Jessica and Danny

"Goodbye, Mrs. Gutierrez," yelled Danny. "I'll see you on Thursday!" He stood smiling in the front door of the dojo, waving as a small, elderly woman walked away.

"Do I want to know what you're doing with little old ladies?" asked Jessica from the sidewalk.

Danny turned and walked back inside, Jessica following him. "She's my tutor for all the school stuff I missed. It's actually pretty neat. Like, did you know that negative numbers and subtraction are basically the same thing?"

"Yes. Literally everyone knows that," said Jessica, taking the spring out of Danny's step. She sighed, rolled her eyes, and decided to put forth very minimal effort to soften the blow: "I mean, everybody learns it in school. But they mostly forget it, so at least for you it'll be fresh."

"Yeah," said Danny, slightly cheered by this interpretation. He led her into the dojo. "I was thinking we should begin with meditation-"

"I would rather suck off Norman Vincent Peale."

"I don't know who that is, but what I was trying to say was, 'I was thinking we should begin with meditation, but I know that's not your style.'" He scowled. "Come on. Give me a little credit."

"I just want to learn how to punch right. You and Matt were schooled by ninjas. Luke's got his military training. I want to be more useful if I ever have to throw down again."

Danny was pleased that Jessica recognized this weakness in herself, and even more pleased that she was seeking his help in correcting it, but he knew better than to verbalize these thoughts. Instead, he said, "Well, let's see your stance." He knew better than to push her toward canonical wushu postures; he would settle for getting her to bend her knees a little. Jessica mostly hit opponents, so she didn't need a stance that would allow her to kick effectively, just one that would let her move and follow through. They spent the better part of twenty minutes tweaking her posture. It would have gone faster if Danny had just been allowed to touch her and show her how to do it, but he settled for modeling and verbal instruction.

Then he aimed a kick just to the left of her face. She tried to grab it, but he was too fast, his foot back underneath him before her hand was even raised.

"Asshole," she muttered.

"Hit me," said Danny.

Jessica took a wide swing, holding back her force as much as possible to avoid injuring Danny. It didn't matter, though, because he bent backward easily, almost lazily dodging. Danny aimed another kick just to the side of Jessica's right flank with a spinning motion, landing on one foot. She began to try in earnest, putting less effort into restraining her own strength and more into just landing a punch, while Danny continued to deploy perfectly targeted blows right next to her body. Jessica could feel her heart rate increasing entirely out of proportion to the light exertion of training. She could hear Kilgrave's voice in his stupid British accent, and feel his breath brushing the side of her-

Danny was standing still. "You're not focused."

Jessica scowled. "You're not going to beat me with reeds, or whatever it was they do in K'un Lun."

For once, Danny didn't rise to the bait. "You need to be of one mind. Push other thoughts away."

"I can't, okay? Other thoughts just show up in my head and unless I'm pretty wasted, I can't just will them away."

Danny gave the thinnest of grins. "Of course, you can't will them away. That's like trying to push water with your hands or blowing back the wind. Don't fight them. Just allow them to exist. And keep returning your focus to one central mantra."

"That you're annoying," said Jessica, "and I want to punch you."

Danny nodded. "Sure, if that works." He jumped several feet to the right, landing in tiger stance. "I'm annoying," he said. "I'm really annoying. And all you can think about is how bad you want to hit me." With every word, he dodged, dipped, and weaved. Jessica staggered from one direction to another, swinging heavy haymakers that she telegraphed from a mile away. "Come and get me!" sing-songed Danny, drawing from faint memories of preschool playgroup.

"What the fuck kind of teaching is this?"

"I'm really annoying!" Danny's voice was nasal and melodic, like a taunting kid brother. "I'm really annoying! I'm really annoy-"

Jessica landed a blow and Danny was thrown backward. He was able to turn his momentum into a roll and regain control before crashing into the wall.

"Shit! Shit! Are you okay?"

"Yeah," said Danny, rolling his left shoulder experimentally. "You just winged me."

"Well," said Jessica, tucking her hair behind her ear, "maybe you should rethink your pedagogy."

Danny didn't know the word 'pedagogy', but he could guess it well enough from context clues. "No way," he said, "it worked perfectly. You focused on one thought! Even if it was, you know, wanting to shut me up, you still put the other stuff aside! And now that you know you can do it, you can learn to do it without, you know, quite so much prompting."

Jessica forced herself to close her mouth and not just gape at Danny. He was pleased with her performance? That he could piss her off enough to make her forget about Kilgrave for one stupid second? "All I asked you," she said, "was to teach me how to throw a punch."

