When you knew what to look for, it was always easier to dig up blackmail.
Not that Karen would know. She certainly had nothing to do with her last supervisor’s firing.
It also wasn’t like she had an opinion on Jess’s idea of subtlety and that opinion was that it was hopelessly lacking.
“Relax, I’m already a screw-up, they’ll expect this kind of shit from me,” Jess told her as she up-ended the contents of a filing cabinet. She dug through it with glee, and, Karen suspected, little intention of finding any relevant material.
“You gonna stand there or are you gonna help?” Jess asked, flipping through folders.
Karen sighed and started skimming through documents with her.
Three days, Matt said. There was no way they were going to meet that timeline with all this stuff.
She flipped through some pages; they were all dated post-2010 and were copies of immunization records and transcripts from other schools. She decided to let Jess handle that situation and tugged on the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. It stuck. She tugged again.
It was locked.
“Jess? Locked drawer?” she asked.
Jess glanced over and yanked the drawer open as though it was as well oiled as any other (which was not well-oiled at all) and returned to the documents. She dropped two folders onto the desk behind them and carried on. She hadn’t exactly told Karen she had superpowers as such, but she didn’t hide it either.
The folders in the bottom drawer were marked with colored dots at the top. Karen pulled out one and flipped it open. Inside was an immunization record, a photo of a beaming guy with neat hair, and a yellow, tri-folded gridded paper. She opened the paper and discovered that it was a report card. A code was stamped across the top and in the ‘comments’ box someone had hastily scrawled, ‘Confirmed’ and a date and ‘referred to Intervention’ and another date.
She hummed and held out the report card to Jess, who took it and returned a pleased sound. It was just shy of a purr.
“Photocopy all of them. I’m gonna tell Mabel we’re doing some spring cleaning tomorrow.”
Jess’s fake customer service voice was a thing of nightmares, but it got them a pat on the head and left alone for most of the following day. It certainly wasn’t enough time to get all of the copies done, but it was enough to stash about fifty especially compelling ones in Jess’s oversized tote.
Karen decided she might need an ungodly tote bag in the future, but Jess absolutely refused to tell Karen where she’d bought it. So, obviously Karen’s mind suggested that it was a converted body bag. She had to course-correct that one: Jess was not a murderer. Jess was not a murderer. Jess was a spy. It was probably a gun bag.
“We won’t need Murdock at this rate,” Jess told told Karen as she fed papers to the copy machine. Karen huffed. Matt was trying his best.
And look, speak of the devil.
Wow, in new Kevlar and in a hurry.
He looked good in red, Karen mused, although the black had certainly done things for his figure. He also looked a little harried as he half-dragged, half-carried someone who she was pretty sure was Danny just out of view of the security cameras.
She heard a door shut.
Jess raised an eyebrow in their direction.
“He’s not exactly subtle, is he?” she said.
About half an hour later, Karen went over to the room which she was pretty sure Matt had spirited Danny away to and listened. She couldn’t hear anything. She opened the door.
There was no one inside.
On the table in the room’s center was a piece of torn binder paper. There was a box with wires and extra processors in it tucked under the room’s monitor, but even that looked undisturbed. She picked up the paper and carried it to the recycling bin. When she got back to her desk, the piece of paper’s mate was sitting under her keyboard.
She picked it up to throw it away and saw that there were words written on the other side.
My name is Daniel Thomas Rand.
I was sold to Advancement a year ago after a confrontation with some people who have a problem with me. Before this, I was officially missing in the United States. It’s a long story. I survived the accident which killed my family and joined a monastery. Mr. Murdock has informed me that this is the most ridiculous thing he thinks he’s ever heard, and I don’t think he believes me, but I swear, I’m not lying. I got back to the US with my friend, Colleen Wing, about a year and a half ago. Please talk to Colleen for more information (she is my next of kin). She knows what happened. If anything happens to me, please tell her everything.
Mr. Murdock has asked me if I regret the decision to commit to Advancement, and I want to make this very clear: I didn’t consent to anything. The organization I mentioned before needed me out of the way. They wounded me and then sold my body to the institute. While the institute must be destroyed, those people must be as well. They call themselves the Hand.
-Danny Rand
“Jess,” Karen called over her shoulder, “Danny’s a monk.”
“Of course he is,” Jess said. She pattered over and took the note out of Karen’s hand and read it. “Make a copy for me.”
