Chapter Text
“So el diablo...”
“Demonio.”
Karen scrunches her nose up. “What?”
“You can say both of them.” Matt shrugs. “Don’t ask me, I’m not a linguist.”
“So a daredevil is…”
“Temerario.” He fights to keep his face straight, which is made somewhat harder by the three glasses of whiskey he's drunk. “As in temerity. Reckless.”
"Temerario." Karen rolls the Rs comically, and starts giggling.
"You sound like a telenovela," Foggy complains.
"Leave telenovelas alone, they're the only thing that got me through Spanish." Karen is still giggling, and Matt pats her absently on the head, though he misses and ends up hitting her ear. She doesn't seem to mind.
It’s a Friday night, and Josie’s is crowded with workers fresh off their shifts, including them. Karen is quizzing Matt on his Spanish - ever since they managed to save Mrs. Cardenas' building, more and more Hispanic people have been asking for their services, and he and Foggy are happy to oblige. The latest case is over child custody; the judge insists on giving the boy to his mother, despite the bruises he always returns to his father with. It’s a messy, complex, emotional case, and after a day arguing with oblivious social workers the three of them had agreed that some cheap whiskey in glasses of questionable cleanliness would be quite nice, thank you very much.
Foggy leans on his shoulder. "Matt."
"What?"
"Gimme your phone." Foggy starts to grope for it, just as Matt extracts it from his pocket and holds it aloft. "C'mon, man! I wanna call Marci!"
"I don't have her number. If you're going to drunk dial people you can use your own - hey!" His phone is snatched from his hand. "Karen, that's larceny."
"What's a phone between friends? Seriously, you still have the default background? I'm changing it. Only sad people and old people have the default background."
"But I am a sad person," he protests as he hears the camera click; presumably the photo is of him, pouting, because he turns into a petulant three-year-old when he's even slightly drunk, petulance directly proportional to volume of alcohol consumed, with Foggy tangled around him.
"Look!" Presumably Karen is shoving the phone in his face, as Foggy grunts in assent.
"Very professional," he announces. "Shows our brilliant interpersonal dynamic. Did you get new shampoo?" This is accompanied by some sniffing in the vicinity of his neck.
"Should I be worried that you actually noticed that? Are you me? With the smelling and all?" Matt reaches over, fumbles around for Foggy's glass - he's mixed it with coke, why would you do that to innocent whiskey? - and takes a slug, wrinkling his nose.
"I don't think I'm you. Karen, your opinion?"
"You're you and you're you." Before Matt can complain that that was as clear as mud, she says "Group selfie!" and the camera goes off again.
"That's the most millennial thing I've ever done," Matt comments dryly as Foggy pushes him aside to grab his phone.
"You're looking the wrong way," Foggy informs him.
"Again. Blind." Foggy does not deign to reply. Karen asks for another drink as Foggy gasps dramatically. "Matt! I thought we had a full disclosure agreement?"
"What?" His mind scrambles through the haze of vague inebriation. Maybe's he's found out about the thing with Wallenquist? That would be... bad. "I've told you everything. Everything everything."
"Who is this Nat dancer emoji Russian flag emoji?"
"And that is the most millennial thing I've ever heard."
Foggy makes a 'pssh' noise as Karen lowers her glass. "Here, lemme see. Wait... Is this..." She lowers her voice - she does a pretty good job of it, she's better than Foggy at holding her drink - and whispers, "Black Widow?"
"Oh, yeah. She gave me her number." If he's being honest, he forgot; he got Mahoney to check his phone (clean) and then ignored it.
Foggy lets out a melodramatic groan. "Why do you have so much game? Why? You know what, screw Marci-"
"You already have," Matt mutters as Karen titters.
"Shut up. We are drunk dialling Natasha Romanoff."
So Matt loves Foggy. He will admit this quite happily, no ‘no homo’s needed, he just does. Love Foggy, that is. He doesn’t even need to be drunk to say it, though it helps.
But however much he loves Foggy, however much he thanks whatever metaphorical deity exists out there (mostly God, of course, Matt is a good Catholic, but just in case anything else exists out there) for the quirk of fate that got Franklin Nelson and Matthew Murdock assigned as roommates in Columbia…
“No. That is an awful, awful idea."
“C’mon, man!” Foggy slams an ineffectual palm on the bar counter, causing Karen to spill some of her drink with a hiss. “I know literally everybody you know. Just because she’s a, y’know, Avenger, does not make her the exception to said rule.” He whispers the word Avenger under his breath, like a curse, and Matt can only imagine the shifty eyes and forced casual lean forward that accompany it.
