Finally he heard his voice just outside, and he was on his feet, patting his hair down at the last moment, when he strode in. He stopped walking mid-step, and his heart jumped; Matt thought he hadn't remembered he'd just been provided with a new assistant. At least he remembered his name after a moment: "So you are Matthew Murdock? The enhanced spy who, being recently out of a job, has now decided he wants to become a lawyer instead?"
He did not need to feel affronted by this man yet, Matt reminded himself. It wasn't easy. "I was with S.H.I.E.L.D., and will be starting work on my JD in January, yes, sir." He was glad, now, that his acceptance to Columbia had come through three days ago. He wasn't sure Coulson hadn't literally been running around a few backrooms uptown to pull that one off.
"Well, you were not my choice of PA, of course. I'm afraid my first question simple must be: how are you going to be handling your enhanced hearing in our world? Because there are a lot of questions about ethical behavior that such an ability raises."
It was a fair question to ask, and Matt had already been expecting it. But there was an undertone there he didn't like at all. Still he gave the answer he'd prepared, "I'm not going to deliberately try to overhear things I'm not supposed to. There's some knowledge I won't be able to help, or my trying to get is going to be a very hard habit to break-my listening for deception whenever someone's heartbeat makes it detectable is probably the biggest thing. Generally I'm not going to find out much about anyone who's not in the same room with me unless I deliberately make the effort, which, as I said, I'm not going to do in violation of legal ethics."
This was certainly what he was going to say to anyone who asked. Matt was still hoping it would be true, too. But he supposed he couldn't know for sure whether he could resist temptation before he actually faced it.
"But what about the things you do find out? Words overheard by accident, drugs smelled on people's breath? Even lies detected; not everyone's going to know they can't lie around you." And now there was no mistaking it, the veiled hopefulness. Well, Matt had already known enough to know that if nothing else, this guy was the kind of lawyer he wanted to avoid becoming.
He let his voice turn cold as he replied, "What I do there I intend to determine on a case by case basis. However, for now, I don't think I'm likely to make use of much of the information I accidentally acquire here at Landman and Zack. I don't have as much grounding in legal ethics as I'm hoping to get in the future."
"Being conscientious, then." He would've concealed his disappointment had Matt only been able to hear his voice.
He didn't ask any more questions about the senses immediately, but instead went through more typical topics, telling Matt about his regular schedule and what he was likely to want from him when. He also gives him a rundown on some of his current cases. "There are a few affairs that I can't really let you be involved in, you understand," he said, and Matt would have, if he hadn't known better. "At least you won't have to do any extra work for those, though"” Well, he hadn't confirmed that he would, though he was starting to think so.
Matt was just starting to think Cranston would now ask if he had any questions, and he'd certainly had those prepared, when he instead said, "I am going to request you sit in on a meeting I've got this afternoon at two. It's with a private investigator who does most of the investigative work on my cases, but to be honest I've never completely trusted her. Of course I'm not asking you to do anything you consider unethical..."
"I might not be able to read her anyway," said Matt. "If people's job relies too much on deception I often can't."
"That could make things a lot simpler," said Cranston, half to himself, and the acceleration of his heartbeat there suggested all too much. "But I've got another meeting in half an hour that I'm going to have to attend alone. Meanwhile, could you take these files down to Lillian Sherbert on the first floor, fourth door to the right from the elevator? When you get back I'd like you to do some research on the latest building regulations over in Saratoga-you've got a laptop in your bag, right?"
He gestured over to where Matt had left his bag, which did indeed include a laptop. If Matt had been less experienced with his senses, he wouldn't have caught that. But he only said, "Yes, don't worry, I can do that," and took the pair of heavy folders Cranston brought over to him.
Matt took his time walking to the elevator, and to Ms. Sherbert's office from there, listening to the sounds of the building as he went. He almost always did that when in a place like this for the first time, especially if he was on a mission, and the offices of Landman and Zack were much less soundproofed than some of the places he'd been in. He'd listened to voice samples of the two partners and their main assistants, as well as a few other people high up in the firm, and he quickly had the location of both their offices. But he was also listening for the voice of Franklin Nelson, and when he was on the first floor, he heard it, saying, "I know, I know, I'll get it. You want sugar too?"
He got the files delivered quickly, and after that hurried up to the second floor. Some caffeine would do him good anyway.
Nelson was coaxing the coffee machine into giving him enough when Matt walked in. "Excuse me," he said, "but is this the second floor break room?"
