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: "Your ex stabbed you in the leg?"

"Yeah, she's some kind of assassin, I think."

"An assassin?"

Matt nods, "I think."

Author's Notes: I was going to start work on a Foggy-gets-sick or Foggy-is-temporarily-blind installment when the announcement was made that they cast Elektra for season 2. Almost immediately, this chapter happened. I just had to write a painful reunion for the two of them. I'll be back next time with one of the prompts for you, dear readers.

I should mention here that the title is a reference to something Foggy says in the chapter and does not reflect Elektra's character completely. She really is more of an anti-hero than evil. There are also references in the chapter to the events of Iron Man 3.

Speaking of, Readers, you are all so lovely and amazing. Thank you for the kind support! Hope you enjoy!


…of Evil Ex-Girlfriends

Matt gets back to his apartment via the roof. Doesn't know how so don't ask. He'll think of a comfortable lie later. He knows he took a roundabout route through the neighbourhood to dodge his attacker, and is pretty confident that he lost her since she doesn't come busting through a window to get to him.

And she would.

Whatever she did to his leg breaks the pain scale. Extending it to twenty doesn't cover it. There's two puncture wounds evenly spaced apart on his calf. Each one's the size of his index finger. He knows, because he accidently shoves his index finger in one trying to inspect it. He comes to with his finger still inside his muscle. Rude awakening for someone with normal senses, but with Matt's tactility, he spends a few moments counting the shredded fibres in his calf muscle. That's before he remembers how to feel pain and lets out a good scream.

The sound echoes in his empty apartment, from the loft to the sitting room to the kitchen. His spatial reasoning is distorted. The walls warble near and far with every breath, expanding and contracting alongside his lungs. Matt wishes he could tune it out, it's not helping, and tries to take ownership of the pain, his disorientation, her, it's too much. There's not enough room inside him for all that to process.

His phone slips through his fingers when he opens it, lands with a discordant clatter on the loft floor. Matt tears off his gloves with his teeth, growling as he does so to keep from screaming again. If his skin isn't covered in blood, it's covered in sweat or tears or saliva; he can't stop shaking either. It's nothing short of a miracle that he dials the right number. When Claire answers, Matt figures it's God's way of making this as alright as it can be, kind of like a peace offering.

"Your place or mine?" she asks jokingly.

Matt wishes he called Foggy. Wishes Foggy knew what to with two giant stab wounds in the leg. Claire's voice is enough to make him start crying again. She's wonderful, and she gone, and she didn't stab him tonight. "Mine," Matt chokes.

He says more, but it's all gibberish. She has the important information, so his brain starts shutting down. The phone drops from his hand to the floor, his body crumples. The whole apartment shouts his name and sounds a hell of a lot like Claire. Then he passes out, because God doesn't do peace offerings.

He dreams about her. The way she used to be.


The sound of his eyelids opening – of all things – rouses him. Matt can't really get a grip on anything else. He's become one of the floorboards. There's pain distantly, miles away, in someone else's apartment, on someone else's leg. Maybe it's Claire's apartment, because he can definitely tell it's her hovering over that punctured piece of meat. Only Claire can be that tender and clinical in the same instant.

"You with me?" she asks.

And just like that, the loft has dimension again. Her echoes let him know he's still lying on the floor, legs elevated on her jacket. There's a blanket wrapped around his chest to combat his hypovolemic chill. Saline dripping into his arm from a bag slung over the bannister. Claire Temple is getting better at scamming Mercy General for its valuable medical supplies. Matt would applaud her if he could move his arms.

"Yeah," he swallows thickly. His saliva's thicker than blood. "I'm here."

"You want to tell me what I'm dealing with?" Claire tugs another suture into place. His skin makes a stretching sound that no human should have to hear as it's tugged back together.

Matt finds other sounds – less disturbing sounds: the storm brewing to the south of Manhattan, sirens over by Central Park, neighbour's cat on the fire escape mewling to get inside. He fixes on the sound of Claire's breathing without even realizing it. Her smell's nice too. The lingering trace of hospital in her clothing tells Matt he's going to make it.

"Matt?" she nudges him. The leg pain hits a fifteen on his revised scale. Better than before, but promising to get worse for the morning. It's nothing compared to the ache he's got going on his chest when his brain connects the dots and figures out who Claire sounds like. "Matt, speak to me."

