A Cheerful Giver
Part 3
On Thursday, it was Foggy’s grandmother’s funeral. Matt tried to give him the entire day off, but Foggy felt guilty about having slept so much in the office that week, and went in for the morning anyway. Naturally, Matt was hurt, and naturally, Foggy healed him. To his delight, he didn’t fall asleep immediately afterwards, but he did feel distinctly lacking in energy until almost noon. It was an effort to even speak, let alone get anything done, but he muddled through. At his parents’ house, though, he discovered that his father had dropped a hammer on his head, and instead of going to the doctor, he had come home to wait for Foggy.
“Dad, how did you drop a hammer on your head?” Foggy asked.
“Just doing a little do-it-yourself around the store,” his father replied. He owned a hardware store, and some of Foggy’s cousins worked there, too. At least one of them had his eye on an eventual buy-out, but Foggy’s father showed no signs of even wanting to retire. “I was pounding in a nail above my head, hit my thumb, and just reacted, you know?”
The reaction had sent the claw-end of the hammer into his scalp. Foggy winced when he saw the blood staining the grey hairs dark red, and took his father’s hand in his. The healing went quickly.
“There, Edward, now go wash your hair quickly or we’ll be late,” Foggy’s mother chided.
“I’m sure Mom would understand,” his father muttered as he went off to the bathroom.
“Your mother might, but not everybody else would.” Foggy’s mom sighed, but then she glanced over to Foggy and smiled. “And how are you getting along?”
“Matt needs healing every day,” Foggy reported, sinking down onto the couch. His mother seated herself in her specially designated “Mom” armchair as he continued to speak. “I fall asleep in the office a lot. It’s embarrassing, but I can’t help it. I suppose Grandma was used to that sort of thing.”
“Oh, I remember quite a few times when a good healing would send her to bed for hours,” his mother smiled. “But Matt – why does he need it every day?”
Foggy shook his head, and tried not to lie to his mother, though it was a challenge. “To hear him tell it, he’s incredibly clumsy. Always tripping over something or walking into something.”
His mother frowned. “I never noticed. He never seems clumsy around us, far from it. And a few bruises shouldn’t take it out of you like that.”
Foggy shrugged. It wasn’t exactly his secret to tell, not that he didn’t trust his mother. But better to be safe than sorry. He tried to change the subject. “Mom—“
But his mother went on. “Does Matt have other friends besides you, Foggy? Anybody that could … you know … be abusing him?”
Foggy couldn’t help laughing at the idea. “Mom, believe me, nobody is abusing Matt.”
“And he’s not in … you know … that shady kind of relationship? Like Fifty Shades of Grey?”
“Mom, tell me you didn’t read that book,” Foggy begged, feeling his cheeks turn hot with sheer embarrassment. “Please, please, tell me you didn’t.”
“I haven’t read it,” she protested. “But I couldn’t help hearing all about it, even from people who should know better. Not that I’m naming any relatives.”
Foggy exhaled in relief. There were some things about parents that their children should never know. “Mom, I promise you, Matt is not in a BDSM relationship. He doesn’t even have a, um, romantic partner right now.”
He hesitated, then went on. “He, um, he thinks I don’t know, but he goes boxing. A kind of fight club. Please don’t tell anybody. Especially not those nameless relatives, okay?”
“Oh,” his mother replied, looking more relieved than Foggy felt. “Boxing. Okay.”
It was a good enough excuse that Foggy thought he could use it as a cover for a real question. “Mom, when I’m around him and he’s hurt, I can’t help wanting to heal him. It makes my hands tremble if I put it off too long! But every time I heal him, he goes back outside and gets hu-hit again. He used to take a few days off if he were really hurt—bruised, but now he doesn’t. I feel like I’m enabling him somehow, but I also can’t not heal him.”
“Oh, Foggy,” his mother sighed, then got up, sat down next to him, and pulled him in for a hug. “Sometimes you have to let people make their own decisions.”
“Yeah, but what if he gets killed one day and I could have prevented it just by not using my gift? Course I’d have to avoid him somehow to do that, but … what if?”
“I don’t know, Foggy,” his mother admitted. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation like that before. I’ve always tried to live my life by doing what I thought was right at the time, and that’s the only advice I can give you.”
“Well, that doesn’t help,” Foggy grumbled.
