Matt knocked on the door with the back of his hand, the heavy bag he was holding swung forward and hit the wood as well, creating a strange echoing sound around the empty hall. On the other side of the door he heard Foggy's heart rate spike suddenly. The scraping sound of a wooden chair being pushed out from beneath the table and the thumping sound of suddenly displaced air as a large book was closed quickly. Matt frowned.

He could hear Foggy's apprehension on the other side of the door as he approached. He could barely remember what it was like not to know exactly who was on the other side of a door, or a wall, or a building for that matter.

"It's me," he said.

Foggy's heart rate dropped a little. The door opened. "Lost your key?" he asked. "Please tell me you didn't, because the last thing I need is to have to pay for a new lock right now."

"No," Matt told him. He had been letting himself in and out of Foggy's apartment with his spare key for the past couple of days as though he lived there. He knew Foggy didn't mind, he had never had much concept of personal space anyway and had handed over a copy of his keys the day he had moved in. Matt minded. Especially now.

Even as a kid, the things that had bothered him most about the loss of his sight was the change in the way that people treated him and the loss of his independence. He wasn't going to start doing the exact same thing to somebody else, and especially not to his best friend. This was Foggy's home, and he had never just let himself in before, no matter how many times Foggy told him to, he wasn't going to start now.

He held up a bag of groceries, making sure to make the plastic crinkle as he did. "My hands were full." he said.

"You went shopping? You?"

Matt laughed. Actually, he would love to be able to say yes, but he didn't go shopping for groceries and Foggy knew it. It wasn't that he didn't want to, but it was too difficult alone and asking somebody to go with him just seemed like too much of an imposition, especially when there were other ways of doing it. Buying online and having things delivered was just easier, when he remembered.

"I came back via my apartment," he said. "I had some stuff delivered the day before the... the other week." The explosion. The accident. Whatever they were going to call it. "No point letting it go to waste there."

Foggy snorted. "Typical, you finally get around to buying some food, then you move out and leave it all there."

"I got some equipment too." Matt added. "I'm willing to bet that your kitchen scales probably don't speak." He left his cane by the door and walked through to the kitchen where he deposited the bag on the counter.

Foggy followed him more slowly. "You're right," he said. "They don't. But the main reason for that is I don't actually have any. You know I'm more of a buy readymade guy. Cooking isn't really me."

"Yeah, I might have noticed that before," Matt told him. "First time for everything."

"I'm not that bad," Foggy told him, "I have cooked before, I just tend to... wait a minute, what do you mean?"

"You're not going to let me do all the work are you?"

Foggy groaned. "Why did I have a feeling you were going to do something like this?"

"I guess you just know me too well," Matt said. "Anyway, I'll need some help figuring out your kitchen. It's chaos in here."

"Yeah, but it's an organized chaos," Foggy told him. "I know exactly where everything is."

Matt doubted that, but they were about to put it to the test.


The sun was setting, the light level in his apartment gradually reduced and as it did, so did the pain in his eyes. He didn't switch on the light. Instead, he allowed the darkness to fill the room, coating everything, making the world more comfortable to live in. When it was dark enough, he removed the glasses and placed them on the coffee table next to the sofa. The same table that was responsible for the bruise he was sure he had on his shins from two days before.

As though roused by the memory, the injury throbbed. He ignored it.

He had been useless in the kitchen, not that there was any real change there, toast was his limit generally speaking, eggs when he was feeling ambitious. Matt had been right, too. He actually had no idea where anything was in the kitchen.

Eating had been an exercise in frustration; slow, difficult, embarrassing, exploring his plate with his fork, searching for elusive food that he knew was there, right in front of him, but just couldn't find. Even when he did, actually spearing it with the fork was as much a challenge as finding it. He had no idea how Matt did it if it really didn't involve using his abilities, and his instructions and attempts to help were not helpful, not really, as much as they sounded like they should be.

It had taken about three times too long to finish his plate. By which point the whole thing had been cold and he didn't want it anyway. He wanted to cry. Actually, that was the last thing he wanted to do, but he had a feeling he wasn't going to have a choice in the matter. He blinked angrily and took an only slightly shaky breath.

"You okay?" Matt asked.

Foggy breathed in again, slowly and calmly. It would pass, if Matt would just shut up, he would be able to get it under control. He reached for his beer, slowly, hand low to the table. Ironically, with the light so low, he could actually see better because he could stand to have his eyes open for any length of time without having to squint.

"Foggy?"

"Y… No." He took a sip of his drink. "I hate that I can't lie to you any more. No, I'm not okay. I hate this. Is that what you want to hear?"

"No," Matt sounded taken aback, surprised at the outburst. "Of course not."

He took another sip and placed it carefully on the table in front of him. "Well tough, 'cause there it is. I'm terrified, and I don't know how to deal with it because if I make out like this is a bad thing, I'm insulting you and all the other blind people out there who know it's not the end of the world. And I know that too, it's just that right now I'm finding it really hard to remember it."

"The only reason most of us know that is that we had to find out the hard way," Matt told him. "Do you think I found it easy at first? Sometimes it's still hard."

"Really?" He hadn't known that. Matt had never told him that. He laughed off every obstacle that society put in his way, took every frustration as a challenge, worked around the things that were important and pushed straight through the things that weren't, and never once did he give the impression that not being able to see bothered him. But then, why wouldn't it? He had lost something precious, learning how to live without it was one thing, learning not to mind was something else entirely. "You never told me that," Foggy said.

