Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The man in front of Stephen was very unwell.

It was obvious—his pallor, the way his fingers trembled. His mouth was pressed into a firm line and his glasses, round and tinted red, sat crooked across his nose. His clothes were wrinkled and cheap—just a band t-shirt and jeans with a hole in one of the knees. He wore a surprisingly nice camel-colored coat. He smelled vaguely of whiskey. His hair was unkempt, but in all fairness, that could just be a product of his evident blindness. At least the man wouldn’t be too freaked out if Stephen’s third eye decided to make an appearance.

Anyway. Stephen could identify a trainwreck when it appeared on his doorstep.

“You’re Doctor Stephen Strange,” the man had said when Stephen had answered the doorbell. He was twisting a red-tipped cane around in his hands. “I’m Matthew Murdock.”

Stephen had paused. After looking the man—Murdock—over, he said, “Lucky guess, I suppose.”

Murdock shrugged. He smiled without any mirth. “It wasn’t a guess at all.”

Stephen wasn’t given to fidgeting, which is why he stood still as he said, “Well. At any rate, we don’t accept solicitors, so unless you have any business with—”

“I do,” said Murdock. He reached into his coat pocket. “I’m Daredevil.”

He pulled out a red mask with little horns protruding from the forehead. He handed it over to Stephen, who brushed his fingers over it. He couldn’t sense any latent magic or active spells. It was a perfect replica of Daredevil’s mask—it even seemed to be made of real leather, reinforced with kevlar and steel plates around the temples. 

Stephen stared at the unwell blind man on his doorstep and carefully handed the mask back. “Forgive me if I’m not convinced.”

Murdock said, “What, do you want me to do a flip in front of you?”

“That will only prove you’re a blind man who can do a flip and perhaps suffers from a delusion of grandeur,” said Stephen. “Look, I’m very busy, and I—”

Murdock threw his cane off the front stoop and punched Stephen in the face.

He hit hard. Stephen rocked back, then overbalanced on his heels and fell to the floor. He spat out blood onto the floor and sighed, because it had just been mopped this morning , and then Matthew is grabbing Stephen off the floor and shoving him against the nearest wall. 

“I’m busy too,” Murdock hissed. His breath smelled sour on Stephen’s face. Stephen scrunched his nose and shook out his fingertips as Murdock said, “I don’t have time for you to doubt me, I need you to— fuck. ”

Stephen blasted Murdock back about ten feet. It was usually a more powerful spell, but Stephen didn’t have the time or space to make the full sigil, so instead of pushing him out the door, Murdock went skidding across the floor. Stephen felt at his jaw for the forming bruise as Murdock flipped himself over, twisting into yet another attack pose. Stephen sighed at the move.

His cape wrapped itself around an inexpensive vase and sent it flying to Murdock. Murdock stood up and caught it.

“Are you really blind?” Stephen asked. Murdock made a growling noise in the back of his throat that couldn’t really be interpreted any which way.

Stephen approached Murdock. He set the vase on a nearby end table and watched Stephen—though perhaps “watch” was the wrong word. Under his red-shaded glasses, it was clear that his eyes were unfocused, fixed on the middle distance in front of him.

“Do you mind taking off your glasses?” Stephen asked.

Murdock sighed, but removed them somewhat obediently. He was a bit unpredictable, Stephen thought—he’d imagined having to cast another spell to get them off, and in fact had to dismiss the magic building his fingertips so he could instead conjure a small light that passed in front of Murdock’s eyes.

The pupils didn’t react at all. Murdock was well and truly blind, it seemed. Which made his claim of being Daredevil both more and less verifiable, somehow. 

(And, as Stephen suspected—he had purple circles underneath his eyes. It looked as though he hadn’t gotten much sleep in the past week, if not the past month.)

Still, there was the mask of it all, which seemed startlingly realistic. If he wasn’t Daredevil, then he was a highly trained liar, and either option was interesting enough to Stephen. He dismissed the light spell and said, “Okay, fine.”

Murdock shifted from foot to foot. He shoved his glasses back onto his face. “Fine?”

Stephen spread his arms out wide. “What can I do for you? I don’t imagine revealing your identity and punching me in the face—which hurt, by the way—was done purely out of a sense of humor or mischief.”

Murdock swallowed hard and went to rub at the back of his head. Interestingly, Stephen noticed his cape flutter toward him, as if it was interested in soothing Murdock. 

“I—um, I…” Murdock stuttered. He seemed suddenly more slumped. With all the tension drained out of his body, he was almost gaunt-looking instead of dangerous. Stephen was reminded of the old willow trees outside of his house growing up—how they swayed down to the earth, as if desperate to burrow underground.

Stephen raised his eyebrows and crossed his arms. Murdock drew himself up, and then took a deep breath.

“I want your help,” he said. “I—I need it. I need you to raise someone from the dead.”

***

Karen called Jessica to bring him home a month after Foggy’s funeral.

She was in the middle of packing for San Francisco, which is only partially why she probably hadn't come to get him herself. She was leaving New York to start a new life. When she told Matt her plans, he smiled and said that if she needed a reference, he would provide one.

Karen had said, “Matt, Jesus fuck, ” and stormed out of his apartment.

Later, he realized he’d had blood in his teeth, which may have explained her reaction a bit better. At the time, Matt only shrugged and continued to sew up his suit, which was still full of knife wounds from the night before.

He let himself patrol for five nights a week and he got drunk the other two. The days were filled with patching his suit, and exercising, and trying his very best not to think of anything. He’d never needed to work after Elektra. She was still considered legally dead and had given all of her money to Matt. Foggy had given some money too, but that was locked away in a CD. Matt would never touch that money. He would never.

He was aware, of course, that he was spiraling. He’d have to be a fool not to recognize that. He knew he’d been punching harder, sloppier. Every time he slept, it was either a nightmare about Foggy’s cooling body, his silent heart; or it was a dream where he killed Bullseye. He followed him down off the roof and plunged a knife into his heart.

It was a night when he’s at the bar. Not Josie’s, not ever again, but some other nameless, faceless dive. He was half a bottle of whiskey deep when Jessica slid into the seat right next to him. 

Matt downed the rest of his drink quickly and signaled for the bartender. Jessica just shook her head and said loudly, “Whiskey. Rocks. Whatever’s cheapest, and one of his, too.”

She jerked her head over at Matt. The bartender laughed and said, “Your boyfriend has the same taste as you,” and set two glasses down in front of them.

“Not in a million years,” Jessica muttered and took a swig of the whiskey. She turned to face Matt and flicked him in the forehead.

“Not in the mood, Jess,” Matt said into his glass.

“As if you ever are.” She kept looking at him. “Heard about Foggy.”

Matt snorted and took another drink. “Heard about Trish.”

Jessica took a deep breath, and then another. “Matt. I’m really sorry.”

Matt nodded, and turned to face her. “I’m sorry about Trish, too. That was—out of line.”

“Eh,” Jessica said, and wiggled her hand. “Your girlfriend thinks you’re unreachable, now.”

“So Karen sent you,” Matt said, and she shrugged.

“Maybe she thought we could talk it through. That I’d have some sage wisdom or whatever. But I actually think she wanted to make sure you had someone to talk to, because you’re sure as hell not talking to her.”

“Well, she’s leaving anyway, so. She’s not making it very easy to talk to her.”

“You’re an idiot,” Jessica said. She pronounced each syllable crisply. She set her glass down on the bar with a heavy thump. “You’re a fucking mess, and it’s not her responsibility to clean you up.”

“I’m not angry at her,” Matt said.

“That’s a fucking lie,” said Jessica. “It’s clear you’re angry at everything in the world right now. Do us both a favor and be honest about it at least.”

“Fine,” Matt snapped. He downed the rest of his whiskey and leaned into her space. Her breath smelled just as sick and alcoholic as his. 

“You want me to be honest? I dream about killing Ben Poindexter. I fantasize about—about gouging his eyes out and throwing him off every building in New York. If he ever leaves the hospital, or—or prison, then that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Every day when I wake up it fucking hurts because for a single second, I think I can hear Foggy’s—Foggy’s heartbeat, and it’s not him, and I carried his casket to an open grave with his father and his brother and his cousins and I’m never going to forget that weight, I feel it on me all the fucking time, Jess. I’m not—I’m not angry at Karen, because she can keep going and I don’t think I can, okay? He was the one person I wasn’t supposed to… He was the one thing, Jessica. He was supposed to…”

Matt gasped in another breath. The bartender set down another whiskey in front of Matt and muttered, “It’s on the house.” Matt could taste salt in the air and he knew it wasn’t from him. He couldn’t cry more than a tear or two at a time.

Jessica wiped her eyes hard with her sleeve and cleared her throat. “You really loved him.”

Matt shook his head. Sometimes it felt like love was too small, too insignificant a word for Foggy.

Jessica reached out and grasped Matt’s shoulder. It was surprisingly gentle for her. “Let’s get you home, okay?”

Matt nodded. He couldn’t find any words. In a way, he felt like he’d said everything he’d ever needed to. Why would he need speech beyond that?

Jessica had Matt take her elbow, and she guided him through the city streets. She took a circuitous route back to his apartment. She was avoiding Josie’s. 

Matt ducked his head against her shoulder at stoplights, and she let it happen. She was warm against his forehead.

***

Stephen said, “Many people die. Some of them are considered important or influential. It doesn’t give them—or their loved ones—any more reason to try and cheat death.”

Murdock shrugged. He sipped at his tea and grimaced.

They were in a room that could quantify as the ‘den’ of the Sanctorum, if indeed the Sanctorum could have a room that was den-like. Really, it was stuffed full of thick paned glass and stiff furniture that creaked under any sort of weight. Stephen had brought Murdock a cup of chamomile because he really seemed like he needed it. Murdock drank it as if it was killing him, but whatever.

Stephen said, “I understand you’re in pain, and I’m sorry.”

Murdock snorted at that. He pressed his palm against the hot porcelain of his mug and said, “You have no idea what I’m feeling.”

“I’ve heard that grief is an overpowering emotion—”

“It isn’t grief,” Murdock said, louder than Stephen. Stephen stopped, and Murdock observed him blankly with a bittersweet turn of his mouth.

“It’s desperation,” he said, more calm this time. He takes another sip of his tea. “It’s different. It’ll last forever until he’s back. So you need to bring him back.”

“That’s not how it works,” said Stephen, but more carefully this time. He remembered Wanda. He remembered the look in her eyes.

“Then you need to explain it,” said Murdock. “Because you’re one of the the highest authorities on magic that I'm aware of, and that means you’re the best shot I have. And if you refuse me, it’ll get uglier, and that’s not something I think you or I really want, is it?”

“I don’t respond well to threats,” said Stephen, and Murdock only nodded at Stephen’s steadily swelling cheek.

Stephen sighed and decided on the truth.

“Resurrection spells have never been pure,” he said. He twisted his own cup of Earl Grey around and around in his hands as he spoke. “On the contrary—they’re variegated for a good reason. No one knows what to expect, and nor should they. Even if the spells may have the best intentions when cast, they’re hardly manageable when it comes to the raw magic of it, when it comes to the effects. There have been few stories of loved ones returning from the dead, whole and safe. Normally, they come back wrong and the spell caster and the loved ones of that person are responsible for fixing a bigger issue than they began with.”

Murdock  had squinted his eyes and chewed at his lip when Stephen began speaking. By the end of his speech, Murdock looked paler. It seemed that he believed Stephen, which was good at least. His finger traced the rim of his teacup, and he said, “There has to be something. Please.”

His breath caught on the last word. He’d had a stilted way of speaking ever since he’d shown up on the doorstep. He was choking back a cry this entire time, Stephen thought. 

Stephen set his tea down on the bookshelf next to him. “I’m very sorry you lost someone,” he said. “It seems they meant a lot to you.”

Murdock shook his head. He squared his shoulders and pressed his lips together, and then sat up straighter in his seat. “I’ve researched,” he said. “I know—I know with magic like what I’m asking for, there’s always going to be danger. Your people are—bad with transcribing spells, especially for a blind person, and there’s only so much you can find on the Internet, but. If there’s an equal price to be paid, I’m willing to pay it. No one else. Just me. I just need you to bring him back.”

Stephen sighed again. A tear dripped down from underneath Murdock’s glasses, and Murdock didn’t bother to wipe it away. Instead, it traced its way to the edge of his jaw and clung there, as if afraid to fall any further.

“Mr. Murdock,” said Stephen. “I’m telling you that almost all of these spells—they demand too much for too little in return. Even if we were to go through with one—you may be sacrificing your own life for a vegetable, or a zombie, or worse. There’s a reason why the Scarlet Witch dreamwalked, why she never sought to bring her brother back to life. Despite everything, she knew the basic rules.”

Murdock shook his head, even as more tears fell. “You said almost. ”

“What?”

Murdock leaned forward. His hands were knuckled white around his teacup. “You said ‘almost all of these spells.’ So that means—that means there’s one. At least one. Please. Please.”

Stephen worked his jaw back and forth. He took another sip of tea. His cape fluttered around him again, trying to pull toward Murdock once more. His cheekbone was still throbbing from Murdock’s punch. Stephen got the sense that he had been holding back, but only barely. Like a car about to spin out, only one tire left on the real road.

If he were to—to explain to Murdock. Well, it would really only endanger himself. And the part of Stephen that was still a doctor rebelled against that—wanted to take this man to the emergency room, and then possibly to SHIELD, which had long considered offering a reward for Daredevil’s identity.

The other part of him thought about Christine. What it would feel like to lose her, even as her wedding made him feel like he’d already lost her. How could he pretend he’d be in any better shape than the man in front of him?

“If you don’t tell me, I’ll find someone who can,” Murdock said. It was said simply, without inflection. He meant it, that much was clear. Stephen bit down on the inside of his cheek, but nodded. 

Murdock seemed to pick up on the gesture. He settled back in his seat, hands still gripped around his teacup. Stephen would have to ask about his powers later. 

“It’s called the Eurydice gambit,” began Stephen slowly. “Almost no one ever uses the spell; almost no one knows about it. But. It could be a way through.”

***

Anna Nelson asks to meet with Matt five weeks after Karen leaves for San Francisco. 

Foggy had been dead for ten weeks at that point. This was a fact that Matt cannot seem to summit. As if facts were mountains, but this one was; it was an impossible climb. It constantly left him gasping for air. He kept searching out texts about Everest, thinking about the too-thin air and the fact that the snow had begun to slip away throughout the years. Climate change. 

Most people who die on Everest are left there to succumb to the natural elements. Sometimes they died in the night, and there are accounts of climbers waking up to their friends, cold and frozen beside them. Icicles forming on their eyebrows, their blood like sludge in their veins.

There’s no one to call him out for being maudlin or morbid. He wouldn’t listen to them if they did, anyway. Matt’s always been stubborn like that. 

When Anna Nelson reaches out, Matt’s heart thuds hard in his chest.

I want to check in, his screen reader said blankly. It’s been a hard couple months for all of us, I know. And you and Foggy loved each other so much.

He swallowed hard around a tight throat. He was hungover and unshaven in his apartment; he kept breathing deep, thinking about the coat that Brett gave Matt after the investigation into Foggy’s death had closed two days ago. 

Brett had had the peculiar, stringent scent of grief on him, same as everyone who knew Foggy. They smelled like the shift between a low and high tide. They smelled like cheap wet wipes and petroleum jelly.

Brett had given him the coat—the one Foggy had bought only a month prior, the one he was so proud to buy, joking with Matt and Karen that he was “finally getting some style, I have to keep up with you kids,” because that had been his latest bit—that he was so much older and wiser than both Matt and Karen, even though he was born only six months before Matt.

Brett pressed the coat into Matt’s arms when he came down to the police station to collect Foggy’s things. 

“I’m not supposed to,” said Brett softly, “but I had it dry-cleaned. Foggy was always saying how—how much stronger your senses were, and I wanted to make sure—I wanted. Um.”

Even with Brett’s effort, Matt could smell the faint scent of copper underneath the detergent and baking soda that the cleaners had used. Matt still pulled the coat from the garment bag and draped it over his arm, fingers brushing against the soft wool. He swore he could locate the phantom smell of Foggy underneath it all—his tea tree shampoo, the curling, hemp seed smell of his beard oil, the chalky scent of his deodorant. Foggy had stopped using cologne around Matt, had curbed his use of scented products in general. Matt had never told him how much that meant to him; how despite that, Matt still missed the strong, spicy scent of his old cologne.

“Thank you,” Matt had told Brett, and Brett uncharacteristically reached out, wrapped his hand around Matt’s elbow.

“Take care of yourself,” he’d said. Matt bit down on his tongue, and then said, “Can you—um, Foggy. He’s proud of this coat, but he never told me—he never told me the color. He forgot with me, sometimes.”

“It’s a nice coat,” said Brett gently, still holding onto Matt’s elbow. “A really nice camel color. Sorta matched his hair, that bastard.”

Matt nodded. He didn’t know what was showing on his face, but it must’ve been uniquely tragic, given how Brett stepped forward and pulled Matt into a hug without even asking. “Get some sleep,” Brett had said into Matt’s ear. “You look like you need it.”

Matt was pretty sure that that got passed along to Anna Nelson, somehow. And now, here he was—haphazardly cleaning himself up, taking a shower and trying to find clothes that weren’t dirty so he could go and meet her at an overpriced coffee shop in between his apartment and the Nelsons' hardware store.

He arrives at the coffee shop before Anna. From the smell of the coffee blends, this shop was overcharging by a fair margin for what they actually had to offer. But the only people who would really know that would either be asshole hipsters or super-sensitive assholes, so Matt sucked it up and bought a black coffee before sitting down at a table near the back of the shop. His fingers curled like claws around his mug, and he sat breathing in the steam of the coffee, listening to the tinny sound of “Silver Springs” playing through a nearby college student’s earbuds, until he heard Anna Nelson enter the shop.

She had that same, clinging smell of grief that Brett had. Of course, she did. Still, her voice was steady and sure as she ordered a latte and tipped the barista. Her head tilted to Matt’s table. He’d texted her already that he’d grabbed a seat, and he heard her suck in a deep breath as she looked at Matt.

Matt shifted, crossing and uncrossing his legs. He’d really tried—he’d showered, and cut back his half-formed beard to neat stubble, and he’d picked a dress shirt and jeans which smelled clean and were relatively wrinkle-free.

That didn’t stop Anna Nelson from clicking her tongue and saying under her breath, “Oh, sweetheart.”

She grabbed her latte from the counter and made her way over to Matt, who tried not to tense up even after she said, “Matt, darling. It’s me, it’s Anna.”

“Of course,” said Matt, and stood because the nuns had drilled manners into him above all else. Anna set her coffee down on the table with a clink of porcelain, threw her bag onto the empty seat, and all but tackled Matt into a tight hug.

“It’s good to see you,” she said. “I told you to keep in touch after—the funeral. Why haven’t you?”

Matt wets his lips with his tongue. He pulls back and takes his seat again. Anna settles herself into her own seat and takes a sip of her latte. Matt feels, more than senses, her eyes fixed on his.

He hadn’t reached out to Anna because it seemed unfair, to be honest. He knew his own grief basically had a gravity field. He was caught up in it, orbiting around and around the sick, empty space which Foggy’s heartbeat used to take up. He was handling everything so badly that Karen actually moved across the entire country just to avoid being part of Matt’s zone of destruction. His knuckles were always bruised, his ribs always fractured, and he was always thinking about drinking, about rooftops, about laying down on Foggy’s grave like it was a bed.

To Anna, Matt said, “Well. There hasn’t been much going on, for me.”

Anna nodded. She clicked her tongue again, and then said, “Well, what about your practice?”

Matt shut his eyes. He gulped down coffee and felt it scald the back of his throat. 

“I’ve—I haven’t taken any new clients,” he said. And he’d foisted all his active clients off on Marci, who took them without so much as a dig at Matt for his penchant for lost causes. One client emailed him to express how lovely Marci was for doing all of the work pro bono. Foggy would have crowed about Marci having a heart after all. 

“Matt,” said Anna. “You love law. You love it as much as Foggy.”

“I can’t focus,” Matt said, and Anna’s heartbeat picked up. Foggy would be so angry at Matt for how he’s worrying his mother. He drank more coffee and said, “I’ve got some money saved up. It’s better that I step away from practicing for the moment.”

He thought he sounded remarkably steady. Anna did not seem to agree, based on how her shoulders creaked with new tension. “So what have you been doing instead?”

Matt shrugged. He lay a hand flat on the table. “Boxing, mostly.”

Anna huffed out something close to a laugh. She put her hand on top of his. One of her fingers traced out a bruise formed around his first knuckle. 

“Foggy always talked about how you were a boxer,” she said. “I know he’d come watch you at the gym sometimes. He said you were strong. It was like he was trying to prove a point to his father and I. But we—we never loved you because we thought you needed help, Matt. We love you because of how you love Foggy. It’s obvious to anyone who ever saw the two of you together. You two adored each other.”

Matt’s tongue felt clumsy in his mouth. He drank another sip of coffee. He decided to say something—something smart, something kind, something that would stop Anna from worrying and would maybe ease her own grief.

Instead, what he said was: “I would’ve married him, I think. If he’d let me.”

Anna’s breath hitched. Her heartbeat kicked up another notch. But her hand stayed warm on top of Matt’s. She gave it a squeeze, and said, “I thought that you—that he and you were like that, sometimes. Foggy always said I was crazy.”

Matt smiled. It felt watery. “Maybe to him, you were. But I—I always would have taken him, any way that he would’ve let me.”

Anna gave his hand another squeeze. “Whoa, there, I don’t need to know about your sex life, Matthew,” she said. It was half of a joke. They both let it dissipate in the air, and then Anna said, “Sweetheart, you don’t look like you’re eating. And you don’t look like you’re sleeping, and someone is taking excellent care to make sure that Foggy always gets fresh daffodils, and I know it’s not anyone in my household because I have interrogated them at length about it.”

