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“Just so you know,” Marci says, apropos of nothing, “I was raped when I was seventeen, so there are some things I don’t like.”
Foggy manages not to choke on his drink, but it’s a nearer thing than he’ll ever admit. They’re at Marci’s, because her roommate is out of town, and they’re drinking vodka tonics out of coffee cups because they’re broke law students, and Marci’s been all but sitting in his lap for the past half an hour, so--yeah. That’s not quite what he was expecting.
She’s just looking at him with the same cool, flat expression that she wears when she argues with their professors. Guard up, ready to fight, and okay, he gets this.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and takes his hand off her leg. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Marci takes his hand and puts it back on her thigh, considerably higher up than it was before. “No, I don’t want to talk about it. I want to fuck your brains out, but for that to be a mutually enjoyable experience, you need to understand that there are a few things I don’t like, and if you do any of them I might punch you in the balls and I will definitely kick you out. Okay?”
Foggy runs through a long list of things he could say, and then says, “Okay. Tell me what not to do.”
What not to do includes: holding her wrists down, missionary or any other position that puts him on top, narrating (“Like, seriously, at all. Don’t call me babe or tell me how good I am. Save that for afterward.”), hickeys, tickling. It isn’t a particularly long list, but Foggy is pretty good at reading between the lines and he’s always had a better imagination than was really healthy for him, so by the time she gets to the end he’s less turned on than he is incandescently furious.
He’s a lawyer, though, or he will be, so he manages to keep that out of his voice. “Are you actually sure you want to do this?”
Marci grins, the ice-queen law-shark expression melting away like water, and slides his hand up between her legs, under her skirt. Her panties are thin silk, and they’re soaked right through. “Does it feel like I want to do this?”
He curls his fingers against her, and she rocks forward onto his hand with a low moan, and oh. Okay. Yeah, he’s back on board with this. “Yeah. It does.”
“That’s what I thought.” She sucks in a breath as he finds her clit through the thin fabric. “God, yeah. Right there.”
Apparently the narrating thing only applies to him. That’s okay, that is fine, especially when she gets his pants open and starts stroking him through his boxers. He has to turn his face into the couch to muffle the curses that want to come out, but that actually seems to be a turn on for her, and honestly, the fact that anything he does is a turn-on for a girl like Marci is almost enough to send him over the edge.
They end up doing it right there on the couch, fast and rough, with Marci steering, which is more or less how he always imagined this would go. Afterward, she collapses on top of him, buries her face in the crook of his neck, and giggles. “That was amazing, Foggy-bear.”
He groans. “Foggy-bear, really?”
“Yeah, really.” She’s still breathing hard when she kisses him under the jaw. “Thank you. For listening.”
And yeah, that kind of makes him want to go kill not only the bastard who did that but all the other assholes who apparently didn’t listen, but he doesn’t say that. Not when she’s loose-limbed and warm against him, not when she already said she didn’t want to talk about it. It’s a chauvinistic impulse anyway, he knows that.
“No problem,” he says, instead. And--fuck it. He’d rather she get mad and punch him in the balls than think he doesn’t care. “Look, I know you said you didn’t want to talk about it, but if you ever do, well--I’m here. I’ll listen, and I’ll try not to be a dick.”
She goes still at that, and he wants to stuff the words back in his mouth. Then she nods without lifting her head. “I really don’t. But thank you.”
“Hey,” Foggy says. “Anytime.”
(She never does talk about it, not really. But there’s one time--long after they’ve broken up, when they’re both working through their internships--when she has to sit in on the defense of a confessed rapist. Foggy hears about it through Matt, who has some mysterious way of knowing almost everything that happens at Landman and Zack. He considers whether or not she’ll slap him if he shows up at her apartment with a bottle of scotch, then considers that getting slapped would probably not be the worst thing that ever happened to him, and Marci, whatever else she might be, is still a friend.
She doesn’t slap him. She lets him in, and they drink in silence for the better part of an hour before she slams her hand down on the table, hisses, “Those motherfuckers,” and bursts into tears.)
The first time he and Matt fall into bed together, they’re slightly tipsy, extremely sleep-deprived, and Matt has just gotten his ass kicked by at least three different goon squads, so Foggy doesn’t really think much of it when he ends up on top and Matt goes tense and still beneath him. It’s just for a moment, anyway, and then Matt’s legs come up around him, and he’s arching off the bed, and Foggy is actually airborne before he knows what the hell is going on.
He lands on his back in the center of the mattress, Matt straddling his hips, and his breath comes out in a surprised laugh. “I’m sorry, for a second there I forgot I was being seduced by a ninja.”