Danny just shrugged as if to say, 'no point in learning to throw a punch if you can't keep your head in the fight'.

Jessica checked her phone. "It's 8:00," she said. The end of their scheduled lesson.

"You want to stay for dinner? On her way home, Colleen is going to pick up-"

"No. Thanks."

"See you next week?" asked Danny and, to Jessica, he just sounded so stupidly hopeful for a guy she had just super-punched in the arm.

Jessica exhaled audibly. Not a sigh, just a little noise. "Danny," she said, "are you good with the internet? Social media and all that?"

"Uh, I've got some of it down." Danny smiled and scratched the back of his neck. "I mean, they had the internet before I went to K'un Lun, but it was different. There was Neopets and all the websites were on Geocities."

"Block out an hour after our lesson next week," said Jessica, "and I'll teach you some tricks."

Matt

On the first floor of the apartment building, Matt could sense Foggy's heartbeat. On the second, he could smell Foggy's preferred brand of anti-dandruff shampoo. On the third, he could hear Foggy rehearsing the Q-and-A of a deposition. On the fourth, he can feel the subtle vibrations of his friend's pacing.

His ex-friend.

His ex-friend who hated him for lying and keeping secrets and not even having the decency to stay dead.

Matt leaned on the wall outside Foggy's fifth-floor apartment. He was free of the influence of the Hand, generally uninjured, and had been eating a lot of fish lately, which he understood to be a healthy dietary option. He was a peerless vigilante and he was not dawdling in his attempt to talk with Foggy Nelson. Really.

Instead, he listened to Foggy reword his questions to avoid eliciting hearsay for several minutes before the pacing footsteps shifted ,the door opened, and – without even leaning out into the hall – Foggy said, "You might as well come inside, Murdock. If you wait out there any longer, you're going to hear me rehearse my Soviet-rap fusion concept album."

Matt entered the apartment. "Soviet-rap fusion?" he asked.

"M.C. Hammer and Sickle is an idea whose time has come."

Foggy's apartment was cluttered, unlike Matt's, with junk on the floors and photographs on every wall. "How did you know I was out there?"

"Actually, I just knew you were coming by sometime today. That was the fourth time I've done that. I figured, why let you have all the creepy ESP moments?"

"Fair enough," said Matt. He had his cane with him, and he was presently holding it vertically with both hands fisted around the main grip. He breathed slowly, in and out, before saying what he came to say. "I didn't plan this, Foggy. I didn't think I was going to-"

"Survive? Yeah, I know." Foggy walked back into his kitchen and began pulling out the ingredients necessary for grilled cheese sandwiches (i.e., bread and cheese). "I got a bunch of texts from your number last night that said as much. Must've been one of your new superfriends."

"How'd you know they weren't from me?"

"Your texts either have bizarre typos or speech-to-text homonym errors. These were too clean."

"Must've been Jessica," said Matt. "I don't know how she hacked my phone PIN, though."

"Is it still your dad's win-loss record?" asked Foggy. He was spreading pesto sauce on the bread and cutting up different kinds of cheese.

Matt didn't answer, which was answer enough.

"Yeah, well, to people who know you, that's not too hard to guess." There were a few clangs as Foggy pulled a both a frying pan and a pot out from under the stove and set them on burners.

"Should I ask what the texts said?"

Foggy stopped bustling around in the kitchen. "You didn't read them?" He pulled out his own phone. "Something happened to me at Midland Circle. The kind of thing that you don't want to know about. It took a lot out of me, and there wasn't much left in me to begin with." Foggy's voice became thinner, wirier, as if he were speaking over a tin can and string. "I asked the others to kill me. I'm not telling you this because I expect you to help me or save me, but because I don't want to hide one more thing from you."

"And she called me dramatic," muttered Matt.

"Fuck 'dramatic'!" yelled Foggy, slamming down the pot lid in his hand. "You died! I had to…I had to tell my parents you were dead. It was Thanksgiving and I was home and I was still so messed up over you, they knew something was wrong."

"What did you tell them?" asked Matt, in what he hoped was an even tone of voice.

"I didn't tell them about Daredevil." Foggy sighed. "I said you had a drinking problem that got worse. You started in on pills and then heroin. But you were getting clean. You said you were getting better and I believed you. And," Foggy's voice broke, "you needed to borrow some money and I lent it to you. I thought you were…you were getting better. But you took that money and you overdosed."

