it's a movie, you're the star.
In the end, it was as simple as changing a number. Just two little digits swapped around. It was so easy, to stop them from meeting. Almost deceptively so. 312 was changed to 321 and the entire universe rippled with the aftershocks.
-
“Goddammit! Come on! Load. Load!”
Foggy Nelson sat on his bed in his new dorm room at Columbia waiting for his ancient laptop to load. He had been trying for about half an hour to sign up for the last spot in a Punjabi class that just so happened to include the extremely hot girl who lived down the hall that he’d been chatting to last night. He wasn’t having much luck, and he continued to huff at his computer as it failed to load. As he was watching his screen, he heard a somewhat tentative knock on the door of his room.
“What?” He shouted without looking up from the screen.
“Excuse me is this room 321?”
“No, who’re you looking for?” He replied before lifting his head up. Standing in front of him, was perhaps the most handsome man that Foggy had ever set eyes on. He was relatively tall, with a mop of floppy brown hair and a shy smile on his face. He was also, as Foggy was only now noticing, very obviously blind. “ Oh, Sorry”
“What for?” the man asked.
“You’re blind right?” He stated dumbly.
“Uh, Yeah, so they tell me. Sorry, I must’ve wandered into the wrong room, would you be able to point me in the direction of 321?”
“Uh, sure man it’s just down the hall, about a metre down on your left. Do you, uh, would you like some help getting there?”
“No, it’s…it’s fine, thank you. Sorry for disturbing you.”
“No problem man.”
And that was that. Foggy’s actual roommate was a guy named Don who never kept his side of the room clean and snored for 5 hours every night. He never spoke to the handsome stranger again. He thought he saw him sometimes, in lectures or walking across campus, but it never felt quite right to try and say hello to the guy. He had a weird sense of de ja vu sometimes when he spotted him and in all honesty, it creeped him out and he steered clear. So Foggy graduated from Columbia 3 years later with a shiny new law degree and a prestigious new job without ever having said another word to Matt Murdock.
-
Sometimes, Foggy hated it at Landman and Zack.
He’d landed an internship there after finishing law school and they’d offered him and his ex-girlfriend from college, Marci Stahl, jobs there once their time was up. The pay was great and it was a steady job but it wasn’t really what he wanted to be doing. Although he was good at it, corporate law had never really been his thing. When he’d first started his degree, Foggy had had big dreams about his career as a defence attorney. He had imagined himself as some type of pro-bono crusader, looking out for the little guy. It might have been nice, he often thought, to have some tiny little office somewhere in Hell’s Kitchen, giving back to his community.
That was just a pipe dream though. To build their own firm, most people needed a partner and Foggy didn’t know anyone that he trusted that much. Marci was great but she was born for corporate law, a shark in high heels, and he didn’t really have anyone else. Foggy had made plenty of friends at Columbia (of course he had, he was a sociable guy) but he’d never met anyone that he really clicked with.
So his dream was still a dream and Foggy was here, sorting through case notes alone in his apartment on a Friday night. Foggy was a pretty new hire at the firm, so he’d been given all the grunt work as part of a new case for a construction company called Union Allied. This particular company had been in the news lately after a secretary who worked there, Karen Page, had been accused of murdering one of her co-workers. She had been found, knife in hand, kneeling over the dead body. To begin with, she had insisted that she was innocent, but later that night one of the prison guards had found her hanging in her cell. To most people, that acted as a pretty clear admission of guilt (if you didn’t pay attention to the fact that the pattern of bruises around her throat meant that it was impossible for her injuries to be self-inflicted) but the company had been under a lot of scrutiny as a result.
Their plans to ‘renovate’ portions of Hell’s Kitchen in conjunction with the real estate developer Armund Tully were already controversial and a number of residents had taken issue with what they perceived as the gentrification of the neighbourhood. In particular, Foggy was dealing with a complaint put forward by an elderly Latina woman named Elena Cardenas. The old woman was determined that she wouldn’t be forced to leave her home and was claiming that it had purposely been left in disrepair to try and make that happen. Foggy honestly respected her determination. That didn’t mean he could help though. There was no way to prove what she was saying, so Mrs Cardenas and the other residents that had complained were being given two options; take a settlement or be evicted.
