Foggy thought he was losing his mind. He was certain there was a meeting scheduled for today, an important one at that, but no matter how many times he checked his calendar, he couldn’t find any trace of the supposed appointment. The only thing he found was an empty sticky note stuck to the page, as if he’d forgotten to actually write down something he’d thought was important enough to add to his schedule. It continued to bug him as he finished getting ready for the day, fingers fumbling with his tie longer than he should’ve.
Their office hadn’t changed much, even since the Blib. While the building had been left vacant for the whole five years, nothing inside had really changed. Foggy appreciated it, for it would’ve sucked to find another space for their business. The only good thing to come out of the Blib was the amount of new clients it had brought their way. Catastrophic events tended to be a legal mess, and Nelson & Murdock had a reputation for being able to meddle through the messiest of cases.
The influx of clients had left their schedules tighter than ever, which is why it worried Foggy so much he couldn’t remember who his appointment was with. Rescheduling it would be a pain if he ended up missing it, even if he didn’t remember who it was with. Maybe Karen had written it down somewhere? She was supposed to keep track of their schedules, but if he was honest, she was just as scatterbrained as himself sometimes, so it paid to keep an eye on his own schedule too, just to be safe.
He greeted Karen with a smile, heading straight for the coffee machine. While he loved Karen with all his heart and would die for her, the coffee she made was undrinkable. She liked to prep a full can every morning, leaving it out for him and Matt to take whenever they needed. Every morning, Foggy poured out the coffee and made a fresh batch. If she ever found out, she’d probably kill him, but it was worth it. He’d rather die to her than to food poisoning from the black sludge she called coffee.
“Do you know if I have a client scheduled for this morning? I could’ve sworn I was supposed to meet with somebody, but I think I forgot to write it down.” Foggy leaned against Karen’s desk, the wood digging into his back. She cast him a look, one that said she expected better of him, before turning her attention to her computer. “Let me have a look… Huh, that’s weird; it says you’re supposed to meet with somebody, the name is left blank…?” She frowned at the screen.
That brought more questions than it answered. “I think it was one of Matt’s clients that I was supposed to follow up on, maybe he filled in the form wrong? You know how outdated that PC of his is.” Foggy had been trying to pester Matt into replacing it for months now. The braille on the keys was starting to fade to the point where Matt was sending emails full of typos, but he just wouldn’t budge. Murdock men and their stubbornness were unrivalled. At this point, Foggy was considering ‘accidentally’ spilling something over the shitty laptop so he could just replace it for Matt with something that didn’t sound like a plane taking off when it had to send a single email.
“Maybe, he’s not in yet, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see if he remembers. If not, I guess you can spend the morning finalising those briefs I’ve been asking you to finish for three weeks now.” Karen slyly grinned up at him, making him laugh. Maybe he would. Still, he felt like this meeting was supposed to be important. Not for a monetary reason though; most of their work was pro bono afterall. No, it was something else, but he just couldn’t remember what.
It sat on the tip of his tongue, teasing him as he waited for Matt. The man was late as usual. His devil shenanigans tended to keep him up into the late hours of the night, to the point where it was almost routine for him to walk into the office late. Foggy wanted to be mad about it, but he had long since given up on that; There was no separating Matt and Daredevil, even if he wished he could. Matt wasn’t going to stop anytime soon, so there was no point working himself up everytime Matt came in late. There was still a lot of tension between them, but they were making cautious steps forward. Foggy didn’t know if things would ever be the same again.
The sound of the door opening snapped him from his thoughts, a surprisingly intact Matt sending both Karen and him a somewhat apologetic smile. “Sorry, traffic.” Foggy wanted to scoff, wanted to point out that literally everybody in the room knew exactly why he was late, but kept it to himself. He didn’t want to argue today. He still had a mystery to figure out.
“Do you remember that client you wanted me to follow up on last week?” Foggy dug through his memory, trying to recall what exactly Matt had asked of him. “The Parker kid!” It finally clicked. Matt had asked him to go check up on the kid, which had been surprising already as Matt rarely asked for help like that. Something about the case had put Matt on edge all week. Foggy must’ve known why at some point, but at the moment he couldn’t remember.
“Parker? I don’t remember a client by that name, so I highly doubt I asked you to check up on them.” Matt’s confused frown perfectly mimicked how Foggy felt. He was certain it was Matt who’d told him about the kid. Something about a framing job? God, his head felt like it was full of cotton. Every time he felt like he was nearing a memory, it slipped from his grasp.
Shaking his head, Foggy decided he must have finally lost it. This was the moment he went crazy, making up conversations that never happened and clients that never existed. “I must’ve gotten it messed up than man. My bad.” He flashed Matt a smile, fully aware the other couldn’t see it. Maybe he could hear his muscles move or something freaky like that. He was still getting used to Matt’s weird super hearing.
With his schedule now cleared out for the day, Foggy settled down in front of his laptop, intending on getting those files for Karen. He hated writing up reports like that, but he couldn’t keep putting it off for much longer without it coming back to bite him later on. Around the time he finished up the third case, he decided he deserved a short break. Grabbing his phone, he scrolled through social media for a bit. A headline grabbed his attention.
