Disclaimer: the characters and concepts in this story are the property of Marvel and their related affiliates. This is an amateur writing effort meant for entertainment purposes only.

Summary: Matt's MIA, so Foggy calls in reinforcements. Unfortunately, the only person good enough to find Matt is the man who trained him.

Author's Notes: As usual, my efforts to conclude a fic exploded well past my initial expectations. I'll save my lengthier notes for the epilogue, then, but I do want to thank the readers of this fic so, so much. It's been a real pleasure slogging through an infection and maggots with you. Please enjoy the last two installments!


Chapter Nine: The Guts to Let It In

The ins and outs of consciousness get harder and harder to navigate. Matt thought he was having a rough time when he first dropped into the sewer and ambled, face-first, against the concrete ground. But then he came to, freezing-cold and soaking-wet; reeking of puss and excrement, and he wanted to be having a nightmare. Foggy's whole being jangled with terrified energy; Stick magically appeared with his wretched tea. The drugging was a kindness, Matt's sorry to say, at least until awareness returns.

Unfortunately, the number of circles in his own personal hell keep expanding. The next time he's 'in' – awake is too strong a word to use for what he experiences – he's in agony. An orgy of needles and hot wires writhes on his infected hip, occupying his senses. Matt hears them slipping and sliding deeper into his skin. He would vomit from the smell of rank flesh if he had the strength to do so. Evidently, he doesn't even have the strength to sit up on his own. There's a heartbeat knocking against his spine, begging entrance. Matt can tell it's Foggy because of the whispers buzzing against his eardrums.

It's not okay, Matt tries to tell him, but he can't remember how to breathe with the brutal gesticulating of whatever is on his hip. Briefly, he's struck with flashbacks to the crap that ate his vision out of his skull. The same chomping sensation digs into his hip. It's not Stick; the old man's shoving a glass of water to his mouth – water that tastes unadulterated but who the hell knows with Stick? It feels better draining down his chin and neck anyways. The chill distracts him from the teeming hoard trying to make a nest inside his abdomen, the same hoard that Foggy and Stick are content to let feed.

Oh, God: feed. He's being eaten. He's being eaten, his best friend is letting it happen, and Matt can't do a damn thing because he's so out of sorts. Limbs dead weight, clubs in place of hands, head a coal-burning furnace. He tenses, and his body heads into flight mode instead of fight mode, having misread the signs that he needs to get these things out of his skin. They're grinding down through his abdominal muscle into his bowel where they'll create a nice neighbourhood of blow flies before streaming out of him, a buzzing mass of white light in an immolated world. Matt hopes he's dead by the time it happens, though knowing his luck – and Stick's sadism – he'll live to see it.

Except that Stick leaves when Foggy orders him to, without a fight, which is weird even for this awful reality. The thought fizzles into steam, not standing a chance against Matt's fever. Besides, the pain is bad: really bad. Worse, somehow, than the deep-seated ache he's carried since Nobu and Fisk, because he can't get away. The spiking, stabbing, and sheering in his skin, and his senses, so well trained by Stick, are harpooned and dragged back to his hip.

Foggy asks if he wants more meds. Matt's forgotten he's been doped. The nausea plays second fiddle to the wet squirming of maggots. No wonder he can't get his senses in order. Clarity, he wants to tell Foggy, the word dying in his throat before being consumed too. He wants his body back, his senses, because he's not going to let a buncha little insects win. Gotta grab himself by the throat and bend it to his will. That's what warriors do, and he's a warrior. He's a warrior.

All these years pushing Stick away, and the old bastard lives on in his subconscious waiting to pounce. Matt can't get him to shut up any more than he can make the maggots stop hurting. Hard to tell which one hurts more, in fact. "I can't, Foggy. I can't…"

Can't give up. Can't let the pain win. Can't admit defeat. Can't tell Foggy that the old sting of abandonment, of Stick's rejection, gets better and deeper when Stick's nearby. That the real reason he's afraid of meds is what Stick'll do with unfettered access to him.

He doesn't want to wake up different. Doesn't want to wake up tangled up in Stick's fucked-up fail-osophy.

Foggy interrupts his inner monologue, the one where Stick and the maggots come together in perfect, painful harmony: "I've got you, Matt." His grip on Matt's wrists and the steady pounding of his heartbeat break through Stick's stranglehold on Matt's senses. Foggy Nelson pile-drives the old bastard and cradles Matt's overheated brain with his words. "Nothing's going to happen to you while I'm around. You're going to sleep, and when you wake up, you're going to feel so much better. Please, Matt? Please?"