She went back to sorting through papers. Karen dug through their phone records to find the number Ms. Wing called from every other day.
It barely took her two rings to pick up, as if she’d been waiting by the phone for hours.
“Hello Ms. Wing, this is Karen Page from Advancement Technical Institute. I understand you’d like to lodge a complaint? Yes, it’s about Danny. Well, I can’t promise anything, but let me give you the email of someone I know in management. I think she might be available to talk to you.”
Karen was going to have a word with Matt about subtlety as soon as she was done having a word with Jess about it.
Jess told her that they’d talk after she and Hogarth had lunch. She hoisted her bag over her shoulder and cheerfully set off out the door with such nonchalance that Karen wondered how this institute had survived so long with such shitty security.
Matt told her, standing in front of the front desk with enough tension in his shoulders to appear mostly android to the camera, that all the security was in the labs. He then informed her that he was there, as a reward for good behavior, to collect the robotics departments’ mail. He fumbled the hand-off, though, and spilled the mail all over her desk. He hurriedly collected it, thanked her, and wandered off, taking with it her keys and the USB drive she’d attached to them.
She only noticed the latter two were missing when she tried to unlock the staff bathroom before she took her lunch.
She’d tossed up her hands and treated herself to a sub and a coffee in the nearby shopping center. When she got back she found her keys and drive in one of the inter-office envelopes in the mailbox. She checked the drive and found an audio file she didn’t remember downloading. She emailed it to herself with her personal email and listened to the first few seconds of it on her phone.
“My name is Luke,” a deep baritone murmured to her. “And if you ever try to tase me again, you and me are gonna have a problem.”
“Really sorry,” Matt’s voice offered.
“No, you’re not.”
“No, I’m not. You said you’d answer some questions for me, Mr, uh?”
“Cage. And no, that’s not how this is going to work. I have some questions for you.”
Karen exited out of the file but left in her headphones for the cameras. She forwarded the email to Jess and opened up her music app to try to calm her heart.
Karen texted Foggy because she needed moral support and when confronted with emotions, Jess shrugged and asked her if she wanted her to sneak in a bottle of whiskey.
Foggy told her that they’d just gotten Luke’s interview and that it was heartbreaking. He didn’t recommend her listening to the whole thing unless she really wanted to.
The guy had been framed and imprisoned multiple times. He’d been experimented on during that time, his wife had been killed, and then he’d lost the bar they’d owned in an arson incident. Someone offered him a job bartending for an event at a local nightclub and he took it for the extra cash. He took a shot with the club’s owner before he left for the night and felt woozy on the way home. He’d just set foot back in his apartment when it became clear to him that there were people waiting for him.
No, he hadn’t consented, who would consent to that kind of thing?
Yeah, he wanted out, he’d tried to revoke, too, but no one gave a shit.
Did he regret it? You can’t regret something you didn’t get a choice in making happen. You can grieve for it, though.
Foggy did mention that the highlight of the interview was how he’d nearly convinced Matt to use the taser on himself so that they were even, and Matt had fucking agreed before realizing that was a spectacularly bad idea. Luke had laughed hard and Foggy told her that he had a great laugh.
It was a little comforting.
The sailing was just a little too smooth and when something finally went wrong, Karen was shaken, but not surprised.
And whatever it was must have gone really wrong, because Karen and Jess looked up three hours before closing to see the robotics director hauling Matt by the scruff of the neck through the lobby like a 1930s headmaster. Matt was having a hard time finding purchase on the wooden floors.
It was all the more shocking because, while they’d known the old man was blind since all his mail came with braille, they hadn’t known he was superman.
Or maybe Matt was lighter than he looked. He was putting up a good fight, though, which couldn’t have made the dragging any easier.
“Don’t know what’s gotten into your fucking head, Matty, but we’re about to find out,” they heard the director growl as they passed through the hall.
Karen’s heart pounded in her ears. She heard a cut-off shout as the two disappeared around a corner and then the pounding of boots. They didn’t get too far before scuffling noises took over and another cut-off shout rang through the hall. A door slammed.
Jess looked at her.
“Well, I think that’s our cue,” she said as she dug out her phone.