He gives him a Look, ruined by his glasses, which are slightly askew. They never sit straight when he drinks. “She's probably busy. At this hour of the night she's generally off strangling aliens with her thighs and stuff.”
Foggy makes a ‘psssh!’ noise; Matt can almost imagine the accompanying hand flap. “We are better than aliens. I prefer us to aliens."
“I don't,” Karen proclaims. “Foggy, you owe me a drink.”
Foggy and Karen descend into friendly bickering, and Matt takes the opportunity to duck into the bathroom. Josie, in consideration of her clientèle, keeps a first aid kit in the men’s, and there’s an ugly gash curving up the inside of his wrist, where the seam of his suit had torn open in a skirmish with a few yakuza. The bandages take more thought than usual to put on, given his state of light inebriation, and it keeps him occupied enough to ignore the feeling that he’s forgotten something.
Foggy is oddly silent when Matt returns; he assumes Karen managed to win their tête-à-tête and that his friend is sulking, and asks for more whiskey. Karen assures him the glass clean, and he’s made good progress into it when Foggy starts giggling.
“What? Karen, were you lying? I’m probably drinking rat droppings. Am I drinking rat droppings?”
The glass is plucked from his hands, and a cool, husky voice replies; “None that I can see.” The ice clinks against the side of the tumbler, and the smell of whiskey - like wheat soaked in disinfectant - disappears, to be replaced by the scent of vanilla.
“I paid for that,” he protests weakly. “You’re gonna steal alcohol from the poverty-stricken lawyer?”
“I’ve stolen from poorer,” Natasha says, settling down beside him. "I am Russian. Are you Foggy? Thanks for calling me, I don't think our mutual friend would ever have gotten around to it." Her voice drips with disapproval.
"Matt's rude like that. I am indeed the esteemed Foggy Nelson, lawyer extraordinaire, and this is Karen Page, our legal secretary." There's some friendly greeting - sans the overblown squealing drunk girls are accustomed to doing - and Karen immediately starts trying to buy Natasha's drink for her. It's quite sweet, actually.
"A White Russian for the white Russian!" Karen eventually calls, and Natasha lets out an undignified snort.
"Never heard that one before," she mutters.
"Karen, that was my joke. You stole it." Foggy and Karen start an argument over intellectual property and Matt sighs.
"Is this what lawyers get like when they're drunk?" Natasha enquires.
"Yep. Just don't bring up torts and you'll be fine." Matt almost asks her what superheroes do when they get drunk, but firstly, he's supposed to Not Know That, and according to the gossip rags Foggy reads aloud every morning, Tony Stark is a recovering alcoholic and, according to the S.H.I.E.L.D. files, Captain America can't get drunk, so he thinks he knows already. "Dancers don't drink, do they?"
"We go straight for the hard stuff." Her tone is too serious to be serious, but...
"I'm gonna say that falls under legal professional privilege." Foggy and Karen are just about done with their argument when Karen complains - "say it, don't spray it!" - and they devolve into mud-slinging again.
"Are they flirting or arguing?" Natasha eventually asks, after observing for a couple moments.
"Foggy's practising for the stand, and this is how Karen lets out her aggression. I've been trying to convince her to take up boxing, but no dice."
"Matt, I am not punching you for recreation. That would be bad. Who'd wail on you?" Karen pauses and, realising the implications of her statement, says, quietly, "Oh."
"He punches back. Pretty hard, actually." Natasha says this with humour, jabbing him lightly in the shoulder, and he winces. "Wait, is that still there?"
That particular bruise came from a weirdly positioned barber shop pole he slammed into the other night. "You don't punch that hard. This was just a small accident."
"Matt never looks where he's going," Foggy pipes up, and starts snickering.
"Wow," Natasha says dryly. "Really? You're already picking on the blind guy?"
"Joke's on him, he has to buy said blind guy a drink every time he makes an ableist comment." Matt kicks him in the shin.
Foggy grumbles, but he pays up, sliding his used glass over to Josie.
"She gonna wash that?" Natasha whispers into his ear.
"Hey, only you and I have used it, and I'm pretty sure you're clean. Washing it would be a needless procedure." He gives her a sharp smile, and she shakes her head, hair brushing against his jaw. This late in the day, the vanilla of her perfume has almost entirely worn off; all that's left is a sweet undertone, overlaid with sweat and city smoke and the faintest tang of blood. Eau de Widow, he thinks. That vanilla smell - it's the only thing that carries over into her Black Widow persona. Everything else changes - her voice darkens, deepens, and her heartbeat speeds up, beating an odd irregular rhythm. Natasha is lighter, more mellifluous, more even. He wonders if the changes are conscious, designed specifically to fool someone like him; probably, given the rigours of the Red Room.
