Delirious
Nicole Clevenger (May 2015)
Notes: The response to my first fic in this fandom - in traffic and reviews/kudos/bookmarks, each one adding a little tape to my fractured ego - has absolutely staggered me. It's something I've never experienced in all my years of writing for tiny, mostly-cancelled shows. So, a gift (but open it over there, because I can't watch) for all of those who asked – yes, it's the Pneumonia Fic. I really never meant for it to be so long. Or to happen at all. Set during the law school days and sprung from a reference in "Man Candy," though there's no need to read that one first. Their only connection the mention of this incident.
Shaped entirely within the Netflix canon, meaning I offer no claims about any invented backstory holding up in the Marvel Universe. Or s2. Regardless, I make no money because they don't belong to me.
'Just a cold now. Remember the pneumonia? Oh wait – you don't. Because you were out of your head delirious for two days before you'd let me take you to the hospital.'
Their second year. 'I remember waking up in the hospital.' What he remembers is the terror of it. Coming to in those unfamiliar surroundings, drugged and disoriented.
'Everyone who was there that day remembers you waking up in the hospital.'
…
'It wasn't that bad.' He's pretty sure that both of their memories say it was.
-"Man Candy"
Matt pauses outside the closed door, takes a deep breath. He can hear Foggy in there, and for a moment he considers turning around.
His body betrays him, the breath catching on something in the back of his throat. It sends him coughing – dramatically, and long enough to leave him hanging limply from the doorframe by the hand not clenched white-knuckled around the cane – and he realizes he's got no choice but to go in. There's no way his roommate didn't hear that.
Matt likes the guy. He really does. So much so that he's found himself lately – tentatively, and as yet only in his own mind – referring to him as his best friend. Foggy's like no one he's ever met, funny and selflessly kind and with a streak of self-deprecation that rivals his own. And the only lies he's ever gotten from Foggy have been tiny ones, silly fibs about which one of them had eaten the last slice of pizza – How would you know how many pieces were left? It was you, man. – and where his thoughts had been after too long a silence. What are you talking about? I was sleeping. As if Matt can't tell the difference.
But the last couple of days have been trying ones, ever since he'd come down with this stupid cold. Matt knows the issue is his, that he's probably imagining how Foggy seems to be everywhere. Not just the borderline hovering – an annoying new feature of this relationship – but every bit of him everywhere all the time. The smell of his shampoo, the taste of his sweat. The sounds of the minutiae of his life, swirling and choking and filling the tiny room. An unavoidable facet of living with someone in so small a space, but for Matt magnified and overwhelming. He feels as if, outside of their shared bathroom – a space defined mostly by artificial layering chemical scents, and a feeling of hollow confinement that separates it somehow from the rest of the world – he hasn't had a single moment to himself for the past two days.
As the doorknob turns smoothly under his hand – unnaturally cold – Matt decides that he feels like shit. And that there's no other word that rings so succinctly apt.
The TV's on, and it sounds way too loud even though he suspects that it's not. By anyone else's standards. Matt tries to twist his wince into a smile, but he's off his game today; he catches a creak of plastic as Foggy picks up the remote. The volume eases down a few notches, taking with it some of the pressure in Matt's head.
"How was class?" Foggy asks.
Exhausting. He probably wouldn't have gone if he didn't have a test Friday. Had almost fallen asleep, actually, a lapse that still felt humiliating even if he doesn't think anyone noticed. "Fine," Matt says. He drops his bag on the end of his bed, collapses in a heap beside it. "How's the paper going?"
"Your phrasing implies that I've started it." The unmistakable crinkling of a snack bag. Potato chips, Matt identifies. Lays. His head has been disturbingly fuzzy today, but he can still taste the grease and salt from over here. "Sadly, not the case," Foggy says, around the crumbled chip he crunches between his teeth.
Matt rolls over onto his back, legs sprawled half over the edge of the bed. He pulls off his glasses, lets the hand holding them fall to the blanket. His other arm is slung up over his eyes, serving not to keep out light but providing a comforting weight he can hide behind. At least for this moment. And maybe the next.
"Big obstacle," Matt mumbles. "You planning to try and get past it any time soon?"
He doesn't care, honestly. But he wants to. Assures himself that on any other day he would.
The chip bag is crumpled in Foggy's fist, presumably empty. There's a soft wet smack as he sucks the salt off his fingers. "All in good time. 'To everything there is a season,' blah blah blah."
"Pretty sure that doesn't apply to research papers," Matt says.
He shifts the arm covering his eyes down over his mouth to cough into the sleeve at his bent elbow. "You have, what, a week?" Matt asks him after a moment. It feels a feeble attempt at distraction, and he already knows the answer.
"And a half, man. Week and a half." Foggy gets up, the springs compressing and releasing unevenly as he wriggles off the bed. "Very important distinction."
Their truncated refrigerator opens, with a squeak of its hinges that scratches across the inside of Matt's skull. It's the same one they've had for over a year now, and the thing has been complaining for almost that long. He's been meaning to see if there's anything he can do to fix it – surely it can't be too difficult to find a screwdriver or some WD-40, even though he's never tried – but rarely is the noise so obnoxious. A tic of irritation, usually forgotten the second it's gone.
There's a split-second impression of substance, something coming fast his way, and if Matt's reflexes weren't dragging so out of sync he would have gotten his arm up to catch it. The water bottle lands with a liquid sloshing on the bed beside him, at least eight inches away and never in danger of actually hitting him. He should have expected it, he tells himself, disproportionately rattled. When he'd heard the refrigerator open.
It bothers him that he didn't. That Foggy's getting him water at all.
"Thanks," Matt says anyway, propping himself up onto his elbows and breaking the seal on the plastic cap. He realizes suddenly that he's incredibly thirsty, even if it's something he's only willing to admit to himself. The water tastes amazing, a blissfully cool nothingness. The only detail comprising his universe as he drinks it, savoring the experience as if it were one he's never had before.
A series of self-indulgent swallows without breaking for air, and by the time Matt drops the bottle he has to suck in an awkward breath. He's not wearing his glasses, he recognizes after a few heartbeats of sated calm; the frames are no longer wrapped in his fingers, and he feels around for their abandoned shape. He puts them back on, even though he doesn't particularly want to. The thin arm stretching over his left ear has been digging into his temple on that side all day, and had he felt better he probably would have gone to see about getting them readjusted.
He knows he doesn't really need to wear them – if there's anyone in the world with whom he doesn't mind not having them, it's Foggy – but it's a habit he still can't entirely break. Even here, even after over a year. They're a helpful diversion, a barrier between other people and what he knows can be a disconcertingly blank stare. A way to facilitate normal interaction, for both himself and for whomever he's talking to. They can more easily forget that he's "different," move past the obvious irregularities. He can focus on what's happening. Not on the tingling paranoia that all they're really doing is staring at his eyes.
"Gonna work on it today?" Matt asks Foggy, to cut through the noise of his own inhaling and exhaling. He hopes it's merely heightened senses that make the breaths sound so loud. "What time is it, anyway?"
The second question is mostly laziness – Matt knows he can figure it out for himself. He just came back from class, after all, plus there's a new app installed on his phone that will give him the answer aloud. A bit glitchy: it seems to always offer the correct time, as far as he's noticed, but encouraging it to do so often requires a lot of extraneous poking at the featureless flat screen. Makes him feel like a bit of an idiot, stabbing repeatedly at that smooth piece of glass with his thumb. He's positive he knows where the icon is – positive – but he's definitely not in the mood to do battle with the thing right now.
"Just after one," Foggy supplies, flopping back down onto his own bed. The fluttering whumph of rumpled bedsheets rising and falling around him; the faint rubbing sound of the mattress being forced up against the wall. "You hungry? I could order something."