It took ten minutes to get through to Hogarth for some reason. But when they did get ahold of her, she told them to stay put and to carry on doing what they were doing. Make the roster, sort the mail, look scared, but don’t kick up a fuss. They’d done great and Matt had done good and given the updates he’d sent the Columbia team, it seemed that he’d been in the process of encrypting some information that Advancement didn’t want getting out when someone had finally noticed him acting weird.
She explained that the Columbia team was obviously freaking out, but they all had to stay calm. She assured them that everything would be fine. If the records she’d found in an archive in high management were right, Matt could handle whatever they threw at him.
But Karen hadn’t expected to actually hear what was happening to him. The director hadn’t taken him too far to deal with him and the confrontation filtered through the wall. It sounded…violent. Jess made like she wanted to cover her ears, but forced herself not to.
“Who is Foggy?” the director’s voice demanded, muffled as it filtered through layers of drywall. The following crash was not nearly as muffled.
This pattern occurred for several minutes before there was a pause.
“Stand the fuck down,” the director’s voice snarled faintly. Only silence responded.
“STAND THE FUCK DOWN,” he repeated, the statement reverberating throughout the lobby. Paper pushers started to gather out by the front desk to see what the trouble was about.
The door in the hallway flew open and Matt stumbled out, shoved by the director.
“Block C,” he barked behind him. Matt hunched deep in onto himself in the hall, but didn’t move. The director grabbed a fistful of his vest—didn’t grope for it like any other blind person might have—and shoved Matt towards the exit to the asphalt lot. It was the quickest way to the robotics lab. Matt stumbled but regained his footing. He held his ground, face trained on the director. Didn’t move until the director repeated the gesture.
“You’re not helping yourself, kid. Block C, now,” the old man growled.
“No!” Matt suddenly snapped.
Everything stood still. Bots never talked back.
“What did you say?” The director asked, deadly.
“No.” Matt repeated. He planted himself low, tension in his arms. Karen’s mind supplied the phrase ‘coiled like a spring.’
“Matty, you’re not gonna do this here,” the director told him. It sounded like an old argument.
Matt didn’t move.
“Make me,” he finally ground out. Karen’s stomach dropped. The old man smirked.
So the robotics director was not only a massive ass-hat, but also a fan of MMA. Maybe not a fan. Maybe a teacher. Some kind of professional; possibly an assassin. A professional, blind assassin.
Karen wasn’t sure anything was real anymore.
Matt put up a good fight—a really good fight which broke the lobby’s coffee table and smashed several floorboards, but the whole thing lasted less than two minutes. The director locked a hand around his throat and pushed him down, pinning him to the ground with it. Matt started making the noises he made when he had panicked in Foggy’s kitchen. He pulled at the hand, and tried to push himself up, but the director dropped down so his forearm choked Matt at the throat while his hand crushed Matt’s wrist in its grip. He worked at the vest and hiked up the underarmor shirt underneath to reveal the skin covering Matt’s chest and abs.
Matt seemed to have an idea of what was about to happen because he started struggling harder, synthetic muscles flexing. The hand pulling the director’s arm away from Matt’s neck abandoned the task and shoved at the hand peeling back the skin on his chest.
After a few attempts, the director lost patience and whipped around to switch arms pinning Matt so that he could grab the interfering hand and slam it hard enough against the floor to crack it.
Matt shouted out, but it wasn’t of pain. He tried to move the broken arm anyways, tried to work his other hand loose and tried to kick a leg out to get leverage. But it wasn’t working. Karen heard another crack as Matt’s boot collided with the floor, its laces a mess. She thought she saw a washer or a bolt roll away from it.
The director managed to unlock the panel on Matt’s chest and he dug a hand into the hollow. Matt’s struggles increase tri-fold.
Then he stopped.
He went limp, limbs sliding down to the floor. His head lolled to the side and his eyes half-closed. The director blew out a breath of air and stood up, shaking out his shoulders like he’d been doing laundry by hand. He sighed and tilted his head down as if examining his work.
“Move along,” he said to the room. It wasn’t a request. People cleared out.
Karen wanted to call the fucking cops or the FBI or SHIELD but Jess clamped a hand around her wrist and took a slow breath to set an example.
The director—Stick, Karen now realized—leaned over Matt and knocked his chest panel closed. He didn’t bother re-adjusting the vest or the shirt or closing Matt’s eyes all the way. He knelt down and gathered Matt up, pulling his torso forward, as a father would for a sleepy child. He braced himself and then hefted Matt up onto his shoulder, not even grunting at the weight as he stood.
