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There was a famed baby at the gym at the moment and Rudy was scheming how to get it into his arms when the old man caught him leaning on the front desk and told him that he had two whole grandbabies waitin’ for him at home.
Matty took that moment to fly in from the back room where he’d been harrassing the shit out of the new ‘clerk’ (as Fogwell called him) to ask if Tina had finally popped.
Rudy was caught off guard by the image of Tina beating the shit out of Matt for that and then by the wave of nostalgia that the kid’s sudden enthusiasm bought.
“Well, look who’s here?” he drawled instead, slowly turning around towards the beast. “Where you been, neighbor?”
Matt beamed at him.
He looked good.
Happy.
Far, far too happy.
Rudy squinted.
Matt waited a beat, then scrambled back into staff entrance and knocked shit over on the desk back there in his haste to go hide behind Fogwell.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
That’s right, troublemaker, go hide behind Grandpa. He’ll protect you, you little shit.
The new gym baby was a full two months old. He was fat and grumpy and his papa’s pride and joy already. Rudy managed to snag an opportunity to get the thing into his arms when Bert and Kenny came in, signaling for the youths that the senior citizen shift had begun.
Fogwell was the most distinguished of the senior citizens, but, of course, he would wait his turn until the rest of them had finished lavishing attention upon his fiftieth great-grandbaby.
Baby’s papa was proud as a peacock.
“His name’s Henry,” he told Rudy, while Henry wrinkled his nose and eyes up at him.
Henry.
Ehn.
Terrible name.
“He looks like a John,” Rudy said.
Papa, who Rudy had forgotten the name of at least six times since he’d joined the gym, laughed.
“I thought about callin’ him Jack,” he said. “But my girl drew the line there.”
Ah.
Right.
This was that kid.
Kenny had gathered everyone into a group huddle in the changing room the other week to explain seriously how they all needed to avoid the fuck out of this guy. He’d said in a whisper that the guy was one of them people into vintage shit.
A hipster, he meant.
A fuckin’ hipster in their midst.
God, there were more and more of them in the gym every day.
Rudy lifted an eyebrow at baby Henry.
He didn’t deserve to be called Henry. He really did look more like a John. But, for the sake of the dead, Rudy decided that he’d squint for as hard and long as it took for him to become a Henry.
Fogwell’s had been legendary back in the day for producing pro boxers out of good-for-nothin’, trouble-makin’ guys with no other prospects.
Fogwell was that general from Mulan who made men out of boys (and the occasional girl. And the most recent kid who said that they weren’t a guy or a gal and if anyone wanted to throw down about it, they were posting their number on the cork board by the front desk).
Back in Rudy’s youth, that had been appealing as hell. And so he’d had a swagger on into the place, thinking that maybe he would pop his guns a bit in Fogwell’s direction and get the polishing he needed to make enough money to buy his girl a ring.
On the upside, Fogwell had, in fact, noticed him. But the downside was that Rudy had had no fucking clue what that actually meant, and so three years later, he’d found himself smoking only twice a week instead of every day, drinking goddamn protein shakes, and doing a daily fuckin’ jog like a military brat.
Fogwell had no time for dumb shit. He didn’t care if you wanted to kill yourself slowly with whatever vice you picked from the basket, but if you walked into the ring with his name on your back, then you would disgrace that name on pain of divine retribution.
It was way easier just to get one step ahead of the guy’s nit-picking than to suffer his judgemental silence.
That had been Fogwell back in the day, and that was still Fogwell in the now.
But as with any force of nature, even if the old man had planted his feet and announced his intention to rest there in that place for the next two millenia, the world around him still carried on spinning around.
Fogwell’s wasn’t just a facility for churning out pros these days. It wasn’t just legendary, now.
It was a fuckin’ institution.
God help them.
They were a tourist destination. Ghost hunters, folks on buses, sports fans, teen girls with a mighty need for a vintage-lookin’ selfie. You name it. They pressed their noses up against the yellowed glass to watch the people inside break their bodies down to build them up into something money-making.
It wasn’t an unwarranted curiosity, to be fair.
Fogwell had produced twenty pro boxers in the last several decades who’d really made it. Like, really, really made it.
Bert was one of them—to literally every one of the senior citizens’ surprise.
Bert had been a empty-headed wise-guy with a porn-stache at best way back when. And like, don’t get Rudy wrong, he was still an empty-headed wise-guy. He was just an empty-headed wise guy with a head like a helmet and a whole lot of money now.