The mention of food turns Matt's stomach, fiercely and unexpectedly. He swallows hard, struggling to think about anything else. "Don't you have class?" he gets out, in a voice that doesn't waver nearly as much as it seems that it should.
"Yeah. I was going to go." Several TV channels flick by in rapid succession; he challenges himself to name the flashes of programming, another direction for his focus. "I might not go," Foggy appends, and Matt barely bites back a groan.
"But you've already missed, what, two classes with this guy? Professor What's-His-Name…" The sentence trails off when he doesn't make the effort to come up with the name in question. Matt pushes himself up from the support of his elbows, gets further up onto his bed. He kicks off his shoes, not registering their double thud to the floor.
"Trying to get rid of me, Murdock? If this is your way of blaming me for getting you sick – which you absolutely cannot definitively prove anyway, Counselor – just come out and say it." Foggy doesn't move, and the TV goes back up to its earlier volume. "And then I will continue to take the high road. And ignore you."
Last week Foggy had used the excuse of a stuffy nose – and dying, of course, he'd definitely been dying – to skip class at least twice, and it was no great leap of imagination to figure out which way the virus had spread. Impossible to escape determined germs when you live with somebody, and Matt knows that if it hadn't come from Foggy, there were innumerable sources of disease surrounding them this time of year.
"I haven't blamed you," Matt tells his friend. "Though it's completely your fault." He lets the back of his head find the wall, with a thump that reverberates all the way around to the front. Flinches, and scrubs at the vibrations in a cheekbone, the bridge of his nose, with the heel of his hand.
"Okay. Good to know you don't blame me," Foggy says cheerfully, selectively listening. He gets up from his bed again, crosses his side of the room toward the small desk that's never used. The hastily varnished plywood screeches against itself as he pulls out the cheap, ill-fitting drawer. Matt hisses through his teeth.
"Sorry," Foggy throws back, and it sounds like it's projected over his shoulder by the angle and the subsequent rustling of the few menus that live in the desk. Matt frowns; he'd thought he'd managed to keep that quiet enough that Foggy wouldn't be able to hear. "Pizza or Chinese?" his friend asks.
Paper swishing over paper as Foggy brandishes the menus like a trophy in the air. The frown on Matt's face feels intractable, all permanently etched lines. He'd hoped Foggy had forgotten about lunch.
Before this last week, it seems like he might have. One of the things Matt values most in this friendship is the absence of smothering, an impulse people often seem to be dangerously close to around him. It had been the biggest fear, in the decision to live with someone else while at law school, that he was going to end up with a roommate tripping over himself to do everything, as if Matt were incapable of doing anything for himself. More even than the reverse: having a roommate so freaked out that he'd be virtually ignored. It's a tough call which is worse, and one Matt's grateful he didn't have to make. But given the choice he thinks he'd probably go for ignored.
Nearer to what he's used to, growing up in the orphanage before Stick – and certainly while surviving alone wherever he could hole up after, because he most definitely had not planned on going back – cultivating a self-sufficiency that Matt can't surrender now even if he wants to. But Foggy had proven himself from the start to be uncannily good at toeing the line. The fact that he didn't drop it after Matt had changed the subject the first time feels a glaring aberration.
And an irritating one. "I don't care," Matt says, closing his eyes behind his glasses. The only alteration to his world a slight soothing of the dry prickling feeling there. "I'm not really hungry." He works to form it less cranky than it sounds in his head.
Difficult with it being such an understatement. There had been no nausea this morning, not last night when this thing truly began to settle in. Nothing until he'd walked in here and Foggy had started forcing him to think about food. Now it's a swelling sensation Matt's having trouble getting away from, probably in part because he can't remember the last time he's eaten anything. A thought which just cycles everything back on itself; Matt concentrates on taking slow measured breaths through his nose, and the plastic of the water bottle crackles a protest in his tightening fist.
The urge to vomit fades gradually, but it's all Matt can pay attention to and he instantly notices its lessening. He takes a few slumped minutes to enjoy the relief, before blinking his eyes back open. Nothing changes. He finishes the water in the bottle, one side a jagged cave-in, irrevocably dented from the grip of his fingers.
"Pizza then," Foggy decides, and Matt wonders how much time has elapsed between this comment and his last. "You can have some later, if you feel like it."
Matt has no way of being able to tell if he looks as bad as he feels. But, if nothing else, it seems Foggy has at least grasped the concept that he's got no interest in eating right now. He'll take the reprieve.
"Sure," he says. Almost as if he intends to.
"Seriously, man," Foggy says, after what Matt estimates has been about twenty solid minutes of deliberate silence being virtually projected from the other side of the room, "blow your nose. I don't know who you think you're kidding."
Matt winces, grabs a tissue from the box on his nightstand. He'd been putting a conscious effort into keeping the sniffling to a minimum, an annoying noise even to the one making it. But a compulsive reflex, and it seems that despite wasting the last five minutes in the attempt, he'd managed to fail spectacularly.
Just as he's failing at studying for this test. He's only got two days to prepare, and in the quiet since his roommate's last interruption – during which Matt may have made a snarky remark about Foggy being deaf, since he certainly didn't seem to be understanding that Matt still doesn't want any food – he's read through the same paragraph about four times.
Four. In twenty minutes. And it's still not sinking in.
He eases up on his charade enough to transfer the cardboard box of tissues to rest permanently on the blanket beside his hip, just as sometime in the last few hours he'd conceded to pull the trashcan closer to the side of his bed. He's gotten tired of stretching for it to throw stuff away, the too repetitive reach pulling taut across his chest in a way that never fully disappears even after he straightens back up. Matt intentionally lets his knuckles brush the rim of the trashcan as he goes to toss the latest contaminated wad of paper, wanting to be sure not to miss. His skin slides past metal and into damp softness, surprising him with how full the thing's gotten.
His lip curls up at this; he pulls back his hand, automatically wiping his knuckles on the blanket. Gross. He should definitely get up and empty that. And he's absolutely going to, after he finishes this page. Or the one after.
Maybe a few more minutes. He really doesn't want to get up.
Matt shifts both of his hands back to lay flat on the textured open pages in his lap; the same words his classmates have, just translated. Bound like any other book and resting with the same weight on his outstretched legs. He has to move those hands to actually read the words though, and at the moment it seems an unfair amount of work to ask. He can feel them sitting useless lumps at the end of his wrists, fingers without any semblance of their usual dexterity and nearly as unresponsive as they would be belonging to someone else. Clumsy. Numb. When he finally gets them moving again, they outright refuse to describe even the paragraph's first letter. Let alone the first word.
He sighs, and the exhale morphs into a jagged spate of coughing that can only feel inevitable after two days already of the same. Three, Matt supposes, depending on from where one were to start counting. It hardly matters, an arbitrary measurement important only in that with each one of them the symptoms have grown progressively worse. Shaping it to sound longer only serves to compound any lurking self-pity.
Matt had skipped a class of his own this morning, not a habit with him but too tempting an idea when he'd woken up muddled and impossibly heavy. He'd told himself it would give him more time to study – not an outright lie at the start, but in retrospect a flimsy line that should have been simple to see through. He'd gone back to sleep immediately, barely remembering to silence his alarm. Lost an untraceable chunk out of his day when apparently nothing Foggy was doing had been enough to shake him out of his hazy dreams.
On the street outside their window, a car honks its horn. Once. Twice. The third is an unbroken peal of sound that slips fingers into the mush of Matt's brain and squeezes.
"Whoa, Matt – you okay?"
