Chapter Text
Foggy could not represent his best-friend’s dead dad. Besides all the practical reasons he couldn’t do it (see Article: Dead, Section: Conflict of Interest, Subpoint: I may or may not be fucking your son), there was no way in fuck he could represent Matt’s dad without ruining his own life. Well, Matt’s life; ergo, his life.
And he wasn’t even being selfish here.
Okay, maybe he was being a teeny bit selfish, but Foggy had damn well earned his right to be occasionally selfish after the last year of first-aid classes and pro-bono work and generally being a saint to the city’s vigilantes. The Vigilante God, whoever the fuck that masked menace was, owed him one for keeping his wayward children out of jail for extended periods of time.
So, yes, maybe a bit selfish, but the most important thing here was that there was no way in fuck that Foggy could take (and more importantly, win) this case without smashing Matt’s trust. And he’d incriminate the fuck out of himself if he had to explain to a judge how he knew the reason Matt’s dad was of special interest to SHIELD or the feds.
Oh, the ethics.
Oh, the perjury.
Oh, the disastrous potential identity reveal and life-ruining consequences for his best friend/partner.
“I know I said I was up for anything--” he told Hogarth carefully, trying to surreptitiously slide the files back onto her desk.
She slapped a hand on them and pushed them back towards him.
“Mr. Nelson, you are one of the best lawyers on staff, and I am seriously considering the pros and cons of a potential partnership here,” she told him, staring up at him without moving her face or hand. Somehow, the files continued to dig into the meat of his palm.
“--but it turns out,” he valiantly carried on, “I am actually and suddenly extremely busy with the impending destruction Jessica will cause in approximately twenty minutes, which will have nothing to do with me or any favors or bribes or anything like that—”
“I trust you, Nelson.”
“And really, I don’t have much experience representing anyone to the Feds and I’d truly, honestly rather eat my own fist than get involved with anything SHIELD has so much as looked at—”
“I trust you, Nelson.”
“—Not to mention that it seems to me that there is a potential conflict of interest in one of these cases, given my, uh, current personal relationship with the client’s—”
“You would let your partner’s father rot in federal custody as a quaint science experiment, Nelson? You’d be complicit in allowing an innocent man—four innocent men and women--raised from the grave by some sadistic shithead’s terrible decisions, be exploited by not one, but two highly suspect agencies who would, no doubt, use their bodies for, if not military, then political gain?”
The files dug into his palm. If he hadn’t interrogated Jessica on the topic already, he’d be damn sure that Hogarth was some kind of telepath who could move things with her mind. He tried to meet her with the same level of determination, but it was like a mouse having a staring contest with a lion. It didn’t matter what he said, he was about to get eaten. He needed a new tactic.
“Jeri, I can’t. I’m mixed up enough in this shit, if they found out—”
“That you seem to know every vigilante in New York? That you spend your free time canoodling with Daredevil? Don’t give me that look, I’m not an idiot, Franklin. Murdock’s charm doesn’t work on me. There’s only so many times a blind man can show up to your cute little lunch dates looking like a train wreck before someone starts putting the pieces together. I know you two are up to something, and I have a pretty good idea of what that something is, but I am willing to overlook that because these people need representation. Good representation. From someone who knows who they are and why they’ve been targeted. You see anyone else in this firm, hell, in the city, who can do that?”
Foggy swallowed.
“I already botched Castle’s trial. And Matt—there is an obvious conflict of interest here. The others, I can try. I’m willing to try, but I don’t know where to even start to navigate this. What if they don’t know?”
“Don’t know what?” Hogarth pressed. Foggy reeled it in, kept his face blank and his voice steady.
“Don’t know about their loved ones’ tendencies to go out and smash faces at night?”
“And you do?”
He couldn’t answer that. Damn her. Wasn’t Foggy backed up into enough corners right now?
He didn’t say anything. She took her hand off the folders; the pressure on his palm let up.
“Your silence is telling; don’t do that in court. These people don’t know what you know, Franklin. Your job is simply to uphold their rights according to municipal and federal law. They may no longer be officially living, but they are still humans. They are not things for the city or the feds or even SHIELD to play with. They deserve to have their rights upheld and Martha is a dear friend; she wouldn’t ask me to get involved if she didn’t think that they had a good chance.” Hogarth stared at him over steepled fingers, “Focus on that. You’re not the client here, you don’t have to tell them anything impertinent to their case.”
Foggy could barely hear her over his heartbeat.
“You’re asking me to lie—”
“Omit,” she corrected.
“To my clients and my friends.”
“I’m not asking you to lie,” Hogarth told him, “I’m asking you to take these cases and to provide information to all involved parties on a need-to-know basis.”