“It was a promise,” Matt said. His voice was hoarse, so he cleared it and traced a ring around his coffee cup with the hand unheld by Anna. “He used to—when I was being difficult on cases, or um. On other stuff. He’d joke that I’d be the death of him, and that if I was, then I’d better bring him fresh flowers. For as long as I live.”

And daffodils were his favorite. Foggy said he thought they were the most sunshiny flower, as if that explained anything at all. Matt hated the smell of them, hated how they made his nose twitch. He’d buy a bouquet every day for the rest of his life for Foggy, just as he promised.

Matt had been the death of him after all.

“You didn’t kill him, baby,” said Anna quietly. She removed her hand from his and instead went to cup his face, and Matt let her. She seemed to examine his eyes very closely, then shook her head. “I think you should see a counselor.”

Matt’s throat went dry. He coughed. “What?”

Anna nodded. “I’ve gotten the girls into it, and Theo,” she said, “and myself and Edward. It’s done us a world of good, and Matt. He wouldn’t want you falling apart like this.”

Except that maybe he would, Matt thought. After all, Matt still put on the suit and tried to kill Poindexter, and he kept putting it on to beat people into comas every night, and that’s exactly what Foggy didn’t want and if Matt had just listened to him in the first place about it all, then Foggy would still be alive, would still be here with Matt. Maybe Foggy would think that this is only what Matt deserved.

Except, no—that wasn’t true. Foggy was too good to think like that for long. He was too good in general. And now he was dead, and Matt was trying to scale his death like it was a mountain, except it wasn’t, was it. It was a slick cliff, it was a thick metal wall, it was barbed wire fencing a thousand feet tall. 

Matt would never get over this, he realized, and in the same heartbeat he knew what he had to do. He’d have to get him back.

There was simply no other way. There was no other way at all.

Matt made agreeable-sounding noises to Anna for the rest of their chat, until their coffees were drained and set in the dish tray near the doorway, until Anna ran out of reasons to linger. She eventually sighed and pressed a kiss to Matt’s cheek and said, “Don’t ever be a stranger. I still expect you at Christmas, baby.”

Which was very kind of her, Matt thought; it was also unnecessary. With his new resolve, he felt dizzy, giddy, like a leaking helium balloon somehow. 

As soon as Anna left, Matt opened his phone and researched the best way to get into contact with that strange sorcerer who’d taken up residence in some old mansion in Greenwich Village. 

***

The Eurydice gambit isn’t well documented. As in it’s hardly documented at all.

There was obviously the original Orpheus and Eurydice myth, for which the spell was named—or perhaps it was the first documented of the spell.

Still, the spell was written down in its entirety, with little addendums here and there of the success and failure rates. It had a solid fifty percent chance of working, it seemed. In the event that it didn’t work, it would only endanger the person who chose to be an active participant in the spell. That was the allure of it to those who wanted it cast. 

And the people who asked for the Eurydice gambit were all widows or widowers, by and large.

The Eurydice gambit was only written down in a single spellbook in the Sanctorum. “It’s not a well-known spell,” said Stephen. “Ritual spells went out of style ages ago. And there are rumors which say that this particular spell actually only makes itself available to those in desperate need of it.”

“But a spell doesn’t have a conscience,” said Murdock. Stephen wavered, and Murdock sighed. “I hate magic.”

“You can hate it once it’s done working for you,” said Stephen, and Murdock sighed again.

They’d relocated to one of the upper rooms. Usually Stephen would guide someone down to the basement for a ritual like this, but he had the oddest feeling that it would be bad karma to do it there—as if something horrible had happened the last time he’d cast a spell there. 

Stephen didn’t linger on the thought too much, and instead took Murdock to an old bedroom which had been converted to a study. 

Stephen produced the spellbook for the Eurydice gambit, and said, “You’re lucky I was reviewing spells just this past week. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have come to mind.” 

“So what do I need to do,” said Murdock. He’d removed his glasses and tucked them into his coat pocket. He was a lawyer, apparently, or so he’d said; in his wrecked state, in the wrinkled t-shirt and jeans he wore, Stephen had a hard time believing that.

Murdock took off his nice coat and gently hung it on a coat rack, and then threw himself onto the couch. He rubbed a palm over his face as Stephen said, “Well, despite the name, you won’t be delving into any underworlds for your love.”

Matt bit down on his lip. His eyes were so dark that it felt as though he was looking through Stephen—though in a way, Stephen supposed that he was. “I—I love him,” said Matt slowly. “I love him more than anything, in every way that matters. But he, um. He didn’t know. I never told him because I didn’t know either, until.”

Matt stopped himself, but Stephen understood well enough. He looked down at the spellbook again and re-read the introduction, and nodded. 

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Stephen said. “All the spell requires of you is, apparently, ‘unconditional love from the bereaved, and the impossibility of moving forward without their love.’”

Matt huffed. “I guess we’re set there.”

Stephen bit down on his tongue, and then said, “It’s really none of my business, but I do know a couple of therapists who would get their hands on a vigilante lawyer.”

“As if you care.”

Stephen shrugged. “I’m a doctor. I know what unhealthy attachment looks like, even if it’s exactly what you need for this spell.”

“It’s fine,” said Murdock, as if that was the response Stephen had been looking for. Some lawyer he was.

Stephen cleared his throat, and said, “So, as I said, you won’t be delving underworlds.”

The concept of the spell was an interesting one. Essentially, the idea was that, when someone loved another so desperately and with abandon, then that love could create a loophole to undo their death.

What Murdock would need to do is use the power of the spell to sift through his memories of his love (“Foggy, his name is Foggy,” said Murdock) and try to pull Foggy from the memory all the way through the present moment. 

“But he’d just be a memory,” Murdock pointed out. He was sitting forward, elbows balanced on his knees, fully focused on Stephen. If Stephen were a lesser man, he’d be unsettled from the deep attention directed his way. Murdock seemed to be the kind of man who could pull your soul from your ears or something.

Stephen shook his head. “There’s a reason why ‘true love’s kiss’ is said to be the most powerful cursebreaker in folklore. It’s a myth based on something fundamentally true—magic values love as a powerful force. Of course, it can hardly ever be weaponized or refined, which makes it a bit of an archaic subject in magical study.

“This spell relies on that power of love to, ah—well, for lack of a better term, to reform your, ah, Foggy as a living, breathing person in your reality. The magic of the spell simply guides the existing love to act as a pulling force. It’s got quite a lot to do with other dimensions and parallel lifepaths and whatnot, but yes. If you love him as you say you do, then if the spell goes well, he’ll be with us in this room almost as if he were always here.”

Murdock cocked his head like a dog during Stephen’s speech. At the end, he simply nodded and leaned back. “So when you cast the spell, all I’ll need to do is pick a memory with Foggy as a starting point?”

“Not quite,” said Stephen. He ran his fingers over the spellbook pages, and took a deep breath. “You’ll need to pick a moment when you were with him right before he died—same day will work. And then, from there, I believe it becomes a bit like the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.”

Murdock frowned. “How so.”

“Well,” said Stephen. “According to the spell, ahem, ‘the most powerful love is blind. It is that which is reciprocated no matter the burdens that may accompany it. The beloved whom is sought must accept the spell subject’s affections despite these burdens presented. And the hero must trust blindly that their beloved does indeed accept them even as they cannot know for certain.”

Murdock’s lip curled up. “Well. Luckily, I am blind,” he said.

Stephen rolled his eyes and gently shut the book, mindful of the fraying binding. “You’re a lawyer. Surely you understand metaphor.”

“It’s an awfully vague text,” said Murdock. “For all I know, it truly values blindness as a trait. Do you seriously think that Orpheus and Eurydice is a real story? Because I find that hard to believe.”

“I found it hard to believe in magic in my prior life as a brain surgeon,” said Stephen, perhaps a bit too pointedly, but still. It felt odd to be the subject of someone else’s skepticism.

“I guess it doesn’t matter at the end of the day.” Murdock stood and began to stretch out his shoulders. “Let’s get to it.”

“There is additional language in the spell,” said Stephen. “You should know, even if I doubt it’ll change your mind.”

Murdock waved his hand impatiently and Stephen sighed through his nose. 

“In the event the spell is unsuccessful, it needs an equal force to true love, so that it doesn’t become a vacuum,” said Stephen.

“Spells can become vacuums?”

“Wong tried to tell me early on in my studies that that’s how black holes formed throughout the galaxy,” said Stephen dryly. “At any rate, it’s important that it doesn’t happen, because it can be incredibly destructive when a spell over a certain magnitude goes wrong.” A shiver ran down Stephen’s spine, even though he didn’t quite know why.

“So you’re saying I’ll die,” said Murdock much too flippantly. He sounded as though he were discussing a children’s movie or what he’d had for breakfast.

“You could afford to care a little more,” said Stephen. “Your willingness to throw your life away over this is a bit disconcerting.”

“As if you weren’t about to commit suicide over losing your motor skills for surgery before you found magic,” Murdock shot back. Stephen raised an eyebrow and Murdock shrugged. “I did my research before I came by.”

“Charming,” said Stephen. “Well—if you’re convinced—”

“Of course I am,” said Murdock. He folded his arms around himself. “It’s what I came here for.”

Stephen inclined his head. “Then allow me to gather the materials.”

The spell was deceptively simple, and the materials required were the same way. Murdock waited patiently, head tilted back on the couch, as Stephen passed through the Sanctorum and picked up the things he needed.

Candles were a must, as was a certain kind of paint lined with silver and bronze. He also needed to create a smoke from basil, rose petals and sage mixed together, which made for an interesting smell that had Murdock sneezing from one floor up (and seriously, Stephen would have to ask about his powers at the end of all this). Finally, Stephen gathered up a red silk sheet and a handful of daffodils and returned to the study.

Murdock stiffened as soon as Stephen entered. “Are those… daffodils?”

“Yes,” said Stephen. He’d already cut the stems and settled them in a clear glass bowl, which he settled on the oriental rug in front of the couch. He moved the coffee table away with a flick of his wrist and spread the silk sheet on top of the rug. 

“Why daffodils?” Murdock asked cautiously.

“They symbolize rebirth and renewal,” said Stephen. “It’s part of the spell ritual—they need to be next to the head of the spell subject.”

Murdock just shook his head, looking faintly bemused. Stephen opted not to ask, and instead said, “This is perhaps awkward, so be thankful you’re blind. I need you to undress.”

Murdock didn’t even blink. He shucked off his shirt and jeans and threw them on the couch. His boxers shortly followed, and he tucked his socks inside of his sneakers and left them next to the side of the couch.

Stephen whistled at the amount of bruises and cuts that littered his torso and legs. Daredevil, indeed.

“Some of this paint might get into your wounds,” Stephen warned, and Murdock seemed singularly unphased.

“Do your worst,” he said, and lay down on the silk sheet, forehead tilted toward the daffodils.

Stephen painted the necessary sigils over Murdock’s body, trying not to flinch in sympathy when a rune line drifted over Murdock’s stitches and cuts. Murdock, for his part, didn’t move a muscle. He seemed to be breathing deeply into the scent of daffodils.

Once Stephen finished, he vanished the rest of the paint and set the smoking plate of herbs down in front of himself. He sucked in a deep breath. It would be a challenge for himself to cast and hold the spell, but Murdock didn’t need to know that. Stephen was confident that the spell would resolve itself one way or another long before Stephen’s own stamina ran out.

“What now?” said Murdock into the temporary lull.

Stephen cracked his knuckles and shook out his neck. “Now,” said Stephen, “I need you to describe him. In full, unfettered detail. You’ll need to keep speaking about him until you’re fully under the influence of the ritual magic.”

“Oh,” said Murdock. “Yes, okay. That, I can do.”

***

Foggy loved sunny days, but not the summer. He loved the spring days that would take your breath away—the ones that directly followed the freezing winter, the March and April days where it hurt only a bit to suck in a deep breath. He loved the look of trees, stripped bare from winter, budding again despite everything.

Foggy loved vanilla lattes with oat milk. He used to take them with whole milk, but he’d grown lactose intolerant over the years. “Maybe I’m getting old, buddy,” is what he would say, patting his stomach. He always  forgot to pick up Lactaid, and over the past two years, he seemed to really like the taste of oat milk anyway. It was always on his breath when he came in in the mornings, along with the faint, sweet scent of Honey Nut Cheerios. 

He was a diehard John Mayer fan for some reason or other. Matt never quite got clarity on that point, but Foggy would hum his songs from time to time when he was particularly stressed, or simply absent-minded. His favorite was “Edge of Desire,” and he always wanted to hear it when he was wine-drunk. Not beer-drunk, not liquor-drunk. Just wine-drunk. And he preferred red wine over white, and Pinot Noir was his favorite kind.

He loved pistachio ice cream. God knows why, but it was always his flavor of choice at any ice cream stand or truck. He would get it in a waffle cone and wait for it to melt just the right amount, because he said it was like ordering a milkshake but cheaper if you let it melt in the right way.

He was gentle. For all of his law school, for all of his hurts, he was gentle. He always had to reword briefs to sound more aggressive, less empathetic. He ironed suits and put on a hard face, but clients inevitably fell for him, felt safe and soft around him. He still received gift baskets from some of their oldest clients, and every time he would split up the pineapple or melon or whatever into chunks so that Karen and Matt could have a taste.

And beyond that, he was smart as a whip. This is maybe the part that Matt was stuck the most on. He was so much for so many other reasons, but beyond it all—he was smarter than Matt. He knew more than Matt. Matt was taught by Stick to recognize enemies by their intelligence above all else, and he had a distinct realization in law school that if he went up against Foggy, argument-to-argument, then he’d lose. He could solve the problem with fists, maybe, or with leverage—but he would never match Foggy in the courtroom. In another life, Foggy was already the District Attorney. In another life, Foggy had already left Matt behind altogether.

But Foggy would never do that. Foggy was too loyal for anything like that. He was selfish, sometimes, and in it for the money, and headstrong and frustrated constantly with Matt, and sometimes Matt thought that Foggy could never understand him, coming from such a big family, with full access to love at all times. 

Matt, in his worst moments, thought of Foggy as shallow, almost insipid at times. And sometimes he was—Matt really didn’t care about vacation packages or name-brand furniture, no matter how much Foggy claimed that he had to—but in his worst nights, and always on the day his father had passed away, Foggy was there, offering his elbow and guiding Matt through Hell’s Kitchen, joking with a street vendor and buying Matt terrible coffee and wondering aloud about case precedent, and whether Karen would stop talking about Vanderpump Rules anytime soon.

Matt was territorial. He knew this about himself. But he’d never thought he’d laid claim to Foggy until the day he died. The night his heart stopped beating, and for a single second how Matt thought, but it can’t, it’s mine. As if Matt owned the unique rhythm of Foggy’s heartbeat. But oh, he wanted to.

He wanted everything to do with Foggy, and most of all, he wanted him back.

Chapter Text

Foggy is having a perfectly normal day, thank-you-very-much. Maybe an above average day—even with Benny squatting in his apartment and probably making a mess of his bathroom. After all, Karen had bought coffee for the office, Matt had made a breakthrough with one of their joint clients’ depositions, and the wind was blowing softly, rustling the trees outside of Foggy’s window and adding a perfect kind of chill in the air. 

They were officially on the crisp side of February, and Karen had just stepped out to meet with a client in Soho, and Foggy was already thinking of conning Matt into a walk around the park on their lunch break when Matt sort of just— burst into Foggy’s office.

“Whoa there, cowboy,” said Foggy and Matt blinked. He pulled his glasses from his face and stared, sightless and cow-eyed, at Foggy before rounding Foggy’s desk and grabbing onto Foggy’s forearms with a bruising grip. He shoved his head into Foggy’s chest. His knees hit the floor.

Weird. So fucking weird. Maybe the weirdest thing Matt’s done all week, and only yesterday he’d told Foggy that he should probably check in with a doctor about gluten intolerance based on the smell of his farts. 

“Hey,” Foggy said, because he was getting the feeling that Matt needed to—do whatever this is. “Uh. Care to clue me in?”

“Foggy,” said Matt, like he was reciting a prayer, and that’s when Foggy started to feel cold.

“It’s not—it’s not the Blip again, is it, or like—anything like that?” he asked. His voice sounded high to his own ears, and he tried to swallow down the intense panic pushing at his lungs. Matt had heard the Blip coming before it took them, and he’d sounded the same as he did now—terrified, clingy, and determined to hold Foggy’s hand as they both turned to dust. Be still, Foggy’s beating heart, in-fucking-deed.

“No,” said Matt, almost fiercely. He let go of Foggy’s forearms only to pull him into the tightest hug that Foggy has ever possibly received. His hands came up to stroke Matt’s back. “No.”

Foggy said into Matt’s clavicle, “Did you fall asleep and have a nightmare or something, buddy? I keep telling you to get a healthy sleep pattern going if you’re not Daredeviling around.”

He knows that Matt can feel his heart speed up as he mentions Daredevil, but Matt didn’t even seem to care this time. Matt made a keening noise (seriously, what the fuck), and pulled away from Foggy. There were legitimate tears in his eyes. Foggy reached up to cup his face on instinct, and Matt just leaned into the touch.

“Matty, tell me what’s going on,” Foggy said gently, and somehow, that’s what kicks Matt back into action. He sucks in a deep breath and nods firmly.

“I’m not able to say exactly why,” he said. “And it’s going to be strange, but Fogs—it’s, it’s the most important thing I’ll ever, ever ask you to do.”

Foggy swallowed hard. His hand dropped from Matt’s cheek, but Matt just grabbed onto it and held it so tightly that it felt like his knuckles were getting crushed together. “What is it, Matt.”

Of course, the answer was yes. But it’s not like Foggy wanted Matt to know exactly how much sway he had over Foggy just yet. He’s been working up to that. For years, but he’s been working up to it.

“I need you to follow me,” he said softly. He bent down and pressed a feather-light kiss to Foggy’s index finger. “I need you to keep following me until all of this is over.”

“All of what, Matty,” said Foggy, and his voice was breaking a little now, but fucking—whatever. 

“I can’t tell you,” Matt said, and sounded genuinely so contrite that Foggy finally stood up and scooped him up in another hug.

“Fine,” said Foggy. “Fine, whatever. Whatever you need.”

Matt’s eyelashes fluttered against the open collar of  Foggy’s shirt. He pressed another kiss into Foggy’s shoulder. Foggy was starting to feel cold again even before Matt said, “Once we leave your office, I—I won’t be able to sense you anymore. I won’t know you’re there, okay? But just—keep following me. No matter what. Please. Please.”

“Matty,” Foggy said slowly. It was improbable, maybe impossible—except it maybe wasn’t, considering the rest of their lives. “Matty, what—”

“Just follow me,” Matt whispered, and Foggy shut his eyes and then turned to vomit into his trash can.

“Fuck,” said Matt, which was perhaps more evidence of the horrendous situation, because Matt almost never cursed, at least while he was busy being an upstanding citizen.

“I’m okay,” Foggy said. “I am. I’m okay.”

“I didn’t think you were feeling sick today,” Matt said softly. His hand stroked up and down Foggy’s back. “You didn’t tell me.”

“I wasn’t until just now,” Foggy said. “It’s fine. It’s fine, I—you can’t tell me anything, can you?”

Matt didn’t even shake his head. He just pressed his lips together and looked vaguely terrified.

“Fine,” said Foggy. “Do you have a mint, at least? Or, wait—I think I have one in my desk, hold on.”

He pulled out the top drawer, and sure enough, there was the candy-striped peppermint that had come with his Indian takeout a few days ago. He looked around the office. It was very believable that it was indeed his office.

He popped the mint into his mouth and said softly, so softly that only Matt could hear: “You’ll remember I was a Classics minor in undergrad.”

Matt turned paler than a sheet of paper. Foggy stood up to face Matt again and said, “Let me,” and Matt was nodding even before Foggy kissed him.

“Just in case,” he said quietly. “And for good luck, and you’ll see me soon, Matty.”

Matt swayed closer to Foggy and his forehead landed on Foggy’s shoulder. 

“I’ll see you soon,” he said, almost to himself. Foggy reached down and squeezed Matt’s hand.

“We should probably talk when all this is done,” he said. “But for now—lead the way, Matty.”

***

Foggy’s heartbeat thundered in Matt’s ears. The way it vanished as soon as he left the office made him want to sob.

Except Foggy was still with him, Foggy was behind him, Foggy had tucked his hand into Matt’s and said that he’d keep holding it as Matt walked. 

And there was the taste of stomach acid and peppermint on Matt’s lips. The evidence that this could work, that it would work. 

Matt stepped out of their old office building and almost stumbled down the steps.

The city was completely silent around him, in a way it never had been. His own breathing and footsteps meant that he could sense around a five-foot radius around him despite the lack of life around him. But the absence of sounds and smells was disturbing to Matt, who had only ever lived in a busy and lively New York City. There seemed to be no one else in all of Manhattan, never mind Hell’s Kitchen.

Matt squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath. He reached out the hand that wasn’t (presumably) holding Foggy’s and skimmed it along the brick of their office building. 

Even though he hadn’t received instructions, per se, on where he was meant to go, it was almost as if there was a hand pushed between his shoulder blades, pushing him forward. Past a crosswalk, through the block where Foggy’s favorite coffee shop sat shuttered and still in the heat of the day. Past another crosswalk. Matt needed to get to the opposite side of the street. To the sewer-smell of the street that Josie’s sat on. 

Josie’s. Of course it was. Of course it was.

***

There was a body on the street in front of Josie’s.

Foggy recognized it like he might recognize his reflection in a darkened window. The moment of disconnect, the sudden splash of recognition, and then the examination of what’s warped, what’s wrong. How his torso may pass through the seam of a window or how his shadow may cast him taller in the imperfect glass.

