Foggy goes to Matt's place planning to clean it out. Instead, he cleans it up.
It starts small: the crooked painting on the wall is driving him crazy, so he straightens it. Why does a blind guy even have a painting? He should've asked Matt. Then his hand brushes the textured surface of the canvas, and there's his answer. Thankfully before he can get too maudlin about all the things he should've asked and should've said.
Then he sweeps up the weird mess on the kitchen floor. He can't even tell what it is. Spilled cereal? And when did Matt stop cleaning up after himself? Depression, obviously. Always a problem. Probably worse without Foggy to keep an eye on it. Nope, not going there. Keep cleaning, and don't think too hard.
The bed covers are still rumpled, but only on one side. Matt was sleeping alone then, at the end. Foggy curls his fingers under the edge of the sheet, ready to pull it off. And he can't. The lump in his throat makes it too hard to swallow. He steps back from the bed, breathes deep. No erasing the dead best friend's silhouette today.
He turns back to the living room, angling toward Matt's desk. Paperwork is safer, less personal. Anyway, Matt would want to make sure his clients were taken care of. Just one problem: everything's in Braille. Note to self, find a Braille translator who can be trusted to respect attorney-client privilege. Right, no problem, those grow on trees.
At least the fridge doesn't need cleaning out. There was nothing in it to begin with, because Foggy had abandoned his best friend to subsist on coffee and protein bars. No, try again. His former best friend, an adult with an Ivy League education, chose to subsist on coffee and protein bars. To distract himself, he starts washing the old coffee cups in the sink. Without thinking, he dries them off and puts them back in the cupboard.
He stares at the neatly stacked plates for one minute, then two. What is he going to do with all this stuff? He'd brought boxes, but where's he going to take it? Goodwill, maybe? He pictures Matt's chipped plates, forlorn on a metal shelf at some thrift store. Get the whole set for $3.98! The lump in his throat is back. It makes him want to punch the wall, but no, that's exactly what Matt would do. Instead he finds a bottle of Windex under the sink and starts cleaning.
By then, he knows what he's doing, even if he hasn't admitted it to himself yet. After the kitchen's clean, he does the bathroom. He dusts the bedroom but leaves the laundry folded in the basket next to the bed. He wipes down the window sills, polishes the windows till they're spotless, not that Matt would ever see. When he gets hungry, he goes down to the bodega for a sandwich and comes back with groceries - a jug of milk, some bread and cheese, boxes of cereal and cans of tuna.
By the time he's finished, it's dark outside and he steps back to survey his work in the light of the billboard. It looks good, he thinks. Like Matt never left. Like he's coming back home.
Keeping Matt alive is easier than he thought it would be. Convincing the power company to switch the autopay to his platinum card is easy; he can guess the answer to most of Matt's security questions, and he's got his lawyer voice for the rest. Taking care of the other bills takes less than an hour. Then he pops a check for three months of rent into an envelope. The landlord's not going to complain about that.
He tells two of Matt's clients that he got hit by a car while crossing the street. Can you believe those bastards, not stopping for the blind guy? He has to go back to Matt's place three times to pick up care packages and flowers. While he's there, he replaces the old milk jug in the fridge with a new one, just in case. Then he tells the next set of clients that Matt went to drug rehab, just to stop the flow of get well cards. The last two cases wind up on his desk, and he tells himself it's because he needs something to do when he can't sleep at night.
At first, his mom doesn't ask about Matt. She knows they're not working together anymore, even if he never told her exactly why. But then Thanksgiving rolls around, and Foggy knows he's not going to get out of this one easy.
"I'm putting dinner on the table at one," his mom says. "And you tell my other son I'm expecting him. He hasn't been answering my text messages, you know."
For one panicked minute, Foggy considers hanging up the phone and buying himself a plane ticket to Fiji. He hadn't even known his mom kept in touch with Matt, but of course she had. He'd come home with Foggy every time the dorms were closed. Senior year, when Elektra disappeared and Matt stopped getting out of bed, his mom dragged him back to the Nelsons' little apartment in Hell's Kitchen.