He swallowed.
“You’re asking me to withhold information which could affect these people’s decisions.”
He wanted to grab her shoulders and shake her, so she’d understand. He’d been there. He’d been on the other side of that shit; where you wake up one morning thinking you know who you can trust, only to have that cute little delusion smashed in front of you like an exploded lightbulb. All those decisions, all the choices you thought you could make, the ones you thought you were safe in making, gone in an instant of awareness.
“I won’t withhold information from my clients,” he said.
Hogarth was quiet, then she dropped her fingers and stood up.
“If it’s too much for you, I’ll give them to Richards,” she said.
Foggy’s back crawled. Richards won his last case purely because his client was in the legal profession. He wore backwards baseball caps on Fridays. He thought Axe smelled good. This was Matt’s dad they were talking about; Battlin’ Jack deserved a better lawyer than a fucking Yankees fan with an obsession with antique shoe-shining equipment. It might not be Foggy, but it had to be at least someone of his caliber.
“Richards is incompetent,” Foggy snapped.
“He hasn’t lost a case since he’s been here.”
“Pure luck. He legitimately likes the Yankees.”
“He doesn’t know any vigilantes.”
“He is physically incapable of compassion.”
“Alright, do you have any better suggestions?”
A long silence stretched between them. Foggy filed through every coworker on his floor. Functional alcoholic Lisa thought that a bottle of wine every weekday was normal and healthy. Mila from Queens was lovely, but up to her neck in corporate jobs. He’d found Tomas hiding under his desk the other day to have a moment, just one moment, of peace before a new file was added to his In-Progress basket. Richards. Fuck him. Dana, Ahmed, Siabhan, Louise. Ugh, fuck Louise.
Goddamn it.
He gritted his teeth. Hogarth arched an eyebrow.
“Last call for suggestions?” she said.
“I’ll take ‘em,” Foggy growled. “But I won’t lie to them.”
He grabbed the files and stormed out, leaving Hogarth to her artful arching and preening or whatever the hell she did while the rest of them emptied their souls into their coffee mugs on the floor below.
The files sat on his desk next to the the In-Progress box until the last hour of the day, when he’d done literally everything he needed to that day but open them.
He didn’t want to. Petulantly. Like, eight-year-old refusing to go to the dentist levels of petulance. Because he knew, he just knew, the second he opened those files, his life was going to go to hell in a handbasket and the only one he’d have to blame would be himself. Hogarth had dangled an alternative right in front of his face (a good one? No, but an alternative nonetheless.) and his fatass ego had refused it because, when it came down to it, Foggy the self-preservation skills of a suicidal gnat. If he really knew what was good for him, he wouldn’t spend his evenings listening with his dick to Matthew fucking Murdock whimpering in his ear. Hell, he would have pushed Matt away and kept him away when he’d had the chance. He would have refused HC&B’s offer in the first place and avoided any and all things Jessica Jones and vigilantes. He would have marched his ass back to Landman & Zack and sold his soul for another two or three years until he had enough experience and sway in the legal community to take his business elsewhere, somewhere nice and quiet and ethical.
But no.
There was an important footnote somewhere in this whole mess which explicitly pointed out that knowing and caring about and doing what is good for you are drastically different things. The presence of one of those acts is not necessarily evidence of the presence of another.
Case in point, Foggy knew what was good for him and he even occasionally cared about it, but he rarely did what was good for him. Possibly because he was a little hedonistic. But also because Matthew fucking Murdock was a bad influence and ran around asking questions like “but what does that do for other people, Fogs?” “what purpose do I serve if not to help people who are not myself, Fogs?” “how is my body, my exhaustion somehow more meaningful or important than other peoples’, Fogs? They’ve suffered, they’re suffering, and I’m in a position to ease that; what kind of person would I be to ignore, or worse, refuse to get involved?”
And Foggy’s heart hurt because Matty had suffered tremendously and was suffering enormously, and yet he still kept on keeping on the best he could, taking people’s eviction cases and their police brutality cases and their unjustly charged cases.
It was the least Foggy could do to at least try to keep up with that kind of selflessness.
He took a deep breath and flipped open the file and started reading properly this time.
Carlysle, Vanessa
Castle, Maria
Murdock, Jonathan
And Parker, Benjamin were all on his list.
Imagining little Peter’s stricken face the first and last time Foggy had ever heard someone mention his uncle was enough to twist the anchor sinking steadily in his gut.