He's got his head clutched in his hands – a cradle of protection doing precisely nothing to block out the noise – and Foggy's somehow here, leaning over the bed. Matt can feel the presence of a hand hovering hesitantly over the slope of his back, a tiny detail that he clings to as he tries to claw his way up through the cacophony still coming from outside. But he hadn't heard Foggy move, a cue that should have been so obvious. The omission abruptly closes up his throat, and for a second Matt's afraid he might cry.
Breathe, he tells himself. You're just way too overstimulated. It's stopped now – listen. Move your hands. Sit up.
"Headache," Matt forces out, as if so mundane an explanation can possibly serve. He isn't sure that he completely forms the entire word. Realizes that he's still got a distressingly clamped grip on the sides of his skull.
"Asshole," Foggy mutters, the vinyl blinds clicking together as he separates them to peek outside. Matt hears them tumble down into place as Foggy releases them, turns back. "He's still out there. Want me to go say something?"
What would be the point? Despite knowing that the noise has stopped, Matt can still hear it ghosting through his head. But it's a thoughtful offer, and he recognizes it as the only one his friend's got. Focusing now, Matt's finally able to pick up the rapid pace of Foggy's heartbeat. Not startled by the horn and gradually settling; it's insistent and thudding and desperate, as he searches for something useful that he can do.
"Nah. M'okay." The words are sticky, his hands only lowered enough to press now against his burning eyes. The lack of eloquence merely ratchets up the speed of Foggy's pulse, and Matt makes himself drop his arms to his sides and lift his head. "He'd probably just… start a fight," he tries again, taking care to enunciate each new syllable, "and you'll only end up… in trouble. For kicking his ass."
His fingers tangle in the blankets, itching to return to his throbbing head. But Foggy laughs a little, and the beat of his heart begins to slow. Matt flattens his palms against the bed, pushing them deliberately against the resistance of the mattress to keep them still.
"Thanks for the unprompted vote of staggering flattery, Murdock. Now I'm sure you have a fever."
A subject that had been postulated earlier, a suggestion Matt had quickly shot down. Though now that he thinks about it, that could have actually been yesterday.
Either way. It's a subject he has zero interest in pursuing. "Not feverish," he protests. "Just can't see the guy. Big?"
"I can't see him either, man. He's in his car." Foggy shifts the blinds to look out the window again. He's calming further the longer the conversation continues, and Matt thinks he may have taken a full step or two back from his looming position over the bed. It's frustrating that he can't really tell. So much Foggy surrounding him, he might as well be sitting on the mattress.
Matt makes himself pin down his friend's exact location. He finds him, but it's difficult with the ringing in his head. "Bet you can take him," he adds, knowing Foggy's not going out there. He just hopes that whomever the guy's waiting for does, before he gets impatient and lays on the horn again.
From somewhere down the hall a thumping bass starts up, louder than he's happy with but nowhere near as excruciating as the sound from outside. Muffling angles and insulation in the walls, but on a better day he would have been able to identify whose room it was booming out of. Matt listens for a moment, judging distance through echo, through the strength of that unending beat; the relentless tempo winds its way around the inside of his head, taking over. It resonates against the bones in his face, threatening to split them apart from the inside.
He drops his head back into his hands, though not with the crushing hold from before. Drags his fingers back and forth through his hair, focusing instead on the sensation of his nails scratching across his scalp. It snaps the spell of the bass, gives him a little distance. He takes a couple of shallow, testing breaths, feeling somehow as if he's pushing his luck.
But there's no fit of coughing come to drain the last of his energy, and after a few minutes more of the satisfying itching, Matt has to remind himself again that he really should lower his hands. Sit up. Quit acting like he's dying.
That's Foggy's performance. Matt looks for Foggy – a concentrated flash of his senses, and a couple quick tilts of his head that send everything alarmingly liquid – and finds that his friend actually is sitting on the bed. Down by his feet, and once again Matt hadn't noticed him move. It's a toss-up for his attention, the vertigo and the blatant miss. They're both incredibly disorienting, and he's not sure which unnerves him more.
"Crap," Foggy says, and now there's a hand on Matt's arm. "Should I go tell them to turn it down?"
Matt shakes his head; it's clearly a mistake. The pressure behind his cheekbones shifts, increases, as everything slides unexpectedly sideways. "S'okay. I'm okay." He's not entirely certain which one of them he's attempting to persuade. "Dizzy," he fights to explain through his clenched jaw.
Foggy's hand disappears, and his weight returns to the mattress. Gradually both the bass and the sickening unbalance fade a bit into the background, still there but more easily ignored. As Matt begins to settle back into the room – four familiar walls; safe, definable – he can hear the hitch to Foggy's breathing. Irregular and laden, heavy with the unspoken words behind it.
Matt waits for it, knowing that – whatever it is – Foggy's going to say it eventually. But he's not in the mood to help him, to ease whatever topic Foggy's tentatively trying to bring up. By the way he's having to work at it, Matt's sure he wants no part of it.
There's a petulant urge to curl up in his bed and bury his aching head under the pillow. As if that would keep any of this out.
"Look, man," Foggy finally begins, and it feels to Matt as if days have gone by. They've always been sitting here, like this. Stuck in this moment. "I get that it's a touchy subject. But maybe it's time to think about seeing a doctor."
He has no clue what song that is. All Matt can pick up is the incessant bass. "I'm fine," he insists; it's diminished a bit when he has to clear his throat. "I'm feeling better."
He doesn't know why he said that. It hangs in the air between them, lamely fluttering.
"Okay," Foggy says, a punctuating word emphasized with a slap to his thighs. "So not convincing." The mattress shifts as he stands again. His footsteps shuffle a distracted pattern over their worn carpet.
Worn… and stained? It's truly the first time that it's occurred to Matt to wonder about the state of the thing. A year and a half in here, surely one of them has spilled something. He sniffs, trying to separate any odors that might be coming from the carpet from those leaching in from the rest of the room. He gets nothing, not even a flow of oxygen through his blocked sinuses.
"I don't know who you're trying to impress," Foggy says, pulling Matt back into the moment, "but, if it's me? Let me say for the record here that I am totally cool with you seeking medical attention. Like, today."
Thump thump thumpthump. Thump thump thumpthump.
Matt struggles to focus. "Medical attention" requires getting up. Maybe changing out of his sweats, definitely putting on shoes. Navigating the riot of the corridor, the front lounge. The street outside. It's probably cold out there; he's not sure where he's left his jacket. A cab ride or too long a walk. Followed by strangers poking at him out of the darkness, and an ultimate prescription of fluids and bed rest.
"Have a test," is what he mumbles instead. This seems simpler for most people to understand. "Need to study."
"Jesus." It's irritated, and for a second Matt can't place why. "At least take a break."
"Yeah." It's a brilliant idea. Bright and fluffy and even glowing a little. "Can I have some water?"
He shouldn't have asked. Should have just gotten up.
"'Course," Foggy says. There's that vicious screech of the refrigerator, directed inside Matt's ear with what feels malicious precision. On behalf of the refrigerator, not Foggy.
He hears that thought bounce back. There's a tiny mental blink.
The water bottle is handed to him, and Matt refuses to acknowledge that it's mostly a guess which guides his end of the connection. The condensation beads and drips over his fingers as he drinks. He can feel the loose abstraction in the motion of his arm as he reaches to set the bottle on the nightstand; a vague gesture, and part of him knows he's not going to make it. When the weight of the bottle vanishes from between his fingers, he thinks for a second that it's fallen to the floor.
But no – Matt tracks hurriedly backward, seeking a sound that's not there. No crunch of impacted plastic, no splashing of trapped water. Foggy. Foggy must have taken it from him.
