in technicolor

It was prom season.

AKA Brett’s personal hell.

People could prattle on about young love and archaic courtship rituals and rites of passage all they wanted, Brett would not be swayed. If these were the purposes of prom, then Brett’s cousin Sasha lived in a constant state of it on Instagram.  And if he saw one more picture of her squatting in an alley, he was going to initiate a frank, cousin-ly discussion with her about where lots of folks went to die at night.

She wasn’t gonna like it. And he was just going to add fuel to the ‘killjoy cousin’ fire he had going on in extended family circles. (“Brett, be nice to your cousins; they’re young.” “You know what else they are, mom? Stupid.”)

The first client in his personal hell showed up that Wednesday. Brett dropped the file he’d been working on onto his desk and leaned his elbows on the other folders piled up there so that the young man sitting across from him would pay attention.

“Son,” he said slowly, “Do I look like I have time for this?”

The kid squirmed in his too big, be-flowered suit and ultimately dropped his gaze to his lap.

“You see all these files?” Brett asked him.

The kid glanced up and away as quickly as possible.

“Yes, sir,” he said, which was a far cry from how he’d been talking to Brett’s officers five minutes ago.

“What do you think these files are for?” Brett pressed.

“I dunno, some, uh. Murder?”

Brett stared the kid down.

The kid had the appropriate reaction. Brett leaned back in his chair.

“You’re absolutely right,” he said. “Murdered. Each and every one of them is dead, dying, or working real hard to get there. So do you think me sitting here with you ‘cause you decided to raise a little hell to impress your buddies is a good use of my time?”

Silence.

He cleared his throat.

“No, sir.”

Damn, right.

“That’s what I hoped you’d say,” he said as controlled as he could, “So here are your options. You walk over there and apologize to my officers for being disruptive, we keep the skateboard, and you get to call your mama to come all the way down here from Queens. No harm, no foul. Or you sit for a minute in the cell with Big Billy over there.”

Big Billy let loose another string of slurred expletives right on cue and tried to punch the cell door again.

The kid pulled at his collar and bowtie.

“I’ll say sorry, sir,” he mumbled.

Uh-huh. Good choice.

One down, twenty million to go.

He had a wave of them, mostly from up north because while prom happened over a period of three weeks or so, the guys up north usually claimed the first week as their own. All the venues up there were booked solid. Kids every type of under- and over-dressed flocked the streets at night. Stations all over called requesting back up to help contain the veritable blanket of youth and painful color choices from upsetting the nocturnal law and order.

And upset it they did.

Brett got a call over the radio, screeching for him to get his happy ass over to Claremont because Frank Castle had been spotted by a group of highschools from Horace Mann up that way. Prom made highschoolers feel invincible in general, but these highschoolers in particular decided that their wild and crazy night would only be improved by a little vigilante justice.

I.e. Frank Castle had found himself in a stand off with thirty juniors and seniors in the Bronx and he was trying, bless his soul, to be gentle about ruining their night, but he really had a fellow terrorist to catch.

Shots were fired.

Brett knew Castle well enough by that point to know that they were fired in the air.

But still. Shots fired. Brett had to go.

Castle wasn’t the only vigilante mobbed by teenage dedication, although he was the only one who told them all to scram or suffer the consequences. Luke Cage was a bit more chill about all the kids trying to take pictures with him on his doorstep. And that was fine until the kids realized that that was the Immortal Iron Fist who had just returned to his place, complaining, from McDonald’s. Sasha posted a picture on Instagram of him hugging his McDonald’s bag to his chest and glaring down at her and her friends from the top of a telephone pole.

Brett didn’t know how to spread the message to all these kids that, just because they were allowed out past curfew for once did not mean that vigilantes had to accommodate or appreciate this.

Bafflingly, most of the kids in the city seemed to have decided that their local night goblins had hearts of gold deep down in there. Either that or kids were just afraid of nothing and no one anymore. First Castle, then Rand, now Jones. Rand’s picture was in the news by the next morning and that set off a city-wide competition among the youth as to who could get the most prom pictures with vigilantes and superheroes in one night.

Poor Cap.

He was so blonde. And so easy to find over all them heads in Brooklyn. The guy made the papers too, although his title was “Local Hero Flocked by Highschool Enthusiasts on Subway.”

Someone made a facebook page called “Leave Steve Rogers Alone,” with the thoughtful subscript: “seriously, the guy’s just trying to live his goddamn life,” which got thousands of followers overnight. Cap liked the page and then, apparently at the behest of his publicist, posted a short message on his twitter account saying that he was flattered by the enthusiasm, but would kindly request a little more discretion.

Barnes replied to the message with “He ain’t shit anyways, kids. me and @SWilson are here for all your picture-taking needs. We’re gonna be in Bryant Park on Wed. 9-11. Come say hey. We’ll wear matching suits.”

