A Cheerful Giver
Part 4
Frankie stood up and came around to where he could lean down and thrust his hands under Foggy’s arms. Foggy screamed as Frankie dragged him away, jostling all his injuries, but although the agony in his leg brought stars and darkness to the edges of his vision, he never quite lost consciousness again. Frankie pulled him beyond the plastic sheets and back to the space where he’d woken up, then dumped him on the mattress and even pulled a rough blanket over him.
“I’m not going to heal him again,”Foggy whispered. “Not so you can keep on torturing him. So you can just take me back. We can pretend this never happened.”
He especially wanted to get back and make sure his Matt was okay.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Frankie told him. “Get some rest, you’ll need it.”
It seemed to Foggy that he did nothing lately except rest and he was starting to hate it. But he wasn’t in a position to do much of anything else except lay very still. He closed his eyes and thought of the warmth of his healing power, but it never manifested, and eventually, he fell asleep.
He woke up feeling better, not completely healed, just better enough to reach for the bottle of water that Frankie had left by the mattress. As Frankie had claimed, it was still sealed, and Foggy drank it all, then managed to sit up. It still hurt, but the pain was manageable, if only barely. There was light coming in from a window high up on the wall, which meant it was daytime, and his watch showed it was shortly before nine a.m., but he wondered if he could trust it in this strange, alternate universe. Although maybe he really had slept for a good fifteen hours. He was certainly hungry enough.
Very carefully, he pushed back the blanket and tried to get to his feet. His groan of pain must have alerted one of the guards, because a man came out from behind the plastic sheeting to check on him.
“Hey,” said Foggy. “You got a bathroom in this place? And would you mind giving me a hand?”
Surprisingly, they did have a toilet, and the man even took Foggy’s arm across his shoulders and helped him limp there. The way led across the section of the warehouse where Matt was lying on the floor, his arms cuffed behind him, one leg chained to the wall, and the four guards sitting nearby. Foggy’s Murdockmeter went straight up to eleven as he hobbled by, but he turned his head and forced himself not to notice. On the way back, though, he waved a hand in what he hoped was a casual manner and asked, “What’s up with him, anyway?”
“Just some stupid vigilante who went up against the boss and killed someone he loved,” Foggy’s guard explained. “Now he’s gonna suffer for it.”
Matt? Matt had killed somebody? This was definitely an alternate universe. Foggy got all the way back to his mattress and sank down in relief before he recovered enough to ask, “Where’s Frankie?”
“Francis is with the boss,” the guard said, emphasizing Frankie’s birth name. “Showing him the new videos.”
Foggy wondered vaguely if this wasn’t a chance for him to run away, but in an alternate universe, where would he go? He didn’t know how to get back – he didn’t even know how he’d got here. And with his half-healed injuries, he wouldn’t get very far even if he did know. He’d have to wait, get more information, and regain his strength. But, hell, he was hungry. “Any chance of some food?”
“Francis wanted to bring something back. He shouldn’t be long. You’re supposed to stay here.”
The guard went and got a chair, then sat down close to the plastic sheeting where he could keep an eye on Foggy as well as on Matt. Foggy frowned when he realized that he was under guard, too, and remembered how he’d told Frankie he wasn’t going to heal Matt again. Obviously, Frankie wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
Frankie came back about half an hour later with take-out breakfast food for everybody, and handed around the bags. To his surprise, Foggy got two of them, and Frankie even sat down on the mattress next to him as he ate. He was wearing a different suit than the day before, and Foggy felt grungy in comparison.
“You go by Francis now?” Foggy asked, and Frankie smiled slightly.
“You can still call me Frankie,” he offered.
“Just so long as you don’t start calling me Franklin,” Foggy said.
“Whatever you prefer,” Frankie said, then asked, “Still need an ambulance?”
Foggy’s bones ached sharply where they’d been broken, but he shook his head. “No.”
“Told you.” Francis looked smug. “And you still don’t know who our Black Devil is?”
Foggy shook his head again. “I told you, completely different guy. I saw him from one angle, thought I knew him, then I got closer, and nope.” He hissed as he made a wrong motion with his injured wrist, then added, “Your friend there said he was a vigilante?”
