Sometimes, he thinks that a part of him will always be in the prison cell.
Four grey, concrete walls, a door made of metal painted a dark blue so long ago that it is chipped and bubbled, the ceiling above his head that had been white once, now yellowed with age, stained in patterns that looked as though something had seeped through from the floor above. He can't help but notice that one of the stains was the shape of Italy.
There is no comfort there, not even a chair to sit in, nothing but the hard stone floor. No window. No view of the outside world.
"Just focus on your breathing. In through your nose, out through your mouth. Shut out everything else but the feeling of the air filling your lungs." Matt is sitting completely still opposite him. They sit on chairs, Foggy doesn't know whether he will ever be able to sit on the floor again without revisiting the cell.
In his worst moments, he remembers the table. Not a feature of the room, but a large metal thing on wheels that barely fits through the door. It almost fills the room. He struggles as they lift him onto it, but by now he is so weak with hunger and exhaustion that he can't put up much of a fight. There are four of them, one woman, three men, all wearing blank disinterested faces. He has never been more sure than in this moment that he is nothing but a lab rat for their experiment.
"Concentrate on the cold sensation in your nostrils as you breathe in, the air filling your lungs. Block everything else out, don't let the things you can hear or smell distract you." He can hear concern in Matt's voice. He can hear the drum-like pounding of his heart increase just slightly.
That's not that problem. He almost wishes that it was.
He can still feel the thick straps securing first his arms and then his legs to the table, tightening until it is actually painful, pinning him to the hard metal surface. Panic does not set in fully until that moment, when he realizes how completely at their mercy he truly is. The fifth and final strap is the worst. Thinner than the others, it extends over his brow. A man with brown hair, a lab coat and wire framed glasses tightens the strap with a buckle and he hears the leather creak against it.
He draws in a deep breath, keeping it slow and even, resisting the urge to give in to the feeling of panic that is rising within him as the memory threatens to overcome him. He tries to do as Matt has instructed, feeling the air entering his body, bringing with it so many scents, food cooking in a nearby apartment, the smell of sweat from his own body, from Matt's, from the neighbors across the hall. Traffic fumes from the street below, somehow finding their way inside through the closed window. He tries to ignore it all, to focus instead on the act of breathing.
He struggles, writhing and wriggling uselessly against the bonds. He strains to breathe, pulling in gulp after gulp of air and it never being enough. He barely catches a glimpse of the thing before they put it on.
Metal, rounded edges rather than angular. That is all he sees before it is too close to his face for him to see anything. A woman leans over him, carefully forcing the lids of his eyes open with gloved fingers as she lowers the thing still further until it touches his face. The frame rests on the lids of both his eyes, forcing them wide open with a gentle, unrelenting pressure. Above him, the stain in the shape of Italy stares down at him.
He stops trying to meditate. It is an exercise in frustration. He takes in a final deep breath and releases it as a sigh, raking the fingers of both hands through his hair as he does. He can feel the accumulated grease of so many days there. He can feel every individual strand of hair, and noise almost like a ripping sound assaults his ears as his fingers part them.
"It'll come," Matt promises him. He sounds far away.
Foggy shivers as he wipes his hands on the sweatpants he is wearing. He had bought them in college and barely looked at them since. It occurs to him that he doesn't remember what they look like.
He had always wanted to see Italy. He remembers looking at a globe as a kid at school, spinning it around, looking at the shapes of the countries. Italy had fascinated him, a boot kicking Sicily out into the ocean like a soccer ball.
Of course, there were a lot of things he had wanted to see. Now he never will.
He wraps his arms around himself and slumps forward, squeezes his eyes tightly closed and tries not to think about that. Somewhere in the building, a husband and wife are arguing about money. Somewhere else, a teenage girl is screaming at her parents. Matt still sits opposite him. His presence is made of the constant beating of his heart, the sound of his breathing. All around him he hears the sounds of everyday life, conversations mingled together to create a cacophony of noise; TVs, radios, traffic, the click of the keys on a nearby laptop, a baby crying as its mother tries to sooth its tears.
