Matt doesn't like hospitals either.

He's never strictly told Peter this in as many words—or, well, in any words at all—but Peter figures it out soon enough. It's hard to keep something like that hidden in their line of work, especially at a time like this, when Matt is bleeding out on his apartment floor and the time when normal people would call an ambulance passed about, oh, an hour ago.

It's two in the morning and they're supposed to be halfway across town breaking up a drug trafficking ring (specialty: laced heroin with a side of illegal weapons). They've been planning it for weeks, ever since a first-time offender dropped the location of an exchange in return for the contact information of an excellent lawyer. They'd pulled Peter out of school early on an intern ruse, cleared Matt's court schedule. Even ordered extra zip ties on the communal vigilante amazon account (funded by Danny Rand in exchange for everyone's Jessica's contact information.)

They were at the warehouse for all of ten seconds before realizing it was a set-up.

Unfortunately, this was due less to Peter's brilliant deductive skills and more to the exorbitant amount of people suddenly trying to murder them with a variety of weapons that included but was not limited to: large guns, knives, larger guns, and, in the case of one guy who seemed to have confused the ambush with a witch-hunting party in the sixteenth century, a pitchfork that still had a Walmart tag dangling from one of its prongs.

(Peter wishes people valued subtly more these days. It's a dying art.)

They managed to get out of the death trap, mainly thanks to a lot of ricocheting webs and a fuse box smashed by a baton from fifty yards away. And luck. A lot of that, too. They somehow stumbled their way back to Matt's apartment, leaving a nice little trail of blood and scorch marks behind them that would hopefully be washed away by the rain. The whole time Matt was leaning heavily on Peter, and Peter kept telling himself that everything would be fine once they got back to the apartment, just get back to the apartment, but now they're in the apartment and even though there's no gunfire, Matt's still not breathing right and there's way too much blood.

So that's how their night ends up. Lots of guns. A pitchfork. Lots of blood. Getting their asses handed to them on a silver platter. Sitting in Matt's apartment waiting for Nurse Claire to arrive so she can perform her Reluctantly Saving Saint Matthew Fuckhead (her words, not Peter's) At Ungodly Hours duties.

They're both beat up pretty bad, because that's what happens when very large bad guys with very large guns and one (1) pitchfork try to do you in. Considering Peter was supposed to end the night with his corpse dumped in a river, though, his injuries are fairly mild—a split lip, black eye, some scrapes and bruises that should be healed in a few days.

It's Matt who he's really worried about.

Matt, who entered the warehouse on the ground floor and took the brunt of the attack and now looks like he went several rounds in the ring with a meat shredder. Who's lying on a backdrop of his own blood giving instructions to Peter on how exactly he's supposed to treat what they think is a punctured lung, which isn't going very well because Peter knows fuck all about treating punctured lungs and Matt, as it quickly becomes apparent, knows even less than fuck all.

An ice pack is what he asks for.

An ice pack.

Matt. On the floor. Wheezing. An ice pack clamped against the large hole in his chest. And he's making these awful choking sounds that sound like he's inverse dry-heaving, and Peter is trying not to have a panic attack every time Matt stops breathing, because there's really only room for one of them to be in respiratory distress right now. Not only because of the logistics, but also because it's one of the rules they have to follow in order to have amazon privileges.

(Rule #3: In case of wounded team member, there must be at least one other person who is not dying, drunk, or incapacited enough to call for help before any extra and unnecessary dying, drinking, and incapacitation takes place.)

The rule was mainly so Wade didn't stab himself in solidarity and Jessica didn't drown herself in a bottle of vodka ("it's not day drinking, you shitheads, I'm just taking the edge off") before appropriate arrangements could be made for said wounded team member. But the rule definitely still applies in this situation because Matt is definitely still dying and panic attacks fall under "extra and unnecessary incapacitation." And on top of it being really bad if Matt dies because Peter can't handle a panic attack, it also means he can't use the vigilante amazon account anymore, which means no more in-bulk zip ties and family-sized bags of gummy worms for long stake-out missions.

The gummy worms would be a tragic loss. Almost as tragic as Matt dying.

So he keeps his breathing as steady as he can. Counting inandout inandout like each inhaleexhale is a consecutive number. One hand clutching his phone, the other pressed to a stab wound in Matt's shoulder, because of course he managed to get himself stabbed by a pitchfork on top of his lung collapsing like a bouncy house at the end of a block party. No lights are on in the apartment, but it doesn't matter because one of them is blind and the advertisement board across the street, shining through the windows like a projector, gives off enough light for Peter to see.

Breathing in and out. Keeping pressure with one hand, an ice pack barnacled with condensation in the other. Floorboards slick with purple light. Wheezing breaths, sticky blood. Hands stained red. A basket of honeycrisp apples on the counter that Peter only notices after his hands are dripping.

He squeezes his eyes shut and counts faster.