“The press calls him the Black Devil,” Frankie said with a shrug. “He claims he’s trying to make his city a better place, but when he starts killing people …”
“Funny, we’ve got a similar vigilante in our universe,” Foggy said. “They call him the Devil, too, but Daredevil, not the Black Devil.”
“Yeah, I know.” Frankie smiled a little.
“You know?”
“I keep tabs on that universe. For the boss.”
“Huh,”Foggy replied, then asked, “So, which universe do you belong to, anyway, mine or – or this one?”
“This one. Though I have spent a lot of time in your universe, especially recently, checking out the lay of the land. Undercover, so to speak. You were right, by the way, when I saw you yesterday. The Frankie in your universe did die. That’s the reason I can cross over, because I’m not there anymore.”
And if Foggy was able to cross over, too, that meant … “So, the Foggy in this universe?”
“He died, too. Right before he was supposed to go to college, he got hit by a car.”
“I’m not sure I wanted to know that,” Foggy said. “So … if I’m not here, who did Grandma give the healing gift to? Or is she still alive?”
Frankie sighed. “She gave it to our Foggy, and then he got killed. So there’s no more healing gift in this universe.”
“And you came over to our side to get it?” Foggy’s mind was starting to whirl. “What if Grandma hadn’t died yet, what if she still had the healing gift? Would you have kidnapped her, too? Dragged her over here?”
“No,” Frankie said. “No, I wouldn’t have done that.”
But he didn’t say what he would have done, he just changed the subject by indicating the remains of breakfast and asking, “You finished? Did you get enough to eat?”
“That depends on why you’re asking,” Foggy said slowly. Now that he felt slightly better, it was easier to be determined. “I told you, I’m not going to heal him again if you’re just going to keep on torturing him.”
“Foggy, I’m the only person who can take you back to your universe, and if you don’t heal him now, I’ll just keep you here until you do,” Frankie said, or rather, Francis did. Foggy could sense a definite difference between the two versions of his relative. It was unnerving, to say the least.
“And if I do heal him? Then what? I go back, and you beat him to death? What did he ever do to you, Frankie?”
“To me personally? Nothing. To the man I work for? He killed someone he loved.”
“So ... the man you work for, why isn’t he here, doing his own dirty work? Why are you doing it for him? In fact, if that guy in there is a vigilante, trying to make his city a better place, like your friend said, and you’re trying to stop him, then that means you’re on the wrong side of the law, Frankie. How’d you get mixed up in something like this in the first place? I won’t say that all Nelsons – and all McMenemins – are perfect law-abiding citizens all the time, but this is being a career criminal!”
“You’ve got it all mixed up, Foggy,” Frankie said. “We’re not the criminals, Black Devil is. Making the city a better place is only his excuse to go out and beat people up. And then he chose the wrong person to tangle with.”
“That still doesn’t justify torture!” Foggy cried. “You should be going through the law, not taking matters into your own hands! That’s just as much being a vigilante as what you say that guy is doing!”
“The Foggy in our universe was going to study business management, not law,” Frankie said. “Maybe it would have been easier to reason with him.”
“Maybe it would,” Foggy said. “But you brought me here, and now you’re stuck with me.”
“It’s the other way around,” Frankie – Francis – replied. “You’re stuck with me. And now that you’ve seen what we can do to Black Devil, are you really going to tell me no again?”
“You’re going to torture me? Seriously?” Foggy asked. “I might not have enough strength to heal anybody after that, you know.”
“I’m not going to torture you,” Francis said in the tone of voice that implied “not yet.” “I’m going to let you torture yourself until you give in.”
Before Foggy could figure out what he meant, Francis lunged forward suddenly, caught Foggy by the arm, and pulled him to his feet. Twisting his arm behind his back, Francis propelled him through the warehouse until he was next to Matt, then spoke to the guard there.
“Chain him.”
Foggy tried to kick out, both at Francis and at the guard who was padlocking a chain around his ankle, but Francis yanked his arm up to the point of dislocation and pushed him forward until he was beyond a 90 degree angle . When the padlock snapped into place, Francis let go, giving him a shove so that he fell to his hands and knees. His Murdockmeter felt like a Geiger counter in a nuclear power station, and Foggy clenched his hands to fists to keep from reaching out involuntarily to Matt. Matt’s sightless eyes were open, but his face was slack, as though he either didn’t hear what was going on, or didn’t care.