Anyone with eyes could tell that this was the result of Cap’s publicist making a phone call, but prom-goers didn’t appear to care too much. They demanded to know what color suits Wilson and Barnes would be wearing.

You know, the real important stuff.

Sasha asked Brett to ask his mom if she could spend the night in Hell’s Kitchen to be closer to this action. Sasha’s dad long-sufferingly apologized for his daughter in a separate text and said that she and her friends were just really into this whole superhero formalwear thing.

Yeah, no shit.

“You should dress DD up in a suit,” Brett told Foggy as they watched the news over the counter at Josie’s. “He could be the next internet sensation.”

Foggy raised an eyebrow at the series of red, webbed suits and dresses a group of kids in Queens had assembled for their big day. They were beyond proud to show off to the reporter. Brett hoped Peter was somewhere losing his precious little shit.

“He’d want a red one,” Fogs said.

“Probably a bow tie, too,” Brett agreed.

“Oh, no. Definitely a bow tie.”

“We could get him a red one to match.”

“Nah, man. We should get him a cravat. Send him out like a 18^th century French lord or something.”

Brett thought about that. The kids on tv all opened their dress shirts to reveal spandex Spidey suits underneath.

“Only if he wears the horns,” he decided.

Sasha informed Brett, as he taught Amos how to make Mickey Mouse pancakes, that she knew he knew Spiderman and, as her favorite cousin, he had a moral obligation to introduce them.

Brett stared at her. Then flipped the pancake. Amos cheered.

“This is your chance to be the cool cousin,” Sasha negotiated.

“Girl, you already had your prom, he’s probably off at his,” he snapped. Then removed Amos from the counter to fetch pancake toppings from the fridge.

He only noticed the silence when he looked up.

Sasha stared at him like he was a target.

“His prom?” she repeated.

Aw, fuck.

“He has a prom? He goes to prom? He’s my age?”

Peter, buddy, I’m sorry. I am not to be trusted either.

He sighed. Amos tugged at his hand, having acquired maple syrup.

“Spiderman’s Sasha’s age?” he asked.

UGH. Children.

“I can neither confirm or deny—”

“OH MY GOD. I’m texting Naomi.”

Brett asked Foggy about it because he was honestly curious himself now and Foggy texted back an adorable picture of Peter trying to escape his aunt’s attempts to slick back his hair, taken apparently by his date.

“Volume is in,” Foggy wrote back.

Ah.

“Who’s he going with?” he asked.

“Our office assistant MJ. They’re best friends. She told him that they’re wearing yellow and that’s that. He’s been moping for weeks. She’s so proud of herself.”

Yellow was a pretty strong color, Brett didn’t blame him too much.

“IS THAT SPIDERMAN?”

He held the phone above his head so Sasha couldn’t see it. Amos thought this was the height of comedy and the two of them made enough racket that Brett’s mom came down to see what the fuss was about.

“I’m disowning you if you don’t introduce me to Spiderman,” Sasha threatened. Brett tried to appeal to his mother’s argument-ending sensibilities with his eyes.

“Let me see,” she said.

Brett held the groan back behind his teeth. He knew better. This would not end well. But still. His mama.

He made sure that she understood the ramifications of what he was about to show her and announced that he would only do it if the kitchen door was closed. The kitchen door was closed. Amos and Sasha whined outside it.

His mom laughed and smiled as he opened up the picture again to show her.

“Aw,” she said, laying her hand on her heart, “He’s just a baby isn’t he? Where’s his date?”

Brett showed her the following picture Fogs had sent of Peter with his arm around the waist of a sweet-looking light-skinned girl in a yellow dress. She was taller than him, and she didn’t appear to be wearing heels.

His mom was so charmed. The apples of her cheeks stood out in her face as she delicately handed the phone back.

“They’re a handsome couple,” she said. “He’s going to grow up big, that one. You can see it in his shoulders.”

Yeah. Yeah, he was. Brett could see it, too.

“Don’t show Sasha, lord knows she’s got enough boys to crush on.”

Roger that.

“I hate you,” Sasha announced when he and his mom reopened the kitchen door.

“Does Spiderman have a girlfriend?” Amos asked. Sasha scoffed at him.

“Only losers to go prom alone,” she said.

“Spiderman is going to prom with his best friend,” Brett told Amos. Amos beamed up at him. Sasha grumbled.

“Is she hot?” she asked. “Can I see the best friend? What color are they wearing?”

Again, obviously the most important question.

“Yellow,” he said. That was harmless.

“Ugh, yellow? Who wears yellow to prom? He should have worn red.”

“Maybe he’s tired of red,” Amos offered helpfully.

“Well if he was tired of it, he should just change his suit.”

