says—gasps, maybe, is the better word for it. The word claws from his throat, raw and tearing bloody against the tender lump he’s struggling to keep inside. His hands close around empty air. “He. I. Karen, I—”
“Hey,” she murmurs, “hey, breathe. Foggy, breathe.”
They’d told Matt to breathe. It hadn’t worked. It hadn’t fucking—
His spine meets the wall, and then his tailbone hits the ground. He hadn’t meant to sit down (fall down, his brain supplies, thanks a million for being not-helpful-at-all) but suddenly he is, and he’s shuddering around the points of his knees where they’re tucked to his forehead, entire body imploding upon itself. Stars do it, don’t they? Burn for a million years and then sputter off into darkness, leaving an eternal void where once there had been light.
Humans aren’t goddamn stars. They’re—they’re not supposed to disappear. Matt’s not supposed to disappear.
There’s a siren wailing, somewhere far away. It pokes against the muggy veil of Foggy’s mind before fading into the absolute distance. It should be coming closer, he thinks absently. It should be coming to save Matt.
Sensation returns in fragments. Scratchy, un-vacuumed carpet. The thick syrupy taste of donut on his tongue. The steady warmth of Karen, hovering above him, the points of her shoes tipped towards each other because she’s uncertain of what to do next. She always does that when she’s uncertain of what to do next. It’s endearing, except that right now Foggy really wants someone to tell him what they should do next.
He inhales, sharp, and lets it out in a long measured breath. Comes to a decision so quickly it almost gives him whiplash. If the ambulance isn’t coming to save Matt, he’ll have to do it himself. Him and Karen. They’ll find Matt. They’ll bring him back.
“Karen,” he says.
She’s kneeling immediately, bottom lip trembling, the ice of her eyes melting to damp. “Yeah?”
“We’re going to Matt’s apartment,” he tells her. He scrubs his hands down his face and stands, using the wall as a crutch, knees wobbly. “C’mon, let’s—let’s go.”
Karen blinks up at him. She’s not moving. Why’s she not—
“Foggy,” she says, in the very specific tone they both use when Matt’s about to do something incalculably stupid. It rankles to hear it directed at him. “Foggy, Matt’s—”
“He’s fine,” says Foggy. “Let’s go, I’ll show you.”
Another siren. It fills the chasm between him and Karen, the abyss he can’t bear to gaze into. He’s caught on tenterhooks, digging into the soft spaces behind his ribs, waiting for her to fucking respond. For her to say what he can’t bring himself to even think. He could handle it better, maybe, if he doesn’t have to be the one to hold it. If she could just extend it out to him, cupped in her palms, and he could look at it. He could look at it and never have to touch it, and then he could put it away forever.
But Karen, who perhaps doesn’t want to touch it either, finally says, “Okay. Yes—yeah. Yeah, let’s go.”
So they go. They leave the pile of dust behind. They turn off all the lights.
They don’t come back.
**
during—after.
What is true:
Matt is gone.
Karen accepts it within the first few minutes, and then she caves to Foggy’s desperate, frantic eyes, and almost begins to believe that maybe the impossible has happened after the impossible has already happened. But they spend the whole night scouring the city, calling Matt’s name like he’s some runaway puppy until the sky bleeds pink and red and smoke-black from all of the planes that crashed from a thousand miles in the air, and he doesn’t come running to them. And he would, she knows. Matt tries his best, but he can never leave the people he loves. It’s not how he operates, no matter how badly he wants it to be, and he’ll return every time.
What is true:
Josie isn’t gone, and neither is her bar. Karen drags Foggy to it before he loses his voice shouting; it’s crowded inside, full of furious spittle and fistfights brewing beneath sharp-edged insults and poorly-masked grief, but Josie takes one look at her and Foggy and the space between them and gets them a quiet—for a given definition of quiet—booth in the corner. Karen orders two beers and then, once Josie’s behind the counter, reaches across the table to clasp Foggy’s hands in her own.
