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The first time Foggy’s heart stuttered, Matt thought nothing of it. All hearts skipped a beat sometimes. Anything could cause it: lack of sleep, stress, attraction, even insufficient calcium.
But three months later, Matt was starting to get worried.
None of Foggy’s cardiac activity was diagnosably bad, and if Matt tried hard enough, he could handwave it away. They were law students, they never got enough sleep; Foggy drank disgusting amounts of equally revolting Red Bull. But regardless of the reason, Foggy’s familiar, increasingly-vital heartbeat had been skipping more frequently than Matt could explain through sleep deprivation and overcaffeination alone.
The question was what to do about it. He couldn’t exactly say hey, Foggy, your heartbeat is irregular. Consider seeing a cardiologist. That would raise questions even harder to handwave away than Matt’s concerns.
Still.
Years ago, before his real training had begun, Stick had made Matt practice somersaults until he either threw up or collapsed. Balance training, he had called it. Matt’s stomach was doing even more somersaults now, just at the possibility of something happening to Foggy, something Matt could have prevented.
“You really should cut down on your sodium,” he tried first.
An indescribable sound came out of Foggy’s mouth, wedged between sigh, groan, and laugh. “Again with the cheese puffs.”
“It’s not…” that, he was going to say, but the combination of dairy fat, palm oil, and sodium wasn’t doing Foggy’s heart any favors. “I’m worried about you, Fogs,” he amended. “I, I care about your health.”
“That’s nice of you, buddy. But I'm fine.” His tone was light, unconcerned, and truthful. But he wasn’t fine. His heart rate was elevated again, and it took several minutes for it to slow to its familiar tempo.
So that was the wrong approach. But Matt wasn’t sure what the right one would be.
He had rhetorical skills, certainly, but he’d mainly used them for disarming ableism and swaying judges at mock trial. Not for… creating lasting, permanent change. Not for the sort of convincing that would keep Foggy safe.
The DAISY-format behavioral science resources at the law library were a little thin, but he pored through them all anyway until he’d found a new approach.
- When creating change, it was easier to replace bad habits than to abandon them— to fill your life with so much good that the bad didn’t have room to take root.
- The best way to convince people to consume products was to put them directly in their line of sight.
Matt bought the best-smelling lactose-free skim milk he could find at the grocery store (Foggy was lactose intolerant, and for both selfless and selfish reasons Matt wanted to avoid triggering an episode) and left it in the fridge, prominently, in front of all of Foggy’s other food. Foggy would never risk moving it somewhere Matt couldn’t find it, and Matt planned to take merciless advantage of this fact.
But over the course of the next week, it sat there, untouched.
“You know,” he said to Foggy, who was eating a pastrami sandwich even Matt had to admit smelled delicious, “that milk is for both of us. Not just me.”
“No thanks.”
“Are you sure?”
“I said no.” It was more of a snap than a reply, sharp enough that it startled Matt. He thought he hid his reaction successfully, but he must not have, because Foggy’s heart rate sped with a more familiar emotion— stress.
“Sorry.” This time the sigh was unmixed with laughter. “I know you mean well, but… I don’t blast this all over campus, buddy, but I’m Jewish. Mixing milk with meat is kind of a no-no.”
“Oh.” A misjudgment, but Matt appreciated the bluntness. “Some soymilk, then?”
Foggy set the sandwich down on his plate, which Matt considered to be progress. “What is with your obsession with my dietary choices lately? Are you fattening me up to eat me?” And with the words, his heart skipped like a broken record again, the BPM of its familiar song increased to a running pace, like he was preparing to flee. Like he was scared of Matt.
He’d never miscalculated like this before. “No!” he protested.
“Then what?”
“You eat a lot of junk food. I just… the calcium,” he said inanely. “I figured you could use something to make your bones stronger.”
Foggy’s heart slowed down, then sped again, this time in a rhythm very familiar to Matt: anger. “What I eat is none of your business,” he said tightly.
At this point, it felt like Matt was familiar with every one of Foggy’s emotions, every one of his bodily functions, and how they all manifested in his heart. Matt always focused on people’s hearts, but this had become an obsession.
It was fine, though, it was natural. Foggy was the best friend he’d never had growing up, someone who’d insistently driven past Matt's keep-out signs, square into the middle of his business, and left the motor running.
