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Another day, another dollar, Foggy thought as he dug through the scuffed old duffel bag.
Well, not exactly. Money didn’t have meaning anymore these days. Everyone traded in goods that were actually useful, or, if push came to shove, in potentially lethal damage caused by whatever weapons were available and effective.
“Here,” Eric had said as he dropped the carry-all in front of Foggy’s feet. “Kinda hit a gold mine on our last run. Some old backstreet clinic that the looters must’ve overlooked. Hope it has some good stuff.”
Yeah, Foggy did too.
He took the bag to the infirmary, started rummaging around inside. It was an eclectic mixture, but holy shit, it did have some of the good stuff! Propofol, diazepam, heparin, different NSAIDs, a few antibiotics, local anesthetics, and damn! Ten vials of morphine. Fucking A!
He put the items he was familiar with into the medicine cabinet first, leaving a small heap of things he didn’t recognize. Newly and necessarily acquired medical skills aside, he was, after all, still an attorney and not a doctor.
Not all the meds had package inserts or prescribing information. Some of them, Foggy just had to put in the drawer he’d mentally labeled ’no effin’ clue whatsoever’. One of the last things he looked at was a flat pouch of some sort, barely the size of his palm. The name and most of the instructions were rubbed off and now pretty much illegible, but he could still make out something that seemed to read igotine Transdermal System.
And then there was the smallest inkling of recognition, because that thing looked familiar. His uncle, Anna’s brother (God knew where they were now, or if they were even still alive)—he’d suffered from Parkinson’s disease. And he’d talked about those patches he’d put on every day, which did wonders for his tremors and hypokinesia.
Tremors.
Parkinson’s.
Degenerative, chronic central nervous system disorder.
Yeah, that sounded familiar. He didn’t know why he hadn’t made the connection earlier, but now that he thought about it, Matt’s symptoms looked a lot like those Uncle Victor had. And dammit, more than ever Foggy wished they’d still have computers or smartphones or, well, a damn internet to look up all the important shit.
He pocketed the pouch, making a mental note to find something that would tell him if it was safe to try this on Matt.
That situation presented itself a week later, when Foggy and Matt snuck out of their room to scavenge for something that Matt could wear. Cause the baggy and too short pants were getting just a little too filthy, and the stench of sweat and muck too much to bear.
They were already on their way back after scoring a few things, including that completely ridiculous “Sun’s Out, Guns Out” muscle shirt, when Foggy’s brain weirdly registered something that should have been completely inconspicuous.
The building was still mostly intact, although the large glass windows on the ground floor were all smashed up. But the sign above the door was still there, and it read ‘The New York Public Library Riverside Branch’.
“Hold on,” he told Matt.
“Foggy?” he asked, confused, in that almost staccato way of pronouncing his name that Foggy had almost gotten used to.
“Yeah, I need to, uh, check something in there, okay?”
Matt’s forehead pulled into a frown, his eyes as unseeing as ever. “Okay,” he acquiesced.
Shards of broken glass lined the tiled floor inside, which crunched underneath their feet as they edged past the broken revolving door.
“Careful,” Foggy warned, although he figured it was probably totally unnecessary.
Foggy looked around, no clear idea where to start. The front desk was largely undamaged, even the computer screens still stood in their original spots—black and lifeless. A sign above the counter read ‘Adult & Young Adult’ with an up arrow on the right. That’s where Foggy went.
“Shit,” he muttered when he came into the large room that housed the books. Most of the shelves were overturned, piles of books littered the floor in unruly heaps. How was he going to find anything in here, let alone specific textbooks on CNS disorders and how to treat them?
“Foggy, what?” Matt asked, the bewilderment still too evident in his voice. This fucked up, half feral version of Matt, it didn’t know how to be subtle or quite comprehend things like common sense.
“You can tell that this is a total mess, right?”
Matt cocked his head a little to the right, his eyes darting around the walls of the room. “Yes.”
Stupid idiot, the question was rhetorical. Another thing the half feral version of Matt didn’t know how to comprehend.
But Foggy wasn’t going to give up so easily. It was probably a good thing that education tended to take a backseat when humanity was trying desperately to survive a hostile alien invasion, because he finally found the medical section tucked away way in the back. And it was mostly still in one piece.
He thumbed through the first book he took out of the shelf, when Matt sidled up to him. “Foggy, what is this?”
