Chapter Text
Foggy wakes up the day after his best friend dies in someone else's bed. It's not Marcis bed, because it doesn't have silk sheets worth more than two months of Foggy life savings, and it's not Karens because she had these endearingly cute sheers with one of the ponies from My Little Pony on there (Rainbowdash maybe?) that Foggy had always given her a hard time about. His brain is muddled, moving through sludge slowly. He thinks that maybe he should care that he's in a strange bed in a strange apartment.
He doesn't though.
He doesn't because Matt is dead.
He doesn't because Matt had bled out underneath his shaking hands and Claire's experienced ones, gasping and choking up blood because his new, special reinforced suit that he had promised would stop bullets had failed to stop bullets.
And at the memory of the blood covering his hands, the way he felt Matt’s chest stutter - once, twice, a third time and then falling and never rising again - his eyes start to burn. He didn’t think it was possible to cry anymore than he already had, because he had screamed at Matt and cried and begged for Claire to fix everything.
But Claire had shook her head, tears streaming down her face.
Because Matt is dead.
Was it even worth getting up if Matt was gone? So maybe he had cut ties with the man and had made the unsteady table of Nelson and Murdock into the crumbled remains of Murdock, but it didn’t mean he had wanted him dead - he had hoped that maybe one day they could reconcile as old men and hang out in their nursing home together, yelling at kids to get off of the lawn and Foggy would lose his eyesight and Matt would laugh at him and -
Fuck, he might actually throw up.
He forces himself up (“It won’t do you any good to stay in bed all day, Foggy, get some sunshine.” His mother tells him lovingly, an affectionate eyeroll hidden beneath those words, and fuck fuck fuck fuck, he has to tell his mother that her adopted baby is dead) because he has to actually live and breathe like a normal fucking human being and call Karen and pretend like everything is okay.
It’s really not okay.
Because Matt is dead.
Because Matt had been his first real friend who hadn’t made fun of Foggy’s pudge (“Nelson, don’t be offended, it was jus’ a joke, no harm meant man.”) or his name (“What kind of lawyer has the name Foggy? You’re pathetic and you have no chance.”) and had filled him with ideas of grandeur and had said dumb things like “I’m sure you’re very pretty, Foggy.”
God, Matt.
He steps onto the cold floor and shivers, wipes at his eyes. He doesn’t want to be the one night stand that cries the morning after, he wants to be the one that quietly sneaks out before he has to face his regret. He quietly approaches the door, slips around it.
The place is nice, kind of. It’s very... vintage, something that totally belonged in the 80’s with some floral couch in the middle of the room and holy shit, that TV is out of the 80’s. He thinks that if he turns it on, it won’t even have colour. It’s not his place though, and it’s kind of rude to turn on other people’s TVs.
He’s tempted to, though. His fling doesn’t seem to be anywhere in sight, and there’s no sound to indicate that they’re in the apartment. He twists the knob to the ‘on’ notch, and wow, it is actually in colour. The channel is on a news station, grainy and hard to watch. He sits on the edge of the couch, watches the news and hopes that he won’t see ‘local blind man found dead’, but kind of hopes that he does.
“Good morning, Hell’s Kitchen!” The newscaster says cheerfully, “It’s 8:30 on the 26th of June, 1992-”
Wait.
1992?
Man, he really needs to go back to bed.
Because if he can have a dream where he’s in 1992 and 33 years old when he’s supposed to be 13, then he can have a dream where Matt is still alive. He assumes that his fling has gone to work, so it can’t hurt if he sleeps on the couch for a second, right?
-
He wakes up still in the 90’s apparently, and he’s pretty sure that he’s awake this time - the grief has hit harder than ever before. He’s choking, drowning maybe. It’s so- it’s so- he doesn’t even have words for it. Matt was always the one with words, and fuck, he’s lost that part of him. It’s like someone has taken his shoulder and left the wound untreated, raw, infected and festering.
It’s six in the evening, apparently to the clock on the wall. His fling isn’t back yet, and Foggy doesn’t feel like going anywhere. Maybe they have beer or something in the fridge, or vodka hidden somewhere. He could do with a bottle or three of just vodka at the moment.