“You won’t be able to resist it forever,” Francis said. “And we’re willing to wait.”
“How do you know so much about the gift?” Foggy asked as he crawled away. Neither Francis nor the guard made any move to stop him – why would they? The chain was only a few feet long, and he couldn’t get far enough from Matt not to feel the urge to heal.
“Because I asked Grandma,” Francis said, as though it were obvious. “Didn’t you, when you were younger? I never let my parents take me to the doctor, I always insisted on Grandma, because I was so fascinated by it.”
“You wanted the gift for yourself,” Foggy guessed.
“And then she went and gave it to you.” Francis snarled. Foggy thought he might say more, but he didn’t, just turned and stalked away.
Foggy sat there for what seemed like hours as the “feel for heal” rose in him to the point where not only his hands but all of his limbs were trembling and his entire body convulsed at irregular intervals. The really bad thing was that he wanted to help this Matt, and not just because of his gift. He wanted to heal him and set him free and make sure he got away cleanly before Francis and his gang could touch him again. But as time went on, the rational part of his mind and his faint hope that Matt – this Matt – would die of his injuries before Foggy had to give in became smaller and weaker as the urge overpowered him. Eventually, he couldn’t fight any longer, and practically threw himself at Matt’s bare foot, letting the warmth explode out of him like water from a burst balloon.
“Sorry, buddy,” he apologized as Matt rolled over onto his back. “I’m so—“
Matt kicked him in the chest with both feet so hard that he actually flew a full yard before landing, and he knew instantly that something had snapped inside him. He lay there, the pain from his fractured breastbone making him breathe shallowly when he really wanted to gasp. Caught in the compulsion of his healing gift, he’d completely forgotten what had happened the last time he’d helped this Matt.
“Stop trying to kill me!” he finally panted. The pain from his previous, only half-healed injuries was flaring up again, too.
“Stop trying to heal me!” Matt retorted in a raspy voice, the first time Foggy had heard him speak. “You wanna do something good, either kill me or let me go.”
Foggy sighed. “I can’t. I want to, but I can’t.”
“Then screw you.”
Yeah, Foggy thought as he watched the other guards get ready for another round of Whack-a-Matt. Screw me.
Part 5
“I’m not going to heal him again,”Foggy whispered. “Not so you can keep on torturing him. So you can just take me back. We can pretend this never happened.”
He especially wanted to get back and make sure his Matt was okay.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Frankie told him. “Get some rest, you’ll need it.”
It seemed to Foggy that he did nothing lately except rest and he was starting to hate it. But he wasn’t in a position to do much of anything else except lay very still. He closed his eyes and thought of the warmth of his healing power, but it never manifested, and eventually, he fell asleep.
He woke up feeling better, not completely healed, just better enough to reach for the bottle of water that Frankie had left by the mattress. As Frankie had claimed, it was still sealed, and Foggy drank it all, then managed to sit up. It still hurt, but the pain was manageable, if only barely. There was light coming in from a window high up on the wall, which meant it was daytime, and his watch showed it was shortly before nine a.m., but he wondered if he could trust it in this strange, alternate universe. Although maybe he really had slept for a good fifteen hours. He was certainly hungry enough.
Very carefully, he pushed back the blanket and tried to get to his feet. His groan of pain must have alerted one of the guards, because a man came out from behind the plastic sheeting to check on him.
“Hey,” said Foggy. “You got a bathroom in this place? And would you mind giving me a hand?”
Surprisingly, they did have a toilet, and the man even took Foggy’s arm across his shoulders and helped him limp there. The way led across the section of the warehouse where Matt was lying on the floor, his arms cuffed behind him, one leg chained to the wall, and the four guards sitting nearby. Foggy’s Murdockmeter went straight up to eleven as he hobbled by, but he turned his head and forced himself not to notice. On the way back, though, he waved a hand in what he hoped was a casual manner and asked, “What’s up with him, anyway?”
“Just some stupid vigilante who went up against the boss and killed someone he loved,” Foggy’s guard explained. “Now he’s gonna suffer for it.”