He held out a book, which Foggy took and turned over to look at the cover. “Uh, Williams Hematology, 8th Edition.”
Matt swayed lightly on his feet, and was he ever going to lose that frown eternally creasing his forehead?
“No,” Matt said, “Don’t understand, Foggy.”
Foggy watched him run his fingers lightly across some of the book spines on the shelf, intoning, “This.”
Oh. Damn. Yeah.
“Those are books.”
“Books?”
“Yeah. Geez, I can’t believe you don’t remember what a book is. It has pages with information written on them. Or, you know, fiction. Stories. People tell stories in books.”
The frown was finally replaced with a telltale half feral Matt grin. “Stories,” he beamed. “Like Mad Max.”
“Yeah, like Mad Max.”
“Want more stories.”
“Yeah, not now, okay? I’ll tell you another story tonight. Shame you can’t read these yourself.”
Foggy briefly wondered if the library carried Braille books. Then again, Matt probably couldn’t read those either, unless Foggy went an re-taught him. Which, admittedly, wasn’t particularly high on the agenda of ‘activities to do with Matt’ right about now.
It took half an eternity for Foggy to actually find a book that had the information he needed, and Matt kept bouncing around, asking too many goddamn questions. Jesus, the guy was still a pain in the neck when he was bored, and Foggy didn’t have much of a clue how he could keep him occupied in a room filled with nothing but print material.
“Go and, I don’t know… build a tower or something.”
And off Matt was, leaving Foggy to wonder if he had actually understood what he’d asked him to do. He was so eager to please Foggy. Like a child with a hero worship problem. It was almost endearing, if it wasn’t for the fact that it was so fucking tragic.
With his book-shaped trophy, Foggy plopped cross-legged on the floor, leafing through the textbook in his lap. There was a rather elaborate section on Parkinson’s, which he skimmed to filter out the important parts. His eyes caught on the word dopamine agonist, and that’s where he dug deeper.
Everything the book told him was spot on, and it felt like he was almost reading a case study of what a feral infection did to a human body. Except whatever the aliens carried, it was a lot more swift, progressive, and lethal.
By the time he had finished the chapter on PD, he was sure that his instincts had been right. The medication could make a real difference for Matt. He’d have to convince him to try it out, and if it worked, they’d have to give their best to find more of the stuff.
Not sure if it was foresight or just a damn epiphany, but Foggy tore the pages with the most useful information out and put them in their bag before he slammed the book shut and went to find Matt.
He was three aisles over, and—
“Foggy. Look!”
There it was again. That proud, desperately wanting-to-please tone, the excited glint in his eyes that translated even beyond the blindness.
Foggy looked, and it was a sight to behold. Matt had built an arch from books as high as six feet. And not just books stacked on top of each other. The upper part was a bona fide arch, half-round and graceful and seemingly defying gravity.
Foggy didn’t have the first clue how he’d done that. Leave it to the guy to still amaze the shit out of you, even with at least 60% of his brain functions out of whack.
“Super awesome,” Foggy said, trying hard to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “Remind me of your spatial geometry skills when we actually need them, you dork. Come on, let’s go.”
And just like that, the frown lines were back on Matt’s forehead. That look on him had stopped being cute half a lifetime ago.
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“Foggy, no!”
Yeah, he’d seen this coming. A mile off.
And now Foggy wondered if this was really the best time to get into The Talk. But he figured a good night’s sleep (or as good as they came these days) and the poor, pilfered excuse for a breakfast might make Matt agreeable enough to have a shot at this.
“It’ll help with the tremors,” he urged.
“Don’t like.”
“It, Matt. Don’t like it.”
“Don’t like it,” Matt repeated without hesitation.
“Add an I, and it’s perfect.”
“Don’t like it I?” Matt tried, and Foggy couldn’t help but laugh.
“No, but close enough. And, look, I know you don’t like medication, cause it screws with... well, whatever it screws with. Your senses. I don’t know. But this’ll be good for you. Trust me on this, okay?”
“Foggy, no,” he repeated, but it sounded a lot less contrary.
“Matty, yes. Here, show me your left hand.”
Matt tucked in his chin, the way he did when he was pondering something. Classic delaying tactic.
Foggy didn’t feel like playing the waiting game. “Your hand, Matt.”
Matt tentatively held out his arm. The traitorous tremor was there, ever-present, the frequency undulating ever so slightly. Foggy had to swallow against a lump in his throat, because he didn’t think he could ever get used to seeing his friend’s body fucked over nine ways to Sunday like this.