"I think that would be obvious..." Nelson started in response, before he turned around and got a look at Matt. "Oh...uh, sorry."
"What for?" Matt asked.
"You're blind, right?"
"Yeah, so they tell me," Matt said, and broke the friendly grin out. "I'll be better about it once I've been here a few days."
"So I've finally found someone newer here than I am, besides the other interns." Nelson sounded all too delighted.
"Please to meet you, then." Matt held out his hand. "I just started as a PA. My name's Matt Murdock."
"Foggy Nelson..." The other man started, then stopped. "Wait...Matt Murdock?" He, too, had read about him, it seemed. That didn't necessarily mean anything, of course.
But then he asked, "Are you...you're not from Hell's Kitchen are you?"
"Yeah," said Matt. "Born there, lived there until I was ten, and now I just moved back there again."
"I've lived there my entire live." Rarely had a man's grin resounded so loudly in his tone. "Yeah, I heard about you when you were a kid, what you did, saving that guy crossing the street, even before you tried to go make a career out of saving people...you're practically a superhero, aren't you?"
"That's going a little far," Matt said, feeling genuinely embarrassed. "I mean, especially considering..."
"Yeah, okay, your bosses turned out to be a little evil. But still, getting your peepers knocked out and the rest of your senses cranked up to eleven saving that old dude? Classic superhero stuff, way before they got involved."
"They didn't get knocked out." That was a weak deflection, he knew.
It worked, though. He even heard Nelson's chest heave slightly as he said, "Good, because that would be...a little freaky. But no offense," he hastily added.
"None taken," Matt assured him. Then, because he wanted to get this established with anyone he got friendly with anyway, he said, "A lot of people seem to think the senses alone turn me into a freak, did even in S.H.I.E.L.D. Or they dance around me like I'm made of glass, which I hate even more."
"Yeah," Nelson said readily, "You're just a guy, right? A really, really, good-looking guy."
"Uh..." He should have read Nelson's signals already, he chided himself; his heartbeat alone gave away the attraction. But he didn't always think to check for that with men. This also brought up the option, of course, of honeypotting him. Matt in his long S.H.I.E.L.D. career had done that only twice, both times with women whom he'd only slept with once. In the old days, he probably wouldn't have in this case. But he had a lot more options back then. Now, they had to consider any possible advantage on hand.
He'd been silent long enough for Nelson to form the most logical conclusion, and he hastily added, "I mean, women must love that, the whole wounded, handsome duck thing, am I right?"
"Right..." He ought to keep the honeypot option open, but it was just too easy to go along with it. "Yeah, it's been known to happen."
"In that case..." Nelson seemed to remember in that moment what he'd come in there for, because he turned back to the machine. But a moment later, he continued, "Don't suppose you're free tonight? Or some other night? I now officially want to hang out with you at least once. See what kind of women it gets talking to me, you know?"
He could have any number of reasons for the offer. So could Matt. Even if he was innocent, as Sharpe's son, it would be useful to befriend him. "Sure," he grinned, "I don't have any plans."
"You want to come out with me, then? How long have you been back? Get a chance to see how the old neighborhood's changed yet?"
"Not yet," said Matt. "And I probably should do it soon, since I'll be starting law school in January, up at Columbia."
He got the reaction he wanted: "Columbia? That's where I went! I can tell you about the campus, where to get the best coffee...it'll be great! Listen, I'd better get these to the bosses, but you want to meet down in the lobby at, uh six-thirtyish?"
When Matt nodded, Nelson hurried out. He continued to listen to him as he made his way back upstairs, a little worried he'd have made him late and gotten him in trouble, but thankfully Nelson didn't get himself yelled at.
He felt kind of strange, like someone had grabbed him and whirled him all around, leaving him uncertain which direction he was currently facing in. But while normally there was little he disliked more, at that moment, he instead felt cheered by it. In a place like this, one that threw cold reality into his dream of becoming a lawyer, he had taken an extra turn into a break room and found something and someone that his long years of experience had firmly declared good, and Matt trusted his judgement there, even when it wasn't at all what he had expected.
Matt had honestly not been able to discern much about Ms. Jones, aside from that she had an alcohol problem and may have suffered some sort of heavy trauma recently. Cranston had asked him to do research on her work. He'd stated firmly he didn't care about her teen years and the whole thing where she'd been fostered by Patsy Walker and her mother after her family was killed. But when Matt had returned with a dearth of information on an investigations practice set up too recently for there to be much and a little more about a the murder of a less than reputable boyfriend, Cranston had chewed him out for not looking at her involvement in the more scandalous corners of the Walker family saga.