Not that you’d have known it from lookin’ at him.
Bless him.
He was paying college tuition for all his kids and he was helping the older ones vet kindergartens with tuition or what the fuck ever, doing all that he could so that those babies didn’t have to live life out of Kraft Mac ‘n Cheese boxes like him.
Bert had made it. That was the dream.
The dream was just that, though. A shot in the dark. A drop in a bucket. Kenny had done alright, just like Rudy had done alright. They’d had their ten minutes of time in the spotlight. Had made enough to get by. Had made enough to be comfortable in Hell’s Kitchen. To retire and become personal trainers or sports commentators or whatever the fuck opportunity jumped up in their faces.
A lot of fellas hadn’t made it, though. And then there were the Almosts.
Jackie had been an Almost, god rest his soul.
This new hipster kid at the gym with his baby had latched onto Jack’s image, found in old magazines and grainy footage, and had decided that that whole vibe fit the image that he wanted to live in.
It made Rudy sick. It made Kenny angry—hence the group huddle.
There were about seven of them left who’d both known Jackie and who still used the gym on the regular. Eight if you included Fogwell.
Nine if you included Matty.
Jesus fuckin’ help them.
This dumbass hipster kid didn’t even know who Matty was. Most of the newcomers didn’t. He was just some bright, perky blind guy to them. He was Center-Left-Second-Back bag. That was his bag.
And he was good.
He was a curiosity to the newcomers and the people pressed against glass—one of a handful of middle-weights in a sea of heavyweights. He didn’t look like everyone else. He wasn’t packing muscle like everyone else. He was lithe and coiled and looked, honestly, a little out of place to folks who didn’t know the gym as Home #2.
He was interesting to the newcomers mostly because he was 100% Fogwell’s favorite. Fogwell doted on him by ribbing him and bullying him viciously, by bumping into him and throwing him off mark left and right, and all the while, Matty just beamed.
The newbies thought he got preferential treatment because he was blind. But that wasn’t it. Matty got treated that way because that was how his grandpa told him he loved him.
Before Jake and Carlos and Omar and Matty, Jack had been Fogwell’s favorite up-and-coming rookie.
It had been no secret. Well. To most people.
Jack had been horrified when he’d found out.
No one wanted to be Fogwell’s favorite. That’s how you went pro whether you liked it or fucking not.
Jack had pleaded with Kenny for hours to take his place, but there was nothing that could be done. Jackie was the youngest and Jackie had come from a shit home life and Jackie would do anything and everything Fogwell told him to do because he was just that kind of sweet and respectful.
Fogwell could smell Jack’s lack of a father-figure on him like Chanelle No. 5.
He could smell it miles away.
Jack had actually been at the gym before Rudy had joined up. He’d been around since he was about seventeen. He’d come in on the heels of his big brother who wanted to go pro.
It quickly became apparent to Fogwell that Tom Murdock didn’t have what it took to be a boxer. He was just a bully. But that little brother of his, Tom’s punching bag, now he had some talent. He had the diligence and respect that the game, in Fogwell’s opinion, was severely lacking.
So Fogwell did what he did best and drove a wedge slowly between Tom and baby Jackie, separating the two of them so that he could get his mitts on Jackie and do something with him before Tom and his junkie sister took Jackie down with them.
Rudy had met Jack soon after Jack’s eldest brother had been arrested for murdering his wife and stepdaughter.
The kid was a wreck. He’d just turned 18.
He didn’t talk. He just fought and fought and fought until he cried and cried and cried. All on his own, from 5pm to 1am, at Center-Left-Second-Back.
Fogwell let him.
Fogwell came over to put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed when he finally dropped from exhaustion.
It was hard to watch.
The older guard at the time had bared their teeth and clenched their jaws as Jackie had pummeled his heart out against that bag.
No one could help him.
Everyone but Rudy, at that time, had seen the man he’d walked into the gym with. They’d seen this coming a mile away. And over a few days of that, it become clear to Rudy that Jack didn’t have a home to go back to that didn’t scream at him from morning until night. At that time, the gym for him was Home #1.
It took about a year, but Rudy eventually got to know this weeping, heartbroken boy from the worst side of the Kitchen.
Rudy learned from the others about the Murdocks.