“I know that your grandmother always tried to heal everybody who asked, everybody who needed it,” his mother went on. “Even your Uncle Ray, though she told me a time or two that she knew he never would change his lifestyle.”
“Maybe she couldn’t fight the gift, either,” Foggy said.
“Maybe. Or maybe she knew that you can’t influence what people do with what you give them. I think she said something once about being a cheerful giver, and not caring about anything else.”
“Hmm.” Then Foggy remembered what he’d originally been about to ask. ”Speaking of the gift, Mom, do you know if Grandma could heal herself?”
“I know she could heal faster, but not instantly, not like when she could heal others,” his mother replied. “She had to sleep on it, sometimes up to three nights, I think she said once.”
“Well, that’s good to know.” Foggy closed his eyes. He woke up three hours later when his parents got home, only to discover he’d missed not only the funeral itself, but also the lunch wake. As he ate the contents of the doggy bag his mother had been kind enough to request for him, he decided that he had to make some changes or his healing gift was going to ruin his life. And those changes had to start with Matt. Fortunately, there was still time for Foggy to get over to the office and talk to him, even do some work while he was there.
Full of energy and determination, he set off, rehearsing in his mind how he was going to ask Matt to come around to his place every night after he’d been out Daredeviling, so that Foggy could heal him and still get some sleep before work. Before he reached the office, though, a man swung out of a coffee shop as he passed and called out, “Foggy Nelson!”
“Frankie? Frankie McMenemin?” Foggy asked, doing a complete double take. “Whoa, you know, I thought you died a couple of years ago, but I must have got you mixed up with one of my other cousins. Good to see you again, man!”
“Good to see you, too!” Frankie replied, equally hearty. Like Foggy, he was wearing a suit, as though he went to work in an office every day, though the Frankie that Foggy knew had worked in casual clothes in the home repairs business. But they’d been out of touch for a couple of years, and anything could have happened in the meantime. Now, Frankie held out a cup. “Hey, I’d like to talk to you if you’ve got a moment, or we can walk and talk at the same time. I even got you a latte, if you want.”
“Sure, why not?” Foggy took the cup, but as he sipped, he found himself glancing over at Frankie and trying to remember the name of his relative who had died of a brain aneurysm. No matter how often he ran through his list of known relatives, though, his mind kept coming back to Frankie. And yet the man was right here, obviously alive and well. Weird.
“So, what’s new with you? How’s the law business?” Frankie asked.
“Hey, it’s great, you might have heard that I’ve got my own practice now,” Foggy said, taking another sip. The latte was a bit sweeter than he usually took, but it tasted good. “With a friend of my mine from college. Nelson and Murdock, Attorneys at Law. What about you? You’ve moved up from drywalling with your brother and now you need some legal advice or something?”
“Actually, I was more interested in your healing gift. The word on the grapevine is, Grandma Nelson gave it over to you, yeah?”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. I’m still getting used to it. But I can tell you’re not hurt. You don’t even have a headache.”
Frankie smiled quickly in a creepy kind of way that Foggy didn’t remember ever seeing on him. “No, I’m not hurt. But I kinda wanted to ask you a favour, if you could heal somebody for me?”
“Yeah, sure,” Foggy replied.
“Great! I knew you wouldn’t turn me down. Can you do it now? Or are you on your way back to the office?”
“Well, officially, I’ve got the day off …” Foggy considered, and mentally rearranged his plans. “I guess I can do it now, yeah.”
“Great,” Frankie said again.
“Is it a guy or a girl? What’s wrong with them?”
“He’s been pretty badly beaten up,” Frankie said. “Think you can manage that?”
“You know, I think I can,” Foggy said, or rather, mumbled, because suddenly, all his muscles were turning weak and nonresponsive, and everything around him was starting to spin and go dark.
+++++
He opened his eyes, shut them, then opened them again and sat up, looking around wildly. What the hell was he doing on a mattress in what looked like part of an abandoned warehouse? And why was Frankie sitting crosslegged on the floor next to him?
“What the hell?” he croaked. His mouth was dry, and he rubbed his tongue against the roof of his mouth before trying again. “Where are we?”
“Hey, Foggy, you okay?” Frankie asked.
“Do I look okay?” Foggy demanded. “What happened? Did you – did you put something in my coffee?”
Frankie smiled that smile again, the creepy one. “Yes, Foggy, I did.”
“What the fuck – why?”
