Chapter Text
They're still working on it, but their connection gets stronger every day, growing its roots back into the ground where they used to be--where they're supposed to be. They have gentle, easy, friend-dates, which mostly consist of eating their way through the best greasy spoons from Harlem to Wall Street and then sitting back with beers and play-by-play recordings from the golden age of baseball.
Foggy tries to keep it light-hearted and like before. Tries to show Matt that their friendship is strong enough and spacious enough for the third person that joined it, this person who could take Matt away from him someday. But Matt has other plans, it seems.
Matt describes all the things he can hear through the windows when they ride the cross-town bus. Some are good things. Parents blowing raspberries on the tummies of giggling babies. Teenagers coming back from the mailbox with the acceptance letters they've been waiting for. People telling each other, "look, I'm just going to come out and say it. I love you, ok? I love you."
Some things make him go utterly stiff and still, go silent for blocks. Every time, Foggy offers to pull the cord and stop the bus, but Matt has only accepted twice.
"Does it get difficult, hearing bad things happen?" Foggy asks, when, after minutes of tense silence, Matt gripped his arm and begged Foggy to talk.
"Yes," Matt says, "sometimes it's bad."
"Other times?"
"Other times it's unbearable." His voice is like a depth charge.
Foggy puts his arm around Matt's shoulders and pulls him in. He chatters on gamely about how amazing it would have been to be there when the Giants won the pennant, and maybe they should listen to the 69 Mets next.
"This helps," mumbles Matt, his head on Foggy's shoulder, bumping gently as the bus trundles over uneven roads.
"The Mets?"
"Listening to you. Talking. I know you hate it, but I can hear you breathing. Your heart. Your smell. It helps."
Foggy looks out the window and tries to think of a response. He doesn't love it, the fact that he's naked all the time for Matt.
"If I'd known about that, I would have been a lot more careful. Done my laundry a bit more, you know?"
Matt smiles, a bit tiredly. "Everyone smells a little bit."
"But isn't it gross?"
"Sometimes. Is it gross when you see people in clothing that's less than perfectly clean?
Foggy looks around the bus, full of New Yorkers in glorious evening rush-hour dishevelment. "Sometimes, but usually not."
"It's like that, I guess. You see dirt, I smell dirt. It's still just dirt."
Matt, Foggy knows, is on a truth crusade, telling Foggy all the things he'd kept secret, making his own attempt at putting the avocado back together. Foggy knows this because Matt stands on the ledge of each disclosure like a swimmer on a starting block, taking a deep breath before plunging in.
"What's the nicest thing you've ever smelled?"
Matt screws up his face. "I don't know."
"Well, think about it," Foggy says, as he pulls the cord.
Matt is thoughtfully quiet as they wander around Chinatown and Foggy mutters angrily at Google maps.
"That roast duck smells pretty good," Matt says. Foggy looks around. They're next to a shoe store and a pharmacy, both with darkened windows. "Two blocks that way." Matt points.
"Any chance you can sniff out the name of the restaurant?" Foggy asks. Matt harrumphs.
"No, but the owner is pregnant." Foggy goes quiet. "Kidding. I can't tell that from this distance."
"You give me acid reflux," Foggy grouses, tucking Matt's hand into the hollow of his elbow.
***
"Orchids," Foggy suggests, his mouth full of lemongrass chicken. Another Friday, another trash-heap of a restaurant serving criminally delicious food. Only in New York. "Napoleon brandy."
Matt stuffs rice noodles in his mouth and shrugs.
"A field of lavender."
"Yes, Foggy, my favourite smell is one of Hell's Kitchen's many lavender fields."
"Frying onions?"
"That's everywhere, every day."
"Fresh bread."
"Sure, why not."
"A woman's neck," Foggy tries, just to be a shit.
Matt doesn't miss a beat. "Not just her neck," he says, smirking.
"I'm rolling my eyes and advertising for a new best friend on Craigslist."
"Good luck to the new guy. The benefits of this job are terrible."
"Well, if you had just told me you had expectations of being my friend with benefits this would have all been cleared up a lot earlier," Foggy says sadly. Matt laughs and loses half a cup of tea down his chin, or maybe he just pretends to.
***
"There's the wind-up," announces Foggy, cradling a crumpled up ball of paper against his chest. Matt settles an empty beer bottle over his shoulder like a bat. "And there's the pitch!"
He lobs the ball at Matt, who swings with such appalling form that it's difficult to believe that he's a master of multiple forms of martial arts.
"Swing and a miss," Matt yells into his cupped hand, making a broadcaster-like reverb, "who put this kid on the plate, I'm asking you, folks."
They collapse on the sofa, full of experimental pizza (kelp and soft-shell crab, possibly?) and experimental microbrew.
"Jesus maestro, what's in these?" Foggy squints at the beer label when Matt hands it over. "I swear we've only had two."
"I'm having flashbacks to that time we partied with those girls from the chemistry department," says Matt, trying to rub his eye and missing.
