Chapter Text
“Matt?”
“Matt!?”
“MATT?!”
The insistent voice broke Matt out of his feverish half asleep half unconscious state, the sound of a heartbeat that was beating way too fast for it to be safe was beside his ear as he felt strong hands rolling him off his awkward angled position on his stomach and onto his side.
“Holy, Shit… Matt! Stay with me buddy!”
Matt was uncertain why the voice was sounding so stressed, so worried. He was fine, the main worry that Matt had was buying himself a new mattress because the one he was lying in on his bed was so uncomfortable it felt like lying on concrete.
Concrete.
Matt startled back to full consciousness when awareness finally slammed into him, the blinding pain in his gut that was very close to sending him back over the edge of the line of unconsciousness. He gasped in a breath as he shifted ever so slightly again, what felt like blood bubbling on his lips as his hands fumbled around at his stomach and he finally discovered the long metal pole that was jutting from his middle. He had to stifle a moan as whoever was currently holding him gently tapped his hands away from the wound.
He felt like he’d been hit by a bus going at at least eighty miles an hour.
“Matt! Oh my god are you awake! I’m sorry, you need to not touch that you’ve been kind of impaled right now but it’s okay, Claire's here she's going to fix this!"
Foggy!
Matt closed his eyes briefly before startling back awake when Foggy tapped desperately on his cheek.
“Hey, hey. I’m sorry, I need you to stay awake for me okay! I can’t risk you going to sleep, you might not.” Foggy broke off in what Matt deciphered as a distraught sob, “you might not wake up again.”
“F-foggy,” Matt struggled on the word, his lips catching on the f and dragging it out until it was barely recognisable as a word. He swallowed feverishly, curling ever so slightly in on himself when a fresh wave of pain rolled over him, “Where’m, Where am I?”
Foggy’s hitched breaths were getting louder and Matt felt the pit in his stomach deepen in guilt over his friend's distress. Foggy didn’t deserve this, Foggy deserved better friends who didn’t feel the need to lie all the time. Matt didn’t deserve Foggy.
“The alleyway just outside Claire’s apartment complex, you’re okay Matt. She’s coming as soon as she can. She’s grabbing you a change of clothes to make you less conspicuous.”
Oh .
“Where’s Karen?” He slurred out after doing a mental headcount of the people he cared about. Karent being the only missing person from the list.
“Karen?” Foggy asked, “I assume she’s at home because last I saw of the two of you we were in the office closing up. I assume she went home.”
Matt licked his lips, a hoarse cough rattling his throat when a clot of blood got caught in the back of his throat and then he couldn’t breathe. He could vaguely hear Foggy yelling panicked words through the phone, “Claire! Claire, he’s choking. What do I do, what do I do? Don’t die Matt. godfuckingdammit don’t you dare fucking die on me.”
If Matt had been in the right mind he would have called Foggy out for his unneeded use of curse words but he was too busy trying not to die that it unfortunately wasn’t his top priority at that moment in time. He found himself breaking out in a cold sweat as his lungs became emptier with each ragged, choppy breath dragging in another lungful of blood instead of air.
“Roll him over,” Claire was ordering through what Matt recognised as the tinny sound of a phone, “get him on his side, carefully and let the blood drain out of his airways.”
And then Matt was painfully being rolled over into a hasty recovery position, the metal pole through his gut jarring his stomach and Matt let out a hoarse, choked off scream as everything whited out in pain. His entire body contorting in agony, his lips parting as he hacked up several mouthfuls of blood. Curling in on himself, his hands clenched so tight he could feel bone stretching the skin of his knuckles as he bit through his lip.
He slipped into blissful nothingness a few times, each time waking up to more of that blinding agony, as if he had broken several ribs and then gone out boxing straight after to receive a beating in the same place. Every breath put a strain on his gut, tearing skin and making a fresh wave of blood stream out of it and onto the ground. The moisture beneath his back and soaking into his fingers from the puddle beneath him would haunt him for years.
“Matt!” Foggy’s voice began to sound more and more distressed as Matt was pulled back to consciousness for another time. “Shit, shit I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Hands looped beneath his stomach and clenched onto the bloody pole jutting out of his gut, supporting most of its weight and keeping it straight with unsteady hands. There was a second heartbeat now and Matt felt himself break into delirious laughter when his feverish brain caught up with him and told him it was Claire.
“I thought you were done with helping me out.” He murmured through gritted, bloody teeth, the act of speaking sending another rush of blood down his chin and his body was wracked with another harsh cough as his body compensated, trying to clear the obtrusion from his airways once more.
“Yeah, well I don’t really have that much of a choice when you show up outside my apartment and die on my doorstep do I?”
“Yeah,” Matt replied feverishly, biting down hard on his lip through a wave of pain. “I suppose you’re right.”
Matt felt Claire’s eyes linger on him just a little bit too long as he felt her gentle hands packing the areas of his stomach around the impaled pole, “there’s an ambulance on its way.” And then. “Dammit, Matt. I was on my break, you ass.”