The line of deduction feels loopy, somehow flawed even if Matt's pretty sure that this is the way it must have happened. It exhausts him to straighten it out, and in the end he decides that the point of it all should be merely that he doesn't have to hold the wet bottle any more, a decidedly positive result. He closes the book in his lap, flinging it somewhere off the end of his bed. He'll probably regret that later. Slouches down into his pillows, over the sheet but under the blanket.
The bridge of his glasses bites into his nose; Matt fumbles them off, suddenly wanting them anywhere but on his face. They land somewhere on the bed, but there's a swish of synthetic fabrics and sense of movement, and he manages to catch the sound of their metal frames coming to rest on the flat semi-wooden surface of the nightstand. Foggy again, relocating them out of the way.
Matt isn't sure if he thanks him. He can hear the words in his head, is reasonably certain that he moves his lips. He shivers under the blanket, and promptly falls asleep.
He wakes from a dream of a thick wood board stretched flat across his chest, with Stick sitting on top of it placidly lecturing him about control of his breathing. Indistinct shapes painted in fire flicker against the blackness, and he can't put a name to any of them.
Matt hears someone gasping, a moist and ugly sound. When he's able to connect it back to the iron weight in his chest, he tries to make himself stop. As the sucking noise transforms seamlessly into a hacking coughing fit, there's a tiny bit of his brain that questions whether or not this counts as success. He decides he isn't sure.
"Hey, it's okay…" Foggy's voice has the qualities of a well-loved LP, a tired pop!hiss! ragged feel to it like this is a tune that's been played over and over. Matt struggles to remember what day it is. How to breathe. They both seem important.
His upper body is propped up against his pillows; he's in his bed. Their room. He can't tell if it's truly his senses improving or just the knowledge of familiarity, but slowly his surroundings begin to sharpen a little.
Though not by much. The world is draped in insubstantiality. Deceptive. Translucent.
Matt licks his lips, the wetness clogging his airways somehow not making its way this far. They're cracked under the path of his tongue, and each tiny fissure he encounters sends up its own shining zing of pain. But Foggy's fingers are so soft – warm, smooth – where they wrap around Matt's, lifting his hand from the bed, and the physical contact yanks at his attention as effectively as any line of sight cue.
His lips are forgotten, Foggy's soft fingers all there is. When Foggy presses a bottle of water against his palm, Matt doesn't know what it's for.
"Water," Foggy says, and Matt wants to protest that, yes, he'd gotten that much. But he's coughing – again and again and again – and Foggy's holding the hand with the bottle, fighting to keep the two together. "Drink," his friend says. Matt's thankful for the simple explanation.
He attempts to tell Foggy so, but the water's in the way and he abruptly thinks that perhaps he should concentrate on one thing at a time, lest he drown. Best not to waste the time calculating the actual probability of this, an exercise that he suspects might take longer than it should. Drink. Then speak. A basic enough logic, and for a few moments it becomes his mantra.
Drink. Then speak. A trickle of water worms its way out from the corner of Matt's mouth to run cold down over his chin. He swipes for it clumsily, smacking his knuckles into his nose, and he wonders whose body he's wearing.
What? The absurdity of the thought jars him. He chokes on the water as he watches the words bump about the room in a cartoon speech bubble.
"Slow, buddy," Foggy murmurs near Matt's ear. He almost points out the bouncing elliptical bubble to Foggy, but he's distracted by the soothing rhythm of the hand that's rubbing circles into his back. "Go slow. Don't forget to breathe."
"Sound like Stick," Matt slurs. Whomever this body belongs to, they should really take better care of it. That voice sounds like hell. "Always talking… talking 'bout m'breathing…"
"Yeah… I got no clue who that is, man. If that's even a who. But if they've been trying to convince you to keep breathing, I am one hundred percent all about that. Drink, and breathe."
"No…" Matt tugs at the bottle, trying to bring it away from his mouth to rest against the side of his face; Foggy's still got ahold of it too, has apparently been guiding it the whole time. The refrigerated plastic is a shock of icy coolness against his skin, a strip of relief that bleeds from temple to jaw bone. "Drink," Matt pronounces; carefully, with a gravitas worthy of the wisdom he's about to impart. "Then speak."
"Breathe," Foggy corrects. The hand between Matt's shoulderblades is hypnotic, and he gradually slumps forward under its pattern. "Listen to The Stig or whoever. Don't worry about speaking."
"Stick," Matt says. It's lost in a cough.
And now there's no more water, just that repetitive circling and the blood in his ears and his head lolling over his legs. He's bent forward nearly in half, he eventually figures out, not a position that helps him to breathe any easier, but one that's at least different. He's beginning to suspect already that there's nothing that's going to really help.
Speaking after drinking. But Matt can't find the speech bubbles; he thinks they may be hiding underneath Foggy's bed. A pain – he doesn't want to get down there and fish them out to see what they say. Stupidly inconvenient way to carry on a conversation, really.
Doesn't matter, he reminds himself. Because he's got a test.
Two sluggish beats later, and this thought slams into Matt with the speed of animal panic. He's got a test, one he hasn't studied for. One that could be happening right now. He doesn't even know what fucking day it is. His fingers find the edge of the blanket and throw it off his legs; bare toes catch in tangled sheets as he stumbles out of the bed. The top sheet's pulled down with him, pooling and tripping him up, and even bleary as he is Matt knows he would have ended up on his face if Foggy hadn't been there to catch him.
"Matt! Hey! Where are you going, man?" Foggy's keeping him up with an awkward bear hug that stretches under his armpits, and the side of Matt's face is smashed against his chest. Foggy's heart punches him in the temple like a fist, and Matt fights to get away from its pounding. But his legs won't hold him up.
"Test," somebody says. It's what Matt had wanted to say, so he repeats it. "Yeah, that. Test."
Foggy laughs, but his heart's still punching and that's wrong. Wrong because it should be slowing down, wrong wrong wrong, all rabbity-fast and scared – so scared – and Matt moans, because it won't quit hitting him in the side of the head. "Hurts," he tries to explain.
"Yeah," Foggy agrees. He isn't sure what they're in such agreement about, but he likes it when they're getting along. "I bet it does."
The world goes slippery and strange, and he's positive that at some point everything flips upside down. But now he's back on the bed. Foggy's hands are everywhere – trying to get him to lie down, though it takes a while to understand this – and Matt tries to find a firm hold on the mattress so as not to fall off. He thinks that Foggy's heart has left a bruise.
"Pretty sure that test is tomorrow," Foggy tells him. "And even if it isn't – not exactly the priority right now."
"Mmm," Matt says, noncommittal. It makes his lips vibrate, a quintessentially silly feeling. So he does it again. "Mmmmm…"
"Great," Foggy says, but Matt doesn't think he knows what that word means. Or maybe he's not saying it right. "Come on."
Wherever they're going it must be later, because Foggy's pulling the sheets back over him. Fixing the pillows behind. Matt doesn't argue; he thinks Foggy sounds tired.
"Because I am tired."
He freezes. Uncertain how Foggy's reading his mind. He frowns, too frightened to ask. For a moment the only possibility seems obvious: some delayed freakish result of the accident, some weird twist on super-senses that's waited until now to enable him to somehow project as well as take in things that others can't. It's a horrifying thought.
That terrible gasping noise has started up again.
It's contagious; now Matt can't breathe either. It takes too long to find the other side of it, but it's a tunnel with walls tiled by a voice that he recognizes. When he comes out the other end, his friend is clutching tightly to one of his hands.
Compressing. Crushing. Matt flexes his fingers, and it eases up a bit.
"That's it," Foggy says. "Hospital. Not a discussion."
"Sleep," Matt counters. He feels like a fencer, wielding an epee. A blurry masked image from a cheesy old movie his dad had insisted they watch. He imagines Foggy coming at him with that thin sword; parries the attack and offers his own.