He’s in luck, fishing a bottle of shitty beer out of the fridge. It’s something he would have drunk in law school, and it’s familiar. He sits down, stares at the TV that’s playing some vaguely sexist drama that he can’t follow. He thinks that maybe, if his blind best friend just happened to be a vigilante who kicked ass, then it’s not that big of a stretch that he’s somehow travelled back in time thirty years. He has another bottle, and then three more. Being drunk, it’s somehow easier to swallow that down.
Of course, he still thinks that he’s dreaming, but it’s easier to think about being in the past than it is to think of the colour that his best friend’s lips had faded to after he had stopped breathing, to think of the way that his heart had been there one second, gone the next. If he was in the 90’s then it means that he could go get super high and become a hippie and go to discos and be super grungey.
But drunk Foggy is still a lawyer, because logically he knows that if he’s in the 90’s then where is the future him? Just gone? Or how does 90’s him even get a job? “Hi, I’m Foggy Nelson and I graduated law school in the future, please hire me.” And how does he pay for anything? Did credit cards even exist in this time?
He wouldn’t even have anywhere to live.
Except, drunk Foggy is helpful enough to suggest that if the owner of the apartment hasn’t come back, maybe he won’t come back at all. Drunk Lawyer Foggy argues that someone was paying rent for this place, and therefore would have to come back at sometime. After an argument with Drunk Foggy and Drunk Lawyer Foggy, he finds himself stumbling to the desk in the corner, pulling out the drawers. There’d have to be some information about the person who owned the place. He finds paperwork, and then more paperwork. He doesn’t read any of it, because he’s not exactly sure which letters are O’s and which ones are Q’s and his brain can’t figure out what ‘TQ WHQM IT MAY CQNCERN’ is supposed to mean.
Maybe he should sleep.
So he does, on the floor, because Drunk Foggy is an asshole to hungover Foggy.
-
Hungover Foggy wakes up at 12 the next day and regrets every moment of his life leading up to this point. After a long session of regret, he pushes himself off of the floor and promptly loses the contents of his stomach. That’s cool, he thinks to himself, groaning.
After an hour or four, he finally moves from his puddle of recrimination and grossness and searches out the bathroom. The owner hasn’t been home yet, either, no sign of them. He showers and cries a little bit (a lot) and then-
“Now what am I supposed to wear?”
Foggy thinks that he’s already thrown up on their floor and had long overstayed his visit, so it couldn’t hurt to steal some clothes from whoever owned the place. He’s pleasantly surprised to find that his partner had been male and the same size as him, so he throws on some hideous tie dye shirt and sweatpants that fit disturbingly well. He then drinks about four billion litres of water and tries to clean the floor, but it’s already so stained that he really doesn’t have to work that hard.
And then he sees the files.
He’s a lawyer, so of course he sits down on the couch with them, tenderly reading each page like a new lover. Most of it is boring, no real information about the person who lives here, until he comes across a written letter.
“Mr. Nelson,
thank you so much for your assistance with the custody case and helping me get my boy back again. He wouldn’t have been safe with Maggie, and I’ll forever be grateful that you took my case pro bono. Will definitely be recommending you to anyone I know in a bit of legal trouble.
Thank you again, Jack Murdock.
01/05/1992”
Well, fucking shit.
Matt didn’t like talking much about his family, but he knows the basics. He knows that Maggie Murdock had not been the most loving mother and had disappeared off the face of the earth when Jack had died, leaving Matt to the nuns. He didn’t know there had been a custody battle, or that Matt had apparently been trapped with her.
He also didn’t know that he himself was a lawyer in the 90’s.
Huh.
Looked like he needed a lot more beer.
-
Right, it’s been six days and Foggy’s pretty sure that he’s the new owner of the apartment. He’s gone through all of the files he could find with the name Murdock and he finds pretty standard things, arguments that Maggie was mentally unfit as a mother and didn’t have the resources or the funds to care for Matt, and arguments against Jack, saying that he was a good for nothing boxer. The last one causes rage to boil in Foggy’s stomach, sitting uncomfortable like too hot soup because Matt never said much, but Jack had been the best father he could have been to Matt.
