the Sprawl

Foggy and Karen were on Father Murdock duty because Matt was busy scrambling around behind said father’s back with a load of old men at Fogwell’s, trying to set up a not-so-surprise birthday party.

Jack would have been 50 if he hadn’t gotten clocked in the head all those years back and he was taking it…well, not in any way Foggy had expected.

So far, in watching Matt and Jack interact, Foggy and Karen had decided that Matt got his pain in the ass personality entirely from his mom. She made not a single move to defend herself from this insult and so they’d taken that as confirmation.

But that was reductionist and unfair. Jack was just as much of a pain in the ass as Sister Maggie when he wanted to be, and he was specifically a pain in the ass with huge muscles and a determination to fucking suffer. Just like his goddamn son.

Matt was furious with his father. Probably because getting the man to have any positive feeling towards his birthday was teaching Matt what it felt like to deal with someone as hellbent as he was that he didn’t deserve such pomp and circumstance and, as such, any celebration that contained either of those things was a waste of time and money.

Matt called Jack a hypocrite.

He reminded Jack very clearly, with a finger stabbing him into place, that every one of Matt’s birthdays from birth to 10 years old had been nothing less than a colossal waste of time and money that they hadn’t even had, and yet Jack had refused to ever let that stop him.

Jack’s explanation for that was that obviously, Matt had deserved that effort.

And no, he would not and could not see how that related in any capacity to the issue at hand.

It was hilarious to watch Matt bang doors and bare teeth and break out cold shoulders in light of this information. It was like every one of his teenage impulses had screamed at the opportunity to be freed, however temporary or petty the issue. And so for the last week, he’d been raging around the office and Foggy’s apartment, pacing and clawing his hands, repeating the same argument at Foggy over and over, as though Foggy had forgotten just how stubborn, incorrigible, and hypocritical his would-be father-in-law was in the day between these discussions.

Jack, for his part, took all of this with a self-satisfied jaw. He showed zero sign of backing down from his stance. It was one of the few times Foggy had seen him purposefully not take Matt’s side. Normally, he was happy to let Matt do whatever he wanted, be it dangerous or stupid or annoying as fuck, and he’d bear that with the patience of a saint.

But apparently this was his own personal type of self-flagellation, and he would be damned before anyone got between it and him.

So Matt had thrown his hands up and broken down and finally, finally admitted that maybe the way to end this hellish cycle was to reach out to his mother.

It was stunning, really.

Sister Maggie looked at her angry son and her undead husband and then told Matt that Jack was allowed to spend his birthday doing whatever he damn pleased. That was how birthdays worked.

Jack was triumphant.

Matt nearly cracked his teeth, he ground them so hard.

He proceeded to guilt his own mother about all the years that Jack’s birthday had taken backseat to Matt’s and all the times he’d had matches on those days, and that time that Matt had gone blind just one week out from Jack’s last one.

“He has a point, Jackie,” Sister Maggie finally said to her increasingly-miffed partner. “It has been a while.”

Jack didn’t give a single flying fuck. Birthdays were birthdays. Deathdays were deathdays. What did they even matter for a guy just kind of floating around in space-time?

Matt’s devil nearly overtook him for half a second and in the space of that half-second, Foggy had felt his stomach drop.

He was used to Matt’s devil, but the flicker of strong annoyance in Jack’s eyes had been new.

Jack routinely pinned Matt to the floor of Matt’s apartment and dragged him, literally kicking and screaming, wherever he wanted him.

There wasn’t enough cover in the church to contain two devils going at it.

Sister Maggie had sensed this and put herself between her husband and son with palms outstretched to both of them.

“Settle,” she ordered. “This is a house of God.”

The effect was immediate. The blaze on both sides died back into a smolder. A bitter one, sure, but a smolder no less.

“Matty, if you want to do something for your father for his birthday, that’s your prerogative and your right. You can’t expect him to want you to or to participate if he’s not comfortable, though, do you understand?”

Yes, he understood.

“Jack,” Sister Maggie said almost tenderly. “Stop being so damn stubborn.”

Jack kept his arms crossed. The line of his lips said that he wanted to argue but wasn’t quite sure how to do so without invoking Sister Maggie’s wrath.

