everybody plays along
In the next few weeks, Foggy learns a lot about the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. It’s all anybody can talk about. For one, he learns that his name was Matt. Matt Murdock. A pro-bono lawyer who graduated from Columbia the same year that he did. It’s only when he sees a grainy photo of the man on TV that Foggy realises he’s the handsome stranger that walked into his dorm on the first day of college thinking that they were roommates. It makes him sad, to think that this was his fate.
The media and Wilson Fisk try to paint the man out to be the actual Devil, a terrorist who went too far and paid the price. They blame him for the bombings, for all the chaos in the city lately, but there are people in Hell’s Kitchen who paint a different picture. A Mr Evans describes how Matt Murdock defended him when he was wrongfully arrested, a Mrs O’Connor talks about the polite young man who helped to solve a dispute with her landlord and a Mr Hernandez sings the praises of the young lawyer who helped to solve the issues with his visa. In the weeks after his death, half of the city seems to mourn while the other half curses the fact that he wasn’t killed sooner.
As far as Foggy knows, there’s no funeral. Just an unmarked grave in the same cemetery as his father. Pictures circulate in the news and on social media of a haggard-looking priest and a grief-stricken nun looking down at the hole in the ground.
It’s from here that everything goes to shit.
-
It doesn’t take long for Wilson Fisk to take over New York.
It starts off slowly. First, Fisk focuses on real estate. He buys out old apartment buildings like the one Mrs Cardenas lived in. He tries to pretend that he’s doing something good by making sure that people don’t have to live in unsafe buildings. Nobody pays attention to the fact that the original residents can no longer afford to live there once the work has been done. Wilson Fisk is painted out to be a hero and nobody dares to speak out against him. The only reporter who even tries, Ben Urich of the New York Bulletin, is found dead in his apartment after a suspected break-in gone wrong. After that, most people keep quiet.
It takes about a month for Fisk to buy Foggy’s building. When he does, he triples the price of the rent. Foggy is lucky. He can just about afford to stay (he has to skip a couple of meals a few times a week, but it’s a small price to pay for a roof over his head). Most of his neighbours aren’t so lucky. Soon, there is no piece of land in Hell’s Kitchen that isn’t owned by Fisk. People are forced out of their homes and their businesses and there’s nothing they can do to stop it.
Not long after Fisk buys his apartment building, Foggy gets a phone call from his Mom. His parents have owned their own business, Nelson’s Meats, in Hell’s Kitchen for decades. His entire childhood was in that shop. But lately, his Mom tells him, all of their suppliers have been dropping out. They haven’t been able to find any replacements and the shop has been struggling. His little brother Theo had been considering taking out a loan until they got a phone call with an offer to buy them out.
“We had to Franklin.” his mom tells him “The shop was failing and your father and I are getting too old for this. We’re gonna use the money to move to Florida. Theo’s gonna come with us.”
His sister and her kids follow not long after. At one time, Foggy’s entire world had been in New York. All his friends and family were here and Foggy had never lived anywhere else. Had never wanted to. Now it was just him, the last Nelson standing.
It came as a surprise to absolutely nobody when Fisk ran for Mayor of New York about six months later, basing most of his campaign on the elimination of the city’s vigilantes. It was even less of a surprise when he won by a landslide.
-
It’s at this point that Foggy starts to have the dreams.
It begins just as the fiasco with the Punisher comes to an end. Like the rest of Hell’s Kitchen, Foggy watches with some kind of fascinated horror as Frank Castle rips through New York’s underworld and feels the same strange mix of relief and sadness when he’s found dead in a warehouse after a confrontation with the Kitchen Irish. He gets the same sense of deja vu when he sees Castle’s face on TV as he did whenever he saw Matt Murdock at college. The dreams start the night that Castle is found dead.
Foggy finds himself in a restroom. He watches himself and the man that he’s with arguing like it’s a movie, but he feels the other Foggy’s emotions as if they’re his own. He feels his betrayal and his sadness and the twisted feelings of longing underneath it all. It takes him a while to realise that the other man is Matt Murdock and the realisation makes him question why his mind would conjure up such a thing. He thinks they’re arguing about something to do with Daredevil and he hears Murdock mention someone called Elektra. He watches himself storm out of the room and he sees the face that Murdock makes as he leaves.
After that, it’s like the floodgates have opened. He has dreams like this every night and they all have Matt Murdock in common. He sees them together at college laughing on a set of steps on campus. He sees them older, sitting together in a bar and agreeing to become partners. He sees himself finding Matt Murdock half-dead on the floor of his apartment and watches as their relationship falls apart. He also watches his own face in the dreams and it’s so obvious that he’s in love with Matt. It’s written all over his face every time that they speak.
The thought of all of this makes him uneasy. He and Murdock had crossed paths exactly once in college. A five-minute conversation and then they’d never spoken again. It makes him feel like a creep, dreaming of the man like that. He didn’t know him, he doesn’t have any right to be feeling like this.
That doesn’t stop him from waking up crying every other night though.
-
Foggy is sitting on a bench in a park when he sees the woman again.
Work had been hectic the last few weeks. Landman and Zack had taken on a lot of new clients recently, and Foggy and the other relatively new hires had once again been landed with the grunt work. He’d been going in early and leaving late for weeks and combined with the lack of sleep he’d been getting lately as a result of the dreams, he was exhausted. He’d actually managed to leave on time today, and he was sitting eating a sandwich and scrolling on his phone when she approached him.
“Mind if sit here?” she asked, standing there expectantly.
He agreed without looking up from his phone and they sat in silence for the next few minutes. He hadn’t recognised her voice and it wasn’t until he actually decided to look at who had sat down next to him that he realised who she was.