“Hey,” she says, soft. It’s tricky to manage. There’s a brittle rage rising within her, like dirt pushed up from beneath by the skeleton’s bones. Old ghosts outlined in new ones. Her thumb traces the fleshy length of Foggy’s inner palm, and there’s a tenderness to the motion that soothes the graveyard within her chest for a moment. It makes it easier to swallow the way he’s gazing blankly at the table’s sticky surface. The way he’s not even pretending to be all right. “Foggy, c’mon. Look at me. Please?”
It takes a long time, but finally Foggy looks at her. It still doesn’t feel like he’s seeing her.
What is true:
Foggy declines his beer, so Karen drinks it for him. When they stumble back home through the haze of dawn and ash, she’s the only one actually stumbling, and he’s got her arm slung around his shoulder. She tells herself that she did it on purpose, that she did it to force him out of his head and back into the world.
(What is not true:
That she did it on purpose, that she did it to force him out of his head and back into the world.)
What is true:
It’s Foggy who throws up in Karen’s toilet, just barely making it in time. She leans heavily against the doorframe and watches his back heave over the ceramic bowl, observes the serpentine curve of his spine, listens hollowly to the damp retches as they fade eventually into ragged sobs. Beneath her fingernails, she can see Matt’s remains. There’s no blood, this time. She’s not sure whether that makes it better or worse.
What is true:
Either way, those remains will never disappear. You can’t get rid of them. The dead cling, and they don’t let go.
What is true:
Karen collapses to her knees on the cold tile of her bathroom and she and Foggy cling to each other for so long that her legs go numb and the gnawing bite of a hangover creeps in under her skull and her shirt grows damp with his tears and his shirt grows damp with hers. His palms grasp at her shoulder blades; her forehead nestles into the curve of his neck. The world becomes a drifting ocean, and they become the last survivors on earth. She wonders if they could stay here forever.
What is true:
Sometimes, the living cling just as tight as the dead.
What is true:
They get up off the bathroom floor eventually. They clean their faces in the sink and Foggy scrambles cheesy eggs on the stove and Karen percolates coffee. They both wait for Matt to comment on the plasticky tack of the cheese, or the coffee’s aggressively bitter undertones. The silence blooms into emptiness. Foggy plates the eggs and Karen pours the coffee and they eat and they put the dishes away and head out into the mid-afternoon light.
The smoke hasn’t dissipated. The crumpled carcasses of cars litter the streets. Children cry for their parents, and parents cry for their children. The world is desolate. They help one little girl find her older brother; they rescue a mewling kitten from beneath a tipped lamppost and deliver it to its grateful owner.
They spend the rest of the day calculating loss. It’s a task that Karen has grown accustomed to; Foggy, less so. He can’t seem to move past the first of them. She can see it in his eyes: The shadow of Matt, spilling to ash right in front of them, faster than either of them can stop it. It only gets worse once they discover that Claire’s vanished, too, and Luke with her. Frank is also seemingly gone, although he’s been in hiding and no one’s quite sure.
(Karen’s sure. She has this sense, see. It tells her who’s still around to love. There’s never enough of them, but it’s usually better than this.)
Jess finds them near dusk.
“Don’t fucking tell me,” she says, and it’s almost a joke. “This is what gets him.”
Foggy muffles a half-sob, half-laugh into his knuckles. Jess offers him her flask. When he declines, she turns to Karen, and Karen—
What is true:
Karen says no.
(What is not true:
She wants to say no.)
What is true:
Jess shrugs and tips her head back to drink. The arch of her throat is pale in the waning sun, pale as Matt’s face had gone as he’d curled into himself against the pain, pale as Kevin’s skin had been below the tendon-white glare of the police flashlights. Memory after memory, piled so high she can’t see around them. This must be where she was always meant to end up: Staring into the eyes of a corpse.