It's made easier with the obligatory masks, his only look at Foggy's face one slightly uncomfortable pass early on. He's got a vague idea of his features. But it doesn't make a difference – Matt's image of Foggy is all about the sense of him. A far more complete picture than he could ever get with just his eyes.
They fence a little more, a friendly match. Matt drifts, watching a back and forth display that now he's no longer a part of. Thinks maybe sometimes masks don't have to be so bad.
"Seriously," Foggy interrupts, "I really think we should take you to see somebody." The fencers crumble to dust as he speaks, and there's only blackness in their wake. "This is way worse than whatever I had."
"M'okay. Sleep. Fencing."
"Fencing?" The mattress dips as Foggy sits on the edge of it, and the whole universe rolls that direction. "All right, Murdock, I'll make you a deal. Show me you can form a complete sentence, and you can sleep for another hour. After that, no promises."
Matt blinks at him, a deliberate motion that he's partially convinced is going to somehow serve to focus his mind. It doesn't work, but he keeps doing it.
Blink.
Blink.
"Time," he blurts out, feeling every bit a genius. "What time is it?"
He's pleased with himself; it was a question – like he's paying attention – and he's fairly certain he got all the pieces in the proper order. But Foggy sighs, a sound like rain washing down a window. Matt wonders which part of it he got wrong.
"Don't worry about what time it is, man. Or your stupid test."
"S'a sentence," Matt points out, but the whole thing loops back into itself with a hiss and it triggers another bout of coughing. By the time it's passed, he's curled uselessly around the phantom hand that grips his lungs. It seems intent on squeezing all the breath from his chest, and Matt's having trouble figuring out where it came from. Why Foggy's not making it let go.
He misses the moment when consciousness surrenders, finding himself in a dream that begins parallel to a memory. He'd done fine, after Stick left him, using what he'd been taught to survive on his own in the forgotten cracks of Hell's Kitchen. But after a while he'd gotten careless, hunger and the cold wearing him down until he'd made a mistake; got spotted one day, on his way back from finding food. A well-meaning busybody and a handful of police, and Matt had found himself back at the orphanage. More different and alone than ever, and continuously plotting escape.
Here the dream diverges, following its own fevered course. The escape is still there, but fractured. Failed. Consisting mostly of an endless hallway, strewn with the debris of countless projectiles hurled at him from out of nowhere. He has to dodge them, both in the air and on the ground, and they're soon joined by taunts from the faceless gaggle that press in from all sides.
He resurfaces into the world with a dragging languidity. His eyelids are glued together, and for a minute he leaves them that way. A hot stinging dances over his skin – water beading up on a griddle – and he tries to determine where he's been hit.
Now reminds himself that the long walk over a carpet he can still feel under his toes never actually happened. The real escape had been laughably easy. He'd kept his head down after, hiding and barely eating for weeks, and he'd never heard much of a fervor. He'd often wondered if they'd kept it intentionally internal – more of a panic, maybe, when a blind orphan goes missing, but arguably also more of a potential scandal.
"Foggy?" He croaks it out before he's even taken the time to figure out where he is. Room. Bed. The confirmation floats in from around him. Fuzzy and after the fact, but there.
"Yeah…" It's muffled, broken by sleep. "Uh, yeah?" comes again, stronger. More alert. "Matt? What do you need?"
"Nothing," he responds reflexively, understanding that he's woken his friend. The somnambulate steps headed toward Matt's bed stop, start to turn back, when – wait – he remembers that there is something. "Water."
"Sure." The noises of Foggy's movements are muted and inexplicably distant. He can't really track them, and after a moment he gives up. Loses himself in a visceral memory of squatting in an abandoned building, half of a hard-won cheeseburger squished in his fist. He can taste it suddenly, the sheer victory of it. More than the actual flavor of the food, scarfed down without savoring because he'd been so very hungry.
Water arrives, the bottle nudged against his hand, and Matt debates the possibility that it's the same one. Magically refilling itself to reappear again and again, in what can only be a conspiracy with that refrigerator. He can hear the thing laughing, from over there across the room. Disguised as the low rumble of its motor, sure, but Matt can pick out the difference; it's just sitting there waiting, knowing that every time it's opened, it gets a chance to torment him with its shrieking cry of complaint.
But he's thirsty – he's never been so thirsty. He can't get the water out of the bottle and into his body fast enough, and a good portion of it ends up dribbling down his chin and his neck to drench the front of his t-shirt. It feels wonderful, that cold trailing over his skin. Far better than the humid sweat he can now feel sticking the rest of his shirt to his shoulders and back.
Matt wrinkles his nose in disgust. It makes him sneeze.
He drops the bottle discarded onto the bed, and he vaguely registers that it may not be empty by the way Foggy lunges for it. A whoosh of a breeze that fans Matt's exposed skin, and he almost asks Foggy to do it again. Somebody laughs. Matt wonders who else is in the room with them.
He scrubs damp hands over his face, his hair, trying to get out from under this syrupy confusion. No results, but it makes him realize that he's not wearing his glasses. Their absence seems important – even if he can't quite recall why – and Matt gropes around for the frames in the general direction of the nightstand beside the bed.
He finds them when he knocks them to the floor. He can't suppress the groan as he bends to reach for them.
Fingertips fumbling futilely across the carpet, and a tenuous angle that's sending all the crap in his respiratory system to congregate in a hasty meeting in his head. The pressure is too much; it pulses with the beat of his heart. But he needs to find his glasses. They have to be down here somewhere.
Hands on his shoulders. Foggy's trying to maneuver him fully back into the bed, but Matt can't jump this train from its track. "Don' step on'm," he warns Foggy. "Have to."
"You know you're barely speaking English, right?" Matt works to shape his expression into a frown, but the muscles of his face are stubbornly lax. Maybe this body's had a stroke. That would suck. He doesn't know how long he's going to be trapped in here. "And you don't need these. I've told you that."
These. This time the frown comes easier. Matt can't see what Foggy's referring to; it seems a dumb thing for his friend to have forgotten. "Glasses," he clarifies, in what feels a gigantic effort. "The floor."
"Yes, Matt. I've got your glasses. They're back on the table. Forget about them."
Foggy sounds yellow. Not a harsh insistent yellow, but the diffuse warm glow of morning sun on skin. Calming. Gentle. Matt remembers yellow.
He forgets about his glasses, as instructed. Forgets about everything for a while. When he drifts back into their room, Foggy's eating pizza; Matt instinctively tries to pin down exactly where the trash can is, so that maybe he can sneak any thrown-away leftovers later. People are always wasting food. He knows how to wait. Where to find the best scraps.
But he's not hiding well enough, and when he shifts against the pillows Foggy must hear it. "Matt? You back with me, buddy?" His friend's voice wafts across the room, oddly disconnected from any one point.
"Mmm." The vibrations annoy him this time. They spread tingling over his face.
"Don't suppose you're hungry…"
"Leading the witness," Matt thinks he mumbles. He isn't sure who told him to say that.
"Hey - that was almost a rational thought. Awesome. I'd forgotten what those sounded like, coming from you."
By the time Foggy gets to the end of the sentence, Matt has forgotten its beginning. "What?" he asks helplessly.
"And there he goes again." It might be what Foggy says. It echoes in his brain a bit Stick.
"Shower," Matt hears someone suggest. It sounds an excellent plan. He decides immediately that this is what he'll do, and he'd be on his feet already if the blankets weren't holding him to the bed. He glares blindly at them, trying to persuade them to release him with a telekinetic power he didn't know until just now that he had. He needs to practice more – it doesn't seem to be working.
The old-fashioned way, then. Matt paws at the cotton, struggling to find the sides. This ridiculous blanket doesn't seem to end, and he can't understand why not. He's flabbergasted.