That was him. Laying on the ground as if he was sleeping, wearing his coat—Foggy had forgotten to grab it from the not-office, he realized, he was only in his shirtsleeves—and there was blood. Thick, black blood oozing from his chest, and he wasn’t breathing, eyes filmy and mouth slack. Foggy stumbled back even as Matt staggered forward, Foggy’s fingers passing through Matt’s handlike—well, like fog.

Matt was clearly affected by the silence of whatever liminal version of New York was. He’d been slower through the streets, fumbling for walls and fences as guideposts, looking more blind than Foggy had ever seen before. Even still, he already knew what the body was—who the body was.

“Foggy,” Matt said. He knelt beside the body, his fingers dancing over its clothes, its wrists. “Foggy, I—I didn’t want you to see, I’m sorry.”

He turned in the wrong direction from where Foggy was standing. Foggy swallowed and moved to face him. It seemed only polite. 

“I—I fucking. I fucking died outside of Josie’s?”  he said, and felt something push up through him. He sighed and a giggle came out. He leaned against the nearest wall for support. “No wonder you came back to get me, Matty, I—what the fuck. ”

Matt reached for the face of the body. He used his thumb and forefinger to gently pull down the eyelids. Now it looked as if it—as if he, as if this Foggy was really and truly sleeping. Aside from all of the blood, of course.

Matt placed a hand on the body’s chest as a shadow crossed over him. 

Foggy blinked, and pushed himself off the wall, closer to Matt. The sun was so bright that Foggy had to cup his eyes to look upward, and even then, he could really only see the negative space of the thing casting the shadow. It looked like a man, standing on the rooftop above Josie’s. He was featureless, haloed by bright white sunlight. Even still, Foggy got the distinct impression that the man was smiling. Foggy tried not to shudder.

Matt stiffened beside him. He finished what he was doing—draping Foggy’s coat over his body like a shroud and muttering a few hurried prayers, it seemed—and then turned and walked up to Josie’s. Instead of facing the door to Josie’s, he wrenched open the door which led to the apartments that sat above the bar. 

As he passed over the threshold, his form seemed to flicker and reshape itself. His sports coat slipped away entirely, revealing a skinny, vertebrae-ridden back lined with strange paint. Then, he seemed to flicker again, and he was in his suit, dark-red and armored and he looked like a soldier now, even from the back. 

Matt thrust open the next door that separated the small foyer from the apartment stairwell. He was breathing heavily in and out through his nose like a bull. Foggy stayed behind him. He didn’t want to see the expression on Matt’s face. 

After a moment, Matt’s gloved hand extended out, and then back. An invitation.

Even though Matt had no way of knowing, Foggy slipped his hand into Matt’s, and they began to climb the stairwell.

***

The last time Matt was in this stairwell, he’d been so desperate, so wrong-footed and furious that it felt more like a nightmare, like every hallway and each staircase was infinite, and Matt would always be drawing Bullseye’s blood, chasing him all the way up to an unreachable end. It felt like he was in the stairwell forever, like he’d fought Bullseye for an entire century while Foggy gasped for breath below them.

Now, Matt walked slowly, his own breath measured and careful. He kept his hand behind him in case Foggy was still there, still wanting to touch him. There was a good chance he was gone already, Matt knew. But he had to keep going anyway.

It wasn’t a tall building. Only six stories. Matt was facing the rooftop access door sooner than he’d expected. He closed his eyes and readied himself. Strange had said that these—trials, for lack of a better word—that they wouldn’t conclude until Matt gave in.

You have to be yourself, your basest desires, he’d said, right before Matt had slipped away into the trance-induced sleep. His face hovering above Matt, his stupid goatee sounding crackly in the smoky room. They will not conclude until you’ve shown an aspect of yourself they demand.

Matt really fucking hated magic.

Still, as he kicked open the rooftop access door, his blood was already sitting forward. He already knew what he was going to do.

Poindexter beamed at him from the very edge of the rooftop. He sat on the raised edge of it, twirling a gun around by the trigger guard. The same gun that killed Foggy.

Poindexter said, “Took you long enough, I’ve been looking for a rematch. And I’d love nothing more than to— oh, GOD —”

Matt walked right up to Poindexter, dodged a swipe at his legs, and stuck his thumb and forefinger into where he knew Poindexter’s eyes would be.

He screamed as Matt dug his nails in. Hot blood and the jelly of his eyes slipped around Matt’s hand, and he pinched his fingers together. Poindexter screamed again. It sounded dull, far away even to Matt’s ears.

Poindexter dropped the gun. Matt released him, wiping the gore on his suit as Poindexter clutched at his face, and Matt picked up the gun and threw it off the rooftop, down to where Foggy lay. Then Matt turned and braced Poindexter against the side of the roof. Both of their hips were cocked against the edge. The air tasted like salt. Maybe Poindexter was crying from his ruined eyes.

Poindexter was still gasping in pain, and he stuttered as he said, “Y-you’re j-just gonna do th-this, know-knowing he might b-be watching? Tha-that he doesn’t want this?”

Matt said, “I have no idea what he would want. You fucking took that away from me. I’m getting it back.”

Poindexter sounded like he was smiling, even as blood continued to pour out of his eye sockets. “So you’re saying you don’t enjoy this at all?”

His voice was different. Darker, more echoing. Steadier, too.

Matt said, “I honestly don’t know.” 

He threw him off the roof again. 

Matt waited a few moments to listen as his body hit the concrete below. It sounded like Poindexter’s neck snapped. Thank god. 

Matt took a deep breath, and turned back to face the rest of the empty rooftop.

“Foggy,” he said. “I’m—”

But there was nothing to say, was there?

Matt shut his eyes and then tipped himself off the roof, too.

***

Foggy was glad that he didn’t have to worry about having a real body. Otherwise, following Matt off the rooftop would have been a lot worse.

That didn’t stop Foggy from cursing Matt out as he tipped over the rooftop. “You fucking dramatic asshole, ” he said, which felt a lot more in his register than dealing with the whole—the whole—

Well, the way that Matt absolutely brutalized Poindexter. 

Foggy knew that Matt was violent. Of course he did, he’s not stupid, he’s literally seen Matt in action before. But that—that wasn’t Daredevil, or the Devil, or whatever Matt liked to call that aspect of his personality. 

Matt had been crying during all of it. Foggy didn’t know if Matt fully knew that.

Foggy had been standing right next to Matt as he threw himself off the roof, so Foggy followed him, squeezing his eyes shut even as he knew that the pain wouldn’t really register—

Foggy landed on a cot in a stony basement instead.

It was uncomfortable—the sheets were papery and the mattress was too firm, and the bedframe groaned as he slowly sat himself up.

It was a small room without windows. It looked as if it were taken out of some tragic adaptation of Oliver Twist. Matt was on a cot next to Foggy. His clothes were flickering again—his torso was pale and thin and painted, and then he was wearing thick gauze bandages and a pair of sweatpants. His face suddenly looked a bit younger, more solemn.

“This is after you pretended you were dead for months, isn’t it,” Foggy said to him as he propped himself up on his elbows. “I’m still really mad at you for that.”

Matt sucked in a deep breath and said, “We’re underneath Saint Agnes Orphanage. The infirmary. I’ve been told it’s a little Draconian, and I guess you’ll have to tell me about it later, Fogs.”

He was faced in the completely wrong direction, away from Foggy. Foggy sighed and threw his legs over the side of his bed and stood up. 

“It is very Draconian,” said Foggy, moving around Matt’s bed to look at him. “So. Who’d you try to kill here? If that’s the pattern, I mean. I’m guessing it’s something like, ‘oh, the man you love is violent! Are you sure you don’t want to stay dead?’”

He sat down next to Matt on the bed and tried to nudge his shoulder. It was strange. He felt solid to Foggy, and Foggy also felt solid to himself. But as Foggy pushed at Matt’s shoulder, he felt his own shoulder become misty, passing through Matt’s body harmlessly until Foggy moved away again.

“Magic is weird,” Foggy said. “And, um. For the record, for whoever’s listening—I obviously know Matt’s violent and fucked-up. He’s basically rabid. It’s fine. I’m fine with it, so—ending this whole thing right now and letting me come back to life or whatever might be a better use of both of our time and resources.”

He waited a few, hopeful moments.

Matt tensed up beside him, and Foggy was sighing even before Elektra entered the room.

***

She was the wrong Elektra.

She was the one without a heartbeat—Matt could only hear her sharp breaths and the way her blood slept in her body. But it was his Elektra in every other way—her crisp ozone smell, the nimble way she carried herself as she entered the infirmary. She was wearing the same outfit she’d worn at Midland. Matt could hear the leather creaking as she walked, and he could smell the copper on the blades at her hip.

She stopped just shy of his bed and shook her head. “Matthew,” she said. “I’m angry with you.”

Matt swallowed hard. It was just a projection. It wasn’t her, it was just a projection.

She stepped forward and sat down next to him on the bed. She faced forward, not toward him, as she said, “I thought, at the very least, you were done trying to kill yourself for the people you’re in love with.”

“You’re just mad that I love him,” Matt said hoarsely. He flexed his fingers and wished that he could still feel Poindexter’s blood dripping from his nails.

“Well, yes,” she said. She shifted—she was drawing the blades as one and holding it in her lap. “But I’d also like you to live, believe it or not.”

Matt swallowed. “Part of you does. But the other part…”

“The same could be said for you,” she hissed, and flicked the blade up so it was a sharp line against both his and her own throat.

“You once begged for something like this,” she said darkly. “In the streets, on your knees like the alleyway was an altar. You were honest when you said you’d like to die. Does it hold true? Do you want to kill yourself still? We could do it together, Matthew. If you so wished.”

Matt closed his eyes. He leaned into the blade, felt it bite against his throat. The delicious hurt of it, the overwhelming pain that drowned everything around him out. You have to be yourself, he thought. You had to give into your basest desires.

If he didn’t answer her, then the entire spell would be over, and Foggy wouldn’t be with him, and that wouldn’t be acceptable.

He turned to face Elektra. “I want to die if Foggy isn’t with me, if he isn’t alive. If I can’t succeed here, then I do want to die. I don’t care that the spell will take me. I know that’s what I’ll want. And I know that’s a lot for him to know, to hear. But it’s the truth.”

Elektra didn’t move the blade for a moment. Then, she stood and slid it back into the holster at her waist.

She tilted her head toward the doorway. “You can walk to your apartment from here pretty easily. That’s where you’ll find your next trial.” She waited a beat, and then said: “And only because I’ve taken the form of someone who loves you, I do feel compelled to say: be safe, Matthew.”

She stepped forward and pressed a kiss to Matt’s lips. It was gentle and quick. Matt reminded himself that this wasn’t Elektra, not really.

Even so, he had to pull her in for a hug. “I really love you too, you know,” he said.

“I know,” said Elektra. She didn’t return the hug, but she also didn’t move away from it. Her body was warm against Matt’s. “Perhaps I should start a friendship with Franklin after all of this is over. We are two people who invoke the desperate love of Matthew Murdock, after all.”

Matt laughed. It sounded a bit wet, but when he wiped at his eyes, they were as dry as they ever were. “He’d hate that,” he told Elektra, and she finally stepped out of the hug. Her hands clasped at each other behind her back.

“That’s part of the fun,” she said. “I’m winking at you, by the way.”

She tilted her head at the door. Elektra was never one to say something twice.

Matt made himself walk forward, past her to the corridor.

When he turned around to feel for her one last time—just at the threshold of the doorway—she was already gone.

***

Foggy watched Matt stay tense and hunched in on himself as they left St. Agnes’s Orphanage.

It was a ridiculous situation, if Foggy really broke it down: Matt, on his quest to resurrect Foggy, was faced with a—spirit, or whatever, that had taken the form of one of the only people Matt’s ever truly loved, and now he, what? Felt awkward about it? About kissing her in front of an invisible, intangible Foggy?

Matt was making that strange face he always made, where his eyes were absurdly wide and twinkly even while he looked like he was sucking on a lemon. Yeah. He felt guilty, all right.

“You’re so fucking ridiculous,” said Foggy as they exited the empty halls of St. Agnes and entered the street. “You’re the most—ludicrous person I’ve ever met in my life, and because of you, I’ve met a hell of a lot of ludicrous people.”

Matt’s clothes flickered again as they walked toward a street corner. This time, Foggy caught a hollowed-out cheek and heavy bags underneath one of Matt’s eyes before he was dressed in a plain, regular suit and his red sunglasses. He could’ve worn this exact outfit ten years ago, or yesterday. Foggy wondered if Matt ever noticed the costume changes—he seemed unaffected, but then again, he’d been incredibly focused on the trials thus far.

Foggy didn’t like what he saw in the transition between Matt’s clothes. It reminded him of what Elektra said, what she’d made Matt admit, and Foggy had personally been trying to focus on anything other than those things since the very moment they were said. Matt and Foggy had bigger fish to fry.

But—but was it true that this spell could kill Matt? That it would take him if Foggy didn’t walk with him?

“But you had to know that I’d follow you, buddy,” Foggy said as they rounded a street corner. “That even if I didn’t figure it out, and even if I thought you were having a complete fucking mental break—you must’ve known that I’d come with you, right? This isn’t some kind of—fucked-up, self-torturous suicide attempt, right?”

Matt, of course, didn’t say a word. At the end of the next block, he turned onto Tenth Avenue. They were pretty close to Matt’s place. 

Matt was still trailing his fingers along buildings, fences, trees. This wasn’t a very accessible spell, Foggy decided. He wished he could guide Matt the rest of the way.

“If you trip and fall and break open your chin, does it reflect on your physical body?” Foggy wondered aloud. Ahead of them, the stoplights flicked through their colors at random. Yellow, then green, then green again, then red striped with yellow. “I mean, we must be in another dimension or something, right?”

Foggy remembered listening to a 60 Minutes interview with that wizard guy who lived in Greenwich Village. He was apparently the designated Avengers PR rep after the Blip, which was a strange choice, even if you didn’t consider his on-the-nose last name. He was pretentious, to say the least. But it was interesting to listen to someone talk about magic as a concrete fact, and to listen to someone other than his grandmother talk about it, too.

His grandmother had sworn up and down that magic had run in the family. Every time Foggy saw her, even to this day, she would pull Tarot for him and send him home with poultices and strange glass jewelry. She read horoscopes every morning and held candle-lit vigils on full moons with her hippie friends. Foggy used to roll his eyes at her—after all, she'd been born in the Bronx and had run a butchery with her husband, for god's sake. That was hardly a magical life.

Foggy had been sort of flabbergasted to realize that magic was real, that there was real study and practice behind it. It had honestly been more shocking than the fucking alien invasion in 2012.

“I’ve told you about my granny, right? She’s so weird. It’s hard to believe that she was onto something with the whole magic thing,” Foggy said to Matt. 

Matt, somehow, was still wearing that same lemon-sucking, puppy-eyed face. “You’re so stupid. I’m not mad.” Then, after a pause: “Okay, I’m a little mad, but I’ll get over it. I always do. And most of the anger is about dying because of Ben Poindexter, anyway, and you kind of fixed that… really viciously, already. So.”

They passed by a church—not Matt’s. It was Presbyterian, made of heavy, tall stone and windows so old that they were thicker at the bottom than at the top. Matt’s trailing fingers clipped a crucifix carved into one of the stones next to the church steps. He flinched, almost in reflex, and Foggy sighed again.

“When’s the last time you went to church, then,” Foggy said, and then said, “You know what, I don’t want to know. Once we’re done here, I’ll go to Mass with you and you’ll do three Hail Marys or whatever the fuck you need to do, and then you can stop this whole martyr charade and we can make out on your couch or something.”

And that was wild to think about, too—Matt being just as in love with Foggy as Foggy was with him. Foggy’s love had changed throughout the years, of course. There were a few years there where Foggy was pretty sure he was going to marry Marci, and he was pretty happy about it. She wasn’t a consolation prize to Matt or anything, either; at that point, Foggy’s love for Matt had turned just into the comfort of an old friend. Foggy had always known that Matt would be one of the most important parts of his life, but in those years, that was all it was.

But then Marci got a good job offer, one that would have her living more internationally than in New York, and they’d both known it wouldn’t work out. Foggy had shown her the engagement ring he’d been thinking about buying, and they’d gotten really drunk and had some really great sex the night before she was set to fly out to England. And that had been that.

And then Matt had started hanging around more, had said that he was thinking of quitting Daredevil altogether. He’d asked to grab drinks, to grab dinner, he’d suggested walks in the park or by the river at during their lunch breaks, and seriously. It wasn’t Foggy’s fault that his crush had come back quickly and with so much intensity.

But Matt had seemed the same as he always was—he wasn’t any more tactile than usual, wasn’t sweeter to Foggy than he usually was. Until this morning, but. 

The problem is that this Matt was a Matt who had lived an indeterminate amount of time without Foggy. This was a Matt who believed that Foggy’s death was his fault. And a Matt with insane amounts of guilt was a Matt who would do anything to fix his mistake. Who may even convince himself that he’s in love, just to make an archaic spell work.

Foggy bit down on his lip as Matt rounded the final corner to his apartment building. The world, this time, seemed to flicker—the sidewalk briefly gave way to a cold, white mist, and the sky opened up in the same way. Foggy stumbled and grabbed onto a tree for support. Matt didn’t seem to notice the glitch, same as he hadn’t noticed his clothes changing.

Foggy swallowed hard. Matt kept walking, so Foggy jogged to catch up with him. Even though he couldn’t touch Matt, he found himself reaching for Matt’s shoulder anyway, feeling disappointed when his hand passed through Matt’s skin.

“It’s okay, you know,” he told Matt. “I love you no matter what. Even if you’re not actually in love with me. It’s obvious that you still love me enough to come all the way here, and that means something. I believe in you. I believe you’ll get me out of here.”

Even though the ground didn’t feel any different, Foggy liked to imagine it was more stable under his feet anyway.

They entered the lobby of Matt’s place and wound their way up through the stairwell. Matt was breathing deeply. Foggy wondered who he was anticipating in his apartment—which person the spirit would choose to resemble next. 

Matt seemed to have an idea, at least based on how tense he seemed to be. Right outside the door to his apartment, he stopped just shy of the door handle. 

“I love you,” Matt said quietly. “I know that you don’t like Elektra, that you’ve never liked her—but it’s over. Between us. You’re an inescapable part of my life, Foggy. I just. I can’t live without you, and I hope you—that you at least know that, as we keep going. I don’t care if you never talk to me again once this is over, I just need to know that your heart is beating.”

Foggy’s tongue felt thick in his throat. Matt always seemed to hit on both the exact right and wrong thing to say, and he always seemed to knot them up in his apologies to Foggy.

“We seriously need to get you a therapist,” Foggy said eventually, and Matt threw open the door to his apartment, shoulders squared as if he were a soldier going to war.

***

It was Stick in the apartment, because of course it was. 

From what Matt could tell, it was a similar scene to when Stick had last arrived at Matt’s place—coffee table smashed, kitchen counters a mess, and Stick smelling of Marlboro Reds in the middle of the destruction. The old man sure had a liking for cigarettes, for all of his preaching about training a body into a weapon.

“Matty,” said Stick. He sounded like he was grinning. “Long time, no see, kid.”

“You’ve never seen me,” said Matt, because he could play this game, at least. Stick threw his head back and barked out a laugh.

“That’s fair enough, kid,” said Stick. He cracked his neck, and then his knuckles. “Well, then. Are we going to get down to business, or just stand here sticking our thumbs up our asses?”

Matt tilted his head. “I’m not sure what our business is , Stick.”

Stick waved a hand in the air. “You’re saving your Pillsbury Doughboy, and being all disgustingly martyred about it, and he’s following you all starry-eyed and lovelorn. I’m here to disabuse him of that notion, is all.”

“Disabuse him? What—?”

And then Stick threw his cane at Matt, and Matt ducked on instinct and immediately had to dodge a leg sweep. He sighed loudly through his nose.

“Not interested in fighting?” Stick sneered. “Well, tough shit.”

And then he aimed a jab directly at Matt’s head.

***

Matt’s clothes had changed again—he had way too many stitches, Foggy decided, before Matt was redressed in his old black getup. The athletic shirt, the combat pants, the heavy boots with thick tread. He changed just in time for the action to begin.

Foggy had never met Stick before he’d died, and now he was sad that he hadn’t, because the man fucking sucked and deserved to be hit with the child abuse charges that Foggy had fantasized about levying against him. 

He was arrogant, and cruel, and so fucking violent. It was clear that every attack aimed at Matt was intended to do the fullest amount of damage possible. Matt, on the other hand, was definitely pulling his punches. Matt could break a man’s rib cage in half over his knee if he was caught on a bad night, and instead he was dodging more than punching, and every jab at Stick seemed almost gentle in comparison to Stick. He wasn’t fighting to win.

Foggy didn’t even know if Matt knew what he was doing. From the scraps of information that Matt had given him (and god, it was so bare bones), Matt wasn’t overly fond of Stick and seemed to realize that he was a bit of an asshole. But at the same time, he always talked about how Stick helped him with his senses, how he pulled him out of a sensory hellscape. He always said it right at the end of any Stick-related rant, as if that was redemptive enough to cancel out his very literal attempt to turn Matt into a child soldier.

Stick punched Matt so hard that Matt hit the floor. He laughed without mirth and placed his boot on top of Matt’s chest to keep him down. Matt gasped for breath as Stick turned to face Foggy.

“You’re always going to be this way,” said Stick. “You’re always going to be fighting. It’s in your blood. It’s the first thing you ever learned. You only know how to fight. You only know violence, Matty.”

Foggy frowned. Stick’s eyes were disconcerting, and it wasn’t because he was blind. They just seemed—pitted. Like Stick had never felt any emotion and never felt the need to.

Matt struggled underneath Stick’s boot, and he ground down.

“Jesus, stop,” said Foggy, and Stick said, “Oh, fine.”

And he lifted his boot from Matt’s chest.

Matt scrambled to his feet immediately. Foggy swallowed hard and circled Stick. “You can hear me,” Foggy said.