But then the files run dry and he really knows nothing more now, except an address. Except, Foggy can’t exactly pop up and say, “Hi, I’m your son’s best friend from twenty years in the future where he just died, mind if I speak to him?”.
No, he’ll be articulate and smart about it. He’ll just act like Lawyer Nelson, calling to check up on Matt and see if everything was okay.
-
Articulate and smart are two words that Foggy would NOT apply to the situation.
He reminds himself for the seventy ninth time that day that he’s a lawyer, he had his own law firm and that he was working for a prestigious company now. He was good at being a lawyer.
For some reason, repeating those words to himself don’t seem to solidify their meanings.
Of course the Murdocks don’t have a landline phone, because Matt had implied (but never said, never complained) with mentions of stale off brand cereal for dinner, that his childhood had never really been filled with grandeur, so it’s really no surprise that there’s no number listed for them.
However, there is a home address and a place of work for Jack, so he thinks, ‘I will be astute and confident and tell this man to protect his precious child from stray chemical trucks in the streets.’. He doesn’t have to hear the words aloud to know how stupid they sound.
But he had aimed to articulate his words, precise and calm. He thinks ‘Jack Murdock, I just wanted to check up on you and your son. No sudden cases of blindness or blind old men named Stick beating him with a stick? No sudden cases of dying in the streets? No? Okay, keep it that way.’ isn’t the best way to go.
But nor is following Jack Murdock home from a fight, which is exactly what he does, because Foggy graduated law school and became a successful lawyer, but he still has shit for brains sometimes. He tries to be subtle, but Matt must have gotten his bat-like senses way before the accident, because half a block later, Jack stops.
Golden moment. Foggy steps out from the shadows, “Mr. Murdock, I’d like to talk to you about your son.” Calm, astute, precise. He doesn’t stutter.
And then he’s on the floor, Jack standing over him. It’s dark, but Foggy thinks that maybe he can see the flames of protectiveness in the father’s eyes. His jaw is set, a furious wave of ‘my son is mine and i will protect him’ flooding off of him - and jesus okay, that’s a look he’s seen on Matt way too many times and it’s like looking at a mirror and it hurts, he feels like he might actually cry on Jack Murdock’s shoulder and sob about how much he looks like his dead best friend. But he doesn’t. He swallows down his sadness and grief and depression and loss down like one of those horrible fitness shakes that his mother drinks (he had taken a sip once and had gagged and almost lost the entire contents of his stomach for the year because it had been so thick and disgusting and ugh)
“Wow, okay.” And the articulate part is out the window, “Sorry, I didn’t think that would make you angry. I’m Foggy Nelson, your lawyer from a few months ago. The custody case?” He asks, like anyone could ever forget almost losing the rights to their precious, only child. Foggy knows from his files that Jack Murdock lived for exactly two things; his son and boxing. “I just wanted to check up on you guys, make sure everything is alright.”
Jack’s face is suspicious. “And you did that by followin’ me home at some dumb hour?”
“Well-”
Jack is suddenly up and christ, he’s fast. Foggy takes a second to get his bearings, jumps to his feet and sprints to Jack. His heart is hammering and his head is sludgy and still feels like he’s had a bit too much to drink even though he hasn’t. He wonders if this is what grief does to people, stops them from functioning. He hasn’t really lost anyone before, except for Great Grandma Ruth when he was four and a family dog when he was sixteen.
“Jack, can you just- can you stop and listen to me for just a second?” And wow, okay, Jack is just like Matt because he’s a stubborn asshole and speeds up his step so Foggy has to walk even faster. If they continue like this, they might actually be running.
“Alright.” Foggy sighs melodramatically. “Fine. You want to play it the hard way, do you?” Because Foggy’s brain is fucked up at the moment (that’s what he’s blaming it on, it’s grief, alright? He’s not usually this dumb, because he’s watched hundreds of sci-fi time travel movies and he knows that the worst thing to do is expose yourself as a time traveller, but give him a break, alright?), he says “Guess you don’t want to talk to the time traveller that just watched your son die because he’s a fucking self-sacrificing idiot.” and wow that had way, way more emotion than he had been intending, but alright.
Jack gives him a sideways glance, raises his eyebrow in the ‘is this guy for real?’, and pauses his steps. “Stop talkin’.” He says after a moment. “Don’t talk to me about my son, and stay away from him. Stay away from me, too, otherwise I’ll make you think you’re from the future.”