They were sinners and drunkards and addicts, word had it. The police were always in and out of their rooms, taking one of the five kids or one of the parents to jail for some damn reason or another. Neighbors wasted their hard-earned money on phone calls to the police for domestic disputes and violence and so on and so on. Everyone on the streets said to be careful of the Murdocks, especially them boys.
They got the devil in ‘em.
But not Jackie, Rudy learned.
He was shy, bless him. He wasn’t suited to those others’ kind of life.
Rudy actually had felt, for the second time in his life, strong brotherly feelings around this kid. He and his own sister didn’t get on until someone threatened the other. Then it was no-holds-barred, bear-like feelings. Just them against the world.
But Jack was different. He had puppy eyes with a constant black one and perpetually chapped lips. It had never occurred to him that he could spend a buck buying chapstick. It had never occurred to him that he could have friends that he didn’t have to smile at until his face hurt.
He didn’t really get what it meant to have relationships with other people and for the first six months of their acquaintance, Jack refused to meet Rudy’s eye, much less say more than five words to him.
He was more than respectful.
He was skittish.
The other guys, who were happy to haze Rudy, warned him that he if so much as looked at that kid, Fogwell would break his bones and his career would be over before it even started.
It had definitely turned into a kind of spite thing.
Rudy had absolutely been that kind of shithead back then.
He’d started by offering to hold Jack’s bag while he worked out his aggression. That had been a mistake.
He’d caught Fogwell snickering at him about ten minutes into it, after trying and failing that whole time to find a way to plant his feet that would let him actually hold onto the bag.
Jack had noticed.
Jack had gotten flustered and freaked out bad enough that Rudy had been forced to leave him be or else he’d hyperventilate or go hide in the backroom in a cupboard or something in self-flagellation.
It took some practice and some muscle, but they got there in the end.
Jack was a great sparring partner because he did not fucking go down. It was like trying to fight a pine tree sometimes. He would, could, and did take hit after hit without batting an eye.
And when it was his turn for offense?
Rudy was well aware that he’d signed up to be a human punching bag, but this? This was a lot.
Fogwell critiqued the fuck out of Jack’s everything.
His form.
His posture.
His aim.
His drive.
His commitment.
His tape.
His fucking hair.
Jack thought he was like that with everyone.
Rudy loved that kid like a brother, but he wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box. Not by far.
That had become more clear when Kenny joined their mottley crew and, aggravatingly sharp, had taken to teasing Jack. That was more frustrating for Kenny than anyone else because Jackie didn’t get a single joke or jibe.
No, Jack didn’t know Seinfield. Or Friends. Or Charlie’s Angels. No, he didn’t know anything about cars. No, he didn’t know about physics or chemistry or math. What the fuck was English lit? Wait, what’s the difference between books and literature?
God.
Bless.
That.
Kid.
He wasn’t unintelligent, he just wasn’t academic.
He was sweet about it, though. The youngest of five, he had no choice but to be sweet because all his siblings called him hopeless and useless and stupid, so he had to be something and so pretty it was.
Rudy had never met someone who performed so well under pressure and around two years into their friendship and, suddenly privy to the full extent of Jack’s honestly horrific, borderline surreal upbringing, he finally got it.
But then along came Grace.
The Lord’s agent herself.
Jack was a good Catholic boy who saw a nun and dropped his eyes, but for some reason, this novice caught his gaze and he was gone.
He got dopey and dreamy the night after she and some friends had snuck out in their novice habits to see a load of guys in desperate need of the Lord hitting on each other.
It was tooth-decaying the way Jack swooned for that girl.
Her name was Margaret, she told him saucily at the church one street over from the one he’d grown up attending, but he could call her ‘Grace.’
Jack banged his melon on a locker a week later at the gym and the jolt make him realize that he was in love with her.
He cracked his head a second time with everyone watching him in a mix of pity, exhaustion, and indulgence and then scurried off to the bathroom to hyperventilate over a urinal.
“Someone go keep Baby M from drowning in a sink,” Horace Whalin, a professional beast at the start of his career, had sighed.
Everyone had looked right at Rudy.
Grace was the worst thing that could ever have happened to Jack.
Everyone at the gym knew it. Fogwell hated that girl with a cold passion.
She made Jack stupider than usual. Bolder than ever.
She made him think and made him question things and like, that was probably a good thing in terms of Jack’s life experience and mental health, but in terms of boxing?
Not good.
Fogwell was openly dreaming up schemes to break them up the day Jack came tearing into the gym and announced that he was getting married.