Stick threw another punch at Matt, who dodged. He was breathing heavily now. He launched himself over the couch and Stick said, “Does it bother you, Matty? That you don’t even know if your pet lawyer is here? It must make you feel blind. I taught you better than that, and you’re wasting it! ”

“Fuck off, Stick,” said Matt, as Foggy said, “You can hear me, can’t you. But you can’t respond to me because then Matt would know I’m still here, which is—apparently against the rules?”

“Fucking keep up, ” Stick snapped. He picked up a vase and hurled it at Matt’s head. Jesus Christ, why did Matt even have a vase, it’s not like he likes or even sees flowers.

“Fine, what do you need from me?!” Foggy could hear the desperation in his voice as he lunged in between Matt and Stick. “Just—stop trying to hurt him!”

Stick narrowed his eyes. Matt took a flying kick at Stick instead, and Stick rolled with the momentum of it before popping up again. He stood casually and shoved his hands in his pockets. He was infuriating.

“What do you want, ” Matt demanded. He stood in an attack pose—crouched, hands in front of him. He looked so ridiculous. Foggy hated that he wanted to kiss him a little bit.

Stick tilted his head again. Toward Foggy, where Foggy was standing.

He said, “I want you to admit that violence is in your blood. That you’re a fighter, and not a hell of a lot more than that.”

“Whatever, Stick,” said Matt, as Foggy said, “That’s not true.”

Stick raised his eyebrows.

“You taught me to be violent,” said Matt, like he was reading a textbook aloud. “It’s no surprise I ended up this way. It’s fine. It’s whatever. Are we done yet?”

Foggy shook his head. “Matt’s way more than that, fuck you.”

Stick’s eyebrows raised up even further on his forehead.

“Can we—I don’t have time for this,” Matt said. “We need to get to the next trial, we need to—look, Strange didn’t give me a time limit but I have a feeling there is one, and I’m getting really tired of talking to you anyway. Fuck.”

Matt raised his hands to his head and walked off into his kitchen.

Foggy faced Stick head-on. “I don’t care if you need me to say Matty’s only use is violence, because then we’re gonna be standing here forever. He’s more than that. He’s more than that shit you make him believe about himself. He’s a human being. He’s a good one. He’s not a fucking soldier and he’s not Daredevil, he’s not even a fucking lawyer. He’s Matthew Murdock, you fucking asshole .”

Matt came back from the kitchen clutching a glass of water with both hands. His eyes were so wide and hazel without his glasses. Sometimes Foggy thought about pressing a kiss between his eyebrows, just to see if Matt, blind as a bat, would still go cross-eyed from it.

“Are we going again?” Matt asked. His grip around the water glass was so tight that Foggy could swear he heard the glass creak. He was preparing to hurl it at Stick in the event that Stick decided that yes, it was time to go again.

Stick, however, just tilted his head once more at Foggy, and then turned to Matt. “We’re done here.”

Matt blinked. “What?”

“Where the fuck did I put my cane,” said Stick, and squinted his fogged-over eyes as if he could suss it out from the silent room alone.

Apparently he could. He leaned down and snatched the cane from underneath Matt’s hallway table. Foggy hadn’t thought that Stick was enhanced. He’d have to ask Matt about that—as if Matt would give him a straight answer, but still.

“What do you mean we’re done?” Matt asked. He slammed the water glass on the kitchen counter. It didn’t look like he’d even had a sip yet. Foggy frowned at him. He must be dehydrated by now, what with trying to kill everyone in this dimension and himself.

Foggy winced at the end of that thought. Bad joke. He seriously needed to get Matt a therapist once he was breathing on his earth again.

“Don’t make me repeat myself,” said Stick. He splayed his cane out in such a wide arc that Foggy had to jump to avoid it, and he grinned. “You’re done, Matty. Next trial awaits.”

He nodded toward the rooftop access staircase. “You know what to do.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Seems to be a common theme,” said Stick, and made his way out of the apartment. His cane slammed against every wall and door he could find, and he grappled at the front door as if he were truly blind and committed to making a racket.

And then he was gone. That fucking asshole.

***

Matt stood idle in his apartment for just a beat too long, and then shook his head and made his way to the rooftop.

Matt had always felt confident that despite everything about Stick, he still fundamentally knew him. He knew his hunger for a fight, his dry ire, his frustrated personality. He was as complex as an infinity knot.

Which made the last trial so strange. Stick had only asked Matt to recite things he’d asked him to recite a million times before, and he’d been so vicious throughout, so bloodthirsty in a way that even Matt was barely used to. He could hardly keep up. And when he’d called for a break, Stick had just—listened, and when he’d come back, Stick had declared that the trial was over.

It was so odd. It was almost as if Stick was answering to someone else. Which—it was a magical spell, and perhaps not even Stick at all, really. But still, there was something off about the whole thing.

Matt tried not to think too hard about it. But as he ascended the staircase toward the next trial, his attention kept getting caught by his apartment. The faucet, maybe, still dripping water; or the billboard, teared with electricity; or his bedroom, the silk sheets pooled at the end of the bed.

He paused with his hand on the handle to the rooftop access. He blew air out through his nose and said, “Foggy. If you’re still there—if you’re the reason I passed Stick’s test…”

He let the words hang in the air. He swallowed past a sandpaper throat and said, “I just really love you a lot, and. And I don’t deserve you. I guess that’s—that’s all I really needed to say.”

***

The rooftop access led into another apartment instead of Matt’s grimy roof. It was a gorgeous space. High, arched ceilings. Tasteful, pale furniture. Art slipped onto hooks in the wall, and the paintings were just as pale and deliberate as the drinking glasses in the sink. Just as pale and deliberate as the angled couch which faced both a plasma-screen television and a neon city-scape balcony.

Foggy hated it well before he saw Wilson Fisk.

He was standing out on the balcony, looking out above the city. The sun was setting. Red light, like blood, bathed the skyscrapers of Midtown. He seemed calm, relaxed. He wore a plain suit and nice dress shoes. His head was so smooth and bald and Foggy had always wondered about that—whether he had alopecia, or if he just used Nair or something.

Matt stalked toward Fisk. His clothes hadn’t changed, which was good. Foggy could hardly handle another glimpse of Matt’s emaciated body on top of everything else.

Foggy slipped out of the sliding glass door to the balcony with Matt and found himself staring down Fisk. He was wearing the same expression as always—wide, intense eyes, and his mouth set in a firm, angry line. He swallowed loudly and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. He held a handgun, and in his massive hands it almost looked like a children’s toy.

“Took you long enough to get here. I’m not in the habit of waiting for others,” he said. His voice was so low and growly. Foggy seriously doubted that that was his natural voice. He wondered whether Fisk stood in front of a mirror and practiced his voice every morning.

Matt was in a fighting stance again. He looked like a predator, like a wolf starving for its prey. Foggy hoped he wouldn’t jam his fingers into Fisk’s eyes. He could barely stomach the first time it happened, and he’d already vomited once today.

Fisk examined the gun in his hands. Then, he held it away from himself. Barrel down, the grip facing toward Matt. “This, I believe, is for you.”

Matt didn’t move. He barely seemed to be breathing. 

Foggy said, “Matt hates guns,” and watched Fisk’s eyes flick over to him for a moment before refocusing on Matt. That was good to know; Elektra and Poindexter hadn’t seemed to realize that Foggy was nearby at all, but Fisk and Stick acknowledging he was there—perhaps it meant that he was meant to do the talking here, too.

Good, Foggy thought. He was tired of learning the upsetting ways that Matt was torturing himself. He was way too Catholic for his own good.

“Maybe on second thought, I’ll keep you far away from church, buddy,” said Foggy as Matt slowly reached out and grabbed the gun from Fisk. “Maybe we’ll just get you the therapist and a prescription to some really strong SSRIs.”

Matt’s fingers stroked the cold metal of the gun. He settled his hand on the grip and pointed the barrel toward the balcony floor. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“Well, it is quite simple,” said Fisk. He adjusted his cufflinks while he spoke. He popped his collar. “I will not attack you. I will do nothing to provoke an attack from you. And you may shoot and kill me if you’d like.”

Matt paled. His hand tightened around the gun as he said, “I don’t want to kill you.”

Fisk huffed out a breath. “Well. We both know that’s a lie. And I’m sure your friend would know you’re lying too, if he is in fact here.”

That was an invitation to speak if Foggy had ever heard one. He glanced between Fisk and Matt. Matt’s breathing was erratic and Fisk seemed much too calm.

“I think,” Foggy said slowly, “That Matt would never kill anyone at the end of the day. I think his—thing, with Poindexter. He did that because he knew it wouldn’t change anything in his reality. I think he was living out a revenge fantasy, but. Matt isn’t and never will be a killer.”

Fisk inclined his head ever-so-slightly. Matt slowly raised the gun and aimed it at Fisk’s heart.

Fisk said, “Did you tell your friend about what you did with the real Bullseye?”

Matt said, “Stop.”

Fisk’s eyes darted to where Foggy stood. He felt a bit like a referee, standing on the side like this. Did they use referees during gun duels? Foggy wondered a bit wildly. He laughed a little and it came out nervous.

“You didn’t care whether he lived or died, did you,” Fisk told Matt. “Except that isn’t quite true, is it? You threw him off the roof and you hoped he would die. A real person. A living, breathing person, and you sent him off the roof headfirst hoping his neck would snap on the way down.”

Matt breathed in and breathed out noisily. His finger looped around the trigger guard and Foggy watched him. He didn’t quite know how he felt, except that he just felt sick.

“Stop,” Matt said quietly.

Fisk shook his head. He stepped forward. “Giving a blind man a gun seems unwise, but you’re not really blind, we both know that. And this body—this me —it isn’t truly me. Same as Bullseye wasn’t really him. There is no difference in killing us, Matthew. It is only an admittance of what you’d like to do. What you believe yourself to be capable of, even in the absence of violence.”

“I don’t want to,” Matt said, even as his finger curled in, brushing the trigger. Foggy sucked in a deep breath. “It isn’t right. Not like this.”

“Was it right when you beat Bullseye and threw him off the roof?” Fisk asked. His eyes darted to Foggy again, and Foggy just shook his head. His lips felt numb. “What you do. Who you are. Is any of it right? Or is it a fantasy of a madman? Are you truly possessed by the devil, Matthew? What’s the difference between punishment and murder? Are you sure you’re following God’s plan when you draw your own lines in the sand?”

Fisk took another step forward. Matt’s hand shook around the gun, the barrel still aimed at Fisk’s heart. He scrubbed his free hand through his hair. 

“Shoot me,” said Fisk. “Admit what you’ve always longed for—let yourself be the judge and executioner. It is what you want, is it not?”

Matt shook his head. His knuckles turned white around the grip of the gun.

Foggy wished that he could point to a moment, an instance, a change in Matt that signaled that Fisk was wrong, that Matt truly wasn’t a  killer and never would be. It would be simpler to explain himself if there was.

As it stood, it went like this:

Fisk went to take another step forward, and Foggy intercepted him, jabbing his hand into his chest.

“Matt doesn’t want this,” he said desperately. “If there’s—if this is anything like the last trial. You have to listen to me. He will hurt himself if he kills you. He’ll never live with it, not seriously. You may think it’s different, Matt may think differently, but you’re both wrong. I know Matt. I know him. I know he won’t ever take any joy out of this. I fucking know, you fucking asshole.”

Fisk regarded him dispassionately. He opened his mouth to say something, and then—

The world fell away.

***

Matt blinked, and suddenly it was Father Lantom in front of him, and his hand was wrapped around empty air instead of a cold handgun.

Matt sucked in a deep breath, and then another. He was standing at the front of Clinton Church, it seemed, at least from the familiar scent of commercially-produced incense and the conifers which swayed loudly in the courtyard outside. Matt was near the altar. He slid down to sit on the front steps and held his head in his hands.

He would have done it. If Fisk had taken another step. Or maybe two steps. He would have shot Fisk in the heart, he thought.

Father Lantom sat down next to him. “Most people like to stand for this final part,” he said. “But I appreciate sitting. It’s more relaxing this way.”

“Sorry,” said Matt. 

“Don’t be,” said Lantom. He sounded so gentle. He tapped a finger on the steps beside them. “You’ve done so well, Matthew.”

Matt squeezed his eyes shut. A terrible, creeping feeling seemed to be threatening his chest. “But?”

“No buts,” promised Lantom. “I simply wished to commend you.”

Matt swallowed down the spit that had been gathering in his mouth during Fisk. “What is this?”

“This,” said Lantom, “is a breath before the end. I believe I’m meant to represent someone comforting from your past. I can choose a different form if you’d like.”

Matt shook his head. He felt stuffed full of cotton. “This is fine.”

“Good,” said Lantom. He pressed his shoulder into Matt’s for a moment before moving away. “All you need to do now is walk out the front doors of the church. You’ll be about five blocks away from the Sanctum Santorum, where your body lies. You’ll just need to join it and you’ll wake up.”

Matt pulled his knees up to his chest. He was wearing church clothes, he noticed. He’d recognized, in the same way that someone else may notice the daylight shifting, that his clothes had changed every so often throughout the duration of the spell. It never seemed as important as the trials, as Foggy, so he’d never questioned it.

“I’ll wake up… with Foggy?” Matt asked, and Lantom grew warmer beside him.

“You’ve done well,” he said gently, so gently. “And I cannot answer that.”

“Oh,” said Matt.

“It’s not a suggestion that he hasn’t followed you,” said Lantom carefully, “it’s just that this is the final gambit.”

“Gambit?”

“There’s a reason the spell is named how it is,” said Lantom. He shifted beside Matt. Started getting to his feet, so Matt did, too. “It’s the closest part of the spell to the myth. For the five blocks you walk, Matthew, you must face forward. Turning around, or trying to check on your love—it will relegate them to the afterlife forever. But for a moment, you will be able to recognize he’s there. If he has, in fact, followed you until this point.”

“He has,” Matt said. “I know he has.”

Father Lantom nodded his assent. “I wish you luck, Matthew.”

Matt swallowed hard. He squared his shoulders and wished he was given his armored suit to wear. But this’ll do. Anything will do, for Foggy.

Without hesitating, he walked down the church aisle and pushed open the front doors.

***

The knowledge that he could feel Foggy at any time, if he simply turned around, burned like a chemical fire in Matt’s brain. For the first block, he was silent. By the second block, his neck began to hurt from how tense he felt, how hard he was trying not to turn around. His radar sense was useless in the face of a simple, physical movement.

So Matt decided to talk instead.

“You have this tie. It’s not like your other ties, it’s kind of stupider, I think. I can tell when you wear it because Karen groans in a very specific way. It makes me laugh every time. You’ve never worn it to court, so I think you know it looks dumb, too. But I always wished Karen would tell me about it. What color it is, the shape, or if there’s anything embroidered on it. I love embroidery.

“Do you remember your tie with the embroidered stripes? At law school, I mean. You’d wear it for mock trials sometimes. I—I know this is a bit creepy, but sometimes when I was drunk I’d riffle through your bureau and find that tie and I’d run my fingers up and down it. I loved the feeling of it. I loved your smell, too. I always do. In those days, you still wore cologne and I was sad you stopped. It was such a warm smell, and it would mix with your detergent really well. You never smelled bad to me, even when you’d just gotten off a plane or the subway and your smell was mixed with everyone else. All I still smelled was you, honestly. I guess that should’ve been my first clue.

“And I mean it when I say if you don’t love me in the way I love you, that’s all right, Foggy. Selfishly, I hope you stay in my life. Needily, I just—need you alive. When I—no, I won’t go there. I’ll just say that you’re everything to so many people. Everything was worse when you were gone.

“And I was thinking that I can give up Daredevil. I know you think I can’t, but it doesn’t seem like it’s done any good. What you and I do together is good. And I know you hate it—the Daredevil thing. That’s okay. You just accept me anyway. But I owe you. I deserve to give something back to you. Now that I have that chance, I’d really like to give you this.”

He was in front of the Sanctorum now. He took a deep breath. The back of his neck was all pins-and-needles. He felt slick with sweat. His neck hurt from how stiffly he held it, how much he refused to shift or do anything to suggest that he was turning around. He wouldn’t do that to Foggy. It was easier to think of it that way; that if he turned around, he would be hurting Foggy. Foggy deserved to live more than anything else.

He took a deep breath once he reached the bottom of the staircase. So many staircases in this spell. It sure loved a dramatic ascension, Matt supposed. 

He curled his hand behind him, palm splayed open. Just in case Foggy didn’t hate him, wasn’t disgusted by him after everything that had happened. He kept it there as he walked up the hallway, to the room where he could already sense his body laying on the floor, barely warm, barely breathing.

He opened the door and walked up to himself. He was in the same sort of position that Foggy’s body had been, out on the street; a bit of a warped mirror, maybe. He shut his eyes tightly. His neck was so stiff.

He said aloud, “I trust you. I trust you’re there. I love you. I know you're there,” and he hoped that Foggy knew that he meant it. He hoped that he meant it, too.

He positioned himself above his own body, slowly started to match up his limbs and felt himself sink down. His arm felt like it turned to mist and then it was his body’s arm again, heavy with a sort of sleep paralysis. As he lowered his head down to match his real one, he felt a deep sense of sleep pull over him like a weighted blanket.

And then he was out.

Chapter Text

Foggy woke up on the floor of a musty-smelling house. Aside from the crick in his neck, he actually felt pretty relaxed. Like he’d gotten a good eight hours of sleep and was waking up precisely when he needed to.

He stretched out his arms and bumped into something firm. He squinted his eyes and sat up, trying to make sense of where, exactly, he found himself. It was then that he realized his eyes were a bit out-of-focus, and it took longer than Foggy liked for the vision in front of him to make sense. He shook his head like his vision worked like a developing Polaroid; strangely, it seemed to help.

He touched a hand to his head and sucked in a deep breath, and was abruptly aware that this was the first real breath he’d taken in a while. The realization felt right, the same as his name felt right on him. His second breath was hitched, and a voice nearby said, “Easy. Coming back to life can be disorienting. I should know.”

Foggy sat up and looked around the room. In the corner, sitting on an armchair, was Doctor Stephen Strange. He looked a bit drained and sweaty. On the end table next to him there was an empty bottle of Gatorade and a packet of half-eaten peanuts.

Foggy shook his head and wondered how this was his life for a moment, before being struck with the cold-water thought that, of course, he was lucky to have a life at all. He placed a hand on his chest and made himself breathe. He was wearing one of his best button-down shirts, and a very nice sports coat, pants, and dress shoes. It was odd. He hadn’t died in these clothes, he knew.

To Strange, he said, “This is actually my second time coming back to life. If we’re getting technical about it.”

Strange made a face. “You got Blipped too? Nasty business.”

“Yeah,” said Foggy, and then was immediately distracted by the firm lump next to him, which he abruptly realized was Matt.

Matt lay naked in the room—which was very drafty. He was covered with strange, metallic painted lines which drifted over his cuts and bruises as if they were unblemished skin. Foggy winced at the thought of Matt having to wash out all of those wounds.

And he was thin. So thin it was upsetting, even borderline unnatural. As thin as Foggy had worried he was, during the entire duration of the spell. He looked like he weighed less than the day that they met when he was fresh out of the fucking orphanage . And even in sleep, he looked exhausted. There was a set to his mouth that Foggy absolutely hated. He sucked in a breath and squeezed his eyes shut, then pulled Matt into his lap. He stroked his hair, placed a hand on Matt’s heart. It beat slow and even, at least.

Foggy looked back up at Strange. “Why isn’t he awake yet? Is it still the spell?”

Strange shook his head. He grabbed a handful of peanuts and said, “If I had to guess? It’s exhaustion more than anything else. God knows I’m tired after keeping the spell going for, ah,” he checked his watch, “forty-five minutes, and the spell did require a certain amount of energy from him. And then there’s the fact that he was basically running on fumes and righteous anger beforehand from what I gathered. Your boyfriend was very talkative about you and not much else. Although he did announce his secret identity in a very unique way.”

Foggy caught sight of Strange’s bruised cheek and couldn’t help but choke out a laugh. It came out wet-sounding. “He’s very bad at taking care of himself.”

“Yes,” said Strange. “I quite got that impression.”

He stood up from his chair and stretched his arms above his head. He wore a truly ridiculous cape that snapped in a non-existent wind. “If you’re both to be impromptu guests of mine, consider moving Murdock to a guest room, at least. There’s one across the hall. I’ve already spent far too much time staring at his naked body. There should be some sleeping clothes in one of the dressers.”

Strange spoke briskly, as if Foggy was a waste of his time, but his words were kind. No wonder Matt trusted him in the end. Strange paused at the door, and turned around. “He is, in fact, Daredevil. Yes?”

“Yeah,” said Foggy. He brushed a strand of Matt’s hair away from his forehead. He should get Matt warmed up and in a bed but first—first, Foggy just wanted to hold him for a moment.

“And he’s a blind man,” Strange continued.

“Yeah,” said Foggy. “He’s got like—a weird radar sense, I dunno. Chemicals splashed into his eyes as a kid that made him sense way more about everyone around him, I think. But zero light perception. He sorta explained it to me once. He’s very vague when he doesn’t want to talk about something.”

Strange nodded. “How did he come to get so attached to you?”

“Roommates in college,” Foggy said. “And law school. And then we opened a practice together.”

Strange snorted. “So you both built your lives around each other, and he was afraid you wouldn’t love him back?”

Foggy swallowed hard against a swelling throat. “He’s. Well, I guess he can be very blind when he wants to be.”

Strange nodded at that. His eyes were very sharp and bright. His goatee looked a little less stupid in person, Foggy had to admit.

“So you’re both lawyers,” he mused. “Well. I expect free legal representation for life, seeing as I just helped resurrect you. And perhaps some help from Daredevil, if the situation requires.”

“We’re defense attorneys,” Foggy said. “Are you breaking laws very often?”

“Oh, all the time,” Strange said, and his face broke into a wry grin for a single moment before he swept out of the room with a dramatic flourish from his weird cape.