And wow okay, that was a little violent and more threatening than he expected, so he stops. “I’ll leave you to it then. I’m sure you have my number for when you want to chat about these things reasonably.”
Jack Murdock, does not reply.
And Foggy goes home to an apartment that isn’t his, lays on sheets that do not belong to him, and cries tears for a best friend who doesn’t even know him in this time period.
-
Foggy thinks that if he had to add another few things to his resume, they would probably be ‘dumbass who doesn’t give up’, ‘totally irrational at times’ and ‘sometimes really stupid but i’m smart i promise’. Because here he is, knocking on the Murdock door and hoping that Jack won’t try to punch his brains out.
The area is shitty, the building a disgusting, crumbling mess that could probably be put up on the stand in court for its ugliness. Inside is no better, stained carpets and flaking paint on the walls. It has a strange odour of stale air and old people, which seems foreboding and a little terrifying.
“Jesus Christ.” Foggy has the good sense to duck this time, feeling the air above him disturbed with a forceful punch. He doesn’t need to add to the collection on his face, the one from the night before is purple and sore and hurts like a mother. “Didn’t I tell you to stay away?”
“Guess I’m not a smart one then, am I sir?”
“No.” And then the door is slammed in his face. Huh, so one thing that Matt didn’t get from his father was the rudeness, but Foggy also puts that down to being raised by nuns and a blind asshole who expected too much from a grieving, blinded child.
He’s about to knock but-
“Dad? Who was that?”
Shit, was that Matt? Little, tiny Matt?
“Just some charity seekers, Matty, nothin’ to worry about. Have you have breakfast yet?”
“Ye-es dad.” The doleful tone is so, so Matt that Foggy actually starts crying again. His fist is to his mouth, swallowing back the sobs. He thinks about the times that Matt had taken the tone with him (“Foggy, I’m fine, it’s just a cold.” “Yes, mom, I have eaten today.”) and thinks that he might throw up, because wow.
His Matt is dead.
That thought suckerpunches him in the chest, leaving him breathless. He stumbles away from the apartment, down the stairs away from the nine year old, not dead, version of his best friend as the sobs rip their way out of his throat with a ferocity like Daredevil’s punches. He makes his way to his apartment in a blind haze, sobbing so hard that he knows he must be getting some looks and the little old lady that he passes on the street reaches out to grab his elbow and asks if he’s okay, but he’s not because Matt is dead and she’s grabbing his elbow like Matt used to, when he was still alive and breathing and not dead, and wow, he’s falling apart.
He can’t find it in him to reassure the old lady, because what would he say otherwise? “No, i’m not okay because i just heard the nine year old version of my dead best friend and he’s not blind yet and he hasn’t had some shitty life yet and he hasn’t grown up to get to the age of 32 to die.” He pulls out of her grasp, finds the apartment and fumbles with the lock. It takes him a good moment to just breathe enough to actually remember that the key has to go in the lock first before it can do it’s job.
Once he gets inside, he throws himself down onto the couch. He wishes to call Karen and to cry at her and with her and then eat shitty ice cream that tastes like cardboard and get roaringly drunk to forget the pain. He wants to call Claire and bond over their stupid mutual dead friend and tell her dumb stories back from law school and tell her that it wasn’t her fault.
More than anything else though, he wishes that Matt was alive.
He doesn’t get squat, though, because Karen and Claire aren’t stuck in the fucking 90’s and his Matt is still dead.
-
“Haven’t you learned your lesson yet?” Jack asks, after he catches Foggy following him home again. He seems in a better mood though - from the sounds of it, he must have won the fight - and he hasn’t tried to punch Foggy yet, so that’s a nice surprise.
“Guess I haven’t.”
“Mm.” Jack nods, looking lost in his thoughts. He’s tense again, though, muscles coiled as though he’s ready to fight for his son’s honour. “I don’t trust you, y’know? You seem desperate though, not sure why.”