Flabbergasted. What a weird word.
"Got some place to be?" Foggy asks. Matt hopes not – if there is, he can't remember. "Geez, Murdock. Gotta tell you, I really miss the days when we used to have, you know, conversations."
Foggy sounds old. A tired old man. Matt plays inept fingers over his chin, checking for a Rip Van Winkle beard. Nope. Though the stubble he finds there nips at his skin.
"Wanna shower." It's a trial to put these two words together, to stand them both up next to each other so they don't tip over on their own. But a step in the direction of conversation. He's trying. He really is.
"A proposition that – believe me – has my vote too. But a bad idea. You can't even stand up."
"Says who?"
"'Says who?' That's the best you can do?" It rings a bit of a hopeful challenge, but Matt's got nothing. Only a swamping airless dullness, and a fantasy of water flowing over his bare skin. Foggy gets off the bed. "Stay there. I'll see if I can find a clean rag or something. At least wipe your face."
When Foggy leaves the room, he thoughtlessly takes all of the oxygen with him. Matt can feel it dwindling as he waits there, trickling away with a gradual inexorability. He should say something, he knows. Ask for it back. It was probably an accident anyway.
But he feels like he's already asked a lot from Foggy over the last couple of days. Weeks? Months? He can't really come up with the specifics, but he's reluctant to ask any more. By the time Foggy returns with a blessed softness against his face and that hand tracing those circles into his back, Matt's gasping for breath but trying desperately to do it as quietly as he can.
"This is really stupid," Foggy says. The cloth smells of his shaving cream – not on it, but too close – and Matt doesn't intend to taste it. But his tongue darts out, catching a dangling corner, and he also gets a hint of rust from the metal ring on the bottom of the can. He scrapes his tongue against the uneven ridge of his top teeth, trying to get it off.
"M'not stupid," Matt protests, when the silence stretches like Silly Putty and he starts to wonder if maybe it's his turn. He realizes he can't seem to stop running his tongue over his teeth now though, and he reconsiders. Perhaps it's a point well made.
"This. This is stupid. You need to be in a hospital. You don't even know where you are."
The cloth soothes a path over his face, his neck, leaving a trail of dreamy euphoria all the more glorious when held up against the rest of his body. He's too hot everywhere else. He doesn't know exactly when that started, but looking back it feels like it must have been this way forever. He wants a shower. A shower would help.
"I know," Matt insists. Trying to thank Foggy by proving that he can participate. "Our room."
It sounds confidant. Correct. An image destroyed entirely a second later, by the tiny scared voice that squeaks out, "Isn't it?"
"Yeah, man." That old man again. "Yeah, it's our room."
Matt can't figure out why Foggy's tone is all weary resignation, since he's apparently gotten the answer right. He's feeling much better about the whole thing himself.
The damp rag is quickly warming to room temperature, still cooler than his skin but less of a treat. It's beginning to feel less soft somehow too – more like the abrasion of a cat's tongue – and Matt can taste the shaving cream dripping down the back of his throat. He reclines back against the pillows to try and escape it, but the cloth follows.
"Do you think you can get up? Go for a ride?" Foggy's always trying to coax him to go places. Wingman. "Because I'm trying not to freak either one of us out here, but I gotta tell you – I keep coming back to the idea of calling for an ambulance."
"Whoo-whee-whoo-whee," Matt imitates, as illustration. He used to love making up stories about ambulances in the night.
"And it's shit like that that keeps bringing it back."
Matt sulks. He'd thought it a pretty good imitation.
He's wearing a scarf, and he really doesn't want to be. In fact he's pretty sure he's already gotten rid of it at least once. The thing keeps coming back, but Matt's determined. He gets his fingers wrapped inside it and wrenches it off, throwing it as far from himself as he can.
It hits something, closer than he'd expected. Drapes itself again around his neck, winding to choke him. "Quit doing that," Foggy says. "Leave it on. You need it."
There's not a lot he can smell at the moment, but the odors surrounding him are different ones from the last interminable span of days. The space reverberates strangely, also – more compact, rounded. An expanse akin to ceiling not a foot above his head. "We're moving," Matt abruptly realizes. "Why're we moving?"
It's slurred and without much force behind it, and he's afraid in the silence that he's going to have to find the energy to repeat it. He doesn't think he cares that much. Except… moving. It seems sort of a big deal.
He doesn't need to repeat it, though his mind is spinning through frayed-edged ramifications of moving, and he almost misses the answer when it comes. "We're going to the hospital, buddy." There's a careful hesitation to the statement that suggests that maybe this is not the first time it's been offered, and that perhaps it hasn't always been met with the utmost receptivity. Maybe Matt's imagining it. It certainly feels like the first time he's heard it.
"Hospital." Sick people go to the hospital. Is he sick? He lets his head fall back against the seat and takes stock.
"No point in fighting now," Foggy hurries to say. "We're already in the cab." Matt's hand rests between them, something he only notices when Foggy pats the back of it. This body's still having a problem with its senses, but he thinks it's supposed to feel reassuring. "You don't have to do anything. I got this."
It's a promise, nebulous and grand, and Matt needs it to be true. He leans into it, concentrating on the unrelenting vibration of rolling tires and the weight of Foggy's fingers on the warm skin of his hand.
Somebody's wailing, a horrible keening sound. No matter how much Matt begs, they won't stop.
His eyes are bleeding. They must be.
Searing. Liquefied. He tries to force them open, but can't make himself do it. The slightest crack of his eyelids, and the caustic burning magnifies to blaze through the curves of his skull. There's a howl of pain, an everywhere sound that seems to originate directly from his damaged eyes themselves.
"Dad? Dad!"
The room hurls itself at him from every direction, a staggering flood of foreign sound and smell. Not just the room – the floor. The wing. The building. The block. Spiraling outward, each new level crashing over the last to obliterate what's come a second before. Waves on a beach, scraping and sweeping at the sand. He can't get a fix on what's there, before the waves come in again to wash it away. Waves made of acid. He doesn't know why his dad won't answer.
"Dad? Where are you?"
Matty…
He gets his eyes open – finally, the blood trailing like lava down his face – and the world is nothing but fire. Inside and out, and he slams them closed with a reflexive self-preservation. He can taste the sounds beating against him from every angle, metallic and sickly sweet and with a bitterness that melds with the panic to clog up his throat. He can't breathe. Can't figure out where his world is.
Matty…
"Dad, please… please make it stop…"
Matty…
"Dad… please… It hurts so much…"
He can't scream; he wants to scream. It strains impotent and mute against his vocal cords, a nightmare silence.
Hands capture his flailing fingers, the only bit of him he can move from within this leaden prison of his unresponsive body. "My eyes," he fights to explain, from inside the burning blackness. Needs his father to understand, so he can make it go away. "Hurts… too loud…"
"Matt… Come on, Matt – you gotta calm down, buddy. If you don't, they're gonna knock you out again. Matt…"
Matty… It's okay, Matty…
"Can't see," he moans. "… hurts so much…"
"I know. I'm sorry, buddy. I know. But you have to breathe. Just breathe for me."
Breathe. It gradually seeps in that he knows that one. Something he can probably do.
His chest is sore, but his lungs inflate and deflate as he asks them to. He struggles to block out everything other than this repetitive pattern, than the anchoring hands gripping his own. An ostrich, clinging to this new focus to bury his head in the wave-strafed sand.
"That's it," a voice encourages. It drifts around his heavy head, curls its way into his ears. "Keep breathing. Slow, just like that."