Matt swallowed, his breath coming in short gasps for a long moment before Claire’s words caught up with him and Foggy’s earlier statement about making him look less conspicuous started to make more sense.
“Wait!” He nearly shouted, hands shooting to his stomach and clutching at the intrusion despite Foggy’s yells for him to stop. “Wait, you can’t take me to a hospital, they’ll arrest me. I-” He cut off in a strangled cough, blood dripping down his chin as he got his arms beneath himself and struggled against the two of them, trying to sit up.
“We can’t not take you to a hospital Matt, I might be a nurse but I’m not a fucking surgeon. There is no way I can treat this here.” He could feel her undoing the laces on his boots and sliding them off, all of a sudden too aware of the fact that they’d evidently pulled his mask off as well, the comforting pressure no longer wrapped around his eyes. “You’re damn lucky you stopped using the devil suit and you're just in black, Murdock otherwise this would have been a lot harder than it already is.
“Please,” Matt slurred, the pain of his previous struggle beginning to set in and he grit his teeth against the overwhelming need to gasp out in pain again, “you can’t!”
“They’re already on their way, Matt. You’ll be fine, there’ll be a hell of a lot of awkward questions but no one is going to know who you are. You’re just the blind lawyer everyone who’s lucky knows you as.”
Matt shuddered out a breath, “what happened?”
“You tell me?” Claire said, her fingers giving the slightest tremble as she began lacing up whatever spare pair of shoes she’d wrestled Matt’s feet into, “it’s three o’clock in the morning, I’m fast asleep in bed and I suddenly get a bunch of gibberish through my phone, I come outside, you have the audacity to wave at me with this thing protruding from your stomach and then you passed out on the floor. Stop touching it!” She ordered, smacking Matt’s hands away from the pole.
Foggy latched onto Matt’s hand instead, keeping one hand on the pole, holding it steady and with the other he was gently keeping Matt's out of the way of Claire’s working as she frowned down at him. “Claire called me and we’ve been trying to keep you stable while the ambulance comes.”
“I need to cut your shirt off,” Claire announced suddenly, “the black and red is too noticeable, if anyone asks we’ll just explain I needed it off to pack it. I’m technically your first responder, they won’t question it.”
Matt had to swallow down a wave of nausea, definitely not wanting to know what would happen if he threw up while a fucking pole was jutting out of his abdomen. The idea of being half naked in such a public area with no idea who could be looking at him hitting him with another wave of fear that for some reason was worse than the fact that there was a metal pole hitting out of his abdomen.
"Matt!" Cold hands were patting him on the cheek again and he fluttered his eyes open, half aware that he hadn't realised he closed them. A finger was pressed against his throat, his Adam's apple bobbing against it before he heard Claire giving Foggy more orders and then his legs were being elevated while Claire dug around in the bag on her lap. From the general size of it and the smell of metal in the air Matt decided they had to be medica shears. He tensed involuntarily as Claire murmured "hey," gently in his ear. "I know that this isn't ideal, but explaining why you're wearing the 'Devil of Hell's Kitchen is somehow a lot harder than why you're shirtless." There was a pause and then, "Matt, do you trust me?"
Matt swallowed heavily, feeling incredibly lightheaded as he struggled to focus on his surroundings with all of his sensory input screaming about the pole in his gut. After a long moment he nodded.
Matt wasn't afraid of death, he would gladly lay down his life for anyone but what Matt was afraid of was how his friends would feel if he did. What god would think if he died without some worthy deed to enable him heaven as his home after life. He felt Claire move to clasp his free hand in hers.
He took in a deep breath around the blinding pain in his stomach and nodded sluggishly. Motioning for Claire to continue, she squeezed his hand lightly and then moved quickly to get to work in cutting Matt's shirt off of him, the cool air of the night hitting his skin and making his tremor as a result of blood loss worse. He felt Foggy shift slightly, pulling Matt's head to cradle it in his lap. Timid fingers ghosting over his cheeks.
"You're okay Matty, you'll be okay." The words were as much a reassurance to Matt as they were to Foggy.
He closed his eyes, suddenly overwhelmed by tiredness as Claire continued fussing around him and any adrenaline he might have been running on previously started running out, replaced by the bone crushing weight of his situation. Matt couldn't even remember what had happened let alone keep up with the fact that there was a literal pole jutting out of his stomach and he was nearing the edge of consciousness again and was very nearly on the brink of death. He could hear the wet sound of his breath rattling in his ears, in the distance he could hear the sound of the ambulance arriving ever so slowly.
He could hear the hammering of Claire and Foggy's hearts and smell the terror that was clouding around them in waves. He could overwhelmingly smell and taste the metallic smell of blood that was the result of him very slowly bleeding out. It was a miracle he wasn’t dead already, if it wasn’t for Claire’s steady hands keeping pressure on the wound and the fact that the pole had miraculously not hit anything vital (hopefully) Matt would almost certainly be dead by now.