"Cranston was actually at Columbia a year ahead of me," said Foggy-he had already insisted Matt call him that. "Always knew he was going to be the sort of lawyer who gets our profession villainized."
"And you, I trust, have every intention of not being that," Matt said, keep his tone light and easy.
"Of course I won't!" said Foggy. "Though I am hoping to make money, but, you know, I pride myself that I can avoid doing anything truly evil, you know?"
Every physical response Matt knew how to read confirmed his sincerity. But he did need to be thorough about this, so he said, "I did hear one thing today, though, from one of the other PAs. I, uh, mean no offense, and maybe he was wrong, but he talked about your mother..."
"My biomom, you mean," sighed Foggy. "Yeah, she's a bit of a..." He stopped himself for a moment, then said, "Honestly, I don't think I even know half of what she does. But I think a lot of it must be bad."
And with that all almost certainly the truth, he was pretty much cleared. And he might not be as useful a source of information as some might have hoped, but Matt was relieved for that, too. He would much rather Foggy be his friend.
But he still had the responsibility to get what little information Foggy had, so he then asked, "Anything in particular stand out from what you have seen? I mean, I hope she hasn't done anything to seriously scare you or anything like that."
"Not scare me, exactly, but...I actually never even saw much of her before these most recent months. I never even heard from her much before I got into her alma mater, after which she started emailing me a lot. But now I've been to her offices, especially right before I started here, and well, I'm wondering about who some of her friends are. And I'm not even talking about her clients; I mostly know who they are. These are guys that came in there that she just described as her 'associates' and I don't know what it is, but something about the way they talk...it's like I get the feeling they would commit mass murder if they thought they could get away with it. Or maybe they even had."
They almost certainly had, but Matt still responded with, "You sure that's not just paranoia? I mean, it doesn't even sound like they introduced themselves to you, even. Afraid if you got their names, you'd look them up, maybe?"
"You know, they didn't, but I did get a few of their names anyway. We could look them up once we're sitting down, if you really want to."
Matt just smiled, and said, "If we have time. You promised to tell me all about Columbia, remember." He would try to make sure they had the time, but if he needed to he could always set up another meeting, especially since he wanted continuous ones anyway.
So they left off that subject for a while, especially when Foggy decided they should actually take the trip uptown and eat at one of the many dirty but dirt-cheap places that had kept Foggy himself fed during this student years. The whole sensory experience, from the train ride to the place itself, definitely wasn't pleasant, but Foggy was a very good anchor. He didn't say a word about Matt clinging to his arm on the train even when they were sitting down, and he seemed to know when it was good for him to talk to Matt and when it wasn't.
The food was a little better. Well-cooked, if a little heavy on the additives. Perhaps Matt shouldn't have gone for the chowder, but he'd always liked its texture, even when the flavoring got downright unpleasant, which this was not. He told Foggy that when asked, and laughed when Foggy replied that he'd known a place in the area where they bragged about how their chowder was so thick some diners used knives on it. "Little out of my price range, though, so I have only their word for it."
"Don't get much money from the rich mother?" Matt asked, mostly out of sympathy.
"Biomom," Foggy said sharply. "My actual mother runs a deli with my father, and he didn't really get anything in the divorce. Okay, I can't say Ms. Sharpe's never helped me, especially not recently. But she's always been stingy and alway put me down and usually been a terrible person to my parents especially."
"Of course," said Matt, who certainly understood the difference between biological parents and actual parents, even if he hadn't actually rejected a former. He even added, "I don't even have any memories of my own birth mother. I think my leaked profile had most of what I know about her..."
"Oh, I didn't read that!" Foggy sounded positively scandalized. "I read about your abilities and skimmed your professional record and that's all. Reading the rest would've been invasive, and weird, and seriously, they should've limited what they leaked. I suppose the likes of the Black Widow doesn't think about things like personal privacy. Honestly, Matt, I wonder about some of the things even the loyal members of S.H.I.E.L.D. did. The whole culture of your old company, you know?"
Matt thought about his secret current colleagues, and all the things they were doing this guy would probably object to. He had to remember that being a good guy didn't mean they were going to understand. So he simply said, "They were very good to me. I assume you read enough to know that they got me basically able to function in the world as a kid, and they always made it clear I was under no obligation to stay with them."
"You wanted to, then." Foggy didn't sound judgemental, exactly, but he did sound like he was trying to figure Matt out there. "And you kept wanting to, until..."
