Doctor's Note: Daredevil on Netflix is a phenomenal show. One feels as close to the cast as family. Please read and enjoy a law school-days flashback! - Dr. MP

Warnings: Quite mild swearing.

Ever since the term project on which they'd partnered in their second semester at Columbia, Foggy Nelson noticed that his roommate and fast friend Matt Murdock no longer wore his glasses in their dorm room.

Not glasses, like regular ones. Dark glasses, because he was blind.

Matt was a private person, reserved and anxious, and considerate of other people to a fault. Even though his eyes didn't look damaged, he wore the dark glasses one-hundred percent of the time in public. At first, Foggy thought it was entirely because Matt wanted other people to feel at ease.

But they'd get back to their dorm room, and Matt would still have them on. Matt would be in bed, but if Foggy was still up, the glasses were still on. Even coming from the shower, dressed only in pajama pants and a bathrobe, Matt remained bespectacled.

Only when he slept were they off – but he was almost always up before Foggy, and in bed long after him. In almost a year, Foggy had never seen Matt's eyes.

That was Foggy's first clue that the glasses were more than a courtesy.

Their first shared term project was in fact a film project. Super-odd class to take for a blind law student, for sure, but Foggy and Matt had both been excited to enroll in an elective that was far removed from the drudgery of memorizing local ordinances.

For the project, they had to use obsolete Bolex cameras to shoot a three-minute short film on any subject. They figured they'd split the duties: Matt would come up with the story and write the script, while Foggy would shoot the scenes and splice together the obnoxiously tiny film strips.

Matt admitted he was not very creative but felt obligated to pull his weight, so he fussed over a cliché plot about a threatened girl on campus who's saved by a mysterious crime fighter. Foggy would both man the camera and play the crime fighter (since none of their uptight peers agreed to perform). They also had to change the girl in trouble to Matt wearing a wig, who didn't need to rehearse to appear lost and helpless when he was attacked by—you guessed it—Foggy in a different outfit.

Foggy forgot that he had to remove the rolls of film in a dark room, and ended up overexposing their original footage. They scrambled to shoot their scenes again in time to get it developed again, even as they crammed for final exams in their core law courses. By the time Foggy had usable film to start editing with—and had hung it from every corner of their dorm room like a spider's web—it was 2 AM the night before the project was due.

Foggy bent low over the film splicer, aligning two frames of himself as the masked vigilante leaping from a low garden wall (straight into the path of the mugger, also himself). It was gonna take some clever editing to make it seem like the two Foggys were fighting, but he and Matt had accounted for it in the shot list…if only Foggy's bleary eyes could see straight, or his over-caffeinated body stopped causing his hands to shake…

A bead of sweat cascaded from the tip of Foggy's nose, splashing onto the film. To top it all off, their dorm's air conditioning had been broken for about four days, during the hottest May weather New York had suffered in decades.

Foggy wiped his brow and grumbled a stream of choice words to himself. In vain he tried to salvage the delicate, soggy piece of film by rubbing it on his equally sweaty t-shirt sleeve. It was hopeless…

"Everything good?"

Foggy tore himself away from his cinematic mess and swiveled his chair around to face Matt, who looked rather small and trapped at his own desk on account of the ribbons of film sealing him in. Matt had several textbooks in braille open before him—one in his lap—and had one headphone in to listen to his laptop. He was studying for their last final, which was the day after tomorrow. Foggy also spotted his barely-touched plain turkey sandwich and felt his malnourished body yearning for a bite.

"Yeah," he said. "Sorry. I just suck at this. And it's hot."

"I wish I could help, buddy," said Matt ruefully, and he meant it. "You're pulling all the weight."

"Nah—the worst part is getting to see every millisecond of my terrible acting," quipped Foggy, feeling bad for complaining. "Times two. Over and over and over again. You're lucky."

Matt laughed. "I disagree. I'm missing the performances of a lifetime." He felt for his laptop and closed the lid, then removed his headphone and set it on top. "But I'm glad I don't have to see myself," he added, cringing. "God. Sorry."

Foggy scoffed. "What are you talking about? You're a natural! A totally convincing damsel in distress." He ran his hands over his shining, red face. "It's hot, Matt," he groaned. "I feel like I gotta go get some air, or some more coffee. Or both."

"By all means," said Matt, "but I'll guard the work-in-progress…I've still got to read three chapters of this stuff." He patted the book in his lap.

"That's like half the unit. Slacker."

"Yeah, you'd be surprised."

"Ha! You don't fool anybody, goody-two-shoes."

"Not you, anyway." Matt was as weary as Foggy, but when he grinned, his whole tired face lit up. Foggy didn't know if his eyes did, too—Matt's dark glasses slid down his nose in the heat, but Matt swiftly pushed them back up.

"Stay tuned, loyal viewers!" called Foggy over his shoulder as he maneuvered around the film strips to the door, grabbing his wallet off his nightstand on the way. "No pun intended."

"Ha!"

