Chapter Text
When Foggy Nelson was five years old, he had the single worst kindergarten teacher in the country for all of a day. On his very first day of school, the day he arrived with a teddy bear backpack and eyes red from crying after saying goodbye to his mom, Foggy learned his first lesson in the potential cruelty of the world. Mrs. Underhill was a bully. She took one look at Foggy’s wet eyes and snotty nose, told him to be a big man, and put him in the back of the class until he was ready to stop crying and join his classmates.
“Big boys don’t cry,” she’d sing-songed in his direction. He never left the back corner. When his dad came to pick him up, Foggy rushed into his arms, sobbing into his neck. Twenty minutes later, when Foggy’s raw cries had faded to hiccups, his dad said something to him he’d never, ever forget.
“Big boys who cry are the strongest boys of all, because they have the biggest, most caring hearts,” he’d said, his hand resting over Foggy’s little ribs. “You’re allowed to have your feelings, buddy. Nobody can ever take them away from you. If somebody tries to, remember that one time somebody hurt their heart, and instead of crying they built up a wall to protect themselves.”
He’d started a new school one week later. Then, eighteen years after that, he met someone with more walls around his heart than anyone else Foggy had ever met.
In those first few months as roommates, Matt Murdock was a mystery to Foggy. He devoted more time to unravelling that mystery than he did to his studies. It wasn’t just the blind thing, although that was part of it; Foggy spent hours online researching the best ways to help Matt without being annoying, rearranging their room to make it safer for Matt, rearranging his life to fit Matt in. He liked the guy. Unlike the other people who had built full-on castles around their sensitive hearts, Matt loved when Foggy let his feelings show. He laughed when Foggy did, sympathised when Foggy was mad, and sat by Foggy when he cried. He didn’t know what to do with the crying, exactly, but he stayed, and for that Foggy was grateful. He was also curious. Matt had told him bits and pieces about his childhood - he grew up in an orphanage run by nuns, his dad was a boxer, he was Catholic - but the pieces never fit together into a full picture. The way Matt relayed the information, they seemed like a series of dispassionate facts, like a journalist reporting on the weather. That didn’t mean that Matt had no feelings, though. It took a while for Foggy to notice that Matt was different around him than he was with others. He was always charming, but Matt smiled more with Foggy. He was more relaxed, and let his occasionally twisted sense of humour show more often. The walls were still there, tall and sturdy, but Foggy knew he was wearing them down. Making cracks. It wasn’t until the first time they got drunk - no, not drunk, full-on plastered - that Foggy first learned what had laid the foundation for one of Matt’s walls.
It made him throw up on the sidewalk.
“No- Foggy…” Matt said, then dropped his head back, laughing at the sky.
“What do you mean no?” Foggy asked incredulously. “You never once suspected that the nuns were secretly lounge singers? I mean, you have to have seen Sister Act. It’s like, the second best thing Jesus ever did-”
“Foggy!” Matt protested, but he was practically doubled over with laughter. “There’s no way any of them- you have no idea...”
Foggy snorts. “What, you don’t think any of them had on sequinned mini-dresses under their -whatsit - robe things…”
“No!” Matt laughed helplessly. He stopped, reaching out for Foggy, who took his friend’s hand and placed it on his elbow. “Trust me, that’s so not something you want to imagine. Sister Beatrice…” but he broke down in giggles again, leaning on Foggy for support.
“I mean, she could be wearing a bikini and a tutu and it’d be all the same to you, right?” Foggy chuckled, cinching his hand around Matt’s waist to support him.
“Yeah, but...but no. I could always hear their robes and their rosaries...swishing and clicking, when they came in to check on me at night, or...or when they found out I snuck out again…” Matt’s laughter stopped in stages, and the chuckle he let out when he finished talking was dark. Foggy tightened his hand.
“Do you think tutus sound different to robes?” he asked, then said, “Bench.” He dropped Matt down on to the aforementioned bench, not letting go as he sat next to him.
“They sound different. Ruffly, not swish-and-clicky,” Matt said. His words were slurring. He dropped his head back to rest on the bench, the smile gone from his face.
“I bet tutu-wearing nuns would be more fun than the ones you grew up with,” Foggy commented. Matt pulled away from his grip. Foggy let him.
“Most of ‘em were good. Nice. Kinda...busy and distant...but they tried, you know.” Matt’s words tumbled out of his mouth, chasing each other, and Foggy knew he wouldn’t be hearing this if Matt were sober. Foggy himself was only just sober enough to wonder if he was taking advantage.
“Most of them?” he asked. Matt paused. Frowned. “You don’t have to-”
“Sister Beatrice,” Matt said, interrupting Foggy. Foggy’s mouth snapped shut. “I swear she had like...super-hearing.” There was a weird, self-deprecating chuckle after that, which Foggy filed away for later. “It was always her. Almost always, anyway. She was just trying to protect us...looking out for us, she said...protecting me. She thought if there were consequences, I wouldn’t keep running away.”
“Consequences,” Foggy muttered. Matt rolled his head away, sightless eyes fixed on something Foggy couldn’t see.
“I don’t think she meant anything by it. That was just the way they did things in her day, you know? And I think it was more the embarrassment...it didn’t hurt, really, when she hit me. She wasn’t that strong. But I held on to my belt when I heard the swish-click anyway,” Matt said into the night air.
“Jesus, Matt…”
“It’s no big deal,” Matt said with a shrug, turning back towards Foggy. His eyes were dry, his face neutral. He wasn’t lying, or at least, he didn’t know he was.
That’s when Foggy vomited over the side of the bench on to the sidewalk.
“Whoa, buddy, you okay? Take it easy,” Matt said. His voice had an edge now, had lost that fog of memory. He rubbed Foggy’s back. “I didn’t know you’d had that much.”
“Guess it was more than I could handle,” Foggy mumbled. There were tears in his eyes. He let them fall as Matt helped him up and they stumbled home together. The whole way back, Foggy clung to Matt a little tighter, but if Matt noticed he didn’t say anything. Foggy could feel Matt trying to reign in his own drunkenness to help Foggy, and it made the guilt-pain-sorrow churning in his gut that much worse. Foggy knew he’d been talking almost the whole way, responding to Matt’s questions, but he couldn’t hear any of the words. He just knew he couldn’t say anything to push Matt, because it would only push Matt away.
“I’m sorry, Matt,” he says heavily when they finally get back to the dorm and Matt somehow managed to deposit Foggy on his bed. “Sorry.”
“Hey, nothing you wouldn’t do for me, right?” Matt said with a smile. He gave Foggy’s shoulder a clumsy pat and flopped on to his own bed.
“Anything for you, bud,” Foggy replied. After all, he couldn’t let him know that the apology was for Matt’s shitty childhood. He wiped the tears from his eyes and nodded fiercely. “Anything.”
(Matt cries in front of Foggy for the first time just before Thanksgiving that year. Foggy pretends he hasn’t been building up to invite Matt to Nelson Thanksgiving for a month. He finds the perfect moment to casually drop it into conversation. Matt says no three times before he says yes. He turns away to wipe his eyes.
“You’re allowed to cry,” Foggy says. Matt nods. When he turns around, he’s smiling, his eyes dry.
“Thanks,” Matt says.
“Anything for you, buddy,” Foggy replies.)