It's sticky, syrupy. Grief coats his fingers sleek like blood while the crimson and butterscotch shade of life becomes an outline, seeping in rivulets of steam into the night like Peter Pan's shadow. And Matt just can't contain it, not when his hands are numb, so numb, and his senses zoom in and out of the alley like a home-made horror movie.
He knows it's his dad, he knows it solid like the ground beneath his knees. He can smell it in the musky stench of sweat and Fogwell's and home that still shimmers between the strands of his hair. He can taste it in the blood that deadens the tip of his tongue and assaults the back of his throat, choking him dense and thick and slow as dripping honey. He knows it straight into that hole in his chest, that devastating earthquake, that all-encompassing burn, that gnawing of insides. Maybe he was shot too, maybe that's what this is, that hurt that can't be contained, the piece of lungs that has gone missing along with something else, something more vital, something that points to North and grounds him harder than gravity.
Matt can't see, he can't see, and his numb fingers refuse to look. He knows it in that too, because dad never left him blind. So he says it, like a prayer in the night, Dad, I can't see, and he calls him too, he calls him back, while his hands hover on the brink of truth, a breath away from the face he knows so well, feather-light against that chest that always rumbles with security. Matt waits, because Murdock's always get back up. Dad, Murdock's always get back up. Yet each one of his calls becomes shorter and shorter, bouncing feet away into the alley, and then not at all, until his cries boomerang their way back leaden with silence, until they land on his lips and stay right there, and Matt stops asking questions that will never be answered.
He never touched his face that night, he never did. He let death hover one space away, like the full stop that wanted to put an end to the story of Jack Murdock but somehow finished Matt instead.
.
There are footsteps first, but they sound like a heartbeat. A key rasps its way into his door and the click of the lock rings like gunfire in his bones.
"Matt?"
Foggy catapults himself into the apartment and the flurry of his terrified pulse and rushing footsteps fills Matt's brain like snow.
"Jesus, Matt!"
It's overwhelming, all that Foggy is. The sounds and smells and tastes and presence. They crash into Matt's senses like small explosions and the ashes pin him down heavy as a blanket.
"Matt, buddy, are you ok? Are you hurt?"
There's a hole in his chest, one that is clasped tight between his cramping forearms and that sleek material that smells like dad and feels sticky tonight, sticky like that night. He can't get it to stop feeling sticky. He can't get it to stop.
"Matt, it's me, it's Foggy," and Matt knows it's Foggy, but he lets Foggy tell him again and again as his hot hands pat him down stronger than a question mark, "Matty, do I need to call Claire? Did you hit your head?"
Matt wants to answer but he doesn't know how. His mouth is full of cobwebs and they trap his tongue. It's sticky, it's all sticky and it won't go down, no matter how much he tries to swallow. He tries again, tries to speak, tries to swallow, tries to breathe. Matt tries, tries, tries.
Foggy is removing his clothes now, searching, still searching. His reassurances and questions bounce off his bare skin, warm and tender but wrong, all wrong. They roll into Matt like waves and their kindness makes the hole throb. Matt doesn't know how to tell him to stop.
Foggy lays Matt bare except for his boxers, naked and exposed for Foggy to read, all scars and cuts and bruises etched like braille onto his skin. Foggy's warm breath hums against his back as he tests the hurt that Matt can't even feel. Gentle scalding palms seep warmth into his unyielding skin, leaving glowing patches of heat that haunt him like ghosts when they leave.
"Matty, buddy, please, please, you need to tell me what hurts."
Everything, Matt wants to say. There are tears that threaten to be spilled, tears that Foggy's heart is unafraid to pour down Matt's conscience as it cries a worried rhythm of despair. Matt absorbs that too, he is a sponge and he wants Foggy to fill each one of his pores until he is not Matt anymore but Foggy, all Foggy. He lets one of his arms fall to the side, ignoring the magnetic urge to shut the hole tight, tight like a lid, so that Foggy can see the universe that is trickling out of his bare chest.
Foggy looks with his eyes, with his hands, with his heart, with his lungs. Matt can feel his stare like a ray of sunshine, a single ray of warmth that teases the ice with the promise of heat.
"Matt, you need to breathe."
Foggy presses a searing palm straight onto the hole, right next to Matt's fist, and Matt gasps, afraid that Foggy will fall right through him. But Foggy is solid, Foggy is concrete and steel and heat, molten lava and steam, and Matt's chest holds steady, presses right back until Matt doesn't feel like he is lighter than air. Air licks back into his lungs and stays there, stays like Foggy's hand on his chest. Matt breathes, breathes, breathes.
"Matt," there's sadness interspersed in the blanks between each letter, one that Matt understands, because it's the same one that fills him head to toe, white and empty.
"F-foggy," he croaks back. Some of the empty seeps out with the word, but mostly his eardrums are crushed with the unabashed relief pulsing through Foggy's veins.
Silk rustles between Foggy's fingers as they run through his father's gown. Matt feels it slip from his grasp like water and holds tighter, holds on with both hands and a knee, holds on with all that he has. It's not sticky anymore, the stickiness is gone, like his father and that night. Gone before he found the strength to grasp it.
It's as if Foggy knows when he covers Matt with that sleek remnant of his father. The fabric seeps its last gift to Matt, its last whiff of dad, and it suffocates him as it swirls in his sinuses.
"He's dead Foggy."
There it is, that lump that won't go up or down in his throat. Stuck, like the grief that he never allowed himself to feel and that built up like steam in a pressure cooker until now, a million years later. Matt can feel it ooze out of his pores and he clutches at the silk to keep from cracking in two.
Foggy doesn't ask, and Matt knows it's not because he doesn't want to. There's a heavily implied 'what the fuck' wedged in between them, big like that elephant that would love to address how Matt ended up sobbing on the floor dressed in his black Daredevil outfit, grieving over a death that happened almost two decades ago and that is somehow fresher than the purple and green bruising that is waiting to blossom on his skin. Matt hears it all in Foggy's pulse, because he knows it so well, even if rarely from this close.
No. Foggy takes one last look at the crumpled shape that is splattered by his feet, at his white knuckles and heaving chest and then he lies right there beside him, with one hand on his ribs and one hand on his back. Foggy squeezes gently until Matt remembers how to breathe.
Foggy is there, in the cage of his arms that keep Matt whole as he empties. Foggy is there, like he can mop-up the hurt along with the ugly sobs that tear themselves out of Matt's throat and land wet and covered in snot into Foggy's shirt. Foggy is there, murmuring empty words coated with promise, like chocolate biscuits and warm cups of tea, and streams of: "It's ok, it's ok, it's ok," until that's what Matt is.
And there may be answers one day. Maybe later, on the couch. But for now, Foggy stays right there, in that spot that his dad left empty in Matt's chest, and that he fills, slow and sweet and sticky, just like honey.