Karen wondered if he was a bot himself.
He carried Matt’s body out the lobby door towards the lab.
Foggy got the call from Hogarth just after he got the call from Karen. Karen was in tears, sobbing in the back room of her office while Jess shushed her softly.
Matt was gone; he’d been shut down and taken away and Karen didn’t know what Stick would do to him. Hogarth kept saying he was going to be fine, but Foggy couldn’t tell if she was telling him or herself.
She instructed him and the others to come to a building in Manhattan and they all caught a bus and just as they got off, he got a text from Karen saying that she and Jess had been released early due to her being traumatized and sobbing all over everything. They were headed their way.
The Empathy Project lived in a hallway of offices on the fourth and fifth floor of a fairly small building. Hogarth’s office was blanketed by paper. Every flat surface was checked with text and images and two laptops were running, one with Luke’s audio on the screen.
Paralegals littered the room and greeted them wearily as they stepped in.
Hogarth was on the phone in a different office, and while the words were muddled, the tone was not. She was, Foggy decided, terrifying.
She came in the room telling the person on the phone to get every officer’s assigned number before sending them over. She said thanks but not goodbye.
“Mr. Murdock has done well, and so have our secretaries,” she announced, stepping around the maze of documents. “This is more than enough for probable cause, and plenty for an indictment. The CO Murdock brought in sang like a canary. Seems to have thought he was taking down Advancement. I’ve got family and friends of two thirds of these people saying they’ve been sighted since their missing persons reports were filed. Almost all of them were wearing a black suit of some description.”
“What about Matt?” Foggy asked. Hogarth leaned over her desk to tap on her computer.
“What about him?”
Foggy swallowed down as much fury as he could.
“What about him? Karen said he’s hurt. Stick strangled him and turned him off. Manually! If it was traumatic for Karen, can you imagine what it was like for him?”
Hogarth stared at him seriously and then dug through the papers on her desk. She held out a folder with a square picture of Matt paperclipped to the outside. It wasn’t a picture Foggy recognized from when he’d done research on Matt originally. He wasn’t wearing glasses in it.
Foggy opened the folder and scanned through the contents. There was a report-card looking paper like Foggy’s from elementary school. There were a series of papers with scores written in red ink at the top. Many were underlined. Some were stamped with a code. He passed the folder on to the others.
“What does that mean?” he asked. He didn’t have time to play tutor and teacher.
“It means,” Hogarth told him, putting a hand on her hip and pressing another to her forehead. “That Murdock is one of the best they’ve got. He’s excelled on every test, every level. The only problem he’s posed is disciplinary. The words they used were ‘insubordinate,’ ‘obstinate,’ and ‘resistant to correction.’ You see that list there, the one on the bookmark?”
George held it out. It was actually two bookmarks stapled together. Dates in various colored ink ran down the front and backs of the cards.
“That’s how many times he’s been corrected. Both digitally and manually. It is my understanding, based off Murdock and Ms. Natchios’s conversation, that correction is extremely unpleasant.”
Foggy wanted to burn the cards.
“What’s your point?” He asked.
“My point is that Murdock has gone through all that and still keeps going back for more. He doesn’t learn, and another correction isn’t likely to make a dent in his psyche. In fact, he may have even have gotten more insubordinate since he met you, Mr. Nelson.”
Sure he had, thanks for the guilt.
“What do we do now?” George asked. Footsteps stopped behind them and Karen and Jess joined them in the room. Jess had what looked like the top half of a body bag swung over her shoulder. Karen’s eyes were red and raw, her mascara clumped together.
“We’ve reached the point where action is necessary.” Hogarth told them. “The police and a team of regulators will be here in twenty minutes. I would recommend that everyone go grab a cup of coffee and meditate or something because the next few hours are going to be very stressful.”
Martie, the police officer who’d arrived to Foggy’s apartment when Matt had brought home his proverbial dead bird, gave Foggy a hard time for exactly five minutes before she eased up and took his statement.
The bot regulator with her, a serious looking skinny guy with thick dark hair and dark eyes, waited patiently until he’d finished his statement with Martie before interrogating him as to Matt’s behavior, habits, whereabouts, malfunctions, and on and on and on until Foggy told him “You know, he literally just wandered into my dorm one day and started talking to me. I don’t know any technical stuff, I just try to keep him away from sockets and water.”