It took everything in Rudy not to start cackling right then and there. The entire gym’s necklines bulged with the effort not to fucking laugh. Fogwell went silent and blank.
He’d waved Jack in close and and when he came—because he would always come to Fogwell, no matter what—the old man set a hand on Jack’s shoulder and told him that if he brought that woman into the gym he’d kill him.
Jack stared up at him and said that they were getting married in a church, Coach. Why would he bring her to the gym?
At that point, it would have taken a saint not to laugh and the gym was full of only sinners.
Grace was the worst thing that had ever happened to Jack, but Matty was by far, the best thing.
Fogwell, after being vindicated upon Jack and Grace’s abrupt and tragic separation, found that Matt could be used as a motivator for his up-and-comer.
Matty, of course, played the part beautifully.
He was unfairly cute with those delicate, wispy red locks and them big hazel eyes. He was bubbly and chatty. An unrelenting troublemaker. Just a barrel of laughs.
Fogwell took to letting Jack put Matty’s carrier on a bench next to the ring or on one of the metal bleachers around the mats in the weights and sparring room. He found that if Matty started whining or crying, that Jack got twice as motivated to finish whatever task was at hand with maximum efficiency.
Matt was the best thing to ever happen to Jack’s boxing career, truly.
He also immediately became the gym’s darling because all the veterans there at that point were dads. Rudy himself had had his first girl Tina the year before, but unlike Jack, the rest of them had childcare arrangements and the money to maintain them.
It was just natural for people to gravitate towards the baby. Out of paternal instincts, yeah, but also because Matty was a source of constant entertainment.
He called everyone uncle until he was seven and he needed to be negotiated with to leave Fogwell be until he was nine. Fogwell didn’t mind him. Fogwell had unwittingly adopted him.
Matty didn’t meet his own uncles and grandpa. Jack couldn’t bear that. He took Matty to meet Bill, Jack’s eldest brother—the one who’d killed his wife—in jail and afterwards had been heart-broken and anxious for days.
Grace did not approve, it turned out.
Grace, who went by Maggie at that point, and who had given up her rights to be the mother of Jack’s child, remained one of Jack’s closest and dearest friends.
They still loved each other, and in Fogwell’s very correct opinion, that was nothing but trouble. He snatched Matty at every opportunity and informed him softly but firmly that he was not going to fall in love with a nun when he was big or there would be consequences.
Matt seemed to have come to understand this rule over time, but he never seemed to put together pieces as to why Fogwell was so insistent about it.
When Jack turned up murdered, everyone at the gym decided that it was their fault.
It was surreal.
Unbelieveable.
He’d been right there, just fine, laughing and smiling the day before. Rudy had held his bag and Jack had told him to tell the girls and Mel that he missed them.
And, in a moment of crushing realization back then, Rudy had understood the implications of those words and then remembered how good Jack had always been about smiling at people.
He knew how to make himself seem okay and unimportant. He knew how to fade into the background.
Fogwell took it hard.
He blamed himself for not recognizing how bad things had gotten at home for Jack and Matty. He blamed himself for not booking him for more jobs, for pushing him harder and harder on his form lately.
Matty was taken away by social services and his absence from the table at the gym the next day finally brought out the tears that Rudy hadn’t been able to let fall.
He tried.
He tried, he did.
Over the years, Matty had become a brother to Tina, Angie, and Penelope. He fit right in that two-year gap between Tina and Angie. Rudy had him over when Jack worked and Jack had the girls when Mel needed a break from the screaming and crying. And really, by then, everyone’s kids were everyone’s at the gym.
It wasn’t a matter of who belonged to who, it was more of a matter of when someone belonged to someone.
Rudy tried to get custody or at least foster rights. Mel gave herself an ulcer over it, trying to think of how to arrange things to make their home safe for Matt. Trying to think of how to make space for him. He could share a room with Tina. They were still young. They probably wouldn’t mind after some growing pains. But social services said that that wasn’t possible. Matt was too high-risk for them. They didn’t have enough experience with ‘his type of child.’
Which was bullshit.
Matt wasn’t high-risk, Matty was traumatized and scared and with people he didn’t know, who didn’t know him.
That was what made him high-risk.
He knew Rudy and Mel’s house. He knew their girls. He knew their neighborhood.
Still, nothing.
Fogwell himself tried. Shocked the shit out of everyone at the gym, but Social services sadly shook their heads.
By then, Matt had been placed out already.