Brett tried to imagine Peter in a yellow suit. He just looked like a power ranger. He muffled his snort and determined that it was time to eat.

“Brett.”

“Sasha, it’s not gonna happen.”

“Okay, but consider this: if Spiderman ditches his date, then I can seduce him and he can be part of this family and then you can bully him to your heart’s desire.”

Ah. Yes, tempting. He’d always wanted a tiny, violent second cousin with zero regard for the law.

“Pass.”

“Ugh, you’re useless to me.”

Foggy posted six horrifying pictures on his facebook wall of them in highschool with the bright cheery text “LOOK WHAT I FOUND” plastered over top of them.

The primary option was to find those pictures and burn them, but now that they’d been posted, there was no hope. The only other options were to murder Fogs or to come up with a scathing, brilliant comeback.

Which, naturally, he had at the tip of his tongue.

Coworkers had already started freaking out and oozing all over the pictures before he could submit the comment, but he was satisfied once the deed had been done.

“Damn, I forgot how much of a theatre kid you were,” he wrote.

“Fuck you,” Foggy wrote back.

“Did Matt go to prom?” Brett asked over tense, ceasefire drinks the next day. Foggy pouted at him.

“Matt says that prom is an ableist, patriarchal institution that he’ll have no part in propagating.”

Uh.

“Not 100% sold here.”

“Yeah, me neither. Broke him down. It’s not a nice story.”

“Oh?”

Foggy drew lines through the condensation on his drink.

“He was in on a suicide hold during his junior prom.”

Fuck.

“Yeah.”

Damn. Had Matt ever done anything wholesome in his life?

“Yeah, no. He said that he couldn’t do senior prom because he had a court date to get emancipated, but that didn’t pan out for him.”

Good god.

“Maybe we should have a prom,” Brett thought out loud.

Foggy paused in massaging his drink to stare at him. He beamed.

“Brett, you’re a genius sometimes,” he said.

“Noooooooooooo,” Brett had never heard someone so opposed to having fun in his life. Hell, half the station had been totally down without question, although a lot of that was borne of the desire to embarrass the ever-loving shit out of their children. Ellen had rushed off to get her old prom dress out of her mother’s attic for the sole purpose of seeing her twin girls cringe.

“Foggy, why? I am so happy being miserable,” Matt moaned into his desk, clutching the corners so he could not be removed from it.

Foggy huffed at him.

“We are going to take pictures. We are going to eat food. And we are going to go clubbing,” he said, “You like almost two-thirds of that agenda. You’re going to be fine.”

“But the misery? What will the misery do without me? Who will keep it safe?”

God.

Murdock must have been a theatre kid, too.

“Fuck you, I was an emo kid.”

Right, duly noted.

“How the hell can you be emo in Catholic School? Didn’t y’all have uniforms or something?” Brett asked.

He got a nasty expression in return.

“I don’t remember, I was highly medicated during the whole of it.”

Naturally.

“Dopamine is good for you,” Foggy barked. He dug his arms under Matt’s armpits and Matt clung harder to the desk and started kind of rumbling like a mad cat. “Up.”

Brett saw no less than four of his juvenile offenders on the way to the restaurant with Maynard’s arm in his. She’d gone out and purchased the most sparkly, low-backed dress she could find. It was navy blue and stunning. Her husband told her at the door that she looked like Audrey Hepburn.

It was probably the hairpiece that did it.

The kids didn’t want to make eye contact, but Brett had an example to set here, and so stared them down as he passed them. He wanted to be sure that they understood that it was, in fact, possible to wear fancy clothes and not make a fool of yourself all at the same time.

Karen looked like a model in peach waiting outside the restaurant with Jessica Jones’s sister, Trish Walker, who was apparently her date. Brett kind of got it. She couldn’t very well bring Castle, could she?

Two seconds in the presence of those two brought Brett to the intriguing conclusion that Trish Walker had a fat crush on Karen and she was doing a piss poor job of containing it. She couldn’t seem to decide where her hands were supposed to go in the gray suit she’d worn, nor could she remember not to stare open-mouthed at Karen’s profile.

C’mon, girl. At least, like, try to be cool about it.

Karen turned into an angry, flapping swan upon Foggy’s arrival. He’d wrangled Matt into a bowtie, and Matt looked like he’d rather be exploring a sewer. He held onto Foggy’s elbow less casually than usual, if only because he needed his hand to be free to help him exude pouting vibes from his entire body.

A handful of other attorneys and officers showed up to join what they had fondly called ‘The Ceasefire Event of the Year.’

It was pretty good. They had dinner. They had drinks. They traded horrible stories with attorneys, many of whom had equally horrible stories, and then they went out dancing and Brett got to witness Matt suffering in a restaurant, a bar, and a club.

It was a good night.