As a rule, Peter did not talk about his uncle. Not with Daredevil, not with Deadpool, not with Matt or Wade out of the suit, not with Stark, and not even with his friends as far as Foggy could tell. Matt told him that the only time he’d ever heard Peter bring up his uncle was for legal reasons, and after that, only when prompted to do so by his aunt. All Matt knew about the guy, and therefore all Foggy knew about the guy, was that he’d taken in his nephew as a toddler without batting an eye and that his death was somehow connected to the emergence of Spiderman as a serious vigilante.
Jessica, who Foggy loved dearly despite all the work she made for him, had unwittingly brought up the subject in introducing herself to the kid and had, as was her way, asked him why he’d chosen the vigilante route over the superhero one. This is to say, she’d asked “Who died for you, then? Mom? Dad? Cousin? Uncle? Twin?” and Peter’s eyes had gone wide and his slim shoulders rigid and he’d edged a little closer to Wade without answering the question. He was an open book, the poor thing. Thankfully, Wade’s dormant paternal instincts kicked in and he’d derailed the conversation by composing a song comprised entirely out of the titles of every possible relative you could have.
Matt liked to sing the song to Foggy to annoy the shit out of him and to Peter to make him laugh at his tone-deafness.
Everyone pretended like Wade had just pulled the song out of his ass the way he did with basically everything else he did because it was uncomfortable to imagine Deadpool as a sentient, sensitive human being trying to protect a kid from his own grief.
Foggy had the feeling, however, that Wade knew a lot more about Benjamin Parker than anyone else outside of Peter’s immediate friends and family.
If he wanted to know about Benjamin Parker without tipping off the Parkers that something untoward might be afoot, he needed to talk to Wade first.
But that was a problem because Carlysle, Vanessa was also on his list of problems.
Foggy knew exactly fuck-all about Vanessa Carlysle except that she had apparently been engaged to Wade Wilson before her murder.
And that was really a stellar start to any story.
What was interesting about Vanessa was that her death occurred well after the appearance of Deadpool; that meant that Wade had met Vanessa as Deadpool and they’d (presumably) fallen in love and gotten engaged despite his occupation.
Alternately, Vanessa hadn’t known about Wade’s job/hobby/craft in the first place.
That was kind of weird, though, since Wade was a very distinctive, highly vocal human being. He didn’t exactly hide the fact that he’d been subjected to some horrible experimental bullshit and had come out on the other side of it mutated. That wasn’t to say that Wilson wandered around sans suit often, but he was cavalier enough with his body and being that it was hard to imagine that his partner wouldn’t have known about his condition. And if they knew about the condition, Wade had probably told them about the following revenge quest; he’d told Matt and Matt hadn’t even asked.
So Vanessa was either completely ignorant of her fiancé’s activities or she was intimately aware of them.
But Foggy couldn’t be sure because the only person who knew exactly what happened to Vanessa and exactly how much Vanessa knew was Wade fucking Wilson and if Wade fucking Wilson found out someone had experimented on his girl, he’d probably level Wisconsin to find the bastard. Foggy had personally witnessed the same man take down a bar full of people to defend the honor of some drunk girl he’d just met.
He needed to know more about Vanessa through non-Wade Wilson means. He scrawled a few notes to look up some possible friends or coworkers to meet with. He also made some notes to check in at the bar she used to work at to speak with her former employer.
While he was asking around about Vanessa, he’d ask Wade about Parker, so that Wade thought that Parker was the main issue here. After he learned more about where Vanessa stood on the whole Deadpool situation, Foggy could decide whether it was safe enough for them to proceed; that is, to determine if they had a shot in hell convincing a judge that Wade was sane enough to be his fiancée’s right of attorney.
That was the easy cases started.
The hard ones were fucking granite.
Foggy honestly didn’t want anything to do with anything Castle-related in his life again. He didn’t even need to ever go to Wales to be reminded by the goddamned architecture of the career-shattering shitstorm which was that trial.
And yet, Hogarth knew his soft spots and he couldn’t help Parker and Vanessa and then turn around and deny the same support to the wife of the man who very nearly ruined his life (and ended his partner’s. Not over it. Not cool, man.)
Maria Castle was gorgeous, like, Vanity Fair model gorgeous. The kind of wholesome woman who smiled to you at church like she really wanted to be there and see you. The kind of woman who laughed in the rain out of joy.
Her records were impeccable. She worked hard, supported the troops, and raised her and Frank’s babies as a single mom while he was away on tour. She adored her husband and her children. Foggy bet he wouldn’t find a single person in the state, hell, the country, who would say anything bad about Maria Castle.
Well, except people who didn’t like girls having babies pretty young, but she and Frank had jumped that hurdle by getting married hella early. Foggy kind of wanted to go back in time and tell baby Frank and baby Maria that it wasn’t the 1950s, no one was gonna send her away upstate to live with a distant aunt to have her bastard child. But whatever, it seemed to have worked out for them. As much as anything could work out for Frank Castle.