Foggy took Matt’s hand. His grip was gentle, but his fingers enclosed Matt’s firmly enough for the amplitude of the quivers to increase visibly. They reverberated through Foggy’s hand and lower arm.
“You can feel this, Matty, can’t you? Don’t you want it to stop? At least for a while?”
The frown lines between Matt’s eyes made a comeback. That intense blank stare, hovering dangerously close to the Pout.
“This. Stop,” Matt said.
“Yeah, and this patch will help do that.” Silently, Foggy added, ‘At least I hope so.’
“Make it stop.”
“Are you telling me we should try putting on the patch? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Foggy, yes.”
Hallelujah. Actual consent. Because for a while Foggy had considered just slapping the damn thing on Matt. But then again, he knew all too well what Matt could do if things were done to him against his will, and that wasn’t something Foggy wanted to mess with.
He studied Matt, trying to figure out where the best place would be to put the damn thing. He knew it should be in a place with not a lot of joint movement and as little hair as possible. Cause, shit, Foggy wasn’t gonna shave Matt for this. Even if he had a razor or razor blades. Which he didn’t.
And if the adventures with the arrow wound and the gauze had given him any pointers, it should definitely be in a place that Matt couldn’t easily pick at. In the end, he decided for Matt’s lower back. Not ideal, but it’d have to do. With enough chastising, it just might.
“I need you to strip out of your pants for this, dude.”
It took some convincing, but finally Matt pulled down his cargo pants to expose the area that Foggy needed to get to. He studied the remains of the writing on the pouch again, but it didn’t have any instructions other than something about storage temperatures and that it should be applied immediately after removal from the pouch.
Foggy pulled the wrapping apart, peeled the paper off the patch and applied it to the halfway fleshy part just above Matt’s butt. Not that there was anything truly fleshy left on Matt’s wiry frame. The adhesive didn’t seem very potent, so Foggy put his palm on it and pressed down for a few, long seconds.
“All right, buddy. All good to go. Now let’s see what this does.”
Matt grunted noncommittally, adjusting his pants again with the makeshift belt Foggy had found him.
“Don’t pick at it, do you hear me?”
Matt’s gaze was... well, not on Foggy, but somewhere near his shoulder. Close enough. But Foggy needed to drive the point home. “It’s important, dickhead. Don’t mess with it. It’ll do jack shit if it comes off. Do you understand?”
“Foggy, yes.”
“Okay, good. It might take a while to work. Let me know if you feel anything. Like, if anything’s different. Can you do that, Matt?”
“Yes,” he repeated.
“Excellent. Now, I guess we have time for what we talked about in the library. Do you remember that?”
Matt’s expression was hopeful. Childish. Adorable, in a way. Foggy melted just a little.
“Story?”
“Bingo, pal. Oh, and you know what? I have actual books here too. Want me to read one to you?”
“Foggy, yes.”
Boy, that had to be one of Matt’s most used phrases. He should start making a tally sheet.
Matt plopped down on the desk chair, and Foggy claimed the cot with the battered paperback in hand. The only one that was actually fiction and not medical texts. He opened it and started reading.
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun...”
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"Foggy, pain. In my ass."
“What?” Foggy’s voice was sluggish. Had he dozed off? He must have.
“Pain. In my ass.”
Foggy frowned. Okay, that was weird. What was he talking about? Ass? But—oh.
“Are you talking about the patch? Does it hurt?”
“Hm. Yes. No. Not— Some.”
“It’s probably just your skin. It’s very sensitive. Does it itch?”
“No. Pain. In my ass.”
Foggy sighed. “Yeah, you’ve already said that, and in another universe that’d actually be funny. But look at it this way. I get to be a pain in your ass for once. Well, kinda."
“Make it stop.”
Foggy sighed again and heaved himself off the cot with a groan that was maybe a little too theatrical. “Okay, let me see.”
Matt was all too willing to expose his scrawny behind again. Foggy looked at the patch, gently poked at the skin around it. Matt only gave a barely perceptible flinch.
“I can’t see anything wrong with it. You’re overreacting, you little shit. Are you trying to pull a pity number on me?”
Matt moved his head in something approximating a head-shake. Foggy still couldn’t put his finger on why it looked so weird.
And there it was again. The Pout. Goddammit, Matt. Stop this right now. “Is it helping, at least?”