His eyes flick wildly around the room, looking for anything that might help him out of his predicament. He repeatedly tries to force his eyes closed, the cold metal frame prevents him from blinking. They sting and he feels tears begin to well, instinctively trying to protect the delicate tissue from pollutants in the air. It isn't until his throat begins to hurt that he realizes he is screaming. The four faces around him still appear uninterested as a man picks up a dropper from a shelf attached to the table where Foggy lies. He unscrews the lid before pinching the rubber tip and removing it from the bottle.
Another of his captors, a black man with hair cropped close to his head, reads from a chart. "Let's move to six drops for this subject," he says. "Each eye."
Italy stares down at him from the ceiling, brown in the middle, fading to yellow around the edges. The dropper appears in his line of vision, and he knows that there is nothing he can do. He bites down hard on his bottom lip and stares upward. Still he feels himself straining against the straps holding him in place, feels the leather biting further into his skin.
For a fraction of a second, it doesn't hurt, then it does. The pain is searing, ripping through his eyes, itching, burning, sinking deep into the tissue. He feels whatever is in the dropper spill from his eyes and begin to run down the sides of his face, leaving a trail of pain as it does and despite his attempts to stop himself, he is screaming again.
They stop, back off and wait. Agony tearing through his still wide open eyes, he stares up at the ceiling because he can't do anything else. His eyes find the stain in the shape of Italy. As they do, his vision begins to swim, then fade to black from the edges inward. The stain is the last thing he sees.
He loses consciousness still strapped to the table. The pain in his eyes is the last thing he is aware off until he awakens on the hard stone floor.
"Maybe…" He hears Matt stand and begin to pace the room. He can hear his exact position by the sound of his heart. As he moves, the air currents in the room change subtly in ways that he doesn't yet understand but knows that in time he will learn. "Maybe meditation isn't for you," Matt says. "Or maybe just not yet. It's not easy at first to quiet the mind, especially with all the…" he tails off. Foggy knows what he means. It is too loud, too many smells, tastes, sensations, but it is not that that is preventing him from following Matt's instructions.
He raises his hands and covers his ears, blocking out a fraction of the sound that is bombarding him. If this is how Matt experiences the world, then it is a miracle that he can get anything done at all.
He fights the urge to close his eyes, forcing himself instead to stare out into the impenetrable blackness before them. Against his will, he feels his eyes flicking from left to right, straining, trying to adjust to the darkness and provide him with a glimpse of his surroundings. His hands slip from his ears to the front of his face and cover his eyes instead in a crude attempt to stop the search.
"It… it's not as bad as you think," Matt tells him.
Foggy moves his hands and instinctively tries to look for the source of the voice. Matt is behind him now, walking back to the chair in front of him.
"I mean, I know it's… It's not…" Matt breaks off, and even from within the cell Foggy feels
himself silently urging him on as he always does when Matt's words fail him.
Outside on the street, a car's horn blares loudly, followed by a string of abuse. The garbage can in the kitchen stinks of rotting food, so badly that it makes him want to vomit. Matt's steps increase in speed as he progresses from walking around to actively pacing the room.
"It'll get better," Matt says. "Not your vision, I don't mean, but you'll learn how to…" he tails off again, then sighs.
The stain in the shape of Italy mocks him. He had never gotten around to seeing the world. He has a list in his head of all the places he had one day thought he would see. He doesn't even have a passport.
"Stick used to tell me that sight was a distraction," Matt adds. "He… he said it got in the way and I was better off without it."
"Stick was an asshole," Foggy tells him. His voice sounds hoarse and he realizes that those are the first words he has spoken since the rescue. Matt's heart rate jumps, just a little, and Foggy knows that he noticed that too.
Matt ceases his pacing instantly, as though someone has flipped a switch and halted his motion. Footsteps resume, in Foggy's direction, approaching him from behind. Foggy can hear his exact location in his footsteps and the sound of his heart. "Hey," he says, speaking in a low tone, as though dealing with a child or animal that he didn't want to startle. "Are you back?"
Foggy doesn't reply. He is still in the cell. He can still feel the restraints biting into his wrists and ankles, the metal frame pressing onto his eyes, preventing him from closing them. He forces his eyes to remain open, because when he closes them he can see the yellow stained ceiling. The darkness he sees here is preferable.
He forces his right hand to move, to touch his left wrist, he rubs gently, erasing the biting sensation of the leather strap.