"It's different now," said Matt, because it very much was. "Not even just because of Hydra, really, though obviously that's a big part of it, just..." He'd never felt able to talk like this to anyone, not even Karen, so he had to think it through to find the words. "It...it just changed way I saw everything I had in my life, and it's sort of like...like that also allowed me to take a figurative look even at things that had been exactly what I'd thought they were and still see them differently. Or maybe...maybe it just let me face that the plan I'd formed as a teenager and gotten comfortable with, to be an agent until I got too old for the field and then do law school, wasn't entirely what I wanted anymore."
"Sounds like an important epiphany to have," said Foggy. "Make sure you hold onto it, keep it in mind."
It was better advice than he even knew. "Thanks," Matt told him. "And I do agree there were records maybe they didn't need to leak. Although while I don't suppose anyone besides herself knows what goes on in Agent Romanov's head, I do wonder if she didn't trust herself to make any judgements there. I mean...I'm not sure I would have. I've done some pretty nasty things in my time. You can and should definitely read all about those." It was still hard to actually say that, to not only accept that others would know but push them to, but he made himself do it. If he had to tell lies to this man in one way, he wanted to be honest with him in every other.
At least Karen's profile wasn't out there anymore. That made it just a little easier to let his own be.
"If you say so," said Foggy, and he sounded hesitant. He'd probably look in the end, though. He wouldn't be much of a lawyer if he didn't do his research.
They were nearly done eating, and Matt found he didn't really want to leave Foggy's company yet. He might look up those names and find something useful, too, though that wasn't really his reason. "Anything else you want to show me?"
Foggy considered it for a moment, then said, "Well, I don't suppose it matter much if you see the campus by day or night, does it?"
"Nope," Matt said cheerfully. "You said the main law building was at one end, right next to Morningside Park?"
It wasn't that long a walk before they were standing together, close enough to the building that Matt can easily map it out, and Foggy even commented, "You can probably discern more about this place than I can right now. The smell's never been my favorite thing in the world either..."
"Right now it mostly smells of cleaning. So way better than most of New York." Matt listens to Foggy laugh, which is kind of becoming a sound he wants to keep hearing in his life. Though the distraction made it a little harder to map the building out, especially with noone currently in the hallways, though at least it wasn't actually empty.
The hum of Columbia's nighttime campus was also a more welcome sound than not. Being a college campus, some of the voices were loud, and so were some of the other sounds, but nothing he couldn't easily deal with after his many years of training. He mostly tuned it back out as he said, "Anything else you want to show me?"
Foggy did. Over the next half an hour, Matt was given a chance to take in a few buildings where Foggy happened to know some interesting history, and also the dorm building he'd spent his first year there in. Despite the chilly night they found themselves lingering, finally sitting down on what Foggy called the Low Steps, as the latter said, "There are other things I can tell you about, too. I'd start with whose classes you want to take and whose you want to avoid if you can, but honestly, I get started on that, we'll be here all night."
"Then maybe we could meet some other time?" Matt suggested. "I might even get lucky and be free for lunch sometime next week."
"Under Cranston? I doubt it. And even if you do, that'll probably be the day when I have to spend ten long hours copying things. But we could do another dinner. Or if you're as broke as I am right now, we could just steal the firm's free bagels and go somewhere nice to eat them."
By then, Matt ruefully thought, they will have lost their freshness, and while Foggy might not care, his heightened senses will. Still, this man's company might just make him mind that less. So he just said, "If you really don't have money for anything else. Do you want me to call or email you?"
They ended up exchanging phone numbers and emails both, before heading back to the metro station together, and Foggy even managed to spot a relatively empty car for them to ride back to Hell's Kitchen in. "I'm currently crashing at my family's place," he told Matt. "I'm holding out hope of getting my own place by the end of the year, but even with the Incident depressing all the prices..."
"The Incident," Matt repeated. It was obvious enough exactly what incident Foggy was talking about. "Is that what they're calling it these days?"
"Look, buddy," Foggy sighed, "not all of us have spent our entirely life dealing with things like aliens invading our home town. Some people have to use a simple term to refer to aliens invading our home town because we're not up to thinking too much about the fact that aliens invaded our home town. So if you're going to live among us, do everyone a favor and get with the lingo, kapeesh?"
"Fair enough," Matt said. "Any other local terms I should know?"
They parted outside Penn Station, and all the way back to his apartment, Matt Murdock found the chilly evening was a little less cold.