The metaphor wasn't particularly hard to follow to its unpleasant conclusion. "Foggy," said Matt, "it's not your fault. I would have gone to Midland Circle even if you hadn't brought me the suit."

"My mom was really broken up about it," said Foggy, not explicitly acknowledging Matt's statement. "I think she always believed you and I would, you know." He didn't look directly at Matt while saying this, focusing instead on setting his carefully-constructed cheese sandwiches in the frying pan.

"Yeah, I know."

"Do you want to die, Matt?" It was a technique they both used at work, jumping into a startling question with no lead-up in the hopes the respondent would be reluctantly honest.

"I…nothing lasts, Foggy. No one stays. I never thought I would live to be old, so after the battle, I assumed it was my time."

"I think the worst part is that you think that's reasonable and reassuring." Foggy frowned, thinking. "Okay, here's what we're going to do. We're lawyers, right? We're going to sign a contract. You're going to agree that you will not harm or kill yourself, nor allow yourself to be harmed or killed through action or inaction except when harm is unavoidable in the expected course of Daredevilling."

"'Daredevil' as a verb probably won't hold up in a court of law."

"And you're going to talk to a therapist-"

"There are limits to clinician-client confidentiality," interrupted Matt. He had obviously researched the issue.

"Did I say you were going to talk about Daredevil? No. You can if you want, but I know you've got enough fucked up shit in your life to fill 50 minutes a week. I mean, Jesus, just what happened to your dad! You're going to see someone for at least twenty sessions. You can switch if you don't like the person, but the counter starts over." Foggy had obviously researched the issue, too. "And you're going to do those two things and in return I am going to suck it up and help you with your stupid-ass quest to run around in a rubber gimp mask."

"Can this agreement, including the part about the rubber gimp mask, be notarized?"

"Absolutely. My assistant at HC&B is a notary and he's sworn to secrecy."

They both stopped talking for a moment. Matt could hear cans being opened and poured into the pot. Smooth sounds, no clunks to indicate lumps. Must be tomato soup.

"I'm s-"

"No," said Foggy. "For once, you don't have anything to be sorry for. Listen to my heartbeat, man. Am I pissed? No. Am I confused, terrified, and hungry? Yes, yes, and hell yes. So we're going to have the dinner of 5-year-olds and work out how to make you an un-missing person in the least disruptive way possible and just generally both be alive."

Foggy sounded unsteady, as though the slightest disturbance would cause him to collapse to the floor of the kitchen, crying between his distant best friend and his lukewarm tomato soup. Matt sat down at the kitchen table. "I agree to your terms," he said. "And I would like you to know that the position of 'Daredevil's Sidekick' is always open."

"Hah! I knew you had an ulterior motive."

It wasn't really funny, but they both laughed as the grilled cheese sizzled and the soup boiled.

"M.C. Hammer and Sickle? Really, Foggy?"

"Oh, yeah. My first hit song was going to be, Too Legit to Quit (Seizing the Means of Production)."

Luke and Claire

Claire Temple was never going fishing again. It didn't matter if civilization collapsed, everyone returned to subsistence living and the only non-lentil-based protein source was fish, she still wasn't fishing.

"I thought it went pretty well, all things considered," said Luke.

"You were the only one to actually catch any fish," countered Claire.

"Danny caught some."

"I'm trying to forget about that."

Luke just shrugged and smiled without saying anything before going back to work reinforcing their new table. He had originally suggested that they just avoid having sex on the more fragile items of furniture, but he had been very easy to persuade, on this topic at least. Once he finished adding the fourth brace, he settled down next to Claire on the sofa.

"How the hell did you know about Saint Thomas More?" she asked. "I thought Baptists didn't have saints."

"They don't. But he was also a philosopher. Wrote a book called Utopia envisioning a perfect society that I read while I was in lockup. And the foreword gave a brief biography, said he was the patron saint of lawyers. I remembered that because I thought it was funny – having a saint just for lawyers."

"So, it wasn't a stab in the dark."

"An educated guess," agreed Luke.

Claire stretched and leaned back against Luke, finding him more comfortable than the worn sofa. "I am never going fishing with you again," she repeated.

"Understandable." Luke wrapped his arm around her, feeling around with his opposite hand for the TV remote. This was the best time to ask – they were close together, but without any potentially embarrassing eye contact. "This may be an odd question," he began, "but how would you feel about inviting Danny and Colleen over-"

"Why would that be-?"

"-for coffee?"