“Helping. Hm.”
“Is that a yes or a no?”
“Don’t... know.”
“Great.”
Matt turned around to face Foggy, the smallest of smiles tugging at his lips. “More story.”
Foggy scrubbed a tired hand over his face. “Seriously? You like it, huh?”
Matt focused on him. “Mm-yes. Arthur Dent. Funny. Towel. Don’t panic.”
Foggy’s face drew into a grin. So Matt’s brain was retaining something. Fragments, like he tended to latch onto, but maybe it was just his way of processing. Perhaps the disconnect wasn’t so much in understanding the input but in the coherent output of collected information. What was it they called that? Aphasia? Because that’d really be the best-case scenario here, the one Foggy wanted to cling to.
“Okay, asshole. One more chapter, okay?”
They were halfway through chapter seven, when Matt startled in the chair, his head perking up. He kept completely still for a few seconds, and Foggy stopped reading. This was Matt in alarm mode. Was someone approaching? Paige? Deborah? Eric?
“Foggy,” he said, and it was halfway between a whisper and something that sounded almost like... awe.
Then he held out his left arm, straightened it out in front of him. It took Foggy a moment to realize what was happening, but— Shit! With a capital S. It was working. There wasn’t even the slightest hint of a tremor. Matt’s hand, his fingers, they were completely steady. Holy crap.
“Look!” Matt intoned.
“Yeah, man, I can see it! Wow, that’s... That’s amazing. How does it feel?”
The biggest smile Foggy had seen on him since the day they reunited was plastered on Matt’s face.
“Good!” he beamed. “No... it’s... g...n...” He failed on the syllables, looking to pull a word out of his vocabulary that seemed to be irretrievably stuck in his brain’s Broca’s area.
“I think you’re looking for something along the lines of ‘fantastic’ or ‘incredible or ‘absolutely fucking awesome’, right?”
“Fucking awesome!” Matt repeated. Yeah. Of course he’d pick the superlative swear word. Although Foggy couldn’t really blame him.
Matt got up and took a few tentative steps. Foggy watched him warily from his sitting position on the cot, curious to see what he would do. He folded a dog-ear into the page they were on and put away the book.
It was a spectacle to observe Matt. So much so, that Foggy was almost spellbound. Matt’s footing was a lot less unsure, even despite the arrow wound.
And he started touching things. All the things. His fingertips sought out surfaces, brushed over some of Foggy’s books on the desk, the tabletops, his first aid kit, the fabric of some of the clothes lying around, the walls, the window panes and frames.
He made little sounds that Foggy couldn’t quite interpret other than recognition or amazement—or both. He could be trying to assign the matching vocabulary in his head, for all Foggy knew.
When Matt got to one of the corners of the room, he stumbled across a cardboard box. Foggy’s box of secrets. Or, well, close enough. There wasn’t anything secret in there, really. Just an assortment of junk he’d accumulated. But that was the thing about an apocalypse. You learned not to throw away things that might potentially come in handy in the future.
“Foggy, what—“
“Is this?” he finished the inevitable question. “Just some stuff I kept. Go ahead, knock yourself out.”
“Knock… out?”
Foggy chuckled. “It means you can take a look. I’m giving you permission.”
“Permission,” Matt rolled the word around on his tongue, all the while opening the box with careful fingers.
He started taking out the items one by one, feeling them with all the wonderment in the world. For some reason Matt made two piles, and at first Foggy wasn’t sure why. But then he reckoned that it must be ‘things I recognize’ and ‘what is this?’. Foggy edged closer, because he already knew what was coming.
“You wanna know what all this junk is, right?”
Matt turned his head, his eyes landing somewhere near Foggy’s hairline. There was affirmation somewhere in his expression.
“Okay, pick them up, I’ll tell you.”
The first thing he chose was one of the broken cell phone chargers. There were four. And a half. He explained them as best as he could. Next was an actual smartphone. Broken, of course. With zero battery charge. He couldn’t even remember if he’d ever actually used that particular one.
There was the mouse pad with a scene from a computer game on it. Definitely useful. For shielding, padding, patching up injuries, a bad makeshift excuse for a pillow, but mostly holding onto bullets when loading gun magazines.
The last thing Matt held up was a bottle of air freshener. The lid with the spray nozzle was light blue. The bottle said ‘Fresh Lemon’. Foggy had used all of it, or at least he thought he had.