A café on campus called "The Midnight Oil" was open long past midnight, but even this was closed when Foggy ventured out at half past two. He ended up buying three cups of convenience store coffee and carrying them back in a tray. It was hardly a reprieve outside in the horrendous muggy air, but at least it was a tiny bit cooler. And Foggy avoided any run-ins with delinquents—everyone was either exhausted from or holed up studying for finals.

When he got back, it was nearly three. He trudged up the backstairs all three flights, sweaty and miserable. He could feel the temperature rising a few degrees every floor. At least the coffee smelled good.

Foggy couldn't ask Matt to open the door—there was no way Matt could get around the film trap without getting tangled and falling. He set the coffee tray on the floor and sagged against the unlocked door.

He stopped short of announcing his welcome: Matt had moved to the floor beside his desk, sitting under the open window. He still had the book propped against his knees, but he had fallen asleep as he was reading, for his head hung low over his slow-rising chest. He was gonna have a helluva crick in his neck real soon.

Forgetting the coffee, Foggy wove between the film strips with deliberate clumsiness until he reached his friend. But just before he was close enough to shake Matt's shoulder, there was a terrible crunch.

Matt jolted awake. "Foggy?" he asked, confused. "What was—"

He instinctively reached toward where the glasses had been resting, but instead Matt's hand found the sweaty bare toes and scuffed flip-flop of a mortified Foggy Nelson.

"Um, Foggy…" Matt kept his head low and his tone ambiguous. "I think those were my…"

"I'm so sorry, Matt. I'm so sorry!" Foggy retreated several steps, sending a shower of film strips fluttering to the floor.

"It's okay."

"No it isn't! You have another pair, right?" Foggy's panic was amplified by stress and exhaustion. "Where are they? Can I grab them for you?"

Matt shook his head. "They broke…"

"I didn't break those, too, did I?!"

"No, Foggy…" Matt sighed. He seemed too tired to be angry, if he was even angry. Foggy couldn't tell. He wanted Matt to be furious, to scream at him and kick him out once and for all. He only ever got in Matt's way—he deserved it.

"Calm down, man," said Matt, almost in response to Foggy's feverish thoughts. "It's fine. I shouldn't have put them on the floor. I should just get a case..." He gingerly felt for his shattered glasses. "Can you help me clean this up, though?"

"Oh, yeah! Yes!" Foggy sprung to the trash can under his desk and flung it over to Matt. "I got it, man, you don't have to touch it!"

"Thanks." Foggy took some of the napkins from his empty fast food bags and scooped up the mangled frame and bits of ebony glass. He glanced up at Matt a few times, still worried he'd be angry. He still didn't seem to be, although he kept his face angled away from Foggy. Foggy suddenly realized he'd never seen Matt awake without his glasses on.

"Can you get another pair?" Foggy asked Matt lamely.

Matt nodded. "I'll order them online. They'll come in a couple days." He seemed to think of something. "Do you have an extra pair of sunglasses I could wear?" he asked, almost shy. "I mean, for our presentation and the final, just until the glasses get here."

Foggy was incredulous. "Of course, man! You can wear all of them! Here—" He left his half-finished cleanup job to clamber over to his bureau, where he extracted a semi-normal looking pair of Aviators from the top drawer. They were his backup pair. The lenses were…blue, but Matt didn't have to know that.

"Thanks, buddy," said Matt. "Could you put them on my laptop?"

"Sure thing!" Foggy hesitated. "You don't wanna wear them now?"

"No." Matt paused. "It'd be dumb to wear them in here," he admitted in a mumble, as though he'd felt it had been rude all along.

"It's all good, man," said Foggy quickly, relieved it was his turn to reassure. "I get it."

Matt didn't say anything, but he turned his head a little toward Foggy—and Foggy saw his eyes. Clear, and steadily fixed on something distant, they were as vulnerable as Matt now seemed—and sad.

Foggy stared at Matt, who made eye contact with him only briefly and by accident. Matt eventually cleared his throat.

"I smell your coffee," he said. "How many did you get?"

"Three! Two for me, and one for you?" Foggy forced himself to look away from Matt, who could probably still feel Foggy's eyes boring into him.

"That would be amazing."

"You got it!"

They tipped their now lukewarm cups together in a finals-week toast, and dove back into their respective assignments—hot, bone-tired, and mentally drained, but somehow revived.

Matt and Foggy managed to earn a B-minus on their film project ("Above the Law") despite the shoddy storyline, filming, and editing. Their professor claimed it had "heart," although he and half the class seemed to be holding back laughter when Matt went up front to explain the script. Immediately after their last final on Friday, they celebrated all night together on the town—just the two of them, as they'd soon noticed they were prone to do. Matt's glasses arrived Saturday morning. Foggy tucked his blue Aviators back into his drawer and sighed with relief—Matt would never know.

But now, whenever they were alone in their dorm room, studying or packing or napping or whatever, Matt would remove his dark glasses and set them on his desk, and let Foggy see his face.

Foggy never took it for granted.

END