Disclaimer: the characters and concepts in this story are the property of Marvel and their related affiliates. This is an amateur writing effort meant for entertainment purposes only.

Summary: Matt's MIA, so Foggy calls in reinforcements. Unfortunately, the only person good enough to find Matt is the man who trained him.

Author's Notes: Okay, so I needed to include a last little bit of Stick being a dick (or is he?), not to mention a short conversation between Matt and Foggy. Once again, I hope this isn't OOC on any part. Stick isn't the only one with complicated feelings, after all.

Readers, lovely readers, I cannot thank you enough for joining me and supporting this fic with your kind attention. Please have a wonderful night!

Chapter Ten: We Were Both Disappointed

Matt dreams of being washed away. Of fingers scrubbing through his hair and the fluffy side of a towel moving over his face, neck, and chest. He dreams of sweet-smelling silk waves running over him, and then of a city street clawing into his spine as a bright blue sky is chewed to black.

The blackness greets him when he opens his eyes, but for once, it's comforting. It's peppered with all kinds of stimuli that register clearly in his head. Nighttime traffic prattles outside the window, and the sound reveals the dimensions of his living room. The smell of rot clings weakly to his skin, having mostly been scrubbed away during his nap.

Concentrating on his body results in a catalogue of aches, pains, and stings. His chest wound still smarts even if his hip had settled into a dull throb. When he draws a hand over it, the dressings don't move and an IV pulls on his forearm.

Hands wring nervously from the other side of the room. Foggy is in the armchair across from him, and the fact that Matt knows this is a small victory.

It's short-lived. He focuses and picks up on other details: staggered breathing. Ponderous silence. Foggy is doing some serious thinking.

Matt doesn't have the strength for a conversation, but he really doesn't have the strength for this. "What is it, Foggy?"

"We'll talk about it later," Foggy states.

"I don't want to wait," he brushes a hand across his hip, making him squirm. The maggots are gone, he has to remember that. "I'm sorry, Foggy. I'm sorry I almost died."

"It's not that." Correction: "It's not just that. It's-"

A cell phone vibrates on the table before he can finish. Foggy grabs it, answers with a confused, "Hello?" Must be an unknown number.

Matt can hear who it is from the shift in Foggy's posture, the way his pulse rings like a Bernard Hermann score, the drop of his voice into a steady flat line, "Yes, he's awake. Do you want to talk to him?" a brief pause. "No, I wasn't going to let you even if you wanted." He goes stock-still in his seat. "I don't think he's hungry."

"I'm not," Matt confirms. He's actually the opposite of hungry. His stomach churns, but the rest of his digestive tract has halted completely. He thinks he can feels a cramp coming on, the thought of which makes him shuffle, which pulls on his hip wound, which reminds him of maggots…

No, definitely not hungry.

The quiet tingles and then flares with disappointment. Foggy's not afraid; he's impatient, angry, all the more so because he actually gets out of his seat and walks into the kitchen. "If this is one of your sick games-" he's cut off by one of Stick's remarks, one he responds to by saying, "Well, I know you are, but what am I?"

The freezer opens. "I see it," Foggy says. "I think soup's a better idea…" then he bristles audibly, "You would say that about any of my ideas."

Foggy nabs something, humming and hawing everything else Stick says until it's time to hang up. He tosses his phone on the counter along with whatever he grabbed from the freezer. "Stick says hi," he tells Matt. "He also says I'm supposed to give you this."

"What is it?"

"I'm pretty sure it's psychological warfare."

Matt braces himself, "It usually is."

Foggy takes that for what it is: an invitation to get on with it. He returns to the chair across from Matt and sets a container on the coffee table between them.

Goosebumps run up and down Matt's exposed bicep from the chill emitted by whatever Foggy grabbed from the freezer. He twists his head, trying to make out the shape using his and Foggy's breathing to echolocate. It's a pint-sized cardboard container.

Foggy clarifies, "It's ice cream."

Matt turns his head back until only his profile is exposed to Foggy. He pulls the sheet up around his shoulders, "Yeah, I'm not hungry."

"Do you want me to burn it?"

He wants to burn Stick is what he wants to do. The old bastard so loves rubbing salt into old wounds and maggots into new ones. "You can throw it out, Foggy," he says as the old ache grows achier inside his chest. "Milk from dairies in three different dairies and…a batch – a batch of chemicals straight off the periodic table and dirt off the hands of whoever packed it."

"You got all that from the package?"

"I got all that from Stick."

Foggy picks up the carton, inspecting it, "Doesn't look like there's chemicals in this. Or dirt. Apparently, it's all natural, organic."

Matt sets his jaw, "That's worse."

"Okay, I am probably going to regret this, but how?"

"When I first met Stick, he took me for ice cream. Told me all the reasons I shouldn't like ice cream, all the things I never wanted to taste in ice cream."

Foggy gets lost in thought, having trouble, no doubt, negotiating Stick's character based on what has to be severely limited information. Matt saves him the trouble, "Stick's an asshole, Foggy."

But that's not the whole of it. There's a lot Foggy isn't saying, so much that Matt was unconscious for and complicates the hell out of the ice cream. So much that Matt doesn't ever want to know. Thank God Foggy picks up on that. "Okay," he rises from his seat and carries the carton away to the kitchen. The sound of the trashcan opening strikes an unhappy chord in Matt's chest despite himself.

Stick's an asshole. He is absolutely an asshole.

"Wait," Matt says. He eases up the pillow until he's on a forty-five degree angle. His stomach protests with a growl; Matt ignores it. "Can you…would you get me a spoon?"

"I thought you weren't hungry," Foggy states. The garbage can stays open expectantly.

"I'm not," he swallows the lump in his throat, the one made of dread, guilt, and loathing, all the crap Stick left behind. "But I should probably eat something."

"You have other food."

"I know."

Foggy's heart rages loudly inside his chest. "He is an asshole."

"I know that too."

The trashcan closes though. The silverware drawer opens and slams shut. Matt winces from the sounds. He isn't going to get food down his throat with all the awful feelings balling up by his tonsils.

He lets Foggy share the couch by adjusting his legs, absorbing the pain in his hip and chest because he's an idiot. He's an idiot who can't give up on the idea of Stick, the larger-than-life blind warrior who saved him from himself, even when the old bastard does nothing but prove Matt's perception to be patently false.

Or does everything to prove that it might be true.

Foggy hands him a loaded spoon and, by the sounds of things, dives in with one of his own. "This is delicious," he comments after his first bite.

Every inch of Matt pouts, starting with his stomach, which stops churning sullenly. "Yeah," he agrees, "it is."

Foggy huffs, "He is such an asshole."

Matt sighs, tucking himself more deeply under the blankets. "Yeah, he is."

Happy reading!