He pretends they didn't happen. Not at Columbia, not anywhere. Matt forgets that he even went to University. He's always been a masked vigilante, one of Stick's good little soldiers. "Just the leg," he tells her, trying not to provoke more conversation. "Bruising everywhere else."

Claire snips the thread. Matt can hear a tail of it bouncing from his leg when she finishes. "Wanna tell me how it happened?"

If they were dating, Matt would consider it his responsibility to enlighten her. Since they're not, he can say, "No."

She doesn't throw her hands up in defeat, just continues dressing his wounds with a fresh bandage. They've come this far at least: past exasperation to resignation, just two people with a working relationship, though Matt's confident they can both admit to having closer relationships with people they work with. "You get the keep your leg…for now. I'm leaving you with some antibiotics to make sure it doesn't get infected. I also have some T3s-"

"Not necessary," his dismissal is automatic.

Claire continues as if she didn't hear him, "-which you will probably want when you're no longer in shock."

In case there's any confusion, "I'm not taking them."

She sighs, "Just stay off your feet for the next twenty-four hours. At least."

Matt nods. It's all he can do. He's looking forward to melting back into the floor for a while, away from Claire's too gentle hands and her familiar voice and the crumpling of his heart.

Claire doesn't notice his discomfort, or if she does, she says nothing, just continues with his prognosis, "I couldn't steal any blood for you tonight, so you're not going to want to move around a lot anyways. I texted Foggy, told him to bring you Gatorade. Any preference on the flavour?"

"It all tastes the same," nothing tastes as good as she felt. Matt snaps himself back to the present. "Can I uh…stand up? Get to bed?"

The silence scares him, as does the way her heart trochees in his ears. Inquisitive Claire. Dangerous Claire. Her heart did that the whole time when he first met her. "Is everything all right? I thought we were past this cloak-and-dagger stuff."

"More like costumed vigilante stuff. And yeah, I'm all right. I got stabbed."

"These aren't your usual knife wounds."

Matt rubs at his face to hide what he's sure is a deceptive expression. He can lie to a lot of people, but he can't lie to Claire, "I wasn't paying attention."

She doesn't buy it. Her pulse is all, "How were you not paying attention to getting stabbed?" At least when the Russians got to him, Matt had an excuse. There's no way he didn't see whatever stabbed him twice in the calf. Claire doesn't grill him further though. She's learned better. Instead, she stands up and comes to help him up. Matt doesn't give her the chance. He pulls the blanket from his shoulders and hops up to his good foot before she can help.

It's a terrible idea: all pride, absolutely no care for consequence. Matt nearly flips over the bannister towards a longer stay in the hospital. He feels caught on a pendulum, swinging back and forth. Claire catches him, holds him until he can hobble away from her and the phantom hands dragging him back to the past. Before tonight. To Columbia and first dates and hard falls into love or whatever passed for it at 19.

"Are you trying to fall?" Claire demands as Matt hops down the stairs. He's moving at a good clip for a guy with one working leg, and he's still tethered to her by his IV.

"Trying to get to bed," to sleep, to forgetting. He won't dream about her, he won't. He can't. She stabbed him. Matt makes a point of not dreaming about people who stab him. "For once, I'm following medical advice."

"Yeah, for once," she laments.

"I thought you'd be happy."

"Thrilled," and absolutely positive that something's up.

Matt rounds the corner and slumps on the edge of the bed. He starts pulling at his suit. "You staying to watch?"

Claire doesn't respond to that. She folds the sack of saline over his clock for the time being, detaching it from the port so he can get undressed. She then raises her hands in mock surrender and walks out of the room.

He's being an asshole to the wrong woman. Where was all this on the rooftops when he was getting stabbed instead of at home getting stitched?

The stab wounds are not his only souvenirs. Matt finds both his sides inflamed, dappled with would-be bruises. He's got a few scrapes too, but they're close calls, dodges and swipes from a fight wasn't ready for. She's fast but he's still faster, just not fast enough to avoid getting impaled.

He is careful not to damage Claire's handiwork as he prepares for bed. Matt runs a hand over them, the two star shapes she's stitched into his leg, future scars to add to his collection. The prickles of pain send sparks through his world on fire.

