what'll i do (when i don't have you)

So maybe Matt signed up for this, but Foggy sure didn’t — this thing that’s eating his friend alive. Matt’s back is to the wall, and Foggy is very very close, daring Matt to hit him maybe or wanting the scene to dissolve into something else — into Matt’s arm snaked through his, maybe. Something from before.

Matt rocks forward on his feet a little, palpable by degrees, keys jingling sharply in his hand. The look on his face is exquisitely cruel, coming from him, and stifling the urge to physically butt heads isn’t easy. “You want distance? You want to walk out on me? Go right ahead.”

“Who do you think’s been paying the goddamn rent for the last two months, Matt? You walk out!”

What the fuck does Matt think he’s going to get out of this, out of showing back up in the office after everything that counts is broken and dissolved? A bunch of unused post-it notes and unopened cans of compressed air? The copy machine? That little braille typewriter Karen sprang for that Foggy knows he never uses — he should call her and find out what she wants to do with it, or where she got it from in the first place, except Karen doesn’t even answer his calls and for all he fucking knows she’s locked in a laundry room somewhere and needs to be let out.

“Give me your keys. All your stuff is going in a box, which is going straight into your apartment’s storage unit. We’re done here, Matt. You know what that means, right?”

“I know,” Matt sneers, bottom lip pink and wet, “what this means. I came to pick up my files before Monday, and that’s all.”

His shit’s in a box in the hall, and he’d know that if he asked. Nelson & Murdock is dead; they’re just Murdock and Nelson now, one guy with an ego the size of Manhattan and one guy who doesn’t know what the fuck he is any more. Foggy’s jaw throbs from the supreme effort of not raising his voice to a scream.

“Because you’re not acting like you know what that means. Why don’t I show you out—”

As a display of intention, his grip digs deeper into the muscles of Matt’s upper arm. Fuck this and fuck Matt. Just touching him is enough to send a thrill up to his shoulder like it used to — the memory of how dizzy over Matt he used to be is sour in the back of his throat. He used to admire him. Foggy used to think he was a reasonable person, and now neither of them are anything close.

Matt says his name then, stern like a warning, and then again — not warning, but pained,

Superpowered ninja Matt Murdock gets slashed up with big knives and fight-fucks spree killers but he won’t let Foggy touch him because it hurts. Good. He hopes it hurts.

All this time Foggy’s wasted just so Matt can play cops and robbers — he could have been putting his time in at Landman & Zack, he could have been working for the city instead of working for the city hoping lightning will strike twice and Nelson & Murdock would bag another earth-shattering organized crime case that could get them both killed. He could have worked something out with Karen, he could have moved into a better apartment, he could have moved to fucking Cleveland, he could have started that fucking butcher shop already and he’d still make more money than trailing after Matt Murdock, cleaning up his mistakes.

So this is what Matt likes, or he’s really dedicated to getting this over with, Foggy pulling the suit-jacket off his shoulders and letting it drop wherever (enjoy your dry-cleaning, assole) and Matt making like he’s fighting it, ripping at Foggy’s buttons and snagging at his undershirt. But he drops his keys, and they skitter under the desk, forgotten.

Foggy edges back into the desk top at the same time as Matt does his level best to shove him down onto it; this just makes him more determined to sit up and clamp down against Matt’s hard muscly leg trying to press between his knees. Grappling with Matt like this is a big joke — all the times they’ve ever arm-wrestled at Josie’s or fake-fought when all this time Matt could have wiped the floor with him and left a bloody smear. If Matt is letting Foggy hold him off for a second or leave bruises on his biceps it’s because he’s playing a game.

“What, you don’t want me to treat you like you’ve been a very bad boy?”

“Shut up,” Matt says through his teeth. “Don’t start something you can’t finish.”

“I don’t know what the fuck you want any more, I mean, what are you—”

A coffee cup goes clattering to the floor, and neither of them bothers trying to catch it. Is this what Matt thinks he wants? He’s not going to roll over and say thanks.

Matt’s face is hard. His eyes are fixed.

“Foggy, be quiet.”

Fine. Foggy has nothing left to say to him.

This part is a recipe for disaster: grabbing at him maybe a little too hard, Matt’s hips pressing into it and Foggy’s mouth pressing into his until they’re chipping teeth. Matt likes getting hurt, so the backs of Foggy’s fingernails cut in against his arms. Matt pulls his head back hard by the hair, sucking at his neck, Foggy protesting all the way until the bruising crush of Matt’s mouth is too much and he’s losing his shoes, digging at the back of Matt’s legs trying to get some leverage against his tongue and hard teeth.

It’s impossible to mistake the lines of his lean bashed-up body through his clothes. An unsettling sideways memory slides into Foggy’s mind of Frank Castle, sauntering into the courtroom looking like fuckable death, except anyone trying this on Frank Castle would get a throatful of their own teeth and Foggy needs to shove it out of his mind’s eye, stat. Matt is leaner and trimmer — Matt looks like this and he goes out all night curb-stomping crooks. If Foggy looked like this he’d take up nude modeling at those weird sushi bars. Foggy has no trouble finding his dick with zero hesitation and starts to jerk him off through his underwear, quick scraping strokes that have Matt quaking and breathing sharp through his teeth.