Matt throws back his head and laughs, all the weird tension draining out of him. “I thought you were seducing me.”
“Hey, if you want to give me the credit, I’m not complaining.”
“Somehow, I didn’t think you would.” Matt kisses him quickly on the lips, and then he’s sliding down and pulling off Foggy’s boxers as he goes, and yeah--definitely not complaining.
The first time he notices is about a month later. It’s a slow, happy evening after a good win in court. They cook spaghetti in Matt’s apartment, make fun of the news with their legs tangled up together on the couch. Daredevil hasn’t been hit with a baseball bat in at least a couple of weeks and there are no fading bruises on Matt’s body.
Everything is good, is the thing, and that’s why he notices. They’re laughing all the way into the bedroom, and Matt is trying to tell some kind of rambling story about wedding cake in between kisses, and then Foggy topples him onto the mattress and climbs on top of him and he just. Stops.
“Matt?” Foggy asks carefully.
Matt gets his legs up, knees jabbing Foggy painfully in the chest as he shoves himself away. It’s not always easy to read Matt’s expressions, but if he was going to hazard a wild guess, he’d be going with ‘freaked the fuck out.’
There’s not much that freaks Matt out. Getting shot at doesn’t freak Matt out, at least not nearly as much as Foggy wishes it did. He climbs off the bed and steps back a couple of paces for good measure. “Matt, are you okay?”
Matt shakes his head sharply, then says, “I’m fine. You want to come back over here?”
He’s trying to smile, but it’s not quite working. Something cold is squeezing at Foggy’s insides, an awful suspicion taking shape in his mind, and despite the fact that he was kissing Matt like he needed him to breathe less than a minute ago, he can’t remember ever being less interested in sex. “No, I don’t think so. Are you okay?”
Matt’s face twists. “I said I was fine,” he says shortly, climbing off the bed. He usually keeps up the habitual pretense that his super-senses don’t actually exist, but not this time--he’s shoving past Foggy and out of the room without so much as touching the wall. Foggy can hear the stairs clang as he climbs them two at a time, and the roof door slamming shut.
He sinks down on the edge of the mattress and buries his face in his hands. Matt is--he’s always been a little standoffish, and Foggy’s always chalked it up to being blind or, after the whole Daredevil revelation, to his freaky senses--but.
The thing is, he’s sitting here, and he’s remembering Marci telling him in a hard voice to not ever pin her down if he didn’t feel like getting castrated. That she didn’t like people on top of her. And it’s--
It’s Matt, he’s a fucking superhero, and he’s literally taken down crime syndicates singlehandedly.
And that means fuck-all, given the wrong set of circumstances. Jesus.
Foggy pushes himself to his feet, runs his fingers through his hair, and takes a deep breath. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that Matt has actually decided to go off along the rooftops rather than risk Foggy coming after him, but in the off chance that he’s still up there, there’s a conversation that definitely needs having.
Matt is still there. He’s sitting at the edge of the roof with his bare feet dangling over sixty feet of empty air. It makes Foggy’s heart thump sharply in his chest with fear, and Matt must hear that, because he tilts his chin without turning. “Hey.”
“Hey,” Foggy says quietly, picking his way across the minefield of old air conditioning units and pigeon shit. He sits down cross-legged on the stone a few feet from the edge; his nerves can’t quite handle the prospect of a five story drop tonight. “Please tell me you weren’t going to leap off the roof and go Daredevilling in your pajamas.”
“‘Daredevilling? Is that a word now?”
“What can I say? I’m a linguistic rebel.”
“You’re something, anyway,” Matt mutters, but he sounds mostly fond. Good. Maybe that means that Foggy isn’t about to get his ass unceremoniously dumped tonight. “And no, I wasn’t. I’d probably kill myself, taking a dive off of this roof.”
“Oh,” Foggy says.
“I’m not a super-soldier, you know,” Matt says irritably. “I can get hurt.”
That’s more true than Foggy really wants to think about, right now. “I know.”
Matt sighs and turns his face away until Foggy can only see the curve of his cheekbone. “I know what you’re thinking. Just ask already and get it over with.”
Foggy doesn’t speak for a minute or so. “I dated this girl in college,” he says finally. He won’t say Marci’s name. That’s not for him to share, not even with Matt. Not even for this. “Her high-school boyfriend raped her, and she never really got okay with being pinned, feeling like she couldn’t get away. She always had to be in control.”