Foggy sighed, and then looked down at Matt. He rubbed Matt’s arms and felt how cold they were. And anorexic people were prone to coldness, anyway—not that Matt was anorexic, but he certainly looked the part at the current moment.

He readjusted Matt so he was laying on the silk sheet again. He stood up and noticed Matt’s clothes on the couch beside them. They seemed wrinkled and had a sort of sharp smell to them—when he moved closer, it was the smell of old alcohol. So strong that even Foggy was wincing at it. He winced and turned back to Matt.

“What am I gonna do with you, buddy?” he asked softly. Matt, for his part, just groaned in his sleep.

Whatever, Foggy decided. Those clothes were a no-go, and Strange had said he had extra clothing in the guest room anyway. He just had to carry Matt across the hall—which seemed alarmingly easy, considering the state of Matt. He could wrap Matt up in the silk sheet, or—

There, on the coat rack, was Foggy’s new coat. The coat that, if memory served him well, he’d died in.

Not that you could tell from it. In contrast to Matt’s clothing, it seemed to be well taken care of. He pulled it from the rack and pressed it up to his nose. No scent of whiskey. Just the faintest smell of Matt, who somehow always managed to smell a little citrusy. 

It was probably from the antiseptics that he poured on himself in a vague attempt at self-care after illegally beating up criminals all night. Anyway.

Foggy pulled the coat from the coat rack and draped it over Matt. Matt shifted underneath it for a moment. Then, he pressed his nose into the nearest section of the coat he could find and breathed in deeply. It was—well, it was honestly a little heartbreaking.

“You’re killin’ me here, Matty,” Foggy muttered, and adjusted the coat so he could pick Matt up. It was just as easy as he’d feared.

Strange apparently opened the door to the guest bedroom as he’d left, so Foggy just carried Matt bridal-style into the room and set him down gently on the bed. It was a gorgeous bed, actually—a mahogany four-poster with matching burgundy coverlet and pillow sleeves, and with an extra knit blanket draped across the foot. Foggy adjusted the coat around Matt, wrapping him up warmly, and then opened an exquisitely carved dresser. There were a couple of different, plain-looking pajama sets, all in different sizes, as well as a few clean pairs of boxers and even a few pairs of woolen socks. Foggy took a moment to wonder why Strange would even need a supply like this, but. It did come in handy, so who really cared?

There was also an ensuite bathroom. Foggy checked the medicine cabinet and found a washcloth, which he doused in warm water and soap. He walked back to Matt and drew it gently over his body, frowning when he had to clean over Matt's wounds. Matt stayed deep asleep, even as he made little sounds of pain as Foggy pulled the washcloth over his torso.

From the dresser, Foggy pulled out a pajama set that seemed to be in Matt’s size. Luckily, the shirt was a button-up, so Foggy didn’t have to go through the rigamarole of pulling a shirt over his sleeping body and waking him up. 

It isn’t the first time Foggy’s dressed Matt—there was that notable time in college where Matt was so sick with the flu that he’d vomited all over himself in his sleep—but even considering that, Matt looks so damn sickly. It was only after Foggy had pulled the pajama pants onto Matt that he realized he’d picked out Matt’s size from before his weight loss. He looked like a little kid dressed up in his father’s clothes, this way. The sleeves kept slipping over his fingers, making Matt mutter inaudibly and shift around on the bed.

“Too late to do anything about that, bud,” Foggy said softly. He moved threw his coat over an empty chair in the corner of the room and turned down the covers. He picked Matt up again to slide him underneath. Matt melted into the bed easily. Hopefully, the sheets wouldn’t be too scratchy on his skin.

Foggy tucked the covers back in, and then couldn’t help but to press a kiss into his temple. His forehead was dry. Matt was usually better about moisturizing. 

“I’ll be right back, Matty,” he said quietly, and slipped into the ensuite bathroom.

Foggy approached the mirror with all the trepidation of someone who’d recently risen from the dead might approach a mirror. He kept his eyes locked on the bathroom counter until he was centered underneath it, and then looked up to gaze at his reflection.

He wasn’t any paler than he had been. There were no strange, dark veins popping out of his skin. He swallowed hard and his throat worked the same way it always did. His hair was the same color, even the same cut—he wasn’t quite sure of the length of time it had been, but he looked exactly the same as the day he’d supposedly died. The last day that Foggy remembered. He opened his mouth and pulled at his upper lip, but no. No fangs, not even a rotting tooth or two.

But then there were the clothes. Looking at himself in the mirror, he could see that someone had taken great care to iron his suit, even if it was a bit wrinkled now. He squinted at himself. He reached a hand into the pocket of his slacks. It was empty, except for the feeling of a glossy piece of paper.

He withdrew a print of a photograph, taken a couple of Christmases ago. Matt’s in the photo, because he had a standing invitation to the Nelson Christmas and often took them up on it, as he had the year this photo was taken. They all stood in front of the Christmas tree in his parents’ living room, and the photo had been taken on a timer, using a wide lens to make sure everyone could fit in the frame.

His mom, dad, both wearing tacky Christmas sweaters. His granny with her silly headscarf. Theo, Candace, Georgia and Nikki. Theo’s wife Becky had her arms around Timmy, Jeanie, and Ruth. Foggy stood with Matt, Matt’s arm slung around him, and his glasses were off for once. He looked like he may have been looking at Foggy’s chin instead of the photograph; he looked like he had sight. He looked like he was in love with Foggy, so in love with Foggy that he couldn’t be bothered to even look at the camera.

It was one of Foggy’s favorite photos ever taken. He had a copy framed on his desk at the office. It was the kind of photograph he’d want to be buried with.

Funeral clothes. Foggy was wearing the clothes he was buried in.

He shut his eyes for a moment. When he reopened them, he’d somehow undressed completely. The suit lay crumpled on the floor and his shirt was draped over the bathroom knob. His dress shoes were overturned in the clawfoot tub.

He sighed. He looked back at his reflection and leaned in.

“Don’t freak out,” he told himself. “Don’t freak out. This is a good thing, don’t freak out, don’t—”

He should call his mother, he thought. She’d want to know, she’d want to see him, she’d come down here immediately and wake up Matt and probably cry all over Foggy and that was fine, but Foggy was—

Well. Foggy needed some time. He needed to check in on Matt, and he needed some time, and he’d call her. He wouldn’t let another day go by where she had to mourn him, but.

He needed to make sure Matt was okay, and quite frankly, he needed to reteach himself how to breathe, because the quick, short breaths he was drawing in and out weren’t exactly cutting it. 

He nodded to himself. “Game plan,” he said. “Wait until Matt wakes up and then—deal with everything else. Yeah. Yeah, that’s fine.”

Even his reflection looked unconvinced, based on the look it gave him. Which was rude, Foggy had to say. But whatever. It was fine, and Foggy—Foggy could hardly handle being alive right now, never mind anything else.

He opened the bathroom door and watched Matt sleep for a few more minutes. Just watched his chest rise and fall, his face as troubled as it always was. 

Foggy grabbed his own set of pajamas and dressed quickly. He climbed into bed next to Matt. It was warm and comfortable, and immediately, Matt gravitated toward him, hands grabbing at him until Matt was situated right on top of Foggy’s chest, legs tangled together.

Foggy sighed. His breath ruffled Matt’s hair. “You’re so bony and needy right now. Your elbow is way too pointy,” he informed Matt. But he also twisted an arm up to hold Matt’s shoulders. Matt puffed out a breath and somehow relaxed even further.

“Sweet dreams, Matty,” Foggy said, and felt his own eyelids begin to droop as if in response to his own words.

***

Matt woke up feeling safer  than he could ever remember feeling before. He was wrapped up tightly in something soft and warm. When he breathed in, there was a familiar scent buried under the detergent used on the bed sheets. He pressed his nose into his pillow and decided that he must be home, that must be why it smelled so familiar and safe. He couldn’t remember what had happened, or really even what day it was, but his brain was just heavy enough from waking up that he didn’t really care to figure it out.

Underneath him, there was a familiar rhythm, gently beating, slow and measured in sleep. Matt smiled, even though he couldn’t remember why he was in bed with Foggy, never mind cuddling with him. But it was still so warm, so comfortable, he couldn’t really find it in himself to care about the circumstances. Instead, he traced his finger across Foggy’s collarbones, his shoulder. He buried his nose deeper into Foggy’s sleep shirt and rubbed his hand across Foggy’s belly.

At that, Foggy’s breathing changed. Matt stayed still while Foggy slowly stirred, his arm squeezing around Matt as he awoke. He hummed and Matt felt the vibration of it, where his cheek pressed against his chest.

“Matty?” Foggy asked. His voice was still thick with slumber. “You awake?”

“Mm,” Matt said. “No.”

Foggy buried his face into Matt’s head, and he could feel the curve of Foggy’s lips as he smiled and said, “Very convincing, buddy.”

Matt shook his head. He still hadn’t opened his eyes, hadn’t admitted to waking, but now more information was filtering to him as his senses stretched out. They were in an old, creaky house. On the second of five levels, and the bed was old but well made, and the sheets had a high thread count and they didn’t irritate Matt’s skin or feel scratchy. 

They weren’t at Matt’s apartment, or Foggy’s. Actually, they couldn’t be at Foggy’s because—

Because Foggy didn’t have an apartment anymore. He’d died and Matt had helped the Nelsons clean it out and he’d paid for a storage unit for the things he’d kept, because Foggy had always been way too attached to his foldable bookshelves, and his coffee table, and his stupid novelty tea kettle shaped like a frog.

Matt jerked himself up, and Foggy said, “Matt?”

Matt shook his head. He focused on Foggy’s heartbeat. Same as always. Same as always.

It worked . The spell had worked, and Foggy was right next to him.

“Matty,” Foggy said again. He  sat up too, and reached out and placed a hand on Matt’s shoulder. “Talk to me, what’s going on?”

Matt turned. He reached out, slowly, and Foggy didn’t move as Matt cupped Foggy’s chin, as he traced out the line of his eyebrows and slid his hand through Foggy’s hair. He could feel tears swelling behind his eyes, his useless eyes because he wished he could see Foggy more than anything, just so he could really visibly check that he was okay, that he wasn’t too pale or there wasn’t a bruise Matt hadn’t detected on his skin, or anything, but it was still Foggy, Foggy was here and with him and breathing with Matt, even if his heart had picked up a bit in the past few moments.

“Matty,” Foggy said again, and rubbed Matt’s shoulder. “Talk to me. You’re scaring me a little here, buddy, I wanna make sure you don’t have like—brain damage or whatever the fuck, seeing as you clearly haven’t taken care of yourself recently.”

“This is real, right? This isn’t a dream?” Because Matt had dreamed of Foggy before. His heartbeat, steady until it wasn’t; Matt waking up next to Foggy and smiling until he realized it was Foggy’s dead, cold body lying next to him.

“It’s not a dream,” Foggy said. “The spell worked, you were just so tired that you fell asleep on the floor after it finished. I brought you to a guest room in this weird mansion thing, and then I fell asleep with you because you’re a bit of a fucking octopus and it turns out being brought back to life is also pretty draining, and—wait, baby, don’t cry. I’m here, I’m here, come on, Matty. Shh.”

Matt hadn’t really registered the tears spilling down his face. It was just that he was Foggy, really and truly Foggy, and when he pulled Matt in closer, shushing him like a child, it was his warmth and his scent. Matt opened his mouth against Foggy’s neck, tongue pushing against his skin, and he tasted as he smelled, there was no latent scent of the grave, no dirt or death or decay, just Foggy. It was all just Foggy.

Foggy didn’t say a word about it, just rubbed Matt’s back in soothing circles and said, “You’re okay, baby, it’s all okay, you did good. You did so good, I owe you like a thousand thank-yous and coffee for the next few decades, I. I love you so much. Shh, baby, it’s all okay now, okay?”

Matt nodded into Foggy’s neck, and Foggy pulled away just enough to put a hand on Matt’s cheek. He was trying to make eye contact with Matt, which was always a futile endeavor, but he had a habit of trying it out whenever he wanted to have a serious friendship conversation.

“You know you don’t have to—the fact that you went to get me at all, that you put yourself through that. I know how much you love me, Matty. It’s honestly a little scary and we should really talk about that later, but I don’t want you to—you don’t need to love me the way I love you, okay? We don’t have to do the whole kissing-and-hand-holding thing, we can just be us if that’s—”

Matt cut him off with a kiss.

It tasted like salt, and Matt had to shift and essentially straddle Foggy to get the right angle, but that was all right. He licked at Foggy’s lips and Foggy opened his mouth immediately, his hands shifting to hold Matt just as tight, one hand on the small of his back and the other tangled up in Matt’s hair. Matt kissed him until he couldn’t breathe anymore out of his nose, it was too clogged up with snot, and Foggy let him go and started wiping at Matt’s cheeks as Matt kissed his cheek, his eyelids, his forehead. 

“I love you,” Matt told Foggy. His hands were fisted in Foggy’s shirt. He felt shaky and hot and Foggy’s heart beat underneath him, steady and true, and it was almost too much. He pressed another kiss into Foggy’s temple, and Foggy shifted, guiding Matt’s legs to the side so he was cradled into Foggy, Foggy’s back against the headboard for support. 

“Okay,” Foggy said, and it was such a bright-sounding word, so full of Foggy’s smile that Matt could feel more tears building in his eyes, his throat. Foggy’s hand caressed Matt’s hip, his fingers pressed against it like piano keys. “I guess we were always a little bit married, so this isn’t that much different.”

“Yeah,” Matt agreed, but it came out on a hitching breath, and suddenly, he was burying his face in Foggy’s neck, something awful and yawning opening up from Matt’s lungs, rushing into his mouth, and then he was sobbing, really and truly, his ribs wracked with it. 

He clutched at Foggy’s shoulder and tried to curl further into him, and it couldn’t be comfortable for Foggy, but he just  squeezed Matt, saying, “Baby, what’s going on? Are you hurting? Is it—what is it, I don’t understand, Matty, help me understand, baby, please.”

Matt shook his head and said, “Sorry, I’m sorry,” and it sounded messy and choked, but Foggy seemed to understand from the way he shook his head and said, “There’s no reason to be sorry, honey, I just want to make sure you’re all right.”

Matt choked on another sob, and Foggy pressed a kiss into Matt’s hair. He started rocking back and forth a bit. If he tried to sing a “Rock-a-Bye, Baby,” Matt would have to shut him down. The thought made him hiccup out a laugh, which probably didn’t make Foggy feel any better.

Matt said, “I’m okay, I am,” and Foggy snorted and said, “Forgive me if I don’t believe you,” and Matt could taste a different kind of salt in the air. He frowned and reached up to wipe at Foggy’s cheek.

“I didn’t mean to make you cry,” he said, and another sob tried to wrench its way from his throat. He swallowed hard, and Foggy sighed.

“If you need to bawl your eyes out, Matty, I want you to,” he said. His hand curled around the ends of Matt’s hair, and he tugged and said, “I’m crying because you’re sad and I don’t know how to help you. Watching you push it down isn’t gonna help or make me less sad.”

“I just really missed you,” Matt said. “So much, I was falling apart, and now you’re here and it’s just—”

“A lot,” Foggy finished. He sounded clearer. He ran a hand through Matt’s hair. “Okay, that makes sense. I gotcha.”

Another sob escaped from Matt, and Foggy hummed and rubbed at Matt’s back, between his shoulder blades.

“It’s okay,” he said over and over again. “Just let it out, I’m right here. I’m not gonna go anywhere. I’m here, Matty, you did it. I’m here.”

***

Foggy waited until Matt’s breathing slowly evened out, until his grip on Foggy’s shirt slackened as he slept. Actually, he probably waited for like an hour after Matt fell asleep again, until he was completely sure that Matt was out like a light.

Jesus fucking Christ, he’d cried himself to sleep. Foggy tried to ignore how upsetting that was by gently rearranging Matt, plumping up a pillow so Matt could hold onto that instead of Foggy. He made a few snuffling noises in his sleep, but otherwise seemed pretty content as Foggy stood and walked toward the bathroom.

Foggy cleaned up his funeral clothes, even while he wrinkled his nose at them. He folded up the shirt and slacks and left them on top of the dresser in the bedroom, draping his suit jacket over them. He pulled the dress shoes from the bath and set them next to the door, and then checked the clawfoot tub. There were tiny, travel-sized bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and body wash resting on a porcelain ledge set into the wall. Foggy frowned and turned over one of the bottles to read the ingredients. There weren’t any sulfates. He opened the lid of the shampoo and sniffed. It was scented—rosemary and mint, it said—but it wasn’t that strong. Hopefully Matt wouldn’t be too bothered by the scent. 

He felt like he was sweaty and wrung-out, and he needed to start moving on the “everything else” part of his plan. He’d checked on Matt and clearly, Matt wasn’t doing too hot. That was okay. Foggy could take care of both of them for now. But to do that, Foggy figured a shower and a coffee were deeply, truly necessary—even if he couldn’t tell what time it was, exactly. The sun was still up, based on the light filtering in from the bathroom window, but it was also gray and grainy. That could be a sign that the sun was setting or that a storm was rolling in. It was never too obvious which one it was in New York.

Foggy turned on the shower and stripped off his pajamas, folding them and setting them on the bathroom counter. Foggy was planning on wearing the set again after he showered, even if he had to go and have a serious conversation with Doctor Strange. Foggy just came back to life, damn it, he could be cut a little slack.

Plus, there was the fact that Foggy would prefer not to ever, ever wear his funeral clothes again, no matter how much he’d liked that button-up.

He showered quickly, and had come up with a new and improved game plan by the time he turned off the water. It was clear that Matt wasn’t taking care of himself, so it was likely that his apartment was a huge, scary mess that Foggy didn’t want to even begin to think about. Foggy didn’t love the idea of cleaning up Matt’s place while he cried all over him, so they’d need to find someplace else to stay for now, until it seemed like Matt was a bit more stable. And if he’d died in Matt’s arms or whatever, then it was unlikely that his parents had kept the lease on his apartment going.

Seeing  as Foggy’s parents lived not too far away, in Jersey City, and loved Matt possibly more than Foggy, Foggy’s idea was sort of a win-win. Foggy would call his mom and bring Matt over, and there, Matt could rest up and get stuffed full of discount cuts of meat from Theo until he looked like himself again, and they could start up their practice again with Karen and get married and live happily-ever-after. 

Well, it wouldn’t go exactly like that, probably. But Foggy liked to be optimistic, and anyway, his mom would probably kill him if he let her spend one more day mourning him when Foggy was actually alive and breathing less than a mile away from her. And since Foggy actually had respect for his loved ones (looking at you, Murdock), he’d need to call her very, very soon.

But first, coffee. And just as importantly, a cursory thank-you and a request for more information from Doctor Strange.

When Foggy stepped back into the guest room, Matt was still dead to the world. That was good. Now that Foggy knew he wasn’t super brain-damaged or whatever, Foggy was of the stark opinion that Matt needed to get as much sleep as possible. 

He figured that Matt would easily sense him anywhere in the mansion once he woke up, so Foggy didn’t bother to try and leave a note or anything. Instead, he pressed a kiss to Matt’s temple and swept his hair back from his forehead again. Matt relaxed into Foggy’s touch, and Foggy sighed.

“You’re gonna make me that sappy guy who’s all for PDA, aren’t you,” he said to Matt, who just let out a little snore and dropped his mouth open to drool on his pillow.

Foggy shook his head and walked to the hallway. 

It was at this point that Foggy realized he had no idea where the kitchen in this house would be, or where he could find Strange, for that matter. 

Well. Most kitchens were located on the ground floor. Might as well begin there, Foggy thought.

The bottom floor of the mansion was narrow, but spacious. Unlike the dimension that he and Matt had walked through, this version of the mansion was strewn with books and strange scraps of jewelry. A cracked diadem was slung over the knobbed end of a standing mirror in the foyer. An empty glass weighed down a yellow page ripped from a legal pad on a nearby bookshelf. Several ballpoint pens, some missing caps, were tossed into a colored-glass mason jar which was ringed with sand at the bottom.

Foggy liked that it was messier than the twinned mansion he’d walked through. It felt safer, more alive. The air in the mansion seemed to crackle with energy that lapped at Foggy’s bones.

He noticed a doorway, ajar with warm light streaming out. He pushed the door open and found himself in a sizable kitchen (by New York standards at least) and Doctor Strange standing at the counter, pouring honey into a absurdly large mug. 

Strange heard Foggy step into the kitchen, but didn’t turn around. He said, “Ah, Mr. Nelson. How’s Murdock?”

Foggy leaned against the doorjamb. “Still sleeping. He’s not very well. But you probably figured as much.”

At this, Strange did bother to glance upward. He capped the honey and set it on the counter beside him, and wrapped his hands around the mug, turning around. “Is that anger that I detect in your tone, Mr. Nelson?”

He raised an eyebrow. All high and mighty. Foggy bit down on his tongue and took a measured breath. “Thank you for your help in—bringing me back to life,” he said.

Strange nodded. “But?”

Foggy pushed himself away from the doorjamb and into the kitchen. “Matt was going to kill himself. And you were going to let him.”

“It was a calculated risk,” Strange corrected. “And for the record, he outright told me he was going to keep searching for a way to bring you back to life, even after I told him how poor of an idea that was. I believed him. You should’ve seen the look in his eyes. I… decided it would be better, to take the path that seemed like it would hurt the least amount of people.”

Strange bit down on his lower lip at that. Foggy remembered the flood of articles that had come out a year or so ago, about the Scarlet Witch and Strange. They all claimed Strange as the hero, and Wanda Maximoff as the unstable superpower who’d needed to be stopped. 

But Matt wasn’t Wanda Maximoff. He wasn’t.

Foggy squeezed his eyes shut, and Strange said, “He’ll be okay. You’re here now.”

If he was another man, his tone could have been interpreted as gentle.

Foggy huffed out a laugh, and said, “Um. What time is it?”