Nurse Claire gets there ten minutes later. The door hasn't even swung shut before she's on her knees with her hands full of dying Matt, berating him for being such a self-sacrificing imbecile and handing out orders to Peter. Almost as grateful for the distraction as he is for her arrival, Peter scrambles to get out of the way, to grab the things she tells him to collect—things that aren't already included in the bag of magical Nurse Claire items she has open next to her, which is filled to the brim with everything a dying vigilante could ask for.

Claire, as it turns out, is a great multitasker. Which is a good thing because if she weren't, then she'd have to choose between a) keeping Matt alive and b) yelling at him that if he dies after dragging her out of bed on a Tuesday night, then she will personally get the Pope to condemn his departed soul to hell. And Peter thinks that if she had to choose between the two, she just might keep on yelling until Matt gives up the ghost.

Ten minutes into her tearing Matt a new one, Foggy bursts through the front door, a trench coat thrown over his flannel pajamas and nothing but slippers on. He takes one look at Matt—still lying on the floor looking like a victim from murder scene—and takes out his phone to dial emergency services. And then Matt is struggling to get up, and Claire is yelling even louder now, and Foggy is trying to push him back down as he hits the call button, and Matt just fights harder and then he's making those awful choking sounds again, and he's telling Foggy that he needs to put the phone down, that he can't go to a hospital, no, you don't understand—God, please—if you don't hang up, Foggy, then I will leave you and never come back, just hang up the phone

Foggy, who is still caught between forcing Matt to lay still so "your guardian nurse can do her fucking job" and communicating with the operator on the other end of the line, breaks off in the middle of his sentence. Stares at Matt with wide eyes. Wide and confused and wounded. Like a child that's been pulled out of school and told their entire family was run over by a bus. He lowers the phone, stops trying to push Matt down. Just keeps staring at him with those wide eyes. Disbelieving. Hurt. Almost grieving.

And Matt? Matt just lies there. A hand still clutching Foggy's arm, even though Foggy has released his. Panting for air, blood leaking out from beneath the credit card Claire has taped over his punctured chest. Head tilted back, staring up at the ceiling with sightless eyes that wander from one spot to the next, searching for something he can't see.

"Please," he whispers. Weak voice bruised with the last drops of desperation.

Halfway across the room, Peter crouches on the kitchen counter, his hand frozen in the middle of sifting through the medicine cabinet for the bottle Claire told him to get. He looks to her for direction, for something, because he's never seen The Man Without Fear Matt like this, and he's never seen "It's Time For CELEBRATION SANDWICHES" Foggy like this, and he doesn't know what's happening or what he's supposed to do, please tell me what to do—but Claire looks just as lost as he is. Sitting back on her knees, mouth open. She's not even performing her trade-mark life-saving Claire magic anymore, so the only sound in the apartment is labored breathing and leaking blood. Purple light from the advertisement board gurgling across the floor.

Slowly, without taking his eyes off Matt, Foggy raises the phone to his ear and says, his voice completely level, "I'm sorry, ma'am. I made a mistake. Everything is fine."

His voice is calm. Collected. Detached. The way it only is in court. The way it only ever should be in court, because Foggy's voice should never be that cool unless he's trying to get a serial killer locked behind bars.

He ends the call. The line goes dead.

Something else in the room does, too.

Claire works in silence after that. Matt's hand slips off Foggy's arm, thuds to the floor. Foggy doesn't protest. Even though he remains by Matt's side, watching everything, listening to every breath, there's something Peter doesn't like about how . . . broken Foggy looks. Almost like he's the one bleeding out on the apartment floor. After enough time, Matt's stuttered breathing becomes nothing more than a metronome to mark the silence.

Peter does his best to make himself invisible. He finds the bottle of pills and gives them to Claire. Sits at the table by the window, tries to ignore the pain and grief and wrongness that hangs in the air like a noose. Sticks band-aids on his busted knuckles even though they'll be healed in a couple of days. Watches the currents of purple drifting across the room, casting dark shadows that roam like circling sharks.

Purple lights. Band-aids. A conditioner advertisement speckled with flowers. Listening to a siren mourning in the distance. Running his thumb over his bandaged knuckles, one hand pressed to his bruised ribs. An elbow resting on the table, his head propped up by one hand. Eyes closing . . . opening . . . closing again . . . drifting in currents like the purple light . . . Not truly asleep but unable to stay awake . . . Waiting . . . Waiting . . .

It's almost dawn when Claire finally begins packing away her things.

Immediately, Foggy stands up and—without asking if Matt will be okay, without asking what his recovery time is and what he'll need in the meantime—heads straight for the door. Doesn't even stop to grab his coat.

"Foggy," Matt says.

The door closes on hinges that are silent to everyone's ears but Matt's.

"Foggy," he says again, even though his voice is nothing more than a croak, even though Foggy is already gone.

"Fog—" But his voice breaks against the word. Not a loud break, but a quiet one. The breaking of something that's been webbed with cracks for so long, it takes nothing more than a whisper to shatter it.

It's the first and only time Peter ever sees him cry.