He was going to have to visit her tomorrow to try and convince her to take the deal. He put the document that he was reading down on his coffee table and put his head in his hands with a low sigh. This really isn’t where Foggy thought he’d end up after law school. Being paid to threaten old ladies into giving up their homes.
He had become everything that he’d always hated and he couldn’t really see a way out.
-
Mrs Cardenas was kind, and that made everything worse. She welcomed Foggy into her home with a smile and an offer of food in stilted English.
It made him feel like absolute shit.
This woman had been living in this apartment in Hell’s Kitchen for longer than Foggy had been alive. What right did he have, to try and convince her to leave? It was wrong and he knew it.
It was as Foggy was contemplating this that the explosion happened. A deafening boom rang out into the air and he threw himself on top of Mrs Cardenas. Shards of glass flew everywhere and covered his back. As he helped a shaking Mrs Cardenas up from the floor, a searing pain spread across his right side. He held a hand to it as he limped out of the apartment with Mrs Cardenas’ arm across his shoulder. She had a large gash across her forehead that was steadily leaking blood and was walking with a limp. Foggy managed to get both of them to a hospital and hand the old woman off to a nurse before he collapsed.
A couple of hours later, he woke up in a hospital bed with a bandage pulled tightly across his midsection. A nurse arrived to inform him that he had lost a significant amount of blood, but they had managed to remove all of the glass and he would likely escape with minimal scarring. He breathed a sigh of relief at that. After the nurse walked away, he turned on the tv above his bed and raised the volume so he could listen to the news.
“We are just getting word of a fast development in the investigation into the Hell’s Kitchen explosions. The authorities have just released some video. This is taken just moments after the explosions that stunned Hell’s Kitchen earlier tonight, pulled from a security camera. And authorities believe this man is responsible for the bombings, possibly as part of an ongoing feud with the Russian Mob. The same man suspected of having just shot and killed the three police officers at the scene of a standoff.”
Being shown on the screen of the small tv was a grainy CCTV image of a man dressed fully in black clothes with a black mask covering the upper half of his face. The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. Foggy wasn’t an idiot. He had lived in Hell’s Kitchen for most of his life and by now everyone who lived there had heard whisperings about the devil, a masked vigilante that stalked the streets at night. There were differing opinions on him. Most of the people that Foggy worked with thought he was a maniac, taking the law into his own hands, whilst others in Hell’s Kitchen called him a hero.
Foggy hadn’t been sure what to think. He couldn’t say that he agreed with vigilantism, but it had seemed like the devil had been doing at least some good. His old friend Brett Mahoney was a police officer and had mentioned a few instances to him that the devil had dropped wanted suspects off at the steps of the precinct, wrapped up in rope like a present. He had wanted to believe that he was a guy just doing his best to make his city better, but tonight had seemed to prove the exact opposite
The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen was a maniac. A violent terrorist with no regard for human life. He sighed as he turned his attention back to the tv.
“… one has to wonder whose side is this man on?”
-
Within a few days, Foggy was cleared to go back to work and found himself back at the office trawling through case files again. A knock on his door interrupted him.
“Hey Foggy Bear. How’s the side doing?”
Marci manouvered her way into his office with a huge pile of files, pushing the door shut behind her.
“Downgraded to agony. What can I do for you, Marci?”
“Can’t I just come and check up on my absolute favourite co-worker without having an ulterior motive?”
“Marce I’m literally the only person in this place that you like, and you don’t even like me that much. What do you want?”
“Yeah, you’re right. I was just bringing some files over for you. Word on the street is that our big anonymous client is about to go public so they want all hands on deck making sure all his shit is legit. I have hours of fun for you right here Foggy Bear.”
Landman and Zack had been working for their big, anonymous client for a long time. Whoever he was, the guy had his finger in a lot of pies. Even though a lot of people made up his legal team, only the partners had ever known who he was, so the fact that he was going public with his identity was massive. Something huge must have happened
“Great. Just what I need. Just add it to the pile, thanks Marci.”
It took him hours to go through everything that Marci had given him. Whoever this guy was, he was powerful. He had a part to play in most of the renovation work that was happening around Hell’s Kitchen and the sum total of all his assets was the most money that Foggy had ever seen written down on paper. After leaving work, he stopped off at a grotty bar around the corner from his apartment. It was late enough that he only caught the tail end of the man’s speech on the TV above the bar. Everyone from the bartenders to the other patrons was enraptured by it.