Foggy arrives once Matt's sweatpants are on, but Claire stops him at the door for a hushed conversation Matt doesn't bother to overhear. He knows what's being said, the worries that she's expressing. He can feel Foggy's worry from where he sits, recognizes its textures. The sound of it permeates everything Foggy does from the second he sets his duffel on the couch to the moment he gets to the bedroom doorway. "Speak of the devil," he says.

"How long have you been waiting to use that one?" Matt asks, crawling under the covers.

"You don't want to know," Foggy replied.

Claire brushes past him. She's billowing like storm clouds in Matt's ears. She reattaches his IV. Her bare fingertips strike his arm; he absorbs their touch like a punch to the gut. No sooner has she finished, he dives under the covers. Buries his face in the pillows. Pretends they aren't still talking about him as Claire leaves.

He dreams about her. The way she is now.


She digs her claws into his calf and drags him awake kicking and screaming and on the bedroom floor. Her claws are still buried in the meat, claiming his blood and muscles as her own.

"Matt!"

"Agh, get her off me," Matt grips at her wrist and tries to pull it away. She's bigger than her remembers, stronger too. He reaches for her shoulders instead and ends up with two fists of an oversized sweater than smells like Foggy.

"Matt, buddy," the hands on his sides are wary but insistent. They aren't looking to hurt him, but Matt gets the impression he's not supposed to be fighting. Because his body can't comprehend that fact, he's finally told, "Matt, it's me. It's Foggy. You're home and you're safe…and bud, you're kind of hurting me."

It dawns on Matt that those are Foggy's collarbones against his knuckles. This is Foggy he's trying to pry off him. The command takes a long time to leech from his brain to his body. Matt's fingers slowly uncurl, his arms lower, his head hurts. God, his head hurts. Blood loss and nightmares are a brutal combination.

"Sorry," he offers weakly. The word doesn't even begin to cover it. Foggy's found him lying in a pool of sweaty silk and has almost gotten punched in a case of mistaken identity. Matt's sensory perception is all over the place. The room seems wrong – too big, then too small. The walls are closing in – and climbing back into bed seems like a mistake. She was all too fond of beds. Matt's happiest memories with her are in bed.

He claws for the mattress to help himself up. Foggy hovers, muggy with sleep, but his hands have fallen away from Matt's chest. He takes a step back to give his friend room to move past him. Matt hobbles towards the couch.

The sharp sting in his arm stops him, as does the slap of a half-empty bag of saline on the floor. "I got it," Foggy scampers to the task. He takes his place behind Matt like a processional and waits to be led, to be useful. Matt can't bear the thought of it. Foggy Nelson, best friend. Supportive and helpful and exactly the sort of person Matt doesn't want around when Violent Ghosts of Assassins Past show up to kill him. Foggy's still sporting bruises from attacking Stick; Matt shudders to think what will happen when his self-appointed wingman finds out who drilled two holes in his leg.

He's so caught up in fearing for Foggy's life that Matt clips the doorframe on his way to the living room. His injured leg takes a hit too, making his perception flip sideways. Floor to wall, wall to ceiling, ceiling to sky. The air explodes with copper and salt. A cry gets forced out his mouth. There's no room left in his body as the fire fills him. The only respite he gets is from the empty hole in his chest, and even that throbs with an ache she used to keep at bay.

He grabs hold of the first solid thing to come his way. It's Foggy. Of course, it's Foggy. Matt's arms find him without his brain wanting them too, and even though he's kind of flailing and falling at the time, he ends up hauled back to his feet. "I've got you," Foggy assures him. "I've got you."

"Foggy?" Matt's breathing still isn't under control, but nothing in his body is. No amount of focusing or owning his pain or whatever the hell else advice he got from Stick helps. He plants his arm on Foggy's bicep and forces himself upright. The doorframe that tried to kill him becomes his own strong point, "You'd tell me if you were an assassin, right?"

"I'd tell everyone I was an assassin," Foggy asserts. "I'd keep an Instagram of all my kills, because I assume in this universe I'm also a psychopath."
Matt can't bring himself to laugh, "And if you were sent to kill me?"

"I would tell you every day just to keep you on your toes? Are you…" Foggy is starting to think this might not a joke, "Are you worried that I might be an assassin?"