He said that he would allow for a cake. That was it. There would be no gifts or dumbass party hats and not so much as a lick of singing. None, Matthew. At all.

Matt seethed.

Jack glared.

Sister Maggie appeared to decide that this was a good compromise, well-reached. She dismissed both of them with a huff and a turn and said to let her know when there would be cake-having so that she could ask for an hour or so’s leave for the occasion.

Jack’s jaw said that he did not intend for there to be any cake after all. The concession had been a tactical tool to escape the scrutiny and ire of his beloved.

Matt’s jaw, however, was a little slimmer than Jack’s and said ‘Fuck you, old man. I got permission now.’

Which was how Foggy and Karen had ended up where they were, trying to keep Papa Murdock from contemplating filicide.

Karen, however, had just the thing for this.

She introduced Jack to the grout situation in her bathroom.

Jack stared at her for nearly thirty full seconds before asking her how long she’d lived like this. And just like that, Karen’s bathroom began the process of being cleaned and re-grouted, while she and Foggy were banished to the living room to be ‘educated and delicate.’

“We should call Frank,” Karen said like a woman on a suicide mission. “That’ll distract him.”

“Do you like this apartment?” Foggy asked her.

“Well, I’ll like it more when the bathroom looks serviceable.”

“Then we’re not inviting Frank,” Foggy said. Then paused. “But we are inviting Maria.”

Foggy called Maria and whispered to her in the corner of Karen’s bedroom that it was Jack’s birthday and he was in a shit mood about it and any moral support she had to give would be appreciated.

He failed to consider that Maria might have feelings about birthdays.

He swore his hearing was out in that ear now.

Maria came down from her shrieking to say that she’d be there asap, and she ended the call before Foggy could even get a word in edgewise.

So that was easy?

Now they just had to wait.

“JACKIE, IT’S YOUR BIRTHDAY.”

Frank made one weak attempt at holding his wife back before she went tearing into the bathroom to pounce on her prey and remind him of his mortality.

“Good work, Punisher,” Foggy deadpanned. “You really put your back into it.”

Frank shrugged a shoulder.

“She wants what she wants and she gets what she wants,” he said.

“You lose your spine in Virginia or Connecticut?” Foggy asked him.

Frank pointed after Maria.

“She puts it in her bag,” he said. “I get it back when she remembers it’s there.”

This fucking guy, man.

Exhausting.

“What kind of guy hates his own birthday?” Frank asked.

Karen helpfully pointed.

Frank purposefully did not follow the finger with his face. There was the sound of unbridled enthusiasm happening that way.

“WE’RE GOING OUT,” Maria declared, reappearing in the hall with one of her arms wrapped around Jack’s neck. He appeared to humoring her by letting her pull him forward with her.

Maria froze, then spun around and shoved Jack back the way they’d come.

“I’m calling Vanessa,” she declared. She slammed the bathroom door. “Stay in there. We’re planning surprises. Ah! No buts! I don’t care. We’re going. Suck it up—what? Fine. We’ll stop by and you can change. Perfect. Thank you. Two minutes.”

She came bouncing back into the room and dug through all of Frank’s jacket pockets to find the phone she’d apparently stuffed in one of them. Then she was off again, in a toss of auburn hair, out to the balcony to wake up the nearly-nocturnal Vanessa.

Karen watched after her and then looked pointedly at Frank.

“Whipped,” she said.

He shrugged, not sorry.

“JACK, IT’S YOUR BIRTHDAY, YOU ASSHOLE.”

Wade looked about ready to fall asleep standing up. Foggy kind of wanted to stick a broom handle under his head or something to prop him up.

Vanessa was in the bathroom. Maria was with her. They had Jack cornered with no hope for escape.

Really, Matt should have just asked these two to handle everything from the start.

“WE’RE GOING OUT,” Vanessa declared, bursting into the living room with Jack’s wrist in her grip. “WADE!”

Wade snapped awake in an instant. Frank and Karen scrambled away from where they had been inching in closer with the dry-erase marker from Karen’s fridge whiteboard.

“Wha’s happ’nin’?” he slurred.

“Drinks,” Vanessa told him. “Bar. Suggestions, go.”

Wade blinked a few times at her and then at her captive and fellow capturer. He shook his head a little bit.

“What’s the occasion?” he asked.