Martie was amused, but the bot regulator was not.
“Mr. Nelson, in order to locate and help your bot—”
“He’s not my bot, he’s his own bot—”
“We need you to cooperate fully.”
“I am cooperating. I’m telling you I have no idea what he does when I’m in class or asleep. When I come home, he’s either there or he’s not. If he’s there, he usually tries to organize my desk or poison me through terrible coffee. I bought him a pillow to hold onto so he’d stop doing both those things and he just kinda lays with it until I’m done studying. Then he wants me to play guitar. Sometimes we talk. Sometimes we watch tv. That is it. That is what we do, day in, day out. What else do you want from me?”
The regulator looked confused. Like he couldn’t imagine a fighter bot like Matt not constantly wreaking havoc on the general public.
“Has he ever shown any dangerous tendencies? Aggression?”
Foggy sighed.
“Yeah, he tried to beat the shit out of some of Hogarth’s people when they broke into my room, and oh yeah, he brought me home a criminal.”
“Broke into?”
“It was a misunderstanding.”
“And before this?”
“Nothing. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. Well, I took him to the gym once and he really took it out on the bag, but he wasn’t directing that at anyone in particular.”
The regulator frowned and wrote something in his notes. Martie hummed and tapped a pen against her lips.
“You know he’s the son of a boxer?” she asked. Foggy blinked and remembered Matt mentioning it what felt like ages ago.
“Yeah, he said once when he was all hooked up.”
“His dad was really well known around Hell’s Kitchen, you know that? Battlin’ Jack, they called him.”
The bot regulator coughed. Martie glared at him.
“I’m just saying. Hitting a bag is different from hitting a person, especially when your daddy did it for a living,” she said.
The regulator tapped his foot impatiently and then asked to speak to Martie outside.
Foggy watched them go and sighed. At least one officer was on his side.
“Did we sign up for an interrogation?” Ernst grumbled as he plopped down next to Foggy and Maiko. Maiko offered him her cup of tea, but he refused.
Foggy was distracted; Matt was probably lying on some table with the grim reaper digging through his guts and here they were sitting around on their thumbs. He bounced his knee and thought through every legal procedure he could remember involving the police. There had to be something to make this move faster.
Jessica staggered out of one of the rooms in the back of the hallway and collapsed next to him. Foggy offered her his coffee without thinking, he was jerked back to reality when she pushed his hand away reached down in her body bag to liberate a half-empty bottle of whiskey.
Foggy watched in stupefied awe as she downed half of it without a wince.
“Sorry for stalking you,” she said finally, holding out the bottle as a peace offering. Foggy shook his head.
“It’s fine, I get why you were doing it.”
“He’s gonna be fine, you know?” She told him, tipping her head in his direction. “You should have seen him, man. He knew he was gonna go down, but he put ‘em up anyways. He’s dumb as shit, but you gotta admire the effort.”
Someone passed by them down the hallway. Foggy sighed and scrubbed his hair.
“Everyone keeps saying that, but like, he’s just human. He’s not going to get up one of these days.”
He watched the person pass by the other way without seeing them. Jessica shook the bottle at him until he took it and took a swallow.
He swore at the taste and shoved it back into her lap and Jess cackled. He looked up to see someone approaching him.
“Hi,” the guy said. Jessica dropped the bottle. “I’m looking for someone named Hogarth?”
“Oh, uh. I think she’s that way,” Foggy indicated with his coffee.
“How the fuck did you find us?” Jessica snapped.
Luke Cage said little in the time between Jessica trying to fight him and Hogarth leaping out of her office to herd her into one of the backrooms for a furiously whispered conversation.
He noticed Karen and seemed to recognize her. He asked her softly if she’d heard from a woman named Claire, recently. She hadn’t, but Jess had, she assured him, tears shining in her eyes once again. The woman had called two weeks ago, she said, and Luke smiled wide like that was the best answer Karen could have given him.
Once Hogarth had convinced Jess not to kill him, she re-emerged and herded everyone into her main office and sat Luke at a wooden table temporarily cleared of its paper.
He was still, then rustled around in his vest pockets for something.
He held out the chip Ernst had installed in Matt’s ankle to Foggy.
“We had a minute and some processing power,” he explained, “Murdock found one for me in one of the labs and helped me make one of my own; guy owed me one for trying to tase me. He said he was about to do something monumentally stupid and asked me to take his when the old man dragged him back to the lab.”