Frankie extended a bottle of water towards him, but Foggy just looked from it to him until Frankie finally said, “The bottle is sealed, Foggy, I haven’t put anything in it, but fine, whatever. Anyway, I wanted to save the long explanation for later, after you’ve done the healing I asked you about.”
“How about a short explanation, then?” Foggy asked, and Frankie shrugged.
“Okay – have you ever watched Fringe?”
“Yeah, I watched Fringe, all five seasons,” Foggy replied, remembering. “I was so in love with Astrid. And the other Olivia.”
“So you know all about the alternate universe, where there’s a different version of you? You’re in that alternate universe now. Just like Fringe. Except completely different. And that’s the short explanation, now it’s time for the healing. Come on.”
As Foggy got to his feet, he couldn’t help asking the first dumb thing that came to mind. “So, do you guys have zeppelins here?”
“Completely different from the Fringe universe, remember?“ Frankie led him past some opaque plastic sheets hanging from the ceiling, into another section of the warehouse. Foggy saw the camera first, set up on a tripod, and glanced over to where it was pointing. He could already feel that there was an injured person there, as his Murdockmeter was rising steadily. The only surprise was when he saw that five men were loosely gathered around the motionless figure on the floor, some seated at a nearby table playing cards, others on chairs either talking or staring at their phones. It almost seemed like they were guarding the injured person, but from what, Foggy couldn’t tell.
Frankie pointed down and said, “Use your healing gift on him.”
Getting his first real glimpse of the man, Foggy whispered quietly, “Matt?”
“You know him?” Frankie asked, but Foggy didn’t answer, looking down at the unresponsive man. Was Francis telling the truth, was this a different Matt, or was it Foggy’s Matt? It looked exactly like Matt, as far as Foggy could tell under all the blood and the swelling. There was blood everywhere, all over his face, all over his clothes where something had sliced him open again and again. He looked even worse than when Foggy had found him half dead in his apartment after a fight with a ninja. His ankles were shackled together, but his hands were free, and Foggy quickly knelt down and reached for one of them. As fast and as smoothly as he could, he let his healing warmth flow into the other man’s skin.
And Matt jumped to his feet despite the shackles, twisting Foggy’s hand in his until there was an audible crack, then striking out and hitting Foggy in the face so hard that he went sprawling across the floor. He was vaguely aware of Matt somersaulting away from the man who tried to catch him, and then Matt’s boots both landed on his leg. Foggy didn’t hear the next crack so much as feel the explosion of agony.
When he became aware again, Frankie was crouching at his side. Still completely shocked, Foggy looked beyond him to where the men had pummeled Matt to the floor, pressing his head down. Now they were moving the shackles from his ankles to his wrists, and starting to wrestle his boots off. He was still fighting, or at least wriggling, but ineffectively. Sickened, Foggy made a motion to help, but even the slightest twitch of his arm muscles sent excruciating pain through his wrist.
Well, at least he knew that Frankie was telling the truth about the alternate universe, because this could never be the Matt that Foggy knew. His Matt would have known him by his heartbeat or his smell or something, even before he’d spoken, and he wouldn’t have attacked Foggy like that, let alone hurt him so badly. It was impossible for his best friend to even think of treating him like that. Matt hadn’t betrayed him, hadn’t hurt him. It was a different Matt. It had to be. Foggy glanced back to Frankie and managed to whisper, “What the –?”
“Do you know him?” Frankie asked again.
“Is that what … you’re asking!” Not even Foggy’s voice wanted to work right; it broke in the middle of the sentence and was otherwise weak and nasal. “No ‘are you all right, Foggy … do you need an ambulance?’ Because, yes, thanks, I do … I need a hospital … and lots of painkillers.”
“You’ve got the healing gift, you can heal yourself,” Frankie said.
“No, I can’t, so fuck you,” Foggy whispered. Matt cried out, and Foggy glanced over, although even the tiniest motion of his eyes made his head hurt. They’d moved Matt, dumped him on the table with several of them holding him down, and one of them hitting the soles of Matt’s bare feet with a cane. Matt screamed again, and Foggy closed his eyes. Even if it wasn’t his Matt, it still made Foggy as sick with empathy as though it were.
“Stop it!” Foggy wanted to shout, but the words only came out as a croak.
“But do you know him?” Frankie urged.
“No!” Even though it was a different Matt, even though this Matt had hurt him, Foggy was still determined to keep his secret. Now he tried again to speak and got his voice a bit louder. “No, I thought I did, but it wasn’t him. Completely different guy. Weird, huh?”