“Jack’s birthday,” Vanessa said over the guy’s attempt to downplay it. “He’s 50.”

“I’m not fifty,” Jack scowled.

“Ancient. The eldest of all of us,” Vanessa said. Her face went blank at Maria. “Hail the elder.”

“Hail the elder,” Maria agreed, equally devoid of emotion.

“I’m not fifty,” Jack snapped at them.

“Jack needs to go home and change, he smells like shit. But after that, we need a destination,” Vanessa carried on, ignoring him.

“Well, what’s your poison, man?” Wade asked.

Jack stared at him right in the eye.

“Lead,” he said.

The ladies shamed and blustered at him until he took it back.

“Jesus,” he told Wade instead.

The gals thought that that was a more acceptable answer.

“Jesus, I can do,” Wade said.

Vanessa and Maria, now that they had Jack in their clutches, had already apparently planned the rest of the night’s itinerary. It took them five minutes maximum. Then it took ten minutes to get back to Matt’s apartment, where the gals critiqued all of Jack’s clothes and bullied him into a un-holey shirt and a leather jacket before locking him in the bathroom again with orders to do something with his hair.

Frank noted that the man seemed overwhelmed by all these women.

“They’re his friends,” Wade said. “That’s his bad.”

His bad, indeed.

“His wife’s pretty high-strung, I think he just knows how to cut his losses,” Foggy said.

He got two stares.

“Wife?” Wade said. “As in, Red’s mom?”

Oh.

Did these folks not know?

“Wait, that nun’s Red’s mom?” Wade whispered into the circle that was him, Frank, Karen, and Foggy. “I thought she was like, his spiritual counselor or something.”

“No, she’s his mom,” Karen said.

Wade stared.

“She told him to pull his head out of his ass,” he said.

Frank choked.

“Not very nunly,” he noted when he got ahold of himself.

“Yeah, well, she wasn’t super nunly when she got pregnant, either,” Karen said. “She’s cool, though. She gave Matt permission to do birthday things. We just need to keep Jack distracted until all his old buddies are ready for him.”

Jack was plenty distracted. Jack was trying to get people out of his hair at the minute.

“More like, we need to move time along a little so he’s not grumpy when we head off to his party,” Foggy said.

Wade considered this long and hard, then nodded sagely.

“No problem,” he said. “Like I said, I got just the place.”

Foggy couldn’t stop snorting into his drink because Wade’s interpretation of Jesus + Drinks was a topless bar where the waiters and waitresses were dressed up in sacrilegious snatches of Catholic garb.

Vanessa and Maria were enjoying themselves immensely. They’d already made friends with a lady wearing a habit and little else. They were explaining to her that their buddy here had married a nun and had a kink.

Foggy was pretty sure that Jack was nearly ready to crawl under the table. His excuses and explanations had fallen on deaf ears.

“It’s his birthday!” Vanessa told the waitress brightly. “But he won’t introduce us to his little lovebird, so my lovebird found us the next best thing.”

She beamed over her shoulder at Wade who waggled fingers back to her.

The waitress thought that was hilarious. She asked Jack what he wanted to drink, but he was too busy trying to suffocate himself to answer.

Vanessa ordered him an Old-Fashioned. When the waitress left, she manhandled him up and told him he was fucking up his chances with all these available women and Foggy took another long drink with Karen.

“At least he won’t forget it,” Karen said.

No, sir. He would not.

Jack lasted a drink.

Then he said that it was against his religion to stay any longer in that bar. And once out on the street he and the ladies set to squabbling about boundaries. Vanessa decided that, fine, okay. Maybe that was a little much, but if low-key was what Jack wanted, he should have just said so. She had a place in mind for low-key things.

 “Babe, go left. No, your other left. Perfect.”

Jack stared at Foggy with sad, sad Murdock puppy eyes. His were nearly as lethal as Matt’s.

“Is this fun?” Maria whispered into the group while Wade and Vanessa better coordinated their spray painting efforts. “I’ve never defaced property before. Is it fun?”

Frank drummed fingers against his chin, watching the other two and evidently thinking up some trouble. Karen would do it with him, if Maria wouldn’t. Karen was already preparing for the occasion by shaking up paint cans with a fervor that spoke of excitement.