‘Spiderman; The Menace Strikes Again’
The Daily Bugle really loved their cliches. Their hatred for Spiderman, in particular James Jameson’s hatred for Spiderman wasn't something they were shy about, but man, this felt like a little much for Spiderman saving some people from a building on the brink of collapse. Blaming him for the building coming crashing down when it was literally on fire before he arrived felt unfair. Foggy had never been a particular fan of the Daily Bugle, but ever since he learned Spiderman was just a kid, his mouth started to taste sour every time he read one of their articles.
He paused. How did he know Spiderman was a kid? Sure, looking at the photo, Spiderman didn’t look particularly tall, but that alone couldn’t qualify him as a kid. Yet, deep down, Foggy knew Spiderman was a kid. A kid who Matt had described as ‘puppy-like’. A kid who was being framed for the murder of Mysterio. A kid who Foggy was supposed to meet with today. Peter Parker.
His memories came flooding back like a damn had broken in his mind. Matt had seen the kid’s unmasking on TV(or heard it, or whatever), and had personally reached out to him. He’d told Karen and Foggy about it after the fact, claiming he just couldn’t let another vigilante struggle like that. With their schedules booked so tight, Matt had asked Foggy to take over the next scheduled meeting, since he didn’t want to cancel on the kid. Foggy remembered writing the meeting time down on a sticky note, which he stuck to his calendar.
But how had the note been empty this morning? Why didn’t Matt remember talking with him about the case? Why had it taken him so long to remember himself? Nothing was making sense, and Foggy was having a hard time even believing himself. Ink didn’t just disappear. Matt wouldn’t gaslight him either by pretending he didn’t know what Foggy was talking about, right?
Typing the name ‘Peter Parker’ in on google yielded no real results past a relatively newly made twitter account going by that name that had ‘Queens’ tagged as its location. Besides that, it was like Peter Parker had never existed in New York. Digging a little further, Foggy found that the woman he was pretty certain was Peter’s aunt had passed away only a few days ago. Looking into the article written about her untimely passing, Peter’s name wasn’t mentioned anywhere. Foggy’s head was starting to hurt. How could an article talking about all of May Parker’s life’s achievements not mention the nephew she took in and treated like a son?
Running his hands down his face, Foggy let out a frustrated groan. Of course things could never just be easy. He couldn’t just have forgotten a normal meeting with a normal client. No, it had to be a vigilante thing. At this point, any inconvenience in his life could be attributed to a vigilante thing. He needed a drink, preferably something strong enough to dull the ache pounding in his skull. But, he couldn’t drink during company time, so instead he downed the last of his lukewarm coffee and pulled up the twitter page he’d found earlier.
He needed to get to the bottom of this, and considering this was his only lead, he decided to throw caution to the wind. Using the companies’ twitter page, something he and Karen had made one late drunken night, he shot the account a message. Maybe whoever owned it would never respond, or they had nothing to do with it, but he had to at least try. Curiosity would eat him alive otherwise. Closing the tab, Foggy went back to work, pretending he was a normal lawyer with normal clients instead of a lawyer who seemed to exclusively work with vigilantes.
The response came sooner than expected. Honestly Foggy wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting. Radio silence, a polite ‘I don’t know who you’re talking about’ or hell, even a ‘fuck off’ would’ve been understandable. What would he have responded if the roles were reversed? He would’ve ignored it probably, laugh about it with Karen and Matt over a couple of drinks before he blocked whoever sent it. Then again, he hadn’t ever been accused of being Spiderman, so he couldn’t know how he’d react.
Reading over what he’d sent, he couldn’t help but cringe. He could’ve probably phrased it a bit better than ‘Hello, my name is Foggy Nelson and I know you are Spiderman. I remember you but nobody else seems to. I can help you’, but in the moment he hadn’t seen anything wrong with it. It was a little forward, but beating around the bush didn’t seem appropriate. If his memory was right, and if the article about May was too, then Peter Parker was a newly orphaned teen who seemed to have been forgotten by everybody around him. Foggy felt it was only appropriate to be transparent with the kid, even if he wished he’d been a bit more… chill with it.
The reply was pretty cut and dry, just as direct as Foggy’s initial message had been. ‘You are from Nelson & Murdock, right? Mister Murdock told me you were trustworthy. Meet me here at noon tomorrow’, followed by an address that Foggy had to google. It was in Queens, unsurprisingly. A deli, one that didn’t look too exciting from the outside. He replied with a simple thumbs up, which made him feel only a little old as he slid his phone back into his pocket.
He wasn’t sure whether he felt nervous or excited as he approached the deli the following day. It was about a quarter to noon, early enough for him to be on time without it being awkward. Being proven right about Peter being real and being their client was exciting, but the implications that had on a bigger scale made him almost wish he was being led on, that this was all some sick practical joke. That would be so much easier, even if he did enjoy being proven right.