Author's Notes: Written for a prompt on the kink meme: some Very Bad People take Matt and Foggy, torture the hell out of Matt, and let Foggy patch him up between sessions.
And a Hard Place - Chapter 1
It's half past who-the-hell-knows when Foggy wakes, and his very first thought is that he's never going to drink again.
His head feels like someone tried to split it in two, and his throat is bone dry, and his mouth tastes like something crawled into the tequila last night and died. Possibly it also started to rot at some point, and Foggy didn't notice – because, Jesus, the taste is all over his tongue, coating it like a scum of oil on water.
"I need an intervention," he croaks miserably, and gropes half-heartedly in pitch darkness for the bedside table. He has a vague idea that there might be a cup of water on it, thoughtfully left by Matt or Karen or someone with a bit of foresight, but his fingers come up empty.
No water. No table. Come to think of it, no bed.
His questing fingers find what feels like tile, and he has a second to think: did I pass out in the bathroom? Followed instantly by: good place to be, bathroom, because the nausea that sweeps over him is sudden and crippling.
Foggy lunges toward where he thinks the toilet ought to be – finds nothing but more tile – suffers a wave of disorientation so strong it nears vertigo.
Then he's puking onto the floor, on all fours, head hanging between braced arms.
He's almost done when some spatters onto his wrist, warm and chunky, and that sets him off on a whole new wave, heaving until he's sure his whole stomach's spread out on the ground beneath him.
When Foggy's finished, he spits, then wipes at his lips with the back of his hand. He needs to rinse his mouth out. He needs to brush his teeth and find some paper towels to clean up the mess.
But before any of that, he needs to turn on the damn light. Even with the curtains closed, his bathroom's not usually this dark. The streetlight across the way must be burned out again.
Standing's a pretty impressive feat, Foggy thinks. There have been sailors in honest-to-god lightning storms that've had firmer ground beneath them – but he rallies like some grizzled old dude with a hook hand and a parrot. He finds his sea legs, and he stands there panting until the room stops swaying.
"Teetotaling," Foggy whispers, fervently. "That's the way to go."
But first up, before he embarks on his new life of virtue: the light.
Foggy puts his hand out for wall and finds… nothing. More air. And that's the moment when he feels the first real prickle of fear.
Because his bathroom is tiny – two steps across, if you're generous and take small steps. There shouldn't be anywhere he can't reach the wall from, but he's stumbling forward, blind – one step, and then another, and then another, and there is nothing where there's supposed to be a towel rack.
"Oh," he says, quietly. "Oh, shit."
And then, before his brain-to-mouth filter can kick in, before he can parse can-nots and should-nots, before he dives feet-first into worst-case scenarios and organized crime and his idiot best friend who makes the worst life choices Foggy has ever seen anyone make, Foggy says, "Matt?"
But it's not Matt's voice that answers.
It's a man's voice, deep and gravelly, somewhere behind Foggy in the dark.
"Mr. Murdock," that voice tells him, "is currently indisposed."
It's the kind of feeling Foggy imagines you'd get if someone shoved you off the docks with your feet in cement – icy and breathless. The thought that he's going to die pounds through his head like his kid sister with a toy drum on Christmas morning.
"Who's there?" Foggy demands, and he means for it to come out as a threat, but his voice is strangled and scratchy from puking. "Don't come any closer."
"No one is here, Mr. Nelson," the voice informs him, neutral. "You're being monitored remotely."
Foggy feels unease scramble up his spine like a spider. He imagines video equipment there in the dark, then instantly wonders how much any video equipment could possibly pick up right now, given that he couldn't see the floor when it'd been a foot in front of him.
For a second, Foggy flounders, fear hobbling his feet. Then he starts forward again, arms out in front like a cheesy version of Frankenstein's monster, common sense cringing in anticipation. If he keeps this up, some rational part of his mind whispers, Matt's not going to hold the record for terrible life choices very long.
"Yeah?" Foggy asks. "From where?"
He doesn't expect an answer. Really he doesn't. Life's not full of cartoon villains, who divulge their plans to anyone who wants to know.
But the voice replies anyway: "Elsewhere in the building."
It's like a bad horror movie. Snippets of half a dozen of them dance through his mind: crazy hillbillies, and chainsaws, and meat hooks. Foggy stops walking – tries to stop thinking.
"So you," he stammers. "So you want to – what? Kidnap a level one defense attorney?" Foggy's heart is loud in his chest. He wonders if this is how Matt feels, all the time. "You could've made an appointment at the office. We've got coffee and everything."
And the voice actually laughs. The chuckle's low, and it makes all the hair on Foggy's arms stand up on end, like it's trying to jump free of a sinking ship.
"Oh, no," the voice says. "It's not your legal skills we're interested in."
Foggy catches a sound, then. It's in the background, muffled as though from bad audio.
"Ah," says the man. "If you'll excuse me, Mr. Nelson." Then there's a hiss of static, brief and distinct, and silence.
The dark is absolute.
Foggy' ears go into overdrive, straining for a scrap of – well, anything, really. He'll take anything at this point.
But mostly, what he wants is to prove himself wrong. He wants something to drown out that last sound, there at the end, the one that's still ringing in his brain. There are warning bells attached to that sound, and some kind of siren shriek of wordless alarm. DANGER, that sound declares, and CAUTION, and ROAD ENDS AHEAD, and a thousand other advisory fragments in construction site yellow.
Foggy knows those particular thoughts well.
They're the kind of thoughts he gets at night, sitting up in his apartment, watching grainy news footage of Hell's Kitchen's newest up-and-coming awful thing – hoping and not hoping to catch a glimpse of some blind asshole lawyer playing dress-up.
They're his something's-wrong-with-Matt thoughts, and if he thinks too hard about why he needs to have a whole classification for those, Foggy's going to hate his life. So he doesn't.
But those thoughts? Those thoughts are ringing off the hook right now.
Because the sound over the audio connection, barely heard, was a sound Foggy knows. The memory's buried deep in reckless nights at Columbia, in shots at Josie's, in Matt Murdock sprawled on Foggy's couch, bleary-eyed and hung over.
It's the sound of Foggy's name, slurred and tentative, in a voice he knows as well as his own.