Foggy decided that he’d leave the misdemeanors to those guys. He had a professional reputation to uphold.  

“Depends on your idea of fun, I think,” he told Maria. “It isn’t exactly my go-to.”

Although, there had been a couple moments when Foggy was a teenager that it had been very satisfying indeed.

“My brothers used to do this kind of thing,” Jack said miserably. “I can’t tell you how many times the cops would come draggin’ ‘em home to my ma.”

He was hiding behind his fingers as only a younger sibling about to get their ass beat as a casualty of a collective crime would.

“You have brothers?” Maria asked.

“Unfortunately,” Jack mumbled.

Foggy was paying close attention now. He’d never heard of these brothers. As far as he knew, Matt had only had contact with his maternal grandmother as a child and even that from a distance.

“They live around here?” Maria asked.

“God, I hope not,” Jack said, still wincing around his fingers at Vanessa and Wade as they constructed their masterpiece.

Foggy decided that this reaction might explain why Matt had shared no information on any uncles.

“You should go see them, Jack,” Maria encouraged lightly. “Maybe they’ve changed.”

Jack watched her out of the corner of his eye for several beats.

“I guess,”  he finally said. “If either of ‘em are still alive.”

Aha!

Finally! A concession towards something almost remotely pleasant.

“I’m sure they are,” Maria said. “What’re their names?”

“Change of plans, guys!” Maria called over to the other four. “We’re going huntin’!”

It was the best possible thing to say to this particular group of people, Foggy mused. Three out of four were professional hunters and Vanessa was nothing if not a gossip hound.

All of them abandoned their delinquency (and for Wade and Vanessa, their neon, dual-toned cock) to gather around and be briefed on their new mission.

Jack was very self-conscious about it.

“I, uh. I don’t give a shit about Tom,” he admitted. “But I think it’d be nice to see my, uh, oldest brother, if that’s possible.”

And why wouldn’t it be?

Jack got even more self-conscious.

“I would just like to know if he’s still living,” he said. “That’s more important right now. He’s ten years older than me. So he’d be, I guess, sixty?”

That didn’t sound so bad.

“Does he live in Hell’s Kitchen? You remember any of his addresses?” Wade asked.

Jack chewed a lip.

“Yeah,” he said. “I remember one.”

Matt’s uncle’s name was Bill.

Well, his name was William, but Jack called him ‘Billy’ and everyone else apparently called him ‘Bill.’ And Jack said the last time he’d seen him had been a couple of weeks before his death. He didn’t have a whole lot of other information on the guy besides his last residential address and he said that he didn’t expect to meet up with him that night. Just knowing he was alive would be plenty for him, for now.

Foggy looked at Karen, though, and Karen looked at Frank who looked at Maria who looked at Vanessa and Wade, and Vanessa and Wade’s face told all onlookers that they were gonna find this sonuvabitch in the next four hours, no problem.

If this was all that Jack wanted, their faces said, then this was what he’d get.

He’d unwittingly fallen into the perfect group for it and it was a lot better than drawing dicks on walls, in Foggy’s opinion.

“Alright,” he said, “I guess we ought to hit the books?”

It was kind of satisfying to know that all tracking, even vigilante and assassin tracking, started with a good ole Google search.

It was less satisfying to be presented with seven million results on Google for ‘William Murdock.’ It did not help that there had been a stupidly famous engineer named ‘William Murdoch’ in the 1800s or some shit.

“Cousin?” Wade asked Jack who gave him a dead-eyed stare for long enough that Wade cackled and went back to click-clacking away.

“Just tryin’ to give y’all some respectability,” he said.

“Yeah, well. Do the opposite of that,” Jack said.

Wade beamed at him.

“You’re funnier than your kid,” he said. “Whaddya think about wearing the horns for a night, eh? Come out with me and the Spiderkid and see what your boy gets up to at night? Could be fun. The city could have two Daredevils running wild for a minute. That’ll throw the press for a loop if nothing else.”

Jack flipped a couple of pages in the ancient phonebook in his lap.

“I’d rather not,” he said.

Wade’s smirk said that he didn’t intend to let go of the idea, but he’d let the topic drop for the time being.

It took longer than Foggy thought. One second, there was loads of frowning and clicking going on in the room, the next there was blinding light in it and people were moaning and groaning and cursing the cause of this offense.