Matt fingered the oblong item, clearly puzzled. Foggy helped him out. “Air freshener. It’s a spray that smells good. You remember what a spray is?”
“Hm. No.”
“Well, uh… How do I explain this? It’s, uh… It’s a bottle that’s under pressure. When you press on the button at the top, it’ll release tiny droplets of liquid. It’ll make the air smell nice. Or, well, nicer. Okay, maybe not to you. But smell differently, anyway. Better than poop or smoke or the million other things that pollute the air these days.”
Matt’s fingers sought out the lid at the top, and he found the nozzle. He pushed down on it, and the last few droplets left in there whooshed out with a pff sound.
Matt flinched, stiffened like an animal detecting danger nearby. Not even a second later, he hurled the bottle across the room. It clanged against the wall before it clattered to the floor with a metallic sound.
“Hey, what’d you do that for?” Foggy chastised him.
Matt made that face where he was looking for a word that wouldn’t come out. Then he made a bomb-like noise and an explosion movement with his hands.
“You thought it was a bomb? In that case, dude, real smart, because if this had been an actual bomb, we’d be tiny pieces of exploded flesh and bone now. Seriously, man, you need to make better decisions.”
Matt lowered his head, and there it was again. The Pout. Gravitating towards the Mope. Foggy felt immediately sorry.
“It’s okay, Matt. No harm done, all right? It was empty anyway.”
Matt recovered quickly, and then went to explore the ‘I know this’ pile. It was weird, the things his fried brain was still familiar with. Cause… post-it notes and a squeaky hole puncher? Yeah, not exactly essential in the grand scheme of all things post-apocalypse. Though maybe a carry-over from their lawyer days.
What Matt was most fascinated by was the tennis ball. He explored the felt surface with nimble fingertips, traced the rubber seams with his left index finger. He rolled it around in his palm, transferring it from his right hand to his left.
Foggy startled when Matt threw it against the wall, only to flawlessly grab the rebounding ball out of the air with that razor-sharp spatial precision of his. Mostly instinct by now, probably.
“You know, one of these days you’re gonna stop amazing me with this radar sense shit.”
“Not… radar sense shit.”
“Yeah, smartass, I know.”
Matt threw the ball again. It made a dull thwack against the sheetrock, and he snatched it with his left hand. Then he started squeezing it, and his face went all hmm-I-wonder-if…
“Foggy?”
The expression didn’t change. Foggy waited for the actual question.
“Touch. Can I touch, Foggy?”
“You are touching. Everything. Kinda.”
“No. You. Can I touch Foggy?”
“You wanna touch me? News flash, you’ve already been touching me. A lot. Every night, pretty much.”
“No,” Matt was starting to sound frustrated. “Touch your face.”
The snort coming out of Foggy’s mouth was entirely involuntary. “Seriously? We’re back to the face-touching? I thought we’d already covered that. I’m not that attractive, all right? Plus, you told me—well the old you told me the whole thing is actually kinda overrated.”
“See your face. I want to see your face.”
There, a whole sentence. Matt must be pretty damn serious about this. Foggy sighed in resignation. “All right, you little shit. Come here, touch my face all you want. Gotta warn you, though. I’m not especially groomed. But then, neither are you. Who is these days?”
Matt cocked his head to the left, narrowing his eyes, as if trying to size Foggy up. What was that analogy he’d used? World on fire? Was he trying to picture Foggy’s outlines in his head right now? Did that even still work for him?
Matt edged closer, cautiously, reaching out both hands towards Foggy’s face. His fingers were careful, his touch more tender than you would ever expect from a creature who used to be driven by primal rage and pure savagery.
Foggy could feel goosebumps forming on his arms as Matt’s fingertips traced across his skin. They caught on the facial hair adorning Foggy’s chin and jaw.
“Beard,” Matt stated.
“Yeah. It probably needs a trim. Yours too.”
“I like it.”
“Do you now? And I’ll take that as a compliment. Not sure I’d reciprocate, though. That whole shaggy look? I liked you better, rocking that perfectly pressed suit and five-o’clock-shadow, to be honest.”
Matt chose not to comment, his expression all scrunched up in intense concentration. His fingers went into Foggy’s hair, mapping out its length. Finally, he finished his ministrations, concluding the examination with an ambiguous, “Mh.”
“Mh what, Matty?”
“Mh, I like you.”