Matt didn't answer. Foggy heard the sound of ripping paper as the label was slowly peeled from a bottle of beer.

"You should tell me stuff like that," Foggy told him. "I know I can't do anything about it, but you should still tell me."

"Wanna watch the movie?" Matt said, not so skillfully changing the subject, diverting the topic of conversation away from himself.

He really didn't. He was almost tempted to say yes simply to break the tension. He resisted the urge. It wasn't that he was worried it would be awful - he knew it probably would be, but as much as he liked to mock the audio descriptive soundtracks and put them to shame with his superior descriptive skills, they weren't that bad. They did the job. They weren't a patch on watching the action unfold on the screen for yourself, but that would have been okay. He just didn't want to have to deal with the glare from the screen. Not when he had just gotten comfortable.

"Foggy?"

He sighed. "Do you mind if we don't?"

"You sure? I chose one I know you've seen before, I thought it might be easier for you to follow what's going on if you already know it."

"It's not that," Foggy explained. "I just think the screen'll probably hurt my eyes. It might be better to do it while it's light some time."

"Oh, it's dark? Yeah I suppose it would be. I noticed you took the glasses off."

Foggy had wondered many times before now what it would be like to inhabit a world of total darkness, where there was no difference between the brightest summer's day and the middle of the night. This was the first time the idea had sounded vaguely appealing.

He backtracked on the thought the instant it entered his mind. That was not something he should be thinking. Not ever.

"Yeah, it's dark. Ish. You know that kinda half light where you can still see, but only just?"

He heard a rustle of fabric as Matt's shoulders shrugged against the chair where he was sitting. He was sure he wouldn't normally have noticed that, he wondered whether Matt was making a special effort to be more obvious about what he was doing. More ripping sounds as he continued to shred the bottle label.

"Right, you probably don't know. I guess you forget things after a while."

Liquid sloshed in a glass bottle as Matt took a sip of his beer. Foggy imagined the label in a neat pile on the arm of the sofa.

"Matt?"

Matt put his bottle back down on the table. "Yeah?"

"Do you think I'll start to forget what things look like?"

Matt froze in place, half way between the sofa and the table. "No," he said. "You'll be healed up before that even starts to become an issue."

"I…" Foggy shook his head. He felt tears beginning the prick the corners of his injured eyes again. "60%" he said. The words came out as a hoarse whisper. He took another sip of his drink, it turned into a gulp, and another.

"What? What does that mean?" Matt edged a little closer to him on the sofa, concern was radiating from his body and Foggy could hear it in his voice.

"That's my chances," Foggy said. "The doc told me this morning. 60% chance of getting enough vision back to be useful. Now I was never great at math, but even I can work out that's a 40% chance I don't. And I mean, sure that's including things like getting most of it back, but it's also taking into account the possibility of something going wrong at it getting worse. 40%. That's practically 50%, Matt. It's practically a 50/50 chance."

Matt edged closer still. An arm snaked around Foggy's shoulders and pulled him toward the center of the sofa. Foggy allowed him, giving in to Matt's gravitational pull as he always did. He leaned hard against him. He could feel his own breathing, ragged, too hard and too fast, as finally saying the words edged him closer to the panic that had been threatening to overwhelm him for most of the day.

Matt, to his credit, didn't try to use the statistics to say something positive. The odds were in his favor, but that didn't mean that they were good. Matt simply held him, breathing slowly and deeply in such a way that Foggy couldn't help but copy. "I'm sorry for leaving you today," he said. "I knew there was something you weren't telling me, I wish…"

"It's okay," Foggy told him. "I needed time alone."

He could feel the tears welling larger now. He blinked them away and allowed them to run down his cheeks. The light level in the room continued to lessen.

"I saw a story about you in the newspaper," he said. "When you had your accident, I read about it. Did I ever tell you?"

He felt Matt's head shake, leaning gently against his own. "You never said specifically, but you knew who I was," he said.

"I couldn't stop thinking about you for days," Foggy said. "Weeks, even. I thought what it must be like for you. I thought… I thought how glad I was that it wasn't me. I'm sorry. I was a kid, I was… Do you think God is having some kind of a joke at my expense? Punishing me for thinking something so horrible?"

"You don't believe in God," Matt reminded him gently. "You told me that in college. You said he's never done anything to prove he existed so you weren't going to believe in him until he did."

He had been drunk. They both had. He didn't remember anymore what had prompted the discussion, what he did remember was that Matt hadn't cared what he thought. There had been no argument, simply a difference of opinion. But a difference of opinion like that could have torn many new friendships apart before they had even begun. That was how Foggy had first known that he and Matt were going to go the distance.

"Maybe this is it. This is him telling me he's there."

"No. God isn't some vindictive kid punishing people for every stray thought years after the fact. And even if he were, that's not an evil thing for you to have thought. It was a man that did this, and believe me, he's going to pay for it."

Foggy pulled away slightly to look at Matt. He couldn't see anything at all now beyond a slightly darker area in the barely illuminated room. "You know something, don't you?" he asked.

Matt didn't answer.

"Matt, what do you know?"

"Nothing yet," he said.

"Who was it?"

Matt sighed. "I don't know anything yet, Foggy. Believe me, I'd tell you if I did. But I'm going to find out."