That motor had gone cold, though, and quiet. Foggy wasn’t talking to him right now, not even to tell him hello when he walked into the room, and Matt found himself missing that warmth even more than he’d expected. His one consolation was that Foggy’s heart issue hadn’t resurfaced.
Maybe it shouldn’t be a consolation at all. Maybe it was Matt’s fault. Foggy had been even-keeled before he met Matt: the usual flares of arousal, the slight elevation that signalled anxiety. Maybe something about Matt was contagious.
“That thing about the junk food…” Matt began.
Already Foggy was tense, and Matt couldn’t provoke his heart issue again. “Never mind,” he ended.
“Spit it out.” Truthful, if angry.
“It came out wrong.”
“You think?”
“I don’t know how to approach this, Fogs.” He'd never had someone to look out for before, someone soft, who could never hold his own in a fight but Matt didn't want to hurt. Someone who deserved protection— no, someone Matt wanted to protect, not felt duty bound to.
“Criticizing my choices isn’t a great place to start.”
“I know.”
He didn't know how to talk about any of it. But his face must have communicated something, because the infuriated racing of Foggy's heartbeat was beginning to slow.
He rubbed at his forehead. "I don’t like it when people get on me about my weight," he said finally. "That was shitty of you.”
“It’s not about your weight."
Foggy's shoulders tensed; moving in the wrong direction again. “You think I haven’t heard that one before?”
He tried a classic hostility defusing tactic: vague, confused smile. “How would I even know about your weight?”
“Nice try, buddy." He folded his arms. "I do walk you to class. You've touched me. You’ve got to have at least some idea.”
“It’s still not that.” He racked his brain for any real explanation that Foggy would accept. Something about the rightness of the way the two of them fit walking together, or the broad warmth of his presence.
“I like how much room you take up,” he said, and cringed. That came out wrong, too. “You, you’ve had a big impact on me, and I, I like that…” It felt weird, commenting on his roommate’s body, something he guiltily tried to avoid thinking about. “I like that the world reflects that.”
Foggy inhaled at the words, and there was the heart condition again, clear as day. Even when he was being sincere, Matt was stressing his roommate to the point of triggering it.
“I understand if you don’t, don’t believe me,” he said. “Is there anything I could do to make it up to you? Anything at all?”
Foggy’s heart skipped again, pumping blood to the surface of his skin, flooding it with worrisome heat.
“Are you feeling okay?”
“Fine,” Foggy said, and it was a little too loud. Matt frowned. It didn’t seem to be a lie, but it wasn’t precisely the truth, either.
“I’m fine,” he said a little more quietly. Took a deep breath and Matt's hand. Lingered for a moment that made Matt feel warm, a moment he wasn't going to think about. Then he shook it vigorously. “Apology accepted, buddy. And for what it’s worth, me too. It’s been a shitty week without you.”
It was an equilibrium; something that kept Foggy in his life, but not something that cured him of his malady. Time to drop the subject before he unbalanced it. “Thanks.”
This time, research wasn’t helping.
He had read up on different heart conditions, had listened to audio clips of them all. They didn’t help. Hearts were never the same on recordings: there was no map of heat distribution, no electrical signal tingling the tips of his fingers, no background throb of veins and arteries. What Matt needed was to listen.
So it was that, wondering if he’d finally lost his mind, he found himself crouched on the roof outside Metro-General Hospital’s cardiac wing, waiting for nurses or doctors to actually name someone’s condition.
Informative visits happened less often than he would have expected. He filled his voice memos with shift changes and routine rounds times— the only daily, consistent sources of information about someone’s specific condition.
It was possible this was no longer something people did for good friends.
After a few weeks, he got through the entirety of the really terrible diagnoses in the textbook and let himself breathe a sigh of relief. None of them sounded like Foggy's heart. Nothing was even all that similar.
So it turned into a late-lunchtime HIPAA-violation routine.
He’d listen for a diagnosis, and, the rare times he heard one, he would tune in to the heart in the room, searching for a familiar pattern.
After seven years and a half, he'd gotten through most of the diagnoses, and still nothing sounded like Foggy's heart.
Maybe Matt was wrong, and the heartbeat wasn’t something to be concerned about. Some genetic peculiarity. It didn’t seem to be getting worse or better. The only thing left was to ask.
