"He said he had been a child soldier like I had."
Foggy had been with a client when the broadcast was on, so he didn't know about the revelation until he went home and watched it on catch-up. He made a point about watching all of the interviews of the people Matt had saved, just in case someone said that they knew who Daredevil was. So far that hadn't happened yet. But that didn't mean it couldn't happen, Foggy told himself.
In reality, he knew that he just wanted to hear someone talking about his deceased best friend in a somewhat positive light. Not saying that he was dead, but that he had been a hero. Foggy knew he was kidding himself into believing that Matt was just retired, and that one day he would have to meet up with him for drinks and give him some cases Foggy just didn't have the time to handle himself to keep him off the streets and out of the costume. (Or suit, as Matt would have said, Foggy thought to himself bitterly.)
When he finally got round to watching the interview, Foggy immediately checked social media to see what people were saying about it. It took reading several dozen comments for the information to sink into Foggy's head.
So Matt had been a child soldier. Foggy knew Matt – or at least, he liked to think he did – and Matt had mentioned being trained by a guy named Stick martial arts after coming clean about being Daredevil. He didn't specify how young he had been, but Foggy assumed that he was at least a teenager. In reality, Matt must have been trained from a much earlier age to be able to do the things he did, or had done, at night, probably from when he had first gone into the orphanage. Which means that this guy Stick (weird name aside, as this is coming from a guy called Foggy) had been training Matt in deadly combat from the age of nine.
Claire had mentioned (information passed on to her from Luke Cage) that Stick had arrived in the Chinese restaurant where Matt and the other heroes had hidden (Foggy wished that he could have teased Matt about that, but Matt wasn't here anymore so he couldn't) and had talked about having trained Matt into participating in the war, but Matt had refused to take part in it. What this 'war' was had been cleared by Danny Rand of all people as basically a bunch of undead ninjas seeking eternal youth by means of Danny's Iron Fist. The thought had nearly made Foggy laugh, which he would have done if he hadn't been so distraught. Given how skilled Matt was, and the fact that Matt had been the one to refuse joining the war as opposed to being rejected, Matt must have been training from an early age.
He really was a child soldier.
The thought changed much of what Foggy had known about Matt. What had being a child soldier done to Matt? Would he had been an ordinary guy if he hadn't been trained? He probably wouldn't have become a vigilante. His anger issues would still be there, but Foggy imagined that they could have been solved by doing boxing (not professionally, obviously, Foggy wouldn't have allowed that) like Matt's dad had done. The…bloodthirst, for a lack of a better term, had been put into Matt by an old guy under the assumption that Matt would be needed in a war against the undead. Okay, the old guy had been right, but he had ruined Matt's life because of it. If Matt had no martial arts training, then he wouldn't have had the means to go out every night and beat up people who really needed to be beaten up. He would have just been an ordinary lawyer.
An ordinary lawyer kept awake at night by the sirens and screams of people being hurt with no means of helping them.
Okay, Foggy was making himself sad again (or sadder, he supposed). What had happened had happened, and he couldn't change the past, no matter how much he wanted to. Matt was dead. He may have been a child soldier, but he was dead and therapy can't help a dead man.
Maybe Karen was right. Maybe he should seek confession (even though he wasn't religious in the slightest, but then, neither was Karen). He walked into a church, Matt's old church, he recognised, and sat down next to Karen. They had a lot to talk about.
A/N: Foggy's way of coping with Matt's 'death' seems to have been the 'out of sight, out of mind' strategy. At the end of 'The Defenders', we see how people are reacting to the aftermath of Midland Circle, and Foggy is continuing with his life, taking cases, being a lawyer, but he also seems to be taking spiritual guidance as he joins Karen in Father Lantom's church. I won't be doing Father Lantom's POV, since we don't see at the end of 'The Defenders' what he thought about Matt being a child soldier. But I think it would be something along the lines of "well that explains why he ignores the sanctity of life obligation in the Church teachings" (the sanctity of life is a Catholic teaching that all human life is sacred and should be protected. It's why the Catholic Church has a big no-no on abortions and euthanasia). Matt ignores this as even though he doesn't kill anyone, he is endangering his own life which can be argued to be a form of suicide attempt which is also a big no-no in the Catholic Church.