“...But I know now it’s foolish to make that decision, that I can no longer do it alone. That I cannot keep living in the shadows, afraid of the light. None of us can. None of us should be forced to. We must do this together. We must resist those who would have us live in fear. My name…is Wilson Fisk. And together, we can make this city a better place.”
As it turned out, Wilson Fisk was a large, bald man in a black and grey suit. He was flanked on one side by a weaselly looking man with glasses and an older man that he referred to as his accountant, and on the other by a beautiful, sophisticated looking woman in high heels. He talked a good talk, that Foggy could admit, but there was something menacing about him. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but it was as if something was bubbling under the surface. On the face of it, Fisk’s bumbling almost seemed like nerves but there was something else. It was as though he was trying desperately to keep himself under control. Foggy really didn’t want to see what would happen when the man snapped.
He had a bad feeling about this.
-
The next day, Marci visited his office again to tell him to drop the case with Mrs Cardenas, as the old woman had been found dead in her apartment the night before. The official company line at Landman and Zack had always been that a ‘criminal element’ existed in Mrs Cardenas’s building, that’s why they were so adamant that she move, but it was still a shock to hear that she’d been stabbed. In the little time that Foggy had spent with her, Mrs Cardenas had been kind and he couldn’t imagine anyone, even a hopped-up junkie, trying to hurt her. It left him in a sour mood for the rest of the day and as a result, he spent his evening drinking himself into oblivion.
He woke up in the morning with the mother of all hangovers so he decided to leave early for work to grab a coffee. It was as he was walking along the street, newly acquired coffee in hand, that he noticed the small crowd gathering in front of an apartment building a few metres away. The entrance to the building had been cornered off with police tape, and as he got closer he noticed the ambulance parked outside.
Just then, two EMTs wheeled what looked like a body out of the front of the building. Whoever it was, was covered with a white sheet, but as the EMTs attempted to manoeuvre it out, the gurney hit something and a pale, lifeless hand dropped down from under the sheet. It was then that he heard two of the cops talking.
“The guy was found by his friend this morning. She’s a nurse, and she hadn’t heard from him in a couple of days. Went round to check on him and found him face down on the floor of his apartment. He’d probably been dead a couple of hours by the time she got there.”
“And you’re sure it’s him?”
“I mean, they still need to confirm it but he was wearing the suit so, yeah. I’m pretty sure the guy was the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen.”
Foggy stepped back, reeling slightly. So the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen was dead. He thinks he should probably be relieved, but for some reason, there’s a pit in his stomach. The guy was a terrorist, he doesn’t even know his name. He shouldn’t be feeling like this at the thought of him being dead. He shakes himself out of his stupor and looks down at his watch. He’s going to be late if he stands here any longer.
He turns around to look for a trash can to throw his coffee cup into when a woman runs into him. She grabs his arm to steady herself before looking frantically towards the commotion in front of the apartment building.
“What’s happened? What’s going on?”
“I…er…I think they found a body in one of those apartments.”
She whips her head around to stare at him then, her dark eyes almost piercing.
“What do you mean, they found a body. Whose?”
Her intensity makes him uncomfortable.
“Erm… I think I overheard one of the cops saying that they think it’s the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen”
She stares at him disbelievingly for a minute before looking back towards the building longingly.
“It can’t be.” she says almost to herself “Matthew.”
“Sorry, did you say Matthew? Do you know him? Because if you do, you should really speak to those cops over there.”
She ignores him and continues to stare at the ambulance.
“I came all this way.”
“It might not be your friend. They didn’t actually say his name, he could be anyone.”
She turns to look at him properly then and for the first time her eyes light up with something like recognition. She surveys him with a cold stare before continuing to speak.
“You’re Foggy aren’t you? Foggy Nelson.”
“Uh, yeah.” He replies, slightly stunned, “ Have we met? Who are you?”
“I’m nobody.” She responds before finally letting go of his arm and taking a step away from him. “I should’ve been here earlier. I was supposed to stop this. This is wrong. It’s so wrong”
“What are you talking about? Who are you?”
His phone buzzes in his pocket and he reaches for it to cut off whoever is calling him. When he looks up, the woman is gone and it’s like she was never even there in the first place. He shrugs to himself, before tossing his cup in the trash and making his way to work.