Matt? Matt had killed somebody? This was definitely an alternate universe. Foggy got all the way back to his mattress and sank down in relief before he recovered enough to ask, “Where’s Frankie?”
“Francis is with the boss,” the guard said, emphasizing Frankie’s birth name. “Showing him the new videos.”
Foggy wondered vaguely if this wasn’t a chance for him to run away, but in an alternate universe, where would he go? He didn’t know how to get back – he didn’t even know how he’d got here. And with his half-healed injuries, he wouldn’t get very far even if he did know. He’d have to wait, get more information, and regain his strength. But, hell, he was hungry. “Any chance of some food?”
“Francis wanted to bring something back. He shouldn’t be long. You’re supposed to stay here.”
The guard went and got a chair, then sat down close to the plastic sheeting where he could keep an eye on Foggy as well as on Matt. Foggy frowned when he realized that he was under guard, too, and remembered how he’d told Frankie he wasn’t going to heal Matt again. Obviously, Frankie wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
Frankie came back about half an hour later with take-out breakfast food for everybody, and handed around the bags. To his surprise, Foggy got two of them, and Frankie even sat down on the mattress next to him as he ate. He was wearing a different suit than the day before, and Foggy felt grungy in comparison.
“You go by Francis now?” Foggy asked, and Frankie smiled slightly.
“You can still call me Frankie,” he offered.
“Just so long as you don’t start calling me Franklin,” Foggy said.
“Whatever you prefer,” Frankie said, then asked, “Still need an ambulance?”
Foggy’s bones ached sharply where they’d been broken, but he shook his head. “No.”
“Told you.” Francis looked smug. “And you still don’t know who our Black Devil is?”
Foggy shook his head again. “I told you, completely different guy. I saw him from one angle, thought I knew him, then I got closer, and nope.” He hissed as he made a wrong motion with his injured wrist, then added, “Your friend there said he was a vigilante?”
“The press calls him the Black Devil,” Frankie said with a shrug. “He claims he’s trying to make his city a better place, but when he starts killing people …”
“Funny, we’ve got a similar vigilante in our universe,” Foggy said. “They call him the Devil, too, but Daredevil, not the Black Devil.”
“Yeah, I know.” Frankie smiled a little.
“You know?”
“I keep tabs on that universe. For the boss.”
“Huh,”Foggy replied, then asked, “So, which universe do you belong to, anyway, mine or – or this one?”
“This one. Though I have spent a lot of time in your universe, especially recently, checking out the lay of the land. Undercover, so to speak. You were right, by the way, when I saw you yesterday. The Frankie in your universe did die. That’s the reason I can cross over, because I’m not there anymore.”
And if Foggy was able to cross over, too, that meant … “So, the Foggy in this universe?”
“He died, too. Right before he was supposed to go to college, he got hit by a car.”
“I’m not sure I wanted to know that,” Foggy said. “So … if I’m not here, who did Grandma give the healing gift to? Or is she still alive?”
Frankie sighed. “She gave it to our Foggy, and then he got killed. So there’s no more healing gift in this universe.”
“And you came over to our side to get it?” Foggy’s mind was starting to whirl. “What if Grandma hadn’t died yet, what if she still had the healing gift? Would you have kidnapped her, too? Dragged her over here?”
“No,” Frankie said. “No, I wouldn’t have done that.”
But he didn’t say what he would have done, he just changed the subject by indicating the remains of breakfast and asking, “You finished? Did you get enough to eat?”
“That depends on why you’re asking,” Foggy said slowly. Now that he felt slightly better, it was easier to be determined. “I told you, I’m not going to heal him again if you’re just going to keep on torturing him.”
“Foggy, I’m the only person who can take you back to your universe, and if you don’t heal him now, I’ll just keep you here until you do,” Frankie said, or rather, Francis did. Foggy could sense a definite difference between the two versions of his relative. It was unnerving, to say the least.
“And if I do heal him? Then what? I go back, and you beat him to death? What did he ever do to you, Frankie?”
“To me personally? Nothing. To the man I work for? He killed someone he loved.”