Matt doesn’t shake his head, doesn’t tell Foggy that he’s way off base, and that by itself is enough to confirm it, even before he says, “And you want to know if that’s what my issue is.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to,” Foggy says, “but yeah, I’d be lying if I said there weren’t some similarities.”
Matt nods shortly. His hands curl into fists on his flannel-clad thighs, and his voice is flat when he speaks. “The answer is yes.”
Foggy closes his eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time before you met me.”
“I’m still sorry.” He takes a deep breath. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but Matt--you have to tell me if there are things I shouldn’t be doing. If there are ways you don’t want to be touched. I can’t--I don’t ever want to upset you like that again.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Matt says, still in that flat, colorless voice. “It’s my issue. I’ll deal with it.”
“Yeah, that’s not how this works,” Foggy says. “Sex is supposed to be fun, not something you just tolerate for my sake.”
Matt does turn toward him at that. “Foggy, that’s not--”
“Because I love you, and I want you to be okay, and not just, just putting up with it, Jesus, Matt.”
Matt doesn’t answer. Foggy replays what he just said in his head and winces. It’s not that it isn’t true, but he’s never said it out loud, and this was probably not the best moment for it. “I--”
“I’m not just putting up with it,” Matt says. He turns back toward Foggy. His eyes are wet, but he looks relatively composed. “Can you come here?”
Foggy scoots closer, until he can feel the heat emanating off of Matt in the cool night air. He doesn’t know if touching is good or bad right now, but when he lifts his arm slightly, Matt tucks himself against his side, the familiar shape of him, all whipcord muscle and bone. He presses his wet cheek to Foggy’s shoulder for a moment, like he’s grounding himself, and says, “It’s not usually a problem. Mostly, I’m good at stopping people when they do something I don’t like.”
Mostly. “I don’t want you to have to stop me. I don’t want to do something you don’t like in the first place.”
Matt smiles against his neck, like Foggy has just done something remarkable instead of expressing a basic degree of human decency. He does that sometimes, and it always makes Foggy want to go back in time and beat the shit out of everyone who ever hurt Matt, who made him think he wasn’t worth taking care of and treating well. “It’s really just the--the pinning me down. It reminds me of--he was a lot bigger than me and I couldn’t--I couldn’t get away. Sometimes it’s fine, but sometimes it’s--not.” He pauses. His hand comes up to Foggy's chest, pressing gently over his heart. “You’re angry.”
Foggy lets out a slow breath. “Yeah,” he admits. “But not at you. Times like this, I kind of get why you do what you do.”
Matt laughs wetly. “That’s one good thing, I guess.” He’s silent for a long moment. “I never told anybody else. I didn’t--” he shrugs a little. “I have a hard time trusting people, sometimes.”
That’s the understatement of a lifetime, but Foggy doesn’t say so out loud. “Thank you for telling me.”
Matt nods against his shoulder, doesn’t answer. They sit like that for a long time, the night cooling down around them. This high up, the noises of the street seem distant, but he can hear sirens. He knows Matt can hear a lot more than that, but it’s a long time before he shifts against Foggy, lifts his head, and says, “It’s going to rain. We should go inside.”
“You can hear rain coming?” Foggy asks, accepting the hand up that Matt offers.
“Smell it,” Matt says. “When it’s close.”
“Well, that’s not weird or anything.”
“It really isn’t. You probably could, too, if you paid attention.” Matt’s smiling at him in the dim light. It looks a little faded, but it’s not fake.
“I seriously doubt that.”
“I’m serious. Here.” Matt’s hands are on his shoulders, turning him toward the gathering breeze. “It’s like--electricity and wet asphalt.”
Foggy breathes in deep, but all he can smell is fabric softener and deodorant and a faint whiff of curry from one of the apartments below. “I got nothing.”
“Hopeless.” Matt shakes his head. “Stand out here for another five minutes, if you don’t believe me. You'll see.”
“I believe you,” Foggy says, as Matt tugs him toward the door.
Matt pauses under the overhang, reaches up. His fingers find Foggy’s face, tracing the shape of his cheekbone, his jaw. Learning him by feel, and it’s far from the first time Matt’s done this by now, but it never fails to make him shiver, and now is no different. In spite of everything.
Matt’s smile isn’t faded this time; it’s warm and genuine and Foggy can feel it against his mouth when Matt leans in and kisses him. It’s just a brief, sweet press of lips, and then he pulls back and says, quietly, “Thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me for anything,” Foggy says.
“Yeah,” Matt says firmly, “I really do.”
He pushes the door open, and Foggy follows him inside. Outside, the rain starts coming down.