Matt disappeared for five years. Just vanished completely. There was no sight of him until one day, Tina came home and said that ‘oh yeah, I saw Matty today’ while playing with her food at the dinner table.
Rudy and Mel had set down their forks.
Tina sighed and said that he was taller now, but he didn’t look good.
He looked sick, she said. With dark rings around his eyes and broken sunglasses. He’d been sleeping, leaning against the side of some stairs out in his school uniform at the Catholic highschool a few blocks away.
She’d poked at her chicken and then set down her fork and excused herself.
Rudy stroked her hair that night as she cried into her pillow for her lost brother.
Matt was, by fifteen, a troubled kid.
Rudy heard shouting one day from Clinton Church and stepped out to see what was happening. He was shocked to see that familiar ginger mop struggling in the arms of two cops, swearing that if these people took him back to wherever he’d come from, that he’d kill himself. He’d do it. Don’t try him.
The priest was called.
Matt was forced down to the ground and handcuffed, still fighting.
It was--it was a whole lot to see. Kenny swore softly behind him and Bert left them to go back inside. He went to the bathroom and didn’t join them out on the mats for a while.
Fogwell decided around then that enough was enough.
He went to the church and asked if he could borrow Matt for a while. He needed some help getting his accounts together and he knew Matt was a bright kid. Giving him a little work experience in a familiar and disciplined setting would be good for him.
But Matt wasn’t there.
The hospital didn’t allow anyone to visit Matt. He apparently hadn’t earned the privilege of visitors from anyone who wasn’t on his care team.
Rudy felt numb at the front desk.
Jack’s boy had tried to kill himself. He’d warned them all that he would do it.
He’d apparently screamed himself hoarse that he wanted to be with his dad in the ground.
He was still screaming.
This wasn’t the first time he’d done any of this, Rudy came to learn through a few whispered conversations with some nuns from St. Agnes.
Grace had found him after the three attempts the nuns knew of. This last one was just bad enough that she couldn’t bring him back from the edge.
Grace’s eldest younger sister had committed suicide. Grace had found her and then left home immediately become a novice. To find her own son as she’d once found her sister was cosmic and divine cruelty—enough that even Fogwell shook his head and said it just wasn’t right.
The first time Rudy saw Matty after the whole situation, he looked exactly as Tina said he did. Tired. With dark circles. Thin. His clothes threatened to fall off of him. They were threadbare and had holes in them here and there.
Matty didn’t talk.
He moved his head around a lot and jerked when anyone spoke to him or brushed against him, and he scrambled back and tripped sometimes if he was touched directly.
It was like looking at a smaller, thinner version of Jack all those years ago—this time with tightly bound wrists and a hospital bracelet that looked like it had been stretched and torn and chewed on.
Fogwell asked Matt if he thought he could do something with the accounts.
Matt said nothing.
Fogwell gave him a box of receipts and bits and bobs of payment cards and IOUs and Matt had frowned and put his hand into the box to touch its feathery contents. He’d lifted his face up in Fogwell’s direction and sneered.
“You can’t seriously live like this,” he’d said in a voice that almost brought tears to Rudy’s eyes. He’d heard Kenny clear his throat behind him.
Matty was the smartest person Rudy had ever met.
He set Fogwell’s accounts into order in an afternoon and then he fucked off for a few days, only to come back and digitize the whole thing after making the Big Man himself sit with him and read everything out individually to him as punishment for his nasty, twentieth-century ways.
Matt was disgusted with Grandpa’s living conditions.
He banged into every object in the backroom and swore like a sailor, loud enough that the folks hitting shit in the front room could hear him.
It was hard not to laugh.
“WHY?” Matt finally raged at Grandpa. “WHY. WHY. WHY?”
Grandpa shrugged.
Matt flailed at him in agitation at the lack of verbal answer and told him to get into the fartherest corner of the room and to get a pen, they were going to organize.
Matt was the reason that Fogwell’s Gym had survived for long enough to become a tourist trap.
Matt put every document in that place in order, ready for an audit. He made computer systems for payments and receipts and direct debits. He singlehandedly bullied Fogwell into the new century and made him get a card machine.
He bitched and moaned and belly-ached until Fogwell had interviewed a handful of tax people with actual, non-criminal reputations and picked one and once he was done with all that, Matt harrassed him to invest in a deep clean for the place and to make it accessible by ADA guidelines—the whole nine yards.