It's made both easier and more difficult with the strange weight pressing down on him, a foggy blanket that pins him flat to be able to more conveniently invade his brain. A soupy full-body haziness making it almost impossible to concentrate, but when he manages to achieve a tentative rhythm to his uncertain respiration, the fog perversely becomes an assistance toward momentarily ignoring all the rest of it.
Fog. Foggy.
"Foggy?" Matt's voice is rusty and unused, and he can't really hear it over all the other noise. He wonders where his dad went, before a little boy's whisper reminds him that he's gone. Dead. It hits him solidly in the center of his chest, knocking him over even though he thinks he's lying down. His careful breathing fractures. Lost.
"Yeah, it's me. I'm here. Keep breathing."
Foggy sounds awful, and Matt tries to determine if it's an illusion of all this crushing sound. Sound he can taste, he realizes. It feels like an idea had before, and a reality he definitely doesn't like. His thoughts won't stay in order, popping and careening off into corners he can't reach.
Foggy. Something wrong with Foggy.
"You… you okay?" His throat is raw; the question splits unevenly. He can't bring himself to open his eyes yet. Foggy's still got ahold of his hands.
Where are they? The relapse of confusion brings back with it the panic; the world gets suddenly louder, an omnipresent beeping that tastes like silver where it lumps on the back of his tongue. Matt tries to narrow everything to only the grip of Foggy's fingers. The universe obliges a little, gets smaller – helped by the contradictory smothering clouds that he still can't identify – but he can feel it all pulsing ominously against this bubble he's so painstakingly created.
Foggy laughs, and it's something else for Matt to grab onto. It's an odd cackle of a noise, and Matt can't connect it with anything. "Seriously? You're worried about me?"
Right. Something wrong with Foggy. And there it is again, that dragging exhaustion that can only be rumbling up from a throat that feels as abraded as his own. Matt wonders what happened. To either of them.
"Sound… like hell," he manages. Foggy laughs again, and it feels entirely worth the effort.
"Look who's talking."
One of Matt's hands unexpectedly finds its way free; it flies clumsily up toward his face, almost a hooking punch to his jaw. Eventually locates his throat. He rubs at the skin over his trachea as if his fingers can reach through to the dull burning inside. "Hurts," he mumbles, the word having to claw its way out.
"I'm sure it does," Foggy says. "You had a tube in there for a while, and you weren't too thrilled to find that out the first time you woke up. Probably jarred the crap out of the thing while you were fighting it."
First time? "Where…?"
"The hospital, remember?" It feels oft repeated. "You weren't getting better. I had to take you to the hospital."
Defensive? Matt can't tell. Can't find Foggy's heartbeat in the distressingly flavorful clamor. "S'okay." He isn't really certain if it is or not. He can't concentrate long enough to decide. But it seems like something he should say. "Can you taste that? Crying. Somebody's crying."
"Whoa," is Foggy's response, and Matt thinks that maybe that second bit should have been kept to himself. "They must've given you the good stuff. Let's see if we can sneak some out with us."
"No…" Matt moans, when he finally wades through all of those words and figures out what it is that Foggy's saying. "No more drugs. Please, Foggy. Please… don't…"
"Okay. Okay, slow down, man. I'll do what I can." No promises.
Where'd his dad go? His dad won't let them give him any more of these disorienting drugs. "Dad? Don't… Tell them. Please…"
"Matt. I'm the only one here. Foggy." The hand still around his squeezes, a gentle pressure that he can almost see. Foggy. He won't be tricked into opening his eyes yet, though. "You gotta stay calm, man. It'll go a long way toward keeping you off the drugs."
Calm. Be calm. "M'calm. M'okay." No more drugs.
Foggy sighs, and Matt wonders if he knows he has that old man living inside of him. It feels like there's an old man sitting on his chest. Fucking Stick.
Asshole, comes a murmur of memory in Foggy's voice.
"When…" Matt starts, but a cough strangles him to gagging, and he has no option but to ride it out. There's a plastic basin under his chin now, his own fingers held wrapped around its edge. Matt swallows, tries weakly to push it away. "When can we… can we g'home?"
"Definitely not today," Foggy says, and the speed of the response feels a slap in the face. A sense of acute betrayal that cuts through everything, and Matt's working to shove Foggy off of him, not wanting his friend to touch him at all.
"Wanna g'home." He sounds like a ten year old boy. Make it stop, make it go away. Make none of this be happening. A scared little kid, crouching orphaned in a damp alley. Let me wake up. Let this all be a dream.
"I'm sure you do. Me too, honestly – this chair sucks."
"Wanna g'home." Maybe, if he keeps saying it, someone will hear him and make the wish come true.
"Later," Foggy says. "Let's talk about it later."
The energy required to speak – to breathe, to think, to stay conscious – drains away quickly, unsustainable with the pull of the drugs. With what feeble strength is left in his battered body. Matt floats, cocooned for a while in this desperate fatigue.
When he wakes again things are a little more settled, though there's a frantic jolt when he automatically pries open his eyes. Not at the smeared flames, the blindness – the epitome of self-delusion to have somehow not accepted this by now – but because for a tingling moment he has no idea where he is. None of his senses are responding as they should, and it takes too long to understand why.
Matt lies motionless, summons all of his meager muddled resources. Bed. Machinery. Antiseptic. Hospital? He listens to the beeping – erratic, but gradually evening – coming from somewhere beside him, and can't figure out why it reminds him of the taste of metal.
Too loud. Too strong. Too much. He fights to breathe through it, to carve all the stimuli down into more manageable chunks. If nothing else, at least he can prod himself to find some more colorfully imaginative terms to describe it. His brain is useless goo, leaking from his ears.
It must be.
Matt tells himself sternly to prioritize, to break things down to one step at a time. Like outlining a legal argument, one point following after another. Something he knows how to do. He's already discovered the hospital bit – here a slip of focus hauls him briefly into it, flinging him down corridors shaped by smell and sound, and he has to reset once he's climbed his way back out – he's in a hospital.
But alone?
First priority, a detail he curses himself for not honing in on the second that he woke up. Matt blinks open his eyes again, to find that the searing pain is still there; it hisses out from the sockets, the steam scalding. A moment later he registers that the noise is actually coming from his mouth. He closes his lips around it, clamping a hand over them for good measure.
Focus, Matty. You can do this. Anyone in the room to hear that? It's important. He doesn't want someone watching him without being aware of it. Not while he sleeps. Not while he's awake. Matt stretches for anything beyond the blaringly-persistent obvious, searching for the ephemeral space under the sensations of the rest of the hospital, but above the ones intruding from within this room. It makes his head ache with a ferocity fit to rival the pain in his chest, but he realizes that he definitely can hear someone breathing.
The headache begins to pound with an insistence that makes him nauseous, but Matt strives for more. A familiar respiratory rhythm, one rising and falling at a sleeping pace, and hint of Foggy's deodorant buried under several layers of day-old sweat.
Foggy's here. It releases a knot of tension that lets go from everywhere at once, and Matt slumps against the pillows nearly choking on his relief. Foggy. Foggy's here. The repetition feels like magic, trailing a sleepy warmth that melts through his muscles.
It's pleasant - he tries for something better, but the lovely word seems to fit - and he soaks in the comfort for a time. He hates the lack of control with the drugs, the way they allow the whole world in at once without any hope of possibly filtering. The invasive blurriness that gives him no say. But as he lies here the thinks that perhaps there's a furry appeal to this blurriness too. That – when things are faded like this, just for this moment and if he's truly fortunate, the one after – maybe he can see why people choose to get stoned.
Is this stoned? He feels stoned. Stooonnnned.
It can't last; he knows this. There's a part of him that can't fully relax into the feeling – pleasant – because he's waiting with every heartbeat for it to end. For the universe to come slamming back.