It was interrupted, of course, by a gang trying to shoot up a load of known officers and attorneys in the middle of the city. So that was fun.

Or panic. It was panic, too.

Mostly because a load of officers and attorneys weren’t stupid and Ellen had had her old prom dress tailored to include a pocket for her pistol. Ellen was always one step ahead of everyone, that way.

Matt finally, finally perked up once people started screaming. And Brett blinked and he was gone. Leaving Foggy in Karen’s loving protection. Fogs didn’t seem concerned.

And in the end there was no reason to be because at some point in the shouting, Matt bumbled his way right through the whole gang’s party and smashed like, three drinks in the process, which allowed him to apologize as loudly as he could. Turns out dumping a drink down someone’s ass is an excellent distraction from the task in front of them.

Ellen took the opportunity to draw her weapon and was followed by whoever else had one.

The standoff intensified.

Until Matt made his merry way back from the bar and ‘mistakenly’ wrapped his arm around someone who was very much not Foggy’s waist. He started flirting. The guy was stunned stupid. Matt asked him why everyone was standing all quiet and it really threw off the other side’s momentum when the guy in front of him turned back a little to explain that they were kind of trying to kill all these officers.

“Oh,” Matt said, “I see. I see. Well, okay. What happens if you kill them?”

A pause.

“They die?” One of the guys over there answered.

“Ah, right. And then what?”

Another pause.

“They—we—uh. Bury them?”

“Bury them?” Matt asked. “Aren’t they a load of cops—hold on, sorry—Are you guys a load of cops?”

What.

“Yeah, we’re half cops,” Foggy said for everyone. Maynard and Ellen gave Brett a firm look which translated to ‘silence your frenemy.’ He could only shrug helplessly at them. Neither Fogs nor Matt could be stopped when they got going.

“Oh, I see,” Matt said. “Right, so. Has any one over there already called for backup?”

Some civilian patron pressed up against the far wall coughed.

“Well, yeah,” Maynard said.

“Right, right,” Matt hummed. He turned to the guy next to him and elbowed him in the ribs, “Like, practically speaking, I don’t think you got time to bury these guys, man. I’m thinking a hit and run’s gonna be more up your alley right now.”

The people around him took a moment to stare at him.

“Either that or you could not shoot?” Matt tried. “Like, legally speaking, this is probably your best option. I mean, knick one of them bastards and you’re looking at a felony for aggravated assault and I’m pretty sure this place has a surveillance camera. But I’d need to confirm that, here, let me confirm—hey Fogs?”

“Yeah?”

“Is there a surveillance thing?”

“Yeah.”

“Any witnesses?”

“Oh, Imma say about thirty or so, not counting all of us.”

Matt sucked in a breath through his teeth and leaned onto his new friend’s shoulder to tell him out of the corner of his mouth, “So that’s not great.”

He patted at the guy’s shoulder cheerfully. “But it’s totally up to you, man. You do your thing, hey, but before you do that, you think you could give me a hand back over there? My boo’s the one with the blond hair. Purple—no blue—is it blue? I dunno—Fogs what color tie are you wearing?”

The guy didn’t know what the fuck had happened, and to be fair, Brett wasn’t quite sure he had either, but, to his credit, the man did stiffly walk Matt back across the line into Foggy’s safe hands. Matt called him an upstanding gentlemen. And? He seemed? To blush?

Sirens sounded outside.

Matt’s evening had been improved by 2000%. He was all smiles from that moment out. At the dive bar they’d all given up and migrated to, he sat primly and happily in Foggy’s lap and beamed at his whiskey like the cat that got the cream.

Foggy even got a few public kisses, which was just about scandalous for Matt Murdock.

Public displays of affection? Open lap-sitting?

Damn. Boy was one drink away from the best night of his life.

“I’m calling it a successful prom,” Foggy declared the next day, having lured Brett outside on his break with a cup of coffee.

Yeah, surprisingly, it had been pretty good.

Notwithstanding the Mexican stand off. But even that seemed like it had somehow improved the evening. Very James Bond-y.

“We should post all the pictures side by side the old ones. It’ll be like a glow-up thing.”

What the hell words were leaving Foggy’s mouth now?

“Glow up, Brett. Are you serious?”

Yes. That sounded like something involving worms.

“No, you dinosaur. It’s like when us ugly ducklings turn into beautiful swans. You put the pictures side by side so folks can appreciate your transformation.”

Ah. Okay.

“Okay?”

Yeah.

“Perfect. I’m doing it now.”

Wait. Wait, no. That hadn’t been permission.

“Ah, no takes-backsies. Anyways, my breaks over, I’ll see you around, man.”

“Fogs, don’t you dare post more highschool pictures.”

“What? Sorry, can’t hear you. Break. Over. Gotta run. Bye, Brett, I love you!”

“FOGS.”