“Yeah. Weird,” Frankie agreed.
“You brought me in to heal him … now you’re just going to … beat him up again?” Foggy asked, and when Frankie didn’t answer, Foggy said again, “Fuck you.”
Part 4
“Dad, how did you drop a hammer on your head?” Foggy asked.
“Just doing a little do-it-yourself around the store,” his father replied. He owned a hardware store, and some of Foggy’s cousins worked there, too. At least one of them had his eye on an eventual buy-out, but Foggy’s father showed no signs of even wanting to retire. “I was pounding in a nail above my head, hit my thumb, and just reacted, you know?”
The reaction had sent the claw-end of the hammer into his scalp. Foggy winced when he saw the blood staining the grey hairs dark red, and took his father’s hand in his. The healing went quickly.
“There, Edward, now go wash your hair quickly or we’ll be late,” Foggy’s mother chided.
“I’m sure Mom would understand,” his father muttered as he went off to the bathroom.
“Your mother might, but not everybody else would.” Foggy’s mom sighed, but then she glanced over to Foggy and smiled. “And how are you getting along?”
“Matt needs healing every day,” Foggy reported, sinking down onto the couch. His mother seated herself in her specially designated “Mom” armchair as he continued to speak. “I fall asleep in the office a lot. It’s embarrassing, but I can’t help it. I suppose Grandma was used to that sort of thing.”
“Oh, I remember quite a few times when a good healing would send her to bed for hours,” his mother smiled. “But Matt – why does he need it every day?”
Foggy shook his head, and tried not to lie to his mother, though it was a challenge. “To hear him tell it, he’s incredibly clumsy. Always tripping over something or walking into something.”
His mother frowned. “I never noticed. He never seems clumsy around us, far from it. And a few bruises shouldn’t take it out of you like that.”
Foggy shrugged. It wasn’t exactly his secret to tell, not that he didn’t trust his mother. But better to be safe than sorry. He tried to change the subject. “Mom—“
But his mother went on. “Does Matt have other friends besides you, Foggy? Anybody that could … you know … be abusing him?”
Foggy couldn’t help laughing at the idea. “Mom, believe me, nobody is abusing Matt.”
“And he’s not in … you know … that shady kind of relationship? Like Fifty Shades of Grey?”
“Mom, tell me you didn’t read that book,” Foggy begged, feeling his cheeks turn hot with sheer embarrassment. “Please, please, tell me you didn’t.”
“I haven’t read it,” she protested. “But I couldn’t help hearing all about it, even from people who should know better. Not that I’m naming any relatives.”
Foggy exhaled in relief. There were some things about parents that their children should never know. “Mom, I promise you, Matt is not in a BDSM relationship. He doesn’t even have a, um, romantic partner right now.”
He hesitated, then went on. “He, um, he thinks I don’t know, but he goes boxing. A kind of fight club. Please don’t tell anybody. Especially not those nameless relatives, okay?”
“Oh,” his mother replied, looking more relieved than Foggy felt. “Boxing. Okay.”
It was a good enough excuse that Foggy thought he could use it as a cover for a real question. “Mom, when I’m around him and he’s hurt, I can’t help wanting to heal him. It makes my hands tremble if I put it off too long! But every time I heal him, he goes back outside and gets hu-hit again. He used to take a few days off if he were really hurt—bruised, but now he doesn’t. I feel like I’m enabling him somehow, but I also can’t not heal him.”
“Oh, Foggy,” his mother sighed, then got up, sat down next to him, and pulled him in for a hug. “Sometimes you have to let people make their own decisions.”
“Yeah, but what if he gets killed one day and I could have prevented it just by not using my gift? Course I’d have to avoid him somehow to do that, but … what if?”
“I don’t know, Foggy,” his mother admitted. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation like that before. I’ve always tried to live my life by doing what I thought was right at the time, and that’s the only advice I can give you.”
“Well, that doesn’t help,” Foggy grumbled.
“I know that your grandmother always tried to heal everybody who asked, everybody who needed it,” his mother went on. “Even your Uncle Ray, though she told me a time or two that she knew he never would change his lifestyle.”
“Maybe she couldn’t fight the gift, either,” Foggy said.
“Maybe. Or maybe she knew that you can’t influence what people do with what you give them. I think she said something once about being a cheerful giver, and not caring about anything else.”