Strange said, “Around half past six in the evening.”

“Right,” said Foggy. “Um. So. Do you have a coffee machine? Do wizards drink coffee?”

It turned out that they did. In fact, they drank very nice coffee. The machine that Strange showed Foggy was so fancy that he could barely work it without Strange’s help, and the coffee grounds he stocked were so fancy that the packaging wasn’t even in English.

Eventually, after Foggy pressed a few buttons, he laughed and said, “I see why you use magic for everything. That was fucking hard.”

“You could too,” Strange said, so offhandedly that for a moment, Foggy didn’t register what he said. Then, he almost dropped the carton of half-and-half he was holding and looked over at Strange, who had a very unsettling smirk on his face.

“What the hell do you mean?” Foggy asked him. He reached over for the sugar canister and  poured in too much sugar, even by Foggy’s standards. 

“I’m not as talented at realizing it as the Ancient One,” Strange said, “but I can somewhat tell when someone has magical aptitude. And you very clearly do. It’s unmistakable. Does witchcraft run in your family?”

Foggy blinked. He took a sip of his too-hot coffee to keep his mouth from dropping open. His tongue sort of burned, but he still swallowed and said, “My grandmother always said so, but she’s also—well, she’s also sort of a new-age hippie.”

Strange shrugged. “It sounds like she might have been correct. And seeing as your boyfriend is Daredevil, and you already died twice—well. I am far too busy to teach magic, but I could lend you some reading. I could even hook you up with some tutors, if you’d like.”

“Tutors,” Foggy said blankly. “For magic. Because you think I could do magic to protect myself and my superpowered—to protect myself and Matt. That’s what you’re saying right now.”

“For a lawyer, you’re not very well-spoken,” Strange observed.

Foggy shook his head. He felt like he had just hit the speed limit on a highway and was suddenly very afraid to go over it. “Can I—can I get back to you? About that?”

“Sure,” said Strange. “I am a very busy man, I’ll have you know. But I’ll give you a card in case you’d like to call.”

He drifted out of the kitchen at that, holding his mug of tea in his hands. And when Foggy said ‘drifted,’ he fucking meant it. Strange’s toes skimmed across the ground and his cape seemed to do most of the heavy-lifting.

Foggy pressed his face into the kitchen counter for several moments. Then he grabbed his coffee mug and squared his shoulders.

He had a phone call to make.

***

Matt’s phone was in the back pocket of his jeans in the study that Foggy had woken up in. Luckily, it wasn’t too low-battery. Foggy learned from the date that he’d probably been dead for about three months, and that it was Monday. Why Matt was here instead of work was a mystery to Foggy, but it also wasn’t the thing that Foggy was worried about the most.

Instead, it was the fact that he was currently calling Anna Nelson.

He’d never wanted to hurt her. She may not be his biological mother, but she was his mother in every other way that could possibly count, and the idea that she had been hurting because of him, because he had the audacity to die before her—he didn’t want to think about it. He never wanted to make her or his father cry. They were too good for that. He used to thank a God that he didn’t believe in that his parents had gotten dusted the same as him and Matt, because the thought that his parents would’ve had to live without some of their children hurt more than the fact that he and Matt had skipped out on five years of other peoples’ lives.

The phone call connected on the second ring. Foggy drew in a quick breath as Anna said, “Matt? Is everything all right? You don’t usually call.”

Foggy shut his eyes. He felt his chin tremble and told himself to keep still. Anna said, “Matt?”

“Sorry,” is the first thing Foggy could think to say, and he had figured it would take Anna a moment to put together that it was Foggy calling, but the way she gasped, it was clear she heard him right away. 

A moment hung between them like a moon. And then Foggy said, “Um. Matt sort of—did something, I guess.”

“It’s you,” Anna said. She sounded almost flat. “It is, right? Please, baby, I can’t—”

“It is,” Foggy said, “Oh, my god, Mom, yeah, yeah it is. You adopted me when I was two, you—um, one time you picked me up from elementary school and I was crying and you took me to Dairy Queen in New Jersey and I asked you why we were all the way out there and you said it seemed like I needed a long drive, and you played my favorite Bruce Springsteen song all the way home, over and over even though you don’t even like Springsteen. It’s me, Mom, I promise.”

“Which—which Springsteen song?” she asked. She sounded breathless.

“Atlantic City,” Foggy said immediately, and he heard her call for his dad. He heard it as she began to cry, and he wished that Matt was awake, that he was beside him, because he felt so unmoored for a single moment that it would be nice to have someone to grab onto. As it stood, he held Matt’s phone with both hands and when his dad came on the phone, he said, “Dad, Dad, it’s me, it’s not a joke, it’s really me, I promise.”

“God, Foggy,” his dad sobbed. “What—how—?”

“I died,” he said. “I really did, I think, but Matt—I don’t know how, but he got that sorcerer, Doctor Strange, to cast a spell, and I just woke up today, I wouldn’t—I wouldn’t, you know? But I’m here, I’m still in Strange’s house, actually.”

He supposed that his parents must have put the phone on speakerphone at some point, because he could hear Anna suck in another deep breath, say something he couldn’t make out to his dad. His dad sounded very somber as he said, “And Matt?”

“Oh,” said Foggy, blinking. His face was blurry with tears, and he wiped at it with his sleeve until it came away soaked. “Matt’s fine, he’s—it’s a weird spell thing, usually it wouldn’t work, I can’t really explain it, but he’s okay, he is. He’s just really tired. He’s sleeping, that’s actually why I’m calling. Well, that, and I wanted to call you guys. I love you so much.”

“We love you too, baby,” his dad said. “Oh my god, this is—I can’t even tell you, Frankie. Where are you? Can we come get you? We really need to see you, son.”

“Please,” Foggy breathed. “I think—I think that Matt’s in a bad way, not from the spell. I think he needs to be around other people who love him, not just me.”

“Yeah,” said Anna softly. “Yeah, I thought the same. Where are you, sweetheart?”

“Strange’s house, I think it’s the Sanctorum or something in Greenwich Village? I can ask him for an exact address if you guys need it.”

“No, that’s fine,” said his dad. “I found it, I found the address on Google. We’re getting in the car now, okay? We’ll only be an hour or so.”

“Okay,” said Foggy, blinking hard so he didn’t only see tears. “I love you. I’ll see you soon.”

“I love you,” his dad affirmed, and Anna echoed him. “We’ll take care of you and Matt. For however long you both need it. We promise.”

And thank fucking God for that, because Foggy was pretty sure he was collapsing in on himself as it was.

***

The next time Matt woke up, it was to Foggy again.

He was shaking Matt’s shoulder gently, and when Matt stirred, Foggy said, “Hey, there, sleepyhead.” He sounded unsteady, his voice breaking in the middle. He was holding a glass of water and a protein bar in his hands, which he passed over to Matt.

“What’s wrong?” Matt asked, blinking quickly, trying to disperse the dregs of sleep so he could focus on Foggy. His heart was going a little fast, and he smelled a little teary, but he seemed physically fine. He held onto Foggy’s wrist as he sat up.

“Nothing,” Foggy said, and his heartbeat promised that he was telling the truth. “It’s just—I hope you don’t mind, but I called my parents using your phone. I didn’t want to make them mourn me any longer than they had to. They’re coming, they’re only five minutes away. Sorry for the late notice, Matty. I just wanted to let you sleep as long as possible.”

“Oh,” said Matt. He felt singularly stupid. Of course Foggy would want to go to his parents, his loved ones. He should tell him about Karen, actually. But for now, he should get himself home. Hopefully Foggy would want to see him sooner than later. “That’s fine, thanks for letting me know.”

There was a beat, and then Foggy said, “Oh, you idiot,” and then kissed Matt’s nose.

Matt blinked. He felt a blush start to spread on his cheeks.  “What?”

“I woke you up because they’re taking us both home,” Foggy explained. “You couldn’t think I was leaving you? After all that? You literally can’t get rid of me for the foreseeable future, buddy. Unless… I mean, it’s fine that we’re going back to my parents’ place, right?”

Matt said, “I’d follow you anywhere,” and Foggy huffed out a laugh that was as shaky as his voice.

“You sap. Obviously, me too,” he said, and kissed Matt gently. It was just a peck, dry and chaste. It was wonderful.

Foggy made Matt choke down the protein bar and drink the water before tugging Matt out of bed. Matt had noticed the slippery, polyester pajamas he’d been wearing before, but he couldn’t help wondering about them now that his mind felt a bit clearer.

“Well, you had to be naked for the spell, I guess. Or you’re an exhibitionist. Anyway, I borrowed them from Strange. I asked him for a bag to hold your other clothes since they’re a bit—gross,” Foggy explained, which was probably a vast underestimation based on how Foggy wrinkled his nose. 

“Yeah,” Matt said, since it seemed safer than sobbing all over him again and apologizing for his recent alcoholism. Foggy kept his hand on Matt’s back as he stood up, and he found himself enveloped in a hug. 

“We should talk,” said Foggy softly. “I’m worried about you. I really love you, okay?”

“I love you too,” Matt said. He pressed a kiss to Foggy’s neck just to feel him shiver underneath him. 

“Okay,” Foggy said, clearing his throat and stepping away. “That’s enough of that. I don’t want to be in an embarrassing situation when Mom and Dad get here.”

He set Matt’s shoes in front of him, and threw his coat on the bed. Matt tied his shoes and stood to wait for Foggy to tie his own. Foggy packed a paper shopping bag with Matt’s clothes, and another set of clothes too. Matt knew that Foggy was wearing another set of pajamas. He made the executive decision not to think about what the other clothing set could be. He had a fairly good idea, anyway.

Foggy nodded at the coat on the bed. “Put that on. Mom just texted that they were pulling up out front.”

Matt frowned. “But it’s yours.”

Foggy folded his arms. “You’re gonna be way colder than I am, buddy. And besides, it’s been yours for, like, the past three months. We can share custody.”

Matt blinked hard. He didn’t want to cry again. It was a disaster the last time he did. “But you love this coat,” he protested.

He could feel the heat of Foggy’s eyes on him. “And I love you,” he said. “Seems pretty convenient to me. Put the coat on, baby.”

Matt blushed harder. He put the coat on.

He knew that Foggy’s parents had made it into the house, but it was still strange to hear the rabbiting pulses of Ed and Anna as they descended the staircase. Foggy kept his hand wrapped around Matt’s hip like he was something fragile, something breakable. Usually, Matt would insist on his independence, but he couldn’t help but lean into Foggy’s side, his breath brushing the side of Foggy’s neck. Foggy’s hand squeezed at him every so often, as if to check he was real.

Matt knew the feeling.

Strange was entertaining Anna and Ed in a sitting room on the left side of the house.

“Matthew was fairly desperate,” he was saying to the both of them. “I figured it was in his best interest to give it a shot, since I was worried he would go to someone with less expertise if I turned him down.”

Foggy let Matt guide them there, and he knew when they were in eyesight from how Ed and Anna stopped breathing entirely. Foggy’s lips clicked as he broke into a sheepish smile. His hand didn’t leave Matt’s side.

“Long time, no see?” Foggy tried, and Anna let out a wounded sound and tackled the both of them in a hug. Ed wasn’t too far behind.

“God,” Ed said. He sounded choked. His hand grasped until he found Matt’s shoulder and he held on so tightly that Matt swore he could hear the bones creak under the pressure. “To think… Matt, I need to thank you. This is… you have no idea.”

Matt tried to shrug. “I might have some,” he said, and Ed snorted and held him tighter. 

Anna said, “Oh, my baby boy, look at you, you’re okay, you really are, oh my god,” and she was pinching at Foggy’s cheeks, then patting at Foggy’s arms, his sides, his hair, as if trying to guarantee he had all ten fingers and toes. Matt decided he would tell them the logistics of the spell a little later, when things calmed down. They deserved that peace of mind.

Strange had risen from his seat. His gaze seemed to be caught between Matt and Foggy, based on how he kept moving his head between the two of them. Eventually, he cleared his throat and said, “I wish you safe travels. Matthew and Franklin—you both should come and see me once you’ve gotten a bit more situated.”

Matt frowned. He’d sort of expected a summons from Strange, but he didn’t love that Foggy was included in it. Foggy squeezed his hip again and said to Strange, “Of course. Thank you again for all your help, Doctor.”

Strange inclined his head. “It’s my pleasure.” His heart didn’t exactly skip a beat.

But Matt didn’t really trust him, either. 

The Nelsons lived in a house in the suburbs of Jersey City ever since Theo had taken over the butchery and Ed had sold his shop. Ed drove the used sedan that was parked right outside the Sanctorum.

Anna took the passenger seat, and Foggy pulled Matt into the back. Matt rested his head on Foggy’s shoulder, and Foggy rested his against the glass of the window. Gentle classical music played through the speakers. She and Ed whispered to each other occasionally. It was a placid feeling in the car, an intentionally curated calm.

“Anything important happen while I was gone?” Foggy asked Matt quietly. Matt tried to think.

“Karen moved to San Francisco,” he volunteered. 

Foggy raised his head up. “What?”

“It’s—we closed down the firm,” Matt said. “After your… I gave our cases to Marci. From what I’ve heard, she’s been killing it in court. Even relocated to be more stateside for our clients. You’d be proud. And I. I wasn’t taking a lot of cases, and you know how Karen’s a workaholic. She got a good job offer at a newspaper out there and decided to take it.”

“Right,” said Foggy. He sounded a bit edgy. “So you’ve been alone these past months.”

Matt shrugged. Foggy was so warm and safe. He burrowed a little deeper into him and Foggy let it happen. “Anna and Ed checked on me a little bit. So did Jessica.”

“Jones?”

“I know,” Matt said. He closed his eyes and breathed. “I was surprised, too.”

Foggy traced out the outline of one of Matt’s ribs. “You gotta take better care of yourself, bud,” he said.

Matt hummed. “Sure.”

“There’s no way you’re falling asleep again,” Foggy said, but he sounded so warm and fond that Matt had to wrap his hand around Foggy’s knee and brush his thumb over the top of it. “You’re Mr. Insomniac.”

“Guess it’s catching up to me,” Matt murmured. 

“A lot of things are,” Foggy said. He carded his hand through Matt’s hair. “Stay awake for me, just until we get home. I’ll tuck you into bed and everything. I’ll even give you a goodnight kiss if you’re very good.”

“I’m always very good,” Matt lied.

“Well, then the odds are in your favor,” Foggy said.

***

Getting Matt up to Foggy’s room was a bit of a trial, but it wasn’t Matt’s fault. It was just the siblings that Foggy had to greet on the way up to his bedroom.

Georgia and Nikki were the youngest, and were apparently home for the weekend from college. They’d gotten a very brief explanation from Foggy’s parents, who had in turn gotten an even briefer explanation from Foggy, so they were confused but hopeful and teary by the time Foggy and Matt had opened the front door. 

Georgia was shouting as soon as she saw Foggy. “There’s NO fucking way! Foggy, how—oh my god, Matt, you look like you were run over by a truck and held prisoner—Foggy we missed you SO MUCH, I can’t—!”

Matt was doing a very admirable job of not flinching at Georgia’s volume. Foggy steadied him with a hand on his back, and apparently that signaled something to Nikki, who had been grasping at Foggy’s wrist but now drew back, hand coming up to her mouth.

“I knew it,” she said quietly. “The state that Matt was in at your—oh, I totally knew it.”

Foggy held out the arm that wasn’t around Matt, and Georgia and Nikki crowded underneath it. Nikki held onto Matt’s shoulder, too, making it a bit of an impromptu group hug.

Foggy said into Georgia’s hair, “Candace and Theo?”

“Theo’s in Florida with Becky and the kids, but he’s looking for the next flight home,” Georgia dutifully reported. “And Candy’s driving in from Buffalo now. They should both be here by the morning.”

“Good,” Foggy said. He kissed her hair and unfolded from the hug. Matt was still pale and unsteady, and he was holding Foggy’s coat closed with a fist. Anna and Ed had arrived sometime when Foggy hadn’t been looking, and were just watching, holding each other and leaning against the wall.

Foggy pulled Matt closer to him, and Matt didn’t even fight him, even though they were in front of Foggy’s family. He said into Matt’s ear, “Tired?”

“Hm,” Matt said, which was enough confirmation for Foggy.

He turned to his family and said, “I’m gonna get him situated upstairs, okay? I’ll be down in a bit.”

Georgia and Nikki opened their mouths, but Anna stepped forward and said, “Of course, sweetheart,” and she wrapped Matt up in a hug.

“Thank you,” she said to him. Her voice was damp with tears. After today, Foggy thought that no one should cry for at least one calendar year.

Matt just inclined his head. “It was for me, too.”

“I know, honey,” she said. She squeezed his shoulders as she stepped back. “It still means something.”

She nodded at Foggy, and he guided Matt’s hand into the crook of his elbow so they could go upstairs to his room.

It hadn’t been taken down after his death. Foggy hadn’t thought about it as a possibility until he opened the door and realized his heart was in his throat, and he felt calmer after seeing his framed posters of Jurassic Park from college and the old, cracked jewel CD cases resting on his bookshelves. It was clear that someone had waved around a duster in here and changed the sheets on the bed for him and Matt, and he was glad for it as Matt collapsed into the bed, his hand still gripped on Foggy’s elbow as if afraid he was about to dissipate into smoke.

“It’s okay, Matty,” he said softly. Matt nodded and pressed his face into a pillow, and Foggy pulled the covers up over him. “Do you need me to stay until you fall asleep?”

Matt shook his head, bringing his face out of the pillow just enough to say, “I could hear your heart from miles away.”

Foggy took the opportunity to press a lingering kiss into the side of Matt’s mouth. “Okay, stalker,” he said fondly. “I’m gonna go talk to my parents for a bit, okay? I’ll be up soon.”

“Okay,” Matt said, and his eyes were already drifting shut.

Only Ed and Anna were waiting for Foggy in the kitchen when Foggy came back downstairs, which was a huge relief. As much as Foggy loved Georgia and Nikki, they were a lot at the best of times, and Foggy needed to take a beat. He needed to talk to his parents, too.

His dad was washing dishes and packaging away the remnants of dinner. The microwave beeped, and Anna opened it and grabbed the plate inside. She set it in front of Foggy, and his mouth watered. It was a shepherd’s pie, doused in gravy. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was.

“Thanks,” he said hoarsely, and she nodded. She sat down across from him at the table and pressed her chin into her hands as he ate. He could feel her eyes on him, and tried not to feel strange about it. To her, her son had just come back to life halfway through her grieving process. 

Ed finished with the dishes and sat down next to Anna at the table. Foggy took another forkful of mashed potatoes and swallowed.

“So… what happened, exactly?” Ed asked quietly.

Foggy looked around. “Where are Nik and George?”

Anna shook her head. “I told them to wait in their room for a bit. I—your father and I, we’d like the full story if you’re willing to share it, and I didn’t want them to get upset. Is it—Foggy, is it permanent?”

Foggy had been planning to make a quip about Nikki and Georgia never following instructions, how they probably were eavesdropping with water glasses outside at that very moment. But the look on Anna’s face stopped him cold. He put down his fork to wrap her hand in his.

“Yes,” Foggy said. “As far as I’m aware, it is, and Matt definitely wouldn’t have it any other way, so I’m here to stay, Mom. I swear.”

“Good,” she said. She rubbed her thumb over the back of his hand. “Good.”

Foggy sucked in a deep breath and stood up from the table. He went to the cabinet and grabbed a glass for water and filled it from the tap. He sipped at it. He counted to ten in his head, and when he felt stable enough, he turned back to his parents and said, “The spell was—it was based in the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. I guess. I mean, I didn’t get a really solid explanation. Matt had to lead me out of, like—an alternate dimension. I don’t remember—I don’t remember what happened, what ended up killing me. He grabbed me before I was even in danger of dying. He was—I mean, he’s really unwell, I think. If the spell didn’t work, he was going to die. Just to save me. I don’t…”

“So you’re from a parallel dimension?” his dad asked. His brow was furrowed. He never loved science fiction; he always said that Star Trek was pretentious. He was gripping the back of his chair with a tight fist.

“I don’t think so,” Foggy said. “I, um. I woke up in the clothes I was buried in. I think.”

His mom pressed her hand to her mouth. Ed swallowed hard and stood up to pace. 

“I just… I know it’s not really your responsibility,” Foggy began, “but. I’m seriously worried about Matt, and he doesn’t have any family—well, I guess his mom’s around but she seriously sucks—and I was hoping that maybe. We could stay awhile. The both of us. I guess I have to get legally raised from the dead and everything, and I want to get Matt into therapy. He doesn’t look like he’s been eating, or, or sleeping, and he doesn’t have anyone to take care of him except for me. For us, if you’re okay with it.”

Ed stopped pacing long enough to look hard at Foggy. “If you seriously don’t think that man is part of our family after what he just did, you’re insane, Frankie.”

“What your father means to say,” Anna cuts in neatly, “is that we were already worried about him. We love him, Foggy. Maybe not as much as you do, but he’s family. Or at the very least, he will be.”

She leveled Foggy with a look and he had to fight hard not to blush. He rubbed the back of his head with his hand and said, “We weren’t together before I died, Mom.”

“But now you are,” she said with the kind of tone that Foggy couldn’t even bother to refute. 

Foggy did his best not to blush as he said, “Well, he did come and get me using a spell that’s inherently romantic. And I kissed him when he did, and he kissed me when he woke up the first time. So.”

Anna smiled. It was the first real genuine smile out of her all night—it had that impish quality that was a hallmark for her. Foggy remembered trying to recreate it in the mirror when he was a child, to very mixed results. 

“I always knew there was something there,” she admitted. “I’d given up hope on you two getting together, though. Despite the circumstances, I’m—I’m really happy for you, baby.”

She got up to give Foggy a tight hug.

Beside them, Foggy’s dad said, “Wait, hold on. How did Matt convince Doctor Strange, a literal Avenger, to help him out?”