"No," the fire inside him subsides. Matt takes a few cautionary steps toward the couch. He can't figure out where the table is, only knows that his apartment is out to get him tonight. He has to stop and take stock, wait for the air currents and the sound of Foggy's heartbeat to tell him where everything is.

That seems to be taking too long, at least for Foggy. He taps Matt on the bicep, "Two steps this way. Take it slow. Looks like your leg's bleeding again."

Matt nods in thanks and does as he's told. Foggy's instructions get him safely to the couch, where he drops like a tonne of bricks. His head is a stuffed animal filled to burst. One half of his broken heart has wandered into his throat and stays there, pounding. Matt thinks he left the other half on the rooftops with her.

Foggy drapes the saline over the back of the couch by Matt's head. The sound of his footsteps frees Matt from his tightly-packed skull. Foggy circles the couch, shifts through some of the bedding – oh, geez, this is where he was sleeping until Matt woke him up – and returns to Matt with a pillow that smells like his hair.

"Lift your leg for me," he says.

"I'm on your bed," Matt replies, still finding verbal ways to not cover things like fighting Foggy off after a nightmare and taking away his place to sleep.

Foggy somehow gets all that though, or maybe he just doesn't care. One of the two. "Lift your leg or I'll lift it for you. You're getting blood on the floor, and your calf's starting to look like a watermelon."

Matt stops arguing. Foggy places a pillow underneath his wounded calf and gently elevates Matt's leg onto the coffee table. It's the best and worst feeling in the whole world. Matt starts to feel what blood he has left circulating, creating a whirlpool in his empty chest and dowsing some of the cotton in his skull. Thinking gets easier. The dimensions of the apartment are perceptible again.

Foggy starts unwrapping the bandage though, interrupting all that. Matt shifts, "Give me a minute." He's enjoying the sounds of his own circulatory system, the feeling that his body's returning to homeostasis, even if the pain in his leg is still oscillating between a 7 and a 16.

"Look, I know how you are about pain meds…"

"No," Matt's self-control is already tenuous. He's one mention of her away from tears. Introducing prescription pain meds into his system is just asking to sob into the arm of the couch. Which he did, by himself, the night it ended. The night she left.

Foggy abandons the topic entirely. "I need to check and see if you popped a stitch."

"I don't feel a popped stitch," Matt wiggles his toes to get a better idea. He ratchets the pain all the way up to an eighteen, because physical agony trumps emotional trauma any day. "I just bashed the blood out with the door frame."

"None of that stops you from getting an infection," Foggy holds his leg up by the ankle and starts unraveling. Matt embraces the agony the way he held her: with wild and reckless abandon. With a great swell of elation because he was finally understood. Figures that she would end up stabbing him all these years later, really. She was a perfect match to a flawless flame.

"Whoa, Matt, hey, I'll stop," Foggy sets his leg back down.

Matt can't figure out what Foggy's all worked up over, until the warm, damp rivers on his cheeks register. They smell of straight saline, of Claire, and Matt wishes she was here instead of Foggy. Wishes he didn't leave her that night when Fisk blew up half his city. Wishes that love wasn't this relentless comedy of errors and tragedy of circumstance. He wipes away his tears, "No, it's fine, Foggy. It's not that. It's fine. I'm fine."

He is fine. He is. Isn't he?

Foggy lays a hand on the table. He's a mess of signals that Matt doesn't know how to read. Heart rate and temperature elevated, posture slumped, loaded silence that may or may not be resolved. "I could really use an explanation here, Matt," Foggy says flatly. No hint of an ultimatum, just a request. Matt's already suffering enough.

The words just sit there on his tongue. He knows their order, even has a pretty good explanation lined up in his head, but moving them out into the word is impossible. Brain tells mouth to move; mouth refuses. The silence sounds better than whatever he might say. Matt swallows the explanation and the half of his broken heart still in his throat. "I just had a really bad night," he hopes that's honest enough for Foggy to leave him alone.

"I've seen you after some really bad nights," Foggy presses lightly. He tugs the rest of the bandage off. Matt's tongue gets thick with the taste of blood from the air. Foggy sighs, "You're right. Stitches are all in place."

"Told you so."