Foggy took the chip and handed it off to the bot regulator.
Hogarth watched, shocked.
“Why would he do that?” She asked. Luke hummed. He was a huge guy, Foggy realized. He seemed even bigger when he leaned forward and rested his forearms on the table.
“Well, first of all, he’s not exactly a shining example of sanity to begin with, if you hadn’t noticed. He didn’t say it in so many words, but I got the feeling the old man was looking for information. You can’t beat info out of someone who doesn’t have it,” Luke said.
“Especially a droid,” he continued. “No information is no information. If you don’t have extra processors or one of those,” he nodded towards the chip, “there’s nothing anyone can do. Stick would have to hook him up, but then chances are, full-processing Murdock would rather die than give up whatever he’s hiding. He’s stupid enough. Or...” he trailed off, processing.
Foggy stifled an only slightly hysterical laugh. Matt had handed off his memories, just like that. Like a damn relay baton. Oops, sorry, almost fumbled it. Jesus Christ, Murdock.
The regulators huddled around the chip and chattered away.
“Or?” Hogarth prompted.
“He had some kind of plan in place.”
Hogarth turned to the officers in the room.
“If Murdock put something on that chip that would prove he was being coerced and possibly tortured, would that be enough here to skip the interviews at this point in time and go ahead with the intervention?”
It would.
All of the files Matt had saved on the chip were strings of data or audio, which confused the regulators until they were reminded that by the way, Matt was blind. Clicking through the first few provided a weird, womb-like ambiance of elongated noise. A few from the middle offered noises like the crunching of a paper food wrapper or a bite being taken out of a gas-station pickle, except six times more obnoxious. Luke pointed out that he had no basis of comparison, but he was pretty sure these were Matt’s sensory memories, the ones which helped him think.
There was one file which wasn’t saved in a strange configuration of letters however. It read THIS_ONE.pdf because Matt thought he was hilarious.
It gave everyone the laugh they needed to calm the fuck down.
One of the regulators opened the document. It read:
“Hello Hogarth. Here is your evidence.
Or, if this is Stick: I want you to know I am putting this in writing specifically to annoy you by making you bring out the screen-reader and to tell you that you may as well burn me out now because I’m just going to keep getting back up and making your life hell.
Apologies for the graphic nature of what follows.”
There was a table with a list of names, addresses, and locations. One Andrew Fischer, for example, was listed as an engineer for the hardware department. He lived in Bed Stuy and worked in lab A.23, which Matt had helpfully labeled as ‘the operating theatre.’
Matt had even included a map of the campus. At the bottom of the page was a link.
A regulator clicked on it.
Matt woke up. Full processing capacity. He was cold and his head felt heavy. He felt an exterior connection click into place as he got his bearings. Why the connection?
He’d been in this room before, he thought. There was a steel standing desk with a computer on it. There were wires in his head. They pissed him off for some reason.
The was a handler.
“Kid,” the handler said, “You’re breaking my heart.” He didn’t sound like he meant it.
Stick.
A bag. A gym. Music.
A name.
Handler? Handler.
A name.
Holding a man over a ledge.
Music. A name. Handler. Foggy? Foggy.
A chip.
Who the fuck is Foggy?
Stand down. Block C. Make me.
Ah, there it was. It came back faster each time. He said nothing. Stick walked around him.
“Don’t play dumb.” Stick told him, “It’s not cute.”
Matt didn’t respond. There was something just out of grasp. It sat between Who the fuck is Foggy? and Stand down. He tried to hold the sand between his fingers.
“Who are you working for, Matty?” Stick asked from behind him.
Working for?
“Advancement?” Matt tried. The sand kept slipping. There was someone else.
“Try again,” Stick said patiently.
It slipped through his fingers. Had he not saved it? There was no memory.
“Advancement.” He told Stick with more feeling. He heard Stick touch his face and breath out slowly.
“Try again.”
“Advance—” wait. “Handler.” He corrected. He heard Stick’s heart beat ratchet up slightly.
“Foggy,” he stated flatly.
“Handler.” Matt confirmed, pleased for some reason. He heard the bones in Stick’s hands creak as they clenched.
“Who does Foggy work for?”
Who did Foggy work for?
“Columbia?” Matt offered. Somewhere, he thought, Foggy might be amused.