“I wonder why.” Foggy mutters to himself, shakes his head. “Look, I know I seem crazy and a little like I’ve seen Back to The Future,” (‘when was that released?’ Will jack even get the reference?’) a few too many times-” Jack snorts, mumbling ‘you got that right’ (and oh good, he does get the reference. It makes Foggy feel just a little tiny bit better.) “- but I’m not lying to you, Jack.”
“You don’t think you’re lyin’. You still might be, though.” Wow, okay, that’s the shit that Foggy expects from philosophers and Drunk Foggy, not from a partially uneducated boxer, but alright. “Look, I get that you’ve got your ‘gotta save the world’ complex going on here-” (and no, Foggy really doesn’t, Matt’s the one with that complex. Foggy has the ‘gotta save Matt’ complex, but he’s sure that they’re similar on some level.) “- but Matt has seen enough shit as it is and he’s not even ten yet, so don’t get involved with him, alright?’
“Of course.”
“Now, I need you to tell me me about Matt dying. How far in the future are you from?” Okay, and Foggy is half tempted to say 80 years, let the man think that Matt died in old age and give the man piece of mind. But fuck, he needs to get this shit off his chest.”
“It’s 1992, right?”
“Mm.”
“Then twenty-odd years, give or take.” He hears Jack hiss air in between his teeth, because yeah, thirty years old is way too young for anyone to die. No one wants to hear that their child only has twenty years left to live, because really, what could they achieve in that time if they’re not Matthew Murdock? “Yeah, I know.”
“What happened?”
Ah, and that’s the question he was dreading. How does he say ‘your son becomes blind and then you die and he gets shipped off to an orphanage where another blind guy teaches him to become a vigilante, and then while being a blind vigilante who has literally had his chest opened up like an autopsy by some Japanese guy, he dies because he got shot by some fucking kids’ to someone’s father?
“I don’t think you want to know.” Foggy says, eventually. The words are weighted with the world, low and shaky. “I don’t think you’d believe me if I told you.”
“I deserve to know.”
Foggy takes a breath. “Alright, Matt’s this good guy right? Like, ‘weight of the world on his shoulders, fix the world on my own’ kind, right? He-” Foggy hesitates. Does he tell the truth? Lie? Omit details? “He had a reputation of sorts, as some guy who helped people. Dismantled human trafficking rings by himself kind of bullshit. It all just caught up to him.” He wants to tell Jack about the way that Matt’s eyes had been rolling around in his head, as though he was trying to see, wants to tell him about how Matt’s hand had trapped his own in the tightest possible grip and he had felt it loosen as he died, felt the hand go limp and then cold, becoming so fragile that Foggy thought that if he applied the slightest bit of pressure, Matt would just deflate like a toothpaste tube.
“You care about him.”
“No shit.”
There’s silence, for a moment. Foggy thinks of all of the things he could say. He could tell Jack that Matt had gone to law school because his dad had wanted to and had graduated summa cum laude. He could tell him about how polite he was, how gentle and caring and kind he was. He could also tell him how broken Matt was, because Matt was like a 100 piece puzzle missing 56 of the pieces.
“Did you-” And wow, did Battlin’ Jack Murdock just hesitate? “Did you want to meet him one day? Not until I know that you’re not gonna kidnap him and take him to the future with you, but...”
“I would love to.” And he would, he really would, but he thinks that nine year old Matt might be a little freaked out when some adult comes over in terrible clothing choices and cries over him. “But-”
“He’s not your Matt. I know.”
“It’s not just that. I just- I’m worried I’ll freak him out, y’know?”
“If your Matt is anything like mine, then you’re wildly wrong about him.” Jack has a sad smile on his face. “Somehow he’s the dumbest and smartest kid alive. Got high hopes for him, but he’s too kind, too understanding.” He grimaces. “From what you’re telling me, it sounds like I had better start training that out of him now.”
Foggy chuckles, and wow, that feels really strange and foreign and wrong because Matt is dead and he shouldn’t be laughing. “He was raised by nuns for a while, so I don’t think you have much chance.” And then he realises that he’s fucked up, he’s fucked up big big big time. “I think I might just go. Things to do, you know, time travel thing-”
“What do you mean ‘raised by nuns’?” Oh, yep, okay, the reports weren’t wrong about Jack Murdock being scary because that voice terrifies him to the core and he thinks that the only other time that he’s only really been this intimidated by another person is when he met the Punisher, just casually hanging out on Matt’s couch with blood pouring out of him.
