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It’s everything. That feeling of the world folding in on itself, closing over him. He fights; bites and punches and scratches trying to find a way out, but he’s always enveloped, and there’s an ending. So many endings. So many he’s promised himself, so many he’s denied.
He wants to hate Frank. More than anything, that is what he wants. And yet he can’t. He can’t, and he hates— hates that he was the one to unfold Matt to himself, hold him stark across the board and pin directly where his heart is. Where it has stayed this whole damn time. Hates that someone like him is who finally understood. Finally bothered to try understanding.
It had been close. That night. If Cherry hadn’t burst through the roof access door, Matt isn’t sure where he would be. If he’d have been able to hold tight to the surface. If he otherwise would have let himself tip over the edge, fulfill the law of falling bodies, and try again to make it end. Make it work this time, this time, because he was too selfish to think of what Foggy would have wanted then, only himself. And he didn’t want to live in a world without him.
But he didn’t. He’s here, and Foggy isn’t. He’s here, going through the motions, earnestly trying this, and then he was bared open because none of it has felt real. He didn’t want to live in this world, so he took the alternative of not living. He’s not living like this. And for someone to see that, to want him alive?
He isn’t sure he can cling to God in cases like these. It’s another thing he’s pretending. He wears his cross. Every blue moon, he goes to a church. Never Maggie’s.
It’s everything, and he isn’t able to take that anymore. Wasn’t prepared for it. Should have been, considering how he knows Frank to be. And still.
But he goes home, and his apartment isn’t empty. The motions continue, but they’re not good enough. He can no longer tell how much of himself is revealed, how much can be spotted by looking upon him. He radiates his own distress, his scent is thick with it in a way he knows only he can tell, and yet his own paranoia grips at him, and it’s that which leads him to open his mouth, to give bits and pieces of the reality that’s closing in, not even recognizing it for the plea it is.
Hector is gone. The police killed him, and the system is proving itself more debauched than ever. And Foggy— Foggy is—
Heather is here. She’s here, her heartbeat a steady drum in this place, her scent wiped clean and pungent with strawberry and lavender, barely on the precipice of being too much. She radiates the warmth a human body always does, a tightly compacted fever of it. She’s here, real. Real. She agrees about the excessive punishment for his client, the words a tangible warning that she’s moving closer, rejoining his space, so he takes a step closer as well.
Matt needs something to crack. Needs something to split open. Not like Frank, never like Frank, please God, no, just… anything. In spite of himself, he keeps talking. Creates that fissure. “You ever feel like you’re, uh. Pushing a rock up a hill. And there’s a bunch of people on the other side pushing it back.”
She’s standing before him, looking at him. Unable to meet his eyes, he knows, unable to look into them, to cross that bridge. He can feel her breaths, hear the soft exhale, that drum of her heart rising slightly, something else rising with it. But she doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t pry her fingers into the fissure. Doesn’t acknowledge that it’s there.
And of all the things Matt can do in the absurdity of this world that always feels against him, of all he can do when laying his heart out the best he fucking can in front of her and utterly incapable of fathoming what she thinks of it—he just… laughs. Something short and awkward, abrupt as he blinks it away. His hand closes in a fist and unfurls at his side, and he has that momentary, wonderful swell of relief when she brings up her hand—
And begins for his clothes. Pulls off his coat one shoulder, then the next.
Something inside him clenches. An open maw over his heart as his next breath shudders through him. He doesn’t step back, doesn’t pull away. Doesn’t move closer, doesn’t bring his hands to her hips. He isn’t even frozen so much as he is lost, caught with the words buried at the bottom of his throat, waiting for release, for some permission he can’t provide. There’s that push of something too close to adrenaline, too wrong to name, but it hovers nevertheless, a snare at his neck.
The moments are passing too slowly. Far slower than they must be in the world outside him, outside them. Perhaps not even a second.
Other words push out of him, a reflex, some stalling, polite habit. “How was your day?”
It isn’t what he wants to say, not even close. He just needs something to fill the space of their silence, her silence, something to make the momentum stop, halt, get pulled short before he lets it all unravel forward.
She keeps going even as she speaks. Hands defly undoing all the buttons of his shirt, brushing against his chest, gentle yet sure.
It’s a call and response as she keeps moving, talking through it, casual and easy, and he doesn’t know what to do with this crushing pressure, the noose at his neck, the anger that had him lunging for Frank’s throat, that is still prowling under his surface because he isn’t strong enough to control it, can’t do it, this, anything.
She is walking forward, and he is walking backward. His home isn’t empty. She is in it.
His home isn’t empty, but he isn’t home, anyway.
Her hands circle around his neck, pull him in while walking his back, guiding him where she wants him with ease, and she kisses him, and there is nothing to do except kiss back.
He thinks, vaguely, that he must be some kind of parody of himself. This isn’t real, he isn’t real, the actions he’s undertaking aren’t real. Maybe he had tipped over the ledge that day. Maybe it hadn’t been Poindexter’s body, but his own. Maybe that’s where the pressure is coming from, and the idea of this is more relief than curse, some promise fulfilled to himself. He didn’t have to carry on. He didn’t have to.
The backs of his legs hit the end of his bed, and he startles back into himself, a small, surprised gasp escaping him.
Heather laughs into his skin, her breath warm and startling against his collarbone. “Didn’t track the steps this time, counselor?”
He blinks, feels the soft pressure of the frames of his glasses across his nose like a touchstone. “Must’ve, ah. Been distracted.”
“Good,” she says, one hand sliding up, burying itself in his hair.
His own hands find her waist then, and his mouth opens, those buried words trying to break free again. He can’t do this. Not right now. Not with the thoughts spiraling in his head, his own grief another vacuum that has split open. He can’t think about her, can’t do— anything with his skin burning, everything too hot and sensitive and far too raw. He thinks he might accidentally split her open. Or, more likely, split himself open.
He needs— anything else. A distance to match what’s inside. He’s always had that slick satisfaction of knowing his effect on people, people like Heather, the effect he’s having on her now, however unwittingly. But he doesn’t feel it, can’t feel it right now, doesn’t want to feel it. The knowledge slips like oil onto his brain, something he wants to recoil away from. His body doesn’t know how to do that. How to back away, stop. The most he can offer is a limp submission and an unanswered prayer to, just this once, have Heather fill the silence with something else instead.
She pushes him back onto the bed, still kissing him. Straddles his hips, grinding down into him. And it’s the only thing he can do. Is allowed to do. Able to do.
***
He doesn’t sleep after that.
Something inside him has mutated. Dug itself into the marrow of his bones and died there.
He can live with it.
Or, rather, he can do what he has to. What’s required of him.
More than anything, he just wants to talk to Foggy. Destroy the distance he’d always upheld between them, the secrecy, the lies. Wants it to come down.
Frank was wrong.
More than anything, Matt wants to hear him. Hear a single fucking thing. But nobody answers him in the silence. Not Foggy. Not Matt himself. Not even Heather when she can hear him. In a world that is constantly so loud around him, he never hears the fucking things he needs to.
He pulls himself from his bed. Puts on his glasses, his clothes. Heads out, and knows not to expect Heather to wonder where he may have gone.