in technicolor

Brett had started a notebook. A notebook which his goddamn nephew had already dug out of his bag and drawn all over in crayon. But a notebook no less.

In it, he’d started keeping track of all the weird shit he was learning through his ever increasing exposure to the underbelly of the New York crime scene.

Daredevil’s overwhelming fondness for coffee had made it in there. So had Brett’s recent discovery that Spidey could be persuaded into doing some worryingly complex chemical tests if provided with a large enough vessel of resin.

Stark did not allow the boy to have resin. Brett thought that there was maybe a good reason for that, but it wasn’t his job to enforce lab safety. It was his job to catch serial rapists.

Jessica Jones, he’d also learned, would be two thousand percent more likely to cooperate with officers if she was not awoken before noon. Luke Cage, similarly, worked a night job and appreciated not having some asshole pounding down his door before 10am.

There were, in fact, two Hawkeyes and yes, they were both called Hawkeye and no, you should not even bother questioning that. Also, one of those Hawkeyes was deaf, but Fogs wouldn’t tell him which one, he said he’d figure it out on his own.

Brett had come to learn that Frank Castle was the human equivalent of Gollum and he could be coaxed forth from one of his many caves only through Karen Page.

Only.

Unless. You were extremely desperate, in which case you might be able to call Daredevil and alert him of the man’s presence in the city. DD would find the guy. You just had to be prepared to lay on him before he could pick a fight and ruin everyone’s day.

If you were desperately desperate too, Brett had learned, you could find Deadpool through Spidey. Little Peter seemed to know where he was at all times, even though he claimed he didn’t. In order to extract this information from Peter, however, you needed to present your case very, very thoroughly. If you didn’t make it exceedingly clear that this was beyond Spiderman’s abilities or that it involved something especially Peter-repellent, then Peter would lie to your face about contacting Deadpool and would meet you at your arranged place himself.

Brett had very few notes on how to work with Deadpool.

Mostly because reliability and logic didn’t seem to be his strong suit. He did things because he wanted to and he didn’t do them when he didn’t. It depended on the day. It depended on how he was feeling. It depended on who he’d just spent the last 72 hours with.

If it was the X-men, you weren’t going to find him. He wasn’t going to entertain anything you said.

If it was what he called his A-Team, there was absolutely no telling whether he’d be amenable to lending support or not.

If it was Team Red, as they called himself, the combination of DD and Spidey making pathetic “but Wade” sounds at him seemed to appeal to his ever wandering better nature.

The captain decided that he was pleased with all of Brett’s progress except on the Deadpool front and assigned him the task of collecting better intel.

Brett informed him that that was fine, but that it didn’t matter how hard the captain wished it, some of these guys weren’t going to give up their secrets or cooperate. They just weren’t. They weren’t interested in justice. They weren’t interested in the system as it was. They hated the police for a thousand different reasons. And many of them were simply not going to do it because they didn’t want to.

It was as easy as that.

Deadpool was one of those guys. He ran in an entirely different world from most of the other guys and he was very, very happy with that, and he was ambivalent at best at above-ground crime and justice.

The captain thought that the recent breakthrough in getting vigilantes to pitch in a little towards more legitimate crime-solving would sway Deadpool on this issue. He said that he believed there was some good in the guy and that if he was any decent kind of person, he’d want to help out.

Yeah, Brett though, maybe if one of his buddies is the target. But otherwise, no pal. You’re barking up the least productive tree in the goddamn forest.

The captain informed him that he was not an expert in this area and told him to provide one or follow orders.

Huh. Now there’s a thought.

Brett, as the up-and-coming vigilante-whisperer of his force (he fucking hated this title and hated that everyone had decided that he was the one for this shitty fucking job—you get two vigilantes to talk to you and all of the sudden you’re the fucking point person for all the goddamn underground folks in the city), found himself in the unique position of reporting on Foggy’s relationship with one Matthew Murdock in exchange for Anna Nelson’s seemingly unfailing ability to make Foggy talk to him about this shit.

Fogs was displeased.

So.

So.

Displeased.

Karma’s a bitch, ain’t it, pal?

This put Brett in a very good position to knock on Foggy’s door and be let in, which he did. Because he legitimately needed to shift this burden from his shoulders.

Fogs opened the door and said that Brett could come in on the condition he helped him with something.

Brett did not like the sound of something.

He was correct.

“Dude, it’s infected,” he pronounced.