“I think I’m going to go-”. Jack’s hand is strong and warm, wrapped around his forearm in a grip that hurts a lot.
“Tell me.”
“Maybe now isn’t the time.” Foggy tries to insist. “It’s getting late and it’s a long story and I’m sure Matt wants to see you before he goes to bed and tomorrow’s a school day so he has to get to bed soon, right?”
“Nelson.”
“Alright, fine. I’ll tell you, but not here. I don’t think everyone is going to be as believing as you if they hear I’m from the future. I can’t afford to be locked up in the nineties.”
“Right.” He sounds are guarded and unimpressed as he did on the first night.
“Tomorrow, alright? You can come over to my apartment and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know, just- just let me try to save my best friend, alright?”
It might have been the crack in his voice, it might have been the tremble in his body, it might have been the tears spilling down his cheeks, but Jack nodded.
Belatedly, Foggy realises, that it might have been that Jack Murdock is a good man.
-
“Tea? Coffee? Shit beer?” If procrastinating had been a class at college, it would have been Foggy graduating summa cum laude, not Matt. Jack has been given a short tour of the place, had Foggy ramble at him for a good five minutes. The man, at the very least, had patience.
“No. Tell me about Matt.”
Foggy sinks down heavily on the chair, swallowing. “Like what, exactly?” He doesn’t need to ask, he knows exactly what Jack will ask. He wants to delay it though.
“You know what.”
“Right.” Foggy rubs a hand over his chin. He needs to shave, he realises. He hasn’t since he’s been to the past. “Matt lived at Saint Agnes’ orphanage from the ages 11 to 18, hence being raised by nuns. He’s so polite that sometimes I’m offended at how polite he is.”
“And why was he at Saint Agnes?”
“I think the orphanage part kind of covers that question, don’t you?” At Jack’s steely glare, he sighs. “Look, Matt didn’t tell me much because from what he’s implied, he didn’t have a great life there, alright? All I know is that Battlin’ Jack Murdock is shot dead in 1994 and Matt is left alone. Maggie Murdock wasn’t anywhere to be found when it happened and I’ve never looked into it in my time, but I’m guessing she’s dead too, or she’s locked away somewhere to deal with her mental health.”
“1994.” Jack says softly. “That’s two years away. Tell me what happened. Tell me so I can give Matt the life he deserves.”
“You won a fight you weren’t supposed to. That’s all I know. You were all over the papers, pretty big deal in such a small place. Everyone was talking about it for months.”
Jack makes a pained sound. “So, what, I lose all of my fights in 1994? I have to make money somehow-”
“Don’t you think your son is a little more important than money?”
“Don’t you think that Matt deserves to have a roof over his head and food, rather than livin’ out on the streets and eatin’ from a dumpster?” Okay, so instead of a boxer, Jack should have been a lawyer because Foggy has no reply for that.
“There’s somethin’ you’re not telling me.” And wow, the man sees straight through him and that’s just a little tiny bit concerning.
“Alright fine, Matt is blind, alright? Happens sometime this year and I’m pretty sure it hasn’t happened yet because he said it happened in winter.”
“Matt’s blind? How?”
“Because he’s a selfless hero. Again, he told me squat about it but he saved some old man and got hit by a truck full of chemicals or the chemicals splashed onto him or whatever. All I know is what I heard from the papers.”
“What else?”
“Uh, well. He’s a vigilante-” at Jack’s panicked look, he scrambled to correct himself, “- that’s what he called himself anyway. People thought he was a hero. He would protect Hell’s Kitchen and defend it against Japanese guys trying to do weird shit to the city and some guy called Wilson Fisk-”
“Stop.” Jack said, shaking his head. “Just, give me a second to wrap my head around this, alright?”
“Yeah, okay.” Foggy stands up, paces. He has all of this sudden energy that he has nothing to do with it. He’s a taut mess of too tired and too overworked and too mournful, energy that he shouldn’t even have coursing through him. He wants to punch something, but he won’t.
He hasn’t really given himself time to grieve.