“It’s you,” he stated almost dumbly as she turned her head to look at him, “You’re the one who… I met you, the night that Daredevil died.”
She smiled at him serenely, “It’s Foggy, isn’t it?”
“Uh, yeah.” He once again ignored the fact that he was pretty sure that he’d never told her that “You, uh, you never told me your name.”
“No,” she stated simply “No I didn’t.”
“Erm, ok”
They sat in awkward silence for another couple of minutes. Foggy was trying to figure out a polite way to get up and leave before she spoke again.
“Midland Circle.”
“What?”
“Does the name Midland Circle mean anything to you?”
“Erm, the name rings a bell. I think it might be one of our new clients at work. Why?”
“No reason.” she replied, looking contemplative “Are your family still in New York?”
The abrupt change in the conversation startled him and the mention of his family put him on edge.
“No, my parents moved to Florida a couple of months ago and my brother and sister went with them.”
“You should go and visit them.”
“What?”
“Your family, you should go and visit them in Florida. You should get out of New York.”
“What…Why?”
“Just listen to me Foggy.” She grabbed onto his arm again, just like she had the night they’d met “Get out of New York.”
He was angry now and stood up from the bench before turning to yell at her.
“What the hell are you talking about? Who even are you anyway? How do you know me?”
She just sat there, looking at him. The expression on her face was strange, almost pitying. She didn’t look like the type of woman who usually pitied people and it looked wrong on her face. After a minute, she stood up without a word and began to walk away.
“Just get out of the city Foggy” she called over her shoulder as she left.
He stood there dumbfounded for a while before turning tail and quickly making his way home.
-
Foggy was sipping on margaritas at his parent’s new place in Florida when he heard about the first earthquake. He didn’t often make a habit of listening to the threats of crazy people, but the woman he met had freaked him out enough that he had listened to her and left the city. There was something about the look in her eye. The notification on his phone from the Bulletin mentioned that a small earthquake had occurred in New York, but he didn’t think much of it. It was New York. Crazy things happened there all of the time. A strange little earthquake was practically normal when compared to recent years.
He’d curse himself for thinking that later.
It was later that night when he heard his mom’s shocked exclamation from the front room. At the noise, he raced out of the guest bedroom, his socked feet sliding on the wooden flooring before he burst into the room. Both of his parents were standing completely still in front of the tv. His Dad had his arm around his Mom’s shoulder as she cried silently with her hand over her mouth.
“Mom? Dad? What is it? What’s wrong?”
With that, his Mom turned to face him and her tears started anew.
“Foggy. Oh my God, Foggy. Thank God! Thank God you weren’t there!” she exclaimed before wrapping him up in her arms.
“What do you mean? What are you talking about Mom? What’s happened?”
He was beginning to feel a pit in his stomach. His Mom was an emotional person, but she was never this dramatic, not without cause. It was then that he spotted the TV over her shoulder. The news anchor on the screen was trying her best not to cry, but there were thick, black mascara lines down her face as she struggled to speak. A banner ran across the bottom of the screen that read ‘Breaking News: Explosion in centre of New York destroys City’.
All of a sudden he couldn’t breathe and he clung to his Mom even tighter. It was gone. The entire city. It was all gone. His home, his job, his friends. All that was left of most of it was a crater. It was inconceivable. New York City had survived everything from terrorist attacks to alien invasions and now there was nothing. Just a hole in the ground where the city used to be.
His Dad came up on his other side and squeezed his shoulder
“I’m sorry, son. I’m so sorry.”
Foggy just kept staring.
-
He tried for hours to get in touch with the people he knew in New York. One of his co-workers had survived, like Foggy he was on vacation and they cried together over the phone. He had called Marci about 20 times with no answer but her voicemail. (He was trying not to think about that too hard.) He didn’t know what he’d do when he finally let himself feel it. The absolute scale of the loss that had occurred was massive. New York was a wasteland. There was nothing left.
The Avengers had put out a statement about an hour ago. A tired-looking Steve Rogers had stood on a podium and expressed their sorrow at the loss of the city. The team had been on a mission in Europe at the time, and they’d flown back to the US as soon as they’d heard the news. Foggy watched with his parents as Captain Rogers paid tribute to the city he had grown up in, before announcing that the Avengers would be there to help with recovery efforts in the city. Too little too late, Foggy thought bitterly. The Avengers hadn’t been there when it counted, and now New York was gone. They would put up a show of helping with recovery efforts and then they’d be gone, relocated to somewhere on the West Coast probably. It was real New Yorkers who would have to deal with the aftermath. Thousands of people were dead and hundreds more, including him, were now homeless. The empty promises of the Avengers were worth jack shit to them now.
Mayor Fisk was nowhere to be seen.
Suddenly it was all too much and he decided to go for a walk, telling his Mom that he needed air. It was on this walk that he saw the woman again. She was sitting alone on a bench at the beachfront, seemingly contemplating the sea in front of her. At the sight of her, Foggy was filled with a deep sense of anger. Like she had done to him before, he sat down on the bench beside her. He sat there, stewing in his rage for a minute before speaking to her, still facing straight ahead. There was something calming about the sight of the sea in front of him. It settled his nerves and he took a deep breath before speaking.
“You knew, didn’t you? You knew that New York was going to be destroyed, that’s why you told me to leave.”
“I did, yes”
“Was it you? Did you do this?”
“No, it wasn’t me. Well, it wasn’t this me anyway,” she replied with a wry chuckle.
“What does that even mean?” he asked exasperatedly. He was so tired of their conversations now, of her not telling him anything important.
She turned to look at him for a minute before standing up and offering him her hand.
“You need to come with me now, Foggy. I think it’s probably time that I explained.”