Foggy blinked. His blood froze in his veins for a second, before pumping so loudly that he could hear the rush like a broken fire hydrant in his head. 

Foggy said, “Oh, um. I’m not quite clear on that point. You’ll have to ask him.”

And then, he faked a yawn so big and loud that his mom and dad winced in sympathy and sent him upstairs, his half-eaten plate of food boxed up neatly and set in the refrigerator.

Foggy would feel bad, but as he stripped out of the strange matching set of pajamas he’d quasi-stolen from Strange, into a much more normal pair of flannel pants and a Strokes t-shirt, he figured that Matt had sort of left him out to dry. And he’d lied enough about his nighttime hobbies. He shouldn’t make Foggy do it for him.

As Foggy climbed into bed next to Matt, Matt exhaled loudly into his pillow. He was deep asleep again. The bruises under his eyes were fading from a deep purple to something mildly less concerning, which was much nicer to see.

Foggy reached for Matt’s hand and held it to his heart, playing with his fingers until Matt inched closer to Foggy in his sleep, his mouth sighing open.

“You’re so lucky I love you,” Foggy whispered to him, even as he knew it was the other way around, too.

***

Matt woke up the next day to birds chirping outside the window and the blanket pulled off of him. Foggy had wrapped it around himself in his sleep. His heart beat just as steady as it did yesterday. As steady as it would for decades to come. Matt would make sure of it.

Downstairs, he could smell Ed making breakfast. He knew that the Nelsons were typically a fend-for-yourself kind of family, at least until dinner. ‘They only make breakfast for holidays, birthdays, and funerals,’ was what Foggy always said. It was close enough to a holiday, Matt supposed. Ed was making bacon, eggs, and pancakes. The smell of the vanilla extract sitting uncapped on the counter made Matt’s nose twitch.

He could hear a car just a little bit down the street, blasting Fleetwood Mac. The sound of the engine and the music choice signaled Candace, probably down from upstate New York just for this. The house would be full of Nelsons by the end of the day. It would be both overwhelming and nice, which was also how Matt felt about most of their Christmases.

Matt’s hand was tangled up in Foggy’s. As he pulled away gently, Foggy’s breath stirred as he woke. He muttered something unintelligible and pushed his face closer to Matt. His morning breath wafted across Matt’s face, and it was a testament to Matt’s delusional love that he didn’t even mind it.

“Candace is almost here,” Matt told Foggy quietly. “And your dad’s making breakfast.”

“Yeah, I can smell the bacon grease even without your dog nose,” Foggy mumbled. He brushed his thumb under Matt’s eye and fidgeted with the blanket until it was covering Matt's toes again. “You feeling a bit better today?”

“Of course,” Matt said. “You’re here.”

Foggy sighed, even as he wrapped a hand around Matt’s shoulder. His hand was so big and warm. He still had a callus on his index finger from how he held his pens. “We gotta talk a little about that, Matty,” he said softly. 

Matt frowned.

“Later,” said Foggy, even as he traced the shape of Matt’s nose. “I just think that therapy is a worthwhile investment. From everything I’ve heard.”

“But you’re here now,” said Matt.

“The fact that you think that that’s an answer is probably part of the problem.”

Matt frowned harder and rolled over on his side to better face Foggy. “The problem’s solved.”

“I just want you to take care of yourself,” Foggy said patiently. “Because I love and care about you, and it scares me how far-gone you seemed to be in the months I was gone.”

“No one’s told you anything,” Matt pointed out.

Foggy sighed. “You’re so bull-headed.”

“I’m a lawyer,” Matt said.

“Oh, that’s such a coincidence, because I am too,” Foggy said. “Don’t think you can argue your way out of this.”

“Technically, you’re not a lawyer right now, you’re a corpse,” said Matt, and then immediately regretted it from how his heart slipped in his chest.

Foggy pulled his arms around Matt and pulled his head to his chest. “You hear that?”

 “I hear a lot of things,” said Matt, even as he pressed against the space above Foggy’s heart and felt it pound against the shell of his ear.

Foggy let him stay like that for a few minutes, and then tilted Matt’s chin up so he could kiss him properly. He opened his mouth against Matt, and they stayed like that for a long time, just breathing in each other, before he broke and started mouthing at Matt’s neck instead.

Matt heard a car door slam outside. “I think Candace is here, now.”

“Mm,” said Foggy.

“We should probably go downstairs,” Matt continued, and gasped as Foggy’s teeth scraped against his collarbone. “Or—get ready, or—oh, my god, Fogs, your parents are downstairs. ”

“Mm,” said Foggy again. 

Matt shut his eyes and pushed his legs in between Foggy’s. “Or we could stay here,” Matt said as Foggy thumbed at the buttons of Matt’s sleep shirt.

“Just for a bit,” said Foggy. “It would be nice, right? For just a moment.”

“Yeah,” said Matt. He fiddled with the hem of Foggy’s t-shirt. It was one of his threadbare band shirts. It smelled so much like him that it made Matt want to cry. “You may be right about therapy. Or, at least. I could try. If you wanted.”

“You choose to think at the exact wrong moments,” said Foggy, who then became suddenly very interested in the drawstring of Matt’s pants. Candace had now made it inside the house, and was listening to Ed and Anna explain that yes, Foggy was here to stay, and yes, he and Matt were together now, and everyone on the whole was very happy about it, don’t make a big deal or they’ll get skittish.

Matt smiled into another kiss that Foggy pressed to his mouth at that.

It was the best morning he’d ever had.

Chapter Text

Their monthly dinners with Karen were gradually getting easier; in fact, Matt would go so far as to say that it was fun to see her now, and he was looking forward to this particular night, since it was a fusion place he and Foggy had been meaning to try out for ages. 

And besides, it was always good to see Karen.

Not that he’d ever wanted to go without seeing her. But he’d understood her need to leave.

So much had happened since she’d moved to New York, and considering Matt’s own reaction to Foggy’s death, her move to San Francisco was extremely reasonable in comparison.

***

A few days after Foggy came back, he’d stepped outside to take a call. Matt knew that it was to Karen. And moreover, he knew he wasn’t necessarily supposed to be listening in.

But the venom in Foggy's voice was so palpable that it had taken Matt aback, had caused him to drop the book he’d been reading on the Nelsons’ couch and listen deeper.

You know he has no one else, Foggy had hissed at her. We’re supposed to be his family, Karen. Family doesn’t run away when it gets hard. I trusted you to be there for each other if anyone happened to me. I thought you cared for him. For me, too.

You don’t understand it at all, Karen snapped in response, her voice tinny in Foggy’s phone speaker. His grief was like a black hole. I mean, look what happened, and I’m not saying I’m not happy, Foggy, I’m fucking thrilled. It was just—there was no room for my own sadness, and it was hard, okay? It was really—it was really hard.

Matt made the executive decision to stop listening to him after that. He went and found one of Theo’s kids and asked her to narrate a Fast & The Furious movie on cable instead. He didn’t need to listen to Foggy and Karen sniping at each other over him like he was a bartering chip in their divorce.

It wasn’t long after that that Matt found a therapist in his network and started going on the condition that Foggy go, too.

“No offense, but I’m not the most traumatized orphan on the face of the planet, babe,” Foggy had joked when Matt first suggested it.

Matt bristled and said, “Yeah, well. You died very suddenly twice in a row and have more mommy issues than I do, somehow.”

The Rosalind Sharpe mention might have been a low blow. But Foggy agreed to go to therapy, so there was that, at least.

Despite the frosty phone call, Karen had started making a concerted effort to come to New York and meet up with Matt and Foggy afterward. Hence, the monthly dinners that were stilted at best, and almost hostile at worst.

The worst one had been the third one, three months after Foggy came back to life. Matt hadn’t been very hungry, and tried to order a side salad in lieu of an entree. Foggy had shaken his head and said, “You need at least a  bowl of pasta, you didn’t eat anything at lunch,” and Karen had huffed and said, “Foggy. He’s a grown man. Let him make his own decisions.”

At this point, Foggy had turned to face Karen, and something on his face must have been so alarming that even Karen, who was fairly unflappable, seemed cowed, based on the blood flooding to her face and the way her heart picked up. He said, “Fuck off, Karen. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

Matt had only sighed. He waved the server away and said he was stepping out for fresh air.

He counted, and before a full minute had passed, Foggy was outside, leaning against the wall of the restaurant with Matt.

Matt turned to him and said, “I don’t need you to be my caretaker, Fogs. I don’t need you and Karen talking about me like I’m not there. I need you to be my partner, okay? I don’t want you to be anything other than that.”

“You’re right,” said Foggy, and stepped closer into Matt’s space, his hand sliding up to grasp at Matt’s elbow. “I just—she just…”

“If you don’t want to stay friends with her, that’s fine,” said Matt. “But don’t use me as a trump card. Be angry at her without me, okay?”

The rest of the dinner was awkward and quiet, but when Karen got up to leave, Foggy actually hugged her. Since then, it’s been getting steadily better between the two of them, which was a relief.

Matt wasn’t used to being the neutral party between the three of them, and he had no idea how Karen and Foggy had done it before. It was exhausting.

***

Now, Foggy was exiting their bedroom, buttoning up the top of his shirt. The air moved around his face as he smiled at Matt, who was on the couch with a deposition transcript from their latest case.

“How do I look, babe?” he asked.

“Hideous, I’m sure,” Matt said drily, and set the printout down on the coffee table (which was actually Foggy’s, pulled from storage—Foggy had informed Matt gleefully that the hefty wood and carved legs of the table clashed horribly with Matt’s more spartan, modern furniture). 

Foggy pressed his hands up to his heart. “The love of my life! My one true love, my fiance, dragging me through the mud. What has this world come to?!”

He dramatically held his left hand up, brandishing his ring. It was a very silly gesture, considering the only other person with him was literally blind, but Matt couldn’t help but smile at it anyway, getting up from the couch just so he could kiss Foggy properly.

***

The proposal was very quiet, but, according to Foggy, “That’s literally fine, I wouldn’t have it any other way actually, if you did anything dramatic I would start to think it was a disturbing pattern of behavior, Matty.”

It was honestly Anna’s fault, too. Not that blame should be assigned to a proposal, but she’d come by Matt and Foggy’s office (“third time’s the charm for Nelson and Murdock,” Foggy had joked as they signed a lease on a new office space) three months after Foggy’s resurrection (“A.K.A. my undeath day, and everyone should know that Matt and I both expect presents and a party next year”). 

“Oh, I was just in the neighborhood and wanted to check on my two favorite lawyers,” Anna had explained to Foggy and Matt. The bag of deli cuts from Nelson’s Meats hanging from her wrist supported her alibi, so Matt and Foggy toured her around the small space. It was nice—full of hardwood floors and solid walls and even an air conditioner that went through the wall instead of a window unit. The radiator sounded like a rattlesnake and smelled a little musty every time it turned on, but you couldn’t win every battle. 

After Anna had complimented the window trimmings, the oriental rugs, and the art prints that Foggy had ordered off Etsy, Matt excused himself to make coffee for the three of them. Foggy was well-aware that Matt was still within earshot, standing at the little kitchenette counter outside of Foggy's office.

Anna was not.

“When are you going to propose to that boy,” Anna demanded as soon as Foggy shut the door to his office. “I mean, it’s getting ridiculous, Franklin, and yes, I’m using your full name for effect.”

Foggy choked on his own spit and fumbled with the chair he was pulling out for Anna. Matt couldn’t blame him. He’d almost dropped the coffee canister, and had to grip the counter for a few moments as his ears tuned fully into the conversation.

“Mom, we’re—we’re hardly boys, we’re pushing forty.”

That wasn’t the part that Matt would have focused on, and Anna seemed to agree with him based on how she clicked her tongue as she sat down. “Even better reason to marry Matt sooner than later.”

“I—Mom, we’re—it’s only been five months, I mean, it’s still a little early to propose in that sense—”

“Matt went to hell to get you back,” Anna said. She tried to sound dismissive, but Matt could hear the tremble in her voice. Matt took a deep breath and poured the coffee grounds into the paper filter, checked the water, and turned the coffeemaker on. It gurgled quietly as it woke up.

“It wasn’t hell,” Foggy said. He sounded just as shaky as Anna. He heard the firm way Foggy grabbed her hand. “But yes. And he’s in therapy for it, Mom. You and I both know that isn’t exactly the healthiest decision he could have made.”

Anna took a deep, slow breath. Matt chewed on his upper lip as he pulled mugs out, as he got the milk out of their mini fridge and reached for the basket of sugar packets. It was a sticking point between Matt and Foggy. Between Matt and his very nice therapist named Catherine, even.

Catherine and Foggy claimed that Matt’s actions were ‘concerning’ and showed a ‘complete and utter disregard for his own safety.’ Matt thought that to be truly safe, he needed Foggy in his life at all costs.

Catherine said that they were codependent, but she liked how Matt talked about Foggy, and she mostly agreed with Foggy’s opinions of Matt. So she hadn’t told Matt to break up with Foggy, which was good, because he’d probably stop going to therapy if she had.

“All I’m saying,” Anna said eventually, as the coffeemaker chirped loudly at Matt, “is that you two are completely committed to each other in a way that I can’t even say Theo and Becky are. And you know I love Becky. And Matt’s already done his big romantic gesture, so it’s your turn to step up, Foggy.”

Foggy laughed a little, which was good. It meant he wasn’t completely uncomfortable with the idea of marrying Matt. Matt grabbed the coffee pot by the handle and began pouring it into Foggy’s mug—which had a big picture of a frog carved into it, because his obsession with frogs was more of a gimmick than anything else these days.

“You know I’d marry him in a heartbeat,” Foggy told Anna, which made Matt jerk and spill a bit of coffee over the counter. He hissed and set it down for a moment to grab a paper towel and wipe it over the counter, ears still perked up. Foggy had to know Matt was listening, right? He had to know. His heartbeat was raised. He was hotter than he usually ran. He had to know.

“I just—I don’t want to introduce too much at once,” said Foggy. Matt listened to the scrape of air as Foggy tried to brush his hair behind his ear—a holdover from when he was still shaggy-headed. “I mean, the paperwork for me to be legally raised from the dead only came through two months ago, and we haven’t even lived together for a full year—yes, Mom, I remember we were roommates for years, don’t give me that look. It’s just different. ”

“You two will swear your undying love to each other in every possible way except the way that matters,” Anna huffed, but she sounded slightly amused, in Matt’s opinion. He finished pouring the coffees and picked up the mugs carefully and headed to Foggy’s office.

Foggy opened the door for Matt once he got close, and Anna made a tsking sound as Matt handed her a mug. “Sorry, sweetheart, I didn’t even think about how you’d need a hand with the coffees.”

Matt waved her off, and he could feel the air move around them as Foggy made the same movement at the same time. Foggy leaned in to press a kiss to Matt’s temple as he grabbed his own mug and settled down at his desk.

“What are we talking about?” Matt asked. He sipped his coffee to hide his smile. He could feel the heat of Foggy’s gaze on him, even as Anna cleared her throat and said, “Oh, just the office. It’s a great location, even if I do miss your old one. It was easier for parking.”

They chatted like that for another hour or so. Foggy’s heartbeat stayed steady and calm. Just happy to be with Matt and Anna. Anna badgered Matt and Foggy about getting tickets for Nikki and Georgia’s graduation, and they talked about Candace’s incipient promotion at work, the infinity pool that Ed wanted installed in their backyard, and whether Theo should switch meat distributors (at Matt’s emphatic yes, Foggy’s heart picked up only slightly, and he gently turned down the bacon that Anna tried to give them).

Finally, Anna checked her watch and sighed. “Oh, boys, I should probably be getting back. Ed’s trying a new lasagna recipe for dinner tonight, and I promised him we could make it an occasion.”

“Still not boys, still fully grown men,” Foggy said, so quietly that only Matt could hear. He still gently hip-checked Foggy as he stood from his seat to see Anna off. Foggy huffed, and caught the side of Matt’s waist to hold him in place. His heart was beating faster now, had been faster ever since Anna had started making noises about leaving, around half an hour ago.

Anna let Matt and Foggy walk her to the lobby of the building but shook her head when Foggy said he'd walk her to her car. “I have two perfectly good legs, and you two have a perfectly good law practice you should be attending to,” said Anna. “Don’t let me be a distraction.”

“The work will keep,” Foggy said. He sounded legitimately nervous now. Matt reached for his hand, and he tangled his fingers with Matt’s on instinct. His heart was going so fast.

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” Anna said, and gave him and Matt one last hug before stepping out onto the street.

There was a delicate moment in the time after she left. Matt squeezed Foggy’s hand and gently let it go, and Foggy turned to him, sucking in a deep breath.

“So you heard,” he said plainly, and Matt smiled.

“Yeah,” Matt said, and Foggy said, “I guess I’m lucky I didn’t want to plan an elaborate proposal, that would be such a headache—”

Matt kissed the rest of Foggy’s words out of his mouth. Foggy sighed, but let Matt tug him up against the wall and hold him there for a moment. When he finally stepped away, Foggy said, “Glad we gave a show to our landlord,” and nodded at a security camera buzzing in the corner of the ceiling.

“I’ll marry you if you want,” Matt said. “However you want.”

“I really was going to propose,” Foggy protested. “Mom’s right, it is my turn, you asshole. I know you’d probably use your stupid—metal-detecting powers that probably sound off like an alarm when I even think about going to a ring shop, but I—I was actually going to oh-so-carefully check how you felt about marriage to me, like next week, I wrote it on my physical calendar so you wouldn’t find it and everything. It was step one in a very carefully constructed plan to get you to marry me, Matt.”

“I’m sure,” Matt said, and moved closer just so he could feel Foggy sigh against his lips. “If it does matter to you—I can wait for your plan, Fogs. I just…”

“I know,” Foggy said, sounding impossibly fond. His beard was scratchy against Matt’s skin—that’s how close he stood, and Matt loved it, he loved everything about him. He really would marry him in a heartbeat—sometimes even fantasized about putting on the suit and kidnapping him and taking him to town hall just for the hell of it.

“Well, it’s not like you’d be able to appreciate the ring when I gave it to you,” Foggy said lightly. He wrapped his hand around Matt’s and squeezed it. “We could always just… go to a jeweller’s tomorrow and get some rings. And then we’d be engaged. Just like that.”

He sounded casual, but his cheeks flushed with blood as he spoke, and his heart sped up ever-so-slightly. He liked the idea. To be fair, so did Matt.

Still, Matt stepped away from Foggy again, and Foggy let Matt fiddle with his collar a bit, smooth out his jacket. Matt said, “It’s not too soon? Because I. I understand what you mean, with it all happening pretty quickly. If there’s any part of you that feels better waiting, then I’m okay to wait, Fogs.”

“I guess it is a little fast, but Matty. We've known each other for twenty years. We know we'll marry each other at some point,” Foggy pointed out, and his heart skipped a beat as he said ‘marry.’ Matt grinned and Foggy nudged him with his shoulder. 

“It’s just the timeline we’d need to figure out,” Foggy continued. “And I’m pretty sure engaged couples typically wait until after they’re engaged to figure that out anyway. And I’d. I’d like a ring, I think.”

Matt moved closer again and said, “Same here.”

Foggy stopped him with a hand to his shoulder. “We can’t keep canoodling in the lobby of our office building.” Then, after a moment: “Oh, fuck, we totally just got engaged in the lobby of our office building, didn’t we?”

Matt laughed. “Just a little. No rings after all, like you said.”

“You’re so annoying,” said Foggy, but squeezed Matt’s hand and buried his smile in Matt’s hair.

The next day, they both took the morning off and stopped by a jewelry shop in Midtown (because, as Foggy argued, any jewelry in Hell’s Kitchen was liable to have been grave-robbed, and “I’ve already been down that road, buddy, I don’t need my ring to come from six feet under, too.”)

Matt, for obvious reasons, couldn’t see the engagement rings that Foggy finally settled on. But he remembered the little gasp of recognition when he slid Matt’s ring onto his finger, and the ring felt nice against his skin. It was intricately carved, pure silver from the smell of it, and Foggy almost teared up as he looked at Matt’s left hand. Foggy got a matching one for himself, and he did cry at that, the salt smell delicate in the air. 

Later, when Foggy called Anna, he simply said, “He overheard you, you know,” and held Matt’s hand while she cried and tried to convince them to host the wedding reception right out of her and Ed’s house.

***

Karen was already at the restaurant when they arrived. The host led a snaking path through tightly-packed tables until Matt could smell the light, floral scent of Karen’s perfume. She seemed relaxed in her seat, and was tapping away at her phone until she caught sight of Matt and Foggy. She stood and hugged the both of them, and when she sat down, it was clear that she was excited about something.

“So what’s got you in such good spirits?” Foggy asked when he settled into his seat. Karen sat forward and wrapped her hands in a loose fist.

“I heard a rumor,” she said, “that you were learning magic. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about this, Foggy!”

“Oh,” said Foggy, and his hand flexed underneath the table even as Matt could hear the smile in his voice. “Now, who did you hear that from?”

“I have my sources,” she said.

“So you were drinking with Jess,” Foggy said, and Matt laughed. 

Foggy reached over and squeezed Matt’s knee gently as Karen said, “Well, I mean, a reporter never reveals her sources. But you have to show me something, I mean. I might’ve expected Matt to take up magic, considering how weird the rest of his life is—but it’s so fun that you’re learning, Fog.”

“Hey, I hate magic,” Matt protested lightly, and Foggy said, “No, you don’t.”

“I don’t hate your magic,” Matt amended, earning himself another knee squeeze.

Karen snapped her fingers and pointed at Foggy’s hands. “Magic. Show me, now, please please please. ”

Foggy huffed, but let go of Matt’s knees to shake out his hands. He leaned a bit forward, matching Karen’s posture, and pulled the burning tealight on the table toward him. He spread his fingers out in a cage. He concentrated, and Matt could feel the air change, becoming charged with energy as his fingers twisted around a rune. When he drew back, Karen gasped.

