Based on this work of god fanfic by @sunshineverse REAAAAL late to the party but I’m only reading this now and clearly I got so invested that I just had fanart :’D I didn’t really go back to the fic and illustrate the scenes word-for-word so forgive me if anything seems off >____<
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
A little Sunshineverse fic by @okilani89. Check it out!
Summary: Foggy and Matt go out on a simple supply run, but of course in this world gone down the toilet, things are never easy. All the caring Foggy has done for Matt is about to be repaid in so many ways.
Am I even doing this right? I have no idea. I am one of your silent (stalker?) Sunshine readers (I’m sure there are others out there) and have never done anything on Tumbler except follow your Sunshine page… but, yeah, couldn’t resist the dvd commentary idea. Don’t know if I am submitting it right or not, but here it is: when Matt finds Foggy again in the park and Foggy decides to take time with him… kills me every time! I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. More than 500 words, but….
Foggy felt ill. “Matt. I can’t take you with me. You know that.”
Okay, I’m gonna Be Real here and tell you guys: I was absolutely terrified to post this chapter. This scene, specifically. I did not think this would go over well, if at all. Coffee shop and soulmate AUs are one thing, but crippling half of Matt’s brain, that’s a little different.
A loud huff against his earlobe. It tickled, but he didn’t so much as twitch, afraid of startling his friend and watching him dart off into the darkness. Another whimper. Jesus. Foggy lifted a hand, very slowly, very carefully, and settled it on the base of Matt’s neck.
Matt being touch-starved is a popular trope in this fandom, and I totally see why. FeralMatt has gone so long without non-violent contact that he’s a total sucker for any sort of physical affection, and this extends through the rest of the story. His “off” button is on his head; if you want to put him in a coma, just give him a decent scalp massage, he’ll be toast in five seconds. He’s also the worst co-sleeper in the world.
Matt straight-up fucking melted into him, like he’d been sedated, the grip on Foggy’s shirt loosening. There was a high, fractured noise, not a whine, and not a grunt, coming up painful out of Matt’s throat– a sob. It sounded like breaking glass. “F'g,” he breathed, then swallowed, and the glass broke again, and then with great difficulty, one halting syllable at a time, “miss’d'y.”
Him finding words and speaking them is incredibly difficult, and this statement in particular took monumental effort. Anyone else might not have been able to tell what it meant, but this is Foggy, and Foggy knows Matt better than Matt does.
Fog, missed you.
For three months.
He wanted to throw up.
Matt was alone, frightened and confused, for three straight months. I think anyone would want to puke if they knew that had happened to their best friend.
Fog, missed you.
It’s a toss-up as to who missed the other more.
“Fucking hell, Matt,” he whispered, not moving his hand from the man’s neck. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what he could possibly do to make this okay for anyone. There weren’t a lot of choices on the table.
When are there ever, especially in this universe?
Option A: take Matt out of the Park and back to the shelter. Unfortunately, Karen– sorry, ma'am, Paige, what a lazy pseudonym– would definitely kill him the moment she saw him.
100% correct, Foggy. If she’d had her gun with her when she met Matt in Foggy’s room, she would have shot and killed him immediately, for good reason. Good thing she wasn’t expecting to get pinned down by a feral and wasn’t carrying her pistol around.
Option B: take Matt and go back to the Kitchen. They could find another place, another apartment to live in, maybe, and stay there, quietly.
Not gonna work, Foggy, you doofus.
Option C: leave Matt. He could very clearly survive out here. Maybe Foggy could visit every once in a while. Like a zoo for your feral ex-best friend. No entry fees.
The difference between “survive” and “live” are evident here. Matt indeed could survive out in the mud with no fresh water or food, but he’s feral. Eventually he would have stopped fighting instinct and just became another animal. (That is, if he survived the infected arrow wound.)
Feral social structure was based off of pack animal behavior, like wolves or lions (humans are technically pack animals, too!), so they have a sort of hierarchy to them. A lot of Matt’s mannerisms, especially in these two chapters, are purely feral. He’ll bow his head in submission and turn his face away to avoid (incidental) eye contact, which is a sign of challenge. Also his audio cues-- growling, huffing, whimpering, etc.-- that he’s now stuck with.
The further the story goes, the more obvious the mannerisms become, meshed in with his everlasting struggle to stay as human as possible. He’s truly stuck between both worlds, unable to safely live in either one. Writing him with these instincts is a lot of fun, especially considering some of them are just an extension of his time as a vigilante-- being hugely territorial and protective of what belongs to him. Being feral, he’s also dangerously possessive and, for lack of a better word, greedy. He wants it all, but not just for him; he wants to keep the only two people close to him as safe as he can, and that includes getting his shit beat over his territory in Brooklyn.
Option D: not even really an option, fuck you, I’m not doing that.
I think it’s obvious, but “option D” was killing Matt right there in the Park.
Fog, missed you.
Three months!
Matt kept pushing his face against his neck, shivering, clutching. His skin felt so cold, but it felt whole and right and Foggy was pretty sure his heart was somewhere around his ankles in a thousand pieces. Maybe on top of his stomach. They were all freezing and painful.
Lowered body temperature is a symptom of the virus. Matt’s extremities are always cold, and he has trouble keeping himself warm without aid. It’ll be nice in the summer, when it’s a hundred degrees every day, but in the middle of winter (or November, which is when this scene takes place), it can be dangerous for him. Also symptoms: increased saliva production, sterility, and, yes, chronic fatigue.