Matt, at fifteen, breathed new life into Fogwell’s Gym and it was kind of amazing how the place went from barely hanging on to a decent business once more.
After that, Matt seemed to be doing a lot better.
He didn’t have any more foster home placements. He didn’t try to hurt himself again. He decided, instead, that he was going to graduate highschool. He’d failed a fuckload of classes, though. Rudy found him despairing in the backroom over these and settled in across from him and asked to see the reports.
They weren’t good.
Matty’s teachers wrote constantly that Matt was extremely bright, but failed to participate in class or turn pretty much anything in for a grade. He slept in class. He seemed dazed. He didn’t ask for help or give any indication that he needed it.
His assigned para said that she found him challenging to work with. He was resistant to questions and seemed to be angry or, at best, uninterested in her speaking to him.
He was way behind.
Rudy had tapped the reports against the table back there and had taken a deep breath.
“It’s okay,” he told Matt. “We’ve got two years. We can make this work.”
And Matty’s head had jerked up from the table.
“We?” he’d asked in a small voice.
Matt really, really struggled with high school. Not because he wasn’t smart enough, but because his experience was so wildly different from other kids. He didn’t go home like they did. He went to St. Agnes’s. He didn’t play video games, he read books. He didn’t smoke cigarettes or joints. He didn’t drink. He was under constant surveillance.
He was bullied. Relentlessly.
Fogwell was quietly furious when Matt came in a few times a week to type away at the desk, inputting receipts for the new secretary to deal with later. Matt was always hurt. Always fighting.
He got his classwork done out of spite, seemingly, but then went home to the orphanage and got harrassed the whole way.
He fought his peers like the devil himself.
It was…
There was…
Something not quite right with him.
Bert pointed out when Matt was seventeen that he didn’t always use his stick like other blind folks. He forgot it sometimes and wandered around the gym like anyone else.
He didn’t trip over anything or keep fingers touching the wall like he usually did in other places.
They all chocked it up to him having grown up in the place.
Matt asked Fogwell to let him train.
Center-left-second-back.
That was Jack’s bag.
That was his son’s bag.
The veteran boxers all cycled through teaching Matt how to box. He knew—they all knew Matt already knew how, but there was always shit to learn.
Except that sometimes there wasn’t?
Matt seemed to already know everything that they taught him, including the nit-picky, little things. He listened to their descriptions, let them manipulate his hands and arms and hips, and then did what they asked immediately and with perfect form.
It was eerie.
It just wasn’t right. There was just something about it that wasn’t right. Rudy couldn’t put his finger on it.
Matt graduated highschool the year after Tina and it was only when Rudy saw the draft of the commencement program slip out of his bag on one of the benches that Rudy realized that Matty hadn’t mentioned it to anyone.
He picked up the program while Matt was attacking his bag and considered it, then did what was done in the gym and handed the program off to Fogwell who, in a booming voice, told Baby M to get the fuck over there, front and center.
Matt clung to his bag in terror at the sound. He, unlike his daddy, had the good sense to be reluctant to follow Fogwell’s orders. Eventually, with his tail between his legs, he skulked over and had his nose shoved in the program.
He pawed at it when Fogwell made him acknowledge it and mumbled something about not going.
Which was absurd.
“It’s not a big deal,” Matt said. “I’m not valedictorian or anything. It’s just highschool. And no one’s got time to go anyways, so what’s the point if it’s just me?”
God, this kid.
Matt’s graduation was very Catholic. Far more Catholic than Tina’s had been, but when Rudy looked over his shoulder, he was pretty sure that even a school this Catholic hadn’t been prepared for the influx of nuns hurrying down from Clinton’s church, all bustling and excited about young Matthew actually getting his diploma.
Between those four (aw, Grace. Look at you trying to play it smooth) and the seven boxing families who’d shown up, Matt was embarrassed to the point of tears. He’d hidden behind his mortarboard for the thirty minutes it took for people started calling folks up on stage.
He didn’t want to come out to take any pictures afterwards, but Tina wasn’t letting that happen. Her sisters leapt on board with the program and Rudy had managed at least one picture of the four of them smiling. Even better, he had one of Matt trying desperately to keep a smile while Fogwell stood stiffly next to him in stone-faced approval.
Matty was the first in the gym’s kid’s generation to graduate college, and then he was the only one to go on to law school.
It was only at that big graduation that Rudy finally saw Matt beaming like a loon—like he had up at Jack as a baby, but this time at the long-haired, chubby guy next to him.