Matt’s got an objectively beautiful dick but it’s hard to appreciate just now. Maybe Foggy is making noises too, but he isn’t saying jack shit. Matt can’t make him.

Matt’s hips grind into him hard, the clear sharp bone edge of his pelvis digging in where his hard-on isn’t; Matt’s thick thigh is convenient for Foggy to grind against to stifle himself and not for a lot else. They’e undignified like a couple of teenagers who just discovered Makeout Point — lips and teeth, bones and soft spots, scrapes and bruises. Matt’s stiff fingers rake across the gauze pad in his shoulder — a sob of pain escapes Foggy’s mouth without him wanting it to and he smothers it against Matt’s heroic jaw. Maybe Matt calls his name, or maybe he just imagines Matt calling his name, but it doesn’t really matter.

Foggy shifts painfully against the table-edge, dragging Matt back with him — this poor suffering desk was in no way designed to bear the weight of two adult men and only Matt’s slackness, the martyr look smeared across his face, makes it seem like it’d really be a good idea to get him horizontal. His sturdy legs are lolling on the junky blotter top, his belt is undone, the dark downy line that traces from his navel to his crotch prickles under Foggy’s palm.

Foggy thumbs at the head of his cock because he likes the way it makes him squirm, maybe he should use spit to make it easier or something but they’re somehow not there yet. The flushed soft skin of his dick is already beading up in pearls of come and Foggy’s sweating hands work him expertly raw. Somehow the scene manages to play exactly into his own stifled fantasies — the way Matt looks with his red cheeks and red mouth, grabbing at him in heated interest, still wearing half of a designer suit — and nothing like that at all. There’s a tape dispenser here, next to them while they fuck. It is very glamorous. It is very romantic.

This is the really sick part. This is the part, in between the betrayals and the breakups and the file folders and the labeling tape, that burns under Foggy’s skin like a fucking cancer. He’s had a thing for Matt, some kind of thing, for however many years now, and this is how it happens? They couldn’t have done this back in college? Back when they were friends? In a fucking bed? Foggy got shot and Matt never came to see him. If he wanted to feel like the hero and get heroically laid they could have done it then.

“Fuck,” Matt pushes through his teeth and lifts his hips just right into Foggy’s awkward grip, Foggy’s other hand is in the crook of his thigh and the heartbeat pounds away there in the big vein of his leg even through his slick suit. The tendons stand out as he parts his legs and Foggy cups his balls instead in a perfunctory kind of way. Like he’s dusting off his second-best technique on some filthy couch in the student lounge instead of feeling his partner’s dick throb into his palm in the middle of the law office that they now no longer share. Why not get Karen in on the action too? Invite some of the cute old ladies from down the hall, the more the merrier. Karen’s doing God knows what at this time of night, probably drinking herself sick worried about Matt, and here they are. Here they are.

Foggy’s elbow is pinned into Matt’s chest. He can feel every shake and sob of his big sturdy body as acutely as he can feel his own flabby weight and he doesn’t have the time to be ashamed of how they press together. Matt is breathing hard and if Foggy didn’t know better he’d hear him call his name, stifled pleading on the verge until the moment he comes. His shirt’s unbuttoning from the bottom and the slick of jizz just makes Foggy Nelson want to rub it away with his fingers. Almost absent-mindedly he rubs at his mouth with the side of his hand and tastes come — he tastes Matt, and with a humiliating flush of self-consciousness he’s suddenly glad Matt can’t see the look on his face.

It is what it is. And this is what this is, a weekday sex mistake they’re too far to turn back on. So there’s Matt, all blissed out and riding high on a mediocre handjob, and here Foggy is finishing up alone again. His anger chokes at the back of his throat, and he’s still hard, still sticky from Matt and hating it, fumbling out his dick and jerking off with quick angry strokes.

Matt reaches out almost languidly like one of those dead saints, kind of slack, and Foggy realizes too late he’s reaching out to put his arm around him.

He hates Matt for making him do this — for leaving him to this, not that he even wants Matt to get him off but for getting him to this place where he needs to get off or he’ll lose his fucking mind. Matt is hardly touching him, just that slack arm, and if he starts Foggy is going to start screaming and never stop.

By the time he’s anywhere close to done Matt is already zipping up his pants and relooping his belt, stiff like he’s shell-shocked, too slow. (Are we boring you, Mr. Murdock? Of course not, if Matt Murdock got bored he just didn’t show up.)

When Foggy finally spits out a string of words the inside of his lip is bitten raw. “Fuck you, Matt. Fuck you and get out.”

If Matt hears him it doesn’t change anything — not how he tucks in his shirt, not how his face is turned away, not how he slips back into his shoes and feels for the wall to support himself. Foggy’s got nothing left to say.