Plot blots out the next few moments, and time, for Matt, is disordered, dizzy, a mad spiral of his own breathing and the maggots squirming. His stomach climbs his esophagus and hangs on his tonsils, itching for release. To answer Foggy's question, the one he asked a lifetime ago, no, Matt doesn't want to feel this way. He doesn't want to be helpless around Stick either. Maybe he can hang on until Claire…

The maggots find a particularly juicy corner of his hip, and whatever he was about to wonder gets washed away by a nauseating wave of digestive juices. Matt hugs himself, finding more pain on his chest when he does, one more thing he wants to control but can't. Wants to breathe through but can't. Wants to wake up from but can't. All of the things Stick taught him how to do, he can't.

"You can: you choose not to," Stick might say…actually is saying in Matt's head. It finally occurs to Matt that him lying in pain is proof positive the old bastard doesn't have to be nearby to have a hold on him. So much of Stick's philosophy lingers, and Matt's internalized it to the point that he would rather be in agony than rely one of the best people he's ever known.

Foggy comes back after that; Stick doesn't. Foggy helps him up, and Stick slips away. Matt doesn't taste the ginger ale so much as feel his stomach slide back into place. He also doesn't taste anything else, anything that shouldn't be there. No tricks, no games, no training.

"Whattaya say about some meds?"

He could say no, and much as Foggy doesn't want to see him in pain, he'd let Matt lie there, hurting. And Stick would come back in the room, grab hold, and never let go, because he'd have Matt right where he wants him.

Foggy is here. Claire is coming. Stick is…he wants Stick to go away.

Matt nods. He smells tears, feels them on his cheeks; thinks it's a little messed up that Foggy is weeping overtop of him but no, wait, it's him. He's crying. He barely tastes the tablet with how much ginger ale he allows himself, and he doesn't notice when he's asleep again.


Too soon, much too soon to be awake. He's wearing sweat like a second layer of skin, thick and sticky and awful, and try as he might to do something about it, his body doesn't respond. Matt has fused with the mattress, become one with the sheets. It's all he can do to keep breathing.

The leaden air makes him gag. He can taste the ooze of digested tissue as he breathes through his mouth.

"Matt? Matt," Claire shakes him. She scrapes sweat off his shoulder, sending a chill flying across his chest. The cold collects on his hip. An itch continues to thrive there, one he tries to find but suspects he doesn't when Claire doesn't move to stop him. "Matt, I know you're tired, but I need you to do something for me. I need you to tell me if there's any maggots left in your wound. Matt?"

The itching persists, followed by a soft stinging across the surface of the wound. "Stop," Claire says, but the stinging grows, the temperature dropping, and Matt struggles to hear past the crackle of what smells like saline in his tissue.

"He's out cold," Foggy notes.

"He's not. His pulse is picking up," she removes her fingers from his neck. Matt didn't even notice they were there. He musters a moan when she resumes shaking him, and the effort costs him a few seconds more of consciousness.

There's more moaning, some groaning, a final whine, because someone out there is in pain. A fire is building in the centre of the bed. Matt comes to with ash in his mouth. He feels his ribs pressing heavily against his lungs. His hand finally finds his hip. Actually, he finds Claire's gloved hand protecting it from being prodded. "Matt, I need you to tell me if there are maggots still in the wound," she commands.

"Itches…" he coughs. Beyond that, nothing. He can't focus with his thoughts flittering up, up, and away. One other thing is clear: "Hurts…"

"Can you feel anything moving?"

Matt groans as he forces his muscles to contract. His hip screams, tissue tugging. The gnashed nerve endings exploding with white-hot heat. He falls back into the pillows – or is pushed. There's hands on both of his shoulders, pinning him to the bed. Still, the stupid idea worked. Matt feels the chemical fog lifting. He gets a few seconds of focus.

It's enough to hear the twitch of muscle fibres, the sweet sting of saline; to smell the build-up of over a day's worth of sweat, blood, and mucous. Nothing moving but the cleaning solution that Foggy's applied liberally. Nothing feeding except the hungry jaws of sleep taking bites at his brain.

"No," he lets go. "No, no…they're gone. They're gone."

And so is he.


The next thing Matt knows is that he's moving. Up and over, around and around, through a thick haze of bio-horror that's taken up residence in the bed. Icy hardwood stabs against his feet as a small patch of skin on his forearm screams bloody murder. Matt tugs at it and tastes copper, along with a muffled chant of, "Hell no, hell no, hell no, Matthew." Fingers clamp protectively around his wrist, "That stays."

He grabs the wall for support, hand slick and slipping, a weak axis for his head to revolve around. And yet there he goes again, performing somersaults to nowhere from the waist up as his feet rollick against the shaking ground. "Another attack, Foggy?" he asks, remembering the way the city rumbled as hell poured out of the sky.

Foggy confirms the worst of his fears: "Yes, Matt, we are absolutely under attack: by bad decisions and compromised judgment."

The doorframe swings out of nowhere and catches Matt across the face. He swipes to try and put it back where it belongs only to find it hasn't moved. He has though. He's swung straight forward, and his knees are trying to follow without his feet.