He knows that on every single list of things to do when you lose someone you love, the first one is to let yourself grieve, to mourn. But he doesn’t want to grieve, because then it really means that Matt isn’t coming back because Matt is dead, Matt is a breathless corpse, a dead man waiting to get into heaven. Matt is his best friend, and he’s gone and it’s something that Foggy acknowledges but doesn’t believe.
He keeps on expecting to wake up and have Matt sitting on his couch and going, “Hey Fog, rough night?” with that dumb fucking smirk of his. Except he won’t, because he cut ties with Matt, except he won’t, because he told Matt he wants nothing to do with him anymore.
Except he won’t, because Matt is dead.
Okay, and maybe he’s crying a little, or sobbing a lot. He doesn’t really know anymore, it doesn’t really make sense. All he knows is that he’s crying over a dead man’s dead son in front of said dead man.
When did his life get so fucked up?
Jack rises, looking a little comfortable and more than understanding, because he’s lost people before too. Or maybe he’s just learned that he’s going to lose his son, or his son is going to lose him. This time travel shit is messing with his head and he just wants to sleep, sleep, sleep.
He realises Jack saying something in a too calm tone and leaving Foggy alone again, and he breaks down, shows the wall his anger with a shattering beer bottle. As the glass shatters, too loud, too loud, too loud, Foggy thinks that he might be shattering with it.
-
Foggy tries to sleep a few hours after his breakdown, but his throat aches from the screaming and his eyes hurt too much to focus on anything else, so sleep eludes him like a one night stand that gave him the wrong number.
It’s about the time that Jack would finish up at the gym or a fight, so Foggy gets up, scrubs at his face so he appears like he’s not a broken human being and meets Jack just as he’s leaving, so he thinks he times it pretty well.
“I wasn’t expecting you tonight.” Jack says, after a while. “Thought you might sleep it off or drink it away or whatever.”
He has tried, but it’s hard to drink away the thought of your best friend dying, just like it’s hard to wash his hands without seeing Matt’s blood on it. (“Out damn spot,” he thinks, every time, feeling hysterically like Lady Macbeth. He hopes that Matt’s death doesn’t drive him from jumping off of a tower but he’s not quite positive he won’t with his current mindset because he and matt were codependent assholes.)
“Thought you might have wanted to talk more. Work on mission: save Matthew Murdock and ultimately the world.”
“Some people might say that God has chosen a path for all of us already.” Jack says quietly.
“And what do you say?”
“I think that sometimes God is not always right.” Jack says quietly. “Matt- he doesn’t deserve to die so young, and he doesn’t deserve to go live in some orphanage for several years.”
“So we’ll change the world?”
“Damn straight, we will. At least for Matt. Kid’s gone through so much shit and he’s only nine years old.”
“Cool, cool.” He doesn’t have any words at the moment, feels like someone has taken the meaning of every single one of them and leaving him with gibberish that he doesn’t understand.
Jack seems to, though, so it’s okay.
-
Three weeks later and several meetings with Jack, Foggy is starting to feel like that they can achieve this, that Matt will be a happy non-blind cinnamon roll, safe and sound for his entire life.
That is, until Matt gets hit by a fucking truck with chemicals in it and wow, Foggy was so not prepared for this. He had assumed that because they were going to save Matt, that he would be okay.
Nope.
Matt’s on the ground screaming because he’s nine years old and he’s in agony and Jack looks like he’s never been so scared in his life and Foggy feels fucking paralysed because this is the first time he’s seen this version of his best friend and of course it’s when he’s crying and yelling and having his retinas burned out, so that’s a lovely thing for him that sends him into something that might be bordering in a panic attack so he hides out at his apartment for a week or two and has paced a whole into the carpet.
Jack Murdock storms down his door at three am, when Matt is safely asleep and there are nurses watching him. He doesn’t say a word, instead goes to the fridge and grabs the shitty beer and drinks a full bottle before he says anything.
“Looks like Mattie’s life is pretty well planned out for him, don’t you think?’
“Don’t lose hope, Jack.” Foggy says, after losing his hope two weeks ago. It feels wrong rolling off of the tongue, like the words have been mishapen to the point that they’re not even words anymore, instead just playdough that a kid squeezed too hard. “Maybe Matt was just meant to be blind; he kind of rocks at being blind in my time, so, you know. We can still make sure that he doesn’t get sent to the orphanage, or get totally fucked up by some old guy.”