“You shut your whore mouth,” Foggy snapped back.

Fogs had spent half of their teenage years begging his mom to let him get an industrial piercing. She’d allowed the ear piercings and had even let him test the waters with a single lip piercing, but she drew the line at the industrial. She could get the rings, but she could not understand why he wanted a bar stamped through his ear as well.

Something about law school—likely an in-depth, highly personalized conversation about professionalism—had made all the metal Fogs had once delighted in terrifying their classmates with fall out of his face. He’d come home to pick up some books three weeks into attending Columbia and Brett, in passing, had nearly punched him in the jaw, having mistaken him as someone trying to break into the Nelson’s family home.

It had taken him ages to see past Foggy’s lip piercing as a kid and now he was still blown away when it wasn’t there.

Fogs claimed that him being a partner at Nelson, Murdock & Page meant that he got to write his own damn dress code for once and his damn dress code included hair to your toes and goddamn industrial piercings.

Hence the present situation.

“It’s probably your fucking hair that did it,” Brett thought out loud. Mostly just to see the scandalized look on Fog’s face.

It would never not be gratifying.

“I need saline,” Foggy decided miserably after bestowing this gift upon Brett. “Do I have saline?”

Fogs did indeed have saline in his absurd first aid kit. Seriously, there was no reason for this much gauze.

Whatever. It didn’t matter.

He commenced attempting to convince Fogs that the best way to soak his ear was to put his ear in a dish of saline rather than just dropping the saline onto the skin, so that he’d douse his face when Brett asked him what he needed to.

Foggy stared at him in disgust and then called his nurse friend to verify this information.

Goddamnit.

“Are there vigilante experts?” he finally asked Foggy and the towel-wrapped ice cube he was holding to his ear.

Fogs shrugged.

“I mean, it’s probably a field of study by this point,” he said. He moved the ice cube to the other hole.

“How do you know all this shit about these people then?”

Foggy shrugged again.

“I just talk to them, man. They come to me, enter my life, and refuse to leave it. Like herpes, I’m telling you. Honestly? I think we’re all friends at this point.”

Huh.

Okay.

Wait.

“You’re friends with the Punisher? That guy ruined your career.”

Foggy scoffed.

“He also fixed the fault in the office and keeps the shitheads from our door, so, you know. I dunno if I’d go as far as friends for me and him. But he’s Karen’s friend, so what can I do?”

Not fucking be friends.

This was not talk Foggy understood. He waved it off like it didn’t mean anything and returned to the earlier topic thoughtfully.

“I wonder how’d they’d study them, these experts,” he hummed, “Like, obviously a survey ain’t gonna do the trick here. So what, interviews? Let’s sit down the Spiderman and the Punisher and see what they think about life?”

Yeah, it sounded pretty nuts now that he thought about it.

“Hey, google it,” Fogs encouraged him. His ear only looked redder from the ice and the infection. Brett got out his phone and took a picture of it to send to Mrs. Nelson before complying over Foggy’s vocal irritation.

Google said that a joint team of scholars at CUNY and Columbia were actually trying to study NYC’s unusually large and active vigilante population as they spoke.

Their website was fucking wild.

They had a counter of “encounters” which documented the exact issue he and Fogs had been throwing around earlier.

“Subject amenable to foodstuffs but not paperwork,” one student had logged in this box. “Accepted foodstuffs but then claimed that could not write with hands full. Researcher feels ‘duped.’”

“Subject agreed to speak, but only about The Shining,” wrote another poor soul.

“Subject appears to have hearing impairment. Repeatedly asked researcher to “sing us a song Mr. Piano Man.”

Brett and Foggy were dying by the end of it.

They were trying so hard.

“Maybe we should throw them a bone,” Foggy said.

Yeah, maybe they should.

Brett sent the group an email saying that he and his lawyer compatriot were currently working on cases which involved vigilantes and were interested in the research being done in the city. They were willing to provide some interviews of their experiences in exchange for being alerted of any significant findings.

Brett got an email back almost one hour later.

It was painfully formal and had obviously been written by a group of folks crowded around a computer bursting with anxiety and shifting commas like their lives depended on it.

He messaged Fogs about this develop and got back a “that was fast.”

They agreed to speak with the students the following week.

Four professors, two post-docs, and a bevy of grad students were dying to talk to him and Fogs that following Friday.