He blinked himself back to normalcy and found Matt, of all people, standing in the doorway in a hoodie and gym shoes. His hand was on the light switch.

“Be aware that I fully recognize the irony of me saying this, but why the fuck are y’all sitting in the dark?” Matt asked.

Well, mostly because it had seemed prudent to just turn on a couple lamps to read by, but also, dude. How long had it been? How long had Matt been standing there by the door trying to figure out why the fuck no one had noticed him?

“Why’re you all at the office?” Matt asked. “I’ve been calling you, Fogs.”

Foggy wasn’t quite sure how to say ‘Sorry, I was looking for your maybe-dead uncle’ and was just coming up with something that sounded less offensive when Jack stood up and shook his head.

“They’re just humorin’ me, kiddo,” he said. “Is it party-time?”

Matt held out a hand for him. Jack took it easily.

“Why are you sad?” Matt asked. “Does it bother you that much? If it’s really that big of a deal, then we don’t have to do anything. I’m sure the guys’ll understand—”

“It ain’t that,” Jack said. “Don’t worry about it. Thanks, the rest of you. It means a lot.”

But?

They hadn’t found anything?

They went to Fogwell’s and Jack allowed himself to be swallowed up by a bunch of huge guys who Foggy had seen tease Matt as he left the gym over the years. The group had put together a real 80s-inspired birthday party. Fogwell himself had come and Foggy finally got to see the man in full.

Eventually, Foggy spotted Jack smiling at his old friends. He seemed like he was having a good time despite himself and despite the fact that every one of these old-ass gym rats seemed to have a compulsion to trap him in some manly hug or chokehold.

But still. There was something off about it. Jack hadn’t asked for a party. Or to be surrounded by his friends or anything like that.

He’d asked to find where his brother was. And Foggy couldn’t help but think that that was what he really wanted from the day.

Vanessa touched his arm and met his eyes with her own dark brown ones. She held his gaze and told him that way that she was thinking the same thing that he was.

Foggy left the Murdocks to go home and have whatever moment they were going to have with each other. Matt was a bit confused when Foggy told him to go on without him and that he’d see him later, but he accepted it.

Foggy stayed behind with his eyes set on the real man of the hour: Fogwell.

Vanessa and Maria must have seen him picking through witnesses because they sent their murderous partners off and nabbed Karen from where she was being amused by the antics of a couple of middle-aged boxers trying to impress her.

They hung back while Foggy saw his moment and went to go help Fogwell sweep confetti off his counter. The old man was huge. He was slightly terrifying in a gruff, old Hell’s Kitchener kind of way. Matt had some good stories about Fogwell. He was extremely fond of the guy who was, apparently, equally fond of him, but the face that Foggy saw didn’t seem to be one capable of feeling at all.

“Mr., uh, Fogwell?” Foggy tried. “Did you have a minute?”

Fogwell paused in his sweeping to loom menacingly at Foggy.

Or maybe that was his nice face?

“You ain’t one of mine,” Fogwell growled.

“I’m Matt’s,” Foggy said. “I’m one of—actually, I’m Matt’s partner. Boyfriend. That’s, er. That’s me, I’m surprised we haven’t met, honestly.”

Fogwell stared at him long, hard, and silent.

Foggy felt like if he looked away for so much as a second, he’d be dumped in the river with cinder blocks tied to his feet.

“Franklin,” Fogwell remembered. “Right, Matty’s young man. I remember now. He talks about you.”

Foggy did not sigh, but goddamn he wanted to.

“Right. Hopefully good?” he said.

Fogwell’s face didn’t change.

Foggy still couldn’t tell if this was his version of ‘pleasant’ or not.

“What do you need, son?” Fogwell asked.

No time for bullshit. Got it, got it.

“Mr. Murdock—I mean, Jack—was talking with me and my friends earlier and he mentioned he was interested in getting into contact with his brother, but we couldn’t seem to find him,” Foggy said. “I don’t think Matt knows this guy; he would have told me if he did. So, I was wondering if maybe you knew anything about him? It seemed a little like—”

“Jackie’s a soft soul,” Fogwell said firmly. It shut Foggy up. It was intended to and it did. Fogwell made sure that he was aware of this before continuing. “He ain’t need to see that man, Franklin. Best thing’s to keep him away. It’ll only hurt ‘em both in the end.”