They exchange losses. Marci’s alive—her and Jess ran into each other on the way to the practice and then separated upon finding nobody there—and Foggy’s chest hitches in relief that Karen shares, distantly, as though it does not belong to her. It should. She knows Marci, too. She likes Marci. But she can’t make sense of her survival. It has no shape, no borders. It blurs into her grief until it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.
When Jess hears about Claire, her mouth grows tight, lemon-pinched, and she storms off without another word. Without meaning to, Karen goes to chase after her, but Foggy stops her with a touch to the elbow. “She’ll be okay,” he says, though he doesn’t seem to believe it himself. “We’ll...we’ll find her, later. I think she needs to—to be alone. Right now.”
And do you need the same? Karen asks him with her eyes. Are you going to leave, too? Tell me now so I can go first.
But Foggy says,
“Can we, um. My family, I need to—y’know. Check. Can you come with me?”
And Karen says,
“Of course,”
and the truth? The real, honest-to-God truth?
Karen’s always been selfish. She’ll cling to Foggy as long as he clings to her, and maybe together that will be enough to stop the dead from clinging, too. Maybe together the graves won’t go so deep. Maybe together the ghosts won’t linger so long in the corners of her room.
Maybe together, she’ll be able to forget that any of this is true at all.
**
after.
It takes a stronger jerk than usual to unlock the window and pry it open. It’s been sealed shut for what seems to be years, if the thick layer of dust along the sill and the creakiness of the hinge as it swings are any indication, though that doesn’t make any sense. Matt had used this window just two weeks ago to sneak into the office at one in the morning after a wayward stab had made it impossible for him to make it home in time for dawn. It hadn’t creaked then, and there hadn’t been any dust. Foggy wouldn’t have allowed it.
A second, stronger shove, and the pane jolts from its frame, bringing with it a clean gust of rain-electric air and the soft pollen of blossoming flowers. The absence of sunlight is dry and cool, like coconut lip balm—nighttime. Matt braces his palms against the sill and leans forward, breathing deep, until his lungs feel scrubbed raw of the clawing, acidic panic that he can’t quite swallow away. And it would have worked, too, if in the immediate next moment he hadn’t heard the car crash two blocks down.
The hot screech of metal; a sharp burst of blood at the backs of his teeth; the rattling impact of a body going boneless against concrete. Silence. Then: screaming. Crying. A loud voice demanding what the hell d’you think you’re doing, man, are you completely fucking blind—
Ouch.
Matt is through the window before Foggy’s voice has a chance to tell him that’s an impeccably dumb idea, Matthew, Jesus. Doesn’t matter now, anyway. Foggy isn’t here. Foggy isn’t here and Matt is and—
His hand claws around the lip of the roof and he heaves himself up and over, landing in a heap on the other side before leaping to his feet. It’s open, up here. The darkness feels less heavy, and he can almost pretend that nothing has changed. He can almost pretend that he can still hear Foggy and Karen’s voices beneath him, that he could still clamber back in through the window and find them waiting, that he can still live the rest of his life without losing anyone else he loves.
But—but. But something has changed. And it’s not only the obvious.
There’s someone else on this rooftop with him, and he doesn’t recognize their scent.
It’s sawdust and crimson metal and the salt-tang of sweat. It’s muscle, pure, raw strength weighing heady on Matt’s tongue, like the force behind a clap of thunder. They’re standing across from him, and there’s something in their hands—it has heft, it has a copper under-taste. A crowbar, maybe? Why is someone holding a crowbar on the rooftop of their law office?
“Matt Murdock?” the stranger asks. Their knuckles creak as they adjust their grip on the crowbar.
Matt pats down his chest. Yep. He’s definitely wearing his normal-person suit. Is this one of Fisk’s goons, furious at their boss’s imprisonment and seeking revenge against the lawyers who put him there? Shit. Is Foggy safe? Matt doesn’t have his phone. He left it at home today and now he can’t call Foggy and what if Foggy’s—
“...Yes,” he says, if only to stop his brain from tossing itself off the cliff’s edge. He tries for a pleasant, fuck-you smile. “And you are?”