The exciting part of Maria’s story was that she 100% did not know that her husband was a mass-murdering fuckhead (Still mad about it, Francis. Never not gonna be mad about it.). This meant that when he inevitably had to talk to Maria, he’d have to tell her that her husband had gone off the rails and become some kind of fucked-up angel of death. And even more excitingly, when she decided that she could look past this sin against God and humanity, Foggy would have to somehow argue to a judge that, since Maria was in fact alive, Frank Murder Death Castle technically had right of attorney and, if she couldn’t make her own decisions as a living person, then he could make them for her.
And if that wasn’t already shitty enough, this whole plan required Foggy to tell Frank Castle that his wife had been experimented on. See Situation: Deadpool above for additional commentary.
And none of that, none of it, even remotely topped the situation what was Jonathan “Battlin’ Jack” Murdock.
Foggy could not imagine a better way to destroy his relationship than taking Mr. Murdock’s (Battlin’ Jack? Jonathan? What the fuck was he supposed to call his boyfriend’s dad?) case.
Everyone go home.
This was it.
Matt talked about his father exactly three times a year. Once on his birthday, once on his death day, and then every time he decided that his dad would be disappointed him. Which was approximately every fifth day of Matt’s life.
Foggy had walked in on Matt sobbing over an exam once in their last year of law school because he hadn’t gotten a perfect score and his dad hadn’t died for him to be a failure, Foggy. Two weeks ago, Matt had decided to lock himself in his room to have a panic attack and then a depressive episode because his dead father might have been disappointed in the way he’d gotten the shit beat out of him trying and failing to save a guy hellbent on meeting his maker in a Walgreen’s parking lot. Explaining to Matt that some people get drunk and fight their drug dealers because they literally have a death wish did not yield the desired results.
On top of Matt’s unhealthy father complex was the fact that he was not exactly wrong about the whole disappointment thing.
If there was one thing Foggy had managed to eek out of Matt over the years, it was that his daddy desperately didn’t want him to be a boxer. Specifically, Jonathan Murdock had said that he didn’t want his kid to have to make his living the way he did. And of course Matt took that without any grain of salt whatsoever, even though Foggy was fairly certain that Murdock just wanted Matt to not have to degrade himself publicly to eat. Now, Matt had succeeded at not having to do that, but he’d kinda swerved and run head-on into the whole Do No Harm thing Foggy thought Jack might have also been shooting for.
Jack Murdock had been known in and around Hell’s Kitchen as a furious fighter, a real embodiment of masculinity for their community. But the people who knew Murdock personally, which was about a quarter of Hell’s Kitchen, also knew that he was a soft-spoken, gentle soul, who fought more for the money than the sport. He didn’t condone violence for violence’s sake. Matty. Well. Matty sort of, kind of reveled in violence for violence’s sake. Sure, he limited that reveling for people who deserved it, but Matt had a whole lot of anger in him and not a whole lot of outlets. Violence, to himself and to others, was pleasurable, and often even desirable, to him.
Without a fucking doubt, if Jack Murdock knew Matt was Daredevil, he would be so fucking disappointed. And if he was anything like his son, he would blame himself and only himself for his kid’s actions. However, in Matt’s mind, he would be disappointed in some configuration of the word and any amount of disappointment was unacceptable and intolerable.
And Foggy legitimately believed that Matt might not survive that.
Jack, therefore, could absolutely, positively, not know that his son was Daredevil.
Which was a problem, because, like Maria, Jack probably had no clue why the hell he’d been targeted by the sick bastard who did this to him. Naturally, he’d want to know why he’d been targeted. Naturally, he’d want to be with his son once he found out he was alive and well (relatively speaking).
And naturally, if Matt found out that he was the reason someone was trying to bring his dad back to life to torture his identity out of him, Matt would lose his goddamn mind in every direction.
So Foggy couldn’t tell Jack his son was Daredevil, and, at the same time, couldn’t tell Matt his dad was alive, but equally couldn’t not help Jack reunite with his son. Which meant that he had to lie to Matty for a little while to get shit in order. Which would absolutely crush Matt’s trust in him because they’d promised each other transparency.
And on top of all that shit was lying to a judge to say that Matt was a competent and reasonable person who would handle his father’s rights and affairs in an entirely responsibly way. No, your honor, I have absolutely no ulterior motives or interest in this case, I am absolutely capable of being objective when it comes to my life partner’s sanity and happiness.
God, just run him over already.
It would be quicker.
And less painful.
He gathered the files and dropped them in his In-Progress box.