Foggy was surprised—no, not surprised.

Shocked. He was shocked.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “It was the only thing he asked for—he didn’t even want—”

“A party, yeah, trust me. We all know,” Fogwell said. “Boy’s one of mine. And we ain’t just a bunch of lugs smashing heads, kid. It don’t look like much, I know, but this shithole and all the shitheads in it are a family. We look out for each other. Jackie came into my fold when he was yay big.” He held his hand at his shoulder. “Been trying to get that kid to let us give him a damn cake since he got here. I’m surprised he let us have one for ‘im now, although I guess a l’il perspective’ll do that to ya.”

Foggy didn’t really know what to say.

“I don’t understand,” he reiterated.

Fogwell sighed and set the dustpan he was collecting confetti in on the counter.

“Bill, right?” he said.

“That’s right.”

Fogwell shook his head sadly.

“Man’s in prison, son,” he said. “Went in for killin’ his wife and step-daughter.”

Holy. Shit.

“Are you—are you sure?”

Fogwell’s pitying face was marginally softer than his normal one.

“I’m sure,” he said. “Jack used to go visit him once a week, as long as he could. He was askin’ now probably ‘cause he ain’t know if the man died. I don’t think he has. Word would’ve got around if he did. Bill Murdock was a good guy back in the day, Franklin. No one thought he had it in him to do what he did. But that’s the thing about the Murdocks, you ain’t never know when one of them’s gonna snap.”

Jesus.

No wonder Jack hadn’t expected to see his brother that night. He just didn’t have it in him to say it aloud.

“Bill never hurt Jack, did he?” Foggy asked.

Fogwell lifted one of his gray eyebrows.

“Hurt Jackie? No, no. That wasn’t Bill. Bill raised Jackie. That was the thing. Bill was the one who brought him to me to begin with. This was only a couple months before he, well. Anyways. Jack’s always thought that he was responsible in some way for what happened. Thought maybe he was puttin’ stress on Bill or something. He was seventeen when it all happened, and of course, he was tryin’ to leave home and whatnot and Bill was worried about him goin’ out on his own.”

Fogwell sighed.

“Jack’s always thought that that had something to do with the guy snappin’,” he said. “Couldn’t talk ‘im out of it. Even Bill couldn’t talk ‘im out of it. It just hurt ‘em both, I know. ‘Cause Bill never argued with the cops. He says ‘I killed my wife and my baby girl,’ that’s what he said, right to a judge. When they asked him why, he says ‘your honor, I ain’t got no explanation for you and no explanation for myself.’ And just like that, they gave ‘im 50 years with the possibility of parole. 25 for each life he took.”

Foggy squeezed his eyes closed hard and when he reopened them, Fogwell was leaning against the counter.

“I’m telling you, son. Let ‘em be,” he said.

“I don’t think that’s my decision to make,” Foggy said sadly.

The old man watched him out of the corner of his eye and then nodded.

The gals were sobered by the news when everyone regrouped by the fence on the side of the gym.

“Shit, man, that’s heavy,” Vanessa said.

“Pretty standard for Hell’s Kitchen,” Foggy sighed. “But I don’t know what to do.”

He looked past his hair and found a load of eyebrows of various curvatures facing him.

“What?” he asked.

The eyebrows did not cease to be weird.

“Dude,” Vanessa said, “Me and Maria here are willingly attached to two assassins. Your own boyfriend is one shade shy of that. Come on, man. Perspective.”

Foggy felt his face twist up in a wince.

She was kinda right.

Really right.

Super right.

Wade had stated on multiple occasions that he’d just wished that he’d gotten back to Canada in time to murder his own father before the guy’s cardiac arrest. Frank had nigh-senselessly set out to kill anyone and everyone who’d so much as spoken the names of his wife and kids.

Those two were exchanging looks that were very clearly trying to work out what the right face to make here was.

“Matt doesn’t know this,” Foggy said. “I don’t want to be the one who—”

“I’ll do it?” Frank offered. “Won’t make much difference, honestly. We already got piles of kindling put aside for each other.”

…not helpful, Francis.