The stranger doesn’t answer. He simply says, as an aside to somebody that Matt can’t sense, “I’ve got him, sir.”
“Technically, you don’t have me yet,” says Matt. “And are you sure you’ve got the right guy?”
“Yes, sir,” says the stranger. “I will.” Then, to Matt: “I’m quite sure, little devil. The price on your head is too large for me to mistake it for anything else.”
The. The what.
The crowbar hurtles through the air almost faster than Matt has a chance to dodge it, distracted as he is by the—the price on his own head that he isn’t aware of, and it dashes the side of his skull hard enough that his ears ring. The dull pain drags him back to the present, and this time, he is able to dodge the fist that hurtles through the air directly after. Instinct takes over: He grabs the stranger’s arm and yanks, wrenching it down and out of its socket with a sickening, squelching pop, and then he darts backwards to avoid the retaliatory attack.
The stranger is all brute strength and single-minded intent. It makes it easier to parse his technique and anticipate his next move, but there’s no making up for the difference in size. Matt’s still off-balance, still reeling from the—thing—and still trying to wrap his mind around the empty cavern where Foggy and Karen had been just minutes ago and a part of his brain is still refusing to let go of that car crash from blocks away. His opponent gets him in the stomach, then the ribs, then the face, and it’s as he’s lying there, breath knocked from his lungs, that the last nail gets knocked into place.
“—what d’you mean, where did I come from?” the guy who crashed his car is demanding. It echoes like Matt’s standing right next to him, though he’s trying his damndest to leverage his arms beneath him and get up, Matty. “I’ve been here, man! I was just—”
“Oh, shit,” says the other—says someone, Matt can’t figure out who’s who anymore and he’s not supposed to be over there anyway, he’s supposed to be on this roof— “Oh, shit, I—I’m sorry, I. You would think that, wouldn’t you.”
“Fuck’s that s’posed to mean?”
Yeah, Matt thinks, as a meaty hand grasps the collar of his suit and hauls him upright. Fuck is that s’posed to mean? He lifts his chin, approximates where the stranger’s mouth is, and spits out the blood on his teeth. He hopes it landed, and when the stranger splutters, Matt takes the opportunity to wriggle free and kick their legs out from under them, sending them thudding to the concrete. He dashes for the edge of the rooftop, prepared to leap to the neighboring one and get out of here, but—
“—been five years,” he hears. “I’m so sorry. It’s been five years since you were driving that car.”
—and everything just. It stops. He doesn’t hear anything else beyond the terrible roaring rush that invades his ears; doesn’t hear anything else except the frantic thud of his heart against the insides of his bruised ribs; doesn’t hear anything else, other than those four words: It’s been five years. It’s been five years. It’s been five years. Because it hasn’t been. It hasn’t. He was just in the office with Foggy and Karen. They’d gotten donuts. They’d had a deposition they were preparing for. They—
He forgets about the stranger until it’s nearly too late. His jaw takes the brunt of a punch; the crowbar has clattered far away, but the stranger makes up for its absence with a hit that takes Matt back to the ground and rattles his teeth so bad they dig into his inner cheek and all he can taste is the thick, sticky, tacky clot that refuses to be swallowed down. The air shifts; the stranger’s rearing back for another punch. Matt rolls, quick as a fish in flowing water, and lets the stranger’s knuckles meet the gravel. Clambers to his feet.
For once, he decides not to be stupid. He’s floundering. Confused. His head hasn’t stopped ringing from that first hit from the crowbar—which was maybe more than the glance he first clocked it as, maybe—and he can’t quite draw a full breath—though the impact of the punch is long gone, so why can’t he breathe, why can he still not breathe—and every time he tries to dig his heels in and stay present he starts falling away, back to the void. Back to the place where he’s alone and there’s no one left and it’s all his fault.
So: Matt decides not to be stupid. He decides not to fight this stranger.
He sprints, and leaps off the side of the rooftop instead.