“I like you, too. A lot. You know that, right?”
“Yes. I know.”
“Good. At least we got that out of the way. What’s next? Groping private parts?”
“Private… parts?”
Foggy lifted his arms in a defensive gesture. “Okay, nope. So not going there.”
“Foggy, what? What is this, private parts?”
“Geez, really? It’s your sexual organs. Your genitalia.”
“You… want to touch?”
“No!” Foggy’s response was immediate. “No, I definitely don’t want to touch. It was joke, okay?”
“Okay,” Matt said hesitantly.
“You’re a serious piece of work, do you know that?”
He wanted to ruffle Matt’s hair. But he didn’t. It was still tricky to anticipate how he’d react to unannounced physical contact.
“Now go and keep exploring while your hand’s still good. It’s not gonna last forever.”
It did last several more hours of Matt touching everything he possibly could, including the toilet bowl, its tank, the bathroom sink, shower curtain, every imaginable texture and surface he could fondle. It was as if he was trying to cram two years’ worth of sensations into a single afternoon. Foggy wondered if there might be a point where his brain would implode from sensory overload.
That evening, Matt flattened himself against the wall the cot was pushed against, trying to leave enough room for Foggy to stretch out almost comfortably. He lay completely still. As still as Foggy hadn’t seen his friend in almost two years. It was almost uncanny.
Matt was holding up his left arm, sticking it up like a beacon. There still wasn’t any tremor. Matt felt his own arm with his right hand, poking it in odd places. Foggy smiled a little in the half light, because it just seemed so totally bizarre.
“Don’t tell me you’re missing the tremor.”
Matt blinked, nudging his chin towards his chest for a fraction of an inch. “It’s gone.”
“Don’t worry, it’s gonna be back before you know it. You’ll feel like your old self again, if that’s what you want.”
Matt’s head shook to each side, and little less coordinated than earlier during the day. “Do not want.”
“Well, pal, sorry. Only had one of those patches. If you want more, we’ll have to hunt for them. Gotta warn you, though. It’s not usually the kind of thing you find on random med supply loots. Now let’s sleep. Whaddayasay?”
“Sleep,” Matt mumbled, already halfway there, it seemed. Foggy was soon to follow.
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As usual, Foggy woke up to someone nuzzling his shoulder. Drooling into it. Of course. Matt was really kinda gross when you thought about it.
Hazy daylight was filtering through the windows, and Foggy figured it couldn’t be any later than six. Damn. He’d hoped for some quality sleep, but his brain was already kicking into gear. Those were the mornings he just knew he wouldn’t be able doze off again.
He carefully rolled to one side, hoping he could get up without waking his friend. Matt grumbled something unintelligible. Figured. Coherence wasn’t something his semiconscious brain could be bothered with when it was caught in the throes of sleep.
Foggy had barely swung his legs over the edge of the cot when Matt stirred, his eyes blinking open.
“Nnf.”
“Morning to you too, sunshine.”
It was then that Matt’s senses kicked into gear. He let out something akin to a whine, peeling his left arm out from under the covers.
“Foggyyyy.” Yep, definite half feral Matt whine.
“Guess the tremor’s back, huh?”
“Do not want it.”
“I know, bud. Guess vacation’s over. Sorry.”
Matt curled himself into a ball. A pitiful sight that made Foggy’s stomach clench. He carefully edged his hand closer, let it rest on Matt’s shoulder. His left one. He could feel the quivering muscles beneath his hand.
“Foggyyyy.”
Dammit, Matt. The little shit was gonna break his heart one of these days. He squeezed the shoulder very gently, and Foggy saw a tear sliding from the corner of Matt’s eye.
All of Foggy’s defenses, along with any residual annoyance, melted in an instant. He lay back down, facing Matt, and pressed his forehead against Matt’s. Their hug of sorts. A universal message of I’m-here-and-I-love-you-you-little-fucker.
“Foggy.” Less whine, more sorrow.
“Yeah,” he whispered. “I’m here. And I’m sorry. I know it sucks, but we knew it would happen. You’ll be okay, though. You can do this. If anyone can, it’s you.”
“I need you.”
It came out complete, and almost as smoothly as if spoken by old, normal Matt. And, fuck, Foggy fought back tears. A fight he spectacularly and utterly lost.
He squeezed his forehead against Matt’s with more intensity, feeling the blanket below them soaking up his tears.
“I need you, too.”
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THE END.