"Oh god, the bathtub tequila," moans Foggy.
Matt tips his head back on the sofa, looking stewed and content, and Foggy has always liked the look of him when he gets this way. He watches as Matt strokes his own arm, his broken-and-reset fingers flickering over the pale skin and the dark hair on his forearm. He drags his nails on the down-stroke, and it leaves faint pink lines.
Foggy's seen this before, the way Matt goes deep into his body when he's the right kind of drunk.
On a whim, he totters to the bedroom and picks up a pillow. He lifts it to his nose, then changes the cover for a fresh one--one of the fancy, silky ones he bought when he was intrigued by Matt's devotion to high thread count bed linen. When he drops it in Matt's lap, his arms and legs wrap around it like a koala and he hums happily.
"This is nice," Matt says, his face buried in the pillow.
"It's clean, I promise. Well, clean to non-superhero standards."
"I know. But it still smells like you."
Foggy's shoulder slump. "Still think having your nose cranked up to eleven would suck, and I'm not sure why you pretend it doesn't."
"It does suck. Frequently. Garbage cans. Boiling tar. Flower shops. God, even the Hudson River on a hot day."
"So why don't you move out to Pennsylvania? Fresh air and spring water and waving wheat or something."
"Cows."
Foggy pushes at Matt's shoulder, and he topples into Foggy's lap, giggling squeakily. "I'm not seriously suggesting you get out of New York. For one thing I'm not sure the Amish would get your whole vigilante thing. I just wish I could make the world less stinky for you."
"There are a lot of nice things out there, you know. And I can smell them, and taste them, and hear them, and feel them," he squishes the pillow, "a lot better than everyone else. Not just for my thing," he wriggles his fingers, which Foggy guesses means being a night-stalking, skull-crushing, one man mass spectrometer, "but for normal things too."
"Like what?" Foggy scratches Matt's scalp, and a groan makes it halfway up his throat before he traps it behind his teeth.
"Silk sheets," Matt sighs, melting a little, "dark chocolate. Ripe strawberries. Honey still in the comb."
"If I didn't know you better, I'd be calling you a bougie little hedonist right now."
"It's not because they're expensive, you jerk," Matt tries to paw at Foggy's face, "it's because they're complex."
"Can I point out that all those things are also a little bit sexy?" Foggy squeezes the back of Matt's neck and, if possible, Matt goes even more gooey. One hand flops out, and Foggy finds himself a bit entranced by the curl of his fingers.
"I'm not taking responsibility for your filthy mind," says Matt. He sounds like he might be drooling, "but yeah, the human body is the most complex thing out there."
Foggy's eyebrows raise. There's a question simmering gently in his brain, but he can't really afford to let it bubble to the surface. What must sex be like for Matt?"
He peers at the clock on the dvd player. "Ugh, we should call it a night. Karen'll put something in our coffee--probably a complete lack of coffee--if we show up late."
Matt doesn't move, but he's rubbing his fingers over the thick cottony weave of the pillow, so he's not completely out cold yet.
"Matt, do you want to stay here or you want me to put you on a hand cart and take you home?"
"Here, please." He rolls onto his back and beams up at Foggy, looking drowsy but not really drunk anymore. "Thanks."
Foggy beds Matt down on the sofa as quickly as he can, and disappears behind his own bedroom door. He's been on the receiving end of a lot of Matt's smiles, and each new one is his favourite one and the one that could push him past the point of his resolve.
Foggy's adored Matt for years, amorphously, the way he imagines people in paintings love. It never really got in the way of the friendship, which was grimy and imperfect, but grounded. Human.
But finding out about the whole Daredevil thing broke his heart. Not because he thought Matt was too good--just too sweet and good--for the insane Batman bullshit he spouted about saving the city. Not because it turned out that Foggy's goofy, finicky, tail-chasing teddy-bear of a best friend was so much more brutal in body and spirit than Foggy could ever have imagined or wished. Not even because of the lies, though that was a huge part of it. It took him days to figure it out, but when he did, well.
Matt lived, fundamentally, somewhere where Foggy couldn't go. In the grand scheme of things, Matt didn't live with Foggy in the world of the legal system, and rent for the office, and Josie's on Fridays. He could only visit. It was like the old saying of the fish who fell in love with a bird, and where would they make their home?
Foggy hadn't known he wanted to make his home with Matt.
In the worst moments of their fight, that was what made Foggy almost sick with grief. When he realized they lived in two separate worlds, and no amount of friendship, or understanding, or could-have-been romance, was going to keep those two worlds together.
But every day that Matt's safe helps Foggy forget the fact a little more, and a lifetime of making Matt's visits into the daylight world as comfortable and as loving as possible? That's not so bad. People have settled for less.
He pounds his one pillow into shape--he let Matt keep the fluffy one--and tries to shove it all into the back of his mind. "I should be much better at this," he mumbles to himself, then listens, hand over mouth, to hear if his words have woken Matt. There's only the sound of Matt snuffling into the pillow.