“It’s not that big of a deal, Nelson,” Wade said diplomatically. “Sure, old man Fogwell says whatever, but it ain’t his family, is it? Let Johnnie-boy make his decision. It’s his brother. And if he wants to see the guy, man, who’s right is it to stop ‘em?”

…also not helping, Wade Winston.

“Here, why don’t we do this?” Maria said. “We’ll just find out if this guy’s still kickin’ around in the prison system and if he is, we’ll tell Jack. We don’t have to tell Matt. You don’t even have to be involved, Foggy. We’ll figure it out, me and Vanessa, and then it’ll be between the three of us.”

Foggy got the feeling that even if he said ‘no,’ these guys were gonna do it anyways.

The wide grins he got upon voicing that statement confirmed it.

He sighed.

Bill Murdock was at Rikers, which was easy enough.

Frank found his name listed among some paperwork he absolutely had no right to be accessing. Maria passed the information on to Jack through text.

“Dad never told me about any of his family,” Matt told Foggy in the office the next day.

“No?” Foggy asked, aware that Karen had an ear trained on them. “Why not?”

Matt sighed.

“Said that he didn’t want me to grow up thinkin’ that our family was hopeless. You know he’s the youngest of five kids, Fogs? Five. Count ‘em.”

Dude.

“Right?”

That was a lot.

“Yeah,” Matt said. “Sister Maggie’s the second oldest of four. Four. I went to ask her about Dad this morning and she told me her favorite sister committed suicide. Like. Foggy.” Matt’s hands were shaking. He put the folders he’d been picking through back down onto the desk.

Foggy reached out to hold his arm.

“Matt, I’m sure she—”

“I tried to kill myself at St. Agnes,” Matt blurted out.

Foggy felt his gut turn to ice.

“Matt?” he said.

“I—when I was fifteen,” Matt said. “She found me. She found me. Can you—she found her sister, too. I can’t even imagine what that must have been like. Can you--? I just—I feel—I don’t—"

There were reasons that Sister Maggie and Jack had come together, then. There were reasons that they’d isolated their son.

Christ.

“Matty, come here,” Foggy said, holding out his arms. Matt didn’t come to them. Foggy went to him instead and wrapped a hand around the base of his neck to pull him in closer. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“I didn’t—I don’t—I don’t even know what to say to them,” Matt murmured into Foggy’s neck. Foggy felt Karen’s heat come in close to them. Her slim fingers touched his arm in comfort and support.

“Be honest,” Karen said softly. “Say you understand now.”

Foggy closed his eyes tight and pressed the side of his head against Matt’s.

She was right. He just had to be honest.

Jack seemed pained when Foggy saw him next. Matt kept nudging at him as though he could sense the lines around Jack’s eyes.

“I’m okay,” Jack said every time.

Matt didn’t believe him.

Jack had scheduled a visit with his brother. He was anxious. Matt said that he hadn’t been sleeping. He was awake when Matt came in from the streets and he stayed up to clean all Matt’s wounds thoroughly before seeing him off to bed.

Matt was going with him to meet his uncle.

Foggy thought that Matt actually wanted to go with in order to shove himself between the two of them should any difficult conversations arise. Matt didn’t seem entirely interested in the idea of having an uncle himself, although he told Foggy that he had asked Jack more about the guy to know what he was getting into.

Jack said that he didn’t know what Bill was like anymore. It had been a long time. He only knew the person that Bill had been towards him. And Bill had always been a certain type of person towards him.

Jack never called his brother two-faced, but there was a lingering feeling there that he felt like he was working with two separate people in his older brother.

Foggy wondered if he’d accepted Daredevil so easily because he’d already had experience navigating his family and their devils.

Matt thought so.

Matt was drowning in guilt over it.

He asked Foggy if he thought that he should stop being Daredevil. If he wasn’t following his uncle’s footsteps. If he wouldn’t eventually kill two innocent people in a rage that he couldn’t control.

Foggy didn’t know how to answer him.

Violence and poverty run in families.

Foggy didn’t go with the two Murdocks to meet their third, but he was there in the aftermath. Sort of.

Jack didn’t come home with Matt.

“He went to go talk to Sister Maggie,” Matt told Foggy.

“Is he okay?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Christ.”

Matty fidgeted, rubbing his fingers together as he did. He caught himself doing it and forced himself to stop, but really just transferred the motion to the loop on his cane.