Matt was jerked back to the present by hands checking his pulse, the deafening sound of sirens and an unfamiliar voice in his ears.
“Hey, sir, I need you to lie still while we cut down the size of the object currently embedded in your lower abdomen.”
“Foggy?” Matt slurred, his voice sounding forgein to his own ears, he could still feel his friend cupping his head. Another hand rested carefully against his chest, it must have been the newcomer because Foggy was standing not too far off he hoped from his friend's heartbeat that he picked out near what he could only assume was the ambulance Claire had promised and he couldn’t hear Claire at all. There was talking to his left, sirens to his right. Pain all around.
Raw animalistic terror clawed it’s way up his throat as the new touch on his bare chest sent a burst of pain rolling over him, nausea sitting like a pit in his stomach and he made a desperate attempt at jerking out of the newcomers reach. Twisting in his attacker’s ever tightening grip as yells rang through his head, disorientating his senses as everyone began shouting at him to stop.
He let out a howl of pain and terror as his abdomen screamed in pain when he tried to jerk out of his attacker’s grip. Only growing more and more panicked when he felt hands closing over his wrists and Matt was too weak, too out of it from blood loss and pain and confusion to have the strength to break free.
“Sir, you need to calm down!”
Another yell of fear escaped his lips as he realised he was well and truly trapped.
“Foggy,” he begged, “Foggy, please! I can’t see! I can’t see! Get off, get off.”
“Doctor? Oh whatever. He’s blind!” Foggy’s voice finally cut through all the yelling, sending a wave of relief rolling over Matt’s fear riddled body, “he doesn’t know who any of you are.”
Matt’s attackers loosened their grip on his wrists for a moment under Foggy’s withering glare and Matt deliriously angled his head toward where he could hear his friend's heartbeat. “Foggy,” he mumbled, “am I dead?”
Foggy hitched in a breath, his hands ghosting over Matt’s stomach, “no, no you’re not dying. But I need you to trust me okay, I get you’re a little out of your mind at the moment, it’s loud and disorientating and you’re in pain and in shock and bleeding out all over Claire’s doorstep but the other people here are just the medical team. The pole is too long to safely move you with so they’ve got a saw thingy they're going to use to cut it and make it shorter. Okay? It’s going to hurt but I’ll be here the entire time. I can even hold your hand if you want me to.”
Matt felt the doctor’s hands ghost over his chest, tensing he latched onto Foggy’s heartbeat, reaching out a hand, relief flooding over him when Foggy happily obliged and took it.
“Sorry, Sir I need you to keep your eyes open for me.” Matt jerked out of his stupor, realising once more that he’d drifted off as the Doctor lifted something towards him. From the general size of it Matt could sense that it might be what they would use to cut down the object in his stomach. “This is a small electric metal wheel saw that I’m going to use to cut through the metal in your abdomen. We cannot move you unless we do this. It’ll hurt and since you’re conscious I need your consent to move forward.”
Matt was struggling to follow his words when Foggy started talking, “just do it.”
“Mr?”
“Franklyn Nelson, I’m his approved medical proxy. He trusts me to make his decisions for him when he can’t. Right now I think he’d appreciate it if you can do this as quickly as possible.”
Matt swallowed, making sure to blink up at Foggy in gratitude, unsure how he was able to read Matt so easily but glad that he didn’t have to speak too much, his mouth growing sticky with blood again and the pain setting in harder the longer he laid there.
“Mr. Nelson, I’m afraid I’m going to need written proof for this information so why don’t you get that out while I get started?”
Matt felt Foggy dig around for his phone when the shriek of an electric saw started up causing him to tense again. Foggy squeezed his hand, lowering his face to Matt’s ear, “Claire’s coming back over now.”
Then the metal in his stomach was shifting from the pressure being placed against it and Matt was crying out in pain again. Blood bubbling at his lips and drooling down his chin as he clenched down on Foggy’s hand. A few moments later the pressure stopped and someone was pressing more cloth into the wound. “You’re doing so well Matt, almost done.” Claire’s voice came resonating through his ears.
“I’m sorry,” Matt mumbled after a moment.
“What for?”
Matt stumbled for a minute there, unsure what to say, “for dragging you out of bed. That was sel- selfish of me.”
He could feel Claire pause, she hummed. Matt wasn’t sure if it was in agreement or in thought. He tried not to think about it too much. More and more footsteps began gathering around him. The sound of something on wheels being wheeled towards him made him tense and he was almost glad for Foggy’s touch.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated stupidly.
“That’s it.” Claire said, “keep talking. You’ve gotta stay awake sorry, at least just until you’re inside the ambulance and on a ventilator.”
Matt blinked sluggishly at her, if he hadn’t been so out of it, he might have found the action funny but instead he just hitched in a breath and felt another trail of bloody dribble drip down his chin uselessly.