"Yeah," Foggy agrees sadly. He retreats to the kitchen, wets a cloth from the sink, returns. He's careful when cleaning the blood off Matt's skin, which is, unfortunately, not saying a lot. The heat from the area tells Matt the bruising is going to be worse than the actual stab wounds. "Can I at least know how you got these?"

Matt feels more tears in his eyes. He can taste the explanation at the back of his throat, a hunk of rock in his esophagus. "I just had a bad night," there's an unmistakeable trace of a whimper when he speaks. "It was just a really, really bad night."

"Matt…"

The first tear cuts a new line down his cheek. Matt swipes it away. "I can't do this, Foggy."

"What?"

"I can't...there's just…" he's fumbling for words, tearing through his vocabulary for the ones that don't have anything to do with her. But everything he's ever been belonged to her once and now he's hers again. Once upon a time that meant long afternoons wrapped around each other. Now it means that she stabs him in the leg in lieu of stabbing him in the chest. "I don't know what to say."

Foggy's voice has reached that sympathetic pitch, the one that runs just above his normal register. "Can you start with what you got stabbed with?"

Matt can't stop the halves of his heart from trying to race out of his chest. He can't see the harm in not saying, but he knows Foggy's tactic too well to start speaking. One word answers are the gateway to longer explanations. About the only thing missing from this equation is alcohol, which is Foggy's other preferred opener to an interrogation. Matt purses his lips and breathes through his nose and, "A sai."

Fuck. There. He said it. "She fights with sais," he feels more tears falling down his cheeks and can't wipe them away fast enough.

Foggy keeps pulling the information out of him, "She?"

Matt hugs himself and locks his jaw. He doesn't bother wiping away his tears. Conversation over. That's all he saying.

The silence in the apartment is oppressive, especially when Foggy punctuates it with such supportive sounds. Scrubbing blood off Matt's leg, tearing open a new package of bandages: the only noise he generates is all for Matt's benefit. Matt hates it and wants to be alone. He's acting like a kid, all weepy and broken hearted. This is just a fight. He lost. Big deal.

Stick's words in his head on repeat. Matt cringes. His ears open back up to the sounds of Foggy getting a glass of water in the kitchen. Christ, the old man really did do a number on him. He has one person in the world he can count as a friend to both him and the Mask. Someone who comes in the middle of the night to make sure he's not alone with the nightmares hit, when he bursts into tears because she tried to murder him, and he can't even dignify that person with an answer as to why he's a mess.

Foggy presses the glass against his quivering bicep. Matt takes it. He sips it and the rock in his throat erodes. Foggy takes a seat in the chair next to him, sighing. He's about to say something distracting, if his heartbeat is any indication. Matt doesn't let him.

"I need you to pretend that you don't care about me," Matt says.

"Yeah, I can't do that," Foggy rubs his face tiredly. Exhaustedly. It's a tough call as to who gets less sleep between the two of them anymore.

Matt begs him, "I need you to try."

"If I try not to care, will you tell me what's up?"

"Yes."

"Okee-dokee. Not-caring about you right now. Go."

Foggy still cares. Matt can feel him caring all the way from the couch. Foggy's body temperature rises subtly. His posture goes taut, like a bow string. He holds his gaze on Matt intensely. "Foggy, you are being too good of a friend for me to say this," Matt notes.

"You can hear yourself, right? You know how weird this sounds?"

Matt nods. He can hear a lot more than himself, and it all sounds off. "You told me I needed to work on letting people help."

"Yeah, people that you care about and who care about you."

"Yeah, well, I can't do that. I can't tell you this and have you care about me."

"Why?"

"Because I don't know what to do with that!" there. He says it. And the world keeps spinning.

Foggy does not. He is way too tired to keep progressing through time and space, "You don't have to do anything. I care about you. That's my problem."

"It becomes my problem."

"How?"

"When you try to fix things for me. Like attacking Stick."

"You said that was adorable!"

"I said I appreciated it," he would not use the word 'adorable' for what happened between Foggy and Stick, "But I can't have you putting yourself in harm's way just to make me feel better. I won't let you care about me like that," Matt takes a deep breath. Foggy does too. The silence rages on with their unspoken agree-to-disagree. "You have to promise that you aren't going to do anything about this. Understand?"

"I promise."

His voice is so mechanical, Matt doesn't even have to listen to his heart, "Don't lie to me."