“So ... the man you work for, why isn’t he here, doing his own dirty work? Why are you doing it for him? In fact, if that guy in there is a vigilante, trying to make his city a better place, like your friend said, and you’re trying to stop him, then that means you’re on the wrong side of the law, Frankie. How’d you get mixed up in something like this in the first place? I won’t say that all Nelsons – and all McMenemins – are perfect law-abiding citizens all the time, but this is being a career criminal!”
“You’ve got it all mixed up, Foggy,” Frankie said. “We’re not the criminals, Black Devil is. Making the city a better place is only his excuse to go out and beat people up. And then he chose the wrong person to tangle with.”
“That still doesn’t justify torture!” Foggy cried. “You should be going through the law, not taking matters into your own hands! That’s just as much being a vigilante as what you say that guy is doing!”
“The Foggy in our universe was going to study business management, not law,” Frankie said. “Maybe it would have been easier to reason with him.”
“Maybe it would,” Foggy said. “But you brought me here, and now you’re stuck with me.”
“It’s the other way around,” Frankie – Francis – replied. “You’re stuck with me. And now that you’ve seen what we can do to Black Devil, are you really going to tell me no again?”
“You’re going to torture me? Seriously?” Foggy asked. “I might not have enough strength to heal anybody after that, you know.”
“I’m not going to torture you,” Francis said in the tone of voice that implied “not yet.” “I’m going to let you torture yourself until you give in.”
Before Foggy could figure out what he meant, Francis lunged forward suddenly, caught Foggy by the arm, and pulled him to his feet. Twisting his arm behind his back, Francis propelled him through the warehouse until he was next to Matt, then spoke to the guard there.
“Chain him.”
Foggy tried to kick out, both at Francis and at the guard who was padlocking a chain around his ankle, but Francis yanked his arm up to the point of dislocation and pushed him forward until he was beyond a 90 degree angle . When the padlock snapped into place, Francis let go, giving him a shove so that he fell to his hands and knees. His Murdockmeter felt like a Geiger counter in a nuclear power station, and Foggy clenched his hands to fists to keep from reaching out involuntarily to Matt. Matt’s sightless eyes were open, but his face was slack, as though he either didn’t hear what was going on, or didn’t care.
“You won’t be able to resist it forever,” Francis said. “And we’re willing to wait.”
“How do you know so much about the gift?” Foggy asked as he crawled away. Neither Francis nor the guard made any move to stop him – why would they? The chain was only a few feet long, and he couldn’t get far enough from Matt not to feel the urge to heal.
“Because I asked Grandma,” Francis said, as though it were obvious. “Didn’t you, when you were younger? I never let my parents take me to the doctor, I always insisted on Grandma, because I was so fascinated by it.”
“You wanted the gift for yourself,” Foggy guessed.
“And then she went and gave it to you.” Francis snarled. Foggy thought he might say more, but he didn’t, just turned and stalked away.
Foggy sat there for what seemed like hours as the “feel for heal” rose in him to the point where not only his hands but all of his limbs were trembling and his entire body convulsed at irregular intervals. The really bad thing was that he wanted to help this Matt, and not just because of his gift. He wanted to heal him and set him free and make sure he got away cleanly before Francis and his gang could touch him again. But as time went on, the rational part of his mind and his faint hope that Matt – this Matt – would die of his injuries before Foggy had to give in became smaller and weaker as the urge overpowered him. Eventually, he couldn’t fight any longer, and practically threw himself at Matt’s bare foot, letting the warmth explode out of him like water from a burst balloon.
“Sorry, buddy,” he apologized as Matt rolled over onto his back. “I’m so—“
Matt kicked him in the chest with both feet so hard that he actually flew a full yard before landing, and he knew instantly that something had snapped inside him. He lay there, the pain from his fractured breastbone making him breathe shallowly when he really wanted to gasp. Caught in the compulsion of his healing gift, he’d completely forgotten what had happened the last time he’d helped this Matt.
“Stop trying to kill me!” he finally panted. The pain from his previous, only half-healed injuries was flaring up again, too.
“Stop trying to heal me!” Matt retorted in a raspy voice, the first time Foggy had heard him speak. “You wanna do something good, either kill me or let me go.”
Foggy sighed. “I can’t. I want to, but I can’t.”
“Then screw you.”
Yeah, Foggy thought as he watched the other guards get ready for another round of Whack-a-Matt. Screw me.
Part 5