"You don't have to do this, Mrs. Nelson, I'll be alright," Matt had protested. He'd run a hand over six days' of stubble and pasted on a brave smile. "I'll shave and everything, I promise."
"I know I don't have to. I want to," his mother had said, looping an arm around Matt's too-thin shoulders. "You're my son."
And just like that, Foggy had known Matt would be okay. Of course his mom had kept in touch. Of course she wanted to know what happened to Matt.
"Franklin, are you there?" His mother's voice drags him back to the present. He should tell her what happened, but if he does that, he'll have to stop putting milk in Matt's fridge, stop paying the bills, fill out the death certificate….
"He just didn't know how to tell you he couldn't come," Foggy says. The words trip off his tongue, and dammit, now Matt's turning him into a liar. "He's, ah, he's going home with his girlfriend."
"Girlfriend?" His mother's glee positively radiates through the phone. Then her voice drops. "Wait, what is this one like? Do we like her, Foggy? Do we want Matt to go home with her?"
"Yeah, yeah," Foggy says hastily. "She's Spanish. From Spain, I mean. Madrid. Getting her master's in comparative lit at Columbia. Matt's with her every day, barely coming up for air, you know how he gets."
"Well, as long as he's happy," his mother says. Then she pauses. "I didn't know they celebrated Thanksgiving in Spain."
Fuck. "No, they don't," Foggy says smoothly. "At least, I don't think so. School's out for the week though, so she's going home."
Fuck Matt for making him such a good liar.
The next time Foggy goes to Matt's apartment, Marci's standing in the middle of the living room.
"I don't even pretend to know what's going on here, Foggy Bear, but you are one dysfunctional human being," she said, tapping her Louboutins on the scuffed wooden floor.
Foggy opens and closes his mouth. The lie is ready. The truth is, Matt had a drug problem. He went to rehab. Ninety days. He and Karen had agreed on the lie. If Matt hasn't come back by then, they can call it a suicide. But the words don't come out. He doesn't want to lie to his girlfriend - and anyway, he can't lie to Marci. She knows his tells.
Eventually she sighs and rolls her eyes. "Whatever. Matt's missing, right? I can tell because you haven't gone on an angry rant about him in two and a half weeks."
"The truth is, he's probably dead," Foggy says. The words come out more calmly than he'd expected, but he'd known this would happen eventually, hadn't he? Ever since the first day he'd found out about Daredevil. The separation from Matt had just been a trial run, preparation for the inevitability of his best friend's untimely demise.
"I know," Marci says. She looks rattled, and something inside Foggy melts a little, even though a warning bell inside his head says he should try to stay numb.
A splash of green on the kitchen counter catches his eye. A fern. That hadn't been there before.
"Did you put that there?" he asks. It doesn't really seem like Marci's style.
"Yeah." She takes a breath. "I also put new milk in the fridge, dusted a little, went through the mail. Not that it told me anything. Oh, and vodka. I put decent vodka in the liquor cabinet, just in case…"
"Just in case he comes back?" Foggy asks. He loosens his tie, trying to give himself a little more room to breathe. His knees feel weak, although he can't really say why.
"Yeah," Marci says, like stocking your dead friend's liquor cabinet is perfectly normal. "That's what you're doing, right? Making sure it's still home, in case he comes back?"
"You hate Matt." It's not a question; Marci had never been the kind of girlfriend to pretend she likes his friends.
"Yup. With a special kind of loathing." She nods matter-of-factly. "But you need this, right? So I didn't want you to have to do it alone."
Foggy notes abstractly that the weak feeling is spreading up from his knees. His chest is getting tight, and the world is getting blurry, but he can still see Marci walking toward him, arms outstretched.
"You're not alone with this, Foggy Bear."
Then her arms are around him, and for the first time, he lets himself cry.