As soon as Foggy entered the room, they were freaking out, telling him how valuable his court cases had been to their research.

He was surprised. It took him a little while to remember all the shit in the public record that had his name on it.

Brett stayed out of this shit because he was still new to the game.

They gave what they thought were fair evaluations and answers to the questions posed.

Some of the stuff was pretty fucking weird and esoteric.

“Has Daredevil ever exposed any religious leanings to you?” they asked. Foggy hummed and hawed and finally said,

“Well, he’s told me once that he believed himself to be possessed by a demon in the past.”

And one of the students clutched her heart, apparently unspeakably relieved that her analysis was still valid.

“Spiderman appears to be very lean, do you think there might be the possibility of an eating disorder there? Maybe some control issues? Has anything he’s ever done led you to believe either of those things might be true?” they asked Brett.

No. Pete would eat anything handed to him, provided it did not contain cilantro or celery. Brett had found this knowledge more useful than it had any right to be.

“No, I have bribed him with every food under the sun and he’s been more than happy to wolf it down,” he explained to furious note-taking. “Pretty sure he’s just like that because of his mutation. If you really want his attention, I recommend calorie-dense things. Ice cream. Hamburgers. That kind of thing.”

They asked Fogs if the Punisher had ever expressed any remorse for his actions and Foggy was so taken aback by the question, it took him several times to get out an answer.

“Frank is not a bad person,” he finally said. “He’s not a psychopath. He’s got a lot of trauma and he’s able to compartmentalize things which he does and things with happen to him better than the average person, maybe, but he’s not a monster. He doesn’t manipulate people or anything like that, and if you’re one of his people, he’ll do anything for you. I know it’s hard to reconcile that with that he’s done, but. He’s just. That’s just who he is.”

And so on and so on.

They were informed that this information, bizarre as it seemed, would be indescribably helpful to the study and that the two of them would be alerted of any findings as soon as possible.

They thanked the group and were thanked in return and left.

Six weeks later saw the captain trying to understand why the fuck Deadpool had graffitied a massive, purple cock and balls on their station window (Brett knew exactly why and it had to do with the new detective Goldberg trying and failing to arrest Wilson spectacularly the night previous. His hubris was now being rewarded by antagonism. He’d learn.), when Brett got an email from the research group followed by a text from Foggy.

FN: k, I know what your thinking

FN:  but fogs you jut got a piercing

FN: but consider, brett, how much improved my sex life would be with another tongue piercing

He had not, nor ever intended to consider this. He informed Fogs of this and received a frowny face.

FN: okay but srs question you think Matt would freak?

FN: I miss it brett

FN: I miss it so much I never told him I had one and i’m scared he’s gotta tap out

FN: BRETT I’M IN CRISIS WHAT IF HE DOESN’T LIKE IT

Okay, this sounded like a drink conversation.

They determined over several beers and a few shots that Matt was the same guy who’d fucked his merry way through half the grad students at Columbia and at least a quarter of his undergrad department and so was probably into all kinds of kinky shit. Probably.

Brett honestly could not imagine Murdock as a kinky guy, but Fogs was concerned, so he went along with it for his peace of mind.

“It’s a piercing, Fogs,” he slurred, “Not BDSM. Oh. Also those students got back to us. Said that they’ve ‘employed some of the suggested techniques and found them far more fruitful.’ They wanted to say thanks again.”

“Wait ‘til they try to talk to Wade,” Foggy giggled.

“Dude, he went for like, veins and everything on the window.”

Fogs did not choke on his drink, but it was a near thing.

Maynard was judging him for all the cups of coffee on his desk and accusing him of colluding with the enemy when the captain came out and demanded that Brett tell him everything he knew about Wade Wilson.

Brett stared at him and opened his once gray, now tie-dye notebook (courtesy of Amos, thank you so much, honey. Uncle Brett loves rainbow) to read off his limited information on Deadpool. It had not changed since the last time the captain demanded this information.

“Call Spidey in then,” Captain griped.

A thud and a squeak attracted their attention and they looked up to see Wade Wilson himself reapplying an enormous, pink, inelegant dick to the window which the captain had personally power-washed the day before.

He froze upon noticing everyone in the office staring directly at him through the window and then flattened himself onto it to make an even lewder demonstration of himself.

Brett addressed the captain.

“You really want to work with that, sir?”

No?

Yeah, that’s what he fucking thought.

No amount of expert opinion or applied theory was going to crack that one.