His hip joins the conversation of aches and pains by building from a scratch to a roar inside him. Matt props his back against the wall and reaches, fingertips prickling against fresh bandages as pain nips at his nerve endings.

He buries himself in the small corner next to the doorframe. The smell has followed him. Every breath is liquid rot, and his stomach churns from the intrusion of necrotic…oh, God, maggots.

"I thought we agreed that I was going to take care of you," Foggy insists.

"I don't…I don't remember."

"What is going on, Matt? What's wrong?"

"Nothing…it's fine. Fine…" Matt wants to correct himself, but his jaw snaps shut when more of the rotting taste hits his tongue. He winces through the next few breaths, remembering that once the nausea wears off, the bleariness, the pain, he'll be fine. He'll be just fine.

"You are on too much medication right now to be fine."

He shakes his head no, but also says, "I know I am…"

"So…back to bed?"

"Smells, Foggy," he tilts his head towards the bed. Foggy nudges him in the opposite direction, a subtle indication of where the bed actually is. Matt corrects himself, "The bed smells."

Foggy pats him on the shoulder. The gesture sounds wet with acrid perspiration. "It's not the bed, buddy. You've been out for almost thirty-six hours, and you've been food for a bunch of hungry maggots. That's bound to make anyone a little ripe."

No wonder he feels smothered: his body is covered in a thick layer of body soil. "I need a shower." The bathroom is…his senses fizzle out of focus, beyond his grasp. The drugs have dampened his tactility to the point where he can't feel his wounds, though he tastes too much blood for him not to be bleeding.

The doorframe comes to his aid, cutting him off. His hip and chest wounds are a splay burn inside him, for one vibrant instant, before he's awash with drowse. He's crumbling into the floor, joining it, becoming one with the frozen hardwood. Foggy stops him before he can melt away.

"I can take a shower, Foggy," he notes.

"Yes, and when you can find the bathroom, stand by yourself, and not spontaneously leap out of bed for no reason, I will let you shower,"

"Foggy-"

"No, Matt!" Foggy's voice leaves a ringing in his ears, one that needles his heart. Matt has crossed a line at last with his friend's patience. All he can hear is an angry heartbeat and the desperate clamour of a pulse in Foggy's palms. "You almost died! Again! And I have worked my ass to make sure that doesn't happen! Again! So you are getting back in bed! And you are going to get better if it is the last thing that I do!" After a very pregnant, very silent pause, Foggy takes the liberty off adding one last, "Again!"

Matt apologizes. Again. He isn't sure how to feel about that. Mortality is a slippery subject, one that halts and breaks against sensations he has no desire to relive. And while he's on the subject of things he doesn't want to deal with, "Is Stick here?"

Foggy takes the bait for the moment. His heartbeat lets Matt know the subject of him almost-dying is not gone for good, kind of like Stick, "He took off a minute before Claire got to the door. I didn't have to tell him to or beat him up or anything."

The Stick in Matt's head seems to have gone silent too. Vanished into his long, painful night without a trace. "Good."

"He saved your life," Foggy adds quietly. His voice dances quietly over the edges of Matt's body, though that might be the aftershocks of his infection. Or the thought of owing Stick anything.

"The war is coming," Matt assures both he and Foggy. "He wants me ready."

"What war?"

"I don't know," and he doesn't want to. He can't find a middle way between the druggy fugue masking his senses and the pain that comes with full awareness.

Foggy's grip asserts itself through the torpor. He is the only certainty in Matt's little corner of oblivion. His heartbeat is unreadable, but the steadiness of his hands speaks louder than any of his words could. Stick-schmick: they have bigger, more pressing concerns. "Bed," he commands, drawing Matt up by the arms, "Now."

"Couch," Matt begs. He can't explain his aversion, but he evidently registers having spent thirty-six hours in bed at a cellular level. He lets himself be half-carried and all-led by Foggy in the direction of one of those two locations.

He's genuinely surprised when the couch bumps against his knees. He can't tell direction, can't measure depth or distance. The living room sounds and feels the same as the bedroom, though he knows the acoustics are totally different. God, he's a mess. "When will uh…when will the meds wear off?"
"Little while yet," Foggy says. He's fiddling with something. Plastic slaps wetly against the back of the couch. Matt smells salt water. The sting in his arm makes sense: IV. Fluids and antibiotics coupled with oral painkillers. No wonder his GI tract is having a fit.

He sinks onto the couch, drifting into a haze, semi-conscious of movement around him. A blanket over his trembling shoulders. A glass of ginger ale landing on the table. Foggy slumping in the chair across from him. The gentle, steady thump of his own tired heartbeat.

Sigh. "Lay down, Matt." He's doing so too slowly and incorrectly, and Foggy manhandles him. "Not that way, not that way." Out of respect for his spinning thoughts, Matt lets himself be manhandled. It's Foggy, after all. He's safe. He's okay. He's breathing.

He's asleep.


Happy reading!