"Are you sure you're a lawyer? I thought you guys lived for needless procedures.”
“They’re really bad lawyers,” Karen says conspiratorially. “We’re so unemployed.”
“That’s not true!” The vigourous clinking of ice in Foggy’s glass makes Matt think he’s waving it, possibly at Karen. “We had a case today!”
“It was our first all week.” Foggy audibly deflates, and Matt hides his smile behind the rim of his glass.
“But we’re building up our practice!” Karen’s voice is proud, and that is ridiculously cute, she’s proud of them.
“Yeah, give us a couple months and we’ll be bigger than Landman & Zack ever was!”
“Also more principled,” Matt adds.
“And with more bagels.” Foggy slams his glass down as if he were a judge with a gavel, and Josie squawks at him for damaging the counter.
The night gets oddly blurry from thereon out. Perhaps it’s because he was trying to keep up with Natasha, but he honestly can’t seem to keep anything in his head - his thoughts drip like water through his fingers. Some remain; he remembers Karen almost choking on an eel and Foggy going for a nap in an unoccupied booth and getting sat on by some bikers and Natasha beating every single crook in the bar at arm-wrestling…
Only when he and Natasha are waiting outside Josie’s for a taxi does his mind come back into focus, the clarity sharp and painful to his bedraggled senses. The June heat has leached away, and Matt shivers slightly, wrinkling his nose. How much did he drink? He’ll be smelling whiskey for the next two days.
“You sure I can’t walk you home?” Natasha’s voice is careful, concerned. “I know you’re wholly capable of it, but…”
He can’t risk her seeing his building. What if, one day, she tracks Daredevil back to his base and sees him slip into Matt Murdock’s home? “No, I’ll be fine. I’m only a few blocks away. I’ll call Foggy if I get into trouble. I mean, he’ll give me crap about it for days, but he’ll help me. He has to.”
She laughs. “Your friends are nice.”
“Liar.”
“I mean it. They love you… and you love them.”
Matt stills. “I’m lucky,” he says quietly, and by God he is.
“They’re lucky too. To have you.”
“I don’t know about that.” Matt spends most of his time feeling like an awful friend. He lied to Foggy, he’s still lying to Karen… Someday, he knows, they’ll have no other choice to abandon him, or go down with him, and he desperately hopes they won’t choose the latter. “I’m… I don’t know. Manipulative. Selfish.”
“So what?” Her voice is flippant. “Sure, you may be manipulative and selfish… but you're human. We’re all like that. You care about them. You can trust me on that… I’m good at figuring that sort of stuff out.” The ability to discern allegiances, weaknesses… things she can take advantage of, he supposes, applied in a more benign context.
“What do you mean, care?”
“You tried to give Karen the Heimlich maneuver.”
“Oh, God. Did I really?”
“You stood up to those bikers after they got pissy at Foggy, too. I mean, I don’t know if you weren’t intimidated by them because you couldn’t see them, or if you’re truly fearless…”
“You weren’t scared by them either. You did arm-wrestle them, after all.”
He hears her hair swish; presumably she’s smoothing it into place. “I beat their asses, too. Don’t forget that.”
“I don’t think I could.”
Natasha chuckles, and they slip into silence, for a few comfortable minutes.
“You’re a good friend, Matt. Really, stop laughing,” she adds.
“Sorry.” Matt sobers up, as much as he can.
“I haven't really had the luxury of friends,” she continues. He supposes not. Being moulded into an assassin by the Red Room is not conducive to forming friendships. Alliances, perhaps, but nothing lasting. “I’m glad I can count you as one.”
“As a friend?”
In response, she places her hand on his shoulder; the stench of whiskey is replaced by vanilla. Her lips are a soft, warm pressure against his cheek, and he finds himself wondering how long it’s been since he’s shaved.
“And that was a friend kiss?” he asks drily.
“Yep.” She sounds oddly smug. “You looked all confused. I thought it was sweet.”
“You’re so European, you know that?” He shakes his head. “Friend kisses. God.”
“Russia isn’t Europe,” she says, scandalised.
“What is it, then?”
“Russia is Russia.” The squeak of wheels as a cab pulls up. “That’s my cue.” He waves, as she climbs in; Natasha says nothing, only snorts as the door clicks and the car pulls away.
Matt makes it home without incident, except for a small run-in with an inconvenient street kerb, and the first thing he does when he gets home is wash his face - he wouldn't put it past her to wear lipstick with tracking gel in it, or something.
(And then he gets sick, because whiskey. Water of life his ass.)