Foggy and his co-dependency. I wanted to make it frighteningly severe, to the point where he legitimately has trouble functioning without Matt there. (See: subway arc.)
“He'p,” Matt pleaded, his voice fracturing the word, low and shivering and barely audible. Broken like the rest of him. “He'p.”
Matt’s sad, garbled speech. Every word takes an age to hunt down and speak aloud. It gets easier, over time, but he’ll never be anywhere near eloquent again, and he’ll always take the easy way out when he’s speaking. There’s a line later on-- (He had a lot of trouble with hard consonants, like his vocal cords wanted to make a guttural noise instead of a word and he had to fight to stop them from doing so)-- and that’s the easiest way to put it. Matt is literally talking around instinctive growls and other such noises.
Help.
Matt never asks for help. Here, it’s one of the first things he does when he finds Foggy. A sign of how different he’s become because of the virus. (He’s also asked for help when he had his final plateau, in chapter two. The virus fucks him up that badly.)
Help.
He doesn’t even know specifically what he needs help with, just that he knows things are all wrong, and that this person can fix it. All Matt has is the barest memories of Foggy-- echoes of his voice, what he smells like-- but his instinctive need to be near his best friend endured, even though he doesn’t remember anything specific. Their lives were so entangled that even without any memories to guide him, Matt was able to recall feeling warm and safe with this person he found in the Park.
Matt’s life is very, very confusing.
Jesus. Foggy didn’t even know how to help himself at the moment. There wasn’t much he could do with the ice in his body and the rapid heavy thrum of his heart in his ears. “Matt, I’m sorry, I…”
So is Foggy’s.
Warmth on his neck. Not blood.
Callback to Matt crying into Foggy’s neck in chapter two.
“Okay… buddy… I gotta…” he swallowed and gently pushed Matt off of him, but Matt certainly wasn’t having any of that, because he whined and immediately forced his way back, pushing his face into that well-worn spot against Foggy’s neck. Jesus Christ, he was strong. He’d forgotten how strong. “No, no, Matty. You gotta get off me.”
Matt is so confused and lost and desperate right now. All he knows is this is where he’s supposed to be. He is terrified of losing that single shred of familiarity that he’s managed to find.
Another sob, harsh, in his ear. Matt clutched tighter. “He'p.”
Ah, Matt, you and your depressing animal noises.
“I can’t.”
Do you suppose Matt detected that lie?
The sob twisted into another high whine. Desperate, like the last noises of a dying animal. It felt like freezing fire when it entered his head.
“I know, Matt, I know.” He didn’t know. He really fucking didn’t. Foggy gently untangled the hand from his shirt, removing Matt from his neck again. The space left behind felt colder than the internal organs he’d dropped carelessly on the ground. He pushed Matt back to arm’s length, even though he would rather saw off his own limbs than do it at all. “Buddy, I gotta go. They’re gonna be looking for me. They’ll kill you if they find you.”
Hahaha, foreshadowing.
But seriously, I do a lot of foreshadowing. I fucking love it, because there’s nothing more satisfying than someone re-reading and then rounding on me on Skype all WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS NOISE
Nobody’s looking for Foggy, which is the sad thing. Karen would, eventually, but if she found him dead, she’d go right back to that empty shell, and nothing will ever be able to pull her out of it.
This time, Matt listened. He retreated back a few feet as his shoulders fell and his eyes searched the emptiness they only ever saw beneath them. A long rattling sigh came from his chest. The machine, idling. He shifted on his feet, lingering, as if he wanted to say something and was working up the courage– and yet… and yet. It looked like this was something Matt expected, a vague sort of acceptance on that empty, filthy face of his. Like he knew this would be the outcome. Unwelcome, unwanted. Damned to a half-life of mud and ash. Because he had made the mistake of protecting his best friend.
Matt’s growling being a “machine” is an ongoing metaphor. Because it really does sound like a machine-- human vocal cords aren’t meant to sound like that, so it’s garbled and alien and frightening to hear.
This is him realizing that he actually doesn’t belong with Foggy, which confuses him even more. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do, because following instinct hadn’t helped, and following his bare memories didn’t do anything, either. If Foggy hadn’t taken him with at this point in time, he would have absolutely been dead in a few days.
Foggy wondered what was going through his head, if anything at all. “Matty, I gotta go back where I came from, okay?” His thoughts rolled madly in his head like boiling water. Pick an option, pick an option, pick an option, pick before he runs off, pick before you never see him again. He worried at his lower lip, then took a breath, and made his choice.
We all knew what it would be.
“Come with me.”
Right here, Foggy changes everything that people know about the virus, forever. He has no idea the repercussions-- both good and bad-- that he’s just brought upon the world. Foggy does what nobody else has ever done before, which is rehabilitating an infected human. To Foggy, that’s just par for the course, because Matt would have done the same for him. To some people, he’s a fucking idiot, and to others, he’s the ballsiest human being on the planet.
In Sunshine’s sequel, In the Pale Moonlight, I’ll be exploring the virus and its effects a bit more. Specifically, the version of the virus that Matt has contracted. I know you’ve noticed, but Matt’s virus is a bit different than the rest, and that’ll be laid to bare in the sequel.
(Also, Frank Castle shows up. It’s gonna be so much fun.)
This fic-- well, this universe-- has always been about the pattern of loss and gain-- physically, emotionally, and mentally. Just because you lose something about yourself, it doesn’t mean you’ve lost who you are. You just need to find it-- and that’s exactly what Matt, Karen, and Foggy do.