“Hmm.” Then Foggy remembered what he’d originally been about to ask. ”Speaking of the gift, Mom, do you know if Grandma could heal herself?”
“I know she could heal faster, but not instantly, not like when she could heal others,” his mother replied. “She had to sleep on it, sometimes up to three nights, I think she said once.”
“Well, that’s good to know.” Foggy closed his eyes. He woke up three hours later when his parents got home, only to discover he’d missed not only the funeral itself, but also the lunch wake. As he ate the contents of the doggy bag his mother had been kind enough to request for him, he decided that he had to make some changes or his healing gift was going to ruin his life. And those changes had to start with Matt. Fortunately, there was still time for Foggy to get over to the office and talk to him, even do some work while he was there.
Full of energy and determination, he set off, rehearsing in his mind how he was going to ask Matt to come around to his place every night after he’d been out Daredeviling, so that Foggy could heal him and still get some sleep before work. Before he reached the office, though, a man swung out of a coffee shop as he passed and called out, “Foggy Nelson!”
“Frankie? Frankie McMenemin?” Foggy asked, doing a complete double take. “Whoa, you know, I thought you died a couple of years ago, but I must have got you mixed up with one of my other cousins. Good to see you again, man!”
“Good to see you, too!” Frankie replied, equally hearty. Like Foggy, he was wearing a suit, as though he went to work in an office every day, though the Frankie that Foggy knew had worked in casual clothes in the home repairs business. But they’d been out of touch for a couple of years, and anything could have happened in the meantime. Now, Frankie held out a cup. “Hey, I’d like to talk to you if you’ve got a moment, or we can walk and talk at the same time. I even got you a latte, if you want.”
“Sure, why not?” Foggy took the cup, but as he sipped, he found himself glancing over at Frankie and trying to remember the name of his relative who had died of a brain aneurysm. No matter how often he ran through his list of known relatives, though, his mind kept coming back to Frankie. And yet the man was right here, obviously alive and well. Weird.
“So, what’s new with you? How’s the law business?” Frankie asked.
“Hey, it’s great, you might have heard that I’ve got my own practice now,” Foggy said, taking another sip. The latte was a bit sweeter than he usually took, but it tasted good. “With a friend of my mine from college. Nelson and Murdock, Attorneys at Law. What about you? You’ve moved up from drywalling with your brother and now you need some legal advice or something?”
“Actually, I was more interested in your healing gift. The word on the grapevine is, Grandma Nelson gave it over to you, yeah?”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. I’m still getting used to it. But I can tell you’re not hurt. You don’t even have a headache.”
Frankie smiled quickly in a creepy kind of way that Foggy didn’t remember ever seeing on him. “No, I’m not hurt. But I kinda wanted to ask you a favour, if you could heal somebody for me?”
“Yeah, sure,” Foggy replied.
“Great! I knew you wouldn’t turn me down. Can you do it now? Or are you on your way back to the office?”
“Well, officially, I’ve got the day off …” Foggy considered, and mentally rearranged his plans. “I guess I can do it now, yeah.”
“Great,” Frankie said again.
“Is it a guy or a girl? What’s wrong with them?”
“He’s been pretty badly beaten up,” Frankie said. “Think you can manage that?”
“You know, I think I can,” Foggy said, or rather, mumbled, because suddenly, all his muscles were turning weak and nonresponsive, and everything around him was starting to spin and go dark.
+++++
He opened his eyes, shut them, then opened them again and sat up, looking around wildly. What the hell was he doing on a mattress in what looked like part of an abandoned warehouse? And why was Frankie sitting crosslegged on the floor next to him?
“What the hell?” he croaked. His mouth was dry, and he rubbed his tongue against the roof of his mouth before trying again. “Where are we?”
“Hey, Foggy, you okay?” Frankie asked.
“Do I look okay?” Foggy demanded. “What happened? Did you – did you put something in my coffee?”
Frankie smiled that smile again, the creepy one. “Yes, Foggy, I did.”
“What the fuck – why?”
Frankie extended a bottle of water towards him, but Foggy just looked from it to him until Frankie finally said, “The bottle is sealed, Foggy, I haven’t put anything in it, but fine, whatever. Anyway, I wanted to save the long explanation for later, after you’ve done the healing I asked you about.”
“How about a short explanation, then?” Foggy asked, and Frankie shrugged.
“Okay – have you ever watched Fringe?”