So maybe Foggy’s had a bit to drink. His tongue is too loose and wow he’s saying way more than he should be, because Jack gives him that look and Foggy spills everything.
“Let me get this straight,” Jack says, after finishing his fourth beer. Foggy hopes that the man is kind enough to pay him back and then realises that the man has a blind kid who has suddenly become ten hundred times more expensive than he was before (because Foggy knows that Matt gets a disability allowance but at the end of the fortnight he’s scrabbling for cash and eating that shitty ramen that both of them hate because being blind is expensive) and feels bad. “Some old guy called Stick takes my blinded, recently orphaned son, and turns him into a warrior?”
“Yeah, that sounds right.”
The coffee table splinters, but that’s okay because Foggy thought it was kind of hideous anyway. He’s not too sure about the new decorations though - the shards of wood just seem a little too dangerous.
“If it makes you feel any better, Stick was blind too.”
“No, it really doesn’t.”
“Me either. Blind or not, I’d trip that asshole over in the street, I don’t care who’s watching.”
“I’d do more than trip him.” Jack mutters darkly, but shakes his head. “Right. Okay. Alright, new plan, we wrap Matty up in bubblewrap and never let him go outside again.”
“I think he might not like that.”
“Yeah, I know. Kid is still independent and he’s fucking blind now. He’s charming all of the nurses and even some of the doctors. I won’t be surprised if at least three of them have asked for his hand in marriage.”
“Yeah, get used to that, it doesn’t change. Dude has a radar for hot chicks- never knew how he ever did it considering the whole blind thing, but-” Drunk Foggy has enough sense to stop talking about Matt picking up hot chicks, because wow, Jack really didn’t need to know about his nine year old son’s future sex life.
“I think I’m going to stop talking now.” It’s probably the smartest idea that Drunk Foggy’s ever had, because Jack snorts and shakes his head at him.
“No, go ahead, tell me all about my nine year old son’s sexual prowess.” And then he laughs and laughs and laughs, and it’s not the happy laugh because Foggy knows that laugh, because he’s done it more than his fair share in this time period. He leaves Jack on the couch to laugh/sob to himself and throws himself down onto his bed.
And he sleeps.
-
Jack is gone when Foggy wakes up with a hangover bigger than his head. He was expecting it, because if his nine year old child had been recently blinded, he want would to spend every moment with him too. His table is still a wreck on the floor, and he plays a careful game of hopscotch in order to not slice open his feet. His head pounds in protest, but he makes it safely to the other side of the room.
Belatedly, he realises he could have just gone around the couch and avoided the mess all together, but Foggy’s brain isn’t working too good at the moment. It hasn’t been for a few weeks, but he’ll blame that on too much beer and too much grief and maybe just a little homesickness.
He thinks that maybe he might stop drinking so much because he’s pretty sure that he’s out of a job (because the landline has run several billion times and Foggy hasn’t bothered answering it) and he’s drinking away what little money he has.
If he sees Jack again, he might ask to see Matt for motivation.
Only might.
He’s not sure if he’s ready to see Matt again, and the boy’s been recently blinded; he’d be shaky and unstable and scared, and it’s really not fair for Foggy to go add to that with his stranger-ness and emotionally hurt-ness.
He maps out a plan in his head, actually, he maps out several; but none of them will help save Matt. He thinks that Jack should quit boxing, but the man doesn’t have a great education and there’s no way an ex-boxer has a chance at getting a job, so he shelves that one away. He thinks that he should just hang around for two years and maybe take a bullet for Jack and leaving Matt with a father, but that requires him to stay in the past for two years and then die. He shelves that one too.
Another one is to let Jack die and then raise Matt on his own, but the only experience Foggy has is from his family and he’s never actually raised a kid before, let alone a eleven year old who is blind and has lost his father.
He fills up the shelves with dumb fucking ideas and becomes an emotional wreck after he shelves the eighteenth one because it was too irrational and wouldn’t work.
Maybe, he thinks, three hours later on the kitchen floor, just maybe, Matthew Murdock isn’t meant to be saved.