This, legend had it, was the Roommate.
The one Matt refused to speak about to anyone at the gym.
Period.
At all.
There was no discussion.
That is, until he was forced by Fogwell standing menacingly over him in silent demand for a hug, to introduce them all to Foggy.
Foggy Nelson.
And then, just like that. It was exactly Jack all over again.
Veins bulging as everyone tried desperately not to laugh at Fogwell’s face at the realization that Matty had gone out and found a better, nicer Fog-person to be friends with.
Foggy Nelson—Edward Nelson from the hardware store’s son—was not fucking good enough for Matty, Fogwell decided. He’d begun a stoic campaign to introduce Matt to every available boxer’s son and daughter in the city in the hopes that a little nudge would get Matty away from all them conniving lawyer-folk. That was all fine and well with Matt because Matt, they’d all learned after a few years in his company again, was a horrendous flirt.
God, this boy.
Incorrigible.
He flirted with Tina and Angie and Penelope and got slapped every time.
He flirted with Bert’s daughter Becka.
He flirted with Becka’s husband.
He flirted with Kenny’s son’s best friend at the son’s wedding.
He flirted with the new secretary’s sister-in-law.
He was completely unstoppable.
Kenny approved.
But Kenny also asked Matt pointedly if he and his roommate had worked things out yet and that sent Matt scowling and shuffling off to go hide behind Fogwell, wherever he was, for emotional support.
Matt was Daredevil.
He had to be.
Everyone in the gym suspected this.
He was too good at fighting. To flexible. Too sturdy and relentless and angry to be anyone else. They all recogized his shoulders in those little blips of videos people posted online. They recognized how close he got to people from the way he get up in his bag’s imagined face.
He had some kind of superpower—some kind of 360 degree awareness was the best Rudy could describe it.
He felt like he remembered Jack freaking out about something like this a million years ago. Nattering on about super-senses in the aftermath of the accident.
Fogwell was the one who’d brought it up again after he’d noticed that Matt liked to come in at night and spar on his own.
One time, just once, he’d left one of the security cameras on, concerned that Matty might get mugged in the night on his own there.
But Matty wasn’t getting mugged anytime soon.
No, for real.
Matt was…maybe something a little beyond them.
The video Fogwell had shown the older guys before deleting it and telling everyone to mind their own fucking business had shown Matt throwing his weight at the bag—throwing legs and fists—in complicated, almost choreographed movements that spoke of lethal intent.
He moved like a weasel. Like a predator.
Like a devil.
God knew where he’d learned those moves. The boy had lived a lot of life in those few years he’d fallen off of the gym’s radar. There was no telling who he’d met or how he’d learned to be as he was, but things made a lot more sense after that.
Jackie had had a devil in him. It only made sense that his dramatic-ass kid had one, too.
Matty had made something more of himself than his daddy. In so many other things, but in this, too.
Fogwell’s Gym was protected. It was home to a devil in disguise.
The hipster Jack-fan appeared with baby Henry a few more times before Bert asked him if he knew that his hero’s kid, who’d lived the life baby Henry was currently living, was actually a regular at the gym.
Hipster-kid gaped and fell over himself trying to ask Bert if he could meet the guy.
Bert smirked. And then waved across the place over to where Matt had just slithered in with absurd orange sneakers that he was very proud of. He was clearly on the hunt to go show Fogwell so that he could be disgusted.
He froze when Bert called his name.
The hipster’s jaw dropped.
“Matty, come tell this man about your daddy,” Bert said.
Matt stared.
Then made a sad, aborted gesture with his free hand that said that he had very important annoyances to make of himself, so could this maybe wait?
“You’re—you’re--?” the hipster stammered.
“Matt Murdock,” Matt said hurriedly. “Great to meet you? You’re the one with the kid, right? Congrats. Have either of you seen Fogwell?”
The hipster blinked.
“Uh?” he said. “Not today?”
Matt scowled.
“He’s not escaping these,” he said, tapping his way angrily back to the door. “I got him a matching set. No one is escaping them.”
The gym at large watched him stalk back out the door, tapping away furiously, no doubt on the way down the block to Fogwell’s house.
“That’s Matt Murdock?” the hipster asked.
“Man, I thought he’d be taller,” another newbie said.
“Kid, that is the least of your problems when it comes to Matt Murdock,” Bert laughed. “Now, all of you, back to work. This ain’t a dog and pony show. Go on.”