Matt moves again, his footsteps positioning him right in front of Foggy. The location of the sound of his heart drops a little, and Foggy realizes his is kneeling in front of him. As though he somehow knows what is in Foggy's head, Matt's hands reach for his arms. They caress gently where the restraints had been.
"They're bruised," he said. "Here," he takes Foggy's right hand in his and ran the fingers over his wrist with a little more pressure than Foggy had used. "Can you feel the difference in the texture? Not the skin itself, but underneath it."
Foggy can. It is subtle, but his too sensitive fingertips can feel a slightly raised strip around the wrist, it corresponds to the location of the strap. He pulls his hand away. Matt touches him again, on the back of each hand, and somehow Foggy knows that it is to ground him, to bring him back. He closes his eyes and sees Italy above him.
"You okay?" Matt asks.
Foggy licks his lips. He tries to lie, but he can't bring himself to say the word. Besides, Matt would know he wasn't, and not just because of the heartbeat thing. "No," he admits. He is holding back a tide of emotion, and that admission comes dangerously close to breaking the dam.
Matt doesn't seem to know what to do with that, like he hadn't expected honesty. He hesitates for a moment, then sits back down in the chair opposite. Foggy hears the springs creak. "You'll get there," he says.
Foggy forces himself to stay in the moment, not to slip back into the cell, not to look at the stain on the ceiling. "This world on fire thing is a bust," he says. He forces a smile as he speaks although it is the last thing he wants to do, knowing that Matt will hear it.
"I…" Foggy hears a slight change in Matt's breathing, he has no idea what it means. "I might not have explained it very well, I didn't think you'd ever…" he tails off. "It'll come. It's just a case of learning how to interpret what you can hear, taste, feel, smell. Use it to build up a mental image, but in time it'll become less like an image, more like a feeling."
"Simple as that, huh?"
"I never said it was simple."
Foggy grunts. He doesn't close his eyes, doesn't slip back into the cell. The world is too loud, it stinks, but he breathes through his nose because it is better than the tastes he can detect in the air. His clothes irritate his skin, he is aware of the movement of the air in the apartment around him.
The straps are around his wrists again, around his ankles, pinning him down. He takes a deep breath. Matt touches his arm.
"I keep seeing the cell where they kept me," he admits. "Not just seeing it, I'm there, experiencing it. There's a stain on the ceiling that looks just like Italy, a..and it was the last thing I…" he breaks off suddenly as his throat constricts, choking the final word of his sentence. Someone walks past his the door to his apartment - no, the floor below him. A car slams on its breaks on the street outside. The garbage still reeks and he doesn't know whether he would be able to bring himself to empty it even if he could see, which he can't. Which he never will again.
If he could just see something else for a second, a flash of anything at all, he knows that he would be able to banish the cell, the map of Italy, even the straps around his arms and legs.
Just a second. Half a second.
Everything is too loud.
He balls his hands into fists and tries not to scream.
Matt's grip on his arm tightens. "Want to hit something?" he asks. "I've got a punch pad in the closet."
Foggy hesitates. That is Matt's coping strategy, not his. But his is a night at Josie's with a bottle of whiskey, and he's not sure he could even stomach the taste any more.
"Come on." Matt starts to pull him to his feet. Foggy follows without protest. Even if it doesn't do anything for him, he can start to work on his spatial awareness. And keep his mind out of the cell.
He is hopelessly lost in seconds. He tries not to care, but it doesn't work. He hears Matt open a door and pull something out. It scrapes along the wooden bottom of the closet, sounding heavy and leathery. Matt takes Foggy's hand and places it on the thing. It is padded, but harder than he expected. "You know," he says, this is really not how I planned on spending my Saturday night."
Matt doesn't exactly laugh, but Foggy hears the smile in his voice. It's not the same as seeing it, but it's close. "It's Monday," he tells him.
"Huh." He rolls his eyes. Or at least he thinks he does. "Well if it's Monday that's fine. Right on schedule."
The world carries on around him, stinking, too loud, too generally awful to contemplate, and he doesn't know what he is going to do next; how he is going to live, to work, to do anything at all, but as he tries to follow Matt's instructions, placing one fist after another into the pad as Matt holds it steady, some of the background noise falls away and for a moment, he remembers what peace feels like.
The rest, he's going to have to figure out when the time comes.