Ultimately it's his body that sabotages the vacation; he unexpectedly swallows a brick of air that takes a divot out of his abused throat, sending him coughing helplessly and doubled over as far forward as he can bend. It's difficult to hear anything over the wretched noise he's making, but when Foggy flounders abruptly awake with a startled gasp and what sounds like a near-tumble out of the chair, it's hard for Matt to miss it.
"What…?" Foggy clears his throat, and his feet thud to the floor with more force than it seems they're supposed to. Matt can't really tell, not with all the rest of it. Not with his new all-encompassing quest for oxygen. "Hang on, buddy. I'm coming…" Foggy sounds half asleep.
A glass, smooth and curved and fitting against the curl of his palm. Matt tries to get his fingers to close around it, but it bobs where it should and finds its own way to his mouth. "I've got it," someone assures him, in a voice he wants to trust. "Just drink."
The water washes a crisp path through him, one that's easy to follow. He traces it over his tongue and down his throat, cooling the center of his chest before it pools into his stomach. It rinses him from the inside, a refreshing flash that sharpens his mind. Relatively speaking.
The glass wanders away. Matt listens to Foggy shifting aimlessly about in the narrow space between the bed and the window, challenges his senses to see what his friend's doing. It's too much work.
"You been here… the whole time?" It's painful to get out, but he's struggling for normalcy. For some kind of solid footing.
"You ask that like you have any idea how long that's been. Or like I'd be anywhere else."
Matt flinches. "Sorry." He's not sure exactly what he's apologizing for.
All of it.
He moves with the vague intention of shifting somehow out of his current position; not an actual plan, but he's stiff like he's been in this one indefinitely. Foggy's hands reach out of the blackness behind his eyelids, real and nonthreatening and supremely helpful in the readjustment.
Supremely helpful. Matt's going to put that on a t-shirt and give it to him.
He doesn't tell Foggy this, decides it will be a surprise. "How long?" he asks instead.
"Couple of days. Don't worry about it." It has the taste of an evasion, and Matt digs through recent memory to try and determine why. But every image he encounters is composed of wet paper. Disintegrating under his fingertips.
"Okay." Feels easier, not to have to sort through all that mushy clumped paper. Now the question he really wants answered: "When can I get out of here?"
"Soon," Foggy says, and there's no doubt this one's an avoidance. "You, uh… you kinda freaked everybody out for a bit there. They just want to make sure you're really okay."
"Sorry," Matt says, and the second time is more satisfying. More pure. More damning. It's the lash of a barbed whip on the bare back of a penitent sinner, and the pain feels inarguably right. So he says it again. "Foggy, really – I'm sorry." Flagellation. A sound-barrier snap that licks pain across his shoulders. "For all of this. So… sorry."
His voice cracks on the last word, and now he can't stop repeating it. His eyes are bleeding again, even though he's got them firmly closed, warm liquid trickling out from under the lids to run down the sides of his nose, off his chin. It registers that he's huddled in on himself, a stuttered rocking to accompany the compulsive litany, but he can't seem to make himself quit doing this either.
Sorry sorry sorry sorrysorrysorry…
"No way," Foggy growls, from somewhere far away. "Don't do this to me again, Murdock. You have to calm down."
Matt thinks this might go on for a while. Impossible to tell when caught in the middle of it, but as the self-punishment begins to slacken – losing its effectiveness, the sentiment now ringing hollow – it dawns on him that Foggy's voice continues to flow around him in a murmur. The words are unimportant, and he allows them to blend together. Uses the soothing tone alone to seek out his way back to the room.
"Sorry," he says, one last time. A hiccup he can't keep ahold of.
"Yeah. Look, I'll talk to someone about when you can go home, okay? Just please stop apologizing."
Matt wipes the back of a hand across his cheek, brings it close to his nose and sniffs at it. Not iron. Salt. Eyes not actually bleeding. Check. It feels like something to be grateful for.
"Maybe I can find a hot nurse to give you a sponge bath," Foggy adds. "I was thinking of going out for a bit anyway. Get some food. I love you, but I can't stand another meal in here."
His pulse gives a tiny flutter at the idea of Foggy leaving him here, for any length of time; Matt tells himself it's really excitement at the prospect of a sponge bath. Just any other guy. Nothing to see here. As if he wants anything right now more than sleep. "Sure," he makes himself say. He doesn't intend to be any more of a hassle than he knows he already has.
"Want me to smuggle something in? You haven't really had the true joy of the whole experience yet, but I promise you – hospital food is crap."
"M'okay." He's fading out again, the world stretching itself thinner and thinner on his horizon until soon it'll be nothing but a sliver of background hum. He thinks Foggy says something about going to find somebody, but it's sucked into the narrowing as irrevocably as everything else.
When he wakes the next time, the world is made of teriyaki chicken. He swims through the tang of it. The TV is on, high up the wall at the foot of the bed, but at a volume barely above a whisper. Foggy's chewing is louder. "You can turn it up," Matt tells him.
Foggy jumps, a creak of the chair frame and the faint pattering of spilled rice raining down over Styrofoam. He takes a breath, and Matt hears him brushing something off of his pants to the floor. "You sure?"
"Yeah." The levels don't change; Foggy resettles, goes back to eating.
"Hungry?" It comes around a mouth full of food. "This might be a little much, but I can get somebody."
"Maybe later," Matt says, simply to be agreeable. Somewhere out in the hospital, a man shouts. A short cut-off cry of utter despair; it stabs through his temple, and he winces.
"Oh crap," Foggy says, misinterpreting the expression. "Is this bothering you? I didn't think about it. I should've –"
"Foggy." Matt wants him to stop moving. There's a whirlwind in here now, and it's making him anxious. "It's fine. Eat."
And Foggy eventually does, with the TV even inching up a bit in volume. There's mindless chatter that Matt may or may not keep up his end of, but it doesn't matter because he knows Foggy doesn't care. The long silences are the same. Comfortable. Unweighted. Safe to meander around in.
"Hey," Foggy says out of nowhere, at the tail end of one of those companionable lengths of quiet. "Who's The Stig, anyway?"
"What?" He manages a flimsy laugh; when it tickles into a cough, he's grateful for the extra time. Matt's not entirely sure what Foggy's referring to, but that name creeps near something close to home. Something secret. "The guy in the helmet from Top Gear?" he offers. Wondering why his fingertips are tingling.
"You know the guy from Top Gear? That British car show?"
"What're you talking about?" The question is an accident of sheer curiosity; it slides out before he thinks that he might not actually want to know the answer. Where is this coming from?
"You said he was always 'talking about your breathing.' The Stig."
He'd said what? Matt fights not to panic, knowing the machines he's chained to will swiftly give him away. Definitely Stick. He backpedals through his memories, but every one is out of focus. What the hell else did he say?
But Foggy's not adding anything to this bombshell, and Matt decides his only hope is deflection. Because there's no way he's telling Foggy about Stick.
Not today. Maybe not ever.
"I don't think that guy talks," Matt tells him. "I must have been delirious."
"Yeah, no kidding," Foggy says. "At one point you thought you were fencing."
Matt tries to work this one out, and his friend returns to finishing his food.
End Notes: Okay, Matt got a little more KickedPuppy in this, but he's younger and Maskless. And maybe nobody will mind. I worried about writing it – not at all my intention when I threw those lines into the last fic – because thus far in my HeadCanon, Beguile holds the definitive look at DruggedMatt with "Calamity Physics." (If you haven't read it, look for it on . If you have read it, go read it again.) I tried to do my own thing here, and any similarities are innocently lifted rather than purposefully stolen. Because I can't get it out of my brain.
Also, a little nod to my Top Gear boys. I'm still unable to emotionally process that after all these years we won't be seeing you again.