Stick sighed.
“I’m running out of patience, kiddo. You’ve been busy the last few days, haven’t you? Don’t think I haven’t noticed. And that show in the lobby just now? Quite something.” Stick trailed off. He put one foot in front of the other, ball first. Matt tried to think. Busy. What had he been doing.
“You know, it’s been a long time since Elektra fucked up,” Stick told him to jog his memories. And there it was. Elektra. Testimony. Danny in the conference room, Luke in the classroom. Digging through the files. Handing off the chip.
“But do you know that she brought me the wrong guy this morning? She didn’t even kill him. I had to. I should have known putting you two back together was trouble.”
Elektra had fucked up. Matt had infected her like a virus. He’d never been so happy to feel like a parasite.
Matt laughed. Caught a fist for it.
“Oh, so now you remember?” Stick growled, “You think this is a game, boy?”
Matt hoped Stick could sense his smile.
“Just a little,” he offered. The blow that followed reminded him of grinning through bloody teeth. Stick huffed. He was disappointed.
“Matty, you don’t even understand what a waste you’re making of yourself. First, they train you like a dog, a damned puppy. You get another chance and you fixate on this ‘Foggy.’ You chase this—whatever it is you’re chasing. You’re dragging yourself under, kid, and taking other people with you. They don’t deserve that. You do good work, Matty. When you do what you’re told, you do good work. Don’t waste it on this fucking Foggy guy.” Stick spat the name like it was arsenic.
Matt bowed his head and shuddered. All he’d ever wanted with this man’s praise, from the time he set foot in the arching halls of the orphanage to the day he’d woken up with two silver lungs. But the words felt hollow.
The devil inside him yearned instead for Stick’s disapproval--for any sign of weakness. It bubbled in Matt’s chest, warm and squirming. It nudged him and whispered to him. Oh how the fucking tables have turned. Oh the humanity! It simultaneously tickled and burned the limits of his core.
He couldn’t contain the feelings. He hiccupped against the laugh and bit his lip to stop it, but Stick had taught Matt everything he knew, including how to listen.
The blow sounded worse than it was.
“Is this a funny to you? A war? People dying because you can’t get your shit together?” Stick snarled, “You think I’m spending all this fucking time on you for my goddamned health?”
“Give it up, old man,” Matt snapped after him as he stepped away to regroup. The last thing he needed was a collected Stick at this point. “I’m never, never gonna be the soldier you wanted me to. All that work you put into me: wasted. I’m a cracked cog and you know that, and despite everything, you just keep trying to fix me.” He imagined blood in his teeth. “I’m starting to think you’re a little attached.”
The next punch sailed to Matt’s temple and rattled his whole body. A hand followed and clenched around his throat. Trying to provoke the original functions to scare him.
“Don’t talk about what you don’t know, boy.” Came the cold response. “I made you and I’ll unmake you. The only reason I gave you up that fucking university to begin with was because I can follow a damn order. Unlike you. If I’d had my way, I’d have taken you apart piece by piece until I found every last shard of memory you had and burned it into nothing.”
“Sounds pretty intimate,” Matt goaded. “What about all those times when I was a kid, huh? Was that part of this grand memory burning memorial? Or was that just to make me scared? Make me submissive?”
Stick didn’t answer, but Matt was positive he was picking at the right scab.
“Didn’t work, did it? Maybe if you’d done a better job we wouldn’t be standing here—”
“You’re right, Matty. Should have kept you the extra year, you sure as hell needed it.”
“One more year means nothing. We’d still be here.”
“Ha, no we wouldn’t.” Stick snapped. “Your heart, kiddo. That’s all you needed to get by. But you are so wrapped up in your mind—”
“The mind controls the body.” Those were Stick’s words.
“Yeah, only if you’re human.”
“I am human.”
“You haven’t been human since the day your daddy died, Matthew. You should be grateful, you know. Crying all over me ‘cause what, ‘you’ve got the devil in you?’ We give you something better and you still want that damn devil.”
The devil was so happy to be mentioned by name. Excitement flared. They were almost done here.
“I didn’t want this.”
“Shut the fuck up. Yes, you did. You practically begged me for it.”
“I revoke my confirmation.”
“Kid, you keep saying that as though someone’s listening.”
Matt smiled wide and said nothing. Stick stopped moving.
“You motherfucker.”