"Fine. Truth: that's the dumbest thing you've ever asked me to do," and then, after remembering something far worse, "Addendum: that's the second dumbest thing you've ever asked me to do. You don't get to decide my life for me. I can't be your friend and stand idly by while you get your ass handed to you. That can't be how this works anymore. And if that's the way you want it, than I should have stayed gone."

God damn it, the tears are coming back. Matt's having flashback to the night after Nobu, of Foggy storming out of his apartment, "I can't have you die because of me."

"So let me know what I'm up against, Matt," Foggy leans over the arm rest towards him. He doesn't touch Matt, doesn't even reach out to try, but his proximity guards against Matt's paranoia of losing everyone again. Of becoming the kind of warrior Stick wanted him to be. "You know why people close to the hero die in comic books? Because the hero doesn't let them know the kind of evil that's after him."

"I'm not a hero."

"Masked vigilante crime-fighter? Defender of Hell's Kitchen? Uh, yeah, Matt, you're kind of a hero," point made, Foggy settles back down into his chair. "That makes me your…" he thinks about it for a long moment. Matt finds the edges of his mouth curling into an anticipatory smile. "What's less involved than a sidekick but better than some stoolie who doesn't know your identity?"

Matt doesn't really want to show how much he knows about the Avengers Initiative, but Tony Stark is just so dam public, "My JARVIS?"

"Yes!" Foggy smacks a hand against the seat, "I'm your JARVIS! Actually, no, I am your Pepper Potts. Badass ginger President of Stark Industries. Entitled to half of your enormous assets – pun intended."

Matt doesn't feel like smiling by he does anyways. "I take it I'm Tony Stark in this metaphor?"

"And I bet Tony Stark doesn't keep Pepper Potts in the dark about all the bad guys who come after him."

"Didn't she get kidnapped for precisely that reason a couple of years ago?"

Foggy snaps his fingers. He has Matt beat, "Uh, no, she got kidnapped because Tony didn't tell her that someone was after him. And Pepper wasn't even threatening to go after that guy. Imagine what we could do together, Murdock and Nelson-"

"Nelson and Murdock."

"The Human Pin Cushion-"

"Oh, God…"

"-and Sarcasm Lad! If you just told me who the hell stabbed you in the leg with a sai."

Matt sighs three times in a row. He twitches from the phantom tapping of a sai point against his leg bone and the angry, molten heat from both his stab wounds. His mind goes back to Foggy's swollen face after the fight with Stick. How he listened to his friend's body for broken bones or a stopped heart. "I can't drag you into my world," he admits quietly. He's sure Foggy can translate what he's saying as, "I can't have anyone else die because of me."

"Who's being dragged? I'm asking."

"You don't know what you're asking."

"So let me know."

The rock rolls itself back into Matt's throat. He takes another long drink of water, empties the glass, hesitates to put it down on the table. At least with the glass in his mouth he isn't expected to talk. The water drains down his throat and seems to disappear in his chest. That blackhole, that vacancy, is spreading. Swallowing him up completely. He's going to disappear into the Mask to keep from dealing with her.

Her. She. Matt's lips shudder.

"Elektra Natchios."

He hugs himself tighter. Her name lingers in the apartment, perfectly at home with the smell of blood.

Foggy doesn't get it, "What?"

"You don't remember the name Elektra Natchios?"

"I don't remember the…wait, that's…the Greek girl from Spanish class?"

"Yeah."

"What about her?"

Matt can't say it. He just gestures towards his leg and lets the clean bandages do the talking.

Foggy leans forward in his chair. His pulse is picking up to a horrified clip. "Your ex stabbed you in the leg?"

"Yeah, she's some kind of assassin, I think."

"An assassin?"

Matt nods, "I think."

Foggy processes the thought in surround sound. Heart racing, breath quickening, eyes shifting: Matt's dizzy from all the micro-activity by the time Foggy speaks again, "Did she know it was you? Under the Mask, I mean?"

"I don't know," Matt hopes not. "She was always hard to read."

"You told me it didn't work out…" Foggy breathes a sigh of exasperation. "Did you know she was an assassin when you were in school?"

Matt shakes his head, "She wasn't an assassin then."

"How do you know?"