“Yeah, I watched Fringe, all five seasons,” Foggy replied, remembering. “I was so in love with Astrid. And the other Olivia.”
“So you know all about the alternate universe, where there’s a different version of you? You’re in that alternate universe now. Just like Fringe. Except completely different. And that’s the short explanation, now it’s time for the healing. Come on.”
As Foggy got to his feet, he couldn’t help asking the first dumb thing that came to mind. “So, do you guys have zeppelins here?”
“Completely different from the Fringe universe, remember?“ Frankie led him past some opaque plastic sheets hanging from the ceiling, into another section of the warehouse. Foggy saw the camera first, set up on a tripod, and glanced over to where it was pointing. He could already feel that there was an injured person there, as his Murdockmeter was rising steadily. The only surprise was when he saw that five men were loosely gathered around the motionless figure on the floor, some seated at a nearby table playing cards, others on chairs either talking or staring at their phones. It almost seemed like they were guarding the injured person, but from what, Foggy couldn’t tell.
Frankie pointed down and said, “Use your healing gift on him.”
Getting his first real glimpse of the man, Foggy whispered quietly, “Matt?”
“You know him?” Frankie asked, but Foggy didn’t answer, looking down at the unresponsive man. Was Francis telling the truth, was this a different Matt, or was it Foggy’s Matt? It looked exactly like Matt, as far as Foggy could tell under all the blood and the swelling. There was blood everywhere, all over his face, all over his clothes where something had sliced him open again and again. He looked even worse than when Foggy had found him half dead in his apartment after a fight with a ninja. His ankles were shackled together, but his hands were free, and Foggy quickly knelt down and reached for one of them. As fast and as smoothly as he could, he let his healing warmth flow into the other man’s skin.
And Matt jumped to his feet despite the shackles, twisting Foggy’s hand in his until there was an audible crack, then striking out and hitting Foggy in the face so hard that he went sprawling across the floor. He was vaguely aware of Matt somersaulting away from the man who tried to catch him, and then Matt’s boots both landed on his leg. Foggy didn’t hear the next crack so much as feel the explosion of agony.
When he became aware again, Frankie was crouching at his side. Still completely shocked, Foggy looked beyond him to where the men had pummeled Matt to the floor, pressing his head down. Now they were moving the shackles from his ankles to his wrists, and starting to wrestle his boots off. He was still fighting, or at least wriggling, but ineffectively. Sickened, Foggy made a motion to help, but even the slightest twitch of his arm muscles sent excruciating pain through his wrist.
Well, at least he knew that Frankie was telling the truth about the alternate universe, because this could never be the Matt that Foggy knew. His Matt would have known him by his heartbeat or his smell or something, even before he’d spoken, and he wouldn’t have attacked Foggy like that, let alone hurt him so badly. It was impossible for his best friend to even think of treating him like that. Matt hadn’t betrayed him, hadn’t hurt him. It was a different Matt. It had to be. Foggy glanced back to Frankie and managed to whisper, “What the –?”
“Do you know him?” Frankie asked again.
“Is that what … you’re asking!” Not even Foggy’s voice wanted to work right; it broke in the middle of the sentence and was otherwise weak and nasal. “No ‘are you all right, Foggy … do you need an ambulance?’ Because, yes, thanks, I do … I need a hospital … and lots of painkillers.”
“You’ve got the healing gift, you can heal yourself,” Frankie said.
“No, I can’t, so fuck you,” Foggy whispered. Matt cried out, and Foggy glanced over, although even the tiniest motion of his eyes made his head hurt. They’d moved Matt, dumped him on the table with several of them holding him down, and one of them hitting the soles of Matt’s bare feet with a cane. Matt screamed again, and Foggy closed his eyes. Even if it wasn’t his Matt, it still made Foggy as sick with empathy as though it were.
“Stop it!” Foggy wanted to shout, but the words only came out as a croak.
“But do you know him?” Frankie urged.
“No!” Even though it was a different Matt, even though this Matt had hurt him, Foggy was still determined to keep his secret. Now he tried again to speak and got his voice a bit louder. “No, I thought I did, but it wasn’t him. Completely different guy. Weird, huh?”
“Yeah. Weird,” Frankie agreed.
“You brought me in to heal him … now you’re just going to … beat him up again?” Foggy asked, and when Frankie didn’t answer, Foggy said again, “Fuck you.”
Part 4