“He was really nice?” he finally said. “My uncle, I mean. Like? He cried a lot. He sounds like Dad, but older and a little deeper. It’s the same accent. The, uh, the guards let them hug because of the circumstances.”

That must have been hard.

“It’s weird,” Matt said.

“I’ll bet,” Foggy told him.

“He talks to my dad weird. He kept saying sorry,” Matt said. “He kept saying that it was all his fault. And Dad kept saying it wasn’t, but I don’t think they believed each other.”

That sounded pretty spot on for Murdock communication skills.

“Did he talk to you at all?” Foggy asked.

Matt scrubbed at his jaw.

“He’d met me already,” he said after a while of thinking. “I guess he met me when I was little. I don’t remember it, though. He held my face and like—” Matt pressed his hands on each side of his cheeks, “—shook it. Kept talking about how big I was and how dark my hair got and how I look like Dad. His hands are huge, Fogs. Like, I think he’s bigger than Dad. Or maybe just wider? I don’t know.”

That was hard to imagine. Jack was already a big dude. Foggy realized Matt had gone quiet again.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I think? I’m a shrimp? In this family?” Matt said, devastated.

Karen rolled in laughter when Foggy presented her with Matt’s revelation. Matt was displeased with her.

“I’m having a crisis, Karen,” he snapped.

Karen was not sympathetic.

Matt huffed and puffed at her furiously.

“Just you wait,” he said. “I’m gonna get me two more inches somehow, and when I do, it’s all over for you, Page.”

“Don’t worry, babycakes, I got some heels you can borrow,” Karen cooed at him once she’d gotten ahold of herself.

Matt threw paperwork at her and set her off all over again.

Matt appealed to Sister Maggie. She took one look at him and just said, “Sorry, kiddo,” and it was the final nail in the coffin for him.

Jack, who seemed to have come out on the other side of things okay after a day or so to process, hugged Matt close when he got home. He promised him that he was very cute.

“I want to be tall not cute,” Matt snapped at him. “Everyone else is tall, yes?”

Jack pet his hair tenderly.

“You’re plenty tall,” he said.

Matt patted at his face.

“You’re lying,” he said. “I want to be tall.”

“You’re perfect as you are, honey.”

“How tall was your dad?”

“You’re perfect, Matty.”

Matt was horrified. He turned to Foggy on the verge of tears.

“I am a shrimp,” he whimpered.

Matt’s grandpa, on the rare occasion that he was standing, was around 6’ 3”, Jack admitted. He himself was about 6’1”. Both of his brothers were taller than that, and his sisters, he thought he remembered being around 5’10.

Matt sought out more information and came back from Sister Maggie with the same information that Jack bestowed upon Foggy and Karen in his absence.

No one in Sister Maggie’s family was taller than 5’8”.

“WHY,” Matt said, shaking Jack by the shirt upon arrival home from his mission.

“Let go,” Jack said, inhumanly patient once again. “I told you, you’re fine. You’re lucky that your mama’s genes went mostly to your head. Let go.”

Matt dropped down and sprawled himself out all over the couch next to Jack to show the world through his body the level of trauma he was experiencing. Jack ruined the effect by petting at his hair.

“At least you’re not so ginger anymore,” he said.

Matt made a sound of disgust and batted away his hand.

“Half as many freckles,” Jack teased.

“That’s your fault, too, why do you hate me?” Matt moaned.

“I don’t hate you.”

“You obviously do. I want. To be. Tall.”

“Matt, this affects you in no way. You’re average height. A perfectly normal—”

“I’m not average, Dad. I’ve never been average. Or normal. Fuck normal.”

Jack gave up at that point, which was fair. Even Foggy could see that this conversation was going nowhere anytime soon.

“I did want to say thanks,” Jack told Foggy and Karen over Matt’s pouting. “It was really good to see Bill again. He hasn’t changed much. It,” he creaked and swallowed and the gesture made Foggy’s throat hurt a little bit.

“It means a lot,” Jack finished.

“Anytime,” Karen said a bit watery, herself.

“For real, anytime,” Foggy said.

“Next time, just ask,” Matt’s muffled voice growled from the couch cushion. Jack laughed and ruffled his hair.