"You're just going to have to trust me on that," because Matt sure as hell is not sharing. He already feels like he's given too much away. Their break-up – which exceeds even Matt's revised pain scale – is going to stay private for a while. He has to give Foggy a little more to keep him off the scent though, so Matt justifies his reasoning by saying, "She was really wonderful when we were…you know…"

Dating? Is that what they were doing? It seemed a lot more than that to Matt, but as Foggy tells him, it always seems like more than that to Matt.

Foggy doesn't take the liberty of filling in that statement. He knows better than to push for the time being. He also knows better than to apologize, for which Matt is grateful. The quiet comes to take on a less menacing quality in the wake of his confession. Matt still feels like his inside are coming apart, like his heart's free floating in pieces and the black hole in his chest has a painful gravitation pull. His leg is still burning too. But he kind of appreciates it, the fact that confession isn't a magical cure all for a terrible night. That there isn't a moral, a rhyme, or a reason. Terrible things happen, and sometimes the only thing to do is just let them be terrible. Almost getting killed by an ex-turned-assassin was one of those terrible things.

"Thank you, Foggy."

"I didn't do anything."

Matt nods, "Thank you."

Foggy is not happy, "This doesn't mean I'm never going to do anything."

"I know," Matt makes the mistake of trying to turn and upsets the fire in his leg. He hisses through the agony but stays focused on the conversation at hand, "This is enough."

"What about tomorrow?" Foggy wonders. "What if she comes back? What if she does know who you are?"

"She would be here by now if she knew," Matt confesses sadly. "And she would…" he doesn't finish. Can't finish. There's not enough blood in his body to support the blood drenching his apartment walls in his mind if she finds them. The only saving grace is that she isn't here. She's still out there looking for a man in a devil costume, not her ex from college. "We'll deal with tomorrow, tomorrow. Your way. Legally."

"And then what? I don't think the law is going to help us take someone down for stabbing the vigilante Daredevil in the leg."

Matt doesn't want to say it either, but he has to, "Then I'll deal with her my way."

Foggy sums up their situation succinctly: "This sucks."

"Yep," he fixes his blind eyes somewhere around where Foggy's sitting. "Still want to be a part of my world?"

"Better the devil I know than the one I don't," Foggy shrugs.

The sounds of the city permeate the apartment. Matt counts the sirens in the distance, the peel of tires against the asphalt, his neighbour's apartment window opening and the cat being let back outside. For some reason, in all the auditory chaos, it dawns on him: "How long have you been waiting to use that one?"

Foggy sounds almost asleep, but he still answers, "Ever since I found out."

"You have any more?"

"Plenty. I made a list. 'm saving them for special occasions."

Matt huffs another breathless laugh, "Thank you, Foggy."

"I haven't done anything," he replies gruffly, curling into the chair out of frustration with himself. "You got stabbed by an evil ex-girlfriend-"

"She's not evil."

"She stabbed you. That makes her evil. For now. And I didn't do anything but bring you a glass of water. I didn't even try to tell you everything will be alright."

"There's nothing to do tonight that'll make me feel better," Matt admits with a sad nod, "but I don't feel any worse."

Foggy shifts a little on the chair, grumbling, incapable of finding a comfortable position, "I am the worst Pepper Potts ever."

"But you are a terrific Foggy Nelson," Matt says sweetly, sarcastically.

"And you're a terrific Matthew Murdock," Foggy's voice is just as sardonic as his. He sits up in the chair. "We're actually not doing anything tonight?"

"I'm going to sit up for a while. Go ahead, Foggy. Take the bed. Get some sleep."

"Okay," Foggy stands up from the chair. He marches tiredly to the bedroom, "But you wake me up if you need anything."

He isn't going to need anything, "Good night, Foggy."

"I'm serious."

"Good night, Foggy."

Foggy walks right into the mattress and flops onto it, apparently intending to sleep like that. He grumbles something unintelligibly, something about Pepper Potts and Tony Stark, but then he's asleep.

Matt continues listening to the city, hoping he'll catch the sounds of her light footsteps on the rooftop or the tang of her sais in the air. He wonders where she is, who she's working for, if she's nursing her wounds in private too as the city races towards daylight.

Wonders if she's thinking about him.

Wonders if she's thinking about the Devil.

Wonders which is worse.


Happy reading!