“Tell me about your family,” Matt said over a bottle of beer on his couch. In cervisia veritas.
"Not much to tell that you don't already know," Foggy said easily, tilting his head onto Matt's shoulder. He always was an affectionate drunk. "I have a big family, and we all get along, but there's a lot of drama. Let's see." He smiled against Matt's neck. "The butcher shop my parents run is Kosher, but you know I'm Jewish so you probably guessed that. I really do think I disappointed them by becoming a lawyer instead of a butcher. But ha. Wait until they find out Theo wants to be an opera singer."
“Do you have, uh. Any genetic conditions you’re predisposed to.”
Foggy propped his feet up on the couch, a warm weight across Matt's lap. “You’re never gonna stop worrying about me, huh.”
“Probably not.”
“Okay.” He sounded content. Happy. Nothing that would explain what his heart was doing, as usual. “Nope. We Nelsons are hearty and long-lived.”
“I’m glad,” he said, and he meant it. Apparently this beat skipping was just the Foggy rhythm of things: like everything else, unique in the world.
Or it was, until the stress of late nights hunting Fisk down, the dissolution of their friendship, and almost dying to Bullseye started to produce a set of irregular noises that, to his dismay, Matt recognized.
"Are you feeling okay?"
"Yeah. Fine." Truth. But Matt had done enough research to know this sort of condition often didn’t show symptoms. "Why?"
Matt took a deep breath. This wasn't going to be an easy conversation. "There’s something going on with your heart," he said. "It keeps skipping beats."
"Oh, now we’re going to talk about this?"
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Not nothing. If, if you can tell me anything, if there’s something wrong with your heart—"
Foggy choked out a laugh, as though exhaust from driving past Matt's secrets had finally stuck in his throat. "There’s something wrong with me . My heart is fine." He shook his head. "Look, drop it, Matt."
"I can’t—"
"You got to keep one big secret from me for years. Drop it."
"Your heart rate’s not normal ," Matt said desperately, he had to make him understand. "It’s never been normal, but with the stress, it’s… I can’t lose you, Fog. You have to do something about it. I’ll help however I can."
"Is that so." His voice was flat, disbelieving. "I have no option other than to do something for my heart. And you’ll help me."
"Yes."
"That is a terrible idea, the worst, the most Matt Murdock..." He paused. "Fuck it," he said, and leaned forward.
It was a sloppy kiss, almost angry, like Foggy was trying to prove a point. He tasted like burnt coffee and leftover pizza and… and Foggy. Tasted like home, a home he'd never known growing up and was amazed, unspeakably grateful, to have now.
When Matt had regained enough coherency to speak again, to give Foggy an appropriate response that fully expressed the depth of what he was feeling, there was really only one option.
" What ."
Foggy's heart began to beat faster, and the bitter smell of stress sweat slowly pervaded the air.
"I thought that was what you meant! It’s not like I haven’t been obvious, with my heart skipping beats, you said it yourself, and… and you can smell my boners!"
"That’s not how it works!"
"Not really the point!"
"I meant," Matt said, "that you need to see a cardiologist." He flattened a hand against Foggy's chest, trying to articulate the sound and electrical impressions. "Your heartbeat’s always, it’s always skipped around me," and now he was finally realizing how foolish he’d been, "but now your blood is flowing slower, too, and your sinus rhythm..." He took a breath. "It sounds like atrial fibrillation episodes. Please don’t ask me how I know. It's dangerous if you don't get treatment, but it’s treatable."
"Fuck," Foggy said fervently. Buried his head in the crook of his elbow. "Okay, uh, thanks for looking out for me, buddy. I'll go." He paused, and when he finally lifted his face from his elbow, it was warm with embarrassment. "Any chance we can forget that other thing that… happened? By accident?"
Of course was on the tip of Matt's tongue. Other than giving up Daredevil, there wasn't much he wouldn't do to keep Foggy happy, to wipe the embarrassment from his skin.
But Foggy had been patient with his lies for years. Just this once, he deserved the truest answer Matt could give.
“What if.” He stepped forward, keeping his hand pressed against Foggy’s chest, against the skip he’d been worried about for years. The skip that was his . “What if I don’t want to?”
Now it was Foggy’s turn to say, a little high-pitched:
“What.”