Matt couldn’t quite make out the look of the spell with his radar sense—he could only sense the energy, the heat of it, which was always a bit blurry and out of focus. But he could tell there was a magic barrier enveloping the tealight holder, and that it burned as brightly as the candle on the table. 

Karen reached out a hand, and then hesitated. She turned to face Foggy. “Can I—I mean, is it safe to touch? Is it even— can you even touch it, or is it like—?” She waved her hands around in the air.

Foggy laughed. “Sure, you can touch it. It’s just a barrier spell.”

“Like a forcefield?” Karen asked. She poked at the rune and Matt could sense the energy push away from her touch, zipping around like lightning scattering in a thunderstorm. The wick flame of the tealight sputtered underneath. The heat spilled out like a broken carton of milk in Matt’s perception.

“Pretty much,” said Foggy. He relaxed back in his seat, and his arm wrapped around the back of Matt’s chair. “It’s just a couple of books and a lesson here and there, when Strange remembers that I’m around. It’s not too hard once you get the hang of it.”

“Okay, Mr. Columbia Lawyer,” Karen teased. She tested out the barrier with her middle and ring fingertips this time, using the surface tension of the spell to swirl little eddies into the rune that even Matt could kind-of, sort-of see. “How’d you learn you can do this, anyway? Can everyone do this? Because being a magic wielder is much more interesting than a newspaper reporter, I have to say.”

“Not as interesting as being a PI, though,” said Foggy, which surprised Matt. It was Foggy’s first overt reference to their old firm that wasn’t steeped in bitterness, and his heart stayed steady as he spoke. “And apparently there’s like a magical aptitude thing—I don’t really understand it. But it does turn out that my granny is a bit more of a witch than I ever gave her credit for. I should have known, honestly. She kept telling me throughout college that Matt could see more than I could. I thought she was just fucking with me.”

Matt’s mouth curled up. Foggy, catching sight of him, slapped the back of Matt’s chair gently. 

Karen didn’t even seem to notice. She kept pushing at the rune with her hands, the energy of Foggy’s magic rippling around her. She was singularly fascinated in a way that Matt had rarely ever seen her. He could hardly blame her for it. 

***

For the first two weeks after everything, Matt and Foggy didn’t talk about the Devil.

In all fairness, it just wasn’t relevant at first. Matt wanted Foggy to get a clean bill of health from a doctor, and Foggy was researching therapists for the both of them, and Foggy wanted Matt to eat and sleep and then eat and sleep even more. “It’s like you’re the witch from Hansel and Gretel, trying to fatten me up,” Matt accused at one point, and Foggy just rolled his eyes and stuffed a strawberry into Matt’s mouth two seconds later.

It helped that they were staying at Foggy’s parents’ house too, which was obviously off-limits for Devil activities; and their neighborhood had a spectacularly low crime rate, anyway. 

But eventually, it was time for them to go back to Hell’s Kitchen. They stopped by the storage facility in Queens for Foggy’s things, and rented a car to transport all of Foggy’s essentials to Matt’s apartment. The afternoon had gone well—it was just unboxing and soft rock playing from Matt’s old record player, and Foggy catching Matt around the wrist to press kisses into his hair, his forehead, his lips. 

And then night fell, and Matt heard the police sirens start to blare.

Matt tried to ignore it, focused instead on Foggy’s heartbeat and the sound of his breath, the pattern of his footsteps as he cooked dinner at the stovetop. But something must have been evident in his face, or the way his shoulders carried the tension. Foggy caught one look at him and turned the burners down, covering the sauce with a lid and turning off the pasta water entirely.

“Sorry,” Matt said. “Just, you know—city sounds. I’ll get used to it.”

Foggy huffed out something that, in a certain light, could resemble a laugh. “I’m sure you will. Just like you always do.”

There was a strange gravity to his voice. Matt didn't like it. He’d been grabbing bottles of ginger beer from the refrigerator for both of them (Foggy had asked if they could both quit drinking for a few months, and Matt wholeheartedly agreed), and he uncapped both bottles and left one next to Foggy on the counter. He moved out of the kitchen.

Foggy didn’t seem to even hesitate as he picked up the bottle and followed Matt.

“We should talk about it,” he said. He sounded purposely casual. Matt shrugged.

His hands squeezed the neck of his ginger beer bottle as he took a sip. He'd stopped in the middle of the living room. He felt like how he imagined deers must feel when they're caught in headlights.

Foggy guided them over to the couch. He observed Matt for a few moments and then said, “Relax. It’s going to be a good conversation.”

Matt shook his head. “I know—I know that the Devil invites trouble, and when you… I mean, it was. I lived in the suit, Foggy. I hated it, I wanted to give it up, but I couldn’t because I was. I was so angry, I’ve never felt so out of my mind. The Devil isn’t a good thing, I know that, it’s just. It’s just loud sometimes, okay?”

He could hear the edge in his own voice, the whine of desperation. Foggy shook his head and moved closer to Matt on the couch. He rested his hands in his lap, his ginger beer bottle on the floor. Matt took a long drink from his own and sighed.

“Matty,” Foggy said, “I’m not going to ask you to give up Daredevil. Okay? This isn’t that conversation.”

Matt blinked. “But Fogs, you—you hate it, and it hurt you. I don’t want to be Daredevil anymore, I don’t.”

“I think that’s a lie,” Foggy said simply, and Matt balked. Foggy shook his head. “No, I don’t think you’re lying to me, honey, I just think you’re lying to yourself. I think, with your senses—with the way you were raised—I think you’re just… desperate for a fight, and you’re desperate to do the right thing. And I like that about you, okay? I like that you’re always trying to make a difference. Sure, I wish that it involved a little less law-breaking, but. Matty, during the spell—it was trying to tell us something about each other. It was pushing us to accept each other as we are. I don’t want to ignore it. I don’t want to ignore the parts of you that make you you. ”

Matt bit down on his lip. He leaned down to set his bottle next to Foggy’s on the floor, and he rubbed his neck with both hands as he said, “I don’t—I don’t want it to be part of myself, Fogs. I want… I don’t want to invite it back in. The danger. There are plenty of other vigilantes out there—I mean, Spider-Man’s basically taking care of all of Queens. Someone’ll come along, and—and we can save people in the daylight. Hell’s Kitchen’s getting gentrified as fuck anyway, I mean, the mobs have basically all moved to Jersey because of rent pricing anyway.”

Foggy really laughed this time, full-bodied and loud. “Yeah, there are too many wine bars in the neighborhood, it’s hard to feel unsafe nowadays.”

“Yeah,” said Matt. He took a chance. He reached out, and Foggy grabbed his hand.

He rubbed his thumb over Matt's knuckles. “But… I want you to know,” he said. “That if you ever feel like you need to go out as Daredevil. I’m not going to stop you, but I will have some rules, okay?”

Matt sucked in a deep breath. He wanted to argue—if he wasn’t going to be Daredevil, then there was no need to keep talking about this, about how Foggy didn’t trust Matt when Matt said he wouldn’t be a vigilante anymore. But. 

But Foggy had a point, and it’s not like Matt’s ever proved before that he can give up the Devil. Not to himself, certainly not to Foggy. 

“Okay,” Matt said, almost soundless. Foggy kept rubbing Matt’s hand. He was close enough that Matt could hear his lips pull into a smile, the graze of air against his exposed teeth, the happy pull of his dimple as it slotted into place.

“Good,” he said softly, and then cleared his throat. He reached over to grab his beer bottle and said, “Okay, so the first rule is you’ll have to tell me as soon as you decide to go out. No matter what. If I’m not around, you text me. I need to know when to freak out about your possible bodily harm versus when not to. It’ll do wonders for my anxiety.”

"Done," Matt said. That made total sense to Matt; he didn't want Foggy worrying over him, either.

Foggy nodded. He continued, “and you’ll have to teach me some first-aid basics. I’m going to get registered with a course as soon as I can, but I want to feel confident in helping you get stitched up. Claire’s too busy with Luke, and you need someone to look after you.”

“I don’t want to have to ask you to do that,” Matt said quietly, and Foggy squeezed his hand. 

“That’s convenient, because you didn’t,” he said. “I'm asking you to let me help you. It's different. No head wounds, though. That’s too much blood and I’d freak out. We’re getting you to a hospital for something like that, and you can tell them you’re in the world’s worst fight club if they ask you about your scars, okay?”

Matt laughed, and Foggy’s smile grew bigger.

He squeezed Matt’s hand again and said, “There’s one more thing.”

Matt turned into Foggy a little more. Just to hear the hitch in his breath, the way he leaned into Matt instinctively. “Yeah?” 

“Yeah, you dick,” Foggy said, shaking his head. “And don’t think you can seduce me out of this conversation. You totally can, but it’ll keep coming back like a weed.”

Matt smiled, but moved back obediently.

Foggy took a deep breath. “I kind of want to show you something, but I actually don’t know if you’ll see it, so just—you know, let me try, and then I’ll explain, okay?”

“I don’t see anything,” Matt said. “Ever, really.”

“Shut up. Okay, I’m concentrating.”

He was. There was a strange heat pooling in his hands—something that wasn’t really hot at all, but it lit Foggy’s hands up in Matt’s perception, a burning brand that highlighted all the bones and muscles in Foggy’s fingers. Matt opened his mouth, slightly alarmed, but Foggy hushed him. The heat—energy, really—kept building, and then Foggy reached over to touch Matt’s shoulder, and his fingers felt the same as always.

Foggy traced something into the fabric of Matt’s shirt. He shivered—or, no, that wasn’t exactly right. It was more that a shiver overtook him, and the energy from Foggy’s hands dispersed into Matt’s skin. He could feel it humming with him, but it didn’t feel bad.

It just felt like Foggy.

“What did you do?” Matt asked, eyebrows pushing together. “That felt—different. What was that? How did you do that?”

Foggy shook out his fingers. “Technically, you’re not supposed to feel anything at all, but I knew you would, you sensitive freak.”

“Foggy.”

“I—might be a bit magic,” Foggy said.

Matt wasn’t sure what his face was doing, but it must have been silly, based on how Foggy choked back a laugh as Matt said, "A bit? What does that even mean?"

“Strange told me! He sent me a book in the mail like a week ago. The day that Theo and Becky made you go get ice cream with them and their kids?”

“Becky said I looked skinny,” Matt said, and then shook his head. “You’re magic?”

“Yeah,” Foggy said, and Matt heard his teeth dig into the skin of his lip. “It’s—I mean, I’m not gonna ever go out and be a vigilante, that would be really fucking stupid of me—and yes, that is a dig at you, Daredevil— but. I figured practicing, and, um. And learning protection and healing from it. I figured it would only be a good thing.”

Matt touched his chest. “You… that was a protection charm?”

Foggy shrugged. “Yeah. Probably weak as shit, honestly, but if you stub your toe in the next two hours, it’s supposed to keep you from getting injured from it. I just thought—if you go out as Daredevil again, or if something like with Bullseye happens… I just thought it would be better if I was prepared for it.”

Matt blinked. Foggy started to say, “I don’t think it’s fair of you if you’re mad about this, considering—”

He didn’t get to the end of his sentence, because Matt tackled him into a kiss.

Foggy landed on the couch cushions from the force, but he kissed back gently. His hand came up to hold Matt’s shoulder, and the other one grazed the small of his back. When Matt came up for air, Foggy said, “So you’re not mad. You don’t hate the magic thing?”

“I hate magic,” Matt clarified, if only to hear Foggy’s heart stutter in his chest a bit. Two weeks of keeping it a secret. Matt was justified.

But then he cupped Foggy’s cheek and said, “I don’t hate yours, though.”

Foggy groaned, but he was cut off by Matt chasing his mouth into another, deeper kiss.

***

Dinner was good, if not a bit weird. Matt ordered something called the “sushi Greek salad,” which came with smoked tuna. 

“Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of sushi?” Karen had asked when Matt ordered it. “Like, I feel like half the appeal of sushi is that the fish is raw.”

“That’s kind of why I’m ordering it,” Matt admitted. "I'm curious about what's going on with the not-sushi part."

“You have to give me a bite,” Karen demanded.

When their food came, she indeed went for a bite of the salad. And then another, and another. 

She licked her lips, and said, “I really don’t think that counts as a sushi Greek salad in any sense of any of those words, but it’s really fucking good.”

Matt agreed. The restaurant had added soft-boiled eggs and rice, and the “salad” was cooked nori, cucumbers and kalamata olives, of all things. The kalamata olives didn’t work at all, but everything else was delicious. He ate most of it, and picked at Foggy’s strange ramen and hummus dish out of curiosity. It was much worse—too many savory flavors mixing together. Foggy seemed to agree, based on the way he nibbled at it and winced every so often.

“We can get pizza on the way home,” Matt said, and Foggy nodded and speared the last sushi roll from Matt’s plate. Matt let him do it, but that was only because he loved him very much.

When the bill came, Foggy insisted on putting his card down before he stood to use the bathroom. “I only just got my money back,” he said. “My future husband is a gold digger. He wouldn’t let me back into my own bank account until a few weeks ago. Can you imagine, Karen?”

Matt rolled his eyes. “The bank was very hard to convince about Foggy’s resurrection,” he translated. 

“You didn’t want to give up my money,” Foggy accused.

“I gave you a duplicate card to use while we were figuring it out.”

“That’s a terrible argument, Mr. Nelson,” said Foggy.

“You’re saying that in place of any real rebuttal, Mr. Murdock,” Matt shot back, which earned him an elbow to the ribs before Foggy wandered off to find the bathroom.

Karen leaned forward on her elbows after Foggy was out of earshot. “How long do you think it’ll it take him to find the men’s room? This place is a maze.”

“Foggy has a terrible sense of direction,” said Matt. “He may be back in a few business days.”

Karen laughed. “I’m really glad you two finally figured things out. There were so many times throughout the years where I thought—but it was always so ebb and flow with you. Both of you. But you’re really solid together. Any moron with eyes could see that.”

“Any moron without them too, I hope,” Matt said, and Karen smiled. She leaned back in her seat.

Her heart started to pulse faster in her chest, and her muscles creaked like a ship as she tensed up. Matt bit down on his cheek and rolled his shoulders back. He wasn't sure what to make of the quick shift of Karen's mood.

She rubbed at her jaw, and then said, “I, um. Matt, I think I owe you an apology.”

Matt frowned. He could feel the muscles in his face tensing, and he made a distinct effort to keep himself relaxed as he said, “Karen, I really don’t think you do.”

She shook her head. “You deserved more than what I gave you, after Foggy died. You both are my best friends, and it was so…”

Matt reached over and grabbed both of her hands in his. She huffed, and it sounded wet in her throat. She didn’t move away from his grasp.

“I don’t handle grief well,” Karen said. “With my mom, it was all right, but then with. With my brother, um. Ever since then, I’ve been—every time, it eats me alive. With Ben, with Danny. With you, in the year you were gone… I just get so angry, and I feel like a ghost, and I feel so awful, it’s like… I dunno, an allergic reaction, maybe.  I’d do anything to make sure I don’t feel like that again, so when Foggy was gone, I left everything behind. That’s what I did to you, and it was unfair, Matt. You needed someone, I know.”

“You needed someone too,” Matt said quietly. 

There was the soft susurrus of skin as Karen pulled her lip in with her teeth. She pulled one of her hands away from Matt so she could drum her fingers on the table instead. The other hand stayed tight in his grasp.

“I guess that’s true,” she said. “But we could’ve supported each other, and I—I abandoned you. I knew you were hurting, I mean, it was really fucking obvious. I guess I was angry at you for being so vulnerable, Matt. That isn’t right. That wasn't right of me."

Matt shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. Foggy told you that we both have therapists now, right?”

He heard her hair brush over her shoulders as she nodded. “Well,” he said, “Catherine—that’s my therapist—she’s actually described our relationship as uncomfortably codependent. She says we love each other in a healthy way most of the time, but the idea of losing each other sends me into a tailspin. She’s right. It’s probably got to do with some things from how I grew up—”

“The Catholicism?” Karen guessed, her voice full of a smile.

Matt smiled back at her. “Most people would shoot for ‘blind orphan’ first, but you know me too well.”

Karen laughed. She pulled her other hand away from him so she could pat the back of his hand instead.

Matt sat up in his seat. He pulled the candle on the table close to him so he could fiddle with Foggy’s spell, which was still active. It was pliant and warm under his fingers.

“My point,” he said, “is that the way I handled Foggy’s death was basically by not handling it at all. And I’m never going to regret what I did. Catherine and Foggy may not agree with me, but if I had the choice to do it all over again, I would. But I understand that’s not normal. Catherine’s been working on it with me for months. She's trying to get me to admit that resurrecting Foggy was an unhealthy and reckless decision, but I really don't think it was. We’ve gotten basically nowhere. And she’s a licensed professional, Karen.”

“So you’re saying I had no chance in hell of pulling you out of your hole,” Karen surmised.

“Pretty much,” Matt said. He pushed two of his fingers into the spell’s forcefield and felt it push back gently, firmly, against him.

“Does your therapist ever try to work on your self-esteem and hero complex? Because Matt—friends don’t give up on each other,” Karen said.

Matt just shook his head. He and Karen were very similar, he knew; when they were guilty, they held onto it almost tighter than they did their loved ones.

“She has,” said Matt. “And she’s also emphasized that self-esteem comes with self care. There’s nothing wrong in making sure your needs are met first, Karen. That’s what I’m saying. And I’m really happy we’re all here again, that we can do this again. You don’t owe me an apology or repentance, and I’m not asking for it.”

Karen sighed. “I guess I concede, counselor,” she said, and cupped her hands over his. 

“Thank you,” she said, quieter. Matt’s ears perked as he heard the familiar tattoo of Foggy’s heartbeat against his chest.

He smelled like antibacterial soap in the bathroom and the slight iron tang of tap water. He moved closer, then let out a big dramatic sigh as he sat down at the table again.

“I come back and find my fiance canoodling with his old business partner? Why, I never,” Foggy said. He draped his arm across the back of Matt’s seat again. His body heat felt like a blanket to Matt, even without Matt touching him. 

Karen pulled away from Matt so she could turn to Foggy. “When are you tying the knot, anyway? I’ve been waiting for my invitation in the mail.”

“Maybe we just didn’t want to deal with international postage,” Foggy said flippantly.

“If you really think that California is a different country, then I think New York may want their bar card back.”

“It may as well be,” Foggy argued. “When are you moving back to the great city of New York, anyway? I can’t exactly believe that the San Francisco Chronicle is sending their journalists out on field assignments every month.”

Matt heard the rush of blood to Karen’s cheeks even as she straightened her spine. “I may be looking around for an apartment. There’s a chance that that’s true.”

Foggy’s arm wrapped around Matt’s shoulders. He shook him slightly. “You hear that, Matty?”

Matt inclined his head. He focused on Karen. Her heart was steady and consistent. That was promising. Less likely for her to be joking with them. “What’s stopping you from just going for it?”

“Aside from the heinous renter’s market?” Karen picked up her napkin from her lap. She fiddled with the thread, her nails clicking against the embroidered loops. “I guess I was waiting to see if, um. Well, if my former business partners would be interested in working together again.”

She sucked in a deep breath and held it. Foggy’s hand froze on Matt’s shoulder.

Matt gave Foggy a few seconds. He clocked his heartbeat, the way his blood was rushing through his arteries and veins. The twitch of the corners of his mouth. Foggy was happy. Really happy.

Matt was, too.

“Well,” Matt said. “I’d say yes, but I’ve been told my handwriting is singularly terrible, and this restaurant has cloth napkins anyway. Someone else’ll have to write our names on a paper napkin this time around.”

Karen laughed, and Foggy said, “Oh hell yes,” and pressed a kiss to Matt’s temple. He reached out his hand and Karen shook it—quite aggressively, if the air currents around them had anything to say about it.

“Guys,” Foggy said, “I’ve never been happier to be alive. Seriously.”

Karen surged up from the table to give Foggy a hug. And even though they were in public—even though their poor waiter was hanging back with the check receipt, clearly waiting for them to have their moment.

Well, there was no other choice for Matt than to kiss Foggy, holding his face gently as he did—as if asking Foggy to stay where he was, please, for just a couple moments longer.

And Foggy did.

***

Later—after pizza, after Foggy pulling Matt onto their bed and laughing about the silk sheets and gently using his fingers, his mouth, his everything to pull Matt apart—after all of that, they shower and lay down together.

Matt rested his head on Foggy’s chest, his hand on his belly.

“No Daredevil tonight?” Foggy murmured to Matt, and Matt shook his head.

“Quiet night,” Matt said, and it was. The subways rumbling underneath the city were louder than anything else around him. The trains made Manhattan sound like a sleeping, breathing body.

“Good,” Foggy said. His breath ruffled Matt’s hair. 

Matt shut his eyes. He was a little bruised up from the last time he’d gone out, a few nights ago. Nothing serious. It hardly ever was, with Foggy’s magic enveloping him like a second skin.

“Love you,” Matt said. He pressed his ear into Foggy’s chest. His ribs hummed with his lungs, his heartbeat. It was like a lullaby to Matt.

“I love you, too,” said Foggy softly. “Just as much. If not more.”

Matt pressed his nose into Foggy. He was so soft and warm. “Not possible,” he said, lips rucking Foggy’s old Columbia tee up. 

“We can argue about it in the morning,” Foggy decided. “Go to sleep, idiot.”

“You got it, Mr. Murdock,” said Matt, just to feel Foggy shiver at the address. He moved around until he was a bit more comfortable, head on the pillow, arm thrown over Foggy’s sternum. 

It was a peaceful, safe night. The bed was warm and the city was gentle. 

It was the kind of night that should be frozen in amber. One that Matt would stay in forever, if he could. 

And for just a moment—right before sleep overtook him—it almost felt like he’d found that perfect moment—a minute that stretched on forever, into the horizon of the sky. 

He smiled in his sleep, all wrapped around Foggy like a wedding ring.